How about the winners be decent human beings and not subject matter other humans to subhuman treatment? Just because societies do that sort of thing ("it's just how it is") doesn't mean that's how it should be.
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TheValkyries
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On the one hand I don't want this thread to devolve into some dumb ass argument about "a civilizations right to slavery" or some apeshit stupidity like that...
On the other hand this thread already has Cookie trying to play off Cathys treatment as if it had nothing to do with her trans identity while passing off the "contact mods" shtick when t was the mods doing the usage of her renounced name in the first place. Not to mention the "hey Alice YOU need to understand that the Internet is all about MY being able to make fun of things and people with no responsibility, and anyone who disagrees has no responsibility for their own emotions and should learn to repress them better."
So really, what's to save here?
On the other hand this thread already has Cookie trying to play off Cathys treatment as if it had nothing to do with her trans identity while passing off the "contact mods" shtick when t was the mods doing the usage of her renounced name in the first place. Not to mention the "hey Alice YOU need to understand that the Internet is all about MY being able to make fun of things and people with no responsibility, and anyone who disagrees has no responsibility for their own emotions and should learn to repress them better."
So really, what's to save here?
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“The delusion goes even further than this glaring mis-combination of fictitious guilt [of the victims] and a punishment that was only too real… In this forgetting of what is scarcely past, one senses the fury of the one who has to talk [their own self] out of what everyone else knows, before they can talk them out of it.”
i don't know why i'm giving into such disingenuity, but:
you have an s-mod in this thread telling a bisexual person that they don't count as a real queer man when they're talking about being harassed for being a queer man (and managing to vomit really awful racial slurs unnecessarily in the process AND heighten the inaccuracy of the post since non-passing mixed PoC constantly get harassed for theri race, lol) and the person who leads firebot, the place where the most racism, transphobia, and misogyny can be found on smogon dot com, and you really think people are gonna pm you about being harassed? lol. yes, i'd definitely come forward about my experiences to people who would instantly dismiss them and tell me to get a thick skin. as you know, I was a super mod, I had multiple people come to me even when I was just a cong mod because I made an active attempt to set an example and oppose this shit when I saw it. please don't give me this shit like you all don't know it's the case when I made sure plenty of you knew it was the case.
hell, most of you also participated in the nonconsensual distribution of women's nudes or the legitimisation of it. yeah you banned it recently, can't imagine how this community would've been perceived as hostile to women before (especially when many of the prominent female users were subject to frequent harassment, stalking [and not just by creeps you all didn't like but popular users too], objectification, a few attempts to doxx, and misgendering)
also i'm not going to do what minwu said and give you all a list of all the trans women this community shunted out so everyone can drag their names through the mud again and deadname them and call them men and ask intrusive questions about their genitals and whatever, and a lot of the harassment is IRC/sim stuff (but both of those are important to participating in this community as you all acknowledge and the same shit you tolerate on IRC leaks into socialisation forums. to be fair #pokemon is usually a lot nicer than the other channels last time I checked and all due credit to the auth for that), but the general a) refusal of people to even give the most basic respect to them b) ambient and unapologetic transphobia everywhere you go c) harassment campaigns against trans women (and don't give me that 'it was her personality' shit; sure i'm biased about her personality in that i made the fucking effort to get along with her, even though i fought with cathy the day i met her, and was lucky enough to become her friend, but if it was just her personality why did everyone target her gender, her previous identity, etc. with such passion?). i'm literally just not going to engage with 'what transmisogyny?' from a person who ran a script for years linking a trans woman to her deadname which she requested with more politeness than was warranted that people not use (and spent years trying to get people to understand) and whose forum is polluted by shit like TIK's thread about trans disclosure or all the general mockery of trans identities, but i will expand:
the general gender scare on this forum (large insecurity about being 'tricked' by a woman with a dick, hunting out 'fake' genders) is enough to terrify a lot of trans people who already endure that shit everywhere they go. people who aren't white and cis shouldn't have to jump through more hoops than everyone else to participate in a competitive pokémon community when they already have to jump through more hoops than everyone else to participate in society. i'm not expecting you all to suddenly change your minds but if you want to actually put your money when your mouth is then you kinda need to set examples and be a bit more receptive about criticism of the site, maybe? definitely don't gaslight people who have already gone through harassment. i mean, the fact you're all so deadset that slurs are just good fun without consideration that some people don't consider them good fun and anyone who doesn't is the problem is pretty nonconducive (let alone the routine hateful rhetoric of minorities). slurs do have context and meaning, the context behind the f slur doesnt go away because you use it on a straight person, especially one who's perceived as acting effeminate, and if the ydidn't then why would you use them so disproportionately compared to other insults? why's it gay people and black people and women and trans people and not white cis straight men?
yes I'm sensitive to slurs and everyone knows I'm a drama llama. whatever, it's especially cool when nobody can forget how you behaved when you were fourteen and being abused in two different environments at once. did you ever maybe think it's natural to react emotionally to things? ever think maybe those slurs are reacted to so badly because they're hurtful and carry massive legacies of history that doesn't disappear when a person with hegemonic dominance throws them around? ever think maybe those slurs reflect a reality in which bi and gay guys are beaten up and murdered for being queer or disproportionately homeless because their parents kick them out and they can't get jobs, trans women are actually killed by insecure dudes and subject to police brutality and nonstop misgendering, black people were enslaved and colonised and to this day everyone tells them it's a post-racial society because a few managed to win at capitalism while their communities and homelands are being subjugated, and it's tiresome to hear them when you come online to do something unrelated to your material conditions? lets say i bought your argument about context-sensitivity, which i certainly don't because you don't get to tell people what good fun is especially when you throw slurs at them that will never be used to actually oppress you. why do those slurs get used the most to people to whom they actually 'apply'? why are gay men mocked the most for being gay? why are trans women the ones you all call slurs? why are women the ones you call cunts the most? why are actually black people the ones you call the n-slur the most and make awful jokes to?
as for internet lawlessness, cookie, you've probably been on the internet longer than me (unlike most people in this thread i'm willing to bet), but you realise ancient internet discourse actually revolved around respect and decency, right? like netiquette is super old for a reason? and when people who didn't abide by that flooded into places like usenet they invented a name for it because they couldn't stand the immaturity? that most communities have outgrown their fetishism for lawlessness? im also sure its super important to the fourteen year olds that join this site these days to preserve the internet hegemony of the early 2000s (like, when they were born), that definitely explains their vitriolic reactions to anyone who isn't them. couldn't just be that white supremacy etc. are still very real power structures. super hypocritical for a site with this type of political swing to appeal to tradition, lol. you're all so afraid of 'feminazis' as if even women somehow held power over men? tumblrinas? okay i guess coming across queer teenagers figuring out their identity is equivalently distressing to having to read 'ironic' slurs, calls for genocide, rape threats, etc. all day, you win the thick skin contest!
and don't give me that shit that feminazis and tumblrinas distorted the words 'privilege' and 'trigger'. yeah some of them dont understand, that makes them exactly like you all, who care very deeply about privilege and triggering i'm sure and seek to learn about these concepts so you can improve society. my whole family unit (me/brother/i) has PTSD, its people who make stupid jokes about the concept of triggering itself that makes it hard to talk about in these spaces because anxiety disorders, dysphoria, etc. are frequently belittled and turned into comic relief by edgelords. if you cared about the distortion of those words then you'd give credence to the concepts and not further drag them through the dirt. so, i don't buy it.
as for 'stain on the movement that gave birth to them', lets just give me a little credit and suggest that I probably know more about the history of feminism than most people itt. did you all know one of the key arguments of a lot of suffragettes was that if black men should vote, it was bad to make white women inferior to them and therefore white women were entitled to suffrage (never mind, you know, black women). did you know margaret sanger, the famous sex education and abortion activist, linked up with eugenicists to promote contraception because black people (whom she equated cognitively to chimpanzees) didn't have 'sexual control'? what about second-wave feminism, the movement that continued the tradition of prioritising the liberation of cis white women and advocate for the eradication and abuse of trans women? yeah I have a lot of issues with liberal feminism but its definitely not that they're trying to be inclusive and intersectional.
have you considered the reason you're surrounded by yes-men is because the ones who think its gross as fuck are mostly all gone (and incredulous at this thread) because none of you would take them seriously if they did come forward about what its like for a lot of minorities to be on this site? this is a site that viciously mocks vulnerability and sincerity, why would anyone ever come forward? why would anyone come forward to be told they have to take responsibility for their feelings (as if they weren't, as if they didn't have to constantly) so you all don't have to be made uncomfortable by the existence of trans people and feminists or examine your predilection for antiblackness? it's 'sad' I hid my race from even my best friends for years (because my best friends on irc literally said shit unironically like my people are cannibals), but I didn't 'take responsibility' for my feelings by concealing my reactions to that kind of racism for years? which of course is completely healthy, responsible behaviour, to automatically blame yourself for being attacked and not being down with slurs and suppress your feelings, and I totally recommend it if you want to replicate the psychological experience of being bullied at high school or domestically abused.
you all know I have a shit life, this doesn't need to turn into a comparison of battlescars, but I'd say getting this far when I was harassed just as badly everywhere else is suggestive that maybe I don't have paper-thin skin and maybe I actually just don't want to be needlessly harassed in online spaces. or maybe you need a thicker skin about criticism of your site and hegemony? maybe the reason i'm posting this is because I have a thick skin, hmmmm, and because I took responsibility for my discomfort and sought to make this a better space for myself and others. the fact I'm alive, working towards my degree still, and go to therapy every week in an attempt to, how do we say it, take responsibility for my emotional reactions and improve my psychological health, is really a testament to how thick my skin is, not the fact that I'm not willing to put up with this shit.
also minwu's derision towards this site's pathological terror of trans women is not remotely equivalent to slurs so I don't buy the moral high ground aspect of it either. btw most of the crap on this site was in social forums and irc, the pokémon forums were a lot chiller, nobody (afaik, sorry if I'm wrong) gets harassed like this in smeargle's studio, I never condoned it in the smog, it didn't happen much in c&c, 'cause the general standard of conduct is high enough in those forums that most of the low-hanging fruit gets deleted, kids were shitty in wi-fi sometimes but I always saw the mods proactively dealing with that
this post is admittedly incoherent because I wrote it in a non-linear order, sorry
you have an s-mod in this thread telling a bisexual person that they don't count as a real queer man when they're talking about being harassed for being a queer man (and managing to vomit really awful racial slurs unnecessarily in the process AND heighten the inaccuracy of the post since non-passing mixed PoC constantly get harassed for theri race, lol) and the person who leads firebot, the place where the most racism, transphobia, and misogyny can be found on smogon dot com, and you really think people are gonna pm you about being harassed? lol. yes, i'd definitely come forward about my experiences to people who would instantly dismiss them and tell me to get a thick skin. as you know, I was a super mod, I had multiple people come to me even when I was just a cong mod because I made an active attempt to set an example and oppose this shit when I saw it. please don't give me this shit like you all don't know it's the case when I made sure plenty of you knew it was the case.
hell, most of you also participated in the nonconsensual distribution of women's nudes or the legitimisation of it. yeah you banned it recently, can't imagine how this community would've been perceived as hostile to women before (especially when many of the prominent female users were subject to frequent harassment, stalking [and not just by creeps you all didn't like but popular users too], objectification, a few attempts to doxx, and misgendering)
also i'm not going to do what minwu said and give you all a list of all the trans women this community shunted out so everyone can drag their names through the mud again and deadname them and call them men and ask intrusive questions about their genitals and whatever, and a lot of the harassment is IRC/sim stuff (but both of those are important to participating in this community as you all acknowledge and the same shit you tolerate on IRC leaks into socialisation forums. to be fair #pokemon is usually a lot nicer than the other channels last time I checked and all due credit to the auth for that), but the general a) refusal of people to even give the most basic respect to them b) ambient and unapologetic transphobia everywhere you go c) harassment campaigns against trans women (and don't give me that 'it was her personality' shit; sure i'm biased about her personality in that i made the fucking effort to get along with her, even though i fought with cathy the day i met her, and was lucky enough to become her friend, but if it was just her personality why did everyone target her gender, her previous identity, etc. with such passion?). i'm literally just not going to engage with 'what transmisogyny?' from a person who ran a script for years linking a trans woman to her deadname which she requested with more politeness than was warranted that people not use (and spent years trying to get people to understand) and whose forum is polluted by shit like TIK's thread about trans disclosure or all the general mockery of trans identities, but i will expand:
the general gender scare on this forum (large insecurity about being 'tricked' by a woman with a dick, hunting out 'fake' genders) is enough to terrify a lot of trans people who already endure that shit everywhere they go. people who aren't white and cis shouldn't have to jump through more hoops than everyone else to participate in a competitive pokémon community when they already have to jump through more hoops than everyone else to participate in society. i'm not expecting you all to suddenly change your minds but if you want to actually put your money when your mouth is then you kinda need to set examples and be a bit more receptive about criticism of the site, maybe? definitely don't gaslight people who have already gone through harassment. i mean, the fact you're all so deadset that slurs are just good fun without consideration that some people don't consider them good fun and anyone who doesn't is the problem is pretty nonconducive (let alone the routine hateful rhetoric of minorities). slurs do have context and meaning, the context behind the f slur doesnt go away because you use it on a straight person, especially one who's perceived as acting effeminate, and if the ydidn't then why would you use them so disproportionately compared to other insults? why's it gay people and black people and women and trans people and not white cis straight men?
yes I'm sensitive to slurs and everyone knows I'm a drama llama. whatever, it's especially cool when nobody can forget how you behaved when you were fourteen and being abused in two different environments at once. did you ever maybe think it's natural to react emotionally to things? ever think maybe those slurs are reacted to so badly because they're hurtful and carry massive legacies of history that doesn't disappear when a person with hegemonic dominance throws them around? ever think maybe those slurs reflect a reality in which bi and gay guys are beaten up and murdered for being queer or disproportionately homeless because their parents kick them out and they can't get jobs, trans women are actually killed by insecure dudes and subject to police brutality and nonstop misgendering, black people were enslaved and colonised and to this day everyone tells them it's a post-racial society because a few managed to win at capitalism while their communities and homelands are being subjugated, and it's tiresome to hear them when you come online to do something unrelated to your material conditions? lets say i bought your argument about context-sensitivity, which i certainly don't because you don't get to tell people what good fun is especially when you throw slurs at them that will never be used to actually oppress you. why do those slurs get used the most to people to whom they actually 'apply'? why are gay men mocked the most for being gay? why are trans women the ones you all call slurs? why are women the ones you call cunts the most? why are actually black people the ones you call the n-slur the most and make awful jokes to?
as for internet lawlessness, cookie, you've probably been on the internet longer than me (unlike most people in this thread i'm willing to bet), but you realise ancient internet discourse actually revolved around respect and decency, right? like netiquette is super old for a reason? and when people who didn't abide by that flooded into places like usenet they invented a name for it because they couldn't stand the immaturity? that most communities have outgrown their fetishism for lawlessness? im also sure its super important to the fourteen year olds that join this site these days to preserve the internet hegemony of the early 2000s (like, when they were born), that definitely explains their vitriolic reactions to anyone who isn't them. couldn't just be that white supremacy etc. are still very real power structures. super hypocritical for a site with this type of political swing to appeal to tradition, lol. you're all so afraid of 'feminazis' as if even women somehow held power over men? tumblrinas? okay i guess coming across queer teenagers figuring out their identity is equivalently distressing to having to read 'ironic' slurs, calls for genocide, rape threats, etc. all day, you win the thick skin contest!
and don't give me that shit that feminazis and tumblrinas distorted the words 'privilege' and 'trigger'. yeah some of them dont understand, that makes them exactly like you all, who care very deeply about privilege and triggering i'm sure and seek to learn about these concepts so you can improve society. my whole family unit (me/brother/i) has PTSD, its people who make stupid jokes about the concept of triggering itself that makes it hard to talk about in these spaces because anxiety disorders, dysphoria, etc. are frequently belittled and turned into comic relief by edgelords. if you cared about the distortion of those words then you'd give credence to the concepts and not further drag them through the dirt. so, i don't buy it.
as for 'stain on the movement that gave birth to them', lets just give me a little credit and suggest that I probably know more about the history of feminism than most people itt. did you all know one of the key arguments of a lot of suffragettes was that if black men should vote, it was bad to make white women inferior to them and therefore white women were entitled to suffrage (never mind, you know, black women). did you know margaret sanger, the famous sex education and abortion activist, linked up with eugenicists to promote contraception because black people (whom she equated cognitively to chimpanzees) didn't have 'sexual control'? what about second-wave feminism, the movement that continued the tradition of prioritising the liberation of cis white women and advocate for the eradication and abuse of trans women? yeah I have a lot of issues with liberal feminism but its definitely not that they're trying to be inclusive and intersectional.
have you considered the reason you're surrounded by yes-men is because the ones who think its gross as fuck are mostly all gone (and incredulous at this thread) because none of you would take them seriously if they did come forward about what its like for a lot of minorities to be on this site? this is a site that viciously mocks vulnerability and sincerity, why would anyone ever come forward? why would anyone come forward to be told they have to take responsibility for their feelings (as if they weren't, as if they didn't have to constantly) so you all don't have to be made uncomfortable by the existence of trans people and feminists or examine your predilection for antiblackness? it's 'sad' I hid my race from even my best friends for years (because my best friends on irc literally said shit unironically like my people are cannibals), but I didn't 'take responsibility' for my feelings by concealing my reactions to that kind of racism for years? which of course is completely healthy, responsible behaviour, to automatically blame yourself for being attacked and not being down with slurs and suppress your feelings, and I totally recommend it if you want to replicate the psychological experience of being bullied at high school or domestically abused.
you all know I have a shit life, this doesn't need to turn into a comparison of battlescars, but I'd say getting this far when I was harassed just as badly everywhere else is suggestive that maybe I don't have paper-thin skin and maybe I actually just don't want to be needlessly harassed in online spaces. or maybe you need a thicker skin about criticism of your site and hegemony? maybe the reason i'm posting this is because I have a thick skin, hmmmm, and because I took responsibility for my discomfort and sought to make this a better space for myself and others. the fact I'm alive, working towards my degree still, and go to therapy every week in an attempt to, how do we say it, take responsibility for my emotional reactions and improve my psychological health, is really a testament to how thick my skin is, not the fact that I'm not willing to put up with this shit.
I'd buy this 'sincerity' aspect if people made any attempt to correct their ignorance instead of just denying it existsMikeDawg said:
also minwu's derision towards this site's pathological terror of trans women is not remotely equivalent to slurs so I don't buy the moral high ground aspect of it either. btw most of the crap on this site was in social forums and irc, the pokémon forums were a lot chiller, nobody (afaik, sorry if I'm wrong) gets harassed like this in smeargle's studio, I never condoned it in the smog, it didn't happen much in c&c, 'cause the general standard of conduct is high enough in those forums that most of the low-hanging fruit gets deleted, kids were shitty in wi-fi sometimes but I always saw the mods proactively dealing with that
this post is admittedly incoherent because I wrote it in a non-linear order, sorry
lmao this is fresh because so few people know the real reasons / have the logs about why cathy was shunned from smogon the second time
while there may (emphasis on may) have been some transphobic actions the FIRST time around, cathy's banishment from smogon the second time around had literally nothing to do with her trans identity and everything to do with the fact that she was mentally unstable
im not in the mood to completely castigate an individual but if these ridiculous implications keep flying out here im strongly inclined to reveal all of the logs / reasons for cathy's banishment the second time, and trust me, it isnt something the cathy white knights want out in the open, but hey, if you all insist on throwing out bullshit like cathy was banished / shunned for transphobic reasons, im more than happy to reveal the reasons for why she was banned, but that is entirely on you guys (mostly for being completely uninformed and so willing to spread nonsensical generalizations)
also im not even gonna bother responding to you jumpluff because both your posts in this thread are just gross generalizations and frankly speaking, you and i both know there were other HUGE reasons you left smogon
ignoring chaos's miltank posts (the reaction to which was hilariously hyperbolic), i really want to know where smogon's auth was explicitly transphobic in a serious manner
if you're claiming that every village idiot we have here is representative of smogon, then i dont know what to say to you, but i do want to know where smogon's upper staff was explicitly transphobic in serious manner
i understand not appreciating jokes (and hey, if vader's crass jokes get to you, i get it), particularly those that reinforce stereotypes, but you have to realize that those types of jokes are universally made, and arent weighted particularly towards transphobia or homophobia or racism or sexism or whatever
and by universally made i mean made in almost any semi large non specialist internet community
Though I'm moderately surprised Aldaron is being open about anything, I think we should avoid bringing up users who are not involved in this thread. I think Jumpluff's comment that it may end up in the same people getting dragged through the mud again is very true, even if it is not the initial intent.
I'm moderately surprised you are willing to stick to standard potshots based on nothing but hey, par for the course for you and your crowd
I disagree entirely; if the implications given in this thread are so strongly toward cathy being banished / banned for TRANSPHOBIC reasons the second time around, I'm far more inclined to reveal the whole, actual truth behind her banishment to set the story straight as opposed to letting you all give impressions to the community that completely unjustified and off base
I disagree entirely; if the implications given in this thread are so strongly toward cathy being banished / banned for TRANSPHOBIC reasons the second time around, I'm far more inclined to reveal the whole, actual truth behind her banishment to set the story straight as opposed to letting you all give impressions to the community that completely unjustified and off base
I named it but ok
I know as well as you know why Cathy isn't around anymore and you'll note that I said rather clearly that Cathy was harassed for being trans. I don't have an issue with people disagreeing with her or not liking what she did, I do have an issue with people who think mocking her for being trans (which persisted well after she 'left' the second time, please) and 'mentally unstable' was justified instead of criticising her actions or that it was difficult to communicate with her (especially if you didn't take her in good faith like most people never did from the start, which really didn't help), or that it didn't compound her problems with the community. Emphasis on may lol, I named a heap of them but it's okay, everyone calling her a man or her deadname or asking her invasive questions especially when she expressed she was uncomfortable with them can't have possibly been transphobic. I don't remember if you were around for that but the sheer gall of you trying to pretend it didn't go on even when Cathy had nothing to do with Smogon anymore and you were around takes my breath away. Also condoning transphobic abuse of Cathy when its perfectly sufficient to criticise her for her actions if you don't like them legitimises transphobic abuse of people you don't like (which is, if you take the chance to read, the heart of my complaint), which creates and legitimises an environment of generalised transphobia, please. You're smart, don't give me that disingenuous shit.
And yes village idiots are representative of Smogon when the popular user/staff culture doesn't just have a long history of condoning and tolerating that behaviour, it encourages them to act that way by replicating the same behaviour and dismissing every single person who speaks out against it.
I really enjoy this 'you have to understand', 'you have to realise' rhetoric. Have you considered that maybe I do fucking realise because I encounter them constantly, and I seek out spaces where they aren't made because people go out of their way to be inclusive? Maybe it's better that things actively change instead of just thinking everything is ok because it happens elsewhere? They're not small spaces, I spend most of my online time on Twitter (where there's plenty of harassment but I can at least respond to it and hang out with people who actively get rid of it from their circles). I deal with enough stupidity playing video games online that I don't want to deal with it discussing video games. Everyone here was cool when I thought misandry was clever though (fwiw I don't anymore), nobody threw massive shitfits because I made jokes about masculinity or called me a feminazi, so I guess this really is an egalitarian space after all. Guess jokes about race aren't linked to race now.
like................................?????
my problems with chaos maybe? I stopped contributing to Smogon's site and never engaged with him but he was still such a routinely shitty person in the exact same banal nature I described that I suppose perhaps my problems with chaos do come under this umbrella. Actually most of my repeatedly expressed problems with this site's staff had to do with these complaints so I suppose we can lump it in. :) Wacky, I think staff should set a proper example if they don't want to be associated with the behaviour of their site's village idiots! Not like village idiots suck up to and emulate the behaviour of ppl like chaos.
School? I was getting straight As when I modded Cong.
Splinters? I disappeared when the most recent splinter drama came to light because I was a coward and didn't want anything to fucking do with it, then started modding again. HMMm clearly the problem
Go on, tell me about my lived experiences.
Also billymills and I have diametrically opposed ideology and the last like seven times we spoke it was about math, not sure he counts as my ideology crew. But fwiw he's a great example of a staff member who has bad/ignorant opinions sometimes but generally seeks to understand why other people think differently/can at least respect people's terms for discourse even if he doesn't agree with them (e.g. doesn't make awful rape jokes around me and shit), which is why we get along so well!
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Alright, but can you make it a separate thread instead?
I'd rather this thread get back on track, as it's supposed to be advice/experience sharing. If you want to make a thread about smogon's internal structure please make it in insidescoop or somewhere else.
I'd rather this thread get back on track, as it's supposed to be advice/experience sharing. If you want to make a thread about smogon's internal structure please make it in insidescoop or somewhere else.
all this GO TO THE MODS talk is pretty hilarious. smogon's mods have shown bias to their 'bros' in the past and taken pretty shoddy disciplinary action when one of the offenders is a friend of their's........ and my instances revolve around male mods acting out towards female users.
yes, mmm, smogon has NEVER EVER displayed sexism towards women....
one mod would pester a friend after she had stated she didn't want further contact with him and then randomly message me as well to no response.. i dont recall what event spurred her to tell a smogon higher up he was harassing her but she did and, because they were bros, he got off with a baby warning to leave her alone. so mods are allowed to stalk and harass female users if they have friends who are admins/smods who will give them a slap on the wrist instead of any disciplinary action.
second one is the mods letting one of their modbros distribute underage revenge porn/nudes of a female user. in case you weren't aware, even nudes sent willingly are considered child porn and you CAN get in trouble with the law if you're found with them, if the person in them was underage at the time. revenge porn laws are becoming increasingly common as well, but was this guy given any disciplinary action for spreading around a(n underage) woman's nudes? nah just a bunch of dudes pattin him on the back
every forum has biased mods and heaven knows serebii's are a huge safehaven for pedophiles. to act like someone could come to smogon's mods and 100% get genuine concern they're being harassed because of their sex/sexuality/race/religion/whatever other thing most of smogon's mods aren't and is a minority, is just plain laughable, because there are numerous instances where this was NOT the case and the situation was NOT properly dealt with.
not to mention the general entitlement that one's context is always presumed by others, or should be, and not grasping that context is the fault of the minority, AND that one has the right to spout out whatever slurs they want because "that's their universe to do it in." sure a straight dude can boast all he wants, nothin's gonna happen to him. which is the problem here, a bunch of dudes who think they have some sort of superiority to dictate the culture and everyone else has to get a thicker skin. but really, what gave anyone more of a right to mold the culture than anyone else?
yes, mmm, smogon has NEVER EVER displayed sexism towards women....
one mod would pester a friend after she had stated she didn't want further contact with him and then randomly message me as well to no response.. i dont recall what event spurred her to tell a smogon higher up he was harassing her but she did and, because they were bros, he got off with a baby warning to leave her alone. so mods are allowed to stalk and harass female users if they have friends who are admins/smods who will give them a slap on the wrist instead of any disciplinary action.
second one is the mods letting one of their modbros distribute underage revenge porn/nudes of a female user. in case you weren't aware, even nudes sent willingly are considered child porn and you CAN get in trouble with the law if you're found with them, if the person in them was underage at the time. revenge porn laws are becoming increasingly common as well, but was this guy given any disciplinary action for spreading around a(n underage) woman's nudes? nah just a bunch of dudes pattin him on the back
every forum has biased mods and heaven knows serebii's are a huge safehaven for pedophiles. to act like someone could come to smogon's mods and 100% get genuine concern they're being harassed because of their sex/sexuality/race/religion/whatever other thing most of smogon's mods aren't and is a minority, is just plain laughable, because there are numerous instances where this was NOT the case and the situation was NOT properly dealt with.
not to mention the general entitlement that one's context is always presumed by others, or should be, and not grasping that context is the fault of the minority, AND that one has the right to spout out whatever slurs they want because "that's their universe to do it in." sure a straight dude can boast all he wants, nothin's gonna happen to him. which is the problem here, a bunch of dudes who think they have some sort of superiority to dictate the culture and everyone else has to get a thicker skin. but really, what gave anyone more of a right to mold the culture than anyone else?
lol sure i'll make it somewhere else
also jumpluff's simple "And yes village idiots are representative of Smogon" is enough to convince me that there is no point to continuing this as we are soooooooo far off from even a remotely similar base to even come close to understanding each other
i've never, ever, in a million years thought of smogon as some conglomerate entity (and DEFINITELY not something that represents my views), and i've always viewed "smogon" simply as a collection of individuals who enjoy online pokemon
if some are transphobic, that is on those individuals, never on "smogon"
clearly we disagree on this point, so i dont even see the point in responding to each other
also jumpluff's simple "And yes village idiots are representative of Smogon" is enough to convince me that there is no point to continuing this as we are soooooooo far off from even a remotely similar base to even come close to understanding each other
i've never, ever, in a million years thought of smogon as some conglomerate entity (and DEFINITELY not something that represents my views), and i've always viewed "smogon" simply as a collection of individuals who enjoy online pokemon
if some are transphobic, that is on those individuals, never on "smogon"
clearly we disagree on this point, so i dont even see the point in responding to each other
tehy
Banned deucer.
holy shit, thank god this discussion is still at a point where i can weigh in:
A: i always use racial / homosexual slurs 'ironically' because I don't really feel they are insulting and thus i hope the guy on the other end think it's just funny that such a term has apparent meaning. i have felt bad about this at times and I might just move to replace all of them with tumbler terms 'r u a cisgender' which correctly castigates ppl i don't like. idk, the whole idea of races or sexuality meaning something is so patently ridiculous, given weight by so many idiots, that it just becomes kind of funny
B:
note that he didn't open with it. he didn't call her a feminazi, or anyone else on this site. he called the feminazis feminazis...unless there are 0 feminazis ever, there's nothing wrong with that.
there's no denying that feminazis exist... do you see the fucking 'delicious male tears' and '#killallmen' and shit? and in a way that goes back to our previous argument... the joke is not 'this is so ridiculous haha', it's 'this is actually how we feel, but emphasized for effect' or w/e. the joke is that it's fucking true that they hate men, and it exists because 'i hate men' is an ok opinion in those spaces. those are feminazis, and it's important that they be delineated as such so we can ignore all the other bullshit rhetoric they spew as coming from a person biased towards hurting men and helping women, at the least.
uh
we still have a ways to go on all the bad stuff, i'm happy to say i think i've stayed above it ? i fucking hope. mods could be better about it and so could we all i'm sure.
ald please don't, i want to see and i'm sure the public does too, plz plz plz
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oh yeah, internet lawlessness is the best. we have so many other forums to be politically correct and locked in, here is the place where i've always felt we can let our true selves fly. try not to be an asshole, sure, but you need a thick skin damnit
A: i always use racial / homosexual slurs 'ironically' because I don't really feel they are insulting and thus i hope the guy on the other end think it's just funny that such a term has apparent meaning. i have felt bad about this at times and I might just move to replace all of them with tumbler terms 'r u a cisgender' which correctly castigates ppl i don't like. idk, the whole idea of races or sexuality meaning something is so patently ridiculous, given weight by so many idiots, that it just becomes kind of funny
B:
i thought V had a fair point, namely that you should be able to brush it off since it isn't you. as for the rest, it's just firemods being edgy...do 100 year old slurs even offend people ? jesus, even i didn't know what a quadroon was. i do feel like edgy humor is purposely meant to offend people and thus won't necessarily be amusing to everyone, but the difference is hopefully that we know it's not for real.
fuck, ever since you got me i was just praying to get you back...thank you god for this post is shat right out of satan's anusvonfiedler said:
note that he didn't open with it. he didn't call her a feminazi, or anyone else on this site. he called the feminazis feminazis...unless there are 0 feminazis ever, there's nothing wrong with that.
there's no denying that feminazis exist... do you see the fucking 'delicious male tears' and '#killallmen' and shit? and in a way that goes back to our previous argument... the joke is not 'this is so ridiculous haha', it's 'this is actually how we feel, but emphasized for effect' or w/e. the joke is that it's fucking true that they hate men, and it exists because 'i hate men' is an ok opinion in those spaces. those are feminazis, and it's important that they be delineated as such so we can ignore all the other bullshit rhetoric they spew as coming from a person biased towards hurting men and helping women, at the least.
uh
we still have a ways to go on all the bad stuff, i'm happy to say i think i've stayed above it ? i fucking hope. mods could be better about it and so could we all i'm sure.
ald please don't, i want to see and i'm sure the public does too, plz plz plz
edit:
oh yeah, internet lawlessness is the best. we have so many other forums to be politically correct and locked in, here is the place where i've always felt we can let our true selves fly. try not to be an asshole, sure, but you need a thick skin damnit
your post is inanely ahistorical, the f slur is used to attack men who are attracted to men for being attracted to men which is why it was used against that person and why it upset that person, because they knew they were being shit on for being bi. even if the word didn't encompass non-monosexual queer men the intent is clearly still there to attack that person's bisexuality, it's really fucking shitty to invalidate people's reactions to being attacked for their sexuality and gender. im sure you'd agree that's not okay, thats why you hate #killallmen and don't use slurs against minorities you're not a part of right? right? right?
yes blood quantum slurs are offensive because they are racial slurs and surprise not everywhere is america. australia is a much younger colony as well than america (which afaicr you live in), those slurs were legal definitions used by the state to categorise mixed aboriginal people here in order to 'breed out' blackness (which was found by a federally-commissioned inquiry in the late '90s to have had genocidal intent, lol) and diminish the aboriginality of aboriginal people / their identities and right to community / justify removing mixed aboriginal kids from their homes and communities and people to forcibly assimilate them into anglo society and whittle away existing bastions of aboriginal culture / demonise interracial relationships which continued into the 1970s, so yes its fucking sensitive. they're also used to erase people's racial identities and originate from attacks on interracial relationships which is screwed up and no that ideology is not 100 years old, people still get mad about it.
no i don't expect you to know or understand shit like that (although god knows this generation could do with some more education about history), i do expect you to contain your ignorance a bit when people who know more than you about the subject are discussing it and maybe not gaslight people when you don't understand the situation.
im ignoring everything in your post that is unfixable like 'firemods being edgy' or 'smogon is our refuge from being politically correct', at least get your arguments in order with the rest of your Movement
edit:
how is it not aimed at him if it attacks queer men even if it wasn't nominal.
I'm a mixed black PoC and my mom was part of that policy, so of course I dont want to see those slurs WHICH ARE STILL USED (if you actually knew what I said then you wouldn't be arguing this point) and the general blood quantum rhetoric used to divide and separate and diminish black communities, and the analogy is bad because those slurs are used to diminish an identity that does apply. its also immaterial because mixed-race black people experience antiblack abuse and most are on the shitty end of white supremacy, just as bisexual men experience antihomosexual abuse. gay men are attacked for the same reason visibly bi men are attacked.
also congrats for accidentally hitting upon intersectionality
im not going to bother replying to tehy anymore because i dont want to make billy delete my posts for being offtopic but lol
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I feel like this is more the "vent about horrible sins committed against me or those I know" thread than anything remotely close to having a fair even-keeled discourse about potentially important issues
like, if you truly feel that "going to the mods" is not good enough for whatever historical reasons, maybe we should discuss how to improve that, at least for the senior staff if not all the mods (as we have waaayyyyy too many mods now for every mod to be truly representative of whatever you interpret "smogon" to be)
like, if you truly feel that "going to the mods" is not good enough for whatever historical reasons, maybe we should discuss how to improve that, at least for the senior staff if not all the mods (as we have waaayyyyy too many mods now for every mod to be truly representative of whatever you interpret "smogon" to be)
TheValkyries
proudly reppin' 2 superbowl wins since DEFLATEGATE
Yo bro, read the op... That's what the threads about...
I honestly don't know who you are or when it was that I "got you", but I think I can take your word for it.
Of course there are annoying people in literally every movement. But how come whenever anything within the ballpark of feminism comes up all the white guys start screaming about feminazi this, tumbler that? Tumbler isn't feminism. It's a web site for posting content you don't own.
I'm honestly not even convinced that #killallmen, cis-scum stuff wasn't entirely invented "ironically" by white bros. Or at least spread for the most part.
Actually I was trying to educate tehy and anyone else who thought it was necessary to further diminish the experiences of whoever it was that said they were called slurs for being bi. Also yes its a venting thread, the thread was explicitly made with the intention to discuss experiences like this on the site, I thought? To be fair I'm the one who derailed it by calling out staff, but given my close association with said staff it was a real part of my experience and also it was directly visible in this thread lol
billy said no internal structure conversation so maybe this post should be moved, but I already laid out how I think you should make it more conducive:
- stop doing the same things yourselves that you would be forced to by site policy to punish other people for
- if you wouldn't punish that kind of behaviour (slurs etc.) don't expect people to come to you to be told it's their fault or that they have to have a thick skin or grow up or generally be dismissed or made to feel worse
- you don't have to cave in to everyone who said something bad happened to them but there are nice ways to not make people feel minimised about their experiences while disagreeing with them and at least demonstrate that you are receptive to their complaint
- set a good example
- lay down ground rules about external harassment witch hunts etc. not being okay (which you already did and is a great start and I totally commend it but you can't expect people to instantly trust that sort of change, but you do need them as a bare minimum to be explicit about what people can actually come to you about and what won't be tolerated), visibly enforce them (has started to an extent) which will engender that trust
- stop denying that bad things did happen into the past (which is like the recommendation of basically every official inquiry into any sort of grievance ever, people don't like being invalidated), focus instead on fixing the future. since everybody is defending the status quo ofc I'm attacking it.
- differentiate between criticism of behaviour and attacks on identity
Some of the mods are plenty approachable as I suggested.
billy said no internal structure conversation so maybe this post should be moved, but I already laid out how I think you should make it more conducive:
- stop doing the same things yourselves that you would be forced to by site policy to punish other people for
- if you wouldn't punish that kind of behaviour (slurs etc.) don't expect people to come to you to be told it's their fault or that they have to have a thick skin or grow up or generally be dismissed or made to feel worse
- you don't have to cave in to everyone who said something bad happened to them but there are nice ways to not make people feel minimised about their experiences while disagreeing with them and at least demonstrate that you are receptive to their complaint
- set a good example
- lay down ground rules about external harassment witch hunts etc. not being okay (which you already did and is a great start and I totally commend it but you can't expect people to instantly trust that sort of change, but you do need them as a bare minimum to be explicit about what people can actually come to you about and what won't be tolerated), visibly enforce them (has started to an extent) which will engender that trust
- stop denying that bad things did happen into the past (which is like the recommendation of basically every official inquiry into any sort of grievance ever, people don't like being invalidated), focus instead on fixing the future. since everybody is defending the status quo ofc I'm attacking it.
- differentiate between criticism of behaviour and attacks on identity
Some of the mods are plenty approachable as I suggested.
tehy
Banned deucer.
your post is insanely ahistorical, none of the mentioned slurs were used against him
in fact it seems like many people are just using them on the side and not referring to him, and in that context, it does feel a bit dumb to be offended by them. being gay is only being attracted to other men, it's fairly different, and it does seem a bit dumb to be offended at something that isn't even aimed at you specifically
when did i say i hated kill all men? oops, all i said was people who say stupid shit need to be outed so that we can ignore the other stupid shit they say. in that context, it's important to note how stupid the thing they say is, rather than simply lump it under 'invalidating peoples reactions is bad'. if you can explain to me why my personal reactions are invalid i'm willing to listen (but please, not about the male power structure...please...we grow up in upper middle class family, idt my sister was ever told anything about her gender should dictate what she did, my mother instructed a course on tank operation, etc)jumpluff said:
'contain your ignorance'jumpluff said:
>>>>as if i didn't know the majority of this
assumptions make an asshole out of you
i said the word quadroon was 100 years old. it's literally an old racial slur dragged out for the express purpose of surprise at such an old racial slur. maybe it's not literally 100 years old, god fucking forbid...i'd say at least 30, 40. of course i could be wrong but asking google 'when did people stop saying quadroon' sure as shit didn't help. overall i don't know anyone who has been offended by those terms and therefore they seem pretty value-neutral, as most of these racial terms seem to be bad because they recall previous incidents, which i bet no one here had (with mulatto or quadroon). so if the intent is clearly non-offensive and it doesn't recall previous incidents, where is the actual offense?
oh yea, cultural and racial identity can go suck an enlargened donger.
ah, so you agree that firemods should be edgy and smogon is our refuge from being politically correct?jumpluff said:
if not put your money where your mouth is
edit:
also, what rest of my movement ? is it because of my avatar or something
Quickly running through with bullet points so you can understand them better and don't just go tl;dr:
- Cathy wasn't banned for transphobic reasons and that was not the implication. What's important is the amount of transphobic comments that were made by staff during the whole debacle. Cathy absolutely should have been banned. The fact that not only the site owner but a large portion of staff were being transphobic assholes both during and after both times is the issue.
- You can't say it's just village idiots when it's people in your senior staff that are making racist, homophobic, transphobic, misogynist comments and passing around nudes and phone numbers of their users. Yes, your site will be defined by its leaders.
- Status