One is the wheelchair kid from Degrassi and the other is a weird South African demon of some sorts.
Man, what a world.
There has been a subtext running through this discussion regarding imagined liberal vigilantes labeling anyone that disagrees with them as Nazis which then frees the vigilante to punch that person…whom in the end was just some upstanding reasonable Trump supporter or what have you.
Surely there must be real world cases of this happening in America. Further, those real world instances must be outnumbering the data on violent acts that white supremacist groups have inflicted on others.
If there isn’t then I regard it as pearl clutching and imagined boogeymen.
Heh, arguing Kedaha. That’s rich Rich. He made up whatever is going on in his head about people unfairly targeting the poor misunderstood Nazis. No one is ever going to make me afraid to say that Nazis are self-selecting low life pieces of shit, and yes, we beat that shit back into the ground before they go around gasing millions again. There is an entire generation we call Great that would agree with me. I’m fine with them on my side and not you.
It’s a fair question. Turns out it’s hard to find accurate data from a 5 minute Google search.
If you want actual murders from white supremacists, here’s a 2017 US government report. It’s both horrifically high from the perspective that even one is too many and surprisingly low from the perspective that there is a lot of ink spent decrying something that happens once or twice a year. (That sounds much more callous than I mean it to be, but you’re 10x more likely to be killed by lightning than white supremacists.) Let me clear: the people who do such things are absolutely wrong and everyone here is fully justified considering them terrorists and punching them when encountered. I did not find data on other violence by white supremacists, but I am sure it exists.
For leftwing violence, I can’t find actual numbers. Here’s a 2017 article from The Atlantic. I expect we’re several years away from seeing any government statistics on it, if it’s even statistically measurable.
Takeaway from that? White supremacists/neonazis/antigovernment militias are clearly a bigger threat to people’s lives, but leftwing violence does exist, isn’t exclusively aimed at white supremacists, and at least spiked around Trump’ s inauguration. I can’t find the data to say which group commits more nonfatal violence, but I’d guess the white supremacists based on murders. Should I be making a big deal about it here? No. Instead I’ll go take a shower to avoid getting any of either group on me and then go yell at the clouds.
So you’re saying we need to focus better and also get those numbers up then?
(sorry, had to)
I think this thread has already devoted more earnest discussion of punching nazis than the topic deserves, and we’re barely a drop in the ocean of the coverage of the topic online in the last couple years.
Richard Spencer got punched, and if anyone deserved it, he did. So it became a whole thing, but mostly an online, tweeting, think-piecing, virtue signaling thing.
It’s not equivalent to the violence committed by nazis present or past, white supremacists, or whoever, and in fact, outside of Spencer, that violence—the proposed punching—may not even really exist yet. But the sentiment is popular, and that’s all the cause you need to speak up if you disagree.
“We should punch all the nazis, just because they’re nazis!”
“No, you shouldn’t.”
That’s a sentiment I can empathize with and a response I can understand.
Well I was trying to tease out two concepts that posters here are intent on coupling to reach desired conclusions.
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The pure act of political violence. Punching a Nazi. Which @WhollySchmidt addresses above.
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The claim that liberals are broadly labeling others as Nazis or using Nazis as a convenient label to dismiss those that don’t embrace a liberal agenda.
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Then combining those two concepts with rhetoric to express some fear of liberal violence against political opponents whether actual or potential.
I find the suggestion of point 3 dubious and lacking merit (and lacking evidence). Or perhaps a less than generous caricature of liberals.
While leftist people discuss about mental experiments, the conservatives are out there actively making the world a worse place and making sure that future generations get a dying planet while they preach about morals they themselves don’t follow.
I think the virtue signaling thing is a symptom of social media really aggregating communities into self-selecting preserves where compulsory civility is not longer required and not really enforceable. What those communities want is not the status quo but being able to change and transform what is or is not acceptable in society.
It’s not that Nazi punching is bad per se, it’s just a symptom of this new sociological phenomenon where smaller more homogenous communities not only feel no need to be diplomatic but can finally enforce their own social standards and beliefs within their spheres of influence and they try to expand their influence into wider society. This comes out on both ends of the political spectrum.
In other words Nazi punching as virtue signaling is just the tip of a much broader phenomenon of communities wanting to ruthlessly enforce new standards of what is and is not acceptable.
I’m sure that’s what the “Don’t encourage people to punch Nazis” people mean, especially when Nazi punching is a proxy for the socio-political-culture wars being fought right now; they see this as a breakdown of that civil compact, or… whatever. But in this case they don’t really understand that the point of Nazi punching, in a sense, is to create a new bar which has to be cleared before extending the hand rather than the fist. They’re fighting a rearguard action on behalf of the Way Things Were while the Nazi-punchers (which is just a small subset adjacent and parallel to a large number of progressive issues) are pushing ahead to the Way Things Ought To Be.
Violence (and threat of violence) against white supremacists sympathizers works about as well as violence against muslims: you’re just going to trigger them into defensive mode and make them more open to radicalization due to fear.
Most of them are perfectly capable of being reasoned with (see the links in my post above) and turned away from silly notions of persecution and racial superiority. After all, very few twats care about jews ruling the world at this point (but those, oh boy, they can make quite the conspiracy theories).
We don’t have to risk losing our deepest values and morals to fight this war, not at this point. Our justice systems have checks and balances for reasons that brilliant minds thought very hard about, even if they were wrong at times.
That doesn’t chance the fact that if you’re a twat making a salute in Dresden, I’m not going to have sympathy for your face.
That makes sense. I suspect 2 is happening more often than some would like to admit (if it’s happening at all, that’s already more than some people would admit), but I seriously doubt it’s translating into 3.
I’m certainly guily of 2 to some extent. On the other hand, there are Brad Grentz and Jason McMaster making comments like
and
Reading those uncharitably, it’s not hard to see them as equating saying “Maybe we shouldn’t be punching anyone we disagree with politically” with being, if not a Nazi, then a Nazi sympathizer.
I think @Enidigm has it mostly right, except that I do understand the point of Nazi punching is to create a new bar, I just don’t like it.
Basically, I miss the days when nazi-punching was just good clean American fun, before “Nazi” got applied to a significant fraction of the US population and it became a way to exclude anyone to the right of you from the dialogue.
So, the statement “It’s always the people defending Richard Spencer that get upset and storm off” is me saying its ok to punch nazis and calling you a nazi sympathizer? What the fuck are you talking about?
I mean, fwiw, I’m not in favor of punching people either, but I understand it.
I think the fact that we had people sieg-heiling after Trump was elected and the President himself refusing to unambiguously denounce white supremacists in Charlottesville has us all on edge.
Some of us can’t help wondering, ‘what if this is 1932 Germany? What do we need to be doing about it right now?’ Yeah, maybe that’s an extreme reading of the situation, but … what if? This shit is always easier to diagnose with hindsight.
The punch-Nazis thing, a fantasy for 99.99% of us, is an expression of deep anxiety.
Since no one mentioned Richard Spencer positively, let alone defended him, it’s am odd statement to make unless you’re implying something.
And I get that, I really do. For those of us who don’t worry that it may be 1932 Germany, however, it’s pretty worrisome to hear the normalization of political violence.
And for the record, I’d be pushing back on someone saying “Punch a commie” too.
What’s disingenuous is characterizing an offhanded “punch a Nazi” idiom as an actual threat of violence. “Normalism of political violence”? Hoo boy. Did you just fall off the internet turnip truck? That’s like suggesting the “Charlie bit my finger” video was an endorsement of cannibalism.
-Tom
Tom, I really don’t get the vibe around here at Qt3 that people are trying to normalize political violence, but I can’t scroll through a couple hours of tweets without tripping over some people who I’m pretty sure actually mean it. I’ve got some friends and connections online that I really value, but we couldn’t be more different politically.
So I can’t speak for @Wyndwraith, but if I’ve just stepped in from the craziness of social media, even “punch a nazi” as a meme can feel a little chilling. Like, I know you guys don’t really mean “let’s get more violent in our politics”, but uh, you don’t mean that, right? And honestly there are a few times around here when I don’t know if someone actually believes what the words they’re posting mean or not.
I can empathize with wanting to push back against it even when I know it’s just a meme/idiom.
I agree with the above. Firstly I don’t like people characterizing everyone on the other side as a nazi and then adding violence to it is just idiotic. But both are done here and elsewhere.
It is no different from people who see every Muslim as a terrorist.