#denigration

[zero-zoxx-international]

The Ignoble Denigration of Diego de Monte in Hs Fine Three-Piece Suit, photo and digital work by Diego de Monte</p

[whats-in-a-sentence]

Their strategy of change is based on psychological warfare, as Supreme Commander Nikolai Alexander explains:

You cannot get rid of everyone that gets into your way, and even if you could, that wouldn't be smart. No, it's best to beat your enemy without firing a single shot. This means you have to beat him with legal or at least semi-legal means. [. . .] Through demoralisation, subversion and infiltration. This means you need to undermine the morale of your opponent by spreading defeatism. For example, by saying this doesn't make any sense, this doesn't lead anywhere, just leave it. Ideally, in combination with smear, for instance by claiming that you work for the enemy. Then of course denigration, so that everything will be questioned, picked to pieces and decried. You sow discontent, impatience and doubt about the leadership. The word for this assault tactic is 'constructive criticism', a concept of the Frankfurt School. Then you try to pit members against one another, stir up disputes, create coteries, promote traitors and expel loyalists. Install levers to influence everything in your interest, outsource relevant structures, etc. And of course, spying, disinformation, lies, smear – the entire set of approaches. These are the tactics and mechanisms to sabotage and destroy a movement.

"Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists" - Julia Ebner

[alexanderrogge]

John H. Bryan - Cop Training Seminar EXPOSED on VIDEO:

StreetCopTraining #PoliceTraining #Malfeasance #Misconduct #Corruption #Discrimination #ExcessiveForce #Racism #RacialBias #Bias #Sexism #Denigration #Dehumanization #Interrogation #SmallTalk #TrafficStop #WrongfulArrest #EvidenceSuppression #CriminalAppeal #Appeal #FirstAmendment #FourthAmendment #DefundThePolice #CivilRights #CriminalJustice #ConstitutionalLaw #Law

[captainjonnitkessler]

I truly, TRULY do not know how to say this, because the fact that I have to say it makes me feel like I am losing my grip on reality. But no, in the post-capitalistic anarchist utopia, I will not be relying on “autistic minecraft girlies” to be building inspectors because - and this may shock you - one of those occupations takes years of education in how to read and interpret hundreds of thousands of lines of regulations based on complicated math and physics that were the result of decades of tragedy and death, and the other one involves playing a children’s video game.

[ivan-fyodorovich-k]

I am going to attempt to describe a phenomenon that I think will be familiar to you and I want to try to give it a name.

It is a style of writing that has taken shape over the course of our time on this platform, a product perhaps of our high proportion of theater/art kids and the capacity of the platform to support longform text.

I'm going to propose the name "tumblr gothic" for what is, I think, a distinctive writing style. This is the melodramatic register tumblr uses when it wants to convey to you how serious, how scary, how truly horrifying something is. It uses a lot language like "no wait" and "you don't understand," describing in the purplest prose how seriously you need to take [thing]. [Thing] can be the latest natural disaster, the latest illness, the latest fire, the latest protest, the latest movement, the latest government misdeed, but whatever it is, nobody is talking about [thing], and nobody knows just how serious [thing] is. Often two or three or five people will chime in. At least one will be an expert, one will be a first- or secondhand witness, all will write in exactly the same register.

tumblr gothic.

[raintides]

thanuri and lahaeli scribbles for the soul (please consider lahaeli)

[hedwigette]

Reading some Drarry fic and why the hell is Harry always written as someone who doesn't know how to clean up after himself but Draco is a neat freak? I didn't know that Draco spent all his childhood cleaning and cooking while Harry had Dobby to do that for him.

Must have skipped my mind

[wonder-worker]

something I find especially entertaining about Edward IV's reign is how Scandalous™ it was lol

he married a woman “whose origins broke all established conventions for English queenship” in a secret ceremony without consulting any of his lords and then made it everyone else's problem. he committed regicide, he committed fratricide; he was accused of bastardry, he was accused of bigamy and a 19-year-long sham marriage, he was accused of using necromancy against his subjects, he was accused of being enchanted by witchcraft by both his wife and his mother-in-law (multiple times). his own mother was said to "rule the king as she pleased" in the early years of his reign. he knew he was hot and actively milked it for money. he was vain as fuck: “he was wont to show himself to those who wished to watch him, and he seized any opportunity that the occasion offered of revealing his fine stature to onlookers”. he knew everything about everyone. "he was more favourable than other princes to foreigners". he was “fond of boon companionship, vanities, debauchery, extravagance and sensual enjoyments”; he was "thought to have indulged in his passions and desires too intemperately”; "it was ever feared he was not chaste”. his subjects publicly gossiped about his sex life, his doctors thought he was insane. NOBODY understood how he was still competent despite all this.

honestly, who was doing it like him?

[pocketsizedquasar-3]

you know. white liberals would be far less annoying (still deeply annoying) and far less difficult to take seriously (still deeply difficult) if they stopped lying to themselves and everyone else about what they were doing. ‘cause y’all either sound completely stupid and removed from reality at best or violently callous at worst.

(and before anyone fails their reading comprehension here, i am not telling anyone to vote or not vote or who to vote or not vote for. get off my dick.)

but no, you’re not doing “real leftism” by voting for kamala (something i have actually seen countless people say. “real leftists” would vote for kamala!!1!!1!! if you don’t vote for her ur not a “real leftist!!!!”). that’s not what that is. words mean things. you’re actually engaging in pretty textbook liberalism. it’s not “real leftism” to vote for a genocidal fascist who is actively employing genocidal fascistic policies both overseas and domestically, and who has pledged gladly to continue doing so. (again, bc this is the bad reading comprehension website, i’m not telling you if you vote for kkkamala ur not a “real leftist” (mostly because that’s meaningless); i’m saying that that act itself is not a """leftist""" action). if you feel the need to justify what you’re doing to yourself by pretending you’re doing ~real leftism~, stop.

you're not “stopping fascism” or “saving democracy” or whatever else. you’re not “stopping fascism” by voting for a fascist. you’re not “saving democracy” by voting for a fascist. if you genuinely can’t see in this current moment that kamala harris & the democrats are fascists, you are deliberately ignoring and excusing fascism as long as it’s happening to nonwhite people. it is willful, deliberate ignorance at this point and it is violent. you genuinely do not see victims of fascism unless it happens to white people.

you’re not “protecting palestinians” by voting for kamala. you’re not making their chances better or being better for them or improving their conditions. you’re not “more likely” to sway kamala on palestine; you can’t even threaten to withhold your support for her because of her wanton slaughtering of palestinians. 13 months of ongoing genocide and ongoing mass protest movements and multiple polls showing that she would literally guarantee the win in key swing states if she would just call for an arms embargo / ceasefire as part of her platform have not swayed her. she constantly, constantly reaffirms her willful, enthusiastic support of this genocide. she has said over and over again that she will not end her support for israel, that she would not have done anything differently than biden, that she has no intentions to stop sending israel arms and money so they can keep slaughtering palestinians and now lebanese. you are not “protecting” or helping palestinians by voting for her. keep their names out of your mouths.

you’re not protecting """minorities""" or """poc""" either. not when the candidate is a cop whose administration has already funneled billions of dollars into the police and the military, who is priding herself on wanting to create the most lethal military, on being tougher on the border&immigration than trump, who is happily continuing to perpetuate racist atrocity propaganda to justify the mass slaughter of palestinians, who continues to reaffirm and support the escalation of imperialism and war even elsewhere in the so-called middle east, who is gladly seeking (and securing) endorsements by racist white supremacist republicans (like dick fucking cheney. come on), whose administration has been for four years enthusiastically accelerating the climate crisis, whose campaign has been littered with examples of both their supporters and the politicians themselves being virulently racist. you’re not protecting us. you’re not helping us.

your candidate wants us dead. your candidate wants me dead. your candidate wants my people in iran dead. your candidate wants my sister peoples in palestine and in lebanon dead. your candidate is actively orchestrating their slaughter.

kamala might be better for you, white liberal american. fine. vote for her if you wish. no one is stopping you. but stop white knighting about it. stop pretending you’re doing this for anyone but yourself. stop lying to yourself and everyone else about what you’re doing. stop speaking over us the with fucking audacity that you’re somehow doing us a favor, and stop talking down to us, palestinians especially, like they are children who need to be ~explained~ the right way to save them. stick your white savior complex up your ass.

vote however you want, but stop lying about what you’re doing and who you’re protecting.

and if you want my vote too? fucking earn it.

[proudfreakmetarusonikku]

something I genuinely despise like actively hate is when people treat the fact that horrible things happened more frequently in the past to mean somehow people were less traumatised by them happening. it’s such horrible dehumanisation (that’s often used against traumatised people today in some way or another, and also one that disrespects every human that’s ever come before us) and it’s so blatantly false if you do even the slightest bit of digging. encountering death was more common in the past where less people lived to a peaceful old age but mourning and grief has never been lesser due to that. burial sites have been beautifully and carefully created since before we had civilisation, and as long as we've had language people have expressed grief frequently- look at the tombs of Roman dogs for just one example because they’re heartbreaking.

and even back when violence and bigotry was seen as the norm, the fact it caused trauma and suffering was known. homer's works have a deep understanding of the horrors of war the trauma of veterans and how innocent civilians suffer and those are three thousand years old. but trauma justifies itself. the unjust establishes itself in a generational cycle of trauma excusing itself to cope. convincing yourself that horrible horrible things are necessary and ultimately good can placate both abuser and victim surprisingly well.

and it very much did not do that for everyone, because there were always people who fought! people who fought so hard to spread innovations to save lives and fight disease. people who fought back against abusive systems of power even though they were raised in a society that glorified them because they couldn’t justify it to themselves! people in the past weren’t fucking stupid and thinking as such is such a disservice to humanity and removes the humanity of our ancestors.

[kaurwreck]

the blunt, all or nothing, dichotomous approach to characterizing kunikida as prim and obedient for his probity and obsessive adherence to structure as his means for kettling the parts of himself too untethered to leave unchecked IS very silly and falls apart against canon like an overworked block of dry melamine foam.

but, like, the insistence that he must be punk because he speaks colloquially, brazenly withholds deference to quite literally everyone who isn't capable of either throwing him to the ground or discerning the truth of all matters with preternatural acuity, and disdains authority is also a blunt, all or nothing, dichotomous approach to characterization.

like, punk fanon Kunikida is not a retort to staid fanon Kunikida. they are both package-dealing in the Ayn Rand use of the phrase: whether punk or prep, both fail to discriminate crucial differences between Kunikida's character and the stock characters to which fanon attaches his name.

Kunikida's rigidity in adhering to his self defined, self evaluated, and self-imposed virtues is not remotely the same as legalism. Kunikida fucking anguishes over whether he is sincere and unfaltering in his ideals. (see: Jouno taunting him + his unbridled fear that he is internally hollow and the ideals holding him aloft are not the substance of deeply held convictions but hot air fueled by his loved ones for whom he is only puffing his chest and performing someone capable of carrying them, and without whom he lacks the spirit to fill that space within him where a greater man might have cultivated a spine, such that he will sink, sink, sink to crumple shapelessly to the ground, liberated from artifice only when there isn't anyone there to lighten the weight of his leaden ego, his isolation as common as the dirt coating his tongue, his transcendence precluded by the cruelty with which reality disfigured his instinct for goodness into a desire for power and empty glory until his soul, still gnashing on the rot of those he couldn't save, starved.)

In other words: his ideals can't be performed or externally enforced. They must be internally cultivated, coaxed into bloom through introspection, their flowering petals manifestations of his deepest feelings. otherwise, he is nothing but hot air and tepid flesh.

except he's not! because while his faith is faint and his body easily crushed beneath the weight of external forces with little regard for love, sincerity, and labor; his body can't feed his ideals anymore than his ideals could feed his body. His ideals can't fill his belly like meat and potatoes or expand his hollow heart like a hot air balloon because, unlike matter, his ideals are intangible. They do not occupy any space or time, and reality can't crush or despoil what it can't grasp, and it can't grasp what doesn't exist by its own laws. It's not that Kunikida's ideals grapple with his reality; nor can his reality erode his ideals. There's nothing to contradict everything, so everything persists.

Kunikida can't trust that he isn't empty, but nothing is emptiness, and his ideals are nothing, so absent inherent faith, absent substance in the yawning void within him, Kunikida nevertheless has his ideals. He has courage, sincerity, love, truth, and labor, not despite his emptiness, but because his emptiness is as conceptual as his ideals; he can't eat concepts but nor can concepts ever be rendered inert — inertia relates only to matter and the material world, which emptiness, nothing, ideals, concepts transcend. They can't be stripped of power, and there isn't any power anyone could exert over them because power is a measure of effectiveness that a force producing a physical effect has over time — mathematically, if linear, power is the quotient of force multiplied by the displacement of an object, divided by time. There is no object, there's only nothing, and nothing is mathematically represented by zero, which, when multiplied and then divided, is unchanged. It works if power is rotational instead of linear too; there, it's the quotient of: (force multiplied by the angle of displacement) ÷ time. again, 0, unchanged.

(Keeping in mind that I have dyscalculia and I am shit at mathematical logic, zero can be both a real and imaginary number, Kunikida's skill is batshit and he doesn't really see it as anything other than convenient. He essentially renders concepts into tangible reality. Like, that's his skill: he conceptualizes something that he's seen rendered tangible before, and then by jotting down its name on a page which is matter, he assigns nothing, 0, a finite point in infinity, and it becomes matter that exists within reality. This is why his notebook can be filled and replaced or destroyed or cut to shreds. The physical notebook isn't his ideals, it's just full of ideals, which he manifests by writing down his intangible thoughts and introspection so that he might then assign them a finite point in himself as the tangible embodiment of his ideals.)

(In Osamu Dazai's Entrance Exam, Kunikida defines his skill by its limitations, which prevent it from the seemingly undefined, limitless capacity that Dazai possesses. But, like, could Kunikida theoretically create a finite time singularity— which is what happens when time is defined and divided by zero? It's cute that he was studying mathematics and sciences.)

His body can't house his ideals because emptiness, nothing, ideals, concepts, perhaps even faith do not occupy any space. They can't be created or destroyed, only conceptualized, and, when embraced and cultivated by someone grounded enough to recognize that his ideals can't be, manifested in the physical act of jumping out of a helicopter to blow up a militarized cop.

Nothing can't be confronted by everything, and everything can't suffocate nothing. Reality can't erode what its own laws have rendered nothing. his ideals, like he himself, are ungovernable.

but he buys an artisan notebook from a craftsman who only makes 100 each year; he's not punk, he's just abrasive, doesn't extend respect unearned, and his writing was marked in his use of colloquial language. he's also wildly pretentious. he's so patronizing; he is mommy, where's that aesthetic for him. he doesn't need doc martens; he needs multiple child leashes.

anyway. punk fanon Kunikida is the same overworked block of dry melamine foam as staid fanon Kunikida, just flipped over. his apparent contradictions dont need to be reconciled or discarded; nothing and everything are in unity as opposites that overlap and exist/don't exist within him, around him, and through him, regardless of him, and only because of him.

like, obviously, do what you want and have fun. I don't really care; i just like babbling about kunikida, and i crave substance. also like. strip your respect from authority figures who haven't earned it. correct your teachers/professors/mentors. disappoint your parents. contribute to the inherent tension between individual freedom and authority. it's good for you. you don't even have to join a counterculture submovenent to do it, you can argue with your therapist at any time. do it for him.

[rawbones]

i dislike her music but i feel bad for chappell roan just because i can't imagine an internet's worth of losers forming a parasocial relationship with an image of me that they, themselves, have constructed purely for their mindless consumption, only for some of them to turn on me when i assert that hey you're kind of shit for doing this and i am human and allowed to have boundaries. celeb/stan culture is a disease

[mswyrr]

1-there's no excuse to be toxic to creatives; they're working for corrupt mega corps and doing the best they can within that. i'm thankful we got as much as we did and, after being annoyed, i will make peace with it and enjoy the parts i enjoyed for a long time. i had a wonderful time as the show aired and they gave us much more than i'd expected going in, but not as much as i came to hope. it is what it is.

2-people can and should disagree on art; that's what it's there for. i'm glad for everyone who enjoyed the end more than i did! their feelings are valid.

3-it's entirely possible to expect people to behave decently toward creatives AND not invalidate/shame/insult/make false accusations against people for having negative emotions expressed in appropriate ways. jumping directly into flinging around insults, pathologizing, etc people who literally aren't doing anything wrong is itself part of toxic fandom behavior

[ignotussomnium]

Sometimes I see a person online making fun of pop music like "wow this lyric literally doesn't mean anything. How stupid for people to resonate with it." My dude (gender neutral) we are human beings. We evolved to find purpose in an inherently meaningless universe. Did you really think Swifties were exempt?

[hanzajesthanza]

dandelion is indeed the worst but if he’s not present in the next book i would legitimately be sorrowful as the whole thing will become a slog . you basically cannot have the “short stories” era-of-the-timeline iteration of geralt without dandelion, it would be like eating unbuttered bread.

though it’s not like season of storms did them dirty, i wasn’t disappointed with it (… with regards to them), but since it’s literally been over 20 years since the saga was finished i’m trying to prepare for any potential reality

[redheadedfailgirl]

From 'Dream of a woman' By Cacey Plett.

This sums up exactly how I feel about most transition timelines. As much as they reflect people's experiences, they are also a narrative. And the narratives that get shared the most tell a lot about what our values are. The timelines that get the most attention are the ones where people go from sad, loser, nothing boys into beautiful women.

But if you go to /r/transitiontimelines or a similar place, and sort by controversial or look at what has the least likes, its people who made timelines when they still don't 'pass' yet. Even if they're happy as can be, that's not what people are looking for.

I think it says a lot about what people expect from trans women, that they only want to see us be beautiful. In some cases, that they want to believe they can be beautiful. So there is no value in trans life if you're not beautiful.