Hi, Bell Fen! - Luminous Hyaena

TAPAICAL: Electric Boogalo

• TAPAICAL: DIE, CIS SCUM.
• Me: Did... did you just tell me to die?
• TAPAICAL: Yeeeep. And you aren't allowed to resent me for it.
• Me: Er, what? You just told me to die. I'm pretty sure you don't know where I live, so I'm not about to call the cops, but -
• TAPAICAL: Pff, get over it. There's no realistic chance of anyone getting killed for being CIS SCUM. Therefore this is unproblematic.
• Me: People don't realistically get killed for having long hair, but I think if strangers started routinely yelling DIE, RAPUNZEL SCUM in my hearing, I would become upset. And when in reality I hear DIE, CIS SCUM, I become upset.
• TAPAICAL: Not *really* upset.
• Me: Pretty upset, actually.
• TAPAICAL: No, I mean not like the actual kind of upset, the *real* kind, the kind you can only have if you and people with whom you share an oppressed status have been suffering over this status for a long time. (The other people count because of psionic linkage.) Cis people can't ever be meaningfully upset about things related to being cis. Being cis is a magical land of euphoria and happiness where everything is privilege and nothing hurts.
• Me: I'm not saying it doesn't have its perks, but then people started telling me to die, and that bothers me.
• TAPAICAL: But not *really* bothers.
• Me: I just -
• TAPAICAL: Shut up! Cis people get to talk everywhere. I am declaring this a SAFE SPACE where we don't have to entertain your BIGOTED REMARKS. Now you just listen.
• Me:
• TAPAICAL: Are you listening?
• Me: No, I'm over here looking at bunny gifs; it sounded to me like you pretty much wanted to tell me to die without repercussions and I'd be vilified if I argued in a way that was insufficiently humble and tentative and deferent, so I disengaged.
• TAPAICAL: YOU HAVE TO LISTEN. WE WILL MAKE YOU LISTEN. SIGNAL BOOST POWERS, ACTIVATE!
• Me: Okay, you've flooded my dash with poorly researched petitions, ever more strident calls for punishment of people who have plausibly committed crimes, and the mass denouncement of the cisgendered, especially white ones. I see here that if I indicate that these sweeping remarks are false generalizations, I'll be accused of -
• TAPAICAL: De-raaaaaail-ing!
• Me: Because conversation topics are inviolable, and can never be allowed to fork into sub-topics, especially not in accordance with the overwhelmingly common human desire to recenter attention on themselves. Ah-huh. And several of these blogs are refusing to tag their signal boosts because if I don't want to see all of these posts six times each, it means I'm evil and should just unfollow them. Even if most of the time they post keen bunny gifs.
• TAPAICAL: Yep.
• Me: If any of these things were said about oppressed groups, you'd be there with pitchforks and torches.
• TAPAICAL: Uuuuugh, you sound like a men's rights activist.
• Me: Really?
• TAPAICAL: Yeah, they're always going on about how you can say things about men that you can't about women without being politically incorrect, and how women don't have to sign up to be forcibly conscripted into a morally objectionable high-risk job at the whim of a dubiously trustworthy government, and how people think men but not women are sketchy if they interact with children, and how calling 'feminism' that makes it sound suspiciously like it's about some topic that begins with 'fem' and not about the pure Platonic essence of gender equality.
• Me: That sounds worth looking int-
• TAPAICAL: NOOOOOOOOOOOO
• Me: What? Why?
• TAPAICAL: MRAs are grooooooss. Don't touch them. They wear characteristic headgear and don't shave all the hair we socially mandate that they shave, like even on the neck -
• Me: Are you kidding me?
• TAPAICAL: They really do! Unshaven necks!
• Me: ...
• TAPAICAL: And! And they care about problems that they have!
• Me: I'm... not... surprised?
• TAPAICAL: No, you don't understand. They care about problems that they have, the solutions to which might require other people to do things, and they have trouble persuading those people to do those things! And that makes them upset!
• Me: That doesn't remind me of anyone. At all.
• TAPAICAL: I mean not *really* upset. Men's rights activists are like cis people that way.
• Me: Of course they are.
• TAPAICAL: Then they talk about those problems, and contemplate solutions to them, and we don't like all their possible solutions, and sometimes they're really nasty.
• Me: I'm going to go out on a limb here. Did they tell some people to die? Some people with all the right psionic hookups to make it really matter?
• TAPAICAL: You're on a roll!
• Me: I'm very smart.
• TAPAICAL: But seriously, they're willing to go to absurd, highly questionable lengths to acquire sex. It's icky and rapey.
• Me: I will agree that this is bad.
• TAPAICAL: I'm so glad you agree that they don't have anything to be upset about and they're just whining and their problems don't matter.
• Me: I -
• TAPAICAL: I mean, seriously, neckbeards and fedoras, hahaha, am I right?
• Me:
• TAPAICAL: It is religious discrimination to care what Muslim women choose to wear on their heads. We have so much manic, slightly forced enthusiasm for pretty hijabs! Criticizing Islam is racist. Actually, criticizing religion in general is pretty racist.
• Me: None of this has anything to do with theistic factual accuracy, I assume?
• TAPAICAL: Of course not, that would be silly. It has to do with the fact that you associate Islam with Middle Easterners and your privilege-addled mind is incapable of forming separate opinions about them, and need to acknowledge the historical importance of Christianity to black people and also the poor, and you don't even want to touch opposition to Judaism because we all know the magic words I get to pull out if you do - oh! Oh! And you also can't have any memes that belonged to, say, Native Americans, that's appropriative and uncool. You also can't use memes that are *bastardized or fictitious* and attributed to other cultures.
• Me: And - just to clarify - this is unrelated to whether any of these beliefs I'm not supposed to criticize or use are true.
• TAPAICAL: Yes. And not just beliefs. Clothes and stuff. Not yours! Back! Back! Begone!
• Me: It bothers people if I wear things because I think they're pretty and they happen to have roots in other cultures? Just how much research am I supposed to do while standing in the thrift store choosing between blouses? I don't know anything about the history of fashion.
• TAPAICAL: I recommend spending several hundred dollars per garment on items by obscure individual designers.
• Me: ...
• TAPAICAL: No, actually, we understand that you can't spend literally all of your effort and all of your money on doing all social justice stuff, all the time. Your self-care is important too.
• Me: That's the nicest thing you've ever said to me.
• TAPAICAL: Oh, that wasn't to be nice, that's not a thing I do. I just want to make sure I'm not being ableist. You might be invisibly disabled in some way.
• Me: I am a little, actually. Does this mean that if I have questions or misspeak or otherwise put a toe out of line I get slack and support?
• TAPAICAL: Only on Tuesdays.
• Me: What?
• TAPAICAL: I'm an abstracted persona; that's as close as I can get to representing substantial community disagreement.