AntiFa ate my baby: Today in Tweets

@Leo

We can agree to disagree, but I hope you can see good faith is intended.

No, we really can’t. This is a situation where there is no middle ground. You are either on the side of nazis, or you are on the side of humanity. If you are on the side of humanity, you support crushing nazis with all necessary force, as that is the only way to be rid of them. Otherwise, you are on the side of nazis. Full stop. And yes, I am aware that I am saying that a majority of white Americans, and quite a large number of white Europeans, are nazi sympathizers. Including you.

though them not being fascists and not deserving it would seem possible if it’s ostensibly a free speech protest.

See, that’s exactly the problem; you believe it’s possible for them to be a fascist assembly and not deserve beatings.

Nazi, rather than just a typical Trump supporter.

The only difference is red hats instead of white hoods.

@CleverForAGirl
Were they chanting ‘blood and soil’ at Berkeley, or at all the rallies/protests?

I was arguing that I don’t think going out with the active intention of using force is a good tactic. That’s it. Reasons for that are primarily that it’s not a good way to own over Dems who we might need as art of a long-term solution to the Nazi problem, and also the possibility of targeting people who aren’t Nazis, of extreme violent action from Nazis which could as we’ve seen be very bad in a crowd, of police brutality and risk of imprisonment, and that it’s not the only way to tackle the situation. I’m not clear on what amount of force is being considered acceptable or if there is any limit, again that’s something I asked.

I meant ‘so far’ as in ‘the way it’s panned out so far’, rather than that it’s gone too far. I’m not comfortable with everything that happened, rewatching some of the footage, though. I don’t think the threat of Nazis necessarily makes it right for force to be used against Trump supporters who aren’t with obvious Nazis, though you could argue that it does.

THERE WILL BE NOTHING THAT IS NICE ENOUGH FOR PEOPLE ENTRENCHED IN POSITIONS OF POWER

MERELY SAYING “don’t kill me” IS ENOUGH TO MAKE THEM THINk IT IS TOO FAR

WALKING ACROSS A BRIDGE IS TOO FAR

EXISTING AND DEMANDING HUMAN RIGHTS IS TOO FAR

THEIR GOAL IS TO EXTERMINATE AND ELIMINATE ANYONE WHO IS NOT A WHITE PERSON BECAUSE THEY BELIEVE THAT THE UNITED STATES EXISTS ONLY FOR THE WHITE RACE AND ANYTHING ELSE IS GENOCIDE COMITED AGAINST WHITE PEOPLE

ASKING THOSE WHO ARE IN DIRECT DANGER OF PHYSICAL HARM BY THESE PEOPLE TO SIT DOWN AND BE NICE OR THEY WON’T BE HELPED IS FUCKING GROSS DISGUSTING AND ENABLING OF WHITE SUPREMACY AND FACISM

ARE YOU PAYING ENOUGH FUCKING ATTENTION NOW OR DO WE NEED TO REPEAT LITERALLY EVERY FUCKING ARGUMENT WE’VE THROWN AT YOU AGAIN BEFORE YOU REALIZE YOU ARE REPEATING BULLSHIT CENTIST BOTH SIDERISM THAT IS ONLY GOING TO ALLOW THIS SHIT TO GET WORSE

@Leo, we’re hip to you. You’re restating the same crap you’ve been saying for…days? Wow. Yeah. Circular from the beginning. And you’re doing it all in a way that doesn’t violate the comment moderation policy so that there’s no immediate reason to discipline or ban you. You’re CLEARLY playing games. I don’t know why, and I don’t care. Stop. We don’t believe you.

Leo, fwiw, I think you are arguing in good faith but I think – in the reality we’re living in – you’re barking up some wrong trees (as others have pointed out with loads of examples).

a) wherever and whenever the nazis gather, it is 99.999% likely that they will attack vulnerable people, especially if there is no force ranged against them. antifa are thus 99.999% right if they show up with the knowledge that they are going to hit.
b) no matter what happens, the news will be spun like a ferris wheel in whatever direction suits those writing the news, so in practice the only thing antifa could do to avoid being blamed is not show up (and probably not even then).

I just wanted to note one detail: you said that

The US can’t build camps tomorrow, the rest of the world would be outraged

but the US already has built camps and nobody says much: reservations are deliberately starved of resources, healthcare, education and pretty much everything, with the ongoing goal of reducing the native american nations to an invisible silence hidden behind a couple of picturesque photo-ops (and if they protest a pipeline endangering them, they are attacked and maligned); and the US ‘law enforcement’, ‘justice’ and prison system is set up so that oops-by-sheer-coincidence it drains resources especially from mostly BAME communities and uses a very significant number of black people as slave labour. They may not get called “camps” but they do the same job.

I probably share quite a few of your feelings, but I think those feelings are probably misguiding us.

Nazi sympathisers

I think ‘sympathisers’ is redundant. You might not actively take part in the activities, but that doesn’t make you a sympathiser it makes you a lazy Nazi.

Leo says:

Specific examples, which I have given, aren’t hypotheticals, they are facts.

No, you are building hypotheticals out of bits and pieces of real-world events. You see a thing on the news and, rather than doing the work to find out what really went down or what lies you’re being told, you either accept the given scenario or make one up.

You don’t know anything, yet you imagine you’re better situated than the people on the ground to decide which strategic goal everyone should be working towards and what tactics are best for it. The very model of a modern armchair general, you are.

Nor is it about whether they deserve it or not

Liar.

Maybe the fascists are just trying to look edgy? What if they’re old ladies? Maybe their weaponry is merely symbolic? What if they haven’t openly advocated genocide? Maybe they’re not immediate threats?

You’ve come up with a rather lot of excuses for why fascists might not deserve to be met with violent resistance. And these are, like everything, treated hypothetically by you. These things are not hypothetical. Not to a great many people. And thus your endless suppositions, and the ignorance they’re predicated on, are of no use to anyone except the fascists.

So shut the fuck up. And go away.

Oh, and Leo? Read this while you’re shutting the fuck up and going away. It was written just for people like you.

@Leo
Nazis by definition are an immediate threat to marginalized groups when they plan these “free speech” rallies they show up armed and intending to inflict injury or death upon either counter protesters or marginalized people in the community,
if you go to one of these “free speech” rallies (in reality a preplanned offensive paramilitary action against civilian targets) then you are either there to support them or potential collateral damage and its the fault of the nazis for lying abut their premeditated violence.

Want to know how we can tell what there motives are?
They refuse to show up if they can not be armed to the teeth,
and more obviously they fucking talk abut there bloody motives and objectives and intentional deceptions.

If police actually did their supposed job and actually prevent nazis from attacking people antifa would not need to do it for them,
and Berkley was a very clear case of defense of another, if milo was allowed to speak then the students he would have doxed on stage would have been forced to flee the collage or face harassment, violence and possibly death, thats not speculation thats what happened at the other campuses he spoke at.

And you know what? At this point I’m seriously thinking that the laws and customs of war should be used here since it actually covers this stuff.

Voluntary human shields lose the protected status normally afforded civilians and become valid targets,
the false nature of the advertising for these rallies could constitute the deliberate placing of involuntary human shields to protect combatants this would be a war crime,
the failure to wear an identifying symbol that can be recognized from a distance is also a war crime and can be punished by summery execution.

In other words: nazis planning violent action and calling it a “free speech rally” shuld be tried for war crimes by military tribunal,
people showing up to a planned violent action with the intent of shielding nazis are valid targets,
nazis not wearing swastikas and engaging in combat can be summarily executed for war crimes.

Antifa for there part are lawful combatants clearly marking themselves by their all black uniform and mask and acting to protect civilians and medics bearing the protected sign of the red cross from unlawful enemy combatants,
counter protesters constitute civilian noncombatants as they intend to peacefully protest and do not act as a shield for antifa but need to be protected by antifa as they are targets of the nazi combatants,
keep in mind nazi violence does not end once the rally is over and the best way to prevent it with out resorting to lethal action (taking prisoners is not a possibility for antifa given the lack of suitable detention facilities) is to brake there will to do violence by forcing them to retreat either by intimidating them or failing that engaging them in direct combat and forcing them from the field.

Leo I’m gonna post this under the assumption (which I actually ain’t clinging to anymore) that you’re still trying to argue in good faith.

You can see that your shit is causing distress and anger among most of us. Can’t you draw conclusions regarding what it might mean about your rhetoric ? Even if you think you’re arguing in good faith, you have to see that it’s certainly not having the effect that “good faith” usually has.

Yet you’re doubling down. Worse, you’re actively ignoring the signs of distress and anger, and gleefully causing some more in the process.

Don’t you think that looks a lot like trolling ?

Maybe my crime here is being too soft, I don’t know, but it doesn’t seem the worst possible thing to be

You’re being soft about it, yes, @Leo. That’s okay, everyone has different tolerance levels and awareness levels.

You’re being soft about it because you can afford to be. I don’t know your situation over there, but I’m betting that you aren’t in one of the groups that is being threatened with genocide. You can afford to say “violence makes us look bad, we’re better off if we can maintain the moral high ground of avoiding violence – it’ll attract more people to our cause.”

There are many people here who can’t do that. These white supremacists can and will brutalize and murder; they have been doing so. They’re ready to start their genocide, right now. When you say “we shouldn’t use violence against them”, you’re telling these people – including the people literally on this blog replying to you – to lay down and die for the sake of tactics and optics. To bleed for the sake of your strategic opinions.

I’m not being hyperbolic in saying this. This is the actual situation in North America. You’re suggesting that the lives of the very people you’re talking to are bargaining chips in this war, and you’re suggesting that they should be spent.

So yeah, you’re making people sort of angry.

The price of a white person being soft in this is that a young muslim or black child hardens. A vulnerable person, barraged by hate and threatened with death, looking for support and sees only a throng of humanity arrayed against them. Divisions draw deeper, and the problem worsens.

It’s okay if you can’t fight them yourself – there are a lot of ways to support the fight against the literal Nazis. This isn’t one of them.

http://static.dhne.ws/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/012_fluttershy_cloud_cushion_vector_by_arctickiwi-d4ty8u1.png

I’ve stated that I think it’s justified and tactically Ok to use immediate self-defence, and to defend others, so protecting a synagogue that was under attack would come under that.

At which point does the violence become immediate self-defence in this case? Do the Nazis have to get to the synagogue and start lighting it on fire before it’s okay to beat them? Do we have to wait and see if they attack the people near/inside the synagogue before it’s okay to beat them?

I ask because in Charlottesville there were antifa who stepped in to prevent Nazis from getting at St. Paul’s Memorial Church, and the clergy and folks who were peacefully gathered there. But apparently that violence was “pre-emptive” and “bad optics” for you… since the antifa succeeded in preventing the Nazis from attacking the church, I presume? We just have to wait until the Nazis start killing people before we can physically fight them, I suppose… Wait, no, they’ve already done that. But I suppose we can’t know if they are “real” Nazis until they each individually kill people. Just gotta wait until then.

You know, Leo, I’m actually inclined toward sympathy toward the position that violence is bad. I held that position myself as recently as that incident where Richard Spencer was punched in the face by antifa.

But my arguments against violence were more substantive than yours. “It looks bad!” wasn’t one of them. No, I’m not going to tell you what they were. I’m still of the opinion that violence is almost always bad, and not because of optics.

I have come around to the position that violence against Nazis and fascists when they organize is justified. Not only justified, but the most morally defensible response. When Nazis get together to march and rally, it’s morally defensible to stand there and conduct nonviolent resistance. However, it’s more so to get up in their grille and punch them in the face.

We all do what we’re capable of doing, and not all of us can be antifa, for physical or psychological reasons. I’m certainly not young enough or able enough to get into a street brawl with Nazis. That’s why I’m grateful that there are people who are young enough and able enough to do that, so I don’t have to try. Antifa put their own safety on the line to protect those who can’t do that, and then you stand there and wag your finger and scold them about how their tactics are not literally ideal and how their optics are bad.

These reasons on which you keep leaning are really, really thin. “It looks bad” is the most milquetoast critique of antifa. There’s no moral grounding there. There’s no logical underpinning. It’s an incredibly lazy criticism. “Your choices are not ideal” is even worse. You are intellectually lazy and your arguments reflect that. You’re holding up a shield and it turns out to be made of a single layer of paint with nothing behind it. It’s super-easy to punch through because there’s nothing there.

I would have thought this method would be too error prone, personally, lots of Trump supporters have MAGA hats, and some types of force such as thrown objects don’t allow for that much specific targeting.

There are two things wrong with this. First, Trump supporters are fascists, definitionally. The basis of Trump’s appeal is racist fascism, and nobody puts on a MAGA hat without being at least okay with that. If you’re okay with fascism, you’re a fascist, full stop.

Second, anyone who marches with Nazis is a Nazi. So someone marching with Nazis in a MAGA hat is easy to identify as a Nazi. Ta-da!

Your hand-wringing over how haaaaaaaaaaaaaaard it is to identify Nazis is about as logically robust as your obsession with optics. Nazis don’t hide during their marches. They get out there and heil Trump. They carry Nazi flags and wear Nazi armbands. They have Nazi tattoos. It ain’t hard to peg them. You want to claim it’s so, so, so incredibly difficult to identify someone with a Nazi armband as a Nazi, and yet you want to be seen as arguing in good faith. That’s not a good-faith argument, there.