I grew up in Texas but worked in Silicon Valley for a few years. One of the toughest adjustments was going from a small conservative town to a major liberal populace. It was astonishing the number of people who got angry _at me_ for having a different opinion then they did. At one workplace I saw two coworkers get into a fist fight because the liberal was "offended" that the conservative differed on a viewpoint. Go t…
I moved to San Francisco from a small, deeply red town. I'll just say this - I think even that small town would be more tolerant of liberals than I felt when I worked in San Francisco, and I'm not even really that conservative (just economically). The leadership at the company was very reasonable, but the politically active folks terrified me, and didn't just think that those that held conservative viewpoints were mi…
> Because it's hard to unanimously and unequivocally identify those who are intolerant as such. Owing to the beguiling nature of language and rhetoric, the intolerant can thrive and propagate by arguing that they're not in fact intolerant, and appealing to "free speech". This seems to be the MO of this so-called "alt-right" stuff; legal or constitutional barriers are almost impossible to define or enforce.
That is creepy to me. You have the ingredients of a witch hunt.
"can't easily distinguish them" aka "anyone could be a witch", "can't use legal methods to attack or 'regulate' them" aka "something... must be done", that's what I'm reading.
There's no evidence that the altright as a group are plotting to murder other citizens. The reverse, threats to do violence to altrighters, I see that on a daily basis without looking for it online e.g. the "punch a nazi" meme. Going from that to "beat up a nazi" to injury/death is not a leap.
And who are they? It's a large collection of loosely connected right wing groups. A full list would take several A4 pages. Most of them hold beliefs little different to our grandparents or possibly great-grandparents in the case of the monarchists. Anybody to the right of the Republican party could be 'altright'. This isn't true but that seems to be how most people have built their classifier.
It's easy to prove that because if you ask (as Trump did to a reporter) people to define the group, they don't know how to do it. I think there is a definition but nobody in the media has mentioned it AFAIK, it's not something that is well understood and so "Nazis!". That nazi flag at the charlottesville rally? A singular item unless the photographers were holding out on us. There are lots of photographs and it's this one guy walking around with a nazi flag.
There seems to be a curious motte and bailey argument going on here. The altright is a relatively small set, but in the media and twitter they are either a fringe sect of right wing lunatics or they are an all pervasive threat to society. It can't be both. Not unless you have an infinitely extensible definition that you can be using for ulterior political purposes.