I was walking around downtown and the band at a (not particularly lefty) bar was singing "The Day the Nazi Died" loud enough to be heard on the street. The whole place, and a fair number of folks outside, applauded. Things at work in the world besides the will of evil.

Again, it is ...odd that before Elon Musk bought Twitter, the regular refrain lobbed at people using the site was that it was not real life, and now that it is owned by the world's richest white supremacist, that same crowd finds it much more reflective of real life.

Israel is following the Nazis, step after step. The Israeli military changing the landscape of Gaza in Rafah and removing the traces of genocide. Sonderaktion 1005 - Nazi initiative launched to eliminate all physical evidence of mass murder and genocide (1942-1944)

Sure, I would just also quibble with the word "roots" -- sometimes the most steelmanned version is not even remotely the causal origin of their position or even a future attractor pulling them in, and what they're throwing out that can be mapped towards it is just chaff they don't believe.

I would nuance that the most important thing is accuracy not necessarily charitableness. It's important to ALSO understand and trace the steelmanned versions of certain things, but it's at least as important to understand when someone isn't saying the steelmanned version but an utterly venal version

To avoid Waffling the Pancakes here, I feel obliged to add the nuance here that there are valid use cases of performative dunking around setting social norms, countering early memetic infections, etc But a milieu or media that *optimizes* for performative dunking will disincentivize understanding.

And, of course, this also applies to people who aren't full-fledged enemies we're trying to annihilate ASAP. It's important to understand social context, nuance, joking, etc with mildly wrong comrades or normies too. But someone being bad is not even remotely an excuse to not bother to understand.

But I'm bitten by the extremely declassee poor people / autistic nerd thing where I think having an accurate map of reality is of immensely greater importance than what strategies garner more immediate gains in social standing. I don't think it's valorous to misunderstand people's perspectives.

"Oh well who can tell with these crazies lol" is a comforting sentence you say to gain points and emotional confort with friends when you get something wrong about a post you're dunking on. That is not a sentence you can say on the battlefield when you're drawing maps of enemy troop movements.

By contrast, the antifascists were intricately nuanced and detailed in their understanding of fascists because it fucking matters immensely whether some bonehead thug was being 3rd degree ironic in some statement, when your goal is to predict his movements and jump him in physical reality.

One of the starkest divides between antifascists and liberals was that the liberals saw it as "low status" to be familiar with neonazis, to know anything about them. The liberals were trying to win games of appearance and pretense that take as background assumption that VOTING is how change happens.

In our present landscape you gain points by demonstrating how unfamiliar you are with monsters. But this is actually just another version of liberalism. The performativity is all around raising morale, jockeying for attention and status in the democratic arena, being seen, signaling.

Liberals think that every conflict is a mere communication error and we should just talk it out and then hug it out with nazis. They're wrong. We gotta utterly brutally completely defeat some monsters. But accurately understanding the monsters is a huge part of completely annihilating the monsters.

Folks complain about rising illiteracy on social media, but I think the deeper issue isn't inability to parse straightforward sentences but a cultivated unwillingness to model different viewpoints and social contexts. Performative dunking rewards *not bothering to understand* the enemy.

free zine on jury nullification