Let me ask you this: When you say "y'all", you are referring to yourself as part of an outgroup. You seem to not see yourself as part of the forum, or at least the majority of it. I guess I would ask what group do you see yourself as a part of, and when you say "y'all" what group are you referring to that others are a part of?
I don't see myself as part of this forum because ETC has demonstrated it doesn't want people of my ideological bent in there and will stop at nothing to brand me as something I'm clearly fucking not.
What is your ideological bent, and what do you believe is the ideological bent of others? I don't mean to be rude, it just sticks in my craw a bit when I see the whole "Era is all X" type stuff or people intimate they aren't welcome because of their beliefs when a fairly wide range of beliefs are accepted here, just not obviously awful ones.
I am a social democrat who has consistently voted and organized in line with socially democratic policy for the last 11 years. This forum gives me the impression that it is increasingly revolutionary socialist in bent and seems to be jumping onto anything that they think will stick to opponents of revolutionary socialism if it Gets The Job Done, and that it took all the posters and none of the lessons from the place it was meant to replace.
I'm just going to say this right now: I am literally one of those victims and will have mental trauma for the rest of my life from it.
Since this forum seems to rise and fall on the whims of bad faith posters regardless of their political lean? Probably not much.
You don't tell a poster who already said multiple times in the thread they are a sexual assault victim that by talking in the thread they are making it unsafe for sexual assault victims. You can disagree with a person without going to that.
or when Caitlin Caruso says (as summarized from Huffpo)
should we not read these as testimonies of experience sexual assault, even if the victims haven't explicitly used that term to describe it?
That was brave as hell of you to share, I hope you are doing okay now
Honestly? As a victim myself it's always immensely complicated whether you read something as an experience of sexual assault. I wasn't even sure myself whether the coercion that I experienced was assault for years after the fact, so I absolutely am giving them that read if they go out and say it. (Caruso in particular is a strong argument toward giving the behavior that read overall.)
I've shared before, but anonymously on the old forum. I've never seen any mental health professionals because I don't want to relive it even though I relive it from time to time it's more intense when I talk about it to people in person. My parents don't even know.
And I don't necessarily agree with Midnight Jon but a wait and see aproach is allowed on this forum and I feel deeply uncomfortable saying to a sexual assault victim in this thread they aren't welcome in a thread about sexual assault victims because they make it unsafe for sexual assault victims. There were ways of disagreeing with Miidnight Jon that involved not saying that.
