#yes the UFO in that Red Bull video made me think about this

[multiseb21]

which driver is the most likely to get abducted by aliens and why is it Daniel

[sunshinetoday]

“It’s been 17 weeks since our favourite show is back in production!! Let’s see what happened in this week. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. week summaries.

*Clicking on links will take you to the original posting of the video/article/tweet… X marks the posting of linked content on Tumblr. It takes you to the post of the Tumblrino who posted it here.*

This busy week started off with some great filming news; Someone walked thru the set and saw Gillian Anderson reading her script...  (X) We got a video of Brick from the make-up trailer! And a picture of Brick from the same trailer.  

And then, it happened. THE PICTURE of MULDER AND SCULLY IN BED, CUDDLING!!!! According to the new BTS video... The screenshot is not the best, but we have one, at least. It is exactly what we would expect from CC. Mulder’s face is weird, Scully is completely under the sheet. Like literally not a single inch of skin can be seen. But her head is on Mulder’s shoulder and they are sharing a romantic moment. On a sofa. That’s all that we saw and of course, it went how it always goes...we had more questions than we had answers. One thing is for certain, tho. Many many people are gonna go after CC in a very violent way, in case this turns out to be another cheap trick... 😄😄😄 Anyhow, here are some theories and summaries:

Looks like Mulder and Scully GET IT ON on Mulder’s sofa!! @youokay-mulder

msr 2018 @youreadarkwizard

Expectation vs Reailty/Or Fan Fiction vs The actual show @hekapolis

So, David says that “there are “definite intimations of hanky-panky” between the pair, beginning in the revival’s third episode” -->doppelganger episode

Chris Carter proved it again, that having no show bible, nor actual memories/knowledge of his show serves him well; “ We’re not used to Scully looking up at UFOs.  We’re not used to looking at Mulder at death’s door.” Could someone email Chris and make him watch his show?! The subject of the email: Platonic Activity. 🙈🙈  

Talking about continuity...One more thing has been revealed in the new video; Welcome back ‘Jeffrey completely perfect, no scar on his pretty face Spender’!!

Thursday arrived and with it, a new #tbt from @gillianaofficial “Looks like we found the upside down first…but in the future. #tbt #TheXFiles aaaaand we got lucky this time, as not only Gillian but David also shared one of his rare #tbt pics. “#TBT to the time when @marilynmanson and I played 🎸 together!”  

And just as awesome as this week started, it continued on when  @gillianaofficial shared another intriguing #BTS  “Praying to the Goddess Media. One. Last. Time.“  @BryanFuller #TheXFiles #bts @davidduchovny  

Fox Mulder is standing in a church, wearing a black tuxedo!!! Other fandoms would be crazy happy, that a wedding is in sight, but here, at the X-files fandom we’ve been tortured, tricked and hurt so many times that this is us: IT IS A FUNERAL. SCULLY IS DEAD. WILLIAM IS DEAD. EVERYONE IS DEAD. So, yes. Chris Carter made sure that we are paranoid and we learnt our lesson. Believe nothing, doubt everything...and fix everything. So here is the MSR wedding picture, we all needed @justholdinghandsok

Next filming day, next pictures by Gillian and David. They shared the same pic of Gillian & her Gilly-box. David Duchovny:  It’s official...longest Gillyboard in history! #TheXFiles #bts  Gillian Anderson: “Awe look at that itsy red mark next to my platform! What wee little earthling is set to grovel at my feet?!” (X) Not much later, thanks to some Photoshop skills, came another post:  Like father like son. @brick_duchovny davidduchovny 

David gave an interview to the Australian press, where he talked about Season 11:  “I was only going to watch one but I had to keep going, they are fantastic, I’m not bulls—ing you, I am not selling it,” he says. (X)

1 MONTH, 1 MONTH, 1 MONTH, 1 MONTH, 1MONTH, 1MONTH, 1MONTH

Filming continued at Garibaldi Park, which looks gorgeous at this time of the year. And so Gillian posted a video on Monday. “Smoothing out my bits” (X)  

Filming news:

#TheXFiles already done on Vancouver's 500 block Hamilton Street today. That was fast.(X)

It is #TheXFiles filming inside of St. Andrew's Wesley Church today. (X)

The X-files filming,  St. Andrews-Wesley United Church (X)

From Carlena Britch on the X-Files season 11 set

#Thischurchislit

#TheXFiles will be filming at & around Garibaldi Park in North Vancouver on Wednesday & Thursday. (X) 

it’s looking great out there! They have created a fake playground, and the street is lined w “police”cars. (X)

The X-files filming, Lynn Canyon Park, night shoot

@thexfiles filming LynnCanyonPark (X)

Press of the week:

The X-Files' David Duchovny Hints at 'Hanky-Panky' for Mulder and Scully (and New Footage Backs Him Up) (X

No Government Agency has jurisdiction over The Truth - Deep State

AN X-FILES EPISODE SHIP GUIDE FOR FOX MULDER AND DANA SCULLY (X)

Gillian Anderson And David Duchovny Celebrate An 'X-Files' Anniversary Together On Twitter (X)

The 'X-Files' revival continues with a mobile game (X)

9 hit TV shows NO-ONE thought would be a success, from Game of Thrones to Doctor Who (X)

Disney's bid for Fox assets gains momentum: sources (X)

Videos/Photos this week:

Season 10 Cliffhanger | THE X-FILES

2 New Cast Promotional Photos & New Featurette (X)

Promo images for The X-Files Event Series: The Second Chapter

In other news this week;

Channel 5 to premiere new Agatha Christie movie adaptation starring Gillian Anderson and Glenn Close (X)

American Gods EPs Bryan Fuller and Michael Green Exit Ahead of Season 2 (X)

David Duchovny on why you should listen to singers with “bad voices” as he preps Australian tour (X)

Gillian Anderson to Headline New Agatha Christie Adaptation (X)

Some awesome gifsets, pictures, videos and fan arts:

Breaking News - Mulder and Scully are fucking @ccoble

Are you okay? I’m fine... @muld-r

What the fuck dude, do you even know what show this is?  @fistful-of-fandom

We are not used to looking at Mulder at deaths door @platonic-activity

The bed sharing is out there @startwreck

Amazing, amazing December wallpaper from @a-january-girl

they know one (1) pose @youreadarkwizard

Seriously, what is with The Gillovnys and being accident prone?! 😂😂😂😂  @abbycorasmom

12/01/17 -  “I won’t let you go alone.” Can you tell me the name of the episode featured at #33? @thexfilesbasement

NEW FANVID,  ✘/ Believer BY @scullygrl9

History of the Gilly-Box &  Kim Manners - ‘Rock from Mars’ Tribute, Season 10 by me

I think this is it for our 17th week! *Let me know if I missed something or if you have suggestions what to include in the next week summary, feel free to message me anytime*

Lots of love, fam! For another great week ahead!  ❤️ 👽😄👽

[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!

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

[bradporter65-blog]

5 Things To Understand About Modern Hate Groups

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

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

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

5

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

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

Lutz Bachmann/Twitter

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

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

Read Next

3 Penis Tropes In Hollywood That You Never Noticed

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

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

4

Yes, Cameras Do Change Minds

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

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

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

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

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

3

But The Sword Swings Both Ways

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

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

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

And yet

2

Modern Society May Have Cultivated A Population Ripe For Hate

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1

But I Still Think The Good Guys Will Win

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[pedrowells24-blog]

5 Things To Understand About Modern Hate Groups

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

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

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

5

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

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

Lutz Bachmann/Twitter

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

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

Read Next

3 Penis Tropes In Hollywood That You Never Noticed

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

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

4

Yes, Cameras Do Change Minds

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

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

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

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

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

3

But The Sword Swings Both Ways

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

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

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

And yet

2

Modern Society May Have Cultivated A Population Ripe For Hate

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1

But I Still Think The Good Guys Will Win

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[gaylemccoy972-blog]

5 Things To Understand About Modern Hate Groups

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

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

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

5

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

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

Lutz Bachmann/Twitter

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

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

Read Next

3 Penis Tropes In Hollywood That You Never Noticed

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

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

4

Yes, Cameras Do Change Minds

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

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

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

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

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

3

But The Sword Swings Both Ways

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

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

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

And yet

2

Modern Society May Have Cultivated A Population Ripe For Hate

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1

But I Still Think The Good Guys Will Win

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[pedrowells24-blog]

5 Things To Understand About Modern Hate Groups

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

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

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

5

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

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

Lutz Bachmann/Twitter

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

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

Read Next

3 Penis Tropes In Hollywood That You Never Noticed

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

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

4

Yes, Cameras Do Change Minds

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

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

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

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

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

3

But The Sword Swings Both Ways

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

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

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

And yet

2

Modern Society May Have Cultivated A Population Ripe For Hate

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1

But I Still Think The Good Guys Will Win

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[bradporter65-blog]

5 Things To Understand About Modern Hate Groups

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

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

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

5

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

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

Lutz Bachmann/Twitter

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

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

Read Next

3 Penis Tropes In Hollywood That You Never Noticed

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

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

4

Yes, Cameras Do Change Minds

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

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

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

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

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

3

But The Sword Swings Both Ways

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

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

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

And yet

2

Modern Society May Have Cultivated A Population Ripe For Hate

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1

But I Still Think The Good Guys Will Win

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[gaylemccoy972-blog]

5 Things To Understand About Modern Hate Groups

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

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

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

5

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

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

Lutz Bachmann/Twitter

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

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

Read Next

3 Penis Tropes In Hollywood That You Never Noticed

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

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

4

Yes, Cameras Do Change Minds

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

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

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

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

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

3

But The Sword Swings Both Ways

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

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

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

And yet

2

Modern Society May Have Cultivated A Population Ripe For Hate

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1

But I Still Think The Good Guys Will Win

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[pedrowells24-blog]

5 Things To Understand About Modern Hate Groups

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

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

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

5

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

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

Lutz Bachmann/Twitter

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

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

Read Next

3 Penis Tropes In Hollywood That You Never Noticed

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

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

4

Yes, Cameras Do Change Minds

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

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

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

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

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

3

But The Sword Swings Both Ways

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

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

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

And yet

2

Modern Society May Have Cultivated A Population Ripe For Hate

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1

But I Still Think The Good Guys Will Win

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[bradporter65-blog]

5 Things To Understand About Modern Hate Groups

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

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

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

5

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

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

Lutz Bachmann/Twitter

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

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

Read Next

3 Penis Tropes In Hollywood That You Never Noticed

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

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

4

Yes, Cameras Do Change Minds

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

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

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

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

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

3

But The Sword Swings Both Ways

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

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

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

And yet

2

Modern Society May Have Cultivated A Population Ripe For Hate

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1

But I Still Think The Good Guys Will Win

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[bradporter65-blog]

5 Things To Understand About Modern Hate Groups

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

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

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

5

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

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

Lutz Bachmann/Twitter

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

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

Read Next

3 Penis Tropes In Hollywood That You Never Noticed

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

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

4

Yes, Cameras Do Change Minds

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

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

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

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

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

3

But The Sword Swings Both Ways

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

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

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

And yet

2

Modern Society May Have Cultivated A Population Ripe For Hate

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1

But I Still Think The Good Guys Will Win

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[gaylemccoy972-blog]

5 Things To Understand About Modern Hate Groups

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

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

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

5

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

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

Lutz Bachmann/Twitter

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

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

Read Next

3 Penis Tropes In Hollywood That You Never Noticed

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

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

4

Yes, Cameras Do Change Minds

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

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

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

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

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

3

But The Sword Swings Both Ways

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

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

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

And yet

2

Modern Society May Have Cultivated A Population Ripe For Hate

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1

But I Still Think The Good Guys Will Win

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[pedrowells24-blog]

5 Things To Understand About Modern Hate Groups

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

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

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

5

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

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

Lutz Bachmann/Twitter

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

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

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.

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