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[ by Charles Cameron — how far gone are we — from a sorta leftist-centrist-don’t-really-fit-labels POV? ]
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I mean, Orwell is going to claw his way out of the grave here

— J.M. Berger (@intelwire) August 15, 2017

I’m not sure what exactly JM was responding to here, there have been too many pointers..

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I for one don’t think Charlottesville stacks up against Kristallnacht, and am wary of the words Fascism and Nazi. I wholeheartedly agree with JM Berger in his piece today, Calling them Nazis:

There’s an increasingly common argument online against referring to the alt-right by its chosen name. “Call them Nazis” is the refrain. If you haven’t said it yourself, you’ve probably seen other people saying it.

While this approach may be understandable and may suit certain rhetorical purposes, it’s a grave mistake for journalists and experts who substantively study and cover the movement to embrace this approach.

JM continues:

The alt-right category is extremely important to understanding what’s happening in this movement. Nazis are only part of this movement, or more correctly neo-Nazis, since most of them aren’t German nationalists. If neo-Nazis were America’s only problem, it would be a much smaller problem.

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My concern here is with a somewhat different angle, and not specifically with the Charlottesville clashes. I’m noting the widespread tendency to suggest we’re already in Brownshirt territory, if not deeper in than that, and I think it may be a bit premature.

IMO, we need to be cautious in where we draw the lines that say, beyond here is Fascism, or Nazism, it seems to me: exaggeration only serves to discredit those who indulge.

There are real problems, both with overt swastika-wavers and with those who support or merely tolerate them. Which way the wind will blow over the coming few years, however, is yet to be seen.

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However, getting back to Orwell —

— it does seem to me that scooping up more than a million IP addresses of epople who may have an interest in protesting Trump gies way beyond some kind of Orwell Limit.

Orwell kept his resistance movement cellular and basically unnowable: datamining the web blows an enormous hole in that strategy.

I’d have to say that with today’s news about DOJ vs DisruptJ20, one of my personal Orwell Red Lines has been crossed.

[ by Charles Cameron — oh, and children and chimps, and a stunning woman-song by Nina Paley, too ]
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Bill Benzon just posted a piece titled Chimps can learn rock-paper-scissors (sorta’) on his New Savanna blog, introducing and questioning a paper on chimps, (human) children and RPS — fascinating!

Bill’s final paragaph, describing the common side-blotched lizard [!!]. caught me

The lower panel features an illustration from Konrad Lorenz, Paul Leyhausen, Motivation of human and animal behavior: an ethological view — showing geese whose pecking order follows the same “transverse patterning” as the female lizards do in their choosing of male mates..

Threeness, in my view, is a significant matter.

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Earlier threeness readings:

Of games III: Rock, Paper, Tank

Spectacularly non-obvious, I: Elkus on strategy & games

Spectacularly non-obvious, 2: threeness games

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Ahoy!

Bill Benzon also posted Nina Paley’s God-Mother, a new animation today. Nina P was the one who, single-handed and beyond almost all copyright, brought us the stunning, feature-length, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzTg7YXuy34 [!!] animation of the Ramayana, Sita Sings the Blues.

Here you go, woman / ouroboros, from the intro to Nina’s next feature:

God-Mother from Nina Paley on Vimeo.

Nina Paley is one of my heros for life.

[ by Charles Cameron — apologies ]
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Addendum removed / corrected

I’d briefly added the following at the end of my post AQAP, the Trolley Problem — and child mind..:

Addendum, five minutes or so later:

No sooner had I finished posting the above, than this turned up in my twitter-feed:

Trump RT'd this pic showing a CNN journalist hit by a train days after a white nationalist ran his car into activists, killed Heather Heyer. pic.twitter.com/tWjdoE70AS

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) August 15, 2017

Child mind?

My bad. The image can easily be misread in this way, but as the tweeter SLandinSoCal notes:

NO, the train is NOT running over the reporter. The reporter is trying to hold the train back. His feet are popping up railroad ties.

I have removed this addendum from my earlier post, and this correction is for the record.

[ by Charles Cameron — a new terror-tactic from the terrorists ]
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We’ve dealt with the trolley problem before here on ZP, in Trolleys come to Terror and A real-life situation not unlike the trolley problem, but with the recent online oublication of AQAP’s Inspire magazine #17, the jihadists have at last made their own view on the topic known — and if the illustration, bottom panel above, is anything to go by, this time they’re in favor of saving lives, not taking them.

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Oops — when you read the whole article, you’ll see that they’re actually recommending train derailment as a tactic, in much the same way they recommended pressure-cooker bombs and “mowing truck” assaults in earlier issues.

Damn.

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And then again, ICYMI..

Never trust anyone under the age of three..

[ by Charles Cameron — & details suggest IS/AQ and the alt-right are at least somewhat comparable ]
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The new face of America is eerily familiar. pic.twitter.com/xpAcHo7gHH

— Julian Assange ? (@JulianAssange) August 13, 2017

Jihadists and hard right, comparables?

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Arie Perliger‘s 2012 report for West Point’s Countering Terrorism Center, Challengers from the Sidelines: Understanding America’s Violent Far-Right runs a hefty 148 pages, but it opens with two epigraphs, each of which similarly compares jihad with the ambitions of far right violent extremists:

This operation took some long-term planning and, throughout the entire time, these soldiers were aware that their lives would be sacrificed for their cause. If an Aryan wants an example of ‘Victory or Valhalla’, look no further (Thomas Metzger, Leader of the White Aryan Resistance, in response to 9/11 attacks)

… We should be blowing up NYC and DC, not waiting for a bunch of camel Jockeys to do it for us (Victor Gerhard, Vanguard News Network)

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The thing is, the mode of terror in Charlottesville, ramming pedestrians with a car or truck, itself “rhymes” with all too many earlier attacks, in a series including the 2006 attempted murder by SUV at the University of North Carolina, the 2013 incident which ended with the murder of Lee Rigby in London, incidents in Dijon, Nice, Stockholm and Westminster — not to mention one incident in Tiananmen Square, and a slew of vehicular ramming attacks across the years in Jerusalem.

The second issue (2010) of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula‘s magazine Inspire recommended the tactic:

— and while the majority of incidents listed in Wikipedia’s article on the topic were perpetrated by jihadists, the tactic has also been used against Muslims — by no means necessarily jihadists or even sympathizers themselves — in the Finsbury Park Mosque attack earlier this year.

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This brings such great repute on jihadists, islamophobes, alt-right, whomever.