[CorsiHockeyLeague]

Originally Posted by PepsiFree

I can't speak for that poster, but there always seems to be this period when discussing issues related to the political spectrum where one issue is so awful it's not even deemed worth discussing (it's a "closed" issue to most intelligent people, like Nazi=bad), so one of the next worse issues gets discussed. The problem is that sometimes this issue is so insignificant compared to the other issues surrounding whatever event, that it seems phony to focus on it (even though it's totally natural to do so). In addition, you get people from the "other side" who are happy to pile on to the issue (in this case, people on the far right taking antifa to task in a way that paints them "as bad" or somehow equal to nazis, as in "your worst are just as bad as our worst, haha") which clouds the discussion with some heavy bias.

I agree - there's only so long that we can all sit around nodding sagely at the statement "Nazis are the worst". The discussion is clearly going to move to other topics eventually, and we're seven hundred posts deep here. It's important to make it clear that by talking about antifa as being awful and justifications for their behaviour being wrong, that it's clear that this in no way equates them to neo-Nazis. There are different flavours of bad, some equivalent, some not. This is not. But by the same token, it would be great if the knee-jerk reaction to someone saying "yeah, antifa is pretty terrible though" was not "how dare you compare them to Nazis". I'm not saying you're doing that, but it seems to be a pretty common reaction to even raising the issue.

It's the same reason why Trump's comment about violence on many sides struck a chord. There are scenarios where it's not necessarily "the time" to discuss antifa, and bringing up that issue can seem like someone is excusing the real issues at play (white supremacy in this case).

Again, I agree with you. As I think I said earlier, Charlottesville is like the epitome of "not the time". It's not the time to talk about the general principles underlying preservation of historical monuments to people who by modern standards we would consider immoral, because the monuments were apparently put up for explicitly racist reasons, they have little historical value and the people they commemorate don't have much to commend them. It's not the time to talk about Antifa, because unlike the Nazis, Antifa didn't kill anyone in Charlottesville, and if they behaved badly at all, that behaviour was utterly drowned out by the sheer horror of what they were up against in this instance.

Like I say, though, either the thread dies or we talk about something else, because I think we're more or less all on the same "Nazis = awful as it gets" page.

True, made even more difficult by how you interpret the immediate threat of violence. Can violent words (hate speech) be justifiable reason for violent action?

Well, even there you have to be more specific. If some guy says to a group of his friends, "I think the Jews are secretly running society to hoard all our money and control us", that's hate speech, but there's no suggestion that the speaker wants to kill Jews. If he follows the above with, "it's time for us good white people to water the roots of the tree of liberty with the blood of those tyrannical Jews", well, now you've arguably crossed the section 319 line, so... enjoy prison.

There's a reasonable debate to be had, I think, about whether 319 is something we actually want, or if we want to allow that guy to say his schtick without fear of reprisal so we all know who and what he is. There are plenty of arguments to be made pro and con, and one of the reasons it's too bad Michael Chong didn't get the CPC nomination is because he would have launched that debate and it would have been an interesting one. But anyway, most days, I'm comfortable with where Canada draws the line on this.