The other user is right. Any tolerance for those ideologies gives them a foothold. It makes room for them. There can be no room, at all, for that shit. Ever. Arguing otherwise is dangerous. There is no nuance here. At all.

Over the past several days I’ve seen you draw out many good faith disagreements about racism or nazism into what seem like intentionally blurry “just asking questions” type derailments whereby you try to shift the topic of the discussion to other, emotional or tangential details and or try to misrepresent the issue at hand to make the racism or nazism seem not that bad. I really don’t think someone would do that if they were coming from a place of genuine confusion or curiosity or dialogue. I might be wrong, but taken together it really gives the impression, intent aside, that you’re trying to spin up plausible arguments for far right stuff and then sow confusion whenever people say “hey, don’t do that, it’s harmful”. I just don’t believe there’s wiggle room here. I don’t want to have a circular conversation about it, but i do want to point out directly what you’re doing, because I think it sucks, and I think that you should stop.

I just want to state very emphatically that deradicalizing people is a specific skill set and set of actions that is completely different than “being friendly to nazis”. And tolerating bigotry so that people don’t feel bad about their bigotry is just tolerating bigotry. On that note, on another post you argued heavily with multiple users that white privilege is not real and that you were being oppressed for your whiteness. I thought maybe you were very young, or confused, and tried to have empathy and explain some concepts, but here you are now also arguing that we need to be nice to nazis for the good of society so that they don’t feel oppressed. I suppose you might say that pointing this out and making you feel more oppressed would drive you further away, but a better approach, i think, would be to tell you very very directly that the things you have been saying here, in multiple places, are white supremacist talking points. And no one here is going to condone that. Stop. If you need help stopping, that is your responsibility, not the hypothetical 9 other peoples’.

RIGHT. Thank you for pointing this out.

:::

I feel like they always try to make it sound more complicated and high minded. I really don’t believe it is!

I really struggle to take seriously what these tech people say about ‘not wanting to censor’. They made a business calculation, and maybe an ideological one, and decided “we want that nazi money, it’s worth it to us.” which really tells you everything about a company and how it is likely to approach other issues, too.

I’m sorry, but i’m going to have to see this reply as bad faith. There’s no good reason to think the news outlet in question skipped the entire journalistic process and ‘has no proof’, so I can only assume you have another reason for sowing doubt about the legitimacy of the story.

I imagine cnn doesn’t want to encourage people to visit the hate account in question by posting a link or screenshot. It doesn’t mean they don’t have proof, it just means they don’t want to drive traffic to hate content. Printing that would be kind of irresponsible. But CNN is known as a pretty reputable news source. I can’t see why they’d lie about it.

If you aren’t seeing any white supremacy on your own timeline, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, it just means the algorithm isn’t showing it to you, which is a good thing. It might seem surprising, but people do actually search for and deliberately seek out that shit. Hate groups use social media to network, I imagine that’s why CNN didn’t post a screenshot of the account name, or its content.

For people who physically cannot go places or access important services (like healthcare, or their jobs) in person, this is a double violation, because it’s unavoidable. Increasingly, the only spaces available to us, our only avenues for accessing services or community, are becoming heavily surveilled in a way that in-person places are not (though in some places physical spaces are catching up). Everyone deserves well-enforced privacy laws and all these corporations should be regulated , but people who are disabled or housbound or otherwise forced to rely on digital services that we know we can’t trust, it’s extra bad. Between this and the heavy push to sign up for digital medial record apps, I do not feel great about the future.

Nina Jankowicz has a book called How To Be A Woman Online, about surviving harassment and disinformation campaigns. While it’s pretty focused on the experiences of women with semi-public profiles, it has a lot of useful things in it that helped me feel a bit better about myself and manage the small-scale, generic bullying that I sometimes worry about. Blocking people, being a bit harder to find, and ending communication with anyone the slightest bit rude or abusive has helped. The Verbally Abusive relationship also has some great tips for spotting people’s crappy behavior sooner. That book deals mostly with romantic relationships, but you can recognize the same kinds of excuses and similar conversation patterns the online bullies use.

Also- just in case you need to hear this- it is so freaking normal to eat meat. I eat meat. Your diet is absolutely nobody’s business, ever. When somebody gets focused overly on a minor detail of your life to be mean to you about it, even if they say it’s for a “moral” or political reason, you can be sure they’re not truly sincere about that issue - because why would they be focused on one stranger’s habits instead of working for system changes if they really felt strongly about it? Eat your food, live your life, and protect yourself from these people. They don’t mean what they say.

I use a a drug store cleanser that’s gentle and nondrying every couple of days when I shower, and AHA every several days. My mother doesn’t use anything at all but water, which I’m hoping to eventually move toward. That AHA i use is from Krave, and it costs $25 and lasts about a year. I would say that’s worth it (for me) but a daily or weekly product routine would not be. I imagine it depends on your budget and your skin, and whether you wear makeup that you need to take off, but I have noticed my skin is in much better shape when i keep things simple, so i do. For me, I found that washing off my skin’s oil, then replacing it with lotion, every day, just created a necessity to constantly buy stuff to keep my face from either drying out or becoming oily, so i just stopped and within a few weeks my skin adjusted and looked a lot healthier. Definitely now feel like most products you’re ”supposed” to use every day are not worth it.

That makes sense. I agree with you there.

No, not at all. I don’t think individual decisions that don’t hurt anyone are ever morally lazy, and I think that in most cases software is just morally neutral. I should have left preferences and technical know how out of it. I suppose I included them because i often see people making the argument that like, it’s morally better and makes you a better human being to be make the most optimized software decisions and if you like, enjoy instagram or windows or google or something, you are not just wrong or less intelligent, you’re also personally propping up the things that are wrong in the tech industry, even though that industry has accumulated so much money and power that they don’t care so much what individual people do. And i wanted to highlight that while little technological resistances to capitalism are very nice, they’re not available to all people, or appealing to all people, or right for all people, and i think that’s fine. Purity is impossible and doesn’t actually fix any systemic problems. I’ve actually seen a surprising amount of ‘you use the wrong software!’ shaming in my life and it’s always framed as “for these reasons” so I guess I meant to try to to dissect the reasons a little but, but ended up putting my foot in my mouth.

Oh nice!! I’ll have to check that on out.

I don’t know. I dislike when apps and websites behave greedily as much as the next person, but within the system where we live, I don’t know if i would go so far as to say that people choosing what’s readily available or easiest for them is “morally lazy”. That line of thinking kind of implies that having the option or the knowledge or the preference to use certain types of “better” technology makes one a “better” kind of person, and I just don’t think that’s true.

There Are No Girls On The Internet is fantastic.

https://www.vox.com/culture/23733213/fandom-purity-culture-what-is-proship-antiship-antifandom It’s in the second section, but the full article is well worth a read. Edit: some good stuff at the links, too.

Yes, the coincidences really aligned. You couldn’t really make something like that on purpose. It’s just one of those things.

I think this was more of a feature of 10 years ago - that being, people meaning well and learning about political theories for the very first time, but then ignoring all nuance and using those concepts to bully each other instead of actually make the world better. Vox has an interesting article about that phenomenon as it played out in fandom circles, and if I remember right it does talk specifically about Tumblr. Huge difference between actually working toward social justice, and simply recycling justicey-sounding words into arguments and harassment campaigns. Things do seem to have leveled out a lot as people have aged and norms have shifted a bit, but I can understand someone feeling wary of the site for that reason.

That’s absolutely true. As someone who’s hung around there since 2010ish, trust is too strong a word. But it does make me sad. If there is an alternative, i’ll happily start using it. But it’s specifically the other people there and the things they do, far more than the platform itself, that I love. If it does all go to hell, I’m sure that people will talk about where they’re going and I can follow. It’s just such a distinct place. It would be the end of an era if it went the way of instagram or twitter.