American Politics Discussion Thread

[Amicalola]

But your kind only deserves to be put behind bars, not be invited to polite debates.

I totally agree with Adrienler. Being tolerant to the intolerant is the death of tolerance.

No, that just makes you no better than those you claim to oppose.  This is just might-makes-right.

You combat speech you don't like in the marketplace of ideas and free discourse.  Not by banning it.  That just makes you what you seek to destroy.

The people on the "right side of history" are usually those advocating freedom and liberty, not destruction and silence.

This is a naive viewpoint that ignores most recent political history. Combatting intolerance by kindly asking it to stop, or by ethically debating it, is a fool's game. Such intolerant people typically have no problem circumventing laws, free speech, and democracy themselves. Ask Hitler, since we've been talking about Nazis recently.


Which, as a sentence, inclines me to agree that this subforum should be closed. Debating the merits of actual Nazis is not a valuable discussion.

[BING_XI_LAO]

Which, as a sentence, inclines me to agree that this subforum should be closed. Debating the merits of actual Nazis is not a valuable discussion.

Who is a Nazi here? Pindrich seemed like a pretty standard Latin American nationalist, and I'm at worst a generic fascist, and I'd be equally happy with a monarchy or a populist democracy. One of my main news sources is Caroline Glick - she's an Israeli Zionist nationalist. I've been banned before from a Nazi discord server for arguing that Donald Trump wasn't a Jewish puppet. I just asked another Russian I chat to online about the Donbass, and he also happens to be Jewish. Meanwhile in the Ukrainian conflict itself there are actual Neo-Nazis at work complete with mass-murder incidents, WW2-era flags, and genocidal chants - and they're on the Ukrainian side.

Anyhow so I asked this Russian I know about the situation in Ukraine - I wanted to know why the Russians of Luhansk and Donetsk chose to rebel. Here's his reply - important quotes are:

"okay, well imagine you're not allowed to use english for any official documents including accounting, government documents"
"the nationalists burned 30-something russian activists alive in odessa and none of them got arrested"
"they agreed to this peace deal which required they pass laws to recognize those republics and give them autonomy, Kiev did not do that"
"they lustrated everyone pro russian from the whole government, every MP and down to petty government workers, like teachers. If they were pro russian they were fired"
"they tell the Russians in Ukraine to leave and go to Russia"
"my wife is from donetsk, her house got shot by ukrainan tank"

Also more about the Ukrainian Neo-Nazis:

"the problem is that the radical nationalists, which are descended from Galicians, they are literally nazis  and they don't hide it. They do heil hitler salutes, they wear Nazi emblems on their military units like the wolfsangel and their veterans fought alongside Hitler and they are proud of it."
"These are the people in western Ukraine who are now in charge of the intelligence services, the police and head the military. Zelensky cannot take a path to peace because he will be overthrown by these guys if he does. America openly helped fund these people back before the 2014 coup, they were  paramilitary forces disguised as  "hunting clubs". In the 2014 protests they were the ones who started sniping everyone to inflame the protest and they were the ones who stormed government buildings rather than just protesting outside."

So if you people want to shut down Nazism, I have an alternative suggestion. Instead of locking the thread, you should just ban people from expressing support for the Nazi-infiltrated Kiev coup regime and its campaign of ethnic cleansing.
You can't tolerate the intolerant, right?

[BING_XI_LAO]

Incidentally, actual Nazis don't support Vladimir Putin. They hate him because of his Jewish connections and because he allows internal migration within Russia of turkic muslims into the ethnic European part of the country.

[T-hawk]

Sorry, I should have been more specific. How would you have dealt with them in a debate like in this forum?

Same as I'm dealing with the Covid tyrants and thought-police authoritarians here. Call out how they're destroying human rights in their misguided zeal to feel somehow safer or secure.

As for the discussion about deleting this forum or thread - if anyone doesn't like it, you don't have to read it, but you don't get to decide what other people can or can't discuss.

[Jowy]

Sorry, I should have been more specific. How would you have dealt with them in a debate like in this forum?

Same as I'm dealing with the Covid tyrants and thought-police authoritarians here.  Call out how they're destroying human rights in their misguided zeal to feel somehow safer or secure.

As for the discussion about deleting this forum or thread - if anyone doesn't like it, you don't have to read it, but you don't get to decide what other people can or can't discuss.

Are you then in favor of more government control over private entities to force them to not delete threads like these?

[Miguelito]

This is what happened in many european countries in the 1920s and 1930s. They were tolerant towards enemies of democracy (facist, communists etc.). In the end that tolerance helped bring down democracy and with that the freedoms and tolerance it should provide. This is not a critic, I'm just curious. How would you have dealt with them in that time period?

What happens when the democracy is the fascism?  Hitler was democratically elected, of course.

What happens when a democratic majority votes to exterminate the Jews, or the dissenters, or the unvaccinated, or whatever other subset?

We discussed this a while ago upthread.  The best answer we've got is a strong constitution and court system to protect the rights of that minority.  Every time you seek to destroy those rights when you're on the popular side, you're destroying those rights that you're going to need for the time when you find yourself on the unpopular side.

To bring this back to the topic of American Politics Discussion I have but two comments:

1. Charriu, do you have an example of a 20s/30s (no, actually any era) country that was too tolerant towards communists and in turn lost its democracy? It's a bit unsavoury to throw those who were the first to be sent to the concentration camps in the same bin with the fascists who put them there. Not saying that a victory of the western communist parties would have been a desirable (or at any point probable) outcome - although arguably preferable to the fascists. But if you look at where communists have succeded historically, it has been generally under intense repression, and typically nondemocratic governments (China, Vietnam, Cuba, ... the one exception is arguably Russia itself, where the repression had just ended).
   
2. Hitler was not democratically elected and the nazis (and their coalition partners) never had a majority in a democratically elected national parlament. Hitler was appointed as chancellor by Germany's conservative (ie monarchist) elite (ab-)using of presidential emergency powers when they felt they needed somebody with popular backing in order to keep governing.
   

[T-hawk]

Are you then in favor of more government control over private entities to force them to not delete threads like these?

No. That's not government business at all. The private entity who owns the platform (effectively BRickAstley who owns the server) can choose to carry or delete whatever he wants. If anyone including myself disagrees with the platform's choices, the answer is competition, to find or start another platform. (What I meant before was indirect - nobody else here gets to decide what anyone can or can't discuss on BRick's platform.)

[Bobchillingworth]

I would far rather read posts by people who are being rude to each other because they have different views on historical analysis and are arguing about which is better, than the half of your posts which consist of condescension, calling others propagandised, and citing the authority of Western media/intellectual class. Pindrich's views are pretty common in Latin America but apparently that doesn't fit in the "international community". Also the antagonism he received, more than he dished out, was fine too apparently.

You're one of the most butthurt posters in this thread and you shamelessly cite ideological difference as well as disagreement on current affairs as among the reasons for a ban, it's pretty stupid that you have mod powers over this thread.

For a self-described troll, you're very sensitive; if it would make you feel better, please feel free to respond to this post with another fatuous jeremiad I won't read.



@ T-Hawk, rather than debate the philosophy of whether an absolute freedom of speech exists for a privately-owned website with a primarily non-American audience, which was founded by a Canadian and purports to promote "respect" and "friendship", or the morality of RB hosting Russian war propaganda, consider the case for banning Pindrich as a simple cost-benefit proposition with the mindset of enlightened self-interest:

Pindrich did not have an established presence on RB, having joined only a few days ago. He participated in no games, contributed only a single half-hearted post to any gaming-related threads, and immediately zeroed in on the politics thread, where he proceeded to insult established members of the community and promote Russia's invasion of Ukraine. As you are well aware, RB was founded as a gaming community, and the handful of explicitly "off topic" politics threads fall well beyond the purview of traditional community dialogue. Pindrich being removed does not detract from the quality of the site in the slightest, and conversely improves it by removing a troll who served no purpose but to antagonize valued members of the forum; several users have attested to this fact. By comparison, I did not ban Bing, despite having every inclination to do so, because he has actually participated in RB's core gaming-related functions, and has generally managed to just skirt the boundary of outright hate speech.

On that topic, it would be ultimately deleterious to the reputation and therefore health of the community if RB became known as a dumping grounds for racist tirades, foreign disinformation, war promotion, neo-Nazi apologia, etc., which would surely cause numerous members to disengage and abandon the site out of disgust, to say nothing of potentially drawing the undesirable attention of various outside entities. Such a morass of toxic discourse would ultimately fulfill no function other than serving as a monument to the tolerance of degeneracy, which in truth doesn't seem to me like a particularly worthwhile endeavor. Also, there's no shortage of alternative avenues for people to argue, troll, and/or shill for totalitarian regimes to their heart's content, so I imagine Pindrich will get along just fine without having RB to pollute. Personally, I'd prefer we simply nuked the various politics threads altogether, and never recreated them.

As a final note, there's nothing stopping Pindrich from just creating a new account, if he actually sincerely wants to contribute to and/or participate in anything actually relevant to video gaming. It takes all of a minute to create a profile here; I spent way more time writing this stupid post.

[superdeath]

As a final note, there's nothing stopping Pindrich from just creating a new account, if he actually sincerely wants to contribute to and/or participate in anything actually relevant to video gaming. It takes all of a minute to create a profile here; I spent way more time writing this stupid post.

IP bans dont exist? Or is that only for Brick?

[Bobchillingworth]

If that exists at all on the site, it's an admin-only function; also, IP bans are irrelevant with VPNs, which I suspect Pindrich was using anyway.