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I’m with Natalie on this one (seriously, watch that video, all her stuff is excellent): there’s merit in winning hearts and minds, and there’s definitely a place for it - but you can’t deradicalize all the bigots, and you don’t need to. As per her example, there are still homophobes aplenty, yet gay rights have come an enormously long way in the last few decades despite their best efforts.
Solidarity and setting a baseline are just as important, and sometimes moreso. Punching nazis may not convince them, but it does empower others and give them some backup, and the Overton window can slide a bit from the impact. The right expletive in the wrong place can make all the dif ference in the world. You hold the line, and you be seen to hold it.
Not all sealions need feeding, not every argument should be dignfied with a response on its own terms, and emotion should not be disparaged in ethical discourse.
Ethics is just a system to predict outrage, and outrage is an emotional response to (plausibly generalised) threat perception. Lose the emotion, and you’re left with an empty, inauthentic shell. And that’s precisely what the bad actors want: they want an abstract parlour game they can disqualify you from, while they remain comfortably insulated from the stakes.
Fuck that, fuck them. I’m a ‘drag the dead kids into the room where everyone has to look at them’ kind of guy; I get tutted at on a regular basis from people who are offended by this, and honestly I’m good with that, because I get results anyway, in my line of activism.
That comes across as hugely condescending; I’m likely misinterpreting, but I’m not clear as to how.
I have watched it. And Sean’s take, and Jessie Gender’s. I followed the wizard game boycott as well as Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull’s tour and debacle in Australia and New Zealand.
Normally I don’t engage with those in the movement at all, (whether we’re talking about the anti-trans movement in the US and UK or the white Christian nationalist movement and fascist takeover of the US federal and state governments). I am used to being confronted by them in response to a comment to a third party. And when hate or allegiance to the movement reveals itself, I feel obligated to confront it. Hate movements thrive when left unchecked to fester and grow.
That said, it wasn’t my intention to brag, more I was pondering if my studies (of the Holocaust, for instance) have dulled its visceral effects on me so I may be expecting a degree of impartiality that isn’t normal for most. I’ve predicted and grieved over the fascist uprising in the US back in the aughts, so today I see it as a near inevitability. We will have to be very lucky for the US to evade autocratic fascism during the next decade.
But it wasn’t my intent to offend, and I get it if you want to assume I’m as incorrigible as much of the internet. My own disposition is neither cheery nor sociable.