It's like furries. Over a decade ago people could post any furry video and it would get through the hopper. Now furries alone aren't strange enough.

My personal view is that the CWC stalking is much darker and sicker than a clip of a hotel panicking because they unknowingly booked YiffFest ‘09 or those disturbing full body makeup animal muscleman videos.

While freak-show gawking at a fringe group is morally dubious at best, as soon as one individual unwillingly gets singled out as ‘king freak’ it jumps right over that gray area.

CWC was never something I was OK with.

Onideus Mad Hatter or Lord Rexington Fear or Q the Ranting Gryphon were one thing, they very deliberately put themselves out in the public eye over and over in a way that CWC didn't, and as far as I know nobody was literally IRL gangstalking them for the majorit yof their adult lives.

Yeah, the CWC obsession always turned me off. To be honest, so did them huge amount of obsessive drama surrounding JDR. And the site was a lot more interesting, and felt (though probably wasn't) a lot more enlightened than, say, Something Awful, when it wasn't just relying on "HAW HAW ANOTHER FURRY SITE" as the bulk of new exhibits.

Alitheia and OMH, broken as they were, were so much more aggressive and assholey, and it didn't feel like punching down.

I remembered reading that PoE Red was shut down because of mounting legal threats. Reading a far more recent interview, K. Thor Jenses said one of the reasons was people breaking the prime directive and fucking with exhibits. Reading between the lines, it's pretty clear that the real reason was morbid fascination turning into contempt, and contempt turning into bitterness and hatred.

When you feel both downtrodden and entitled, you'll do anything to claw your way back up, including punching down. ESPECIALLY that, because it becomes easy to believe the contradictory ideas of 'they are weak and so can be defeated' and 'they post a threat and thus MUST be defeated'. It's how 4chan and Kiwi Farms became what they are. It's how fascism happens.

They have a thread about Maddox, which doesnt make sense cause Maddox is badass and brilliant.

Her analysis of obsessive cringe is spot on, isn't it?

There's still a good deal of punching down on this site too, more the pity. Some here get a big emotional kick out of looking down their noses at poor people and mocking them for basically being poor and uneducated, calling them "retarded" or worse. You don't have to subscribe to the politics of the "Red State trash" to remember that they are still human beings.

At the same time we do need laughter and mockery. As Contrapoints said, that's what finally turned the GamerGate types into the figures of ridicule they should be. So it's a fine line: you SHOULD mock the fools marching aginst cov-19 lockdown; you sure as fuck shouldn't write off whole populations as "retards" somehow less human than you.

Tell me more about kiwi farms If you care to

And now I need to confess that of course I look down on that kind of spiteful pissy hypocrisy precisely because I recognise it in my own soul too.

Of COURSE a part of me looks down on Trump’s white non-college-educated Evangelical base as a pile of inbred fat ignorant racist gun-toting book-burning meth-abusing bleach-drinking cousin-fucking WalMart-shopping trash. And I know that part is hypocritical and punching down so I stifle it and aim to be a better humanist.

So then I hate it when OTHER liberals (who aren’t TRUE liberals like ME) pull that shit and make the REST of us liberals look BAD.

Which is just what she was talking about.

You keep naively assuming a desire for fascism and totalitarianism is just a lack of education or income. You seem to think you would be able to de-radicalize every SS member in nazi Germany and turn every ISIS fighter into a feminist if you just had enough time and pamphlets.

Assad isn’t a violent dictator because he’s dumb, it’s because he likes the wealth and power he gets by being a dictator.

The dumb hopeless republican base are in the same vein. They sincerely believe that if they’re able to brutalize enough scapegoats then they will be elevated to a 1950s upper middle class fantasy. This is the rise of fascism.

And you are much like the many idealists in countless pre-fascist countries who kept preaching love and peace right up until the death squads showed up.

It's kind of funny, because K. Thor broke the Prime Directive a lot.

Whenever SolRo knows he’s in the wrong he makes up crazy shit to put in other people’s mouths. That’s his defense mechanism.

Obviously I’ve never ever said “don’t fight the fascists.” I take a lot more actual ACTION than SolRo who think he’s really sticking ii to the billionaires by acting snide and calling people “retards” on an obscure comedy forum.

It’s obvious that SolRo’s anti-fascism, while genuine, is also his excuse for hating the rural poor, just like his probably-genuine pro-Palestine views are his thin excuse for hating Jews. On some level he knows it’s disgusting and wrong, he can’t dodge forever, so he makes up shit like “oh so you love fascism huh?”

Hazelnut, most of the people protesting are poor and they don't have nest eggs to fall back on. A lot of them are not getting government money apart from the stimulus, which will not cover their bills. A lot of people are financially suffering right now and if they government tells you to stay at home and you can't afford rent, food, or anything else, you're probably going to protest as well.

It's all just a matter of perspective.

"if the government"

Yeah, I do agree. Leaders like Mitch McConnell are sheer scum; they are as close to true irredeemable evil as you get in this world. But must dumb schlubs voting Republican are victims, not evil monsters.

Most of the people protesting are retirees and stay-at-home moms who rotted their brains away with facebook conspiracy theories.

I haven’t seen a narrative from the protestors about how they can’t afford food or are about to lose their house, it’s all “freedom, fascism and i want to go to the beach!”

Missing the forest for the trees in any case. Those protesters are a tiny (and astro-turfed) sliver of the population, hardly representative of the average undereducated American.

Come to think of if, that’s exactly what Natalie refers to in the video as ‘Mascotting’: picking out a horrible (or at least cringey) member of a community in order to shit on that whole community.