#correcting people on misinformation = good

[arcticdementor]

Teacher -> Democrat Party, and especially the sort of Democrats @mitigatedchaos (and others, like Shoe0nHead) are complaining about.

Students -> American electorate

The math/history/whatever curriculum -> "Democratic policy priorities"

Cellphone distractions -> non-left-controlled sources of information, the sort that lefties are given to denounce as "far-right pipelines" of "misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation" like x.com

Taking the cellphones away -> more social media/internet censorship

In short, to go back to Miti's original statement:

For some reason, changing Democratic policy priorities to appeal to voters is considered completely unacceptable.

It's considered unacceptable to these people because they see these "policy priorities" as objectively correct, and changing them to appeal to voters being like changing the answer to 2x2 to match the wrong answers on students' tests. If the voters disagree with Democratic policy priorities, then either:

The Democrats have a messaging problem (the teacher isn't teaching the lesson well enough), and they need to do a better and more thorough job denouncing people as racist, sexist, fascist, etc., until it the lesson finally sinks in and they vote (D).

The Democrats' messaging would be fine, were so many people not led astray by far-right disinformation on places like x.com (the students are being distracted and misinformed), and we need more fact-checking and censorship to ensure everyone is listening only to them again.

The Democrats' messaging is fine, the voters heard and understood what the Democratic party stands for and what their policies will be, as compared to the Republicans, and have knowingly chosen Trump… and thus knowingly chosen the racist rapist fascist felon who embodies all that is evil in the world, over the perfect candidate, her "perfect campaign of hope and unity," and a party that stands for all that is good in the world and whose policies are all absolutely perfect and unquestionable; and therefore have knowingly chosen evil over good, error over truth (the students are disobedient, and need punished). Thus, the electorate needs purged of this evil forthwith.

In short, these people hold that it is not — as people like miti would have it — that the job of the Democratic party is to appeal to the voters, and the voters don't owe any party their votes automatically ("vote blue no matter who"), but the party has to earn them by providing things the voters want. No, they hold that the job of the Democratic party is to pursue these correct policies, the voters do owe the party their votes, because it is the voters' job to empower the party, and if the voters don't find the party's platform preferable to the other guys', then it's the voters who have failed.

The teacher might not be teaching it well, the students might be stupid or wicked, but the curriculum is always right. The job is not to change it to suit the students, but to make the students accept it, whatever it takes.

You don’t get it, idiot. This AOC clap back is going to make racists develop a sense of empathy.

[lonelyy-clown]

uhhh here's my thoughts as one of the native co-writers of the letter sent to rtvs. i said before i won't be making rtvs posts anymore, but i guess i wanna compile all my thoughts onto one as they have been scattered around as the whole thing went down so.

not sure how best to structure this btw, i'm still not good at words and this is a mess atm. but uhh im trying.

one thing i hope will be acknowledged in the apology that wayne correcting the misinformation he said in november was very much possible on his own. i can't be mad that he didn't know about pt's shit right away, but when i google anything about the dev's offensive comments/work in the game, before and now, this is all i can find.

like not looking into it for one second before making your statement was really irresponsible. it's the main reason i decided to actually say something, at least with my one post about his message. apparently it's an issue with people calling whatever the dev said an 'apology'. and i said in the letter too, one of my goals was for that misunderstanding to be cleared up.

and yep, the response to the letter was definitely disappointing. i hope behaviour like that will not be repeated again too. wayne being so determined to leave his november message as his final word, even when that's what i had an issue with in the first place, and the quick mention that he mispoke on the apology part, it was very dismissive to me.

it sucks that it took two months just to finally admit it was incorrect on top of that.

but specifically for mike. what the fuck? how can you say something like that to someone's face?

"if you really had your tribes best interests-" and "we're just people on the computer like you" are wild things to say.

do better. grow up. broaden your perspective. even if you can't be perfect all the time, none of us are saying you ever were, still, do whatever it takes to not do anything like that again.

you can't pull the "we're just silly idiots here guys" card everytime.

ughhh. not gonna lie, thinking about how kinda weird it is taking a part of this at all since the first thing i did after seeing the collab announcement was just leave quietly. like i only called the collab a big L (💀), unfollowed everyone, and avoided rtvs entirely for a whole month. but i agree with what people have said; yes, there was barely any attention brought to the whole thing anyways. only a handful of people pointed out the issue at the time, but everything else went on as normal and that was it. it was a bummer.

so as a final note, i hope this makes something good to learn from. personally, i can't help but be sure that rtvs wasn't going to acknowledge the issue with the collab if we didn't make the letter. maybe it would've been a later apology after some hindsight or something, i don't know. at least there was a push and acknowledgment they gotta do better.

we're still waiting on their apology right now. i'm willing to wait for a while just to be fair. i'm just not following them though so i don't know how active they've been, sounds like just as usual it seems. well, i just hope a good amount of thought and effort goes into the apology whenever it comes out.

don't know how to end this i'm tired uh.

[gender-euphowrya]

spell of explode all transphobes Activate

[chronic-frustration-syndrome]

Oh, absolutely, there is a difference between the groups. (Part of the problem with "I'm so" was that it wasn't just "I'm so", but also "you're so" & "that's so", which is very different from "I relate to this personally".) And it is, of course much easier to treat people with empathy when they're already treating you with empathy.

(Ugh, I hate brain fog, got halfway through this & am now struggling to say what I mean, so apologies if I start making less sense; going to stubbornly finish this anyway, because I enjoy discussion when I can manage it.)

The thing is, I think the common assumption that people saying "so relatable" directly are the only ones who are aligning themselves with a group due to shared experience rather than clichéd assumption is flawed. After all, on face value, saying "I'm so/I'm such a" is just a way of saying "I relate to this group of people strongly enough to align myself with them directly". Obviously conext & so forth can change this, but if we go in with the assumption "these people don't actually relate" we lose sight of the people that do relate, they're just expressing themselves poorly.

Let's leave OCD aside for the moment, & take ADHD as an example, since "I'm so ADHD" was as much of a thing, as well as being the originator of the "so relatable" meme.

The person who was always late, constantly teased by their friends for being forgetful, etc, saying "I'm so ADHD" was 'jokingly' beginning to scratch the surface of a possible explaination for their struggles. However, unlike "stop being so relatable", the general/most common response wasn't "here is some more information so you can figure out if this is actually something you can look into" but "you can't say that" which just stops all potential understanding in its tracks. Even though there was an increase in awareness of ADHD (however flawed) due to it constantly being mentioned, there was no particular increase in understanding that resulted from this. If, instead of "you're trivialising REAL ADHD" (which many people were, to be fair) the response had been "many people struggle with time management, here are some ways in which neurodivergent & neurotypical struggles can differ, as well as some strategies that can help people with various neurotypes" I wonder if we might've reached "so relateable" sooner.

In many ways discussing OCD is harder than discussing ADHD, both because it is more widely misunderstood, & often more negatively perceived, but also because OCD itself often makes elaborating on certain experiences nigh impossible. But it is precisely because of this that I think extending as much empathy as possible is important. By that I don't mean "people with OCD should just suck it up & let themselves be misrepresented on the off-chance that the person commenting flippantly about their struggles just so happens to have undiagnosed OCD themselves", but rather "because OCD is so widely misunderstood, any opportunity to educate people is a good thing, & people are much more able to absorb information when it is presented kindly".

It's similar to how arguing with TERFs & other essentialists rarely results in the essentialist themselves changing their mind (in fact it often makes them double down), but that it's still important to engage with them in good faith, for the sake of people on the fringes who are more likely to see it & actually engage with the information provided.

i genuinely think ocd is incredibly underdiagnosed bc i will see people posting what are obvious rituals, compulsions, intrusive thoughts, spiralling, hyper morality, etc and its like Have You Considered This Might Be An Issue

[lord-squiggletits]

Man, it doesn't matter what the medium or fandom is, truly the debate that ruins fandom discussions the fastest is when people try to decide which characters "deserve" what. Especially when it comes to them deciding which characters are evil, how evil they are, and how severe their punishment should be for their evil deeds.

It's really annoying/harmful on multiple levels. For one, morally speaking, the line between "evil, but can repent/compensate for their deeds" and "evil, cannot be redeemed, suffer and die forever" is harder to define than you think, and who has the authority to define it anyways?

But also, fictional stories (especially the better, more nuanced, more mature ones) are rarely ever about "deserving" and don't divide their characters neatly between the "good" and the "evil." Every time I see fans debate about "how evil" a Problematic Fave is, or if Fave 1 is better/worse than Fave 2, all I see is people ruining their own fun and stirring up bad blood between other fans. Why would you add this dichotomy of "deserving" to a FICTIONAL story and start real life beef with people over it? At that point you're getting more invested in your discourse over imagined good/evil binaries than you are invested in watching/reading/consuming the actual story itself.

[slingerapen]

im genuinely so sorry for everyone who has ever been negatively affected by it, but ofmd discourse is so entertaining

[bisexualamy]

.

[doppelnatur]

to a certain degree i don't think there is such a thing as purely internalized and internally directed bias. i don't think directing bias at yourself is morally much better than directing it at others it's just a lot harder to stop. that said, as soon as your self cruelty begins to affect anyone else it's just cruelty. a gay man being homophobic is not any more justifiable than a heterosexual man. then again, maybe this entire way of thinking shows a lack of compassion for myself and is a form of bias.

[girl-with-bones]

Holy shit I'm so fucking tired of this- PUBERTY. THE- IT'S. IT'S FUCKING PUBERTY.

THAT'S WHAT HRT DOES. I DONT KNOW HOW OR WHY PEOPLE HAVE IT IN THEIR HEADS THAT HRT IS SOME EXTRA SPECIAL EXTRA SCARY BODY HORROR SHIT THAT KICKS YOUR PUPPY AND KILLS EVERYTHING YOU HOLD NEAR AND DEAR TO YOUR HEART.

Does Puberty affect people's singing voices? Yes? Cool. Hrt will do that too. Does every single male singer say Puberty ruined their voice? No? huh that's weird, maybe Hrt is the exact fucking same.

Yeah, hrt can fuck shit up. So does REGULAR PUBERTY BECAUSE THAT IS WHAT HRT IS. THAT IS WHY IT WORKS. YES IT IS DIFFERENT IN SOME WAYS BUT IT IS STILL JUST THE BODY REACTING TO HORMONES BY GOING 'OH SHIT WE GROWIN UP'

please im gonna. fucking. burn parliament down I don't even know I just- HELP

i am SO sick of the fearmongering around T and how it will affect your singing voice. i have been singing since i was a kid. i mean i have been singing as long as i could talk, i was once in an all girls choir, i was the youngest person in my churches choir when i was, like, 8. i never had much confidence in my voice because i sounded like a girl, which led me to singing less, which led me to sounding worse. before i started T i was SO worried that it would ruin my beautiful feminine singing voice.

but the difference is like night and day. i sound SO much better than i did pre-T. i can sing without hating myself. i sound like a man and i can sing

and yea maybe i’m no longer and 8 year old soprano. but i can sing and listen to myself and not want to die and isn’t that fucking wonderful?

[flimsy-roost]

at least once a week I think about the whiplash of my creative writing professor praising and raving about a personal narrative I wrote because I so vividly conveyed what it's like to have the extreme sensitivity to sound that I do that she could viscerally understand my experience and capped off the compliment paragraph by saying that it was especially impressive that I could communicate these feelings so well because I don't feel emotions

[a-little-bit-oddish]

so i'm joining the stem cell registry and donating blood regularly now, because i like, should. and it's been a good process and they're very nice. but as i was signing up for things, it had the box for sex at birth. Which is kind of an insane question. not "what hormones does your body primarily run on". but just... sex at birth. something that is not relevant for blood donation, and also extremely misleading??

they check your red blood cell count when you show up. if I told them my sex at birth was female they'd be fucking horrified by my count. testosterone does shit to the blood! It is so much more relevant to know that my body runs on testosterone! i keep seeing medical fields doing this.

i think that they assume it's nicer, somehow. they don't just ask sex anymore, they just go haha please tell us what you were called as a baby :) we're doctors so we need to know, it's important :)

except it's not. at all. it is more ethical for me to lie to the blood donation centre so that they don't see my blood and flag it, when it is perfectly good blood for people with more testosterone.

i have to go to a throat doctor next month. they specifically asked for my sex at birth. there was not an option to tell them what they should actually expect from my voice and body. when it asked me to list medications, it physically wouldn't allow me to list testosterone, and it flagged it.

it's nuts, because all these places have actually been really welcoming and cool about me being trans, but the actual system is horrific, it's just forcing me to out myself by having to reach out after to correct it. because answering honestly is medical misinformation.

anyway you can just fucking lie i guess

[ashenberry]

I want to bite into something

[that-stone-butch]

transphobic family members are one thing but it's so hard to deal with family that are convinced they're supportive but are bumbling, misinformed, or forgetful and will still misgender/deadname you nearly as frequently, but when you call them out or ask them to try harder all of a sudden you're the bad guy. i have heard some of the most fucked up shit from 'liberal' parents using the 'correct' terminology about trans people, where what they're actually saying is deeply fucked up. like my step mom excitedly telling me she saw 'an afab man' at the market and explaining how she could tell.

'i don't want to be in a room where i will be misgendered/deadnamed/deal with transphobia' applies even if it happens 'on accident' every single time you see someone. and it's a healthy boundary to set. but good g-d some people would rather kick and scream and cry than acknowledge that they're hurting you, even unintentionally.

[salemlunaa]

ೄྀsome of you STILL don’t understandೄྀ

you must get comfortable in your god state to really succeed

ೄྀPART I | STOP NEGOTIATING WITH THE 3D

To get comfortable in your god state you need to understand that it is you ALONE that manifests. Stop consuming and spreading misinformation, you don’t have to “meet in the middle”with the 3D for your manifestations.

“If you want your dream bod to be manifested you have to stand firm AND workout”

“If you want to manifest clear skin, it’s good to visualise but you should also be focusing on skincare”

“If you want to manifest good grades you can affirm but you actually have to study”

“You can’t expect to manifest when you aren’t bothering to do anything in the 3D”

bullshit. absolute bullshit

although it’s important to still take care of your necessities, there’s no such thing as meeting halfway for your desires. If you think that you don’t understand what manifestation is. And with the assumption that it is, means that you don’t understand your full potential. As soon as you think of a desire it’s yours, no negotiating needs to be done with the 3D. All you have to do is stand firm.

Why are you making deals with the 3D?, “okay, okay if i workout in the 3d and manifest my dream body in my 4d it will come” that just isn’t needed

“okay but it does help things move faster” “it does help things become a little easier” nope, still wrong!

you don’t have to lift a finger for something that’s already yours. never. same goes for inducing pure consciousness, you don’t have to spend hours saturating your conscious mind in order to shift. You can have the worst day and still induce pure consciousness because that’s all it is: a state of consciousness.

ೄྀPART II | EVERYTHING YOU DO IS PERFECT

To get comfortable in your god state you must also understand that you’re doing it all right. Stop asking dumb questions, you’re doing everything correct. The fact that you rely on bloggers to tell you if you should do this or that as if they’re your god shows that you don’t truly understand (and it’s getting really frustrating).

“will i still be able to induce pure consciousness if I lay on my side rather than in a starfish position?”

“do i have to affirm?”

“what if i don’t do this one blogger’s method to the minute details, does this mean i won’t shift?”

asking stupid questions like these confirms that you still don’t understand the extent of your power, you still don’t understand who you are.

And if you don’t understand, you will never progress, treating this like a chore that you have to perfect is where you go wrong. As a god, everything you do is correct, you could even induce pure consciousness by standing straight up and singing heavy metal at the top of your lungs, because what ever you say goes.

Stop sitting back up after minute 5 of it “not working” to check if you’re doing that method correctly. Why does you living your dream life depend on other people’s rules, are they the gods of your reality or is it you?

And you do know this still counts as you putting the void state on a pedestal? There are people who find out about pure consciousness and induce it that same day. Get your head in the game.

1: You don’t have to lift a finger for your dream life

2: You’re doing everything correct, you are “I AM” trust that and you’ll induce in no time

Both of these things, negotiating with the 3D and asking if your doing it right in YOUR OWN reality are signs that you don’t trust yourself enough. Learn to actually trust yourself and accept your fate as a god and you’ll have everything you dream of

NOW GO GO GO, GO GET YOUR DREAM LIFE

🍵🪷To understand and succeed you must trust yourself

[fishyartist]

(Adding an extra image, Source+more info about this specific chart https://bdsmovement.net/Act-Now-Against-These-Companies-Profiting-From-Genocide <click that)

McDonald's is giving out free fries.

Disney is giving out Disney100 cards.

Starbucks is giving out buy one get one frees.

Why? Because their stock prices are falling.

They are losing money because of the boycotts because we are not giving them more money to fund and support the genocide of Palestine.

They're scared.

So they're gonna do whatever they can to get that money.

Keep it up.

Make them cry.

We may not be able to get them all, but the ones we get oh they are gonna suffer.

[pearwaldorf]

People in fandoms* associated with Neil Gaiman are not showing each other the grace they should be in a stressful time, and I would like to remind people of some things:

Not everybody knows about the allegations because it is not being reported widely in mainstream media. Gaiman has engaged a PR/crisis management firm that has done work with Marilyn Manson, Russell Brand, and Danny Masterson to actively squash coverage.

The story broke on a site unfamiliar to a lot of non-UK people. There was confusion as well as outright misinformation about whether the site was a TERF outlet (it is not). While Rachel Johnson, the lead reporter on the story, is a TERF who has publicly clashed with Gaiman about trans rights, she has behaved responsibly and ethically as a journalist regarding this. I wrote more in depth about these things here.

Everybody deals differently with finding out creators are problematic. The method you prefer is not the only correct way of coping. Some people are able to divorce art from the creator and some people are not. This is an attitude that can change over time. And if you feel like you need to express frustration that somebody else's method isn't the same as yours? I would recommend shutting your fucking trap.

If people know about the allegations, it's shitty to assume they're ignoring them or think they're false until somebody explicitly says so. There are many things people don't say online, and you are not owed disclaimers or explanations.

Fandom is more than the work itself. Some people find strength in the community that has formed around it, and rely on each other to help cope with and grieve this loss. The love you have for the work and your fellow fans is not something that belongs to the creator. It never has and that can't be taken away.

Your personal relationship with a creator's work will change over time. That's inevitable regardless of whether they turn out to be problematic or not. And when those works are deeply significant and formative, like many of Gaiman's works are to me** and countless others? That's fucking tough. Be kind to yourself and others when working through this. I love you all.

--

* I have seen this in Good Omens most prominently, although I am sure there are other places where it is happening as well.

** I have been a fan of Gaiman's work longer than some of you have been alive. It has not been a great month or so.