#being an asshole online is not praxis

[transrevolutions]

also if you want the satisfaction of punching up I can tell you from personal experience that it is much more satisfying to focus your energy on attacking those in the actual high positions in society as opposed to [other minority group that you believe has it slightly easier than your minority group]

[writterings]

to be so for real i think a lot of people especially in progressive spaces are just rude and ignorant about witchcraft being a valid religion. like it might seem like make believe and woo woo shit to you and YEAH there's countless issues with cultural appropriation and bioessentialism within the witch community but like. man cmon that's every religion. like sorry you're a raised-vaguely-christian-and-now-atheist asshole but making fun of someone's religion that most likely pulled them out of a dark place and now currently enhances their life is not the political praxis you think it is. it just makes you pathetic and annoying. also there's a lot more to witchcraft than the shit you see online like pinterest spells and witchtok. like it's a legit religion to countless people that has many deep and nuanced practices, beliefs, and guidelines that you obviously don't know about.

[caspercryptid]

hey i respect u a lot and i love it when ur an asshole but i just want u to know being an asshole to someone who thinks they r trying to help w the whole gpt thing doesnt make them not wanna use gpt it just makes them think the people who want them not to use it are assholes. like fuck gpt but the cake thing is p demeaning & just shuts out the ppl ur trying to advise into ur an asshole and im not listening land. not helping the anti ai movement, just making urself look mean about it yk

While I will fully acknowledge that the "I'm sorry my follower added that comment to your post" cake Is rude as shit, what's also rude as shit is reblogging a post about Chat GPT contributing to the death of creative expression with unasked for advice about using it to replace the work of copy editors instead, especially when that work actively continues to teach chat GPT more shit about how to steal and take work away from myself and people like me.

Perhaps I should have said that in the reblog but there is so little good faith discourse on this website that the one allowance I could make to good faith was not blocking immediately and bothering to respond at all. Bluntly, I'm fucking tired. I once had a harassment brigade against me because I posted a polite reminder that people with HP urls should change those. No matter how nice and polite I am people who want to misunderstand still will, and I didn't reply because I was doing praxis or trying to help the anti-ai movement— I replied because I was annoyed and upset! But maybe that's nihilistic and i shouldn't get jaded and assume everyone I disagree with is going to ignore everything I say and/or send me nasty grams, I'm just tired of writing out long-form thoughtful responses to people who aren't going to listen.

At the core of my irritation isn't actually the anti-ai argument at all— I think people should consider the intent of the OP and if their "advice" will be welcomed, even when the advice is genuine and well intentioned. It's like that post about wanting nice mugs and to own nice things that got brigaded with advice to go to a thrift store. The post is not asking where to find nice mugs. The OP of that post did not want advice on how to correctly use Chat GPT, and I did not reblog it for that.

Thank you for respecting me, even though I'm an asshole. I was a little harsh, but I feel very strongly about this and this is my life and career. I do a lot of slush pile reading and copy editing, and asking chat GPT to do rephrasings for you is the #1 tool of plagiarists. It's really disheartening to see it in my own online space— I could have been nicer about that, I just didn't have the bandwidth this morning to assume good faith.

[pumpkinpaix]

once again, please do not reblog this or take this personally, it is a vent post and I need to just be really unkind in a public space for a second. i love you.

god i swear every single time I think I’m getting better at not letting myself be swept away by an all-consuming rage over an inconsequential bad take, someone manages to prove me wrong, and then all the floodgates go crashing open and suddenly it’s summer again and I’m being called a race traitor, white apologist, mandarin supremacist as if i am not orders of magnitude more familiar with racial conflict and identity trauma the fucking gall of it “u know mandarin supremacy is like a big deal right, my family speaks dialect first and mandarin is violent” oh PLEASE tell me fucking more!! TELL ME MORE!! about how it’s mandarin supremacist to use a mandarin romanization system for a source material that is fucking, get this, in mandarin

tell me, someone who has lost no fewer than FOUR FUCKING DIALECTS in just two generations of my family history. tell me about the trauma of not being able to communicate with your own family, tell me about feeling untethered, tell me about your suffering all while dismissing the inherent complexity of my lived experience and invalidating my knowledge of my own language because I was born in the US. wow thank you so much for confirming that you ARE one of those people who think i am a hollow, rootless thing, that water cannot run through me, all while I am smiling and gritting my teeth and trying so fucking hard to be gentle when you will not grant me the fucking courtesy of considering me a fully realized human being. choke on it assholes.

it’s so fucking unfair that you attacked me personally and then had the audacity to be pissed because “how were you supposed to know” when I tried to be transparent about it. and then to be so self-important as to think that we make policy decisions as “revenge” against “POC”? why do i bother, why did i bother, why do i ever try when it takes less than an hour for people to tell me how much they missed my point every single fucking time oh im sorry you think i’m assuming that people know less than they actually do? maybe i wouldn’t have if you hadn’t been spouting clear misinformation about a job that i am currently doing as if you were some kind of authority on the matter. you think i’m assuming malice when there is none? fucking check my goddamn mentions. you think i don’t understand what happens when a non-white person talks about racism online? check my fucking mentions you stupid fuck

and all the while, there’s just this constant stream of self-aggrandizing fake-woke bullshit that could not have more obviously come from a shallow, young euroamerican leftist take on intersectional praxis that is so self-deluded they think they can cast themselves as w/wx, a righteous hero standing up to popular, immoral opinion all while demonstrating that they have completely and fundamentally misunderstood his character due to their utter lack of cultural context. i keep thinking i’ve seen the worst of it, but you all just find new and awful ways to surprise me. sure, say some angry shit and people will eat it up bc everyone seems to think that anger is an indicator for validity. thanks! i love experiencing relentless racism from both sides of the equation and then being told i’m the fucking problem. wow! revolutionary! it’s not like i’ve been experiencing this my whole life, but sure, go off i guess! demonstrate to me every day that actually, maybe i shouldn’t give anyone the benefit of the doubt anymore! show me that compassion is worthless! do it! fucking do it!!! show me that i’m the stupid one for expecting anyone to approach me as an equal because who goes back when they keep getting burned when am i going to fucking learn

[audarcy]

like it isnt praxis to not rib at people with cringe interests but at some point along the path of trying to seem cool u find yourself so disillusioned with the world and the people who inhabit it that it makes u wonder if its really worth it to broadcast so clearly what u think is socially acceptable or not and it makes u wonder whose opinions youre so worried about and why. as someone constantly afraid of embarrassment it's a hard urge to fight. genuinely do not know where the line is with like, it being okay to privately rib at stuff with your friends and when its just self-sabotage. like at what point do you start navigating the world expecting it to be worthy of mockery. at what point does the Cool Online Attitude become Being An Asshole

[postsforposting]

i really wish people would stop claiming there’s no problems from wearing a mask. the answer to “this makes me sweat buckets” isn’t “i should be allowed to go in the store and breathe death on everyone”, it’s “stores should be required to deliver to all addresses or at least provide curbside pickup for free”. but you can’t get everything online that you can in the store, no store lists literally everything available in the store, also online. that is part of the problem here. the other being that it costs so fucking much to have delivery service. 

it pays to be rich and abled. you know who’s going to suffer because people want to act like nothing is the matter and nobody could possibly suffer here? disabled people. immunocompromised people. you all, when you get old and become disabled and immunocompromised, when you become the target audience for all these problems that you say don’t exist and aren’t hardships. 

everyone is all about invisible disabilities and all about how asshole doctors love to deny people’s pain and tell you you’re making shit up for drugs and to waste precious doctoring resources and tax money and because they’re psychotic and malicious. then yall get a chance to put your actions where your mouth is, and what do you do? you deny people’s pain and you tell them they’re making shit up. 

praxis is cheap and performative. ideology means nothing. what you do in your everyday life shows what your real priorities and beliefs are. just as it does for hypocritical religious people who praise charity in church and then murder people from the voting booth.

[truethingsiwishicouldsay]

I have all the thoughts about this, since I used to be the one asking these kinds of questions. I’ll try and break it down:

Prioritizing women should never mean abandoning your friends and loved ones, putting up with toxic assholes, or blindly conforming to the unreasonable expectations of extremists.

Online, and especially on Tumblr, the most toxic members of a political group tend to be the loudest, which is part of why we all end up incredibly wary of each other. The sad truth is that there are a disturbing number of toxic people in Radblr, and they keep presenting their extremist views as mainstream radical feminism.

And that ends up confusing a lot of people. So I’ll try to compare and contrast healthy expressions of radical feminism with the absolute bullshit that the toxic fringe of Radblr pumps out.

To extremists, “criticizing heterosexuality” isn’t about analyzing power dynamics in heterosexual sex and relationships and encouraging OSA women to make more empowering choices. Instead it is about attacking straight women, demanding justification for their not being celibate and alone, demanding that they end their relationships if they don’t want to be “fakefems”, and pushing compulsory celibacy or political lesbianism.

To extremists, “prioritizing women” doesn’t just involve practical, reasonable things like fighting for every woman’s rights, patronizing women’s businesses, donating to Feminist causes, supporting women in need, or setting up mutual support networks. “Prioritizing women” is instead framed as an absolute standard wherein, as you noticed, somehow even individual female strangers on the Internet are supposed to be more important to us than men whom we have long, positive relationships with.

To extremists, men are uniformly evil, and women who love and befriend them are uniformly stupid, disgusting traitors who owe them a thorough accounting for their “bad behavior”. Meanwhile normal radfems talk about toxic male socialization, how many men embrace it with no self-awareness, and how to deal with it. Separatism is brought up as a positive, supportive option that should exist for all women, not a requirement to prove how Feminist you are. Nor is it framed as “abandon male friends and loved ones or else we’ll call you a fakefem and suicide bait you forever” except by the kind of women you wouldn’t want to go anywhere near.

The thing you need to understand, and that I wish THEY would understand, is that these fanatical, toxic women do not represent most radical feminists, their philosophy or their praxis.

Seriously, do you think Andrea Dworkin would run around suicide-baiting  women for, say, refusing to abandon supportive male loved ones? Of course not. But certain members of her fan club do and see nothing wrong with it. If they’re at all aware that what they’re doing is wrong, their only response is to hide what they’re doing through anon harassment.

Honestly, any radfem who pressures you to abandon friends and loved ones “for the movement” while embracing strangers because they’re part of that movement is unironically using a classic cult tactic. That by itself shows that she’s not a mainstream, generally representative radfem. She’s a fanatic, to whom other women’s absolute conformity to her ideals is far more important than their freedom of choice or personal well-being.

Please don’t think every rad and rad-leaning Feminist is going to treat you like that, or that you have to follow those kind of crazy demands. In the end, if a woman really, truly prioritizes fellow women, she will respectfully seek to find common ground and understanding, not try to bully them into obedience and conformity.

Actual Sincere Question for Radfems

I am a biological female. A lot of radfem rhetoric pushes for biological females to prioritize other biogocal females. Right?

You want women to be focused on helping other women, interacting with other women, and forming bonds with other women. That type of ideology.

Now, ignoring any other disagreements I have, how do you propose that idea to a girl that's faced her worse at the hands of other girls and women.

I, for example, always got along with guys better in the social arena. My earliest bullies were all other girls. Other girls tore down my self esteem before I hit the age of 10.

My mother encouraged it, forcing me on dangerous low calorie diets as young as 7 years old. Other women in my family bullied me in their own way, belittling my appearance because I wasn't feminine or girly enough or they saw my autistic traits and hated them.

Women taught me to hate myself, while the men I befriended over the years showed me looks don't matter, and gave me time and support when I needed it.

So with my experiences, why would I make women a priority? Why would I wanna tell the men in my life that they're not well meaning?

Like I don't wanna get yelled at, I'm honestly curious.