So if you’ll just shove your bed into your closet and take a walk . . .
Cite?
Yeah, it’s the same thing. Requiring someone to be 35 before holding the highest office in the land is the same as forbidding certain political views from ever holding public office.
You know you are right. From now on Jews can’t not hold office in the United States. Wait a minute, did I say Jews? I meant Nazis. It’s an easy mistake, one group was treated as less than full citizens by those holding power in their country. But that would never happen here, right?
A free society can not ban Nazis and remain free. No matter how many times you repeat it, it just ain’t so. When you remove the freedom of speech, and the freedom of association, from one group, you have taken away freedom. You ignored my lesson about banning Nazis - Commies - Muslims. So I ask again, who decides? Once Nazis are bad, when do others get that label and for how long and how long do we wait to ban them?
You don’t like Nazis. I get it. Let it go. There is no more despised group in modern history. The Nazi name will never rise to power again, not in Germany, not in the United States. But the actions you call for are directly from their ideology. Trample the rights of the minority, make them pay, take away their full citizenship.
They did, in her last episode.
Fair enough.
“Nazi” is not an acronym. Please stop spelling it NAZI. Thank you.
Sincerely,
A Grammar Nazi
How our existing mechanisms work is pretty well exhibited in the destruction of the KKK in Kentucky in 2008. In short, a civil suit was brought alleging that the Klan incited violence that resulted in a 19 year old being beaten. They lost and a got socked with a $2.5 million judgement that wiped them out. Similarly, the Aryan Nations lost a suit brought by the Southern Poverty Law Center that cost them $6.3 million in 2000.
Freedom of speech does have its limits and when those limits are exceeded we have a system that not only responds, but can severly punishnot just individual perpetrators, but organizations that foment criminal action.
It’s not a coincidence that as legal entities those types of organizations are subject to a whole series of laws that on one hand protect them, but on the other impose certain responsibilty and enable recourse. Just like the rest of us.
How is Nazi not an acronym? I know, technically, the acronym is Naso, and Nazi was a parody of that, but…
For everyone who we just lost: It’s an acronym to the same extent ‘modem’ is an acronym, which is a style a lot more popular in German. It’s formed from taking initial syllables, not letters, and sticking them together; as ‘modem’ is formed from ‘modulator-demodulator’, ‘Nazi’ is formed from the German noun-phrase-word (that is, a noun phrase without spaces between the elements) ‘Nationalsozialismus’, which means ‘National Socialism’.
Acronyms of that sort are usually not fully capitalized, nor are extremely common acronyms of the common English sort, such as ‘radar’.
I was unaware of the earlier ‘Naso’ form, but it makes sense.
I’ve heard the story that it was the Munich Post, an anti-Hitler paper, was the first to regularly call the Nazis, “Nazi” being Bavarian slang for an idiot, a hick, or a simpleton (the name Ignatz having had the same connotations in Bavaria as the name Cletus in the US.) The Nazis resisted it for a while, but eventually inertia took over, and since the Social Democrats were already the Sozis, Nazi became common in imitation of that.
I think you’re allowed to refer to N*zis as bastards.
I have to agree with the general sentiment of the thread here. The ideology of the Nazis was despicable and is synonymous with evil in the modern world; no one here is going to argue that point. But if we value free speech, we have to allow a modern day Nazi to speak. We’re free to criticize, counter-point, ignore, or ridicule them, but we’re all far better off not banning Nazism and confronting it head-on. For one, it presents as fear or weakness and it gives those people a talking point “look, we’re being repressed, they’re afraid of what we have to say” and it’s the sort of thing that can corrupt a weak mind. You see this sort of argumentation all the time, and it can be convincing to some people.
It also gives us an opportunity to respond to the things they say publicly. That is, they could tell a kid behind closed doors all kinds of horrible lies about how the Jews and the blacks have ruined our culture or some stuff, and without another voice to speak out, how might they know they’re being fed lies? Anything they say in the public arena can and will be much more easily shot down. They’ll have to respond to questions when they make those sorts of assertions and people who might otherwise be swayed can at least hear some of both sides.
But most importantly, it’s a slippery slope. It’s easy to ban speech that only one in a million even wants to say and the rest see as wrong and hateful. But where do we draw that line? Surely a large majority of people have at least one view or opinion that isn’t particularly popular and, if left to a standard of being in a minority view, could just as easily be banned. If we start doing that, we’re engaging in some of the very same behavior, and that leads down dangerous ideological paths.
And even if we ban the Nazi party, what keeps the same people with the same views from reforming under a different name and pushing the same agenda? You can only ban people publicly acknowledging their ideologies, you can’t make them stop thinking it or stop spreading it, not without measures well outside any resemblance of a free society.
So yeah, the guy is a huge prick, worthy of great ire, but let’s not lower ourselves to his level.
In support of Captain Amazing: Online Etymological Dictionary: Nazi
I also have to admit that I enjoy the mental image of a Capitol Hill lobbyists’ party, to which all registered lobbyists have to be invited. So the Nazi lobbyist is there at the crowded party…
…standing in the exact middle of a huge circle of empty space…
…which moves with him wherever he goes.
Can you imagine the sheer PR toxicity of that guy? He might as well have full-blown Ebola virus for all the contact Washington politicos are going to want to have with him.
Found another interview with the Nazi lobbyist:
Well now, isn’t that sweet. Always nice to see a political activist taking constitutional rights seriously, don’t you think?
So what is the modern nazi platform anyway? I know I saw some other white supremacy group try to use weasel words to say they were not about hate anymore but about celebrating Aryan identity and culture or some obvious bullshit.
Godwinized.
I can’t believe a thread on Nazis has been Godwinized. Who’d a thunk it?
Got a cite showing that they received instructions or funds to promote domestic subversions from the USSR?
Also, here’s Hitchens talking about free speech.
Some of the arguments seem to be forgetting that there’s an actual example of a country that has banned the Nazi party. It’s kinda silly to claim that there’s some necessary slippery slope or some end-of-democracy scenario when there’s already an experiment running, and that experiment is doing just fine.
The main argument that I see is just that there’s no point in doing so. it doesn’t accomplish anything. You can’t outlaw the ideas themselves, as outlawing ideas breaks the concept of a democracy. All you can do is outlaw the symbols and the word. We can actually look at that example again, and we see that Germany with their restrictions may not be worse than we are, but they aren’t any better either.
There’s just no reason to go to all the effort or spend the money. No one who calls themselves a Nazi will ever have power again. The only way they could is if we did outlaw them, so people wound up forgetting they existed.
That’s been discussed a bit in this thread, and I agree there’s no fullscale elimination of free speech rights on the horizon over there. But I think some people would argue that the ban in Germany is evidence that free speech rights there are not fine. I’m not sure how I feel that ban personally.
Nonsense, he can say it because it is true. A concentration camp is not an extermination camp, which is why the camps the Nazis set up as labor camps for political and ideological opponents during the 30s were called concentration camps and the camps set up from 1941/42 were called extermination camps or death camps. Insisting that the two mean the same thing leads to absurdities such as claiming the Nazis were only doing what the British did first by setting up concentration camps in the Boer War with the implication that the British camps are somehow analogous to Nazi death camps.