Wednesday 7 October 2020

Moving My Goal Posts






































https://www.osrelfgame.com/post/nazis-not-welcome?fbclid=IwAR364PJBxdEr576tgxEmHBaXgfSYYNUMigMhPD5_9vWwUCY7XXR5SkGqJsQ

http://www.tabletoproleplaying.com/the-osr-is-anti-fascist/?fbclid=IwAR36KiZvQKagXqPL0aMT-NAqBCB1Y3k6YuiCEc-UwYG2HitCmk3BER9YxeI

https://thac0rpg.blogspot.com/2020/10/thac0-stands-in-support-of-elf-blog.html?fbclid=IwAR3kcf_vg4zmlYQVUeOl1nGrCm_n3LjNkcMCW9DIgTcTJO2NAYTrvYUP0-A

So a renewed interest in being anti-fascist anti-nazi and anti-racist has sprung up which I welcome. Few links above examples of this. I had my doubts that OSR can be saved or should be as so many good people gave up on it years ago but If people are keen to try good. It would be good to create a culture that could bring back all those who quit the scene and even quit public gaming lives. It would be good to convince all the people who associate OSR with awful people might reconsider. It would be good if people called out fake centrism and neutrality that uses SJW as pejorative or who use the phrase "PC culture gone mad". I'm not sure if things are at that stage but If you have the energy to try to go for it and you have my blessing. Antifascism should be normal and politicians shouldn't be trying to target it by the use of fantastic claims. 

People weaponising soft porn to drive people out of nerd culture are one of my pet hates. I'm for porn but smearing it everywhere to deliberately offend people and drive away people who don't like it is shitty. It is a common tactic in all kinds of nerd culture.

So If I have not lost your readership forever yet stay tuned.

So If you didn't know I have been an anarchist punk since the 80s. I've been destroying nazi graffiti, posters and stickers all that time. I've worked in unions and was elected as a left newspaper editor for 3 years (yea I mostly art directed and had a team of proofreaders). I worked in human rights, community groups, indigenous aid, homeless and sex worker programs and prisons. Friends have been involved in gang brawls with Nazis for decades and carried weapons. I prefer pacifism and I'm not a huge fan of violence and I prefer to give people a chance If I can. I prefer not to purge people from my life but I have. I prefer not to do this to my family but I have to some degree - some made this easy for me. While lecturers at uni could tell what uni I was in when by my style and considered me very left-wing Id be first to admit some of my ideas are dated and this is why I appreciate young friends and people who have given me a chance rather than banhammered me for life for my errors.

I've known lots of awful people and I generally will try to be civil if people are civil to me. Plenty of douche edgelords like to say shocking shit but might not act on it. People who think they are normal and nice can say shitty things out of ignorance and lack of experience. As I managed to convince some nazis and racists to not be anymore I prefer to leave a door open rather than shut it forever. I guess if someone went to being a nazi skinhead white supremacist into genocide to now just says they wouldn't marry a different skinned person but will socialise with them and let hippies hug them I count as an improvement. Some of them thanked me for helping them get out. I did swerve to scare a Nazi in a huge swastika T-shirt once and my GF of the time thought I was intolerant. Sure thing I was and not just because I know such people would hurt me or people I care for.

So I'm not going into details today but after I removed a bunch of swastika stickers and looked at my phone I had discovered I had lost people over my suggestion I prefer to judge people over their conduct vs the shit they say but I probably said this in a shitty way. Basically, I said one group I admin had someone I recently was a Nazi. I had known them for 20 years since they were a teen and never noticed till someone pointed it out - rather I hoped to keep an eye on them. I had no idea from their group posts but looking at their personal feed I unfriended them but didn't kick them out. So I've adminned stuff for orgs and government and I don't feel I always have the luxury to impose my standards on everyone In a public forum. Actually, my standards would exclude most co-workers, some family and some of my clients. So anyway people didn't like my shitty examples so I have apologised to all concerned, purged the previously mentioned Nazi and backed off. 

I get people who didn't like my approach. I do hope I can influence deluded people rather than isolate them more into their world of shit. We don't all have the same approach to dealing with this or the same antipathy in us. But I get other people to have different takes. I have friends who don't believe in any anti-nazi iconography that depicts Nazis or Swastikas because portraying them at all ever empowers Nazis. I get this point but I wouldn't go that far so I lost one friend over this. I've lost friends on the correct way to hate HP Lovecraft's racism even though we agree he was a racist and agreed on almost everything else.

I'm an Anarchist and I am suspicious of Communism being of Estonian descent and seeing how they behaved in unions and told me my ethnic group deserved to be put in gulags without a thought. My dad told me about seeing farmworkers being found in the forest dead with hammers and sickles carved in their bodies. Some Estonians were pro-German some Pro Russian and some pro-nationalist despite that cause vs two huge war machines unlikely. Pro german and pro-Russians factions argued which side would exterminate all Estonians fastest and argued 20 years was more desirable than a few years. Which is pretty crap and sad alternative to debate. My grandpa was an heir to a Jewish department store - he ran away from home as son of a single mother who ran a bathhouse because he wanted to go to school and was adopted by Jews. By the end of the war, the store had been robbed, bombed flat and he was in a camp for 18 years unaware his wife and children escaped to Germany and eventually got to Australia because Estonians were considered white and non-semetic so desirable for immigration officials under the White Australia Policy.

Estonian Christmas is was a contest who could tell the most shit miserable war stories. Grandma my dad and aunt fleeing Russia got locked in a German jam factory with Polish people and spent several years there. One night grandma was sent to the hospital and her kids went with her. While in the hospital the Jam factory was bombed and everybody killed. When released from the hospital the family got to rebuild the factory. After the war, lots of Estonians were tempted by (fake) letters from home to go to Soviet-occupied Estonia and none were seen again. I'm sure plenty of people have worse stories.

So I'm not a fan of swastikas or hammers or sickles. I know Ukrainians whose family were murdered by forces of Nestor Makhno the anarchist Hero and I get their unhappiness with people liking this man or Anarchy. I've been assaulted plenty by people claiming I am gay or foreign or Asian of which I am non of. But I know I didn't like racists my first day of school because I have epidermal folds. I regret some shitty things I've done and said or when I was slow or resistant to ditch shit ideas. I feel safer in a diverse community.

Nazis are officially racist. Fascists and Communist states may officially not be racist but can be in practice and historically were. There are lots of brands of left thought that are neither communist nor socialist. Cruelty and authoritarianism are always wrong even if capitalist or whatever. People bringing up slavery in Arabia or Africa as if it absolves white people in developed colonialist nations now are arseholes. Yes, cops have an image problem and all those new weapons and doubling down on douchebaggery instead of doing better and failing to police themselves is not helping anyone.

I mostly don't approve of mass murder. But the new super-rich could back off and not gobble faster when exposed because it is killing people more than a powerless idiot who blames the wrong people. Millions of idiots with violent fantasies they wish to unleash on the others they blame is a problem. Wanting everyone to have justice, food, water, safety and home is fine.

Being Australian I find it sad for people to predicate their idea of masculinity or freedom on guns. Running protesters over or turning up from another state with a gun is a terrorist dick move. Claims antifascists are an organisation to be feared by non-fascists or more dangerous than the right are a scam. While I'm here, look at the discrimination subhuman status atheists like me are given in many places here. Many places assume atheists are communists and incapable of moral conduct. 

I try to be utilitarian and humanist. I'm not a fan of ultra-rich or the conservative politics they puppetmaster through racism and classism. I like minimum income, everyone with a home, shelters for special interest groups, free healthcare, free education and an effort to help people get over generational poverty rather than blame the poor or the yet unborn generations they will produce. 

The point of this is to make my stance clear - its part self cringe and despair at recent events and state of the world and where I am now. I'm not doing this to be popular. But I hope by wearing my politics on my sleeve it can act like a dickhead filter. Also to say I support people suffering from xenophobes, homophobes, transphobes or attacks against the poor. I don't have to understand all your struggles or problems but I can try to not add to them or deny them. So I'm sorry If I contributed to your problems.

I'm happy to talk if I have time, it is in good faith and you don't resort to swearing or arguing like a graduate of the Ben Shapiro school of man-baby debate. Jordan Peterson is a loser too.

11 comments:

  1. I'm a pacifist but i recognise if you stop a bully cold you protect yourself and others in the future from harm

    ReplyDelete
  2. "the correct way to hate"

    This comment in particular struck me as a great way to explain everything that is wrong with certain spaces on the internet. Like, it's become a competition of who can be the most correctly hate-filled? It's the worst.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I'm not sure where I stand these days... I see crazed zealots on all sides of me. Hating Nazis/fascists/authoritarians does seem normal... but I'm also solidly against censorship, or lying for the cause.
    So I do use SJW as a pejorative, aimed at people I generally agree with, but who act like the bullies they claim to abhor.
    So I don't really fit in anywhere...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I would suggest stop using 'SJW' as a pejorative, and instead focus on a person's behavior. If they're glorifying censorship or engaging in bullying, you don't need to use insults to point out how destructive that is.

      Delete
    2. saying people who care about others and humans right are bad and racists are not so bad is not a good look. I want people to have better basics to make the world better than we need to eliminate a group to make things better (then another one stop repeat)

      Delete
  4. "I mostly don't approve of mass murder"...

    There you have it, folks. Current leftism in a nutshell. I wonder what would happen if they get real power?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. so the right dont talk about killing people every day?

      anyone with an automatic weapon and into open carry has not considered it?

      War is mass murder. Didn't the SS or instigators of deathcamps deserve to die?

      Your going to take me as a representative of millions of people? Please dont Im not the king of the left, I have dont have that kind of power

      Delete
    2. Current conservatives brought back death camps in the US.

      Delete
    3. We have offshore detention centres run by mercenaries in dodgy regimes with no chance Australians can scrutinise them and politicians made law to make them immune to prosecution for human right crimes - still nobody discussing ongoing aboriginal genocide and culture destruction

      Delete

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