either of these outfits made in the U.S.A.?
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Like the Wicked Witch of the West, Trump’s constituents would have been fearful of melting in the rain, hence the low turnout.
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Congress would be the place to look while the Trump distraction is going on.
They seem to be be in high-gear, directly voting on stuff rather than referring it to committee first.
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Bingo. This is a two-front “war”.
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We (immigrants, women, LGBT people, etc) exist. That’s all the incentive to kill that the alt-right need. They have already killed people regardless of whether they are violent or pacifists and they will continue to do so. I try my best to be a pacifist, but with all the hate it is getting hard. I will still try, but it seems like it will only a matter of time before I will have to defend myself again, and it will have fuck all to do with whether some alt-right shitbag got punched or not.
I only have my experiences to go by. I have been beaten up by fascists in daylight just for walking down the same street that they were on. I have had death threats shouted through my letterbox. I have had bricks thrown at my window. I still have PTSD from all that, twelve years later!
What did I do to get that treatment? I was MTF transgender. All I did was exist. I never threw a punch until i was punched first (and it wasn’t a punch, it was a metal pipe to my head).
I also remember the Admiral Duncan bombing. What did they do to deserve that? In the mind of the fascist that made that bomb, they existed.
Transgender Day of Remembrance is every November. Most of the people on that list were killed because they existed.
Whenever we breath it is a figurative punch to the face to the fascists who hate us and who want to wipe us off the face of the Earth. One more real punch isn’t going to make a difference for us.
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I used to think this, but then I realized that we are at a position of privilege to think that way. I prefer nonviolence, but sometimes violence is necessary, for self defense etc. If the time comes when I have to use violence so the future generations will not have to, or so that they can even exist, then I will, even though it’s something I will not be able to live comfortably with.
In this case, it’s more or less that the advantages of cold cocking a white supremacist far outweighed the disadvantages, at least for the guy who did it. That’s just how it is. I don’t recommend randomly trying to mix it up with white supremacists, but that video was really fucking satisfying for me.
I don’t think it’s okay, just that there are far worse things than punching a Nazi. For example, it’s legally wrong to physically assault a Nazi, but it’s morally even worse to give him a national audience.
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The cops probably did nothing when you were attacked. If they did anything, they probably just laughed about it after it happened.
Around these parts, the police are deeply homophobic and transphobic, maybe even openly so.
If this Nazi who will not be named gets thwapped in the face a little, he fucking deserves it. It’s just a drop in the bucket compared to what we go through just trying to exist.
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I think he’s somewhere between those two points right now. At what point on the scale do we resist? Might be best not to wait until the very end.
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Again, if you think the law is on your side, then you’re the type of person the law protects, not the type of person the law is twisted backward around itself to persecute. The law is a joke. It applies to certain people, but it doesn’t apply to other people, and it is used to beat other people down. It’s not fair at all, you have to know this by now.
Also, rational thinking? Rational thinking? Laws aren’t decided by rational thinking, debate, free exchange of ideas, or anything of the like. It’s all down to bribery now. People don’t vote through rational thinking either. They vote for whichever candidate they’ve heard the most about, and whichever candidate they want to drink a beer with, and whichever candidate all their friends and family like.
We are in a state of chaos. It may be illegal to punch a Nazi in the face, but it’s deeply immoral to give that Nazi a microphone and a national audience. It’s also illegal to gay bash, but whenever it’s happened to me the cops have done jack shit, so your “illegal” doesn’t mean a whole lot to me.
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Rule 1: Believe the autocrat.
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I was in Carlisle, England when it happened. It is better than the worst places in the US, but still a deeply homophobic and transphobic place.
The Crown Prosecution Service dropped my case (as is common for trans people, even now). There was a worrying few months afterwards as the person who attacked me with the pipe wanted me charged with Actual Bodily Harm because he got his fingers broken when I pulled the pipe out of his hands (thankfully, that case was also dropped). There was also a worry that I might have accepted a caution while concussed, but I hadn’t.
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I’m going to have to disagree that they aren’t the same. What spencer and his ilk advocate (and are now getting a hearing about, because of the current climate in the US) might well be protected speech, but it’s about as violent as you can get without laying a hand on someone. Again, I don’t think that a punch in the face is nearly as bad as what they advocate. Nor am I saying they shouldn’t have their say. Free speech isn’t freedom from the consequences of that speech. And like I said, I’d gladly go to jail for that.
by employing state violence, of course. The state has a monopoly on violence, but what does that mean if the state itself is compromised? I think we could make the argument that years of the state allowing and justifying white violence against minorities (racial and religious) was completely illegitimate and that self-defense was warranted. Passive resistance works best if the people on the other side see you as human in the first place. [quote=“redesigned, post:440, topic:93289”]
I’m a pacifist, and prefer peaceful resolutions and eschewing violence whenever possible.
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I think that’s fine and I respect that. I do think that there are times when it’s literally not possible. You might disagree that random nazi punching isn’t one of those times, but I think that others might feel otherwise and might be justified in feeling that way. [quote=“redesigned, post:443, topic:93289”]
If he goes from orange con man, to evil dictator
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And one could argue it would be far too late at that point. By the time the nazis engineered the burning of the reichstag it was far too late.
Indeed. But we keep being told to wait and to pull our punches, and to not defend ourselves, but the system has a history of not protecting us the way it does the interests of white, christian men. That’s just a historical fact of life. [quote=“LearnedCoward, post:450, topic:93289”]
I don’t think it’s okay, just that there are far worse things than punching a Nazi.
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And I’m okay with that disagreement! [quote=“redesigned, post:452, topic:93289”]
why we have courts, and laws, and rational thinking.
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You have to remember that the court system has historically not provided equal protection for all. It still doesn’t. Minority populations often can’t expect legal support when they are attacked. I think that matters in this discussion. And I’m all for rational thinking, but nazis are not.[quote=“redesigned, post:452, topic:93289”]
but there is a reason why violence and wars are called “brutal”
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Unless it’s employed by the state, though. Wars are often waged on behalf of high ideals, but are really little more than exercises in oppression or landgrabs.
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Malcolm X once said,
I’d argue his last statement could easily be applied to just about any marginalized group in America.
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If I can shoot rabbits…
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But when has it ever been so? At what point can we say, finally, that a bug is actually a feature and figure out a way to change it to the ideal.
but they are starting out with the ethnic cleansing of the US. I assume you or your brother never threatened that with each other. [quote=“redesigned, post:461, topic:93289”]
removing the moral high ground.
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I still think that the nazi does not have the moral high ground. Ever. Anyone advocating for ethnic cleansing is coming from a nadir of a moral position, and I think we’d have to punch an awful lot of them to stoop to their level.
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Fix it. I never advocated otherwise. But there has never been a point in US history where law has been fairly applied across races, classes, or genders. And that was not a mistake. it was baked into the system. [quote=“redesigned, post:463, topic:93289”]
if they started an ethnic cleansing, then fuck yeah we’d revolt.
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By the time it gets going, it’s often far too late. The trick is understanding where action is still able to happen, before it slips into chaos that often surround these things. We know from history that it often seems like a light switch because those who aren’t the rhetorical targets say we need to wait on action. History is littered with the bodies of those who died because some wanted to wait. I don’t think the line is easy to see, and that’s a huge part of the problem. [quote=“redesigned, post:463, topic:93289”]
how many racists feel more justified after that punch?
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Do you think they don’t feel justified anyway? Do you honestly think a nazi getting punched was the key thing that set off Dylann Roof? No - it was the existence of black people in America that set him off. They don’t NEED justification for their beliefs and people of peace are of no more higher value to them than those who are violent - Roof proved that by shooting up a room full of praying Christians. It has nothing to do with their mindset or why they think and act as they do. They live in a world free of reality and rationality, where white people have long been victims of Jews and people of color, straights have been victims of gays, men have been victims of women, and race is a an actual thing that confers moral standing. Actions themselves mean little to these people and in fact, that often say they admire violence.
I can debate, disagree with, and even agree to disagree with people on many political issues. This isn’t really about politics, though, but about the basis of reality and social structures.
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Because all major moral codes were devised or adopted by those on top, and those on top feel particularly threatened by violent revolution?
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Okay, you just compared a descendant of Holocaust survivors who wants to avoid being murdered to the people who want to murder him. Keep digging.
It takes two to make peace, and one to make war. If the very basis of their ideology is that “People not like me are vermin to be purged”, then you cannot negotiate peacefully with that. The Golden Rule does still apply–but needs to be applied from their perspective, not yours. You are willing to live in peace. They are not. And therefore, by their own standards, you need to be able and willing to fight back. It’s a two-way street.
Okay. What sorts of things do you have in mind? Honestly and sincerely asking: How does one deal with an avowed and committed ideologue whose ideology requires the ethnic cleansing of people not like them? Do you propose (re)education? Appeasement? Economic benefits? Social sanctions/shunning? I mean this honestly and sincerely–what methods do you wish to attempt to implement in order to attempt to make peace with fascists?
And, finally, how many corpses of their victims that you could have saved are you willing to accept for your principles? And that is not a rhetorical question either. So long as you’re willing to make the case that commensurate resistance to genocide is the same as attempts at genocide, you’re basically saying you’re willing to blame the victims of violence for not appeasing their murderers with kindness.
But, hey, what do I know? I’m just someone that gets death threats from Neo-Nazis and yet is told that I can’t treat them as threats because that apparently makes me just like someone who wants to shut me into an oven alive, or gas me, or vivisect me, or put my eyes and ears out and use me for target practice…
Yeah. Me wanting to live unmolested apparently makes me just like them.
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Mostly the latter. The existing laws are either unjust laws specifically instituted to keep the powerful in power*, or they have been twisted to keep the powerful in power. Our legal system needs reform, which will be not be fast and will not be easy.
My point was that some of us are already in a literal streetfight, and it is disingenuous to tell us to play by the rules when the rules are being used against us.
In a fair world, it would be wrong to punch Nazis in the face, but there would be fewer Nazis because people would resist them, violently if necessary. We would all live in harmony, except for the Nazis who would be oh so inconvenienced by not having their bigotry tolerated in public.
I believe it’s wrong to punch Nazis in the face, but it’s not the wrongest thing in the world. For some of us, it’s actually in our favor to punch Nazis, but for most of us, the most we can do is sit back and watch it happen.
*three strikes laws, the War on Drugs, pretty much any “tough on crime” law, the vast majority of all laws directed at the poor and those receiving government benefits, etc.
You don’t get that type of thinking, unless your brother killed six million Jews and was threatening to do it again.
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