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The successive events of coffeegate and chiligate have proven to me that there's a subculture on this website of mostly privileged "disability activists" (no relationship to actual disability activism) whose main approach is a sort of radical misery

About ten years ago this was on Tumblr, but it wasn't the disability activists doing it, it was the depression people who were anti-recovery ("depression is who I am and trying to treat it is genocidal") and anti-mitigation ("it's hard to make myself wash, therefore I shouldn't")

But the thing is that depression does make you feel unhappy and defeated in irrational ways, that's sort of the definition of the illness. I'm pretty sure the Twitter subculture are also depressed too, but it feels like they've managed to radicalise themselves into it via Likes

It also started back on the pre-social media internet - Ana Mardoll was a Shakesville person, Tumblr learned its academic privilege checking language (that it used for interpersonal bullying) from blogosphere posts being shared as "Feminism 101" material etc...

But the feeling on it lately is different. It's gone past slapfights on Tumblr because there's a feeling that Twitter is the site that changes the world. It's a site where the people who write history hang out, while Tumblr is where the people who write fanfiction hang out.

It was, and still is, a valuable service to be able to criticise e.g. an event, or a proposed solution, by pointing out it isn't as accessible as they think. And doing so feels counterintuitive, therefore smart and rewarding. Apply only that principle to activism and you get this

You get rewarded for being counterintuitive and pointing out hypothetical excluded people. Let's base the entire thing on the feelings of hypothetical excluded people. Fuck you, old lady who "loves" "talking" to her "husband", a lot of us can't talk because we're mute & in pain!

It's also a politic that can only come out of comfort, because it's about the kind of politics that people can cultivate as a luxury. The person who called Chili Neighbor "the most deeply racist person" (not even because of the chili - in general) is a landlord

But not just a landlord, oh no, a landlord trying to get their renters to join their polycule. An actual imbalance of power - trying to get sex from people who depend on you for housing is a WAY more coercive situation than trying to give someone food they might not want

I think the reason these weirdos targeted Chinchillazilla is because she chooses happiness. She doesn't spend all her time fighting people, she spends it raising a therapy pig and trying to spread joy to people around her. Her haters only know how to cut things down

This feels like the common thread for shitty online activism cults to me - they aren't interested in building a world, just in punishment. If they are supportive to each other it's usually just insincere lovebombing to encourage each other to post harder

And it all comes back to the Poster's Paradox, which is that people who are happy and engaged with the world don't post as much as people with not enough of an outlet. The fake disability activism chokes out the real kind because these people can outpost anyone with e.g. a life

It's always people who are older than they should be. The person who wrote a ~2000 tweet thread about how Chili Neighbour is bad because her neighbours might not own bowls? 37 years old.

Ana Mardoll typifies the childishness - a children's book purist with an "innocent youth" aesthetic in early middle age. It's obviously fine to enjoy kid's stuff as an adult, but he refuses to mature his perspective on it, ironically cutting himself off from childish glee

Fake disability activism is about infinite vulnerability, insurmountable problems impossible to even fight, and reactionary suspicion of kindness or happiness. None of this does anything

Apologising for this tweet, which was based off hearsay and not an accurate reflection of the behaviour of the relevant person. I lied out of apathy and I'm sorry.