It's hard to gauge, but I generally get the impression that these hilariously obtuse arguments simply don't have the sway they used to. Even people who might be squeamish about more overt types of antifascism increasingly recognize that these defense of fascists in the name of civility and free speech are moronic and/or extremely misguided.

Pearl clutching doesn't work like it used to, at least to my estimation.

Yep.

Apparently if you say a Nazi is a bad person you are going to start shooting grannies for telling their grandson they are the most handsome kid in the world.

Interesting piece, and some refreshing honesty here for someone who has a job on legacy media.

https://twitter.com/mehdirhasan/stat...09509711130630

We don't have to pretend we don't know how this kind of rhetoric ends. Carlson and his fans are ethnonationalists and fascists and they are dangerous. Cancelling them, if possible, seems like an incredibly positive solution. More likely a good bit of blood is going to be spilt first, but such are the wages for ignoring the dangers of an increasingly reactionary and radicalized right in this country.

The fascist threat in this country (and abroad) is a 'all hands on deck' emergency. Those downplaying the danger they face are carrying water for those that desire to commit genocide, and it is becoming increasingly noncredible that they don't know it the longer this goes on.

Not exactly, no.

You seem to want someone sacked on the word of a random person on the street, someone who didn't say whether he was assenting to a paraphrased version or an exact quotation. This is witch hunt mentality, no time to stop and get the facts straight.

The idea of people wanting other people to stay in their own neighborhoods isn't unusual or necessarily related to racial animus. In the ½ sq. mi. where I live we've two distinct neighborhoods, Trails (Original) and Trails North. They've got different neighborhood associations and amenities, and sometimes people get in a tizzy when folks go from one to the other to use facilities which their HOA doesn't support or maintain. I doubt anyone would say "back to your hood" (hardly anyone around here listens to Pooh Shiesty) but the sentiment is basically the same.

But of course never calls the white supremacists, holocaust deniers and the like nazis for some reason.

Sure. How do you propose to limit the torches and pitchforks to ONLY self-declared nazis?

Are there other beliefs that you find odious enough to advocate for extrajudicial punishments?

Are you aware that you're advocating for civil war and murder?

Seriously, how blind can a person be to not understand that the approach their preaching is completely and utterly fascist in nature?

Since you're so sharp at reading murderous intent in a statement, what do you make of Tucker Carlson preaching that ethnic replacement is a dire threat to this country?

"You want to give rid of Fascists? You know who else wants to get rid of people? That's right Fascists! Which makes you a Fascists!" is such a stupid argument.

Everyone who doesn't understand the problem of the "Paradox of Tolerance" get out of both the discussion and the society please.

//ETA: And totally unrelated but **** "Fascists" being such a goddamn hard word to spell over and over...

To be fair, doing nothing while this country slips into fascism would be very orderly. Sure, there would be state and political violence at mass scale, but it would be organized and only happen to those that broke the rules. After a while you wouldn't even notice the things you lost.

Doing anything to stop this would be awfully noisy and chaotic, and we can't have that.

It's even dumber than that.

'You can't use the same freedoms the fascists use in order to oppose the fascists which is what I'm using to oppose you right now, because that could lead to murder which the fascists have already been doing.'

It's hypocrisy² in addition to being wrong².

You're going to have to provide a link with full context before I can opine in any way.

Two wrongs don't make a right.

If the fascists are already murdering people, then they are criminals and should be treated as such.

Murdering them in retaliation doesn't make you better, it just makes you a murderer too.

Yeah, that sounds bad. Maybe us good people should decide we don't want to associate with such bad actors. Maybe we should identify and ostracize all these people wanting to commit political based murders. Probably be a good idea to raise a stink whenever some ghoul went of TV advocating a policy of ethnic cleansing.

You'll need to provide a link showing where murdering fascists is being suggested as a solution. I just haven't seen it here.

Oh ah... the rain in Spain falls mainly on the plans. A stitch in time saves 9. A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. A watched pot never boils.

Stopping a wrong is not wrong, so you don't have to factor it into some thought terminating truism.

Not to beat this drum yet again but this also sounds a lot like the "I can't ignore you engaging the troll, so you have to ignore the troll" thing which I can't stand.

This fits in well with my observation that among this... type of people it's seen as better to have no standards (intellectual, moral, ethical, legal, whatever) then it is have standards and commit the Cardinal Sin of not living up to a 100% strawman, super-literal, no accounting for context version of them.

Here's how their thought process seems to works.

1. Someone tells them anything. This triggers the "How dare you tell me what to think!" subroutine. The idea that someone else has given them information they don't have offends them on a deep level and it drives them crazy. So much of their personal identity is wrapped up in "thinking for themselves" that they have started to actively rejected external information.

2. They immediately start looking for reasons the other person is a "hypocrite." And the way they do this is take the person's values, create a hyper-strawman version of them, find an incident where the person didn't live up to that version of their "standards.

For instance. AOC is actually pretty poor for a member of Congress, but she does make a halfway decent living, drives a fairly nice car, stuff like that. I mean just living in DC is goddamn expensive so I'm sure on a literal level she does throw around more money than average. But AOC is pretty far on the Left and speaks out a lot on class and wage disparity and the ultrawealthy. So the fact that AOC drives a Tesla means she's a... HYPOCRITE while a Republican Congressman worth many, many times more isn't. She is demonized for having standards. If you don't have standards you can never be a hypocrite, never be pretentious, never have to be taken down a peg, can't ever be "not as smart as you think you are" and all those other faults that these people focus on. The only sin you can commit to these people is aiming high and not making it. Wallow in the gutter and you can never let anyone down.

Now me, I operate much more on the "The pot can call the kettle black and the kettle can still be black" side of things. Hypocrisy is certainly an annoying personal trait but it doesn't override actual facts. Not matter the pot and kettles opinion of each other's blackness the RGB and Luminosity values of said pot and said kettle are verifiable facts that exist indendenatly. If I point a DataColor ColorReader at the pot and it returns an RGB value of #000000 the pot is black and the kettle's opinion is no longer needed or matters. The pot, the kettle, or anyone else can be hypocritical about the color of the pot or kettle they want, the facts don't change.

A person who says global warming is a problem and drives a nice car is STILL ******* CORRECT THAT GLOBAL WARMING IS A PROBLEM. Class Disparage isn't not a thing just because AOC doesn't live in a cardboard box and take the bus.

This is why discussions with them always have to take place in some fantasy world they are making up. They never want to discuss events as they actually happened but alternate timelines they are making up in the brain where they can control all the variables.

That's why we have a dozen threads at random point on this board where there's one person who on top of a hill going "If you ignore all the reasons I'm wrong and judge my argument solely on my alternative universe version of events then you'll have to admit I'm right."

Extrajudicial? What on earth are you getting confused about now?

Nope that is what anyone saying they are a Nazi is advocating for, that is why it should be illegal to be a Nazi, it is like any other terrorist ideology.

It is not being fascist to resist those trying to murder your fellow citizens.

Again one day, God willing, I will find a woman who loves me as much as Internet Free Speech Advocates love Nazis.

You will get fewer Free Speech Advocates to run screeching out of the woodwork at you if you actually go "I'm against Free Speech" then you will if you are against Nazis.

This is like someone going "Just because he calls himself a Rapist doesn't mean he rapes people."

Yes it does. WORDS MEAN THINGS.

I predict crickets, or mealy mouthed platitudes about fairness.

Yup.

As long as you have the enablers, the ostriches with their heads buried in the sand, the supporters of "the marketplace of ideas" and the "eVerYone ShoULd GeT a FaIr HeaRiNG" crowd, and those who invoke Torquemada every time their own arguments tank, then you will get this argument.

Did you mean to write "left" there?

Its kinda like criticizing Greta Thunberg for *gasp* riding on a diesel powered train and then deciding because of this she can be ignored and climate change is fictional.

Yeah brain fart.

Fascist: "Some people are sub-human and need to culled for the greater good of mankind."

Marketplace of idea supporter: "Well no I don't actually support that, but I support their right to say it".

Someone else: "I think genocide is like REALLY BAD and I'm going to voice my opinion by saying I'll boycott anyone that monetarily supports proponents of genocide whether its their employer, advertiser, investor etc".

Marketplace of idea supporter: "WTF OMG YOU CAN'T DO THAT! What about freedom of speech (for the fascist, but YOU can't say anything that might effect them in any negative way)".

Its absurd.

IS he? Where?

100%, yet we have "fascists are people too" members right here on this forum, whose posts are exactly like those responses.

I'm sure it's been a "thing" on some level for pretty much ever, but for me the modern version of it it started when "Al Gore doesn't live in a solar powered cardboard box, ergo environmentalism is just leftist pseudo-science" stopped being the subtext and started being the text in the early 2000s.

Well I don't disagree with "fascists are people too" and still deserve civil rights. That doesn't mean anyone should be required to give them a platform to spew their **** about. As if we lose something valuable by not hearing them out.

Not only does this give the fascists more latitude, it means not applying that same standard to themselves.

Fascists have dehumanized people by falsely claiming that certain groups are inherently dangerous and trying to replace white people. This has lead directly to mass murder in the recent past (El Paso, Tree of Life, a very vile etc). This speech can't be used to judge the character of the people literally paying for it to be advanced, and you have to still associate with theses people, because not doing so would dehumanize them and might lead to murder in the future. This is why you cannot correctly find the fascists inherently dangerous.

But the deluded centrist somehow misses that if that is the standard not only should they be trying to hold the fascists to it too, but if they held themselves to it they are doing that to the people judging the character of the fascists, which by the deluded centrists standard would mean they are dehumanizing which can lead to murder.

It's absurd all the way down.

Everyone has rights. That's a pointless truisms that says nothing.

A rapist has rights. That doesn't mean "rapists" and "person who rapes" have different meanings.

You forgot that in the LaLa Land of the Enablers and Marketplace of Ideas supporters, Cancel Culture = Murder Culture!

I'm not sure it is, fascists generally don't think so.

I love the Marketplace of Ideas. As I concept I will always support it.

But it's meaningless if every idea has to stay in it forever. The Marketplace of Ideas is allowed to make decisions and go "Okay we've decided this is wrong."

Again there's an always an ulterior motive for people who want the debate to never end.

Wanna fix it while you are still in the edit window?

Sure, the guy has Nazi tattoos and wears Nazi paraphernalia, chants Nazi slogans, and runs a Nazi website, but if you don't know if they subscribe to the economic policies of 1940's Germany, you can't call them a Nazi and are apparently a horrible person for even suggesting it.

Yeah I fixed it. Thanks for the heads up.

From time to time you actually come across the true believers, but generally that is not the case. It's like finding a libertarian who's not in it just for the kiddie rape and tax evasion.

There are a couple "cancel culture" pundits who I actually find take a pretty consistent view of this, bemoaning censorious right and left alike. Still don't think they have a point, but it's nice for some intellectual honesty.

I was in it for the legalized pot* but since our democratic governor did it there really is nothing about their party I find appealing.

*I flirted with libertarianism for about one semester in college.

In case people forgot what real censorship looks like:

Man who was arrested for 1A protected speech cannot sue cops that illegally arrested him because of qualified immunity.

https://reason.com/2021/09/28/florid...immunity-cops/

He might get something from the department for wrongful arrest but, yea getting a cop personally for wrongful arrest is never going to happen.

Getting something from the department will mean the city or county re-allocating funds which means the punishment for the people actually committing the crime is nothing and essentially makes it de facto legal. It would be like punishing someone who stole $100 with a fine of $1.

Ah so like wage theft then.

There's a concept in legalese, estoppel. It basically means you if you outright admit you are doing something, you can't then go back and argue terminology.

Let's say a jurisdiction has anti-smut laws, but the laws don't really make it clear what is smut and what isn't.

But you open "Big Dave's House of Smut, That's Right I Said Smut, Come Buy The Smuttest Smut that ever Smutted" and get arrested, you can't THEN go back and argue that what is smut isn't clear because you've already admitted you know which side you are one.

This is what kills so much discourse and why I have such a seething hatred of the "No wait let's stop and define the line" arguments.

If you're are saying "I'm a Nazi" then there is literally no point in trying to have the discussion, or have some someone have it on your behalf, about where to drawn the line. You've already declared which side of it you are on.

nazis aren't the real nazis

Silver lining about the far right is that they are often even more incompetent than the stereotypes would have you believe.

https://twitter.com/stevanzetti/stat...99000187297795

Cancellations incoming!

ETA: important to remember that this hack is the result of a broader campaign to cancel these people. Epik is a provider of last resort after the more reputable vendors refuse to host their bigoted content.

As with some others here, I used to be more of a free speech absolutist, but see the folly of it now.

I do still resist any kind of government department enforcing standards, but only because the pragmatist cynic in me believes that it will inevitably get staffed by fascists and turned on its head.

I hope you see this before it gets zorched for being off-topic, but I was reading yesterday about the school in KC (I think) that did not allow their volleyball team to wear t-shirts that promoted racial unity before a match against a team that is known for having a lot of racist crap thrown at them. The school's justification was that "If we allow these shirts, we would have to allow them to wear KKK shirts."

Nominally, that is true, but I have to suggest, if you are concerned that you students are going to be wearing KKK t-shirts to a volleyball game, then you have a much bigger problem at your school than your free speech policy that prohibiting racial unity shirts is not going to fix.

Seems they violated a supreme court ruling to me... but those have become pretty meaningless lately.

https://www.uscourts.gov/educational...r-v-des-moines