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10 Traits That Make a Character Secretly Dangerous

❥ Disarming Humor. They’re the life of the party. Everyone’s laughing. No one’s noticing how much they aren’tsaying.

❥ Laser-Sharp Observation. They see everything. Who’s nervous. Who’s lying. Who would be easiest to break. And they don’t miss.

❥ Unsettling Calm. Even in chaos, they stay still. Smiling. Thinking. Calculating.

❥ Weaponized Empathy. They know how to make people trust them. Because they know exactly what people want to hear.

❥ Compartmentalization. They can do something brutal, then eat lunch like nothing happened.

❥ Controlling Niceness. The kind of kindness that’s sharp-edged. You feel guilty for not loving them.

❥ Mirroring Behavior. They become whatever the person in front of them needs. It's not flattery. It’s survival—or manipulation.

❥ Selective Vulnerability. They know how to spill just enough pain to make you drop your guard.

❥ History of “Bad Luck”. Ex-friends, ex-lovers, ex-colleagues… they all left under “unfortunate” circumstances. But the pattern says otherwise.

❥ Unshakeable Confidence in Their Morality. They don’t think they’re the villain. That makes them scarier.

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Haven’t seen many people talking about this. One of the groups behind pressuring steam to remove adult content is a TERF group backed by conservative Christian groups. Once again the root behind a lot of anti-porn talking points is transphobia/transmisogyny and the idea that being trans is a social contagion caused by porn/‘pervertedness’

Now, the group is claiming responsibility for Steam’s new payment processor policies, with its co-founder calling impacted gamers “porn sick” and “brain rotted.” In one case, the organization even retweeted a notoriously anti-trans feminist who declared that “pervert nerds are responsible for most of society’s ills.” The retweeted feminist, a self-described “trans-exclusionary radical feminist,” proceeded to write under her post, “Evidence #1: trans.”

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I warned you.

About 15 years ago, I had a minor moment of Internet fame when I wrote a lengthy essay series on LiveJournal called "Christians in the Hand of an Angry God." In it, I argued that right-wing evangelical "Christianity" was literally Satanic by scriptural standards, was literally the cult of anti-Christ that Jesus prophesied in Matthew 25:31-46, that they were literally worshiping a made-up guy with the same name to justify cruelty, just like Jesus predicted they would the week before the crucifixion.

And at least half of the people who read it and praised it called it excellent satire. They saw my point, thought I was onto something, but couldn't take seriously that I literally meant what I literally said.

"Do not commit the sin of empathy."

Jesus' prophesy that these people were coming was not especially miraculous, in hindsight. No philosophy or theological movement becomes a large organized church, let alone a majority faith of a nation, without needing rich people's money, and/or government funding, to pay for it all.

And rich people in general, and right-wing governments in general, get to be the way they are by believing that the poor and the down-trodden can never be shown anything but cruelty, should never be rewarded, or else they'll lose all motivation to obey, to work hard, to be good. (By contrast, they believe that the same thing would happen to rich, powerful, popular people if they were ever punished in any way, if they were ever anything but rewarded.)

And rich people and governments are not going to subsidize your church foundation funds, your church repair funds, et cetera if you tell them that they're evil. But someone definitely will come along and offer to take that money. The people who take that money and conform won't even all be lying psychopaths; if you truly believe that your organization matters, is doing irreplaceable good in the world, you'll sacrifice any principle of your faith to keep the bills paid, you'll look away from or excuse any sin. It's that or see it all shrink and crumble into irrelevance.

I've come to the conclusion that it may not actually be possible to be a good person while practicing the majority faith of the land you live in. Or, if it is possible, well, like the man said, "straight is the gate and narrow is the way, and few there be that find it."

The Episcopal Church has its own legacy of sin, they've long overlooked a laundry list of crimes to pay their own bills, so don't rush to congratulate a mainline bishop for preaching mainline Christianity or take too much pleasure from Trump and his fascist followers being surprised that that happened. But do remember this:

From the mid-1970s to the present, right-wing billionaires have poured a LOT of money into church expansion and maintenance conditional on them distorting the Bible's teachings to make it appear that Jesus was pro-fascist. "To deceive, if it were possible, the very elect." So when honest theologians tell you that this is literally anti-Christ, literally checks every box in the Bible's description of the future cult of anti-Christ, you need to hear us.

The modern book and movie image of "the Antichrist" was a well-funded propaganda campaign to distract you from the plain language of the scriptures. The biblical anti-Christ is not some socialist liberal peacenik. The biblical anti-Christ is everyone who tells you that Jesus wants you to be cruel to "the least of these, my brethren" so that they'll straighten up and fly right.

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We don’t dismiss the reality that, on the scale of U.S. settler colonial violence, even the slightest degree of harm can mean life or death for those most vulnerable. What we assert here is that the entire notion of “voting as harm reduction” obscures and perpetuates settler-colonial violence, there is nothing “less harmful” about it, and there are more effective ways to intervene in its violences.

At some point the left in the so-called U.S. realized that convincing people to rally behind a “lesser evil” was a losing strategy. The term “harm reduction” was appropriated to reframe efforts to justify their participation and coerce others to engage in the theater of what is called “democracy” in the U.S.

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What is going on here is the substantial impact of absolutely staggering infant and child mortality. Under these assumptions, by age 10, fully 50% of all children born are already dead; only about 45% of all children make it to adulthood as we generally define it (around 18 years). And as a reminder that is only for live births – we have not yet considered miscarriages, stillbirths or maternal mortality. This enormous child mortality rate is not an accident of a particular ancient society, but in fact an absolute constant for all pre-industrial societies, be they hunter-gatherers, pastoralists or farmers, be they urbanized or not, ‘civilized’ or not, ‘western’ or not. For all societies, everywhere at every time before about 1750 (and in most places for a long time after that) it was simply a fact of life that half, HALF of all children died.

A lot of people forget about this.

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Discourse bullshits for which I nurse a particular and potentially immoderate personal hatred, 1/∞

Strategically forgetting how comparisons and analogies work to indignantmaxx. "You say these things share quality x, that means you think they're equally serious & worthy of concern. YOU JUST COMPARED THIS—TO THAT!!! EEEAAAAGH you just compared them you just COMPARED them you did" and so on. Shut up.

"You say this will make the problem worse. But what you forget is that the problem was already a problem. So there's no point in worrying about it getting worse — after all, this is just A Continuation of an Existing Trend What Was Happening Already, which I am very proud of myself for coolly pointing out as everybody else freaks out about aforesaid worsening of the situation. I will not be helping, no, why do you a

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new asoiaf/got worldbuilding discourse just dropped! check out the author’s blog for more thoughts on asoiaf, lotr, and more.

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It's still incredibly fucked up that my Credit Card company has any say over what I spend my money on.

I'm an adult, I earn my money like everyone else. Who the hell is MasterCard to say what I can and can't spend it on?

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imagine an episode of House but it takes months to learn what any intervention does and none of the doctors are ever in the same room and instead the patient has to set up appointments with each of them in sequence at 5 different hospitals to slowly relay a conversation between all of them and all of them are super busy and don't remember what happened last time

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still not over the stephen colbert thing, the way they're punishing him so much by not only essentially firing him but cancelling the show he loves in its entirety, which means also punishing all 200 people who work for and with him on the show.

it is setting an example. it's saying, "this is what happens when you speak truth to power. we will not only punish you. we'll punish the people around you that you've led and loved. is it worth it now, stephen? would it be worth it, other late night talk show hosts? if you don't keep quiet, we will quiet you". the other late night talk show hosts are not all under paramount (iirc, it's just the daily show), but this sets a precedent that tells them they are all vulnerable.

"it's not a big deal" idk man it really seems like it is

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The ideology of pharmacological determinism “invests the substances themselves with more power than they actually have” (Reinarman and Levine 1997a, 8). In actuality, when psychoactive drugs enter the body, they produce their effects through the release or reuptake of brain chemicals called neurotransmitters. That is, drugs work by stimulating substances already present in the human brain. The fact that “psychoactive drugs produce their effects by neurotransmitters points out their true secret: All drug sensations, feelings, awareness, or hallucinations can also be achieved without drugs” (Gahlinger 2004, 159; emphasis in original). Though many find this idea controversial, people can and do achieve altered states of mind through non–drug related activities such as religious fervor, gambling, long-distance running, roller coaster riding, dreaming during sleep, and other behaviors that affect the flow of brain chemicals.4 My point is that drugs do not produce feelings that the body and brain are incapable of producing by themselves. “All the thoughts, perceptions, and behaviors [resulting from drug use] already exist” (Gahlinger 2004, 159). By themselves, drugs are inert substances—they do not cause harm or relief until people choose to consume them (Reinarman and Levine 1997a). But by placing heavy emphasis on “the sphere of molecules” (DeGrandpre 2006, 27), a cultural acceptance of pharmacological determinism fails to consider the social, cultural, and historical contexts of drug use. And contexts (i.e., the conditions under which people take drugs) are often more important than molecular structures for understanding consequences and patterns of use (Zinberg 1984).

Meth Mania: A History of Methamphetamine, Nicholas Parsons, (2014).

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Gosh.

Must be rough for them.

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Kpop Demon Hunters as Textposts because I'm bored part 3

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Behond one if the funniest things ive seen on reddit in a hot minute

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So here's what happened on Reddit:

A transmasc posted about how transmascs and trans men are often invisible, how our issues are dismissed, and how resources, especially medical ones, are almost always written with non transmascs in mind. They posted this both to r/Trans and r/lgbt.

A moderator of r/Trans responded by telling them to “stop bitching.” That’s the word they used. That’s the level of respect trans men get. Transandrophobic by the way, don't call trans men bitches.

The comment was deleted, quietly, after backlash. Then the entire post was removed. When asked why, a mod responded that the post was “playing oppression olympics,” and took the time to go through and dismiss each of the original poster’s points, including saying that trans men being sexually assaulted isn’t “unique to transmascs” and therefore not an issue, and claiming that access to testosterone isn’t any more restricted than access to estrogen, which is a straight-up lie, because T is a tightly controlled substance in most places and E is not.

The original poster was banned for three days.

Then a separate mod made a post saying, “nobody asked us our side of the story,” which is wild because people absolutely did, publicly and repeatedly. Users also started reporting that they’d had supportive comments removed or had been banned after disagreeing with the mods, some of those claims are still unconfirmed, but given the general behavior, it wouldn’t be surprising.

Then r/Trans locked down entirely. No new posts. The conversation was forcibly ended.

Some people posted about it on r/FTM, many of those posts were mass-reported, automatically removed by Reddit’s automod, or quietly buried. Meanwhile, r/lgbt also removed the original post, with no explanation.

One of the r/Trans mods eventually posted an “apology,” which was really just a soft-scrubbed PR post full of noncommittal language and distancing. They said they didn’t mean to call a trans man “a bitch,” they just used it synonymously with “complaining,” and they didn’t think about the implications until later even though the first post was about microaggressions just like the mod committed. They did not apologize for anything else, not for wrongfully banning people, not for accusing a transmasc venting like any other user of playing oppression olympics, nothing at all. They said they’re on break and can’t do anything about it. They said, and I quote, “please don’t be mad at the rest of the team.” even though the rest of the team are just as culpable for not stopping their behavior.

They also added that trans men are “a welcome part of the community” and tried to point at moderation history as proof. Because apparently we should be grateful that people occasionally get banned, every so often, for implying trans men aren't oppressed at all, wow, thanks, that is like below the bare minimum, cool.

The current state of things is: r/Trans has over 600,000 members, and trans men and transmascs were silenced, banned, and told to shut up for bringing up their own oppression. And the subreddit is locked down. There’s a mass exodus happening to the new sub, r/trans4every1, but let’s be real, the damage has already been done.

Now let’s talk about what this actually means.

This is not “just more Tumblr discourse.” This isn’t some random blog saying they don’t like transmascs. This isn’t a Twitter reply guy. This isn’t a niche zine or a spicy personal take. This is a massive trans-focused subreddit with over half a million users. It's easily one of the largest public facing trans community online, maybe even the largest, I've certainly never found a bigger one myself. And the moderation team made it crystal clear: they do not want transmascs to feel safe or welcome there.

This is what transandrophobia looks like on a slightly larger internet scale. When it’s in the hands of people who get to decide who gets heard and who gets deleted.

And for anyone who’s still stuck on “well they apologized” listen: trans men are told all the time that we’re being too loud, too angry, too entitled, too manly, too feminine, too confusing, too “binary,” too "Nonbinary", too much. We’re told that we’re “oppression olympics-ing” just for talking about our lives. And now we're getting banned and locked out of the spaces that claim to represent a huge portion of online trans people.

This isn't just online drama. This is a bellwether. And if it isn’t setting off alarms in your head, it should be.

The way transandrophobia manifests in online spaces absolutely bleeds into real life, into medical gatekeeping, into poor data collection, into the erasure of sexual violence against transmascs, into advocacy groups that write us out of the picture, into educational materials that treat us like footnotes, if they include us at all.

And if you’re sitting there thinking, “well it’s not that deep,” you’re part of the problem.

We need to start being more honest about this: Transandrophobia is real, it is widespread, and it is growing. We need to stop giving people the benefit of the doubt when they’ve shown us they don’t want us in the room.

And frankly?

We need to start making TRFs [Trans Radfems & transmasc-exclusionary feminists alike] deeply uncomfortable being open about their beliefs. We need to make them afraid to be TRFs, the way they’re trying to make us afraid to exist.

The same way we don’t coddle fascists. The same way we don’t tolerate TERFs. We need to stop tiptoeing around transandrophobia.

Because this growing wave of transandrophobia is going to kill people. Full stop.

Protect trans men. Protect transmascs. Protect your siblings; all of them!