ANTIFA: Media Backed Terrorists

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Shouting down people for holding Nazi views is constitutional. Attacking people for their views is not. Usually, when a politician takes an oath of office it mentions something about defending the Constitution. If there a barroom brawl gets out of control, the cops are called, the fights are broken up and people arrested. In Charlottesville and Berkeley, the cops did not protect people expressing views from being beaten up. Whose fault that is we may never be known but it is the local government officials job to set policy or guidelines and their ultimate responsibility. The mayor claims the situation was beyond the control of the local police because the "Unite the Right" people were better armed. If the situation is beyond the ability of the local police to handle the National Guard needs to be called. In Berkeley, my guess is that the local officials told the police not to interfere because they were sympathetic to Antifa or knew their voters are.

The free speech provisions were put in and have been upheld by SCOTUS with the express purpose of protecting people whose views are very unpopular or whose views are not liked by government officials.

Last edited by ASPartOfMe on 30 Aug 2017, 11:00 am, edited 1 time in total.

Well yes, the operable word in the clause is 'peaceably'. When it moves outside 'peaceably' it's a safety issue and that's also the only current restrictions to the first amendment are those that deal in safety. My point is one of access, namely that's all the government claims in the Bill of Rights, is that they will provide you access, no more, no less. They don't claim they'll make your speech unfettered by nuisance or disagreement, merely they won't get involved if you choose to use it.

Nothing in the Constitution protects you from microaggressions

What on earth makes their views irresistibly seductive? That's the part I'm having trouble understanding. This hypothesis almost seems to be on the Christian 'kingdom of Satan' model and that demons will be giving people full-body massage, aromatherapy, crystal-healing, and happy endings to seduce them to eternal perdition when they hear a neonazi talk about hate.

They give people someone to blame for all their problems. Stupid people eat it up. It also represents an explicit statement of the underlying attitudes toward the other. Implicit racism conflicts with how people are supposed to think. White supremacy makes the implicit explicit and removes the cognitive dissonance. People can say all the things they learned from movies and the nightly news, namely the false and dangerous ideas that brown people commit more crimes and violence.

One only needs to look at Germany, the Nazi's never won a majority vote, merely a plurality @ 30%. Most Germans were not pro-nazi in 1933, but by 1934 Hitler had used his new institutional power in the German government to either assassinate or ban his opposition. After that point most Germans became Nazi supporters, the writing was on the wall: join us or be eliminated. Fascism spreads aggressively like a virus, it's not so much 'irresistibly seductive' as it is a 'deal you can't refuse' (think Tony Soprano).

This is why I absolutely hate identity intersectional politics - ie. this would be the right playing the left's game but with muscle and intimidation rather than race/gender privilege-shaming and doxing.

I suppose if this is really the way of it, that we agree that freedom of speech stops at demagoguery and race/gender blaming we might be able to walk things back but wow, it would really have to be universal to fly. Any corner of 'but it's okay for this group to shame this group because of x historical event' would pull the rug right out from under things and we end up right back where we're at.

I still have to ask though, with Germany having nearly the full austerity weight of the Treaty of Versailles and a Venezuela-type living situation when Hitler came to power, do we have a model for what this looks like - ie. when fascists are given speaking rights, and it's in times that are relatively stable? It seems like something's over-inflated in the math here one way or the other.

Also, if I'm really to follow this pessimism out to its completion - the elites are right. We may be too dumb/feeble for democracy and our freedoms need to be taken from us so that a more authoritarian state can take it's proper parental place over us. In a lot of ways the core ideals of the Enlightenment are really under test here and from a lot of directions there seems to be agreement - at least on the left and right - that this is the case.

Last edited by techstepgenr8tion on 30 Aug 2017, 5:18 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Well my issue with fascism is that it's the antithesis to democracy. A democratic government can't function without some form of free expression, which inevitably leads to people arguing for some sort of totalitarian regime. That's all fine, freedom of speech and all, but that speech needs to be met with louder speech to keep it in check or the nation loses it's democracy and eventually that free speech altogether. It has nothing to do with identity politics for me and everything to do with preserving the democratic society we all have the privilege of living under.

My understanding of how my own country works might be lacking, if so please forgive me, but I was always under the impression that violence or calls to violence had immediate legal repercussions. We keep civil discourse and the uplifting or destruction of ideas on their own merit based on people's ability to speak without violence. Once violence threatens speech the whole project of the marketplace of ideas sorting things out is in trouble.

If you're here in the states we have no restrictions on hate speech, you can freely call for violence against all manner of groups, that's constitutionally protected by the first amendment. If it actually steps into violence then criminal law applies, not the first amendment. Basically as long as you don't actually follow through, you're welcome to argue for the extermination of entire groups, ethnic or otherwise, and it's not a crime, you can even argue for the downfall of the U.S. and it's not a crime. The founders left it up to the people to engage on the speech front, the government keeps it's distance. That's why I say, I may disagree with the militant attitude the antifa movement has taken up the last half decade but they're still better than the alternative, which is the same militant attitude but directed at everyone that's not protestant anglo-saxon and a large portion of protestant anglo-saxons that are deemed 'inferior'.

And for any aspies reading this thinking fascism is an appealing argument and beneficial because they're white protestant: you go with all the Jews, Muslims, and gypsies to the camp, fascism is about a 'pure' bloodline, deformities such as autism are not tolerated.

Nope....they are not.

Many disabled people were put into the death camps. Many were "experimented" on.

What is not often mentioned here on WP is how the Nazis used to perform experiments on people.

Right, and I think there's also a line with respect to moving from philosophic abstractions to specifics such as imploring people to harm or kill a specific person or to go out and take up violence against a given group.


I think we do have a genie to stuff back in the bottle (ie. the harder thing to do) or we have to hope that some of the people who are working to eat away at the termites themselves who've been eating away at the foundations of western civilization. A good example is Jonathan Haidt's Heterodox Academy project - I really do hope that he's able to continue drawing like minds in high places to a similar assessment, ie. that we as human beings are so badly riddled with our own biases that once you get an echo-chamber of a particular belief the quality of thought suffers to the degree that there's a monocultural purity. While it could come down to the major colleges folding up and most higher education being online, and I do think there's a higher education bubble set to burst even if were economics and relative value of degrees alone, I have concerns as well as to what the standards would look like if that did happen. My best guess is that there'll be a healthy tree-shaking an academia in the next five to ten years, it may be in it's beginning stages already, and we may be hearing less and less about what are essentially activism studies and degree programs.

There's probably a lot of hype in this, but, there's probably plenty of truth in it as well:



My guess is that there are several reasons this dynamic is occurring - news being rigged like enertainment for advertising demographics, growing bureaucracies that want more employment, and I'd also add my hunch that the elite are getting deeply concerned about the heightened leverage that technology is giving people to do ill in the world, might be equally pessimistic about our ability to self-govern, and so plenty of this might be provocation - as the video suggests - toward a more authoritarian balance.

I need to read this guys book. This was a great interview.



Liberal democracy has no mechanism that prevents fascists from taking power. We need to adopt a more nuanced understanding of politics and violence.