It’s one thing to have differing views, but I’ve seen enough attempted reddit migrations to be relieved that the popular communities in the fediverse so far haven’t been about crazy racist stuff or other extreme right bullshit.
I am also glad that I’m getting away from reddit’s general political shitposting, which was more left leaning. You couldn’t have any proper discourse on there, and even I with my generally more left leaning views recognized that.
I’m not advocating for unchallenged platforms for nazis. What I’m concerned about is the dangerous broadening of the term ‘nazi’ to include any viewpoint differing from one’s own. Neither you nor I hold all the answers. However, I’m not the one categorizing wide-ranging groups as ‘nazis’ to conveniently dismiss dissenting views, while complacently considering myself superior to all those being arbitrarily mislabeled as ‘nazis’. It SERIOUSLY weakens your entire argument when you throw that word around so carelessly.
Well we don’t use it for just anyone who has any different opinion. So the problem right there is solved. We do use it frequently. But that’s when we see thing like homo/transphobia(Nazis hated queer people), antisemitism(another group Nazis hated), racism(also Nazis), and sexism(once again, Nazis). There seems to be a pretty fucking large overlap of what modern day Republicans preach and what the Nazis preached. Including as of lately “eradicating transgenderness” and “erasing communities.” As well as the amount of terrorist attacks that ha e actively been encouraged.
So if you would prefer we could just call everyone bigot, since that includes them all and not everyone personally considers themselves a Nazi, but I hardly see the difference between a Nazi, the KKK, Proud Boys, 3%ers, etc, when they all preach the exact same stuff. At that point you’re not arguing anything except semantics. It’s like the whole “race realism” thing. It’s racism, but more palatable to racists who think the name racist is mean, but not the mentality.
I guess another way to look at it is as people keep bringing up, but there’s a German saying about this. If you have a table with 9 people and 1 Nazi, you have 10 Nazis.
This also doesn’t change the actual argument being made, which is about a forum that is open. In which case, you do get Nazis. Like not even what we mean when we call Nazis as Nazis, but people who call themselves Nazis. We have seen that over and over and over. You get Nazis, and you get pedophiles. Then everyone else starts to leave and you are stuck with Nazis and pedophiles.
So once again, I get the mentality behind it. In a lot of ways I would love a site like that. But it’s also a little different for those of us that are having people call for our deaths on a regular basis.