This kind of thinking is actually incredibly bad, because it erases real achievements groups have made. Some of the nicest communities and people I know of are using Pleroma. They're working on innovative things like MRF which Mastodon only dreams of ever getting.

It's the same shit PoC in America have to deal with, and something a lot of you already recognised is bullshit. So why don't Pleroma haters recognise this one when they see it?

I can already see the rebuttal some of them have

"But it's so widespread"

Congratulations, idiot, you have literally parroted an argument against PoC in America. This is literally the thing they say as a rebuttal. "There's so much violence, it's so unsafe, it's so bad," etc. when the reality is it's a relatively small group of extreme troublemakers.

I shouldn't really be surprised; I think most of the people doing this are milquetoast liberals who probably /do/ say things like this behind closed doors.

@Elizafox I usually expect the liberals to be more quantitative and less prone to excuse 'I had a bad experience/I actually had a lot of neutral experiences, but the bad ones reinforced my bias/emotional disposition so I forgot all the non-bad ones" as reasoning.

@Azure My experience is they'll just throw a bunch of stats at you

@Azure As if stats justify racism

@Azure I am waiting for them to gain stats on Pleroma users (I am sure they are, they love numbers) and then throwing them in our faces

@Elizafox Heck no! If anything stats are (at least for me) the best way to lay out in black and white the true obscenity of racism.

There's really /no way/ to deny structural racism when you can plainly see 'Hey! The legacy of segregation and neglect literally poisons black children due to unremediated lead that practically overlaps demographic maps'

Not to say that some people won't try, I guess.

@Azure they selectively show you the numbers rather than the numbers that matter

you know like 29% of blacks below poverty line in the US vs 9% whites below poverty line, and how poverty leads to violence and learned helplessness... but nobody will ever tell you that side of the story, nope

@Azure (and how, when adjusted for poverty, blacks don't have crime rates higher than whites... )

@Elizafox (This is on reason why I have no time and care for 'There is no objective reality, just competing narratives/Supposed 'objective' information is just a tool to reinforce the whims of the powerful.' It's like NO. REALLY this is an evil festering in the world that we have to do something about, not 'one valid narrative among many'.)

@Azure this is a trick pulled by people who have their own agenda to push and to discredit their opponents.

@Azure or by centrists who are usually fatalist sorts of people

@Azure @Elizafox
If you beleive that "all" points of view are valid for someone, then it logically follows that there are still invalid points of view: those that, by their very nature, deny that any other point of view is valid.
::look back at that sentence:: Eurgh. That's a lot simpler in my head than in English.

@Elizafox It's what happens any time someone is hostile to a given demographic or category. Groups are so large, there will always be someone in that group, somewhere, doing something bad

There's a Yiddish expression, "A shadna fur die goyim", about this effect as applied to jews, but it works everywhere

from r/shitamericanssay to breitbart and yes, Mastodon too

https://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com/post/171882428456/ has a rather civilised takedown of this bias (CW: reponding to TERF)

@Elizafox

1. pleroma isnt a marginalised group
2. holy shit this is a bad take
3. Almost ever pleroma user Ive met has been a dickhead
4. Lets face it, you're far more liberal than I am so don't even bother attempting to use that
5. Did I mention how much of a fucking awful take this is?
6. seriously don't trivialise actual racism

@zeezeemoomoo

doesn't surprise me, she is racist, I blocked her ages ago because she was saying racism had nothing to do with her, or her family, she consistantly uses ableist language.

(I removed the mastoaddress of hers because IDK how masto would hand ating a user that is blocked.)

@Elizafox I thought the parallels were obvious

It's one of the biggest reasons I want to find other communities

I would never underestimate the power of human creativity to find outs to be horrible to others, when given an inch to do so

@Elizafox This is also why I consider the "punch up" line to be the worst advice in modern history, compared to just "don't kick people while they're down"

It reminds me of the perverse joke "Do onto others before they do onto you"

It's good advice iff society has deteriorated in certain ways, and accelerates its decline in mortifying ways otherwise

Whoever came up with that either had no appreciation for the power of human creativity, or knew it all too well