She’s a professional victim, it’s nothing but a grift. Also lol she looks nothing like those photos she posted. That’s like a completely different person.
“Ok, yeah, he’s obviously raped kids. And he was best friends with known child rapist Epstein for decades. Oh, and he’s convicted of raping women. And he’s obviously a racist. And he’s obviously a Russian asset. And he’s obviously a traitor…and he hates my kind of people, but, BUT, we agree on this one specific thing so he gets my vote!
…
Oh shit, he’s coming for me now. Who could’ve foreseen this!!!?!!”I’ve gone from being super far rightwing to now being super far leftwing over the course of my life; yet somehow, “Brianna Wu is a fucking idiot” has remained constant.
“Brianna Wu is a fucking idiot”
Ahh, I remember when saying anything less than utterly complimentary about Wu was considered transphobic and misogynistic.
She got an awful lot of free passes and clout from “these people are mad at me, and they are mostly right wing” about a decade ago.
And holy fuck was her game terrible. Like bad enough that when I got to try it at PAX East it stood out how awful it was, to the point that when she popped up in other contexts my immediate reaction to the name was “the dev behind that terrible mobile game from PAX”. You always expect some indie stuff to not land with you, but usually that sort of thing is at worst forgettable. But this one was so bad it circled all the way back around to memorable, but in the bad way.
Can you share exactly what led to the change in perspective?
TL;DR I was predisposed to skeptical and critical thinking, learned other people had emotions, actually believed in the right’s fake freedom rhetoric, and fell in love with a cute lefty boy (unrequited but good friends)
Also MAGA really exposed the ugliness
unrequited but good friends
me too, buddy
Edit: accidentally typed out my life story. See other reply for TL;DR
Unfortunately I can give no useful insights (except: empathy, understanding, and the desire for both). I was raised Christian and reasoned my way to paganism thinking there didn’t need to be a god for miracles to exist; then to atheism when I tried to prove magic and ghosts existed as an explanation; eventually debunking and abandoning the belief in the very concept of supernatural miracles. Similarly with my political views: it seemed more to be an inevitable journey, where I started in one place and, without my core beliefs changing, drifted to another which was more aligned.
As a teen I was big into Alex Jones and conspiracy theories to the point of losing friends before it was cool (pre-maga). Unfortunately for him, I took his advice and “did my own researcher”; becoming more disillusioned with his bullshit the more I learned. For one example, there was a great analysis paper on the sorts of energies and temperatures involved in 9-11, whose models perfectly matched the real world structural damage: no thermite or lasers needed. I bought into the h1n1 vax hoax from Ventura after I had the shot and thought I’d be crippled when then turned on the signal or whatever… But I wasn’t. Same with the Fukushima disaster Alex fearmongered about; turns out we’re not in a radioactive apocalypse. Retrospectively: he had a terrible track record for predictions.
I was a diehard freedom absolutist: yell fire in crowded theatres, everyone should open-carry everywhere. I wasn’t even American but I bought into the mythos, especially as promoted by the right. However I was a fan of star trek as a kid… And I hated the very concept of monetary systems. I wanted people to live free of control, and have the best lives possible. Still do. I also never cared for the social conservatism: i was bi* and was cool with LGBT; “the government has no place in a bedroom between consenting adults”. Also no racial prejudice: all deserved freedom (humans were foreign enough to the probably-autistic me; no need for further outgroups…) A severely existential and somber perspective has always been the basis for my worldview (I was a pretty fucked up kid).
That none of that has changed… But one thing did.
Beau of the Fifth Column yt channel, now Belle of the Ranch, was where I first heard this after my change towards the left: they said they believed in “the most amount of freedom for the most people”… I had believed “the right for me to swing my fist ends at your nose”, until I realized that threatening to hit someone can have just as much a real consequence for them as actually doing it. Race doesn’t exist biologically, certainly in no form that people would recognize colloquially: but people were racialized; racism self-manifested through systemic failures and active oppression. I could no longer pretend that race didn’t exist: it absolutely did, but we made it. Trying to be blind to it would cause more harm than using it as a shortcut tool for informing various socially-caused inequalities. Understanding that taught me, vividly, the concept of a real and impactful “social construct”; a concept which I had great disdain for: “facts don’t care about your feelings”…
However, if I had to point to something, there was one catalyst… My whole life, I’ve tried to understand people. Empathy, emotions, and even ‘the self’ did not come naturally to me. I learned with great effort and (luckily, through birth) the resources to permit such efforts. The one thing that really pushed that forward was falling in love. He leaned left, but hated SJW / tumblrite stupidity leading up to the height of gamergate. We had many overlaps, and I grew exponentially in the decade since meeting him and exploring these feelings. As creator ShoeOnHead would say about Sargon of Akkad (para): “I hated SJWs because they were terrible optics; you hated them because you thought they were causing the fall of western civilization”… Turns out we were both the former as well. The divide between the alt-right, their rhetoric and growing popularity, and the things conservatives claimed to care about became more evident, and my growing awareness and knowledge of social issues was pushing me much further to the left.
Just like when I was 8 years old, I still think money is pretty fucking stupid, and people should be able to live comfortable and free. What changed is that I think some “freedoms” are actually just tragedy-of-the-commons oppression (e.g. “freedom” to discriminate based on race) and must be restricted, and not everyone needs to be packing heat to live free (not needing to is more free… an armed society is not a polite society; polite people don’t need the threat of violence, much like good people don’t need the threat of hell)
Truth is truth.
Claims: “Love the country”
Also: votes for a traitor
🧐
Claims: I am a fascist.
Also: Votes for fascist.
People thinking they are famous on social media is one of the largest downfalls of society. Openly voting for a traitor and a pedophile so you can blend in with the other MAGA’s isn’t the flex you think it is.
I am in no way suggesting LGBTQ people aren’t smart- but this one isn’t.
I second this
It never works out trying to be one of the good ones.
Hey, they should avoid the first round of deportations and be nicely included in the second.
Oof, but yes.
‘I only wanted innocent Iranians to be killed!’
Liberals acting shocked every time the fascists turn on them, instead of just helping them kill middle eastern people.
I’m out of the loop. What do liberals have to do with this?
Wu is a liberal trans rights activist, who has been a consistent cheerleader for fascism and genocide, and she’s upset she ended up in the crosshairs of fascists.
Maybe being on Twitter is a huge component of the problem…
Is it the disease or just a symptom tho?
Absolutely both.
Everything feeds into twitter (and influencers will always glom onto something), but American political psychology wouldn’t be so messed up if meteors had hit Twitter’s datacenters a decade ago. It’s peak ‘attention is all that matters’ and ‘polarization feed’ by design.
If you love your country, why did you vote for Trump?
Well remember yesterday when Trump said smart people don’t like him?
It’s always fun to see how close he sometimes gets to an epiphany. But it’s always from the wrong direction as it were.
Indeed. And they have every reason to.
In this timeline that was ages ago
Good to remember/ reiterate for the duped
“only country without POCs, women with rights, and immigrants”- says the 3 trump voter.
“Its a small world afterall” - if you never cared to look across your counties border…
If you “love your country”, then you’re most likely fash. Thus trump.
Absolutely nothing surprising there.
Wow. I didn’t know there were people who underestimated the harm Trump would do to trans people because their single issue was Israel on both sides!
Jesus Christ, Wu played MAGA apologist? Given her history? She’s always been a shit person, I just figured she at the very least wouldn’t join the crowd tied at the hip to her arch-nemesis GamerGate edgelords.
I guess it really doesn’t matter what flavor of bad you are, in the end they all gravitate toward MAGA.
The entire GamerGate/anti-GamerGate fiasco was a psyop designed to divide people and drain them of money and direct influence that was being run by bad actors and useful idiots. I had forgotten her name until now, but I guess Wu was the Useful Idiot type.
GamerGate was also weaponized to be used as tool to popularize far right ideology by Steve Bannon. The rise in groups like Proud Boys, Groypers and the Manosphere can all be traced back to the GamerGate movement.
Yeah, I know. And while the GamerGate side was the far, far worse one, the anti GamerGate was also employing bad faith arguments and grifting their followers. Or in Wu’s case, just plain dumb. Both sides where easy targets for each other’s followers, which is how they wanted it. Who actually used that Call in a Gamer Girl service?
“My enemy’s enemy is my friend”
When your enemy is human decency, you acquire a lot of piece of shit friends.
sometimes my enemy’s enemy is just another enemy pointed the right direction for once
Now if we could only get them all to gather in one single place.
Like the USA 😀😅
For what purpose? I don’t like 'em, either, but doing to them what they do to everybody else would make us no better.
The only good fascist is a dead one. My grandparents understood that and so do I.
Thats such a bad argument. They do it to people for things that dont harm anyone and are out of their control. We would do it to them for the things they want to do to innocent people. Things that harm people and that are in their control.
So yes, we would be much better than them.
That depends upon what you want to do, which is why I asked. If you do the same things in return, then you’re also “in control.”
Don’t worry.
We won’t keep them as slaves. We won’t rape them or force them to carry and birth our babies. We won’t herd them into ghettos and slowly starve and hunt them to extinction. We won’t infect them with easily preventable diseases. We won’t lock them in cages and waterboard them. We won’t bully them until they kill themselves. We won’t drag them behind a truck until they’re ripped to pieces.
Unlike them, we will try to limit their suffering and make things go as quickly and painless as possible. Completely different things than what they want.
Want some ketchup with that boot?
Whataboutism is so cowardly.
Inaccurately hiding behind “whataboutism” is such pathetic avoidance.
Don’t type mad, magaboy.
Don’t. Lemmy is a place full of terminally online people. You won’t change anyone on here, trust me, so you will have to suffer moronic people calling for literal concentration camps like the Nazis had. Because if you call them out on fashist thoughts and ideas they will pretend that its you who is the problem. 0 education, a lot of opinion and thinking they are worth more than other people.
In truth they are just enraged about how helpless they feel so they like to fantasize about having the power. Pretty sad to see what they would do with it.
Feel free to logout.
Thanks for the support. On the plus side, this has actually turned into a rather productive exercise in outing quite the number of assholes to block. 🤷
What the hell happened to her? Didn’t she used to be an actual lefty/progressive? Am I misremembering??
She was never intellectual about it though. It’s always been reactionary shit that you just happened to agree with.
Reactionary shit is what I don’t agree with my very young padawan.
Don’t. I clearly has never been a fan of hers, but I knew way too many people who just liked her for the team she was fighting for at the time. When the Gamergate shit was going it, it all looked liked a cluster fuck. No one was making good faith arguments or if they were, it was getting drowned out idiots. Hell, one of the reasons I stopped going to lan parties was because people who couldn’t stop talking about politics kept complaining about politics.
I was thinking the same thing but maybe this twitter account is a different Brianna Wu than who we’re thinking of? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brianna_Wu
How many trans Brianna Wu’s with verified twitter accounts can there be?
I guess trans people can be just as shitty as the rest of us. Don’t hurt me, I’m one of you. Hurt all the OTHER trans people…
Yeah, trans people are just people. They’re not like magic.
Every conservative, from the most spiteful MAGAt to the polite nana across the street, all believe they are the exception and special. They won’t be stepped on. It’s all those other people that deserve it.
It doesn’t matter if they are trans, cis, white, or black.
The core belief of conservatism is that they earned their place while all those others didn’t.
“He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting!”
-Source: Crystal Minton (Marianna, Florida), January 2019.
A few miles away, another prison employee, Crystal Minton, accompanied her fiancé to a friend’s house to help clear the remnants of a metal roof mangled by the hurricane. Ms. Minton, a 38-year-old secretary, said she had obtained permission from the warden to put off her Mississippi duty until early February because she is a single mother caring for disabled parents. Her fiancé plans to take vacation days to look after Ms. Minton’s 7-year-old twins once she has to go to work.The shutdown on top of the hurricane has caused Ms. Minton to rethink a lot of things.“I voted for him, and he’s the one who’s doing this,” she said of Mr. Trump. “I thought he was going to do good things. He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”
Damn.
Reminder for myself, engrave this in marble and bury it for future archeologists.
People are dumb and easily misled, so we need to construct a more foolproof world. I’m pretty sure there’s such a thing as “Latinos for Trump”, lol.
I am not one bit surprised because I saw their stance on Palestine .
