I’ve been pretty much describing myself as politically homeless and have been in a state of questioning, scrutinizing, and doubting the old anti-SJW narratives.
I wish I can better paraphrase on its definition or had access to a better word for “corporation(s) that only advocate and push for progressive ideas in the name of profit” that hasn't been tainted and/or cooped by the right and right wing grievances shill mongers. The leftist criticism you’ve presented does piqued my interest.
The point we're trying to get at is that most corporations aren't even really pushing or advocating progressive ideas in the first place, they just recognized that there's a market out there for stories with gay and trans people in them, or that some people wanted video game character customization to give them more options for things, and they recognized that giving off the appearance of supporting equal rights is good PR that costs them nothing besides changing their Twitter profile pic to rainbow colors in June- in some places, in some times, but the moment the pendulum shifts they abandon that faux-support, and in more conservative parts of the world like China or the Middle East they never even pretended in the first place. It's, for lack of a better way to describe it, "Virtue Signalling" in the most cynical, corporatist way possible.
So it's kinda bewildering to the rest of us when there's a certain subset of people on the right that consider even
that level of shallow support and representation, consisting of a few more menu options in games, and a couple of gay characters briefly appearing in the background of a summer blockbuster (which they can easily remove if they want to release it in a less accepting place), and a few bland social media posts, to somehow be "the woke left is forcing transgenderism on the rest of us!" Because they only got 36 video game protagonists this year who were stoic muscly straight white marine man with a gun when last year they had 37. Like somehow, if we don't treat one very specific archetype of person as the Normal Acceptable Main Character and anyone else is a degenerate weirdo, if we dare to acknowledge other identities exist and should be respected, that's pushing a nefarious agenda? It's like when Christians hear someone say "Happy Holidays" and go on a rant about the War on Christmas, never mind that plenty of people are
still saying Merry Christmas and celebrating it and it's one of the biggest holidays of the year.
I’ll admit that I’m very much unaware that the term is a dog whistle. Especially since it doesn’t strike me as the traditional infamous dog whistles used in the past. Should I have elaborated further? I should have in hindsight to avoid or mitigated any faux pas.
Well yeah, that's kinda the point of a dog whistle, that they sound innocuous enough to not immediately inspire revulsion and can be adopted by more "normie" people who don't recognize it as a dog whistle. You can't always clearly recognize them. If you want to try to get better at not using them, a good way to start is to consider whether it might be subtly reinforcing some kind of right-wing narrative, but failing that, just stop using it if someone points out to you the problem with it.
I guess my new problem is expressing my position that doesn’t utilize the old language that ends up getting me into the receiving end of “pwning the chud”.
Okay, you've mentioned this concern about being on the receiving end a few times, so please listen carefully:
The vast majority of us aren't responding to you to try to "pwn" you, or bully you, or invite everyone to point and laugh at you, or get some kind of social one-up on you by showing how bad of a person you are. We're responding to you because we think you're saying things that are wrong and hurtful, whether you meant to or not, and we want you to recognize that and cut it out. If we ever seem a bit angry or impatient at you when we do this, it's because a lot of the time, we've already explained the same thing to you, again and again, and every time you say you want to get better but the lessons never seem to stick, and on top of that, any time someone tells you "hey not cool" you respond by making it all about how bad it makes you feel that someone would "attack" you like that.
As I, and countless others, have been trying to explain to you for two decades,
someone giving you negative feedback is not a personal attack on you. It's often not even about you, it's about all the other similar harms a marginalized person has to deal with and you end up as the straw breaking the camel's back, and someone saying words wrong, even if not intentionally so, is an easier thing to change than a bunch of centuries-old institutional systems of oppression. It's not, in isolation, that bad that someone says a bad thing, but if you have to deal with hundreds of people saying the same things it can get really frustrating, especially if when you tell one of them to stop they just make excuses for it, or act offended or hurt that you're accusing them of something and now you have to manage their emotional reaction to it as well, and that's incredibly exhausting, on top of already feeling upset at what the person said in the first place.
Accidentally hurting someone doesn't make you a bad person, we all do it sometimes. But when you do, and they tell you they're hurt, you're supposed to apologize, do what you can to heal the harm, and work on how to not do it again in the future. If you instead try to make excuses for it or act like the real problem is that they're yelling at you for it, then you're being a jerk.
