Welcome! Don’t let the ironic detachment fool you, this is one of the kindest and most well moderated places on the internet.
Be open to having your opinions challenged because if you’re from the anglosphere I promise you the propaganda and indoctrination run much deeper than you expect. No one challenging your views is doing so out of some desire to personally attack you. Feel free to report if that’s what it feels like because our mods are A1 best in the fediverse and they will attend to that shit. Most of us are just trying not to feel hopeless and powerless, especially those of us in the west. Sometimes that can manifest as vitriolic rhetoric but our mods are pretty good and catching and stamping that shit out.
We all believe that growth happens through struggle and we’ve all had to struggle a lot with each other and ourselves to arrive at the positions we carry. And do not mistake this for a hive mind because there’s actually a pretty wide range of beliefs here and we’re all the better for it.
And we all recognize that we are all fallible and so it’s ok to be wrong about things. We get stuff wrong all the time here. But often times the difference between correct and incorrect is not so much whether “X thing happened like this” vs “actually X thing happened like this” but “X thing happened like this” vs “I do not have the firsthand knowledge or resources to say how X thing happened or whether it’s happening at all”. This is especially true when it comes to current events. (Uyghur “genocide” being a great example of this)
Just keep an open mind and remember that the atomic unit of propaganda is NOT falsehood, it’s EMPHASIS.
And if that comment about Xinjiang is too spicy for you then DM me so I can set you up w/ my homie Mehmet. He’s no Authoritarian tankie totalitarian apologist and he can get you an incredible deal on some Iraqi WMD’s!
Oh and don’t clean the owl, we like them that way!
I credit hexbear for preparing me to handle a young cousin’s FTM exploration properly. I was hanging out with them at the Toronto pride parade this year. They’d always liked to present themself as androgynous when growing up. When they used a traditionally-masculine name different from their birth name at a coffee shop, it was nice to simply ask “Trans?” and for the right pronouns. I know they were worried about how I’d react (a very cis male 40+ oldster) but learning from people here about how to be a trans ally really helped that conversation go well. I went from just being the cool cousin, to being the cool safe ally cousin. That was a really good day. I owe it to the people here.
Edit: And I just found out that they’ve come out to their parents as trans, and their parents are 100% supportive, never deadnaming, never misgendering. I always did like that particular uncle. He’s a good guy.