#uncritical thinking

[reality-detective]

Critical Thinkers vs Uncritical Thinkers 🤔

[mermims]

Good lord, that ask. There is a lot to unpack here, but Anon presents three basic arguments: the first is about the time investment or time requirements, the second is presented in the form of different hypotheticals, and the third is that the study of fat cadavers would place an undue burden on already overtaxed medical students. Let’s dissect these, shall we (rubs hands together evilly).

So, what about those poor med students? This argument is an appeal to empathy; students are already struggling with so much, you'd have to be "a bit fucked up" to expect even more from them wouldn't you? This sets up a false dichotomy of fat people vs med students with the implication that one or the other group must in all necessity and fairness monopolize your empathy.

With the hypotheticals, all of these implicitly argue that any alternative is simply infeasible: the logistics wouldn’t work out, the math isn’t mathing. This blends into the appeal to empathy (you wouldn’t take away students’ holidays or other downtime would you?) and also makes an appeal to fairness with the assertion that some students would have to work longer on fat bodies than their peers who got thin bodies in the… cadaver lottery. There is no arrangement that doesn’t leave some students at a disadvantage while privileging others, which is clearly unfair.

At this point you may have noticed that these arguments feature two kinds of people, the medical student and the fat person, and it may seem readily apparent that these are the most relevant groups in this issue. In this framing these two groups seem equally balanced: making things more fair for fat people results in things being less fair for students, and, presumably, vice versa. But is this framing accurate?

Well, the second and third arguments are both predicated on the first, which is that fat cadavers can't be studied in medical schools because there isn't enough time. The specific claim made is that the time is "inherentely (sic) limited." I love this. Because I cannot think of a single human system that is "inherently" anything. Human systems are built from the ground up. There isn't a clock counting down to zero at which point the lab explodes. "The alternative would be to force the med students who get fatter cadavers to do more lab sessions at weird times outside of the usual schedules." Are these "usual schedules" handed down by god and set in stone? Who built this system; who writes these curricula?

As soon as you ask that question you may realize that Anon has managed to conveniently erase the one group that actually holds any significant power in this situation; which is of course the administrations of these medical training institutions. I, for one, do not understand the logic of arguing to absolve a responsible party of its responsibility, but I think it is part of a very top-down, hierarchical sort of thinking, and Anon is quite condescending. The attitude is: why are you making problems where there aren't any, it's obvious why things have to be this way. To a degree it's even kind of saying, how dare you. How dare you question the way things are. How dare you question authority.

To me, the logic goes: fat people are human beings, human beings need health care, therefore how to medically treat fat people aught to be taught at medical schools to all students seeking to be medical professionals. There is no reason that should not be the case. "This isn't fatphobia, it's just .. the way dissecting bodies works"—there is no argument that could convince me that scientists cannot figure out how to dissect fat bodies, or how to teach that to students.

As I've gone through these arguments, you can see that there are actually very few facts presented—Anon has relied on appeals to emotion, and because the base of the argument is emotion the conclusions it supports are actually more vibes based than evidence based. You can bring evidence to refute an argument like this, as mingus-archives has done above to debunk the claim about time, but my purpose in deconstructing this argument without bringing any facts is to show that you don't necessarily need to know anything concrete about the issue at hand to suss out whether an argument holds water or is a load of bunk. Especially if the other person is bringing nothing but rhetoric.

The reason fat cadavers are not accepted for medical programmes is that you need to cut through every layer of fat carefully. Which takes time, and lab sessions are inherentely limited in that. It's better for med students to spend that time looking at what organs actually look like in bodies. This isn't fatphobia, it's just .. the way dissecting bodies works? In the same way surgeries on fat people take longer because there's just physically more tissue. The alternative would be to force the med students who get fatter cadavers to do more lab sessions at weird times outside of the usual schedules. Or force them to stay over the holidays. Or not let them get enough time to do the lab work they need to. Which imo would be a bit fucked up especially when med school is already so difficult and time-consuming.

It’s fatphobia. Fat bodies absolutely need to be studied. To ignore an entire demographic of oppressed individuals in the medical field for the sake of convenience(?!) is violence. Did you even read the article? They called working on fat cadavers “unpleasant.” It’s fatphobia and it’s unacceptable.

[orange-coloredsky-archive]

a development team that looks like this could not possibly have any preconceived biases against Black people. noooo way. its just a mistake that all of the Black people in fo4 are slaves or named after fascist colonizers or murdered or stereotypical conspiracy freaks. there is no way that the reality of this team is reflected in the art they create over and over and over and over and over and over and

[ID 1: A photo of the Fallout 4 development team taken from above and forward, showing a large crowd smiling at the camera, made up apparently entirely by white people, and almost entirely by white men. End ID.]

[mutalieju]

TBH in the original Hellblazer it's not that all of John's friends died, lot of them did, for various reasons, (plus there's the Newcastle incident and all that personal trauma), but lot of the time the old friends John reconnects with have either abandoned their anarchist/leftist principles or revealed they never had any particularly solid politics and John is like 'wow this sucks we're all going to die' and then wanders around for a bit depressed until satan tries to kill him again

Most of new 52/DC stuff with John just refuses to interact with the political elements this way. so it is what it is and can't even really answer the question why john is depressed

[arodykeism]

all you ever need is to be nice and friendly

[soleta]

i have parasocial beef with pierre war and peace

[burningcheese-merchant]

Hear me out on fire spirit cookie🙏

Ok so here's the thing. Here's the problem with what you said. "Hear me out" is for characters that are considered ugly/weird/unconventional. "Hear me out" is for characters that, normally, would not be considered attractive or desirable, and you would have to justify wanting to date/fuck. Like the fish dad (Marlin) from Finding Nemo or a xenomorph or something.

You think this man is UGLY? You think I need to justify putting him in the SMASH category?

Because he's NOT and I DON'T. Fire Spirit is HANDSOME. He's got BEAUTIFUL EYES. He has a KILLER SMILE. His devil-may-care attitude is CHARMING. Hear you out? YOU hear ME out 'cause I've been talking for 8 years straight now (I've been playing Cookie Run since high school lmao). I LOVE this man. He is GORGEOUS AND PERFECT IN EVERY WAY. WOULD. SHOULD. Without hesitation!!!

[fantastic-nonsense]

truly every time I stop feeling disgust and disdain towards Grant Morrison and start thinking 'oh maybe I can forgive them someday' some bullshit comes up to remind me of how much they SUCK

[calypsolemon]

Probably one of the worst effects of the disney live action remake trend is that it's got people talking about the original movies as if they are golden standards of animated cinema, when often they are rife with their own issues, both within the works themselves and outside them. Like many of these movies still function as mechanisms through which disney monopolized the animation industry, monetized poor rip offs of better and yet lesser-known pre-existing media, crafted conservative slop to forcefeed directly into the mouths of children, turned minority groups into marketable caricatures, etc etc. It's just that the remakes are so devoid of even the slightest hint of artistic integrity that the overall bar for what counts as a "good movie" is buried six feet underground.

[artbyblastweave]

I was talking with others on the Parahumans Discord about mutants and parahumans, and I realized that a conversation between Apocalypse, Magneto, Goddess, and Mama Mathers would be interesting considering they are all different flavors of "powered supremacy"

Yeah I think what it comes down to is that there's a sliding scale between cape things that treat the "powered supremacy" question as part of a larger tortured metaphor for real life civil rights issues, and cape things that are actively trying to shed light on the fact that if superpowers existed the resultant social tensions would be novel tensions that wouldn't map cleanly to any real-world forms of discrimination despite having the potential to intersect with them- all four of those guys have very different things going on with differing levels of "deliberate commentary on analogous IRL dynamic" to "if two astronauts killed each other on the moon would that be fucked up or what"

[anghraine]

You know, "The Corbomite Maneuver" isn't remotely my favorite episode of TOS, not in my top 10 or anything, but J and I are into S3 of TNG and I'm starting to really, really, really miss that kind of episode and the ethos that underlies its sense of their fundamental purpose:

KIRK: Intelligence different from ours or superior? SPOCK: Probably both, and if you're asking the logical decision to make— KIRK: No, I'm not. The mission of the Enterprise is to seek out and contact alien life.

-

KIRK: Those of you who have served for long on this vessel have encountered alien lifeforms. You know the greatest danger facing us is ourselves, an irrational fear of the unknown. But there's no such thing as the unknown, only things temporarily hidden, temporarily not understood.

-

KIRK: There are lives at stake. By our standards, alien life, but lives nevertheless. Captain out.

-

KIRK: Mr. Sulu, bring us to within one hundred meters. Ahead slow. SULU: Ahead slow, sir. MCCOY: Jim, don't you think— KIRK: What's the mission of this vessel, doctor? To seek out and contact alien life, and an opportunity to demonstrate what our high-sounding words mean. Any questions?

[spookygibberish]

Dogstock are typical of what are often deemed the ‘evil’ races in many other fantasy works. They were created by some higher force to be slaves, they are carnivorous by nature, they resemble animals other than human in dentition and build. They growl and bite and walk behind.

The Uhasr (a dogstock culture) are descendants of such slave-infantry that was abandoned when the empire that used them to capture the steppes decided the land wasn’t so profitable after all, and more pressing matters drew their attention elsewhere. Like tools left spent on the ground, the unneeded, excess dogstock were left to survive on their own in Hochkiskuph. The native peoples, of course, did not welcome them any more, or see them any less as oppressors when the hand released the lead. To the Hochkiskuph peoples, the Uhasr are a predatory ghost, an echo that consumes them even in absentia. To the Uhasr, one human is much like another, differing in number and equipment, but never in essence. Uhasr are a species of wild animal with a human face. Humans are prey on two legs. Humans smoke and poison uncovered dens on principle, Uhasr abduct and consume men and women and children all the same.

A common trend I have noticed in media which aims to humanize monsters, is that it often relies on passivity. Humanity is contingent upon kindness. The monster that is A Person only so long as they are a harmless thing at heart, something which can be understood and befriended. Their violence is reluctant, their hearts noble. Grace is a concession to the dominated. Only the toothless beast, declawed and pinioned and caged, is one which has earned its personhood. The ontological enemy supersedes the ontological man.

[alkemylabz]

whenever i say im glad i grew out of "fandom" i dont mean like. i stopped engaging with things i liked. but that i learned that the way "fandom" operates is a very specific way of interacting with media that you at some point will feel compelled to do for *all* kinds of media. and the problem is "fandom" is built around primarily childrens media and pop culture, which often does not require the same levels of seriousness that a lot of works oriented at adults does- especially highly political or personal ones. like you wouldn't read slaughterhouse five with the same expectations that you would warrior cats. thats like a totally different toolset of media analysis and comprehension

[nylarac]

i stopped shaving my legs for the first time since i was in like. i think late middle or early high school and it's v interesting/freeing

[opens-up-4-nobody]

Sometimes I think about hetalia and im like: hey man, what the fuck was all that? Who the fuck let that happen?

[junewongapologia]

The fact is tho that no matter how you look at it, no matter how insufferable she is, no matter how Out Of Touch, regardless of whether she’s doing herself no favours: Eloise is right about society and just about everyone else in the show is wrong.

Like, she’s not got the full picture, she’s blinkered and her political philosophy is not very in depth or well thought out. But she’s right, and I think that’s why a lot of people watching really don’t like her because she’s breaking the illusion. All in all, the 1810s were a shit time to be alive for most people, and you can “well actually” it all you like, but the Luddite movement existed for a reason, the Chartists existed for a reason, Porto-feminist writers like Wollstonecraft and de Gouges wrote what they did for a reason.

So when you keep being reminded that it was a terrible social order for women - in a show targeted mainly towards women for escapist purposes then that character is going to come across as irritating, because she’s ruining the immersion.

Really, her attitude isn’t more anachronistic than the dresses, or the hairdos, or the diamond necklaces (men and women had been advocating women’s right to vote since before Eloise was born, lads), but it’s a problem because people are watching the show for the sweeping romances and the general regency vibe, they don’t want to think about how the regency was for most people. Which inevitably leads to some incredible projection, when watchers of a show with the central conceit of only being interested in the love lives of the top one percent of the one percent of the British aristocracy acting as though Eloise is the only privileged person on the show.

And yeah, she is better off than most of the people who exist in all of Regency Britain (though if you were to take the show as read, Britain is made up of about 70% aristocracy, 1% gentry, 5% urban bourgeoisie and 24% urban workers), but she’s the only one whose privilege is harped on out of her whole family and social circle. 99% of the speaking characters in the show come from a posher background than Beau fucking Brummell.

And! Eloise is literally just about the only main character who ever has to question her privilege! And when she is in season 2 she doesn’t throw a shitfit, she’s willing to learn! She goes out of her way to hear perspectives that she wouldn’t have heard in her social circle! But the narrative punishes her for that, and that’s because for all the criticism she gets about needing her privilege checked, they don’t actually want her to learn, they just want her to shut up and enjoy the trappings of regency decadence as much as they do.

Also - I know it’s really fashionable to rag on “pick-mes” and “Not Like Other Girls” - but actually, no, “traditional femininity” has never been socially unacceptable for women the way being GNC is, and it is in fact ruthlessly socially enforced against GNC women, even more so in the 1810s. Eloise is a teenaged girl in a society that stigmatises her for her wish for more legal autonomy, the idea that she’s somehow the villain for not being able to enjoy “feminine” hobbies without seeing them as just another element of the way women’s education is trivialised as ornamental, is farcical. “Sewing is a valuable and useful skill” so is cooking, but there’s a reason my mam, and not my dad, had home economics lessons, and that reason is still misogyny, despite the fact that it set her up better for being able to operate independently as an adult.

Idk I’m just kind of uncomfortable that in a world of rising reactionary political sentiment towards women, and this seemingly increasingly re-normalised view that women need to be wives and homemakers, people feel that the person on the show who needs to do the most introspection regarding their politics is an eighteen-year-old who is vocal about the fact that she has limited legal rights, and not any of the adult men in the show (a lot of whom probably have seats in the Upper House!!!) who never mention politics at all.

And frankly, given the shower who were Having Political Opinions in the long eighteenth century, Eloise’s brand of semi-anachronistic protofeminism is infinitely preferable to Hannah “I refuse to teach the poor how to write in my schools” More, or Edmund “don’t read my big thesis on revolutions too closely it’s definitely not all lies and junk history” Burke, or even a load of prominent members of the Bluestocking Society.