We can no more escape our tribalism, than we can escape our desire for love and human comfort.
I understand and respect that - but my friends who do that seem to also turn a blind eye to riots and beatings from folks "the left". There just seems to be a lot of double standards with saying fringe wackos on one side represent the entire group, but not the the side.
http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything...
It's long, but I think worth the read.
Yes, those "left" beatings get zero widespread cultural support. Violence is not glorified by any prominent voices on the left.
Whereas racist and sexist voices on the right make a boatload of money and fill up the comments of every news article posted to Facebook. It's cultural.
This is just not true.[1] Even in our tech community it's pretty commonplace to see 'it's okay to punch a nazi' is a well supported position.[2]
[1] https://heatst.com/culture-wars/prominent-leftists-celebrate... [2] http://reason.com/blog/2017/02/15/now-its-okay-to-punch-nazi...
When someone thinks you don't deserve to live because of the color of your skin, you're well within your right to defend yourself against that idea. You shouldn't have to wait until they're knocking down your door.
Replace color of your skin with political belief, and you've just made an argument for Trump supporters who live in places like Berkeley or San Jose to violently defend themselves from liberal rioting.
For a liberal, its' easy to write off Glen Beck when he says Obama is a fascist for taking particular action. However, it is difficult to write off the Huffington Post, when they say Trump is a fascist for rolling back the previous administrations 'reform' (thus returning us to the hell-world of laws existing in 2007).
I suspect the right-leaning people in this thread would say the same thing in reverse.
I'll avoid naming them, but there at least 5 loud rightwingers who make millions of dollars promoting racism. Not just on the web, but on TV. On the radio.
This isn't a "people live in a bubble" thing. This is people exaggerating the size of the fringe left and equating it with actual mainstream right.
Considering your political opponents is difficult. You may not even know too many of them in real life, and even when you do---political discussion is frowned upon so at best you get a niggling thought of "Bob is a great dev, I don't understand how he could be so crazy to vote for X".
This statement is probably true for most people, but the side with the fringe wacko for a candidate is up for debate.
That mindset is the sort of thing the article is talking about.
First, you're talking about Trump, his supporters and evil in the same sentence. That's polarizing and does nothing except make you feel righteous.
Also, acting like Nazis? That sort of emotional trigger word has been done to death. Also, Trump doesn't get to choose his supporters and he has repudiated them. Trump also has a daughter that converted to Judaism and a Jewish son-in-law. Calling him a Nazi or Nazi-like in his actions is silly and counter productive.
I have to disagree here. I think it's fairly obvious that Trump is not an actual Nazi. The fact that he doesn't speak German is proof alone of this; you can't be a real Nazi if you don't speak German. I think it's also pretty hard to be a real Nazi if you weren't an adult during Hitler's reign, which pretty much excludes almost anyone still alive now (unless the Nazis came up with some secret anti-aging medical treatments, perhaps in use on their moon base...).
So obviously, no one is talking about real Nazis. They're talking about metophorical "Nazis". They're drawing parallels between Trump and the rise of Hitler, and the authoritarianism that existed back then, and how it was fueled by xenophobia. Back then, they blamed Jews. Obviously, Trump isn't blaming the Jews, but he is blaming other groups of outsiders, much as Hitler and co. did with the Jews (and some other groups too, just not nearly in such large numbers).
So no, I don't think it's "silly" or counterproductive to make historical parallels. There's a lot of disturbing similarities between Trump and Hitler and other authoritarians' rise to power. There's nothing counterproductive in pointing this out.
When most people think of Nazis, they think of concentration camps and mass murder, not totalitarianism. That's the image and idea they want to associate with a group of people when they accuse them of being Nazis, and to argue otherwise would be disingenuous.
For example, you could argue that people who advocate for smoking bans and vegetarianism are Nazis and literally Hitler, as they too tried to reduce the amount of smoking and meat consumption in the name of public health.
Then when they get called on logical inconsistencies (because somebody is against smoking doesn't make them a Nazi) they retreat to a different, more easily defensible assertion.
Also, I don't see xenophobia in any of this discussion. They want rigorously enforced immigration laws, which are already on the books.
The executive branch is in charge of law enforcement, and I don't see how that is xenophobia when you're targeting illegal immigrants, rather than people of a specific ethnic group.
Actually, he kinda did blame the Jews in his last campaign ad.[1]
[1] -- http://www.nbcnews.com/card/anti-defamation-league-trump-ad-...
Calling a Nazi a Nazi is one thing, but do you honestly believe that nearly 50% of American voters are Nazis, Nazi sympathizers, or have Nazi-like views?
I don't. I think nearly 50% of voters thought that, in balance, Trump was a better choice than Hillary.
If all Trump supporters are Nazis, then presumably all Hillary supporters believe that one should unashamedly lie rather than admitting that one made a mistake. Both of these conclusions seem equally false to me.
I think that the whole "PC" issue is an example of this going both ways. There's certainly a bad kind of insistence on political correctness, which often takes the form of demonizing people who express an unpopular viewpoint or who merely say something that could be construed as expressing an unpopular viewpoint. On the other hand, I think there's just as much rhetoric going around claiming that left-leaning people are horrible for supporting this sort of political correctness without any particular evidence that they do so.
Humans are social animals, and like to know they're doing the "right" thing, where "right" is often defined by what everyone else is doing. A common example of this kind of "social proof" is a counter productive littering campaign that told people that everyone was doing it. So people thought, well if it's good enough for them.
It seems clear to me that people don't like being called racist. So much so that they'll try really hard to convince people to stop calling them racist, by threatening to do more racist stuff if they don't. Probably, though they don't like to talk about it as much, simply the threat of being called racist hold them back from doing racist things.
This theory is also corroborated by the number of people who suddenly felt their xenophobia was widely shared and that they could therefore attack random people after Brexit or Trump's victory. Literally often prefacing their behaviour with the announcement that it was now okay.
I have to admit I don't know with certainty if it's productive or not. But if the people saying it is are mostly concern trolls, then I'll take a leaf out of their book and reject it just because I don't like their tone.
I don't think that's true. Basically if you call somebody racist and they don't think it's warranted, they'll just disregard any of your other opinions about anything at all. Your opinion doesn't really matter anymore. "He thinks I'm racist, he's obviously an idiot."
Eventually, people realized that Bush II was a bad president, and that came from the slow, unavoidable accumulation of facts. People that showed up at the ballot box (but not to rallies) for Trump will eventually come around when they see how incompetent he is, how often he lies about easily debunked things, etc. The jokes and insults won't be a productive part of this process.
This...
...is why we can't have nice things.
So while you might have a few reasons why the right is full of Nazis, the right has a few too.
My favorite example of this is the recent hell at UC Berkley over Milo, which the right turned into ammunition to discredit the entire left, even mocking the notion that the left dared to call the right Nazis. [0][1]
Keep piling on the jokes and the mud-slung strawmen if you dare. You give them more fuel to burn, and more ways to discredit you and everything you believe, and more ways to "keep winning" perhaps beyond the next four years.
[0]: http://insider.foxnews.com/2017/02/13/tucker-carlson-battles... [1]: http://www.sfexaminer.com/uc-berkeley-police-release-photos-...
I'd make several assumptions:
1) It's possible for humans to act like Nazis 2) It's possible for a democratic state to gradually become not only a host to Nazis, but become a host that's run by Nazis 3) At an early stage, many people can't distinguish between Nazis as a positive or benign force and Nazis as, well, Nazis.
So, perhaps I could use some tips. What would acting like Nazis look like?
They'd crush the unions to undermine their political opponents.
They'd align themselves with big business.
They'd tell "big lies" and believe that if they repeat them enough then people would believe them.
They'd think a minority religion was plotting their downfall and start making plans to deport them all.
They'd build up the army, while not spending enough on problems at home.
Against all economic advice they'd stop trading with others, viewing it as weakness, and try to become entirely self-sufficient.
So watch out for that kind of thing.
a) compromise and appeasement of evil is wrong, if trump and his supporters act like nazis then call them that, and
b) it's totally unproductive and gets us nowhere to simply pile on joke after joke, insult after insult, millions upon millions of them on every social media and tv show available to us, on the red tribe aka the trump supporters.
Reading this blog post of course swings me back around to b). Then I read a casually racist opinion from a red tribe member or hear another xenophobic policy proposed by Trump and swing right back to a.