On Punching Nazis

[jducoeur]

I've been mulling over the "punching Nazis" incident a couple of weeks ago, to understand how I think and feel about it.

Really, it's not a simple one. On the one hand, I can totally understand the visceral satisfaction of pasting one to the smarmy bad guys. OTOH, as many folks have pointed out, that doesn't make it right: the Nazi preaching his

Comments

[jducoeur]

Oh, I am *totally* not agreeing with the "equal time" myth. The press is under no more moral obligation to give airtime to the Nazi on the street than to the loony who thinks that the moose in his back yard is an alien from Neptune.

Indeed, this is a dangerous false equivalence, and now is the time to fight back against it. A lot of right-wing nutjobs have been peddling the notion that they have the right to spew their bile *anywhere they want*. (Particularly on the Internet, but also in the media and the physical world.) That is, again, bullshit. We should be against censorship: you have the right to say what you want. But you do *NOT* have the right to demand that others forward it on or report it, nor do you have the right to literally or figuratively bust into peoples' houses and start yelling in their faces.

Censorship has an intentionally specific definition: it is when the *government*, directly or indirectly, tries to prevent you from saying something. That's a deathly critical restriction on government power, especially now, and one we should be fighting to defend. But that doesn't mean we have to listen to or report on the bad guys, and it *certainly* doesn't mean we need to pretend that their views are equally valid.

I just wish more of the press would grow a spine and remember this...

[lilairen]

A friend of mine has been consumed by the need to write the stuff on this site today, in response to some of the same impulses.