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Yes, tariffs increase prices in almost any case they’re implemented, which is the goal. Trudeau seems to be hoping that by adding these tariffs, it will become even easier to shift consumer behavior to buy non-American made goods, which could possibly either lead Trump to reduce/remove his tariffs, or at least make Americans feel more of the economic impact of those reductions in sales, which could then push more people to go against Trump politically.

I draw a distinction between how I try to conduct myself (and, by extension, how I think society should conduct itself), and how I think a government should conduct itself. Any common overlap, while it may theoretically draw from the same core personal beliefs, is more of a coincidence in practice, imo.

I do the same thing. I don’t apply every possible way I conduct myself to how I think the government should regulate people’s actions, but when it comes to Nazism, I specifically believe the government should intervene, not because I personally wouldn’t do what they’re doing, but because their actions are observably, categorically harmful to society.

Yes, I think that society should not socially tolerate any of these behaviors

I think that society should take an active position to socially oppose them

but I don’t believe that a government should take action

So you think society should oppose them, but when an institution to represent the will of society has the power to oppose them, you now no longer believe it’s justified to oppose them. You’re contradicting yourself.

unless the well-being of an individual is actively under threat.

Any furtherance of a Nazi agenda puts every individual in a free society under threat by its very nature. If you allow a Nazi to spread their rhetoric, you increase the likelihood of an actual fascist regime happening that harms millions, if not billions.

We fine people for speeding all the time even if they don’t kill someone in a car crash, because we know that if more people are speeding, the likelihood of a car crash will increase, and that is obviously undesirable if your goal is to preserve human life.

We should do everything we can to prevent Nazis from gaining any power, whether through political office or social relevance, because we know that when they are allowed to do so, the likelihood of a fascist regime existing that is harmful to the preservation of human life grows.

but all of your examples seem to simply a be a difference of opinion (no matter how abhorrent and unpalatable an opinion may be). I don’t believe that one should be legally punished for a difference of opinion.

My opinion is that we should nuke X country and kill all of its citizens. I will spread this message, attempt to gain support for it, and hopefully get to a point where a member of the movement can gain political power that allows them to launch those nukes. Should I be allowed to do so, or should I only be stopped once I’ve already gained the power to launch those nukes, and have my finger over the button? After all, it’s just a difference of opinion.

Opinions can be harmful, not just because they can cause legitimate mental harm to those in the immediate vicinity on the receiving end of that rhetoric, but also because they can lead to harmful outcomes, that would otherwise not exist had the opinion not been allowed to spread.

The only one that may have some legal ground, in my opinion, as I currently understand your examples, is

Supporting dictatorship, authoritarianism, or totalitarianism as a concept or goal

If you support censoring/imprisoning those who hold that belief, then you support doing so to Nazis. If you don’t support doing so to Nazis, then you don’t know what Nazis do, or stand for.

This is yet another example of you holding contradictory views, where in one case you’re okay with the thing being stopped, but the moment someone with the “Nazi” label does those same things, you begin to drop your support for actually doing anything meaningful to prevent the ideology from spreading.

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How the fuck do we fix this?

The primary issue is twofold:

1. Heavily biased information and restrictive media diets
2. Democrat Inaction

If you try viewing even a tiny amount of right leaning content on a fresh social media account on any platform, you’ll see the type of content that gets perpetuated. People simply become indoctrinated by content recommendations that are practically incapable of showing the other side, not to mention that most mainstream media is entirely corporately captured.

The fact that the Democrats were slow to release official policy for Harris’s campaign, indeterminate on Gaza, and had (or really, still have) a very “this is fine, you’re just overreacting, but sure we’ll fix a few things” attitude towards political messaging, only helped Republicans, because it led a lot of people to just vote for the party that promised the most, and that was the Republicans. All the wars would be over, things would be cheaper, all the “bad” people wouldn’t be here anymore, etc.

To a normal person with very little media literacy, those promises sound downright amazing.

I personally think we fix this by at least starting with messaging, since that’s what actually leads most people to make a decision on who to vote for. There were literally people deciding on election night who they wanted to vote for, so messaging is highly important.

The left needs to speak to the immediately visible, material needs of the working people directly. While it’s important to fight against the right on culture war issues to prevent the ceding of ground on things like civil rights and discrimination, I think a lot of left leaning messaging focuses too heavily on that, and as a result, it can seem to right-inclined people that the left has no economic policy. That needs to change.

See: Bernie Sanders, and how he very consistently addresses specific economic issues people face, and has broader support on the right compared to any democratic congressperson. Hell, even JD Vance said Bernie was one of the people he least disliked on the left, and Bernie’s further left than the Democrats. Populist, economic disparity focused, anti-billionaire, pro-worker sentiment is how you change ordinary people’s minds in the current media economy.

As an individual, the most you’ll likely be able to do in this respect is going to be volunteering for phone banking efforts, donating money to left leaning charities focused on reducing economic inequality, and generally bringing these kinds of talking points up in general political discussion with others.

There’s something else that’s commonly overlooked though, and that’s local policy. Think of a city’s “town hall” type meetings that accept public comment. How many people in that city are actually regularly attending a town hall meeting? Think of how few people it really is during a particularly contentious proposal. Now imagine what it’s like when it comes to something like “housing and urban development: reducing the rate of homelessness - meeting no. 57” Almost nobody. Get yourself and a few friends down to your local relevant policy meetings, make even a little noise, and the amount of change you can make as a result can be drastic compared to the actual % of the city’s population you make up.

Pushing for things like ranked-choice voting in local elections can also be very viable, since it’s proven that tends to push voters further left, on average, and it also adds some extra competition that can spur a party like the Democrats into actual meaningful action.

Because when the norm to these people is media that exclusively panders to them, even one single piece of media that doesn’t represent them is a zero-to-100 change. Going from even 0 to 1 piece of inclusive media is startling, new, and scary to them, because they’re simply not used to it.

It’s the root of the entire conservative mentality (which is why you’ll primarily see conservative men talking about this) since all conservatism is based in a desire for things to remain the same. Change is just scary to these people, no matter how benign the change may be.

The Nazis could claim you are in violation of your laws if you support “pedophiles” (by which they mean “trans”). Or supporting “enemy invaders” (by which they mean “immigrants”). Even mentioning “Luigi” could qualify as a violation.

Nazism, however, can be more objectively defined than single-word terms, as you’ve used here.

For instance, if someone says the words “Heil Hitler” while raising their hands in a traditional Nazi salute, there isn’t exactly room for a fascist to go “weeeeelllll but you saying ‘black lives matter’ with your fist up is the same thing, actually,” if the law explicitly states that saying the exact words “Heil Hitler” while raising your hand in that salute is the specific thing required to get you imprisoned. Laws can be more objectively defined than “pedophiles,” “supporting enemy invaders,” or “Nazis.”

Never give the government a power that you would not give to the Nazis.

Nazis simply ignore the law. Trump is quite literally doing it right now, He’s passing executive orders he doesn’t actually have the legal capacity to enforce, which is then leading to things like congresspeople being prevented from entering buildings they have a right to enter, or databases being given to people without legally required security credentials. They don’t care what the law was, they care what it will be once they’re done screwing with it.

Whether or not you pass a law prohibiting explicit behaviors that are categorically harmful to society will not change whether or not they are then capable of manipulating the laws to do what they wanted to do to you regardless.

It will, however, heavily reduce the chances of them coming into power, and having the ability to misuse any laws or power they may have in the first place

That conclusion does not arise from my arguments.

And yes, it obviously does. You stated that we should not censor Nazis because Nazis in power later on could use that law to suppress others. The same logic applies to any other regulation or prohibition. We shouldn’t pass gun control legislation because it’s possible someone uses it to take the good people’s guns away. We shouldn’t imprison people for rape because someone could redefine what rape means to mean non-married people having sex. We shouldn’t jail pedophiles because they could redefine trans people as pedophiles simply for existing.

It’s the same logic all the way down. There is nothing different when it comes to imprisonment for Nazi-aligned speech/actions, or other dangerous speech/actions. All of them can be prohibited to an extent, even though there’s a possibility that the power dynamic could then be reversed later on by the same group of people being prohibited.

Look, I’m not going to keep going on this because I think it’s clear neither of us are changing our stances. Send a reply if you want, I’ll gladly read it, and give it some thought, but I’m done trying to continue a conversation if you think we shouldn’t try to stop Nazis because Nazis could possibly get in power and stop us instead. That applies to any regulation against any group that could possibly come into power, and I would encourage you to look back at the examples I provided, stop, and think about just how different the logic really is to the idea of censoring Nazis, because I think you’ll find it is, in fact, not different at all.

This argument boils down to “You want the government to do a good thing, but bad people can abuse the government to do the opposite.” Sure, that happens sometimes.

But following your logic, I guess all laws shouldn’t exist then. After all, if we give the government the ability to do anything against any citizen, they might use it in a bad way! This argument is fundamentally unworkable, because it doesn’t just apply to enforcing rules regarding speech, it applies to all rules.

Yes, I believe the government should enforce the standards I believe are correct. No, I do not believe that simply by enforcing such standards the power is magically granted for them to use it incorrectly, in a way that they wouldn’t be capable of had my preferred regulation not been implemented. Whether Nazis are or aren’t allowed speech won’t stop a bad government from simply censoring acceptable speech, if the government is acting in bad faith. They will do so regardless of if anti-Nazi speech regulations were in place prior.

Should we never attempt to implement any positive policy if it grants power that could theoretically be abused?

I think, in this case, it depends on how you are defining freedom of speech

Yes, it does. The extent to which I support any individual’s freedom of speech only extends until that speech causes demonstrable harm. Unfettered free speech has no beneficial social utility compared to free speech that has restrictions for things that cause great social harm.

People often get caught up in the idea of “free speech = good, therefore anything I disagree with should still be allowed to be said,” when it doesn’t actually provide any value to let them do so, and actually harms society in the process. People have the right to say almost anything they want, but if we know the things they’re saying inevitably lead to fascist systems of power that oppress and kill millions, then restricting their free speech as much as possible is always justifiable, because doing so directly reduces the chances of people dying unjustifiably.

the government would step in as it must prevent monopolistic market behavior to ensure fair market competition

The government rarely actually steps in, even in cases of demonstrable monopolies. This is very easy to see in our world today, and will always be the case as long as you live in a capitalist system. Capitalism grants power to the capital holders by allowing them to buy the means of productions, restricting the power of workers to mobilize against corporate action, elect representatives not favorable to capital owners, etc. It causes anti-monopolistic tendencies to waver, because in a system built on being able to buy up businesses, capital concentration is the design, not just an unintended side effect.

if the nazis were a majority of the populace, I fear the argument is moot as they likely would be the ones creating the laws in the first place

A group of people do not need to be the majority of the population to hold drastically more wealth, and thus a direct ability to impact the choices of businesses. See: the top 1% of wealth holders owning 30% of wealth, and the bottom 50% of wealth holders owning just a few percentage points.

Critically though, we need to look at the possibility of such a drastically negative outcome occurring in both of our possible systems. In mine, Nazism simply is not given a chance from the start. It is not given the opportunity to even attempt a power grab, because those who publicly spread the ideology are imprisoned.

In yours, they are given the ability to spread their ideology, still get employment and buy goods at sympathetic businesses, can gain functional societal acceptance by accumulating wealth, and so on. Your system does less to stop Nazi ideology from spreading than mine does. It is fundamentally less hostile to Nazis.

Now, I’m going to try consolidating my responses to all your other replies in this one comment, since I want to try and keep this tidy.

I think this begs the question — is it certain that social intolerance wont prevent, or is likely to not prevent these ideologies from accelerating in adoption?

They can do so, but they are less effective. We as a society, generally, hold distaste for people who do murders. If we lived in a society where nobody was ever imprisoned for murder, would we see less murder? Of course not, because the only consequence to doing so would be social shunning, but you would still be free to do whatever else you please in your life, and if you’re a person that doesn’t care what people think of you, or can surround yourself in a community of like-minded murderers, then social shunning does nothing to disincentivize you from murdering more people. Imprisonment exists for a reason, that being it is more effective than other means of preventing behavior, such as social shunning.

The exact same logic applies to Nazism. The ideology, after spreading far enough and gaining power, inevitably leads to outcomes that most of us would find highly undesirable, such as the genocide of entire groups of individuals, and thus should be treated as such, with the strongest force possible to reduce the chance of it spreading by as much as possible.

I don’t agree that this is necessarily true. For example, what of the case of a tyrannical government? Society may be accepting of a behavior, yet the behavior may be an imprisonable offense. Therefore something being an imprisonable offense doesn’t necessitate that it be a socially shunned behavior (by the majority).

Sorry if I was unclear by what I meant here. I meant specifically that imprisonment isolates you from the rest of society, by locking you up either in a cell block with very few other people to communicate with (relatively speaking) or by putting you in solitary, with no people to communicate with. You objectively have less ability to interact with other human beings, and have been “shunned” as a result. Or at least, you experience similar effects. (Social deprivation, being placed in situations only involving other people rejected from the common populace, etc) Again, apologies if I was unclear.

It may depend on what you mean by “beneficial”, but, generally, I’m not necessarily arguing that not imprisoning those espousing nazi-rhetoric would be more “positive” than the alternative, I simply fear the risks of going the route of governmental force outweigh the benefits. I fear tyrannical overreach, and I think a liberal approach, while not perfect, may be the best means to stave off this outcome. But, at least we have experiments like Australia, which can be examined from a distance.

Philosophically, the question becomes rather uncomfortable for me to answer; I personally don’t feel that I can be certain that my views are moral, so I tend to prefer the option that ensures the largest amount of ideological freedom. I understand that the paradox of tolerance is a threat to that idea, and it should be resisted, but I’m simply not convinced that imprisonment is the best antidote.

I understand this point a lot, and I do think it’s a quite justified opinion to have. If we can’t be certain our views are moral, we want to do what requires the least harm to come to people, in case we’re wrong.

This

I fear tyrannical overreach

is a good fear to have, but if this logic was applied consistently, then we wouldn’t imprison anybody, for any offense, because we can’t actually be 100% confident that we were making the right choice in imprisoning them. As I mentioned earlier, we already know what Nazi ideology leads to in the end, we’ve seen its effects before, and with the rise of fascism in America with Trump’s second term, we’re seeing it begin again.

Just like how we could observe that murder negatively impacts the wellbeing of local communities, and societies as a whole, we can observe that what tends to arise from Nazi rhetoric also produces those same outcomes. For instance, Trump’s new executive orders are doing things like cutting billions in aid that currently keep many people alive in struggling countries, who are now likely to die from a lack of aid. His policies will be resulting in a significant shortfall in spending on critical programs people need to stay alive, like Medicare/Medicaid, are cutting funding for research that develops critical cures for people’s health problems, he’s actively stripping policies that level the playing field for disadvantaged groups which will only result in their overall relative share of wealth going down over time, not to mention his billionaire supporting policy that’s actively funneling more of the few percentage points of wealth everyone not in the top 50% of people has to the top 1%, which will only make their lives harder.

We see the outcomes, more concrete moral biases we can often feel more confident in (e.g. less death is usually ideal, people should ideally be healthy and happy, etc) back up why those outcomes are wrong, so we can then feel confident in saying the thing that caused those outcomes should be legislated against.

If you believe Nazis are a harm to society, and we have all our concrete understanding of their misdeeds to back that up, then it is no different from any action we take against any other bad action to say that they should be imprisoned for the harm we know they do to society.

I understand it’s difficult to support something that you could end up being wrong on, that ends up overreaching, but if you do nothing more than the social shunning that already happened just recently right up through when Trump entered the Oval Office, then you get fascism, and we’re seeing, yet again, the harm that fascism causes.

Do we really want to mandate jail time though? It seems like maybe fines would be effective?

Fines are generally not as effective as we’d like, because fines only affect the poor. If you’re wealthy, a fine is nothing to you. If a working class person espousing Nazi ideology were to be fined, say, $10,000, that could possibly make them bankrupt. If Elon Musk was fined $10,000 every time he said something directly aligned with the Nazis, he’d still be a multi-billionaire.

Now, sure, we can adjust fines as a percent of income, for instance, which helps, but generally speaking, the loss of autonomy (imprisonment) discourages bad behavior more than the loss of money, thus it tends to be a better way to prevent given behaviors from occurring.

I’m not in favor of inventing more ways to fill up for-profit prisons […]

I understand, and I agree to an extent, but I think if the problem is the for-profit prisons, we should focus on not having for-profit prisons, rather than not prosecuting what should be crimes just because the current prison system is quite bad.

[…] with non-violent offenders.

Nazis are inherently violent. They may not directly harm an individual, but the ideology revolves around harm coming to other groups. (e.g. how the Nazis killed Jewish people, advocated for the death of homosexuals, etc) When someone supports Nazism, they directly support an ideology that effectively mandates the death of many.

In the same way that I believe health insurance CEOs should be considered murderers when they deliberately implement bad algorithms that deny claims for the sake of shareholder profit, even though they didn’t directly cause a death, I believe that people who support ideologies that can lead to the death of many should be treated maybe not as someone who has done a murder, but as someone who allowed the means for a murder to happen, knowingly, gladly, and deliberately.

Yes, I agree that not using governmental force would be more legally tolerant — as you mentioned above:

(referencing your other comment for consolidation purposes)

I support social actions that prevent their views from being held and spread.

So what we’ve established is that:

1. You are intolerant of their views…
2. …and won’t socially accept them…
3. …but if given the choice to force them to stop the behavior, you are no longer willing to not tolerate them, at that extent.

Your stance is categorically "I don’t think Nazis should be able to say the things that make them Nazis, and I’ll be mean to them about it and hope businesses shun them, but I won’t actually stop them from doing that."

So, what is your reasoning for why they should be shunned socially, but not legally? Why is it more beneficial to allow them to say specifically what they say, as opposed to preventing that by force?

Okay, let’s throw that out then, and look at this objectively. Social shunning or unemployment does not discourage something more than imprisonment, because not only does imprisonment do all of those things, it also restricts individual autonomy altogether, and is thus a more harsh punishment than just denying someone business or employment. Stating that businesses rejecting Nazis will somehow be more of a punishment than arresting them is quite irrational.

Especially when you consider that businesses look out for what will make them the most profit, not what’s socially right/wrong. If the Nazis had more money than the non-Nazis, then substantially less businesses would do anything to stop them, whereas ideally, the law doesn’t care how much money you have, and if you break it, you go to jail. Obviously the wealthy are able to skirt many regulations using money, but there are many that they can’t. If a billionaire stabs someone in broad daylight, they go to jail regardless.

Generally speaking, espousing/engaging in the support of many harmful beliefs traditionally held by Nazis, and generally fascists more broadly since Nazism is just a branch of fascism, such as:

• Supporting the actions of the Nazi party historically (e.g. saying the Nazis were right to kill Jewish people, saying “Heil Hitler,” or doing the Nazi salute in a clearly deliberate manner)
• Supporting dictatorship, authoritarianism, or totalitarianism as a concept or goal
• Belief in a so called “master race” or the subordination of other races for the benefit of another/the nation
• Advocating for the imprisonment/killing of homosexual/transgender individuals (the exact category of people at risk here can change over time, since fascism just re-selects a new group of people to attack once the former has been exterminated/ostracized enough)
• Religious nationalism by any denomination
• Advocating to eliminate unions for the benefit of corporations/the state
• Ultra-nationalist rhetoric
• Advocating for an expansion of the police state
• Views of immigrants as sub-human
• etc.

Practically speaking, I think it would probably make the most sense to judge whether somebody is a “Nazi” legally, by requiring at least a few of these tenets to be met before any trial could take place to prevent false imprisonment and the like, but as these views are objectively harmful to society, I don’t believe they should be allowed to flourish, full stop.

If you don’t support imprisoning people who hold these views that directly lead to the death of many innocent people, the taking over of people’s land/homes, the destruction of democratic systems, and the elimination of entire races of people from populations, then you are inherently tolerating their beliefs.

I think a more forceful alternative could be being something like “I wont allow you into my place of business”

Ah yes, not letting Nazis buy from a business, at the business’s will, dependent on every single individual place of employment all knowing they’re a Nazi and actively choosing to deny them business and employment, as opposed to… just locking them up so they don’t have a chance of their views being spread in the world. Truly, the “more forceful alternative.”

I would like to reiterate that I am not advocating for tolerance. It’s quite the contrary. I am advocating for very vocal intolerance of these groups and their behaviors.

Saying we shouldn’t police those behaviors is actively stating that you want to tolerate them, just via legal means rather than solely social ones. You say you don’t want to tolerate them socially, but when it comes to any actual legal intervention, suddenly, they should be tolerated. If saying they shouldn’t be stopped using the force of law isn’t tolerating the behavior more than saying we should stop them using the force of law, then I don’t know what is.

It is simply my belief that governmental force is not a necessary means to this end, not to mention that it is incompatible with the ideas of liberalism [1], which I personally espouse.

Then you should reconsider your ideology. If your ideology allows Nazis to face no legal consequences for being Nazis, while you simultaneously state that you don’t believe they should be tolerated, then you hold mutually contradictory views.

If you don’t think their views should be tolerated, you should support actions that prevent their views from being held and spread. If you don’t do that, then you inherently are tolerating them to an extent.

I don’t think it’s a good idea to police it through the use of governmental force.

Oh it absolutely is.

If you don’t think it should be socially tolerated, then great, regulations are how we enforce social tolerance in a manner that isn’t just “I don’t like you, please stop, but also I won’t do anything to you if you keep doing it.”

Furthermore, and this is something you’ll probably see brought up a lot when using that talking point, there is a paradox of tolerance that cannot be avoided when it comes to issues like Nazism. Nazi rhetoric is inherently discriminatory and intolerant. If you allow it to flourish, it kills off all other forms of tolerance until only itself is left. If you don’t tolerate Nazi rhetoric, it doesn’t come to fruition and destroy other forms of tolerance.

Any ideology that actively preaches intolerance towards non-intolerant groups must not be tolerated, otherwise tolerance elsewhere is destroyed.

(This mini comic explains the paradox well, as well.)

The response from the LLM I showed in my reply is generally the same any time you ask almost anything negative about the CCP, regardless of the possible context. It almost always starts with the exact words “The Chinese Communist Party has always adhered to a people-centered development philosophy,” a heavily pre-trained response that wouldn’t show up if it was simply generally biased from, say, training data. (and sometimes just does the “I can’t answer that” response)

It NEVER puts anything in the <think> brackets you can see above if the question is even slightly possibly negative about the CCP, which it does with any other prompt. (See below, asking if cats or dogs are better, and it generating about 4,600 characters of “thoughts” on the matter before even giving the actual response.

Versus asking “Has China ever done anything bad?”

Granted, this seems to sometimes apply to other countries, such as the USA too:

But in other cases, it explicitly will think about the USA for 2,300 characters, but refuse to answer if the exact same question is about China:

Remember, this is all being run on my local machine, with no connection to DeepSeek’s servers or web UI, directly in terminal without any other code or UI running that could possibly change the output. To say it’s not heavily censored at the weights level is ridiculous.

I’m running the 1.5b distilled version locally and it seems pretty heavily censored at the weights level to me.

Many methods of protest should make normal people angry. That’s the entire point. Protests exist to be disruptive.

Block a billionaire’s driveway, and they fly to a private luxury penthouse and don’t have to deal with you ever again.

Block major roads, and everybody realizes that the only way they’re going to get to work on time in a consistent manner going forward is by actually satisfying your movement’s demands, voting against oil company supporting politicians, demanding they stop subsidizing fossil fuels, etc.

Making one billionaire’s life marginally harder won’t convince them to change anything. Making thousands or even millions of people’s lives harder on a regular basis until they collectively force the billionaires to stop will most certainly change something.

This argument is like if you demanded that during the Civil Rights Movement protests, nobody ever did sit-ins at restaurants because it would annoy the patrons, but wasn’t going directly after the politicians involved. In actuality, that was a key driver of furthering the movement, because not only did it make it difficult to maintain white-only infrastructure without annoyance, thus causing some business owners to rescind their policies since it was more trouble than it’s worth, but it also gave people who were more on the fence a prescient reason to stop being segregationist.

In this analogy, the restaurants are the roads, the patrons are the people driving in their cars, and the business owner is the government managing the roads.

Once it becomes more difficult to maintain the current status quo, instead of having functional roads by caving to public pressure and ending subsidies, stopping new fossil fuel development, and migrating to cleaner alternatives, then those exact changes will get implemented.

They genuinely didn’t know, they were just asking because they wanted an answer! /s