! YOU ARE AT RISK !

These topics, while unintentional, are perfectly designed to eat away at people's ability to critical think! to think for themselves! As well as pose great risk to the future of the progressive movement.

I'd argue some of these 'discourse' ideas are as dangerous as the right wing's Qanon.

Basing your opinions and beliefs on OTHER people's approval is a recipe for disaster. Here's how to save yourself:

COGNITIVE BIASES AND FALLACIES - educate yourself on the list of cognitive biases. Many of these arguments or "debates" fall into the trap of attribute substitution, empathy gaps, false consensus and many many others. There is no GOOD DATA in these debates, its just feelings. And remember; facts over feelings!

Generally improving your knowledge of logic and scientific thinking will help you greatly. Crash Course has just started a scientific thinking series and it's wonderful and I think a must-watch before going onto the internet at all.

MORALS START INSIDE OUT : NOT OUTSIDE IN - developing and basing your mortals on what makes you APPEAR the most correct? basing your morals on what your "friends" will or wont exile you for? Is a mental prison and you cannot develop your own baseline morals this way.

You NEED to be able to look deep inside yourself and be able to boil ur sense of morals down to a single or handful of concepts (compassion, equity, etc) - THEN you can take ur beliefs or any new beliefs that come your way and compare them to this core moral. Do they align? is there a disconnect? If it doesn't align then u gotta bin it. You are allowed to change your mind! You are allowed to grow! Consistency is key when it comes to ethics, NOT optics.

WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT? Do you know why the right is so successful right now? bc they arent splitting themselves over HAIRS!! there are people who wildly disagree with one another (atheists, christians, pagans, anti science, pro science etc etc) but are able to form an actionable unit because they care MORE about their GOAL than each other. YOU NEED TO CARE MORE ABOUT THE GOAL THAN WHAT EACH OTHER IS DOING!!!!

You need to care more about freedom for all and saving the planet more than you do about what fanfic ur neighbor is reading. Otherwise we WILL fail.

Im not a conspiratorial thinker and I advice against it at all cost - but to get the point across; it would NOT be surprising if things like pro/anti ship and kink discourse was sowed intentionally into leftist spaces to create division. It's not what's happening, we managed to do this to ourselves but that's how serious of an issue it is. That it's better than intentional attempts at destroying the left.

NAZI IDEOLOGY IN WOKE CLOTHING - THOUGHT CRIMES AND DEGENERATE ART : 'it's just internet discourse it's not that serious'. This is what i keep telling myself yet it still keeps me up and night and why?? this is why.

If you believe that what someone draws/writes/thinks about can be considered a crime. THAT is a thought crime and thought crimes is a fascist belief. End of story. The simple point is that you CANNOT assume someone's intent or actions off a thought, fantasy or a dream. Would it be helpful if it were the case? sure. But sorry, it's simply not how reality works.

It is a VERY quick slope from imprison this person they made a yucky drawing to -> imprison this person because they disagree with the state. Also who decides, who enforces? What happened to ACAB and prison abolition? ACAB includes the thought police.

Plenty of people have fantasies about unethical things, hurting others, hurting themselves, doing something destructive or taboo. But know perfectly well that its not possible to do in real life safely. So they use fantasy to engage with it SAFELY. THAT IS THE POINT OF FANTASY - IT IS A SAFETY MECHANISM - DESTROYING THAT WILL DO NOTHING BUT HARM. This is not a debate, it's a fact.

Thinking some kinks are somehow "evil" is an incredibly destructive mindset, especially as the kink community was one of the founding forces behind lgbt liberation. (INCLUDING abdl-ers, leather families, crossdressers and pet players to name a few) If kink falls, we all fall.

All kinks are valid or none of them are.

THIS DOES NOT MEAN YOU HAVE TO ENGAGE WITH ANY OF IT - the block button if ur best friend and 90% of these issues would be solved if people stopped trying to reform other people's minds instead of just using the block button. Curate ur space but also maybe develop a bit of discomfort tolerance; it'll take you a long way.

THE ENEMY OF MY ENEMY IS MY FRIEND - You GOTTA start being able to engage with people who disagree with you over the small stuff. The amount of discords and DNIs I see splitting people over interpretations of labels or how one chooses to describe their experiences. You are slowly poisoning yourself by not being able to handle disagreement.

THIS is what people mean by hazardous echochambers.

I think the left really threw the baby out with the bathwater when people started going on about "I can't agree to disagree over human rights" when talking abt keeping in contact with conservative family members. Yeah totally that's good! However this has extended to cutting entire populations of your OWN community off from you bc of minor thought disparity. But that thought disparity is HEALTHY! You need to get used to feeling REFRESHED when someone disagrees with you, be able to see things from other perspectives even if in the end you remain steadfast. THATS GOOD. THAT'S how you develop a TRUE moral compass.

This is MUCH better in person than online but you can use things like books and podcasts to start titrating yourself back into it. If you're in school and it has something like a philosophy club, highly recommend!

Ok this was a very rambly ranty version of what I wanted to say - I will make individual posts addressing topics better but i just HAD to get this out of my brain as it feels like taking poison damage everytime i have to think about it.

Feel free to ask questions I will answer them it may just be slow. You CAN be saved. I believe in you!

Is this a lot to take in? here are some quick tips i reccommend for staying safe online:

if you see a discussion or 'debate' or space where people use cutsey labels to describe themselves or others (pro/antiship, pro/antiendo, etc etc) - RUN, RUN FAR FAR AWAY!!!!

If you have a DNI you may already be involving yourself, heres what to do about that.

and why DNI's don't work and are kinda... weird?

I see a lot of folks on tumblr (and sometimes other sites) so desperately try to keep racists or bigots or whatever off of their blog. But it's almost always in the form of a "DNI" (or "Do Not Interact") a small or sometimes huge list of descriptors of the kind of people the user doesn't want interacting with that blog.

But the issue is... 99% of the labels of people listed aren't concepts people self identify with.

People who are racist, xenophobic or commit crimes DON'T SELF IDENTIFY AS RACISTS, BIGOTS OR CRIMINALS!!!

Which then completely and utterly makes the concepts of DNIs pointless.

They will read that DNI go "oh! this doesn't apply to to me" and ignore it. Boom completely useless piece of text taking up precious space on your blog for no reason. And even on the tiiiiniest chance you list a label that someone might identify with... they can just.. ignore it if they like ur content..

so in short.. DNI's do nothing.. except they DO do one thing... They fill your blog, bio or intro post (or god forbid every post) with a bunch of potentially triggering words and tons of negative energy. For literally no reason. Nothing makes me assume a blogger is annoying or unfun to be around like seeing a DNI. And not to mention all the times i've had my day ruined by trying to enjoy scrolling thru a tag only to be constantly blasted with "HEY REMEMBER THAT [insert horrible thing] EXISTS???". It sucks. And it's driving me mad.

But I'm not just here to rant about it, about how awful they are and that noone should use them. I understand that people want to enjoy their time on their internet and curate your space, so i'm going to show you the SUPER easy SUPER effective way to actually do that. And it can go RIGHT where your DNI is!

HOW TO ACTUALLY KEEP PEOPLE YOU DON'T LIKE OFF YOUR BLOG IN ONE EASY STEP:

List the things you DO support.

That's it.

Take your DNI and invert it. List all the groups you support. Wanna keep terfs off your blog? say I LOVE TRANS PEOPLE!!! TRANS WOMEN ARE WOMEN! want to keep racists off your blog? I SUPPORT BIPOC RIGHTS. etc etc.

How does this work? Well lets go back to that hypothetical racist on the internet: They come strolling upon ur blog dum dee dum and now they see ur intro and bio. They see that you support bipoc rights, landback movements and insert other movements that support marginalized groups. Said hypothetical racists will see that, go 'ew' and then leave. Probably.

is it 100% effective? no. many ppl don't even read bios or intro posts and some folks follow ppl they disagree with. But for the most aggressive of these types? 10-20% of them going ew and leaving is better than 0% doing anything after reading a DNI they don't believe applies to them.

But that's not the only thing this method does. Because here's the thing.. I don't really believe people have DNI's to keep people off their blog. Shocking.. i know. For most ppl it's a list of their morals so they can show off how 'morally good' they are. Which is a whole can of nasty worms I'll go into in another post. But for now I'll take it at face value and go with it. And tell you that if you want to broadcast your morals, why do it with hate?? Because all that does is spread that hate and negativity, all it does is remind all the marginalized folks who you DO want around, of all the people who suck and hate them and making feeling like shit. But a support list? a list of groups you support? well now you just have a paragraph dedicated to love, the folks you actually want interacting with you will be like 'oh damn, they like and support my people. awesome :)'

and to me that is far faaaar more important than just listing down all the people you hate.

That's it for my ramble on this topic- "oh but mr throwawayblog what about [x, y, z] or people who disagree with me on [x stupid internet discourse topic]?" that is once again another nasty can of worms that I will be saving for future posts, either on this blog or another. But it's a lot harder pill to swallow then this. And I want this post to be shareable enough to spread at least somewhat and reduce the amount of DNI's im forced to look at. by idk, at least 10%?? at least?? please?????

thanks and good night.