#legitimately no reason i should post this

[restinan]

I don't actually think that shooting the ten guys with the wealth has literally never made things better at any point in the history of man. If you actually read my post instead of pattern-matching it to the nearest easy thing to dunk on you might notice that I don't ever say anything incompatible with there being a wide range of outcomes. That said, it really is the case if you read history broadly there are trends in how well countries do if they descend into political violence and civil war. It tends not to make things better. Yes, there's a distribution- it's not a good distribution.

I understand that's a bit rude to accuse you of pattern matching to something dunkable rather than actually thinking, but you're the one who opened by attributing people who disagree with you to propaganda from the US government and fantasy novels. I get that that lets you feel pleasantly smug but there are in fact historically literate people who disagree with you for real reasons.

The American Revolution is probably one of the examples of "just kill some people" working out well you're thinking of here. It's genuinely true that things worked out well, but the American Revolution was a very weird civil war. The American revolution notably preserved most of the existing ruling class and didn't substantially disrupt the general structure of society. If you want to argue that wars of secession specifically have a very different track record from popular uprisings or attempting to use political violence to stabilize a country you'd have a good case for doing so. That said, even in that reference class the American Revolution had much better results than typical.

Perhaps you're not thinking of something so famous and instead thinking of examples like the overthrow of the government of communist Romania?

If you're making predictions from the American Revolution and the French Revolution and a handful of overthrows of dictatorships at the end of the Cold War and not on the banal, boring, usually forgotten peasant uprisings in Early Modern Europe, or the various peasant uprisings and descents into warlordism in Ancient China, or the slow rise of political violence and decay in norms in the Roman Republic (a shiny popular example, but still not one you should leave out- reversed stupidity isn't intelligence and we have a disproportionate amount of insight into this one), or the dozen instances of political violence in the early twentieth century aiding in the rise of the opposed party from the people doing the violence, or the communist attempts to swiftly restructure society in ways that accidentally caused massive famines, or the general outcomes of civil wars in the late 20th century, or the hundred other things in this vein, you're going to end up wrong about things.

Yes, the distribution of outcomes is wide. Yes, it is not entirely negative. That doesn't mean anywhere near as much as it might seem. A lottery which has a 50% chance of killing you horribly, a 20% chance of torturing you before you die, a 30% chance of leaving you alive but worse off, a 10% chance of not much detectable change, and a 10% chance of making things a small amount better, is not a lottery worth playing. That doesn't correspond to the political violence lottery, it's just a simple example.

The obvious response to this is that we should be examining the cases where it goes well to see how to get results like that. That response is a good response. However, to do that you need to know in the first place that violent revolution isn't a magical cure-all. You need to know that it tends negative or you won't even bother figuring out how to make it not do that. You need to know that the present has a larger list of fragile improvements and so you can't just use outcomes from nobility in 13th century France or even 18th century America to make predictions.

Things are legitimately different in the period where wealth flows almost entirely from land and just killing people and taking their land will mostly just work to enrich yourself. Even then, doing a bunch of it via an outside-the-norms-method in a polity and eroding the legitimacy of whatever is stopping the descent into violence from kicking off earlier tends to result in more and more violence over time. That trend really isn't hard to notice. Almost every single time without exception you end up with the place in general being drastically worse off. Usually the people who started the cycle end up very dead and frequently their family ends up extinct or less powerful than they started. Yes, they cared about different things- it was still usually a mistake to kick off a period of violence by their own values. For an example of this, consider literally any period of civil war in the history of China. Yes, someone manages to succeed and end up the next dynasty. The odds of being that someone aren't great. Assassinating your uncle to end up Emperor has a better track record. if not a stellar one. It's also not a mass uprising, and has a lower chance of kicking off a civil war.

If all you do is notice a lot of the people who hold a view are unsophisticated and stupid, find a couple counterexamples, and then smugly posture about how there's nuance, you see, you may legitimately be doing better than the idiots. But you need to actually know the distribution to be right, you can't just notice some other people know less than you and assume that means nobody knows more. Historians can tend kind of stupid in a lot of ways but there is actually something you get from having seen a broad overview of history. Not as much as a lot of historians like to pretend, but "just using a bunch of outside-the-norms violence to try to make things better for you personally was a high risk strategy before the modern world, doing it to make things better for people in general or for the sake of preserving a polity's stability was harder still, and the modern world makes it all work a lot less well" is one of the things that is, frankly, somewhat overdetermined.

What people care about is usually whether something makes slides into dictatorship more likely. Whether it makes famines more likely. Whether it makes instability and a lot of suffering more likely. Whether it tends to make things worse by our values, both when people don't care much about that and even when they do. The answers there are pretty clear. Yes, there's a distribution rather than a universal single outcome. It's not a good one.

[illegiblehandwriting1]

humans are funny because we like to eat things that want to eat us. And sometimes it's happening simultaneously, like kiwi and pineapple

[synoicus]

Urgghhhh. I do not enjoy My Job.

[bad-as-me]

My point in replying to this is your take offers no applicable solution.

This isn't a suspision I "immediately jumped to" - I said it because this is where this cynical line of thinking inherently leads to. Whether no action is taken because we don't want anything to get done, or if it is because we are so consumed by the fear of people who take our attempts to perform healthy forum moderation and use it to form harassment campaigns, the result is the same.

My belief, one that I hope you are on the same page about, is that we should make a stronger effort to form clear distinctions of when a fandom space is becoming unsafe, and make sure we can identify which criticisms are legitimately towards harmful behavior, and which are centered around subjective experiences with imaginary people.

You are right that we can't control the amount of bigots are in the world, nor can we control if they decide to move to another circle. We are, however, well within our power to control who and what we engage with, and if they feel welcome enough in our lives to stick around. Making our own circles inhospitable to bigotry is where the greater goal of improving fandom culture begins, in my opinion. And your response, as I interpreted it, is that there is no point in even trying because of the litany of bad faith people you described.*

I do not want this to continue as much as you do, but I think it is worth the effort to cultivate a healthy space. Just as there will always be bigots, there will always be people looking for community in a shared interest, so why is it unreasonable to try and do better by that desire?

*(in terms I see just about every proshipper use, so you might understand why I brought the pro/anti labels into this. Not only that, but there are dozens of examples of people, within the replies of this very post, reporting a trend of self identitying proshippers doing so to avoid reasonable criticism for their behavior. I am talking about a greater trend of immaturity as well here!)

the problem with 'let people do what they want' is that fandom spaces will churn out the same bigoted content into perpetuity

[nostalgia-tblr]

loki/william rufus fic, where bill explains that as the second son he has inherited england while big brother bob only got the duchy of normandy, ha ha ha.

[mariocki]

Donald Sutherland guest stars as the appropriately named Philip Guest, a less appropriately unbalanced kidnapper, in Gideon's Way: The Millionaire's Daughter (1.21, ITC, 1966)

[arolesbianism]

I think its so important for everyone to learn to like characters because of their negative traits instead of in spite of them. Like there is so much joy and whimsy to be experienced once you get to a place where hating smth abt a character inevitably leads to loving them dearly because of that same trait

[maulfucker]

having a rejects doc is great because I can delete and redo whole scenes without losing anything. and also because I can keep pet paragraphs like this one until I find a scene willing to adopt them

[maryellencarter]

so i can't be arsed to actually give this OP the opportunity to verbally jack off at me, but i just saw a post where someone was complaining (validly) about the ludicrously high hardware requirements for upgrading to windows 11 -- i have a gaming macbook made in 2018 which i partitioned to windows and *that* can't even meet the motherboard specs -- but then turned it into a diatribe on how this was only a problem because you, personally, are too much of a little whiner to switch to linux.

and if i could climb through my phone and slap that person's face right off their skull, you can bet i'd do it. linux is crossfit for nerds. the first rule is that you have to holier-than-thou about it to everyone in earshot at all times, and the second rule is to give yourself a repetitive stress injury failing to make it work. not only is linux completely unsuitable for 90% of what people want to do on a computer, its whole design philosophy is antithetical to many of those things, such as "have a program I can find documentation for" and "work without having to write any code myself".

(and, crucially, "not have to listen to linux dickwads being snide in order to find out how to do things". calibre, the drm-stripping software, is a good example: it's permanently on my shitlist because some years ago, i picked it up to attempt to strip some drm as you do, and discovered that the part of the "manual" which would have told me how to do that was "The exact command line to use has been left as an exercise for the reader." Go jump off the continental shelf.)

i'm not turning off reblogs. feel free to share. but if you feel obligated to defend the honor of linux to me, consider that you've been sucking your own cock for so long you don't even realize your spine is stuck that way now, and don't bother.

[bubu-pharmacy-doctor]

Ask drunk Baizhu anything for an equally drunk response

Nothing outwardly NSFW but suggestive-ness is allowed.

I'd like to say every time I get tipsy I put my blogs on a wheel and spin it to decide who's drunk, but I just sent a message to my friends saying "I'm thinking Nari or Baizhu" and Baizhu was the first one named.

THe main rules post

(Changsheng and Gui can still be addressed but are not drunk.)

[engagemythrusters]

begging solely-The Mandalorian fans to find another piece of Mandalorian lore/culture/history/etc to talk about other than a now-defunct laser sword used to keep one asshole family in power

[eleilinnrallin]

Me: Hey I'm trans.

People: Read The Bible

Me: only finding affirming things in bible study ... Yeah I'm doing that. I'm trans.

People: >:[

[oflgtfol]

it is really unfortunate the way suicidality is talked about nowadays because it’s either all a joke so it’s hard to discuss in a serious capacity or it’s so upsettingly serious that you can’t even discuss it without fear of like being institutionalized

[princesspeach5]

I wouldn't even necessarily mind a layout change if it were good but with the negative association I have with twitter, opening tumblr to the exact twitter layout is actually making me angry + the more time I spend on it it does feel cramped + the notifs on "following" (and now "home") are sooooo annoying somehow it's worse to me than the sparkling store icon and it's harder to just ignore than the notifs on "activity" because at least those max out and stay the same whereas this is constantly changing. the constant glitchy-looking appearing and disappearing of the following/for you bar as I'm scrolling was irritating enough without a changing number on it (also why would it make sense for that bar of all things to follow you down your dash. even if I used the for you tab, why would I switch in the middle of scrolling and lose my place?? it doesn't make any sense). but I'm getting off-topic. I don't understand every website copying all of twitter's famous-for-being-bad decisions right now. I hope all the things people are trying will work. looking forward to the probable xkit fix. thank you xkit devs for everything.

[misscammiedawn]

The thing that sucks most about this is that those who are accused of being annoying and needy and desperate are likely the ones who were deprived of those massive necessities of the soul and the knowledge of being perceived this way is typically seen as unwanted too.

It makes a person lack confidence, it makes them as a social drain who is concerned about being too much, too loud, too annoying. It dampens their ability to shine and the act of apologizing for whatever light they give off, as they have been trained to expect punishment for being perceived, makes it harder for others to give them what they need.

It's a horrible vicious cycle that causes the attention starved person to blame themselves for the fact that they are supposedly unwanted/unloveable and worse, it causes them to flinch at receiving the very thing they need.

its kinda weird that humans, a social species, view “attention-seeking” as a negative trait

[loverboybrightsideghost]

they should invent a me that's good at everything i want to be good at. [thing from the addams family pokes out of a nearby box and hands me a piece of paper] thank you, thing. what's this...oh! why, it's a paper that says i have to be the one to do that for my future self! huh.