I'm glad nobody argued with your great post ❤️ I don't have anything to add, just mostly enthusiastic response:

I think these arguments are part of a more holistic issue that has existed since the beginning of the site and has seen neurodivergent moderators and users that can't cope with it or properly develop masking techniques to deal with it to quit in droves, which has caused it to get worse because all of the people who would have made it better were basically forced to leave.
A lot of very cool and very gay and autistic people disappeared because of this.

I saw people mention this during the -Tank session, and I'm sorry I never got to meet these folks 😕

It's a system that's become disconnected from any specific users or leadership, because it's become a dominant ideology of the site.

seems that way to me, too.

We as a site are so fundamentally infected with this attitude that is inherently hostile to many, many neurodivergent people, that changes I believe moderators have made to try and fix it have been done with the exact problematic attitude. The misgendering and toxicity moderators showed to users was this exact thing made manifest. We are so fundamentally disconnected from the struggle against ableism on a systemic level on this site that our leadership cannot justify changes made with actual neurodivergent theory. Instead, random vibes-based accusations of users that outright misgender and make false assumptions of them had to be conjured up, because users and moderators could tell something was wrong but they basically developed an entirely false consciousness due to having no proper way to describe it (or, worse, a concern that the website's user base wouldn't take ableism seriously).

Being uncivil is absolutely possible to do while being precise and specific with what you hate. Being uncivil practically requires it, actually, because it's greatest virtue is in being truthful and when someone is calling people ugly or pathetic or stupid they're being imprecise and inherently less truthful because doing that is circling around what they have actual issues with.

Calling a Nazi a piece of shit Nazi isn't enough- they have to be a cuck and a simp and stupid and ugly and have a weird chin, because we've internalized this fundamentally ableist and deeply problematic idea that it's more acceptable and accurate to judge people for traits that are in no way their fault by using these demeaning words for normal variation, in fact variation that is very often influenced by mental processes and physical disabilities, than it is to just say someone is bad because they are willfully hurting people.

We need some sort of immense purge of the entire site's toxic brainworms, it's staff, its user base. I don't really think this involves mass banning though? More like mass re-education. We need mass mod mails and messages and interventions and empathetic approaches to rule breaking and a completely different approach to policing the site than we have done ever before.

I love this. it sounds like a ton of work that will require even more mods, but I think it's a goal worth pursuing.

To make Hexbear an explicitly, radically pro-autistic-behavior and interaction website will make it more radical, not less. That's because it will mean focusing on our actual radical criticisms and how to make those criticisms relevant to and relatable to your average person, rather than figuring out how to warp reactionary insults into somehow progressive statements because it's "just common sense".

embrace SocialistDovahkiin thought