Agree with you. This country used to deal with morons by simply ignoring them. Now we all pile on to get our outrage fix.
Popehat (who first coined the Rule of Goats) agrees.
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It’s like… I get that they are making a statement, I completely assumed from the outset that the swastika on their mask was meant to be a symbol that the people making them wear the masks were the Nazis.
BUT
Wearing swastikas in public is a death threat, whether you mean it as one or not.
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I honestly did not. Maybe it’s because I’m German but that symbol is so powerful to me that it hadn’t even entered my mind that someone would use it to make a (shitty) point. It’s the ultimate taboo that you would only break if you are 100% behind its message. If I see a swastika I see a nazi.
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I’m 100% with you. Like I said, I think it’s a death threat, no matter how clever the people presenting think they are being. The only reason I’m able to take the message that they are saying the mask itself is fascist is because I’m a privileged philosopher who isn’t the target of the threat. I can think the best possible thing of everyone all day but that doesn’t make me right.
I think Germany is right to outlaw the swastika and other countries should follow suit. It’s not like Germany’s unique history with that symbol didn’t include the rest of us. It’s hardly more restrictive of free speech than copyright law, and for a much more important reason.
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There is a fine line between “ignoring” and “accepting.”
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Ignoring them got us the Trump era.
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I’ll go further: There is no line. Ignoring and accepting are the same thing. If your program is to eliminate all morons from our culture, then you yourself are flirting with Nazism. We must accept that morons with offensive ideas have always existed and will always exist, and wasting time answering them just empowers them.
To the argument that ignoring them got us Trump, don’t you remember how we all (CNN most memorably) assiduously FAILED to ignore Trump while he was running for office, and in fact couldn’t get enough of what seemed at the time to be a laughable media sideshow?
Hmmm…I’m not entirely sure you have a handle on what exactly the Nazis were up to. In any event, I am under no illusion that one can eliminate all morons from society, but we can make efforts to not allow shitty ideas and shitty people to be normalized and accepted.
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First off don’t assume what people have or have not been educated in. Now you generalized with a “the people arguing” and also replied directly to me above while quoting someone else. So I feel there is some “lumping” going on here that isn’t exactly correct.
So to be clear…I am not arguing if Nazism is allowed or not as a political party in the US. I think that is unfortunately not settled, and it isn’t something we can truly agree on. The definition and origin is of the Nazi Party and was a political party by definition. It also clearly went beyond that into an ideological belief which politics and ideologies intersect…so untangling that becomes messy and for my point I made doesn’t need doing.
In the US there are 7 federally protected statuses for workers and no employer can terminate someone for any of those reasons (publicly). Many states have additional items, CA in particular has one for: political activities or affiliations. If your employer fired you for wearing MAGA hat in RI, you are SOL; if they did so in Cali…you’d have a discrimination case.
That was my point and it is entirely accurate. If they fire you for wearing a “Make American Nazi Germany 1942 Again” hat, my response is good riddance and go eff yourself.
You just killed your own argument.
I cannot “just ignore” people who want me and everyone else who isn’t White, straight, cisgender, able bodied and claiming to be Xtain exterminated from the face of the planet.
Fuck that noise; FUCK Martin Niemöller and his fatal cowardice.
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Right?
Those kinds of arguments always sound like “maybe you should just give up your rights, your body, your whole life … ya know cause when I didn’t know about it my life was better.”
It’s great if burying your head in the sand works for you but FFS it’s not a social strategy, it’s a psychological defense of the self. It’s just being selfish and acting pious because of it.
I don’t even mind the selfish part, go ahead and be selfish it’s fine… really, it’s perfectly normal. But don’t act like it’s something that will help anyone else or like it’s people’s fault for reacting to what is happening to them.
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Are you saying I should or shouldn’t respond to this?
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Exactly; some of us don’t have the PRIVILEGE of “just ignoring” hateful fuckers, because said hateful fuckers would gladly see us all dead and buried in a mass grave.
Some of us have no choice but to fight if we want to survive.
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They are running the executive branch. Ignoring them did not work. 
white supremacy is an ideology, that plenty of people with intelligence believe in. It’s about power more than anything else. It has precious little to do with intelligence.
And we can change the ideologies people believe in, as I suspect you don’t now believe in the divine right of kings, right? That was an ideology that most people accepted at face value for centuries. Most of us don’t now.
This has never been a simple problem of people not being smart. It’s a much more complex problem of power and ideology.
Right? The ability to “ignore” these people is a white, male privilege. And the people who do this are pretty much leaving the rest of us to our fate. It’s clear that they are not with us, but willing to let everyone else that doesn’t look like them suffer because it’s not “their” problem…
That’s exactly what they are.
Bingo!
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By the time Trump was running for office, it was too late. We ignored them in the 90’s.
We had two Clinton terms, two Obama terms, countless mass shootings, Waco, the Oklahoma City bombing, the Bundy family, and on and on ad nauseam, and somehow it is only now we are designating white nationalist organizations as terrorist groups. The racist/militia undercurrents grew, and propagandized hate to another two generations.
What we call Q now is the grandchild of boomers spouting theories about Vince Foster almost 30 years ago. Hillary Clinton is basically the devil incarnate for probably 25+% of the voting American public, the villain of a deep-rooted mythos of secretive world governments and abortion-fueled eugenics conspiracies. Each generation adds a new twist.
It doesn’t matter that what tainted her was laughable to us, it was gospel to millions of voters. She was tainted, and shouldn’t have been run. Even with the horrific curse of that, she still beat Trump in the popular vote. Someone untainted by it would have beat him outright.
We can’t ignore this stuff.
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Wow. Where did I say any of your points were inaccurate?
Yes, I quoted someone else, so you could see it wasn’t about politics in the workplace at all. That is why I added the poster’s handle to attribute who it was I was quoting.
The dispute was about whether or not employees could be forced to wear a swastika in the workplace. Politics doesn’t enter into it. I said they must not have had a compliance class because this stuff is made pretty clear in EEOC compliance classes.
Harassment can include, for example, racial slurs, offensive or derogatory remarks about a person’s race or color, or the display of racially-offensive symbols .
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Y’all: I find your lack of imagination and willingness to try to change things worrying.
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NO.
But those two MN jackholes would probably ‘snowbird’ to Florida. Most likely the panhandle and “Redneck Riviera” Gulf coast shitholes.
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If I were to list out some of the things I would actually like to change in US government, laws, and politics, I imagine you’d find some of them so outlandish and impractical that we’d quickly switch places in this conversation (PM me if you’re curious, I don’t want to derail the thread).That doesn’t mean I should keep my eyes closed about how difficult to achieve any particular outcome would be - if I don’t know that I can’t figure out a path to change anything successfully, except by accident.
That said, hate speech laws do happen to be a place where I’m very leery of change in the US specifically. Canada, Germany, and many other countries that have these laws have parliamentary systems of government where it is very hard for any one ideology to be in control for very long if they do unpopular things. It would be very difficult to misuse these laws there in any large-scale way. In contrast, the US’ voting system locks in the two-party system pretty firmly, so giving whichever group has a current slight plurality of representation any kind of censorship abilities is very scary to me. Censorship of any kind is a weapon that works equally well no matter what ideology wields it, and calling the laws “hate speech laws” doesn’t actually change that. If hate speech laws were on the books today, it would be just as easy for Trump-appointed judges to use them to punish left-leaning opinions, arguments, and so on, no matter their content.
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