#anyways sorry for the incoming flood of thoughts from mass

[sophiechoir]

Thoughts from Mass 5/17/20 (6th Sunday of Easter)

@ St. Teresa of Avila’s <3

Today’s theme: Courage

Canticle of the Son (opening song)

One body in faith - plagued

Fr. Chris is taking the approach of making direct, intense eye contact with the camera for the entire duration of Mass. *blush*

“with one accord, the crowds paid attention” miracle indeed

a joyous city - paradox? nah, that’s just the cynicism talking

acceptance and baptism not enough to receive the Holy Spirit (so confirmation is in fact something more than either of those sacraments, and necessarily so)

sanctify Christ (hm - sanctify Him according to ourselves, maybe) -> in your hearts

*** “Always be ready to give an explanation to anyone who asks you for a reason for your hope, but do it with gentleness and reverence...” ***

>an explanation, not an attack or defense - your hope, not your persecution or aggressive proselytizing - they should want to learn from you, and you should teach instead of wound - many keyboard warriors could stand to take these words to heart

err on the side of martyrdom

“If you *love* me, you will keep my commandments”

The Spirit of Truth, apparently male (vs Wisdom - female?)

“The world will no longer see me, but you will see me”

love love love <3

“Whoever loves me will be loved by the Father, and I will love him and reveal myself to him.” ***sequence

>begin with love for Christ specifically. Christ the gate

>but can’t one approach God without necessarily knowing or fully knowing Christ? even here it says that after one is loved by the Father, one them comes to fully see Christ - Christ reveals himself. either way, love and trust before knowledge

churches reopening!! oh thank God - well, in Indiana, at least

>hm, smaller churches might have more difficult time getting supplies necessary to reopen? I wonder how that will shift the church’s demographics

the confidence of a priest secure in his vocation - that must be the best feeling. that must be like being in love

I’m sick of homilies reflecting on COVID-related anxieties. The most comforting homily right now would be something very academic/theological/more separated from this bog of reality

>(but then again, I’m a coward lol)

The Son loves us as the Father loves Him

Roll back the stone from the tomb! Open the churches!

“Jesus promised the disciples he would not leave them orphans.”

Upper room at Passover vs at Pentecost - look up details (?)

The Lord doesn’t take away the danger or fear or trials, but instead gives us what we need for the next step

Spirit in life, in truth (life = truth)

*** “Courage is using what you’ve been given in the moment that it’s needed the most.” *** (not quite the usual cliche - lovely)

We can’t exercise any of the virtues if we don’t have courage (CS Lewis)

*** Trust over fear. Trust over fear. Trust over fear. ***

“Hope does not disappoint.” A bold statement, Fr. Chris. I want to believe it - can I believe it?

I wonder if anyone’s studied the “Masses” held by children who grew up to be priests. What sort of spiritual value or power do they have? What an amazing phenomenon

You are My All in All (song)

Spiritual Challenge: Look up Thomas Merton’s “Prayer of Abandonment and Trust”:

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going.

I do not see the road ahead of me.

I cannot know for certain where it will end.

Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so.

But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you and I hope that I have that desire in all that I am doing.

And I know that if I do this, you will lead me by the right road although I may know nothing about it.

Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death, I will not fear, for you are ever with me and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

[chazukekani]

Previous // Next

Summary for Code:04 is here!

Please notice that this is just a summary so not every single detail is included!

Stormbringer Summary 5

Code 04: Grantors of disgrace, you need not wake me again

Recap: N and Verlaine escaped from the laboratory.

The chapter begins with an excerpt of Rimbaud's diary. He wrote that there was once an anti-government movement 'May Revolution', and the leaders were called 'The Fauns'. They created a secret weapon which was named 'No.12 of Darkness' that can control gravity freely. Once Rimbaud acquired this weapon, he was ordered to educate him and trained this weapon to become a spy, and its name was Paul Verlaine.

-  Unbelievable. The Secret of the Gentle Forest was decoded. Here it lies the most fierce beast, and Verlaine...

Rimbaud wrote in his diary.

-

Verlaine and N were at the top of a tower crane. Verlaine had N here because he wanted to know why N knew the Secret. However, N claimed that the last 6 pages of the Secret was erased by Rimbaud himself so he couldn't tell much. Verlaine couldn't believe that's actually Rimbaud who altered the information.

He was strong, Verlaine referred to Rimbaud. He is the only one who was capable of battling with Verlaine in his organisation, and they were partners. Not only this, Rimbaud also called Verlaine his friend, but Verlaine just felt like he couldn't like Rimbaud.

Verlaine left N on the tower crane alone and left.

-

It was a night with a clear sky, a train was moving on the railway and Mori was sleeping inside. At once, a human showed up on the railway, and stopped the train. The train was derailed as a result of mass shock.  Verlaine went inside the train and searched for something, and he believed no one inside the train was able to survive after the shock.

Verlaine found the body of Mori, and he approached to confirm the breath. But that wasn't Mori. It was a man who wore the outfit of his, but was not Mori himself. Turns out it was Mori's double, Hirotsu. A tiny person also appeared afterwards, and that's Dazai.

Suddenly, there was light in the dark, and that was flame. By the mountain near the railway, there were 50 and more sniper bullets aimed and shotted Verlaine, and the target was in utter pain.

'Don't think these little rocks could kill me...' Verlaine was trying to use the woods beside him to attack the snipers who were hiding in the mountain, but he stopped

'Hoho- You really look like my subordinate when I take a closer look' said an elegant lady, Kouyou. She summoned Golden Demon and launched offense towards Verlaine.

'You can't beat me alone,' Verlaine said.

'Who said I am alone?' Verlaine then felt his whole body sinking down to the ground, and turned into multiple snakes that were about to swallow him. That was the Lieutenant's ability (reference to Dead Apple manga, former Port Mafia executive), that could manipulate the state of objects.

'Ability organisations are stronger than ability users,' Dazai observed and smiled. Various ability users from the Port Mafia were launching all kinds of attacks towards him, such as the ability of slowing the time and freezing. In fact, Dazai sent 420 Mafia members which included 28 ability users to the scene to defeat Verlaine.

'I will mourn you,' Dazai said to Verlaine, and took out Rimbaud's diary from his pocket.

The next moment, a black wave inflated and spreaded to the whole field.

'-- You hatreds, your dumb torpors, your weaknessses,

And your brutalisation suffered long ago,

You give back, O Night, like an excess,

Un-malevolent, of blood, each month or so, (extract from The Sisters of Charity, by Arthur Rimbaud)' Verlaine said the spell.

The wind calmed, the buzz on the ground vanished as if escaping from something. The invisible waves were flooded in the atmosphere.

'The door was opened,' Dazai observed. A black object appeared far far away in the forest. Right after, where Verlaine were, ejected a form of dark energy. The car that was hit by this energy was completely deformed with half of it vanished and the remains were just like a wrapped paper.

On the mountain, there was a monster who controlled a dark sphere. When people touched the sphere, they died.

No.3 Forces, annihilated; No.5 forces, all dead, No.8 forces, no response, as reported from Dazai's walkie talkie. The mountained was eliminated, and the ground was distorted. All the mafia members were screaming and suffering.

'It's all in the plan, we will win if the next attack succeeds,' said Dazai.

-

Up in the sky of Yokohama, Chuuya and Adam were inside a helicopter and they jumped off from it due to the attack from the monster. Adam was able to fly in the sky because his body allowed him to transform himself into a flying machine.

Similar to Chuuya, Verlaine was also intolerant to poison despite having ample physical strength, so actually it was their plan to approach Verlaine closely, so that they can inject poison into Verlaine's body. It was notable that Adam mixed this poison pill.

It was very difficult to get closer to Verlaine because he had activated his corruption, which he lost his consciousness and attacked the surroundings without rationality.

Nonetheless, Chuuya did put a toxic pill into Verlaine's mouth, which he has his conscious back. Yet Verlaine splitted out the pills right after.

'You always surprise me, Chuuya,' Verlaine spoke. He told Chuuya that once he said the spell, he would have his human personality unlocked and become a mad beast that generated ability singularity. However, that is Rimbaud who thought about adding a spell on Verlaine, which enabled him to get back to a rational form after using his corruption.

'He always thinks about what he could do for me,' said Verlaine.

'But you betrayed him,' Chuuya replied

'Because I wanted to save you,' Verlaine answered.

Suddenly, a finger touched Verlaine's face.

'What an unexpected offense. I bet no one could foresee this. What a joke,' said Chuuya

Verlaine turned back, and realised that was Adam's finger.

'Do you wanna hear an android joke?' Adam's finger was installed with a tiny syringe, and this enabled poison to be injected into Verlaine's body.

'Seems like a child's trick can defeat the king of assassins. Thanks for listening to my android joke.'

-

It returns to another section of Rimbaud's diary. Rimbaud was thinking about what presents he should give to Verlaine on his birthday. He came up to a conclusion: a black hat. That was not an ordinary hat. The materials used inside the hat consists of 10% platinum, 10% titanium and the rest were made with rainbow-coloured ability metal which was installed with the ability of the Fauns inside. By wearing this hat, it enabled Verlaine to act on his own will and less interfered by external instructions and interruption. In other words, Verlaine was a step closer to a man with free will by having this hat.

Rimbaud gave the hat to Verlaine on his birthday, and he did not look surprised or happy either way.

'Just take it,' Rimbaud told Verlaine, and there was no response. They drank some wine that night and said goodnight to each other.

-

The battle was so called ended, but the field was left with gravity waves and the forest was completely destroyed. Verlained passed out, but still alive. Dazai told Adam and Chuuya that N was rescued from the tower crane, but disappeared during transportation.

-

'I can't die here...' said N. The car that he was taking bumped into a utility pole because he injected some form of medicine to the driver. He took out an old style flare gun and shooted.

'Is this some mistake made by the offense team?' Chuuya noticed the shot far away.

'Shit...' Dazai's eyes were in despair.

The shot that shooted from N's flare gun was exploded with colourful metal pieces floating in the air like snow, and even accompanied with some music. Verlaine suddenly yelled painfully. His eyes were filled with blood and the blood stream was clear on his face and grabbed his chest hardly.

'That was not the effect of my pill!' Adam shouted, 'The gravitational field was unusual here!'

The space was deformed, and Verlaine was flooded inside his own gravity wave.

'The world ends here...' Verlained whispered just like an old man who's dying 'Run, Chuuya.' Verlaine smiled sorrowfully.

The sky was divided, the thunder was coming and the atmosphere was expanding. N saw the ability form of Verlaine. It was a black beast, the opposite of god, and original demon -- Guivre the Beast. The monster annihilated all the aircrafts incoming and was about to proceed to the city center.

'See that Verlaine! That's your end!' N laughed, almost screamed. 'An unique being like you will die because of such a boring creature like me! HAHAHAHA DIE VERLAINE!'

-

Here comes a flashback during the night of Rimbaud and Verlaine's mission of stealing Arahabaki.

'Don't give this kid to the French,' Verlaine was holding the young Chuuya on his arm.

'What?' Rimbaud was confused.

'Don't hand him over to anyone, and don't let him go back to the lab. Grow this kid in a farm and just never let him know about his truth.'

'What are you talking about?' Rimbaud asked once again.

'Think about it Rimbaud,' Verlaine's voice was tense and hostile at the same time, 'If someone tells you you're not a human, how impactful it will be. You are not born with god's blessing but just a programme, how hurtful it is. You cannot see the moon and live in darkness forever without any hope, and no one will come save you. Even such a feeling of despair is designed by someone else!'

'We have this conversation countless times, Paul,' Rimbaud stepped forward, 'You are a human, everyone sees that. Instead of thinking how you were made, isn't it better to think what you should be as a being?'

'Paul...' 'Don't get close.'

'I am sorry. Anyways, should we go back and have a chat?' Rimbaud stepped forward again.

'No, it's too late.'

A huge fight between the spies broke out.

-

Adam had an idea to stop the destruction of Guivre. Almost at the end of the Great War, Britain had developed something that was currently the energy source of Adam's machines. However, the initial usage of Adam's energy source was a mass destruction weapon. Adam smiled and continued. If they used Adam's weapon inside him, they could burn and melt the Guivre.

So they put this in practise. Adam asked Chuuya to tie Adam's own arm to an electric cable. However, Adam pushed Chuuya away when he was about to trigger the weapon. He explained to Chuuya that the weapon inside him was called the Shell (55 minutes reference). It can burn down the surroundings of 22 yard radius, and the internal temperature could reach 6000 degree celsius, and that is almost the temperature of the sun surface. This was sufficient to destroy the Guivre.

'Don't do this!' Chuuya cried

'Don't you have your dream! To build an investigation organisation purely ran by machines right!'

Adam silenced for two seconds.

'My dream is to protect humans,' Adam replied, 'and my dream comes true now.'

'Wait!'

A gigantic fireball. It burned the woods, and boiled the land, and altogether evaporated. The Guivre moaned miserably and decomposed in the air. Adam sacrificed himself and the monster was destroyed.

However, the tail of the beast in front of Chuuya and Dazai was forming into something. That piece of tail suddenly grew a face out of it, something like a reptile. It then turned into a huge form of creature. Its head was pretty much the head of the former Guivre, but the number of eyes were different, and it had red eyes.

'Don't look at it, Chuuya,' Dazai warned, 'He was sensitive to emotion, so don't let him see you.'

'I know how to defeat this ability singularity,' said Chuuya, 'I recalled from my memory.'

'Let's brief me that,' Dazai smiled.

-

They figured out how to open Chuuya's door. In order to activate Chuuya's corruption, he needs to say the spell 'Grantors of disgrace, you need not wake me again'. Together with the hat gifted by Rimbaud, Chuuya could control the door with his own consciousness. However, there's a problem. Once Chuuya said the spell, the log inside his programme will altogether be erased, which means Chuuya could no longer find out whether he was human or not via the programme.

Chuuya was flying in the sky. He grabbed his hat tightly and recalled his friend's word

-- I am satisfied that I can protect you.

And he said 'Grantors of disgrace, you need not wake me again.'

The battle between the gigantic beast and a tiny Arakami (God of Arahabaki) began. Dazai was directing the forces to launch offense towards the beast. Meanwhile Chuuya's physical body could no longer tolerate the power inside his body. He was bleeding severely. Finally, Chuuya created an enormous fireball that was as if the second sun in the night. Finally, the beast disappeared and Dazai nullified corruption.

Code:04 End

[moonlitceleste]

Elevator Love (Ch. 1)

A/N: Welcome to my first multi-chaptered fic! This was supposed to be a one-shot but I kept writing and here we are. I’m not super happy with this, so I’m probably going to rewrite it eventually. Staring at my document hasn’t seemed to help so far, so I’m probably gonna take a break on this and work on requests. For now, just sit back and enjoy :D

Marinette gnawed on her lip nervously as her fingers toyed with the ladybug keychain on her white crossbody purse.

Her eyes were glued to the towering Wayne Enterprises building before her. The big “W” atop it seemed to stare her down, issuing a silent challenge for her to walk past its doors.

“You got this, Marinette!”

The heroine smiled weakly at Tikki’s assurance—although she did appreciate the sentiment, Marinette wasn’t quite sure she could agree.

She was not prepared to meet Tim whatsoever.

Sure, they had been friends for nearly two years—but regardless, Marinette couldn’t help but stress.

It had all started when Tim decided to commission MDC for a few pieces, offering a large sum of money in exchange for her efforts. Despite being doubtful of whether or not he was truly who he claimed to be, Marinette accepted the request.

Soon enough, back-and-forth emails progressed to casual texting, which led to an eventual friendship. The two seemed to click naturally, which was evident in their smoothly-flowing conversations.

Tim knew everything there was to know about her (barring her identity, of course), yet they had never met in person.

He was the co-CEO of a multi-billion dollar company and she was a prominent designer that moonlighted as a superhero—finding time to video chat one another was hard enough.

But now that Marinette had finished université, she had nothing tying her down to Paris. 19 was a young age to be done with school, but her life wasn’t exactly normal.

That’s why a few weeks before graduation, Marinette decided to email Bruce Wayne.

It was a spur-of-the-moment decision; Tim had made an offhand remark about how he wished he could be there for her graduation, and the cogs in Marinette’s brain began to turn. Maybe he couldn’t come to Paris, but she could go to Gotham.

Once her mind was made up, it was only a matter of planning.

It was surprisingly easy to get ahold of Tim’s father; from then on, everything else fell into place.

Perhaps attempting to surprise someone as smart as him went against her better judgement, but it was too late to turn back now.

Marinette’s phone pinged, and she scrambled to press her thumb to its home button. Speak of the devil.

Mr. Wayne

It’s ready.

Tell your name to the receptionist at the front desk, and she’ll give you a lanyard with a pass into Tim’s office as well as a set of directions.

I apologize again for not being there to guide you; unfortunately, I have other matters to attend to.

Marinette tucked the gift box she was holding under one arm, freeing her hands to type out a response.

Marinette

Thank you so much for your generosity, M. Wayne!

I really appreciate all your help in planning this, and for allowing me to surprise Tim in the first place.

Despite your busy schedule you’ve gone through so much trouble to help me. I really can’t thank you enough!

Once she pressed send on her last message, Marinette inhaled deeply.

Her hands moved to smooth down the soft fabric of her blush pink dress.

It was an admittedly simple ensemble, but the billowy sleeves and fluttery skirt gave it a delicate flair. Her white strappy sandals, circle purse, and wavy half-up braided hairstyle tied it all together nicely.

Marinette checked herself over one last time to make sure she wasn’t forgetting anything. She tucked her phone into her purse, grabbed the box containing Tim’s gift, and turned to look at the imposing building with a burst of newfound confidence.

Here we go.

-

“To the right…” Marinette muttered. “Or was it to the left?”

The designer scrunched her nose in confusion, turning around in a circle to better survey the building.

She had already obtained the lanyard and directions, but decided to make a last-minute detour to the bathroom. It shouldn’t have been a problem since Marinette was a few minutes early, but now she was lost. Sure, the place had a fairly open floor plan, but it was enormous! She couldn’t be expected to navigate this.

In hindsight, maybe deciding to deviate from her original schedule had been a mistake.

Marinette sighed and started walking. She didn’t want to disturb anyone, so wandering aimlessly was her only other option.

Well, it wasn’t her only option—she could easily use her Ladybug magic to give herself a push in the right direction, but Tikki would disapprove. Oh, and it was wrong to use her powers for selfish gain. Marinette totally remembered that.

Turns out she didn’t even need to use her Ladybug powers, though; it only took  a few minutes of searching for her to stumble across what she was looking for.

About 10 meters away was a set of elevators lined up against the wall. A glowing “up” arrow was visible on the panel beside a pair of open steel doors.

Marinette’s eyes widened at the sight of the open elevator. She promptly broke into a jog, careful to keep her speed somewhat appropriate for the environment. The doors started to close, and Marinette’s heart raced faster. There was a shadowed figure inside, but due to the angle they likely couldn’t see her.

“Wait!” she called as loudly as she dared.

It was almost funny how similar the experience was to her lycée days.

Marinette pushed the thought to the back of her mind—she would rather not taint her day with memories of that dumpster fire.

She turned her attention back to the elevator, whose doors had retreated. Thankfully, the person inside heard her. Marinette slowed her pace as she covered the last few meters, but was mindful to not walk obnoxiously so.

As she approached her destination, it became increasingly apparent that whoever was inside was remarkably tall.

Ugh, she could practically hear Tim’s jest in her head—are you sure it’s not just because you’re short? He loved to poke fun at her height with short jokes, even though he was only 8 cm taller than her.

Anyways, despite her petite stature, Marinette was sure the person inside would be considered tall by any standards.

She prepared a friendly smile, a “thanks” on the tip of her tongue when they finally came into view.

The first thing she saw was a pair of worn black men’s work boots on what was an admittedly toned body.

Marinette didn’t let her eyes linger on the muscles there, rather opting to trace her gaze from the man’s body up to their face. And wow, was that a gorgeous face.

She wasn’t the type to fall for someone based on appearance alone, but Marinette would be crazy to think this wasn’t the most attractive person she’d ever seen.

He had messy black hair with a pure white streak in the front, tousled to perfection in a way that would make a supermodel jealous. His brilliant green eyes were pools of emerald, richer than any shade she had seen before. Marinette would gladly drown in them.

Speaking of his eyes, he was looking at her with his captivating gaze and mesmerizing face...

Marinette would forever deny swooning at the sight. She would never swoon.

(She totally did.)

Say something! she scolded.

“Uh, than-thank you.”

Oh no. It was the stutter.

Not just a stutter, but the stutter. The one that only appeared when she was nervous and/or talking to hot guys.

Marinette had long outgrown it—or at least, she thought she had—but apparently now it was back with a vengeance.

Her face heated up, and she moved forward to press the button to her designated floor before taking her place some distance away from the man. She turned her head away in embarrassment, hair shielding her face so he couldn’t see her flushed cheeks.

If she had been looking up, perhaps Marinette would have been prepared for the flood of incoming mass. But she was too busy cursing herself to notice the group of people entering until she felt a nudge on her right side.

Marinette squeaked at the stack of boxes that was suddenly in front of her face and looked up to see a small group of workers entering the elevator, pushing a large platform truck stacked with packages. She shuffled on instinct to make more room.

The cart seemed way too big to fit, especially with the capacity of the elevator. Someone would have to contort themselves, or at the very least they’d be squished up against one another uncomfortably. 

Marinette watched as they pushed the platform truck in all the way. It left the tiniest bit of wiggle room, just enough space for someone to squeeze past.

The designer found herself slowly edging towards her left each time another person wiggled their way past the load.

The elevator wasn’t too crowded, and the process went relatively smoothly—that is, until the last worker attempted to get inside.

He had a build somewhat similar to her Papa: tall and large, so his struggle was understandable. It took a minute of grunts and loud sighs, but he managed to slip past the obstruction and into the elevator.

His large frame, however, meant less space for everyone, and Marinette felt the sudden impact of being shoved.

She couldn’t help the soft yelp that fell out of her mouth as her feet stumbled, and before she knew it her left side was firmly pressed up against someone.

Oh god. It was Hot Guy. Of course it was him.

She pressed her lips together in mortification, arms squeezing Tim’s gift to her chest even tighter.

“Sorry.”

Marinette nearly jumped as the husky voice spoke quietly next to her ear. Her head whipped towards the direction it came from, which wasn’t exactly hard to place. There was only one person on her left side.

She turned her head to face the man with the white streak. She had to crane her neck awkwardly in order to properly see him, which really put into perspective their height difference.

His green eyes were sincere, and Marinette could see the apology in them.

The lack of space wasn’t his fault whatsoever, but it was nice to see someone care about her boundaries.

“U-um, it’s okay.”

Marinette smiled at him shyly, then diverted her eyes away. Her brief burst of courage could only take her so far.

Before she knew it, the ride was over. The elevator stopped with a ding, and coincidentally enough, everyone was headed to the same floor.

Marinette fished out the set of directions Mr. Wayne had written from her purse, skimming over them once more. Her stomach filled with butterflies at the thought of finally meeting her best friend.

She barely noticed the workers pushing out the platform truck or Hot Guy walking away, the outside world long forgotten.

Marinette’s body went on autopilot, following the instructions on the paper until she found herself stopped in front of a sleek door. She didn’t know what it was made of, but she was glad it wasn’t glass like many other things in Wayne Enterprises. That would make her surprise a lot harder to pull off.

Above the key card security system on the left was a name plate, nearly identical to others she had passed on her way here. The name Tim Drake was written in elegant silver cursive letters, the metal gleaming as if it were brand new.

Marinette’s chest tightened in anticipation as she pulled out the lanyard Mr. Wayne had given her. She took a deep breath before knocking twice.

There was a short pause before a familiar voice responded.

“Who is it?”

She scanned her card and opened the door.

“Marinette?!”

-

A/N: For reference, Marinette is 5’3” (160 cm) and Jason is 6’4” (193 cm), so there's a 13" (33 cm) difference. I tried to use French terms and measurements so it'd feel more like Marinette's perspective.

And yea, I'm not super proud of this so I'm probably gonna rewrite it in the future. I have a bunch of other WIPs to work on though, so sorry in advance for my wacky updating schedule!

-

PERMANENT TAGLIST @avengerthewarrior @enternalempires @freesportspalacesalad @h1sss @nathleigh

[breathlester]

Life has a hopeful undertone (and I'll be holding on to you)

pairing: dan howell/phil lester

summary: au in which Dan and Phil are struggling not to drown in unpaid bills, but somehow they're making it work. Or: Dan has an anxious breakdown and Phil comforts him.

genre/themes: angst, angst with a happy ending, emotional hurt/comfort, mental health issues

content warnings: anxiety, mentions of past self-harm, depression, mentions of homophobia, mentions of homelessness

(this was written years before dan talked about his mental health and his childhood, so it really isn’t trying to be accurate to that - it’s an au! please also be aware that this isn’t necessarily a healthy relationship and a partner can never replace a professional therapist.)

“Seek assistance.”

Dan curses and takes a deep breath before he swipes his card past the scanner again. The annoying error sound buzzes through the air once more, piercing the busy chatter of the rush hour, and a woman behind him sighs loudly.

“Seek assistance,” the screen taunts Dan in bright red letters and he can already feel tears prickling at the back of his eyeballs.

No.

He swallows hard and tears his gaze away from the card reader, blinking violently.

There’s a man in uniform trying to catch his eye but Dan bites down on his bottom lip and turns away quickly, shoving past the people queued up behind him. He doesn’t need to seek assistance from staff to be told that his oyster card needs recharging. His bloody wallet needs recharging.

Dan ignores the loud complaints of people around him as he busts through the crowd recklessly. Just out, out. Out of the stuffy tube station and into the clear air.

Except the air isn’t all that clear, because London at 5 pm is bustling with hasty people and honking cars and thick with the stink of noxious fumes. The sky above is thick with heavy grey clouds, and Dan’s head is thick with a fog of noxious thoughts.

He tries to replace them with positive ones. So what if he can’t take the tube. It’s probably chock-full anyway. Besides, a walk home is supposed to be good to clear your head, right? Get some fresh air, catch some sunlight…

A young girl passing him gives him a weird look when he laughs out loud at his thoughts, bitterly. He pulls the hood of his jacket over his head and shoves his fists into the pockets as it starts to rain, and wishes for the millionth time for enough money to buy an iPod so he could at least drown out the world.

By the time Dan arrives at his flat the sun has been smothered by a clusterfuck of clouds and his hoodie is clinging to his skin. He’s soaked to the bone, teeth chattering as he jams the key into the lock, struggling with the door for a bit because his hands are shaking so much. It’s only September, it’s not supposed to be this cold.

The heating isn’t even on yet.

Finally, the door falls shut behind him and Dan leans back against it, allowing himself to close his eyes and breathe for a moment.

All he wants is to crawl into bed and have Phil whisper sweet nothings into his ear.

But his boyfriend won’t be home for at least another hour.

The tears are threatening to spill again, but Dan holds them back with all his might, because once he starts crying he won’t be able to stop anytime soon and then he’ll end up with a migraine and have to call in sick and he can’t fucking afford a sick day right now.

So he picks himself up and strips off the hoodie to throw it to the laundry. He mops up the puddle he made on the hallway floor and raids the cupboards for instant coffee and Phil’s emergency ration of chocolate, then he builds a fort on the sagging sofa with his threadbare duvet. Focusing on trivial domestic work, ignoring the dark, menacing world.

Thunder is rumbling outside and Dan ignores it, just as he ignores the creaks of the sofa beneath his weight and the blister on his tongue from the too-hot coffee. He’s okay.

He’s okay.

The tv suddenly goes blank during a particularly loud roll of thunder and Dan sits upright, his hand clenched around the mug although the sloshing coffee burns his skin.

“I’m not afraid,” he says out loud to the black screen that is staring back at him deridingly. Dan sets down the empty mug and licks the coffee off his hand.

“It’s just masses of air colliding”, he tries again, remembering what Phil, writer of the weather forecast for a news website, has told him.

“Nimbus, the rain cloud”, he recites. “Cumulonimbus, the storm cloud -” His voice cracks midway and he bites down on his lip again, tasting blood.

There’s a noise from the hallway and Dan jumps.

The scratching of a key being turned in the lock sounds eerie in the quiet between thunder rolls. His heart raps against his throat as he pulls out his phone and glances at the screen.

It’s not time for Phil to be back yet.

“Dan?”

The relief he feels sparking up at the sound of Phil’s voice is immediately flooded by doubt and sorrow. They swirl and fill up his chest, building tidal waves that knock hard against his ribcage, threatening to take his breath.

He scrambles to his feet and out into the hall where Phil is shaking out his umbrella with dry clothes and reddened cheeks and shining eyes.

The straps that have been holding Dan together snap.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Phil, I just mopped here!”

Phil flinches and his eyes widen. He puts the umbrella down. “I’ll wipe it up, okay?”

“No, it’s not fucking okay!”

Now he’s heaving breaths, feeling like he’s drowning, and he didn’t want to let this happen, fucking hell, no, he can’t let the dam break…

Through clouded eyes, he sees Phil reaching for his hand and pulls away. The words tumble off his tongue and he’s too tired to try and stop them.

“You can’t just come in here and act like things are okay when they fucking aren’t! You’ve been fired, haven’t you? Why else would you be home early? Don’t fucking lie to me – we’ve got to pay our bills, Phil, the rent is due next week and you haven’t even… you haven’t even said anything, why aren’t you saying anything, Phil, I -”

He’s cut off by a hiccup and warm hands cupping his cheeks. His half-hearted reluctance is ignored. A mouth presses against his own and suffocates the angry rant.

He breaks away and continues, softer now, worry and fear lacing through his words, tearing through the mask of ire.

“What are we going to do… Phil, if you’ve lost your job that means our income is less than half, I don’t know how -”

Phil presses a finger against his lips. “Dan, I haven’t.”

“You haven’t – what?”

“I haven’t been fired.”

Dan exhales shakily, his fingers grasping bunches of Phil’s jumper without even noticing. He doesn’t understand.

“But then – why are you -”

“Home early?”

Phil’s eyes light up and he smiles, his face so close Dan can count the laughter lines in the corners of his eyes.

There’s still a hint of worry in the creases, but it doesn’t gain the upper hand over his excitement. Phil never lets it.

“I’ve been promoted.”

Dan stares at him, dumbfounded. The silence is disturbed by another hiccup.

“They’re letting me write my own column”, Phil explains. “I can work from here mostly and the pay’s a lot better, too.”

Dan kisses him, and his hiccups turn into sobs against Phil’s lips, and he’s clutching the fabric of Phil’s jumper as if it were a lifeline.

What he wants to say is, “I’m so proud of you”, because really, he is, and Phil deserves the reward because he’s such a good writer and he’s so fucking clever and hardworking and Dan loves him so much, but all that comes spurting out is, “Oh god. Oh thank god. Oh Phil, I’m so sorry.”

“It’s okay”, Phil mutters against his mouth, but Dan pulls away from the kiss and shakes his head.

“I’m sorry I shouted at you. I’ve been missing you all afternoon and I’ve had the shittiest day and then you’re home and all I do is rant for no reason, I’m sorry.”

His breath is hitching and he’s sniffling but Phil, wonderful, selfless Phil, holds his arms open and says, “C'mere.”

Dan sinks into them and allows the waves to crash.

The power’s been cut off but the water in the shower runs hot and steady. Outside, the storm has eased into heavy rain that patters against their windows, providing a soothing background noise.

Dan is stood with his back to Phil whose fingers are threading languidly through his hair. He feels 19 all over again, when the older university student had picked him up off the streets, a scrawny teen with filthy hair and self-harm scars and no home to return to.

The sweetish scent of cheap shampoo fills up his nostrils and he sighs at the feeling of Phil’s fingertips gently massaging his scalp. He can feel the tension resolving, headache slowly retreating, reluctant to admit its defeat. Phil’s always been Dan’s most effective painkiller.

“Lean forward.”

Water washes the shampoo out of his thick curls and Phil’s hands venture downwards. Dan flinches when he feels them briefly skimming his neck.

“Hold still, I’m trying to work out the knots,” Phil murmurs behind him, fingers digging into Dan’s shoulders.

He tries to measure his breaths, sync them with Phil’s. Maybe they can work out the knots in their life as well.

When Phil’s hands run down his back and come to rest on his hips, Dan leans back into him, lets his head sink onto his shoulder and the water stream wash away the tear stains on his face. The bathroom air is misty and damp and there’s most likely a moudly spot in the corner of the shower cubicle, but Dan inhales it like it’s salutary, because it’s home, it’s comfort.

Just like Phil’s arms that sneak around his waist, holding him tight.

“Let’s take tomorrow off”, he whispers, barely audible through the sound of rushing water. “Just stay in bed.”

Dan presses his head into Phil’s neck. “You know we can’t. They’ll fire us.”

Gently, Phil turns him around and makes him lean back against the shower wall, ducking to mouth against Dan’s neck.

“We could always run away,” he mutters, his breath tickling Dan’s skin. “Leave this city behind, you and me alone.”

Dan closes his eyes, relishing in the feeling of Phil’s body moving softly against his, but blinks before the dream can take shape.

“With what money? We’d end up on the street again and freeze to death when it gets cold.”

As if to confirm his words, the water turns cold and they clamber out of the shower and straight into bed. Shared body warmth makes up for the lack of heating as they huddle close together underneath the duvet.

Phil’s eyes blink at him, blue and honest in the dimness.

“Dan, I’m sorry we can’t afford a better living. I promise you I’ll do my best with the column, I’m going to work on it day and night -”

Dan presses his index finger against Phil’s lips. “Don’t apologize, Phil. I already owe you so much.”

He moves closer, replacing the finger with his mouth. Their lips slot together slow and sweet, and everything feels just that slight bit less frightening when Phil’s body is pressed to his, the heaving and sinking of his bare chest a calming parameter in Dan’s shaking, swirling world.

“That shower is going to be evident in our next water bill,” he mumbles as they part for breath.

Phil yawns. “It’s on me.”

He reaches out to pull Dan into his chest, but Dan resists. “I don’t want you to pay for everything, Phil, it’s not fair. I’ll have to find a better job soon.”

It’s not like he loves stacking boxes at Tesco.

“Sometimes I think my father was right, y'know,” he says haltingly. “If I’d gone into law, we wouldn’t be struggling to pay the rent now.”

Fingers tilt his chin upwards. Phil’s brow is furrowed.

“Dan, stop. You know I don’t care if you pay less than half. You’ve made it up to me just by being there. I love you. And don’t even start like that – if you’d become a lawyer just because your father wanted you to, it never would’ve made you happy.”

What he doesn’t say is that they wouldn’t even have met if Dan had complied with his father’s wishes. Dan knows Phil is secretly glad everything went the way it did. He also knows that Phil would never admit to this.

His boyfriend’s voice softens and his hand moves to cup Dan’s cheek.

“I just want you to be happy, okay? Who cares what he wanted. Apparently he also wanted a straight son, and look how that worked out.”

Dan cracks a tiny smile. He wishes he could laugh at Phil’s words, but the thought of his father still leaves a bitter taste behind, a reminder of the nagging wound in his heart that has only started to fade in the past years. Some things aren’t easily forgotten, and one of them certainly is being told that you’re an abomination. Even if the words are taken back afterwards. Because afterwards is too late.

Phil shifts to press his forehead against Dan’s. He’s so close Dan can feel his breath on his face, and the flutter of his eyelids.

He knows Phil’s right, knows that he shouldn’t care, shouldn’t still be clinging to the idea that he had to please his father somehow, to make him proud.

And yet…

“I don’t want to disappoint you”, he breathes, blinking fresh tears away. He wants to make Phil proud, to make him happy, because it’s always Dan who spills his guts and Phil who listens and holds him, and he feels so incredibly selfish.

“You couldn’t”, Phil whispers, leaning in for another kiss, and Dan wants to believe him, but it’s not easy.

It’s never been and maybe it’ll never be.

“You don’t have to try so hard, Dan”, Phil mutters against his lips. “You’re only twenty-four. You’ve got all the time in the world to find out what you want to do. I know we don’t have the means right now, but I firmly believe that one day we will and then you can still go to uni if you want to, get a degree, and we’ll move into a beautiful old house on the countryside and have a dog or two, or five.”

Dan chuckles under tears and wraps his arms around Phil’s neck, kissing him hard, clinging to him as if for dear life. And in many ways, that’s true. Phil’s been there for him when no one else was, has helped him up onto his feet again, cared for and comforted him countless times, and Dan would be mad not to hold on to him. In Dan’s darkest days, Phil is like a ray of sunlight, so full of wisdom and courage and hope. And in all honesty, Dan doesn’t need a lot of money or a nice house if only he gets to keep Phil by his side.

Dan’s never been one for faith, but if there’s one thing he believes in it’s them. He knows that he loves Phil.

And if they’re lucky, that might just be enough to hold things together.

*** this used to be on my ao3 page (softiejace). i’m taking my phan content down from the for personal reasons but reposting it here so people can still enjoy it :) ***

[gaylemccoy972-blog]

5 Things To Understand About Modern Hate Groups

Here's a popular right-wing meme that got spread around before the attack in Charlottesville:

So, here's what I want to ask anyone sharing that (or wearing it on a t-shirt - yes, they sell them): When we replace the stick figures with actual bleeding humans, does that change how you feel about it at all? (WARNING: Graphic fucking video):

It's not a rhetorical question. I think the answer to that will decide what happens next.

5

The Internet Could Have Been The Greatest Anti-Bigotry Tool In History

Bigotry is never about hating a real person. The target is always a perfectly hateable caricature we invent to avoid glimpsing the true enemy staring back at us from the mirror. It's a punching bag, a shape drawn around a bull's-eye. This is why so many racists have a real Black Friend they can hide behind - when they actually get to know one, a whole different part of their brain lights up (I mean, he's not even black to me! He's just Steve!). Do I have to point out the obvious, that their entire worldview would change if they could somehow get to know every minority the way they know their buddy? How many times have anti-immigration politicians and pundits gotten caught hiring illegals themselves? Well you see, my illegals are honest and do great work. Not like the rapey stick-figures on those T-shirts.

Lutz Bachmann/Twitter

I had secretly been hoping that the internet, social media, and smartphones would make it impossible to not put a real human face on those groups. In a connected world in which I can tell you what my cousin's coworkers considered eating for lunch yesterday, minorities can't remain abstractions. I was hoping that over time, smartphones would do to racism what they did to UFOs.

You remember UFOs, right? For a generation leading up to the 1990s, some fuzzy flying saucer turned up in the news every month. Now, when there are a thousand times more cameras around, the flying saucers have evaporated like smoke - belief in alien visitors plummeted by the mid-2000s. The myth became impossible to preserve in the face of evidence (or lack of it).

Read Next

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Racism, likewise, is based on a myth - that these people aren't people at all, that they don't cry or bleed or want the same things we want, that fixing our discomfort is as simple as making them go away, somehow. Now we have the technology to see an event like Charlottesville in real-time from half a dozen angles; we can hear the screams, see first-responders desperately trying to resuscitate victims. We can get a mental image of what an ethnic cleansing would really look like - that same chaos, repeated millions of times. That's the truth behind the edgy frog memes and red-arm bands. Take it in, assholes.

It would be a wake-up call. That was the dream, anyway.

4

Yes, Cameras Do Change Minds

I'm known as a hopeful optimist, possibly having to do with being a white person who accidentally made a lot of money off of a story he originally wrote as a prank. But it's not like I just pulled this dream out of my ass - there's precedent for it.

The presence of cameras all but eliminated the American public's tolerance for military casualties, for example - we've completely built our foreign policy around it. America lost 100,000 troops in WWI, 400,000 in WWII, and almost 60,000 in Vietnam. That last one was the turning point - a flood of full-color footage of maimed soldiers and screaming civilians turned public opinion against the war overnight. The reality of war didn't change, but you can bet your ass that seeing it made all of the difference. We haven't had a comparable war since; Afghanistan saw a tiny fraction of those losses (2,400) and so did Iraq (4,500). Suddenly, soldiers' lives mattered - the myth of the consequence-free war went the way of the UFO.

Why in the hell did you think a horde of screaming Actual Nazis would have their hearts melted by the sight of dying protesters? you ask. If anything, they probably get off on it. After all, Americans don't seem to care about hundreds of thousands of bombed Iraqis.

But I'm not talking about the raging Nazis here - it's only the extreme fringe who'll walk around in public doing that shit, and some of them try to sheepishly talk their way out of it later. The systemic racism that exists in the world doesn't emanate from them, it flows from the comfortable indifference of the majority. The most incurable form of bigotry persists specifically because it doesn't feel like heat coursing through the veins - it feels like nothing at all. I was born in Trump Country and I only met a couple of people who openly called for black genocide, but knew dozens if not hundreds who simply thought society didn't need changing (and I agreed, at the time). We didn't want the stick figures to die, we just didn't think they needed help. What does a stick figure need food stamps for?

The latter are the ones I thought would be turned in this age of pervasive cameras and personal connections. It's easy for the comfortable casual racist (who, by the way, hates Nazis) to ignore a headline or pie charts about income inequality. It's harder to ignore a man bleeding in the driver's seat of his car while his young daughter and her mother sit helplessly next to him, wailing in anguish. I didn't think it would change overnight, but over the decades I thought these attitudes would be chiseled away one gut-wrenching video at a time. Do you see? He's not a fucking statistic. He bleeds. His family loved him just as much as your family loves you. Look.

3

But The Sword Swings Both Ways

Hey, did I mention that after years of decline, belief in UFOs has shot back up to its previous highs? The need to believe was always there, so others looking to fill that void simply adapted to the marketplace (If you think about it, the aliens would have cloaking technology that makes them invisible to cell phones!).

Now consider the fact that the Confederate statues the protesters were rallying around in Charlottesville aren't all 150-year-old relics. New ones are being built all the time (35 Confederate monuments have been added since 2000 in North Carolina alone - lots of them were built in the 1960s as backlash to the civil rights movement). They are, in other words, modern symbols erected by groups looking to change policy today. That's why there's a movement to take them down, and a bitter counter-movement to preserve them. It is only about preserving the past to the extent that it's about making current law conform to it.

The point is, if racism is a dying relic, it sure as hell doesn't feel like it. Oh, I'm not surprised that hate groups thrive in this era - a few charismatic sociopaths have always been able to cast a wide umbrella of influence and mass media has just amplified their reach. I mean, you've seen their memes. What I had hoped, though, was that society would be better at spotting them, quicker to see through their tricks. I often wonder how average German citizens would have reacted if camera phones had existed back then and somebody had leaked video from inside a concentration camp. But lots of German citizens did know about the concentration camps! Sure, but it's one thing to have a vague concept of eliminating Jews, another to actually see a wheelbarrow full of dead children. It would be meaningless to the true zealots, but most people aren't that.

And yet

2

Modern Society May Have Cultivated A Population Ripe For Hate

It's too easy to think of Nazis as a different species, like they were aliens who invaded from another planet. If you tell me we shouldn't humanize them, I say that humanizing them actually makes them scarier: They are not only human, but they are your motherfucking neighbors. After the war, German soldiers and officers went back home and got jobs - it's not like you blow up the mothership and the foot soldiers topple over. Likewise, your brother or uncle or daughter could join a hate group tomorrow and they would still be family. Some of the people reading this have had this exact thing happen.

Think about it: Even if the worst happens and 20 years from now we're in an actual shooting war with a new round of Nazis, it's not like we'll kill them all. No war ends that way; there'll be some kind of resolution and the combatants will take off their uniforms and the very next day they'll be next to you on the subway. If you want to stop that future, you have to start with understanding how Nazis are made, and how regular everyday folks get sucked in. Hate is a prickly shell humans grow around fear, a defense mechanism to replace the terror of the unknown with the cold certainty of rage. You don't have to feel sorry for them, but hate is like cancer - it's all about knowing the warning signs and catching it early.

So, let's start here: What a human needs, above all else, is to matter. And mattering in 2017 is hard as shit. There are 100 million Americans who neither have jobs nor are looking for one. Of those who do work, only 36 percent say their job has meaning and significance (did you know that a low-paying, unstable job is actually more stressful than unemployment?). I guess there used to be pride in building a house or a car, or growing crops - creating something tangible - but now, the machines have those jobs and we're stuck serving coffee or moving numbers around a spreadsheet, counting down the days until the machines take those jobs, too.

Our generation has fewer close friends than previous generations and are less likely to have a sexual partner or children of our own. We trust each other less than we ever have. We need to matter, but we don't have people in our lives reminding us of that, so we compensate. I matter because I'm not [insert hateable stick figure here].

And I can't emphasize enough how much it doesn't actually make a difference what goes in those brackets. Reddit's Trump community The_Donald overlaps strongly with their now-banned Fat People Hate community and the anti-woman subreddit TheRedPill. Where you find articles railing on blacks, you'll find articles demonizing Jews, homosexuals, trans people hell, go to any right-wing site and notice their bitter loathing of vegans.

It's hard for most people to grasp how hate can be both arbitrary and murderous, but that's how the human mind works. Once you switch into that primitive Us vs. Them survival mode, the rationale becomes totally irrelevant. Remember that one of the world's oldest and most pervasive prejudices is against left-handed people. Skilled manipulators could pull out endless examples of how inherently dishonest and filthy those lefties were, and they always found an audience. That only sounds ridiculous until you realize how great it must have been to wake up every day and congratulate yourself for using your right hand, a.k.a. the hand you automatically used anyway.

If you haven't built anything you can be proud of - be it a house, career, family, or loving circle of friends - then you need to draw your pride from somewhere. Hate groups let you set the pride bar so low that you can swell with pride over the fact that you woke up this morning with a certain color skin and heterosexual urges, as if both were the result of diligent effort on your part. Imagine eating a delicious cheeseburger and congratulating yourself for having accomplished your noble goal of not being vegan.

1

But I Still Think The Good Guys Will Win

If you've come to the conclusion that the internet really didn't change anything because people are people and set in their beliefs, the facts say you're wrong. For instance, the internet era has been devastating for religion in the U.S.A., with the ranks of nonbelievers more than doubling just since 1990. In that same span, support for gay marriage went from 13 percent to 58 percent. Support for marijuana legalization, from 12 percent to 53 percent. I absolutely believe those abrupt changes happened because many Americans were coming in contact with their first atheists, uncloseted gay people, and admitted pot smokers and finding they weren't monsters. You can strap somebody to a chair and make them watch a thousand hours of PSAs about how this group or that is just like us, but it won't have the same impact as a single positive encounter with one of them. Dogma dies in the face of such experiences.

It's easy to think of the internet as a cesspool of anonymous harassers but it is mostly a constellation of tight-knit communities that overlap with others, bringing them together in unexpected ways. You've heard a lot of talk about online bubbles of like-minded people getting more and more extreme in the absence of opposition, but the reason we became so much more open-minded on some issues in the first place is that online communities forced us to mingle across demographics. We may all have joined a forum based on our Babylon 5 fandom, but we quickly realized some of the cool people we were talking to were the type we'd never have run into in our real-life neighborhoods (Wait, you're posting from Brazil? What time is it there?!?). When I was a kid, you'd hear about a deadly earthquake in Taiwan and briefly raise an eyebrow over your coffee. So sad. Today, you jump online and say, Wait, did they say Jiji? That's where Ironheart69 is from! Has anybody heard from her?

What I'm hoping is that what we're seeing now is the reaction to that, the loud rage of a racist realizing his sister is dating a damned Muslim, that his old college roommate turned out to be a trans woman, and that there are black people in horror movies who don't die. An ideology kicking and screaming as it is dragged out the door, the equivalent of segregationists blocking black children from their schools, knowing full well that theirs was a lost cause.

Over time, lots of those segregationists realized they were wrong, that their rage and the fear at its core were based on nothing. That will happen again. I think. I hope.

David Wong is the Executive Editor at Cracked. His new book, WHAT THE HELL DID I JUST READ, is available for preorder now at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Indiebound, iBooks, and Kobo.

For more from David, check out Some Brief, Friendly Advice About Race And Racism and 7 Reasons We're Quietly Letting Racists Win.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel, and check out Donald Trump Finally Embraces The Hitler Comparisons, and other videos you won't see on the site!

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Read more: http://www.cracked.com/blog/why-hate-doesnt-have-to-win/

[bradporter65-blog]

5 Things To Understand About Modern Hate Groups

Here's a popular right-wing meme that got spread around before the attack in Charlottesville:

So, here's what I want to ask anyone sharing that (or wearing it on a t-shirt - yes, they sell them): When we replace the stick figures with actual bleeding humans, does that change how you feel about it at all? (WARNING: Graphic fucking video):

It's not a rhetorical question. I think the answer to that will decide what happens next.

5

The Internet Could Have Been The Greatest Anti-Bigotry Tool In History

Bigotry is never about hating a real person. The target is always a perfectly hateable caricature we invent to avoid glimpsing the true enemy staring back at us from the mirror. It's a punching bag, a shape drawn around a bull's-eye. This is why so many racists have a real Black Friend they can hide behind - when they actually get to know one, a whole different part of their brain lights up (I mean, he's not even black to me! He's just Steve!). Do I have to point out the obvious, that their entire worldview would change if they could somehow get to know every minority the way they know their buddy? How many times have anti-immigration politicians and pundits gotten caught hiring illegals themselves? Well you see, my illegals are honest and do great work. Not like the rapey stick-figures on those T-shirts.

Lutz Bachmann/Twitter

I had secretly been hoping that the internet, social media, and smartphones would make it impossible to not put a real human face on those groups. In a connected world in which I can tell you what my cousin's coworkers considered eating for lunch yesterday, minorities can't remain abstractions. I was hoping that over time, smartphones would do to racism what they did to UFOs.

You remember UFOs, right? For a generation leading up to the 1990s, some fuzzy flying saucer turned up in the news every month. Now, when there are a thousand times more cameras around, the flying saucers have evaporated like smoke - belief in alien visitors plummeted by the mid-2000s. The myth became impossible to preserve in the face of evidence (or lack of it).

Read Next

3 Penis Tropes In Hollywood That You Never Noticed

Racism, likewise, is based on a myth - that these people aren't people at all, that they don't cry or bleed or want the same things we want, that fixing our discomfort is as simple as making them go away, somehow. Now we have the technology to see an event like Charlottesville in real-time from half a dozen angles; we can hear the screams, see first-responders desperately trying to resuscitate victims. We can get a mental image of what an ethnic cleansing would really look like - that same chaos, repeated millions of times. That's the truth behind the edgy frog memes and red-arm bands. Take it in, assholes.

It would be a wake-up call. That was the dream, anyway.

4

Yes, Cameras Do Change Minds

I'm known as a hopeful optimist, possibly having to do with being a white person who accidentally made a lot of money off of a story he originally wrote as a prank. But it's not like I just pulled this dream out of my ass - there's precedent for it.

The presence of cameras all but eliminated the American public's tolerance for military casualties, for example - we've completely built our foreign policy around it. America lost 100,000 troops in WWI, 400,000 in WWII, and almost 60,000 in Vietnam. That last one was the turning point - a flood of full-color footage of maimed soldiers and screaming civilians turned public opinion against the war overnight. The reality of war didn't change, but you can bet your ass that seeing it made all of the difference. We haven't had a comparable war since; Afghanistan saw a tiny fraction of those losses (2,400) and so did Iraq (4,500). Suddenly, soldiers' lives mattered - the myth of the consequence-free war went the way of the UFO.

Why in the hell did you think a horde of screaming Actual Nazis would have their hearts melted by the sight of dying protesters? you ask. If anything, they probably get off on it. After all, Americans don't seem to care about hundreds of thousands of bombed Iraqis.

But I'm not talking about the raging Nazis here - it's only the extreme fringe who'll walk around in public doing that shit, and some of them try to sheepishly talk their way out of it later. The systemic racism that exists in the world doesn't emanate from them, it flows from the comfortable indifference of the majority. The most incurable form of bigotry persists specifically because it doesn't feel like heat coursing through the veins - it feels like nothing at all. I was born in Trump Country and I only met a couple of people who openly called for black genocide, but knew dozens if not hundreds who simply thought society didn't need changing (and I agreed, at the time). We didn't want the stick figures to die, we just didn't think they needed help. What does a stick figure need food stamps for?

The latter are the ones I thought would be turned in this age of pervasive cameras and personal connections. It's easy for the comfortable casual racist (who, by the way, hates Nazis) to ignore a headline or pie charts about income inequality. It's harder to ignore a man bleeding in the driver's seat of his car while his young daughter and her mother sit helplessly next to him, wailing in anguish. I didn't think it would change overnight, but over the decades I thought these attitudes would be chiseled away one gut-wrenching video at a time. Do you see? He's not a fucking statistic. He bleeds. His family loved him just as much as your family loves you. Look.

3

But The Sword Swings Both Ways

Hey, did I mention that after years of decline, belief in UFOs has shot back up to its previous highs? The need to believe was always there, so others looking to fill that void simply adapted to the marketplace (If you think about it, the aliens would have cloaking technology that makes them invisible to cell phones!).

Now consider the fact that the Confederate statues the protesters were rallying around in Charlottesville aren't all 150-year-old relics. New ones are being built all the time (35 Confederate monuments have been added since 2000 in North Carolina alone - lots of them were built in the 1960s as backlash to the civil rights movement). They are, in other words, modern symbols erected by groups looking to change policy today. That's why there's a movement to take them down, and a bitter counter-movement to preserve them. It is only about preserving the past to the extent that it's about making current law conform to it.

The point is, if racism is a dying relic, it sure as hell doesn't feel like it. Oh, I'm not surprised that hate groups thrive in this era - a few charismatic sociopaths have always been able to cast a wide umbrella of influence and mass media has just amplified their reach. I mean, you've seen their memes. What I had hoped, though, was that society would be better at spotting them, quicker to see through their tricks. I often wonder how average German citizens would have reacted if camera phones had existed back then and somebody had leaked video from inside a concentration camp. But lots of German citizens did know about the concentration camps! Sure, but it's one thing to have a vague concept of eliminating Jews, another to actually see a wheelbarrow full of dead children. It would be meaningless to the true zealots, but most people aren't that.

And yet

2

Modern Society May Have Cultivated A Population Ripe For Hate

It's too easy to think of Nazis as a different species, like they were aliens who invaded from another planet. If you tell me we shouldn't humanize them, I say that humanizing them actually makes them scarier: They are not only human, but they are your motherfucking neighbors. After the war, German soldiers and officers went back home and got jobs - it's not like you blow up the mothership and the foot soldiers topple over. Likewise, your brother or uncle or daughter could join a hate group tomorrow and they would still be family. Some of the people reading this have had this exact thing happen.

Think about it: Even if the worst happens and 20 years from now we're in an actual shooting war with a new round of Nazis, it's not like we'll kill them all. No war ends that way; there'll be some kind of resolution and the combatants will take off their uniforms and the very next day they'll be next to you on the subway. If you want to stop that future, you have to start with understanding how Nazis are made, and how regular everyday folks get sucked in. Hate is a prickly shell humans grow around fear, a defense mechanism to replace the terror of the unknown with the cold certainty of rage. You don't have to feel sorry for them, but hate is like cancer - it's all about knowing the warning signs and catching it early.

So, let's start here: What a human needs, above all else, is to matter. And mattering in 2017 is hard as shit. There are 100 million Americans who neither have jobs nor are looking for one. Of those who do work, only 36 percent say their job has meaning and significance (did you know that a low-paying, unstable job is actually more stressful than unemployment?). I guess there used to be pride in building a house or a car, or growing crops - creating something tangible - but now, the machines have those jobs and we're stuck serving coffee or moving numbers around a spreadsheet, counting down the days until the machines take those jobs, too.

Our generation has fewer close friends than previous generations and are less likely to have a sexual partner or children of our own. We trust each other less than we ever have. We need to matter, but we don't have people in our lives reminding us of that, so we compensate. I matter because I'm not [insert hateable stick figure here].

And I can't emphasize enough how much it doesn't actually make a difference what goes in those brackets. Reddit's Trump community The_Donald overlaps strongly with their now-banned Fat People Hate community and the anti-woman subreddit TheRedPill. Where you find articles railing on blacks, you'll find articles demonizing Jews, homosexuals, trans people hell, go to any right-wing site and notice their bitter loathing of vegans.

It's hard for most people to grasp how hate can be both arbitrary and murderous, but that's how the human mind works. Once you switch into that primitive Us vs. Them survival mode, the rationale becomes totally irrelevant. Remember that one of the world's oldest and most pervasive prejudices is against left-handed people. Skilled manipulators could pull out endless examples of how inherently dishonest and filthy those lefties were, and they always found an audience. That only sounds ridiculous until you realize how great it must have been to wake up every day and congratulate yourself for using your right hand, a.k.a. the hand you automatically used anyway.

If you haven't built anything you can be proud of - be it a house, career, family, or loving circle of friends - then you need to draw your pride from somewhere. Hate groups let you set the pride bar so low that you can swell with pride over the fact that you woke up this morning with a certain color skin and heterosexual urges, as if both were the result of diligent effort on your part. Imagine eating a delicious cheeseburger and congratulating yourself for having accomplished your noble goal of not being vegan.

1

But I Still Think The Good Guys Will Win

If you've come to the conclusion that the internet really didn't change anything because people are people and set in their beliefs, the facts say you're wrong. For instance, the internet era has been devastating for religion in the U.S.A., with the ranks of nonbelievers more than doubling just since 1990. In that same span, support for gay marriage went from 13 percent to 58 percent. Support for marijuana legalization, from 12 percent to 53 percent. I absolutely believe those abrupt changes happened because many Americans were coming in contact with their first atheists, uncloseted gay people, and admitted pot smokers and finding they weren't monsters. You can strap somebody to a chair and make them watch a thousand hours of PSAs about how this group or that is just like us, but it won't have the same impact as a single positive encounter with one of them. Dogma dies in the face of such experiences.

It's easy to think of the internet as a cesspool of anonymous harassers but it is mostly a constellation of tight-knit communities that overlap with others, bringing them together in unexpected ways. You've heard a lot of talk about online bubbles of like-minded people getting more and more extreme in the absence of opposition, but the reason we became so much more open-minded on some issues in the first place is that online communities forced us to mingle across demographics. We may all have joined a forum based on our Babylon 5 fandom, but we quickly realized some of the cool people we were talking to were the type we'd never have run into in our real-life neighborhoods (Wait, you're posting from Brazil? What time is it there?!?). When I was a kid, you'd hear about a deadly earthquake in Taiwan and briefly raise an eyebrow over your coffee. So sad. Today, you jump online and say, Wait, did they say Jiji? That's where Ironheart69 is from! Has anybody heard from her?

What I'm hoping is that what we're seeing now is the reaction to that, the loud rage of a racist realizing his sister is dating a damned Muslim, that his old college roommate turned out to be a trans woman, and that there are black people in horror movies who don't die. An ideology kicking and screaming as it is dragged out the door, the equivalent of segregationists blocking black children from their schools, knowing full well that theirs was a lost cause.

Over time, lots of those segregationists realized they were wrong, that their rage and the fear at its core were based on nothing. That will happen again. I think. I hope.

David Wong is the Executive Editor at Cracked. His new book, WHAT THE HELL DID I JUST READ, is available for preorder now at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Indiebound, iBooks, and Kobo.

For more from David, check out Some Brief, Friendly Advice About Race And Racism and 7 Reasons We're Quietly Letting Racists Win.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel, and check out Donald Trump Finally Embraces The Hitler Comparisons, and other videos you won't see on the site!

Follow us on Facebook, and we'll follow you everywhere.

Get intimate with our new podcast Cracked Gets Personal . Subscribe for great episodes like The Most Insane Things We Saw In Embergency Medicine and 3 Wild Stories from Inside the Opiate Epidemic, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Read more: http://www.cracked.com/blog/why-hate-doesnt-have-to-win/

[pedrowells24-blog]

5 Things To Understand About Modern Hate Groups

Here's a popular right-wing meme that got spread around before the attack in Charlottesville:

So, here's what I want to ask anyone sharing that (or wearing it on a t-shirt - yes, they sell them): When we replace the stick figures with actual bleeding humans, does that change how you feel about it at all? (WARNING: Graphic fucking video):

It's not a rhetorical question. I think the answer to that will decide what happens next.

5

The Internet Could Have Been The Greatest Anti-Bigotry Tool In History

Bigotry is never about hating a real person. The target is always a perfectly hateable caricature we invent to avoid glimpsing the true enemy staring back at us from the mirror. It's a punching bag, a shape drawn around a bull's-eye. This is why so many racists have a real Black Friend they can hide behind - when they actually get to know one, a whole different part of their brain lights up (I mean, he's not even black to me! He's just Steve!). Do I have to point out the obvious, that their entire worldview would change if they could somehow get to know every minority the way they know their buddy? How many times have anti-immigration politicians and pundits gotten caught hiring illegals themselves? Well you see, my illegals are honest and do great work. Not like the rapey stick-figures on those T-shirts.

Lutz Bachmann/Twitter

I had secretly been hoping that the internet, social media, and smartphones would make it impossible to not put a real human face on those groups. In a connected world in which I can tell you what my cousin's coworkers considered eating for lunch yesterday, minorities can't remain abstractions. I was hoping that over time, smartphones would do to racism what they did to UFOs.

You remember UFOs, right? For a generation leading up to the 1990s, some fuzzy flying saucer turned up in the news every month. Now, when there are a thousand times more cameras around, the flying saucers have evaporated like smoke - belief in alien visitors plummeted by the mid-2000s. The myth became impossible to preserve in the face of evidence (or lack of it).

Read Next

3 Penis Tropes In Hollywood That You Never Noticed

Racism, likewise, is based on a myth - that these people aren't people at all, that they don't cry or bleed or want the same things we want, that fixing our discomfort is as simple as making them go away, somehow. Now we have the technology to see an event like Charlottesville in real-time from half a dozen angles; we can hear the screams, see first-responders desperately trying to resuscitate victims. We can get a mental image of what an ethnic cleansing would really look like - that same chaos, repeated millions of times. That's the truth behind the edgy frog memes and red-arm bands. Take it in, assholes.

It would be a wake-up call. That was the dream, anyway.

4

Yes, Cameras Do Change Minds

I'm known as a hopeful optimist, possibly having to do with being a white person who accidentally made a lot of money off of a story he originally wrote as a prank. But it's not like I just pulled this dream out of my ass - there's precedent for it.

The presence of cameras all but eliminated the American public's tolerance for military casualties, for example - we've completely built our foreign policy around it. America lost 100,000 troops in WWI, 400,000 in WWII, and almost 60,000 in Vietnam. That last one was the turning point - a flood of full-color footage of maimed soldiers and screaming civilians turned public opinion against the war overnight. The reality of war didn't change, but you can bet your ass that seeing it made all of the difference. We haven't had a comparable war since; Afghanistan saw a tiny fraction of those losses (2,400) and so did Iraq (4,500). Suddenly, soldiers' lives mattered - the myth of the consequence-free war went the way of the UFO.

Why in the hell did you think a horde of screaming Actual Nazis would have their hearts melted by the sight of dying protesters? you ask. If anything, they probably get off on it. After all, Americans don't seem to care about hundreds of thousands of bombed Iraqis.

But I'm not talking about the raging Nazis here - it's only the extreme fringe who'll walk around in public doing that shit, and some of them try to sheepishly talk their way out of it later. The systemic racism that exists in the world doesn't emanate from them, it flows from the comfortable indifference of the majority. The most incurable form of bigotry persists specifically because it doesn't feel like heat coursing through the veins - it feels like nothing at all. I was born in Trump Country and I only met a couple of people who openly called for black genocide, but knew dozens if not hundreds who simply thought society didn't need changing (and I agreed, at the time). We didn't want the stick figures to die, we just didn't think they needed help. What does a stick figure need food stamps for?

The latter are the ones I thought would be turned in this age of pervasive cameras and personal connections. It's easy for the comfortable casual racist (who, by the way, hates Nazis) to ignore a headline or pie charts about income inequality. It's harder to ignore a man bleeding in the driver's seat of his car while his young daughter and her mother sit helplessly next to him, wailing in anguish. I didn't think it would change overnight, but over the decades I thought these attitudes would be chiseled away one gut-wrenching video at a time. Do you see? He's not a fucking statistic. He bleeds. His family loved him just as much as your family loves you. Look.

3

But The Sword Swings Both Ways

Hey, did I mention that after years of decline, belief in UFOs has shot back up to its previous highs? The need to believe was always there, so others looking to fill that void simply adapted to the marketplace (If you think about it, the aliens would have cloaking technology that makes them invisible to cell phones!).

Now consider the fact that the Confederate statues the protesters were rallying around in Charlottesville aren't all 150-year-old relics. New ones are being built all the time (35 Confederate monuments have been added since 2000 in North Carolina alone - lots of them were built in the 1960s as backlash to the civil rights movement). They are, in other words, modern symbols erected by groups looking to change policy today. That's why there's a movement to take them down, and a bitter counter-movement to preserve them. It is only about preserving the past to the extent that it's about making current law conform to it.

The point is, if racism is a dying relic, it sure as hell doesn't feel like it. Oh, I'm not surprised that hate groups thrive in this era - a few charismatic sociopaths have always been able to cast a wide umbrella of influence and mass media has just amplified their reach. I mean, you've seen their memes. What I had hoped, though, was that society would be better at spotting them, quicker to see through their tricks. I often wonder how average German citizens would have reacted if camera phones had existed back then and somebody had leaked video from inside a concentration camp. But lots of German citizens did know about the concentration camps! Sure, but it's one thing to have a vague concept of eliminating Jews, another to actually see a wheelbarrow full of dead children. It would be meaningless to the true zealots, but most people aren't that.

And yet

2

Modern Society May Have Cultivated A Population Ripe For Hate

It's too easy to think of Nazis as a different species, like they were aliens who invaded from another planet. If you tell me we shouldn't humanize them, I say that humanizing them actually makes them scarier: They are not only human, but they are your motherfucking neighbors. After the war, German soldiers and officers went back home and got jobs - it's not like you blow up the mothership and the foot soldiers topple over. Likewise, your brother or uncle or daughter could join a hate group tomorrow and they would still be family. Some of the people reading this have had this exact thing happen.

Think about it: Even if the worst happens and 20 years from now we're in an actual shooting war with a new round of Nazis, it's not like we'll kill them all. No war ends that way; there'll be some kind of resolution and the combatants will take off their uniforms and the very next day they'll be next to you on the subway. If you want to stop that future, you have to start with understanding how Nazis are made, and how regular everyday folks get sucked in. Hate is a prickly shell humans grow around fear, a defense mechanism to replace the terror of the unknown with the cold certainty of rage. You don't have to feel sorry for them, but hate is like cancer - it's all about knowing the warning signs and catching it early.

So, let's start here: What a human needs, above all else, is to matter. And mattering in 2017 is hard as shit. There are 100 million Americans who neither have jobs nor are looking for one. Of those who do work, only 36 percent say their job has meaning and significance (did you know that a low-paying, unstable job is actually more stressful than unemployment?). I guess there used to be pride in building a house or a car, or growing crops - creating something tangible - but now, the machines have those jobs and we're stuck serving coffee or moving numbers around a spreadsheet, counting down the days until the machines take those jobs, too.

Our generation has fewer close friends than previous generations and are less likely to have a sexual partner or children of our own. We trust each other less than we ever have. We need to matter, but we don't have people in our lives reminding us of that, so we compensate. I matter because I'm not [insert hateable stick figure here].

And I can't emphasize enough how much it doesn't actually make a difference what goes in those brackets. Reddit's Trump community The_Donald overlaps strongly with their now-banned Fat People Hate community and the anti-woman subreddit TheRedPill. Where you find articles railing on blacks, you'll find articles demonizing Jews, homosexuals, trans people hell, go to any right-wing site and notice their bitter loathing of vegans.

It's hard for most people to grasp how hate can be both arbitrary and murderous, but that's how the human mind works. Once you switch into that primitive Us vs. Them survival mode, the rationale becomes totally irrelevant. Remember that one of the world's oldest and most pervasive prejudices is against left-handed people. Skilled manipulators could pull out endless examples of how inherently dishonest and filthy those lefties were, and they always found an audience. That only sounds ridiculous until you realize how great it must have been to wake up every day and congratulate yourself for using your right hand, a.k.a. the hand you automatically used anyway.

If you haven't built anything you can be proud of - be it a house, career, family, or loving circle of friends - then you need to draw your pride from somewhere. Hate groups let you set the pride bar so low that you can swell with pride over the fact that you woke up this morning with a certain color skin and heterosexual urges, as if both were the result of diligent effort on your part. Imagine eating a delicious cheeseburger and congratulating yourself for having accomplished your noble goal of not being vegan.

1

But I Still Think The Good Guys Will Win

If you've come to the conclusion that the internet really didn't change anything because people are people and set in their beliefs, the facts say you're wrong. For instance, the internet era has been devastating for religion in the U.S.A., with the ranks of nonbelievers more than doubling just since 1990. In that same span, support for gay marriage went from 13 percent to 58 percent. Support for marijuana legalization, from 12 percent to 53 percent. I absolutely believe those abrupt changes happened because many Americans were coming in contact with their first atheists, uncloseted gay people, and admitted pot smokers and finding they weren't monsters. You can strap somebody to a chair and make them watch a thousand hours of PSAs about how this group or that is just like us, but it won't have the same impact as a single positive encounter with one of them. Dogma dies in the face of such experiences.

It's easy to think of the internet as a cesspool of anonymous harassers but it is mostly a constellation of tight-knit communities that overlap with others, bringing them together in unexpected ways. You've heard a lot of talk about online bubbles of like-minded people getting more and more extreme in the absence of opposition, but the reason we became so much more open-minded on some issues in the first place is that online communities forced us to mingle across demographics. We may all have joined a forum based on our Babylon 5 fandom, but we quickly realized some of the cool people we were talking to were the type we'd never have run into in our real-life neighborhoods (Wait, you're posting from Brazil? What time is it there?!?). When I was a kid, you'd hear about a deadly earthquake in Taiwan and briefly raise an eyebrow over your coffee. So sad. Today, you jump online and say, Wait, did they say Jiji? That's where Ironheart69 is from! Has anybody heard from her?

What I'm hoping is that what we're seeing now is the reaction to that, the loud rage of a racist realizing his sister is dating a damned Muslim, that his old college roommate turned out to be a trans woman, and that there are black people in horror movies who don't die. An ideology kicking and screaming as it is dragged out the door, the equivalent of segregationists blocking black children from their schools, knowing full well that theirs was a lost cause.

Over time, lots of those segregationists realized they were wrong, that their rage and the fear at its core were based on nothing. That will happen again. I think. I hope.

David Wong is the Executive Editor at Cracked. His new book, WHAT THE HELL DID I JUST READ, is available for preorder now at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Indiebound, iBooks, and Kobo.

For more from David, check out Some Brief, Friendly Advice About Race And Racism and 7 Reasons We're Quietly Letting Racists Win.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel, and check out Donald Trump Finally Embraces The Hitler Comparisons, and other videos you won't see on the site!

Follow us on Facebook, and we'll follow you everywhere.

Get intimate with our new podcast Cracked Gets Personal . Subscribe for great episodes like The Most Insane Things We Saw In Embergency Medicine and 3 Wild Stories from Inside the Opiate Epidemic, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Read more: http://www.cracked.com/blog/why-hate-doesnt-have-to-win/

[gaylemccoy972-blog]

5 Things To Understand About Modern Hate Groups

Here's a popular right-wing meme that got spread around before the attack in Charlottesville:

So, here's what I want to ask anyone sharing that (or wearing it on a t-shirt - yes, they sell them): When we replace the stick figures with actual bleeding humans, does that change how you feel about it at all? (WARNING: Graphic fucking video):

It's not a rhetorical question. I think the answer to that will decide what happens next.

5

The Internet Could Have Been The Greatest Anti-Bigotry Tool In History

Bigotry is never about hating a real person. The target is always a perfectly hateable caricature we invent to avoid glimpsing the true enemy staring back at us from the mirror. It's a punching bag, a shape drawn around a bull's-eye. This is why so many racists have a real Black Friend they can hide behind - when they actually get to know one, a whole different part of their brain lights up (I mean, he's not even black to me! He's just Steve!). Do I have to point out the obvious, that their entire worldview would change if they could somehow get to know every minority the way they know their buddy? How many times have anti-immigration politicians and pundits gotten caught hiring illegals themselves? Well you see, my illegals are honest and do great work. Not like the rapey stick-figures on those T-shirts.

Lutz Bachmann/Twitter

I had secretly been hoping that the internet, social media, and smartphones would make it impossible to not put a real human face on those groups. In a connected world in which I can tell you what my cousin's coworkers considered eating for lunch yesterday, minorities can't remain abstractions. I was hoping that over time, smartphones would do to racism what they did to UFOs.

You remember UFOs, right? For a generation leading up to the 1990s, some fuzzy flying saucer turned up in the news every month. Now, when there are a thousand times more cameras around, the flying saucers have evaporated like smoke - belief in alien visitors plummeted by the mid-2000s. The myth became impossible to preserve in the face of evidence (or lack of it).

Read Next

3 Penis Tropes In Hollywood That You Never Noticed

Racism, likewise, is based on a myth - that these people aren't people at all, that they don't cry or bleed or want the same things we want, that fixing our discomfort is as simple as making them go away, somehow. Now we have the technology to see an event like Charlottesville in real-time from half a dozen angles; we can hear the screams, see first-responders desperately trying to resuscitate victims. We can get a mental image of what an ethnic cleansing would really look like - that same chaos, repeated millions of times. That's the truth behind the edgy frog memes and red-arm bands. Take it in, assholes.

It would be a wake-up call. That was the dream, anyway.

4

Yes, Cameras Do Change Minds

I'm known as a hopeful optimist, possibly having to do with being a white person who accidentally made a lot of money off of a story he originally wrote as a prank. But it's not like I just pulled this dream out of my ass - there's precedent for it.

The presence of cameras all but eliminated the American public's tolerance for military casualties, for example - we've completely built our foreign policy around it. America lost 100,000 troops in WWI, 400,000 in WWII, and almost 60,000 in Vietnam. That last one was the turning point - a flood of full-color footage of maimed soldiers and screaming civilians turned public opinion against the war overnight. The reality of war didn't change, but you can bet your ass that seeing it made all of the difference. We haven't had a comparable war since; Afghanistan saw a tiny fraction of those losses (2,400) and so did Iraq (4,500). Suddenly, soldiers' lives mattered - the myth of the consequence-free war went the way of the UFO.

Why in the hell did you think a horde of screaming Actual Nazis would have their hearts melted by the sight of dying protesters? you ask. If anything, they probably get off on it. After all, Americans don't seem to care about hundreds of thousands of bombed Iraqis.

But I'm not talking about the raging Nazis here - it's only the extreme fringe who'll walk around in public doing that shit, and some of them try to sheepishly talk their way out of it later. The systemic racism that exists in the world doesn't emanate from them, it flows from the comfortable indifference of the majority. The most incurable form of bigotry persists specifically because it doesn't feel like heat coursing through the veins - it feels like nothing at all. I was born in Trump Country and I only met a couple of people who openly called for black genocide, but knew dozens if not hundreds who simply thought society didn't need changing (and I agreed, at the time). We didn't want the stick figures to die, we just didn't think they needed help. What does a stick figure need food stamps for?

The latter are the ones I thought would be turned in this age of pervasive cameras and personal connections. It's easy for the comfortable casual racist (who, by the way, hates Nazis) to ignore a headline or pie charts about income inequality. It's harder to ignore a man bleeding in the driver's seat of his car while his young daughter and her mother sit helplessly next to him, wailing in anguish. I didn't think it would change overnight, but over the decades I thought these attitudes would be chiseled away one gut-wrenching video at a time. Do you see? He's not a fucking statistic. He bleeds. His family loved him just as much as your family loves you. Look.

3

But The Sword Swings Both Ways

Hey, did I mention that after years of decline, belief in UFOs has shot back up to its previous highs? The need to believe was always there, so others looking to fill that void simply adapted to the marketplace (If you think about it, the aliens would have cloaking technology that makes them invisible to cell phones!).

Now consider the fact that the Confederate statues the protesters were rallying around in Charlottesville aren't all 150-year-old relics. New ones are being built all the time (35 Confederate monuments have been added since 2000 in North Carolina alone - lots of them were built in the 1960s as backlash to the civil rights movement). They are, in other words, modern symbols erected by groups looking to change policy today. That's why there's a movement to take them down, and a bitter counter-movement to preserve them. It is only about preserving the past to the extent that it's about making current law conform to it.

The point is, if racism is a dying relic, it sure as hell doesn't feel like it. Oh, I'm not surprised that hate groups thrive in this era - a few charismatic sociopaths have always been able to cast a wide umbrella of influence and mass media has just amplified their reach. I mean, you've seen their memes. What I had hoped, though, was that society would be better at spotting them, quicker to see through their tricks. I often wonder how average German citizens would have reacted if camera phones had existed back then and somebody had leaked video from inside a concentration camp. But lots of German citizens did know about the concentration camps! Sure, but it's one thing to have a vague concept of eliminating Jews, another to actually see a wheelbarrow full of dead children. It would be meaningless to the true zealots, but most people aren't that.

And yet

2

Modern Society May Have Cultivated A Population Ripe For Hate

It's too easy to think of Nazis as a different species, like they were aliens who invaded from another planet. If you tell me we shouldn't humanize them, I say that humanizing them actually makes them scarier: They are not only human, but they are your motherfucking neighbors. After the war, German soldiers and officers went back home and got jobs - it's not like you blow up the mothership and the foot soldiers topple over. Likewise, your brother or uncle or daughter could join a hate group tomorrow and they would still be family. Some of the people reading this have had this exact thing happen.

Think about it: Even if the worst happens and 20 years from now we're in an actual shooting war with a new round of Nazis, it's not like we'll kill them all. No war ends that way; there'll be some kind of resolution and the combatants will take off their uniforms and the very next day they'll be next to you on the subway. If you want to stop that future, you have to start with understanding how Nazis are made, and how regular everyday folks get sucked in. Hate is a prickly shell humans grow around fear, a defense mechanism to replace the terror of the unknown with the cold certainty of rage. You don't have to feel sorry for them, but hate is like cancer - it's all about knowing the warning signs and catching it early.

So, let's start here: What a human needs, above all else, is to matter. And mattering in 2017 is hard as shit. There are 100 million Americans who neither have jobs nor are looking for one. Of those who do work, only 36 percent say their job has meaning and significance (did you know that a low-paying, unstable job is actually more stressful than unemployment?). I guess there used to be pride in building a house or a car, or growing crops - creating something tangible - but now, the machines have those jobs and we're stuck serving coffee or moving numbers around a spreadsheet, counting down the days until the machines take those jobs, too.

Our generation has fewer close friends than previous generations and are less likely to have a sexual partner or children of our own. We trust each other less than we ever have. We need to matter, but we don't have people in our lives reminding us of that, so we compensate. I matter because I'm not [insert hateable stick figure here].

And I can't emphasize enough how much it doesn't actually make a difference what goes in those brackets. Reddit's Trump community The_Donald overlaps strongly with their now-banned Fat People Hate community and the anti-woman subreddit TheRedPill. Where you find articles railing on blacks, you'll find articles demonizing Jews, homosexuals, trans people hell, go to any right-wing site and notice their bitter loathing of vegans.

It's hard for most people to grasp how hate can be both arbitrary and murderous, but that's how the human mind works. Once you switch into that primitive Us vs. Them survival mode, the rationale becomes totally irrelevant. Remember that one of the world's oldest and most pervasive prejudices is against left-handed people. Skilled manipulators could pull out endless examples of how inherently dishonest and filthy those lefties were, and they always found an audience. That only sounds ridiculous until you realize how great it must have been to wake up every day and congratulate yourself for using your right hand, a.k.a. the hand you automatically used anyway.

If you haven't built anything you can be proud of - be it a house, career, family, or loving circle of friends - then you need to draw your pride from somewhere. Hate groups let you set the pride bar so low that you can swell with pride over the fact that you woke up this morning with a certain color skin and heterosexual urges, as if both were the result of diligent effort on your part. Imagine eating a delicious cheeseburger and congratulating yourself for having accomplished your noble goal of not being vegan.

1

But I Still Think The Good Guys Will Win

If you've come to the conclusion that the internet really didn't change anything because people are people and set in their beliefs, the facts say you're wrong. For instance, the internet era has been devastating for religion in the U.S.A., with the ranks of nonbelievers more than doubling just since 1990. In that same span, support for gay marriage went from 13 percent to 58 percent. Support for marijuana legalization, from 12 percent to 53 percent. I absolutely believe those abrupt changes happened because many Americans were coming in contact with their first atheists, uncloseted gay people, and admitted pot smokers and finding they weren't monsters. You can strap somebody to a chair and make them watch a thousand hours of PSAs about how this group or that is just like us, but it won't have the same impact as a single positive encounter with one of them. Dogma dies in the face of such experiences.

It's easy to think of the internet as a cesspool of anonymous harassers but it is mostly a constellation of tight-knit communities that overlap with others, bringing them together in unexpected ways. You've heard a lot of talk about online bubbles of like-minded people getting more and more extreme in the absence of opposition, but the reason we became so much more open-minded on some issues in the first place is that online communities forced us to mingle across demographics. We may all have joined a forum based on our Babylon 5 fandom, but we quickly realized some of the cool people we were talking to were the type we'd never have run into in our real-life neighborhoods (Wait, you're posting from Brazil? What time is it there?!?). When I was a kid, you'd hear about a deadly earthquake in Taiwan and briefly raise an eyebrow over your coffee. So sad. Today, you jump online and say, Wait, did they say Jiji? That's where Ironheart69 is from! Has anybody heard from her?

What I'm hoping is that what we're seeing now is the reaction to that, the loud rage of a racist realizing his sister is dating a damned Muslim, that his old college roommate turned out to be a trans woman, and that there are black people in horror movies who don't die. An ideology kicking and screaming as it is dragged out the door, the equivalent of segregationists blocking black children from their schools, knowing full well that theirs was a lost cause.

Over time, lots of those segregationists realized they were wrong, that their rage and the fear at its core were based on nothing. That will happen again. I think. I hope.

David Wong is the Executive Editor at Cracked. His new book, WHAT THE HELL DID I JUST READ, is available for preorder now at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Indiebound, iBooks, and Kobo.

For more from David, check out Some Brief, Friendly Advice About Race And Racism and 7 Reasons We're Quietly Letting Racists Win.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel, and check out Donald Trump Finally Embraces The Hitler Comparisons, and other videos you won't see on the site!

Follow us on Facebook, and we'll follow you everywhere.

Get intimate with our new podcast Cracked Gets Personal . Subscribe for great episodes like The Most Insane Things We Saw In Embergency Medicine and 3 Wild Stories from Inside the Opiate Epidemic, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Read more: http://www.cracked.com/blog/why-hate-doesnt-have-to-win/

[pedrowells24-blog]

5 Things To Understand About Modern Hate Groups

Here's a popular right-wing meme that got spread around before the attack in Charlottesville:

So, here's what I want to ask anyone sharing that (or wearing it on a t-shirt - yes, they sell them): When we replace the stick figures with actual bleeding humans, does that change how you feel about it at all? (WARNING: Graphic fucking video):

It's not a rhetorical question. I think the answer to that will decide what happens next.

5

The Internet Could Have Been The Greatest Anti-Bigotry Tool In History

Bigotry is never about hating a real person. The target is always a perfectly hateable caricature we invent to avoid glimpsing the true enemy staring back at us from the mirror. It's a punching bag, a shape drawn around a bull's-eye. This is why so many racists have a real Black Friend they can hide behind - when they actually get to know one, a whole different part of their brain lights up (I mean, he's not even black to me! He's just Steve!). Do I have to point out the obvious, that their entire worldview would change if they could somehow get to know every minority the way they know their buddy? How many times have anti-immigration politicians and pundits gotten caught hiring illegals themselves? Well you see, my illegals are honest and do great work. Not like the rapey stick-figures on those T-shirts.

Lutz Bachmann/Twitter

I had secretly been hoping that the internet, social media, and smartphones would make it impossible to not put a real human face on those groups. In a connected world in which I can tell you what my cousin's coworkers considered eating for lunch yesterday, minorities can't remain abstractions. I was hoping that over time, smartphones would do to racism what they did to UFOs.

You remember UFOs, right? For a generation leading up to the 1990s, some fuzzy flying saucer turned up in the news every month. Now, when there are a thousand times more cameras around, the flying saucers have evaporated like smoke - belief in alien visitors plummeted by the mid-2000s. The myth became impossible to preserve in the face of evidence (or lack of it).

Read Next

3 Penis Tropes In Hollywood That You Never Noticed

Racism, likewise, is based on a myth - that these people aren't people at all, that they don't cry or bleed or want the same things we want, that fixing our discomfort is as simple as making them go away, somehow. Now we have the technology to see an event like Charlottesville in real-time from half a dozen angles; we can hear the screams, see first-responders desperately trying to resuscitate victims. We can get a mental image of what an ethnic cleansing would really look like - that same chaos, repeated millions of times. That's the truth behind the edgy frog memes and red-arm bands. Take it in, assholes.

It would be a wake-up call. That was the dream, anyway.

4

Yes, Cameras Do Change Minds

I'm known as a hopeful optimist, possibly having to do with being a white person who accidentally made a lot of money off of a story he originally wrote as a prank. But it's not like I just pulled this dream out of my ass - there's precedent for it.

The presence of cameras all but eliminated the American public's tolerance for military casualties, for example - we've completely built our foreign policy around it. America lost 100,000 troops in WWI, 400,000 in WWII, and almost 60,000 in Vietnam. That last one was the turning point - a flood of full-color footage of maimed soldiers and screaming civilians turned public opinion against the war overnight. The reality of war didn't change, but you can bet your ass that seeing it made all of the difference. We haven't had a comparable war since; Afghanistan saw a tiny fraction of those losses (2,400) and so did Iraq (4,500). Suddenly, soldiers' lives mattered - the myth of the consequence-free war went the way of the UFO.

Why in the hell did you think a horde of screaming Actual Nazis would have their hearts melted by the sight of dying protesters? you ask. If anything, they probably get off on it. After all, Americans don't seem to care about hundreds of thousands of bombed Iraqis.

But I'm not talking about the raging Nazis here - it's only the extreme fringe who'll walk around in public doing that shit, and some of them try to sheepishly talk their way out of it later. The systemic racism that exists in the world doesn't emanate from them, it flows from the comfortable indifference of the majority. The most incurable form of bigotry persists specifically because it doesn't feel like heat coursing through the veins - it feels like nothing at all. I was born in Trump Country and I only met a couple of people who openly called for black genocide, but knew dozens if not hundreds who simply thought society didn't need changing (and I agreed, at the time). We didn't want the stick figures to die, we just didn't think they needed help. What does a stick figure need food stamps for?

The latter are the ones I thought would be turned in this age of pervasive cameras and personal connections. It's easy for the comfortable casual racist (who, by the way, hates Nazis) to ignore a headline or pie charts about income inequality. It's harder to ignore a man bleeding in the driver's seat of his car while his young daughter and her mother sit helplessly next to him, wailing in anguish. I didn't think it would change overnight, but over the decades I thought these attitudes would be chiseled away one gut-wrenching video at a time. Do you see? He's not a fucking statistic. He bleeds. His family loved him just as much as your family loves you. Look.

3

But The Sword Swings Both Ways

Hey, did I mention that after years of decline, belief in UFOs has shot back up to its previous highs? The need to believe was always there, so others looking to fill that void simply adapted to the marketplace (If you think about it, the aliens would have cloaking technology that makes them invisible to cell phones!).

Now consider the fact that the Confederate statues the protesters were rallying around in Charlottesville aren't all 150-year-old relics. New ones are being built all the time (35 Confederate monuments have been added since 2000 in North Carolina alone - lots of them were built in the 1960s as backlash to the civil rights movement). They are, in other words, modern symbols erected by groups looking to change policy today. That's why there's a movement to take them down, and a bitter counter-movement to preserve them. It is only about preserving the past to the extent that it's about making current law conform to it.

The point is, if racism is a dying relic, it sure as hell doesn't feel like it. Oh, I'm not surprised that hate groups thrive in this era - a few charismatic sociopaths have always been able to cast a wide umbrella of influence and mass media has just amplified their reach. I mean, you've seen their memes. What I had hoped, though, was that society would be better at spotting them, quicker to see through their tricks. I often wonder how average German citizens would have reacted if camera phones had existed back then and somebody had leaked video from inside a concentration camp. But lots of German citizens did know about the concentration camps! Sure, but it's one thing to have a vague concept of eliminating Jews, another to actually see a wheelbarrow full of dead children. It would be meaningless to the true zealots, but most people aren't that.

And yet

2

Modern Society May Have Cultivated A Population Ripe For Hate

It's too easy to think of Nazis as a different species, like they were aliens who invaded from another planet. If you tell me we shouldn't humanize them, I say that humanizing them actually makes them scarier: They are not only human, but they are your motherfucking neighbors. After the war, German soldiers and officers went back home and got jobs - it's not like you blow up the mothership and the foot soldiers topple over. Likewise, your brother or uncle or daughter could join a hate group tomorrow and they would still be family. Some of the people reading this have had this exact thing happen.

Think about it: Even if the worst happens and 20 years from now we're in an actual shooting war with a new round of Nazis, it's not like we'll kill them all. No war ends that way; there'll be some kind of resolution and the combatants will take off their uniforms and the very next day they'll be next to you on the subway. If you want to stop that future, you have to start with understanding how Nazis are made, and how regular everyday folks get sucked in. Hate is a prickly shell humans grow around fear, a defense mechanism to replace the terror of the unknown with the cold certainty of rage. You don't have to feel sorry for them, but hate is like cancer - it's all about knowing the warning signs and catching it early.

So, let's start here: What a human needs, above all else, is to matter. And mattering in 2017 is hard as shit. There are 100 million Americans who neither have jobs nor are looking for one. Of those who do work, only 36 percent say their job has meaning and significance (did you know that a low-paying, unstable job is actually more stressful than unemployment?). I guess there used to be pride in building a house or a car, or growing crops - creating something tangible - but now, the machines have those jobs and we're stuck serving coffee or moving numbers around a spreadsheet, counting down the days until the machines take those jobs, too.

Our generation has fewer close friends than previous generations and are less likely to have a sexual partner or children of our own. We trust each other less than we ever have. We need to matter, but we don't have people in our lives reminding us of that, so we compensate. I matter because I'm not [insert hateable stick figure here].

And I can't emphasize enough how much it doesn't actually make a difference what goes in those brackets. Reddit's Trump community The_Donald overlaps strongly with their now-banned Fat People Hate community and the anti-woman subreddit TheRedPill. Where you find articles railing on blacks, you'll find articles demonizing Jews, homosexuals, trans people hell, go to any right-wing site and notice their bitter loathing of vegans.

It's hard for most people to grasp how hate can be both arbitrary and murderous, but that's how the human mind works. Once you switch into that primitive Us vs. Them survival mode, the rationale becomes totally irrelevant. Remember that one of the world's oldest and most pervasive prejudices is against left-handed people. Skilled manipulators could pull out endless examples of how inherently dishonest and filthy those lefties were, and they always found an audience. That only sounds ridiculous until you realize how great it must have been to wake up every day and congratulate yourself for using your right hand, a.k.a. the hand you automatically used anyway.

If you haven't built anything you can be proud of - be it a house, career, family, or loving circle of friends - then you need to draw your pride from somewhere. Hate groups let you set the pride bar so low that you can swell with pride over the fact that you woke up this morning with a certain color skin and heterosexual urges, as if both were the result of diligent effort on your part. Imagine eating a delicious cheeseburger and congratulating yourself for having accomplished your noble goal of not being vegan.

1

But I Still Think The Good Guys Will Win

If you've come to the conclusion that the internet really didn't change anything because people are people and set in their beliefs, the facts say you're wrong. For instance, the internet era has been devastating for religion in the U.S.A., with the ranks of nonbelievers more than doubling just since 1990. In that same span, support for gay marriage went from 13 percent to 58 percent. Support for marijuana legalization, from 12 percent to 53 percent. I absolutely believe those abrupt changes happened because many Americans were coming in contact with their first atheists, uncloseted gay people, and admitted pot smokers and finding they weren't monsters. You can strap somebody to a chair and make them watch a thousand hours of PSAs about how this group or that is just like us, but it won't have the same impact as a single positive encounter with one of them. Dogma dies in the face of such experiences.

It's easy to think of the internet as a cesspool of anonymous harassers but it is mostly a constellation of tight-knit communities that overlap with others, bringing them together in unexpected ways. You've heard a lot of talk about online bubbles of like-minded people getting more and more extreme in the absence of opposition, but the reason we became so much more open-minded on some issues in the first place is that online communities forced us to mingle across demographics. We may all have joined a forum based on our Babylon 5 fandom, but we quickly realized some of the cool people we were talking to were the type we'd never have run into in our real-life neighborhoods (Wait, you're posting from Brazil? What time is it there?!?). When I was a kid, you'd hear about a deadly earthquake in Taiwan and briefly raise an eyebrow over your coffee. So sad. Today, you jump online and say, Wait, did they say Jiji? That's where Ironheart69 is from! Has anybody heard from her?

What I'm hoping is that what we're seeing now is the reaction to that, the loud rage of a racist realizing his sister is dating a damned Muslim, that his old college roommate turned out to be a trans woman, and that there are black people in horror movies who don't die. An ideology kicking and screaming as it is dragged out the door, the equivalent of segregationists blocking black children from their schools, knowing full well that theirs was a lost cause.

Over time, lots of those segregationists realized they were wrong, that their rage and the fear at its core were based on nothing. That will happen again. I think. I hope.

David Wong is the Executive Editor at Cracked. His new book, WHAT THE HELL DID I JUST READ, is available for preorder now at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Indiebound, iBooks, and Kobo.

For more from David, check out Some Brief, Friendly Advice About Race And Racism and 7 Reasons We're Quietly Letting Racists Win.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel, and check out Donald Trump Finally Embraces The Hitler Comparisons, and other videos you won't see on the site!

Follow us on Facebook, and we'll follow you everywhere.

Get intimate with our new podcast Cracked Gets Personal . Subscribe for great episodes like The Most Insane Things We Saw In Embergency Medicine and 3 Wild Stories from Inside the Opiate Epidemic, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Read more: http://www.cracked.com/blog/why-hate-doesnt-have-to-win/

[bradporter65-blog]

5 Things To Understand About Modern Hate Groups

Here's a popular right-wing meme that got spread around before the attack in Charlottesville:

So, here's what I want to ask anyone sharing that (or wearing it on a t-shirt - yes, they sell them): When we replace the stick figures with actual bleeding humans, does that change how you feel about it at all? (WARNING: Graphic fucking video):

It's not a rhetorical question. I think the answer to that will decide what happens next.

5

The Internet Could Have Been The Greatest Anti-Bigotry Tool In History

Bigotry is never about hating a real person. The target is always a perfectly hateable caricature we invent to avoid glimpsing the true enemy staring back at us from the mirror. It's a punching bag, a shape drawn around a bull's-eye. This is why so many racists have a real Black Friend they can hide behind - when they actually get to know one, a whole different part of their brain lights up (I mean, he's not even black to me! He's just Steve!). Do I have to point out the obvious, that their entire worldview would change if they could somehow get to know every minority the way they know their buddy? How many times have anti-immigration politicians and pundits gotten caught hiring illegals themselves? Well you see, my illegals are honest and do great work. Not like the rapey stick-figures on those T-shirts.

Lutz Bachmann/Twitter

I had secretly been hoping that the internet, social media, and smartphones would make it impossible to not put a real human face on those groups. In a connected world in which I can tell you what my cousin's coworkers considered eating for lunch yesterday, minorities can't remain abstractions. I was hoping that over time, smartphones would do to racism what they did to UFOs.

You remember UFOs, right? For a generation leading up to the 1990s, some fuzzy flying saucer turned up in the news every month. Now, when there are a thousand times more cameras around, the flying saucers have evaporated like smoke - belief in alien visitors plummeted by the mid-2000s. The myth became impossible to preserve in the face of evidence (or lack of it).

Read Next

3 Penis Tropes In Hollywood That You Never Noticed

Racism, likewise, is based on a myth - that these people aren't people at all, that they don't cry or bleed or want the same things we want, that fixing our discomfort is as simple as making them go away, somehow. Now we have the technology to see an event like Charlottesville in real-time from half a dozen angles; we can hear the screams, see first-responders desperately trying to resuscitate victims. We can get a mental image of what an ethnic cleansing would really look like - that same chaos, repeated millions of times. That's the truth behind the edgy frog memes and red-arm bands. Take it in, assholes.

It would be a wake-up call. That was the dream, anyway.

4

Yes, Cameras Do Change Minds

I'm known as a hopeful optimist, possibly having to do with being a white person who accidentally made a lot of money off of a story he originally wrote as a prank. But it's not like I just pulled this dream out of my ass - there's precedent for it.

The presence of cameras all but eliminated the American public's tolerance for military casualties, for example - we've completely built our foreign policy around it. America lost 100,000 troops in WWI, 400,000 in WWII, and almost 60,000 in Vietnam. That last one was the turning point - a flood of full-color footage of maimed soldiers and screaming civilians turned public opinion against the war overnight. The reality of war didn't change, but you can bet your ass that seeing it made all of the difference. We haven't had a comparable war since; Afghanistan saw a tiny fraction of those losses (2,400) and so did Iraq (4,500). Suddenly, soldiers' lives mattered - the myth of the consequence-free war went the way of the UFO.

Why in the hell did you think a horde of screaming Actual Nazis would have their hearts melted by the sight of dying protesters? you ask. If anything, they probably get off on it. After all, Americans don't seem to care about hundreds of thousands of bombed Iraqis.

But I'm not talking about the raging Nazis here - it's only the extreme fringe who'll walk around in public doing that shit, and some of them try to sheepishly talk their way out of it later. The systemic racism that exists in the world doesn't emanate from them, it flows from the comfortable indifference of the majority. The most incurable form of bigotry persists specifically because it doesn't feel like heat coursing through the veins - it feels like nothing at all. I was born in Trump Country and I only met a couple of people who openly called for black genocide, but knew dozens if not hundreds who simply thought society didn't need changing (and I agreed, at the time). We didn't want the stick figures to die, we just didn't think they needed help. What does a stick figure need food stamps for?

The latter are the ones I thought would be turned in this age of pervasive cameras and personal connections. It's easy for the comfortable casual racist (who, by the way, hates Nazis) to ignore a headline or pie charts about income inequality. It's harder to ignore a man bleeding in the driver's seat of his car while his young daughter and her mother sit helplessly next to him, wailing in anguish. I didn't think it would change overnight, but over the decades I thought these attitudes would be chiseled away one gut-wrenching video at a time. Do you see? He's not a fucking statistic. He bleeds. His family loved him just as much as your family loves you. Look.

3

But The Sword Swings Both Ways

Hey, did I mention that after years of decline, belief in UFOs has shot back up to its previous highs? The need to believe was always there, so others looking to fill that void simply adapted to the marketplace (If you think about it, the aliens would have cloaking technology that makes them invisible to cell phones!).

Now consider the fact that the Confederate statues the protesters were rallying around in Charlottesville aren't all 150-year-old relics. New ones are being built all the time (35 Confederate monuments have been added since 2000 in North Carolina alone - lots of them were built in the 1960s as backlash to the civil rights movement). They are, in other words, modern symbols erected by groups looking to change policy today. That's why there's a movement to take them down, and a bitter counter-movement to preserve them. It is only about preserving the past to the extent that it's about making current law conform to it.

The point is, if racism is a dying relic, it sure as hell doesn't feel like it. Oh, I'm not surprised that hate groups thrive in this era - a few charismatic sociopaths have always been able to cast a wide umbrella of influence and mass media has just amplified their reach. I mean, you've seen their memes. What I had hoped, though, was that society would be better at spotting them, quicker to see through their tricks. I often wonder how average German citizens would have reacted if camera phones had existed back then and somebody had leaked video from inside a concentration camp. But lots of German citizens did know about the concentration camps! Sure, but it's one thing to have a vague concept of eliminating Jews, another to actually see a wheelbarrow full of dead children. It would be meaningless to the true zealots, but most people aren't that.

And yet

2

Modern Society May Have Cultivated A Population Ripe For Hate

It's too easy to think of Nazis as a different species, like they were aliens who invaded from another planet. If you tell me we shouldn't humanize them, I say that humanizing them actually makes them scarier: They are not only human, but they are your motherfucking neighbors. After the war, German soldiers and officers went back home and got jobs - it's not like you blow up the mothership and the foot soldiers topple over. Likewise, your brother or uncle or daughter could join a hate group tomorrow and they would still be family. Some of the people reading this have had this exact thing happen.

Think about it: Even if the worst happens and 20 years from now we're in an actual shooting war with a new round of Nazis, it's not like we'll kill them all. No war ends that way; there'll be some kind of resolution and the combatants will take off their uniforms and the very next day they'll be next to you on the subway. If you want to stop that future, you have to start with understanding how Nazis are made, and how regular everyday folks get sucked in. Hate is a prickly shell humans grow around fear, a defense mechanism to replace the terror of the unknown with the cold certainty of rage. You don't have to feel sorry for them, but hate is like cancer - it's all about knowing the warning signs and catching it early.

So, let's start here: What a human needs, above all else, is to matter. And mattering in 2017 is hard as shit. There are 100 million Americans who neither have jobs nor are looking for one. Of those who do work, only 36 percent say their job has meaning and significance (did you know that a low-paying, unstable job is actually more stressful than unemployment?). I guess there used to be pride in building a house or a car, or growing crops - creating something tangible - but now, the machines have those jobs and we're stuck serving coffee or moving numbers around a spreadsheet, counting down the days until the machines take those jobs, too.

Our generation has fewer close friends than previous generations and are less likely to have a sexual partner or children of our own. We trust each other less than we ever have. We need to matter, but we don't have people in our lives reminding us of that, so we compensate. I matter because I'm not [insert hateable stick figure here].

And I can't emphasize enough how much it doesn't actually make a difference what goes in those brackets. Reddit's Trump community The_Donald overlaps strongly with their now-banned Fat People Hate community and the anti-woman subreddit TheRedPill. Where you find articles railing on blacks, you'll find articles demonizing Jews, homosexuals, trans people hell, go to any right-wing site and notice their bitter loathing of vegans.

It's hard for most people to grasp how hate can be both arbitrary and murderous, but that's how the human mind works. Once you switch into that primitive Us vs. Them survival mode, the rationale becomes totally irrelevant. Remember that one of the world's oldest and most pervasive prejudices is against left-handed people. Skilled manipulators could pull out endless examples of how inherently dishonest and filthy those lefties were, and they always found an audience. That only sounds ridiculous until you realize how great it must have been to wake up every day and congratulate yourself for using your right hand, a.k.a. the hand you automatically used anyway.

If you haven't built anything you can be proud of - be it a house, career, family, or loving circle of friends - then you need to draw your pride from somewhere. Hate groups let you set the pride bar so low that you can swell with pride over the fact that you woke up this morning with a certain color skin and heterosexual urges, as if both were the result of diligent effort on your part. Imagine eating a delicious cheeseburger and congratulating yourself for having accomplished your noble goal of not being vegan.

1

But I Still Think The Good Guys Will Win

If you've come to the conclusion that the internet really didn't change anything because people are people and set in their beliefs, the facts say you're wrong. For instance, the internet era has been devastating for religion in the U.S.A., with the ranks of nonbelievers more than doubling just since 1990. In that same span, support for gay marriage went from 13 percent to 58 percent. Support for marijuana legalization, from 12 percent to 53 percent. I absolutely believe those abrupt changes happened because many Americans were coming in contact with their first atheists, uncloseted gay people, and admitted pot smokers and finding they weren't monsters. You can strap somebody to a chair and make them watch a thousand hours of PSAs about how this group or that is just like us, but it won't have the same impact as a single positive encounter with one of them. Dogma dies in the face of such experiences.

It's easy to think of the internet as a cesspool of anonymous harassers but it is mostly a constellation of tight-knit communities that overlap with others, bringing them together in unexpected ways. You've heard a lot of talk about online bubbles of like-minded people getting more and more extreme in the absence of opposition, but the reason we became so much more open-minded on some issues in the first place is that online communities forced us to mingle across demographics. We may all have joined a forum based on our Babylon 5 fandom, but we quickly realized some of the cool people we were talking to were the type we'd never have run into in our real-life neighborhoods (Wait, you're posting from Brazil? What time is it there?!?). When I was a kid, you'd hear about a deadly earthquake in Taiwan and briefly raise an eyebrow over your coffee. So sad. Today, you jump online and say, Wait, did they say Jiji? That's where Ironheart69 is from! Has anybody heard from her?

What I'm hoping is that what we're seeing now is the reaction to that, the loud rage of a racist realizing his sister is dating a damned Muslim, that his old college roommate turned out to be a trans woman, and that there are black people in horror movies who don't die. An ideology kicking and screaming as it is dragged out the door, the equivalent of segregationists blocking black children from their schools, knowing full well that theirs was a lost cause.

Over time, lots of those segregationists realized they were wrong, that their rage and the fear at its core were based on nothing. That will happen again. I think. I hope.

David Wong is the Executive Editor at Cracked. His new book, WHAT THE HELL DID I JUST READ, is available for preorder now at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Indiebound, iBooks, and Kobo.

For more from David, check out Some Brief, Friendly Advice About Race And Racism and 7 Reasons We're Quietly Letting Racists Win.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel, and check out Donald Trump Finally Embraces The Hitler Comparisons, and other videos you won't see on the site!

Follow us on Facebook, and we'll follow you everywhere.

Get intimate with our new podcast Cracked Gets Personal . Subscribe for great episodes like The Most Insane Things We Saw In Embergency Medicine and 3 Wild Stories from Inside the Opiate Epidemic, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Read more: http://www.cracked.com/blog/why-hate-doesnt-have-to-win/

[gaylemccoy972-blog]

5 Things To Understand About Modern Hate Groups

Here's a popular right-wing meme that got spread around before the attack in Charlottesville:

So, here's what I want to ask anyone sharing that (or wearing it on a t-shirt - yes, they sell them): When we replace the stick figures with actual bleeding humans, does that change how you feel about it at all? (WARNING: Graphic fucking video):

It's not a rhetorical question. I think the answer to that will decide what happens next.

5

The Internet Could Have Been The Greatest Anti-Bigotry Tool In History

Bigotry is never about hating a real person. The target is always a perfectly hateable caricature we invent to avoid glimpsing the true enemy staring back at us from the mirror. It's a punching bag, a shape drawn around a bull's-eye. This is why so many racists have a real Black Friend they can hide behind - when they actually get to know one, a whole different part of their brain lights up (I mean, he's not even black to me! He's just Steve!). Do I have to point out the obvious, that their entire worldview would change if they could somehow get to know every minority the way they know their buddy? How many times have anti-immigration politicians and pundits gotten caught hiring illegals themselves? Well you see, my illegals are honest and do great work. Not like the rapey stick-figures on those T-shirts.

Lutz Bachmann/Twitter

I had secretly been hoping that the internet, social media, and smartphones would make it impossible to not put a real human face on those groups. In a connected world in which I can tell you what my cousin's coworkers considered eating for lunch yesterday, minorities can't remain abstractions. I was hoping that over time, smartphones would do to racism what they did to UFOs.

You remember UFOs, right? For a generation leading up to the 1990s, some fuzzy flying saucer turned up in the news every month. Now, when there are a thousand times more cameras around, the flying saucers have evaporated like smoke - belief in alien visitors plummeted by the mid-2000s. The myth became impossible to preserve in the face of evidence (or lack of it).

Read Next

3 Penis Tropes In Hollywood That You Never Noticed

Racism, likewise, is based on a myth - that these people aren't people at all, that they don't cry or bleed or want the same things we want, that fixing our discomfort is as simple as making them go away, somehow. Now we have the technology to see an event like Charlottesville in real-time from half a dozen angles; we can hear the screams, see first-responders desperately trying to resuscitate victims. We can get a mental image of what an ethnic cleansing would really look like - that same chaos, repeated millions of times. That's the truth behind the edgy frog memes and red-arm bands. Take it in, assholes.

It would be a wake-up call. That was the dream, anyway.

4

Yes, Cameras Do Change Minds

I'm known as a hopeful optimist, possibly having to do with being a white person who accidentally made a lot of money off of a story he originally wrote as a prank. But it's not like I just pulled this dream out of my ass - there's precedent for it.

The presence of cameras all but eliminated the American public's tolerance for military casualties, for example - we've completely built our foreign policy around it. America lost 100,000 troops in WWI, 400,000 in WWII, and almost 60,000 in Vietnam. That last one was the turning point - a flood of full-color footage of maimed soldiers and screaming civilians turned public opinion against the war overnight. The reality of war didn't change, but you can bet your ass that seeing it made all of the difference. We haven't had a comparable war since; Afghanistan saw a tiny fraction of those losses (2,400) and so did Iraq (4,500). Suddenly, soldiers' lives mattered - the myth of the consequence-free war went the way of the UFO.

Why in the hell did you think a horde of screaming Actual Nazis would have their hearts melted by the sight of dying protesters? you ask. If anything, they probably get off on it. After all, Americans don't seem to care about hundreds of thousands of bombed Iraqis.

But I'm not talking about the raging Nazis here - it's only the extreme fringe who'll walk around in public doing that shit, and some of them try to sheepishly talk their way out of it later. The systemic racism that exists in the world doesn't emanate from them, it flows from the comfortable indifference of the majority. The most incurable form of bigotry persists specifically because it doesn't feel like heat coursing through the veins - it feels like nothing at all. I was born in Trump Country and I only met a couple of people who openly called for black genocide, but knew dozens if not hundreds who simply thought society didn't need changing (and I agreed, at the time). We didn't want the stick figures to die, we just didn't think they needed help. What does a stick figure need food stamps for?

The latter are the ones I thought would be turned in this age of pervasive cameras and personal connections. It's easy for the comfortable casual racist (who, by the way, hates Nazis) to ignore a headline or pie charts about income inequality. It's harder to ignore a man bleeding in the driver's seat of his car while his young daughter and her mother sit helplessly next to him, wailing in anguish. I didn't think it would change overnight, but over the decades I thought these attitudes would be chiseled away one gut-wrenching video at a time. Do you see? He's not a fucking statistic. He bleeds. His family loved him just as much as your family loves you. Look.

3

But The Sword Swings Both Ways

Hey, did I mention that after years of decline, belief in UFOs has shot back up to its previous highs? The need to believe was always there, so others looking to fill that void simply adapted to the marketplace (If you think about it, the aliens would have cloaking technology that makes them invisible to cell phones!).

Now consider the fact that the Confederate statues the protesters were rallying around in Charlottesville aren't all 150-year-old relics. New ones are being built all the time (35 Confederate monuments have been added since 2000 in North Carolina alone - lots of them were built in the 1960s as backlash to the civil rights movement). They are, in other words, modern symbols erected by groups looking to change policy today. That's why there's a movement to take them down, and a bitter counter-movement to preserve them. It is only about preserving the past to the extent that it's about making current law conform to it.

The point is, if racism is a dying relic, it sure as hell doesn't feel like it. Oh, I'm not surprised that hate groups thrive in this era - a few charismatic sociopaths have always been able to cast a wide umbrella of influence and mass media has just amplified their reach. I mean, you've seen their memes. What I had hoped, though, was that society would be better at spotting them, quicker to see through their tricks. I often wonder how average German citizens would have reacted if camera phones had existed back then and somebody had leaked video from inside a concentration camp. But lots of German citizens did know about the concentration camps! Sure, but it's one thing to have a vague concept of eliminating Jews, another to actually see a wheelbarrow full of dead children. It would be meaningless to the true zealots, but most people aren't that.

And yet

2

Modern Society May Have Cultivated A Population Ripe For Hate

It's too easy to think of Nazis as a different species, like they were aliens who invaded from another planet. If you tell me we shouldn't humanize them, I say that humanizing them actually makes them scarier: They are not only human, but they are your motherfucking neighbors. After the war, German soldiers and officers went back home and got jobs - it's not like you blow up the mothership and the foot soldiers topple over. Likewise, your brother or uncle or daughter could join a hate group tomorrow and they would still be family. Some of the people reading this have had this exact thing happen.

Think about it: Even if the worst happens and 20 years from now we're in an actual shooting war with a new round of Nazis, it's not like we'll kill them all. No war ends that way; there'll be some kind of resolution and the combatants will take off their uniforms and the very next day they'll be next to you on the subway. If you want to stop that future, you have to start with understanding how Nazis are made, and how regular everyday folks get sucked in. Hate is a prickly shell humans grow around fear, a defense mechanism to replace the terror of the unknown with the cold certainty of rage. You don't have to feel sorry for them, but hate is like cancer - it's all about knowing the warning signs and catching it early.

So, let's start here: What a human needs, above all else, is to matter. And mattering in 2017 is hard as shit. There are 100 million Americans who neither have jobs nor are looking for one. Of those who do work, only 36 percent say their job has meaning and significance (did you know that a low-paying, unstable job is actually more stressful than unemployment?). I guess there used to be pride in building a house or a car, or growing crops - creating something tangible - but now, the machines have those jobs and we're stuck serving coffee or moving numbers around a spreadsheet, counting down the days until the machines take those jobs, too.

Our generation has fewer close friends than previous generations and are less likely to have a sexual partner or children of our own. We trust each other less than we ever have. We need to matter, but we don't have people in our lives reminding us of that, so we compensate. I matter because I'm not [insert hateable stick figure here].

And I can't emphasize enough how much it doesn't actually make a difference what goes in those brackets. Reddit's Trump community The_Donald overlaps strongly with their now-banned Fat People Hate community and the anti-woman subreddit TheRedPill. Where you find articles railing on blacks, you'll find articles demonizing Jews, homosexuals, trans people hell, go to any right-wing site and notice their bitter loathing of vegans.

It's hard for most people to grasp how hate can be both arbitrary and murderous, but that's how the human mind works. Once you switch into that primitive Us vs. Them survival mode, the rationale becomes totally irrelevant. Remember that one of the world's oldest and most pervasive prejudices is against left-handed people. Skilled manipulators could pull out endless examples of how inherently dishonest and filthy those lefties were, and they always found an audience. That only sounds ridiculous until you realize how great it must have been to wake up every day and congratulate yourself for using your right hand, a.k.a. the hand you automatically used anyway.

If you haven't built anything you can be proud of - be it a house, career, family, or loving circle of friends - then you need to draw your pride from somewhere. Hate groups let you set the pride bar so low that you can swell with pride over the fact that you woke up this morning with a certain color skin and heterosexual urges, as if both were the result of diligent effort on your part. Imagine eating a delicious cheeseburger and congratulating yourself for having accomplished your noble goal of not being vegan.

1

But I Still Think The Good Guys Will Win

If you've come to the conclusion that the internet really didn't change anything because people are people and set in their beliefs, the facts say you're wrong. For instance, the internet era has been devastating for religion in the U.S.A., with the ranks of nonbelievers more than doubling just since 1990. In that same span, support for gay marriage went from 13 percent to 58 percent. Support for marijuana legalization, from 12 percent to 53 percent. I absolutely believe those abrupt changes happened because many Americans were coming in contact with their first atheists, uncloseted gay people, and admitted pot smokers and finding they weren't monsters. You can strap somebody to a chair and make them watch a thousand hours of PSAs about how this group or that is just like us, but it won't have the same impact as a single positive encounter with one of them. Dogma dies in the face of such experiences.

It's easy to think of the internet as a cesspool of anonymous harassers but it is mostly a constellation of tight-knit communities that overlap with others, bringing them together in unexpected ways. You've heard a lot of talk about online bubbles of like-minded people getting more and more extreme in the absence of opposition, but the reason we became so much more open-minded on some issues in the first place is that online communities forced us to mingle across demographics. We may all have joined a forum based on our Babylon 5 fandom, but we quickly realized some of the cool people we were talking to were the type we'd never have run into in our real-life neighborhoods (Wait, you're posting from Brazil? What time is it there?!?). When I was a kid, you'd hear about a deadly earthquake in Taiwan and briefly raise an eyebrow over your coffee. So sad. Today, you jump online and say, Wait, did they say Jiji? That's where Ironheart69 is from! Has anybody heard from her?

What I'm hoping is that what we're seeing now is the reaction to that, the loud rage of a racist realizing his sister is dating a damned Muslim, that his old college roommate turned out to be a trans woman, and that there are black people in horror movies who don't die. An ideology kicking and screaming as it is dragged out the door, the equivalent of segregationists blocking black children from their schools, knowing full well that theirs was a lost cause.

Over time, lots of those segregationists realized they were wrong, that their rage and the fear at its core were based on nothing. That will happen again. I think. I hope.

David Wong is the Executive Editor at Cracked. His new book, WHAT THE HELL DID I JUST READ, is available for preorder now at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Indiebound, iBooks, and Kobo.

For more from David, check out Some Brief, Friendly Advice About Race And Racism and 7 Reasons We're Quietly Letting Racists Win.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel, and check out Donald Trump Finally Embraces The Hitler Comparisons, and other videos you won't see on the site!

Follow us on Facebook, and we'll follow you everywhere.

Get intimate with our new podcast Cracked Gets Personal . Subscribe for great episodes like The Most Insane Things We Saw In Embergency Medicine and 3 Wild Stories from Inside the Opiate Epidemic, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Read more: http://www.cracked.com/blog/why-hate-doesnt-have-to-win/

[pedrowells24-blog]

5 Things To Understand About Modern Hate Groups

Here's a popular right-wing meme that got spread around before the attack in Charlottesville:

So, here's what I want to ask anyone sharing that (or wearing it on a t-shirt - yes, they sell them): When we replace the stick figures with actual bleeding humans, does that change how you feel about it at all? (WARNING: Graphic fucking video):

It's not a rhetorical question. I think the answer to that will decide what happens next.

5

The Internet Could Have Been The Greatest Anti-Bigotry Tool In History

Bigotry is never about hating a real person. The target is always a perfectly hateable caricature we invent to avoid glimpsing the true enemy staring back at us from the mirror. It's a punching bag, a shape drawn around a bull's-eye. This is why so many racists have a real Black Friend they can hide behind - when they actually get to know one, a whole different part of their brain lights up (I mean, he's not even black to me! He's just Steve!). Do I have to point out the obvious, that their entire worldview would change if they could somehow get to know every minority the way they know their buddy? How many times have anti-immigration politicians and pundits gotten caught hiring illegals themselves? Well you see, my illegals are honest and do great work. Not like the rapey stick-figures on those T-shirts.

Lutz Bachmann/Twitter

I had secretly been hoping that the internet, social media, and smartphones would make it impossible to not put a real human face on those groups. In a connected world in which I can tell you what my cousin's coworkers considered eating for lunch yesterday, minorities can't remain abstractions. I was hoping that over time, smartphones would do to racism what they did to UFOs.

You remember UFOs, right? For a generation leading up to the 1990s, some fuzzy flying saucer turned up in the news every month. Now, when there are a thousand times more cameras around, the flying saucers have evaporated like smoke - belief in alien visitors plummeted by the mid-2000s. The myth became impossible to preserve in the face of evidence (or lack of it).

Read Next

3 Penis Tropes In Hollywood That You Never Noticed

Racism, likewise, is based on a myth - that these people aren't people at all, that they don't cry or bleed or want the same things we want, that fixing our discomfort is as simple as making them go away, somehow. Now we have the technology to see an event like Charlottesville in real-time from half a dozen angles; we can hear the screams, see first-responders desperately trying to resuscitate victims. We can get a mental image of what an ethnic cleansing would really look like - that same chaos, repeated millions of times. That's the truth behind the edgy frog memes and red-arm bands. Take it in, assholes.

It would be a wake-up call. That was the dream, anyway.

4

Yes, Cameras Do Change Minds

I'm known as a hopeful optimist, possibly having to do with being a white person who accidentally made a lot of money off of a story he originally wrote as a prank. But it's not like I just pulled this dream out of my ass - there's precedent for it.

The presence of cameras all but eliminated the American public's tolerance for military casualties, for example - we've completely built our foreign policy around it. America lost 100,000 troops in WWI, 400,000 in WWII, and almost 60,000 in Vietnam. That last one was the turning point - a flood of full-color footage of maimed soldiers and screaming civilians turned public opinion against the war overnight. The reality of war didn't change, but you can bet your ass that seeing it made all of the difference. We haven't had a comparable war since; Afghanistan saw a tiny fraction of those losses (2,400) and so did Iraq (4,500). Suddenly, soldiers' lives mattered - the myth of the consequence-free war went the way of the UFO.

Why in the hell did you think a horde of screaming Actual Nazis would have their hearts melted by the sight of dying protesters? you ask. If anything, they probably get off on it. After all, Americans don't seem to care about hundreds of thousands of bombed Iraqis.

But I'm not talking about the raging Nazis here - it's only the extreme fringe who'll walk around in public doing that shit, and some of them try to sheepishly talk their way out of it later. The systemic racism that exists in the world doesn't emanate from them, it flows from the comfortable indifference of the majority. The most incurable form of bigotry persists specifically because it doesn't feel like heat coursing through the veins - it feels like nothing at all. I was born in Trump Country and I only met a couple of people who openly called for black genocide, but knew dozens if not hundreds who simply thought society didn't need changing (and I agreed, at the time). We didn't want the stick figures to die, we just didn't think they needed help. What does a stick figure need food stamps for?

The latter are the ones I thought would be turned in this age of pervasive cameras and personal connections. It's easy for the comfortable casual racist (who, by the way, hates Nazis) to ignore a headline or pie charts about income inequality. It's harder to ignore a man bleeding in the driver's seat of his car while his young daughter and her mother sit helplessly next to him, wailing in anguish. I didn't think it would change overnight, but over the decades I thought these attitudes would be chiseled away one gut-wrenching video at a time. Do you see? He's not a fucking statistic. He bleeds. His family loved him just as much as your family loves you. Look.

3

But The Sword Swings Both Ways

Hey, did I mention that after years of decline, belief in UFOs has shot back up to its previous highs? The need to believe was always there, so others looking to fill that void simply adapted to the marketplace (If you think about it, the aliens would have cloaking technology that makes them invisible to cell phones!).

Now consider the fact that the Confederate statues the protesters were rallying around in Charlottesville aren't all 150-year-old relics. New ones are being built all the time (35 Confederate monuments have been added since 2000 in North Carolina alone - lots of them were built in the 1960s as backlash to the civil rights movement). They are, in other words, modern symbols erected by groups looking to change policy today. That's why there's a movement to take them down, and a bitter counter-movement to preserve them. It is only about preserving the past to the extent that it's about making current law conform to it.

The point is, if racism is a dying relic, it sure as hell doesn't feel like it. Oh, I'm not surprised that hate groups thrive in this era - a few charismatic sociopaths have always been able to cast a wide umbrella of influence and mass media has just amplified their reach. I mean, you've seen their memes. What I had hoped, though, was that society would be better at spotting them, quicker to see through their tricks. I often wonder how average German citizens would have reacted if camera phones had existed back then and somebody had leaked video from inside a concentration camp. But lots of German citizens did know about the concentration camps! Sure, but it's one thing to have a vague concept of eliminating Jews, another to actually see a wheelbarrow full of dead children. It would be meaningless to the true zealots, but most people aren't that.

And yet

2

Modern Society May Have Cultivated A Population Ripe For Hate

It's too easy to think of Nazis as a different species, like they were aliens who invaded from another planet. If you tell me we shouldn't humanize them, I say that humanizing them actually makes them scarier: They are not only human, but they are your motherfucking neighbors. After the war, German soldiers and officers went back home and got jobs - it's not like you blow up the mothership and the foot soldiers topple over. Likewise, your brother or uncle or daughter could join a hate group tomorrow and they would still be family. Some of the people reading this have had this exact thing happen.

Think about it: Even if the worst happens and 20 years from now we're in an actual shooting war with a new round of Nazis, it's not like we'll kill them all. No war ends that way; there'll be some kind of resolution and the combatants will take off their uniforms and the very next day they'll be next to you on the subway. If you want to stop that future, you have to start with understanding how Nazis are made, and how regular everyday folks get sucked in. Hate is a prickly shell humans grow around fear, a defense mechanism to replace the terror of the unknown with the cold certainty of rage. You don't have to feel sorry for them, but hate is like cancer - it's all about knowing the warning signs and catching it early.

So, let's start here: What a human needs, above all else, is to matter. And mattering in 2017 is hard as shit. There are 100 million Americans who neither have jobs nor are looking for one. Of those who do work, only 36 percent say their job has meaning and significance (did you know that a low-paying, unstable job is actually more stressful than unemployment?). I guess there used to be pride in building a house or a car, or growing crops - creating something tangible - but now, the machines have those jobs and we're stuck serving coffee or moving numbers around a spreadsheet, counting down the days until the machines take those jobs, too.

Our generation has fewer close friends than previous generations and are less likely to have a sexual partner or children of our own. We trust each other less than we ever have. We need to matter, but we don't have people in our lives reminding us of that, so we compensate. I matter because I'm not [insert hateable stick figure here].

And I can't emphasize enough how much it doesn't actually make a difference what goes in those brackets. Reddit's Trump community The_Donald overlaps strongly with their now-banned Fat People Hate community and the anti-woman subreddit TheRedPill. Where you find articles railing on blacks, you'll find articles demonizing Jews, homosexuals, trans people hell, go to any right-wing site and notice their bitter loathing of vegans.

It's hard for most people to grasp how hate can be both arbitrary and murderous, but that's how the human mind works. Once you switch into that primitive Us vs. Them survival mode, the rationale becomes totally irrelevant. Remember that one of the world's oldest and most pervasive prejudices is against left-handed people. Skilled manipulators could pull out endless examples of how inherently dishonest and filthy those lefties were, and they always found an audience. That only sounds ridiculous until you realize how great it must have been to wake up every day and congratulate yourself for using your right hand, a.k.a. the hand you automatically used anyway.

If you haven't built anything you can be proud of - be it a house, career, family, or loving circle of friends - then you need to draw your pride from somewhere. Hate groups let you set the pride bar so low that you can swell with pride over the fact that you woke up this morning with a certain color skin and heterosexual urges, as if both were the result of diligent effort on your part. Imagine eating a delicious cheeseburger and congratulating yourself for having accomplished your noble goal of not being vegan.

1

But I Still Think The Good Guys Will Win

If you've come to the conclusion that the internet really didn't change anything because people are people and set in their beliefs, the facts say you're wrong. For instance, the internet era has been devastating for religion in the U.S.A., with the ranks of nonbelievers more than doubling just since 1990. In that same span, support for gay marriage went from 13 percent to 58 percent. Support for marijuana legalization, from 12 percent to 53 percent. I absolutely believe those abrupt changes happened because many Americans were coming in contact with their first atheists, uncloseted gay people, and admitted pot smokers and finding they weren't monsters. You can strap somebody to a chair and make them watch a thousand hours of PSAs about how this group or that is just like us, but it won't have the same impact as a single positive encounter with one of them. Dogma dies in the face of such experiences.

It's easy to think of the internet as a cesspool of anonymous harassers but it is mostly a constellation of tight-knit communities that overlap with others, bringing them together in unexpected ways. You've heard a lot of talk about online bubbles of like-minded people getting more and more extreme in the absence of opposition, but the reason we became so much more open-minded on some issues in the first place is that online communities forced us to mingle across demographics. We may all have joined a forum based on our Babylon 5 fandom, but we quickly realized some of the cool people we were talking to were the type we'd never have run into in our real-life neighborhoods (Wait, you're posting from Brazil? What time is it there?!?). When I was a kid, you'd hear about a deadly earthquake in Taiwan and briefly raise an eyebrow over your coffee. So sad. Today, you jump online and say, Wait, did they say Jiji? That's where Ironheart69 is from! Has anybody heard from her?

What I'm hoping is that what we're seeing now is the reaction to that, the loud rage of a racist realizing his sister is dating a damned Muslim, that his old college roommate turned out to be a trans woman, and that there are black people in horror movies who don't die. An ideology kicking and screaming as it is dragged out the door, the equivalent of segregationists blocking black children from their schools, knowing full well that theirs was a lost cause.

Over time, lots of those segregationists realized they were wrong, that their rage and the fear at its core were based on nothing. That will happen again. I think. I hope.

David Wong is the Executive Editor at Cracked. His new book, WHAT THE HELL DID I JUST READ, is available for preorder now at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Indiebound, iBooks, and Kobo.

For more from David, check out Some Brief, Friendly Advice About Race And Racism and 7 Reasons We're Quietly Letting Racists Win.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel, and check out Donald Trump Finally Embraces The Hitler Comparisons, and other videos you won't see on the site!

Follow us on Facebook, and we'll follow you everywhere.

Get intimate with our new podcast Cracked Gets Personal . Subscribe for great episodes like The Most Insane Things We Saw In Embergency Medicine and 3 Wild Stories from Inside the Opiate Epidemic, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Read more: http://www.cracked.com/blog/why-hate-doesnt-have-to-win/

[bradporter65-blog]

5 Things To Understand About Modern Hate Groups

Here's a popular right-wing meme that got spread around before the attack in Charlottesville:

So, here's what I want to ask anyone sharing that (or wearing it on a t-shirt - yes, they sell them): When we replace the stick figures with actual bleeding humans, does that change how you feel about it at all? (WARNING: Graphic fucking video):

It's not a rhetorical question. I think the answer to that will decide what happens next.

5

The Internet Could Have Been The Greatest Anti-Bigotry Tool In History

Bigotry is never about hating a real person. The target is always a perfectly hateable caricature we invent to avoid glimpsing the true enemy staring back at us from the mirror. It's a punching bag, a shape drawn around a bull's-eye. This is why so many racists have a real Black Friend they can hide behind - when they actually get to know one, a whole different part of their brain lights up (I mean, he's not even black to me! He's just Steve!). Do I have to point out the obvious, that their entire worldview would change if they could somehow get to know every minority the way they know their buddy? How many times have anti-immigration politicians and pundits gotten caught hiring illegals themselves? Well you see, my illegals are honest and do great work. Not like the rapey stick-figures on those T-shirts.

Lutz Bachmann/Twitter

I had secretly been hoping that the internet, social media, and smartphones would make it impossible to not put a real human face on those groups. In a connected world in which I can tell you what my cousin's coworkers considered eating for lunch yesterday, minorities can't remain abstractions. I was hoping that over time, smartphones would do to racism what they did to UFOs.

You remember UFOs, right? For a generation leading up to the 1990s, some fuzzy flying saucer turned up in the news every month. Now, when there are a thousand times more cameras around, the flying saucers have evaporated like smoke - belief in alien visitors plummeted by the mid-2000s. The myth became impossible to preserve in the face of evidence (or lack of it).

Read Next

3 Penis Tropes In Hollywood That You Never Noticed

Racism, likewise, is based on a myth - that these people aren't people at all, that they don't cry or bleed or want the same things we want, that fixing our discomfort is as simple as making them go away, somehow. Now we have the technology to see an event like Charlottesville in real-time from half a dozen angles; we can hear the screams, see first-responders desperately trying to resuscitate victims. We can get a mental image of what an ethnic cleansing would really look like - that same chaos, repeated millions of times. That's the truth behind the edgy frog memes and red-arm bands. Take it in, assholes.

It would be a wake-up call. That was the dream, anyway.

4

Yes, Cameras Do Change Minds

I'm known as a hopeful optimist, possibly having to do with being a white person who accidentally made a lot of money off of a story he originally wrote as a prank. But it's not like I just pulled this dream out of my ass - there's precedent for it.

The presence of cameras all but eliminated the American public's tolerance for military casualties, for example - we've completely built our foreign policy around it. America lost 100,000 troops in WWI, 400,000 in WWII, and almost 60,000 in Vietnam. That last one was the turning point - a flood of full-color footage of maimed soldiers and screaming civilians turned public opinion against the war overnight. The reality of war didn't change, but you can bet your ass that seeing it made all of the difference. We haven't had a comparable war since; Afghanistan saw a tiny fraction of those losses (2,400) and so did Iraq (4,500). Suddenly, soldiers' lives mattered - the myth of the consequence-free war went the way of the UFO.

Why in the hell did you think a horde of screaming Actual Nazis would have their hearts melted by the sight of dying protesters? you ask. If anything, they probably get off on it. After all, Americans don't seem to care about hundreds of thousands of bombed Iraqis.

But I'm not talking about the raging Nazis here - it's only the extreme fringe who'll walk around in public doing that shit, and some of them try to sheepishly talk their way out of it later. The systemic racism that exists in the world doesn't emanate from them, it flows from the comfortable indifference of the majority. The most incurable form of bigotry persists specifically because it doesn't feel like heat coursing through the veins - it feels like nothing at all. I was born in Trump Country and I only met a couple of people who openly called for black genocide, but knew dozens if not hundreds who simply thought society didn't need changing (and I agreed, at the time). We didn't want the stick figures to die, we just didn't think they needed help. What does a stick figure need food stamps for?

The latter are the ones I thought would be turned in this age of pervasive cameras and personal connections. It's easy for the comfortable casual racist (who, by the way, hates Nazis) to ignore a headline or pie charts about income inequality. It's harder to ignore a man bleeding in the driver's seat of his car while his young daughter and her mother sit helplessly next to him, wailing in anguish. I didn't think it would change overnight, but over the decades I thought these attitudes would be chiseled away one gut-wrenching video at a time. Do you see? He's not a fucking statistic. He bleeds. His family loved him just as much as your family loves you. Look.

3

But The Sword Swings Both Ways

Hey, did I mention that after years of decline, belief in UFOs has shot back up to its previous highs? The need to believe was always there, so others looking to fill that void simply adapted to the marketplace (If you think about it, the aliens would have cloaking technology that makes them invisible to cell phones!).

Now consider the fact that the Confederate statues the protesters were rallying around in Charlottesville aren't all 150-year-old relics. New ones are being built all the time (35 Confederate monuments have been added since 2000 in North Carolina alone - lots of them were built in the 1960s as backlash to the civil rights movement). They are, in other words, modern symbols erected by groups looking to change policy today. That's why there's a movement to take them down, and a bitter counter-movement to preserve them. It is only about preserving the past to the extent that it's about making current law conform to it.

The point is, if racism is a dying relic, it sure as hell doesn't feel like it. Oh, I'm not surprised that hate groups thrive in this era - a few charismatic sociopaths have always been able to cast a wide umbrella of influence and mass media has just amplified their reach. I mean, you've seen their memes. What I had hoped, though, was that society would be better at spotting them, quicker to see through their tricks. I often wonder how average German citizens would have reacted if camera phones had existed back then and somebody had leaked video from inside a concentration camp. But lots of German citizens did know about the concentration camps! Sure, but it's one thing to have a vague concept of eliminating Jews, another to actually see a wheelbarrow full of dead children. It would be meaningless to the true zealots, but most people aren't that.

And yet

2

Modern Society May Have Cultivated A Population Ripe For Hate

It's too easy to think of Nazis as a different species, like they were aliens who invaded from another planet. If you tell me we shouldn't humanize them, I say that humanizing them actually makes them scarier: They are not only human, but they are your motherfucking neighbors. After the war, German soldiers and officers went back home and got jobs - it's not like you blow up the mothership and the foot soldiers topple over. Likewise, your brother or uncle or daughter could join a hate group tomorrow and they would still be family. Some of the people reading this have had this exact thing happen.

Think about it: Even if the worst happens and 20 years from now we're in an actual shooting war with a new round of Nazis, it's not like we'll kill them all. No war ends that way; there'll be some kind of resolution and the combatants will take off their uniforms and the very next day they'll be next to you on the subway. If you want to stop that future, you have to start with understanding how Nazis are made, and how regular everyday folks get sucked in. Hate is a prickly shell humans grow around fear, a defense mechanism to replace the terror of the unknown with the cold certainty of rage. You don't have to feel sorry for them, but hate is like cancer - it's all about knowing the warning signs and catching it early.

So, let's start here: What a human needs, above all else, is to matter. And mattering in 2017 is hard as shit. There are 100 million Americans who neither have jobs nor are looking for one. Of those who do work, only 36 percent say their job has meaning and significance (did you know that a low-paying, unstable job is actually more stressful than unemployment?). I guess there used to be pride in building a house or a car, or growing crops - creating something tangible - but now, the machines have those jobs and we're stuck serving coffee or moving numbers around a spreadsheet, counting down the days until the machines take those jobs, too.

Our generation has fewer close friends than previous generations and are less likely to have a sexual partner or children of our own. We trust each other less than we ever have. We need to matter, but we don't have people in our lives reminding us of that, so we compensate. I matter because I'm not [insert hateable stick figure here].

And I can't emphasize enough how much it doesn't actually make a difference what goes in those brackets. Reddit's Trump community The_Donald overlaps strongly with their now-banned Fat People Hate community and the anti-woman subreddit TheRedPill. Where you find articles railing on blacks, you'll find articles demonizing Jews, homosexuals, trans people hell, go to any right-wing site and notice their bitter loathing of vegans.

It's hard for most people to grasp how hate can be both arbitrary and murderous, but that's how the human mind works. Once you switch into that primitive Us vs. Them survival mode, the rationale becomes totally irrelevant. Remember that one of the world's oldest and most pervasive prejudices is against left-handed people. Skilled manipulators could pull out endless examples of how inherently dishonest and filthy those lefties were, and they always found an audience. That only sounds ridiculous until you realize how great it must have been to wake up every day and congratulate yourself for using your right hand, a.k.a. the hand you automatically used anyway.

If you haven't built anything you can be proud of - be it a house, career, family, or loving circle of friends - then you need to draw your pride from somewhere. Hate groups let you set the pride bar so low that you can swell with pride over the fact that you woke up this morning with a certain color skin and heterosexual urges, as if both were the result of diligent effort on your part. Imagine eating a delicious cheeseburger and congratulating yourself for having accomplished your noble goal of not being vegan.

1

But I Still Think The Good Guys Will Win

If you've come to the conclusion that the internet really didn't change anything because people are people and set in their beliefs, the facts say you're wrong. For instance, the internet era has been devastating for religion in the U.S.A., with the ranks of nonbelievers more than doubling just since 1990. In that same span, support for gay marriage went from 13 percent to 58 percent. Support for marijuana legalization, from 12 percent to 53 percent. I absolutely believe those abrupt changes happened because many Americans were coming in contact with their first atheists, uncloseted gay people, and admitted pot smokers and finding they weren't monsters. You can strap somebody to a chair and make them watch a thousand hours of PSAs about how this group or that is just like us, but it won't have the same impact as a single positive encounter with one of them. Dogma dies in the face of such experiences.

It's easy to think of the internet as a cesspool of anonymous harassers but it is mostly a constellation of tight-knit communities that overlap with others, bringing them together in unexpected ways. You've heard a lot of talk about online bubbles of like-minded people getting more and more extreme in the absence of opposition, but the reason we became so much more open-minded on some issues in the first place is that online communities forced us to mingle across demographics. We may all have joined a forum based on our Babylon 5 fandom, but we quickly realized some of the cool people we were talking to were the type we'd never have run into in our real-life neighborhoods (Wait, you're posting from Brazil? What time is it there?!?). When I was a kid, you'd hear about a deadly earthquake in Taiwan and briefly raise an eyebrow over your coffee. So sad. Today, you jump online and say, Wait, did they say Jiji? That's where Ironheart69 is from! Has anybody heard from her?

What I'm hoping is that what we're seeing now is the reaction to that, the loud rage of a racist realizing his sister is dating a damned Muslim, that his old college roommate turned out to be a trans woman, and that there are black people in horror movies who don't die. An ideology kicking and screaming as it is dragged out the door, the equivalent of segregationists blocking black children from their schools, knowing full well that theirs was a lost cause.

Over time, lots of those segregationists realized they were wrong, that their rage and the fear at its core were based on nothing. That will happen again. I think. I hope.

David Wong is the Executive Editor at Cracked. His new book, WHAT THE HELL DID I JUST READ, is available for preorder now at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Indiebound, iBooks, and Kobo.

For more from David, check out Some Brief, Friendly Advice About Race And Racism and 7 Reasons We're Quietly Letting Racists Win.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel, and check out Donald Trump Finally Embraces The Hitler Comparisons, and other videos you won't see on the site!

Follow us on Facebook, and we'll follow you everywhere.

Get intimate with our new podcast Cracked Gets Personal . Subscribe for great episodes like The Most Insane Things We Saw In Embergency Medicine and 3 Wild Stories from Inside the Opiate Epidemic, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Read more: http://www.cracked.com/blog/why-hate-doesnt-have-to-win/

[bradporter65-blog]

5 Things To Understand About Modern Hate Groups

Here's a popular right-wing meme that got spread around before the attack in Charlottesville:

So, here's what I want to ask anyone sharing that (or wearing it on a t-shirt - yes, they sell them): When we replace the stick figures with actual bleeding humans, does that change how you feel about it at all? (WARNING: Graphic fucking video):

It's not a rhetorical question. I think the answer to that will decide what happens next.

5

The Internet Could Have Been The Greatest Anti-Bigotry Tool In History

Bigotry is never about hating a real person. The target is always a perfectly hateable caricature we invent to avoid glimpsing the true enemy staring back at us from the mirror. It's a punching bag, a shape drawn around a bull's-eye. This is why so many racists have a real Black Friend they can hide behind - when they actually get to know one, a whole different part of their brain lights up (I mean, he's not even black to me! He's just Steve!). Do I have to point out the obvious, that their entire worldview would change if they could somehow get to know every minority the way they know their buddy? How many times have anti-immigration politicians and pundits gotten caught hiring illegals themselves? Well you see, my illegals are honest and do great work. Not like the rapey stick-figures on those T-shirts.

Lutz Bachmann/Twitter

I had secretly been hoping that the internet, social media, and smartphones would make it impossible to not put a real human face on those groups. In a connected world in which I can tell you what my cousin's coworkers considered eating for lunch yesterday, minorities can't remain abstractions. I was hoping that over time, smartphones would do to racism what they did to UFOs.

You remember UFOs, right? For a generation leading up to the 1990s, some fuzzy flying saucer turned up in the news every month. Now, when there are a thousand times more cameras around, the flying saucers have evaporated like smoke - belief in alien visitors plummeted by the mid-2000s. The myth became impossible to preserve in the face of evidence (or lack of it).

Read Next

3 Penis Tropes In Hollywood That You Never Noticed

Racism, likewise, is based on a myth - that these people aren't people at all, that they don't cry or bleed or want the same things we want, that fixing our discomfort is as simple as making them go away, somehow. Now we have the technology to see an event like Charlottesville in real-time from half a dozen angles; we can hear the screams, see first-responders desperately trying to resuscitate victims. We can get a mental image of what an ethnic cleansing would really look like - that same chaos, repeated millions of times. That's the truth behind the edgy frog memes and red-arm bands. Take it in, assholes.

It would be a wake-up call. That was the dream, anyway.

4

Yes, Cameras Do Change Minds

I'm known as a hopeful optimist, possibly having to do with being a white person who accidentally made a lot of money off of a story he originally wrote as a prank. But it's not like I just pulled this dream out of my ass - there's precedent for it.

The presence of cameras all but eliminated the American public's tolerance for military casualties, for example - we've completely built our foreign policy around it. America lost 100,000 troops in WWI, 400,000 in WWII, and almost 60,000 in Vietnam. That last one was the turning point - a flood of full-color footage of maimed soldiers and screaming civilians turned public opinion against the war overnight. The reality of war didn't change, but you can bet your ass that seeing it made all of the difference. We haven't had a comparable war since; Afghanistan saw a tiny fraction of those losses (2,400) and so did Iraq (4,500). Suddenly, soldiers' lives mattered - the myth of the consequence-free war went the way of the UFO.

Why in the hell did you think a horde of screaming Actual Nazis would have their hearts melted by the sight of dying protesters? you ask. If anything, they probably get off on it. After all, Americans don't seem to care about hundreds of thousands of bombed Iraqis.

But I'm not talking about the raging Nazis here - it's only the extreme fringe who'll walk around in public doing that shit, and some of them try to sheepishly talk their way out of it later. The systemic racism that exists in the world doesn't emanate from them, it flows from the comfortable indifference of the majority. The most incurable form of bigotry persists specifically because it doesn't feel like heat coursing through the veins - it feels like nothing at all. I was born in Trump Country and I only met a couple of people who openly called for black genocide, but knew dozens if not hundreds who simply thought society didn't need changing (and I agreed, at the time). We didn't want the stick figures to die, we just didn't think they needed help. What does a stick figure need food stamps for?

The latter are the ones I thought would be turned in this age of pervasive cameras and personal connections. It's easy for the comfortable casual racist (who, by the way, hates Nazis) to ignore a headline or pie charts about income inequality. It's harder to ignore a man bleeding in the driver's seat of his car while his young daughter and her mother sit helplessly next to him, wailing in anguish. I didn't think it would change overnight, but over the decades I thought these attitudes would be chiseled away one gut-wrenching video at a time. Do you see? He's not a fucking statistic. He bleeds. His family loved him just as much as your family loves you. Look.

3

But The Sword Swings Both Ways

Hey, did I mention that after years of decline, belief in UFOs has shot back up to its previous highs? The need to believe was always there, so others looking to fill that void simply adapted to the marketplace (If you think about it, the aliens would have cloaking technology that makes them invisible to cell phones!).

Now consider the fact that the Confederate statues the protesters were rallying around in Charlottesville aren't all 150-year-old relics. New ones are being built all the time (35 Confederate monuments have been added since 2000 in North Carolina alone - lots of them were built in the 1960s as backlash to the civil rights movement). They are, in other words, modern symbols erected by groups looking to change policy today. That's why there's a movement to take them down, and a bitter counter-movement to preserve them. It is only about preserving the past to the extent that it's about making current law conform to it.

The point is, if racism is a dying relic, it sure as hell doesn't feel like it. Oh, I'm not surprised that hate groups thrive in this era - a few charismatic sociopaths have always been able to cast a wide umbrella of influence and mass media has just amplified their reach. I mean, you've seen their memes. What I had hoped, though, was that society would be better at spotting them, quicker to see through their tricks. I often wonder how average German citizens would have reacted if camera phones had existed back then and somebody had leaked video from inside a concentration camp. But lots of German citizens did know about the concentration camps! Sure, but it's one thing to have a vague concept of eliminating Jews, another to actually see a wheelbarrow full of dead children. It would be meaningless to the true zealots, but most people aren't that.

And yet

2

Modern Society May Have Cultivated A Population Ripe For Hate

It's too easy to think of Nazis as a different species, like they were aliens who invaded from another planet. If you tell me we shouldn't humanize them, I say that humanizing them actually makes them scarier: They are not only human, but they are your motherfucking neighbors. After the war, German soldiers and officers went back home and got jobs - it's not like you blow up the mothership and the foot soldiers topple over. Likewise, your brother or uncle or daughter could join a hate group tomorrow and they would still be family. Some of the people reading this have had this exact thing happen.

Think about it: Even if the worst happens and 20 years from now we're in an actual shooting war with a new round of Nazis, it's not like we'll kill them all. No war ends that way; there'll be some kind of resolution and the combatants will take off their uniforms and the very next day they'll be next to you on the subway. If you want to stop that future, you have to start with understanding how Nazis are made, and how regular everyday folks get sucked in. Hate is a prickly shell humans grow around fear, a defense mechanism to replace the terror of the unknown with the cold certainty of rage. You don't have to feel sorry for them, but hate is like cancer - it's all about knowing the warning signs and catching it early.

So, let's start here: What a human needs, above all else, is to matter. And mattering in 2017 is hard as shit. There are 100 million Americans who neither have jobs nor are looking for one. Of those who do work, only 36 percent say their job has meaning and significance (did you know that a low-paying, unstable job is actually more stressful than unemployment?). I guess there used to be pride in building a house or a car, or growing crops - creating something tangible - but now, the machines have those jobs and we're stuck serving coffee or moving numbers around a spreadsheet, counting down the days until the machines take those jobs, too.

Our generation has fewer close friends than previous generations and are less likely to have a sexual partner or children of our own. We trust each other less than we ever have. We need to matter, but we don't have people in our lives reminding us of that, so we compensate. I matter because I'm not [insert hateable stick figure here].

And I can't emphasize enough how much it doesn't actually make a difference what goes in those brackets. Reddit's Trump community The_Donald overlaps strongly with their now-banned Fat People Hate community and the anti-woman subreddit TheRedPill. Where you find articles railing on blacks, you'll find articles demonizing Jews, homosexuals, trans people hell, go to any right-wing site and notice their bitter loathing of vegans.

It's hard for most people to grasp how hate can be both arbitrary and murderous, but that's how the human mind works. Once you switch into that primitive Us vs. Them survival mode, the rationale becomes totally irrelevant. Remember that one of the world's oldest and most pervasive prejudices is against left-handed people. Skilled manipulators could pull out endless examples of how inherently dishonest and filthy those lefties were, and they always found an audience. That only sounds ridiculous until you realize how great it must have been to wake up every day and congratulate yourself for using your right hand, a.k.a. the hand you automatically used anyway.

If you haven't built anything you can be proud of - be it a house, career, family, or loving circle of friends - then you need to draw your pride from somewhere. Hate groups let you set the pride bar so low that you can swell with pride over the fact that you woke up this morning with a certain color skin and heterosexual urges, as if both were the result of diligent effort on your part. Imagine eating a delicious cheeseburger and congratulating yourself for having accomplished your noble goal of not being vegan.

1

But I Still Think The Good Guys Will Win

If you've come to the conclusion that the internet really didn't change anything because people are people and set in their beliefs, the facts say you're wrong. For instance, the internet era has been devastating for religion in the U.S.A., with the ranks of nonbelievers more than doubling just since 1990. In that same span, support for gay marriage went from 13 percent to 58 percent. Support for marijuana legalization, from 12 percent to 53 percent. I absolutely believe those abrupt changes happened because many Americans were coming in contact with their first atheists, uncloseted gay people, and admitted pot smokers and finding they weren't monsters. You can strap somebody to a chair and make them watch a thousand hours of PSAs about how this group or that is just like us, but it won't have the same impact as a single positive encounter with one of them. Dogma dies in the face of such experiences.

It's easy to think of the internet as a cesspool of anonymous harassers but it is mostly a constellation of tight-knit communities that overlap with others, bringing them together in unexpected ways. You've heard a lot of talk about online bubbles of like-minded people getting more and more extreme in the absence of opposition, but the reason we became so much more open-minded on some issues in the first place is that online communities forced us to mingle across demographics. We may all have joined a forum based on our Babylon 5 fandom, but we quickly realized some of the cool people we were talking to were the type we'd never have run into in our real-life neighborhoods (Wait, you're posting from Brazil? What time is it there?!?). When I was a kid, you'd hear about a deadly earthquake in Taiwan and briefly raise an eyebrow over your coffee. So sad. Today, you jump online and say, Wait, did they say Jiji? That's where Ironheart69 is from! Has anybody heard from her?

What I'm hoping is that what we're seeing now is the reaction to that, the loud rage of a racist realizing his sister is dating a damned Muslim, that his old college roommate turned out to be a trans woman, and that there are black people in horror movies who don't die. An ideology kicking and screaming as it is dragged out the door, the equivalent of segregationists blocking black children from their schools, knowing full well that theirs was a lost cause.

Over time, lots of those segregationists realized they were wrong, that their rage and the fear at its core were based on nothing. That will happen again. I think. I hope.

David Wong is the Executive Editor at Cracked. His new book, WHAT THE HELL DID I JUST READ, is available for preorder now at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Indiebound, iBooks, and Kobo.

For more from David, check out Some Brief, Friendly Advice About Race And Racism and 7 Reasons We're Quietly Letting Racists Win.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel, and check out Donald Trump Finally Embraces The Hitler Comparisons, and other videos you won't see on the site!

Follow us on Facebook, and we'll follow you everywhere.

Get intimate with our new podcast Cracked Gets Personal . Subscribe for great episodes like The Most Insane Things We Saw In Embergency Medicine and 3 Wild Stories from Inside the Opiate Epidemic, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Read more: http://www.cracked.com/blog/why-hate-doesnt-have-to-win/

[gaylemccoy972-blog]

5 Things To Understand About Modern Hate Groups

Here's a popular right-wing meme that got spread around before the attack in Charlottesville:

So, here's what I want to ask anyone sharing that (or wearing it on a t-shirt - yes, they sell them): When we replace the stick figures with actual bleeding humans, does that change how you feel about it at all? (WARNING: Graphic fucking video):

It's not a rhetorical question. I think the answer to that will decide what happens next.

5

The Internet Could Have Been The Greatest Anti-Bigotry Tool In History

Bigotry is never about hating a real person. The target is always a perfectly hateable caricature we invent to avoid glimpsing the true enemy staring back at us from the mirror. It's a punching bag, a shape drawn around a bull's-eye. This is why so many racists have a real Black Friend they can hide behind - when they actually get to know one, a whole different part of their brain lights up (I mean, he's not even black to me! He's just Steve!). Do I have to point out the obvious, that their entire worldview would change if they could somehow get to know every minority the way they know their buddy? How many times have anti-immigration politicians and pundits gotten caught hiring illegals themselves? Well you see, my illegals are honest and do great work. Not like the rapey stick-figures on those T-shirts.

Lutz Bachmann/Twitter

I had secretly been hoping that the internet, social media, and smartphones would make it impossible to not put a real human face on those groups. In a connected world in which I can tell you what my cousin's coworkers considered eating for lunch yesterday, minorities can't remain abstractions. I was hoping that over time, smartphones would do to racism what they did to UFOs.

You remember UFOs, right? For a generation leading up to the 1990s, some fuzzy flying saucer turned up in the news every month. Now, when there are a thousand times more cameras around, the flying saucers have evaporated like smoke - belief in alien visitors plummeted by the mid-2000s. The myth became impossible to preserve in the face of evidence (or lack of it).

Read Next

3 Penis Tropes In Hollywood That You Never Noticed

Racism, likewise, is based on a myth - that these people aren't people at all, that they don't cry or bleed or want the same things we want, that fixing our discomfort is as simple as making them go away, somehow. Now we have the technology to see an event like Charlottesville in real-time from half a dozen angles; we can hear the screams, see first-responders desperately trying to resuscitate victims. We can get a mental image of what an ethnic cleansing would really look like - that same chaos, repeated millions of times. That's the truth behind the edgy frog memes and red-arm bands. Take it in, assholes.

It would be a wake-up call. That was the dream, anyway.

4

Yes, Cameras Do Change Minds

I'm known as a hopeful optimist, possibly having to do with being a white person who accidentally made a lot of money off of a story he originally wrote as a prank. But it's not like I just pulled this dream out of my ass - there's precedent for it.

The presence of cameras all but eliminated the American public's tolerance for military casualties, for example - we've completely built our foreign policy around it. America lost 100,000 troops in WWI, 400,000 in WWII, and almost 60,000 in Vietnam. That last one was the turning point - a flood of full-color footage of maimed soldiers and screaming civilians turned public opinion against the war overnight. The reality of war didn't change, but you can bet your ass that seeing it made all of the difference. We haven't had a comparable war since; Afghanistan saw a tiny fraction of those losses (2,400) and so did Iraq (4,500). Suddenly, soldiers' lives mattered - the myth of the consequence-free war went the way of the UFO.

Why in the hell did you think a horde of screaming Actual Nazis would have their hearts melted by the sight of dying protesters? you ask. If anything, they probably get off on it. After all, Americans don't seem to care about hundreds of thousands of bombed Iraqis.

But I'm not talking about the raging Nazis here - it's only the extreme fringe who'll walk around in public doing that shit, and some of them try to sheepishly talk their way out of it later. The systemic racism that exists in the world doesn't emanate from them, it flows from the comfortable indifference of the majority. The most incurable form of bigotry persists specifically because it doesn't feel like heat coursing through the veins - it feels like nothing at all. I was born in Trump Country and I only met a couple of people who openly called for black genocide, but knew dozens if not hundreds who simply thought society didn't need changing (and I agreed, at the time). We didn't want the stick figures to die, we just didn't think they needed help. What does a stick figure need food stamps for?

The latter are the ones I thought would be turned in this age of pervasive cameras and personal connections. It's easy for the comfortable casual racist (who, by the way, hates Nazis) to ignore a headline or pie charts about income inequality. It's harder to ignore a man bleeding in the driver's seat of his car while his young daughter and her mother sit helplessly next to him, wailing in anguish. I didn't think it would change overnight, but over the decades I thought these attitudes would be chiseled away one gut-wrenching video at a time. Do you see? He's not a fucking statistic. He bleeds. His family loved him just as much as your family loves you. Look.

3

But The Sword Swings Both Ways

Hey, did I mention that after years of decline, belief in UFOs has shot back up to its previous highs? The need to believe was always there, so others looking to fill that void simply adapted to the marketplace (If you think about it, the aliens would have cloaking technology that makes them invisible to cell phones!).

Now consider the fact that the Confederate statues the protesters were rallying around in Charlottesville aren't all 150-year-old relics. New ones are being built all the time (35 Confederate monuments have been added since 2000 in North Carolina alone - lots of them were built in the 1960s as backlash to the civil rights movement). They are, in other words, modern symbols erected by groups looking to change policy today. That's why there's a movement to take them down, and a bitter counter-movement to preserve them. It is only about preserving the past to the extent that it's about making current law conform to it.

The point is, if racism is a dying relic, it sure as hell doesn't feel like it. Oh, I'm not surprised that hate groups thrive in this era - a few charismatic sociopaths have always been able to cast a wide umbrella of influence and mass media has just amplified their reach. I mean, you've seen their memes. What I had hoped, though, was that society would be better at spotting them, quicker to see through their tricks. I often wonder how average German citizens would have reacted if camera phones had existed back then and somebody had leaked video from inside a concentration camp. But lots of German citizens did know about the concentration camps! Sure, but it's one thing to have a vague concept of eliminating Jews, another to actually see a wheelbarrow full of dead children. It would be meaningless to the true zealots, but most people aren't that.

And yet

2

Modern Society May Have Cultivated A Population Ripe For Hate

It's too easy to think of Nazis as a different species, like they were aliens who invaded from another planet. If you tell me we shouldn't humanize them, I say that humanizing them actually makes them scarier: They are not only human, but they are your motherfucking neighbors. After the war, German soldiers and officers went back home and got jobs - it's not like you blow up the mothership and the foot soldiers topple over. Likewise, your brother or uncle or daughter could join a hate group tomorrow and they would still be family. Some of the people reading this have had this exact thing happen.

Think about it: Even if the worst happens and 20 years from now we're in an actual shooting war with a new round of Nazis, it's not like we'll kill them all. No war ends that way; there'll be some kind of resolution and the combatants will take off their uniforms and the very next day they'll be next to you on the subway. If you want to stop that future, you have to start with understanding how Nazis are made, and how regular everyday folks get sucked in. Hate is a prickly shell humans grow around fear, a defense mechanism to replace the terror of the unknown with the cold certainty of rage. You don't have to feel sorry for them, but hate is like cancer - it's all about knowing the warning signs and catching it early.

So, let's start here: What a human needs, above all else, is to matter. And mattering in 2017 is hard as shit. There are 100 million Americans who neither have jobs nor are looking for one. Of those who do work, only 36 percent say their job has meaning and significance (did you know that a low-paying, unstable job is actually more stressful than unemployment?). I guess there used to be pride in building a house or a car, or growing crops - creating something tangible - but now, the machines have those jobs and we're stuck serving coffee or moving numbers around a spreadsheet, counting down the days until the machines take those jobs, too.

Our generation has fewer close friends than previous generations and are less likely to have a sexual partner or children of our own. We trust each other less than we ever have. We need to matter, but we don't have people in our lives reminding us of that, so we compensate. I matter because I'm not [insert hateable stick figure here].

And I can't emphasize enough how much it doesn't actually make a difference what goes in those brackets. Reddit's Trump community The_Donald overlaps strongly with their now-banned Fat People Hate community and the anti-woman subreddit TheRedPill. Where you find articles railing on blacks, you'll find articles demonizing Jews, homosexuals, trans people hell, go to any right-wing site and notice their bitter loathing of vegans.

It's hard for most people to grasp how hate can be both arbitrary and murderous, but that's how the human mind works. Once you switch into that primitive Us vs. Them survival mode, the rationale becomes totally irrelevant. Remember that one of the world's oldest and most pervasive prejudices is against left-handed people. Skilled manipulators could pull out endless examples of how inherently dishonest and filthy those lefties were, and they always found an audience. That only sounds ridiculous until you realize how great it must have been to wake up every day and congratulate yourself for using your right hand, a.k.a. the hand you automatically used anyway.

If you haven't built anything you can be proud of - be it a house, career, family, or loving circle of friends - then you need to draw your pride from somewhere. Hate groups let you set the pride bar so low that you can swell with pride over the fact that you woke up this morning with a certain color skin and heterosexual urges, as if both were the result of diligent effort on your part. Imagine eating a delicious cheeseburger and congratulating yourself for having accomplished your noble goal of not being vegan.

1

But I Still Think The Good Guys Will Win

If you've come to the conclusion that the internet really didn't change anything because people are people and set in their beliefs, the facts say you're wrong. For instance, the internet era has been devastating for religion in the U.S.A., with the ranks of nonbelievers more than doubling just since 1990. In that same span, support for gay marriage went from 13 percent to 58 percent. Support for marijuana legalization, from 12 percent to 53 percent. I absolutely believe those abrupt changes happened because many Americans were coming in contact with their first atheists, uncloseted gay people, and admitted pot smokers and finding they weren't monsters. You can strap somebody to a chair and make them watch a thousand hours of PSAs about how this group or that is just like us, but it won't have the same impact as a single positive encounter with one of them. Dogma dies in the face of such experiences.

It's easy to think of the internet as a cesspool of anonymous harassers but it is mostly a constellation of tight-knit communities that overlap with others, bringing them together in unexpected ways. You've heard a lot of talk about online bubbles of like-minded people getting more and more extreme in the absence of opposition, but the reason we became so much more open-minded on some issues in the first place is that online communities forced us to mingle across demographics. We may all have joined a forum based on our Babylon 5 fandom, but we quickly realized some of the cool people we were talking to were the type we'd never have run into in our real-life neighborhoods (Wait, you're posting from Brazil? What time is it there?!?). When I was a kid, you'd hear about a deadly earthquake in Taiwan and briefly raise an eyebrow over your coffee. So sad. Today, you jump online and say, Wait, did they say Jiji? That's where Ironheart69 is from! Has anybody heard from her?

What I'm hoping is that what we're seeing now is the reaction to that, the loud rage of a racist realizing his sister is dating a damned Muslim, that his old college roommate turned out to be a trans woman, and that there are black people in horror movies who don't die. An ideology kicking and screaming as it is dragged out the door, the equivalent of segregationists blocking black children from their schools, knowing full well that theirs was a lost cause.

Over time, lots of those segregationists realized they were wrong, that their rage and the fear at its core were based on nothing. That will happen again. I think. I hope.

David Wong is the Executive Editor at Cracked. His new book, WHAT THE HELL DID I JUST READ, is available for preorder now at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Indiebound, iBooks, and Kobo.

For more from David, check out Some Brief, Friendly Advice About Race And Racism and 7 Reasons We're Quietly Letting Racists Win.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel, and check out Donald Trump Finally Embraces The Hitler Comparisons, and other videos you won't see on the site!

Follow us on Facebook, and we'll follow you everywhere.

Get intimate with our new podcast Cracked Gets Personal . Subscribe for great episodes like The Most Insane Things We Saw In Embergency Medicine and 3 Wild Stories from Inside the Opiate Epidemic, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Read more: http://www.cracked.com/blog/why-hate-doesnt-have-to-win/

[pedrowells24-blog]

5 Things To Understand About Modern Hate Groups

Here's a popular right-wing meme that got spread around before the attack in Charlottesville:

So, here's what I want to ask anyone sharing that (or wearing it on a t-shirt - yes, they sell them): When we replace the stick figures with actual bleeding humans, does that change how you feel about it at all? (WARNING: Graphic fucking video):

It's not a rhetorical question. I think the answer to that will decide what happens next.

5

The Internet Could Have Been The Greatest Anti-Bigotry Tool In History

Bigotry is never about hating a real person. The target is always a perfectly hateable caricature we invent to avoid glimpsing the true enemy staring back at us from the mirror. It's a punching bag, a shape drawn around a bull's-eye. This is why so many racists have a real Black Friend they can hide behind - when they actually get to know one, a whole different part of their brain lights up (I mean, he's not even black to me! He's just Steve!). Do I have to point out the obvious, that their entire worldview would change if they could somehow get to know every minority the way they know their buddy? How many times have anti-immigration politicians and pundits gotten caught hiring illegals themselves? Well you see, my illegals are honest and do great work. Not like the rapey stick-figures on those T-shirts.

Lutz Bachmann/Twitter

I had secretly been hoping that the internet, social media, and smartphones would make it impossible to not put a real human face on those groups. In a connected world in which I can tell you what my cousin's coworkers considered eating for lunch yesterday, minorities can't remain abstractions. I was hoping that over time, smartphones would do to racism what they did to UFOs.

You remember UFOs, right? For a generation leading up to the 1990s, some fuzzy flying saucer turned up in the news every month. Now, when there are a thousand times more cameras around, the flying saucers have evaporated like smoke - belief in alien visitors plummeted by the mid-2000s. The myth became impossible to preserve in the face of evidence (or lack of it).

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Racism, likewise, is based on a myth - that these people aren't people at all, that they don't cry or bleed or want the same things we want, that fixing our discomfort is as simple as making them go away, somehow. Now we have the technology to see an event like Charlottesville in real-time from half a dozen angles; we can hear the screams, see first-responders desperately trying to resuscitate victims. We can get a mental image of what an ethnic cleansing would really look like - that same chaos, repeated millions of times. That's the truth behind the edgy frog memes and red-arm bands. Take it in, assholes.

It would be a wake-up call. That was the dream, anyway.

4

Yes, Cameras Do Change Minds

I'm known as a hopeful optimist, possibly having to do with being a white person who accidentally made a lot of money off of a story he originally wrote as a prank. But it's not like I just pulled this dream out of my ass - there's precedent for it.

The presence of cameras all but eliminated the American public's tolerance for military casualties, for example - we've completely built our foreign policy around it. America lost 100,000 troops in WWI, 400,000 in WWII, and almost 60,000 in Vietnam. That last one was the turning point - a flood of full-color footage of maimed soldiers and screaming civilians turned public opinion against the war overnight. The reality of war didn't change, but you can bet your ass that seeing it made all of the difference. We haven't had a comparable war since; Afghanistan saw a tiny fraction of those losses (2,400) and so did Iraq (4,500). Suddenly, soldiers' lives mattered - the myth of the consequence-free war went the way of the UFO.

Why in the hell did you think a horde of screaming Actual Nazis would have their hearts melted by the sight of dying protesters? you ask. If anything, they probably get off on it. After all, Americans don't seem to care about hundreds of thousands of bombed Iraqis.

But I'm not talking about the raging Nazis here - it's only the extreme fringe who'll walk around in public doing that shit, and some of them try to sheepishly talk their way out of it later. The systemic racism that exists in the world doesn't emanate from them, it flows from the comfortable indifference of the majority. The most incurable form of bigotry persists specifically because it doesn't feel like heat coursing through the veins - it feels like nothing at all. I was born in Trump Country and I only met a couple of people who openly called for black genocide, but knew dozens if not hundreds who simply thought society didn't need changing (and I agreed, at the time). We didn't want the stick figures to die, we just didn't think they needed help. What does a stick figure need food stamps for?

The latter are the ones I thought would be turned in this age of pervasive cameras and personal connections. It's easy for the comfortable casual racist (who, by the way, hates Nazis) to ignore a headline or pie charts about income inequality. It's harder to ignore a man bleeding in the driver's seat of his car while his young daughter and her mother sit helplessly next to him, wailing in anguish. I didn't think it would change overnight, but over the decades I thought these attitudes would be chiseled away one gut-wrenching video at a time. Do you see? He's not a fucking statistic. He bleeds. His family loved him just as much as your family loves you. Look.

3

But The Sword Swings Both Ways

Hey, did I mention that after years of decline, belief in UFOs has shot back up to its previous highs? The need to believe was always there, so others looking to fill that void simply adapted to the marketplace (If you think about it, the aliens would have cloaking technology that makes them invisible to cell phones!).

Now consider the fact that the Confederate statues the protesters were rallying around in Charlottesville aren't all 150-year-old relics. New ones are being built all the time (35 Confederate monuments have been added since 2000 in North Carolina alone - lots of them were built in the 1960s as backlash to the civil rights movement). They are, in other words, modern symbols erected by groups looking to change policy today. That's why there's a movement to take them down, and a bitter counter-movement to preserve them. It is only about preserving the past to the extent that it's about making current law conform to it.

The point is, if racism is a dying relic, it sure as hell doesn't feel like it. Oh, I'm not surprised that hate groups thrive in this era - a few charismatic sociopaths have always been able to cast a wide umbrella of influence and mass media has just amplified their reach. I mean, you've seen their memes. What I had hoped, though, was that society would be better at spotting them, quicker to see through their tricks. I often wonder how average German citizens would have reacted if camera phones had existed back then and somebody had leaked video from inside a concentration camp. But lots of German citizens did know about the concentration camps! Sure, but it's one thing to have a vague concept of eliminating Jews, another to actually see a wheelbarrow full of dead children. It would be meaningless to the true zealots, but most people aren't that.

And yet

2

Modern Society May Have Cultivated A Population Ripe For Hate

It's too easy to think of Nazis as a different species, like they were aliens who invaded from another planet. If you tell me we shouldn't humanize them, I say that humanizing them actually makes them scarier: They are not only human, but they are your motherfucking neighbors. After the war, German soldiers and officers went back home and got jobs - it's not like you blow up the mothership and the foot soldiers topple over. Likewise, your brother or uncle or daughter could join a hate group tomorrow and they would still be family. Some of the people reading this have had this exact thing happen.

Think about it: Even if the worst happens and 20 years from now we're in an actual shooting war with a new round of Nazis, it's not like we'll kill them all. No war ends that way; there'll be some kind of resolution and the combatants will take off their uniforms and the very next day they'll be next to you on the subway. If you want to stop that future, you have to start with understanding how Nazis are made, and how regular everyday folks get sucked in. Hate is a prickly shell humans grow around fear, a defense mechanism to replace the terror of the unknown with the cold certainty of rage. You don't have to feel sorry for them, but hate is like cancer - it's all about knowing the warning signs and catching it early.

So, let's start here: What a human needs, above all else, is to matter. And mattering in 2017 is hard as shit. There are 100 million Americans who neither have jobs nor are looking for one. Of those who do work, only 36 percent say their job has meaning and significance (did you know that a low-paying, unstable job is actually more stressful than unemployment?). I guess there used to be pride in building a house or a car, or growing crops - creating something tangible - but now, the machines have those jobs and we're stuck serving coffee or moving numbers around a spreadsheet, counting down the days until the machines take those jobs, too.

Our generation has fewer close friends than previous generations and are less likely to have a sexual partner or children of our own. We trust each other less than we ever have. We need to matter, but we don't have people in our lives reminding us of that, so we compensate. I matter because I'm not [insert hateable stick figure here].

And I can't emphasize enough how much it doesn't actually make a difference what goes in those brackets. Reddit's Trump community The_Donald overlaps strongly with their now-banned Fat People Hate community and the anti-woman subreddit TheRedPill. Where you find articles railing on blacks, you'll find articles demonizing Jews, homosexuals, trans people hell, go to any right-wing site and notice their bitter loathing of vegans.

It's hard for most people to grasp how hate can be both arbitrary and murderous, but that's how the human mind works. Once you switch into that primitive Us vs. Them survival mode, the rationale becomes totally irrelevant. Remember that one of the world's oldest and most pervasive prejudices is against left-handed people. Skilled manipulators could pull out endless examples of how inherently dishonest and filthy those lefties were, and they always found an audience. That only sounds ridiculous until you realize how great it must have been to wake up every day and congratulate yourself for using your right hand, a.k.a. the hand you automatically used anyway.

If you haven't built anything you can be proud of - be it a house, career, family, or loving circle of friends - then you need to draw your pride from somewhere. Hate groups let you set the pride bar so low that you can swell with pride over the fact that you woke up this morning with a certain color skin and heterosexual urges, as if both were the result of diligent effort on your part. Imagine eating a delicious cheeseburger and congratulating yourself for having accomplished your noble goal of not being vegan.

1

But I Still Think The Good Guys Will Win

If you've come to the conclusion that the internet really didn't change anything because people are people and set in their beliefs, the facts say you're wrong. For instance, the internet era has been devastating for religion in the U.S.A., with the ranks of nonbelievers more than doubling just since 1990. In that same span, support for gay marriage went from 13 percent to 58 percent. Support for marijuana legalization, from 12 percent to 53 percent. I absolutely believe those abrupt changes happened because many Americans were coming in contact with their first atheists, uncloseted gay people, and admitted pot smokers and finding they weren't monsters. You can strap somebody to a chair and make them watch a thousand hours of PSAs about how this group or that is just like us, but it won't have the same impact as a single positive encounter with one of them. Dogma dies in the face of such experiences.

It's easy to think of the internet as a cesspool of anonymous harassers but it is mostly a constellation of tight-knit communities that overlap with others, bringing them together in unexpected ways. You've heard a lot of talk about online bubbles of like-minded people getting more and more extreme in the absence of opposition, but the reason we became so much more open-minded on some issues in the first place is that online communities forced us to mingle across demographics. We may all have joined a forum based on our Babylon 5 fandom, but we quickly realized some of the cool people we were talking to were the type we'd never have run into in our real-life neighborhoods (Wait, you're posting from Brazil? What time is it there?!?). When I was a kid, you'd hear about a deadly earthquake in Taiwan and briefly raise an eyebrow over your coffee. So sad. Today, you jump online and say, Wait, did they say Jiji? That's where Ironheart69 is from! Has anybody heard from her?

What I'm hoping is that what we're seeing now is the reaction to that, the loud rage of a racist realizing his sister is dating a damned Muslim, that his old college roommate turned out to be a trans woman, and that there are black people in horror movies who don't die. An ideology kicking and screaming as it is dragged out the door, the equivalent of segregationists blocking black children from their schools, knowing full well that theirs was a lost cause.

Over time, lots of those segregationists realized they were wrong, that their rage and the fear at its core were based on nothing. That will happen again. I think. I hope.

David Wong is the Executive Editor at Cracked. His new book, WHAT THE HELL DID I JUST READ, is available for preorder now at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Indiebound, iBooks, and Kobo.

For more from David, check out Some Brief, Friendly Advice About Race And Racism and 7 Reasons We're Quietly Letting Racists Win.

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