No prize for showing up

I haven't written in a while, and in fact have officially cast off my previous "every night if I feel like it" schedule, I will be updating once a week guaranteed and more often if I feel like it, I am going to try to buckle down and finish personal projects and I usually only have the energy during the day to work on one thing, so this will be scaled back.

That said you know I gotta talk about this weekend. Sort of.

Y'all know what went down in Charlottesville this weekend right? A person, and two cops, died so you better. It turns out that Nazis don't make for peaceful protests, who knew? For the most part this has inspired a near universal outpouring of condemnation from all sides of the political aisle, almost as universally is a condemnation of the violence inflicted by "all sides" or even  "many, many, sides" because centrists will destroy us all one day.

Sigh, I had a point, then I went and got distracted by virtually the entire rest of the internet because thinking is hard.

You know how I complained before about getting credit for showing up? Maybe you don't, I have written nearly eight hundred of these posts and they aren't sorted like at all.
The problem I have is that I seem to get a lot of credit for just meeting the baseline for human decency, picking up a baby after it falls over, not giving my sister in law shit for having to go and have a cry during dinner, being nice to my wife, that sort of thing. I do these things and the response is overwhelming. It makes me wonder if people have low expectations of me in particular for some reason, or if it is people in general, men I mean.

I feel like it is the latter, and that is the problem at hand. It isn't good enough to not be evil.

We have an actual literal Nazi problem in America right now, one that is, once again, literally, killing people on our soil. It is hardly a controversial position(so far) that Nazi's are bad, this is pretty well accepted, what is less accepted is that fighting them is good.

Here we run into the expectations I talked about, see, white America expects medals for showing up, I mean that metaphorically because I couldn't give less of a shit about who gets medals for sports and so on, and this is not directed at millenials either, so shut up. White Americans are rewarded constantly for simply not being actual Nazi's, a public statement disavowing them is good enough for the vast majority of the public, action is not required. All a politician, celebrity, or even regular citizen has to do to be seen as a champion of equality is make a public statement to the effect of "Nazi's are bad, freedom of speech is good." That perhaps wouldn't be the worst thing, but increasingly often that is coupled with "but violence is unacceptable no matter who's side you are on".

That last part is wrong, but since their statement meets the minimum standards for human decency, we don't challenge them, we don't push for more, we just accept that this person has joined the human race and move on, we shake our heads sadly at the state of discourse being perpetuated by those unruly activists, and the Nazi's grow in strength.

I once, as recently as half a year ago, said that it is and should be illegal to punch Nazis, but it is our moral duty to do so anyway. I was wrong, it is still our moral duty to punch Nazis, don't get me wrong, but I have come to feel that punching them is and should be far from illegal. Fuck man it should be a public service. Here is the main thing that the centrists pushing for peace at any cost(to minorities) don't understand: Nazis don't want peace, and surrendering violence as a means of opposing them only puts the initiative in their hands. It causes the deaths and injury of civilians, encourages hate crimes, and allows them to make a space in the public discourse for themselves, but there is no room in public discourse for Nazis, we had a war about that.

It's an ideology that is explicitly built around exterminating those who don't meet a certain standard of racial purity, their very existence in the public space should qualify as "incitement" and not be protected by free speech, there is no such thing as a quiet Nazi, their ideology is built around hatred and the idea of other races being literally subhuman and either not worthy of consideration at best or at worst subject to extermination. You can't debate that, not in any way that really matters.

You fight Nazis, you do it online by calling them out for what they are and letting their employers know as well, you do it in the streets by hitting them or pegging a brick at their face, and you don't apologize for it, and you don't leave the groups they targeted to do it alone, the Nazis are on the rise again because they see a culture that isn't willing to condemn them, they see a president who, while it is possible(if unlikely) he doesn't believe as they do, surely doesn't have a problem asking for their support, they think they are welcome, and shitty statements disavowing them do nothing to detract from that idea, they know the subtext even if those making the statements don't, and that subtext is "don't be violent if you are a minority".

So for white people, making those statements does literally no good at all, and in fact does measurable amounts of harm. You know what you can do? Call them Nazis, tell people who keep condemning all violence that they are being apologists even if they don't think they are, someone on my Facebook feed posted something saying that if you go to a protest, dress like you are going to a job interview, or for your profession, use your privilege for something good, when the riot cops and the Nazis come marching, they should see a well groomed white man in a business suit standing with the black man they want to beat up, they should see a nurse in scrubs chucking a half brick at them, they should see a firefighter standing on the line in front of the police protecting them, and students, shopkeepers, mothers, retirees and everything in between standing between them and their targets. If your personal situation allows for it, leave the mask off, they need to see that everyone is against them, that they have drawn the ire of the entire nation and that they will surely die if they keep up this losing fight.

The minimum isn't good enough, it never has been.