avocadoesaboveall

No one knows anything

[outinthewilde]

At midnight today, I'll hit hour 144 of my 504 hour (21 day) fast. I've lost almost 7kg this week. SW:81.2 kg|| CW:73.5 kg|| GW1:65 kg.

I'm so grateful for self-discipline. I'm no longer tired and lethargic all the time because of food comas. I am the most productive I have ever been, both at my job and in my fitness. I started the week with 10k steps daily, but now I am fit enough that I was able to hit 20k. So happy.

[outinthewilde]

I've had enough of people singing about love. Can we have more songs about overthrowing the government? Especially in the current political and economic state of the world.

[polypharmaci]

i dont think eating disorders are good i just work here

[outinthewilde]

"well, you could just quit" in this economy??

[outinthewilde]

Stop normalising heartbreak and romanticising "healing" from it. No, I will not be building resilience. I will simply pass away.

[outinthewilde]

My stomach has been hurting ever since I deleted tiktok to fix my attention span.

[outinthewilde]

When I die, place the medusa sculpture on my cremation vase because I, too, would have loved to be a powerful goddess that turns everyone who looks at me into stone.

[wordpress-blaze-248520911]

The Machinery of Horror: On the Ubiquity and Banality of Evil

We have a preferred narrative for evil. It is a force of monstrous, singular intent. A cackling villain in a shadowy lair. A face we can point to and say, "There. That is the source of the darkness. It is nothing like me."

This narrative is a comfort. It is also a lie.

The deeper, more terrifying truth is that the architecture of human atrocity is most often built not by monsters, but by administrators. The bricks of genocide are laid by the hands of accountants, notaries, and train conductors. The mortar is mixed with bureaucratic language and a profound, willful lack of imagination.

This is what philosopher Hannah Arendt termed "the banality of evil." It is the realization that evil is not a profound, demonic force, but a shallow, thoughtless one. It is the inability to think from the perspective of another, amplified and weaponized by a system.

The Unmonstrous Perpetrator

The archetypal example is Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi official who managed the logistics of the Holocaust. At his trial, Arendt did not see a raging ideologue or a sadist. She saw a clerk. A dull, cliché-ridden man whose primary motivation was not hatred, but career advancement and a desire to follow orders efficiently. He was not thinking about the moral weight of exterminating millions; he was thinking about schedules, transport capacity, and promotion.

He was ordinary. And that was the most horrifying thing of all.

This pattern repeats. The guards at gulags, the functionaries in totalitarian regimes, the executives overseeing exploitative systems—they are rarely psychopaths. They are often ordinary people who have outsourced their moral compass to a higher authority: the state, the company, the "rules."

The Anatomy of Complicity: How the Machine Operates

The machinery of horror operates on a few simple, devastating principles:

The Diffusion of Responsibility: "I was just following orders." "I was just one small part of a large process." This fractures the moral whole of an atrocity into a thousand seemingly insignificant tasks, allowing each participant to feel absolved.

The Language of Euphemism: "Final Solution," "Ethnic Cleansing," "Collateral Damage." Language is sanitized to sterilize action. You are not murdering children; you are "liquidating assets." This creates a cognitive buffer between the act and its human consequence.

The Dehumanization of the Other: The victim must first be re-categorized as less than human—a "vermin," a "cockroach," a "statistic." It is easier to process paperwork for a number than to sign a death warrant for a person with a name, a family, and a favorite song.

The Unspoken Truth: The System is Us

The most terrifying implication of the banality of evil is that it is ubiquitous. It is not a German problem from the 1940s. It is a human problem.

It is the call center employee who is incentivized to deny a sick person's insurance claim. It is the social media algorithm that amplifies hate speech because it drives engagement. It is the corporate board that approves a polluting process to maximize quarterly profits.

We are all capable of clicking "approve" on a small evil when it is framed as a neutral duty, a necessary cost, or just "the way things are done."

The Antidote: Thoughtfulness as a Moral Imperative

If evil is banal, then the antidote is not sainthood. It is thoughtfulness.

Arendt argued that the key to moral action was the ability to think—to engage in an internal dialogue, to hold two conflicting ideas in your head, to imagine the world from another's perspective, and to refuse to let your conscience be silenced by a rulebook.

It is the conscious, daily rebellion against the unthinking flow. It is the question asked in the meeting: "But what is the human cost?" It is the refusal to use the sanitized language. It is the willingness to see the face of the person behind the file.

The banality of evil implicates us all. But it also empowers us. It means that the greatest bulwark against horror is not a superhero, but a thoughtful, ordinary person who simply refuses to let their humanity be processed away.

The machinery is powerful, but it runs on our compliance. The most radical act is to stop the conveyor belt, even for a moment, and ask, "Why?"

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Source: The Machinery of Horror: On the Ubiquity and Banality of Evil

[outinthewilde]

Someone should take my personality and give it to someone who likes people. All this swag. All this whimsy. All this wit. All this confidence. Trapped in the body of a person who would rather impale herself on a sword than voluntarily interact with anyone.

[outinthewilde]

Finally accepting that my yin and yang are ana and bed except they don't coexist, but just fight for dominance.

[marklikely]

blocked someone for having "strong opinions" on how much they hate tofu . she isnt a joke to me thats my fucking wife youre talking about

[marklikely]

[outinthewilde]

Anyone who hates tofu should get tofuck away from me.

[luxe-pauvre]

Boredom almost unilaterally carries a negative connotation—if you are bored, you need to figure out a way to fill that boredom with something, which sometimes simply includes opening the same fridge over and over every five minutes just to see if new food has magically spawned on the shelf. I don’t mean to beat a dead horse because we have talked about this topic into oblivion, but perhaps this is indicative of the instant gratification society that we have turned into. Even using AI and generative AI as a solution to everything without thinking for a second is symptomatic of this. I always say that a walk outside in the sunlight can be a quick fix to so many problems, and that’s because living in the digital world, with constant stimulation from social media posts and playlists and podcasts in our ears, sometimes makes us lose the ability to quite literally touch grass. A 2017 article explains this feeling of boredom as ‘ecological boredom’, saying “because we’re bombarded with increasing doses of glamour, glitz, buzz, celebrity, hype, and excitement, we initially find the natural world mundane”, which feels even more true eight years later. While I am not advocating for all of us to suddenly throw our phones out of the window and become prehistoric hunter-gatherers, I do think there is substance in that sentence, that we have always historically viewed nature as awe inspiring and we oftentimes no longer do, due to the constant information overload and ten second reels and scrolling through a hundred people’s thoughts at once in the span of ten minutes. In short, we have quite literally forfeited our ability to feel awe for overstimulation from content. And awe is arguably the most important emotion we can have.

Elle, we’re not bored anymore, and we should be

[outinthewilde]

Ever since I was young, my playlist has been made up of men who wear eyeliner and women who wear suits.

[outinthewilde]

I hit my friend quota at 18. I should have been allowed to leave society and live in the mountains after that. Why must I keep meeting people?

[digitaldiscipline]

Great news! JSTOR now have a free account with an Independent Researcher category. You can access 100 documents per month.

https://www.jstor.org/action/showLogin

[nyantara]

Better News! all of JSTOR is on SciDB by annas-archive.org for free. We don't have to celebrate receiving scraps from an organisation that supported the prosecution of Aaron Swartz for violating their copyright. A prosecution which drove him to suicide.

[outinthewilde]

Life would sure be great if balance was real. But alas, we all operate on a spectrum of obsession and disinterest, right? RIGHT?

[kristina100000]

the lonely idgafer starts giving a fuck late at night

[outinthewilde]

God forbid a girl clocks in for her night shift.

[outinthewilde]

What is the devil, if not proof that God abandons you when you become inconvenient? What is the devil, if not proof that abandonment by those you once worshipped is not the end; that a kingdom awaits when you step out of line?