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Tolerating intolerance
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this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2023
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The problem is, if you condemn them back to the shadows and basements, they fester and pass their hatreds down within their in-group. They'll just teach their children "the south with rise again" in private, with no pushback because others don't know it's happening.
At least letting them talk in the name of free speech lets you know who the Nazis/fascists/white supremacists are, instead of having them going back to using toxic, slowly indoctrinating dogwhistles and regrouping.
At the end of the day, secrecy just prolongs and exacerbates problems. We should rise or fall as a society on who we all are, not on the basis of who has the most appealing web of lies. Let the Nazis bury themselves by speaking their fucked up beliefs, because otherwise they'll temper their messaging, which will recruit more people than the horror of their actual endgame.
You wrote three paragraphs to demonstrate how thoroughly you missed the point of this extremely blunt comic. Don’t get mad at me for pointing this out, I’m just exposing my own opinion the to purifying effect of public discourse.
Maybe they don't agree with the comic.
I think you misinterpreted their post as anger.
No, I anticipated an angry response to providing the kind of discourse they portrayed as necessary.
Why would I be angry about what you said? You're allowed to have a different opinion on how to react to bigots.
Because I’ve put forth no constructive criticism, I’ve not tried to explain why you’re wrong or justify my own position, nor would I accept any arguments that you put forth to try and explain your position. If I could shout over you, I would do that too. I’m arguing in bad faith. I’m not here to debate you. I’m here to make people think you’re stupid by publicly making fun of you with cheap crowd pleasing rhetoric and imply what you said is wrong because of it. This is the tactic I will use to take control of this country and you seem to think I have a right to use it.
This is the kind of discourse someone attempts when they don't feel they can declare their fucked up beliefs overtly.
I'd rather make them feel like they can declare their fucked up beliefs without hedging or room for doubt, then inform their employer, the businesses that deal with their employer, their family, their neighbors, etc with the receipts.
Oh good, you shouted down a nazi on a street corner ranting about the inferior this and the inferior that. They'll now temper their message, keep their job, and slowly convert the new office runner with terms like "urban" and "not real Americans." congratulations, you've now got a stealth Nazi staying low insidiously making more. Thanks a ton.
What you guys aren’t understanding in this frictionless hypothetical sphere of argument is that a single Nazi, by itself, is not a threat. The problem comes when this Nazi connects with other Nazis. If Nazis can’t publicly be Nazis then finding the other ones to gang up with becomes a lot harder.
What you seem to keep overlooking is that It's considerably easier for white supremacists to, again, use mutually understood dog whistles to identify one another and recruit others, than the alternative and what they want because they don't think it through: to say, their fucked up shit in it's entirety so there's no room to deny or wriggle out of it WITH PUBLIC SCRUTINY and social consequences.
Instead, they say "the south will rise again/the civil war was about state's rights!" which = "Black people should still be slaves!" when decoded. And they're allowed to say that all day with no social consequences, to have kids and infect them with their bile and tactics for discreetly propagating it further.
Tldr: instead of shouting down Nazis, calmly record their unrestrained discourse, let them go home feeling good, then use those recordings to tangibly destroy any social standing they may have, as was done in Charlottesville. Tell the businesses that work with their employer that they're doing business with Nazi enablers until that person is terminated, as just one example.
Shouting them down in the square doesn't make them rethink spreading their venom, only their tactics. Hitting them in their lives with tangible consequences might get them to shut up wholesale.
The nature of a dog whistle is that it’s supposed to be subtle enough to escape public scrutiny. If you’re not already “in the know” about it it flies right over your head. They are only useful for identifying people who are already bought in. For bringing new people in, for growing the movement, you need to be visible to the uninitiated. You’re not getting new recruits with dog whistles unless the dog whistles are so well known that they aren’t dog whistles anymore and just whistles.
The problem with that is that over a hundred million people have always been racist wannabe slavemongers in this country since before it even started so there will always be large numbers of people who get it.
Lincoln and the Repubs failed us when they didn't fully push for de-bigoting the bigots during Reconstruction. Instead they were allowed to be racists because Lincoln's camp was too afraid to challenge their racist ideas because they were so popular, and now we suffer.
What really needs to happen to prevent genocide is that the country needs to be split according to ideology and either strict borders enforced or great distance put between them to prevent the peoples of each from engaging in warfare with each other.
They can start with "people from the inner cities are soooo lazy, aren't they MARK?"
Dogwhistles can unfortunately also plant seeds and apply the perception of peer pressure. Most Americans don't spend time thinking about race relations and are pretty suggestible. You work in a southern factory for years and have a half a dozen coworkers blame the urban every time they stub their toes, and some might start adopting that point of view at work as the path of least resistance because, again, most Americans don't think about the higher stakes or consider the antisocial consequences of their biases. "Hank, Cletus, and Jimmy-Joe-Bob-Steve sure do hate urban people, and those guys are my friends, so I guess urban people must be bad..."
With our k-12 systems sitting mostly in utter ruin to cut billionaire taxes for the last half century, you really can't expect the median American to have reasonable or even minimal critical thinking skills in a vacuum, much less in the face of targeted social pressures.
If you have such a low opinion of the public’s critical thinking ability I think you’d rather have those Nazis forced into subterfuge. The need for secrecy necessarily limits the amount of people that are exposed to it. The added complexity and stress of working subtly would tax their poorly educated minds and make them less effective.
Ultimately if it wasn’t such an effective strategy they wouldnt be crying about how they get deplatformed and silenced all the damn time. If you think their opinion is so valuable, listen to what they’re telling you.
I don't think they're opinion is valuable for the information it disseminates, only for the source it identifies. That has value, because then if that Nazi has anything to lose, that opinion can be used to unravel that source's life, aka a consequence beyond "hey...shut up."
Yeah dude, the consequences only come if society actively shuns them for publicly saying Nazi shit. That’s the whole point! You can’t get someone fired for heiling hitler if people don’t think that’s something that should be punished!
No, you want to actively stop them before they've given their complete speech with every gruesome atrocity.
I want that shit on camera. Please, keep talking, do go on, and please belabor specifics and ultimate goals of your hate.
Difference. The more they say, the less they can bullshit out of it. You didn't recite the first chapter of Mein Kampf from memory because you were having a bad day.
What difference? Is laying out a complete plan for rendering the Jews into ash going to make their public shaming more effective somehow? Are they gonna get extra fired, double canceled?
The difference is you not letting them bury themselves with their words as much as humanly possible. You think "I hate the Jews" is sufficient, I think that can be wriggled out of more easily than letting them do their 2 hour diatribe of how much they hate them and what temperature oil they'd use to boil them alive.
"Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake."
-Napoleon Bonaparte
"I was saying juice! I hate juice boss you gotta believe me!"
When someone wants to divulge their evil plan, fucking let them. Hell, they might start talking about future plans which means that Nazi might not be society's problem anymore if you're recording.
But the consequences are the same. The grave was already deep enough to bury them in. Letting them convince a bunch of impressionable rubes that the soil is soft and the solution to everything is buried in it is the mistake, not shoving in the dirt when they’ve dug deep enough.
The consequences are not necessarily the same. You add deniability cutting them short. You limit any long term plans, discussion of numbers or organization, their method of recruitment at the end, etc. All of which could be useful in social consequences and more importantly law enforcement tracking, which they thankfully do when it comes to white nationalists.
Making a Nazi's position as public as possible makes it harder for that nazi to move, and measures how much resource should be committed to tracking them. It's the difference between "I hate x" and "I hate x, if you're interested we meet at 6 at the church rec center on tuesday!"
Now you have a phone call to make, with video, that a white nationalist group is meeting at the church at 6 on tuesday. To the FBI tip line, and to local news which raises the local consciousness as a problem.
Nobody is doing all that work though, dude. There’s no catalogue posted publicly itemizing their crimes for all to see. Law enforcement tracks these people well enough already. They had people in leadership positions of the proud boys informing the FBI, for fucks sake, and still did nothing to stop their participation in Jan 6th. At least half the people in law enforcement probably agree with this shit.
Again I want to stress that a single Nazi is not a problem. You’re overly focused on fighting some kind of hypothetical individual and not a widespread and growing political movement.
I cant stop all Nazis everywhere, I can only seek to attempt to inflict maximum penalty upon those I do encounter.
That is all I can do as an individual. And in that regard, it is within my power to inflict more penalty upon them than "hey shut up."
Nothing you can do as an individual will have any kind of meaningful effect on the movement as a whole. If you care about stopping this, truly, you must start thinking about strategy in collective terms.
Canceling and silencing them doesn’t make them stop being Nazis, it just entrenches them, but nothing you do is going to make them all have some kind of enlightened epiphany and stop being racist. The best you can hope for is that if they get lonely enough from being a pariah that they’ll reflect and come around on their own terms. That isn’t going to happen if they’ve built a support network of virulent racists to surround them and tell them they’re right and the libs are evil for denying them their free speech. Separating them from the means to make that support network is imperative if you actually want to turn this tide, instead of getting some self indulgent revenge on a dipshit who doesn’t know anything about any grander strategy for you to even theoretically glean while they shout out whatever persuasive bullshit they were fed that made them Nazis.
Honestly dude this is all just rearranging deck chairs and fun hypotheticals. Climate change has blown through estimates at this stage and is going to decimate our species in such a way that we can't even really reasonably hypothesize the scale of humanity or the level of surviving civil/technological memory on the other side. Civilization might limp along for a little while, or we could be looking at a second dark age, there just isn't enough data yet.
Our sociopolitical differences are going to feel very, very quaint in 10 years when the mass famines set in.
Yeah fair enough. If watching Nazis dig impossibly deep holes brings you joy in these end times then by all means don’t let me rob you of that.
I've come to take a great deal of solace in seeing that our selfish species as a whole has lost.
All the stupid race wars, empires of dust, snake oil peddling religions, and nation states in human history. All the elitists manipulating peasants out of greed and glut. Nobody wins. Good.
For the very real in my opinion overarching crime of humanity: dividing ourselves and competing against one another at every conceivable level instead of working for each other, we as a species deserve what we have wrought.
Humanity will survive. We're cockroaches. Maybe If we're thinned out enough, when we rebuild, we can rebuild as a planet and a people instead of as nation states undermining one another to get mooooooore than the next guy. This petty nation state crap is idiotic, and a means for sociopaths to manipulate people against people for power.
I see it more as an unfortunate victory of destructive ideology than a well earned collective punishment for our faults as a species, but otherwise agreed.
That's great and all, but knowing who the Nazis are is just step one. Without taking additional steps, that knowledge is useless.
That knowledge literally ended the employment of a lot of white supremacists that were filmed in Charlottesville overtly chanting against Jewish people. You see? They were given enough rope, and they hanged themselves, and now those images and reputation can keep others informed about who they are and never to give them an inch.
Free speech is the absence of consequences by the state, but once you know someone is a proud white supremacist, you don't have to keep them employed, or renew their lease, or hire them, or stay married to them, or invite them to your wedding, etc. A known Nazi can suffer social consequences all day and be socially ostracized, if they were emboldened enough to disclose that fact instead of spending their lives infecting people with shit like "I hate urban people in the inner cities." Shit like that can appeal to the weak minded.
It'd obviously be better if the Nazi ideology never surfaced in the first place, but that would require a good level of education, empathy, and social support...or as the right puts it, "leftist woke indoctrination."
Instead you have disingenous discourse defended under the banner of free speech. Fascists have historically used this right as their anchor point to undermine Democratic institutions.
Usually they amplify their racist/hate speech, xenophobic messaging, and nationalistic fervor during times that Democratic institutions are under particularly extreme pressure by natural disasters or domestic/foreign wars. Democratic societies tend to propagate comfortable and idealistic upper/middle class citizens when they're doing well (not under said pressures), often fostering the sentiment for a live and let live philosophy, even for those with dangerous hateful ideologies and rhetoric.
Then, when the Democratic institution is inevitably put under stress by external or internal circumstances, Fascism accelerates and gains momentum in the public consciousness not because they debated better or have genuinely good ideas on how to solve the society's problems, but because they argue that is the only way everyone can survive, when in fact they are usually just narcissistic megalomaniacs who want to control everything and everyone around them, ultimately destroying personal freedoms and diverse communities in the name of moralist, nationalist hegemony.
That is a myth that too much media falls for, and that fascist groups exploit mercilessly.
They can and do recruit a lot more people by spreading lies about minorities on live TV than whispering it to their buddies in the basement.
I don’t believe you can see my reply but counterpoint: reddit and 4chan both went that route and host major nazi ideology funnels. Just like… ban assholes.
Counterpoint to your counterpoint: because they have bigot dens to spew their bile among like minded white nationalists, intelligence agencies now have their names and identities and they're now on lists. They can and have stopped violent actors that were given enough rope to feel safe discussing their plans online instead of being driven to bars and basements to plan out of view.
If you don't give the Nazis the the freedom say "hi im a Nazi" you don't know where the Nazis are, let alone have the means to find out what they're planning.
Now I’m not sure how the partial defederation works… anyway, they move offsite to websites owned by the moderators, in the case of Reddit, so that’s not exactly true. It’s equal parts money-making and radicalization effort and it largely flies under the radar. 4chan, on the other hand, makes as many nutters as it stops. It’s not effective for your mosquito spray to kill 5 mosquitos and create 5 more from the ether.
They're already doing that. It's 2023 ffs. They've been doing this since slavery was abolished. Time to signal to the entire world that it's not fucking okay. Letting Nazis talk has only ever allowed them to plant their insidious misinformation campaigns and gather followers. We don't give Nazis a fucking inch and they are not welcome in the town square. Kill your local Nazi.
The only good Nazi is a dead Nazi.
I can't name a single Nazi. Even Richard Spencer, the guy whom most people think of as a Nazi, says that he doesn't identify as a Nazi. So, who identifies which people are Nazis and which aren't if they don't self-identify?
But that contained the problem for many, many years. And more times than not when members of the group experienced the real world, their indoctrination fell apart. Being in daylight emboldens them and lets them amplify their message and find like-minded people.