#something something my job on the leftist commune would just be to study whatever i wanted

[demoisverysexy]

An Open Letter to the Person who Blocked Me for Being Mormon

For context:

If you’re reading this, I hope it finds you well.

This letter is mostly for me, so I can get my feelings out. I’ve already talked about this with a few of my friends, and I’m feeling better than I was than when you blocked me. I’m still upset. Mostly because of general trends I see on tumblr of hatred for Mormons. A lot of it comes from ignorance and misunderstanding. Some of it comes from a place of genuine hurt that can’t go unaddressed. I don’t want to be dismissive of those who have faced trauma at the hands of my church. I am one of those people, and I know how deeply pain associated with my church can be. After our interaction, I felt that talking about it would help me process this.

Before I go on, I must be clear that this is not an attempt to get you to unblock me. As nice as it would be to be able to see your blog again – you’re very witty, and I enjoy your content! – I can live without it. This is more a response to the trend on tumblr specifically of hatred against Mormons, and assuming that they’re all bad people who are complicit in every single bad thing that the church does. You just happened to force me to be a little introspective about my church and my relation to it. Thank you for that.

First, however, I would like to clear up some misconceptions:

Your initial joke that prompted me to tell you I was a Mormon was a joke about Mormons and polygamy. The largest two organizations that can be classified as “Mormon,” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and the Community of Christ (which incidentally allows for gay marriage and has female clergy, though I am of the LDS sect), both disavow polygamy. There are other, smaller offshoot Mormon groups who do still practice this, which is where horror stories of polygamists marrying teenagers arise. These people are also Mormons, though I wish they weren’t, in the same way that problematic Christian groups are Christian, though many Christians wish they weren’t.

I do recognize that mainstream Mormonism has been labeled as a cult by many people, though the reasons people provide generally don’t hold up. Often the proof that people provide of my church’s cult-like nature is to take note of corruption that can be found in almost every church. These issues – such as racism, homophobia, and misogyny, to name a few – while real and important to address do not a cult make. Sometimes the proof is to point towards practices that are demonized in my church, but are practiced in other religions with no comment, or even celebration. Other times people will point to their own experiences with toxic church congregations, and while those issues are very real, they are by no means universal. My experience growing up Mormon was a lucky one in many ways. I personally don’t think that most people who study my church from an academic vantage point would call it a cult. I would consult them on this matter. After all, someone in a cult is rather hard-pressed to be able to tell whether they are in one or not.

Another point often levied against Mormonism is how it leaves its queer members with religious trauma due to its homophobic teachings. I understand this well. I have experienced deep religious trauma associated with my political stances in favor of LGBTQ+ rights (though that wasn’t the whole story). I won’t go into detail about this right now, but suffice it to say, I had a very traumatic time on my mission that led me to a very dark place, and ended with me contemplating choices I would never be able to take back. I’m fine now of course, but I carry those memories with me.

So why would I stay despite all this? Is it because I’m brainwashed? You would have to ask a psychologist about that, but I would say probably not. I knew, and know now, that the ways I was being treated were unfair and wrong. I don’t have time to go point by point to address every grievance I or anyone else has with my church and explain my position on it, as much as I would like to clear the air once and for all on this topic so there is no misunderstanding. Here’s the reasoning that has kept me here so far:

I think that every person of faith must, at some point, deal with the problematic aspects of their church’s history and doctrine. This comes with the territory. Whether it be disturbing stories in scripture, imperialist tendencies, doctrines that chafe against us, or problematic leaders, no person of faith is exempt from wrestling with the history that accompanies their faith. I have studied my church’s history in depth. Many of the horror stories I heard were provably false. Many were true. Where does that leave me?

I believe that God is bigger and better than us. We make terrible, awful mistakes all the time. But I don’t think that makes God less willing to work with us. If anything, I think it means he wants to help us more. He wants to help us move past our histories and become better. My church has a long way to go in this regard. For too long we have been silent when it mattered, and people have been wounded by our silence. Or even the words we have said out loud! If you look at my Mormonism tag on my blog, you will see some examples of what I am talking about. I have been wounded by the things my church has said and not said. It hurts awfully, and I ache for those who have been wounded more deeply than I.

But at the same time, I cannot deny the healing my faith has brought me. Whatever problems my church has – and it has many, deep and pressing issues – it is because of my faith that I am the person I am today. I can draw a straight line from my religion to the positions I hold today. Because I am a Mormon, I became a Marxist. Because I am a Mormon, I became nonbinary. Because I am a Mormon, I became a leftist. I cannot ignore that my religion, flawed as it may be, has led me to where I stand now. I am at the intersection of the hurt and healing the church offers. It is a difficult line to walk. But I hope that in walking it, I can bring healing and love to those who hurt in the ways I do. To let them know that they are not alone, and that they have a friend who can help them wherever they choose to go.

Yes I am queer. Yes I am a Mormon. I am here because I am trying to fix things. If at some point in the future I realize that I cannot change things, perhaps I will leave. I hope it does not come to that. And things are changing. They have changed before, and they can change now. I am confident that my God is willing to lead my church where it needs to go. I hope I can help speed things along. We shall see.

But spreading unequivocal hatred and disdain for Mormons does not help those of us who are Mormon who are trying to fix things. Yes, those who have left Mormonism due to trauma need a safe place to be away from that, and acknowledging the church’s many faults can be helpful to those people. I myself have criticized my church quite vocally. But refusing to listen to the stories of those of us who choose to stay, telling others that we are evil or stupid or what have you, is also quite traumatic to us. We are people too, with thoughts and feelings. It is easy to dismiss us out of hand if you assume we aren’t.

I try to be open about my religion and political stances on my tumblr. See for yourself: It’s a mix of Mormonism, LGBTQ+ activism, Marxism, and pretty much every other leftist political position you can find. Along with all the furry stuff, of course. But despite all this, I am still terrified every time someone follows me to tell them I am Mormon. More than I am to tell them that I’m queer. Tumblr is not representative of how things work in the “real world,” of course, but I have received hatred for being a Mormon there as well. And it’s mostly other Christians. So on the one hand I’m hated by LGBTQ+ folks, on the other hand I’m hated by my church for being queer, and on the third hand (as apparently I have three hands), I am hated by other Christians. I do not face hatred to the same degree from other Christians. I saw it most on my mission. But still, it exists.

(Incidentally, Evangelicals, who you seem to have problems with, and perhaps rightly so, though I have not done a study of the matter myself, largely despise Mormons, from what I have heard. Something to consider.)

I want allies. I want help. I want understanding. If I am to push back against bigotry in my church, I need your help. I need everyone’s help. Fighting bigotry wherever we see it is a worthy pursuit, I think. And if we can succeed, we can make the world a better, safer happier place. I want to fight off the ghosts that haunt my church. You don’t have to fight them with me, but I would appreciate it if I could have your support. It would make my job much easier.

We aren’t enemies. At least, I don’t think you’re my enemy. We both have been hurt by homophobia and bigotry. We live in a capitalist hellscape where police brutality and racism are on the rise. Fascism is looming over the political backdrop, along with the ongoing threat of ecological disaster. I think we would be better off helping each other than going after each other. I ask that you please listen to us when we say you are hurting us. The Mormons you blocked knowingly followed you, an openly queer person who calls out racism and bigotry and pedophilia. Yet you assume we are in favor of those things. Someone can at once be part of an institution while recognizing it’s flaws. (Aren’t we both Americans? Why not move if we hate it so much?) And perhaps we have used the “No true Scotsman” fallacy to justify why we stay. I don’t believe I have. I don’t feel I need to.

I hope that you consider what I’ve said here. I hope we can work together. And I hope that no matter what, you find peace wherever you end up.

Yours truly,

Demo Argenti

[fipindustries]

my trip to the left

(warning, a lot of this is very cringy, as anyone talking about their past politics is)

those who have been following this blog for long enough (and by long enough i mean since 2012) mayhaps know this. i was much more to the right back then than i am today. to the point im seriously wondering how come i didnt turn into a full alt-righter. 

i talked about this in the past but really it doesnt quite paint a picture of how close i got to becoming the kind of person that worships ben shapiro, or sargon of akkad. how i almost took “the red pill” as it were.

i was strongly anti-sjw, i sympathized with gamer gate, i browsed 4chan and 8chan almost daily, i watched youtubers like the amazing atheist and the internet aristocrat, i was skeptical of feminism, i thought gender queer people were being ridiculous. i thought the humanities such as sociology and psychatry were not real sciences. more to the point i identified as a white man, i was a virgin well into my 20′s. i was basically an antisocial NEET who had gone through a lot of bullying as a teenager and i depised anita sarkeesian.

look, none of these thing are necessarily bad on their own, of course. but in the aggregate they do check all the stereotypical boxes do they not? the only thing i had going for me was that i was that i more or less fit into the standards of beauty.

so, how come i am where i am today?

well the more direct answer is that primarily i did have a sense of self worth and self esteem, product of a loving and supportive family and of my hobbies as an artist and a writer. i didn’t grew with this strong sense of resentment towards the world, perhaps by virtue of the media i consumed, perhaps by virute of being raised in very leftists enviroments (my mom was studying as a language and comunication teacher when i was a kid and she would take me to her college in lieu of hiring a nanny) and being exposed to more conservative enviroments just enough to see how lame and unplesant they can be (my dad’s family was very strongly catholic and i never got along very well with them).

also the fact that i live in latin america instead of USA, and thus being exposed to a different culture did help a lot. on top of that the fact that (and i am probably blowing smoke out of my ass at this point, you guys let me know). most of what i know about american culture is based on movies really, but they always paint highschool and college as a very atomized “every man for himself” enviroment. in latin america there is a different attitude towards peers. my classmates in highschool and my roomates in college were all very prosocial and loved to include me in their activities. i wouldnt always participate, but every now and then i would join and go out with them, and hag out with other people, people who thoguht differently than me. people with different perspectives. people who would get me out of my own head every now and then.

so those were the conditions that shaped the kind of person i am, but what was the road that led me to the beliefs i hold? this is all nice and good to make me pause whenever i would hear something about “the jewish question”, but the internet is very good at channeling dissafected youths through dark pathways. i was on the daily two clicks away from ending up in stormfront, or breitbart, or listening to milo yannopolous, and very skeptical of the left in general back in 2014.

well, gamer gate happened. get ready because this is a really silly ride.

as i said, i was very supportive of gamer gate. sure, ethics in videogame journalism, i was all for it. gone home was a terrible game, zoey quinn was a monster, and sarkessian was telling me i was bad because i liked videogames. that was the full extent of my thoguht process back then.

one thing i still more or less agree with from back then is that i think the left did a poor job by drawing arbitrary lines in the sand and immeditly giving up in reaching towards people who might be in the middle. the undecided and the agnostic. from where i was standing the gamer gate faction had no trouble embracing and bringing forth anyone. i still remember the fiasco with vivian james and the fine young capitalists. i still remember #notyourshield. these things speak of a giant failure in building coalitions. the whole affair was a giant mess.

of course being a supporter of GG meant looking past a LOT of ugly stuff. the harrasment, the toxicity, the misoginy, etc. the excuse i used back then was that these were just a loud minority. crazy people who didnt speak for the movement. i refused to allow the loudest, ugliest aspects of a movement tarnish the lofty ideals that the movement stood for. and that is when the shoe dropped.

well, wasn’t that what i was doing with the left? see, i had no problem ignoring the rabid masses in twitter and actively seek out the smartest, calmest, most coherent advocates i could find when it came to support my side, but if i was to be intellectually consistent, shouldnt i give the same chance to the other side and make the honest effort to hear them out?

this is a heuristic i still apply whenever i can, whenever you have a dissagreement with an ideology, give it a fair shot, dont stop at the rabble and idiots that shout slogans in twitter but actually look for what the best and the brightests in that ideology have to say.

so that is what i did. of course, me being me, and this being 2015 i started with the nostalgia chick. back then it was when she was starting to distance herself from channel awesome and her content was starting to get much more political. she had this series of videos where she would explain feminism through the lens of the transformer movies.

and her videos were actually good.

more or less at the same time i was reading a little story called HPMOR, which led me to less wrong, which led me to slate star codex, which led me to the rat-adjacent side of tumblr. a place famously filled with trans catgirls each with her own manifesto on gender theory. what the rat adjacent community tought me above everything else is that you could defend leftists ideas while still remaining a rational, impassioned, analitical agent.

and then that was it. from lindsey ellis i soon would find contrapoints and from contrapoints i came across vaush and then i got myself into breadtube learning about socialism while taking my hormone supplement to feminize my body. 

that is where i find myself today. who knows where i’ll be a couple of years from now. in retrospect i am a bit disquieted by how much i reduced everything into tribalism and how my politics where primarily influenced by aesthetics and respectability rather than real arguments, but i do find some pride in the fact that i was aware of this and so i went out of my way to find arguments presented in a format i was willing to listen from the outgroup instead of sitting passively and taking in whatever arguments came my way from the ingroup.

[corvid-420]

hey, my brain is really fried so i don't mean this to disregard your video: Am i correct in understanding your video is saying the british reporter is casting doubt on us/uk involvement in China to then go on and provide a rationale for why he, a british man who may have a reason to cover up uk/us involvement in China, is reporting facts and not propaganda to then go on and display propaganda?

Thanks for the question! Even if you were disregarding it, it would still be an opportunity for shameless self-promotion so here’s the vid in question for anyone who hasn’t seen it:

So you’ve got the gist correct:

1. Yes, the British reporter is casting doubt on US/UK stratagem in China, especially regarding the Hong Kong protests.

2. Yes, he is also providing a rationale for why he, a British journalist in a still freshly-recent former British colony, isn’t an outside agitator on behalf of American/British interests.

3. His aim is to spread propaganda to stir the pot to advance Anglo-American interests.

What’s missing (and I edited the direct explanation to this because it was making the video too long) is the ‘narrative’ portion.

This is not some politically illiterate “leftist” on the internet accidentally channeling Mike Pompeo because freedumb against authoritariiaiaiaianism.

The British journalist in Hong Kong has been a media professional for his entire career; he studied Digital Media and Communications at the University of Leeds.

Even without any nefarious intentions - even if you’re just a marketing specialist for some local business - media professionals will do things like draft talking points, pitches, devise a narrative for whatever they’re selling. They (and these are the zoos I frequent, too, so I know my way around them) will likely practice in front of a mirror or even record themselves delivering these talking points.

And remember too: “talking points” isn’t just some phrase to describe tropes, cliches, etc. “Talking points” are rhetorical devices, as well as products of hours and hours of labor over the course of days, weeks, or even months (depending on the campaign) from one or more communications professionals poring every little word to get it just ‘right.’ The same way one might spend 40 or more hours taking orders at a drive-thru, bussing tables, delivering food/passengers via some app, other people spend that amount of time or more on nothing more than scheming. (I recall sitting in an office in Chicago parsing a few words in a press release about a coal plant closure that downplayed the economic impact the closure would have on a local community; about thirty people lost their jobs, iirc.]

But again: even if you’re just slinging some local restaurant’s happy hour, you’re going to be rehearsed in how you deliver your pitch, how you write the copy for the menu, how you present it, etc.

Now imagine that the stakes are much higher than just bringing some drunks in for overpriced appetizers on a wednesday night. You’re now trying to convince viewers that

1.) recalling ongoing attempts by the US/UK to spy and meddle in Chinese affairs, never mind recalling historic attempts by said spies to arm insurrections up to and including the Dalai Lama, is “wacky” and “conspiratorial.”

2.  If ‘political counselors’ from a hostile embassy meet with protestors, that’s perfectly natural and to think something is amiss there is paranoid, even if the hostile embassy is representing a country that started a trade war against its host.

3. And you shouldn’t treat all “caucasians” (as he says) in Hong Kong as spies, so if you see some of them with protest organizers, it’s fine, they’re locals, especially the journalists like me, and also, the Chinese are orientalist for suggesting the protestors have outside help.

The narrative part is key because this guy is really polished in what he’s doing.

He starts VERY broadly by coraling viewers into a very limited perspective: history is over, don’t consider everything that the US/UK have ever done in and to China.

Once he’s cut you off from any escape route through the ideological flights of fancy like “history”, he brings it down to more ‘concrete’ things, asserts that any evidence that looks like it Americans or the British could be agitating the protests is actually pretty normal and not at all nefarious.

Finally, in case anyone might doubt why a British man in Hong Kong should be trusted to tell you The Truth, he pre-empts those accusations by saying locals aren’t always Asian, they can be white, too (because recalling it’s former a colony is wacky i guess.)