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Harmonic Psyche

@harmonic-psyche / harmonic-psyche.tumblr.com

Daily psychology information, social justice, and occasional fandom content (Mother: CogDis and She-Ra). In the past I posted a lot about Myers-Briggs. Cognizance of cognitive concepts is crucial to comprehending our companions!

I need people to stop condemning something because it is “criminal” and start asking “is it harmful?

I need people to stop condemning something because it is “deviant” and start asking “is it harmful?

I need people to stop assigning notions of criminality and deviance to harm, and start asking “how do we prevent harm? how do we mitigate it? what do those harmed need to be safe and heal? how can we support these processes?”

The corollary to this is that people need to stop claiming things are “harmful” when they’re just *uncomfortable.*

Basically I see no way to believe *both* of the following:

  1. There are only two genders
  2. Gender is a straightforward description of observed biology

One contradicts the other.

There are, very obviously and demonstrably more than two arrangements of sexual characteristics.

And once you go, "Well, yes, but we just ignore those fuzzy edge cases for most purposes" you are admitting that you are doing something else other than "straightforward description"; you are in fact explicitly *ignoring* certain biological realities in order to preserve the taxonomy.

And that's kind of *all* I'm saying. There might be perfectly good reasons to use a taxonomy that is not a straightforward description of biological reality. Even if you throw up your hands and go, "Fine, you pedant every intersex condition is its own gender" that really doesn't say much at all about whether trans identities are valid or good or whatever.

I just think it would be nice to make arguments that *don't* start on a foundation of total incoherence.

I've had too many other things going on this past week to spend much time on Tumblr, but I've gone back and forth in my head about whether it makes sense to respond to this post where you reblogged me arguing that it doesn't make sense to insist on the claim that "there are two biological sexes". I either don't like or don't understand some of your arguments there, but I suspect that we're mostly just talking past each other on this question, that it's somehow a matter of different philosophies about how to prioritize what's technically true and what's taxonomically convenient, that there may not really be any substantial daylight between us on what matters most here. Maybe a brief version of my response would be that I can't really blame conservatives* for harping on "but there are two sexes and that's just science and common sense" as long as liberals appear to be using "actually it's kind of a myth that there are two sexes" (to various degrees, the most extreme of which is the "colonialist cultural construct" one, and another more common of which is to vaguely oppose using the phrase "biological sex" to mean anything at all) as a talking point: there is a big difference in the context of discourse between making that kind of claim and saying "If we want to be maximally precise and correct about it, 'two sexes' is just a convenient taxonomy but there are a bunch of ways to be intersex as well".

So I guess I decided not to respond to that, and just now I kind of did, but anyway. This slightly more recent OP above spurs me to just clarify something, both with regard to my own positions and maybe towards sharpening the conversation as a whole: the question of how many biological sexes there are has absolutely no bearing on the main Trans Issue at the center of today's culture wars. I mean, gender is proposed as being a separate thing from sex, right?

For the purposes of figuring out trans rights, we shouldn't care how many people fall into the biological categories of male and female and how many alternatives to these two there are. Suppose we lived in a world where exactly 100% of humans satisfied either a list of male sexual traits (including having a Y chromosome) or a disjoint list of female sexual traits (including not having a Y chromosome): would that at all change the validity of gender identities that don't match up to sexual characteristics at birth or the rights issues that come with that reality? Suppose on the other hand we lived in a world where a good 10% of humans had intersex characteristics and couldn't be classified as male or female, and it really looked like a smooth spectrum: would that really change anything about trans issues and the primary arguments coming from both sides? I would say no. (As a qualification, there are some concrete issues that are indirectly affected by this: like obviously how near-precisely we're all divided into males and female affects sporting categories and thus the whole trans women in sports issue.)

When conservatives keep going on about "But there are only two sexes!", they are mostly gesturing at a red herring. At worst, they are being deliberately obtuse about the other side claiming that gender is a different thing from sex, or deliberately making no effort to understand what the other side means by gender, in order to remain ignorant and dismissive of trans rights causes. At best, they are either sincerely struggling to understand what gender is even supposed to mean (which I've admitted that I myself struggle with) or are very genuinely hung up on the phenomenon of definitions of common words changing as language and culture evolves (we shouldn't underestimate how much of a true stumbling block this seems to be for many overall intelligent people: I highlighted Norman Finkelstein as one rather stubborn and extreme example and encountered another example in person just about a week ago!). But either way, when they bring this up as an attempted justification of their conservative position on trans issues, they are arguing fallaciously.

One of my issues with some of the liberal rhetoric on this, however, is that liberals are also often bringing up the fuzziness of biological sex categories as if it somehow adds strength to their position, which I also think is (mostly) fallacious. Like I said in my most recent post interacting with you on this, and like I argued two or four paragraphs above, bringing up "well actually you can't even really say there are two biological sexes" seems neither here nor there as far as defending the concept of gender identity goes, and acting so insistent on this claim does come across as a determination to defy common sense.

Some of the time, liberals are making a point that sounds like this only because conservatives brought the sex thing up ("There are only two sexes, so all claims of transgenderism are denying basic reality!"), and in that context I have much more sympathy with liberals' choice to bring it up. On the other side, sometimes conservatives are bringing up the point about biological sex in response to liberals who seem committed to harping on it and needlessly trying to muddy the common-sense two-sexes taxonomy, and this is what I was defending conservatives' desire to do in my last post on this.

But in any case, the biological sex category issue strikes me as a pointless distraction for the most part. And I understand that a lot of intersex people are tired of being used as part of this distraction as a talking point.

*For the purposes of these discussions, I'm generally going to refer to the people on each of the main sides of this culture war issue as conservatives and liberals, even if they may not be or identify as such on other issues.

As I said in OP, I don't draw any conclusions from this obviously logical inconsistency.

What frustrates me is that people will go,

"If you just look at biology, that's enough to prove that there are two sexes which are fixed from birth."

And when I respond, "Well, sex characteristics have a bimodal distribution with two main cases and a minority who aren't members of either case, so couldn't that be equally well described as three or more categories?"

They go, "Ugh, of course it could but obviously we didn't come up with this taxonomy through simple biological observation of sex characteristics, and I have absolutely no idea why you are focusing on biological observation instead of addressing the *actual* reasons we believe this. Your weirdo focus on this makes it seem like you have no common sense."

Like, am I not allowed to simply be frustrated at this annoying goal-post shifting simply because it *is* annoying goal-post shifting, without drawing any further conclusions?

Was listening to a thing on King Charles and his political views, his traditionalist anti-modernist political views weren't too interesting in themselves but they did address the issue of "disenchantment," that unlike classic kings and churches the modern world of companies and markets seems very disenchanting, and for him that's why we need to RETVRN.

But this does hit on one of my recurring thoughts, why are companies so disenchanting? "They are abusive and exploitative" you say, well I've got news for you about kings, churches, and families, being abusive does not stop people from being enchanted. This is one those things that I think we don't even consider that anyone could be enchanted with them so we don't think to ask why we are not. (I should say that this does happen a bit at the consumer end but not at the employee end)

There's a simple answer and that's "time," these aren't old enough. Maybe in the year 2200 the people will crave a return to the traditional values of Amazon.com.

Never felt satisfied with that though, and the other answer I've had is that, unlike church, family, and king, a fundamental part of how corporations work is firing. You can be cut loose from a family or excommunicated from a church, but this is not core to how those institutions work.

Don't really know if this even makes sense to wonder about, but I return to it every once in a while

I think you're really on to something there.

The relationships that characterize, say, an aristocracy are in some sense stable; am aristocrat with no money at all is just as much an aristocrat as he was when he was rich.

Or, to put it another way, the Catholic Church might excommunicate someone, but the pope is not going to declare that, due to declining profits he is going to shut down the church and he wishes all the former bishops luck in their next religious posting.

The relationships in business are *all* subject to being dissolved at a moment's notice the instant that they are no longer profitable, and when you are layed off that's often a signal of total apathy: what happens to you specifically not only doesn't matter, it *can't* matter.

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I would question the premise that the modern world isn’t enchanted. Nike, after all, was the Greek Goddess of victory before it was a shoe company, and Nike the company sought to embody the ideals of victory and athletic excellence in the minds of their customers. They weaved a dense mythology of what their shoes meant and what relation it had to victory, mostly by advertising, including endorsements from people who had attained success in athletics, whose real stories helped to buttress the myth making of Nike’s advertisers. Now, Nike’s shoes are enchanted, in the most literal way possible in the modern world, and you know it because some people are willing to spend several hundred dollars for a sneaker that cost ten dollars to make.

Right but what happens if the market shifts? That enchantment is called "branding" and it is not done for its own sake but to sell shoes.

It exists for as long as, and *only* as long as it sells shoes and can be abandoned at any time should it fail to sell shoes.

One characteristic of the modern world that I don't know how to quite articulate is that it used to matter what happened to you, as in, you specifically, Bob Smith of 133 Maple Street. The things that happened to you might be caused by your social position and might, in fact, be extremely bad for you but it was important to society that they happened to you specifically.

Currently it doesn't really matter what happens to you specifically. What happens to you might be sad or happy but there's no specific reason why it *should* happen to you and nobody is willing to do much for or against it.

The bureaucratic global order mitigates against the ever-shifting mirage of the market but it still understands you primarily as a fungible instance of a certain demographic.

The thing about a cog in a machine is that it usually needs to be there for the machine to function, so people will do a lot to insure that it doesn't pop out of the machine.

A better metaphor for our modern situation is the dollar bill. Why should I spend this dollar bill with the dog-eared edge rather than that dollar with the small tear?

No reason whatsoever. All dollar bills are interchangeable so there's no sense in tracking what happens to a specific one.

I think Anton Chigurh made a similar point.

Another thing is, a religion, say, the Catholic Church, or the Mormons, may well exploit their parishioners but the relationship is fundamentally not really analogous to an employer/employee relationship, and particularly the idea of "useless" parishioners being expelled from places of worship, while perhaps not unheard of, certainly strikes me as a less central behavior than laying off or firing an expensive employee.

Or, another difference, Churches tend to make money because making money allows them to perpetuate their worship and beliefs; a company like Nike creates a brand because it allows them to make money.

Honestly the belief that all human interactions can be understood in market terms strikes me as a huge component of becoming disenchanted with the world.

Something I keep circling around and not quite finding a way to express is that, in contemporary times, the question, "Why does it matter what happens to me, specifically?" is getting harder and harder to answer.

In fact, let's go broader, the question, "Why does it matter what happens to any specific person, object, or idea?" is getting harder to answer.

And in my mind I keep getting sucked into the related idea that modern relationships are highly contingent.

But I don't think that's really quite the nub of the issue.

Something I've thought about in history is how violent monarchies were. The king is always going to be the king, so if he's your political enemy or if he's stupid or tyrannical the only way to solve the problem is to just kill the guy.

King Charles is the King because he's the son of the previous monarch. The "because" in that previous sentence is *not* the same as the "because" in the sentence, "I have a job because I perform the duties well and help the company make money."

Charles, or some medieval monarch, has a Kingship that is in some sense contingent; if he does a bad enough job there might be a revolution or a coup.

But the Kingship cannot be severed from the person; the King's relationship to Kingship is permanent and is a feature of that specific person.

And as a result of that feudal societies take a tremendous amount of interest in what happens to the king.

My relationship to my job, on the other hand, is severable. It is necessary that the company I work for have somebody perform the duties of my job; but it is in a position to treat me as fungible with all other equally skilled workers.

Should I, say, stop showing up to work, they don't have to kill me and all my male heirs, they can just fire me.

What happens to me, specifically, me, Morlock-Holmes, not my demographic, not my country, not people in my religion, but what happens to me, specifically, as an individual, only matters for as long as I can justify it mattering in economic terms.

It has occurred to me that I have not defined what it means for something to "Matter" but in this case it means something like, "Society takes a tangible interest in expending resources to create a certain outcome."

So, like, Market relationships are extremely contingent in certain ways but too much instability is undesirable so there is also a bureacratic system to make things less contingent in one meaning of that term. E.g. we don't have to murder our inept leaders anymore because we have processes to remove them. And it's hard to have a market if I can just shoot you and take your stuff without consequence.

But what both the market and the bureacratic state devalue is the idea that I specifically matter; both tend to treat me as a type. I can get a job if a company can buy my labor for less money than I make for them. I can get food stamps if my income is under a certain level. If I don't meet those thresholds I don't get that stuff, but if I don't apply for a job I don't get it either. If I don't apply for food stamps nobody will particularly notice that I'm going hungry.

What happens to me is important only in so far as I meet certain requirements, and to the extent that I don't meet them there is no particular reason to take any notice of me at all.

The distinction I am trying to make is that society cares what happens to "People who are in danger of starving because they don't make enough money" and "People who have certain marketable skills" but it does not care what happens to me, specifically.

Market relations have so dominated our psychology that I think it's very difficult, particularly for Americans, to understand the distinction.

It's certainly difficult enough for me to articulate it!

Here's another go at it:

I get medicaid from the state because I am poor. This means a number of professional doctors and dentists and such will do things to keep me healthy and diagnose me if I get sick.

But the state medicaid apparatus is not concerned with ensuring that Morlock-Holmes has certain health outcomes; rather, it is concerned with the health outcomes of certain poor, elderly, or disabled people, and the moment I stop being poor enough to qualify, the medicaid system will abandon all concern with whether I am healthy or not.

The professionals I have relationships with will consider it sad that they are no longer economically able to justify taking an interest in ensuring that I have certain health outcomes.

This kind of thing heavily characterizes our relationships with our employers and is not really characteristic of, say, a caste system or a religious congregation. An excommunication, or a murder, is actually an expression of extreme concern about the outcomes for a single, specific individual; to be laid off is an expression of a lack of such concern.

Claims of AGI ignore fundamental problems in package management

Recently, a number of public intellectuals have claimed that we're getting increasingly closer to artificial intelligence that can solve a wide array of problems as well as a human can. However, these claims overlook fundamental barriers in the field that we are still decades from solving. To discuss this, I turned to alcoholic grad student James Belmini at MIT.

"It's just these fucking packages, man", James told me, while pouring himself a glass of straight vodka at 3 in the afternoon. "The 'language comprehension' package requires pyflubnugget at version 3.8.6 or less, but this 'Superintelligence' git repo requires conkflonk of 1.1.2 or greater, which conflicts with pyflubnugget. So any speculation of the capabilities of true AGI is purely hypothetical, because it's gonna take at least 5 years to work this shit out."

Asking about James' thesis progress did not yield anymore information about the problem, but did cause him to pour himself another shot and down it wordlessly without making eye contact

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idk who needs to hear this rn but suffering is not noble. take the tylenol

One time when I was younger I was refusing to take headache medicine and my mom said “the person who invented that medicine is probably so sad you won’t let them help you” and now every time I find myself denying medicine I just imagine the saddest scientist making those big wet eyes like “why won’t you let me help” and whoop then I take the medicine

[ID

A photo of a man reading a neon sign on a tree that says “Healing also means taking responsibility for the role you play in your own suffering”.

End ID]

the rudest most helpful thing anyone ever said to me is "why do you keep hurting your own feelings long after [the person who once hurt you] probably forgot about it" like literally just dear god you've split me open so neatly my entire soul is just flopping around on the ground between us now but thank you

Just fyi if you're autistic/adhd and struggle specifically with this sort of thing, please know what what might be happening is something called perseveration, which is a common neurodivergent behavior that can include, among other things, revisiting emotions repeatedly and being unable to break loose from processing or managing stressful events.

Don't keep hurting your own feelings. But don't feel bad if you get stuck there, either. Something else could be going on.

Weird question for my first poll. Do other sighted people occasionally do rote activites in the pitch dark, such as going to the bathroom and washing your hands?

I do and I’m wondering if it’s a reflexive way to reduce stimuli. If I don’t need to see for a task, take a break from all that visual input.

I'm on the autism spectrum and I TOTALLY do this. I've done it since I was a kid, and still do. My family has called me a “vampire” for how much I've loved hanging out in the dark. I've rationalized it different ways in the past, but nowadays I think the simplest explanation is just that I like reducing sensory stimulation.

one of the things that makes autism a disability (and why some of us choose to label it as such rather than an “alternate neurotype”) is the stress. 

part of autism is just being incredibly stressed. overstimulation? stress. holding a conversation? stress. something happening to our schedule? stress. people talk about how often autism is recognized and diagnosed via our stress responses (like meltdowns) because it is just so common to see autistic people stressed because of lack of accommodations to how our brains work.

and this matters because stress kills. stress causes a lot of health issues, or it can trigger pre-existing ones by making certain chronic conditions flare up. i once had a psychiatrist very unhelpfully tell me i “just need to manage my stress” when the stress i was describing was things i could not avoid in neurotypical society and can’t “just get over”. i can do “self care” all i like but i cannot at the very base level change the way my brain inputs information and reacts accordingly.

i only learned this year that loud noises aren’t physically painful for other people. i have lived 34 years in a world in which my friends and family regularly physically hurt me at random just by shouting, and i thought everyone else just thought i was kind of a wimp for not dealing with the pain as well as they did.

like. loud noises physically hurt. it’s like a static shock from my ears to my spine that doesn’t stop until the volume goes back down. i thought we all agreed that ‘that’s too loud!’ and covering our ears meant ‘ouch!’. turns out i’ve been dealing with a stressor almost no one else has, my whole life, alone.

autistic people have to keep functioning through debilitating levels of stress that no one else in their life acknowledges or helps them with. it’s no wonder that their most visible ‘tells’ are breakdowns

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eye-opening tumblr post for me included the words "people are meant to be burdens" as in humans rely on and support one another and it's not a bother it's our purpose; to love and be loved in return. so if you ever think you're being annoying just remember we were made to love and it's going to be okay

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that being said... don't dump heavy emotional stuff on people without asking permission first. they gotta have the spoons. but even if they don't, they still love you

Anonymous asked:

I think these nonsensical anti-trans arguments originate from trying to subtitute nature in the place where God used to be in these arguments. Unfortunately, they can't just define nature to be whatever they need it to be, so they run into problems. What transphobes don't understand is that their idea of a "natural order" is not actually natural.

@americanbrightside made a very similar point and that does make a lot of sense to me.

As you say, it's frustrating because people act like "biology" demonstrates these things that I would argue it not only doesn't demonstrate, but *can't* demonstrate.

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I mean, I think if you look at this honestly, the whole "God doesn't exist and/or didn't influence the development of nature according to some kind of intelligent design" thing starts requiring a lot of convoluted justifications.

But more generally... I see commentary like this and that seems to deny not merely a divine telos or an ontologically intrinsic telos, but any kind of telos or purpose at all. Which seems like an absurd and extreme position at odds with normal thought.

This has been called "nominalism".

Like, I don't think it is a remarkable or controversial claim that "the purpose of muscles is to act as mechanical actuators" or "the purpose of teeth is to bite things", or, for something that relates to sex, "the purpose of the ovaries is to produce female sex hormones, operate part of the ovulatory cycle, and produce female gametes".

These are, at the least, evolutionarily selected in such a way that they perform a specific purpose, and failure to fulfil that purpose is strongly selected against even if a different configuration of purposes is possible.

Of course, in the world of trans politics, people love to follow rhetoric to an extreme conclusion, use that to justify excluding a bunch of people from a place in the world, and then demonize them when they chafe at this.

This is not an argument people make so often though.

"We have reasons to believe that there are two healthy sexes but that not everyone develops exactly according to one" is not synonymous with "Everyone is one of two sexes" but people will assert the latter proposition loudly and assertively, and then, when called on it, do what you do here, which is to defend the former proposition.

But I'm not attacking that former proposition (There's ways I could, but in this case, I'm not).

What I'm attacking is the idea that the two propositions are synonymous.

I am nearsighted.

You can argue that the tellos of a human eye is to have 20/20 vision, but when I say that I don't have 20/20 vision, nobody jumps to say that I am being delusional, and actually everybody has 20/20 vision it's just that some people need treatment to realize it.

Yet, if I were to argue that intersex people are neither men nor women, that would be incredibly controversial and even deeply offensive; if I were to argue that some of those conditions could be corrected such that people would become men and women that would also be considered offensive and bizarre.

These categories are not constructed through simple biological observation, because we feel an incredibly urgency to retain the categories even when biological observation suggests something else.

All I'm asking is for people to actually think about and acknowledge this very obvious fact.

What do you think the origin of the idea of there being two genders, “man” and “woman”, is?

Oh, I know this one! Cognitive bias.

  • Putting things into the same mental category makes someone see, and think about, them as more similar than they really are.
  • Putting things into different mental categories makes someone see, and think about, them as more different than they really are.

Together, those tendencies form “the Binary Bias,” the “tendency to impose categorical distinctions on continuous data.” In other words, if you imagine information as a color spectrum, our minds usually chop it in half and understand the spectrum as one half versus the other half.

Below, I first review some of the psychological research literature demonstrating that we have a Binary Bias. I then discuss the metaphysics of categories.

'how could you lie to doctors??'

I don't actually. I treat them pretty much like a toddler.

Spoon feed your doctor little bits of medical information until they come to the obvious conclusion all by themself and then you go 'oh wow aren't you smart! I'm so proud of you!' then get them a treat

Hilariously (?) this is also the most effective way I’ve found to communicate with doctors as a nurse.

Every medical professional who confirms this warms my soul and heals my psyche from the damage inflicted by the doctors in my notes who keep going 'have you considered that malpractice is actually the fault of the patient for not trying hard enough to avoid the bad doctors'

Yes! I had to do this to get my autism diagnosis. Another one that helps for doctors ignoring your symptoms is "I would like it noted in my medical record that I have (insert symptoms) and you are refusing to do (clearly needed diagnostic test/treatment)." Usually that gets the wheels in their heads turning enough to give you what you need to avoid a malpractice suit.

When people say "I hate people who walk slow/ use straws/ don't make eye contact/ other thing disabled people do more." then, when told it's often disability related, follow it up with "obviously I wasn't talking about disabled people" I make a mental note they are not safe.

Because the only way this is "obvious" is if you don't think disabled people are people.

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One of my friends said he hated it when people stood still instead of walking on the escalator. I pointed out I always stand still and hold on, since my dyspraxic ass would fall down easily. He said obviously I should hold on, he just meant people being lazy. I pointed out there's no visible signs of a whole bunch of disabilities and even just bad days or transient illnesses that could cause someone to need to stay still on an escalator, or any other way of meeting a person's needs. He sat down and thought about it, called himself an asshole, and admitted he was wrong. He's since got into the habit of asking me "Beckit, this thing really annoys me, am I being a dickhead?" when he's not sure if the thing is potentially related to a disability. It's made him a much more understanding person.

I'm very proud of my friend for reflecting on his behaviour and working to take down that red flag.

I think one of the most damaging ideologies towards children is the conviction that having children isn’t a calling but a moral obligation.

Not to be a crazy radical or anything, but children deserve to be deeply wanted by their parents.

Children shouldn’t be a “stage” in life that everyone is obligated to fulfill; childrearing is not for everyone. More importantly, children shouldn’t be state-enforced punishments for “irresponsible” sexual behavior.

Children are people with thoughts and feelings just like the rest of us. They are conscious of the way people treat them. And they can certainly tell when they are unwanted and/or resented.

[ID: tumblr tags. they are: #reblog #i also dont think its enough to want a child. i think you need to want a teenager and an adult too #my mom wanted a baby. when i was too old to pronounce spaghetti wrong and let her put me in church dresses she was done with me #my dad wanted a person. he wanted a baby a child a tween a teen and an adult #my dad wanted to watch a person happen. which was different. /end ID.]

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Boosting all of the above signal.

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tumblr is an absolutely garbage platform for long-term archiving

A lottttt of witchblr masterposts are filled with dead links. Old posts with content under the "read more" break are inaccessible because only the visible content is preserved. Tumblr's internal search features are horribly broken, making going through blogs a nightmare unless the post is tagged.

If you find content on this platform that you want to save, like a masterpost with a bunch of links, I highly recommend you reblog each post in its entirety. Maybe queue it or post it to a purely archival blog if you don't want to spam people.

If you find content that looks cool and you want to save it, you best do it right then with the understanding that if that content is not 100% stored to your own blog, you might never see it again.

More people should abandon Internet discourse and get into observing/engaging with local politics. I say this not because local politics often offers more meaningful opportunities for effective praxis (although it does), but because local politics often offers just as much highly toxic and entertaining petty drama.

I highly recommend city council meetings. You might make yourself an informed voter and active community member or something. You also might get to watch an ongoing soap opera of old men ready to murder one another over trash collection ordinances, and unlike the Internet, none of them can effectually tell one another to kill themselves no matter how hard and how clearly they are thinking it.

I'm involved in local politics where I live and honestly it's so fucking funny

Also, you get to hate on local politicians and have the ability to confuse people with your overly specific reasons to hate this one local politician which is A LOT of fun

hey guys just wanna say next time you see some stupid bullshit white supremacist meme thing that you wanna dunk on be real fucking careful with how you do it or just dont do it at all lest it ends up like every other meme that spawns from white supremacy where people end up just thinking its another meme template and not someone mocking bigoted morons

like the whole EMBRACE TRADITION thing was a white supremacist phrase that got meme’d into a phrase people just say now because someone edited the phrase over pictures of a cracker barrel. the white “chad” guy with the beard was literally a caricature of a “perfect aryan” that 4chan neo nazis used in their strawman “x bad y good” cartoons and is now in every comic because people were making fun of it. the term “sigma male” was used by like a small circle of dipshit youtubers and bloggers that, because people screencapped and mocked, now everyone just says “sigma male” as an actual thing like its a word thats been used forever. nothing pissed me off more though than when stonetoss did NFTs and everyone went “UHHH THE AMOGUS GUY IS DOING NFTS???” like thats not the fucking amogus guy thats the nazi klurfs guy theres a reason the person who made those edits of his comics would regularly replace the signature with a huge “STONETOSS IS A NAZI” that would always be in the middle of the image but because ONE fucking edit didnt have that now everyone shares his stupid fucking shitty comics that are meme template bait. dont even get me started on the whole PC MASTER RACE bullshit.

also the “change my mind” guy was steven crowder