#uncharitable

[artbyblastweave]

To be a cynical bastard for a minute- I like Terry Pratchett, I think Terry Pratchett was a good writer, and I think that Terry Pratchett can rightfully be claimed to have been deliberately pursuing empathetic and progressive messaging in a way that sometimes reads like straw-grasping cope when the claim is applied to other writers. But lets be real; the reason he's almost universally beloved on here, and the reason his corpus has dodged getting scrutinized to pieces in the same way as so many other nerd tentpole IPS, is that he died about a decade ago when many of us were children or teenagers, and the dead can't sully their own reputation. The Dead have whatever opinion you need them to have regarding recent developments. The Dead Can't Write and the Dead Can't Tweet Shit That Makes You Go Back And Re-Evaluate Their Other Shit

[st-just]

Deeply, deeply aggravating when people stumble upon an ethical justification to hate something they already loathe for different reasons and get just insufferably smug about it.

Like shut up about how much water AI art uses. You never cared about water use in data centres before and assuredly never will again if it doesn't help you win some dumb internet argument.

[maklodes]

Me, writing world building and writing advice circa 1700: If your setting doesn’t have anyone with smallpox scars or anyone who has lost a friend or loved one to smallpox, because “ooh, it’s the future and we’ve magically eradicated smallpox with futuristic medical technologies :)” then I’ll assume your story really has nothing worthwhile to say about the human condition.

[mitigatedchaos]

Progressives place a very high value on social approval. "All the right institutions are saying this, all the right people are saying it. Read the room. Don't be socially clueless."

I've been thinking about how to say this in less than 10,000 words, and I think the short version goes like this:

Being difficult to lie to is a virtue.

[disarminglybright]

there are few people who care about doctrine less than professed believers. The amount of 'catholics' I've met who don't believe in the veneration of saints or the transubstantiation of the body and blood. And like, for the record, it's fine not to believe those things but also we have a word for people who don't believe those things: protestant.

[iteratedextras]

Feels like radfems like this are just what it looks like when someone boots up the ethnic conflict hardware for something other than ethnicity.

[javob]

Part of the problem in arguing with word-cel lib adjacent midwits is that their opinions are outcome determinative, but they simultaneously don’t have the brain capacity to model certain outcomes, which leads to these crazy circular arguments where they’re convinced they are very smart when in reality they’ve argued themselves into a hole.

It’s made me realize why certain morals were paramount for society at one point, because these types literally cannot see past like a one event causal chain.

Here’s an illustrative example: Liberals are pro-immigration. Why? Immigrants deserve a better life. That’s their argument, with nothing beyond it. It doesn’t matter how badly immigration would hurt you or people you know or your community, that is the nexus of their moral belief on immigration.

Righties have seen this position, and have now come to realize there is nothing behind the drywall. It’s a full-stop moral position with no real ideology other than platitudes scraped off of PBS and Twitter. So Righties have taken the logical stance that to get Libs to stop immigration, they must stop immigrants from having a better life when coming to America. By not having a spine (or real leadership) when it comes to the immigration question, Libs have forced their ideological opponents into a very bad position for future lib-adjacent ideology.

Will Libs learn from this? Probably no.

Will Libs continue to be gullible saps who can be easily led by the nose into hating their neighbors and loving complete strangers for some reason? Probably yes.

[caesarsaladinn]

I’m starting to see why Tolkien got so mad at people who called his books allegorical. maybe it’s not WWI trauma. that was a fun analytical lens for a while but maybe he was also able to recognize and depict universals in human history, like being sad about war

[misledmagiard]

before telling somebody to be normal about trans people remember that the normal position is sex = gender

[ntrlily]

All things said though what I got out of that one post is that for all the shortcomings the YGO card game has due to its nature, YGO players are on average better at "having fun" than MTG players

[artbyblastweave]

"Gen Z needs to reckon with its-" Is there a newsletter. Do they all meet up and vote on this stuff. Or are they as politically fractured and mutually disdainful as every other generation to ever infest this fallen earth

[st-just]

Fundamentally if someone looks out on the whole span of humanity today and complains that life is too convenient and easy I can't help but feel a real contempt? Even beyond the total selfish myopia, it's not like the world lacks for edifying struggles and productive challenges for someone with some free time and capital to take on. You're just terminally incurious and lazy and want to make it technology's fault.

[fierceawakening]

Hellaciously uncharitable but

Just saw a post one of my mutuals reblogged that was like “never tell a suicidal person their loved ones would miss them” (I’m not even sure why they think you shouldn’t do this. Maybe the idea is you’ll make the person feel guilty but they won’t stop feeling suicidal so you’re making it worse?)

Bitch, on my bad nights the only thing keeping me here is “if I kill myself, whoever finds my body will be haunted and traumatized the same way I am now. I CAN’T complete—I’d be evading the virus by passing it to someone else. Hell fucking no.

This awful thing dies with me, which means I die a natural death.”

Would it be more effective than something nicer to remind me I’ve got a duty?

I mean, I don’t know, but I’m not going to tell someone NOT to use this to talk me out of it.

[utilitymonstergirl]

>looking for new queer porn

>ask the artist if their porn is Gengoroh Tagame or Oh Joy Sex Toy

>they don't understand

>I pull out an illustrated diagram explaining what is Gengoroh Tagame and what is Oh Joy Sex Toy

>they laugh and say "it's good porn, ma'am"

>read it

>it's Oh Joy Sex Toy

[utilitymonstermash]

There's a certain portion of the online right that views the "obvious falseness" of some of the left's sacred truths as something akin to a loyalty test or occasionally a demonstration of submission.

Well the literal corporeal resurrection of Jesus Christ has got to be one of the most obviously absurd and false "sacred truths" of all time.

[iteratedextras]

I think part of what Americans find so outrageous about all this is that...

So the joke about rednecks in America, about "trailer trash," is that they have shotguns, which they will use to defend the perceived dignity of their daughters, and that they may be too trigger-happy about threatening to use them.

In fact, the contemporary mythology of America is that everywhere in America, from the inner cities, to the decaying rural towns, to the shadows of the shuttered factories in Detroit, the poor are armed, and not only are they armed, but they are over-armed.

So obviously, abuse happens in America, and obviously, a fatherless child is more vulnerable to exploitation.

But in America, we can console ourselves with the knowledge that if someone poured gasoline over someone else's kid, if there's a father in the picture, even if he's not reliable, he may show up to decide that's not going to happen anymore.

In America, at any time, a man might show up with a gun.

In America, even if the politicians don't care, and the police don't care, and the news don't care, if the girl's father cares, if he's willing to wager his life and his freedom on it...

In America, we look the other way when our poor people hurt each other. We write off their suffering as caused by poor impulse control or disordered lives.

But in America, that goes both ways.

In Britain, if a father somehow used a kitchen knife to overcome five men who had poured gasoline on his daughter and threatened to light her on fire, my impression is that this would be considered terrible. How could he do something like that?

In America, that's just a bad weekend in Chicago. "Oh, they poured gasoline on his kid and threatened to light her on fire? Those fucking dumbasses. What did they think was going to happen?"

Oh, we might prosecute him. We might even throw him in jail for multiple homicide. Process is important, don't you know? You're supposed to go to the police! But those fucking dumbasses, what the Hell did they think was going to happen?