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Bad time to be in the US (discuss.online)
submitted 5 months ago by to c/antitrumpalliance@lemmy.world
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[–] 1 point 5 months ago* (3 children)

I understand what you're getting at, and I even addressed this exact point in my last comment:

Societal shame and alienation may have worked in a pre-Internet world, but it works no longer. No matter how depraved, destructive, or horrible someone’s behavior is, there will be a community on the Internet who supports and encourages it. The ONLY WAY to reach those people, to keep them from falling deeper down rabbit holes, is through compassion.

Societal ostracization, stigmatization, they just don't work anymore as a means of discouraging negative behaviors. That's why overt white supremacy has made a comeback, despite being the most stigmatized, widely derided and most culturally unacceptable pattern of behavior. Shaming people is no longer effective to change behavior. If it was, Trump never would have been a viable candidate.

The only remaining reason to treat people poorly is to make ourselves feel better. There's no other benefit to doing so anymore. I'd recommend you accept the reality of the world we're living in.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (2 children)

    You don’t understand what I’m getting at. The internet is not your community. You have no idea if you’re talking to someone that lives next door or across the planet, someone talking in good faith or deliberately repeating negativity, an actual human or a bot. My suggestion is not about how to waste time arguing with anonymous opinions on social media, it’s about how to deal with a flesh and blood person in real life.

    Shaming someone on the internet achieves nothing, they can block, ignore, and go about their lives knowing there’s no possible way you could impose consequences for their actions on how they operate. They can easily call your bluff because neither of us know who the other is and even if we did manage to find out, most of us aren’t going to travel somewhere just to escalate a social media beef.

    We’re interconnected globally but most of us only have an impact locally. This is where ostracism and isolation work. You should start with an attempt at dialogue, but have enough sense to recognize when irrationality is not naivety but willfull ignorance fueled by selfishness.

    Adults have the right to ignore all the learning and experience they’ve acquired, deny the patterns of history, and refuse the aid of humanity to the point their behavior is self-destructive and kill themselves. You can’t force a change on that behavior, you can only isolate it so that when it does self-destruct its impact is negligible. Their boundary of right to self-destruction is when that process heaps repercussions on another who doesn’t want that, especially the most vulnerable who can’t prevent the recklessly selfish person from hurting them.

    That behavior is something you can quarantine in person. I could tell the people burning down Ebola hospitals why they shouldn’t handle corpses, but I can’t stop them. If my neighbor drug a corpse home I could sit a reasonable distance from their front door and tell them “enjoy your misery, but step one foot out that door and it’ll be your last”. I can tell some Zionist foot soldier what a piece of shit I think they are online but I’m personally powerless to stop them. I can however put myself between their ideological kin in my town make them afraid to act on their beliefs.

    I might not even win, physically or legally, the current regime is not on my side when it comes to suppressing hateful ideology with the threat of or escalation to force. That’s the risk. I’ve gotten my ass beaten trying to convince neo-Nazis they weren’t welcome in our community spaces and I’ve run them out of town when our force was bigger and better equipped. Sometimes that’s been achieved by raising community awareness of what they were trying to do and denying them a place to rally (the Hammerskins wanted to have a music festival, we made sure no venue would host them), sometimes with threat of force (we armed ourselves, didn’t brandish, but put ourselves in front of truckload of white boys harassing the Hispanic families in our neighborhood and made it clear; get the fuck out), and sometimes you just throw hands with bigots in a back alley. There’s no authority to appeal to, they don’t care and their ranks are currently filled with folks who support the cause of the haters anyway.

    Internet shame doesn’t work. Occasionally you might find someone worth the effort of responding to. Like me and you. We might disagree on some points of how to deal with the problem, but at least there’s a conversation here worth having even if we don’t end up on the same page. But we can’t directly affect each other’s ability to do anything, it’s all just words. The power to prevent or reduce harm in your community is offline and in person. Don’t abandon the power of the internet to communicate globally, to have good conversations and maybe shape opinions, but recognize its limits and the situations where you actually become the agent of change/protection/prevention.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago* (1 child)

    Yeah, I was talking about in real life, too - I'm a union rep and I've been very active in my local area's activist groups for almost all my adult life, so I know full well that organizing IRL is absolutely everything and the Internet is just a way to communicate as best we can.

    What you described is more like community self-defense, which is absolutely vital - and I applaud you for doing it - but I'm sure you recognize that the neo-nazis you ran out of town didn't change their ways, they just went somewhere else, or went underground.

    What I'm really talking about is how you change people, rather than just protecting ourselves from them. Please don't misunderstand me here: for some people (maybe even many people, these days, sadly) there is a point where words can do no more good and force is necessary to mitigate the harm they cause - I think we agree on that. However, where we may disagree (or maybe we've just had a communications breakdown) is that the use of force to protect communities from harmful people/behavior shouldn't include bullying them, because it's just counter-productive - it doesn't help you to protect yourself and it does nothing to change the people you use it against. These people likely already see us as enemies simply because we're acting in opposition to their world view, and any attempts to shame them will only validate the "us-vs-them" narratives common in communities like these.

    This isn't an abstract conversation, for me. My dad was really abusive and taught me a lot of really terrible lessons, and I basically was a neo-nazi when I was a teen. It has taken me a long time to get to where I am. I would never have been able to break free from the hateful ideology I was brainwashed into believing if it wasn't for people willing to extend compassion towards me, and demonstrate that not everyone sees the world the way my dad taught me everyone sees it.

    People treating me badly, bullying me, shaming me, ostracizing me, all of that just confirmed everything my dad taught me, that there are people who hate me for who I am, and that those people see me as subhuman - and that I should see them as subhuman, too.

    I'm not saying that you need to be nice to neo-nazis, far from it - beat them up, push them out of your town, do what you need to do to look after yourself, the people you care about, and your community. But we need to recognize that doing that is only dealing with symptoms of a disease rather than dealing with the actual cause. The only way to actually treat this disease in the long term is compassion for those whose compassion has been cut off. Otherwise, the cycle of violence will just continue forever.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago

    For some perspective on my experience, grew up in an extremely Christian conservative, extremely bigoted and abusive home, it’s just my folks were filthy rich, two-faced pillars of the community in public so they got a pass. Both my brother and I are adopted. I’m white, he’s Hispanic. Despite racist lessons, I grew up watching how the rest of the world treated him, despite being culturally white (and my parents brainwashed his ethnicity out of him while touting how great they were for “rescuing” an impoverished brown child), the community that knew exactly who we were treated him second class compared to me. I was also not surprised when he came out, which resulted in multiple “scared straight” attempts by our parents. Also worth noting I grew up in Idaho, where white nationalism has long been vocal and public.

    My history of violence is originally rooted in pure misguided rage marginally channeled into something productive (fighting Nazis), but I did find community building channels in my teens. I was in Seattle in ‘99, lived at Occupy for months, and a lot in between. I’ve volunteered with refugee resettlement (Boise is a major center for placing new Americans) and as a dog rescuer, have been involved with our shelter’s program that pairs pups who need a little extra help before they’re ready with inmate trainers. My thoughts on justice, rehabilitation, and restoration changed greatly because of this experience.

    People absolutely can change. Inmate volunteers are heavily prescreened by the prison before acceptance into the program, but the only automatic disqualification is a history of animal abuse. So the volunteers range from druggies, to sex offenders, to murders, to gang bangers. It’s a full spectrum of humanity who has done some heinous shit, held some genius beliefs, and while they are all working on themselves, not all are “redeemed”. Some will get out, some are lifers. My job is not to judge. They had their trials, they’ve been found guilty, their sentence is what it is. I don’t google their stories but I have a good idea of who’s in for what and some, while very capable of being loving and gentle with a dog, I agree that permanent removal from society is the best solution. But they do forever remain human, and capable of change, the onus is on them to do so.

    I’ve also known a lot of miscreants in real life. Junkies, abusers, racists, bigots. I’ve met people like you, who went down a bad path but pulled themselves out. And while I never indulged white supremacy, I’ve still been violent, an addict, a womanizer, egotistical, made homophobic/misogynistic/ableist/bigoted jokes, and punched down. Like you, I got friendly support from others who saw potential for change and politely encouraged me to “do better”.

    But I can’t deny the times hard boundaries, push back, and ostracism worked on me as well. It’s a hard lesson, when people you know care about you put up the wall of “love ya, don’t like ya right now”. Both can pressure change.

    Where I don’t know the right path is America as it is. In the 90’s, in Idaho, we tolerated the “right to free speech” and allowed the Aryan Nations compounders and Dick Butler to file for permits and exercise the free speech and parade around once a year. The rest of the year they retreated to their compound, which eventually got sued out of existence after they Nazi’d too hard. It’s not that version of America anymore.

    Our great experiment is failing. After all my teenage and youth aggression I should have grown, mostly kinda did. I shouldn’t be considering show of force to drive bands of emboldened haters out of my neighborhood. The modern world has never seen a “superpower” embrace hate on the level of the US. Even at its worst the Third Reich was 1/3 the territory the US is, didn’t have the resources and infrastructure the US has, and a lot of what it had acquired was subverting it. We’re in uncharted territory and there’s plenty of plebs all in that will enable whatever to get one step ahead, backtrack on the leader when it doesn’t come fast enough, but empower the next best promise at the expense of whoever they consider lesser.

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