#humanism

[kyriefae]

Even taking advertisement down to its most foundational function...it's designed to stir up attention around a given product at the financial cost of a company to hike up sales.

In a world as monopolized as ours, I am hard pressed to remember the last time an advertisement brought my attention to something I didn't already know existed.

The shelves at the grocery store are lined with the same major brands that have dominated the market for the last 40+ years. Advertisement has nothing to do with their success, they are companies that bought out or bankrupted their competition systemically for decades until all that was left was them.

Do I need an ad to inform me Cheetos has come out with a new variant flavor for their Red Hot line? No. Even when I found out that new flavor was Dill Pickle? Doubly no.

Do we need the Super Bowl ads? Of fucking course not. Speaking of being as harmful as fossil fuels...nothing that costs several millions of dollars to put together for literal seconds of airtime could ever be good for the environment or, for that matter, the stability of society writ large.

Down with ads. Fuck em.

Also I've said this before but advertising is an industry that should be considered as pointless and harmful as fossil fuels.

[kyriefae]

Doctor Who has been so cathartic as a queer person.

While the real world leaves me in what feels often like a ceaseless pool of grief and worry...this silly sci fi show built on a 60+ year old premise of an old man kidnapping two of his granddaughter's school teachers because they discovered his time machine plays on in full blown celebration of queerness, kindness, and duty to help for its own sake.

Plus, I'm in love with Belinda Chandra.

Love her story so far. She's just trying to get back to her life. The universe has thrust the most impossible series of events her way and instead of being in shock or awe, she remains intent and purpose driven. She values her work and that facet alone would endure her to me. 🥹

I feel...safe while I watch Doctor Who. That safety is a fleeting feeling to be certain as it would be foolish to believe the bigots that are working to make life more hostile for the LGBTQIA+ community are simply going to stop on a whim but watching Doctor Who helps me to frame it all just a bit more poetically. There is danger yes...but there is also beauty.

In the words of Dan Mangan (a Canadian singer-songwriter I recommend most highly), "They say the world is dangerous, but all it seems to do is turn."

[robreyart]

Bioluminescence Oil, 18 x 24 in, 2015, First in the Bioluminescence series. The light of life and the natural world. In all the vastness of space, as of yet, we know of only one planet that supports life. At least within some great distance from here, life is rare. Each organism being the exquisite and detailed product of billions of years of evolution, life is precious. This point of light and inspiration stands in contrast to the lanterns and lights that are historically thought to be sources of illumination but are now dimmed; mythologies and superstitions humans have created as we struggled in the dark of ignorance to understand our world. But the process of science has revealed a luminous, living planet, more amazing than we could have ever imagined. Where the intricacies of biology are miracles of evolution and our consciousness is a gift of natural processes that allow us to experience what it is to be alive. Prints: https://robrey.storenvy.com

[jstor]

✨ New on the blog: If your heart is in the humanities, you may be discouraged in the face of other academic fields–but the humanities remain critical. Through a journey of loss, literature, and scholarly accounts, learn how the humanities are vital to human understanding. Read the blog post. Image: Charles Le Brun and William Hebert. A man whose profile expresses compassion. n.d. Wellcome Collection.

[apis-vergilii]

The study of the humanities is a training ground for the mind and the development of critical thought, self-knowledge, a deeper understanding of one’s own ethical values, and an appreciation of the shared humanity of those removed from oneself by either temporal or geographical distance. These are not idle theoretical fripperies: they are the foundation of curiosity, compassion, and responsible citizenship.

<piss on the poor>There are indeed many pathways to this knowledge. Yes, go to the library and the museum. No, not everyone needs to get a degree in medieval literature. Everyone SHOULD study at least some history and literature in high school and college.</piss on the poor>

The fact that the serious pursuit of humanist studies has been deliberately made *economically inaccessible* to something like 95% of the human population, and entirely generations of people have been deliberately trained to consider these subjects laughable and worthy only of mockery and disdain (and the first subjects to remove from formal curricula) is a catastrophic injustice on a planetary scale.

[juan-francisco-palencia]

For all mercy hearts please

Save us from the genocide

Share my post and donate if you can

I'm vitted by 90ghost and northgazaupdate

https://www.gofundme.com/f/save-mohamed-and-his-elderly-parents-from-genocide

Well, I think I understand that in some way you ask for help through me and everyone. Honestly, I don't have many resources, but I offer my help by providing first aid to injured people, since I have medical knowledge, and my specialty is channeling those who have suffered first and second degree burns. If you feel that my medical knowledge could be of use to you, I am more than willing to help.

I wish you good luck. ⚘👋

[liberalsarecool]

The Left wants a community where everyone is welcome to be who they want.

The Right wants 'lonerism' where everyone is grinding their lives for shareholders' crumbs.

[average-transfem-robotgirl]

God, humans are so hot. I love uhhh.. their.. viscera and fluids?? I love how they are uh.. hairy.. and have uhm.. pores!!

I sure do love fleshy, fleshy humans. I love the way they intake oxygen and emit carbon dioxide. I really just can’t get enough of em’.

In fact, I love humans so much, this blog is no longer a robotgirl, robotfucker, objectum blog, it’s a.. humangirl, humanfucker, fleshum blog. Oh boy!! I sure do love being a cisgender, heterosexual, human-lover!! 🫀

>[APRIL FOOLS] [^_^]

[thepersonalwords]

I am not an atheist. But the religion that I do advocate is not of the Bible, Vedas, Quran or any other scripture. The religion I speak of, is what Christ talked about, it is what Buddha talked about, it is the religion of plain everyday kindness.

Abhijit Naskar

[baneshake]

Another post showcasing my options for a YouTube thumbnail test, though this one hasn't completed as of posting since the connected video will not premiere until twenty minutes after this post is made (I reference the option to come see all of these here at the end of the video).

The video is titled "Assassin's Creed was ALWAYS woke" and debunks the anti-woke grifters who are trying to spread bad faith arguments about Assassin's Creed Shadows, primarily since they consider a (historical) black man to be an issue for all of their stupid, stupid reasons. I push back on a lot of those claims, and focus heavily on the fact that Assassin's Creed has been heavily politically progressive since its inception, and why that's a good thing. I genuinely wonder which one of these will win out for the thumbnail test:

[quasi-normalcy]

I know that this is the "Turning social problems into matters of individual virtue" website, but here's one change that you can make to yourself as an individual that I honestly think will have beneficial collective effects:

Stop Thinking You're Better Than Other People.

Do I mean that you should go through life thinking that you're the lowliest and most wretched scum who's ever lived? No. I mean that there exists no meaningful criterion by which one human being can be said to be absolutely 'better' than another. And even if there was, you don't know enough about other people's circumstances and interior thoughts to meaningfully judge them in these absolute terms. So don't even try! It's a futile endeavour.

"But what about fascists? Surely I'm better than them!"

Okay, so let me preface this by saying that fascists are dangerous, they're misguided, their acts and intentions are evil, and they need to be stopped, including through physical violence. But you're not better than them. I know that this is a difficult pill to swallow; I myself used to pat myself used to pat myself on the back because, well, at least I wouldn't have been a Nazi. But you know what? If the circumstances were right, I could have been. We all could have been, just as we all could have joined a cult at some point.

Looking at myself, for example: there was never any serious possibility that I could have been swept up into the alt-right movement. Why? Because I'm transgender, and I was raised to be a socialist. How easy it is to *not* become a fascist when you're one of their scapegoats! How much harder it would be to avoid if you're one of the people they flatter and groom, if you're raised by people who are sympathetic to fascist ideals, if you grow up in a community where such ideals are common! The fact that fascist movements can seemingly emerge amongst every nation and people--including those who have historically been victims of fascism--confirms this. What if I had lived a hundred years later, at a time when transgenderism was a complete non-issue, and they'd moved on to some new scapegoat? What if they had approached me on my absolute worst day and told me that all of my problems were caused by moochers and parasites, and that I could fight back and claim my birth right by joining them? Can I really say that I wouldn't? Can anyone?

But even beyond that, what is a fascist but the ultimate example of someone who needs to feel superior to others? What is scapegoating but the act of selecting an entire group of people and declaring them to be inferior to you? And if you just refuse to believe these things; if you refuse to accept the premise that some people are better than others, and call it out whenever it comes up; then you're cutting these movements off at knees! The ideological force of fascism comes from imagining humanity as a strict hierarchy, with the master race on top and the degenerates on the bottom. Simply refuse to believe in such a hierarchy! Refuse to even entertain it!

"But then how can I feel self-esteem? How can I feel that I matter and have value?"

You have value just by existing as a person! But if that's not enough for you, then try this: instead of trying to increase your sense of self-worth by finding people to feel superior to, increase it by being of value to others. Help them! Make their lives better! Contribute to society! Not even in a way that you can (necessarily) put a dollar value on, but in any way you can! Create art! Plant a pollinator garden! Tell a joke! Make someone happy! If nothing else, you can at least give someone love, and I guarantee you that that will be of value to them. The universe is so vast and we're all so small that any value we can ever have will only ever be to each other. And surely it beats spending your life trying to be king of the microbes.

[unsolicited-opinions]

My eldest was nine years old and had questions, for the first time, about why we said Hamotzi over the Friday challah we'd picked up at the JCC.

"Blessed is God, ruler of the Universe, who brings forth bread from the earth." 

9yo:...but I don't believe in a ruler-of-the-universe kind of God...?

Me: I don't either- but I'm glad bread exists and I'm grateful that we have food to eat. Are you?

9yo: Yeah... 

Me: So I think of it as a way of remembering to be grateful. To remember how amazing it is that humans learned to cultivate wheat, to grind it, and make the flour into bread. A prayer like this is a way of remembering how fortunate we are instead of taking it for granted.

9yo: But it's amazing that HUMANS learned to grow wheat and bake bread. Why thank God? 

Me: Do you remember when we talked about Pesach and the Exodus story and the ancestors of the Israelites being slaves in Egypt? Do you remember what we learned about that? 

9yo: They were probably never slaves in Egypt, because there's no evidence for it where there should be. It's probably just an origin myth. 

Me: Pretty much, yeah. But if a people's origin myth includes escaping slavery, how are they likely to feel about slavery? 

9yo: They'll hate it

Me: And how will they hopefully feel when other people are enslaved?

9yo: They'll know it's wrong. 

Me: So even a story which isn't literally true...can still be good. Origin myths shape peoples. I like this one and I'm glad it's the origin myth for our ancestors.

9yo: Okay...but Hamotzi isn't about the Exodus story...?

Me: To me, Hamotzi is sort of like the Exodus story- it doesn't need to be literally true to be good. Since I don't believe in a creator-of-the-universe sort of God, I see the prayer as a way of remembering to be glad that we evolved the way we did to enjoy eating delicious bread, to be glad that humans learned to grow wheat, grind flour, domesticate chickens and bees, and make bread, and to be grateful that we have enough to eat, because many people in many times and many places, including today, don't have enough to eat.

We can see it as a way to remember to not take for granted that our bodies are healthy and we can enjoy eating bread which fuels our bodies. We're lucky to have this bread, and it is good for us to remember how lucky we are. It's bad for us to take our good fortune for granted.

9yo: Okay, being grateful is good. But why thank a God who we don't think is listening? Why do it in Hebrew? 

Me: Because expressing that gratitude, in Hebrew, towards God, is the way our ancestors remembered to be grateful for a very, very long time. When we do it the same way they did it, it's a way of remembering who they were, how hard they worked, and how much they struggled to enable you and I to be here, generations later, on the other side of the planet, healthfully and peacefully eating bread.

Sometimes, it's easier to remember to be grateful if the words for expressing that gratitude are pre-parepared. Sometimes, it's easier to feel gratitude if there's a direction in which to express it. I don't believe in a human-like God who cares at all about prayers or being thanked by humans in Hebrew or any other language. But I believe it is good for us to take moments, now and then, to appreciate the incredibly long chain of events which have resulted in you and I, sitting here, eating Challah, and talking about why we pray.

9yo: Okay. It just felt weird to thank a God I don't believe in.

Me: Oh yeah. That felt weird to me for a long time too. You ask really good questions, though- and I like how you don't want to do or say things which don't make sense to you.

9yo: Someone at school told me it's bad to question God.

Me: Maybe that's what the religious tradition of their heritage teaches. In the religious tradition of our heritage, questions are not just okay, but good. You're supposed to question stuff.

9yo: Oh. So that makes me good at being Jewish?

Me: Absolutely.

[jesusinstilettos]

Your life gets significantly better the day you stop pretending you’re a robot. You’re a silly little mammal, act like it motherfucker. Your ancestors made tools with rocks and sticks, ran around a lot, had sex, lived in communities, ate when they were hungry, rested, chanted together, felt the sun, breathed outside air, listened to the trees and birds. You have biological needs bitch!!!

[robreyart]

Bioluminescence: Question, Hypothesis, Experiment Oil, 30 x 20 inches, 2020

The light of life and the scientific method. These points of light and inspiration stand in contrast to the lanterns and lights that are historically thought to be sources of illumination but are now dimmed; mythologies and superstitions humans have created as we struggled in the dark of ignorance to understand our world. But the process of science has revealed a luminous planet, glowing with the magic of biological reality, more intricate and amazing than we could have ever imagined.

Prints: https://robrey.storenvy.com

[t-jfh]

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