Neo Nazis and the Alt Right

I love that the topic of the thread is whether I personally should go around and kill Nazis.

My God, start a Patreon account already so that people can support your mission to personally kill/punch Nazis.

Someone did a google-search correlation:

It’s also important to note that not all people searching for the N-word are motivated by racism, and that not all racists search for that word, either. But aggregated over several years and several million searches, the data give a pretty good approximation of where a particular type of racist attitude is the strongest.

Interestingly, on the map above the most concentrated cluster of racist searches happened not in the South, but rather along the spine of the Appalachians running from Georgia all the way up to New York and southern Vermont…

…So some people are sitting at home by themselves, Googling a bunch of racist stuff. What does it matter? As it turns out, it matters quite a bit. The researchers on the PLOS ONE paper found that racist searches were correlated with higher mortality rates for blacks, even after controlling for a variety of racial and socio-economic variables.

"Results from our study indicate that living in an area characterized by a one standard deviation greater proportion of racist Google searches is associated with an 8.2% increase in the all-cause mortality rate among Blacks," the authors conclude. Now, of course, Google searches aren’t directly leading to the deaths of African Americans. But previous research has shown that the prevalence of racist attitudes can contribute to poor health and economic outcomes among black residents.

We’ll have to disagree, then. I sympathize totally with your feelings, believe me. I disagree that “we tried it my way,” as the circumstances in Weimar Germany were so different from those today in the USA–not the least in the absence of any strong institutions or ways to combat evil–that I reject the idea that it’s history repeating itself. But I don’t think either of us is going to convince the other.

And I’m not terribly optimistic, really, just pretty sure that we need a broad, not a narrow, solution.

Actually, we tried it your way with the Nazis and failed. Reds fighting the brownshirts in the streets is what allowed the Nazis to take power. If the anti-Nazis had tried to bolster the democratic institutions instead of undermining them, a lot of horror might’ve been avoided. You don’t have to look far for more recent historical examples: their was street violence in the run-up to the last U.S. election, and it only helped the more authoritarian candidate.

For what it’s worth, I agree with @TheWombat and @antlers 's approach. Now people should definitely not be complacent, and should counter-demonstrate at the same time, and place, and yell at/disrupt the events of the neo-Nazis/white nationalists. And be prepared to defend oneself with violence if violence is offered both at public events and of course in private–it would definitely behoove us all, if living in a place where this sort of thinking and behavior is on the rise, to be ready to defend oneself and others with more than a phone call to 911 in the case of imminent threat. It’s one of those “hope you never need it” things.

Yeah when they started rolling into France and other countries we should have protested louder… Would’ve changed everything.

Hey, I’m right in that deep red zone in PA.

See the reason I think that punching Nazis is good, is because they come in two breeds.

One is big ass criminal skinhead guys. Punching these guys probably won’t do much. They aren’t scared of much.

But there is another group, especially these days. Little weasely alt right guys who are scared of everything. People like Richard Spencer. These guys are basically just losers, albeit not actual criminals. What’s weird about these guys is that they have added to the racist vibe of normal Nazis a huge sense of misogyny.

Those are the guys who punching helps, because they are cowards, and won’t be out there if they think they could get punched, or really, of Nazism is simply shamed and ostracized again.

This shirt arrived last week and I wore it to work on Friday:

https://mollycrabapple.com/product/punch-nazis-shirt-unisex/

That’s a cool shirt, but I’m always wary of wearing stuff that I can’t read myself.

How can you be sure it’s not spelling out the URL for meatspin?

The only worry I have with the whole punch Nazi thing is what if it gets expanded into punching non-Nazis? These things do have a tendency to expand.

It’s not irrelevant because it shows the act is separate from the morality, which means—and this is important—that the act itself is devoid of any morality. Imprisonment isn’t good or evil, it’s something being done for good or evil reasons.

Yet if we return to our punching Nazis example; how often have I not heard someone (this does not refer to anyone in particular on this board) say ‘Violence is wrong!’ while at the same time holding the exact sort of view as you do concerning Nazis or fascists, or whatever. Violence against those with different beliefs obviously isn’t wrong as by the above imprisonment example such a thing needs to be clad in morality to be good or evil.

Yeah. Like WW2, where we also ended up punching fascists and an aggressive empire who attacked us first.

In narrow terms, yeah, we did what we had to do to stop stuff that had to be stopped. But in broader terms, I’d hardly point out WWII as an example of good conflict management, either in its direct consequences (50 million or so dead) or its aftermath (Cold War, MAD, utterly screwed up political situations across the globe).

We had to put down the mad dogs, but the price was, um, rather high.

Well the problem with WW2 was that we took too long to start punching said Nazis.

“The main thing that’s struck me is that some people are now calling me an ‘extremist’, that being anti-fascist is somehow ‘extremist’,” she told the BBC.

A sixteen year old girl at a protest against fascists is an extremist huh… well I wonder what part of the left these “some people” consider not extreme.

I wouldn’t call her an extremist, and most anti-fascists (at least here in the US) are cool, but some of the “antifa” folks (again, here in the US) have been giving the left a bad name for a bit. The problem is that it’s hard to know who is anti-fascist and who is “antifa” during a protest until the bottles and rocks start flying.