[orcbara]

i swear to god if people don't start understanding that responding to doylist critique of a piece of media with watsonian exonerations is not an actual rebuttal

[orcbara]

somebody saying "hey i don't like that the only gay man in this story is a weird pervert and it portrays gay sexual promiscuity as a moral failing and character flaw" cannot be rebuked by arguing about how the character's backstory or personality traits explain their behaviour. the choices made by a writer are all fundamentally mutable; somebody saying an author's choices should have been different is not going to be persuaded by an argument that takes those choices as immovable fact

[justanisabelakinnie]

[literally-black-jesus]

I hate how it's always "stop letting your teenagers drink energy drinks!!!" And never "stop letting energy drink companies put dangerous amounts of caffeine into their drinks and stop letting them market to teenagers" or "stop forcing teenagers to be at constant sleep deficits because of early wake ups and absurd homework and stress loads" but hey who cares why not blame the literal child for trying to stay awake enough to match the absurd expectations y'all have for us now

[whyenn-reader]

might be the headonism in me but what the fuck is a dopamine addiction. you mean liking feeling good?? in the one life you get????? what are you evangelical?????????

[whyenn-reader]

banger tags after bager tags on this post fellas

[butter-and-too-much-bread]

How to explain to people that the harmful part of addiction is the harmful patterns of compulsive behavior and not the parts that feel good?

[mousidy]

a lot of my disillusionment with the trans "community" comes down to the fact that too many of you take "gender is different from sex" and go "ah ok, so instead of saying women are fragile and men are strong, I should say afabs are fragile and amabs are strong. to be Inclusive"

then you just treat gender like a surface level aesthetic draped over what someone "actually" is. really is indistinguishable from terf rhetoric

[mousidy]

you all need to unpack your bioessentialism, but we also need a better theory of gender than "it's just dressup." I will pick my words carefully here, but the word "gender" itself refers to so many different phenomena that have been lumped together, and we need to un-lump them

[mousidy]

in a feminist context, "gender" has historically referred to externally imposed categorization and the internalization and performance of said categories. in a paper I wrote on this subject, I called this sense of the word "extrinsic gender"

"intrinsic gender," on the other hand, is what I used to refer to the sense of the word "gender" that a lot of trans people are talking about when they discuss social gender dysphoria and euphoria. it's the internal sense of category that's resistant to external impositions

but then we also use the word "gender" to refer to subconscious sex, which is the term Julia Serano coins in Whipping Girl to name the phenomenon we're talking about when we talk about bodily dysphoria. it is the "gender" being "affirmed" by gender affirming healthcare like HRT and bottom surgery

so, "gender" is: a social classing system, a performance, and at least two internal phenomena as well. and I really don't know if it's doing us a service to conflate all of these things!

[mousidy]

a lot of people lately seem to be going heavy on the "performance" use of the word, ignoring (intentionally or otherwise) social classing, intrinsic gender, and subconscious sex. this seems to have led to a lot of "progressive" people treating trans women like men "amabs" who wear womanhood as a costume, and nobody understands why that's wrong because they also think gender is just a performance

[mousidy]

see also "why can't you just be a femboy/feminine man/etc"

[dovesndecay]

I see a lot of folks defending their vitriolic repugnance towards toddlers with cries of "but my sensory needs!" as if children are not also in possession of sensory needs. As if you, an adult here on Tumblr.com, do not have the capability and resources to learn the skills or acquire aids for coping with competing access needs. Or, y'know, just the option to leave, the way children most often do not.

You're holding an actual child to higher standards than you hold yourself, but it's the child that should be removed from public and community spaces. For your comfort.

Go fuck yourselves.

[dumbpuppyfag]

listen up folks he may be a paleolithic racist who failed upwards until he was in a position to give tens of billions of dollars to enable a genocide but you're mean and that's worse. remember the human.

[dumbpuppyfag]

wait no not those ones

[dumbpuppyfag]

remember when he led opposition against active school desegregation? remember when he was best friends with the most notorious segregationist in washington? remember when he gave the eulogy at that guy's funeral? remember in 1991 when bush sr conditioned loans to israel on a halt to illegal west bank settlements and he co-sponsored an amendment to forcibly override it? remember when he drafted the 1994 crime bill that fueled the ongoing mass incarceration of primarily black men? remember when he bragged about it? remember when he led democrat support for the invasion of iraq? remember when he led an all-white congressional panel in dragging a black woman's name through the mud on live tv for the crime of being sexually harassed?

the nauseating reinvention of this lifelong monster as a civil rights hero is solely due to his proximity to the first black president, which he only had because they needed someone on the ticket to reassure racist liberals that the white house would stay white. he spent 50 years making the world a worse place. he bears personal responsibility for the imprisonment and death of millions of people in the us and in the global south. his presidency was delivered by a bourgeois class that was terrified of any challenge to neoliberal orthodoxy. his entirely self-interested decision to pursue re-election delivered the everyday horrors you're seeing now. this doesn't even touch on the genocide you've been watching play out for over a year. he is a vain, miserable, racist, warmongering, murderous sack of shit and you do not owe him any sympathy whatsoever. save it for his victims.

[quasi-normalcy]

Two indy horror movies are now outperforming a Star Wars flick at the summer box office; truly the Old Gods are dead.

[quasi-normalcy]

I feel like we're all just starved for novelty

[zimmydee]

This is a huge part of the reason I'm sort of over a lot of Nerd Culture™ shit. When it first bust into the mainstream it felt great because wow, a lot of the stuff I thought was cool was getting some mainstream appeal.

Then it felt like there was this convergence of nerdy people saying "If we stop watching/supporting this they'll stop making it!" and large corporate entities realizing "If we keep pumping this recognizable shit out the nerds will keep paying for it," and I'm just... so bored. I've never been so bored by science fiction, comic books, and other fantastic stories.

So I stopped. No more Marvel, no more Star Wars, even my beloved Star Trek is on thin ice. Give me something I've never seen before. Give me new stories that start at the start of the movie and end at the end of the movie.

[quasi-normalcy]

Again, I maintain that indie productions are where you have to look now.

[swiftrunnerfelidae]

"Kill your local sex offender!" Oh, you mean the guy who went streaking at his local college football game on a dare one time? That's a sex crime.

"No, I mean-"

Oh, maybe the woman who had to pee in a public park that only had pay toilets, so she tried to hide behind the bushes but got caught? Public urination is a sex crime.

"What? No, I mean-"

Oh, maybe you mean the homeless guy who had to strip down to get his clothes in the laundromat to clean them for the first time in weeks? He tried being subtle, but someone called the cops on him, and now he's on the sex offender registry for public nudity.

"Rapists and pedophiles! Kill rapists and pedophiles!"

Oh, like the trans woman who got called a pedophile groomer for helping a trans kid escape her abusive parents?

Or maybe the black man who got labeled a rapist because he came on to another man's wife, and he decided to get back at him by charging him with rape?

How about the 17 year olds who were fooling around, fully consensually, in one of their bedrooms? That's still technically underage sex and thus rape of a minor.

Oh, or maybe you're talking about the doctor who performed genital reconstructive surgery in a state that just voted to get that classified as rape?

People will do everything they can to get you convinced rape and pedophilia are the worst crimes possible, then accuse whoever they like the least of being either a rapist, a pedophile, or both, counting on you turning on them just for being accused of the crime.

"Oh, so you're saying you don't want to kill a serial rapist?"

That's exactly what I'm goddamn saying.

Once we decide a group is okay to kill, the government will do everything they can to convince you that their political enemies are either part of that group, or just as bad as that group, to get you to kill their enemies for them.

The only way out is to accept every life as worth saving.

EDIT: If you're going to go on this post to say that no, you think you really should be allowed to kill people you decide are rapists and/or pedophiles, I'm going to block you. I have already been blocking you, because it's clear that you aren't willing to engage with what I'm saying.

Also, if someone says something like that we'd be better off with rapists being dead BUT that they won't let that opinion shape their stance on public policy, and you reply to that person to accuse them of wanting to murder people, I'm also going to block you, because what the fuck that's a completely different sentence.

EDIT 2: Since so many people seem to fail basic reading comprehension, let's state it again, in different words:

1. Killing people is bad.

2. Killing someone can never be undone by any means we have.

3. If the government can kill people, they will want to kill their political opposition and other undesirables (WHICH CAN INCLUDE YOU PERSONALLY AND ANY IF NOT ALL OF YOUR FRIENDS AND FAMILY).

4. If there is a class of people OF ANY TYPE who the government can LEGALLY KILL, they now just need to convince you their enemies count as that class (ever wondered why there's so much emphasis on claiming gay people are pedophiles? Now you know!)

5. If there is a class of people OF ANY TYPE that the public can LEGALLY KILL, murderers just need to convince people that their victims counted as that class (I murdered him because he's a rapist. Anyway now his job is free promote me into that position plz.)

6. As pointed out in the notes (thank you everyone pointing this out!), if the penalty for a crime is death, people are much more willing to silence witnesses to that crime (for example, murdering their rape victims), which is EVEN WORSE than just committing the initial crime.

7. THEREFORE the only way to keep those from happening is to have NO category of people it is considered okay to kill FOR ANY REASON.

[creekfiend]

if you looked at how high the walls were, and you looked at the people who were being allowed through the gate, and you looked at who was being turned away, and you decided based on this information that it wasn't worth it to try entering the walled city, that was gatekeeping working as intended.

gatekeeping is so effective because it allows the people in charge of it to frame it as a passive and natural force. "ah well, you just don't meet our criteria because of some technicalities, it's not that we are screening specifically for Your Kind Of Person, you understand, it's just that all the requirements coincidentally happen to produce a result where Your Kind Of Person is unable to enter our walled city :) so i think you'll see that we are not discriminating!"

i think a LOT less people understand how much gatekeeping impacts their lives than are impacted by gatekeeping. if you were ever prevented from participating in something bc of your inability to meet technical requirements for reasons outside of your control, that is gatekeeoing. if you ever decided to not even fucking try because you understood that the walled city wasn't for People Like You, that is the natural and intended outcome of gatekeeping.

one of the big reasons that gatekeeping is effective is because it cedes control of the narrative to the institution that has erected high walls around their city to begin with. they say the walls are natural. they have the power to make those claims because in general, no one else has the resources to develop alternative models. due to the gatekeeping.

[maidthings]

people like to posit that sexuality/gender/whathaveyou is intrinsic and immutable because conversion therapy doesn't work, which is always a strange argument, because it assumes that you can get rid of anything that isn't intrinsic and immutable by torturing it out of someone. Which is pretty obviously not true?

[shopcat]

look at this wonderful gif of scallops getting scared and scattering like a flock pigeons

[elioftheasphodel]

whatever. go my scallops

[whitachi]

last night I had the experience of "referencing a tumblr post that you think is widely known but turns out to not be as widely known as you thought it was" last night and it was this post. whatever. go my scallops

[realian]

"Anthy being fought over like a piece of meat was really fun and good until the show revealed how it was trying to talk about such abuse and CRITICIZE the systems that objectify and victimize women! that's just YIKES!"

[realian]

hello? can anyone hear me? it's so dark.

[rimonoroni2]

my general opinion on what people should be "allowed" to portray and what topics they should be "allowed" to explore in fiction is that you can make whatever art with whatever themes you want but i'm also allowed to think the way you handled it was tasteless and should've been done differently. my negative opinion on your handling of sensitive topics is the price of admission for publicly showcasing your work. this is not a pro-censorship stance because i am not The Government

[rimonoroni2]

this is getting really popular so i’d like to add the important caveat that your criticism of a work is no more unassailable than the work itself. just as one is entitled to be critical of something someone else is entitled to disagree with that criticism. i add this because some of you pretend to give a fuck about thoughtful analysis and then when someone points out flaws in your argument you declare that all criticisms are valid. this is untrue. the status of a hater is no more sacred than that of a liker. get off your high horse and engage in the thoughtful discussion you pretend to believe in or perish by my blade

[stillnaomi]

using violence to liberate people from sweatshops, unsafe mines, and grinding poverty isn't the same as using violence to impose those things on people. the idea that violence is morally repugnant regardless of context is a belief that every oppressor throughout history would love for the oppressed to hold

[chachassirkom]

however its also important that violence alone rarely ever accomplishes things long term. eg countries who broke out from under their colonizer's control, or countries that had revolutions are typically a failstate mess of crime and poverty and often end up with some other weird authoritarian/totalitarian regime.. or on a smaller scale: gangs/cartels/illegal jobs being destroyed by force doesn't usually solve the ghetto's problems, they only make things more chaotic and violent.

the most successful revolutions are those who haven't even become ones. the most successful takeovers are made with rules and non violent reforms, with smart decisions targeting the cause of the abuse

not to attack the op, just a thought. if you blow up a mine or kill the mine owner it's most likely next year all these people will end up on another mine because something made them go there. or will end up doing crime and whatnot. you need to be smart about it and give people safety and kindness and support that will make them free to chose another option

[anton--rayne]

the idea that all states that ever broke free of their oppressors are "failstates" and that you can only succeed without harming your oppressors or doing a revolution is a belief that every oppressor throughout history would love for the oppressed to hold

[quixoticanarchy]

i do not want to live in the fucking panopticon fuck the camera that blinks above me at work, the tv watching me at the store, the "smile you're on camera" signs, the ring cameras, the flock cameras, the apps to track your child or partner, the activist friends telling me "just assume everything you do in public is being recorded somewhere", the government building protester databases, the teslas recording every move all around them, the knowledge that everything i type or search or save is being tracked and logged, the ads and search suggestions that mysteriously know what i was just talking about, the way biometrics keep creeping into more places, the way my car spies on me, the way my phone spies on me, the way there is nowhere to go to get away from it!!! no wonder the internet is full of vindictive little stalkers and witchhunts when it's the water and the air of society from the culture to the infrastructure

[aughwl]

We can take control back! Community mapping projects using free open source software let you add where surveillance cameras are. I often take walks through new areas and observe the buildings to spot the bastards. When you do it, you find out there are more blind spots that you think. If you have a good map of public cameras you can avoid them or tell people about them. Or other things :)

Surveillance under Surveillance

Surveillance cameras and other means of surveillance

Surveillance under Surveillance

Surveillance cameras and other means of surveillance

[anarchopuppy]

Blinding the Cyclops, Wrecking the Panopticon

[m4gethecat]

DeFlock

Find license plate readers (LPRs) near you.

[smute]

i think the most upsetting thing about american-flavor puritanism is how fucking patronizing it is. it's 2026 but the whole world still has to deal with a cultural hegemony grown from the gnarled vestiges of victorian-era paternalism. tax-paying adults with passports and the right to vote are treated like wayward children because of the antiquated idea that authorities must protect the weak minds of the unwashed masses from depravity and corruption. the average american can send a fellow citizen to the chair, but they can't piss in a ditch without being declared an outlaw. american entertainment media is saturated with sex, but you can't talk about it online without getting your account suspended. it's such blatant censorship at a universal scale, but because sexual content is framed as inherently dangerous, this restriction on basic adult autonomy, this blanket denial of moral and intellectual adulthood, can be reframed as protection, an expression of care, a moral duty. "won't someone think of the children!" I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN!

[smute]

thank god that the video game that features slow motion animations of graphic gunshot wounds and is rated 18+ has a profanity filter in single player offline mode. thank you for protecting this 33 year old mind from the corrupting influence that is a horse named apple slut

[autistic-dazai]

if you're in a relationship making a silent tally of everything your partner does wrong then you are the problem. Doubly so if you assure them they haven't done anything wrong. Erase the tally and replace it with open communication and requests Now