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Comment by savanaly | Hacker News Reader

This was a fascinating read. I myself go back and forth daily between the two positions:

a) compromise and appeasement of evil is wrong, if trump and his supporters act like nazis then call them that, and

b) it's totally unproductive and gets us nowhere to simply pile on joke after joke, insult after insult, millions upon millions of them on every social media and tv show available to us, on the red tribe aka the trump supporters.

Reading this blog post of course swings me back around to b). Then I read a casually racist opinion from a red tribe member or hear another xenophobic policy proposed by Trump and swing right back to a.

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I think it's important to remember that the "us vs them" dichotomy that is polarizing your beliefs is a fiction. Humans build up the idea of tribes because its cognitively cheap, not because they actually exist or map to real structures in the real world. You see the harsh language and think "what an angry, terrible person" and on the other side is someone who just got off a 10-hour shift working with rude customers and an aggressive boss and unhappy children and then they got cut off at a yellow light on their commute, etc, and _then_, after all that, they vented online about something that was cheap and easy for them to hate. Was what they did right? No. But they aren't a vast conspiracy out to destroy you either. Often people who are the angriest, are also the people who hurt the most, feel stuck in an unhappy life. It's important we treat people like people no matter what, or we erode the basic humanity owed to all of us.

I agree with everything you said. I use the purposefully archaic word "tribe" to remind myself that this feeling of tribal competition is based on our biology and was evolved in the distant past to solve problems that we no longer need to solve in the same way.

I think the issue with saying tribal competition is based on our biology, is that all our basic precepts concerning thinking are rooted in our biology.

We can no more escape our tribalism, than we can escape our desire for love and human comfort.

> Then I read a casually racist opinion from a red tribe member or hear another xenophobic policy proposed by Trump and swing right back to a.

I understand and respect that - but my friends who do that seem to also turn a blind eye to riots and beatings from folks "the left". There just seems to be a lot of double standards with saying fringe wackos on one side represent the entire group, but not the the side.

This phenomenon is explained well here:

http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything...

It's long, but I think worth the read.

Excellent excellent link! Thanks for posting it. Seriously... thank you.

> but my friends who do that seem to also turn a blind eye to riots and beatings from folks "the left"

Yes, those "left" beatings get zero widespread cultural support. Violence is not glorified by any prominent voices on the left.

Whereas racist and sexist voices on the right make a boatload of money and fill up the comments of every news article posted to Facebook. It's cultural.

>zero widespread cultural support. Violence is not glorified by any prominent voices on the left.

This is just not true.[1] Even in our tech community it's pretty commonplace to see 'it's okay to punch a nazi' is a well supported position.[2]

[1] https://heatst.com/culture-wars/prominent-leftists-celebrate... [2] http://reason.com/blog/2017/02/15/now-its-okay-to-punch-nazi...

I thought parent commenter was referring to generic Trump supporters being beaten.

When someone thinks you don't deserve to live because of the color of your skin, you're well within your right to defend yourself against that idea. You shouldn't have to wait until they're knocking down your door.

> When someone thinks you don't deserve to live because of the color of your skin, you're well within your right to defend yourself against that idea. You shouldn't have to wait until they're knocking down your door.

Replace color of your skin with political belief, and you've just made an argument for Trump supporters who live in places like Berkeley or San Jose to violently defend themselves from liberal rioting.

Find me a leftist actively making plans and pushing for the elimination of those with certain political beliefs, and I'll agree. Saying that people shouldn't be racist or oppose welfare != saying there should be a "peaceful ethnic cleansing", a la Spencer.

Antifa is the yin to the alt-right's yang. Both are jokes.

Radicals on your own 'side' are difficult to distinguish, and even harder to repudiate because they constantly say things where you agree with 95% of the content, or most of the underpinnings of their reasoning.

For a liberal, its' easy to write off Glen Beck when he says Obama is a fascist for taking particular action. However, it is difficult to write off the Huffington Post, when they say Trump is a fascist for rolling back the previous administrations 'reform' (thus returning us to the hell-world of laws existing in 2007).

As a person on the left, when you look at the left you see your bubble. That is, you see the people you are already agreeing with, the nice people. However, when you look at the right, you see the controversy; the things most visible in the mainstream are the ones that are most talked about, are the loudest and most divisive ones. Your point of view is not symmetrical.

I suspect the right-leaning people in this thread would say the same thing in reverse.

What media outlet, TV or radio or web, promotes active violence against Trump supporters?

I'll avoid naming them, but there at least 5 loud rightwingers who make millions of dollars promoting racism. Not just on the web, but on TV. On the radio.

This isn't a "people live in a bubble" thing. This is people exaggerating the size of the fringe left and equating it with actual mainstream right.

It's hardly a double standard. Fringe members of your own side cannot represent your entire group, because you are part of the group therefore you have 1st hand evidence that some members (i.e. you) are utterly rationale, reasonable, realistic human beings.

Considering your political opponents is difficult. You may not even know too many of them in real life, and even when you do---political discussion is frowned upon so at best you get a niggling thought of "Bob is a great dev, I don't understand how he could be so crazy to vote for X".

I agree that conscientious leftists shouldn't turn a blind eye to wanton violence and property destruction at their events. But I don't think it's quite a double standard, when one of the groups of "fringe wackos" in question occupies the highest executive office in the country (slash world depending on your assessment of American power). And as far as representing the whole: nobody voted for the black bloc; 62.9 million people did vote for Trump.

There are fringe wackos on both sides, but only one of the sides had a fringe wacko as a candidate.

Considering how much flack the Democrats got for shutting down Bernie's campaign with questionable means, that was a close-run thing.

> only one of the sides had a fringe wacko as a candidate

This statement is probably true for most people, but the side with the fringe wacko for a candidate is up for debate.

> compromise and appeasement of evil is wrong, if trump and his supporters act like nazis then call them that

That mindset is the sort of thing the article is talking about.

First, you're talking about Trump, his supporters and evil in the same sentence. That's polarizing and does nothing except make you feel righteous.

Also, acting like Nazis? That sort of emotional trigger word has been done to death. Also, Trump doesn't get to choose his supporters and he has repudiated them. Trump also has a daughter that converted to Judaism and a Jewish son-in-law. Calling him a Nazi or Nazi-like in his actions is silly and counter productive.

>Trump also has a daughter that converted to Judaism and a Jewish son-in-law. Calling him a Nazi or Nazi-like in his actions is silly and counter productive.

I have to disagree here. I think it's fairly obvious that Trump is not an actual Nazi. The fact that he doesn't speak German is proof alone of this; you can't be a real Nazi if you don't speak German. I think it's also pretty hard to be a real Nazi if you weren't an adult during Hitler's reign, which pretty much excludes almost anyone still alive now (unless the Nazis came up with some secret anti-aging medical treatments, perhaps in use on their moon base...).

So obviously, no one is talking about real Nazis. They're talking about metophorical "Nazis". They're drawing parallels between Trump and the rise of Hitler, and the authoritarianism that existed back then, and how it was fueled by xenophobia. Back then, they blamed Jews. Obviously, Trump isn't blaming the Jews, but he is blaming other groups of outsiders, much as Hitler and co. did with the Jews (and some other groups too, just not nearly in such large numbers).

So no, I don't think it's "silly" or counterproductive to make historical parallels. There's a lot of disturbing similarities between Trump and Hitler and other authoritarians' rise to power. There's nothing counterproductive in pointing this out.

Well, this is an example of the motte and bailey technique. (http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Motte_and_bailey)

When most people think of Nazis, they think of concentration camps and mass murder, not totalitarianism. That's the image and idea they want to associate with a group of people when they accuse them of being Nazis, and to argue otherwise would be disingenuous.

For example, you could argue that people who advocate for smoking bans and vegetarianism are Nazis and literally Hitler, as they too tried to reduce the amount of smoking and meat consumption in the name of public health.

Then when they get called on logical inconsistencies (because somebody is against smoking doesn't make them a Nazi) they retreat to a different, more easily defensible assertion.

Also, I don't see xenophobia in any of this discussion. They want rigorously enforced immigration laws, which are already on the books.

The executive branch is in charge of law enforcement, and I don't see how that is xenophobia when you're targeting illegal immigrants, rather than people of a specific ethnic group.

> Back then, they blamed Jews. Obviously, Trump isn't blaming the Jews, but he is blaming other groups of outsiders, much as Hitler and co. did with the Jews (and some other groups too, just not nearly in such large numbers).

Actually, he kinda did blame the Jews in his last campaign ad.[1]

[1] -- http://www.nbcnews.com/card/anti-defamation-league-trump-ad-...

I remember reading an article talking about how people were throwing similar aspersions at Bush and other Republicans in the past decade that when the actual Nazis came along we wouldn't be able to convince people because the word has been bandied about too casually against people who were likely not Nazis in the past.

> a) compromise and appeasement of evil is wrong, if trump and his supporters act like nazis then call them that

Calling a Nazi a Nazi is one thing, but do you honestly believe that nearly 50% of American voters are Nazis, Nazi sympathizers, or have Nazi-like views?

I don't. I think nearly 50% of voters thought that, in balance, Trump was a better choice than Hillary.

If all Trump supporters are Nazis, then presumably all Hillary supporters believe that one should unashamedly lie rather than admitting that one made a mistake. Both of these conclusions seem equally false to me.

For someone left leaning anyone not agreeing with him is a "Nazi", "fascist", "racist". The right leaning group interviewed in the article got sick of that as well.

I hope you don't actually mean that you think that most or all left-leaning people believe that. I admit that this would be a much less severe accusation than calling all right-leaning people Nazis, but it would still be nice for people to stop stereotyping other people based on their political beliefs.

I think that the whole "PC" issue is an example of this going both ways. There's certainly a bad kind of insistence on political correctness, which often takes the form of demonizing people who express an unpopular viewpoint or who merely say something that could be construed as expressing an unpopular viewpoint. On the other hand, I think there's just as much rhetoric going around claiming that left-leaning people are horrible for supporting this sort of political correctness without any particular evidence that they do so.

Is it unproductive though?

Humans are social animals, and like to know they're doing the "right" thing, where "right" is often defined by what everyone else is doing. A common example of this kind of "social proof" is a counter productive littering campaign that told people that everyone was doing it. So people thought, well if it's good enough for them.

It seems clear to me that people don't like being called racist. So much so that they'll try really hard to convince people to stop calling them racist, by threatening to do more racist stuff if they don't. Probably, though they don't like to talk about it as much, simply the threat of being called racist hold them back from doing racist things.

This theory is also corroborated by the number of people who suddenly felt their xenophobia was widely shared and that they could therefore attack random people after Brexit or Trump's victory. Literally often prefacing their behaviour with the announcement that it was now okay.

I have to admit I don't know with certainty if it's productive or not. But if the people saying it is are mostly concern trolls, then I'll take a leaf out of their book and reject it just because I don't like their tone.

> So much so that they'll try really hard to convince people to stop calling them racist

I don't think that's true. Basically if you call somebody racist and they don't think it's warranted, they'll just disregard any of your other opinions about anything at all. Your opinion doesn't really matter anymore. "He thinks I'm racist, he's obviously an idiot."

Blasphemy laws didn't make people more religious. They just made it so people didn't talk about it. It's the same here.

What about lots of people talking openly about not believing in religion anymore and how it's kinda dumb? Does that have an effect?

Does it make people less religious? I'm not sure - it definitely makes religious people more likely to hide their faith and not allow it to be challenged directly.

These positions aren't contradictory; there are a ton of people that voted for Trump not because they're Nazis, but because Trump's terrible ideas about race and sex are just not very relevant to them. They just didn't pay attention to that aspect.

Eventually, people realized that Bush II was a bad president, and that came from the slow, unavoidable accumulation of facts. People that showed up at the ballot box (but not to rallies) for Trump will eventually come around when they see how incompetent he is, how often he lies about easily debunked things, etc. The jokes and insults won't be a productive part of this process.

> if trump and his supporters act like nazis then call them that

This...

...is why we can't have nice things.

So while you might have a few reasons why the right is full of Nazis, the right has a few too.

My favorite example of this is the recent hell at UC Berkley over Milo, which the right turned into ammunition to discredit the entire left, even mocking the notion that the left dared to call the right Nazis. [0][1]

Keep piling on the jokes and the mud-slung strawmen if you dare. You give them more fuel to burn, and more ways to discredit you and everything you believe, and more ways to "keep winning" perhaps beyond the next four years.

[0]: http://insider.foxnews.com/2017/02/13/tucker-carlson-battles... [1]: http://www.sfexaminer.com/uc-berkeley-police-release-photos-...

Maybe it would help you (honestly, not trying to sound condescending) to reevaluate what acting like Nazis would look like.

Any specific ideas?

I'd make several assumptions:

1) It's possible for humans to act like Nazis 2) It's possible for a democratic state to gradually become not only a host to Nazis, but become a host that's run by Nazis 3) At an early stage, many people can't distinguish between Nazis as a positive or benign force and Nazis as, well, Nazis.

So, perhaps I could use some tips. What would acting like Nazis look like?

Well, they'd promise to make the country great again for starters.

They'd crush the unions to undermine their political opponents.

They'd align themselves with big business.

They'd tell "big lies" and believe that if they repeat them enough then people would believe them.

They'd think a minority religion was plotting their downfall and start making plans to deport them all.

They'd build up the army, while not spending enough on problems at home.

Against all economic advice they'd stop trading with others, viewing it as weakness, and try to become entirely self-sufficient.

So watch out for that kind of thing.

I find myself flipping between these two states and find it exhausting.

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