ObjectivityIncarnate

Actually, the evidence indicates the opposite.

Please keep in mind as you read the below that punching and doing literally nothing are not the only options, since I get that false dichotomy as a response way too often: “oh, so you think we should just leave them alone and ignore them?” No, oppose them, emphatically. But not violently–making martyrs of them, to their buddies and those they’re looking to recruit, by sucker punching them is not going to accomplish what you think it will.

On a purely pragmatic/practical level, it’s a bad idea, if your goal is to oppose Nazism.

Experts on extremism/terrorism etc. are all saying the exact same thing.

See for yourself: (emphasis added)

In the case of violent counterprotest tactics — e.g., punching Nazis — experts on extremism say it is likely only to aid the white supremacists’ cause.

The most commonly stated argument in favor of physically disrupting white-supremacist rallies is that society can’t give an iota of legitimacy to these groups. To allow them to spread their message of hate is to offer them a platform to recruit and to glorify their cause. What this logic leaves out is that it may well be the case that hate groups are better able to recruit and glorify their cause when they are able to engage in violence, regardless of how that violence starts, according to researchers in the field of countering violent extremism, or CVE.

“On the one hand, I don’t think these expressions should go unanswered,” David Schanzer, director of the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security at Duke University, said of the recent white-supremacist gatherings. “But you’re essentially giving them exactly what they want when you try to confront them directly.” That’s because these groups’ efforts to recruit and mobilize supporters rely on a very specific strategy that benefits greatly from violent conflict.

In the U.S., explicitly white-supremacist groups know they are vastly, vastly outnumbered by everyone who hates them — their paltry numbers being an easy thing to forget in the age of social media and especially so this week, in the wake of a real-life white-supremacist murder. So their only hope for relevance is to maximize every potential bit of media coverage. And the best way to do this is to create media moments: scary, evocative images like the torch photos from last weekend, but also as many violently photogenic confrontations with counterprotesters as possible. Producing violence is an underlying, often unstated, goal of many white-supremacist protests and gatherings.

When violence does break out, videos of it race through the internet’s white-supremacist underbelly, serving as incredibly valuable PR material. It doesn’t matter who gets the better of a given confrontation: When the Nazis get punched, it’s “proof” that anti-fascists or liberals or [insert minority group] or whoever else did the punching have it in for “innocent white Americans just trying to protest peacefully.” When the Nazis punch back, it’s proof that their enemies are, to borrow a word from alt-right parlance, “cucks” who are easily bested in the streets. Even when white supremacists lose street fights, they win the long game.

This sort of tactic, said Jeffrey Kaplan, an academic researcher and the author of a number of books on terrorist movements, “is a constant in terrorism or any form of asymmetric warfare,” whether the group in question is jihadist or white supremacist or whatever else. Kaplan, who is an incoming professor at King Fahd Security College in Riyadh, summed up the extremists’ logic like this: “Our numbers are paltry, we are despised by our countrymen and we couldn’t get a date for the life of us, but any action that has enough impact to strike at the heart of the enemy by getting media coverage is a major triumph.” Violent confrontations allow extremists to make a tantalizing offer to the angry, disillusioned young men — they are almost entirely men — whom they hope to groom to become tomorrow’s haters and killers: We are part of a movement to change the world, as you can see from this latest video that movement is working, and you can be a part of it.

Schanzer laid out a fairly straightforward alternative: Counterdemonstrators should respond assertively, vociferously, and in far superior numbers — but at a distance from the extremists themselves. This tactic both prevents the sort of violent conflict American hate groups want, and has the added benefit of drawing at least some media and social-media attention away from the smaller hateful gathering and toward the much larger counterprotest.

“Violence directed at white nationalists only fuels their narrative of victimhood — of a hounded, soon-to-be-minority who can’t exercise their rights to free speech without getting pummeled.” “I would want to punch a Nazi in the nose, too,” Maria Stephan, a program director at the United States Institute of Peace, told him. “But there’s a difference between a therapeutic and strategic response.”

Even former white supremacists admit punching Nazis plays right into their hands, gives them exactly what they want:

…when mouthpieces for white supremacist ideology are physically assaulted on camera, it becomes a powerful validation of their victimhood complex: in their minds, plain evidence that white people are indeed under attack, and motivation to spread a call to violent response with renewed zeal. This “punch felt round the world” was a great boost to the “alt-right” cause. If you aid and comfort neo-Nazis, which is exactly what punching them in the face does, you are no better than they are. Real life isn’t a fucking Quentin Tarantino movie.

When I was a neo-Nazi skinhead over 2 decades ago, I got beat up as often as I beat anyone else up. It never made me any less violent. In fact, we used to pile into vans and drive from Milwaukee to Chicago for the thrill of brawling fellow devotees of romantic violence like the guy throwing the punch in this video. We lived for violent opposition. We thrived on it. Violence of any sort, no matter how it may be rationalized, is the bread of hatred. We put mustard on that shit and gleefully gobbled it up and clamored for more.

Back in the 1930s, there were gangs of communists who routinely brawled the Nazi brownshirts in the streets of Germany. Their contemporaries would have us believe that if there were more communists who brawled harder than they did back then, that the Holocaust wouldn’t have happened. As a former neo-Nazi, I can attest to how important it is to have violent opposition in order to maintain the hatred necessary to hurt people. The communist gangs helped Hitler’s National Socialist party come to power not only by galvanizing their own members, but more importantly by serving as a crucial ingredient in the overall atmosphere of fear and loathing that led the German general public to look to the Nazi party for order.

No, the explanation that involves conspiracy is not the simpler explanation.

Not much, what’s on with you?

Men prefer women to do it because women are the only ones with non-permanent options that are 99.x% effective.

Fact is, only the female body has a built-in ‘mode’ that naturally shuts off fertility, that pharmaceuticals can ‘trick’ the body into activating, making creating effective contraception for females extremely easy compared to the difficulty level for males.

There is no one to blame for these biological facts of the matter. They are as they are, all we can do is work with what we’ve got.

There’s another wrinkle: pregnancy is a health risk for females, and is the consequence for unprotected sex for them. Males have no equivalent thing that happens to their body as a result of unprotected sex. Contraception needs to be at least as safe as the alternative to be viable. Therefore, female contraceptives need only to be less risky than pregnancy to be viable, while male contraceptives need to be less risky than doing nothing, to be equivalently viable.

Again, this is not anyone’s fault. That’s just how it is.

Oncome

The fact that people are so lazy that they keep going for the corporate-sure-to-enshittify options shows how little people actually care about escaping corporate control of their lives.

It’s not that deep.

People want to go where other people are. A tiny minority of them are even aware of the things that are influencing your decisions. Not a single moment is spent thinking about whether X or Y is more ‘corporately controlled’ before deciding to join a new platform.

Lemmy moment.

He exists because his parents had sex. Having sex is stupid now?

This is completely unrealistic.

A UBI of just $10,000 a year, and only to all working age Americans, would still cost several trillion dollars, every year.

Even if you could wave a magic wand and convert the combined net worth of all of the US’s billionaires to cash 1:1, that cash wouldn’t fund even that meager amount of UBI for more than a couple of years.

we can’t know how many also choose to escalate because of these outlets.

But we do know that in general, porn doesn’t elicit that kind of escalation into real life. If this particular category of porn did cause that, it’d literally be a total outlier.

Same with other media, too. Rape porn lovers aren’t statistically more likely to rape irl, violent video game lovers aren’t more likely to be violent irl, etc., compared to the general population.

So I think it’s pretty fair to hypothesize that, if anything, it would reduce the incidence of real-world offense. Just look at the massive negative correlation between the proliferation of porn (thanks to the Internet), and the overall incidence of rape.

Also, I’m familiar with one bit of evidence out of Japan that apparently showed that child molesters consume less porn than the average citizen, which I was definitely surprised to learn, but once you think about it in the context of the stuff I mentioned above, it actually makes perfect sense.

In all likelihood, fictional ‘simulations’ like LLMs will directly reduce the incidence of CSA, if anything. If that’s the case, I can’t oppose such things in good conscience–it’d be pretty narcissistic to put my personal disgust over even a single kid not getting bad touched.

Played it with my SO, reached a certain scene that completely warped the tone of the game (I’m guessing you know which one I mean), and neither of us really have had the urge to play since.

Also, both parents are kinda unlikable as characters imo, lol.

If they were actually good products/services, they wouldn’t need to advertise

How do they get their first customers without advertising?

Hell, I don’t even want to ban users guilty of piracy.

Yeah, if someone shoplifts from a store, the punishment/penalty should not involve confiscating the car they drove to the store, lol.

Obviously not, what are you on?

Atheism isn’t a religion, likewise asexuality is not a sexual orientation, but the lack of one, I say.

Then you must seek to increase your grunt range, or you’ll never make it.

Nah, there’s plenty of both, even mixed in very similar subject matter. Example:

An ATM (initialism) takes a card then asks you for its PIN (acronym).

It’s true, happiness can’t be bought. However, what money can buy is the removal of certain obstacles to that happiness.

Here’s a great response to that:

If you’re at a house party and you need to take a shit, do you do it with the door wide open so everyone can see and smell you? Or do you actually understand, when it comes down to it, that there are valid reasons for wanting privacy other than wanting to get away with something wrong or illegal?

Jimmy Carr said it best:

My father always said ‘Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger…until the accident.’

Redundancies do exist, but I think we naturally try to get rid of them, mostly out of laziness probably, lol. That’s the whole reason “u” and “r” ever got substituted for the words they’re homophonic with. It only saves two letters, but there it is. Contractions in general are the same thing. “Goodbye” is the final form of “god be with ye”, and even that is just “bye” the vast majority of the time.

We are a linguistically lazy lot.