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A not insignificant number of posters appear to find "language changes over time" to be an inconceivable occurrence

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i feel like counter-trolling is an essential skill that kids online aren’t learning and it’s kinda worrying

like back in my day, the day of online forums, learning how to trick someone in to getting themselves banned was an essential skill. if you could tell someone was a chud, you would ask them short, leading questions and watch them get frustrated and post longer and longer rants until they said something that would catch a mod’s attention and get them banned and/or at least publicly humiliated. 

and guess what? that’s the exact same tactics the alt-right use now. these people are exclusively acting in bad faith. every interaction these people post online is done with the intention of getting someone to respond to them so they can screenshot the massive paragraphs of text and laugh

so, what’s the solution?

dare ‘em to post dick pics.

don’t acknowledge the content of the stuff they post. if you see someone trying to engage you in bad faith just dare them to post pictures of their penis until they either get frustrated and leave or get frustrated and do it. either way they lose. 

this is the tactic used by the fans of a podcast (that i haven’t listened to) called the Chapo Trap House, and 4chan’s /pol/ users fucking HATE them. they hate Chapo Trap House and think they’re crazy because Chapo Trap House fans refuse to engage in meaningful debate and repeatedly demand dick pics. they get frustrated and leave. it works. 

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I help the male Gardevoir cause by calling art of two gardevoirs who are romantically involved yaoi (the other tags were calling it yuri)

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Published in The Evening Herald,

Ottawa, Kansas, April 2, 1904.

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All trolling and drive-by harassment aside, I do want to elaborate on the statement that the people harassing random Jews over Israel (and for that matter, the right-wingers harassing random Palestinians or Arabs over Hamas) absolutely do have a part in making this war worse and do need to take responsibility for it. (Will they? No. But those of us on the side of rationality, humanity, and peace need to hold them accountable.)

Here's the thing: when you pump out misinformation, disinformation, harass people who are not at the levers of control, deny proven atrocities, leverage people's cultural trauma against them, and/or gaslight them about any such behavior, you are actively participating in polarizing these communities against each other, when really we have a lot more in common than anyone seems to want to recognize.

Any legitimate peace process is going to be messy, requires nuance, a lot of grace, and overall is going to hinge on a lot of deeply traumatized and radicalized people letting go of and forgiving things no one should ever be asked to forgive. The more you polarize our communities, the more hatred you sow, the more you encourage and inflame outlandish maximalist ideas that are likely impossible and would require mass atrocities to accomplish in any event, the harder you make an already extremely difficult and delicate conversation.

And while I can't speak for anyone else, sowing hatred of Jews throughout the diaspora absolutely leads to people attacking us. Multiple people have already died because of this rampant, unchecked antisemitism. It is literally killing us.

So yes, if you engage in these behaviors, you do have blood on your hands.

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My instagram:instagram.com/woshibaii

Nearby 17

Translation: Guandi Wu ) Proofreading: Amir Hampel

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My hair is fine, but I'm not 😬

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i say this in all seriousness, a great way to resist the broad cultural shift of devaluing curiosity and critical thinking is to play my favorite game, Hey What Is That Thing

you play it while walking around with friends and if you see something and don't know what it is or wonder why its there, you stop and point and say Hey What Is That Thing. and everyone speculates about it. googling it is allowed but preferably after spending several minutes guessing or asking a passerby about it

weird structures, ambiguous signs, unfamiliar car modifications, anything that you can't immediately understand its function. eight times out of ten, someone in the group actually knows, and now you know!

a few examples from me and my friends the past few weeks: "why is there a piece of plywood sticking out of that pond in a way that looks intentional?" (its a ramp so squirrels that fall in to the pond can climb out) • "my boss keeps insisting i take a vacation of nine days or more, thats so specific" (you work at a bank, banks make employees take vacation in long chunks so if youre stealing or committing fraud, itll be more obvious) • "why does this brick wall have random wooden blocks in it" (theres actually several reasons why this could be but we asked and it was so you could nail stuff to the wall) • "most of these old factories we drive past have tinted windows, was that just for style?" (fun fact the factory owners realized that blue light keeps people awake, much like screen light does now, so they tinted the windows blue to keep workers alert and make them work longer hours)

been playing this game for a long time and ive learned (and taught) a fuckton about zoning laws, local history, utilities (did you know you can just go to your local water treatment plant and ask for a tour and if they have a spare intern theyll just give you a tour!!!) and a whole lot of fun trivia. and now suddenly you're paying more attention when youre walking around, thinking about the reasons behind every design choice in the place you live that used to just be background noise. and it fuckin rules.

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I just Had to do it

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Check out the bonus panel on the site!

SMBC ◆ PATREON ◆ INSTAGRAM ◆ BLUESKY ◆ STORE

Buy this comic as a print!

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Quick disclaimer cause people love to never finish my posts before assuming things: It is wrong to think the below. I am just pointing out hypocrisy

It's laughable that antisemitism is justified by people saying "well how can you not think like that when you see Israel's actions" yet if jews or hindus were to point at our own history and how jews have been oppressed historically and say the same thing about muslims, we would instantly be branded as Islamophobic and screamed at that Islamophobia isn't justified.

Which like I said in my disclaimer, it's true that it's wrong to say that. Islamophobia is not justified. It is not okay to say "well how can you not think like that when you look at how Muslims have oppressed jews". That is a fucked up thing to say.

Yet people love to think it's okay to say that about jews.

It's a way to take away guilt for antisemitism. You're not putting the onus on yourself, you're putting it on a entire country often hundreds of miles away. You're not being antisemitic, you're just somehow being forced to by this (((evil force))).

And the reality is, it is a conscious decision to blame jews. It is really easy to go "the Israeli government bad" and leave it there. It is a choice to be antisemitic and go "the Israeli government bad... and so are all jews".

Newsflash - you should feel guilty for being antisemitic.

Another newsflash - the trick to absolving yourself of that guilt? Not being antisemitic.

I and many other jews would be and literally have been forgiving of people who used to be antisemitic, learned better and apologized.

I would rather surround myself with people who used to be bigoted, educated themselves and unlearned their bigotry who continue to grow as people, than self proclaimed allies who engage in bigotry and then scream at you about how unbigoted they are.

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I will genuinely never forgive anyone involved in making The Imitation Game for their absolute travesty of Alan Turing’s story.

He was intensely autistic, and gay, and *kind*.

He mentored people below him in the programme - including women, who pretty much everyone else was crappy to.

He had terrible allergies and went cycling in a gas mask in the country to avoid then, and when he got overstimulated at parties he pulled incredibly daft elaborate “walking into a cupboard” leaving gags to handle them that left everyone screaming on the floor despite the silliness.

He got on really well with kids and never talked down to them. He gave his neighbours his sugar rations on their kids’ birthdays so she could always make them birthday cakes - even when he was being persecuted after the war, even when he was suffering horrible side effects from the tortures they put him through.

He was such an utterly, genuinely lovely human being, and he deserved so much damn better, and at the very *least* he deserved to be portrayed as who he was in the 21st fucking century instead of falling into a whole slew of horrifically harmful stereotypes that erased the fucking gift he was to us all over again.

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by Laerte Coutinho

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