• 2 Posts
  • 193 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • Folks.

    If you ever catch yourself describing how you want to torture someone to death, I want you to stop and take inventory of your priorities.

    Look. I am not a pacifist. Some motherfuckers need to be removed from positions of power by any means necessary, up to and including violence.

    That being said, should we not focus on restorative justice and rehabilitation? Why create unnecessary suffering in the process? The argument that things like the death penalty act as a deterrent doesn’t seem to be borne out in the evidence. What good is served by torturing someone, even if they’re the nastiest son of a bitch in existence?

    It is important to make sure we don’t let killing for sport seep into our ideology. Using violence against people is not something we should take pleasure in, let alone fantasize about. History has given us plenty of examples to draw from here; once you make a policy out of sadism, the group of people you use violence against only grows.

    Also, porn is fine in moderation (like everything else) and can be made totally consensually, you terminally online freaks.


  • I feel like there’s this explot in human psychology:

    1. People are pretty bad at matching causes to effects.

    2. Doing something novel / outside your usual routine can feel pretty good, regardless of what it is you’re doing.

    Therefore: People who try weird diets, snake oils, or letting the sun shine on their asshole really do feel better afterwards, at least for a while. That must mean it works!







  • You bring up a good point, but I don’t think religion necessarily involves the kind of unreality I have in mind.

    A lot of religious claims deal with things that are unfalsifiable. Invisible forces, unreachable gods, consciousness after death, things like that. Not the most rational stuff in the world, but not obviously false on the face of it either.

    Now, though, we’ve got folks believing things that are easily disproven. Climate change denial, anti-vaccine bullshit, the never-ending parade of moral panics churned out by the above mentioned propaganda machine, Jewish space lasers, pet eating immigrants, etc.

    I won’t go so far as to say that religion never causes people to deny observable reality; it surely does. But I think the right wing media empire we have now does so intentionally and on a scale greater than any religious movement I can think of.


  • The bad news: The most evil people in the world spend billions every year on the largest propaganda machine in the history of man, and it enthralls a large minority of us.

    The good news: That’s what it takes to maintain this! This many people living in a bubble of unreality is not natural! It is the product of a machine built by man, and all machines built by man are destined to eventually fail. Maybe the right person dies at the right time. Maybe the conflict between their narrative and reality eventually becomes too much. Maybe they lose control of the story and the movement splinters into hundreds of contradictory conspiracy theories that no longer move in lockstep. Maybe the magic just wears off one day.


  • I feel like a lot of progressive vocabulary words get used outside the contexts where they apply.

    “It’s not my job to educate you” is a fair and valid thing to say when someone demands you defend the validity of your identity while you’re just trying to live your life. It’s unreasonable to expect every trans person to explain the history and complexity of gender to every chud who gives them shit.

    It is, however, the opposite of activism and super unhelpful for an activist to say while ostensibly trying to build a movement.

    Similarly, “mansplaining” is not a blanket term for any man explaining anything, listening to a friend vent is not “emotional labor”, and participating in cultures other than the one you grew up in is not “cultural appropriation”. All real terms that point at real problems, all sometimes used outside the contexts in which they are helpful.