TERFs and guns: two terrible tastes that taste worse together

…Before anyone says “we’ll fix the future consequences after we solve the current Nazi problem” you are being very optimistic. History says that it will just get bumped off the tables in favor of some other issue from some previous generation that never really got resolved and will end up not getting fully resolved either in favor of some other issue which was not resolved, and then the Nazi thing will probably pop up again… You want a long life, you don’t have the luxury of centrists forcing you to leave things half-finished. Seriously, NO MORE.

How fucking terrified do you have to be to constantly think all trans women want to r*pe you in a goddamned gas station?

Fucking hell, I just want snacks

Curiously, there are a lot of people who think the opposite. Isn’t that kind of part of the problem?

No, because that’s a completely false equivalency. Don’t be this fucking dumb. It looks bad on you.

Is there a fascist breaking down your door right now?

No, but in 2014 there was a gang of neo-nazis who went out hunting for feminists/leftists on the 8th of March and knifed a person into intensive care. They tried your “both sides, eh” self defense argument, but the one (sort-of, to be honest) left-leaning magazine mapped their movements and it was noticed that while they claimed that they were on their way home when they were “attacked” the home in question was equidistant (8 km, or half a mile) to the place of the knifing. I’ll leave it up the observer to guess about the legal outcome.

It’s a very minor point rightly overshadowed by all the other vileness, but I couldn’t help but notice that when “LoveNotPorn” wrote,

Today I went to get some gas and when I went into the gas station a TIM was stood talking to the cashier,

they used the typically UK colloquial expression “[x] was stood”. Please correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m unaware of any US dialect which favors this locution. An American English speaker would have said, “[x] was standing” or “[x] stood”. I suspect LoveNotPorn is either a recent immigrant to the US or a British TER(F) pretending to be a Mississippian.

@Bookworm:

Those who have the privilege of not actually at this moment being a target, need to speak out.

This, of course, was the point of Niemoller’s poem.

Sigh. I guess that this is an “Okay Boomer” situation where I’m the Boomer (metaphorically, as I’m at the older end of Gen-X) where we’re just talking past each other. Or possibly a Malcolm X telling MLK “fuck off, KKK Apologist” situation (again, metaphorically, he didn’t literally say anything like that as far as I know). By my count, from a US perspective, we’ve had 5 Black Rights movements (6 If you count the Reconstruction separate from the Civil War, but I wouldn’t), 4 Women’s rights movements, 4 LGBTQIA+ movements, and we’ve had to deal with Nazis three times and Rogue Pseudo-Feminists at least twice, and now we’ve got Incels… and on top of that, the ever-present threat of religious fundamentalists for over a century and Climate Change since the 1970s, neither of which has ever really been dealt with, and not from lack of trying. And where has that all lead to? Incrementialism, small improvemets with a constant cost of blood to keep them, and centuries further to truly reach the goals. You want to play that kind of game? Like the one where you can’t talk about the problem of gun violence until gun violence is solved, because it’s always too soon? Okay.

Conservatives: Let’s just forgive and forget.
Centrists: Fine with me! I’m back in my comfort zone.
Liberals: No, really, we need to talk about the future now.
Conservatives: Nope.
Centrists: Nope.
Moderate Liberals: Eh, maybe they have a point? Nazis aren’t really a threat any more.
Other Liberals: But…
Everyone else: 70-30. You’re outvoted. And we’re stopping you if you try to pull anything.
Conservatives: Hey, you know what we’d like to bring back? Stalinism. Except without the communism part. Stalin was awesome. (Or whatever, I don’t know what they’d go with next, but it almost certainly wouldn’t be Stalinism.)
Centrists: Meh, don’t get it all over my shoes.
Liberals: Crap, more fires to put out! Survival mode!

This is the world we live in. This is the world we have always lived in. This is the world we always will live in, or for several more generations at least, so long as people focus only on the present and believe that the rightness of their cause are enough to carry the day and stamp out evil forever, and that they won’t burn all the bridges needed to make the last few steps in the process, just like all the previous generations failed at. You don’t have the privilege to be MLK, or the diplomats who keep the centrists on board long enough to keep the Nazis from getting their fingers on too many of them? Then be the Black Panthers. A successful movement has to have all three. But don’t tell the others to step aside, because it’s only your destiny and only your right to determine the future because you were the most wronged, because if you succeed then I guarantee that the best case scenario is that there will be only minor improvements and we’ll be right back here in a generation, just like we’ve always done, and that’s just the best case.

I lived through a similar, but not identical, collective firestorm in the 1980s and some smaller ones in the 1990s and beyond. I made similar mistakes of thinking in my youth. But I’m not playing that stupid fucking game anymore if I can help it. It’s really hard to opt out when people who are in survival mode say “Nope! Play the game where we fight evil on its own terms where it can’t truly lose or step aside, evil-lover! All that matters is the now!” but I’m trying anyway.

I’ve heard variations of “if you don’t deal with the present, there is no future.” These usually come from people who are unknowingly or uncaringly sabotaging their own future, so they don’t have a future anyway without outside intervention. My position is the opposite: if you don’t tend to the future, whatever you do in the present doesn’t much matter. That attitude not only helped me out of a death spiral, by being dedicated to finding “third options” whenever possible, but also put me in a strong position to help out others who took the opposite attitude and failed. (When I tried to get my cousin to explain why she did things like that, she specifically said that her focus on the present was to endure in hopes that one day things would somehow work out in the end, and people like me eventually bailing her out counts as “working out in the end”. While some risk-taking is necessary, I personally find that risky in all the wrong ways. How would outside intervention even work on a broad social level? “Benevolent” colonialism? How would just waiting for anything else to happen work? Hoping Nazis all drop dead from slow attrition like a bunch of mindless zombies?)

I don’t believe in just enduring, even when I am enduring. That is putting off losing, not winning. You need to win sooner or later. If you can, win sooner. I also don’t believe in lesser evils. Occasionally, you have to give in because there’s no time to find a better way, but relying on lesser evils doesn’t stop the greater evil, only delays it and lets it grow stronger in the meantime. I mean, if you don’t mind the political tangent, Bill Clinton? Barack Obama? Joe Biden? Okay, Obama did a little in his last two years, but that was all undone. Those people are/were just delaying tactics, not the start of real solutions, just like everything else. I have little doubt that Biden will plant the seeds of someone worse than Trump taking over if we don’t find a way to whack him upside the head or do on his behalf all the necessary things he wouldn’t dare to do, despite his power and likely resistance. Enough already. Seriously.

Sometimes I forget that most of the people here see only their own bubbles and the bubbles of their enemies. That’s only a small part of the whole. You can’t write off the rest of it, you have to deal with everyone else too. Or somebody has to on your behalf, if you’re going entirely the Black Panthers route. I’d dig up MLK’s quote about moderates setting timetables for black rights, but most of the people here probably know the one. In the end, he was right, in the worst possible way. That needs to be fixed too, and you can’t do that by threatening them with violence. (Or maybe you can, no one’s tried on a large enough scale, but it would be an extremely difficult victory which requires thoroughly abandoning the moral high ground.)

If caring for both the present and the future instead of just the present, if caring about both the blood spilled now and the absolutely certain blood to be spilled in the future, if caring about distinctions which don’t matter to you but do matter to other people who are not like you, if trying to find/make some third option work to break out of the cycle while also staying out of your way, if all that makes me a revolting evil-lover, then so be it. Kill me. Kill all of the enemies of the Nazis, so your rage born of vengeance and righteousness can seek out it’s true target alone and with unmatched purity, as is your right and your right alone, and fuck everyone else who was also wronged. I’d hope you win. I’d also like to see the fallout from that, in a world were the Nazis are temporarily vanquished yet again but Antifa and BLM and similar groups are remembered as the villains of the story. No, wait, I wouldn’t like to see that, aside from as a morbid intellectual curiosity in a reality where there was no hope for anything better, but it wouldn’t matter to me because I would be dead at the hands of my presumed teammates and allies.

I want this to be the last generation which has to deal with most of this garbage. I have little hope of it, because these kinds of things have an inertia which are extremely hard to stop. Doesn’t matter, I’ll try anyway. But to even try, I do not have the luxury of considering only the present. Or for that matter, only the Nazis and the people fighting against them. And, as warped as it may sound, for those currently in the trenches, being able to only consider those things *is* a luxury – albeit one which they can’t (and shouldn’t) be grateful for.

So next time someone tells me to fuck off, Nazi apologist I’m going to respond with fuck off, Blood Knight. You can’t just fight Nazis just because they’re there, with no plan to keep them from coming back. That’s how you get more Nazis. That’s how you get eternal conflict with them. That is tantamount to being a blood knight, someone who keeps fighting and fighting and fighting because that’s all they can do, or sometimes, all they want to do. Yes, that’s a bad take. So is “Nazi apologist”.

@Catalpa: Yes, and no. Optics alone does not work. Smashing Nazis alone does not work. We need both. And that’s just two thirds of it. The other third is having a plan to deal with the scattered and hidden Nazis in the aftermath, one which does not look like we are the new oppressors.

Also, I’m not sure if we mean the same thing by “optics”. You do need to smooth things out with the centrists so that they don’t snatch your long-term defeat from the jaws of your short-term victory, but at the same time, you need to put constant pressure on them with arguments which they can’t easily ignore or refute. That’s not quite playing nice. “But WWII !” is a really weak argument, for example. Yes, those people were clearly bad, but you have to refute the economic side of fascism too, and prove that nationalism always leads to bad stuff regardless of how reasonable it may sound on the surface. And you can’t use the wisdom of, say, Karl Marx to do so. They haven’t read him and will be as totally as lost as you were in my rant (if not more so) and won’t want to read him once they find out it’s, well, Marx. Repeat for a lot of other people. Yes, huge handicap there, but if you don’t acknowledge that handicap then you’ll just be speaking gibberish or making unwarranted assertions for all they can tell.

One cannot just say “Nazis are bad. This is obvious” because it is really not obvious to a lot of people. You can’t just dismiss all of them as idiots. You need to speak to the ones you can reasonably speak to on a level that they can understand. That is in addition to all the other stuff. This is a multi-spectrum problem which can’t be permanently solved with a single ray of attack, to use a tortured light metaphor.

So. I’m German.

@Snowberry: We have a word for people who weren’t actively pursuing Nazi goals, but not resisting them either. ‘Mitläufer’ vaguely translates to ‘run along siders’.

The thing about Mitläufer is that, while they don’t actually do anything ‘bad’, not doing anything to stop said ‘bad’ thing is functionally indistinguishable from actually approving and endorsing said ‘bad’ thing.

Said ‘bad’ thing being the killing of 6 million Jews, 6 million Sinti, Roma, disabled, LGBTQ+, political dissidents, and countless others in WW2. And don’t forget the slave work POWs and inmates of concentration camps were forced to do.

The analogy of 1 Nazi and 10 others? That’s one Nazi and 10 Mitläufer. And a Mitläufer is indistinguishable from a Nazi.

In the face of fascism, anything but vocal disagreement is endorsement.

And why do I care?

Because I had disabled relatives who were killed by the Nazis.

Because I am disabled. And my people are always the first to be exterminated. Because we are a nice test balloon, to see if people care. And they never do.

I am German. Everywhere I go I see little bronze plaques in front of buildings, with the names of the Jewish owners and inhabitants on them. With the date when they were forcibly removed. Which camp they were sent to. And the date they were murdered.

THIS is what we’re fighting against.

It is happening again. Right now! In ICE concentration camps!

It is happening here. Yes. Even in Germany. Even though we should know better.

But at least our government is doing something about it. Not terribly effective, but for every Nazi protester there are more counter protesters, at least.

And you, @snowberry, are a Mitläufer.

@Knitting Cat Lady & maybe a few others:

Yeah, no. I promised I would say it, so I will: Fuck off, blood knight.

I know what people like you want. You want the Mitläufers to escape so they can create the next generation of Nazis. You want to stoke the fires of your hate and righteous fury so you can kill them, again and again. They are bad people, and bad people must die, and you must kill. Killing must be justified, get the bad people. You don’t want to let anyone disable the Mitläufers, because no more Nazis to kill. So you accuse anyone who tries to do so of being one of them, in hopes that they will eventually break down and say, “I was wrong and you were right. Blood for the blood god! Skulls for the skull throne!”

Breaking Nazi ideology is not and never was your goal. Breaking Nazis is your goal. When you have learned the difference between self-defense and vengeance, then maybe we can talk about ending Nazis. But until then, fuck off, blood knight. Go back in the trenches and focus on the enemy and no one else so that the people who want to win, by using diplomacy and optics in addition to violence, can try to find a way to break out of the ongoing cycle in spite of you. Don’t kill the other people in the trenches who have not yet learned to hate like you, or have learned to let it go. That would make things a lot harder. Of course, you might actually want that.

Don’t like that take? Then stop acting like violence is the solution to everything. Violence is an unfortunate necessity in this case. Violence is what protects in the short term and buys the time to enact solutions AND IT IS NOT AND HAS NEVER BEEN A SOLUTION TO SOCIAL ISSUES unless you want to go full genocide, in which case, you’d damn well better succeed… and who are the Nazis now? If you go that route, please kill yourself in penance afterward so I and the other non-blood-knight warriors in this cause don’t have to, regardless of whether you succeed.

Fuck it, Ethiopia is on the verge of experiencing a large-scale genocide in part because of fucking optics because some of the major social media outlets are passively complicit. You want Mitläufers, there’s some of them right there. But sure, target the people who are taking the task to them (“them” being the social media outlets) both there and for the fight at home, along with all the other people who are taking the other prongs in this multipronged fight. Any way to ensure there will always be more Nazis. No, of course you don’t want that. Or so you claim. But in my eyes, you’re just as indistinguishable from a blood knight as you apparently believe that I am indistinguishable from a Nazi enabler, assuming you are not lying in the hopes of browbeating me into compliance, blood knight.

Sigh. Humans some days.

So, @snowberry, your solution is appeasement. Got it. Because that worked so fine last time around.

I don’t want to kill all the Nazis. But I will do my damnedest to take the ones coming to kill me with me.

What I want is for everyone to work together to stop the fucking Nazis. To make it so their policies can’t take hold again.

And fucking Mitläufer like you just don’t fucking care to lift a finger to do the simplest things like, ya know, go out and fucking vote.

I will do everything I can, which isn’t much beyond donating money to specific causes due to being fucking disabled, to stop the fucking Nazis getting enough power to actively start killing me and people like me.

And people like YOU, @snowberry, quibble about whether it’s ‘fair’ to call Mitläufer Nazis.

Enablers are functionally indistinguishable Nazis.

And if you don’t show me and other Nazi targets that you are actively, vocally, against Nazis? I will treat you like a Nazi. Self preservation demands it.

In the fight against fascism, if you’re not with us, you’re against us.

@Knitting Cat Lady: Awesome! Now we’re getting somewhere. You’re not a blood knight after all. You’re a conservative! Or at least think like one.

So much black and white thinking. You’re with us or you’re with the Nazis. You must let the cycle of generational violence continue or you’re appeasing them. You’re putting everything that I say in one of two boxes when the entire point of what I’ve been saying in all of these rants is that both of those two boxes are a centuries-long proven losing strategy, not just on Nazis but other social issues – or at least one of them is on its own, so it’s long past time to find more boxes. And use all of them. Yes, I get some people aren’t in the position to find new boxes, and some of those might be offended by other people trying to find new boxes because they’re the ones hurting most so they should have all the say in things, but it has to be done unless living with a constant blood price for incrementalism is really the world you want.

So if I stole a pair of a Nazi’s pants ?, that’s appeasing them, because it doesn’t fit the box of smashing them directly and no other boxes are allowed as far as interaction with them is concerned, to use a silly example. Okay. Hey, let’s appease Richard Spencer by deplatforming him and stealing all his money! ? So much to unpack now, but I’m going to bed.

(Oh, and in case someone says why I didn’t address the “quibbling over whether it’s fair to call the Nazi-adjacent ‘Nazis'”, I personally don’t care whether or not it’s fair, only whether it is counterproductive certain cases, and anyway that’s only vaguely adjacent to anything I was trying to say. Anyone who wants to prevent me from making the Nazi-adjacent no longer Nazi-adjacent because it is somehow “appeasing” the Nazis and not helping to destroy as many possible footholds for their ideology to take root again is blood-knight-adjacent and will be treated accordingly. Anyone who tries to stop me from my part in forcing various social media to be socially responsible and not accomplices to the worst of humanity will also be treated accordingly. Anyone who tries to stop someone else who is using other methods… you get the picture.)

@Snowberry

So if I stole a pair of a Nazi’s pants ?, that’s appeasing them, because it doesn’t fit the box of smashing them directly and no other boxes are allowed as far as interaction with them is concerned, to use a silly example. Okay. Hey, let’s appease Richard Spencer by deplatforming him and stealing all his money! ? So much to unpack now, but I’m going to bed.

I don’t understand what you mean by this. We should do whatever we can to stop Nazis, and if that means stealing pants, then that means stealing pants. You seem to be the one thinking in black and white here.