Furthermore, it's a bullshit false equivalency that a Nazi, who wants to at the very least discriminate people, is somehow equal to a random person who would get discriminated against. Or a racist and any random person. Those are not the same, and don't deserve the same protections.

Pretending that Eich's treatment for promoting oppression (or even the downvotes I've received for stating my views or you may have received for stating yours -- I've seen a lot of handwringing in this thread about maintaining multiple HN accounts and self-censoring themselves on HN as if that was some great horror) are in any way equivalent to actually taking away rights is another form of fair and balanced horseshit.

A “rule of law” is a tool that can be used for evil. I’m not sure why we’re being blind to this?

Note that the Anti-Nazi laws in Germany were not -iirc- put in place by Germans, but in fact by Americans. In 1945 these laws made sense to deal with the situation at the time: in a society that had been severely distorted by NSDAP propaganda. As German society has changed, they make less sense now, and people have slowly come around to changing/removing these laws. I'm sure you can see why they are doing so very carefully. I understand the original reason for the laws, and I support the very careful removal/change of the laws.

In case you're curious (I was!): it is entirely possible to get a library loan for Mein Kampf in Germany. A quick google shows you might get a heavily annotated version printed by the state of Bavaria, but it's definitely available.

I agree with you on b). Nor do I disagree with democratic decision making by the community in general. I might have some opinions on people trying to subvert democratic systems to backdoor censorship and/or propaganda. (See also above, with that odd situation in Germany with quite a story to it.)

I think institutions in most western countries are -these days- quite well armored against incidental subversion. That's actually pretty good because that makes it easier to catch before things really go wrong. However, the laws, traditions and processes themselves only slow things down. You still need to actively catch people doing it and work to prevent it, so end of day you still need to maintain (eternal) vigilance.

Democracy and freedom of speech are the primary bulwark against people like that, not the cause of it!

That's what you're advocating, apparently.

And protections against ant-Semitic expression were too weak as evidenced by Nazi regime coming to power by being elected in democratic process.

Another source: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/nazi-propa...

"When the Nazis came to power in 1933, the German constitution guaranteed freedom of speech and freedom of the press. Through decrees and laws, the Nazis abolished these civil rights and destroyed German democracy. "

But I concede that there are exactly opposite views.

After all it's history so anyone is free to make stuff up about it that fits his narrative.

Might makes right and censorship of political opponents was Nazi canon. I thought you were saying their ideology was defeated.

The free speech loophole has to be left open for everybody. The moment we let someone arbitrate speech, we no longer have free speech.

We don't need to let nazis to empower themselves to guard against groupthink.

A right for everyone has to be a right for everyone. If you study what happened in the rise of Fascism in the Weimar Republic, you'll find that it was the left leaning Weimar Republic that put into place the legal framework for Nazi totalitarianism. In almost every law that had to do with human rights, the Weimar Republic put in a "unless necessary for the public good" or "unless a law is passed to the contrary" clause. All the Nazis had to do was to use those clauses.

Free Speech protects society as a whole against groupthink. Any minority, no matter how small or unpopular, is protected. The moment you introduce Weimar Republic style exceptions to those rights, you lose a society that is protected against authoritarianism. Instead, you get a society that's just an incubator for totalitarianism.

My activism would be related to moving closer to a society where the starting floor hasn't fallen out for others based on class, race, and gender. Nazism, you know, kinda gets in the way of that.

Study the Weimar Republic. Explicit activism of the type you mention above (following an ethos of "By Any Means Necessary") was precisely the kind that set the stage for Nazis to come to power. Also, you should note that the "floor" in the US, even for "groups disadvantaged by class, race, and gender" is quite high in absolute terms. As Dinesh D'Souza's friend once observed, "I want to come to a country where the poor people are fat and own VCRs." There are people whose "floors have fallen out," but I don't think the existence of Neo-Nazis has had much affect on them. Can you give me an example where people demonstrating have made poor neighborhoods poorer? I can give you examples where riots have done that, but those were not sparked by Neo-Nazis.

Groupthink may be groupthink, but you know how we combat that – we fund public education.

The way to combat groupthink in the long term is to advance groups. One interesting thing that Thomas Sowell brings up in his book Race and Culture, is that Russians, Poles, and Italians started out having IQ score disparities as large as those of US black communities, but caught up over the time span of the 1st half of the 20th century. By 1950, the scores had basically equalized. He also notes a study of black children of GIs growing up in Germany, who showed comparable IQs to other children growing up there. Yes, there is clearly systemic racism in the US. It can be seen in the rising crime rates and decay of communities. (As a black man who was born in North Carolina and went to school in Harlem, Thomas Sowell has an interesting personal take on this.) I think it takes the form of incentives that encourage broken homes and abet poverty. (This can be seen in an increase in the IQs of black children in the early 20th century, which ended and reversed after the introduction of perverse incentives in the 1960's and 70's.) I think it takes the form of politics which protects public schools and keeps market buying power out of the hands of parents who want to help their children to advance. If one studies immigrant groups, one finds a pattern of groups that advance themselves in spite of overt oppression codified into law and sometimes enacted as violence. One also finds a pattern of groups, whose leaders keep their people in cultural isolation in order to maintain their power. Such patterns are found all over the world, and repeat themselves across cultures and in different times. I think it should now be obvious such patterns are at play in the US.

Not okay, but not illegal, and better than the alternative i.e. a society without freedom of speech (as the Reich was, or Weimar Germany).

Remember Trump's "Muslim ban"? The US courts declared the law unconstitutional and prevented its implementation. The judicial reform would make it de facto impossible for the Israeli supreme court to strike down whatever crazy stuff the right-wing extremist government comes up with. Death penalty for stone throwers? No problem.