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  • Look, I am a big believer in attempting to educate other people and better the world around you by trying to change harmful or hateful outlooks, but I also realize that some people cannot be changed. Trying to engage these types of people in real life is just putting yourself in danger. Engaging them online is fine but there's a limit to how long you should spend having dialogue with someone who could probably argue their irrational viewpoints for weeks on end without stopping.

  • Is this centrism or is it just a bad faith argument from a bigot?

    • The person making the argument could just be naive too.

      I could see myself 25 years ago making such a statement in completely good faith, trying to see both sides and all that. But I was naive to think that both sides were also arguing in good faith.

      But to be fair, that naive messenger would still be repeating an argument that originated in bad faith.

    • Here in the states, even the most progressive Democrats are right of center compared to the industrialized world, and so those who are centrist are leftist by comparison, and those who are left wing are seen as radical, even when we talk about how the justice system, between its false conviction rate, law enforcement brutality or propensity for cruel (if usual) punishments, needs to be either massively overhauld, or disassembled and redesigned from the beginning.

      But any state or society that decides it needs to cull the population for any reason has failed as a community, and therefore has failed as a state or a society.

      Also centrists, like their conservative brethren, fail to recognize that the misery experienced by the bottom rung strata is extreme and heinous, and the neglect by institutions to act on it as if it were a crisis is heinous itself (and might compare to crimes against humanity). And this is what fuels radical direct action (even terrorism) from the left.

      (Curiously, Osama Bin Laden said as much was what drove his own terror campaign, including the 9/11 attacks, though he was also pissed at George H. W. Bush's gulf war, what he thought he could resolve with his mujahideen army. But the Gulf War from the US position was less about Kuwait and more about securing oil for import to the US.)

      (And yes, left-wing violence gets into tankie territory, what is a paradox of wanting to create a functional, peaceful public-serving society that isn't exploited from the top, and being unable to compute how to get there without breaking one's own principles. We radical leftists are not good at this yet.)

      • But the Gulf War from the US position was less about Kuwait and more about securing oil for import to the US.

        I mean, that's one and the same. Saddam was responding to slant drilling from Kuwait into oil rich southern Iraqi oil fields. That's why he burned the Kuwait wells on his way out. It was retaliation for what he claimed was a violation of Iraq's sovereignty.

        The Kuwaiti wells, and the slant drilled wells into Iraqi territory, were operated by American petroleum companies and their affiliates. And the US incursion into Iraq, with the intention of destroying the Iraqi offensive capacity, was about restoring the ability of Kuwaiti drillers to access Iraqi fields. 2003 made that redundant. But the initial Desert Storm was intended to prevent Saddam from threatening cross-border drilling operations into the future.

  • This is such a braindead take. Humanity is networked. You can cut a link, but you can't disconnect someone from yourself unless you yeet them out of existence

    Drive them into bigot echo chambers and someone has to deal with them thinking everyone is secretly as bigoted as them

    Respond in kind - if they're rational, defeat them with reason. If they're a dumbfuck, quote then and mock how stupid their words are. If they're a troll, counter troll them

    And when they feel bad for saying bad things, offer an olive branch. Highlight the path back to being a respectable person

    You don't need to be equipped to do it all - I'm personally good at counter trolling and reaching out to those already verbally beaten down

    We all have to live with these people - we all have a have a responsibility to do our part. Give them the social rejection they deserve when they say unacceptable things - people who don't learn from logic learn emotionally, so make them feel bad. It's ok to attack those attacking others unfairly - just always leave a path back to acceptance

    Kill them or rehabilitate them - those are the only options that fix the problem

    • It's less about cutting them off as a person and more about banning them from a page, group, or platform. Like banning them from a Mastodon instance or Lemmy server.

      • That's my point - you're cutting them off from negative feedback in a very low risk setting. They still vote. They come to Thanksgiving. They work and shop around you. And most people don't quit social media after getting a ban - they find somewhere more hospitable. They go soothe each other by turning bigotry into a sense of belonging. Then, having normalized saying horrible things, it comes out elsewhere

        The better outcome is that a healthy community circles around them and calls them an asshole, and hopefully a few people explain why they're being an asshole

        Yes, feelings can be hurt, but this is a best case scenario even on that front - when someone says something terrible to you and the community leaps to your defense, it hurts a lot less. I'd go so far as to call it empowering

        Some people need safe spaces, because they've been traumatized. Safe spaces should exist for people to heal - but they should be limited and small corners.

        Humans need to mix. They naturally adjust to social norms - I think the last decade has shown us that bigots who hold their tongue are much better than ones convinced it's socially acceptable to say horrible things

        Moderation has a place, but it should be dedicated only to keeping the community healthy - a healthy community is a community that can police itself. Spammers have no place in a healthy community, because they exploit the medium of communication. Doxing is generally the same. Continuous personal attackers eventually prove they deserve exile from the community. A community under attack from outsiders might need a more decisive hand to return to health

        But a healthy community should have dissidents. Modern communities are just little shards of society as a whole - if you're not spreading social norms you're just an echo chamber. You have to spread that health outwards, because we're all connected at the end of the day - the people we ban don't go away, we deny them the pressure to rehabilitate when we decide to keep them out of our online platforms. They're still there in the real world

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