bittersnurr:

fullyarticulatedgoldskeleton:

theunitofcaring:

Your movement is less strategically capable. Sometimes the best tactic to achieve a goal isn’t ‘hurt someone for shits and giggles’. I would go so far as to say this is usually not a good tactic, and is often an actively terrible one. I want to achieve things. Therefore, I’m not going to work with communities full of people who just want to hurt people for shits and giggles, because they’re useless as allies whenever that doesn’t happen to be the best way to accomplish things and they won’t shut up and get out of the way when other tactics are needed. if they never cared about our cause except as an excuse to hurt people, they’ll keep hurting people for kicks no matter how badly it harms our cause.

If you have created your community in a way where it is now full of people who are there to hurt people for shits and giggles, and are only hurting neo-Nazis instead of gay people because it’s more convenient, then your community is incredibly unstable – it’s full of people who want to harm anyone they can get away with harming! I can’t put my safety and wellbeing in the hands of people who will hurt whoever they can get away with, even if right now they can’t get away with hurting me. I don’t want to have to make sure they can never get away with hurting me; I want to build communities out of people who don’t want to hurt me.

So communities can either have people who are looking for the most convenient excuse to hurt someone they can find, or they can have people who want allies who care about them and care about not hurting them. I think the second kind of people are more worth having than the first, and so I think it’s a mistake when a community chooses to attract the first and abandon the second. 

And it gets worse, because I think once you’ve attracted the people who want to hurt people, they’ll do that even if there aren’t any neo-Nazis around. You’ve built this coalition of people who just want to harm others and don’t care who, and you don’t have acceptable targets for them, so then what? I think the definition of acceptable targets expands, so instead of just hurting neo-Nazis they start hurting anyone who disagrees with them about being nasty to neo-Nazis, and they start hurting anyone who disagrees with them about that…leftist communities are often absolutely vicious to one another and to their own members, and I think it’s because if you attract lots of petty sadists then you can’t actually keep them all trained on the enemy. 

I also don’t think there are a fixed number of people who just want to hurt others, such that we have to choose between ‘point them at whoever society says they should hate’ and ‘point them at neo-Nazis’. I think that it is actually possible to make there be way, way fewer people like this, by treating that behavior as bad behavior and correcting it instead of rewarding it and encouraging it as long as the targets are good. People can learn and grow. We can enforce norms that help them do that, or we can enforce norms that reward cruelty and indifference about who is the targets of that cruelty, as long as we’re personally benefitting from it. 

I think the right choice is to expect better of people. If someone just wants to hurt people and doesn’t care if it’s gays or neoNazis, my answer to them is “well, I’m not going to compromise my goals and the safety of my people to give you cover to hurt people, and I expect you to learn and do better”. If your answer is “as long as you hurt the Nazis you’re welcome”, well, okay, but you’ve chosen to protect and encourage and welcome that person at the expense of everyone who doesn’t want to interact with that person. Do you see why that’s a substantial cost and harm, even if you disagree with me that it’s substantial enough that we should never make that compromise?

I’m glad you’re really good at breaking down your thoughts into detailed explanations, because my response probably would have been “there are more than two choices, this is a false dichotomy”

Also a really common thing in these spaces people rightfully point out a lot of shit people say is just basic normal bigotry with an extra word added on. A lot of “white girl” complaints being straight up sexism, most attacks on men seeming specifically stereotypes for disabled men and men of color, the fact like half of posts about men on this site are actually aimed at transwomen.

Like you promote this in your group you kill intersectionality entirely. I am at this point comfortable in basically no spaces supposedly meant for me because there is too many attacks on people for things I also am with only the comfort of “oh we don’t mean you” when you can still see at least some of the time, yes it means you. People move the goalposts too. I think it took maybe a couple months for “if you ship this you are evil unless it’s to cope” discourse to drop the exception of coping and green lit harassment of abuse survivors? These ‘safe spaces’ are not actually safe.

Plus, I find the most aggressive people in attacking oppressors often really do suck at intersectionality. Like pay attention to how many targets you see of this shit are ACTUALLY the stereotypical privileged kinds and which ones are just slightly better off members of minority groups then the ones doing the screaming. People aim for targets they can actually hurt and that usually means they are taking advantage of another axis of oppression to do so. When you notice that in reality you see a fraction of attacks on actual nazis vs someone in not enough marginalized groups with a wrong opinion it’s a hell of a lot harder to justify it. These people will turn on you too if things shift and you end up an acceptable target too.