do you want to help anti-vaxxers change, and stop being anti-vaxxers, or do you just want to feel superior to them?
Depends on the person and the situation. This isn’t some hypothetical, far reaching discussion about why they should recycle to prevent future global warming. Look at the picture attached to the post. There’s a kid suffering from measles because some adult in their life wouldn’t use the reality of science and reason and put that kid in the position they’re in. If adults with all those tools and learning want to expose themselves to preventable consequences; fine. That’s your choice, and while I think you’re an idiot, by all means, ignore history, logic, and reality and suffer your consequences. Die. I’m not going to save you in the face of all that.
Did they do so by mocking and belittling you, or did they do it with kindness and by helping you understand your mistakes in a way that didn’t make you feel rejected?
Both. I’m far from perfect or ideal. I’ve done things that were selfish and had both the rejection of strangers and the support of individuals who same some kernel of personal humanity in spite of my behavior and backed the idea I could change even when it seemed like I couldn’t, had hurt others, and was otherwise not a benefit to society. But I also used that opportunity to self-reflect and try, sometimes unsuccessfully, to grow and change. I will always fight to give people who have a spark of that the opportunity and time to change. There’s people covered in swastika tattoos who’ve realized their error and try to work beyond the people they’ve been. There’s murderers and rapists who grew up in environments of victimization and passed that on once they became adults because it’s the only lesson they got about how one treats others. My beef isn’t with the victims of bad lessons who are struggling but willing to learn from the consequences of their actions. It’s with the ones that continue to use their past as an excuse to justify their current behavior, and especially those who are aware of reality but don’t care because they have the power and ability to dodge the consequences of what they’re doing but have no concern if it affects another.
Right, this is what I’m getting at. Bullying people and treating them like shit will not help them self-reflect and change. To achieve that, we need to extend that support you mentioned, we need to somehow see the kernel of personal humanity within them.
Like you said, this isn’t a problem where the consequences are confined to individuals, adults acting poorly is causing innocent children to suffer and die, so we need to focus on solutions. This isn’t like these people believe in Flat Earth, if we just sit around mocking and belittling these people, more innocents will die at faster rates.
We need to collectively swallow our (totally justified) anger and find some kind of a way to understand the root reason of why people are anti-vaxx, and help them resolve whatever broken logic or unresolved emotional issues is standing in the way of them doing the right thing.
This isn’t like these people believe in Flat Earth,
My local anti-vaxxing, Straight Pride Festival hosting, “free drinks at my bar if you can prove you turned someone in to ICE”, white nationalist just tried to primary our Republican governor, who himself is helluva bigot, and while he lost he still got 30% of the vote. He’s also a flat earther who hosts round tables for fellow believers at his bar. There’s a substantial overlap in the illogical and irrational belief community.
Now, I don’t think he personally is a flat earther. Despite being repugnant, he’s an intelligent and charismatic person, smart enough to recognize gullibility and use it to gather strength of numbers. For a person like that to change they’d have to be willing to abandon the power they hold. It’s the same problem with podcasters, celebrities, snake oil salesmen, and talking heads that push these ideas. Plenty of them aren’t true believers, it’s a means to profit and clout. There comes a point where you have to stop looking at people as victims of their own ignorance and instead intentionally harmful for their own gain at the expense of others.
There’s also the problem of religious beliefs. We allow people a lot of leeway in spirituality because humans do seem to have a need to feel connected to something “greater”. When someone does that in a manner where their belief guides them but has respect for the rights and boundaries of others, fine. When spirituality becomes religion it often ends up becoming another tool of oppression and unaccountability because people begin demanding their to practice their beliefs regardless of how it’s affecting others. Since god is made up, you can put any words you’d like in god’s mouth to justify your behavior, and worst case you disregard the people you love around because “only god can judge me”.
The US created a problematic loophole with its hands off approach to religious beliefs. If people used their liberty to pursue beliefs that nurtured their personal spirituality and self actualization it’d be great. Instead it’s become a breeding ground for hucksters to develop their own cults of “this is what the ancient book really meant”, or sometimes they just write a brand new book. And we do at times come together to quash behaviors of the religious even at the expense of an individual’s right to act on their supposed god endorsed beliefs because that practice violates the right of another. Joe Smith informed people god was chill with dudes marrying multiple teenagers, but that one’s gotten quashed (for the most part, but some sects still do it, they just have to live removed from society). We’re still fighting to quash child marriage loopholes and male genital mutilation. I don’t care if your god impregnated a teenager with your Savior, your prophet married a child, or your god commanded you to cut of the end of a kid’s penis as a sign of devotion. It’s gross. They’re gross and people are gross for abiding it.
Arguments of logic and reason don’t work on people whose core belief is based on the existence of an invisible, all powerful, universal puppet master. It results in people who do not take accountability for why they must be accountable for their actions in the here and now, judged for their behavior by fellow humans instead of some future where god decides. It also creates people who are willfully ignorant of cause and effect, prevention and accident. I’m content to let adults dance around in a church with a handful of rattlesnakes. I could tell you why that’s a bad idea, but if an adult wants to lose an arm or their life engaging in that, welp. Their life to lose. Spreading disease or denying a child access to healthcare because they’re praying over them instead; not their life to lose.
help them resolve whatever broken logic or unresolved emotional issues is standing in the way of them doing the right thing.
Like an addict, who continues to destroy themselves and the lives of those in their circle/community with their addiction, repairing broken logic and unresolved emotional issues can’t be helped by external forces until they make the decision to change for themselves and then accept the help. Otherwise they cycle repeatedly through the consequences of losing their privilege of being a part of society, turn themselves into pariahs as the community shuns them to avoid the collateral damage of their behavior, or kills themselves through their own choices. We don’t have to tolerate the fallout of selfishness while they “work on it”. At what point do we look at the pox ridden, scarred for life, maybe dead body of a child then turn to the adult that helped cause that and say “nah, fuck you, your right to chose is revoked”.
This isn’t the dark ages, people aren’t unaware of the sources of disease. We’ve had a good thousand years to figure out where they come from and our literacy rate, declining as it is, is sufficient that we can demand a baseline understanding of cause and effect out of adults. If they want to put up a fight, fine. I’ll fight them over it. If bullying them to the point their only choice is to live cut-off from society so they can’t spread their disease and die alone, unvaxxed but self-satisfied they clung to their belief to the miserable, painful end, so be it.
That’s a lot of words to come around to the conclusion that you believe we should force people to undergo unwanted medical procedures for “the greater good”. I’m sorry, but that idea is even more harmful than anti-vaxxers. This exact same sentiment was used to justify unbelievable atrocities in the past, such as sterilizing minority groups and things like the Tuskegee Syphilis Study.
I agree with you that people need to want to change to change, but bullying and belittling them is counterproductive to encouraging people to want to change.
The fact is that you just want to feel justified in treating people badly, because you (totally justifiably) feel that those people are doing bad things. You need to recognize that you need to choose between working towards solving the problem, or just making yourself feel better by shitting on them.
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.
I’m not implying forced vaccinations from the government, I’m suggesting that when your neighbor is a threat to the most vulnerable members of your community, you, yes, you the person I’m talking to, unite with your likeminded neighbors and do everything in your power to isolate, ostracize, and exclude that person from society until their only choice becomes live in total isolation or complies. Our government is in the hands of the anti-vax enablers, they’re not going to do anything about it. It’s your responsibility to identify the threats to children, the elderly, and the most vulnerable in your community and neutralize them.
They don’t even need to change their minds about it, just like a bigot is free to be a bigot in the privacy of their own home. You can’t force a white supremecist to abandon their mindset because you cannot “make” someone believe what they don’t want to believe. You can only make espousing their beliefs and acting upon them in public a costly endeavor.
Look at what’s happening in Africa with the Ebola outbreak. The demand for access to dangerous corpses due to religious beliefs is fueling the destruction of the facilities trying to protect the public and will result in the disease continuing to spread. Measles and Covid are bad, Ebola is pretty much just death waiting to happen. Would you tolerate “right to deny” and demand we coddle deniers with patience and compassion if they were willfully exposing society to some of our most lethal diseases? If yes, well, there’s nothing left to discuss. If not, why do you demand we tolerate them scarring children for life with something that could have been prevented.
We do already hold people accountable for knowingly spreading disease. If someone knows they’re HIV positive and continues to spread it without informing their partner of the risk, they are penalized for it. HIV isn’t even the death sentence it was 30yrs ago, but it is a lifelong medical burden that can affect quality of life and life expectancy. Why do we allow others to spread diseases that cause suffering, scar, cause long term health issues, and sometimes kill? The responsibility for protecting your community is on you, not the government.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Depends on the person and the situation. This isn’t some hypothetical, far reaching discussion about why they should recycle to prevent future global warming. Look at the picture attached to the post. There’s a kid suffering from measles because some adult in their life wouldn’t use the reality of science and reason and put that kid in the position they’re in. If adults with all those tools and learning want to expose themselves to preventable consequences; fine. That’s your choice, and while I think you’re an idiot, by all means, ignore history, logic, and reality and suffer your consequences. Die. I’m not going to save you in the face of all that.
Both. I’m far from perfect or ideal. I’ve done things that were selfish and had both the rejection of strangers and the support of individuals who same some kernel of personal humanity in spite of my behavior and backed the idea I could change even when it seemed like I couldn’t, had hurt others, and was otherwise not a benefit to society. But I also used that opportunity to self-reflect and try, sometimes unsuccessfully, to grow and change. I will always fight to give people who have a spark of that the opportunity and time to change. There’s people covered in swastika tattoos who’ve realized their error and try to work beyond the people they’ve been. There’s murderers and rapists who grew up in environments of victimization and passed that on once they became adults because it’s the only lesson they got about how one treats others. My beef isn’t with the victims of bad lessons who are struggling but willing to learn from the consequences of their actions. It’s with the ones that continue to use their past as an excuse to justify their current behavior, and especially those who are aware of reality but don’t care because they have the power and ability to dodge the consequences of what they’re doing but have no concern if it affects another.
Right, this is what I’m getting at. Bullying people and treating them like shit will not help them self-reflect and change. To achieve that, we need to extend that support you mentioned, we need to somehow see the kernel of personal humanity within them.
Like you said, this isn’t a problem where the consequences are confined to individuals, adults acting poorly is causing innocent children to suffer and die, so we need to focus on solutions. This isn’t like these people believe in Flat Earth, if we just sit around mocking and belittling these people, more innocents will die at faster rates.
We need to collectively swallow our (totally justified) anger and find some kind of a way to understand the root reason of why people are anti-vaxx, and help them resolve whatever broken logic or unresolved emotional issues is standing in the way of them doing the right thing.
My local anti-vaxxing, Straight Pride Festival hosting, “free drinks at my bar if you can prove you turned someone in to ICE”, white nationalist just tried to primary our Republican governor, who himself is helluva bigot, and while he lost he still got 30% of the vote. He’s also a flat earther who hosts round tables for fellow believers at his bar. There’s a substantial overlap in the illogical and irrational belief community.
Now, I don’t think he personally is a flat earther. Despite being repugnant, he’s an intelligent and charismatic person, smart enough to recognize gullibility and use it to gather strength of numbers. For a person like that to change they’d have to be willing to abandon the power they hold. It’s the same problem with podcasters, celebrities, snake oil salesmen, and talking heads that push these ideas. Plenty of them aren’t true believers, it’s a means to profit and clout. There comes a point where you have to stop looking at people as victims of their own ignorance and instead intentionally harmful for their own gain at the expense of others.
There’s also the problem of religious beliefs. We allow people a lot of leeway in spirituality because humans do seem to have a need to feel connected to something “greater”. When someone does that in a manner where their belief guides them but has respect for the rights and boundaries of others, fine. When spirituality becomes religion it often ends up becoming another tool of oppression and unaccountability because people begin demanding their to practice their beliefs regardless of how it’s affecting others. Since god is made up, you can put any words you’d like in god’s mouth to justify your behavior, and worst case you disregard the people you love around because “only god can judge me”.
The US created a problematic loophole with its hands off approach to religious beliefs. If people used their liberty to pursue beliefs that nurtured their personal spirituality and self actualization it’d be great. Instead it’s become a breeding ground for hucksters to develop their own cults of “this is what the ancient book really meant”, or sometimes they just write a brand new book. And we do at times come together to quash behaviors of the religious even at the expense of an individual’s right to act on their supposed god endorsed beliefs because that practice violates the right of another. Joe Smith informed people god was chill with dudes marrying multiple teenagers, but that one’s gotten quashed (for the most part, but some sects still do it, they just have to live removed from society). We’re still fighting to quash child marriage loopholes and male genital mutilation. I don’t care if your god impregnated a teenager with your Savior, your prophet married a child, or your god commanded you to cut of the end of a kid’s penis as a sign of devotion. It’s gross. They’re gross and people are gross for abiding it.
Arguments of logic and reason don’t work on people whose core belief is based on the existence of an invisible, all powerful, universal puppet master. It results in people who do not take accountability for why they must be accountable for their actions in the here and now, judged for their behavior by fellow humans instead of some future where god decides. It also creates people who are willfully ignorant of cause and effect, prevention and accident. I’m content to let adults dance around in a church with a handful of rattlesnakes. I could tell you why that’s a bad idea, but if an adult wants to lose an arm or their life engaging in that, welp. Their life to lose. Spreading disease or denying a child access to healthcare because they’re praying over them instead; not their life to lose.
Like an addict, who continues to destroy themselves and the lives of those in their circle/community with their addiction, repairing broken logic and unresolved emotional issues can’t be helped by external forces until they make the decision to change for themselves and then accept the help. Otherwise they cycle repeatedly through the consequences of losing their privilege of being a part of society, turn themselves into pariahs as the community shuns them to avoid the collateral damage of their behavior, or kills themselves through their own choices. We don’t have to tolerate the fallout of selfishness while they “work on it”. At what point do we look at the pox ridden, scarred for life, maybe dead body of a child then turn to the adult that helped cause that and say “nah, fuck you, your right to chose is revoked”.
This isn’t the dark ages, people aren’t unaware of the sources of disease. We’ve had a good thousand years to figure out where they come from and our literacy rate, declining as it is, is sufficient that we can demand a baseline understanding of cause and effect out of adults. If they want to put up a fight, fine. I’ll fight them over it. If bullying them to the point their only choice is to live cut-off from society so they can’t spread their disease and die alone, unvaxxed but self-satisfied they clung to their belief to the miserable, painful end, so be it.
That’s a lot of words to come around to the conclusion that you believe we should force people to undergo unwanted medical procedures for “the greater good”. I’m sorry, but that idea is even more harmful than anti-vaxxers. This exact same sentiment was used to justify unbelievable atrocities in the past, such as sterilizing minority groups and things like the Tuskegee Syphilis Study.
I agree with you that people need to want to change to change, but bullying and belittling them is counterproductive to encouraging people to want to change.
The fact is that you just want to feel justified in treating people badly, because you (totally justifiably) feel that those people are doing bad things. You need to recognize that you need to choose between working towards solving the problem, or just making yourself feel better by shitting on them.
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.
I’m not implying forced vaccinations from the government, I’m suggesting that when your neighbor is a threat to the most vulnerable members of your community, you, yes, you the person I’m talking to, unite with your likeminded neighbors and do everything in your power to isolate, ostracize, and exclude that person from society until their only choice becomes live in total isolation or complies. Our government is in the hands of the anti-vax enablers, they’re not going to do anything about it. It’s your responsibility to identify the threats to children, the elderly, and the most vulnerable in your community and neutralize them.
They don’t even need to change their minds about it, just like a bigot is free to be a bigot in the privacy of their own home. You can’t force a white supremecist to abandon their mindset because you cannot “make” someone believe what they don’t want to believe. You can only make espousing their beliefs and acting upon them in public a costly endeavor.
Look at what’s happening in Africa with the Ebola outbreak. The demand for access to dangerous corpses due to religious beliefs is fueling the destruction of the facilities trying to protect the public and will result in the disease continuing to spread. Measles and Covid are bad, Ebola is pretty much just death waiting to happen. Would you tolerate “right to deny” and demand we coddle deniers with patience and compassion if they were willfully exposing society to some of our most lethal diseases? If yes, well, there’s nothing left to discuss. If not, why do you demand we tolerate them scarring children for life with something that could have been prevented.
We do already hold people accountable for knowingly spreading disease. If someone knows they’re HIV positive and continues to spread it without informing their partner of the risk, they are penalized for it. HIV isn’t even the death sentence it was 30yrs ago, but it is a lifelong medical burden that can affect quality of life and life expectancy. Why do we allow others to spread diseases that cause suffering, scar, cause long term health issues, and sometimes kill? The responsibility for protecting your community is on you, not the government.
I understand what you’re getting at, and I even addressed this exact point in my last comment:
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.
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.
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.
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.