If you see someone who’s questioning Elon Musk for the first time because he obviously lied about having a top account on Path of Exile — do not mock them, do not shame them, do not complain that they should have figured this out years ago. That would just be pushing them back into the radicalizing environment they’re currently standing on the edge of saying “wait a moment…”

Radicalizing environments and cults pull people away from their friends and family and tell them that they’ll be mocked for embracing the truth but it’s worth it. The mockery then pushes them into the arms of the ones saying “shh shh, we understand… don’t worry, you’re the smart one here, they’ll be sorry.”

Yes, obviously lying about Path of Exile doesn’t even make his top one hundred worst sins. That’s not the point. The point is that this one is clear as day to the exact demographic he’s targeting — lonely young men. Once you conclude for yourself that someone is irrefutably a liar, it becomes easier to revisit what they said before and reevaluate it.

@0xabad1dea kinda like https://xkcd.com/1053/

@0xabad1dea naaah, fuck em. They took too long, and caused too much damage.

No one distinguishes between Nazis that were swept up in it, and willing participants; they just called Nazis

@sortius I need to check if you understand I am mainly talking about thirteen year olds

@0xabad1dea hmm, yeh, 13 year old are dicks, and I agree, not talking about them. It's the 30 year olds I've seen on YT and whose screenshots are posted here I'm referring to.

Legal age of responsibility and all; well, unless they've participated in something so heinous it could be suspended

@sortius in any case, refusing to acknowledge the possibility for someone to take an off-ramp from the Nazi Highway before they personally start helping kill people, pushing them back onto the highway and telling them that’s where they belong, is how you maximize the number of Nazis and hence number of people killed by Nazis

I was raised in a right wing fundamentalist cult. Much of my extended family are Trump stans. I’m not. Because I took an ideological off-ramp when I was about 20 years old.

@0xabad1dea I get that there's an "off ramp", but I'm not going to applaud anyone for taking the turn. You've gotta show the world you're not part of it, much like Nazis who "got swept up in it" had to.

There's no easy road out of fascism, it's hard, and it needs to be hard, so people don't want to do it in future.

Part of ostracism is that they need to spend some time in the wilds before being accepted back into society

@sortius @0xabad1dea sorry if i’m misunderstanding, but wouldn’t a difficult road out make it harder to stop being a nazi, therfore increasing prevalence of nazism, hostlity to outgroup, and discourage poeple from attempting to leave nazism?
edit: offramp-> road out

@piku @0xabad1dea I dunno, worked for about 60 years before people started saying "let's hear them out"

@sortius @piku bro literally what are you talking about. Germany wasn’t converted into a giant civilian punishment camp for ritual purification in the wilderness for sixty years. That would be unhinged. And evil. And directly cause WW3, now with more ideologically committed Nazis who feel more justified than ever

@0xabad1dea @sortius @piku yeah, a number of high ranking nazi officials that didn’t get hanged or exported to the US or USSR got back into government positions. west germany’s 3rd chancellor for example was a member of the NSDAP that was the leader of a committee in the foreign ministry that was there to correspond with the propaganda ministry. He denied doing it out of hate or opportunism but complete refusal was an extremely common sentiment among germans after the war

@0xabad1dea @piku @sortius denazification is a lie that we tell ourselves but that didn’t really happen

sure some of the leaders got killed, but many more got away with no consequences whatsoever. which allowed naziism to survive and thrive when west germany absorbed the east, creating brand new types of economic and social issues that weren’t there before, or weren’t nearly as bad (high joblessness rates, high emigration, many buildings being abandoned, etc)