Iām curious, have any links?
1 Like
A quick search didnāt show up anything, was from a video interview I saw at the time (not sure if it was online or from the regular tv news).
Itās complete fucking horseshit. The gun toting wingnuts protecting the nazis (and thatās what it is, you were protecting fucking nazis) I can guarantee you to a man are the same ones bragging about running over BLM protestors blocking highways. Yes, Iām sure somebody somewhere can dig up a video of someone claiming that. It means nothing. āOh, well we said weād protect BLM marchers but for some inexplicable reason they didnāt want a bunch of white people they didnāt know hanging around them with gunsā. Give me a break. Who actually believes this garbage?
I donāt think thereās a difference between people who defend nazis and nazis. If you donāt want to be called a nazi, donāt defend nazis.
6 Likes
Iām 100% on board with this. Half the people in the KKK are probably there for social contact and donāt even care about the racist stuff. A lot of terrorists are just disaffected youth who wanted something, anything, to believe in.
In the end they still did what they did, and defending nazis is still defending nazis.
3 Likes
I mean, the guy could have been lying, but I think he was being genuine. These militia guys arenāt actual white-supremacists (I know some people are trying to loosen the definition of this, but Iām talking about actual nazis), they are not organisationally or ideologically associated with the alt-right, and they predate them. Iāve no doubt there are individual racists among their number (and probably even some who are actual white supremacists too), but they seem a pretty diverse set of radical individualist weirdos.
So the ACLU are nazis?
Jordan Peterson seems to think certain members of liberal arts colleges are nearly as bad as actual Stalinists (who, for the record are worse than Nazis by any sensible metric), the notion that anyone who thinks Nazis having a right to free-speech makes them nearly as bad as actual Nazis is equally as stupid as Peterson. There might be good practical arguments to be made for why certain speech needs to be limited (Iām not an absolutist myself, though closer to the ACLU position than the other side), but that doesnāt give people a legitimate reason to slander people in the opposite camp because they disagree with that view, and doing so is counter-productive in the extreme.
1 Like
Even the nazis think Free Speechā¢ is just a cover.
4 Likes
I was pleased to see this paragraph in the nytimes
And yet, the First Amendment is not as strong a shield as many assume it to be. Throughout its history, politicians and judges have sought to restrict its scope for political reasons. When, in 1917, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes coined the famous line āThe most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic,ā he did so to insist that to distribute antiwar leaflets to conscripts was just like āfalsely shouting fire in a theater.ā
A lot of people seem to get confused about this metaphor.
3 Likes
I think whoever was responsible for the text that gets turned into the one-box didnāt read the article 
The UKās libel laws are anything but weak which is the point of the article.
1 Like
I think they just got things backwards in their head. I think by āweakā they meant āshittyā. I mean, thatās consistent with the first part about the first amendment being too restrictive.
Yeah, I hear people bring up that the āfire in a theaterā thing is a bad example because it comes from a very bad case. But the whole reason they used it as an analogy in that case it because itās a very good example of when speech can be restricted. Obviously if you intentionally cause panic and people get trampled to death you canāt rely on āfree speechā to shield you. We may object to the analogy to handing out the pamphlets, but obviously as an example of something free speech doesnāt protect, it works. We keep repeating it because it resonates.
If the case was bad, that doesnāt taint the example. (Iām not even convinced the ruling in the case was wrong incorrect [edit: I shouldnāt say I donāt think itās āwrongā because I think itās terrible, but that doesnāt make it legally incorrect])
4 Likes
Whole bunch of stupid here, so letās get started!
The militia members I know, from the gun shows and other various mainly conservative events of my youth, had to regularly be told not to sell or display nazi memorabilia. The rightwing ideologically is far closer to nazis than they like to admit, all the way from the boardrooms to the trailer parks. Pedantic, mealy mouthed ānot real nazisā whining aside, individualists to a man subscribe to a reactionary might-makes-right ideology. āI do not need a societyā is step one for āand those who oppose me must be ādealt withā.ā
No, aside from Redneck Revolt, a relatively new group, and other antifa orgs, militias in the US have been exclusively rightwing. Itās pretty well documented.
If you want to defend nazis, be prepared to be considered a nazi. Pretty simple.
This next bit I love, and what tips your hand as just another reactionary ājust asking questionsā and āplaying devilās advocateā. The good old, āStalin was as bad as the nazis!ā routine. Thank goodness for certain people he existed so they can always dredge up his corpse as a counterpoint to anything bad the right does. You need to toss in some stuff about rootless cosmopolitans too, really get that McCarthy era stupidity going for full effect. Of course, weāre not talking about Stalinists, those imaginary bogeymen just waiting for the US to become weak so they can take over with the reanimated corpse of a decades dead dictator, weāre talking about nazis that are literally marching in the streets of our country right now.
But then you go and just flat out state, with no justification, that people who claim nazis donāt deserve free speech are stupid. So itās not like you are that great at discussing the issues at hand anyways. Iāll bite though.
Emphasis mine, to showcase the stupidity. Slander. Arguing that nazis (you know, that group that wants to kill everyone who isnāt white?) shouldnāt have free speech is slander. This is exactly my point when I say that free speech absolutists (and you are one, youāre arguing in defense of nazis which is directly a defense of calling for genocide) cannot or will not place speech in context. They refuse to treat speech as anything more than words. Whereas society as a whole has decided that no, calling for someoneās death is not acceptable, as it is understood under the law as threatening language. Strict legality aside, advocating for genocide is not accepted by society as reasonable speech.
Insisting that hate speech be removed from the context that it exists in fails at the most basic understanding of the purpose behind it. Hate speech is violence because it leads to nothing but violence. There is no reasonable debate for or against the existence of a group of human beings. Claiming that there is room for debate on this issue is nothing less than advocating for it. And defending the speech of those who do is nothing less than the acceptance of their ideology as a reasonable stance.
7 Likes
6 Likes
william lloyd garrison was shocked that lovejoy used a pistol to defend himself from the mob. in one speech about the incident he described lovejoy as an american martyr if not a christian one, holding him up as representing the standard of the declaration of independence if not of the new testament scriptures. garrison was notable for his early adoption of practices related to civil disobedience and nonviolent resistance.
4 Likes
Motherfucker!
In Alabama, for instance, the law states that āany program or curriculum in the public schools in Alabama that includes sex education or the human reproductive process shall, as a minimum, include and emphasize ā¦ in a factual manner and from a public health perspective, that homosexuality is not a lifestyle acceptable to the general public and that homosexual conduct is a criminal offense under the laws of the state.ā
I had to go look that up because it was hard for me to believe that homosexual conduct was criminal, even in Alabama. Itās not, they are getting teachers to lie to students about the law.
I wish that was going to court. If the government canāt legally make a law against something, how can they legally lie to people and tell them there is a law against that thing?
11 Likes
Okay Iām not sure where you get your information regarding militias but what Iāve known going back to my youth in the 90s when I was lapping up militia rhetoric of the time, many militia movement folks are very much right wing. Many are anti-LGBT and many border on white supremacy inasmuch as they think ācertain races should be with their own kindā kind of sentiment. Theyāre not out-and-out Nazis but if you put a Nazi next to a militia guy (even a 3 percenter type) and they talk about everyday things and politics happens to be part of the conversation then theyāll agree about 99% of the time. I think the only break would be whether or not they should kill entire ethnic populations. Heck, most militia folks are fine with mass deportation. So for all intents and purposes militia folks are fascistic or authoritarians (mostly the latter). Which puts them in the same camp as the goosestepping morons of old.
Jordan Peterson is a hack. A tenored hack but a hack none the less. He shouldnāt even be given an interview on the basis of the fact he doesnāt even get his facts right regarding biological evolution and its influence on modern species with respect to their psychology (hint: lobsters donāt have hierarchies like Captain Shrink-Hack thinks). So just on that basis alone I think anyone worth their salt should at most give the guy a verbal hazing on local TV. Anything more is just being cruel to oneās audience. And if that personally offends you that I think the guy should be shunned by society then too bad. Weāve given quacks far too much air time as it is. Look at Dr. Oz. God that guy is a complete and utter moron. So why give this jerk from Canada any play anywhere? Because āfree speech?ā Come on!
7 Likes
How about the metric where the Nazis were rounding up trans people to sent to āre-educationā camps (basically the beta version death camps) as soon as they were in power? That first time when they were burning books in Berlin they were at the Institut fĆ¼r Sexualwissenschaft destroying Magnus Hirschfeldās work on gender dysphoria. They kept the records of who had been there though.
Stalin was far from being friendly to the LGBT community (he repealed the pro-LGBT laws brought in by Lenin) but my life expectancy would be longer under a Stalinist dictatorship than under a Nazi dictatorship. Probably long enough to get out of there too.
8 Likes
Unsurprisingly, the Nazi pug dude has a somewhat inconsistent approach to free speechā¦
9 Likes
I think this sums much of my views up:
The most important thing here is the judge saying that context and intent donāt matter.
How on Earth can they not matter? Theyāre absolutely critical.
I know very little about this Count Dankula guy, and his views, but the real issue for me has always been: should you be able to be improper for comic effect? I canāt imagine a world where you couldnāt. Thereās a huge difference between someone spreading Nazi ideals as a Nazi, and someone using Nazism as an offensive bogeyman. I know, there will always be arseholes who try to present the former as the latter, but life is like that. Thatās why we differentiate murder and manslaughter.
3 Likes
In this case, it appears to have been the former.
6 Likes
Iād heard, earlier, that the guy was a communist; that immediately brought to mind friends of mine who would do this sort of thing: portray a caricature of an awful person, saying awful things, without danger of real offence because everyone knows their actual views are utterly opposed to it.
