The Difference

[rowyn]

I'm at Panera, and I don't really feel like writing anything in particular. But I do really feel like playing 4thewords, so Imma just ramble for a while.

My Twitter feed is All Politics All the Time Now. A big popular thing is Punch Nazis in the Face. Some white nationalist dude got punched in the face and my Twitter feed is now all Pro-Violence

Comments

[archangelbeth]

I can live with the former but not the latter.

I don't think I can live with the former. I have too many gay friends whose marriages, potential or actual, are important to them.

The thing that gets me about Trump is that... Either there are very few people who have lived with abusers in this country, or there are so many that they've normalized it. I looked at him and I saw my late sire, writ larger and with richer parents, and fled screaming. (Though for what it's worth, my sire might've had better picks for Secretary of X Departments. Which is saying SOMETHING. *headdesk*)

I am of two minds on punching Nazis. Maybe 3, because I am bloody-minded (look, I embraced the Sith label a long time ago and am waiting for my lightning badges to arrive...). On the one hand, yeah, you're right. On the other hand, it also strikes me as pushback for a social norm that says, "Being a Nazi is socially unacceptable." In a problematic way. Though for Nazis, who believe in Nazi things, and are currently emboldened to be kind of publicly Nazi... I'

[rowyn]

I dunno. There is a spectrum of "bad things that are intolerable", like legalized slavery and internment camps and institutionalized racism and disenfranchising classes of people. Some of those are worse than others and all of them are worth dying to prevent. I guess for me, "have a marriage that is recognized as valid by the government" is not one of the things that I think people should die for. OTOH, I hate having the government involved in the marriage business anyway so I'm just weird.

Yours sounds like a perfectly reasonable description of Trump to me.

I already said my bit about Nazi-punching, so, yeah. I think Cluudle below has a good point that most people are using it as a joke, and while "use violence against speech" is not the awesomest thing to joke about, I can understand why people find it funny. :/

[archangelbeth]

Yeah, there's a spectrum -- but I'm of the opinion that drawing the line ahead of the dire stuff, for fighting, is probably better than drawing it at baselines of survival.

I'd like the government to not be involved either, but unfortunately, with varying degrees of recognition for different formations of People Living Indefinitely With Other People... Someone needs to have the big stick to say, "No, hospital where dying person was taken because it was an emergency, you MUST allow the person's designated PLIWOP-partner(s) to visit them, and make medical decisions, even if you don't approve of that pattern of PLIWOP!"

There's also the structure of taxation, that currently impacts PLIWOPs... So it's tangled. It'd take a lot of editing to untangle in something vaguely resembling a fair way.

[cluudle]

You know what the Nazi punching thing makes me think of? Rape jokes. I swear, there's a connection. Okay. I don't consider rape jokes funny or acceptable, but I do consider Nazi punching jokes both hilarious and acceptable. But they're the same basic category of thing - joking about violence - and I can see my own hypocrisy even if I have no plan to change it.

Part of twitter being a bad medium for politics is that my absolute glee about a Nazi getting punched in the face doesn't have wordspace for bits like 'that doesn't mean we should make a habit of punching Nazis,' or really any other complicated bits.

I have a complicated tangle of feelings about people who voted for Trump, but I haven't stopped talking to anyone over it yet.

[rowyn]

Y'know, if it'd just been people making Nazi-punching jokes, I might've continued to ignore it. But one of the people I follow excoriated a guy for this tweet:

Today is difficult, but cheering violence against speech, even of the most detestable, disgusting variety, is not a look that will age well.
- Nick Spencer (@nickspencer) January 20, 2017

The reaction was that this -- that saying "maybe don't cheer use of violence against speech" -- was a completely unacceptable, unforgivable, monstrous thing to tweet. His work needed to be boycotted! He needed to be destroyed! HOW DARE HE. He is Neville Chamberlain! He is saying we should all stand still and be slaughtered!

...

So it's not just "Rape jokes are hilarious!" but "IF YOU SPEAK OUT AGAINST RAPE JOKES YOU DESERVE TO BE RAPED."

...

I guess after a while of this, I lost my sense of humor. v_v

[cluudle]

I saw a comment similar to that, though less, uh, caps lock-y, that basically said that you couldn't capture the heart of Captain America without having deep feelings about punching Nazis.

I'm a little too tired to make sense tonight, I'm sorry - I'll swing back around later. We shouldn't tear each other to pieces, though, turning the internet into a circular firing squad.

[thewronghands]

I substantially agree with you. Starting the violence opens a can of worms that I don't think is going to go well for us as a nation. I vehemently disagree with Nazis. I will say so to basically anyone any time it comes up. But I'm not going to go around punching people whose views I find execrable unless they are successfully harming others. Talk is opposed with talk, violence can be opposed with violence.

If we're going to get ourselves out of this deep division, we need to stop demonizing everyone who disagrees with us. :/ Punching people in the face doesn't move us in that direction.

[rowyn]

♥ Yes. Thank you.

Although, I have to admit, I don't mind people demonizing white nationalists. I mean, Richard Spencer (the guy who got punched) advocates for "a white homeland" and "peaceful ethnic cleansing" and deliberatle uses Nazi rhetoric. I am totally down with people calling him a vile scumbag, because wow, HE REALLY IS.

But yeah, it bugs me a iot that (a) people have collectively decided that his speech is enough to justify violence against him and (b) that I can't tell the difference between what lot of vocal liberals say about Richard Spencer vs what they say about any given conservative. v_v

[tagryn]

It sets a terrible precedent. Legitimizing violence-as-political-tactic opens the door for actual brownshirts to do as they please...and they will. With probably a lot more experience and comfort with violence backing them up than the people who hit first have

[rowyn]

Yeah, the last thing I want to do when my side is losing is normalize violence. x_x

I feel like "Trump is president" should be an object lesson in the virtues of a limited government that can't do much and especially CAN'T DO MUCH HARM but unfortunately, this does not seem to have persuaded anyone but people who already leaned libertarian. :/

[3rdragon]

As someone who has been a pacifist on both moral and religious grounds,* I'm with you on feeling uncomfortable with the amount of PUNCHING NAZIS IN THE FACE sentiment that has been going around lately. On the one hand, I recognize it as a symbol of action against things that people find unacceptable, and that a lot of people are finding that symbol to be really cathartic right now, and I'm not one to call people out for self-care, particularly not right now. And then there's the other hand where I'm standing firmly with you, and I don't consider violence to be a good answer, and firmly believe in the right of people I don't like to say things that I consider abhorrent, and also what you've said more eloquently above about responding to speech with violence

[rowyn]

The people who find "let's all punch nazis in the face" a funny meme do not bother me nearly as much as the people who are trolling anyone who doesn't agree. I can get why people find it funny. Getting up in arms because other people don't think it's the best idea ever is taking it way too far. v_v

I so hear you about not wanting to promote "kill the bad guy" as the ideal form conflict resolution. I wrote The Moon Etherium and The Sun Etherium both because I wanted stories where the good guys do not win by killing the bad guys. The tidy narrative where heroes kill people because they're bad people and that's all they can ever be is viscerally gratifying but I do not think it is true to life. Real people do not divide nearly so neatly into "good" and "evil". The point at which we decide a large fraction of the population is "evil" and can only be stopped by killing them is also the point at which we consign a large fraction of the population on "our" side to death, too. Because the people we decided are evil are not going to just

[3rdragon]

I'm behind on The Moon Etherium (surprised?), but that gives me even more incentive to catch up on it! (You may be pleased to know that I lost forty-five of sleep the other week due to failed will saves on TME vs. bedtime. But life without bedtime is unpleasant enough that I get a lot of bonuses on that will save, and bedtime eventually won out.)

Oooh, I haven't read/watched V for Vendetta, but that reminds me of the other thing I was going to say: the people on my Twitter timeline posting "life under authoritarian regimes is okay for most people" stuff were definitely doing it from a place of pointing out that you don't wake up one morning and discover that it is now We Are Living In A YA Dystopia Day -- it just happens gradually, bit by bit, and your life changes in subtle ways until at some point you're there and didn't notice, but it's not so bad after all, is it? That there's not going to be a watershed moment where you can stand up and put your atheist/agnostic/Christian/Jewish/whatever self down as Muslim on the religious

[rowyn]

Twitter is where all my friends go to talk politics and it is SO BAD at politics. UGH. x_x

I am glad to hear you are reading TME, behind or otherwise! Today's installment is one of my favorite parts. ♥