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No,they are your coworker. Period. They're not your friend. They are not promoting neo-nazi beliefs at work or direspecting other coworkers,what business of you

No,they are your coworker. Period. They're not your friend. They are not promoting neo-nazi beliefs at work or direspecting other coworkers,what business of yours is their neo-nazi activity? Peace has a price.

casiotone 8y ago
Pathetic. Their neo Nazi activity is my business because it’s infecting my community, it’s beating members of my community up and leaving them dying in the street. It’s making my community unsafe for people who have done nothing wrong. This capitulation of yours to dangerous, vicious belief systems is beneath contempt. We fight intolerance because it is never benign. It does not affect you but it affects others and you are willing to turn a blind eye and pretend everything is fine, because when YOU walk home, nobody is going to stomp your head into a curb.
woodruffw 8y ago
It's my business because, should they have it their way, I wouldn't be alive. Asking people to be tolerant of ideologies that pose an existential threat is contradictory at best.
- smhost 8y ago
  The fact that this has to be explained at all shows just how much hacker news is overrun with fascist moral relativism. There's even a guy equating nazis with jews. What the fuck happened to you people?
- mc32 8y ago
  This is a difficult question. Communism has led to countless unjust senseless deaths. Many people alive would be dead in a traditionally communist regime. Should we make communism objectionable as a political ideology? (note: I am not saying naziism should not be objectionable, just that we have an equally deadly ideology that has some acceptance) These things are fraught with complication.
  - woodruffw 8y ago
    Communism, expressed as the kind that killed all those people, is objectionable. I object to it, and it seems like a broad segment of the population agrees. However, that just isn't the same as what I'm describing. There is nothing analytical about communism that poses an existential threat to me. Neo-Nazism, on other other hand, is a priori incompatible with my existence.
    - mc32 8y ago
      I do see this difference. However, in practice communism and faschism are pretty much two sides of the same coin. One has specific victims (though like communism, none stated, but there is always the out-group, I mean, you see Black African nazi sympathizers in Africa) communism also has an out-group: whether it be the owner-class or people who get in the way of their ideology.
      - woodruffw 8y ago
        Sure, there's plenty of violence in the world. I am opposed to most forms of it. But no, there is no equivocation here. One of these things (Neo-Nazism) is fundamentally incompatible, even just on the linguistic level, with my existence. The other (Communism) is undesirable and even reprehensible, but doesn't threaten the mode of discourse itself. Put another way: proposing tolerance towards analytically intolerant ideas amounts to an "disagreement" between a linguistic claim and a claim about the language itself. I wrote about the danger of viewing these as normal "disagreements" about a week ago[1]. [1]: https://blog.yossarian.net/2018/08/20/Disagreement-Language-Metalanguage https://blog.yossarian.net/2018/08/20/Disagreement-Language-...
    - jobserunder 8y ago
      All Communism leads to that. Every single instance has led to suppressing, sacrificing individuals for the Collective. Forcing someone at gunpoint to be "kind" to their neighbor because it is their "duty" is never a good starting point. The whole premise is messed up. Taking peoples houses, possessions and giving it to others is a sure fire why to demotivate people and slam the brakes on the economy.
- austhrow743 8y ago
  People have cooperated with existential threats for economic gain for a very long time. Trade today, kill each other tomorrow. It's not contradictory at all.
  - woodruffw 8y ago
    This assumes that the software engineering market is so strapped for hires that it needs neo-Nazis. I don't buy that. But more to the point: the contradiction isn't economic, it's linguistic. See the comment thread below.
  - r00fus 8y ago
    And what kinds of societies and organizations so these dire situations blossom in? Crime organizations, autocratic regimes and slavery countries. Sorry I don't want to work for or live in that kind of setting. I wouldn't want anyone to be forced to do so.
craigmcnamara 8y ago
The price of peace has historically included kicking the shit out of Nazis and forcing them underground. Remember that thing they did that one time?
- sosense 8y ago
  Replace "Nazis" with "Jews" and see yourself for what you really are.
  - casiotone 8y ago
    You know, there are some real reprehensible morons on this site, but this takes the fucking cake.
    - sosense 8y ago
      Is that supposed to convince me of something / change my mind about something?
      - casiotone 8y ago
        Oh no, your mind is clearly too far gone. I only want you to feel a deep shame.
        dang 8y ago
        If you post personal attacks like these again we will ban you. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow those rules when posting here.
        casiotone 8y ago
        Perhaps you could also put "Don't equate Nazis with the people they genocided" in there. I will not apologize nor will I stop attacking abhorrent people like this. It says a lot that my post is your priority and not the rest of the comments in this dumpster fire of a comment section.
michaelmrose 8y ago
You can't have peace with people who want to kill and oppress a significant portion of the population.
- yellowapple 8y ago
  Not with that attitude you can't. Racists aren't (usually) racists for the fun of it. Racists are racists because they feel threatened by or lack sufficient exposure to / understanding of other races. If your goal is to cure racism, then making racists feel even more threatened is probably the least productive way of going about it. Instead, the trick is to befriend them. Show them that there's nothing to fear. These people are more often than not just scared and confused; they're usually otherwise-decent people, and putting them at ease goes a long way toward letting them realize on their own that "hey, maybe my Jewish neighbors ain't so bad after all". I know full well that the above is a lot easier said than done, but if you want a growling dog to stop growling at you, giving it treats is at least slightly more effective than yelling at it. On the former path, you might eventually tame the dog and get a friend out of the deal. On the latter path, it'll just growl louder and louder until it bites you.
  - casiotone 8y ago
    > Instead, the trick is to befriend them. Show them that there's nothing to fear. This doesn’t work[1]. Allowing parasitical ideology the space to express itself only emboldens it. [1] All of recorded history
    - Izkata 8y ago
      > This doesn’t work Except it does: https://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544861933/how-one-man-convinced-200-ku-klux-klan-members-to-give-up-their-robes https://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544861933/how-one-man-convinc...
  - ikeyany 8y ago
    No, the "trick" is not simply to befriend them. That is an incredibly simplistic and naive way to interpret hate, and it shows you haven't had to deal with racism strongly impacting your life. Not all bigotry is based in innocent misunderstanding. Sometimes it's intentionally strongly held convictions of derision and superiority. The answer isn't to spew hate back at them, but it certainly isn't to make friends.
GW150914 8y ago
The price of peace with these people was a world war. I’m not eager to see the price paid again, and I want to live where they want me dead. You can feel morally superior and hug a Nazi, I’ll stick with the more practical “Hetzjagd and Nazis.” I’m not interested in principle where people with no conscience or principles of their own are concerned, and I’m an adult who has standards in a world of standards. They’re not perfect, but they tend to get better with time and freedom to discuss them. “Kill the Jews/Blacks/Gays/etc” has been discussed extensively, then a war was fought. It’s over, the standard around Nazism is established as zero tolerance, and I for one am in favor of that. I’ll leave it to the paralytically anarchist/libertarian moral relativists to die on the hill of defending Nazis on principle. In other words, my grandfather already paid the price for this peace in WWII, I’ll do my best to uphold it even in the face of the ideology which started that war.

casiotone 8y ago

Pathetic. Their neo Nazi activity is my business because it’s infecting my community, it’s beating members of my community up and leaving them dying in the street. It’s making my community unsafe for people who have done nothing wrong. This capitulation of yours to dangerous, vicious belief systems is beneath contempt. We fight intolerance because it is never benign. It does not affect you but it affects others and you are willing to turn a blind eye and pretend everything is fine, because when YOU walk home, nobody is going to stomp your head into a curb.

woodruffw 8y ago

It's my business because, should they have it their way, I wouldn't be alive. Asking people to be tolerant of ideologies that pose an existential threat is contradictory at best.

smhost 8y ago
The fact that this has to be explained at all shows just how much hacker news is overrun with fascist moral relativism. There's even a guy equating nazis with jews. What the fuck happened to you people?
mc32 8y ago
This is a difficult question. Communism has led to countless unjust senseless deaths. Many people alive would be dead in a traditionally communist regime. Should we make communism objectionable as a political ideology? (note: I am not saying naziism should not be objectionable, just that we have an equally deadly ideology that has some acceptance) These things are fraught with complication.
- woodruffw 8y ago
  Communism, expressed as the kind that killed all those people, is objectionable. I object to it, and it seems like a broad segment of the population agrees. However, that just isn't the same as what I'm describing. There is nothing analytical about communism that poses an existential threat to me. Neo-Nazism, on other other hand, is a priori incompatible with my existence.
  - mc32 8y ago
    I do see this difference. However, in practice communism and faschism are pretty much two sides of the same coin. One has specific victims (though like communism, none stated, but there is always the out-group, I mean, you see Black African nazi sympathizers in Africa) communism also has an out-group: whether it be the owner-class or people who get in the way of their ideology.
    - woodruffw 8y ago
      Sure, there's plenty of violence in the world. I am opposed to most forms of it. But no, there is no equivocation here. One of these things (Neo-Nazism) is fundamentally incompatible, even just on the linguistic level, with my existence. The other (Communism) is undesirable and even reprehensible, but doesn't threaten the mode of discourse itself. Put another way: proposing tolerance towards analytically intolerant ideas amounts to an "disagreement" between a linguistic claim and a claim about the language itself. I wrote about the danger of viewing these as normal "disagreements" about a week ago[1]. [1]: https://blog.yossarian.net/2018/08/20/Disagreement-Language-Metalanguage https://blog.yossarian.net/2018/08/20/Disagreement-Language-...
  - jobserunder 8y ago
    All Communism leads to that. Every single instance has led to suppressing, sacrificing individuals for the Collective. Forcing someone at gunpoint to be "kind" to their neighbor because it is their "duty" is never a good starting point. The whole premise is messed up. Taking peoples houses, possessions and giving it to others is a sure fire why to demotivate people and slam the brakes on the economy.
austhrow743 8y ago
People have cooperated with existential threats for economic gain for a very long time. Trade today, kill each other tomorrow. It's not contradictory at all.
- woodruffw 8y ago
  This assumes that the software engineering market is so strapped for hires that it needs neo-Nazis. I don't buy that. But more to the point: the contradiction isn't economic, it's linguistic. See the comment thread below.
- r00fus 8y ago
  And what kinds of societies and organizations so these dire situations blossom in? Crime organizations, autocratic regimes and slavery countries. Sorry I don't want to work for or live in that kind of setting. I wouldn't want anyone to be forced to do so.

craigmcnamara 8y ago

The price of peace has historically included kicking the shit out of Nazis and forcing them underground. Remember that thing they did that one time?

sosense 8y ago
Replace "Nazis" with "Jews" and see yourself for what you really are.
- casiotone 8y ago
  You know, there are some real reprehensible morons on this site, but this takes the fucking cake.
  - sosense 8y ago
    Is that supposed to convince me of something / change my mind about something?
    - casiotone 8y ago
      Oh no, your mind is clearly too far gone. I only want you to feel a deep shame.
      - dang 8y ago
        If you post personal attacks like these again we will ban you. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow those rules when posting here.
        casiotone 8y ago
        Perhaps you could also put "Don't equate Nazis with the people they genocided" in there. I will not apologize nor will I stop attacking abhorrent people like this. It says a lot that my post is your priority and not the rest of the comments in this dumpster fire of a comment section.

michaelmrose 8y ago

You can't have peace with people who want to kill and oppress a significant portion of the population.

yellowapple 8y ago
Not with that attitude you can't. Racists aren't (usually) racists for the fun of it. Racists are racists because they feel threatened by or lack sufficient exposure to / understanding of other races. If your goal is to cure racism, then making racists feel even more threatened is probably the least productive way of going about it. Instead, the trick is to befriend them. Show them that there's nothing to fear. These people are more often than not just scared and confused; they're usually otherwise-decent people, and putting them at ease goes a long way toward letting them realize on their own that "hey, maybe my Jewish neighbors ain't so bad after all". I know full well that the above is a lot easier said than done, but if you want a growling dog to stop growling at you, giving it treats is at least slightly more effective than yelling at it. On the former path, you might eventually tame the dog and get a friend out of the deal. On the latter path, it'll just growl louder and louder until it bites you.
- casiotone 8y ago
  > Instead, the trick is to befriend them. Show them that there's nothing to fear. This doesn’t work[1]. Allowing parasitical ideology the space to express itself only emboldens it. [1] All of recorded history
  - Izkata 8y ago
    > This doesn’t work Except it does: https://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544861933/how-one-man-convinced-200-ku-klux-klan-members-to-give-up-their-robes https://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544861933/how-one-man-convinc...
- ikeyany 8y ago
  No, the "trick" is not simply to befriend them. That is an incredibly simplistic and naive way to interpret hate, and it shows you haven't had to deal with racism strongly impacting your life. Not all bigotry is based in innocent misunderstanding. Sometimes it's intentionally strongly held convictions of derision and superiority. The answer isn't to spew hate back at them, but it certainly isn't to make friends.

GW150914 8y ago

The price of peace with these people was a world war. I’m not eager to see the price paid again, and I want to live where they want me dead. You can feel morally superior and hug a Nazi, I’ll stick with the more practical “Hetzjagd and Nazis.” I’m not interested in principle where people with no conscience or principles of their own are concerned, and I’m an adult who has standards in a world of standards. They’re not perfect, but they tend to get better with time and freedom to discuss them. “Kill the Jews/Blacks/Gays/etc” has been discussed extensively, then a war was fought. It’s over, the standard around Nazism is established as zero tolerance, and I for one am in favor of that. I’ll leave it to the paralytically anarchist/libertarian moral relativists to die on the hill of defending Nazis on principle. In other words, my grandfather already paid the price for this peace in WWII, I’ll do my best to uphold it even in the face of the ideology which started that war.