moniquill:
aqueous2:
luigicat117:
I couldn’t have said it better myself.
As a 30 year old man who escaped the Alt-right pipeline, you’re not going to be happy about the answer.
All I hear from leftists is how much they hate me for my immutable traits, how much they blame me for everything wrong with the world, how much they want me and everyone who looks like me dead.
Whereas Alt-right types would call me “brother” and welcome me into their ranks so long as I hated the right ways.
Do you understand the difference?
I’m an ally and support equality because I feel it’s the morally correct choice to make, but holy fuck is it difficult to reconcile that with the fact that means fighting for a lot of people who see you as the scum of the earth.
Read this and then read it again and then read some fucking bell hooks because this is a legitimate problem on the left.
“To create loving men, we must love males. Loving maleness is different from praising and rewarding males for living up to sexist-defined notions of male identity. Caring about men because of what they do for us is not the same as loving males for simply being.” - bell hooks, The Will to Change https://bellhooksbooks.com/product/the-will-to-change/
You will not end misogyny by fighting it with misandry.

Yeah. This is all very true, but, like the man said, people don’t like it.

Which I think is for a specific reason– part of the reason a LOT of things in the world get so bad.

Suppose you go back in time to try and stop a bad guy. (I’m not gonna say Hitler like the original screenshot did, because Hitler has very specific connotations and would start a very specific debate that’s not the more general point I wanna address.)

Let’s just say, there’s a guy who did terrible things, and you travel back in time to try and prevent this.

And you find him when he’s a baby.

Two schools of thought here. One is, you give that baby a different life where he grows up with different experiences, and then he won’t do the evil things he did.

Some people don’t like that idea, because it suggests that what he did wasn’t his fault– maybe was no one’s fault, just an accident of circumstances lining up wrong. And that’s not satisfying, for people harmed by the evil he did.

But the other school of thought is, you kill the baby, because the problem is him, not his environment. He’s gonna be evil regardless of how he grows up.

But then, where is the evil? In his genes? In the soul God gave him? And how does THAT make it any more his fault?

“Oh, it’s not in his genes or his soul or his experiences! It’s his choice! He COULD choose to overcome whatever’s in those factors, he just won’t!”

…Oh? He definitely won’t? In any possible timeline? Then what is it that makes him so inevitably destined to make that choice?

“He CAN, but it’s not possible that he ever WILL” …and how is that any different from “he can’t”?

This is how a lot of radfems think about men in general. But people don’t like to go very far down that line of thought, because ultimately it makes them question the concept of free will.

Thing is, though– if we’re ever going to move behind a punitive, carceral mindset for how to deal with evil, we HAVE to start questioning that.

I’m not sure we can, on a societal level. But I still hope we try.

Even if stuff is predestined, we don’t know what the future is… and we can always hope it’s something good, or at least not the worst. And hope that the things we can do are gonna help it become that way. We have to. Because hope is all we have.