Tumblr @dilfgirl
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: it’s more important to know and understand fully why something is harmful than it is to drop everything deemed problematic. It’s performative and does nothing. People wonder why nobody has critical thinking skills and this is part of it because no one knows how to [simultaneously] critique and consume media. You need to use discernment.

This is ultimately why propaganda is going to work on you. Because you never learned how to think for yourself and the actual ideology behind things. You simply rely on group think and the bare minimum explanations to tell you what’s good and bad.

[Source]

It’s OK to engage with and even be complimentary of the good aspects of media containing elements that are problematic — or abusive or bigoted.

Sometimes the specific thing will be too horrible or central and you can’t enjoy it at all. That’s normal, and when it comes to watching for pleasure, doing more work is exhausting.

But “you are not immune to propaganda”, and one of the few inoculations that exists is studying it, particularly bad propaganda where all the seams are out and obvious. It’s possible then to catch what a more skillful creator is doing subtly elsewhere because you actually understand it and how it fits together.

“Thing bad” is a start, but understanding why “thing bad” helps protect against novel strains of related memes (in the idea-virus sense), so that you don’t say, “ugh I hate terfs” then turn around and sound just like them toward asexual people, or say “free Palestine!” enthusiastically but still consider “Land Back” in a USA context to be IdPol nationalism, or whatever.