The other thing about "dog whistles": you can claim anything you want is a "dog whistle", and even if it isn't, it is almost impossible for anybody to prove you wrong. It is an unfalsifiable claim, and unfalsifiable claims rarely have much value.
I'm no fan of Wagner PMC – they are brutes guilty of war crimes – but why bother with this worthless "dog whistle" criticism of them when there are lots of real atrocities we can condemn them for?
Who are you talking about here? Yevgeny Prigozhin? Dmitry Utkin?
And what is the evidence either of them is a "nazi sympathizer"?
As I said, I'm no fan of either man – I expect the day will come when the ICC indicts both of them for war crimes – but I don't see the point of labelling them as "nazis" on the basis of flimsy evidence. The case that they are war criminals is much stronger than the case that they are Nazis – and surely being a war criminal is a lot worse than being a Nazi (not all of whom were guilty of war crimes/crimes against humanity/genocide–Franz von Papen joined the Nazi Party and served Nazi Germany as its ambassador–first to Austria and then to Turkey–but the Nuremberg Trial acquitted him of all charges)
Please don't cross into personal attack or flamewar, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are. You can make your substantive points without any of that.
Maybe you should stop to argue in bad faith? The guys behind this are nazis with nazis tatoos, a name and a logo inspired by nazis and are doing nazi-like actions and support nazi racial ideologies.
You broke the site guidelines badly in this thread. If someone else is wrong or you feel they are, it's enough to substantively show how what they are saying is wrong. Adding name-calling and personal attack just poisons the thread, evokes worse from others, and discredits your own argument. If you happen to be right, that's particularly bad because then you end up discrediting the truth, which hurts everyone (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).
Apologies if it came this way, I didn't point out (or wanted to) if they are wrong or not, I just wanted to expose some flaimbait and sophisms used to defend neo-nazi groups.
I felt like using sophisms to defend neo-nazis wasn't in the spirit of HN, I come here for the intellectual curiosity and productive messages.
I'm sorry, but I don't see how that's an accurate representation of what you did in this thread. You attacked the other user badly, in violation of HN guidelines like "assume good faith", and accused them of doing a bunch of things that (at least from what I saw) they hadn't done. That's not cool.
I know that with a topic this provocative it's difficult to read other people correctly, but the site guidelines provide explicit guidance about that too:
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
I'm not "Trying to construct threads in bad faith" or "bikeshedding" or whatever else. It isn't a violation of the site guidelines to disagree with you.
Also, you accuse me of violating the guidelines, but your allegation never cites their text; whereas, in accusing me of "bad faith" you are violating an explicit statement in them ("Assume good faith")
> I'm not "Trying to construct threads in bad faith" or "bikeshedding" or whatever else. It isn't a violation of the site guidelines to disagree with you.
This comment is yet another example of how you are not arguing in good faith.
You're somehow trying to misrepresent the problem of your insistence in downplaying and even denying evidence of Wagner's neonazi and white supremacists ties as just people disagreeing, and then passing yourself as a victim for being attacked for not agreeing with something. This is a gross misrepresentation of the whole discussion.
You're referring to a guy covered in Nazi tattoos who created an organization reflecting Nazi ideology and with known tie with white supremacists and neonazi ideologies as having no objective ties to Nazi ideologies. While you deny that, you're desperately trying to pass off any remark refuting your baseless claim as being attacks o difference of opinions, when actually you're irrationally denying evidence and insisting on pushing a blatantly false idea.
You don't seem to be arguing in good faith, and it looks you're trying to manipulate and distort things to whitewash neonazi organizations under the excuse of relativizing evidence, shift burdens of proof, and manipulating objectivisim bars to still claim a fact is not verified in spite of all the evidence and thus it should be treated as false. This is not good faith, and screams as neonazi apologism.
You've broken HN's rules badly in this argument, and you've done it repeatedly elsewhere. We end up having to ban accounts that do this, so please stick to the rules from now on.
If someone else is wrong or you feel they are, the good options include (1) post correct information substantively, so the rest of us can learn (this is very different from calling names and attacking personally, as you and others did in this thread); (2) downvote and/or (if the comment breaks the site guidelines) flag the post; (3) chalk it up to the internet being wrong and simply move on.
I'm no fan of Wagner PMC – they are brutes guilty of war crimes – but why bother with this worthless "dog whistle" criticism of them when there are lots of real atrocities we can condemn them for?