Comment by smithcoin
7 hours ago
because once you attempt to start to apply any label it becomes more and more vague. If I am a black man from South Africa who hates white people for perpetuating the Apartheid, am I welcome or am I a racist? If I am a man who's own father transitioned to being a woman and I no longer feel comfortable around trans-people because I lost my 'father figure', am I a transphobe or am I welcome? I understand these are deliberately obtuse examples. I bring them up because I never know where on the spectrum the line is drawn for these labels yet people will gladly declare somebody a 'nazi' because their dad watches Fox News. Even asking the question "when does somebody on the right go far enough to be considered a fascist?" often is met with the retort "defending nazis makes you a nazi".
I'd be curious to know your answers to these because they seem rather obvious to me..
Just because some people calling someone a nazi are wrong doesn't mean everyone calling someone a nazi is wrong.
We both know what the 'answer' is because we are normal people who understand nuance - a skill many people have lost as they have come to have their ideals defined by their identity, not the other way around.
> Just because some people calling someone a nazi are wrong doesn't mean everyone calling someone a nazi is wrong.
Sometimes they aren't just wrong, they are the loudest.
From this reply your answer could still be read either ways and that someone is still a nazi regardless of how loud someone is.
Those of the conservative persuasion love to use the loudness of some people to invalidate all condemnations of nazis, right or wrong.
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True enough, but the likelihood that the person calling another person a Nazi is correct about the other person is so low that it’s much more likely they’re wrong rather than right. (This is true just statistically speaking.)
Absolutes are not usually very compelling nor very interesting, just as high improbabilities are usually neither compelling nor interesting.