I'm morally rigid in the same ways extreme religious conservatives are but in a way where my thing is sufficiently unpopular that I'm forced to consider how I come off to others & make nonzero effort to meta-reason about which morals are better. I hate it! I want to live in a society of a hundred million people who all agree that obviously my intuitions are correct and help me go to war against our neighbors who disagree
Meta level griping is fine and good but let me lay out my object level position here: there is functionally no acceptable reason to abuse people online, to send them threats or doxx them or flood them with huge numbers of vitriolic messages. These things would take a toll on the psyche of any human being, and as far as I can tell that's just about all they do. I've yet to encounter a case where sending someone a bunch of internet hate has actually made any kind of substantive difference in the world! The only result is that you make someone really stressed and unhappy for a while. Even if this person has genuinely done some kind of harm, that's fucking pointless!
By default I always have solidarity with the victims of internet hate mobs, even if they are actually guilty of whatever the hate mob is accusing them of. These things exist basically exclusively as an excuse for people to be cruel with some flimsy moral justification and you should not participate in them.
I can name a case where sending a bunch of internet hate made a substantive difference.
JK Rowling has become way more bigoted as a result of her ongoing war with her own fanbase. She doubled, tripled, and quadrupled down; where she was once a professional author with some prejudices, she became a professional bigot with some books.
Granted, the substantive change was the exact opposite of what the people sending the hate hoped to accomplish. But it was substantive change.
I've yet to encounter a case where sending someone a bunch of internet hate has actually made any kind of substantive difference in the world!
This seems incorrect to me. Abusing people online clearly has a chilling effect on broader society – the tail risk of harassment nontrivially drives how the median person acts. And some subset of harassers are, surely, happy with that cultural change.
I like philippesaner's example and agree that harassment often undermines the harassers' own goals, but I don't think the strategy is obviously ineffective. The major downside is that you sell your soul to do this, not that it never works.
me trying to cut short an anxiety episode: tell me that I have real problems, but they're much smaller than i make them out to be
81k: [repeats this in an authoritative voice]
me: you're one of the white guys Japanese companies hire specifically to tell management unpleasant things, except I am the entire Japanese company
tonysopranobignaturals-deactiva
this is from a "manipulation advice" video and it's just so fucking funny to me. why didn't I think of responding to insults like this
I cored out my closet to see if sleeping in it would improve sleep quality (results are pending) and now my room is so cluttered that it makes me anxious to be in it (and I just came back after avoiding it for 24h straight)
owning anything, if you live in a city, imposes a space tax that I find it hard to account for even when trying to account for it
it is costly to have hobbies not because buying that river tubing tube for $35 costs $35 but because it costs Doom, Forever, In Your Closet, Am I Outgoing And Social Enough To Use This Again Or Will I Die Alone Without Ever Seeing Water Again?
should I throw away this dildo that I used only once but on a cute girl during a threesome? Am I the kind of person who is going to have sex with cute girls again? WHO KNOWS?
one of the most annoying people I know irl alluded to having social anxiety, and while I understand nothing precludes socially anxious people from being annoying and their suffering is bad, I wanted to shake them by the shoulders and go "what is that even FOR"
this particular guy is possibly the only person I've ever met who made me go 'OH. that's mansplaining'
once he started giving a lecture on how whiteness is a social construct while river tubing, and I, a person who read how the irish became white a decade ago, started silently untying my tube from the the group's
A Few Thoughts On AI Art, Which May Already Be Obvious To Some
I wrote a little more about this on my patreon if people have any interest in further reading
All the claims in this comic are sufficiently irony-framed that I'm aware I'm not arguing with "what the OP is really saying" or anything like that, but –
"Human art can be transcribed directly from the mind's eye to paper" seems profoundly wrong. When I paint, I start out with a digital sketch of what I want, or a reference photo that I intend to transform in such and such ways. There is no True Ideal I'm trying to get out.
I have intentions, but those intentions frequently change because I realize they were wrong. Just like writing helps you clarify your thoughts, painting helps me clarify what relationship between various colors, or compositional elements, would look good. Those were things I couldn't have predicted in advance because my brain is too small to pre-compute them.
The painting I have, in the end, is the product of a (not very high-def) initial idea ("blue and green... X is looking at Y... there's a reflection that symbolizes... the secondary focus is on this seeming mundane object that... ooh and use this brush technique to get this texture on...") and a lot of iteration.
On a high level, I don't think that's different from what an AI is doing.
What was the book you read that talked about infanticide among hunter-gatherer societies? I want to recommend it to my girlfriend.
I'm not actually sure of any of the titles I read on the subject at this point, sorry - it's mostly a bunch of articles from back in university more than any monographs.
(Unless you're talking about a specific book I talked about? In which case I just have completely blanked on its existence and have zero idea)
It might have been a paper. I just think I remember you posted quotes from it, but I couldn’t find those with any key words I stuck into tumblr’s terrible search function.
Just want my followers to know that I'll respect your identity, no matter how outrageous or unusual. Transage? I'm down with that. Transspecies? If you say you're a dragon, you're a dragon, 100%. Unless there's other people around in which case I'll pretend we've never met.
I'm bigender but only to OP
anytime scott has a new male friend stiles is immediately like “ok. Time to kill them and also my self”
we never got to see bi scott in action bc if he ever got a boyfriend, stiles would have started screaming and moaning and throwing up and making everyone DEEPLY uncomfortable
Coward learns the futility of punishing evil
have i mentioned that you should read Flower recently. You. You There. Read Flower
The two of us hadn't spoken for most of the trip, other than a little small talk. It wasn't that the atmosphere was awkward, per se, but it was complicated. It felt like we were at the end of a long road, and that anything I said would be somehow vulgar, inappropriate for the weight of the moment.
Which was annoying, because there was, in fact, something I'd been meaning to confess.
I just... Wasn't quite sure how, yet.
So I kept watching the sky, for a little while. It was a grim-looking, overcast day, with only small holes in the grey cloud cover-- Better suited for a funeral than the event we were on our way to. Slowly, the creeping restlessness began to beat out the unease I was feeling, my finger starting to tap idly against the seating.
I turned to her.
She was a smaller woman than me, with short cut, curly hair, tan skin, and thick eyebrows, and was dressed in a professional-looking brown and black robe, in contrast to the rather unprofessional colorful wool stola I was wearing. Presently, she was reading a book, one of her high-brow romance novels.
I took a deep breath.
"Hey, Ran." I said, quietly.
She blinked, then looked up from it. "What is it, Su?"
"You want to... Hear a joke?"
She regarded me with a flat, skeptical expression.
"What?" I said, defensive. "Come on. Don't look at me like that."
She narrowed her eyes for a moment, then sighed, setting the novel aside for the moment. "Alright. Fine. Do your worst."
"Okay..." I said, shifting a little closer to her. "So: There's this man who hates his life. He has a few things going for him, a handful of family and friends... But overall, things aren't looking good. He works a boring, dead-end job that he hates, he doesn't have any prospects for romance, most people find him sort of obnoxious, and he lives in a small, shabby apartment. One day, he decides he's had enough--"
"This isn't going to be another suicide joke, is it?" She interjected flatly.
"Wh-- I..." I hesitated, scratching the side of my head. "Why are you jumping to to that conclusion?"
"You tell a lot of creepy jokes about people dying lately, Su," she said, her brow furrowed. "It's getting kinda worrying. Even considering the circumstances."
"Well, this won't be one of them," I insisted. "No suicide punchline. I swear."
She regarded me with a suspicious look.
"...alright," she eventually said. "Keep going."
gosh I just really hate sci-fi stories about human exceptionalism huh
tried one of those tumblr short stories about aliens finding humans weird, because this time its specific premise seemed interesting and like it might not bother me so much, but it went harder in that direction than I'd hoped 😔
the whole trope just really rustles my jimmies for reasons I've never quite taken the time to articulate.
I never like this Humanity Fuck Yeah kind of thing because it feels like a desire to create a politically safe form of chauvinist xenophobia, like people want the experience of being jingoistically contemptuous of enemy nations but without any of the unpleasant real-world political associations, so they invent an enemy that's sufficiently humanlike to feel like a rival human nation and stand in for that role in mythmaking, but wholly fictional and sufficiently removed from Actual Humanity that there's deniability there. And, like, okay, I guess in some sense I admire the effort, but I feel like the chauvinistic triumphalist xenophobia is a kind of fault in itself; it's probably unavoidable in politics writ large but I don't really like the effort to wallow in it as a free-floating artistic project.
I don't actually feel this way bc liberalism but if I were an ancient Greek philosopher in the platonic school, I think it would be easy to reach the conclusion that the ideal society, the form of which this world's community is a crude and unsightly shadow, is one in which cute gfs are kept in petting zoos.