ETA2:
Thanks to @gracchus for doing a great job explaining the rationale for guillotines on BB, essentially that they are a prediction not a prescription:
And I found a good debate that explains the reasoning behind the Nazi punching prescription. https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/9dt2q7/cmv_punching_nazis_is_bad/
essentially the reasoning is that being a Nazi is a death threat to particular people, and those particular people have standing to punch back. While I don’t agree, I see that there is internally consistent logic that explains why Nazis are uniquely punchable, mostly that most other seemingly punchable tyrants are not directly specifying which people they intend to make dead.
And so I consider the question answered and thank the community.
Note to the reader: the posts below tend to be out of order since they came from different threads without context. The meaty post is the one from @gracchus .
Original post:
Is there an explainer on how threatening guillotines and Nazi punching by the left is compatible with basic human rights and the fight against fascism?
I mean I get the broad stroke that Nazis and plutocrats are so unreformeable and unaccountable that only the strongest level of force will work.
But what exactly makes a Nazi bloviating on a street corner or a plutocrat billowing carbon from their spaceship different from all the other threats for which extrajudicial violence is the tool of the man?
Are these serious threats that you would carry out, or a haka dance?
ETA1: The haka dance is a beautiful way to channel warrior energy with integrity. I would personally have more respect if the answer was that it was intended like a haka. I apologize for using that word since it clearly came across as an insult, which was opposite from my intention.
If there is a better way to genuinely ask this question here, please help.
Guillotines are usually presented as a warning of the inevitable result of runaway social inequities rather than a prescriptive solution for the wealth gap.
Nazi punching is always compatible with the fight against fascism, because that’s literally fighting fascists.
Progressives aren’t the ones appropriating the haka dance, bro.
tl;dr: use of the image as a symbolic admonition about an unpleasant and unwanted historic outcome of inequality and greed is fine; talking about actually building the device (or some 21st century equivalent) in the modern day is just unhelpful brocialist edgelord posturing (or perhaps an attempt at bothsidesism).
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