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[busy-being-bodacious-blog]

Dealing with nazis isn’t as simple as refuting their points

I’ll admit my title is a bit of a straw man, but this line of thinking is something I see everywhere. In the US, a place where we value ethical discourse, we assume that, since we want to engage in a conversation with someone using our evidence, they will do the same. I see lots of comments along the lines of “why punch nazis in the face when you can refute their points with facts and logic.” This ignores how nazis are programmed.

The trick to creating a nazi today is to essentially trick them. Feed them racist and anti-semitic memes until you start to turn them to your side. Get them angry about hoaxes based on racism (and other forms of bigotry). It cultivates an angry person who sees people who don’t look like them as the reason for all of their problems. If you happen upon one of these people in the comments of a video or in real life and they say something way off-base, you can try your damndest to prove why what they said was wrong. But you’re using evidence to refute thinking and reactions not based on evidence. So it doesn’t work.

In addition to all of this, it’s possible (especially on the internet) that the nazi is baiting a response, and is there only to waste your time. If they say something and you disagree, you have the burden of the proof. You will never meet their burden of proof, because they will dismiss any evidence you present as uncredible. This will force you to battle them on their ground, which is rhetoric, and they will win almost every time. In addition to all of this, you need to consider what it looks like when someone argues with a nazi on the internet. Long responses followed by brief ones that dismiss all of what one person wrote. It looks like the nazi is winning. Don’t let the nazi win- just don’t engage them.

Something else to consider is that you may not actually be engaging a nazi. Nazis have been very good at disseminating their talking points. I have seen plenty of people who aren’t nazis parrot nazi talking points. So it’s not like you can respond to any questionable comment calling them out for being a nazi, because it’s plenty possible that they aren’t a nazi, and don’t even realize what the thing they’re saying means.

These are my thoughts on the matter, based on observations I’ve made on the internet. I have one source, in the future I’ll refute specific things, I just wanted to actually get something out there within a couple days of making this account. I’m hoping to one day make videos. I don’t think all of my stuff will be about nazis, but nazis are fucking scary so  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. I don’t have anyone following this blog or anything like that, but I just want to get a higher volume of people who are trying to help others deal with nazis. Because fuck ‘em (the nazis, not the people who don’t like them).

Source:

https://medium.com/@DeoTasDevil/the-rhetoric-tricks-traps-and-tactics-of-white-nationalism-b0bca3caeb84

[busy-being-bodacious-blog]

Introduction to this blog

Hello! I am a person who likes to argue with people on the internet. I have gotten myself into many an argument where both parties come away better for having engaged each other, but in the past year or so I have gotten myself into more and more bad faith arguments. These arguments tend to be with people on the alt right, or who are parroting alt right talking points. The more violence seems to escalate in the right, the more I find myself noticing dog whistles and wanting to engage people in discussion to dissuade them from their views.

In my research into alt-right strategy, I have found that they will get into arguments with leftists and liberals to waste their time. That’s an amazing strategy! Not only does it waste time someone could put toward making blog posts debunking specific comments, but it also makes the person who has tricked the leftist or liberal look like they’ve (”they” referring to the troll) won.

Well, I don’t want to dance in circles for the alt-right anymore, I’m kind of sick of that tbh. As I see questionable comments on forums and in comments of videos, I want to take apart what the comment literally says, what the comment implies, and why that line of thinking is dangerous. This will be the basic formula I envision, although there will likely be many exceptions.

My main focus will be on comments that assist the alt right in some kind of way. Of course there is rhetorical fuckery going on within every ideology, but frankly, the alt right is the most pernicious and far reaching of these ideologies. I want to do my part to put them in their place, which sure as hell is NOT in the main stream.