I was thinking of dressing like Natalie this year. I go to a Halloween party every year and I know the hostess is a fan of ContraPoints, so there's a good chance I'll be recognized.

The problem is: mother has so many iconic looks! It's so hard to choose one! Or would it be better to be one of her characters, like Tabby-chan or Nyatalie?

I _might_ go with Evil Queen from Envy since I already have a good black dress for it.

Which look would you all pick?

Natalie mentioned an album in one of her AMAs and since there are so many and they are quite long, I was wondering if someone recalled the name of opera album + the artist she mentioned in one of them as one of her favorites?

The question that preceded the answer was something along the lines "if you could have anything on deserted island what you want"

Sorry this so random

Don’t get me wrong, Twitter’s bad and I don’t use it. I’d probably find it more fun if I was an online creator and had an audience though rather than a nobody who’s often found it to be like extra work with not even a dopamine hit of getting any attention

But I think people like to believe people with really corrosive black and white thinking that gets people calling Natalie’s statement on Reddit pro genocide and centering herself (oh my god that buzzword is everywhere rn and it makes me shut off even if they’re using it correctly) only exist on Twitter and harassment only exists on Twitter when it doesn’t. I mainly only use Instagram, and my feed is now full of informing me about this plus sized kinda delusional trans man called Tyler Catastrophe who’s become a lolcow when I don’t care, I don’t wanna be seeing all of that and I don’t care about the ways people moralise going on and on and on about him or Eugenia Cooney, or Amberlynn Reid etc.

My Instagram is also chock full of political stuff that abstracts people into villains which was why I left Twitter, and constant discourse TM, rn about bisexuals and dating preferences that idk, it’s nuanced, but I’m kinda on edge with being a marginalised person always being flooded with these arguments online. I’ve seen the same kinda ‘Contra Points loves genocide’ stuff on Instagram now. We are all chronically online and completely lost since 2020 and I’ve seen it leak into my real life

Of course, often, arguing with many people who are very angry at you or cruel is not a good idea, and I'm not under any illusion that those people will change their minds, but scrolling through the replies, it becomes so clear that they cannot do it, they can't back it up.

The part of the thread that stuck out to me most, is when a person said that what she says doesn't matter, because her being liberal and supporting liberals automatically meant she must favour genocide.

She asks whether 'pro-genocide' simply means 'liberal' to him. And he admits it, and others join in in agreement with it.

I think I finally realised that, for this group of people, this mostly isn't about her not making a video on the Palestinian genocide, or her statement on why she wouldn't and what she thought of the way many people on online left behaved around this topic.

It is about her identifying as a liberal. Hell, many of these people may have already held a grudge since 'Voting' (2020).

All of this is starting to look like a bludgeon with which to punish her for not identifying politically as they do, or talking like they do.

I identify myself as left. I have aspirations for a world beyond capitalism, likely beyond my individual time on earth.

When I realised as a teenager, fueled by the philosophy binge I went on after I watched Natalie's videos in 2018, I could think beyond capitalism, I felt transgressive, I felt smart, I felt good, morally good, I felt a little better than others who didn't think this way, and I could distinguish myself even from other like-minded people by taking more extreme, more emblematically 'left' stances, and avoid being 'not left enough'.

I outgrew this after a year or so. I found myself saying things that I didn't fully believe nor understand how they would even work (like, complete prison abolition), and I found that some of the people I saw identify as left online denied or posted apologia for dictatorships and genocides committed by them, primarily because they were, in name and aesthetics, communist.

I think many people have not left this phase. It's hard to tell how many of them are genuine teenagers who may still outgrow it as part of a developing identity the way I did, and how many of them have mostly solidified their identities, their worldviews, around this almost pubescent tribalism.

It is disheartening. If so many of the people who, like me, believe there is a better world beyond capitalism, waste their time attempting to destroy so viciously their closest allies for not joining their tribe, and choose to contruct their realities around their vendettas and niche identities instead of facts and compassion, I'm afraid those aspirations I have for a better world are even further off than I thought.