Offensensitivity.
(Opus T. Penguin)
Yeah, this is a point that occured to me too. Lib, I can’t help but compare they vitriol with which you lit into the guy who tried to excuse Andrew Jackson, and the way you leapt to defend the dignity of one whose worst criticism of Hitler is that he’s a “symbolic cliche”.
By the way, is anyone else wondering if David is even aware of this thread’s existence?
Do you not understand how eerie that is? It could well be a quote from their site.
Fenris
You misread me. I wasn’t referencing David. He was by no means the only bully in the thread, merely the most vociferous.
I’m sorry, but I can’t buy into the “my self-righteous anger is justified, but yours isn’t” mentality. It is not lost on me how almost everything we say about them here, they are saying about us there.
Yeah, we’re right and they’re wrong. We’re decent folk and they’re monsters. We’re… wait a minute… who are we exactly?
We champion equal rights for and tolerance of all people. Do we? For Sionnach? For His4ever? Hey, but those people aren’t worthy of the name “human”.
It’s damn spooky, I tell you.
Scylla
The minimum. That means that I wouldn’t be chatty, but I would be polite. As a matter of fact, that is what I presumed that Sionnach would advocate. I had seen references at their site to “Injuns”.
I would only become angry if she lied about it, or revised the facts, saying, for example, that Indian Hater Jackson was the best thing that ever happened to the Cherokee. And I might likely open a Pit thread about it. But in Great Debates, I would tell the true story and let readers make up their minds.
Lib,
I know you apologized so I am not going to hammer home any points on that level. I would like to add the following in respect to your stance to the Supremacist crowd though:
I have kept repeating it over in GD and I’ll say it again here; rational debate with the Aryan Nation kids is just a complete and utter waste of time. Maybe insulting them wont help either. That being said, personally I find your behavior in respect to them just as annoying as you found David’s. To boot yours contributes to the societal problem they make out since your 'understanding tone’ lends them the illusion that their intolerance can be tolerated, the fact is that they go beyond the acceptable levels of intolerance by supporting and carrying out actual actions of violence, oppression and murder. Neo-Nazis are a very special kind of tribe of nastiness. When they happen to attract someone who has brains and intellect on top of the obvious mental disturbance you need to have in order to be one, they become incredibly dangerous to other human beings around them.
You can’t debate that away. You can’t debate them away. The only way you can remedy it is by trying to sway the individuals that are gyrating into that environment. You will never achieve that by ‘understanding and tolerating debate’. The simple reason is that they do not believe what they do based on any rationality – it is purely emotional. Mostly it is fear, some of it is irrational anger and quite a bit is alienation and a general feeling of being disenfranchised by society, mostly it is the misfortune that they ended up bumping into this ideology that gives them simple answers, however wrong.
If you want to sway them you need to befriend them and get close to them and make them feel safe, and then you need to provide meaningful alternatives for them socially and emotionally - some of them are far too gone for you to even be able to that when you have befriended them. If you want to understand them you have to live amongst them and share their everyday, their ups and downs, the ideology quickly peels away and you start seeing a bunch of very disturbed individuals grasping at ideological straws to solve their existential angst and turning to systematic hatred and violence when that doesn’t help.
Your personal chances of ever doing either of the two without risk to limb and life is more or less nil, ‘cause you ain’t white enough. I am and I did it for while, eventually I couldn’t take it anymore - my calling in life was never to be psychologist/psychiatrist and in fact that wasn’t why I hung out with them in the first place, it was research for a social documentary, a book about skinheads and a sociological study of sub-cultures at the Stockholm University that I contributed research material to back in the eighties.
Respectfully
Sparc
Lib, sorry for misreading you regarding David. 
On the other hand, let me be clear. I do not wish to be included in that “we” in the last paragraph I quoted.
I am not a champion for tolerance of all people. The minute someone starts talking genocide, my tolerance for them ends.
Lib both of us feel that (at minimum) a primary role of gvernment is to protect us from coersion. IMO she should be free to persue her goals of White Seperatism by: [ul]
[li] Getting like minded people together[/li][li] Pooling their money[/li][li] Buying land [/li][li] Keeping any non-Nazis out.[/li][/ul]
But she’s talking deporting me, my family, stripping us of our assets, nuking us, etc. I don’t think she has a snowflake’s chance in hell of accomplishing this, she can barely respond to tough questions without grunting. But I’m not going to make the mistake my great-grandparents did and simply ignore these troglodytes who want to kill me because I think that it’s unlikely that they can achieve their goal. I refuse to be “toleratant” of people who want me dead.
I think she has a constitutional right to spew whatever she wishes (but not where ever she wishes to do so of course), but leave us not forget that the flip side of that coin is that I have a right to debate, or mock, or heckle or jeer.
And calling someone a Nazi who is a Nazi is being accurate. Words mean things to quote Rand. If she doesn’t want to be associated with Nazis, she should stop espousing Nazi views. (I grant you it would be an insult to call someone a Nazi who espoused a, Ghandi-esque view, for example). Allow me to toss the question to you: how is she not a Nazi in the common sense of the word (aka, the non-economic way)?
Fenris
This might surprise you, but I don’t disagree, Sparc.
To be precise, I haven’t advocated tolerant debate but civil debate. The reason is because it is not the debators who decide who wins — it’s the spectators.
I have no illusions of mass conversions, although I do believe that there likely exist some number, however small, that would indeed respond to rational argument.
But I’m most interested in the point of view of the audience. I’ve mentioned these same principles before about debating with Creationists. A person can look like an utter dolt by the sheer absurdity of their arguments against yours. But start piling on. Start hurling insults. Start dehumanizing the person. What happens when you carry this too far is that, to observers, you begin to seem something other than human yourself. You seem merciless. You seem to be the very monster that your screaming “monster!” at.
You end up saying things like this:
In my opinion, it is as likely as not that whoever lurked and saw that statement had a different opinion about who followed a demon religion.
Hate is as hate does. That’s what I mean when I say that becoming them does not defeat them.
Fenris
I know how difficult it can be. Imagine a man of my passion opening a thread that attempted to cast the murderer of my ancestors as their hero. I had to walk outside and breathe before I could steady my hands enough to respond. I do know how you feel.
But to answer your question, there is a context in which calling someone a Nazi is a statement of fact and a context in which calling someone a Nazi is an ad hominem. A member of the National Socialist Party, for example, is a Nazi.
But this, and not Great Debates, is the place for ad hominems. I mean dammit, man. Have you been to their board? They apply a different set of rules to the “antis” than they do to themselves. They have a moderator who charges into threads like a Samurai warrior and hurls rhetorical blasts at people. They mock. They cajole. They…
Gah. Think about it.
GD is indeed not a place to hurl invective. But it is also not a fuzzy-wuzzy tea party in which all views are equal, and indicating contempt for the views of one’s opponent is not forbidden.
When debating WNs, I think it wise to steer away from namecalling and insults because that’s homeground for the WNs–they are dimwitted individuals who think in grunts and short, obscene interjections. I’d rather get them out in the light of logic and evidence, uncomfortable ground for ideas that breed best in the dark, like mildew.
But I have zero respect for Sionnach and her droogs. **Fenris is a warm, intelligent, generous, guy with a wicked talent for parody and who knows more about musical theater than any straight guy should. When I was feeling down, he took the time to write me some very inspiring e-mails. Fenris is my pal.
But Sionnach can’t see that. All her tiny little mind can comprehend is that Fenris is a member of a group that she hates irrationally. She wants to harm my friend, and that violates one of my rules–Nobody fucks with my friends.
White nationalists are not just one blossom in the garden of ideas. They are (ironically enough) the forces of darkness, and they must be challenged and their views refuted whenever they appear.
We agree then. I just thought you went a tad bit far as civility goes, but generally we agree.
Since Nazism is so completely oriented towards Germany and so intricately tied to the ideology of Hitler I agree again, but only with an added nitpick. While only a member or supporter of the NSDAP can justly be called a Nazi, Sionnach and Halogen are in fact neo-Nazis through the ideology they embrace. They try to pass it off under another label, but no matter how often you try to call that apple an orange it stays an apple.
Sparc
I think “Neo-nazi” would be appropriate.
I’m cool with Neo-Nazi too. So we’re all in agreement!
Group hug!
GD&R!
Fenris
So do in, in reguards to the specific concern I voiced in my last post.
Ahh, shit, I missed Fenris’ hug. Damn. 
<Announcer> When neo-Nazis invade, the Straight Dope community pulls together. Coming up next on a very special episode of Cecil and the Gang</Announcer>
This exerpt from Lib’s post is an excellent summary of my exact feelings about these sort of situations. Absolutely perfect. Thanks for concisely phrasing the argument that I’ve been stumbling around for months.
I think I could live with “Neo-Nazi” also. It implies enough difference between their movement and National Socialism historically and as a political philosophy to intellectually satisfy me, and it retains the common meaning by indicating that the movement has borrowed from the racial mythology and ethnic nationalism that accompanied the Hitler regime. It’s still a little inflammatory, but it’s more intellectually honest than simply “Nazi”, as I addressed earlier in the thread.
[singing]Everything Old is Neo Again![/singing]
So, by agreeing to call her a Neo-Nazi, does she still want to eliminate Jews just because they’re Jews? Or does she want to eliminate them for a Neo reason?
There is no spoon.
[sub](aw, shit. wrong Neo, huh?)[/sub]
So, like, if we call a neo-Nazi a Nazi, are we going to invoke Godwin’s Law?
ducks
Hey, I want a hug!
Only one thing that slightly set my nose out of joint:
Sion posted an increasingly large amount of bullshit in that GD thread culminating in a remark that Israel should be nuked because it’s full of Jews. At this point I wondered whether she was starting to become a jerk…
…and I’m the one who gets an official warning!!!
sheesh