theunitofcaring:

ozymandias271:

theunitofcaring:

I don’t like the ‘this man is expressing anguish over being a member of the oppressor class, maybe that’s because he’s actually trans’ thing because I witnessed the whole monetizeyourcat “if you’re a man, I hate you and you have no worth and I hope you die. If that makes you sad, it’s because you’re actually not a man, you’re trans! That makes you a worthwhile person who shouldn’t die!” thing and even before everyone found out monetizeyourcat was an abuser it was pretty obvious to me that that’s a deeply manipulative line of thinking.

I think that line of thinking is a natural byproduct of believing all suffering by men (especially if it’s caused by guilt/self-loathing) is deserved and then encountering a man who is clearly suffering in a way it’s hard to believe he deserves. Something has to bend, so people jump to “clearly he’s not a man”. 

That wasn’t myc’s position. Her position was that anyone could choose to be trans if they wanted to be, and thus choosing to be cis and/or male was choosing to exercise coercive power over other people. Her attitude towards men who were unhappy being men was similar to your attitude towards rich people who are unhappy being rich: “you know, you can just stop! and it will make other people much happier!”

I feel like a key ingredient was the insisting that men were absolutely shit, and then using the fact that people felt badly about being told they’re shit to convince them they should transition?

Like, if I wrote at length about how rich people were evil and inhuman and worthless and then said “you’re sad about being repeatedly told that you’re worthless? stop being rich!” that feels very different from just saying rich people’d be happier if they gave their money away. 

I don’t really take issue with “you, yes you, would be happier if you transitioned” - what made it scary was the “you are evil and disgusting. the fact that hearing me say that makes you sad is itself evidence you should transition”.

IIRC the thing @theunitofcaring is describing here was pretty close to the surface in some of myc’s posts – from time to time she would literally say things like “if you want me to listen to you instead of insulting you, try becoming female” (and when that was juxtaposed with 10 billion posts per day about how “men are terrible” and “anyone can become female, it’s easy and great,” the message was pretty clear)

(via theunitofcaring)

I saw a post about how myc is back under a different name on twitter, and because I’m an idiot I typed in the twitter URL, and indeed, it’s full of myc tweets by myc, and I read many of them, and now my bad mood is worse.  I don’t know what I expected

I feel like I shouldn’t reblog the post because I get the sense I have followers who would do exactly the same thing with the same result

But I’m sort of relaying the message indirectly I guess

diarrheaworldstarhiphop:

governmentname:

diarrheaworldstarhiphop:

nostalgebraist:

TBH I really dislike how “abuser” is pretty much the only term in social justice culture that will let you criticize well-known social justice-aligned people and get taken seriously — because it means you can only criticize scary people after they have done bad things and word gets out.

It removes any possibility of an early warning system, a serious consideration of red flags and warning signs, an attempt to prevent the worst before it happens; you have to just wait until the scary, manipulative people do their thing and then afterwards say “welp, I guess they were an abuser!  Shucks!”  This is really obviously morally bad.

Callout culture should be met with intense scrutiny for this very reasonn

well the fact that a conversation like this is even taking place says a lot. specifcally, that people don’t have any standard of morality or ethics that precluded them in the first place from accepting this mob, fascist type of cultural movement. its insidious and destructive and has never shown itself to be anything other than that. EVER.

It’s not universally insidious, but it’s a culture that assumes the role of a unequivocal moral compass. So proponents of it often never think to consider it’s own leaders and other flagbearers to be predisposed to being manipulative or abusive. To an abuser, it appears like a haven to easily co-opt others to their own ends without drawing attention to one’s self. Any criticism can easily be framed as mechanisms of oppression and from that they can escape scrutiny and become even more insulated from being exposed.

Any ideology that proclaims itself as an embodiment of equality can easily be manipulated into something totalitarian/destructive and to that, we should be extremely wary of any power given to anything of the sort that doesn’t allow for itself to be heavily scrutinized. For example, every communist regime ever.

Yeah, I agree about abusive people viewing SJ culture as a useful feeding ground.

A lot of of what made me write that post is that this thing keeps happening where some semi-popular “internet SJ” figure strikes me as really creepy and fucked-up, and then later it turns out that they demonstrably did something everyone agrees is awful, and I’m like “yeah, that sounds about right.”  (monetizeyourcat and Requires Hate are the two most memorable cases.)  In this kind of context it’s easy to feel like a genius by simply choosing not to turn your creep sensor off; these people aren’t even subtle.

But before these people had committed their misdeeds and then had their misdeeds reported to the world at large (which doesn’t always happen!), it was very difficult to say anything negative about them without the conversation devolving into arcana about who gets to speak, and who gets to decide who gets to speak, and who gets to decide that, etc. ad nauseam.  And then in the wake of the change in mass opinion, everyone says “well this was an isolated, personal incident and let’s not use it to score political points,” and I’m like, okay, but this could have been prevented, isn’t that important?

(via diarrheaworldstarhiphop)

A great post on the recent toxic SJ thing →

what changed? all the “abuse” was stuff that was in plain view basically all along, seems like everything just changed when she said the same things with shame instead of proudly

I don’t understand the question.  When I say “abuse” I’m talking about specific ways she treated people in her personal life that were not known to most of her followers, e.g. me, until a few days ago.  So if you mean “what changed over the last few days” it’s precisely that: things came out that we didn’t know, simple as that

If you’re asking about the line I’m drawing between 2014 and earlier, I don’t think I can really explain it if you didn’t see it in her posts while following her over the relevant periods

This post is a sleep-deprived nonsense train wreck of #myc feels, read only if that actually sounds like something you want to read

Keep reading

This is another “probably not appropriate response” but I can’t stop thinking about The Instructions again

That’s a book that really captures some things about charisma and ideology and radical/violent/exclusive politics and group dynamics and the way these things are connected to personal voice and humor and all this stuff – at least the way those things work in my head, though it may not resonate for others

And it hides this stuff in a very stylized, comedic, almost twee setting/tone which I think works really well, again, for capturing how humor and more generally “unseriousness” work rhetorically in these contexts

This post is badly written because it’s deliberately vague, I don’t want to actually spoil the plot or give some sort of overall gloss on what the book is “saying,” which would be missing the point anyway.  It’s a complicated book and even the things I think this vague post implies about it are too simplistic.  I’m just trying to make these big gestures toward this book really getting how my mind interacts with all this stuff

Let me know if you need to talk - I’m on my way to bed but will be supportive however I can. This is rough, man.

Thanks.  I’m fine for the moment – it’s more just melancholy and weird for me than outright horrible (like I imagine it is for some others).