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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: September 13th, 2023

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  • I need people to pay attention to the popularity of denial of the mass killings by Nazis of transgender people. One of the doctors who performed the first vaginoplasty, on Dora Richter, did also go on to participate in brutal abuses in a concentration camp. Like a dung beetle, a group is rolling around this tiny kernel of truth, coalescing in a ball of shit that ends up like this.

    There’s something so vile about this. It has to be deliberate.

    DuckDuckGo and Google have always had at least one denialist result in every single Google search I have made about the Holocaust. Back in 2010 - in high school, I remember reading half of a book online which seemed to be the memoirs of an American World War 2 soldier, than abruptly realizing that he was starting to say some really strange things. Never anything quite wrong, but off. I did a little googling, a bit more research, and then started running into names like David Irving.

    It’s just such a damn difficult problem to fix. They are insidious. Deniers know that the Holocaust happened. They know that trans people were brutalized and massacred by the Nazis, whether you feel like the “purpose” of the mass killings makes it a genocide or not.

    They don’t care. They want stupid people to believe it, because then you can get the stupid people to look the other way. To laugh at people pointing out the patterns.













  • It’s very selective. They know Bible stories from Sunday school and have been told a few passages.

    It’s a really complicated anthology of books written across 1000ish years (earliest being fragmentary bits of poetry preserved in altered context, most of it being 400 BCE on). Tons of it is related to distant political struggles or cultural norms, stuff so hopelessly distant from us and written in hard to understand language (especially with this KJV only-ists.)

    Then, you add 2000 years of history, pop culture, and interpretation. It’s a really difficult text and it’s difficult for anyone to understand without getting a lot of support and context. The context is often presented in a misleading way, pick your denomination and flavor of distortion


  • The absolute best strategy for most reading comprehension struggles is read aloud. Active discussion is good too.

    Or I also like to tell my high schoolers to be contrarian with the text. To argue against it, to try to prove it wrong, even to the point of bad faith. “You’re saying the book sucks - I want receipts. Tell me about it.” I don’t really have training in teaching english but I will happily pressure high schoolers into reading the books in English class.





  • These is why the alt right pipeline for women is transphobia/TERF shit.

    Sexism is real, lots of teenage girls and young women feel frustrated and powerless, but they get easy wins going after trans women. They can’t get Dobbs reversed, but forcing trans people to detransition is an explicit goal of conservative power structures. They get to feel like they “won” with that UK court ruling - that “women’s rights” were won by something that did nothing to actually meaningfully help women.





  • It’s probably some ASD-ish adjacent, but it just breaks my brain every time. It seems like there’s a large proportion of people who don’t seem to actually care whether they have an accurate understanding of the world or not? The amount of times online I’ve been able to show someone evidence that they demanded, and then they double down. At best they’ll go silent, but then you’ll see them making the exact same claim later.

    In general right now it seems like there are a lot willing to call evil good, and good evil. Everything is backwards. The Moral Majority voted in a pedophile rapist.