On Punching Nazis and other hyperbole

[mneme]

I'm willing to sing about punching Nazis, but I'm not willing to seriously advocate that doing so (or censoring them) is ethically and morally right.

Ken White (Popehat) has an excellent post as to why not. (oddly enough, -do- read the comments here).

Comments

Re: On the no-platforming of Nazis

[avram]

An example shown in the Twitter comments was "Deport dreamers." That's about immigration status, not race.

That's nonsense. Immigration restrictions are one of the mechanisms through which American racism has traditionally been expressed. You might as well claim that redlining wasn't racism, because it was housing policy.

Turning around what you said, how many people have ever said, "My ideas were suppressed by superior force! Now I realize they're wrong!"

I'm less interested in convincing Nazis that they're wrong than I am in keeping them from organizing, gaining power, and killing people.

Re: On the no-platforming of Nazis

[mneme]

Fundamentally, this question rests on whether you think that Nazism and related philosophies are superior philosophies that will inevitably peacefully gain supporters until stopped by superior force -- or, alternatively, whether the line is from "people saying stupid shit" to "people engaged in active planning of violence, harassment, and other criminal activity" and where in that it's reasonable to stop someone by force.

Re: On the no-platforming of Nazis

[avram]

The notion that only "superior philosophies" inevitably gain supporters assumes that good ideas always drive out bad. That's not how real-life marketplaces always work, and it's not how the marketplace of ideas always works, either. Remember what the markets for food and medication were like before the FDA?

I'm starting to speculate that democracies become especially vulnerable to fascism during a period when a new communications technology emerges. Hitler made very good use of film/video (it's a cliché that the film techniques Leni Riefenstahl pioneered are still being used today), and Trump is capitalizing off of reality TV and the Internet. I think it takes a generation or two for a society to develop a memetic immune response to the new information vector.