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Neo-nazis and their ideology directly threatens the very lives of a lot of people, and it's basically impossible to argue against them because they already unde

Neo-nazis and their ideology directly threatens the very lives of a lot of people, and it's basically impossible to argue against them because they already understand these ir position and just don't care about any of the myriad reasons why they're wrong. This is where the "punch a nazi" thing comes from. They're a very real personal threat to people, and they can't be convinced to change their mind, so all you can really do is get them to shut up and go away, and the way you do that is by punching them. If you can make them afraid to express their neo-nazi ideas, then that's a win.

tptacek 9y ago
This logic ends nowhere good for anyone. If you can punch away evil, so can the people who believe abortion clinics are murder factories --- in fact, their arguments are even better than ours.
- ZeroGravitas 9y ago
  Not if they don't support factual sex education and easy availability of contraception. If they don't then they're probably just fascists using emotive subjects to gain power (see the blood libel against the Jews) or suckers falling for the fascist propaganda. It's great that Godwin can't be applied to this thread.
  - tptacek 9y ago
    Sorry, but that's an orthogonal argument. Pro-life activists believe abortion is murder. Nothing you can say about contraception refutes that argument. The fact that I find the pro-life argument so personally repellant is why I think it's a reasonably good example in discussions like these: it's a system of practical beliefs directly contrary to my own that is held by a great many people. Whatever ethics about speech suppression I would apply to others, I have to make work for these as well.
    - ZeroGravitas 9y ago
      People could have said the same about Nazism. Personally I put the anti-abortionists (who directly cause more abortions) in the same category as the guy who turned up at a pizza parlor with a rifle and many low level Nazis. Confused by propaganda into making the situation worse.
      - tptacek 9y ago
        All you're saying is that you disagree with them. I do too. What's your point? There are tens of millions of them. To be actively racist is (thank Christ) to marginalize yourself in modern society. But to be pro-life? Sorry, it may not seem that way on a message board, but there's not a lot of stigma to opposing abortion. Meanwhile, there's no evading it. You simply must stipulate that opponents of abortion believe, in good faith, that abortion is the unjust taking of human life. If you believe you have the right to punch Nazis, I don't see how you escape conceding that pro-lifers have the right to punch women walking into abortion clinics. We neatly avoid all of this simply by allowing that while it's important to suppress Nazism (and white supremacy and all that stuff), we're not entitled to use physical violence to do it. Obviously, I have company in that perspective with the ACLU.
        anigbrowl 9y ago
        If you believe you have the right to punch Nazis, I don't see how you escape conceding that pro-lifers have the right to punch women walking into abortion clinics. Nobody can ask the fetus whether it is OK or even agree on whether it has the capacity to experience suffering given that most abortions take place prior to fetal brain development. A fetus, therefore, has no legal agency of its own. By contrast, someone who advocates punching Nazis does have legal agency, and may be wishing to exercise it on their own behalf rather than on behalf of some third party. This is a fundamentally different situation. We neatly avoid all of this simply by allowing that while it's important to suppress Nazism (and white supremacy and all that stuff), we're not entitled to use physical violence to do it. It sounds awfully like you're abrogating people's right of self-defense. How is this 'suppression' to take place when Nazis have a demonstrable track record of being willing to use violence but you deny that option to their opponents under any circumstances? I'm having trouble following your reasoning here.
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  No they're not. People who object to abortion clinics claim to be intervening on behalf of a third party (the fetus) whose legal status is that of a non-person in law and whose moral status is indeterminable by rational means. Quite a lot of the people who are willing to punch Nazis are, by contrast, people who feel their own persons are threatened, as opposed to being outsiders choosing to insert themselves into a private dispute.
  - tptacek 9y ago
    All you're saying is that you don't agree that abortion is murder. I don't either. Would that our agreement on this were dispositive of the abortion debate.
    - anigbrowl 9y ago
      Thomas I can't help observing that you're completely ignoring my second point about what differentiates anti-fascist activists from anti-abortion activists.
      - tptacek 9y ago
        Could you re-state it? You know I'm not inclined to blow you off; you've been on my list of favorite commenters for something like 5 years. I seriously do not see a distinction between the two perspectives, other than that the anti-abortion activists would be employing violence to actually stop what they believe to be real, immediate, kinetic violence. Again, it's not like my argument here is novel. It's the ACLU's argument, from National Socialists of America v. Skokie.
        anigbrowl 9y ago
        Anti-Abortion protesters are appointing themselves as moral guardians of a fetus. Anti-Nazi protesters are declaring their own selves to feel threatened by Nazism, rather than claiming to be intervening in the defense of someone else. I don't really care about the ACLU's argument. Things have moved on since 1976 and the scope and intensity of violence perpetrated by white nationalists and similar far-right groups has increased considerably. Also, consider the fact that the ACLU was founded in 1920, but it was not the ACLU that defeated the Nazis in World War 2. These aren't academic discussions with imaginary Nazis. The people killed by Dylann Roof or Jeremy Christian were real people who really died at the hands of people who really profess support for white supremacist ideologies, to name but two examples. The mini-riots and street battled in Berkeley might seem comical from afar but having been at several of them I can tell you for a fact that there are people there who show up shouting nazi and white nationalist slogans and threatening or engaging people with weapons. https://psmag.com/social-justice/the-ku-klux-klan-were-memelords https://psmag.com/social-justice/the-ku-klux-klan-were-memel... White nationalism is not some tiny radical fringe. I'd remind you that people like Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller occupy senior roles in the administration of the executive branch and there's abundant evidence of their extremist views.
- eridius 9y ago
  I don't see the relation. Neo-nazis and white supremacists are espousing a viewpoint that takes away rights from other people, and in many cases threatens their very lives. That's what anti-abortionist people do too, in fact. They're trying to take rights away from women (specifically, the right to control their own body), and in many cases threatens their very lives (abortion can be used as a medical intervention to save the life of the mother). The only real difference I can see is that anti-abortionists are more likely to be able to be reasoned with.
  - tptacek 9y ago
    All you're saying is that you disagree with anti-abortionists. Because if the anti-abortionists are right (spoiler: they aren't), then it's nowhere nearly as simple as "they're trying to take other people's rights away from them".

tptacek 9y ago

This logic ends nowhere good for anyone. If you can punch away evil, so can the people who believe abortion clinics are murder factories --- in fact, their arguments are even better than ours.

ZeroGravitas 9y ago
Not if they don't support factual sex education and easy availability of contraception. If they don't then they're probably just fascists using emotive subjects to gain power (see the blood libel against the Jews) or suckers falling for the fascist propaganda. It's great that Godwin can't be applied to this thread.
- tptacek 9y ago
  Sorry, but that's an orthogonal argument. Pro-life activists believe abortion is murder. Nothing you can say about contraception refutes that argument. The fact that I find the pro-life argument so personally repellant is why I think it's a reasonably good example in discussions like these: it's a system of practical beliefs directly contrary to my own that is held by a great many people. Whatever ethics about speech suppression I would apply to others, I have to make work for these as well.
  - ZeroGravitas 9y ago
    People could have said the same about Nazism. Personally I put the anti-abortionists (who directly cause more abortions) in the same category as the guy who turned up at a pizza parlor with a rifle and many low level Nazis. Confused by propaganda into making the situation worse.
    - tptacek 9y ago
      All you're saying is that you disagree with them. I do too. What's your point? There are tens of millions of them. To be actively racist is (thank Christ) to marginalize yourself in modern society. But to be pro-life? Sorry, it may not seem that way on a message board, but there's not a lot of stigma to opposing abortion. Meanwhile, there's no evading it. You simply must stipulate that opponents of abortion believe, in good faith, that abortion is the unjust taking of human life. If you believe you have the right to punch Nazis, I don't see how you escape conceding that pro-lifers have the right to punch women walking into abortion clinics. We neatly avoid all of this simply by allowing that while it's important to suppress Nazism (and white supremacy and all that stuff), we're not entitled to use physical violence to do it. Obviously, I have company in that perspective with the ACLU.
      - anigbrowl 9y ago
        If you believe you have the right to punch Nazis, I don't see how you escape conceding that pro-lifers have the right to punch women walking into abortion clinics. Nobody can ask the fetus whether it is OK or even agree on whether it has the capacity to experience suffering given that most abortions take place prior to fetal brain development. A fetus, therefore, has no legal agency of its own. By contrast, someone who advocates punching Nazis does have legal agency, and may be wishing to exercise it on their own behalf rather than on behalf of some third party. This is a fundamentally different situation. We neatly avoid all of this simply by allowing that while it's important to suppress Nazism (and white supremacy and all that stuff), we're not entitled to use physical violence to do it. It sounds awfully like you're abrogating people's right of self-defense. How is this 'suppression' to take place when Nazis have a demonstrable track record of being willing to use violence but you deny that option to their opponents under any circumstances? I'm having trouble following your reasoning here.
anigbrowl 9y ago
No they're not. People who object to abortion clinics claim to be intervening on behalf of a third party (the fetus) whose legal status is that of a non-person in law and whose moral status is indeterminable by rational means. Quite a lot of the people who are willing to punch Nazis are, by contrast, people who feel their own persons are threatened, as opposed to being outsiders choosing to insert themselves into a private dispute.
- tptacek 9y ago
  All you're saying is that you don't agree that abortion is murder. I don't either. Would that our agreement on this were dispositive of the abortion debate.
  - anigbrowl 9y ago
    Thomas I can't help observing that you're completely ignoring my second point about what differentiates anti-fascist activists from anti-abortion activists.
    - tptacek 9y ago
      Could you re-state it? You know I'm not inclined to blow you off; you've been on my list of favorite commenters for something like 5 years. I seriously do not see a distinction between the two perspectives, other than that the anti-abortion activists would be employing violence to actually stop what they believe to be real, immediate, kinetic violence. Again, it's not like my argument here is novel. It's the ACLU's argument, from National Socialists of America v. Skokie.
      - anigbrowl 9y ago
        Anti-Abortion protesters are appointing themselves as moral guardians of a fetus. Anti-Nazi protesters are declaring their own selves to feel threatened by Nazism, rather than claiming to be intervening in the defense of someone else. I don't really care about the ACLU's argument. Things have moved on since 1976 and the scope and intensity of violence perpetrated by white nationalists and similar far-right groups has increased considerably. Also, consider the fact that the ACLU was founded in 1920, but it was not the ACLU that defeated the Nazis in World War 2. These aren't academic discussions with imaginary Nazis. The people killed by Dylann Roof or Jeremy Christian were real people who really died at the hands of people who really profess support for white supremacist ideologies, to name but two examples. The mini-riots and street battled in Berkeley might seem comical from afar but having been at several of them I can tell you for a fact that there are people there who show up shouting nazi and white nationalist slogans and threatening or engaging people with weapons. https://psmag.com/social-justice/the-ku-klux-klan-were-memelords https://psmag.com/social-justice/the-ku-klux-klan-were-memel... White nationalism is not some tiny radical fringe. I'd remind you that people like Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller occupy senior roles in the administration of the executive branch and there's abundant evidence of their extremist views.
eridius 9y ago
I don't see the relation. Neo-nazis and white supremacists are espousing a viewpoint that takes away rights from other people, and in many cases threatens their very lives. That's what anti-abortionist people do too, in fact. They're trying to take rights away from women (specifically, the right to control their own body), and in many cases threatens their very lives (abortion can be used as a medical intervention to save the life of the mother). The only real difference I can see is that anti-abortionists are more likely to be able to be reasoned with.
- tptacek 9y ago
  All you're saying is that you disagree with anti-abortionists. Because if the anti-abortionists are right (spoiler: they aren't), then it's nowhere nearly as simple as "they're trying to take other people's rights away from them".