This isn’t my story, but it’s been posted dozens of times if you want to look it up.
Guy is in his local pub. Two new guys come in. They don’t seem to be offensive, but the bartender screams at them to get the fuck out.
The bartender explains that those two are part of the local Nazi clique. How the Nazis work is to have two or three guys come to a place and become regulars. After a couple of weeks, they bring in four or five more guys. Then those guys bring in their buddies, and all of a sudden the regulars don’t want to come in any more and, without noticing, it’s now a Nazi bar.
It’s neat how your rebuttal was to something entirely different from what you were responding to.
It’s not that your comment wasn’t valuable in and of itself. But strictly as a rebuttal to “people go overboard by calling people who make them sad a Nazi”, the idea that we should correctly call out actual blatant low-instance Nazi behaviour as Nazi behaviour isn’t a rebuttal so much as it is a speech. This is question-ducking like I haven’t seen outside of politics.
“Hypothetical people misuse the word nazi” is a very small problem, especially in today’s context. You are wasting time and energy and making yourself look like a nazi defender, even if you are acting somehow in good faith.
The argument you are making often comes up as a distraction. Someone will be like “The republicans wanting to put out-groups into camps is seems like a nazi thing to do” and someone like you will pop in with “well actually” and it’s not helpful. Unless you want to keep people unfocused and bickering so they can’t actually organize and cohere around fighting the villains
This is why you call them all Nazis.
This isn’t my story, but it’s been posted dozens of times if you want to look it up.
Guy is in his local pub. Two new guys come in. They don’t seem to be offensive, but the bartender screams at them to get the fuck out.
The bartender explains that those two are part of the local Nazi clique. How the Nazis work is to have two or three guys come to a place and become regulars. After a couple of weeks, they bring in four or five more guys. Then those guys bring in their buddies, and all of a sudden the regulars don’t want to come in any more and, without noticing, it’s now a Nazi bar.
It’s neat how your rebuttal was to something entirely different from what you were responding to.
It’s not that your comment wasn’t valuable in and of itself. But strictly as a rebuttal to “people go overboard by calling people who make them sad a Nazi”, the idea that we should correctly call out actual blatant low-instance Nazi behaviour as Nazi behaviour isn’t a rebuttal so much as it is a speech. This is question-ducking like I haven’t seen outside of politics.
“Hypothetical people misuse the word nazi” is a very small problem, especially in today’s context. You are wasting time and energy and making yourself look like a nazi defender, even if you are acting somehow in good faith.
The argument you are making often comes up as a distraction. Someone will be like “The republicans wanting to put out-groups into camps is seems like a nazi thing to do” and someone like you will pop in with “well actually” and it’s not helpful. Unless you want to keep people unfocused and bickering so they can’t actually organize and cohere around fighting the villains
The way I look at it, we’ve got real Nazis out here, right now.
So if some idiot calls their roommate a ‘nazi’ because the that person hogs the shower, it really doesn’t matter.
People know the difference between an actual murderer and someone saying, for example, Taylor Swift ‘murdered’ a song.
Misusing words is a minor thing to worry about at this point.