The Woke thread AKA Liberal Kaynesplaining

Totally legit. Gender criticality isn't a lifestyle choice, it's who you are.

What the fuck does this even mean?

"There are a few different sites selling great merch with GC messages. You could wear a definition t-shirt to work or when meeting up with friends/family. You could start using a “Female” design mug in the office. It could be something more subtle like a Women Won’t Wheesht badge or ribbon. Or leave a copy of “Trans” or “Material Girls” on your desk. You don’t have to make a statement – others “in the know” will recognise the subtle signals and maybe start a conversation with you."

What is Wheest? And Trans in this context? It is all so smug, awful and pretty much bizarre.

Nail meet head.

The parallel with Morrissey is weirdly accurate in more ways than one, on 10th November he celebrates "Morrissey Day".

Wheest means be quiet/shut up et (I only know it from my Scottish father-in-law, so assume it's a Celtic thing)

I'm so glad that none of this shit has got anything to do with me. I get to eat popcorn and watch.

Not sure where to post this, so this thread will do. Remember hateful Gamergate/Breitbart News dickhead Milo Yiannopoulos? Let's see what he's up to these days...



Deplatforming works.

I can just never take him seriously. Just seems like he's always taking the piss out of whatever he is doing.

I think it's called being a shill.

I think what you're missing here is that this very rarely happens in isolation except to people with or bordering on mental illness.

It's not true that normal people double-down endlessly on stuff and go down rabbit holes by themselves. Most people, if people around them yell at them, actually tend to eventually rethink their ideas (for better or worse). The main time they won't is if something is truly intrinsic to them (like sexual orientation), or as noted, if they're not doing well mentally (but the latter is rare and specific).

And here's where the internet causes a problem.

"By themselves".

Because the internet provides people who have similar views to you, and who may well already be organised into groups to support those views, no matter how demented or nasty. And then the backslapping and big-up'ing commences. And you get the circle-jerks and so on. This is why people go down rabbit-holes, not because they're "attacked". It's because they find people who support their lunatic views, and who indeed praise them for having those lunatic views.

A compounding factor is that a lot of people out there are seeking praise, often unconsciously. So they find something to hitch their wagon on to, and get praised for. The praise for mainstream things is mild. There's no gold star for not being a racist or sexist (despite men liking to pretend the latter and calling people "white knights", "captain save-a-ho" and so on), so the praise there is always going to be mild at best. So people, again often unconsciously, seek out smaller communities where the praise will be more intense. Or fanatic communities, ones which are growing apace and feel like they're opposed by society, so similarly hand out intense praise. A good recent example would be Qanon. If you started to get into Qanon stuff, you'd get HUGE amount of praise from Qanon people. Your back would be slapped endlessly. You'd watch videos directly praising people like you.

So you get these two things combining in a way that's so dangerous it's more binary explosive or something than just "toxic". People with bad views find others with the same views and reinforce them, even when people around them are sane, and people who are drifters seeking praise latch on to those views and say them as a way to get praised, and they often rapidly come to fully believe them, because why wouldn't you believe them if they're getting you praised?

My sympathy is strictly limited because it's become clear to me, over decades of talking weirdoes and extremists on the internet, and not turning like that, that the people this happens with are already people with problems. This is why it happens with teenagers and they usually get better - teenagers are exploring the world, they're trying all this stuff out, but they're not there solely for praise and they usually don't dig so deep in they can't get out (again where they do you will almost always find a serious problem leading them to it).

JKR, bizarre as might seem, is essentially one of the "praise-drifters". She's seemingly a very suggestible person who passes on opinions from her peer group. A decade or so ago, after she became mega-rich, cut off contact with most of her RL friends, and started getting louder in politics, she became a very online person, but was subject to a lot of criticism and dislike, and very much limited who she talked to online. Largely to leftist feminists of an academic-leaning kind. Which might have been fine, but they were ones her age or thereabouts, and of a certain political bent (and many of them butch lesbians which lead to further complexities re politics), and that's how she ended up getting into GC stuff. And of course they praised her intensely and constantly for having those views, and as she started to air them, she only got more praise from this peer group. Criticism continued, now often from younger people, and JKR just kept blocking people who were critical, even extremely polite ones, then and she decided to basically "come out" as a full-on bigot, and now of course Rowling is getting even more praise from her peer-group.

Also a lot of people on the internet are just fucking morons who don't know what's good for them. I was reading about the "TikToc tic" thing earlier today and yeah it seems like watching people with tics doesn't cause them in others except if you're already susceptible to tics (which a lot of people are), and then I'm reading one person with tics and she's like "Oh yeah I watch this dude who has terrible tics all the time and I keep picking up his tics!", and it's like what the fuck is wrong with your brain? Stop fucking watching him! Like I get that you want to communicate with people with your issues, fucking don't just watch a dude and make your issues worse though, that's moronic.

But a lot of people are morons, and they find people who won't call them on it.

Wow, guy who always seemed like a piece of shit turns out to be a piece of shit..

Yeah, pretty much. Activision-Blizzard's announcement of cleaning itself up always rang hollow when you still had Kotick sitting at the top. If this new batch of issues results in him being given the boot than maybe we can start actually believing some of changes will happen (still probably a slim hope).

My browser blocks twitter embeds. What's it say?