On February 15 2019 13:56 Liquid`Drone wrote:
I don't advocate punching nazis, just to be clear. I think the idea that violence begets violence holds true even if it's violence towards a group I 'hate', and I think engaging in violence perpetuates a violent cycle. I do think violence can be defended from a self-preservation (or preservation of other, weaker groups) perspective, but there's nothing indicating that actual nazis, today, are a big and significant enough group that violence is the only way to combat them. But I mean, if you're looking for a group of people to punch, then yeah, jihadists are prolly as close to an acceptable group as nazis as you can find. Those groups actually are equivalents to a large degree (also in terms of what type of people they attract). Communists, or muslims at large, don't fit at all.
It's kinda like nazis are to 'groups somewhat skeptical towards increased immigration' what 'jihadists' are to 'muslims'.
and you agree that spreading a "puncha jihadist" retoric woudl mostly just enable racists to punch muslims right?
the same way punch a nazi would just enable maniacs to punch people wearing MAGA hats
(to you, a nazi and a commie are not a valid equivalency but to many it is, and you would still green-light violence to anybody who thinks that way)
Like I said, in no way a fan of the punch a nazi rhetoric, and yes, I agree that leftists adopting that rhetoric (and other leftists acting based on that) would probably lead to a greater degree of acceptance of violence from the right. I mean, actual nazis already accept violence, but it's fair to assume that 'punching nazis is good' 'trump supporters are nazis' at some point will lead to 'maga hat jerk being punched in the face by leftist' which can lead to 'moderate' republicans being like 'well they started' and 'there were jerks on both sides' when some nazis punch antifas during some big rally.
Since your stance seems to be based largely on the fact that Neo-Nazism "isn't big enough" to warrant grassroots resistance against them that inevitably involves violence at times, and because it involves a dangerous slippery slope, let me ask you this.
Given the documented shortcomings of "liberal anti-fascism" -- the fact that Nazism came to power legally in a highly intellectually and culturally advanced nation -- and the failure of the allied strategy of appeasement leading up to WW2, a convincing argument can be made that allowing fascism to develop and expand runs the documented risk of sliding into totalitarianism. If we don’t stop them when they are small, do we stop them when they are medium-sized? If not when they are medium-sized, then when they are large? When they’re in government? Do we need to wait until the swastikas are unfurled from government buildings before we defend ourselves? When would you support a militant anti-fascist movement that challenges the state monopoly on political legitimacy?
My stance is that a significant part of what makes nazism and fascism such abhorrent ideologies are their propensities towards violence. If it was just a bunch of pacifists getting together deciding that they want a strong leader for themselves and that they hate jews and black people and anyone deviating from the norm and that there exists a racial hierarchy and that some races should govern others, but then they were like 'but this is just our opinion, we don't want to enforce it upon anyone', then it'd be like.. whatever?
Being the first side to resort to violence in a conflict is a fundamental error. In the eyes of a very significant number of people, it morally justifies a violent retaliation. You may argue that nazism is fundamentally violent and thus violence towards them is retaliatory violence for actions they will inevitably undertake in the future, especially if they grow, but that line of thinking would again be in conflict with important principles.
I don't even know what to do in a scenario where the majority of people want to abandon democracy, aside from preemptive stuff like reasonably decent education limiting the power of demagogues and having a rock solid system of checks and balances.. Otherwise that's a situation where any 'cure' puts society closer to the society I'm fighting to combat. I can't endorse violence in the name of fighting violence. I mean, you might correctly point towards instances of nazis abandoning some public rally due to threads of antifa violence, but that does not mean that violence is the only way to combat nazism. From my perspective, it's almost like using violence to discipline your kid; you might succeed in repressing whatever behavior it is you want to discourage, but there are a bunch of negative side effects, and you could have succeeded in repressing said behavior through non-violent means.
On February 15 2019 22:20 blackjacki2 wrote:
The theory of preemptive violence against evil people that may be violent in the future given a set of circumstances sounds kind of like it was ripped from the Bush administration
Right, because warmongering over weapons of mass destruction that were proven to not exist in order to continue forward with a well-known, pre-existing imperalist agenda is the exact same thing as trying to prevent more of this from happening:
I'm talking about a concept of the Bush Doctrine that preemptive war (violence) is justifiable to ward off some future threat. Regardless of the actual motives of the Bush foreign policy do you agree with the concept or not? If you are unsatisfied with my example maybe you can provide your own historical example of when violence would be justifiable against a group of people for propagating certain ideas?
It's hard to take the ADL or SPLC seriously when they seem so adamant to downplay Islamic terrorism and play up Right-wing terror despite the fact that Islamic terrorism has killed far more people in the 21st century in the USA despite the fact that Muslims are maybe 1% or 2% of the population.
Case in point, one of the examples of Right-Wing extremist murder from 2018 from the map you posted:
Jason Auvenshine, 47, killed a man on a skateboard in an auto collision then fled the scene. Prosecutors said Auvenshine was a member of a white supremacist prison gang and even had a gang manual in his vehicle at the time of the collision. In May 2018, Auvenshine was convicted of intoxication manslaughter and failure to stop and render assistance and received two concurrent life sentences.
I googled it... the guy on the skateboard he hit was white. Not exactly what I would call a hate crime...
Of course nobody can dispute there is a ton more right-wing terrorism than left-wing terrorism in the US right now. I just happen to see a lack of left-wing terrorism/extremism as a good thing.
I mean... you present this case as if the ADL wasn't up-front about their data and whether or not the killings are ideologically related (hate crimes). You're almost complaining that there is too much data, implying they should only focus on hate crimes. Why shouldn't we know the full scope of the murders, because it's too complicated to read their breakdown in the report? It's complicated to include that information on a map, but the information is easy to find. I think it's valuable to know that extremism leads to a range of violent behaviors. An extremist ideology is the ideal way to justify and channel an already existing desire for power and violence, it doesn't restrict it. It could be helpful for instance to have data that shows that a lot of white supremacists are also wife beaters, so that it's less likely that women would want to associate with them even if they sympathize with white supremacy.
I've already said that I do believe in preemptive/defensive violence. I criticized your comparison because you couldn't have picked a worse one. The evidence was crystal clear that there was no threat to justify the invasion of Iraq. As for historical examples, pick any serious threat of genocide and I believe that a violent resistance was justified. As soon as someone uses their freedom to threaten someone's existence or their humanity, they have to be ready to deal with the consequences, and I don't believe the state should have the monopoly on making and enforcing those decisions.
Can you provide your sources for the claim that the ADL is downplaying Islamic terrorism?
You don't think it's a stretch for an anti-hate organization to include a white man's drunken vehicular manslaughter on another white man as an example of "White Supremacist extremist murder of 2018"? The crime had absolutely nothing to do with Right-wing extremism. I doubt they are making similar stretches to try to connect random crimes with left-wing ideology.
Do you want to compare every crime to every person's left/right ideology? There's probably a reason why Republicans have been trying to disenfranchise felons and why Democrats have been trying to restore their voting rights.
Right-Wing Extremist Violence is Our Biggest Threat. The Numbers Don't Lie.
These are the dominant headlines coming from these organizations these days. My evidence that ADL/SPLC downplay islamic terrorism is because they're giving magnitudes more press to Right-wing terrorism than Islamic terrorism.
From Politifact:
PolitiFact recently examined the GAO report and found, like the Reveal investigation, that more attacks were carried out by far-right violent extremists. But more people died during attacks connected with Islamic jihadists.
Of those 225 deaths by extremists:
• 106 individuals were killed by far-right violent extremists in 62 separate incidents;
• 119 individuals were killed by radical Islamist violent extremists in 23 separate incidents;
Even if you exclude the 3,000~ people from 9/11 you can still see that Islamic terrorism is killing just as many if not more people as right-wing terrorism, despite the fact that people that identify as Right-Wing probably outnumber people that identify as Muslim by 20 to 1. 2018 was obviously a down year for Islamic terror but we shouldn't pretend like we can take 1 year of data and extrapolate that Right-wing terror is a much bigger threat.
I don't mean to discount everything ADL/SPLC does but it should be clear that they are not impartial in these matters.
Like I said, I don't think we lose anything by including all of the instances of extreme violence and murders committed by radicals. People are defined by their actions, not by their allegiances, so all violence counts. I'll concede that the map should have a filter for ideological crimes. If a left-wing eco-terrorist ends up killing people accidentally, it's something I want to know as well. I have currently no reason to believe that there were such instances that were suppressed by the organization. The basic left-wing/right-wing dichotomy obviously is simplistic and problematic and not just in this particular scenario. The multi-axis political compass should always be replacing it.
There's a lot that can be said on this topic but I don't feel like spending time on it, we're very far from the initial context of the discussion in which I presented this data because you were basically downplaying Neo-Nazi threats and making an implication that anti-fascist action is unwarranted or paranoid. The only thing I wanted to show was that it is a legitimate threat, and that it has grown significantly in recent years, but there is every reason to believe that anti-fascist resistance has stunted that growth. I don't have to defend the ADL's work, they're the experts, not me. On the issue of Islamic terrorism, it seems like you're looking at a data set that goes further back than the one used by the ADL, so I don't think it delegitimizes their more up to date findings. I can of course be wrong. But whether they do or do not is irrelevant to my point.
fuck I should just sell some of my Pokemon cards, if no one stakes that is what I will have to do - lostaccount
On February 15 2019 13:56 Liquid`Drone wrote:
I don't advocate punching nazis, just to be clear. I think the idea that violence begets violence holds true even if it's violence towards a group I 'hate', and I think engaging in violence perpetuates a violent cycle. I do think violence can be defended from a self-preservation (or preservation of other, weaker groups) perspective, but there's nothing indicating that actual nazis, today, are a big and significant enough group that violence is the only way to combat them. But I mean, if you're looking for a group of people to punch, then yeah, jihadists are prolly as close to an acceptable group as nazis as you can find. Those groups actually are equivalents to a large degree (also in terms of what type of people they attract). Communists, or muslims at large, don't fit at all.
It's kinda like nazis are to 'groups somewhat skeptical towards increased immigration' what 'jihadists' are to 'muslims'.
and you agree that spreading a "puncha jihadist" retoric woudl mostly just enable racists to punch muslims right?
the same way punch a nazi would just enable maniacs to punch people wearing MAGA hats
(to you, a nazi and a commie are not a valid equivalency but to many it is, and you would still green-light violence to anybody who thinks that way)
Like I said, in no way a fan of the punch a nazi rhetoric, and yes, I agree that leftists adopting that rhetoric (and other leftists acting based on that) would probably lead to a greater degree of acceptance of violence from the right. I mean, actual nazis already accept violence, but it's fair to assume that 'punching nazis is good' 'trump supporters are nazis' at some point will lead to 'maga hat jerk being punched in the face by leftist' which can lead to 'moderate' republicans being like 'well they started' and 'there were jerks on both sides' when some nazis punch antifas during some big rally.
Since your stance seems to be based largely on the fact that Neo-Nazism "isn't big enough" to warrant grassroots resistance against them that inevitably involves violence at times, and because it involves a dangerous slippery slope, let me ask you this.
Given the documented shortcomings of "liberal anti-fascism" -- the fact that Nazism came to power legally in a highly intellectually and culturally advanced nation -- and the failure of the allied strategy of appeasement leading up to WW2, a convincing argument can be made that allowing fascism to develop and expand runs the documented risk of sliding into totalitarianism. If we don’t stop them when they are small, do we stop them when they are medium-sized? If not when they are medium-sized, then when they are large? When they’re in government? Do we need to wait until the swastikas are unfurled from government buildings before we defend ourselves? When would you support a militant anti-fascist movement that challenges the state monopoly on political legitimacy?
My stance is that a significant part of what makes nazism and fascism such abhorrent ideologies are their propensities towards violence. If it was just a bunch of pacifists getting together deciding that they want a strong leader for themselves and that they hate jews and black people and anyone deviating from the norm and that there exists a racial hierarchy and that some races should govern others, but then they were like 'but this is just our opinion, we don't want to enforce it upon anyone', then it'd be like.. whatever?
Being the first side to resort to violence in a conflict is a fundamental error. In the eyes of a very significant number of people, it morally justifies a violent retaliation. You may argue that nazism is fundamentally violent and thus violence towards them is retaliatory violence for actions they will inevitably undertake in the future, especially if they grow, but that line of thinking would again be in conflict with important principles.
I don't even know what to do in a scenario where the majority of people want to abandon democracy, aside from preemptive stuff like reasonably decent education limiting the power of demagogues and having a rock solid system of checks and balances.. Otherwise that's a situation where any 'cure' puts society closer to the society I'm fighting to combat. I can't endorse violence in the name of fighting violence. I mean, you might correctly point towards instances of nazis abandoning some public rally due to threads of antifa violence, but that does not mean that violence is the only way to combat nazism. From my perspective, it's almost like using violence to discipline your kid; you might succeed in repressing whatever behavior it is you want to discourage, but there are a bunch of negative side effects, and you could have succeeded in repressing said behavior through non-violent means.
So, if I'm understanding you well, your response to my question is "I think I might wait until the swastikas are unfurled from government buildings"? How are you not saying that we should not learn from history? You're saying that we should rely on the state as our fail-safe to prevent this from happening again, despite knowing that the state has failed millions of Jews (and others) before. So what I'm indirectly getting from you is that you think that we're better prepared now, we have progressed enough as a species, morally, so as to take the risk. But is that really the case? Is the world less authoritarian than it was pre-WW2? As I type now, we have the most powerful man in the world who has assumed dictatorial powers in order to push a deeply disturbing racist agenda. This is in the midst of (and a distraction from) a real state of emergency, a genuine planetary crisis that threatens all of our existences, and which that same person and his entire administration doesn't acknowledge. But most important than the chance of something happening is the scale of the possible damage. Would the consequences be less dramatic now if a world empire turned totalitarian? Clearly not, it would be significantly more catastrophic, and so we have to be a lot more vigilant and proactive, because we might never get another chance to get it right again. According to many respected scientists and historians it is already some kind of a miracle that we didn't annihilate ourselves with nuclear weapons. That shouldn't just fly over our heads.
I think the beating your kid analogy is spectacularly bad. The data on that is pretty clear. A much more apt analogy would be a cancerous growth. Do we wait until it grows and spreads before we decide to take the violent and invasive actions of mutilation, radiation therapy, and introducing intracellular poisons to inhibit cell division? For how long? It might be that love and lifestyle choices could cure it, but are we willing to look at the literature, see how likely that is, and take the risk? When your body fights cancer, it has to be pretty aggressive. It can't afford to make too many mistakes. That's how I look at antifa. There are some immune cells that don't do a good job, but that shouldn't make us question the necessity of immune cells. Pure tolerance in a society is analogous to pure oxygen in an organism, it becomes a poison that destroys organized life. Complex life is only possible because of its imposed constraints, and it has evolved only because life is diverse and adaptive. It cannot be free, it is always constrained. Society also necessitates constraints, adaptability and diversity in order to maintain itself. Nazi ideology denies these facts in favor of an abstract ideal of purity, homogeneity and genetic superiority. Contrary to Baal's uneducated misunderstandings of "communism", it demonstrably, objectively has no place in politics. But the world in which we live now does not prevent it from being so. White supremacists can be in power. We should not accept the legitimacy of a state that lets something like this happen, just like we should not accept that the head of EPA is a climate change denier. We have a right to protect ourselves, and I'd argue we have responsibility to protect vulnerable people from people who actively work to harm them, whether the predictable consequences happen right now or later.
I am all for non-violent means. I am completely opposed to categorizing people as evil and irredeemable. Even people who have committed the worst of crimes should be given the chance to "atone" in my view. People who believe and do hateful things do so because they are very troubled and ignorant, and I support an anti-capitalist world for them as well, because they could heal from this more easily in a friendly environment, and because less people would meet the preconditions for this to happen in a post-capitalist world. I'm not stupid, I know you can't beat fascism out of someone. It was violence that made them this way to begin with. (Systemic violence that even liberals like you don't seem to acknowledge, because you still support capitalism). I know the best way to get them to change is to make them open up, to show compassion for their struggles, to give them something better to aspire to. Non-violence should always have the priority over violence, but that isn't the issue. The issue is when non-violence fails. The issue is when the society has become poisoned enough that the threat is significant enough, and the consequences of doing nothing severe enough that it warrants violating the freedom of people who are actively working to violate others'. Rights are granted to us in the context of participating in a functioning society, not in order to annihilate it.
The resistance and often ensuing violence is not just to prevent another Holocaust. It's to prevent regular incidences of overt violence on people of color and trans people who already don't feel safe in daily life. These are the people who make up the majority of antifa, and if you ask them why they risk their safety by participating, they'll say it's because they would feel even less safe if they didn't do anything, because they are already feeling threatened all the time. They're not people who are going out to pick fights with random Neo-Nazis or encourage people to do so indiscriminately. Policies like immigration bans and the building of new migrant prisons, LGBT bans that has people losing their jobs or fleeing their country, the restricted ability to protest as leftists and the criminalization of indigenous resistance; these are not far away threats, they are current events that are being resisted against. When it comes to the worst, can I defend making an inspirational Neo-Nazi leader afraid to incite violence and genocide in public? Yes, because his words inspire people to grow bolder and more violent. I believe this is the lesser of two evils. Richard Spencer isn't just a Neo-Nazi, he has had a literal cult of personality around him. It is quite astounding how ignorant we have to be in order to be revolted at an elitist Neo-Nazi getting sucker punched while harmless people are being tortured and massacred around the world every day in the name of profit, the lives of most people are terrible even in rich countries, and where kids have had their future stolen from them because people who are in power are doing next to nothing about climate change and environmental degradation. This is really perfectly representative of how much of a failed system consumer capitalism is. While human civilization is collapsing before our eyes, we still defend elites and the status quo, and most of our attention is paid to trifles.
Edit: Also a reminder from Charlottesville: "Antifa saved our lives" - Cornel West (6:00 onward)
fuck I should just sell some of my Pokemon cards, if no one stakes that is what I will have to do - lostaccount
On February 16 2019 17:05 Loco wrote:
Everyone can make mistakes. A mistake on one issue does not invalidate another issue that they reported on. Especially when they have apologized for it. That's what a respectable organization does.
its a mistake to label and double down when challenged a well known muslim who fights islamist extremism?
They apologized becauze Nawaz forced them to in the settlement, and that is one of the dozens of crazy things the SPLC has done.
LOL @ posting a link trying to prove that SPLC > Breitbart, not only you failed to understand obvious hyperbole but you also setting your source-quality bar at a pitiful height.
Ex-PokerStars Team Pro Online
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blackjacki2 United States. Feb 17 2019 02:49. Posts 2581
ADL Condemns Alleged Homophobic, Racist Assault on Actor Jussie Smollett; Calls for a Hate Crimes Investigation
“This reported attack on Jussie is a disturbing reminder of the terrible homophobia and racism that plagues our society,” said ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt.
Police sources: New evidence suggests Jussie Smollett orchestrated attack
Seems like this was an attempt to spread hate/propaganda towards white people / right-wingers, which I don't think is something ADL even cares to track.
@Loco
I read your posts, I agree with 90% of what you say and then you say something like this:
According to many respected scientists and historians it is already some kind of a miracle that we didn't annihilate ourselves with nuclear weapons. That shouldn't just fly over our heads.
Often respected scientists and historians make absolutely retarded predictions on what would happen to the world. As smart as they are and as experienced they are, they have absolutely no chance to predict something like that.
Anyway its completely mind-boggling to me how the "world leader" has to go through a super lengthy procedure to oppose major power abuse by the president. The USA has to be the biggest joke of a "democracy" on the entire planet. Also what the fuck is he doing, he's causing massive chaos inside his own country. I didn't think he s that delusional. Has the USA ever been so split in its entire history apart from the Civil War ?
I think the beating your kid analogy is spectacularly bad. The data on that is pretty clear. A much more apt analogy would be a cancerous growth. Do we wait until it grows and spreads before we decide to take the violent and invasive actions of mutilation, radiation therapy..
We have to erradicate a cancerous growth in society with violence before it destroys us.
ADL Condemns Alleged Homophobic, Racist Assault on Actor Jussie Smollett; Calls for a Hate Crimes Investigation
“This reported attack on Jussie is a disturbing reminder of the terrible homophobia and racism that plagues our society,” said ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt.
Police sources: New evidence suggests Jussie Smollett orchestrated attack
Seems like this was an attempt to spread hate/propaganda towards white people / right-wingers, which I don't think is something ADL even cares to track.
Huh? These are the guys he allegedly paid to have himself attacked. . . . pretty sure you'd want to pick white guys for that.
According to many respected scientists and historians it is already some kind of a miracle that we didn't annihilate ourselves with nuclear weapons. That shouldn't just fly over our heads.
Often respected scientists and historians make absolutely retarded predictions on what would happen to the world. As smart as they are and as experienced they are, they have absolutely no chance to predict something like that.
Anyway its completely mind-boggling to me how the "world leader" has to go through a super lengthy procedure to oppose major power abuse by the president. The USA has to be the biggest joke of a "democracy" on the entire planet. Also what the fuck is he doing, he's causing massive chaos inside his own country. I didn't think he s that delusional. Has the USA ever been so split in its entire history apart from the Civil War ?
I think you misunderstand. I wasn't referring to scientists making abstract predictions. It's about now being able to look back and see what happened. Those words you quoted of me are something that Chomsky has said repeatedly.
"There have been hundreds of cases when human intervention aborted a first strike minutes before launch, after automated systems gave false alarms. We don't have Russian records, but there's no doubt that their systems are far more accident-prone."
On February 17 2019 02:34 blackjacki2 wrote:
Unless you don't have white friends that are willing to join your conspiracy to negatively portray white people.
Wait, he said that they were white? I hadn't read much about the case, but after seeing the black guys I just assumed he probably staged some homophobic thing for attention and you assumed it was something else. I don't know, if it turns out that this is true, it's pretty fucked, but I'm pretty sure it's not something that's trending.
fuck I should just sell some of my Pokemon cards, if no one stakes that is what I will have to do - lostaccount
Last edit: 17/02/2019 03:50
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blackjacki2 United States. Feb 17 2019 03:55. Posts 2581
On February 17 2019 02:34 blackjacki2 wrote:
Unless you don't have white friends that are willing to join your conspiracy to negatively portray white people.
Wait, he said that they were white? I hadn't read much about the case, but after seeing the black guys I just assumed he probably staged some homophobic thing for attention and you assumed it was something else. I don't know, if it turns out that this is true, it's pretty fucked, but I'm pretty sure it's not something that's trending.
It's my understanding he said they were white and yelling stuff like "This is MAGA country." Then it came out that these 2 were the supposed suspects and they live in his building, were extras on his show, and appear to be friends or acquaintances of his.
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Liquid`Drone Norway. Feb 17 2019 10:12. Posts 3093
On February 15 2019 13:56 Liquid`Drone wrote:
I don't advocate punching nazis, just to be clear. I think the idea that violence begets violence holds true even if it's violence towards a group I 'hate', and I think engaging in violence perpetuates a violent cycle. I do think violence can be defended from a self-preservation (or preservation of other, weaker groups) perspective, but there's nothing indicating that actual nazis, today, are a big and significant enough group that violence is the only way to combat them. But I mean, if you're looking for a group of people to punch, then yeah, jihadists are prolly as close to an acceptable group as nazis as you can find. Those groups actually are equivalents to a large degree (also in terms of what type of people they attract). Communists, or muslims at large, don't fit at all.
It's kinda like nazis are to 'groups somewhat skeptical towards increased immigration' what 'jihadists' are to 'muslims'.
and you agree that spreading a "puncha jihadist" retoric woudl mostly just enable racists to punch muslims right?
the same way punch a nazi would just enable maniacs to punch people wearing MAGA hats
(to you, a nazi and a commie are not a valid equivalency but to many it is, and you would still green-light violence to anybody who thinks that way)
Like I said, in no way a fan of the punch a nazi rhetoric, and yes, I agree that leftists adopting that rhetoric (and other leftists acting based on that) would probably lead to a greater degree of acceptance of violence from the right. I mean, actual nazis already accept violence, but it's fair to assume that 'punching nazis is good' 'trump supporters are nazis' at some point will lead to 'maga hat jerk being punched in the face by leftist' which can lead to 'moderate' republicans being like 'well they started' and 'there were jerks on both sides' when some nazis punch antifas during some big rally.
Since your stance seems to be based largely on the fact that Neo-Nazism "isn't big enough" to warrant grassroots resistance against them that inevitably involves violence at times, and because it involves a dangerous slippery slope, let me ask you this.
Given the documented shortcomings of "liberal anti-fascism" -- the fact that Nazism came to power legally in a highly intellectually and culturally advanced nation -- and the failure of the allied strategy of appeasement leading up to WW2, a convincing argument can be made that allowing fascism to develop and expand runs the documented risk of sliding into totalitarianism. If we don’t stop them when they are small, do we stop them when they are medium-sized? If not when they are medium-sized, then when they are large? When they’re in government? Do we need to wait until the swastikas are unfurled from government buildings before we defend ourselves? When would you support a militant anti-fascist movement that challenges the state monopoly on political legitimacy?
My stance is that a significant part of what makes nazism and fascism such abhorrent ideologies are their propensities towards violence. If it was just a bunch of pacifists getting together deciding that they want a strong leader for themselves and that they hate jews and black people and anyone deviating from the norm and that there exists a racial hierarchy and that some races should govern others, but then they were like 'but this is just our opinion, we don't want to enforce it upon anyone', then it'd be like.. whatever?
Being the first side to resort to violence in a conflict is a fundamental error. In the eyes of a very significant number of people, it morally justifies a violent retaliation. You may argue that nazism is fundamentally violent and thus violence towards them is retaliatory violence for actions they will inevitably undertake in the future, especially if they grow, but that line of thinking would again be in conflict with important principles.
I don't even know what to do in a scenario where the majority of people want to abandon democracy, aside from preemptive stuff like reasonably decent education limiting the power of demagogues and having a rock solid system of checks and balances.. Otherwise that's a situation where any 'cure' puts society closer to the society I'm fighting to combat. I can't endorse violence in the name of fighting violence. I mean, you might correctly point towards instances of nazis abandoning some public rally due to threads of antifa violence, but that does not mean that violence is the only way to combat nazism. From my perspective, it's almost like using violence to discipline your kid; you might succeed in repressing whatever behavior it is you want to discourage, but there are a bunch of negative side effects, and you could have succeeded in repressing said behavior through non-violent means.
So, if I'm understanding you well, your response to my question is "I think I might wait until the swastikas are unfurled from government buildings"? How are you not saying that we should not learn from history? You're saying that we should rely on the state as our fail-safe to prevent this from happening again, despite knowing that the state has failed millions of Jews (and others) before. So what I'm indirectly getting from you is that you think that we're better prepared now, we have progressed enough as a species, morally, so as to take the risk. But is that really the case? Is the world less authoritarian than it was pre-WW2? As I type now, we have the most powerful man in the world who has assumed dictatorial powers in order to push a deeply disturbing racist agenda. This is in the midst of (and a distraction from) a real state of emergency, a genuine planetary crisis that threatens all of our existences, and which that same person and his entire administration doesn't acknowledge. But most important than the chance of something happening is the scale of the possible damage. Would the consequences be less dramatic now if a world empire turned totalitarian? Clearly not, it would be significantly more catastrophic, and so we have to be a lot more vigilant and proactive, because we might never get another chance to get it right again. According to many respected scientists and historians it is already some kind of a miracle that we didn't annihilate ourselves with nuclear weapons. That shouldn't just fly over our heads.
I think the beating your kid analogy is spectacularly bad. The data on that is pretty clear. A much more apt analogy would be a cancerous growth. Do we wait until it grows and spreads before we decide to take the violent and invasive actions of mutilation, radiation therapy, and introducing intracellular poisons to inhibit cell division? For how long? It might be that love and lifestyle choices could cure it, but are we willing to look at the literature, see how likely that is, and take the risk? When your body fights cancer, it has to be pretty aggressive. It can't afford to make too many mistakes. That's how I look at antifa. There are some immune cells that don't do a good job, but that shouldn't make us question the necessity of immune cells. Pure tolerance in a society is analogous to pure oxygen in an organism, it becomes a poison that destroys organized life. Complex life is only possible because of its imposed constraints, and it has evolved only because life is diverse and adaptive. It cannot be free, it is always constrained. Society also necessitates constraints, adaptability and diversity in order to maintain itself. Nazi ideology denies these facts in favor of an abstract ideal of purity, homogeneity and genetic superiority. Contrary to Baal's uneducated misunderstandings of "communism", it demonstrably, objectively has no place in politics. But the world in which we live now does not prevent it from being so. White supremacists can be in power. We should not accept the legitimacy of a state that lets something like this happen, just like we should not accept that the head of EPA is a climate change denier. We have a right to protect ourselves, and I'd argue we have responsibility to protect vulnerable people from people who actively work to harm them, whether the predictable consequences happen right now or later.
I am all for non-violent means. I am completely opposed to categorizing people as evil and irredeemable. Even people who have committed the worst of crimes should be given the chance to "atone" in my view. People who believe and do hateful things do so because they are very troubled and ignorant, and I support an anti-capitalist world for them as well, because they could heal from this more easily in a friendly environment, and because less people would meet the preconditions for this to happen in a post-capitalist world. I'm not stupid, I know you can't beat fascism out of someone. It was violence that made them this way to begin with. (Systemic violence that even liberals like you don't seem to acknowledge, because you still support capitalism). I know the best way to get them to change is to make them open up, to show compassion for their struggles, to give them something better to aspire to. Non-violence should always have the priority over violence, but that isn't the issue. The issue is when non-violence fails. The issue is when the society has become poisoned enough that the threat is significant enough, and the consequences of doing nothing severe enough that it warrants violating the freedom of people who are actively working to violate others'. Rights are granted to us in the context of participating in a functioning society, not in order to annihilate it.
The resistance and often ensuing violence is not just to prevent another Holocaust. It's to prevent regular incidences of overt violence on people of color and trans people who already don't feel safe in daily life. These are the people who make up the majority of antifa, and if you ask them why they risk their safety by participating, they'll say it's because they would feel even less safe if they didn't do anything, because they are already feeling threatened all the time. They're not people who are going out to pick fights with random Neo-Nazis or encourage people to do so indiscriminately. Policies like immigration bans and the building of new migrant prisons, LGBT bans that has people losing their jobs or fleeing their country, the restricted ability to protest as leftists and the criminalization of indigenous resistance; these are not far away threats, they are current events that are being resisted against. When it comes to the worst, can I defend making an inspirational Neo-Nazi leader afraid to incite violence and genocide in public? Yes, because his words inspire people to grow bolder and more violent. I believe this is the lesser of two evils. Richard Spencer isn't just a Neo-Nazi, he has had a literal cult of personality around him. It is quite astounding how ignorant we have to be in order to be revolted at an elitist Neo-Nazi getting sucker punched while harmless people are being tortured and massacred around the world every day in the name of profit, the lives of most people are terrible even in rich countries, and where kids have had their future stolen from them because people who are in power are doing next to nothing about climate change and environmental degradation. This is really perfectly representative of how much of a failed system consumer capitalism is. While human civilization is collapsing before our eyes, we still defend elites and the status quo, and most of our attention is paid to trifles.
Edit: Also a reminder from Charlottesville: "Antifa saved our lives" - Cornel West (6:00 onward)
.. No my point of view is that there are good solutions you can reach without ever having to resort to violence. Norway doesn't have a nazi problem. (I mean, there are nazis in Norway, probably even a couple hundred of them, but they're such a tiny, marginalized group that they really don't matter.) The reason for this is not that we've threatened potential nazis with violence, it's that we've done a fairly good job providing public education highlighting the horrors of nazism. Doing additional stuff like building youth centers with fun activities (free, permanent LAN etc) in areas with potentially marginalized youth, that's the kind of stuff that actually works and yields positive results. Nazis are recruited from the white person version of muslims that join IS - people with few or no friends, people that are ignorant, with little or no prospects for the future.. We know what types of environments make people more likely to radicalize, and we have the societal tools to hinder those environments from forming. Violence is not necessary.
I think the beating your kid analogy is apt, and I think you're taking the role of the parent saying sometimes, spanking is necessary to correct the worst behavior.
And, I think that while being violent towards nazis might well succeed in demoralizing them from marching in public, it's also gonna make them more likely to actually be violent (rather than just intimidating) towards lone people belonging to any group nazis want to target. (just like being violent towards your kid makes your kid more likely to be violent towards others, even if it also succeeds in making it more obedient towards you.)
Being the first side to resort to violence is a great way to lose the moral high ground, and I don't want to lose the moral high ground if I am fighting against fucking nazis. And I'm not remotely convinced that it's impossible to find a non-violent solution. I'm honestly very hard pressed to find a situation where violence is ever justified against any people that are not being imminently violent.
On February 17 2019 09:12 Liquid`Drone wrote:
No my point of view is that there are good solutions you can reach without ever having to resort to violence.
I did not misunderstand you. I highlighted that the meat of the issue is when those good intentions and those good solutions fail, and when the consequences of not preemptively stopping a threat are significant enough that it might be justifiable to not play by the rules. Because those moments exist, and you're avoiding dealing with them. 95% of antifa tactics are non-physical, non-violent, and probably 80-90% of the work they do does not occur in public; yet because of media bias and sensationalism and the viral nature of memes in the 21st century, people falsely think that 'punch a Nazi when you see them' is some kind of foundational tenet of antifa. It couldn't be further from the truth, because often, just the threat of violence is enough to be successful, no violence is necessary.
The argument that we should leave fascists alone if they are small is one that, again, is not borne out by the evidence. It started as a small group of Hitler followers in Germany. Few paid attention to the small group of people following Mussolini. And as recently as 2013 in Greece, there was the Golden Dawn that burst out of nowhere to become a major force poised to lead a government before criminal charges (the murder of an anti-fascist musician) decimated party leadership.
While there's good sociological information found in looking at the Scandinavian countries, mentioning Norway in the way you do is problematic to say the least. I don't know why you do because we have already gone over this before. You cannot isolate Norway from the rest of the world. Its "successes" cannot be recreated everywhere. We know what types of environment Norway contributes to making around the world, as a NATO state and a productivist country. Your relatively peaceful country is built on the blood, sweat and tears of less fortunate people. Good for you if you don't have to confront Nazis, but it doesn't mean anything. I don't know about Norway, but it would take 4.2 earths in order to sustain a world that lives like the Swedes do. It's like, yeah, if we suddenly had 3 more Earths, radicalization would certainly go down, but that's not the world we live in. In the world we live in, your relative stability is also being threatened (by the system you support and present as a solution). Like Peter Joseph says:
"No country is an “island”, and the interplay of global affairs creates outcomes across countries in the same way socioeconomic classes self-arrange in a given nation. In the world of nation-states, the Scandinavian countries play the same role as the fleeting “middle class” in American society, with security, fulfilling jobs, little debt, reliable transport, a good home, and overall balance. These countries are the resulting “global middle class” and exist only because of the extremes surrounding them. And, like domestic classes today, they are also slowly being eroded by the ongoing pressure of neoliberalism, which is again really the socioeconomic colonization of the modern era. Contrary to popular belief, this game of strategic international exploitation and geopolitical dominance has not declined in the past century, only morphed into new methods."
One of the foundational notions of nonviolence is that in order to be respected, one must behave well and abide by the social contract: work hard, follow the rules, and prosper. The problem is that since the beginning of the Atlantic Slave Trade, black people had worked harder and followed more rules, more strictly than anyone in America. And still they found themselves in an impossible and impoverished situation. King might not have been as militant as the militants would have liked, and he may have become an even greater citizen of the world while cities were on fire, but by the time he spoke in the fall of 1967, he recognized that it would no longer be effective to tell black folks to only protest peacefully, kindly, and respectfully. They could not prosper in a game where they were the only ones expected to play by the rules. King closed that speech with a stark truth:
“Let us say boldly that if the violations of law by the white man in the slums over the years were calculated and compared with the law-breaking of a few days of riots, the hardened criminal would be the white man. These are often difficult things to say but I have come to see more and more that it is necessary to utter the truth in order to deal with the great problems that we face in our society.”
Sound familiar? Antifa looks at history and current events and also remarks that playing by the rules might not be the way to go about things. Not beating a child is always the way to go about things, on the other hand. Even if we granted that raising a child and social struggle were comparable, you still couldn't compare the scale of the damage from the establishment of a totalitarian government in the world's leading empire in the 21st century to the kind of damage that a kid can do if they are undisciplined, nor can you compare it to the kind of suffering that even a very small group of Neo-Nazis can impose.
I think it's much more helpful to look at a situation like the school bully instead. I used to be a bully, but I realized that I was a bully for defensive reasons. I was violent towards others so that I would be part of a group in which I cannot be bullied. I didn't like to be cruel toward others. If someone had stood up to me, punched me hard enough, I know for a fact that I would have learned my lesson. This is not to say that punching bullies is the best solution, it is only to say that you have to look at every circumstance for what it is. For some bullies, it wouldn't work, and it could make things worse, but assuming that this is the case without investigation is clearly a mistake. Most importantly, and this is what I keep stressing, the threat of violence alone could have worked. If, say, someone whom I bullied came up to me with his older brother and his older brother said "the next time you do this to X, you'll regret seeing me again." It would have sufficed. Personally, I would wager that most bullies were like me. They thrived on intimidating others because others were too afraid to stand up to them.
Being the first side to resort to violence is a great way to lose the moral high ground
There is no reason to believe that what is considered to be the moral high ground of one specific society at a point in time should be upheld universally and prioritized above all other considerations. Societal sympathy toward, and definitions of, violence and nonviolence have varied by time and place. In May 1968 in Paris, students and workers battled the police on the barricades. Yet, when the police brutally demolished the student barricades, the majority of the French public sided with the student rebels. In France right now, the gilets jaunes movement includes its fair shair of violence, mostly as a response to police repression, and they are maintaining popular support.
All of the popular justice movements in the West involved violence at times, and I think it's wrong-minded to look at it as a group of rebels initiating violence; they were responding to violence that had been perpetuated by elites and defended by the status quo. Looking back, we can't say that they could have been equally successful if they had kept to peaceful protests at all times. Nonviolence can succeed, even go as far as toppling dictatorships, but it needs to be able to leverage public opinion domestically or internationally to make the dictatorship untenable. Where in the world did there exist a population in the early 1940s whose potential outrage could have made Hitler change course? Does it exist now?
My point of view is that we should be skeptical of "conventional wisdom" and be willing to investigate matters more deeply even if they are uncomfortable. To say the very least, playing by the rules of liberal society should not be an attitude upheld with a near religious fervor.
fuck I should just sell some of my Pokemon cards, if no one stakes that is what I will have to do - lostaccount
I think the beating your kid analogy is spectacularly bad. The data on that is pretty clear. A much more apt analogy would be a cancerous growth. Do we wait until it grows and spreads before we decide to take the violent and invasive actions of mutilation
I think the beating your kid analogy is spectacularly bad. The data on that is pretty clear. A much more apt analogy would be a cancerous growth. Do we wait until it grows and spreads before we decide to take the violent and invasive actions of mutilation
gas the nazis
Loco obviously s going to keep not replying to those provocations :D
While I do believe he s walking on a very thin line between freedom and governmentless fascism he does have a point.
We all admire non-violence movements that provoke our thoughts and force society into change, but when you think about it you can't oppose a nazi-like movement without violence. They are just going to slaughter anyone in their way regardless.
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Liquid`Drone Norway. Feb 18 2019 13:53. Posts 3093
yeah. I'm gonna respond more in depth later but it is definitely true that MLK or Gandhi could never have worked out as a form of protest against nazi germany, because they and their supporters would just get massacred. There are historical situations where violence is the only alternative. I don't think any western country is close to being 'there' though.
