!oldstrags did you know Metafilter still exists? It does!
Did you know it's a giant circlejerk even more insular than reddit? Of course you did.
(For those who don't know, MeFi is an ancient internet forum that costs $5 to join. It's like SomethingAwful if it were never funny, or rdrama if you losers had jobs and could afford 5 dollars to keep out the thirdies)
Anyway, in 2014 they had a struggle session about thinking the unspeakable wrongs.
Wendy Carlos is a transwoman. Seriously, I mentioned this once and it got instadeleted because WTF? apparently some longstanding flame war of which I wasn't even aware.
I don't know who Wendy Carlos is, but I know that trans 
women are women . There's no such thing as a "transwoman".
Anyway, after few thousand comments the thread devolves into people getting their fee-fees hurt and demanding apologies
If you want a personal apology for a comment that was not directed at you then you might as well just come out and say so instead of continuing to harp on it despite the fact that sweetkid has explained her reasoning and sincerely apologized to the actual people involved.
Then later on, down the end there's a big argument about whether it's okay to dox a 27 year old dude 
who really really likes a 17 y/o 
This comment does not look to me like an apology or an expression of misunderstanding. It looks to me like an admission he googled the information and intentionally doxxed someone he was characterizing as a "libertarian" and "sexual predator."
So folks are free to read the actual MeTa I am recalling and decide for themselves whether or not I am wildly misremembering anything or mischaracterizing it.
Y'all can't behave!
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Jimie be out here excavating ancient archeological sites to bring us content lmao. This would have been vintage even in the old subreddit.
Good find though. It's interesting to watch how older free speech libs had to contend with the pro-censorship activist radlibs who went on to dominate online lib/left spaces. This feels like a take that Scott Alexander might have
but I think something that gets missed in the whole woke/anti-woke discussion is the death of respectability and civility in these places meant for discussion. Both sides of the culture war accepted that being rude and vulgar was acceptable, especially when dealing with the opposition, and IMO it was the reason these groups had so much internal conflict and drama. Just because you're on The Right Side of History™ doesn't mean you should be allowed to sperg out freely with no sense of decency. If you don't want to encourage civility for the sake of better discussions with the enemy, you should at least do so in order to avoid creating a culture of fear within your own camp.
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