#between antis and conservatives

[unpopularfanopinion]

if your defense of ao3 ignores the racism and zionism displayed by both users and staff then you are in no position to call people white supremacists. protecting bigotry under the guise of "free speech" while belittling and shouting down opposition is exactly what conservatives do. don't act like the people who disagree with you are republican adjacent when you've used their ideals to make your point as well.

i hope you snap your neck falling off that high horse lmao.

I am going to try to say this as simply, bluntly, and kindly as possible. I have not compared anyone demanding additional content moderation than the current legal stand they use to being white supremacists. I have compared them to conservative authoritarians. If you think being a white supremacists, or supporting white supremacy is inherently or intrinsically tied to conservative authoritarianism you are sadly mistaken.

A Frank Wilhoit gave one of the best description of conservatives and conservatism ever

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect

There is no marginalized group that is so inherently good and pure that they will not have members who desiring, power and control over others will try to place themselves as the protected in-group and others into the subjugated outgroup. (and oddly enough you're complaining about one such example of an oppressed marginalize group that successfully turn itself in a group of conservative, authoritarian oppressors. If you can't tell yes I am talking about the Zionists. While tight media control and propaganda helped them get away with it for so long, part if was also "Oh they were so harassed and oppressed in so many places and for so long. They has a people understand the pain of oppression. They wouldn't go harm another people.)

As I have mentioned in the past being conservative is more about a way of thinking and HOW you come to your positions rather than about the positions themselves. Studies have demonstrated that conservatives have a much stronger disgust reaction than liberals. So when an idea or concept triggers a feeling of disgust they immediately assume that thing to be evil, immoral etc. . . without truly taking the time consider if it’s actually harmful(or even disgusting sometimes it’s just different) This winds up making them fearful of change and non-conforming behavior.

This feeling of disgust also makes them feel justified in certain forms of bigotry making up all manner of excuses to call whatever disgusts them immoral. Such as supposedly leftist progressives being ablelist and claiming that any disabled person is basically a child and therefore featuring disabled people having sex(fictional or live action)is no different than CSEM.

Conservatism is more often less about the specific position a person claims to hold and more about how they got to those positions, and how they intend to fix the issues and problems that they find.

Conservatives hide behind claims of free speech when they wants to spam, harass, and troll people(and often using other people's equipment such as servers to do so) And I have noticed that when people like you actually seem to care about free speech on Ao3, when you want to spam comments, troll people, and harass people using Ao3's comment features either on news posts or on people's stories.

There is a lot to criticize about Ao3's response to reports of racist harassment, and how they resolve interpersonal disputes between volunteers, however none of that can or would be resolved by them even trying to make additional content rules or attempt to ban "bad fic" Because despite what you think someone writing a bad fic, or using certain tropes(tropes are tools, tropes are not bad) is not in and of itself harassment.

And also no, Ao3 staff telling one volunteer not to harass, and abuse another and reminding them of the professional code of conduct they expect from ALL volunteers is not proof of Zionism among Ao3's staff. Pretty much everyone involved in that fight on Slack on reprimanded for it but only one went crying to the internet about it. If that had happened between a Ukrainian volunteer and Russian volunteer and the Ukrainian volunteer quit would you be accusing Ao3 of being pro-Russia?

[emotinalsupportturtle]

Just thinking of nuwho doctors being unapologetically socialist, absolutely based and sometimes just borderline anarchist

As someone said, the commie doctors are unionizing

these two should consider recruiting David Tennant too (I mean it's only a matter of time before he pops up with one of these)

[bisexualseraphim]

Bigots who burst a vessel over gay and trans people existing because it’s “not natural” are the funniest people on the planet because like. Babygirl the car you drive isn’t natural. The house you live in didn’t magically appear, it’s not natural. The phone you’re using to call people slurs on Twitter isn’t natural. If you need glasses to see, they’re not natural. If you have a job standing on your feet all day at Target, that’s not natural. This whole ✨marriage✨ thing you’re obsessed with protecting isn’t natural. 99% of things human beings have done for the last 5000 years or more aren’t “natural” so unless you want to go back to completely living like homo habilis I don’t want to hear shit about “natural”

[a-court-of-moonlight-and-ire]

whats up with the "[x character] would vote for [x us-political party]" discourse. its bringing me back to people being like "rhysand is a zionist" "nesta would be pro-palestine" but a bit less bad

[is-the-owl-video-cute]

why the fuck do people think anti-feral porn = anti-furry ??? it's literally just the normal thing to think. and I'm saying this as someone who was groomed into pro-feral porn areas in the past, it is weird as hell!!! people really need to get help, and that isn't completely an insult

These people would cry if they found my furaffinity and I’m glad for it.

But yes feral and cub porn are both creepy and it’s weird to act like having any disliking of that makes you anti-furry.

[werewolf-cuddles]

Gotta love how when the "drag is inherently sexual" crowd are presented with an objectively non-sexual instance of drag in a piece of media they like, they'll immediately jump to insisting that it isn't drag, and get mad at the person who brought it up for "making it weird/gross", or even going as far as to call them a pedo.

Anyway, drag isn't inherently sexual, and if you disagree you are objectively wrong.

[icelynia]

Both should be considered child abuse. The amount of stories I’ve heard from detransitioners who were groomed into thinking that normal feelings to have during puberty meant they were trans is insane!

No one knows what they want when they are 9-17. Why should we be allowing a child who still plays make-believe and has imaginary friends to make choices that have such long lasting consequences??? Everything talked about is body mutilation and kids can consent before they can get a job, drive, or even legally have sex. HUH?? And if a parent doesn’t agree or give consent, that poor person is suddenly going to be labeled “a transphobe and a child abuser!”

We should not be giving in to the delusions of mental illness. rather we should trying to help that person get through it. Get the person therapy, maybe some medication, that’s it.

The surgery talked about is the Tommy John surgery I believe this person meant. Here is an article about it:

Here is a quote from the article:

“The official number of Tommy John surgeries performed nationally and internationally is unknown. But they are increasing, especially among youths, and the risk persists.”

Here is an article about the rise of transition surgery:

Here is a quote from the article:

“The majority of the patients were 19 to 30 years old, making up more than 52% of the surgeries. Breast and chest procedures were twice as common as genital procedures among that age group.

More than 21% of the people who had surgery were 31 to 40. Genital surgeries were more common among those older than 40.

The study found that a fraction of gender-affirming surgeries – about 7% – were done on patients ages 12 to 18, but some experts think that number sounds high. Wright said the majority of these surgeries tended to be among 17- and 18-year-olds and were the less-invasive procedures like breast or chest procedures.

Surgery is not typically recommended until adulthood, and in some states, surgeries on teens are illegal.”

Those teens that were talked about shouldn’t even be getting the trans surgery. The kids are not informed properly about the risks and how this will affect the rest of their lives.

In both cases talked about, both sets of parents should be getting arrested for child abuse.

Also what’s with the breasts comment at the end??? I’m conservative and have never heard anyone say something like that other than my doctor.

Please pray for these lost souls.

God bless!❤️✝️

[countessrivers]

Not to start talking about aussie politics, but you can't say that you support women and victims and totally aren't a bunch of morally corrupt, grubby, misogynistic assholes and a failure as a political party who think women are lying about being raped, while um...treating brittany higgins the way you're treating her.

[baphofemme]

anti-lgbt lgbt ppl will always baffle me to no end...

[introvert-celeste]

Every time I hear about what DeSantis is doing it just gets worse. I love Florida but I fucking hate the people in charge. It's sickening.

[the-13th-rose]

Yeah I was gonna reblog that post about how kids are a huge commitment and it shouldn't be seen as the default to make that decision because you can't just change your mind later

Then I looked and the blog was like "actually oppressed men are shit too and anyone who argues against gender essentialism is a patriarchy-supporting coward" and I ran so fast

[darcylindbergh]

Can't vote for Biden and his vicious and cruel destruction of title ix. Really embarrassing that Dems have mainly left it to the right to try to defend it, and it's not like I can vote for them because they also hate women just in different ways. Shat on by the left, shat on by the right, women are in an awful situation

i'm posting this so we can all deconstruct what a far right psyop ask looks like.

on first read, this looks like someone who wishes they could be confident in voting blue but they're bummed by the democrats in office. targets title ix for their ire but doesn't really explain, perhaps assuming i'm out of touch and will just react instead of doing my due diligence (bad bet: i'm an attorney). uses over the top dramatic language like "vicious." they equate the left and right as being identical and indicates they won't be voting for either, with the implication that i shouldn't either, but goes on to blame the dems specifically for...something.

look at the very specific way they've couched this sentence:

Really embarrassing that Dems have mainly left it to the right to try to defend it,

i'm not meant to fight them on this. i'm meant to be embarrassed to be voting blue in november, i'm meant to blame democrats for abandoning some law, and i'm meant to recognize the right as upholding it.

title ix, if you didn't know, bans sex-based discrimination in schools and education. when someone tells you about democrats destroying title ix, that someone is a TERF.

and TERFs largely have aligned with the conservative hard right. I'll link a few articles at the bottom with detailed explainers, but for right here it's enough to say that TERFs want the far right to win because the far right is voting with them on their single issue, which is the destruction of trans rights and the ouster of trans and gnc women from public spaces. TERFs have marched with the Proud Boys. TERFs have partnered with anti-lgbtq groups to advance their anti-trans agenda. they will throw every other issue under the bus repeatedly if their anti-trans agenda wins.

and, importantly, the far right recognizes that TERFs are a tool they can use to destablize the left. the far right knows that as long as they will align with TERFs on this single issue, which they will because they too want to enforce the gender binary and traditional gender roles, TERFs will vote for and with them regardless of every single other issue. not only that, but the far right knows TERFs are a modern movement that's gained traction in social media spaces over the last several years, and they are relying on TERFs to send asks like this one to infiltrate spaces like tumblr and twitter and tiktok to encourage would-be blue voters not to vote because they want the far right to win.

this is a psyop. this is, whether formalized or not, a psychological operation intended to discourage voting in and among the left.

don't fall prey. vote blue in november.

I like this one because they have this great graph that specifically points out the link between TERFism, the far right, and disinformation attempts like the ask above.

[probablyasocialecologist]

The study itself is titled, “Long-Term Regret and Satisfaction With Decision Following Gender-Affirming Mastectomy,” and sought to study the rate of regret and satisfaction after 2 years or more following gender affirming top surgery. The study’s results were stunning - in 139 surgery patients, the median regret score was 0/100 and the median satisfaction score was 5/5 with similar means as well. In other words… regret was virtually nonexistent in the study among post-op transgender people. In fact, the regret was so low that many statistical techniques would not even work due to the uniformity of the numbers: In this cross-sectional survey study of participants who underwent gender-affirming mastectomy 2.0 to 23.6 years ago, respondents had a high level of satisfaction with their decision and low rates of decisional regret. The median Satisfaction With Decision score was 5 on a 5-point scale, and the median decisional regret score was 0 on a 100-point scale. This extremely low level of regret and dissatisfaction and lack of variance in scores impeded the ability to determine meaningful associations among these results, clinical outcomes, and demographic information. The numbers are in line with many other studies on satisfaction among transgender people. Detransition rates, for instance, have been pegged at somewhere between 1-3%, with transgender youth seeing very low detransition rates. Surgery regret is in line with at least 27 other studies that show a pooled regret rate of around 1% - compare this to regret rates from things like knee surgery, which can be as high as 30%. Gender affirming care appears to be extremely well tolerated with very low instances of regret when compared to other medically necessary care.

[...]

The intense conservative backlash, to the point of disputing reputable scientific journals, likely stems from the fact that reduced regret rates weaken a central narrative these figures have championed in legal and legislative spaces. Over the past three years, anti-trans entities have showcased political detransitioners, reminiscent of the ex-gay campaigns from the 1990s and 2000s, to argue that regrets over gender transition and detransition are widespread. Some have even asserted detransition rates of up to 80%, a claim that has been broadly debunked. Yet, research consistently struggles to find substantial evidence supporting this narrative. The rarity of detransition and regret is underscored by Florida's inability to enlist a single resident to bear witness against a lawsuit challenging the state's ban on gender-affirming care.

[unravelingwires]

Clump

Do you know how the name of my blog is “unraveling wires?” That isn’t completely arbitrary. When I was a kid and trying to parse my own mind, I imagined my thought process as a tangled knot, each strand representing one maladaptive idea or emotion. You didn’t have to know a strand’s source to begin untangling it, but it was often easier to do so if you had a bird’s-eye perspective. I loved untangling jewelry and power chords, even then, so it was calming to imagine a process as fraught as introspection as something finite with an end goal. 

Slowly, that idea expanded to cover a lot that happened on the inside of my head: philosophy and spirituality and project structuring. It was reductive at times—anxiety cannot be handled by introspection, in my experience—but the point of symbols is that they continually expand until you forcibly pin them down.

I was talking yesterday about the colonization of Mars, trying to explain why it felt like a degradation. “Just because no one lives there doesn’t mean it doesn’t have value,” I said. “I know that Mars is a rock so it can’t be hurt, but just because it’s alive doesn’t mean we have a right to reform it any way we want to.” One of my friends pointed out that humans change any ecosystem we touch, that we cannot just write ourselves out of existence, and I thought about the days I’ve spent poisoning honeysuckle and tallying grass stems, catching crayfish and tracking elk. I thought about how Yellowstone was inhabited when we turned it into a national park, how the inhabitants sure as hell weren’t parasites, how there were no regulations against killing predators after the park was established.

The UK doesn’t have big predators anymore. India—with its 1.4 billion people and counting—does. The modern US, despite everything, still does too, and it has people working to keep it that way.

So no, I think there’s a difference between colonizing Mars and living on Earth. Hell, there’s a difference between traveling to Mars and colonizing it. If you’re careful, you can untangle vines without killing them. 

[buddhistmusings]

Every time I post something referencing the very real humanitarian crisis in Palestine, my "for you" page changes and becomes filled with recommended posts that contain the most vile antisemitic shit.

It makes me so sad, because it reminds me of what an awful job that a movement that was supposed to be about advocating for Palestinian lives has done with boundary maintenance. It is so compromised that social media algorithms don't appear able to differentiate between advocacy on behalf of Palestinians and antisemitic content. The crossover between the two has become enough that a user who engages with content of one kind is recommended content of another. People who are not educated on antisemitism and the covert symbolism it uses might not recognize it right away, so we are seeing an entire group of people, convinced that they are participating in a civil rights advocacy movement also being indoctrinated into a separate hate movement, under the impression that these two movements are the same.

With such poor boundaries being maintained between these two ideally separate movements, and such overlap growing, how long can I honestly maintain that these are two separate movements?

Meanwhile, innocent Palestinians are being bombed, children are starving, far-right governments on both sides of the conflict are gloating in the support they get from American conservatives and leftists respectively, and functionally, I hear nobody advocating for peace anymore, only the destruction of their enemies. Palestinians are being so incredibly demeaned, by both the people who want to destroy them and their sovereignty, and the people who claim to be supportive of them.

Sane, rational people who are advocating for peaceful solutions are disregarded and voices on the fringe are centered. People are witnessing what they interpret as a genocide unfolding and in response are advocating for a counter-genocide. Can they not see how this actively impedes the peace process? They give legitimacy to (false) far-right Israeli nationalist claims of Palestinian statehood as an inherent danger to the safety of the Jewish people, and demean the Palestinian people by suggesting that what they want is revenge and not to live their lives in peace. They've made questions about the legitimacy of Hamas, an evil terrorist organization, central to the movement, instead of what should be the priority, that innocent people are suffering and that this is unacceptable. They have redefined and reappropriated Jewish words to use as antisemitic slurs and convinced their audience that using these slurs is not antisemitism.

Meanwhile, capitalizing on the above mentioned antisemitism, those who want to harm the Palestinian people, deny them statehood, are using the words and actions of these activists as ideological ammunition to fire up their anti-Palestinian base. Donald Trump literally called Joe Biden a Palestinian at the presidential debate as a slur. Republicans are using the word "Palestinian" as a slur. Netanyahu (possibly one of the worst people involved in this entire situation), in his speech to congress, was able to point to the very real antisemitic actions of activists to further cement support for him personally. By the way, saying how antisemitic activists harm Palestinians shouldn't have to be the rhetorical point we resort to. The fact that antisemitism hurts Jewish people is enough to make it a bad thing and is enough to make us avoid doing it, right?

I'm tired of turning in one direction and saying "You should NEVER say something like that about Palestinians" and then turning in the other and saying "You should NEVER say something like that about Jews". It should not have to be said that condemning the very existence of one of two ethnic groups in their shared homeland is unacceptable, and yes, it is their shared homeland, because they both live there and are both from there. It should not have to be said that you should understand what a word means before using it to insult people. Here I am in fact talking about the word Zionist, because that is a family of various movements, some of which are worthy of condemnation, but frankly, the basic premise of Zionism does not demean or degrade Palestinians at all, because it simply is the belief that Jewish people have the right to return to and form communities in their homeland.

I'm kind of opening myself up to get a lot of criticism here, but I wanted to get these thoughts out, because I have been finding them enormously frustrating. My heart breaks for all the innocent Palestinians who are suffering and have a lackluster movement advocating on their behalf, and my heart breaks for all the Jewish people who have lost friends to antisemitic conspiracy. My heart breaks for the victims of 10/7 and their families, as well as the Jewish community who was interrupted in the mourning of their losses. My heart breaks for all of the Palestinians who have lost friends and family in the subsequent destruction in Gaza and the immense violence and famine we are seeing.

Please root your activism in peace and compassion, not hatred and destruction. Please think before you speak about entire groups of people. Learn about what words mean before you use them to condemn others. Learn about Jewish people, Palestinian people, their lives, their cultures, and why they both feel such a strong connection to the land. Make this about healing, love, and reconciliation, and not about being right.

[lizardsfromspace]

It's wild to see people advance these completely made-up histories

So, if voting mattered, gay marriage would be legal nationwide. It was legal, in 2008, but Democrats repealed it in 2013 and it's remained illegal since.

So first up: huh???

Gay marriage is legal nationwide. Right this second. In 2008 it became legal in a few states, most notably California, but not federally, and then California blocked gay marriage with Proposition 8 that year. 2013 was when the Supreme Court struck down Proposition 8 & the Defense of Marriage Act, which was a good thing. Then in 2015 two Bill Clinton justices, two Obama justices, and one Reagan appointee (who went less conservative in the court & who was a moderate nominated when Democrats torpedoed the nomination of Robert Bork) legalized gay marriage nationwide. Which is still the law.

(I keep seeing people claim it's Revisionist History to attribute Obergefell to Obama, since activists pressured him into that, and it can't be both the Supreme Court and activists responsible, it can only be one. Because of course gay rights activists would've been able to pressure John McCain or Mitt Romney and whoever they appointed to the court just as much!)

In 2022, the Biden administration passed the Respect for Marriage Act, which forced states to recognize gay marriages from other states even if it's banned again. "It would be legal nationwide by now" - it is legal! Now! The best case scenario is that this person got very confused by the legalization and repeal of it in California, the worst case scenario is they're just lying.

True, there is no federal "you can get gay married everywhere" bill. But there also can't be? Marriage licenses are granted by states. That's why states were able to legalize gay marriage under the Defense of Marriage Act, and why even after that Republicans talked about a constitutional amendment against it, only that or a Supreme Court decision could do that everywhere at once. Same with the unenforceable anti-gay marriage bills in the states, the federal government can render those unenforceable, but it doesn't have authority to make states take them off the books. Do people just not understand the difference between federal, state, and local government anymore?

Anyway if someone has to contort history this badly to make a case that something doesn't matter, it probably does