I have nieces and nephews and if I walked past a wall with them that reads FUCK i'd probably laugh and tell them its a bad word and move on with my life.
Would it still be funny if it was a swastika? Or the n-word? Is that also a part of your glorious fight against evil capitalists? If not, why is it any less legitimate? Clearly the “community” must want it there if it was left up.
If it was a swastika or the n-word I would be very concerned about the nature of the community in that neighbourhood and if I'm in danger. But in terms of how i'd deal with kids seeing it, I'd take it as a teachable moment. I don't have to hide my kids from everything I don't believe in (besides they probably see crazy shit online anyway), I just need to teach them how to deal with it. Anyway, theres a wall near where i live where someone has made a massive mural making a political statement. People keep defacing it with the opposite opinion, and people keep painting back over that. If you really need the authorities to tell your community that swastika graffiti should make them angry and call them to action, then your community is screwed already. Either way, yeah just as we have laws to deal with incitement to violence and hatespeech we can have that with walls if you'd prefer, it just has to be sth actually extreme and targeted.
A “teachable moment” like this is not how childless people imagine it to be, with the parent didactically educating the child with words of wisdom. Instead, the kid absorbs what they see or hear and it appears later on in their drawings or what they say on the playground. Children understand the power of transgression and all ideas are eligible for them to play with.
Bro I knew what a swastika and the nword was at that age. And yeah, probably I took them too lightly sometimes because I was a kid and its a learning process. But I knew they were wrong. Because my parents taught me right and wrong. How stupid do you think kids are? I used to pray for the victims of ww2 when they told us to pray in assembly. I wasn't a 6 year old neo-nazi because I knew what a swastika looked like.
> If it was a swastika or the n-word I would be very concerned about the nature of the community in that neighbourhood and if I'm in danger.
If you lived in a large city like NY or London and you saw a random swastika, your immediate reaction would be to blame your neighbors? How do you know it wasn’t someone from somewhere else?
> If you really need the authorities to tell your community that swastika graffiti should make them angry and call them to action, then your community is screwed already.
Hopefully nobody needs the authorities to tell them things, but they do need authorities to help them enforce already agreed-upon laws. I can’t spent my time running around cleaning up all the graffiti.
Do you think it should be the duty of citizens to stop bank robbers, too?
> Either way, yeah just as we have laws to deal with incitement to violence and hatespeech we can have that with walls if you'd prefer, it just has to be sth actually extreme and targeted.
We literally already have this which is why vandalism is ILLEGAL, but your previous comments were completely dismissive of this!
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Seriously, this is like Basic Empathy and Human Emotions 101. Imagine yourself seeing the n-word written several times around your city. Contemplate the anger that you would feel, the desire for someone to do something about it, the realization that even if you dedicated all your free time to finding and stopping these people you probably couldn’t do it yourself. Now replace “n-word” with something someone else finds deeply offensive and imagine yourself as them. Do you STILL think graffiti is totally harmless, or justified as long as you’re vandalizing a megacorp?
