A few words on this, I guess.
I watched the part on stream where he was saying those things about genocide, and I through it was all bullshit. Really stupid shit.
Then I read a bit on some forum at the reactions, and I got really annoyed by how his words and opinions were twisted. So one moment I was assaulting him (in my mind), and another running to his defense. That’s how I always find myself fighting against everyone, and losing all battles. But… We should really not need to resort to exaggeration and straw-manning when what is being said is ALREADY evidently wrong when taken accurately for what it is. Why do you need to distort, to make it worse, to point at an enemy and make it so irrational to be incomprehensible?
That’s how you stop understanding, and how you start hating. The blind hate of rage that only damns inwardly.
Before you try to understand WHY what Asmongold said was wrong, you need to understand why he said it and why it was rational and logic from that perspective. If that perspective doesn’t look logical, it’s not because it isn’t, but because you conveniently distorted it, to make him the monster. To feel good for hating the bad guy. As Diablo would say, you hold your convictions, but understand nothing.
So what was Asmongold’s “logical” point? As he repeats in his “apology” video, he is against religious extremism. So what he did in practice was to mirror and so reverse the statement. In a way that looks like this: if these people want to kill us, then they deserve to be killed. He applied a kind of silly reciprocity, but that still kind of works on this simplistic line of thought. From his perspective it’s like saying that he hates so much these religious zealots that would slaughter with glee, because how deep they are in their absolute ideologies and convictions, that if they end up eating their own “ends”, then it’s only right. It’s only right that you suffer what you’d dispense to others. If you want to deliver violence, then you deserve receiving it.
That’s the “rational” argument. If you don’t understand the legitimacy of it, you’ll never know how to actually, properly DEFUSE it. We’ll go through apologies and posturing, while those people will continue thinking what they are thinking.
What is actually wrong in that argument has at least two core aspects. One it’s tricky and complex, because it’s about realizing that it’s all circular violence that perpetuates itself, and going that way only reproduces what it is, progressively getting worse. Which is exactly what is happening in the practical context of these wars. You’d have to learn how to “correct”, rather than “punish.” And how to integrate, rather than expel and reject (which is the whole ultimate point of this culture war and “canceling”, aka, accountability versus recovery).
The simple part is instead realizing that groups and cultures are quite far from homogeneous, and you need then be very careful to contextualize when you pass judgment. Not everyone in Palestine is a murderous zealot, and this goes without actually saying. But even then, see the point above, even if they were (religious zealots who would murder with glee), do they deserve death? Because here we’re back in theme with all the Gad Saad/Elon Musk rhetoric about the west (and the left) having become too empathic with their “enemy.” And so we should destroy our enemies in order to survive (prevail).
Well, that’s supremacist ideology, and it is VERY POPULAR.
You know what happens when you ban Asmongold? That you FEED that ideology. Because you slap the wrist of the exaggeration, but you condone the underlying ideology. You just hid the worm so that it keeps spreading the rot in society. You clean the surface, while the rot spreads BELOW.
Everyone was ready to rage at the superfluous so that no one addressed the rot.
And so rather than an episode (and following apology), we get a SEQUENCE. Because that rot will continue spreading and surfacing again and again, having not been addressed for what it is.
In the same way having powerful weapons and having the upper hand doesn’t give you the RIGHT of killing your enemy, but charges you of actual, practical RESPONSIBILITY of AVOIDING that brainless reciprocity. The same with Asmongold, having popular stream and videos watched by tons of people, charges HIM with a similar responsibility.
Because idiots are everywhere, and the worst is keep breeding them. One one side you’ll have those idiots who hate Asmongold and will say his apology is dishonest. Because they feed on the same certainty that drives their enemy. And then there are idiots, the greater majority here, that do not believe his apology BECAUSE THEY AGREE WITH HIM. And they think that this apology was ALSO dishonest in order to comply with great censoring powers that control the world.
They double down on his defense, thinking that they KNOW that he spoke true the first time, and false the second. And that’s Asmongold’s responsibility, here, to remove ambiguity, rather than to feed it however convenient:
While I don’t think anyone is responsible for how other people decide to twist what you may say or write, you still have the responsibility of what come after. Of confronting what monster you have produced, rather than brushing it off and deflecting responsibility.
These are your children.
(it’s quite funny, one of the guys there, thinking that correcting your parents having the same impact of personalities on the internet with millions of followers)
EDIT: Nevermind, he came back to be worse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCms-mad-Eo
