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Comment by makotech221 | Hacker News Reader

If you don't ban the nazis, you become a nazi site

Who are these nazis you're talking about? People posting a mod that removes a trigger warning from a remake of a 20 year old game[1]? Some pretty weak-sauce nazis.

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/1atpq7d/nexus_mod...

Don't forget the ultimate crime against humanity: changing a remade RPG's "body type 1" and "body type 2" character creation options back to "male" and "female" as they were in the original game.

https://www.neogaf.com/threads/mod-that-restores-male-female...

Yes! Thank you! This is actually the perfect example, because that mod wasn't removed and the author was banned after he specifically said he was making the mod for the purpose of upsetting trans people. Even better with the context that he was linking to kiwifarms, a known hotspot for online harassment.

Nothing proves with more certainty that the GP of this thread has it backwards, the removed mods were uploaded with bad intentions.

Lmao that mod is clearly targeted at the worst kind of right-wing snowflakes. People who can't even see a trigger warning without getting incensed and try to legitimize their behavior by saying it's "misinformative," but then dog whistle who they're really talking to with the Pepe frog. Nazis are, by default, weak-sauce; not being able to tolerate something this innocuous is both weak-sauce and perfectly coherent with fascism's inherent insecurity.

You can't claim law of triviality when you rot were the ones that cared enough in the first place to change it. Changing settings back to match reality and original game settings is the only sane approach here, objectively.

> is the only sane approach here, objectively

How is any of this "objective" at all? The whole discussion from beginning to end is very subjective, both ways, but maybe I've missed out on new usage of this word.

> Nazis are, by default, weak-sauce; not being able to tolerate something this innocuous is both weak-sauce and perfectly coherent with facism's inherent insecurity.

I read stuff like this and I can't help but marvel at the irony when we're talking about people getting mad enough at an optional mod to get it banned.

Who's mad? I am not mad that their mod exists, I think they're sad snowflakes. I'm mad that people think removing intolerance from our communities is somehow hypocritical. The paradox of tolerance tells us that a community that tolerates intolerance turns into an intolerant community. Prune out the racists, the fascists, and the bigots at every opportunity or else they will ruin your society. Those who are intolerant should not be granted tolerance.

The trap a lot of the left has fallen into is often defining genuine disagreement over their ideas as "racist", "fascist", or "bigotry". This keeps those ideas from being challenged and refined thus making them ultimately unconvincing. "Tolerance" itself is a very loose concept here that has come to mean mostly the same as "political agreement". There's also no mechanism that I can see for correcting this issue. In this frame, the bar for what constitutes "fascism" keeps getting lower such that even mainstream political positions from 10-15 years ago are being labelled as "fascist" in some circumstances.

None of this seems healthy for the future of left wing thought and is already leading to a backlash (one naturally being called "fascist").

It's not a trap the left falls into. If anything, the left is overzealous in internal tone policing, to the point where activists and organizers wish it would become less of a distraction. You have organizations and individuals of prominence in the US political sphere who are openly and actively try to promote bigoted and fascist talking points and implement them in government, often using long-debunked arguments or outright lies, and the people insisting that these ideas are not bigoted or fascist are either being duped or arguing in bad faith. I do not and will not attribute good faith to reactionary, white-supremacist, ultra-nationalist right-wing movements as we have in the US.

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