Yeah, this whole thing is really bizarre to me, like all of it. There’s people who seem to spend most of their lives obsessed with the fact that the Nazis are taking over. But I really have no idea what they’re talking about. There are a few people out there who are trolls and like to take oppositional or contrarian viewpoints, and ask stupid questions like “mmm and how do you KNoW all this about the holocaust?” and they do seem to be succeeding and getting outsized attention. I don’t think they’re going to be disabused by facts, I think a better tactic is to validate the right to ask questions while basically ignoring them or distracting them. This business of making every platform with a conservative on it a Nazi bar is not an effective tactic I’m told that because I’m a white heterosexual male I’m not exposed to the harassment, which I can believe, but recruitment? I’m not going to try to invalidate the lived experiences of anyone who has been harassed but I’m not seeing anything like Nazi recruitment.
Discussion
Yea, I think you raise a good point, you might not convince someone they are wrong, and maybe that's not really the point, its to convince everyone else more than anything. As a few comedians have pointed out, there are real Nazis living in america, like 7 of them, and they hold no political authority, so its best to simply expose what they are wrong about. Debate what you hate, if not for your opponents sake, for everyone else's.
Moreover, I kind of appreciate when I hear someone who says something I'm wildly against and is outside of the norm. When there is a person that's capable of living outside of the range of acceptable political views, there's a chance you get a Galileo, there's a chance you get someone who hates you for your immutable characteristics; the fact that you have neonazis is kind of a defacto demonstration that you can still hold a wildly controversial opinion, and that no amount of social conditioning will breed that out of humanity.
The value of divergent opinions is overrated in some circles and underrated in others, unfortunately. A lot of folks say controversial things so that they can get “censored” and make themselves some sort of a free-speech martyr. The trick of being a good Internet citizen these days is to be able to:
1. Calmly, and cleanly debate people with the wrong ideas assuming good faith, while
2. Knowing when it’s not in good faith, these people are just trolls and it’s not worth your time.
It is possible to direct naturally contrarian people into productive uses of their brain that don’t involve Nazi nonsense.
Yea its not like I love edgy opinions, its that I appreciate that they exist. I hear people talk on podcasts and say terrible things that I think are coercive and wrong, I might shut the podcast off if they are just too annoying (like, exceptionally, lack of self control or self awareness annoying) or make bad enough arguments, I might even get a bit heated, but I still appreciate that they are able to say those things.
Right. I don’t have any particular animosity towards Joe Biden, but I do feel a small surge of patriotism when I walk around on July 4th and see “let’s go Brandon” shirts l.