#which like... considering how cult like the trans movement is

[feminismisstillahatemovement]

You might have talked about this before, given your name, but as a woman, I don't think it's recognized enough on how the way feminists to respond to non-feminist/anti-feminist women. It reeks of narcissist speak. "How can you be against me? It's because of me you have all you do!" "Feminism is why you have any rights at all" "You just don't understand it". Obviously I don't deny the good feminism had done for women, but these days, all I see is violent, gross man haters. Ones that ignores female abusers constantly and male victims. That gender issues (rape/DV) that affects both men and women. I won't support a movement like that. I understand it just fine.

Yes. if you're outside of the feminism cult, to those within it, you're no longer to be considered a woman. Your voice and opinion no longer matter to them.

It's the same with all the identity politics movements: if you're a black conservative, you're no longer to be considered black, and fair game to be contemptuously referred to as an "Uncle Tom" or much worse. If you're gay or trans or a Muslim or disabled or whatever and you have the "wrong" opinions, or vote for the "wrong" candidate - meaning anyone right of AOC - you are no longer invited to compete for Who's the Biggest Victim, which is the highest prize anyone on the woke left can aspire to, now that they've rid themselves of goodness and objective truth. The groups that claim to exist only to speak FOR you will now seize every chance they can get to destroy you.

[weepingchoir]

Imperium Sanctus

(...T)he phrase “Grimdark” may suggest the name of some 2000s era Goth club. It’s a recent coinage for an ongoing craze in “gritty” and dark fantasy settings, epitomised and popularised by George RR Martin, becoming the default tone for a whole range of feted fantasy offerings from Joe Abercrombie’s First Law series featuring a dark, brooding protagonist who kills a lot of people — and occasionally feels bad about it — to Mark Lawrence’s Broken Empire Trilogy featuring a dark, brooding protagonist who kills a lot of people — and occasionally feels bad about it.

Like many fantasists with a bone to pick, mister Milbank doesn't actually know when or where "grimdark" was coined. Knowing fuck all has never stopped a critic (indeed, The Critic): Milbank goes on to blame everything from Breaking Bad to The Sopranos, constructing a spurious history of dark fantasy(?) that ultimately singles out author Michael Moorcock as godfather of grimdark.

While Moorcock’s gory, British sorcery is a major influence on today’s grimdark, the inception point of the trend is in fact googleable: it’s been the tagline of gory, British science-fantasy wargame Warhammer 40,000 since its 1993 second edition.

In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war.

Already this betrays the hopepunk's antimaterialist concerns. It doesn't matter that The Walking Dead and Boardwalk Empire are nothing alike. Taking the historicist tack, it becomes even less likely that they have a connection to 40K. But morality, as an immaterial concern, is a laser beam: it vaporizes material history. Grimdark is a specter on the pages of anything that irritates gentle sensibilities.

For the sake of avoiding googleable gaffes, Alexandra Rowland, author of books named things like A Taste Of Gold And Iron, and coiner of "hopepunk", in a follow-up essay:

There’s no such thing as winning forever. Evil cannot be vanquished, only beaten back for a day or two, and then it trickles back in, like water seeping through the cracks in a dam. Ask it of hopepunk, then: "What's the point?" And the answer is, of course, that the fight itself is the point.

In the noble brightness of the far future, there is only (___)?

Unlike Rowland, Milbank is a nothingpunk: The Critic is a conservative Christian rag pontificating everything from trans-exclusionary rhetoric to the dismantling of higher education. Which begs us to consider how Milbank so easily co-opts shades of Rowland's language to peddle a retvrn to Tolkien, on its face the last thing a fantasy author looking to innovate would want.

The Imperium of Man, the central setting of 40K, is an arch-conservative Great Man cult worshipping the once-Emperor of Mankind. This is the gate leading to the inner sanctum where the Emperor's corpse resides. Catholic readers may have noticed similarities to portrayals of the Archangel Michael fighting the Dragon (1400~, 1498, 1860), as narrated in Revelation 12.

Revelation is the tale of darkness enveloping the world, and the noble, virtuous men who persevere despite persecution and are eventually victorious in heavenly war(!). This is not dissimilar to J.R.R. Tolkien's "fundamentally religious and Catholic work", in which ordinary men persevere against darkness enveloping a world. Rowland and Milbank both champion Tolkien as exemplary, the former in the same breath as Jesus. Yes, of Nazareth.

The Lord Of The Rings is unmistakeably about the War of the Ring. Positing Tolkien's apocalypticism as aspirational fails to rebuff the basic conceit that war is a human constant and even a force for good. If this isn't the aim of a genre purported to concern itself with kindness and "giv[ing] a fuck about the people on the other side of the world", what is?

Aesthetics. Rowland doesn't call for a narrative movement with less conflict, but one that appropriately celebrates those that fall on the right side of conflict. Even just those that deigned to imagine, of slaying the Dragon, "probably drunk in a bar somewhere, I bet it can be done, though." (The writer's original temptation: a medal for thinking the right thing.) Millions of people die in Revelation, magnitudes more than in Game of Thrones, but the virtuous go to heaven forever. The Emperor of Mankind sits on the Golden Throne, Frodo bodily assumpted into the Undying Lands, Jesus curled up into a ball and just rolled away. All manner of things shall be well.

The transition from here to open conservatism is again in aesthetics, and thus stepwise. Having established Tolkien as the only fantasy writer he respects, Milbank derides grimdark as immature wish fulfillment. If you write fantasy at all, it ought to have a clear moral message, else you are devaluing reality by infesting Real (not in the Lacanian sense) conflict with magic missiles. But he's also established that realistic fiction with no clear hero is a faux pas. He wants Breaking Good and, like, The Walking Alive.

This is no surprise: if you were around for the Disco Elysium craze, you might remember this tweet (holy shit it's still up) calling for a game that uses Disco's systems to narrate the story of "a young witch" looking for her neighbor's cat. Take another step and this is the logical conclusion of an aesthetic that prizes upright moral posture: a world where the protagonist has to do nearly nothing to be good. The little village in the Alps and the events of Disco Elysium might be unfolding in the same world. But our little German girl with no problems doesn't have to participate in anything as unsightly as a Pinkerton massacre. Milbank disdains C.S. Lewis without knowing that what he wants is the end of Narnia, irrespective of the events that preceded it: the crowning of the king, who once was good. The Emperor protects!

[hexagon-club]

I’ve been thinking about your reblog where you stated that “there's something about the way gendies argue where I can't help but get the feeling that they don't even comprehend opposing views” and especially the line “they understand so little of how other people think that they don't even understand that they don't understand how others think.” 

I remember arguing with a TRA and explaining to her that I wholly supported womens (ie., females) right to be as masculine and gender-non-conforming as they wanted. Somehow we started arguing about this TIM who has a full-on beard and basically makes no effort to convey that he wishes to be perceived as a woman. I said that I wouldn’t want someone like that in women’s spaces, and the TRA I was arguing with said, “It’s funny how you talk about her beard, and then parade around like you don’t care if women are masculine.” Like, she really thought my issue was that the TIM we were arguing about was masculine, not that he was male. She couldn’t even conceptualize the idea that I did not view him as a woman. 

I think TRAs are such a unique category of people with delusional beliefs, because every other group of people with delusional beliefs at least has the language and vocabulary to articulate what they think (religious people, conspiracy theorists, etc). They can at least demonstrate a degree of reasoning behind their thoughts, no matter how flawed that reasoning may be. TRAs don’t even have that—they don’t even pretend to. It’s just circular definitions and the assertion that their internal feelings change material reality. I’m so dismayed that this ideology which is not grounded in linguistics, science, reason, material reality, or anything else has gained the popularity that it has.

I wanted to ask you what you think will become of the trans movement in the next five to ten years? Do you think we will continue to descend more and more into unreason? Do you think radfems will become more appealing in the process? I would love to know your thoughts. 

I think you're on to something. Other belief systems, even ones that are considered to be absurd by the general public, have a consistent internal vocabulary based on words that have a very clear meaning among the group members. Often they will use words in a way that is different to the way people outside the group would use them, cults love jargon after all, but they can generally communicate quite clearly with each other. If not with outsiders.

One of the many things that makes arguing with TRAs difficult is that they are not even on the same page as each other, there's the trutrans/transtrender divide, but even among the "transtrenders" which have become the mainstream of the trans movement their beliefs seem weirdly inconsistent. One of them will try to make a point, I'll debunk it, and then another will accuse me of attacking a strawman and insist that no trans person believes the thing I just debunked. They can't even clearly communicate their beliefs to each other, so they're not on the same page. But in a weird sort of way this is a strength not a weakness, because it means we're constantly trying to hit a moving target, can't really debunk an ideology if the ideology is so inconsistent no one can agree on what it even is.

On that note I just realised something, so I don't know how aware you are of this, I only learned about this after the fact, but there was something of a war on tumblr in the early 2010s between the two wings of the trans movement. The trutrans/transmedicalists represent what was essentially the mainstream of the transgender movement in the 2000s, their philosophy is essentially that being trans is something akin to a chronic illness. One that can be treated through transition, but not cured. This is in contrast to the more modern wave of TRAs who think of "gender" something more like a form of self expression. The trutrans were actually some of the earliest critics of tumblr identities and mogai stuff, because they saw that as making light of (what they believed to be) their legitimate medical disorder.

Anyway, my point is that I don't think the current mainstream of the trans community even have a word for themselves. The trutrans people call them tucutes and transtrenders. But they don't seem to have a word that refers exclusively to themselves, but not to the trutrans. That's weird, they don't even have the language to acknowledge that they are a subfaction of a larger ideology.

As to your last paragraph, I really don't know where we go from here, it's amazing that the trans movement has gotten as far as it has given how ideologically incoherent it is. But it is incredibly profitable, gender affirming care is big business, and plastic surgeons and drug companies aren't going to want to leave money on the table by letting it become less accessible. Incidentally I think this is one of the reasons why other trans identities (transrace, transage, transabled, otherkin) are never going to catch on, they are much harder to monetise, so there's no point marketing them.

The left seems to have decided this is the hill they want to die on. They seem to view gender as a sort of individual freedom. And think that people not acknowledging it is the same thing as trying to force people into rigidly defined gender roles. Like, in their minds, if they hear me say something like "non-binary is nonsense" they equate that to me saying "all women need to become stay at home housewives who wear high heels and dresses." Because they equate the word "woman" to the feminine gender role, and don't even really understand the concept of it as a purely biological classification. Even though that's what they basically all believed 15 years ago.

If the current trans position becomes untenable I think there will probably be a retreat to the "trutrans" identity. People like Blair White, Marcus Dibbs, and Buck Angel are hated by a lot of the mainstream trans community, but they are actually helping them out by preparing a fallback position for when mainstream society gets sick of their shit. I think people will mostly tolerate that, not that I think "trutrans" makes any more sense than the current position, but it's less evangelical and overall less annoying than what they currently preach. Also, quite frankly I think there are a lot of men (left wing and right wing) who are sick of TRA nonsense, but are also deeply antifeminist, and who will want to keep transgender ideology alive because they can use it against feminists.

I'm thinking of this meme I got from Sargon of Akkad's twitter account:

So there's a group of men who know that transgender ideology is nonsense, but still get a certain sadistic pleasure at seeing it get used against women.

I'm not really sure if things are going to get more irrational from here. Both the left and the right seem to be getting more and more unhinged, the left has chosen transgender/queer ideology as its cult of choice, whereas the right has QAnon and it's weird offshoots. It does seem like we are entering an era of unreality where people are giving up on the concept of a shared objective truth and are retreating into fantasy.

That's a depressing note to end on, sorry if I rambled a bit.

[clearancecreedwatersurvival]

Reminder that people who have been in one high control group tend to end up joining other high control groups (including the guy who developed the BITE model).

Reminder internet movements/communities/pipelines often become high control groups.

Reminder that online communities that demand you at all times police yourself and everyone else around you, and/or sell you a worldview of complete nihilism where people not in the in group are evil or stupid and only you the people in the group Know The Truth and embody Goodness because what the group believes is the only correct way to be Are High Control Groups and if you find yourself in one you should consider getting the fuck out of there.

If it walks like a cult and quacks like a cult, it’s probably a fucking cult.

Flat-earthers/Q-anon/Atlantean/ancient alien conspiracy theorists (all of which are rooted in anti-semitism and most of which originated with the Nazi party) are high control groups, and most of the people in those communities are also in fundie Christian cults.

The ‘rationalists’ who push shit like the imminent evil ai which must be protected against and simulation theory and a Lot of Eugenics and also that one extremely notorious Harry Potter fanfic back in the day are high control groups.

Terfs are a high control group, and so are the community which is basically their inverse: the black-pilled part of the manosphere/incels. Once again most people in those groups are also in or formerly from fundie Christian cults. In the case of terfs, some people in the community genuinely believe that they are progressive and feminist which I find very darkly funny given that the entire terf movement has been proved to be intentionally created and spread by, you guessed it, the same fundamentalist Christian evangelical death cultists who are trying to seize governmental power and proposing anti trans bathroom laws and bans to anything remotely sexual or divisive in internet spaces.

Multi-level-marketing companies form high control groups out of their ‘sales rep’ consumer bases who don’t realize that 96% of them will never make a profit and they’re not supposed to, because they are actually the company’s market. And yes, mlms are incredibly popular with people who are also in a fundie cult, which is why they’re the most popular in the United States in Utah.

And the anti-shipping community is also a high control group which has found extreme purchase in algorithmic rabbitholes on tiktok and twitter. And it’s pretty apparent that most people in that community are either currently in some sort of repressive Christian religious environment or formerly so, given how many of them keep telling people to burn in hell for disagreeing with them.

[inazuma-fulgur]

A terf followed me today, and I wasn't sure at first needed to scroll a decent amount to confirm

And I'm just, do I let her follow me? I at least wanna save the account. Study them, keep them and their bubble like my jar ecosystems

I can tell patterns in the rhetoric but I've also seen new surprising stuff today, illogical takes, long complex ultimately contradictory paragraphs

My favorite post was two posts actually. That terfs could accept trans and nonbinary people, that gnc women have always existed, that dysphoria in women is no surprise and neither is rejecting that forced upon role. The second post then talked about how many terfs are trans and nb but because they "know" gender is a religious experience they reject it as not real and focus on their sex, which they know is real, instead and just learn to sit with their dysphoria and discomfort.

Amidst all this tolerance of trans people being trans was still only extended to women, trans men were dismissed as believing in a false god, trans women were never once mentioned. Nonbinary people got weaponized but their impact on gender being in fact not real did not get explored or even brought up.

Instead the post talked about gender being not real and that rejection being the reason terfs do not wanna be called cis, as it's an inaccurate gender marker. This is again related to gender being a religious experience, and gender zealots being unable to understand someones alternate believe as anything but hatred and rejection of their own, similar to how a religious person might claim that atheist just venerate Satan and hate god.

Mind you that they still actively denied the legitimacy of specific, really most, ways to be trans + stripped everyone they don't consider a woman of the ability to be trans.

This is just some superficial looks, I really believe I could gain some insight in how cult-esque movements forms and how radicalization moves along. And of course rhetoric

[rivertalesien]

Spoutible does look pretty good and lot of people are moving there. Did you ever get a reply about JKR?

It could only benefit from more queer voices speaking up for clarity.

I asked the question if she would be welcome there, because:

1. there was a poll before the official release of the site, sent out to those earliest users as to whether they wanted adult content/sex work/porn/kink on the site. This was criticized by a queer poster, whom he replied to, saying those who answered the poll overwhelmingly rejected it:

Is he seriously saying that a handful of early users, who may not even be part of our community, are deciding what goes? Via a poll?

2. While I'm sure he's very busy, he does take time to reply to questions like this:

He likes pointing out when famous folks join the site and welcomes them, uncritically.

Would he be uncritically welcoming of JKR?

Considering all the above, while anecdotal, I think it's a valid question in need of response and it circles back to how safe queer folks will feel there. If certain users deciding they don't want to see certain things have been listened to, would we be listened to?

There's a little cult of personality developing on the site already which can easily lead to a clubhouse/members-only attitude that will block any and all valid criticism and shut it down before it can spread (because everyone has to be "nice.")

If Bouzy wants us and claims his site to be a safe space for us (not that any site ever is), listening to us is the first step. We, especially our trans fam, are under attack in the US and elsewhere. It's not an exaggeration to say there is an ugly movement on the right to eliminate us completely. We need allies who aren't going to compromise with the rich and famous over privilege.

Take us or leave us, but don't lead us on, you know? It isn't safe out there.

I hope more of us show up and ask, because a handful of us isn't going to work.

[emotionalsupportaudino]

fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu

I feel like if I don't write this down somewhere I'm going to go absolutely nuts.

I converted to Judaism a year ago after years of considering and learning and time under a Reform movement rabbi. It has brought me so much joy and peace--I used to be angry all the time, and I've hit a point where my mental health is starting to recover because my conversion has healed a lot of old wounds caused by religious trauma.

I'm so fucking happy being Jewish.

I'm also nonbinary, which was... deeply respected by my rabbi. My Hebrew name is Chesed Miryam b'nei Avraham v' Sara (as opposed to bar or bat for son or daughter, it just means "child of"). I didn't have to choose to be a girl--I was allowed to just be me. I feel so happy and accepted my heart feels like it'll burst out of my chest when I think about it.

My parents, on the other hand, are alt-right, indoctrinated by the cult of Trump and Qanon. I don't know how or when it got so bad, especially because they rely on programs like food stamps and medicaid. My mom was a teacher. But we spent a decade in a cult as a family and when that happens, you're kind of more susceptible to being dragged into another cult.

I didn't realize how bad it had gotten. But last week my dad told me he wants a pendant that has a nazi dogwhistle, and my mom tells me all trans people are groomers now, DESPITE KNOWING SOME OF MY GOOD COLLEGE FRIENDS WHO SHE KNOWS ARE TRANS???

I'm in a fucked up position. How did I fail so badly as a child that I, a NONBINARY JEWISH CONVERT can have transphobic neo naiz parents??? My parents agree that overall I'm a good person, I'm smart, I'm compassionate, I'm doing well for myself. But they believe I'm "one of the good ones" and brainwashed by "the Left."

I have googled for advice and nothing comes up. I'm just stuck here knowing that "goddamnit now I'm an unprecedented event." I can't talk to my rabbi about it because like how the hell am I supposed to ask my rabbi about my parents who are neo-nazis? And my therapist can understand this on a level but I don't think even she has the words for this.

I know the obvious answer is to go no-contact with them, but that means going no contact with my little brother who has a chance of getting out and struggles as much as I did when I lived with them. He's their scapegoat, the source of all their problems, just like I as when I lived with them. And then there's the crushing guilt. Like I let them backslide this far.

I don't know what to do. So I am just going to lay on my floor whispering "fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck" to myself until sleep takes me.

[radmista]

Random updates 1/?

Long semi-vent/talking outloud about relationships with TRA's

So I have a gf now. Sort of my first gf in a way, I dated a tif and nb tif before briefly. And while I know they were female, since this was more in my "be more accepting" phase, I kinda did see the tif as a guy even though our relationship was 1000% one I wouldn't have had with a male. I kinda processed it like "trans guys are just better bfs".

Having a GF is nice, she was one of my bestfriends and she asked me out the last day of June which was really sweet. I'm normally kind of hesitant to relationships, I feel I've never really gotten the supposed correct burst of excitement that comes with "making things official". I always feel kinda bland about it, like I'm a gf now woo... now what? I kind of chalk it up to being raised to be incredibly independent and not needing romantic relationships, if I were to die without a romantic partner I guess I wouldn't be too bothered as long as I had a good life. And also bc with my friends I form very close relationships that from the outside can be seen as romantic, so the shift to being an item isn't really anything drastic imo? The only addition really is kissing and other activities, and I guess I soften up around my partners, like I afford them more patience and lenience than I would if they were just my friend (I'll bite my tongue more on their behalf and not be as critical).

I'm pretty sure I love her, I care about her deeply and she makes me happy, I feel I can be mostly myself (minus the GC stuff) without judgement, I like holding her and kissing her, we can have good conversations and have differing opinions in debates and stay respectful, and I enjoy being in her prescence most of the time.

I say mostly bc like... she's kind of emotionally unstable sometimes. Technically she has an unspecified mood disorder, but she says she probably has BPD or at least says she related most to people with BPD. And that since the beginning of our friendship has been a flag of sorts. Not that I wouldn't date her for it, its just... a flag? Nearly everyone I've had a relationship with thats had BPD ended in a flaming pile of chaos and was rather traumatic. She doesn't split (permanently at least) from my observations of her other friendships and how she talks about people who've previously burned her so thats not a big worry. But she does get a rather big victim complex about some things and will jump to a "well I guess its all my fault"/"just blame [her name] for everything" and its frustrating. She's not a bad person, just a lot to handle at times.

Her emotional and mental issues aren't really a big beef, she at least acknowledges she has a problem and is trying to get back into therapy so cool. My main hangup is she's pretty big into the TRA koolaid. I didn't think it was that bad when we first started dating, I thought at most she believed in binary and nb trans people the basic stuff. But 2 weeks ago she mentioned having "bigender" and "genderfluid" ocs and it somehow managed to torpedoe any good mood I had that day and I got really quiet and gave her a "cool." response and continued cooking. And last week while discussing womens solidarity and how we need to have class awareness and making claims like "abortion doesn't affect rich women" or "abortion doesn't affect white women" only serve to distract and create divides meant to turn women against each other so we don't think we can work together. She got really defensive saying abortion affects poor people more (which yeah ik it does that's not what I said) before spewing what felt like an automated "the abortion ban affects everyone! Women, men, trans men, nb people, genderfluid people, intersex people, queer people!". And it nearly made me blow my top. I didn't argue her mentioning all the tq+ stuff but when continuing to make my point I made sure to keep saying "females" or "women". Since we're both in the med field she thankfully doesn't object to the term female being used (and even uses it herself sometimes).

Its just frustrating. She's so stubborn so I know changing her mind will be astronomically difficult. Her views on gender ideology and TQ+ shit was one of the main reasons /I/ didn't ask her out even though I found her attractive and saw potential in a relationship. She's also relatively "new" to being bisexual, she says she only realized she was bi when she was 21 (she's 23 now) and also claims to be demisexual (despite having more sex than me or heck even our other friends). So she's still sort of in her "vomitting rainbows" phase which can be a little cringe ngl. I knew I was attracted to women at 14 in catholic school, and have always just seen it as part of me, nothing special needing any fanfare. And I get thats just a difference in personality, but she's very much like those fandom people who always have to show off "how gay" they are on everything. I'm not doubtful she is bi and has attraction to women, she says she's had woman crushes and is attracted to me afterall.

I've tried approaching the demi thing before we even started dating, talking about the rise of hookup culture and male centered media that paints an unrealistic picture of attraction and sexual activity, how women develop sexual urges later than men tend to, the rise in use of SSRI's dampening or killing libido, and how wanting to be close to others before wanting to bang them is 100% NORMAL for women and a lot of people. Its just painted as the abnormal by media thats hypersexual. Even tried pulling out the "why isn't hypersexual a sexuality then?" before putting it away bc she kept expressing disgust at people that are hypersexual. I thought I had at least given her something to think about, but when her parents visited she had asked them to buy her a demisexual flag and now I gotta see it everytime I visit her.

I guess at the end of the day its not a HUGE issue since I'm also not very sexual, but it does make me uncomfortable sometimes wondering what internalized homophobia rhetoric she can be harboring as tumblr ace/demi people are usually pretty homophobic. She comes off sort of better than thou because she's not always horny, and looks down on people who are and calls them disgusting and that they should "keep it in [their] pants its not hard!" also saying shit like "sex isn't even that great an experience, its can be such a chore sometimes. You know what feels amazing: adding something to your shopping cart, so much serotonin, or cuddling on the couch yassss". Which I roll my eyes at bc I'm not a shopping addict and have heard the stupid "just cuddle" shit ad nauseum from asexual tumblr and past friends.

I know that sounds like a lot of bad stuff but idk, I feel like these are all things that she can shift her opinion on. She is younger than me and I didn't really fully jump on board radfem stuff until I was almost 24. Even though I was always skepticle of the trans movement from when I was 15, I did buy into their shit every once in awhile and tried to be supportive as a transmed until I was 23 when gloves finally came off and I couldn't keep believing the lies they told or ignoring the horrible erosion of womens rights. She lives in this very ignorant TRA bubble and hasn't seen any negative sides to the trans community or how their enforcement of sterotypes is wrong and misogynistic. I think partially bc (as typical fandom bi) she finds feminine men, men with long hair, and men in heels and skirts hot. She probably has a crossdressing fetish only through fiction, bc I doubt she'd find a real 6ft tall 0 fat distribution male with giant feet hot in high heeled shoes and an unflattering dress that fits him poorly.

I think if I just keep being vocal about womens rights and the rampant misogyny in society maybe things will start clicking in place for her. I just don't know how to make the transition (hah) to mentioning how trans and gender rhetoric also plays into this and is actually super regressive and making shit worse for women. I want her to realize how bs this all is, how its abusive to gnc gay and lesbian kids/teens and been a huge step backward for women. I just don't know how I'll get there without setting off alarm bells that I'm an evil "terf" and she "blocks to stay safe" herself from me. I've actually broached the "single sex only spaces" issue with her and her other friend in the room, and while her friend (gay male) opposed it and said it was transphobic (bc of course he did his safety isn't at stake) she said she can kinda see both sides. Which I think is a good thing, if she can at least see my point without branding it as an evil terven thought crime. So I feel like there's hope, but it'll prob be a real uphill journey esp if she continues to keep company with alphabet soup people on discord and fandom.

[kolyage]

trans activism has a label for literally everything, this way they blur the original concepts and create a shame rhetoric where people are accused of “isms” and “ists.” it’s always “terf trick” “medical shaming” or a motto which no one considers the meaning of “trans children exists.”

it really shows that rather than actual activism, it has all the qualities of a cult like organisation. when they can’t find an answer their response is “but i think you’re a shitty person.”

they project onto feminists who don’t agree with them and create a rhetoric where they tell everyone that “radfems”, “terfs” “lesbians” want them to die while they go on to tell about how they’d punch a terf, stab a terf or let a terf die on the street.

It’s very problematic honestly because radical feminists don’t hate trans people. They want trans people to have the most essential human rights as every other person. And that includes proper psychologic treatment too.

Radfems are women too. Women are not your enemy. Women were never the ones who killed you or participated in killing. Women are a vulnerable group as their own. What’s harmful to every group is that patriarchy feeds stereotypes between women and men, it enforces porn industry and sex industry where trans women suffer in too much. Liberal feminism literally gaslights you into thinking that feeding these stereotypes is the healthy wokest thing when this actually works most for a group of capitalists who benefit from your money: including hormones, surgeries and make up products and you all go and think this is normal.

As an amazing twitter thread tells us: there is no one group of transexual people. There are very different kinds of people in every group. But trans activism generalizes their movement and ignore the specific needs of each group. I believe this is the main problem of current trans activism. It has lost its subjectiveness a long time ago, now it has become a cult like ideology where everyone has to follow certain blind mottos that feed misogny and homophobia; and vulnerable people are lost in the crowds.

You can find the thread here: https://twitter.com/lacroicsz/status/1513949311754993664?s=21&t=fAkFogqchBD_N_10o_-7dQ

And since you’ve come this way, let me include this here too. Because logic is clearly lost in current trans activism.

https://twitter.com/humangaymale/status/1513472856054800385?s=21&t=fAkFogqchBD_N_10o_-7dQ

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Podcasting "Tech Monopolies and the Insufficient Necessity of Interoperability"

This week on my podcast, I read my latest Locus Magazine column, “Tech Monopolies and the Insufficient Necessity of Interoperability.” It presents a theory of change to get us to a world of aggressive, trans-industry, global trustbusting.

https://locusmag.com/2021/07/cory-doctorow-tech-monopolies-and-the-insufficient-necessity-of-interoperability/

Most industries are monopolized. Whether we’re talking about athletic shoes or pharmacy benefit managers, the path to monopolization is the same: companies buy up small competitors, merge with major ones, and use their investors’ cash to subsidize anticompetitive attacks.

The reason they’re able to get away with it is that for 40 years, the world’s been in the grip of a dangerous economic delusion: that the only basis for fighting monopolies is “consumer welfare.” That is, monopolies should only be considered harmful if they make prices go up.

The “consumer welfare” standard originated with the far-right economics cult of the University of Chicago and was launched by Ronald Reagan, and has been supported by every president since (until Biden, whose EO from last week explicitly rejects it).

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/10/unnixing-the-fix/#r2r-plus-plus

Reagan had incipient dementia (and was thick as pigshit even in his prime), but consumer welfare’s boosters understood its consequences: by focusing solely on what monopolies did to us as “consumers,” we’d remove from consideration how monopoles acted on us as citizens.

“Consumer welfare” was a recipe for concentrating corporate power so that it could overwhelm regulators, lawmakers and judges, creating a kind of pluocratic planned economy where how we live and work is decided in unaccountable board-rooms, not public legislatures.

Lawmakers were complicit in this power-grab while it benefited them — while the campaign contributions offset the voter alienation that followed from every corporate sellout — but today, it seems, a critical mass of lawmakers have had enough.

The 26-hour markup session for House Democrats’ six landmark antitrust bills saw every kind of lawmaker speak out against tech monopolies — from far-right clowns like Matt Gaetz to “squad” member Pramila Jayapal, and every kind of “moderate” in between.

Lawmakers are, for once, ahead of the electorate. Lots of voters are furious about some kind of monopoly — tech, health insurance, cable, beer, finance, meat packing — but precious few who understand that the problem isn’t with one industry, it’s with monopoly itself.

To create the momentum we’ll need for global, cross-industry trustbusting, we have to create and build momentum for the movement. I think we should start with tech.

Even though few people have fixing tech at the top of their agenda, nobody likes the tech industry.

What’s more, though tech companies monopolized the same way that, say pro wrestling did (spending their way to the top, buying out or crushing all rivals), tech has particular, specific characteristics that make it easier to pry apart again.

You’ve probably heard that tech is monopolized because of “network effects.” That’s econ jargon for a product or service that gets more valuable as more people use it. You join Facebook because your friends are there. Once you’re on FB, others join because you’re there.

But while network effects explain why tech gets big, they’re not why tech stays big. For that, you need to look at the neglected economics concept of “switching costs” — the things you give up when you stop using a product or service.

Facebook and other Big Tech companies do everything they can to raise switching costs. When you quit FB, you lose access to the friends, communities and customers who stay behind. There’s no technical reason this has to happen.

You can switch cell carriers without losing the ability to call your friends, after all. The high cost of leaving FB was deliberately created by the company, which has used expensive lawsuits and technological countermeasures to block every attempt to interoperate with it.

But if we used the law to guarantee interop, to force FB to connect to other, non-monopolistic services (say, ones run by co-ops, nonprofits or startups) then FB’s billions of users wouldn’t be a reason to join FB, they’d be a reason to leave it.

If we passed the ACCESS Act — which imposes a duty on Facebook to interoperate with rivals that promise not to mine or commercialize data — then leaving FB would give you all the benefits of FB (community and friends), with none of the privacy costs.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/22/vapescreen/#improve-access

And if we safeguarded Competitive Compatibility — the right to interoperate without permission, we’d future-proof the ACCESS Act, by securing the right to mod FB to protect security, add accessibility, and add other forms of interop.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability

Fixing industry — including and especially tech — requires action from the public sector. We can’t make monopolies better by acting as “consumers” — we have to act as citizens.

You won’t fix Surveillance Capitalism by buying Apple products.

https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59

For all the noise that tech companies make about their rivalries — Google vs Facebook, Apple vs Google — at bottom, they differences are as meaningless as the flavors of “marshmellows” in a box of Lucky Charms.

Apple and Google are effectively a combine — for years, Google’s Eric Schmidt sat on Apple’s board. Apple’s biggest single customer is Google. And Apple and Google had no problem illegally colluding to suppress wages with “no poach” agreements.

https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/silicon-valleys-poaching-case-growing-debate-employee-mobility/

Same goes for Google-Facebook’s rivalry. For two companies that are supposed to be as different as night and day, there are a fuckton of personnel who have moved from one to the other — all the way up to Sheryl Sandberg, the one-time Google VP who’s now Facebook’s COO.

In his dissent to Citizens United, Justice Stevens wrote that corporate free speech was bullshit because “corporations have no consciences, no beliefs, no feelings, no thoughts, no desires.”

Companies want us to believe they have “values,” but these are just marketing crap.

That’s why monopoly is so easy. Back when the DoJ killed AT&T and T-Mobile’s merger, John Legere took charge of T-Mobile’s and declared himself the “un-CEO,” growing out his hair and donning a t-shirt and emphasizing that he was nothing like his rivals.

But Legere was an ex-AT&T exec. T-Mobile’s differences from the other carriers — its claim to be an “un-carrier” were as superficial as those Lucky Charm marshmellow flavors.

That’s why Legere was able to merge T-Mobile with Sprint, pocket $135m and retire.

If corporations really had character and personality, if corporate rivalries really meant anything, then we wouldn’t have waves and waves of mergers.

I mean, either Disney and Fox were completely at odds with one another and Rupert Murdoch and Bob Iger were Romeo and Juliet, whose desperate, burning love for one another united their two great houses, or…

…It was all bullshit.

To the extent that corporations have “character” and “value,” these boil down to one thing:

Class solidarity among monopolists.

Which is why boycotts or other purchase decisions are not going to solve the monopoly problem. You’re not a consumer, an ambulatory wallet who votes by buying or not buying. You’re a citizen, who can and must demand action from your state on your behalf.

Corporate capture isn’t inevitable. It’s the result of monopoly — of massive profits and concentrated decision-making power following from boiling an industry down to a few companies.

We can have a responsive government, but only while it is more powerful than companies.

We need to bust every trust, but we have to start somewhere. Tech is uniquely suited to being that starting point, both because of the role interop can play in shattering tech’s power, and because tech is the infrastructure for a mass movement to change every industry.

You can read the article here:

https://locusmag.com/2021/07/cory-doctorow-tech-monopolies-and-the-insufficient-necessity-of-interoperability/

Here’s the podcast episode:

https://craphound.com/news/2021/07/12/tech-monopolies-and-the-insufficient-necessity-of-interoperability/

Here’s a direct link to the MP3 (hosting courtesy of the @InternetArchive, they’ll host your stuff for free, forever):

https://archive.org/download/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_397/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_397_-_Tech_Monopolies_and_the_Insufficient_Necessity_of_Interoperability.mp3

And here’s the RSS feed for my podcast:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/doctorow_podcast

Image: Royalty Free (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/99783447@N07/9433864982/

CC BY: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

[agiar2000]

Resistance to Violence

I just saw this video, and I found it very intriguing and impactful, intellectually. It actually did get me thinking differently about the main issue therein. https://youtu.be/YJSehRlU34w

When this video was published, I was probably already quite convinced of the virtue of non-violent resistance.

In recent years, however, I have seen more and more of how non-violent protesters have not only been subjected to oppressive violence in retaliation, but have also been publicly blamed for the violence being done to and around them, so that the corrupt media has successfully managed to redirect the sympathy that ought to be conferred on those who are bravely and peacefully standing in the face of violence and oppression, and twist it into even more support for the oppressive system. I have seen how violent regimes are perfectly willing to brutalize peaceful people just to assert and demonstrate their dominance, and then I see them getting praise from large swaths of the population who support that oppression.

On the other hand, I have also been thinking more about situations where violence was the catalyst to finally make progress for equality and justice. The Confederate States of America, the Nazis of Germany, and the various unconscionable horrors they wrought were not stopped by people protesting peacefully, by seeking common ground, by seeking to understand them better and make them comfortable. They were stopped by a sufficient opposing army slaughtering them until they ceased to be willing and able to pose a continuing threat to humanity.

It's also helpful, I think to contrast the end of the Confederacy with the end of the Nazis. Starting with the Confederacy: While slavery and white supremacy were certainly overtly stated goals of the Confederacy's rebellion, the Union was (and still is) hardly an anti-racist country, and it has been noted that their goal in fighting the Confederacy was more about retaining the Union than about ending slavery. In the end, when the Confederacy surrendered, there was an attempt by the victors to ease the feelings of the erstwhile rebels, to allow them to retain a great deal of "Southern pride". For that, we get the Daughters of the Confederacy whitewashing and rewriting history, the Ku Klux Klan continuing to wage terror across the country, and many of the various monuments and other dedications to honor Confederate leaders. The meaning of these symbols is clearly white supremacy, and not merely "Southern pride", as evidenced by how they're used. Many of these monuments were erected in the former Confederacy as part of the backlash against the civil rights movement in the 20th century, and some people even outside of America proudly wave the Confederacy's navy jack flag. Why would non-Americans wave that flag? Because they want to wave a flag for white supremacy, and they can't legally wave the flag of the Nazis.

The Nazis, by contrast, were obliterated. They were not allowed to retain "Nazi pride" after the fall of their heinous regime. The symbols of their monstrosity were banned. A standard of basic human decency was granted greater priority than the "freedom" of terrible people to do horrible things. Nazism was destroyed, not simply because it opposed other powers that wanted to control them, but because they were evil, and they needed to be stopped for the good of the world. The result is that now, less than 8 decades after the fall of the Nazis, Germany is a far more decent, pro-social democracy than the former Confederate states, which continue to stand for right-wing oppression, even over 15 decades after the surrender of the Confederacy.

Another example, though less of a dramatic one, is that of the Stonewall riot. The LGBTQ community did not start gaining rights and freedom from a horrifically oppressive regime because they were kind, nice, and peaceful, gently appealing to the better angels of their murderers and oppressors, making the effort to try to understand them and to meet them in the middle. What kicked off their victories at this time was Black trans women of color throwing bricks at police.

Considering all that, I found Chenoweth's presentation difficult to reconcile. When the oppressive regime has control over the media, when they make every peaceful protester look like a violent, dangerous terrorist, and they convince large portions of the population to be willing to fight for fascism, convincing them that it is actually "freedom", and that efforts for justice are actually an attack on their very identity, how can one possibly proceed? When those in power do murder peaceful protesters, do you keep showing up to protest peacefully? If you see someone going around shooting people left and right, do you stand there and demand verbally that the shooter stop?

So, what to do? We live in a violent society that has normalized routine violence against the poor, minorities, people of color, and all of the most marginalized and vulnerable in society. We only need 3.5% of the population to actively resist? Already 5.8% of the American population is in deep poverty, with 9.2% in poverty, generally. Globally, these numbers are even more horrifying, with 9.2% in deep poverty and nearly 17% in a state of being "multidimensionally poor", and nearly half living on less than the equivalent of US$5.50 per day. Couldn't we count on those people, at the very least, to oppose their own oppression? No, we cannot, partly because part of being so oppressed is being kept so weak and powerless that you don't have the energy to resist and being provided just enough that you're terrified to lose what little you have by daring to stand up, but also because so many of them have been brainwashed and corrupted into voting against their own interests and being willing to fight against the people who are trying to help them, and blame the even more marginalized among them or phantoms of foreign powers for all of their problems. Maybe if they knew what was really going on, we would have won long before now.

Now, regarding the topic of the video, the success of non-violent resistance, I very much appreciate that Chenoweth's presentation relied on statistical data from studies of hundreds of events rather than the mere anecdotes that were foremost in my mind when I started watching, and I also appreciate that she started by talking about the mindset from which she started, which closely resembled my own, including good examples of violent revolutions that ended corrupt regimes. I don't know exactly how the data she used to reach her conclusion were gathered and classified, and I retain some skepticism, but I would very much like to believe that her data are, in fact, representative, accurate, and actionable. I would very much like to believe that we can, in fact, win freedom and justice through peaceful means, though I have a hard time really being confident in it. I want to believe that she's right because otherwise, I see very little hope at all. We are very close to a point at which total environmental collapse is inevitable, with the majority of global power still putting the pedal to the metal to drive us off that cliff as fast as possible. The most aggressive policy proposals to save the planet involve easing up on the gas slightly, far too little far too late, and even those are being defeated by the regressive death cult of neoliberals, conservatives, and fascists. At this point, it is hard to see how any future can exist that does not involve tremendous destruction. Either the forces of evil win outright and destroy everything, or the forces that oppose them are forced to wreak so much destruction in order to stop them that they might as well have lost anyway. It's hard to imagine sometimes that we have not already completely lost, that the world is not already completely doomed, and all that is left is to watch as the monsters responsible for it just keep making things worse until the very end.

I guess the answer is just to have faith and to do whatever we can to give humanity the best possible chance, and that means two main strategic goals: 1. Motivate and influence enough people to reach that 3.5% threshold to actually resist for the change that we all need. 2. Determine an actual action plan for those people to carry out that will have the desired effect with a minimum of collateral damage and harmful side effects.

Sadly, I have no idea how to do either of those things, and anything I can think of still feels either depressingly small and insufficient or worrying for its potential to cause unintended harm.

[innuendostudios]

Here’s How to Radicalize a Normie, a video essay on how the Alt-Right and their fellow travelers recruit. Clocking in at 41 minutes, 6756 words, 633 individual drawings, and 27 sources (including three full books), it is by far the longest and most heavily-researched video in The Alt-Right Playbook. I am very tired.

It took so long to put this behemoth together that my Patreon started to dip. So, maybe a little more than usual, if you want to keep seeing videos like these, please consider backing me on Patreon.

Transcript below the cut.

Say, for the sake of argument, your friend Gabe is starting to worry you.

Gabe’s always been just, you know, a regular guy. Not very political. He likes video games, sci-fi, comics, Star Wars, and anime. White guy shit. The only offbeat thing about him is you suspect there’s like a 20% chance he’s a furry. For all intents and purposes, Gabe is a normie.

But recently Gabe’s been spending a lot of time on some radically conservative forums, and listening to radically conservative podcasts, and picking some radically conservative arguments with you and your friends. You never would have expected this, not from Gabe, and, given the speed it’s happened, it’s worrying to think where it might be headed.

How have the Alt-Right gotten their hooks into your friend?

If you’ve ever known a Gabe, this video is for you. Here’s How to Radicalize a Normie.

Step 1: Identify the Audience

What you need to know before we begin is: around 2013, the Nazis went online.

Hate groups in the US, as tracked by the Southern Poverty Law Center, had been growing in number since the noughts, but, between 2012 and 2014, they dropped by almost a quarter. Patriot groups dropped by over a third. However, hate crimes stayed about the same. Radical conservatism was not shrinking, but decentralizing. Still radical, still often violent, but now full of white nationalist nomads unlikely to join a formal organization.

This didn’t make them harmless. What it did was protect their asses from the typical hate group cycle: getting the public’s attention, making allies in conservative media, swelling their numbers, and then eventually disgracing themselves with failures, infighting, and, often enough, members committing horrific acts of violence, which come with social and sometimes legal consequences for all the other members.

So the Alt-Right and their fellow travelers these days don’t so much have members. They have hashtags, followers, viewers, and subscribers. This insulates them from their own audience. If Gabe, as a member of that audience, were to go out and commit a crime on their behalf, there’d be little doubt they had a hand in radicalizing him, but it’d be very hard to claim they told him to do it. On some of these sites, where Gabe spends hours and hours of his day, he’s never created an account or left a comment; the people radicalizing him don’t even know he’s there.

This distributed nature is what makes the Alt-Right, and the movements connected to it, unique. (You may remember a notable proof-of-concept for this strategy.) Doing almost everything online has, as compared with traditional hate movements, dramatically increased their reach and inoculated them from consequence. The trade-off, as we will see, is a lack of control.

And so we come to Gabe.

Gabe exists at the intersection of the kinds of people the Alt-Right is looking for - straight white cis men who feel emasculated by modern society, primarily, though they do make exceptions - and the kinds of people who are vulnerable to recruitment. Gabe fits the first profile in that he got bullied in high school, and often feels he has to hide his nerdy side for fear of getting ridiculed. The Alt-Right also has success with men who can’t get laid or recently got divorced or feel anxious about an influx of non-white people in their community. These things can make one feel like less than the confident white man they’re “supposed” to be. And it’s the closest they will ever come to being minoritized.

Regarding the second profile, it’s important to know that Gabe is not categorically different from you or me. He’s a cishet white dude - his problems are not unique. There isn’t a ton of research into the demography of the Alt-Right, but there may be a higher-than-average chance Gabe has a history of being abused or comes from a broken home. You don’t know if it’s true of Gabe, he’s never said. But most abuse survivors don’t become Nazis. The things that make people like Gabe recruitable tend to be situational: it happens often during periods of transition, as dramatic as the death of a loved or as benign as moving to a new city. Things that make people ask big life questions. Gabe has concerns like economic precarity, not knowing his place in a changing world, stressful working conditions. In other words, Gabe is suffering under late capitalism, same as everyone, and it’s entirely plausible he could have gone down the path to becoming a Leftist.

This is not to make an “economic anxiety” argument: the animating force of the Far Right is and always has been bigotry. But the Alt-Right targets Gabe by treating his “economic anxiety” as one of many things bigotry can be sold as a solution to. It is their aim that, when dissatisfied white men go looking for answers, they find the Alt-Right before they find us.

Step Two: Establish a Community

Were Gabe pledging an old-school hate movement, there would probably be a recruiter to usher him into an existing community. But that’s the kind of formalized interaction modern extremists try to avoid. Online extremism has many points of entry, and everybody’s journey is unique, so rather than be comprehensive we will focus on what are, in my estimation, the two most common pathways: the Far Right creates a community Gabe is likely to stumble into, or infiltrates a community Gabe is already in.

The stumble-upon method has two main branches, one of which is just “Gabe ends up on a chan board,” which we’ve already done a video about. The other is kind of the polar opposite of 4chan’s cult of anonymity: Gabe ends up in the fandom of a Far Right thought leader.

These folks are charismatic media personalities (that’s charismatic according to Gabe’s tastes, not ours; I don’t understand it, either). These personalities may gain traction on any number of platforms, from podcasts to reportage to blogging, though the most effective platform for redpilling is, and yes I am biting the hand that feeds me, YouTube. They may get Gabe’s attention through fairly standard means, like talking about or even generating controversy to get themselves trending, while some of the more committed will employ dubious SEO tactics like clickbait, google bombing, and data voids (just pause for definitions, we don’t have time).

What they tend to have in common, especially the most accessible ones, is that they don’t present themselves as entry points to the radical Right. In fact, many did not set out to be Far Right thought leaders, and may not think of themselves as such (though they are often selling products, of which the Alt-Right are among their biggest purchasers, and it’s not like they’re turning the money away). How they present is the same way anyone presents who wants to be successful on social media: accessible, approachable, authentic. The face-to-face relationship a budding extremist forms with their recruiter or the leader of their hate group’s local chapter are here folded into one parasocial relationship with a complete stranger.

Why this person appeals to Gabe is they’re not selling politics as politics, but conservatism as a kind of lifestyle brand. They rely heavily on criticizing or ridiculing the Left: feminists are oversensitive, Black people unintelligent, queer folks doomed to loneliness, and trans people insane; I dunno if it’s a coincidence that these are all things Gabe thinks about himself in his low moments. By contrast, they don’t sell conservatism as having sounder policies or a more coherent moral framework, but that abandoning progressive principles and embracing conservative ones will make Gabe happier. Remember, Gabe isn’t looking for white nationalism or misogyny, what he wants is the cure to soul-sickness, and these friendly micro-celebs are here to offer a shot of life advice with politics as the chaser. It is extremely important that politics be presented as a set of affects, not a set of beliefs.

The second pathway is infiltration, which is its own beast. Media personalities sometimes become gateways to the Right almost by accident: they do something edgy, a part of their audience reacts positively, and, facing no real consequence, they do it more; this leads to further positive reinforcement from conservative fans, the rest of the audience acclimates, and the cycle repeats, the personality pushing the envelope further and further based on what flies with their increasingly conservative audience. In this way, they become a right-wing figure by both radicalizing and being radicalized by their audience.

Infiltration is deliberate.

The Far Right will reliably target any community that has 1) a large, white, male population, 2) whose niche interests allow them to feel vaguely marginalized, and 3) who are not used to progressive critique of said interests. This isn’t to say progressive critique doesn’t exist, or hasn’t been baked into the property from the beginning, but that it has been, so far, easy for white guys to ignore. As such, progressives within that community probably don’t talk politics much, and women and minorities are perfectly welcome to post, same as anyone, but just, you know, don’t, don’t make identity politics, you know, like, a thing.

Given Gabe’s proclivities, he’s probably already in a number of fan communities where he can geek out and not get teased. And this is where the Far Right will go looking for him

Communities are at their most vulnerable to infiltration at times of political discord. This can happen naturally - say, a new property in the fandom has a Black protagonist - or it can be provoked - say, a bunch of channers join the forum and say provocative things about race to get people arguing - or both. Left to its own devices, the community might sort out its differences and maybe even come out more progressive than they started. But, with the right pressure applied in the right moment, these communities can devolve into arguments about the need to remove a nebulously-defined “politics” from the conversation.

The adage about bros on the internet is “‘political’ means anything I disagree with,” but it’d be more accurate to say, here, “‘political’ means anything on which the community disagrees.” For instance, “Nazis are bad” is an apolitical statement because everyone in the community agrees. It’s common sense, and therefore neutral. But, paradoxically, “Nazis are good” is also apolitical; because “Nazis are bad” is the consensus, “Nazis are good” must be just an edgy joke, and, even if not, the community already believes the opposite, so the statement is harmless. Tolerable. However, “feminism is good” is a political statement, because the community hasn’t reached consensus. It is debatable, and therefore political, and you should stop talking about it. And making political arguments, no matter how rational, is having an agenda, and having an agenda is ruining the community.

(Now, it is curious how the things that provoke the most disagreement tend to be whichever ones make white dudes uncomfortable. One of life’s great, unanswerable mysteries.)

You can gather where this is going: a community that doesn’t tolerate progressivism but does tolerate Nazism is going to start collecting Nazis, Nazis whose goal is to drive a wedge between the community and the Left. Once the Left acknowledges, “Hey, your community’s developing a Nazi problem,” the Nazis - who are, remember, trusted, apolitical members of the community who might just be kidding about all the Nazi shit - say, “Did you hear that, guys?! Those cultural Marxists just called all of us Nazis!” Wedge. Similarly, any community members who say, “but Nazis though” are framed as infiltrators pushing an agenda, even if they’ve been there longer than the Nazis have. They get the wedge, too.

This is how fandoms radicalize. They are built as - yeah, I’ll say it - safe spaces for nerds, weebs, and furries, and are told that the Left is a threat to their safety. Given a choice between leaving a community that has mattered to him for years and simply adjusting to the community’s shifting politics, the assumption is that Gabe will stay. This assumption is right often enough that a lot of fandoms have been colonized.

What is true of both of these methods - Gabe finding the Right or the Right finding him - is that Gabe does not come nor stay for the ideology. He’s here for the community, the sense of belonging, of being with his people, of having his fears validated and his enjoyment shared. The ideology is simply the price of admission.

Step Three: Isolate

There is a vast, interconnected network of Far Right communities out there, and Gabe is, at this point, only on the periphery. In order to keep him in, they need to disrupt his relationships to other communities, and become, more and more, his primary online social space. Having made this space hostile to the Left, they now seek to break his connections to progressives elsewhere in his life.

This is hard to do online. The whole appeal of moving radicalism to the internet is that your away-from-keyboard life doesn’t have to change. You are crypto the moment you log off. Some thought leaders will encourage their audience to cut ties with Family of Origin, or “deFOO,” but, even then, they can’t monitor whether the audience has actually done it the way an in-person movement could. And so alienating Gabe from the Left is less controlled, and, consequently, may be less total. How much Gabe isolates is up to him.

But the vast majority of Far Right media presumes an alienation from the Left. Part of conservative bloggers and YouTubers making the Left look pathetic is doing a lot take-downs and responses. This is a constant repetition of the Left’s arguments for the purpose of mockery, and, for Gabe, it starts to replace any engagement with progressive media directly. He soon knows the Left only through caricature. It also trains him, if he does directly engage, to approach the Left with the same combative stance as his role models. (For reference, see my comment section.) And this is only if he doesn’t partake in one of the many active boycotts of “SJW media.”

In addition to mocking the Left’s arguments, they also, curiously, appropriate them. This is one part sanitization: liberal centrism is more socially acceptable; indeed, many figures on the outer layers think of themselves as moderates, even as they serve as gateways to radicalism. But, also, many of Gabe’s problems could be addressed by progressive leftism, so they sell him racist, sexist versions of it. Yes, there is a problem with workers being underpaid and overextended, but the solution isn’t unions, it’s deporting immigrants; yes, there is a chronic loneliness and anger to being a man in the modern age, but it’s not because of the toxic masculine expectations placed on you by the patriarchy, it’s women being slutty; yes, wealth disparity does mean a tiny percentage of elites have more influence over culture and politics than the rest of us combined, but the problem isn’t capitalism, it’s the Jews. And it’s hard for Gabe to reject these ideas without, in the process, rejecting the progressive ideas they’re copied from; the Right’s “take the red pill” is, to the untrained eye, similar to the Left’s “get woke.” (Or, at least, the bowdlerized version of “get woke” that is no longer specifically about race which came to fashion when white people started saying it, grumble grumble.)

Take the red pill or reject them both; either is a step to the right.

As this rhetoric slips into his day-to-day conversation, even as seemingly harmless “irreverence,” it may strain relationships with people who are not entertained by this shit. Off-color comments about race and gender can certainly be wearying for female and non-white friends, which can lead to a passive distance or an eventual confrontation [“why is everyone but me so sensitive?!”], which only seem to confirm what his reactionary community says about liberal snowflakes. If he says these things on social media, he may get his account suspended, and, if he comes back under an alt, you can bet his new reactionary friends will be the first to reconnect, applaud the behavior that got him banned, and repeat should he get banned again. A few cycles of this and he’s lost touch with everyone else.

Also, his adoption of the insular, meme-laden terminology of this community makes him less and less comprehensible to outsiders.

Over time, sources of information get replaced with community-approved ones: conservative news, conservative YouTube, conservative Wikipedia if he’s really committed. The Algorithm soon takes note and stops recommending media from the Left. He stops watching shows with a “liberal agenda,” which usually means shows starring women and people of color. Now, there is evidence that the human mind responds to fictional characters similarly to real people, and that consuming diverse media can decrease bigotry in ways roughly analogous to having a diverse group of friends, which is one of many reasons we say representation matters. By consuming a homogenous media diet, Gabe stymies his ability to have even parasocial relationships with anyone who isn’t a cishet conservative white dude or one of their approved exceptions.

To the extent that any of this happens, it happens at Gabe’s discretion and at his own chosen pace. It has not been forced on him, only encouraged and rewarded. But the fact that it hasn’t been forced can make him all the more willing to accept it, because it seems safe to consider; even though his life and social circle are changing to accommodate, he does not feel committed. But many Gabes have walked these halls, and, if they close the door behind them, there’s nowhere left to go but down.

Step Four: Raise their Power Level

(...and they say we ruined anime.)

Consider the ecosystem of the Alt-Right as layers of an onion, with Gabe sitting at the edge and ready to traverse towards the center. (No, I’m not just going to reiterate the PewDiePipeline, though, if you haven’t seen it, go do that.)

The outer layer of the onion is extremism at its most plausibly deniable. Without careful scrutiny, the public-facing figureheads could pass as dispassionate, and the websites as merely problematic rather than softly fascist. It is valuable if Gabe believes this as well; that, at this stage, he believe the bigotry is simply trolling, the extremists an insignificant minority, and any report of harassment faked. That he believe where he is is as deep as the rabbit hole goes. And that he continue to believe this at each successive layer.

People in the deepest crevices of the Alt-Right self-report getting redpilled on multiple issues at different times in their journey to the center of the onion. If Gabe’s first red pill is about the SJWs coming for his free speech, he’ll think that’s all anyone in his community believes; there’s no racism here, people are just making a point about their right to use slurs. Then, when he gets redpilled on the white genocide, he’ll laugh at those Alt-Lite cucks who tried to sweep the race realists under the rug, and at himself for having once been one, but acknowledge that those channels and websites are still useful for onboarding people, so he won’t denounce them. At the same time, nobody takes those manosphere betas seriously.

And this process is reiterated with every pill swallowed: gender essentialism, autogynephilia, birtherism, Sandy Hook truth, pizzagate, QAnon if he’s really out there. The heart of the onion is typically the Jewish Question, but these can happen in any order, and in any number. But each layer sells itself as being, finally, the ultimate truth. Each denies the validity of the others; the layers ahead don’t exist, they’re made up my liberals, while the people behind are asleep where you are now awake. That’s why they chose “the red pill” as their metaphor: take it, and everything will be revealed. That’s why it cozies up with conspiracism. But what’s supposed to follow is that this knowledge help Gabe in some way, and it doesn’t. Blaming immigrants doesn’t actually fix the economy, and hating women doesn’t make men less lonely. But, having been alienated from everything outside the onion, once that sinks in, the only recourse on offer is to seek out the next pill.

And pills are easy to find. Those within the network have laissez-faire relationships, even as they, on paper, disavow one another. When they need a source or a guest host, they aren’t going to go to the Left; they’re going to feature each other. The Left is the enemy; their ideas are beneath consideration, and the only reason to engage them is for public humiliation. [Shapiro’s book.] But you can interview “western chauvinists” and that doesn’t mean you’re endorsing them, just, you know, it’s fine to hear ‘em out, nothing should be off-limits in the marketplace of ideas. Besides, Nazis are apolitical.

And because these folks keep showing up in each others’ metadata, regardless of what they say, Google thinks there is definitely a relationship between the guy “just asking questions” and the guy denying the Holocaust. Gabe is softly exposed to many flavors of conservatism just slightly more radical than he is now, and is expected, at the very least, to not question their presence. This is an environment where deradicalizing - listening to the Left - would be sleeping with the enemy, but radicalizing further? You do you, buddy.

Gabe’s emotional journey, however, is somewhat more complex. If you’ve spent any time reading or watching reactionary media you’ve probably noticed it’s really. fucking. repetitive. It’s a few thousand phrasings of the same handful of arguments. Like, there’s only so many jokes about attack helicopters! But these people just crank out content, and most of it’s derivative; the reason to pick one personality over another isn’t because they say something different, but because they say it differently. Gabe just picks the affect it’s delivered in.

Repetition dulls the shock of the most egregious statements, making them appear normal and prepping him for more extreme ideas. Meanwhile, the arguments themselves? They’re not good. (BreadTube will never run out of shit to debunk.) They are repetitive because they’re not good. They’re mantric. A good argument you only need to hear one time; if you can follow it, internalize it, and explain it to someone else, you know you’ve understood it. But a bad argument can’t convince you on its own merits, so it will often rely on affect. This can be the snappy, thought-terminating cliche, or the long, winding diatribe that sounds really sensible while you’re hearing it but when someone asks you for the gist you can only say “go watch these 17 videos and it’ll all make sense.” Both these approaches are largely devoid of content, but, gosh, if they don’t sound sure of themselves.

And that mode can be very persuasive, but it doesn’t stick the way a coherent argument does. It needs to be repeated, the affect replenished, because the words matter less than the delivery. There needs to be a steady stream of confident voices saying “we’ve got this figured out and everyone else is stupid” or Gabe’s gonna notice the flaws. They are not well-hidden.

And the catch-22 of returning to that stream over and over is that these communities are stressful even as they are calming. People afraid they will die virgins go to forums with people who share and validate that fear, and also say, “Yes, you will die a virgin.” People afraid Syrians are coming to kill us all watch videos by people who share and validate that fear, and also say, “Yes, Syrians are coming to kill us all.” Others have already pointed out that rubbing your face in your worst anxieties is a form of digital self-harm, but I need to you understand the toxic recursion of it: Gabe is going to these communities to get upset. Every emotion is converted into anger, because sadness, fear, and despair are paralyzing but anger is motivating; Gabe feels less helpless when he’s pissed off. And so, while he’s topping up on reassuring nonsense, he’s also topping up on stress. And, being cut off from everything outside the network, the only place he knows to go to release that stress is back to the place that gives it to him. It’s a feedback loop, pulling him deeper and deeper on the promise that, at some point, relief will come.

It is a similar dynamic that keeps people in abusive relationships.

When someone in Gabe’s community makes a racist joke, they are presenting Gabe with a choice between the human interaction of laughing with his friends and his societal responsibility not to be a fuckin’ racist. And not laughing seems ridiculous; everybody’s friends here; no one’s getting hurt; this is harmless. And so the irreverent race joke draws a line between the personal and the political, and suggests that one can be safely prioritized over the other. One way to look at radicalization is being asked to stick with that seemingly innocuous decision as the stakes are raised incrementally: first with edgier humor, and then comments that are funny because they’re shocking but you couldn’t really call them jokes, and then “funny” comments that are also sincerely angry, but, in each instance, since he laughed with his bros last time, it stands to reason he should keep favoring the personal over some abstracted notion of “politics.”

This is why the progressive adage “the personal is political” is among the most threatening things you can say in these spaces.

I’m not trying to make a slippery slope argument. Most of us who laughed at edgy jokes when we were teenagers didn’t grow up to be Nazis. It is a slippery slope in the specific context of being in community with people trying to radicalize you. Gabe is a lonely white boy in need of friends, and laughing at a racist joke is personal, while not laughing is political. Staying in a community that has Nazis in it is personal, and leaving is political. The personal is what brings people together and the political drives them apart. (The “only if some of them are bigots” part of that sentence is usually lopped off). There’s this joke on the internet that nerds perceive only two races: white and political. Following that logic, what could be more apolitical than an ethnostate?

They are banking on his willingness to adapt his beliefs to suit an environment that meets a need. That same need can be satisfied by white nationalism. There are few things more seductive to people who doubt their own worth than being told you are valuable simply for being white. And you can sub in male, cis, straight, allosexual, or able-bodied. It just takes priming: by the time Gabe officially embraces bigotry, he’s already been acting like a bigot for months. The red pill is simply the moment he says it out loud.

Change Gabe’s surroundings, and you change Gabe.

Step Five: ???

The final step in a traditional extremist group would be getting a mission. But that is one thing the Alt-Right can’t do. Once you start giving clear directives, you can’t play yourselves off as a bunch of unaffiliated hashtags and think tanks; you are now a formalized movement accountable to its followers, and can be judged and policed as such.

To my mind, Charlottesville was an attempt to become such a movement, taking things offline and getting all the different groups working collectively. And, as so often happens when these people get in the same space - especially with no official leaders or means of control over their members - it backfired. Their true colors came out before they were ready and a counter-protester lost her life.

This would be the point where, historically, an extremist group starts to disintegrate. Their veneer of respectability gone, they’re now hated by the public, the media wants nothing more to do with them, and everyone not in jail turns on each other or goes underground. This is also the point where the liberal establishment says, “My job here is done,” and utterly fails to retake control of the narrative, allowing the next batch of radicals to pick up more or less where the last one left off.

But to an already-decentralized group like the Alt-Right, Charlottesville was bad but eminently survivable. People retreated back to the internet, with its code words and anonymous forums, but that’s where much of the work was already done anyway. The platforms where they organized kept tolerating them, the authorities still didn’t classify them as terrorists, and any disgraced figureheads were replaced with up-and-comers.

The major change in strategy is that it doesn’t seem anyone has tried to formalize the Alt-Right since.

So where does that leave Gabe? He’s gone through this whole process of largely hands-off indoctrination - and I should stress his journey may look like what we’ve outlined or it may look different in places, this video is not comprehensive - but now he’s swallowed every pill he cares to, he blames half a dozen minorities for everything he sees as wrong with the world, and no one will give him anything to do. You’ve got this ad hoc movement frothing young men into a militant fervor and then just leaving them to stew in their own hate. Should we really be surprised at how many commit mass shootings?

This is a machine for producing lone wolves.

Leaving men to take up arms of their own volition is a way of enacting terror while being just outside the popular conception of a terror cell. There are also, of course, more classic militias that will offer Gabe clear directives - they’re recruiting from the same pool. And Gabe may stop short of this step, settling in a middle layer that suits him or finding the inner layers too extreme. But violence is the logical conclusion of an ideology of hate, and, should Gabe take this step, he can approach violence in the same incremental fashion he approached conservatism.

He can start with yelling at people on Twitter, and then maybe collective brigading, DDoS attacks, sharing dox, leaking nudes, calling their phone numbers, texting them pictures of their houses from the sidewalk. These acts of cruelty become games of oneupmanship within his community. All this can start as far back as Step 2, and get more intense the deeper he goes. Some people join explicitly partake in harassment and violence the way Gabe joined to talk about anime.

But this behavior can serve as a kind of buy-in. The Left and the feminists and the LGBTQs and the Muslims and the immigrants are all, within his community, subhuman. You’ve maybe heard the conservative catchphrase “feminism is cancer”; well don’t treat cancer by having a respectful exchange of ideas with it, but by eradicating it down to the last cell. Cruelty against the Left is framed as righteous.

From any other perspective, posting someone’s bank information is something you might feel ashamed of. Which creates a psychological imperative not to consider other perspectives. A thing that keeps people in is staving off the guilt they will reckon with the moment they step out. Gabe is also aware that anything he’s done to the Left could be done to him if he leaves; some communities even keep dox on their members as insurance. And the things he’s been encouraged to do to the Left will likely make him feel that the Left would never take him now; the radical Right is the only home he’s got. Harassment becomes another tool of isolation.

Steadily, options for Gabe are whittled down to being a vigilante or a nihilist. There are periods of elation: moments the Alt-Right feels it’s winning - or, more accurately, the people they hate are losing - are like cocaine. They are authoritarians, after all. But the times in between are mean and angry. They are antisocial, starved of emotional connection, consuming incompatible conspiracies that may at any point run them afoul of one another, devoted to figureheads who cater to but cannot risk leading them, and living under constant threat of being outed to the Left or turned on by the Right for stepping out of line. Gabe took this journey for the sense of community and purpose, and, but for the rare moments everything goes their way, the Alt-Right can’t maintain either. They can only keep promising his day will come, a story he could get from a $5 palm reading.

The feeling there’s nothing left but to kill yourself or someone else is so common it’s a meme.

But there is always a third option: Gabe can leave.

Pre-Conclusion: For Fuck’s Sake Do Not Make Gabe Your Whole-Ass Praxis

Before we continue, I want to state plainly that Gabe went off the deep end because he found a community willing to tell him that, because he is a cishet white man, the world revolves around him. Do not treat him like this is true.

If a fraction of the energy spent having debates with America’s Gabes were spent instead on voter re-enfranchisement, prisoner’s rights, protections for immigrants, statehood for DC and Puerto Rico, and redistricting, Gabe’s opinions, in the societal sense, wouldn’t matter. Reactionary conservatism is a small and largely unpopular ideology that is only so represented in our culture and politics because they’ve learned how to game the system.

And I get it. Those are huge problems that are going to take years to address, where, if you know a Gabe, that’s a conversation you could have today. And, if you think you can get through to him, it is worthwhile to try. This is a fight on many fronts and deradicalization is one of them. But it is only one, so please keep it in perspective. It sends an awful message when we spend more time trying to get bigots back on our side than we do the people they are bigoted against.

Your value as a lefty does not hinge on whether you can change Gabe’s mind.

Conclusion: How Gabe Gets Out

He may just grow out of it. These communities skew young, and some folks hit a point where hanging with edgy teens doesn’t feel cool anymore.

He may become disillusioned after the movement fails to deliver on its promises.

He may become disillusioned if something goes wrong in his life and his community isn’t there for him, if he feels they like his race and his gender but don’t actually care about him.

He may be shocked if he sees the Alt-Right at its worst before being appropriately conditioned. Charlottesville was a step too far for a lot of people.

His community may turn on him for any perceived unorthodoxy, and he may leave out of necessity.

He may be separated by circumstance from the community - a trip with no internet, hospitalization, arrest - and not be able to top up on the rhetoric. This may lead him to question his beliefs.

His community may disappear, either tearing itself apart or getting shut down by authorities.

He may have incidental contact with populations he’s supposed to hate, and have trouble reconciling who they are in person with what he’s been told about them. In his community, people bond over shared intolerance, but, suddenly, being tolerant helps him make friends. (This is one reason the Alt-Right has made a battleground of the college campus.)

He may form or revisit relationships outside the network, people who can offer him the connection he’s been looking for. This may reintroduce outside perspectives. More importantly, it rekindles his ability to have healthy relationships at all, something the Alt-Right has estranged him from.

As with recruiters, it seems these “escape hatch” relationships can sometimes be parasocial; coming to respect a public figure who is on the Left, or is critical of the Alt-Right.

Someone he is close to may compel him to choose, “me or the movement.” A lot of young men leave to save a romantic relationship.

Hearing stories from people who’ve already jumped may help; there aren’t a lot of public formers, and some raise suspicions as to their sincerity, but it is getting more common, and may be the closest we get to exit counseling for the Alt-Right.

He may become aware of the ways he’s being manipulated, or have them revealed to him, maybe because he stumbled into BreadTube, I dunno. Knowledge that you are being indoctrinated is no guarantee it won’t work - you are not immune to propaganda - but it can help one resist.

And he may revisit a core belief system that used to guide him, be it religion or social justice or a really wholesome fandom, and be reminded of the identity he used to have.

Moments like these, in isolation or in aggregate, can inspire Gabe to jump. They are also good times for friends to intervene. The reach and the impunity that comes with the internet means it has never been easier to fall into reactionary extremism. It has also never been easier to get out. People who exit skinhead gangs often fear for their lives; for Gabe, there’s a chance getting out is as simple as going to a different website. Much of his community does not know his name or his face and he may not important enough to dox.

What doesn’t get Gabe out - not reliably, not that I have seen - is an argument with a stranger who proves all his facts wrong and his ideology bunk. Facts don’t always work because facts don’t care about his feelings. This was about staying in a community, and holding onto an identity, that mattered to him. It was about belonging, and that is something a rando from the other side of the culture war can’t give him and probably shouldn’t be responsible for.

The theme here is human connection. Before he can do the work of disentangling himself, and facing the guilt of what he’s believed and maybe done, he has to know there’s somewhere for him on the other end of it. That the Right hasn’t ruined him. They’ve told him all of history is groups fighting each other over status, and, without his clan, he’ll be an exile. He needs a better story.

I don’t know that lefty spaces are ideal for this, in no small part because bringing someone who’s a bit of a Nazi but working on it into diverse communities is… questionable. And it probably wouldn’t be good for him, either; having just gotten out of a toxic belief system, he’s going to be deeply skeptical of all ideologies. In a perfect world, people who care about Gabe could build for him - to use a therapy term - a holding space. Someplace private - physical or digital - where Gabe can work out his feelings, where he is both encouraged and expected to be better but is not, in the moment, judged. That comes later. It is delicate and time-consuming work that should not be done in public, but we find these beliefs, built up over the course of months or years, tend to fall away very quickly with a shift of environment. Change Gabe’s surroundings and you change Gabe.

But, instead, a lot of people who jump are functionally deprogramming themselves, which is working for a lot of them, but it’s haphazard, and there are recidivists.

If you don’t personally know a Gabe, or have training as a counselor, you may not be in a position to help him. Possibly there are things you can do to disrupt the recruitment process or prevent infiltration of spaces you’re in - I’m looking into it, but talk to your mods - but, elephant in the room: meaningful change will require reform on the part of platform holders. Tools to disrupt this process already exist and are being used on groups like ISIS, but they’re not being used on the Alt-Right because they try oh so very hard not to get classified as terrorists (and also any functioning anti-radicalization policy would require banning a lot of conservative politicians, so there’s that...).

But what makes our story better than theirs is that the fight for social and economic justice, though it is long, and difficult, and frustrating, when it works, it fulfills the promise the Right can’t keep: it materially make people’s lives better. I am not prone to sentimentality, or to giving these videos happy endings. But one thing we have that the Alt-Right doesn’t is hope.

[yetanotherlesbianonthiswebsite]

If you are wondering how my writing process for Arc 2 of TRoT is going, I’d be halfway through it by now if it weren’t for one small scene that at max should cap out around 3k words.

There are reasons I am placing it at the particular point in the story, why it has the dynamic it has, why it involves specifically those characters, and what it is saying in-universe direct, in-universe metaphorically and with its metacommentary. It has a more defined outline than the entire chapter it belongs to because I want it to fulfill specific purposes.

I loathed the way TME treated Briala’s sex life as something outrageous to be used against Celene; an indigenous-coded black lesbian finds herself in an incredibly toxic relationship with a white woman who is responsible for the violence her people face and it’s considered as something the white woman should be ashamed of. I can’t really think of a narrative that would rob Briala more of sexual agency and I want to write a modicum of counterbalance to that where Briala can enjoy sexual agency and sex in a loving and caring relationship.

Honestly, the way that both DA:O and DA II treat genderqueer sex workers is horrifying down to my soul; dehumanized, treated as experimental and weird and even treated as nigh violent in some situations, robbed of all ability to define themselves and ultimately the punchline of a joke. Dragon Age absolutely does not care about the humanity of genderqueer people and treats us as a fetish at best that the protagonists are kinkshamed for. Having a sex scene with Imerati as a trans lesbian main character is a fuck you towards the writing of DA in general that I need in my story.

Having this scene exactly in this chapter means that I can talk about dysphoria and sex. Afterwards, the main triad gets seperated and in the meantime before they reunite, Merrill introduces Imerati to the mirror of transformation. Writing this scene right here means three things: I can explore trans femme sex before GRS (with the added bonus of writing a beautiful sex scene that doesn’t or rather can’t end with all parties having an orgasm), I can explore the very personal pain that comes from not having the access to some of the means of medical transition (though for Imerati, it’s the taint messing with blood magic and for me, it’s the Federal Republic messing with my health insurance provider, but same degree of pain) and I can have a sex scene between a trans lesbian and a cis lesbian that shows that yes, some cis lesbians decide in favor of sex with trans women before GRS and it can be quite beautiful, which is the metacommentary of this scene.

The problem is that it is so incredibly personal. I have written Imerati to be an almost perfect mirror of me, I write my pain and trauma and happiness and hopes into her, she acts like me in any situation, she decides and thinks and feels like me. And that means that I have already canonically written into her the trauma surrounding sex that comes from growing up in a sex-negative cult and in the catholic church. It means I have already given her the clumsyness I have, the result of weak bones and failing muscles. It means that I have written her with all the general anxiety I have and the specific anxiety that comes from the intersection of being a lesbian and trans and having limited motoric skills. It means that writing this scene would mean acknowledging my own sexuality, in full, and exposing myself in a deeply anxiety-inducing way to the readers.

I know that a lot of smut is just the authors expressing their own sexual fantasies and preferences. I know that a lot of readers go there because that particular smut is connected to a lot of their own sexuality. I know a lot of comments and fics are just very openly horny. And yet that openness is exactly what makes it so difficult for me; to so openly make clear that despite not being allo, I am not ace either. Among the global anti-queer hatred movements, violence against specifically trans femme sexuality is a central motive; that’s what the metacommentary counterattacks, and yet that makes it so much more difficult for the entire thing to be so personal. Trans women being openly trans and sexual can be an act of resistance and revolution, and that’s exactly why this scene belongs in TRoT. This fic is built around the question “what is revolutionary?” and one of the most prominent answers next to “stating the truth” is sapphic intimacy and sapphic love; so it almost seems thematically imperative to have at least one sex scene like this.

And yet, it is so damned personal. Given how strong and organized transmisogynistic violence is globally, some of the strongest wounds of self-hatred within me stem from internalized transmisogyny. It means that I have an easier time believing that people hate me than love me; it means that by the shit I hear on the daily, it feels like my partners are making a big sacrifice by being together with a trans woman, that they somehow suffer under me being trans. Every transmisic sentence I have ever witnessed is another dagger in my soul, and believe me when I say that it makes sex incredibly difficult when the fact of your sexuality is the battleground upon which organized global movements rally for the destruction of all queerness.

It would be disingenuous to the way I’ve written TRoT so far to now step back from the plan of writing this scene, and it would be equally disingenuous to not acknowledge this real-life pain in this scene. One of the most fascinating contrasts I see in my writing of TRoT and Nerdling’s writing of Run Home is that I write very openly romantic characters that have a lot of problems with sexuality because of their trauma and that the inverse is true of the protagonists of Run Home, they are openly horny and yet find emotional commitment extremely difficult because of their respective trauma. The problem is that my story does not have ten chapters space for a healing arc where the characters slowly address and partially overcome their trauma; the main source of conflict is the historically grown structure of the status quo, not the trauma of the characters per se. I need to fully address and work through Imerati’s (and in turn, my own) pain in one short scene. I need to balance pain and beauty, anxiety and peace, because the thematic reasons for this scene demand such a balance.

I’ve written the coronation chapter in arc 1 in one writing session, I’ve written the Gaspard POV chapter in three, and yet I sit five writing sessions on this one short scene and I don’t know what to do. I’ve written myself into a corner, not narratively, I have solutions to every single narrative conflict until 9:43, but thematically and metanarratively. I’ve seen excellent and beautiful and sweet sapphic porn in my search for examples and guiding lights in the DA fanfic community, in name that is Prequels and Pirates, and yet, I don’t know if the path I will have to take in my writing must be different. I’ve always written TRoT without the explicit need for beta readers (though I always feel like I need sensitivity readers) but this time, I feel like I need beta readers for one small sex scene. It should be simple and yet it is so fucking complicated.

[djlandrover]

Lesbian does mean homosexual female. As a biological male attracted to the opposite sex, pay closer attention to those brain sex studies. MTFs like you don't have brain features like women or lesbians. That probably won't stop you from lying and mansplaining lesbianism and womanhood bc the heart of a straight male beats like a colonizer and you're no different. Make women ignore our rights to serve you in our movement to be free of you. Make lesbians ignore our sexuality to serve you in our community to be free from you.

I’m aware of what a lesbian is. I’m attracted to men. I am not a lesbian. I am a straight woman. I don’t know how many times I need to say this.

If you’ve read through the post that started this, you’ll see that the brain studies have been disproven. There is, however, other evidence linked to the validity of trans people, which you will similarly find in the notes.

I’m not mansplaining shit- I’m making assertions usually backed by scientific evidence, and when they aren’t backed by scientific evidence I make other assertions to explain my case (as shown in the “can men be feminists” thread).

I’m not attracted to women, nor am I a man. Your assumptions are wrong and you should really do at least basic research before you voice them, as I’ve stated both of these things more than once.

How am I making you ignore your rights? I’m not forcing you to do anything- I’m asking you to leave me alone and let me live my life. By not doing that, you’re infringing upon my rights, which doesn’t make a good case for your argument.

I’m not making lesbians ignore their sexuality. While *some* trans women may make that assertion, most do not. We understand that lesbians don’t want to have sex with partners with male genitalia. We understand that straight men don’t want to have sex with partners with male genitalia. The problem comes in when you reject trans people on the basis of being trans for reasons other than sex (I.e. rejecting platonic relationships on the basis of being trans, harassing trans people in the internet because you can’t mind your own business, etc).

Additionally, many trans women have female genitalia- that’s where the line gets blurry. While I don’t personally think that lesbians should be bothered by post-op trans women, I also acknowledge that it’s not my place to have an opinion as a straight woman. If someone is uncomfortable with having sex with another person, that is ultimately their decision, and I’m not here to criticize that.

You need to seriously consider what you say. Trans-exclusionary radical feminism has essentially turned into a cult at this point, and you’re repeating talking points that are irrelevant at best, and sometimes are outright lies. Take a critical look at what the evidence supports, and the structure that TERFs have taken on in recent years. People have twisted what they want to hear and hidden it under the guise of feminism in order to oppress a minority group that means no harm. That’s not good, for anyone.

[aion-rsa]

The Mandalorian May Want More Cara Dune But Many Star Wars Fans Want Less Gina Carano

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

This Star Wars: The Mandalorian article contains spoilers.

The Mandalorian‘s latest episode, “The Siege,” is a mostly entertaining action romp through Nevarro that gives fans more clues as to what the Empire is planning for the Outer Rim. The episode is also an opportunity for Mando and Baby Yoda to reunite with season one allies Greef Karga (Carl Weathers, who also directed the episode) and Cara Dune (Gina Carano). But, while the “getting the band back together” feel of the episode generally works in its favor, many Star Wars fans are dismayed by Carano’s return to the show.

The actor and former MMA fighter has quickly become one of the most controversial figures currently working in Star Wars, which has left many fans conflicted about how to celebrate the importance of her character while also separating Cara from Carano herself. Much of the debate between fans who support Carano and those who are petitioning for Disney to fire her from the show (using the #FireGinaCarano hashtag) stems from the views the actor has shared on Twitter.

For the past few months, Carano has used her Twitter handle to question Covid-19 mask mandates meant to protect people from a pandemic that has already killed over one million people around the world, posting conspiracy theories and memes that question a proven preventative measure that can slow the spread of the virus. Just days before “The Siege” aired on Disney+, Carano posted a meme suggesting that “Democratic Government Leaders” would soon “recommend we all wear blindfolds along with masks so we can’t see what’s really going on.”

She’s also been dismissive of adding pronouns to her Twitter bio in solidarity with the trans community, at one point using the words “boop/bop/beep” in her profile name to seemingly mock those who use pronouns.

“They’re mad cuz I won’t put pronouns in my bio to show my support for trans lives. After months of harassing me in every way. I decided to put 3 VERY controversial words in my bio.. beep/bop/boop,” Carano tweeted after her stunt was criticized by the Star Wars community. “I’m not against trans lives at all. They need to find less abusive representation.”

Carano later took down the joke, explaining that she’d spoken with The Mandalorian star Pedro Pascal (who does use pronouns in his bio) about the meaning of the gesture.

“Yes, Pedro & I spoke & he helped me understand why people were putting them in their bios,” she tweeted. “I didn’t know before but I do now. I won’t be putting them in my bio but good for all you who choose to.”

After Carano declined to show support for the Black Lives Matter movement in August, she was praised by alt-right site Breitbart for “refusing to buckle and bow to the woke social media,” according to Vanity Fair.

“In my experience, screaming at someone that they are a racist when they are indeed NOT a racist & any post and/or research you do will show you those exact facts, then I’m sorry, these people are not ‘educators.’ They are cowards and bullies,” Carano tweeted at the time.

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Most recently, Carano has shared conspiracy theories about unproven claims of widespread voter fraud in the aftermath of the US general election and has also announced that she’s joined Parler, a “free speech” social media site that’s quickly become a haven for right-wing extremists.

“We need to clean up the election process so we are not left feeling the way we do today,” she wrote in a recent tweet. “Put laws in place that protect us against voter fraud. Investigate every state.  Film the counting. Flush out the fake votes. Require ID. Make Voter Fraud end in 2020. Fix the system.”

What’s all the more alarming about Carano’s real-world views is the importance of her character, a rare female hero in Star Wars who doesn’t conform to the traditional gender roles or body type usually represented in the movies. On The Mandalorian, Cara Dune is a muscular ex-Rebel shocktrooper who likes a fight, especially when it means punching fascist Imperials in the face. After the end of the war, Cara chose the mercenary life over the New Republic but eventually settled down on Nevarro as its marshal.

Along the way, Cara has teamed up with Mando, a character who, despite being from an isolationist warrior cult, has shown himself to be surprisingly accepting and supportive of other cultures and belief systems, even learning to communicate with Tusken Raiders, a race often depicted as savage and cruel in Star Wars. In “The Marshal,” for example, we watch as Mando encourages Cobb Vanth to be more respectful of Tusken traditions and customs.

Pascal, who has been very vocal in his support of BLM and trans rights, is certainly a better example of the message of inclusivity Star Wars has tried to promote in its latest stories. Meanwhile, Carano has failed to grasp the message all together, personifying someone in the Star Wars galaxy who is more likely to wonder on the HoloNet whether the Empire was really all that bad.

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A post shared by Pedro Pascal he/him (@pascalispunk)

If calls for Carano’s firing lead to Disney removing her from the show, the Star Wars community could lose something important in the process: a mold-breaking character (at least in this saga) that many fans have seriously connected with. The better solution might be to recast Cara Dune, replacing Carano with a new actor while keeping the fan-favorite character.

“The Siege” subtly suggests that Cara might be ready to make a change, as she considers whether to join the New Republic’s ranks. While it’s just as possible that this could provide an easy way to write Cara off the show, a change of this magnitude to the character could also make it easier to recast the actor. This wouldn’t be the first time a popular TV show has recast a major character after all, even if recasting hasn’t happened very often in Star Wars.

Whatever happens to Cara Dune, it’s clear that we should be able to expect more from the actors who bring our favorite characters to life. Or at least the bare minimum — like not discrediting science in the middle of a deadly pandemic.

#FireGinaCarano for using her platform for spouting dangerous rhetoric that literally puts queer and trans BIPOC in danger. She is a racist transphobe. She has publicly shown her support and spread dangerous misinformation and conspiracy theories surrounding covid19 as well

— 💫 Lune (they/them) 🦋🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈 (@lunarsith) November 15, 2020

#fireginacarano and replace her w the ladies we actually want to see pic.twitter.com/sOmjp5Jahc

— olivia ✿ (@G0NKDROID) November 15, 2020

#FireGinaCarano and replace her with Frog Lady please. pic.twitter.com/u6yIqdBTcO

— Wren (@wrenhousevizsla) November 15, 2020

#FireGinaCarano and replace her with Ming Na Wen who is passionate about Star Wars pic.twitter.com/fQc9c1pFPc

— jews for hanleia and blm 💫 commissions open (@leiasskywalkers) November 15, 2020

Keep up with all of The Mandalorian season 2 news here.

The post The Mandalorian May Want More Cara Dune But Many Star Wars Fans Want Less Gina Carano appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[passionate-reply]

DAS KABINETTE - “THE CABINET”

I’m always very interested in how we continually pass down elements of culture--memes, if you will, though I use that term with the full academic or scientific sense of it in mind. Why is it that some pieces of popular culture and media are absolutely huge in their own time, but then get forgotten later? Conversely, there are works that weren’t terribly well-received in their own time that become cult classics later, or even beloved parts of what we might call “mainstream culture.” A lot of the time, it seems more or less arbitrary, which is a bit confusing or worrying in my opinion. It seems like it would be ideal, or at least nicer, to live in a world where something resembling objective quality or defensible cultural significance and influence were the metrics by which society collectively decided which works were worthy of “the canon.” But it’s often as minor or petty as an old song getting used in an ad or a trailer, and its creator picking up steam from there to become a household name again. 

One such work whose legacy is very interesting to me is the 1919 German silent film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. It’s considered by many to be the “first horror film,” as it tells the tale of a mad doctor who has used esoteric arts to turn a sleepwalker into his personal hitman of sorts, selecting innocent victims for him to murder from an early example of the “creepy carnival” trope. The story is a bit on the silly side I suppose, but the film certainly remains a deeply compelling aesthetic experience. Steeped in the melancholic sturm und drang of the German Expressionist art movement, Caligari creates a warped and twisted landscape of crooked houses and pulsating rooftops. In one of the first extensive uses of the “close-up” shot in the history of film, the chilling visage of the monstrous, emaciated somnambulist Cesare awakens before us, with black-ringed eyes carved deep into a ghostly white face.

If that look sounds a little familiar, that’s because a lot of the aesthetics of what we call “Goth” can more or less be traced back directly to Caligari. In the works of Tim Burton, Robert Smith, Jhonen Vasquez, and many other such darlings, the influence of this film runs deep. I mean, that’s interesting and all, but I find it even more interesting that through all this time, the name and specific identity of this film have managed to survive with a vigorous persistence that’s seemingly unmatched. I can think of few other works of popular media this old that have remained anywhere near as recognizable and fondly remembered, aside from the obvious Metropolis. 

The early 20th Century, and I think especially the “inter-war period” between the World Wars, is a really fascinating time. It’s sort of what I specialized in when I studied (visual) art history. In a lot of ways, it really was the genesis of many things we think of as “modern” today, from ironic meta-art that insults viewers instead of pleasing and titillating them, to surgeries that help trans people feel more at home in their bodies. And, of course, slasher flicks. I really do think that art and media of this time feel more modern than you might otherwise think, and that that’s a big part of the continuing appeal.

Whether this minimal wave track would sound at home as part of a new score for the film or not, I’m a little uncertain. It’s got a positively throbbing, intense synth hook that certainly creates a sense of excitement, and perhaps a little unease, which is amplified by some filtered vocals that sound suitably menacing. Actually, the treatment makes me wonder if they intended for it to sound like it’s coming from an old, somewhat decrepit recording, a little like a decaying, early film. Perhaps if they had added a little more panning or syncopation it might have sounded more “asymmetrical” to match the visuals of the film...

At any rate, it’s deeply interesting to me that Caligari has been so lovingly remembered, remixed, and reimagined by so many successive generations of artists, dreamers, and dark creatures of the night. It’s hard to imagine a more illustrious legacy for any work of art in any medium.