You keep referring to a fictional group. Wouldn’t it be better if we all talked about real world people? If you’d prefer fiction, maybe you’d like to start a thread in Cafe Society?
Maybe the Nation of Islam, but they’ve always been that way, so I don’t think that would count.
:dubious:
It doesn’t? Last time I checked, I can’t threaten to kill my next door neighbor and get away without a visit from my friendly neighborhood policemen.
That’s ridiculous.
Don’t tell Evan Drake. That means free speech as a concept is destroyed!
(Though you’re right that what I said didn’t really make sense.)
Charlottesville was the largest gathering in a long time. It had double the number of counterprotesters. There were maybe a thousand nazis in the biggest nazi event in ages. What counts as “marginal” here? NAMBLA?
In some cases, it’s not the number, but the positioning. Police officials, media owners, local and federal senators, the president of the freaking country… If this truly wasn’t a problem in America, BLM most likely wouldn’t exist to begin with.
ACLU really pissed me off. 1971? Then* they* totally pissed me off, later. Several times.
Even today, when I write them a check, I grit my teeth with chagrin. And then I sign it.
Trump is not a Nazi. I’m not sure which senators are nazis, but assuming that any of them actually are (everything in the above article applies just as well to Steve King, and he’s the worst I can think of) do you think any of them are candid or public about it, or do you think that them saying, “I openly and honestly profess to being a nazi, and a supporter of the ideology of the NSDAP” would end their political careers? Let’s not inflate the category of “nazi”.
Just to expand on this… I don’t want to minimize the problem of rising far-right nationalism. But if we’re going to make the argument that Nazis are uniquely worthy of having their rights removed because they’re violent, we’re going to need to make it clear what is and is not a nazi, and differentiate based on that violence. The response to violence is violence. The response to speech you don’t like, even if that speech seems to imply violence, is more speech.
Do you think any ideology or ethos can be inherently violent? Are minorities wrong to feel an existential threat from white supremacist beliefs, even from people who don’t (seem) to act on it? (Even then, I’ve seen arguments that racist political actions, even if legal within the framework of the law, are themselves actual violence.)
As I’ve remarked before, I think your problem in convincing some people is that many of them already feel that the system is corrupt and racist and ACTIVELY trying to LITERALLY murder them RIGHT NOW, if not through police guns, then through, say, active neglect of water systems, or capitalist policies that keep the poor, especially minorities, from being anything but poor and starving while coddling the rich. There’s a lot of justified frustration out there, and I don’t think those who feel it will find your argument for saying that genocidal speech is A-OK very convincing. What good will “more speech” do them?
Maybe you don’t feel there are enough of that type of person out there to matter. But frankly, I think that more such people are being generated every day under the Trump Administration, and I think ignoring that is the wrong thing to do. (One big reason being that these are exactly the kinds of people who clash physically with Nazis to begin with, for obvious reasons.)
Even assuming you’re speaking metaphorically, I can’t figure out any way to interpret this that would make it a true statement.
It will do them the same good as it does for Nazis, which is the point.
Nazis will try to convince the rest of us that Jews are secretly running the government, or whatever, and the people you mention will try to convince the rest of us that the system is LITERALLY murdering them RIGHT NOW, and the rest of us decide which side, if either, is right. Thus freedom of speech works mostly for the benefit of whichever side has the better case.
In your judgment, who has the stronger case? Why would those with the stronger case get to use violence? Why would they need to?
Regards,
Shodan
It’s not (necessarily) “the rest of us” that’s the problem, though: it’s the entirety of the system. I think that’s the difference. I know you agree with the current government on major issues, but we see that in the health care protests and, yes, in BLM.
Not to mention, surely you’ve heard liberals complain about Brietbart and Fox News and foreign propaganda; even if you don’t agree with these particulars, perhaps you might acknowledge that sometimes “the stronger case” doesn’t necessarily win out.
(This may be put poorly; it’s way too early right now. I’ll think about it some more in the coming day.)
Ask yourself this: if it became illegal to openly express the opinions in the paragraph above, would they cease to exist? If not, why wouldn’t the same be true of the frustration and resentment that gives rise to white nationalism?
Given that, what’s the point in trying to squash anyone’s voice?
I’ve been led to believe that saying that someone is still “learning” is an acceptable means of excusing someone saying or doing stupid, ignorant crap.
The NSPA (a.k.a. American Nazis), not the KKK. But that’s the case I often think of whenever I hear about the ACLU defending hateful speech.
Pretty much.
I concur. America has a bad habit of overreacting to threats (left, right and other) and doing more damage to itself than the original threat posed.
Or, as US Air Force Academy Chief Lt. General Jay Silveria said recently:
It is all too tempting to try and quash disagreeable speech. But as noted, this is a solution that is, in the long run, much worse than the problem it is solving. The battle of countering bad speech with better speech is a much harder one, but a necessary one nonetheless.
I’m not sure that this difference makes a difference - the rest of us are the ones who need to be convinced. If “the rest of us” are the system, well, that doesn’t change anything. We still need to be convinced, and neither Nazis or Antifa or the ACLU or BLM or anyone else gets to use violence to silence anyone else.
Sure, I would agree that the stronger case doesn’t always win. The issue is, who gets to decide what is the stronger case? The US is a republic, and majority rules (within certain limits). Thus, almost by definition, the stronger case is the one which the majority accepts.
If “liberalism is white supremacy”, and “liberalism” includes majority rule, then BLM has an uphill battle ahead of them. They have to convince the majority to give up authority, and “majority rules that majority shouldn’t rule” is a tough sell.
Regards,
Shodan
If liberalism is white supremacy, and it kinda is, at least in the sense that the Euro-American version regards white ideas as superior, then the answer is for African-American philosophers to come up with their own ideas(which many have), and for African-Americans and non-blacks who agree with those philosophers to push their views so that they become as important as Locke, Rawls, Keynes, and Galbreath.
Almost for the first time, a Noam Chomsky quote is useful
Ideas aren’t black or white. If free speech for everyone is a bad idea, then it is a bad idea even a black guy came up with it.
Regards,
Shodan
Eh, that’s a layer deeper than the argument being had here; I’m granting for the sake of argument that nazi-style fascism is inherently violent. I think there’s a good case to be made that that just isn’t really true.
Depends how you mean that. In the sense that, “Shit, we have to prevent these people from gaining any actual power,” they’re definitely not wrong. In the sense that, “Shit, these people are going to murder us right now and the only reasonable reaction is violence and limiting people’s rights,” they’re almost certainly wrong. Nazis are not an operational threat. White supremacists are not an operational threat. If you insist on stretching the definition to include everyone who thinks white people are better, or who fails an implicit association test,
The entire purpose of the state is a legal, coordinated, predominately consensual monopoly on violence. (I’m trying to avoid the worst argument in the world here, sorry if this seems overly detailed.) Violence is not inherently wrong or bad in this context; it must be considered in the context of the effect it has. That said: yeah, racist political actions are almost always the bad kind of violence. The question is, how do you push back against that effectively? Trying to remove the state’s monopoly on violence and fight back with violent seems like, on the meta level, an exceedingly risky move to make (because the Nazis are going to do that too, and feel like they have an excuse), as well as one that is very unlikely to work on an object level (because the government will crush you like a bug and you will probably lose public support - how much damage do you think Micah Xavier Johnson did to the movements he claimed to espouse?). Instead, the way to go is to fight back politically. A little like the people in the OP, just, yanno, not being fucking stupid.
It might convince others to join their side. It might make their claims (as presented by you) sound less hysterical. There are things wrong, but if someone thinks there are people actively trying to murder you right now in the political system, most of the time that’s paranoia speaking. There’s tons of things wrong with our treatment of African-Americans. But these are problems best solved through political means. Who do you punch to fix Flint? Who do you punch to solve inequality? The nazis have nothing to do with that.
I’ll gladly speak to those people, if they’re willing.
As I noted earlier in the thread, it is weird and ahistorical to limit our understanding of the sources of modern American rights-based liberalism solely to white theorists like “Locke, Rawls, Keynes, and [Galbraith]”. (What the hell does an economist like Keynes have to do with the evolution of rights-based liberalism, anyway? If Keynes is a significant source of our modern understanding of civil rights then so is every other major economist and political theorist of the 20th century.)
Our modern US views of rights-based liberalism are also influenced by the ideas of many nonwhite people, such as Frederick Douglass, Gandhi, King, Randolph, Marshall, and a bunch of others. It is kind of fucking creepy to keep describing its history as though only its white contributors are entitled to any credit for its ideas, while its nonwhite contributors are ignored or treated as merely derivative.
Even if modern American liberal ideology were indeed the product solely of white thinkers, that still wouldn’t make it a “white idea”, as Shodan notes. But that kind of rhetoric is even more irritatingly inaccurate given that modern American liberal ideology is not the product solely of white thinkers.