#that mob violence and killing everyone who disagrees with you/everyone who's accused of being The Enemy is a valid political strategy
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i know i’m late to the conversation—i just watched the movie this month—but i feel compelled to say this because i was genuinely shocked (still am) to see that the overwhelming takeaway for many viewers was the "d-16/megatron was right" bs. while it’s understandable to sympathize with his anger and grief, justifying his actions in the end or framing them as entirely right feels so deeply misguided. what surprised me even more was the tendency to shift the blame on orion/optimus, as though he was solely responsible for d-16’s downfall. it’s disheartening to see orion/optimus being villainized so much. his efforts to reason with d-16 came from a place of desperation and hope, as he tried to prevent the escalation of violence. at that point, d-16 had already begun to spiral into his unchecked rage, disregarding the safety of those around him. to see that nuance overlooked, with orion being faulted for a situation that was far beyond his control (the whole "don't be like sentinel" thing is often used to shit on op lol), is genuinely baffling.
while i love that the movie showed the tragedy of d-16’s arc and even empathize with his situation, painting his actions as justified—and vilifying orion/optimus in the process—feels like a misreading of the movie’s core message. sorry but i was so happy to see your post about the movie, it was tiring to see so many 'megatron was right about this and that' comments.
Oh man if you're new to this fandom, you really ought to know that this place is full of people who glorify terrorism and war in the name of "justified revolution" and it doesn't really matter what Dee/Megatron does or how horrible/over-the-top it is, he's oppressed or he's mentally ill or he's just plain upset which means that everything he does is justified and questioning him makes you evil.
It's so funny because I hoped for sure that a continuity where both OP and Megatron were working class individuals before the war would reduce this kind of shit take (compare to something like archivist/librarian OP and gladiator Megs in TFP or CBV, or cop OP and miner Megs in IDW1), but unfortunately this fandom literally still found a way to blame Orion for everything even though he suffered the exact same things Dee did..... and furthermore Orion literally was the rebel challenging the system compared to Dee who wanted to keep his head low and not cause trouble so honestly at this point I just think the fandom (and somehow new fans whose first exposure to TF is this movie) purely sides with Megatron on everything as either a knee-jerk reaction or some misguided attempt at being counterculture and intelligent.
People get sooooo mad when you tell them that unbridled rage and killing everyone who disagrees with you isn't a good social/political strategy, but then again this is a problem that is universal to humanity and not just the Transformers fandom. It's just a shame that so many people looked at a movie that blatantly spells out what the moral of the story is, and has all of the protagonists be working class oppressed people fighting against a tyrannical system, and their takeaway from it is still basically "fascism is okay if you're mad enough about it and if your friends try to stop you it's a sign that they're centrist liberals who think punching Nazis makes you as bad as a Nazi." It's childish black-and-white thinking masquerading as critical literary analysis.
And at this point people pretty much just don't give a shit about Orion/Optimus and will find a way to make him the villain no matter what the context is, no matter if he also has feelings or if he also deserves to be respected/listened to/validated as Megatron's long-time (possibly lifelong) friend. If ppl look at the way Dee treated Orion and their other friends and DON'T see what was concerning about that then there's really no saving them until they deradicalize a little and learn what usually happens when "kill all the bad people until society is a utopia" is implemented as a governing party's primary strategy.
#squiggle answers#but yeah the downside of this fandom in particular is that it's a story about war and politics#and most of the ppl here have very plainly not lived thru war or political turmoil in their own countries#so they have extremely bad cases of radicalization + glorifying of violence to the point that they think#that mob violence and killing everyone who disagrees with you/everyone who's accused of being The Enemy is a valid political strategy#ppl in this fandom want a squeaky clean morally comfortable excuse for mass murder so bad it makes them look stupid#but yeah i'd like to point out that ppl like OP bee and elita were also oppressed and lied to and exploited as slave labor#and they didn't come out of it going 'i'm going to violently beat destroy or kill anyone who stands in my way of what i think is right'#also for a fandom full of people who glorify revolution it's really weird to me that so many of these OP haters shit on him#for breaking protocol. like don't yall normally clap your hands for rebels who defy caste systems and the functions/jobs they were#made to fulfill. or do you only cheer for rule breaking when it's megatron who does it aklsdfjksld
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I love it when others complain about other's morales and actions. You might not have heard, but there's a little thing called perspective. Everyone has their own perspective of which they can justify their actions. Let's take people in America, they complain about terrorism, which is not a good thing, but we are guilty of that as well. How is it that we can do it, but others can't? It's all about perspective. Here's an example of America's terrorism, the whole entire American Revolution. The Americans were considered terrorists and unruly by the British, but the American Revolution was justifiable to Americans. On the other hand, it was unpresented and savage to the British. Here's another example, America's nuclear warfare. When America dropped those bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki it was considered an act of terrorism by the Japanese. However, it was justifiable to Americans for it was necessary to the progress of the war, which I'm not saying it was or was not the right thing to do, I'm just showing different perspectives on the matter. Here's another, the Tulsa Race "Riot". I say riot with quotations for it was extremely one-sided and more of a racial act of violence. If you don't know what this "incident" is, I don't blame you for not knowing. This tragedy is often covered up and looked over, not getting the attention it deserves. Here's what it's about:
More than 800 people were admitted to hospitals and more than 6,000 black residents were arrested and detained, many for several days. The Oklahoma Bureau of Vital Statistics officially recorded 36 dead, but the American Red Cross declined to provide an estimate.
The riot began over a Memorial Day weekend after 19-year-old Dick Rowland, a black skinned shoeshinner, was accused of assaulting Sarah Page, the 17-year-old white skinned elevator operator of the nearby Drexel Building. After he was taken into custody, rumors raced through the black community that he was at risk of being lynched. A group of armed African-American men rushed to the police station where the young suspect was held, to prevent a lynching, as a white crowd had gathered. A confrontation developed between black and white people; shots were fired, and twelve people were killed, ten white and two black. As news of these deaths spread throughout the city, mob violence exploded. Thousands of white people rampaged through the black community that night and the next day, killing men and women, burning and looting stores and homes. About 10,000 black people were left homeless, and property damage amounted to more than $1.5 million in real estate and $750,000 in personal property ($31 million in 2018).
Some black people said that policemen had joined the mob; others said that National Guardsmen fired a machine gun into the black community and a plane dropped sticks of dynamite. In an eyewitness account discovered in 2015, Greenwood attorney Buck Colbert Franklin described watching a dozen or more planes, which had been dispatched by the city police force, drop burning balls of turpentine on Greenwood's rooftops.
Now do you see how this is an issue. The funny thing is, the media and government covered it as a riot where both sides were fighting, which isn't the truth. The African Americans didn't even start it, according to eye-witnesses, the whites were the first to fire in beginning of the "riot". What they did was retaliate, which is justifiable to them. What proceeded after that, the racial acts of violence and hate crimes, was justifiable to the whites and police. Hell, there was dynamite and balls of turpentine being dropped by planes on the city. Guess who was arrested? The blacks. Now by very definition, this was an act of terrorism committed by Americans on other Americans citizens. Let's remember, this was completely justifiable by the government and police. So don't start with your judgement of other countries and people's actions and say that your country or someone else would never do that. Overall, my point is to take into account other perspectives that, oh god, have different morals, ideas and concepts and you that's a fact of life. You just have to learn to deal with it or agree to disagree, but don't pretend that you are above others.
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As progressives continue to tear our social fabric apart by mobbing people in restaurants, calling for social upheaval to overturn elections, and so forth, they naturally provoke stronger and stronger reactions from the Right. As we grapple with this new reality, conservatives have to figure out how far is too far when fighting back. But while appropriate restraint is always a part of this consideration, we go too far when we decide that we must always adhere to every aspect of a dying civility no matter the cost. Failing to openly defy the Left’s blatant aggression does not preserve civility — it only emboldens the uncivil and betrays their victims.
Conservatives make a category error when we declare that we should rather lose the culture war than be uncivil. Like most such errors, this one is rooted in a powerful truth: On moral absolutes, we should absolutely rather lose than violate them. It really is better to fail than to succeed by murdering; it really is better to suffer than to enjoy adultery; etc. Nevertheless, the error creeps in because conservatives tend to put certain kinds of traditional behavior into this same category. Contrary to this tendency, things like courtesy and civility are not moral absolutes; they are social contracts.
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Because civility is not a moral absolute and its form is always adjusting along with culture, it’s requirements are determined primarily by social contract — the kind of behavior we all implicitly or explicitly agree to when interacting with one another. Historically, some of these contracts have been great blessings while others have been reprehensible, but all are, by nature, contracts.
The detail that conservatives tend to forget is that when one party violates a contract, the other party is no longer bound by all of its terms. If you sign a contract to buy a car, and the dealer refuses to turn it over you, you aren’t “sinking to their level” by refusing to hand over your money. If you contract an employee who never shows up for work, you aren’t “repaying evil for evil” by withholding his wages. The same is true when dealing with people who are deliberately uncivil to civil people — it fundamentally changes what the rest of society owes them.
To be sure, this doesn’t mean that we must recklessly abandon civility whenever we get angry at the latest atrocious behavior from liberals. Civility is extremely valuable and is never something that should be tossed aside lightly. You need only look at the social justice left to see the consequences of doing so. Their enemies are not limited to conservatives. They rail just as hard against common sense when they melt down over beliefs that were shared by virtually everyone who ever lived until last week. They even cannibalize the very leftists who carried them to term whenever they’re triggered. Accordingly, conservatives are quite right to try and conserve valuable social structures like courtesy — they prevent all manner of chaos and suffering.
That said, civility does not actually exist between two parties when even one of them is deliberately uncivil. The unfortunate reality is that we increasingly find ourselves in circumstances in which there is nothing left to conserve. We need to stop taking the lazy road of “be civil though the heavens fall” and begin being deliberate about when to be civil — and when not to be.
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What is a problem is what we’re now seeing from the SJW’s who, unlike the rest of us, cannot abide working with people who are different. When they detect badthink in coworkers or business owners, they do everything they can to destroy them professionally. There’s no shortage of public examples, from Brandon Eich to Barronelle Stutzman to James Damore, but there are far more who never made the news.
Because of this viciousness, it is every good employer’s responsibility to avoid hiring SJW’s in the first place, and if that fails, to make sure they’re never put in any kind of position of authority where they can harm their coworkers. Those in charge of organizations also need to start reducing the power of human resources departments and rolling back the nebulous codes of conduct that SJW’s have weaponized.
It may not be how we’ve always done things, and it may be uncivil, but we absolutely need to blacklist the blacklisters. It’s not because they have different politics, but because they’re breaking our social contracts in terribly destructive ways and attacking our neighbors. When someone targets one of your people over something that turns out to be innocuous, it’s the accuser that needs to be disciplined. Anything less is a betrayal of the good people for whom we are responsible. You cannot conserve civility by constantly acquiescing to the uncivil.
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But truth is of far more consequence than courtesy. When the left forces these two into conflict, there should be no question about which of the two we need to maintain. We need to speak up, and we need to do so unapologetically. Apology is pretty much the default setting for conservatives. Having the capacity for self-reflection, we can always find something that we could have done better or said differently.
Our inclination is therefore to apologize on demand as a courtesy for the sake of defusing conflict (and usually demand that our compatriots do the same.) But when it comes to SJW’s, apologies don’t avoid a fuss — they whet appetites. Apologies are the inches which lead them to take miles, because they are frequently treated as confessions and therefore license for further retribution.
Finally, conservatives need to stop coming down so hard on people who are being uncivil towards the uncivil. Deciding when civility is appropriate is a fine line to walk, and it’s to be expected that we will stumble from time-to-time as we find our way. On one side of that line is bullying, but on the other is cowardice. As long as conservatives reserve their outrage for the former, their representatives are always going to be the latter.
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By all means, love your enemies, as Christ said; but in so doing, don’t forget to love the family, friends, employees, and neighbors whom God has given into your care. And let’s face it: Jesus was not always civil and courteous, as many pharisees and money-changers could attest. Christians must not take civility and courtesy as license to abandon the vocations God has given us and thereby act immorally towards the past and future victims of SJWs. Christians are by no means commanded to abandon their neighbors by holding them to the terms of broken contracts.
Like it or not, we are in an existential struggle with the social justice left. They do not want to compromise. They don’t really even want to merely get their way. They want to annihilate opposing opinions. The whole point of calling everyone who disagrees with them Nazis is that punching Nazis is a socially acceptable solution. The only common debate about whether it would be okay to kill Hitler is about whether it would still be okay to travel back in time and kill him as an infant.
It is therefore no great mystery why the left is becoming more and more comfortable with violence. You do not compromise with Nazis, you eliminate them. So next time one of them flips out about Chick-Fil-A, ask yourself something: If they can’t even stand the thought of Christians selling chicken sandwiches; exactly what place do you think they will allow us to occupy in society when they’re in charge? Are you really going to abandon your family, your friends, your fellow conservatives, and your fellow Christians to the left’s non-existent mercy simply because it would be impolite to do otherwise?
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Make NOT Doing the Wrong Thing a Habit
By Don Hall
"Me, too."
Following the explosive revelation of something everyone already knew about—the serial abuse upon countless women in Hollywood by Harvey Weinstein—the simple request online was for any woman who had experienced sexual harassment or assault to respond with “Me, too.”
The numbers of women who typed those two words was harrowing and maddening.
Most men online were either silent (that was my response) or typed in response “I believe you.”
The onslaught of women online opening up about the crap treatment they’ve received was overwhelming. It was inspiring in that these stories have been routinely suppressed for a variety of reasons over the years. It was frustrating to note that, in an effort to be a part of things, a lot of women couldn’t help but put catcalling and condescension on the same level as sexual coercion and rape.
Likewise, the number of men who jumped in the fray with the placating of meaningless belief (because the declaration of belief in every voice, regardless of context or specificity is the very definition of virtue signaling and nonsense to boot) was daunting.
Neither the declaration of contextless assault nor the insincere blanket belief is particularly helpful. It is the activism of the internet—looks good but generally doesn’t amount to much. It also, like so many examples of the voiceless crying out for a sense of justice, ignored the fact that a black woman rather than a white actress from the nineties started the “Me, too” tag about ten years ago and was roundly ignored by the mainstream.
These matters, like all sociopolitical issues, demand context as they are a bit more complicated than the “Look at How Evil Men Are” simplicity of the online sharing.
I was 13 years old in 1979. My mother had been married a couple of times by then and I had witnessed my first step-father, Dennis Coley, routinely beat my mother with his fists, with a belt, with a cast iron skillet. In terms of toxic masculine behavior, I had a front row seat to the freak show.
One would think that being audience to that would have an effect. One would think.
Sherri Stevens was a girl that lived down the road from us. She was in my eighth grade class out in the tiny country school in the middle of Where are We Again, KS. At first we were friends but, like so many adolescent things, I said something to her or she said something to me or something misinterpreted. I honestly can’t remember how we became enemies, but enemies we were.
The trouble lie in the fact that we lived on the same stretch of country road and we had to ride the bus together to school every morning. We had to wait for it or we weren’t getting to school that day so we were both out on the cross section of dirt roads every morning around 6:30 a.m. I threw rocks at her on most mornings.
I don't know why. It was the thing she and I did every morning. She would insult me in some way or I would call her fat, she would call me stupid and I'd start flinging rocks at her. She was six inches taller than I was and would chase me but I was fast so I’d run, taunting her and throwing gravel at her as I bolted from one side of the road to the next. Once in a while, she’d catch me and pummel my stupid boy head. Which meant that the next day, I had to come up with better insults and bigger rocks.
Her mother witnessed this one day and immediately went to my mother to make it stop.
My mother let me know that that behavior was not acceptable. To be fair, my tiny spitfire mom didn't tell me this quite so politely—I pretty much had my ass handed to me for taunting a girl because of her weight and throwing rocks at her at the bus stop.
As any 13-year-old boy would, I felt maligned and angry... at Sherri. SHE had gotten me in trouble. It was HER fault! She called me stupid and she laughed at my clothes! She was so fat! And I hated her guts. It was her fault that my mother had read me the riot act and I got grounded for doing NOTHING WRONG!!!
I was 13 then. Three decades and some change later, I was bullied by another former friend turned enemy online. I unfriended her on Facebook—apparently a hanging offense in the digital high school—and was subjected to a mob of accusation and name calling by 50 or so of her friends, most who had never even met me. I was a sexist. A racist. I used her as a token Latina. I was never her friend. I used her and everyone else. And on and on.
And I threw digital rocks at her. I fought back with words meant to hurt. To be fair, I never went to the place of gendered insults. She was an asshole and a bully—you know, gender neutral descriptors. But they were still rocks, and apparently I hadn’t really learned anything from Sherri. I got grounded, in the adult sense, not for enduring her toxic crap but for fighting with a girl and being unable to stop fighting back. And I blamed her just like I did Sherri.
Just like Harvey and Bill O’Reilly and Bill Cosby and Donald Trump blame the women they threw rocks at.
One day at the bus stop, I restrained myself from taking my unfocused masculine rage out on our neighbor. And I came home, proud of myself. I told my mother that I hadn't thrown any rocks at Sherri that morning. And all I got was a nod. "Can I be ungrounded?"
I'll never forget what she said in response to that.
"Donald. You don't get rewarded for not doing something you know is wrong. Your reward is that you are a better human being because you didn't bully that girl. Your reward is that you weren't an awful person... this morning. Make not doing the wrong thing a habit and you just might not be killed by your mother before you graduate eighth grade. Your reward is being allowed to live."
I’d love to say that that was the moment of clarity required to see the error of my boys-will-be-boys ways but I’d be lying.
I did connect the dots and was self-reflective enough to never use any physical force on women ever again—my stupid monkey brain was at least that evolved but it never occurred to me that even that attitude was still patronizing. I felt that by declaring and adhering to a stance that violence against women by men was forbidden, that I was to be rewarded. By not doing the wrong thing, I should be seen as righteous.
The question becomes what do I do to be a better person when it comes to my relationship with women?
I mean, I’m not as evolved as I’d like to be. I’m quite happily married but I’m not immune to checking out attractive women young enough to be my offspring. I watch porn once in a while. While I’m no predator or rapey type, I’ve been known to follow the John Hughes model of “Stalk Her Until She Relents” mode of courtship in the past. My sense of humor runs to the offensive and I’ve been known to be pretty racey without regard to the gender of those receiving it. Most of my bosses have been women so I’m pretty certain I’m not threatened by that but I wonder sometimes when I disagree vehemently with one. Sure, I can type “I believe you’’ but I can’t promise that I will or I do in every instance.
So I return to the words of my mother. Make not doing the wrong thing a habit. I can and do acknowledge that I am a guy in a system that rewards me for my gender and skin color and the best I can do is not be an awful person... this morning. And then again tomorrow morning. And the next morning.
Not for any external reward or for props in the online world but because my mother allowed me to live past 13.
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