It's pretty scary how the article goes from killing Nazis is fantastic, to anybody at my right is a Nazi and it's morally ok to punch them.
>Too often, when we engage in arguments with extremists who talk of racial purity, we falter to explain our side. Instead, we punch them and tell them “because.”
>Nationalism leads to war
So if you see somebody waving a flag, you punch them?
I don't like the "punch them" rhetoric. It's not compatible with free speech. It's way better to combat "racial purity" ideologies (or any other speech) with more speech, with reason and truth than with violence. The second option makes you look like the Gestapo or the NKVD
It does not say that punching nazis is ok. The closest it comes to that is "To be clear, sometimes the only way to win against a Nazi is to punch them."
The article is clearly advocating coherent argument over violence, dialogue over silencing.
I believe you have significantly misunderstood.
It's way better to combat "racial purity" ideologies (or any other speech) with more speech, with reason and truth than with violence.
You mean as advocated in the article, where it states:
"... we also need to understand and be ready to explain the reasons why racism, genocide and white nationalism are bad"?
I think you are grossly misinterpreting the sentence you quoted. It isn't advocating anything; it is making an observation. "We punch them" is indicative mood, not subjunctive as you seem to have taken it ("we should punch them").
That's some pretty sickening white-washing. I'll assume good faith and that it was unintentional.
Their primary purposes were providing protection for Nazi rallies and assemblies, disrupting the meetings of opposing parties, fighting against the paramilitary units of the opposing parties, especially the Red Front Fighters League (Rotfrontkämpferbund) of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), and intimidating Slavic and Romani citizens, unionists, and Jews – for instance, during the Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses.
Perhaps you point out that "originally formed" and "primary purpose" aren't necessarily the same. Fair enough. So:
Some 70 people attended, and a second such meeting was advertised for 13 November in the Eberlbrau beer hall. Some 130 people attended; there were hecklers, but Hitler's military friends promptly ejected them by force, and the agitators "flew down the stairs with gashed heads."
The next year, on 24 February, he announced the party's Twenty-Five Point program at a mass meeting of some 2000 people at the Hofbräuhaus. Protesters tried to shout Hitler down, but his former army companions, armed with rubber truncheons, ejected the dissenters. The basis for the SA had been formed.
Even from what you quote I noticed you took it as an endorsement of what it criticizes, but it goes on:
> To be clear, sometimes the only way to win against a Nazi is to punch them. But we also need to understand and be ready to explain the reasons why racism, genocide and white nationalism are bad. This may seem simplistic and rudimentary, it may even make you angry, but we must be ready to explain to young people why these ideas are so poisonous. It is no longer enough to just point at the history and say “because.”
or, as you said:
> Kind of like "It's way better to combat "racial purity" ideologies (or any other speech) with more speech"
Ironically, disallowing speech and interpreting it as the opposite of what it very clearly says are both closer together than they are to free speech. What's the point of being able to say something when you then feel free to turn it on its head? That's shifting the point of breakage. And is it some kind of joke that EliRivers got downvoted for stating what you should have realized, much less other readers; without even a response?
Careful. Whether it's OK to retaliate violently against odious views is one question (personally, I think: no). Whether Nazism is simply a "view one dislikes", like a particular ice cream flavor, is another.
It's grossly dishonest to reduce white supremacy to "views one dislikes". Yes, if you remove all of the content of views and just focus on the act of liking or disliking them, you can make any disagreement look unreasonable.
The problem with that is that, especially when emotions run high, it becomes very difficult to tell where the line is for sufficiently "dangerous" views that deserve punching.
If you look around today's blogosphere and social media, for example, you'll see a significant variance in what gets labeled "racist" or "white supremacy" (to use the most germane example).
If someone is declared a white supremacist for touching a black person's hair and the standard is "it's ok to punch white supremacists because they are violent and dangerous"... it will become a mess fast.
Which is one reason why it's generally a good decision-rule to not employ violence (as a citizen) unless violence is imminently being used against you.
There will always be unreasonable people, in fact everyone's idea of what is unreasonable will be different. It's ok though because we're a social species whose individuals like to share their thoughts and values and refine them together. The fact that people will disagree about what warrants violence is not a refutation of the idea that it is possible to justify violence. It is not a justification for refusing to ever analyze the merits of a particular justification for a particular act of violence.
Instead of discussing the merits of whether it is justified to violently oppose the ideology of white supremacy, whose latest form includes doublespeak like "peaceful ethnic cleansing" (Richard Spencer), you've shifted the topic to abstract considerations where the implicit demand is an argument that decides for all instances of violence whether or not they are justified. I can justify punching Richard Spencer, for example, without considering the rather absurd claim that someone who touches black hair (I presume you mean without consent) should be considered a white supremacist and therefore worthy of violence.
Just because a problem is difficult doesn't mean it's not worth examining. The fact that one cannot analytically decide a priori when violence is justified or not is just one of the many messy facts of the world that necessitate politics and taking conflict seriously.
See now you've introduced a third debate. If this was simply an attempt to deal with whether it's a good idea to punch Nazis (again, I think: no), we'd be much more careful. But now we're asked to debate whether touching a black person's hair (also: huh?) is "white supremacist".
Neo-nazis and their ideology directly threatens the very lives of a lot of people, and it's basically impossible to argue against them because they already understand these ir position and just don't care about any of the myriad reasons why they're wrong.
This is where the "punch a nazi" thing comes from. They're a very real personal threat to people, and they can't be convinced to change their mind, so all you can really do is get them to shut up and go away, and the way you do that is by punching them. If you can make them afraid to express their neo-nazi ideas, then that's a win.
This logic ends nowhere good for anyone. If you can punch away evil, so can the people who believe abortion clinics are murder factories --- in fact, their arguments are even better than ours.
Neo-nazis and white supremacists are espousing a viewpoint that takes away rights from other people, and in many cases threatens their very lives.
That's what anti-abortionist people do too, in fact. They're trying to take rights away from women (specifically, the right to control their own body), and in many cases threatens their very lives (abortion can be used as a medical intervention to save the life of the mother).
The only real difference I can see is that anti-abortionists are more likely to be able to be reasoned with.
All you're saying is that you disagree with anti-abortionists. Because if the anti-abortionists are right (spoiler: they aren't), then it's nowhere nearly as simple as "they're trying to take other people's rights away from them".
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 suppression I would apply to others, I have to make work for these as well.
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.
All you're saying is that you disagree with them. I do too. What's your point? There are tens of millions of them. To be actively racist is (thank Christ) to marginalize yourself in modern society. But to be pro-life? Sorry, it may not seem that way on a message board, but there's not a lot of stigma to opposing abortion.
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.
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.
Nobody can ask the fetus whether it is OK or even agree on whether it has the capacity to experience suffering given that most abortions take place prior to fetal brain development. A fetus, therefore, has no legal agency of its own.
By contrast, someone who advocates punching Nazis does have legal agency, and may be wishing to exercise it on their own behalf rather than on behalf of some third party. This is a fundamentally different situation.
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.
It sounds awfully like you're abrogating people's right of self-defense. How is this 'suppression' to take place when Nazis have a demonstrable track record of being willing to use violence but you deny that option to their opponents under any circumstances? I'm having trouble following your reasoning here.
I didn't argue that you can't hit someone who is literally about to physically attack you, and neither did the ACLU.
You seem to be arguing that the mere presence of a Nazi marching under a Nazi flag in the public square justifies physical violence. What did the ACLU get wrong about that when they defended the Nazis in Skokie?
The ACLU was worried about government restraint on anyone under the 1st amendment, specifically the display of the Nazi flag with a swastika. I think they were wrong insofar as the march and display of the flag was intended specifically to terrorize the Jewish population of Skokie. In the event, the march never took place; by the time the case was resolved, the residents of Skokie had built a holocaust memorial and the Nazis got permission to hold a march in Chicago instead, which they did.
The 1st amendment does protect private parties from government interference with their political expression. It says nothing about whether other private parties should passively accept political expressions that are specifically aimed at intimidating them. Had the march gone ahead and the citizens of Skokie set about the Nazis with baseball bats, I would not consider the Nazis' first amendment rights to have been inhibited in the least bit.
If I'm standing in a park with a police officer and an angry activist and I say something that offends the police officer and he hits me to shut me up, he's violated the First Amendment.
Similarly, in that same set of circumstances, if I say something that offends the activist and he hits me to shut me up and the police officer doesn't arrest him, the police officer has also violated the First Amendment.
So, no, I don't think you can flee into definitions of "private parties" versus the "government" to avoid the ACLU's logic here.
Are you sure about that? Police officers owe a duty to the public in general, not to specific individuals. In general, police officers do not have a duty of care towards individuals unless there was a prior promise to provide protection, and then only in that context.
I'd like some case law support for your claim that failure to arrest/act by a police officer equates to a violation of the first amendment.
In the meantime, I'd also like you to consider that it's not hard to find examples of collusion between police and members of right-wing militias, as in this one from just a few weeks ago, which provoked questions from the mayor of Portland: https://theintercept.com/2017/06/08/portland-alt-right-milit...
In this document, the police chief replied to the mayor's inquiries and admitted (Q5/page 5) preemptively detaining and photographing left-wing activists on the basis that they might later engage in violence against right-wing activists, based on observations of earlier altercations between the two groups. Oddly, no such preemptive behavior was carried on with respect to the right-wing group. I might point out that the ACLU also finds this problematic.
Individual anecdotes like this are not dispositive, but there is at least some evidence for believing that the police do not reliably maintain a politically neutral position as referees of fair play and good behavior, notwithstanding the belief that they should.
Note how the weird particulars of how Colorado police were not required to enforce this person's restraining order in effect define where there are requirements, in particular, from anything intrinsically stemming from the Constitution.
Fascinating though your unproven legal theory is, I'm a lot more worried about the immediate reality of how to deal with the problem of white supremacists in and out of the police force. Obviously getting a restraining order against them isn't going to do the trick.
No they're not. People who object to abortion clinics claim to be intervening on behalf of a third party (the fetus) whose legal status is that of a non-person in law and whose moral status is indeterminable by rational means.
Quite a lot of the people who are willing to punch Nazis are, by contrast, people who feel their own persons are threatened, as opposed to being outsiders choosing to insert themselves into a private dispute.
All you're saying is that you don't agree that abortion is murder. I don't either. Would that our agreement on this were dispositive of the abortion debate.
Thomas I can't help observing that you're completely ignoring my second point about what differentiates anti-fascist activists from anti-abortion activists.
Could you re-state it? You know I'm not inclined to blow you off; you've been on my list of favorite commenters for something like 5 years.
I seriously do not see a distinction between the two perspectives, other than that the anti-abortion activists would be employing violence to actually stop what they believe to be real, immediate, kinetic violence.
Again, it's not like my argument here is novel. It's the ACLU's argument, from National Socialists of America v. Skokie.
Anti-Abortion protesters are appointing themselves as moral guardians of a fetus.
Anti-Nazi protesters are declaring their own selves to feel threatened by Nazism, rather than claiming to be intervening in the defense of someone else.
I don't really care about the ACLU's argument. Things have moved on since 1976 and the scope and intensity of violence perpetrated by white nationalists and similar far-right groups has increased considerably. Also, consider the fact that the ACLU was founded in 1920, but it was not the ACLU that defeated the Nazis in World War 2.
These aren't academic discussions with imaginary Nazis. The people killed by Dylann Roof or Jeremy Christian were real people who really died at the hands of people who really profess support for white supremacist ideologies, to name but two examples.
The mini-riots and street battled in Berkeley might seem comical from afar but having been at several of them I can tell you for a fact that there are people there who show up shouting nazi and white nationalist slogans and threatening or engaging people with weapons.
White nationalism is not some tiny radical fringe. I'd remind you that people like Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller occupy senior roles in the administration of the executive branch and there's abundant evidence of their extremist views.
This is a pretty ahistorical argument. We've had overtly racist Presidents and Klan members at the highest levels of government in the past, not to mention a 100+ year history of lynchings.
The First Amendment wasn't repealed when Steve Bannon accepted his role as Trump's chief strategist.
Yes, that's quite true. And my point is that vulnerable people are sick and tired of dealing with violence directed at their persons and communities and are voicing their discontent by saying they're not going to take it any more.
Why do these discussions always end up with liberals wringing their hands over whether any Nazis are going to get punched, but the opposition to the eliminationist rhetoric of fascists themselves is so muted? Yes, yes, of course everyone agrees that they're bad and that their ideology is bad.
But the reflexive agreement that Nazism is bad doesn't translate into action to do anything about it. Donating to the ACLU or the SPLC is great, but it does nothing to make the streets safer for vulnerable people. Surely it has not escaped your attention that many vulnerable populations are distrustful of the police precisely because of this legacy of injustice you mention, which has often taken place with the tacit agreement of the authorities. .
Muslims, jews, black people, latino people, queer people and so on are not enthused about being the designated victims for yet another round of The Oppression Show. Simply put, there are a lot of people who don't feel safe exercising their rights in the USA and are getting really pissed off about it.
I'm allowed to hold two thoughts in my head at the same time: that it's important that we do everything within legitimate law to suppress bigotry and racial supremacy, and also that it's important that we defend the basic principles on which our rule of law is built.
So: I'm not so concerned about the welfare of the Nazis that are getting punched.
What I'm concerned about is that normalizing political violence will have the effect not just of normalizing Nazi punching, but normalizing punching of all sorts of people.
Does this mean that vulnerable people should be left to fend for themselves on the streets with Nazis throwing bottles at them or beating them? No, of course not. Beat the shit out of those people (call 9-1-1, too).
But those same vulnerable people are going to need to employ something other than violence to deal with offensive flags and racial slurs, no matter how unsafe they (legitimately!) feel when confronted with them.
I think the basic problem is that people arguing the way you are arguing are basically arguing in a theoretical space. It almost never addresses the practical realities nor tells people how to move the needle in any meaningful way. Arguing about doing it right very often ends up being a form of flak that helps keeps the status quo in place.
I'm currently homeless and I try to explain to people why I don't agree with their position and it kind of boils down to the fact that no matter what I do, I seem unable to get meaningful traction on solutions and, very often, people are content to argue with me about "well, we need the right answers" and ignore the fact that they could do something for me right here, right now.
I am probably not saying this very well, but I just run into an awful lot of people online who imagine themselves to be good people who claim they desire to live in a better world and see zero contradiction between that and crapping all over me personally in conversation while doing nothing whatsoever to help me solve my financial problems in any kind of meaningful way.
I am somewhat sympathetic to your side. I get a lot of flak from women who act like my efforts to empower them are simply another form of blaming the victim. But I increasingly feel that it is both irresponsible and disingenuous to argue the side you are arguing without giving concrete solutions in the here and now to the problems people are actually having. Without that, these arguments merely serve to say "We need to respect Nazis (or other horrible people) and we don't need to respect you and we don't actually care about your problem at all."
Hold on. I DO NOT think we need to respect Nazis or their beliefs. Rather, I think citizens have something close to an obligation to suppress Nazis (and all related ideologies) with every lawful means available.
By way of example: the deference Hacker News gives to racism and misogyny in the name of tolerance is deeply problematic for me, and, I think, an enormous mistake.
Where Ed and I disagree is that I do not think it's OK to physically assault someone simply for carrying an offensive flag. That is probably the entire extent of our disagreement.
When people are horrible enough and are not respecting the laws at all themselves, advocating that we can only go after them by lawful means amounts to advocating more respect for them than they will give anyone else.
I don't know the solution. I really don't. But in order to defend yourself from horrible, predatory people in the world today, you basically need to be some kind of kung fu wizard and diplomatic genius combined or you will be railroaded by the laws that, in theory, are supposed to protect good people.
As a victim of childhood sexual abuse who was clear I would murder anyone in cold blood if they raped my small children -- and then go to jail for a very long time because I would not have at all made a sympathetic defendant -- this is a problem space I have contemplated a great deal. Fortunately, I am hellaciously talented and was able to make sure no one raped my children. But there is something very wrong in a world where we worry more about protecting the rights of heinous people like child rapists than we do about their victims, which is essentially what is going on here.
The moment a Nazi attempts to use physical force against you, all bets are off.
But the idea that you can physically attack someone for carrying an offensive flag can't possibly be defensible.
I understand how the flags and racial slurs and such create strong emotions and I offer you all the rhetorical space in the world to talk about how you personally would beat the everloving crap out of someone who tried to burn a cross in your field of vision. I'm not condemning either you or Ed for having strong feelings about Nazis.
But it remains a simple fact that you can't use coercive physical force to stop people from talking.
What has usually happened in practice is that people seize the offensive flag and shred or burn it. Look Thomas, carrying a Nazi battle flag or a deliberate derivative of it isn't just a matter of 'creating strong emotions' in the sense of some proxy moral outrage. In certain contexts, it's an act of aggression.
Legally speaking this may not rise to the standard of criminality for evaluating criminal threats. But a lot of people are increasingly losing confidence in the legal system to protect their civil rights or fairly balance their interests with those of other people in society. In relation to both this and your exhortation to call 911, it's worth referencing the recent controversy over the acquittal of the police officer in the death of Philando Castile. However you feel about the legal aspects of that verdict, there's no getting away from the fact that many people of color and other groups do not feel safe around police officers.
You keep saying of course we must use available within-the-law means to suppress Nazism, but that presupposes the law is morally neutral (highly questionable), fairly enforced (likewise), and that this job should really be left to law enforcement and prosecutors rather than being the subject of any kind of private or collective action. I suggest to you that that's an easy attitude to have when you are not a member of a vulnerable population, but a potentially fatal error of judgment for someone in a more marginal position.
I have basically the opposite perspective: that in a time like this, when the executive branch of the country is controlled by someone who aspires to be an American Duterte, the rule of law and our institutions have never mattered more. To abandon them now is to lose entirely.
Punching nazis isn't because they're "carrying an offensive flag". If that's all it was, I'd totally agree with you.
The difference is the nazi ideology directly threatens the very livelihood of people, and allowing nazis to spread their ideology is really dangerous to these people. The very ideas they're espousing are threatening, because they lead to bigotry and racism and disenfranchisement and violence and death. You can't just argue against them, because your argument isn't going to convince 100% of listeners to reject the nazi ideology. The only way to actually be safe is to stop the spread of nazi ideology, and the way to do that is to make nazis shut up, and the way to do that is to make them afraid to open their mouths.
Yeah it really sucks that this is what it's come to, but the other systems in this country that are supposed to deal with this lawfully aren't working.
I advocate violent suppression of those who think genocide is appropriate. I don't advocate violent suppression of people talking loudly on cellphones.
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?
I'm not following your suggestion of conflation. The correct way to read my comment is as a criticism of the clear rhetorical support for violence in its parent. I am full of controversial opinions, I know...
The contents of a persons heart are known only to them and fundamentally unknowable by anyone else barring some scientific breakthrough, so they cannot and should not be subject to sanction. The words that come out of their mouth, on the other hand, are discernable.
You say the correct way to read your comment is as a criticism of the rhetorical support for violence in the parent, but the parent comment in question treats of violent opposition to Nazism, an inherently violent ideology, which you seem to be overlooking.
Allow me to illustrate how this looks from where I'm sitting:
Abel: Nazism is good! I support putting [people I dislike] into camps and killing them.
Baker: I find Abel's views repugnant and threatening to me, and if he expresses them in my presence I will punch him.
Charlie: Baker is terribly violent!
Please explain to me why you find the idea of violent opposition to Nazism 'chilling' but don't have anything to say about Nazism itself. It seems like a strange double standard.
> Please explain to me why you find the idea of violent opposition to Nazism 'chilling'
That is one HECK of an uncharitable assumption. My original comment speaks for itself. You are coming uncomfortably close to calling me a Nazi sympathizer. I don't appreciate that.
In case the ancestors get edited:
>>> It's way better to combat "racial purity" ideologies (or any other speech) with more speech, with reason and truth than with violence
>> Do you have any evidence to support this claim?
> One of the most chilling comments I've ever read on this site. How does one provide evidence of the content of their heart?
I have no doubt you're a good hearted person and have not made any assumptions to the contrary, but it does read as if you are chilled by a request for evidence that reason and truth are the best means of combating racial purity ideologies.
It would certainly be nice to rely on reason and truth if those strategies are indeed reliable. But the extant question is what if they're not?
The historical record suggests that appeals to reason, truth, and morality actually have a really terrible record as practical responses to autocracy. As we've been talking about Nazis, it's an easily verifiable fact that there was abundant intellectual, political, and religious opposition to their ideology and that none of these proved especially effective.
Once the nazis got comfortable and installed their people in key administrative positions, they just started arresting people whose public behavior was politically inconvenient for them. I don't want to start drawing parallels with individual current events which is more likely to confuse than to inform, but they're not hard to imagine.
I'm not misrepresenting it, I'm giving you my best understanding of your rather cryptic utterances. It would be a lot easier to understand your point if you would explain it in greater detail.
I realize you think your original comment speaks for itself, but I'm telling you that I'm finding it vague and confusing.
No, they expressed a sociopolitical theory that honestly sounds ineffective. They can support that theory with evidence if they want to convince at least me
> I study the role of the monopoly of force in shaping cultural traits associated with violence
and their persistence. I do so in the context of the settlement of the Canadian Prairies from
1890 to 1920. I find that places with a weaker monopoly of force by the Canadian state
during the settlement – as measured by their distance to the early Mounties’ fort – were and
are still more violent despite the later consolidation of the Canadian state. My interpretation
is that counties with a weak monopoly of force during the settlement developed a persistent
culture of violence. Consistent with my view, I find that hockey players born in these places
behave more violently even when observed in a common environment: the same team in the
National Hockey League. Besides the persistence of culture via inter-generational transmission
and socialization, I find that culture favors complementary institutions and political
views, creating an additional channel of persistence. Finally, I show that the monopoly of
force during the settlement crowds out pre-existing cultures of violence brought by immigrants.
Despite the persistence of culture and its dependence on past circumstances, the
right institutional conditions can change it
American textbook whitewashed versions of King and Gandhi, perhaps. It's convenient for the ruling class to have peaceful (and ineffectual) forms of 'resistance' lauded over other means.
So if you see somebody waving a flag, you punch them?
If they're carrying a battle flag (a specific design you can look up) then they're literally signalling that they're there for purposes of conquest. It's perfectly OK to oppose that.
I don't like the "punch them" rhetoric. It's not compatible with free speech. It's way better to combat "racial purity" ideologies (or any other speech) with more speech, with reason and truth than with violence. The second option makes you look like the Gestapo or the NKVD
But the 'racial purity' ideology is not always expressed in terms of their personal life choices about who they start a family with. Rather, it frequently comes paired with the assertion that the Other must be conquered, driven away, or eliminated.
'More speech' sounds really nice in principle, but I'm guessing you're not a member of any group that is threatened by eliminationist rhetoric, and people who are under threat are not obliged to serve as martyrs for you to use as moral exemplars in polite debate. Thus, the 'unlimited free speech' argument is a very privileged one, because speech is only free if it can be engaged in without existential anxiety.
Consider Jeremy Christian, the guy who killed two people and injured a third in Portland just weeks ago. He was yelling abuse at two female passengers on the train and people intervened to ask him to stop, and he attacked them with a knife. Those people took your 'more speech' approach and they're dead, are they not? No more speech of any kind for them, and no speech of yours can possibly restore them to their families.
Why, exactly, should people have to subject themselves to injury or death at the hands of bad actors before they're allowed to take any other action in your value schema? By feitishizing 'free speech' without regard to the consequences, you're giving extremists a license to engage in criminal threats but insisting that the people who are the subject of such threats do nothing to safeguard their own persons.
If your approach is so great, how does authoritarianism get off the ground anywhere? Why isn't it just talked out of existence by people armed only with reason and truth? What good are reason and truth when confronted with anti-rationalist ideologies that ignore logic and rely on atavistic emotional appeals, and which are demonstrably successful in activating people to commit violence against innocent people and populations?
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 is somehow intrinsically violent.
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.
That's just not true, and I think we both know it. The Confederate flag is literally the battle flag of militant American chattel slavery of black people, and virtually nobody who wears or carries it intends to physically attack you.
(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?)
Perhaps that has something to do with my willingness to punch back.
I've been the subject of quite a lot of unprovoked assaults in my life, Thomas; it's rather disconcerting to have someone that I've had as a guest in my own home tell me to disregard my personal experience of violence.
People who are displaying a Nazi battle flag or its derivatives in public spaces are not doing so to express their desire for peace and mutual respect.
And you know that if you ever find yourself in Chicago you are always welcome in my house, too.
I'm not discounting your personal experience of violence. But no personal history of any sort entitles you to hit someone simply for carrying a flag. You know that's true.
I don't know that's true, and will read each situation on its own merits.
I think it's important not to over-simplify or sanitize this. I'm making specific and qualified statements about political realities, not arguing a law school hypothetical. I'm not proposing just unilaterally hitting anonymous individuals over display of generic flags. I am saying that we're suffering an institutional breakdown where reflexive adherence to behavioral norms under all circumstances could compromise people's safety.
The two people who died in Portland a couple of weeks ago are dead because they remonstrated verbally with Jeremy Christian and he responded by cutting their throats. They would have done better to just assault him physically and they might still be alive if they had. They could have done nothing, of course, but you may recall that Christian was abusing and threatening two young women at the time, as opposed to just shouting at nobody in particular.
That's a real thing that happened. Those two people are really and permanently dead now because they underestimated the guy's willingness to initiate deadly violence.
>Too often, when we engage in arguments with extremists who talk of racial purity, we falter to explain our side. Instead, we punch them and tell them “because.”
>Nationalism leads to war
So if you see somebody waving a flag, you punch them?
I don't like the "punch them" rhetoric. It's not compatible with free speech. It's way better to combat "racial purity" ideologies (or any other speech) with more speech, with reason and truth than with violence. The second option makes you look like the Gestapo or the NKVD