shanlonwrites - Tumblr blog

[shanlonwrites]

(radley's rad and I'm inspired to add to this)

Empathy is dangerous in two ways: one, it can hurt! Like said above, that's a super insightful take! It hurts. And pain is most often the root of fear and anger. But it can also risk social belonging, because there's this puritanical culture that's developed, where empathy is viewed as agreement.

Empathizing with someone does not mean you agree with them.

I can understand with great empathy exactly how JKR got to where she is. She had a real, traumatic experience, and when she voiced a fear borne of that pain, when people said, "trans lives matter and trans people deserve safety", she heard "your safety, and the safety of other vulnerable women, doesn't matter". Of course she doubled down! Of course a children's author who wrote about standing up for what's right in the face of bigotry and violence saw this as a threat against other women and stood up against who she thought was the enemy! And all of that understanding doesn't mean for a second that I agree with her beliefs.

For me, it comes down to a choice. I can do three things:

Get angry at someone and condemn them. This signals my values to others, and it might make an impression on some people who haven't yet made up their minds, but not for the right reason. Not because I've explained a position, just because they want to belong to a group, same as me. It likely won't affect the target of my condemnation except to reassure them that I'm the enemy.

Engage with empathy, like the exceptional example at the beginning of this post. It might not do anything that I can see, but that doesn't mean it hasn't done anything. Changing thoughts and beliefs often takes a lot of time and many experiences. I'm a drop in the bucket, but the bucket's a little fuller than it was!

Not engage. I'm not the most social and I'm not the best communicator. I don't have the energy to engage with everyone. But I do have the energy to engage gently with friends and family, because they do the same for me!

And in the end, the biggest thing you can do is offer grace. Not the religious kind, the human kind. Accept, give space, be gentle, because you deserve to be accepted, to have space, and to be treated gently. And the best way to practice treating yourself with grace is to extend it to others.

I will bet you that that person in the original chat treats themself with a similar grace, and allows themself to grow and change. That love they talk about comes from within as much as without. It shows.

Wow. The patience, kindness and calm communication skills. Outstanding.

From raindovemodel

[shanlonwrites]

After four years, I finally got COVID. I keep sniffing things hopefully. Candles. Food. Lotions. Soap.

Nothin'.

[shanlonwrites]

It's kind of Halifax's thing.

[shanlonwrites]

And another reason:

Asking for help will reveal that I missed or forgot something obvious which everyone else heard and understood and if I just listened better I’d know this.

This explains a lot about my lack of asking for help when I clearly need it

[shanlonwrites]

[shanlonwrites]

I was thinking about how I have grown to value mandatory voting over a system that allows allegedly more freedom. Because in country, mandatory voting means I just have to send in a ballot. It can be empty or filled with the write in ballot "pickle farts" if I want.

If I go to the voting station all I have to do is get my name checked off. I don't have to vote if I don't want to.

But it means it is much more difficult for the government to try and suppress voters. Because voters have a legal obligation to go to the polls, so you can't restrict them or try tactics to dissuade them.

Voting polls are open long hours with access to food and water being a fairly standard staple. You don't need any form of ID, you have to be given time to go vote in work hours without penalty if you cannot do it after work hours.

Every now and then a politician tries some small way of voter suppression but it isn't as easy. And so I have learned to appreciate it.

But when I googled, out of curiosity, if the USA had ever had anything like that I was met with a barrage of websites talking about freedom and justice and the absolute liberty of Americans. I thought an eagle was going to bust out of the screen.

Going through some of these I noticed they were think tanks connected to billionaires, one of them was funded and created by the Koch brothers.

Gotta love how often the American "freedom" is actually used as a way to further deny actual freedoms, both linguistically and politically.

[shanlonwrites]

You know how people don’t put their shopping carts in the corrals at the grocery store? How they’re left sitting in a parking space or the middle of the sidewalk in someone’s way? Or how they leave them spilling out of the corral because they couldn’t be bothered to nest them properly?

Imagine those people, who can’t find it on themselves to do this simple, benignly helpful thing, being relied on to personally and of their own volition support their formerly pleasant neighbour who yells at them because they are sundowning, and who needs help and support to live day to day. Or going out of their way to check in on the man down the street who lives alone and hasn’t been seen in a few days.

The problem with these anarchic utopias is that they fall apart the second you try to imagine them full of a variety of real people who don’t really care about anarchic ideals.

"if your vision of communist society is one in which the disabled have to rely on the goodwill of others to live that vision sucks" -person who wants the disabled to rely on the goodwill of an institution

[shanlonwrites]

How God must feel about us.

[shanlonwrites]

[shanlonwrites]

Was at a restaurant recently where they'd converted both their bathrooms to gender neutral (nice) and as i was washing my hands a guy came out a stall and saw me & said, "Oh!!! my god!! Is this the ladies'?? 😨😨😨😨 I'm so sorry!!!!!!" and I was like "No, it's fine, it's gender neutral" and he goes ".......Oh. uh. Ok." And then walks straight out. without washing his hands.

Sir. You need to be less embarrassed about hypothetically crossing some arbitrary gender barrier and more embarrassed about getting your Peepee DooDoo Shit Hands all over this fucking RESTAURANT

[shanlonwrites]

I’m really tired of seeing people broken up into labels of absolutes.

People are not just “good” or “bad”.

People are not a list of labels. 

People are complex, situations are complex.

I know, that makes it a lot harder when you want to just write off everything someone’s ever done as bad – but that’s not how people actually are, and it would do everyone good to stop pretending they are.

I am tired of hearing about the fear people have in putting themselves out there. And it is a scary thing! Putting yourself out there means subjecting yourself to people who want a really good reason to tear you down, who will jump at the first chance to feel “good” by labeling someone else as “bad”.

I reject this. I reject the idea that there should be fear in speaking up and talking about experiences and trying to reach an understanding of a situation.

I’m unhappy to see people spitefully urging others to cut off ties with their friends under the guise of “well, that person’s just inherently bad, so if you talk to them you’re bad too.” That is fucked up. You definitely have the right to let the friend know you don’t want to hear about whoever troubles you, but you do not at all have the right to decide who their friends should be. This includes guilt trips.

Anyway, just try to be more aware of others. Everyone else is a person like you. They might not have the same experiences as you. They might not understand how their words are harmful, or how what they’re doing is wrong. They certainly won’t if you never tell them.

Most people are trying to be good, but they’re going to mess it up sometimes. Try to keep that in mind. Even when people do really fucked up shit, sometimes they are trying to do good. “The road to hell is paved with good intentions” and all that.

Nothing gets solved, no growth happens when you put people into a box from which you’ll never let them escape.

Yes, you absolutely must be careful about people who have tendencies and patterns that are harmful to you. Sometimes people try to overcome those patterns and they fail, and you have to distance yourself from them: that is the sad reality of life. Sometimes though, they can overcome it. But they certainly won’t if the first thing you do is write them off after a fuck up. 

Be sincere. Use your best judgment.

[shanlonwrites]

How can you not love the sheer chaos of tiny humans who have only kind of just figured out how to do a thing bumbling around finding wrong ways of doing a thing while learning?

Simply adorable!

Going to see children and adolescents dance badly, play ball badly, sing badly, play recorder badly because they are young: YES! YOU ARE LEARNING! INCREDIBLE!

[shanlonwrites]

Hey bro/ster I'm super sorry to have to be the one to break this to you, but uh sometimes being a socialist means, you know, putting your dreams of terrorism down for a minute and talking about public policy and how your proposed form of government would like, uhhhhh................ work.

[shanlonwrites]

People need other people to live, now as always. Turns out distributing labour and trading skills is necessary and efficient for a society.

In the past we attached class to that distribution. Now we distribute a lot of it to machines, and therefore the companies and tradespeople who make and service those machines. A house without the modern trappings of electricity, plumbing, and heating, would certainly cost a lot less to build and maintain. I wonder if that difference would be enough to hire a porter?

I don't know how strictly accurate this is, but one of the things I find shocking about watching historical dramas is how many people there are around all the time---according to Madame de... (1953) a well-off French household in the Belle Epoque maintains a workforce of at least 3, and the glittering opera has staff just to open doors. According to Shogun (2024) you can expect a deep bench just to mind your household, and again, people who exist to open doors.

Could people....not open doors in the past? Were doors tricky, before the standardization of hinges? Because otherwise, the wealthy used to pay a whole bunch of people to do it for them in multiple contexts, and I find myself baffled.

[shanlonwrites]

There are many benefits to being a marine biologist

[shanlonwrites]

Add to list: Eddy Burback curious about weird restaurants on food delivery apps accidentally discovers ghost kitchen iceberg.

tbh i think the funniest phenomena that's been happening in the last couple years is "youtuber, having gone too deep into the research hole, has been made an investigative journalist against their will"

[shanlonwrites]

I know the health questions are asked constantly, and I'm really sorry, but I have to ask the question: is there a protein powder you can tolerate? Maybe rice or collagen?

I would love to send you some, if so. I've enjoyed your content for years, and really do want things to suck less for you. Those migraines sound absolutely hellish.

Due to this post about migraines, I realized that, between a combination of MCAS, the cost of groceries, and general executive dysfunction, I'm likely not getting much protein. So, I decided to sit down and work out how much protein I'm getting a day vs how much I need.

According to the Mayo, the average adult should get between 50–175 grams daily, depending on body mass.

How much am I getting?

6-12 grams.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that's not good 😐.