anaisnein:

dagny-hashtaggart:

theaudientvoid:

funereal-disease:

tanadrin:

fierceawakening:

gaytog:

Social isolation doesn’t strike me as a good way to facilitate deradicalization, though.

Thank you, @gaytog, that’s exactly what made me uneasy about this too.

Also like… I probably have a weird perspective, but if you’re in social service work at all… I’m not saying you can’t or shouldn’t turn away a *Nazi,* but if a person with objectionable views still needs food, or mental health care, or various other things, turning them away does mean allowing them to come to harm.

I don’t think that is never okay, and I don’t see negative responsibility and positive responsibility as equal, but… tumblr is flip about making that decision in ways I’m not entirely on board with.

Dovetailing this, my rant about Alex Jones and crazy uncles from earlier, and some post that I now cannot find (read: am to lazy to dig up) about how suffering often makes people worse: conspiracists, fringe thought, racist, and the alt right (which are a large, interrelated complex of ideas, it must be emphasized, and not at all separable from one another) prey on the socially isolated and, if sometimes not the mentally ill, at least those vulnerable to subclinical-but-serious quantities of anxiety, disordered thinking, and paranoia. By demanding the ideologically unclean be shunned, you demand they never be exposed to views contrary to the monolitic diet of Alex Jones/Fox News/Stormfront/whatever else they’re being fed on, which is only going to make it worse. Also, you’re often (not always, but often) putting vulnerable people in a position where the only ones who will tolerate them are those preying on them either because they see them as an easy target for radicalization or because they’re literally scamming them.

We have, at this juncture, a great deal of data on what works to deradicalize people sympathetic to everything from ISIS-style religious fanaticism to Westboro-style homophobia to KKK-style racism. It involves, unfortunately, talking to people and exposing them to individuals and to narratives that counter their worldviews. At larger scales, communities are made less racist by being made more diverse; our natural inclination to empathy generally overcomes xenophobia and bigotry as we encounter more people who are very different from us.

You do not get the jolt of chemical pleasure of self-righteousness this way. You don’t get to stick it to the rethuglicans or piss off the conservatards, and you don’t get to satisfy that aggressive itch you feel when you watch Nazis get punched in the face. But you do actually decrease the amount of bigotry in the world, which, if you want to make the world a safer place for minorities, a happier and more understanding place, a more peaceful place in general, i.e., actually better, is surely more important, right? Right?

The mental illness intersection is so, so important. It’s not always easy to differentiate “bigoted ass” from “person having a psychotic or delusional episode”. A lot of people, with the admirable intention of avoiding ableism, like to claim that it’s easy, but it’s really, really not. I know that the closest I, personally, have come to believing terrible things has been when my mental health issues have been manipulated *just right*.

If you declare anyone who has casual contact with The Enemy™ to also be the Enemy™, then you are going to end up with a lot of enemies. Radicals need to win over moderates in order to enact their political agendas. That is literally how the Overton Window works. You can come up with a convincing argument for anything, provided that no one is arguing back. Therefore, we need to have people arguing back. Radicals will always exist within society, and the will find a platform. Attempt at “deplatforming” always fail, and are tantamount to declaring defeat in the war of ideas

I really wish we could banish this “evil is moral cooties” idea from popular liberal and leftist thinking. Let the right have it if they want; if they want to embrace ineffectiveness I’m happy to let them. I’m not saying anyone should feel compelled to interact with people who make them uncomfortable or unhappy, when it comes to your personal mental health and safety you do you, but if refusing to talk to someone because they talked to someone who talked to someone who has Bad Opinions becomes your radical praxis, you have consigned yourself to political uselessness. Even if we (wrongly, I think) believe that everyone with Bad Opinions is irrevocably evil, we still need people in the trenches willing to engage with their audiences, with the people on the fence. Contra moral entrepreneurs on both the right and left who want you to feel maximally embattled so that you listen to them more, there are a hell of a lot of these people, and if we decide that they too are monsters who aren’t worthy of consideration just because they didn’t immediately cut their MAGAnaut uncles out of their lives, we’ve already lost.

agree with the last couple of comments; not everyone needs to personally engage in this sense, put on your own oxygen mask first, etc, but I think that for those who can sustain it without taking too much direct damage it’s very much net-beneficial and certainly shouldn’t be stigmatized.