#social beliefs

[kestrelsandcentipedes]

Not socialist in a “I won’t have to work” type of way but socialist in a “I’ll still be working but I won’t be worried I won’t make the rent” type of way. In a “billions won’t be hoarded by one person” type of way. In a “janitors, fast-food workers, child care workers, preschool teachers, hotel clerks, personal care and home health aides, and grocery store cashiers, will live comfortably” type of way. In a “the sick and elderly will be cared for” type of way. In a “no child should work” type of way.

[willowsearth]

How Our Social Beliefs Shape Reality: The Power of Expectations

Our expectations shape reality in relationships, education, and workplaces. Explore the psychology behind behavioral confirmation, stereotypes, and self-fulfilling prophecies, and discover how conscious thought can foster growth and connection. #Psycholog

Imagine a teacher standing at the front of her classroom on the first day of school. She glances at her list of students and notices a few familiar names, siblings of past pupils. Subconsciously, she recalls their older siblings’ behavior—whether they were diligent, mischievous, or disengaged—and unknowingly assigns these traits to the new students before even speaking to them. This scenario…

[vintage-bentley]

I wish that people who identify as nonbinary could just admit that it’s a subculture. They have more in common with emos and goths than with homosexuals and bisexuals…they aren’t experiencing oppression for the way they were born, at worst they’re experiencing bullying for the way they choose to express themselves. So why are we supposed to consider them Super Special And Oppressed Queers when they just aren’t? They need to just leave LGB people alone and embrace the fact that they are an aesthetic-based subculture, not an oppressed minority.

[mossy-aro]

sorry but i am SO deeply tired of the 'aphobia isnt real' arguments because they are literally always being conducted in such bad faith. NO there is not specific societal or legal discrimation against aces and aros BECAUSE we are asexual and or aromantic. you cannot hold specifically bigoted beliefs towards a group you do not even know exist. there ARE, however, underlying and deeply pervasive systems and beliefs that actively erase, dehumanise and make life tangibly more difficult for aro and ace people on a social, economic and legal basis. most of this is due to hyperinvisibility, the medicalisation of any nonnormative + misunderstood orientations, the elevation of romance + romantic structures as the most important aspects of interpersonal relationships in society, as well as the nuclear atomisation of the family. among other things. like. amatonormativity has never been ABOUT aromantic people specfically oh my GOD. its simply the underlying social belief that everyone is expected to be in monogamous romantic relationships and that those relationships are expected to the default centre of one's life. its something that affects EVERYONE! but within that it affects aromantic people in a specific and heightened way because of our inability to participate in it in a societally acceptable way. like these are not 'aromantic' or 'asexual' or 'polyamorous' issues specifically. these are theories and terms that originated within feminist + queer sociology studies! its all part of the wider underlying social fabric! aspec people are simply pointing out that we are often affected by these things in unique and often unseen ways.

the idea that we believe people actively 'hate' us for being asexual or aromantic is completely ridiculous. most people i know do not even know the definition of those words! so how could they hate me for it. they could however, for example, hold the pervasive + societally unchallenged belief that not experiencing sexual or romantic attraction is a medical issue or something concerningly abnormal in a human being + something i should get fixed. and its not uncommon that when you DO explain that its simply your orientation to them, they continue to medicalise it and see it as some sort of issue. genuinely so deeply tired of having to explain this to people time and time again when they only want to cherry pick the most ridiculous arguments to respond to and then act as if that's a majority held opinion in the aspec community. like i actually think we are aware of how society views us we're not fucking deluded and stupid. we don't have victim complexes we are just pointing out facts that yall are so desperate to ignore. UGHHHHH

[joyfuladorable]

Baby Junior's First Steps (based on a scene from Bluey)

Prompt from my buddy @vadfannypack! Everyone thank them Right NoW!!

[gansey-like]

Hey so this is super scary

Meta on Tuesday announced a set of changes to its content moderation practices that would effectively put an end to its longstanding fact-checking program, a policy instituted to curtail the spread of misinformation across its social media apps.

The reversal of the years-old policy is a stark sign of how the company is repositioning itself for the Trump era. Meta described the changes with the language of a mea culpa, saying that the company had strayed too far from its values over the prior decade.

“We want to undo the mission creep that has made our rules too restrictive and too prone to over-enforcement,” Joel Kaplan, Meta’s newly installed global policy chief, said in a statement.

Instead of using news organizations and other third-party groups, Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads, will rely on users to add notes or corrections to posts that may contain false or misleading information.

Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, said in a video that the new protocol, which will begin in the United States in the coming months, is similar to the one used by X, called Community Notes.

“It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression,” Mr. Zuckerberg said. The company’s current fact-checking system, he added, had “reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship.”

Mr. Zuckerberg conceded that there would be more “bad stuff” on the platform as a result of the decision. “The reality is that this is a trade-off,” he said. “It means that we’re going to catch less bad stuff, but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down."

Elon Musk has relied on Community Notes to flag misleading posts on X. Since taking over the social network, Mr. Musk, a major Trump donor, has increasingly positioned X as the platform behind the new Trump presidency.

Meta’s move is likely to please the administration of President-elect Donald J. Trump and its conservative allies, many of whom have disliked Meta’s practice of adding disclaimers or warnings to questionable or false posts. Mr. Trump has long railed against Mr. Zuckerberg, claiming the fact-checking feature treated posts by conservative users unfairly.

Since Mr. Trump won a second term in November, Meta has moved swiftly to try to repair the strained relationships he and his company have with conservatives.

Mr. Zuckerberg noted that “recent elections” felt like a “cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech.”

In late November, Mr. Zuckerberg dined with Mr. Trump at Mar-a-Lago, where he also met with his secretary of state pick, Marco Rubio. Meta donated $1 million to support Mr. Trump’s inauguration in December. Last week, Mr. Zuckerberg elevated Mr. Kaplan, a longtime conservative and the highest-ranking Meta executive closest to the Republican Party, to the company’s most senior policy role. And on Monday, Mr. Zuckerberg announced that Dana White, the head of the Ultimate Fighting Championship and a close ally of Mr. Trump’s, would join Meta’s board.

Meta executives recently gave a heads-up to Trump officials about the change in policy, according to a person with knowledge of the conversations who spoke on condition of anonymity. The fact-checking announcement coincided with an appearance by Mr. Kaplan on “Fox & Friends,” a favorite show of Mr. Trump. He told the hosts of the morning show popular with conservatives that there was “too much political bias” in the fact-checking program.

The change brings an end to a practice the company started eight years ago, in the weeks after Mr. Trump’s election in 2016. At the time, Facebook was under fire for the unchecked dissemination of misinformation spread across its network, including posts from foreign governments angling to sow discord among the American public.

As a result of enormous public pressure, Mr. Zuckerberg turned to outside organizations like The Associated Press, ABC News and the fact-checking site Snopes, along with other global organizations vetted by the International Fact-Checking Network, to comb over potentially false or misleading posts on Facebook and Instagram and rule whether they needed to be annotated or removed.

Among the changes, Mr. Zuckerberg said, will be to “remove restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are out of touch with mainstream discourse.” He also said that the trust and safety and content moderation teams would be moved from California, with the U.S. content review shifting to Texas. That would “help remove the concern than biased employees are overly censoring content,” he added.

[syscest]

hi im assuming the us vs them post is about a specific term, which one would that be?

so the sysmed out-group term being referenced in the joke post was (as the reblogs guessed) "endogenic", and I'll lay our thoughts out straight just once to avoid being potentially taken the wrong way

I've got two angles here, existential theological linguistic bullshit, and harm-reduction. stay with me here because even if you're not on board with the first thing you'll want to see the second.

so "traumagenic vs endogenic" is a false dichotomy, and I don't just mean "there's a secret third thing", I mean both classifications are fundamentally not real.

personally? we haven't the foggiest idea why we're a system. but the thing is, I don't think anybody else does either - I think it's genuinely impossible to know why your own consciousness is behind your own eyes and controlling your own body, why you *experience* existing in first-person at all. Like shit, lots of singlets believe it's because a soul has been created or introduced to their flesh, and a bunch of others think that's a load of crap and the chemicals just *do this* on their own. Singlets get this unalienable right to believe whatever the hell they want about why they're experiencing being themselves all the damn time, and I refuse to believe that systems are uniquely special in a way that singlets are not such that anyone can fucking flawlessly divine the cause of our consciousness all of a sudden. These are existential-tier questions and to deny their impossible complexity and the right to self-belief over them is, in my eyes, to deny systems something many singlets feel is part of what makes them human.

You can believe all sorts of stuff about the nature of your own systemhood just like how you can believe all sorts of stuff about the nature of your own existence - that doesn't make you definitively right, it's just a meaningful mechanism through which you understand your own experiences that other people should respect - it's like any faith, go figure.

Frustratingly, these words - traumagenic, endogenic - they're not talking about belief, they're objective buckets actively being used for exclusion. So every time we use the term "traumagenic systems", in saying "systems that objectively exist because of trauma" we are saying, loudly, "it is possible to know why a system exists". and frankly? no the fuck it isn't.

Anyway that's airy bullshit and reflects very idealised interactions so - practical, realist opinions, and harm reduction:

Saying "I'm pro-endo" is a net good, though I think "I support all systems" is probably marginally better because it doesn't perpetuate categories pushed by sysmeds for exclusionary reasons as being essential to defining systemhood - as we joked about.

Contrastingly, self-declaring "traumagenic" or "endogenic" in a bio is a net bad. Saying "I'm a traumagenic system" also says "Hello sysmeds, I believe in your dichotomy and I'm one of the good ones" (great way to get sysmed followers), and that factor doesn't go away if you go on to say that you support all systems - you've already thrown away your opportunity to shield more vulnerable systems from harassment through making who sysmeds need to target more obscure.

In fact, regardless of whether your bio says to sysmeds "I am a target" or "I'm not a target", by saying it explicitly, you're pressuring other, more vulnerable systems to similarly self-declare. It's like cis people putting pronouns in their bio to shield trans people from harassment through obscurity and embarrassment, but in reverse - if you shut up about it, and *just* call yourself a plural system, even if you do believe in their categorisations, you stop the propogation of the self-labelling and exclusionists are forced to make themselves look like idiots because most of their harassment would have to be done at random. It's basically herd immunity - nobody talks, everybody walks.

anyway yeah there's context for future, though honestly the section in plural respect is a lot more succinct lmao

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Thank you. I'm sorry.

[First] Prev <–-> Next

[stump-not-found]

Sorry if this has already been answered, but does Ford celebrate his birthday? I know its pretty hard to keep track of time when its ... nonlinear in the multiverse but I feel like Bill would know. And to ford every once and a while Bill demands his attention and he comes back to the pyramid to the wildest (worst) surprise party. The cake is human skin, candles are those really long wisdom teeth. Ford hates it.

i'll call out that a main plot point of chapter 4 is the fact bill gets ford presents on his b-day so yah its a regular thing, but they celebrate the day after his b-day

first birthday together bill probably does the skin cake thing but ford just rolls his eyes and sighs . bill almost fucking shoots himself after that response

[governmentmandatedryujinstan420]

releasing this from the hj discord dungeon because the public populace was in agreement also i'm chronically offline on tumblr and need to fix that for my chronically online ahh

[good-to-drive]

Abuse, Silence, And Why Kevin Can Fuck Himself

I recently finished watching Kevin Can Fuck Himself on Netflix, and, aside from being the most brutally honest portrayal of domestic abuse I have ever seen, I discovered a beautifully written examination of narrative as power and silence as abuse and how this manifests in our larger culture. 

Without going into too much detail, the show is filmed in two distinct styles that are interleaved throughout each episode to tell a cohesive story. Allison and Kevin’s relationship as seen by the rest of the world is told through a multi-cam, laugh-track sitcom that depicts a very typical “goofy husband, shrewish wife” mainstream comedy. Allison’s life through her own eyes is told through a single-cam drama/thriller about Allison planning to murder Kevin to escape his abuse. 

It’s an absolute masterclass in screenwriting, but more than that, every episode explores the difference between truth, fact, and reality, and how none of these things are quite as much or as little as story. But while the process of transforming the chaotic and plotless reality of life into a story is as involuntary and essential as breathing, misogyny and the degradation of women is just as ubiquitous in our society, and a story that exists at the expense of another person’s lived reality is a refutation of their humanity. 

It's also just a great show for anyone who likes to engage with history (or reality TV or true crime or “real life stories” in general), because while we have to tell ourselves stories about her own lives, we have to tell ourselves stories about other people as well. Eternal silence is narrative death, and the perpetual silence of an unspoken narrative is often the last death we can visit on someone whose story we’d rather ignore. 

I also pulled up some books – Lolita and Disgrace – that dealt with similar themes, but from the perspective of the abuser. And what strikes me the most is that, across three beautifully written stories about narrative and silence within a culture that normalizes abuse, Allison, who began her story within a state of narrative death, was the only point-of-view character who had any chance of surviving. 

One of the main themes of Kevin is that a compelling story is often a story that reinforces what we already believe or like to believe, and while the story may be factual and true it often also exists at the expense of someone's lived reality. The exact same series of events can be a silly joke or a harrowing tale of abuse depending on the lens through which we view it, but historically we've only been willing to see the multicam, laugh track, sitcom perspective on unbalanced relationships.

The alchemical process of turning a series of disjoint facts and experiences into a narrative creates something new and compelling, and erases much of what previously existed. In this way, it’s entirely irreversible. We spin our experiences into a very thin thread, a story we can tell ourselves that elicits something within us, something we need in order to live with the complex, uncertain, and unsatisfying reality of life. In think in many ways the thing we elicit in ourselves is truth. But truth is both more and less than fact, often more a reflection of our own beliefs and desires than the events of our lives. And in telling that truth we may never stray from the facts, but we almost by definition cannot give voice to another person’s reality.

There's a scene in season 2 of Kevin when Allison is hit by a door – a la the classic excuse – because of Kevin’s carelessness. And while he absolutely did not hit her, the way it's written is such an incredible allegory for how Kevin has curated their story and curated their friends' and family’s perceptions of their story such that even if she tells everyone the exact, unvarnished truth of what's happening to her and begs for help, they will only be capable of seeing the laugh-track, sitcom, “Kevin is a harmless goofball and his wife is a total shrew” perspective on the events of their lives. 

As so often happens with abuse, their friends and family saw Allison being hurt because of Kevin. But the alchemy of creating a narrative around Kevin and Allison is irreversible, and the series of events they witness can only be spun together to a joke, an accident, a silly, childish mistake. Allison’s reality, Allison’s pain and fear, is completely elided. Like a lost sound in the middle of a sentence, her experience goes silent, and their larger understanding of her relationship never has to change. And you feel so acutely how Allison lives her entire life in that silence. 

Storytelling is human, it’s essential, there’s no other way to engage with our own lives. And it’s not lying. It’s never lying to tell the truth. But it doesn’t reflect every reality, either, because another person’s reality can’t be reflected within our own narrative, because that’s what it means to be another person. To spin two different threads.

And because narrative is the essential process by which we understand our reality, denying someone their own narrative, or denying that this narrative be heard, is inherently abusive. To allow someone a voice is to give them humanity, and to suppress it is to strip that humanity away. 

Disgrace, by J.M. Coetzee, follows the story of a professor, David, who rapes a student and then fails to protect his daughter, Lucy, from being raped by intruders in their home. He destroys his daughter’s life  – not through failing to protect her, but through twisting her rape into a story about why the rape of his student wasn’t wrong. The main theme of the book is generally considered to be exploitation, but Coetzee doesn’t deal with the exploitation of the rape. That’s too direct, too immediate, too easy for the reader to understand as misogynistic and wrong. Rather, Coetzee delves into “the innocuous-seeming use of another person to fill one's gentler emotional needs” (Ruden).

The rape is how we understand David as a fundamentally exploitative person, a person who denies others their humanity by converting them into a vessel for his own desires, who erases their voice in order to speak through them and give himself the things he needs. And that’s how we recognize that the way he absorbs and claims the stories of his daughter and his student is another kind of violation of their humanity. Another way of turning women into vessels for men’s pain and fear and need. 

What’s fascinating is that David's student finds her voice – files a complaint against him – and is eventually able to continue with her life. The woman he raped is less damaged by him than his own daughter, because she was the woman he couldn’t permanently silence. 

In Lolita, another brilliant novel about abuse, dehumanization, and storytelling, Humbert turns to the reader at the end and says, “Imagine us, reader, for we don’t really exist if you don’t.” 

It’s not that Humbert knew he was fictional, but that he knew everyone was fictional. Believed the entire world only truly existed in his own mind, because anything beyond that was irrelevant to his needs. He coped with the collapse of his ability to dehumanize Dolores (who he called Lolita) by demanding that his voice be resurrected. Demanding immortality. Demanding his narrative exist in another person’s world, and thereby be given the existence and humanity that Allison and Dolores and Lucy and David’s student were denied. 

Pushing his needs, finally, onto the reader, because we are the only person he has left, and a person like him can only exist through the use of another. In that way, Humbert was powerless. In that way, Kevin and David were powerless, too.

In Disgrace, David’s dream is to write an opera, and at the end of the book he realizes he’ll never finish his magnum opus. He’ll never be able to terminate the process of converting himself, his world, into a story. But he does learn to decenter himself in that narrative. And it’s when he loses all fear of death, and any conception of the self, that he gains the ability to give dogs – who he generally equates to women – a voice within his opera, his life’s work. 

It’s in death that we discover our true unimportance as human beings, that we learn to let go of vanity and our conception of the self entirely. And David had degraded women so thoroughly in order to justify how he used them to meet his own emotional needs that it was only in losing all value for his own life that he could gain the ability to see them as equal voices. To actually put those voices into his own life story. It's at the cost of himself that he allows other people to truly exist, in the death of the self that he finally allows the world to exist outside of himself. It’s almost a positive character arc. Almost.

When Kevin finally loses the ability to abuse Allison, he, like many abusers, loses all desire to live. His world was built on a structure of superiority and inferiority, on beings and vessels, on the inherent value of men and the inherent meaninglessness of women’s lives. The system on which he based his entire reality has been destroyed by Allison’s declaration of the self. And, if he was a being because she was a vessel, then in losing the ability to treat her as a vessel, to fully and completely dehumanize her, he has lost his own humanity. 

It may be perfectly summed up here: “Become major. Live like a hero. That's what the classics teach us. Be a main character. Otherwise, what is life for?” (Coetzee).

If you’re not to be a main character, if there indeed is no split between major and minor characters, between people and the paper dolls that populate their story, between living beings and the vessels into which they pour their need – what is life for?

Nothing. At least, not for people whose narrative must exist at the expense of another. 

And that’s why I say that only a narrator like Allison could survive this kind of story. Despite beginning her story trapped in eternal silence, her reality fully elided no matter how immediate and obvious it became, Allison was the only point-of-view character of any of these three stories who didn’t establish her power through the degradation of another. Who didn’t conceptualize the world via being and vessels. Whose narrative didn’t exist, by necessity, at the expense of another person’s humanity. Whose thread could exist in a larger tapestry without destroying her sense of self.

Don’t get me wrong, she’s not generally a likable character. She’s misogynistic, cruel, selfish, jealous, desperate, afraid, and in pain. Like anyone in an abusive relationship, she’s not at her best, and she’s often pushed to do things that are ugly and disturbing because she’s simply been pushed too far. 

But, for me, the power in her character is in how her last scene never felt like a final scene. Her story didn’t have to be killed, her conception of the self didn’t have to be killed, in order to reveal the brutal reality of stories twisting and intertwining without any inherently superior truth or narrative among them. Allison’s story was one of declaring herself. And that’s why it didn’t feel like it ended at the end. Instead, this felt like a beginning.

[ivan-fyodorovich-k]

societies that demonize children and child bearing when their population starts its dramatic decline and women still refuse to have children: 😮

[catherine-sketches]

Thinking about Charles Xavier, who is simultaneously aware of everyone but at the same time not because if he was himself to the fullest people find him upsetting and rude and nosy

Thinking about his unshakable sense of morality, right and wrong and justice that he formed at the age of 9 and has kept ever since, with modifications along the years but those core values remain

Thinking about how the overstimulation of a thousand voices in his head drove him to self medicate to the point of nearly addiction

Thinking about how he has difficulty reading people when his power is not in use, ending up saying the worst things without meaning to upset no one

Thinking about how everyone should be “mutant and proud” except Charles over there that is too passing to be a mutant but too weird to be a human and simultaneously his mutation, the way his brain is fucking wired, is too inconvenient for everyone around him mutant and human alike to accept

Charles Xavier they would never make me hate you. You and your autism telepathy

[angryducktimemachine]

Ok this post is mainly for me and my brain, in the hopes that if I put this into words, it'll shut up and stop bothering me.

I've gotten quite a lot of followers for my Sherlock Holmes art recently - which is cool and I'm very excited about, and I really do want to make more Sherlock Holmes art of that silly little detective in the future. Unfortunately, my brain has also caught on to that and has kind of... Trapped itself into a little anxiety corner of i _must_ draw Sherlock Holmes because there's so many people looking at me now. And I don't like that because it makes it miserable and a chore and I'd rather have a fun time drawing.

There's no real big message here I'm just trying to show my brain that this is my art account and I can do art of whatever I want and need to stop getting myself into an anxiety corner about it.

[noblessyousforgiacomo]

Tumblr Hall of Fame post about how daddy issues make you a people pleaser but mommy issues make you a sociopath is so Dick Grayson and Jason Todd coded.

[kwillow]

I have to ask of Ambroys. Is there a standard he has of people, no matter how low, that has to be respected that when broken would result in him stepping in?

Ambroys' sense of morality and good taste are both exceedingly simplistic and malleable. He knows what sorts of things to parrot and he might even be able to convince himself he actually believes things like "stealing is wrong, be kind to your neighbor," but he doesn't really think about or care what other people do unless it impacts him in some way or is so egregious that it's a no-brainer to hate it.

He likes the status quo. He likes when the world is clean, simple and predictable. He also believes in the privileges afforded to those with status and power -- and conveniently, he thinks of himself as being near the top of that pyramid, and those that he's fond of get to be, oh, a few rungs below him. So, he might step in to stop someone who is mocking his brother for being a bastard... but he's fully within his rights to do the same thing to the poor guy. Charly is Ambroys' brother which makes him more important than the average person (to Ambroys), so normal people have no right to bully him, but also Charly is below Ambroys in status, so Ambroys is fully in his rights to bully Charly. But if that person was mocking bastards in general, rather than the specific bastard he's related to, it wouldn't bother him, because bastards are low status, and they're all strangers anyway, so what does he care? Status quo, doesn't affect him. (Unless, of course, he was trying to befriend someone who did care about the rights of bastards, in which case he would speak up so he looks good to that person.)

But even his thoughts on the rights afforded by status are malleable. If he was drinking with a group of commoners and they were complaining about the nobility, he'd laugh along with them. It would make him uncomfortable if they were getting a little too revolution-y about it, but they're just peasants, what could they even really do? It doesn't affect him right now. You know what does? If he says something too controversial and they don't want to party with him anymore. That's what's important here.

I think the only way he'd bother to act "altruistically" and in accordance with any interpretation of real moral standards would be in punishing those whom society has deemed unambiguously okay to punish. If he came across someone who he knew was a dangerous murderer with a price on his head, he'd have no qualms firing an arrow through the man's head. Ostensibly this would be about justice, but emotionally he would feel the same way about it as someone might feel squishing a cockroach in their basement. "That's disgusting and I don't want it in my house. Die."

(Older Ambroys cares a bit more about laws and has more stringent standards for politeness and morality and is very willing to step in and enforce them, but since they're the laws and standards HE MADE and he loses absolutely nothing by squashing people like bugs if they don't dance to his tune, I don't think that counts as "moral fiber.")