#discourse are you getting an A in the echo chamber?

[ablednt]

A little girl just fucking died and half you fuckers are still acting like this is some political discourse and going on about hamas fuck you I've actually had enough

[greensaplinggrace]

You obviously know this is about D*rkling or have you misused tags in other fandoms as well? And I am still better than people condoning child trafficking.

i dont believe in cross-tagging, my friend. i think it's gauche. unfortunately for you i'm the one that made the darkling slander tag on tumblr. if you want a different experience then can i perhaps recommend tiktok? it's a pretty decent hangout for those with no critical thinking skills and the need to argue with thin air. besides, the tumblr slander tag actually has real slander instead of the shallow bs i see antis spew. as if it's my fault i'm better at your jobs than you.

also maybe self-evaluate in regard to the last sentence of your ask. best of luck in therapy!

[i-c-u-p]

going to start using this platform like twitter again and by that i mean posting relentlessly and going on rants in the tags

[trans-leek-cookie]

sittimg at the Wikipedia article. Comptemplating

[queeranarchism]

One of the most important things that I learned from Susan Stryker is that the basic tendencies of nationalism can pop up anywhere.

Those tendencies being: 'This territory/group is better than others and must be kept unified by a coherent shared identity and by keeping out those who fall outside that identity'.

You apply that thinking to the group 'women', you get terfs.

You apply that thinking to the lgbtia+ community, you get exclusionist, you get 'drop the t', you get anti-ace discourse.

You apply that thinking to a political group, you get thought police and echo chambers.

You apply it to a subculture and the subculture becomes insufferable and eventually dies.

Learn to recognize it and go 'no, we're not doing nationalism, we're a coalition of people with diverse experiences working towards shared goals' and you're stopped like half the possible bullshit you can fall into.

[doberbutts]

So I'm going to ask an honest question here and ask you please explain in layman's terms. Every trans person I know irl has no concept of the transandrophobia discourse but every time I see more of it online I'm...unsettled, and it takes a lot to power through all the terminology.

I initially was really receptive to transandrophobia because the rationale behind being against it sounded stupid and akin to label discourse in the queer community. I saw "being a man is not an axis of oppression therefore you don't get your Own Word" and thought that was pedantic nonsense, that language doesn't need to adhere to that rule, and that it's helpful to have a term designated towards transmasculine experiences so people can find those experiences easier. Not that trans women's experiences aren't also beneficial! But that, well, obviously no matter how similar the experience birds of a feather and that sense of comfort of sharing identity still matters. This is true for other issues of identity too, I find, weather that's a good thing or a bad thing idk, but it is human.

The thing is I follow a lot of transwomen and have been seeing some alarms being raised about the community being formed around this word. You blocked one of the most egregious offenders so I trust you (which is why I'm asking sorry) I've seen a lot of misogyny and essentialism from people using the term "transandrophobia" and more egregiously "transmisandry." Idk your opinion on the latter term (I haven't scrolled down far enough on your blog, sorry if you talked about this before) but to me it's unconscionable. I was taught that transandrophobia existed as a term specifically NOT to use that term, that elevating misandry to a legitimate issue was dangerous for obvious reasons and it was one of the reasons why I was so supportive of transandrophobia. To me, it seemed like an awareness that misogyny was the prevailing issue behind all issues of gender oppression, but when I actually look at the tag I...get uncomfortable.

Blogs I follow have repeatedly been upset at misogyny from this community, and have been using the term "transandrobro" to describe behavior they find akin to cis MRAs. I've truly seen horrible things with hundreds, sometimes thousands of notes to it that do, unfortunately, feel like women are being blamed for the plight of trans men. I've seen cis people say they were originally on MRA reddits and then came to tumblr to "confront the misandry directly" only to wholeheartedly adopt transandrophobia into their worldview. It's hard because I KNOW I shouldn't judge a community based on a few crazies but it truly does feel sometimes like "transandrophobia" gives misogynists a venue to air their woman-hating to an eager audience, kinda like how "Karen" has been co-opted beyond the og meaning of being for racist white woman to any woman being mildly rude.

So like, here it is: can transandrophobia exist without being co-opted by misogynists? Is there a threshold of proliferation for misogynists destroying this word until a new one needs to be made? Or will every word trying to identify the transmasculine experience be inevitably co-opted by misogynists because misogynists are just that powerful, so people should double down harder on the word and work to push misogynists out?

(Also am I going crazy, or did this word a year ago used to have a WAY better community than the one I see nowadays. Back then I could find your blog and really compassionate people easily, and now it's just...bad.)

It is a little hard to understand some of this post but I will do my best to answer what I think is being asked.

To put simply, I think the reason why it was better a year or two ago is because the majority of the people who were actually trying to further the conversation and not just circle jerk in the echo chamber got chased off. Transandrophobia, anti-transmasculinity, transandromisia, transmascphobia... the guys who coined these are largely either not posting at all anymore or post far far less than they used to. They were harassed and the constant exposure to transphobia made them shut down their blogs for their own mental health. Not all of them, but a lot of the so-called "big names" had this happen.

Even I stopped posting for a while and shuttered the doors for a bit outside of a long queue of dog photos because of how much it was affecting my mental health.

In their place remain people who are not committed to the same conversation. Perhaps they are younger, or less familiar with the building blocks of theory that really should be required reading, or are still stuck in their "everything sucks and it's YOUR fault" phase. Maybe they do come from different places, like 4chan or reddit, which are less prone to this sort of discussion. A lot of the original crowd had been on tumblr long enough to remember when we could still edit posts, and I keep seeing people who would have been in elementary school at that time posting to the tag nowadays.

I was discussing this problem on discord with a small group of friends and one of them- a trans fem- called it second wave transandrophobia discourse as a bitter joke. I think she is more right than wrong, regardless.

I'm not sure who you believe I've blocked- in general I don't air out who I block on this blog because at nearly 12k followers there are too many people who would love to dogpile someone for the sin of disagreeing with me and I do my best to prevent that. I don't want anyone to be harassed, after all. There's a lot of assumptions that have been made about my block and follow behavior that vary from "hilarious but untrue" to "outright offensive slander".

People are people, and some people are shitheads. Trans mascs and people who want to support trans mascs are not exempt from that. I say this all the time- Kayne West is objectively a shitty person but his existence doesn't prove the concept of antiblackness to be a myth. Caitlyn Jenner is objectively a shitty person but her existence doesn't prove the concept of transmisogyny to be a myth. So why do shitty trans mascs prove our own theory to be dangerous or nonexistent? Why hold us to a higher standard than any other marginalized group?

I could ask you the same question- there are posts on here with hundreds, sometimes thousands, of notes made by trans fems and cis women who blame their problems with transmisogyny on trans mascs. There are people coming from reddit, Twitter, 4chan who are being actively transphobic and misogynistic and claiming they're doing it for the good of transfeminism. There are posts filled with misogyny and bioessentialism and gender essentialism and even interphobia and racism and transphobia being left completely unchecked. Do you think it would be acceptable for me to ask if that means transmisogyny theory should be abandoned or if we should just accept that it will draw people with bad intentions?

Or do you think the better answer is to focus instead on finding those with a good head on their shoulders, and making sure it's them who has their voice heard? Do you think we should maybe not judge entire demographics because there exists some shitty people who claim the same identity?

[utilitycaster]

How did you feel about the end of c2? This time around it seems the discontent is c3 was was a poorly made story with narrative failure. Less outright attacks at the cast. I remember c2 ending with people expressing much more personal hurt and anguish, cries of homophobia, ship discourse and the cast was directly attacked more. C3 is the characters are bad. C2 was the cast is bad. Personally I liked c2's ending but meh on c3.

I loved the ending of C2! You can go back to my archives of early June 2021 to get the full rundown, but I thought it was phenomenal.

I'm going to keep this brief because I've said it before: Campaign 2's haters at the time were either people who were mired in bitter shipping wars that were largely due to their own immersion in echo chambers during the extended hiatus and who already had a history of harassing the cast; or people who uh, think that if a character dies and remains dead it is a failure to be rectified and failing that, punished.

Campaign 3 didn't really have ship wars at all because frankly there weren't sufficiently rich character dynamics to justify them, and most of the people, such as myself, who felt Campaign 3 had a burnt crust and a raw inside are not the sort of people who would send the cast hate, because we are adults who do not do that sort of thing. Were the cast to manifest in my apartment physically and say "Ms Utilitycaster, how did you like the finale?" I'd say "it was pretty bad, and the campaign overall is a distant third of your three main campaigns in terms of quality, would you like to hear my thoughts in depth" but I'm not going to like, @ them on Twitter because who the fuck does that. So yeah I think the lack of hate towards the cast for C3 is not an indication of higher quality of the work so much as an indication of the higher quality of Critical Role fans who disliked it.

[zahri-melitor]

In terms of 'people haven't read comics' I actually think there's a nuanced position people sort of instinctively understand and don't spell out:-

A lot of people enter comics fandom via an adaption medium (be that movies, video games, tv shows, cartoons)

That means they come in with a level of background understanding of various characters existing and some knowledge of them via osmosis, either from adapted stories or reading fic

General fandom discussion tends to coalesce around a small subset of characters and story runs

Because getting into comics is expensive, people preference what's easily available and/or what's most highly recommended in an attempt to maximise a story they will like

This is where all the panicking about 'where to start' comes in - it's overwhelmingly huge to look at and people are scared of 'getting it wrong'

They then read a run of a comic. Given all of the above for DC it's probably going to be a Bat comic, and there's a good chance it's UTRH, Red Robin 1-12, Batgirl 2000, Robin: Son of Batman, or The Court of Owls. They want the best storyline after all and that's what people tell them are favourites

They have also from being peripheral to the fandom noticed discourse about how certain stories/writers 'don't get' or 'ruin' characters and then avoid reading those stories

Because people are likely to only have read this small subset of stories, the discussion then focuses further on that subset

Echo chamber, the narrative that there's no such thing as a consistent canon in comics causes people to continue to avoid reading further, because they've been told Not To Read certain writers, and what they read doesn't really match how the fandom describes it

Because they're enjoying the fandom, they lean into the fanon and just...never read more comics. Sometimes pride themselves on not doing so

You end up with people who have 'read comics' but they mean about 3 famous runs totalling well under 100 issues, and very little comfort with even DC teams or families outside of the Bats

The current situation compounds because people aren’t comfortable with reading characters written by different writers and how that changes the story, even though that’s a huge part of comics

[qqueenofhades]

what's been particularly vile to me is this group of white online leftists who insist that anyone who cares about more than this one issue for the election is a bad person, like, as if us black and brown people are making up reasons to be afraid and not.....believing the gop when they say they are coming for us. believing trump who has said previously that he does not bluff, that he will do the things he's said he will do (i hate what social media has gone to the word gaslighting but it feels like gaslighting. we lived through four years of trump. we saw the damage. stop treating us like we're being dramatic). it must be great to not have to worry about that i guess? "life won't change under trump" is such a telling admission because maybe theirs won't but mine will. and so many others' will.

and it is often again these (white) online leftists that love to call anyone who disagrees with them a white liberal (derogatory) because they know it would be racist (bad) to be this shitty and condescending to poc but they don't want to actually listen to anything black and brown voters are saying. it's easier to just call us white liberals and throw our opinions out, to ignore the work of black people for decades to gain the right to vote, to disregard the weight of telling them to not do that. it's genuinely appalling. they care so much about racism until it's time to engage with poc who have different opinions than their online echo chambers, then we're just stupid liberals with terrible opinions like..... wanting to live. not wanting four more years of trump. so sorry for that.

sorry for this vent in your inbox, i'm just so fucking tired of white people trying to rewrite history as if trump wasn't that bad. he was for my family and countless others and i am terrified for what's to come if he wins.

The thing about (the often-white) Online Leftists is that they have become just as much as a radicalized death cult as the diehard Trumpists. If you don't want to die for The Revolution and/or sacrifice your life, friends, family, the rest of the country, etc., then you're Insufficiently Pure and must be Purged. (Which I think is just complete BS, as none of them could actually handle sacrificing anything, but it's increasingly the only kind of performative rhetoric that is acceptable in leftist-identified discourse spaces.) This is functionally identical to "if you aren't willing to lay down your life for our Lord and Savior Donald Trump and the Great White Christian Nationalist Dictatorship, you're a liberal cuck," but with the names and justification changed. It doesn't change the underlying radicalization, nihilism, and insanity of the premise.

Another thing the Trumpists and the Online Leftists have in common is that they are busily rewriting just how bad Trump was in order to serve their Ideology. Ever since January 6, 2021, the Republicans have thrown everything they have at revising and whitewashing any suggestion that it was an "insurrection," and the Online Leftists have done the same, in an attempt to "prove" their insane point that Trump "would be better" than Biden. This is embodied in the recent ultimate-brainworm-nonsense maximalist-online take that "Biden has to lose so the rest of the world will see that the US rejects genocide!!!" That's right, the message that the rest of the world would take from Biden losing to Trump is that the US rejects genocide. Never mind if Trump literally wants to commit all the genocide possible and to install himself as a fascist theocratic dictator. In the deeply twisted minds of the Online Leftists, this is the only possible interpretation of Biden's loss, so they'll push for it as hard as they can! The Trumpists and the Online Leftists, at this point, are working pretty much in concert to damage Biden for similar insane reasons and get Trump elected. Etc etc., one Nazi and ten people at the same table is eleven Nazis.

Like. Sure. Four years ago, when Trump was president and people were dying by the thousands because he didn't want to wear a mask because it smeared his bronzer, just to name literally one of the terrible things he did every single day (and not even mentioning how much worse a second term would be) we were absolutely better off. Super-duper great. (Sarcasm.) Either that or "there is suffering and evil in the world and the only solution is to drastically increase the suffering and evil for everyone and to destroy what progress we have managed to make because It Does Not Fix Everything Now" is an absolute moral imperative, and either way, yeah. I'm calling bullshit.

[interstellarsystem]

We've made many posts on this before, so I don't need to reiterate all of our points on it. If you want links to more in-depth posts on this I can grab them for you.

But the point is: We will not be pushed out of DID/OSDD/Disordered system spaces. But we're quoigenic, isn't that invading spaces? We are literally diagnosed with DID. But we support endos, isn't that invading spaces? We are literally diagnosed with DID, why does our stance matter if it's a space about the disorder we have? But we [insert something else here], isn't that invading spaces? DID systems can access DID system spaces. End of story.

We've went long enough sitting here allowing ourselves to be pushed out of spaces we belong in, sitting in a grey area of not relating wholly to endogenics and not being allowed to dare look at DID spaces because we, checks notes, don't hate people for existing and hm let me see here, have headmates separate from our DID formed ones that we also see as people. Interesting how that works. But we're done with it. We WILL tag our posts with the OSDDID tags, the actually DID tags, the disordered system tags, the systempunk tags and whatever else where applicable. Why? We're a part of the damn groups that belong there. And we're done with making ourselves so small and inoffensive because either way we get hate. We have DID, we can enter DID spaces, that's final. We're growing to be more open and unapologetic about who we are and this is another step toward that. Not letting discourse walk all over where we put our posts.

Like yes, people without disordered symptoms don't need to access purely disordered spaces. I get that. But guess what? We are literally disordered. That isn't going to change because we also have soulbonds. Being so strongly anti-endo hurts people with the very disorder you claim to protect. You don't care about systems, you don't care about people with DID, because if you did, you wouldn't kick out systems with DID who are pro-endo. You wouldn't hate mixed origin systems with DID. If you cared about the disorder and people with it, there wouldn't be an "except those ones" box you put people you disagree with in.

Hurting people with disorders based on unrelated views isn't helping anyone. It isn't punk. It isn't inclusionist. It isn't protecting anything except the echo chamber of hate.

[luxen-r]

Unpopular opinion:

Radblr seems like an echo chamber to you because of the dogpiling (which other women have worded much better than I could ever) AND because the fist thing we do is hand out accusations like they’re candy. You can’t going around accusing other people and then getting mad because they get defensive. We ALL do it or participate it in it one way or another.

And I’m not talking about the right wingers who just hate trans people and call themselves radicals. I’m talking about our fellow radfems. We are not perfect, there’s always new information coming up to the surface, people can get things wrong. We come from different backgrounds (I come from a tiny ass country, I’m not white, and get accused of being a white westerner). We will always have biases and circumstances that we have to overcome together to reach true female consciousness. However, you are too worried trying to be correct and stewing in your dignified anger.

What I’m trying to say is: get off your high horse, if you feel defensive or angry then cool off, and start communicating and listening to each other.

You have a right to be angry and express your opinion. But don’t just throw it at radblr and then complain that discourse is not possible. You want reasonable discourse on radblr, then BE the reasonable discourse.

[theroguefeminist]

Something that should not be surprising to me is how prominent feminist subreddits have become echo chambers that censor and exclude marginalized voices and perpetuate toxic strains of feminism. r/feminism regularly features highly upvoted posts that promote islamophobia. A lot of these posts feature titles you wouldn't be surprised to see as a Fox News headline. It's THAT racist. If you try to argue anything in response, you get slapped with a permanent ban. r/askfeminists is crawling with SWERFs and will slap you with a ban if you have any nuanced take on sex work or BDSM.

These subreddits become echo chambers that villify Muslims, sex work, kink, or any groups they determine are "unfeminist." The mechanism of moderation on reddit stifles a diversity of opinions if the moderators are steeped in a particular ideology and censor civil discourse that includes alternative perspectives. The moderators of prominent feminist subreddits, who are most likely primarily white and cisgender, are turning back the clock on the progress intersectional feminism had made by silencing marginalized voices. They are bringing back a time where only certain voices can be heard. They believe in only one kind of feminism, and any other points of view from women of color, Muslim women, sex workers, or women who have sex in ways they personally disapprove of, are excluded.

[toyourstations]

i posted this on bluesky first, but here it is as a block of text for easier reading

what if i wrote a moderately wanky thread or newsletter post about people talking about an indie art revolution and how if it happens it won't be online and there won't be evidence of it for years, it'll just be a vibe and it'll only happen if people talking about it actually go outside and make it

im just gonna do it yesterday Chase Carter of Rascal News posted an addition to their article about games journalism not being marketing, in which they called out that the audience the article targeted were not Rascal's audience. This is where I'll start. read the post I quoted here

Internet discourse is a practice of preaching to the choir, preaching to the pastor, and an exercise in futility in 90% of cases. You may be educating someone, but more likely you are just talking to people who already agree with you and may know more about the topic than you (this thread included)

The way the internet is shaped around common interests exaggerates this when it comes to indie art. You know who sees indie art online? other indie artists. In a small community this only gets more pronounced. People call this an echo chamber when they want to be rude. I think of it like art club.

everyone at art club has a buy in on making art, because they're an artist too. I'm a volunteer at my local art gallery. Every other volunteer assumes I am also a visual artist. Because art club exists in the offline spaces too. Most of the customers at a small town art market are also vendors.

But unlike my local art gallery where school kids can tour it and families bring their kids in for handful of minutes where they can make the children quiet after a 5 hour car journey, and adults waiting for a train after lunch can kill some time, the internet doesn't get tourists.

Or at least, most of the tourists are just visiting from a different art club. So when I saw a creator today talking about how all their colleagues (I'm not sure if at a day job or a creative job) are sick of mainstream slop and the time is ripe for weird indie art, I sort of winced.

Of course everyone at art club wants an indie revolution, that's their stuff! But it won't happen if we just post about it on social media, because nobody who is not in art club is going to show up to the rally. Here's another angle:

In uni I attended at least 3 AGMs for clubs that didn't meet quorum, because people assume that someone else will go and a meeting sounds boring. But without the club AGM, there's no queer disco, there's no art show, there's nobody handing out condoms at the event, there's no tea in the staff room

And it is these public and open spaces that get people interested and involved who are not already at the club. When the jock picks up a little condom packet (because free condoms!) from the queer club, he also gets info about preventing HIV.

When the kids get dragged into the art gallery in a weird small town populated entirely by weird small town artists, they see weird art that makes them ask questions. "Why do her boobs have to be out" "why is that hand holding an orb full of cash?"

If you have a table of free zines at a local market, at least one person will think about your weird art who usually doesn't think about weird art at all, or is from a completely different art club to yours, but has a friend or family member who your art reminds them of.

Today at the gallery I explained how valuable it is that she has kept her son's retro consoles in good condition to a jade carver. Our interests don't overlap much but I was there the first time she ever set up her work for exhibition and we had a lovely conversation!

If you want a weird and indie art revolution, it has to be offline. You cannot rely on art club to change the world without people who don't attend. Like I said, I know this thread is just an example of doing it all online, but it's also not the only thing I'm doing.

one more thing - if you are shy about your art with the people you share physical space with, stop that. You don't have to show your mum your most soul revealing poem or any porn at all, but you should start getting comfortable showing people what you're working on, or explaining your projects

I promise, even if you think your art is silly or doesn't matter, or isn't good enough to show off, someone is impressed by it. An old lady at the art gallery asked if I was going to have an exhibition and I laughed and showed her a gif of pixel art art fighting game santa I had been working on

and she started talking about how there SHOULD be an exhibition of digital art. She had no context for pixel art or fighting games but she saw an animated santa doing punches and kicks and was tickled pink. Audiences don't need to know what's going on they just need to have feelings about it

2 calls to action, if you want them:

know when and where your local markets are. Attend them, talk to the vendors.

show your art to someone in your physical vicinity. Draw on a thank you card or write a poem for a notice board if you want

If that's easy cakes for you, here's a harder one (and one I'm going to work on myself)

organise yourself a booth at a local market, or a piece in a local art show, or ask your local art gallery if they're accepting works for their gift shop. At the very least leave some zines somewhere.

People don't want to put in the work to become part of art club, and that's fine, you can still show them the art you make, and they might even love it, and sharing with people outside the club is the ONLY way a club turns into a movement. Otherwise you just become academics.

Link to my thread on bluesky

Link to my newsletter where I post more of my opinions once a week if I remember to write it

[proshippers-against-censorship]

UWU stop interacting with antis. If you’re anti-censorship then act like it, you can’t stop people from having opinions <3 coming from someone who isn’t pro or anti ship because I’m not a 15 year old porn addicted gooner

This is a discourse blog. A discourse blog that speaks quite a bit about sexual topics. If a 15 year old was running this blog, I would have concerns, in all honesty, because they really shouldn't be interacting as publicly and openly with NSFW content.

However, your comment alone helps to display why, while I'm perfectly fine running my discourse blog as a discourse blog, this may not be the place for you. So let's break this down:

• No adult with any desire to be taken seriously by anyone uses the term 'gooner' unironically. That being said, you give off the red flags of being a younger teen, and interacting directly with NSFW content easily breaches the boundaries of adults.

• If a 15yo was regularly interacting with porn to the point that this is easily known, their parents can be held liable in multiple states. You could try reporting me to the police for being a 'porn-addicted minor'. Unfortunately, you will come off as a laughingstock, because I'm not a minor and I also just...don't watch porn. Unlike you, presumably, I am in a lovely relationship with a significant other who can handle those desires.

•The APA and DSM-5 do NOT classify porn addictions as real, and therefore, they aren't a thing. Multiple studies, as well, have disproven the existence of the 'porn addiction'. This idea can be traced back to - wait for it - Christian Puritanical anti-sex culture. Now, as much as church needs to be better separated out of everything, the Christian God does not run my life nor most countries, and so his religious anti-sex ideals are irrelevant.

• I'm guessing you just, don't read (shocker), but if you check out that beautiful intro paragraph that is pinned on this blog, you'll notice that I welcome opinions shared in a civil way, even if they oppose my own, and am in fact quite stern on the idea that you shouldn't lock yourself in an echo chamber. Hearing contrasting opinions can help strengthen or even change your core beliefs. But that whole idea leans on the idea that neither side is pissing their pants over discovering that their ideals don't extend to everyone, which is what you appear to be doing here. I am welcome to conversations on why you think what I'm doing is stupid, but I'm not going to bother with you unless you put on your big boy pants and be a mature person.

• You aren't 'neither', you're an anti. You scream it throughout your whole message. So if this account bothers you, why don't you do yourself a service and block it instead of being annoying in my DMs?

• This point is just here to see if you have the capacity to actually read things, since you obviously know nothing about this account despite the big ole pinned post. Go have some tea, get in a better mood, and then feel free to come back for a more progressive, civil conversation. It'd be good for you.

[system-of-a-feather]

Honestly I really feel some people take the "if you are sitting at a table with four Nazis having dinner, then there are five Nazis at the table" line to the extent that "if you ever are friends (or in some cases, talk) with someone with a less than ideal view then you are inherently supporting their ideology" and then that is also taken to "you need to make sure everyone you talk to is fully in line and agreement with the least problematic opinions at all time because everyone you engage with is inherently a reflection of your moral character" is honestly like…. a huge problem built from a well meaning place and just puritan culture

You might be wondering "what made Feathers say this"

Nothing other than me thinking about how honest to god collaborative and supportive the birding community is and that there is very very very little concern about anything other than birding when you walk up to a stranger who seems to be birding and ask if theyve seen anything interesting

And me just thinking about how that really discourse / politics / social issue removed space, environment and culture is a really nice thing to have that is unfortunately becoming rarer and rarer

A lot of social engagements with people almost seem to have to preface with a "do we have the same opinions on everything" - looking at extensive DNIs and what not - before you ever even get to talk or engage with people and it makes for a pretty just… kinda sad environment

Sad and unnuanced and non communicative environment and of course echo chambers

I feel a lot of people have lost the skill of "agree to disagree" in attempts to be morally correct at all times

I think its kinda sad how a lot of relationships and friendships have strings attached to being 100% on the same page about everything

[punkitt-is-here]

I make a point of not wading into Discourse on this site, because this whole… debacle is something that provides a pretty good example of how there are so, SO many real-world factors at play in how someone goes about their opinions and feelings, and how arguments online are more a collision of those feelings than any sort of... productive statements on the efficacy of the positions being argued from, but... yeah. The echo chamber effect and not having a varied social structure can really screw with your perceptions of the world- I know it did for me when things were bad. "Nobody is there for you" and "You can't trust x people" are definitely the sorts of things I thought then. I'm grateful for the friends I've got who cover a whole swath of life experiences, who I do trust implicitly no matter what despite those differences in our worlds, and it seems like you've got the same- that kind of friendship is one where trust is a given- hell, one might even call it "magical", and everyone deserves friends like that. Sad to see that someone can't believe that we're more alike than we are different as humans. I find we're better off when we come to the world from that point of understanding.

Three of my best friends in the world are a trans man, a genderqueer person, and the most cis man on the planet. Every one of those people have wildly varying experiences compared to me in class, gender, and upbringing, but I would literally trust any of them with my life. No matter the differences in our worlds, the bonds I feel with them transcend those differences and thinking that everyone that's unlike you is out to betray you in some way is far more a product of trauma than it is of every single person on the planet. I hope everyone can come across the camaraderie I feel with my friends, genuinely. If you feel like you'll never get those kinds of people in your life, I can guarantee they're out there and they're waiting to meet you.