Edit: Damn, there’s a lot of borderline nazis here. You can keep telling yourself that your path is righteous but it does not change the fact you are all horrible people.
I have a friend that is deep in to the alt-right conspiracy territory and the one thing that keeps him from going all out extremist is me and some other friends. At heart he is a good person that is deeply misled and troubled and that is why it is important we keep in him our circle, engage in dialogue with him and challenge his views.
bawww my fash friend is really a good person i swear (and please don't point out that i'm more similar to him than i realise)!
also i like challenging views, which is why I immediately call those who oppose fascists "literal nazis"
Communists saying they want to kill Nazis? That's borderline Nazism!
The "14th Baby Torturing Division of the Jew Killers (1st Aryan-Galician)"? Oh, those guys were just fighting against Stalin to build the Ukrainian homeland bro...
lol, now I want to set up a psychic studio to milk s by telling them their loved ones have special message for them, it's "live. laugh. love." or some other platitude and when they exit the seance room it's just a gift shop that sells those same platitude word art paintings.
While I don't know what the original user said besides your quote, working to rehabilitate and convince people despite the most awful is a laudable goal.
How is someone who is against the thesis of something the very thing they are against? The only thing I can think of is the Nietzsche quote about the abyss. It seems like a form of dialectics? Like there's an understanding of a contradiction of sorts and then some essential aspect is filtered out and that's applied to everything in the situation. Then some small exclusion is made for whatever the specific characteristics are that line up with the conditions the person has is proposed (in this case their friend's circumstances). I think what I dislike is that there might not be further investigation and attempts to broaden discussion are met with some hostility.
It's not as though I want to make things unpleasant for others, but it seems like it's frequently taken that way :/
It's sad to have to realize that "good" (whatever that means) people can become nazis too, and it's almost like you have to mourn them before they die. But they have died, that person has allowed their hueristic to be replaced with an exterminationist one, and in doing so discarded what made them worthy of mourning in the first place. I had high school friends who became nqzis and tough shit, you have to write them off. Ironically, I look at fascists the way they portray rioters: as zombies. But where they see zombies as nothing but metatextual human meat targets, I focus on what they actually are, in the lore of all those stories. They're the final-stage victims of a brainworm infestation, their actions are dictated by a mindless hate fashioned by a mindlessly atavistic un-sapience. They have made themselves human cnidocytes, individual stinging cells in the body of the mad god Capital, and will go on stinging and poisoning forever until they're stopped. Hopefully whatever's left of the person they used to be in there can glean some measure of calm, perspective and understanding in the quiet moments after someone acts in defense of the rest of humanity, but thats's about the best you can realistically hope for them.
It's not "something" though right? I don't agree with the idea of it like being part of someones soul or whatever, the concept of evil.
It's the combination of the society they live in and the propaganda fed to them, while being unable to overcome it for a plethora of reasons. Every Nazi is a tragedy, because it's a failure on multiple levels of the overarching societal governance that allowed them to come about.
Edit: a tragedy because there's only one end for them (the wall) not because you should necessarily sympathize
By all means, work on the individuals in your life, but we won't always have the luxury to treat them as therapy cases. When nazis start marching, there's no pause button where you can stop time and deradicalize those people before they hurt innocents.
Bigotry is also hard to cure. It self-reinforces. It diminishes empathy and creates negative confirmation biases, which then makes it hard to see past stereotypes. This is even more intense for well-off white people, because then classism and class narcissism play into it too.
Most of the time you're not going to talk someone out of their bigotry. The only real cure is exposure, taking time to get to know people from the group they hate, and even then bigots are liable to compartmentalize about how "they're one of the good ones."
We don't always have time for that. Sometimes the only solutions are violence and intimidation.
hey everyone, get a load of this nerd's edit:
bawww my fash friend is really a good person i swear (and please don't point out that i'm more similar to him than i realise)!
also i like challenging views, which is why I immediately call those who oppose fascists "literal nazis"
shut the fuck up, loser
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Communists saying they want to kill Nazis? That's borderline Nazism!
The "14th Baby Torturing Division of the Jew Killers (1st Aryan-Galician)"? Oh, those guys were just fighting against Stalin to build the Ukrainian homeland bro...
One would think that running over Nazis in a tank would have probably prevented his friend from being radicalized?
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lol, now I want to set up a psychic studio to milk
s by telling them their loved ones have special message for them, it's "live. laugh. love." or some other platitude and when they exit the seance room it's just a gift shop that sells those same platitude word art paintings.
When his friend does a hate crime they'll be the ones saying "no one saw it coming"
Lol I hope this guy's friend is run over by a tank
"I'm too much of a coward to cut ties with this nazi I call a friend"
While I don't know what the original user said besides your quote, working to rehabilitate and convince people despite the most awful is a laudable goal.
How is someone who is against the thesis of something the very thing they are against? The only thing I can think of is the Nietzsche quote about the abyss. It seems like a form of dialectics? Like there's an understanding of a contradiction of sorts and then some essential aspect is filtered out and that's applied to everything in the situation. Then some small exclusion is made for whatever the specific characteristics are that line up with the conditions the person has is proposed (in this case their friend's circumstances). I think what I dislike is that there might not be further investigation and attempts to broaden discussion are met with some hostility.
It's not as though I want to make things unpleasant for others, but it seems like it's frequently taken that way :/
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anyone who actively sides with fascism should die, everyone else gets a decade of community service
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It's sad to have to realize that "good" (whatever that means) people can become nazis too, and it's almost like you have to mourn them before they die. But they have died, that person has allowed their hueristic to be replaced with an exterminationist one, and in doing so discarded what made them worthy of mourning in the first place. I had high school friends who became nqzis and tough shit, you have to write them off. Ironically, I look at fascists the way they portray rioters: as zombies. But where they see zombies as nothing but metatextual human meat targets, I focus on what they actually are, in the lore of all those stories. They're the final-stage victims of a brainworm infestation, their actions are dictated by a mindless hate fashioned by a mindlessly atavistic un-sapience. They have made themselves human cnidocytes, individual stinging cells in the body of the mad god Capital, and will go on stinging and poisoning forever until they're stopped. Hopefully whatever's left of the person they used to be in there can glean some measure of calm, perspective and understanding in the quiet moments after someone acts in defense of the rest of humanity, but thats's about the best you can realistically hope for them.
They have become something so twisted, they aren't who they were, they are a monster. Well said/
It's not "something" though right? I don't agree with the idea of it like being part of someones soul or whatever, the concept of evil.
It's the combination of the society they live in and the propaganda fed to them, while being unable to overcome it for a plethora of reasons. Every Nazi is a tragedy, because it's a failure on multiple levels of the overarching societal governance that allowed them to come about.
Edit: a tragedy because there's only one end for them (the wall) not because you should necessarily sympathize
There's some legitimate dumb guys out there who have no idea what's going on that think nazism is cool, but idk about "good"
Exactly, it usually just means "nice to me personally". But i also do mourn the dumb guys. In another life, etc
my response to that edit:
By all means, work on the individuals in your life, but we won't always have the luxury to treat them as therapy cases. When nazis start marching, there's no pause button where you can stop time and deradicalize those people before they hurt innocents.
Bigotry is also hard to cure. It self-reinforces. It diminishes empathy and creates negative confirmation biases, which then makes it hard to see past stereotypes. This is even more intense for well-off white people, because then classism and class narcissism play into it too.
Most of the time you're not going to talk someone out of their bigotry. The only real cure is exposure, taking time to get to know people from the group they hate, and even then bigots are liable to compartmentalize about how "they're one of the good ones."
We don't always have time for that. Sometimes the only solutions are violence and intimidation.