#by trying to justify your preferences using morality for cookie points.

[uchiha-sensei]

I'll be honest: you buffoons are so overly concerned with ship wars and claiming the moral high ground that you entirely miss what is *actually* wrong with XO Kitty's season 2.

First of all, what happened in S2 is NOT queerbaiting (I'm begging you to stop overusing that word for literally anything you do not like regarding fictional lgbt characters), it's simply bad writing, more specifically rushed development of a script that was more suitable for a 20 episode series.

And that is the main problem with season 2. The choice for plotlines were all wrong, because they'd never had the time to properly develop them in only 8 episodes. That is why Kitty didn't have the time to date girls (despite being interested in Preveena and a solid foundation for dating her being built and then falling apart so quickly) properly; that is why the Gay DramaTM with Yuri fell flat, and so did the sudden fallen out between Yuri and Kitty, despite Kitty being so smitten with Yuri.

[stranger-rants]

You are right about people sabotaging their own characters and ships. I honestly don't understand ship wars, to me is just a bunch of people bullying each other online over what they like/dislike and that is idiotic because we commonly use these spaces to have fun and find people who like the same things we do and maybe become friends with those people. I don't get why people love ruining other people's fun to the point they make others so angry to start fighting back or leave the fandom entirely. When it comes to Steve Harrington, my favorite character, I love almost all ships people have for him: Harringrove (my favorite ship), Stancy (yeah, I'm okay, dw about me), Stonathan (which now holds a dear place in my heart) , Stommy... And I'm capable of understanding the "illegal" ones such as Steve and Max (when they are both in their 20's and it is mostly AU) and Stobin (AU's) and many more. I have tried liking Steddie, I really have and I really want to meet the cool people you say are fed-up of the bullying extreme Steddie and Eddie fans cause... But god it is difficult to like something that has caused too much harm and it sucks these people cannot see what they are doing. Lmao, I feel like that girl from the Mean Girls movie who want to bake cookies and cakes and have peace all around haha

I understand ship wars to an extent. I just don’t love the dishonesty of it nowadays. When I was a teenager, ship wars were primarily a war over preferences that was usually hyped up by the creators of a series to increase interest and revenue. We knew this. While people took it seriously, there was always this underlying understanding that this is all just a part of fandom. This isn’t to say people didn’t take it too far or that there was no bullying involved. This isn’t a “those were the good old days” response. It was just more honest about its absurdity.

Now, you have people writing shipping meta as to why one ship is not only morally superior to another but trying to convince people that shipping is a form of activism. I am not talking about ships that are controversial because they inherently contain disturbing elements. It could be as simple as two relatively “normal” ships being pit against each other with one side arguing that a singular moment of conflict between characters in one ship deems the whole thing too toxic and unhealthy for audiences to support them.

*cough**cough*The Steddie vs. Harringrove ship war that boils down to differences in respectability*cough**cough*

Just be honest is all I ask. Like, you shouldn’t be out here inventing reasons why supporting one ship over another is a matter of social justice. It’s not. You preference something very strongly. You hate the competition. You whine about it. You find shallow reasons to hate the competition. You put up the get off my lawn signs. Then you think for some reason that you need a deeper reason to justify your hate so you Google queer theory and use all the Right Words to convince people shippers of x, y, or z are destroying the fabric of society.

(Not you personally, anon. This is the proverbial “you.”)

LMAO okay. Please be serious…

[rametarin]

We deal with this, “fiction is reality” shit EVERY. GENERATION.

And I mean it comes back among authoritarians playing to sheep EVERY fucking generation on different pretenses.

It always boils down to a bunch of people that are insecure about the effects of culture and media on other people, and as a flimsy pretense/pretext to restrict access to things to other people “in society” for their own safety and sense of security.

And when it comes to, “obscene literature” or illustrations, the source is always jealousy, insecurity and an attempt to reduce other people down to a demographic statistic. Whether it’s reducing black people to a caricature and acting like hip-hop just turns the kids into violent, drug abusing, psychotic felons, or imagining pornography is what turns people into horny fucking do-nothings, it’s always about control.

And we’ve put it off for so long. We’ve put off the conversation about just what demographic these people play to in order to get traction and followers and staying power and warm bodies for their movements. They’re the demographic that makes antis- work, the demographic that screams for censorship because illustrations “hurt them personally,” or “cause men to hurt them.”

I’m talking about women. Particularly, cis women, as trans women are not in numbers enough to affect anything, and it is EXPLICITLY IMPORTANT that the source of the offense and complaint come from the population that are the gateway through which the next generation is born and brought up.

Individual men may be so clueless as to assume the way degeneration works is a person is left improperly or negligently nurtured, and so just make bad decisions because, “they were never taught better.” They embrace the idea that people only do bad shit because, “the society,” isn’t paying attention, or that individual people are just blank slates beholden to the righteousness and morality of the cultural hivemind of said society. That Society is an objective effect, and if bad people exist, it’s proof to them that there’s something wrong with said society.

But individual men know that the bad actions of other men are not caused solely by “male culture,” or the absence of it, or shitty “role models.” They see the shitty natural inborn attitudes of other men, and despite being raised in shitty conditions, naturally develop a good head on their shoulders, and despise actions like that. As men you can’t HELP but grow up watching boys around you make shitty decisions based on shitty impulse control and, no matter how often they’re punished, how much they’re loved, how much they’re compassionately talked to, STILL act the fool and wind up as terrible, stealing, violent adults. As men you can’t do anything BUT reconcile that some people are just fucking shitheads, and the idea as a man YOU should be punished or treated like the “association” of men itself is at fault, smacks of sexism. The same sort of sexism women’s lib supposedly is against- at least, when it happens to women.

Women, however, are not men, are not privy to the thoughts and feelings of men. Men are abstracts to these women, many of whom are so solipsistic or gynocentrist that they just see men as a class of monsters in a videogame. Just a pattern of individuals that surely must all get their code and culture from “society.” Clearly, when there’s bad men about, it’s proof this “society” isn’t doing everything it can to mollify and gentrify those horrible beastly men to make them safe and not dangerous and productive.

These women that see men like living aggregates for society, imagine that in order to “keep men working properly,” they need to not have “bad moral influences,” treating pornography and access to drugs and literature like a cleaning lady treats dirt on linen. They imagine that the only reason rape or murder or theft by men occurs is because “there’s a problem with men, thinking that is okay.” Like the only reason your average man isn’t running around violently raping people or killing them is because they sang enough hymns at church- by force. Or because they were prevented from, “getting deranged by wrongthink.”

So with this in mind, how do they imagine porn affects men, male minds, and this big abstract-turned-monolithic-concept called, “society?”

Well, they imagine fiction is reality. That if “people of lesser intellect” read a thing, then they’ll inherently believe it, because, “it presents itself as factual and reality.” When.. no. That’s not how it works. They believe, absolutely, that without some mechanism there to go, “BUT WE’RE JUST PRETENDING THO, IT’S NOT REAL!” that will inherently make people, whom all have tenuous and toddler-like grasps of reality and object permanence, think a thing in fiction is real and applies to reality.

And naturally, they see men as people of lesser intellect. So they reason, those dangerous statistical anomalies are just men that haven’t been browbeaten, and whom are subject to any given negative influence or writing or opinion or culture that preaches values and ideas incongruent with their preferences, as women. Therefore, they conclude, fiction that does not preach their “good values” is in fact advocating bad ones, bad habits, bad moral character, bad mental health- call it whatever you want based on your generation. It’s ALL THE SAME SHIT. All the same knee-jerk moralism based on justifying societal and institutional use of force to restrict and arbitrate and judiciously enforce and justify dictating censorship and good-think. It’s just a question of where that basis comes from.

And theres’ ultimately no reasoning with that culture of women when they grasp hold of a thing that appeals to them, flatters and justifies their prejudices and biases. You can sit there colorfully or dryly explaining the ways in which this shitty point of view is wrong, much as you can try to walk back a persons beliefs in their homophobia that they base on religious purism or use the purism to validate their homophobia, but you cannot just get them individually to give up those nice, comfortable beliefs.

And when grouped together for mutual support and validation, it becomes this negative-thought, field of fucking SHEEP braying “Nuuuh-uuuh!” and arguing for restriction of content and sanitation and disbarrment from certain subject matter to be in consumable porn or literature or even just art. The only thing keeping them in check being the consequences for vandalism, and the ability for a community or institution to police out the bias usurpers that would seek to enter their foundations and run them on behalf of the values of these easily upset, insecure sheep.

every FUCKING generation, it manifests in some manner. Be they from church ladies, to radical feminists, to intersectional feminists. If you capture the imaginations, insecurities, jealousies, foster and sanction them, interpret them, get young women believing them, participating in the romance that tells them the way to change the bad things or take the edge off the bad men is to foster and enable authoritarianism (be it regional social, regional institutional, or federal institutional) then you have this neverending avalanche of unending support for it. Be it from dictators, or just from pure ideology from a doctrine. They’ll do it. And stubbornly and obstinately believe in whatever compliments their biases, to the contradiction of everything.

And while you can remove a man and his influences on the next gen from the home, from the social radius of the next generation to be a significant source of culture and how they relate to young people, removing women from the equation, from whom the next generation comes from, is virtually impossible. So a male zealot, already susceptible to scrutiny and punishment for being so wild and zealous with their beliefs, can be retaliated against, muted, beaten and removed from relevance until they censor themselves or change their tune.

But you cannot do that to a female human, or women/mothers as a sex, without both women AND men taking it as an attack on humanity at their most prime and kernel. It has to be done with disproportionate authoritarian state power that does not fear mass dissent and violent retaliation, or it isn’t done at all.

So these zealous Karens that embrace wholly these ideas enabling authoritarianism under a banner they approve of, are allowed to propagate unchallenged, and even if challenged, cannot be subdued or subverted. Their own little cliques and echo chambers and lack of desire to even consider their positions are wrong. Any attempt to point the fingers at this very real, disproportionate and characteristic, objective power female humans have just on the basis of their sex and how that relates among them socially, can and will be trash binned arbitrarily as, “sexism.” Despite the fact, it’s absolutely true.

So long as women that believe “society” is an objective, monolithic thing from which, “that other sex” and other women get their marching orders on how to BE what they are, and don’t see them as billions of individuals with their own ambitions, instincts, inborn personality and character flaws, independent of “society’s failures,” believing those people can be saved or corrected IF ONLY WE CENSOR EVERYTHING or make all media “good thing,” we’re just going to have people with illiberal beliefs asserting their dominance and insisting it’s for the soul of the species, society and the planet.

I mean yeah there are male antis and shit, but honestly. Tell me honestly. How many fucking deranged fandom people that are doing shit like mailing cookies with sewing needles backed into them are male gendered or male sexed, either? As uncomfortable as it may be to acknowledge or consider this might have a sexual grounding, I’m sorry. Not acknowledging it is simply rejecting reality.

[max1461]

Ok, there are a number of things I'd like to bring up in response to this.

your entire view is based on the idea that “private property” was invented by the state when that obviously isn’t true – three year olds don’t know about no goddamn state but they do know they don’t want Billy playing with the twuck because MY TWUCK MY TWUCK.

My view is certainly not dependent on the idea that private property was "invented" by the state: there are plenty of intuitive moral principles which a three year old might be familiar with, but which we nonetheless don't construct massive society-wide systems of bureaucracy to enforce by threat of violence. Three year olds often also have an intuitive desire for fairness: "if the other kids all get a cookie and I don't I'm gonna cry" and so forth. You could just as well pick this as the right to enforce at gunpoint —indeed, some people do. But whichever moral intuition you happen to prefer, you cannot deny that taking it from a mere moral intuition to the system by which society is organized takes enforcement, and enforcement takes coercion.

This is something you have to admit if you want society to be governed by any moral principle in practice: it won't just happen, if you want it true you have to make it true. And, factually speaking, making private property real takes a massive amount of force. This is the point I'm trying to articulate. If you are blind to the continuous use of force required to make private property into a functional reality, you will fail to reason coherently about the trade-offs to personal liberty that we must accept in order to do so. And some of those trade-off are immense: consider the huge degree to which freedom of movement must be restricted in order to make private land ownership a reality. Consider the degree to which free speech must be restricted to make intellectual property a reality. I'm comfortable with people arguing that these trade-offs are worth it, this is a claim with which I may or may not agree depending on the case. But to elide discussion of these trade-offs entirely is absurd to me.

This brings me to my second point: not all property is created equal. What has counts as "property" has varied considerably across time and across cultures, and it's not obvious that there even is a one-size-fits-all argument in favor of private property. What it means to own a shovel is very different than what it means to own a house, or a share in Apple, or the concept of Sonic the Hedgehog, or 200,000 acres of farmland. Even if most three year olds do find the concept of "my truck" intuitive, it is not clear to me how many of them would readily conceptualize these other forms of ownership as "the same thing". My claim is merely that the onus is on the person arguing for this "right to property" to justify why we should institute such a massive system of social control to manage ownership of all of these things in precisely the way that we do.

“Work or starve” is not imposed by a state – it’s imposed by metabolism.

Right —the fact that work must be done at some point for anyone to eat is certainly true, but I think it's orthogonal to my point. It is true that a starving homeless guy might also be starving in a world without private property. Of course it is! But there's also a chance that he wouldn't be starving, because he could hunt or fish on the common land and feed himself that way. Or any number of other possibilities. The point is not that he has a right to be fed (one may or may not believe in such a right, it's irrelevant here), the point is that the current state of affairs, in which he has no path to avoid starvation, is produced by the state and enforced through threat of violence. Sure, if the state wasn't doing that he might starve anyway, but that's not a particularly good argument for anything!

By your logic, I could look at people imprisoned for political dissent and say "well, their freedoms haven't been violated! It is perfectly plausible that were the state not running around imprisoning dissenters, these people would have found themselves locked up in cages by some kind of freak accident! And we can't go around coercing locksmiths into letting people out of cages for free, so our imprisoning of them doesn't violate any freedoms at all!"

If I, by my actions, force you into a certain position, it is not relevant whether you might otherwise have ended up in that position had I not been there.

The other issue with this argument is that, again, not all property is created equal! Food and other consumables are not really representative examples of private property at all. Holdings in land, in infrastructure, in stock, and in intellectual property all behave in very different ways. Even if we accept that food must be privately owned in order for due compensation of producers to be ensured, this same argument makes no sense when applied to land. All the land was already here, privatization is strictly a program of restricting access to it. Depending on your metaphysics this may or may not also be true of intellectual property.

If you think there’s a state (of being, not government) to reach where resources are given freely with no regard to return payment because resources are so abundant it doesn’t matter – well, first of all, you’re wrong. Second of all, this was not a situation that existed before state intervention created the concept of private property.

Well, with respect to land at least it actually sort of was like that, in little pockets at least. Look up the enclosure acts. But more generally, this argument about how things were "originally" is completely irrelevant! I am not making a primitivist call to return to the original state of society, I am making an atemporal call to sane discourse about private property as a concept. I am asking that, instead of treating property as something which naturally exists and which can only be restricted by state action, we recognize that private property is something which requires a massive system of enforcement (state or otherwise) to institute in reality. And I am asking that people who believe in the right to private property make compelling arguments as to why the trade-offs in personal liberty that this system requires —trade-offs against freedom of speech, trade-offs against freedom of movement— are justified. It may indeed be the case, but it is not a given! It must be defended!

Next time a conservative complains about their tax money being used to support social welfare look up what company they work for and find their annual financial reports. Find their number of employees and their net profit after tax and work out their average net profit after tax per employee (profit devided by number of employers)

For my workplace, that number is about $250,000.

So even a relatively well off middle management person at my work making $100,000 a year is still making $2.50 for our shareholders for every $1 they earn themselves.

If you take their labour at face value and say it’s worth $350,000, that means shareholders are “taxing” them 71% of their value. Meanwhile the government only takes 33% of what’s remaining, which in real terms is only 9.5%.

So. To summarise:

Shareholders take 71%

Government takes 9.5%

And the worker gets 19.5%.

But sure, conservatives, go ahead and complain about government taxes.

[joshuazev]

On injera and carts of math books:

It’s snowing in Seattle.  I can see it all over social media my mom even face timed me to show the beginning of the fall.  It’s cold here and drizzling.  Throughout the entirety of the day I was thinking of how nice it would be to resort back to old traditions back home with my family.  Sit on the couch and watch a movie or two.  Eat some sweets like some chocolate chip cookies, a Christmas cake (but a jewish rendition), or some chocolate chip banana bread.  The quote of the week seemed to be that Christmas didn’t really feel like a holiday anymore or maybe I just heard a lot of people speaking the same bogus.  Kyrie Irving, the point guard for the Boston Celtics, who is infamously known for pushing the “world is flat” theory said that he doesn’t consider Christmas a holiday, anymore.  To him, and his case is specific, it’s just another day to spend time with your family.  As a professional basketball player I can see how that might be the case, but I think that applies to everybody.  Yes, it’s still the most hectic holiday—with respect to adoration and preparation—but when it comes down to it, everybody loves Christmas Eve and Christmas because it might be the only day where everyone’s family gets together.  And even though I don’t celebrate it, this is the first time I’ve ever spent these days away from my family.  It kind of sucked.  It did suck.  Now, that being said my roommate and I still did what we could to make the most of it.  I bought groceries at a pretty tame Trader Joes.  (According to the cashier it wasn’t very crowded because a lot of people living in New York aren’t from New York, so everyone was back home).  I did some laundry.  I woke up late to another grey sky and cool day, so even though I wasn’t physically back home the elements were trying their hardest to provide an embrace.  Upon the suggestion of my roommate, we tried to have a Christmas eve meal somewhere, but to our dismay most of the places were closed.  We ended up meeting with a friend of mine and going to a vegan Ethiopian place that she and I had gone to a couple of days before.  It was one of the only places around that was open late.  A couple of us literally got what the menu called a “Feast,” which was a huge plate of injera with seven items from the menu.  Lentils, greens, beets, you name it.  It was filling and delicious all at the same time.  For some odd reason I was inclined to drink some wine with the other two.  We emptied a bottle of red pretty quickly, and not being used to getting tipsy from drinking wine, I became drowsy by the end of the meal.  In the first ten months of this year I could count the amount of times I had something to drink on two hands, but for some reason I’ve been drinking more lately.  I’m a bit disappointed in myself because it was one of my resolutions to greatly reduce and try to not drink at all, but it almost feels like these last couple months have been a relapse of sorts.  I’m not an alcoholic, but alcohol—especially in social settings—is such a crutch.  Disciplining myself not to drink when there are drinks around might be something that I have to practice over time.

There were many opportunities today to get on the right track in several different areas of study, cleaning, and mindset, but my overriding excuse to everything was that it was Christmas and I would take care of it when the holidays were over.  I almost got trapped into saying I’ll just take care of it next year considering that 2018 is in a week now, but luckily I didn’t go that far.  I’m not getting down on myself for being lazy today or for not accomplishing the tasks I wanted to accomplish, but I’m very cognizant lately of troubling trends and bad habits.  Like always, I know that recognition is not enough—I must go through the trouble of changing.  Sometimes when I’m walking around the city I ask myself if other people have done what they need to do to change, not knowing who they are or what their current situation may be.  On the way home from the restaurant there was a guy on the subway with a heavily tattooed face asking for money and wearing what looked to be a brand new leather backpack.  Or when we were waiting for the train, there was this guy who was speed walking, dropped the sweater he was holding and then tried to sell it to us for three dollars.  I always wonder what it would be like to be homeless.  What would the struggles be.  I looked on a social media post that showed a homeless man acting out on the street.  Two of the visible comments were by ex-NFL players who agreed that homeless people were the freest people on the earth.  I didn’t know exactly what they were talking about, but after a while I could kind of see where they were coming from.  Then again, walking from stop to stop today when the winds were doing their chilly best to give my body frostbite, I agreed that being homeless wasn’t on the top of my list.  In one of my earlier posts I talked about some moments of anxiety in which I realize I’ve been holding my breath and it makes me take a huge gasp, almost like I’ve woken up from a nightmare.  I feel for the homeless population, especially during times like these.  I wish they could be with their families.  I wish they weren’t spending their time trying to stay warm in the cold.  Good thing there is a new tax bill that’s looking out for them…

This week I made two separate visits to Strand’s bookstore, near Union Square.  I didn’t really have a point to going there, but there was a book I was interested in reading and at the time there was 175 plus holds on all of the copies at the library.  So, when I got there and saw that the hardcover was $24 and that it was a New York Times bestseller and that plenty of copies had already been sold, I told myself that I would treat my visit to Strand’s as if it was the library and I would try to just read the book there.  The book, which I have almost finished now, is called “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F***.”  It had been recommended to me by many of my friends and I was interested in taking a look to see what all the hype was about.  The first two chapters (my first visit) made me very defensive.  A lot of the author’s mentality is backwards and attempts to challenge out hardwired ways of thinking.  A lot of it was obvious on the surface (we stress out too much) to the types of advice that makes someone like me a little less comfortable (we need to stop caring as much and we need to accept that not everyone is extraordinary, potentially even us).  I realized that during my second visit (the next two chapters) that I would need to try to find the information I agreed with and take the rest with a grain of salt.  I was naturally skeptical and questioned how genuine this author really was.  I wondered if he stood by what he was saying or he was just trying to make money.  I also wondered if it was my own insecurities that were questioning the advice of a successful man.  I don’t know for sure, yet.  I’m hoping to go back soon and finish after a couple more visits.  My thoughts on self-help books haven’t changed much, though.  I don’t know why, but I’ve stayed away from them.  On the surface it makes me look pathetic because it looks like I’m not trying to help myself, but call me crazy, I just feel like a lot of those books are a bunch of bullshit.  I’m sure they work for some people.  I just don’t know if they work for me.  It’ll be good for me to finish this one.  

Strand’s was a wonderful sight though.  It was earlier in the week, so I think it was a wonderful mix of the everyday vibrancy of the bookstore and all of these men, women, and children who were there in the hope of trying to find a decent gift for Christmas.  I reveled in the business of it all.  A city within a bookstore.  Creatures scurrying around.  It was fantastic.  The first day I sat on a bench on the second floor and people came and went to sit beside me.  Finally one older guy sat down next to me with a bunch of math books and started to take out his notebook and begin copying random equations down.  The second day, I went to go to the same bench and there was no room to sit and sure enough, the mathematician was in the same exact spot with his notebook, math books, and cart right in front of him.  I went to the other one in the back and after about fifteen minutes this older guy sat down next to me and was struggling with a slow I-Phone.  I suggested that maybe he get out of all of his open applications and he looked at me like I was speaking Chinese.  It took a while, but when he let me show him how to do it his phone started speeding up again.  He said, “How much would you like?” and with a confused face, I shrugged it off and told him that I hope his phone starts working better now.  He ended up striking a conversation and we talked for a little while.  He couldn’t hear very well, so I had to repeat a lot.  He continued on about how he loves music and preferred to listen to the opera in Europe because the acoustics were way better over there than the “crap” in America.  When I told him I was an actor, there was good conversation to be had, but then he started to take some ill advised left turns.  He talked about Kevin Spacey, Hollywood, Weinstein and other relatable topics.  His stance would have been torn apart by women and his final conclusion seemed to be that he was an amoral person and that we were ridiculous to be in a position to judge morality or to judge someone else’s morals.  I realized that I had shut him off when I could tell his opinions were getting on my nerves and looking back on it, I wish I hadn’t.  I had made a mistake and an error in judgement and instead of trying to hear him out and tell him why I disagreed I turn the sound all the way off.  Like Matt Damon and other men recently who insist on giving their opinion on the topic, a spectrum of bad behavior should have been considered.  To me it sounded like men that were comfortable with an old way of life trying to justify a machismo society, but maybe that’s what my tone deaf ears were telling me.  The amoral comment, which really struck a funky chord, is one that I’m still trying to unwrap, but maybe, all things considered, he was making a good point.  We are all creatures.  Creatures that have done and done wrong, so really, who are we to judge, at all?