starless @starless@pixie.town

@drwho@hackers.town if you're concerned with the ripple effects from this, wait till you hear about Caitlin Jenner. :P

In all reality, though, if this is something you do care about (and you do care enough to write up a post on it), you might want to reach out to your local chapter of Life After Hate and ask if they need anything. I know when I'd tried to raise ours, they were wildly busy and it was almost impossible to get to a human. Additionally, there are a number of local post-prison community integration programs that could really use some empathetic men who are willing to work with ex-cons and treat them like useful members of society. I don't know who's active in your area, but that was the major request I heard most recently (admittedly a couple years stale) from some folks involved with disrupting the pipeline to WS groups in the Midwest.

IMO, people who are involved with a hate group know that it will be very difficult to re-integrate with greater society. People leaving hate groups already know that they will have many barriers. There is an incredible amount of humility and courage that this takes, along with an enormous amount of community support, and I think that the impact of this article is just a drop in the bucket, compared to, say, a highly visible tattoo of a hate symbol on someone's forehead that they haven't been able to afford getting removed.

Remember that every time you advocate on behalf of possibly making neo-nazis more comfortable, you're telling everyone else in the room that you're more concerned with the wellbeing of a fascist than the safety of their victims in your community. Being a neo-nazi is not a victimless crime, and if you imply it is, you end up further dehumanizing those groups, unintentionally advancing exactly what the fascist wanted in the first place.

It might feel like you're saying "everyone please be nice to each other", but it seems like you're saying, instead "you can continue being a violent fascist as long as you feel bad about it. please stop complaining about this fascist, they obviously feel bad already."

Anyways, I appreciate that you're capable of finding empathy for someone trying to leave a hate group, I'm just concerned that the way you've expressed this empathy is less likely to directly help folks in that position and more likely to let neo-nazis know that you are open to them sitting at your table.

If you have those feelings because you, yourself, have had issues with radicalization and felt discouraged, feel free to DM me and I'll do what I can to help.

@drwho@hackers.town dude, the guy's gone back to preaching anti-semitism and suggesting violence.

Do you have any idea how many years of work a community puts in to de-radicalize just one person? It's a huge amount. The article makes no claims as to whether or not the stories presented here are representative of neo-nazis as a whole. If folks that had been previously, laboriously, de-radicalized have been regressing, it seems pretty newsworthy to me. Not necessarily as a judge of character, but because it lets communities know that those folks might need extra support right now, and that maybe it's worth checking in on folks around the fringes.

After all, fascism often wears a very friendly face to the 'right' kinds of people, and once it makes a home in a community, all the voices that are most different from those preaching it all disappear. Not the folks opposed to fascism, but the quiet folks, perhaps who've seen first hand what it did to their home, quietly go elsewhere, because the folks running the show have demonstrated that they're willing to give fascists a platform.

Anyways, just FYI, I'm surprised and disappointed that "writing about the relapse of a high profile neo-nazi is a bad idea because it might discourage neo-nazis from reforming" was your takeaway from that article. IMO, the conditions in the last year and a half were ideal to make folks relapse, and maybe looking at how to improve those conditions in the future is a better shot for helping folks reform than being mad at journalists for covering the story.

@f0x Good luck! <3

if those are too heavy, I also really like the YA fic The Raven Boys, although that series isn't scifi per se. It was really nice reading for when I had loud feelings/low spoons.

@f0x IMO, religions concerned with modesty and Islamophobia are a good part of why there was such strong anti mask sentiment in the US. Framing the issue as religious or reflective of individual views rather than being reflective of statistical risk in communities was not helpful, IMO. But I'm not sure if that's where you were going?