starless @starless@pixie.town

@drwho@hackers.town yeah. Glad to hear we're on the same page here.

I'm about to pick stuff apart based on my reading, and it's probably gonna come off pedantic af. This is just my takeaway based on what I got after reading your post (admittedly kind of tiredly) last night.

In response to "How did I come off as advocating?"

Here,

> This (both Heimbach, and this article) discredits people who want to (or have) changed for the better.

> Maybe that's the point, to discredit them.

> Once again, the culture war finds a way to turn people against one another.

There's a couple of things.

A) it wasn't super clear what you meant by Heimbach's inclusion in particular. When I first read through, I assumed you meant his identity, rather than his more recent action of returning to hate. The way I read the article, he repented from WS in favor of more traditionalist socialism, and then returned to WS once a group of WS socialists emerged.

It wasn't clear to me at first, though I think it's clearer now, that you were intending to say "a fascist renouncing their past and then re-embracing it again may discredit people who pursue genuine change."

B) it seems like you're lumping in journalistic coverage of this action in the same boat as the action itself, which seems weird. Maybe in the future, lament the lack of guidance, support, resources, or what have you that they could have included for folks trying to leave groups, rather than speaking quite so broadly about coverage.

C) your inclusion of people who are still practicing hate but are considering peace alongside those who have left or are in the process of leaving gives a lot of wiggle room. In the future, maybe frame this as 'folks who are in the early stages of leaving', instead. I imagine most people practicing hate had complicated feelings about it at least once.

D) this might be a little too related to c, but you never outline what you expect someone leaving a hate group (or changing their political mind) to actually be, instead you just imply "changing for the better". This could still include practicing hate or other extremist ideologies, but in a different way. Since pretty much everybody wants to be a better person, this is pretty easy. In a sense, you set a very vague, low bar for what you expect neo-nazis or other extremists to need to do in order to no longer be seen as 'part of a problem requiring a cultural opposition'.

At the end, you lament that there is a culture war and that there is derision. You wish for harmony. But because you don't clearly predicate that the hateful actions of fascists must stop in order to fully realize that harmony, your response comes off as 'both sides'-y.

With all these things together, it seems like you blame the cultural reaction to extremism and the news coverage of a man's return to fascism more for causing the derision you lament than the actions of the extremists themselves, and that you were advocating for folks to be more gentle towards neo-nazis as a whole because they *might want* to be a better person than they are today.

Okay, pedantry over. Just explicitly saying that fascism is bad whenever you link to something covering fascism is probably an easy way to resolve the above concerns.

@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?