I'd like people to remember another quote, this one from Voltaire;
> You believe things that are incomprehensible, inconsistent, impossible because we have commanded you to believe them; go then and do what is injust because we command it. Such people show admirable reasoning. Truly, whoever can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. If the God‐ given understanding of your mind does not resist a demand to believe what is impossible, then you will not resist a demand to do wrong to that God‐ given sense of justice in your heart. As soon as one faculty of your soul has been dominated, other faculties will follow as well. And from this derives all those crimes which have overrun the world.
It's why I genuinely believing in rancid conspiracy theories is dangerous. It's the prelude for what comes next. People start out at conspiracies hating some sub-group. They end up at the "Jewish question," or their cultural equivalent.
Reason and reason alone is what protects us from the insanity that has plagued humanity since the dawn of time.
"Reason and reason alone", it's a bit more complex than that, unfortunately. From Voltaire, Descartes (Le bon sens est la chose du monde la mieux partagée [1], "Common sense is the best distributed commodity in the world, for everyone is convinced that they are well supplied with it, and even those who are the most difficult to please in everything else are not in the habit of desiring more of it than they have."), and others, Enlightenment has risen. And there is a rather pertinent critique of enlightenment, as in the Dialectic of Enlightenment [2] by Adorno and Horkheimer. For them, the Nazis also think they must purify the race because it's the most rational thing to do, even if they view as the best leader a brown-haired, weakly-mustached, average height methamphetamine abuser.
[1] "Le bon sens est la chose du monde la mieux partagée : car chacun pense en être si bien pourvu, que ceux même qui sont les plus difficiles à contenter en toute autre chose, n'ont point coutume d'en désirer plus qu'ils en ont.", 1637, Descartes, Discours de la Méthode; the French, only their guillotines are sharper than their words.
Why do people think that it is somehow a contradiction in terms for a Mexican to be a white supremacist? ‘Mexican’ is a nationality. Mexicans can be white, and Mexico has a long history of color-based racism (which for example you can still see in the casting of Mexican TV shows - white out of all proportion to the population).
On top of that, there are innumerable instances of people supporting ideologies that are directly contrary to their interests. People are weird. Someone who commits mass murder is especially unlikely to be a particularly rational and consistent thinker.
At this point there’s overwhelming evidence that the individual in question was fixated on Nazi imagery and far right ideology. If that doesn’t fit your priors, then they may be due for update.
The individual in question was quite obviously Latino. His photos were plastered all over the news. He very well might have had far-right, extreme and racist views, but it's rather hard to believe that he specifically subscribed to an ideology that hated him. But the media really likes the tagline "white supremacy", so that made it into all the articles regardless of the specific factual accuracy.
Latino isn't a race. You can be white and Latino. This person may have considered themselves white, for all we know. In many countries he would be regarded as white.
In any case, if you just want to make a distinction between 'white supremacist' and 'far right, extremist and racist', then are you not splitting hairs somewhat? We know which race the people who liked swastikas favored, and it wasn't the Mayans.
But whacky far-right racist beliefs always find a way. Here's an amusing line from the Wikipedia article on a Mexican fascist movement that I linked in another comment:
>Rodríguez claimed that blood tests carried out by ethnographers showed that Mexicans and Nordic peoples were racially equal.
What sort of reception would Mr. Garcia have received had he attempted to interact with white supremacists in real life? For some reason I don't think they would accept his census self-identification...
Sure, it is a fairly fine distinction, but an awful lot of people saw a news story about a Latino "white supremacist" and just uncritically believed it. Despite the sheer inconsistency of such a thing. Yes, crazy people do exist, but it's important to critically examine news particularly when it is ridiculous. And that's really what the original parent post was about: the ability to convince people of something ridiculous simply by saying it. Elon doesn't have that power, but in many cases the media as a collective does. Eg. The media acted as cheerleaders for the war in Iraq, fabricating the WMD story which should have collapsed under even the slightest scrutiny.
If anything, Elon seems to be usually out of step with the legacy media consensus. That's a good thing if it makes people stop and consider what they are believing and why, on a more frequent basis.
> Thanks to Elon Musk, I found a Garcia post where he tells the story of a “PC” Jewish chemistry teacher who tried to reason Garcia out of his Hitler worship by insisting that he isn’t white but Hispanic. He repeatedly taunts the poor woman, greeting her by saying “white power”, “Final Solution”, and giving her Nazi salutes.
Musk thought he was being very clever because he thought ‘Latino white supremacist’ was like ‘square circle’. It’s not. You can keep insisting that it’s a contradictory concept, but we have an instance.
> Garcia himself was not white but Latino, something that occasionally bothered him. He wrote that there “was a time when I was ashamed of being Hispanic.” However, he added, “I’m Hispanic whether I like or not. I’ve made peace with that.” In another incident, Garcia claimed someone asked, “Are you Hispanic?”, to which Garcia allegedly replied “Yuck, don’t remind me.”
Only 272 years ago, one B. Franklin, that Franklin from your pocket, was wondering if the Germans are really white in "Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, etc." [1] and if the German immigrants would really fit in the American spirit, 25 years before the foundation of the country. Just as a helper: white is never about the levels of melanin in the skin, it's about the we, the powerful. And now to fully blow your mind: one of the richest person in the history of our collapsing society is the orthodoxy.
[1] "in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth", actual quote from that one B. Franklin, <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observations_Concerning_the_In...>
I don't usually reply to such comments, but there are more things in heaven and earth, Pseudo0, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
> we live in a society where men can give birth
Biology doesn't deal in absolutes. Chromosome anomalies are extremely common. Here's an example of an XY woman who is/was fertile and had a child, "Report of Fertility in a Woman with a Predominantly 46,XY Karyotype in a Family with Multiple Disorders of Sexual Development" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2190741/
I think it applies to our world. The world is complicated and we want simple solutions.
Can speech be violence? Yes. If I incite a mob and use that to murder someone, then the speech I used to commit that act was a form of violence. Speech is powerful. It can be thoughtful. It can also cause people to view one another as cockroaches and then go around slaughtering their neighbors until all is a pile of rubble.
Reason and reason alone is what protects us from the insanity that has plagued humanity since the dawn of time.