bobbyfiend

[bobbyfiend]

Let's say Luigi turns out to be autistic. Then let's say the jury-shopping goes very badly for the prosecution and Luigi is found not guilty by reason of mental health thingy.

Precedent: not prosecutable for murdering a CEO who denies treatment to autistic people due to being autistic.

Is this realistic? No. Why? Because if it was, Boom! Infinite Vigilante Justice Loop.

[bobbyfiend]

Fuck you. Antisemitic fuckhead

The critical thinking is strong in this one.

[bobbyfiend]

Kill yourself you americentric whore

Aw, someone got sad because their favorite occupation force is doing a genocide and they can't make literally everyone in the world stop noticing it.

Get a hobby.

[bobbyfiend]

"How can people do this?"

Because they're people. Fascism is, in some ways, the natural state. Bigotry, greed, clawing for power, domination of others... they're all built into humans, every bit as much as love, compassion, caring, empathy, or a desire for rational thought.

The dark and the light parts have always existed in humans. The dark has inertia and a corrosive, vicious power--the power to hurt and destroy. It has a kind of advantage, and it keeps coming back every time it finds a crack in the armor. Right now fascist thugs are "patrolling" the streets of Valencia, taking advantage of the chaos left by Dana. Bibi saw Trump get elected and understood the bat signal for sadism had been lit; he fired his defense minister, who had been saying dangerous things lately like "maybe we shouldn't murder everyone", and he decided to declare almost half a million people "combatants" so he can order his IDF boys to ramp up the murdering.

Fascism is the default. So is love and courage, but fascism has some horrible advantages. We've spent 10,000 or 100,000 or 500,000 years fighting the dark narrative. We've been winning, sometimes. This time we got kicked in the nuts. It's not because of some unnatural "how could people do this?" thing. It's more like "People are being thoughtlessly people again."

Going with fascism is rolling down the mountain. It is relaxing into our worst nature. Fighting fascism is climbing the hill, always.

[bobbyfiend]

Me: There are lots of things I love despite them not being perfect, like Signal, Mastodon, Tim Horton's, the United States... I even love some things because of their imperfections, like my cats, my daughter, street art...

Partner: And what about yourself?

Me: See, this is the kind of personal attack that threatens relationships

[bobbyfiend]

Look. I know it's complicated. However, if you can learn the difference between yaoi and yuri, how and when to use nonbinary pronouns, and why the conflict in Gaza is a genocide, you can definitely learn to use apostrophes correctly.

[bobbyfiend]

how about instead of responding to the achingly inane innovations being pushed of AI that will write your emails so that another AI can read them and provide a summary to the person you're emailing by defending the sacred art of emailing we instead stop to consider what kind of systems we have created in which people are constantly sending emails so worthless that getting an idiot robot to both read and write them seems like a sensible value proposition

[bobbyfiend]

I often think about psychopaths. You know, people who experience little or no remorse or empathy (among other characteristics). I think about how to judge their morality--because we do judge the morality of people, or at least of their behavior, constantly.

*looks around at literally all of tumblr*

Psychopathy does not make you do bad things. It does, however, remove one of the most powerful training and feedback mechanisms in the human cognitive/social system for preventing you from doing bad things. Remorse, guilt, and perhaps most importantly empathy give us powerful emotional reasons not to hurt others. Our culture (and I think it's safe to say all human cultures we know about) uses these human responses, which are present at birth (so probably before birth), to shape morality and therefore behavior.

Psychopaths don't have that. It's worth mentioning that many people with ASD also fail to experience empathy (sometimes at all, sometimes just less than average), but probably due to slightly but importantly different brain development things, and in a notably different way. For decades or centuries, however, we (i.e., whatever humans were trying to figure this out) confused these two conditions. But autism is a separate thing. Back to psychopathy.

If you don't feel--maybe can't feel--remorse for your actions, because you don't or can't understand what another person feels (i.e., empathy), some big things happen making you different from other humans. You don't have a reason to "do the right thing" if you won't get caught, for instance. And you don't have a reason to avoid hurting people who are in the way of what you want. Those people might not even seem totally real to you; you don't feel their reality the way most others do. Their suffering doesn't affect you, so it doesn't change your behavior.

Note that this isn't sadism--people with high psychopathy (i.e., "psychopaths") don't necessarily like hurting people, though that occasionally happens--it's just a lack of empathy. That transforms a person's social and psychological reality in huge ways.

So how do you judge a psychopath's behavior? If they hurt someone in small or large ways, how do you weigh that on the scale of Asshole to Douchebag to Alright Human to Total Champ?

I think it's clear we should prevent suffering, so everyone--including psychopaths--should be prevented from hurting others who don't want to be hurt. But that's prevention. What about punishment? We are all about that in the America. We even have court procedures whose sole purpose is to make criminals display remorse. If you're a psychopath, I guess your best bet in that situation is to practice your remorse act until it's convincing.

Can a psychopath be a good person? How would that work? How would we decide? I'm not sure, and not paid enough to spend a career working on this, but here's my tentative suggestion for right now: think of a cat.

How do you evaluate the morality of a cat's behavior?

[bobbyfiend]

most important thing to remember about being a woman is if youre married you have to go under the covers with your husband and laugh cutely and play wrestle so when you die to progress the narrative he can remember it in slow motion montages

[bobbyfiend]

Tumblr is a place where

a. I see things like "OMG you said 'ch**se' without even a CW tag? You are literally the reason why neuroatypical people are oppressed. Kill yourself, hater! Why are you so racist!?"

b. I also see things like "Canceling or censoring Huckleberry Finn because Mark Twain wrote the N-word is not helpful. There is a Narrative Voice, idiot. Suppressing discussion of racism makes racism worse."

So I guess that's one reason I keep coming back.

Also the constant Supernatural references that I will never really get (because I'm not going to go watch 372 seasons of B-grade TV, or at least not that particular B-grade TV) but which make me laugh anyway.

[bobbyfiend]

"Lysistrata was the first denial of service attack."

Except that's not how DDOS attacks work. But it could be...

Dude goes to get some nookie with the gf/wife.

Another woman appears, completely naked, begs for his cock.

He gets interested. Another woman appears, with the same routine.

He feels like a kid in a very porny candy shop. So many options!

More women appear. If he gets close to a kiss or caress with any one, a new woman pops into the room, under him, behind the last one, etc. Dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of women, each more beautiful (to the dude) than the last.

He spends the night trying his best to have sex with at least one woman. However, as the dawn breaks and he passes out in his bed, he has touched no hoo-has, has entered no golden chambers.

DDOS'd.

[bobbyfiend]

Your entire response is "My argument is better because I'm Jewish."

You know what I’ve noticed, any post about my home country (Armenia) or other countries conflicts specifically, don’t break over a thousand notes usually.

But when people mention those conflicts while posting about Palestine they break over like 20 thousand.

It’s almost like you can’t bring attention to any conflict unless you blame Jews.

[bobbyfiend]

What a blind and possibly fascist take. The main reason pro-Palestine (and anti-Israel-Foreign-Policy) sentiment is so huge in the USA is that the USA is fucking FUNDING THE GENOCIDE. We have a huge problem with disproportionate influence on our government by a foreign country using that influence to get away with murder^100000.

But sure. Make it all about antisemitism. Ignore everything else.

You know what I’ve noticed, any post about my home country (Armenia) or other countries conflicts specifically, don’t break over a thousand notes usually.

But when people mention those conflicts while posting about Palestine they break over like 20 thousand.

It’s almost like you can’t bring attention to any conflict unless you blame Jews.

[bobbyfiend]

"You call yourself some kind of goddess and you know nothing, madam, nothing. What don't die can't live. What don't live can't change. What don't change can't learn. The smallest creature that dies in the grass knows more than you. [...] You're no kind of goddess. I ain't against gods and goddesses, in their place. But they've got to be the ones we make ourselves. Then we can take 'em to bits for the parts when we don't need 'em anymore, see?"

- Granny Weatherwax, Lords & Ladies, Terry Pratchett

[bobbyfiend]

#Private Idaho (B-52's)

Reblog and put in the tags the fourth song that’s in your spotify on repeat playlist

[bobbyfiend]

I'm a little high so now is the perfect time to write shit.

TW: mention of violence and (briefly) of suicide

Today's shit is: Stop saying Fragile Masculinity unless you know what the fuck you're talking about.

I feel the boldface above is perhaps too aggressive, but whatever. Moving on.

The interwebs seem to think Fragile Masculinity means a man who is fragile. Or a guy who is a douchebag. Or something. IDK. What does it really mean?

Fragile Masculinity (a.k.a. Precarious Manhood) is an academic theory about the nature of "masculinity" in patriarchal societies. From here on out, I'm talking like the theory, so I don't have to say "according to..." 100 times.

Masculinity isn't an innate aspect of a person in this conception; it's a status or identity conferred on certain people (i.e., people who look like "men") by their culture or community.

Your culture gave you masculinity, and it can take it away. Easily. "Fragile Masculinity" means that masculinity, as a concept or identity or social status is hard to achieve and easy to lose. It's fragile, get it?

Femininity or Womanhood, by contrast, is not thought to work the same way, usually. The theory isn't really about women, but writers/theorists comment on the contrast, sometimes: Women in patriarchal societies aren't potential people in charge, or even particularly agentive; they're resources to be utilized. Those resources need to be available at any time, and how they feel about that, or what they've done in their lives to be good resources are less important than mere existence and availability. Women become women, generally, just by growing up and having the "right" biological bits. Even bad women are still women. Even women declared good for nothing but sexual or domestic use are still women. By contrast, men become men (i.e. masculine) by doing the right things, and not doing the wrong ones, and they stay masculine the same way. Masculinity can be lost easily.

How do you lose masculinity? You fuck up. You fail to do the things the culture thinks men should do. You fail to retaliate when another man insults you. Or compliments your girlfriend. Or makes out with your wife. You fail to commit the situation-specific violence your society requires of men. You fail ?o dominate others--especially men--in social interactions. You get dominated--much worse if by a woman. You show insufficient physical strength, or (worse) you show fear of being hurt.

I'll stop with that, now. I think you get the picture.

Or you do things the culture says men should not do: you listen to your gf or wife's thoughts a little too much. You play a sissy sport or no sport at all. You hang with gay people. You are gay people. You are (or seem to be) trans--and yes, the system seems to be rigged so that both MtF and FtM trans people will generally be seen as insufficiently manly.

Getting the picture? You don't become a man just because you get physically older; you have to do things, and you have to not do other things. Otherwise, you're not a man, not really.

And every damn day there will be at least one (and maybe a hundred) tests of your manhood. If you fail to meet any one of them, your "man" status can be damaged or revoked.

Why is that so bad? Because non-men have no place in patriarchal society. Men have a place, weak-ass men sort of have a place, women have a place (most of them, most of the time); non-men do not have a place. Non-men do not receive or deserve anyone's respect or even kindness. Non-men are homo sacer. Hurting them is a great pastime because it both harms someone who should should be ashamed to exist and gives you status points with your buddies (this includes both men and women). "Hurt the outsider" is one of the most reliable methods for bonding with your tribal group. It's even better if the outsider is a traitor, someone who used to be one of you. Outsiders can be hurt because they're outsiders. Traitors should be hurt because they have committed one of the worst possible moral wrongs: they were good group members and then they chose to not be. It's disloyalty to the group. Non-men are traitors so fuck 'em up.

What is a man to do who has been declared "non-man", or just lost some of his man status, or is just worried he might? Maybe he gets the most manly job ever: cop, soldier, WWE wrestler. Maybe he makes sure to commit some extra amounts of culture-sanctioned violence or domination. Maybe he kills himself.

I hope you're getting this. Fragile Masculinity is not a description of some men's insecurities or overcompensation (though it's not totally separate from that). It's a sociological/critical theory about the concept of masculinity itself, and how it works within patriarchal cultures. Masculinity in such a culture is fragile. It's hard to achieve and easy to lose. That has a lot of really bad consequences.

[bobbyfiend]

ROOM. WITH. A. FUCKING. VIEW.

Helena Bonham Motherfucking Carter.

Helena Bonham Carter in A ROOM WITH A VIEW (1985) — dir. James Ivory