My best friend was one of those that didn't find PK likeable and I was personally neutral. When Pengo's callout came out, we were both sadly looking for something juicy, but after reading halfway through, idk. It sounded like relationship drama that happens all the time rather than any actual abuse, long before the rebuttal. While our opinions of PK haven't changed, we have to say we're fully against her being labeled an abuser. Let's just hope none of the face-value rebloggers serve jury duty.
well bless you for actually reading it
i get the feeling a lot of people just sorta mashed page down, saw a lot of screenshots, and were like “wow this must be terrible to have so much text and evidence”
i mean, a couple weeks ago i asked someone who had been muckraking to name one abusive thing pk had done, and they just linked me to the callout. couldn’t actually name a single thing.
i remember my english prof in college told us a story about jury duty once; they all went in the deliberation room and one of the other jurors immediately said “well he looks like he would’ve done it” and most of them agreed
the power of first impressions is incredible
Nearly everyone with ADHD answers an emphatic yes to the question: “Have you always been more sensitive than others to rejection, teasing, criticism, or your own perception that you have failed or fallen short?” This is the definition of a condition called rejection-sensitive dysphoria. When I ask ADHDers to elaborate on it, they say: “I’m always tense. I can never relax. I can’t just sit there and watch a TV program with the rest of the family. I can’t turn my brain and body off to go to sleep at night. Because I’m sensitive to my perception that other people disapprove of me, I am fearful in personal interactions.” They are describing the inner experience of being hyperactive or hyper-aroused. Remember that most kids after age 14 don’t show much overt hyperactivity, but it’s still present internally, if you ask them about it.
The emotional response to the perception of failure is catastrophic for those with the condition. The term “dysphoria” means “difficult to bear,” and most people with ADHD report that they “can hardly stand it.” They are not wimps; disapproval hurts them much more than it hurts neurotypical people.
If emotional pain is internalized, a person may experience depression and loss of self-esteem in the short term. If emotions are externalized, pain can be expressed as rage at the person or situation that wounded them.
In the long term, there are two personality outcomes. The person with ADHD becomes a people pleaser, always making sure that friends, acquaintances, and family approve of him. After years of constant vigilance, the ADHD person becomes a chameleon who has lost track of what she wants for her own life. Others find that the pain of failure is so bad that they refuse to try anything unless they are assured of a quick, easy, and complete success. Taking a chance is too big an emotional risk. Their lives remain stunted and limited.
For many years, rejection-sensitive dysphoria has been the hallmark of what has been called atypical depression. The reason that it was not called “typical” depression is that it is not depression at all but the ADHD nervous system’s instantaneous response to the trigger of rejection.
Hey, I'm an artist who did a brief stint in PMDe. Read your, ah, very thorough rebuttal of Pengo – I had three hours to kill, apparently – and wanted to express both sympathy for the hate you've been getting, and genuine admiration for your thoroughness. Top notch. I will say that your brief comments on paranoia were not particularly necessary or sympathetic, but then, neither was he. Hope people take the time to read it!
hey thanks
i am still kind of, uh, torn on that
ultimately if you have a significant filter on how you interact with the world it seems useful to take that into account? especially if that filter serves as a useful explanation that would not otherwise exist
but people often operate in extremes and there’s seemingly no way to say “maybe sometimes a paranoid person experiences unreasonable fear”, even though that’s by definition, without it sounding like “nothing paranoid people say is reliable ever”
it’s the same sort of problem as “you say you’re innocent, but that’s just what a guilty person would say” — believing victims is a good idea in general, but there’s no room for subtlety
i dunno
Anonymous asked:
I think you misunderstood me? I do not think PK is the bad one I think "they" need to learn how to deal publicly with situations like this. Thats all, with the way they respond it would be very easy for someone to seriously tarnish their reputation (even though they are IN THE RIGHT). And frankly Pengo's post was just plain sad, it never made pk seem abusive to a reasonable minded person. It just seemed like two people who clearly did know how to communicate/respect each others feelings. And it
makes pengo look worse since he was the only one who actually begged people not to support her or have anything at all to do with her. they might have been upset but they never set out to hurt him at all. So please try to understand WHY I am saying they need to learn how to deal. Its so no one else can try to drag her name and hard work through the mud over misunderstandings like this. Because some will not believe just because of how you all initially responded.
haha, i actually got another anon ask along the same lines between these two parts.
on the one hand, sure, tone greatly affects how people interpret a message. sometimes more than the message itself.
but a few things bother me there. like, i’m a loudmouthed jackass a lot of the time, and i fairly rarely get any of this “you’re a jerk because you use strong language” attitude. i don’t have nearly mel’s audience, sure, but i have a few thousand twitter followers, and that one php post i wrote got tends of thousand of reads. (it earned a lot of nasty comments, but none of them criticized my tone.)
the obvious difference is, people on twitter follow me because they like that i’m a loudmouthed jackass, whereas people follow mel because they like her art. then they discover she says things and… i don’t know. feel cheated out of something, maybe? buyer’s remorse?
if it were as simple as not liking the stuff she says, then people could just unfollow her. but she leaves such a strong impression that some people decide she is a bona fide Bad Person. if someone is polite but cruel to her, and she is clearly angry about it, then there will still be a good few fingers pointed at her.
she could just only be polite, or even publicly post nothing but art. but isn’t that validating this behavior, letting the mob decide how she should behave? that’s not cool. she very strongly values saying what she’s thinking, and it eats at her if she can’t. she put her AX rant on her personal blog, separate from her art, and people are still criticizing her for it right now. she put her vent post on a password-protected blog, and that still bit her too.
pretending to be polite certainly works, and it’s a useful thing to know. but i don’t think it’s good that people work this way, i don’t think we should encourage each other to continue to work that way, and i don’t think it’s at all fair to expect people to talk like press releases 100% of the time.
“omg… i just can’t believe pk would threaten and silence… someone who was just trying to destroy her life and spread whatever muck he could get his hands on with out regard for how true it is… how could she do that??”
the only way i can make sense of this attitude is to assume the speaker doesn’t even see mel as a real human being.
i have no other explanation for completely ignoring what pengo has done because it gets in the way of demonizing mel for her reaction. no one has explained this to me, just repeated that seeking legal advice for legal matters is somehow an unreasonable thing to do.
coddle pengo, because he’s nb and abused and little-known. condemn mel, because she’s “popular”. it doesn’t seem to matter what they do, what they say, or even what’s actually true. it only matters what their respective labels are.
well, newsflash. sometimes goliath was just minding his own business, and david was being a prick.
I read every word (I just stayed up for an hour+however long I’m going to be writing this comment when I shouldn’t have stayed up to do so), and I’ll spread this via the various channels I have. For the record, I probably wouldn’t have seen this so quickly if you hadn’t put me in the post as a specific call out either; I was reading what you wrote while it still had four notes.
I have no idea if you’re going to see my comment, but I will say; the reason I was inclined to give the original post credit is a combination of how “truthiness” impacts human psychology and that I was already primed to believe negative things as a consequence of my own anxiety about you both. Because make no mistake; you and Mel are two of the maybe four people on this earth that I genuinely feel anxiety (not anger, sadness, or some other emotion about) whenever I see a reminder that you exist, and that our social circles only barely no longer overlap. I sincerely don’t even really remember WHY I feel so consistently anxious about you two; it’s been an appreciable fraction of a decade since we’ve been in any sort of direct contact. But it’s a real emotion regardless of its origins and it has real impacts, in this case being to jam up what are usually fairly astute bullshit detectors.
I will also say, for the record, that even though I am/have been uncomfortable with and around you guys for a long time, I have always tried to be a voice defending you in anonymous spaces, regardless of what I thought or felt and expressed with my name attached. Whatever criticism there was, and for whatever degree of validity I felt it held or lacked, it was always overridden in those internet-sewer spaces by raw unvarnished misogyny and I tried to treat that exactly the same as I try to with other expression of it, regardless of who it was addressing. I recall in the past (during an incident long before mike’s grossness) you guys feared I was doing the opposite, and I want to reiterate once more that that is not the case.
Well, I stayed up for… far too long writing that and mulling over what I wanted to say, and adding and removing a few more paragraphs than that . I have no idea if you’re going to see anything I’ve just spent two hours writing and mulling over, but I’ve put it out there anyway. As penance for contributing to harm, against the backdrop of another ridiculous storm sparked by an ex’s tremendous flawed callout post.
If you want to talk to me, or yell at me, about any of this and my gullibility or culpability in its spread, I think we’re still friend-ed on steam. You’re a far more busy person than I; if you wish to, contact me at your leisure and I will always be available unless I am asleep. I had a few other things I wanted to say, but I don’t think they’re in any way appropriate for public spaces or the current context of Shit.
well hey this is pretty big of you and i appreciate it. thank you.
i’m surprised you said this explicitly:
the reason I was inclined to give the original post credit is a combination of how “truthiness” impacts human psychology and that I was already primed to believe negative things as a consequence of my own anxiety about you both.
i didn’t really drive it home in the doc, but i assume it contributes to why a fair number of people so readily believed the original: the contingent of people who have “bad vibes” were eager for something more juicy to justify how they already felt.
kinda fucked up.
Anonymous asked:
i think its interesting that you and pk both used the fact that pengo is mentally ill/paranoid as your main argument to why he might be lying, and yet pengo has never brought up the fact that pk's past dealings with abusive mentally ill family might make them more likely to be ableist. it's almost like you two and others are shitbags who use ableism as a tool to silence people.
i think it’s interesting that your head is so far up tumblr’s collective ass that you’ve forgotten what words mean. this seems to be a common affliction, too. i don’t know why this is so hard for people to understand.
“pengo is paranoid” does not mean he is lying. (who ever said he was lying? that seems to have been invented by his supporters as a convenient strawman.)
“pengo is paranoid” also does not mean he is imagining everything.
however.
a neurotypical person would probably not sit down and honestly write 70+ pages about someone else’s abuse, when that abuse never happened.
if someone were to do that, well, gosh, they might be diagnosed with something. like paranoia.
pengo is paranoid. this is a fact, established by pengo himself.
let’s ask wikipedia, everyone’s favorite resource, exactly what that means.
A popular symptom of paranoia is the attribution bias. These individuals typically have a biased perception of the world often exhibiting more hostile beliefs. A paranoid person may view someone else’s accidental behavior as though it is with intent or threatening.
oh! how interesting. so we know that at least sometimes, pengo views incidental events as deliberate attempts to sabotage him.
we know this because if pengo never incorrectly perceived others’ actions as hostile, he would not be paranoid.
reminding you that pengo is paranoid does not imply that he is automatically imagining everything. but it establishes the possibility, which would not otherwise exist. neurotypical people do not, by and large, imagine bogeymen.
this is not ableist stereotyping. this is by definition. this is what “paranoia” means.
the question is not whether pengo is imagining this alleged abuse. the question is whether this alleged abuse is one of the fears we already know pengo is imagining.
i know it’s hip with tumblr to never be or do or act negatively towards anyone with any mental illness for any reason, but mental illnesses mean something. they aren’t cutesy labels. they are names of problems, and those problems are only given names in the first place when they can significantly affect daily life.
i didn’t say pengo’s paranoia automatically means he’s imagining things. but the replies i’ve gotten seem to suggest that pengo’s paranoia means he can’t possibly be imagining things. not only is that incredibly foolish, it’s dangerous: you’re encouraging someone with paranoia to never question his own fears, because questioning him would be ableist!
if anything you are making his mental illness worse, by pretending it doesn’t exist. good job.
tbh it’s pretty obvious what’s actually going on here
a couple people have ants in their pants about piercings
so they see one, scowl a lot because the ants are biting their taints, and make a post with some snide told-you-so garbage like “heh, guess you won’t get a job now”
just so very, very deeply angry about piercings that they have to weave fictional tales of ironic cosmic justice being delivered upon the offending party, unless of course she bends to their fashion sense and gets rid of it and expresses the deepest regret for having betrayed them in the first place
tell me that’s not 100% what is happening right now
i am a male, not white but mexican,i consider my self a femnist, i want women to have equalrights, yes those comments that some ppl make about males do bother me sometimes, but i brush them off because ik whats happening to women right now is wayy more important than my feelings. idk sorry i just felt like i needed to say this sorry
It’s understandable. A lot of men feel this kneejerk reaction when they see comments that generalize what men do. It’s that feeling, “but I’m not like that…” and while that is fantastic, the horrible reality is that most are. And when people say “men do this” they are LOOKING for that awful feeling to hit the men reading it - because the alternative is being ignored. The alternative is men reading it and going “oh ok it says only some men, that must not mean me” - which kind of nullifies the point of complaining about it.
You’ll find that you’re a lot less bothered as soon as you realize the stuff indeed isn’t about you — unless it rings true. In which case, work very hard to change that behavior. People definitely aren’t perfect, but the reason people even make posts like this is to urge men into catching themselves in the middle of bad mindsets and bad world views before they spiral out of control and another tragedy happens. Call out your male friends, be the guy that girls can rely on as a safe place to vent without feeling like you’re constantly trying to invalidate her experiences out of insecurity. Be the guy who goes “man, I hate that men do this. I’m going to fight against this if I see it.”
Those sort of actions help a lot in repairing your own feelings; fighting to make sure this shit ends is the first step.
“men do X” is not so much a generalization of men, but a generalization of X.
that is, it’s not saying “most men do X” — it’s saying “most people who do X are men” (and it’s usually done to women, making the distinction all the stronger)
so it makes sense to level the criticism towards men. not all men, but sometimes only men.
and yeah a lot of the more subtle stuff, a lot of people do without realizing. but even for the more extreme examples like not-so-jokes about violence, i think the hope is that men who don’t really approve start saying so. tell that one guy to knock it off, because politely and awkwardly chuckling just tells him that it’s ok.
yesterday i read a post i have no idea how to find again, emphasizing the mindset of casual rapists in particular — they assume what they do is totally normal, i.e. everyone else is a casual rapist too. so when they crack jokes about rape and no one pushes back, or people even laugh, they take that as validation of how they think and what they think about you. they see it as bonding with other casual rapists.
i imagine that’s at least slightly armchair but it sounds basically like how people work. if no one claims to be uncomfortable, we assume everyone is comfortable or even approving.
i must point out that we don’t tend to think of “brunette” and “blonde” as social constructs, even though those aren’t perfect labels either
in which case we’re just wrong. in American culture redheads have an entire mythology dedicated to them (“soulless gingers” etc.; I have one friend who dyed her hair just because she couldn’t put up with the endless tirade of ginger jokes and people fetishizing her hair); the “blonde as airhead” trope is a pretty clear indication that it’s a distinct social category as well. if you’re trying to say that these groups aren’t a construct because colors are some sort of “objective” measure, well, colors are a construct too. different people even within a culture will disagree about what etic expression of color falls into which emic category, and between cultures and languages there’s massive variation in how things are categorized. some cultures (ostensibly including the Pirahã though that depends on how much you trust Daniel Everett) even have a binary color distinction between “light” and “dark”. making it actually quite a good analogy for gender :p
ah, but this is conflating several things again, as we are wont to do
“brunette” and “blonde” still (try to) refer to objective measurements, even if our choice of how to segregate the spectrum is entirely cultural.
though i doubt cultural differences in color vernacular come into play too strongly here. all the ones i’m familiar with are about where to draw the line between blue/cyan/green, pink/red/orange/yellow, and the like; much hair color is split between the pretty distinct categories of light, dark, and redhead. (i observe that even english doesn’t have separate words to distinguish between dark brown versus medium-light brown hair, or to describe black hair.)
we do have the separate and entirely bogus concepts of the soulless ginger and blonde airhead, yes. (where the hell did the ginger thing even come from?) but that’s pattern recognition and reuse of known categories gone awry. it’s a general habit we should be breaking ourselves of. it doesn’t mean hair color doesn’t exist or isn’t a useful qualifier; hairstyle is one of the most obvious ways to find or describe a person. (another being apparent ethnicity, something else we’ve gone and cocked up.)
so we have descriptive labels and then we build stereotypes on them and then we start to enshrine those stereotypes in the culture. we should really stop doing that.
it seems like the blonde airhead trope has lost a lot of its appeal in recent years, at least
specifically it was the agrarian stage of “development” where social stratification showed up. unsettled hunter-gatherer cultures were/are mostly egalitarian, so any understanding of gender they had would be completely alien to a modern western perspective, and they certainly had no knowledge of genetics so they’d have classified an “XX-male” (quotes because it’s an unfortunate cissexist and binaristic term but a technical one) with the rest of the people who had the right bodies for tiger-punching without a second thought, even though you or I would probably call that person intersex.
you can be egalitarian and still notice that human beings tend to come in two general shapes. especially when most of the species is only interested in having sex with one of those shapes. first we notice the categories, then we start to invent conclusions
hm. even with our knowledge of genetics it’s not like we karyotype every newborn. i do wonder, are we even aware now when a baby expressing male physiology is an androgen-insensitive XX? i used to know someone who only found out she was XXY when she was 17 or so, and iirc it basically had to be self-diagnosed.
i have no idea what this says about our labeling. what were we even talking about here.
well, yeah, it was written by western authors for a western audience. not sure how you’d talk about gender without using the terms “male” and “female.” it’d be like trying to explain verb tense to someone who only speaks Mandarin without using words like “yesterday” or “soon” or “tomorrow.” it’s certainly not the right conclusion to draw that this means all cultures have a male/female distinction at least; what you can say is that all cultures have at least two genders (just like all cultures have at least two terms for color.)
it’s certainly possible that a culture could, say, never develop the idea of referring to people by apparent sex at all. i just expect that this would be pretty rare, especially if the society grew to have settlements larger than a small tribe, because it’s one of the most obvious ways to narrow down a description of another person. we seem to be pretty well-wired to guess from a glance whether another human is someone we could perhaps make babies with.
likewise it’s rare for a culture to not have words for colors, just because they make for such clear distinctions. but there is at least one!: the Pirahã, who i believe are the same people that have no words for individual numbers, and no interest in developing any.
trying to define one as male and one as female doesn’t really make sense because traits that are assigned to one gender in one two-gender culture are almost guaranteed to be split up among both in another culture. there’s some general trends in terms of “people capable of reproducing generally wind up getting fucked over and land on the bottom of the social ladder” but even that’s not universal.
hmm. some cultures have genders that are either subsets of the binary genders, or include people who don’t really fit the binary genders.
but are there any cultures where gender is radically and completely unlike our notion of gender and can’t be mapped to ours at all? and if so, would it even make sense to call those distinctions “gender”?
the words aren’t the ideas; if they’re divided along the same lines, we’d still use “female” to refer to the group that carries the babies, because that’s what the word means to us.
in the story in your linked post, the student goes wrong by asking how to say a word rather than how to express an idea. in japanese you don’t really say “i wonder X”; you express it with a sentence suffix that changes the mood of the sentence. “male” and “female” are words we can say, but as long as another culture has groupings that express the same concepts, we can still reuse the words.
you made the claim that intersex people’s bodies were “trying” to be one sex or another and failing, and that’s what I’m taking issue with. I’m not saying intersex people are super common, but I am saying that defining them in terms of their noncomformity with a male/female sex binary is privileging that binary purely because most people can be sorted into one category or another without a lot of difficulty. there’s no intellect driving human development, and if something suddenly killed off all the non-intersex people on the planet, a lot of traits that we see as intersex would be established as the new normal; it’s not like we’d necessarily gravitate back to a notional male/female sex binary over the generations as things got back into order or something. tl;dr making gigantic ontological claims is completely pointless; as a linguist my field is very full of those and I’ve never once seen them be useful *cough*CHOMSKY*cough*
i apologize for anthropomorphizing human development; it’s a very tempting habit :)
the semantics are wacky here since everything we’ve got resulted from natural processes, which don’t have any deliberate goal in mind, or even a mind in which to store one.
and it’s even worse because of all the moral baggage we tack onto words like “wrong”. and american culture, with its competitiveness and its worship of winning, thinks pretty poorly of “fail”.
i don’t think it’s unreasonable to suggest that intersex results when something interferes with the usual process — the process human biology is most accustomed to experiencing and has evolved alongside. we even say intersex, literally between the sexes.
but certainly that’s not bad. it says nothing about the resulting person. it may be unfortunate if it results in infertility or other practical problems. but i cannot even wrap my head around the idea of judging a person, morally or naturalistically, on the grounds that biology is not a perfect machine that produces identical “perfect” individuals every time. we wouldn’t be here if that were the case; our very existence resulted from an ongoing comedy of errors.
eh. from what I saw it had more to do with the creation of a distinct social category that gay people could be slotted into to preserve gender norms, which is very visible in terms of the gay/straight binary it established (it’s instructive that biphobia is still all over the place, and even gay people are very likely to be biphobic.) which isn’t to say that those factors weren’t what drove that reconfiguration, just that it’s important to look at the structural shifts themselves. simplifying things down to “acceptance/prejudice” is kinda not very useful? I digress, though
most of the vocal arguments were moral or naturalist. granted most people probably aren’t even aware of how perceptions of gender affect them, but we’ve gone from “it’s gross” and “it’s just wrong” and “this book says it’s evil” to a surprising amount of acceptance and support in relatively little time.
it is a shame that half the letters in LGBT have been left in the dust. but i feel the goalposts have moved, that something fundamental has shifted ever so slightly. i’m optimistic.
well, also their social environment and the constructs that define it weren’t challenged the way that happened to people who moved to urban areas, which was an alien environment and called for a lot of new structures to be established.
yeah. i think that’s ultimately the same idea. in an urban area, the very concept of encountering the unfamiliar itself becomes familiar.
that’s definitely how I tend to assume dysphoria works; ever since I learned from body-modders that cis people can experience (non-gender-related) dysphoria too I figured it was probably the exact same mechanism. certainly my own experiences suggest my brain hadn’t been getting the signals it developed to expect and was trying to cope with crappy generic drivers :p
you should upgrade to linux 3.11 for workgroups i hear it’s got drivers for everything
also wow what an asshole of a doctor
on top of that I was seeing her specifically for an HRT consultation, like my trans-ness was exactly why I was there. I’m really sorry for the other people who wound up working with her. :/
lol what? how did she even get into this position. like why would she want to work with trans people and then condescend
…yes? labels are the most visible outward manifestation of a construct. much as I’d love to you can’t just drive your Gayroller 9000 over an abstract concept that lives in people’s heads, you have to do something to make them dismantle that construct and attacking the labels they use is one of many ways to do it. basically I think we’re in agreement on this and are just kinda talking past each other
it has been known to happen
i feel like attacking labels is just attacking symptoms and if successful would lose us words that really are useful sometimes, but i’ve been wrong about how people act before haha
oh i know. i was trying to paint a picture of a person who didn’t want to switch religions, but who was being pressured to do so purely by outside forces. i imagine someone who feels very strongly about religion would be far more likely to see the problem as being with everyone else.
not in my experience. even the strongest beliefs need support and external validation from time to time, and if you’re not getting any of that, but you are getting massive negative feedback, it’s almost impossible for most people to keep them from diminishing. otherwise religions wouldn’t need temples and rituals. and people very rarely deconvert all on their own without any external factor pushing them. on the other hand trans people tend to know something is wrong even in horribly cissexist societies where being trans isn’t even culturally a thing, let alone something looked kindly upon.
hmm that’s interesting. i’ve always thought it funny that christianity has grown to be so focused on its churches, when to my understanding it caught on in the first place because its focus on the individual was so different from ritual-oriented paganisms, or something
catholicism, bringing you zero sense of irony since the year of our lord 300
this isn’t news, but still genuinely surprises me. not that i remotely believe anyone decides to be trans, but the brain is a very flexible organ, and i would expect that at least occasionally it would notice it’s really bumming its owner out and adjust itself accordingly.
I mean, if we had the mechanisms to do that, depression wouldn’t even be a thing.
which would be nice.
or maybe some people really do “just get over it”, but those are the people for whom it never blossoms into a serious problem in the first place
but it would also probably make things really easy for totalitarian dictators and abusers in general. which might explain why we don’t have that kind of mechanism; it’s not necessarily pro-survival. but that’s just idle evo-psych speculation and I don’t think anything good has ever come of that.
i love evo psych it tells me that i’m great because nature wanted it to be so, something something hunter-gatherers
I was suspended from FA for calling a sexual predator a sexual predator and pointing out that putting said sexual predator in a position of power was stupid.
Do not ever forget that Zaush sexually harassed several women. Do not ever forget that he raped someone. Do not ever forget that the administration of this website never stood up for the victims, and protected Adam Wan when the information about what he had done was leaked.
i could swear i’ve raved about this phenomenon before, somewhere
we are all pretty aware that “rape” is a bad thing, but the culture is still full of people doing things that dance around the line
so we encounter people who believe “rape” is bad, but find themselves (or their friends) having done something that could be classified as “rape”
now, we never want to think of ourselves as evil, but “rape” is clearly a thing only “rapists” (Evil People with twirly moustaches) do
thus, cognitive dissonance, and the gut reaction is to define “rape” such that the thing that was done is not “rape”.
which is why i’ve been putting it in quotes: people easily forget that it’s a horrific act and instead treat it as a horrific label. if you can argue that the label doesn’t apply to what you did, you are scot free!
the same thing has happened with “racist”, bringing us such gems as “i’m not a racist but” and “i’m not a racist because”
it doesn’t matter what effects our actions have on anyone else as long as we can argue that they don’t fall into one of a set of predefined buckets of bad behavior
this is particularly fun with dragoneer; he is the owner of the biggest furry art site, and here he is, completely oblivious to his position of power as he dispenses moral judgment and graciously offers to let the victim climb on a soapbox to “attack” someone else who is popular and powerful.
not only that but (i believe) he’s a bit paranoid about delegating any meaningful power or responsibility to anyone—hence the constant lack of admins and devs. so of course he would turn to zaush, who appears at first blush to have no idea what he’s doing. his qualifications don’t matter. his behavior and ethics don’t matter. the only thing that matters is that dragoneer believes zaush won’t do anything to sabotage FA.
Anonymous asked:
well bless you for actually reading it
i get the feeling a lot of people just sorta mashed page down, saw a lot of screenshots, and were like “wow this must be terrible to have so much text and evidence”
i mean, a couple weeks ago i asked someone who had been muckraking to name one abusive thing pk had done, and they just linked me to the callout. couldn’t actually name a single thing.
i remember my english prof in college told us a story about jury duty once; they all went in the deliberation room and one of the other jurors immediately said “well he looks like he would’ve done it” and most of them agreed
the power of first impressions is incredible