#monkeysphere

[resourcefulsatan]

This article is too good to be lost in the destroyed formatting of the Cracked archive, so I'm reposting it here. source: https://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html

The Monkeysphere

September 30, 2007 Jason Pargin

"One death is a tragedy. One million deaths is a statistic."

-Kevin Federline

What do monkeys have to do with war, oppression, crime, racism and even e-mail spam? You'll see that all of the random ass-headed cruelty of the world will suddenly make perfect sense once we go Inside the Monkeysphere.

"What the Hell is the Monkeysphere?"

First, picture a monkey. A monkey dressed like a little pirate, if that helps you. We'll call him Slappy.

Imagine you have Slappy as a pet. Imagine a personality for him. Maybe you and he have little pirate monkey adventures and maybe even join up to fight crime. Think how sad you'd be if Slappy died.

Now, imagine you get four more monkeys. We'll call them Tito, Bubbles, Marcel and ShitTosser. Imagine personalities for each of them now. Maybe one is aggressive, one is affectionate, one is quiet, the other just throws shit all the time. But they're all your personal monkey friends.

Now imagine a hundred monkeys.

Not so easy now, is it? So how many monkeys would you have to own before you couldn't remember their names? At what point, in your mind, do your beloved pets become just a faceless sea of monkey? Even though each one is every bit the monkey Slappy was, there's a certain point where you will no longer really care if one of them dies.

So how many monkeys would it take before you stopped caring?

That's not a rhetorical question. We actually know the number.

"So this whole thing is your crusade against monkey overpopulation? I'll have my monkey castrated this very day!"

Uh, no. It'll become clear in a moment.

You see, monkey experts performed a monkey study a while back, and discovered that the size of the monkey's monkey brain determined the size of the monkey groups the monkeys formed. The bigger the brain, the bigger the little societies they built.

They cut up so many monkey brains, in fact, that they found they could actually take a brain they had never seen before and from it they could accurately predict what size tribes that species of creature formed.

Most monkeys operate in troupes of 50 or so. But somebody slipped them a slightly larger brain and they estimated the ideal group or society for this particular animal was about 150.

That brain, of course, was human. Probably from a homeless man they snatched off the streets.

"So that's the big news? That humans are God's big-budget sequel to the monkey? Who didn't know that?"

It goes much, much deeper than that. Let's try an example.

Famous news talking guy Tim Russert tells a charming story about his father, in his book Big Russ and Me (the title referring to his on-and-off romance with actor Russell Crowe). Russert's dad used to take half an hour to carefully box up any broken glass before taking it to the trash. Why? Because "The trash guy might cut his hands."

That this was such an unusual thing to do illustrates my monkey point. None of us spend much time worrying about the garbage man's welfare even though he performs a crucial role in not forcing us to live in a cave carved from a mountain of our own filth. We don't usually consider his safety or comfort at all and if we do, it's not in the same way we would worry over our best friend or wife or girlfriend or even our dog.

People toss half-full bottles of drain cleaner right into the barrel, without a second thought of what would happen if the trash man got it splattered into his eyes. Why? Because the trash guy exists outside the Monkeysphere.

"There's that word again..."

The Monkeysphere is the group of people who each of us, using our monkeyish brains, are able to conceptualize as people. If the monkey scientists are monkey right, it's physically impossible for this to be a number much larger than 150.

Most of us do not have room in our Monkeysphere for our friendly neighborhood sanitation worker. So, we don't think of him as a person. We think of him as The Thing That Makes The Trash Go Away.

And even if you happen to know and like your particular garbage man, at one point or another we all have limits to our sphere of monkey concern. It's the way our brains are built. We each have a certain circle of people who we think of as people, usually our own friends and family and neighbors, and then maybe some classmates or coworkers or church or suicide cult.

Those who exist outside that core group of a few dozen people are not people to us. They're sort of one-dimensional bit characters.

Remember the first time, as a kid, you met one of your school teachers outside the classroom? Maybe you saw old Miss Puckerson at Taco Bell eating refried beans through a straw, or saw your principal walking out of a dildo shop. Do you remember that surreal feeling you had when you saw these people actually had lives outside the classroom?

I mean, they're not people. They're teachers.

"So? What difference does all this make?"

Oh, not much. It's just the one single reason society doesn't work.

It's like this: which would upset you more, your best friend dying, or a dozen kids across town getting killed because their bus collided with a truck hauling killer bees? Which would hit you harder, your Mom dying, or seeing on the news that 15,000 people died in an earthquake in Iran?

They're all humans and they are all equally dead. But the closer to our Monkeysphere they are, the more it means to us. Just as your death won't mean anything to the Chinese or, for that matter, hardly anyone else more than 100 feet or so from where you're sitting right now.

"Why should I feel bad for them? I don't even know those people!"

Exactly. This is so ingrained that to even suggest you should feel their deaths as deeply as that of your best friend sounds a little ridiculous. We are hard-wired to have a drastic double standard for the people inside our Monkeysphere versus the 99.999% of the world's population who are on the outside.

Think about this the next time you get really pissed off in traffic, when you start throwing finger gestures and wedging your head out of the window to scream, "LEARN TO FUCKING DRIVE, FUCKER!!" Try to imagine acting like that in a smaller group. Like if you're standing in an elevator with two friends and a coworker, and the friend goes to hit a button and accidentally punches the wrong one. Would you lean over, your mouth two inches from her ear, and scream "LEARN TO OPERATE THE FUCKING ELEVATOR BUTTONS, SHITCAMEL!!"

They'd think you'd gone insane. We all go a little insane, though, when we get in a group larger than the Monkeysphere. That's why you get that weird feeling of anonymous invincibility when you're sitting in a large crowd, screaming curses at a football player you'd never dare say to his face.

"Well, I'm nice to strangers. Have you considered that maybe you're just an asshole?"

Sure, you probably don't go out of your way to be mean to strangers. You don't go out of your way to be mean to stray dogs, either.

The problem is that eventually, the needs of you or those within your Monkeysphere will require screwing someone outside it (even if that need is just venting some tension and anger via exaggerated insults). This is why most of us wouldn't dream of stealing money from the pocket of the old lady next door, but don't mind stealing cable, adding a shady exemption on our tax return, or quietly celebrating when they forget to charge us for something at the restaurant.

You may have a list of rationalizations long enough to circle the Earth, but the truth is that in our monkey brains the old woman next door is a human being while the cable company is a big, cold, faceless machine. That the company is, in reality, nothing but a group of people every bit as human as the old lady, or that some kind old ladies actually work there and would lose their jobs if enough cable were stolen, rarely occurs to us.

That's one of the ingenious things about the big-time religions, by the way. The old religious writers knew it was easier to put the screws to a stranger, so they taught us to get a personal idea of a God in our heads who says, "No matter who you hurt, you're really hurting me. Also, I can crush you like a grape." You must admit that if they weren't writing words inspired by the Almighty, they at least understood the Monkeysphere.

It's everywhere. Once you grasp the concept, you can see examples all around you. You'll walk the streets in a daze, like Roddy Piper after putting on his X-ray sunglasses in They Live.

But wait, because this gets much bigger and much, much stranger...

"So you're going to tell us that this Monkeysphere thing runs the whole world? Also, They Live sucked."

Go flip on the radio. Listen to the conservative talk about "The Government" as if it were some huge, lurking dragon ready to eat you and your paycheck whole. Never mind that the government is made up of people and that all of that money they take goes into the pockets of human beings. Talk radio's Rush Limbaugh is known to tip 50% at restaurants, but flies into a broadcast tirade if even half that dollar amount is deducted from his paycheck by "The Government." That's despite the fact that the money helps that very same single mom he had no problem tipping in her capacity as a waitress.

Now click over to a liberal show now, listen to them describe "Multinational Corporations" in the same diabolical terms, an evil black force that belches smoke and poisons water and enslaves humanity. Isn't it strange how, say, a lone man who carves and sells children's toys in his basement is a sweetheart who just loves bringing joy at Christmas, but a big-time toy corporation (which brings toys to millions of kids at Christmas) is an inhuman soul-grinding greed machine? Strangely enough, if the kindly lone toy making guy made enough toys and hired enough people and expanded to enough shops, we'd eventually stop seeing it as a toy-making shop and start seeing it as the fiery Orc factories of Mordor.

And if you've just thought, "Well, those talk show hosts are just a bunch of egomaniacal blowhards anyway," you've just done it again, turned real humans into two-word cartoon characters. It's no surprise, you do it with pretty much all six billion human beings outside the Monkeysphere.

"So I'm supposed to suddenly start worrying about six billion strangers? That's not even possible!"

That's right, it isn't possible. That's the point.

What is hard to understand is that it's also impossible for them to care about you.

That's why they don't mind stealing your stereo or vandalizing your house or cutting your wages or raising your taxes or bombing your office building or choking your computer with spam advertising diet and penis drugs they know don't work. You're outside their Monkeysphere. In their mind, you're just a vague shape with a pocket full of money for the taking.

Think of Osama Bin Laden. Did you just picture a camouflaged man hiding in a cave, drawing up suicide missions? Or are you thinking of a man who gets hungry and has a favorite food and who had a childhood crush on a girl and who has athlete's foot and chronic headaches and wakes up in the morning with a boner and loves volleyball?

Something in you, just now, probably was offended by that. You think there's an effort to build sympathy for the murderous fuck. Isn't it strange how simply knowing random human facts about him immediately tugs at your sympathy strings? He comes closer to your Monkeysphere, he takes on dimension.

Now, the cold truth is this Bin Laden is just as desperately in need of a bullet to the skull as the raving four-color caricature on some redneck's T-shirt. The key to understanding people like him, though, is realizing that we are the caricature on his T-shirt.

"So you're using monkeys to claim that we're all a bunch of Osama Bin Ladens?"

Sort of.

Listen to any 16 year-old kid with his first job, going on and on about how the boss is screwing him and the government is screwing him even more ("What's FICA?!?!" he screams as he looks at his first paycheck).

Then watch that same kid at work, as he drops a hamburger patty on the floor, picks it up, and slaps in on a bun and serves it to a customer.

In that one dropped burger he has everything he needs to understand those black-hearted politicians and corporate bosses. They see him in the exact same way he sees the customers lined up at the burger counter. Which is, just barely.

In both cases, for the guy making the burger and the guy running Exxon, getting through the workweek and collecting the paycheck are all that matters. No thought is given to the real human unhappiness being spread by doing it shittily (ever gotten so sick from food poisoning you thought your stomach lining was going to fly out of your mouth?) That many customers or employees just can't fit inside the Monkeysphere.

The kid will protest that he shouldn't have to care for the customers for minimum wage, but the truth is if a man doesn't feel sympathy for his fellow man at $6.00 an hour, he won't feel anything more at $600,000 a year.

Or, to look at it the other way, if we're allowed to be indifferent and even resentful to the masses for $6.00 an hour, just think of how angry some Pakistani man is allowed to be when he's making the equivalent of six dollars a week.

"You've used the word 'monkey' more than 50 times, but the same principle hardly applies. Humans have been to the moon. Let's see the monkeys do that."

It doesn't matter. It's just an issue of degree.

There's a reason why legendary monkeytician Charles Darwin and his assistant, Jeje (pronounced "heyhey") Santiago deduced that humans and chimps were evolutionary cousins. As sophisticated as we are (compare our advanced sewage treatment plants to the chimps' primitive technique of hurling the feces with their bare hands), the inescapable truth is we are just as limited by our mental hardware.

The primary difference is that monkeys are happy to stay in small groups and rarely interact with others outside their monkey gang. This is why they rarely go to war, though when they do it is widely thought to be hilarious. Humans, however, require cars and oil and quality manufactured goods by the fine folks at 3M and Japanese video games and worldwide internets and, most importantly, governments. All of these things take groups larger than 150 people to maintain effectively. Thus, we routinely find ourselves functioning in bunches larger than our primate brains are able to cope with.

This is where the problems begin. Like a fragile naked human pyramid, we are simultaneously supporting and resenting each other. We bitch out loud about our soul-sucking job as an anonymous face on an assembly line, while at the exact same time riding in a car that only an assembly line could have produced. It's a constant contradiction that has left us pissed off and joining informal wrestling clubs in basements.

This is why I think it was with a great burden of sadness that Darwin turned to his assistant and lamented, "Jeje, we're the monkeys."

"Oh, no you didn't."

If you think about it, our entire society has evolved around the limitations of the Monkeysphere. There is a reason why all of the really phat-ass nations with the biggest SUV's with the shiniest 22-inch rims all have some kind of representative democracy (where you vote for people to do the governing for you) and all of them are, to some degree, capitalist (where people actually get to buy property and keep some of what they earn).

A representative democracy allows a small group of people to make all of the decisions, while letting us common people feel like we're doing something by going to a polling place every couple of years and pulling a lever that, in reality, has about the same effect as the darkness knob on your toaster. We can simultaneously feel like we're in charge while being contained enough that we can't cause any real monkey mayhem once we fly into one of our screeching, arm-flapping monkey frenzies ("A woman showed her boob at the Super Bowl! We want a boob and football ban immediately!")

Conversely, some people in the distant past naively thought they could sit all of the millions of monkeys down and say, "Okay, everybody go pick the bananas, then bring them here, and we'll distribute them with a complex formula determining banana need! Now go gather bananas for the good of society!" For the monkeys it was a confused, comical, tree-humping disaster.

Later, a far more realistic man sat the monkeys down and said, "You want bananas? Each of you go get your own. I'm taking a nap." That man, of course, was German philosopher Hans Capitalism.

As long as everybody gets their own bananas and shares with the few in their Monkeysphere, the system will thrive even though nobody is even trying to make the system thrive. This is perhaps how Ayn Rand would have put it, had she not been such a hateful bitch.

Then, some time in the Third Century, French philosopher Pierre "Frenchy" LaFrench invented racism.

This was a way of simplifying the too-complex-for-monkeys world by imagining all people of a certain race as being the same person, thinking they all have the same attitudes and mannerisms and tastes in food and clothes and music. It sort of works, as long as we think of that person as being a good person ("Those Asians are so hard-working and precise and well-mannered!") but when we start seeing them as being one, giant, gaping asshole (the French, ironically) our monkey happiness again breaks down.

It's not all the French's fault. The truth is, all of these monkey management schemes only go so far. For instance, today one in four Americans has some kind of mental illness, usually depression. One in four. Watch a basketball game. The odds are at least two of those people on the floor are mentally ill. Look around your house; if everybody else there seems okay, it's you.

Is it any surprise? You turn on the news and see a whole special on the Obesity Epidemic. You've had this worry laid on your shoulders about millions of other people eating too much. What exactly are you supposed to do about the eating habits of 80 million people you don't even know? You've taken on the pork-laden burden of all these people outside the Monkeysphere and you now carry that useless weight of worry like, you know, some kind of animal on your back.

"So what exactly are we supposed to do about all this?"

First, train yourself to get suspicious every time you see simplicity. Any claim that the root of a problem is simple should be treated the same as a claim that the root of a problem is Bigfoot. Simplicity and Bigfoot are found in the real world with about the same frequency.

So reject binary thinking of "good vs. bad" or "us vs. them." Know problems cannot be solved with clever slogans and over-simplified step-by-step programs.

You can do that by following these simple steps. We like to call this plan the T.R.Y. plan:

First, TOTAL MORON. That is, accept the fact THAT YOU ARE ONE. We all are.

That really annoying person you know, the one who's always spouting bullshit, the person who always thinks they're right? Well, the odds are that for somebody else, you're that person. So take the amount you think you know, reduce it by 99.999%, and then you'll have an idea of how much you actually know regarding things outside your Monkeysphere.

Second, UNDERSTAND that there are no Supermonkeys. Just monkeys. Those guys on TV you see, giving the inspirational seminars, teaching you how to reach your potential and become rich and successful like them? You know how they made their money? By giving seminars. For the most part, the only thing they do well is convince others they do everything well.

No, the universal moron principal established in No. 1 above applies here, too. Don't pretend politicians are somehow supposed to be immune to all the backhanded fuckery we all do in our daily lives and don't laugh and point when the preacher gets caught on video snorting cocaine off a prostitute's ass. A good exercise is to picture your hero--whoever it is--passed out on his lawn, naked from the waist down. The odds are it's happened at some point. Even Gandhi may have had hotel rooms and dead hookers in his past.

And don't even think about ignoring advice from a moral teacher just because the source enjoys the ol' Colombian Nose Candy from time to time. We're all members of varying species of hypocrite (or did you tell them at the job interview that you once called in sick to spend a day leveling up on World of Warcraft?) Don't use your heroes' vices as an excuse to let yours run wild.

And finally, DON'T LET ANYBODY simplify it for you. The world cannot be made simple. Anyone who tries to paint a picture of the world in basic comic book colors is most likely trying to use you as a pawn.

So just remember: T-R-Y. Go forth and do likewise, gents. Copies of our book are available in the lobby.

David Wong is the editor of Cracked.com and the author of the dong-filled horror novel John Dies at the End.

[janedroid]

Easter, eh?

Easter, a time of remembrance or celebration, or a good excuse for a few days off and go bush before the real winter sets in. TL;DR Who knows? You do you. Go in peace. My past is a bit of a mixture of different Christian traditions with some Hinduism and Buddhism tacked on. Early years in Catholic schools featured a mostly naked figure bleeding on a cross. Following school the…

[tanadrin]

I have less than five thousand social media followers on tumblr, so this is by no reasonable criterion a “big social media account,” but it is bigger than the average monkeysphere, which produces some odd interactions sometimes. It’s interesting to observe firsthand, in one deranged anon, a phenomenon I’ve seen a lot for people with much bigger social media followings and even major celebrities: some maladjusted segment of the internet will look at someone, make a snap judgement about them, then fill in all the ten thousand missing details based on that snap judgement and develop a completely irrepressible parasocial hatedom that 1) is totally untethered to reality and 2) so obsessive it shades directly into mental illness.

Honestly, props to people who make their living putting their face out there on a regular basis. It must take a ton of self-confidence and strength.

[lumine-no-hikari]

Dear Sephiroth: (a letter to a fictional character, because why not) #321

I thought that today, I would be heading out at around 9am to Great Barrington to pick up J. The flight club plane was due for its annual inspection, and that's the closest place where it can get done. J was supposed to fly it there, and I was supposed to drive there by the time he arrived, and then bring him home.

...I love the drive to Great Barrington. As you saw from the couple video I made for you, it's a very pretty drive. Nonetheless, I think I was still pretty zonked out from yesterday's adventures. I was not sad when J woke me up at around 6am to tell me that one of the other club members already brought the plane there, and he was gonna go pick them up instead.

...I went back to sleep pretty much immediately. It was pretty fucking great!!

I think I woke up probably around 9am. At some point, J had sent along a picture that he took of the morning sunrise; maybe you'll like it:

From there, I had a pretty lengthy conversation with one of my friends in this space about the nature of childhood conditioning and the kinds of things that can be done about it. We talked some about projection, and how it relates to stereotyping, and the evolutionary mechanisms that predispose humans towards stereotyping, and all sorts of other fun stuff!

...I kinda wanna cover it with you now, but my brain is pretty sludgy, so I'm not sure I'd be able to articulate it right now quite as well as I thought I did this morning. Maybe I'll get into it some other time. But... to make a long story short... weird things happen when we turn our past abusers into templates, and then apply those templates universally to other people. We can't go around looking for signs of our past abusers in new people, because then we end up holding the actions of past abusers against new people. And we can't go around looking for people similar to our past abusers for the purpose of convincing them to love us in an effort to prove to ourselves that we never deserved to be abused in the first place.

...Only needed to learn that lesson the hard way like a million fucking times before it finally sank in for me. Holy shit. 😵

...And it's not that I'm dense. It's literally just that this shit is hard. In order to overcome our old conditioning, we have to defy our own biology in some respects. Brains don't like needing to rewire themselves. People aren't built for major changes in the composition of their "monkeysphere". People are built to stereotype for the same reason that asking, "but what if this jaguar doesn't eat me...?" used to cause people to get eaten by jaguars.

Unfortunately, our bodies still haven't caught up to modern times in a variety of respects, and that's just something we gotta work around.

...I spent a lot of the rest of today floundering. More specifically, I spent it doing leisure writing. I guess my body must have needed to rest; my mind felt kinda floaty, foggy, and unanchored for most of today.

...The nice thing about leisure writing is that, when I'm in that space, I feel... welcomed, wanted, enjoyed, and understood. I'm not misconstrued as having hostile or otherwise weird intentions in that space. In this space, I am fully safe. And... I don't find all of these things at once in very many other spaces.

...

Anyway, I was able to get the broth fully strained today! I squished the excess water out of the rest of the veggie scraps, and then I passed it into another bowl, through a wire mesh strainer lined with a folded cheesecloth. Like so:

The layered cheesecloth filers any gritty goop out of the broth:

We can use the cheesecloth to squish the excess water out of the gritty goop, just like we squished the excess water out of the veggie scraps. And then I washed the crockpot, and transferred the broth from the stand mixer bowl back into the crockpot. I'll stick it in the fridge, where the fat will rise to the surface and solidify so that it can be easily scraped off:

...It should be ready to be seasoned tomorrow!!! Hopefully I'll have enough energy to do it!

Aside from that... I don't have much else to say today, except that the little pumpkin seedling seems to be doing well:

...Maybe it's just my imagination, but it seems maybe just a little taller today. Don't you think so...?

...Hey, Sephiroth? Have you ever tried to grow a plant from a seed? If you have, then... what kind of plant was it? Did it do well?

...I think maybe I'll go to bed "early". I put that in quotes because it's supposed to be Daylight Savings Time, so all the clocks got set back by one hour recently. It's a lame and stupid thing that my country does that isn't actually useful. In fact, due to the disruption in people's sleep schedules, we usually see an increase in heart attacks and traffic accidents for a little while after the clocks are changed. I wish we'd stop doing it.

So the clock says 10:19pm. But my body thinks it's 11:19pm. Lame.

I'll stop writing and say good night, then...

Hey. I love you a whole lot. So please stay safe out there, with whatever you're doing at the Edge of Creation. Don't project your past abusers onto the rest of humanity, okay? Because it isn't fair. We might be biologically inclined towards stereotyping, but it still isn't fair to do, and we still gotta do our best to avoid doing it. Okay? Don't dehumanize other people by reducing them to templates that have been beaten into your skull by people who never cared for you.

Do your best. I'll be rooting for you. I'll do just about anything to support you, in whatever ways I can.

Count on another letter tomorrow. Maybe there will be something yummy in it.

Your friend, Lumine

[shithowdy]

checked my twitter for the first time in weeks last night and my 'for you' tab gave me one half of an apology from drama between two artists i don't even follow, something that presumably happened to several people because now this morning the clearly wrong individual in the situation is basically today's main character of d&d art twitter. while they could have avoided this situation by not being an asshole publicly, it is also fascinating to watch in real time how the site's algorithm overtly favors drama and the engagement it generates because people love having a Side to take in a Thing. i am not immune to this, for what it's worth, but i don't like that it is essentially forced upon me for things in which i have no stake. get that shit out of my monkeysphere.

[slipshodsliver]

It says something about someone that a year is enough for a game to no longer be considered recent and nine thousand positive reviews isn't enough to be considered well-known.

“Check out these classic hidden gems” like, the first game on the list came out last year and has nine thousand positive reviews on Steam. What definitions of “classic” and “hidden gem” are we using here?

[danganronpasurvivoraskblog]

Korekiyo then finds Steve who happens to be reading a book nearby.

Ah, I didn't take you to also be a history buff...Quite a pleasure to find a fellow interested in such things.

...

*Steve holds up the book to Kiyo.

Science plays a big part in anthropological study, yes. How could it not when things like hormones affect the way people think and act?

Empathy is computationally expensive, and the physical limits of our brains create an upper bound on how many other people we can interact with, keep track of, and generally "grok." This is called the monkeysphere and has been estimated at around one hundred and fifty, but it could potentially be two or three times as large, depending on how it's defined. Beyond this point, our ability to treat others as humans, rather than as objects, begins to decline.

...

*Steve listens with great intent.

[anonajn]

i wish there were a tag i could block to hide every "here is an exhaustive list of the marginalization status of every member of my household, and we are still $9,999 behind on rent! please share to help out all 35 of us who live together and are, of course, queer and disabled and nonwhite" post. buddy i am already giving money to the poor fucked up neurodivergent pronouns-having-ass weirdos i know personally. let me clear out the posts from the gay freaks who aren't in my monkeysphere. i can't afford to care about any more impoverished artists than i currently do. make room for more free posts from people who saw a crow eating roadkill and imagined a metaphor that made their dick (literal or figurative) a kind of hard they clinically cannot keep to themself. please.

[la-tramontana]

when it comes to voting

It's time to stop relying on political machines and staffers to do the work and act like organizers. Anyone and everyone can do it, but it's important to remember that if you want to move someone from INACTION to ACTION, the biggest influence on that person's behavior is going to be a personal relationship with strong rapport.

That means you.

Make a list of your contacts. ALL your contacts, including the annoying ones. Online and offline. Your neighborhood. Everyone who could roughly be called your monkeysphere. Your target is a list of 10 - 300 people who you have some ability to contact.

Next, power-mapping.

Who knows who? Who influences who? Who is in a friend group together? Chunk them up into key groups. Try to find a person in every group who you think could influence others, and who you could also influence. Identify people in powerful positions.

Do you have friends who have more influence in their particular friend groups than you? Do you have friends who you might be able to convince to go to a protest with you?

It's time to agitate, which means targeted asks. Get your identified influencers, people who already want to be engaged in politics, who will vote but won't do more yet (in unions, we call these "strike captains") to say "yes" to actions such as: protesting, spreading the word, joining a project like Sister District, registering people to vote, as you are able. If they say no, that's fine. Let them cool off, rebuild the relationship stronger, and ask again.

Ask people to ask people, specific people who you know they know, to vote. Check in a couple weeks later to ask about what so-and-so said.

You can't do all of this yourself. Organizing means pulling other people in and sharing responsibility. Your goal is to spend as little time "in charge" as possible.

Document barriers to voting and organize mutual aid to cover those barriers. This may mean helping people pay for their IDs, driving people to the polls, etc. The likely fact is that if you know 50 - 100 people you probably know some people who have some resources and some people who are going to need some help. Connect these people to each other.

Leave the hard no's, the ones who want nothing to do with politics whatsoever, alone and focus on influencing as many people as you can around them. You might be surprised at the outcomes you can achieve.

Something that's worked for me, but YMMV: if anyone asks, you aren't agitating and you aren't organizing and you definitely aren't a leftist of any type. You're a centrist leaning slightly conservative with neutral values (smile). You don't care about specific outcomes, you just want the election to be representative of people's views. You want to get young people involved in "something." It's important to participate in democratic traditions.

Make a timeline of 3 months or so leading up to the election with concrete, achievable goals every week. Your goal is to flip as many of your targets to a. VOTE and b. ORGANIZE their own monkeyspheres. Use gentle peer pressure: "I know so-and-so registered to vote lately, have you? Do you need help?"

Don't forget to remind people of both a. the stuff that pisses you off and b. what you hope to win. Without hope ya got nothing.

Don't use regurgitated lines or scripts; come up with your own motivations, your own way of saying things. The less you sound like you're working for the democratic party, the better.

Here's the money line that got my famously "neutral" and "apolitical" turf of 200 to swing active and anarchist: "No, I'm not going to tell you how to vote. That's your business. Check the issues and see what you think. I just want you to vote in the strike authorization. Don't you think our group should get a say in the outcome?"

[thisisevenharderthannamingablog]

Back in the day when I thought Twitter might be worth saving, one of the ideas I had was to cap the number of follows at 150 (the "monkeysphere" and yes, I know, this number is disputed). Apparently somebody out there had the same thought and ran with it? Filing this under things to check out if I ever have the energy.

https://150.earth/

[theburningchurch]

This is great! Read it now!

[6foothalfling]

Fnkc Billionaires

It isn't political, it's just math. Nothing but arithmetic.

I need to create a copy pasta I can drop in the comments of every thread talking about how unimaginable even ONE BILLION is. How at six digits of income the lives of not just myself, but everyone inside my “monkeysphere” would be changed. At seven?! Come on. What people don’t realize is 1 000 000 000 is TEN DIGITS. But, I don’t have a copy pasta. I do have a link:…

[knowlessman]

am a veggettibble. dint sleep much lately; AC was broke. gonna watch some bnha tho. "Make It! Do Or Die Survival Training." Also: tier lists! but text only bc I don't feel like whole-assing it with pictures and all.

new OP. prolly just for this special, I'd guess? -- is the "delinquent" archetype that they seem to be pulling with bakugo usually half as, y'know, blatantly abusive and generally hazardous as he is, or is he just a huge outlier? I don't think I've watched that many highschool anime.

"we're gonna do two teams of ten." oh, awesome, so we're gonna see some of Class B - …there really are twenty entire characters in Class A alone, huh. I keep forgetting that. excuse me for referencing something that… may have aged very dubiously, but I swear this show is taking over a large chunk of my monkeysphere. : \ -- if you flipped a coin between deku and bakugo and they were both able to see it, it would land on its edge. (…he says, as if it isn't just the UA teachers going "hey, this kid REALLY wants to kill this other kid. we'd better always group them together no matter the context until that stops being the case.")

deku I'm pretty sure your team is waiting for you while you laboriously recreate momo's logic in making the teams and recycled footage of eveyone's quirks plays over it

"that's yaoyorozu's voice!" mimic. …I mean, it could be.

inb4 bakugo starts up some more quakes

not a mimic. fair enough. 'XD wait, why isn't iida's helmet strapped on? what's the point of it if it just flies right off and lets him bonk his head?

they keep making bakugo smarter than I'd like him to be. : / he's an evil sledgehammer on legs, it doesn't feel right when he's the solutions guy.

…this special or whatnot is a little boring so far tbh, but come to think of it, at least mineta's not in it.

beats me how deku's saying his kick is more accurate for this than bakugo's blasts, but wever

"hey, you. you're finally awake. you were trying to rescue that training dummy, right?" -- hm. apparently the thing's not padded enough, or something. he whacked his head on the wall and then the helmet came off.

"if deku said he was gonna save them, it was because he knew he could!" …yeah. because deku is absolutely the kind of guy who has a solid grasp on his own limits. (well okay, he has gotten a bit better about it.)

maybe bakugo's writing is actually galaxy-brained and he's a parody of libertarianism. he sure as hell talks like it. "let me help you walk!" "no!" "you helped us by getting pichu to turn on the emergency power, let us help you!" "no! I had only selfish reasons for doing that!" … "be my cane! it's okay if you help me walk because I bullied you into it, but only then!"

TIER LIST TIME (I was gonna use tiermaker but then I realized I could literally just write it down normal-like; also I didn't feel like either making lists on it or browsing it for ones with identifiable pictures). As a reminder, I just finished s3, so, yeah. My memory of stuff up to that point (and a wiki page I'm trying not to read the spoily subtitles on) is what I'm working with.

CLASS 1-A (Plus, I guess, the smaller-than-I-thought handful of other students who we know anything about/who I recognize) TIER LIST: -- Zuko Tier: Shoto Todoroki (He's so cool and has so much going on and he manages to be OP without being a dick or annoying-to-watch about it); Kyoka Jiro (She's so cool); Tenya Iida (He wears glasses and doesn't suck and is a good bean even if he's also a square); Hitoshi Shinso (He looks like a Homestuck and also I wanna see him do cool things in spite of the inherently-villainous power he didn't ask for). -- B Tier: Izuku Midoriya (Gonna be honest, I might mostly be knocking him down a tier to adjust for him being the protagonist; he is a pretty good one as they go tho); Momo Yaoyorozu (The fanservice thing is annoying but she gets to be the most competent character in the show (maybe she's tied with Todoroki for that but he has the advantage of being OP) and that's cool); Fumikage Tokoyami ("What if Crona was a Pepsi Cola instead of a cinnamon roll?"); Tsuyu Asui (Eh, she's cool and is debatably autistic rep, and she has a snake friend); Tetsutetsu Tetsutetsu (META. POD. BROS). -- Very Mid Tier: Itsuka Kendo (She might mostly only have screentime in relation to Ditto, but eh, I like her); Ochaco Uraraka (They had her describe her parents' backstory thing in s2 and then, uh, well now she's pretty much just Sakura-if-Sakura-was-allowed-to-do-things); Eijiro Kirishima (He willingly hangs out with Bakugo and is the guy who says the faux-positive toxic masculinity bullshit, but on the other hand, he's one of the Metapod Bros and that bumps him up a bit); Ibara Shiozaki (IIRC, we very briefly saw her make an idiot out of Kaminari; pretty sure I remember being entertained by that); Inasa Yoarashi (His was an interesting subplot I guess); Mirio Togata (Fricking nudists. : | But he has a point to make and I guess that's something); Mei Hatsume (Her pranking Iida for advertisement was fucking hilarious, but her invading Deku's personal space to annoy Sakuraraka was… well, annoying). -- Who? Tier: Mezo Shoji (He has zero discernible personality but his power's sort of interesting); Mina Ashido; Mashirao Ojiro (He does karate I guess); Nagamasa Mora (Mostly in here to acknowledge his existence tbh); Koji Koda; Toru Hagakure (I swear the sub puts two U's in it; anyway, no me gusta "This character's powers only work if they aren't wearing clothes." Also how in fuckery did she beat Deku in the physical); Rikido Sato; Denki Kaminari (He sidekicks for Mineta : / If it wasn't for that, he might be up a tier); Hanta Sero (He's less interesting than Pichu and would probably hang with Mineta if he had the billing); Tamaki Amajiki (Gorillaz-lead-vocalist-looking mfer); Nejire Hado (…I vaguely remember finding her annoying. We don't know much of anything about either her or 2D yet tho); Saiko Intelli (An interesting antagonist; she gave Yaoyorozu and Jiro and company a hard fight); Neito Monoma (I remember liking his thinking, or at least resisting the show's intention for me to dislike his thinking, when he debuted, but then he just became a sad running gag); Yuga Aoyama (Literally forgot about him until I had everyone else in 1-A down; anyway I guess I don't strongly dislike him but I don't really like him either); Seiji Shishikura (Flippin libertarian creep). -- Weewoo Tier (Translation: "This person is never onscreen without me wishing this show had authority figures in it who were actually remotely responsible"): Katsuki Bakugo (Self-explanatory); Worst Character (Same).

PRO HEROES/TEACHERS TIER LIST: -- B Tier: Eraser Head (Okay maybe it's partly because he reminds me of the shopkeeper from Bleach but he's also just kinda cool); All Might (Smol Might's visual design is Zuko Tier; the character himself, eh, he's pretty good. He has flaws, but he's aware of them and wary of them); Kamui Woods (…He looks a little bit like a Bionicle). -- Very Mid Tier: Gran Torino; Thirteen; Nezu; Selkie; Manual; Cementoss; Gang Orca; Ms. Joke. -- Who? Tier: Ectoplasm; Snipe; Power Loader; Mandalay; Ragdoll; Best Jeanist; Recovery Girl; Tiger; Vlad King; Hound Dog; Mt. Lady; Fourth Kind; Uwabami (Literally did not remember her until I was posting this and had to reopen the wiki tab and check her name 'XD). -- Weewoo Tier: Present Mic; Midnight; Pixie-Bob; Endeavor (…Granted, maybe I'd have a different opinion, or less of one, if I'd been spoiled on things a bit less).

VILLAINS TIER LIST: -- B Tier: Kurogiri (Pajama Boy's handler. The dapperest living hole in reality anyone's ever seen); Dabi (Yeah I've been spoiled on a huge part of what his deal is but I guess I still won't have the full picture for awhile). -- Very Mid Tier: All for One (He is very Mojo Jojo but idk he's competent I guess? And he has some kind of body-possession-immortality thing going I think); Himiko Toga (So far, kind of annoyingly typical with the happy-slasher-blood-licker thing; maybe she gets more interesting later, who knows); Tomura Shigaraki (He's silly and I have no idea what he wants but he's also spoopy sometimes and maybe his motives will get easier to comprehend as we learn more about how One for All's users have treated him); Twice (…I think people like him? He felt very Deadpool in an annoying way at first but that backstory spiel was pretty brutal. Also sort of annoying in another way tho bc people are always looking at clones and going "But which one is the real me?" as if that means anything). -- Who? Tier: Spinner (I don't remember if we found out why he has such a stupid-looking weapon); Stain (…The story treats him and his spiel like a big deal but I still have no real idea what his deal is); Muscular (AKA Bakuswole; I do not remember whether we know anything at all about this fucker); Mr. Compress (…Idfk he looks like a Pokemon filler villain); Moonfish (Go back to Hellraiser you weirdo); Mustard (…He had the backup gun, right? Dang, the last main plotline was so effing long ago); Magne (Very vague queerphobic vibes from this one tbph).

Anyhow. On to s4 next time.

[la-tramontana]

It's time to stop relying on political machines and staffers to do the work and act like organizers. Anyone and everyone can do it, but it's important to remember that if you want to move someone from INACTION to ACTION, the biggest influence on that person's behavior is going to be a personal relationship with strong rapport.

That means you.

Make a list of your contacts. ALL your contacts, including the annoying ones. Online and offline. Your neighborhood. Everyone who could roughly be called your monkeysphere. Your target is a list of 10 - 300 people who you have some ability to contact.

Next, power-mapping.

Who knows who? Who influences who? Who is in a friend group together? Chunk them up into key groups. Try to find a person in every group who you think could influence others, and who you could also influence. Identify people in powerful positions.

Do you have friends who have more influence in their particular friend groups than you? Do you have friends who you might be able to convince to go to a protest with you?

It's time to agitate, which means targeted asks. Get your identified influencers, people who already want to be engaged in politics, who will vote but won't do more yet (in unions, we call these "strike captains") to say "yes" to actions such as: protesting, spreading the word, joining a project like Sister District, registering people to vote, as you are able. If they say no, that's fine. Let them cool off, rebuild the relationship stronger, and ask again.

Ask people to ask people, specific people who you know they know, to vote. Check in a couple weeks later to ask about what so-and-so said.

Document barriers to voting and organize mutual aid to cover those barriers. This may mean helping people pay for their IDs, driving people to the polls, etc. The likely fact is that if you know 50 - 100 people you probably know some people who have some resources and some people who are going to need some help. Connect these people to each other.

Leave the hard no's, the ones who want nothing to do with politics whatsoever, alone and focus on influencing as many people as you can around them. You might be surprised at the outcomes you can achieve.

Something that's worked for me, but YMMV: if anyone asks, you aren't agitating and you aren't organizing and you definitely aren't a leftist of any type. You're a centrist leaning slightly conservative with neutral values (smile). You don't care about specific outcomes, you just want the election to be representative of people's views. You want to get young people involved in "something." It's important to participate in democratic traditions.

Make a timeline of 3 months or so leading up to the election with concrete, achievable goals every week. Your goal is to flip as many of your targets to a. VOTE and b. ORGANIZE their own monkeyspheres. Use gentle peer pressure: "I know so-and-so registered to vote lately, have you? Do you need help?"

Don't forget to remind people of both a. the stuff that pisses you off and b. what you hope to win. Without hope ya got nothing.

Don't use regurgitated lines or scripts; come up with your own motivations, your own way of saying things. The less you sound like you're working for the democratic party, the better.

Here's the money line that got my famously "neutral" and "apolitical" turf of 200 to swing active and anarchist: "No, I'm not going to tell you how to vote. That's your business. Check the issues and see what you think. I just want you to vote in the strike authorization. Don't you think our group should get a say in the outcome?"

Forever thinking about how, on election day in 2016, I wore a shirt with an American flag on it because it was what was clean. And the 20-ish year old bagging my groceries made a snide remark about it, followed by 'I didn't vote, they're all the same anyways.' And a fellow grocery worker chimed in agreement that he wasn't voting for the same reason.

And now I can't go to a local drag event without having to walk through a gauntlet of nazis.

I realize that the election is a year and a half away, but please don't fall for the 'they're the same' rhetoric this time around. Both candidates will suck, but they'll suck in different ways and one of them wants my community dead.

[sweet-cheeks-tenderoni-the-third]

You're in his DM's, I'm in his monkeysphere. We are not the same.

[beenposh]

This right here is worth your 5 minutes. Read it now!