I wrote something about the Charlottesville riots a few weeks ago, but nasty stuff is always happening in the world, and I don’t keep up with it all, so I felt like maybe the matter was dated by the time I would get the post out, but retro is always the rage somewhere.

[one of those] awful website[s] that I am always complaining about despite continuing to use happened to institute a “code of conduct update” and announce that to all users. the “update” is of course totally pointless; the core rules, treat each other with respect, should cover everything. So the update primarily serves to remind people that they can argue about what “is” hate speech and who is more victimized by hate, themselves or the people they hate.

This completely unremarkable announcement prompted an endless series of arguments by opposed parties accusing each other of being fascists and nazis that resulted in the topic being closed for further remarks within less than a day. Which I suspect happens on EVERY site-wide update, and usually I try not to look too close –this manner of futility is nothing new in the history of the internet– but I have a terrible habit of skimming them in search of ludicrously long, petty comment threads, and happened to end up on this statement:

and I think that cuts to the meep of the matter. Not so much of what people argue ABOUT, but how they are able to continue arguing forever about ANYTHING. Once the previous pseudodiscussion is no longer hot, other dorks want to argue about the argument.
This post is NOTHING except a prompt for more people to agree or get angry at it. The BASE matter, white supremacists feeling more and more empowered and acting accordingly, is not one where “both sides” are equally at fault. But when you engage in jerky acts, you make it seem like it is. How can you claim to be peaceful when you go looking for pointless fights? People like that getting involved in peaceful movements, daring others to hit them so that they can hit back and claim self-defense, they allow the “other side” to isolate their abrasive behavior and apply it to the group as a whole. I am not making a “few bad apples” argument. This is a bad tree, and the tree IS on “both sides.”
I think there is an extremely small group of actual fascists, and legitimately violent “anti”-fascists, but the amount of fear hype about has drawn uncommonly large groups of folks with no clue what is going on into aligning themselves to fight something that doesn’t really exist, or at least promoting the fact that they think they do.

Comments like this accomplish what? Nothing at all. These people see that the arguments are pointless but would rather smirk at the camera like Ferris flippdippin Buehler than contribute in a meaningful fashion. And they will do it anywhere, not just on dumb old furrafinity. And I admit to also going in here primarily for my own amusement, but I don’t gloat about it. I recognize that I have an unfortunate habit. I don’t ENCOURAGE this to keep happening.
The earliest remarker doesn’t even understand the matter, seeming to think that “Antifa” is a person, presumably conflating it with “Anita,” the name of somebody who was at the center of the “gamergate” ideology furor a few years ago, whose contributors were equally unwilling to have solved. And I didn’t talk about it, since it wasn’t relevant to my life. But every social conflict looks like it now. My understanding is that antifa is a loose organization of abrasive folks but not necessarily out to break anything.
I think it is a misconception that protest marches are organized with the specific purpose of theft and vandalism. But then there are sorts who claim to belong to protest movements who are only in it because they like breaking stuff and/or stealing stuff, which means they are anti-everything, and not worth trying to please because nothing will ever be enough or more fun than feeling camaraderie while smashing things. It comes to the same thing as “getting popcorn,” except they grab it from somebody else. I do not think that will help them achieve their goals, assuming they have any. But there is not much I can say to somebody who has already given up!

Whoever you are, you can’t win by trying to get revenge or by telling your opposition it is stupid, because you have to share the planet with them. No, killing them is not an option, and “punching” them will only make them less rational. “But THEY would kill ME” I often see as a reply to this, and I do not believe that they would, on the whole. To use criminal outliers as an excuse to demand zero tolerance and pre-emptive punishment for anything and be abrasive forever seems to me like ultimately the same thing. That creep who backed a car into people on purpose, HE is a murderer, as an individual, even if a few people in the car’s path probably WISHED he would do it. Those wishers are also individuals, and not helping themselves or their friends, but not responsible for a murderer’s actions, either.

The “alt-right” movement exists by fixating on the most ridiculous and aggressive “liberals” and painting them as terrorists to distract from its actual irrational and unattainable root values, that non-straight and/or non-whites have to go, which is only deeply considered by a very small group. I guarantee you most of those “right wing” people don’t follow it to the core; they wouldn’t actually kill their target if given a chance. They claim that isn’t actually their goal, and I think if forced to admit that it WAS, or was the goal of their leaders, they would be embarrassed and go back to being privately jerky.

If modern day confederate support is not about hate, it is about ignorance. Enemies of the union should not have monuments to them on union land, and nobody should die for having a problem with that. The dumb old statue is just an excuse to reignite the fight. At the same time, I believe in self-preservation. The driver who killed a person and injured others plainly was out to cause damage, and is rightly being charged as a murderer. But unprotected people should taunt at cars driven by people who want to hurt them, since the car has all the power in that scenario. If you sincerely believe somebody to be a nazi, you ought to believe they have a nazi’s regard for the lives of those they disagree with. I just said I don’t think there are many who truly believe in killing for this, but there certainly are some. Having a person die as martyr does get attention to your cause, but I wouldn’t want to a belong to a group that encouraged its members to put themselves in danger needlessly. This is not China, this is not Afghanistan. We do not need to do that. From my perspective, white supremacists seem to be losing in this country. They are dying out and getting more desperate, and behaving like cornered rats. But they are human beings, and have legal rights that rats do not, so there is no situation where it makes sense to corner them that is in aid of peace. Somebody is going to get hurt, and it will be a crime either way. If your goal is to remove the entire legal system which grants equal rights in this manner then that is another matter entirely.

My thoughts drifted to “Crispy kat,” a proud nazi cartoon artist, who I mentioned several years ago. Yes these are the people that I know about, unfortunately. I had to check and sure enough Crispy has a predictable opinion on all this. I didn’t even guess that Crispy was pro-confederacy, but I guess just IS by default since that looks controversial and gets people annoyed. This person appears to think that since there were Union supporters who owned slaves, the confederacy should not be treated as emblematic of slavery. But it is only the south that fought to protect slavery. The northerners with slaves may be analogous with multinational corporations now, that exploit workers, don’t pay taxes, and don’t clean up after themselves, but that doesn’t mean that a lesser, more isolated injustice should be permitted, because that just keeps the powerless fighting each other. Crispy also feels that since soviet Russian imagery is not stigmatized, neither should nazi germany’s be. Again trying to confound the issue instead of taking responsibility. Instead of protesting offensive imagery, they present counter, deliberately offensive imagery, and then act smug about it. I must confess I don’t encounter people “who proudly fly the hammer and sickle,” but then I only know about Crispy’s proud swastiking by weird chance, and will believe that other inappropriate use of oppressive dictatorship imagery occurs. But the hammer+sickle are not iconographic in the same way that nazi swastikas, or “stars and bars” are (in fact Crispy, as much as she loves to change the subject and get off on a technicality, doesn’t even realize that “stars and bars” HISTORICALLY referred to the first national Confederate flag that nobody uses now since it looks too much like the Union’s flag). Since soviet Russia continued to exist with the same symbol for decades after its worst atrocities, the symbol became somewhat normalized and almost comical, when it became synonymous with cold war absurdity. And of course the current non-soviet Russia has its own issues with oppression, and also with neo nazis, as it happens. I, personally, would accept the swastika becoming innocuous and laughed at like that, and I think the confederate battle flag is well-designed. But they aren’t innocuous now, and probably are not going to be soon, and I would solve nothing by conspicuously enshrining them. I wish people could, or would, see where they stop fighting for justice and start fighting just because they like fighting. Crispo correctly identifies overpopulation and carelessness toward the environment, palm owls notwithstanding, as primary factors in the sad state of the world, so why continue to do stuff that gets people bickering over inconsequential symbolic issues?

At one time I considered that nazi furry-artwork was poorly executed satire, but now I just think it is mental illness. There are people who call themselves “furry raiders,” a group founded by somebody called Foxler. I cannot accept political rhetoric as sincere from somebody who role-plays as Adolf Hitler as a cartoon animal and wears a nazi-style red armband with a paw print instead of a swastika. Such a person has a very slight grasp on reality, and it would be irrational to argue with him. He even missed calling himself “Adolphin Swimler,” after eh. In a sense, it is unfair to ban him or his adherents from any conventions because most of your attendees in general are going to be people who live a weird fantasy. Although he also supposedly practices bestiality and sexual predation toward minors, while simultaneously criticizing furries who are outwardly perverted for giving the fandom a bad reputation.

When you experience dimwitted political conversations, somebody will often expound on what they think Rev Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd would do or say in that situation, and can probably find a quote to fit any viewpoint that is antithetical to his actual viewpoints. Imagine if we talked about what Hitler would do. He would have EVERY suspected furry shot and shoved in a ditch, regardless of whether they pretended to be a cartoon fox allegory of him.
And so, I think, this gang actually aren’t Nazis, but they get off on being able to sport nazi-like regalia and attitudes in public and claim that isn’t what it is. They are enrapt in the petty sub-fight, of complaining about media bias and non-existent conspiracies targeting their heritage or whatever. Gosh the English lost the war of 1812 and nobody has a problem with THEIR “heritage” displays, because this isn’t really about that.

My older brother reads a lot and knows a lot, but expresses his knowledge in a way that gets people angry at him, and call him a fascist, and post nazi-punching memes at him, so he doesn’t really solve anything, and I fear that he enjoys not solving anything and feeling targeted. He wouldn’t go full crispy but if he put a backwards swastika on a bag and called it a manji and carried the bag in a flagrant manner so somebody would try to put him in the hospital, that would STILL surprise me but it is more plausible. And my other brother has his own frustrating ways about that. It is very challenging to untangle the whole mess because there is always another story to shift focus to that I haven’t heard of and therefore cannot dissect, and half the time they turn out to be completely made up.

I do believe it is counterproductive to “tell it like it is” in a way that hurts marginalized people. That is not my goal. There is criticism about those who “crawl into a victim space” and in truth heavy conservatives were doing it first, with their wars on Christmas and assault on good old American Values talk. It may just be human nature to view yourself as the most wronged, and I would prefer to live with the less violent of the aspiring victims, if I had to choose, but I think I am stuck with both. Negative lifestyles cannot be magically changed, only eased out of.

What do I stand to gain, really, from talking about this? Nothing, probably, but I hate seeing people pat themselves on the back and solicit donations for saying dumb trash like “WE don’t support HATE” and “punch a nazi today!” and selling little trinkets with slogans on them. That, as usual, doesn’t help anything and it doesn’t take any courage to do that. And it doesn’t take courage because nazis are a minority and there is an extremely low chance you will run into more than one in any location where there isn’t a greater number of people who ostensibly advocate punching them. And so they will feel justified in using terrorist weapons, like automobiles against you. The real problem is people acting without empathy, and taking easy actions based on what their support groups, families, churches, whatever, encourage. Our president exacerbates this. He is seen as a hero by white supremacists, but since he can point to the fact that he never openly endorsed white supremacy in itself, he thinks doesn’t have to DO anything to stop it. He won’t take charge of a role he has but did not choose unless it serves his desired image. This is somebody who looked straight at the dumb eclipse (which I didn’t see at all but never mind) three times while everybody told him not, and he did it just BECAUSE everybody told him not to. He might do himself permanent damage, he might not, but he got to show off people who act like they think they are smarter than him.

Consider this: I have a niece, and sometimes I am asked to look after my niece, even though I am terrible at it and have things to work on. I could say: I don’t drink beer, I don’t do sex, I will never have children, and know I should not have children, and consequently there is no reason I should have any role of responsibility over this or any child. That would be “fair” in a sense, but it would cause animosity, hurting my family and alienating me from them, and in the end it would be my fault.
I say let the “nazis” have their rallies. The low turnouts speak for themselves. You can get a few thrown in jail by provoking them to extreme violence but never win in that manner.

This reminds me of Boromir in Fellowship of the Ring. When he tries to steal The Ring, even knowing that the point of the quest is to destroy the ring and the evil it permits to exist, he starts fantasizing about NOT destroying the ring and using its power to lead great armies. He wants to fight great wars forever, not prevent them, since that is all he understands, and all he enjoys. And I almost removed this bit of text, thinking it was better to refer to real acts by real people, but nobody I know seems real anymore, so perhaps I should exclusively use fictional examples.