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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 26th, 2023

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  • Their leader calls journalists vermin and they go on about the ‘Lugenpresse’, his followers shoot up synagogues, allied media spread Nazi/far right inspired anti-semitic canards like Cultural Marxism (‘Kulturbolshewismus’), they go on about how the ‘’‘left wing intellectual elite’‘’ are trying to undermine western values and cause a decline of morals and degeneracy (‘Entartung’), they’re afraid of difference, they hold the weak in contempt, they abhor nuance so use a limited newspeak vocabulary to limit critical reasoning, they’re obsessed with plots, and on social media many of his followers spread the Q-anon conspiracy which is a reworking of the antisemtic blood libel canard.

    Walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, is a duck.

    I presume we’re no longer talking about the movie’s marketing department…?

    Here’s a Sartre quote that’s also increasingly relevant (again):

    “Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”

    What I’m reading here are things in the lines of “Good faith anti-Semitism doesn’t exist” or “anti-Semitism is intrinsically confrontational and quarrelsome”. I don’t quite think that’s a tenable position as it would be trivial to disprove. Am I misreading this? What is your take?
    Are you sure the line is concerned with anti-Semitism in general and not only with a very specific kind of anti-Semite (e.g. mid-century, mid-Europe, Bierkellerputsch-y types)?