#fear mongering

[rhinozzryan]

PSA: the guardian is not working on a hit piece on diy hrt, and claims they are are misinformation (see update)

UPDATE: the guardian has published an article referenced by the original 4chan post, which was legitimate. the email continues to be fake. the article appears not to have contacted trans people or under-18s. and the message remains the same: don't talk to journalists about your personal information or history. you can see a recap and response to this publishing here. tl;dr: claims that the guardian's Susanna Rustin is writing a piece on diy hrt and contacting trans people for comment is false.

on the 18th, this post appeared on 4chan's /lgbt/ (slurs in thread: link). a screenshot was posted to reddit, then to tumblr. you've probably seen it:

today, the 23rd, another screenshot popped up on various discord servers, then was reposted variously to twitter. it shows a supposed email from guardian journalist and notorious TERF Susanna Rustin, claiming as the original 4chan post does.

it's now been shared around, and it's with good intentions. the message is useful: don't share your personal information or medical data with journalists, especially ones that happen to be TERFs.

but the post does this through misinformation and fearmongering. i'm still waiting on my response by email from Rustin, but she's reiterated twice (once, twice) that she did not write the email and is not working on such a story. on the 19th, i talked to other guardian newsroom journalists, who said they also did not know of a story's existence.

the moral of the story: this is misinformation, and it's dangerous. it spreads a fine message here, but it does it through spreading anxiety and terror.

you can follow along with this post on my parallel thread on twitter. also calling on @wakewithgiggli to delete their original post!

[tmninjagirl]

[ararebreedstory]

Conservatives in the 90's for no reason:

[dandyads]

Listerine, 1938

[awesomecooperlove]

THE HISTORY OF PLANDEMICS ‼️‼️‼️

👨🏼‍🔬🧑🏽‍⚕️👩🏻‍⚕️

[reality-detective]

[greentea13666]

HOW TF IS TIKTOK ALL OF A SUDDENLY BACK?????!!! LIKE WHAT EVEN IS THE AMERICAN GOVERNMENT??? MAKE UP YOUR MIND YOU DORKS. LIKE WE DID ALL THAT PANICKING FOR WHAT??? FOR WHAT??? NOTHING. ABSOLUTELY NOTHING!!!! AND T***P IS BEING PRAISED BY SOME OF TIKTOK FOR "SAVING THEM????" WHAT THE HELL??? HE'S NOT EVEN PRESIDENT YET. THIS JUST PROVES THAT THIS WHOLE THING WAS A STUNT. I HATE IT HERE.

[jccheapalier]

Black Woman CONVERTS To Republican Then GOES OFF On Hateful Democrats & ...

[theeternalwomb]

Community does not need this!! But they’re loud in the comments about how harmful this could be for the community and divination and other spiritual practices and traditions! Thankfully!! I was just talking about spiritual psychosis on my close friends on Instagram yesterday and then I see things like this and post just went viral of some woman absolutely losing it, snot running out her nose and everything over the eclipse.

The fear mongering and demonization of spiritual teachings, astrology, tarot and spiritual practices and traditions is about to start becoming very big. It was already a really prominent thing oppressors have used for ages especially against poc who practice forms of witchcraft or deity worship they brought with them from home. I was just watching a docu-series yesterday that highlighted how the native population on mt. Shasta were forced to leave and practiced ritual and held ceremonies in the caves of mount Shasta and those who colonized would go into those caves after they left and preform mockeries of their ceremonies and rituals as entertainment.

We’re about to step into a reality and time where spiritual people, practitioners and others within the community will be replacing celebrities and individuals of high rank or people who hold a lot of power in this world and I said before that the oppressor has a very specific recipe for oppression and trying to keep people (especially in the west) as unaware and as stuck in perpetual karmic cycles and systems as much as possible. And this is just yet another technique they use to discredit individuals with gifts. They use psychics and astrologers and others themselves to help them predict and interpret what’s coming.

They use these types of stories or ideas to fuel radical religious beliefs and ideas that are built upon fear mongering and hatred, they use religious institutions and manipulated versions of their Bible and beliefs and create division within the west. Vast majority of republicans are statistically uneducated and are conservative who hold onto heavy religious beliefs and views to back up, support and justify their actions and beliefs. Heavily similar to antebellum America and the justification of slavery and the mistreatment of African American people.

To add onto that, this movie about tarot does not accurately portray what tarot really is and how it works whatsoever but guess who’ll believe it and perpetuate it. Half the negative ideas that are swirling around about metaphysical, Wiccan or spiritual practices are due to pop culture and horror movies and the individuals who sit at their desks in the dark scribbling away these plots and releasing these movies.

[liskantope]

It seems to me that more women today than ever before are willing to be single for most of, if not their entire lives, and I'm not entirely sure of the reason. Do you think this is indeed a trend, and if so, why?

I absolutely think it's a trend that younger people in general are more willing to be single for longer periods of time or forever, and I can see a cluster of reasons for this but I think the main one is that we're getting more and more misanthropic in the sense of being afraid of forming connections with other humans. Technological changes as well as social evolution towards more fear-of-daily-occurrences-based mindsets has contributed this. We all still have our deeply-ingrained instincts towards wanting deep connections and to be in a position of taking care of someone, so a bunch of us pour all of those energies into pets, which further makes it harder to find the bandwidth to get a human significant other. (All of this is becoming a severe concern to me personally.)

As for this trend among women specifically, this is less visible to me but I can plausibly believe that women are more likely to fall into this camp of not caring to find a significant other. Reasons for this include a rise of a particular type of misandry that I don't think was prevalent before the 2010's in which men are seen as generally kind of scary and privileged in a way that affects our every move, and the fact that, while everyone a few decades ago was under more social pressure to follow the traditional path of getting married, women had more of that pressure, and maybe in trying to liberate themselves from this gendered expectation there has been some overcorrection.

(I would be very curious about how pet-ownership correlates with gender, actually. My instinct is to imagine that women are more likely to own pets and to put more energy into them, but quick googling gives mixed results.)

Of course, I don't really get why proportionately more women would prefer lifelong singleness rather than partnering with other women (bisexual-identification among women, after all, is shown to be steeply increasing nowadays).

[awesomecooperlove]

IN 1992 AMERICAN BROADCASTER EXPOSES THE “GLOBAL WARMING”, CHANGED SINCE THEN “CLIMATE CHANGE” SCAM

[reality-detective]

A Russian State media outlet, citing Russian law enforcement officials, reports that Ukrainian Armed Forces are planning to detonate a dirty nuclear bomb and the potential targets are storage sites at power plants. 🤔

[ministerpeacefulpoetwordwitch]

Should we ban Sharia law:

From a discussion on X about banning Sharia law. Sharia law does not exist in America and therefore does not need to be banned, it's just fear mongering Islamophobia. Create a fear to create a law to subjugate a group of people you hate out of your own fear because you fail to understand - my latest:

"There are good witches and bad witches, good Jews and bad Jews, good Christians and bad Christians. Jesus will judge not you - let me repeat what I just wrote earlier: You don't think Satan is in your church. Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. 300 thousand children have gone missing in America in just a few short years, it wasn't Islam that did that. Jesus himself said to his own disciple "get behind me Satan" Satan is everywhere, even in your church - but you are too narrow minded and prejudice to see. This is why Jesus spoke of those who have eyes to see and ears to hear. Right now the goats and the sheep are being separated. The goats will say to Jesus, I thought we were saved, why are we being cast out and Jesus will say, I did not know you. Those who will be saved will say - really, we're saved, what did we do? Jesus says when you help the least of mine, you have helped me. Muslims believe in Jesus. You of great faith who look down on the Muslim in judgement, maybe they are the least and they need your help, have you thought about that. The ninth commandment: You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. Have you investigated these accusations (you) make or are you just spreading rumor judging entire nations of people. As you judge so shall you be judged. Maybe you should go back and read the gospels, I don't think you understand.

From whence it all started if you can follow on X

[terabyteaix]

Discord Chain Letter Warning

Hey folks, you probably have seen a chain letter mentioning DomoAI going around, probably looks like the first image I've attached. This is not true. This is fearmongering.

I've gone more in depth about this in this post. Due to not wanting to ABSOLUTELY FLOOD people's feeds though, I'll put it behind a read more.

1: The reason you can actually ban the bot is because you can ban literally any user or bot using the /ban command and a numerical ID, regardless of if they've ever been in your server. Hell, you can even do it to deleted users and deleted bots! I banned MEE6 in a private server it's never seen before for shits and giggles. Just for a test, I also banned Midjourney (a bot that I know I don't share any servers with) and that also worked.

EDIT: People have told me that the ban command doesn't work on DomoAI, so I tested it with the ID provided in the chain letter.

Yup, it does work.

Also fun fact: This function of the ban command is actually incredibly useful for moderators when they have to ban someone who will do harm if they even get in the server. It's great for raid prevention, preemptively stopping ban evasion, and if you know someone who's been doing significant harm in DMs or in other servers, you can toss them too!

2: This is not an "official partnership" between Discord and DomoAI, it's just another application in the app directory, think of the app directory as Discord's built in search engine to find bots for your server. Discord is in no way shape or form forcing this into any server. Hell this isn't even new, ChatGPT and a few AI image generators like Midjourney are in the app directory too!

[the first attached Discord screenshot is not mine, but goes over how the Discord system works and compiles info from DomoAI's announcement]

3: DomoAI does NOT train off of the art you post in Discord servers, as that is against Discord's TOS. They also clearly state it in their announcement (yes, i read their announcement) and I've attached it to this message. If DomoAI did so, it would be incinerated quite fast, and there's precedent for this happening too. Shapes AI (basically character.ai but discord bots) got banned off Discord for training AI on Discord content among other things, NTTS has a whole ass video on it going into the laundry list of issues with shapes but it's rather long.

TLDR: Internet chain letter fearmongering strikes again.

DISCLAIMER: I am in no way defending DomoAI or any AI image generator, I'm an artist too, I heavily dislike generative AI. I understand if this chain letter scared you, and I do not fault you for it, but just remember it never hurts to do a little digging.

You can also still ban the bot in servers you have moderator permissions in if you still want to ease your worries, but there's generally nothing to be afraid of.

Feel free to reblog this, though I won't force you.

[snakeflower-cottage]

“But aren’t you afraid of going to hell?”

Witches have always been called hell-bound, but that’s a skewed belief of what it means to follow the crooked road. To the holy, Hell is a place of torment, a pit of eternal fire meant to punish the sinner. But witches—those who have passed through the spirit-death and learned the devil’s artes—have no concept of sin.

Folklore tells us that those who serve the devil do not go to Hell as punishment, but as his own. In 16th and 17th century witch trials, witches often claimed that in death, they would continue to serve him. In France, Jeanne Bosdeau (1647) swore she would go to the Sabbath forever after death, “dancing and making merry” (Ginzburg, Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath). In Scotland, Isobel Gowdie (1662) confessed that she and her coven would live as spirits, taking flight in the wind and storms (Pitcairn, Ancient Criminal Trials in Scotland). The devil does not discard his own.

And if he sets his own alight, do you think it is to burn them away? No, the flames of Hell do not unmake the witch. They shape us. Fire has always been a tool of transformation… bones blackened into charms, herbs turned to potent ash, or iron hardened in the forge. A witch to be burned in Hell is not to be destroyed but to be remade.

The pious fear the fire because they have never been through it. They have never walked through the coals and come out laughing. They have never struck a bargain that carried them past the threshold of death and into something new. If the devil sets your soul on fire during the spirit-death, then you cannot be burned.

So no, I do not fear Hell. If old scratch wants me, he will make me into something else. Something terrible, something profane, something whole.

And what could be more blessed than that?