#actually criticize the theory and not a strawman of it

[a-polite-melody]

To the people who criticize transunity who say that there is no part of transmisogyny that comes from hatred of men:

TERFs????

None of us are denying that trans women are also oppressed as women; that part of transmisogyny comes from hatred of women.

But uh. TERFs very much base their oppression of trans women primarily on viewing them as invading predatory men (actually, basically all of their oppression of trans people comes from bioessentialism—in other words literally viewing us as or DGAB and nothing else.)

I don’t understand where people are getting the idea that by saying part of trans oppression comes from viewing us as failed versions of our DGAB means that we think it’s the be-all-and-end-all of it? Especially if you’ve actually read more than a singular sentence from the teansunity manifesto. It really feels like people saw a screenshot of one sentence and based their views on transunity on that and only that.

#my post #transunity #transunitism #I’m all for criticism of transunity; truly #but come ON #actually criticize the theory and not a strawman of it #and also maybe don’t forget about how TERFs operate?

[leyacer]

Getting mighty sick of retrospective videos that are over two hours long. I have yet to be convinced anyone actually needed that extra time to adequately make their point

#this is about a d*nganronpa 3 video i watched and all the other retrospective videos i started getting recommended afterwards #like a b0tw retrospective #girl that game is only six years old and we have yet to see its longterm effects on the series #also #dr3 is BAD but they did not need 5 hours to explain that #'this could have been an e-mail' except this could've been a 1-hour video #AT MOST #okay rant incoming about that video in specific #firstly the swapping between the dissections of the arcs #cute idea in theory #but since those arcs are so interlinked and share problems #separating their discussion and being forced to put off discussing certain topics because of that only hampers the analysis #also the 'devil's advocate' character they had to represent criticism from people who like dr3- again a cute idea #but it's so poorly executed #god forbid you have to face an actual reasonable good faith argument in defense of the thing you're criticizing #i expected a devil's advocate. an actually different perspective. not a strawman #that's on me though ig #and the section on chiaki firstly did not need to be put off for that long considering how crucial she is to dr3 and its flaws #and then it just devolved into angry ranting halfway through #everyone's gotta rant once in a while #heck im doing that right now #but after a certain point you're not saying anything anymore #you're just being angry #and so many points in general could have just been a few sentences #leya rambles

[blossomthepinkbunny]

Talking about Adam and the villians of HB

Adam is such a dissapointing villain for Hazbin Hotel that absolutely doesn't make use of the great opportunities they had for the bad guy of this project. Like, what is Adam? A sexual, irrational, rockstar asshole who kills demons for fun and is shown to be completely idiotic and unable to make any good point for his actions. And that sucks.

Atleast to me, them making Adam an irredeemable asshole type just seems like the show acknowledging that they can't take any actual feedback on Charlies idea. He is a strawman who never really gets to be anything else until his final moments, when they want you to care about his fight. The show doesn't want you to actually think critical about what Charlie has planned it just wants you to think she is right, by making you hate Adam, by making his side actively carry out genocide. The fact that a show all about revealing that people have layers and presenting seemingly morally grey areas in them has a villian who is completely one note and just evil and irrational because the show needs him to be is not great.

There are actual things that can be criticized about the Hotel and the idea of redeeming sinners, but Adam can't call any of these out because then Charlie would have to defend herself, which she can't do and then you would realize that the writers couldn't think of arguments for why she is right. And then Charlie would come off as not as great as they want you to think she is.

What if he had called out the fact that genuinely no demon seems to give a shit about being a better person. We don't get a definitive time for how long Charlie has been working on the Hotel but we can assume that it has been atleast a little longer. We see her advertise her idea on the news in the pilot and the Hotel makes an advertisement in the first episode, so we know that it's pretty open information that a place where demons can redeem themselves exist. Yet in the entirety of the pilot, season one and however much time lays between the two, only two sinners came to the hotel to change (im not counting staff members because they are there to work, not to be redeemed).

Angel Dust and Sir Pentious are the only ones who came to stay, which either means that just no other sinner cares to be better or that Charlie is not taken seriously and that her hotel is viewed as stupid in concept alone. And you have to remember that even these two didn't initially join because they genuinely wanted to change.

Angel just decided to stay because it was a cheap place to live where he wouldn't have to see Val. And while Pentious does decide he wants to be better, we don't know if he would have even done that, had it not been for the agreement he made with Vox (which made him come to the hotel with bad intentions in the first place).

Why doesn't Adam get to point out that sending Sinners to heaven might be a bad idea when there are probably people that they hurt or may have even killed up there. Like, Angel Dust was in the Mafia and you can assume that he has quite the killcount and it's very possible that some of his victims are in heaven. That goes for every other demon too, they're down there for a reason. And while sometimes that reason might be something stupid or irrelevant, just giving every demon the benefit of the doubt and a chance to get to heaven (in theory) seems pretty irresponsible.

That is also completely ignoring the fact that Charlie's method has no proof of even working. Seemingly in the entirety of hell existing no sinner has ever redeemed themselves and went to heaven until Sir Pentious, which was mostly an accident as well.

I'm not saying Adam had to be likeable or relatable, but it's pretty obvious that they made him so hateable just because. He can't just be an obnoxious, sexist asshole because that's not blatantly evil enough apparently. He also has to commit genocide for no reason other than that he enjoys it. Again, im not saying his genocide should be excusable, but he should have a reason that isn't presented as him just doing it for fun because hes a jackass (he should have a reason that would make what he is doing okay in his own eyes where the viewer could understand how he views the world without having to agree necessarily).

Writing evil characters who are purely bad because they just are can work. But in my opinion that shouldn't be the main villian, especially not in a show where the central idea is supposed to be discussing morality and moral greyness.

Cioccolata from Jjba is a villian where this works in my opinion. He is just evil and Araki really plays that up. He isn't just a crazy doctor type who violently experiments on people for fun, his backstory also shows that he has been doing this since he was 14 and started with driving elders to suicide. And also he films everything he does because he just likes watching people suffer. Cioccolata really is just irredeemably crazy and sadistic but it works for him because he is just a side antagonist and therefore doesn't have the burden of playing as a direct counter to our main protagonist and because for all his immoral actions he still has philosophy behind that. A fucked up philosophy but an understandable (not excusable) one nonetheless. He explaines that in his eyes people can only experience true happiness from two situations. Either when your own despair is replaced with hope, or when one watches other people fall into despair themselves. In his eyes, the more people he watches die, the more he understands the human race and the stronger he gets, which leads into another aspect of his philosophy, which is that the strong have have the right and responsibility to rule over the weak. That is why I think he works.

We actually get some insight into Adams deeper character motivation in his last moments. When he gets upset that the demons aren't just falling at his feet, worshipping him, even though he is the original man all life came from. And that would be a good idea to expand on, that Adam has this intense sense of entitlement that leads him to despise the demons because he doesn't have power over them, when he feels like he should. And because a crowd of people that don't worship him, feels threatening to him, he would want them gone as to not possibly risk his position of power with their ideas.

That could be the reason for why he despises Charlie, because she is a demon who makes her own plans to save her people, which would mean they could start to follow her and work with her, rather than idolizing him. Something like that would work so well for his character and would fit this saviour attitude that some religious people have when "helping" atheists by recommending that they should be religious to make all their problems dissapear or something (no shade to people who genuinely find peace and safety in their religion I think that's actually great but it's not a solution for everybody). The last moments he has give great insight into what his character could've been, had they focused on this, rather than always just having him say how much he enjoys killing demons for no reason.

And in the song he has he also nearly approaches giving another possible reason for his actions (that being that he just doesn't care because demons already had their chance to be good, didn't choose that and now don't deserve a second chance), but that is also never expanded on and is pretty much ignored throughout the season.

Also I find it interesting that Adam has to be completely and irredeemably evil, hated by everyone, while Lucifer gets away with just letting the people he is supposed to rule die like it's nothing. Lucifer didn't to anything to stop the exterminations, he didn't contact his daughter in quite some time and actively mocks her idea when first meeting her after these months of not giving a shit for her or what she does (her idea that is supposed to save his people from literal death btw).

We see him easily finish Adam off in the finale which begs the question for why he just never cared to do anything before. But it's fine because he's just so silly and goofy and actually cares a lot for Charlie say's the show. That is why he gets to be redeemed in the same episode he appeared in for the first time and no one is allowed to question him because then you're just not nice and understanding.

Lucifer didn't have to like sinners. I think his approach of basically leaving the sinners to their own devices is pretty interesting. But HH wants you to hate Adam and like Lucifer without acknowledging that people who just watch bad stuff being done without doing anything about it are also shitty. And for Lucifer it seems extra shitty because we see he can literally just defeat Adam and he just didn't do anything for this whole time.

Helluva Boss has this problem too where it picks characters it wants you to like and if you don't like them then you're just wrong. And therefore no villian gets to call these characters out without being shown to be either stupid, irrational or mean.

Striker was genuinely interesting and cool when he first appeared. He was an antagonist who had understandable goals that tied in well with the trajectory of the story. The classism in hell's society is a pretty relevant theme for HB. We see that Blitzø has to sleep with Stolas to be able to even do his job and earn a living, we see Imps just being tossed around and abused and hear Stolas say stuff like "impish little plaything" to Blitzø. Striker wanting to take the demons of high rank down to make hell better for the Imps by ending classism made sense and was an interesting take to see. Especially since at that point the show didn't insist on Stolas being this misunderstood good guy who just cares soo much for Blitzø, there was a sense of suspense maybe to watch wether or not Blitzø will go along with Striker or if this interaction might influence how he views his clearly predatory "relationship" with Stolas.

But all of that got thrown out the window because in s2 we just can't have people criticise Stolas, since actually acknowledging the fact that he benefited and actively made use of hells classist system would mean that we wouldn't see him as a poor confused bean anymore and that one might actually think of some of the pretty bad implications the Stolitz relationship has. So now Striker is a completely obvious, self obsessed bad guy who loves himself so much that he monologues about how great he feels when torturing Stolas instead of just killing him while they also gave him a weird gimmick where he doesn't like it when someone makes a sexual remark and gets so upset that he drags out Stolas' killing and gets defeated by Millie and Moxxie because of it (the same guy was established as a great assassin in another episode).

They also removed all the backbone to his ideology. He still talks about Stolas diminishing Imps in "Western Engery" but it lacks any point because they have gone so far with woobifying Stolas that he is presented as sympathetic and Striker as bigoted. Striker also acts like he can't kill Stolas because Stella called off the assassination on him. I get him being upset that he won't get his money for the kill but he still has very clear reasons for why he would want Stolas dead regardless (atleast he had when he was still a cool character). It's not like suddenly not being hired anymore would make a big change for him.

Killing Stolas could have consequences because Stolas is royalty, but these consequences always existed for him even while Stella was requesting the assassination. Stella would obviously not want others to know that she is reponsible for Stolas dying (then again we don't know if that would even matter since demons generally don't care about killing others until it's plot relevant) and the point of an assassin is that people are killed in a way that can't be tracked back to someone, so Striker should also not face issues, especially since he is apparently a really good and threatening assassin.

Striker was interesting until the show decided it liked Stolas too much for people to call him out and be presented as reasonable. Stella was turned into just an abusive, whiny and stupid bitch who just hates Stolas and wants his money instead of acknowledging that she pretty much has the same backstory as Stolas, who we are constantly told to feel bad for because of his childhood (arranged marriage, forced to have a child and a set-up relationship neither of them wanted).

Verosika is really not relevant but usually also falls into the "bitchy and just rude" category because she doesn't like Blitzø (it's not as bad for her as it is with Stella but still). Asmodeus and Fizzarolli where really mean and exposed and embarrassed Stolas and Blitzø publicly. But the next time we see Asmodeus interact with Stolas he is just chill with him? Why? Blitzøs and Fizzarollis relationship was atleast handled in a way and we see him act rude towards Blitzø until they make up. But it still followes the theme of people who dislike Stolas and Blitzø either changing their mind or just being shown to be horrible to make their opinion seem invalid (also notice how these male characters in the story get to be forgiven for how they acted and show different sides to their character while the women are reduced to being bitchy).

Barbie Wire was also handled soo bad. She only appears in the last few minutes of her début episode and never gets to talk about specifically why she doesn't want to have contact with Blitzø in the first place. The focus is mostly on how hurt he is by the fact his Sister wants nothing to do with him, even after he worked soo hard to find her and just wanted to make things right with her soo bad. They also basically made her a groomer which just doesn't help her come off as reasonable at all.

For a show that wants it's main characters to do bad stuff and have to deal with being called out for that it surely doesn't like people actually calling them out.

The double standards applied to the villians as opposed to the "good guys" are also just amazing. Like Millie and Moxxie can complain about Chaz being a bad partner in hindsight, but when Verosika talks about Blitzø being selfish in their relationship it's all about how he feels. Loona literally throwing stuff at Blitzø, hurting him just because he dared to carefully point out a true fact about her behaviour is played for laughs, but Stella abusing Stolas is super duper evil and we all hate her now (not saying it isn't bad but the show shouldn't pick and choose who is funny when abusive and who is evil when abusive). The I.M.P taking out random people because they were paid to is fine, but Striker attacking Stolas after being hired is bad just because he also happens to have a (understandable) motiv for why he would want to do it regardless of his job and because Stolas just so happens to be a main character. Blitzø and Loona commenting on Moxxies weight is funny, but when Mammon remarks that Fizzarolli gained a few pounds he is just bad.

That's just my opinion on some of the antagonists in HH and HB. Mammon is pretty much the only villian I really care for in both shows (also Stella and Striker before they got ruined). I mainly think antagonist are either really underused (Vox, Velvette, Verosika) or were just incredibly mishandled (Adam, Striker, Stella). Part of this post was just an excuse to talk about Jjba tho, which I always love.

#hazbin hotel critical #vivzepop critical #hazbin hotel criticism #hazbin hotel critique #helluva boss critical #helluva boss critique #helluva boss criticism

[spectrumspace]

the Thing about Mid-2010s Ace Discourse that gets me is that even if you weren't really someone who kept their pulse on the latest news in the lgbt+ community or queer theory or whatever, it'd still make its way onto your dash in a more subtle way as "cringe"

like i think a lot of funny posts at the time being made by the Big Guys were like "34yo 'fandom moms' about to doxx a preteen for not shipping rey-lo" followed by an image of peter griffin photoshopped to have dyed hair, piercings, heavy makeup, and a shirt in the ace flag colors using a laptop with fandom stickers on it. like very much a "gay people i do not respect" strawman but with the label scribbled out and a new one slapped on. and no one really read into it critically

and if someone did actually go "hey what does asexuality have to do with it" they were put on blast by op and their friends for "reading too much into it" and the post would immediately devolve into bullying whoever decided to speak out -- often someone very young and/or with trouble picking up on social cues -- until they wrote up a long emotional thesis trying to stand their ground where inevitably they said something wrong and op got to say something like "ummmm 😳 did you just say lesbianism is aphobic??? 😂" and everyone would reblog the whole miles-long thread going "LMAOOO CRINGE" with the subtle insinuation that All Ace People Are Like This.

like i never saw anyone share around straight up Discourse™ discourse on my dash specifically, even if i knew it was out there/saw it in the wild outside my personal bubble sometimes, but this kinda stuff was Everywhere thanks to the rise of "cringe culture", and i think that was more fundamentally damaging than any 10k word google doc essay with sources trying to make an "intelligent point" for ace exclusion

#ada weblog tag

[sophieinwonderland]

"A bunch of people who agree with my lies say this other person spreads misinformation, so I'm going to dismiss any sources they provide."

I would say I'm surprised, but this is about the usual level of critical thought I expect from anti-endos.

A couple usually means "2". I think what you mean was zero.

Oh. The articles state the only possible way to develop dissociative "parts" are trauma???

What articles are those?

Hmm... Was it this one...

Hmm... No... that's pretty explicitly saying that it may be possible to have multiple "self-conscious dissociative parts" through other practices such as mediumship and hypnosis.

But you know, that doesn't really mean anything does it. Just look at the authors. They're probably just nobody endogenic systems themselves...

Yeah, never heard of them...

See... it's just the literal creators of the Theory of Structural Dissociation!

🙄

Ooh! We have a spicy hot take here!

I think what @frenzyborderlines is referring to as "normative" dissociation is referring to the ICD-11 Boundaries with Normality.

(Either that, or they're just arguing with a strawman they made up. Really hard to tell.)

If so, not only are they accusing endogenic systems of "playing pretend," but also mediums and other spiritual practitioners!

Anyway, if you want more, here are the screenshots from Transgender Mental Health by Eric Yarbrough, and published by the APA.

If that's what you want. 🤷‍♀️

As long as you and your anti-endo friends understand that when I post my responses in the anti-endo tags, it's on you.

It's cute that you think you posting easily debunked misinformation and being proven wrong with quotes from actual experts is a "fight."

#syscourse #pro endo #pro endogenic #anti endo #anti endogenic #endogenic #endogenic system #sysblr #multiplicity #endos are real #endos aren't real #psychology #psychiatry #science #actually a system #actually plural #facts

[chaifootsteps]

That Mammon episode having a strawman stalker has made some of the stans so fucking obnoxious istg. There's one particular stan on Youtube, the Cartoon Universe channel (who I don't think is a bad guy, but this really rubbed me the wrong way), who was discussing the stalker from the Mammon episode; he said, paraphrasing "this is one of those people who don't like a show for what it actually IS, but only for what the show could do for THEM. The fame it could make for THEM. That's why the stalker is depicted as having chained Fizz up in his daydreams, with the spotlight shining on him and Fizz bowing to him. The stalker tries to insert himself into Fizz's life to get Fizz's fame, and gets pissed when it doesn't go his way, turning on Fizz and trying to tear him down. The stalker represents those critics who 'rewrite' shows because they think they can do better."

Which is hilarious coming from that channel, because this is one of those fan channels who, after each episode or preview comes out, will make 10 different discussion videos about it; where they "theorize" about what might happen in the show's future, and the theory is pretty much just them writing their own goddamn fanfiction for the show that's wildly different from the show itself. None of their predictions have ever turned out to be true (although because we're dealing with Viv's source material, I admit, some of their theories WERE actually better ideas than what the show did in the end). So it's insufferable to hear them using the old "PFFFFT THE CRITICS REALLY THINK THEY CAN DO BETTER, LET'S SEE YOU DO BETTER" nothing defense, when they're basically writing wildly divergent AU fanfiction every other video with the sincere thought it was gonna come true.

But just like. Acting like critics are "just mad the show didn't go the way THEY wanted" or "were jealous of its fame and just wanted the fame for themselves and tear it down when they aren't allowed to change it"… So frustrating.

I'm genuinely hard pressed to think of another fandom that's cared this much about the fact that people criticize a piece of media. I'm sure they're out there somewhere, but damned if any are coming to mind.

#Anonymous #vivziepop fandom #actual blog post

[molsno]

it really is remarkable how I've never once seen anarchists share actual theory on here. the average anarchist political position from what I've seen can be boiled down to "state bad" and whenever you criticize them they jump in the replies to say that you're strawmanning them but they don't ever provide counterpoints based on evidence or history (probably because there have never been any meaningful anarchist Ws in history). the closest thing to theory that I've seen from them has been "if everyone commits random acts of petty crime and accepts that they may go to jail for it then capitalism will crumble and we'll all be liberated" which I've seen multiple times from different anarchist groups and it just sounds like a fed psyop. and then on the other side you have marxist leninists who regularly post theory backed up by nearly a century of historical and modern evidence that actually engages with reality and it all makes sense, it all explains the state of the world in a way that makes history so easy to understand. and I'm just stunned that there's even any debate to be had on which ideology is more likely to bring about the end of global capitalist hegemony.

#txt

[hero-israel]

Hi, how are you? Wishing you the best.

I'm really interested to hear what you think about the Nexus definition of antisemitism. It sounds like it has some valid contributions in theory but unfortunately many of the people that I saw endorse it before 10/7 went mask off later on during the war (or on October 8). Specifically, the "double standard" bit which some people weaponize to hold Israel to a higher standard because, according to what it says it's not prima fascie of antisemitism as people can care more about Israel because of its special relationship with US (this might also be a strawman argument as I don't recall the IHRA say criticism of Israel as prima fascie either). Anyhow, I'm also wary because I often hear BDS supporters and Corbynites cite this definition in opposition to the 3Ds of antisemitism and IHRA, and I've seen the proponents of the definition itself go out of their way to contextualize people's anti-Israel remarks (like Ilhan Omar herself) saying things like "Hatred against Israel is different from Hatred against Jews" which I'm like uhm actually.

Sorry for rambling, would love to hear your thoughts! Take care :)

The IHRA definition is perfectly fine as-is.

The problem is that ANY definition of antisemitism as advanced by actual normative Jews - ANY definition which says "something goes too far" - will become "controversial," as the IHRA definition purportedly is. And so then you have a working group and a position paper and an interim committee and a comment period and a referendum needing a quorum and an advisory board doing the work of integrating the synthesis of input from all stakeholders and just every last bit of it should be waterboarded with sulfuric acid.

Nexus added more wiggle room to when "criticism" does or doesn't become antisemitism, but it was all in vain because the point of antisemitism is that nothing is antisemitism, it's all just "criticism" and Jews may never complain about it or codify methods to stop it. The more people insist they need to fine-tune and finagle the definitions, the less likely they would ever care about it. Remember when Trump was first elected, and there were all those posts about how the way to undermine a system without LOOKING LIKE you are undermining it is to seem like you're going along loyally with it but to raise all kinds of procedural points and keep repeating old debates so that nothing ends up being done? It's like that. And they would probably be comfortable telling you that defining antisemitism is fascism.

As for the "my taxes pay for this, of course I'm mad" concept, right from the outset we can note that this is ruled out for any non-Americans, so the Corbynites and French street pogromists have no such fig leaf. American taxes go all over the world, to people of all colors and backgrounds, and countries with all kinds of human rights nightmares in their closets (or, usually, on their front lawns in broad daylight). How long do you think it would take for an obsessively negative fixation on Egypt or Afghanistan among mixed company to be called Islamophobia? Our taxes have certainly gone to Palestine, funding "pay-for-slay" and UNRWA.

[not-goldy]

Are you all being for real ???

You all really thought it's like wife taking husband's name in other countries? Only sibling have same surname in korea so if he read out Jeon Jimin then he literally established them as brothers 💀💀💀 Spouses don't take surnames there and it's not at all a thing there so if he read it out he meant it as bros or understood it as such 💀💀💀

Actually you are wrong. Sit down let me school you. I'm in an online meeting but I can multi task purr 💅🏾

First off your analysis and conclusion are all wrong, off base, delusional, laughable, cosmically speaking crap, smelly, stinky text full of unintelligible, confused, deranged, disturbed, and a steamy pile of hot poo💩

If I wasn't so sure you are nuts I would have asked you

And my second question if I wasn't sure you was a nincompoop would be

No jikooker said that I promise you.

Cos we all know Jeon Jimin is an inside joke and we all know the context behind that meme, where it comes from, who said it and JIMIN'S EPIC REACTION TO IT FROM YEARS AGO!

This absurd and ridiculous.

It's similar to how yall make a fuss about Jungkook singing this melody claiming he saw a Tuktukker viral video on tiktok when in actuality us jokers did it first AND WE DID IT BETTER

U WELCOME

So no Anon no. The gag is not some wild ridiculous theory you peddling disguised as criticism cos that's just strawmaning GROSS. YOU ARE GROSS

TRANSLATION

You are delulu. you are in my ask box talking crazy you sound cuckoo when you say married spouse and siblings and surnames- where did you get all that stuff from cos Wow top notch batshit crazy kudos 👏🏾

If that is your understanding of jeon Jimin YOU NEED HELP.

Listen to me, REACH OUT TO SOMEONE ASAP you've surpassed insanity and delulu YOU ARE GONE

Now SHOOO BYE BYE

[iteratedextras]

You might win more Internet arguments if you didn't speak for other people and tell them what they believe whenever the topic of white supremacy is brought up rather than genuinely attempting to engage with their theory. Like you see to have a real bee in your bonnet about it and appear wounded by the assertion that whiteness, i.e. prioritising and promoting white people and subtly dismissing and destroying non-white people culture, is an ideology that many (tho not all) white people subscribe to - rather than writing paragraphs, I'd ask you to reflect and consider: why is this? Why do I react in this way? Why does this upset me? After you've reflected, I would then consider engaging with some level of legitimacy and reading with empathy. Maybe you'll still be a defensive racist who strawmans arguments (sorry dude but this is exactly who you are), but part of me hopes the person reading this is capable of critical reflection.

Another genuine recommendation, since I see you've been debating about Ukraine too, I think Timothy Snyder's Ukraine lecture series is excellent, provides a very thorough historical background which helps contextualise the current war.

Attempting a bogus psychoanalysis on me is certainly an assertion of superiority on your part - but the exact same psychoanalysis can be applied to those who are emotionally wounded by white people "taking up space," to use their own lingo.

How can we resolve this stalemate?

It's fairly simple. (I'm going to bold some things because I know some Tumblr users have problems reading.)

If you want to convince me, you must approach me as a peer, and that means providing evidence that I can verify from the outside that your theories work.

I want you to step back and do some critical self-reflection.

Your whole psychoanalysis is based on the logic of "whiteness" theory, including the idea of "defensive racists," which is a motive that whiteness theorists believe is a "real" thing driving hostility to their practices.

I think there's a much better explanation.

It's actually quite normal to be offended over being materially harmed for no good reason. This is normal for people of any race.

The material result of the larger cluster that is "whiteness" theory, "white privilege" theory, and similar left-wing race-first approaches is attempting to deny people health treatment specifically and explicitly on the basis of their race, by grouping people into "whites" and "BIPOC" ('everyone else').

This does not even rise to the epistemic standards of conventional racists, who typically group people into at least five "races."

When you support these ideologies, you are demanding to do "race conscious" policy, and there is absolutely no reason that I shouldn't hold you to the strict epistemic standards used against biological race realists, because your potential failures could be just as bad as theirs, much as Communist death counts are not so different from Fascist death counts.

The reason people don't like you, and the reason I don't like you, is because...

You want to do open, explicit racial discrimination. (This is what "race conscious" policy means.)

...with no pre-agreed limit where you'll agree, "Okay, we tried, discriminating against you isn't working to improve things for underrepresented minorities. We'll stop discriminating against you now."

...without doing the hard work to show that this will actually close the race gaps, so that the "corrective" racial discrimination will end in the future.

That's why I don't like you. That's why other people don't like you.

When we criticize the lack of evidence to justify "corrective" racial discrimination by social race realists, it's criticized as "white" epistemics, which is of course, like the idea of "Jewish science," cult material.

That is of course, a very threatening stance to take, even if it isn't that deadly yet. Obviously if you see such an authoritarian ideology where it both 1) doesn't have any proof it can get results, and 2) doesn't have a means to give up if it doesn't get results, then the smart thing to do is to shut it down early.

#anons #asks

[nothorses]

Interview With An Ex-Radfem

exradfem is an anonymous Tumblr user who identifies as transmasculine, and previously spent time in radical feminist communities. They have offered their insight into those communities using their own experiences and memories as a firsthand resource.

Background

I was raised in an incredibly fundamentalist religion, and so was predisposed to falling for cult rhetoric. Naturally, I was kicked out for being a lesbian. I was taken in by the queer community, particularly the trans community, and I got back on my feet- somehow. I had a large group of queer friends, and loved it. I fully went in on being the Best Trans Ally Possible, and constantly tried to be a part of activism and discourse.

Unfortunately, I was undersocialized, undereducated, and overenthusiastic. I didn't fully understand queer or gender theory. In my world, when my parents told me my sexuality was a choice and I wasn't born that way, they were absolutely being homophobic. I understood that no one should care if it's a choice or not, but it was still incredibly, vitally important to me that I was born that way.

On top of that, I already had an intense distrust of men bred by a lot of trauma. That distrust bred a lot of gender essentialism that I couldn't pull out of the gender binary. I felt like it was fundamentally true that men were the problem, and that women were inherently more trustworthy. And I really didn't know where nonbinary people fit in.

Then I got sucked down the ace exclusionist pipeline; the way the arguments were framed made sense to my really surface-level, liberal view of politics. This had me primed to exclude people –– to feel like only those that had been oppressed exactly like me were my community.

Then I realized I was attracted to my nonbinary friend. I immediately felt super guilty that I was seeing them as a woman. I started doing some googling (helped along by ace exclusionists on Tumblr) and found the lesfem community, which is basically radfem “lite”: lesbians who are "only same sex attracted". This made sense to me, and it made me feel so much less guilty for being attracted to my friend; it was packaged as "this is just our inherent, biological desire that is completely uncontrollable". It didn't challenge my status quo, it made me feel less guilty about being a lesbian, and it allowed me to have a "biological" reason for rejecting men.

I don't know how much dysphoria was playing into this, and it's something I will probably never know; all of this is just piecing together jumbled memories and trying to connect dots. I know at the time I couldn't connect to this trans narrative of "feeling like a woman". I couldn't understand what trans women were feeling. This briefly made me question whether I was nonbinary, but radfem ideas had already started seeping into my head and I'm sure I was using them to repress that dysphoria. That's all I can remember.

The lesfem community seeded gender critical ideas and larger radfem princples, including gender socialization, gender as completely meaningless, oppression as based on sex, and lesbian separatism. It made so much innate sense to me, and I didn't realize that was because I was conditioned by the far right from the moment of my birth. Of course women were just a biological class obligated to raise children: that is how I always saw myself, and I always wanted to escape it.

I tried to stay in the realms of TIRF (Trans-Inclusive Radical Feminist) and "gender critical" spaces, because I couldn't take the vitriol on so many TERF blogs. It took so long for me to get to the point where I began seeing open and unveiled transphobia, and I had already read so much and bought into so much of it that I thought that I could just ignore those parts.

In that sense, it was absolutely a pipeline for me. I thought I could find a "middle ground", where I could "center women" without being transphobic.

Slowly, I realized that the transphobia was just more and more disgustingly pervasive. Some of the trans men and butch women I looked up to left the groups, and it was mostly just a bunch of nasty people left. So I left.

After two years offline, I started to recognize I was never going to be a healthy person without dealing with my dysphoria, and I made my way back onto Tumblr over the pandemic. I have realized I'm trans, and so much of this makes so much more sense now. I now see how I was basically using gender essentialism to repress my identity and keep myself in the closet, how it was genuinely weaponized by TERFs to keep me there, and how the ace exclusionist movement primed me into accepting lesbian separatism- and, finally, radical feminism.

The Interview

You mentioned the lesfem community, gender criticals, and TIRFs, which I haven't heard about before- would you mind elaborating on what those are, and what kinds of beliefs they hold?

I think the lesfem community is recruitment for lesbians into the TERF community. Everything is very sanitized and "reasonable", and there's an effort not to say anything bad about trans women. The main focus was that lesbian = homosexual female, and you can't be attracted to gender, because you can't know someone's gender before knowing them; only their sex.

It seemed logical at the time, thinking about sex as something impermeable and gender as internal identity. The most talk about trans women I saw initially was just in reference to the cotton ceiling, how sexual orientation is a permanent and unchangeable reality. Otherwise, the focus was homophobia. This appealed to me, as I was really clinging to the "born this way" narrative.

This ended up being a gateway to two split camps - TIRFs and gender crits.

I definitely liked to read TIRF stuff, mostly because I didn't like the idea of radical feminism having to be transphobic. But TIRFs think that misogyny is all down to hatred of femininity, and they use that as a basis to be able to say trans women are "just as" oppressed.

Gender criticals really fought out against this, and pushed the idea that gender is fake, and misogyny is just sex-based oppression based on reproductive issues. They believe that the source of misogyny is the "male need to control the source of reproduction"- which is what finally made me think I had found the "source" of my confusion. That's why I ended up in gender critical circles instead of TIRF circles.

I'm glad, honestly, because the mask-off transphobia is what made me finally see the light. I wouldn't have seen that in TIRF communities.

I believed this in-between idea, that misogyny was "sex-based oppression" and that transphobia was also real and horrible, but only based on transition, and therefore a completely different thing. I felt that this was the "nuanced" position to take.

The lesfem community also used the fact that a lot of lesbians have partners who transition, still stay with their lesbian partners, and see themselves as lesbian- and that a lot of trans men still see themselves as lesbians. That idea is very taboo and talked down in liberal queer spaces, and I had some vague feelings about it that made me angry, too. I really appreciated the frank talk of what I felt were my own taboo experiences.

I think gender critical ideology also really exploited my own dysphoria. There was a lot of talk about how "almost all butches have dysphoria and just don't talk about it", and that made me feel so much less alone and was, genuinely, a big relief to me that I "didn't have to be trans".

Lesfeminism is essentially lesbian separatism dressed up as sex education. Lesfems believe that genitals exist in two separate categories, and that not being attracted to penises is what defines lesbians. This is used to tell cis lesbians, "dont feel bad as a lesbian if you're attracted to trans men", and that they shouldn’t feel "guilty" for not being attracted to trans women. They believe that lesbianism is not defined as being attracted to women, it is defined as not being attracted to men; which is a root idea in lesbian separatism as well.

Lesfems also believe that attraction to anything other than explicit genitals is a fetish: if you're attracted to flat chests, facial hair, low voices, etc., but don't care if that person has a penis or not, you're bisexual with a fetish for masculine attributes. Essentially, they believe the “-sexual” suffix refers to the “sex” that you are assigned at birth, rather than your attraction: “homosexual” refers to two people of the same sex, etc. This was part of their pushback to the ace community, too.

I think they exploited the issues of trans men and actively ignored trans women intentionally, as a way of avoiding the “TERF” label. Pronouns were respected, and they espoused a constant stream of "trans women are women, trans men are men (but biology still exists and dictates sexual orientation)" to maintain face.

They would only be openly transmisogynistic in more private, radfem-only spaces.

For a while, I didn’t think that TERFs were real. I had read and agreed with the ideology of these "reasonable" people who others labeled as TERFs, so I felt like maybe it really was a strawman that didn't exist. I think that really helped suck me in.

It sounds from what you said like radical feminism works as a kind of funnel system, with "lesfem" being one gateway leading in, and "TIRF" and "gender crit" being branches that lesfem specifically funnels into- with TERFs at the end of the funnel. Does that sound accurate?

I think that's a great description actually!

When I was growing up, I had to go to meetings to learn how to "best spread the word of god". It was brainwashing 101: start off by building a relationship, find a common ground. Do not tell them what you really believe. Use confusing language and cute innuendos to "draw them in". Prey on their emotions by having long exhausting sermons, using music and peer pressure to manipulate them into making a commitment to the church, then BAM- hit them with the weird shit.

Obviously I am paraphrasing, but this was framed as a necessary evil to not "freak out" the outsiders.

I started to see that same talk in gender critical circles: I remember seeing something to the effect of, "lesfem and gender crit spaces exist to cleanse you of the gender ideology so you can later understand the 'real' danger of it", which really freaked me out; I realized I was in a cult again.

I definitely think it's intentional. I think they got these ideas from evangelical Christianity, and they actively use it to spread it online and target young lesbians and transmascs. And I think gender critical butch spaces are there to draw in young transmascs who hate everything about femininity and womanhood, and lesfem spaces are there to spread the idea that trans women exist as a threat to lesbianism.

Do you know if they view TIRFs a similar way- as essentially prepping people for TERF indoctrination?

Yes and no.

I've seen lots of in-fighting about TIRFs; most TERFs see them as a detriment, worse than the "TRAs" themselves. I've also definitely seen it posed as "baby's first radfeminism". A lot of TIRFs are trans women, at least from what I've seen on Tumblr, and therefore are not accepted or liked by radfems. To be completely honest, I don't think they're liked by anyone. They just hate men.

TIRFs are almost another breed altogether; I don't know if they have ties to lesfems at all, but I do think they might've spearheaded the online ace exclusionist discourse. I think a lot of them also swallowed radfem ideology without knowing what it was, and parrot it without thinking too hard about how it contradicts with other ideas they have.

The difference is TIRFs exist. They're real people with a bizarre, contradictory ideology. The lesfem community, on the other hand, is a completely manufactured "community" of crypto-terfs designed specifically to indoctrinate people into TERF ideology.

Part of my interest in TIRFs here is that they seem to have a heavy hand in the way transmascs are treated by the trans community, and if you're right that they were a big part of ace exclusionism too they've had a huge impact on queer discourse as a whole for some time. It seems likely that Baeddels came out of that movement too.

Yes, there’s a lot of overlap. The more digging I did, the more I found that it's a smaller circle running the show than it seems. TIRFs really do a lot of legwork in peddling the ideology to outer queer community, who tend to see it as generic feminism.

TERFs joke a lot about how non-radfems will repost or reblog from TERFs, adding "op is a TERF”. They're very gleeful when people accept their ideology with the mask on. They think it means these people are close to fully learning the "truth", and they see it as further evidence they have the truth the world is hiding. I think it's important to speak out against radical feminism in general, because they’re right; their ideology does seep out into the queer community.

Do you think there's any "good" radical feminism?

No. It sees women as the ultimate victim, rather than seeing gender as a tool to oppress different people differently. Radical feminism will always see men as the problem, and it is always going to do harm to men of color, gay men, trans men, disabled men, etc.

Women aren't a coherent class, and radfems are very panicked about that fact; they think it's going to be the end of us all. But what's wrong with that? That's like freaking out that white isn't a coherent group. It reveals more about you.

It's kind of the root of all exclusionism, the more I think about it, isn't it? Just freaking out that some group isn't going to be exclusive anymore.

Radical feminists believe that women are inherently better than men.

For TIRFs, it's gender essentialism. For TERFs, its bio essentialism. Both systems are fundamentally broken, and will always hurt the groups most at risk. Centering women and misogyny above all else erases the root causes of bigotry and oppression, and it erases the intersections of race and class. The idea that women are always fundamentally less threatening is very white and privileged.

It also ignores how cis women benefit from gender norms just as cis men do, and how cis men suffer from gender roles as well. It’s a system of control where gender non-conformity is a punishable offense.

#transgender #transphobia #trans #transmisogyny #radical feminism #radfem #feminism #transandrophobia #terfs #tirfs #gender critical #nothorses #cult mention #long post

[tsscat]

I don’t even know where they even got that idea that the core idea of white supremacy is “white people capable people of color incompetent” that’s not remotely true. Even when you do have the ideology of “white people competent people of color stupid and childlike” it very very obviously comes from “white people superior to people of color, and thus smarter”. And the fact that 1) they thought that “all evil in the world is the root of European colonialism” was an actual statement (and not white people, ie them, exaggerating genuine critique of white supremacy) and 2) that “European colonialism has profoundly shaped the world and is the root of so many of the problems in the worked today” or hell, even this exaggerated strawman they made up is a remotely white supremacists statement. White supremacists would like you to believe that Europe civilized the world and everything good about colonized countries is because of them. That white people were superior (“good”) and so them ruling inferior (“bad”) people of color was better. White supremacists would like you to believe that every bad thing you see in colonized countries are because of the inferiority of the people of color living there. Even an acknowledgement of the bad European colonialism is against white supremacist ideology, but an assertion of the truth that European colonialism fundamentally and massively shaped the world for the worse, that so many countries are worse off because of European imperialism and colonialism fundamentally contradicts white supremacist thought that everything good about colonized countries is because of the superior white people who came there.

That post is exactly why people say that white people can’t really be experts on white supremacy: their experience of being white means that they are (raised to be) ignorant of how white supremacy works. Their rhetoric shows a misunderstanding of very basic ideas about white supremacy and how that ties in the European colonialism that tbh, many children of color would understand. However, it’s not that white people can’t be informed/understanding of white supremacy; they just have to listen to people of color and consume works by people of color on this subject. What really is dangerous is when they are both ignorant and arrogant, assume they know better, and then makes posts like these. The author of that post sounds like a republican talking about critical race theory.

#tara talks

[firstagent]

On the Digimon Tamers Drama Fiasco

Last night I watched the Tamers drama reading from Sunday’s DigiFes. You may have heard of it! It’s the one the internet is loudly criticizing (and a few trolls naturally defending), and where even the fansub group added a disclaimer at the beginning warning of its promotion of “far-right politics and conspiracy theories.” The good news here is that if you’re going off of just the screenshots, you’re not getting the full picture of the content. The bad news is that the full picture of the content is actually much worse.

So here’s what you probably heard: that the whole thing’s a heavy-handed rant against cancel culture and political correctness. That’s what the most-distributed screenshots are showing, and that’s what the most influencial accounts who are talking about it are sharing. It’s not wrong- the enemy entity identifies itself as “Political Correctness” and uses “Cancel Culture” as a weapon. They say it in English! There’s no ambiguity about that!

But you can see the trouble with rallying around those, right? Yeah, rallying against someone criticizing “Cancel Culture” gets accused of it themselves. And talking about cancel culture, even criticism of it, shouldn’t be out of bounds: it’s a tricky subject with potential for exploration. I touch on it in my own stuff even! But simply turning cancel culture and political correctness into a vague evil entity reeks of lazy parody, like some skit from a right-wing Youtuber thinking he’s funny.

The real issue with the drama lies in the set-up to all that. Namely Yamaki bursting in, interrupting the usual reunion fluff with a long rant that Youtuber would be proud of. It touches on all the usual nonsense: big tech is censoring everybody! Regular media uses fake news to cover up reality! Fact checkers eliminate dissenting opinion! Add that to some of the content from Konaka’s blog and it spells someone who fell a little hard into some really damaging nonsense. This stuff isn’t about cancel culture. This stuff is untrue, harmful, and has no place in Digimon coming out of anyone but a villain. None of the kids argue, save for Jian being an intentionally weak strawman. That’s the stuff that should be screenshotted.

So what are we supposed to do with that? The easiest thing to do is make a note of Konaka’s current mindset and otherwise forget about it. It’s disappointing to hear for sure, even moreso if you actually watched it. I don’t recommend that by the way: there are a couple nice bits cleaning up some things from the series and both audios, but they aren’t worth it. This is thankfully designed to be ephemeral, meant for a one-time reading with no official release. Even Konaka said this isn’t meant to be taken as canon. And it doesn’t change what Tamers is. It’s still full of love, values reality and the collective, and even Konaka’s trademark spots of conspiratorial nonsense aren’t malignant. This isn’t a case like Harry Potter where now that we recognize the author’s true colors, we’ve become more cognizant of the damage hiding in her pages. We can still love Tamers, we have no need to carry this baggage, and we’ll get past this.

#digimon #digimon tamers #digifes

[onecornerface]

Australia Anti-Realism

If Australia exists and the world is round, then Australia would fall off. This does not show that the world is flat, and it does not show that Australia doesn’t exist. But it shows that there is an inconsistency between Australia Realism and the Routh Earth Theory. More people adopt the Flat Earth Theory than reject Australia Realism. This is a mistake. There are several other lines of evidence against Australia Realism.

Australia Realism implies that Australia is simultaneously an island, a continent, and a country. This is bizarre and unparsimonious, unprecedented within the broader field of geography, and thus this is strong evidence for why we should reject Australia Realism.

As such, there is an underappreciated argument against Flat Earth Theory which is not addressed in the extant literature—namely a set of independent reasons to reject Australia Realism. Even though I am a Round Earth Theorist, some of my fellow Round Earth Theorists will attempt to condemn and silence me because I do not stick closely enough to the party line. They will say it is not enough to defend Round Earth Theory—orthodoxy *demands* that we must defend Round Earth Theory on orthodox grounds, which precludes seriously entertaining the Australia Anti-Realism viewpoint.

Many people do not value academic freedom and will try to cancel anyone who presents evidence that they don’t want to hear about. They will insinuate that the evidence already proves Australia Realism, and they will yell at you to “read the literature”—but they can never point out *what* literature you’re supposed to read. On the rare occasion that they actually cite an article, the article is usually on some ancillary topic, not relevant to the question of whether Australia exists. All they can do is change the subject.

They will exhort you to “listen to Australians,” but invariably these people are not Australians and cannot point to any Australians. I’ll just mention there have been some high-profile cases recently of people getting caught pretending to be Australian.

Am I saying Australia has been proved not to exist? No. It’s debatable. But what’s not debatable is that it *is* debatable.

Some critics are even so dishonest as to imply that Australia Anti-Realism negates the existence of New Zealand. But rejecting the existence of Australia does not imply rejecting the existence of New Zealand. Such a strawman attack is so dishonest as to be unworthy of a response.

Nowadays it is common for the ultra-woke crowd to accuse Australia Anti-Realists of “erasing centuries of oppression.” What they mean, of course, is that there are supposed to be nonwhite people who live in Australia, and it is supposed to be oppressive to deny that they exist by “erasing” them, which of course Australia Anti-Realism de facto is “guilty” of. Needless to say, this moralistic argument is simply begging the question against Australia Anti-Realism and trying to shame its advocates into silence, so there’s not really any substance to the objection.

#trolling

[dana-chan-the-control-brain]

Hey, did you saw the film theory on Invader Zim on Membrane that Low-key makes sense

NO. IT. DOESN’T!

Okay, maybe this is my personal bias shining through, because I really don’t like Mattpatt sometimes... No. Okay, I have nothing against the guy personally. More frankly, I don’t like his fanbase or the way he structures his videos.

The way Mattpatt words and structures his videos acts like he’s the first person who thought of this idea, it’s the main contributor to why I stopped watching his videos a long time ago.

He speaks in a lot of rhetorics and strawman arguments rather than just saying what he wants to say. Like “If you don’t believe me... look no further then...” and that’s the one thing I ABSOLUTELY HATE on theory videos.

And some of Mattpatts own theories he doesn’t take seriously, but this is what you get when you base your INCOME off of youtube ad revenue and browse the reddit forums for new ideas. A completely monopolized way of theorizing. (and this is why there are several paragraphs in my current chapter of Tech Support of Zim’s Computer complaining about the concept of youtube entertainment in general.)

Sure, I don’t think Mattpatt will run out of theories... but I really hate the structure of his videos follows along strawman arguments, acting like he’s always arguing with an imaginary audience for entertainment value rather than just say what he wants to say.

That, and people will often cling to theories of someone with good editing software and a youtube channel then Their own opinions.

Something that I learned was incredibly dangerous to do. I learned my lesson with “That Guy with the Glasses dot com” and I don’t plan to act like I know something or am better than someone else cause I agree with someone who said something on youtube once.

I do watch Internet reviews and theory videos for entertainment, but that’s all they are to me. I don’t like to watch youtube videos to give me opinions on how I feel about things. And I seriously think a wide margin of his subscribers lack critical thinking skills at times, as well as a majority of the youtube audience, or from what I’ve seen in the comment section.

However, remember... These are just my thoughts on the matter... My thoughts are not law and I never claim them to be.

Like when I first joined the fandom and posed my GIR analysis questions... I even said:

“I don’t know if the fandom has talked about this in depth or not... I just got here... or if someone put it into this many words before but...”  

Also... the thing that bothers me about his Invader Zim theory...

A lot of Mattpatt’s sources are just..... Wrong...

(for the next few minutes I will be talking about this video, feel free to watch or don’t)

Okay.. “Membrane is an Irken” this has been a popular fan theory since before I even entered the fandom and there are old fics about this. I have read Irken Membrane stories before.

It’s not personally my cup of tea, but it’s fun to think about.

But the straws Mattpatt grasps in his video.... Really upset me because there is some thought to the theory back in the day.. ... Like back in 2002??? but like.... NOW?!

Okay, I’ll pick apart this a little... bit by bit...

He says that Membrane takes a hard stance against anything paranormal.

Kinda... but no.. Membrane never outright denies the existence of aliens. (except in ETF... which he mainly says out of frustration...) This is what Membrane says about “there are no aliens” in the show:

Membrane just says that there are no “intelligent” aliens...None that are able to travel the massive distance to Earth, anyways... If aliens existed at all, (like the cryptoids Dib talks of) they would have traveled the distance to the planet and communicated with them by now.

However, this is a nitpick of a minor issue. One that a majority of the fandom tends to overlook when viewing Professor Membrane and Dib’s relationship in general. 

And I do find it weird that he used this for evidence when he cut out the most important snippet from the full lecture he gives Dib here.... JUST to support his claim... as if he’s intentionally leaving that part out.... hmmmm

However, I can let this slide, because it’s a nitpick and really doesn’t change anything that Membrane is very dissuasive of Dib’s alien-hunting hobbies. (I have a theory as to why and I explain it here in my own way)

The point is, Membrane is dismissive of anything alien... maybe because he’s an Irken...okay, good, yes. fair. 

A lot of Mattpatts claims from then on are pretty solid, and I won’t bunk them with “But in my headcanon/Fanfic verse...”  Because what he is saying is all true.

Membrane denying the existence of aliens even after being taken to space jail doesn’t have much of an explanation and is played for comedy and there are many ways you can go with this, and I am not going to bring up my fanfics or my own headcanons to argue with him here.

Because there is no explanation, and he is going with the “Membrane is Irken” theory... So that’s very solid when he’s talking about Membrane denying the Hallucinations. 

Mattpatt claimed that Membrane wore his face covering at all times and had been dressed this way since he was a child.

I will not deny this. This is true.

However, isn’t bringing up Membrane’s childhood kinda put a hole in your own argument?

MEMBRANE WAS A CHILD.

He had been shown to have childhood memories in the comics and the show.

Irkens don’t really have a “Childhood” per say, at least not in the way that humans do. They are a smeet, then elite, then Invader..

If he’s claiming that Membrane came to earth as an Irken SMEET....How, why, and when? 

That kinda raises more questions than it answers.... What are you proving by bringing up Membrane’s baby pictures on Earth exactly? It kind of works against your own argument? 

Saying that they’re Irken because they all have the same hair.... that’s just stupid... and he’s citing the Invader Zim wiki on this .... oh boy.

Yeah, Like before I watched the show I thought Dib and Disguised Zim were the same character or brothers...

But I don’t think character design here is a solid enough reason in this case... At least not when it comes to the hairstyles... That’s a stretch.

“Hmmm Membrane’s hair forms an M shape... What could the M stand for? Mirken?! SUSPICIOUS!” (this is just a joke)

Also... the lack of ears thing... He did say it would be hard for Membrane to hear if his headpiece was covering his ears, but not necessarily... The entire thing is a headset and he is the man of science, he can really do whatever the fuck he wants cause Science is like magic in a show like this. So if Membrane wears a headset that doesn’t obstruct his hearing at all, I can buy it... Also.. it’s equally possible his ears got blown off in a chem lab accident or he’s legally deaf and that headset acts as a hearing aide and HELPS him hear... 

Actually, I always noticed how in Membrane’s original design from the show, the headset looked a lot like a hearing aid. Specifically one with a head clip, It’s one of the things I first noticed about his design in the show.

And it’s just something I always assumed because he’s a scientist who deals with explosions in his face on a daily basis... (in fact he experiences one in episode 2B) So on first viewing, I thought that his headset served as a hearing aid as well as prescription glasses and a communication device. 

I’m just throwing out possibilities because the “lack of ears” is also kinda a stretch.

Mattpatt complaining about “lack of nose” however... Okay, yeah I’ll give him that one. It’s a character design choice that is a little odd for Professor Membrane, but it does fit with the Irken theory, since a majority of human characters, in fact, all have noses. So, Yes the “lack of nose” does fit more into the Irken theory. 

However.... Florpus anime Membrane DOES have a nose...

Meant to be drawn in a more semi-realistic artsyle, you can clearly see the bridge of his nose here.

And he looks very similar to anime Dib... Sooooo... Shrug-city... 

It’s likely that Membrane not having a nose in the show is simply a stylistic choice than anything else. Basically, the bridge of the nose is there... we just don’t see it.

Especially since Nightmare Membrane has a nose as well..

Membrane is like Home Improvement’s Wilson. We will never see his face, and that’s part of the gag. The man probably sleeps in his labcoat honestly...

I also find the voice pattern thing a bit of a stretch. Membrane and Zim are just eccentric characters who yell to emote or emphasize a point or emote stronger. And Membrane’s inflections are never the same as Zim’s.

Remember, no other Irken TALKS like Zim. Professor Membrane doesn’t really go around screaming: “I AM PROFESSOR MEMBRANE” either..... 

If anything... it just kinda proves both characters have auditory processing issues or hearing problems more then anything.

And there is a lot of screaming on this show.... Screaming from Dib, screaming from Membrane, Screaming from GIR, screaming from Zim... Screaming is funny... and characters scream so much that the characters with their mouths wide open is somewhat a staple of the show.

This is more because of Johnen Vasquez’s voice direction...

Especially since no other Irken really talks like Zim..

Zim’s manor of Speach is strictly a Zim thing and not an Irken thing.

Professor Membrane’s manner of speech is simply a Membrane thing and not a human thing.

I will give Mattpatt that. That a lot of tech in the show looks similar to Membrane’s. I feel this is mostly a stylistic choice, but it really does fit in with the Irken theory. 

Like that Zim just so happens to use the same operating system as Dib is played off as a joke. But it does add some small credence to the theory here... I need to point out when he does get it right... some pats on the back.

These are very good points and does follow through with what he’s trying to prove by the end of the day.

(even if Membrane was lying about the destruction of all mankind with the beans thing, but that’s a minor nitpick here) 

But his entire paragraph comparing Membrane’s tech to Irken tech is a really good one. Props there.

This whole paragraph about there being only Tall or short irkens cause their society is height based and there are no “medium-sized” irkens....cause they were “dealt with”

Okay.

....

Sure Mattpatt. Let’s just entirely ignore the existence of the Frylord and this entire character even though you mentioned it in the synopsis at the start of your video... Showing that Taller irkens are in positions of power against the shorter, also... Zim is a tiny irken... there are many Irkens that stand taller then Zim.

Being tall in Irken society is a rarity, and Almighty Tallest Purple said that he and Red “became” the Tallest. How? We don’t know, but we do know at one point the current Tallest looked like this:

How do Irkens get that Tall? Body modifications? Maybe... it’s never explained, but considering the Frylord is super big and probably eats a lot of snacks might have something to do with it. We don’t know.

It’s safe to say that being Tall in their society is a rarity and Tallests are either born or made special from the cloning chamber from the get go.

Not to mention, Membrane is Taller than the current Tallest are already...

 and you said earlier in the video that Membrane would have gone to Earth as a child...

When he was no taller than a wrapped Christmas box of socks...

So why would Membrane take refuge on Earth at this point? Mattpatt says that Membrane was sent on a mission to Earth because the Tallest felt threatened by his rule...

BY MEMBRANE’S RULE?!?

HE’S THE SIZE OF A CHRISTMAS BOX OF SOCKS!

What do they have to be threatened by? 

Because... Mattpatt DID bring up Membrane as a child earlier in the video... meaning Membrane came to earth when he was about the same size as Zim.

SO THEY HAD NOTHING TO BE WORRIED ABOUT AND HAD NO EVIDENCE TO BELIEVE MEMBRANE WOULD GROW TO BE TALL ORE EVEN VIEW HIM AS A THREAT

You bunked your own argument. Congradulations.

Membrane conquered the world through his inventions. In a way, sure. Membrane Labs does own a lot of stuff. But he doesn’t own everything. A majority of the Corporations that keep the population stupid usually don’t have anything to do with Membrane Labs and aren’t affiliated at all. 

But this does fit into the “Membrane is an Irken” theory so I will give him that one.

However, Membrane being an evil corporate dictator is a hot take I never really appreciate at all and I can never get behind it.

It hits too close to home in the real world, and I always like to view Membrane as a self-made man and a World loving hippie at his core who just wants to make the world a better place, much like his son, but he actively does something about it. (which can also be why he encourages Dib with real science so much cause he knows Dib wants to save the Earth as much as he does)

Just calling Membrane a capitalist billionaire that doesn’t care about the little guy kinda seems disingenuous towards his character for me. 

Especially when Membrane in “Ten Minutes to Doom” created a machine (foodio) that completely end world hunger... which was in BETA in the unreleased episode...

 but by the time the movie rolls around... Foodio exists... past his BETA, meaning that he’s probably no expensive than a common household microwave and can materialize food from nothing:

Yeah. Membrane completely ended world hunger off-screen. thanks. (something no capitalist would ever do...)

Membrane also does appearances for charity (in the comics), and often takes funding for sponsorships when he is low on funds and he had to find a cure for pig mouth. 

Sure “Membrane conquered the world” fits the Irken theory...

But I never appreciate that take on his character and that is admittedly, very personal bais. 

I just wanted to say my peace a little bit here about how I 100% don’t vibe with the “Membrane capitalist/billionaire scum” especially since he ended world hunger...and invented a cure for the un-common cold.

Works for the theory, so good on Mattpatt for that one, but I personally don’t vibe with it.

Mattpatt compared Zim and Dib’s head shape as something to argue... Like because Dib has a similar head shape to Zim... that Dib has to be an alien... Okay... But If you look at the Invader Zim artbook (which I own)

The show has a very distinct look on how they draw characters’ heads. It’s a very distinct stylistic choice and there are pages upon pages in the artbook describing the style and how it looks in motion, and many revision notes to the Korean animators.

There are lots of pages on the artbook describing in detail the differences between the main characters’ heads, what to do, and what not to do.

It’s a difficult style to replicate, and Dib having a big head was mostly a joke from the showrunners to the showrunners, cause they kept drawing Dib’s head slightly bigger to make him look more appealing.

A majority of the audience doesn’t really notice because all the children in the show have big heads. All the kids are like 3-4 feet tall and have huge heads. 

Also... Dib’s head is far more rounder then Zim’s in the comics and the Movie... comparing their head shape as an arguing point, when Dib’s head shape changed midway season 1 when the designs got slightly more streamlined is just... bad form..

Dib and Zim’s heads never really look the same from the early episodes as they do later on.

Comparing this character design similarity just because of the artstyle is really stupid.

This is the most infuriating thing about the video... because Mattpatt disproves his own argument with his own footage not a few seconds earlier. 

He claims that Gaz sarcastically mentioning she has a squeedly spooch is a canon fact...... but ... hmm.. Mattpatt... can I rewind the footage of your video, please?

Where’s her squeedly spooch?

IS IT BEHIND HER CLEARLY HUMAN ORGANS?! I DON’T SEE IT?

And this isn’t just a stylistic choice... here’s a picture of another human’s organs for comparison.

Mattpatt literally disproved his own argument and ignored the fact that we saw an X-ray of Gaz’s organs in the very same episode...

Gaz doesn’t have a squeedly spooch and she literally was being sarcastic.

and the whole thing is disproved very easily.

Everything Mattpatt says in between those two points, about Dib being taken aboard an alien ship as a baby, and that there is no mother, and the Clone theory... That is all good stuff and this is what the theory video should have speculated and focused on, because there is some digging to be had here... I feel he focused a lot on the wrong points in his video...

And this is the most outrageous point he makes in his video. It’s the thing that pissed me off the most... and lead me to write this essay in the first place.

He claimed Eric Trueheart himself confirmed the clone theory and had story plans where Dib would discover his clone origins.

HE DID NOT!

IN FACT, Eric Trueheart himself published Volume One of the Invader Zim script book AND THIS IS WHAT HE SAID:

Eric neither confirmed nor denied the rumor.

But for Mattpatt to blatantly say that Eric said that Clone Dib was a planned thing by the screenwriters?!

He is BLATANTLY putting words into a Screenwriter’s mouth! Something that you should NEVER do.

Because it is 100% a lie.

He had no source for this claim. He probably just read the same rumor on the wiki and has no source.

This is the reason why I don’t trust videos like Mattpatt. The truth is often stretched for entertainment value, or information is just made up to prove “they were right” about whatever the topic of the day was. He doesn’t even bother to cite the source he got “Eric Trueheart’s word of mouth” from... because it was wrong.

Sorry if this whole thing is more hostile than it intended to be... But Mattpatt was looking at the ENTIRELY wrong evidence for this show....

Irken Membrane is a fun theory... but Mattpatt picked the entirely wrong topics and points of discussion, even to the point of hiding the truth and straight-up lying to his audience about his sources.

It’s kinda like saying “Birds eat ghost peppers because they’re part dragon and dragons can handle spicy food”

While, yeah, Birds are descended from dinos, it’s kinda missing the full story there and it’s not the reason why birds can eat spicy food.

Irken Membrane is a fun fan theory... do what you want with it. I am not here to dissuade Irken Membrane headcanons...

I’m just here to encourage critical thinking, and perhaps NOT put words into content creators' mouths when there is no credible source for it just because it benefits your argument.

#Invader Zim #Film Theory #Mattpatt #danachan's rants #lol sorry i went off but he really needed to cite his sources more on this one

[apas-95]

Marx, Nietzsche, and the Conscious Pursuit

Reproduced from: https://redsails.org/really-existing-fascism/#marx-nietzsche-and-the-conscious-pursuit See also: https://redsails.org/on-identitarianism-a-defense-of-a-strawman/

In our story so far, Nietzsche and the question of symmetries and anti-symmetries between Nietzsche and Marx have sat unattended in the background. Now is the time to bring them to the fore and to explain why I consider them so useful.

Consider how Nietzsche talked about masks:

Every profound spirit needs a mask. Even more, around every profound spirit a mask is continually growing. [49]

Contrast this with the way Marx and Engels publicized their commitments, and encouraged others to do so, in The Communist Manifesto:

The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. [1]

Consider how an early Nietzsche polemicizes in favour of a “new slavery” and the virtues of the ancients, whereas for Marx there is no question that the greatest hero of antiquity is the leader of slave revolts: “Spartacus is revealed as the most splendid fellow in the whole of ancient history.” [50]

A young Marx, musing on his vision of utopia in The German Ideology, waxes poetic about the possibility of a society freed from the division of labor itself:

In communist society, nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic. [51]

Nietzsche, meanwhile, in Human, All Too Human, describes a different kind of utopia, a grim society organized around the harsh exigencies of breeding genius in the midst of scarcity:

My Utopia. — In a better arranged society the heavy work and trouble of life will be assigned to those who suffer least through it, to the most obtuse, therefore; and so step by step up to those who are most sensitive to the highest and sublimest kinds of suffering, and who therefore still suffer notwithstanding the greatest alleviations of life. [52]

Nietzsche was no fool. It would be a mistake to dismiss these aphorisms as the antisocial madness of a lone misanthrope; to recall Waite, Nietzsche’s project is “the only position outside communism.” Nietzsche is articulating widespread skepticism about the ability of socialism to deliver mass happiness, and his critique resonates powerfully with anyone who feels their individuality imperiled by a collective. Stalin (and his cohort) claimed Marx, while Hitler (and his cohort) claimed Nietzsche… and the majority of the Western world went on to claim Nietzsche too. Just take a trip to your local bookstore — everything Nietzsche ever wrote is now a classic that never goes out of print, finding its way into teenagers’ backpacks and academic seminars alike.

Accusing Nietzsche of being a proto-fascist, or even the ur-fascist, in a public setting has predictable consequences: his countless fans swarm to explain that he never actually endorsed the Nazi party because he was already dead, that any linkages to the Nazi project are the result of a conspiracy orchestrated by his German-nationalist sister, that he denounced German ethnonationalists and mocked antisemites, that his philosophy was in fact aesthetic and spiritual and anti-systematic and impossible to pin down, and that he grew out of any misguided ideas he may have held in his youth.

Domenico Losurdo examines each of these defenses in detail, including the conspiracy theory, in his critical biography of Nietzsche. Nietzsche comes across as a powerful and complex thinker, who indeed went through multiple phases and espoused contradictory beliefs, but Losurdo shows that one thing remains constant: Nietzsche never stopped experimenting to find the best way to oppose the egalitarian leveling tendencies of modernity that he despised. Funnily enough, after exposing the extent to which Nietzsche corresponded with out-and-out antisemites in his youth, Losurdo cedes some ground to Nietzsche’s apologists:

Cosima’s advice to be careful about what he said may have had a positive effect: far from remaining confined to the verbal level, the self-censorship led to a kind of sublimation and transcendence of immediacy, in the sense that the merciless analysis of modernity became to a certain extent autonomous of the Judeophobic themes that accompanied it. [53]

In other words, when his antisemitic interlocutors advised Nietzsche to mask racism in his writing, they inadvertently spurred him to find justifications for slavery and elitism that weren’t rooted in the all-too-modern and universalist (and thus unstable, empirically refutable) arguments of “race science.” After all, “race science” is, both historically and logically, a liberal concept. If racial differences turn out not to be inherent, there goes the whole (liberal) argument for white supremacy. Liberal racism still feels the need to justify itself in scientific, i.e. universalist terms. As Nietzsche correctly observed, this is already a capitulation to socialism, which wins more the more people scientifically reason together. To truly condemn socialism, Nietzsche painted the issue of class domination as one of will, aesthetics, “freedom,” and spirit.

Just as the material conditions of capitalist countries vying for resources on an already-occupied planet helped us understand fascism as a geopolitical phenomenon rather than a psychopathology, Nietzsche helps us understand the real ideological appeal of fascism for ordinary, educated people. Nietzsche helps explain how fantasies of “slavery” and “extermination” could become respectable and even beautiful. Nietzsche was uniquely talented at making his readers feel special and strong as a reward for embracing his deep, misanthropic pessimism:

May good reason preserve us from the belief that someday or other humanity will discover an ultimate, ideal order and that then happiness will shine down with constant intensity upon the people ordered in this way, like the sun in the tropics: […] No golden age, no cloudless sky is allotted to these coming generations. […] Nor will suprahuman goodness and justice stretch like an immobile rainbow over the fields of the future. [54]

We see now why Chinese and Soviet masses generate such widespread revulsion among the would-be aristocrats of the West, how even Western proletarians feel comfortable referring to them as gullible “herds” and “insects.” Nietzschean thought, unlike Hitlerian thought, is widely respected and acknowledged as an influence by powerful people in just about every institution in our society: in an academic setting (Hannah Arendt, Jordan Peterson), in mass media (superhero movies, Breaking Bad, etc.), and on the Left (Emma Goldman, Mark Fisher, Contrapoints, etc.).

My last argument regards consciousness-raising and self-awareness.

We’ve established that Marx used the concept of “primitive accumulation” to describe one of the operational aspects of capitalism. But Marx also discussed “primitive communism,” in reference to the solidarity and camaraderie that was necessary for the survival of early human societies, because it bore an important resemblance to future communist society.

According to Marx, solidary forms of social organization that in the past had arisen simply out of need and circumstance, which were equally superseded by need and circumstance (by the efficient oppression of man by man, by slavery), were to make an emancipatory comeback. However, this time around they would be enshrined and protected by masses of conscious workers, workers who know the value of their labour, who demand an economy that they have made, that they know they have made, and that they are capable of remaking ongoingly. [55]

Nietzsche, if we accept the reading of him as the ultimate fascist philosopher, is easily understood as making an analogous plea to his own reactionary constituency. Where Hannah Arendt and John Seeley try claim that Western colonization and slavery were “absentminded” pursuits, Nietzsche persuades readers that there is glory in all of it, if done properly, aesthetically, “beyond good and evil.” Where Marx wants the masses to rediscover “primitive communism,” only this time consciously, Nietzsche wants elites to pursue the brutal programme of “primitive accumulation,” only this time consciously and without private shame.

I say private because, in anti-symmetry with Marx, and fully aware of the danger of letting people know what he’s really about, Nietzsche recommends concealing one’s aims. Thus we come to understand Nietzsche’s warm reception in the liberal West, whose architects turn out to be much better pupils of Nietzsche than the Nazis ever were. George Kennan posits American supremacy as an end in itself, donning a perfectly serviceable mask of liberal pluralism, then goes on to play an important role in planning several decades of “Pax Americana” on the basis of genocidal terrorism. The defining characteristic of the fascist is that they defend their anti-egalitarianism purposefully. The fundamental cleavage between Classical Liberalism and Modern Liberalism is simply the heightened awareness, given the Revolutions and Counter-Revolutions of the 20th century, that it is tactically expedient to wear a mask.

The observation that capitalism always operates in dual aspects (the regime of non-violent exploitation in the core and the regime of violent expropriation in the periphery) is the key to understanding how, though swastikas may be banned and in poor taste, the entire history of the West can be described as deeply fascist:

The profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilization lies unveiled before our eyes, turning from its home, where it assumes respectable forms, to the colonies, where it goes naked. [10]

Elevating Nietzsche to the position of ur-fascist means that he is not someone who can be dismissed out of hand. Our task as communists is to prove him wrong.

#i have to read the rest of the article more thoroughly because it does seem to present a counterproductive view of fascism #but maybe that's just first blush #anyway this excerpt is interesting