You can tell them by their hats

So how did it happen that there were so many Germans willing to round up Jews and march them into gas chambers?

Well, it started with rhetoric. Rhetoric by the Nazi Party leadership in their Party newspaper, the Daily Stormer, and in speeches and radio broadcasts. Rhetoric painting Jews as criminals, as rapists and thieves, as terrorists and vermins.

We’ve seen the same kind of rhetoric from Donald Trump and his supporters — rhetoric that might have come right out of the pages of the Daily Stormer in the 1920’s, except with immigrants from south of the border in place of the Jews. With the inevitable result: there’s now a significant part of the American population that would be willing to round up immigrants and march them into gas chambers.

Just look for the hat if you’re wondering who they are. MAGA!

– Badtux the Sadly Snarky Penguin

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Gosh, why are people so mean to Nazis?

Something to think about *before* you become a Nazi: Most people really don’t like Nazis, and they don’t react well when they find out that you are one. Gosh, amazing how sending millions of Jews to death camps and invading random countries and killing millions of people will make people dislike you! So Tony Hovater, his wife, and his brother-in-law were all fired when their boss found out that they were Nazis? Gosh darn it, I’m so sad to hear that. That’s not chuckling you hear, that’s… alt-crying. Yeah. LOL.

Meanwhile, back to personal business. Had a lot of carnage out on my Thanksgiving camping trip, more than usual. My Jeep lost a bolt holding on the hi-lift jack, a weld cracked on my gas can mount and I had to put the gas can *inside* the Jeep (eep!), and the door strap snapped when my door was caught in a 50mph wind, in turn putting a big dent in my cowl as the mirror slammed into it. Meanwhile, on a personal basis, I tore the scar tissue on my left foot (the scar tissue from the motorcycle accident when I was 19 that covers the missing chunk of my foot), and while in camp in sandals managed to whack my big toe on my right foot so it’s a nice rainbow blue and purple now, and somewhere in all this I also managed to wrench my back so it spasms if I move wrong. Man, the desert has decided it doesn’t like me!

Back to Washington D.C. stupdity, the AARP notes that the Republican tax “reform” bill will cut BILLIONS from Medicare. If you’re in a state with Republican Senators, call them *now*.

Finally, Florida Man, the world’s stupidest supervillain, strikes again. In the first incident, Florida Man accidentally shoots himself during a road rage incident. In the other incident, Florida Man tried to break into a car filled with cops. The only thing that could have made that last one funnier would have been if he’d tried to hold up a donut shop. A donut shop across from the police station. Now *that* would have been funny :).

– Badtux the Aching Penguin

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Nazis. Goddamn fucking Fascistbook sides with goddamn fucking Nazis. *AGAIN*.

Facebook bans Jim Wright due to complaints from Nazis that he was being mean to Nazis — *AGAIN*.

In this case, Jim Wright reported someone to Facebook who made a death threat — and Facebook kicked *him* off, rather than the Nazi.

I swear, do we gotta just call it goddamn fucking Fascistbook, already? It’s getting to be about as useful as tits on a goldfish, what with all the trolls and their troll farms making sure to get anybody who is anti-Nazi kicked off of the platform.

I don’t get it. What does Facebook get out of pandering to fucking Nazis? Eyeballs, you say? So apparently Facebook thinks that Nazis are more appealing to advertisers than Jim Wright’s followers, and thus if it comes down to Nazis vs Jim, they side with the Nazis every time? Why they came to that conclusion, I don’t know. Jim’s followers are highly educated and probably relatively wealthy compared to the average Nazi loser. I mean, all the Nazis really buy is Nazi paraphernalia, hardly a huge advertising market. But that’s what Facebook is doing — siding with a bunch of losers over a bunch of winners.

I don’t get it. I really don’t. You’d think that someone with a name like Zuckerberg would side with anti-Nazis rather than with goddamn fucking Nazis, given that the Nazis would like nothing better than to shove his rich Jew ass into the nearest oven and turn it to “Roast”. But maybe it’s all the goddamn fucking Nazis they got working for them like Peter fucking Thiel, who is probably the only motherfucker in the whole goddamn Silicon Valley who is more vile than Venod Khosla (the rich motherfucker who desires to steal California coastline for his own private beach, despite the fact that California beaches have been public property for over 40 years). At this point I doubt Zuck knows — or cares — what’s going on with Fascistbook. I mean, he’s got his bajillions of dollars. He don’t care. He doesn’t have to.

So there we go. Our President is a goddamn fascist Nazi sympathizer (“and some of them, I’m sure, are good people” my ass). The biggest social network is, as far as I can tell, run by goddamn fucking Nazis. The Republican Congress don’t seem to care about any of that. Shit, why don’t rename the United States the 4th Reich and get it over with, already?!

– Badtux the Grumpy Penguin

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We are a nation that needs a refresher on basic kindergarten lessons

Hurting people is wrong. That’s something that most of us should have learned in kindergarten, though I wonder about some of our national leadership, which seems to have never learned fundamental lessons taught in kindergarten.

Allowing people to hurt other people is just as wrong. Sins of omission, in the end, are no different from sins of commission. The “good Germans” who stand by silently and watched atrocity happen are just as guilty as those who do the atrocity.

It always boils down to Nazis in the end, whenever we’re talking finer points of ethics. Nazis loved hurting people. Should we have allowed them to do so because “tolerance!”? Or should we have done what we did — whatever was necessary to stop them from hurting others and whatever was necessary in order to dissuade others from emulating their behavior, up to and including hanging a number of them by the neck after all was said and done? And how does that make us different from the Nazis? Well, there was one important difference — we were killing murderers or enablers of murderers. Nazis were killing innocent women and children who had never harmed anybody in their entire lives.

And if you think that doesn’t make a difference, I have to ask: where did you go to kindergarten?

– Badtux the Morality Penguin

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Ignoring Nazis and Klansmen is the same thing as supporting them.

Why? Simple:

Silence means consent.

I completely disagree with the notion that the best way to deal with right-wing spewers of hate is to ignore them. Silence implies that you agree with them. Silence normalizes speech that should be rejected by anyone who is not a monster, speech that demonizes minorities, speech that condones genocide against groups of people the speaker doesn’t like, speech that encourages violence against people the speaker doesn’t like.

Silence is golden only for monsters. Because silence is what allows monsters to gather followers, silence is what allows monsters to impose their policies, silence is what, in the end, leads to atrocities. If the majority of the people refuse to be silent and instead shout loudly, “what you are proposing is evil and abhorrent,” monsters cannot thrive. Silence, on the other hand, is their life blood. In silence, they can thrive, and kill, and lead nations to slaughter.

Monsters may have a right to free speech here in America, but so does every other American, and we can choose to surround the monsters and shout “Hate is not acceptable.” Silence means consent. Reject silence.

— Badtux the Monster-spottin’ Penguin

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So when is it okay to kill Nazis?

I’m pretty sure that everybody here is okay with the fact that these people killed Nazis, lotsa Nazis:

U.S. and Soviet soldiers meet up in the middle of Germany on 26 April 1945 as they clean out Nazi holdouts

So hey, let’s quit that bullshit about “it’s not okay to kill Nazis!”. Because clearly, under some circumstances, it is okay to kill Nazis. (And if you disagree that the folks up above were right to kill Nazis, please don’t post it here… I’m not interested in a debate about the virtues of Nazis, they lost any moral high ground they might have ever occupied when they exterminated millions of Jews, gays, Roma, and others).

So the question is, when did it start becoming okay to kill Nazis? Was it in 1939, when Britain and France declared war against Nazi Germany? Was it just the British and French who were justified in killing Nazis at that time? There were American volunteers who flowed into Canada and formed military units that fought Nazis before the U.S. entered the war, were they justified in killing Nazis? What about Jews, if they killed Nazis after the Nazis started killing Jews, would it have been morally defensible? What if they had killed Nazis before the Nazis started killing them, but after Kristallnacht? Would they have been justified in killing Nazis then based on the theory that the Nazis were a direct threat to their physical safety? What about even earlier, after Hitler had stated in his book Mein Kampf that the Jew must be exterminated? Would they have been justified in killing Nazis based on the theory of preemptive self defense?

When did it become okay to kill Nazis? And do those conditions still apply today?

I know there’s a lot of knee-jerking about “violence is never right!” and all that. That’s bullshit. It took violence to get rid of that murderous bastard Adolph Hitler, a lot of violence, a level of violence unprecedented in human history, a level of violence that has never been matched or surpassed before or since. No amount of pacifism would have stopped Hitler from killing those millions of people that his regime murdered in cold blood. So let’s dismiss the notion of “violence is never right!” — because as Hitler shows, sometimes it’s not only right, but the only moral thing to do — and answer the question: when is violence against Nazis right? Note that I say right, as in, morally right, not legal. Law and morality are two different fields. Law is what’s written in law books. Morality is what kind of person you are, what kind of society you live in, and whether you’re doing things that are morally right or morally wrong. It is legal to be a Nazi here in the United States, and illegal to punch a Nazi here in the United States. That’s not the question. The question is whether it is morally justified to use violence to prevent Nazis from doing the morally reprehensible things that they claim they want to do.

– Badtux the Morality Penguin

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So Google hired a bunch of neo-Nazis to train its “troll detector” system, with predictable results

Google’s “troll detecting” comment ranking system has gone full Nazi, basically downranking people for saying they’re black, or gay, or Jewish, or whatever, while utterly ignoring blatant Nazi shit.

That’s the problem with crowdsourcing shit like this — it gets punked by the same fucking trolls who it’s supposed to stop. But this is nothing new. Jim Wright of Stonekettle Station keeps getting his posts deleted off of Racistbook err Facebook for being mean to Nazis, and occasionally gets his profile locked for the same. And of course Google itself is most famous recently for having to fire a fucking Nazi by the name of James Damore, who claimed that 20% of Google’s workforce is genetically incapable of doing the work because they’re women, but that wasn’t the only dude at Google who believes bullshit like that — he’s just the only one stupid enough to put his name on that opinion and say it loudly.

So despite all their lip service to hating Nazis, it’s pretty damn clear that Google and Racistbook err Facebook are part of the problem. They both allow Nazis to harass liberals with impunity while banning liberals who respond to Nazi harassment. Both refuse to remove Nazi profiles from their services or do anything about all the Nazis trashing their comment threads and making them unusable by normal people due to crapflooding. They claim it’s about “free speech”, but these are private corporations — they have a right to decide who is going to use their service or not, their service is theirs, hosted on their computers, owned by them, it’s their private property, and nobody has a right to use their property without their permission. They can deny permission for people to use their property at any point in time without there being a single free speech issue, since the person being kicked off their service still has a right to start a blog or post broadsheets in the town square or whatever, just not using their property.

But they don’t kick the Nazis off their service. Despite having every right in the world to say, “We don’t want Nazis using our property.” They don’t do that.

All I can figure is that they actually condone fucking Nazis. Which is their right too, but they don’t need to be whining about how they’re these great defenders of Western democracy, while supporting people who would destroy American democracy.

— Badtux the “Fucking goddamn NAZIS, goddammit!” Penguin

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