Hey all,
Moderation philosophy posts started out as an exercise by myself to put down some of my thoughts on running communities that I’d learned over the years. As they continued I started to more heavily involve the other admins in the writing and brainstorming. This most recent post involved a lot of moderator voices as well, which is super exciting! This is a community, and we want the voices at all levels to represent the community and how it’s run.
This is probably the first of several posts on moderation philosophy, how we make decisions, and an exercise to bring additional transparency to how we operate.
A lot of that makes sense in general. I think specifically Nazis and similar ideologies are an exception. When your ideology is lethally violent and subverts any sincere debate, is that consent to physical conflict?
There’s a Sartre passage from 1945 that’s commonly quoted that still holds true today about debating Nazis. It’s worth noting that he literally coined the term “bad faith” (in French) in describing anti-Semites. Nazis literally define bad faith:
“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”
Another thing to consider is the famous photograph “The woman with the handbag”. Mild trigger warning, I suppose. It’s a woman hitting a Nazi with a handbag: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Woman_with_the_Handbag
It’s not exactly schadenfreude that the picture evokes… More like a feeling of righteousness maybe? Like the Nazis are so wrong that someone would take all of these risks on themself to publicly refute them, really in the only way possible.
These wars are better to fight on these terms, doing everything possible to stop people from thinking it’s a good idea to become a Nazi. Regardless of whether existing Nazis can be deprogrammed. Just simply as a strategic calculation, it’s easiest to stop them when they’re smallest in number.
And it’s not like a lot of leftists are real bruisers. For the most part counterprotesting Nazi rallies is a ton of people that have never been in a fight in their life. Radical queer folks of all stripes, and random black block kids, mixed with the odd liberal that finally felt moved to get off the couch for something. All taking real risks.
Anyway, just food for thought.
On neurodivergence, the person that I’ve learned the most from is just active in a lot of facebook groups (among other platforms) and reposts a lot of content as well as creating her own. Particularly around parenting an autistic son and daughter while being autistic herself. We’ve also done some organizing together and it’s always a ragtag group of misfits.
I think the most liberating thing is basically just commiserating and sharing little observations and realizations.
One of my favorite rants on that front is that neurotypical people are the ones that are disabled. If they’re so socially functional, they should have no problem interacting with neurodivergent folks. But generally, they’re awful at it. in fact neurodivergent folks are forced to learn how to cope and navigate the preferences of neurotypical folks and if we can’t, we’re duly punished. It’s basically a conspiracy.
My thought of the day is that one reason that neurodivergent folks don’t necessarily get along is that many of have been told that we’re special and unique all our lives (and we might be used to being special, being surrounded by mostly neurotypical folks) but facing the reality that what? Maybe 20% of the world is neurodivergent? It can be a little deflating to face that we’re not that special. I’m not really sure about that one. Just fleshing out these ideas as thought experiments.
I can definitely relate to being annoyed at folks though. One thing that reliably bugs me is when people are extremely self-centered w without realizing it. Like in the US everything encourages is to be that way, but if a couple switches are flipped in someone’s head they can really buy into the unique individual thing pretty hard. Everything they say and think is the most important thing, and it’s usually about themselves…
That’s another partially fleshed out thought, but based in thinking about someone I was working with recently.
Hey, thank you for the trigger warning. I’m really really bad with seeing people getting physically hurt.
I did absolutely bring up in the original post I replied to (not in Beehaw Support, the one about Nazi lives not mattering that I linked earlier in this discussion) that given their ideology is basically “violence, extermination against everyone else” this kind of thing might be taken as self-defense. I wish I knew the stats on if violence towards individual Nazis (as opposed to going to war against a Nazi country—I am definitely fine with fighting Nazis in WWII) actually serves as a deterrent or not. I hate violence.
I really have no need for retribution, for justice in the sense of making someone pay for their crimes. Only a need to help the victim get back to where they were before they were victimized, and prevent the offender from hurting anyone again. I suppose this is the disconnect, I don’t do the entire “this feels righteous” thing.
Weirdly enough I know I’m extremely selfish and will admit to it. I just also try my damndest to avoid being entitled. Knowing I’ll put myself first all the time and will not take physical risks for anybody (sorry, I’m not a good leftist but I’m also not going to get in fights I know I won’t win, I’m not taking a hospital bill and getting scars and broken bones that might heal wrong and opening up worse treatment for myself for being uglier than I currently am) isn’t the same as expecting people to put me first and take physical risks for me—in fact I’m completely fine intellectually with them saving themselves. I expect nobody to put their life on the line for me or sacrifice for me, I only expect the basic human decency we are all entitled to, like not being randomly insulted or harassed by strangers. I’m selfish but I’m also consistent.
About the neurodivergent thing—I guess, but if they’re disabled because they can’t figure out interaction with us, then we’re still disabled because we also can’t figure out interaction with them. We just get called disabled because there are more of them. And I’m going to be a realist and say that in the world we live in, I’m disabled.
Some of my minority demographics absolutely make me different from people I know. But I also know that in a world of 7 billion people, though nobody has my exact mix of life experiences and DNA, there are people who are like me. Maybe not as many as those without as many minority demographics, maybe you can consider me special because 1% of people are asexual, but 1% of 7 billion is still a giant amount of people. There are still a lot of people like me. A big part of my teenage desire to be individual and special was refusing to think I’m amazingly special and unique, refusing to fit that stereotype and be deluded about how special I am, and this is still with me I suppose. A big part of my ego is acknowledging reality and not falling prey to common mental traps—including the mental trap that this desire to avoid fallacies makes me immune to them.