Sympathy and Nazis

[Salty]

ITT, the scene in Where the Red Fern Grows where the raccoon gets caught in that trap with a tiny piece of metal on the inside, and he could get free if he just let go of that little piece of metal, but he can't because he's a raccoon.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

"I'm totally going to do the work to inform myself, right after I argue about it some more for a few days and ask someone else to do the work for me".

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

"It's not that I'm against killing Custer; I just think we need a better ideology than "eliminating the immediate genocidal threat", you know what I mean?"

[The Wizard Joseph]

Ok. I see that I'm a big damn fool and should be the shutting up now.

Maybe one day that will change. I'm letting go. For fuck sake I wish I was better at not opening my mouth in the first place, but I'm kind of a dumbass and need to learn that the hard way.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I have a thing that I like to remind myself, which is essentially that if I want to be a contrarian jerk, I'd better first make sure I'm right.

[Salty]

I just want to point out a commonly unspoken and maybe misunderstood fact of life:

Punching NAZIs is the REASONABLE and CAREFULLY MEASURED response to NAZIs. It is the initial step, like firing across an enemy's bow. The follow-up, should the punching not work, is KILLING them. Most people don't want to kill anybody, NAZI punchers probably don't more often than not. But the thing is, usually, you're not given much choice in the end, kill or be killed or worse.

So, yeah.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I just want to point out a commonly unspoken and maybe misunderstood fact of life:

Punching NAZIs is the REASONABLE and CAREFULLY MEASURED response to NAZIs. It is the initial step, like firing across an enemy's bow. The follow-up, should the punching not work, is KILLING them. Most people don't want to kill anybody, NAZI punchers probably don't more often than not. But the thing is, usually, you're not given much choice in the end, kill or be killed or worse.

So, yeah.

This is also true. If we punch them now, maybe we can shut down the Nazi movement before a whole lot of people get very irretrievably dead.

Or maybe we're supposed to hold off on punching them in case the Nazis aren't going to be genocidal this time.

[MMIX]

TWJ, you better learn to be aware of context before you go back into education or you are just going to be wasting your time and a load of public money. FWIW I had no idea who the author is either. I do now.  To be honest I personally don't think that understanding about Ellis' life is at all important to understanding why you are apparently in a minority of one over your overreaction to what he said.

That is because you did not react to what he actually said. That you are still making weird disgruntled noises about the reaction that your outburst garnered means that you still haven't heard what Ellis was actually saying.
 
I'm going to insert two things into the original text so that you can see what everybody else is reading, as opposed to the anti-MLK diss that you seem to be seeing


"Martin Luther King once said "the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice" THEREFORE ON THIS POINT AND  THIS POINT ALONE I SAY THAT Martin Luther King was full of shit BECAUSE There is no moral universe."

The point is about the existence of a moral universe. 

[tyrannosaurus vex]

I just want to point out a commonly unspoken and maybe misunderstood fact of life:

Punching NAZIs is the REASONABLE and CAREFULLY MEASURED response to NAZIs. It is the initial step, like firing across an enemy's bow. The follow-up, should the punching not work, is KILLING them. Most people don't want to kill anybody, NAZI punchers probably don't more often than not. But the thing is, usually, you're not given much choice in the end, kill or be killed or worse.

So, yeah.

This is also true. If we punch them now, maybe we can shut down the Nazi movement before a whole lot of people get very irretrievably dead.

Or maybe we're supposed to hold off on punching them in case the Nazis aren't going to be genocidal this time.

Nazis, and their counterparts in every place at every time, are an unfortunate but inseparable thread in the tapestry of human civilization. So it isn't like we're going to punch them into non-existence. But punching them is still the moral high ground compared to letting their movement fester and metastasize and grow into what we all know they are seeds of.

Unrelatedly, I'm going to posit to my bandmates that we change our band name to "Irretrievably Dead".

[The Wizard Joseph]

I've read the above. I'm working on the context thing and acknowledge my mistake. Just replying to note that I read them.

As a side note "Irretrievably Dead" sounds like a good band name.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

TWJ, you better learn to be aware of context before you go back into education or you are just going to be wasting your time and a load of public money. FWIW I had no idea who the author is either. I do now.  To be honest I personally don't think that understanding about Ellis' life is at all important to understanding why you are apparently in a minority of one over your overreaction to what he said.

That is because you did not react to what he actually said. That you are still making weird disgruntled noises about the reaction that your outburst garnered means that you still haven't heard what Ellis was actually saying.
 
I'm going to insert two things into the original text so that you can see what everybody else is reading, as opposed to the anti-MLK diss that you seem to be seeing


"Martin Luther King once said "the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice" THEREFORE ON THIS POINT AND  THIS POINT ALONE I SAY THAT Martin Luther King was full of shit BECAUSE There is no moral universe."

The point is about the existence of a moral universe.

YESSSSSS thank you for spelling that out, it didn't occur to me to do so but I think you may have nailed the location of the problem.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I just want to point out a commonly unspoken and maybe misunderstood fact of life:

Punching NAZIs is the REASONABLE and CAREFULLY MEASURED response to NAZIs. It is the initial step, like firing across an enemy's bow. The follow-up, should the punching not work, is KILLING them. Most people don't want to kill anybody, NAZI punchers probably don't more often than not. But the thing is, usually, you're not given much choice in the end, kill or be killed or worse.

So, yeah.

This is also true. If we punch them now, maybe we can shut down the Nazi movement before a whole lot of people get very irretrievably dead.

Or maybe we're supposed to hold off on punching them in case the Nazis aren't going to be genocidal this time.

Nazis, and their counterparts in every place at every time, are an unfortunate but inseparable thread in the tapestry of human civilization. So it isn't like we're going to punch them into non-existence. But punching them is still the moral high ground compared to letting their movement fester and metastasize and grow into what we all know they are seeds of.

Unrelatedly, I'm going to posit to my bandmates that we change our band name to "Irretrievably Dead".

Oh, that would be a good band name!

As a sort of aside, it's probably worth noting that if white supremacists were any other color than white, and doing exactly what they do, they would be arrested for terrorism, not punched in the face.

Until our white supremacist government and white supremacist society decides that terrorism is still terrorism when it comes from white people, and is still terrorism when it perpetuates the principles upon which our country was founded, punching white supremacists in the face is kinda all we've got.

[minuspace]

Tldr;  something about morals and punching Nazis, might as well help them back right into the propeller of the ride that got them here.  In my limited experience with fascist states from late 20th century Europe, not only are the practitioners simply useful imbeciles, they are also frightened little cowards.  They rely on the false sense of strength derived from their fabricated unity.  Ergo the fascist bundle of blunt, brittle little sticks.  Catch one of them by themselves and it's a very different story.  Their erosion started before they ever even banded together.  Apart from only punching them, which might incidentally embolden them together under something slightly more tangilble than their bigoted principles, the trick I think is to have them implode.

See, with all those extremely intolerant judgemental racists, most of them are only less than a couple of degrees removed from what they proclaim to hate.  The black-eye subsides, and can always serve as a badge of honor.  The fact that their mom's is Jewish, their dad's gay or their brother's black, well, that eats them inside-out:  starting with the weakness that allowed this to happen in the first place.

Just two cents.

[LMNO]

I'm gonna take a softer approach, because I do see some of myself in TWJ's approach.

I'm not violent. I hate violence. I hate expressing anger. As a child, I didn't scrap with the other children, get knocked down, and then grab their hands as a bonded friend.

When I lost my cool and got angry, I would fight to win. No-- I would fight to MAKE IT STOP AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.  This carried over into relationships, where I was unable to have "relationship fights" verbally because when I got angry enough to lose it, I would be utterly awful.

Basically, I'm a huge asshole when I get violent. And I hate that. If I was in Fight Club, every fight would end up with one of us looking like Jared Leto, afterwards.

So I would love to live in a world where punching nazis was not the best option. I would pray to live in a universe where rational debate and moral positions could be explained and accepted. Quite literally, punching anyone is my least favorite option.

And yet. The world I want is not the world I live in. This is hard for me to accept. I want it not to be true.

But here we are. In this world, the extrapolation of not punching nazis is demonstrably worse than punching nazis.

Me not wanting this to be true does not change the universe

[The Wizard Joseph]

My experience with violence can be found in my "Who I Am" thread. What I'm willing and able to say on the matter can be found there near the most recent additions to it.

Outside of "philosophy" or any abstraction I personally have a rather grave decision to make on the matter.

Considering that we got several "visitors" spidering the forum that's all I care to say here about my own personal perspective or plans going forward.

I allowed my emotions and deep seated fears about myself to get projected here and personally apologize on the matter of "what I thought" about Mr. Ellis.