As someone who’s had several long debates with a neonazi on discord, it usually boils down to them saying “Goldbloom controls you, all your arguments are therefore nullified”
Their aptitude for dismissing information is amazing
Which is why we don’t debate them, and avoid giving them a public platform!
After we had our fun with them we banned them. We still laugh about it to this day
Don’t underestimate how much resentment and anger a privileged people can develop when they don’t get every. single. thing. they think they are entitled to.
They get to feel superior to vast swaths of the population without doing anything.
Probably generally starting with either an inferiority complex, or being a sociopath.
Consider this question: how is it that anyone under the age of 40 today has ever smoked?
By the time they were born, the bad effects of smoking were well understood. By the time they were teenagers, not smoking should have been as obvious as not jumping in front of a train. People already addicted find it difficult to quit, but it in no way explains anyone starting.
The question is different and yet very similar, because the things you mention wind up in a similar way. Somehow people start in that route even though it should be obvious not to. And these things you mention are much easier to fall into than smoking because parents, family, etc are all pushing it on people. Smokers generally aren’t pushing their kids, nieces and nephews, grandchildren, etc to smoke, and somehow smoking still proliferates to some degree, just consider how much more difficult to avoid it is for those whose families are actively encouraging them to fall into these methods of belief and hate.
Feels > reals.
“so much knowledge against it”? We live in a n overwhelming ocean of information, what seems obvious to many people may be completely unheard of in other areas, we’re not all getting our information from the same sources. Or some people have become indoctrinated by other groups and have become basically inoculated against “wokeism”. Plato’s allegory of the cave is just as relevant today as it was in his time (if not more so). There are people spending their whole lives looking at shadow puppets dancing on the wall, thinking that that’s reality. Who knows, maybe it’s us, but the point is, even though we’re awash in information, ignorance is alive and well.
I was raised in a left-leaning, progressive, atheist, LGBTQ+/minority-accepting household, but one surrounded by a white, largely conservative exurban community. I was raised to be inclusive of others, to be thoughtful, to be curious, to be polite and empathetic. I had good* parents who supported me, and taught me to treat others well.
In the middle of fifth grade, I transferred to a magnet program focusing on STEM concepts. It took me from a school that was almost entirely white, to a school which was very much multi-racial. I was really small for my age, nerdy, and the new kid. I’d always been bullied at school, but after the transfer it got a lot worse, and got pretty severely physical. A lot of the people who harassed me the worst were black. I honestly never understood the social circles enough to know what their deal was, and it certainly wasn’t only a race thing, but the fact that many of my tormentors were black wasn’t lost on me, to be sure.
When I was 11 or so, I used all the savings from a lifetime of cumulative birthdays, Christmas gifts, etc. to buy a laptop to play games on. Pretty quickly, gaming became all I did. It was an escape, and I enjoyed it. I played whatever F2P games I could. Diablo clones, random MMOs, shitty pay-to-win FPS games, whatever. My parents didn’t supervise my activities very closely, and to be blunt, I quickly became way more savvy than them about subverting any surveillance they tried to put in place anyways.
Eventually I started looking into hacks for games. I found a really large forum (think 25k members) for sharing game hacks, and joined up. By the time I was maybe 13-14 or so, I was one of the highest-ranking moderators on the forum. I hung out in their IRC server (which definitely isn’t the internet chat-rooms you’re supposed to be careful about, those are different) all day, dabbled in making my own (occasionally illicit) software and hacks, and was firmly in the community. These weren’t good people, but I didn’t know that. When I got home from school and got online, they asked me how my day was. They cared about me, they played games with me, they were my friends. I remember I was gone for like 2 weeks when I was seriously ill, and one of them tracked me down and called my house to check in on me. I didn’t think anything of it, because of course they could do that. I’d been in a Skype call with one of them who was screen sharing the array of webcams they had access to through their botnet. I didn’t realize at the time that they were probably blackmailing people, or holding their data ransom. We just hacked in video games, none of that actually serious stuff. The malware I was toying with was just because I was interested in it, and of course, my friends must have been too, right? Just a learning exercise. I figured I might try to go into cybersecurity when I started high school and could actually start taking courses in computer topics. Programming was SO fucking interesting!
My parents didn’t know what was going on. They should have. I was barely a teenager, I can’t possibly have been hiding my tracks all that well. But then, their marriage had started to fall apart, and things were bad a home. I didn’t know anything about that then, I was in my room gaming and running communities for terrible people. The headset kept their fighting far away from me. My parents didn’t know who I was hanging out with. They had raised me well, but now they weren’t doing what they should have been. So when my friends shared hateful content with me, “interesting” videos they’d found about how terrible women were, how violent minorities were, who was I to question it? They were speaking as those with knowledge. They taught me stuff, they knew better than me. And besides, I’d been physically harassed by black people before. I’d seen it for myself, right? My U.S. history teacher was REALLY smart, and she told us (in a MN classroom) that the civil war wasn’t actually about slavery either! That was super interesting to learn! And the women they complained about weren’t me. Just because a lot of the guys I hung out with had bitches for girlfriends didn’t mean they hated women, it was just bad luck with shitty women. Right?
I was a good person. I mean, I was a weird socially outcast nerd, but I wasn’t a bad person. My family was still caring. Still accepting. My Mom’s apartment was always a refuge for any of our friends, even (and especially) the queer ones who had been kicked out by their own terrible parents. They had a place to come and be safe and be themselves with us. So I was a good person too, right? Good people, smart people, they keep their online lives separate from their personal lives. They don’t talk about their online activities with others, and they don’t talk about their personal information with internet strangers in chatrooms. The only people I talked with were my FRIENDS. I ran their Minecraft servers. I discussed the Jordan Peterson videos they shared. He sounds so fucking smart after all. I hardly understand what he’s talking about, but I’m sure one day I will. And the parts I don’t understand, other people can explain to me. I laughed at their racist memes. After all, it’s just a joke. And of course, overt bigotry got stomped on. I was in charge, and I was a good person. I wouldn’t tolerate that sort of thing. But a dog-whistle is just a tool for training a pet, and we’d only ever kept cats.
I eventually joined a different gaming group on the side. We played Jailbreak in CS:S. I got really good at it. Really into it. And I stopped hanging out as much with my older friends. I still kept in touch, but I’d found a new hobby. These people weren’t good people either, but I mean, the fact that they liked my voice on mic wasn’t that they were creeping on a 15 year old who they wanted to fuck, it was because I had gotten a new microphone a few weeks ago and must have sounded good on it. I had gotten lucky though. These people weren’t great people, but they weren’t nearly as bad. They weren’t literally cybercriminals, just asshole kids on the internet. So when I became a moderator in THAT community and started running things, the community actually improved. But eventually that community collapsed, and I moved on again. And again. And again. I ended up with some Brits for a while, and “mate” settled itself into my vocabulary in a deeply unwelcome way.
I’ve been incredibly lucky. I’m 28 now. The last 14 years of my life, I’ve slowly climbed from one community to another, and mostly through random luck each of those have been better than the one I was leaving. I am surrounded now by some of my favorite people. They are TRULY good people. They care about others, and stand up for good causes. Some days, I even think maybe I might be a good person too. I wasn’t a good person. I fell WAY down the alt-right rabbit hole. I’m sure that I’ve hurt people, and I’ve made countless decisions that sicken me now. But I’ve been incredibly lucky. If I hadn’t been, I have no idea where I’d be now. Or what nonsense I’d still be believing, because everything around me told me it was normal.
You know how they say “Show, not tell” when writing? Excellent job mate, thanks for it
I’m glad you appreciated it! I think I can forgive the subtle jab xD
Genuinely, thanks for sharing your experience. I don’t think most people realize how insidiously easy it is to slowly slide down that path. I’m very glad to hear that you’re moving in a better direction these days.
Great writing style too, for what it’s worth.
Some days, I even think maybe I might be a good person too
You sound like a good person to me. That level of self reflection rarely / never leads to being a shithead in my experience.
Crazy story but a very interesting read. Thanks for sharing.
Thank you, I appreciate it.
It’s not a matter of knowledge, it’s a matter of what they want.
One may desire to be advantaged/superior to some others, and particularly nice and easy if race or gender is a convenient shorthand for knowing who is ‘in’ and ‘out’, as long as you are in the ‘in’ group of course.
So life is just plain easier if women are just supposed to sit there and please them. If the ‘natural order’ justifies that convenience, then one may be attracted to that thought. To the extent fairness and equality makes their life harder, they are inclined to be upset at that obstackle. It’s convenient if the legal and labor world gives their race preferential treatment, and other groups are left desperate enough to do whatever they need done but don’t want to do, and scared enough of the government to not get “uppity”.
Sometimes overt evil, sometimes more subconscious manifesting as being very receptive to narratives that correlate with those feelings.
People just want an easy scapegoat, and there are many parties willing to sell them one.
Knowledge against racism has existed for millennia. Time is a flat circle.
Incels at least is a natural consequence of the difference between society’s expectations, the needs of an individual, and generally the lack of support and or direct toxicity towards men who need help and emotional support men require as humans.
That one is a societal problem around isolating people away from affection.
The rest I have no freaking clue how one becomes a Nazi in 2024.
You make it sound like incels become incels because they weren’t loved enough during childhood.
For incels there really is no other community for them. Hell, even if you are liberal there are not many mens spaces for you.
Ok you got me intrigued so what would be a men’s space?
Naziism and fascism are broadly a response to the same material conditions as communism and anarchism (to an extent).
Liberalism does not put forth a response to those conditions because it created them and has no internal process to relieve them (instead it externalizes them) or stop perpetuating them.
When faced with a choice between communism or fascism people generally don’t perform an in-depth analysis of what’s best for them or their cohort but instead attach to the group that provides some relief or aid.
That’s why it’s important to always help people around you when you can.
Classic bloodfart ‼️ banger
How does liberalism create material conditions leading to nazism and fascism?
I think that’s a stretch to paint with such an unconditional broad brush.
Both movements broadly point to the material conditions created, perpetuated and encouraged by liberalism as their impetus. Scholars within both movements have written extensively cataloguing the precise ways different conditions came to pass and how it’s the fault of liberalism.
Generally speaking your communist will say liberalism sprang from the class relation under capitalism and the bourgeoise, while your fascist will say it was “‘da joos”.
E: I tried to click preview but replied instead but it’s fine because I don’t want to summarize two centuries of political thought anyway.
If you have a specific example you want clarification on I’d be happy to give it but if you truly feel befuddled that a person could say that liberalism creates the conditions (perhaps, contradictions 🤔) for communism or fascism I can point you at a bigass pile of books instead.
You keep saying “because liberalism” but you don’t specify why. You repeating yourself and using bigger words isn’t answering the question other than pointing the finger at liberalism.
You didn’t ask why, you asked how. It’s really broad question so I was gearing up to answer how by starting with what the two (overly broadly classified) schools of thought called the why.
Then I pushed reply instead of preview and realized while editing my post that I don’t want to reply to you the way I started because it would be long winded and you probably aren’t interested in reading that and I’m certainly not interested in writing it.
Liberalism creates the conditions for revolt and reaction in a lot of different ways but primarily it’s through a combination of pursuit of profit leading to unaccounted for externalities buttressed by primacy of the powerful disguised as freedom in the marketplace and in word and deed.
If you want specific examples or you want examples related to a time, place or event you’re already familiar with just let me know.
It’s hard to summarize hundreds of years of history and philosophy in just a few sentences while on break so please do me the courtesy of not nitpicking my overly broad statements.
Liberalism creates the conditions for revolt and reaction in a lot of different ways but primarily it’s through a combination of pursuit of profit leading to unaccounted for externalities buttressed by primacy of the powerful disguised as freedom in the marketplace and in word and deed.
The only place I can find such an association with pursuit of profit and liberalism is specifically in the capitalist-liberal perspective, and that is conjoined with neo-liberalism, basically “free market” that isn’t really free.
I can find no connection with liberalism, as a philosophy or a socioeconomic choice in governance, where the pursuit of profit (other than oligarchy or other authoritarian regimes that pay only lip service to liberal concepts, but that’s the end result, not the philosophical precursor) is the focus or result of liberalism.
If all you care to do is mic drop and gesture aimlessly in the direction of history, I’m afraid your point is lost.
Do you think the philosophy of liberalism can be separated from the atomized individual acting in a market?
Those ideas underpin all philosophical liberalism that I’m aware of. We can’t have liberal social relations or philosophy without a market to act as a replacement for the often feudal social relations and theocratic philosophy that existed before liberalism.
Consider Protestantism if you want a great example. It was only possible because the market allowed a class of people access to a new social relation and they needed a new system of beliefs that fit it.
You can’t separate any part of liberalism from the elevated position of the market.
I’m really not trying to be aggressive or only make pithy, in your words mic drop replies. The question you asked is very broad and I’m not able to summarize it without glossing over lots of stuff. I also don’t have the time to type, source, check, proofread and edit a reply that covers the last 800 years.
Like I said, if you want something more specific or that you’re familiar with just name it and we can talk in those terms.
Ok. You continue to make connections between liberalism to religion, markets, personal economics, and more…clouded by words like atomize, feudal, and “elevated position of the market”.
Frankly, you don’t make sense. If you are incapable of reducing the connection between the philosophy of liberalism and the direct path to fascism due to plain text tenets of that philosophy it very much sounds like you don’t understand it yourself. Or you’re just making shit up.
You have expended extraordinary paragraphs waving your hands at every point of the compass while claiming you can’t be bothered to expend effort to type an explanation. I spent a good 20 minutes searching for papers, academic, historic, or otherwise, that could connect your claims - in effect I was attempting to prove you right. There are none.
I don’t see any point in continuing this conversation, you make lots of claims using fun words, but nothing to substantiate them.
I grew up watching WW2 movies and the Nazis were never shown as being anything other than Bad Guys. I would love to know how anyone grows up here in the U.S. and doesn’t know that.
To see Nazis being presented as the good guys just turn on the DNC stream.
You become an incel by not getting laid.
Yeah, being an incel isn’t an ideology. It’s a material condition.
People become lonely, disaffected, and negative towards the world they live in. They then reach out to other communities, and due to one thing, or another, primarily their personality, they don’t get accepted. However, communities based around hate will gladly take them in, as long as they fit a profile they are looking for.
"Are you a young, white, male, that is dissatisfied with their life, and the world? Well, we accept you here. These things are not your fault, it is the fault of others. You aren’t the reason you cannot get a relationship with a women, it is the women who are fault for this. The reason it is so hard to get a good paying job? Immigrants. Why is housing so expensive, and hard to get, at least anywhere with a large enough job market to really advance somewhere? The Jews. Why can’t you rise on the corporate ladder where you work? Progressive policies… also jews, and immigrants. You are a white man, you should be rightfully at the top of the hierarchy. Women should be given, by their fathers, to men, on a mutually beneficial, transactional, basis. Women should submit to your authority. "
Or, in the case of incels “Are you depressed? Have no friends? No social life? No relationship with a woman? Are you an adult virgin, loser? Well that is because women are evil. We will accept you, unlike the evil female species.”
So in that thought women are prostitues? Because a beneficial transaction?
Not prostitutes. A lot of these groups believe we need to go back to when women were literally their property. You got a women because it created bonds within the community, and they often paid you to take her.
As I don’t believe in women being property but I would totally take Majorie Taylor Green as property. Then I could smack the shit out of her until she quits saying stupid ass shit that riles the American public in anger
