The blog of Erik A. G. '59 @erikag59 - Tumblr Blog

Fun how the bystander effect was coined to cover up how cops are bigoted cowards who let a queer person die and Stockholm syndrome was also coined to cover that the cops handled a hostage situation so badly the hostages trusted their captors more than the cops.

eel-slap

Also adding that the ACTUAL proven "bystander effect" (in further studies) isn't people not wanting to be involved but any of the following and/or a combination of them.

Uncertainty (e.g. people aren't sure what is happening is dangerous/that someone's getting hurt, e.g. they think the screaming is someone's TV being too loud/the fire alarm is malfunctioning again/the person who seems barely awake is just drunk and will recover fine) and they (rightfully) don't want to waste an emergency response or risk getting involved if doing so would actually hurt/inconvenience people or make them look bad.

Belief someone else has already called for help/will help better than they can (e.g. seeing a car crash and assuming any of the other drivers nearby called emergency services, seeing a medical emergency and assuming there's a trained doctor or paramedic in the crowd and they'll step forward any minute now, waiting for someone else to act first)

Fear of consequences (e.g. being afraid the police will arrest them at an overdose/party where one has occurred, being afraid to report the fire they accidentally started until they can no longer possibly control it out of fear of being blamed, being "made an accomplice" in something like abuse or corruption or a scam etc so they're afraid reporting it will all land on them, knowing one would be the first suspect from their gender/race/class/other social status)

All of these factors can be addressed. There is no one "bystander effect," there's a plethora of reasons for noninvolvement that cluster into these general three buckets.

So what can you do personally? Not much about fear of consequences (short of say informing people of stuff like legal protections for people who call for medical help and whistleblower/labor law protections etc, and working to reduce bigotry and prejudice in general) For the others? If you're unsure whether something is an emergency/someone needs help, pay attention and act as if you may need to do something (whether make an emergency call or evacuate or whatever) until you know otherwise. Don't just go "meh, couples argue" or assume the fire alarm is a false alarm.

Never believe someone else has the situation under control/is helping unless they directly say they are. If you're not sure they are helping/know what they are doing when you know more - help them too! If you're not sure if they've called for help, make that call too. If you need help or are warning people, call out to someone specific or with a specific request ("HEY YOU IN THE GREEN SHIRT CALL 911" "GRAB THE FIRE EXTINGUISHER NOW!" "GUN! RUN!")

thememedaddy

ckret2

getting scambot messages from random accounts that clearly used to be normal active blogs is sad enough. you know that there used to be a real person on that blog until they were tricked into handing their password to the digital fae.

but it's an entirely new level of tragic when somebody you've actually spoken to gets turned into a bot account. it's like peeking at a zombie apocalypse through the window and realizing one of the shambling corpses was your friend.

and then the zombie catches sight of you, lurches up to your window, and shouts through the glass that they accidentally reported your account to tumblr and you'll be deactivated unless you click this link.

RIP to the blog that used to DM me to tell me they liked my new chapters. Their last known words spoken before being turned, 17 hours ago: "Ggs!" They were praising someone's deadlift.

ckret2

the message they tried to get me with is probably the same message that got them, so for anybody who hasn't already been warned about the signs of a zombie account:

if you get something like this ↑ they're gonna follow up by instructing you to contact tumblr support on discord and give you contact info; or they're gonna link a website that looks sort of like tumblr support and say you have to email them; or any variety of "you must now contact tumblr, here is how you contact tumblr."

whatever they send you, it Does Not lead to tumblr. it leads to the master zombie that bit them and inducted them into the ranks of the undead, and will bite you the second they have your email and password. i might be confusing zombies and vampires. anyway,

it's easier to fall for these messages because the blog doesn't LOOK like a bot blog, because it ISN'T a bot blog. it's a normal person's blog that got accessed by a bot, meaning the blog's content CLEARLY looks like a real active user when you click on it. and yes—it might even be a blog you already know. sometimes bots like this go down a blog's DMs or reblogs and message people they've previously interacted with.

they got one of my treasured followers, and they can get you too. don't fall for their tricks. know the signs.

geekysteven

I'm accepting anti-sponsorships now. Pay me enough and I'll pretend to use your competitor's product and be consistently annoyed with it.

hopencyde-deactivated20250901

ndnbutch

personally I am of the opinion that vegans who are like “the way our food system currently works under capitalism on a large scale is exceptionally cruel to all animals including humans and is not sustainable, so I’m doing what I can to make the most ethical choices available to me about what I eat and encourage others to do the same” are generally very reasonable people who I agree with in spades. but vegans who seem to think human beings are not themselves animals who are ultimately also part of the food chain but instead some kind of other paternalistic higher entity that can never engage in ethical and sustainable hunting practices (and especially the fringe I’ve seen who think other carnivorous animal predators are also evil and need to be eliminated) are people I regard as foolish at best if not actively anti-indigenous and racist

ndnbutch

hey can y’all maybe ask yourselves why when people of color say things like “this movement I generally agree with has a racism problem” your gut instinct is to downplay and dismiss and say it’s only a few bad apples and that we’re co-opting the larger conversation by talking about it? can y’all examine this instinct in yourselves for a second?

wheeloffortune-design

my friends just gave birth to twins, but they're very picky about names, and will not name a child until they fall in love with a name. for their first born it took weeks.

now, they found ONE name they liked. so currently we have to ask "how are Suzie and the other one?". which is hilarious.

thydungeongal

Every once in a while I will feel compelled to check up on the "people who think call-out posts are a form of justice" side of this site and sometimes I'll bear witness to something like. Oh, one of them is having their face eaten by leopards now, because these people are extremely trigger happy and constantly monitoring not only their targets but each other for any sign of moral failure.

One would think that maybe these experiences would teach these people that "hey we're perhaps fostering a really bad culture that is bound to destroy itself because everyone is constantly having to be hypervigilant about their own and each others' behavior" and that maybe they should stop doing this but in fact what happens is that the harassment fandom has now fractured into two different cliques of harassment fans. And of course under the perverse sense of justice these cliques cultivate, of course it's the other clique who are wrong and unable to see the truth (it's because there is absolutely no sensible standard of "justice" to these people, because their behavior is largely in line with "coming up with a crime to accuse someone of after the fact").

thydungeongal

My former compatriots have unfairly painted me as one of the freaks that should be harassed to death. They are, of course, wrong. Will this make me reconsider my policy of "some freaks deserve to be harassed to death?" On the contrary, my faith in the system of "harassing freaks to death" remains unflinching and this is simply an issue with individual bad actors.

#callout culture

anghraine

Any take on Luke as just a normal kid whining about freedom should probably account for the fact that he lives on a lawless desert planet controlled by gangsters who kept his father and grandmother as slaves

anghraine

#like … every time i see a post about how much easier he has it than leia i’m #he absolutely does in some ways #but also leia’s family are wealthy and powerful while luke’s are eking out water from the air

This post is nearly ten years old and I still think about this, honestly. Luke has no consciousness of the dangers and pressures in Leia’s life when he’s playing with his toy starship; she’s already had to become what he can only vaguely dream of. But she’s also never had to consider “where is tomorrow’s food and water coming from” to anything like the degree that Luke, Owen, and Beru do every day. Luke and Leia both make sure they’re armed when they leave home because their environments are so dangerous, in completely different ways.

It really is possible to talk about the ways Leia has been forced to grow up and Luke has been allowed to remain functionally a boy, without dismissing pretty much everything we ever find out about Tatooine and the Skywalkers, or the drastic differences in their opportunities and access to material luxuries. I promise, she’s a good enough character to stand on her own without misrepresenting Luke’s circumstances to prop her up.

#star wars

archipithecus

softshell and hardshell books

paperback and hardcover turtles

discoursedrome

A CBC News investigation found a number of Facebook accounts run by people overseas impersonating real Albertan separatists.

Really fun story on the CBC today.

Historically there's been a lot of hand-wringing about foreign state-affiliated troll-farms using social media to influence domestic election results, and of course there's a long history of online scams from poorer countries toward richer ones, leveraging the wealth multiplier, but this is much more interesting: it's about people from other countries posting hoaxy politicized ragebait because they're in Facebook's Creator Monetization program and get a small cut of the ad revenue when their posts drive engagement.

This is about Alberta separatism, which is a contentious issue in Canada right now, but it's not motivated by any desire to shape public opinion on that topic, it's just looking for anything that achieves high engagement. And unlike the scammers, they're not necessarily conning their marks out of money -- one of the people profiled here is plagiarizing posts, but that aside, the advertisers footing the bills are getting what they paid for.

I doubt this will last, but I really like the picture it paints of a globalized attention economy in which freelancers and firms scour the world for underexploited ragebait topics, directing their efforts in the same way that the global economy directs international investment and labour toward countries with opportunities for yield.

femmenietzsche

Maybe this is a dumb way of thinking about it, but the Andromeda Galaxy is about 2.5 million light years away, while the edge of the observable universe is about 46.5 billion light years away, which is only 18,600 times further. That's a lot obviously, and it makes a bigger difference when considering the volume of a sphere, but in cosmic terms one thing being only 20k times further away than another is way more graspable than a lot of the numbers you have to work with. (And while obviously Andromeda itself is ungraspably far away, relative to the size of the Milky Way it's not that far either.)

femmenietzsche

I guess the alternate way of looking at this is that in terms of like the factors of ten scale of the universe, most of the empty (macroscopic) space exists between stars rather than at the largest scales

argumate

does that suggest that if you can navigate the galaxy, getting to another galaxy isn't such a stretch? but navigating the galaxy is already crazy hard.

ralfmaximus

All those observable galaxies might not be there anymore. They could have disappeared a few billion years back and we'd never know.

Heck, Alpha Centauri could have exploded four years ago and we'd not know it yet.

argumate

dammit, the good real estate is slipping over the event horizon before we can get there!

argumate

wild that "milli vanilli news" is a perfectly valid query in 2026, even more wild that the surviving member of the duo and the session musicians who actually recorded the songs have each independently stated that they don't want to be associated with a Trump event, I mean damn.

noknowshame

people in fiction are always making plans like "how about tuesday?" and then leaving without elaborating. what time? where? do you even have each other's numbers? deeply stressful

#data centers

gwydionmisha

A judge appointed by Gov. Laura Kelly said Kansas likely violated parental rights by restricting gender-affirming care for trans minors.

vaspider

The judge found 349 individual facts supported the continued provision of gender-affirming care.

Republican Attorney General Kris Kobach brought forward a litany of anti-trans witnesses familiar from litigation defending these bans. Among them was James Cantor, a Toronto psychologist who has built a career testifying for states defending care bans despite no clinical experience treating transgender minors—and who was once quietly dropped from a Florida Board of Medicine hearing after it emerged he had served on the advisory council of the Prostasia Foundation, a group that has worked to destigmatize pedophilia. Folsom wrote that Cantor "has not conducted any original scientific research on the efficacy or safety of gender dysphoria treatments," and noted he is not licensed to treat anyone under 16 and has never diagnosed a minor with gender dysphoria. [...] "The Court gives Dr. Cantor's testimony little weight," Folsom concluded. The judge turned next to Farr Curlin, a Duke University doctor and theologian who was an author of the Trump administration's HHS report on pediatric gender dysphoria ... By his own admission, Folsom noted, Curlin's views are "radically counter to current medical orthodoxy." The judge found his opinions "appear motivated by his personal views as opposed to a methodology applicable in the field of medical ethics," and gave his testimony "little-to-no weight." ...

And then there was Jamie Reed, the self-styled "whistleblower" who built a national profile on lurid, largely unsubstantiated accusations against a St. Louis gender clinic and who has gone on Fox News to describe being transgender as a delusion. Reed also did not testify and could not be cross-examined. Folsom gave her affidavit "little weight,” and had scathing remarks towards her lack of expertise: “The Court gives thus Jamie Reed’s affidavit little weight, given that she is not a medical provider or mental-health professional. In addition, her affidavit primarily addresses her experiences with a clinic operating outside of Kansas—thus, it does not rebut or refute the credible, uncontroverted testimony about clinical practice within the state of Kansas,” read the order.

This decision is 117 pages long, and if you want to actually feel good about something a judge has had to say recently about trans rights, this is legitimately a good read. (I understand that some people do not read legal decisions for fun. You should still try reading this one. It's really good.)

Given how thoroughly and completely he eviscerates the supposed qualifications and relevance of the same tired grievance actors that the right totes from case to case like a basket of moldy oranges, I hope that this decision will not only act as an example for future judges, but save them a bunch of work, because they don't have to then go do all of the writing themselves on how much these people suck, they can just cite this decision.

titleknown

Times That Copyright Expansion Has Historically Fucked Over Artists On An Institutional Level:

Sampling rights becoming prohibitively expensive to use by small artists

Musicians being forced to sign over sampling rights to their record company, making any benefits they would hypothetically gain moot.

The Digital Milennium Copyright Act leading to the vidmaker-stomping nightmare that is ContentID

The DMCA leading to making it harder than ever to preserve media due to the way it prohibits tinkering with any locks the megacorps put on it, meaning it's way easier for artists' hard work to end up vaulted and lost.

The way basic chord progressions and musical styles have become copyrightable thanks to various lawsuits by the Marvin Gaye estate

The fact that the artists of the past used to be able to remix; adapt and iterate on art made within 56 years of them, likely created in their lifetimes, and now artists can only do those things with art produced nearly a century ago by people long dead.

New and independent artists being crowded out of the market by megacorp-owned IPs that would be public domain (and thusly convey less of an overwhelming advantage-via-marquee-value to megacorps) if the US had its pre-1976 copyright laws.

Times That Copyright Expansion Has Actually Materially Helped Artists On An Institutional Level:

????????

carolxdanvers

Times that Copyright Expansion Resulted In Something Kinda Funny:

When Metallica did a twitch concert and got a copyright strike on their own music as a direct result of their lobbying for copyright expansion

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The blog of Erik A. G. '59