Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated) @joepie91@pixie.town

This exact problem is also a big part of why I only view peaceful bridge building between different perspectives as a tool in the toolbox, and not as a universal solution; sometimes it cannot bridge this gap in lived experience, and the only remaining options are the ones where you put your foot down and draw a line.

One of the most frustrating things to deal with is people making assumptions about how (social/political) systems work, and the reality being so far off that you can't possibly correct them without sounding like you're making shit up.

Like this persistent idea that journalists are careful purveyors of the truth and facts, and then you have to explain to people that they also just copy-paste the government press releases without checking anything, that many journalists have genuinely never *considered* the possibility that these government sources may be lying, that they have full uncompromising faith in the government.

And if you tell people this, they're like "surely that can't be right, someone would have noticed", because the person you're talking to has a fundamental distrust of the government, but the journalist has a fundamental trust, and likely neither could even imagine the other party's perspective being real, because their lived experiences are so far apart.

And then you're left 'inbetween' them with your data and evidence, and it doesn't matter what the answer is, because at least one of them will disbelieve you no matter what conclusion you draw and no matter how much evidence you supply.

And like, I don't know, maybe we should be demanding healthier UI, instead of just passing it off to be someone else's problem through stalebots?

I can't help but observe how every justification for the importance of stalebots, despite the varied stated reasons, always seems to boil down to "this is a workaround for a third-party project management UI that is not respectful of my mental health or time", but without actually drawing that conclusion

I should've probably included the #FediBlockMeta tag, considering that half of the 'discourse' on there seems to fall into this exact bucket

A shocking amount of people really needs to learn that a lot of bans/defederations/whatever are not handed out for specific directly-observable behaviour, but for the offender's active refusal to reflect or reconsider when approached about it.

This is true for defederations on fedi, but it is very much also true for community management more broadly.

Most moderators do not act impulsively. If someone got banned somewhere, and they're telling you that "all they did is <innocent sounding thing>", then the reality is that *they are probably lying*, and there was actually a whole conversation (or multiple) where they were asked to stop doing the thing and they trivialized it or actively refused.

That doesn't mean that every moderation action is always justified. But it *does* mean that if you want to question the legitimacy of a moderation action, you actually need to do the work of understanding the full context and not just go off whatever the banned person claims (nor just what's in the public logs).

So transphobes have been reviewbombing the new Doctor Who episode on RottenTomatoes due to its trans representation.

Some of the comments include people holding up Davros (the explicitly eugenicist villain from earlier episodes) as their role model, using the phrase "I sit with Darvos" (sometimes as a hashtag). At least one of the comments told the showrunner to kill themselves.

In case anyone was wondering how that's going.