[pangur-and-grim]

fairly reliably when someone is mean and weird to you on Tumblr, you can look on their blog and all their recent posts will be about how unhappy they are in their interpersonal relationships and/or how frustrated they are that their creative venture hasn't found success. and it's like ohhhhh okay, I get it. you're clawing at other people because you're actively drowning. my sympathies, that sucks, but I'm not a lifeguard so carry on.

[pangur-and-grim]

[only-cat-memes]

[chronicallyunfazed]

If you are posting on Tumblr.com you are not subaltern.

[chronicallyunfazed]

There are going to be people you encounter online who say the most wild things, who can twist your words into an attack no matter what you do, who will lie, and yell, and encourage harrassment. No matter what you do or who you are, your words are problematic to them- You're ableist, transphobic, racist, sanist, etc.

If they can't find fault in your words they will poke and poke until they get something to point at and say 'look, this is a bad person, I was right!' Nevermind if they've done and said the exact same things, social justice for me but not for thee. Hypocrisy is not in their vocabulary other than to turn it against the Enemy of the Day.

I'm not talking about your run-of-the-mill troll doing it for a laugh. Usually it is someone with real skin in the game, someone who has been hurt and is still hurting and only knows how to deal with it by taking it out on others. They generally respond very poorly to expressions of concern or suggestions for alternatives to what they're currently doing.

It sucks because clearly they are having an awful time, and often they gain an audience that feeds off the high of each new fight. They excommunicate anyone that isn't in full support so it becomes an echo chamber.

They generally have a long standing pattern of ruminating about a certain discourse or Enemy of the Day and bringing it back up, juggling their discourses every few days/weeks/months to keep the intensity high even when everyone else has gotten sick of it.

If this description resonates about anyone you've seen, I suggest ignoring and blocking from the get-go, do not interact, do not express concern, if you have them blocked and they are fomenting about you still do not respond to anything they say, delete all asks regarding it, turn off asks for a bit if you need to, let the wave pass.

We all want to defend ourselves, our morals, and our community. But any interaction at all feeds the cycle they are in. If you are worried for them the best thing you can do is leave them alone. I think that it's kinda cruel how the internet makes this sort of person (who is obviously hurting badly and struggling whether they agree or not) into a spectacle.

[chronicallyunfazed]

If you're expecting to be struck, you will bite at every hand reaching out. You deserve grace and the people around you deserve not to get bit (unless they want to). These ideas can and should coexist.

[chronicallyunfazed]

being homeless for 10+ years while making hundreds of thousands of dollars is kind of a skill issue at that point lmao

You missed the point, there are people citing specifically the being homeless for 10 years and NOT the income. People have been acting like just being homeless for an extended period of time is impossible rather than a reality for many, many people. Also if someone is making that much money and are truly homeless, there is probably something else deeper going on there that I wouldn't apply the value judgement of 'skill issue' to, but again, not what we're talking about here.

[chronicallyunfazed]

I think the best things we could do towards youth liberation right now is:

Work towards youth having more freedom in choosing where they live AND building a foundation of living options for all kids, especially those who are severely isolated/don't have any safe options currently. Give them protection and recourse when parents (any adult actually, just in current system it is often parents) try to use the legal system to get them back in their control.

Extending this further is allowing and protecting the rights of youth leave any situation without fear of what comes next. This means kids not being physically restrained for walking out of a classroom. This means choosing to leave your parents home doesn't require a child to justify how terribly abusive or neglectful their parents are. This means that when anyone makes a child unsafe or uncomfortable, the child having means and ability to go somewhere else safe that can provide for their needs.

This isn't an easy one solution fits all problem by any means, but I think every action taken towards is powerful.

[chronicallyunfazed]

All other things about that situation aside... yall know it is completely possible to be homeless for 10+ years right? I have met many a chronically homeless person who has been on the streets for 20+ years now. Use other talking points, saying someone being homeless for 10 years proves how obvious their grift is just shows me you know nothing about the reality of other people's lives.

[vaspider]

To step away from @biglawbear's post, I think y'all need to seriously recalibrate your brains if you immediately respond to "I wish I had a space to Just Be, always being drenched in politics is exhausting" with "NORMIE LIB, THAT ISN'T THE WORLD WE LIVE IN, YOU ARE SO NAIVE."

Fucking stop it. It is normal to want to have a break. Saying you can't long for a place to sip your fruity drink with a limp wrist in peace because we just don't have that world yet is immensely psychologically harmful.

People need to rest. That is a fact. Stop demonizing them for wanting to be able to do so now and again, and definitely stop talking down to them about it.

[biglawbear]

Thank you!

There are places for politics. There are places for frustration and grief and anger. There are places for community and joy.

They can and should be separate. It won't always be a perfect separation. But it's not healthy to be immersed all the time.

Third places are important because it gives you rest and hope to go back to the hard things.

Like, people always post about wanting queer bookstores and coffee shops etc.

But it's also important that those places don't just become another place for politics.

If third places disappear because they've been subsumed by politics and fear and anger—which is what I've experienced and what I was critiquing—then we lose every place where we can have space to come up for air.

[myfootyrthroat]

I will tell the story again: A local plant group on Facebook had a "no politics" policy. All posts had to be about plants. They were accused of "burying their heads in the sand" and "having the privilege to avoid politics" by a bunch of white people. People tried to be slick about it and post pictures of the gardens with a "Black Lives Matter" flag in the background and the mods were like "That's literally fine. It's still a picture of a garden. There just have to be plants."

Some of the white people started another group that was like "[Original Plant Group Name] BUT NOT RACIST". Then the mods of the original group posted a group photo: all black and native women. The founder posted a message that said "Yes, you're right. We CAN'T avoid politics. That's why we wanted this one group where we could talk about plants and NOT about the police, without taking on the thankless work of moderating a bunch of threads about politics."

[guelwaar]

sorry but i don't really get the point of trying to frame 'morality ocd' as a fixation apart from the drive for social inclusion when if you listen to someone talk about their scrupulosity for .5 seconds it's basically invariably related to fear of ostracisation (& often but not always in the context of religious rules). it's like when people try to frame 'rejection sensitive dysphoria' like unique adhd brain chemistry and not the result of being excluded for being weird and annoying, or like conceiving of restrictive eating as a kind of asocial food fear with no relation to the systems of punishment for fatness... like, these are specific terrains of doubt & guilt for reasons. im not saying it magically solves your problem if you analyse its causes but it definitely won't solve your problem if you're just getting told, like, obsessing is unhelpful without acknowledging what's actually at stake in any given relationship & why you're invested in other ppls moral approval of you

[crippled-peeper]

“people won’t be friends with you if you’re mean to them” is something you have GOT to learn in adulthood if you never learned it as a shut-in internet-socialized youth. you can’t just go up and say to ppl to shut the fuck up and kill themselves all the time and then expect people to genuinely care for you.

[tpwrtrmnky]

It's interesting how high the miss rate is on internet users trying to determine whether a trans experience is Generic Trans or gender-specific.

[tpwrtrmnky]

Like being expected to conform to your assigned gender growing up and facing backlash if you don't is sort of The Trans Thing, but trans women will get told that they can't possibly understand that, and in fact simply uncritically absorbed their Male Socialization up to the point of transition. Which is transmisogyny.

[tpwrtrmnky]

here's a super relatable one that i'm sure all trans guys have totally experienced: when you're trying to get your gender affirmed but everyone around you insists they just use "girl" and "bitch" gender-neutrally. i'm basing this on a naive assumption that my experiences can simply be inverted.

[chronicallyunfazed]

To those who say they hate men- could you explain what you mean by that?

I saw an old post of mine and it made me think about it more and wonder what people's framework is. Feel free to check it out to better understand what I'm asking.

I'm not looking for a fight, I want to hear different perspectives, doesn't matter how much I agree/disagree with you. That being said, I will delete comments and block anyone who is actively hostile- i.e. threats, shutting down others/calling people stupid, harrassment.

[chronicallyunfazed]

Is your hatred of men:

A. Hatred of the social class known as 'Men'

B. A trauma/fear response due to abuse, harassment, and assault you've experienced

C. Both

If A or C:

1. How does this hatred impact how you interact on an individual level?

2. What does hatred on a systemic level look like/mean to you?

If B or C:

1. What signifiers of 'man' cause a fear/hatred response in you?

2. Do those signifiers ever overlap with anyone that is not a 'man'? Or is the fear immediately alleviated when you discover a person is not a 'man'?

For all:

1. How do you react to people you don't know the gender identity of? (As in, every person who hasn't told you)

2. How might your hatred impact someone who is still an egg? (Trans woman or trans man who still believes themselves to be cis man or cis woman)

3. If someone you believed to be a cis woman tells you they are a trans man, how would that change your perception of them and treatment of them?

[chronicallyunfazed]

I have seen more complaining about trans headcanons than I have seen... trans headcanons. I feel this is emblematic of discussions in (online especially) trans communities in general.

[chronicallyunfazed]

When you see an awful take going around instead of assuming it is pervasive, start taking count of how often you actually see that opinion, maybe even take a gander at any patterns in who is spreading that post.

Also question when others agonize about 'everyone is saying xyz', don't let this get categorized as more datapoints because your brain exponentially grows the issue."'this person also saw everyone saying this so there MUST be everyone² number of people saying this."

It behooves a small group to pretend their belief is pervasive and righteous. It creates a sort of moral bandwagon effect of 'oh everyone is talking about this? I must be wrong for disagreeing' to grow the number of people who believe.

'Remember the hits and forget the misses' function of brain seems to scale to how awful the 'hit' (discourse in this case) is which can counter your bullshit detector if you aren't careful. One person who is saying some whack stuff can be written off... but then you see posts lamenting how everyone believes xyz and suddenly it seems plausible to you.

Is everyone saying xyz thing now, or is there a discord/friend group of ~10 people central to the discourse happening that spend every waking moment talking about it?

...Then remember that there is 8.14 billion people on earth.

[chronicallyunfazed]

"if we accept this Cringe Person into our community no one will take us seriously"

"Your Cringe Behavior is insulting to me, who honorably suffers in a non cringe way"

Intercommunity behavior policing won't make anyone respect you more. You are just upholding the already existing power structures (and are therefore more likely to direct that ire at the most vulnerable people in your community)

When you conflate cringe, annoyance, and discomfort with active harm all you do is justify doing violence in return. You become the cudgel so those in power don't have to directly do the violence.

What harm is being done?

What power does this person hold?

Are you protecting your community from a bad actor or trying to trim down the fat of your own community to conveniently fit into the spot in the hierarchy that you feel you are owed?