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I've been musing a bit on that one post that went around during the recent holiday season, to which someone added their family tradition of Present Practice. My god! Imagine actually telling kids what behavior is expected, instead of expecting them to intuit it and punish them when they get it wrong!!

Separate post because this topic is a little tangential to that, but I think it does a great job of unearthing one of our very well-hidden internal biases, which goes as follows:

Good people don't need to be taught.

A good person (in this case, a good child) shouldn't need to be told to be gracious and grateful when given a gift. A good child should just know that a holiday tradition of gift-giving is a social performance to strengthen family bonds and that personal preference or genuine reactions are secondary to that performance. A good child should just know how to value gifts, how to express thanks, how to praise and compliment. No caretakers in their lives should need to put any effort into instructing or modeling these things.

Good people should just know how to be good. If they were really Ontologically Good, their inherent goodness would simply intuitively guide them to correct behaviors. If they can't do that on their own, in a vacuum, in the absence of cues, that's a sign of their inherent moral lack.

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...Which all sounds very reasonable and obvious, and surely a mistake that only fundie christian families would make! Except that people in the social justice sphere also do this all the time. It's not anybody's job to educate you. It's 2024, how do you not know this already? If you were a Good Person, you wouldn't need to be taught. You would simply intuit the correct philosophies and gravitate to them according to your superior internal moral compass.

If you were a Good Person, you would already know that everything you were taught by your family and/or background was wrong. You should have rejected it already. You should have cut off your family, your heritage, everything about your childhood and upbringing that was Bad and Wrong. You should have known it was all a lie.

If you were a Good Person, you should be able to find the correct way yourself. You should be able to seek out the proper educational resources, and distinguish them from bad advice leading you astray, and make sense of them all according to your own internal moral code.

If you were a Good Person, you would have found your way by the proper, dignified, official channels, not by reading a comic or watching anime. You shouldn't need entertainment or art to guide you. You should just know.

And if someone can't do these things on their own, in a vacuum, in the absence of cues, that's a sign of their inherent moral lack.

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this should have been me

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this really hit me and I thought it was worth sharing

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Comix.

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in this new year I want you to be alright. I hope you move out. I hope you have enough money to feel safe. I hope you abandon shame and forgive yourself. I hope you get enough sleep and some good news. I hope you laugh a lot and the heaviness of the world eases a bit. I wish you to be alright.

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I’m always feeling like wait did I just do something unforgivable? But all I did was walk somewhere or turn in a paper late

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can you guys watch my squab for me im gonna go on my smoko

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spongebob shows off his sexual techniques

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genuinely about to cry at the word for france in te reo māori. so like. almost every country name is just the english name but altered to only have letters that exist in te reo (so like canada = kānata, norway = nōwei etc) except france that is literally just fucking. wīwī. as in ouioui. imgoing to fucking die

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Just fucking chilling

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There is still good stuff on Facebook

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tumblr glitched out somehow but idc because this is way better than the original poll

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I'm pretty sure the single best thing you can do for your mental health is to plant a salad garden.

Because on the one hand there's the sense of accomplishment, the nurturing of new life, all the benefits of having green things live with you, The hands-on factor that really isn't too labor-intensive, not to mention the salad.

But all of that really pales in comparison to the ability to squat down next to a plant and cram some leaves in your mouth like a dinosaur from the land before time. That shit rewires your brain. Absolutely nothing drives home the point that you are a recently domesticated animal living in the modern world than eating like a caveman.

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