[CorsiHockeyLeague]

That was a super interesting post. This is much better than this thread usually is.

Originally Posted by Itse

If a Marxist student opens her mouth about armed revolution, sure, punch in the face is fine.

So we've now expanded the category of speech where it's okay to use violence to silence people to:
a) advocating for genocide or race-based violence; and
b) advocating for an armed revolution.

Any further categories we need to add here where it's okay? Maybe advocating for violence, generally? And to be clear, are we talking about just punching in the face? What if they start talking again, do you keep punching them until they stop? Can we just do whatever it takes to shut them up?

These aren't rhetorical questions; I'm seriously trying to figure out where people draw the line. Or rather, lines.

Again, there's plenty of history to prove that Marxists are perfectly capable of being a constructive part of a peaceful democracy. There is no similar history with Nazis.

What about the Nazi ideology are we focused on here? It's probably not the tenets of national socialism so much as the concept of ethnic purity or mass killings, right? Because there are a number of states that successfully pulled that off and went on to operate as viable states afterwards. Look at Indonesia.

But this is sort of beside the point. Your argument here, if I understand it, is that there is something essential to the Nazi ideology that is incompatible with a functioning democracy. I'm not actually sure that's necessarily true (largely because I don't know exactly what part of the Nazi ideology you're focused on), but let's assume you're right. If that's the standard we're using for our face-punches of silence, wouldn't we definitely want to start beating up anarchists?

It just seems like you're arbitrarily picking beliefs and practices you find odious and saying it's fine to silence the people who hold them.

I am firmly in the belief that we here in the West have failed to identify that a new Cold War of ideologies has started.

I think the exact problem we're hoping gets addressed is the notion that it's a cold war. Make it a hot war. Get everyone's views out in the open and let's see whose win. I'm pretty confident that reason and evidence have a shot at the title, if actually given a chance. They were doing pretty well for a while and it's time for a comeback.

I think it's starting to be obvious that the next big clash of ideologies is that between Conservative and Liberal. You may argue (like I guess peter12 does) that this is a war that the Liberals started, and heck, he might even be right. At this point however that doesn't matter.

At the risk of being accused of semantics, this is pretty important: can you define the ideologies you're saying are clashing? Because it's really obvious from your post that your idea of what "liberal" means is very different from mine. I suspect you mean two loose collection of mutually incompatible policy positions that aren't really tied together by anything but have been aggregated to the "left" and "right" side of the political spectrum, respectively.

I'm not sure I disagree that there's a clash of ideologies coming, but if there is, I suspect it'll be between liberals - in the sense of the real meaning of that word - and authoritarians. If so, the "left" and "right" will gradually become less important.

That is the very simple reason why they are so clearly willing to sacrifice things like a working democracy or why they are so eager to walk all over normal political and legal processess.

But so are you! You say so above in condoning the silencing of some ideas by means of violence. And again later on:

I do think that it's very much a time for the liberals to start playing rough. By that I mean civil disobedience, which is exactly the way things have started to go.

Historically, rioting and destruction of property has been proven to be fairly succesful in getting civil rights. Peaceful protests not so much.

Isn't this hypocritical, given your earlier statement about punching Marxist revolutionaries? An armed revolution in support of marxism - i.e. political violence aimed at effecting a change in how the country operates - justifies beating someone to stop them from talking, but violence in support of what you've described as "liberal" ideology is laudable? Maybe there's a good reason for treating these sorts of political violence differently, but I'm not sure I see what it is.

There are now two groups of people with very different ideas about how the country and world should be run, each of whom are utterly certain that their ideal vision of society is the righteous, correct outcome and are willing to compromise more or less any principle to effect this outcome.

There is then a third group that says, "no, you say you know what's best, but I don't trust you. Every time some political movement du jour has claimed dominion over what must be for everyone and tried to seize total control to create their utopian vision, they've ultimately been shown to be wrong. The principles we came up with about 200 years ago have carried us to the golden age of human history. Let's continue that project."