[Itse]

Corsi posted this in the American politics thread, but I'm answering it here as it's a better place for it.

Originally Posted by CorsiHockeyLeague

Okay. So you've just advocated violence against, using one example, a Marxist advocating for armed rebellion. So they're allowed to punch you, too, right? See where I'm going with this?

So what? Let's assume that a Marxist revolution was actually a serious risk. I'd probably get imprisoned as a political dissenter if that happened. Between a face-punching contest and imprisonment, I'll take the face-punching contest with people who are not-yet-the-government.

However, this is a reason why I support the monopoly of violence. It's a good solution to the problem. Unfortunately the police is historically pretty bad at reacting to threats of far-right threat.

My point was that if the problem with Nazism isn't so much the socialism aspect but the genocide, well, it's not the case that genocide can't produce a viable functioning state.

A state that engages in genocide is not functional by any sane definition. "Not murdering huge groups of people" is a pretty low bar to set for a functional state.

If you really need some further logic here, I would argue that the most fundamental measurement of a functioning state is it's ability to protect the life and well-being of their citizens. (This is why for example Belgium was not a failed state even though they couldn't form any government for over a year and a properly functioning government for even longer.)

The point is that there are plenty of other ideologies that, if they took hold, would be completely contrary to what we call a free, democratic society. I was really just asking if you're also saying we can feel justified in shutting those people up, too.

Pretty much yes.

This doesn't get anywhere with me. This was literally the basis for arguing that HUAC and McCarthyism, as just discussed above, were necessary.

False equivalency. The Trump regime is blatantly racist and authoritarian and displaying almost all of the basic signs of fascism. It has members that are or have been openly supportive of white supremacy. That was not the situation with communism during the McCarthy era.

If you don't believe in principles rooted in a free exchange of ideas for those ideas you truly despise, if you don't support it when it's difficult, you don't support it at all.

It's not about who I despise, it's who I consider genuinely dangerous. You are projecting moral judgment into what is ultimately a question of self-protection.

Most people who I despise would not literally kill me if they had the chance. Nazis probably would.

Nazis keep lists of people to be killed when the opportunity arises, and they are totally serious about those. The police in Finland found one of those lists so I know that a few of my friends and my brother among other people are on such a list. People I know who were on that list have gotten hospitalized by Nazi violence here in Finland. I have openly trans and gay friends who would be at risk, and I have coloured friends who have already been seriously affected by the rise of racism in Finland in the last few years.

This is often the problem with discussing this stuff people who obviously are not under any serious threat of far-right violence themselves. They fail to recognize that treating the fight against ultra-conservatism as a "battle of ideas" is a luxury that a lot of people don't have.

The problem with Nazism or ultra-right in general is not that it's an "evil ideology". It's that they literally will kill, beat up and/or imprison a lot of people if you give them the chance, and even in their mildest will strip you of a lot of basic rights.

Right now if you're gay, trans, black or muslim in the US, fighting the Republican regime is not a battle of ideology, it's a serious battle for personal safety. Those people know all too well that their guarantees of safety can disappear very quickly.

People like Milo Yannopoulos are not preaching just some abstract ideas. Milo Yannopoulos is right now going around US teaching people how to identify and out trans people, which is a serious issue of personal safety for trans people.

He openly advocates harassing trans people and feminists, and it's also pretty obvious he implicitly advocates violence towards trans people. This should really be illegal, but since it's not, I think it's perfectly okay to try to shut him down.

I was analogizing to simply say that the struggle between ideologies should be held in the open with everyone's cards on the table. What do you believe and why? Let the best argument prevail.

I should try to find some version of Nazi political considerations from the 20's and 30's I could pass to you. (It's been a long while since I read them.) They're very interesting in the sense that they provide some rather astute observations on how easy it is to twist and control the "battleground of ideals" in a liberal democracy. It's especially interesting when you consider that democracy in it's then-present state was a really new thing.

It's one of those things that has unfortunately been forgotten, but the reason why spreading Nazi ideology was specifically banned in many countries after WW2 was not just that it was considered a terrible ideology. It was seen as a necessary precaution, as many felt that the Nazis were right, that liberalism does not protect a state from Nazism.

What I'm equally opposed to is the notion that because so many right-wingers are intractably irrational, that the left should cede the field of argument to them and start behaving likewise, which has been more and
more the case in the past half-decade or so.

I agree that it's always necessary to also try to engage the opposition on an intellectual and moral level. But when the other side is acting like it's in a war of survival, you need to do a lot more than talk to protect your rights, or you'll quickly find yourself without any.

Can you support this? Because I have no idea whether or not it's actually true. Has the guy said that everyone who disagrees with him should shut up, or something? I have heard him twice - once on the Rubin Report, and once on a radio call in, and both times he gave the opposite impression - basically "everyone who disagrees with me is wrong and stupid, but they're entitled to be wrong and stupid".

This has nothing to do with engaging in actual discussion.

Yannopoulos is good at presenting himself as a simple troll through the use of humour. Before these incidents however he was probably best known as a keyboard warrior who would get his followers to harass anyone who tried to engage in debates with him. He did this to such an extent that he got banned from Twitter. (Which is probably still his biggest moment of fame.)

Which have nothing really to do with liberalism, per se. This all worked more or less fine when the people who were advancing these policy positions were doing so for liberal reasons; when all our arguments were founded on liberal principles. As that's ceased to be the case, the label no longer applies.

I'm not even sure what possible time you might be referring to, but what ever it is, you're just romanticizing here. No such time has existed.

Oh, I agree completely. I don't think anyone embraces authoritarianism with their eyes wide open. It's always going to be out of anger, fear, or for some similar ulterior reason that in the instant moment seems so important that it's okay to compromise on some of your principles.

There have always also been people who fundamentally believe that authoritarianism is the good and right way. Essentially lots of people think they or their friends would make good benevolent dictators.

But it's the same for a large and growing contingent on the left, who want to protect people from having to hear views that they find odious or offensive or hurtful, and who want to suppress ideas that they see as counter-productive to the ultimately Marxist goal of equal outcomes for all identifiable subgroups or minorities. For those goals, they too are perfectly happy to compromise basic principles like freedom of speech or the open pursuit of scientific discovery.

This is again a false equivalency. The fight on the liberal side is ultimately a fight against certain ideas and ideologies. The conservatives are fighting against certain people. Those are different things.

The far-left wants to stop people from expressing their opinions. The conservatives wants to literally kill, harass and beat up gays, trans and muslims and drive filthy wrong colored people out of the country, or at the very least make it okay for people to treat these people like #### and drive them out of sight.

Not equivalent things. That doesn't make the stupid "liberals" okay, but they're a completely different level of not-okay from what the conservatives are doing.

And again, it's not a left/right thing. There are plenty of liberal righties and conservative lefties.

I get where you're coming from but I just have to draw the line at hurting people for your beliefs. That's essentially terrorism. If assault is justifiable as civil disobedience, there's nowhere really to stand to criticize, say, protestors who want to attack Kinder Morgan execs, as those protesters may honestly and fully believe that fossil fuel production represents the greatest threat to human existence, far in excess of Nazism.

Well, they kind of do, and I think in a decade a lot of people will agree that we should have started punching oil execs at least a decade ago. And yeah, I think that's how that's kind of what it's going go come down to.

I've been long thinking that politics in the West are going to get bloody, mostly because it's simply the only way out of an untenable situation. It might not improve anything, but that's the nature of bloodshed. Usually not a good idea in retrospect.

To address your point more generally, yeah, punching people in the face is essentially a form of terrorism. One persons terrorist is anothers freedom fighter and so forth.

While I'm generally a pacifist and Gandhi has probably been the biggest single influence on how I try to act in my personal life, I have also however read too much history to give a blanket judgment to political violence. Sometimes it works, sometimes it's even necessary.

I'm personally not that likely to punch a Nazi or anyone else, but I certainly don't rule it out. I would not however actively recommend it, or at least I would recommend to everyone that they should very carefully consider what they are doing before doing it.

Well, now you've followed up a request to not call people who disagree "children" with a post wherein you call people you disagree with "intellectually lazy".

I edited that last part to better represent my ideas in this context.

I do think that a lot of people who claim they're trying to follow some sort of moderate middle road are pretty much just using it as an excuse to be intellectually lazy. But in this context it's not a fair thing to say.