#and i know this is showing my bias and overgeneralizing

[subtract-me-from-your-heart]

Tbh I would need a substantial amount of proof in order to believe an evangelical Christian could be a good therapist

[thestrangestthlng]

How about we just go ahead and exchange some terminology. We put these terms in a box with concepts like BT's 'making up slurs', and BT's doing xyz with zero actual proof; and replace them with some vital information for your everyday lives.

Another thing #they like to do is say that BT's are "textbook whatevers", but you know who actually has a textbook? This bitch.

To understand the hive, one has to understand the mind.

In the behavioral sciences world we study the mind works both in relation to the individual and in relation to society.

Today's lesson is going to be Fallacies in Critical Thinking.

According to Forzano & Gravetter (2016, 2018) "people are not particularly good at logical reasoning".

The key factor in critical thinking is the ability to recognize and avoid fallacies. These concepts are universal when exercising the ability to think critically and rationally regarding any social problem.

Fallacy of Dramatic Instance: This refers to the tendency to overgeneralize by using one or several cases to support an entire argument. Unfortuantely, this one can be difficult to counter due to the fact that the cases are often part of an individual's personal experience and partially based in facts. In order to think critically and avoid this fallacy one must have the ability to recognize that exceptions exist.

Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness: This refers to the tendency to making something abstract into something concrete. Do I really need to explain this in more detail?

Fallacy of Personal Attack: When a person can't back up their argument by reason, logic, or facts they will tend to attack their opponent personally. This is different than a tit for tat or just being mean. This is when someone says something like "BuckTommy wedding when?" and it being quoted with someone saying that all BT's look like naked mole rats, or other nasty shit.

Fallacy of Appeal to Prejudice: This is the one we see most often, I think. This can happen in addition to a personal attack. Debaters will use this fallacy with popular prejudices or passions to convince others of the correctness of their opinions. Isn't this fandom in a nutshell?

Fallacy of Circular Reasoning: Refers to using conclusions to support the assumption that were necessary to make the conclusions. These conclusions don't even have to be based in fact.

Fallacy of Authority: Refers to an argument by an illegitimate appeal to authority. This fallacy appeals in several ways. *the authority may be ambiguous. *the authority may be irrelevant to the problem/debate. *the authority may be pursuing a bias. *the authority may have a vested interest. (Monetized accounts, anyone? *the authority may simply be wrong. And this one is the one that keeps on being the "gift" that keeps on giving in fandoms. Especially when it comes to BNFs. They said it, so it must be true. I just saw a Twitter thread regarding LFJ being (insert all baseless -isms and -phobics mixed in with assumed political affiliations) and every comment under it being like "oh my god, I hate him even more now, I didn't know this. All just assuming that this was true with absolutely zero evidence to back it up.

Fallacy of Composition: Refers to the assertion that what is true for the part is necessarily true of the whole. (i.e. because Buck is now canonically queer, Eddie must be too.)

Fallacy of Non Sequitor: This correlates with nearly all other fallacies; however, it also stands on it's own. It is an argument that does not follow logically from what as preceded it. It is commonly found when interpreting statistical data, but can be for anything. I see it often in media and media literacy. I.e. the common argument that Tommy was wrong and cruel to end the date with Buck. This bad faith argument includes almost all of the fallacies discussed, but especially this one because the concreteness of this assumption does not follow the absolute shit show of a date that we all suffered through.

This is not to say that it is only one "side" or another. Anyone can have this line of thinking; however, if the shoe fits, it should be worn.

We can ALL benefit from better critical thinking skills.

So next time a Bvddie tells you that BT's are "textbook" anything, just remember that often that reference for them has been manipulated to serve their fallacy of appeal to prejudice.

and for your visual pleasure: two people who canonically like each other, with Hen holding the box we're gonna put all those terms in.

I’ll preface this by saying I’m not really a shipper. I just enjoy canon couples on TV Series/films.

Terms I’d like B*ddies to remove from their vocabulary because they don’t know how to use them correctly:

Media literacy: For a group that uses this term a lot you sure do misinterpret everything in this show.

Queerbaiting: Going to expand on this one. A show that’s already been pre established for having queer characters simply cannot queerbait.

Ship baiting: While sometimes you can argue that they could be doing that, that’s only if you look at the show in a very biased manner. You might think this is the case but the general audience doesn’t think the way you do.

Ship war: This isn’t a one tree hill situation where there was Team Brooke Vs. Team Peyton where the middle guy (Lucas Scott) had canonically been with both women. This is people not understanding fanon vs. canon and not being able to just watch the show. It’s like playing quarterback on Madden and thinking you could be better than Patrick Mahomes.

Plot device: everything’s a plot device. Move tf on.

Predator: You sound like crazy MAGA supporters calling everything regarding the LGBTQIA+ community as predatory. Sit down.

Co-parenting: I know this is a big one and discourse was brought up during the hiatus. Oliver and Ryan have loosely mentioned this years ago but it was never to be taken this seriously. Do y’all even know what co-parenting is or are you that big of a donut? Buck is someone who loves his best friend deeply and by extension, his kid too. Him taking care of him frequently does not make him a co-parent. Maybe he is a parental or uncle figure, but he isn’t a co-parent. Also, I swear y’all need to learn how a will works. He is a GODPARENT, not a GUARDIAN. Stfu.

Hag: This especially applies to women, but to say that someone 25-30+ is a hag for still being in fandoms or enjoying tv shows/films is inherently misogynistic. Men are never held to this much criticism for enjoying fictional media, but women aren’t allowed to?

Queer Coding: people of the same sex “looking at each other”, hugging, or having intimate moments all together doesn’t make them queer coded. It could mean that they just love each other that deeply platonically. While representation is amazing and just because you interpret a character as queer coded (just like my ship baiting comment) doesn’t mean others interpret it that way as well. In addition, network TV has stipulations, and also actors are allowed to decline storylines. Ryan has mentioned his character is heterosexual an abundance of times which means (at least for now) that he isn’t willing to go for this storyline.

Dead naming: Y’all construing the fact that Buck wants people like coworkers and some of his former love interests, to saying Evan is his dead name is inherently transphobic because do you even understand what a dead name is? Evan Buckley is shown as being fine with being called Evan by both Tommy and his sister. I’m pretty sure some of his love interests have called him Evan as well.

Fetishizing: You guys saw two hot guys who “looked at each other” and for 6 seasons have wanted nothing but to see those two make out with each other. Those of us who enjoy Tevan saw Buck giddy at the thought of Tommy and have wanted domestic fluff for them since.

Anything to do with racism, homophobia, and misogyny: I’ve seen the way you guys have conveniently weaponized Henren and by extension Aisha/Tracie when you didn’t get the Ryan/Oliver interview, don’t try to act like you’re morally superior. Not to mention wanting a canonically gay man to die in a show and not even holding those who use your ship name to write CSA fics accountable because you’re petty and want to throw hissy fits. Anyone looking at your comments as an outsider would think you’re homophobes and yes queer people can be homophobic.

I do hope you can expand your vocabulary. 🤍

[echoesofadream]

i don't "ship my biases", since jin is my bias. it just seems to be a trend that people who happen to ship taekook also mysteriously happen to be overly critical of jimin and write huge think pieces about how they "don't haaaaate jimin, no, no... but-" yes, you can give constructive criticism but that's his voice. if you like it, great, if not, then why are you here? why are you listening to bts?

taekook love jimin so much and i feel as if none of you guys see that and it's frustrating.

ahhhhh here we go. i knew this would happen hence the overly clear explainations i wrote lest i be taken for an anti. but ill humor you because its fun for me too.

i should have been more clear in my wording, but i felt like i had already written too much to a very small audience to bother clarifying myself. What i meant is that when it comes to stanning artists you are bound to have favorites and for many of us, myself included, this is musically/artistically founded. But also based on things like attractiveness (which is subjective), personal taste, the artists personality etcetc. When you start to like this person more than the other it creates a kind of positive feedback loop; exposure to the person and the thing you liked about the person in the first place makes you like them more and more as you get to know them, and the things you liked you start to love even more because you start to love the person these qualities belong to more. So if i had liked jimins voice more in the beginning i would probably have liked him more overall by now and then his voice would have been even better to me. Basically!

And yeah i only have one bias as well, but taekook are my favorite members, so like i thinks its only natural that i like their relationship most, too, dont you think? So maybe thats not the case for everyone and maybe i overgeneralized but i do think that for most ex. jikookers that jimin and jungkook are their two favorite members. 🤷‍♀️ edit: at least they probably prefer them over taehyung which i feel is only natural due to the above

I am not overly critical of jimin i am critical of all members including taehyung and jungkook. You have seen one post of me where i said i didnt like jimins new song. Do you know my full history of what ive said or thought about the members? In fact i have probably said more critical things about both taehyung and jungkook simply because i am most invested in them. The fact that im even mentioning jimin shows i have an investment in him as well doesnt it? I wanted vibe to be good. I made a post about that tho i think its deleted now. I understand taekookers can be overly critical of jimin but you have no basis for saying that about me. Im just voicing my opinions on my own blog.

Not sure what taekook loving jimin has to do with any of this. Like it feels surreal that you are telling me that. Like i know? I talk about vminkook all the time. Especially vmin because i have a personal preference that makes me for some reason like vmin more than jikook. Oh okay cancelled! Cancelled for not having equal feelings about every single member and ship!!!!!!!<- you btw

Its so funny that you are asking me why i even listen to bts when i literally yesterday made a post about why i like bts and their vocal line especially and why they stand out to me as a group. Where i literally say that if any of the members were excluded their music would be emptier and that they complete each other.

[onecornerface]

"porn addiction” has NOT been debunked (afaik)

It’s sometimes assumed that the concept of “porn addiction” is debunked. I don’t see why I should think so. To be clear, I haven’t studied porn addiction much. So a lot of my claims here are highly tentative.

But here I’ll attempt to modestly unpack just a few things that seem a little messed up about some of the arguments I’ve seen, largely in terms of their underlying assumptions and argumentative structure. I don’t know whether or not many people in psychiatry/etc. are guilty of the sorts of problems I’m criticizing here. They might well not be. At the very least, a lot of lay discourse seems to have these problems.

For all I know, maybe the category “porn addiction” is indeed bunk. But I think this view is often defended on the basis of sloppy thinking, which I aim to challenge here.

Consideration #1. In saying “porn addiction is real” or “porn addiction isn’t real,” it is often unclear whether this is (A) an empirical dispute over what the phenomena are, or (B) a conceptual dispute over whether to classify the phenomena as “addiction” or not, perhaps due to a dispute over how broad or narrow a category “addiction” should be and what the criteria should be for inclusion. This is an important distinction, yet many people completely ignore it.

There is also an important normative question as to whether and why and how much it matters whether we accept “porn addiction” as a legitimate category or not. There is a serious question as to why people care so much, and whether they should care, about the outcome of this debate. It’s not obvious what the answer is. But the question remains unanswered, and (worse) unasked, by many disputants.

Consideration #2. It is pointed out that most people who self-identify as having an addiction to porn are surely wrong. This is true. Most people who self-identify as addicted to porn are religious conservatives who morally disapprove of porn but use it anyway—and use it far too rarely for it to plausibly qualify as an addiction. They mistakenly (but IMO not unreasonably) classify their condition as an addiction, because they continue doing something despite disapproving of it and trying not to do it. I think this is a reasonable mistake, because our society has not given many people the education to recognize good or bad criteria for calling something an addiction. Extremely ignorant and sloppy thinking about addiction is society-wide—not at all unique to religious people who disapprove of porn, who are being unfairly singled out.

Importantly, the prevalence of false positives in self-diagnosis (or in any other diagnosis) does not show that porn addiction isn’t real. Some real conditions are hard to diagnose properly, either due to the complexity or ambiguity of the condition itself, or due to cultural biases, or both (or other factors).

Some people think porn addiction is a dubious category because it is corrupted by a widespread bias of moral disapproval against porn use. This is a serious worry. But as a complaint about the category’s legitimacy, it risks overgeneralizing. The paradigm “real” addiction, in most people’s eyes, is drug addiction. But drug addiction is also probably prone toward over-diagnosis—due to a similar widespread moral bias against drug use. But relatively few people think this is a strong reason to dismiss the category of drug addiction. (I actually think dismissing the category of “addiction” altogether is a respectable minority theory, though. I’ll set this aside here.)

Consideration #3. It is pointed out that porn addiction is not recognized by the DSM-5, so people assume it is not legitimate. But non-drug addictions are quite new to the field of proper psychiatric study, across the board. There is no reason to think the DSM-5 has finished the process of discovering all the legitimate behavioral addictions. My impression is that psychiatrists have said behavioral addictions have not been included in the DSM editions thus far mainly due to insufficient research—not mainly due to research “debunking” porn addiction or other behavioral addictions.

So far, the DSM-5 only accepts gambling addiction as a non-drug addiction. If we think gambling addiction is a real thing, then either (A) gambling is the only non-drug behavior that can lead to a “real” addiction, or (B) some other non-drug behaviors can also lead to “real” addiction.

If gambling is the only non-drug behavior that can lead to addiction, then that’s pretty weird! We’d need an explanation as to why gambling would be unique, and I’m not aware of any compelling explanation (though I’m pretty sure there are some highly speculative explanations). On the other hand, if gambling is not the only non-drug behavior that can lead to addiction, then the possibilities are more open. In that case, I don’t see why we should rule out the possibility that viewing porn is another non-drug behavior that can lead to addiction.

Consideration #4. Many people have serious problems with compulsive porn viewing—even if this turns out to be some addiction-adjacent category like an impulse control disorder, a compulsion, a non-pathological problem, or suchlike, rather than a “real” addiction.

 The casual dismissal of the category “porn addiction” is often expressed in a manner that implies that (A) nobody has any serious problem stemming from their pornography use, or (B) if anyone does have a serious problem stemming from porn, it is solely because of their irrational religious bias against pornography. I agree that religious disapproval of pornography is mistaken. Viewing porn is not intrinsically immoral. But nevertheless many people are seriously distressed by their own compulsive use of pornography. Some of this distress is caused by moral disapproval of their porn viewing. However, I don’t think this fact means their distress is worthy of mockery or dismissal, and I think it would be good for them to have forms of counseling or other services that can help them reduce or eliminate their porn usage if they want to do so. I hold this view for three reasons:

First, it might be the case that some kinds of porn usage are immoral—for instance, it might be immoral to use pornography when doing so conflicts with one’s other obligations. Second, even when one mistakenly believes porn usage is immoral and the porn usage is actually not immoral, the belief system is often a non-negotiable part of the person’s worldview. I think our society ought to provide services to help them stop viewing pornography due to their moral beliefs, even when their moral beliefs are false. If someone is suffering due to false beliefs, but they won’t change their beliefs and we can reduce their suffering (without harming other people), then we should do so. Third, it is likely that not all their distress about pornography is due to moral disapproval of it. It is reductive and implausible to think disapproval of pornography is the only cause of distress around one’s pornography use.

Consideration #5. It is pointed out that a sizable majority of the discourse on porn addiction is basically manufactured by pseudoscientific self-help books and articles, and is deeply tied in with religious fundamentalism and shady movements like NoFap. This is true. And the self-help industry has a long history of making up many fake mental disorders in order to sell books. So it’s possible that “porn addiction” is another such case.

But this is not positive evidence that porn addiction isn’t real. This is an inevitable byproduct of several of the above points. People have problems with compulsive porn viewing; the field of properly scientific psychiatry has not caught up to deal with it; and people are incentivized by religion and culture to overstate the severity of their problem (which can also create or exacerbate their problem). So, predictably, the industry of self-help has stepped in to exploit their ignorance and peddle phony explanations and solutions. If porn addiction were not real, the self-help industry would have invented it. But again, this simply leaves us unclear on the question of whether porn addiction is real.

[justanotherdumpingground]

So, someone on the Choices Discussion Group on Facebook called Victoria Fontaine a "bitch who doesn't deserve redemption", and that pissed me off.

OK, I know Victoria's ultimately a video game character, and not everyone likes the same thing (I'm not trying to change opinions on certain characters), but this overgeneralization of a complex character as a mere "bitch who doesn't deserve redemption" reeks of dismissing a character's depth and the bigger picture just to fit into a narrow-minded view of things. This post is spot on regarding the reasons why Victoria deserves a redemption arc, which I not only agree with but also use for my understanding of her need to have her story properly completed, even if it doesn't whitewash her bad behavior.

Not only that, but Pixelberry's chronic habit of disrupting meaningful storylines like Victoria's in favor of unnecessary screen time for "popular" male love interests shows their mismanagement of what limited time and resources they have. I acknowledge that some popular franchises can flop financially and unpopular ones are surprisingly lucrative, but that's still no excuse to veer away from your intended purpose of the product and give mere scraps to other kinds of players.

I may sound like someone who screams "fuck the silent majority because they never matter", but I also understand that their actions are an important factor in determining a franchise's success. Like, it's no secret Matt Rodriguez and Thomas Hunt are deemed more successful since the beginning and therefore gets more screen time because they appeal to the target audience; the former for his appearance and gender and the latter for the sense of nostalgia for HWU characters. Seth Levine actually qualifies for the former for the same reasons Matt is considered successful. In fact, it has gotten to the point that we don't have to pay diamonds to have him work on Tender Nothings after Markus bailed. Nevertheless, that doesn't excuse any individual reader/player/consumer's narrow-minded bias on certain "types" of characters, whether good or bad.

Honestly, this post has gone off-topic by now, but suffice to say that it's a disservice to Victoria's character to say that she doesn't deserve redemption when she has good reasons why she deserves it.