finally ready to speak about this, so- hello. my name is candy. i just had to put down my childhood dog right after losing my job. needless to say i am devastated, financially and otherwise. i am short on rent, and also owe nearly a thousand dollars for just euthanasia and cremation. i really, really need some help.

please consider throwing a couple bucks my way, it would mean the world to me and would help tremendously.

thank you all so much.

Today's Seals Are: Alien Abduction

Hey, let's talk about anons like this, because I know some people haven't been in a position to see the patterns these play out in on broader scale and may indeed not spot the trap.

And it is a trap.

An ask like this has several purposes.

First, it uses social justice language in passive aggressive and manipulative ways to try to coerce a behavior. In this case, the desired behavior is usually for the recipent to participate in community shunning and/or harrassment. The language above is intended to put the recipient on the defensive where, in the haste to disassociate themself from the Bad Thing, they quickly disassociate themself from the bad person, often with no particular fact checking or evidence.

The message is also intended to create a sense of being surveilled and judged by an unknown amount of people with unknown amount of social power and an unknown amount of relevance to your life.

Notice that these asks are usually framed as if they are coming from a follower or potential follower, someone who is addressing you personally and who cares about your opinion and who your blog has an effect on. However this is usually.... very much not the case. If you've ever had the misfortune to watch a gossip campaign from like this from the outside, you will very quickly notice that messages like this get sent in mass batches to dozens and dozens of strangers. (You can often turn these up with a tumblr search, if you look.)

The sender does not know you and probably does not follow you. They have a person they don't like (possibly for their stated reason and possibly not), and they are going through the reblogs of a post from that blog and mass messaging *everyone* with a form letter. They will not see your response and they will probably never even see your blog again.

Which brings us to the second goal of whisper campaigns like this:

Notice that I blacked out the names above? That's because when the recipient answers anonymous asks like this, they provide a platform for the opinion on their blog. An anonymous message like this that gets posted doesn't just spread gossip and apply pressure to the recipient, it is spread to the recipient's entire community.

The *goal* is to get access to your community. The *goal* is to use you as a soapbox.

Is the information accurate? Did anyone check? Does the anon have an ulterior social motive? BIG SHRUG

If you go into the comments on one of these whisper campaigns you will see that *most people never bother to check.*

They assume good faith from a follower, they're off balance defending themselves, and they jump straight to conciliation.

It's a really, really effective form of social manipulation, and really really commonly misused.

It still amazes me that the US Army gave combat artists carte blanche to paint whatever the hell they wanted to depict during Vietnam War

This is an era where censorship in public and private is not only accepted and encouraged (from the WWII/Korea era’s lingering influence) but widespread. The news can’t do too closely. Letters are routinely censored of military detail, and then anything that makes the military look bad too.

But the artists? They were left to do as they pleased. The US Army established CAT (Combat Artist Team) units that literally only went to Vietnam to sketch things, then returned home and spent the rest of their time turning those sketches into paintings. They were given free rein to depict whatever they wanted to draw.

There’s some harrowing artworks that I keep stumbling across while in the Vietnam war photograph section. Most atrocities (American and South Vietnamese alike) were not photographed or those that were, were censored (I do occasionally unexpectedly run into pictures of mutilated corpses, mind you).

But the artists? They were left to do as they pleased, and the result is some of the best and most thought-provoking singular things I’ve seen of the Vietnam War.