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Notes -
Sam Brinton is in the news this week.
For those who don't know, Sam is the first non-binary, gay drag queen to hold a federal government leadership position. I know him for his distinctive appearance, with moustache, bald head, and typical cross-dressing clothing and makeup. Here's another piece about him, from several months ago. The culture war angle should be obvious, as this man was highlighted, along with Rachael Levine, as examples of progressive hiring in the Biden administration. Suffice to say that he is not the kind of person I can take seriously, and I do not think he should have been hired, and certainly shouldn't have been celebrated. But that's not why I'm posting.
Now, why was he in the news this week?
Brinton was caught stealing luggage from an airport terminal. I'll notice that this article has no pictures of him. A summary, from here:
So he's been put on leave, for now, and he's due in court on the 19th of this month. At first, I wouldn't have considered posting this, as I simply found it funny in an absurd way, but then I ran across what is really the reason why I posted. I ran across a thread on twitter explaining why this was actually serious, and reflected a dangerous escalation of perverse behavior. I'll quote the main points:
Go ahead and read the whole thread.
I hadn't considered this angle, at first, but once it's been pointed out to me, I can't shake it. It's the most plausible argument I've heard of for why Sam would steal the woman's luggage, given that all others make no sense.
So, to wrap up, my questions. First, should he be fired for stealing? Second, how likely is it that Sam stole the luggage specifically for underwear? And third, does this move the needle for you in any way, when considering whether to trust, hire, or promote people like Sam?
I can confirm that thread dude is a loony, sadly. I thought it was going to be a paleofem, but he's just off his rocker if you look at all the other stuff
(ok he might have a point about 'uwu' being a paedo symbol, but his justification based on Japanese blush emoji being secret pedo spiral code wasn't very good. He's just seeing patterns in noise.)
Are you talking about Jon? I read through his feed, and besides retweeting more than I like, it seems pretty normal. Obviously he's got an angle, but there's nothing really loony about any of his posts.
This whole thread could be charitably just called wrong, but it's just kinda a mess of Chinese Cardiology, bad grammar, and pretty bad understandings.
It's not like there aren't problems in the furry fandom! But it's pretty much just word association, at that level.
Wrong is one thing, loony is another. I can argue with wrong, but loony is dismissive and demeaning.
He has an angle, but I don't see anything particularly loony about it. He's worked with many sexual predators and sees the same patterns there as he does in, this case, furries.
There's a certain point where you go from being wrong to being consistently wrong, and while I agree that 'loony' is dismissive and demeaning (along with sounding too much like 'insane' in a clinical, which I don't mean to imply), it's kinda hard to avoid that problem once someone's gotten that untethered from the bit.
Some of that's the more general problem where you look into the abyss too long and the abyss goes nuts -- he's pretty clearly managing to attract and focus on the wackiest people and then end up in wars with them, the 'wacky' parts are pretty bad, and they're also using inappropriate tools to try to shut him up. But come on: puppy play means that someone's an actual dog-fucker that's going to move onto child abuse? Anime is for child abusers? Sexual deviance as the first step into morphing into psychopathy? Random allegations aimed at specific people?
I don't think it's an organic delusion or a disorder in the clinical sense, but it's got enough overlap with the massive prediction errors without any possibility of disproof to match.
To be fair all you need to do is click ninja02's profile there to see a furry going
And then one click away from that you have they/them/foxself posting Minor Attracted Person Pride Flags
And a click away from that there's zoophile callout posts from a guy who was a "furry daddy" for a 15 year old boy he was chatting about sex with(wtf, how the hell is this not open grooming that would never be tolerated if a straight man did it. How do these people have infinite license to break the law and every social standard?)
The guy may be seeing patterns in gibberish, but you can't dip a paw in furry fandom without turning up zoophile groomers (and it's not because of the art you want banned).
Something really bad happened since I stopped paying attention to furries, and the batshit political radicalization is a tiny part of it. I 100% cannot blame that guy going a bit loony from digging into it, and feel bad my first post sounded unsympathetic.
... which ninja02 is pretty specifically and clearly criticizing. Again, there are a lot of problems in the furry fandom. I'm not saying that there aren't!
But if your detector pings for everything, it's not a useful detector. You can't defend "this person is on the pathway to child abuse because they like anime fox girls with honking hooters" by seguing to "this entirely different person that the first guy hates 'came out' as a dog-fucker". Well, I mean, you can, demonstrably, since that seems to be something he’s tried, but it's not very persuasive. If he was focusing or prioritizing his criticisms on the latter cases, I'd not be making this complaint, but as it is he seems more likely to be making random free-association than even attempting to distinguish specific bad actors, and that's not limited to the furries.
Mu?
Uh, wasn't that the whole thing with the Burned Furs? "Just because we like furry art and are furries, we're not yiffers"? Several years back, I was online acquainted for a while with a guy who felt he had been driven out of main furrydom precisely because he wasn't interested in the overtly sexual stuff.
And then there's the babyfurs thing which I don't understand and don't want to get into discussing, because it seems much too convoluted.
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