Summary
Australia has enacted strict anti-hate crime laws, mandating jail sentences for public Nazi salutes and other hate-related offenses.
Punishments range from 12 months for lesser crimes to six years for terrorism-related hate offenses.
The legislation follows a rise in antisemitic attacks, including synagogue vandalism and a foiled bombing plot targeting Jewish Australians.
The law builds on state-level bans, with prior convictions for individuals performing Nazi salutes in public spaces, including at sporting events and courthouses.
I used to be a person that believed very strongly in freedom of speech and that anything which was categorized as a philosophy or belief shouldn’t be censored.
However, after seeing how hard fascism has taken hold in America, I’m beginning to change my mind.
Kudos to Australia. Leon Hitler should travel there, have his arrested and deposited in the middle of the Great Australian Desert.
If anyone with enough money and power does this they will likely not have it applied to them. It was just a weird awkward gesture right?
Yes that’s how corruption works
Send nazi pig Elon there on a one way flight.
Hey now! Australia is probably sick of everyone just sending criminals there!
Good. This needs to be worldwide. They need to reeducate the people as to
A: Why the Nazis were bad beyond ‘they wanna kill people!’ Their utter disgust of science and technology, and how their social policies were actively fucking over their own people in addition to others. B: Just how incompetent the Nazis were, and were far from a hyperefficient machine. C: Just how bad they were at science and despite their demonization, West Germany was never fully denazified and how many former Nazi officers returned to work as politicians and military officers.
There is a plethora of books written before and during WW2 that showcased just how evil the Nazis were and how fucked their society was. They also need a review of Mein Kampf and how Hitler dictated it. Exactly like how Trump dictated the Art of the Deal to a writer and did not write it himself.
My suggestion of one book written during the Nazi Era is Education for Death by Gregor Ziemer. The society it showed was really, REALLY fucked. How anyone could think this was a paradise is beyond me. Most modern fascists, with their donut bodies and chinless faces would be the types considered feeble and probably sterilized as a ‘charity’.
Just how bad they were at science
Operation Paperclip.
Those were the exceptions. When it came to things like medical science with experiments on POWs and concentration camp prisoners they were so abysmal it wasn’t funny.
First, I despise the fucking Nazis and Communists. The disgusting human experiments that were conducted by the Germans and Japanese were gobbled up by the Allied medical professionals.
I don’t see how mandatory jail time helps with “They need to reeducate the people”
People tend to get further radicalized in prison, not less.
If you want to Re-educate people you need to invest in education in the first place.
I don’t see how mandatory jail time helps with “They need to reeducate the people”
Jail doesn’t work for Nazis. The world learned only one things solves the “fascism problem”.
It depends upon whether Australian prisons are focused on rehabilitation or punishment.
Once someone buys into Nazi rhetoric it can take decades to deprogram them. How do you suggest this to be done when it takes far shorter amount of time to spread their rhetoric?
Their point is that not only does jailing them not deprogram them or prevent them from spreading their rhetoric, it is more likely to have the opposite effect.
That is a poor point and allowing it to spread is the reality we are actually facing.
Case in point. Germany has been tightly controlling this for several decades. Is their society now overran by Nazi rhetoric? The answer is no.
Being German, unfortunately the answer to that is yes, but it didn’t happen in a vacuum, it’s because the media and politicians have been courting right wing ideologies over the past 20 years to an extent that things have become normalized that should have never been normalized, e.g. framing asylum seekers as „migrants“ and adopting dehumanizing language against them, which has led to us having AFD polling at 20% and CDU at 30%.
CDU has recently collaborated with the right wing extremist AFD to push through a proposal for an anti-migration bill that violates our constitution. There has been an uproar but CDU and AFD actually polled higher after this. Our country is in deep trouble and we’re moving into a very scary direction.
Thank you for that perspective. It is sad to see all that diligence being chipped away.
That example proves the first users point. The answer to the German question is that they spend a great deal of money on having an excellent education system, and spend a lot of time educating their youth with an honest, unflinching look at the history of Nazism and fascism.
I’m not even saying don’t throw people in jail, I’m simply saying it is pure idiocy to believe that will do anything at all to help the underlying problem.
The answer to the German question is that they spend a great deal of money on having an excellent education system,
I think it was more that they had their country completely flattened due to them being fascists, and didn’t want it to happen again.
Some people need to be separated. This isn’t about censorship, it’s about group dynamics.
Let’s take it from both angles - just to avoid politics. A disruptive kid in a classroom affects every other kid. Get rid of that kid, and suddenly the whole classroom improves. Everyone can agree to that.
The other side - a company has a pro-union worker. Shitty company doesn’t like not controlling their workers, so they find a way to fire them.
Back to the Nazi, separate them from the rest of society. We don’t need them.
Back to the Nazi, separate them from the rest of society.
Permanently. Like how we permanently separated Nazis from the rest of the world in the 1940s.
facists are deadend for humanity
I feel like this copypasta is mandatory here:
(transcribed from a series of tweets) - @iamragesparkle
I was at a shitty crustpunk bar once getting an after-work beer. One of those shitholes where the bartenders clearly hate you. So the bartender and I were ignoring one another when someone sits next to me and he immediately says, “no. get out.”
And the dude next to me says, “hey i’m not doing anything, i’m a paying customer.” and the bartender reaches under the counter for a bat or something and says, “out. now.” and the dude leaves, kind of yelling. And he was dressed in a punk uniform, I noticed
Anyway, I asked what that was about and the bartender was like, “you didn’t see his vest but it was all nazi shit. Iron crosses and stuff. You get to recognize them.”
And i was like, ohok and he continues.
"you have to nip it in the bud immediately. These guys come in and it’s always a nice, polite one. And you serve them because you don’t want to cause a scene. And then they become a regular and after awhile they bring a friend. And that dude is cool too.
And then THEY bring friends and the friends bring friends and they stop being cool and then you realize, oh shit, this is a Nazi bar now. And it’s too late because they’re entrenched and if you try to kick them out, they cause a PROBLEM. So you have to shut them down.
And i was like, ‘oh damn.’ and he said “yeah, you have to ignore their reasonable arguments because their end goal is to be terrible, awful people.”
And then he went back to ignoring me. But I haven’t forgotten that at all.
I first saw this on reddit
Also this idiot performing a nazi salute outside court after just being sentenced, got busted. What a nimrod.
“No charges to be laid over alleged Nazi salute made by officer at Victoria Police academy”
https://amp.abc.net.au/article/104796744
Cops get to be a little Nazi as a treat.
Yeah. There’s not a lot of information there though. Who really knows what happened.
Maybe the police covered it up. Maybe it wasn’t a Nazi salute.
This guy was pretty emphatic. I mean there was nothing about how she’s a good officer or maybe a misunderstanding or whatever. That was a sincere and direct statement of position and intent to prosecute any offenders.
As an American, this feels wrong on the surface with our broad first amendment and all.
But when I think about it with my morality-enabled brain? Fuckin’ strewth mates! Get those cunts!
As an American, this feels wrong on the surface with our broad first amendment and all.
They do not give a rat’s fuck about YOUR freedom of speech and expression, and have been fighting in every single legal and illegal manner to suppress it. At this point in time it must be acknowledged that there needs to be that limit on them to force them back into being a small pathetic group that they were and to hopefully allow society to outgrow them in the future.
They will be ‘so much for the tolerant left’ so matter what you do, and they will actively censor anyone and anything they don’t like also no matter what. Liberals have been highly prone to hiring fascist and bigoted nutjobs in order to allow for a more ‘balanced’ perspective, but any attempt to make them hire more liberal minded people for their own platforms is brushed aside without a second thought. That shit doesn’t work on them. They want access to your stuff while also 100% forbidding you from even looking at their stuff.
No disagreement on the reality of the evil bullshit going on around here, that’s for sure. It was just a throwaway line on my part to set up the comment, but as always the devil is in the details.
An Australian anti-fascist perspective: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZ2KvtlLJyQ
Removed by mod
See, I am overall against any and all limits of free speech but…
Yeah. Context matters. And in current world context, good job Australia, hope outher countries take notes.
I don’t really understand this whole “free speech” thing. If it were ww2 would you be worried about nazis having free speech or would you do what needed to be done?
but…
That’s where you lost me.
Knowing my luck, I’d get 12 months for having my arm at an unfavourable angle while giving directions.
Literal hate crimes, I’m all for. A gesture with your arm gets you 12 months? That’s too much, regardless of its origin or meaning.
I’ll say, likely wasting my digital breath, I do not support any sort of Nazi bullshit or affiliates. But truly, outlawing gestures is a next level, knee jerk reaction to a problem they don’t know what else to do to solve.
If you read the article, just a gesture with your arm does not land a person a 12-month prison sentence. It needs to be in public and in combination with: hateful speech, or a hateful act. It seems to be an add-on for specific types of hate crimes.
Excellent, then I’m all for it.
So Elon Musk would’ve been in the clear.
You sound like those cops who tell victims of domestic violence that there’s nothing they can do until lives are being threatened.
Cool dude. You sound like a battered house wife that sticks up for her abusive husband.
I generally don’t do “slippery slope” arguments, and I also dislike invoking the “paradox of tolerance”, but I will say that I think the messaging here is important.
To me, it’s not “just a gesture”. It’s a very clear and intentional demonstration of ideological alignment, and it’s an ideology of hate and intolerance.
I’m absolutely ok with expressing, as a society, that we will not accept this ideology amongst us. If they want to scuttle around through the cracks like cockroaches then so be it.
Fair point, best explained response yet.
The problem is application of this kind of law tends to be highly subjective depending on who is in power. This law is ironically ripe for abuse by fascists. This type of free speech should be met with universal scorn, shaming, and ostracism, not jail.
Yeah nah. Any law is ripe for abuse by fascists.
To me the law is less about punishing Nazis and more of a clear statement that as a society we find this ideology unacceptable.
While without context I’d agree that banning a gesture is a bit much, especially with such steep measures, I think that in a world when one of the de facto co-leaders of major if not the main world superpowers openly does nazi salute twice, we need to up the guard and cut this shit in the bud.
And as you said - we don’t know how to solve USA becoming a nazi state rapidly. Nobody does. And third reich ain’t gonna hold a candle to USA if they decide it’s time for blitzkrieg. So doingall we can to damage and reduce nazizm where we still can is admirable.
It’s a nazi fucken salute mate. What part of it isn’t a hate crime?
The part where it’s raising your arm at an angle. You dislike it because of what it means and signifies, but imagine some group took ‘flipping the bird’ to align with their ideology and in 20 years your kid gets arrested for flipping someone off.
Obviously a silly example but you have to look past the context and think about what are we really doing here? Jailing people for a gesture?
That’s fucking wild.
Fucking finally. Good shit Australia. Doing better than most. Watch Elmo throw a hissie fit. Pathetic
I hope he tests the waters there and Australia follows through.
Don’t kid yourself. Australia is also an oligarchy where corporations get most of what they want passed within days/weeks, with little to no debate, while popular or inconsequential policies are given months or years of debate (so the murdoch/oligarch propaganda machine can distract the public and tell them how to think).
There is no chance in hell either major party would imprison an American dictators right hand man. They’re both corporate whores at heart, with little/no virtue.
Don’t import this “both sides” bullshit just because you see everyone saying that about the US.
Criticising governments is fine, but Albo’s government is a polar opposite to LNP.
Any politician needs to function within our capitalist society. If you don’t like that, have a revolution and return us all to agrarian communism. In the mean time the PM needs to keep corporate Australia ticking over. That said, there’s a reason Labor has such deep ties to Australia’s unions. Labor has very consistently improved wages and terms for employees, while LNP wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire.
Agreed.
I’m so sick of this absolutist free speech bullshit that wants to make room for terrorist ideologies to hide.
There is no free speech absolutism. Dare to criticize him or make fun of him and you are banned and ostracized. It’s a Nazi enablement pure and simple.
He’s a free speech absolutist- when it comes to his own speech.
It’s kinda weird to sort of start rolling back to where some type of conservatism is actually a good thing. I don’t want to identify as a conservative, but I definitely want to conserve institutions of justice and whatnot and not have them corrupted by right-wing crypto cucks.
It’s kinda weird to sort of start rolling back to where some type of conservatism is actually a good thing.
For what it’s worth, politics is more complex than conservation and change. The status quo is what got us here, so we must to better than merely conserve.
targeting Jewish Australians.
There it is. I’ll bet criticizing Isreal is considered anti-semetic too. Meanwhile Aboriginals still don’t have rights.
You may want to quote some more of that bit, bud. It was a FOILED BOMBING PLOT targeting Jewish Australians.
How is Israel relevant?
But yes, native people always seem to get the shaft, no matter where you are. Again though, not relevant in this thread surely.
Sorry what rights don’t Aboriginals have ?
The thing is this just makes it “cooler” among the Nazis because now it’s illegal. It plays right into their persecution complex. It also opens up a legal morass of trying to define a hand gesture in court. To me this seems like it’s fighting the symptoms and not the underlying problems.
Nonsense.
Courts are good at figuring out what constitutes an illegal action. It’s what they’re intended to do and what they have been doing since the dawn of civilisation.
I don’t really care what Nazis think is “cool”.
It’s addressing the underlying problem by communicating the seriousness of the threat of fascism to everyone.
Judges could have biases of their own whether they realise it or not.
I hope you’re right but I’m less optimistic about courts.
Remember that Hersant idiot from a few months back did the salute outside a courthouse.
He was found guilty, judge gave no fucks: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-08/vic-nazi-salute-jacob-hersant-court/104443118
A Nazi/Hitler salut was always illegal in Germany after WW 2 and courts figured it out what counts as a nazi salute and what not (it often comes down to context i guess).
The thing is this just makes it “cooler” among the Nazis because now it’s illegal.
Only until they are caught.
Then they become martyrs for their group.
It also opens up a legal morass of trying to define a hand gesture in court> It also opens up a legal morass of trying to define a hand gesture in court I feel like that part would just be the same way porn is treated, "I [the judge] know it when I see it]
Sending people to jail is a great way to make sure they don’t spend time embroiled in Nazi ideology on every level. Probably the best way to make sure someone never comes in contact with a single particle of Nazism, is to send them to prison.
(Can you tell I’m american?)
Someone performing a Nazi salute is already a Nazi.
Making the gesture illegal is a clear communication to all Australians that we will not tolerate this ideology.
Yeah, but most of the people I imagine pulling a Nazi salute “as a joke like Elon (were so hilarious haha look at those [insertracialslur])” might be deterred from pulling their shitty “joke” if it actually means prison time automatically. It doesn’t matter if it’s just like a week. Try explaining to an employer why you didn’t attend the important meeting you had because you sat in jail for a week for a fascist “joke”.
It’s illegal to do it “in public”. So doing it at work is perfectly fine, as long as it isn’t a public place.
So doing it at work is perfectly fine
Alright. Make me a video of you giving the salute to to your boss during work hours and we’ll see how it goes.
Maybe he works at Tesla? Hell probably get a raise and employee of the month trophy.
As if he ever saw Elon while working at the factory floor, loltz. And the manager might not take too kindly, no matter who they work for. Lots of them prolly got their job before Elon went batshit insane. Or took mask off, whichever. Or pre- crippling ketamine addiction. Idk.
It was a joke, chill bro.
Well both can be true.
I did understand it was a joke but also yes I wish I could but there’s laundry to do and a genocide to stop.
Work like at a business open to the public?
I mean free speech is a deeply contradictory concept, which i largely support, however, people having the “right” to harm others as fascists mean to do is not a human right but a right of domination, which I am actively and deeply set against. And prison justice is just a “right” to harm others, only one that we are conditioned to live with.
It does create an opportunity for a little irony, which I can’t pass up.
But part of my criticism is not just “Nazis exist in prison” but “carcerial justice is just as fascistic as anything we associate with fascism” which never gets even thought about let alone discussed anywhere but the fringes of the prison abolition movement.
And things like prisons and police, the existence of many kinds of crime, particularly property crimes, need to be considered historically contingent, so that no matter how much we want to just delete all prisons they do serve as a solution to contradictions that arise within our society. So that the struggle to abolish carcerial punishment has to be simultaneously replaced with something better. Which is just and worth fighting for.
Getting rid of heil Hitler hand gestures in public might prevent the public proliferation of “signs” of fascism, the actual causes of it are institutional and function in cooperation with systems of institutional racism, Etc., and until those tendencies are abolished, and that is the worst expressions of class domination within capitalism, fascism will always be a problem to contend with.
In other words, we have fascism because we have prisons. Or rather, the underlying logic of fascism is just the underlying logic that justifies carcerial justice, taken to its natural conclusions.
So its not just irony, its like a double irony
“carcerial justice is just as fascistic as anything we associate with fascism” which never gets even thought about let alone discussed anywher
Yeah because it’s childish strawman. Of course it’s not the same to have to spend a day in a drunk tank because you lost control and were kicking off mirrors from cars as it is to be marched into a gaschamber.
That’s false equivalency.
Also, if you had ever picked up a single philosophy book, you’d know how much positive and negative freedoms and the right of the government to impose those on others is actually discussed. It’s like >95% of what philosophy has been going on about for the 1000 years.
Getting rid of heil Hitler hand gestures in public might prevent the public proliferation of “signs” of fascism, the actual causes of it are institutional and function in cooperation with systems of institutional racism,
Not really. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demagogue
In other words, we have fascism because we have prisons.
Fucking roflmao, literally. Well I didn’t drop to the floor but I did roll around giggling a bit on my chair. I would suggest reading “Leviathan” from Hobbes, but since I know you won’t, here’s a video sort of summarising Hobbes’ thoughts, by a professional philosopher called Alain de Botton and his channel “School of Life” POLITICAL THEORY - Thomas Hobbes
Alain de Botton did some really good philosophy videos, maybe for the BBC.
Recommended.Alain de Botton omg and you thought I was funny.
Anyway you completely missed my point wrt false equivalence since both things are true. Its called nuance, dingus. I believe in the continual progress of human spirit, similar to Hegel’s formulation of freedom, but I’m a materialist and Marxist, not right wing liberal like Hobbes. Because believe it or not society has progressed since the 1680s when the ascendent English bourgeoisie seized control of the British empire and needed rational justification for their rule – which Thomas Hobbes Leviathan is. Its a piece of political philosophy, and certainly worth studying. I haven’t read it and might not, but I know others that have. I get the gist I don’t need Alain de Buttman’s watered down baby philosophy for online babies, please and thank you.
I’ve read thousands of pages of philosophy. You’ve watched thousands of hours of vaush and destiny. We are not the same. Come back when you’re capable of making a point or having an adult discussion. I’ll be here.
Actually if you could point to the place in the book where he argues definitively for carcerial justice over other forms, effectively addressing arguments that have come since from intellectuals like Michel Foucault and Angela Davis, as well as the abolition movement more broadly, that would be super helpful to a big dumb idiot like me a hurr durr
I believe in the continual progress of human spirit
Good luck with that happening and allowing Nazis to be Nazis right out in the open.
Nazism, and I’m not sure why you don’t know this, is the opposite of progress.
I’m not false equivocating in order to take the fight off of fascism, both things are true. My point is we don’t fight fascism by allowing courts to make performative gestures outlawing performative gestures, its done by organizing against the worst tendencies of capital. By all means ban Nazi salutes it won’t affect anyone I associate with, and if it did I would no longer.
Lots of people seem to think having a slight criticism is the same as trying to bad faith rhetorically muddy the waters to give space for fascism. But no, that’s what liberalism does, consistently.
Oh you’re laughing at it because he’s so familiar to you because it’s the most “hardcore” philosophy you’ve ever engaged with? Yeah, I assumed as much.
That’s why I assumed you wouldn’t read “Leviathan” and from all your writing it’s clear you never have previously. Or even listened to a summary. Perhaps had those playing in the background, pretending like you’ve been listening to them.
The way you can’t distinguish a thought from the philosopher who brought it up shows that you larp as being read instead of being read.
I don’t need Alain de Buttman’s watered down baby philosophy for online babies, please and thank you.
Oh you most certainly do. It would definitely improve your skill on larping as a philosopher if you had the ability to pay any attention.
I’ve read thousands of pages of philosophy.
Thanks. That got rid of some phlegm. THOUSANDS of pages you say. Wow. That must be like… at least a half a dozen books. :D
We’ll continue the conversation when you understand how asinine your earlier garbage is. If you weren’t an egoistical teenager who’s all about what other’s perceive for them to have read and done and actually put import on understanding the things people say to you, you would at least skim what the Leviathan is about so you’d know what point I was making. But the fact you’re incapable of even understanding that means that I’m simply not interested in anything you have to say as you have zero intellectual curiosity. That sort of youthful egoism is fine, as long as it’s driven by actual intellect.
Yours isn’t.
Your previous comment. It looks a bit like how ridiculous it looks to you to now look illustrations of what people in the late 19th century thought the 21st century would look like. Firemen with flappy wings and whatnot. It’s utterly ridiculous because you know that would be the absolute worst way to go about flying. Either the wings would have to be absolutely massive or go really fast and still they’d be much worse than most other options we have for personal flying we can already achieve, like the jetpacks. The reason I’m saying this is that is what it looks like to me when reading your “arguments”. I can see how someone ignorant of political theory might formulate a naive theory like that, but the theory itself is utterly ridiculous and wouldn’t work because of facts you do not seem to know.
If you have even the tiniest bit of intellectual curiosity, you’ll look up what the Leviathan is about (while remembering to distinguish between an author and an idea) and then you’ll see why your earlier assertions are laughably naive.
Why are you so rude and mean? I actually have an interest in philosophy, which you apparently do too? But I don’t use it to like make people feel stupid. I’m nobody. I’m just like a guy with a job and a family that reads hard books. I’m proud of what little intellectual accomplishment I’ve made, and I encourage others to study. But dude I don’t fucking care about reading Leviathan! I’ll read books by people who have read it, but not Alain de Botton because he is a turd, but despite a good measure of intellectual curiosity, more than most in my life at least, it isn’t something that will come up for me. I’m glad you got so much out of it. made it into your whole identity maybe, but it hasn’t come up for me in the way that will lead me to read it, at least not yet! All I can say if on my very long reading list, it isn’t on there and I don’t see that changing this year.
This book is so important and crucial to your point yet you can’t point to a single line or paragraph to support your non existent arguments, which amount to “ur dum”. Why not demonstrate how great a book it is by quoting a passage that is relevant? L
I’ve read more than 6 philosophy books in the last 6 months. You are strawmanning me, because I’m not who you have delusionally convinced yourself that I am. Its completely unnecessary and not at all about the topic at hand.
I’m neutral and you’re reading into it.
If you find it offensive that I caught on about you actually not having the authority which you pretend to have on the subject, then the “hostility” is from your own non-acceptance of your ignorance, not me calling out your hypocrisy. If you don’t pretend to be an expert falsely, people can’t shame you for falsely pretending to be an expert, can they?
But dude I don’t fucking care about reading Leviathan!
Then don’t make statements like
“carcerial justice is just as fascistic as anything we associate with fascism” which never gets even thought about let alone discussed anywhere
Because it DOES GET DISCUSSED, you just “don’t fucking care” to read the discussion.
Just to alleviate the “you’re so mean” thing, the point here is very shortly that you can not have a society without some sort of a government. That probably sounds very authoritarian, because lots of people don’t use these words in the same context as they’re used in the philosophical discussion of politics. It’s because any society that comprises of more than three members will have some sort of rules. And those rules will then be enforced in some way. And that is the question they try to answer in these HUNDREDS OF YEARS OF PHILOSOPHICAL DISCUSSION that isn’t hidden anywhere and accessible to pretty much literally everyone in the world through the miracle of the internet, which you claim doesn’t exist.
They do explore the alternatives. Pretty much all of them. You should just start with Hobbes because he sort of started the conversation because it was around the time belief in the “divine right of kings” was already faltering. And since you “don’t fucking care about reading Leviathan”, you might put on the “baby philosophy” or whatever you called it (seems you’ve cleaned up your answer a bit) from de Botton and quickly listen to the cliffnotes on what he thought about it from a guy — who is making pop-philosophy videos, yes, but — who also is a professional philosopher and is objectively communicating their ideas rather skilfully. As that will save you time on reading the centuries of books on the matter as you can get the cliffnotes or sort of “previously on:” so that you can get to the book that you’re more interested in reading but which comments a lot on the earlier works which you may or may not have read.
Like 14 years ago or something I had just recently seen Slavoj Zizek, and I enjoyed his analysis (and honestly just his person.) So after watching some of his speeches and the The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema and The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, I decided to pick up a book of his. It’s genuinely the only book I’ve ever just given up on, as back then I was nearly as read and it made so many references to specific ideas of specific earlier philosophers, that I spent like a few days getting through just the first pages as I had to teach my self so much stuff backwardly before really understanding what Slavoj was trying to say. I also tried reading it without doing that and it was fine, you can keep up the context somewhat, but I noticed after a chapter or two that I had gotten something wrong on a fundamental level and had been getting some tiny idea wrong for a few pages and it had coloured my read of it and I had to do it all again.
So, because Hobbes is one of the fundamental thinkers on the subject, despite his own personal political views, he does make good and fundamental points about society. They’re not too complex, so you honestly don’t need to read the entire book. Fucking read a wiki-article what do I care. I’m just trying to point out that because you’re trying to make spending a night in a drunk tank “as fascist” as marching people to a gas chamber, you don’t seem to have a too nuanced understanding of the necessities of certain control measures in a society.
Google “State of Nature” to start with idk.
Like idk how you’d expect me to politely inform you of just how wrong you were in that statement because it would require me to author a succinct reply that would still convey hundreds of years of philosophical ponderings which you thought didn’t even exist?
edit that wasn’t exactly that “shortly”. well, to me it was, but I gather other people perceive it differently sometimes
I sat on a jury recently and a large part of the case had to do with prison culture. It’s so incredibly sad how accurate this is.
My dad was a prison guard, I’ve thought about some of these dynamics a lot over the years.
Honestly what else is there to do? These people aren’t exactly going to change their minds, and letting them display hate in the name of free speech is only going to help them mobilize and elect more trumps in the world.
I’mIn American prisons are white, black, Latin superiority gangs.I don’t know we do it, but I think addressing the root causes as to why people are drawn to hate groups or hateful beliefs would be better. Eliminating the symptom doesn’t solve the problem.
It’s a hell of a lot harder to join a hate group if you can’t identify any members to find out who to sign up with.
They can still easily identify each other online, social groups, clubs, etc. I would think that’s how most of these people get together anyway, and not from some rando on the street throwing up a nazi salute. Making the gesture illegal also doesn’t solve why people are this way. It doesn’t solve the problem. It just covers it up (imo).
I have no idea why you are so convinced that people are just as likely to join hate groups when they don’t know that they exist, but okay…
Because, as I said, they find each other online, in social settings, etc. Shit, the Aryan Brotherhood started as a prison gang. Banning the salute isn’t going to keep people from knowing about hate groups because that’s not how they find out about them to begin with.
I’m not arguing against banning hate speech, I’m just saying that that alone isn’t going to fix the problem. We also need to figure out why people are drawn to this stuff. Is it poverty? Lack of education? Lead in the drinking water?
Yes, no one is denying there are other ways to do it.
What you seem to be suggesting is that if you eliminate literally the most easy way to find who to sign up with when it comes to joining a hate group, it won’t make a difference.
What exactly do you think the point of public advertising is? Aesthetics?
Well I say it elsewhere, but we need to really start to rethink carcerial justice as a solution to social problems. It doesn’t help, it just compounds the contradictions that lead to problems like crime, fascism in the first place.
I understand we can’t just snap our fingers to make it go away. But The first step is discussion.
Lets discuss freeing violent rapists.
No.
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Does imagining everyone that is locked behind bars as a violent rapist make you feel safe?
No, the vast majority never go to prison. I gave it as an example, i dont think you are pro rape. It’s just an example of incarcarating people in order to protect society. I believe that protecting people is the primary goal of incarceration. Better rehabilitation would obviously help this endeavour. I disagree completely with the idea of no incarceration as this would allow violence to flourish with no protection for those under threat.
Sorry I deleted that comment, I didn’t like my tone.
Personally I’m not a prison abolitionist. I’d like to see an end to it, ideally, but realistically that would be an amount of practical work beyond just simple reforms, the whole of society would have to be changed. I’m into that, which is why I don’t ideally dismiss it.
I treated it better elsewhere, here I just said “you can’t snap your fingers” but what I mean is prisons and police they actually are the answer to a lot of problems in society. I agree with you, I would like to see much more reform programs rather than the USA prison system that “needs” prisons, which isn’t to say every prison is a social necessity, more like there are political and economic incentive structures that make meaningful progressive change extremely difficult. But my father was a prison guard, and we don’t agree much on politics, especially when it comes to carcerial justice, but that man had seen some absolute monsterous behavior from people who are basically unreformable by any modern standard – and as much as I wish that wasn’t the case and I wish they had been given the opportunity for a better life where maybe they wouldn’t have lost every bit of their humanity, that doesn’t change reality.
However I do think that a society that proliferates carcerial justice the way that we do in the USA, which is all my experience is about, I dont know about Aussie prisons, is not one that is able to restore or even preserve the humanity of all its citizens. A society that makes monsters needs a place to put them; however a place to put monsters creates a demand for monstrousness that must be met. This is what I think it is possible and realistic to abolish.
Thanks for the response, I did take it personally but thanks for clarifying your position
I think we would agree that for profit prisons are an absolute atrocity. I harbour a lot of hate for certain types of criminals, but for profit prison is downright evil and corrupt right off the bat. Protecting the public must include rehabilitation or you’re just releasing monsters. I would separate violent and non violent, i would also throw every intervention at the problem and see what works, employ the success stories, end poverty fist and foremost. In my opininion, incarceration is necessary mostly because society has failed, in some caes it is however, unavoidable.
I appreciate your perspective and experience on the subject. Thank you.
Trump puts tariffs on Australia…
And Musk to block Starlink from Australia.
gosh, how we let the weird kid gather so much power…
He’s gonna get starlink to burn insects like with a magnifying glass. Maybe the Jewish space lasers were Nazi space lasers all along.
Wow I never thought about this but would not be surprised at the development. If you vertically integrate the company that controls the satellites, the company that launches them into orbit, the govt that oversees it all, etc, you could just send whatever up there, especially with hundreds of launches and satellites.
They’re projecting like always.
In their defense, that’s the only thing lasers know how to do.
