EDIT:The title should be:considering opposition to feminism, black lives matter, LBGT rights, as just different opinions.
More and more I see this happening where people are considering even straight up nazism as "just a difference of opinion." I say absolutely fuck that noise.
Opposing the rights of POC, women, LBGT, and everyone else who gets shafted in America on a daily basis dude to systemic injustice isn't just a different opinion. Considering it to be just as simple as a difference of opinion normalizes and emboldens those views. Giving the opposition of basic human rights a platform normalizes and emboldens those who see me as inferior based on my color.
Another big issue I see cropping up in threads is the idea that doing anything but the quietest and most peaceful protests is "wrong" and that it only emboldens white supremacy. Addressed here in this post:
This mentality doesn't help in any given situation and CERTAINLY never helps discussion where the rights of others are concerned.
These people who dismiss proponents of fascism, ethnic cleansing, and any other form of violent bigotry as "people with mere differences of opinion" are one of two things in my view: pussies who are too afraid to get caught in a fight or traitors to humanity. These are not valid stances worth hearing out.
The Sons of Liberty destroyed private property and tarred and feathered politicians in protest of taxation by a foreign government in which they had no voice.
The world dropped bombs on Nazis in World War II. The ones we took alive were either jailed or later hanged.
The violence of the Stonewall riots were directly responsible for the advancement of LGBT rights including the spread of marriage equality in the US.
These people who think nonviolence is the only way forward, when they're sincere, are incredibly naive and ignorant of human history. They have this ideal world built up in their heads where the real big problems can be hashed out solely through thoughtful discussion. We don't live in that world yet. The reason LGBT people can be part of the conversation today is because yesterday they proved that you'll get physically fucked up if you don't listen to them. We're still in a place where you bow down to the guy with the bigger stick or the guys who's willing to fight dirty when you close off clean avenues. That's how we prevent our enemies from building nukes while we keep them stockpiled. It goes down the way it goes down because
we say so.
Then there's these
other people who I call snakes in the grass. They
pretend to be progressive just to get a seat at our table. Once they're there, they begin planting seeds of dissension. They employ a divide and conquer strategy by making us argue not about who's right, but who's
more right. They get us to fight over trans people in public bathrooms and gay wedding cakes while they make plans to take Supreme Court Seats. They distract us with purity tests while they engage in voter suppression and intimidation. They make false equivalences in our respective behavioral patterns while we endlessly debate the origins and meanings of words.
It's sometimes very difficult to discern who's being sincere and who's an outright traitor, but I know that I have a lot of animosity towards both kinds of people, because in spite of all the historic precedent we have at our disposal to examine, they don't see the big picture.
Just taking a look at America, I see a clear pattern in our history with respect to civil rights. Women fought for the right to vote - half the population. Africans fought to end slavery - 15% of the population. LGBT people achieve marriage equality - 5-10% of the population. Each oppressed group at the forefront of civil rights struggles from era to era gets smaller than the one before it. That tells me that we're on the right path and we're getting better. And we get better because we're willing to bleed for it. We don't die for differences of opinions, we die to prove that we deserve to live.
I don't ask everybody to grab a gun and go to war against fascism, I don't ask everybody to go punch white supremacists on the street. I just ask that you don't chastise anybody who's willing to get dirty because you sound like an ignorant asshole at best, and if you're defending the enemies of humanity, that makes you one of them. You're not being thoughtful, you're just in the way.
We know how humanity works, we know what difficult people really respond to. We are now faced with an enemy who dismisses any information they dislike as fake news regardless of it's actual authenticity. We are constantly encouraged to consider the feelings of people who refuse demonstrate any willingness to reciprocate. It is constantly demanded of us that we reach out to people who look at us like lepers, and they ask us to build bridges to places where we're not wanted. Sometimes it feels like you've run out of options with these people. Sometimes your enemy simply can't be talked to. Sometimes your enemy simply has to be put down just so that
you can survive. Sometimes you have to be an asshole to beat a bigger asshole. That's the reality we still live in. If you don't wanna talk, and you don't wanna be reasonable, and you don't wanna catch these hands, just stay the fuck out the way because we're moving forward with or without you.
