Don’t bother thanking Trump, he’ll take it as a compliment.
I’m bi, which has never placated a homophobe. Depends whether they have targeted my house, or if the are marching past my house as part of a general protest. The latter is not (from the point of view of whether I’m allowed to respond violently to them) a direct, imminent threat.
And like I’ve said before, I’d much rather they are out in the open. When a handful of them march, and next Pride there are tens of thousands of people, they can’t claim they are a silent majority if they’ve had the chance to have their say. Pushing abhorrent views underground helps nothing, it won’t stop people holding those views and makes any conversation with what few of them might actually be willing to listen much harder. It also makes any understanding of why they feel that way more difficult, again making change harder.
But what happens when you elect one of them president?
So you advocate violence to prevent speech?
That’s partly because you believe, naively, that antifa are motivated by what they say. Why not encourage people to beat up religious people whom you disagree with. Eternal damnation for believing the wrong thing is surely worth a punch in the nose. :rolleyes:
Are you seriously that fucking retarded?
Who would be more in the wrong, morally, me for attacking them, or them for saying, “Death to America!”?
Huh? I specifically said, multiple times, that I think violence to suppress speech is wrong.
Some of you are confusing supposedly peaceful deeds that in actuality contribute to monstrous evils with simply advocating for monstrous evils. A peaceful office worker at Auschwitz is still committing war crimes because he is aiding and abetting genocide. Whereas a person who calls for genocide is expressing a viewpoint and not actively hurting anyone. It’s the most horrible viewpoint one can possibly express but the words aren’t putting anyone in the hospital. And anti-fa is doing more than just punching people in the face. And they are doing more than just attacking neo-Nazis. They are attacking police, they are attacking journalists, because they are so sure of the rightness of their cause that they fear to be identified. And they are beating people badly enough to hospitalize them and may have killed someone at Berkeley. They’ve thrown Molotov cocktails at police.
You have, and I think we’ve all agreed on that. What we don’t agree on is whether violence is worse than speech, which I do believe is a very dangerous view. “Words are violence” is being used as a justification for anti-fa’s “self defense”. That may not exactly be your argument, but you are clearly saying that some viewpoints are worse than violence. I think that view might be fashionable, but it’s not tenable.
It’s not having a viewpoint – any viewpoint – that’s worse than punching someone in the face. It’s publicly advocating for white supremacist and nazi (and other hateful and inherently violent) ideologies. That’s an action, not just a viewpoint.
I doubt anyone would argue with the assertion that “it’s morally wrong to berate and insult children on the street”. That’s a morally wrong thing to do. So is personally insulting strangers based on their appearance, or loudly mocking a disabled person that passes by on the street, or any of a million other really obnoxious things to do.
So I think it’s not controversial that it can be morally wrong to express certain things in public. I’m asserting that advocating for ideologies that are inherently hateful and violent, like white supremacism, is morally very wrong. It’s hard for me to understand how some people don’t believe that advocating for these sorts of ideas has a moral component to it.
Those are all bad things, including the advocacy of monstrous evils.
I think punching a peaceful journalist is a lot worse than punching a peaceful white supremacist. I think both are morally wrong, but not to the same degree.
I feel entirely comfortable making such comparisons. Some actions are morally worse than others.
But I maintain that actions occupy a totally different moral place than words. Evil actions trump evil words, no matter how evil the words or how mild the action. Nazis hate me too. At this point, I fear anti-fa more than I do Nazis.
Then again, I imagine that being pro-Israel can get you kicked in the head with the anti-fa folks too. So maybe I’m screwed either way.
Advocating publicly is action. Trying to convince others is action. These are all actions that are being compared – the actions of advocating publicly for white supremacism and the action of punching that guy who just advocated publicly for white supremacism. I feel comfortable saying that the former is morally worse than the latter, even while they’re both morally wrong.
And I think it’s dangerous to call attempts at persuasion or advocacy “action”. It justifies all kinds of things, even if you don’t intend it to.
I’d also note that since anti-fa does contain a lot of elements that advocate awful views. These kinds of groups don’t tend to have much difference in temperament from those they oppose. For many of them ,it’s not hatred for their racism that drives them, it’s hatred for what Nazis do to communists. Remember, they aren’t “anti-racism” they are “anti-fascism”.
"No USA at all!"So I’d say on the scale of horrible advocacy, they come pretty close to the racists and probably have racist elements themselves.
It’s just going by the dictionary definition.
Would you really disagree with me that it’s morally wrong to loudly and publicly mock a disabled person on the street? Or shout insults about a stranger’s weight? Or insult children at a bus stop?
And if these are morally wrong, then why isn’t it also morally wrong to try and convince someone that the Jews should be exterminated?
Although I think Berkeley’s mayor might be going a little far here, advocating that anti-fa be treated as a “gang”. I’m not sure what legal significance that has, but I’m not sure it’s accurate either.
http://www.msn.com/en-ie/news/us/berkeley-mayor-classify-antifa-as-a-gang/vi-AAqUARD
Is there some kind of significance in California to labelling something a gang?
And one is an action that is protected by the constitution and one is a crime in every jurisdiction in America.
mc
Yes, and as I’ve said multiple times, this is how it should be.