That leaves three possibilities: Either people are lying about thinking their actions are good (I like to think this is rare, as I have a generally positive view of people), I'm wrong about what is good and what is evil, or they're wrong about what is good and what is evil.
I like to think that the fact that my beliefs are based on an axiomatic framework of suffering bad, free will good, and innocence by default makes them more likely to be correct than a knee-jerk disgust response of "gay people are icky", but maybe I'm biased.
Regardless, between the latter two possibilities, in terms of praxis there is little difference. When two people hold fundamentally contradictory axiomatic beliefs, I fully expect both the fight to protect them and theirs. I don't fault them for choosing to fight. I fault them for the beliefs they're fighting for.
Let’s be tolerant of everyone except those who belong to groups explicitly making the world worse. Is that a subjective measure? Yes. Does that mean we shouldn’t, to use a modern phrase, “punch Nazis”? No, punch away.
Everyone has the moral authority and responsibility to act to reduce suffering.
How can you believe that other people can err in their judgement of themselves and others and at the same time assume that you are immune to the same error? It's completely ridiculous.
What I'm arguing against is inaction in the face of uncertainty.
The phrase "punch nazis" polluted my point. Violence against the violent is justifiable. Yes, my enemies can think the same way; this is why armed conflict exists in our world, and why being blanket "anti-war" or "anti-violence" for that matter is unfortunately naive.
It's not idealism, its pragmatism.
Your natural move is to claim (their) speech as harmful. This inevitably descends into "My violence is merely political speech, but their political speech is violence," inverting the meaning of things.
And if you're advocating punching them, then violence is an inherent part of your ideology.
That's why they call it horseshoe theory.
Edit: And to be clear, Far Right groups are responsible for over half of the terrorist deaths in the US, with Jihadist groups being number 2: https://www.newamerica.org/future-security/reports/terrorism...
You know the funny thing about those terrorist violence stats is that a lot of them seemed to cut off around 1974. I noticed that a few years ago. Then I did some digging and it turns out that the cutoff just magically happens to be "just right" for excluding a lot of far-left Weather Underground bombings.
The thumb has been on the scale to discount violence like the Berkley Bike Lock basher. Or, wasn't there a right wing figure punched, sans provocation, right there on video, and the judge threw that one out? I don't track those guys so I don't recall the name, but I do recall the outcome.
The fact of the matter is that today the far right commits much much higher levels of violence then the far left, if you have specific statistics that are different from that, not just some random anecdotes, please supply them.
Of course, you are the one who gets to define who is innocent, yes? That they are defending their innocent children against your influence means nothing. "I think those people want to subject my children to medically unneeded procedures, maybe sterilize them. I am defending the innocent. Therefore ..."
I think your approach lacks humility, allowance for genuine disagreement, and the general principle of not attacking first.
My basic point is that when you combine two very popular flavors of the day ("punch/kill Nazis" and "that person is a Nazi"), you get a recipe for more or less random bloodshed based on little more than conjecture. It's like the Satanic Panic of the 1990s all over again, driven more by self-righteous bloodthirst than reaction to anything anyone has actually done.
You hear it over and over. This person is a fascist, that person is a Nazi. Go head, hit Google, search for (and use quotes) something like "Donald Trump is a Nazi." You'll find thousands of results returned. So, can we just go be violent at someone because someone else says "They're a Nazi"? That's what I'm talking about. You have a person, you haven't seen them do anything, they haven't done anything to you, but Rick says "He's a Nazi," so do we go punch them on Rick's word?
I keep hammering on this because we have people feeling fully justified in physically attacking others who haven't physically attacked anyone else (non-violent), but someone has ascribed Nazi to them. This isn't just a hypothetical, take that bike lock basher guy. He struck seven people on the head with a bike lock. (Interestingly, at least one of them was friendly fire.)
Now, you won't get anyone to call that left-wing terrorism, for some odd reason, and the guy completely skated. So we have these non-violent people just standing there, someone thinks "that person is a Nazi," and attacks them. That's my non-violent Nazi. Are they actually fondling an Iron Cross at home? Doing a little seig heil before bed? We don't know, and we generally will never know.
And I focus on that because, let's be honest, there's almost no actual Nazis. Probably some elderly "were Hitler Youth" hanging out in Brazil, but aside from that, it's just really sloppy slang, and I've had to hang with some people who will gleefully refer to anyone to the right of Bernie Sanders as a fascist Nazi.
They might, however, be a 'useful idiot'. Which, in its original definition, is a person propagandizing for a bad cause, originating from a devious, ruthless source, without comprehending the cause's goals.
Sadly, there's no shortage of those people in mainstream discourse.
Needless to say, tolerating Nazis does not mean tolerating all actions inspired by Nazism.
"Texas mall shooting: gunman expressed interest in neo-Nazi views – report"
Or the guy who shot up a dollar store
Or "Neo-Nazi Marine Plotted Mass Murder, Rape Campaigns with Group, Feds Say While tasked with protecting the nation, Matthew Belanger was plotting a killing spree against minorities and to rape “white women to increase the production of white children,” according to federal prosecutors"
Weird that you apparently feel compelled to downplay the threat.
...in brigade-level strength, that liberals have been rooting for for almost two years now. Shrug. Don't waste time explaining this to them.
No, actually, they are monsters. Just like Jeffrey Dahmer was a monster. Pointing out that he is not that different from me is an utterly absurd equivocation.
> Their existence does not cause suffering per se
Their existence as some kind of side-effect-free theoretical-spherical-cow, no. The things they do that make them nazis, as opposed to some other group of people, like, say, a knitting club, yes.
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The problem with the idea of "punch Nazis" is that it's really, really easy to go from "I punch people because they are Nazis", to "I punch people, therefore they are Nazis". This is made worse when "Nazi" and "fascist" are general epithets thrown by the left at anyone to their right.
Pre-emptive self-defense is valid. You don't have to wait for them to swing their fist into your nose. But imminence requires imminence. You do have to wait for them to be squared up and about to swing. You can't just sucker punch them from the back.
Just because there is no objective way to measure evil does not mean one shouldn’t attempt to fight it when one can. No, I don’t punch my political opponents.