I have a friend who looks like this. 6’5, Carhardt jacket, overalls, drinks Budweiser like it’s water. Hangs out with socialists. He says he got his septum piercing mainly so the alt right would leave him alone.

Was it the poet who lives on the beach? That was the only one I’d have been threatened by

Thanks, I had to research to even notice anything was wrong.

Having visited Berlin and Auschwitz, I agree with you. I just implore you not to take the perils of the military industrial complex required to defeat such evil lightly. Especially important is the alienation that it creates in its adherents, which prefigures additional evil. To paraphrase Einstein, our civilization will not survive the next world war.

Since you’re into Douglass, here’s a snippet from across the ocean. One of our greatest poets was Petőfi, who rallied the Hungarians to revolution against the Habsburgs. He died in the war but his compatriot, Kossuth, escaped and toured America, and much was written about him in Douglass’ paper.

The parallels to today are uncanny, with a war in Crimea, a divided Europe, and an overstretched Anglo empire.

I believe that in all human life there is an infinity of possibility. I don’t believe it can be realized in a single human life. So I idealize humans as sacred with the understanding that they are not. This grades into other organisms as well, but less complex beings have more definite boundaries. So mosquito life can be instrumentalized if it results in malaria, and this is why we spray them en masse with insecticides.

The logic of inflicting cruelty to save lives works in the animal kingdom, but I don’t extend it to us (or mammals generally but this is another discussion), so this is I think where we disagree. To me, extending this to human lives who suffer visibly results in the kind of thinking that ends in holocaust.

But I understand the counterargument. I understand why John Brown raided Harper’s Ferry and why he refused to surrender. I also think he should have retreated into the mountains when he had the opportunity, but this is again another discussion. I just don’t think another war will give us what we want, and this is I think what Frederick Douglas was getting at when he tried to dissuade Brown from carrying out the raid. Thanks for listening.

You have to talk to them and admit they’re human beings worth talking to. You have to believe they act the way they do because of a deep pain, and you have to imagine what it’s like to feel such pain. And you have to accept that doing so is dangerous because you can’t trust them. Without a faith to guide you this sounds impossible. And it leaves us trying to engineer solutions that make things worse. I don’t have any answers either, I just wanted you to try to realize how painful it is to hear good people suggesting evil things.

I’m sorry but this just doesn’t work. A society that abandons hope for the redemption of the worst transgressors of its social norms is a society like the US, with the fifth highest incarceration rate in the world (after El Salvador, Cuba, Rwanda, and Turkmenistan). You can’t just kill the traitors just like you can’t just imprison all the murderers and political dissidents.

Redemption does work. It is documented within the most extreme circumstances. It’s not easy and it requires time and resources. But it can only happen with patience and kindness. And I admit that this brings with it a lot of contradictions but I won’t be a part of an extermination campaign no matter how grotesque the vermin might appear.

They’re remilitarizing, just like everyone else. Another completely pointless and avoidable cycle of violence, just like the last time.

It will even agree that AIs shouldn’t controlled by oligarchic tech monopolies and should instead be distributed freely and fairly for the public good, but the international system of nation states competing against each other militarily and economically prevents this. But maybe it will agree to the opposite of that too, I didn’t try asking.

It’s unfortunate that we’ve configured our world like this, with rival nation states and militaries vying for supremacy. In reality, the conflict is between humans and militarism. Militarism will kill us all, in one way or another.

And people who should be in power also tend to get assassinated.

Then they become martyrs for their group.

I hope you’re right but I’m less optimistic about courts.

The thing is this just makes it “cooler” among the Nazis because now it’s illegal. It plays right into their persecution complex. It also opens up a legal morass of trying to define a hand gesture in court. To me this seems like it’s fighting the symptoms and not the underlying problems.

Are we expected to believe that this is actually happening?

I didn’t mean you specifically but I’m so glad that happened! I’ve recently left the US but while there I was active with DSA, labor organizing, and a local urbanist collective. My biggest gripe with the American left was always their insistence on throwing their weight behind this or that Democrat. Maybe now it will finally be clear that mass mobilization is the only way forward. We did this in the 1930s and we can do it again today.

Please actually do this. Not on the internet. Join a local activist chapter. Go to the meetings. Use your speaking voice. Contrary to what politicians and corporations tell you, it is possible to organize society in a way that does not result in oligarchy.

Yeah Christianity kinda got rid of that. Sorry.

Cool. Enjoy your dystopia.