francisfordpopola:

dreg-heap:

imwiremother:

dreg-heap:

Twitter discourse is exhausting most of the time but that one time it was discovered someone known for giving people shit for every random perceived transgression was actually working a high paying job at Raytheon was genuinely very funny

i come home from work at the exploding orphans factory. i see a post on my tl where someone is recommending a ya book where an iffy exchange happened on page 234. my eyes pop out of my head like a loony tunes character and i start tweeting up a storm in between my posts begging for money to feed my starving cats that live in my 4 bedroom mansion. i heal the world one keystroke at a time

What a day, what a day

The fact that he works at the war crimes factory gets a lot of attention but it should not go unstated that his constant shit-starting was also in essence a job. He very directly made money by harassing people and inciting others to harass them.

Most online harassment campaigns aren’t spontaneous and self-organizing. Pretty much every time if you dig through the mud and the blood and the posts you will find that one or more moderate-to-large accounts pushed the snowball down the hill. This is true, for example, of the social murder of Isabel Fall, which Mardoll was an aggressive participant in. It was a relatively limited internet brush fire until a few big name authors including NK Jemisin (who specifically knew who Fall was, and had pre-existing beef with her) massively boosted its exposure.

The more cases you dig into, the more you see the same names cropping up over and over as the people who throw the first stone in each community. And when you see the same people consistently engaging in a socially harmful activity, it should be a tip-off to any good materialist that someone is making money from it. How, exactly, varies a lot, but the thing to understand is that the value being extracted here is always through the boost in visibility you’re afforded by casting the first stone. It’s a sort of clout-gravity-assist—if you have a big enough platform already to cast a big enough stone, throwing it will get a lot more eyeballs on your account. At that point, anything that converts views proportionally into money is a viable option for cashing out; most people use a mixture. Boosting your own work in the same field is an option. Some people literally just set up a Patreon. One of the most common and easily the most insidious one is just to have constant rotating donation drives for your various agonies.

While this business model is incredibly common across our big beautiful Online, right now on Twitter it is worse than it has ever been anywhere else. Mardoll was far from the worst offender—as already mentioned, many of his personal enemies were doing likewise. There are also just roving gangs of freaks who will put a price on the head of anyone they cross paths with (including recently, the grieving trans girlfriend of a trans woman murdered by her parents) in the name of protecting marginalized people, somehow. And of course the more banal example of the Twitter Main Character, which runs on this same model, and happens so much it’s become a joke and even a point of pride.

Mardoll ran an incredibly common grift and he ran it because it worked. He was a constant fixture in any discourse to do with queer media, very transparently directing hate towards other queer authors on a regular basis, and he made money doing it. Obviously the war crimes thing is more important as well as more dramatic. But I would argue that the two are not unrelated, in the sense that harassing other queer and marginalized people for money and lying about being unemployed when you secretly have a job at the murder robot company both require a truly bottomless kind of cravenness and self-absorption, and betray a complete disinterest in any kind of politics based in solidarity. Both are the kind of thing you can only justify to yourself if you understand your marginalization entirely as a barrier to You Getting Yours, rather than something that has drafted you from birth into a shared struggle for liberation.

gekken:

adz:

surprisedentistry:

tragicallyphosphorescent:

surprisedentistry:

surprisedentistry:

if the satanic panic was happening now a lot of you guys would be like “DNI if you don’t believe survivors of satanic ritual abuse at daycare”

have already been accused of being a fascist for making this post

I dare you to explain what “satanic panic” is supposed to symbolize here. Did you refrain from saying “red scare” or especially “war of drugs” cause you knew if you said that people would stop for a minute and consider before rebloging this nonsense post mindlessly? Or is this about survivor of violence or rape? Or just what tf is this about?

have you considered googling “satanic panic.” sometimes if you look up words you don’t know you can find out what they mean

adzenysofficial:

ryangoslingofficial:

It’s 106 miles to chicago, we got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, empty can of mr. pibb, half a bag of jack links beef jerky, full carton of fat free milk, 3 bags of goldfish, fifty knives, a red wrench, a gay wrench, one really pissed off scorpion, two swords, 1000 loyal soldiers, 10 ounces of cannabis rutica, gut full of flesh, half a picture of gangsta spongebob, half a 2007 honda accord,  an incredible vr experience, burnt cd of poorly compressed weird al songs, handful of loose peanuts, two tickets to paradise, 20th century howitzer cannon, tiao cruz megahits mixtape, a daft punk yaoi keychain, and a cassette to kd lang’s ingenue

rabbitrah:

radiohead2:

guys dont ask me why but doesnt pink give you such she/her vibes… omg and blue is SO he/him… not sure why but it just makes sense ❤

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