The continual alt-right technique of projection and appropriation of arguments is perpetually confusing to me. I mean that not in the "I don't get it" sense, but in the "I can't figire out who's right and who's wrong" sense.

The latest flare ups have seen people on both sides chiding others for their lack of self awareness, calling everyone facists, and so forth. I can't navigate online spaces anymore, because everyone's using the same reasoning and saying the same things. Just aiming it in a different direction. I can't understand why people are tolerating and supporting what looks like hatred, but seemingly those same people have massive support, and I begin to wonder if my assessments are wrong. I'm also continually afraid of people professing that violence is the answer.

Full disclosure, I also fully anticipate that my being squeamish about violence will cause people to regard me as a liability, and an enabler of evil.

It's very confusing and I feel myself just wanting to give up, because I am either too impressionable or dull to know what's what anymore. And maybe if I just evaporate and disappear, at least that will make everyone's life easier because I won't be supporting the awful people, even if I don't know who the awful people are.

I'm just too easily overwhelmed, and weak.

@Phorm Your feelings are real. You are not a bad genie for feeling them. I can share my thoughts if you'd find them helpful, but I'd rather focus on making sure you feel like you're being respected and understood. What right bow would help you feel safer?

@literorrery Honestly at the moment, I just want to know what I can do to increase the safety of others, most critically including reducing the harm I do to others. I just have zero idea if I'm better off removing myself entirely from everything, if I'm bending to the will and thoughts of evil, or if I'm unconsciously enabling evil. And overall that makes me feel completely unsafe, because I may become actively or passively harmful to people who are already in peril.

My apologies for making noise about this, by the way. But my vast appreciation for your thoughts on the matter.

@Phorm I think that it's entirely possible for people to have mutually incompatible goals or needs without anyone being morally flawed. It's very hard to deal with, but sometimes it's unavoidable. I don't have any pat answers for those situations, but I do think that coming to terms with those possibilities is critical for self-care. It's the starting point for deciding when to accede to others and when to assert the self.

@Phorm I think that speech which advocates for the suffering of others is a form of violence that we as a society have been trained to think of as harmless because it's "just words," and we're now seeing the consequences of that. As a result, there's a lot of "ambient background violence" to which people are now responding as one would threats of violence: declarations of boundaries and promises to respond in kind.