One Billion Lions

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Remember the sixpencee child slave thing? What happened there, exactly? Was the kid freed? No? They were just run off the website? OK so what good exactly did that do?

Remember the bone stealing witch? What exactly did that witchhunt accomplish? The person got arrested, oh that's great, the american justice system surely rectified the situation

And again, those are instances where the accusations were true and involved real substantive harm to another person. We used to joke on here how callout posts were shit like "receipts below: [several paragraphs of petty fandom drama] [three paragraphs of petty interpersonal drama involving cheating on partners or stealing food out of the fridge or something] [fabricated evidence that the person is responsible for the murder of JonBenét Ramsey]"

And that was back in the 2010s. The meta has changed. Callouts used to be a tool people used to point out actual harm a person had done, rarely, and more commonly were used as a means of bullying somebody over petty drama. Nowadays they're used to manufacture outrage and harassment against marginalized populations. They are a weapon bigots use to turn us against each other. A few manufactured accusations here, some out of context or clipped screenshots there, and people who should be standing in solidarity with each other against white supremacy, patriarchy, cisheteronormativity, are instead devouring each other.

It's sinister as shit, dude, and people will still share these accusations without a second thought. So, why? What is the point? What's the best case scenario here? Raising "awareness?" what the fuck is that supposed to accomplish? Will we get the oh-so-trustworthy authorities involved? Are we hoping for an arrest? A conviction? Throwing a queer or poc person in prison so they can be abused and assaulted and humiliated behind bars? Is that who we are?

Callouts and the like don't serve any real good in the world. At a macro scale they divide us when we should be standing together, and at a micro scale they result in deeply traumatic never-ending harassment and threats and doxxing and worse to a person who almost definitely does not deserve it. And again, for what? A sense of "justice?" this is not justice. This is retribution. It is punishment.

Rhetorical dogwhistles are things that most people would not be able to identify as bigoted because they're INTENDED to have plausible deniability.

The wording changes are meant to be subtle enough that people really can mix them up accidentally when they don't have much information!

So when the gender critical movement calls trans women "transwomen", they're hoping for 2 things.

this usage will spread enough among people who don't know any better, to give transphobes the plausible deniability of not LOOKING like a frothing bigot constantly.

the usage grammatically places trans women in a different category than other women; it's changing "trans" from an adjective to part of a noun to make this distinction.

The more we can avoid this usage, the less deniability have transmisogynists have when using it, and the less rhetorical ground we cede to the degendering and misgendering of trans women.

Many, many people celebrated Pulse. We were told we deserved it. That it was God’s punishment for our sin of loving the same sex. We are sent messages like these I received in 2018:

We in the community often call the victim count 49+ to include the survivors who couldn’t live with the pain.

The event was never officially declared a hate crime or targeted homophobic attack and is rarely listed as one in databases.

At our vigils for those slaughtered, Extremist Christian groups showed up to protest, holding signs like this:

ID: Me kissing a woman I was casually seeing in front of an angry looking man with a “Sodomy is Sin” sign.

Please understand how much more than just a mass shooting this was. We are still to this day harassed and told we deserved it by some.

Here's how it works:

Someone starts a fire at an army draft office.

The cops look through their files for anyone who might be in the political orbit of someone who'd want to do that. People picked up at protests, for drug charges, vandalism, anyone who is already on their radar. They look into their known associates, anyone they live with, anyone they drink with.

Then they start subpoenaing these people for a grand jury summons. They give you immunity (but only for the matter of the grand jury!) so that you can't exercise the fifth amendment against self incrimination. If you say nothing, they can imprison you almost indefinitely for contempt of court. If they catch you in a lie, that's criminal perjury.

They'll ask you for information on everyone you know. Obviously they'll ask about their involvement in any crimes, but they're casting a wide net. Who knows who, where do they hang out, who talked to who about what and when. They'll ask you to spill interpersonal stuff, whether anyone is cheating on someone, whether people have substance abuse problems or embarrassing personal issues, if anyone is closeted, anything they consider dirt. Anyone you name is gonna get subpoenaed and they'll be asked for all this information on everyone they know, including you, and although you have immunity from your own testimony, you don't get immunity from each others.

Assuming you didn't personally do anything they can prosecute you for in the matter of the grand jury, they'll go after you based on what they know. The cops will arrest you on any little thing they have suspicion of, even if they know they can't prosecute you, just so that they can keep you in jail for a few days while you miss two shifts at work and your friends have to scramble to raise bail. They'll leak any embarrassing info that comes out, to your boss or your family or even the local press. Whatever they can do to make your life a little harder.

They will lean fucking hard on anyone who is involved in the scene but had second thoughts or felt like they were dragged into something they never wanted to do in the first place by their friends. The cops will say 'do you want to get your life ruined by people who did something stupid over something you barely even believe in' and sometimes that's a very compelling argument! If people have dependents or kids who they think won't be looked after if they go to prison, there's a lot of pressure to cooperate.

It's important to note two things:

1) Based on the ratio of actual prison sentences to maximum possible sentences for the charges, it's better for people not to cooperate with the jury both individually and as a group. People who talk still get sentenced, with the information they helped provide.

But

Meanwhile, according to a 2016 study on retired boxers, about 11% of all retired boxers examined had a mild case of CTE, and about 6% of the boxers had major neurological problems. And if you just looked at boxers who were over the age of 50 and fought in over 150 fights, the rate of CTE went up to 50%. (2)

I’m sorry, but it is absolutely reasonable for a boxing fan to say that American football should be illegal due to the injury risk, because American football is a much more dangerous sport than boxing in relation to the risk of traumatic brain injury.

And if you’re surprised to learn that American football is more dangerous than the sport where you literally punch each other. Well. I’d say that that’s part of the problem, actually.

(1) Mez J, Daneshvar DH, Kiernan PT, et al. (25 July 2017).

To be clear, I personally don’t think that it’s necessary to outright ban American football. There are a huge number of things that we could do to make the sport dramatically safer, short of just banning it altogether! But I think that part of the issue is precisely that people don’t know the relative risks of these things. Many fewer parents are comfortable letting their kids play the “hit each other in the head” sport than are comfortable letting their kids play American football, and that’s absolutely an issue of informed consent.

While it is overwhelmingly focused on the NFL, it does also get into how dangerous football is for young kids. Which they could research because they tragically have some kids die young for unrelated reasons and researchers got to look at these teens and 20 somethings brains. And they had signs of damage. Even in some people that had never had a concussion reported.

Basically its cumulative damage via deceleration... not just concussion. Kids that haven't gone through puberty yet are particularly susceptible to damage done *below* the threshold for a concussion because they haven't fully developed neck strength. So anything with a lot of sudden sharp deceleration via collision where they may effectively get whiplash (or just below diagnosable whiplash) is the culprit.

So it's not the time they got a concussion, it's doing repeated tackling drills with the sudden stop. The helmet doesn't help, because damage is due to brain moving inside skull due to the sudden stop. Helmet helps vs collision vs a secondary object but not just sudden stops.

Teens and adults are at lower risk because of greater muscle mass that can absorb more of the force safely, but still AT risk because when they DO tackle... they have a lot more mass which means a lot more force is involved. Its sheer physics. A little more resistant to the low speed collisions, but engaging in far more high speed, high force ones.

Which is also some of why football is more dangerous than boxing. You've got full body mass accelerating/decelerating.

Force = Mass X acceleration

a boxer isn't using his full mass or running speed, so even though its a direct head strike... its still got less force applied than quarterback getting plowed by a linebacker. And just by the nature of boxing, routine practice is not involving head strikes or rapid deceleration of the head with near the force of someone plowing into a tackling dummy.

Overall young kids shouldn't play tackle football. It's not necessarily a hit in game that's the risk, its repeated drills in practice that aren't done in a safe way. With insufficient rest in between. brains are really delicate and heal slowly from even minor trauma you can't see. teens & adults likely aren't getting near enough rest to recover either, especially for routine practice cumulative stress. There's techniques to make it safer but it's never really safe because of the cumulative nature of damage without time to fully heal in between.

Football is, unfortunately, often the only way some teens can get scholarships to try and get out of where they are... all while destroying the ability to benefit from same scholarship. Same kind of trap as military recruiting.