Antifa: There are Monsters Everywhere!!!!

[Kyriakos]

It's on the rise in several countries. In Denmark "The New Right", a party, is overlapping with "identitarians" and outright using dogwhistles, and the person I mentioned in a previous post, who was assaulted by Antifa, was 0.2% below the electoral threshold in the last election. He happenstance got arrested in Sweden recently, but The New Right has a similar stance that equates to cruel police policy and flirts with an "everyone must go"-approach to immigrants. Eastern European countries are promoting "illiberal democracy" as a Russia-emulating "solution" to the problems of liberalism.



I don't want to get into it for this thread, but I wouldn't call ancient Greek democracy "real"

Just to note that I liked the first part of your post, disliked the second, so ultimately nothing became visible ^_^

 

[Angst]

Just to note that I liked the first part of your post, disliked the second, so ultimately nothing became visible ^_^

<3

 

[Cloud_Strife]

If you could, for the benefit of society as a whole, stop one of two movements, which would it be?

• Avowed neo-Nazis
• “Vaccines cause autism”

I know which one I would say presents a greater overall danger.

Which of those two tend to engage in murder?

Defending someone's first amendment right to both free speech and right to assembly can hardly be equated with concurring with their actual rhetoric, which to say I don't would be an understatement.

No, but it is enabling it.

You cannot allow a bigot to express their views no matter how genuine or heartfelt, without it coming at the expense of those they target.

I don't think the benefits of allowing hateful, bigoted rhetoric to spread freely outweighs the damage done by it.

I speak as a member of a group that's on the receiving end of the abuse, abuse that has motivated people to murder and attack us.

 

[amadeus]

Which of those two tend to engage in murder?

I wholly disagree with the premise that it would be either only one or the other.

I tend to view consequence as more important than intent, and the suffering brought about by the anti-vaccination movement does more harm in a month than some nit-wit neo-Nazis could imagine doing over five or ten or twenty years.

 

[Gorbles]

I wholly disagree with the premise that it would be either only one or the other.

I tend to view consequence as more important than intent, and the suffering brought about by the anti-vaccination movement does more harm in a month than some nit-wit neo-Nazis could imagine doing over five or ten or twenty years.

Sure, but the entire thing is contrived to start with. Why the anti-vaxx movement? Why not the flat earth lot?

I'll answer for you: because you wanted to trivialise the threat of neo-Nazis and similar modern fascist-types by presenting an arguably-larger problem that also inflicts harm on society. Maybe "trivalise" is a bit harsh (but it's also accurate regardless of intent), but your logic was to undermine the threat of one by presenting a different threat.

 

[Cloud_Strife]

I wholly disagree with the premise that it would be either only one or the other.

Okay, but which of those two engage in active, planned murders? Anti-Vaxers are dangerous for different reasons, but Neo-Nazis are also an issue that shouldn't be downplayed, especially when they've had a president who is at best, ameniable to their desires, currently in office.

I tend to view consequence as more important than intent, and the suffering brought about by the anti-vaccination movement does more harm in a month than some nit-wit neo-Nazis could imagine doing over five or ten or twenty years.

Spoken like a person who doesn't have to ever worry about neo-nazis even gaining a scintilla of power and what they'd do with it.

What do you think would happen to non-white people or LGBTQ people or Muslims or Jews or Disabled people in a society in which Neo-Nazi's are allowed to do as they please? Even with the threat of police catching up with them, they still have little difficulty in killing and abusing people, or are you so quick to forget the likes of Roof, Breivik or the shooter in New Zealand?

The consequences are that people, who usually don't look like you, ****ing die or are abused or get attacked or suffer in other ways.

 

[Kyriakos]

Probably in that general setting (march indirectly tied to future lethal events) it matters more if x people die, than if y die, as long as x>y. Should not matter if y is a minority or not.
In that respect, I think there is no ground to have the actual state ban either, on the grounds that they indirectly lead to deaths.
Besides, usually massive rallies need to get some kind of approved status from the state police (at least here; and I obviously don't mean splinter groups which don't care about the law in the first place), so any sense that the rally itself may cause direct harm would be examined. But to ban marching on their ideas, regardless of how disagreeable they may be, is not democratic, and at any rate ideas aren't negated by a state ban. I doubt many people think that nazism is no longer having cultists in Germany, despite the long official ban; there it is risk-management, nothing more.

 

[amadeus]

Sure, but the entire thing is contrived to start with. Why the anti-vaxx movement? Why not the flat earth lot?

Because saying the earth is flat, while dumb, does not increase the risk of disease and human suffering.

Spoken like a person who doesn't have to ever worry about neo-nazis even gaining a scintilla of power and what they'd do with it.

You’re right, I’m not, and neither are you.

 

[Kyriakos]

There's another group that always justifies its terror tactics by alluding to fear about its own existence. The state of Israel.

 

[Cloud_Strife]

You’re right, I’m not, and neither are you.

You are a liar.

I've been attacked by people who are far enough along in the far-right pipeline to be functionally neo-nazis, I've been discriminated on the basis of who i am because people, specifically lawmakers, have bought into neo-nazi ideas of "lgbtq degeneracy" and actually acted upon them.

You don't know what the hell you are talking about and the reason you consider anti-vaxxers more dangerous is people neo-nazis don't tend to attack people like you, so of course you consider them less dangerous.

 

[Gorbles]

Because saying the earth is flat, while dumb, does not increase the risk of disease and human suffering.

Sure, okay. Paper cuts then. Neo-Nazis or paper cuts. Off you go

Also, technically-speaking, neo-Nazis and their ilk don't necessarily increase the risk of disease either. And what happens when a neo-Nazi is an anti-vaxxer?

tl;dr: are you seeing the problems in your contrived choice yet?

 

[Zardnaar]

There's another group that always justifies its terror tactics by alluding to fear about its own existence. The state of Israel.

Fear tends to do funny things to people.

I've noticed it a bit with Israelis, Americans and some Eastern Europeans.

Media/ nationalism seems to play a big part.

 

[Cloud_Strife]

There's another group that always justifies its terror tactics by alluding to fear about its own existence. The state of Israel.

At this point, Israel is a literal apartheid state, but that's an aside from this topic.

 

[amadeus]

I just like to think of myself as living in a universe where probability exists and not all threats are equal. Wake me up when the neo-Nazis become anything more than an isolated bunch of loonies.

 

[Cloud_Strife]

I just like to think of myself as living in a universe where probability exists and not all threats are equal. Wake me up when the neo-Nazis become anything more than an isolated bunch of loonies.

Wake me up when Neo-Nazis explicitly target you for who you are, rather than say every other minority they disagree with the existence of.

Wake me up when they stop trying to kill people, shooting up churches, beating up minorities, voting for harmful politicians and policies, wake me up when neo-nazis, militia groups and those that are too cowardly to acknowledge they support them (Republicans) stop being a real threat to me and literally everyone else who isn't white or straight or male or cis or christian in this country

It's a personal failing on your part that you continue to fail to acknowledge that for some of us, the threat of far-right bigotry is very real, because you have the rationality to acknowledge and admit that anti-vaxers are dangerous because of the threat they represent to you and yours, but you can't quite seem to piece together the fact that the far right also represent a threat, perhaps again because you aren't the kind of person they tend to target.

 

[Zardnaar]

0

You are a liar.

I've been attacked by people who are far enough along in the far-right pipeline to be functionally neo-nazis, I've been discriminated on the basis of who i am because people, specifically lawmakers, have bought into neo-nazi ideas of "lgbtq degeneracy" and actually acted upon them.

You don't know what the hell you are talking about and the reason you consider anti-vaxxers more dangerous is people neo-nazis don't tend to attack people like you, so of course you consider them less dangerous.

By any objective measure Covids more dangerous than neo Nazis.

 

[Kyriakos]

By any objective measure Covids more dangerous than neo Nazis.

Not if covid was manufactured by neo-nazis.

 

[Cloud_Strife]

By any objective measure Covids more dangerous than neo Nazis.

Disengenuous.

Covid presents a threat, but so do the far-right and the latter have been doing so for a longer time and will continue to do so after Covid eventually recedes

 

[amadeus]

It's a personal failing on your part that you continue to fail to acknowledge that for some of us, the threat of far-right bigotry is very real, because you have the rationality to acknowledge and admit that anti-vaxers are dangerous because of the threat they represent to you and yours, but you can't quite seem to piece together the fact that the far right also represent a threat, perhaps again because you aren't the kind of person they tend to target.

I don't fail to acknowledge it, I fail to see it as being disproportionately high enough of one to consider it to be a looming crisis. I'd say the overall trend over the past 40 years has been more positive than negative for LGBT, and even the right side of the spectrum has abandoned some of the more discriminatory policies that were once considered more socially acceptable.

Let me ask you this as a question: if you were to rank order the top ten risks in your life, would neo-Nazis really be on it? There's a hundred things that I could think of that present a more real threat, and I would say that society should place attention proportionally on those dangers rather than focusing too much on groups that, statistically, have little impact. FBI resources or whatever, I think sure, they should be looking into them and preventing them from gaining influence. But even if they didn't, I don't think they would gain any influence.

Not if covid was manufactured by neo-nazis.

It was.

 

[Gorbles]

@Zardnaar

Put solely in terms of body count, arguably. But threat isn't just body count. Which, for the record is also why Covid is dangerous (and why people often ignore or downplay it). Because people don't like seeing threat. People don't like seeing things they can't measure. And that's understandable - it's okay to be cautious about claims of something threatening. But the prpblem is we've taken that to its extreme - where even with evidence (as with Covid, or with repeated alt-right and far-right terrorist attacks) - we try and explain away the issues as though they're not actually issues.

We train ourselves to ignore the threat, often because of its lack of proximity to us as individuals. And that's not great either.

I just like to think of myself as living in a universe where probability exists and not all threats are equal. Wake me up when the neo-Nazis become anything more than an isolated bunch of loonies.

Not all threats are equal, but threats are contextual. Especially to someone not even living in the US. You probably shouldn't tell other posters what is or isn't a threat for them in their lives, because it comes off as both arrogant and condescending.

As for "wake you up", I mean, Charlottesville. There you go. Charlottesville wasn't isolated. People came from all over. But I don't expect this to change your mind, because you've come into this with a particular attitude and chosen to ignore salient counterarguments in favour of mocking forum posters' lived experiences.