That said, it does matter who is president! Look at the article from Foreign Policy I just linked to, in which the FBI and DHS warned about this growing threat months ago. The US has experienced several periods of growing right wing extremism all within the past 50 years, and I am sure federal law enforcement has a rich history of investigating and prosecuting these folks. I am not sure how much direct influence the White House has on the scope and zeal of these efforts, but I would imagine it could make a big difference.

A few weeks before Heather Heyer was murdered and many others were injured after a coalition of hate groups gathered violently in Charlottesville, Virginia, the Trump administration—under guidance from trusted aides such as Katharine Gorka—revoked a $400,000 federal grant from a U.S. nonprofit dedicated to rehabilitating former white supremacists and other extremists.

Just before President Donald Trump took office in January, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced that Life After Hate would receive funding from the $10 million appropriated by Congress for the department's Countering Violent Extremism Grant Program (CVE).

"In this age of self-radicalization and terrorist-inspired acts of violence, domestic-based efforts to counter violent extremism have become a homeland security imperative," Barack Obama's DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson said when the first round of grants were announced.

However, when Trump took office a week later, his new DHS Secretary ordered a full review of CVE, and when the revised list of grantees was released in late June, it made no mention of Life After Hate or any other groups focused specifically on countering white supremacy extremism.

Even before Trump took office, Katharine Gorka—a controversial national security analyst and anti-Muslim activist who has been credited, along with her husband and research collaborator Sebastian Gorka, with "driving Trump's national security policy"—had been trying to kill Life After Hate's grant, as the Huffington Post reported:

Trump aides, including Katharine Gorka, were already working toward eliminating Life After Hate's grant and to direct all funding toward fighting what the president has described as "radical Islamic terrorism."

In December, Gorka, then a member of Trump's transition team, met with George Selim, the DHS official who headed the Countering Violent Extremism program until he resigned last month, and his then-deputy, David Gersten.

Gorka told Selim and Gersten she didn't agree with the Obama administration's approach to countering violent extremism―particularly the way the administration had described the threat of extremism…

Both Gorkas vocally advocate for U.S. policymakers using the term "radical Islamic terrorism," and as Politico reported earlier this year, strongly criticized the Obama and DHS under his administration:

Katharine Gorka wrote in 2013 that the Obama administration "seems to be allowing Islamists to dictate national security policy." And she criticized President Barack Obama's DHS for allegedly changing its training protocols to include an "emphasis on Islam as a religion of peace."

The married couple have both have written for Breitbart News—the far-right website formerly run by White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon—and they both served on Trump's transition team. Sebastian, now deputy assistant to Trump, earned a Ph.D. from the little-known Corvinus University of Budapest, and as Bob Dreyfuss reported in Rolling Stone: "During the decade and a half Gorka spent in Hungary, he was enmeshed in a web of ultraright, anti-Semitic, and even Nazi-like parties, politicians and media outlets."

Katharine Gorka, as The Intercept revealed in May, now works as an "adviser" to DHS.

That same month, "federal law enforcement agencies expressed concern...about the domestic threat white supremacist groups posed and would continue to pose," according a government intelligence report obtained by Foreign Policy, as Common Dreams reported Monday.

This report, White Supremacist Extremism Poses Persistent Threat of Lethal Violence (pdf), noted that white supremacist groups were "responsible for 49 homicides in 26 attacks from 2000 to 2016, more than any other domestic extremist movement," and was prepared by the FBI and DHS less than a week before prominent white supremacist Richard Spencer led protests over Charlottesville's plan to remove a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee.

May's protests over the statue's removal were followed by the massive "Unite the Right" white supremacy gatherings in Charlottesville this weekend, which left one counter-protester dead and dozens injured.

Christian Picciolini, a former neo-Nazi and co-founder of Life After Hate—the group that lost its DHS funding—spoke with NPR about Charlottesville on Sunday. "It was both disheartening to me but also, unfortunately, not a surprise because my organization and myself have been warning about this specific situation for many, many years," he said.

Picciolini also echoed the concerns expressed in the May FBI/DHS report:

What people need to understand is that since Sept. 11, more Americans have been killed on U.S. soil by white supremacists than by any other foreign or domestic group combined by a factor of two. Yet we don't really talk about that, nor do we even call these instances, of the shooting at Charleston, South Carolina, or what happened at Oak Creek, Wisconsin, at the Sikh temple or even what happened in Charlottesville this weekend—as terrorism.

DHS did not directly respond to the Huffington Post's inquiries about whether it views white supremacy as an extremist threat, or why it cut funding for the group that aims to de-radicalize neo-Nazis. However, a department spokesperson told the news outlet that 16 of the 26 groups that received DHS funding "have applicability to all forms of violent extremism and as such will address the threat of domestic terrorism."

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

Ah, but who gets to determine what is "offensive" other than the offended party?

And I shudder at the open-ended scope of the word "consequences". This interpretation of your post pretty well illustrates exactly the kind of damper on speech that defines the notion of political correctness today.

At the end of the day, it all comes down to the whether or not the person making the ostensibly "offensive" statements is doing so in good faith and for the purpose of furthering discourse rather than repeating memes.

This is true. And truly frightening and concerning.

That said, it does matter who is president! Look at the article from Foreign Policy I just linked to, in which the FBI and DHS warned about this growing threat months ago. The US has experienced several periods of growing right wing extremism all within the past 50 years, and I am sure federal law enforcement has a rich history of investigating and prosecuting these folks. I am not sure how much direct influence the White House has on the scope and zeal of these efforts, but I would imagine it could make a big difference.

People have a right to not be offended to a certain degree.

The National Guard would be a better response than citizens armed with blunt weapons.

Yeah, well, unless you are drawing the line at people invading their personal space, I can totally see that this where you went off the rails there. You most certainly don't have a right not to be offended, and trying to carry out this fantasy is dangerous.

I'm not trying to talk about whether some Tumblr user gets offended because of something trivial. I'm talking about real discourse.



Regarding the Cleese video, he said something like "you do not have the right to not be offended". It's not hard to come up with thought experiments where the opposite intuition is true. Imagine you worked in an office, and people regularly made remarks calling you ugly. Imagine you had a son and your neighbor called him a sissy as he was walking by. Would either of these be tolerable to you?

Hold up, when did I ever mention invading other people's personal space? Being called ugly has nothing to do with personal space. That's just you being offended super easily.

Bullies are bad. People can be *******s. And bullying might well not be tolerable for individuals. But wouldn't it be an instance of government overreach if bullying was illegal? Because if we're saying people have a "right" not to be offended, wouldn't we expect that right to be backed up by the law? And by the ability to prosecute and press criminal charges if one is bullied?

Bullies are bad. People can be *******s. And bullying might well not be tolerable for individuals. But wouldn't it be an instance of government overreach if bullying was illegal? Because if we're saying people have a "right" not to be offended, wouldn't we expect that right to be backed up by the law? And by the ability to prosecute and press criminal charges if one is bullied?

You implicitly mentioned that limit when you implied that you drew the line beyond it, where you suggested that people have a right not to be offended in circumstances where their personal space was not violated.

I don't know how that has to do with personal space, because everything I've said falls under the same realm of speech as anything else we say.

Because presumably, people who say nasty things on the internet without threatening to track you down and murder you, etc., are not actually violating your personal space, and therefore I find it highly questionable to extend to them a "right to not be offended".

I wasn't exactly speaking about laws given by the government, I was more thinking of the social contract we are a part of in society.

And I do understand that the target of that slur is the third party causality, of which we ought to be mindful and careful not to become party to their further maligning, but when the people making the insult are usually doing so in bad faith, the only practical answer is to ignore them rather than try to punish them. You cannot punish trolls and avoid making the problem worse. You can try to make their voices fainter and pay less attention to them, but don't try to stamp them out so much that they become virulent. When will people get this?

I don't know why you'd use the language of "rights", then. Rights are backed up by laws, or else they aren't really rights (because only if they are backed up by laws is there a legal penalty when they're violated, and only under such circumstances are rights truly guaranteed).

Ignoring bad language is not a blanket solution to the problem. There are times when speech can be ignored, and there are times when it should be spoken against.

I decry political correctness which seeks to end the career of the person who made a mistake by attempting to construe them as inherently bad people. What needs to be dealt with is media which allow anonymous memes to be propagated in bad faith in a way that profits the rage-industrial complex.

Heh. You're going to lose this war. Spamming memes in bad faith is always cheaper than countering it with reason. In fact it gives them pleasure to see you try because they can just call you a cuck and laugh at you for wasting the effort.

I absolutely support political correctness if it ends the career of far-right nationalists in positions of power, i.e. the police. That doesn't mean I support all witch hunts, but this stuff is acceptable to me.

I know. That's why I went to counter-protest the Nazis.

I never denied it exists, I just don't like the term political correctness for it.

I absolutely support political correctness if it ends the career of far-right nationalists in positions of power, i.e. the police. That doesn't mean I support all witch hunts, but this stuff is acceptable to me.

First of all, you are pretty courageous for attending that counter-protest, so you have my respect for that.

I want to point out here that the online communication is rather different than face-to-face interaction, and generally speaking I don't think we can talk about the two in the same way.

That's fair, but I don't know what else to call it.

that we have no right to respond to offensive language

That's fine. Regarding the start of this conversation, I asked about the term because I was curious to hear your thoughts about what it meant to you personally. And, to unravel a bit, because it's such a politically packed term that it's rather meaningless without a serious discussion.

At the end of the day, it all comes down to the whether or not the person making the ostensibly "offensive" statements is doing so in good faith and for the purpose of furthering discourse rather than repeating memes.

This makes me angry:



https://www.commondreams.org/news/2017/08/15/ahead-charlottesville-trump-cut-funds-group-fighting-white-supremacy

I did learn a few things. The racist corners of 4chan have unequivocally been taken over now by oughtright Nazis, who are unabashedly displaying Nazi flags over their posts. But in the hours before this, many other people on the fence of trolling and outright murderous hatred seemed to be expressing frustration and disillusionment with the board. Those who are braving this "raid" by "storm***s" are ridiculing these people as "Nazi larpers", which is heartening.

Of course that leaves the site's only remaining constituency-an alliance between the KKK and 14 y.o. edgelords.

Natural rights are closer to what I was thinking, but I was more referring to what we give license to the people around us to do or say. Like, I can say, "you have the right to take candy from my desk", but I don't think that's a legal statement.

So, yeah, there's this vague "right" that you're talking about. But presumably you want these norms to rest on something more reasonable than "if you break with social conventions, you'll get doxxed on Twitter".