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I'm also not keen on treating WHAM civilly.

It's all right, Ali. We can keep up the status quo, where one side act like children angrily calling people names, while the other side keep a cool head and act like adults.
Keep calm and carry on.

You can't expect acceptance and forgiveness when all you've done is express the same views in politer and more nuanced terms.

I expect no acceptance, since  we disagree on certain topics and hold vastly differing worldviews and historical backgrounds, and thus clearly cannot accept one another's views.
I expect no forgiveness, for I don't believe I have done anything wrong where I would need to be forgiven.

I expect civility and basic human decency, things I am fully willing and able to grant even to people with whom I vehemently disagree and disapprove of.

Perhaps the nub of our disagreement is that I think endorsing Nazi ideas is wrongdoing?

I see no major disagreement here. Many, even most, ideas held by the Nazis are deeply wrong. They were so at the time, and they remain so today. The ideas that weren't quite so bad could even be argued to not be nazi ideas, but rather older, more deep-rooted ideals of Germany and other historical nations the Nazis adopted.
Most of the things I've said you seem upset about are well over a decade old now, from a time before I turned 18, and when I wrote in far edgier style, using cruder language to represent my ideas. While much of those ideas still hold, such as the belief (now even stronger, the more history books I've read) that the victors write the history they want and will colour it to their liking, they are far more evolved and nuanced nowadays with plenty more reading done and life lived.

I've said this before and will say it again, I'll be happy to discuss views and matters with people at any time. I have Discord for that, as well as many other avenues of communication. Sadly it seems that no matter what opinions I state out in the open on a topic at hand, the end result seems to repeatedly just be me having to defend my character rather than the content of what I have said in the past decade.

No. I don't agree when the person in question has expressly said that the Nazis were no worse than the opposition in WW2, that criminals are sub-human and that only weak-minded people are horrified by Nazi symbolism. When the person in question JUST shared a political comic strip from a cartoonist who endorses holocaust denial. No, obviously not.

Funny how my worldviews still hold the same basic principles: just because one side is worse than the other does not mean the other one is not also bad and need to be dealt with accordingly. Oh, and yes, I still also hold the view that the most vile of criminals do deserve to lose their human rights. Difference between people like you and people like me is that I expect there to be inviolable evidence of wrongdoing before a punishment should be laid out, rather than just deciding that someone should be labelled as evil and thus all they say is also automatically evil. The comic does a very good job at illustrating how abusing labels is a way for the most vile people to get their way, in the exact same fashion as certain individuals here are doing things. Isn't it interesting to notice how only one side seems to have to rely on slapping labels on their opponents to justify their abuse, while the other side only has to make reasoned arguments?

Any other topics you'd like to discuss again?

And the comic you posted is, as it turns out, from an alt-right artist, with other strips that are transphobic, racist, and express Holocaust denial (and with its official forum a Neo-Nazi fan community that was banned from Reddit). Which again, is not permitted here.

The creator of the comic, or parts of their fanbase, can hold whatever views they want. I see no reason for that to detract from the art itself, or the all-too-real message it portrays.

WHAM, could you briefly clarify which ones you believe to be more accurate? Why and by what margin? At least for me it would help clear up that Nazi sympathizer accusation, one way or the other.

People actually fighting for freedom and equality, such as the more stable parts of the BLM movement, are in my opinion on the more righteous path than someone like Antifa or Qanon.
My short view on the BLM movement is that it has a very good underlying cause and idea (equal opportunity regardless of race, and the end of racial discrimination in the legal system among others), but is marred by its more extreme components and fringe ideas that seem to serve only to discredit the more sensible parts of the movement.

As for Qanon, I don't know that much about their movement, but they seem to just be a particularly active movement built around conspiracy theories and capable of mobilizing their members in real world locations. So far, to my knowledge, their movement doesn't really have any merit whatsoever.

Antifa on the other hand is a reactionary group of self-righteous thugs looking to dehumanize their opponents to justify various forms of violence and destruction under the guise of blind faith in a "good cause" and "saving the world from the nazis".

"It remains both sad and funny at the same time to see how the left-leaning people all over the world have so utterly failed to learn what kind of harm it does to label people" - I don't think you can pin this solely on the left. I think both sides are guilty of labelling - it's a childish conflict response - but certainly something the outgoing president has not held back on indulging in himself.

For my part, I've no qualms pointing the finger as much on the right as I do on the left. I've been repeatedly calling out the extremes on both sides, and both sides are, at least in the US, definitely guilty of using the same tactics. The issue of labelling people as you please and then using those labels as justification for further abuse, of special interest to me as a thing I've had the unpleasant experience of being the target of myself, has become increasingly prevalent in US politics over the past decade and seem to be steadily seeping out of the US and into the politics and especially the media of slightly more civilized parts of the world as well.

Oddly enough, even on this very forum we seem to find plenty of people willing to look the other way when one side, or rather they themselves, are abusing these tactics, and are more than eager to call it out when someone else does it.

Sure, there are neo-nazis out there, but they lack the power to do much, so pretending they hold such power is inane.

I can sympathise with your family history, even though my family was very much on the other side of the experience, and if we were having this conversation in a setting where actual holocaust survivors were present then even I would wholly agree that jokes on the topic would be in utterly poor taste. However, an internet forum is not such a place, and while everyone might have a different opinion and personal experience, silencing opinions, ideas, topics and worldviews, as well as making certain words and symbols simply verboten due to some aspect of their history, is a wholly unreasonable expectation of an entire community.

Well, unless that community chooses to expel all who hold different opinions and worldviews and sets up gatekeeping policites, as some sites already do.

Yes, Ali, well spotted. That was the exact joke I was making, and the exact kind of people I was both mocking and warning you about.

And even if I were to play along with the notion that the swastika is used in other contexts than nazism, WHAM stated outright that he only changed his avatar to look like a nazi

That was kind of the point. Whether I look like, or don't look like a "nazi" in a forum avatar does not change what I truly am. The symbology can just as well be a joke or a jest, if used that way.
The symbol has no power unless you give it power, and every time someone clutches their pearls and faints at the sight of a "nazi symbol" they are simply empowering actual nazis to think they still hold some real power in society. The exact kind of validation that all the other crazies online, the Qanons and whatnots, feed off of.

It remains both sad and funny at the same time to see how the left-leaning people all over the world have so utterly failed to learn what kind of harm it does to label people they don't like as something they are not. Fascist, nazi, deplorable, alt-right, whatever it happens to be. Such false labels only serve to drive people away from your cause, and into something you absolutely don't want to drive them to. It was precisely this my joke of an evil-to-the-point-of-having-glowing-red-eyes nazi avatar was trying to exemplify. Unlike the nutcases on Capitol Hill, I'm content to poke holes in weak ideologies and to change a forum avatar, though.

Plus don't you think an avatar with SS runes would be pretty horrifying to forum users who haven't followed the context of this discussion?

To be "horrified" of an old symbol of a dead ideology is, to me, a sign of weakness of the mind and spirit. It's a fear of ghosts.
It's not the symbol we should fear or feel outrage over, but the actual ideas and actions, the actual extremism that actually harms people all over the world. A picture on the internet has not hurt anyone, a brick, a fist, a fire, or a boot or a gun has, and the people who take to the streets with those are the ones we need to worry about, whatever symbols they choose to wear that particular day.

Just like all the pearl-clutching about the swastika, which still remains in use in a number of countries, such as Finland over here, acting horrified over a rune or a symbol with a multitude of meanings just because ONE of those meanings was vile long ago is a foolish thing to do and merely gives far more power to the very people we'd all (hopefully) like to oppose.

SS-runes on your avatar now, WHAM, eh?

**** off!

Hey, if I get called a nazi and fascist by people who don't know the difference, then I might as well look the part, right?
Alas, I'll swap the avatar if it hurts your frail little soul so much to see 16 evil pixels on your screen.

EDIT: There, all better now.
EDIT EDIT: Oooh? I'm watched now, but not the people who keep accusing me of being something I'm not, namecalling and showing various forms of hatred and outright bigotry. That... seems about right for what's going on nowadays. Carry on.

When the so-called anti-racists are saying that some races are exempt from the rules, and should be treated unequally, I tend to think of them as just another flavour of racists.

True, whenever people try to draw an equivalence between people killing others, and the people protesting the killings..

You mean the BLM shooter who killed 5 police officers?
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/09/us/dallas-police-shooting.html

Or are we talking of all the people dead and injured in the other BLM and George Floyd protests so far?

Again, just because one side is worse (no matter if it's my evaluation or yours, and if those evaluations come to a different value judgement of these violent extremist movements) than the other, should not mean we need to start arguing about which group is worse than another group. We should be agreeing that violent political extremist groups are a foul thing and need to be acted upon.

With Trumps Twitter shut down, it will also be interesting to see where that leads. I'm guessing big tech companies are going to have to go on a rampage shutting down the smaller social media platforms to make sure the people cut off from the major platforms cannot find a refuge anywhere. For if the fail that, we'll just see a further division of the internet into smaller and smaller communities with more and more extremism. Hell, back when I joined the AGS forums I told people this was the nicest, friendliest community I'd ever seen online, but nowadays some of the loudest voices seem to be perfectly happy to spout hate, abuse and toxicity at other users for the crime of not agreeing with them. Never would have believed it, back in the day...

You mean a civil war, right?
I feel that's too extreme, even with the high level of polarization and constant expansion of radicalism. The actual underlying issues aren't such that I could imagine any states seceding from the union, let alone doing so in a group large enough to threaten the whole of the union. The average quality of life across the states is high enough that vast majority of people won't be willing to risk that.

For my part, while it's less about Trump and more about the future, I more interested in how the next 4 years will go. While I've been pessimistic about things, and remain so, I am genuinely curious to see what team Biden can actually do, and what steps they take to resolve the ongoing conflict in the US. While I may be too short sighted to see a solution, maybe people smarter than me have ways of actually bridging the divide and resolving some of the tensions that are currently dividing America?

Whether one thinks Trump was the cause or effect of this divide, what do you folks think might be required to heal the nation? What can be done to de-radicalize the extremes and help give the regular people who just want work, peace and stability a voice in a society where, currently, it seems the group that screams the loudest gets all the attention?

(And your last sentence is exactly the famous trope of the guy who's definitely not a nazi becoming a nazi because of all the SJWs who keep calling him a nazi. You couldn't imply "closeted fascist" more if you tried)

I guess there's nothing to do, then. I am undone! I cannot resist!
Curse thee, oh soyboy leftie! I will wear my MAGA hat with pride and dignity as you cuck yourself on the altar of woke socialism! Choke on your precious bread, marxist!

(Good enough? Did we get the sarcasm layered on thick enough?)

I didn't disagree with anything you said, but nice to see that believing that violent extremism is bad makes me a closet fascist. I'd imagine it's that exact sort of gatekeeping that's keeping a lot of people from wanting to have anything to do with certain worldviews and groups.

To me it just seems the whole "based on what, and to what degree, is this extremist movement bad compared to the others" conversation is pretty pointless. Violent political extremism in all aspects should be curbed and pacified if a nation is to remain a place of law, order and justice. Creating a tier list of who's worse than who is irrelevant to that end, save for the time-sensitive risk analyses produced by law enforcement as they do their work.

They're very different brands of crazy, but until Capitol Hill Qanon at least didn't have any deaths on its hands, so I guess we can now say Qanon has caught up in that regard. They are, however, extremists in sharing the same set of tools and ideals. Both believe they are on a righteous path (some more accurately than others) and doing the right thing, both are prone to extreme worldviews, make unrealistic demands of society to sate their needs and wants, and now are both proven to be capable of extreme action and violence.

I've seen a BLM oriented American friend of mine go from "We need to be more active and vote" to "I think it's okay to burn down the city hall and see some cops get killed if that gets people to listen to us" in less than a year.

The parties themselves obviously aren't extreme on either side, because they have to encompass the normal people as well as the extremes. The extremes aren't sitting in halls making policy, they are the ones hurting people, destroying lives and property, and claiming they have the right to do these things due to holding the correct ideology while their victims hold the wrong ideology. You know, like extremists do. Thus it makes sense that, say, the extreme right will claim that all Democrats are "extreme left" to justify their actions, and vice versa. Whether it be Qanon or BLM or Antifa, it's all self-serving extremism of some degree or other.