(CW: long and autistic)
I've been thinking about how Corust and his mutuals are sufficiently unbothered by us to use us as a resource and to refuse to back down when they get criticism for it. A few years ago, I had what one might call the standard view of the Farms: that it's a far-right hive of bullies and sociopaths that delight in ruining people's lives for the lulz. I started lurking in earnest during the Jonathan Yaniv ball-waxing saga, eventually registered and started posting, and learned that this place--or at least the parts of it I visit--was nothing like I had been told. I stay out of A&N, because fuck those guys, and I tend to only follow lolcows who I perceive as actively malignant in some way, people who affirmatively work to make the world a worse place and whose success at doing so I find ethically offensive.
(The only real exceptions on my watchlist are JustinRPG, who is clearly living his best life and I wish him well, and I guess Mode_View, whom I only follow because I'm a Kevin completionist.) So for the most part, the people I interact with here are just run-of-the-mill folks with normal lives and normal consciences who enjoy gossiping about eccentric Internet personalities but have zero interest in harassing or bullying anyone.
Take this thread, for example. From the information people put out, we're clearly a lot more diverse than most online communities. We range in age from early twenties to mid-fifties and beyond. We range in education and life experience from working men and women to people with advanced degrees. I would guess we're a
lot more balanced between men and women than most of the places the terminally online congregate. Politically we're all over the map, and probably balance out around center-left. We really don't have much in common besides our mutual unwavering conviction that Lou Gagliardi is a grifting piece of shit who takes far more from the human race than he has ever given to it and does not deserve to succeed in life. And yet we're all fundamentally civil to each other almost all of the time, we don't go out of our way to find reasons to get offended and yell at each other, we're not continually engaged in a Hobbesian struggle to increase our own social clout at the expense of others. If you're an outsider looking in on this thread who can stand to occasionally read the gamer word without experiencing heart palpitations, it's gotta stand out as being a healthier place from an emotional standpoint than, say, Twitter.
I was thinking about that when I read
the rather alarmist article USA Today published a few days ago about the Byuu/Near alleged suicide, which relays the aforementioned standard view of the Farms:
And I thought: Fucking
seriously?
We're the ones who are supposed to lack empathy and have cluster B disorders? Nearly every day you can go on Lou's Twitter feed and find examples of him attacking people in acutely personal ways. He targets their religion, their ethnicity, their friends, their disabilities, their home states, whatever he can find that he believes will cause them more pain than anything else he could say. And he does it to them directly on Twitter, while we sit here talking about it on an entirely different website that he never has to visit. And
we're supposed to be the sociopaths? It's looking more and more to me like we're the only empathetic ones in the room.
And if someone who's been hurt or cheated by Lou or people like him drop by and see that we really are nothing like what people say about us, that our main function in here is to catalog his misdeeds so he cannot run away from them, that has to have an impact. It's true that this is not the most trans-friendly website in the world, but they will also surely have noticed that Lou receives very little criticism from us for being trans, mainly because we really don't consider Lou trans at all. (Perhaps that will put a thunk or two in people's minds about whether they need to honor the "validity" of someone who clearly only pretends to be trans online for the social clout.)
So if Corust & crew happen to see this: Hi! Thank you for your service! We think what you're doing is great and we will do what we can to continue to make it possible in our own way. Confronting a cruel, dishonest person with evidence of their cruelty and dishonesty is not bullying or harassment; if anything, it will make it harder for them to abuse and cheat people in the future. Disavow us if you must, but if you were to take leave of your senses and start participating here, I think we'd get along just fine.
we are spiraling faster and faster towards page 1000, and I am so super fucking excited. It's been such a ride, and this is easily the thread I participate in the most. We're gonna have some more suicide baiting later, guarantee it!
