@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.