I'm all for it, but what kicked it off?
this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2025
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This guy obviously didn't get that memo
I really love that story. He is a better person than me. I really wish I still had hope for my fellow man like he does, but trump's second election fucking broke me. People who I used to think were smart and empathetic were jumping on the "fuck your feelings" bandwagon.
I've lost hope. I've lost love. I only have anger anymore.
I don't know your friends. But I'd argue there's at least some reasoning for this.
If trade policies like globalization have harmed your economic status, offshoring a lot of the jobs you'd previously held, and you were having trouble feeding your family, wouldn't you vote for the person you thought could fix this? Wouldn't you say 'fuck your feelings, I need to feed my family so I'm sorry if you have trouble putting the sex you want on your passport I'm more worried about feeding my family'? At least in concept?
I think that's where a lot of that sentiment came from. The people of the nation are hurting, and part of Trump's message always was 'I see you hurting and I want to fix it'. Dems are totally tone deaf in their messaging. A huge % of the populace gets left out of the 'American Dream' and they say nothing. And in recent years they focus a lot on social justice issues and identity politics while ignoring the elephant in the room. It's why those good people are saying fuck your feelings (IMHO at least), because if the choice is your feelings or their livelihood, then of course they'll tell your feelings to shove off.
Of course it didn't work out that way- government cutbacks, tariffs, foreign policy, all handled in such a ham-fisted non-strategic way that whatever benefit might have been gained was instead lost. And now it's the little guy suffering, so you see a lot of people renouncing their votes.
All I'm saying is keep in mind some of those people who said 'fuck your feelings' thought they were fighting for a greater good. I don't believe they turned malicious. Some did I'm sure, but not all of them.
Thanks for trying to help keep me grounded.
No worries my friend. I know it's hard, but it's useful to always assume good faith.
That applies to us too.
I think it especially applied in 2016, first time in my life that all pretense of respectful debate went away, replaced with 'unfriend me if you like Trump' as a mainstream accepted even encouraged position to have.
I talk to a lot of people who supported Trump. Most of them talked about tariffs, manufacturing, jobs, there was a dream of bringing back American industry and rolling back outsourcing. Yes there was some assholes, but there were plenty of good American folks who just wanted to keep their jobs.
But if you listened to Democrats, the only valid reason anyone would vote for Trump is because they are a tiki torch wielding racist misogynist sexist xenophobic islamophobic basket of deplorables. The public discourse broke down for good, it was all just insults from both sides.
Nobody saw a monster in the mirror. We only saw an opposition supporting a guy who was basically openly racist and creeped on his own daughter.
But they didn't see a monster in the mirror either. They only saw an ivory tower elite whipping ourselves into a frenzy over which bathroom someone uses while the middle class is dying.
That's why, in my opinion at least, it is always vitally important to generally assume good faith on the part of your opposition. Because if there is good faith, then we repair the cracks that are dividing the country. And if there really isn't good faith, then we are all totally fucked anyway so it doesn't make any goddamn difference.
I find that assassinating prominent political figures helps me feel better.
How many have you killed today?
Nice try FBI
.338 Lapua for the soul
I'm just thinking opsec here, why wouldn't you choose the ubiquitous .308? I mean even ol' Charles showed us the 30-06 can be effective even if you miss and it is a much more common round.
Better accuracy and mainly thinking of the longer range, to give oneself a wider choice of nests. You’re right though, the .308 would be much more difficult to trace. The truly important bit is sighting in the scope and practice.
He is an outlier. Simply impossible for me and most of other people to be so selfless, social, patient and dedicated.
Why?
I'd argue he isn't tolerating white supremacy, he's found a good way to counteract it. If he tolerated it he wouldn't do anything.
It's BY tolerating it (or more specifically, the people who espouse it) that he fights it.
And I think that's the key difference- tolerating intolerance (the action), vs tolerating the intolerant (the people).
I think we would all (probably including Mr. Davis) agree that the action of intolerance should not be tolerated. For example, if a local movie theater wants to have 'whites only' movie nights, that should not be tolerated and in fact we should all aggressively fight back against such things wherever they happen.
But what of the intolerant person? What of the theater owner in the above example? Should we run him out of town? Tar and feather him? Refuse to talk to him?
The KKK folks he encountered are used to intolerance- threats, shouting, protests, etc. They know they're not popular, but that helps feed the belief that they are right. They're used to it. They're NOT used to being welcomed by anti-racists.
And thus Mr. Davis got through to the racist- by tolerating the intolerant, not by tolerating intolerance. It's a subtle but vital difference.
There's two wolves in me. One ages with this and the other says nazi punks fuck off and thinks they should be punched.
I think that's called conflict exhaustion. You're sick of fighting, sick of holding your nose and respecting things and people you find repugnant, while there's little/no serious progress in your direction, it seems like there's more racism and hatred than ever. So part of you is ready to set the world on fire if it gets rid of MAGA and all the thinly veiled (or not so thinly veiled) racism and intolerance.
Just keep in mind that the dark wolf actually serves those nazi punks. Punching them only makes them stronger.
Yeah because Hitler was defeated by being nice to him, and if you let a Nazi into a bar and don't kick them aggressively out, you'll end up with a Nazi bar.
Violence isn't my first choice but I'm not going to remove that card from my deck, and sometimes I really want to use that card.
In that sense you're right- some people only understand and respect force, and the only way to stop them is to use force against them. The analogy of Hitler might be compared to hardened criminals- being nice to a criminal won't stop them from victimizing you.
This is a different battle though. The small % of racists who want to burn minorities' houses down, they must be met with force.
Force doesn't win hearts and minds though. Force is intertwined with fear- 'if you do xxx, force will be used against you'. So it might stop some church burnings, but it doesn't stop racism. Force doesn't win 'hearts and minds'. Force doesn't convince a racist that they were wrong. It might make them too afraid to speak up, but it doesn't win them over, and they will only take their message underground, where it will thrive.
I don't know that he didn't get it. He just hadn't a different method of fighting back. Not everyone is going to be able to go around knocking them out. The vast majority of people won't in fact. There are still other tools they can use to stop the spread, or, in rare cases, reverse it. You have to be careful to not legitimize it though if you're doing something like that.
This thread got me thinking a little more about Mr. Davis.
We talk about 'not tolerating intolerance' but I think there's a second level-- there's the intolerance (the actions of the racist), and then there's the intolerant (the racists themselves). It's easy and simple to group the two together- we don't want racism, we don't want the KKK, we don't want KKK members, all of you go fuck yourselves with your burning cross and go die in a fire (preferably in another county).
I don't think Mr. Davis would tolerate intolerance any more than you or I. But I think what he does is tolerate the intolerant person, engage them in conversation, treat them like a human being. And THAT can help fix intolerance- by reaching out to the intolerant people and trying to bring them into the larger community and heal them, rather than shunning them and reinforcing their stereotypes.
"Hate the sin, love the sinner", so to speak.
Exactly 100%
Yep, and it has the potential to be very effective. I think we need both of these —punching Nazis and talking with them to change their views.
Another big issue that goes with this is a lot of people will say that if their were bigots once then they should be shunned. This is very harmful though. If we do that then their only reasonable option is to double down. If they lose their group and also can't be accepted by the rest of society then they're never going to do that.
I think this problem is much larger than only this right now too. People make their opinions equal to them as a person. They feel if they change their opinion then they're failing as a person. This isn't true though. Changing your opinions when you're shown new information is a sign of strength.
Can you explain to me how punching Nazis works to reduce Naziism and racism? What is the mechanism of action? Like how specifically does getting punched make someone less racist?
That is a genuine question and I'd love an answer.
I personally believe that punching racists only creates more hatred. The racist will be angry at the one who punched him, and thus less open to anti-racist messaging.
It probably won't change that person (unless you kill them). It's to show everyone else that it isn't tolerated. It's to prevent them from going around doing whatever they want as if it's normal, which will make other people believe it's acceptable and may start believing the same things.
Can you point to some other times in history where the threat of being beaten up has been effective in eradicating an ideology?
I can point to plenty of instances where driving an ideology underground only fuels its growth...
And look at the simple logic of it- if the guy in the big KKK hood says 'the establishment doesn't want you to acknowledge this' and he then gets beaten up by mainstream majority people, you've just proved him right in the eyes of a would-be follower.
It's like if you found someone who knows nothing about astronomy, and told them 'today the sun will rise at 7:15am and set at 5:43pm, and the moon is mostly made of bleu cheese' you've predicted two things correctly so that gives you credibility when they consider the 3rd.
If I said that to you, you'd say 'you looked that up on Google, anyone can do that, and it's well known the moon is made of rock'. But you are knowledgeable about astronomy (on a basic level at least).
This works with the KKK person because chances are the KKK person has had limited or no actual contact and understanding with black people. So he sees news reports of inner city black people doing crimes and it becomes easy to convince him black people are somehow inferior. And 'THEY don't want you to know the truth' is a powerful message for someone already interested in counterculture / dislike of the mainstream.
That's why Daryl Davis is effective- he sits down with the racist, who has a mental image of what a 'black person' is, and he's not that. It's like putting you on a rocket and flying you out to the moon and saying 'okay we're here, where's the cheese?'
And that's why violence ISN'T effective- because the racist is expecting violence, so being violent only reinforces their belief.
WWII?
Yeah, it usually doesn't eradicate it. That's basically never how we measure effectivity though. Being nice hasn't either. Again, the point isn't to change the person being attacked in these cases. It's to show others that their views are not acceptable by society. It's to show others that it isn't a widely held belief and to not listen to them.
Yeah, unless we go on an all-out war against them it won't be eradicated through violence. Growth can be slowed though. That's why I said we need both violence and dialogue. They both can be useful tools.