rmj

[mush-dooms]

hey so I actually don't think you should be breathing that much, like don't you already breathe enough? it isn't a good look to be inhaling and exhaling that much. idkk I'm just worried about your health, you know how many toxic chemicals are in the air :/ if you want I can surgically take out one of your lungs so that you won't breathe as much! you'll feel much better :) omg do you see that guy over there trying to catch his breath that's so funny haha he's breathing so much hold on I'm gonna film him real quick so my friends and I can all laugh at him later! hey so I heard about this new thing called "suffocation" and it's supposed to help you not breathe as much isn't that great? I mean yeah people die from that but at least we found a cure for the breathing epidemic! btw all of this is so normal

[diagraphers-brother]

[diagraphers-brother]

I’ve recently been plating Age of Mythology, and have been having some thoughts on the choice of pantheons in the core game:

The core game pantheons in Age of Mythology (Greek, Egyptian, Norse) are the same as the real-world pantheons included in the Dungeons and Dragons 3rd Edition splatbook Deities and Demigods. They’re also the first three pantheons listed in Scion: Hero 1st Edition, and the only pantheons featured in both Scion: Hero and the Dungeons and Dragons 5E list of fantasy-historical pantheons. There seems to be some sort of cultural consensus that when media features multiple pantheons drawn from mythology these three are always the first three to be included. And I don’t understand why this is.

[toasthaste]

I learned a little while back that apparently A/B/O fiction as it is actually written tends to be WAY less interesting than I'd always kind of assumed. Like ok yes it's a way to fictionalize existing gender/sex stuff so it can be explored from a safe distance, that's valuable, whatever-- but what I THOUGHT it was about, was brand NEW weird gender roles, and humans having an extremely alien method of reproduction that requires the participation of three distinct individuals. People are always acting like a/b/o is soooo weird and strange and deviant, I just assumed it had to at least have, like, ovipositors or something!

[bojanus]

I'm sorry but……. "requires the participation of three distinct individuals"??

Were u assuming like…. like literal alpha/beta/omega like it's a three-part harmony??? u gotta collect all three to get a full set for sex??? Is that how u interpreted it?????

[toasthaste]

Of course! Why else would there be three?? Or, well, I didn't think it had to be a threesome setup all at once, I've watched the Lindsay Ellis video so I've seen enough text snippets to know that's not true, but I figured it was like... A and B get down and dirty, and then B and O go at it, and that's the circle of life! It's like bees carrying pollen from one flower to another! It's the obvious interpretation!

[diagraphers-brother]

That’s how Azadian sex works in The Player of Games.

[loving-n0t-heyting]

The wapo this morning asking the tough questions:

How can there be justice for the families of victims in a shooting a quarter of a century ago if they can’t forestall any possibility the 14yo mentally disturbed child responsible will ever again be allowed to set foot outside his designated collective torture facility?

[loving-n0t-heyting]

More and more I increase in my conviction that mass shooters and other a few other designated varieties of disenfranchised criminals are a sort of gateway drug to rabid rightwing lawandorderism for socially conscious liberals who want to flatter themselves champions of the poor and oppressed; the idea that psychologically disturbed teenagers who shoot up their schools and get jailed for it are somehow representatives of a hegemonic ruling class is insane on its face, but still somehow commands enough conviction to get ppl primed to respect articles about the Serious Question of whether states should sentence 14yos to life without parole that would otherwise trigger blaring socon totalitarianism alarms

[loving-n0t-heyting]

About the best summary of the American prison system I’ve seen!

[armedjoy]

[sculptingsuccess]

Look we all want a robo dog but if you kill someone with a sledgehammer to steal theirs, they are going to find you. There’s no way a 75k$ dog doesn’t have gps

we are killing the dog

[purplealchemist]

NO.

ALL DOGS ARE PRECIOUS.

Even robot ones.

[perigeeprincess]

its not a dog, its a machine used and designed for police surveillance and the entire reason they made it dog shaped is so idiots like you would go “awwww robot dog how precious” instead of seeing them as the oppressive tools they are.

we’re killing the fucking dog

[nonbunary-coco]

i dont like that we’re at the level white folk are already valuing hunks of metal over poc bc the metal looks even just vaguely like a dog holy fuck

[zwoelffarben]

That thing is a weapon, designed by elites to better maim and kill innocents: we’re five years out (at best) from seeing BD mount guns on these things to better maim you with. 

If you want a robot dog, get a fucking roomba.

[zwoelffarben]

Hey, so I was wrong: it wasn’t five years, it was less than one. This news article was written exactly one day yester to my original reblog, which predicted gun-mounting, ’s aniversary.

'This needs to be illegal as of yesterday': Video of robo dog with machine gun terrifies internet

A robot dog featuring in the video looks quite similar to the one which was once promoted by Boston Dynamics.

I caught the dodgeball in my bare hands and y'all still ain’t believe my canary ass proclaimation.

[morlock-holmes]

Sometimes I’m completely baffled by Tumblr. This argument, “They’re going to mount guns on this and use it for war!” Also applies to cars (internal combustion and electric) but people don’t broadcast this rabid hate for Toyota.

This technology also has at least one other obvious application (search and rescue in dangerous areas) and possibly others down the line.

I mean hit it with a sledgehammer if you want, I don’t care, but “Nobody should invent robot legs because they will be used by the military” is never going to convince people outside of your bubble, not because it’s wrong but because it’s obvious.

The technology we are all using to type these posts represents a *profoundly* dangerous weapon in the hands of government and the military but somehow that fact didn’t convince us all to stop using it.

[morlock-holmes]

Maybe you have to do it. Maybe the only way to get politicians to do anything to restrict or eliminate the bad uses of this technology is to post sledgehammer pictures whenever they come up and make Boston Dynamics such a burnt brand that politicians will try to get votes by passing law.

The fact that these aren’t aimed at individual consumers but rather, businesses and governments probably makes that kind of cultivation of emotional distance easier than doing it to smartphones.

The inconsistency still bugs me though.

[thathopeyetlives]

a lot of pro-high-density-city polemic has this kind of "caring about quality of life makes you a classist, if you stopped caring about quality of life / blamed all problems on Teh Landlordz you would feel better" mentality.

[discoursedrome]

The simple rule of thumb is: if you care about quality of life, it’s fine. If you use your property to improve your own quality of life at the expense of fellow citizens, people don’t agree on whether that’s fine or not (and some people would say it’s OK in some cases but not others), but it’s not much of an issue in densification discussions unless you’re a major landlord. If you pressure the government  to protect your quality of life at the expense of other citizens, that’s not great; if you do this while also becoming wealthy as the government intervention you’ve requested causes your assets to appreciate, that’s a subsidy from the people you’re keeping out to yourself, which is actively bad. Depending on the speaker’s political affiliation, the general principle here is either, “you shouldn’t be able to have it all while others have far too little”, or “OK, you can have it all while others have far too little, but only if you pay what it’s actually worth.”

Not all discourse follows these rules, and much of it is filtered through ideological agonism, but that’s the shape of the issue.

[yaldabaothadeez]

OP, isn’t your gimmick “pretending to be Catholic”? Why you you be against something that accurately describes Rome?

[evilsoup]

If you pressure the government to protect your quality of life at the expense of other citizens, that’s not great

Minimum space standards, requirements to have fire exits, bans on use of flammable cladding, etc, are all government actions to protect the quality of life of tenants at the literal expense of landlords, and I think those are pretty great.

[thathopeyetlives]

Bwah?

I do not understand what people think I was talking about?

(also... I'm actually Catholic?)

[thathopeyetlives]

yaldabaothadeez

10h

Also sorry OP; in my mildly delirious state I interpreted your post as a general anti-density argument, rather than being against the particular thing you're actually talking about (which I'll admit I haven't seen; most pro-urban-density people I see seem to think it would be a net QOL improvement). I should probably go to bed.

I mean, I actually am kiiinda anti-density...

I think that 1 to 500 people per square mile is a perfectly reasonable population density (for inhabited areas) and I wish that it was possible for more people to live like that, and I wish that the locus of cultural power was located in rural areas rather than urban ones.

I don't want to support unsustainable price-increase-speculation schemes, though I also think that people who own an ordinary house should be prevented from being driven out of it. I'm (somewhat) anti-suburb, though I also don't like the mentality that there is no value to single family houses or to yards.

But what I was really criticizing in the OP was this attitude that some left-wing urbanists have, where they just seem completely insensitive to a variety of issues with cities (issues which, IMO, make or break cities as pleasant places to live) and view anybody who cares about them as a bigot or a classist or something.

Like, if someone complains about the city that they live in being unpleasant because it smells like piss and there's garbage and filth in the streets, or that they just feel uncomfortable in a crowded, densely populated area, it's messed up when people go off on them like it's wrong to consider that undesirable.

[morlock-holmes]

I mean, there's two frustrating subtexts at work, somehow simultaneously:

"The cities are crime-ridden cesspits, thank goodness my six figure salary affords me a life in this gated suburb"

And,

"The out to lunch liberal elite don't understand how hard it is in rural areas, and why the poor there aren't excited to have big city problems imported into their humble small towns and farms."

As a poor city dweller, it's infuriating. Like, car discourse drives me crazy because my experience of "unwalkable neighborhoods" is with wealthy suburbs where the median income is five times what I make.

But it's always portrayed as the rich liberal elite vs. the rural poor.

Honestly I'm not even sure density is the issue. I have been in neighborhoods of single family dwellings with lawns that were very pleasant to walk five miles in; and I've been in only slightly less dense neighborhoods where walking under a mile to the store was unpleasant and dangerous. Not because of crime, because of traffic.

The absence of suburbia from these discussions, and the attempt to conflate suburban and rural areas drives me up the wall.

[fuckyeahgoodomens]

[roach-works]

https://www.zmescience.com/ecology/animals-ecology/cats-kill-up-10-times-more-wildlife-than-natural-predators-so-keep-them-indoors/

[afloweroutofstone]

The Espionage Act has been used as a sledgehammer against every single journalist and whistleblower who's tried to uncover government abuses and war crimes in modern history, if Democrats start rallying around it because they're using it to investigate Trump I'm going to scream

[morlock-holmes]

Actually I'm curious and want to run a non-scientific experiment, so reblog and in the tags put roughly the area you grew up in and what you call these little guys:

[alwaysbewoke]

The cops knew and protected this guy while throwing her in jail.

[ms-demeanor]

Look pals, I also hate cops but this is misleading.

Shanteari Weems doesn't appear to have reported anything to police before the shooting incident; she shot him in the leg and he was arrested and charged with sexual offenses against children while he was in the hospital recovering; she is being held without bail and considered a risk to the community because she confronted him in a hotel, where she barricaded herself in the room and threatened to shoot herself if police entered. The judge explicitly stated she was being held without bond because her decision-making seems compromised, which seems like a fair assessment.

She is claiming that she shot him in self defense when she confronted him about being a child molester, but when she allowed police into the room they found a will she had created and a notebook describing her plans to shoot him.

The family of a child in the daycare reported him to the police in June and warrant was issued for his phone about a week before the shooting, which also indicates that he was being investigated by police, not that he is being protected by some blue wall of silence while his innocent child-protecting wife was getting thrown in jail. In fact, he was extradited from his hospital in DC to Maryland, where he is being charged and ALSO being held without bail.

I'd like to take a moment to break down the second tweet here.

1. Husband=retired cop 2.Multiple kids/parents came forward 3. Husband confessed to her 4. She called the cops to report 5. Naturally, they did nothing 5. She shot him in the leg & he’s still alive 6. She’s in jail, he is not 7. Reason: “Public Safety”

This is accurate.

Multiple kids (and/or) parents came forward to both Weems and the police.

He confessed to her when she confronted him in a hotel room with a gun. Generally we should not accept confessions at gunpoint as reliable.

According to everything I'm seeing, no she didn't call the cops to report; she confronted him alone in a hotel after.

There was an ongoing police investigation into her husband's conduct pre-dating the shooting by weeks, including a warrant for his phone that was executed three days before the shooting.

This is accurate.

They are both in jail; he was arrested the day after this tweet, though he was still in the hospital on the day the tweet was posted, and they are both being held without bond.

She shot him in a hotel and barricaded herself in the room, threatening to kill herself if anyone came in. It is not unreasonable to treat people who shoot people in buildings accessible to the public and who then barricade themselves in those buildings as a public safety hazard. (There is likely also an element of suicide watch with her continued custody).

Okay. So. @NTKallday is a public defender and prison abolitionist who ran for the position of Seattle City Attorney.

I think that she's making a really terrible case for justice and prison abolition here.

*IF* we totally discount what police have said about this case (seems like a fair thing to do, of course they're biased) and go only on statements from Weems' lawyer, witnesses at the hotel, and verifiable information about the daycare closure, this is still a case of someone directly confronting a person about a crime, shooting them in a hotel room, and barricading themselves in the room and preventing medical first responders from entering.

NTKallday clearly wants to present Weems as unfairly maligned by the police, a hero reporting child abuse and being ignored because of blue silence and taking things into her own hands.

My issue with this is, as a prison abolitionist myself, cornering accused child molesters with a gun and shooting them is also what a whole bunch of people want to do to drag queens.

Claiming that the authorities are protecting pedophiles for nefarious purposes is also why several pride events were targeted by what were functionally armed vigilantes.

Moreover, you don't have to lie about cops being bad in order to find plenty of evidence that cops are bad. This is a story out of Baltimore, you don't have to look hard to find cops doing heinous shit in Baltimore, but the worst that cops seem to have done in this situation are "execute a warrant (against a former cop) after a credible report of abuse" and "arrest someone who shot someone else and claimed it was because of an unverified crime." As far as cops go, that's not really reprehensible.

I guess my problem with the tweet is that it seems to be handwaving some really reactionary shit under the guise of being pro-abolition and anti-cop. It seems like the tweet is saying that it's okay to shoot people who you think are pedophiles, or at the very least you shouldn't be arrested for shooting a pedophile if you've called in a police report and gotten no traction. It seems to be saying that people who shoot people in public places aren't a public safety hazard if they thought they had a good reason for shooting the other person (the tweet doesn't even try to use self defense as a fig leaf, just broadly accepts that it's okay to shoot accused child molesters).

It seems absolutely bananas to me that a public defender is claiming that it was unjust for the police to arrest someone who (in the logic of this tweet) shot someone who had not been convicted of the crime she was shooting him for.

The question of what justice looks like outside of a carceral state is a complicated thing. But what it does not and CANNOT look like is vigilantes gunning down the people they believe are guilty of crimes.

I know that NTKallday wants to set up a narrative here that this is a story about cops committing crimes and exploiting the helpless and then closing ranks to protect one of their own from a person who wanted to Do What Was Right, but in doing so this tweet is basically saying "if you really, really believe someone did something wrong it's okay for you to execute them."

And that is really, really, really not a message that prison abolitionists should want to send.

[gravedangerahead]

Ok I'm. I mean this respectfully but. I'm so confused... How does Europe and Asia make more sense as two continents than North and South America? At least the latter are only connected by an isthmus, and are otherwise separate land masses. Eurasia is basically just one massive land mass. Of course I guess this is approaching the question from an emphasis on physical geography 😅

Dividing Eurasia doesn't make any sense at all from a physical perspective, it's definitely a purely political thing. If I implied that dividing Eurasia made sense I misspoke. But dividing America doesn't make sense either, and it doesn't even work politically because you're cutting Latin America in two??? Why? It doesn't work physically or politically, I don't get it.

The border is between Panama and Colombia as far as I can tell, let me know if I'm wrong. Panama and Colombia used to be one single country until 1903, and they might still be if the US hadn't decided it wanted a canal and that they should back the separatists.

The political subdivision of the American continent is North America, Central America and South America, and Central America is more culturally and politically connected to South America (making Latin America) than North America in my opinion. There's no physical discontinuity and no political reason to lump Central America with North America. Are Nicaraguans North Americans?

Honestly, I was taught the 6 continents model, but the 5 continents model makes the most sense. So Eurasia, Africa, America, Oceania and Antarctica.

Again, I'm not implying that dividing Eurasia makes sense either, Russia is in this liminar situation for example (although I think historically and culturally it might also be a bit in this liminar place between Asia and Europe, even if it makes zero sense physically).

I'm not great at geography and all these classifications are necessarily artificial and somewhat arbitrary (some models consider Eurafrasia to be one huge continent).

I'm just saying what makes sense to me based on what I was taught, and the absurdity of dividing Latin America is more apparent to me, since I'm not Eurasian and because it's new to me. I don't get why a bunch of contiguous countries that fought the same independence wars, speak the same languages, and a few were even part of the same country, should be in different continents.

I don't know if any of that made sense lol

[diagraphers-brother]

Egypt straddles Africa and Asia, Arabic is spoken through most of both Northern Africa and Western Asia, and I definitely get the impression that Northern Africa and Western Asia are more culturally and politically connected to eachother than either is to the rest of their continent. So far as I can see all your arguments for grouping North and South America apply every bit as well to Africa and Eurasia.

[morlock-holmes]

Something that helped me is realizing that if, in reality, someone sets up their boundaries as an invisible minefield that they refuse to explain, and then blames you when you do something they don’t like, they are actually just being a jerk

Thanks, and I'm trying to get there but it's very hard if you're around a lot of normie left-wing pop feminism stuff because, like, okay, here's some things I heard a lot:

Attractive women are subjected to constant unwanted attention and the inability to escape it is profoundly frustrating;

Women are socialized to placate men because bad things happen to them when they don't;

Men are afraid women will laugh at them; women are afraid men will rape them;

You, Morlock Holmes, have autism and you have strange ideas about how to act and socialize with people.

To me, that makes it seem like I won't be able to know if a woman is actually interested; and that, morally speaking, I have no right to expect the women around me to risk themselves by telling me if I make them uncomfortable; and further that, given the excess of attention women get anyway, and given that my attention is probably awkward and strange, I have no right to impose it on others just to satisfy my own desires.

People who aren't left wing can just say, "Yeah, that's not how it works" but like, most of my friends accept the premises I just laid out, but somehow not the conclusion for reasons that none of them can articulate that well.

It always comes off as, "Just think of dating as one of those low-pressure fun activities where some of the participants think that they are going to be raped or murdered... By you."

[four-last-songs]

I suspect that they don’t actually believe those premises, but since a major part of pop sj is “shun people who question the orthodoxy,” they don’t feel safe saying so.

[morlock-holmes]

That is the only conclusion I've been able to come to.

It utterly blows my mind that the answer to "How do I reconcile my day to day behavior when it comes to romance and dating with #yesallmen style pop feminism?"

Is just, "Oh, you don't"

I've done a lot to try to deprogram myself but I still can't wrap my head around it. People really seem to think that there's no relationship there and no reason you'd think too hard about it.

It's mind-boggling.

[morlock-holmes]

@argumate

"it’s been years, right? that style of discourse isn’t even in vogue any more"

It's easier to avoid, yeah, and I've done some good deprogramming work but talking to a lot of people about it the conclusion I've come to is,

Maybe 85% -99% of people knew that stuff was just a fad, like mullets or bell bottoms, and they boosted it on Twitter and used the jokes about men being trash in real life conversation and just kind of understood it as a vibe.

You kinda get the vague sense that what's being complained about is real and you have some kinda vague responsibility to be a good man but pretty much you can just do whatever you were already doing.

#yesallmen is very important to know but, I mean, like, we all know that some men are more all than others.

And then there's a tiny minority of people who didn't get the memo that we were supposed to treat all this raw emotional political rhetoric as the pet rock of the 2010s, and attempted to really take it seriously as, you know, the fucking moral and political philosophy people kept saying it was.

And none of the people spreading it even really realized that we were trying so hard or taking it seriously.

And if you spend a lot of time living with this as a moral belief it's not so easy to deprogram yourself in a flash.

It's like you take, I dunno, Catholicism really seriously and confess every week and feel the weight of mankind's guilt and one day you come to church and everyone including the Bishop is like, "Yeah that Catholicism stuff is so five years ago, we're all Buddhists now. Seriously that guilt stuff is weird, you need to get laid.'

[argumate]

well yeah, you’re supposed to look at the world and see what things people say are accurate descriptions of reality as it is and what things are just things people say, not take everything as literal truth (and nobody takes everything as literal truth as the set of things conflicts, you can’t not apply editorial discretion unless your mind is a howling maelstrom of nonsense)

[morlock-holmes]

Well, as I have said before, it in fact is.

Autism spectrum disorders appear to have something to do, in a fundamental way, with a difference in the processing of patterns and pattern recognition and...

Honestly scratch that.

It's one thing when the Catholic Bishop goes on the news to decry birth control and pre-marital sex, and then the Atheist says, your objections are silly and superstitious.

It's another for the bishop of your church to go on TV and decry birth control and premarital sex, and then have him walk of the set, walk up to you, and go, "You should go out and get laid, you'd feel better, I genuinely have no idea why you take sex so seriously."

Once I started talking to people I quickly realized that the left wing attitude was, "As a man, your very presence makes women aware of your potential to inflict patriarchal violence on them but I genuinely can't imagine why knowing that would have any effect on your self-conception or behavior at all."

That's fucking weird! It's weird even if you aren't autistic and it's REALLY fucking hard to just notice on your own if you are.

[argumate]

why privilege one particular inconsistency over any other though? the world is full of random stuff people say that contradicts the way they act, almost nothing makes sense if interpreted as an honest belief, and bishops in particular are famous for acting differently than they preach.

[morlock-holmes]

I don't know, it's the confusion, the people saying, "Why don't you just do this" followed by "Why on earth did you do that?"

It gets frustrating.

It kind of feels like you're saying it's crazy to expect to get any kind of help with the stuff you struggle with from the people around you, which I have found to be untrue.

[loving-n0t-heyting]

i understand—and, indeed, sympathise with!—treating "ecosystems" as valuable in their own right, but it is strange to me when i see ppl act as though any obligations we have to animals (or plants, etc) must be entirely derivative from their contribution to the biosphere. to the point that ppl will assume anyone who treats obligations to individual animals as taking precedence over the ecosystem in which they are embedded is simply speaking out of confusion about the relevant ecology. or take it that noting some way of killing animals is not "ecologically disruptive" should be sufficient to dispel any possible qualms. an individual beetle's value seems so much more obvious to me than the ephemeral value of their biological environment, and yet to others this seems to be reversed. how peculiar!

[cop-disliker69]

Well I think those two concepts of nonhuman organisms having value are in direct conflict. Because sometimes valuing the health of an ecosystem requires like... genocide of a particular species. If you value an insect just as an individual with interests of its own, then fumigating your house becomes morally questionable. An idea like “lets reintroduce wolves to Yellowstone so they can slaughter all the deer and allow the trees to regrow” becomes highly questionable.

[oligopspispopd-deactivated20221]

I think there’s a stronger case to be made for caring about animal suffering than animal death; (most other) animals don’t have long-term goals that would be frustrated by their dying, which is the main thing I take to be bad about killing humans and perhaps some other animals,* but they do clearly enjoy or dislike present experiences in a way that’s directly analogous to us. so like factory farming or animal cruelty seem worth stopping even if the calculus of deer dying of wolves vs parasites I suspect comes out in a wash

(actually I’m not sure I really buy the idea that ecosystems have more than instrumental value, since value derives from the preferences of conscious systems and i strongly suspect ecosystems qua ecosystems aren’t. but their instrumental value is noncontroversial enough)

*the other is that unpredictable early death is “ecologically” bad for humans, partially for the same reasons random theft is

[loving-n0t-heyting]

@sigmaleph

[loving-n0t-heyting]

I don’t think I principally oppose killing out of concern for their long term projects however. I am as opposed to killing idle ambitionless humans as highly motivated ambitious ones? And most animals in general seem highly averse to death at most given moments—the longtermness of their desires that would be frustrated by dying seem less significant than their clear desire not to die in the here and now

[morlock-holmes]

"(most other) animals don’t have long-term goals that would be frustrated by their dying, which is the main thing I take to be bad about killing humans and perhaps some other animals" This seems like an astonishingly contentious thing to write, since it implies that there is nothing wrong with, say, killing someone in a coma.

Also, like, whenever people say things like that it drives me nuts. How did you come to the conclusion that any given animal has or does not have "long-term goals"?

[loving-n0t-heyting]

i understand—and, indeed, sympathise with!—treating "ecosystems" as valuable in their own right, but it is strange to me when i see ppl act as though any obligations we have to animals (or plants, etc) must be entirely derivative from their contribution to the biosphere. to the point that ppl will assume anyone who treats obligations to individual animals as taking precedence over the ecosystem in which they are embedded is simply speaking out of confusion about the relevant ecology. or take it that noting some way of killing animals is not "ecologically disruptive" should be sufficient to dispel any possible qualms. an individual beetle's value seems so much more obvious to me than the ephemeral value of their biological environment, and yet to others this seems to be reversed. how peculiar!

[cop-disliker69]

Well I think those two concepts of nonhuman organisms having value are in direct conflict. Because sometimes valuing the health of an ecosystem requires like... genocide of a particular species. If you value an insect just as an individual with interests of its own, then fumigating your house becomes morally questionable. An idea like “lets reintroduce wolves to Yellowstone so they can slaughter all the deer and allow the trees to regrow” becomes highly questionable.

[oligopspispopd-deactivated20221]

I think there’s a stronger case to be made for caring about animal suffering than animal death; (most other) animals don’t have long-term goals that would be frustrated by their dying, which is the main thing I take to be bad about killing humans and perhaps some other animals,* but they do clearly enjoy or dislike present experiences in a way that’s directly analogous to us. so like factory farming or animal cruelty seem worth stopping even if the calculus of deer dying of wolves vs parasites I suspect comes out in a wash

(actually I’m not sure I really buy the idea that ecosystems have more than instrumental value, since value derives from the preferences of conscious systems and i strongly suspect ecosystems qua ecosystems aren’t. but their instrumental value is noncontroversial enough)

*the other is that unpredictable early death is “ecologically” bad for humans, partially for the same reasons random theft is

[loving-n0t-heyting]

@sigmaleph

[loving-n0t-heyting]

I don’t think I principally oppose killing out of concern for their long term projects however. I am as opposed to killing idle ambitionless humans as highly motivated ambitious ones? And most animals in general seem highly averse to death at most given moments—the longtermness of their desires that would be frustrated by dying seem less significant than their clear desire not to die in the here and now

[papasmoke]

Tumblr is like a monastery compared to the chaos of Twitter. Progressive liberals are coming out of the woodwork to defend some popular user working for 15 years at Lockheed Martin and exposing themselves as morally bankrupt as well in the process.

This website could never, nobody here has a job.

[homoethotic]

I would also like to submit these horrors to evidence:

Like. Twitter is just the absolute nexus of people who want the aesthetics of social justice while retaining the behavior of Amanda Bynes high school cult from Easy A with some blisteringly American racist and imperialist beliefs thrown in for good measure

[papasmoke]

If not for the thin veneer of inclusive language you could easily convince me these were all comments from Reagan Administration alumni

[boychic-deactivated20230922]

"people of a the global south are a rhetorical construct" what?

[diagraphers-brother]

Maybe you’re hanging out in better parts of Tumblr than me, but this strikes me as worse than Tumblr more in a “whoops you said the quiet part out loud” way than a “thank god there aren’t people like that here” way. Admittedly more so when I first joined Tumblr than now, but I’ve definitely encountered people on Tumblr who seemed to me to have these exact attitudes and just be too tactful to outright admit it.

[secondbeatsongs]

here’s a question for you:

do you remember that cartoon about a teenage redhead who had a blonde boyfriend, an ethnically ambiguous best friend, and two younger brothers who can’t stay out of trouble?

you know, the show with the nonverbal animal mascot that helps fight evil? and the villain named Dr. D that hangs around with a dramatic goth lady, and builds robots for crime reasons?

it’s the one where the blonde boyfriend has a cute baby sister that he cares for and dotes on all the time. oh! and there’s a tech nerd who, for a large part of the series, you only see on a screen!

yeah? you remember it? great!

which one

[diagraphers-brother]

This is just scratching the surface of the parallels:

- Both pairs of younger brothers are implausibly good at high-tech handicrafts.

- Both villains have more successful supervillain rivals who feature as such all though the show but who only act as episode villains in the finals season.

- Both goth ladies come across as perpetually somewhat sick of the villains’ constant stupid plans.

- Each series has a movie where we see a version of reality where a recurring villain has won, turned the world into a dystopia, required everyone to dress like them and turned a character much of the fandom ships them with into their mind-controlled elite guard, and where the main characters’ friends and families are leading the resistance and have become much grimmer and more macho as a result.

- Each has a movie where the evil scientist nearly succeeds in taking over the world with an army of flying robots.

- Each has a movie where aliens lead by a giant green woman kidnap the teenage redhead and one of the evil scientist-goth lady pair, leading the two’s associates to team up to rescue them, and said teamup then return to earth and continue fighting together to save the world from the aliens, who are now invading it; in each of these movies the aliens are eventually defeated by a plant monster that also fights the heroes, and the day is eventually saved by one of the evil scientist’s inventions which was introduced when he used it in a comically unsuccessful attempt at villainy.