How I learned to defeat fascism with the power of love:
Chapter one:
Realizing you cannot stop fascism with the power of love.Chapter two:
The power of incredible violence.Chapter three:\ Not actually doing anything
I don’t think implementing thought police solves any problems, because the same thing could play out if it’s pointed the wrong way. Panel 1 and 3 I agree with the guy. Panel 2 is a disturbance of the peace and panel 4 is the fault of a hateful majority in that area, not the guy.
“free speech” is a thought-terminating cliche for people too lazy to come up with a real argument or plan to stop fascist rhetoric.
Its also a convient fig leaf for fascist movements so they can be defended while incubating in liberal societies
This is like the 3rd or 4th comic from this artist with the same message, same punchline, and same structure. We get it, Jennie.
Then filter/block her and move on instead of policing what she writes.
Block me and move on instead of policing what I removed about.
Do you (not you personally) though?
Yeah. The ones who are capable of getting it already got it before the comics were made. The ones who don’t get it are already lost. Nothing important is being done here. We could all go an entire century without the creation of even more more little bit of trite, sanctimonious political proselytization and the course of human development would be literally 100.0% identical because that’s what happens when you shovel your opinion into a hypersaturated market for that opinion.
It takes a long time to change some people’s minds. Somebody has to try to do it and we shouldn’t discourage them. If you don’t like it, just mute and move on friend.
You should make a comic about it.
Done, took about as long as these did I’m sure
Thought provoking. I’m ascending.
I learned that discourse has “saturated the market” which really only leaves violence or apathy.
It really makes you think.
The problem with those panels, in my opinion, isn’t the defense of free speech itself, it’s ending the conversation with a defense of free speech. This shifts the discussion away from how awful those other ideas are and instead distracts people with a debate over free speech itself.
If you truly want to support a free marketplace of ideas you have to be an active participant, you can’t expect others to pick up the bullhorn for good in your place.
Ironically the ‘paradox’ of ‘Tolerance of intolerance’ kind of argues for people self-selecting into groups which is anti-thetical to the intent lol.
Careful everyone, comics like these can spread dangerous ideas
Promises…
A society that values free speech rejects Mustache’s philosophy. He never gains enough of a following in panel 1, 2, or 3 to be able to enact panel 4.
As soon as we allow ourselves to silence someone, Mustache can use the same argument to justify silencing Black Shirt. When we allow ourselves to suppress an enemy of society, Mustache merely needs to suggest to us that Black Shirt is such an enemy.
The insidious part of fascism is that by the time we get to Panel 4, we are the ones carrying Black Shirt to the gallows.
i really don’t understand this perspective. we aren’t talking about the ability for anybody to silence anyone for any reason, we’re talking specifically about rhetoric calling for the death of human beings. is that not a well defined category of speech we should at least keep an eye on? should we let people actively call for the death of other people, when we know historically that that specific kind of rhetoric can lead to people being put in camps?
like, if somebody’s sole contribution to an platform is doxxing anybody they don’t like, they should be stopped. if they shout death threats in a public forum, they shouldn’t be in that forum. we don’t need to give platforms unchecked power over our lives to put reasonable limitations on conduct for public platforms.
really don’t understand this perspective. we aren’t talking about the ability for anybody to silence anyone for any reason, we’re talking specifically about rhetoric calling for the death of human beings. is that not a well defined category of speech we should at least keep an eye on?
There is a difference between speech and violence. “Calling for the death of a human being” is violence, not speech. The speaker making that call should not be silenced; they should be jailed. And we have a process for doing just that. That process involves far more than someone unilaterally deciding to take away their microphone or ban them from a platform.
That process involves judges, either elected directly, or appointed by elected officials. It involves the community in the form of a jury of one’s peers. It involves open processes and procedures, an appellate process, and a wide variety of protections for the accused.
Banning them from the platform is not a sufficient response to such an act of violence.
riiiight, because the legal system is the perfect tool to deal with social disputes, and we should definitely rely on the slow, expensive, and often deeply flawed rulings of politically appointed officials to manage social media platforms. feeding people into the prison-industrial complex is definitely a more just and effective way of dealing with interpersonal conflict.
of course, that’s ignoring the many far right figures that are currently spreading explicit calls to violence on most major social media platforms, encouraging people to doxx private citizens and weaving elaborate conspiracy theories that position queer people, jewish people, democrats, and people of color as satanic pedophiles that are coming for your kids. we can quibble about what might lead to fascism all we want, but when people start pulling out the swastika and parroting talking points the literal nazi party used in the lead up to their genocide, how can that be anything but fascism? and it doesn’t seem like the legal system is in any way equipped to deal with these kinds of threats, seeming as most of these people are still spreading their bullshit without meaningful consequence to this day.
so you’re basically just asking people not to use systems developed for use within a community, and instead entrust their safety to an outside authority with a terrible track record of actually taking action on threats of violence. cool.
the reality is, that bans, defederations? these things are tools a community can use to manage itself and its relationships autonomously. appealing to some outside force to impose order while insisting that we allow bigots to be bigots on our platforms regardless of the circumstances? nah. not gonna happen. not only is it a bad idea, its just plain not going to happen. if you decide you want to be all buddy buddy with the bigots, defend their right to call me a slur or whatever, you go do that over there, and have fun with your bigot friends. the rest of us will be fine without y’all.
riiiight, because the legal system is the perfect tool to deal with social disputes,
Threats of violence are not social disputes.
The rest of your argument is predicated on this fallacy, so I will ignore it.
oh that’s why you’ll ignore it, huh?
Correct. I am not defending death threats or threats of violence in any way, and I will not allow you to portray me as doing so. Please confine your arguments to forms of speech that do not rise to the level of violent criminality.
Fascism arises when dissent is silenced. Death threats are not dissent.
that’s the thing, we don’t live in a world where death threats and threats of violence are being dealt with in the way you seem to think they are, and community tools like bans are sometimes the only recourse people have that isn’t ruinously expensive, glacially slow, and uncertain to work.
but sure, lets say we aren’t talking about explicit death threats or threats of violence. instead, they just… post the account information of queer tiktok creators, and spend most of their time calling queer people groomers and pedophiles. its not directly a threat of violence, but every time they post something, the accounts they post get harrassed by tons of anonymous followers, one of them figures out where they live, and then start bombarding a real human person with death threats. everybody doing the death threats is anonymous, there’s no way for the legal system to touch them. what do we do? nothing? or somebody’s whole online presence is talking about the great replacement, how the anglo-saxon race is being exterminated, and somewhere down the line we start seeing mass shooters pop up saying nearly the exact same thing in their manifestos. stochastic terrorism. using speech to motivate anonymous observers to take violent action, without calling for violence explicitly. should nothing be done about that? is that not concerning to you?
i think you have a very simplistic definition of what fascism is, and what can or cannot be defined as a threat of violence. there is nuance to what should and should not be considered hate speech, and if you’re defending the institution of slavery, implying queer people are groomers, really doing any sort of bigotry, it can meaningfully cause harm to people even if it isn’t in and of itself a threat of violence. what do we do then? either nothing or put them in jail? because i think that having more than one way of mediating and enacting punishment for misbehavior is a good thing. i think that being able to respond proportionately to assholes without waiting for them to reach the threshold of illegality is a more healthy way of maintaining a community than putting a firm barrier between “dissent” and “actual crime”.
On the other hand, calling for the death of capitalists or Billionaires, and the politicians that enable them should be protected speech. I’d go so far as to say that anything up to with the exception of actually committing physical violence directly upon them and their family should be the most protected speech.
If you are exploiting society so completely, so wantonly that people want to actually kill you, then you SHOULD feel uncomfortable in that society. You should feel the need to hire an army of private security, going outside should be a burden for you because of what you have done.
I couldn’t have said it better.
You have dictatorships you would not identify stereotypically as fascist, yet they silence anyone dangerous by calling them a fascist. Oldest trick in the book.
A very simple test: A f*ing fascist could use the same comic to justify repressing communists in a fascist regime. It just has to replace those “fascists” believes by communist ones.
This is what worries me about large centralized platforms. They normalize the idea that offensive speakers should be silenced, or should be able to silence dissent. They shouldn’t. They should be challenged or ignored. You can block an individual, controlling what you listen to. You can urge others to ignore them. But it should be a cringeworthy act of authoritarianism to lay down a banhammer and block someone from speaking.
The offensive, intolerant asshole should not be banning dissenters; dissenters should not be banning assholes. Any banning anywhere should be seen as deeply troubling, and only done openly, publicly, and with the consent and agreement of the community.
Unilateral control over the process should be seen as fascism.
I am thrilled at the decentralized nature of Lemmy effectively eliminating that capability.
deleted by creator
this isn’t about “offense” or whatever. its specifically about people calling for other people to be removed from society. when is stopping the spread of that specific conduct ever a bad thing. i broadly agree that decentralized platforms are a good thing overall, but we can’t ignore the many ways in which poor moderation make spaces hostile to people, right? or the very real problems that unmoderated, anonymous spaces have with bigotry, CSAM, and other bullshit. i don’t fuckin’ like 4chan, places like that suck balls. not every aspect of our social lives should be governed by some blanket approval for saying whatever the fuck you like whenever the fuck you want, no actual real life social situation plays by those rules. if a person consistently talks about killing jews, or other bigoted bullshit, i don’t want to occupy the same social space as that person, and i want there to be mechanisms in place to stop people like that from bothering people.
this isn’t about “offense” or whatever. its specifically about people calling for other people to be removed from society.
Well, I’ll give you an example of exactly when that is a problem:-
i want there to be mechanisms in place to stop people like that from bothering people.
Your very own statement could be considered a “call for other people to be removed from society”. Specifically, you were calling for “anti semites” to be forced to “stop bothering people”.
Now, you and I might agree that anti-semites don’t bring much of value to the table, but in calling for them to be silenced, we are likely going to impact Palestinians, for example, who arguably have a legitimate grievance that could also be classified as anti-semitism.
The Germans believed they were protecting society when they rounded up Jews, and other undesirables. They raised the same arguments you have. They didn’t believe at the time that they were the mustached man in the comics.
The allies believed they were protecting society when they continued to imprison the homosexuals that Hitler had arrested. They raised the same arguments you have. They didn’t believe at the time that they were the mustached man in the comics.
If we are appalled at what Mustache is saying and doing to the people he considers his enemies, we must refrain from saying and doing the same things to those who offend us. We cannot assume that our adversaries are completely wrong. We each have to consider that we might be the ones wearing the mustaches.
They raised the same arguments you have.
you’re wrong? you’re just wrong. the Nazi’s called for death. i am not. they spoke their desire to see the extermination of millions of people, and then they did it. saying that bigots shouldn’t be able to speak hate on a public platform and saying that people should die are NOT even remotely similar, and are extremely easy to distinguish from one another. we are not, at all times, at risk of becoming fascists because we don’t want people to try organizing pogroms in the modern era.
you’re flattening speech down into this binary choice, where we can either allow everybody to say anything or we cede our right to speech entirely. that has always, and will always be a falsehood. there has never been, at any point in human history, the kind of free speech you seem to think is an intrinsic right. it simply is not how the world has ever worked. if you make threats at people in a public place, you can be made to leave. if you attend a party and scream racist slurs at a guest, you can be made to leave. if you join a club and can’t stop yourself from ranting about jews, you can be made to leave. it is not wrong or authoritarian to expel anti-social weirdos from the places where you socialize.
no community of people is obligated to tolerate bigotry, hatred, and threats, and communities that do tolerate such things are usually shitty places only assholes like to hang out in. it is not some great miscarriage of justice that we are implementing ways of removing assholes from our digital spaces, in the same way we have done so in meatspace since before we had agriculture, and it is not a sign that we’re sliding into fascism. what is a sign that we’re sliding into fascism is platforms empowering extremists to speak their desire to do harm to others into being, allowing them to say their bullshit without meaningful consequence.
the Holocaust started with words. it started with speeches and books and pamphlets, and it culminated in the extermination of millions of human beings. words are powerful, and we must treat them as such. that being said, i am generally opposed to corporate middlemen monopolizing the social spaces we inhabit, that’s why we’re having this conversation here instead of elsewhere. i just think this whole idea, that we ought not ban people from platforms for being bigots, ought not have codes of conduct for our social spaces, is fundamentally at odds with any sort of functional, friendly, welcoming community, and i don’t want to have to sort through racist screeds every time i go on the internet.
the reality is, if you want to cultivate a space that accommodates bigotry and hatred, expect to find only bigots and racists to hang with, because all the nice people are not going to want to visit your Nazi bar.
Remember that there is no paradox of tolerance if you treat it as a social contract instead of a moral issue: Those who do not abide by it are not protected by it.
This assumes there is some clearly defined line of what is intolerance that everyone agrees on. For a while at the company I worked at, just being a white male was considered “intolerant”, so they fired many of them. The irony was not lost on the employees. It was a very oppressive environment and I’m glad it recovered. It’s a famous company that aired some of this dirty laundry publically so you might be able to guess who it is.
Some people are black and white bigots like this comic, but people are stupid binary thinkers and call people out as intolerant who are not overtly bigoted or bigoted at all, but are of the wrong identity or associate with the wrong groups.
This comic is basically a straw man.
There is no paradox of tolerance if you treat it as a social contract. Those who do not abide by the contract are not protected by it.
