lj-writes:

sonfaro:

korrasera:

lj-writes:

korrasera:

lj-writes:

korrasera:

To preface this, I’m not actually shipper or an anti-anti. By which I mean that my opposition to antis rests purely in their authoritarianism. But otherwise? I don’t have any skin in that game. I think reylo is a little gross myself, but shippers are free to do what they do. The closest I’ve gotten to caring is that I think Kara and Lena should be canon on Supergirl and I cried tears of joy when Korra and Asami became canon.

And unfortunately, you’re incorrect about antis. I mean, I would love it if the picture you were painting was accurate, that some antis are authoritarian while others are not, but the fact of the matter is that being an anti-shipper means that you’re subscribing to an authoritarian stance in regards to fandom. Sure, maybe you’re not as hardcore as other people, but the ideology you’re talking about is still ultimately authoritarian in nature. I wrote a short 101 on authoritarianism when an anon criticized me talking about authoritarian exclusionists that hate aces in the LGBTQ+ community because they didn’t understand authoritarianism either. (source)

As for your abortion debate example, a better way to put it would be this. Not all people who are anti-choice support murdering people who seek abortions or doctors who provide abortions. But! All people who are anti-choice stand opposed to bodily autonomy and think that all pregnant people, almost all of whom are women, should not have the right to control their own bodies. That’s an inherently authoritarian and an inherently violent ideology, regardless of the number of them willing to assault and murder people in the name of their cause. The only real caveat I have is that anti-abortion might just be born out of a different kind of authoritarianism, as in the US it’s strongly indicative of religious conservative Christian attitudes and that community is authoritarian as all get out.

In other words, you don’t have to provide shelter and material support to someone who does evil if you actively enable evil by embracing authoritarianism. Since anti-choice advocacy gets people killed and intentionally tries to strip rights from people, that counts.

Antis, on the other hand, just subscribe to an ideology that polices fandom looking for people who are not sufficiently pure, using disgust in the place of reasoning to judge someone as being evil or morally wrong. It would be nice if those of you who just didn’t like a ship were the core of your community, but that’s not what an anti is, at least not anymore. They’re people who harass shippers, drive them off of social media, and use claims of pedophilia and child grooming to do it. A lot of people have pointed out how anti attacks on shippers actually make it more difficult for us to stop predators who go after children because not only has it meant creating false reports that law enforcement officials have to take action on, but the community has themselves sheltered predators because they know how to manipulate authoritarian power structures in order to facilitate their grooming behaviors.

Why do you think so many people identify as left-wing in US politics without identifying as Democrat? It’s because identifying as a Democrat means participating in the system Democrats have built, much of which has been built on regressive social policies that aren’t much better than what Republicans offer. In this same fashion, identifying with a community that’s become defined by it’s authoritarian ideology means supporting that ideology, even weakly.

Yes, I stack rank antis near the bottom of the list of authoritarian groups that I personally care about fighting, but it’s still not healthy. If you want to be healthy then I’d encourage those of you who don’t subscribe to those views to come up with a new term to describe yourselves and break your community away from that ideology so you aren’t in tacit support of them.

For someone who’s not in fandom you sure are eager to tell me I’m wrong about fandom spaces I’ve been active in for years. You also seem to think you know what my “ideology” is when it’s nothing like what you describe. I’m actually closer to you–I think the ship is gross but that people are free to ship what they like. I don’t want to censor people or stop them from creating content, and I certainly don’t want to be anyone’s thought police. I have a hard enough time managing my own thoughts.

I do talk about things like bigotry and misogyny in fandom, commenting on and criticizing publicly available content generally without even interacting with the creators. That’s what the bulk of anti activity consists of, at least among people who came to be known as antis through a combination of tagging convention, identification by detractors, convenience, and self-identification.

I mean sorry we don’t match the cartoon idea of us you have in your head, I guess, but when reality and your own conceptions don’t match maybe it’s the latter that should be adjusted rather than the former. And that’s a cool take, telling us that we should cede our fan space and label to the worst elements among us, effectively saying we need to get out so the trolls and harassers can take over. All this from someone who has admitted to not being much involved in the spaces I’m talking about.

And if we did as you suggest and relabeled ourselves “crits” or something else, do you really think the caricature of us that lumps us in with harassing trolls will stop? I highly doubt it, considering that the reason Black women who talk about fandom racism get called fascists and racists isn’t because of a fandom label. They get treated like that because they’re Black women who talk openly about racism. Falsely labeling them as inherently authoritarian abusers helps, of course, so thanks for that.

All people who are anti-choice stand opposed to bodily autonomy and think
that all pregnant people, almost all of whom are women, should not have
the right to control their own bodies. That’s an inherently
authoritarian and an inherently violent ideology,

Having anti-abortion beliefs correlates with authorian personalities, certainly, but that by itself doesn’t make someone an authoritarian personality, or rather by itself doesn’t determine their score on the right-wing authoritarian scale. You seem to be sliding over the definition of “authoritarian” to encompass all bigotry and evil, which is unhelpful and imprecise. Authoritarianism is a scale, with high scores having predictive value for certain behaviors such as intellectual/moral inconsistency and aggression on behalf of leaders. It’s not a test of good and evil people. (I just took it myself and the people bragging in the comments about their low scores were… something.)

And did you seriously say people who identify as Democrats in the U.S. are supporting the Democratic Party’s worst policies? I mean I guess that means people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democratic Socialist who became the Democratic nominee for her district, is participating in the Democratic system and therefore is complicit. Never mind that leftists like her who run in Democratic primaries are trying to change the party and take it over from the centrists and right-wingers. It almost looks like a label is more important to you than actual actions.

In specific:

Unsurprisingly, I have a few problems with your response, starting with how you’ve just accused me of being eager to tell you who you are, when in fact you’re the person that was in a hurry to attach a label to me while simultaneously misrepresenting  and misunderstanding what I’ve said about authoritarianism. And a quick side-note: I referred to you as an anti-shipper and you’ve just said that you’re an anti-shipper in saying “I mean sorry we don’t match the cartoon idea of us you have in your head” so it doesn’t sound like I’m being presumptive at describing you as an anti. You just identified as one.

One thing I see I didn’t clarify properly before is that there’s a difference between calling someone a harasser and an authoritarian, but you’ve interpreted me talking about groups exhibiting authoritarian behaviors as being indicative that all such people are harassers. If you’ll reference my previous post you’ll see that I was very clearly talking about how people who consider themselves antis but do not engage in harassment are still siding with a group of people who harass people, because it’s those antis that go inventing claims of pedophilia and harassing people off of social media that you have to worry about.

That said, let’s get to the points you’ve made. Yes, if you aren’t aware that anti-shipping is a hotbed of authoritarianism then I am telling you that you are wrong about fandom spaces you’ve been active in for years. This is me, telling you that you’re wrong.

Next, let’s talk about what the actual point of describing how authoritarian antis are, because this shit comes up in my communities all the time in the form of exclusionists and truscum. In short, your community has a lot of dirty laundry and right now it’s been strewn about the floor for everyone to see. Or, in simpler terms, there is so much harassment leveled by antis at shippers that there’s no way that you can claim that they’re edge cases, they represent the community.

That’s something that is usually really useful in determining whether or not a community is inherently authoritarian, because in communities that don’t embrace it, or even better are outright anti-authoritarian, when someone behaves poorly the rest of the community calls that person in and helps them learn that what they’re doing is wrong. In authoritarian communities, the behavior is either condoned or supported, with only very weak attempts, if any, to put a stop to it. And that goes whether we’re talking about harassment, abuse, or straight up violence.

So, you’ve got three options. Deal with the problem people in your own community and reclaim it, break away as I mentioned before, or get used to being lumped in with people who do terrible things. Take the word authoritarianism out of it if you want, it’s not really important for this part of the framework, but to be honest I left out the ‘deal with your problem’ part of it because I anticipated that you’d reject that because you’d probably reject the notion that your community has problems. And yes, if there was a concerted effort by healthy anti-shippers, people who identified themselves by the way they find some aspects of shipping distasteful but in no way needed to enforce that view on shippers, you’d get a new reputation and would be able to distance yourself from being associated with abusive and authoritarian antis.

But the fact of the matter is that you’re still supporting a fundamentally authoritarian community. And you’re even inventing excuses for it, ways to explain away the criticism without actually addressing it.

---

In general:

Okay, now for all of the cleanup:

Yes, having anti-abortion beliefs makes you an authoritarian. You cannot hold anti-abortion beliefs without choosing in some part to support an authoritarian stance, in which someone chooses to police other people to change their behavior in order to bring it into line with a group norm based on purity and adherence to a central authority, whether that’s the ideology or a leader. Just like you cannot be selectively progressive and call yourself progressive, you can’t be anti-authoritarian and yet not support bodily autonomy. If you choose to oppose bodily autonomy, even in spirit, you are choosing authoritarianism, because the idea that our bodies are our own is core to not just anti-authoritarian principles, but also most legal systems and a great deal of everything human beings have ever based our morality on.

No, there’s no one authoritarian inventory. It’s been studied extensively for decades and a lot of people have come up with different scales and inventories to describe it, so your experience taking one right-wing authoritarianism inventory does not describe the whole of what authoritarianism means. My preference, and I’m hoping this is the one that you found, is the Right-wing Authoritarianism Scale invented by Bob Altemeyer, a professor at the University of Manitoba who studied authoritarianism in great detail. If you haven’t read his book The Authoritarians, it’s a great start. I recommend immediately following it up with the book Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents by Lindsay C. Gibson, PsyD. That should make the link between emotional immaturity and authoritarianism absolutely clear, something that Altemeyer only hints at in The Authoritarians, when he addresses the need for security in such groups.

I am impressed at the level of sophistry that takes ‘left-wing people often times don’t identify as Democrats because Democrats have done some terrible things’ and then suggest that means I’m saying that reformers and non-Democrats who attempt to join and reform the party are somehow responsible for regressive social policies they had no hand in building. Because, and let me quote you exactly here, “people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democratic Socialist,” is somehow responsible for things like the prison-industrial boom created by the Clinton Administration in the early 90s. I do hope you can see that this point is ridiculous because not only are Democratic Socialists not the same thing as Democrats, Democractic Socialists like Ocasio-Cortez, or the Justice Democrats that came out of supporting Bernie Sanders, who join with the Democratic Party to reform it are specifically choosing to fight the very same corruption I talked about.

No, I’m not defining authoritarianism as all bigotry and evil. The fact that you feel the need to simplify everything I’ve said to that point kinda suggests that you can’t engage with the material. I’ve repeatedly, in that 101 post I linked to you before and elsewhere on my blog, have addressed the complicated nature of authoritarianism, the way it does harm, it’s role as a cognitive flaw in our species that arises naturally, it’s relationship with emotional maturity, and the fundamental need for security that authoritarianism tries to fill…and the best you can come up with is to look at all that and say that I’m basically saying that authoritarianism = evil.

Hell, one of my core fucking points is that authoritarianism isn’t evil, it’s a trait that a lot of us embody that we can unlearn and that we have to fight to help others unlearn before they go past the point where they’re never going to give it up!

---

In closing:

I don’t like how simplistic your attitudes are on pretty much all of this. Whether we’re talking about the way you want to sidestep discussion of the problems that antis create, the way that you clearly don’t grasp authoritarianism or how it relates to political science, or just the way that you’re throwing cheap rhetorical tricks at me in an attempt to make your point, it does not sound like you’re arguing in good faith. At all.

I mean, you honestly just tried to turn something I said inside out and tell me that it somehow suggested that I cared more about labels than someone’s actions.

Well, your actions tell me that you can’t argue your way out of a wet paper bag or you’d be presenting substantive and valid points instead of misinterpretations and misdirects.

---

Post-script:

I noticed you’ve got an ‘anti-anti bs’ tag. Where’s your ‘anti bs’ tag?

If you stand opposed to people in the anti community that harass people, it seems like you might want to point that out when you see it and educate people on how to avoid it and prevent it. Or maybe take any stance on it aside from ignoring it.

Maybe you haven’t ignored it. I don’t know in detail, as I don’t follow your blog. But you want to tag stuff as being ‘anti-anti bs’ because presumably you think that people who oppose antis often say bullshit things. I’m pretty sure harassment and abuse is worse than bullshit, so why no tag there?

Me: *repeatedly states that there are antis who are harassers, trolls, and abusers, and explains that it won’t help to vacate the anti label in favor of them*

You: OMG YOU’RE DENYING THAT ANTIS HAVE PROBLEMS!!! DEAL WITH IT!!

At this point there doesn’t seem to be much relationship between what I said and what you’ve replied to. I do know there is a problem. I have acknowledged it. All I’ve told you is that there are authoritarian antis and non-authoritarian antis, much like there are authoritarian shippers and non-authoritarian shippers. It’s ironic that the ask at the top of this thread was literally about shippers harassing Black antis to drive them out of fandom, but I don’t go from there to say reylo is inherently authoritarian or whatever. It means there are reylos who behave badly, including in authoritarian ways.

Sure, maybe you’re not as hardcore as other people, but the ideology
you’re talking about is still ultimately authoritarian in nature.

Um? The only “ideology” I’ve described is this:

I think the ship is gross but that people are free to ship what they
like. I don’t want to censor people or stop them from creating content,
and I certainly don’t want to be anyone’s thought police. I have a hard
enough time managing my own thoughts.

I do talk about things like bigotry and misogyny in fandom,
commenting on and criticizing publicly available content generally
without even interacting with the creators.

This is authoritarian, despite not meeting any of the criteria you’ve described? If anything the only authoritarian parts seem to be the parts I’ve said I don’t subscribe to. This is another part where what you’ve said to me doesn’t seem to have any bearing on what I actually wrote. If you want to tell me I can’t argue/am not arguing in good faith, it’s a good idea to look like you actually know what my arguments are.

As for having an #anti reylo bs tag: There’s that inconvenient part where I and other antis have in fact discussed harassment and misogyny among antis (link, link). When disgusting shithole antis on Instagram stole and posted a picture of a shipper’s minor child, I knew about the situation because antis on Tumblr talked about it and condemned it.

You seem to think I should make more regular posts about anti reylo bs, but do you really not know how these harassers operate? They act generally as anonymous mobs who send awful anons to shippers. In order to regularly track and document that I’d have to follow/regularly read reylo blogs, which is a big no both for my own well-being and because that’s like, stalking? Anti antis can do that, which is an upside to their fandom presence. (It’s almost like anti anti isn’t inherently a bad thing? I mean what else do you call people who are against all antis? Oh right, you’d rather pretend you’re not anti anyone and prefer to make your inaccurate and wrong arguments under a veneer of neutrality and intellectual rigor that you don’t actually possess. Okay.)

I referred to you as an anti-shipper and you’ve just said that you’re an
anti-shipper in saying “I mean sorry we don’t match the cartoon idea of
us you have in your head” so it doesn’t sound like I’m being
presumptive at describing you as an anti. You just identified as one.

Where…. did I say you were presumptive… for calling me an anti…? I said I am one and that you were presumptive for making blanket condemnations of a fandom community whose activities as a whole and whose “ideology” you don’t actually know outside of its worst elements. I’m taking you to task for using the label incorrectly, not for applying it to me. Again, reading what I actually said would help.

Because it evidently bears repetition, I know there are authoritarian antis who subscribe to authoritarian beliefs. My problem is with your saying that there are authoritarian and non-authoritarian shippers, but that there are no antis who are not authoritarian or at least do not give tacit support to authoritarianism by being an anti. (Would this be a correct summation?) I’ve explained to you at length why that’s an inaccurate and harmful stance that helps silence fans of color who discuss fandom racism, so if you actually care about that you can scroll up to read it.

Yes, having anti-abortion beliefs makes you an authoritarian. You cannot
hold anti-abortion beliefs without choosing in some part to support an
authoritarian stance, in which someone chooses to police other people to
change their behavior in order to bring it into line with a group norm
based on purity and adherence to a central authority, whether that’s the
ideology or a leader.

Except there are multiple ways to have anti-abortion beliefs and not all of them involve adherence to purity and authority. I’ve debated enough of them on a sideblog to know (link if you want to see it). Many anti-abortion people sincerely–and wrongly–believe that abortion is murder and infanticide. Others of course, perhaps most, simply use that argument as a veneer for the authoritarian motivations you mentioned. That doesn’t mean the former are giving tacit support to the latter’s worst actions or have similar psychological profiles as the latter. It’s like saying soccer fans tacitly support hooligans by being soccer fans.

If you haven’t read his book The Authoritarians, it’s a great start.

The funny thing is I was literally describing Altemeyer’s research from that very book, and though I read it in full a long time ago (10+ years) I’ve checked it briefly to see if I remember the main points correctly. Unless my memory seriously fails me it didn’t have anything about labeling single beliefs as “inherently” authoritarian or blaming all conservatives for being complicit in authoritarianism.

I do hope you can see that this point is ridiculous because not only are
Democratic Socialists not the same thing as Democrats, Democractic
Socialists like Ocasio-Cortez, or the Justice Democrats that came out of
supporting Bernie Sanders, who join with the Democratic Party to reform
it are specifically choosing to fight the very same corruption I talked
about.

This just in: Being a Democratic nominee for Congress, hell, campaigning to be the Democratic nominee for President, does not constitute identifying as a Democrat. If a would-be Democratic nominee for President is not a Democrat, who is? Joining the Democratic Party isn’t the same thing as identifying as a Democrat? Whut?

Also LOL at thinking being a Democratic Socialist is incompatible with the Democratic Party, whose members hold a broad range of beliefs from leftist to right of center. It’s almost like people can identify with a party affiliation while being critical of it and working to change it, so your original take was hilariously wrong and actions matter more than labels.

This is still argument in bad faith. If you weren’t, you wouldn’t need to continually misrepresent the things I’ve said in this very thread to try to make your argument sound better without saying anything substantive.

About Democrats, first you were arguing that I said that reformers are part of the problem and now you’re saying that acknowledging that some people have joined with the Democrats specifically to reform them means that they aren’t Democrats. You should really choose one of those and stick to it. I shouldn’t need to give you a poli sci 101 to help you avoid engaging in rhetorical tricks. Hammer and nail indeed. It’s been a while since I’ve engaged with someone so interested in dodging the topic.

Here’s the core problem: You don’t want to acknowledge that supporting an authoritarian ideology means giving tacit support to authoritarians, whether or not you yourself embody any of those behaviors. I responded because you claimed that I was calling all antis authoritarian harassers. While your original position was inaccurate, it was presented in good faith. My failure is that I didn’t consider how uncomfortable you might be about this issue and how that might make you dig in your heels and just deny the topic all together.

Yes, if you support anti-abortion, it doesn’t matter how sincere you are that you believe abortion to be murder and infanticide, it’s still supporting an ideology that is at it’s core authoritarian. Similarly, all you’re doing here is trying to argue that some anti-shippers aren’t authoritarian, when the community is as a whole dripping in that behavior.

Authoritarian groups always attempt to establish a social hierarchy and take control of any communities they’re a part of. And that’s exactly what’s happened with antis. Maybe at some point in the far distant past that wasn’t the case, but now they’re the ones that represent the anti community. It’s kinda like how, yes, Trump supporters are racist, even if they didn’t intend to be. You can’t support someone like Trump without also supporting racism and white supremacy, it doesn’t matter how sincere and wrong they are, they’re still supporting it.

And finally, I really hope your idea of confronting harassment or abuse in the anti community consists of more than a single post in a single tag if you want to claim that you and other anti-shippers like yourself aren’t authoritarian and actually stand opposed to such behaviors. It certainly isn’t due to confronting fandom racism, because last I checked people didn’t need to be an anti to do that, and confronting racism isn’t the same as antis.

You don’t have to confront it, but if you’re comfortable being bedfellows with the people that represent anti culture, you’re comfortable standing alongside authoritarians.

“By which I mean that my opposition to antis rests purely in their
authoritarianism.”

This is a pretty strong claim that needs actual evidence.

“And
unfortunately, you’re incorrect about antis. I mean, I would love it if the
picture you were painting was accurate, that some antis are authoritarian while
others are not, but the fact of the matter is that being an anti-shipper means
that you’re subscribing to an authoritarian stance in regards to fandom. Sure,
maybe you’re not as hardcore as other people, but the ideology you’re talking
about is still ultimately authoritarian in nature. I wrote a short 101 on
authoritarianism when an anon criticized me talking about authoritarian
exclusionists that hate aces in the LGBTQ+ community because they didn’t understand
authoritarianism either. (source)”

If an anti doesn’t like a ship, but does nothing to force
someone else not to like it, how exactly are they behaving in an authoritarian
manner?

But! All people who are anti-choice stand
opposed to bodily autonomy and think that all pregnant people, almost all of
whom are women, should not have the right to control their own bodies. 

This is poisoning the well.  This is like
arguing all people who are pro-abortion are pro child murder.

“In
other words, you don’t have to provide shelter and material support to someone
who does evil if you actively enable evil by embracing authoritarianism. “

No, but your definition of authoritarian seems to include people just not
liking something, which doesn’t match any established definition of
authoritarian at all.

Antis,
on the other hand, just subscribe to an ideology that polices fandom looking
for people who are not sufficiently pure, using disgust in the place of
reasoning to judge someone as being evil or morally wrong.

Some antis do.  Some just don’t like a
ship.  That’s basically all it means to
be an anti – to not like something. Some folks will voice that displeasure and
some won’t.

 It would be nice if those of you who just didn’t like a ship were
the core of your community, but that’s not what an anti is, at least not
anymore.

Based on who’s metric?  This seems like a
personal statement rather than anything actually measurable.

“They’re people who harass shippers, drive them off of social media, and
use claims of pedophilia and child grooming to do it. A lot of people have
pointed out how anti attacks on shippers actually make it more difficult for us
to stop predators who go after children because not only has it meant creating
false reports that law enforcement officials have to take action on, but the
community has themselves sheltered predators because they know how to
manipulate authoritarian power structures in order to facilitate their grooming
behaviors.”

Eh, that goes for shipping in general.
Taking your predator example, pedophiles can begin grooming young fans
into perceiving such relationships to not be an issue from pro shipping.  

“Yes, I stack rank antis near the bottom of the list of authoritarian
groups that I personally care about fighting, but it’s still not healthy. If
you want to be healthy then I’d encourage those of you who don’t subscribe to
those views to come up with a new term to describe yourselves and break your
community away from that ideology so you aren’t in tacit support of them.”

This doesn’t follow.  It’s
like telling someone who is conservative to break with the Republican party
because the KKK supports them.

“Unsurprisingly, I have a few problems with your
response, starting with how you’ve just accused me of being eager to tell you
who you are, when in fact you’re the person that was in a hurry to attach a
label to me while simultaneously misrepresenting  and misunderstanding
what I’ve said about authoritarianism. “

This is a turnabout fallacy.

“And a quick side-note: I referred to you as an
anti-shipper and you’ve just said that you’re an anti-shipper in saying “I mean
sorry we don’t match the cartoon idea of us you have in your head” so it
doesn’t sound like I’m being presumptive at describing you as an anti. You just
identified as one.”

It’s the authoritarian part that’s being argued, not the anti.  At no point has lj-writes stated
otherwise.  You’ve erected a strawman
here.

One thing I see I didn’t clarify properly
before is that there’s a difference between calling someone a harasser and an authoritarian,
but you’ve interpreted me talking about groups exhibiting authoritarian
behaviors as being indicative that all such people are harassers.

You’ve still not specified what you mean by that.  You’ve declared that anti’s are
authoritarian, but never followed up with evidence for your claim.

“If
you’ll reference my previous post you’ll see that I was very clearly talking
about how people who consider themselves antis but do not engage in harassment
are still siding with a group of people who harass people, because it’s those
antis that go inventing claims of pedophilia and harassing people off of social
media that you have to worry about.”

People on the left that don’t engage in harassment often side morally with rioters.  This does not make the left anarchists.

That
said, let’s get to the points you’ve made. Yes, if you aren’t aware that
anti-shipping is a hotbed of authoritarianism then I am telling you that you
are wrong about fandom spaces you’ve been active in for years. This is me,
telling you that you’re wrong.

Shipping IN GENERAL is. It’s been that way since shipping became a thing.

“Next, let’s talk about what the actual point
of describing how authoritarian antis are, because this shit comes up in my
communities all the time in the form of exclusionists and truscum. In short,
your community has a lot of dirty laundry and right now it’s been strewn about
the floor for everyone to see. Or, in simpler terms, there is so much
harassment leveled by antis at shippers that there’s no way that you can claim
that they’re edge cases, they represent the community.”

This is a gross generalization that has no metric backup.  And even then it’s an argument that doesn’t
follow. It’s like arguing the African American community is represented by
criminals due to the high level of incarceration compared to the rest of the
population.  It just doesn’t follow.

“That’s something that is usually really useful
in determining whether or not a community is inherently authoritarian, because
in communities that don’t embrace it, or even better are outright
anti-authoritarian, when someone behaves poorly the rest of the community calls
that person in and helps them learn that what they’re doing is wrong.” 

This happens constantly.
There are Anti’s are pounding down on a group of cross taggers as we
speak.

“In authoritarian communities, the behavior is
either condoned or supported, with only very weak attempts, if any, to put a
stop to it. And that goes whether we’re talking about harassment, abuse, or
straight up violence.”

Given that you’re not actually in the anti-community I doubt you would know
what is or isn’t being done.  But please,
if you have evidence for what you’re saying feel free.

“So, you’ve got three options. Deal with the
problem people in your own community and reclaim it, “

Gonna stop you there.  THIS is
authoritarian.

“break away as I mentioned before, or get used
to being lumped in with people who do terrible things.”

Gonna finish by pointing out this is fallacious.  You can also expect reasonable people to be
capable of not making grand generalizations.
Which is always at the heart of bigotry.

Take the word authoritarianism out of it if you
want, it’s not really important for this part of the framework, but to be
honest I left out the ‘deal with your problem’ part of it because I anticipated
that you’d reject that because you’d probably reject the notion that your
community has problems.

Every community has problems.  As human
beings people are tend to err.  It
happens. Lj-writes never claimed anti’s were squeaky clean.

And
yes, if there was a concerted effort by healthy anti-shippers, people who
identified themselves by the way they find some aspects of shipping distasteful
but in no way needed to enforce that view on shippers, you’d get a new
reputation and would be able to distance yourself from being associated with
abusive and authoritarian antis.

Or people could realize that making grand generalizations are dumb.  But here we are.

But
the fact of the matter is that you’re still supporting a fundamentally
authoritarian community. And you’re even inventing excuses for it, ways to
explain away the criticism without actually addressing it.

You’ve STILL failed to back this up with anything.

Yes,
having anti-abortion beliefs makes you an authoritarian. You cannot hold
anti-abortion beliefs without choosing in some part to support an authoritarian
stance, in which someone chooses to police other people to change their
behavior in order to bring it into line with a group norm based on purity and
adherence to a central authority, whether that’s the ideology or a leader.

False.  One can hold anti abortion views,
but only apply it to themselves and their lives.  It happens rather often.

Just
like you cannot be selectively progressive and call yourself progressive, you
can’t be anti-authoritarian and yet not support bodily autonomy.

You actually can.  It happens all the
time.  You might get called out by people
who are “More progressive” but the key to progressivism is progress at the end
of the day.  Not everyone is going to
want to move as fast as others.

“I
noticed you’ve got an ‘anti-anti bs’ tag. Where’s your ‘anti bs’ tag?”

Why would she need it in your case?  What
even is that question?

Authoritarian
groups always attempt to establish a social hierarchy and take control of any
communities they’re a part of. And that’s exactly what’s happened with antis. 

Again.  Where?

Shoot, Lj-writes initial
post ISN’T EVEN IN THE GENERAL STAR WARS TAG.
So she’s not taking control of literally anything or policing anyone.  She’s voicing her opinion on tumblr.  So what is this really?  What are you looking to accomplish here?

^^^^all this, and also to @korrasera:

About Democrats, first you were arguing that I said that reformers are part of the problem

You said people who identify as Democrats are part of the problem, and I pointed out that people who identify as Democrats include reformers.

and now you’re saying that acknowledging that some people have joined
with the Democrats specifically to reform them means that they aren’t
Democrats.

Are you referring to this part?

This just in: Being a Democratic nominee for Congress, hell, campaigning to be the Democratic nominee for President, does not constitute identifying as a Democrat. 

I’m guessing the sarcasm didn’t stick, because “This just in” is a common retort made in an attempt to point out that the part that comes after it, which is often a rephrase of what the interlocutor said, is ridiculous and makes no sense. The parts that came after this quoted portion were rhetorical questions also meant to point out that your position–that Democratic candidates for office somehow do not identify as Democrats–makes no sense.

You should really choose one of those and stick to it.

I did. It’s fine if you don’t fully understand sarcasm and I would have adjusted for that had I known, but I was not being inconsistent here–you mistakenly perceived me as being so.

You don’t want to acknowledge that supporting an authoritarian ideology
means giving tacit support to authoritarians, whether or not you
yourself embody any of those behaviors.

I have asked you over and over how I support an authoritarian ideology and you have not answered me, other than repeating that a) anti-shippers are inherently authoritarian and b) just using the label anti is therefore authoritarian regardless of what I actually do or what I actually believe. It seems to me you’re the one who’s uncomfortable engaging with the subject, not me, since you refuse to look at the reality beyond your preconceived ideas.

The parts about abortion are just you repeating your points over and over without engaging with anything I’ll said, so I’ll just skip over it.

Similarly, all you’re doing here is trying to argue that some
anti-shippers aren’t authoritarian, when the community is as a whole
dripping in that behavior.

My argument from the first has only been that you don’t know the community “as a whole,” something you consistently refuse to acknowledge while you insist that you know and can define the community while not even really being in fandom. But then again you have abundantly proven that you don’t know authoritarianism either, so pretending to know more than you do isn’t a new thing for you evidently.

It’s kinda like how, yes, Trump supporters are racist, even if they
didn’t intend to be. You can’t support someone like Trump without also
supporting racism and white supremacy, it doesn’t matter how sincere and
wrong they are, they’re still supporting it.

This is particularly funny because, in the anti Reylo section of the SW fandom at least, the so-called antis are predominantly fans of color who are fed up with the anti-Finnrey and anti-Finn rhetoric from Reylos and engage in discourse about it, not harassment. It feels really great that a white woman is coming in to compare us to Trump supporters. (This is sarcasm, by the way.)

And finally, I really hope your idea of confronting harassment or
abuse in the anti community consists of more than a single post in a
single tag if you want to claim that you and other anti-shippers like
yourself aren’t authoritarian and actually stand opposed to such
behaviors.

I actually gave you two links and described one other incident, and there have been other incidents such as me criticizing an anti for stealing reylo art to mock the artist’s skill, yelling at and blocking an anti for comparing reylos to Nazis (y’know, kind of like how you think the mostly fans of color in the anti Reylo community are comparable to Trump supporters bahaha), and pointing out that mocking a Reylo shipper for her age is misogynistic. Sorry I can’t produce the requisite number of posts, tagged for your convenience and to your exact specifications, to prove my fandom activities are valid and non-authoritarian. (This has also been sarcasm.)

It certainly isn’t due to confronting fandom racism, because last I
checked people didn’t need to be an anti to do that, and confronting
racism isn’t the same as antis.

Again, you don’t even know what anti Reylos do–because a large chunk of named anti Reylo activity is exactly that, confronting racism that disproportionately comes from the Reylo fandom– and as such I don’t give your opinion any credence until you’ve actually educated yourself.

I’ll add this last part as a screenshot to keep a unified thread:

I think you mean one of the first asks I fielded about this conversation? Because the post you mentioned is an ask, not a reblog (link). Like, I’ve already said that the anti community is problematic why are you pulling it out like it’s a giant gotcha 😂 It’s almost like stretching a terms like “pedophile apologist” and “authoritarian” beyond all recognition is bad or something. (This is a sarcastic dig at you.) If you’re in the mood to defend golbat, maybe also check out the post where they told Black women fans, including N.K. Jemisin, that they were ignorant about the evils of racism and should read less fanfic and more history (link). Not to mention their infamous “antis are very colonialist” post lmao.

Since korrasera has made her desire clear not to participate in this conversation anymore, I’ll answer her points by reblogging from myself and finish up.

No, I said that the Democratic party has done a
lot of bad things so a lot of people on the left-wing don’t identify as
one because they don’t want to be associated with those things.

Convenient how you left out the part where you said:

It’s because identifying as a Democrat means
participating in the system Democrats have built … In this same fashion, identifying with a community
that’s become defined by it’s authoritarian ideology means supporting
that ideology, even weakly.

And I have pointed out that people who do
identify as Democrats, by say, running for political office as
Democrats, can push back against bad things Democrats have done and try
to make changes. So that pretty much undercuts your whole comparison.
You still haven’t answered how reformers who run for office don’t
identify as Democrats, likely because you can’t.

Yeah, so I linked you to my thread on what
authoritarianism is, and described how authoritarians police shippers
and fanfic writers to attack them as the enemy, but apparently that
wasn’t worth reading.

I did, actually, but there’s a whole prior issue
that’s unresolved before that, i.e. you don’t know what people who are
called anti Reylos actually do and believe, and are insisting the
version in your head is right no matter how poorly it fits the reality.
By this point this issue has been pointed out to you so many times I
have to assume you’re either avoiding it or physically/mentally
incapable of reading and understanding it. Remember how authoritarianism
is a cognitive flaw that compromises a person’s ability to engage with
reality? I wouldn’t call you an authoritarian, because unlike you I
don’t throw a very specific term around will-nilly, but you might want
to think about your own possible cognitive biases.

So, in other words, antis that are anti Reylo are people of color and so can’t be criticized if they harass someone.

That’s
a pretty mind-boggling strawman, and doesn’t even make sense in the
context of your own comparison. It’s interesting that your mind
immediately went to harassers and abusers when I mentioned fan spaces
dominated by fans of color, when the entire discussion is about antis
who DON’T harass anyone and what their moral responsibilities are. You
made that clear with your own Trump comparison:

It’s kinda like how, yes, Trump supporters are racist, even if they didn’t intend to be.

You were talking about Trump supporters who are not consciously racist,
and therefore the comparison has to be to fans who do not harass people
and how they, according to you, are complicit in authoritarianism. But
the moment I pointed out you are yet another white fan trying to dictate
the terms on which fans of colors can exist in fandom, you panicked and
undermined your own premise by changing the scope of the argument from
non-harassers to harassers. It’s also interesting how that mental shift
happened as soon as I mentioned fans of color.

The Trump
supporter comparison, in addition to being all kinds of offensive,
doesn’t even fit because antis who harass people and those who don’t do
not share a belief, at least not the belief that motivates and justifies
harassment. I have pointed this out from the first, but you have dodged
the issue over and over and over again–because it doesn’t fit your
frame™, I guess.

And since I do not believe that anyone
deserves to be harassed, your using Black Reylos as a shield is yet
another sad strawman (straw shield?).

…I already pointed out how bullshit your two
links were. Again, are you in the habit of not reading what someone
writes before you respond to it, or is this kneejerk reaction new for
you?

You’ve worked your way up from calling it a
single post to admitting I gave you two links, congratunations! But no,
your entire “objection” rested on the grounds that I wasn’t writing
enough posts in the right tags. You said, and I quote:

And finally, I really hope your idea of
confronting harassment or abuse in the anti community consists of more
than a single post in a single tag if you want to claim that you and
other anti-shippers like yourself aren’t authoritarian and actually
stand opposed to such behaviors.

Again, congrats for
making the mental leap from one to two, but I have now linked or
described about six incidents to you and it’s still not enough. Because
not only must I confront and call out harassment by antis, I must do it
in the right amounts (which you have not specified), in an unspecified
right way, and do it in tags that you decree.

At this point
the goalpost isn’t just moving, it’s flying. Also I hope you realize how
demanding and controlling you come across, saying antis (those who do
not harass people, since it evidently bears clarification) have to blog
in exactly the way you want–desires that you have not even made
specific enough to be followed–in order not to be like Trump
supporters.

Yes, because it’s so relevant to make a semantic argument that I used the term reblogged when you were responding to an ask.

Clarifying
questions are dead now, evidently.  This is actually sort of relevant
to an earlier point, though, that the worst antis operate anonymously
and that makes their activities hard to regulate or call out. If there
were a post to reblog that person would, as a general matter, be
operating under their own online identity and it would be much easier to
have a coherent community and mutually police that community. It’s also
why having regular anti callout posts is not feasible, because the
worst anti Reylo behavior is actually housed on Reylo blogs and it’s not
possible to have a community with an army of greyfaces in sunglasses,
but if you didn’t read it the first time why would you read the second
time lmao.

And. That. Doesn’t. Refute. My. Point. At. All.

Who said it did? Calm the fuck down.

Someone was sending you an ask to call
golbatgender a lesbophobe and a pedophile apologist and you don’t
believe that they’re indicative of the problems in the community.

I… I literally said it was. I said:

Like, I’ve already said that the anti community is problematic why are you pulling it out like it’s a giant gotcha 😂

I repeatedly said the anti community has problems, and you repeatedly
insist I didn’t. At this level of denial it goes beyond intellectual
dishonesty into lying. Who are you lying to, though, me or yourself? I
have a feeling it’s the latter more than the former to protect your own
mental constructs, because obviously it won’t work on me.

And I went and read those posts you linked to by
golbatgender. Have you read them? Because I’m pretty sure you haven’t if
this is your interpretation.

Numbers aren’t your
strong suit, I’m guessing? Because there was only one link in that post,
and the screenshotted extract was from that same linked post. I mean
I’m as forgetful and careless as anyone but the way you can’t seem to
keep basic facts straight, together with the way you blatantly ignore
like half the things other people are saying on this thread, doesn’t
give me a high level of confidence in your ability to engage with
reality outside of the version in your own head.

The first one is you describing an exerpt of one
of their posts as ‘cringe’ because they’re pointing out that moral
content policies are used by oppressors to attack marginalized
people…which is a pretty reasonable conclusion. And you then argue that
pointing this out is racism.

No, I’m pointing out
that telling Black women that they are ignorant of the evils of racism
and should be reading history instead of fanfic is a cringeworthy case
of whitesplaining. And yes, golbatgender’s argument still in fact
pertains to the Black women on the thread, since diversehighfantasy
mentioned prohibiting racist fanfic and Ms. Jemisin was in favor of
flagging and content warnings, all of which golbatgender is against. By
implication they also seem to be responding to the OP and saying that
no, Black people shouldn’t be creating their own racism-free archives because that’s banning stories based on content and that can never go well.

lj-writes:

Saaaaaame. And they justify it by deliberately conflating all antis with a subset of awful harassers, ignoring the fact that antis who operate under their own names are by and large people who just don’t like a fucking fictional ship and engage in discourse about it. I have literally seen anti-antis like @korrasera (whose take on other subjects I respect) say all antis are by definition authoritarian harassers. Way to ignore the fact that, in reality, the word is also used to describe people who do no such thing. It’s like saying all anti-abortion people are killers or complicit in sheltering killers. I fucking hate the anti-abortion movement and am well aware that there is a strong authoritarian streak in the movement. A number of them are in fact bullies, harassers, and terrorists. That doesn’t mean anti-abortion thought is inherently authoritarian or violent, just goddamned stupid and sexist.

Which is the same position that golbatgender then
supported and clarified to say that it was already the case. Racism was
already a tag on AO3 and it was very obvious to anyone who read the
thread (again, did you?) that golbatgender was responding to the people
asking why racist fanfic shouldn’t just be banned completely.

……This
is your idea of reading? Because what golbatgender actually said was
that there are tags but racism can’t be an archive warning, nor would
flagging work, both ideas that diversehighfantasy and Ms. Jemisin
advocated. And again, banning based on content is an idea that
diversehighfantasy mentioned (and which Ms. Jemisin did not say no to,
since it’s really on a continuum especially in combination with
flagging), so the cringey whitesplaining of racism to Black women in the
last paragraph still applies.

I’m not the one who screwed up here and you are, once again, showing
that you’d rewrite reality to fit the frame in your head.