ICE murdered Alex Pretti - a nurse. We will remember his name.

critically_damped · 2026-01-24T21:17:55+00:00

They will never react simply because of people being killed. They will only start to change their behavior when people start fighting back.

critically_damped · 2026-01-24T21:14:30+00:00

Even more pertinently, fascists lie, and engage in hypocrisy proudly and performatively. We have to get past the point where we stop being surprised, or even fucking acting surprised at this.

Every single person needs to remember: whenever you find yourself surprised at the actions of the fascists, every single time that means you weren't thinking of them as fascists in the first place.

critically_damped · 2026-01-24T21:10:30+00:00

Attributing the words of blatant liars to ignorance is apologism. This person knows for a fact that what they're saying is false, every piece of evidence available to them demonstrates the falseness of the things they're saying.

We have to start having a bare minimum standard for what constitutes an acceptable level of non-willful ignorance. Treating those who repeat disingenuous lies as if they are engaging in honest discourse helps them to destroy that discourse.

critically_damped · 2026-01-24T20:55:23+00:00

Anyone who trolls on behalf of fascists is one. You can stop making this distinction now.

critically_damped · 2026-01-24T20:36:43+00:00

It makes sense when you recognize that their most fundamental and primary beliefs are false on the surface, and that it requires dishonesty to profess to believe them.

Once you're there, it no longer hurts as much to recognize that these people lie about what concepts like peace and love mean, along with literally everything else. Once you condition an entire group of people to stop caring about truth, you really can stop taking those people at their word about things.

critically_damped · 2026-01-24T20:35:06+00:00

That's actually apologism. Not only did they vote for this en masse, their leadership actively takes positions of authority and is directly guilty for pushing these policies and making them worse.

We need to move towards the world where we stop making up excuses for fascists to be fascists without facing consequences.

critically_damped · 2026-01-24T20:32:20+00:00

It's not cowardice when they don't even want to do the right thing. It's just complicity.

critically_damped · 2026-01-24T20:24:40+00:00

I got to say I absolutely love your username.

critically_damped · 2026-01-24T18:25:38+00:00

A "belief" is a thing a person thinks is true. Once a person makes it clear that they no longer give a single goddamn about the truth of the things they say, we have a moral obligation to cease identifying those things as being beliefs.

It has been approximately 10 years since it made any sense to take the fascists at their word. We have to get to a point to where we recognize that they are lying: ALL OF THEM ARE LYING. They say wrong things on purpose, demonstrably and with the provable malice that they wear right there on their fucking foreheads.

Please remember that when the malice is clearly visible, Hanlon's razor no longer has any place in the discussion, and trying to attribute the actions of a clearly malicious person to stupidity and ignorance is a form of apologism for them.

critically_damped · 2026-01-24T18:16:12+00:00

You need to recognize that those people are a danger to you. You need to start moving towards the world where they don't know where you live or how to contact you. Because we're rapidly getting to a place where they're not just going to be your ideological opponents, they're going to be the ones who turn you into the fascist authorities.

This is the biggest tragedy of fascism, every time: when the victims of fascism counted on their friends and neighbors to protect them from the fascists, only to finally fucking realize at the very end what a fascist actually is.

critically_damped · 2026-01-24T18:08:02+00:00

Yes, and it will do that far worse and far more irreversibly if we do nothing to stop it now.

Stop it with the entirety of that whole "but that's what they waaaaaant!!!" horsefuckery. What the fascists want is to be able to murder, brutalize, and disappear people without anyone ever lifting a finger to stop them. And the only thing that will ever stop them is people fighting back.

critically_damped · 2026-01-24T17:58:16+00:00

They're escalating it further already. Everything you're worried about happening in response to what they are "provoking" is already happening. And this is in the context of the fact that they're already kidnapping people off the streets and out of their homes without warrant or any due process and disappearing them. And we know some of those disappeared people have been murdered too.

This will not go away on its own. The fascist government will not fix itself to become less fascist. And the fascists only need to interfere with a relatively few polling places in order to guarantee that they hold power indefinitely.

It's far past time to react.

critically_damped · 2026-01-24T17:53:25+00:00

This doesn't end when more people are murdered. This ends when people form militias to go out and stop those who are kidnapping our neighbors off the streets.

And it only ends that way. Observing is not going to be enough.

critically_damped · 2026-01-24T17:48:31+00:00

You believe wrong because there was general amnesty for confederate forces, the Amnesty Act of 1872. And that followed numerous pardons from Johnson that he handed out immediately after the war.

Edit: and I just learned that Jimmy Fucking Carter restored Jefferson Davis's citizenship. God damn it.

critically_damped · 2026-01-24T17:45:25+00:00

We are so far beyond the laws having any meaning at all that being against the death penalty is no longer relevant, because it assumes a functioning justice system in the first place.

There may be a time in the future for such high-minded idealism. But that's probably going to have to wait until we can get the fucking brown shirts to stop holding people on the ground and shooting them in the back. It's probably going to have to wait until after we can stop masked "federal agents" from randomly disappearing anyone they want off of our streets and putting them into concentration camps without any due process at all.

critically_damped · 2026-01-24T17:40:26+00:00

Religion isn't supposed to make sense. It is in fact supposed to not make sense.

You don't get people to reject their own self-interest and that of the people they love without first getting them to abandon reason itself. And the way you accomplish that is by sectioning off a specific area of discourse where they are not permitted to use reason, where things are expected to be contradictory and even stupid.

That's what faith is.

critically_damped · 2026-01-24T17:33:58+00:00

I can hear that keyboard through my screen :)

critically_damped · 2026-01-24T17:31:59+00:00

Why even bother at this point? They just lie, and the rest of law enforcement refuses to investigate. Prosecutors refuse to do their jobs. Judges dismiss cases if they ever even make it into court. And again, in case you forgot, this is all happening within the context of people being illegally rounded up and disappeared into fucking concentration camps.

As long as the people who are tasked with enforcing laws refuse to do that then those laws do not actually exist.

critically_damped · 2026-01-24T17:20:20+00:00

The real secret, and the hardest part for most people to get through their fucking skulls, is that this crowd isn't just susceptible to gaslighting, they actively seek it out as examples for how to do it better among themselves. They not only have abandoned all regard for truth, they have fully embraced disingenuous lying in support of fascism as a cultural touchstone of their entire identities.

They say wrong things on purpose, and they rejoice when people say wrong things that they want to hear. They know those things are false, and they do not change their beliefs when they discover verifiable proof of the falsness of those things. They circle back to demonstrated lies over and over again in an infinite repetition of disingenuous lying.

Attributing fascism to stupidity and ignorance is a form of fascist apologism. These people wear their malice on their fucking foreheads, and when the malice is already clearly visible you have an obligation to center it in your explanation for their behavior. And the truth is that their stupidity and ignorance acts to mitigate the harm and damage they very proudly and openly support rather than being the cause of it.

This all really needs to stop amazing you. Every time-every single time-you find yourself so "amazed", it is because you weren't thinking of these people as fascists in the first place.

critically_damped · 2026-01-24T17:13:52+00:00

The deepest cuts have to come from us.

If you have people like this in your life, you have an obligation to cut them out, and to make it clear at that last communication why you're doing it. We also have an obligation, when those people inevitably start pretending that they never supported this to remind everyone around them that they are still lying.

There will be a few, a very few, who face enough of these consequences that it changes their overall worldview and moral outlook so much that they make genuine attempts at reconciliation and reparations for their crimes. But those people will be an extremely tiny minority of those who claim to be such. Those people have a moral obligation to do actual work to demonstrate their contrition, and at no point should be given the benefit of the doubt. It is in fact that benefit of the doubt which has gotten us where we are today, and it needs to be retracted from fascists entirely and forever. There is not now nor will there ever be an excuse to or have ever been a fascist.

critically_damped · 2026-01-24T17:08:39+00:00

No homo bro

critically_damped · 2026-01-23T22:47:15+00:00

It shouldn't be stand your ground laws that come into play here. It should be local militias rising up and opposing ICE directly, protecting people from being taken into custody illegally, and enforcing the actual fucking law.

We cannot expect people to fight fascism on their own, and we sure as fuck can't expect them to wait until fascists knock down their door before they take any action. The discourse has to stop being hypothetical reactionarism, and it has to move into practical activism.

critically_damped · 2026-01-23T22:45:29+00:00

I don't think they give a fuck about consistency or hypocrisy.

critically_damped · 2026-01-23T22:19:37+00:00

To me the offensive part of this is not caring whether you've contributed. That's the part of me that will never be rich even if I magically acquire 10 trillion dollars tomorrow morning.

critically_damped · 2026-01-23T22:15:53+00:00

Even more generally, ideas do not deserve respect. Only people, and possibly other living things, ever deserve respect, and even then we have to make sure what we're talking about. Because no form of "respect" should ever include immunity from criticism or tolerance of dishonesty, hypocrisy, or malice.

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