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by Clubber
3187 days ago
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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. |
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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".
[1] https://twitter.com/ContraPoints/status/896823834338263041