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Why does my mom and her boyfriend always need to do the boom shaka laka while I’m staying over? Like guys I’m literally next door, you’ve traumatized me with this shi enough times😭
And then when I ask my mom if they could wait till I wasn’t there she gets annoyed, and I get that it’s their love life their choice but I would love for them to have in mind that there is a possibility that a CHILD can hear them do it. Idk maybe I’m overreacting
I literally have no idea why I wrote in Bornholms ask blog that she’s 600, she’s around like 1100 idk wtf I’m doing bro
The good thing about my phone is that it’s half a decade old so if it gets stolen I’ll have the joy of knowing that the thief will have a war with trying to sell it
I’m stuck on the devil island lmao
not to mention everyone has literally consumed something made by someone probelmatic by accident and literally didn't know. yes, even the morality abusers screaming at people
EXACTLY YES. We are living under capitalism, and capitalism as a system is inherently broken. Look no further than Nestle and their various scandals, including that thing they did starting in the 60s or so when their aggressive ad campaigns of infant formula in low income countries led directly to the deaths of thousands of newborn babies. (ironic considering the man who founded the company invented infant formula specifically to save the lives of babies who couldn't be breastfed. Capitalism ruins everything!!!)
Did Nestle know ahead of time that their ad campaigns would kill babies? Maybe not, but they did know that forcing a product onto a demographic that could have easily just breastfed their babies for free and couldn't afford extra expenses like that would have hurt the population at the very least, and they did it anyway, because under capitalism, profits always come before people.
A lot of people have been dedicated to boycotting Nestle at least since the 80s when the controversies first started coming to light, and what happened? Well, Nestle is still one of the leading food companies in the world, likely because not supporting them at all is almost impossible. Even if you avoid packages with Nestle's logo on them, a whole bunch of food companies are still owned by them anyway, so you'd have to do extensive background research on every food company that could possibly be involved before you buy anything from the grocery store, and even if Nestle isn't involved, those other companies have definitely done unethical things too, because that's how our broken system works.
Once again, most people don't know that jkr is a terrible person whose actions are directly contributing to the suicide rate of trans people in the UK going up. Most people don't even know what a trans person is or that it's even an option! Yes, we're raising more awareness overtime, and ideally, in a world that was actually fair, jkr would be stripped of her power the second she started hurting people and you could actually support Harry Potter without supporting her.
Do you see me yelling and screaming at people for buying a Switch 2 even though it's a shit-ass console made by a large corporation who is currently suing individual people for millions of dollars in "lost revenue" and trying to make emulation illegal, which would lead to art being lost to time forever due to worse punishments for archival piracy??? NO, I DON'T, BECAUSE I'M NOT A GODDAMN HYPOCRITE AND CAN UNDERSTAND WHY YOU WOULD WANT THE NEW TOMODATCHI LIFE THAT LETS YOU BE BLACK AND NONBINARY!!!!!
I still remember a story I heard about how a bunch of jewish people were open about playing Hogwarts Legacy and they were harassed to hell and back for supporting antisemitism. I also remember when someone sent Hogwarts Legacy spoilers to my inbox even though I had expressed repeatedly that I wasn't going to play it and didn't care to play it, simply because I defended the notion that you can appreciate a fucking book series without endorsing everything about it and everything the shitty author is doing now.
I am so fucking tired of this. I HATE jkr. I hate everything she stands for and what she's doing is not fucking okay. I can also appreciate a book series made by a white feminist who had a few bad internalized biases BEFORE she went off the rails and became a full-blown terf. These ideas can coexist!!!
People who do this shit; I kindly ask that you stop defending the notion that bad people can't make good art. It does much more harm than good.
Thanks for coming to my fucking ted talk.
I wanna do a face reveal, but also not really, but also kinda want to, but also dunno, but also would like to, but also-
Sweden and Bornholm kinda have the same relationship as Pettson and Findus btw😼
Hi there!! I’m a fan of your content and love hearing your opinions on cancel culture, fandom wank, performative activism and all that kind of stuff so I wanted to ask you for your opinion on this video I came across
I came across a video of another content creator I like (that I will not name since I do not want to risk them getting harassed) who said that they, as an autistic person dropped, their hyper fiction on Harry Potter because of JKR bigotry and said that people have “no excuse” to continue supporting the franchise and I feel kinda of conflicted on that statement
I will preference this by saying that I am not on the spectrum and do not experience hyper fixations, so I cannot confirm whether or not it is difficult to forcefully drop a hyper fixation, that being said I don’t know how to feel expecting people, especially other neurodivergent people, to forcefully drop an interest they have or a fandom they are into
Obviously people should not be financially supporting JKR but posting Harry Potter fanart on Tumblr or writing fanfiction on AO3 is not the same as buying her books from Barns and Noble or giving her money directly
I don’t really know if this falls into the moral purity or performative activism you talk about so I wanted to hear your thoughts directly from you
Thank you for reading!! ^ - ^
Thank you so much for this ask! 😁💙⭐ It does fall into moral purity and performative activism, and here's why; Taste is not a moral issue.
Let me repeat that; TASTE IS NOT A MORAL ISSUE.
We've already established that a lot of people have stopped buying things directly from the franchise itself. Hell, after I found out about jkr's meltdown on twitter, I still bought two Harry Potter themed books from a THRIFT STORE knowing the profits would just go back to the store itself and not jkr. I was even gleeful about that fact, like I was ripping her off or something. I also once saw a sign in a library that basically said, "We don't stock Harry Potter because we don't agree with the author's transphobia, so if you want to read them, we suggest buying them from a used book store." showing a clear acknowledgement that wanting to read the books doesn't make you a bad person by itself, which makes perfect sense coming from a library.
Of course, there's also the related politics of yelling at people who literally didn't know, how effective a boycott can even be when most people don't even know there is one, as well as the obvious problem, "If you want to be consistent, then you have to develop moral OCD in order to make sure you're not supporting any other bad thing." but I'll swing back around to that point later.
Since we've established that we're not giving money to jkr, which would be a valid concern, everything after that IS a question of purity; The idea that you can simply absorb bad ideas uncritically from every book you read is called the magic bullet theory, but I refer to it more broadly as contagion theory, where even reading a post from a full-blown racist will cause you to become more racist simply by association, even if you've put in the work to learn what covert racism looks like and even if you yourself are a racial minority. This goes back to the idea fascist authoritarians try to push all the time to argue for censorship, and it's the reason why using the JAWS effect as an argument is so common even among leftist marxists who really should know better.
So, now that we've established that 1.) None of my money is going to jkr, and 2.) As long as you're aware of what covert bigotry looks like, you're not going to just become a bigot by reading books that have bigotry in them...
I ask you now, whoever might be reading this post;
What's the problem?
What are you genuinely afraid is going to happen because I'm rereading some books I got as a gift 15 years ago and can't refund anymore? Genuinely, what else is there?
Some people would argue at this point that the problem is the fact that fandom attention is still real attention. This would be a valid argument if it wasn't for the fact that fandom is a very VERY niche subculture and doesn't have the power to make things more popular by itself. Even the most popular fics on all of ao3 (so assuming every single user is in the same fandom, which is a dubious assumption at best), assuming every registered user on the site is 1 person (so no alt accounts, which is a ridiculous assumption), that's still far less than 1% of the overall population. (I put this through a percentage calculator just to be sure; 11 million registered users, compared to the 8 billion people on earth...that's 0.1375%, which is basically nothing in the grand scheme of things.)
Harry Potter is popular in real life, and that's the reason why it's so popular in fandom. Without that real popularity, the fandom wouldn't exist at all, but if the fandom didn't exist, the series overall would still be popular. This is a direct causal relationship that only goes in one direction. As you said, lovely anon, posting Harry Potter fanart is not the same as supporting jkr financially, or really even at all, the same way that me posting Luigi fanart doesn't mean I support Nintendo's shitty business practices in real life (seriously, the switch 2 is total garbage, why did anyone buy it???)
Now, I would just like to preface this explanation by saying that every autistic person is different, so it's impossible to make blanket statements about all of them the way this youtuber apparently feels comfortable doing. For my part, while my autism does severely limit me, I can still hold a verbal conversation, I can shower by myself, I can cook and feed myself, etc. so I'm not even close to the "most" autistic person out there. I would probably be a level 1 autistic if I had to guess, also called low support needs.
And yet, that youtuber, saying people have "no excuse" because she was able to drop her special interest on a dime...that still very much reads to me as exceptionally cruel.
Unfortunately though, it is very common, and it's especially biting when it's coming from another autistic person. Picture this; Your parents want to take you out somewhere, and they put you in a cute shirt. You insist that you can't wear that shirt because it's a bad texture. Your parents laugh you off and force you into the shirt and then you have a meltdown at the mall because wearing that bad texture for so long is so overwhelming, it's now crossed over into actual pain. You KNOW how embarassing it is to break down over something that's "really not a big deal," but you can't turn it off. The longer you wear the shirt, the more pain you feel, until it's genuine agony and you can't stop crying and screaming over it. Your parents yell at you for throwing a tantrum and making a scene, even though you literally have no control over it. You learn that your pain doesn't matter.
The problem is that we live in a world where ALL disabled people are forced to accept that they are going to be gaslit. It does not matter how bad your disability is; Someone is always going to tell you it's "really not that bad," that "you're overreacting," that "you're just making excuses." The only way to fix the bad shirt problem is to take it off and do self-soothing techniques to temper the meltdown until it's gone, but autistic children aren't taught self-soothing techniques; They are simply gaslit until they either learn to mask, or just accept being called a failure at every single opportunity, depending on the person and the task they are failing at.
It is a VERY common problem among autistic people that we don't even recognize when we're in pain anymore, because we've been bullied out of any kind of reaction to pain. Oftentimes, I don't even recognize that something was even hurting me until it's gone and I feel a vague sense of relief. Even between autistic people, this pain response is always different, and even if that bad shirt feels fine to an NT or even to another autistic person, that doesn't mean it's not a bad shirt to you.
You can probably see where this is going.
It really just reminds me of those people who were addicted to heroin or alcohol and say that they could quit cold turkey, so there's no excuse, despite the fact that heroin withdrawal is basically torture and puts you at a higher risk of an overdose and alcohol withdrawal can literally kill you, and that reaction changes addict to addict.
Now, I know what some people will probably say; "But MAAARSH, not having Harry Potter won't KILL you!!! You're being dramatiiic!!!" and sure, I personally dropped Harry Potter easily and it wasn't a detriment to me in the slightest.
But you know what IS a detriment? Being told that even just LIKING something as trivial as a CHILDREN'S FICTION BOOK is the same as sitting on a throne made of the skulls of murdered trans people. Would that be acceptable even if autistic people weren't a factor? Do people really consider that reasonable??
Remember; All autistic people are different. If you know 1 person with autism, then you know 1 person with autism. Just because one person may be able to drop their hyperfixation doesn't mean everyone could, and it's unreasonable to expect every autistic person to be able to just cave to people's demands of them simply because one autistic person could. That's ableism plain and simple.
I even have a personal example I can draw from; My biggest and most intense special interest has always consistently been Sonic the Hedgehog, and I lost the ability to gain joy from the games and from doing fanart and fics for YEARS because it was ruined for me by how rabid the fandom is and how cruel cringe culture was in the 2010s when I was a teenager.
My friends, losing that well of joy was HEARTBREAKING. It was one of the factors that made me so suicidal through my later teenage years and well into my twenties. It was genuinely gut-wrenching. I wouldn't wish that hell onto my worst enemy! Intense special interests like that, at least for me, literally make life worth living!!! Fanart and fanfic to me is like Bob Ross painting happy little trees!!!
AND YET, I know for a FACT that this isn't the worst situation it could have been; What if it came out that all the people who initially made the Sonic games—Yuji Naka and others, some of whom still profit from the series—were involved in a very serious controversy and it caused everyone in the fanbase to drop the games, drop the fandom, and bully others for not doing the same? Now there's a layer of moral obligation on top of it! Now, if I didn't give it up just because I love the stories and characters involved in it, I would be told that I'm a bad person, that I should have known all along, that the games were shit anyway so why do I need to keep clinging to them???
Now, not only am I cringe, I'm basically killing trans people myself. Do people not think about what that does to people with moral OCD? Do people not consider the idea that you can't control your own imagination? It puts autistic trans people in a really bad situation where they lose no matter what they do. Some trans people even discovered they were trans BECAUSE OF HARRY POTTER, probably because it emphasizes how much your choices matter and how the whole "mudblood" thing was used as a clear metaphor for discrimination on the basis of how you were born. Like seriously, did everyone just collectively forget that?????
This leads me neatly back to that point I put a pin in earlier; "If you want to be consistent, then you have to develop moral OCD in order to make sure you're not supporting any other bad thing."
Once again, I've never heard of mass harassment campaigns lobbied at people who continue to give attention to the fnaf series despite the fact that Cawthon is AT LEAST as bad as jkr. Nobody's ever told me to kill myself because I like Coraline even though Niel Gaimen was accused of sexual assault. Hell, if profit isn't the only concern, then H.P. Lovecraft fans should be hated too considering that guy's white supremacy was well-documented and bled into his stories quite a bit! If contagion theory still holds, then reading from the perspective of racist characters should surely mean you're absorbing white supremacy uncritically!!!
So why aren't modern Lovecraft fans hated just as much as Harry Potter fans??? I mean, fuck, I've considered finally playing fnaf for myself, and if I decide to do that, I'm going to pirate it, because I'm not comfortable giving money to Cawthon that he could just give directly to Trump afterwards...and yet, this effort of mine is never acknowledged, like it doesn't even matter (almost like it's not about ethics but is actually just an excuse to virtue signal pure morality to others in order to not be harassed...?)
This leads to a rather unsettling conclusion, which is that, in order to make sure you're not supporting any terrible person with your hard-earned cash, you need to do a background check on everything you've ever been interested in BEFORE you give yourself permission to experience it. This logic then leads into another unsettling thought, which is what if you miss something? What if you clear someone and then give money to that person and THEN they use that money for a really bad controversy? What if someone is just really secretive until it finally comes out? There are a lot of ways controversies can arise, and there's no way to avoid supporting ALL of them!!!
Because I have moral OCD, this is a thought that fucking torments me. I'm basically always thinking, well what if Adam Young ends up in a controversy and now I can't listen to Owl City anymore?? What if it turns out Shigeru Miyamoto or Satoru Iwata were involved in a terrible controversy and now I can't play Mario Galaxy or Twilight Princess anymore??? Once you're on this train of thought and you become dedicated to not being a hypocrite, literally everything starts to feel like it's under threat. Even necessities like food are no longer safe because a whole bunch of food companies are actually owned by Nestle, a company who is allegedly responsible for the deaths of literally THOUSANDS of NEWBORN BABIES!!! Even Tony's Chocolate has now been under scrutiny for allegedly using slave labor, the very thing they promised they wouldn't use!!!
So what am I supposed to do now?? Never spend money ever again??? Leave society and live like I'm in the stone ages???? I seriously can't comprehend how nobody else seems to want to be consistent unless they're willing to just give up and stop fucking worrying so much about it. Seriously, what is up with this blatant double standard??? The only difference between jkr and Cawthon is that Cawthon doesn't have a meltdown on twitter every 3 minutes; His bigotry is far more covert, which you'd think would be MORE concerning!!! But maybe that is the point, huh? Because jkr is more public, it's easier to use that as an excuse for harassment, whereas Cawthon at least pretends to be amicable in front of others. Makes you think, doesn't it?
And at the end of the day, it doesn't even matter, because Harry Potter is a cultural phenomenon whether people want it to be or not, and under our hellworld in post-capitalism, no amount of boycotting is going to change anything because you can't ABSTAIN your way to a better world. These things need to change on the federal level. Calling your reps, getting involved in protests, never missing an election, these are all far more ethical courses of action that actually work compared to just not reading a book made by someone who is basically the Elon Musk of Britain and isn't going to be touched by your refusal in the slightest. Seriously, why should people even get to have that much power just because they wrote a book a lot of people liked???
Once again, the reason why online leftist spaces suck so much is that they are full of people who believe it's more important to do nothing wrong than it is to do something right.
It is so fucking frustrating that every time jkr does some terrible shit, there's always a predictable corous of people being like, "Well her books are shit anyway." as if that matters. Her books could have been the absolute best books ever written and it wouldn't make what she's doing to real people okay. All saying that really does is tell me that if the person who made THEIR favorite thing ever ended up being terrible, they would simply deny it, because obviously bad people can't make good art, and if you liked something bad made by a bad person, it becomes a threat to your own self-image, which means you have no choice but to deny and excuse it away. Cognitive dissonance.
But who gives a shit about any of that, right? Everyone knows the best way to be an activist is to simply repeat what the rabid cancel culture witch-hunting hate mob told you to say in order to avoid being unpersoned for it. (/sarcasm)
So to recap; An autistic person is using their autism as a weapon against other autistic people who may have a real painful reaction to losing a special interest, which is already gaslighting autistic people are taught to accept and internalize from every other fucking direction. Having an interest and participating in the fandom doesn't actually do shit and dropping out of it will do less than nothing to actually stop the real problem, and on top of all of that, it's not even consistent, as if dropping this one singular franchise will fix the world and no other terrible people have made anything popular, so they're hypocrites as well as bullies.
If that's not moral purity politics or performative activism...I don't know what is.
