6 ms·

This was a fascinating read. I myself go back and forth daily between the two positions: a) compromise and appeasement of evil is wrong, if trump and his suppo

This was a fascinating read. I myself go back and forth daily between the two positions: a) compromise and appeasement of evil is wrong, if trump and his supporters act like nazis then call them that, and b) it's totally unproductive and gets us nowhere to simply pile on joke after joke, insult after insult, millions upon millions of them on every social media and tv show available to us, on the red tribe aka the trump supporters. Reading this blog post of course swings me back around to b). Then I read a casually racist opinion from a red tribe member or hear another xenophobic policy proposed by Trump and swing right back to a.

ZeroGravitas 10y ago
Is it unproductive though? Humans are social animals, and like to know they're doing the "right" thing, where "right" is often defined by what everyone else is doing. A common example of this kind of "social proof" is a counter productive littering campaign that told people that everyone was doing it. So people thought, well if it's good enough for them. It seems clear to me that people don't like being called racist. So much so that they'll try really hard to convince people to stop calling them racist, by threatening to do more racist stuff if they don't. Probably, though they don't like to talk about it as much, simply the threat of being called racist hold them back from doing racist things. This theory is also corroborated by the number of people who suddenly felt their xenophobia was widely shared and that they could therefore attack random people after Brexit or Trump's victory. Literally often prefacing their behaviour with the announcement that it was now okay. I have to admit I don't know with certainty if it's productive or not. But if the people saying it is are mostly concern trolls, then I'll take a leaf out of their book and reject it just because I don't like their tone.
- jimmywanger 10y ago
  > So much so that they'll try really hard to convince people to stop calling them racist I don't think that's true. Basically if you call somebody racist and they don't think it's warranted, they'll just disregard any of your other opinions about anything at all. Your opinion doesn't really matter anymore. "He thinks I'm racist, he's obviously an idiot."
- ameister14 10y ago
  Blasphemy laws didn't make people more religious. They just made it so people didn't talk about it. It's the same here.
  - ZeroGravitas 10y ago
    What about lots of people talking openly about not believing in religion anymore and how it's kinda dumb? Does that have an effect?
    - ameister14 10y ago
      Does it make people less religious? I'm not sure - it definitely makes religious people more likely to hide their faith and not allow it to be challenged directly.
gedy 10y ago
> Then I read a casually racist opinion from a red tribe member or hear another xenophobic policy proposed by Trump and swing right back to a. I understand and respect that - but my friends who do that seem to also turn a blind eye to riots and beatings from folks "the left". There just seems to be a lot of double standards with saying fringe wackos on one side represent the entire group, but not the the side.
- berberous 10y ago
  This phenomenon is explained well here: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything... It's long, but I think worth the read.
  - brockers 10y ago
    Excellent excellent link! Thanks for posting it. Seriously... thank you.
- orbitur 10y ago
  > but my friends who do that seem to also turn a blind eye to riots and beatings from folks "the left" Yes, those "left" beatings get zero widespread cultural support. Violence is not glorified by any prominent voices on the left. Whereas racist and sexist voices on the right make a boatload of money and fill up the comments of every news article posted to Facebook. It's cultural.
  - true_religion 10y ago
    Radicals on your own 'side' are difficult to distinguish, and even harder to repudiate because they constantly say things where you agree with 95% of the content, or most of the underpinnings of their reasoning. For a liberal, its' easy to write off Glen Beck when he says Obama is a fascist for taking particular action. However, it is difficult to write off the Huffington Post, when they say Trump is a fascist for rolling back the previous administrations 'reform' (thus returning us to the hell-world of laws existing in 2007).
ben_ja_min 10y ago
I find myself flipping between these two states and find it exhausting.
Afforess 10y ago
I think it's important to remember that the "us vs them" dichotomy that is polarizing your beliefs is a fiction. Humans build up the idea of tribes because its cognitively cheap, not because they actually exist or map to real structures in the real world. You see the harsh language and think "what an angry, terrible person" and on the other side is someone who just got off a 10-hour shift working with rude customers and an aggressive boss and unhappy children and then they got cut off at a yellow light on their commute, etc, and _then_, after all that, they vented online about something that was cheap and easy for them to hate. Was what they did right? No. But they aren't a vast conspiracy out to destroy you either. Often people who are the angriest, are also the people who hurt the most, feel stuck in an unhappy life. It's important we treat people like people no matter what, or we erode the basic humanity owed to all of us.
- savanaly 10y ago
  I agree with everything you said. I use the purposefully archaic word "tribe" to remind myself that this feeling of tribal competition is based on our biology and was evolved in the distant past to solve problems that we no longer need to solve in the same way.
  - true_religion 10y ago
    I think the issue with saying tribal competition is based on our biology, is that all our basic precepts concerning thinking are rooted in our biology. We can no more escape our tribalism, than we can escape our desire for love and human comfort.
jimmywanger 10y ago
> compromise and appeasement of evil is wrong, if trump and his supporters act like nazis then call them that That mindset is the sort of thing the article is talking about. First, you're talking about Trump, his supporters and evil in the same sentence. That's polarizing and does nothing except make you feel righteous. Also, acting like Nazis? That sort of emotional trigger word has been done to death. Also, Trump doesn't get to choose his supporters and he has repudiated them. Trump also has a daughter that converted to Judaism and a Jewish son-in-law. Calling him a Nazi or Nazi-like in his actions is silly and counter productive.
- Yhippa 10y ago
  I remember reading an article talking about how people were throwing similar aspersions at Bush and other Republicans in the past decade that when the actual Nazis came along we wouldn't be able to convince people because the word has been bandied about too casually against people who were likely not Nazis in the past.
- Arizhel 10y ago
  >Trump also has a daughter that converted to Judaism and a Jewish son-in-law. Calling him a Nazi or Nazi-like in his actions is silly and counter productive. I have to disagree here. I think it's fairly obvious that Trump is not an actual Nazi. The fact that he doesn't speak German is proof alone of this; you can't be a real Nazi if you don't speak German. I think it's also pretty hard to be a real Nazi if you weren't an adult during Hitler's reign, which pretty much excludes almost anyone still alive now (unless the Nazis came up with some secret anti-aging medical treatments, perhaps in use on their moon base...). So obviously, no one is talking about real Nazis. They're talking about metophorical "Nazis". They're drawing parallels between Trump and the rise of Hitler, and the authoritarianism that existed back then, and how it was fueled by xenophobia. Back then, they blamed Jews. Obviously, Trump isn't blaming the Jews, but he is blaming other groups of outsiders, much as Hitler and co. did with the Jews (and some other groups too, just not nearly in such large numbers). So no, I don't think it's "silly" or counterproductive to make historical parallels. There's a lot of disturbing similarities between Trump and Hitler and other authoritarians' rise to power. There's nothing counterproductive in pointing this out.
uxp100 10y ago
Maybe it would help you (honestly, not trying to sound condescending) to reevaluate what acting like Nazis would look like.
- wwweston 10y ago
  Any specific ideas? I'd make several assumptions: 1) It's possible for humans to act like Nazis 2) It's possible for a democratic state to gradually become not only a host to Nazis, but become a host that's run by Nazis 3) At an early stage, many people can't distinguish between Nazis as a positive or benign force and Nazis as, well, Nazis. So, perhaps I could use some tips. What would acting like Nazis look like?
  - ZeroGravitas 10y ago
    Well, they'd promise to make the country great again for starters. They'd crush the unions to undermine their political opponents. They'd align themselves with big business. They'd tell "big lies" and believe that if they repeat them enough then people would believe them. They'd think a minority religion was plotting their downfall and start making plans to deport them all. They'd build up the army, while not spending enough on problems at home. Against all economic advice they'd stop trading with others, viewing it as weakness, and try to become entirely self-sufficient. So watch out for that kind of thing.
amluto 10y ago
> a) compromise and appeasement of evil is wrong, if trump and his supporters act like nazis then call them that Calling a Nazi a Nazi is one thing, but do you honestly believe that nearly 50% of American voters are Nazis, Nazi sympathizers, or have Nazi-like views? I don't. I think nearly 50% of voters thought that, in balance, Trump was a better choice than Hillary. If all Trump supporters are Nazis, then presumably all Hillary supporters believe that one should unashamedly lie rather than admitting that one made a mistake. Both of these conclusions seem equally false to me.
- tdkl 10y ago
  For someone left leaning anyone not agreeing with him is a "Nazi", "fascist", "racist". The right leaning group interviewed in the article got sick of that as well.
  - amluto 10y ago
    I hope you don't actually mean that you think that most or all left-leaning people believe that. I admit that this would be a much less severe accusation than calling all right-leaning people Nazis, but it would still be nice for people to stop stereotyping other people based on their political beliefs. I think that the whole "PC" issue is an example of this going both ways. There's certainly a bad kind of insistence on political correctness, which often takes the form of demonizing people who express an unpopular viewpoint or who merely say something that could be construed as expressing an unpopular viewpoint. On the other hand, I think there's just as much rhetoric going around claiming that left-leaning people are horrible for supporting this sort of political correctness without any particular evidence that they do so.
jpfed 10y ago
These positions aren't contradictory; there are a ton of people that voted for Trump not because they're Nazis, but because Trump's terrible ideas about race and sex are just not very relevant to them. They just didn't pay attention to that aspect. Eventually, people realized that Bush II was a bad president, and that came from the slow, unavoidable accumulation of facts. People that showed up at the ballot box (but not to rallies) for Trump will eventually come around when they see how incompetent he is, how often he lies about easily debunked things, etc. The jokes and insults won't be a productive part of this process.
fny 10y ago
> if trump and his supporters act like nazis then call them that This... ...is why we can't have nice things. So while you might have a few reasons why the right is full of Nazis, the right has a few too. My favorite example of this is the recent hell at UC Berkley over Milo, which the right turned into ammunition to discredit the entire left, even mocking the notion that the left dared to call the right Nazis. [0][1] Keep piling on the jokes and the mud-slung strawmen if you dare. You give them more fuel to burn, and more ways to discredit you and everything you believe, and more ways to "keep winning" perhaps beyond the next four years. [0]: http://insider.foxnews.com/2017/02/13/tucker-carlson-battles-protest-organizer-who-supports-berkeley-riots-violence http://insider.foxnews.com/2017/02/13/tucker-carlson-battles... [1]: http://www.sfexaminer.com/uc-berkeley-police-release-photos-suspects-violence-vandalism-campus-protest/ http://www.sfexaminer.com/uc-berkeley-police-release-photos-...

ZeroGravitas 10y ago

Is it unproductive though? Humans are social animals, and like to know they're doing the "right" thing, where "right" is often defined by what everyone else is doing. A common example of this kind of "social proof" is a counter productive littering campaign that told people that everyone was doing it. So people thought, well if it's good enough for them. It seems clear to me that people don't like being called racist. So much so that they'll try really hard to convince people to stop calling them racist, by threatening to do more racist stuff if they don't. Probably, though they don't like to talk about it as much, simply the threat of being called racist hold them back from doing racist things. This theory is also corroborated by the number of people who suddenly felt their xenophobia was widely shared and that they could therefore attack random people after Brexit or Trump's victory. Literally often prefacing their behaviour with the announcement that it was now okay. I have to admit I don't know with certainty if it's productive or not. But if the people saying it is are mostly concern trolls, then I'll take a leaf out of their book and reject it just because I don't like their tone.

jimmywanger 10y ago
> So much so that they'll try really hard to convince people to stop calling them racist I don't think that's true. Basically if you call somebody racist and they don't think it's warranted, they'll just disregard any of your other opinions about anything at all. Your opinion doesn't really matter anymore. "He thinks I'm racist, he's obviously an idiot."
ameister14 10y ago
Blasphemy laws didn't make people more religious. They just made it so people didn't talk about it. It's the same here.
- ZeroGravitas 10y ago
  What about lots of people talking openly about not believing in religion anymore and how it's kinda dumb? Does that have an effect?
  - ameister14 10y ago
    Does it make people less religious? I'm not sure - it definitely makes religious people more likely to hide their faith and not allow it to be challenged directly.

gedy 10y ago

> Then I read a casually racist opinion from a red tribe member or hear another xenophobic policy proposed by Trump and swing right back to a. I understand and respect that - but my friends who do that seem to also turn a blind eye to riots and beatings from folks "the left". There just seems to be a lot of double standards with saying fringe wackos on one side represent the entire group, but not the the side.

berberous 10y ago
This phenomenon is explained well here: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything... It's long, but I think worth the read.
- brockers 10y ago
  Excellent excellent link! Thanks for posting it. Seriously... thank you.
orbitur 10y ago
> but my friends who do that seem to also turn a blind eye to riots and beatings from folks "the left" Yes, those "left" beatings get zero widespread cultural support. Violence is not glorified by any prominent voices on the left. Whereas racist and sexist voices on the right make a boatload of money and fill up the comments of every news article posted to Facebook. It's cultural.
- true_religion 10y ago
  Radicals on your own 'side' are difficult to distinguish, and even harder to repudiate because they constantly say things where you agree with 95% of the content, or most of the underpinnings of their reasoning. For a liberal, its' easy to write off Glen Beck when he says Obama is a fascist for taking particular action. However, it is difficult to write off the Huffington Post, when they say Trump is a fascist for rolling back the previous administrations 'reform' (thus returning us to the hell-world of laws existing in 2007).

ben_ja_min 10y ago

I find myself flipping between these two states and find it exhausting.

Afforess 10y ago

I think it's important to remember that the "us vs them" dichotomy that is polarizing your beliefs is a fiction. Humans build up the idea of tribes because its cognitively cheap, not because they actually exist or map to real structures in the real world. You see the harsh language and think "what an angry, terrible person" and on the other side is someone who just got off a 10-hour shift working with rude customers and an aggressive boss and unhappy children and then they got cut off at a yellow light on their commute, etc, and _then_, after all that, they vented online about something that was cheap and easy for them to hate. Was what they did right? No. But they aren't a vast conspiracy out to destroy you either. Often people who are the angriest, are also the people who hurt the most, feel stuck in an unhappy life. It's important we treat people like people no matter what, or we erode the basic humanity owed to all of us.

savanaly 10y ago
I agree with everything you said. I use the purposefully archaic word "tribe" to remind myself that this feeling of tribal competition is based on our biology and was evolved in the distant past to solve problems that we no longer need to solve in the same way.
- true_religion 10y ago
  I think the issue with saying tribal competition is based on our biology, is that all our basic precepts concerning thinking are rooted in our biology. We can no more escape our tribalism, than we can escape our desire for love and human comfort.

jimmywanger 10y ago

> compromise and appeasement of evil is wrong, if trump and his supporters act like nazis then call them that That mindset is the sort of thing the article is talking about. First, you're talking about Trump, his supporters and evil in the same sentence. That's polarizing and does nothing except make you feel righteous. Also, acting like Nazis? That sort of emotional trigger word has been done to death. Also, Trump doesn't get to choose his supporters and he has repudiated them. Trump also has a daughter that converted to Judaism and a Jewish son-in-law. Calling him a Nazi or Nazi-like in his actions is silly and counter productive.

Yhippa 10y ago
I remember reading an article talking about how people were throwing similar aspersions at Bush and other Republicans in the past decade that when the actual Nazis came along we wouldn't be able to convince people because the word has been bandied about too casually against people who were likely not Nazis in the past.
Arizhel 10y ago
>Trump also has a daughter that converted to Judaism and a Jewish son-in-law. Calling him a Nazi or Nazi-like in his actions is silly and counter productive. I have to disagree here. I think it's fairly obvious that Trump is not an actual Nazi. The fact that he doesn't speak German is proof alone of this; you can't be a real Nazi if you don't speak German. I think it's also pretty hard to be a real Nazi if you weren't an adult during Hitler's reign, which pretty much excludes almost anyone still alive now (unless the Nazis came up with some secret anti-aging medical treatments, perhaps in use on their moon base...). So obviously, no one is talking about real Nazis. They're talking about metophorical "Nazis". They're drawing parallels between Trump and the rise of Hitler, and the authoritarianism that existed back then, and how it was fueled by xenophobia. Back then, they blamed Jews. Obviously, Trump isn't blaming the Jews, but he is blaming other groups of outsiders, much as Hitler and co. did with the Jews (and some other groups too, just not nearly in such large numbers). So no, I don't think it's "silly" or counterproductive to make historical parallels. There's a lot of disturbing similarities between Trump and Hitler and other authoritarians' rise to power. There's nothing counterproductive in pointing this out.

uxp100 10y ago

Maybe it would help you (honestly, not trying to sound condescending) to reevaluate what acting like Nazis would look like.

wwweston 10y ago
Any specific ideas? I'd make several assumptions: 1) It's possible for humans to act like Nazis 2) It's possible for a democratic state to gradually become not only a host to Nazis, but become a host that's run by Nazis 3) At an early stage, many people can't distinguish between Nazis as a positive or benign force and Nazis as, well, Nazis. So, perhaps I could use some tips. What would acting like Nazis look like?
- ZeroGravitas 10y ago
  Well, they'd promise to make the country great again for starters. They'd crush the unions to undermine their political opponents. They'd align themselves with big business. They'd tell "big lies" and believe that if they repeat them enough then people would believe them. They'd think a minority religion was plotting their downfall and start making plans to deport them all. They'd build up the army, while not spending enough on problems at home. Against all economic advice they'd stop trading with others, viewing it as weakness, and try to become entirely self-sufficient. So watch out for that kind of thing.

amluto 10y ago

> a) compromise and appeasement of evil is wrong, if trump and his supporters act like nazis then call them that Calling a Nazi a Nazi is one thing, but do you honestly believe that nearly 50% of American voters are Nazis, Nazi sympathizers, or have Nazi-like views? I don't. I think nearly 50% of voters thought that, in balance, Trump was a better choice than Hillary. If all Trump supporters are Nazis, then presumably all Hillary supporters believe that one should unashamedly lie rather than admitting that one made a mistake. Both of these conclusions seem equally false to me.

tdkl 10y ago
For someone left leaning anyone not agreeing with him is a "Nazi", "fascist", "racist". The right leaning group interviewed in the article got sick of that as well.
- amluto 10y ago
  I hope you don't actually mean that you think that most or all left-leaning people believe that. I admit that this would be a much less severe accusation than calling all right-leaning people Nazis, but it would still be nice for people to stop stereotyping other people based on their political beliefs. I think that the whole "PC" issue is an example of this going both ways. There's certainly a bad kind of insistence on political correctness, which often takes the form of demonizing people who express an unpopular viewpoint or who merely say something that could be construed as expressing an unpopular viewpoint. On the other hand, I think there's just as much rhetoric going around claiming that left-leaning people are horrible for supporting this sort of political correctness without any particular evidence that they do so.

jpfed 10y ago

These positions aren't contradictory; there are a ton of people that voted for Trump not because they're Nazis, but because Trump's terrible ideas about race and sex are just not very relevant to them. They just didn't pay attention to that aspect. Eventually, people realized that Bush II was a bad president, and that came from the slow, unavoidable accumulation of facts. People that showed up at the ballot box (but not to rallies) for Trump will eventually come around when they see how incompetent he is, how often he lies about easily debunked things, etc. The jokes and insults won't be a productive part of this process.

fny 10y ago

> if trump and his supporters act like nazis then call them that This... ...is why we can't have nice things. So while you might have a few reasons why the right is full of Nazis, the right has a few too. My favorite example of this is the recent hell at UC Berkley over Milo, which the right turned into ammunition to discredit the entire left, even mocking the notion that the left dared to call the right Nazis. [0][1] Keep piling on the jokes and the mud-slung strawmen if you dare. You give them more fuel to burn, and more ways to discredit you and everything you believe, and more ways to "keep winning" perhaps beyond the next four years. [0]: http://insider.foxnews.com/2017/02/13/tucker-carlson-battles-protest-organizer-who-supports-berkeley-riots-violence http://insider.foxnews.com/2017/02/13/tucker-carlson-battles... [1]: http://www.sfexaminer.com/uc-berkeley-police-release-photos-suspects-violence-vandalism-campus-protest/ http://www.sfexaminer.com/uc-berkeley-police-release-photos-...