71–80 of 149 posts
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One of the most chilling comments I've ever read on this site. How does one provide evidence of the content of their heart?
Nobody's asking for validation of the contents of a persons heart. But people are saying that certain speech acts deserve unyielding opposition because they consist of exhortations to violence. Why conflate two different things?
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Not if they don't support factual sex education and easy availability of contraception. If they don't then they're probably just fascists using emotive subjects to gain power (see the blood libel against the Jews) or suckers falling for the fascist propaganda. It's great that Godwin can't be applied to this thread.
Sorry, but that's an orthogonal argument. Pro-life activists believe abortion is murder. Nothing you can say about contraception refutes that argument. The fact that I find the pro-life argument so personally repellant is why I think it's a reasonably good example in discussions like these: it's a system of practical beliefs directly contrary to my own that is held by a great many people. Whatever ethics about speech…
Personally I put the anti-abortionists (who directly cause more abortions) in the same category as the guy who turned up at a pizza parlor with a rifle and many low level Nazis. Confused by propaganda into making the situation worse.
The bar is very low, it seems.
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One of the most chilling comments I've ever read on this site. How does one provide evidence of the content of their heart?
Nobody's asking for validation of the contents of a persons heart. But people are saying that certain speech acts deserve unyielding opposition because they consist of exhortations to violence. Why conflate two different things?
The event and Mr. Spencer were panned, to be sure, but not as unambiguously as one might have expected.
Hate and supremacists — of all stripes — are alive and well in the U.S.: https://www.splcenter.org/hate-map
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I'll quote you the opening paragraph, which isnt about internet nazis at all: "In certain corners of the Western world, Nazi ideology is making a comeback. For years, we’ve taken it as a given that ideas such as racism and ultra-nationalism were poisonous roads to pain, suffering and war. Pop culture, and especially video games, share part of the blame." This is an example, not holistic
Right: video games share part of the blame by rendering Nazis not as perpetrators of atrocity but rather as all-purpose generic bad-ass villains.
those two seem to be mutually exclusive
writers/designers like Nazis not because they're generic but because they were horribly weird, they were associated with multiple mystic organizations like the Ahnenerbe and the Thule society, they worked on crazy engineering projects like superweapons, megacities, and rocketry, they did lovecraftian experiments on people in concentration camps
the reason people use Nazi Germany in their media is because they were extremely interesting
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You moved the goal posts. Virtually all of us "oppose" Nazism. That doesn't make it OK to physically attack them. Once again: if it's OK for us to punch Nazis, it must also be OK for anti-abortion activists to violently attack abortion clinics. Their argument that abortion clinics are murder factories --- and argument I vehemently disagree with --- is on firmer ground than our argument that white supremacist speech i…
If someone is carrying a battle flag, they're manifesting an intention to physically attack you. I already addressed your abortion point in more detail elsewhere, but briefly, anti-abortion activists are intervening on behalf of a third party, the fetus. Many who support punching Nazis feel directly threatened by Nazism. These are two wildly different situations.
(Apropos nothing: I was walking through Munich a week ago and saw someone walking down the street in a Confederate flag shirt. I wondered, should I say something? Maybe they just didn't understand what it meant?)
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Right: video games share part of the blame by rendering Nazis not as perpetrators of atrocity but rather as all-purpose generic bad-ass villains.
>generic bad-ass those two seem to be mutually exclusive writers/designers like Nazis not because they're generic but because they were horribly weird, they were associated with multiple mystic organizations like the Ahnenerbe and the Thule society, they worked on crazy engineering projects like superweapons, megacities, and rocketry, they did lovecraftian experiments on people in concentration camps the reason peopl…
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Sorry, but that's an orthogonal argument. Pro-life activists believe abortion is murder. Nothing you can say about contraception refutes that argument. The fact that I find the pro-life argument so personally repellant is why I think it's a reasonably good example in discussions like these: it's a system of practical beliefs directly contrary to my own that is held by a great many people. Whatever ethics about speech…
People could have said the same about Nazism. Personally I put the anti-abortionists (who directly cause more abortions) in the same category as the guy who turned up at a pizza parlor with a rifle and many low level Nazis. Confused by propaganda into making the situation worse.
Meanwhile, there's no evading it. You simply must stipulate that opponents of abortion believe, in good faith, that abortion is the unjust taking of human life.
If you believe you have the right to punch Nazis, I don't see how you escape conceding that pro-lifers have the right to punch women walking into abortion clinics.
We neatly avoid all of this simply by allowing that while it's important to suppress Nazism (and white supremacy and all that stuff), we're not entitled to use physical violence to do it.
Obviously, I have company in that perspective with the ACLU.
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Let's not forget that the Nazi's took power during a time of democracy, with full support of a plurality of the vote. Between that and Trump's overt authoritarianism, it's fair that people will draw analogies between the situations.
Yes, also important not to confuse correlation and causation IMHO. Even if we fully mirrored the rise of the Nazi party (in the political sense), it would not necessarily imply that we would mirror their actions (genocide, etc). In situations like this, its important to step back and ask - under what circumstances would the US actually cross the same line that the Nazis did? (And I do not mean anecdotal instances - I…
There are certainly people who actively espouse genocidal intentions openly in our body politic, and the connections between them and powerful figures in the administration are not very distant.
In situations like this, its important to step back and ask - under what circumstances would the US actually cross the same line that the Nazis did?
Have you heard about this plan to build a wall and forcibly move millions of people to the other side of it?Somewhere between 1/4 and 1/3 of the population seem heartily in favor of this idea.