BlackHeart Biohazards

sal-absinthii:

falcon-fox-and-coyote:

elfwreck:

biglawbear:

The interesting part:

This isn’t coming from the religious (or anti-religious, or religious-debate) side of Tumblr. It’s coming from a blog doing research on proshipping.

The anti-ship communities use the exact same tactics as biblethumping proselytizers: Meet in restricted-access locations (private Discords, in this case), give each other a bunch of propaganda material (a handful of fake statistics plus a whole bunch of emotionally charged aphorisms), exhort each other to go out into the world and convert the unbelievers err, cancel the pro-shippers.

And they are reviled, mocked, insulted, blocked, and otherwise treated exactly as you’d expect if someone came up to a stranger on the street and said “I can tell by the book you’re reading that you are an immoral pervert, probably/actually a criminal, but if you immediately denounce your evil ways there is some chance you might become a decent person someday.”

They convince NOBODY.

And then they go back to their private Discord servers and wail about how the world is full of evil perverts and this is the only place on the internet where they can be safe.

And when they start to doubt the people around them… they have no friends anywhere else. They don’t know how to begin to say “maybe I was wrong.” They don’t understand how they can dislike some types of content but not hate the people who make it or enjoy it. They are stuck, because they don’t know how to leave even if they don’t feel like they belong anymore.

I was reading that response and was thinking about the anti/pro debate the whole way through, glad someone put it into words

Feels a little weird to me to talk about shipping wars just because the magnitude of these things is quite different (although it is still 100% correct), and the original post was removed so I can’t reblog it directly from the source, but I really want to point out tags like these, because people so often fail to understand how extremism works and propagates itself and I am metaphorically on my knees begging you to read this:

That last part especially.

That is how passive indoctrination can turn into active involvement. Maybe you grew up in a certain world or you live with people who believe a certain kind of ideology and you don’t have to actively buy into it, maybe you even dislike it, but you’re sheltered and don’t know any different, and as soon as you try to break out of that sheltered world and you find out that there is a much bigger gap between you and the “real world” than you thought and that everyone hates you for the ignorance that was not your fault…it’s very easy to end up running back to the place you thought you were running from, because it’s familiar and safe and you start thinking maybe they were right all along. And that goes extra for people who are vulnerable for other reasons. Somewhere along the line it switches from being something that wasn’t your fault (like being raised in a cult or in a family with particular political views) to something that you are now choosing to participate in. That’s why you see things like evangelical groups really heavily encouraging young teenage members to start doing this kind of work, because it’s all about cementing that identity, making that switch from passive to active, as soon as possible, at the age when they’d otherwise start forming their own identity separate from the group.

I personally feel weird about putting shipping wars on the same level as cults and the alt-right, but it’s still worth understanding that it is the same mechanism, because once you’re primed to see the world in terms of safe in-group vs degenerate out-group, it is very easy to get pulled into much worse things. Sometimes the in-group/out-group you are trained to see starts out as something different; for example, TERFs don’t recruit by telling people that the in-group is transphobes and the out-group is everyone else. They tell you that as a woman you’re in constant danger and everyone is you enemy, and you will always be a victim (notice how the so-called radical feminists never talk about ways in which they can uplift women or about women who do great things unless it is a jab against people they don’t consider women — empowering women would actually be contrary to their recruiting goals), and then once you’re good and scared, they tell you that now even the very idea of womanhood is under attack blah blah blah. And then you have the tertiary phenomenon of groups like white supremacist traditionalists taking advantage of how close these cult-indoctrinated people are to their own views about gender and social roles and it’s a short leap into that. The primary fear/in-group is about sexism, which may often have roots in reality, but which is distorted and manipulated. The secondary in-group is “people bravely standing against encroachment on the very idea of womanhood.” The tertiary in-group is “people standing bravely against moral degeneration of proper Western values by cultural relativism.” Not everyone will get as far down the same road, but it happens a lot. This is just one example. So yes, recognising the black-and-white, existential-fear-based thinking that goes into something like the anti-shipping stuff does help keep you aware of where that road starts.

Understanding this is also necessary to combatting it. You won’t be able to argue these people out of extremism, and trying will likely just make it worse. Now, that is not to say you shouldn’t push back, especially in public, because when you publicly say “hey man what the hell, this is pretty fucked up” it is about sending the message to bystanders that this is not normal or socially acceptable. Extremists often do not think of themselves as extremists, and their view of what is moderate and on what scale is very warped by what surrounds them. You can’t easily get through to a person in that situation, because the realisation that you were/are an extremist is…it can be unbearable. So people just reject it. Because what do you do with that knowledge? Especially if that realisation does not come with a clear path out. A person may have a window of wanting to change, but if they are met with nothing but hostility, it’s very unlikely that they will. Extremism is also fuelled by unresolved anger, rejection, neglect, abuse, ostracisation…extremist groups promise belonging, value, empowerment, a support system, a family, a chance. If these risk factors do not already exist in a person’s life, they will manufacture them; that’s where this whole idea of making you believe the world is your enemy comes into it. But a lot of times these factors do already exist, and if they are not addressed, if those needs are not replaced with something else, they won’t come out of it. Why would they? To jump into unbearable pain for no reason, with no motivation? It won’t happen. There always has to be something.

A lot of people talking about extremists act like there is some objective moral reality they’ll somehow get the ability to see and that their eyes will be opened to the error of their ways and they will do a 180 change overnight simply because it’s the Right Thing To Do, that because you know racism or transphobia or fascism is bad they must also know the same things you know. But if that were true, there would be far fewer hateful people in the world. I read something recently about how the Proud Boys call themselves “alt-lite” because “the alt-right is about racism and we’re not,” despite most non-extremists seeing that they very much are about racism. It’s not just a matter of optics. The boots-on-the-ground people may very well believe this. If you are surrounded by extreme right-wingers and this is your normal, you don’t see yourself as extreme, you may even tell yourself you’re a centrist or fairly moderate and that all the people to the left of you, those are the radicals. Most people know that racism is bad, for instance; it’s a message drilled into us as a stock response, that racism is one of the ultimate evils of the world etc. But you can know that and still fail to understand that what you personally are doing/saying/believing is racism. And when confronted with the claim that you are doing harm, most people are not going to go “oh, wow, you’re right. That is racist, and racism is bad. I’ll reject everything I know and my entire social sphere and change my entire worldview now.” That doesn’t happen. They find ways to simply reject the claim as an absurd accusation (and probably further proof that their opponents are the ones making mountains out of molehills). That’s the same phenomenon as in the screenshot here. That pressure against you just makes you double down because it’s too difficult psychologically to accept any different.

The most effective way to deradicalise people is to accept them. This seems counterintuitive to many, and there a lot of people for whom it is not practical or safe to just “accept” extremists in their life, and those people have no obligation whatsoever to put themselves in harms’ way, but the way a lot of you talk about “the other side” is alarming and sickening because I know that you are only making it worse. It’s not about who’s right and who’s wrong or who started it; it’s about the practical outcome of giving people a path out of hate and extremism. I am telling you, and you can hear the same thing from any ex-radical or ex-cult member etc you ask, that you will get nowhere by arguing against their beliefs directly, but you can get quite far by simply being willing to listen to their problems without telling them that their problems are stupid or that other people have got it worse or whatever, even if that’s true. There are unresolved needs being both exacerbated and masked by the hate and extremism and that is the only way you can possibly reach them. You don’t have to fix them entirely for this to work. You just have to show them that someone gives a shit, other than the in-group feeding them both the poison and the antidote.

At the VERY LEAST, you NEED to stop self-righteously bitching at people who “are a little confused but got the spirit.” I cannot drill into you enough the harm that you do when you pile on to people because they aren’t as plugged-in to the jargon-du-jour etc. I remember all too well the vicious fights people would have about the stupidest shit like whether you have to say LGBT or LGBTQ or LGBTQIAA and what does the ‘A’ stand for and do you say trans or trans* and is it ‘transgender’ or ‘transgendered’…someone who is trying to learn but isn’t as terminally online sees that and immediately gets accused of all manner of evil because they used the acronym that was popular last year and is out of fashion now, and at best they give up. At worst it drives them back into the world they came from, with a vengeance and new bitterness. It is a game in which everyone loses (and of course, all you are doing is fragmenting yourselves, often helped along by the deliberate efforts of far right trolls you are too naive to see, while I guarantee you that your actual political opponents don’t have any problem working with imperfect ideological bedfellows to achieve their goals, but that is another rant and I know most of you won’t listen to me anyway). It’s like trying to teach someone calculus and screaming at them for screwing up when you won’t explain anything or take the time to realise they only know as far as painstakingly self-taught algebra; do you think that person isn’t going to despise calculus and take the first chance they get to ditch it? Do you think that won’t be your fault? The failure of a student is the failure of the teacher, and whether you like it or not, whether it’s sexy revolution or not, activism is 99% about education and patience. If people are trying to be more open, trying to change, trying to get out of where they are…don’t close that path to them. For the love of whatever god or power you want, don’t close that path. What seems easy and obvious to you is very, very difficult for them and the fact that they are there at all is a huge feat.

This post ended up being much longer and going a lot more places than I intended. But please. There is so much harm that is done in the way so-called activists respond to this because they don’t understand how it works and I implore you to listen for once in your lives.