#I reject this. There are NOT fundamentally good nor fundamentally bad people

[bonefall]

I'm glad you're keeping the part where Thunder puts himself between Clear Sky and Grey Wing, willingly showing that he would rather die before letting Clear Sky kill his dad.

That's actually a Bones Addition. You just think it's canon because it literally should have been there from the very beginning. Thunder doesn't get between them at any point during the battle, he runs towards them only to get interrupted by 2 people trying to kill him.

First was Falling Feather, who Jackdaw's Cry then jumps on and dies fighting with, sister killing brother.

Second was Leaf, who's a diehard Clear Sky supporter and general bully.

In canon, Clear Sky stops the battle after Gray Wing says the line, non-fucking-sensically imo. Killing his BROTHER is too far, but killing someone who wasn't even attacking him? A noncombatant who said something mildly insulting? That wasn't. Rainswept Flower did the SAME thing Gray Wing did and still got bumped off for it;

“Is this worth it?” he heard Clear Sky hiss at Rainswept Flower. Scrambling to her paws, she faced him. “What do you mean?” Clear Sky flattened his ears menacingly. “Are you ready to die just to stop me from making borders?” Rainswept Flower curled her lip. “You’ll keep stealing land as long as we let you.” “Stealing land?” Clear Sky’s mew trembled with rage, “I’m just making sure my cats never starve.” Rainswept Flower’s gaze flitted around the lush slopes of the hollow. “How could any cat starve here? There’s so much. Wanting more is just greedy!” “How dare you!” With a snarl, Clear Sky leaped for her, grabbing her throat between his jaws. Her paws flailed desperately, lashing out at thin air as he shook her like prey. Then she hung still. Clear Sky dropped her, gazing coldly at her lifeless body. “You never understood. I’m not greedy. I’m just strong.”

-The First Battle, Chapter 20

Then in Clear Sky's pathetic wet beast scene, he stares down at Rainswept's corpse, and thinks "I was so angry I don't remember killing her :("

So how, exactly, does this same character keep his cool when Gray Wing says the same shit but worse?? Is he really so controlled by emotion that his logical processes flip off, or fucking not? Gray Wing was refusing to submit, lunging at him, calling him power hungry and taunting him that he would kill his own littermate for it, and THAT manages to get through Clear Sky's blood-poisoned head?

"ouuugh it's his brotherr that's why his personality completely changes for him" the fucking guy tried to have this same brother murdered in Sun Trail by Fox. The first book. He EXILED HIS OTHER BROTHER for having a broken leg because he, "didn't want to look biased"

Again; is he controlled by his fear and anger or not? Is this a man who would snap the neck of someone he cares about because he feels insulted, or not?

The answer is that the Erins are breaking their spines bending over backwards to try and keep him "redeemable" when he shouldn't be. He's whatever the plot needs him to be, but the most consistent character traits point towards Clear Sky being the kind of person who would never have wanted to change his ways.

So, they write Clear Sky ridiculously backing down for Gray Wing, calling off the battle and "coming to his senses" instead of having Thunder do WHAT HE SHOULD HAVE DONE and jump to his REAL dad's defense.

This is what I mean when I mention how firmly I feel that Clear Sky's Redemption Arc was a mistake. He works best as a villain, a fearful, proud, controlling monster, understood by his impacts on other characters rather than as a person the story should concern itself with sympathy for.

[fierceawakening]

I just read a post on Pratchett that explained what someone loved in a really moving way that I think accidentally shed light on what doesn’t work for me.

In the post, they were saying that as a teen they became cynical and started to see human nature as fundamentally bad. Were gross, were ugly, were mean, what’s the point, etc? And they read Guards! Guards! and found it revelatory, because it agreed “you’re absolutely correct, people suck! But help them anyway, because it’s the right thing to do.”

And that was a revelation for them.

Which is awesome.

But it’s a revelation that needs to be phrased in a certain way to work for me.

For me “we’re not good, but we should be good anyway,” doesn’t quite add up, even if you tack on “that’s what makes us good” at the end. Because if our fundamental nature is non good, then there’s no hope. All we can be is what we are, even if we defy it sometimes.

So I landed at “we’re neither good nor bad. We can become good, or we can become bad. We do this by existing in the world and watching what’s around us and deciding what we value. Those of us who are good are people who choose good values (this is very broad and varies person to person. I’m just closing the door on “so is a sincere Nazi a good person?” His sincerity might be admirable, not being wishy washy takes strength, but no, he’s unfortunately a bad person, as he devotes himself deeply to corrupt things) and act on those values even when it might be difficult.

So I’m not “seeing that people are bad but helping them anyway.” I’m thinking people aren’t actually anything, and thus they never lose the potential to become good, and that’s why I’m helping. To show someone it’s worth it to become good. Not because I’m inherently good, but because I’m inherently the same. I’m trying my best to do the same work.

“People are bad but so what?” is uplifting for some! But it doesn’t work for me, as I just go “people are bad? Then there’s no point, time to lay down and rot.”

I think I have similar issues with that famous quote from Death a lot of people love, where he says justice and mercy are “big lies” that we need to survive, so we use stories to teach them to ourselves.

I get the point, that we need stories to learn the virtues. I agree!

But framing them as lies pings my head in the same way. If it’s a lie, that means we’ll never get it right.

And there’s a certain sense in which that’s true. Every trial is a bunch of flawed people guessing what they didn’t see. Every law is a bunch of flawed people trying and failing to think of every contingency. None of that can be Justice.

But again, PERSONALLY my brain doesn’t quite vibe with answering this conundrum with “Justice is a pretty lie.”

My brain wants “Justice is a thing we do, a skill we practice. There is no perfection, but every time we do something big like abolish slavery or give women the right to vote, we’re doing Justice. There’s Justice in the choice we made. That makes it real, and not a lie. Calling it a lie would be ‘no, it wasn’t just to free the slaves. It was kinda good, but we’re not just, because we can’t get it all right in one fell swoop.’”

Stories are fictional and they teach us important things. But it’s not their being fictional that makes them special. It’s that reading a story is like practicing doing justice, or mercy, or whatever virtue. It’s play that helps us learn by experience what the virtues are.

Like a kitten pouncing to learn how to hunt, but we’re doing it to learn to be good.

And what we learn IS Goodness. It’s not perfection, no, but no one looks at a rock and goes “there is one true rock shape and this isn’t quite it. It’s only rockish.” People have known that doesn’t work since Plato proposed it, my guy.

We learn what the good is by looking at instances of it. (Or by looking at instances of the bad and rejecting them, that works too.)

Some of those instances are stories, from which it follows that we need stories.

No need to wonder if goodness is real.

[myriadium]

Hi hello I am obsessed with your Bakugan AU omg. Love the new spins you’ve taken on the characters, grounding them more in reality! :D (and the wide diversity in gender identities and orientation is wonderful.) It’s also super interesting to see them aged up so they have jobs/higher education to be worrying about and such, it adds an interesting element imo.

Could we hear more about Alice? What’s her life like outside of Bakugan - did she work with Mikhail or have a job/education of her own? Does her whole deal with Masquerade differ at all to canon? (I always hated the way they just kind of write him off soon after the reveal instead of exploring how Alice deals with it more. One episode is not enough to fix the trauma, lmao, c’mon guys.)

YOOO THANK YOU SO MUCH I'm so happy you like it!!!!! These characters basically grew up with me so I love projecting aspects of my life onto them!

I'm also so glad you asked about Alice cus the show did her dirty in both the first and subsequent seasons. To be revealed as such a menacing threat and one of the big bads, only to be demoted to a side character and then a picture on a screen is simply insulting for the best character ever in Bakugan.

So basically my Alice grew up with her grandfather, who's field of physics requires him to study in remote and distant areas with no phones, no wifi, no outside signals (I think some places that communicate with satellites out in space are built in the middle of bumfuck nowhere because you really can't have electronic interference). As such, Alice grew up extremely sheltered, passing her days by playing with imaginary friends and reading books (favorite was alice in wonderland, wouldn't you know it).

In Russia, she didn't get a job nor did she go to university; she was a quick study and with the books (and harassing Mikhail) she kind of became a physics prodigy. She was a homebody with anxiety and agoraphobia, only comfortable with the familiar and the safety of her bed. That is, until Mikhail disappears. Somehow she finds the courage to leave her home and go to a whole new country to find where he ended up. She sees and meets more people than she ever thought possible, and grows to like it.

She gets a job at Runo's family's cafe, where she meets all sorts of people, and gets introduced to the Brawlers. I'd like to think that she takes a couple uni classes before Vestroia destroys the fabric of reality. Between S1 and S2 she actually goes to school and speedruns getting a PhD. When we see her after a timeskip she has short hair and is going into a program for dimensional physics (not yet a real program). She works in tandem with Marucho and Mikhail to monitor and maintain the dimensional rifts required to sustain Bakugan's existence in their universe.

As for her connection with Masq I like the idea that Masq was the manifestation of her negative emotions (Silent Core n allat). In this case, her being so drawn to the battlefield clashes with her belief that the game is dangerous; it's the cause of her grandfathers disappearance after all. Her general shyness and fear of the unknown prevents her from reaching her true potential. The Silent Core separates her desires from the ones she embraces and the ones she wants to reject. Enter Masqerade, the embodiment of her desire to battle! Stripped of everything except bloodlust, this form answers to the Silent Core and fucking wrecks the leaderboards because guess what, Alice is actually a very good brawler!

While Masq is fucking shit up, Alice is left in the dark. Her different aspects remember different things, have different abilities, but are fundamentally the same person. As the leaderboards settle and people start losing their Bakugan, Alice's fear of battling increases until Masq is nigh unstoppable. It's until a little scuffle with Exedra where his image flickers...just a little bit...to reveal a very scared woman...

Anyway basically Alice has to embrace her desire to kick ass and becomes one with Masq. Sounds corny and probably is but you can have her accept this part of herself slowly, like picking up battling, which weakens the Silent Core's hold on her, until the final fight where Masq collapses afterwards to reveal that it was her all along! Hydronoid recognizes her as his true master and a new player - Alice Gehabich replaces Masquerade as the number one player! She's still pretty shy (I don't like how people treat introversion as something they need a character arc to get over, some people are just like that smh) so her media appearances are few and far between. However, you can reliably catch her on the battlefield maintaining her number one spot.

Also in New Vestroia Alice replaces Marucho because I cannot fathom for the life of me why he was taken on the trip of a lifetime while my girl, who used to be the NUMBER ONE PLAYER IN THE WORLD, MIGHT I ADD, stays inside the house and babysits some alien.

[ina-nis]

I feel like one of the fundamentals of my relationship issues (and the bane of my existence) is breadcrumbing, aka being fed crumbs of attention and affection.

I didn’t know there was an actual term for the phenomenon but apparently this is, indeed, a thing, and I should say I’m a little bit surprised about the fact that I’m also guilty of doing that to others.

Mayhaps, I try to flaunt myself, as if I’m immune to certain behaviours and actions that hurt me so, of course, I would not want to do that to others, but a lot of my defenses are mirrors: I’ll do these things even if I don’t realize.

When I “breadcrumb” others, I believe, it might be my way of keeping these relationships and connections superficial and lighthearted. When shit hits the fan, I’ll be “safe” from further harm (and believe others are safer too, since nothing too profound was established in the first place). That’s why I am capable of cutting off bonds with ease, and why it doesn’t feel as painful, and it’s almost as there were no real links, even if they were there at some point.

I believe that makes me untrustworthy, and unreliable, just like the wind - which one can’t control - or like a ghost or apparition. I can be fun and lovely to have around, I can inspire and lift others up, I try to be friendly and a safe space, and it all might look like a facade, not totally false, neither totally true. If you give me the right amount of triggers and discomfort, I’ll vanish like smoke. It just takes a while for that to happen usually.

I used to think I have a low tolerance for a lot of interpersonal issues, but the truth is that I’m extremely resilient. I take it and take it, for too long even. I try because I know that’s what one should do. I give chances and I guess I try to communicate to the best of my ability. But I’m not at a place where I’ll just stay passively waiting for things and people to change. It’s hard for people to change and they will not change for others so... if something, or someone, isn’t good for me, I’ll simply leave. Conflict resolution can only do so much.

Of course, I could try harder. Of course I should work more on desensitizing myself and my triggers or... I could dedicate my energy and time to things and people that will make me feel good - they’re out there, I don’t have to put up with bullshit, and I will not.

I withhold deep affection because, well as much as I’d love to deny it forever, I’m afraid of (the inevitable) rejection. Like I’ve been saying for over an year now, I still haven’t had any positive experiences to balance out the bad and traumatic ones, I still didn’t have anything long lasting enough that could tilt the scales and aid me into a less turbulent recovery. Instead, I just feel stuck, and bad things keep on happening.

On the other side, when I’m on the receiving end of crumbs of attention, it immediately make my alarms go off. I try to not hold it against people, nor blame or judge, I know it can be hard, all things considered. At the same time, I know my worth and I’m not going to bow down to eat crumbs off the floor like a dog, no thanks!

This time, it’s others that feel untrustworthy and unreliable - most of them are in my eyes - and I rarely get a chance, or rather I haven’t had any chances, to be proven wrong.

So in these interpersonal “games”, where it feels like someone has to concede, I feel like that someone is almost always me, and it always ends up poorly for me. One-sided things never really work for long anyway. It’s hard to trust my bowing down and trying to appease will bear any fruits.

So far, I’ve been right in thinking it will go wrong. It’s more a matter of how much I’m willing to put up with and for how long.

It’s hard to change this mindset on my own, it’s hard to give people a chance because they are people through and through, it’s hard to remain hopeful about someone different being out there, but I guess I am because I feel like I’m someone like that myself - I’m not perfect, far from that, but I’m making an effort however I can.

I’m not expecting perfection, I’m not expecting The One... I’d like, at least, reciprocity and proper communication, for a start. To me, that’s the bare minimum.

[straynoahide]

I like your explanations of our morally imperfect existence, accepting the need for help or a savior, that Christianity is also a mindful and onerous process, not a side-thought with no burden, that being raised Christian and being Christian are two entirely different things, and the personal relationship with God. I would add, Christian faith is faith in the ultimate goodness and victory, Hope unending, despite the world, despite everything, because of Him.

Everything in this universe is transactional, except God's love, which merely has to be understood, and accepted. God is perfect and needs nothing - he made us because he wants us, because he loves us, because he chooses us.

A "Christian declaring himself to be a Jew" is a schismatic and heretical form of the religion, very atypical, a Messianic Jew, and should not be used to misrepresent Christians in general.

Catechism leading up to confirmation, in many Christian denominations adult confirmation, is also a process of learning, reflection and commitment, although it is not "conversion" itself, it is part of the road towards being a full member of the Church and living in the faith, and it is for example the way i converted / re-connected.

I however, perhaps influenced by having being an atheist until the time of my actual conversion (despite having being raised Christian), have never come to actually believe in punitivistic Hellfire doctrines.

I can get the doctrinal view of the existence of a state of self-imposed separation from divinity, and of the unredeemed, but I believe two fundamental things that modulate how I interpret that: (1) there are kind and good people who are not Christian, (2) Christ helps us willingly and enthusiastically by us accepting his moral message, which is time-sensitive worldly kindness and ultimate goodness, and rejection of cruelty and tyranny when it matters, which is now.

I really don't believe that atheists, Jews, muslims or other 'pagans' are "punished" simply for not professing Christianity, the mere idea is unchristlike. Communication and truth go deeper than that. Christ, who is the Logos, emphasized content and criticized form so many times it can't be a coincidence.

I also don't conflate unredeemed and unredeemable. I think only God knows what the "restoration of all things" is and that attempts by us to see who is in eternal exclusion are meaningless, because we are partial and our view is partial so long as we are here- as Christians I believe we should, for example, reject the death penalty to be truly pro-life, and also reject "capital punishments" of the soul in our utterances of who is condemned, lest we incur in sin, because if we pronounce a soul condemned to hell, and we are wrong, what does that entail for our soul? I believe we should strive for healing, reconciliation and restorative justice on this Earth, for literally everyone. No one harms who has no god-given unmet need and is at ease, no one kills without halving their humanity. There is no other sound view of universal human dignity, to me. You can't dignify through disdain nor exclusion.

On proselytism, my views are not precisely typical or orthodox. I believe there are many ways to evangelize. I personally don't have an individual disposition towards trying to make others hold my beliefs. On the contrary, my tendency is towards compatibilization unless proven wrong. So as for evangelizing, I think there are good ways and bad ways to do it, and I think the Church has sometimes done it poorly, organizations within it often do great work however and I appreciate it, and have been part of some.

As for my personal life, I believe in doing good and in sharing knowledge as the main forms of 'showing not telling' my moral worldview. I feel more like non-proselytes in that regard, because I know I can influence people in a positive way despite them not coming to share my worldview - and that I can learn from the Other and genuinely listen, even if they aren't Christian, without needing to be insecure that it will challenge or oppose my faith.

At the end of the day, these are just my interpretations, and I've shared them with my spiritual father; there is room for discussion and differing views on punitivism and proselytism, but I remain a full member of the Roman Catholic Church and I respect my fellow Christians and those who are not because I believe highlighting the human dignity of everybody, in our work and in our words, is the most christlike thing we can do.

My favorite, and I mean FAVORITE teaching of Judaism is that proselytizing is wrong. It’s the one Christians have the hardest time understanding. That even though Judaism is an incredible part of my life, that it’s an incredible community to be apart of, that I could not care less about wether or not they choose to become apart of it. That conversion is possible, and converts are a welcome part of our community and no less Jewish than anyone else, but at the same time we do not seek out people to convert. In addition, conversion is a very serious decision, and the conversion process is lengthy and difficult.

It’s because while I love being Jewish, and I love my community, I do not think that Jewishness is required to live a happy and productive life. I know that it is not right for everyone. I know that for most, the conversion process is not something they view as worth the time and effort. And that is okay. No one HAS to be Jewish. No one should EVER be coerced, manipulated, or forced into conversion.

If someone chooses to convert, it is because THAT PERSON wanted to. They saw something of value in the teachings and community. I think that means so much more than “convert or you’re going to burn for eternity because you are a bad person.”

[wisdomfish]

THE FREED ATHEIST

Naturalism is the belief system that regards the natural, material, and physical universe as the only reality. Nature is the whole show. This viewpoint is often characterized by corollary beliefs such as monism (all reality is one), materialism (reality is ultimately matter), antisupernaturalism (all supernatural explanations are to be rejected a priori), scientism (only the scientific method yields “truth”), and humanism (humanity is the ultimate outcome, hence “value”).

According to naturalism, everything (things, people, and events) can be reduced to “matter in motion.” Everything is reducible to, or explained in terms of, certain fundamental natural phenomena (physics, chemistry, and biology). Carl Sagan expressed the position of strong naturalism in a famous statement in his television series Cosmos: 

“The cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be."

Thus, If God is dead and the grave our final destination, 

"nothing would be immoral any longer, everything would be permitted, even anthropophagy [i.e., cannibalism]."

They [i.e., atheists] are now free, if they so choose, to become nihilists or sadists or solipsists on their own account. 

Some theories of 'the Superman' [Ubermensch] derive from atheism, and a person who thought that heaven and hell were empty could conclude that he was free to do exactly as he wished. The fear that this might be the outcome-well-expressed by Fyodor Dostoyevsky-underlies many people’s reluctance to abandon religious dogma.

Not all showed such reluctance. Ted Bundy being one such person,

"Then I learned that all moral judgments are “value judgments,” that all value judgments are subjective and that none can be proved to be either “right” or “wrong.” I even read somewhere that the Chief justice of the United States had written that the American Constitution expressed nothing more than collective value judgments. Believe it or not, I figured out for myself what apparently the Chief Justice couldn’t figure out for himself: that if the rationality of one value judgment was zero, multiplying it by millions would not make it one whit more rational. Nor is there any “reason” to obey the law for anyone, like myself, who has the boldness and daring — the strength of character — to throw off its shackles. I discovered that to become truly free, truly unfettered, I had to become truly uninhibited. And I quickly discovered that the greatest obstacle to my freedom, the greatest block, and limitation to it, consists in the insupportable “value judgment” that I was bound to respect the rights of others. I asked myself, who were these “others”? Other human beings, with human rights? Why is it more wrong to kill a human animal than any other animal, a pig or a sheep or a steer? Is your life more to you than a hog’s life to a hog? Why should I be willing to sacrifice my pleasure more for the one than for the other? Surely, you would not, in this age of scientific enlightenment, declare that God or nature has marked some pleasures as “moral” or “good” and others as “immoral” or “bad”? In any case, let me assure you, my dear young lady, that there is absolutely no comparison between the pleasure I might take in eating ham and the pleasure I anticipate in raping and murdering you. That is the honest conclusion to which my education has led me after the most conscientious examination of my spontaneous and uninhibited self.

[Kenneth Samples; Mitch Stokes; Fyodor Dostoevsky; Christopher Hitchens; Ted Bundy.]

[truthandlove]

Some are asking: "How do we show mercy and love without compromising or affirming sin?"

This question shows a total lack of understanding. It shows a DANGEROUS confusion between God's love and human social niceness.

We show mercy and love by NOT compromising or affirming sin. To be friendly with sin is abuse and the opposite of love. To not confront sin is to enable a person's slide into hell.

We show love by speaking raw truth on the matter! Love WARNS. Love DISRUPTS and CONFRONTS all lies. Love is not niceness. Love is disruptive truth that does not play with or tolerate that which destroys.

Exactly, you love by not tolerating it. Your bad behavior is unacceptable and will not be tolerated. This is because it is damaging you and those around you. For this reason, since I care about you, I will not let you do this around me and to whatever degree I can control. I am acting on what is best for you, whether you feel that or not. Because degradation/compromise will not be tolerated, we can foster that which is truly good and beneficial. Here are the exact boundaries and here are the exacct repercussions / consequences for violating those boundaries. You will be held 100% accountable because that is what love does. They confusion between love and niceness has us DOING TOO LITTLE TOO LATE, and thus becoming an ACCOMPLICE to evil, a COLLABORATOR with degradation. To be soft on evil IS evil.

As I posted yesterday: The FALSE church and the FALSE gospel tries to make Christianity into something comfortable and entertaining. It thus utterly misses the BIBLICAL ADVENTURE of submitting to Christ and fighting evil. By failing to fight evil, it strips people of meaning and purpose. Sadly, it puts them to sleep instead of vibrant and responsive to the Holy Spirit.

IF YOU ARE ASKING: how to be firm against evil while also being soft on evil... aka how to love BIBLICALLY while also being SOCIALLY NICE, then such a question shows a fundamental lack of comprehension as to what is at stake. Our culture has swung RADIALLY over to the side of tolerance and niceness towards sin, lawlesness... and the results are predictably DISASTROUS. So don't be part of the problem, friends.

Come back to REAL love. Come back to Godly love that confronts and disrupts evil, EVEN AT THE RISK or rejection and being misunderstood. If you are afraid of refection, or accusations, of being misunderstood, then you fundamentally CANNOT love as Jesus demonstrated love in the 4 Gospels.

Know that REAL REAL REAL love has never been nor will ever be mainstream or socially acceptable. You cannot be a lover AND be socially acceptable at the same time, so choose one of the other. If you try to do BOTH, you run squarely into the destroyed society we see all around us today.

Love BOLDLY. Jesus does not just "love", He loves HEROICALLY. And this is EXACTLY what your heart was made for - heroic love. I suggest this book to disabuse you of rampant and dangerous confusion between social niceness and Biblical love. Without courage and risk, there is no genuine love. The book talks about how to hold various kinds of sinful/evil people ACCOUNTABLE in a way that fosters change.

Let me quote the summary of the book:

We’ve come to view love as being “nice,” yet the kind of love modeled by Jesus Christ has nothing to do with manners or unconditional acceptance. Rather, it is disruptive, courageous, and socially unacceptable. In Bold Love, Dr. Dan Allender and Dr. Tremper Longman III draw out the AGGRESSIVE, UNRELENTING, PASSIONATE power of GENUINE love. Far from helping you “get along” with others, Bold Love introduces the outlandish possibility of making a significant, life-changing impact on family, friends, coworkers―even your enemies. Learn more about forgiveness, maturity, and seeing others through Jesus’ eyes.

[choppedearthquakecheesecake]

What are morals?

We made them, didn't we?

Our morals are made so that others can feel comfortable. How would you feel if a random person on the street didn't mind killing you? Like it was nothing but a normal conversation about the weather.

They are all for selfish reasons

Our morals. Be kind so you wouldn't hurt people's feelings. Be accepting of others, so they wouldn't feel left out even if you don't want to associate with them. Put others before yourself, so that they may benefit by your generous attitude

Good labels to have, like kindness, thoughtfulness, empathy, forgiveness, are all to benefit the person in front of you. Not yourself

Why do you think so many people drop you after you stop being a people pleaser?

Why do you think we feel the need to antagonize someone?

The answer? To make ourselves feel better. Simple. We hate to see qualities in others that we recognise in ourselves and see as 'bad' so that they don't hurt our ego. The blazing need to feel stronger

Everything, and anything in today's society, in every aspect of our being, is to benefit us as as a whole. To be kind to our ego, to our hidden want to be better, to make us feel like we are worth something again

Being kind to people is just to make them feel better. Not yourselves. And that's our morals. The very begining of your thoughts. The very essence of your every day decisions. Because you would rather put somebody else's well being above your own, rather then think if you are the one that actually needs to receive the same kindness. Forgive yours enemies? Because they've made a mistake and don't want to live trough with the consequences

Murder tho? It makes us feel alive, like so many killers have spoken before. We read about them, watch them take a big part in our daily lives trough the media.

Feels good doesn't it?

The thought of holding somebody else's life at the palm of your hand, the mind clouding power of having control over a completely different being other than you. But, it wouldn't benefit the said being, would it? Not a her, nor a him or they, an it. We operate off of fear. Not being seen, of being an outcast, of not being the center of attention, of being rejected, of uncertainty, of betrayal, of being hurt. Killing goes against all of that, right? It's in the very essence of our fears, of feeling somebody control you in that very moment. Makes you think- do I really deserve this? Is this how It end? I don't want to die. I'm scared. Can somebody even help me?

Yet, our morals are what's stopping it

A random person on the street. Can you imagine? Wandering on with your day in fear of who could be the next one that kills you? What would happen, if our darkest fears were put into the spotlight?

Look around you. Everything you see, was made to benefit you. To make life easier, more comfortable than it would be otherwise. Same things to protect us from our greatest fears, like drowning or height. Safety webs. Lifeguards. Better tasting food? To bring a sense of comfort or belonging. We crave comfort in our everyday broken-like state, just to feel warm. It's in our very nature, at the very fundamental level of our instincts

So I shall ask again, what are morals?

[for-the-love-of-javert]

Here are my thoughts on Javert's Ending

Firstly I think this was totally a spare of the moment thing. he did not pre-plan to end his life, and perhaps had no plans at all to do so until the moments between leaving Jean Valjean after saving Marius and actually leaping into the watery depths of his final doom. When I read the chapter (I have read it a few times online now), Jarvert Derailed, I see a man in my mind who is not just falling apart mentally and emotionally but a man who is realising that a) he is no different to the other human beings in society whom he had long since, not only isolated himself from but chosen not to believe himself to be like them. But also the premise that he had constructed his entire existence on, Law & Justice were fundamentally flawed and that also made him fundamentally flawed as a man.

He was no longer the person who he had always believed and made himself out to be and this caused an identity crisis for him. He's always believed that bad people could not be redeemed and that people were either good or bad with no room in between for any possibility of improvent. On realising this was wrong and that the very thing that was the fundamental core of his existence was flawed/wrong (Law & Justice) he could not make sense out of it and nor could he see any way of changing his beliefs and ways in order to fit in with the rest of humanity. I wouldn't like to guess whether he realised at any point before he jumped that he set himself up for his own fate by brainwashing himself into such a faulty mindset.

Reflecting back on how grotesquely traumtising it must have been for him to be born and grow up within a prison. I strongly suspect he was depressed all of his life, afraid of being rejected and hurt and not wanting to be anything like his parents who were both criminals he sought to better himself but while doing this he created a persona for himself that he wore like a suit of armour so he was protected from all the things humans normally experience such as love, having fun, socialising, having friends, marriage, family etc. Very much a loner and introvert I think Javert likely had Schizoid Personality Disorder (not to be confused with Schizophrenia. They are two different MH conditions), By the time he gets to the bridge and decides to jump his entire life probably flashed in front of his eyes or most certainly played in his mind like flashback's, he had nobody, nothing other than a successful career. No love, not much of a life other than his work which he constructed his existence around) no friends, NOTHING! The poor bastard was probably so mentally fucked he couldn't control his emotions and no longer knowing who he was and not knowing how to move forward and find out, improve and change he saw no other way out of his misery.

The breakdown of his mind and identity was too much for him and he couldn't cope with it. these days there is help for people who have these problems, my own father had 2 mental breakdowns in his life (he died 5 1/2 years ago) and I saw him go through it. He was suicidal one time andleft a note for me and my mum but didn't actually do anything to harm himself. I also struggle with depression and anxiety and the fuckery that goes on in the mind is beyond anything I've ever experienced. Poor Javert. it wasn't all his fault and also imo he wasn't 100% wrong in his belief that bad people can't be redeemed. I believe that there are some bad people who can never be redeemed and should never be allowed into society ever again. Javert is a complex and flawed man and often seen as the villain in Les Mis though this is entirely wrong, because hes not. He is grossly misunderstood.

But alas, I still love him

What are everyone's thoughts on Javert unaliving himself & his reasons for doing it?

I'm asking mostly out of genuine idle curiosity. But, I have seen numerous opinions on this and yes I have my own which I will publish soon. I'm just interested in whether anyone has any other ideas to add to the act itself and reasoning behind it other than whats written in the book. Earlier I watched a video of an interview with a Les Mis star who gave a different set of ideas for why Javert takes himself out of existence. As someone (meaning myself) who is studying mental health I look at Javert's ending from a number of angles. What do you guys think?

Footnote: I'm going to buy the novel next payday and read it again as it's been years since I last read it. However, I have read the chapter of Javerts ending online and it's one of the most beautifully written chapters I've ever read in any novel/book imo. I know it's a bit naughty to read a later chapter before the earlier ones but, well, errrrm........................never mind, I did it so bit me!

[fangirleaconmigo]

Do you think it's bad for a cis woman to read gay smut fanfictions or the opposite, as it's not really about exploring the reader's own sexuality?

Hi Anon,

I know this question is controversial in fandom, and liking peace and quiet as much as I do (and disliking Discourse as much as I do), it would be much smarter for me to just delete your ask.

However, I have some extremely strong feelings about this, so I’m going to dive in and hope for the best in how it is received. (famous last words) It is going to be long, because I do think it warrants careful thought. The question of shame, fetishization, and homophobia is an important one, so I will address that. This may be a lot more than you wanted, but asking me any questions about morality is going to open up a huge ol can of worms. I am a wordy bitch. So here we go.

Firstly you ask, is it ‘bad’. To explain my own personal system of morality, my measurement for whether something is bad always boils down to, does it hurt people or does it help people? And when the thing we’re judging is a personal action someone has taken, I ask myself, is this person making a choice for themselves (as is their right to do) or are they making a choice for other people?

Obviously this can get very complex. I studied political philosophy in college, so I know that when you are in the fuzzy areas, you can debate these things until the end of time. People are still arguing over moral ideas put forward centuries ago. BUT that is the basis, the starting point for my own system of morals.

So. Does reading fiction in private, or being horny harm others or even affect others? No. Obviously not. Does it help anyone? Yes! It helps the person reading it! People really really really underestimate how much pleasure, a release, a bit of serotonin, can turn your mood and therefore your mental health around. I’m all for profound emotional shit, but let’s not overlook the fundamental role simple things like pleasure, fun, play, and release make in our quality of life and mental health. Eat a cookie! Smell a flower! Laugh! Orgasm! It’s all the good brain chemicals, folks.

That’s even setting aside (for the moment) the more profound ways reading smut can help you with your own trauma, shame, or general desire to explore your sexuality. It’s also even setting aside the way that smut fics often also have strong emotional elements of love, connection, learning to trust, and healing from trauma. I am setting that aside because even though it is true, it is not necessary to my argument.

So, it doesn’t hurt anyone (I will get to the fetishization question, bear with me.) And it is usually great for you. Or not! You’re a human being. You get to decide what is best for you.

Further, asking “should a woman with X gender identity and X sexuality be reading gay smut of two men” requires a few things. It implies that I am going to pass moral judgement on someone for what fiction they read, and base that judgment on their gender identity and sexuality. So, it requires me to know what that gender identity and sexuality is. Then, it requires me to say...you should or should not be reading that.

So my first issue with that is that I always reject efforts to police, restrict, or gatekeep art. Yes, even horny art is art. Even art created to provoke a sexual response, which many people (often very religious people, but also a subset of online fandom activists) consider a “lower” or “base” function of the human experience, IS art. (I don’t believe the human experience can be dissected in that way, but that is neither here nor there.)

Just as importantly, I viscerally recoil from any effort to police people’s gender or sexuality to see if they are allowed to read (or are just shamed for reading) certain material. Just. Whooooeeee, no thank you. Dear god, no.

Setting aside the fact that people’s sexuality and gender evolve, and they may not even know how to label themselves, this mentality, this sort of approach, often requires people to ‘out’ themselves. It demands that they publicly disclose their own sexual and gender identities in order to enjoy fiction in peace. It is, and I cannot stress this enough, toxic, abusive, and always damages queer people far more than anyone else. It is the exact opposite of queer liberation. Please look up Isabel Fall. There is an article on Vox that thoroughly walks you through one example of people shaming someone and demanding their identity, sending a trans woman into the hospital, and back into the closet.

Cishet white men literally do not give a fuck what you think about what they read. It is always and I mean ALWAYS LGBTQ people that suffer under the policing and forced outing of sexuality and gender. It also stinks of fascism.

I hear people saying “we aren’t burning books, it’s not censoring, relax.” What if we aren’t actively restricting material? What if we just judge, stigmatize, and shame in order to bully straight people into changing their reading habits? Isn’t that ok?

And what kind of disaster would we call upon ourselves if we don’t force anyone to out themselves? I mean, if you just ‘let’ lgbtq people do what they want without disclosing, you could get a bunch of straight cis women slipping through! They could just be out there! In their homes! On their devices! Being horny for fun!!!

I’m completely fine with that.

I am aware that the conversation happening in fandom spaces is whether it’s inherently fetishizing for women to think two men together in fiction is hot, and whether the smut is the cause of a tendency to fetishize gay men. Since I care a whole lot about fighting homophobia, I’ll take that seriously and address that.

People always use the example of “but how is this different from men lusting after lesbians? Don’t women hate it when men fetishize lesbians? How is this different?” That is always the question. “What if the genders were reversed?”

So I am going to start there.

As a gay woman, I can tell you, what a man beats it to in private is his business. I could not be less interested in the details of that. It doesn’t affect or harm me. It is literally none of my business.

What harms me is when a man mistreats gay women. When he thinks he can ‘convert’ a woman, says that she hasn’t had the right dick yet, or asks gay women to perform for him.

And I can say with confidence that men reading explicit material about two women has zero to do with this.

(People often bring porn into this, but bringing real human beings performing sex into the equation would require a broader ethical conversation and you asked about smutty fiction, so I’ll keep it focused on that.)

So, to really drive this point home, we need to separate two concepts out.

Sexual attraction vs dehumanization.

Sexual attraction is being hot for someone. It is morally neutral before you have acted on it in a way that involves another human being.

Dehumanization is seeing someone as less than human in some way. Dehumanization is when people believe they have the right to touch, harm, or even kill another person. It makes people believe that another human doesn’t doesn’t need or deserve to decide what happens to their own body. Dehumanizing is how you get young army recruits to kill complete strangers. Dehumanization facilitates bigotry. It shuffles sexual assault under the rug. It devalues life.

Misogyny is a form of dehumanization. It is a form of violence. It is what causes men to feel entitled to demand sexual favors from a woman, and to disregard her sexuality and autonomy. It is not sexual attraction. It is misogyny.

And you do not “get” or “catch” misogyny from smutty fiction.

When men are still boys, before they even pick up a device or a book, they are taught to see women as commodities. They are taught by their parents, their pastors, even CHILDREN’S MEDIA that sexual harassment is comedic, stalking is romantic, and women are prizes to be won. That if they achieve certain milestones required of men, they are entitled to a ‘prize’ of the woman they desire.

Misogyny is systemic. It is everywhere. It’s in the water, the air of our society, no matter where you live. It is global. The thing that makes men walk up to women and demand their bodies is one thing: sheer, mind boggling, entitlement. Audacity. Gall. Fucking nerve. Insidious misogyny.

I know this sounds dramatic to people who don’t experience it. But think about it. Every time someone tells a girl that she is ‘mean’ for not responding to a ‘nice’ guy's advances they are saying...you are a commodity to bestow on someone as a reward. You are not someone who gets to just simply have preferences. That is for ‘real’ human beings. This kind of mentality, in the mind of a violent angry person, is quite literally why men kill women for breaking up with them.

(I know that men, and people of all genders, suffer abuse and violence against them. I am not denying that, I am just having a conversation focused for the moment on violence against women.)

NOW, the constant violence against women in this context (and you may not experience it, but please look at the numbers for rape and domestic violence and other gendered violence) has made people CONFLATE men’s sexual desires with predation.

That is how you get people who profess to be leftists and care about oppressed peoples treating the ENTIRE CONCEPT of men’s attraction to women as predatory and therefore stigmatizing and demonizing the entire concept of sex and men's sexuality. I’ve heard people talk about leftist puritans online and I think a lot of stems from a misguided reaction to a society that allows sexual predation to become rife. No, darlings, no.

The problem isn’t men or their sexuality. The problem is misogyny.

If we are to have even a prayer of a healthy, kind society, we need to separate those two things out. Get a crowbar. Pull them apart. Don’t allow the patriarchy to poison you against something that is an important, fundamental part of who we all are! There is nothing dangerous or shameful or predatory about men being sexually attracted to women.

If men think women are hot as fuck? If they want to read about or think about hot gay ladies together in order to get off? Shit, me too, man!!! ME FREAKING TOO.

We can apply this to the concept of women fetishizing gay men. When we talk about women fetishizing gay men, we are talking about women who ask creepy intrusive questions. Who call gay men demeaning pet names against their wishes. Who touch them without their consent. Who go to gay clubs just to treat it like their own personal entertainment and make everyone feel uncomfortable and on display. These are women who don't give a shit about the personal boundaries or comfort or well being of gay men.

This behavior is revolting. But the root of that behavior isn’t lust. It is homophobia. Homophobia isn’t just ‘I hate gay people’ or ‘I want to beat up gay people’ or ‘I think they shouldn’t get married'. It is also, ‘gay peoples’ sexuality isn’t real or important, and it just exists to entertain me or get me off.’

Again, we are taught homophobia from the cradle in a thousand different insidious ways. People have their homophobia deeply rooted far before they even find out what AO3 is, my friends. Homophobia is a violence. It is evil. It is systemic.

And we cannot combat it without NAMING it. Without UNDERSTANDING IT. Bigotry is baked into our society (whichever one you live in). You have to learn to IDENTIFY IT to COMBAT IT.

And to do that, I am begging people, BEGGING THEM, my god I am on my knees people, (cue Boyz II Men, down on bended knee) to learn the difference between sex and violence. Between attraction and assault. We don’t have a prayer of eliminating bigotry or the shame and stigma around sex until we do that.

Because the stigma and shame we attach to our bodies and to sexual desire (or lack of sexual desire, ace people are valid, all level of sexual desire is valid) are pernicious, violent, and toxic to our self worth and to our very spirits.

This goes back to the question I asked earlier. If we aren’t forced outing people or actively censoring material, isn’t a little shame and bullying ok just to keep the straights on their toes?

It really is not.

Please take it from me, a person with a metric fuckton of experience working through PTSD, depression, anxiety disorder, and dissociative symptoms, most of it due to sexual abuse as a child, that shame about your body and your natural desires (or, again, lack of) is what keeps their boot on your neck. It is what keeps you from healing. It makes you live a half life. It steals joy and health and peace from you. It is the enemy of the human spirit.

My god! There is nothing wrong with experiencing sexual desire for fictional characters or scenarios! There's nothing wrong with being horny in your own house! Lol Just imagine the damage that kind of shame and stigma does to people!

I was raised by fundamentalist Baptist right wingers. They tried to teach me the same thing. That the natural things my body did were shameful and disgusting outside the bounds of a marriage to a Christian man. It turned out all that did was make me a perfect target for predators because no matter what happened I would always feel at fault.

Besides all the abuse, I was also told point blank by my father and my pastors that gay people are all sexual predators, child molesters, and deserve to be executed. You may not see much of this attitude anymore in public spaces like twitter or tumblr. But it is still very very common all over the world. In fact, it is more common than not. And I internalized that to the point that even as a grown woman I am not whole. I still have work to do to get rid of the shame I have around my own sexuality. But I will get there!

And reading sexy fiction online (along with a metric fuckton of therapy, self help books, meditation, several inpatient hospitalizations, and, well, you get the picture, I’ve done a lot of stuff) helped me work through some of the damage that did to me.

So….thanks, sexy fic writers! (I’m going to talk to the sexy fic writers for a second) You cannot know how much you have helped me! Even all the fics that are ‘just’ pwp or ‘just kink’. You cannot know! It has been a process of shedding shame and being able to face up to who I am after having a whole bunch of self loathing dumped into my brain while it was still mushy and forming.

And reading sexy fic that doesn’t contain any representations of my own body has been really, really important to ease into learning to accept myself, because it offers me a space that will not trigger any hatred or shame I have attached to my own body. That is how it has helped me.

But it doesn’t have to ‘help people’. It can just be fun.

So, when women enjoy smut of two men, and people point and say “Look! Look! Those women aren’t gay. They’re just...(gasp, choke) attracted to men!!! And therefore!!! They like two men together!!!” as though it is just a fucking S C A N D A L. I just. It’s hilarious. Most people are horny, and GOD FORBID, some of them like men! (MEN?? NOOOOO, NOT M E N) Let me notify the church real quick. Let me clutch my pearls. Light some flares. Call the red phone. Turn on the bat signal. Help, Batman, help.

So, dear anon, I don’t know why you asked the question. I don’t know whether you believe it is bad, or whether someone has told you it is bad and therefor you feel bad about yourself, but my answer for you and women of any sexual or gender identity who love gay smut, I promise that you are not inherently bad.

Certainly, if people are like ‘I don’t trust women who only ship men’ or if they have critique about the way fics are written, that is their right. You must respect their feelings and their decisions about what they read and who they associate with. They have the right to feel however they want, and read whatever they want. Being a person is complex, and we all have our own perspectives.

But as for you? Being inherently bad? No, no, no.

And as for gay men, I can guarantee you that the absolute last people on planet earth to be horrified by an attraction to men, are gay men.

Just don’t treat real people like they exist to be your little pet or that their queerness exists to fucking entertain or serve you.

Just don’t confuse fiction and reality. That should be easy enough. One is words on a page. The others are living, breathing, human beings.

[dukeofriven]

Saw a really bad take today that basically boils down to "why bother separating art from the artist when there's so much other art out there: just go enjoy the other art. Nobody cares if you have fond memories of the old art just go make new ones lol."

It’s bad for a few reasons. Let’s get down to cases. (Warning: I talk about Barthes.) 1) That's not how brains work. I can’t tell someone to stop being in love with someone. I can’t tell someone that their favourite city is a hellhole. I can’t even tell someone to stop enjoying kale. I mean... I can, but not with any expectation of a serious result. Neither you nor I can usually meaningfully affect the desires, wants, and tastes of others: we can provide counterfactuals to taste, such as ‘the person you’re in love with is cruel to me and other people you care about maybe you shouldn’t love them,’ or ‘LA is a vapid town full of vapid people and it smells bad you shouldn’t like going there,’ or especially ‘kale was forged in the darkest pits of Utumno by the dark lord Melkor in mockery of spinach and your mouth cringes at the flavour stop eating that shit,’ but that usually has no effect. And that’s fine. That’s how brains work. Especially in the neuro-divergent community, in which hyper-fixations are something people can have really no control over, swanning-in and telling someone to just... like something else, telling someone to just abandon the thing their brain has subsumed into its quintessence as a form of day-to-day stability, their wellspring of pleasure in a brutal word—that’s not going to work (and a smug little ‘lol’ at the end of your post does not change the fundamental rudeness of the imperative.)

2) Especially in regards to bigger media franchises (and speaking as someone who finds critique really important), there's something unhinged in acting like we can all just divorce ourselves from things that have had inescapable impact on culture because we don’t like them, either from a taste standpoint or a moral standpoint (although the two are far too often conflated these days.)

To pick an example at random: The Mists of Avalon is one of the most important books in all of feminist fantasy. It is extraordinarily influential and traces of it can be found in the writers who followed in its wake, writing homages, writing counters, all encouraged or driven by these later writers relationships to Mists. Mists of Avalon’s author is, alas, someone whom we would now, socially, very much like to shove down the memory hole, but we cannot reverse the effects of Mists. It will never go away, and to pretend that it has—to act as though it never existed, or that by not acknowledging it and its influence (or, perhaps more crucially, by not studying it or engaging with it to understand why everything that came after it owes it a debt) is the morally correct choice is an approach to art that I reject. It is based on a wrong-headed belief that art should only ever be a form of comfort, both textually and meta-textually. The viewpoint seems to be that if the art has a ‘problem,’ if it cannot be fully comforting, then it should be abandoned. Absurd. Idiotic. Juvenile. We hobble ourselves as critical thinkers (which we should always strive to be)  when we ignore these nested layers of understanding—the strata of pop culture—that everything is built on. I find that dangerous. If you don’t know what came before then you can’t understand what got you here or where you’re going, and you don’t really comprehend all that a text might be trying to say. All sorts of important things fall through the cracks when you start ignoring any art you find personally distasteful.

3) If you cannot separate art from artist then you're going to lose a lot of good, interesting, or challenging art, particularly in places where the divergence between your opinion and the artist is relatively small. For every criminal whose work you might reasonable find no longer palatable, there's other nuanced authors for whom you are simply not similar. I disagree with Tolkien in several major ways, but I think excising his art out of culture or simply my life results in a much poorer experience of living. Which leads to:

4) The farther back you go the more art and artist are intrinsically divorced because we simply don't know all that much about the artist. Most great paintings are functionally anonymous, and there are entire centuries where biographies (at least to the degree modern fandom content consumption seems to demand) essentially do not exist. We cannot study Shakespeare and know if the man was more distasteful than we might like in his personal life. I cannot promise you that Shakespeare was never gross to someone in a bar. I cannot promise you he never pressured people unduly, or scammed people out of money, or defended a really gross friend. I cannot prove that away from his writing he wasn’t gross to women, or queer people, or foreigners, that there was not the Tudor equivalent of Twitter receipts for scandalous, problematic behaviour lurking in his life.  We just don’t know enough about Shakespeare to speak with much certainty on his moral virtue as an artist—and that needs to be okay. We actually need to separate art from artist more, because the assumption that social media has brought is that we should have intimate, daily access to an artist’s life, opinions, political beliefs, and even location. That’s wrong. That’s grotesque, and intrusive, and it is just messed up! No! You don’t need to know anything about an artist to enjoy their work! Shit, you shouldn’t have to know anything about an artist to consume their work if the work gives you pleasure, or interest, or does anything to you that art is meant to do. Despite the extremely bad fandom interpretation, Roland Barthes’ Death of the Author (which, hey, opens with an sentence that some might well consider transphobic, so are we going to declare Barthes problematic and stop using Death of the Author to justify our awful fan fic choices? I mean that would require any of you to have ever read it, but, y’know...) does not argue that the author had no influence on the content of a work, that an author’s beliefs, politics, and choices can be separated from (or, more specifically, ignored-in)the text—especially if we don’t like it. Barthes’ argument is, in fact, that that act of transmission, the alchemy of art-creation, forever sunders a work from its author by the very nature of language itself. Even should I tell you the extremely autobiographical short story of “yesterday I went to see Bob’s Burgers: The Movie. It was a delight and I think you should go,” that sentence is not truly about me, but the crafted “I” of the story: I, the real person, am not the I of the thrilling tale of the trip to the cinema. The author is dead: they cannot live in their work because the moment it is transmitted is no longer a living moment. (Italo Calvino covers the same strange nature of I-as-Character in his seminal work of metafiction If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller...)

In other words, though the author can never be absent from their work, meaning in art can only ever come from what you, the observer, bring to it. As Barthes puts it: “Every text is eternally written in the here and now.” No understanding of an author as a person is needed, necessary, or arguably even desirable when approaching art: your connection to it, how you understand it, what it means and how you are shaped by that meeting, exists only in the present, in the act of engaging with the art. (For the record I think Barthes is somewhat too encompassing in his beliefs, I don’t agree with him in full, but the underlying point is: art can not only be separated artist, art is always separate from artist. The artist cannot be the art.)

5) Purity culture is boring. According to these bad takes, we must demand ideological compliance with all our consumed art, and we are somehow bad or stupid people when we form connections with art made by problematic, challenging, or perhaps even reprehensible people> This is such a childish complaint. This standard to which all artists and art-consumers must be held is an irrational one. Modern fandom culture seems utterly unable to accept artists as humans: people who err, who have biases, blind spots, and beliefs. I have been around ling enough to see the term ‘problematic’ lose all meaning, to mutate into a yimakh shemo, a denunciation from which there can be no remorse. Modern fandom culture frequently seems to expect a certain level of investment nomadism: you stick with a work until its author errs, at which points you are to immediately move on, abandoning the old thing completely. Again, it is the quote up at the top that inspired this whole tirade: we are to know all aspects of an artist, we are to judge those actions unceasingly, and at the first ‘error’ we are to just abandon the art and find something new. We should simply like something else at will. It’s tiring. It’s boring. And I am sick of the animosity, the smug judgement, the crucifixions and the damnatio memoriæ. I’m just tired of this puritan impulse in which I must justify my pleasures to the masses in order to prove that my free time is spent virtuously. I must be quick to denounce all that is ungodly, and allow no wickedness to sully my heart. I read no evil, I listen to no evil, I ship no evil. Piss off. [Edit: in response to some comments, I should note that yes, there is a distinction between engaging with the art of a problematic artist, and handing them money. While we cannot often just ‘stop liking something’ we discover comes from a morally complicated place, we can quite easily not support an amoral person financially.]

[catgirlsupremacist]

I feel like callout culture is very much the more 'progressive' part of the internet, harassment culture. reminds me of the way people on older internet forums and communities would stalk, harass and bully each other for small infirgmnets which fundamentally affect those with lest social power the most. You mix this in with tumblr's history of being more left leaning, and people's obsession with guilt, victimhood and wanting a stringent set of 'rules' of what right or wrong you get 'callout culture', which sadly doesn't feel very tumblr specific any more at least. I hate to use the term but it very much felt as if people were trying to en masse create a form of 'moral ocd', or fucked levels of catholic guilt for basically 'thought crimes' and emotions.

People very much seem to want an acceptable target or 'freak/weirdo' they can bully, but also feel righteous about it want to punish and bully weather or nor there is an infringement (more like someone broken the 'rules' even if the 'rules' were /regressive or punitive towards certain groups)

And going back especially to victimhood vs abuser/'bad people' vs 'good people' there seemed to be a culture of this person has wronged me in some way therefore they are a wrong and evil person, even if you barely knew the more it was a complicated interpersonal conflict (basically what was very much tumblr kinning communities). Which now become extra public as they are online in a way which make it a 'community' spectacle, you have to let everyone know you were the wronged party! there's a lot you can get into about sexual assault/abuse in particular and the way allegations are both accepted rejected levied and dealt with and people conflating dynamics online, in person and fucking celebrities vs normal people

On top of that you can gain clout and some minimal funding of donations on this site through callouts, it just feels as it's gossip/tabloid press with moral outrage but reskin tumblr users progressive language and buzzwords. There is a form of clout and people attention you can gain through this sort of thing, as well as a constant sort of outrage you get to feel and farm yourself. Plus like the old tabloid press or small town gossip/rumour mill the most acceptable targets to harass stalk and make a spectacle are not those with a lot of power and so transwoman, especially those who dare to have a sexuality degree outside the norm become boogeyman

i kinda feel like lrb is gonna fall on deaf ears because like. the issue is this website has a genuine callout culture and has had it for at least a decade and there's several important groups that affect this. first of all it's the people who write callouts and it's literally always the same people and rit has been the same people for years, who have a little clique of assholes and a lot of followers who will spread their posts. and then there's people who just believe any and all callouts that cross their dash and will reblog without question (people who took "believe victims" to mean "enact revenge on the accused ASAP") and then there's also just the really scrupulous mentally ill people who see anything that guilt trips you into reblogging and do just that. like obviously transmisogyny is a big part of it, but on tumblr specifically it's an issue with how the site works and the sorts of people that are on it.

[sunkcost]

On Jimmy being willing to change himself to however Kim wants, it really hurts my feelings that those lines are almost the exact same as when he’s begging Chuck in “Nacho” (I’d also add to the pile Inflatable where he actually admits he tries to be what they want, and the Fall commentary where they said he steals costuming and lines from everyone else). Like I’m not trying to woobify, but fuck he deserves a little peace with himself, and not just hiding behind a loud and colourful mask.

no, i'm totally with you. there's something so sad about jimmy's desperation for acceptance. i think that's one of the major contributing factors in how he reaches this point. he's constantly chaffing against people's expectations but he also cares so much about what other people think of him. he wants to be wanted. i really never stop thinking about that peter gould quote saying walt turned out to be driven by a desire for power but jimmy's always been driven by a need for approval and acceptance and it's something he never quite gets. i think that one of jimmy's major problems is that he is so fixated on how people see him, even as he doesn't want to be. it's the same problem he has with morality, really, that he's too caught up in external justification.

trying to refrain from getting too into the weeds on it, but if the show is in many ways about the non-existence of objective morality, the idea that there are things which can be existentially proven to be right or wrong, then there's something really perfect about how jimmy's need for external approval is so tied up in his struggle with identity. looking at morality from an existential perspective, the idea is really that if you cannot objectively prove things to be wrong or right then justifying your actions is fundamentally impossible. there's no logical foundation to base your argument on because the ideas of 'wrong' and 'right' themselves are ideological constructs. they only mean as much as you decide to allow them mean. therefore, the idea is more about acting in good vs. bad faith than being wrong or right, deciding what you personally believe to be correct or incorrect courses of action, knowing there's nothing objective to dictate that decision and that you cannot justify it to anyone else. all that to say, jimmy steps outside the law, the socially agreed upon idea of morality, but he isn't ever really able to give up the need to justify his actions to other people. he has left the social standard of moral acceptance but he doesn't have the internal conviction to stand by his decisions when they aren't understood by other people.

i think he has the same problem with identity. he doesn't want to live his life defined by societal norms but he also can't deal with the fact that people reject him when he steps outside of them. there's a constant tension between him not wanting to conform and him wanting to be wanted. he has an identity in there somewhere, i do believe that, but his identity is incompatible with his need for acceptance and so he gets stuck in this awful place in the middle where no one understands or accepts him and he doesn't understand or accept himself. that is my very longwinded way of saying that i completely agree. to me it feels like the only way he can really move forward is to start relying on internal conviction instead of external validation. he has to give up on being accepted, which for him i think is an extremely difficult thing to do. at the same time, there is something about him going from jimmy, a person torn between being who he is and being who people want him to be, to saul, who is neither who he is nor who people want him to be, to gene who is, like he says, a shadow or a ghost, not really a person at all.

i also think it kind of has to do with observation. saul is about controlling how people look at him, even if negatively. on the surface it seems to be about giving up on what people think of him, but i think it's the opposite. i think it's nothing but an awareness of how people think of him, and it's at once an attempt to control it (he can't make them love him but he can make them hate him), and to punish himself (he's existing in his own personal hell, a world where no one understands him and no one wants him). gene is also something like that, but different as well. saul is like a perversion of jimmy, all the things people dislike about him taken to the extreme, playing into their preexisting perceptions even as they don't actually reflect what he wants or who he is. gene is totally average, accepted by people, but not in a real way, because no one knows him well enough for the acceptance to mean anything. jimmy's real identity is still somewhere inside of him but it's not perceived by anyone and so he remains unknown and unwanted. that's a big part of the reason why i don't think further punishing jimmy is the best outcome for the series. it feels like the trajectory of his identity has pushed him to a point where he could either disappear entirely or realize his identity as something outside of other people's perceptions. to me that feels like the only way to stabilize his struggles with morality and identity.

[teabooksandsweets]

It’s a good thing when young adults realise that, though there is NOTHING wrong with liking stuff meant for kids and teens, or sometimes feeling younger, that they are fundamentally adults and, in when it really comes down to it, in the same group as other adults. Like, if you’re in your early twenties, you are closer to people several decades older than you, than to people just a few years younger than you. That doesn’t mean you have to get on or be close with much older people; it doesn’t mean you couldn’t be jolly good buddies with teens. But fundamentally, though not mathematically, 25 is closer to 50 than to 15. Don’t forget that.

This is also especially important when it comes to romantic or sexual relationships. If someone assaults you or gets too close to you in ways that make you uncomfortable then that is ALWAYS wrong. But, say, a much older person is not a creep or pedo just for being attratced to you when you are a young adult – they are a creep and an assaulter when they don’t respect your No. But the same goes for a person your age. On the other hand, being a twenty something who likes cartoons or stuff doesn’t make it okay to be in relationship with a teen – “feeling like a kid” doesn’t change anything. On tumblr in particular many adults like to “categorize” themselves as children, in ways that are truly concerning, especially in their attutude towards actual children.

I do not play down the vulnerability or inexperience of very young adults, nor the complexities of growing up or the fact that legally coming of age doesn’t mean that one isn’t just a full blown adult just now, or the dangers of people who want to exploit just that. But infantilizing actual adults is NOT the solution to that. It’s better to point out that people who are not pedophiles can be really bad people and exploit aspects of a person’s development or life circumstances, rather than to pretend that anyone pushing thirty is in acute danger of becoming a victim of child abuse. It’s also important to point out that mere sexual attraction to an adult person – if unrelated to any sort of misbehavious – is not a sign of perversion, even if that adult person is young. And also that there is a growing problem of young adults who think their “childishness” and youth would justify a sexual or romantic approach to actual kids and teens.

And because this is tumblr, let me repeat:

Sexual assault is BAD. People have to respect your rejection. BUT people are not perverts or creeps or pedos if they are attracted to you when you are a LITERAL ADULT.

You can like and be friends with kids if you’re an adult. You can just... not vibe with older adults, but you need to recognize that they are not some evil different species.

Liking kids’ stuff as an adult is FINE. But it doesn’t make YOU a kid. It does not make the STUFF for adults either. Just deal with being an adult enjoying children’s media.

At a certain age your liking of children should be from the perspective of an adult; not from the perspective of a peer. If you’re a very young adult who’s attracted to an older teen, then that is actually normal – but you’re the one with the responsibility to handle that for yourself and leave them out of it. If you dislike the attentions of an older adult, you are absolutely in the right for that, but don’t pretend that’s because “you’re still a kid”.

People always develop, even adults. People can always be predators, people can always be assholes, and people can always exploit a person’s “deficiencies” or circumstances. But being some years younger than someone else doesn’t automatically place an adult person in a very terrible situation, even if it is a factor to consider in romantic, platonic, professional or other relationships – one of many factors.

[viohra]

This is what it must feel like to be a lead researcher on vaccines watching people freak out and claim that the perfectly good scientifically sound vaccine is causing autism in children and planting 5G mind control chips in adults.

Some of y’all are unironically reblogging from blogs with “jihad” in their url and not thinking “hmm… maybe this person is biased towards something…”

Same typa people who whinge “israel is committing genocide” whilst also tone-deafily chanting “from the river to the sea” like my fucken guy not every war between two different ethnic groups is a genocide and that slogan is literally calling for the removal (re: eradication) of all Jews from “Palestinian land” (also re: historically a lot of this land was co-settled by indigenous Jewish and Muslim peoples; the concept of palestine is quite new as well so the phrase “Palestinian land” is quite problematic altogether). You are misusing the word “genocide”. Stop it.

Look, I was and still am a Palestinian supporter and a criticiser of Israeli policies, but I’m also not a fucking dumbass. I too think Israel shouldn’t exist, but thanks to the brits and french it does and you can’t undo that, so stop thinking that can happen. That’s like saying “decolonise USA” and I do realise some people legitimately think and chant that, but those people aren’t the sharpest tools in the shed but they sure are fucking tools, so maybe don’t try to emulate them? I believe in the 1948 border solution which was rejected by the arabs, and I believe that Israel should remove all settlements in West Bank and reduce (or completely remove) control of Jerusalem to the UN or a dual-government solution with WB, but I realise it’s a pipe-dream at this point.

But idk about you guys but I wholeheartedly do not support religious fundamentalism in any form. hOw CoUlD tHiS hApPeN???? Dude history fucking foreshadowed this.

I also recognise that if this happened to any western nation, it would’ve been far bloodier than what Israel has done. Western nations haven’t been so forgiving when attacked historically.

…

This isn’t a war where one side is the immaculate “good guys” and one side is the horrible irredeemable “bad guys”, both fucking suck. Also if you’re trying to find a moral high ground in a war you’re never going to accomplish that. That being said I don’t side with religious fundamentalists nor people who actively target civilians nor the people who cheer for the former twos’ accomplishments. Which for me means I support a country I hate lol.

I wish people realised that just because one side is the “underdog” does not mean their actions are justifiable.

I didn’t spend my adult life studying the middle east to watch tumblr denizens who’ve never left their western nation make wackass claims about a war that they know nothing about

[flightlessnightingale]

On Lesbianism

I’ll state it at the top here, because many have not understood my stance. The purpose of this essay is not to say that Lesbian cannot mean “Female homosexual.” Rather, my objective is to show that Lesbian means more than that single definition suggests. Female Homosexuals are lesbians, unless they personally do not want to use that label. Now, on with the show: Lesbianism is not about gatekeeping, and I don’t want to have to keep convincing people that the movement popularized by someone who wrote a book full of lies and hate speech then immediately worked with Ronald Reagan is a bad movement. In the early ’70s, groups of what would now be called “gender critical” feminists threatened violence against many trans women who dared exist in women’s and lesbian spaces. For example, trans woman Beth Elliott, who was at the 1973 West Coast Lesbian Feminist Conference to perform with her lesbian band, was ridiculed onstage and had her existence protested. In 1979, radical feminist Janice Raymond, a professor at the University of Massachusetts, wrote the defining work of the TERF movement, “Transsexual Empire: The Making of the Shemale,” in which she argued that “transsexualism” should be “morally mandating it out of existence”—mainly by restricting access to transition care (a political position shared by the Trump administration). Soon after she wrote another paper, published for the government-funded, National Center for Healthcare Technology — and the Reagan administration cut off Medicare and private health insurance coverage for transition-related care.

Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminism is a fundamentally unsustainable ideology. Lesbianism is a fundamentally sustainable existence.

There used to be a lesbian bar or queer bar or gay bar in practically every small town — sometimes one of each. After surviving constant police raids, these queer spaces began closing even Before the AIDS epidemic. Because TERFs would take them over, kick out transfems and their friends. Suddenly, there weren’t enough local patrons to keep the bars open, because the majority had been kicked out. With America’s lack of public transportation, not enough people were coming from out of town either.

TERFs, even beyond that, were a fundamental part of the state apparatus that let AIDS kill millions.

For those who don’t know, Lesbian, from the time of Sappho of Lesbos to the about 1970′s, referred to someone who rejects the patriarchal hierarchy. It was not only a sexuality, but almost akin to a gender spectrum.

That changed in the 1970′s when TERFs co-opted 2nd Wave feminism, working with Ronald fucking Reagan to ban insurance for trans healthcare.

TERFs took over the narrative, the bars, the movement, and changed Lesbian from the most revolutionary and integral queer communal identity of 2 fucking THOUSAND years, from “Someone who rejects the patriarchal hierarchy” to “A woman with a vagina who’s sexually attracted to other women with vaginas”

How does this fit into the bi lesbian debate? As I said, Lesbian is more of a Gender Spectrum than anything else, it was used much in the same way that we use queer or genderqueer today.

And it’s intersectional too.

See, if you were to try to ascribe a rigid, biological, or localized model of an identity across multiple cultures, it will fail. It will exclude people who should not be excluded. ESPECIALLY Intersex people. That’s why “Two Spirit” isn’t something rigid- it is an umbrella term for the identities within over a dozen different cultures. In the next two sections, I have excerpts on Two-Spirit and Butch identity, to give a better idea of the linguistics of queer culture: This section on Two-Spirit comes from wikipedia, as it has the most links to further sources, I have linked all sources directly, though you can also access them from the Wikipedia page’s bibliography: Two-Spirit is a pan-Indian, umbrella term used by some Indigenous North Americans to describe Native people who fulfill a traditional ceremonial and social role that does not correlate to the western binary. [1] [2] [3] Created at the 1990 Indigenous lesbian and gay international gathering in Winnipeg, it was "specifically chosen to distinguish and distance Native American/First Nations people from non-Native peoples." [4] Criticism of Two-Spirit arises from 2 major points, 1. That it can exasperate the erasure of the traditional terms and identities of specific cultures.           a. Notice how this parallels criticisms of Gay being used as the umbrella           term for queer culture in general. 2. That it implies adherence to the Western binary; that Natives believe these individuals are "both male and female" [4]          a. Again, you’ll notice that this parallels my criticisms of the TERF definition of Lesbian, that tying LGBT+ identities to a rigid western gender binary does a disservice to LGBT+ people,—especially across cultures. “Two Spirit" wasn’t intended to be interchangeable with "LGBT Native American" or "Gay Indian"; [2] nor was it meant to replace traditional terms in Indigenous languages.  Rather, it was created to serve as a pan-Indian unifier. [1] [2] [4] —The term and identity of two-spirit "does not make sense" unless it is contextualized within a Native American or First Nations framework and traditional cultural understanding. [3] [10] [11] The ceremonial roles intended to be under the modern umbrella of two-spirit can vary widely, even among the Indigenous people who accept the English-language term. No one Native American/First Nations' culture's gender or sexuality categories apply to all, or even a majority of, these cultures. [4] [8] Butch: At the turn of the 20th century, the word “butch” meant “tough kid” or referred to a men’s haircut. It surfaced as a term used among women who identified as lesbians in the 1940s, but historians and scholars have struggled to identify exactly how or when it entered the queer lexicon. However it happened, "Butch” has come to mean a “lesbian of masculine appearance or behavior.” (I have heard that, though the words originate from French, Femme & Butch came into Lesbian culture from Latina lesbian culture, and if I find a good source for that I will share. If I had to guess, there may be some wonderful history to find of it in New Orleans—or somewhere similar.) Before “butch” became a term used by lesbians, there were other terms in the 1920s that described masculinity among queer women. According to the historian Lillian Faderman,“bull dagger” and “bull dyke” came out of the Black lesbian subculture of Harlem, where there were “mama” and “papa” relationships that looked like butch-femme partnerships. Performer Gladys Bentley epitomized this style with her men’s hats, ties and jackets. Women in same-sex relationships at this time didn’t yet use the word “lesbian” to describe themselves. Prison slang introduced the terms “daddy,” “husband,” and “top sargeant” into the working class lesbian subculture of the 1930s.  This lesbian history happened alongside Trans history, and often intersected, just as the Harlem renaissance had music at the forefront of black and lesbian (and trans!) culture, so too can trans musicians, actresses, and more be found all across history, and all across the US. Some of the earliest known trans musicians are Billy Tipton and Willmer “Little Ax” Broadnax—Both transmasculine musicians who hold an important place in not just queer history, but music history.

Lesbian isn’t rigid & biological, it’s social and personal, built up of community and self-determination.

And it has been for millennia.

So when people say that nonbinary lesbians aren’t lesbian, or asexual lesboromantics aren’t lesbian, or bisexual lesbians aren’t lesbian, it’s not if those things are technically true within the framework — It’s that those statements are working off a fundamentally claustrophobic, regressive, reductionist, Incorrect definition You’ll notice that whilst I have been able to give citations for TERFs, for Butch, and especially for Two-Spirit, there is little to say for Lesbianism. The chief reason for this is that lesbian history has been quite effectively erased-but it is not forgotten, and the anthropological work to recover what was lost is still ongoing. One of the primary issues is that so many who know or remember the history have so much trauma connected to "Lesbian” that they feel unable to reclaim it. Despite this trauma, just like the anthropological work, reclamation is ongoing.

Since Sappho, lesbian was someone who rejects the patriarchal hierarchy. For centuries, esbian wasn’t just a sexuality, it was intersectional community, kin to a gender spectrum, like today’s “queer”. When TERFs co-opted 2nd Wave feminism, they redefined Lesbian to “woman w/ a vag attracted to other women w/ vags”. So when you say “bi lesbians aren’t lesbian” it’s not whether that’s true within the framework, it’s that you’re working off a claustrophobic, regressive, and reductionist definition.

I want Feminism, Queerness, Lesbianism, to be fucking sustainable.

I wanna see happy trans and lesbian and queer kids in a green and blue fucking world some day.

I want them to be able to grow old in a world we made good.