Wow, looks like we all of a sudden lost a helluva lot of posts. What did I miss?!
Honestly unsure. some of my posts got eaten, and I can’t exactly tell why.
Usually I assume that it’s because I’ve replied to a post that got eaten, but in this case that definitely wasn’t it. no feedback from mods so ???
Hey abutilon. You are misattributing that quote, which was actually written by JustForOnce, to me.
Just sayin’…
By your characterisation of people are punching Nazis as not only afraid and angry (both true) but also being “tired of empty words, and are desperate to mold their society to their own shape” I’m still not convinced you do understand.
People who don’t want their entire races or religions eliminated and oppose Nazis are expressing something more fundamental than a desire to merely “mold their society to their own shape” – they just want to live their lives without the threat of an eliminationist movement gaining power or being normalised.
And yet we’ve seen over and over again in this thread spurious claims that those who espouse Nazi, white supremacist, or white nationalist ideologies by their words and symbols somehow aren’t actively threatening to perpetrate physical violence on entire ethnic groups. Instead, they wring their hands over the occasional on-camera punch that re-inforces the idea that said ideologies are unacceptable in this country.
Some of it went here, the rest was presumably chowed upon.
One of mine got eaten because a certain poster kept moving goalposts and drawing false equivalancies, and I called them out as a paid troll.
I get it, but the behavior is infuriating and deserves to be called out. The actions and postings of a few have caused our community to spend a lot of daytime hours rallying against fascist nonsense.
/rant
Or chanting ‘blood and soil’.
On a similar theme:
"Hey abutilon. You are misattributing that quote, which was actually written by JustForOnce, to me.
Just sayin’…"
Thanks, Lexicat, sorry about that. Corrected. Scrolling through this thread multiple times has been intense!
More than likely… also a derail was moved to a new thread it may be over there.
This new breed of fascist “alt-right” kids seem to be all about the rethoric, but I grew up with skinheads and neonazis being the dudes that had an initiation rite where you would go to the streets and find a gay or non-white person and beat the living shit out of them to be accepted in their group. Having a kill made you some kind of hero between the smegmaheads. That actively try to isolate and beat people to death today, that break and torch immigrant owned stores, that kill transsexuals whenever they can get away with it, that is woefully frequent.
Less the incel assholes, that have a huge hard-on for murder-suicide sprees.
Part of those nazi dicks in Charlotsville were practicing their old tradition of beating a black person they isolated from the group and keep kicking them in the ground until police interfered, lest we forget.
And here we are discussing the rethorics and moral conundrums of punching a guy looking for a fight while these guys don’t give a fuck about keeping on beating and killing anyone they deem “inferior”.
Pray tell me how all these walls of text are keeping the targeted groups alive and safe again?*
*This line isn’t personal about Victor, it’s about the general attitude in this discussion. I 100% agree with Victor.
A specific set of circumstances is what started this topic.
A guy, using a nazi armband, trying to pick fights with black people shouting racially charged slurs in the hopes that police would at the very least arrest black people and even maybe shoot and kill black people for him. And you can bet your ass that the black guy that decked him feared this too.
Because, you see, THAT IS WHAT NAZIS DO. This is what he was trying to achieve. To get someone killed using the power of his words and cops as his weapon.
The specific set of circumstances is that this guy is trying to provoke me into getting shot by a cop.If left unchecked, this arse would only keep engaging until he succeeded in killing someone with plausible deniality.
C’mon, it’s not rocket science!
This as an aside, but these quotes squarely frame it…
I was talking to a friend over the weekend (which featured plenty of fascist violence aimed squarely at peaceful protesters engaging their 1a rights) and we are puzzling over why it is exactly that (US-version) libertarians are joining sides with the rising fascists. Reasoning aside, it seems the greatest disconnect for me is here- they are fools to believe they wont be sent to the camps in their own due time.
Same. In the community I came of age in, we had a choice- we could either be victims of neo-Nazi harassment and violence, or we could make sure they were too scared to show their faces around town. We chose option B.
TLDR; Choosing option B led to a dramatic decrease in fascist violence.
(For Nitpickers: Option B represented a diversity of tactics, and violence itself was not sought out i.e. we didn’t go Nazi-hunting, but countered. They didn’t leave us alone solely because coming out to a punk show might get you bottled, but also because their homes would get spraypainted with warnings for the neighbors like Dumb Fukk Nazis Live Here, and their employers were informed and of course harassed until the Nazi was jobless.)
Capital-L Libertarians see them the same way that too-clever-for-their-own-good German conservatives saw the Nazis during the Weimar period: as anti-Communist* rubes who can be easily controlled and manipulated to preserve their own privilege and who can be used as examples to liberals and progressives that socialism isn’t the only valid ideological alternative for the proletariat. As you note, it didn’t work out well for many of those bankers and plutocrats.
This is why, for example, you’ll often see Libertarians on this site making excuses for the bigotry of Il Douche’s supporters. The standard line is some variation on “you educated liberal elites on BB don’t understand the concerns of hard-working Real Americans™, who are angry that their tax dollars are supporting ‘undeserving’ layabouts.” It’s also one of the reasons they try to steer conversations like this toward ones about small-l libertarian “free speech absolutism” and concern-driving trollies about Nazis not being given a fair hearing due to left-wing PC thuggery (including the occasional punch).
It’s total disingenuous BS, of course, but Libertarians are more concerned with winning a debate than than they are with exploring the integrity of their position, and tend to have as sophisticated an understanding of history as they do about running a business.
[* modern Libertarians consider the slightest hint of socialism as starting us on the slippery slope to Communism]
As a teen we had one of those “scared straight” / “just say no” style presentations by a police officer invited to our school. He was hell bent on telling us all the ways we could wind up in jail. The one caveat he offered, was if we got into a fight with the “San Jose Skins”, which he assured us, would always be their fault. Different times then, but unfortunately not different enough it seems.
This twitter thread seems relevant.
It amazes me that someone could claim to read an entire thread filled with verbiage about Nazis being punchable and still come away with this impression.
So:
Nazis aren’t people one merely disagree with. There is nothing eminently protectable or defensible about what Nazis actually are. They don’t want to do something with water rights or zoning laws or responsible governing in local government or how police do their thing.
They want to murder people. I can respectfully disagree with someone who thinks that’s somehow protectable, but I cannot and will not respect Nazis. (Cf. this entire thread if you’re still confused about who this is about.)
You can be a pacifist. That’s valid. But pacifism only works if no one is prepared to surrender their neighbors’ literal lives to monsters. That’s not tolerance. That’s not pacifism. That’s surrender.
“Surrender” is not what pacifism or tolerance has ever been about.