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"Discourse". Ha. You think people's experiences can be "discoursed" about.

It really upsets me when people think former burnt out gifted kids are lying about their experiences or assumes they're just sad they didn't live up to their expectations. Gifted kid burnout is real. It is not always experienced by neurodivergent gifted kids. Neurodivergence can be a factor in "gifted kid burnout". The way neurodivergent people are expected to perform in fast-paced, capitalist, contemporary society leads to "gifted kid burnout". Quit being shitty. Just stop. Stop assuming the worst about everybody. Not everyone is just an attention-seeking narcissist or a liar or someone who didn't perceive things correctly. They're not average people with a lot of privilege just overestimating themselves either. It's not "You thought you were smart but you're actually not!" (I HATE THIS ONE THE MOST, IT GETS UNDER MY SKIN) Sometimes really smart people suffer, okay? I saw people assuming bullied and socially excluded kids somehow deserved it because of one case of a "bullied kid" actually being a racist bully kid who sort of deserved what was coming to him that went viral. "Oh, all the popular kids at my school were actually super nice and that's why they were popular!" Good for you. My elementary school's popular kids were cruel and materialistic and they made fun of me because I was poor and ADHD/autistic. You do not know the minds of strangers. Every human being is an iceburg. I can't believe there is discourse about......... how people fucking feel about themselves and their lives. It disgusts me. Hivemind discourse and groupthink LIKE THIS makes me want to throw up. It's all over Twitter. I'm seeing it pop up here too. It SUCKS ASS. KNOCK IT OFF. There is A LOT wrong with the education system. It is traumatic much of the time. All of it, from gifted programs to special ed, needs to be re-evaluated. The way we sort children is wrong. But this is the same website that had a shit ton of discourse on asexuality as a sexual orientation. It just exists, people. Things outside of your experiences exist and people experience the world differently than you do. There are 8 billion + human experiences running right now and they are all different and complex. Imagine people complexly.

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When a child is smart and gets good grades but struggles to socialize, they're often told something like "just wait until you're an adult, you'll be rich and people will like you easily, and those people who don't like you now will be working for you".

This is shitty advice for so many reasons.

They may not actually be as smart as you think. They may just have a special interest that causes them to notice a few extra patterns while they struggle intellectually in other ways. This could put an unreasonable amount of pressure on them, causing them to become burned out.

They may be unknowingly giving people a good reason to not like them, which is very common for autistic people who struggle to understand social rules or who don't realize that what they're doing is wrong because it's exactly what's done to them. If you convince them that everyone who doesn't like them is just jealous of how smart they are, then people will still continue to dislike them just as much as before but now everyone will think they're conceited on top of it.

Their smartness won't necessarily translate into a career. Even someone who's a total genius could easily have skills that are not specific enough to be useful for a career, or can struggle to market those skills in an interview. It's also very hard to get a good paying job without experience. For those who struggle in social situations, that's extremely likely.

It's not reasonable to expect them to just sit back and tolerate being disliked for their entire childhood and however long into adulthood it takes for them to become financially successful. They may decide that it's not worth it and stop trying. They may intentionally start acting dumb because they think people will like them more.

If your prediction comes true, they'll be surrounded by gold diggers who only like them for their money. And if they have a disability that affects their social skills, they won't know when someone is taking advantage of them.

You're promoting the belief that rich people earned their riches and that underpaid employees are experiencing karma.

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idgaf how autistic you are stop being racist😭😭

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This tweet lives rent-free in my head now. Hands-down the best comment about the relationship between art and artist.

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“…history does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”

— Mark Twain (via conceptual-a)

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“The tyrant dies and his rule is over, the martyr dies and his rule begins.”

— Søren Kierkegaard (via quotemadness)

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“Until the lion learns how to write, every story will glorify the hunter.”

— African proverb (via fyp-philosophy)

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Reading articles about MrBeast's dominance of YouTube is fucking bizarre because, from my perspective, the dude isn't even on YouTube. I've never watched one of his videos. YouTube has, to the best of my knowledge, never recommended one of his videos to me. Every thumbnail screenshot of his looks like something you could tell me was a photoshopped parody of YouTube culture, and I'd believe you. No one I follow on YouTube ever mentions him, even negatively or in passing. The first time I ever heard his name was in regards to the quality of his ghost kitchens. The only way I know he isn't a mass, shared hallucination is that I've witnessed the thoroughly mid-looking chocolate bars he sells at Walmart for some reason

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"People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so, the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn’t that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people. As soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn’t measure up."

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The thing about "lack of third spaces in the U.S." that doesn't get mentioned enough is that it's not just "Capitalists and corporations bought up the commons, privatized public resources, and made people pay to access them."

That's a big part of it. But it's not the only part.

The other part is that middle-class people -- particularly middle-class white, abled people -- willingly forked over money to set up private spaces rather than share public spaces with people of color, disabled people, neurodivergent people, poor people, religious minorities, and other "undesirable" people.

When you look at any article or picture from some point in the 20th century about third spaces that are less common now, consider that depending on exactly where and when in the 20th century U.S. this was, people of color might have been banned from that space by either law or threat of violence or both (or, at minimum, made to feel unwelcome). Physically disabled people probably could not access those spaces (or were institutionalized or kept at home). Visibly non-passing neurodivergent people probably could not access those spaces, because they were institutionalized or kept at home. Two women kissing, a man in a dress, any type of visibly queer or gender nonconforming person would not have been tolerated in that space.

And my point is, these things are not unrelated. The decline of third spaces is not unrelated to civil rights gains.

I'm not saying "Stop talking about the good things of the mid-20th century, don't you know that era also had racism and sexism and ableism and queerphobia?"

I'm saying they're not unrelated -- it's not "This time period was better in some ways, like more third spaces, but worse in some ways, like more racism and ableism." It's "Those good things, those third spaces, those labor unions, those safe neighborhoods, that sense of community, relied upon the systemic exclusion of a dehumanized underclass, and as soon as any civil rights pressure was put on that systemic exclusion, the sense of community crumbled."

The pattern is clear and recurring: Privileged people build a public space for "the community", marginalized people start using it (sometimes after a court case or two), the public place gets a reputation for being "full of" marginalized people, privileged people build a private space they can exclude people from, privileged people abandon the public space, the public space gets neglected and deprioritized because "nobody (who matters) uses it anymore," the public place goes to shit from neglect and possibly closes, the private space gets expensive, privileged people lament the loss of the public space.

Privileged people killed public pools rather than share them with Black people. Mortally wounded public schools rather than share them with people of color and religious minorities. Are trying to kill public libraries rather than share them with queer people and unhoused people and neurodivergent people. Can't revive public transportation for fear of sitting next to poor people. It's white flight all the way down.

The whole "Social democracy is the left wing of fascism" claim is tankie ridiculousness, but like most tankie ridiculousness, there's an underlying grain of truth. In this case, the underlying grain of truth is that widespread support for public services is a much easier sell when people don't think they'll have to share resources or public space with people they consider inferior. It's not a coincidence that some of the countries that provide the highest quality of life for their abled citizens are some of the worst to noncitizens and disabled people.

And it's not like Weird Queer Left-Leaning Types have a great track record of sharing public space with people different from yourselves, either. Y'all can't be normal about someone wearing a yarmulke at Pride. Y'all can't be normal about adults playing board games with kids. There's no way you'd be okay with unsupervised, uncontrolled, unmedicated-by-choice schizophrenic people hanging out and talking to themselves. You cannot handle public third spaces.

Yes, blame corporations and advertisers for privatizing public spaces, but also blame the social prejudice that willingly forks over money to avoid sharing public space with Those People.

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can we stop doing this trope

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Real life is not like anime. You are not gonna be lauded for being cruel to people for no reason. You are not Katsuki Bakugo, you are not Hiei, and you are definitely not Sasuke Uchiha. Bully people and excuse it with your tragic backstory enough times, and people are eventually gonna get sick of it and stop associating with you.

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ive said this before but it was on my old blog so I'm saying it again

dehumanizing abusers is not effective at doing anything other than make people think they're ontologically incapable of violence

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it’s a great time to be a hater, many things are bad and lots of stuff sucks. it’s also a terrible time to be a hater, because many people will insist that you have to like the bad thing because a company spent millions of dollars making it and it’s just not very nice to say it’s bad

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there is this annoying trend where for example someone will like. reinvent phrenology and someone will point out " you know the nazi's believed in that" and then response they'll go "oh so i should make sure my phrenology isn't racist or anti-sematic!" because they don't understand that assigning physical traits to intelligence or morality is still bad no matter what, not just because "people who i know are objectly bad share those beliefs for the wrong reasons" and this happens everytime.