I try to stay away from a lot of fandom discourse, but since I’ve been seeing this on my dash again and in tags, I feel the need to make a statement on this, particularly for any young fans who follow me that might get drawn into this mindset.

Stay away from purity culture. Warn your friends away from it too, if you see them starting to fall for it. It’s very easy to get drawn into it

Almost always, it starts with one of three roots, pedophilia, incest and/or abuse. Usually it’s pedophilia. Funnily enough, that’s also what congress usually uses to try to justify passing bills that undermine online privacy & security. Because it’s an easy, extreme target, and when people attempt to argue against it, it’s nice and easy to say “Oh so you like pedophilia” rather then actually engaging with their argument.

The logic goes like this, although there’s many forms of it.

This is the foundation of “anti” culture, and it’s important to be aware of it so you can catch this false equivocation. Fictional explorations of something, are not the same as the thing itself. Fictional explorations are fiction. The characters are not real people. There is no actual harm being done. Equating fake harm and real harm is a dangerous, slippery slope, which leads us to fundamentally flawed ideas of moral purity. It’s a form of controlling people & making them feel guilty for their very thoughts, rather than holding people accountable for their actions. 

A very handy trick for when you encounter this sort of argument, is to replace whatever the selected purity term is with murder. After all, we can all agree that murder is bad, but at the same time, we understand that a murder in a book =/= a murder in real life.

Let’s see that argument again, shall we?

Hopefully, it’s now easy to see why the above argument is fundamentally flawed.

Keep your eye out for purity culture in your fandom spaces, and when you see it, refuse to engage with it. Warn your friends if you see them falling into the same traps, although try to be kind about it; this is a very easy thought pattern to fall into. I don’t recommend trying to argue/debate anti’s. The attention only feeds them. Block them instead. Don’t let people control or shame you for what you create or consume, and don’t control or shame others for what they create or consume.

Also, as a note, let me be clear about something. If you are uncomfortable with any of the above discussed things, or anything in general in fiction (ie, underage ships, murder, incest, abuse, penguins, needles, etc), that’s perfectly fine (it’s also called a squick, for those that haven’t heard that term before). Absolutely control your fandom experience by blocking people, filtering tags, unfollowing, etc. However, just because you are uncomfortable with something, does not give you the right to control other people. Other people have no right to control what content you create or consume, and you have no right to do that to them either. 

Okay?

“It’s a form of controlling people & making them feel guilty for their very thoughts, rather than holding people accountable for their actions. ”

hope u dont mind me keeping ur tags because ur right:

I’ll reblog this every time I see it.

If you need drugs to be happy, you should be talking to a psychiatrist, not a drug dealer.

“Describe homestuck” is a weird question, because you can describe the overarching plot but not the weird branches it shoots off into

Like, “Homestuck is about a reality altering video game that comes about at the end of every world that, if beaten, allows the players to become gods of the next world. we follow four kids from our world who play it, the aliens from the previous game that made our world, and a ‘reboot’ game that comes about when ours fails.”

And then someone asks about how the fuck Betty Crocker plays into it and you don’t fucking know how to answer without a goddamn essay

giving someone a quick, offhand summation of homestuck like it didn’t consume at least three years of your life:

THEY ASK A FOLLOW-UP QUESTION:

I haven’t read Homestuck, but I’m willing to trust that this is how explanations of it will work.

People be like “Why would the government want to spy on me? I am not dangerous...

Dear sweet child, it is the government that is dangerous.

They want to spy on you so they can victimize you more easily.

They spy not to protect themselves, but instead to strip you of the protections afforded by your obscurity.

there’s a difference between “being canceled” and “facing consequences” but there’s also a fine line between “facing consequences” and “deincentivizing growth and change” and i think that needs to be grappled with more. i’m not saying all mistakes need to be forgiven by everyone, but people who make mistakes are people, and if it becomes clear that not only will they will never be forgiven for their past, but that they will also be continually punished, then it’s a normal human response to grow frustrated and stop trying, and the holier-than-thou response of “well if they were really sorry, they would willingly accept all the punishments we throw their way” is stupid. what does pulling receipts up from 20 years ago do? who do these “gotcha” moments help?

it also isolates people and makes them more likely to join extremist and reactionary groups. connection and acceptance is a fundamental human need. so if someone feels cast out of their social circles because of something that they are told is irredeemable, they are likely to look for a group that will accept or even encourage that behavior. by holding people to impossible standards, you may be unintentionally radicalizing them

Bold of you to say "unintentionally" like that wasn't the goal from the start. It's a long form version of kafkatrapping in which you abuse and ostracize people who don't cater to your whims so that when they get fed up and join your opposition out of spite you point and yell about how you were "right" about them being bad people all along and it's as fucking morally reprehensible as it is the exact opposite of helpful to the cause of civil rights to an absolutely maddening extent.

I think that SJWs, in their current form, are an engineered phenomena. A cultivated societal psychosis.

There are always a few nuts in every place and age, but they’re never this centrally organized and directed. They’re what Yuri Bezmenov would call useful idiots. They’re deliberately put in place to cause chaos and destabilize things, and to cause damage.

The fact that the social conditions are set up to cause a purity spiral means that these emotionally controlled shock troops basically wipe themselves out after they’ve gotten rid of any organized or outspoken opposition. Then all that’s left are a few dregs of the most mentally and emotionally indoctrinated or crippled people of the advance force.

If I were trying to destroy a civilization with relatively little manpower, this is one of the best ways I could imagine to do it.

THEY KNOW EXACTLY WHAT THEY ARE DOING.

https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/history/chm/outreach/disorder/expertpanel/suicide_and_insanity_in_19thc_prisons_hardwick.pdf

Isolation, masks, and suicides in prison populations. Page 3.

Remember to social distance, isolate yourself inside your home, and wear a mask (or two) if you ever go outside. Think of people as dangerous disease carriers rather than fellow human beings.

Don't leave your tea in the tags!

Vwym is more about individuals choosing to not give money to a business they don’t support for very specific reasons and redemption is very possible. They go through legal and ethical means to send a message of they don’t support and why.

Cancel culture is a mob ostracizing whoever they don’t like, regardless if they’re actually guilty. CC also often harasses people and send death threats to the individual and their family.

A good example of VWYM is that I canceled my Disney+ subscription because of the Gina carano situation. I didn’t send death threats to Kathleen Kennedy or call for Disney hq to be burned down. Cancel culture takes it to such an extreme they become worse than whatever they’re trying to cancel

I don’t think I have anything more to contribute. Y’all got it covered.

@arcanciel-par-un-lerme (I can’t seem to find you in the “at” list, so here’s my attempt at reaching you.)

That’s when I knew I was in for a good breakdown.

“If you didn’t act/ look like X, then maybe people wouldn’t bully you.”

Stop. If you try to act ‘normal’ then bullies will still search for the smallest, most irrelevant aspect about you and use it against you. I was mocked about having a thin goddamn bellybutton in the changing room, nothing I did incited that behaviour towards me. It was never about how I acted or what clothes I wore, it was about the power they had over me, it was about the mob mentality they had. This idea that bullying is a teaching tactic to help the victim mature, to push them away from some kind of cringe culture, is fucking ridiculous. Stop excusing bullying behaviour and blaming it on the victim. No one ever asks to be teased and isolated, so why do we assume the victim was asking for it? Maybe you just don’t want to address the issue because you’re part of the problem.

Stuff like this is why I’m trying to imagine what it would be like to expand civilian firearm or weapon ownership to the schools would look like.

I suspect that this would be the most effective way to stop bullies from attacking people. People often fear consequences, but only when they’re capable of imagining them. “If I keep this behaviour up for a few decades, then I might have trouble keeping a job, or I might get a bad reputation” is just too abstract and forwart-thinking an idea for many bullies to have. It’s also too far in the future for most teenage brains to really conceptualize in any real way, just due to developmental reasons.

There would probably be people who use the firearms specifically as a tool to attack or intimidate others, but the beauty of firearms is that all it takes is one person with a firearm to end a problem like someone who keeps trying to start fights and attacking others. Sure, a bully could theoretically kill a few of their bullying targets, but all it takes is one person recognizing who the problem is in this situation to put a stop to it.

This idea feels like an old one. I’m sure there’s some sort of battle royale style movie or comic set in a high school that tries it out. 

Do y'all ever just stop and think about how JKR is the most prominent example of why this Red Scare 2: Nazi Boogaloo shit is awful and why modern American/Western in general Leftists are the most self-defeating dipshits ever because they fundamentally do not understand how radicalization works?

I was waiting for someone to ask for an elaboration, and since you decided to be a cunt I’ll tell you!

Because JKR spent years trying to backflip to appeal to woke cultists who outright berate people for trying to extend any goodwill or placation to them.

Make fun of her cringy post-canon bullshit all you want. Laugh at the “Vanish me poopum” and “X is actually Y representation all along” nonsense by all means. (I know I will!) That doesn’t change the fact she spent decades trying to be woke only to be met with vicious contempt.

And I’m not talking about the mockery and laughter that I’d indulge in and someone like her should’ve expected and was no doubt warned about repeatedly, I’m talking about death threats, actual harassment, and constant slander from media outlets twisting her as a bigot (BEFORE she became a TERF), which would negatively affect pretty much anyone.

Like that “Don’t punish people for doing what you want” post where the moral was “If Success merits the same result as failure people are gonna stop giving a shit.” Maybe someone somewhere tried, probably desperately even to tell her this shit was a dumb idea.

But if she was able to be radicalized into TERFdom under the pretense of “men invading women’s spaces”, combined with apparently some pre-existing trauma(?), then it’s not much of a stretch to imagine being bombarded with the cringe-inducing shit you see on tumblr and twitter and accusations of bigotry over absolutely dumb, trivial bullshit made her flock to the one group that seemed to actually want her. This is why people join Nazis. This is why people join Cults. This is why people keep joining incel forums and groups and that kinda shit: Whether it was the result of their own actions or (almost always) not, people who get ostracized will go to whoever will accept them, regardless of whether that group is a toxic influence.

Because it turns out when you’ve been stomped on, mocked, shamed and whatever for long enough, people won’t care about warnings about how this group is bad, even if for extremely legitimate reasons. And they’ll be more accepting when that bad group tells them “Oh they just hate us because X reasons” and whatever other propaganda they shit down your throat. JKR’s a successful rich white lady in England so by no means am I saying she’s had it as bad as say, some poor white trash fuck in the south who’s been put through the ringer Arthur Fleck style.

I’m saying that Cancel Culture’s bad because it directly creates the very problem it “fights against.” If any of the people who scream day and night about the Orange Man actually gave a FUCK about actually stopping racism and bigotry, they’d stop doing it because we have years worth of evidence that it doesn’t work.

But judging by your attitude there I’m just going to assume this is all falling on deaf ears, so by all means keep being part of the problem. 

Man just once I wish you people weren’t so disgustingly predictable and didn’t prove my point at every single turn. 

Imagine dismissing a person’s entire argument based solely on them having an MLP icon.

I’m not sure when you hopped on to Tumblr, but that’s been an extremely common event to see for around a decade so far.

-

This problem with the Leftist mobs defeating themselves is probably by design, not by accident. 

We know that they rally around their cult leaders and are regularly incited into action by others rather than taking action themselves. From this, we can figure out that they’re a controlled group, especially given all the co-ordination and co-operation from the establishment. The government forces ordered to ignore them and let them burn down cities unopposed for months on end, the multi-billion dollar corporations giving them upwards of a hundred million dollars, the favourable coverage in the news media, et cetera.

The Left also always eats itself. They destabilize whatever society they infiltrate and then set off a purity spiral after they’ve turned whatever they’ve taken over into a hollow shell of it’s former self.

That makes them the perfect weapons. Tools. Useful idiots.Shock troops.

Take an enemy population. Sabotage them and break up the family. Take over the education system so that your enemy’s children spend more waking time with your cult indoctrinators than with their own parents. Do not instill in them useful habits. Rather, instill wokeness into them. Take their soft minds when they’re most fragile and haven’t developed critical thinking skills yet, and fill them with utter nonsense that will prevent them from being effective and happy people in the future. Then, when they’re near the end of their education, they’ll find themselves unable to get a job. (This works better if you also destroy the economy along the way).

At this point, you have a population of people who have little hope of a better life on their own, and they also have a fundamentalist belief in talking points and slogans that YOU decided back when they were children. Offer to pay them peanuts to go protest. Go rally for something. Go act out their aggression on a society they haven’t been prepared for. Give their urge to destroy an outlet and a target. Due to their own behaviour at this point, once they start drinking the kool-aid, they’ll have little choice but to continue. They’re all mentally ill. Their maturation and growth has been sabotaged. They have been made to be less competent and prepared than their forefathers, and they’ve been dropped into a society that’s in the process of being gutted.

They know that something’s wrong. They want to make it right, but they’re not equipped to understand how. So they jump at the first, most immediate solution offered to them.

I think I may have wandered a bit from the point, so I’ll regroup here. Their only option is to be part of the cult. But the cult is one that was formed based on rabid attacks on heretics. The criteria for what a heretic is ever-changing. They’re all in competition with each other to be as woke as they can possibly be. To do that, they all have to virtue signal as much as possible, at every available opportunity. Their chances at jobs literally depends on it.

This ever-more-fervent virtue signalling has no end point. The cult does not have the concept of forgiveness in it. Every prior act that used to be considered okay is in danger of being considered “evil” in the future, due to no fixed morality system.

Regrouping again: You have a mentally ill slave army that will tear itself apart the minute that it’s no longer being pointed at new targets by their masters. And they’re all being taken from the children of your hated enemy. 

One of the most important things once things get really hot at the later stages, it’s important to make sure that the people who notice the patterns get vilified the most harshly. If people start to listen, there’s a chance that things could be turned around.

Hey, @takashi0, I think you have a pretty good example of the mechanic in action. What do you think of my rundown of how it seems to work?

Fandom:

Adults: *create a space for other adults*

Minors*: *come into that space* 

Minors: this isn’t a safe space for kids!!

Adults: …..uhh no, it’s not.

Minors: why are you personally attacking me personally?

Adults: ….????????………… 

Minors: I know you want to fuck children

Me: *looks at fic with one character that’s in his 40′s and another that’s in his 50′s, with no children in sight* 

Me: ………please get out of my house

(I still get a lot of responses to this post calling me a pedo and I am t i r e d of this bottom-of-the-barrel quality discourse)

* this obviously doesn’t apply to all minors, and to all those minors (like me, when I was your age!) that manage to enjoy and participate in fandom without calling everyone a pedophile, I appreciate you.

Adults: we want to write/draw porn of these fictional adult characters.

Minors: that’s not appropriate for children.

Adults: yep! that’s why it’s tagged as explicit and has a warning for mature content and also is tagged for various sex acts in case you’re not into that.

Minors: that type of content makes me uncomfortable.

Adults: we totally get that but that’s why the tags and warnings are on it.

Adults: look you even have to agree:

Adults: so if you’re not into that type of thing then you can just skip over it.

Minors: it make me uncomfortable.

Adults: ……then… don’t… read it?

Minors: no. 

Minors: you should stop writing it.

Adults: no.

JUST FUCKING SAYING

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. If you’re old enough to be using the internet unsupervised, then you’re old enough to be learn how to avoid content that upsets you. Adult fans and content creators are not here to be your babysitters.

The same thing happens when women enter men’s spaces.

The opinion of non-Whites in regards to White nationalism is absolutely worthless. They’ll fight tooth and nail to suppress it the best they can to secure their place in White countries. All they care about is keeping their place here, even at the detriment of the White population. They’ll use any excuse, dress it up in all kinds of rationalizations, but it all comes down to their feeling of entitlement to live here at any cost.

It would be rather easy to put this argument in the frame that shitlibs adore so much as well.

Colonizers opinions on whether or not the colonized organize to their own collective interest are absolutely worthless. You could quite easily get them to accept the premise by starting with any other race, then including whites after they swallow the bait with gusto.

It would be easy. Accurate? Not even close. Immigrants and refugees aren’t colonizers. Colonizers travel somewhere, set up their own govt, steal resources from natives, and commits atrocities to the natives. You’ve gotta be high to say those against white supremacists fit that.

hmmmmm

hmmmmmmmm

hmmmmmmmmmm

hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

life imitates art

Looking at y’all staring him down with bated breaths at how much you wanna assault, injure, or even kill him if you think you can get away with it.

hm. yeah. the beard dude in the maga hat looks like the bad guy in this situation. not the all black wearing bands of motherfuckers in ski masks and balaclavas all around him.

right.

Leftists: the government needs to silence people who say things I don’t like.

Everyone else: the government should protect people from physical harm.

Leftists: hurrrr who has safe space Now?

I’d say OP was especially stupid, but I’ve seen other regressives post that first image.

Also, it’s kinda hilarious how none of those people know the difference between an ideological and emotional safe space and a space where people need to be protected from physical assault.

They think the enemy’s words are violence and their own violence is words.

nice try

Where did he put out the “call” for it and what did it have to do with the Annapolis shooting?

I want to know that this story is being clearly communicated and that the correlations and language are factual. The corporate press has a duty to these elements. You as a distributor of their narrative share this responsibility.

Please provide.

In a private conversation with a reporter, Milo said “I can’t wait for vigilante squads to start gunning down journalists on sight”

For some reason, he’s surprised that a reporter reported something he said to a reporter.

However, it should be noted this shooter’s attack was personal, not political.

Okay so he didn’t put out a “call” to shoot reporters and it had nothing to do with the shooter or shooting in Annopolis. It was something repugnant said in private conversation as a major press outlet was preparing to run a story about restaurants this guy frequents in New York as a form of harassment. Thanks for clearing it up.

Also, from what I understand, he said that in response to being asked what his opinions were on people giving him shit for joining UKIP along with Count Dankula, Sargon of Akkad, and Paul Joseph Watson.

These are comments from the notes. They are the desired response to the distortions and omissions in the reporting. They assume that it was a public call to violence and that this call was incitement related to the Annapolis shooting. Both are false but are central to the way the story has been posed in major outlets like the WaPo and The Hill.

This incident is not “newsworthy”, it was carefully tailored utilizing the elements that could create a sense of correlation between unrelated events and used to buttress a manufactured chunk of the popular political psyche. Right/violence/media/victim. Facts regarding this particular exchange between three people were obfuscated or buried.

Consider it in contrast with the outright and very public calls for violence, not only against trump and people in the admin, but against his supporters as a whole. You have people like Michale Moorer on Colbert telling people to prepare to die in opposition, you have Maxine Waters losing her mind and inciting harassment and violence in public appearances and planned public speeches. I may have missed it but I’ve seen very little push back against her or commentary like Moorer’s. The most I’ve seen is establishment dems like Schumer distance themselves from it. YouTube is full of videos with public calls for violence from celebrities and activist alike.

We had a literal Bernie Bro shoot up a baseball practice of the political opposition. How quickly was that association completely downplayed, discarded, and forgotten? Some of these same press outlets played the same game they’re playing now by being fast and loose with the facts. If you’ll recall in the immediate aftermath of the baseball attack they attempted to play a relativist game by trying to blame the Gaffords shooting in Az on Sarah Palin despite there being literally no connection.

There’s absolutely no evidence that the shooter heard what Milo said. This isn’t even guilt by association, it’s guilt by proximity.

> How quickly was that association completely downplayed, discarded, and forgotten?

Almost literally overnight.

This is horrifying. The left is doing everything in its power to incite an explicit war.

In fact, the other day I was at a local meet up with people for board games. One of the groups there brought their kid. He must have been around 10-12. He said that of he could press a button to kill trump, but a million people would die, he'd instantly press that button without thinking twice. He's a kid, so I'm sure his parent (and her boyfriend) coached him into this opinion.

At this rate, things are going to get really ugly, and self preservation against an explicitly aggressive attack will be propagandized into the first strike.

Games already cost next to nothing to physically produce and sell. Digital copies alone mean they could sell infinite copies if they wanted. The $60 price tag is just a weird anachronism that most major companies aren’t willing to drop because they are operating under the moronic notion that people won’t buy their games if they see them as cheap and less valuable. Plenty of smaller studios have already proven that a steep discount not only sells more copies, but makes them much more money, and customers are generally happier. Drop the price to $30 or $40 and sell more copies, or at least make the digital copy much cheaper, because then it costs practically nothing and no plastic or shipping costs have to be wasted just so it can gather dust on a Gamestop shelf.

Besides that, all they really need to do is make good games with reasonable development cycles and slash the budget of the marketing and advertising department.

On the first point, big studios and publishers are stuck making games in the worst possible way. They often farm out huge chunks of the game to different studios with wildly varying levels of skill and competence to work on different important aspects of their games. Look what happened to Mass Effect Andromeda. Underskilled studio working on the game in a very short timeframe, literally being told not to work on certain aspects of the game because they were farming that part of the development out to some even shittier studio.

In some cases, they try running more people working on a game thinking twice as many people will finish the game twice as fast.  It doesn’t fucking work that way. That’s just twice as many people to fuck things up and the cost of running a studio like that is exponentially higher than simply working on the game for another year. Also, more people means when one part of the team hits a roadblock or a major problem, you can be potentially stuck with a huge team of people who can’t get anything done.

Also, there’s the problem of games getting caught in the con and expo cycle, constantly halting development to put together ‘vertical slices’, demos, gameplay trailers, which take time away from working on the actual game to make phony mock ups and and barely functional demos. Some studios get caught going to E3, the PAXs, TGS, CES, investor meetings, and similar events back to back to back that it more or less grinds development to a halt as they scramble to put together something that they can show. This can leave them with a lot of wasted work that gets cut from the final release. This sort of thing is also why some games aren’t even announced or revealed until they are already playable and getting ready to be released.

On the second point, marketing teams are infamous in the vidya industry for wasting tens of millions of dollars on stupid PR stunts, extravagant staged review events for journos, and dumb shit that can often sabotage a game instead of helping it, like fake trailers and overaggressive hype. Literally no one even trusts the opinion of journos anyways. Youtubers and streamers are more influential on the buying habits of gamers than every gaming news site, review aggregator, and magazine combined. Not wasting the money to fly journos out on all expenses paid trips so they can play the game for 3 hours means the studio and publisher doesn’t have to milk the game with bad DLC and loot boxes to make a profit.

Very thorough.

Where the fuck were you people LAST YEAR?