So, today in the discourse:
* There's no difference between generally shitty people and actual Nazis why would you defend a nazi?
* If you're skeptical of the value of secondary targets as part of "cancellation", you are defending the guy being cancelled.

* community accountability isn't about taking power away from abusive people so as to reduce harm, it's about punishment as a model for justice. Let's just forget everything we tend to say about punitive justice models.

People who are holding on to attempts to inflict pain and punishment as a form of maintaining community norms - those approaches have no part of any community I'm in so far as I'm concerned. That's just some abusive relationship and parenting norms you've carried in from outside.

There are ways to exert pressure and uphold basic norms of decency without being focused on make it hurt till they stop doing whatever bad thing they're doing. The latter ends up just entrenching more harm, and finding more victims.

One of the reasons it matters telling the difference between an asshole and a Nazi is because typically the sky is the limit for acceptable ways to stop the Nazi. Being cautious about where to draw that line is a critical part of maintaining *any* amount of community.

There is a difference between people being generally antisocial (lots of people are generally anti social, for lots and lots of reasons, many of them not particularly sympathetic) and being out to purge a community.

If you find yourself saying to another member of something you consider community "look, if you want this [harassment, piling on, pain, whatever] to stop, you know what to do" you need to recognise that is abuser bullshit. Classic abuser bullshit.

You need to understand when people point out that this stuff is always more sharply pointed towards women, poc, queers, working class people, or less educated people or whatever, that's not a personal point about whether you are a valid target for the next round of pain dealing.

This internet community policing shit has taken negative turns because to some extent it's exhilarating for people. I hesitate to call it cancellation because frankly, when an artist is cancelled you stop buying them, you tell other people you know to do so, no venom required.

We should *always* be looking for ways to reduce the harm going on. If you're escalating and not trying to minimise harm in a situation where you're not personally the direct victim of harm someone has done, you are adding heat and emotional labour burden to those who do.

Noone is right all the time or even most of the time, everyone gets mad and frustrated and unreasonable, but trying to reduce harm in queer communities should be a norm we try to hold ourselves to, including when we're trying to hold people accountable.

Fucking people I've seen saying "cancelling does no harm, she can stop any time" while a trans woman had multiple death threats for receiving kindness positively from a guy who's been a dick. Eugh. I called it misogynistic because it was.

Someone raised the point that TERFs call things misogynistic and I'm going to say something potentially controversial which I've been saying for two years now already anyway -

TERFs are wrong and hateful, but a growing chunk of the shit sent their way is folks who like an excuse

I'm mad as anyone about the threat they pose to our civil rights and yet there are a minority of absolute shits out there sending them rape and death threats and I find it hard to believe that's anything other than abusers finding an excuse, the same as transphobes do to us.

Wrt what I said above, that's also the end result of "TERFs are Nazis" garbage - there are definitely a small number of full on fascists operating in TERF circles unchecked, mostly because many of them are pretty slack on actually monitoring the far right.

But the slide to anything goes implied by TERFs are Nazis has led to a ready made radicalisation pipeline whereby anyone who missteps gets tagged as TERF and gets enough hostility to be pushed into the arms of people who will eventually one day send us to jail for trying to PISS.

For fucks sake act as if people lives depend on make careful steps here because they will do eventually.