• 5 Posts
  • 56 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Over the past several days I’ve seen you draw out many good faith disagreements about racism or nazism into what seem like intentionally blurry “just asking questions” type derailments whereby you try to shift the topic of the discussion to other, emotional or tangential details and or try to misrepresent the issue at hand to make the racism or nazism seem not that bad. I really don’t think someone would do that if they were coming from a place of genuine confusion or curiosity or dialogue. I might be wrong, but taken together it really gives the impression, intent aside, that you’re trying to spin up plausible arguments for far right stuff and then sow confusion whenever people say “hey, don’t do that, it’s harmful”. I just don’t believe there’s wiggle room here. I don’t want to have a circular conversation about it, but i do want to point out directly what you’re doing, because I think it sucks, and I think that you should stop.



  • I just want to state very emphatically that deradicalizing people is a specific skill set and set of actions that is completely different than “being friendly to nazis”. And tolerating bigotry so that people don’t feel bad about their bigotry is just tolerating bigotry. On that note, on another post you argued heavily with multiple users that white privilege is not real and that you were being oppressed for your whiteness. I thought maybe you were very young, or confused, and tried to have empathy and explain some concepts, but here you are now also arguing that we need to be nice to nazis for the good of society so that they don’t feel oppressed. I suppose you might say that pointing this out and making you feel more oppressed would drive you further away, but a better approach, i think, would be to tell you very very directly that the things you have been saying here, in multiple places, are white supremacist talking points. And no one here is going to condone that. Stop. If you need help stopping, that is your responsibility, not the hypothetical 9 other peoples’.


















  • I think many people in the U.S. do feel extremely shitty about it. People do care, people are upset, and many are protesting and talking and doing what they can to try to mitigate or heal or push back against the actions of their own governments in the ways that they can. I don’t know if you were around for the 2000s, but people protested then, too. It may not feel that way depending on what media you see or what people you know, but many people do strongly criticize their own government and feel awful about the way their tax dollars are used and the rhetoric that comes out of their leaders. I think most americans (offline anyway) do condemn war crimes, do feel icky about our own government’s involvement and motives, and are mourning the suffering on both sides of this conflict. If you’re seeing lots of disregard for human life around you, it might help to seek out some of the groups and voices and people who are feeling unsettled and are doing something. I know there are lots of donations happening and I’ve seen news about events mourning the dead and groups trying to help the people who are there. It might not be on every front page, but it is out there, if you look for it. The people loudly saying that death and suffering is justified for certain groups of people will try to make it seem like everybody feels that way. But in practice, that has never been true. Anyone with a heart hates this shit. So many people are trying to help. Don’t let propagandists convince you otherwise.


  • So there’s a big whole complex of online harassment, offline harassment, misogynistic attitudes, beliefs about dating, “strategies” for “getting” women to date or have sex with you, weird money related ideas about all of this, ideas about strategies to turn a no into a yes, etc etc, that is in the background whenever normal low stakes human interactions are happening. So it’s not the act of saying “hi, you seem cool, let’s get coffee” that is the problem. It’s the context. Tinder is making the context so, so much worse. It’s creating creating conditions that make an otherwise normal ‘hi’ seem more likely to be in bad faith, and sending a signal to malicious people that a new option for being malicious has opened up. So, even if the vast majority of people looking to meet humans this way are totally kind and earnest, it brings a certain vibe to the entire thing that will make many people, especially women who have had scary or unpleasant experiences in that vein, very uncomfortable, and cause them to think twice about that “hi”, because they know that access to their inbox has been sold, when that was never allowed before, to people who may be more likely to have bought into the aforementioned complex of bad ideas. It makes the “hi” not normal anymore.