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from the what-y'all-love-social-sciences dept.
It's 2017. Why are there still Nazis?
It's a question many observers are asking after hundreds of white supremacists, many displaying swastikas and Confederate battle flags and shouting racist, anti-Semitic, and anti-communist slogans, took to the streets of Charlottesville, Va., this weekend, provoking violence that claimed the life of one counter-protester and resulted in multiple injuries.
The continued existence of people who hold openly white supremacist ideologies more than seven decades after the fall of the Third Reich can be explained, in part, through a social theory developed in the early 1990s. Social dominance theory seeks to explain how hierarchy-enhancing ideologies do not just drive social inequality, but are also a result of it. It suggests that a single personality trait, called social dominance orientation (SDO), strongly predicts a person's political and social views, from foreign policy and criminal justice to civil rights and the environment. What's more, it offers insight into how ideologies such as racism, sexism, and xenophobia tend to arise from the unequal distribution of a society's resources.
"Social dominance theory provides a yardstick for measuring social and political ideologies," says Felicia Pratto, who developed the theory with fellow psychologist Jim Sidanius. "SDO is one way – not the only one – to try to figure out what those ideologies are 'about.'"
You too can take the Social Dominance Orientation quiz to determine your nazi quotient.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 16 2017, @11:32PM (3 children)
Let's tally the body count of Nazis versus Communists and see who is worse.
Wait, you don't like those numbers? Okay, then how about just Nazi Germany and Communist Russia? No change.
Reality doesn't care about your fee-fees.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 17 2017, @02:45AM (1 child)
False equivalence, anyone who dislikes Nazis is a communist? I think an entire US generation would have a few things to say to you.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 17 2017, @02:50PM
Right now you have Nazis telling everyone to f off and leave them alone, but it doesn't look like even they think they will be taken seriously. On the other side you have Antifa saying that unless you support Antifa you are a Nazi.
Downtown I am always seeing posters "with us or against us" , "they are killing us now" , "its our turn" with marx/lenin cropped into them. Maybe it is just the anarchist holdovers from a couple decades ago but it is still messed up.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 17 2017, @02:58AM
Not sure why we're talking about Communists. Antifa seems to be related to a certain kind of anarchist. Pretty sure they're aligned neither with Communism nor the authoritarian regimes that have called themselves "Communist" in various countries. "Nazi" and "Communist" here are just two different labels for authoritarianism, I see no reason to believe Antifa would be any more into the latter than the former.