this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2023
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[–] [email protected] 117 points 1 year ago (13 children)
[–] [email protected] 89 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Someone somewhere said something smart:

View Tolerance as a contract. If someone is tolerant of others, tolerate them too. But if someone is intolerant towards others, they don't get to be tolerated either.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I really dont understand how anyone can look at the modern era of politics without a consideration for game theory, it is so useful for resolving these more nebulous or philosophical idea when it comes to thought conflicts. If your 'opponent' is constantly escalating and you arent responding, you are functionally forfeiting. and we all know the fascists are escalating as often and as hard as they can. if you seek peace or de-escalation you have to negotiate, and they wont do that. if you seek neutral ground you have to respond with equal escalation. and if you want to win you have to apply overwhelming force.

most conflicts in politics are not zero sum like this so its not a useful tool most of the time, but fascists are literally out for the destruction of democracy by definition, its existential by nature.

[–] Cabrio 12 points 1 year ago

It gets easier to comprehend when it's tempered by the knowledge of global literacy rates. In the US, for example, 54% of adults read below a 6th grade comprehension level.

More than half the planet can barely analyse the nuances between two similar statements, let alone comprehend anything that takes a formal education to learn. As a result many people lack the communicative skills that enable us to avoid conflict because they literally lack a conceptual understanding of the many words they don't know or understand correctly.

Hell, try even explaining concepts like context and nuance to many people and their eyes glaze over. I'd like to think it's a largely fixable problem due to insufficient education, but another side of me remembers all my classmates in highschool who failed English.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Ah, you get what you give rule.

[–] Cabrio 6 points 1 year ago

AKA: Fuck around and find out.

[–] CannaVet 11 points 1 year ago

If it's the same writing I'm thinking of I'll try to remember to link it when I get home.

"Tolerance isn't an ideal, it's a contract you're automatically entered into at birth. The contract protects all involved who agree to the contract, but if you break the binds of the contract you are no longer entitled to it's protections. To be intolerant of an intolerant person does not break ones commitment to the contract because the intolerant person is no longer protected by the contract. "

Paraphrased AF

[–] BornVolcano 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

These people never seem to realize that even at its most basic level, ensuring equal rights and freedoms requires a level of forfeiting individual freedoms. In order for everyone to have equal right to physical safety, you forego your freedom to punch them in the face without consequence.

These people go to talk about democracy, describe anarchy, then get upset when reality doesn't meet their expectations. Your expectations don't meet reality, bud.

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[–] [email protected] 94 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (8 children)

Random person: Hey Hitler, can you please stop doing the Holocaust.
Hitler: Nein.
Random person: Damn, guess I can't do anything. If I used force to stop Hitler from committing a genocide I would be just as bad, because everyone knows killing a Nazi who wants to kill every Jew and killing an innocent Jewish person are equal moral acts.

I honestly don't understand how people think like this. All they do is enable fascism and the imperial ambitions of more aggressive nations. As long as we live in a world with sovereign nations, some of those nations may do something extremely wrong that requires a war to stop, and that doesn't mean you just let them do it. Ultimately, war is bad but genocide is worse and sometimes sacrifices have to be made (exclusion existing for nuclear war, which would render humanity and most of life on Earth extinct).

[–] [email protected] 47 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Neoliberalism is how people think like this. In order to stop the wave of strikes, protests, and violent demonstrations for workers rights the capitalist ruling class started heavily pushing the doctrine that "All acts of violence are always morally wrong". They indoctrinate children into it through the education system and mass media. The intent was to stall the progress of workers rights movements in the long term, and it worked exactly as they intended.

[–] TotallynotJessica 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The biggest thing people don't understand is that governments exerting control necessitates violence, as laws are only recommendations otherwise.

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago (1 children)

People have taken the line "violence is not the answer" to the extreme. It is true that violence is rarely the answer. However, there are times when violence is the only answer, because words will literally never work.

[–] Canadian_dalek 35 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Violence is the last answer, when all avenues of negotiation have failed

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago

Similar energy:

"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Thank you for expressing my sentiment in a much more articulate (and concise) manner.

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[–] Anti_Weeb_Penguin 68 points 1 year ago (8 children)

"Germany plz stop occupying Poland"

[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago (1 children)

More like "Germany plz stop occupying Czechoslovakia".

Much of Europe celebrated the Munich Agreement, as they considered it a way to prevent a major war on the continent. Adolf Hitler announced that it was his last territorial claim in Northern Europe. Today, the Munich Agreement is widely regarded as a failed act of appeasement, and the term has become "a byword for the futility of appeasing expansionist totalitarian states."

"Ah, darts. We didn't appease the discourse hard enough. You can keep Czechoslovakia if you pinky-promise not to invade any more countries! If you do, we'll be forced, to, uh, you'll see, and you better believe we'll do it!" (Narrator: They didn't, in fact, do anything when Germany invaded Poland).

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It was a whole bunch of that.

  • Remilitarization of the Rhineland.

  • Anschluß of Austria.

  • The Sudetenland.

  • The actual invasion of Czechoslovakia.

Nazi Germany really pulled "whatcha gonna do about this, bitch?" and got away with it for a surprisingly long time.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Appeasement doesn't work. It did not work out for European powers, it did not work for Stalin, and more recently it did not work with Crimea/Ukraine.

Yet every time a portion of the population will wholeheartedly support appeasement policies out of what I can only assume to be a mix of abhorrent cowardice and a pathological compulsion to submit to authority. I can only imagine the kind of fucked-up childhood these people lived, to make them so afraid of fighting back even when they're the ones holding the bigger stick.

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[–] BornVolcano 18 points 1 year ago (3 children)

"If you could stop killing people by the millions in a mass cultural genocide, that would be great. Thx."

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[–] [email protected] 46 points 1 year ago (6 children)

The nice way to beat fascism is to make it less appealing. When families live in precarity or in poverty, they start looking to blame someone. Sometimes it's obvious, like billionaires forcing workers to pee in bottles.

In response, the affluent elite utilize their resources to create a propaganda campaign to blame scarcity on already-marginalized groups (in the US and UK, the rising genocide of transfolk is an example). Hangry communities feeling insecure + Tucker Carlson spewing hatred every night leads to fascist action.

Note that it works because its instinctive. We don't like living in societies with more than a hundred people, even when it means we get infrastructure like running potable water or internet or electricity or food at our grocery stores so we don't have to farm and hunt, ourselves. We actually have to train ourselves to live and let live, and not start a centuries-long family feud every time someone cuts us off on the freeway.

Social safety nets and better standards of living can pull people out of poverty and precarity, so they don't feel they have to begrudge everyone outside their front door.

Otherwise, we're going to keep trying to organize labor, and in response, the companies are going to try to distract with hate campaigns. Remember Trump commandeered the GOP in 2015 and 2016 because he gave permission to hate while the other candidates wanted to just continue to quietly oppress with code-worded fears. Even if we quash Trump, they'll find new Mussolini-wanabes to back and worship, and eventually they'll start a civil war.

If we don't want the civil war, we need to make shit less bad for the 80% living paycheck-to-paycheck (or worse) and we need to reform elections so that their outcomes are better informed by the interests of the public (not the elite). Or at least that's what CIA analysts (retired) interviewed on PBS think.

Once civil war breaks out, though, or they're harassing marginalized people and committing hate crimes, yeah, feel free to [REDACTED] off the face of the earth. And anytime a law is passed or a rule is adjudicated that retracts a civil right, remember that is violence.

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[–] whaleross 41 points 1 year ago

Contemporary Untermench Nazi Toilet Stains: We're going to terrorize innocent people and threaten them with violence and jump them simply because they exist and we're gonna celebrate past genocides with flags and marches and then we will overthrow the government and create the third reich with even more atrocities and and and...!!

Everybody else: Well, we're going to fight you every step of the way and respond to your violence if necessary.

C.U.N.T.S: SO MUCH FOR THE TOLERANT LEFT!! I'M ENTITLED TO MAH OPINION!!1! YOUR OPPRESSING ME!!¤#!!! 😨😰😥😢😭😱😖😣😞😓😩😫😤😡😠🤬👿

[–] WolfhoundRO 27 points 1 year ago (7 children)

I also remember how we got to WW2 by appeasing the rising fascism instead of debating and disassembling it word for word. If we need to get to the physical violence and war to fight the evil, then we failed the early stages of disproving and debating why it's evil. And then, just like now, its mere idea will rear ist ugly head

[–] McJonalds 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

it's that you have to disprove it to everyone. the ideology that "our tribe is better than theirs" is a cancer in and of itself so the more people think that and are programmed to tell others the same thing, the harder you have to work you suppress it

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago

"I want to take away your human rights."
"Actually that is bad so can you please not do so?"
"Oh I see it now, you're right, thanks for educating me!"

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Fascism was not defeated in WW2 only Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Japan. Everyone forgot about fascist Spain and Portugal. What's more they even made deals with them. My country was left alone to suffer because the war was never against fascism.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago

Better to see WW2 as a war against fascist expansionism. But yes, Spain and Portugal were left to their own devices, and because of that, millions suffered under the rule of Franco and Salazar.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago

I can get people wanting a "one-size fits all" solution where we peacefully resolve all problems and the violent one are obviously evil.

But the unfortunate thing is, you do have to fight for "the right beliefs", and yes the right beliefs are technically subjective and this could be abused. But there's just no alternative to taking a specific stance and physically fighting for it no matter what.

[–] WorldieBoi 18 points 1 year ago (8 children)

Yeah fascism really ended in 1945 /s

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Millions of Nazis were permanently cured of fascism through the noble efforts of the Allies. :)

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

You are making jokes about it but there is actually a measurement to proof this: a lot of former fascists got high positions in post war Germany in politics, economy, jurisdiction, media, ... and if a former fascist gets an influential position in a liberal democracy like post war Germany, there is no doubt they are cured. /s (if not obvious)

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

I heard this claim somewhere that the reason why Neville Chamberlain agreed to it was because UK was nowhere close to being ready for war. Something along the lines of having been instructed to secure peace at all cost.

In retrospect it's easy to see the Munic Agreement as a mistake, but I have to admit that I am curious if he had any real alternative.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

The UK was nowhere close to being ready for war, but in truth, neither was Germany. Chamberlain made his decision with noble intentions, but in retrospect, even just strategically, it was still the wrong decision.

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[–] Hextic 13 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Politically motivated threats of brutal physical violence covers pretty much every war ever. Much to broad a definition

[–] MostlyBirds 26 points 1 year ago

Violence against fascists just sounds like plain old self-defense to me.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The only way to beat shitty people is to prove that you're better at whatever dumbass game they're playing than them. Evangelicals? Just pretend to be a DesNat/fundie. When someone is being violent towards you, the only way to "win" is by returning it 10 fold. Their worldview is based on superiority, do not let them delude themselves and others.

[–] CannaVet 6 points 1 year ago

I saw a dude with nazi tats on the bus today and while I didn't hit him what I told him after he got all huffy and in my face for saying "fuck you nazi" would probably get me moderated. But it involved a famous Inglorious Bastards reference and how it would be the centerpiece at a party I'd be arranging if he touched me.

[–] BornVolcano 9 points 1 year ago

"Correcting a broken bone out of alignment is... Strategically re-aligning through use of force to snap it back into position in order to enable proper healing?

That's literally breaking a bone again."

I'm trusting the doctors more than you on this one, buddy

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