Edit: Rule has been replaced.
Old title was “An addendum to the rules. No more using the words “Nazi” or “Fascist”.”
The words Nazi and Fascist have no meaning. No one is referring to 1940s Germany or 1930s Italy. It’s just name-calling at this point. You can see this all over this sub.
So the banned words has been extended from just stuff like racial slurs to include Nazi and Fascist.
Yes, I do realize this is a slippery slope, but hopefully any meaning you wanted to impart can still be done without the kindergarten-level name-calling.
Credit to https://lemm.ee/u/[email protected] for the idea.
Hell of a lot better than my “Conservatives Only” tag idea or banning bad faith arguments. It’s a clear cut rule that should help with a problem without cutting down on actual discussions.
If you have any feedback/complaints/raging against the machine/questions, feel free to leave them here.
The far-right is obviously aware, but they’ve learned the importance of dodging labels.
Not too long ago, neo-nazis called themselves neo-nazis and consequently had almost no access to popular communication platforms. After all, the moment someone admits to being a Nazi, you know their political views are dogshit and their solutions immoral and ineffective.
Then, they announced they were now “the alt-right” and everything suddenly changed. Not their opinions, pundits and idols of course, but their access to communication.
That tiny bit of plausible deniability bought them space on platforms they had only dreamed of. They were allowed to build themselves little communities full of abusive scum on major social media sites. Some of them were even on television! It’s the furthest they’d ever been able to push their views before they were spat on.
By the time “Unite the Right” rolled around, they were feeling untouchable. They whipped off their masks, triumphantly declared “Ha! We were nazis all along!” and started marching around with tiki torches, chanting antisemetic catch phrases and waving Nazi flags. They even got to do a bit of domestic terrorism against innocent people.
But the fallout was huge. The platforms that had been coddling them and claiming “it’s important to hear all viewpoints” suddenly treated them like radioactive cups of asparagus piss.
The rebranding they’d worked so hard on was ruined. Everyone knew they were neo-nazis again, only discernible from the original National Socialists by the word “SJWs” scrawled in crayon at the bottom of their list of undesirables.
But they learned from that mistake. They learned to stay mask on and never, ever “reveal their powerlevel”, even as they wrote Mein Kamph fan fiction and attacked anyone who wasn’t straight, white and stupid.
Labels were to be avoided at all costs. If anyone asked, they were simply “conservatives”, perhaps even “centrists”. It was the social media equivalent of the Proud Boys in their khaki pants and white balaclavas, still fuming over the jobs, friends and family they lost when they went out without them.
Because without labels, they couldn’t be criticised. They’d used 1984 not as a warning, but as an inspiration. They had to control the language. The “alt-right” was not only dead, it had never existed at all.
And if people reverted to simply calling them “nazis” again, they had a catch phrase to use as a shield, parroted by scumbags and useful idiots alike.
“The left just call anyone who disagrees with them a Nazi”.