Well, I don't know if I think a middle-aged man who goes to a rally to hold up a sign saying "NO TRUMP. NO KKK. NO FASCIST USA," is progress over the alt-right. To me it's the exact same thing -- an overly zealous person who takes politics as a tribal game and has no sincere intention of changing anybody's mind.
The exact same thing? That’s one hell of a false equivalence. The alt right aren’t bad people because they are “overzealous”, they are bad people because of their bigotry on the basis of race, religion and national origin.
Not really.... these aren't real nazis committing atrocities....
Going to 4chan and saying a bunch of trolly triggering stuff at your friends to get out your anger isn't really a bad thing. It's immature, but it's not really immoral, nor is it illegal, nor does it make you a "bad person." It's venting, tribalism, and immaturity. (case-in-point, the moderator was a 13-year-old jewish boy)
This is what the article describes when it shows the man with the nazi flag posing for the reporters-- a symbiotic relationship that is entirely for show.
To be fair to the poster you're replying to, I can assume a much more charitable interpretation is that the quote draws an equivalency between being against Trump and being against the KKK, and that's the over-zealous and tribal aspect.
It's similar to saying "No Bernie, No Marx." Yes, they're on the same side of the spectrum compared to center, but it seems unfair and disingenuous to combine them as such.
I agree with you in the abstract ideal, but for a lot of people, this choice is roughly as good as it gets. In place of moral compasses, most people have thermometers they use to read the room, adopting belief systems and then enforcing them brutally, with no room for anything resembling moral reasoning, nuance, or basic human decency. The majority of the variability tends to be in 1) the belief system they choose to ingest and 2) the degree of passion with which they choose to engage in it. I'm not throwing my hands up and drawing a universal false equivalency here: Not every possible manifestation is as harmful as every other, and I have no trouble saying that the dehumanization and hatred that marks the strain of mainstream idpol leftism that's currently popular[1] is nowhere near as dangerous a manifestation as that of the alt-right. I don't see a lot of moral distance between the _participants_ in either of these ideologies; as far as I can tell, circumstances out of one's control have an outsize influence on which ideology most people end up as footsoldiers in. But the way in which people's barbarism is sublimated is extremely important from a pragmatic point of view, and I'd much rather see Sam become a mirror of the old man described than the modal alt-right participant at that rally.
Taking the author at her word[2] when she describes how Sam started out, it sounds like he may have been in touch with the sensitivity and decency it takes to approach others with basic empathy. But such a state can be fragile and it sounds like Sam's reaction to the incident at his school knocked him out of that orbit. In the best-case scenario, it's a temporary situation, but the author's claim is that Sam is at a point where he's got a lot of confusion and passion and rage that he's sublimated into politics, and perhaps the best we can hope for is that the path of hate that he picks is one of the less harmful ones like garden-variety identitarian center-leftism.
[1] I'm aware that this is probably an extraordinary claim to many here, so here's a simple example of what I mean. FTA:
> I’d never in my life backed the “masculinist” cause or imagined that men needed protecting—yet I couldn’t help but agree with Sam’s analysis.
The idea that the author doesn't realize what an abhorrent view this is is chilling; people and their lives are insanely complicated, and there's no group that's flatly-generalizable enough that a decent person would never have occasion to imagine they may need protecting in some scenario or another. There's no difference, at its fundamental root, between this and other more recognized forms of dehumanizing people by erasing their individual identities.
[2] Though perhaps we can't take this for granted: as evidenced by other parts of the article, she doesn't seem like a particularly decent person herself.
This is hilarious. You couldn't get any more on-brand for Hacker News without suggesting that someone rewrite the kernel in Rust.
The people at this rally almost certainly supported Trump, and at least some of them supported fascism. As such, a slogan condemning Trump alongside fascists is totally reasonable, even if it wouldn't necessarily be in other contexts. (And if you think that someone carrying a nazi flag doesn't really believe the message, well, the burden of proof is on you).
Politics, by the way, is a tribal game. Almost everyone develops their beliefs primarily based on those of the people in their community or communities. For example, the belief that "holding an anti-Trump sign is just as bad as holding a Nazi flag, because both of them passionately express opinions" is basically non-existent outside of the Hacker News-reading demographic, but one which I've seen expressed here fairly often. That's not because HN readers are smarter than everyone else: it's because people tend towards the opinions that they're exposed to in their communities, and the rules of Hacker News effectively mandate impassioned centrism, so that's the ideology of the Hacker News tribe. If you think you're immune to tribalism, you're wrong, in the same way that if you think you're immune to confirmation bias, you're wrong.
Visibility is much more important to influencing people than good arguments or sincere intentions. For example, five years ago, I was aware of the arguments for open borders, but I didn't publicly advocate for them, nor did I have a particularly strong opinion on the matter. That's because back then, there was very little public discussion of the issue. Now that I've met other people who are pushing for open borders (probably in response to Trump), I consider it to be one of the most important issues that I care about. That's just how humans work. That's the reason that people advocate for their views in highly visible ways, like protests. The point isn't to convince your enemies, it's to bring out the people on your side.
John, who derives all his beliefs from careful research and pure reason, gets just as many votes as Bob, who likes Trump because he triggers the libtards. Actually, I suspect that Bob will get more, because half the time, people like John don't actually vote. You can talk as if you're above the rabble all you like, but in Democracy, it's their opinions that matter, and if you take politics seriously at all, it's them that you have to reach. Going out in the real world carrying signs, shouting, blocking traffic, throwing bricks, and maybe getting arrested is the best known way to get your message out, even if it offends your sensibilities.
The parent comment was not equivocating "KKK and anti-KKK", it was simply pointing out the false equivalence on that guy's T-shirt. All-caps claims that Trump, the KKK, and Fascism are equivalent is part of the problem and exacerbating tribalism.
The anti-Semitic terrorist in Powey wrote that he felt personally betrayed and furious at how friendly Trump is with Jewish people and his support for Israel. The media, and protestors, making such extreme claims aren't just misleading people who oppose bigotry, they are misleading people who support bigotry and making the conflict bigger and more confused than it otherwise would be.
Yeah, he was angry that Trump isn't far right enough for his taste, a common trope among Nazis. I'm not sure how transfer any responsibility for his crime onto the people who are protesting against right wing extremism though.
Maybe not "equally", but they are both intolerant. The groupthinks of both teams are used to mobilize violence against easy targets of their outgroups, regardless of the purported goal.
The real distinction to draw here is the matter of numbers. A counter protester is "punching up" in respect to the more numerous mob. They're not likely to get the mob to put down their pitchforks no matter how well-crafted their sign. But as this story demonstrates, their presence makes for human faces that object to the furor.
