Hacker News Reader

Comment by eropple | Hacker News Reader

> I used to have a nazi symbol on my car just to rile people up.

No healthy person does this "just to rile people up."

This is profoundly fucked behavior, and in a sane society it does, and should, lead to ostracizing. Actions have consequences.

View on HN

At absolute best, it's tasteless, and certainly grounds for social exclusion, but criminalizing and especially pathologizing mildly anti-social behavior is profoundly immoral, reckless, and inhumane.

Nazism and its asides are not merely mildly antisocial behavior. Nazism is a pathology, it is the declaration of the intent to commit violence, and repping Nazi symbols makes you a goddamn Nazi. I believe that communities and societies have the right and the duty to defend themselves against clearly communicated threats of violence. Germany and countries with similar antifascist and anti-Nazi legal strictures have the right of it.

Nah, this is wrong. Putting a Nazi symbol on your car with the intent to piss people off is a juvenile provocation and in no way requires that the perpetrator actually harbor a secret desire to bring about the extermination of the untermenschen.

Completely relinquishing the ability to judge things on their actual context in favor of the unthinking punitive application of absolutist principles is the beating heart of every anti-human ideology.

You're certainly entitled to that opinion. But your assertion is not convincing. This rather is my bag; studying neofascists and their propaganda tactics is a rather in-depth hobby of mine. And the way they rely upon the plausible deniability of "actual context" is why I am happy to disregard it. Literally any other nonfascist ideology, yes, I agree. Not Nazis, not fascists. They're autoimmune disorders and societies and communities erring on caution with and specifically with fascists won't keep me up at night.

Putting Nazi shit on things you own is a sign of tribal identity and that tribe exists to break our norms and kill us once they have the chance. On one's own head be it. This may catch up some dipshits who want to offend people. But...y'know? That's OK. Don't be that dipshit. Don't play with Nazi shit.

If you have a whole class of people who have every hour of the day to nanny and harass other people - to rile them up- with any means possible, seems like a good cause.

Bonus Points if you put a Hammer and Sickle right next to them. Creepy Thought-controll-freaks of all nations united- in outrage. My man.

Hammer and Sickle gets you into serious trouble in much of East Europe, particularly in Poland and the Czech Republic.

I’ve seen people (fellow foreigners) wearing hammer and sickle on tshirts in czech and it didn’t seem to cause any trouble. I’m sure people quietly thought “what an idiot” but nobody actually did anything. Weirdly a friend of a friend who was a member of the local football ultras threatened to kick the shit out of a someone who was wearing that iconic Che-Guevara-face t-shirt ... but nothing happened (and that’s probably one of the more violent people).

In all fairness, you need to be a particular brand of idiot to show communist glorification on your clothing in the country that was subject to the violent break of the liberalization that we now know as Prague Spring. Anyone who has read anything about Czechia knows about that.

I would expect czech police there to be more "nah, above my paygrade" when it comes to foreigners than German customs officers.

Oh I don't disagree - when wearing this sorta stuff you're at best ignorant and at worst trying to be provocative (god knows why you'd want to). The cases I saw were mostly the dumb Threadless "Communist Party" t-shirt which is definitely in the latter camp.

And you're right, the police would likely just roll their eyes and move on. I think anything nazi-related is taken much more seriously in Germany than anything socialist/communist related is here (there's even still an actual communist party which iirc gets regular single-digit share of electoral votes).

Yes they do. The students of the university I was at were always doing offensive things trying to provoke reactions. Like a column about "Underage celebrities I'd go to jail for" or drawing a giant penis on the carpark. It's normal student culture where I'm from.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com