I find the word almost always reflects more poorly on the accuser than the accusee. Just a near meaningless curse word used with very little care or accuracy.
I find posting an old meme reflexively upon seeing the word “nazi” to be kind of odd. It is not clear what being able to ctrl-c ctrl-v an epic dunk accomplishes
I would imagine that people that are not extremists or lefties are comfortable calling e.g. Richard Spencer[0][1] a nazi, or self-proclaimed white nationalist Nick Fuentes[2][3] one.
There is a very small but very vocal subset of posters that would take this opportunity to weigh in on the latter as being mislabeled, though I have not taken up previous suggestions to deeply familiarize myself with his writings in order to disabuse myself of some perceived error in judgment.
I tend to keep scrolling when I see someone use a word in a way that I disagree with. In the case that I do feel compelled to correct someone I certainly don’t see the value in copy/pasting a vague insult about their sanity. That is, to me, a genuinely strange decision to make given so little stimulus.
Nazism is dead. There is no significant nazi organisation on this planet. Yes there are still white nationalists. Yes there are still anti-semites. This was also true before the Nazi party existed. And during its existence! If WWII commander General Patton of the US Army had a twitter account, it would probably have more of the above than both the accounts you linked.
So, I re-iterate. If you're unironically calling people Nazis in 2024, you're either a political extremist, not all there in the head, or completely ignorant of history. Often it seems to be a combination.
I think what we have here is a difference of values. I am not particularly precious about the word because definitions change over time with common usage.
The majority of people would understand, given context clues, what the phrase “the nazis ruining twitter” refers to. To those that were still confused, my examples of neo-nazi white nationalists with sizable followings (for example, the first one, who helped organize the Unite the Right rally[0]) should clear that up entirely. No one, literally no one at all would think that I meant that Herman Göring is retweeting Harambe memes.
The “are the nazis in the room with you?” joke isn’t really as much of an own as you might have thought. Instead of signaling “Get a load of this guy that thinks there’s ghosts in his computer!” you’ve kind of signaled “I would like to take this time to share with you all that, due to my specific and stubborn refusal to understand context clues or acknowledge that words can be used differently over time, whenever I see this particular word I can only envision a guy that thinks there’s ghosts in his computer! My mind can only summon the one image!”
I agree. This conversation began when you saw a word used online in a way that didn’t align with your strict and personal definition of it and exercised your better judgment to insult a stranger on the internet.
