Richard Spencer says that antifa sucked all the fun out of college appearances, calls it quits

I refer you back to my other comment, wherein i point out that repatriation will not occur voluntarily and hence would involve force:

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@Mindysan33: [Practical Marxism usually is actively opposed and undermined].
@hamster: Fascism was under attack, too.

Sorry, but [citation desperately needed] if you don’t want me to get really, really rude.

I am reading this wrong, spell it out in an unambiguous way. Thank you.

Oh, and BTW:

What the fuck are you playing? This ain’t pick your least worst thing from the fascist rulebook. The Nazis wanted to eradicate a whole “race”. That’s all you need to know to want to punch a Nazi. They are so far out of any form of humanism, there isn’t even a category for them you need except Nazi.

Maybe I should have stopped reading this whole thread here:

Bullshit, and you should know it. Skip that revisionist garbage. Next stop Dolchstoßlegende, exit on the right.

FTR, the Nazis did not paint themselves as victims, and they did not win the 1933 Reichtagswahl on a sympathy ticket.

I considered after your Hamburg comment that you might be German. But your history of Germany needs a brushing up, if you aren’t argueing in bad faith.

This has gone far enough. Drop it.

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Let’s please keep this discussion civil. Flag posts if you believe them to be in violation of the community guidelines, otherwise, stick to challenging the ideas discussed, not to attacking the poster.

Thank you.

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I’m going to show off my immense privilege for a bit.

This. So much this. I was raised in a ‘law and order, the police are your friends’ bubble while being told that certain immigrant groups didn’t trust the police because their police and justice system in the old country was bad, not our shiny, pure, mostly corruption-free system.

Spoiler (not really, but apparently some people don’t see it): that narrative is such a large load of bullshit that it qualifies as a major biohazard. I got to believe it, mostly because in my bubble, these injustices didn’t happen. Fortunately, the Internet (and oddly, taking a Media and Communications program) helped me get out of that bubble. So, yeah, when I see someone defending and championing the Justice system (under an unabashed racist atm, for extra fun) as how these white Supremacists are best dealt with, and how it will solve our problems… I know exactly the type of privilege that person has gotten to live under.

If the system is so good and trustworthy, can tell me how a bunch of white people who instituted an armed takeover of public property can walk away scot-free, while Philando Castile is dead for merely mentioning that he (legally!) was in possession of a firearm.

To quote one of my favourite writers: There is no Justice. There is Just Us.

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If there was any actual “justice for all” at work, DeAndre Harris wouldn’t have had to go to court for defending himself against a group of white nationalist ‘demonstrators’ who viciously assaulted him, with the whole incident caught on film.

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I was going to cite that-- you beat me to it.

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Sadly, it doesn’t matter how many examples we list, we’ll never get to them all.

Unfortunately, there are too many system defenders that will point to Mr. Harris’ acquittal and say “see, the system works!” (There is a reason when I posted on another site, I used the term “right-ish”. Yes, the acquittal is better than conviction, but charges should never have been laid in the first fucking place).

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I really thought the court would rule against Harris; that’s just how much “faith” I have in the system that’s been failing anyone who isn’t a ‘person of privilege’ since it the country was founded.

This melee may have been “fun” for Spencer when he started out, but it’s always been a matter of dire consequences for People of Color, Gays, Transfolks, Jews, Muslims, Women, and anyone else who gets systematically targeted by hate groups.

And while people can obviously take whatever stance they like on the matter; I, for one, am glad that all his fun has been “spoiled” by all the backlash against his ‘platform.’

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I was blown away by “Not Guilty”. Like “holy fucksocks, they remembered that was an option?”

And if I can recognise that things are that fucked up…

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I think my biggest problem with the whole ‘punching nazis’ thing (amusing as it was to watch) is this:

Who gets to decide who the nazis are?
What’s the threshold for how right wing you need to be to warrant a punching?
And how much of a punching does that warrant?
What evidence gets collected and who judges it?
What if they’re wrong?

Seriously - what if they’re wrong?

People make mistakes all the time, like when there was a paedophile scare in the UK in 2000. Paedophiles are bad, right? They deserve a punching too, right? Only, a paediatrician got targeted, because people are idiots.

I’m not saying that the rule of law is necessarily great, especially if you’re a minority (disclaimer - I’m not), but it’s better than vigilante justice which is what punching nazis comes down to. If you’re punching nazis I don’t trust that you’re only punching nazis.

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that’s not much impediment for me, but sounds like a good rationale for you to not punch nazis.

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My privilege story from this weekend, starting with embarassing admission: Yesterday I went to the park with my 6-yo and a bike. Somehow will all the winter-weather clothing we forgot to bring a helmet.

On the way home 6-yo realized this and pointed it out. My spouse and I were mortified. Somehow in the following discussion it came up that it was actually illegal for parents to let their kids ride without a helmet.

So we got lots of questions about going to jail. We explained that no one was going to jail, that even if a police officer had seen us we mostly likely would have been warned, and at worse fined.

Later when the kid wasn’t around, I recalled the question to my spouse, “Would we go to jail?” and joked that my reply should have been, “Let me tell you a little something about being white.” The sad truth is that we really would have gotten a warning, maybe a fine (that we could afford to pay); but if it has been an indigenous family the cop may have called Children’s Aid to investigate if the kid was being properly looked after. Almost as disturbing as this reality is how many people are unaware of this reality.

Then someone undeserving gets punched.

Actual laws doing what they are supposed to do is the best outcome. But vigilante justice isn’t a cause of the erosion of the law, it’s a result of the erosion of the law. Vigilantism is basically a proto-legal-system. It happens when there is a vacuum in the law that is left for individuals to fill. I don’t think you can fix vigilantism by going after vigilantes, the law has to actually fill the vacuum.

So far the SPLC has attributed 13 incidents encompassing 43 murders to alt-right violence. These people aren’t just talking, they are recruiting killers. I know that if I endorse people punching nazis that I endorse a small chance of someone running up and punching me one day. I am also endorsing a small chance that one young person won’t get on board with a hateful ideology that leads them to shoot up a school or a church.

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Please explain how that happens without acts of violence. it doesn’t. Their position was just cover for anti-immigrant sentiment.

And of course, the BNP had right wing hooligans committing acts of violence against immigrants on a regular basis in the 1980s and 1990s. So yes, those so-called supporters of repatriation deserved a punch, since they were going around punching people on a regular basis on behalf of the BNP.

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I find this pretty pendantic, given that it’s not like it’s just nazis out there. Spencer doesn’t call himself a nazi, but he certainly advocates for their polititical views as part of his own. Ethnic cleansing is never peaceful.

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My experience was that the police were useless when I was being threatened and attacked by fascists for being trans. The only useful help I got from them was one cop telling me “they couldn’t protect me and if I didn’t get out of where I was living the fascists would continue trying to kill me” (his words, not mine). Then there is the CPS, which is still institutionally transphobic nearly 15 years on.

Under those circumstances it’s less vigilante justice and more keeping myself alive for another day.

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It was a response to everyone saying that nazis advocate genocide, that’s how you know they’re nazis.

If we’re talking about punching nazis who advocate genocide, what about the ones who don’t?
Where do you draw the line?
How far away do you need to be to not get punched?
And who makes that decision?

I don’t trust you to make that decision, nor do I trust me to make that decision, and I very definitely don’t trust a bunch of hardcore marxists to make that decision.

So how does that decision get made, and what constitutes an acceptable punishment beating?

@the_borderer, as I said, I’m not a minority and I’m aware I don’t have to go through what others do, and I don’t know what choices I would make in that situation. I do think we need to advocate for better law enforcement.

Why do you believe them when the entire point of the Nazi party was mass murder? Is the person advocating for at best, ethnic cleansing, a more reliable truth teller than people who aren’t advocating for that.

We’re not talking about literally going up to people’s houses, or as they are just sitting there not doing anything and punching them for their political views. We’re talking about events in the heat of the moment, during protests or confrontations. Some people will draw the line at an explicit threat, which happens quite often in these situations. When nazis would show up at punk shows and start shit, punks made the decision to punch back in self-defense.

At the end of the day, no one can make that decision for others. But nazis, white supremacists, and the like have a long history of actually attacking first. Again, this is not some projection on my part - it’s a part of the historical record.

From what I understand, that didn’t work out so well for @the_borderer. And lets not forget that law enforcement here in the US has a long history of association with the right wing and with white supremacist organizations.

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They do. I’ll take their word for it.

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I was looking for that one.

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