Erika3sis [she/her, xe/xem]

I think Hexbear had a server but not anymore. In any case, how about a Luanti server instead of Minecraft? Because it’s important to support free software and all, and Luanti as FOSS might be more accessible to people than Minecraft is.

The best way to think of Wikipedia is that the site represents the consensus of everyone who is proficient in a particular language; has the means and technical understanding of how to edit Wikipedia; and has a lot of free time to edit Wikipedia.

For English, this means that most edits are made by highly educated white US-Americans, Canadians, Australians and Europeans, who either live comfortably off their parents, have a job that gives them a lot of free time, or perhaps they’re even businessowners or get paid to edit Wikipedia to promote an agenda (see: CIA edits to Wikipedia).

In any case, this is going to give Wikipedia’s most prolific editors a particular bias in terms of which sources have prestige, which topics they write about and how they write about them. There’s also a lot that can be said of the political leanings of the site’s founders, site admin/moderation, its biggest donors being Big Tech companies like Google and Amazon, etc.

I blocked Kirby aaaages ago cause they were a huge sophist about carnism, they came across as a real fart smeller master debater, a true Redditor in spirit. So it does not surprise me that Kirby has turned out to have it out for intersex people, too. It’s the exact sort of possessive casual cruelty and “conveyor belt” mentality towards fellow human beings I was trying to warn about. So if people have grown wise to this character and they’ve been banned from Lemmygrad since I last had the displeasure of interacting with them, I’m glad. If they’re doing this sort of pathetic sock puppetry out of a weird obsession, it’s risible.

If what you’re trying to get at is that whereas it is very important to unlearn the lies and exaggerations one was told about a country, that people also need to avoid replacing these lies with an overly simplistic and uncritical understanding of that same country, and that the current social media landscape makes it very difficult for many people to have the necessary nuance to avoid this pitfall… Then I would agree with you, but I’d also tell you that mentioning the eugenicists’ favorite way of measuring “intelligence” is a very bad way of phrasing this idea, and that your standards of what counts as “circle-jerking” about a country are probably not nearly as inviting of nuance as you’d think.