There's been a bit of drama on Mastodon over the past few days as Wil Wheaton has been subject to ongoing brigading and attacks apparently motivated by the trans community. Federation doesn't turn...
There's been a bit of drama on Mastodon over the past few days as Wil Wheaton has been subject to ongoing brigading and attacks apparently motivated by the trans community.
Federation doesn't turn out to solve all the world's problems.
Federation does mean he won't be banned from Mastodon as a service though; just from a particular instance. In a centralized service like Twitter for example, being banned from Twitter means being...
Federation does mean he won't be banned from Mastodon as a service though; just from a particular instance. In a centralized service like Twitter for example, being banned from Twitter means being banned from all of Twitter, so that you can never again use the platform. On Mastodon he can continue to use it if he likes, just in a different community. That being said, I have to say, I've given the matter a cursory look and I can't figure out why people are so angry with him. Does anyone here have perhaps a summary or breakdown of why he's being banned?
Edit: Apparently the blocklist Wil used, created by Randi Harper, has a whole bunch of issues with it... like including many trans people who got in minor disagreements with her.
It's still not clear to me who exactly is targeting him or why, though.
edit 2: Okay... the more I dig the weirder it gets and less sense it makes. People supposedly accused Randi Harper of being a TERF (trans-exlusionary radical feminist) for including many trans people on her block list, and because Wil used her block list (that included many trans people) that apparently makes him "anti-trans" as well. So I guess he is being targeted with reports by the trans community on mastodon. Huh?
I have trouble believing that the people attacking wilw actually care about trans issues. As per usual, it seems like a tactical strike to silence an opponent.
I have trouble believing that the people attacking wilw actually care about trans issues. As per usual, it seems like a tactical strike to silence an opponent.
There's work being done on making it a smoother process but as of now you can download a few settings (see this ss for example) and upload those to a new server so that you can be up & running...
There's work being done on making it a smoother process but as of now you can download a few settings (see this ss for example) and upload those to a new server so that you can be up & running fairly quickly again. Yes, he'd lose people following him but people they follow would be notified (new follower notification from the new account) and you can forward an old account to a new one, that points towards where the user now is.
Anyone have a rundown on what it has to do with the trans community (would love to hear from our friends in the trans community!)? I tried googling and came up with almost nothing.
Anyone have a rundown on what it has to do with the trans community (would love to hear from our friends in the trans community!)? I tried googling and came up with almost nothing.
Wheaton uses Randi Harper's blocklist. Harper's blocklist includes some outspoken people from the trans community... And that appears to be all there is to it.
I have no sympathy whatsosever for Wil Wheaton. IMO, celebrities have no business creating accounts on public instances and then trying to establish their brand or "verify their identity". There's...
I have no sympathy whatsosever for Wil Wheaton. IMO, celebrities have no business creating accounts on public instances and then trying to establish their brand or "verify their identity".
There's no reason a celebrity can't spin up their own instance at "social.celebrityname.website" (or pay somebody to do it for them) if their brand matters that much to them.
If you're a celebrity, trying to migrate your personal brand onto somebody else's instance is a dick move, especially if they run it at their own expense.
And he doesn't even have to disrupt his existing website. All he needs is to create a subdomain like "social.wilwheaton.net". And if he wanted to try Mastodon before committing, all he had to do...
If he can afford wilwheaton.net, he can afford to throw up a mastadon instance on it.
And he doesn't even have to disrupt his existing website. All he needs is to create a subdomain like "social.wilwheaton.net". And if he wanted to try Mastodon before committing, all he had to do was not insist on being the Wil Wheaton.
What am I missing here? He did not violate any rules, but he's being bullied off of the platform by people who have some personal grievances against him. Isn't this very similar to why many people...
What am I missing here? He did not violate any rules, but he's being bullied off of the platform by people who have some personal grievances against him.
Isn't this very similar to why many people have fled twitter for mastodon? The oppressed always seem so quick to oppress.
Seems generally apologists feel it's okay because he can just move to another instance or that he should be responsible for establishing his own instance so the mob can be ignored by him and it's...
Seems generally apologists feel it's okay because he can just move to another instance or that he should be responsible for establishing his own instance so the mob can be ignored by him and it's as though this mob being able to coerce instance owners to censor people isn't a problem to be solved.
Mastodon.cloud (disclaimer: my own home instance) and mastodon.social (run by Mastodon's creator, Eugen), are two of the largest English-speaking Mastodon instances. Yes, some of the harrassment...
Mastodon.cloud (disclaimer: my own home instance) and mastodon.social (run by Mastodon's creator, Eugen), are two of the largest English-speaking Mastodon instances. Yes, some of the harrassment originated from both, but that's not representative of either as a whole.
Several smaller instances, including particularly https://bofa.lol, participated far more relative to size, and with the explicit support and encouragement of admins. One admin at another instance all but encouraged death threats against Wheaton.
Those have now been blocked by numerous other instances.
Mastodon.cloud's admin has struggled with site stability and general communicativeness and openness for months, if not the beginning. I'd moved to another instance after an initial set of technical glitches (that instance has since gone largely dormant, though it remains online). It's not an easy task and I've strong doubts he's up to it.
I think it's a point well articulated. People who want to learn more about the research-side of the behavior you're talking about can look up "learned depression" for the sad side of things and...
I think it's a point well articulated. People who want to learn more about the research-side of the behavior you're talking about can look up "learned depression" for the sad side of things and "Defense mechanisms" for the more active approaches you're emphasizing.
I do feel for him for being reported unjustly, but at the same time, my face is stuck in a perpetual "unsure" expression at the idea that a mob of trans people is going after a poor innocent cis...
I do feel for him for being reported unjustly, but at the same time, my face is stuck in a perpetual "unsure" expression at the idea that a mob of trans people is going after a poor innocent cis dude. (The fact that he spells cis as CIS in all-caps in another toot isn't helping.)
I don't know if it's happening in Wheaton's case, but I know that some (repeat: SOME!) LGBTI people are very quick to assume they're being attacked, and will counter-attack accordingly. I've seen...
Exemplary
my face is stuck in a perpetual "unsure" expression at the idea that a mob of trans people is going after a poor innocent cis dude.
I don't know if it's happening in Wheaton's case, but I know that some (repeat: SOME!) LGBTI people are very quick to assume they're being attacked, and will counter-attack accordingly. I've seen this in real life, among actual friends, and on the internet.
I explain it thus:
Imagine a puppy. A cute adorable puppy that just wants to be friends. Ain't it sweet? Now put that puppy into a home where the humans beat it and neglect it and kick it and abuse it every day of its life. What sort of dog is that puppy going to grow up as? It's going to become one of two things: a cowering whimpering mess, or a vicious wild dog. It'll either run away at the sight of a raised hand, or it'll bite any human who comes toward it.
The same thing happens to LGBTI people. A lot of them have to face ongoing bullying and discrimination and even violence. Just like that poor little puppy, they're either going to whimper or bite. We don't see the whimperers: they're off living miserable lives of depression and sadness (when they're not actively killing themselves). But we do see the biters. They take offence at everything because they have been conditioned to believe that everyone is against them because everyone they've met is against them.
I've seen LGBTI people turn nasty at the slightest hint of an attack. And the problem is that, because they've been conditioned by the real hate they've had to deal with, they see hate even in places where it's not present. They're pre-emptively defending themselves even when they haven't been attacked because they've learned that everything is an attack.
I repeat: this is only some LGBTI people. Everyone responds differently to the circumstances of their life. But there is a significant minority of LGBTI people who are like this: they were abused as puppies so they grew up to be dogs who bite.
Wil Wheaton's mob of trans people is most likely real.
I'm sorry to bring you down. I'm merely reflecting the real-life statistics that LGBTI teenagers are between 4 and 8 times more likely to attempt suicide than their heterosexual cisgender peers....
I'm sorry to bring you down. I'm merely reflecting the real-life statistics that LGBTI teenagers are between 4 and 8 times more likely to attempt suicide than their heterosexual cisgender peers. And, if we separate out just the "T" part of that community, the suicide rates skyrocket, with up to half of all transgender people having attempted suicide at least once in their lives.
I do understand the inclination to assume bad faith, as a gay person who's been burned too many times in my life... but this story just seems all too perfect for the "cis straight people are the...
I do understand the inclination to assume bad faith, as a gay person who's been burned too many times in my life... but this story just seems all too perfect for the "cis straight people are the oppressed ones these days" narrative.
One of the traps I think people fall into too often, and one of my favorite lessons on PR that I had in undergrad, relates to how to handle cases like this where it seems like someone you're...
One of the traps I think people fall into too often, and one of my favorite lessons on PR that I had in undergrad, relates to how to handle cases like this where it seems like someone you're representing did something wrong. I'll describe the lesson first and then get into the trap that basically my entire class made (myself included).
The lesson scenario was this: a police officer appeared to have driven drunk to his home after his shift was over. He ran a red light at an intersection and collided with another vehicle, causing a fatality. How do you, as the PR rep for the police department, handle the story?
The trap we all fell into was trying to mitigate the offense, spinning the narrative way out of what the facts of the situation called for. We all did it. We all would have lost our jobs.
Good PR, and good responses to situations where groups we associate have done something a little off color, is to admit the mistake, not to spin the facts to suit us. I'm really uncomfortable with how Wil Wheaton was treated in this case, not because he's necessarily a perfect person, but because I don't believe that anything he did justifies the reaction people gave him. I also think this is typical behavior for social media generally, so the fact that it happened on Mastodon more or less shows that it's still social media, no matter what magical new structure they're sporting to mitigate the worst behaviors of Twitter.
I don't think we need to say "Cis straight people are oppressed" to say "we shouldn't be treating people poorly without good cause first."
I'm not quite sure what point you're making. Are you saying that Wheaton, as a cis straight person, is actually being oppressed? Are you saying that other people are using Wheaton's story to claim...
I'm not quite sure what point you're making. Are you saying that Wheaton, as a cis straight person, is actually being oppressed? Are you saying that other people are using Wheaton's story to claim that cis straight people are oppressed? Are you claiming it's all a fiction and there are no actual trans people out to get Wheaton? I'm confused.
Regardless, it doesn't negate what I wrote. There are LGBTI people who will attack at the slightest provocation, like our poor abused dog. However, just like our dog, the LGBTI people are usually fighting back from a place of weakness. It's not hard to kick a dog, or just chain it up in the back yard. It's very hard for a minority group facing so much discrimination to actually oppress the majority.
The point I'm making is that "look at this poor innocent cis straight person being beseiged by unreasonable crazy queer people!" is such a hackneyed, right-wing cliche, I can't take it seriously.
The point I'm making is that "look at this poor innocent cis straight person being beseiged by unreasonable crazy queer people!" is such a hackneyed, right-wing cliche, I can't take it seriously.
Ah. The "boy who cried 'Wolf!'" response. You've seen so many cisgender white people claim to be under attack from minorities that, even if there were such an attack for real, you wouldn't believe...
Ah. The "boy who cried 'Wolf!'" response. You've seen so many cisgender white people claim to be under attack from minorities that, even if there were such an attack for real, you wouldn't believe it. Thanks for explaining.
Basically. Also, I didn't see where Wil actually posted the names of the people report-bombing him. Why should anyone automatically believe that it's trans people and not just trolls?
Basically.
Also, I didn't see where Wil actually posted the names of the people report-bombing him. Why should anyone automatically believe that it's trans people and not just trolls?
Is it that hard to feel bad for a human being mobbed by people with an imagined grievance? The modern web get's so obsessed with labels these days, it's now becoming okay to endorse online...
Is it that hard to feel bad for a human being mobbed by people with an imagined grievance? The modern web get's so obsessed with labels these days, it's now becoming okay to endorse online harassment campaigns when the victim is a white male. Really? Is that the kind of person you want to be?
I'll just quote from your post: I interpret that as follows: "Mobbing people online is bad, but trans people 'punching up' at cis white guys is good. I guess perhaps I can forgive the bad actions...
I'll just quote from your post:
I do feel for him for being reported unjustly, but at the same time, my face is stuck in a perpetual "unsure" expression at the idea that a mob of trans people is going after a poor innocent cis dude.
I interpret that as follows: "Mobbing people online is bad, but trans people 'punching up' at cis white guys is good. I guess perhaps I can forgive the bad actions of these people as the target of their harassment is white, male and cis."
You seem to be saying that your initial sympathy at being the recipient of an internet hate-mob fades away somewhat when faced with the fact that his harassers are trans and he is white, etc.
I didn't write the original post, so I'm not sure what you're on about there, I objected to you inserting your own bias, which I quoted. The fact you are conveniently ignoring what led up to it,...
I didn't write the original post, so I'm not sure what you're on about there, I objected to you inserting your own bias, which I quoted.
The fact you are conveniently ignoring what led up to it, assuming all the harassers are trans rather than outrage trolling like James Gunn, and trying to make it a race thing is you framing the conversation around a particular political narrative.
So, no, the fact he's white and the "harassers" are supposedly trans isn't significant, but it is revealing you'd try to pigeonhole someone who disagrees with you as doing so out of prejudice. The reason I don't care more is because he's a celebrity and he can handle getting removed from a single, small, platform.
"Unsure" doesn't mean "it's okay", it means "I don't believe this story". I also don't believe my comment was ambiguous, so I wonder how you reached the interpretation you did.
"Unsure" doesn't mean "it's okay", it means "I don't believe this story".
I also don't believe my comment was ambiguous, so I wonder how you reached the interpretation you did.
I didn't say it's okay to mob a white man. I said that the idea of a mob of Evil Trans Activists ganging up on a "CIS" man is unbelievable. It's literally a right-wing strawman.
I didn't say it's okay to mob a white man. I said that the idea of a mob of Evil Trans Activists ganging up on a "CIS" man is unbelievable. It's literally a right-wing strawman.
I don't think anyone here is calling trans people evil. Being trans doesn't make someone the devil and it doesn't make them a saint. Trans or cis, we are all just people, with all the strengths...
I don't think anyone here is calling trans people evil. Being trans doesn't make someone the devil and it doesn't make them a saint. Trans or cis, we are all just people, with all the strengths and flaws that come with being human. I have no problem believing that a group of trans people could gang up to attack someone, because trans people are human and mob psychology is a deeply human thing. That doesn't make them evil. It just makes them people.
That some people will use this to justify their hatred of minorities or that anyone feels like they have to be perfect or be demonized for every real or imagined flaw is a terrible thing.
Any group, and any person, is capable of evil. It's the groups and persons most convinced they cannot do evil, or who respond to any accusation that their actions are wrong with denials and...
Any group, and any person, is capable of evil.
It's the groups and persons most convinced they cannot do evil, or who respond to any accusation that their actions are wrong with denials and justifications, who are most capable. They've literally disabled their own self-check on antisocial behaviour.
Underdog rising to evil oppressor is cliched trope because it is so true.
He played Wesley Crusher in Star Trek TNG, with recurring cameos in plenty of random television series, the most popular of which is probably The Big Bang Theory. He's also active in all manner of...
He played Wesley Crusher in Star Trek TNG, with recurring cameos in plenty of random television series, the most popular of which is probably The Big Bang Theory.
He's also active in all manner of podcasts and gaming-related stuff, conventions etc. I'd say he's 'nerd famous.'
No. Wheaton isn't famous as a writer. He was a child actor with a leading role in 'Stand By Me' who went on to become famous as a teenage actor in 'Star Trek: The Next Generation'.
No. Wheaton isn't famous as a writer. He was a child actor with a leading role in 'Stand By Me' who went on to become famous as a teenage actor in 'Star Trek: The Next Generation'.
What rules? From what I see, Will didn't break any rules but is being forced out due to mass reporting from an action that didn't actually break any rules.
What rules? From what I see, Will didn't break any rules but is being forced out due to mass reporting from an action that didn't actually break any rules.
There's been a bit of drama on Mastodon over the past few days as Wil Wheaton has been subject to ongoing brigading and attacks apparently motivated by the trans community.
Federation doesn't turn out to solve all the world's problems.
tildesgold.jpg
Federation does mean he won't be banned from Mastodon as a service though; just from a particular instance. In a centralized service like Twitter for example, being banned from Twitter means being banned from all of Twitter, so that you can never again use the platform. On Mastodon he can continue to use it if he likes, just in a different community. That being said, I have to say, I've given the matter a cursory look and I can't figure out why people are so angry with him. Does anyone here have perhaps a summary or breakdown of why he's being banned?
I can't find anything definitive but it appears to be somehow related to his recent blocking of a whole bunch of alt-right and gamergate shitheads.
http://wilwheaton.net/2018/06/regarding-blocklists-trolls-twitters-systemic-inaction-against-abuse-and-the-responsibility-of-wielding-great-power/
Edit: Apparently the blocklist Wil used, created by Randi Harper, has a whole bunch of issues with it... like including many trans people who got in minor disagreements with her.
https://medium.com/@obvious_humor/dont-use-randi-harper-s-blocklist-use-naziblocker-instead-db16cd666d49
https://sjwomble.wordpress.com/2016/04/28/the-problem-with-personal-block-lists/
It's still not clear to me who exactly is targeting him or why, though.
edit 2: Okay... the more I dig the weirder it gets and less sense it makes. People supposedly accused Randi Harper of being a TERF (trans-exlusionary radical feminist) for including many trans people on her block list, and because Wil used her block list (that included many trans people) that apparently makes him "anti-trans" as well. So I guess he is being targeted with reports by the trans community on mastodon. Huh?
https://mastodon.cloud/@wilw/100635802111245669
I have trouble believing that the people attacking wilw actually care about trans issues. As per usual, it seems like a tactical strike to silence an opponent.
Right, but if he switches instances he'll effectively lose all his followers/connections/etc., right? You basically have to start over from scratch?
There's work being done on making it a smoother process but as of now you can download a few settings (see this ss for example) and upload those to a new server so that you can be up & running fairly quickly again. Yes, he'd lose people following him but people they follow would be notified (new follower notification from the new account) and you can forward an old account to a new one, that points towards where the user now is.
Anyone have a rundown on what it has to do with the trans community (would love to hear from our friends in the trans community!)? I tried googling and came up with almost nothing.
Wheaton uses Randi Harper's blocklist. Harper's blocklist includes some outspoken people from the trans community... And that appears to be all there is to it.
Yup. Mastodon doesn't do threading that well, but Wheaton explains it himself right after the linked post here
Thank you!
I have no sympathy whatsosever for Wil Wheaton. IMO, celebrities have no business creating accounts on public instances and then trying to establish their brand or "verify their identity".
There's no reason a celebrity can't spin up their own instance at "social.celebrityname.website" (or pay somebody to do it for them) if their brand matters that much to them.
If you're a celebrity, trying to migrate your personal brand onto somebody else's instance is a dick move, especially if they run it at their own expense.
And he doesn't even have to disrupt his existing website. All he needs is to create a subdomain like "social.wilwheaton.net". And if he wanted to try Mastodon before committing, all he had to do was not insist on being the Wil Wheaton.
What am I missing here? He did not violate any rules, but he's being bullied off of the platform by people who have some personal grievances against him.
Isn't this very similar to why many people have fled twitter for mastodon? The oppressed always seem so quick to oppress.
Seems generally apologists feel it's okay because he can just move to another instance or that he should be responsible for establishing his own instance so the mob can be ignored by him and it's as though this mob being able to coerce instance owners to censor people isn't a problem to be solved.
I'm grossed out. Is it correct that mastodon.cloud is the instance these bad actors are on?
Some from that instance and some from others
Mastodon.cloud (disclaimer: my own home instance) and mastodon.social (run by Mastodon's creator, Eugen), are two of the largest English-speaking Mastodon instances. Yes, some of the harrassment originated from both, but that's not representative of either as a whole.
Several smaller instances, including particularly https://bofa.lol, participated far more relative to size, and with the explicit support and encouragement of admins. One admin at another instance all but encouraged death threats against Wheaton.
Those have now been blocked by numerous other instances.
Mastodon.cloud's admin has struggled with site stability and general communicativeness and openness for months, if not the beginning. I'd moved to another instance after an initial set of technical glitches (that instance has since gone largely dormant, though it remains online). It's not an easy task and I've strong doubts he's up to it.
Thank you for the summary!
I wrote about this elsewhere in this thread.
I think it's a point well articulated. People who want to learn more about the research-side of the behavior you're talking about can look up "learned depression" for the sad side of things and "Defense mechanisms" for the more active approaches you're emphasizing.
Wow. I didn't realise there were actual, fancy, high-falutin' terms for these behaviours! To me, it's just stuff I've seen and experienced.
I do feel for him for being reported unjustly, but at the same time, my face is stuck in a perpetual "unsure" expression at the idea that a mob of trans people is going after a poor innocent cis dude. (The fact that he spells cis as CIS in all-caps in another toot isn't helping.)
I don't know if it's happening in Wheaton's case, but I know that some (repeat: SOME!) LGBTI people are very quick to assume they're being attacked, and will counter-attack accordingly. I've seen this in real life, among actual friends, and on the internet.
I explain it thus:
Imagine a puppy. A cute adorable puppy that just wants to be friends. Ain't it sweet? Now put that puppy into a home where the humans beat it and neglect it and kick it and abuse it every day of its life. What sort of dog is that puppy going to grow up as? It's going to become one of two things: a cowering whimpering mess, or a vicious wild dog. It'll either run away at the sight of a raised hand, or it'll bite any human who comes toward it.
The same thing happens to LGBTI people. A lot of them have to face ongoing bullying and discrimination and even violence. Just like that poor little puppy, they're either going to whimper or bite. We don't see the whimperers: they're off living miserable lives of depression and sadness (when they're not actively killing themselves). But we do see the biters. They take offence at everything because they have been conditioned to believe that everyone is against them because everyone they've met is against them.
I've seen LGBTI people turn nasty at the slightest hint of an attack. And the problem is that, because they've been conditioned by the real hate they've had to deal with, they see hate even in places where it's not present. They're pre-emptively defending themselves even when they haven't been attacked because they've learned that everything is an attack.
I repeat: this is only some LGBTI people. Everyone responds differently to the circumstances of their life. But there is a significant minority of LGBTI people who are like this: they were abused as puppies so they grew up to be dogs who bite.
Wil Wheaton's mob of trans people is most likely real.
This is just about the saddest thing I've ever read on tildes.
I'm sorry to bring you down. I'm merely reflecting the real-life statistics that LGBTI teenagers are between 4 and 8 times more likely to attempt suicide than their heterosexual cisgender peers. And, if we separate out just the "T" part of that community, the suicide rates skyrocket, with up to half of all transgender people having attempted suicide at least once in their lives.
Discrimination actually kills people.
I do understand the inclination to assume bad faith, as a gay person who's been burned too many times in my life... but this story just seems all too perfect for the "cis straight people are the oppressed ones these days" narrative.
One of the traps I think people fall into too often, and one of my favorite lessons on PR that I had in undergrad, relates to how to handle cases like this where it seems like someone you're representing did something wrong. I'll describe the lesson first and then get into the trap that basically my entire class made (myself included).
The lesson scenario was this: a police officer appeared to have driven drunk to his home after his shift was over. He ran a red light at an intersection and collided with another vehicle, causing a fatality. How do you, as the PR rep for the police department, handle the story?
The trap we all fell into was trying to mitigate the offense, spinning the narrative way out of what the facts of the situation called for. We all did it. We all would have lost our jobs.
Good PR, and good responses to situations where groups we associate have done something a little off color, is to admit the mistake, not to spin the facts to suit us. I'm really uncomfortable with how Wil Wheaton was treated in this case, not because he's necessarily a perfect person, but because I don't believe that anything he did justifies the reaction people gave him. I also think this is typical behavior for social media generally, so the fact that it happened on Mastodon more or less shows that it's still social media, no matter what magical new structure they're sporting to mitigate the worst behaviors of Twitter.
I don't think we need to say "Cis straight people are oppressed" to say "we shouldn't be treating people poorly without good cause first."
I'm not quite sure what point you're making. Are you saying that Wheaton, as a cis straight person, is actually being oppressed? Are you saying that other people are using Wheaton's story to claim that cis straight people are oppressed? Are you claiming it's all a fiction and there are no actual trans people out to get Wheaton? I'm confused.
Regardless, it doesn't negate what I wrote. There are LGBTI people who will attack at the slightest provocation, like our poor abused dog. However, just like our dog, the LGBTI people are usually fighting back from a place of weakness. It's not hard to kick a dog, or just chain it up in the back yard. It's very hard for a minority group facing so much discrimination to actually oppress the majority.
I'm really not sure what you're trying to say.
The point I'm making is that "look at this poor innocent cis straight person being beseiged by unreasonable crazy queer people!" is such a hackneyed, right-wing cliche, I can't take it seriously.
Ah. The "boy who cried 'Wolf!'" response. You've seen so many cisgender white people claim to be under attack from minorities that, even if there were such an attack for real, you wouldn't believe it. Thanks for explaining.
Basically.
Also, I didn't see where Wil actually posted the names of the people report-bombing him. Why should anyone automatically believe that it's trans people and not just trolls?
Is it that hard to feel bad for a human being mobbed by people with an imagined grievance? The modern web get's so obsessed with labels these days, it's now becoming okay to endorse online harassment campaigns when the victim is a white male. Really? Is that the kind of person you want to be?
You're missing the point and pushing your own narrative.
I'll just quote from your post:
I interpret that as follows: "Mobbing people online is bad, but trans people 'punching up' at cis white guys is good. I guess perhaps I can forgive the bad actions of these people as the target of their harassment is white, male and cis."
You seem to be saying that your initial sympathy at being the recipient of an internet hate-mob fades away somewhat when faced with the fact that his harassers are trans and he is white, etc.
I didn't write the original post, so I'm not sure what you're on about there, I objected to you inserting your own bias, which I quoted.
The fact you are conveniently ignoring what led up to it, assuming all the harassers are trans rather than outrage trolling like James Gunn, and trying to make it a race thing is you framing the conversation around a particular political narrative.
So, no, the fact he's white and the "harassers" are supposedly trans isn't significant, but it is revealing you'd try to pigeonhole someone who disagrees with you as doing so out of prejudice. The reason I don't care more is because he's a celebrity and he can handle getting removed from a single, small, platform.
"Unsure" doesn't mean "it's okay", it means "I don't believe this story".
I also don't believe my comment was ambiguous, so I wonder how you reached the interpretation you did.
I didn't say it's okay to mob a white man. I said that the idea of a mob of Evil Trans Activists ganging up on a "CIS" man is unbelievable. It's literally a right-wing strawman.
I don't think anyone here is calling trans people evil. Being trans doesn't make someone the devil and it doesn't make them a saint. Trans or cis, we are all just people, with all the strengths and flaws that come with being human. I have no problem believing that a group of trans people could gang up to attack someone, because trans people are human and mob psychology is a deeply human thing. That doesn't make them evil. It just makes them people.
That some people will use this to justify their hatred of minorities or that anyone feels like they have to be perfect or be demonized for every real or imagined flaw is a terrible thing.
Any group, and any person, is capable of evil.
It's the groups and persons most convinced they cannot do evil, or who respond to any accusation that their actions are wrong with denials and justifications, who are most capable. They've literally disabled their own self-check on antisocial behaviour.
Underdog rising to evil oppressor is cliched trope because it is so true.
In all seriousness, who's Wil Wheaton? It's the first time I heard of him. He seems to be a big celebrity looking at the number of followers he had.
He played Wesley Crusher in Star Trek TNG, with recurring cameos in plenty of random television series, the most popular of which is probably The Big Bang Theory.
He's also active in all manner of podcasts and gaming-related stuff, conventions etc. I'd say he's 'nerd famous.'
Ah thanks!
I never got into Star Trek, but I did watch Big Bang Theory for many years. TIL that this actor is Wil Wheaton.
Thanks.
TNG was the best Star Trek anyway :)
I though his main claim to fame was being a writer for some tv or movies? idk maybe I'm mixing things up.
No. Wheaton isn't famous as a writer. He was a child actor with a leading role in 'Stand By Me' who went on to become famous as a teenage actor in 'Star Trek: The Next Generation'.
Yep, I mixed him up with Jose Whedon - I guess surnames sound similar? Idk
He was in Star Trek: The Next Generation and is an active person in various nerd/geek communities.
Also Stand By Me was another big role.
For those of us who were straight a in every class but pe in the 89s and 90s, he was a hero along with Val Kilmer.
Speak for yourself. Charlie Decker from Stephen King's novel Rage was my hero.
Finally they get the rules they asked for enforced on them.
What rules? From what I see, Will didn't break any rules but is being forced out due to mass reporting from an action that didn't actually break any rules.