I’m basically with you on all of that, except it still sounds better than renting.

Also, I don’t have kids, but I see a lot of folks buying houses in suburbs “for the schools”. In affluent towns where the math you’re describing is the worst, renting often isn’t even an option. Also a lot of those parents will sell and move the second their kids graduate high school. All of that is way cheaper than private school, especially for multiple kids.

‘No Way to Prevent This’, Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.

Though I’m sure similar scumbags to the FOP are hard at work at exporting mass shootings.

Was that the first Star Trek movie? They recycled a lot of content, so it may have been elsewhere as well. Good movie though!

Community organizing, the game… Movement building, organizer training, etc… It could be something pretty low tech and still be interesting, thinking like Oregon Trail or a MUD.

Are there any games that use street view? A racing game would be amazing.

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.

Fair enough to try to avoid stereotyping, and violence is definitely an extremely gendered topic. If the goal is just to understand each other, I’m not sure that there’s a big issue though.

There’s also socialization around risk. What are acceptable risks to take? We have this collective insanity of everyone agreeing that it’s OK to drive cars, despite massive numbers of injuries and deaths. You can also get permanently injured or killed skateboarding or playing a sport. Look at ice hockey in particular and bare knuckle boxing on a rock hard, slippery surface, is part of the sport. That’s consensual between players, and some never take part.

If you grow up with any of this, you get a few broken bones or black eyes, and they heal, you get a million small injuries, and they heal, maybe you get a few chronic injuries that slow you down a bit, but overall the skills that you learn and reaction time that you hone prevent many other injuries and accidents. You also need those experiences to be able to assess certain types of risk at all.

On enjoying the suffering of others, I think it’s more about beliefs and values than the emotional response. Both are definitely socialized, but attempting to socialize sadism (and masochism?) out of existence seems like it might have some major unintended consequences. Are we really removing it, or just suppressing it?

You already mentioned that slippery slope, but it is just a cultural negotiation of what degree is accepted, and in what contexts. A lot of US culture comes from British culture, which is stereotypically pretty stifled (though again, those stereotypes are about the upper class).

On the autism note, again that’s awesome that you know that about yourself (whether professionally diagnosed or self-diagnosed). I’m on the spectrum as well, and have been really enjoying the general trend of acknowledging and exploring neurodivergence (over what, the past ten years or so?). So many insights that people in our communities have make everything snap into place.

Particularly for women it’s obviously a lot less common for folks to get diagnosed at all, and harder to accept and navigate (because US male socialization shares so many traits with autism), but many of my autistic mentors are women and non-binary folks.

So solidarity on that front. One funny quirk (maybe it’s a defining characteristic) of neurodivergent folks is that we tend to have as much trouble getting along with each other as neurotypical folks have trying to get along with us. So that takes deliberate effort to overcome as well.

I think I was drawn to comment because your preferences are an extreme version of what most people prefer (basically avoiding conflict?). You also seem to know yourself better and explain where you’re coming from better than most people.

So there’s a practical question that has value, of how you’re doing the work to help win these ideological wars, or if you’re strictly trying to be a bystander. Your answers probably have a lot more relevance to strict bystanders than mine.

On Nazi punching, I was just raised working class, where punching is one of the ways we communicate. Celebrating the misfortune of someone that deserves it is also completely normal. So I’d chalk a lot of the mismatch up to culture rather than right or wrong.

A little bit more confounding, a lot of the habits and culture of the professional class, managerial class, owning class, ruling class, etc. are offensive to me. You’ve probably seen how that goes. But particularly silence in the face of unjust violence can often be extremely violent.

I’m a strong proponent of punching Nazis, and I hadn’t thought about it until now, but I’m also supportive of any and all positive responses to a Nazi being punched, including “lol”.

Glad to peacefully coexist with you on this platform though. Not trying to fire up that debate, but glad to lend perspective if it’s of any interest or use.