#information distortion

[intersex-ionality]

Okay, well, since we’re going to continue calling me a Nazi for some reason, I’m going to just take this opportunity to ask myself the question I asked yesterday: have people actually read these tweets, or are they being told they were bad without knowing why?

Just in case distortion is at play, here are the tweets in question.

Diana Tourjée (@DianaTourjee), Auigust 31 2019:

Sometimes it's funny when you’re the only trans person in a space where everyone is announcing their pronouns. Like it gets to you and a hush falls over the room and you can just like check your phone because only cis ppl need to be working on their pronouns game.

Natalie Wynn (@ContraPoints):

This has happened to me before in hyperwoke spaces. Like it's me and a bunch of cis women and we all have to go in a circle saying she/her because I'm there.

There's this paradox where I can go into a sports bar in North Carolina and be miss/ma'am all night no question, but in self-consciously trans-inclusive spaces I have to explain my pronouns and watch woke people awkwardly correct themselves every time they say "you guys."

I guess it’s good for people who use they/them only and want only gender neutral language. But it comes at the minor expense of semi-passable transes like me and that’s super fucking hard for us.

Y'all who are mad about this thread--I'm not saying we shouldn't have a norm of disclosing pronouns in trans-positive spaces, and I'm happy to give up having my gender assumed to help NB/non-passing trans ppl. But why can't I at least acknowledge this hurts more than helps me?

Not all trans people have the same needs, and some of the rules that trans people have taught woke cis people to follow lead to me be misgendered (“they”) and interrogated about my gender more often. Why can’t I point that out? Can’t a tran vent on Twitter.com ?

So let’s all take a minute here to actually read this thread. A thread in which Natalie points out that cis allies are the ones harming her, that they are doing so in the name of trans inclusiveness, and that Natalie was perfectly happy to let them because it still benefited other trans people and there’s no solution to the issue of “unknown vs neutral” gendering in the english language.

Let’s all really look at that, then ask ourselves why it is that a woman who works almost entirely in making progressivism, trans rights, and leftism more accessible to alienated people who wouldn’t otherwise hear those messages was run off of twitter for saying, “hey, this thing hurts me, and I’m happy to take that hit for y’all, but man, wouldn’t it be great if it didn’t have to?”

And then when we’re done looking at all that stop fucking calling my JOC (jewish of colour(tm) ) ass a fucking nazi for being unimpressed with the way she’s been treated over the course of all this, you twats.

[lines-and-edges]

This deserves a longer post, but hot take: it's not surprising that child soldier narratives are very relatable to many people in this era, because the emergent properties of politics and social media have given rise to an ongoing war of DIY black ops and psyops, commonly enlisting teenagers.

[lines-and-edges]

The hipsterish idea that believing anything which is popular to believe makes you uncool or unwoke is a problem. It’s behind flat-earthers, behind global warming denial, and behind the denial of the documented reality that agent-provocateur bloggers (Russian and otherwise) are tampering with our discourse.

Sometimes things are popular to believe because people are followers, and other times they’re popular to believe because that’s what the facts are.

[lines-and-edges]

not a dossier (yet)

I've started digging into the archive.org history of several of the blogs on the Russian tampering list - started with the one I best remember seeing before (blackness-by-your-side). Hustleinatrap, ghettablasta, and swagintherain (possibly others) were part of a reblog cluster with this blog.

Some observations so far:

The blogging style seems to mostly consist of pulling stuff from other social media/news sites that lots of people are likely to agree with, and adding vehement comments.

It is obvious that there's something "off" about the linguistic style when you pay close attention. How many actual Black Americans do you know that don't understand the use of definite and indefinite articles in English? (Speaking of which, "hustle in a trap" already stood out to me, but I assumed it was a Tumblr dialect mutation before this.)

Some of the work they were doing was very subtle, and burying it in a hail of posts that mostly everybody agreed with was a very good cover strategy.

There's a weird aesthetic similarity between them.

Some of these blogs have what look like SEO posts about random topics in between the political ones. How do you do, fellow American humans?

[lines-and-edges]

I’ve seen a very large amount of “the only way to save the world is to BRING ABOUT REVOLUTION” takes lately, and I just.... they never have any way to go about it suggested (and even often say “voting isn’t enough”), and like... these are coming from what I usually think of as reasonable people, assuming that a possibly-violent otherwise-unspecified Revolution is somehow going to save us. It’s kind of worrying.

I mean, I absolutely share the concern that the structure of our society has become totally untenable. But.

Leaving aside the hazards of doing anything that damages our already flagging infrastructure, having a feasible revolution that leaves you with a place to live afterwards has to follow the same principles as electing a feasible third-party candidate.

Your neighbors have to already know and agree with you, or it won't work.

I would like these people to go out of their front door and look around and talk to these neighbors. See those American flags on porches? Those are people who are often conservative or "politically moderate", whatever that means any more. They are invested in going about their daily lives and raising their children.

They will likely oppose revolution and support martial law (under the extant regime) over revolution unless and until they are absolutely assured that this new regime these people are talking about will bring them stability and not harm their kids.

Which means that in order to organize a revolution, an actual revolution and not just a bloody and brief conflict in which a bunch of leftist activists are slaughtered to send a message to anyone else who might want to try it:

(a) it has to actually be stable for people's kids! Keeping everyday people's lives running has to be a central strategic focus!

(b) talking to your neighbors and bringing them into the loop has to be a central tactical focus for getting started! A majority of people have to agree with or be willing to go along with what you're doing!

One of the primary objectives of alt-right astroturfing on fake leftist blogs is to keep leftists from thinking realistically or doing any of the things necessary to succeed.

[lines-and-edges]

I don't necessarily think you are wrong about the situation regarding teens on the internet at present, but I do think you and almost everyone else taking your position just ... really, really understate the amount of harassment, bullying, and abuse that young people entering fandom spaces are exposed to (and have been exposed to for a long time). Kids may be more antisexual b/c they cannot deal, but they are also being asked to deal with things they simply should not have to.

I mean... yes, you just described a major component of the situation I'm writing to address?

Some of the young people I'm talking about are bullied, some are the bullies, and some are both; and I'm trying to extend a certain amount of empathy to those who have fallen into a cult mentality, and analyze the outside factors that have made them vulnerable to it.

Because when people who are caught in this trap become aware of these factors, it's easier for them to reach out and escape the toxic environment. So that's what I try to facilitate here.

And yes, the socioeconomic factors aren't the only ones; the social media infrastructure is also a huge problem - sites have discovered that creating a flow that makes people angry and upset actually keeps them logged in more and therefore sells more advertising, so abusive infrastructure causes sites to become and remain large and successful. Tumblr, Facebook and Twitter all have this problem, and have their own economic reasons to actively avoid solving it - and usually when people abandon ship they flee to one of the other toxic sites, because everything else is smaller.

Anyway, that post starts with the line "a complex topic I need to write (more) about", rather than "this is a complete thesis on what is wrong here," for a reason.

[lines-and-edges]

I'm pretty sure the word 'kyriarchy' was invented by radfems, or at least some kind of separatist feminists. Would you consider using 'hegemony' instead?

Hmm, I looked it up just now, having no prior experience with the word’s background: it was coined by Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, a Christian feminist theologian.

Google’s quick-definition for kyriarchy indeed suggests that she’s a radical feminist, but when I click through to the source for that quote, it’s a 19-year-old college student’s personal website, which in turn sources this claim to the theologian’s Harvard profile (no longer extant but archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20140123034508/http://www.hds.harvard.edu/people/faculty/elisabeth-schüssler-fiorenza).

The closest thing to that there is “Her teaching and research focus on questions of biblical and theological epistemology, hermeneutics, rhetoric, and the politics of interpretation, as well as on issues of theological education, radical equality, and democracy.”

“Radical equality” is a keyphrase I’m still tracking down, but in the first few pages of results it doesn’t seem to have a link to radical feminism or isolationist feminism.

When I search on her name and “radical feminist” I find a blog saying that her work is “reformist feminist” to be differentiated from “radical feminists”; another blog using her work to refute TERFism; a conservative Catholic site using the phrase to broadly describe and warn against all feminists within the Church who advocate for women’s ministry (I don’t think they mean the same thing by “radical feminist” as we do, to say the least); and someone’s thesis which also characterizes her as a “reformist feminist”: http://uir.unisa.ac.za/bitstream/handle/10500/2374/thesis.pdf

A religious philosophy site which gives an overview of her work also characterizes her as a “reformist” or “reconstructionist” religious feminist: http://www.philosopherkings.co.uk/Reconstructionistfeministtheology.htmlThis site also has a page on “radical feminist theology” and in one of the first sentences of it directly contrasts Schüssler Fiorenza’s work against that school of thought.

There are several sites which refer to her briefly in passing as a “radical feminist theologian”, but they seem to be talking very vaguely as opposed to giving examples of how her beliefs exemplify radical feminism, so it’s hard in context to say whether this is to be parsed as “[radical as adjective] feminist theologian” or “[radical feminist] theologian”, and most of the context I can find on her actual work suggests it’s the former.

So I’m happy to take correction if other information reaches me. But for now it seems likely that we’ve got yet another case of algorithmic information distortion on our hands.

[unspeakablehorror]

One of the things that can be as insidious as lying is a focus on the wrong details. Sometimes something is true but not ultimately as important as other information which is glossed over and outright ignored.