I disavow the ignorance displayed in the statement that “Feminists always think women are better than men.” But felt important to share how well received such a message is received on this site.
Kind of a roundabout way to say that, but I guess the underlying message is people are equally terrible? That's not really the worst opinion I've seen.
thanks for saying the truth lol. i happen to also believe that people are equally terrible but it’s annoying that people are intentionally ignoring the other half of the message.
That is definitely what they said, but they seem to mislabel feminism in general. Since feminism isn't about superiority to men, then who they are referring to is not representative of feminism as a whole. I guess what I'm saying is that they are actually right that anyone that thinks that one group is superior to another is wrong. They are wrong about the term they used to describe someone like that though, which I don't label as the worst thing ever compared to actually thinking the former point. So not understanding the term feminism bad, but also their point directed at the right people isn't wrong.
ignores the entire first half of the sentence, the half that i highlighted in my post “that’s not really the worst opinion i’ve seen” and twenty odd upvotes
People will conveniently skim the subtext and skip to the true parts when the text, when taken as a whole, confirms their own biases.
A lot of people see feminism as a "women are better than men" take. It's not, that's radfem, feminism is about equality despite the name as it has roots in the suffragettes movement.
They certainly have a misunderstanding of what most people mean when they call themselves feminists. My point was it's not as bad as it could be since they don't demonize what feminism actually is. They think everyone is on an equal level even if they don't have a positive opinion of everyone. I would say misusing a term is not really that bad when they could have said a lot worse like actually saying something along the lines of "women bad." Which I didn't really get that from their post, but perhaps I misunderstood their intentions.
Lemmy isn't a monolith, and understanding that the fediverse has set itself up as an alternative to centralised platforms, I don't think we should be surprised when trolls who tend to get banned on those other platforms find their way here.
Of course we're going to see a lot of reactionary opinions here. These are the reactionaries that are too reactionary for reddit. They've learned to be less overt in their views because lemmy can excise a whole instance that's just reactionary.
I'd say right now they're trying to radicalise the normies. Vote manipulation is probably part of that strategy to make their views look more accepted than they are.
People are blaming propaganda, I additionally blame the attention economy aka social media algorithms that favor attention. Young men are often shown videos of "crazy feminists" acting stupid, which gives this impression.
If you only see the dumbest people and takes from a movement, big surprise you won't understand it.
honestly i don’t think it’s too big a stretch to claim that the attention economy you describe is an intentional structure of conservative propagandists.
Not at all a stretch indeed. Although I think they discovered the attention economy, which was initially a side-product of profit-driven social networks.
I think your point might also apply the other way - people are also encouraged to make exaggerated, incendiary comments for attention. Mild, reasonable takes, especially not posted quickly, will usually be overshadowed by the more extreme top comments. I believe the poster in question defended themselves claiming it was just an exaggeration.
excellent analysis. this is part of my reasoning for making posts like these. silly little reactionary posts responding to misunderstanding or bigotry often have some of the more interesting and nuanced discussion and learning in the comments.
tldr i think it’s possible to reverse engineer propaganda structures if you put some thought into it
I additionally blame the attention economy aka social media algorithms that favor attention
I mean this is also propaganda :P This is how the alt right are setting their hooks in people, by using the algorithms as they are to get boys and young men to listen to their little gurus etc. and slowly pull them right.
These two have been lit really doing the root cause analysis. Has to go further, glad to see bell hooks mentioned in the thread. And the curiousity. Conservative propaganda and indoctrination doesn't play fair. Leopards, faces, how long will folks allow their rights be stripped away before their eyes?
I mean, I do think that using the term Feminism for movements that aren't about women seeking equality is kind of a stretch of the original word. If the focus of the movement has changed so much that defining it as the original focus isn't accurate anymore, a new word should be used for the new movement instead. I'm undereducated on modern Feminist theory but this seems to me to be self-evident and I've never seen a good argument why referring to gender-related egalitarianism as Feminism has more positives than negatives.
imo we're also just at a point now where everyone's getting fucked, maybe let's focus on preventing fascism right now and when neonazi parties aren't getting 40% of the votes we can go back to worrying specifically about women's rights.
Though aside from that there's also the fact that we're sorta supposed to not be grouping everything into "men" and "women" anymore, so at the very least the term "feminism" feels a bit inherently unsuitable.. Maybe let's just go with working class solidarity yeah?
I have always felt that feminism has had a marketing problem. I consider myself a feminist and I am for equal rights for all. But the issue with feminism is that it's easy to point to the word and use it to propagandize a people against it. The word evokes a priority towards women (which I believe it should), but that makes folks feel like there are people out to be against them which is not what the movement is about.
And then you have the people who claim to be feminist who are really just misandrists who want to see men broght down to achieve equality or who want to see women be valued higher than men. In reality, the way forward should be to lift women up to the level that society holds men. It shouldn't be a battle of sexes.
Feminism also (in name only) sorta precludes anyone who isn't female. So non-binary? Get fucked I guess? I think there really ought to be a better way to market an equality movement than labelling it for women, even if that is the primary target of increasing equality.
It would be like calling a racial equality movement blackism and then saying you represent all race's equality. That specifically disregards all races not considered black from a marketing perspective, even if your movement's actions are positive representation for all races.
The rest of the work you are responding to is in fact doing exactly what you are asking, reasserting the truth that “Feminism is for Everybody.” You should read it! Of course, she doesn’t have a time machine and can’t rewrite entire etomological history, but the book is good and more people should read it. It’s linked in the above comment :)
awww dont tell me what to do :( i have learned much on this site and now i’m contributing back. i like
doing my part to make the places i hang out nicer for everyone :)
Also is this OC in 196?
yes
Isn’t that sort of against the spirit of the community?
How hard is it to manipulate votes on Lemmy instances? I'm guessing the answer varies depending on the instance but I don't think it's completely impossible on any of them.
Whenever I see such situations I'm glad I have created an account on hexbear after they federated, because I know they don't tolerate this shit. All the ex-reditors on those instances tell each other scary campfire stories of the things hexbears did when they were federated with them (or as is the case .world, the things they could do if they were hypothetically federated), but as can be seen from the upvotes on that post, they are the people who would most benefit from being haunted by them for their takes.
Sadly and ironically, FOSS mentality and bigotry have a very broad overlap. I guess being terminally online at a formative age can have only so many outcomes.
While I see how it would be very logical to think that a community founded under the principles of openness, cooperation and liberty would have less bigotry, this is sadly not the case.
Glad to hear you've found welcoming places. It is unfortunately not the case for most of the community and the first step in making any kind of improvement is acknowledging the problem.
I've exchanged dozens of comments with drag, drag is a snowflake troll. In all of our interactions, I misgendered drag once and drag immediately capitulated on it and acts like I've maliciously set out to torture drag for making a mistake, once. Drag then turned on me for defending drag's pronouns in a discussion about how many feel new and modern pronouns don't deserve respect, claiming I am lying about drags pronouns and only did it to hurt drag.
But drag refuses to apologize for calling me a Nazi, or any of the other insults drag has hurled at me, because drag feels I'm a Nazi for criticizing Harris/the DNC despite me being a trans veteran who voted for Harris.
I'm sorry drag, but it's just not transphobia to not be willing to use bespoke alternative second person pronouns. Second person pronouns are probably the single most closed class in the English language.
Drag is talking about the aftermath of the time drag made two posts on c/yepowertrippinbastards, and some furry came to both posts to start fights, say nounself pronouns are trash, ping random other people to get them to fight drag, call drag a troll for being trans, and give fake bans to drag in the modlog. Then, when drag went to the admins of the furry instance to complain about the mod abuse, this guy created an alt account to harass himself while pretending to be drag, and pinging various other people in the furry community to start fights in the same strategy he used on his own account. The end result of which was a bunch of furries who drag has never heard of assuming drag pinged them and harassed this guy, and spreading rumours about drag, just as this guy planned.
And the specific aftermath drag is talking about is when drag was banned from c/[email protected] for "encouraging suicide" (telling trans Americans to shoot Nazis). Drag contacted the mods and explained the situation, and they said they were wrong to ban drag for encouraging suicide, but that they'd heard some "more serious accusations" that they refused to share, but that were now the reason for the ban. So in short, drag got banned from a trans community for secret reasons and was given no chance to appeal.
What drag thinks happened is that furry guy, being a skilled manipulator with deep knowledge of Lemmy systems and a grudge against nounself pronoun users, convinced that mod team to go along with his campaign against drag, while hiding his transphobic intentions behind the false flag campaign. So the mod team thought they were protecting trans users on their community from harassment. They had good intentions. But the intention guiding their actions without their knowledge was this transphobic guy who loves starting fights and hates nounself pronouns. They sided with a transphobic bad actor over a trans member of their community because they were lied to. And if they had followed proper moderation procedure about not banning people for secret reasons, it wouldn't have happened. Which is why these kinds of procedures exist in the first place, it's to protect people from disinformation campaigns. So in drag's opinion, those mods bear some responsibility for the hidden intention guiding their actions, because they weren't careful enough to keep the transphobia out of their actions.