this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2026
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ShowerThoughts
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Sometimes we have those little epiphanies in the shower.. sometimes they come from other places. This is a home for those epiphanies.
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I agree with that last quote.
But what I'm noticing is a reducing of the original saying to mean any place with a nazi is a nazi bar, and therefore contaminated. Taking back online and IRL communities from nazis involves sharing space and occasionally having a dialogue.
If someone has a close relationship with a nazi, to the point where they think they can change their mind, it's their duty to try. Otherwise the nazi is only going to hang out with other nazis and become more of a shit head.
In the end I think we all agree there should be fewer nazis, but maybe we disagree on how to do that.
A bar that allows Nazis is contaminated. If the bar has Nazis in it, and someone stays in the bar with the Nazis, what does that say about them?
Both things are a lot like trying to play chess with a pigeon; the pigeon won't follow the rules of the game, at most it'll shit on the board.
The Nazi are only willing to share a space as long as they can't kick you out, due to lack of power. But once they do it, the discourse flips from "everyone should have a voice" (implied: "we Nazi should have a voice") to "fuck off with your degenerate shit, you don't belong here". And Nazi are known for using shitty rhetoric to enforce their views*, to the point a rational dialogue is impossible.
That does not imply we should simply ignore people who are adjacent to the Nazi; or sometimes reproducing bits of Nazi discourse without realising it. It's often worth to try to pull them back, before they fall into that hole. That teen leaning into inceldom, that grandpa who's fine with most marginalised groups except "that one", so goes on.
Pretty much.
*here's a list of videos about this, that I heavily recommend.
It's the sharing space and having a dialogue part I'm not sure I can get behind. We've all heard the karl popper quote.
Having a dialogue implies an amicable meeting of minds. I cannot, and will not try to, be amicable with Nazis, and there can be no meeting of minds on my part. There is nothing they can say to persuade me, and any grievance or line of reasoning that led them to that place is invalid purely because it did so. Being a Nazi because of economic anxiety makes economic anxiety less plausible to me, not Nazism more sympathetic.
So at least one party can't engage in a good faith dialogue, which makes it best a lecture.
The civil thing to do is make it clear to whoever's in charge that they boot to Nazi or I leave, get others to leave, dissuade people from coming, and try to get them shut down.
There's a line where either my naked scorn persuades you, or it doesn't. If it doesn't, I don't want you in my community and I'm willing to get uncivilized about it.