u/brianscottbj

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/sheriff-grady-judd-says-troll-crossed-lines-of-first-amendment-in-threats-made-to-kaitlin-bennett/ar-AA1XW2d2

We've gotten lots of new users recently, but probably those who have been around a while remember a guy who used to post here with the pen name Erik Houdini, generally promoting his indie blog/magazine trying to make old fashioned Web 1.0 type alternatives to social media, writing slightly unhinged but also often profound long form theoretical essays, and just posting about his personal trials and tribulations. Some people frankly disliked him, but you know I think it's important to embrace our weirdos here and I personally liked the guy and have kept in touch with him since he stopped using Reddit.

Long story short, he's facing serious potential prison time, essentially for talking too much shit against a third rate fascist grifter and making some unwise references to Charlie Kirk in the process. He's been pretty deeply involved in DSA and mutual aid type shit in Florida for a bit now, but is currently pretty much fighting to stay the hell out of prison. I consider us mates, and we email pretty often, and he asked me to share this here so I am.

I can understand why some people might find him annoying or off putting, but also I'm just letting you know that if you engage in any weird schadenfreude against him you will be banned. He's kind of unhinged and unreasonable at times, but he's also somebody who would quite literally give the shirt of his back to anybody. He's about that life and devoted body and soul to doing the damn thing that many of us only post about.

And more than that, it just sucks that they can do this to people. He's shockingly calm and resilient about the whole thing, and I doubt that the worst case scenario will happen here. But even if he is totally acquitted, he already lost a job over this, has had to spend time in jail, and its been a drain on his exceedingly limited finances and mental wellbeing, not to mention putting pretty much all of his political activity to a halt which is what he really care about. It's infuriating that the legal system and the fascists that make use of it against people like him can just so easily fuck up the lives of broke people with no recourse that I'm going to type in a public forum.

Anyway, he's a righteous brother whose name is in the book of life, and I love him even if he's kind of odd sometimes. I remember I think our associate throwawaynumbers making a comment recently about how under Nazism, generally the well adjusted and normal people did nothing and the biggest opponents of the regime were people who were kind of weird and extra. We gotta defend our weirdos people, they are our brothers/sisters/non binary comrades. He's probably reading this so please be nice and prayers up for our boy.

The site is still up by the way here https://houdinimagazine.com/ albeit with less involvement from him directly, with indie programming such as this https://houdini-magazine.itch.io/cold-crack-3-piece-with-sides

The main body of this came from some lengthy messages I exchanged with a user I temporarily banned and I'm vain about my writing and it annoys me that it will only be seen by one person if I don't share it so I'm putting it here too.

Why are we even here? For many of us it's just a diversion and something to look at while we're in the bathroom avoiding work, and that's fine. For many of us, we're just interested in uncovering buried truths around occurrences like the "pilot rescue operation" that are impossible to talk about with people who don't have a similar baseline level of left wing conspiracy beliefs. But some of us, probably foolishly, probably take this fairly seriously and will put real time and effort into posts. Why?

For me, the key to posting efficacy is knowing that we are performing for an audience. As a mod I bear witness to basically every stupid petty argument that devolves into people calling each other liberal retard bots or whatever, and to me it shows a basic lack of understanding of why we are even here.

If you go into posting interactions with the attitude of "I am going to defeat this dumb person" you have already lost. On this site, probably a very high number of people are literally bots, paid shills, or so stupid and brain rotted that they're functionally indistinguishable. If you let them actually make you mad at their unwillingness to listen, you've already lost. When you see bad but not repugnant takes, let's say "This wouldn't have happened if we had a Democrat president" you don't need to go in thinking "I will show this fool how stupid they are." Instead, see it as an opportunity to educate the audience reading in the future.

It's like this. If someone says "We still need to vote Democrat to prevent the worst!" for example, and gives some reasons why, and you respond "fucking redact yourself stupid liberal piece of shit" then people who don't know better will read that interaction and say "damn that guy is a dickhead" and move closer to the OP and associate our beliefs with being an asshole. If you present a thorough, articulate argument against the liberal instead, you never know what 15 year old reading it might have their life changed by reading it.

For every power user whose name you remember, there's a hundred people who pop in and out casually, and for every one of those, there's a hundred lurkers who read stuff sometimes but never actually post anything themselves (good for them). They are the people you should be thinking about. You're almost certainly not going to actually convince some idiot to change their beliefs. If they're already deranged enough to post their opinions online at all like some degenerate, they're probably already a deeply stubborn and sick person, or else literally a bot. But there's a thousand less stubborn undecided people reading at any time, and you need to have them in mind when you make an argument.

What I'm saying is basically, don't get stressed and angry about this posting shit. Either have fun with it, or treat it like an intellectual exercise in out arguing your enemies in order to educate and persuade invisible onlookers, or else just take a break. It's silly to get genuinely mad on Reddit dot com. And for another thing, when you post angry shit at people, you'll probably get reported and shadow banned by the big boss admins. I've seen a massive increase in the number of people getting shadow banned by site admins lately, so be careful out there.

Most people do not believe what we believe, or know what we know. If that is to change, you're going to have to argue and educate relentlessly and patiently for things that seem like absolute moral and logical common sense to you, because the user base here is a bunch of people coming from the most propagandized society in the history of the world. This is a site with a massive user base where if nothing else we can send out opinions and knowledge out into the world. The algorithms are against us, and for every one of us there's a hundred bots or de facto bot people. The algorithms overwhelmingly favor fascist content and will put that in front of people's eyes as much as they can, but nonetheless, if people are just reading two sets of words going back and forth, at a certain level you can't brainwash people into not reading them and making their own opinions. There's massive audiences of uninformed schmoes who could go either way that read what we say, and we must keep them in mind and comport ourselves in a way that makes us seem intellectually serious and good hearted and like people who have beliefs that they want to learn more about, despite the fact that actually we're mostly losers and lunatics shouting into the void.

And don't forget to have fun!