#because there is enough of a problem that the transphobes would probably spread this like wildfire as justification for their shittiness

[queen-thick-dick]

Aight I'm genuinely unsure of how to react to how some of my trans sisters are reacting to the very real and present hate that we're getting on this site. I've definitely been shown that the hatred is much more rampant that I thought but I saw one girl saying something along the lines of "it's so clear that 90% of AFABs hate trans girls" and like.... no the fuck that isn't clear at all and is in fact dangerously hyperbolic? Like I was actually insulted because it's implying that a ton of my connections with trans people are somehow fake? Like the support my friends give me isn't real?

I get that we're angry girls and I'm genuinely not well informed enough to weigh in on whether some trans girls are being "trans separatists" or whatever the fuck. But can we not saddle *all* of the hate we're getting on other trans people?

[swan-lite]

Dang it, okay, I have thoughts

James Somerton made an apology video in which he says "I'm sorry" several times but

Couches it in a pity party

Does not directly address any of the people whose work he stole by name

Never uses the word "plagiarism," instead referring to his theft almost exclusively as "citation errors"

James discusses how many videos he and his team were releasing and the frequency of releases as if someone was pressuring them to release a high volume of videos, as if to say it isn't his fault that there were quality problems

James offers to make his videos public again and add "citations" in a pinned comment or in the descriptions as a means of crediting the people he stole from

He also insists that some of the videos won't need these citations because some of them were his own "original work"

(In other words: that he has nothing more to hide)

James states that he isn't bigoted against ace folks, bisexual folks, trans folks, or women and that the several disparaging remarks he has made against these communities in his videos were not written by him

Because we have receipts for several of these remarks thanks to Harry's (hbomberguy's) video on James, we know that they didn't come from the articles and books he was stealing from, so if James didn't write them then the only other person who could have was his cowriter Nick

James then immediately says that he's not trying to blame Nick

James does not try to explain the ace/arophobic, biphobic, transphobic, or misogynistic remarks he has made on his Twitter or Patreon accounts

James mentions - and seems genuinely bothered by - the "people online" who are spreading lies and misinformation about him

Finally, James discusses future projects he would like to work on

He then deleted the apology video

Harry states near the top of Plagiarism and You(Tube) that "When someone more competent than Filip uses [his] techniques in a subtler way, we can recognize them for what they are."

This is not competent. It's not even subtle. James's career was so thoroughly eviscerated literally overnight that this is the best he can do, and it's not even good.

James says that he's sorry, but doesn't actually explain what he's sorry for. He doesn't admit to, or take responsibility for, the extent of what he actually did. In this way, he can now say when confronted that he apologized. But with the wording, he still manages to avoid actually taking ownership of his actions. In other words, it's using passive language to imply that what he has done just happened. He definitely didn't sit down and choose to commit extensive plagiarism - of course not! What really happened? *shrug* Anyway, sorry for it.

When iiluminaughtii (henceforth referred to as Blaire) tried to explain the many times in her video essays she has misspoken or misused words, she played it off as a byproduct of the amount of "work" she churned out for her fans. James is trying to do the same thing here, only it is deeply ineffective. It's quite upsetting to me to think that some of his fans - young queer folks who are probably used to having to make themselves small - might on some level fall for this trick. The idea is to make you the viewer feel guilty for the demands you have placed on this creator, when in reality this is a grown adult who knew exactly what he was doing.

I'm not going to spend too long on this next point. If you've read this far, you're probably invested enough to be well aware that James has used the trick of burying a citation under a mound of text no-one will read many times. It's the same trick Blaire used, and the one The Internet Historian used as well after he was caught.

James stops short of making a "Colombo villian speech" in this apology video. He does, however, take the time to say that he has nothing more to hide. Again, if you've watched Harry's video, you know this literally always means that the person who insists they have nothing to hide is absolutely hiding something else. Whether this is more plagiarism or some other skullduggery we haven't yet found out about, I'm sure it will come to light eventually. I'm honestly surprised and a little disappointed that James tried this tack. Obviously he's thought better of it, since the video is gone now. But I would think a grown human who has just been the subject of an hours-long piece of, frankly, journalism would know better than to say something like this.

With the comments about his bigotry, James is trying to simultaneously redirect attention and perform allyship by saying "Look, I have an asexual friend! Who may or may not be public about his sexuality at this time!" This is the kind of thing I think a lot of us in the queer community are used to - supposed allies downplaying microaggressions by pointing to folks in the ally's proximity who happen to have an identity that they are being accused of speaking badly about. "This one person can stand to be around me, so clearly I can't be all bad." Personally, as someone whose racist parent tries consistently to downplay their own racism by pointing to me, their mixed race child, I can tell you that this is always misleading. In this case, I feel comfortable saying it's intentional. James tries to excuse the bigotry that "ended up in the videos" by saying that he didn't have time to edit the scripts properly. He doesn't seem to realize that time constraints often make people much more honest. In reality, this is James trying to make excuses for the bigotry he put in his videos because the time constraints he put onto himself made it much more difficult to disguise how he really feels.

James then directs some indignation at the people who are online discussing what he did. I would interpret his discussion of his income as an oblique reference to Dan Olson's thread about his recording equipment if I had a degree in literary analysis. My degree is not in literary analysis, so I'll leave it there. Ahem.

James makes reference to future projects he hopes to work on, as if this endeavor has in any way preserved or helped to bolster his shattered reputation. Jessie Gender makes a great point in saying this feels like a promise of work we could get out of him if we all just collectively decide to ignore all the harm he has caused. And James has caused harm. Whether he meant to or not, given the sheer magnitude of his plagiarism, there is absolutely no doubt that he has caused significant harm to a community he claimed to defend.

I want to spend a moment on something others have already pointed out. Actually, Harry pointed this out too. If James's theft were in any way defensible, he would have defended it. He would not have gone to such great lengths - up to and including deleting videos - to hide it. He wouldn't have used Nick as a shield, he wouldn't have outright lied in his livestreams, and he wouldn't have deactivated his Patreon (before reactivating--y'know what, this post is long enough, we don't need to get into that). James lied and dodged and beat around the bush for years BECAUSE he knew what he was doing was wrong. I had a justice studies professor once tell my class that nobody wakes up in the morning and decides to be A Criminal. People make choices, and choices have consequences, but most people don't choose consequences. People choose the thing that benefits them and consequences follow. James made a long, long series of choices, and I would like to remind everyone that they always had consequences. Even before Harry's video came out, James was facing consequences. Those didn't come from nowhere, they came from the people he was hurting. He knew about them, he just didn't stop because of them. He stopped because he literally couldn't keep going anymore.

Finally, James deleted his misguided response to the multitude of accusations against him. I don't think I need to explain to anyone what that indicates.

I would like to finish by saying that nobody should be harassed. Nobody should be bullied, or dogpiled, or doxxed. Nobody should wake up in the hospital because their dad realized he needed to call an ambulance. James's life is undoubtedly in a really difficult place right now, and while he absolutely deserved to lose his career, that's all he deserved. I hope he regains his health, I really do.

And I hope Harry and his team don't feel any responsibility over this. It seems easy from the outside to believe they wouldn't, but I also know that if I had just released a 4-hour long video detailing someone's fraud and then found out they had been in the hospital because of an incompleted suicide, I would feel pretty conflicted about a project we know Harry already felt conflicted about.

I hope Harry and his team are doing okay, and I hope James starts doing okay soon, and I hope James realizes this was the wrong damn time to try any release and apology. It was a bad apology.

[caffeineandsociety]

The past few days on tumblr have been a fascinating albeit EXTREMELY frustrating case study in how bigotry spreads among people who think they're resistant to it.

Mattie-boy, shortly before....all of this, went on a whole screed about how he doesn't SEE race and he's so similar to MLK and anyway labels like race and gender and sexuality are just so divisive and uwu can't we all just be friends? He is not actively hateful on a group level, we will not see him go on a rampage about how trans women are ruining his precious website because by all evidence that's not what he CONSCIOUSLY believes, that's not what he BELIEVES he believes; he's just a giant egomaniac who thinks he has nothing left to learn about the world and the people in it.

But three things are very obviously true about him:

He experiences a lot of subconscious bias,

He doesn't care to take the time to learn basic sensitivity (again, he thinks he's already got that down), and

He is blissfully unaware that overmonitoring one group while letting others slide for the same infractions - if not making false accusations outright and letting the authorities come up with a post-hoc justification to explain why someone freaked out (because it WOULDN'T be for NO reason, right?) - is a form of both top-down and grassroots bigotry VERY popular on the internet, despite us telling him multiple fucking times over the course of 5 years.

I'm sure that Matt believes he would act the same way toward ANYONE who bruised his ego so severely. I'm sure he's wrong about that; I'm sure the intensity might be similar but the specifics would be very different given the number of blatantly transphobic and specifically transmisogynistic tropes he's invoked-

But more importantly, we're overlooking a core part of the problem that is much bigger than Matt and his ego: not many groups would ever get the CHANCE to bruise his ego so severely.

He prides himself on being a good and fair and just person who believes in equality...in the most center-right liberal chickenshit way. The exploitability of his moderation system - the automated nature of a good chunk of it, and the way the human staff is so overworked that they make constant obvious mistakes and often act as barely more than an extension of the machine, such that anyone with an axe to grind and a willingness to mass-report (you know, usually racists and terfs...who are largely the same people) effectively becomes a member of the FUNCTIONAL community standards team - shows in no uncertain terms that he is failing to live up to that ideal.

And he can't fucking STAND having that called out. He HAS to prove its not true...by constantly changing his justification for banning a trans woman who made too much of a stink about it, justifying taking down her SFW photos with claims that she totally DID post explicit ones elsewhere, then abandoning that justification to say she threatened him, then abandoning that justification to say she HARASSED him (AND, as an afterthought, other users), and THEN stalking her to another fucking website to double down on the already disproven explicit content allegation.

Again. This is a center-right milquetoast liberal loser. This is someone who believes that he treats everyone equally and doesn't see labels. Not only is this obviously not true, he is ignoring the role of systems of abuse in determining who pops up on his radar as a threat to that spun glass ego of his. Absolutely none of this would have happened had he been willing to take criticism and make even the SLIGHTEST effort with the SLIGHTEST bit of transparency to make the moderation system less exploitable, but because he hasn't - and, as he just admitted, hadn't even considered it until now - it was near inevitable that the person who would end up bringing it to his attention so loudly as to wound his ego this severely would be a victim of the system; i.e., probably a trans and/or Black woman - and sure enough, as it ended up, it was a trans woman...surprising absolutely no one but Matt himself.

And, frankly, we are doing a disservice by ignoring that aspect as well, especially since now there's yet another bullshit pedo callout circulating about yet another trans woman and the overlap between people who have been calling this bullshit for what it is and people who have been reblogging that callout uncritically is...significant.

The problem, in this case, is that entirely too many people here have not unlearned the stranger danger mindset. Of course, we believe, trans women are not especially likely to be 🚨 SEXUAL PREDATORS 🚨...but as a community we still do believe in the idea that the INTERNET as a whole has a massive problem with unchecked 🚨 SEXUAL PREDATORS 🚨 and callouts of them work. We talk about how the stereotype of trans women as predators is a problem - but every single time a callout comes along, as a community, we often think it's one individual exception; most trans women aren't child molesters...but THIS ONE totally is!

In reality, let's look at where CSA is common: in the nuclear family, and under other systems of authority that are held up as beyond questioning. The most likely child abusers are older immediate family members, religious authorities, cops, teachers, sports coaches, doctors and nurses - people who, for one reason or another, have power over the victim that manifests as a sense of ownership, be it permanent or temporary. Randomly acting opportunists are rare.

Many of us know this, some of us don't, but even among the people who do know, we also know that "rare" doesn't mean "nonexistent"...

So as a community, every time someone swears they've found that rare exception, people believe it. The fact that it's a trans woman about 80% of the time, another trans person about 19% of the time, a POC a good chunk of the time including most of the 1% of the time it's a cis person - as a community we don't even tend to consciously notice, because every time is yet another "rare isolated incident".

There's too much acceptance of the premise that the internet is just FULL of PEDOPHILES like all the stranger danger PSAs of the 2000s claimed, and too much trust that no one in THIS community would make such a callout in bad faith, or at least that a bad faith one would contain NO evidence but "dude trust me", so even the flimsiest "evidence" is accepted without question - and that's not even getting into how the kink community and the queer community intertwine, and yet a kink more taboo than light bondage is often seen EVEN among younger queer people as proof of predatory tendencies.

You see what happens? Even if you have fully managed to reject the idea, on a personal level, that trans women (or other trans people, or POC, or mentally ill people, or whatever other group painted with this brush, for that matter) are disproportionately likely to be A Predator, if you uncritically believe whatever callout crosses your dash, you will still disproportionately hurt marginalized people, because most if not all of them are going to be bullshit and you're not going to be given nearly as many targets who are NOT part of those groups - just like how Matt may indeed have had this nuclear meltdown on anyone who bruised his ego this badly, but the odds of him being pushed to that breaking point by anyone BUT a trans woman, or a member of at least one of a handful of other marginalized groups, were extremely slim.

And thus, bigotry finds a way to perpetuate itself even in communities and individuals who staunchly believe themselves to have rejected it.

[socialjusticefail]

Here the commentary from the anon who submitted this:

Me: Well finally, an honest and deep review that doesn’t go-

and its real-world harms are impossible to ignore.

Okay, hopefully this review won’t dwell on them too much.

WIRED It helped me say goodbye to the setting for good.

That’s the only good thing about it? 😒

TIRED The story is rooted in anti-Semitic tropes. The gameplay feels dated. The graphics feel like they’re a couple generations behind. All the characters are one-dimensional. It doesn’t stay true to the established lore. Every character feels like an off-brand version of the characters we know and love. There’s no sense of place. No magic, no heart. 

Emphasis mine. Okay, beyond that first sentence which just continues to spread a rumor, this person actually has some valid points that aren’t social justice related.

[At least every third paragraph basically whinging (there's really no other, nicer way to put it) about how transphobic JKR is]

*scrolls to the bottom of the page to where I hoped to see a comment section (there wasn’t)*

I probably won’t ever know your names. But you know who you are—I see you, and I appreciate you more than words can ever express. Thank you for making it easy for me to close the book on Hogwarts and Harry Potter. The magic is gone and won’t ever return, because without us, the Wizarding World is as heartless as its creator.

Wait, what? *scrolls up a bit*

Combined with who this game helps and who it harms, well, it's definitely not worth it unless your goal is to cause harm. This is a familiar problem though. It’s one we see in the latest Wizarding World films as well. The new movies are bad. Not just bad morally, but bad qualitatively. They’re not fun to watch. There’s spectacle, but it all feels flat and kind of confusing. If you look closely, you can see the steady decline in quality as the new movies go on, with IP owners trying to wring any remaining semblance of life from a franchise all but poisoned by its owner, despite attempts toright the ship. Some reviews chalk it up to Rowling having more direct control, and fewer people to tell her no or give her edits. The George Lucas problem. But Hogwarts Legacy makes me think this isn’t the case.

Okay, but that still doesn’t explain-

Standing Together There’s a direct correlation between how open Rowling becomes about her bigotry, and how flat and heartless Wizarding World media becomes. I don’t think that’s a coincidence. I think it’s because LGBTQIA+ people and genuine allies are some of the best creative minds in the world, and these films and this game were made largely without them.  The game industry is far queerer than most people realize. All the things you know and love about your favorite games were made by queer people. I don’t just mean directors or executive producers. I mean the concept artists who bring your favorite games to life, the sound designers, the engineers, the technical artists, the composers, the musicians, the writers, the testers, the producers—the hands that make the best games in the world are queer. We’re the life, the heartbeat, and the magic of great games. In the yawning emptiness at the heart of Hogwarts Legacy I see the quiet solidarity of queer people and our allies in game development. The people who just said no when the job offers came their way. The ones who didn’t answer the emails from Portkey Games, the ones who politely let their coworkers know that working on a Harry Potter game would be harmful to the trans community, the ones who listened and said, “Okay, yeah, thanks for letting me know.” The people who put their morals, and their loved ones, above an easy paycheck.

🤦🏿‍♂️🤦🏼‍♂️🤦🏾‍♂️🤦🏻‍♂️🤦🏽‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦🏾🤦🏻🤦🏽🤦🏼🤦🏿🤦🤦🏽‍♀️🤦🏻‍♀️🤦🏾‍♀️🤦🏼‍♀️🤦🏿‍♀️🤦‍♀️ And that still isn’t enough facepalms! I effing hate when people resort to manipulative guilt.

I wasn’t really planning on buying the game, but not because it “supports transphobia”. Rather for the non-social justice reasons this person pointed out. To say the least, I’ve been in an awkward position regarding HP and the ‘verse (I guess Wizarding World is its proper name) since even before JKR made those comments. While I haven’t even bought “Beetlebard” or whatever that tie-in book that came out shortly after “Deathly Hollow” was called let alone supported the “Fantastic Beasts” films in any way, I am absolutely no rush to destroy my HP merchandise. Nor am I in a position to “say goodbye to the setting for good”- the canon may suck now and has since the last three books in the series proper, but that’s what fanfiction (on AO3 and elsewhere) is for. And I would still like to visit Universal Studios Florida someday- you know, where there are entire sections dedicated to the Wizarding World (unless Universal decides to pull a Splash Mountain, but so far there has been no announcement to that effect). Still, I could do without the lectures and, as mentioned earlier, manipulative guilt.

No, I’m not going to buy the game to spite this reviewer and everyone else decrying it. Again, there was already a lack of interest on my part and I would have just ignored the game’s existence were it not for the social justice crowd who feel the need to screech about how “transphobic” and “anti-Semitic” it is every hour on the hour.

PS: funny that you posted an article clarifying JKR’s stance from someone who totally bought into it at first’s POV. Here’s a backup link in case that one ever goes down: https://archive.is/oRpGC

[smollestbean-2]

Because they so ‘Kindly’ gave me permission; Callout post Kaijugoliopod

They have no problem making a call out post on other people so; just for my own humor and benefit, I’ll do one of them because they think it’s funny. Well I’ll make it fucking hilarious for them so @kaijugoliopod I hope your friends/mutual share this to you and I hope you have a grand old time you little brat.

Sadly they don’t have their age on there so I’m going to go ahead and refer them as a 2 year old because to me that sounds appropriate for them. Since they act like one so much!! and I’ll also be referring them as a Karen cause why the fuck not!! 

By the way Karen, ‘Not a Minor’ doesn’t tell us your age and to me it just screams “hey I’m a minor but I want to be seen as an adult so I’ll put this here instead of a random age!” 

anyways, I so kindly asked Karen to give me receipts on their so called problem of “receiving Megastar porn without consent” because I wanted both sides of the story and I wanted to see if they actually did get those pictures without consent. Reason why? well I follow a couple Megstar shippers and never before have I ever received any ‘porn’ or pictures of the ship without consent or out of the blue. 

Here’s how that interaction went my guys: 

A link to their post if you will to show that it only shows what happens after the picture is sent. They have nothing leading up to the picture to show that it was actually sent without consent or not therefore leading into Karen’s narrative that it was in fact sent without consent and out of the blue and people believing them just by word of mouth. https://kaijugolisopod.tumblr.com/post/642248719231795200

and yes they also say just ‘ONE’ example, how are y’all gonna believe only one example with so little evidence that it was sent ‘without’ consent?!

sounds kind of dumb to me don’t you think Karen? 

will that come back and bit me?? probably, but dudes it literally only contains kissing that could be suggestive. There is no ‘Porn’ anywhere in those pictures at all so why would you even consider it porn??

And am I gonna get backlash for calling OpStar the same as MegStar? probably but I have red abusive OpStar fics before as well so don’t even try to tell me that OpStar isn’t on the same fucking level Karen. 

Anyways when I had asked for the full conversations in their so called ‘Proof’ but instead they immediately attacked me and started insulting to me. I don’t know about anyone else but to me it sounds like they didn’t have any proof or that they were lying and had no other way to react other than to attack me and turn it around to where they were the victim themselves. 

you wanna tell me that this doesn’t bring up ‘ANY’ red flags at all?? if you were happy to show me that ‘proof’ then you would be happy to show me further proof and the whole conversation of it when asked to further prove your so called claim of it being sent without consent. 

But no, all they did was attack me because I simply stated “there is no proof that it was sent without consent, can you show me the beginning of the conversation so that I know for sure that it was sent with out your consent?” 

then I accidentally let the 2 year old Karen get to me because yes, my age is a sensitive subject. Fuck off.

Anyways, yeah I got tired of their bullshit because I’m not gonna believe someone’s claim without enough proof. Would you believe something with so little proof of it happening?? I wouldn’t. 

and then Karen ends with this, clearly trying to turn it around on me saying that I’m gaslighting them. I don’t think I am but y’all believe in whatever you want to. I’m just over here trying to show people that this Karen has no proof and nothing to back their claim so they want to justify their actions of harrassing people by attacking others who call them out for it. 

This person is just mad that someone likes a ship that they don’t like and when they find out that some of their mutuals like this ship they get all uppity and decide to call them; ‘rapists’ ‘abusers’ ‘you must be just like megatron to like a problematic ship like this!’ ‘transphobic’ ‘MAP’ ‘you say that sending children porn is okay?’ << that last one just proves that they’re in fact a minor my guys. 

believe in what you want but I wanted to show everyone my side of doing my research on getting both sides of the story. I know what I believe in now and I believe this person is just starting shit to get attention, I also believe their just a bored kid whose got nothing better to do than bully and ‘cancel’ someone just because they don’t meet their criteria. 

Hey Karen, did I get all that right?? I just want to make sure I didn’t miss anything from my receipts because I don’t know about you but I’m sure I have everything accounted for. Do you? 

if so, prove it. Are you gonna show the full conversation like I did? Are you gonna show everyone that you’re in fact right about this so called spread of ‘PORN’? because I’m ready for it. I’m ready to see all the bullshit you have lined up for me my dude. 

[jazinerambles]

Persona 2 Innocent Sin Review

I wanted to have some time in between playing the game and writing my thoughts for Persona 2 Innocent Sin. I will be referencing it and other Persona games so there may be some light spoilers for games 2-5. 

I played the psp version of the game on a Playstation TV. I beat the game at 76 hours on the dot. I have not completed most of the theater missions, but I have completed the main story of the game and did do a few sidequests.

My review will be organized in several sections-gameplay, story, music, characters, LGBTQ representation, extra content, wishlist and recommendation.

Gameplay:

Persona 2 Innocent Sin was released in 1999. Therefore plays as a game from 1999. The PSP rerelease updated menus, changed the difficulty, and added all out attack art similar to P3-P5 for the fusion spells. I love the all out attack animation and although the menus got a little cumbersome, it didn’t really impact gameplay for me. 

The biggest complaint about Persona 2 IS is how easy and repetitive it is and the high encounter rate. The battles for the most part are easy and if you set up all your attacks in the first round, you can basically use autoplay until an emergency occurs or you encounter an enemy in which you must change it up. 

I never saw the gameplay as repetitive as others do and I feel those who do only just battle and that’s it. I was constantly trying to get all the fusion spells, max up my personas to trade them for items, try different combinations for the demon negotiations and spread demon rumors to get items, spells, and cards (you need cards to summon new personas in the velvet room.) Demon negotiations also allow you a better look into each of the characters’ personalities and relationships. Events in the game will change how the characters react in these negotiations so it is always nice to go back to them throughout the course of the game. 

The demons you encounter have emotions. I believe they are intrigued, happy, angry and fearsome. Make them happy and they will offer a pact with you and give you free stuff and willing to spread rumors for you. Make them angry they will fight you. Make them fear you they will run away. Make them intrigued and you get the cards needed to summon personas and even more if you already have a pact with them. 

I wanted to return to the big complaint though, the high encounter rate. This was something that I felt hot and cold about. Most of the time this didn’t bother me, because I needed to level up my personas anyway. But when I needed to backtrack and explore further, it did get a little bothersome. 

You can use estoma to avoid enemies weaker than you. It is not a passive skill, so once you have a persona that has it, you have to cast it every time it wears off. At the Mu casino, you can also purchase a disguise kit that does the same thing, but it effects last about the same amount of time and it is ridiculously expensive. Just use estoma. 

As briefly mentioned above, unlike Persona 5 in which you can just catch Personas, in P2IS there are only two ways to get them. You get cards from demon negations, take those cards to the velvet room and then trade them in for a Persona. But you have to enough cards to summon it and the persona has to be 5 cards within your character level. 

You can also talk to the demon painter, for him to make you cards for the specific arcana you want by using blank cards. These are also given through demon negotiations that you have a pact with. 

In P2, ALL your characters are capable of changing out Personas, but their compatibility with different personas varies with their Arcana. 

The other way to get personas is through the story. There are certain actions that you must take to get the prime personas and then the final personas. These personas are character specific and you can’t give them to other characters. 

I wanted to talk about three more things before I move on to the story: rumormongers, fusion spells, and dungeons. 

Persona 2IS is based around rumors. Just like P3 is for the dark hour, P4 the midnight channel, P5 around palaces and so on...

To get certain items and progress the story, you MUST gather and spread rumors. There are five characters throughout the game called rumormongers. They will give you information in exchange for receiving information. You then share this information to the detective agency, pay a fee for them to spread them for you, and there you go. rumor spread. As mentioned earlier, there are also demon specific rumors. 

Fusion spells were something I really enjoyed in this game. Although hearing “Are you ready? Here goes” and “Let’s go everybody” will be stuck in my head for the rest of eternity...

Basically, to create a fusion spell, members in your party require a requisite spell and then that party member is placed in a specific order when taking turns. Once that spell is unlocked, it will let you know if you have the requisite spells and you no longer have to adjust the order of party members. Some of the spells you need to unlock fusion spells are persona specific. The fusion spells are elemental. 

I will not go into weaknesses of elemental spells, I am just going to say that you aren’t “down”’ed like you are in 3-5. 

Finally, my first real pet peeve with this game-the dungeons.

Oh boy. Air raid, AeroSpace and one of the four Zodiac dungeons (I am pretty sure its Eikichi’s) gets ALL my hate. There are cheap gimmicks that make the game artificially hard but only for these dungeons and more so, frustrating. 

But I am not going to go into detail why, and the other dungeons are not bad at all. But play the game and experience these dungeons for yourself. That is all I am going to say about that.

Story:

This section will be nowhere was long as gameplay. The story did not go where I thought it would, but that’s a good thing. I would go in completely blind if you can. The ending definitely surprised me a bit. I think it has one of the best stories of the persona games.

It does not follow a calendar like the later Persona games and time just blends together. By the end of the game, you won't know if a day, week or month passed from the beginning to the end.

Music:

The music is actually really good. It is the reason why I played the game in the first place. Just don’t look at the soundtracks names. Spotify has it available if you live in the US. You are better off listening to the soundtrack because I promise you that most dungeons songs will be cut off due to the frequency of battles. 

Some of my favorite songs are Smile Hirasaka, Unbreakable Tie, Kurosu’s theme, Joker and the Taurus dungeon’s theme.

Characters:

Despite Persona 2 not having social links, I feel like I know these characters better than some of the persona games that do have social links. It is also the only Persona game that I can say without any hesitation that I like the entire main cast. 

I truly love them all, but my favorite would probably be Yukino or Maya. 

Unlike other Personas, the dynamics for Persona 2 IS are different, because not all of your party members are high school students. The adult characters have adult problems, the high school students have high school problems, and all of them have deep psychological problems and abandonment issues that will take years of intense therapy (or Philemeon) to forget.

One of the biggest themes of Persona 2 is confronting your past and learning from the mistakes of your childhood. And the characters do! And by the end of the game you are so proud of how far they have come. And then things happen...

LGBTQ representation

Let me say that I started P2IS off on the wrong foot, but I am still absolutely justified at being upset by it. One of the very first interactions you can have with a NPC is through a very uncomfortable exchange between you, Eikichi and a transman that is pretty transphobic. And to add the icing on the cake, Atlus refers to him as a “weird woman.” 

I was literally going to just stop playing the game like an hour in because of that, but I decided to continue.

What I discovered was a game that has highs and lows when it comes to LGBTQ representation. 

You can play as a bi character who can confess his feelings to men and women. *Stares hard at Persona 4 and Persona 5*

You have a gay character that has an interesting story, character development, is unabashedly gay and isn’t a walking stereotype. Nor is his entire arc centered around gay panic. 

From what I understand the dialogue from the NPC does get better, but I am not holding my breath. 

And the one sapphic kiss scene we get in a Persona game is a kiss of manipulation and not love. So that is a little sad. 

But overall, P2IS does try to make an effort. And it definitely makes a better effort than its successor released almost 2 decades later.

Extra content:

Again, Persona 2 doesn’t have social links or a calendar. Please don’t approach it like the other games where you have to fill up your time between dungeons. It is not a necessity, but there are things you can do. 

Mu is a casino that you can visit that allows you to play mini games to gain coins that you can use to get weapons, rare items, and even unlock personas. I spent a little too much time at Mu....

You can also talk to NPCs to do side missions. Be careful though. You have to do the side missions in a given amount of time or you may not get rewarded for it. Also P2IS is very much like Final Fantasy 9 where it is much better to go to a place sooner than later, because there may not be a later...

You also have the factory which is an optional dungeon that opens up more and more as you progress through the game. 

There is the theater which is a PSP exclusive which has side missions unrelated to the main story that you can play. They are okay.

Wishlist

I hear so many people wanting a remake of P2IS so the game can be more accessible. I am very torn about this. Besides the difficulty and maaybe tweaking the encounter rate a bit, I wouldn’t change a thing. However, I also know that I couldn’t enjoy Shadow of Colossus until the controls were updated. Like I tried and then just gave up. 

I honestly don’t want a remake. I don’t trust the Atlus of today with this game.

I do want it to be acknowledged and more accessible though. 

But if I had to make a wish list, this is what it would be. Again, this would be a “it would be nice list.”

Make the battles harder.

Update cut scenes? I really like the art for the cut scenes already, but would like some more. Maybe keep the drawings but update the CG?

Social side quests. I do not want social links in Persona 2. However, side quests that allow you to learn more about your character like a social link would, would be something I would be very interested in. 

Make the portraits consistent. The art from the original game and the new art put in the PSP game (I am talking about you climax lady) clash so much. Pick one style and stick to it.

I want to fight Ms. Ideal. Let me do it for reasons. Give me a chance to battle her.

I want the option to switch out characters. I love both Jun and Yukki, but I want to be able to play with both. 

Let me skip the animation when I create a new Persona. 

*EDIT*  I can’t believe I forgot this and feel awful I did, but I do think they should keep the trans NPC, but change the dialogue and the the name. It isn’t the NPC that is the problem but the dialogue and actions. Otherwise, I think it would be ok. 

I think that’s it.

Recommendation:

So should you play Persona 2 IS? Short answer, yes. Long answer is that it is complicated. In a few months the game will no longer be accessible for psp consoles. The physical version of the game is ridiculously expensive. You will have to accept the fact this game is on psp and its sequel’s psp version never came to English speaking markets.

You may not like the graphics, gameplay, or that it doesn’t feel like the later persona games. And as much as I love this game, that is alright. You do you. But I truly do think you are missing out on a great game. So if you have the opportunity to do so, yeah absolutely give it a shot. 

[beelspillowpet]

The HoLPG has gotten quite big, and with a lot of people comes a lot of problems unfortunately. We have had people spreading rumors about myself and a close friend of mine, and I would like for it to stop. That being said, I have done a 30 day pruning of the server, removing any and all people who HAVE NOT been active in the server. This was not done manually, and therefore I might have accidentally removed people who had seen the initial announcement, and reacted, but not shown any other “sign of life”.

No one asked or probably cares but today is my only day off for work in a good while. I would like to spend it peacefully. If we can’t be adults and have a conversation privately, then I will deal with it in a way that may upset you further because I don’t know wat to do. I don’t take kindly to people spreading rumors about me, nor do I take kindly to the same being done to my friends who are shooting the shit and having fun. You can call me a p*do, racist, transphobe, whatever you like. I can take it. I know you’re wrong and are crying for attention, and this is the easiest way to do it. But at least come to me and show you have backbone. Hell, do it on anon if you’re afraid enough. But give me a chance to speak on the matter to you directly or have a conversation, privately if you so wish.

You’ve forced my hand to prune the server when I never wanted to do that. HoLPG has become a safe place for me to talk and vent about my problems, and I’ve actually grown as a person in the short time its existed. I don’t have the energy to fight with people, and I’ve been exhausted. I hope whoever it is spreading rumors about me can come to me privately and we can talk. Otherwise?

Shut the fuck up.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Why Is It So Hard for Democrats to Act Like They Actually Won?

By

Rebecca Solnit

November 19, 2020

When Trump won the 2016 election—while losing the popular vote—the New York Times seemed obsessed with running features about what Trump voters were feeling and thinking. These pieces treated them as both an exotic species and people it was our job to understand, understand being that word that means both to comprehend and to grant some sort of indulgence to. Now that Trump has lost the 2020 election, the Los Angeles Times has given their editorial page over to letters from Trump voters, who had exactly the sort of predictable things to say we have been hearing for far more than four years, thanks to the New York Times and what came to seem like about 11,000 other news outlets hanging on the every word of every white supremacist they could convince to go on the record.

The letters editor headed this section with, “In my decade editing this page, there has never been a period when quarreling readers have seemed so implacably at odds with each other, as if they get their facts and values from different universes. As one small attempt to bridge the divide, we are providing today a page full of letters from Trump supporters.” The implication is the usual one: we—urban multiethnic liberal-to-radical only-partly-Christian America—need to spend more time understanding MAGA America. The demands do not go the other way. Fox and Ted Cruz and the Federalist have not chastised their audiences, I feel pretty confident, with urgings to enter into discourse with, say, Black Lives Matter activists, rabbis, imams, abortion providers, undocumented valedictorians, or tenured lesbians. When only half the divide is being tasked with making the peace, there is no peace to be made, but there is a unilateral surrender on offer. We are told to consider this bipartisanship, but the very word means both sides abandon their partisanship, and Mitch McConnell and company have absolutely no interest in doing that.

Paul Waldman wrote a valuable column in the Washington Post a few years ago, in which he pointed out that this discord is valuable fuel to right-wing operatives: “The assumption is that if Democrats simply choose to deploy this powerful tool of respect, then minds will be changed and votes will follow. This belief, widespread though it may be, is stunningly naive.” He notes that the sense of being disrespected “doesn’t come from the policies advocated by the Democratic Party, and it doesn’t come from the things Democratic politicians say. Where does it come from? An entire industry that’s devoted to convincing white people that liberal elitists look down on them. The right has a gigantic media apparatus that is devoted to convincing people that liberals disrespect them, plus a political party whose leaders all understand that that idea is key to their political project and so join in the chorus at every opportunity.”

There’s also often a devil’s bargain buried in all this, that you flatter and, yeah, respect these white people who think this country is theirs by throwing other people under the bus—by disrespecting immigrants and queer people and feminists and their rights and views. And you reinforce that constituency’s sense that they matter more than other people when you pander like this, and pretty much all the problems we’ve faced over the past four years, to say nothing of the last five hundred, come from this sense of white people being more important than nonwhites, Christians than non-Christians, native-born than immigrant, male than female, straight than queer, cis-gender than trans.

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito just complained that “you can’t say that marriage is a union between one man and one woman. Now it’s considered bigotry.” This is a standard complaint of the right: the real victim is the racist who has been called a racist, not the victim of his racism, the real oppression is to be impeded in your freedom to oppress. And of course Alito is disingenuous; you can say that stuff against marriage equality (and he did). Then other people can call you a bigot, because they get to have opinions too, but in his scheme such dissent is intolerable, which is fun coming from a member of the party whose devotees wore “fuck your feelings” shirts at its rallies and popularized the term “snowflake.”

Nevertheless, we get this hopelessly naïve version of centrism, of the idea that if we’re nicer to the other side there will be no other side, just one big happy family. This inanity is also applied to the questions of belief and fact and principle, with some muddled cocktail of moral relativism and therapists’ “everyone’s feelings are valid” applied to everything. But the truth is not some compromise halfway between the truth and the lie, the fact and the delusion, the scientists and the propagandists. And the ethical is not halfway between white supremacists and human rights activists, rapists and feminists, synagogue massacrists and Jews, xenophobes and immigrants, delusional transphobes and trans people. Who the hell wants unity with Nazis until and unless they stop being Nazis?

I think our side, if you’ll forgive my ongoing shorthand and binary logic, has something to offer everyone and we can and must win in the long run by offering it, and offering it via better stories and better means to make those stories reach everyone. We actually want to see everyone have a living wage, access to healthcare, and lives unburdened by medical, student, and housing debt. We want this to be a thriving planet when the babies born this year turn 80 in 2100. But the recommended compromise means abandoning and diluting our stories, not fortifying and improving them (and finding ways for them to actually reach the rest of America, rather than having them warped or shut out altogether). I’ve spent much of my adult life watching politicians like Bill Clinton and, at times, Barack Obama sell out their own side to placate the other, with dismal results, and I pray that times have changed enough that Joe Biden will not do it all over again.

Among the other problems with the LA Times’s editor’s statement is that one side has a lot of things that do not deserve to be called facts, and their values are too often advocacy for harming many of us on the other side. Not to pick on one news outlet: Sunday, the Washington Post ran a front-page sub-head about the #millionMAGAmarch that read “On stark display in the nation’s capital were two irreconcilable versions of America, each refusing to accept what the other considered to be undeniable fact.” Except that one side did have actual facts, notably that Donald J. Trump lost the election, and the other had hot and steamy delusions.

I can comprehend, and do, that lots of people don’t believe climate change is real, but is there some great benefit in me listening, again, to those who refuse to listen to the global community of scientists and see the evidence before our eyes? A lot of why the right doesn’t “understand” climate change is that climate change tells us everything is connected, everything we do has far-reaching repercussions, and we’re responsible for the whole, a message at odds with their idealization of a version of freedom that smells a lot like disconnection and irresponsibility. But also climate denial is the result of fossil fuel companies and the politicians they bought spreading propaganda and lies for profit, and I understand that better than the people who believe it. If half of us believe the earth is flat, we do not make peace by settling on it being halfway between round and flat. Those of us who know it’s round will not recruit them through compromise. We all know that you do better bringing people out of delusion by being kind and inviting than by mocking them, but that’s inviting them to come over, which is not the same thing as heading in their direction.

The editor spoke of facts, and he spoke of values. In the past four years too many members of the right have been emboldened to carry out those values as violence. One of the t-shirts at the #millionMAGAmarch this weekend: “Pinochet did nothing wrong.” Except stage a coup, torture and disappear tens of thousands of Chileans, and violate laws and rights. A right-wing conspiracy to overthrow the Michigan government and kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer was recently uncovered, racists shot some Black Lives Matter protestors and plowed their cars into a lot of protests this summer. The El Paso anti-immigrant massacre was only a year ago; the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre two years ago, the Charlottesville white-supremacist rally in which Heather Heyer was killed three years ago (and of course there have been innumerable smaller incidents all along). Do we need to bridge the divide between Nazis and non-Nazis? Because part of the problem is that we have an appeasement economy, a system that is supposed to be greased by being nice to the other side.

Appeasement didn’t work in the 1930s and it won’t work now. That doesn’t mean that people have to be angry or hate back or hostile, but it does mean they have to stand on principle and defend what’s under attack. There are situations in which there is no common ground worth standing on, let alone hiking over to. If Nazis wanted to reach out and find common ground and understand us, they probably would not have had that tiki-torch parade full of white men bellowing “Jews will not replace us” and, also, they would not be Nazis. Being Nazis, white supremacists, misogynists, transphobes is all part of a project of refusing to understand as part of refusing to respect. It is a minority position but by granting it deference we give it, over and over, the power of a majority position.

In fact the whole Republican Party, since long before Trump, has committed itself to the antidemocratic project of trying to create a narrower electorate rather than win a wider vote. They have invested in voter suppression as a key tactic to win, and the votes they try to suppress are those of Black voters and other voters of color. That is a brutally corrupt refusal to allow those citizens the rights guaranteed to them by law. Having failed to prevent enough Black people from voting in the recent election, they are striving mightily to discard their votes after the fact. What do you do with people who think they matter more than other people? Catering to them reinforces that belief, that they are central to the nation’s life, they are more important, and their views must prevail. Deference to intolerance feeds intolerance.

Years ago the linguist George Lakoff wrote that Democrats operate as kindly nurturance-oriented mothers to the citizenry, Republicans as stern discipline-oriented fathers. But the relationship between the two parties is a marriage, between an overly deferential wife and an overbearing and often abusive husband (think of how we got our last two Supreme Court justices and failed to get Merrick Garland). The Hill just ran a headline that declared “GOP Senators say that a Warren nomination would divide Republicans.” I am pretty sure they didn’t run headlines that said, “Democratic Senators say a Pompeo (or Bolton or Perdue or Sessions) nomination would divide Democrats.” I grew up in an era where wives who were beaten were expected to do more to soothe their husbands and not challenge them, and this carries on as the degrading politics of our abusive national marriage.

Some of us don’t know how to win. Others can’t believe they ever lost or will lose or should, and their intransigence constitutes a kind of threat. That’s why the victors of the recent election are being told in countless ways to go grovel before the losers. This unilateral surrender is how misogyny and racism are baked into a lot of liberal and centrist as well as right-wing positions, this idea that some people need to be flattered and buffered even when they are harming the people who are supposed to do the flattering and buffering, even when they are the minority, even when they’re breaking the law or lost the election. Lakoff didn’t quite get to the point of saying that this nation lives in a household full of what domestic abuse advocates call coercive control, in which one partner’s threats, intimidations, devaluations, and general shouting down control the other.

This is what marriages were before feminism, with the abused wife urged to placate and soothe the furious husband. Feminism is good for everything, and it’s a good model for seeing that this is both outrageous and a recipe for failure. It didn’t work in marriages, and it never was the abused partner’s job to prevent the abuse by surrendering ground and rights and voice. It is not working as national policy either. Now is an excellent time to stand on principle and defend what we value, and I believe it’s a winning strategy too, or at least brings us closer to winning than surrender does. Also, it’s worth repeating, we won, and being gracious in victory is still being victorious.

[Rebecca Solnit’s first media job was in fact-checking and her last book is the memoir Recollections of My Nonexistence. She’s sent a lot of mail to her nieces and nephews during the pandemic.]

[uninterestiing]

i liked your post on matteo taking his time to process things, so i'd love to know what your thoughts are on david being outed?

hhhhhhhhh well from what i’ve seen in the tag, i disagree with like 90% of youse and was gonna hold my thoughts till later… but since you asked… yeah i reckon its good writing actually.

(beware under the cut, this is long)

so disclaimers before people get big mad: i’ve actually been in the situation depicted. i’m a gay trans guy who came out in year 12 & to me, it’s extremely realistic. teachers in my last year of high school pulled me aside to say all kinds of nasty shit and the rumour of my transness spread around pretty fuckin quickly. it was a fucked time in my life but i didn’t have any issues watching the last clip, i enjoyed it and found it pretty relatable honestly, especially the teacher bit because its a really common thing trans kids go through to be harassed more by staff than students, but i’ve never actually seen it be depicted before… but i’ll also say, im really not easy to upset and almost impossible to offend when it comes to trans stuff. i work as an openly trans person in the media and my skin is very thick, 17 year old me who was experiencing it real-time would have probably been shaken up a bit.

that said, like i discussed in my other post about this, realism doesn’t automatically equal good storytelling! so what is good storytelling?

big subject obviously, but rn i’m gonna define it as a consistency of theme, tone, and character. (its also how well you tie all those things up at the end but i wont comment on that because… druck ain’t finished yet and we need to remember that!) plus, of course, it’s just… whether you like it? which is completely subjective, and something i can only comment on for myself!

so i think the main issue here is that people expect things from druck it never promised them, and from the very beginning was never going to be.

take the perspective issue for example, which effects tone & character immensely. i’ve seen numerous complaints that the show isn’t depicting the trans issues from an internal perspective. which is interesting, since from the very start, we’ve known that was the case. we knew it was matteo’s season, and we knew how very, very closely skam shows follow their protagonists. everything is from their perspective. so i knew it was never gonna be about trans issues from a trans perspective because david was not the main character, he’s the love interest. that was evident from day one ya’ll it’s how the show is structured. and that is Not Inherently A Bad Thing, it’s just not what some of you wanted.

however… druck has stretched the limits of perspective more than any other version. the texts, for instance, are not just the main’s, and do a lot for fleshing out the background characters. also (and this is thematically important) it showed the way outing / spreading of rumours actually happens irl. re-watching the last clip i noticed that they leave matteo’s POV for a second, and “switch” to david as he’s coming down the stairs, realising what’s happening. not so much as to break the consistency of the show’s structure, but enough to make the audience really understand the gravity of what’s happening. it’s done really fluidly and i thought it was a genius way to both keep it matteo’s story, but also, give that moment a much needed trans perspective, because i really don’t think all that ringing distortion sound was matteo’s panic. 

and really, i just don’t think a trans person needs to be the main character of the show for it to be good representation. i think they have done an exceptional job of not tokenizing david by making sure to establish his whole character & his relationship with matteo before his trans identity was confirmed on the show, in the exact same way they do with the other evens and their mental illnesses in every other version. and honestly, when it comes to trans men, there’s very little media stereotypes or negative tropes that they could have conformed to because there’s not enough representation yet for those to have actually formed. like, we know druck won’t kill david off, and i don’t really know any other tropes that exists for trans men in storytelling at the moment. a lot of the show is covering new ground subject wise, they don’t have a script to follow, so some minor blunders are to be expected.

over all, the fandom jumps the gun every damn time. the show decides to have conflict or deal with a social problem and everyone looses it, as if that’s not been the entire ethos of skam since the OG. skam / druck is a teen show that deals with identity issues. every season picks topics to educate on through the story, and they do it with a lot of care and research.that’s the whole deal, it’s why the show exists, fucking of course they aren’t going to brush over trans issues, it amazes me that people thought they would, and that there would be no conflict and it’d play out like fanfiction fluff. here’s another really good post about it.

so obviously, this season is about about being gay and being trans, but specifically about outing, and has stressed this theme all the way through, way more than any other version. so friday’s clip is what i’d call a natural culmination of theme and narrative. in terms of the queer experience, and the trans experience, i think it was a very good idea to take on coming out / outing as a central thematic and narrative through-line, because it’s one of the central things gay and trans people have in common. and then analyzing them both in comparison and contrast throughout the story, really works and makes for good fucking writing, pacing and - yup, you guessed it - consistency.

i find the choice to situate a trans man as the love interest, and therefore, an object of desire, incredibly subversive. and though yes, stories with trans protagonists are lacking, literally any form of story where trans people exist is lacking, and the creators of druck wanting to tell a story about what it means to love & be in a relationship with a trans person is just as important a story to tell as any other, and complaining about what “type” of trans story is more important to tell first, or which aspect of trans existence to highlight more, is ridiculous. at the end of the day, one story cannot cover everything, and the writers had to make choices as to where their focus would lie. and there’s literally nothing wrong with their specific choices in subject matter (being trans in the context of relationship & outing, mainly), other than personal preference.

so like i said in my previous post: wanting a comfort show where trans characters exist, but the trans experience is not plot-relevant, is fine & cool. i really want that too, but not here. getting angry or upset that druck did… exactly what skam shows do… is stupid. and then turning around and blaming your dislike, which is born out of judging a show by the wrong genre standards, on “bad writing”, is just plain wrong. this show is amazingly produced. just… c’mon guys. chill.

(also @ every weird cis person in the tag giving fuckin condolences & saying their askbox is open if someone needs to talk…… stop. literally nobody asked. its so weird. we didn’t put a call out for you to be upset on our behalf. its just a tv show. like its super important rep for us… but its also just a tv show that people can just not watch if its not your cup of tea.)

tl;dr the friday clip was fucking good and made sense because druck is well written, acted, researched and produced, is really not transphobic (in fact i’d say it’s pretty subversive), and it’s also not the creators fault when you’re disappointed by the direction taken in a show that was crystal clear what direction it was headed into!

[arianatheangel-girl]

My Feelings on the current Jeff Goldblum situation. (Or, The Problem with MeToo and Nicole Cliffe).

Some of you probably know that there’s rumors going around that Jeff Goldblum is going to be the next subject of the MeToo movement. Thus far, the rumors seem to mostly be restricted to Twitter, specifically a single thread; as of today, I can’t find any legitimate news sites covering the story, only a few Reddit and blog posts.

It’s not even clear what it is he’s being accused of. Most of the tweets on the thread were second or third hand gossip, and involved him being flirtatious and sometimes touchy-feely with people; something we already knew about him. 

The Twitter thread in question was started by a woman named Nicole Cliffe, a journalist from Utah who writes for Slate magazine. She claims Jeff is a creep and a sexual predator, and that she’s had many people tell her via email they’ve had creepy experiences with Jeff. She also claims she has serious dirt on him. Thus far, however, she has not disclosed what this is, nor has she provided any actual proof or evidence of him being a sexual predator.

(And no, as much as you want to argue the opposite, Tweets and Twitter threads are not evidence. Anyone can make those and it’s impossible in many cases to fact-check them.)

She also has a penchant for making false accusations in order to make herself relevant and put her name in the news. There are two major examples of this that I can find. One is that she spread a rumor about the British royal family back in 2018 without fact-checking which caused enough backlash for her to quit Twitter for a while. You can read about it here:

https://stylecaster.com/prince-william-conspired-against-meghan-markle/

The second, and probably most egregious example, is her smear campaign against a man named Jesse Singal, a writer for The Atlantic. Much like these current Jeff Goldblum tweets, she posted that he was transphobic and “obsessed” with trans women to the point of stalking them via DMs and such. 

Quite a juicy tabloid story, except NONE OF IT WAS TRUE. 

This is a snippet from an article Jesse wrote about his experiences with her. I will post the article link below.

“These tweets rang a bell for me. The last time I saw Cliffe tweet excitedly that she had heard from many of the victims of a man’s creepy behavior, the allegedly creepy man in question was, well, me. This happened in 2018, when, outraged at my Atlantic article on youth gender dysphoria, Cliffe blasted out a completely false and potentially career-ending rumor about me without bothering to do one iota of verification. She then quietly deleted the most attention-getting tweet, never revisiting the matter, explaining, or apologizing...Cliffe is not a moral or a trustworthy person.”

Not exactly someone I’d trust to be telling the truth either, Jesse. Here’s his story if you want to read it: https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/nicole-cliffe-is-a-poor-choice-of

As to whether Jeff Goldblum is guilty or not, I cannot say. I don’t have enough information to make an informed decision. According to one of my friends, however, he has a pending restraining order on Nicole Cliffe for harassing him. This is unconfirmed, as I cannot find any information about this at the moment, but it would not surprise me considering her track record.

For now, though, until more substantial evidence comes out or there is some legal action against him, I will still continue to like him and to watch his work. I’m not going to “cancel” him because of one thread of completely unsubstantiated rumors on Twitter.

In the end, all I can say is this: Don’t instantly believe negative Internet rumors. Don’t believe the worst about someone when they’ve done nothing to deserve it. Don’t rush to judgment without facts.

[eruthiawenluin]

Probably because trans exclusionary radical feminism is an ideology and not a state of being ?? You don’t morph into a gay man just because you reblog from one. But you can accept ideas when you reblog them. Science might be a hard thing for you to grasp, but your brain stores information.

I so love getting vagued (/Sarcasm), but it’s much better than being liked or tolerated by this bunch. Obviously you think trans exclusionary radical feminism isn’t transphobic, so you can just admit you’re a terf, right??? No problem???

First of all, this shit could’ve just not picked up my post to begin with. But she’s a terf and they’re a pushy, conservative bunch. It’s sad but I’ve met a few Republican lesbians in my lifetime, and that’s what this is. Someone who’s so intent on bringing down another minority, she’s fine with damning herself and others along the way. That’s how Trump got almost as many votes as Hillary— he appealed to the hatred of EVERY group, so that even hated minorities would be pulled in by their hate of others. We all saw it happen. Trump assaulted women, but he got 53% of white women’s vote. We saw white gay men campaigning for him, and antisemitism at a Chicago women’s march (squints at OP’s name).

Also, love how she’s saying trans and nb is white and westernized (as if a couple sjw-sounding phrases are going to change the root of the argument) when the strict gender binary that’s currently enforced in westernized countries is… western. And specifically western, because not a lot of places even had these ideals of what’s attractive in women and attractive in men. Ever notice how having a lot of hair is so hated here, or girls being big? And I mean, a shitload of non-white cultures have more than 2 genders and trans people, and it’s been recorded for thousands of years. And it’s white people who have tried to erase that history. But sure, sure, it’s all white people who are trans or nb, even though it’s western cultures who historically oppress them, and then spread it everywhere else like a disease (which they spread a whole lot of, too). Real-life people are a much better sample size than whatever you’re getting! Your blog has selfies of a random trans girl who’s apparently, in your eyes, not performing femininity well enough to “count,” and you say “they all look like this.” Which is a lot to unpack, for someone who “cares” about women and sexism. And don’t get me wrong, I’m sure you have actually seen a lot of the diverse and beautiful trans people in the collective of Tumblr, and you chose one who doesn’t adhere to your idea of femininity enough because you needed easy pickings to justify your gross agenda! I get it, I do. It’s just that you literally have no positive beliefs besides women’s sexual freedom, and even then it’s not about freedom, it’s about exclusion. So it’s safe to say that although, like I said, straight skinny people are going to get the spotlight, the community is much more diverse than what you’re going to see on tv or wherever you get your ideas from. And you can’t use cishets’ idea of what a trans person should be to claim that’s what all trans people are.

Implying that I’m a non-gay policing gay folks in your response earlier is kinda funny, too. I’m not gay enough, apparently, even though I’m afab, even if I’m using they/them! The “biological males” aren’t gay enough, because to you, everyone’s self is based on what role they play in reproduction. You’re acting on the idea that hetero is the default, and you don’t even know it! I don’t like to throw the word pathetic around buuuuut. Well, when you get this swept into an ideology that it becomes your whole identity, you’re lost.

Anyways, don’t give her or any of these other terfs any attention, don’t respond, it just gives them more room to talk. I responded and I just got more of her piss on my post. Just block, vague, inform, and move on. She can have fun living in a bubble, but I’m not having any sort of conversation with her. Instead, you should look at this post and ask yourself if you’re doing any of these things, and how you can improve.

Example:

She reblogs things from radfems, you can blacklist the tag to make sure you don’t do that. Even if you don’t know it, you might be taking in their rhetoric.

You can also make sure you’re not being pulled in by anything like “Well, trans/nb people are actually oppressing X group” like she does here regarding poc, women, and lesbians. Alternatively, blaming that group for the actions of conservative Christians. (“They’re the reason conservatives think sexuality is a choice!” That kind of thing.)

Be wary of dogwhistles, such as reference to biological sex, unnecessary use of male/female (especially paired with homosexual, which they use to emphasize the sex bit), shifty opinions on what gender is, calling people homophobes without stating why that is (the “homophobe” is probably trans or anti-terf), and generally speaking on everyone’s behalf.

Watch for argumentative tactics recycled from your typical right-wingers, like rephrasing any debate into the kind of language above^, not addressing the questions and instead moving on to dismissal, dogpiling, hints at any kind of exclusionism, etc. Sometimes people don’t want to give away what they are, they just want their opinions to spread. A lot of people who are exclusionary of bi, ace, pan, and nb people end up becoming terfs.

Feel free to add on.

Just because they use leftist language doesn’t mean that what they’re advocating is leftist. There are wolves in sheep’s clothing.

[wetwareproblem]

@diagnosis-prognosis-psychosis​ Frankly this is taking up way too much real estate on my blog so... this is what you get.

I was drafting an extremely lengthy point-by-point response to this, explaining all of the many, many, many, many things you misunderstand about every religion other than your particular flavour of Xianity, and Judaism in particular. I sunk probably an hour into it.

Then I got to your point 4.

4. You’re right, I am. My faith demands that I find a model of Judaism that fits Christian teachings, and that model is the model that Christ and his apostles preached. That is what my faith considers the true model of Judaism - a model wherein evangelism was only prohibited by the first covenant due to the circumstances of Israel at the time.

That’s... that’s a show-stopper on the religious-education front.

You are never going to find that model, because it doesn’t exist. There is no “version of Judaism” preached by the followers of Oily Josh, because that religion is Xianity. Judaism is, in fact, its own distinct entity with its own distinct history. A history that includes over a millenium of Xian evangelists being the first step toward murdering us.

So yeah. We take a dim view of evangelism.

I’m done talking religion with you; you are just too completely, willfully ignorant to even make sense of it anyway.

That leaves us with the rather disturbing politics you’ve been fed.

9a. You don’t seem to be taking the cute snarky hints, so let me be explicit: The things you are saying? Are made up by racists.

Kid, I have lived over twice as long as you. This means, among other things, I’ve got way more life experience than you. Don’t give me that “if you lived in a small town you’d know” bullshit. I have lived in many places in my time, from cities of millions to a community that still numbers less than 100 people total.

The divide you’re painting does not exist. There are urban communities (and let me come out and say outright what you keep dancing around: communities of coolour) that are tight-knit and vibrant. There are rural “communities” in name only, stretches of road where you might see your neighbours once every couple of months and never know their names.

You have been fed a racist myth, kid. I’m sorry.

9b. [citation needed]

9c. You’re about ten seconds from launching into a diatribe, I can tell. But... riddle me this: 

You claim government is evil.

You claim government is beholden to corporations.

You claim corporations are not evil.

How are corporations not responsible for what their minions do?

9d. No. No it is not. You see, unlike you, I lived through the 90s. I personally witnessed the way “urban” was used in that time. Remind me, when was he apprehended again?

You are talking racially-tinged politics whether you know it or not.

9e. “I never defended their actions, I just said they’re not a problem and we shouldn’t really do anything about them.” Now who’s playing semantics? What you are doing provides cover for their actions because - get this! - if we don’t do anything about them THEY ARE FREE TO FUCKING ACT.

Re the FBI stuff: See point 9b.

Kid, the alt-right literally marched under the slogan “Jews will not replace us” before murdering someone I would have been proud to call a comrade. They routinely talk about how they want to kill us all off, threaten us, beat us, and shoot up synagogues.

So yes. The alt-right do, in fact, see me as Them. They see me as a traitor and collaborator, and they have shown that at least some of them are ready to kill over it.

Have you ever heard your sources talking about ZOG? (If not, please remember this when it happens. Because it will happen.) What that refers to is the “zionist-occupied government,” a common belief in alt-right circles that Jews have infiltrated the government and are the reason it is bad. They will never ally with me against the evil government, because they think I’m the reason the government is evil.

“Is one point of difference enough to condemn your greatest ally against-” When that “one point of difference” is whether I and people like me should be alive or not, then yes, that is enough to condemn anybody who differs from me on that point as an enemy and a would-be murderer.

The rest of that paragraph is racist bullshit that somebody fed you because if you thought that Black people were the cause of everything bad you wouldn’t notice while they picked your pockets. I’m sorry this happened to you, but now you have an opportunity to do better - to show righteousness.\

I will not engage further with racist diatribes, and they will not get reblogged here because there’s no way I’m giving them a wider audience.

10a. So... where are all of the people shooting up white churches in the name of nonwhite people? Have you got a list of 100 people murdered by antifa? ‘Cause... I was able to find that kind of evidence of a problem on the alt-right side in like 30 seconds tops, and frankly I know it’s being awfully conservative with that body count.

One side in this debate has a list of murderers and gunmen who were specifically motivated by common ideology. The other does not.

Why are you pretending these are equal? Why is it important to you to see “murderers” and “not murderers” as the same?

I don’t care about political registration. That’s one of those clever distortions fed to you by people who want to feed you a story. What I care about is actual motivation, as demonstrated in statements preceding these incidents, documents left by the people, the people themselves when they’re around after the fact, things they said and did while attacking people, etc.

You know, the things that show what their reason for resorting to violence was.

That strikes me as a little more important than a piece of paperwork that they had to fill out once upon a time because your political system is deeply weird.

🚩: Saying that having the “wrong” hormone levels for your gender is bad is something that will always splash on trans people, who literally always naturally have the “wrong” hormone levels for our gender. So yeah. Transphobic. Saying that abnormal hormone levels mean you are irrational and should not be listened to is wildly transphobic.

🚩: See the bolded line in point 9e.

11. I don’t care what your original motivation was for repeating right wing myths. I care that:

You’re repeating right-wing myths as facts, and You are doing so specifically to cover up for the actions of Nazis. Oh, and also: In doing so, you are playing into very old antisemitic conspiracy theories. Eventually, the people you’re listening to are going to use your belief in this myth to convince you that actually Jews are just oppressing ourselves.

Yes, it sounds ridiculous when I put it that way. But there is a direct path from A to B that these people use all the time. I’d lay it out here but frankly I’m not sure you won’t believe it because you are in just that vulnerable and ignorant a position.

I desperately hope you find more honest and less manipulative sources before it’s too late. But... I’ve seen enough kids like you that I’m very, very worried you won’t. Hell, TBH I’m not sure it’s not too late already.

This is an important lesson: It doesn’t matter whether you intended to say bigoted things or not. You did say bigoted things, and now you need to own that. You screwed up; fix the mistake.

You have a model of what you think about Jews, but... I’m afraid that model has some holes in it.

If you don’t think less of us, why do you think that we - people who live and breathe Judaism every single day - know less about it than you, an outsider who literally only knows what other outsiders have told you? Do you think we’re that ignorant of our own history, customs, and culture? Or do you think that you’re just naturally that much more knowledgeable than everybody about everything?

You might not hate us. But you’re spreading falsehoods that have a very ugly and violent history, and that put us in danger. If you don’t hate us, if you don’t want us endangered, that should concern you.

Your perspective is coloured by your faith - and that faith, unfortunately, is stained with a history and undercurrent of bigotry and harm toward Jews. That’s not saying it’s irreparable, but you have to understand that that context is there and it shapes interactions between our cultures. Some of the remnants of that historical bigotry are still there. Some of the less obvious forms of it are still routinely practiced. I don’t expect you to know and recognize all of this - how could you? It doesn’t affect you, after all! - but please, please show us enough kindness to listen when we talk about how it affects us.

[saturniidicks]

Here’s my hot take: You can hate Lanque and not be transphobic and hate him for more than just not meeting expectations. Based on his troll call I was getting major Damien Bloodmarch vibes and I was expecting a carbon copy, but I was hoping for some diversity (yes there’s femme trans men, and femme cis men, but it’s kinda bad when most trans men are represented as feminine, because that implies they can only be seen as feminine. Diversity is needed so everyone can have someone to relate to). I’m not mad at him for really blowing away that expectation, I’m mad at him for making light of seriously harmful stereotypes in a purposefully offensive and unapologetic way, and not actually being trans representation. Here’s my TED talk:

The SFW route is just a major slap to the face. It feeds into the whole soft feminine trans boy stereotype, showing a cute flower crown boy, in tune with his emotions and artistic side, treading incredibly carefully to respect triggers, remaining loving and kind... It’s all so purposely sterile to mock safe spaces, people who fit that stereotype, and the player for choosing the route. It’s fine for people to fit the stereotype, but it’s rude to mock it like this and force it onto all trans men.

The NSFW route is the one I have the most major problems with. Feminizing trans men is just straight up transphobic, but presenting a trans man as a sexual predator (I’m not talking about the consensual sex with MC, though he did  coerce them into it. He unconsentually groped Lynera when hugging her) is harmful beyond belief. Pinning trans people as sexual deviants and predators has been a long time transphobic strategy to keep trans people out of bathrooms, and further spreading the idea that they are dangerous people. This stereotype being portrayed in a trans character for the sake of political commentary and to shock and offend players is outright wrong and I refuse to excuse it. Probably the most offensive part of all to me was the fact there was no concrete evidence he was trans outside of the tweets and posts. No talks about how transitioning on Alterina works, if there’s transphobia, how Lanque experiences dysphoria with an alien body, what ways there are to medically transition, how he copes with dysphoria is romantic/sexual situations...  most notably NO TOP SURGERY SCARS. I’ve seen the debate about advanced Alternian sciences but without any other mentions to anything else regarding being trans... there’s no excuses, it’s just lazy representation. There was so many cool possibilities to learn more about troll anatomy and gender identity, but it was totally ignored, and it’s incredibly lazy and comes off as pandering in the end.

The creators have seemed to take pride in the fact that Lanque is offensive, and like to laugh at fans for being excited about him. If more thought was put into Lanque making a commentary on the SJW and Anti-SJW culture regarding trans people, I’d listen, but the creators are showing a bias towards shock value over actual opinions. There wasn’t any effort put forth to even show anything about being trans outside of mocking sigma around being trans, and I don’t know if it comes from a fear of misrepresentation or just outright laziness, but it should be critiqued nonetheless. 

Let me just end with this, evil/morally dubious LGBT representation is a great avenue I wish more creators were willing to go down. It’s one not explored nearly enough, and I think that’s to do with the fear of them being LGBT relating to why they are evil, which would be offensive by nature. I’d like to see more LGBT villains, but Lanque is not a good example of what this trope could look like. He’s made to mock and he’s loaded with harmful stereotypes. As a queer trans man, I was excited to see another character I could relate to, but the creators chose to ridicule me for it.

[postpunkpontypandyphantomthief]

6th Comedy Monologue

“So folks, that whole Brexit rubbish is finally over isn’t it?”

“I know, some of us could see it coming and Teresa May looks like the spitting image

of the stepmother from Cinderella

how come nobody has noticed that yet?

we all have politicians we don’t like don’t we?

at times like this, I have to remind myself Teresa May is a very well liked woman

but then I remember back in the day Margaret Thatcher was also a very well liked woman

don’t you think she and Teresa may are quite similar?

well this is how she’d treat a political problem

*attempts impersonation*

“what’s that? ok men I did you to do this and then this and then this and this”

whereas Teresa may would handle the situation like…

*attempts impersonation*

what’s this? oh leave it for a few months

but the main thing is they both hate poor people so who cares what they think

I actually sort of understand why people like Jeremy Corbyn but I had written that previous gag back in late June of last year, speaking of outdated gags

Pirates were the communists and socialists of the 17th century

they wanted money, disagreed with colonialism and didn’t care what the government thought of them

like with communists they were accepting and inclusive but they wanted gold

the pirates accepted many on their ship they allowed homosexuality, they allowed women in strong roles  there were great times had on the high seas

even with the loot, they got they’d share it evenly what other power was involved with being inclusive with most things except money Oh Yeah! the communists

Yes, Yes we’ll handle it we’ll accept you but give us all your money

communism is a good concept but in the end, people get greedy for the money

like with pirates

we’ll accept you matey but give us some gold

however they didn’t agree about the government, they had their own independent pirate crews and disagreed with colonialism and capitalism

kind of like some of us, I think

we criticize politics, we like to party and we accept most people except colonialists …and capitalists...

Oh well, at least there’s been good music with Marina and the diamonds, Ariana Grande and the 1975

We, humans, love music

which makes me think about bands related to Homosapians

in the 60s we had the Monkees good band good name

and now we have Arctic Monkeys, Gorillaz, Rang a Tang and Apes

what about the lesser known homosapian types

Chimpanzees and Baboons

if music existed in Planet of the Apes

the Kate Bush hit Babooshka would be about a

monkey looking for love after getting his heart broken seeing his wife cheat on him with an older mandrill

only to fall in love again with who he’d call his baboonska

Animals are interesting creatures whether they are made of glass, made of 1960s haircuts or made of the first songs of a math rock band

Another good thing about music and animals is that Roger Taylor is going to help us save the bees

Thinking bee! Thinking queen! thinking bee! Thinking queen!

Speaking of which there’s been a whole glam rock/synthpop revival going on

And I love that

although as a kid I watched media from all sorts of different decades

While they watched Jersey Shore and Love Island I was watching Disney and CBBC sitcoms mixed with Japanese cartoons and shows from years before like Jem and the holograms, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and the original my little pony series.

I would also watch funnybones, the original noody series from a VHS I “borrowed” from my neighbours, as well as the Muppet show and some classic cinema.

I think it’s amazing that this revival is happening it’s like the 60s,70s,80s,90s and early 2000s are all going on at the same time.

Revolutionary anarchic protests, Androgynous rockers, Neon colours, post-punk indie shows, peculiar fashion trends and reality shows as well as the cybernetic future beyond

But I’m also cold and angry about how this is happening because on the other hand, there are things carried over from previous decades that shouldn’t still be around...fascists in positions of power, nonces in the entertainment industry, Threat of a nuclear war, low economy, Jamie Oliver, Piers Morgan, Death, Pollution,Misogyny,Misandry,Sexism,Racism and White Supremacy

I could list more, but I can’t think at the moment I’m focusing on my work while morons on Twitter and Tumblr are yabbering on about vegan sausage rolls.

I’ve never tried Greggs before but I’m sure the vegans and vegetarians are happy that a mainstream chain like Greggs has made a product catered specifically for them, whereas before if you asked for a “vegan option” at a restaurant the waiter would scratch their neck.

However not all restaurants are like this,having to work overtime dealing with angry parents,screaming children and the odd nazi at Mcdonalds is not an easy task,yet so many waiters and workers across the world are able to somehow keep those businesses afloat,you guys, girls and comrades don’t get enough credit,you should be paid more,no wonder so many mainstream restaurants are having strikes or running out of food and people are either going to more independently funded places or ordering online to get their daily dose of fast fried convenience.

and while I would be interested in trying a vegetarian diet,It would be hard for me to give up eating chicken that quickly but I don’t really eat meat that often,and before you say anything as long as cannibals don’t use their choice of food in a dangerous way they’re ok with me, it’s no different to when our prehistoric ancestors had to hunt to find food in order to survive,some people still have to do that,it’s sad...it really is,while Christianity isn’t something I believe in anymore, it did say in the bible that Jesus shared his bread and food with his people,and I think some of us should start doing that,and if you already do whether it’s a snack you have or leaving out leftover food from your side takeaway business, that’s brilliant your making more people happy and your allowing more people to enjoy food and to have access to that basic human necessity that we all should be able to have to access to.

Sharing is another primary school lesson it feels like half of humanity has forgotten about outside of basic decency and kindness, but I’m probably not the one to talk about that since I was called “Rude” for most of my life.

there’s a big difference between telling someone they’re a plonker and making someone more aware of how they can improve themselves as a person.

Most of us all have flaws, most of us have had toxic moments,

we’ve all at times had moments where we’ve said something wrong that we didn’t mean,

or times where our cowardliness has accidentally caused misunderstandings and drama

or times where we didn’t intend to sound hurtful but that’s how it came across, or times where we’ve blindly followed toxic people, imitating their actions without meaning to or just generally times where we’ve been ignorant little eijjits.

Even people some would say were flawless had flaws or problematic aspects about them

David Bowie wasn’t too nice to his wife Angie in later years, Graham Lineman and Robert Webb are transphobic, Rowan Atkinson supports Boris Johnson’s “so-called” jokes and Ricky Gervais doesn’t like hearing people with different opinions than him.

Overthinking however can exaggerate this, overthinking can take that one time you were a bit rude as a child and that problematic “fandom” phase you had as a preteen and make you feel like your worst person in the world.

Your not, but most of us have had moments,there’s also the “not like other girls/boys phase” sometimes it’s just a light-hearted comparison drawing or blog post taken out of context other times it’s the grown-up equivalent of saying “I like this thing over your other thing that means I’m better than you”

Considering my at times cold thoughts it’s weird that I’m the person of all people telling you this

It’s perfectly ok to be prideful and narcissistic just don’t be so arrogant that you forget about your morals and the people that you're close to, but if at times because of mental health you question your levels of empathy, sympathy and compassion that’s ok too, your voices deserve to be heard, and there is help available you can find it through helplines, organizations or even your own comrades.

Outside of all the twits in this horrid fishbowl of a world, there are also millions of very kind nice people, I don’t know where I’d be now without my comrades

The offline pals who are like my sunshine because they brighten up my day,the old secondary school friends that made me feel less alone,the online people who I can vent to, converse with and joke with,the bloggers from years ago that I still sometimes keep in touch with and the creators who through their work in Media, Theatre and the Arts were able to encourage me to keep going, keep working, keep creating.

I think your all lovely and beautiful and creative human beings, no matter what identity you are, what music genre you listen to or what topping you prefer on your pizza

I will most likely adore you and if I haven’t it’s probably because I haven’t met you yet

You are one biscuit of cells, on this fishbowl planet, your mind is a land of wonder and your body is the garden surrounding it, take care of yourself like how you take care of your garden, your pets or the fictional characters you write about.

Your future might not be the future you expect, but it’s one you’ll enjoy.

if you are doing something you love which harms nobody, be as happy and passionate about it as you like

you are a person who deserves the world

Don’t push yourself too hard, if you know you’re doing a good job keep at it, don’t stress yourself too hard, but remember not to procrastinate, your mental health is important, some people might not understand all of the issues you’re going through, but you can make it out alive.

You're, not a number or statistic you're a person, your a beautiful, Kind, incredible, wise person

spread some love and don’t forget what the late Freddie Mercury said,

Keep yourself Alive!

[mysteriorockanova]

just had some thoughts on the situation between disney and the florida government after reading half of this dumb article about it (cw: it’s pretty transphobic, and tries to excuse away the desantis administration’s blatant bigotry). i’ll be the first to admit, i don’t know everything about the situation, but i just had a couple things i wanted to say about it.

like i said, i don’t know everything about this, but it seems like florida republicans are basically pissed off that disney stopped giving them donations? which is why i think it’s so weird that the article tries to frame this as “disney should stay out of politics >:-(”. like, is that supposed to mean that they’re meddling in politics by NOT giving money to the party? and they have to stay out of politics by giving them money again? idgi..

i don’t think disney are great heroes fighting for lgbt rights, or w/e. they’ve done a lot over the years to promote so-called “traditional family values”, including the mentioned campaign donations to republicans (who didn’t just suddenly become transphobic and homophobic out of nowhere). and it’s true that corporate meddling in politics should be opposed, but the “right populist” framing that the problem is “woke corporations” completely fails to address the real problem. tbh, i think it’s probably a good idea to tax disney more and put restrictions on how much land they can develop or own or w/e. i also think their property should be expropriated and redistributed, for that matter. but i have to say, it’s weird as hell to say the reason we should do that is because disney “went woke” and isn’t homophobic enough any more.

this is kind of the typical thing with so-called “populists”, where they might occasionally say something halfway anti-corporate or pro-worker, but for completely irrational and bigoted reasons. i want to emphasize, you really DON’T have to hand it to desantis here. if this is simply a case where he’s punishing disney for woke crimes, then that’s already dumb as hell (no need to elaborate). if he thought it would be a good idea to tax disney so his government would have more revenue to function, but knew that his base would think that’s communism so he threw in the bigoted culture war stuff to make it go down easier, then that’s also bad, because that’s spreading the message that the problem isn’t capitalism but “woke capital”.

when people on the left bring up race, or gender, or sexuality, they’re often told that if they really wanted to help working people then they shouldn’t be distracted by “the culture war” or “identity politics”, but a lot of people who claim that they’re above the culture war are really just reactionary (or at least they seem that way to me. sorry!). there are a million valid reasons to be critical of disney, but if somebody says the main problem with them is that they’re “too woke”, i’d have to say THEY are the one being distracted from the real issues.

it always bugs me when tucker carlson or jd vance or whoever say something about “woke corporations” and people are like “well, they’re partly right..” partly right? maybe.. but still mostly wrong. basically, i think talking about “woke capital” is kind of like “crony capitalism”, in that they can both be used to acknowledge actual problems in capitalist society, but then say that the problem isn’t capitalism itself, but only these particular bad actors in the system. this obfuscates the actual problems and impedes the development of class consciousness, so i think the “woke capital” framing should be rejected. wokeness isn’t the problem at all.

sorry if this was kind of rambly and repetitive or if i haven’t explained myself well, but i doubt anybody even read this anyway, lol

[bluewavenewwave]

Part of being an ally is forming your own opinions.

I've seen a lot of people get questions either in their inbox or in their curious cat messages about certain social/political issues and their answers will be "I'm not part of that community, so I can't say". For instance, a trans person will ask a question prefacing that they are trans, give their opinion, and then ask the other person for theirs, and the answer they will get back is "I'm not trans, so I can't say". 

The better way for allies to answer these kinds of questions would be to preface by saying: "I'm not trans (or part of the community in which is being asked about), so I have not had the same experiences.” Acknowledge the other person's views if they have stated them, then you can say "please correct me if I'm wrong" if you want to before giving your opinion, then “here's what I think/here's my take” and then give your opinion. You should give your opinion because that's what they are asking of you. 

If it's truly something you do not know enough about, you can say that you don't know enough about the issue, and you're not as educated as you would like to be, and state that you'll come back to it after educating yourself (if you plan on educating yourself on the issue, which, as an ally, you should) or just educate yourself first and then answer the question.

And if you're not going to respond in one of those two ways, you just shouldn't answer/post the question.

Saying “I'm not part of X community, so I can't answer that question/I don't get a say” takes the pressure off of you (the ally) and puts it back on the community who already has the pressure on them. 

Saying “I'm not part of the community, so I don't get a say” feels like an excuse to not get involved in said issues; i.e. not calling out people who are being transphobic/ homophobic, etc. or actively choosing to not educate yourself or spread awareness because you're not part of the community and it's not your problem. It feels like you're saying “I'm not part of this community, this person's community/issues make me uncomfortable, so I'm going to stay out of it."

If a trans person is asking a cis person a question on trans issues, they want to know the cis person's opinion. They want to know a wider range of opinions on these issues. They are trans and can provide a trans opinion to the discussion, but they're not cis and cannot provide a cis opinion, so when they ask a cis person for their opinion, they expect an answer. 

When someone asks for your opinion it's because they want to know your opinion. This is obviously not the same thing as trans people talking about trans issues with other trans people and then a cis person interjects with their unsolicited, unprovoked cis opinion. 

Sometimes not answering comes across as "I don't want to be a part of your problems, I'm going to stay out of it" and it seems like you don't care enough about these communities and these issues to get involved. 

It sounds like you're saying "that's your problem, figure it out yourself" and it doesn't feel like I have your support. It feels like you're trying to get away from helping/supporting me. 

If I ask a question and then nobody answers, I'm left just as confused as I was before I asked. Nobody helped me, and I wanted help. 

Sometimes it feels like the question is being brushed off as if it’s not even important. But I’m sure it’s important to the person who’s asking the question. 

Sometimes it feels like someone asks "should trans people have equal rights" then get in response, "sorry I'm not trans, so I don't get a say". Like, no, you do get a say. Hopefully your answer is yes, trans people should have equal rights, and as an ally, it probably is. When you vote, you are giving your opinion on other communities' issues, so people do expect you to answer their questions about their communities' issues when you are asked. 

Obviously white people shouldn't be telling poc what is and isn't racist (example below**), and men shouldn't be telling women what is and is not misogynistic (example below*) and cishet people shouldn't be telling queer people what is and is not homophobic or transphobic, but if someone from a certain community asks someone who has defined themself as an ally a question about a certain issue they are facing, they do not want to get an answer of "I'm not part of that community, so I can't say". It just isn't helpful.

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* For example (men shouldn't be telling women what is and is not misogynistic) 

During the Olympics, I was with a group of people. One was a man, the rest of the group were women. The man brought up trans women competing in women's sports and how it was unfair to women, it was misogynistic, it was an attack on women, and women need to stand up and speak out against it. Almost every woman in the group said that it isn't misogynistic, that trans women are actually at a disadvantage to cis women because their estrogen levels are higher than cis women, and that trans women have every right to compete in women's sports. The man doubled down, saying that men and women are born with different bodies and that men have the athletic advantage (which isn't even true). To which the women continued to try to explain to him that the only real advantage men have athletically comes from hormone differences, which after taking HRT and meeting athletic requirements, the advantage is already long gone and there is no issue with trans women competing in women's sports. Again the women reiterated that trans women competing in women's sports is not misogynistic and not an attack on women and there is nothing for women to speak out against, as we all thought it was a good thing that there were trans athletes competing at the Olympic level. Of course the man (who is ironically the most misogynistic person I have ever met) played the victim and said how hurt he was that we told him that his attempts at feminism were actually far more misogynistic than what he had tried to pass off as misogynistic.  

This was an example of a man trying to tell women what is and is not misogynistic and actually trying to compel women to fight back against a real win for women. This was also an unprovoked comment, no woman had asked him his opinion on feminism, trans women, or women's sports. He was trying to push his views and use feminism as an excuse to be openly transphobic. In this case, he was speaking over the actual group whose issues were in question, and not listening to them when they told him he was not being helpful.

** For example (white people shouldn't be telling poc what is and isn't racist)

One time, the same man from the above example, was having a conversation with some of his friends about the Redskins changing their name to the Washington Football Team. He said how the Redskins logo had been the image of a real person, not just a generalized caricature, and he said (condescendingly) “Well I think that’s racist” to remove the image of a real person. The issue was not whether the Washington logo was drawn in a mocking/racist way, or if it depicted a real person or a fictional person, the issue was that the Washington team was using a person’s race/ethnicity/culture as a mascot/costume, and using a derogatory term for their team name. As this man is not part of that race/ethnicity/culture/heritage, he cannot decide what is and is not racist to them. He can’t say something is racist when that group is saying it isn't. He cannot say something that that group is saying is racist isn't just because he likes football and doesn't want his team name/mascot to change. In this case, again, he was speaking over the actual group whose issues were in question.

Obviously, these two examples are not the kind of giving your input that I had previously described.

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Overall, the point is that part of being an ally is educating yourself on issues that the community you are an ally to is facing, and forming your own opinions so that you can contribute to discussions when you are called upon to do so. As an ally you often have a louder voice or bigger platform to spread awareness /take a stand than the people who are part of the community that you are an ally to. Often when people of a certain community are asking for your opinion,  they are asking for your help to spread awareness of their communities' issues and be a loud voice and platform to help them. Refusing to contribute to discussions when called upon to do so is to turn your back on your role as an ally. Yes, allies should first and foremost uplift the voices of people who are part of the community and help put the attention on people who are trying to share their own experiences, but allies also need to be educated and be ready to contribute to said discussions when they are asked for their input.

Being an ally is an active role, not a passive one. It's an action, not a title.