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by tekmate 1113 days ago
please elaborate where op drew false equivalencies to attack political opponents
1 comments

I read it that way too, even if he didn't explicitly say it. Probably because Takei is known to be very vocally anti-Republican or anti-right or pro-left or pro-liberal, not sure of the exact dynamic there. But the comment also said Takei is "liberal" and knows what it's like if "that kind of people" regain power.

To me, it's clearly an anti-Republic or anti-conservative jab, implying that "those people" shouldn't be allowed to regain power, else some poor minority will get put into camps. Using the argument that if Takei says so, it's because he's lived through it, so we should listen to him. Ofc, not to detract from what he went through, it's horrible.

Takei is so silly for not knowing which political party was in power during WWII. Thank God the internet exists to hold him to account for those crazy positions of his, which he so clearly holds that he doesn't even need to say them.
It's not a jab, rather the plain reality of the contemporary political landscape.

Speaking as a non-partisan libertarian - it is a fact that the contemporary Republican party has openly embraced white nationalism. Racism is a type of collectivism, which is attractive precisely because it's a lazy un-nuanced explanation for one's woes. The Republican platform used to have mainstream politicians that kept those urges in check, and while perhaps pundits courted those urges with dog whistles and the like on talk radio, they could still be said to have distance from the mainstream party. But part of Trump's "edginess" was openly saying what "couldn't be said", and so the dam holding it back has burst. This certainly does not mean that all Republicans are white nationalists, nor does it imply that Republicans with power will automatically enact white nationalist policies. But open white nationalism does now form a significant part of the mainstream Republican party.

Now since I must include an analogous analysis of the other political sports team, lest some partisan respond with "no that's not true and even if it is the other party is the same or worse" - It is certainly true that there is a large contingent of the democratic party that has openly embraced minority-favoring racism, and that is a terrible thing as well! But for the most part that discourse revolves around inclusionary racism (disadvantaged group #643 needs help) rather than exclusionary racism. We've seen the catastrophic results of exclusionary racism enough times to know where it leads, but it's much harder to know where inclusionary racism leads (apart from stoking more racism in general, these political teams are in ying-yang). Presently, the concrete results seem to be bureaucracy, language policing, and a new proto-religion to repeated if one occupies a politically sensitive position (and it's not clear how this could continue to snowball into society-wide exclusionary racism). These things are certainly not great dynamics, but they're a far cry from bottom-up lynchings and top-down concentration camps.

What’s the difference of left and “liberal”?
> To me, it's clearly an anti-Republic or anti-conservative jab,

Only because the GOP allowed their party to be turned into a Nazi bar:

https://old.reddit.com/r/TalesFromYourServer/comments/hsiisw...

If the folks on that side of the political spectrum don't like it, maybe they should be kicking out the Nazis instead of courting them for votes.