Thread by @HumblyAlex

To formally end my involvement in the #HarryPotter drama (rather than let it be easier to get sucked back in) I'm going to tell a relevant story about when & why I rebranded my Twitter account almost a year ago. Not relevant for the trans person involved, but for the groupthink.

I used to be part of a large private Facebook group where people posted screenshots of the messages they would receive from creeps that slipped into their DM's. The group included the intent to shame them in its title.

Now, I used to be one of those creeps awhile back. I can now see both sides of that experience a lot clearer (especially after remembering some messages I've received from people asking if they could give me a massage on another site and not taking no for an answer).

Awareness came slowly and I had to find it myself. Shame never once convinced me of anything. In that regard I've also been a hypocrite plenty throughout my life. That all aside, here I am in this Facebook group enjoying the screenshots people are posting.

One day, a trans woman posts a screenshot with a caption ridiculing and villifying the person they were talking with via a dating app. In the screenshot, the cis guy asks an innocent and admittedly naive question regarding when and how they dress more femininely.

The trans woman immediately flips out on them for asking. The guy apologizes and admits that they're ignorant. The trans woman doesn't care. They've already been triggered by the non-wrongdoing, let's them have it, and then brings the convo to the group to further mock them.

I comment pointing out what had actually occurred (not the trans woman's narrative of events we could read for ourselves). Another woman in the group also pointed it out.

The difference between how I communicated it and how the other woman communicated it was that she defended the guy while I also pointed out the hypocrisy. If you can't handle people confronting you over public wrongdoing, why make anything public, right?

I can barely paraphrase how I wrote it, but it went something like, "While I assume you may have a sensitivity to being hurt by others, your shaming him for something he didn't do is a form of bullying in itself."

All of a sudden they're making up lies about what I said and did, calling out mods to help them stay ignorant of the reality pointed out by using a mod's actions against me as a validated excuse to avoid critically thinking for them self and I was suspended. Mission accomplished.

Now, based on my own ADHD related truama growing up, I myself have a predisposition for acting on perceived injustices which I've only recently gotten better at mitigating the impulsiveness with. So, I message the mod to get answers.

Turns out there was a rule I didn't recall about not messaging mods directly, but they responded anyway. Their excuse for the suspension was that the group's intention was to validate everyone's experience, no questions asked. Basically admitting they were enabling wrongdoing.

They block me, I find them on Twitter, and I confront them again. The same bad faith responses for days and then their mob comes after me. Starts sending me horrible private messages on FB and joining in on the bad faith with tweets.

I'm overly hyperfocused and it's greatly taking away from a weekend trip to an airbnb and the casino either the gf, so I decide then & there I was done w/ arguing publicly with people unless there was a productive intention behind it other than being upset at a lack of fairness.

Willful ignorance isn't just something I've tried solving for most of my life, but I definitely have a sensitivity to it when I realized as a kid it was not just the greatest problem with my parents, but also every injustice and lack of correction for it.

I joined Mensa with the hopes of finding others who could work on the problem of willful ignorance & intellectual arrogance with me, but mostly found just the same if not more of it. Used my time in a cesspool of a group they have poking and prodding the sociocentrism going on.

Learned a lot from the experience and then left once the learning was barely a trickle. Now I'm here, finding the same pseudo-intellectualism that always runs counter-productive to the goals held as I dip my toes into a topical issue to see just how bad the situation overall is.

It's worse. People lack the skill that is having an unconditional sense of self-worth, everyone is virtue/intellect-signaling like there's no tomorrow to make up for what they don't have, the unconscious incompetence, lack of self-awareness or reflective thinking is high.

People are letting groups do the thinking for them, their thoughts are directed by fear and comfort seeking biases with zero interest in mitigating and of it for the sake of consequences they will be all too prepared to avoid responsibility for.
We're just repeating history here.

Gonna have to go back to shutting people down the moment they show even an ounce of bad faith again to save me the time hoping they'll ever redeem themselves, let alone acknowledge what they've done when it's pointed out. 99% of people let me down in that regard.

I hope to make a difference toward our breaking this cycle someday. The intellectual glass ceiling on our progress as a species needs to be broken if we have any interest in seeing just how much we can flourish together and on average. Fingers crossed.