absolutes-are-dangerous - Tumblr blog

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I wish age gap discourse hadn't spiraled the way it has because I want there to be a safe space to say "Men in their 40s who date 25 year olds aren't predators, they're just fucking losers"

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New discourse: it's actually predatory to date someone with a different star sign than you, because the differences in your personalities means you'll never be able to have exactly the same life experiences, thus leaving a knowledge and power gap between the two of you which will inevitably lead to an abusive relationship!

also if you're a Sag and you're dating a Taurus, that means you're secretly seeking a May-December relationship, which is age gap coded!

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Your commentary really added nothing to that post that had not already been said. Also "try to design a better system"? We are. Look up prison abolition or even criminal rehabilitation.

I don’t think you will enjoy my tumblr much

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you gotta be able to say "die"

you gotta be able to say "suicide"

you gotta be able to talk about "sex"

they're uncomfortable topics, YEAH for SURE

because LIFE is uncomfortable. Death and suicide and sex and pain are straight up going to happen. not having words for the way it discomforts you doesn't make it more comfortable, it just makes you less able to reach out about it.

even more vital, you gotta be able to say words like "rape", "abuse", "queer" or "racist". cause we fought fucking hard to name those experiences. to identify "rape" as distinct from "sex" and "racism" as distinct from "acceptable behaviour" and "queer" as distinct from "invert"

like the function of communication is not to minimise immediate discomfort. we gotta be able to talk about stuff that's hard or sucks or causes difficult conversations.

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Why would anybody read fanon when yours is an example of how cancerous it is 💀

anon did you think when i said "read fanon" i meant fan canon instead of... Frantz Fanon, author of The Wretched of the Earth?

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youtubers love to say “i hope i’m pronouncing that correctly” while recording themselves in a video that they upload to the internet, which they have access to

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today my wisdom is: the ecological crisis of our planet is not a thing that will Suddenly destroy us sometime in the next century—it has taken decades of continuous work for our biosphere to be preserved thus far, and it will take decades more of continuous work to continue preserving it.

The apocalypse is not a single event hovering in the future bearing down on us while we sit helplessly. We are at least 150 years into an ongoing "apocalypse."

Things will continue to steadily get worse without steady action, but "augh! it's already too late to stop climate change and mass extinctions!" is specifically the worst response

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btw. your search for the most morally upright and ethical piece of media that has the most correct “representation” will destroy your ability to find the most profound and beautiful and human of stories. and may even destroy the stories themselves before they are created. if you even care.

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I think somewhere people got confused and now think that "privileged" equals "oppressor" and "having privilege" equals "has the power to oppress".

It doesn't.

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Btw you can be intensely critical of the Democratic party and recognize that it is full of aged out of touch moderates who are refusing to meet the urgency of the moment,

and also recognize that voting for Democrats is extremely important because it allows things like the confirmation of Justices and prevents the literal fascist party from gaining more power and that harm reduction is an important end in itself

These things can coexist

Politics is a long game. Being disappointed and angry today does not obviate your responsibility to participate

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This zine, and I cannot over emphasize how funny this is, is for Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire

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If you expect fiction, especially so-called genre fiction, to educate you on politics, social issues and morality, you might just read too little nonfiction

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Hi Neil, what's your opinion on the rewrite of Roald Dahl's works in the name of "making it available for all"?

Thanks.

I'm a lot more comfortable with this kind of thing when it's done by a living writer to existing work. I remember as a kid picking up a copy of John Masefield's Collected Poems, and seeing a 1930s errata slip in the book, which said in the poem London Town, replace

“‘And craftily fares the knave there, and wickedly fares the Jew.’

with

“‘But wretchedly fare the most there and merrily fare the few.’

And I nodded my 9 year old head in approval. Someone had pointed out to the poet that that line was awful, and he had fixed it.

I can't imagine anyone deciding to fix that line after the poet had died, though.

I removed a line from "The Day I Swapped My Dad For Two Goldfish" (over the objections of my editor, who wanted to keep it) because too many people had reached out to me and told me it had upset them or their children on reading it, and I realised it was being taken in a way I hadn't intended. So on later editions it went away.

And having said that, language changes. Enid Blyton's children's books have been rewritten, her children renamed (farewell Dick and Fanny) and so forth, with the idea that the Blyton estate is a commercial entity that wishes to remain viable. The Dahl estate is in the same place. So is the Dr Seuss estate -- and they chose to simply let some of the earlier books go out of print. There comes a point where it's not about art, but about sustaining a commercial entity. And I don't know what I think about that.

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“if you consume enough problematic media then there will be a point in which you become desensitized and replicate the behavior”

right, that’s why all my media studies professors moonlight as serial killers

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One of the nastiest outgrowths of the Self Help Industrial Complex and the pseudo-psychiatric therapization of, well, everything, is this worrying trend of dividing the world into Givers and Takers, into Empaths and Toxic People, into Victim and Victimizer. The already warped and butchered idea of emotional labor has been twisted into a monster that devours the simple idea of establishing boundaries and shits out a foul heap of convenient excuses and categories to assure you that you are an ontologically good person who just needs to avoid ontologically evil people and to mete out emotional interaction in a totally transactional way in order to be safe. Sorry! We're all complex people who both provide and require emotional support to others! We're gonna get hurt! You don't get off that easy!

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Hey if you're not physically disabled and just ND, please don't say "cr*ppling," or any variations thereon, since it's ableist toward physically disabled people. "Disabling," and "incapacitating," are two better words to use instead.

(It took me a while to figure it out; anon was bothered by this post.)

Okay, sure, I’ll try to do that. That said, I want to encourage people engaged in anti-ableism efforts that take the form of asking people not to use certain words to put their energies elsewhere. Firstly, I think they make the disability advocacy community inaccessible to a lot of people, since having to relearn which words are “allowed” is overwhelming and particularly difficult for people who have limited access to words in the first place.

Secondly, every time I’ve seen this implemented it…hasn’t made anyone less ableist? People who scrupulously remove “crazy” from their vocabulary in favor of “irrational” still treat the people they’re talking about like unpersons. Often the recommended replacement words are just as good at suggesting “less valuable person” as the words they replaced. I think there’s some value in asking “does our use of words surrounding disability to mean ‘bad thing’ come from a place of treating disabled people like tragedies?” and often it does, but that doesn’t mean that challenging that mindset is as easy as changing out the words. Thirdly, I think it emphasizes the wrong concerns. I saw a newspaper headline the other day saying “the president’s plan will be a crippling blow to the economy” and one about the “crippling burden of student debt”. I’d think that the fact the president’s plan includes making it harder to get SSI, or the fact disabled students are way less likely to graduate and likelier to end up in debt, is a much more urgent problem than the turn of phrase used in the headline. 

Lastly, it seems like the anti-words advocacy often pretends at a false consensus in disability activism. There are physically disabled people who are bothered by that newspaper headline and those who are not. There are mentally ill people who are bothered by use of crazy and some who couldn’t care less. But no one ever says “hey, that word bothers me personally because people have used it to be mean to me”, they say “it’s ableist towards physically disabled people,” as if all physically disabled people agree on this (or as if the ones who disagree are just obviously confused poor souls and don’t merit a mention). “There are physically disabled people who dislike the phrase ‘crippling anxiety’ and there are physically disabled people who don’t care and there are physically disabled people who have, themselves, described their anxiety as crippling” is much more accurate, but less compelling.

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thought this was neat