Stop infantilizing Keith who is an adult

He probably has more life experience than you

[date-a-jew-suggestions]

When are you people going to learn what a dogwhistle is

[pomoapple]

⚡⚡- Nazi SS insignia

((())) - With a name in the middle, it's used to identify/accuse people of Jewish ancestry

3%ers/lll%ers - Three percent'ers. A militia group that bases themselves symbolically on the incorrect statistic that only 3% of men in the original 13 colonies fought against the British. A flashy signifier to let other far right groups know that they will absolutely take up arms for America

9% - The supposed percentage of the worlds population that is fully/pure white

13% - Anti black dog whistle for the false claim that black men make up 13% of the population but commit 50% of homicides

100% - Pure race white

1-11/111 - Used almost exclusively for the Aryan Knights with 1=A and 11=K in accordance to their numerical alignment in the English alphabet

12 - With no law enforcement context, 12 could read as Aryan Brotherhood with 1=A and 2=B in accordance to their numerical alignment in the English alphabet

13 - Used almost exclusively for the Aryan Circle with 1=A and 3=C in accordance to their numerical alignment in the English alphabet

18 - Adolf (A=1) Hitler (H=8)

21-2-12(21/2/12) - Used only for The Unforgiven as a shorthand for their motto. Unity (U=21) Brotherhood (B=2) and Loyalty (L=12)

23-16 - White (W=23) Power (P=16)

109/110 - Representative of the number of counties Jewish people have been expelled from which (depending on which type of fascist you're dealing with) some would consider America to be/will be included, hence the 110

311 - Representation for the KKK meaning 11 (K) three times

737 - Used only for Public Enemy Number 1 (PEN1) in accordance to their numerical alignment on a telephone keypad

1423 (14/23) - Used almost exclusively for the Southern Brotherhood. Unlike other white supremacist organization who follow numeric symbolism, they instead choice to represent themselves under The 14 Words AND The 23 Precepts

1488 (14/88) - 14 being David Lane's Fourteen Words and 88 being the eight letter of the alphabet twice (HH) as a placeholder for Heil Hitler

6,000,000,000,000/6 trillion - Not only limited to trillion. Some variants feature billion, zillion, gorillion etc. A mocking reference for the 6 million lost to the Holocaust

AKIA = KKK shorthand for "A Klansman I Am"

American Identity Movement (AIM) - The chosen reformation name for Identity Evropa. Definitely a source of confusion though since the change was made last year but members (ex members?) still choose to identify as Identify Evropa members

Blood and soil - "Blut und boden". Lebensraum ideology claiming that the original (blood) descendants belong to their original (soil) land

Blueish - Placeholder for Jewish. Can sometimes be found in manipulated/edited photos that gives the subject a more blue tint

Coal burner - "Race traitor" white person who dates black people

Clown world (🤡🌍) - The normalization/continuous birth of Jewish, Muslim, poc, LGBT+, autistic, disabled people will make the world (west) a circus

Day of the rope - A fictitious day where mass murders of Jewish/Muslim/Poc/Race traitors will occur

Discussion club - Alt right meeting

EST - Purposefully meant to be confused with Eastern Standard Time but when used in a context that doesn't have anything to do with time, it's actually shorthand for Every Single Time. Meant to place blame on Jewish people whenever anything "bad" happens. (Can also be used against Muslims and pocs)

FGRN - KKK slogan. "For God, Race, and Nation"

Fren - "Far Right Ethno Nationalist". Plays into internet subculture baby talk (think uwu or cummies or woofer) with common phrases being "frens don't fite frens" or "no fren wars!!"

Globalism - Obvious anti immigration nonsense

Great Replacement - Claim (falsely stated as scientific fact) that immigration and increased birth rates of foreign born people is leading to white genocide. (May sometimes include interracial relationships)

Happy Merchant - The written version of that ONE anti semitic drawing that's a standard for all anti semites to post that we've all seen a dozen times before. No I'm not gonna post it -_-

Identitarianism/Identitarianist - Nice way of calling themselves Nazi

JQ - "Jewish Question". Debate on the status of the civil, political, and all around humanity of Jewish people

Jwoke - Someone who is supposedly "woke" to the "ruling status" and "crimes" that Jewish people commit

Listen and Believe - The far right belief that liberals (and some moderates and centerists) are more willing to allow/accept the talking points of fascist if presented by someone they view as a leader, role model, trustable, or at the very least, level headed

Loxist/Loxism - Combination of lox (brined salmon commonly enjoyed by Jewish people) and racism

Milk before meat - Mormon origin. Used when recruiting/softening up "normies" to far right ideology. Offering up soft and digestible fascist talking points to gauge openness before giving them more hearty fascist ideology

NazBol - THERE'S A LOT TO UNPACK HERE! NazBol is, simply put, Nazism and Bolshevism smashed together. With Bolshevism originating as a faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, and Nazis just being your standard Nazi. Bolsheviks were a working class alliance who greatly opposed Russian involvement in WW1, heavily favored unity amongst the poorer class, and coined the slogan Peace, Land, and Bread. Absolutely baffling how one can force these two polar opposite political magnets to collide, but APPARENTLY the mental gymnastics behind it is that it's a Third Position political ideology. Basically NazBols espouse the standard ideas of Nazism (eugenics, ethnic cleansing etc etc) but heavily favor certain leftist ideologies because they will give a better quality of life to the chosen few left behind. Ain't it funny!?

Nibba - The n word

Noticer - ~see jwoke~

ORION - Our Race Is Our Nation

Our guy - A far righter/believed to be far righter

Power level - Dragon Ball Z origin. Indicative of someone's involvement in far right beliefs. The more of a fascist you are, the higher your level is

ROA - Race Over All

RWDS - Right Wing Death Squad

Skype - Anti semitic k word

WAU - Women for Aryan Unity

Windmill - Swastika

YKW - "You know who". A question where the answer is Jewish people. ~see EST~

Zioworld - A replacement for Zionist Occupied Government meant to be less obvious

I'm also including fascist symbols. Although not technically dog whistles themselves, they still rely on obscurity to thrive

And here are some more detailed/extra dog whistles

This database provides an overview of many of the symbols most frequently used by a variety of white supremacist groups and movements, as we

BONUS: Here's a video dispelling the stupid Great Replacement myth sinces it's extremely informative and relevant

(Disclaimer: This list is by no means perfect or binding. ANY type of person can have a skull on their body, but have it be used soley for their grimdark aesthetic. You can also have someone with a hammer in their profile, but have it be representative of their work as a carpenter. Or you can have someone be referred to as "our guy" just because he's the life of the party! Certain pieces of dog whistle symbols and lingo can be totally innocent on their own (Pepe), BUT many literally CANNOT exist in any capacity that doesn't tie into fascism ((())). This is why they need to be learned and context needs to be added to every situation and sentence they are found in. Because the kid in the tiktok begging their fren to come dance with them doesn't need to be burned at the stake. And the Kekistan citizen putting blue filters over celebrity pics with a milk icon in the Twitter header DOES NOT need to be given the benefit of the doubt.)

[date-a-jew-suggestions]

This is one of the best replies I’ve ever gotten this is so comprehensive thank you!

[not-freyja]

Just saying what should be obvious for the younger crowd: almost every piece of iconography that Nazis and other fascist have is stolen from other cultures. If you see someone using these symbols it does not mean “I am a Nazi!”

It means, “this person is using images that Nazis use,” You are now dealing with Schrodingers Nazi. apply critical thinking skills or straight up ask a person what that symbol means to them to find out if they are a Nazi piece of shit.

[date-a-jew-suggestions]

This is also good advice! A lot of these can be 100% innocently used so be careful

[crittizen]

Something else that is hopefully common knowledge but bears repeating: these are dogwhistles. You’re SUPPOSED to not be able to know. That’s why if you are going to use one or more of these symbols you have to make yourself vocally anti-Nazi and pro-jewish/pro-poc.

[ladyheart-deactivated20210919]

Pedophiles and their apologists will say fiction has no affect on reality because it's the only way they can get themselves to feel better abt the disgusting shit they enjoy.

Meanwhile, Anton "claims to be pro-life, dies anyway" Scalia, an actual person who served on the supreme court and made massive decisions that affected millions of lives, sited the fictional character Jack Bauer (a "rogue cop" character that was known for mercilessly torturing criminals) as his defense for torturing political prisoners.

If someones mind and point of view can be horribly altered via exposure to media that glorifies violence, you bet your ass it can be altered by exposure to media that glorifies pedo bullshit. Including your piece of shit ao3 fanfiction.

[pro-survivors]

Correlation does not imply causation. Someone citing a popular television show character doesn’t mean that they watched an episode of 24 and decided that horribly inhuman treatment was good and constitutionally sound. 

In the article you cited, it says that Jack Bauer was brought up by another person who is saying completely the opposite of your position- we should not treat people like they are treated by this fictional character. If you position that fiction was influencing people into thinking torture is good, this person who is obviously familiar with Jack Bauer and the show he’s from should also think torture is good!

But it doesn’t work like that, and blaming the media someone consumes for their own negative/predatory/whatever behavior is wrong and gives predators an out. 

Nobody says that ‘fiction does not affect reality’, we say that fiction has no bearing on whether or not someone is a predator. Your idea that ‘someone’s mind and point of view can be horribly altered via exposure to media that glorifies violence’ is called ‘the hypodermic needle theory of communication’ and it has been debunked since the mid-19th century. 

People are not simply passive vessels that helplessly take in whatever they are presented with and are forced to act accordingly. People make their own decisions and are responsible for their own behavior - which is why there are so many antis who are rapists and predators and abusers. Stop giving predators an out by blaming the media they consume and stop fostering abusive behavior towards survivors and other marginalized communities. 

[floisdonewiththisbullshit]

Just wanted to add that if a predator or anyone who has committed a violent crime sites a fictional character as inspiration... They're not doing it out of the goodness or their own heart or to be honest. They're doing it in order to shift blame off of themselves. To say "Hey, I was a good person until THIS fictional thing made me do it/think it was okay" and get off easier or at all because if the bad evil media made them do it, then they must have been innocent and unlikely to do it again, right? Don't give predators this out. If anyone hurts anyone outside of self-defense, or preys on someone, them and them alone are to blame. I would say the only potential exception to this is someone so severely mentally ill, that they are neither lucid enough to make any unimpaired judgement, or can no longer tell the difference between fiction and reality. But let's not fear monger here: mentally ill people are more likely to be the VICTIM of violent crimes, not the perpetrator. (If that is the case though, the solution is not censoring all of our media to the point where there's no conflict. It's actually providing free, adequate, and humane mental health services to those who need it.

[floisdonewiththisbullshit]

The JS/E fandom has taken discourse to a whole new level holy shit.

[antis-delete-your-blogs-pls-thx]

okay so WRT RPF abt minors. i honestly worry if banning that would just end up with all RPF getting banned, because where does that boundary go. would they also end up banning incest RPF? like ao3 is the only fic posting website that i know of that allows RPF and as an exclusively RPF writer i'm honestly afraid of a slippery slope kind of situation, as much as it grosses me out and i think it's morally wrong to write RPF about minors i just worry abt the rest of the RPF community.

Yeah, banning is a slippery slope, and people always need to take the slippery slope into consideration and try other ways of addressing a problem.

[accidental-hermit-deactivated20]

I just don’t like this attitude that smut about real children is an acceptable sacrifice, or a necessary evil for the rest of the RPF community. Is it worth it? What extent does this go to? Do you care more about your right to post incest RPF than protecting the boundaries of children? Also a reminder that AO3 banning something doesn’t mean you can’t still write about it and email it to all your friends.

[antis-delete-your-blogs-pls-thx]

And I totally get that. It becomes a question of logistics in the end, really. And implementation. Who can we trust with moderation powers and who can’t we? Etc, etc. That’s really the overarching question in a fair amount of this discourse in general. We couldn’t trust staff to mod the site, and we did anyway, and they banned all NSFW. I’m not going to act like this is a matter of human rights and say that banning content you find distasteful infringes on the right to free speech, as long as it is allowed elsewhere, but history both online and offline does show a slippery slope, so even when faced with the worst of the worst we have to be careful about how moderation is implemented.

But in my own personal morals, I wouldn’t ever want to read or consume such content because of how I perceive it to violate boundaries. So I completely agree with you on that point, that it’s to me personally like an upskirt shot.

[accidental-hermit-deactivated20]

I mean the thing is we’re ALREADY trusting the people at AO3 with moderation. They moderate by deleting spam, harassment, fic that isn’t properly tagged with archive warnings. It’s not a question of whether they should have the power to moderate (because they already do) it’s a question of how they should use that power. I don’t get the “slippery slope” argument, because the people at AO3 are fully in control of what they do and don’t ban, so uhhhhh if they didn’t want banning content to go too far they just wouldn’t let it go that far. By allowing this type of fic they’re saying it’s acceptable.

[antis-delete-your-blogs-pls-thx]

I definitely get you there. I suppose the slippery slope argument in this case is coming from what I feel is a very long and fraught past for fandom of mods going on power hungry trips. I have a high degree of respect and trust for the AO3 staff, so while I don’t think they’re a group of animals barely keeping their overambitious natures in check, I (and many other fans) have, like, generational trust issues lmao. While AO3 is of higher quality staff than LJ or FFN or Tumblr, because of all those times where content that was disgusting or off colour was banned first, but everything else soon followed, people are “once bitten, twice shy”. Or, uh, “ten times bitten, twenty times shy” at this point.

The current moderation mindset is quite hands off for AO3. No hate speech, no doxxing, nothing illegal, etc. But the mods are there as guides to keep the site within legal grounds rather than to make moral directives. On an individual level you definitely can. I, individually, find it crosses a huge line. But I also don’t have power. And right now the mods powers are limited by the site’s internal doctrine of absolute power corrupts absolutely, even when it comes to stuff as trivial as a fanfiction website. If we unlimit those powers to make moral judgements, much more subjectivity comes into play. Laws are objective and therefore easy to enforce on the site. I want to also add so I can hopefully assure you that this is difficult for the mods, too, what they allow on the site doesn’t reflect their own morality, and I’m sure they’re often horrified by what gets put up. It’s a really difficult job imho and I have a lot of respect for the mettle involved in going through page after page of subjectively disgusting content and having to tag it or decide to not remove it.

Sorry for rambling here, I hope you get what I’m trying to say. I agree with you and yet also think we may have too much to lose here.

[accidental-hermit-deactivated20]

I understand what you’re saying, but ultimately the reason I’m never going to agree is because I think that the right children have to a certain expectation of privacy and boundaries is always going to outweigh the right to post fanfiction online. I know fandom is very important to some people etc., but are we willing to say that well, children having smut written about them is just the price we have to pay for that? If fan communities are going to fall apart without the right to write sexually explicit content about kids (which I don’t believe they will ftr), then y’know, maybe we should let them.

[antis-delete-your-blogs-pls-thx]

I mean, I agree with you 100% about the expectation of privacy. Actually, someone just sent me a very well-written ask about this that sums up my thoughts about why it’s crossing a line. Give me just a moment to publish it.

[floisdonewiththisbullshit]

Yeah honestly as an RPF writer... I'd rather Ao3 ban RPF of real life child/underage celebrities then continue for them to host it, even if it means RPF as a whole on the website ends up banned somehow. (Which I do truly and honestly doubt.) Generally, though, I trust the Ao3 staff enough to not ban all of RPF. There's a whole lot of difference between looking at adult actors and celebrities and what have you and being sexually attracted to and writing out these fantasies and posting it online and (hopefully) in a way that won't reach the celebs themselves.. and about children. Like actual children. As much as us RPF writers say we're basically writing OCs based off the real people...it's still technically them even if we only get the persona. There's just not enough separation for me to be comfortable with it. They're not anime characters. They're real children.

[antis-delete-your-blogs-pls-thx]

I think the problem here isn't explict RPF of underage actors, but the fact that underage actors exist at all. RPF in and of itself is fine as a concept, explict or no. Adult actors are able to consent to the side-effects of fame, and know what they're getting into - someone isn't crossing the line making something expected that the actor can avoid. A child can't whatsoever. An older minor can a little, but not much. Being a child actor in this environment is traumatizing already, (1)

what with them people developing people being thrown blindly into the public eye and subject to the nastiness of that. The environments are already exploitative, and they are already subject to publicly lewd comments over mass media. Add in RPF that’s about a child (them) being in a sexual situation, and that just compounds the trauma many actors already have, which has the same effect as sexual abuse. Children can’t consent to even so much as the situation. An adult can, even if they can’t (2) even if they can’t consent to sexual media written about them. An older teen can at least understand the situation. Children aren’t really able to control their exposure or experience at all and will have a higher chance of internalizing and finding and hearing about that fic than other age groups who can control these things and have better concepts of boundaries. Add in that children are generally underclass.. It’s very different, and I think the rules and expectations should be different too.“

Here it is. Thank you, this sums up my thoughts about how Hollywood is on child actors much better than I can.

[antis-delete-your-blogs-pls-thx]

@accidental-hermit Here you go. Does this resonate for you too?

[floisdonewiththisbullshit]

This, definitely this.

[antis-delete-your-blogs-pls-thx]

You know who y'all remind me of? Keith Jacobson. Guy who literally just mail-ordered child porn in the 80s and said the laws against that were invented by homophobic right-wing fundamentalists. I can't find any information on him after the case that shamelessly threw out his conviction, so I like to think he got shot by a CSA survivor.

That was REAL CSEM, asshole. Some fangirl’s anime fucking Spider-Man x Iron Man drawings are not even slightly fucking close to real CSEM and don’t you dare imply otherwise.

[floisdonewiththisbullshit]

OP that ask is reprehensible holy shit.

[tyramir]

being against pedophilia means we "want to control the thoughts of others"??? Well you sure just outed yourself for who you really are didn't you

I’m gonna answer this one publicly, because I really want to have my stance on this clear.This comment was probably concerning one of my responses to the idea that I am against controlling content in fanfiction/writing, even if it’s the bogeyman of pedophilia. Because I don’t subscribe to the inanity that is group think, censorship, or book burning. Because, hey, one of those always leads to the next.

It always starts off small. “Well, we want to get rid of the pedophilia.” Okay, sure, great. I’m super against pedophiles, and all the child-diddling that they do (Although, if you ask people like this, who know nothing about me, I own and maintain a child slavery ring in my basement). But then it goes, “Well, rape’s bad, too. Let’s remove that from fiction.” And I’m like, “Okay, sure, I can understand that.” And then we remove the rape, too. “While we’re at it, let’s get rid of incest. You don’t support incest, do you?” (Insert pearl-clutching here) Well, of course I don’t. So, let’s get rid of that from fiction, too.

You know what the next step is? Same one it always is. Homosexuality. Sex in general. ‘Problematic’ relationships.  The term ‘problematic’ ends up getting defined by the mob. Soon, fiction is general is just run roughshod over.

“We’d never do that,” they say. “You’re exaggerating.”

Strikethrough. Boldthrough. Etc. I have actual historical examples on my side. 

I don’t have to be pro-pedophilia to be pro-being able to write it. Because, guess what. The world’s a shitty fucking place. And writers are gonna write about the shitty thing that is summed up as ‘the human experience.’ And yes, I know most of the writers out there don’t depict teenagers (read: “children”, “pedophilia”, etc) fucking as a ‘bad’ thing or whatever. A lot of them do it to get their rocks off.

So fucking what?

Who is it hurting?

“Oh, but I have a study here that says pedophiles use fanfiction to…”

Okay, first of all, red herring. Second of all, if we used things actual pedophiles do to decide what does and doesn’t get banned, we’d have a shittier world. I grew up in the 80′s and 90′s. You know what pedophiles used to get at kids? Arcades. Malls. The fucking internet. Did we ban any of those things?

No. Because we exercised basic intelligence, and didn’t use the scummy layer of the pool dictate who could and could not swim in it, and what they could do in the water once they were in it. Sure, a lot of people pee in the pool. You know that ‘chlorine’ smell? It’s actually urine mixed with chlorine. Enjoy that factoid for a second. Most of us still accept it and swim anyway.

Oh, and by the by, my A03 profile.

You’ll notice a distinct lack of fics with people fucking in them, of any age. Not my thing. I’m actually on the Ace/Demi spectrum. So, you know what horse I have in the ‘child fucking race’?

Not a godamn one.

[tyramir]

Well, you’re certainly already spamming notes on this, but let’s address this one specifically.

See, I don’t see a link between them. But other people do. Know that part in my post where I mentioned “Strikethrough” and “Boldthrough”? My historical examples?

This is what happened.

This is exactly what happened. I am not making up a line of causality and throwing in random stuff to make it look like a slippery slope. This actually happened in the fandom community the last time we had a wave of ‘but think of the children’ purity arguments. It literally started off as anti-pedophilia, then anti-rape, then anti-incest, then anti-BDSM, homosexuality, and anything deemed offensive to the purity mob. 

I beg of you. Please read up on it. I lived through it. It’s a Google search away.

[insufficiently-advanced]

no clue how this person got ‘you’re saying that queer identity and pedophilia are linked in actual people’ from what is pretty clearly ‘attacking a marginalized community p much always starts with attacking content/a community that everyone agrees is bad’

you get your foot in the door with a tame stance, like ‘csa is bad,’ and then escalate. like, that’s how it works, and that’s how we’ve seen it work, within fandom and without. it’s a recruitment tool; like, to use a very extreme example*, when the alt-right recruits they don’t lead with the nazi shit. they lead with ‘you’ve gotten a really raw deal in your life and most of it really isn’t your fault. you can talk about it here, we all understand how you feel’ and then from there it’s super easy to convince them that the cause of all their pain just so happens to be everyone the alt-right wants to murder

start with broad appeal, then cut more and more away until all that’s left can be easily and tightly controlled. they never start with targeting queer shit but it sure is where they always end up. when you recognize the pattern, you can nip it in the bud before it gets its intentionally agreeable foot in the door

*i use this example because the pipeline they use is easy to understand, not to draw any comparisons

[lymmea]

That is what the actual slippery slope argument means, and why you cannot censor the content that people are allowed to create and consume.

(I do need to specify here that there’s a difference between censoring content, and legally forbidding content where the making and consumption of that content is inextricably tied to human rights abuses, like actual child porn. You can’t make child porn without hurting children, which is why it’s illegal. But fictional content does NOT directly harm real people, either in its making or its consumption, and if people use it as an excuse or an incitement to hurt real people that’s on them, not whatever excuses or influences they cite. That’s why the Beatles weren’t banned after Charles Manson got so wrapped up in the White Album that he believed it was telling him to murder people. Basically anything can be used as an excuse for the actions a person decides to take, but guess what? A person’s actions are their own responsibility, not the media they consume.)

On the long list of things antis don’t understand, the fact that no media can actually determine a person’s actions is at the very top. They’ve drawn huge false equivalences between certain cultural trends of sexualizing minors (especially girls) and what that says about cultures that have developed those trends, and somehow decided that fanfics with 300 total views writing about a consensual teenage relationship are causing that culture. First of all, antis have that completely backwards - the predominant culture influences the media created, much more so than the other way around??? Second of all, the only media influences that could nudge the Overton window over in any way are hugely mainstream ones - we’re talking James Cameron or Steven Spielberg, not xxSesshouBishie99xx on fanfiction.net unless that is a celebrity’s pen name, but even then that celebrity would have to be promoting harmful things with their own name and cultural influence attached or it wouldn’t matter. (That account probably actually exists, and if it does I apologize to them because that was an off-the-cuff example.)

The only two examples of fanfiction that have ascended to the heights of popularity that could potentially have a significant cultural impact in recent years have been Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey. And you know what? I was myself concerned about the cultural impact of those works - yet as far as I can tell, people’s relationships are no less healthy, and no more abusive, than they were before those books came out. The things even I was worried about, from GENUINELY MAINSTREAM and thus POTENTIALLY CULTURALLY IMPACTFUL pieces of media, didn’t even come true in any measurable way that I’m aware of! And I was kind of an asshole for acting like those books would be the downfall of society! Although, tbh, even when I was at the height of my concern and intellectual snobbery, I still never called for those books to actually be censored; I wished they hadn’t been made to exist, or that they hadn’t gotten popular, but I didn’t suggest that they should stop existing once they did.

I think Penn (of Penn & Teller) illustrated the point that antis consistently miss excellently, when he was talking about religion. I’m just going to quote him directly, taken from Wikiquote:

“The question I get asked by religious people all the time is, without God, what’s to stop me from raping all I want? And my answer is: I do rape all I want. And the amount I want is zero. And I do murder all I want, and the amount I want is zero. The fact that these people think that if they didn’t have this person watching over them that they would go on killing, raping rampages is the most self-damning thing I can imagine. I don’t want to do that.“

It’s not a directly related subject, but in a roundabout way it illustrates exactly what is wrong with the anti mindset. It does not matter if problematic fictional content exists. It absolutely doesn’t! It literally never has. Problematic fictional content is made and has existed for as long as anyone reading this has been alive. And it cannot influence anyone into doing anything they do not want to do. A person who is not inclined to commit pedophilia, or incest, or rape, isn’t going to do those things no matter what kind of content they make or consume. And someone who is inclined to commit any of those acts will do so regardless of what kind of content they make or consume.

Likewise, the media itself isn’t the problem even when it’s popular or prevalent; even if you look beyond a person’s own inherent inclinations and decisions to their biggest influences, usually those biggest influences are either their own individual circumstances or a broader societal influence, which no one piece of media - however problematic it might be - can claim to be the sole cause of. When specific pieces of media are cited - like the Beatles’ White Album - it’s correlation, not causation. It’s the people projecting onto the media, not the other way around. This is the exact same argument for why video games don’t cause real world violence; at the very most, violent video games may attract people who are inclined to violence, but even then they’re only a tiny fraction of the overall audience and it wasn’t the games that made them violent. And banning the games wouldn’t solve any problems, because it does nothing to address the root causes of those problems; they’re just a convenient scapegoat by fearmongers who want to be seen doing something, even if it’s totally ineffective and unhelpful. So they target things they already don’t like and try to make those things be at fault.

Censorship is THE quintessential slippery slope. It’s easy to drum up support for banning fictional depictions of incest, and rape, and pedophilia, because obviously those things are bad in real life and everyone can agree on that…and the voices crying out against it are easy to ignore, and even vilify. Even if the concerns they’re raising are things like how they’re being banned from exploring their own real life victimization, or that maybe stories about two teens exploring their sexuality is less ‘pedophilia’ and more ‘the subject of a lot of YA novels’ or ‘someone who is a teenager themselves exploring their own feelings in fiction’, or that maybe you’re defining ‘incest’ pretty broadly if you call incest on totally biologically unrelated characters who merely mentioned they felt like family once. I mean, those are all fringe cases, right? It’s for the greater good! Some sacrifices must be made!

Except then it starts getting harder. The more you try to draw hard lines, the more you find the grey areas in between. More and more of those fringe cases have to be ruled on, and it’s easier to just blanket ban than it is to determine case by case. People start making cases for banning other harmful things. What about fictionalized abuse? That’s bad, right? Just the physical kind? And then maybe violence, too. What about harmful depictions of queer people? Well, then you have to define what kind of depictions of queer people are harmful. Are you defining it from an inclusive lens, or an aphobic one? What about depictions of trans people? Is writing about transphobia too potentially harmful to be allowed? What about writing about race? Is racism a good thing to address in fiction? Or religion - criticizing religion in fiction is bad, right? Which religions is it wrong to criticize? Boy oh boy, look where we’ve ended up. And all of this isn’t even getting into the fact that you have to figure out who is making the rulings on these things and deciding what’s acceptable and what’s not, and that usually the people in positions of enough power to do that are those of the privileged majority, which means it’s always more vulnerable minority groups - queer people, POC, non-Christian religions, abuse victims, etc - who get shafted first and hardest. Because the people who decide these things aren’t part of those groups, and aren’t concerned about the same things as them, so they throw those concerns under the bus without ever realizing (or caring, or believing even if they’re specifically told) how critical those issues are to other people.

Generally, if you have a unified consensus on how to handle ANY of these topics, you probably don’t have a large or diverse enough representative group that you should be speaking with authority on any of these topics.

One of my biggest problems with antis is how sure they are that they have the solution to the serious problems they claim to be so concerned with, and that solution is censorship. Bitch, I may not know much, but I know two things for sure. One, censorship has never been the SOLUTION to anything, it’s always been a huge problem of its own. And two, I know just enough to accept that I don’t know everything. Anyone as confident in their own rightness as an anti is selling you snake oil. There is no issue or subject on god’s green earth that has no nuance. Yes, even that one. Yes, even THAT one. If the solutions to these problems were so easy, they wouldn’t be problems because we as a species would have solved them already.

Antis are, shockingly, not the only people on earth to have realized that pedophila is bad and maybe we should take steps to stop it. They’re just the only ones stupid enough to think that censorship is an innovative and practical solution to the problem that’s never been tried. (The idea of completely muddying the waters as to what pedophilia even means, such as whether it’s specifically about an adult taking advantage of an underage child or whether it can be expanded to mean “this 22-year-old character is a pedophile for being with this 19-year-old because the 19-year-old has a childish personality”, is in fact a fun new idea antis do get to take full credit for. Who knew that identifying and warning people about actual pedophiles could be made harder by accusing perfectly innocent people and relationships of being pedophilic without evidence or logical basis to the point where no accusation can be trusted anymore without extensive research being required by people who may very well be triggered by the subject? Thanks, antis, we hate it! You’re doing God’s work!!)

[floisdonewiththisbullshit]

I shouldn’t have to because all of these additions are really good along with OP, but because I know people will do it:

Child porn is defined as any visual explicit depiction that is either indistinguishable from or actually depicts an ACTUAL MINOR. AKA A CHILD THAT ACTUALLY EXISTS AND WAS BORN IN THIS WORLD. Not Deku from Boku no Hero Academia or whatever completely fictional show or game you’re playing/watching this week. An actual minor. An actual child who will be harmed from it because it depicts their actual abuse.

Stop watering this term down. Stop using it for your online discourse about fictional ships because you don’t like them. 

Think I’m lying? Here it is, straight from the official website for our justice department. You can find the definition for Identifiable Minor here as well as here. 

This isn’t some boogeyman that people allude to but doesn’t exist so you can use it all you want to spook them. This is serious shit that people alive, right now, browsing this website even, have been through. And are going through! Right now! There are children all the round the world going through this shit. And by watering this shit down you make it a lot harder to help them because every time you cry wolf, you make it harder for someone to take you seriously. Or, worse, you distract law enforcement who are legally obligated to look into your tip from the actual child in need of saving! And every second counts!

So yeah, cut that shit out.

[agustdsbaby]

when u got some opinions on things but ur deciding if its worth starting an argument over

[antis-delete-your-blogs-pls-thx]

you white jews have no brain. shalom bitch

So,,, you’re going to be antisemitic to other Jews now? Ok

[floisdonewiththisbullshit]

It floors me that these are teenagers. Like 16 year olds who should honestly know better by now. I wish I could show their parents this crap. I bet they wouldn't approve of them being so damn antisemitic and racist.

[antis-delete-your-blogs-pls-thx]

Receipts I've downloaded from the new channel in the past day. (For posterity, and convenient linking.) TW for graphic depictions of violence, abuse, suicide baiting, rape threats, ableism, racism. The usual.

[antis-delete-your-blogs-pls-thx]

[antis-delete-your-blogs-pls-thx]

[g-blocking-ants]

Antis parade about caring about people's feelings and consequences of their actions as long as it follows tumblr shipping standards. Good to know their moral superiority is always derived from public opinion regardless of logic behind it rather than relying on their own judgement.

[floisdonewiththisbullshit]

That one about how you don’t get to call yourself a survivor if you write problematic content infuriates me beyond words. Like holy shit. How much of a garbage person do you have to be to say that because a survivor doesn’t agree with your stance on fiction? Holy fuck. 

Sorry some of us cope using fiction or like exploring these themes in a safe way I guess. Jeezes fuck.

[remakingggggggg-deactivated2020]

tumblr loves defending mentally ill people with hyperfixations up until that person turns 18, then they’re just a creepy adult way too obsessed with a cartoon. lmao it’s not like hyperfixations go away once we become a legal adult.

[remakingggggggg-deactivated2020]

[floisdonewiththisbullshit]

Seriously. Sorry, I'm autistic, I have special interests. And I'll continue to have special interests until I die. Y'all can be mad about it but that's the tea and y'all can continue to be ableist and ageist jerks all you like. We can see through you.

[floisdonewiththisbullshit]

[sumnovasugarbee-deactivated2020]

“Don’t interact interact if you’re a racist, even though I’m being racist for culturally appropriating an Asian word while being a white girl”

“don’t sexualize adults.. EVER!!”

[kiwisoap]

Not to get into discourse but something I've noticed a lot about people wanting AO3 censorship is that, when they talk about not wanting the site to host fic that has shit like pedophilia or incest or etc in it, they don't seem to be aware of the fact that most of the time that stuff isn't shown as like. Being Okay.

Like, if you say you want to remove all fic with depictions of child sexual abuse in it, then that would include the fics about a character who was sexually abused as a child living with how that trauma affected them and their path to recovering from it. It would include stories about characters suffering through sexual abuse as children and going on to recover from their trauma and live happy lives as adults.

"But those ones are okay, we just want to get rid of the ones that glorify [x]!" Okay but who gets to decide that? Who gets the authority to look at a fic and read through it and say "this one is allowed to stay but this one gets purged." How graphic of a description of someone's trauma does it have to be before its deemed inappropriate? Any nuanced content ban would be so difficult to enforce that it would be effectively impossible. I could go on and on about this but there have already been countless posts about it and I'm tired.

[fandomsense]

It’s also insulting people call for Ao3 to censor things when Ao3′s entire ass reason for existing was to escape censorship and it has been a stronghold for freedom of expression through fandom content since then. If you don’t like Ao3 for what it already is then use another site or work together to create your own (the code used for Ao3 is literally open source you could copy it and set up your own servers if it means so much to you).

[shipping-isnt-morality]

Something that doesn't make any sense to me is that, canon is allowed to start characters as children and then age them up later, but fandom is apparently not. That's such a weird double standard to me

I genuinely don’t know what has happened that so many people treat published fiction as though it is real things happening to real people

creativity is anarchy. canon has no inherently value. why are people like this. “you’re imagining kids as adults!” no I’m telling a different story about fictional characters the same way the original creator does

[floisdonewiththisbullshit]

Quite honestly, I think this one is less about actual morality and way more thinly veiled shipping wars stuff. Because they only really argue this for ships they don't like, and honestly mostly for ships that are minor/adult in some way in canon. Like they think we're doing it to get around their arbitrary moral rules and it really annoys them because their original arguments don't really count if the character is an adult in this fanwork. So they make up another excuse to actually get around that, despite aging up their own ships all the time and getting away with it.

[floisdonewiththisbullshit]

the argument that tagging for fanfic isn't automatically framing something as bad flabbergasts me bc like it doesn't matter ir abuse survivor karen, age 19, wrote a fanfic where mc doesn't know they're being abused or think its sexy for some reason no one is going to look at the tag "abuse" and think whatever is gonna happen in this fanfic is healthy if someone thinks that abuse is healthy and okay then something went extremely wrong along the way like they were either failed by the adults around them when the were children to be educated by this stuff they might be in an extreme situation of abuse where the non-existence of that fanfic wouldn't do anything to help them anyways (aka they need help to get out, otherwise it's just a band-aid solution at best) or the're someone who is abusive and doesn't care like the word abuse is a heavily negative word and how abuse gets normalized is that its a top down process where the media in question shows abusive behavior and doesn't at all call it abuse and passes off as normal and has the range of millions of people to reach

[shipping-isnt-morality]

Another realization: “disgust as morality” leads directly to “mere exposure leads to moral decay”

As you are exposed to something frequently, you become acclimatized to it. It stops eliciting disgust. This happens with everything from gore to porn.

There has been research after research showing that fictional depictions don’t lower empathy for real victims or decrease the perceived severity of the crime, but it does lower disgust reactions at fictional depictions of it.

To antis, this lack of disgust is the normalization they are fighting against, because disgust is how you know something is wrong. If you no longer feel disgust, your morality is compromised.

That’s what I mean when I say antis resemble Puritan Christian morality. Christianity has so many conflicting instructions regarding morality, and many areas where it’s flat-out vague. And yet they know exactly what is good and natural, and what is horrifying and sinful.

How? It’s disgusting.

Antis are impossible to argue with, because the logical arguments are made post hoc to defend what they already know: this disgusts me because it is wrong. The disgust is the true basis of their argument, and no reasoned argument will touch it.

[elfwreck]

Their core argument is, “How can you know something is wrong if it doesn’t disgust you?”

They cannot imagine understanding how and why something was done, potentially empathizing with the person who did it, and still believing it was wrong and must be stopped.

And that leads them to think the reverse is true: That if they’re not disgusted, it must not be (too) wrong.

Which means that whatever atrocities don’t disgust them, they believe are okay. Prison labor isn’t “wrong” to them, because it doesn’t set off their disgust. Bombing civilians isn’t “wrong” because they don’t have that visceral reaction. Gay couples being denied the right to adopt doesn’t strike them as a moral outrage because, again, they don’t think “eww gross” when they know it’s happening.

They think homeless encampments are wrong because they’re gross. They’re filthy, dangerous places. They don’t realize that city policies create those camps - policies don’t make them react in horror, so they can’t comprehend that the “wrong” is not in the physical camp, but in the policies that created them.

[floisdonewiththisbullshit]

This is such a good take and raises a question I want to ask to Antis:

If you base what is moral on what disgusts you, then what about homophobes? Gay people disgust them, and a lot of them think gay relationships are immoral. Does that mean it’s true? Does their disgust make it true? If not, why? Why is your base logic any different?

A lot of people are disgusted by autistic people like me and what we do. Are we immoral for just existing? What about our “weird” behaviors?

Lots of different food combination disgusts me. Does that make those who enjoy them immoral? Should we ban fishing because the taste and smell of fish disgusts people? The idea of eating bugs or cats or dogs is abhorrent to me, but there are plenty of cultures where it’s not taboo at all and even normal. Is it moral of me to impose my societal norm on other countries just because I can’t stomach the thought? No? Yes?

How far are you willing to go with this logic? Where is your cut off for it? How do you judge if something is moral in the absence of disgust? Or does that automatically make it moral just because it doesn’t disgust you?