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miss-rum-hee

Half the quote tweets on this tweet are just dragging her ass for saying this. Love to see it.

miss-rum-hee

It is Men's Mental Health Awareness Month.

shithowdy

hey. if someone tries to smear you on the internet for something asinine, what you need to do is block every single person engaging with the post and remind yourself that absolutely under no circumstances are you obligated to draft a PR response defending some out-of-context screenshot or kink fanfiction or thing you said when you were 15 or whatever put your blood in the water. you are not a public figure or a brand. you do not have to respond to something if you know in your heart it is bullshit.

towerologia-sideblog

Keep your cool, minimize the damage, and only make amends to those you owe it to.

mikkeneko

Lots of good advice in the link above, but the one line that really sticks out to me: Don’t try to satisfy a public that is setting out not to be satisfied.

theharlotofferelden

All of the article is good, but I want to highlight this part in particular:

This has, more or less, been the case of pretty much every fandom space I've been in that's attempted to do some sort of Call To Action against a community member.

Even in cases where the reasons have been clearly listed, they either tend to bend the argument being made about the "poor behavior" in question, or undermine the overarching point they're trying to make by creating a grocery list of crimes and trespasses (that are typically less about informing people, and more about overwhelming and confusing anyone reading).

And none of this gets into how so many of these harassment campaigns employ DARVO against their targets to further ostracize them (and anyone associated with them) from participating in the community.

d0uble-0h-se7en

One of the most baffling moments of harassment ive ever gotten was when I said that all those copy pasted inbox messages claiming to be from Gaza hit every single red flag for an internet scam with researched links about how many of them are from the US, and how GFM doesnt have bandwidth in Palestine, etc, and then in a few weeks people in the notes had taken the trouble to look up my pronouns to accurately tell me in excruciating detail how they wanted me to kill myself.

It was so fascinating from a psychological perspective. You do this horrible, unforgivable thing of telling a complete stranger neutrally pointing out the red flags in something theyre concerned about that they deserve to die a horrific and violent death, and before you do that you do the research to accurately he/him him. It showed this fascinating conflict between what they thought of themselves (Good People who make sure to be Trans Allies) and their outward actions (people who wish death upon others for challenging their pre-conceived ideas of the world. Objectively the actions of horrible people)

I really dont know what to say to that and I still dont lmao, but it haunts me to this day

d0uble-0h-se7en

No youre hitting another fundamental side to this behavior: you can quell your own insecurity towards your unconscious knowledge that you are the type of person who sends people death threats for challenging your preconceived notions by cherry-picking ways to show your supposed allyship. Its easy to say all the right words to technically not misgender a trans man while you harass him, thereby establishing yourself to others perception as someone who has a moral principle to uphold trans allyship even against those who are One Of The Bad Ones. When you are inevitably put before your own machine of internet harassment when you step out of line, you can point out how youve, for example, never misgendered someone. But that doesnt change whats fundamentally rotten and disgusting about you as a person: that you are the type of person who sends people death threats for challenging your preconceived notions. What they dont understand is that there is no amount of performative allyship that will change that rotten part of you

holyfoal-moved-deactivated20230

“middle aged women shouldn’t participate in fandom” and you think it’s teenagers that are writing those brilliant, incisive 100k fics of your favourite characters

cinnamonest

I think it’s worth adding although kids are parroting it, the roots of this stuff is less ageism in general and more misogyny. It’s never applied to men. In 2000s fan culture you still saw the same targeted exclusion of middle aged women participating in fandom, but instead of a 14 year old bakugo pfp with a half-mile DNI list it was coming from men of all ages.

Fan participation in men of all ages is praised and normalized, and at worst ignored, but never really shamed (with some exceptions like adult men into mlp), but for women being allowed in fan culture at all cuts off around mid 30s or so to these people. It’s ultimately that men get viscerally upset over women enjoying and enriching their lives for themselves rather than having kids/marrying, because in their minds that is the sole purpose of a woman of that age and her doing anything else with her life is borderline criminal in their heads. That’s why you only see this exclusion applied to women, why the same tweens saying this will turn around and foam at the mouth for 30+ y/o male gaming YouTubers and the like. These internalized and normalized sentiments are being parroted

Also “men do fanart/etc not fanfiction” notice fanfiction is the only form of fan contribution constantly assigned a sense of shame/“cringe” yet also the only form of fanwork dominated by women.

rainbowloliofjustice

Not wrong for the most part, but it isn’t as simple as men in fandoms being praised and at worst ignored.

Depending on the fandom, men who participated were nerdy, obsessive basement-dwelling weirdos at best and pedophiles/sexual predators at worst. Not to mention, women in fandom are by in large attacked by teens and other women whereas men in fandoms just tend to stay in their own lane and leave each other alone minus a mutual shit-throwing contest.

When it comes to how people foam at the mouth for guys like Markiplier or dudes who do Minecraft and other similar games, they aren’t looked at as fandom participants. They’re looked at as accessible, minor celebrities. There is an intense parasocial relationship there between them and their young(er) audience. Not to mention, it’s helped by the fact that the gaming YouTubers are in some way attractive or if they’re faceless, their fans fantasize about how attractive they are combined with the fact that they’re making content for the audience.

Whereas with fanart, fanfiction, etc. the parasocial relationship is lacking. They’ve been gaslit into thinking that fiction, fandoms, etc. are some form of political activism that you need to do “right” because of people who prey on teenage rebellion and desire for justice but not lacking the wisdom to know where evil originates from. It’s why they call people any kind of x-phobic over ships, fiction, etc.

And because the parasocial relationship of idol or celebrity status is missing, they target them thinking that they’re doing some moral good in the world. Not to mention, older people in fandom tend to make the content they, themselves, want to see and not what these tweens and teenagers want to see. Because they aren’t making content for tweens and teenagers, they’re deserving of criticism because they aren’t as accessible as the 30-year-old gaming YouTuber who makes content for them. They’re old enough to know what they want, but not wise enough to navigate the fact that not everything revolves around them and their personal tastes.

Factor in the fact that it’s usually other women participating in these attacks too and well it isn’t as simple as thinking women should only be having children. In my experience and casual observation, most men in fandom tend to just stay in their own lane. Of course, you have those who attack women for just participating because they’re misogynistic, but their attacks are distinctly different from it being pedophilic, x-phobic, fetishizing, etc. They just go straight for and stick to the misogyny. There are very few if any moral or social justifications behind it like “protecting MLM” or “protecting children”, etc.

In short, the 30-year-old gaming youtubers get a “pass” because they’re not looked at as fandom participants. They’re looked at as if they’re minor celebrities who make content for an audience whereas women in fandom who make for themselves are not as accessible and then you just combine that with being gaslit into thinking fandom participation is a form of activism.

takashi0

cheshireinthemiddle

If I said "There are Chinese spies acting as politicians", I would be called a conspiracy theorist.

brazenautomaton

It would actually depend entirely on what definition you used

If you said there were Chinese spies in the Senate that would be wacky

If you said there were Chinese spies working for Senators, the answer is "yeah, probably a few"

If you said "the mayor of a town of 50k people is a Chinese spy" the response would be "I guess, i'm not sure it would even be that beneficial to China to do that but if so they've got a lot of potential takers."

throwitonthepilethesecond

Well, the city she was mayor of was Arcadia, part of the suburbs of Los Angeles. If your job is to be a listening post, I'd say it's well-situated to know a lot of stuff.

brazenautomaton

Not a lot of stuff Chinese intelligence would be interested in knowing, though. Like, not much she knows would be secret.

throwitonthepilethesecond

ah, found the reason why

Eileen Wang, now the former mayor of the City of Arcadia, agreed to plead guilty to one felony charge that she acted as an illegal foreign a

Eftimiades said China is carrying out a "whole of society approach." Unlike Western intelligence agencies, which focus espionage efforts on other intelligence organizations or militaries, China also focuses on spying at a societal level, he explained. "That means that they're recruiting mayors and congressmen with the hope that they'll rise into greater positions."

Once in place, he said the idea is that these leaders could carry out a range of operations on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party, including spying on members of the Chinese diaspora who are perceived as dissidents or monitoring the activities of visiting Taiwanese leadership.

For example, federal prosecutors say Yaoning "Mike" Sun, who worked with Wang on the website and as her campaign advisor, closely surveilled the then-president of Taiwan when she visited the area in 2023.

"insert your preferred candidates at the local level and wait for leadership positions to open up" is one way to play the soft power game, i guess

brazenautomaton

ah, a long-term strategy

makes sense

cookingwithroxy

It also makes sense considering their policy of social credit. When you want to push influence on people, it is far more effective to make it from those around them rather than from the top-down. And if one internalizes that approach from every level, it makes more sense to go for minor roles one can use for soft influence rather than major roles that get more attention.

After all, you don't need to get an agent into Congress if you can get one to spend time with Eric Swalwell. Hell, it's even better that way because pointing out that their relationship is hinky can be treated as an example of racism.

igotsomethingtohide

*movie with women main characters comes out*

Men: this movies cinematography was way off. The characters were impossible to connect with and the action scenes were just not realistic. I will say a bunch of big words to hide my sexism behind and so you think I'm right and so so smart.

emeraldmercury

Women: This isn’t good female representation, this is pandering. The heroine is a typical high school mean girl and thinks being a girlboss is peak feminism. The writers clearly wanted to write a strong woman before writing a good character or a story. If this is how all women are supposed to be, I’m offended.

People like OP: Shut up pick me! Dick worshipper! What, are you trying to be not like other girls?? He’s not going to text you back! There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t support other women!

rosiewitchescottage

Yes. I want to see characters that represent real women, in all of our rich variety, showing both our virtues and our failings.

In other words, characters showing women as real human beings.

cookingwithroxy

I'm stuck remembering how the original Charlie's Angels did so well... and the third film in the 'series' did so badly. And it absolutely wasn't for the concept that people hated the concept of heroic women.

Ghostbusters 2016 failed to capture it's audience, and while people try and blame sexism, it's a thing where it was overtly done as a Line-o-rama film as opposed to the original's well written script.

Sexism is just a very handy excuse to wave away the results of poorly made films. And it's not like it's a trait unique to female-lead series! There's a SHITTON of crappy films with male leads in them! Just people don't try and deflect from the criticism!

arcenciel-par-une-larme

Communist communications ever since Mao took over China (and the CCP before that) almost always follow this kind of formulation, called 提法 (tífǎ), which literally translates as "watchwords" or "slogans." [...] The purpose of the sloganeering is actually to do a kind of political engineering through carefully selected and weaponized words that are easily memorable and that hijack the critical thinking faculties of the people who both hear and repeat them so they'll advance the Party line. [...] In his amazing analysis of the CCP in the early 1950s, just after Mao took power (in October 1949), psychologist Robert Jay Lifton referred to what amounts to tifa as "thought-terminating clichés." That is, they're slogans (or clichés) that have the power to turn off your ability to think clearly about what's being said and implied and to just go along with the political messaging rather than to question it. [...] The statement "nobody is illegal on stolen land" is very sophisticated as tifa because it contains three mystifications in just six words: 1) "Nobody is illegal" confuses the distinction between being a human being of basic human dignity and being a citizen of a country or legal visitor there; 2) "Stolen land" confuses the legitimacy of the country in question; 3) The idea of being able to be legal or illegal if the country itself is not legal because it is "stolen land." This is distinct from the idea of the land itself being stolen because it conceptually bridges the concept of legality and legitimacy of the country. [...] To fully engage a six-word tifa through explanation, discussion, and argument to try to break someone free of it might take 50-100 thousand words worth of effort by the time all is said and done. (Another example: "trans women are women"; look how much effort that one has taken!) [...] These rhetorical traps not only put critics in a bad, weak, and likely losing position from the start, but they also invite adopting a reactionary or chauvinistic stance as the only possible reply (e.g., "we aren't colonizers; we're conquerors" or "illegals are illegitimate"). This feeds the strategic principle of "your target's reaction is your real action" upon which these manipulative movements gain the most ground. [...] Notice that through the application of tifa as a form of political warfare (public opinion warfare, specifically), any idiot (including the average Billie Eilish fan) can ensnare any good-faith actor in this very sophisticated political warfare device even without understanding in the slightest how it works, dragging them into either confusion or arguments meant to be fought on losing ground for the good-faith critic. You don't need a sophisticated political warfare operator to make this happen. Furthermore, notice that any idiot who falls for the tifa here will actually repeat it, making the slogan campaign viral so that it is mostly being fought out not by experts but by masses of laypeople who know there's a fight but who aren't properly equipped to deal with it. This is why it is an example of "public opinion warfare" as one of the CCP's "three warfares" doctrine styles. [...] Since the late 1960s, almost all "New Leftist" activism in the West runs on a Maoist-Marxist engine, including the heavy use of tifa sloganeering as a form of rhetorical and political warfare. Most of what we engage in today with their B.S. rhetoric is tifa. So these "thought-terminating clichés" (tifa) are very powerful and sophisticated political warfare tools that we all encounter every day. The only way to beat them is to identify them for the manipulations they are and explain them as best we can so that people are more likely to identify them and less likely to fall for them, and also to help people out of the ones they're already caught in and under the spell of.

-- James Lindsey, on the recent spectacle of Billie Eilish lecturing 300 million Americans on "Le Stolen Land" at the Grammy Awards

vomitdodger

👆the very short list of examples.

riflebrass

I was raised by my grandparents. Every year I was told I absolutely have to get the flu shot. Teachers, doctors, pretty much every adult in authority was telling me I need to do it for my grandparents because it'll make sure that not only will I not get sick but I won't get them sick either. If the elderly get the flu it can really fuck em up.

So every year I got the shot and every year I got sick anyway. The answer was "bummer you must have gotten the wrong strain". After all, there's a bunch of new strains every year and it's not possible to make enough vaccines for everyone to be immune to all of them. They need to make an educated guess what areas will get hit hardest by what strains and plan accordingly.

Then covid hit and we got the exact same spiel. Take the shots and you'll be completely immune. You won't pass it on to others! It wasn't just some politician who doesn't know better or some random millennial that follows IFL Science. Actual doctors were telling us the covid shots would work that way. People tried to implement vaccine passports to force people to get it. Biden mandated that OSHA force everyone to get the shots or else. People were demanding that people who don't get the shots be put in camps or shot. There were a million other proposed ideas out there all on the basis that the experts promised us that it would grant immunity and stop the spread of the disease.

It didn't work like that. For weeks they kept moving the goal posts. You just got infected a few days before your second dose took full effect. It still works. It's just a few rare break through cases. It still works. It's actually a new strain of covid. It still works on the original virus.

Finally they changed the narrative. Vaccines don't work like that. They never worked like that. Are you stupid? What even gave you the idea they work like that? Everybody knows it just reduces your symptoms so you don't get as sick.

A year or two later they changed the narrative on the flu shot. It doesn't really make you immune. You just won't get as sick.

There's no way in hell it took some 70 years of vaccines being in common use for doctors to realize that vaccines don't work the way they promised. Even if it was possible it's very telling the way they acted like this was common knowledge. In 2021 I didn't see one doctor say that everyone is grossly misunderstanding how vaccines work.

Science doesn't lie but scientists and doctors will lie for a paycheck.

mereologic

it's sorta wild how much people will cheer on e.g. a woman damaging her boyfriend's property because he cheated on her when if a man did that in response to his girlfriend cheating we'd all recognize it as completely unhinged.

but i think it's wrong to frame this as a "men's rights issue" mostly because i don't think the ideal world is one where we also let the vengeful boyfriend exact vigilante justice for unfaithfulness!

if anything it seems more misogynistic than misandrist to excuse a woman for something we'd hold a man accountable for, it's like they're treating the vengeful girlfriend as less of an autonomous adult; they don't expect her to behave because to them she's only kind of a person. they think her boyfriend should have known better than to cheat because to them he's a full-fledged member of society while she's a child. meanwhile in their eyes the girl who cheats on her boyfriend is just a kid who doesn't know any better; they feel the boyfriend should reign himself in and be the mature person in the situation when dealing with someone beneath him.

barryogg

This post is morbidly funny because you are capable of understanding that people's opinions and behavior are in the wrong here, but you can't bring yourself to the conclusion "men are human, they are moral subjects whose lives and wellbeing are worthy of consideration" so you have to add epicycles about how akschually it's harmful for the woman.

eric-coldfire

They're so close to getting it.

star-trek-fandom-confessions

1797

You know those quirky ds9 posts that are like “this show is about a TERRORIST and GOO and a WORM, and they all do GAY CRIMES in SPACE, and Sisko is TEAM DAD,” etc? This is going to make me sound like a joyless asshole, but I hate them. They’re usually just lists of reductive stereotypes, headcanons/fan ships presented as canon, things that would be zany in a sitcom but are perfectly normal for sci-fi, etc, and they give me flashbacks to the most annoying fandoms on 2014 Tumblr. I’ve seen, like, maybe two posts of this genre that were actually clever, and even that is pushing it. Stop making these, guys. We have enough

moleshow

Okay, so caveating this by saying I'm not @conspirator0.bsky.social and nowhere near as expert. The operation has two main arms: the Abdelfa

fascinating thread. at this point my main question is who is running these

peregrynne

I can give a little bit of insight. Not one of the bot farms, but many of them utilize actual real people working in scam centers. For background I'm Palestinian, my family came to Canada in the '80s. I talked to one of these bot accounts, and I actually managed to get one of them to show behind the scenes. He admitted to being a man from Egypt, who said he was forced into running online scams due to being in severe amounts of debt. He said he felt ashamed that he had to exploit the suffering of his neighbors to get out of debt, but I still think that's disgusting of him.

Here's a picture of his Tumblr dashboard, he admitted to me he ran six accounts, and he used AI to generate/enhance pictures as well as stealing some pictures from actual charities. You can zoom in on the screen to see closer. He wouldn't admit more about who was running the whole operation, but with knowledge of similar online scams it's usually a center with multiple employees all running similar scams.

And once again, if you really do want to help Palestinians, please donate to actual verified charities like PCRF instead of these dubious "gazafunds" gofundmes. These scammers can speak Arabic, and they can bypass the incredibly dubious "vetting process" easily.

isaacsapphire

I traced several “Palestinian” scammers to US Caucasians too; the actual recipient of the money is often listed in Chuffed or whatever fundraising website they’re using, and you can search for the actual recipient and find eg. Previous fundraisers they’ve (unsuccessfully) run for themselves or records of their house purchase.

generallemarc

Let's not rule out the Golden Triangle either-that place is functionally a microstate run by gangs whose main income is scams. Specifically, scams run by hundreds of kidnapped tourists from China, Thailand and other East Asian and Southeast Asian nations who're forced to run scam accounts in horrid conditions for absurd lengths of time to squeeze out as much money as possible.

chilewithcarnage

we used to make fun of men for making boobs and butt art. we used to critique misogyny in media.

echoictwistofshadow-deactivated

Thank fuck yours isn't the popular opinion.

Boobs are great. Ass is great.

Women should be celebrated, not covered up and shamed for our features.

Artists should be free to do as they please with their art.

takashi0

I love this, because it really just perfectly demonstrates how leftists just don't understand anything at all.

If anything Epstein is the ultimate demonstration that Gamergate was right because GG's assertion that news outlets will gladly coverup the bad behavior of those they're in bed with (literally in Zoe Quinn's case) extends all the way up to the highest reaches of the government in ways we could scarcely even fathom.

And instead of connecting those dots and admitting that just maybe the """Chuds""" were onto something, the Leftists would rather do what they always do and steal from Far Right conspiracies by blaming the Jews for it while somehow still insisting they're somehow better or different.

"Wokeness has never been more vindicated" Imagine being dumped in diarrhea and saying you just got out of a cleansing bath, this a lethal overdosage of copium.

christileannek

beardedmrbean

More than 60 per cent of offensive tweets posted by women used derogatory animal references

notreallyimportant

Alright… let’s talk about how a lot of people are getting but hurt people of color being casted as characters who are normally white.

Starting with Ariel and Halle Bailey being casted as her.

I don’t see the problem. The only trait I though would be a problem is her bright ass red hair. But everyone’s like “ She’s a red head, so she can’t be black” like black gingers don’t exist. Her character has very little to do with whatever race she is. Her whole story is she’s obsessed with the human world, falls for a guy that she just met, makes a shady deal, but gets her guy in the end. And we’re met with “ But if we did a live action Princess and the Frog, we can cast Dove Cameron.” I mean you could, but the entire story will change because the 2008 Princess and the Frog is set in a black neighborhood in New Orleans, Tiana being so focused on getting her restaurant that her father dreamed of and being denied for being a ( and this is a condensed quote) “ woman of her background”. If she was white, she wouldn’t have to struggle because she could have easily gotten a loan( or at the very least has an easier time). You’d have to change the entire story.

Next we have the story of Aladdin( and this is just an example)

We could set it in Malaysia or Korea, and the same story could be told( with some changes to fit the area): Street rat falls for the Princess, gets a magical wish granting companion, has to deal with a royal advisor that’s hella creepy, gets the girl in. Same story.

And it’s been done before but not by Disney. If you grew up with cable you’d know Happily Ever After: A Fairy Tale For Every Child

They had Robinita Hood( a gender bent Latin twist to Robin Hood), a Jamaican Goldie Locks, a Diné( I think. I could be wrong. The story is set in the Southwest US and there’s a lot of tribes in that area that turquoise is apart of their culture) Snow White, a rappin’ Mother Goose Special, so on and so forth. They literally proved that the characters don’t have to be white to fit the story. The story they didn’t really tell is that of Mulan because she’s a folk hero in China.

So if HBO did this in the late 90s/early 2000s, why are y’all mad Disney and other studios are doing this now. And don’t say they’re changing the story because we had Brandy as Cinderella and a Cinderfella( a gender bent Cinderella) and it was the same story.

cheshireinthemiddle

The issue is that it was exactly the same people defending black Ariel, who spent years insisting that (white) people not play outside of their race.

Theyre holding you to your own standards. You were outraged when Ghost in the Shell came out. Infuriated when Goku was played by a white guy. You boycotted Death Note and The Last Airbender, focusing purely on the white actors (despite black and indian actors also doing some race swapping.

No one cared about Brandy Norwood or Eddy Murphy playing white characters. Happily Ever After (while only really race-swapping one-siddedly also wasnt a problem. Race swapping was fine. Until you made it political.

disgruntled-foreign-patriarch

Make your own fucking myths

cheshireinthemiddle

That's the thing. There are so many already. Non-white superheroes, non-European folklore. But instead of investing in racially/culturally diverse stories/characters, they prefer to just change the races of existing European/white characters.

I'm still waiting on a Static Shock movie. An Anansi movie. A Journey to the West story. We have to stop pretending like making Superman black is the only way to put people who arent white on screen.

#the fact that this has so specifically been happening to red-haired characters bothers me a lot

defilerwyrm

Let people grow.

When I was younger I was very right-wing. I mean…very right-wing. I won’t go into detail, because I’m very deeply ashamed of it, but whatever you’re imagining, it’s probably at least that bad. I’ve taken out a lot of pain on others; I’ve acted in ignorance and waved hate like a flag; I’ve said and did things that hurt a lot of people.

There are artefacts of my past selves online – some of which I’ve locked down and keep around to remind me of my past sins, some of which I’ve scrubbed out, some of which are out of my grasp. If I were ever to become famous, people could find shit on me that would turn your stomach.

But that’s not me anymore. I’ve learned so much in the last ten years. I’ve become more open to seeing things through others’ eyes, and reforged my anger to turn on those who harm others rather than on those who simply want to exist. I’ve learned patience and compassion. I’ve learned how to recognise my privileges and listen to others’ perspectives. I’ve learned to stand up for others, how to hear, how to help, how to correct myself. And I learned some startling shit about myself along the way – with all due irony, some of the things I used to lash out at others for are intrinsic parts of myself.

You wouldn’t know what I am now from what I was then. You wouldn’t know what I was then from what I am now.

It distresses me deeply to think of someone dredging up my dark, awful past and treating me as though that furiously hateful person is still me. It distresses me to see others dredging up the past for anyone who has made efforts to become a better person, out of some sick obsession with proving they’re “problematic.”

Purity culture tells you that once someone says or does something, they can never go back on it. That’s a goddamn lie. While it’s true that some remain unrepentant and never change their ways and continue to harm others, it’s important to allow everyone the chance to learn from their mistakes. Saying something ignorant isn’t murder. Please stop treating it that way. Let people grow.

got-zayn

Still call it out and question it ….

defilerwyrm

Bruh. No. Listen. Call out what people do now, absolutely. If they haven’t changed, call them out on their record. This post is explicitly not about people who HAVEN’T changed. What this post IS saying is, if someone is making an effort to be a good person, don’t go digging around in their past for evidence that they were once for what they’re now against, or once against what they’re now for, as “proof” of what they “really think,” because people’s opinions and beliefs can change.

The obsession with finding shit in someone’s past and then claiming that a questionable or even sordid past negates all possibility of a good present needs to become extinct. Gold-star activism and purity culture are bullshit and we need to collectively reject the fuck out of them.

If someone has changed for the better, don’t harass them about what they were like before they fuckin’ changed. That’s shitty and it needs to stop.

sepdet

We can’t change the world if we decide people can’t change.

sarasa-cat

Gold-star activism and purity culture are bullshit and we need to collectively reject the fuck out of them.

We really need to start asking where this purity bullshit came from. I’m not Christian and was not raised Christian but there has been a lot evidence that much of gold star activism and purity culture originated in of evangelical youth movements and then infiltrated progressive left-wing and center-left politics when those youth left their churches but failed to leave behind the black-n-white puritanical “you’re going to hell if you stray one inch from the righteous path” style of thinking they were taught.

I distinctly remember some conversations I had in the late 00s and very early 2010s with long time social justice activists who were baffled and disturbed by the new crop of youth activists who were practicing something that was decidedly NOT social justice despite stealing that phrase from us.

In the decade and a half that has passed since then, all of this gold-star activism and purity culture has done exactly what I predicted back then: empowered the far-right while sowing division everywhere.

Folks. This shit needs to stop.

bisexualbaker

People who have changed for the better are incredibly precious to me. They’ve had a harder fight than I have in many ways, and I admire them greatly for the work they’ve done and how far they’ve come. We may not always see eye-to-eye, but I am very grateful they are here, because they remind me of two things:

First, the evidence that people are not doomed to be one way forever, but can become better than they were. That means that there is an actual, tangible goal to standing up for our rights: That, even if we can’t change everyone’s mind, we might someday be able to change enough minds that we can be safe.

And second, that if I ever mess up, that it won’t be the end; there will still be a path back for me to being the kind of person I want to be.

ben-the-hyena

These people are ready to do all the mental gymnastics to excuse their favorite fictional villain but will burn down a real person’s house poison their water and destroy their crops for something they said years ago when they had not matured yet

robin-hood-for-freedom

So like I saw the post you reblogged from doe-eyed disaster on gamergate and I'd like to add something, but I also don't want to kick the hornet's nest on that post... I think like... Yes, it's true that the 'critics' of the time were absolutely incorrect and their assessments were vapid. These people were grifters citing bad and misinformed ideas about video games wrapped up in the idea of criticism, not any criticism you should actually give the time of day. The reaction to people like Anita Sarkeesian was more about her dragging the medium into a culture war, which would be fine if were warranted, were it not almost entirely based on a misrepresentation of games in that medium. But let's not forget - that's also, unequivocally, NOT what Gamergate was about. The criticism of Sarkeesian came about before Gamergate happened, and this was not about her or any cultural critic. People involved in Gamergate tried very hard to make it not about her Gamergate happened because there was a controversy over potentially hidden relationship between a games journalist and an indie dev they were covering. This would have been a random event which faded into the background, but the people running the forums tried to scrub all mention of it. This created a giant backlash as gamers wanted to know what was going on. The Game Journalists responded to these demands by mischaracterizing the initial controversy - unequivocally about this undisclosed personal relationship (As in a friendship) at first, now about censorship of discussion of gaming issues - as a meritless defamation by reactionary gamers and organized all the seemingly-unrelated gaming sites to all publish articles at once about how gamers are over and to demean 'gamer culture' as inherently misogynist. This revealed a deeper rot among game journalists - these people were all colluding behind the scenes to push particular narratives. This was proven definitively as the GameJournalPros group chat was leaked. Thus - the point was a demand for basic journalistic ethics. Just enough to disclose personal links, when money was transferred, and to ideally not publish smear articles or censor basic discussion of gaming issues. That's all Gamergate wanted! That was their demand, and the journalists went to war over that. What Gamergate evolved into there, was a letter-writing campaign to cut ads from gaming sites which endorsed this unethical behaviour. And it was generally very focused on that. There was even a big effort made from those in Gamergate to distance themselves from the people who would politicize this, referring to people like Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian as 'Literally Who?" as sort of an effort to make the topic as little about these people as possible. There was also a big effort made in the #NotYourShield sub-movement, to show that Gamergate was comprised of a lot of the people these game journalists were asserting it was a hate movement against, and that this idea it was to shove women out of gaming was a complete mischaracterization Towards the end, a lot of sites had begun to either adopt basic journalistic ethics, become increasingly irrelevant, or had risen to more prominence because they had implemented a journalistic code - So a lot of the calmer minds went off, satisfied. But, from there things got kinda muddy. Cultural critics on every side had inserted themselves into the discussion, despite good efforts to not make it about that. Towards the end, the mischaracterization of gamergaters by the gaming media had begun to take hold as the calmer minds left. Game journalists had constantly called this a reactionary campaign by misogynists - And once roots for ethical journalism was established, what remained was the people who jumped in to get a piece of that culture war. This is unfortunate, but they tried all they could to make that not happen. That's what Gamergate was. It was never about harassment, nor hating women, nor reactionary politics. It was really, mostly about writing letters about pulling ads.

I dont even have anything to add to this.

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