I doubt anyone will read this who still remembers me from my "glory days" on the Complaints Forum. They were great times! I was in college, and dressed so fabulously, and did a distinctive eye makeup trick people still ask me about to this day. I was so objective and intellectual, so self-loathing. Self-loathing was just the cool, objective, funny, intellectual thing to be! I drank vodka hidden in coke and no-flavor Listerine from waking up until I went to bed, and barely even tried to kill myself! All the racism, the sexism, the homophobia and transphobia, all that shit was so ironic and so funny if you were enlightened enough to be ironic.
I had a place where I was thriving, a lovely, cynical place full of 4chan-adjacent humor. Funny thing was, Nazis kept showing up. Oh, they were such friendly Nazis, though! You have to be able to get along with people outside of your ideological spectrum. Everybody was equal on the Complaints Forum! Jewish, Black, Trans, Gay, Nazi, these are all just things to acknowledge that you are and be ironic and ashamed about! I remember a particular conversation about "are Nazis bad or not" where a well-known Nazi told a 17-year-old (or so) Black woman that she was "my favorite Untermensch". She accepted this "compliment", because we were all having such a great time!
We were all having such a great time that I was alienated from the most important part of my life, because it was full of fucking Nazis, and every time I criticized them I was called out for being prejudiced against their views! Is prejudice against Nazis not, indeed, like unto their prejudice against everyone they want to kill?
FUCKING NO IT IS NOT?
So I left, and I was like "I was having a good time on there with all my funny self-loathing, and all that other 4chan prejudice also being so funny and so ironic, and I'm so glad 4chan itself is a moderate haven for not Nazis where all the prejudice is ironic!" And I hoped those people I left behind would think, "hmm, are Nazis bad?". They remained objective.
And then Gamergate happened, and I was like "Oh, holy shit, the bigots I thought were so funny were bigots the whole time. Good thing nobody will take them seriously now!"
And then Donald Trump was elected and his inauguration speech was written by a white nationalist. Then he literally ripped babies from their parents' arms, and they were forgotten in the foster care system, and nobody even mentions it anymore because so much other horrible bullshit has happened, and now he wants us all to die of plague.The last four years, I tried to get out of six or seven years ago. Turns out letting Nazis in is how you get Nazis, and you let Nazis in by pretending giving their views a hearing is "objective"!