What are examples of political topics you see people arguing about in a dehumanizing way? What kind of comments do you mean by “dehumanizing”?
I keep hearing this argument that the tone and style of political arguments are getting more vicious and causing harm to society, but nobody can give me concrete examples of what they mean.
That’s pretty vague, can you be more specific? What issue do you have in mind? What is an example of someone claiming that “speech merits a violent response”?
You asked who holds the opinion that speech can constitute violence; I answered. The answer is that a "hodge podge" of people hold that opinion.
If you don't know anything about the survey, read the survey. I intentionally linked the results because I didn't want to present a biased synthesis as fact.
Antifa holds that opinion, and believes violence is justified in return.
From the Atlantic piece previously linked:
> the parade’s organizers received an anonymous email warning that if “Trump supporters” and others who promote “hateful rhetoric” marched, “we will have two hundred or more people rush into the parade … and drag and push those people out.”
> An article in The Nation argued that “to call Trumpism fascist” is to realize that it is “not well combated or contained by standard liberal appeals to reason.” The radical left, it said, offers “practical and serious responses in this political moment.”
> Antifascists call such actions defensive. Hate speech against vulnerable minorities, they argue, leads to violence against vulnerable minorities. But Trump supporters and white nationalists see antifa’s attacks as an assault on their right to freely assemble, which they in turn seek to reassert. The result is a level of sustained political street warfare not seen in the U.S. since the 1960s. A few weeks after the attacks in San Jose, for instance, a white-supremacist leader announced that he would host a march in Sacramento to protest the attacks at Trump rallies. Anti-Fascist Action Sacramento called for a counterdemonstration; in the end, at least 10 people were stabbed.
> A similar cycle has played out at UC Berkeley. In February, masked antifascists broke store windows and hurled Molotov cocktails and rocks at police during a rally against the planned speech by Yiannopoulos. After the university canceled the speech out of what it called “concern for public safety,” white nationalists announced a “March on Berkeley” in support of “free speech.” At that rally, a 41-year-old man named Kyle Chapman, who was wearing a baseball helmet, ski goggles, shin guards, and a mask, smashed an antifa activist over the head with a wooden post. Suddenly, Trump supporters had a viral video of their own. A far-right crowdfunding site soon raised more than $80,000 for Chapman’s legal defense. (In January, the same site had offered a substantial reward for the identity of the antifascist who had punched Spencer.) A politicized fight culture is emerging, fueled by cheerleaders on both sides. As James Anderson, an editor at It’s Going Down, told Vice, “This shit is fun.”
Did you read all of those pieces in the eight minutes between my comment and yours? Your arguments suggest you don't. You can't ask for examples and dismiss them, refusing to read the things I link.
> You asked who holds the opinion that speech can constitute violence; I answered.
I did not.
> You can't ask for examples and dismiss them, refusing to read the things I link.
If your goal was to answer my question (ignoring the fact that you misread my question in the first place), then a more effective approach would have been to write an answer. That answer could have included quotes from your material. It is customary to include links to the raw material backing up your quotes, as a footnote.
Instead you just dumped links with no explanation or context. After a few minutes of skimming your material, a coherent point failed to magically appear.
So no, sorry, I’m not going to invest an hour of my time doing research on your own material to produce an answer you couldn’t be bothered to articulate yourself.
Politically motivated violence is not synonymous with fascism, it's an actual political movement/"philosophy" with hallmarks and such. Plenty of violence happens in the world, both in response to speech and not, without being 'fascism'.
>Plenty of violence happens in the world, both in response to speech and not, without being 'fascism'. Politically motivated violence is not synonymous with fascism
Correct we call that terrorism when it is to further your own political, religious, social, racial, or environmental views.
Domestic terrorism: Violent, criminal acts committed by individuals and/or groups to further ideological goals stemming from domestic influences, such as those of a political, religious, social, racial, or environmental nature.
The ideas they believe they are opposing are genocide, ethnic cleansing, slavery, “women are property” levels of misogyny, and “they want our kids” levels of homophobia and transphobia.
How correct they are about what they’re fighting is a separate question. As you have demonstrated, there are many different definitions of fascism. The Berlin Wall was described as the “anti-fascism protection wall” by the DDR. And, of course, “my opponent is literally Hitler” is widely dismissed as a melodramatic overstatement.
However, if we presuppose that they are correct about who they are targeting — sadly plausible, given how many genocides followed the one in WW2 — then to say that Antifa as a movement is itself “fascist” is like saying that the Allied powers in WW2 were “fascist” for violently opposing the “political opinion” of Herr Adolf H. and Signore Benito M.
You're clearly drawing paralells to nazi germany and the holocaust, but it's not as though it was years of peaceful planning followed by a sudden outburst of violence.
A quick timeline:
* Jan. 1933 Hitler took power
* Feb. 1933 civil liberties of Jews "temporarily" curtailed. This is a key step.
* Mar. 1933 Dachau created
* May 1933 Books nazis disliked burned
* Sept. 1935 Nuremberg Laws; gypsies and others sent to concentration camps
* July 1938 Hitler tries to sell German Jews to the rest of the world at $250/head
* Nov. 1938 Kristallnacht; Jewish kids kicked out of public schools
* Dec. 1938 nazis seize Jewish businesses
* Sept. 1939 Germany invades Poland
* Oct. 1939 "euthanasia" starts
* Dec. 1940 Mass murders at Treblinka
Look at the timeline and tell me where you think we are. Then please point to the currently-elected American politician who is "calmly suggest[ing] killing Jews as a way to fix what ails the country". I get fed up with the argument that current leadership is "literally hitler". It's intentionally dis-ingenuous, put forth in bad faith, and designed to incite unrest with no reasonable backing of the points.
"The historian Ian Kershaw points out that several passages in Mein Kampf are undeniably of a genocidal nature. Hitler wrote "the nationalization of our masses will succeed only when, aside from all the positive struggle for the soul of our people, their international poisoners are exterminated", and he suggested that, "If at the beginning of the war and during the war twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the nation had been subjected to poison gas, such as had to be endured in the field by hundreds of thousands of our very best German workers of all classes and professions, then the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain."
"The racial laws to which Hitler referred resonate directly with his ideas in Mein Kampf. In the first edition of Mein Kampf, Hitler stated that the destruction of the weak and sick is far more humane than their protection. Apart from this allusion to humane treatment, Hitler saw a purpose in destroying "the weak" in order to provide the proper space and purity for the "strong"."
Note that this was in a book for popular publication, that Hitler "hopes the book will run into many editions, thus enabling him to fulfill his financial obligations and to defray the expenses incurred at the time of his trial". Announcing that when you rise to power, you intend to kill a significant fraction of the population is probably a bit much to expect.
The "temporary curtailment" was not really the first step.
Scroll to Brooklyn NY. Trump enjoyed 93% support in an all Hasidic Jewish neighborhood (ocean parkway district.) and 80%+ support across most hasidic Jewish districts.
Hitler did not magically appeared in 1933. He was politically active pretty much from 1918. The ideas he drawn from were even more older.
1933 is when Hitler gained all the power and Germany was pretty much at point of no return. The time to stop Hitler was before. Your timeline literally starts when experienced and possible opposition is about to go to Dachau. It is too late at that point.
Even if you believe that Hitler has taken power (which I am sure some people believe), what is your analog of "civil liberties of X 'temporarily' curtailed"? What specific event do you point to that you think is equivalent to that?
(As the article points out, this did not begin with Trump; the illiberalisation of America dates at least to 2001 and the permanent war footing thereafter.)
So "literally hitler" has taken power? Who do you believe this to be? How have the civil liberties of American citizens been curtailed by legislative actions?
> Why would you recommend forbidding anyone from making this comparison?
This is a blatant mis-representation of what I have said. I responded to your comment claiming that we ought to punch people who hold certain positions. I don't believe we ought to restrict anyone from saying anything that's not defamatory; if something defamatory is said, it can be fought out in court. The fact that I disagree with your position doesn't mean I advocate restricting your right to express it.
No. I believe I used the term “analogy” which is the opposite of what you’re implying.
> How have the civil liberties of American citizens been curtailed by legislative actions?
I didn’t mention legislative actions. There’s an overwhelming consensus among experts on authoritarianism (not just US experts, in case you were hoping to dismiss those experts as partisan hacks) that the US is currently in a transition from democracy to authoritarianism. I won’t argue this point with you for the same reason I won’t argue the reality of the climate crisis.
> > Would you recommend forbidding anyone from making this comparison?
> Why would you recommend forbidding anyone from making this comparison?
You are misquoting me: my question does not start with “why”. You added that word out of thin air, completely changing the meaning of my question.
> I responded to your comment claiming that we ought to punch people who hold certain positions.
I never said that either. You must be confusing my post with another.
> people aren't actually interested in the plight of the Uighurs. Rather, it's convenient ammunition for justifying pre-existing political and national feelings.
Hardly anyone would say that to the face of someone who gets tortured, and nobody would say it while they get tortured.
For every Nazi who actually laid hand on anyone, there were hundreds or thousands of Nazis who "merely" looked the other way, with oh so flowery language.
Can't talk about that here, it all gets flagged like a brick, because hey, anyone who cares is just "virtue signalling". I mean, how the fuck could totalitarianism be important for any intellectuals? Just like no intellectuals wrote about the Nazis or Stalin, why would they, it was all just partisan dick waving contests.
Imagine being in bed with something so horrible, you don't even dare to lift the covers. Congratulations, to all whom it may concern. May you live a long life, see interesting times, and all that jazz. All of it.
Abortion is a great one. Pro-choice advocates are painted as baby killers and murderers as opposed to those concerned with the rights of women, and pro-life advocates are portrayed as evil power hungry individuals who want nothing more than to control and degrade the rights of women, rather than people genuinely concerned about ending life at its most helpless stage.
Honestly abortion is one of the messiest, no easy answer issues out there and yet the vitriol and extreme rhetoric is completely over the top.
Here in the UK, we're going through a phase where right-wing middle-aged men are dismissed as "gammons" and progressive young people are dismissed as "snowflake millennials". People that don't buy into Brexit hype are remoaners, people that want to nationalise services are commies/marxists/trots, people that think the free market would be good for the NHS are neoliberal scum, people that are uncomfortable with current immigration levels are fascists etc... . All in the service of categorising and not having to apply any real thought or empathy.
I don't know if it's significantly worse than the situation 50 or 100 years ago, but it does get on my nerves.
On either side of various political disagreements, you commonly find each side regards the other's position as immoral, and the other person thus morally bankrupt. I think this is what's here referred to as dehumanising.
Arguments over abortion rights commonly frame the opposition as condoning infanticide on one side or violating bodily autonomy on the other. Each framing creates a morally bankrupt opposition.
Both those for and against socialism / redistribution of wealth see their opposition as wanting to take unearned wealth.
>> I keep hearing this argument that the tone and style of political arguments are getting more vicious and causing harm to society, but nobody can give me concrete examples of what they mean.
Just visit twitter and search for "muslim" or "jew" or "african american" and you'll find plenty of vicious and dehumanizing rhetoric. In any hour-long surfing session, you'll see accounts calling for all sorts of ethnic cleansing.
To me it’s calling people “racist”, “socialist” or just “haters” whenever they say something slightly off the accepted opinion . In certain camps a person with one of these labels can’t even be talked to, listened to or work at the same company (or any company).
What is an example of something “slightly off the accepted opinion” which I might say, that would get me called “racist”? And what would be the consequences for me of being called that?
People who object to affirmative action programs or special hiring programs for people who aren't white are often called "racist". Same with people who don't support illegal immigration.
The consequence can be an angry social media mob that demands your employer fire you.
Sure, an example would be the opinion that "people should have the right to assemble and engage in free speech, even if they have offensive opinions".
Such an opinion could get accused as being a defense of horrible people, as opposed to a defense of everyone's universal rights.
And some people believe that if you even think that people who are engaging in offensive behavior should have rights, then that makes you just as bad as the offensive people, and therefore deserve to be the target of violence.
Even arguing in favor of free speech, solely in support of these rights, can get you accused of being a terrible person, and therefore a deserving target of violence.
If your talking about the US, I would say the way some politicians paints illegal immigrants. Especially when the discussion about them centers around (what I think are exaggerations of) crime and drugs instead of the reality of how hard we have made it for them to come and help farm/pick our produce and do other manual labor.
I keep hearing this argument that the tone and style of political arguments are getting more vicious and causing harm to society, but nobody can give me concrete examples of what they mean.