I never liked the analogy.
Anywhere that is accepting of Nazis becomes a Nazi place. Probably why the church is infested with them.
Is every place that accepts socialists a socialist place? Every place with queer folk a gay place?
I had a formerly liberal friend go down a dark path, so I invited them over for dinner with my queer, socialist pals to try to show them a sense of community and opinions that were lacking in their online echo chamber. Did my place become a nazi house?
It’s about acceptance.
If people accept nazis at the bar it becomes a nazi bar. Common it’s not that hard to understand.
My shower thought wasn’t that hard to understand either, which was about taking control of spaces rather than treating a nazi like the single drop that spoils the batch.
If you carefully read my comment, to your comment, you might have something to answer instead of trying to shifting the goalpoast to your shower thought.
Is it shifting the goalpost when I’m trying to bring a conversation back to my original point?
Admittedly, it’s hard to keep track of every thread in this discussion, which is why I’m trying to stick to reason I posted.
In this case, yes it is.
Got it. Unshifting goalposts is shifting the goalposts now.
Was your friend a nazi or sympathetic to Nazi ideologies? If so, did your nazi friend realize that his Nazi beliefs sucked and at least left them behind? Or did they normalize and promote those beliefs? If they did the latter and you still invite them, your place might be a Nazi house.
Or is your friend a run of the mill conservative? Then not likely a Nazi.
They did try to promote their beliefs online and were fully into Q Anon and Alex jones.
I disagree with the complete lack of nuance, we invited them with the understanding that they weren’t allowed to bring up any opinions against any group of people, as sort of soft intervention.
They’ve since come out as non-binary and seem to have dropped the bullshit. We’re not close anymore, though.
In the end, I saw the opportunity to help get rid of a nazi. It’s not a contagious disease anymore than not being a nazi.
Glad they dropped the bullshit. You and they done good, regardless of where your friendship currently is.
“I’ll take ‘Things That Never Happened’ for $100, Alex.”
If you went through covid without anyone you knew going down the crazy hole, you must not know many people.
That’s why the bartender is supposed to kick the Nazi out.
The “Nazi bar” analogy is good, as long as it’s properly used: “if there’s someone in charge, demand them to kick the Nazi out. Otherwise the Nazi will eventually multiply in that place, and kick everyone else out”.
Same deal with the German saying @AllNewTypeFace@leminal.space mentioned (if you have a Nazi at a table and 10 other people eating and drinking with him, you have 11 Nazis): “it’s part of your duty to not play along with the Nazi, and failure to perform this duty means condoning their actions”.
I agree with that last quote.
But what I’m noticing is a reducing of the original saying to mean any place with a nazi is a nazi bar, and therefore contaminated. Taking back online and IRL communities from nazis involves sharing space and occasionally having a dialogue.
If someone has a close relationship with a nazi, to the point where they think they can change their mind, it’s their duty to try. Otherwise the nazi is only going to hang out with other nazis and become more of a shit head.
In the end I think we all agree there should be fewer nazis, but maybe we disagree on how to do that.
It’s the sharing space and having a dialogue part I’m not sure I can get behind. We’ve all heard the karl popper quote.
Having a dialogue implies an amicable meeting of minds. I cannot, and will not try to, be amicable with Nazis, and there can be no meeting of minds on my part. There is nothing they can say to persuade me, and any grievance or line of reasoning that led them to that place is invalid purely because it did so. Being a Nazi because of economic anxiety makes economic anxiety less plausible to me, not Nazism more sympathetic.
So at least one party can’t engage in a good faith dialogue, which makes it best a lecture.
The civil thing to do is make it clear to whoever’s in charge that they boot to Nazi or I leave, get others to leave, dissuade people from coming, and try to get them shut down.
There’s a line where either my naked scorn persuades you, or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, I don’t want you in my community and I’m willing to get uncivilized about it.
A bar that allows Nazis is contaminated. If the bar has Nazis in it, and someone stays in the bar with the Nazis, what does that say about them?
Taking back online and IRL communities from nazis involves sharing space and occasionally having a dialogue.
Both things are a lot like trying to play chess with a pigeon; the pigeon won’t follow the rules of the game, at most it’ll shit on the board.
The Nazi are only willing to share a space as long as they can’t kick you out, due to lack of power. But once they do it, the discourse flips from “everyone should have a voice” (implied: “we Nazi should have a voice”) to “fuck off with your degenerate shit, you don’t belong here”. And Nazi are known for using shitty rhetoric to enforce their views*, to the point a rational dialogue is impossible.
That does not imply we should simply ignore people who are adjacent to the Nazi; or sometimes reproducing bits of Nazi discourse without realising it. It’s often worth to try to pull them back, before they fall into that hole. That teen leaning into inceldom, that grandpa who’s fine with most marginalised groups except “that one”, so goes on.
In the end I think we all agree there should be fewer nazis, but maybe we disagree on how to do that.
Pretty much.
*here’s a list of videos about this, that I heavily recommend.
See, the problem is that there cannot be any ‘dialogue’ or ‘sharing space’ with a Nazi because a dialogue implies two way communication and sharing the space is implicit acceptance of their views. You cannot ask a cancer nicely to leave your body any more than you can discuss the pros and cons of racial superiority/inferiority or ethnic cleansing or any other Nazi talking points.
If you take in their arguments and listen and contemplate them, you’re no better than the Nazi. Nazis will not be tolerated longer than it takes to make it known they are not, and will never be, welcome.
You are not supposed to leave, you are supposed to kick the Nazi out.
As they say in Germany, if you have a Nazi at a table and 10 other people eating and drinking with him, you have 11 Nazis.
What does that have to do with what I said? That the people who exist in the same place as a nazi are nazis by default?
Why are you choosing to eat with a nazi?
That’s not what I said. What I said was:
“If a nazi walks into a bar and everyone else leaves, it becomes a nazi bar.”
And this particular thread line moved to a different turn of phrase with the same meaning that you replied to. Use those critical thinking skills and put 2 and 2 together.
Why you’re asking if I’m eating with nazis, is what I’m trying to get to the bottom of. My quote was about taking up space, not sharing a meal.
If a nazi walls in to a bar, they should be thrown out by the admin and other patrons. If not, then the non-nazis may leave as they recognize the admin is cool with nazis and thus were already in a nazi bar.
It’s about whether the community including the admin are willing to out up with nazis. If they are, it’s a nazi space. If not, then nazis should be kicked out to prevent them from turning it into one.
Your hypothetical about it being a socialist or queer space doesn’t hold water because those groups are not inherently antagonistic to every other group the same way nazis are.
It seems you’re misinterpreting the ‘Nazi bar’ parable(? Metaphor? Whatever it is.)
It’s not intended that if a Nazi sits at your table you leave, it’s intended that you make the Nazi leave. You are correct though, that if a Nazi enters a bar and nobody makes it leave, then the bar is a Nazi bar. The only problem is that it already was if the owners are fine with the Nazi being there.
I think it’s not about who leaves, but who stays and also allows the nazi to stay and doesn’t shut that shit down. Even when it’s uncomfortable to act on what you see happening.
It solves the tolerance paradox: if the bar tolerates the nazi (allows them to be a nazi and take a foothold spreading hate in their space), it becomes a nazi bar. If the bar (and community) reject the nazi, it is intolerant but prevents the nazi from having a public stage for their hate.
I think the analogy can be worded differently and have significant truth.
Yes, that’s why you kick him in the face
A nazi walks into a bar.
Well, not so much walk as he was shoved into it. Face first. Hard af.
In the story, the Nazi gets kicked out of the bar.
A Nazi bar is a place where you can punch the occupants without remorse.
If there are people associating with someone who should be punched in the face without remorse, those people start to become punchable themselves.
If everyone leaves and the punchable individual is allowed to stay, or even protected in some way, then fuck that place. Good on the people who left.
Maybe it’ll fail like the rest of the Nazis do at life and a proper person acquires it and turns it into something more valuable, like a vacant lot.
If violence shows up, your options are to resist it or leave. If you stand your ground and fight to the death, you can never go back. You can however build another bar elsewhere. Your showerthought demonstrates a vital decision that faces humans every day that ultimately helps our species evolve away from savagery… if we choose correctly but counterintuitively.
Showing up to a bar takes way less time and effort than building a new bar, this difference in effort is key to why this approach is wrong.
A community has to have an answer which is just as fast as showing up to the bar, like kicking someone out of said bar.
Otherwise, you’re stuck building bars for nazis as you’ll be constantly leaving your bar to build new ones.
I feel like I’m stepping around landmines replying this, but I never liked the analogy either. It works fine at a small scale, and I’m fine with that, but everyone here wants to apply it universally at a macro scale to the point it’s just ridiculous.
e.g. If a nazi moves in down the street, and everyone else doesn’t up and move, regardless of their financial situation, you live in a nazi neighborhood. Guess you and your kids should just go live in your car because…moral purity or something.
Given the entire saying, you should be forcing the nazi out of the neighborhood; not moving away from them so their nazi friends can all move in after you leave.
My statement, the original shower thought, was referencing how the entire saying got turned into a purity test for online spaces, not that I’m against Nazi’s getting kicked out of bars.
I’m using this account because I’ve been seeing, almost daily, someone calling this instance a Nazi Bar. I don’t think the saying works for highly segmented online forums like these.
I wonder why so many people disagree with the idea I’m putting forth that leaving a space because of one terrible person allows terrible people to take control of a space.
Because you are not supposed to leave the space. You’re supposed to keep it Nazi free by making the Nazis leave. I don’t know where you got that misunderstanding from
I’ve been seeing people, almost daily, calling this instance a nazi bar
Are they .ML or db0 users? Because they do be doing that.
From all instances, including .world.
I never liked it either. I know this is a landmine already.
