The Tara Knight situation is pretty bad.

Obviously it's awful that she faked a letter from the FBI telling her to Stop Writing About Transfeminism, just for clout/clicks. I'm glad she admitted to it in pretty quick order so things have a chance of settling down and other trans people writing about trans theory online can feel more at ease.

Unfortunately, that's probably not going to happen, because this is now a Discourse Nexus and everyone is primed to shout about it a lot.

At least one 'journalist' is apparently trawling for people with 'stories' about Tara's alleged interpersonal wrongdoings to come forward (to be clear, this is hostile muckraking that benefits nobody), and it's probably only going to get more vile over the next few weeks.

What happened is already clearly documented public knowledge. That should be enough!

I think a hard and annoying truth to truly internalise is that people in marginalised communities are not immune from the pressures that make people act unpleasantly, selfishly, or even scammy. In fact, they feel these pressures more than non-marginalised groups, by definition.

Nobody has insight into other people's minds, so the exact motivations for this sort of stuff are going to remain opaque. No amount of additional blame or harassment (or gloating, or muckraking) will move the community towards a better understanding of what happened, why, or of the person behind it.

In the end, 'scammers' or 'grifters' are not a separate class of people who have an inherent advantage over everyone else. Sometimes, people you are in community with are going to lie or pull some shit in order to benefit themselves.

Treating anyone who pulls this sort of stunt like a perpetual target for 'punching up' discourse (or even just harassment) isn't reasonable. It doesn't solve anything. It doesn't work to alleviate the conditions that make people consider harmful, selfish behaviour.

If you're so disappointed and angry with someone that you can't trust a single thing they say anymore, then the best and healthiest option for you, them, and the community at large is to disengage from them completely. Don't start whisper campaigns, or dig up more 'proof' of various wrongs. That will have zero positive impact.

i think part of what makes bojack horseman really good is that like, bojack horseman is a groomer. he gets vulnerable and/or young women to rely on him and takes advantage of them when they do. but i think an important part of it is that bojack doesn't *feel* like a groomer for most of the series, i struggled to put into perspective how his treatment of sarah lynn was intentional. But that's the point, he didn't do it on purpose. and as an audience we can see how he didn't do it on purpose, we can read every explanation he gives and understand that he's being honest. it's just, he took advantage of it. when charlotte wanted it, he took advantage of it.

directly asking merch makers in their preorder fundraising posts who makes their products & where & if equitable pay can be guaranteed to the ppl actually sewing their shit together .. perhaps a new trend this year

Starter questions

happy shark walk wednesday

I'm a lesbo...

yeah

it’s not problematic or “anti-masculinity” to have the expectation that men divest from the patriarchy and from misogyny, and anyone who says it is just wants to be misogynistic with no pushback

Saw *another* person today do the whole "well ackshually all this shit with Venezuela and Greenland is obviously just a distraction from the Epstein Files" thing and legitimately can't believe the level of applying-movie-logic-to-real-life-politics brain that it takes to publically say that and feel like you're saying something insightful or intelligent.

The thing i find most repugnant about it is that, given this assertion, the only logical conclusion to draw is that discussing or caring about the fact that the US recently bombed and kidnapped the president of another country makes you some kind of rube who's falling for The Distraction. Going on the internet and implicitly framing the fact that other people care about US imperialist aggression over the stupid pedo scandal slapfight as Falling For The Distraction Like Dumb Sheeple takes a uniquely american form of thinking you're the main character.

If someones idea of misogyny is entirely when men are mean and/or violent towards women, it is safe to disregard that persons opinion

REAL masculinity is about [traits and behaviors that anyone can have that youre gendering for reasons that are ultimately misogynistic]

the term ‘representation’ as its used to describe works of mass market genre fiction has always been incomplete and naïve and further has since been completely denigrated to mean ‘if you depict it and someone has lived it then it's Good Representation and therefore imbues the work with moral value.’ it's silly to think that the challenging of normative epistemes in genre fiction does anything (insert the kurt vonnegut quote) but it is in fact straightforwardly demonstrable that art which reinforces those epistemes can foment prejudice at large scales. on the one hand you can't Queer Rep your way into class solidarity and the dismantling of antagonist structures but on the other hand look at the way people in the us talk about russians and how media reinforces this lmao. and so you get people with these asinine-to-reactionary reads based purely on the moralizing discourse of ‘representation’ without any thoughts to ideas which said media is reifying lmao. i don't care if you you Feel Seen that plot point is racist and misogynist!