The Political Thread

[Professor Bear]

If those babies want boxes they should work harder, but instead we're teaching them to freeload from birth.

[Keef Monkey]

One of the things that really bothers me about any kind of political discourse online nowadays is that everyone seems to have decided if they're 'left' or 'right' and use that as an excuse to just ignore opinions or information that doesn't fit the agenda they've chosen. If I had a pound for the amount of times I've been told 'oh you would think that though because you're a leftie' then I'd have several pounds.

I truthfully don't think of myself as having picked one side which I'll align myself with in any situation that arises, instead I see a situation and decide how I feel about it. I'm sure that in most cases that does mean that I wind up falling on the side of the left, but it's not like I automatically adopt that stance before having a think about things first.

The whole 'both sides are as bad as one another' and 'taking one extreme viewpoint is bad either way' argument is pretty nonsensical when the two extremes are 'being openly evil' and 'not liking people being openly evil', so seeing people go through incredible mental gymnastics to find the logical loopholes they need to defend racists without openly stating they sympathise with them is insane to watch.

None of that is a complaint about anyone here, this is genuinely the only place I've found on the internet where people tend to have reasoned, balanced discussions about these things with a minimum of mud-slinging and barely any aggression. Sure, things can get a tad heated but it's nothing compared to every other public forum out there. Twitter and Facebook are absolutely maddening, seeing the way people talk about these subjects.

So yeah, not having a go at anyone here at all, but after reading a lot of comments threads elsewhere today I guess I needed to vent a bit.

[The Legendary Shark]

Talking of following flags, according to foreignpolicy.com, "Under Trump, the United States has dropped about 20,650 bombs through July 31, or 80 percent the number dropped under Obama for the entirety of 2016. At this rate, Trump will exceed Obama's last-year total by Labor Day."

If accurate, this makes punching Nazis look like a sideshow at a village fete and shows who the real monsters are.

[Satanist]

I actually don't understand why they are wearing swastikas? I mean they have that crap frog as an icon already but no lets wear a swastika so folk will really, really hate us.

[The Legendary Shark]

...everyone seems to have decided if they're 'left' or 'right'...

I agree and I think that this is no accident. The Powers That Shouldn't Be love to simplify everything as much as possible and reducing people to left wing or right wing makes it easier to polarise society, to divide and rule us, by boiling down complex issues to two or three simplistic options from which we are expected to pick the one which appeals to us the most and reject the others. 

The left/right choice is entirely false and succeeds only in stifling reasoned debate, promoting tribalism and stirring up emotions.

[TordelBack]

I'm still not sure anyone's response to a gang of white folk strutting around with torches and swastikas giving Hitler salutes could be materially affected by self-identification as one side of the false dichotomy of left or right, or how anyone could fail to have a pre-existing opinion about the matter.

Nazis, and people that fancy themselves Nazis, are BAD.  Yes, ALL Nazis. Yes, ALL of them, even the ones that like dogs and are vegetarians.   If you subscribe to an ideology that actively asserts your manifest racial superiority at the systematic expense of other groups you claim as inferior obstacles to your destiny, you are A BAD PERSON.  Because there can be no-one on the planet that is more than two clicks away from understanding in the most graphic detail what that ideology represents in practical, human terms: this isn't political theory, this is factual history.  There are other equally terrible things done in the name of other equal awful ideologies, but this is the one that everyone knows about.

It genuinely is the yes-or-no black-or-white exception to a balanced nuanced assessment of human perceptions and attitudes that proves the rule. You need to be for or against.

With the greatest of respect Shark, this is indeed a sideshow, as most of the things that fill our daily diet of news (the actual show is climate change and coping with population growth and migration): but that doesn't mean it can be allowed to continue and grow and strut its stuff on the public stage.

[JamesC]

I'll try to give a scenario which illustrates why I think punching Nazis (or people who think they're Nazis, which may not be the same thing) is maybe not the right thing to do.
You have to assume that some of these nutters have kids at home. The kids are too young to understand what's going on but if you punch their dad, you're the one who looks like a hate filled nutter!
"What happened to daddy?"
"Daddy got his face broken by someone who thinks we should all love each other."

I tend to favour a 'Louis Theroux' style approach which is to try to understand people and ask them lots of questions. I think sometimes they'll come to the conclusion that their answers don't make sense.
There are people who have left the Westboro Baptists but they say that they came to a realisation through patient discussion rather than by being attacked.

You have to play the long game. I think punching Nazis just makes for more Nazis and strengthens the resolve of an 'us against them' attitude.

[The Legendary Shark]

It is a bad ideology, I completely agree with that - but I cannot agree that every person who self-identifies as a Nazi is a bad person. Take, as a hypothetical example, a sixteen year old person who has been brought up as a Nazi, indoctrinated and brainwashed. Is he or she a bad person? I would say no - just a person infected with a bad ideology (and there are many similar ones, from Catholicism to statsm). So long as there is the opportunity to educate the bad doctrine away, the infected person is not intrinsically or irredeemably bad. A person only becomes bad, in my view, when they act badly. So long as there is the opportunity to change the way a person acts, that person is not unsalvageable.

Naziism, like so many evil ideas, is just that - an evil idea. It's an infection of the mind which we must strive to eradicate. I do not think that the way to eradicate this evil is to eradicate the infected. If history teaches us anything, it's that eradicating people based on their beliefs - based on any difference - only leads to more hatred and more bloodshed down the road.

I'll tell you the truth, I don't know what the answer is and I don't particularly like the idea of tolerating these evils until solutions can be found and implemented but I do feel, quite strongly, that the hard path of education and leadership through example is the preferable route. It might be tempting, and far easier, to burn the heretics but humanity really must start leaving this kind of thing behind.

(I do not for one second believe that you would advocate burning people at the stake (for example), Tordels, and I don't want you to think I'm suggesting such a thing. What I'm saying is that there are people who would support such a bloodthirsty (final) solution and that I think those people are utterly wrong. If humanity is to grow, it needs to grow up.)

[Hawkmumbler]

Nah, every Nazi is bad. By the very belief they support that ideology makes them a bad person.

Only good nazi is a dead nazi.

[Theblazeuk]

Unfortunately as much as I'm behind the words of the Dead Kennedys and Woody Guthrie, I think in practicality the best way is something in between.

That said as outlined in this article, the work of reaching out and rehabilitating is not something the current administration approves of:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/katharine-gorka-life-after-hate_us_59921356e4b09096429943b6

[JamesC]

Nah, every Nazi is bad. By the very belief they support that ideology makes them a bad person.

Only good nazi is a dead nazi.

As much as I can understand the emotion behind it I think this sort of blanket policy is idiotic.

[Hawkmumbler]

I wasn't being serious but, eh, i'll stand by it. Fuck nazi's.

[Modern Panther]

The kids are too young to understand what's going on but if you punch their dad, you're the one who looks like a hate filled nutter!
"What happened to daddy?"
"Daddy got his face broken by someone who thinks we should all love each other."

There's a way to test this theory.  How popular is Nazism in modern Germany, and would it be more or less popular if we hadn't punched as many Nazis in the 1940's?

[JamesC]

The kids are too young to understand what's going on but if you punch their dad, you're the one who looks like a hate filled nutter!
"What happened to daddy?"
"Daddy got his face broken by someone who thinks we should all love each other."

There's a way to test this theory.  How popular is Nazism in modern Germany, and would it be more or less popular if we hadn't punched as many Nazis in the 1940's?

I think you're being facetious but I'll rise to it.
I think many German people's relationships with their past and their older relatives in the years following the war have been incredibly complex. I know of someone personally who says that her grandfather (in the Luftwaffe I think), while always saying that he knows the Nazis were wrong had a nagging sense of shame that Germany lost the war.
In a war situation I don't think there's much left to do but fight. War signals a failure of other, better solutions.

I'd ask - do you think Hitler would have lost support if more people had been punched at his rallies?

[The Legendary Shark]

Hitler would simply have lumped the Nazi-punchers in with the trade unionists, the communists and the Jews as enemies of the state intent on destroying Germany. Like all politicians, he'd never let a good crisis go to waste.