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Comment by BuyMyBitcoins | Hacker News Reader

>”wow, if they could do that to nazis they could do that to me (not a nazi)!”

Yes, that is literally the concern. Activists hurl around the Nazi label with reckless abandon, showing little to no restraint when foisting the label on people they disagree with. There is also a sentiment taking hold that not being enthusiastically anti-Nazi makes you a Nazi sympathizer.

So yes, people have some reasonable reservations about where this could go, without having any real Nazi sympathies.

”wow, if they could do that to heretics, they could do the same thing to me (not a heretic)!”

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personally, i'd solve that by being enthusiastically anti-nazi, but if you can't muster up the strength to say nazis are bad, thats something you'll have to figure out on your own.

Your perspective leads to radical polarization between two alternate extremes--what we're seeing happening to political discourse across the entire Western world--and, eventually, war and death.

https://twitter.com/thenib/status/1027247065783574528

Do you not understand just how dystopian this is? This refrain to be enthusiastically anti-X reminds me of 1984 and the two minutes hate.

I can't get enthusiastic about being anti-Nazi because Nazis are not a thing I've had any kind of first hand experience with. Sure, I've learned all about bad things they've done in WW2, but however bad those atrocities were, nothing even close to those events have happened in my own lifetime with regards to Nazis.

I've also learned about similar atrocities caused by the Soviets under Stalin, by Pol Pot in Cambodia, and by various Europeans during colonial times. They are similarly historically distant, with maybe the closest kind of atrocity in my lifetime being the Iraq war. Even with that I have a hard time working myself up about it too much, because... why? What would be the point? To show that I'm sufficiently scrupulous? To prove that I'm on "the right side of history"?

>”i'd solve that by being enthusiastically anti-nazi, but if you can't muster up the strength to say nazis are bad, thats something you'll have to figure out on your own.”

Case in point, right here.

https://twitter.com/thenib/status/1027247065783574528

Why don’t you use your own words and just directly say what you’re trying to get across?

“Anyone who isn’t performatively anti things-I-disagree with is thing-I-disagree-with”

I remember my liberal friends sneering Bush for his “you’re with us or against us” take on the war on terror/patriot act. Funny how it’s come full circle.

Correct, if you aren't vocally against hate speech, homophobia, transphobia, etc, you may as well be on the side of it. "the only thing it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing" blah blah blah, you get it nazi.

Can I ever have time to do something else, though? Like, can I ever get some work done, or go for a walk outside, or have a conversation with friends or strangers about some non-political topic without constantly have to perform a "I'm against bigotry" dance?

It would be exhausting to constantly be virtue signaling like that. Maybe that's why the Twitter accounts that do also often tweet about how tired they are.

So would you argue then anyone against mass surveillance supports terrorism? That if you don’t support NSA hardware back doors you might as well fly the planes into the towers yourself?

I’m starting to think this person we are responding to is either a troll or such a one dimensional thinker that they are, in the literal definition of the word, a bigot.

“A person who is obstinately and unreasonably wedded to a particular religious or other creed, opinion, practice, or ritual; a person who is illiberally attached to any opinion, system of belief, or party organization; an intolerant dogmatist.”

Perhaps they are cut from the same cloth as those who enthusiastically guillotined perceived enemies left and right during The Terror, only to be beheaded themselves months later by other revolutionaries using the same justification and sense of righteous fervor.

Would I argue the same way in a completely different scenario that has nothing to do with what I said about standing against racism and transphobia? No, i wouldn't

This is a serious suggestion: if you are concerned about blanket accusations, it’s helpful to avoid blanket statements like “Activists hurl around the Nazi label…”

Some people do use that term with insufficient care. Some people use it carefully. Some people use it carefully but disagree with you about who it reasonably applies to.

I think this might be a case of language being interpreted in an unintended way.

I’m talking about a subset of all activists, and I didn’t think I necessarily needed to qualify a specific amount or to specify an affiliation in order to declare that such people exist and they follow this kind of behavior. I also specifically wanted to avoid charging a particular organized group of this.

In that sense I don’t feel like I’m making a blanket accusation against defined people, but rather, claiming the behavior is being exhibited by some segment of activists.

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