Why is every article about the right so negative? Soros is rarely derided on HN like this
If Soros was found to be funding an equivalent group – maybe PETA or one of the black bloc groups, but there's really nothing comparable in both popularity and derangement currently – you would find similar disapproval for the same reasons. We don't because he's not the monster under the bed claimed by the less factually constrained.
>That funding comes in addition to more than $33 million in grants to the Black Lives Matter movement from top Democratic Party donor George Soros through his Open Society Foundations, as well as grant-making from the Center for American Progress.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/aug/16/black-lives-...
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/08/19/no-george-s...
If you'd read the article you linked you'd see, after much hemming, hawing, and redefining terms they admit their own headline is wrong.
I can get you a bridge for cheap. One thing I've found disturbing about this election is the extent to which Democrats can stare blatant corruption in the face and not see it.
This is the only use of the word "umbrella", here. It does not describe an "umbrella organization", a master control system. It describes the absence of central organization, an anarchist model of organizing, which, by the way, has been the favored method of organizing on the left for several decades. It is pointing out that it is impossible to give a grant to a group of people who lack central organizations. Some money might have gone to groups that are working on issues that BLM activists might care about - but $33 million has not been granted to BLM activists.
If you believe otherwise, show us the list of grants.
There's an 88 in my user name because once I used one of those freemail services to register for an account in a spammy website and didn't bother to change the autocomplete.
People can legitimately have different opinions about Black Lives Matter but there's no question that it's a real political movement with leaders, stated positions, etc. with many supporters around the country. Whether or not you agree with their positions or think that they're taking the best actions, that's a very different thing from a PAC some rich guy created to spew propaganda memes online.
(Again, to be clear, I'm also not saying that this is true of all right-wingers – it'd be a huge step up if, say, he'd used that money to promote libertarian ideals, given a podium to a theologian or nat-sec hawk, etc. so there'd be something to talk about and maybe learn from. This is just the intellectual equivalent of trying to live on a diet of cotton candy.)
I think that writing off the Pepe meme thing as "hate" and leaving it there is convenient, comforting, superficial, and insufficient to capture the essence of the matter. Since I no longer police my acquaintances for political compatibility or spend all my time inside a filter bubble, I've had the interesting opportunity to get to know a few Pepe posters. They're remarkable people, and from what I've been able to gather, fairly typical: young enough to enjoy drama and feel it strongly in their lives, thoughtful even if they haven't had the time or the scope to develop a broad and nuanced understanding of politics and ideologies, and very angry at the progressive left in power for what they perceive, I think accurately, to be its efforts to circumscribe for ideological reasons their thoughts, beliefs, words, actions, and opportunities. Pepe posters feel such effrontery is best met with loud, brash, insulting, and unstinting defiance. I feel it's best met with calm, thoughtful, reasoned, and discursive defiance. But I can and do respect the effectiveness of what they do, and they conversely seem to find it useful having an old guy around who's read books and thought thoughts they haven't yet found time for.
It is, of course, your prerogative to respond in whatever fashion you please to this analysis. I'm not asking you to feel sympathy for Pepe posters. They wouldn't want it even if you were inclined to extend it. I'm just providing a bit of insight into why they do what they do. Whether you're interested in understanding your political opponents, or would rather simply deride them in ignorance because they do not believe or behave as you do, is entirely for you to decide.
What is your proposal on how to deal with them? Burn their books and art publicly?
If they choose to spend their time circulating white supremacist memes, that's a shame but we don't need to censor it — only refuse to play the false equivalence game.
To paraphrase Noam Chomsky (IIRC) in many respects the left in the US is equivalent to the center right in most other highly developed countries. HN has an international following. Combine US-based "left" with the rest of the world and you'll have a strong leaning away from the extreme right.
Add to that, Trump comes across as technology illiterate, sometimes hostile [1], which goes against the grain of the average HN reader.
[1] “We have to talk to them about, maybe in certain areas, closing that internet up in some ways. Somebody will say, ‘Oh freedom of speech, freedom of speech.’ These are foolish people.”
Most right wingers would e.g. see the dominance of left-wing thought in academia and entertainment as its own form of elite power, an unearned and unwarranted influence not based on merit, which only pays lips service to its own ideals of rationality and impartiality.
At the time this put a neat division between "power" and "powerless". Then we had a century or two of democratic power being used to pillory the rich; the boundaries have become confused.
I think the useful distinction is still the same - one should always fight against power, wherever it is strongest. Sometimes, in the modern day, this means supporting government. But most often it means opposing the conjunction of state and private power, which still, as in the early days before the French Revolution, continue to travel together.
It is no surprise that socialism is often favored by the elites and when the everyman rejects it, the elites stick their noses up and pout, "They're just too stupid to know what is in their own best interest - we should be in charge. If only they knew that!"