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Yeh, outside that lot. Probably would have worded it differently, but at th'mo I hadn't ate more than a few small chips in the last... twelve hours? Sixteen? Less than twenty four, not sure by how much. Food currently going into stomach, but I've definitely been a bit less careful with bits of wording for the last while.

... doesn't help that I'm still pretty pissed off at trump. Longest and most angry I've been at about anyone in the last couple of decades, honestly. Apparently I care about the grandparents more than I thought, which is a helluva' thing 'cause I thought it was a lot.

Heh. Fun thing, smj, is that fortunately for the US if we wanted to try something like that, our biggest problem on the extremist front isn't our minority populations! That our police forces have thoroughly screwed the pooch at the moment with race relations would only matter so much when the one group they ain't been screwing is holding what needs to be corralled.

if the alt-right ever became competent propagandists, they'd seize on clashes with antifa as "nationalists vs anarchists" or something crazy like that.

Last I checked they've been trying to wank that line as hard as they possibly can for years, PG. It certainly comes up if you take a few seconds to read much in the way of commentary.

Fortunately it's harder in cases like this latest big bit because it's rough trying to present yourself as a nationalist when you're standing shoulder to shoulder with someone that is openly proclaiming they want to kill much to most of the nation's population. Like, that's probably not as much of a concern when the forces trying it have near zero ability to make strides with the groups that are going to be the net majority within another decade or three.

You cannot do this with force.

Yeeaaah, all things else aside, bullshit. We already have, once. Didn't make them completely gone, but it cut off the gas and the rest came later. It wasn't attempted conversion, but steady opposition up to and including violence and a persistent social effort to treat them as pariah that did it, after we, y'know, broke the back of their military forces and nuked people. You won't find many people that are much more of a proponent of soft conversion as I am -- as I've said, Nazis are effectively the only goddamn thing in existence I think other methods starts off on the table and never leaves it -- but I'd be blind to not acknowledge that force is, in fact, a viable option when you're talking about stopping this particular ideology from doing harm. Necessary, beyond a point, because you have a fair bit of trouble discussing things when they're trying to kill you, your family, your countrymen, etc., etc.

We'd just like not to have to use it full throttle, again. Or even hint at having to, really.

You can't do it without force just as much as you can't with it alone, because to whatever degree violence fails to dissuade believers, anything less than absolute rejection does, as well, and harder. Giving up a whole slate of ways to stop this shit before it becomes (more of) a problem rather than after helps nothing. Particular when it necessarily goes hand in hand with a message that maybe these guys aren't that bad, maybe there's room for something besides slamming the door in their face and applying boot if they try to kick it down. Which there isn't, when you're dealing with goddamn nazis. That this country softballed the bastards is the entire reason we're having this discussion at all.

You can work on conversion and your 20 Nazis (which, hell, if you've got a handful of years to work at it, might even do a decent job and more power to you for it) after the several hundred or several thousand aren't a concern, preferably because society has rejected them so hard they no longer have the means to be one. It's even a hell of a lot easier once congregation like that has been made effectively impossible, and any interconnection made more difficult. Nonexistent or ineffective are goals just about equally desirable when you're talking about a group specifically attempting to organize for murder.

Ideally it never reaches the point force is even warranted, but as MSH noted, when you've reached the point that there are Nazis walking down your street with flags and torches, yelling the ideology's screeds and beating protesters, as your country's primary leader softballs them for reasons who the ruddy hell knows, you're past the point you no longer have good reason to interact with the ideology's adherents without being armed or expecting violence.

I ain't gon' say much if you're trying to talk a nazi out of that filth when it's one on one or a small group, but when they're organizing and gathering in the dozens or hundreds or more it's reached the point they're a threat to anyone around them -- because being a threat to everyone around them is literally their reason to exist -- and one very much sufficient to warrant force if less than that doesn't serve to disperse or contain. Which, y'know. Protesters beat with lit torches, murdered american, etc. If there was a way to talk that out no one managed it.

Doing anything else pisses on the very concept of a free society.

Not half as hard as sitting with your thumb up your ass while genocidal shitbags drum up enough bodies to start killing people.

Seriously, for what has to be approaching the forth or fifth time, this is not a matter of disagreement. This is a matter of a group trying to organize around the goal of genocide. Anything short of violence is preferred, and massively, but if it takes cops, or the people if they fail to do it, physically breaking up their attempts to gain enough resources human and otherwise to try to reach their goals, then so goddamn be it. There is no state where a nazi group operating, be it neo-nazi or otherwise, isn't extending to actual violence. If it's not the immediate exercise of it, it's to attempt to get the ability to. Close to any other fucking ideology there is has room to make an argument otherwise, but nazism is specifically aimed at genocide. Its works immediate or future is aimed at genocide. Everything they do short of stopping being a nazi, is aimed at being able to commit genocide.

The issue is not their opinion, it's the only place that opinion can end up if they keep having it. Which is killing people. Because, y'know. This isn't just a belief. It's a stated goal of murder. That "belief" is "I am going to try to kill people." As a country, we actually do try to shut down that sort of thing. We just apparently haven't been on the ball enough to get off our ass and apply the metric to goddamn nazis.

As said. If this was a general "any belief", like. You'd be right, sho, giz. But it is not. It is a belief that is explicitly signaling the person holding it is attempting to reach the point they can kill people.

That said, I'd agree engaging in violence strictly because they're a nazi is probably going too far. The primary goal is to prevent them from organizing more than prevent them from existing. Label that shit a terrorist group, stop giving nazi demonstrators permit to march, all that sort of crap. Counter-protesting and all is what you do when your country's governing forces fail to do that. Our country does not have a mandate to give platform to people that have declared their intent to murder its citizenry. No country does. We should not demand of a people they stand themselves hobbled in the face of group working to kill them, just because that group is not immediately doing so, y'know? Maybe that they exhaust most or all other attempts beforehand, but that's the most of it.

Spoiler: Americapol-lite (click to show/hide)

So why was the statue taken down?

'Cause folks, including the local officials, had been trying to get rid of the damn thing for years, and someone finally got pissed off enough to just do it.

If you're asking why they wanted it gone, well, because among other things, the thing was venerating the oppression, slavery, and murder of a great deal of the area's population's forefathers, and was specifically put in place less than a century ago to shit on civil rights. Locals wanted to stop having to drive by the thing, since it put out about a thousand wrong messages and a passel of other stuff, too.

Which line? 'Communism is evil'?

Communism is worse than nazis, i.e. whoever leftwards you can paint as communist is worse than the skinheads literal or otherwise that are literally killing people. That sort of line.

An intentional one. Killin' with a gun or starvation don't make much difference.

Any case, because it's unconnected to anything, neo. Nurture plays enough part in how humans work who you were born from means pretty literally nothing when it comes to considerations like that. How you were raised might, which who your family et al can have things to do with, but that's entirely not the thing being addressed.

Communism is worse than Nazism, though.

oh boy lets see if they bite

Yeah, yeah, quote function's a bitch.

Though I'unno man, if you saw folks flying the Red Army flag there, you might want to get your eyes checked or lay off the absinthe

Eh, parts of that make sense. Most of the right wing fucks showing up to things like that with guns are fairly organized, enough that they realize that there's basically no goddamn way they're going to be able to spin opening fire in any way that doesn't leave them and -- and by way of the country's population flipping a great deal of collective shit -- a great many people like them either in jail or facing the death penalty (assuming cops don't get off their ass and start treating them like armed black people, anyway :V).

Meanwhile folks opposed to them generally don't default quite as regularly towards being inclined to being a murderous waste of human flesh, so they don't show up to these sorts of things nearly as armed, nearly as often.

Basically it's lose/lose for the right wing bastards (with those trending towards armed being cognizant enough to know it), and less opportunity and/or inclination from everyone else involved. So we've largely managed to avoid these things turning into an open firefight, so far.