There seems to be a lot of that in this forum. I have found that when the world has a problem with what I am saying, it is usually not the world that has the problem after all.
Correct, I am not accusing anyone of being a Nazi. All I’m saying is “using language like calling your opponents maggots is dehumanization, and I think it is wrong”. Obviously there are different degrees of that, as I’ve said myself up thread.
I didn’t say that your actions are “the same as those that led to Nazi persecution of Jews”, you made that part up because it’s easoer to argue against than what I actually said. If anything, I said that your choice of words is reminicient of the words the Nazis used. Which it is - Maggots are a type of vermin, and indeed, the Nazis called Jews and other people they considered undesirable vermin.
The fact that this one aspect of your actions and theirs are alike does not mean that your actions overall are anything akin to theirs, and I never said or implied that to be the case.
YOU said “we didn’t reason the Nazis out of their opinions, we fought a war with them”. In response, I said “OK, if you think it’s going to take a war to stop MAGA, call them maggots, it will get you in the right headspace for civil war”.
If you said “we didn’t reason the Nazis put of their opinion” but you meant to imply something other than “therefore it is not worth reasoning with MAGAts, we will need to defeat them by force to”, please let me know what you meant.
Sigh.
I’m not saying you want a massive ideological civil war.
I am saying that IF you truly believe that anyone who is a Trump supporter is motivated only by hate and cannot be reasoned with - which is what @Der_Trihs said up thread - then the logical conclusion is civil war.
I did not say that if you call Trump supporters maggots that you automatically believe that a civil war is necessary.
I also never said that you’re acting like Nazis.
I literally just said that calling people by a name derived from vermin sounds like the type of insults the Nazis used.
If you’re unable to separate “you’re using the same insults the Nazis did” from “you are a Nazi and you’re going to genocide the people you’re insulting”, I don’t know how I can possibly clarify.
No, that’s precisely what I said. If you think otherwise, go ahead and quote it.
Stealing gum from the grocery store is very juvenile compared to scamming senior citizens out of their life savings, but if someone calls me on shoplifting, I’m not gonna say, “But Bernie Madoff!”
Okay.
Duly quoted.
You’ve said a lot more than that. Don’t soft-pedal your views now when we can all read the thread.
You don’t even realize you’re doing it, do you…
MAGAts → maggots → vermin → Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda is a well-greased rhetorical slope you’ve got there. And yet you are simultaneously claiming you’re not doing it.
You’ve mentioned Nazis a lot for an argument that wasn’t intended to draw comparisons.
I was rebutting your comments on the matter, which (as I didn’t “imply” but stated overtly) were not remotely reality-based.
If you’re unable to understand why repeatedly accusing people of sounding like Nazis would give them the impression you are comparing them to Nazis, I don’t know how I can possibly clarify.
Mods: can we just move this fucking thing to GD?
There’s no way this is a good faith comment.
Of course I was drawing a comparison. Between your language and theirs.
That doesn’t mean you’re generally comparable.
Oh, I fully understand the rhetorical strength of not acknowledging the distinction. It lets you act like I said you’re a Nazi and argue against that instead of addressing the very simple fact that when you call your political opponents maggots you sound like a Nazi, even if you are nothing like a Nazi during the rest of your day.
The conversation will go a lot more smoothly and productively, IMO, if folks:
- Clarify what they’ve said without lingering on the issue of whether they said it correctly the first time.
- Accept others’ clarifications of their words without lingering on the issue of whether it’s what they said the first time.
Well stated.
And now one last point that I’m curious about and I think I will have looked at this from every angle. The phonetics. It would be pretty funny if this was part of the hang-up.
To me, MAGAt sounds exactly like Maggot. 100% the same.
This is what MAGAt/Maggot sounds like in Texas: Magg-et or Magg-it. Acceptable, Magg-ut.
Never: Magg-at.
And certainly not: Magg-ot.
So the two way it’s actually spelled are not how I hear it. It that how everyone else says it/hears it?
Hard to stop a few radical nuts- no matter what they call themselves. The American Nazi party has … wait for it… 500 members. Out of 345,426,571 or so.
Until I see that calling people “maggots” is a specific tactic of Nazis (with a history to match) I don’t buy the argument that it is imitating Nazis. You might think it sounds like that but that’s just your opinion. “But a maggot is a kind of vermin!” Okay, well next time someone calls me a bookworm, I’ll accuse them of sounding like a Nazi.
It’s a terrible argument and I give it absolutely zero consideration.
Everyone trying to pretend that it’s “dehumanizing”, yes. No one else.
While I don’t agree with @Babale’s original premise here, they’re right on this point. You don’t have to belong to “the American Nazi party” to be a de facto Nazi. The Proud Boys are clearly neo-Nazi. So are other white supremacists. For that matter, so is much of Trump’s rhetoric and most of the cult that cheers it on.
So, yes, the rise of neo-Nazism is a much bigger problem in America than it is in Germany, where history is still remembered and they don’t worry so much about the niceties of free speech absolutism. Neo-Nazism is on the rise in America, or at least, is a major movement whose membership numbers in the millions. Have we already forgotten Charlottesville?
And yet, somehow the term “MAGAt” is a threat … to something.
They have maybe twice as many os the ANP. Again, you are not talking even 1% of the US population. When a group gets over 300K members- then I will be concerned.
So no, the rise of neo-Nazism is not a problem at all in the USA.
You’d be surprised how weird/wrong Texans pronounce things. For what it’s worth, Cambridge and Webster’s also go with the “magg-et” pronunciation for maggot.
How do you pronounce MAGAt, then? I’m genuinely curious.
What’s funny is that I very rarely hear anyone ever pronounce the word. I see it sometimes, but it is usually being used by the Right claiming that the left shouldn’t use it.
“I wasn’t saying you were like the Nazis when I compared you to the Nazis,” is neck-and-neck with “Calling someone a MAGAt is completely different from calling them a maggot,” in terms of unconvincing arguments presented in this thread.
Strangely, hundreds of reputable media reports like these disagree with you. The neo-Nazi ideology is also becoming increasingly decentralized, so the membership of any one specific group under any one specific leader isn’t very meaningful compared to the ideology itself when it’s promoted by a mainstream figure like Trump and his cultists.
Again, this is what we should be worried about, instead of ridiculous academic arguments about how “MAGAt” is supposed to be pronounced and whether its usage will bring about our own moral downfall.
Yeah, scare news. There is always scare news, even tho the risk is de minimis.
You go ahead and worry about that less than 1/0th or 1% of Americans, I will worry about the 30% who are MAGAs.
What you should worry about is the large degree of overlap between the Trump cultists and the neo-Nazis. If you think the cheering rally attendees all over the country – or those who threaten violence if Trump isn’t elected, or the cheering crowds who actually perpetrated violence already – are simply looking for conservative economic policy, you’re very much mistaken.
But this is wandering far away from the thread topic and I won’t participate in this hijack further. I was trying to draw a distinction between a real and present danger to a peaceful democracy and an extremely silly bit of pedagogical moralizing about the term “MAGAt”.