#i'll take 'hating benedict cumberbatch is homophobic and ableist' discourse on here anyday

[envysnest]

i know this is tumblr, but the amount of bad faith arguments i got caught up in when i moved to twitter was astounding. i didn't engage in nearly as much bullshit here, and twitter ultimately fucked with my mental health and my anger management badly. like, having-to-bring-it-to-therapy badly. the pandemic made it soooo much worse since i got to watch other scientists be mocked and derided for trying to save lives. here's an example:

my very last twitter fight was with some techbro who argued that the l4b leak theory of c0vid was real based on a single shoddy pre-print. (a pre-print is a scientific paper that has yet to go into peer review.) to be abundantly clear, the l4b leak theory has been rebuffed dozens of times: the literature agrees that c0vid originated in the wild, and it's now about where it evolved from. but this guy was telling his 37k followers that the proponents of the natural origin theory COULDN'T be right, since the authors...."sounded pissy."

i pointed out, using just off-the-cuff knowledge, that the paper was incorrect and mentioned that it was dangerous to encourage others to reject scientific findings based on tone-- that it was a misinformed and childish thing to do, to boot.

within *30 seconds* this guy put me on blast to his 37k followers, making tired "me when i post misinformation" jokes.

i got called a cunt and all sorts of other unpleasant things from dozens of dudebros. when i rebuffed the guy, he started crying about how i had mischaracterized him, that he had science knowledge too (quit a phd over a decade ago; i'm months away from finishing mine and have a decade of experience), *cited himself as a source for why he was right*, and posted this banger:

like. EXCUSE ME. an AMATEUR. in SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE. (peep the self-citation with a bunch of pseudo-intellectual word salad thrown in for good measure.)

also, apparently i'm elitist for [checks notes] pointing out that i have the knowledge base to process c0vid news for my non-scientist followers. but calling a woman in STEM with a shitton of experience an "amateur" isn't elitist? isn't the same bullshit i deal with in academia daily? o-kay. we love a progressive king.

i'm glad twitter is dying. i wasn't happy to have my fandom space be turned into one where i felt like my brain was being melted by uninformed takes. i hated having my own discussions with my own inner circle be turned into circuses whenever someone with > 10k followers decided to take a shot. (never 4get the snapewives article. that was a bad day.) i hated that combatting misinformation was a meme. i hated what was being done to researchers trying to help others.

i think elon is a fitting end to that website: an uninformed charlatan driving informed professionals away, leaving only the sexist cryptobro seagulls to pick through the refuse.

#text posts #will NOT miss the peanut gallery full of people with 2-month old accounts #will NOT miss people evading blocks to call me names over fictional characters #i'll take 'hating benedict cumberbatch is homophobic and ableist' discourse on here anyday