AB Boofers

I wonder if a butterfly would feel guilty or mighty if it knew that a flap of its wings had caused a tornado

[self-loving-vampire]

It's kind of strange how many people over here rail against individualism while simultaneously advocating for more individual agency even if it would come at the cost weakening the control of their community.

Youth rights, trans rights, reproductive rights, no-fault divorce, etc. are all centered around giving various groups more agency and freedom to resist the demands of those around them, especially the patriarchs who tend to be in charge of their closest social unit.

But people hear the word and think something like an oil CEO setting the world on fire for short-term profit or a lack of social safety nets (even though they actually increase average freedom) instead.

Personally I just love being able to go no contact with my father and decide who I want to marry and having the ability to just be a childless atheist. Not being parental property: Pretty great.

[wolfspidersanctuary]

I think the phrase "rugged individualism" has given the concept a bad rep, as well as all the libertarians who spent the first quarter of the 2020s parading the phrase around to mean "the freedom to not wear a mask and reject vaccines and go anywhere I want no matter how sick I am"

[shreyanj9]

i think this is true and that there is a lot of value in reclaiming individualism for social justice -- giving up the framing that individualism is just about being atomized, both through lack of having any support and of providing any, is really damaging to any attempt to use individualism to defend self-expression and human rights.

plus it seems that a lot of rights issues become sort of absorbed into "community, us vs them" framing by pure collectivist advocacy. i.e. i want to be able to be trans without having to align myself with some concept of a "trans community". it is fundamentally an individualist thing

[p-adict]

how would you define individualism other than “valuing the individual over the community”?

as i understand it, there is no concept of transgenderism without societal idea of gender, and no social or medical transitioning without community

[self-loving-vampire]

Then your understanding might be incomplete.

I am a gender abolitionist. I consider gender norms to be coercive and limiting, more so for trans people if anything. I still want a right to change my own body as I please and that's my own business and no one else's because I am the sole owner of my body. I also don't want to be forced to perform some arbitrary gender role to satisfy a sexist gatekeeper before I am allowed to do this.

And the community I happened to be born into was my biggest obstacle to doing that. My parents did not want me to transition (in fact my father did not want to have any daughters at all) and my country of birth was one of the most dangerous to trans people in the world. My father explicitly considered the rest of the family to be his property by default.

Being able to leave was life-saving for me.

But to answer the question: I am not saying "don't have a community" but rather that you need to have the ability to choose which one you have according to your individual preferences and that communities should not exert this much control over how you're allowed to live your life.

[cumpriest]

so funny to me when white american christians are like “ooh i incorporate my religious trauma into my art and thats why i draw these stained glass gothic church gold multi eyed reneissance sculpture angels agnus dei” like i know your protestant southern california ass didnt have any of that. go make some art about this

[deoidesign]

ok

[arsonsara]

Damn way to read the assignment and go above and beyond.

[sunshine-tattoo]

the bleakness and sanitized feel of most American protestant churches really is an underused medium.

[sketchy-scribs-n-doods]

idk why tf the images were deemed to be ‘violating community guidelines’, but here’s what this post used to look like

[nerpaas]

fat chud

[succuviiussy]

A real sister kisser also posts about the non-sexual aspects of siscest

[matt-sarme]

Like how your sister always knows exactly which songs you need to hear when you're spiraling at 3am so she queues up the perfect playlist that somehow syncs with your heartbeat while she pets your hair

and she remembers the exact way you like your hot chocolate even though you switched from oat to almond milk six months ago

and she still keeps that faded photo booth strip in her wallet even though the edges are frayed

and she and you both blur together on who actually built that treehouse that collapsed after ten minutes because your memories switch and overlap so seamlessly that sometimes you each swear the scraped knees and the triumphant yell and the pile of broken planks were yours alone

and she knows which books to recommend when you're feeling lost because she's read them all twice and annotated the passages that made her think of you specifically

and she hums the same lullaby your grandma used to sing when she thinks you're asleep on the couch during movie nights

and she argues with you over the dumbest things like whether cereal belongs in the bowl before or after the milk but she will never acknowledge that she's wrong and cereal go first

and she has a coded language of emojis that evolved over years into a full dialect only the two of you can decode which drive your polycule crazy during group chats

and and and and and and

[what-even-is-thiss]

I can make Tangled (2011) about being queer if I want to.

[what-even-is-thiss]

I am not immune to the cutting of hair being a symbolic representation of both freedom of the new life and death of the old life.

[what-even-is-thiss]

Whoops it was 2010

[what-even-is-thiss]

Somebody asked for elaboration so

Immediately discovering that the way that other people live isn’t as dangerous as an abusive parent says it is

The male lead spends a lot of his time and energy pretending to be something he’s not to try to find a niche in life but really becomes happy only after dropping his macho lady killer facade

The first place Rapunzel finds help and gentleness in the outside world is in a bar full of people that are viewed as dangerous by society, including disabled people, conventionally unattractive people, and people who dress in odd costumes

The cutting of Rapunzel’s hair both literally and metaphorically kills her controlling parental figure. Sometimes to truly be free and be yourself you need to fully cut a controlling parent out of your life and it can feel like a death of sorts.

As a closeted blonde transmasc child who was constantly discouraged from cutting my hair for the benefit of others who liked looking at it I was of course totally normal about the hair cutting scene when I saw that in theatres

[muzzlesbian]

(through gritted teeth) you cannot heal when the knife is still in the wound. you cannot heal when the knife is still in the wound. you cannot heal when the knife is still in the wound. you cannot heal when the knife is still in the wound.

[puppygirl-official]

Then pull out the knife. Take control and do what you need, even if it'll hurt more in the moment, you'll heal in the long term. Pull out the damn knife.

[muzzlesbian]

When someone is stabbed, you should not pull out the damn knife, because doing so will only worsen the bleeding. You have to wait for proper help to arrive, and only then can the knife be removed and the wound safely patched up. That’s the entire point of the metaphor.

[fagdyke-fckry]

#also if you forget and pull out the knife only to then remember not to do that don’t put it back in cause then you’re just stabbing yoursel#sorry every time I remember that bit of medical advice I remember this other very specific post#don’t know what that would look like within the context of the metaphor

I think that within the metaphor, putting the knife back would be re-traumatizing yourself.

A very common, typically maladaptive, way of coping with trauma is to put yourself back into dangerous situations because they’re familiar, or to try and feel some sort of control over things.

If you learn too late that removing the knife worsens the bleeding, you may be tempted to put the knife back in.

If you’ve ever done this, try not to beat yourself up over it. After all, blood loss can affect your sense of judgement. At the time, it may have felt like a perfectly logical step to take, or maybe even the only step to take.

You can’t change the past. You can’t yell through time to keep past-you from stabbing yourself. All you can do is leave the knife where it is and wait for help to arrive before touching it again.

[roycohn]

we need to have a conversation about how the "everyone is 12" theory of politics now doesn't only apply to conservative men who want to kick the bad guys' asses and then go home and eat a steak their bangmommy made just for them (NO VEGGIES!!!) but also to adult women who are literally afraid of other people having sex and being sexy. it's like there's been this massive regression among women in their 20s where we've gotten rid of feminism and replaced it with a new form of purity politics that requires never saying anything bad about another women unless you find a new and creative way to call her a whore. the misuse of "she caters to the male gaze" as a new form of enlightened slut shaming, labeling any woman who wears a short skirt or has sex with a man as "not a girls' girl" and "a pick me," the intense overreaction to celebrity affairs or even just shit like the summer house mess where a woman is now dating another woman's ex even though there was no overlap and the "relationship" was just kind of a situationship that fizzled but now these little girls are online demanding both people involved in the new relationship lose their jobs and not get any brand deals, the panic over mildly sexual content in literally any capacity like ads or an instagram post in a crop top, the compulsion to link everything back to the epstein files, the monthly meltdown over sex scenes on tv and in movies. everyone is 12 and AFRAID of sabrina carpenter.

[roycohn]

a helpful guide

[improbablecarny]

people who don’t watch horror movies are SO confident that they know everything there is to know about the genre. like it’s okay to not know things. it’s okay if you don’t like friday the 13th or whatever. i promise you don’t need to make an ass out of yourself on the internet about it

[improbablecarny]

horror is an incredibly diverse genre, because there is potential horror in everything. it’s in nature, it’s in architecture and technology, it’s in human relationships, it’s in folklore, the past, the future, the mundane. there are horror movies from all over the world. it is straight up anti-intellectual to pretend that the handful of B slashers you’ve vaguely heard about comprise the totality of what horror has to offer. If you’re just not interested in horror, or if you dislike certain subgenres of horror, then that’s fine, you’re not obligated to like anything at all. but smugly announcing that you don’t like horror because you dislike a handful of VERY specific non-universal tropes is just as stupid as saying that you hate comedy because you don’t like adam sandler movies.

[improbablecarny]

this is what I mean by anti-intellectualism btw

[solarprominence]

I maintain that the best summation of my feminist beliefs are that men and women are not fundamentally different. There are a few quantifiable differences if you average out every woman and every man, but they are not qualitative. And most of them are socially constructed, and would be fixed if we started treating men and women the same. Neither is inherently smarter, neither is inherently kinder, neither is inherently more stoic or stronger or angrier or softer. Everyone is obsessed with the differences between women and men, with finding them and creating them and distancing themselves from the "other half". It's fucked up

[xilos]

In a gender and sexuality class in uni right now, and this pretty much plays out in the data too.

Like, if you look at the purely physical biological traits— they really only start to matter at the extremes; we’re talking Olympic level athletes and world record holder extremes. The average peaks for many data sets are so close to each other that the vast majority of men and women inhabit pretty much the same range, with minor variations in percentage at each level. It’s also notable the degree to which all of this is influenced by environment: hormone balance, diet, training regimen, etc. It is distinctly possible that raising girls and boys more similarly would close these gaps even further.

Humans are literally notable for our very low sexual dimorphism, especially among primates, and sex estimation is notoriously finicky in forensics fields, with straight up incorrect analyses occurring on a fairly regular basis.

The problem with so much of this is that analyzing gender/sex needs to be descriptive, but by creating categories at all we are often being prescriptive— and thus inevitably wrong. It’s hard to say how much of our current data is biased in this direction, too— especially with the unfortunate tendency to discard “outliers”.

[solarprominence]

I maintain that the best summation of my feminist beliefs are that men and women are not fundamentally different. There are a few quantifiable differences if you average out every woman and every man, but they are not qualitative. And most of them are socially constructed, and would be fixed if we started treating men and women the same. Neither is inherently smarter, neither is inherently kinder, neither is inherently more stoic or stronger or angrier or softer. Everyone is obsessed with the differences between women and men, with finding them and creating them and distancing themselves from the "other half". It's fucked up

[weiszklee]

One of my biggest pet peeves is people being unable to differentiate between personal annoyance and actual moral issues. This maybe makes me a bit of a weirdo, because I am constantly impulsively defending people's right to be annoying, and probably being annoying myself in the process. But I genuinely believe that this is an extremely important principle to lodge into your head as firmly as you can. Thinking yourself morally justified in eliminating any and all annoyances is an actual morally dangerous mindset. I don't mean you have to just bear any annoyance, but you will inevitably have to bear some, and this is okay.

Progressives who are used to instinctively being on the right side of issues like gay and trans liberation or the presence of different cultures in everyday life, which is where the danger of the anti-annoyance mindset typically rears its head, are weirdly susceptible to it in other areas. This is why so many otherwise reasonable seeming people are so incensed at teenagers playing music or reels out loud on public transport, or at someone wearing a puppy mask at pride or bringing their hetero partner. They are not used to flexing their annoyance bearing muscles, because the big issues their in-groups are talking about just come naturally to them without any annoyance.

Incidentally, I think this is also the source of a good chunk of the reason why many progressives treat AI slop as a sign of the end times. It's annoying, and the substantive arguments are just pro forma. When you refute one, another will be found.

[machine-saint]

can't remember where i saw it but i remember seeing someone talk about how whenever life extension/transhumanist stuff comes up people will always go "this is bad because it'll only be available to the rich" but they never say that about... literally anything else? like imagine saying "we shouldn't put research into curing this difficult-to-cure disease because only rich people will be able to afford the cure", or "only rich people can afford to be educated, so we shouldn't have college because that'd further the gap of generational wealth"

[gayteensupreme]

"queer-owned business" means nothing anymore. OpenAI and Palantir are both queer-owned businesses.

[gayteensupreme]

if this is how you find out that both sam altman and peter thiel are gay im sorry

[ms-demeanor]

I want to be super duper clear that any time you share a screenshot of a twitter post without going to look for the context, or any time you reblog a news article because of a provocative headline on a story that you didn't actually read, you are "outsourcing your thinking to [X]" or "giving in to cognitive surrender" or "allowing cognitive offloading to override your critical thinking."

Of course it is not good that people are using AI unquestioningly and accepting whatever answers it gives them.

It is also very fucking bad that people are not double checking ragebait news headlines, are lamenting "trends" that are a single deranged twitter user on a rant, or are seeing something third-hand in a post that drastically misinterpreted the source material and using that as the foundation for their reactionary viewpoints.

As somebody who is critical of AI it is crazy-making to see so many people talking about how AI kills your critical thinking abilities while citing points from a tumblr post of a screenshot of a news article that overasserted a claim made in a paper they didn't read that circulated and picked up tens of thousands of notes from people being confidently wrong about water use and power consumption (based on numbers from 2021-2022) IN ADDITION to using language that the authors of the paper explicitly begged people not to use when discussing their research (which, of course, the rebloggers never saw because they read a reblog of a screenshot of a news article that overstated a claim, not the paper that made the claim).

For instance, in the paper that everyone loves to talk about when they say that AI is making people stupider (the cognitive offloading one), nobody ever brings up the fact that the group that used their brain only for the first few instances of the task had higher overall performance than the AI-using group and the search engine using group and then had higher performance over their own previous metrics when using AI in an optional instance at the end of the study.

Our media literacy and critical thinking skills were disastrously eroded before AI tools where everywhere and now people are pointing at AI as a scapegoat while they are still not *reading the goddamned stories or doing the critical thinking.*

[anexperimentallife]

I know I've mentioned this before, but if your crush is autistic (or suspected), you ABSOLUTELY MUST tell them you have a crush on them. And if your way of telling them is inviting them somewhere as a date, you ABSOLUTELY MUST tell them it's supposed to be a date.

The only reason I am married to my wife now is that in 2018 she straight up told me she had a crush on me and wanted to be my girlfriend.

[invisible-goats]

Seconding. I didn't realise spouse had been flirting with me AFTER A SOLID WEEK OF TALKING ONLINE NON-STOP when they explicitly asked if I wanted to go on a date

[bippysaurus-rex]

One of my ex’s didn’t realize I had a thing for him after I whipped off my top, revealing a lacy hot pink see through bra and sat on his lap flirting for half an hour. His eyes never went below my nose. I sighed, took that as rejection, and moved off and said “oh, I had such a crush on you.”

He was genuinely shocked. He thought his crush was unrequited and was trying to be a gentleman. I thought half naked lap grinding was an impossible to miss signal.

If you have a neurodivergent baddie you wanna bang your only option is to yell “I CHOOSE YOU PICACHU”

[chocoholicbec]

@tikkunolamorgtfo's tags: #This goes for friendships too!#I really do need you to say ‘Hey you’re cool let’s be friends’ like we six year olds at recess#or I will assume we are mere acquaintances and that I need to maintain boundaries to make sure I don’t annoy you

[morlock-holmes]

A lot of people who spent a lot of time warning about the dangers of left-wing moral relativism are now going, "Oh, so it's somehow 'wrong' to use the threat of violence to take resources from other nations purely because you want to?"

A lot of people who spent a lot of time telling me about how only Christianity can truly ground your morals are now talking about how many Iranian civilians they are going to kill if Iran doesn't do what we say right now.

[lumsel]

[gaytanic-panic]