Here’s a pattern you’ve probably seen:

  1. Racists/nazi shows up and says racist/nazi things
  2. Get called out for it and/or banned
  3. They claim they are unfairly banned “for disagreeing.” They completely leave out the part about them being a racist nazi.

You know, that move. I’ve seen it more times than I can count and I bet you have too. They call disagreement with nazism “opinions you don’t like”, leaving out the nazism part. Any way of framing disagreements with them while subtracting out the actual content of what they say.

It’s so common that I think it deserves a word. I know there are generic descriptions: e.g. “being a troll”, but I think something specific to this particular behavior deserves its own word. That way it can just be identified and dismissed for what it is and not argued with.

  • arcane
    12•3 years ago

    Fuck Nazis and their little crybaby problems. If they feel like they’re being censored, fucking good, that means it’s working.

    Deplatform them online, punch them in person.

    • @ace
      -1•3 years ago

      Punching them in person helps their cause, and allows the to cry fowl. Counter protesting, and violence in self defence is a better rule of thumb imo.

      • arcane
        6•3 years ago

        I don’t know. It was effective for trash like Richard Spencer who has been punched, deplatformed and is now largely irrelevant.

        • @ace
          3•3 years ago

          I think the deplatforming was a lot more effective than the punch. I heard more about him after getting punched then ever before or after.

          • arcane
            4•3 years ago

            Yeah, I mean you’re probably right but watching him get KTFO was quite satisfying

            • @ace
              6•3 years ago

              Agreed, but justice boners are dangerous. That’s why we have cops idolizing the punisher. Violence is only justified when it has a tangible positive effect imo. I enjoy seeing justice get served as much as the next guy but retribution for retribution’s sake is not a good thing. Utilitarian justice FTW.

            • @jowbloe
              1•3 years ago

              Let’s not exaggerate. I’m no boxing maven but in the video it looked like a glancing blow that did not even knock down the target individual. I admit I have watched the video a good few times. I don’t advocate violence.

  • @AgreeableLandscape
    10•3 years ago

    Classic blame shifting or victim complex. Instead of acknowledging their own shitty behavior, they blame others for not tolerating something that objectively shouldn’t be tolerated.

  • Ephera
    8•3 years ago

    In a convoluted way, it’s kind of the slippery slope fallacy.

    Their “argument” usually is that free speech needs to be protected and that if you don’t allow everyone to exclaim any ridiculous, inhumane non-sense, then you’re limiting free speech and by tomorrow no one’s allowed to say anything anymore.

    But yeah, that specific slippery slope argumentation definitely deserves its own pedestal for how shit it is, in every way.

  • @seahorse
    7•3 years ago

    Unfortunately, there isn’t a clear term, like say, gaslighting. We all know what that means. It’s a form of a strawman I guess. Hate speech =/= something I disagree with. This is a sly rhetorical trick they’ve come up with to normalize their opinions. They build up your response to their hate speech as “a difference of opinion” so they can blow it down as you being “intolerant to differing opinions”. Human rights aren’t up for debate.

  • @DrivingForce
    4•3 years ago

    I have never dealt with outright nazis before but I have seen users that are a step below nazis claim their comments were not racist. They carefully word their comments so that they can say that it was technically not racist. I mainly only see those types of people just trying to get flame wars started so the term troll is accurate for them.

    I don’t think I have ever seen a straight up nazi talking on a forum like that yet. Just almost nazis.

    • @abbenmOP
      5•3 years ago

      They’ll never self-identify as nazis. They’ll just show up and do stuff like get into debates where they just happen to be defending nazis.

      My concern here isn’t how nazis self-identify themselves, although I know there’s a whole conversation to be had about how explicit they are choosing to be, and how they like to experiment and play around with plausible deniability, which they certainly do.

      My concern is the specific rhetorical move of trying to rebrand their nazism as “things you don’t agree with” after having been called out. This appears to be a pretty common thing, and it would be helpful to disarm it by having a word for it. The same way that we now have words for, say, Sea Lioning, the Coutiers Reply and stuff like that.

      • @DrivingForce
        3•3 years ago

        I can’t seem to find the win social media site that the account you linked was mentioning. Tbh if you wanted a term that would encompass closest nazis would not closet racist be the term?

  • @Stoned_Ape
    2•3 years ago

    Whatever the words turns out to be, there are people who think that I should be labeled with it. Because in their view, I fulfill all the steps you just laid out, meaning that according to their view, I am definitely and obviously a word.

    As long as there are different views on what counts as racism and what does not, people will label each other with that word and disagree on the correct use.

    • @abbenmOP
      4•3 years ago

      Sounds like we don’t disagree about the fact that this behavior is out there. The question is just whether we call it out with a short word or phrase, or whether we should continue to describe it in a way that takes a couple of sentences. Like how in English have no one word for “As one gets older, the fear that time is running out and important opportunities are slipping away”. But in German, all of that has one word: Torschlusspanik.

      As for the choice between long-word and short-word, I guess I disagree with the long-word approach because I don’t think subjective differences in word usage go away once you add more words. If a person’s use of a word is subjective and subject to variation across people, then a person’s word cloud is exponentially more so because it leads to more possible combinations of words. We have to deal with that subjectivity no matter what.

      It’s just a question of whether a new phenomena is important enough or frequent enough that we should put it into a new word in our subjectively understood language that we already work with on a day to day basis. And if there’s room in the English language for himbo and smize, surely there’s room for something that catalogues some of the strategies used to defend nazism.

      • @Stoned_Ape
        2•3 years ago

        Sounds like we don’t disagree about the fact that this behavior is out there.

        That’s true, though I don’t think this kind of behavior is something that only nazis or racists show. That’s why I don’t really think it would be a benefit to anyone to find a word for the situation when somebody is doing this AND is a racist.