Appropriating suffering

[NitroNine]

The Irish Times has reported on an increasing far-right presence in Ireland, with a rise in the number of anti-immigration rallies focused on accommodation used to house refugees & asylum seekers. The terrorising of vulnerable children is a sickening thought.

So of course the Director of the Rowan Trust (& aren’t all Irish charities registered in America & vague on details?) has tweeted the following about said article:
‘We were afraid’: Ireland’s far-right is mobilising, and they are coming to a town near you. This harassment of Migrant and Trans communities is not spontaneous but carefully organised over years #CeadMileFailte

I’m sorry, what harassment of “Trans communities”? Perhaps Dr Barron is hoping nobody will read the actual article & see that these groups Just. Aren’t. Into. Him. I suppose it’s a bit embarrassing that TRAs have spent years squawking about the impending “trans genocide” & how “the fash” are totally after them (with bonus sinister conspiracy theories) and now they’ve rolled up and they haven’t even managed a single queer-bashing for old times sake. Too busy persecuting an actual vulnerable minority. But why let that stop you from insisting that you’re totally being targeted?

This is possibly the most egregious example of false teaming & victimhood-claiming yet.

WTF? There's absolutely no mention of trans people, communities or issues in that article. What is he actually talking about, did he hallucinate it? That's really blooming odd.

Remember that advice given to TRA groups - was it from Denton’s? - about piggy-backing onto more popular causes.
TRAs have jumped in with LGB groups (and convinced them it was their idea, and had always been the case), Black Lives Matter, pro-choice groups …
This is nothing new.

@ControversialOpening
They normally manage not to create a narrative that is disproved on clicking the link of “evidence” they attach though. So in that sense it is novel, especially as it’s not coming from some random, even if he’s “tweeting in his personal capacity” (or however the disclaimer is worded). So his tweet is exactly as baffling as @ArabellaScott said. He’s made no attempt to create an explanation for trying to tack trans issues on to the story - & when discussing protests of this kind, everyone knows they’re not happening.

If they insert themselves into a narrative they share stories they’ve taken control of - their BLM stuff was all about black trans lives (etc) - not ones that show up their claims as nonsense.

They normally manage not to create a narrative that is disproved on clicking the link of “evidence” they attach though.

Don't know - I'm finding this increasingly common. Both in links, and also in related "academia".Basically relying on readers just checking that the ARE citations, but not going to see what they say.

And also the reverse, to some extent - a particularly blatant example of that from the other day:

twitter.com/mattywheelz/status/1615528661188329472?cxt=HHwWgIC-6cCwwessAAAA

Let’s break this down: Hobbes claims Singal cherry-picked examples from right-wing websites, and shares a screenshot of his op-ed with highlighted text that includes a link. He also shares a screenshot of a right-wing website, implying that Singal has linked to that website

But the link he highlighted does not go to the site he screenshotted. It goes to an earlier article by Singal in NYMag’s The Cut, which explores how fraught “microaggressions” are as a concept and how our newfound obsession with them may be harmful.

Singal’s NYMag article is largely a discussion of an academic paper published in Perspectives on Psychological Science that calls into question the empirical evidence that backs up claims about microaggressions. [...]

What Hobbes does here is completely disingenuous. Because an example Singal used has also appeared on a right-wing website, he claims that’s where Singal GOT the example—and uses a series of misleading screenshots to trick you into believing him.

The common theme is a total disregard for truth, which in turn implies they believe there's no significant penalty for lying - a combination of having a primary audience that doesn't care about truth, and there being no significant social cost to having anyone point out the lies.

I guess this arises within a polarised environment - Good People accept what other Good People say (especially about a Bad Person), and only a Bad Person would disagree, so anyone pointing out lies is a Bad Person.

Who is Dr Barron and is there a link to his tweet?

They've always done it - a few years ago, when the UK news was full of Syrian migrants, it was always 'migrant and trans' are particularly affected by whatever it was they were talking about at the time. They piggy back on anything else going on to try and emphasise the 'most oppressed' narrative being pushed.

A poster here eloquently described it as pouring a nice warm bath of someone else's oppression then settling in it for a long wank.

@NecessaryScene
I wonder if it’s to do with relying on people just looking at headlines - the shortening attention span effect? People often seem to respond to tweets about news articles based on the headline not the article itself - same as how on MN a lot of the time people are in such a rush to share their opinion they don’t read threads just respond to the OP. Really worrying it’s creeping into academic papers though.

@Nutmegger
Sorry it wasn’t clear that my OP is all about the same person: he’s chair of the Rowan Trust (website linked in OP). Is the tweet not showing up when you search that quoted text?

@QuinkWashable
Yes, they’ve endlessly been gluing themselves to any kind of oppression they can find for ages - but it used to be that if they added a news article when they did; it wouldn’t be lacking any mention of trans. So with BLM they’d only link to coverage that had something about black TRANS lives. Migrants they’d find the trans story & it’d be everywhere. Ukraine the same. This might as well be a story about an abattoir with a claim they’ll be literally slaughtering trans people next added to it.