Yeah, I was talking about in real life, too - I’m a union rep and I’ve been very active in my local area’s activist groups for almost all my adult life, so I know full well that organizing IRL is absolutely everything and the Internet is just a way to communicate as best we can.

What you described is more like community self-defense, which is absolutely vital - and I applaud you for doing it - but I’m sure you recognize that the neo-nazis you ran out of town didn’t change their ways, they just went somewhere else, or went underground.

What I’m really talking about is how you change people, rather than just protecting ourselves from them. Please don’t misunderstand me here: for some people (maybe even many people, these days, sadly) there is a point where words can do no more good and force is necessary to mitigate the harm they cause - I think we agree on that. However, where we may disagree (or maybe we’ve just had a communications breakdown) is that the use of force to protect communities from harmful people/behavior shouldn’t include bullying them, because it’s just counter-productive - it doesn’t help you to protect yourself and it does nothing to change the people you use it against. These people likely already see us as enemies simply because we’re acting in opposition to their world view, and any attempts to shame them will only validate the “us-vs-them” narratives common in communities like these.

This isn’t an abstract conversation, for me. My dad was really abusive and taught me a lot of really terrible lessons, and I basically was a neo-nazi when I was a teen. It has taken me a long time to get to where I am. I would never have been able to break free from the hateful ideology I was brainwashed into believing if it wasn’t for people willing to extend compassion towards me, and demonstrate that not everyone sees the world the way my dad taught me everyone sees it.

People treating me badly, bullying me, shaming me, ostracizing me, all of that just confirmed everything my dad taught me, that there are people who hate me for who I am, and that those people see me as subhuman - and that I should see them as subhuman, too.

I’m not saying that you need to be nice to neo-nazis, far from it - beat them up, push them out of your town, do what you need to do to look after yourself, the people you care about, and your community. But we need to recognize that doing that is only dealing with symptoms of a disease rather than dealing with the actual cause. The only way to actually treat this disease in the long term is compassion for those whose compassion has been cut off. Otherwise, the cycle of violence will just continue forever.

I understand what you’re getting at, and I even addressed this exact point in my last comment:

Societal shame and alienation may have worked in a pre-Internet world, but it works no longer. No matter how depraved, destructive, or horrible someone’s behavior is, there will be a community on the Internet who supports and encourages it. The ONLY WAY to reach those people, to keep them from falling deeper down rabbit holes, is through compassion.

Societal ostracization, stigmatization, they just don’t work anymore as a means of discouraging negative behaviors. That’s why overt white supremacy has made a comeback, despite being the most stigmatized, widely derided and most culturally unacceptable pattern of behavior. Shaming people is no longer effective to change behavior. If it was, Trump never would have been a viable candidate.

The only remaining reason to treat people poorly is to make ourselves feel better. There’s no other benefit to doing so anymore. I’d recommend you accept the reality of the world we’re living in.

You know, there’s no shame in admitting you were wrong. If anything, being able to admit when one was wrong is an admirable trait.

As a lifelong Star Wars fan, I enjoyed it. I thought it was fun, the soundtrack was great, the environments were really detailed and cool. The writing was mediocre, but it’s for kids ultimately, so I don’t expect it to be super complex - and it was still better than the Super Mario Galaxy movie for sure. There are more adult-oriented Star Wars content like Andor which is also great, but the kid-friendly content is also good fun if you just accept that it’s content designed for kids!

I’m glad they changed it. I guess I wasn’t the only person to be frustrated.

The BBC is way, way worse for doing this around other topics, especially Israel’s genocide.

What’s that clop-clop sound?

Not sure what this is a reference too, maybe I’m too young

That’s a lot of words to come around to the conclusion that you believe we should force people to undergo unwanted medical procedures for “the greater good”. I’m sorry, but that idea is even more harmful than anti-vaxxers. This exact same sentiment was used to justify unbelievable atrocities in the past, such as sterilizing minority groups and things like the Tuskegee Syphilis Study.

I agree with you that people need to want to change to change, but bullying and belittling them is counterproductive to encouraging people to want to change.

The fact is that you just want to feel justified in treating people badly, because you (totally justifiably) feel that those people are doing bad things. You need to recognize that you need to choose between working towards solving the problem, or just making yourself feel better by shitting on them.

Societal shame and alienation may have worked in a pre-Internet world, but it works no longer. No matter how depraved, destructive, or horrible someone’s behavior is, there will be a community on the Internet who supports and encourages it. The ONLY WAY to reach those people, to keep them from falling deeper down rabbit holes, is through compassion.

I find it tiresome when people act like the media have no choice in what to quote. Why quote it as ‘vandalism’ and not “riverside destruction”?

The media, which is owned and controlled by the ruling class, choose how to frame stories. They have reasons for their choices. You can pretend that the BBC is unbiased if you wish to remain ignorant, but my refusal to do so has nothing to do with a high horse and everything to do with my frustration with mainstream media relentlessly defending the interests of the ruling class and minimizing the harm they cause.

Yeah, this is how minimising language works - it’s technically correct, but it minimises the actual harm. I’m not saying that it doesn’t meet the definition of vandalism, but when someone says “vandalism”, absolutely nobody in the entire world thinks “oh, that’s when you destroy multiple ecosystems for your personal benefit to expand your farm”. It’s ridiculous.

I fucking hate the mainstream media constant use of minimizing language when it comes to the crimes of businesses and landowners. Calling this shit “vandalism” like it’s as harmful as someone scrawling their name on a bathroom stall is absurd.

Right, this is what I’m getting at. Bullying people and treating them like shit will not help them self-reflect and change. To achieve that, we need to extend that support you mentioned, we need to somehow see the kernel of personal humanity within them.

Like you said, this isn’t a problem where the consequences are confined to individuals, adults acting poorly is causing innocent children to suffer and die, so we need to focus on solutions. This isn’t like these people believe in Flat Earth, if we just sit around mocking and belittling these people, more innocents will die at faster rates.

We need to collectively swallow our (totally justified) anger and find some kind of a way to understand the root reason of why people are anti-vaxx, and help them resolve whatever broken logic or unresolved emotional issues is standing in the way of them doing the right thing.

I’d argue the “left” agrees that the owners of capital play an essential role in most economies nowadays, but also believe that it doesn’t have to be that way.

So… they don’t play an essential role. If we can make do without them, we don’t need them!

My comment was a little tongue-in-cheek, I don’t think leftists truly want billionaires to go live in a mountain. Personally, I’d rather bring them to justice for their crimes against humanity.

Libertarians, most commonly. It’s the plot of their favorite book, Atlas Shrugged, as I mentioned

Okay, let me put this in the language of bullying, so you can understand it.

I’m not a liberal, you fucking dipshit, and I’m not tolerant towards harmful ideologies, I’m just smart enough to recognize the fucking reality: you need a theory of change, to actually change things. Are you seriously fucking stupid enough to believe that calling someone names will change their minds, you fucking moron?

Did that work? Are you convinced? No? Oh well maybe your approach is fucking stupid, then, and you need to learn from someone who actually has deradicalized nazis before.

It’s ironic that the left and the right share the fantasy of Atlas Shrugged: that all of the rich people would fuck off and go live isolated inside a mountain to show how much (little) we need them

Okay, so your options there are either to force them to have vaccinations, which would be a violation of their human rights, or to change their minds so that they voluntarily get vaccinations.

Remember, these people are generally just acting out of fear and ignorance. Treating them poorly won’t change their behaviour, it’ll only alienate them further from the rest of society.

Bullying people is a completely ineffective means of changing behaviour. It’s actually likely to make them dig their heels in further and become even more entrenched in their views just out of pure opposition to their perceived enemies.

Belittling and mocking them isn’t bullying them, it’s insulting them.

I get where you’re coming from. The question is, do you want to help anti-vaxxers change, and stop being anti-vaxxers, or do you just want to feel superior to them?

If you want them to change, I really encourage you to think yourself about times in your own life where someone else successfully encouraged you to change their mind. Did they do so by mocking and belittling you, or did they do it with kindness and by helping you understand your mistakes in a way that didn’t make you feel rejected?

There’s a difference between criticism and bullying. Criticism can be constructive and help people to change. Bullying just isolates and alienates people and tends to calcify their positions.

It’s all a matter of what we want. Do we want to feel superior? That’s what bullying is for. Do we want to help people change their ways? Then go for constructive criticism.

Pure cope and denialism, through and through. You need to allow yourself to face reality. I know it’s uncomfortable and scary, I know nobody wants to feel disillusioned and disenfranchised, but it beats being under the illusion that the democratic party are doing everything they can to beat the republicans and deliver a progressive policy platform.

It is overwhelmingly obvious that mainstream democrats are more focused on fighting their left flank than they are about winning. They would rather lose as centrists than win as a left-leaning party. That’s why they snatched Clinton’s defeat from the jaws of Bernie’s victory, that’s why they constantly cry about Hasan Piker, it’s why they refused to primary a candidate in 2024 and it’s why Kamala advocated for republican policies (harder border, pro-military/military industrial complex, and so on.

The democrats try to strike a balance between the base of the democratic party (generally progressive people) and the donors of the democratic party (corporations, billionaires, Israel, lobbyists) but when it comes down to a conflict, the party has and always will side with the money.

The ruling class is allowed to inflict infinite violence upon you, but the moderators here do not allow for you to suggest the ruling class shouldn’t have a monopoly on violence.

It is typical liberal behavior, enforcing the status quo for no reason other than civility.

The US is not a democracy, it’s a system where the power of the state is auctioned off to the highest bidder. Both mainstream political parties maintain this system. That is the uniparty consensus: capitalism must be protected.

To change that system we need to organize, it’s not enough to just vote every few years. We need to push for the change we want to see, and build momentum for a general strike, and even a revolution.