Notices by Kit Malone (thekitmalone@hoosier.social)

I often vibe more with liberal faith leaders than with other atheists. Tonight I finally realized why.

I was chatting over pie with the nice Episcopal minister who agreed to be the officiant at our wedding. He's consistently rolled hard with us fighting anti-LGBTQ legislation and has become a good friend.

We have in common a real deep love of community and a desire to be of service that is more interesting to me than the details of his belief system or my lack thereof.

Smaller Pride events in #Indiana have always attracted some protest - typically local church folk who think they are out "preaching to the unsaved."

This year, they've gotten measurably darker. I'm hearing more slurs and threats.

Recently I worked a festival that was circled for hours by a man with AR-15
& full battle-rattle, calling us pedos and child mutilators.

This alarming escalation is due to increasingly vicious anti-#LGBTQ political posturing.

People are following their leaders.

If you tell people that your enemy is mutilating kids, it hardly matters if that's true or not.

A certain percentage of people are gonna believe you, and because they believe you -- a certain percentage of *them* are going to feel comfortable using any imaginable level of violence to stop what they think of as a credible threat.

When we talk about "stochastic terrorism" as one of the products of hate speech, this is what we mean.

In my more naive, younger days I used to ask the annual Pride protestors a couple of questions. Not a debate question, or any kind of gotcha.

I'd just ask, "What is your goal here?" And they'd usually say something vague about making sure people know about Jesus and sin and forgiveness, yadayada.

And then I'd followup with, "Do you think this is an effective means of achieving that goal?"

nmw their answer was, you could always tell that they hadn't really thought about it in those terms.

And back then, I (naturally) drew the wrong conclusion: that these were mostly harmless idiots with a bad plan.

Now I understand that I was wrong - because I presumed they were honest about their goal.

But I see now the goal never was about changing minds. Their goal was *always* to make sure that queer people felt nervous and unwelcome. But, formerly, with a veneer of respectable concern for their souls.

All they've done, recently, is just pull off that veneer.

Oh, one more every here:

It should alarm all of us how easy it was to get them to move from a public pose of "love the sinner, hate the sin" to "it is our civic duty to eliminate these groomers"

It only took about a year for that to become acceptable, mainstream discourse.

All it took was the sports issue to crack it open, radicalize a few prominent figures, and now we're investigating parents for having trans kids and running on the idea of eliminating us from public life.

@mahaska LGBTQ folk and homeless people are often the same people. They aren't separate sets of people.

@BlueDot @leighms it's honestly as if the designers of this thing didn't consider that harassment spills over into real life too?

@leighms

Mosdef - I've had some scary moments in the past.

I've accepted being a local public figure - and enjoy having a platform (because frankly eff them).

I know there's a tradeoff with that and with personal safety and I've taken it.

I just think it's bad that people can interact with me in ways that I can't directly respond to in any way. And I can't imagine I'm the only person to experience this!

@BlueDot @leighms

That is so weird. I learned about them through the fact that they were somehow replying to my toots via a user on another instance. I saw their handle in the replies and was just curious, initially.

So like - what do you do when a user on an instance (noagendasocial.com) can see/interact with your content but you can't see/interact back?

This just happened and it was p alarming -- it turns out they are an actual nazi on an instance with a lotta nazi content.

I could see their replies to me on their instance page. They were unsearchable/unfindable/unblockable here AFAIK.

Do I just hafta deal with the occasional random unblockable nazi???

#Mastodon #Fediverse #Fediblock #Feditips

@leighms @hoosiersocial

Luckily the admin of hoosier social is really cool ... but! This is a real problem that seems like a larger mastodon problem, right? Like I post publicly and I'm cool with that, but it seems Really Weird that a situation is possible where people can interact with my content and I can't block them and move on.