It's easy to distinguish them. One is thoughts (we don't arrest and convict people for thoughts) and one is action. When it comes to something like inciting a riot though, that's a fairly grey area. I would guess it is mostly used to squelch unpopular speech.
If whether they're getting arrested is your concern, there's no need to worry. Simply being a white supremacist doesn't get you arrested. Though it looks to me like the thread started over the question of what sort of non-government concession a tolerant society owes to white supremacists and the like.
I believe the assertion was that a tolerant society succumbs to the political ideas they tolerate. The OP seems to be arguing that tolerating distasteful political ideas will inherently lead to society adopting those distasteful political ideas which ends in it's ruin.
I find that assessment difficult to swallow and was asking for a citation or example of when this happened.
I also find that idea dangerous, because in the US political power changes every 4-12 years and ideas you might hold dear may be deemed distasteful. Of course, I'm willing to discuss the merits of that idea rather than just banning it.
It's a popular idea that there are two legitimate sides to every issue. It's also a wrong idea. "Tolerance" as a societal ideal does not require treating ethnic cleansing as a legitimate goal, a respect-worthy political platform, etc. This comment thread was initially about the Daily Stormer, not something that is merely "distasteful."
Unfortunately a lot of people fall for this technique. People that are generally educated and willing to argue back with rational/logical arguments seem to be particularly susceptible. The problem is assuming the person trying to introduce an inappropriate, reprehensible, hateful idea is trying to win an argument. They expect to lose the current argument, nor are they actually interested succeeding in the "marketplace of ideas".
The point is to get everyone talking about the meme until it becomes a legitimate "side". To in introduce humans to a radical idea that is far outside what they would normally consider acceptable, you have to reframe the idea and/or their beliefs. The easiest way to do that - which marketing departments have known for a long time ("branding") - is by repeated exposure. If enough people talk about e.g. ethnic cleansing in a way that gets you to repeated argue back about how they are "obviously wrong", you will eventually believe it's a legitimate political point of view that people might have.
Nobody said anything about treating ethnic cleansing as a legitimate goal or a respect-worthy political platform except you. That is a huge red herring and it's disingenuous to associate that with an discomfort with banning speech and ideas, particularly in a country where it explicitly lists that freedom in the first amendment of the constitution.
Look, one of the people you replied to was talking about branding and all that. The second you go on a crusade and talking about banning people with ideas, the stronger their brand becomes.
I haven't thought about Neo Nazis in 20+ years, that is until everyone started talking about banning their sites. It's not the people who tolerate their speech and ignore it that gives these people's ideas weight, it's the people who demand a moral crusade by silencing them that do.
It's true irony that in the effort to silence distasteful ideas, people are giving those ideas much more relevance than if they had done what we always do. Allow people to say stupid things, ignore them, then wave as they scurry off under the rock of which they came.
Then may I suggest doing some research on what they have been doing in the last two decades? In particular the current tactics[1] they are using?
> banning their sites
A private business refusing service is very different from a government ban. I agree that the extreme centralization of the internet has put a troubling amount of power in the hands of very few businesses. However, this is orthogonal to the fact that neo-Nazi groups have took advantage of a lot of people ignoring them for 20+ years.
> It's not the people who tolerate their speech and ignore it that gives these people's ideas weight
If everyone was actually ignoring the neo-Nazis, we wouldn't have a problem. Instead, we have people tolerating their speech and arguing against it in the neo-Nazi framing. They have been very successful at constructing a framing with blurring language and rhetoric constructed specifically to sound reasonable. So now we have people unintentionally defending fascist ideas that has been carefully camouflaged as "distasteful idea".
>>I find that assessment difficult to swallow and was asking for a citation or example of when this happened.
It happened in post-WW1 Germany. Nazis were originally a fringe movement. Even though they weren't particularly competent, they were able to gain power and influence due to the ambivalence and apathy of (and tolerance by) the masses.
>they were able to gain power and influence due to the ambivalence and apathy of (and tolerance by) the masses.
Yes, this is the only example I could really think of, but it isn't a good, concrete example by the simple facts that Hitler was never elected as chancellor and the Nazi party never held a majority in the Reichstag. In other words, tolerance didn't give them power, the took power. They also did a lot of things other than propose ideas to get into power.
I don't want the idea of allowing people to present and hold distasteful thoughts confused with being allowed commit crimes (including but not limited to assault, murder, carrying an illegal firearm, inciting a riot, etc).