middle managers suck.

FTFY

SOME of our hearts are in the right place

Okay, you seem to believe that every American is somehow perfectly reflected by its government, which is reductive but I get it, you’re upset.

But if you live on planet Earth, whether or not it suits you, it absolutely IS your problem. My government is an extractive, imperialist bully. My government’s military is single largest institutional consumer of fossil fuels and biggest single institutional emitter of greenhouse gases. My government has no qualms about making it your problem.

Pretending it’s not your problem is like pretending the neighbor’s house on fire isn’t your problem. You can get away with that for a while, but eventually you’ll burn too.

Nobody is being quiet about it, though. People are on the ground doing real things to try to change this. Like, ALL kinds of people. It takes time, and saying things like “your country is whack” isn’t helpful in and of itself. Saying “looking at this thing happening in your whack country right now” (like this post) is helpful. I didn’t ask anybody to solve our problems.

Me too!

We are. It’s going to take some time, and it will probably get a lot worse before it gets better, but we are.

Yeah, we’re working on it. Things are just getting heated up now. It takes a lot of critical mass to do what needs to be done. That takes time, unfortunately.

Yeah, again we know our country sucks. What else do you have? Because if you seriously think that “It’s not anyone else’s problem” then, have I got news for you

Thanks, we know that. Got anything helpful to share with the class?

This is genuinely not true. Same goes for 2016. Non-voting democrats tend to skew conservative. You’re just trying to start a fight with the left. That’s not helpful to our current situation; it literally only helps the fascists.

Up here in Minnesota it’s roughly March-June, but when I lived in Oklahoma for a little while it seemed like it was Mid Summer

As someone who lives in the Midwest, let me tell you, there absolutely IS a tornado season. We’re actually in the tail end of it right now.

This is so true and so depressing

I’m kind of really tired of liberal news outlets doing this. Let me make it clear for those of you in the back of the room: THEY DON’T CARE IF YOU CATCH THEM LYING.

They don’t care about being hypocrites. Calling them out on it and shaming will not work on the shameless.

I wrote a thing and then thought, you know what? It’s not worth it. We’re strangers that know literally nothing about each other, so what’s the point? I’m an anti fascist and I know that. If that’s the side that you’re also on, then we are on the same side. I don’t know what else to say

It wasn’t a joke?

And the only thing I want people to think about when it comes to Nazis is stopping them.

I genuinely just don’t have the energy to go around and around in the same argument for literally years. So when I see somebody say something like (and I’m paraphrasing here) “If animals can’t do evil then does that mean that dumb Nazis can’t be evil too!?”, it seems like the kind of gotcha moment that is built on a foundation of watching a lot of YouTube videos and then deciding that that’s your whole personality.

Maybe the naturalistic argument your pet peeve, but it doesn’t really change the point.

So in case you haven’t been reading what I’ve been trying to lay out, it’s this: Nazis are human beings. Not all human beings deserve your sympathy. In fact, some of them deserve your hatred. Nazis are amongst that group. If you can’t realize that, then you are missing a HUGE thing about the capacity for great evil (and great good) that human beings have.

It’s like when somebody call a serial killer a “monster”. It’s like, “No, monsters aren’t real. That’s a made up bed time story thing. That serial killer is a human being working within the capacities of a human being”.

An “Internet philosopher” is a particular type of person. If you’re serious about ending fascism, then our petty little back and forth will not matter when it really comes down to it, then right?

Because, historically, dehumanization comes in handy when it comes to elimination, but not so helpful when it comes to the part that comes next. It seems like an excuse to not feel guilty for killing, and that seems like a dark path to go down.

Ugh 🙄 internet “philosophers”. I’ll see you in the front lines, dude. We’ll have a good laugh about how unnecessary this argument was once we’re there

I have no desire to reason with Nazis, I believe the only kind of good Nazi is a dead Nazi, and I genuinely believe it is my moral duty to punch a Nazi on site. But I don’t have to pretend their not human to do that. Evil is a human thing. No other animal does that. You have to recognize it for what it is and root it out. Calling them not human doesn’t help anything.

Nazis are actual real people. It doesn’t do anybody any good to deny that human beings are capable of great evil. It only seeks to further distance ourselves from our shared history of violence and doom us to repeat it. Talk like that is exactly what leads to Nazis in the first place