Are the Nazis on a street corner saying horrible, but not immediately threatening words, and not performing any violent acts? Then I disagree. Violence and immediate threats of violence are the only things that warrant violence in a civilized society.
I'm going to carepost off of this because of a jumble of thoughts about this, but since I'm not an asshole, spoiler tags.
spoiler (click to show/hide)
There's a broader issue and it relates back to premises/definitions and the degradation of them that ERA especially participates in endlessly.
Nazi's and Communist/Anarchists/Antifa are not real movements creating legitimate existential threats in the United States. You wouldn't know this from ERA and similar hysterics, but at the same time they're the best evidence of this. I use ERA since it's what we're familiar with, but you can see it in all kinds of different culture war circles. The conflation of Nazi's, Incels, GamerGate, etc. that we all make fun of. You see the same thing with someone saying horseshit on Twitter that becomes "death threats" or "I can't leave my house or I'll literally be murdered" or whatever is the latest attention grabbing thing of the moment.
But in order for the ERA poster to reach the support for the action they want to promote, the premises have to be accepted. So Nazi's must be a real threat. They must be everywhere. And immediate. Incels have to be what incelsiorlef defines them as, which is so specific as to render the term massively less valuable. James Gunn's corporate politics bullshit has to be an elaborate Nazi plot that shows the threat we face. Alex Jones being kicked off websites is a deepstate-internet video complex plot to silence voices. Same with the invisible bans or whatever they're whining about, and the blocklists that other side of the twitter culture war whines about.
And language has to be violence. And so tolerating language is allowing violence. And we have to strike first against the Nazi's/ANTIFA. It's a simple construction of supporting premises to justify what they already want.
The danger they claim is that tolerating intolerance makes it win and makes lesser but still dangerous intolerance acceptable. But neo-Nazi's are jokes. They have no real power except these stupid fights and regular everyday crime. And ERA identifies that it's their Nazi allies in power, in the Trump Administration, running Disney, developing Eastern European RPGs, etc. and all they can muster up is "deplatform" them or yell at them at restaurants or only stream Guardians 3. If the lowlife non-entity Nazi's are literal existential threats then what is the Trump Administration?
It's about justifying violence against easy and ultimately irrelevant targets. It puts a lie to their entire set of premises when they fall back to "make sure and vote" as what SHOULD BE DONE, because that indicates the system has not collapsed, there is no existential threat, and the targeting of small pockets of the uncouth or legitimately hateful is simply that.
I framed most of this against Nazi's because it's the stronger rhetorical lean, and it's also ERA's focus. But it's perfectly fine to apply it in other instances often considered in "reverse" like say how police select their victims.
It's also being promoted by "elite" influences, like John Brennan and his allies. Who declare Trump to be committing treason daily, destroying the country, working with enemies, and also declare that removing a security clearance is a violation of free speech and what dictators do. If we accept these premises then the nation is lost, the system has failed and violent resistance is justified. Yet, nobody ever follows these to their obvious conclusions, the rule of law is still being trusted as the safety valve.
And it's the same instance with the Nazi stuff, if these are literal existential threats that need to be combated, then why get squeamish? If their hate is literal violence, the full force of self-defense is justified. And usually the same forum Robespierre's argue in favor of pre-emptive actions against Saddam Hussein GamerGate. Or old women who say racial slurs.
The one post in that Antifa thread complained about them LARPing, but what is the online-only #Resistance that consists of sharing all the same tweets and starting OT threads to fight over internal party politics of one party in one country on the planet if not epic lazy LARPing.
The late Kame-sennin deserves better than these panty-waists who tremble at the pogroms of old social media postings being discovered leaving a multi-millionaire director to make millions elsewhere and also at the same time slap fight with "brogressives", "progressives" and "Moderate Darlings™" on a forum that doesn't really have any American political dissent unless Kirblar needs to scream at socialists to get himself off.
So you're saying that since I
don't spoiler-tag my careposts...
But yeah, I agree with most of what you said. The one thing I would add is that the reason society works is because people have agreed that believing something is right isn't by itself justification to do that thing. And this idea is completely lost on these people.
"We should punch the Alt-Right."
"Why?"
"Because it's the right thing to do."
"Why?"
"Because they're evil and need to be stopped."
"Okay, so you're saying if someone believes someone is evil and needs to be stopped, they're justified in punching them? You realize that means they are justified in punching you, because they believe you are evil?"
"No, because they
are evil. That's reality. This isn't about beliefs, it's about reality."
"Okay, but you're saying what you believe to be reality. If you think you're justified in punching them because you think the reality is that they're evil, then they're justified in punching you because they think the reality is that you're evil."
"I don't
think they're evil. They
are evil."
...continued ad nauseum as the concept of subjective belief about the world around us completely eludes them.
It's one of the reasons the misuse of "objectively" is one of my pet peeves, because I think it either contributes to or is a manifestation of the complete inability to understand that what you perceive as reality is subject to your fallible mind and senses, and all of us are feeling our way through the dark and have to make concessions in that regard just to get along with each other.
