(how am I gonna be an optimist about this)

[remanence-of-love]

[jvlianbashir]

my friend's discord server has a "proof of touch grass" channel where they post pics of them doing regular activities outdoors/in public. i think many online spaces could benefit from such a thing

[weaselle]

when i was super depressed - like struggling to eat anything barely able to get out of bed to pee depressed - my good friend asked me every day to send her a picture of me holding a leaf and a picture of a meal i was eating and it helped me significantly

(also, she was never judgey - if my meal was a single potato chip she would simply say good job eating a potato chip today <3 )

which is to say, i agree proof of touch grass is a good idea for online spaces

[yadelah]

This kinda required my brain a bit

[telomeke]

[ID–

Textpost by "tapir worf" @‌eggy_egregore, that reads:

If you don't go outside every single day during the day and look at the sky, you are performing a punishing biological experiment on yourself previously reserves for prisoners

End ID.]

‌

[sailatina3]

[realsocialskills]

Manipulative fake apologies

Some apologies amount to someone asking for permission to keep doing something bad.

These apologies generally shouldn’t be accepted.

(But it can be really hard not to, because who want permission to do bad things tend to lash out when they don’t get it.)

(If you have to accept a bad apology to protect yourself, it’s not your fault.)

Eg:

Moe: “I’m sorry, I know this is my privileged male opinion talking but…”

Or, Moe: “I’m sorry, I know I’m kind of a creeper…” or “I’m sorry, I know I’m standing too close but…”

At this point, Sarah may feel pressured to say “It’s ok.”

If Sarah says, “Actually, it’s not ok. Please back off” or “Yes, you’re mansplaining, please knock it off”, Moe is likely to get angry.

The thing is, it’s not ok, and Moe has no intention of stopping. 

Moe is just apologizing in order to feel ok about doing something he knows is wrong.

Another example:

Sam is a wheelchair user. He’s trying to get through a door.

Mary sees him and decides that he needs help.

Mary rushes to open the door. As she does so, she says “Oh, sorry, I know I’m supposed to ask first”, with an expectant pause. 

At this point, Sam may feel pressured to say “It’s ok”, even if the ‘help’ is unwanted and unhelpful. 

If Sam says, “Yes, you should have asked first. You’re in my way. Please move”, Mary is likely to get angry and say “I was just trying to help!”.

In this situation, Mary wasn’t really apologizing. She was asking Sam to give her permission to do something she knows is wrong.

More generally:

Fake Apologizer: *does something they know the other person will object to*.

Fake Apologizer: “Oh, I’m sorry. I know I’m doing The Bad Thing…” or “I guess you’re going to be mad if I…”

Fake Apologizer: *expectant pause*

The Target is then supposed to feel pressured to say something like “That’s ok”, or “I know you mean well”, or “You’re a good person, so it’s ok for you to do The Bad Thing.”

If the Target doesn’t respond by giving the Fake Apologizer permission/validation, the Fake Apologizer will often lash out. This sometimes escalates in stages, along the lines of:

Fake Apologizer: I *said* I was sorry!

Fake Apologizer: *expectant pause*

The Target is then supposed to feel pressure to be grateful to the Fake Apologizer for apologizing, and then as a reward, give them permission to do The Bad Thing. (Or apologize for not letting them do The Bad Thing.)

If the Target doesn’t respond in the way the Fake Apologizer wants, they will often escalate to intense personal insults, or even overt threats, eg:

Fake Apologizer: I guess you’re just too bitter and broken inside to accept my good intentions. I hope you get the help you need. And/or:

Fake Apologizer: Ok, fine. I’ll never try to do anything for you ever again. And/or

Fake Apologizer: *storms off, and slams the door in a way that causes the person who refused their intrusive help to fall over*.

Tl;dr Sometimes what looks like an apology is really a manipulative demand for validation and permission to do something bad.

[madphantom]

"I'm just a girl☺️🥰💖💞💅🌺🌷🦄" when you were eight and the teacher said she needed some strong boys to carry something you used to be furious, and when you convinced them to let you help, you carried twice as many chairs as the boys with the righteous anger of a girl who knew she was just as capable as them. Where did that go?

[that-windy-place-tho]

People in the notes

[meowbugz]

ID: Tweet by Benny Feldman (@Feldfrog): “It’s just a joke dude. And the joke is just rooted in ideas. That I’m just reinforcing 😈” End ID

[jungwildeandfree]

and while we’re at it, fuck this idea that ONE ACCOUNT has to belong uniquely to ONE PERSON. This is the same thing these silicon valley fucks want; their vision of the future where everyone has a unique biometric ID code implanted in their body is the ultimate extension of Netflix’s “no password sharing” policy. You want to use your friend’s car? Sorry, you can’t, you need to be an authorized user. Your mother wants to let you look something up on her OED account? Too bad! That’s only for her! The concept of perfect market efficiency gives them greedy little money bag eyes.

If I pay money to have a newspaper sent to my house, they don’t charge me extra when I show it to my dad. This password sharing thing isn’t just a Netflix problem; don’t be surprised if it shows up elsewhere in other forms. Stamp this idea out now or we’ll be stuck with it.

[jungwildeandfree]

This is by far the most popular post I have and I have to say: good, I’m right. Password sharing and ID verification are going to kill the internet. not oooh in 50 years. in like 5 more.

[respectissexy]

My absolute least favorite type of "neurodivergence" (used colloquially to only ever mean "Autism and ADHD") misinformation is the type that posits that being neurodivergent makes you a better person.

"Justice sensitivity" does not mean "neurologically I am a good person who stands up for what's right." It means you have a strong reaction to perceived injustice. But it does not mean your moral compass is calibrated well. The white dudes who are most obsessed with taking away Affirmative Action likely also have "justice sensitivity" -- their sense of injustice is just triggered by something different from what triggers mine, because we have different values. Some people's sense of injustice is triggered by pretty much any situation ever not working out in their favor. Those people can still be "justice sensitive" even if you wouldn't think of them as good people.

Also, there is no neurodivergent condition that makes you automatically capital-H Honest. Some Autistic people aren't good at intentionally lying or find it very uncomfortable to intentionally lie, but others lie just fine and I've met some who did it all the time. "Intentionally lie" is also doing a lot of work here, as you can be very dishonest without intentionally lying if you are prone to lying to yourself, which neurodivergent people are no less likely to do.

There is no neurotype that confers superior moral reasoning or instincts.

[programmerhumour]

Anon visits webpages in 2022

[mornington-the-crescent]

As others have pointed out before, if you visited a web page 20 years ago and it acted like that, you would rightly assume your computer had gotten a virus.

[calciumcryptid]

I feel like a lot of people get "All Art is Political" confused with "All Art is made with Political Intentions" which is not the same.

[vasira96]

idk who needs to hear this, but your partner should be making your life better and easier than it is on your own. if your partner is making your life harder, they're constantly stressing you out, if they're not showing up for you? babe you gotta leave, life is so short and we only get one, so don't spend it with someone who makes you feel bad about your life, you deserve so much better than that

[annabelle--cane]

like as a feminist and an asexual if you ever imply that not having sex / not having "enough" of it is a conservative or reactionary trait I will be running you over with a bus pronto

[annabelle--cane]

you do not need to have sex ever. if you don't want to then you can just not do it. you don't need to have sex in order to mature as a person. you don't need to have sex to prove that you don't think it's immoral. you don't need to have sex to be a good partner. you don't need to have sex to be physically and/or mentally healthy. all of these goals can be achieved by hundreds of means other than sex. you can chose to do it for any reason you want, but you can also chose not to do it for any reason you want, including just not really feeling like it at any given time in any situation. the only thing not having sex says about your life and character is that you decided not to have sex. you can really really just not do it and that will be 1000x better for you in every conceivable way than making yourself do it when you don't want to.

[newlyy]

Not that I think all marriages are doomed but when deciding who to marry you should ask yourself “is this someone I’d want to divorce?” As in, is this someone I believe would be mature and fair, even when they’re upset and don’t particularly like me at the moment. Is this someone I could continue to trust while going through an adversarial process? And if the answer is no, don’t marry them.

[anarchistmemedistro]

[succubusboyfriend]

practicing self care less out of self love and more for the sheer logical reasoning of it’d be kinda stupid of me to expect myself to be able to function without proper maintenance

[succubusboyfriend]

“oh i don’t deserve rest and relaxation, i haven’t done enough, i haven’t earned it” and my car’s breaks don’t deserve break fluid because they aren’t breaking well enough to earn it. that’s what you sound like!!!!!

[shamebats]

"it's just stress" oh thank god, it's just the silent killer that slowly kills you, perfectly harmless, no need to worry

[baddywronglegs]

If you are young and fit and healthy, get a hobby you can do while ill. Something that brings you joy and you can still enjoy while laid out with flu or whatever.

Future you will thank you for not pinning your ability to enjoy and get any sense of achievement on having the base energy levels of a teenager.

Sure, you might still be dancing and playing tennis and running marathons in your 80s. Or you might be walking short distances with a cane between breath stops in your 30s, and really glad past-you found those breath stops were so much more enjoyable if you brought a pencil and some paper to draw the pigeons you were sharing a bench with.

[galileosballs]

Something that gets really lost in a lot of discourse is that what we would now call 'going low-contact' or 'going no-contact' with your family used to be so completely within the normal range of familial contact that there wasn't even a term for it. Sure, in the pre-IM pre-social media days some people were calling their parents daily, but I'd wager the vast majority of people were not. Long distance calling used to be quite expensive, after all. If your kid went to the big city to seek their fortune you might hear from them every few weeks, or every month, or once a year, and that wasn't particularly odd. This was even more the case before telephones were common, of course - people would send letters, but definitely not more than once a week and probably a lot less. It was just a normal, accepted fact that you'd hear from some family members who lived nearby often, and some who lived farther away very rarely.

The minimum amount of contact with family that is expected of people in the groupchat-facetime-instagram era is so much higher than at any previous point in history. The ceiling is about the same, since then and now multiple generations often live under the same roof, but the floor is higher by orders of magnitude.

How many adult children who are 'no-contact' or 'low-contact' now would also have been the ones who moved to the city and sent a letter every three months then? Is family estrangement an actual current problem, or is it just an illusion caused by smartphones?

[hyperlexichypatia]

When I complain about increased surveillance, control, and infantilization of older kids and young adults, it's often a level of surveillance and control that wouldn't have been possible, or at least practical, in previous generations. At minimum, it would've been escapable.