Did anything on pen ever change your opinion or behavior?
Reading through some of the forum posts from 21 years ago recently filled me with nostalgia again. Which is always dangerous. While a nice escape, nostalgia can, sometimes, be a disease.
But anyway. While reading I realized that I was both in awe of how much creativity I had, but also ashamed about how shitty some of the things I said was. Which made me wonder what type of things changed my mind.
From there I thought about the old "Do you fold or crumple when you wipe your ass" debate we had that went like 20 pages. I think it even had a few discussions on if you stood up or just lifted a cheek to wipe. I have to admit... that forum thread absolutely made me change how I wiped my ass.
So, did any discussion on Pen ever change your opinion? Did anything here ever change your behavior outside of Pen? Or even how you presented things?
Comments
I do remember one instance very early that immediately made me change a few ways I presented and thought about things.
A main page post I wrote very early on, February 2001. I had told a story about how a very flamboyant man was heavily joke-flirting with me while getting me to convert change to bills while I was working in the gas-station. I mentioned how that made me feel, and how the guy thought it was hilarious and doubled down when I looked and sounded uncomfortable with it. Rather than my normal self-deprecating fare, I had used the word "shrieking" and "flamer" and was not complimentary of the dude. I was pretty mad about the experience, and should have waited a few days to write about it, if at all.
Well, that post actually generated "fan-mail"
Christ, I got like a dozen emails about it, including a couple of folks sharing their own stories with me. But the thing about those stories... not a goddamn one could be published without heavy editing. One story was literally how a dude was out drinking and beat the shit out of a guy that dared flirt with him, and there was no way I was touching that shit. I remember thinking "I don't wish harm on anyone, I was just venting!"
Yeah. Well. Now I had a fucking following that hated gay people and were happy to share their stories about it.
So... how did I handle it at the time?
Well... I didn't.
Well, I guess I self censored a bit more. Shared the emails with a few people expressing exasperation. I sometimes waited before publishing things after that.
Also I guess I doubled down on the jokes about how Mightymon really liked goats. Goddamn he just couldn't quit talking about how goats had square pupils, and also how they filled him with uncontrollable lust.
This post pre-dated my joining Pen, and I can't say what my reaction at the time would have been, then. My first reaction now is to think, here is a man experiencing, for one time, what women experience when creepy men aggressively hit on them. I don't know if that's an insight I would have had twenty years ago.
Funny enough, the title of the post was "Now I know how the women in bars feel"
But yeah, definitely not the message the emailers took from it.
I learned why dogs might wear socks.
I used to think a lot like Bill. Then I moved out of my hick town and actually met black people.
You know... Now that you mention it, so did I. So did I.
The 100% totally worthless valuation of BitCoin.
If I recall correctly, I think I learned it from you.
I learned it early. I believe I asked eod. There were early references to socks on dogs here going back to when I first joined up.
Its like the stock market, but completely offsetting any gains we get from renewables!
I now think it's ok to ask women to show their tits, because apparently that shit actually works sometimes
i learned a ton of shit on pen! i learned literally everything i know about internet decorum on pen, for better or worse. on the upside, i learned a lot about why you should be careful about what you share online, even shit you don't think is relevant, interesting or particularly specific to you; i learned how passionate people are about unpopular opinions, some of which they wouldn't feel free to express in any other place. i learned early on how social hierarchies actually work in online spaces, and what that says about offline spaces. i know what a meme is, now. i kinda know why a meme is. etc etc. on the downside, pen definitely prepped me for the big reveal of humanity's misogynistic, racist approach to sharing this planet (or not, as it falls)--but again, on the upside, it also showed me discourse in action. 'not all men,' but really. in real time. a lot of the political threads on pen are more interesting and thoughtfully rendered than books written by luminaries on the same subjects.
but also, y'all are just fucking funny. just a bunch of funny motherfuckers.
Time to bump this up again.
I keep clicking on the Like button, but nothing happens.
The color schemes being as close as they are is completely accidental. :-)
I often wonder how race-realists and adjacent sorts are viewing the current administration.
Like do they walk around going "yeah, it's regrettable that we have secret police disappearing people off the streets to likely be tortured, but at least we're getting the blank-slaters out of our college faculties"
I don't know where the USA as a society goes after this.
There was a potential space for serious discussions about race and immigration, and the balance thats possible while still retaining a form of society thats acceptable to the majority - but it disappeared as soon as it appeared because the fringes have been empowered to not be ashamed of their views.
the same thing is happening here.
I still think this issue goes all the way back to civil-war reconstruction. Reconstruction was just kinda... stopped. Of course it was already weakened by Andrew Johnson's presidency after the assassination (the U.S. method for choosing a VP was very strange in that era). Johnson pardoned most confederate leaders and blocked a lot of progressive policies. But a lot of important shit was passed with veto-proof majorities despite than... and then Grant's presidency was a short reprieve. At least until near the end of his second term where new methods of preventing black suffrage were being implemented (poll taxes, tests, etc).
Then there was a contested presidential race resulting in the Compromise of 1877. The certification of the previous election was so fucked that it ended up being decided by congress... (You may recognize this as a strategy that Trump was hoping to implement back in 2020). Well, the people preventing it from being certified agreed to "let" the Republican win in exchange for removing all Federal troops from the south. But they did this verbally with zero paperwork and zero saved records (another thing Trump really likes).
Suddenly progress stopped. The lost cause movement was born. The first border laws were born (Chinese Exclusion act, etc). The black congressmen lost their elections since their constituents couldn't vote. Terror campaigns reigned. Thousands of confederate statues were erected. Sundown towns, Plessy vs Fergeson (separate but equal), Operation Wetback, etc etc etc etc. Tons of shit that continued to exist up until our own grandparents lifetimes, and in some cases even our parents.
We're still fighting the goddamn civil war.
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...That said, if it really comes down to it, I'm going to blame Reagan and/or Nixon.
I dunno if this story has gotten enough attention:
https://cnn.com/2025/04/01/politics/maryland-father-mistakenly-deported-el-salvador-prison/index.html
Yeah, exactly. When I see those stories I wonder what people like race realists think about it.
Probably: "wow I'm sure glad the government wouldn't dare take away MY due process like that"
These are not things red hats care about. They're not upset about people who don't look or talk like them that probably are associated in some way with a gang not getting their due process. They read the Bill of Rights as privileges - ones only for the people who have proven (to them) that they are real Americans, - not ideals and inalienable human rights that we should be extending to anyone we can- as a nation and as individuals.
The American voters have given the Trump regime two years to do whatever they want. Protests, peaceful or otherwise, will do nothing to change any of this. Posting gleeful memes about how inept they are won't change this. Posting apologies to Canada, Ukraine, on Facebook won't change this. Mansplaining what empathy is to your trumper relatives won't change this.
Every bit of focus needs to be on the mid-term elections and then the big one in 3.5 years. And none of that focus should be wasted on converting red hat voters. They are rubber and you are glue. Give it up. The focus needs to be on the dumbfucks who thought not voting for Harris would punish Biden for not being tough enough on Israel, or who didn't get a warm feeling from her like they did with Obama, or thought she wasn't left-enough, or thought it couldn't be any worse than the last time Trump was in office and it would give them an excuse to hang out with all their college friends at more protests. Those motherfuckers need to be dragged kicking and screaming to the voting booth. Until then, we just have to hope Trump's lackeys will be 50% less efficient at dismantling the republic than the Nazis were.
Well said.
Although I do think there's also political space for issuing a fairly solid non-metaphorical kicking to the morons in the Democratic Party who thought that Harris was a good option. They have at least a fractional responsibility for this as well.
If we assume that a lot of voters believe they are voting for the lesser of two evils, you guys need to understand what the evils are that the red hat brigade thought they were voting against, and see if the Democrat's next candidate can either seem to oppose some of those evils, or at least not openly represent them.
Meanwhile in the UK, a lot of us are trying to get our social-democratesque government to look vaguely anti-immigrant and have some cohesive anti-immigrant policies based on rational and usable law, because our Conservative party has gone off the deep end, taking inspiration from you know who....
What happened to the 13 million people who voted for Biden? Are there really that many democrats out there that won't vote for a woman?
The logical assumption to make right now - when you've put a women on the Dem ticket twice and both times they were beaten by the same joke candidate - is that yes, there are. And factor that assumption into any plans you have to win a presidential election in the near future
I do think that Mrs. Harris's campaign was excessively feminist and this did harm her support among men. A democrat can't win without working class men and some of those men are acutely aware of some feminist interests and their interests being mutually incompatible.
I'd contrast that against Mrs.Clinton's campaign, which was far more mainstream but became defined by a couple of gaffes ("basket of deplorables", etc), her potential ill-health and her being entirely uninspiring, and getting on the ticket because it was her turn and nobody better was in the way this time.
It would have been better if Biden hadn't tried to run, and substituted her in at the last minute. I think that really hurt her. It was far from the only reason she lost, but it's in the top five.