On Punching Nazis

[jducoeur]

I've been mulling over the "punching Nazis" incident a couple of weeks ago, to understand how I think and feel about it.

Really, it's not a simple one. On the one hand, I can totally understand the visceral satisfaction of pasting one to the smarmy bad guys. OTOH, as many folks have pointed out, that doesn't make it right: the Nazi preaching his

Comments

[lilairen]

Part of the problem, though, is as soon as one gives equal-time-to-talk about whether or not, say, black people should be genocidally expelled from the US or whether or not Chuck Schumer is a foreign national because he's Jewish - both of these topics dear to Spencer's heart - one has lost some critical battles.

I've seen a lot of people basically saying "We cannot actually let these people have a platform, because Naziism is designed explicitly to use the 'everyone gets a platform' nature of modern democracies to destroy those democracies using their own institutions." There is no functional public debate to be had with someone who starts from 'these people are not people like you and me'; individuals on an individual level can make a difference, but that does not reach far enough fast enough.

It's still complicated.

[jducoeur]

Oh, I am *totally* not agreeing with the "equal time" myth. The press is under no more moral obligation to give airtime to the Nazi on the street than to the loony who thinks that the moose in his back yard is an alien from Neptune

[lilairen]

A friend of mine has been consumed by the need to write the stuff on this site today, in response to some of the same impulses.