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Comment by rbanffy | Hacker News Reader

The upside of this, jailing racists and nazis for being racists and nazis, is that we don’t have (too many) problems with nazis and racists.

> You are supposed to work with the people you went to school with, and your family connections, all your life

What you describe is common in very closed societies, something we are proud we work not to be. In places where the language doesn’t have a word for networking, we use “networking”. Not sure if it’s the same everywhere, but where I live we have a lot of “new Irish” (as opposed to “born Irish”) and we like to have meet-ups so that all those people who are new to this place can feel welcome.

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As another fellow European, I also agree that this is putting nazis and dangerous people behind bars but recently more generic people had gone behind bars or legal hurdles compared to actual nazis amd racists because due to heavy shift to right, racism and nazi supporters now pretend to be doing political campaigns to cover their crimes and walking free. Not a good sign but I am optimistic.

> racism and nazi supporters now pretend to be doing political campaigns to cover their crimes

Yes. We need to have stronger laws to catch those. Not even when they are overtly doing political campaigns, but even when they are just misinforming and radicalizing people for politicians they support. We need to stop that.

"The upside of this, jailing racists and nazis for being racists and nazis, is that we don’t have (too many) problems with nazis and racists."

I wonder what metric you use for (too many problems). We also jail the most outspoken jihadis, but western Europe has a huge problem with Islamic radicalism anyway.

The far right has fairly high preferences in the last decade or so, so in practice, you have a lot of far right politicians in parliaments and sometimes governments.

Jailing people don't make them disappear, indeed they are good at exploiting the forced pause and radicalizing other people that happen to sit behind the same bars. Which means that their new recruits will stem from the most violent, least socialized subsets of the society.

Ideologies are somewhat contagious. Unless you isolate the carriers socially, which is hard to impossible, they tend to infect new people.

> We also jail the most outspoken jihadis,

I believe the question here is influence. There is no jihadist party in Europe, but there are plenty of parties (some in governments, some even with almost full control of their countries) that are nazi in everything BUT name.

> The far right has fairly high preferences in the last decade or so, so in practice, you have a lot of far right politicians in parliaments and sometimes governments.

Outrage drives engagement and makes media more profitable. This is why things like Fox News and the Murdochs exist. Now they have discovered they can influence elections as well. We can blame Russia for giving a helping hand to far-right authoritarians aiming to destabilize the EU (and the US, let's not forget that).

> Jailing people don't make them disappear,

No, but it sends a message.

> Ideologies are somewhat contagious. Unless you isolate the carriers socially, which is hard to impossible, they tend to infect new people.

Like any disease, it's hard to fight and, like any contagious and deadly disease, it's worth fighting.

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