Just a note: fascists do not believe the things they say. There is no point in arguing with them or criticizing their claims with logic or facts. There is no benefit in pointing out their hypocrisy because they were never presenting those points in good faith. No gotchas work, no clever retorts and no amount of carefully compiled data will be effective against the reasons they claim are the justification for their hate and bigotry, because the hate came first, the justification is an afterthought. They believe the hate, not the justification and no amount of time or effort or proof will logic them out of their hatred. No evidence will change their minds because the things they say are not truly held beliefs. So, don’t engage. They want you to waste your time arguing with them about their obviously wrong claims, in part because it wastes your time and energy and in part because taking their lies seriously gives them legitimacy. There is no point, no benefit to trying to disprove them. As far as I’ve seen the best way to rattle them is to accurately describe their behavior. That’s all. Don’t listen to their arguments, don’t engage with their talking points, don’t be sidetracked by their attempts to waste your energy. Focus on the core of whatever issue you’re concerned with and don’t be sidetracked. For instance, the whole “roman salute” conversation? Bull shit. Obviously. But the more they got people talking about it the more energy people wasted trying to get them to admit the truth. They knew they were lying, that’s the point. Their goal was to waste people’s time with trivial nitpicks. Do. Not. Engage. Focus on your goals, the points that actually matter in a discussion. Things like: It’s irrelevant who started what in Gaza, genocide is wrong. It’s irrelevant if George Floyd was a bad person or not, people shouldn’t be murdered by the police. It’s irrelevant if there has ever been a single instance where a trans person did anything inappropriate in a public bathroom, they are people who deserve the right to exist in public without fear. It’s irrelevant what a woman was wearing or if she was drunk or was flirting, there is no excuse for rape. The list goes on and on and their disingenuous points are always only an obfuscation of the core of the argument, which is usually that all people are people and deserve the right to exist safely in this world. Their points will try to create some reason why certain people don’t deserve that. They are wrong and they will say any lie to try to manipulate people into believing otherwise.

Thanks!

I grew up in the farm-y outskirts of a big-ish city. I got to catch lizards and tadpoles and toads in the creek nearby, and we’d collect reeds from cattails and weave them into little mats for fun. we’d walk/bike to our friends house without parents, just yell that your going to so and so’s and off you trot. We knew the farmer who grew the sweet corn we ate all summer, and the farmers who had the peach orchard and tomato fields we’d harvest from at the end of summer to can cheap produce for the winter.
The foothills behind our neighborhood were covered with grass and shrub, spattered with bike trails and caves right up to the tree line. There were foxes and racoons that you’d need to protect your chickens from. Deer would chill in our yard in fall eating the fallen Apples from around our trees. Flocks of starlings covered our huge cottonwood trees making a huge racket and pooping everywhere. I’d take a metal baseball bat to our big metal clothesline post to make a big gong noise to scare them off cuz they were so loud.

Then a fence went up, blocking us from using the hills, and they started construction on a bunch of high end mc mansions. They filled in the caves, killed the foxes and racoons, and paved over the creek to make a walking trail. More and more deer ended up as roadkill till they stopped coming to eat the apples altogether. Developers bought out the farmers to build more houses, first the tomato fields, then the corn, and finally the peaches were ripped out and paved over. The dairy became a giant strip mall for a Staples, and a Kohl’s, a donut shop and a sandwich shop. The road I walked alongside, barefoot, to play in the creek became too busy to be safe for kids to walk next to.

In summer we’d play outside and drink from the hose till we were too hot, then we’d run inside and stand under the swamp cooler to cool down. Year after year it got hotter and hotter till the heat was too much and we couldn’t play outside for too long because the swamp cooler wasn’t enough to cool us down anymore. In winter we used to make snow men and build igloos with buckets full of snow as bricks, and we’d trample paths into the snow drifts that came up to our hips. But year after year the snow banks got shorter and shorter and the snow came later and later until… I remember the first year we had no snow till after Christmas. The decorations looked so sad and stupid sitting on brown grass instead of coated with bright snow. That’s the last year I bothered to put them up. The more people moved to the area, the thicker the smog got in the winter. All the stagnant stinky car exhaust and fumes from the refinery got caught in the bowl of the valley all winter, till the hazy air was so dense you couldn’t see the mountains that surrounded us.

The world got hotter and more full of cars and houses all while the people got more stranded inside. Yes by the lure of Internet, but also to try to escape the heat and dust and smog. New neighbors in the big houses would snap at us to get off their lawn then smile like they gave a fuck the next Sunday at church.

Neighborhoods full of community became individuals in houses.

I’m only 34.

Agreed, none of the others are balanced properly or have good flow. Number two is the only option.

Sigh, yes. A dream I have, for a world that isn’t as fucked up as ours, is brain computer interfaces that can just record your train of thought for you so that when you get a third of the way into a thought and you forget what you were thinking you can just replay your brain for a second and remember what the fuck you were thinking about. Or you know, walk into a room forget why you’re there and say “hey brain, why am I here?” and it will fucking tell you instead of just going “eat a dick bitch”. Or God forbid decide on a plan for a day or a week or goals that you have and want to focus on and then have some hope of and fucking assistance in actually remembering that thing that you wanted to do and following through on it instead of just “well your brain sucks and you forgot so I guess there’s no life progress for you!”

Because women aren’t objects to play for and win like a prize in a claw machine. They’re people who have thoughts and wants and desires and aren’t interested in being treated like an object to be possessed while they’re out having fun. If you walk up and you’re obviously looking to find something to be romantically interested in, and they want to get to know people like people before anything romantic, you’re not going to have any luck. Like a bunch of the other comments said, go find something that you enjoy doing and get to know the people there as humans. Talk about your shared interest, about your goals and wants and desires for your life outside of a romantic partner, and ask them about the same. Surprisingly, once you stop treating women like fresh meat on a savannah and actually try to get to know who they are as people, they stop being so freaked out and might actually be interested in getting to know you as a person.

I try not to blame individuals for the failure of systems, especially ones as exploitative and damaging as capitalism. Why blame the people who can only afford the cheapest toilet paper when you could blame the corporation that made the cheapest toilet paper clog toilets? The people with the least money have the most negative repercussions. How are they supposed to know it clogs toilets without having to learn the hard way? Why wouldn’t you assume that toilet paper would all be equally safe to flush no matter how cheap it is?