"You want to prevent white supremacist fascism from organizing hate crimes and infiltrating government positions? YOU'RE the REAL Nazi!"
-- so, so, so many fucking shitheads
I'm not sure how clueless one has to be to ignore the end game of actual white supremacists, but it's depressingly common.
> neither acronym is any less disingenuous
I disagree, but I consider all groups disingenuous to a degree.
> It is that entire paradigm that feeds idiots who want to be contrarian as fuck
I strongly disagree -- if being 'contrarian as fuck' is 'upholding things as they are', then I'm not seeing how the difference between upholding the status quo and improving the status quo isn't a relevant issue.
> chucklefuck hate speech apologists
Isn't this really just going to end up being another catch-all that ignores the distinction between SQWs (who aren't thinking about consequences) and FFNs (who are simply lying fascists)?
> You toss garbage in a bin, not ideas.
Allow me to synthesize: You toss garbage *ideas* into a metaphorical bin, don't you?
You're asking me to do precisely that with 'SQW', since it's 'unproductive' to you.
@sydneyfalk No, I think your "SQW" is more what I had in mind, not "FFN". Hopefully we can make a distinction between idiots and bad actors. Maybe I'm just allergic to acronyms?
I probably should avoid metaphors if I'm going to eschew acronyms. I was trying to make a point about sorting bins, not garbage bins. I'm not good at metaphors, at all.
I think that the whole SQW and SJW label is more productive to people who are just looking to argue.
I like acronyms because it reduces typing strain.
SQWs argue against progressive stuff reflexively, often because their own lives are Pretty Much Okay. Think South Park -- every episode (with I think a handful of exceptions) has the same moral: "Everybody stop caring so much, things will calm down, it's already okay, guys."
As for arguing -- I hope more arguing goes on, really. Complacency is how this mess got this bad, IMHO. :(
@sydneyfalk I'm sorry I initially phrased it the way I did. I have no right to tell you what to call a sandwich.
I'm just tired of watching people bandwagon to defend awful things and I wonder how it can be stopped. You're right about a lot of things as I can see it, and you make solid arguments for your thinking.
I want all arguments to reach a point of resolution where we can agree that we're all human.
> I want all arguments to reach a point of resolution where we can agree that we're all human.
I *want* that.
I do not think it's possible, any longer, if I'm painfully honest.
I think there's always going to be a subset of people who decide the wrong skin color is the problem, or the wrong language, religion, or culture.
The stupid ones are loud and very shortsighted. The smart ones become what I term FFNs, 'frozen fruit Nazis'.
The FFNs recognize elements of the status quo they can leverage to gain alliance with and support from SQWs -- people who have it good enough to be suckered into long-term destructive aims for short-term gains. Log Cabin Republicans, trans white supremacists, etc.
And then you have otherwise good people suckered into arguing for hate speech to have legal protections of the highest order -- like now.
I won't lie -- my view of humanity has always been pretty bleak, but it has become more so in the last year. I don't really think there's a 'bottom' to potential human vileness, not any more.
The reaction of a lot of complacent folks has restored some amount of faith in potential inherent benevolence in human beings, but -- my views are tainted by my experiences. This is unavoidable.
I wish I still thought it was possible that All The Hate Spreaders could somehow be shown the error of their ways, but I don't believe that any more.
I'm not sure anything could make me believe it, short of unicorns or magic suddenly changing their minds somehow.
There are, IMO, terrible people who know better and don't care. They want to destroy, because they'll gain. They want to eat the marginalized.
> I don't understand people anymore.
To be fair, I may have an advantage on this point, because I have never understood people, and I never believed I did -- only that I had degrees of understanding.
I think everything is degrees, TBQH -- and if one looks at things this way, sometimes these issues feel less staggering. The white supremacist cancer was always there, in confederate flags and Klan parades.
It's just growing.
> The banality of evil just keeps becoming more banal.
That's the normalization that SJW folk keep talking about, yes.
I actually had someone argue with me a while back that a news article that essentially was just pictures of Hitler picnicking with his wife and dogs, with I think two sentences to even mention the Holocaust, wasn't "normalizing", just "historical".
@sydneyfalk Right, like lighting up a cross and dancing around in sheets would be a "historical re-enactment" according to some awful people.
All that Civil War re-enactment stuff and the various organizations, United Daughters of the Confederacy, the statues of dead generals/slave owners, it's all there as a way to keep that shit alive.
FFSQW is what I call people who argue for free speech genuinely but, out of shortsightedness, do not take steps to avoid the path of least resistance doing so. Which is to say -- they usually end up being the ones telling victims "there's always assholes" in some stripe, but don't actually argue with attackers/harassers/white supremacists -- and the net result applies pressure the FFNs covet.
Mental health issues aren't the relevant part, though, IMO. There will always be people who can be lured into listening to the basest, most animal parts of their mind.
Blaming the mentally ill for it is likely to just increase negative impact on the mentally ill as a whole.
The FFNs are the relevant part, IMO. If they no longer have the "LEGALLY it's part of FREE SPEECH" argument, then they just look like Nazis, which -- they are.
@sydneyfalk I don't think we need to paint atrocities as mental illness, but we do need to reflect on the lessons of the Stanford Prison Experiment, and so on to reject the notion that hate should get a platform. Hate is a disease.
But yes, if we were in Germany, there would be no avenue to say "of course we can do the Nazi salute and our 14 words thingy, free speech!"
I'm all in favor of (eventually) working out root causes.
However, this is a gunshot wound on the global human culture, and gunshot wounds do not need lengthy research about why gun violence occurs.
They need bandaging, rapidly. They need triage, immediately.
Well, degrees. I mean, there ARE people applying pressure, there ARE people setting up triage, there ARE people trying to put the pin back in.
It's potentially lethal, but it is by no means inevitable at this point. The heart is still pumping.
There's just a lot of blood spilled, metaphorically and otherwise.
@sydneyfalk Fucking culture wars never end. It took a lot just to get the right to vote for many. "But that happened like a million years ago, and it's totally not a problem today, right?" They never end, but people forget in interesting ways what went down.
You can walk through Hiroshima and never realize what happened there until you go to the museum and see a little girl's fingernails that fell out, next to a half-melted roof tile.
There's been a few moments that Hiroshima has been burned into my mind -- despite the fact I have never been to the museum -- because I have read accounts and seen photographs (and, in the case of Infocom's Trinity, learned about the cranes.)
The shadows Dave Barry described in his chapter on Hiroshima are where I first felt things.
The world has a lot of thoughtless cruelty -- and thoughtful cruelty isn't much better. :(
Thank you for listening to my points -- and I believe I understand the personal situation you're in, even if we disagree about aspects of the larger situation.
I can't talk about this any more, though. This topic often crashes my everything mentally and emotionally, and i don't want to risk it more.
Thank you again -- and please, feel free to respond about other things if you wish. I just don't want to discuss this further. <3
<3 NP :)
> But yes, if we were in Germany, there would be no avenue to say "of course we can do the Nazi salute and our 14 words thingy, free speech!"
Pretty much that. And while Germany has their own issues with white supremacists at this point, they're not ELECTING them.
So, y'know, I think that'd be a good angle. ^_^
(and, with the understanding that working out the root cause would be a good idea -- do you think that'll be easier or harder if hate speech is still "free" and constitutionally protected?
just saying)
> I don't think hate speech is protected to begin with.
I think the legal status is that it's a non-starter to take down at this point. (And whether it's technically protected or not, the ACLU keeps doing it, so -- same end result.)
@sydneyfalk Slippery slopes everywhere, like sledding down a never ending hill that at some point has white people in FEMA camps for mis-gendering someone in a casual conversation.
I think we might just be able to tackle "god hates f-words" or "all n-words must die" without invoking the US version of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Nobody would do that anyway because it would be cultural appropriation. Fear is seductive, though.
> white people in FEMA camps for mis-gendering
I'll make the deal with you that I make with literally every other cis person who's ever floated the concept: The day I see an actual attempt to do that, I'll care about that hypothetical.
White supremacy is actual. I'm more worried about it than what you describe.
> we might just be able to tackle
With respect, if it hasn't happened yet, I don't see it happening.
Viva la revolution.
SydneyEFalk
Vacuum Forest 🌳