seeing all the expected stuff about "reach out to trump supporters, understand their feelings" making me think of how one of my bullies back in middle school or so later became a friend

how, you ask?

i punched him in the mouth and he saw he could no longer step all over me

in my experience, and i think in a lot of people's experience, where you do find people who can actually Change and Grow is first they need skin in the game. if you're reaching out without making it clear you won't take shit, they'll walk all over you. no reason not to for them.

i think of derek black, the kid who was gonna inherit strmfront, and how he was turned around from those beliefs. people like to point to how this happened with a bunch of conversations at his college

they skip over how before the conversations, he became a pariah on campus.

without consequences, a lot of bullies are just gonna... stay bullies. even if you genuinely want them to become better people, a lot of them are not going to stop being shitheads until you show that there are consequences for being horrible. social consequences or others.

i am not someone who follows MLK's beliefs of anti-violence, but i do study him and his techniques all the same, because he was a brilliant thinker, and it's crucial that one of the biggest non-violent tools he had in his bag was shame.

making people feel shitty about doing shitty things... actually decently effective at stopping the shittiness. even if they don't personally become better people, it mitigates the harm, and often opens up the avenue to WANT to become better, as it did for derek black.

nazis who got their ass beat by punks in the 70s and 80s scene - i don't think it'd be all that hard to find some former nazis from that era who found their way to stopping BECAUSE they got their ass kicked.

and even if they didn't stop being nazis - their power was shrunk.

you can reach out to people all you want, but in the times i have in my lifetime, the most successful i've gotten at making people change away from doing shitty things was not unconditional patience and listening, but making it clear the shittiness had consequences first.

the bullies whom i just 'talked things out' with continued to step all over me. they didn't see any reason to care about me as a person.

the ones who i hit back at? some became better people. at least, they thought twice about stepping on me.

much better results.