Comment by TimorousBestie 17 days ago
That sounds so bleak.
What’s the endgame to this approach? Seems to me, folks with genocidal thoughts and feelings would find more positive reinforcement amongst themselves and less negative reinforcement everywhere else. Not great for the “genocide is bad” theory.
I think there are ways a friend can be toxic without threatening death. This friend may encourage you to isolate from your jewish friends, or explicitly make your jewish friends feel unwelcome by saying slurs while in group settings. This friend is explicitly making you in the position where you have to isolate your own friend groups from each other to "keep the peace", i.e. you are forced to do the labor, instead of them, to handle the harm they are causing.
Like we all know a guy who we can't keep around because he keeps saying unhinged stuff, or creeps on any women, or whatever it is he does that ruins it for everyone else.
So I think it's more nuanced than just refusing to cut off heinous viewpoints. It's also how this person injects this view in your existing friend ecosystem.
This only works in so far as their actions are illegal.
But the premise here is these people have these beliefs and are working to make them legal. The idea isn’t that these people want to kill Jews, it’s that they want to make killing Jews the right thing to do.
Then, it becomes your problem. Particularly so if you are Jewish, but even if you are not.
This of course extrapolates to less extreme examples.
The negative reinforcement is supposed to be when they actually attempt to unlawfully kill others, a 9mm bullet goes through their head. Until then, they have the right to their opinion.
It's hard to imagine isolating them from counter points is going to mitigate their position.