Freeverse wrote: ↑Mon Jun 22, 2020 8:22 am The Proud Boys are fascist. They are a far right extremist hate-group, and the suggestion that I'm projecting is quite a leap to be making. I'm not completely certain why you would take that away, rather than just "they're not as bad as you think they are because people tend to exaggerate the opposition".
I've said nothing about the Proud Boys in this discussion. I've just replied about Gavin and Milo, the former left the organization and the other has nothing to do with it though that ilk congregate around him.
Whatever they are and what they might do or not do I'm sick of this shit that's been building for years. I don't know how old you are, but I've seen things developing for over 15 years and noticed the change in talk of many in chat, message boards and elsewhere where idle teenage banter of taboo breaking through the joking of racism and other subjects developed into a settled overt outlook in many I once knew. This isn't just my own anecdotal observations of online friends, as I clearly saw the development of that build across the internet and knew it was just a matter of time until things like open antisemitism would erupt, which it has.
It isn't violence, but I do not like seeing the change of the culture taking place from that angle and many others. I greatly dislike the feeling from the circles you seem to be in that appears to be encouraging this crap on your own end by driving people into opposition from your sanctimony and righteous, uncaring fury. It seems in the end to be a self-fulfilling prophecy: you guys seem to want fascists to be back precisely so you have people to deservedly punch and you don't care if you drive people in their ranks because it simply gives you more faces to hit.
It's like tone policing plus denying my experiences. Which may be unintentional, but it seems like you're willing to dismiss me for what are maybe not great reasons.
I'm not trying to control your tone at all, but I don't like it. The sentiment expressed within it is that it's inexcusable to use violence against anyone, anyone except your enemies which you label as fascist. I do not like the dilution of that word and I'm sickly intrigued to witness the effective replacement of demonization with "fascistization" - everyone is just itching to point the finger now and say that F-word at their opponents with the Right-wing just slightly behind the curve on that.
Like, I don't think I've actually said what I think should happen to them, and maybe I should have been more clear with the fact that I think violent tactics are acceptable under certain conditions. I mean, I feel that getting into a fist fight with someone harassing a person of color isn't fascism.
Stop fucking looking at everything through the lens of fascism! All you see is good and fascism. The label dominates your perception of everything. The Proud Boys could and very likely are pieces of shit, but that I feel is immaterial to if they are fascist or not. One can be an asshole, a bad person or even an evil one without the F-word being drawn into it. You are not a fascist, but that doesn't mean your outlook and where it can and will lead isn't dangerous.
The only condition which I find violence acceptable to be used is when someone else initiates violence first with your use of it being to end a dangerous situation and restore order. It shouldn't extend beyond that. Once we get to the position where we have to throw that away everything else is gone, and in the case of your country, that means laying the groundwork for another wonderful civil war.
Or is it because I don't think all forms of speech deserve equal consideration? Like, yeah, I don't think we need legal protections in place for racism. But that's not the same thing as actively suppressing speech, I just don't think it deserves to be defended as strongly. Also, that's the actual law in Australia, Belgium, Canada, Chile, Croatia, Denmark, The European Union, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Malta, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Ukraine, The United Kingdom, and possibly others I'm not aware of, all to one degree or another.
None of those countries listed have enshrined freedom of speech. Everyone in those country's assumes that is protected when it never was, it was just en vogue to go with the US on it since the end of WWII and that cultural fad is now fading. European nations have never loved that idea and never will.
There's a difference between all forms of speech deserving equal consideration and equal protection. I certainly do not give that kind of talk equal consideration, but that is different from allowing them the right to say their stupidity. And I'm not just saying that out of some principled desire to give them equal treatment either, it's to undermine their crap by not affording them a sense of importance that persecution would bring.
Look at the KKK decades ago. It had shrunk down enough they were lucky to have a few thousand in their protests at the best of times. Simply put, they were not worth it to bother, and I surely wished they could have faded away into oblivion. Now I don't know what their numbers are now, but I don't like seeing the opposite treatment being done with people like the Proud Boys, but that then makes me wonder if that is deliberate or not, which goes back to my dreaded suspicion that too many on the Left want fascists to punch again like the good old days of 1930s Germany, that if they don't have any around, then they'll make them.
Regardless, I don't like the feeling of the change in culture, and I don't mean it in the way you might think. I worry simply that people are giving up in their belief of things like representative government and other things. They're shifting enough that the foundations of things as we know it will collapse, and not because people deliberately trying to tear it down, but because people are changing enough that the system is simply unworkable and so we're right back to needing aristocracy and rigid hierarchies again, the only question is who gets to dominate at the top of them after the scramble that seems to be developing.
BridgeConsoleMasher wrote: ↑Mon Jun 22, 2020 12:42 pm
I've heard this before and it just sounded like people conflating Marx with totalitarianism.
There's enough odiousness to make me wonder exactly lurked beneath his thinking. I think his ideas resonated with people for a reason, and it isn't the one that the label lists. It's similar to Hitler and Nazism: It wasn't racist purity and a 1000 year Reich that resonated with people, it was murdering as many people as they could before they dragged the whole world down that did in the same manner that mass shooters have a manifesto but their actions always boil down to desperately gunning down as many as possible enjoying their moment as a god in their little corner of the world.
