You know I used to think "tumblr's absolute refusal to actually engage with the Trolley Problem in favor of insisting that there must be a third, morally pure option that doesn't require them to make a hard decision and anyone who asks them to make a binary choice is just a short-sighted idiot is really fucking annoying, but I guess it's not actually doing any harm".

Anyway that was before we asked tumblr at large to decide between "guy aiding a genocide but making progress elsewhere" and "guy who would actively and enthusiastically participate in a genocide and would also make everything else much, much worse for everyone elsewhere" and the response was that there must be a third, morally pure option that doesn't require them to make a hard decision and that anyone who asks them to make a binary choice is a short-sighted idiot.

Oh, god, I hate that this is correct.

"Engaging with the lever in any way makes me culpable for the death that occurs" seems to be the rationale behind most of the voting naysayers, so, and I am quoting wikipedia here, their rational is quite literally one of the positions of the trolley problem;

'...since moral wrongs are already in place in the situation, moving to another track constitutes a participation in the moral wrong, making one partially responsible...'

Their refusal to engage with the trolley problem has made them ignorant not only of how their position IS one of the sides they refuse to take, but also that the other option recognises their desire for moral purity at the expense of obligation, for what it is;

'Under some interpretations of moral obligation, simply being present in this situation and being able to influence its outcome constitutes an obligation to participate. If this is the case, then doing nothing would be considered an immoral act.'

People who refuse to vote because "they're both bad" may be taking the high ground, but there are still people on the tracks.

This post is stupid because there IS a third option. The party doesn't have to run biden again! The party can have anyone as a candidate! They're choosing to.

Don't run genocidal candidates if you want my vote. It's that easy. Surely you can find one Democrat willing to run for president who isn't also genocidal, right? Surely it can't be that hard?

You are still missing the point of the trolley problem, just like OP was saying people do.

The trolley problem is not "why couldn't they have given us a better track"

It's not even "should we take steps to prevent the kinds of people who would tie people to train tracks from having access to those train tracks"

The trolley problem is about reacting to the situation AS IT IS.

The trolley problem is; does taking steps to mitigate harm mean you are therefore responsible for the harm that has occurred as a result of your choices? Do you allow more suffering to happen because you are scared to be tainted by your association with *some* suffering? Or, if you make the choice to abstain from participation, are you then responsible for the harm that occurs because of your choice not to act?

We'd all love some morally pure option. But when voting day comes, there might not be one. So you will have to choose between getting your hands dirty in the hopes of some progress, or clean hands and letting the trolley rampage out of control.

And I just got confirmation from a second ex-colleague that a deal with midjourney has been brewing since months ago. Not any extra details, just that's a real thing.

Shit, I don't see any way for this to happen that doesn't make it an apocalyptic event the size of the porn ban. Fuck.

Shit. This may be pure chance and coincidence, and it's not he is in a position to be able to talk about anything, but seeing prominent staff members announcing they are moving their original photography out of tumblr just two weeks ago seems a pretty significant cue of shit to be about to hit the fan.

Just tested. It’s possible to swap out pictures on already-published posts. So in that case, a solution:

Nightshade your photo posts now.

Even if you don’t post your own art anymore, go back to your old stuff and watermark it.

Do it ASAP, before the deal goes through and the scraping begins.

This will not only protect your art, but has the opportunity to fuck over this deal on a pretty large scale. The more of these posts that are glazed or poisoned, the less valuable this deal becomes for tumblr and midjourney.

Share this with everyone. And i do mean everyone.

i have this disease called i will open your message and get distracted and forget to reply and then the notification will be gone so i will not have replied for ages and you will think i am ignoring you but. i am not. it’s incurable

As a bonus, you get to bring this feature to your work life, where the same applies to emails, and the only way you can ensure that you don’t forget an email exists is to mark it as unread. But now suddenly you have 200 unread emails and don’t know where to start, and they keep coming in and the pile doesn’t dwindle—especially because of the reminders about reminders about reminders to reply to an email (which honestly you need anyway and come to appreciate)—so the system doesn’t really work anymore so you use labels or folders to try to categorise the unread emails but then that takes almost as much effort as answering them in the first place.

She's not interested in participating in the day

[ID: photo of a bed with a pillow on it. Three cat feet are just visible sticking out from under the pillow. End ID]

#mood

I don’t even care who fucking wins the presidency this year look at this

This makes an INCREDIBLE difference!!!! For fuck sake go vote!!!!

A few years back a Republican won my house district by six vote. Now she’s talking about making it illegal to protest the Gazan genocide. Pay attention to Congress

the "canon isn't real we make our own rules" to "i am begging you people to revisit the source material" pipeline

the energy here is unparalleled

yo yo wait that reminds me of something really funny i saw once, hold on--(you watch me open my phone browser and manually and correctly type the entire url of a specific tumblr post)

Imagine showing up to work one day and people are like "jesus fucking christ there's a corpse in here", herd you to the back room and everyone who sees you also agrees that there is now a dead body where you are sitting, with the appropriate amount of shock and disgust about it. You figure it's some kind of a prank that they're pulling, but also the people that you know aren't into pranks, or aren't very good actors, are treating you like a corpse. They go weirdly back and forth between talking about you as if you're not there, and politely asking you to stay still while they figure out who you're supposed to call in case of a dead body randomly appearing.

Paramedics show up, study you thoroughly and agree that while they can't see any apparent sign of death, you are, indeed, dead, and ask you to climb aboard the ambulance. You're taken to the temporary corpse storage that hospitals have.

On the way there you ask them whether this kind of shit happens often, and while they won't look at you, the paramedics agree that they've never had a talking corpse before, though they won't question the fact that you're moving on your own.

You're eventually led to a morgue, where you're shown a slab to lay on, and at this point you don't really even question it, you just climb onto the Corpse Shelf and lay down, maybe have a little nap, with no idea what's going to happen next.

Then you wake up to someone walking into the morgue, who has the shit scared out of them when you move, and they're like "dude what the fuck, you're not supposed to be here, this place is for storing dead bodies" and when you're like "aw man sorry I thought I was a dead body" they have no idea whether you're joking and they don't care, you're just chased out of there.

And you just kinda go home and take a shower, show up to work normally the next day and nobody questions it.

And basically that's probably how those ants feel when scientists spray them with the Pheromone That Dead Ants Smell Like, and just hang out at the dead-ant-pile until the smell wears off.

I was waiting to find out what social issue this was going to be a metaphor for, so that ending really punched me in the face.

This new kafka story goes hard

I drew the gang,

I think we need to get more comfortable with the idea that sometimes shitty, racist, homophobic, bigoted people are still incredibly talented.

I feel like every time I see a post addressing someone’s shitty behavior the post also takes the time to mention that they’re not even good at [x] anyway. And that’s just not always true? Equating being good at a skill as being morally good is just not necessary. Someone can be a fantastic writer, can have a beautiful singing voice, can create breathtaking artwork, and still be a horrible person.

I know part of this is probably just the instinct to dislike everything about a person when you dislike them, but I also think this mindset leads to people defending creatives way past where they should, because if bad people create bad art, then if this person creates art that I like and resonates with me, then they can’t be a bad person!

And you know. That’s just not true. Those two things are simply completely unconnected and I think it’d be healthier if we all started disconnecting them in our heads.

You must kill the voice in your mind that tells you that good art is only made by moral, upstanding people. The most monstrous people you have ever met are capable of art that would make you weep. It is the contradiction at the heart of the human experience.

We create to create, not because we are good or bad. We critique the worldview and beliefs forwarded by that art, but the craft of the art can still be excellent.

Creation is not ethical or moral. It is human.

When I’m reading smut and the author breaks the flow of the story so that the characters can tell us that they have enthusiastic consent it feels exactly like when Dora the Explorer looks directly into the camera and says ‘Seat belts so we can be safe!’ anytime she gets into a motorized vehicle.

Always very funny to go from tumblr culture (Harry Potter basically, like, anathemized) to coworkers or relatives just casually bringing it up with zero idea about why the franchise would even be controversial. Unironically one of the bigger bubbles I forget I'm in.

take your time