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New from me: When "Punch a Nazi" Goes Wrong, a deep dive into a recent viral altercation between furries on a beach where one hit another over the head with a megaphone. In the immediate aftermath, the bulk of reactions were people celebrating it as a justified case of punching Nazis. The event first drew my attention due to my distaste to people celebrating political violence, no matter the target, then continued drawing me in as I realized how warped the initial story had been and how unlikely it was that anyone else would see a reason to get a clearer picture. I spent a couple of weeks interviewing everyone I could get in touch with who had some connection to the conflict, poking around and trying to construct a full picture of what happened.
Normally I would excerpt a chunk of my post here, but this one is long and not particularly well suited to excerpting, so I'll summarize instead.
I went in assuming that the victim was some variety of conservative, warped by the standard methods to "Nazi", but the closer I looked into it, the more I realized that not even that was true. When I spoke with the victim, he described himself as a "Bernie Sanders democratic socialist," and he had the social media presence to back it up, not to mention the shirt he was wearing at the time of the assault (covered in the full array of wine-mom-liberal slogans: "Science is real", "Black lives matter", so forth).
The full story is tragicomic, an initially petty dispute given meaning over the years by the participants working to frame it as a grand political struggle. The original cause of the "Nazi" allegations was the behavior of the victim's boyfriend, who, while having similar political leanings to the victim himself, had roleplayed as a Nazi furry in the video game Garry's mod half a decade ago. This, and a couple of other vague allegations, were enough to turn a personal disagreement into a half-decade-long mission to smear his name in public and private wherever he tried to go within his community. The dispute intensified after a disagreement about responsible Covid precautions at meetups (to wit: would a voluntary, masked, outdoor meetup in 2021 kill people?), ultimately escalating to threats of lawsuits, deep mutual acrimony, and eventually this assault.
Ironically, if the victim and his boyfriend had been the far-right figures they stood accused of being, they'd be in a much better position to weather the whole controversy, with sympathetic allies to spread a counter-narrative, presenting them as martyrs and providing a community to retreat back into. Part of the tragedy of the whole sequence is that the ostracization was so effective only because the two of them were inches away culturally and politically from the leftists celebrating the assault (different primarily, as one mentioned sardonically in a message to me, in not believing random people should be assaulted for political reasons).
There's a certain futility to writing something like this. It's unlikely to reach the core audience who would need to accept it to make a meaningful difference in the ingroup reputation of the victim. Narratives have a way of reinforcing themselves, and when I reached out to writers spreading the Nazi allegations with some authority, they found excuses for every piece of evidence that suggested something more complex was in play. I can only address a crowd of uninvolved onlookers predisposed to agree with me on the material issues at hand. I felt compelled to write about it, though—both because the event is a microcosm of a lot of current cultural trends, a reminder of how destructive personal disputes become when they become charged with the sense of righteous political struggle, and because it was the sort of story big enough to permanently ruin the victim's reputation in his own community and small enough that nobody else would bother to tell his story. If someone's going to become an outcast from a community of outcasts, they deserve that much.
Full article here.
At the risk of being "that guy" can you provide an example of "punch a Nazi" going right? What is the outcome you expected in contrast to the one you got?
I believe I address this adequately in my article, so before I answer I’d appreciate hearing your understanding of my opinion given my article’s commentary on the matter.
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Sorry, Trace, this is one of those "everyone involved is horrible" scenarios. Live by the sword, die by the sword. He rattles off a laundry list to you including "I want to see Donald Trump hanged"? Then this is the "I never dreamed the leopards would eat my face" consequence of what him, his boyfriend, and the entire incestuous, turned in on itself, little scene has hothouse incubated.
Of course. Such accusations have long left behind any shred of real-world relevance and are now simply a convenient way to smear those you are having an argument with, and to garner praise for yourself as a Nazi-puncher.
In fairness, who among us has not wished fervently to see a senior politician hanged? Let he who is without sin etc etc...
If he wants 'em all hanged, no problem. If he adduces Orange Man Bad to prove he's one of the good guys and on their side so why are they calling him a Nazi, well - leopards are eating your face because that's what the leopards do.
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I've never wanted to see a politician hanged.
I have however wanted to see all three branches of government literally crucified along I-95 from DC to New York, and I'd vote for anyone who promises to do so. You could resurrect histories worst monsters, who run on a policy of working me in the shit mines until I die. So long as their administration doesn't believe the government can confiscate your children and mutilate and sterilize them, I'm in. The degree to which I'm a single issue voter on this, and will support literally anyone against it cannot possibly be overstated.
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Interesting. I've never thought about this before but it makes sense. This potentially has an impact on the optimal thresholds for evidentiary standards to balance false positives versus false negatives when using social rather than legal punishments. That is, if we decided that punishing one innocent person was equivalently bad to failing to punish ten guilty people, then you might naively try to balance your standards so that the false positive threshold was ten times smaller than the false negative. But if the innocent people are actually getting significantly worse punishments because the impact of social shame is higher, then the appropriate threshold would set the false positive rate possibly several times lower for social punishments than it would be for other types of punishments.
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Yeah, there's been a lot of small-scale stuff like this recently that's been very disheartening, across a variety of communities. I've pointed to the End Of Forge in the MineCraft community for a nonviolent version, but funhouse mirror insinuations and games of telephone have reached to broken communities or actual physical fights in more than a few cases.
On the flip side, it's not exactly new, so much as seeming to occur at smaller scales. I've worked at length with a MineCraft server operator who later pointed out how proud they were for punching Brendan Eich, from context probably somewhere in the 2007-2009 period. Dogpatch Press has been pretty hard on considering "fraudulent ideas" that need be ejected from the marketplace of ideas like... libertarianism -- and that 2018 tweet is not exactly some massive change in perspective. Part of the 2 the Gryphon cancellation (2017) involved a not-exactly-subtle campaign smearing him as a nazi, including r/drama-heads assisting it. There's been efforts to cancel a fur for a fetishized drawings of World War One German outfits that I've been aware of as early as 2014, and I'd be surprised if there weren't closed-door discussions far earlier.
Nor is it specific to Too Online communities like: I've had to handle a lot of drama from supposed adults over politics in STEM outreach work that near-instantly escalated to claimed fear to life. As much as RPGnet is a telling story on the political axis, as specifically for failures to keep 'fuck nazis' as a bound applied to actual nazis, a lot of the political mess over there post-Morke since has only be adjacent to politics. And while Trump was a convenient excuse for many, it really just was an excuse and not just one aimed one direction.
What's particularly frustrating is that this happens even when there is something there. That Skaard tweet from March 2022 you screencapped was in response to this dogpatch.press article, and it's an absolutely fascinating piece even and especially from an anti-fascist perspective. There's certainly actual smoke and probably fire for a few people, there... and it was so heavily mixed in with random things that weren't smoke that they eventually revised the article to at least remove bits where the sole evidence against someone was 'drew Italian Futurism' or 'drew pithy conservative comics' or whatever this is, and the revised version still has crap like 'hawaiian shirt' or 'NFTs' or 'Pine Tree Flag' as if they were anywhere comparable to 'glorified a real-world spree shooter' or 'thinks "miscegenation is worst thing you can do in the world"'.
Yes, to some extent even weak information should be evaluated, but there's a very fine line between trying to pick out from a weak signal and going full Pepe Silvia. And while it's more frustrating to see when it distracts from serious criticism of actual bad actors, it's more worrying when it's aimed as a seque at rando edgelords or actual innocents who get wedged between unrelated bad actors.
[caveat: my impression's that Skaard's still a bit of an edgelording twerp, though I've not interacted directly it probably impacts my interpretation. But it's also probably why the edgelording teen disclaimer doesn't impress a lot of others.]
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You know, I'm reminded of when Yasser Arafat died, and the generation of sociopathic serial killers his regime groomed turned on each other to consolidate power. After years and years and years of "both sides" narratives about the Israel/Palestine conflict, watching how viciously and hatefully Palestinians turned on each other when denied an opportunity to exorcise their hate on their further neighbor really gave me a certain moral clarity about the conflict. Whatever Israel's faults, those are the sorts of "partners in peace" they have to work with. I wouldn't waste my time coming up with any sort of diplomatic resolution with a political party that you just watched murder, main and torture it's political opposition in the streets either.
Likewise here, to a lesser degree. All I see here are mentally ill people programmed to hate and violence. The lack of a "valid target" does nothing to change their violent programming. That is who they are now. And likewise, seeing it so nakedly grants a certain moral clarity to the larger conflict at home.
This is the pattern of "we are brutal toward our friends so just imagine what we will do to our enemies" that carries throughout history. For instance Mongols themselves practiced group guilt where the unit of 10 men were responsible for things done by every member, similarly the unit of 100 was responsible for things every 10th did and so forth. So if you get an order to gather ears or arms of innocent victims as a proof of genocide in soon to be razed city, there is 9 of your comrades breathing on your neck willing to literally kill you if you do not conform - or it will be their neck on the chopping block. Similar pattern of behavior can be seen in WW2 Imperial Army - when POWs complained about beatings and horrible conditions, it was relatively "reasonable" distance from normal Japanese soldier who faced harsh disciplinary punishment as well. And lastly I could see that pattern when listening to some intercepted phone calls to Russian soldiers in Ukraine from their families. It was interesting to hear wives or even mothers of soldiers who were just told that their "loved ones" just barely survived almost whole wipe of their unit and that they very likely will die or get severely injured - only for it to ignored and the discussion turned onto salary or what can the soldier send back home.
Of course the whole thing is much more frightening for members of these communities.
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Do you have any summary for this power struggle that happened after Yasser died? It sounds interesting, and I can't find anything that is presenting it concisely in one place after cursory googling, just bits and pieces.
Not really, these are my contemporary memories. There is a rather verbose wiki article about it that is rather anodyne IMHO. But it does cover the highlights.
I did find this Human Rights Watch article from June 12 2007
Has all the "Throwing political enemies off roofs" that I remember seeing on the news at the time.
They dramatically publicly executed the cook for the previous presidential guards? Why? There's retribution and then there's senselessness.
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I'm sure you've written about this before, but do you discuss where and how you first became a furry somewhere?
Yeah, I'm working on an article about it, but this is the most thorough account I think I've given so far. Copied for convenience:
Different people have different reactions to strict religious environments. I was a serious, religiously scrupulous kid who took my faith's commandments very seriously. I was also always a bit odd. Mormons have a strict prohibition against pornography, unmarried sex, or dating before 16 years old, something that extends to generally strict modesty standards and instructions not to look on women with lust more broadly.
I internalized those standards and, so far as I can tell, developed an instinctive disgust/irritation reaction to seeing women in any sort of immodest or 'sexy' settings: bikinis, billboard models, sex scenes or kissing in movies—everything intended to arouse, even tame stuff, was something to grimace and look away from. No dating, no relationships, no sex? Fine by me. I'd shove all that stuff into a corner and deal with it when I was an adult or something. This extended for me even to things like crude sex jokes from other guys, which bothered me in particular when they came from other Mormons—didn't they care? I valued modesty and chastity and was scrupulous in those values. Sexual things were threats and temptations. Noticing them with anything other than disgust was a personal failing.
But, well, I was still an adolescent boy, and hormones don't simply disappear when ignored. I took my faith's prohibitions seriously and rarely dug where I wasn't supposed to, but seem to have sublimated my romantic feelings into an interest in something safely outside the realm of the real. At some point, I wandered onto deviantArt, where I found a few extraordinary artists who portrayed the world of anthro animals in compelling, beautiful ways—see here or here for (safe) examples—and without being able to articulate why I was so fascinated by that world or was paying so close of attention to it, began to follow their work with interest. I've always loved nature and the sense of wildness; the artists I found excelled at capturing emotions close to my heart. Art (and I do mean art here, not as a euphemism) became a non-threatening, meaningful outlet for me to explore the idea of romance disconnected from the baggage, cruft, and uncertainty around a real world where I had internalized that I should clamp down on all feelings in that domain.
I'm not convinced that people are born with immutable romantic interests, but I am convinced that past adolescence, some stay more-or-less fixed. In my case, a strict upbringing that I took seriously, combined with the need for some sort of outlet and an insistence on staying glued to the computer when possible, meant that my own oddness was channeled and focused during a sensitive development period towards a deep-running interest in and appreciation for anthropomorphism, along with a conviction that I was asexual. I'm quite sure at this point that the interest is immutable, and I wouldn't change it—I remain mostly detached from the furry fandom for many obvious reasons, but I continue to love the impossible world I was so drawn to in adolescence, for all the same reasons.
I kept telling myself that romance would come later, that crushes and noticing interest in people and all the rest would be right around the corner, but as I got older and it kept not happening I started to seriously ask myself whether I was capable of being in love. In my early twenties, after I stepped away from Mormonism and let myself examine questions of romance in any way connected to the real without flinching away, I finally noticed a sense of romantic interest in people—men, that is—and was thoroughly relieved to learn I was normal enough to be able to fall in love. So then I started dating, met my now-husband, and lived happily ever after. The end.
In short, I see my interest as a sublimation of religious scrupulosity towards all things sexual, the result of being an odd person who took a strict environment seriously while having open access to outlets that eventually swept my pre-existing tendencies into a specific, peculiar cultural niche. I like to tell people, because I think it's true, that five hundred years ago I would have been a monk. But I grew up in the early 2000s, so I became a gay furry instead.
So it goes.
Thanks for sharing. I have some more questions, but I'll wait for your piece on it (where I'm sure some will be answered). I think that anthropomorphism and ideas of lust seem to have a long history, I know they crop up occasionally throughout history in different and interesting ways, furry-ism can't be dismissed as a purely modern phenomenon. Anyway, I look forward to your writing.
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