#ideology and methods

[azurendays]

Who would’ve thought a Furry Event is how we get good Jason Todd writing??

[tomwambsganshater]

Vinland saga gets a lot of criticism for being unrealistic and too naive in its pacifism but I feel like that's a fundamental misunderstanding of thorfinn's character. His ideology isn't supposed to be universal, he develops it because of his circumstances, he's killed too many people and inflicted too much misery to be able to stomach any more of it, to the point that defending himself disgusts him. It's not a method to live your life or to change the world, it's his specific emotional reaction to his experiences. He's not even preachy about it either, when he meets Canute he admits that he knows he can't change the world that way, and that he can't judge whether Canute's way is right or wrong. His vinland plan is an attempt to create a society from scratch based on his radical pacifism in hopes that it'll meaningfully stick and become a value for the next generations, and thus create a society where it's the norm, but as we can see in the story and just history, it's going to fail. I don't know how exactly it's going to end, but I'm pretty sure it's not going to be by telling the reader that "You should be a pacifist all the time and violence is never justified". The story's always been nuanced, Thorfinn himself is just incapable of stomaching it.

[fluffypotatey]

Miguel O’Hara: *giving a long and “serious” monologue about how important it is that no one disrupts a Canon event* me, a long time veteran of fandoms and breaking or bending canon events from my favorite stories just for funsies: he’s never heard of headcanons

[lemongogo]

wheres that post that talked ab vash’s conscious refusal to kill despite his desire to do so several times throughout the manga . it was such a good read on his deliberate commitment to pacifism and how its like .. smth he actively works towards as opposed to it being some inherent quality of his

[transkholins]

"people are more empathetic towards women than men" why does the word "bitch" exist. answer quickly, crypto-fascist evolutionary psychologist.

[questioningdragons]

I keep thinking about the Secret Pet Mal thing and wondering if it's a commentary on the sad state of sex ed.

[baishouqijia]

dropping this again because i love it so much and i want u all to rewatch it

[eaglerayys]

Starting the finale with the Lightning Thief Intro (Luke’s version) is making me insane like they’re really making sure we don’t forget how similar Luke and Percy actually are

[elvenferretots]

Not to start a training methodology war, because lord knows what we need in the training community is more cooperation and communication, not less.

But I have spent three years trying to be an R+ trainer, trying to grow my method's efficacy and kindness. In those three years, I have been following expensive and time-consuming plans. I have dug deep into behavioural theory. I have thought through every little micro-choice I made with my dog.

And I have to admit, it made me a better trainer. It strengthened my relationship with my dog and my empathy for dogs in general. It also did not solve the problems it claimed it would fix in any kind of timely or client-friendly manner.

It was frustrating. This really neat and wonderful idea of training with kindness. And all it took was one family member not carrying through on the dog sitting for petting and we have a chronic jumper with zero improvement outside of the humans who have extensive training relationships with him. One mistake during reactivity training and we have a blowup that takes us back three months of work for weeks. A dog who bites for the pure pleasure of biting with owners who do not have good timing deciding whether their dog lives in a muzzle because this behaviour is escalating quicker than they are learning to teach alternatives.

And then tonight I am listening to two world level competitors talk, and it strikes me again. To paraphrase:

"What would you do if your dog is chewing the dumbbell? Because I generally would tell him to stop and praise when he was holding it firm."

"My dog would never make that mistake."

"But dogs make mistakes. How would you handle a client coming to you because their dog making that mistake?"

"I would have them do layers upon layers of other training, sending me video, before the dog even saw the dumbbell. The dog would never get to make that mistake."

Like, on one hand, is there anything wrong with that? No! It's great training. But is the attitude accessible? Not at all.

Over and over, I experience this. Even with the classes I really enjoy, you often spend twice what you would for in-person to spend weeks on things like marker timing over video. You get reactivity courses that depend on more management than training. And its not that they're bad ways to train or wrong ways to train. But it makes it much harder to cross over when the balanced trainer who competed nationally or has dogs loose leash walking in a week is running a $25 seminar and free content for the basics, while the R+ trainer has a $150 seminar in which they lay out their first step to a long term plan for the same skills.

I'm probably beating a dead horse here, but if we want your average Joe Public dog owner or even hobby level competitor to pick up R+ training, it would be so valuable to have more resources that were clear, concise, and accessible.

[elgaravel]

thinking thoughts about el/akira both surviving au

[psycherprince]

third hot take of the day is that yes "boycott fatigue" is. yikes. but we're not doing anyone any favors by pretending large boycotts don't take any effort whatsoever. like we talk abt "invisible labor" in the household when talking abt feminism, which is the cognitive load of knowing what has to get done even if the tasks are divided, and having to keep track of who is doing what (wrt childcare) and the preferences of your family when cooking/grocery shopping/etc. Other ppl have explained this better than me but the point is. It does take cognitive effort to keep track of what you can and can't buy, and which companies own what, etc etc.

We can acknowledge that yeah it does take effort and yeah it can be annoying that you have to make some kind of change, but also still maintain that complaining abt that right now is insanely tactless and irrelevant. Like yeah you DO have to remind yourself not to buy sabra hummus or the starbucks brand creamer or whatever but like there's a genocide yknow get some perspective

[likeabxrdinflight]

Season four needed a little work on the villains' motives. I don't just mean Kuvira, though she's certainly underwritten, but also Bataar and really the entirety of the Earth Empire supporters.

Reuniting a fractured Earth Kingdom makes sense as a political motive. So does taking back Republic City and the lands that were co-opted by Aang and Zuko after the war. But as a character motive...why does Kuvira want to do this? Why does Bataar believe in it and in her so much? And why does any of this require so much Nazi imagery and allegory?

There's something lazy about the way its all written. Why does she need a superweapon (because the atomic bomb existed in ww2). Why is she locking water tribe and fire nation people in prison camps (because the holocaust was a thing). Why does she go about reuniting the Earth Kingdom/invading independent states as a militaristic dictator (because that's what the nazis were).

It's like the writers wanted to use all this shorthand to explore fascism if fascism developed in the atla universe without one, considering very deeply why fascism even evolved in our world in the first place, and two, without considering why the characters doing the fascism were doing it in the first place.

It's like they wrote the events and forgot to consider why those events might occur. They wanted the cool mech suit battle with the atomic bomb gun but forgot to ask why Kuvira would want to take back Republic City so much that she would create this kind of weapon in the first place.

It's weak character writing and shallow world building. It says "do the thing" without explaining why the thing would be done.

[rpfisfine]

alex and aleksa adhd x autism couple, i mean aleksas limp wrist raptor hands are you joking, love them

SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO so so so real i have said this and i am always saying this and i will continue to say this forever they like literally are...... aleksa is soo autistic in the jordan peterson relationship test video on patreon he said sth along the lines of getting unreasonably excited over the possibility of watching a documentary on "mayors in china" with alex but alex looked like he thought that was the most boring activity imaginable.... plus on top of every adhd thing alex has ever said & done there are so many instances of him having the shittiest reading comprehension ever he literally had to squint and pause while reading the sentence 'I avoid difficult reading material' and then said 'yes!! i hate reading' (which aleksa also confirmed) while selecting the 'strongly agree' option. also on the note of reading there was a question that said 'I have difficulty understanding abstract ideas' which aleksa answered 'no way bro. i read capital by karl marx' & then picked the 'strongly disagree' option. like they genuinely couldnt possibly be more different

TLDR:

[ugisfeelings]

my issue with recent historians’ claims of making quote, “theoretical interventions” from reading global histories of colonialism and diasporic migration is that their purchases to this cache so often rely on an uninterrogated and almost de tocquevillian-insistence of historical continuity and the immutability of hegemonic logics over change and contestation. which frankly, is profoundly unimaginative (it is quite conservative actually!) and vacates subaltern/colonized people of their own historical agency n mobilization against otherwise! it goes against the v ethos of historicization that they seek to recuperate within cultural studies and recourses to flat presentism. and of course, their archives are almost exclusively drawn from the discursive vantage of colonial elite statesmen (if they even do archival research), and thru a wholly hypostatized notion of culture and state power.

[geffenrecords]

me who spent my childhood having severe repercussions for talking to people on animal jam and horse games when i was like 9 and nowadays im watching my friends put their full names and dates of birth for literally any website they ever sign up for

[berah-ronah]

tbh my take on the BOE is that they’re a morally complex insurgency with internal disputes over methods and goals, and that the violence they use is sometimes against targets that are innocent (even if “innocent target” is often a loaded phrase that ignores the complexities of structural/imperialist violence) BUT because people are so willing to buy into the Nine House’s framing of them as Violent Terrorists, I will ALSO say that I’m a BOE stan who think that they’ve done nothing wrong and are always justified