Amen and Praise Logic.
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I don’t think so. One of your first instincts was to sit down and have a dialogue with the actual literal Nazis who aren’t exactly up for a friendly chat.
As for me, I’ve been warning people about this, in general, for decades. I’ve seen this particular scenario, with Trump as president and white supremacists running amok, two to four years back.
Alas, nobody listened then, and I doubt they’re going to start listening now.
Over the past few years, my mindset has shifted from conversation to gentle warnings to more frantic warnings to panic. Maybe I should just accept the fact that we’re all fucked, and everybody around me is oh so much smarter than me for doing all the fuck-all they could despite not even being aware of the massive fucking warning signs everywhere…
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Yeah I had to check that instinct. Sometimes I’m just too empathic for my own good.
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Damn right
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An empathic person would sense danger and run away. This is having too much faith in people, if that’s what it is.
The only way to talk to neo-Nazis before they become neo-Nazis is if they’re your pre-teen son on 4chan, or maybe your teenage son on Reddit. And even then, only if it was four years ago or so.
Another way is to challenge the bullshit that we’ve learned from our parents instead of passing it on to our kids and others. Did you know that black people don’t actually get free stuff from the government, just for being black? Nobody I grew up with knew that, apparently. With any luck, by now they realized that stuff like that is all bullshit, but I’m not holding out much hope. Also, this approach is only useful on the so-called “polite racists” who have yet to go full Nazi, and even then, only so-so.
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Take this conversation to PMs, please.
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We’re pming.
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Grazie.
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To quote the words on the cover of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, “Don’t panic”.
Remember the words of the Chinese Buddhist who was asked what he did during the Cultural Revolution: “I went for a walk in the Kunlun mountains.”
I’m not going to preach (over 40 years ago I decided that wasn’t the route I was going to take through life) but I get through life on Zen Buddhism. One of my sons in law, who has a similar background, is a practitioner of Aikido, which embodies many Zen concepts.
I find it helpful at difficult times to remember that the fact we are here at all is incomprehensible, and what we call reality really is illusory - as any physicist can tell you. But you don’t just get to understand this by reading the words, you have to live it.
It works for me, it may not work for you. But now is not the time to panic. I am sure that part of our problem is that the Internet confronts us with stuff that has always been there but we simply weren’t really aware of it before. It is too much information, literally.
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Sometimes too much information is actually too little.
The stuff we’re not supposed to pay attention to drowns out the stuff that we are supposed to pay attention to.
That’s largely the problem.
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@Melizmatic, thank you for starting this thread.
In the summer heat, tensions naturally run high in groups, though this year’s have been exacerbated by offline happenings. It’s usually around this time of year I sit down and write a letter of grievance nominally addressed to my Member of Parliament. It’s never pretty.
I would be more worried if there wasn’t discord at this time of year. Server-side, metrically, engagement is up this fortnight.
I am human, fallible, and prone to jumping the gun. It is only through practice that we can deal with our… Emotional tension in a productive manner.
Sorry. Didn’t mean to be a sentimental fool. Touchy-feely stuff usually sounds like hogwash to me. (Especially when Chris is wearing a sweatervest. A freakin’ sweatervest!)
Right now, all I can say is this:
I love you all. And I’m sorry for snapping at you. Sorry for letting you down.
We’re a community of survivors. We’ve come through a lot of troubles over the years: the Pedant Pendant, the St Elsewhere Day Horror, and now this. Every time, we come out stronger, wiser, and maybe a little more scarred for the trouble.
Every last one of us, from @popobawa to @LearnedCoward, makes it all worth it.
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That reminds me, it is probably (past) time for me to do one of those posts. Maybe I’ll look at that tonight.
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How can you assign worth to me?
My value is a figment of the imagination. It holds no more worth than one imbues to fiat currencies.
Money does not exist.
Some days, neither do I.
But I’m trying, lord.
I’m trying to help people see that all people have intrinsic worth, to believe that in all their soul.
Just like they believe in money.
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And my imagination says you have value. You’ll just have to live with it, I’m afraid! 
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And do we have polar opposite value all of a sudden?
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YES, do. Please. With your choice of delicious toppings.
Can you believe he was considered a “controversial” figure even in 1961/62?
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De nada.
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If it’s not a mistake to chime in on this – with apologies otherwise, to please correct as appropriate – but I doubt your empathy should be faulted. I know you’ve been learning more about communication and conflict, and trying to do better about them in practice. And with the Nazi thread it rather seemed to me you were looking at this conflict threatening all society, that nobody has any pleasant answers to, and just got hopeful that maybe these new tools could help.
I think the approach you set out was a mistake, as I and others explained there. And it’s a very frustrating and dangerous one; if you weren’t someone I recognized my reaction would have been total dismissal. Because so many have been peddling appeasement, as if the whole last century of history never happened, willfully deaf to others who know exactly where that leaves them. I can’t tell you how awful I find it; I can only imagine how it is to the others who would actually be at the top of a new Niemöller poem.
But knowing the above context, I do think it was at least an honest mistake for once, the sort people make easily halfway through learning new ideas. And hey, instead of awfully sticking to it, you seem to have listened and admitted. So I took it more as a rough pothole on a good road?
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Excuse me, but I feel a need to chime in here as well. I can see both sides of the argument, and I don’t think ChickieD and Learned Coward were entirely wrong, or entirely right.
I believe ChickieD was speaking from a place of compassion and empathy, and I think that’s a wonderful thing. And she’s not wrong to want to help people with the skills she has. There’s more than one story of people who have been taught their concepts of racism were wrong through friendly outreach. Here’s one, and I’m sure there are more:
http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_585c250de4b0de3a08f495fc
But, that only works on an individual level. We’ve got a much bigger problem. There are far too many who are so entrenched in their pain and hatred that they can’t be reached easily, if at all. And they feel so empowered that they speak their poison publicly. They feel justified in beating people within full view of the police-- and in Charlottesville, the police did nothing. That is profoundly wrong, and profoundly frightening. Like Learned Coward, it terrifies me. So winning over individual hearts and minds cannot be our only strategy to turn things around. We need people who will stand up and say, this is wrong, and we won’t tolerate it. And we are seeing that. Seeing rallies where these Nazis are outnumbered by 10 to 1, or more, gives me hope. But that cannot be our only strategy, either.
We’re in a war, I think. We’re fighting to define what our country stands for-- fear and hate, or love and unity. In order to win, we need to fight on many fronts, with many strategies. And each of us has unique skills to contribute. So when people with amazing levels of empathy want to reach out to help their opponents, I think it’s wonderful. But direct action and confrontation are needed as well. We’ve seen people gather in protest marches. Those who know the legal system can fight it out in the courts. And I’m sure there are even more methods of resistance that my tired brain can’t name right now. But I don’t see it as a question of “either/or.” I think it’s a matter of “yes-and”… if that makes any sense. And to win this fight, we’re going to need to support each other, and use every skill at our disposal.
That’s my two cents, anyway. If I’m out of line, I apologize.
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In Buddhist terms, we’re overwhelmed by Maya - illusion. When the Buddha under the Bo-tree is described as being assaulted by gods and demons, that’s maya - they are all illusory.
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