#radically aligned

[lesorus]

petrochemical and chemical engineering student here. in my university, it is a woman dominated major. All professors teaching chemistry or field specific classes are women except one. most students in my class are women, compared to electrical, civil or mecanical engineering that are heavily male dominated, and computer and communications engineering which is split 50/50. And each semester without fault, there will be a male professor that will say something along the lines off "You're all studying petrochemical and chemical engineering majors, right? that's where the slackers go." (typically an engineer professor say this, not the math or physics PhDs) . And plenty of male students have this outlook too:

In line to get my inscription in order yesterday, a mecanical engineering student a year younger who had failed a couple classes had asked me for advice on how to plan his next year because he couldn't finish all his prerequisites for next year said "Ah, that's the easy major" when i told him I was in Chem E so I wasn't sure about all the classes he has to take.

"What kind of job are you supposed to get with that, some makeup firm?" a guy in CCE had told me when i told him what i was majoring in, as if his girlfriend in the same field as I wasn't sitting right next to him. As if pharmacological and oil industries didn't need us to function.

But simultaneously, if ask anyone outside my major how they feel about chemistry. Majority says they hate it, its complicated, not fun, too hard, and the one chemistry class they took the first common course semester was apparently hell. A lot of friends regularly comment "I could never do this." or "Why would anybody choose this major of their own free will?".

And don't get me wrong, i feel similarly about computer and electrical engineering. I cursed every programming class i had to take and electrical systems frustrate the hell out of me. this isnt a "who has it the worst" debate. All engineering fields are hard. All require hard work and sleepless nights. The issue is, when men feel disadvantaged in a field, they ridicule it. Just when it ever so happens that women dominate a room, it becomes unworthy to be in. Petrochemical and chemical engineering is easy, despite the hundreds of formulas, details and nuances we have to keep in mind. Despite it being one of the highest paid engineering fields. Because women are intrested in it. Right?

Same goes for teaching, once a highly respected field. Along with nursing, that is necessary for the function of hospitals. And here goes clinical psychology too.

Other female dominated fields in my country are pharmacy, a lot of people including my dad father I'll end up a store clerk when i considered that major, when his sister in law, a pharmicist, is working with Pfizer. Architecture, one of the most time demanding majors became "so you like drawing huh?".

Female ambition is belittled. Fourty years ago, men were congratulated for wanting to be in these fields until people realised the classrooms were filling up with women.

[remus-poopin]

The “A very frosty Christmas” chapter in HBP is so interesting to me in terms of understanding Lupin’s relation to the werewolf community. The standout line to me is this:

“‘I am not complaining; it is necessary work and who can do it better than I? However, it has been difficult gaining their trust. I bear the unmistakable signs of having tried to live among wizards, you see, whereas they have shunned normal society and live on the margins, stealing — and sometimes killing — to eat.’” (HBP, 334)

The framing of this is interesting, he didn’t say: “wizards have shunned them from normal society therefore marginalizing them so they have to steal and sometimes kill to eat”, no he puts the werewolves in the active role as if they are making a sort of choice. It effectively takes the blame off of the wizards that oppress them.

I think he might feel that it is a choice they are making. He has tried very hard all his life to fit into wizarding society. Everything he does is in an attempt to appear non threatening. He has made a choice to not live in the werewolf colonies, he’s made a choice to hold jobs, he’s made a choice to socialize with other wizards, he’s made a choice to appear civilized, he’s made a choice to conform into wizard society-

yet he is still not accepted.

The issue is not the werewolves disregarding society but a society that fundamentally disregards their humanity.

On some level he must know this yet the way he speaks about his community is dripping with a sort of self loathing that pushes for a drive for assimilation (something you can find in most groups of marginalized people).

He holds these views of achieving social mobility through the appearance of civilization while being walking proof that werewolf assimilation is futile, so he has to construct mental barriers to avoid being crushed under the weight of his own hypocrisy.

[lurkiestvoid]

You're being targeted by disinformation networks that are vastly more effective than you realize. And they're making you more hateful and depressed.

(This essay was originally by u/walkandtalkk and posted to r/GenZ on Reddit two months ago, and I've crossposted here on Tumblr for convenience because it's relevant and well-written.)

TL;DR: You know that Russia and other governments try to manipulate people online. But you almost certainly don't how just how effectively orchestrated influence networks are using social media platforms to make you -- individually-- angry, depressed, and hateful toward each other. Those networks' goal is simple: to cause Americans and other Westerners -- especially young ones -- to give up on social cohesion and to give up on learning the truth, so that Western countries lack the will to stand up to authoritarians and extremists.

And you probably don't realize how well it's working on you.

This is a long post, but I wrote it because this problem is real, and it's much scarier than you think.

How Russian networks fuel racial and gender wars to make Americans fight one another

In September 2018, a video went viral after being posted by In the Now, a social media news channel. It featured a feminist activist pouring bleach on a male subway passenger for manspreading. It got instant attention, with millions of views and wide social media outrage. Reddit users wrote that it had turned them against feminism.

There was one problem: The video was staged. And In the Now, which publicized it, is a subsidiary of RT, formerly Russia Today, the Kremlin TV channel aimed at foreign, English-speaking audiences.

As an MIT study found in 2019, Russia's online influence networks reached 140 million Americans every month -- the majority of U.S. social media users.

Russia began using troll farms a decade ago to incite gender and racial divisions in the United States

In 2013, Yevgeny Prigozhin, a confidante of Vladimir Putin, founded the Internet Research Agency (the IRA) in St. Petersburg. It was the Russian government's first coordinated facility to disrupt U.S. society and politics through social media.

Here's what Prigozhin had to say about the IRA's efforts to disrupt the 2022 election:

"Gentlemen, we interfered, we interfere and we will interfere. Carefully, precisely, surgically and in our own way, as we know how. During our pinpoint operations, we will remove both kidneys and the liver at once."

In 2014, the IRA and other Russian networks began establishing fake U.S. activist groups on social media. By 2015, hundreds of English-speaking young Russians worked at the IRA. Their assignment was to use those false social-media accounts, especially on Facebook and Twitter -- but also on Reddit, Tumblr, 9gag, and other platforms -- to aggressively spread conspiracy theories and mocking, ad hominem arguments that incite American users.

In 2017, U.S. intelligence found that Blacktivist, a Facebook and Twitter group with more followers than the official Black Lives Matter movement, was operated by Russia. Blacktivist regularly attacked America as racist and urged black users to rejected major candidates. On November 2, 2016, just before the 2016 election, Blacktivist's Twitter urged Black Americans: "Choose peace and vote for Jill Stein. Trust me, it's not a wasted vote."

Russia plays both sides -- on gender, race, and religion

The brilliance of the Russian influence campaign is that it convinces Americans to attack each other, worsening both misandry and misogyny, mutual racial hatred, and extreme antisemitism and Islamophobia. In short, it's not just an effort to boost the right wing; it's an effort to radicalize everybody.

Russia uses its trolling networks to aggressively attack men. According to MIT, in 2019, the most popular Black-oriented Facebook page was the charmingly named "My Baby Daddy Aint Shit." It regularly posts memes attacking Black men and government welfare workers. It serves two purposes: Make poor black women hate men, and goad black men into flame wars.

MIT found that My Baby Daddy is run by a large troll network in Eastern Europe likely financed by Russia.

But Russian influence networks are also also aggressively misogynistic and aggressively anti-LGBT.

On January 23, 2017, just after the first Women's March, the New York Times found that the Internet Research Agency began a coordinated attack on the movement. Per the Times:

More than 4,000 miles away, organizations linked to the Russian government had assigned teams to the Women’s March. At desks in bland offices in St. Petersburg, using models derived from advertising and public relations, copywriters were testing out social media messages critical of the Women’s March movement, adopting the personas of fictional Americans.

They posted as Black women critical of white feminism, conservative women who felt excluded, and men who mocked participants as hairy-legged whiners.

But the Russian PR teams realized that one attack worked better than the rest: They accused its co-founder, Arab American Linda Sarsour, of being an antisemite. Over the next 18 months, at least 152 Russian accounts regularly attacked Sarsour. That may not seem like many accounts, but it worked: They drove the Women's March movement into disarray and eventually crippled the organization.

Russia doesn't need a million accounts, or even that many likes or upvotes. It just needs to get enough attention that actual Western users begin amplifying its content.

A former federal prosecutor who investigated the Russian disinformation effort summarized it like this:

It wasn’t exclusively about Trump and Clinton anymore. It was deeper and more sinister and more diffuse in its focus on exploiting divisions within society on any number of different levels.

As the New York Times reported in 2022,

There was a routine: Arriving for a shift, [Russian disinformation] workers would scan news outlets on the ideological fringes, far left and far right, mining for extreme content that they could publish and amplify on the platforms, feeding extreme views into mainstream conversations.

China is joining in with AI

[A couple months ago], the New York Times reported on a new disinformation campaign. "Spamouflage" is an effort by China to divide Americans by combining AI with real images of the United States to exacerbate political and social tensions in the U.S. The goal appears to be to cause Americans to lose hope, by promoting exaggerated stories with fabricated photos about homeless violence and the risk of civil war.

As Ladislav Bittman, a former Czechoslovakian secret police operative, explained about Soviet disinformation, the strategy is not to invent something totally fake. Rather, it is to act like an evil doctor who expertly diagnoses the patient’s vulnerabilities and exploits them, “prolongs his illness and speeds him to an early grave instead of curing him.”

The influence networks are vastly more effective than platforms admit

Russia now runs its most sophisticated online influence efforts through a network called Fabrika. Fabrika's operators have bragged that social media platforms catch only 1% of their fake accounts across YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, and Telegram, and other platforms.

But how effective are these efforts? By 2020, Facebook's most popular pages for Christian and Black American content were run by Eastern European troll farms tied to the Kremlin. And Russia doesn't just target angry Boomers on Facebook. Russian trolls are enormously active on Twitter. And, even, on Reddit.

It's not just false facts

The term "disinformation" undersells the problem. Because much of Russia's social media activity is not trying to spread fake news. Instead, the goal is to divide and conquer by making Western audiences depressed and extreme.

Sometimes, through brigading and trolling. Other times, by posting hyper-negative or extremist posts or opinions about the U.S. the West over and over, until readers assume that's how most people feel. And sometimes, by using trolls to disrupt threads that advance Western unity.

As the RAND think tank explained, the Russian strategy is volume and repetition, from numerous accounts, to overwhelm real social media users and create the appearance that everyone disagrees with, or even hates, them. And it's not just low-quality bots. Per RAND,

Russian propaganda is produced in incredibly large volumes and is broadcast or otherwise distributed via a large number of channels. ... According to a former paid Russian Internet troll, the trolls are on duty 24 hours a day, in 12-hour shifts, and each has a daily quota of 135 posted comments of at least 200 characters.

What this means for you

You are being targeted by a sophisticated PR campaign meant to make you more resentful, bitter, and depressed. It's not just disinformation; it's also real-life human writers and advanced bot networks working hard to shift the conversation to the most negative and divisive topics and opinions.

It's why some topics seem to go from non-issues to constant controversy and discussion, with no clear reason, across social media platforms. And a lot of those trolls are actual, "professional" writers whose job is to sound real.

So what can you do? To quote WarGames: The only winning move is not to play. The reality is that you cannot distinguish disinformation accounts from real social media users. Unless you know whom you're talking to, there is a genuine chance that the post, tweet, or comment you are reading is an attempt to manipulate you -- politically or emotionally.

Here are some thoughts:

Don't accept facts from social media accounts you don't know. Russian, Chinese, and other manipulation efforts are not uniform. Some will make deranged claims, but others will tell half-truths. Or they'll spin facts about a complicated subject, be it the war in Ukraine or loneliness in young men, to give you a warped view of reality and spread division in the West.

Resist groupthink. A key element of manipulate networks is volume. People are naturally inclined to believe statements that have broad support. When a post gets 5,000 upvotes, it's easy to think the crowd is right. But "the crowd" could be fake accounts, and even if they're not, the brilliance of government manipulation campaigns is that they say things people are already predisposed to think. They'll tell conservative audiences something misleading about a Democrat, or make up a lie about Republicans that catches fire on a liberal server or subreddit.

Don't let social media warp your view of society. This is harder than it seems, but you need to accept that the facts -- and the opinions -- you see across social media are not reliable. If you want the news, do what everyone online says not to: look at serious, mainstream media. It is not always right. Sometimes, it screws up. But social media narratives are heavily manipulated by networks whose job is to ensure you are deceived, angry, and divided.

Edited for typos and clarity. (Tumblr-edited for formatting and to note a sourced article is now older than mentioned in the original post. -LV)

P.S. Apparently, this post was removed several hours ago due to a flood of reports. Thank you to the r/GenZ moderators for re-approving it.

Second edit:

This post is not meant to suggest that r/GenZ is uniquely or especially vulnerable, or to suggest that a lot of challenges people discuss here are not real. It's entirely the opposite: Growing loneliness, political polarization, and increasing social division along gender lines is real. The problem is that disinformation and influence networks expertly, and effectively, hijack those conversations and use those real, serious issues to poison the conversation. This post is not about left or right: Everyone is targeted.

(Further Tumblr notes: since this was posted, there have been several more articles detailing recent discoveries of active disinformation/influence and hacking campaigns by Russia and their allies against several countries and their respective elections, and barely touches on the numerous Tumblr blogs discovered to be troll farms/bad faith actors from pre-2016 through today. This is an ongoing and very real problem, and it's nowhere near over.

A quote from NPR article linked above from 2018 that you might find familiar today: "[A] particular hype and hatred for Trump is misleading the people and forcing Blacks to vote Killary. We cannot resort to the lesser of two devils. Then we'd surely be better off without voting AT ALL," a post from the account said.")

[presidentofthelipglossclub]

heatwave and optimus are such an underrated comedic duo. every single time they are in the same vicinity as each other everything immediately goes to shit. this is i think because they are both primus's blorbos, and in true blorbo fashion, must suffer. greatly. anyway this leads to some very fun interactions such as:

heatwave, newly appointed leader of like every rescue bot, on his first day as a secret alien on earth, immediately deciding he wants to leave right after accepting optimus's orders. and when he can't do that, he starts talking to people because he has no fear i guess.

optimus prime, leader of the cybertronian race, chosen by primus, and guy who says "nothing much, double dutch" in response to an extremely casual greeting in a very formal situation in front of his child (heatwave), presumably to embarrass said child.

heatwave, recent student of optimus's old friend who is a respected and decorated war veteran as well as a long time rescue bot, calling optimus (WHO IS FRIENDS WITH THIS GUY) just to bitch at him.

optimus prime, protector of civilians and humanity, fully prepared to watch a game show (created by blades and chase) in which a human child gets electrocuted. (there was a misunderstanding involving the term "lightning round" in trivia).

heatwave, rescue team leader, assigned to protect humans, straight up just driving off a cliff into the ocean with no warning, with his human partner who is screaming, all to win a race.

optimus prime, by now nearly a godlike figure, adopted father of all the rescue bots, also a terrible communicator, ghosting his kids for four years (get it. ghost. bc he died.) and then not explaining ever.

like literally i could go on but they are total messes and it's hilarious. where is all the content of incredibly chaotic and weird father daughter bonding for heatwave and optimus. they are so funny.

(yes i meant to type daughter bc heatwave gives off eldest daughter energy ok. no other reason for the shit he pulls.)

[maslows-pyramid-scheme]

Another day, another fruitless attempt to inform 'rad'blr that it's conflating radical feminism, one branch of feminism, with 'lesbian feminism,' a separate branch of feminism (ironically, 'lesbian feminists' split from radical feminism over radical feminisms failure to condemn opposite sex relationships).

[xxcalicofemmexx]

i got a couple requests to use my banner, so i made some alternates with the other original galactian symbols!

free to use! just credit me in your pinned or bio or something :3

[menlove]

as a card carrying terf I don’t think trans ppl are disgusting and neither does any radfem i’ve ever met, vast majority of us dgaf about trans people specifically; we want single-sex spaces to exist and btw trans people need those single-sex spaces too. trans women deserve to have spaces for Just trans women and cis women deserve spaces with Just cis women etc etc. i highly recommend doing some actual research into radical feminism instead of repeating the "theyre all conservatives who hate gnc people and find trans people disgustinf and want to kill them" that is simply not true lmao. you may be surprised a what you learn! sincerely a gnc lesbian and proud radfem

I have in fact done much research into radical feminism babe! trust me I have spent hours in yalls spaces! and you simply cannot speak for every single terf just as I can't speak for every trans person. you can't say "come on NO ONE IS SAYING-" just like I can't say that either. do you know every terf? have you seen every blog? have you been a trans person (particularly a trans woman) on the internet trying to just exist in peace? no? then you don't get to say "no terf is SAYING-" because yes, a lot of you are!

"no terf thinks trans people are disgusting" cool so when I was 19 and hadn't touched testosterone a day in my life and had she/they in my bio one of you coming into my ask going "I can tell by looking at you that you'll never be a woman lmfao" bc I'm latine w a shitton of body hair and non-eurocentric features, THAT was out of love for ✨women✨.

when yall (not you specifically but your group you associate with) get on twitter and pick apart the selfies women post telling them they're ugly and following it up by saying you KNOW they're "men" and it turns out 9/10 you've just harassed a cis woman who just doesn't meet eurocentric beauty standards, that's so totally cool and awesome and out of love for cis women and a want for separate spaces right?

when yall go into trans people's asks and tell us to kill ourselves, call us pedophiles, call us rapists, call us ugly... that shit just doesn't happen, right? and yes I'm Aware yall get death and rape threats too. you shouldn't, it's gross on both sides, but really it's not proving your point here.

it's fucking infuriating. you're infuriating. because radical feminism could be something worthwhile (and funnily enough I've met a lot of older ex radfem lesbians who have veered away from it bc of how fucking vitrolic yall are towards trans people). but instead, it is steeped and inseparable from the mire of hatred and disgust that you parrot. you don't give a single shit about women, whatever sex.

I'm an assigned female at birth lesbian who has only ever slept with other people with vaginas (consensually anyway). I can't tell you the amount of hate I've gotten from yall. just for being trans. even though I meet your definition of being a woman and being a lesbian. it doesn't matter because your hatred for people you deem as degenerate outweighs actually fucking advocating for feminism.

I'm not even going to argue with you on how useless single sex spaces actually are bc despite their best attempts there's always going to be problems (namely: fun fact cis women can be awful too AND how the fuck are you going to check and enforce this rule? what is your end goal?).

but what I AM going to say is no, sorry, that's NOT what a lot of you think. that's what YOU think. that's why YOU'RE a terf. but actually fucking look at the people around you. go on a trans person's blog or twitter who's receiving harassment and fucking try and tell me it's to promote "uwu safe spaces" like.... be fucking serious with me right now lmfao

you're not conservatives! but you are a bunch of fucking assholes who care more about harassing trans people than building a feminism that might actually have teeth. if you're using those teeth to attack a group more vulnerable than you, you're just an aggressor.

tldr you don't speak for all of them, go fuck yourself, etc

[femmesandhoney]

some of yall come into radical feminist spaces where many are just rad-aligned or feminists in general and then weirdly assume every woman you speak to must all subscribe to every radical ideology ever made just because they agree with radical feminism as if people on radblr aren't all at various stages of agreement and disagreement with radical feminism and label themselves many things besides radfem. if you come for women on here for not being "radical" enough for you despite knowing this i think you're just looking to stir up problems for no reason tbh

[serenfire]

finished the bg3 ironhand gnome plotline today and was wondering about the pulse of the fandom so i checked and

turns out almost everyone who played this game is a coward!! doesn’t see that bg3’s commentary on violence can be about resistance by any means necessary to the point that you turn the knife on every single one of the people you once called friend

[tabbbbyyyy]

Does the Masked Man have a job? And ik froggy does eventually have a job as the Prince and all that but I'm counting him as he is at the start of the series

[mogai-sunflowers]

if ur pro-Pali but you are queerphobic what are you even doing….

[toubledrouble]

"fuck the rich and the government" but like in a christian way yk

[nullcoast]

Why can't we just love eachother and help eachother and cry for eachother when we hurt and laugh for eachother when we're happy. What happened to radical acceptance and beauty. Why are we self-separating using white suppremist ideas about identity. The idea someone needs some pure property to be worthy of adopting a community is point blank a white suprematist idea. Where is the understanding of mistake and pain.

We are so alone and isolated in this generation and we are playing directly into the interests of those in power by further self-separating. Focus on some important fucking shit.

[jellyfishfem]

having a convo with a woman who secretely agrees w radfem values is a breath of fresh air

[the-casbah-way]

FINALLY finished my outline for prodigal son it’s going to end up way longer than i planned </3

[toytulini]

i made an oc thats at least nicknamed "Stupid" and im constantly thinking about what a power move that is tbh