SirEDCaLot

You are confusing the spread of ideology with the spread of a conquistadorial government. Remember, most of the Germans who supported Hitler didn't realize the Jews were being massacred. And we didn't go to war to stop Nazi ideology, we went to war to stop Germany from conquering the entire fucking world through military means.

The problem with using force to stop an ideology is that to the people who might follow that ideology, the fact that you care enough to use force against a belief system must mean there is something important in that belief system they should be checking out. Trying to stop an ideology with force only makes that ideology stronger, gives it validation.
If you want to stop an ideology, ridicule it. Make fun of those who believe in it. Talk about how stupid they are. Talk about how they are morons not worth your time. Don't give that ideology the validation of deserving force.

The other problem with violence, is it prevents dialogue. If you are hitting somebody while talking to them, they are not going to hear what you are saying.

Hitler was defeated by being nice to him

In that sense you're right- some people only understand and respect force, and the only way to stop them is to use force against them. The analogy of Hitler might be compared to hardened criminals- being nice to a criminal won't stop them from victimizing you.

This is a different battle though. The small % of racists who want to burn minorities' houses down, they must be met with force.

Force doesn't win hearts and minds though. Force is intertwined with fear- 'if you do xxx, force will be used against you'. So it might stop some church burnings, but it doesn't stop racism. Force doesn't win 'hearts and minds'. Force doesn't convince a racist that they were wrong. It might make them too afraid to speak up, but it doesn't win them over, and they will only take their message underground, where it will thrive.

Can you point to some other times in history where the threat of being beaten up has been effective in eradicating an ideology?

I can point to plenty of instances where driving an ideology underground only fuels its growth...

And look at the simple logic of it- if the guy in the big KKK hood says 'the establishment doesn't want you to acknowledge this' and he then gets beaten up by mainstream majority people, you've just proved him right in the eyes of a would-be follower.

It's like if you found someone who knows nothing about astronomy, and told them 'today the sun will rise at 7:15am and set at 5:43pm, and the moon is mostly made of bleu cheese' you've predicted two things correctly so that gives you credibility when they consider the 3rd.
If I said that to you, you'd say 'you looked that up on Google, anyone can do that, and it's well known the moon is made of rock'. But you are knowledgeable about astronomy (on a basic level at least).

This works with the KKK person because chances are the KKK person has had limited or no actual contact and understanding with black people. So he sees news reports of inner city black people doing crimes and it becomes easy to convince him black people are somehow inferior. And 'THEY don't want you to know the truth' is a powerful message for someone already interested in counterculture / dislike of the mainstream.

That's why Daryl Davis is effective- he sits down with the racist, who has a mental image of what a 'black person' is, and he's not that. It's like putting you on a rocket and flying you out to the moon and saying 'okay we're here, where's the cheese?'

And that's why violence ISN'T effective- because the racist is expecting violence, so being violent only reinforces their belief.

I think we need both of these —punching Nazis and talking with them to change their views.

Can you explain to me how punching Nazis works to reduce Naziism and racism? What is the mechanism of action? Like how specifically does getting punched make someone less racist?

That is a genuine question and I'd love an answer.

I personally believe that punching racists only creates more hatred. The racist will be angry at the one who punched him, and thus less open to anti-racist messaging.

Why?

Yup all those too.

I wish Reddit would put up a banner like 'you are on the grown up internet now, please act like it'.

I think that's called conflict exhaustion. You're sick of fighting, sick of holding your nose and respecting things and people you find repugnant, while there's little/no serious progress in your direction, it seems like there's more racism and hatred than ever. So part of you is ready to set the world on fire if it gets rid of MAGA and all the thinly veiled (or not so thinly veiled) racism and intolerance.

Just keep in mind that the dark wolf actually serves those nazi punks. Punching them only makes them stronger.

There is three questions to consider.

One is the site itself. Reddit inc has their own policies that apply site-wide no matter what. Lemmy has no central organization like that, although each individual server operator has their own acceptable use policy for what they allow on their server. This means it is both more free and more confusing- if you want to post potentially objectionable content like porn, there are plenty of servers that allow it or you can always run your own, but you have to make sure you are on one.

Next is individual group moderation. Both Reddit and Lemmy have this, community level moderators that apply whatever standards particular community requires. There is much less of the 'power mod on a power trip' situation than on Reddit currently, at least in my experience. I think some of that is because the overall traffic level is less, so it will be interesting to see what happens as Lemmy grows.

Finally there is culture and self-moderation. You see this on mass market platforms like Instagram and TikTok, where someone will say like they were roped at a party and want to buy a pewpew to unalive themself or some other such bullshit. Unfortunately that brain rot is spreading into Reddit, even though it is not at all required. Fortunately Lemmy seems pretty free of that so far.

Exactly 100%

No worries my friend. I know it's hard, but it's useful to always assume good faith.

"The monster never sees a monster in the mirror. We all have good reasons and justifications for what we do." -- J. Michael Straczynski

That applies to us too.

I think it especially applied in 2016, first time in my life that all pretense of respectful debate went away, replaced with 'unfriend me if you like Trump' as a mainstream accepted even encouraged position to have.
I talk to a lot of people who supported Trump. Most of them talked about tariffs, manufacturing, jobs, there was a dream of bringing back American industry and rolling back outsourcing. Yes there was some assholes, but there were plenty of good American folks who just wanted to keep their jobs.
But if you listened to Democrats, the only valid reason anyone would vote for Trump is because they are a tiki torch wielding racist misogynist sexist xenophobic islamophobic basket of deplorables. The public discourse broke down for good, it was all just insults from both sides.

Nobody saw a monster in the mirror. We only saw an opposition supporting a guy who was basically openly racist and creeped on his own daughter.
But they didn't see a monster in the mirror either. They only saw an ivory tower elite whipping ourselves into a frenzy over which bathroom someone uses while the middle class is dying.

That's why, in my opinion at least, it is always vitally important to generally assume good faith on the part of your opposition. Because if there is good faith, then we repair the cracks that are dividing the country. And if there really isn't good faith, then we are all totally fucked anyway so it doesn't make any goddamn difference.

People who I used to think were smart and empathetic were jumping on the “fuck your feelings” bandwagon.

I don't know your friends. But I'd argue there's at least some reasoning for this.
If trade policies like globalization have harmed your economic status, offshoring a lot of the jobs you'd previously held, and you were having trouble feeding your family, wouldn't you vote for the person you thought could fix this? Wouldn't you say 'fuck your feelings, I need to feed my family so I'm sorry if you have trouble putting the sex you want on your passport I'm more worried about feeding my family'? At least in concept?

I think that's where a lot of that sentiment came from. The people of the nation are hurting, and part of Trump's message always was 'I see you hurting and I want to fix it'. Dems are totally tone deaf in their messaging. A huge % of the populace gets left out of the 'American Dream' and they say nothing. And in recent years they focus a lot on social justice issues and identity politics while ignoring the elephant in the room. It's why those good people are saying fuck your feelings (IMHO at least), because if the choice is your feelings or their livelihood, then of course they'll tell your feelings to shove off.

Of course it didn't work out that way- government cutbacks, tariffs, foreign policy, all handled in such a ham-fisted non-strategic way that whatever benefit might have been gained was instead lost. And now it's the little guy suffering, so you see a lot of people renouncing their votes.

All I'm saying is keep in mind some of those people who said 'fuck your feelings' thought they were fighting for a greater good. I don't believe they turned malicious. Some did I'm sure, but not all of them.

This thread got me thinking a little more about Mr. Davis.

We talk about 'not tolerating intolerance' but I think there's a second level-- there's the intolerance (the actions of the racist), and then there's the intolerant (the racists themselves). It's easy and simple to group the two together- we don't want racism, we don't want the KKK, we don't want KKK members, all of you go fuck yourselves with your burning cross and go die in a fire (preferably in another county).

I don't think Mr. Davis would tolerate intolerance any more than you or I. But I think what he does is tolerate the intolerant person, engage them in conversation, treat them like a human being. And THAT can help fix intolerance- by reaching out to the intolerant people and trying to bring them into the larger community and heal them, rather than shunning them and reinforcing their stereotypes.