 Recently, someone on Twitter asked what my response was to a video posted by Mr. Medicare about the SCP Wiki celebrating Pride Month, and here's the thing about this particular brand of asshole. They tend to go away when you ignore them. The whole of their being is tied up and being outraged at someone else's outrage, so responding to them is bound to just add to the spiral. Yet when that person has a group of people called to action, which has happened here, more on that later, there's a bigger issue at hand. So that's what I'm stuck with now. Do nothing and watch misinformation burn hotter and faster or say something. That's the thing about status quotes. When you remain silent, you're not refusing to support a side. You're actually supporting whatever the status quo is. I'm going to take this piece by piece, but I won't be replaying any of his video here for two reasons. One, though my platform is small, I won't contribute to spreading his message. And two, I've been around long enough to know when you go after someone like this and you're a smaller channel, they're going to copyright strike you regardless of it being clear, fair use. So I'm not going to risk that either. And the first few minutes of his video are mostly about how the media, and incidentally, the SAP Wiki, is trending towards LGBTQ plus inclusion and how that will somehow make everything worse. He mentions DC Comics hiring Zoey Quinn, who was the target of a huge amount of online harassment to create for them. He mentions Netflix, his new anti harassment policies following documented misconduct on their sets. And he mentions the portrayal of an LGBTQ plus protagonist in The Last of Us 2. I'm going to address each of those really quickly because most of them have nothing to do with the SAP Wiki's logo change. One, hiring writers with diverse viewpoints is only going to make your work stronger. Two, policies that can help stop sexual harassment and worse things than sexual harassment are good. And three, LGBTQ plus inclusion in fiction does not affect you like at all. That last point is going to get to the heart of the whole matter, but we'll get to that in a second. First, let's think about the logo change. Humans have this intrinsic nose wrinkling at change. We just don't like it. I like to think it stems from our natural fear of the unknown, that idea that we just don't know what's over the horizon, and we've got food and water and shelter here. So why move? Humanity has spent a long time expanding their campfires to beat back more and more of the night. And we've illuminated almost the entire world at this point. There's still things we don't know and don't understand, and those things terrify us. And for not an insignificant portion of the population, LGBTQ plus inclusion is a thing that isn't really well understood, and Medicare does his level best to define it in as broad as strokes as possible. He groups supporters of it all together and dismisses them out of hand. In relation to his own worldview, people who support this are idiots and deserve derision, which is I imagine how somehow in his mind, the three things he mentioned are somehow connected. And personally, I don't see how you can draw a line between sexual harassment policies and gay pride on the SCP Wiki in the first place, but maybe that's just me. But after ranting on that for a while and couching the language in a chuckle to make sure he's giving it the dismissive tone he thinks it deserves, he pretends to fill you in on how the Wiki got to where it is today. And that's when he moves on to SCP-7143-J. It's a joke article on the Wiki about a sexually attractive doorknob. Now Medicare expresses incredulity that people might find something offensive about a joke like this. Something can be a joke, hell, something can be funny and still be offensive. I should note this is unrelated to the common tactic of saying it was a joke to excuse bad behavior. This instead gets at the heart of what a joke is, and the problem Medicare seems to have with understanding that something can be two things at once. Now jokes can be told about horrible things and they can still be funny. The trick there, though, is in the target of the humor. If people find sexual harassment funny it's going to be when the harasser gets his comeuppance. Now 7143-J, I should note by the way the writer is a friend of mine, isn't funny and it's not funny because it's a one-note joke that hammers home how skeazy the harassers are without actually delivering on their comeuppance. In this case the norm is sexual harassers often get away with harassment and we build our view of the world's norms on what we see in here. If you're not subverting things in fiction jokes or otherwise you're reinforcing them. Medicare spends an inordinate amount of time addressing specific comments from that discussion without a full and clear understanding of why the piece isn't even funny and why some might reasonably consider it offensive in that light. Instead he sees this as a pivotal point where the wiki began to go in a direction he doesn't understand or appreciate. Medicare uses a lot of they and them and these people to refer to those who work towards inclusion, but it inclines a bit towards the greater cultural changes that media are currently going through. But these folk are not a monolith. They don't all think the same, they don't all react the same, and they don't all come from the same background. Now in between here we've got to talk about the staff response to the controversy. Now some don't all overreact it. I understand where they're coming from. If you spend your life being told that who you are is wrong and suffering small little passive-aggressive quips when you're not being openly mocked, you start to react to comments like these with at least a raised eyebrow. Let's examine the three basic objections raised of the SCP wiki altering its logo for a month. One, it doesn't fit aesthetically or tonally. Two, it's political and a distraction. Or three, people simply dislike being reminded that LGBTQ plus people exist. The last one is something I cannot help you with. If that's your viewpoint, then nothing I say is going to change your mind. Take the logo change as your notice to leave. The wiki is going to continue to move towards LGBTQ plus inclusion regardless of your opinion and it might be best to part ways now hopefully on friendly terms. Some though certainly not all of those are by people who actually fall in the third camp but no better than to say it out loud. Now those people can refer to what I just said the rest of you though we're going to talk this out. I was talking earlier about how doing nothing is the same as supporting whatever the status quo is and if the status quo is LGBTQ plus people are treated poorly by society then taking action is necessary to change it. If you feel the inclusion is political I hate to break it to you but Gaines isn't a political party you're giving equal credence to the people who think that Gaines is wrong versus all of the people who just want to live their lives as who they are. Both sides of an issue do not always deserve equal time and sometimes one side is just wrong but at the grander point it doesn't fit aesthetically or tonally. There is no canon. If you want to say that the foundation was infected by an anomalous virus by gamers against weed then bam you're done justifying it. Taking a half inch step to the left to justify something that means a whole hell of a lot to your fellow site members is a small price to pay. But we can come back to the staff reaction now the reactions from staff were swift and harsh across reddit, tumblr, facebook, twitter and the site's forum itself. Do I personally think it got out of hand? I think in some places a little and some of staff have said that in the future these things will be handled a little differently. I like to think the best of people and I like to think that most folk will come around if giving a solid argument and time to think about it but I don't live every day facing this sort of hate passive-gressive or not. I am a straight white male who only found out what cis gendering was a year ago and I'm still trying to do my best to come to terms with this whole new inclusive world. However medic here spends a lot of his time talking about how staff behavior is ridiculous and again uses the chuckle voice to really drive home the dismissiveness. It feels like he lacks a good sense of self-awareness or at least a bad sense of where he is in the pecking order. To him he's on the bottom fighting to keep from being buried but what he fails to recognize is that he's actually on the top and every shovel full of dirty digs out lands on someone else. If you think the staff are being a little too aggressive that's a valid criticism but it doesn't make staff's arguments any less valid. After his complaints about this died down a bit he moves on to complain about another SCP. I'm going to address it specifically in a moment but can I just say there's between three and four thousand SCP articles on the wiki. Like he uses these two articles as somehow designated milestones of how the wiki has changed for the worse in his opinion. We've already tackled how he's wrong about that but you could conceivably pick out two articles to support any argument you want because there are so many to choose from. But let's talk a moment about SCP-2721. SCP-2721 is about an anomalous satellite that identifies as a transsexual woman and is a fan of the webcomic Homestuck. I don't like SCP-2721. I think it's kind of boring but I'm in the minority on that point and that's okay because this content really isn't for me. People who have a life experience similar to that of the author. Those people are the target audience and those people love it and guess what? That doesn't hurt me. In fact that doesn't affect me at all. I'm willing to admit right here and now I am not a fan of Homestuck and people writing Homestuck related fiction on the wiki doesn't make me angry or disappointed. One of the fact that I'm not the target audience of the article make me angry that it exists. There's room for all kinds of fiction on the wiki and if your plot hinges on something I don't understand or identify with I can just read something else. Nearly 4,000 articles remember? Yet fans of Medicare right now downvote Brigading 2721 for the flimsiest of reasons and from that we can circle back to The Last of Us 2. LGBTQ plus themes and storylines do not make a story worse. I mean hell The Last of Us is about a dad who loses his kid. That element is the through line of the entire work and I can appreciate it without being a dad. I'm pretty sure I can appreciate a story about an LGBTQ plus teenager if the story is written well enough and that's a thing. Holding up 2721 as an example is a dishonest way to make your point. It makes pretend that the wiki is only about one thing when it's not. It's about everything and saying otherwise is just wrong. A final note for any LGBTQ plus members of the community who have gotten down after seeing all his drama unfold. This is the work of a small number of assholes with the exact purpose of bringing you down because they figured you were flying too high and they don't realize that inclusion doesn't have to be a zero sum game. Remember this, airplanes take off by flying into the wind and so can you. When you get to new heights you're going to do it against the strongest of headwinds. Don't let them bring you down. Let the assholes of the world sustain you. Thanks for watching.