#but youre. STILL. fucking stuck maiming each other on sight what the hell what the fuck. potentially for multiple lifetimes. unreal

[narwhalandchill]

btw hi hello still not abt to fucking . Forget NOR Forgive what they called this dashing summonable mofo in the earliest version of the english beta (& when i say the potential lore implications here are fucking Massive If that initial desc wasnt just old ass outdated lore text and actually happens to have Anything at all to do with the storys current iteration and intended direction. i MEAN that shit) so like yeah actually . yes i did post abt it back then as it happened. but im gonna talk abt it again i literally Must . speak my Truth

readmore as usual if u dont want leaks (well. its literally the outdated beta text desc of a TCG summon but . Well .) but like. i am 100% serious when i say this shit has Literally been rent free since then and the fact that the next beta update removed it in favor of calling that dude a bland ass "dark shadow" is just Genuinely my villain origin arc i want to SCREAM

LIKE. WHAT THE FUCK WHAT THE FUCK WHAT THE FUCK . IM GOING TO TEAR MY HAIR OUT I JUST . AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

IT KILLS ME. IT KILLS ME. IM DYING IRL

WHAT FUCKING NEMESIS!??!?!?!?!?!?

[brandstifter-sys]

Trash Bat

@dukexietyweek Day 7 - Music         (Ao3)

Word Count: 1581

Characters: Roman, Janus, Remus, Virgil

Rating: T

Warnings: innuendo, fire, spiders 

Virgil is goaded into going to one of Roman’s boring galas, because Remus wants him there to help cause problems just like old times. 

(Song fic. “Trash Bat” by AFI, also inspired by this and this)

---

Virgil had never been one to go to one of these events and take it seriously, even when Roman pleaded with him. He hated dressing up in fancy costumes and slow dancing with figments from the Imagination. But he was here, all because Janus called him out for always rudely refusing, and he was not about to make Janus look honest. 

He hated the stupid purple jacket with silver embellishments and the black dress pants. He wanted his hoodie and his headphones but he couldn't have those for a while. So he watched the people dancing around on the golden floor, avoiding the Grecian columns and the gaudy double staircase. The prince was not one of them. 

"You know," Janus said as he wandered up to the window ledge where he was hiding behind a long red curtain, "Roman doesn't have any qualms about you not attending." Virgil glared at him and clenched his fists. 

"Then why the fuck did you guilt me into showing up?" he hissed. Janus shrugged and brushed any dust from his jacket. 

"Roman isn't the one who wants to see you here. It's not often Remus gets dressed up. Like a pulp tabloid magazine with a slick-print cover." 

"You couldn't bother telling me that to get me here in the first place?" 

"I was under the impression that the others don't know about your rendezvous and you wanted to keep that a secret," he hummed and scanned the crowd. And then he smiled. 

"I am going to kill you until you're so dead the Dragon Witch can't reanimate your corpse," Virgil spat. Janus had the gaul to laugh and meander onto the dancefloor to find a woo-able partner. Virgil glared at him until he was out of sight. 

"You look tense, Scare Bear," Remus giggled and grabbed his hand suddenly, "Tense and princely, in a satanic way!" 

Virgil glanced at the duke and his heart skipped a beat. Remus was clean and groomed impeccably, with his usual makeup toned down and human teeth that were straight and blinding, rather than his fangs. He looked good in his more refined jacket with silver shoulder pads and a clean sash. He also looked like he was wearing cardboard.

"And you look like you want to start a fight and destroy this place," Virgil scoffed as Remus kissed the back of his hand, "So why don't we get out of here? I'll make sure you get your fill of carnage." 

"Now there's an idea! So you don't want to woo the Gerard Way figment? He'd show you how he disappears in your—" 

"Puppy, you know I only have one person I want to bring to my bed," Virgil cut him off, "And he smiles no matter how rough I get with him." 

"Are you going to be my angel after we destroy this boring shindig?" 

"You should know by now that I put you through hell, and I don't play nice." 

"You're a devil in the sheets and on the streets, but you're so sweet in the dark, it makes all the agony worth it." 

"You really want help ruining this, don't you?" Virgil snorted. He knew how the duke pleaded all too well.

"I do! Even Roman is bored! It's the perfect opportunity! It'll be just like old times!" 

"We always pissed Princey off and then he threatened to maim us." 

"And we can apologize for it with a video!" 

"Only if you keep it clean for the camera." 

"We're talking about my brother here!—But does that mean when the camera's off—?" 

"You can be my filthy little trash bat. Yeah," Virgil shrugged and got up, "So, once more with a smile, let's start with the music and then the spiders and fires." 

Remus beamed and led him to the dancefloor with all the false poise and grace of a man with a snake face. For the first time that night, a genuine grin crossed Virgil's lips, a wicked one but still a genuine grin, and Remus' heart melted. 

They fell into a simple waltz, taking broad steps to clear a piece of floor. No one, not even the prince they pushed aside, suspected what was to come. No, the way those two were gazing into each other's eyes gave off a different impression.

And then they were in the middle of the floor, frozen in place when the song faded. Remus briefly lifted his hand from Virgil's shoulder and snapped his fingers as he relaxed his other arm. He winked and reached behind his back, grabbing the hand Virgil pressed to his lower back, not letting go of Virgil's shoulder. 

The music picked up again, suddenly. The loud drums caused the crowd to panic momentarily, but they were almost immediately distracted when Virgil snapped his arm out and spun Remus, quickly reeling him back in, and pulling him to his chest, holding his waist. 

Remus wasted no time twisting and kicking his legs up and over his head, flipping out of Virgil's grasp. He grabbed Virgil's hand and spun him out, letting him take an extra spin and fall to a knee. It was time for the real fun to begin.

Ρulp in the slick

Αnd you're all I take tο bed

Το read with me

Remus was thrilled to show off his footwork kicking and jumping, crossing his feet and spinning. He was fast, looming closer to Virgil. 

Ρulp in the slick

Αnd you're all I take tο bed

With me tο

In a flash, Virgil swung his leg around, getting Remus to jump over it and take a knee. Virgil planted his hands and used the momentum to backflip to his feet. He made a show of swinging his leg over Remus and flipping over him in a sort of cartwheel, landing low to grab Remus' hands and pull him to his feet. 

Οnce mοre with a smile

Brοken teeth and bloody eyes

They swung around each other once, then Remus pulled Virgil in, letting him swing between his legs and back. Virgil regained his footing and hunched down so he could flip Remus behind him so they were back to back. 

Ιn my mean light

Μy my my Trash Βat

Roman was in awe. He thought this level of insanity was over, and hated that this was the beginning. The two of them were still incredible to witness as their sharp bold moves shifted into a sort of rapid tango. Virgil seemed to be leading, if only because Remus was showing off, but Roman knew they could switch in an instant and stay in sync. 

Once more with a smile

Broken teeth and empty eyes

As they seemed to finish another round of "don't step on my feet" in style, Virgil grabbed Remus' waist and dipped him. Remus tumbled out of his grasp. He faced his emo and goaded him with his hands.

In my mean light

My my my Trash Bat

Virgil ran at him and dropped to the floor, sliding under Remus as he jumped into the air. Virgil rolled onto his front and crawled toward Remus with his legs trailing behind him. He swiftly took a knee and nodded to the duke, holding his hands out and open.

Flies οr the flames

Wear nο halo 'rοund my head

Οh blessed be

Remus ran at him, ready to make some waves! He pressed a foot on Virgil's hands and jumped as the emo flung him to the ceiling. He grabbed onto the largest chandelier and swung on it, giggling and kicking his feet. 

Virgil snickered at how happy Remus looked and snapped his fingers. Remus only got more giddy as thousands of spiders flooded in through the windows. Patton was the first one out of there, followed swiftly by the majority of the crowd. And then Remus set the curtains on fire. 

Κeep it clean

Κeep it clean fοr the camera

When no one else was in the building, except for Roman, Virgil banished the spiders and stood under the chandelier with open arms. 

"What the hell was that!?" Roman huffed and marched up to Virgil, "I thought you were done wreaking havoc!" Virgil shrugged and winced as Remus fell into his arms.

"He wasn't planning on causing problems til I seduced him!" Remus laughed, "But it was worth it! And we livened up this shindig so you're welcome!" He stuck out his tongue at his brother before kissing Virgil's cheek and getting to the ground. 

"Are you—? He's my brother and you and he—?" Roman gawked when it hit him. 

"Don't sound so surprised!" Remus laughed and leaned against Virgil, "I'm the hot twin! And I get off on mean compliments! You just aren't the right fit for Scare Bear!" 

"If you think that I'm jealous, you're wrong. I just can't believe that you and he would even consider each other that way!—especially you, Virgil." 

"I'm madly in love with Remus," Virgil admitted shyly, "He's my trash bat." Remus cooed and moved to kiss his cheek, but Virgil had other plans. 

He turned his head at just the right moment to capture his lips in a chaste kiss. Roman was gawking like a fish. 

"You sneaky sonofabitch!" Remus giggled and clung to him. 

"We're gonna go ahead and leave. Thanks for the invite," Virgil mumbled and sank out with Remus, leaving Roman to wrap his head around it all. They earned the following round of cuddles and then some!

[voidstilesplease]

in another life

part one

"We have a bit of a situation," is what greets him when Stiles takes the call. Mason sounds winded on the other side. "Are you almost in town?"

His eyebrows shot up, "I'm perfectly well driving in the snow, Mason. Thank you for asking."

"Stiles,"

He rolls his eyes, "Thirty minutes tops. You guys are making me feel warm, huh." Stiles disconnects the call and almost regrets his decision to come home early for Christmas, but it's too late to turn back now.

~•~

He parks outside of Scott's house - the official pack headquarters even if Scott himself has not returned from college yet. He promises to arrive in four days while Lydia has scheduled a flight for next week. Malia is stuck with papers and can't fly until the 23rd. For now, Stiles is responsible for the pack until Scott returns - he resents that. He should've gone home first and changed into comfortable clothes, but Liam has rung him up, frantic, two more times after Mason's call. They won't tell what the problem is. Stiles figures if it were a life-and-death thing, they wouldn't delay information. They are vying for the drama is what's going on.

Melissa opens the front door and beams when she sees him. She opens her arms wide for a hug, "Hey! Looking good, Stiles. FBI been taking care of you?"

Before he can reply, Liam appears from behind Melissa. "Stiles!" his face looks so harried, splotches of red appearing. "Sorry to interrupt, but you really have to see this."

Liam hurries back without checking if Stiles follows, but he scrambles after him with an apologetic smile to Melissa. The beta leads him upstairs to Scott's old room. From the hallway, Stiles can already hear two voices talking, sifting out of the open door.

"Look-"

"No, you look. I don't know why you guys took me here or why you seem so wary about me. But, Jesus Christ, for the hundredth time, I don't know you."

Stiles frowns, confused. One of the voices belong to Mason, the other-

He stops short by the doorframe, startled at the unexpected sight of Theo Raeken sitting by the foot of Scott's bed. 

They haven't seen the guy since Gerard's plan to start a war between the supernaturals in Beacon Hills and the residents -and the subsequent flop. He left town less than a month after Tamora Monroe and her hunter lackey's escaped. They haven't heard from him since, and that had been two years ago.

Theo looks almost the same when Stiles last saw him. His hair is long, fringe falling to his eyes, and he has the same stocky build. His face scrunches in annoyance and impatience, and that's also not new. The only difference probably is his five o'clock shadow, reminding Stiles that he has also grown since then. He has always been clean-shaven.

Theo catches sight of Stiles by the doorway and his expression shifts to that of relief. "Oh, thank god, Stiles." He gets to his feet and crosses their small distance in two strides. Without preamble, Theo takes Stiles into his arms, clutching him firmly, as he buries his face in Stiles's neck.

Stiles is too stunned to push him away -and he should because there could be a dagger poised to pierce his guts any second now- but even Liam and Mason freeze in their spots. Liam snaps from his daze, and his eyes begin to glow yellow in a warning. Theo leans back and takes Stiles's face between his hands, ignoring the low growl coming from Liam. What's even more baffling is that he smiles. Theo Raeken smiles - not smirks, or frowns, or grimaces, but smiles. "You're here."

Mason finds his voice, "Wait. I thought you had amnesia and didn't know any of us?"

Liam retracts his claws and fangs when Theo turns back to them, seemingly unarmed. The beta scoffs, watching the way the chimera presses himself close to Stiles. For his part, Stiles is still recovering from the onslaught of uncharacteristic behavior from Theo and his blatant cluelessness of what's going on. It looks like the snow has given Stiles brain freeze from the long drive because he's only gawking instead of asking questions. The FBI should not hear about this. 

"Of course, he forgets all of us, but not Stiles," Liam crosses his arms, a little bit of condescension dripping in his tone. "The ghost riders took him and basically erased him from existence, and Theo still remembered him, anyway."

Theo looks lost, trying to follow Liam's words, "Why wouldn't I remember Stiles?"

"Hm," Liam curls his lips. "Those were even your exact words before."

"Okay," Stiles says, having enough of this. He steps away from Theo, raising both his hands in a gesture of stop. He fixes his gaze between Liam and Mason. "What is going on?"

"I've been trying to ask the same thing," Theo interjects, scowling at Mason and Liam. "But they hardly speak to me and refuse to let me go."

Liam exhales, sounding exasperated. "He woke up in the hospital," he starts, ignoring Theo. "making a scene, insisting he shouldn't be in California, and that he was just in New York seconds ago."

"Liam's dad recognized him," Mason offers. "So he told Melissa who called us. Then, we collected Theo and brought him here."

Liam shakes his head, eyes on Theo. "But he keeps saying he doesn't know us, or even Scott."

"I don't," Theo steps forward again and tugs at Stiles's clothed arm. "Let's just leave, babe-"

Stiles promptly plants his feet to the floor and halts Theo, blinking rapidly. "Wait, wait, wait," he withdraws his arms and puts his hands in between them to establish distance. Theo has been evading Stiles's personal space like friends would, but Stiles draws the line at endearments. They're not friends, and he isn't a babe. "What did you call me?"

Theo frowns at him, a hurt look crossing his features. "Babe," he answers like it's not a questionable thing at all. "I called you babe."

"Wow," Liam scoffs, blinking in disbelief. "Not only are you amnesiac. You've also apparently gone mad."

Theo turns to Liam, getting a more violent shade of red in the face. He would've stepped towards him in a challenge had Stiles not intercepted him with a hand to his chest. Stiles is surprised that Theo even concedes. There's only a slight force in his touch that a chimera with superstrength like Theo can strike with no problem.

"I'll tell you what's crazy," Theo grounds his teeth, nose flaring at Liam. "I don't know what the fuck is going on or who the hell you two are. I don't know how I'm here. Some kind of-" he delays, struggling, and then spits out, "magic plucked me from New York, and put me on the other side of the goddamn State. I thought I was dreaming, but the nurses keep claiming to sedate me." his hands gesture back and forth at the two. "Then you strangers keep coming at me, saying my name like we knew each other, telling me I live in a car - I don't, okay? I have a fucking apartment in Manhattan. I live with my boyfriend, and Stiles and I were having a stupid snow fight when I lost consciousness and woke up in that damn hospital. That's what crazy is!"

Silence follows Theo's outburst. Stiles can feel Liam and Mason's eyes -and even Melissa's from where she's standing outside the room- on him. He only gapes at Theo's flushed face and heaving chest.

"Did you just call me your boyfriend?"

Theo transfers his eyes on him, looking gutted. "Of course, I did." His expression quickly morphs to worry, "Has something happened to you, too?" then his face falls in dread when he asks, realizing the situation. "You don't remember me?"

It sounds like Theo’s remembering the wrong things, but Stiles's only response is to stare. What's happening is too bizarre for his exhausted mind to process. He's glad that there's no maiming involved with this little reunion with an old nemesis, but he doesn't know what to do with all the touching and intent looking and the sudden selective amnesia.

Theo looks crestfallen for an awkward while before his face lights up again. "We have to call Tara. She-"

"Tara?" Stiles echoes loudly, rearing back and cutting him off in shock. "Your sister?"

He beams, nodding his head. "Good. You remember her. That's progress, I think."

Stiles blurts out before he can think to stop himself, "You think she's alive?"

Theo pauses. His smile slowly flattens out, until he frowns, eyes reflecting a little bit of alarm at the crass question. "Why wouldn't she be?"

And yeah, Stiles doesn't have enough brain cells to start explaining that.

Theo's confusion has to straighten out as soon as possible.

~•~

title from: The One That Got Away by Katy Perry

[nomadmilk]

Why the God Isn’t Bored on Midgard - Loki x F!Reader Drabble - 7

Summary: With Ragnarok decimating Asgard, Thor and Loki and their people return to Earth searching for refuge. Everyone else has seemed to settle, except for Loki - the God of Mischief and Chaos - who isn’t willing to live the domesticated Midgard life, and getting utterly bored out of his mind... Until he discovered you.

Word Count: 1.8K

Warnings: Rated M/18+. The return of the jerk ex. Mentions of sex, and sex things.

Author’s Note: I’m stuck inside reading, playing Animal Crossing, and writing this :) Let me know what you think, and enjoy <3 Hoping to get more parts up soon!

Here are the other parts to the series: Part 1     Part 2 Part 3     Part 4 Part 5     Part 6 Part 7     Part 8 (First Half)     Part 8.5 (Second Half) Part 9

It seemed like you hadn’t come to terms as to what happened at Stark’s party. Loki assumed you were too stubborn and shy to actually say anything, and resorted to your usual plan in being distracted; working.

You did the tasks; helping women with recommending lingerie, funny gifts that might actually get the ball rolling for couples, and even did the boring stuff like keeping count of stock and if there was anything that needed to be delivered. You were even able to talk and gossip with your new colleagues. Over folding and hanging pieces and products, you talked briefly about past work employers, a little about family, and little specs of each other’s lives. You admit, you don’t say much, probably because you’re still the new kid in the store, but you listen intently as you and a colleague stack some new boxed lube on a shelf.

“So, I actually tried this with my boyfriend.” She says, inspecting the box before placing it on the row you had made. “And, oh my god, it does wonders. You have no idea how big he is.”

Your eyebrows raise as you nod along. It wasn’t what you were expecting on hearing. Although, it didn’t make you startled in any way; you had just been dealing with a guy who wanted to know what gag was best with a unicorn outfit.

“I mean, they say size doesn’t matter – like, yeah, I totally agree. “ She continues. “But it’s like they took the Karma Sutra, and somehow made it a thousand times better… I mean, technically they’re, like, thousands of years old, so they must have had the reading and practice-”

“Or they were really bored.” You chime, nervous about the jokey input. The colleague chuckles.

The shift wasn’t too bad at all-

“Wait.” You say, stopping your hands and turning to her. “You-… Asgardian?”

“Yeah, my boyfriend’s Asgardian.”

“And you said he-“

“Yes. They all have big dicks.”

-----

“Uh. Who the hell are you?”

Loki has had his fair share of ugly welcomes, and he also had his fair share of countering them. The temptation to do so was high, but Loki moves the conversation along. “Can I help you?”

The Prince stares t the stranger, who is in the meantime, blinking at his stature. It seemed like he wasn’t expecting Loki at all to answer the door, so Loki had to assume he was looking for someone else.

He prompts him again. “Are you looking for someone in particular?”

“Yeah, uh, Y/N?” The man blunders. “Does she still live here?”

“I’m sorry, but she’s not here at the moment.” Loki answers, assessing the man’s language. “Can I pass on a message?”

The man completely ignores the offer. “She said there’s a box of my stuff left over. Can I come in?”

Hesitant in a reply and beginning to glare, Loki wasn’t comfortable with his presence at all. Here he was in the apartment, head buried in books and student papers, until this guy comes along and bombards the serenity of it.

Over a box of stuff.

You never said there was going to be a visitor today. To be honest, you hadn’t spoken to Loki since Tony Stark’s party. He smirks to himself; with your job occupying all of your time, you must be pent up more than ever.

“Listen, I’ll just grab it and go, is that alright?” The man says, hurriedly this time.

Loki opens the door wider, and the man immediately steps into the flat. As he closed the door, he turns around to see the man in awe of the room. “When’d she renovate this place?”

“Since I moved in.” Loki proceeds to your room to pick up said box, passing the man by. “You said-“

He grabs Loki by the arm. Loki stills. For a second, the god almost relinquishes a blade into hi hand, but he stops himself. If this guy ended up in the news as  murder victim, Fury would be breathing down his neck constantly. And he’d have to wish his little bit of freedom and sanctuary gone.

Loki sighs; it was a reflex. He didn’t know why he needed a weapon to maim a human when he can actually just use his strength or cunning to actually do more so. But the extra threat made it guarantee that the man didn’t retaliate.

Not that the guy stood a chance.

On the other hand, Loki didn’t know why he felt a little agitated by this stranger.

“Who are you?” His grip was not loosening. “Are you sleeping with her?”

“I’m just someone who lives with her.” Loki says, the reply is satisfactory enough for Loki’s arm to be returned. His jaw clenches; this guy was too curious. “You never introduced yourself either.”

“Just someone concerned about her well-being.” He squares Loki, not reaching the same height, though. “Wait a minute… Your voice… She was with you…”

Loki surveys him, the man’s expression changing. What was he talking about? Was he a spy? A stalker? It was difficult to read him because Loki had little to work on. All he could pinpoint was that anything related to you, or just you, were definitely his buttons to push. You’ve never mentioned this man at any point in your interactions. The only man Loki had heard, who he had never met, who you barely noted upon was-

Then it struck him; it was if you were here to slap him. Again.

So, this was the so-called Ex? The guy phoning you at Stark’s party.

“You were with her that night.” The Ex resumes. It seems like he’s making a few revelations in his head as well. “What were you doing with her?”

It was like spite and pride had invited themselves to spread the smile onto Loki’s face. And before he could get a word in play, you had entered the apartment.

You promptly recognise The Ex in your home, and Loki steps back as your face crumples in confusion and ferocity. And he knew the next few minutes was going to be better than what he had originally planned.

You weren’t hiding your disbelief of your Ex just barging into your place, and you unleashed your rage by interrogating on why he was here in the first place. Although, The Ex, battling against you, stood no match against you.

As the scene plays out, it reminds him of when he saw you in the apartment for the first time… Your anger was volatile when it was pushed, and maybe that’s why Loki has never tested it, even though the allurement to mess with you some more was attractive.

Your eyes are fierce, and your cheeks have that glowering complexion that made Loki freeze in an unnatural way.

“Get out.” You demand, pointing to the open door.

“You’re not serious?” The Ex fumes. “And really? Him? Who the hell is he?”

“What? He’s just-“

“Oh! You’re really oblivious, y’know! You don’t even recognise it! You never fucking do!” The Ex stomps towards the exit.

“You never noticed anything I did!” You yell some more. “And I finally fucking realise that!”

The door slams shut.

Loki lets you breathe for a minute. You slip off your heels, easily coming off due to your stockings. You remove your jacket, and hang your handbag along with it.

You lock eyes with him, and for some reason Loki is left breathless by the sight of you; as you take off the band that made your ponytail, your hair beautifully flows and frames your face. Your uniform was an ill-fitting polo shirt and skirt, but it accompanied your body charmingly.

However, whilst Loki was staring at you, awaiting a word or for you to just walk by, you were looking at him back.

Although, when he was checking where your irises were wondering, they seemed to be… They seemed to be looking low… It looks like you were looking low at his…

“Sorry you had to see that.” You utter suddenly, eyes darting away. Your cheeks fade from the glower in replacement of a pink hue. You exhale. “This day has been exhausting. So, uh, I’ll be relieving myself to my bed.”

Loki frowns in amusement; you blush even harder.

“To sleep!” You add quickly. “I’m going to relieve myself by sleeping, is what I meant.”

You pace pass him, not knowing why you felt the need to hide your face.

Loki puts his hands in his pockets. “Enjoy yourself.”

-----

The pillows comfort your head as you lay. Your room was starting to dim with violet and orange as the sun outside your window was lowering from the sky. You roll over, glancing at where the rays hit your chest of drawers. It was like the universe was being perverse with its humour because the sunset shone directly as to where you hid your sex toys. You get flashbacks of work, and the personal conversations that your colleagues spilled you with, and all the dildos you displayed, and all the vibrators you pressed buttons on to demonstrate their strengths.

Cuddling a pillow, you thought about Loki and pondered about what he was doing; he seems pretty calm, as per usual, and probably busy with some work from his students at the university. Shutting your eyes, he comes to life in your mind. Your memory makes the room vivid as it remembers the walls of hardcover novels and encyclopaedias, and his deep brown varnished desk in the middle of it all. He sits behind it, his low-lidded eyes concentrating on a page in front of him. You internally whine; you can’t see his eyes properly but they’re green and glinting. Watching his hands, you see him write; they’re large, agile and slender. His fingers touch his face in contemplation, and you see him take a small bite of his bottom lip…

A pool of wetness began dripping from your folds as your minds lets you relive the touch of his hands on your body, and his lips against yours. You can smell a scent; a citrus and oak fragrance that familiarised the God of Mischief to you…

God, you were horny, and the added detail that the colleague gave you, was making your body shift in need of alleviation.

Nothing was going to relieve you like Loki did. It was infuriating as to how good he could make you feel. Since then, no dildo, no toy had satisfied you the way he did. Even he put your own hands to shame; they knew how to do it, but Loki seemed to be more attentive, and intimate, and clever…

With the time you had been taking to evade and distance yourself from him, the more you understood that your body wanted him, and to accept that fact was getting easier and easier.

[flightofaqrow]

🌟

Send 🌟 for lines of your writing that I enjoy a lot!

There’s probably a billion more that I could toss in here, but I’m pulling stuff that immediately jump to mind from my favorite threads, and what I can peep doing an archive skim. I’ll probably miss ones I really adored at the time IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO PICK WITH YOU OKAY.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Speaks lots about his character that he would drink it dry over mixed. A concoction often mixed with water for its taste. Something you sip, not drown yourself in.

And Qrow drowns.

He drowns himself in everything that he consumes. From the busted pack of cheap Parliaments in his pants pocket to the oxygen that he breathes. Knows no such thing as self-control. The one variable in his life that he seeks to restrain forever flowing freely from his fingertips. Feels the glass slip from his grasp and its only luck that he catches it before it clatters onto the counter.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Wracked with guilt, Qrow pushes himself away from the counter onto shaky feet to look the other properly. Ozpin only taller by a few inches. He wipes at his mouth with the back of his hand, wet with booze and now tears that fell unprompted. The death of many weighing heavily on his conscious.

“I’m so… stupid,” Qrow breathed out finally, breaking the uncomfortable silence that fell between them.

“Everyone said not to, and I did.” A bitter laugh and Qrow’s face is all but happy. Twisted up in sadness and sorrow as he looked the other with pleading eyes.

“I gave you everything,” He breathed out, voice barely audible, “And you couldn’t give me the truth.”

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PLAY ALONG for now, mister.

Nothing more needed to be said as a warm body cozies up against his side, Qrow only mere seconds away from downing his third shot of Scotch. Sets the glass back down and he knows a trap when he sees one. Knows when a game is being played, having been one who played such games when he was younger, before Beacon.

A ploy harder to keep with age.

And age shows well on Qrow. It’s the weapon secured on the small of his black and the title he’s earned for himself that makes playing hard. He’s not as cute or coy about it anymore. Too well seasoned and trained for cheap party tricks. Secures information in more adult manner now.

A smirk graces plush lips as she leaned in, the smell of cheap perfume tickling his senses. Hooks an arm around her waist and pulls her forward and around, so she was trapped between him and the counter of the bar itself.

“Say no more, doll.”

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

He’s hunched over the edge of a crate in the middle of a fucking alleyway in Mantle during a patrol. Clover the unfortunate sap stuck to tend to the huntsman in his current nauseated state of being. Withdrawal symptoms hitting him at the worse possible time and all he wants is for it to end.

A moment of peace in his life devoid of pain and suffering. He wants to breathe and be at ease. No fear of his semblance and what harm it could bring. No fear of being hurt and left behind to die. Could count the times he’s been left behind by the tribe to waste away. Liquor his saving grace from his misery.

Numbed the hurt and gave him something better to feel in return.

This, this was not better. This was miserable and god awful. This needed to end right now and all Qrow wants to do right now is to bitch and gripe about it. Shoves the hand reaching out to smooth his hair back away as he hurled once more.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

There’s a clench of his stomach in response. Empty. The idea of eating is unappealing to the Branwen however. The body wants, but Qrow does not feel the urge to feed it. Craving for liquor and basic necessities all merged into one, he can’t quite tell the difference anymore.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

HE’S QUICK. He has to be. Doesn’t have muscles oozing off of him like every other huntsman he knows. No where like anyone else in the tribe.  Qrow is all speed and skill. A natural talent honed in on to make up for the everything that follows him. He over compensates for being a bad luck charm. The movement is fluid. A  smooth transition, from running up on the Grimm, the fall of his footsteps quiet and controlled, to the extension of Harbinger. Qrow pirouettes from first position to second and swings down into third. Harbinger’s blade slicing clean through with each transition as he comes into place in front of Clover. Stops mere inches from slicing the other in half with his scythe. Cool metal starring dangerously into the face of the other.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

[ THIS IS A PLACEHOLDER FOR ONE I CAN’T FIND. THERE WAS AN AWESOME METAPHOR/TURN OF PHRASE WITH CLOVER AND CARDS AND I THINK A BLACKJACK REFERENCE AND FOR THE LIFE OF ME I CANNOT FIND IT!!! I liked it so much I read it out loud to my husband oh my god I’m so mad I don’t remember when it was... ]

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

I won’t copy/post nsfw stuff, it might even be weird to mention it but uuhhhhhh THIS WHOLE ANSWER

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

It’s like kissing ink on paper, bitter with a touch of something else underneath. Meant to stain and leave an impression. 

[ oddly enough the first half of the imagery with these lines kind of had a disconnect for me, because while I appreciated the hell out of the reference I couldn’t see why black coffee would need to be shaken OR stirred, so I wasn’t exactly sure what was being communicated. THE INK METAPHOR HIT ME HARD THO. especially with the concept of it being a layered thing. ]

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

[JUST INSERT THE ENTIRE F’ING THREAD WITH STAT’S RAVEN OKAY. BUT UGH I GUESS I’LL PICK SOME]

Free them all from the burden of carving out their hearts and stabbing it into the trees of the woods where it can be maimed and torn apart by the very same creatures they hunt.

They’ve fought many times before and now should be no different to rekindle their love for one another. What she did hurts, but nothing hurts more than having a part of him forcibly torn away. To see her suffering further than he can feel from afar.

They’ve wounded each other enough as it is. Not a part of them scratch free. Their blades permanently carved into one another. Said things neither one of them truly meant and felt nothing, but each other’s pain in return. Tears shed from both twins, strong and overwhelmed with the emotional force combined by both parties.

Reaches out the only way he knows how, by baring himself whole. Put his emotions on display in it’s rawest form. Knows nothing else, but how to be honest. Tells her with little words that he still feels everything that she feels, if not more that she ever could. “I’m here, Raven.”

A hive abandoned by it’s own Queen is destined to die. Wither away blindly completing tasks with no end-goal.

He tightens his grip around her hand, rings pressing into the other’s skin. Only then is he mindful of how tight it exactly gotten. Something akin to fear in his hold. Like if he doesn’t take this, take all of it, she’ll slip away from him again and he’ll be here. Standing alone in the rain with an empty hand reminiscent of warmth he craves. Warmth that could only be fulfilled by her.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 

[ I should actually do some of OURS huh... lmao]

No, Qrow offers himself up on a silver platter. Highlights his best features and puts it on display with the intention of captivating anyone who inched too close.

His next drink is lined up and Qrow circles the rim with his index finger. Feels the welcoming warmth of intoxication slowly begun to consume him. Combs through his hair with a level of familiarity and comfort he’s grown far too accustomed with. Beckons him to coo in delight at the sensation.

This conversation is far too convoluted to keep his interest. There is both nothing and everything going on at the same time and Qrow has little interest in thinking. If he was looking for a chat, he would have reported back to Ozpin hours ago. He would have followed through with his meeting with James, but he has done none and neither of these things.

He smiled as Briar laced their hand together, swinging their arms back and forth as they walked the streets of Mantle post-drinking spurge. Wherever it is their feet leads them is wherever they will go for the night. It doesn’t matter as long as she’s by his side.

Sweet is the first word to come to mind at such a brazen promise being bestowed upon him. Briar is sweet. How could she not be? Gentle in nature with consideration tucked under her belt. A dosage of sugar and spice he never knew he needed in his life. She is fun and a blast in the wake of his somber lifestyle.

Makes a request for rum and ginger ale, something sweet to satisfy his tongue. Far too odd for him to simply order whiskey on the rocks in a club. A drink meant for isolation, not mingling.

He pulls back and Qrow brushed at her shoulder with his hands to get rid of everything that left him. Disgusting as it is. Small smile on his lips as nervous laughter follows next. Doesn’t know what to do with himself as he stood there awkwardly, drenched to the bone in Briar’s apartment. “Hey,” he tried, “I’m back.” What else can he say after all that? The moment gone and Qrow more than ready to move on like it never happened.

It’s Briar! Qrow LOVES Briar. Qrow loves Briar except for when Briar is being the most Briar she can be and this, long pointed finger in his face as vermilion eyes narrowed at the sight of painted nails mere inches away from his nose as he drank is the least version of Briar he liked. Briar with a point.

The people outside the tribe far too fragile about their precious masculinity and feminity. Whereas Qrow could not care about these gender norms they aspire to. He sees a pretty outfit. He wants to wear it. It’s as simple as that.

OKAY ITS BEEN HOURS I NEED TO STOP AND MOVE ON BUT I COULD CONTINUE FOR MORE HOURS. I WANTED TO PUT SOME SIENNA ON HERE TOO BUT THIS IS SO LONG ALREADY SEND FROM THAT BLOG IF U WANT IT I GUESS. OKAY. ILU BEST BITCHHH

[catte-bard]

Prompt: Kidnapping

Pain.

That was the first thing she became aware of as she began to wake. Bellona groaned, wincing at the throbbing waves of pain going through her face. Even doing that made it hurt. Expressing in general.

The murmur of voices drew her further out of unconsciousness. It was dark. And she had to blink her eyes a few times to adjust. It looked like she was in the back of some sort of wagon. The faint scent of spices and chocobo hung in the air.

Dazed, Bellona tried to stand only to find her wrists bound. A twinge of panic rose within her. She struggled to free herself, rope biting painfully into her skin the more she fought.

No no no…

This wasn’t happening.

Her mind was hazy but slowly her memory came back to her. The people who captured her.

She hadn’t known who they were at first. Or why they were hunting her. It had been days ago when she first noticed these strangers stalking her. Following her in Hawker’s Alley. Eyeing her from a table tucked away in a dark corner of the Quicksand.

They weren’t Eorzean. She had heard them speak. Their accents gave them away as foreigners. Northern accents. From somewhere in Ilsabard.

What they had wanted with her, she didn’t know. She wasn’t sure if she should have told anyone about them. She wasn’t sure how threatening these individuals were or if they were harassing anyone else.

They seemed only interested in her…

And she probably should have told someone. D’jahv or Vurrelle. A Yellow Jacket or Brass Blade on duty. The Scions even. Perhaps she wouldn’t be in this mess right now.

Bellona gnawed at the rope, desperately attempting to chew it off. Though, that seemed to hurt even more. She let out a frustrated cry through bared teeth.

“Help!” She groggily called. Though she doubted there was anyone around to aide her. “Please, someone!”

Her voice sounded weak and muffled against the wagon walls. Screaming her throat raw would do nothing to get her out of this situation.

New plan: she needed to escape herself.

The wagon certainly didn’t feel like it was moving. Perhaps, if she could find a way to get the door open she could make a run for it? Find somewhere safe and get help?

You don’t know where you are.

It didn’t matter. Better than being stuck in here. Better than wherever her captors planned on taking her.

But first she needed to get that wagon door open. Attract her captors’ attention somehow. Then the moment it opened; she’d make a run for it. If anyone hindered her escape, she’d fight them to the best of her ability. She’d kick and bite and push. Make them regret ever capturing such a feral woman.

Suddenly she heard voices close by. Right outside the wagon.

“She’s making too much noise.” Grumbled one voice. Female. “Someone is going to hear her. I told you we should have done something about her mouth.”

“I thought she’d be out for longer.” Came a man’s snappy reply.

Bellona tensed, ready to act.

“Listen…She’s quiet now. Maybe she already gave up?”

“I don’t want to take any chances, Emile. You either make sure she stays quiet until we at least get to Ilsabard. Or I will.”

“Alright…alright…”

The sound of a latch coming undone. A sliver of sunlight.

Bellona launched forward, crashing against the door and sending it flying open. There came two shouts of alarm as she bolted out of her prison.

Bright sunlight nearly blinded her. Squinting against the brightness, the woman broke into a run. Her eyes would readjust while she got away.

Trees everywhere. She was in some kind of woodland. The Shroud? It was no part of the Shroud she was familiar with though.

She paused by a tree, ducking behind it while she took a moment to get her bearings. The Shroud wasn’t a place she liked to venture into often. Hunting never took her too far from the city.

A shot rang out and the bark beside her head exploded. Bellona hissed a cursed and threw herself to the ground to avoid any more fire. Another shot came seconds after, sending wood flying from the tree she had taken shelter behind.

“Are you bleedin’ insane? You want that Garlean bastard to have our heads for killing his daughter?!”

“I wasn’t shootin’ to kill…”

“Well I’m quite sure the man won’t be paying us if we bring the girl back maimed.”

“Why weren’t her swiving legs bound?! I told you—”

She heard her pursuers bicker with each other. They were close—perhaps only yalms away. Panic had her frozen on the ground and trembling. Too frightened to move lest one of them attempted to shoot again.

But she couldn’t stay there either. They’d catch her.

Had she heard that right? Her father had sent these people? If she would not return home of her own will, then it seemed she’d be forced to return…

Who were they? Lawless mercenaries? Conscripts desperate for citizenship and hoping by aiding an imperial lord they’d be granted it?

She didn’t care. She wasn’t going anywhere with them. Not even if it were her father who commanded them.

Heart thudding, she waited a moment to listen for footfalls. They’d stopped arguing. She couldn’t hear anything…

It didn’t matter. The time to move was now!

Bellona sprang to her feet and ran. Somewhere behind her, she heard the shouts of her pursuers. The woman didn’t dare steal a glance over her shoulder.

Of course. She should have known better to think that Atticus would be the only to come after her. Should have known better to think that her parents wouldn’t take action themselves.

You ran away from home. Did you really think they’d just sit down and do nothing about it? Especially since word about her actions had already reached Garlemald. Gods only knew what they must be thinking right now.

She shook her head. Just keep running.

Keep running…Right. She didn’t even know where to run! Drunk on adrenaline and trying to shake the people chasing her, Bellona had no bearings in the Gridanian woodland. Everywhere she turned looked the same. Every step felt like she was only going further into the forest and straying away from any settlements. Away from any help.

It was a dizzying maze of trees and brush. Everything felt like it was getting closer together, the canopy of leaves above grew thicker; it was getting darker. Bellona wasn’t sure if she should be more worried about being caught or becoming lost…

Blindly she ran, ignoring leaves slapping her in the face and thorns catching skin and clothing. Not even pausing when she stumbled over a root or stone in her path. Her eyes darted everywhere, looking for signs of haven. A camp. A road she could follow somewhere.

She couldn’t run forever. Her legs were beginning to tire—her chest beginning to ache. Surely by now, her pursuers have lost track of her?

Bellona spared a glance behind her. Nothing but the sight of trees clustered in the shadows.

Safe…For now at least.

She came to a stop, allowing herself an uneasy rest. Scanning the trees while she caught her breath. Ready to bolt at the slightest movement.

“Fuck…” She panted.

At the sudden sound of a twig snapping, Bellona looked around. Tensed, her heart fluttered anxiously within her chest. Her gaze darted about. She could hardly see anything in the thick copse.

She made ready to bolt again. But she couldn’t run forever. She’d need a place to hide—somewhere to hunker down until she could get back to the city.

More movement. Brush rustling grew louder as it drew closer…

Abruptly a squirrel burst from the bushes. The small creature paused to clean its face and then glance at Bellona. With a head tilt and twitch of its tail it went scampering off as quickly as it had come.

She heaved a loud sigh and relaxed. Safe…for now. Still couldn’t let her guard down though.

How many of them were there? The most Bellona ever noticed was four together. Two of them were currently hunting her. Which meant there were two—or more—others somewhere out there she stilled needed to worry about.

“Fuck!” She exclaimed.

How was she going to get out of this mess? She couldn’t ask for help. These people were her problem. The thought of dragging anyone else into this mess left her feeling ill. She didn’t want anyone getting hurt trying to shelter her. People were capable of doing vile things if there was money involved. Vile things she didn’t want to see happening to anyone she cared about.

How she hated her luck.

Closing her eyes, she leaned against a tree. What was she to do now? Wander through the Shroud until she stumbled across a poacher’s camp? Hope they’d be hospitable enough to offer her haven for the night?

Another twig snapped somewhere in the distance.

Her ears perked. Another squirrel? Or…

She looked around, slowly stepping back. Something was moving out there. Something much bigger than a squirrel.

Had they found her again that quickly?

Movement through the copse, undeniably something much bigger than a squirrel. Moving closer to her…

And then it suddenly stopped. Quiet settled over the woodland. An uncomfortably heavy kind…

From behind a hand clamped around her arm and whirled her around. Bellona met the grinning face of one of her hunters.

“Found you.” The Roegadyn woman grinned, her grip tightening painfully around Bellona’s arm. The imposing woman waved a small gun in her face. “Now, you either come quietly. Or I use this to break that pretty little nose of yours.”

“I have friends who will coming looking for me. They’ll kill you if you don’t let me go.” Bellona threatened. She struggled to pull away, but the other woman’s grip was vise-like. And seemed to only tighten at her protests.

“Ha! Let them come! I’ll shoot them all right between the eyes if they try anything. I’m not letting you slip away. Not with how much daddy dearest is paying us to bring you to him. You should be happy, girl. We’re reuniting you with your dear papa.” The hunter sneered. Giving Bellona one last cold look, she turned to call over her shoulder. “Emile, I got her! Tell Leos—”

Like hells you do! She cared not who it was they were taking her to. Bellona wasn’t going anywhere with them!

In a desperate attempt at escape, she bit down on her captor’s wrist. Bit down as hard as she could. Until she drew blood if she had to. However, the hold on her was released before she could down any real damage.

The woman cried out in agony. Swearing and shouting for her companion.

“You little bitch!”  

Bellona ran but the Roegadyn hunter was faster. Quick in her recovery, she grabbed at her again. Fingers dug into her flesh like the talons of some feral beast.

No!

The woman yanked her back before she could even get far. “You’re going to pay for that!” She snarled. Murder flashed behind that gaze.

The last thing Bellona saw was the back of the gun swinging for her face.

[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/

[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/