Gotta love it when some rando feels the need to add inane commentary onto your reblog.
Usually better just not to engage, but it can get hard sometimes.
(On the brighter side, though, that weird glitch from earlier seems to have fixed itself. *fingers crossed* This seems to be displaying OK, at least.)
Just to be clear, I’m not talking about anyone who would probably be reading this. More drive-by commenters who don’t seem to have read/tried to understand what they’re commenting on
Gotta love it when some rando feels the need to add inane commentary onto your reblog.
Usually better just not to engage, but it can get hard sometimes.
(On the brighter side, though, that weird glitch from earlier seems to have fixed itself. *fingers crossed* This seems to be displaying OK, at least.)
Mark Zuckerberg is a despicable misogynist and a capitalist pig who sells all of our private information, and is responsible for selling that to the people who used it to ensure the election of a crypto-fascist president, but this site reaaaally needs to stop with the “secretly inhuman / alien / lizard person” jokes because he is jewish and that shit comes DIRECTLY from literal antisemitic conspiracies started and propogated by genuine neo-nazis so why is it so hard to just not do that?
Before you recoil from this and develop defensive emotions, I used to joke about him having to go to human classes (a real thing he did) but then when i was watching the Live Congress thing he’s doing yesterday, youtube had the comment feed on and i got to watch people literally in real time at like 8 mph use that rhetoric while spamming stars of david next to it and i recoiled back from that joke/line of mockery so fuckin fast my guys.
Consider yourself informed and move forward from it. We can think up new things to mock him with that aren’t being glorified by neonazis.
I’m reblogging this particular version bc of the second part. Like, this isn’t even covert stuff. It’s out in the open and if you don’t see it, all that means is that you are isolated from it – and probably that you’re not the target of it.
But neonazis sure do love for you to spread their hate by proxy, and I for one don’t want to be complicit.
This is true for a lot of other places too. Prior to colonization, Southeast Asian women had a lot more autonomy, sexuality was not seen as shameful, and being gay/or and transgender was more accepted and sometimes even revered. SEA history can basically be summarized as “everything changed when the white men attacked.”
Before Europeans came to the Americas, Cherokee women had more political and social power (matriarchal lineage, land was passed down to daughters since women were responsible for farming, husbands moved into their wife’s house, children belonged to their mother’s clan, etc).
Additionally, they also didn’t view sexuality (specifically regarding women) as shameful and sexual assault was almost unheard of.
“Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700-1835 (Indians of the Southeast)” by Theda Perdue is an excellent book that describes life of Cherokee women before, during, and after colonization, and how Cherokee society and culture was affected.
I would strongly recommend Barbara A. Mann’s Iroquoian Women: The Gantowisas.
Which looks specifically at the Haudenosaunee, but a lot of similar patterns apply to other Eastern Woodlands people with similar social setups. Including the also-Iroquoian Cherokee.
IMO, Mann is much more careful not to take colonists’ interpretations of what they were seeing at face value. (An unfortunately common problem.) While dealing with sufficiently different cultures, where they didn’t always understand what they were even observing very well.
At any rate, a lot of other cultures just did not have the same ideological/religious investment in homophobia or anything like the same kind of gender systems as Europeans at the same time.
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Reminded by seeing some colonial history mentioned, with Maryland getting split off from Virginia. Oddly enough there’s a Maryland not too far from us where the naming went the opposite way from what you might expect.
From Wikipedia (not even trying to add all the links on mobile):
Maryland’s earliest known recorded appearance is on a map of Essex published by J. Oliver in 1696, where it is marked as ‘Maryland Point’. The name originated with a rich local merchant who bought land and built in the area having returned from the American colony of Maryland (itself named for Queen Henrietta Maria, wife of Charles I). London’s Maryland is therefore an unusual example of a place in Britain named after an American location, rather than vice versa.
Various attempts have been made to identify the merchant. The most likely candidate seems to be Richard Lee[1] (1617-1664, great-great-grandfather of Confederate General Robert E. Lee), who emigrated to Virginia around 1640. His estate there included land on the Maryland side of the Potomac River, near a place known as Maryland Point (later to be the site of the Maryland Point Light). On returning to England in 1658, Lee bought land in Stratford, and in 1662 was recorded as owning a large house there.
Somewhat interesting connection, but yeah. Can’t say it’s that surprising that the descendant of someone who apparently made a fortune as a fairly early planter ended up a Confederate general 200+ years later.
Lee was a lawyer, planter, soldier, politician, and Member of the Virginia House of Burgesses.
By the time of his death, Lee was the largest landholder in Virginia, with 13,000 acres and perhaps the richest man in Virginia.
That was after he decided to move to London, of course. Obviously not all of his family went with him, more’s the pity.
(Also, the London one is pronounced “Mary-land”, like Disneyland but with a very Catholic theme. Still a bit disconcerting, no matter how many times I hear it. Which would be more than a few, with Maryland on the train line between us and London proper.)
She said this in the context of how incels basically form parasocial death cults when they are ‘blackpilled.’ They come to believe that because they feel terrible about themselves right now, that feeling is objectively true and forever, and even the reality of how the ‘world really works’ and there’s no hope to change it, only to “LDR”. Which is, ‘lie down and rot’, a form of suicide baiting. What’s happened here is that otherwise genuine feelings of pain or insecurity have been validated maybe too much and have evolved into an entire worldview centered around affirmation of pain. And once pain-as-truth becomes social capital, the way people behave changes to maximize its growth and spread.
But I have to say? I feel like I have encountered versions of the very same behavior in my own spaces, on tumblr, on facebook, etc.:
There’s definitely forms of love-bombing that surround mental illness or depression support connections that shower you with confirmation and praise only as long as you reject any steps of managing mental illness, so long as it unstoppably dominates your life. Once you question someone else’s behavior or declare that you’re seeing a therapist or something all your new parasocial friends turn against you.
I’ve seen it in supposedly feminist spaces where women that are otherwise strangers to each other talk each other into hopelessness and heightened fear of sex and fear of other people in their life, especially male figures. Sometimes not even based in a specific personal experience, but instead just this collective ‘dark truth’ of womanhood. TERFs love to do this, and segue younger people into fear of trans women this way.
I’ve seen it happen a lot within lgbt+ spaces where someone’s personal despair about dysphoria, homophobia they face, not being able to find a partner or being judged by family or strangers, or even fear of violence, enters a feedback loop with other people they don’t actually know and don’t have any interests but their own consumption in mind amplifying it, forming these insular enclaves where fear is truth and everyone else is wrong because they don’t feel as terrible about being attracted to the same sex or for being trans as they should. Meanwhile no one struggling within this structure is actually getting the support or help they need, they’re just arguing about it and building cases for, when the mythical support does fall from the sky, why they should get it first.
There’s mounds of discourse where people argue over how because that group couldn’t possibly live as terrible a reality as this group, their lived experience isn’t the order of the universe and therefore doesn’t deserve validity or attention at all. And to argue, inexperienced people fall into the trap of trying to artificially match the despair levels of their critics, or try to counter one black pill with their own black pill which will never be credible to outsiders, resulting in cringy disaster at all vectors. In the red-hot radioactive mess troll accounts prosper.
Which is not to say that all these situations are full of people as baseless as incels– some of them are living very difficult lives, but are using “masochistic epistemology“ as the internal logic of their world. And the effect of such an internal logic is extremely dark self-confirming biases in excess of what is necessary to communicate the dangers of their lives, or cope with hardship. And any similar person who goes off seeking friends who acknowledge their pain is going to find a black hole of people who’d otherwise be peers escalating that very pain in themselves and others in order to confirm it’s all real.
Natalie Wynn herself, a trans woman, struggled with the urge to go to 4chan’s /lgbt/ and wait for the most toxic and hopeless crowds there rip her appearance apart even though it made very little logical sense. The people there shared the same insecurities as her, that they don’t pass, that people will despise them, and in some way hearing those insecurities confirmed rather than denied to her felt more like ‘the real truth’ or ‘what people really think’ than it did to hear praise and encouragement. Even if what they had to say wasn’t anywhere near an objective truth.
The “pain is real” mindset is that hard to shake! It doesn’t matter if you’re smart, prepared to identify the phenomenon with philosophy education, intellectually aware that it’s bad for you. There is a self-harm impulse to ‘face reality’, but a very specific reality that confirms the bias of your pain or insecurity. The comfort zone of discomfort, in a way! It just wants you to not feel crazy for feeling those things and is willing to hurt you even more to prove you’re right about your environment or your life.
When I’m at my sickest, I feel like my pain is objectively true in a way nothing else is. The people who love me are lying or duped by my manipulative nature, the hope I had was false and I never should have tried, etc.
Online communities of a certain kind of political bent really encourage this—present the idea that there’s a way the world is, and that way is not just unfair and unjust sometimes but endlessly destructive. People on the right and the left do this.
It’s… unlivable, and breaks people.
Horrible painful things are not always inherently more true. This is very hard to truly believe when your brain tries to trick you to think otherwise, but it’s so important.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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