need a polite way to say "im not engaging in a discussion on this topic with you because the conclusions you have reached are based on so many interwoven layers of misconceptions it would be easier to just like, hard reset your whole brain, just start over as a baby and try again"
this tiktok screenshot ruined my life i need to see the serbian pigeon movie so so badly but it doesn't exist it's so foul to make this bad of a point with something so cool and then take it away from me.
Tiktok marvel fans really will be out here like "movie fan SHOCKED because i'd rather watch superhero movie #54 in blue and not a sensual 1987 french horror film about a man discovering his wife may not exist set in what is gradually revealed to be a space station" as if you're supposed to agree that superhero movie #54 is the clear winner in this comparison
Love the idea of a story about a complex issue that's told from the perspective of something that cannot comprehend or care about the issue. The way the story would be sliced up and moments that a human would consider pointless would be focused on because the pigeon happened to be there would be hype as fuck
Ok FINE I made the movie poster of it
Mališa, otherwise known as Little One, is a pet pigeon owned by a conservative butler of the Austro-Hungarian aristocracy. She is loved, and she is pampered— until her owner is murdered in cold blood, and she is left to fend for herself in Sarajevo.
In the wilds of the city, she feeds from the poor, working nationalist radicals, and the vieux riches alike.
To Mališa, there are no ethical concerns. No politics. No burgeoning nationalism.
There are only hands that feed her, and hands that do not.
This is compelling. Consider me fucking compelled.
Final shot is the bird hearing, but not seeing, the sound of a .32 ACP pistol, and flying away in shock
"From the studio that brought you Goncharov...."
My God guys we can't do this again
Yes, we absolutely can
Who would stop to feed a pigeon in war time and what does that say about the state of society?
Who tries to lure the pigeon with a promise of food only to turn and try to make her into food? How does that first break of trust change her reactions to humans?
How long until she doesn't trust any of them?
How long until she's stealing food instead of waiting for it?
How long until she's not a tame pigeon anymore?
The pigeon who has always had a clean and freshly lined dove box trying to build her own nest to lay an egg
🤌 the METAPHORS 🤌
The moment you decide that horrific violence is okay if it's aimed at Bad Guys™, you immediately have an incentive to categorize all of your "enemies" as Bad Guys™ in order to justify violence to them. They are not people anymore, they aren't complex and diverse human beings with their own motivations and lives and desires, they are the Bad Guys™ and everything done to them (no matter how horrific or indefensible in any other situation) is okay because it's for a Good Cause™.
The only way to not fall into that sort of mindset is to just not let yourself create exceptions for your basic morals. And that isn't EASY, you have to correct yourself constantly and break away from people and blogs and new sources and the like that push dehumanizing and violent narratives, but it's the only way to approach sensitive and important topics with kindness and compassion rather than hate and anger.
okay, but how do we stop boys from falling down the rabbit hole??
There are a few different suggestions ranging from interpersonal to systemic, and much like birth control none of them are 100% effective but they increase their effectiveness if you use more than one.
If a kid is gonna get radicalized into misogyny it helps if they can go "but wait... my aunt Meg isn't like how these people describe women, and actually my uncle Byron is visibly happy and healthy without needing to act like how these people say men should be." This is without these role models even necessarily needing to verbally intervene.
2. Make sure your kid regularly interacts with peers their age of all genders, especially pre-puberty.
Being able to talk to someone of the opposite gender without being weird about it is a skill that takes practice under the patriarchy. If your son is completely isolated from girls when he enters puberty then his main exposure to them will be through porn. And if he can't interact with girls outside of a sexual context without walking away feeling like he did it wrong, that puts him in a state where he's vulnerable to these online misogynists.
3. Don't just foster kindness; foster introspection.
The manosphere is at its core reactionary. It's emotions-driven rather than reasons-driven, which is maybe why the rhetoric of men being more logical than women slowed down in the past 20 years. You can certainly try to make sure your kid's emotional needs are met and that they have the ability to meet them themselves as they become more self-sufficient, but also make sure they have the tools to regulate and reflect on the occasion that they don't.
The fact is, the manosphere is nothing but a grift meant to pull in angry people and keep them angry to keep them watching and spending money. It won't solve their problems and it will make them bitter people. Lots of people notice this happening and get out early, but they have to either see it destroy someone else or recognize that it's destroying themselves in real-time. That's hard to do when you're in it, but it's easier if you have practice with introspection.
4. Include men's issues in feminist activism.
These boys are told by the manosphere that feminists want to make men's lives worse, and feminists corroborate this narrative when they say that the patriarchy benefits men and that it needs to be destroyed.
I have always advocated for the notion that the patriarchy benefits a select small group of men while ignoring the rest and actively oppressing women. The average working class man is just as likely to benefit from the abolition of the patriarchy as a woman is. A lot of female feminists scoff at this but I've personally used this rhetoric to break a few men out of their pipeline before it was too late.
It's critically important that men see feminism as a viable solution to their problems because for the most part right now their only option is MRA.
5. Something about walkable cities
Part of the reason boys are falling so hard into hyper-misogny after generations of increased progressivism is because actual social isolation is at an all time high. Solving the problem of social isolation is its own can of worms but the reintroduction of 3rd spaces, making sure teens and adults can physically meet up regularly, and so on would go a long way.
Generally, the higher proportion of socialization is done in a physical location, especially in a public space, rather than in private and online, the better. That's not to say online friendships are bad by any means, but there's a phenomenon of participating in discord groups and forums as an alternative to having friends that is destroying people of all genders, and men in particular are being radicalized through this process.
6. Destroy the patriarchy.
Easier said than done, but it would definitely work.
On 6 specifically, you have to foster masculinity that doesn’t build itself on the patriarchal ideas of masculinity. A lot of patriarchal masculinity is the result of misogyny so if you logically follow one, you also follow the other. This is harder said than done because you are literally fighting against the influence of society.
Edit to add my tags to the main post bc I think it’s important:
#btw terfs are the opposite side of the coin of the manosphere #by believing that men are inherently violent and dangerous they reinforce that idea into vulnerable men #and it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy #and by insisting that men and women be isolated from each other socially and politically #they make it harder for us to learn from each other and understand each other #advocating for 'female separatism' or whatever they call it will never be feminist #it's not realistic or sustainable and it does more harm than good
Loving the new counterpoint that not only is posting activism, not posting is complicity. Why doesn't everyone with any fame or internet presence immediately release a lengthy but perfectly-worded statement telling us where they stand on every issue? Is it because they're evil??? It must be because they're evil
And then the usual answer is "they don't post online very much". Which is all very suspicious, don't they know everything of importance is done by posts on social media now
Okay I'm going to talk about this for the last time bc currently the stupidest manifestation of this I've ever seen is unfolding, and nothing can top it or explain this phenomenon better
So Amal Clooney was one of the lawyers who advised the ICC to charge Netanyahu with war crimes & issue an arrest warrant. But apparently there was already a backlash over her "not speaking up" which is already dumb, like, as far as I can tell she has no social media, but also she's a lawyer, she can't comment freely on cases, that could literally destroy the case
But she was trending bc people were saying she should be forgiven, for not posting. But also there are people adamant she not be forgiven. Because she should have spoken up sooner. Helping charge Benjamin Netanyahu with crimes against humanity is not good enough, she should have been posting, she needs to be held accountable for her lack of posting while she was, again, serving as a legal advisor on a international humans rights case against Benjamin Netanyahu.
Like when you're at the stage where people ask where a celebrity was, and the answer is "helping arrange an arrest warrant for Netanyahu", and your response is "why was she doing that instead of posting online" I really just have to conclude you think posting online is more important than anything else. Also that your online activism revolves around finding righteous ways to dislike celebrities you have entrenched parasocial relationships with that you rationalize by going "well I obsessively hate them so it's okay". But mostly the Posting Is More Important Than War Crimes Tribunals part
I think the hot new trends for this summer should be reading comprehension and critical thinking skills
A white: but saying Asians are naturally smart is POSITIVE discrimination:)))
Me: The model minority myth was invented by whites as a tool of antiblackness to create divisions between communities of color and prove that ‘anyone can succeed in America if they just TRY hard enough!!1!’ thereby implying that antiblackness is black ppl’s own fault for not TRYING enough. Additionally, it relies on false interpretations of data and hurts the opportunities of all Asians, particularly less privileged ones, and dehumanizes Asians by furthering stereotypes of us as some kind of innately robot-like monolithic-minded hive, devalues our individual accomplishments and uses us as a tool to further antiblackness
you know i don’t think we often talk about how difficult it actually is to suddenly realize that a belief you thought was good and moral and correct was actually really fucking toxic. how you have to look at something and go ‘oh shit, oh i fucked up. oh this is going to take probably years at minimum to deprogram from my brain because of all the little ways this shit pervaded the rest of my beliefs’
so. to all the people picking up all the pieces of a recently shattered world-view and trying to figure out what is safe to keep and what has to be thrown away and started over
to all the people having to relearn how to even listen to other people
to all the people putting in the work to do better while struggling with the guilt that comes from finding out you were the asshole
i’m proud of y’all.
it’s hard to admit being wrong and even harder to change in the aftermath. just keep doing the best you can and just know that the effort is appreciated. everyone can change. everyone can do better. keep fighting.
A problem I have with a lot of lefty popular discourse is the term Educate. Like people talk about the whole ‘not my job to educate you’ thing, and there’s a whole thing to complain about there, but there’s also a question of like…
Are you sure you’re an Educator? Is you-saying-your-opinions-on-the-topic *Education?*. Do you have some kind of epistemic authority that separates you just Having Takes with you *educating* people.
I feel there should be kind of a high bar to consider yourself “educating” people; most of the time it can much more accurately be described as you “Having Takes” or “Repeating what you vaguely recall overhearing somewhere on social media and didn’t check but felt it sounded like the sort of thing that would be true so you believe it.”
Is there any reason why the person you’re talking to should take you seriously, and trust that what you have to say is more true than what everyone else has to say (particularly when everyone else is saying something different?)
What reason do they have to trust that your beliefs are superior such that they should paste them over their own? Why isn’t it the other way around? What reason can you give them to sit down to your lecture and shut up and listen, instead of -you- sitting down to -their- lecture. After all, *they* think that they’re right, the same way that you think that you’re right.
It’s the difference between Educating someone and having a conversation with them, and most people on the internet with takes aren’t quite equipped for the former. But we should *all* be capable of the latter.
This is also why it’s hilarious when people would say things like “we need to have a national conversation on race”
when hoo boy that is not what they, or anyone, wants. Like you really wanna have a conversation on race with people who don’t already agree with you? No you do not. No one wants that.
(The thing ya want is not called a “conversation.” The desire here is called “Obey me, peons.”)
This
So for some context, the whole “it’s not my job to educate you” line began its life as a way to shut down people who used “but if you won’t educate me then how can I improve?”, either as a bad-faith time-wasting tactic, or (more often) as a lazy attention-seeking one, like “I care about this but only as long as I don’t have to do anything at all.” This is a pretty rare case, but it does come up, and began as part of a toolkit of responses for common pitfalls in SJ discussions (almost all of which were useful and relevant originally, and almost all of which have been widely abused as Internet Argument Trump Cards). This is why the current usage makes little sense – it’s a rebuttal designed for someone who claims to have a sincere interest and be actively seeking education.
I think it’s important that people understand that the reason It’s Not My Job to Educate You became the thought-free gotcha it did is because it was popularized in Derailing for Dummies, which was a culturally important document that’s essential for understanding the 2010-2015 period. (It was later rewritten to be less smug and agonistic, but I’m linking to the original here because that’s the version that’s culturally important.) The thing about Derailing for Dummies is that it was clearly written by someone who was kind of a dick and spraining themselves to pat their own back, but a lot of the phenomena it criticizes are real things, which really are bad, and at least some of the hostility comes from a fatigue at dealing with them. But then it got spread as, like, a Bible of Social Justice, and a lot of people who had not become embittered and battle-weary from years of social justice arguments started treating it as, like, Two Minutes Hate for reply guys, and ten years later this is where we are. (This was also an important factor in the popular use of “derailing” to mean “contributing topically in ways I dislike”.)
It’s tempting to say that oh, this is because DfD is written in that obnoxious adversarial way, of course people used it in obnoxious adversarial ways! But that’s not it at all: as I said, many of the critiques it’s making are broadly correct within specific situations that are familiar to people who have spent a lot of time in the discourse mines. The problem is that it got treated as a spellbook full of incantations to instantly win arguments against Our Perfidious Foes, and so these all got applied without understanding to situations where they made no sense, and pointing this out was seen as attacking something sacred. And all of that would have happened no matter how well you wrote it. The problem is that when stuff becomes popular, most of the people who get their hands on it are going to be looking for validation and success. Whatever actual moral principles it encodes will be left on the curb, as they aren’t useful for that. I say this not so much to apologize for it as to remind people that it will happen next time too, and it will happen regardless of the political affiliation of the source. That’s how it goes!
Watch this to learn how to put down toxic masculinity and internalized misogyny. As with “the kids these days are terrible” beginning circa prehistory (thanks Plato) this points to “men aren’t masculine anymore” and tracks it backward.
I keep saying nothing ever changes to those who know history.
Still remember when a homo- and transphobic acquaintance tried to bring up JKR’s views on trans people in conversation and I shut it down with «oh yeah she’s been saying a lot of dumb shit on Twitter after she finished writing Harry Potter, like when she claimed Dumbledore was gay, just to be politically correct», which made it absolutely impossible for him to admit that he agreed with anything JKR had ever said. Sometimes you just have to weaponise people’s homophobia against their transphobia.
Other ways to stop family members/acquaintances from going on bigoted rants:
The point is that I’ve used all of these in various contexts and they’ve saved a good number of dinner table conversations from derailing into pointless debating. You don’t de-radicalise friends and family members by entering into political discussions they initiate just to stir up shit. You de-radicalise them by shifting the focus away from their shitty opinions and onto the things you have in common and the practical everyday stuff that exists outside their internet echo chambers.
This made me realise that not all people may have been taught persuasive techniques in high school. Most of which are 1 to 1 with logical fallacies. There is a reason why news article rely so heavily on persuasive rhetoric and its because its sincerely effective at changing people's views.
Maybe I'm missing something but what does this actually achieve, you havent stopped them being transphobic nor "shifted their focus onto the things you have in common" you've just agreed with them on the homophobia to try and get them to stop talking. All the bullet points in the follow up make perfect sense but I fail to see how this aligns with putting gay characters on par with transphobia. You may think she was wrong to do so bc it wasnt written in the books but I presume your homophobic uncle thinks that calling a character gay was wrong full stop so like??
What you achieve is a family dinner/work lunch conversation that’s not a transphobic rant, how is it so hard for people to understand that this isn’t intended as the Solution To All Bigotry Ever, it’s just a handful of tips to make bigots feel a wee bit silly about their bigotry so they’ll stop wasting your time by trying to drag you into a debate in a situation where you’re just minding your own fucking business
Not everything that is unethical or bad should be illegal. very simple to understand
people listening to music loudly in public may be annoying or rude but people trying to use the law to enforce politeness is what leads to noise ordinances that are largely used to brutalize black people
plagarism is unethical and plagarists should be criticized and held accountable for it but intellectual property law is mostly used to suppress speech critical of major media corporations and stifle the creativity of independent artists
just as some examples
generally speaking i just think trying to use the power of the law to make people be polite is a bad idea just, in general
many problems are caused by the mindset that the world is divided into good people and bad people and the bad people can be "found out" and removed, eventually leading to a utopia containing only good people.
"It was much better to imagine men in some smokey room somewhere, made mad and cynical by privilege and power, plotting over brandy. You had to cling to this sort of image, because if you didn't then you might have to face the fact that bad things happened because ordinary people, the kind who brushed the dog and told the children bed time stories, were capable of then going out and doing horrible things to other ordinary people. It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone's fault. If it was Us, then what did that make Me? After all, I'm one of Us. I must be. I've certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We're always one of Us. It's Them that do the bad things."
--Jingo, by Terry Pratchett
Matt created an important update.
[ Matt Bors ]
People in the notes are saying they’re not sure if this is satire or not.
It very much is, and if you haven’t seen it before, it’s also referencing the famous ‘Gotcha’ comic by the same artist that riffs on obnoxious argumentative fallacies:
Kudos to the artist for making this asshat so fucking punchable that I actually want to yeet my phone to smash his face
people are like "if you put crabs in a bucket they can't escape because they keep pulling each other back in, this is called crab bucket mentality and describes why people don't help each other" and never acknowledge that crabs do not naturally occur in buckets, a human with more power had to put them there
ALSO the crabs arent acting with any kind of malicious intent, theyre not thinking "oh no youre coming down with me" theyre thinking "pinch pinch pinch whats going on right now" its insane to extrapolate a moral point about humans from their behavior
reblog if you engage in crab bucket mentality (pinch pinch what is going on here)
