Forced Reboot

Two major thoughts here:

Don't let anyone convince you that this type of conversation should only exist in therapy. Your friends and loved ones are there for you. Its called a support system for a reason. Getting advice and comfort is entirely different from talking shit.

uh no

there are dozens of girls in my notes telling me how scared the idea of suddenly liking men made them. it's such a pervasive idea that im constantly seeing freshly out girls terrified and asking for advice because they desperately don't want it to happen.

I've never once seen it even be used in a kink context come to think of it, it's always some poor scared trans lesbian desperate for it not to be true and a bunch of people saying oh don't worry about it if it happens it happens men are actually great tehe.

The moon’s not white! It’s concrete-gray! It only looks so shiny when compared to the void of space!

they show up in court and just ask the lawyer for the collection company: can you prove where this number comes from? Do you have a contract showing that you purchased our debt? probably luckily for them, a reporter researching a book on the topic showed up and asked the same questions.

10 minutes later they get in front of the judge and the collection company drops the whole case and theyre free to go. story is below, it has a transcript in the link too

https://twitter.com/BrianManookian/status/1674963884703088642

You're not going to get far if you start with language policing. Kids know almost nothing and fear rejection a lot, so we should try to figure out the actual meaning behind the poorly chosen words of the question instead of immediately chastizing them for asking it in the wrong way.

Rule 1.a if it is possible to do something wrong, then it must therefore be explicitly possible to do something right.

Rule 2: we are all born ignorant, everything is learned.

Here's the thing. The right absolutely loves to use "the left disagreed with us" as justification for anything. Express any opinion, and you'll get "This is why Trump won" or "this is why you lose elections" or "this is why you should be rounded up into camps and exterminated."

I gave a specific example of this in a different thread/branch where a white supremacist arrested for assaulting a counter-protestor in Charlottesville tried to make it sound like he wasn't on the side of the white supremacists until those darn lefties attacked him for being a white male-- when the video of the attack, as well as his online history, paint an entirely different picture.

This particular method of propaganda does three things:

It recontexualizes deliberate actions into reactions-- in his case it turned "I deliberately choked a woman just to make a point" into "I was reacting to being screamed at and pepper-sprayed".

It plants the idea that challenging the behavior can make it worse.

It perpetuates the victim narrative that the right wears like body armor.

I'm not saying there's not a wrong way to confront pubescent misogyny-- or really, any -ism or phobia-- I'm just saying that anytime someone says "I was like this because people were mean to me", I think of Steven Balcaitis, or that politician who whined about how unfair it was that his friends no longer wanted to be associated with him just because he was exercising his constitutional right to speak about how we should dehumanize a vulnerable population, or Mike Pence at the Farmville debate responding to an accurate description of his political history with "Do you see how mean he's being to me?"

The goalpost for "how respectful and gentle should the left be" will always be moved to a point behind the current speaker, until we are quiet and invisible-- and then we will become the threat to their existence that is hiding under their noses, and the fact that we try to stay invisible will be vilified.

We need both tactics and a few in between as well.

We DO need people to hold the line. To refuse to be dragged to the right or silenced.

But we also need a few people out there willing to hand hold people to guide them to being better people.

And we need people who will gently scold and we need people who will go tough love and we need people who will react with disgust instead of anger and we need people who will react in ways I can't think of because I'm not the person to be doing those jobs.

There is NO ONE RIGHT WAY. The entire concept that there is one is one of the characteristics of white supremacy culture. Believing that anyone has the right to decide what's right for someone else is also on the list. So is thinking there's an objective way you need to respond to bigots (even baby bigots). Also the idea that no one should feel discomfort or pain as part of growth.

I will die on this hill:

We have to work with what we have and we have to do what works. And what works is different for every single human being.

If you find the idea of hand holding a baby misogynist revolting, then be one of the people holding the line. But you're not doing anything helpful by treating the hand holders like traitors.

If you can't stand the idea of pushing someone into the right wing and you have a firm grip on how you got to the left, then be a hand holder. It isn't a job for everyone. People who are willing to do the job need to stop insisting that people who aren't suited to the job take it on.

Let's not bury the lede.