fallenasleep101

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“i hate avoidants!!” is crazy to me like you know what would help a traumatized and cagey animal feel safe? telling them they’re harmful for not showing me belly and making themselves vulnerable the second i want it, irrespective of their needs.

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when you save alarms for specific things but then you just keep reusing them. like sure wake me up at the chocolate milk alarm, what do i care

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More bare pussy on album covers NOW

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People say shit like "when I took acid, I could see the atoms making up everything" and they feel like they've pulled away some illusion and are seeing reality as it really is. But, of course, atoms are too small to see for unavoidable physical reasons. If you take acid and feel like you're seeing atoms, that's the illusion. The "atoms" are something produced by your mind (maybe some kind of visual processing artifact, similar to visual snow), not an actual feature of external reality.

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Hiii, I am curious to learn more about your personal politics. Are u socialist of democractic socialist? Do you reject Marxism–Leninism? Are you more of a reformist of revolutionary?

Over time I've moved away from talking about my own ideology on here for a variety of reasons (I have lots of disparate influences and there's no label I 100% identify with, everyone loves to start heated fights on here, it seemed a bit self-absorbed, etc.) But considering that it has been years since I've really made any attempt at laying out what my viewpoint is, it might make sense to do so again.

There are three terms you could fairly use to describe my views:

I am a democratic socialist because I think that the people should be able to collectively decide upon their shared fate, and that democracy is superior to both political dictatorship and capitalist oligarchy. (See Eugene Debs, Michael Harrington, etc.)

I am a liberal socialist because I believe that socialism is the logical extension of historical liberalism as an attempt at liberating people from existing hierarchies and authoritarianism. (See Carlo Rosselli, John Rawls, etc.)

I am a social democrat because I believe that the potential for successfully achieving transformative change through aggressive action within the presently existing system is drastically larger than the potential for a successful proletarian revolution, mass insurrection, etc., etc. (See Eduard Bernstein, Jean Jaurès, etc.)

This all puts me very firmly in the reformist camp of the reform vs. revolution debate. I would not consider myself a Marxist, although there are ways in which Marx's thought has influenced my own both directly and through the thought of others in the broader Marxist tradition.

In further detail:

I am a market socialist who believes in a large welfare state that provides for everyone's basic needs from cradle to grave; workplace democracy through widespread cooperatives and strong labor unions; progressive reforms to redistribute wealth more evenly; full employment; the reorganization of the global economy to eliminate present injustices; the diminishment of corporate power; strategic public ownership in certain key sectors; and the provision of opportunities for everyone to live their lives in the way that they desire.

I am a democrat who believes in an equal opportunity for everyone to influence public policy, including the periodic chance for the people to freely select their own leadership from amongst a variety of different choices, without unfair restrictions, corrupt financing by the wealthy, domination of the process by a political elite, or external interventions.

I am an anti-militarist opposed to armed conflict in any and every scenario where it can be avoided; an anti-imperialist opposed to the abuses of all powerful governments which take advantage of others and impose their will upon them; and an internationalist who believes in a democratic system of multilateral diplomacy and equitable exchange in which all countries can resolve their differences peacefully and cooperate for the common good.

I am a progressive who believes in an egalitarian culture that values every single person equally, abolishes rigid social hierarchies like patriarchy and white supremacy, welcomes immigrants, embraces secularism to separate church from state, and provides for the full rights and liberties of all peoples.

I am a civil libertarian who believes in the universal right of all people to fundamental liberties (speech, belief, protest, press, association, etc.) and protections from authoritarianism (privacy, government transparency, a fair legal system, limits to detention, humane treatment of prisoners, rule of law, anti-discrimination policies, demilitarized state security forces, etc.)

I am an environmentalist who believes in a just transition that ends our dependence on fossil fuels and establishes a green economy that minimizes (and even reverses) the damage of climate change; ensures clean air, water, and land; preserves natural ecosystems; and provides for everyone's needs in a sustainable fashion.

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Well, I think that's part of the appeal—believing unflattering stories about the world makes you feel privy to the Dark Truth that everything else is Too Afraid To Admit, while also giving you plenty of material to tar your opponents with, etc. etc. But really it's uniquely shameful for the rationalists, because evopsych is at the intersection of like three axes of epistemic shaky-ground.

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If you've read anything about the Holocaust, you'll know that it had no specific, definable start date. The Wannsee Conference in 1942 is when the Final Solution was most explicitly put into motion (although the Nazis tried to cover their tracks even here), but by this point the Einsatzgruppen were already massacring Jews freely across Eastern Europe.

There's not going to be a point when Netanyahu's government says "and now, the Palestinian genocide will begin". But I think they've come basically as close to laying it out in advance as the Nazis did. At the beginning of this war I was hesitant to use the word genocide—not out of a desire to defend Israel, but out of my general conviction in the value of using words precisely. Now I feel much more comfortable with that term.

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Same with trying to tactfully explain to someone why their behaviour was racist

Honestly part of the problem with this obsession with only consuming unproblematic fiction is that people are less likely to acknowledge when something is harmful. If you so much as say hey this one joke in this one episode was offensive fans will write you an essay on why it wasn’t. Because they’ve created a world view where this is basically accusing them of being a bad person who has committed an unforgivable sin.

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in an economy dominated by rentiers, the financial times' general position of wanting a healthy, productive capitalist system is actually to the left of mainstream "centre-left" politics (democrats, labour party, etc)

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Wait can you elaborate what you mean about recovery being a myth?

it isn’t real. you just find deeper and further rooms of the torture prison you have different sadomasochistic relationships with. I’m in one of the more beautiful ones right now where my partner is still alive and her flower garden is still going strong.

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How do you identify when someone is anxious/fawning like your coworker? A lot of people seem to relate to this profile but I’m not sure if I’ve ever encountered it in the wild. Maybe i repel this type of person or maybe I am this type of person without realizing it. I find it hard to identify the emotional conditions or motivations of others.

there’s a high likelihood their scanners don’t pick you up as a useful target. the fawners I work with pick who they see as simultaneously the safest and most threatening: they want to recreate and redeem the terrible dynamics of their earliest childhood through whoever will do the best job of milking and releasing those emotions for them. your hands are too rough for their tender teats so they don’t pick you.

they apologize constantly and usually for things that don’t need apologizing. mine will walk into a room and effusively thank me and pile me with praise for…. nothing. she’ll make what she considers to be a mistake and then tell me about the gifts she’ll get me later to “make up for it.” she gets me presents out of the blue. she insults herself like she’s trying to get it out of the way before I can say those incredibly cruel things first. every time I have a resting neutral expression she asks what’s wrong and if I’m angry at her. she watches and comments on my every movement and every microexpression and I can feel her scanning me for threats at every second.

I am a threat, she’s not wrong, but she has no idea what I actually threaten because all I am is a reflection of her own hopes and fantasies and fears.

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Republicans vote against the policy preferences of their voters more often than Democrats, but are not punished for it at the ballot box to the same degree that Democrats are. One theory for why is that Republicans are more motivated by ideological identity than Democrats are.

When a Republican voter identifies a policy they dislike that is nonetheless considered "conservative," they are more likely to approve of a politician supporting it than a Democratic voter would be with a policy they dislike that is nonetheless considered "liberal."

[Free PDF version here]

Drawing on research from political psychology, we argue that past scholarship on roll-call voting and representation has incorrectly conceptualized constituency preferences by dismissing symbolic attachment to ideological labels as a source of real attitudes used to evaluate legislative position taking. Indeed, political psychology research has shown that operational policy preferences and symbolic ideology are distinct dimensions of ideology that are not necessarily strongly correlated with one another (Converse 1964; Ellis and Stimson 2012). Mason (2018a) calls these two dimensions “issue-based ideology” and “identity-based ideology.” We argue that both dimensions of ideology—issue/policy and identity—influence public evaluations of elected representatives’ roll-call votes. Moreover, because people often hold policy preferences that do not match their symbolic, identity-based attitudes, a lawmaker’s roll-call decision can create internal conflict in how constituents evaluate their performance. A single roll-call vote can either satisfy both dimensions of a constituent’s preferences, neither dimension, or only one. When these two preferences diverge, we argue that rank-and-file Democrats reliably prioritize policy preferences over symbolic attachments, but rank-and-file Republicans tend to reconcile the conflict in favor of their symbolic attachments to their ideological identity. These differences in the behavior of Democrats and Republicans, we argue, are a function of the “source cues” that citizens receive from political elites—cues that help structure the opinion of rank-and-file partisans. Due to the ideological composition of each party’s coalition, the elite cues differ systematically between Democrats and Republicans. On the one hand, Republican identifiers overwhelmingly also identify themselves as conservatives—i.e., they embrace a conservative identity—but they hold diverse operational policy preferences. On the other hand, Democrats are a diverse coalition of ideological identities, but all largely endorse liberal policy positions. As a result, Republican and Democratic lawmakers face different incentives when it comes to the way they frame political issues and engage in roll-call behavior. Republican lawmakers are more likely than Democrats to cast roll-call votes that are incongruent with district opinion on high-profile policy issues because their constituents often value symbolic loyalty to “conservatism” more than they care about the content of the public policy being advanced, while the opposite is true for Democratic lawmakers. As a result, lawmakers of both parties are following their electoral incentives, but they serve districts that demand different patterns of representation. Our argument ultimately stands in contrast to recent work depicting Republicans as more motivated by ideology and Democrats by identity (see Grossmann and Hopkins 2016). ...We show that Democrats are more likely than Republicans to approve of representatives who cast votes in line with their specific policy preferences. Conversely, Republicans are more likely than Democrats to approve of representatives who vote in line with their ideological identity, even if they sometimes vote against their preferred policy outcome. In other words, Republican identifiers reward support for in-group loyalty to the conservative team but Democratic identifiers reward support for their individual policy positions. ...Among districts represented by Republicans, though, operational opinion has a weaker association with roll-call decisions than it does among districts represented by Democrats, while the reverse is true for symbolic, identity-based attitudes. The district’s symbolic attitudes predict roll-call voting for Republicans in Congress more than they do for Democrats.

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i kind of feel like if you take "don't bomb iran" as an endorsement of the iranian government, you're not intellectually ready to engage in conversations about real-world politics. Go talk about steven's universe instead

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making a viking dress for gender euphoria and ren faire and did trim for the first time! i think it turned out great for a first attempt