BirdieBirdie @birdiebeauty - Tumblr Blog

i love every media clip of "journalists" trying to hold count binface to standard and then he just points out nigel farage has consistently not met those standards

reptile-ruler

Sometimes a guy in a fanfiction has the ability to read someone's gaze with the same level of detail a wine taster can taste the wine

reptile-ruler

"He glared at him with anger in his eyes, but behind that longing and sorrow over things left unsaid, a subtle but desperate yearning for things to be different, and with just a hint of roasted nuts right at the end."

harpieisthecarpie

we've all heard about the male gaze in media, but we've yet to explore the equally important sommelier gaze

reptile-ruler

the only fun addition to this post

msmimundo

Girl that's literally Perry the platypus and Heinz Doofenshmirtz

bowlby4

consortthedragonenjoyer

Hey fun fact. Did you guys know that Count Binface has a ko-fi? You can donate to him Considering that he's completely unironically the most trustworthy politician in the UK and possibly the ONLY politician in the UK with a spine, I've donated. Please please please let this man beat Farage, it would be equal parts funny and a dose of sorely needed hope for my beleaguered nation. Binface Sweep

https://ko-fi.com/countbinface

the-clacton-affair

bowlby4

puppygirldick

Morphological differences between thorns, spines, and prickles

bowlby4

depsidase

the-clacton-affair

That is illegal Nigel.

birdiebeauty

gods this is so funny, he's so scared that he's breaking the law to advertise. Because he's going to lose to a fucking trash can.

homunculus-argument

There's a fascinating phenomenon that isn't unique to tumblr, but which I have certainly seen here a lot, which I'm going to call the Default Assumption of Incompetence. It's when somebody has the baffling habit of always starting from the assumption that other people do not know anything about anything, or at least that having more knowledge than the assumer is extremely rare and statistically unlikely. To do this, they will frequently go out of their way to ignore context clues that indicate otherwise, or in some cases the assumer simply doesn't know enough about the subject at hand to be able to estimate whether or not this person knows what they are doing.

The assumer will see a social media post about someone's mushroom harvest, which clearly only contains exactly two distinct kinds of mushrooms, which the poster has identified and correctly named in the post itself, and the assumer will feel compelled to warn the forager to be careful out there! Some mushrooms are poisonous and they should be very careful to only pick ones they can identify! The assumer, who has ignored the fact that the poster did identify both of the mushroom species they had picked, and can most likely be trusted to do so in the future as well, has naturally assumed that the person showing off the results of their latest mushroom haul must have been obliviously picking them at random like an unsupervised toddler who is lucky to be alive.

If someone makes a post talking about how they just got a new job as a bus driver, the assumer might swoop in to warn them that driving a bus is extremely dangerous! It's so dangerous that it's literally illegal to do that unless you have a specific special training for doing that! Even a normal driver's license isn't good enough, you need a special license for it! And when the person who just got hired as a bus driver verifies that yes, they know that, they do have the license to drive a bus, and that they wouldn't have even hired someone who doesn't. The first question of the job interview was about making sure that they have a valid license for driving this type of vehicle.

"Well how was I supposed to know that?" is the assumer's standard answer to being corrected. Not embarrassed or apologetic, only defensive and insulted, as if the other person here is the one being unreasonably rude for implying that it was stupid of the assumer to assume that someone who just got a job driving a bus might not know how to drive a bus.

mrwolfe1920

This kind of thing isn't necessarily about being arrogant and assuming that everyone else is stupid. It's about not assuming that everyone is smart and knowledgeable.

You see this a lot in tech support. Everybody hates those basic questions like "Have you tried turning it off and on again?" It feels ridiculous and condescending both to the person being asked and the person asking, and you honestly just want to skip it because surely nobody would bother calling tech support waiting without checking something so basic?

...and then you get that call. The one where you spend twenty minutes troubleshooting only to figure out that not only haven't they tried turning it on and off again, the device isn't even plugged in. After that, you always ask.

Somebody posts about picking mushrooms. Did they correctly identify the species? Or did they just get very, very lucky? Emergency rooms (and funeral homes) have seen a lot of people come through who were very confident in their mushroom identification skills.

I'm sure your bus driver example was intended to be an exaggerated strawman, because obviously nobody would hire someone to drive a bus without making sure they're qualified, right? You can totally just assume that from context clues.

Encounter this kind of thing enough times, and you stop assuming that people know what they're doing. Instead of getting offended that some stranger didn't automatically know how skilled you are, maybe take a moment to appreciate that they were looking out for you -- even if it wasn't necessary.

homunculus-argument

That's a valid point, but even coming from that perspective, I think it's still not a reasonable response. Someone stupid enough to go randomly picking mushrooms they don't know, has no idea that driving a bus requires a special training you can't just intuitively guess, or thinks they can just DIY electric installment stuff without at least checking beforehand whether they can do that, should simply die as the consequence of their actions.

hroethvitnir

So, tech support is very explicitly different in a very key way: they have asked for help.

The fact that someone, somewhere, has found a way to do things that make literally no sense, is not an argument for treating everybody like they're about to make the stupidest possible decision at all times.

The examples given were also very specifically about the explainers very clearly knowing less than the person they're talking to/at.

Not being able to discuss literally anything without being talked down to, leading to feeling the need to include giant paragraphs of asides that will get get ignored and/or picked apart, is *not fun*.

Sharing an experience in a social space is not a request for basic guidance on a topic you have in no way demonstrated any need for.

I think most people understand that if they responded that way irl chatting with someone they are vaguely friendly with, it would not go down well.

Context matters online as well.

elodieunderglass

I feel like this post, in which I made a joke that demonstrated an extraordinarily high level of knowledge of a hobby and received people “correcting” me, is a great demonstrator of the low-stakes version of this behaviour.

If you’re excited to share knowledge, then you can politely reach out your hand to share, rather than instantly assuming the other person is in need of correction or lecturing.

This will also spare you from the tremendous embarrassment of correcting your superior.

the-clacton-affair

cyberpunkpavlichenko

People legitimately think there was no criticism of the Harry Potter series before her TERF/soft holocaust denier era and I'm sorry to tell you but people were criticizing the Cho Chang banking goblins werewolf-AIDS metaphor elf emancipation is silly series years before Joanne's public turn to transmisogynistic chauvinism.

There were things to criticize of the series.

poetrylesbian

I did not spend years of my life at university studying rome in classes that were over 50% women to let someone say "rome may be for the guys" on my post!!!

winslowhomersimpson

men aren't obsessed with Rome they're obsessed with being patriarchs who get to subjugate everyone around them. He doesn't care about Pliny the Elder, he's having wet dreams where he gets to be Caesar. It's unironically the new vegas thing, we're living in an age beyond on-the-nose satire. This was also mussolini's deal

birdiebeauty

If you're interested in learning about the Roman Republic/Empire, that's good. It's a deeply fascinating time and civilization.

If you want to LIVE in the Roman Republic/Empire, that is a major red flag, as you would know if you actually cared about learning about the Roman Republic/Empire.