I’m already the guy who will cross to the opposite side of the street so I am not walking behind you at night, but on top of that, there is one of the cardinal rules of survival in the wild.
Don’t mess with mama bear
4 Likes
Nothing scares me more either!
4 Likes
And hey, at this rate, it might pay for a couple Tylenols. </s>
2 Likes
That isn’t “might is right”—because this is horribly glib.
Someone agitating for murder isn’t doing free speech. They are agitating for murder.
I don’t get how this is ambigious. We all understand what Nazis are, right?
Right?
16 Likes
The behaviour I oppose is advocating that people I love be put into ovens. You appear to be unlclear about the game they are playing. For one thing, genocide is not a fucking game.
23 Likes
Hey look everyone!
I think it’s dumb to treat nazis and fascists as reasonable people. I think that they need to be opposed, possibly even violently. Otherwise they get into power. And once they’re in positions of power, the only think that solves the problem is bullets, and bombs, and fire, and war. Because they’re behind genocide and anyone who’s not opposing them as is complicit in genocide.
I wonder, has appeasement and reasoning with genocidal murderers ever worked in the past?
12 Likes
But there is nothing ambiguous about the intent of these people, and it means only one thing to anybody with sense.
If you wear Nazi insignia, or shout Nazi slogans, or do, wear, or say anything that identifies you as being admiring of or aspiring to the Nazi cause, you are proclaiming yourself to advocate an ideology whose single most defining characteristic is the promotion and enactment of genocide.
The threat is inherent in the symbolism. It doesn’t stand for anything that is not an open threat of genocidal violence.
You do not debate with Nazis. You do not engage in civil discourse with Nazis. You do not agree to disagree with Nazis. Nazis do not need a hug. They deserve neither respect nor sympathy nor tolerance. You stand up and shout them down and oppose them, over and over and over, as often as necessary.
And if the only way to prevent their vile and repugnant ideology from gaining further support is to mock and shame and intimidate and, yes, punch them in the face, then you’re goddamn right that’s what you do. It is morally rephrensible to do otherwise. We know this. We know, because 80 years ago we tired ignoring them and we tried appeasement and we allowed them murder millions for our folly.
That will not happen again.
You are concern driving trollies for evil. It is tedious.
30 Likes
The opposing group physically attacks one of your members, so you’re proposing that your group physically attacks them.
Is it that big a stretch to think that your group physically attacking one of their members will encourage someone from their group to physically attack us?
White supremacists commit the overwhelming majority of terrorist acts in the US. A white supremacist murdered Heather Heyer and injured dozens of others two months ago. Why are you pretending that people who cloak themselves in the ideology of genocide require provocation or encouragement to commit violence when you know they commit violence without provokation all the time?
14 Likes
The nazis are always okay with physically attacking decent people.
That’s their whole MO.
If we don’t physically keep them down, they commit genocide.
It’s that simple.
They don’t need any excuse to be violent. That’s the whole point of fascism. Throughout history the only way to get rid of them is with bullets and bombs and fire.
12 Likes
So what’s more important to you, fighting Nazism or fighting Nazis?
Because in WWII those were the same things, to fight Nazism you had to fight Nazis.
But nowadays, if you want to fight Nazism then going around and fighting Nazis might be the worst thing you can do.
Seriously, what do you think punching a Nazi is going to accomplish? If some Nazi punched you are you going to stop advocating against Nazis or are you going to get pissed off and advocate harder? Why do you think a Nazi would respond differently? Are leftists the only people manly enough to take a punch?
All you end up doing is feeding their persecution complex and making it easier for them to draw a false-equivalency with the left. That’s why all you hear about from the alt-right is Antifa, that’s why Steve Bannon wanted Milo Yannopolis to draw violent protests, because they know the best way to grow the alt-right is to create an equivalent villain on the left.
If there wasn’t any leftists volunteering to punch Nazis then they’d probably try to hire one.
3 Likes
Persecuting nazis is the correct thing to do in any moral framework that makes sense.
They don’t have a “persecution complex”, they are persecuted. Almost always in a perfectly fair and legal way. And persecution is exactly what they deserve.
If they don’t like it, they can all stop being nazis. It’s that easy.
It’s not like Jews or black people or gay people or immigrants can just hang up their races and ethnicities and national origins and sexual orientations.
18 Likes
Why are you pretending that every Nazi is born a Nazi?
You’re not in a war, you’re not trying to kill enemy soldiers, you’re trying to stop and extremist movement from gaining more followers.
There are dedicated White Supremacist who will kill people in terrorist acts, it’s a tragic fact that we can’t really do much about it other than rely on law enforcement to do its job.
But if you really give a damn about stopping the next Heather Heyer from being murdered then you need to talk to the people who matter, the Hannity fans, the Breitbart readers, the die-hard Trump groupies, the people who are either at risk of becoming Nazis or talk to other who are.
If you can reach those people you might actually make a difference, but I don’t understand how punching Nazis will help.
Really? Then why isn’t Canada overrun with Nazis? You only need “bullets and bombs and fire” when you’ve screwed up and allowed them to coalesce into a major socia
2 Likes
What do you call it when one is living in the white house and had his campaign run by a very outspoken neonazi?
11 Likes
They’re going to compare you to the conservative hawks now, because real world experience of finding out that talking to or ignoring fascists and walking away doesn’t work is apparently inferior to a theoretical ideal of pacifism and free speech.
10 Likes
If you want to fight them you need to understand them, you don’t have to agree with them but you need to understand them.
So I’m going to tell you my understanding of the thought process and motivation of a modern day Nazi/White Supremacist/Altright because I think you need to understand what you’re dealing with.
First, realize that everyone is racist, everyone, people build patterns based on limited information and there’s no getting around it.
Modern racists realize there’s no such thing as colour blind so they embrace their biases instead, even when they accept the label of racist they don’t think of themselves as being racist, they imagine they’re being politically incorrect realists.
Second, diversity does make things more complicated, people from different cultures are harder to relate to, most people tend to make friends with people very much like them. And on a more practical matter it’s harder to evaluate someone from another culture with a weird accent. Sometimes strangers are dangerous and you have a better chance of picking out the dangerous strangers from your community than from different cultures.
Third, people like nice distinct identities, “France is for white Europeans who speak French”, “America is for whites, and a few natives, who speak English, and some blacks (depending on the style of racist)”, etc, etc. They want to keep local flavour.
There’s a lot more to it, but these can be powerful ideas. England has been an English speaking country full of white people for a very long time, and racially diverse country is something different. I grew up in a town that was overwhelmingly white, I don’t mind if the cultural and racial complexion of that town changes, but I suspect a lot of people would feel very uncomfortable with that.
If you want to stop Nazis and the rest of the far right you need to see that they’ve been given some very elegant and simple answers to some tough questions, you need to show them those answers are wrong.
2 Likes
You can’t show them they are wrong without them wanting to see.
At this juncture, with their murders and marches, I’m unwilling to waste my time with deaf ears. I’m more interested in fighting them, possibly even violently, in order to protect those they seek to intimidate, silence and kill.
13 Likes
During the summer I went to the gay pride parade and a group of fundies was out there protesting. So I found one near the edge and talked with him for about half an hour.
I told him I was an atheist but I understood his beliefs were sincere and he thought he was doing the right thing. I pushed him a lot on transgendered people and its relation to intrasexed people, and he admitted he didn’t have good answers.
I called him on a fake Dawkins quote and he acknowledged his source was probably wrong.
He admitted one of his arguments was wrong and offensive.
I didn’t convince him to love gay people, I didn’t even convince him to walk away from the protest, but I guarantee he walked away from that encounter with a lot more doubt than he showed up with, and I’m hopeful that some of the conversation has gestated since then (or he may have forgotten entirely).
But I do know if I walked up and yelled, insulted, or even punched him than he’d have gone away even more anti-gay than when he showed up.
3 Likes
Do those evangelicals also go around killing people for being gay? Do they advocate a program of genocide?
There’s a false equivalence here.
Lots of them say “fags burn in hell.” I’ve practically never seen evangelicals saying “kill all the gays.”
8 Likes
