One thing that majorly affected my politics was a research project I did for school about bullying. I learned the usual stuff: that bullying is harmful, that it's widespread, etc. But the question that interested me was: what do we do? What kind of interventions stop bullying? People have tried a lot of different interventions to deal with bullying. And most of them don't work. More security/surveillance? Just changes where the bullying happens. Appeals to the bully's empathy? Slides off. Telling weird kids to be less weird? Makes it worse.

There's a principle researchers who study ideas of morality have come up with that I think is really helpful in looking at Matt Walsh and his reaction to Josh Duggar. It's that there are two basic approaches to morality, which most people mix: harm violation and purity violation The harm violation approach is that something is immoral because it hurts someone. If you punch someone, for instance, that's bad because of the pain that it causes the person who gets punched. It's a very simple, and I think good moral idea.

Hunter x Hunter characters with Onion articles (spoilers)

So Maya Forstater, the woman JK Rowling is supporting, wrote a manifesto. I won't link to it, but it gives a more detailed version of how she lost the contract. She nervously makes a transphobic tweet, and nothing happens. So she decides to make more specific ones. No reaction. Rather than questioning if she's oppressed, she makes, by her own count, 150 TRANSPHOBIC TWEETS IN A WEEK (which are at most politely debated with) before finally getting, not fired, but a polite letter telling her coworkers are uncomfortable and could she stop.

So transphobe twitter has become obsessed with a woman by the name of Jessica Yaniv, so let's talk about her, because while it might seem like a case that fits transphobic narratives well, even it reveals some of their weaknesses. First off, there's the court case involving her and then there's allegations about her having creepy online behavior surrounding kids. The second thing is irrelevant to the first, and it's worth noting how few transphobes acknowledge that. It says something of their real beliefs