la danse macabre

[vulpinesaint]

saying "question mark?" and "however comma," out loud are game changers. punctuation on the go. and it's always the funniest thing that anyone around you has ever heard

[sandmandaddy69]

[wheeloffortune-design]

CONTROVERSIAL OPINION ABOUT BISEXUALITY

that purple in the middle is not the right saturation, it doesn't fit with the other two colors and it drives me crazy.

[deus-ex-aquila]

all right, I think I got this, I've got dual citizenship and I have another flag we can borrow from:

step 1

step 2

step 3

[varangianviper]

[wheeloffortune-design]

This is true bi/ace solidarity.

[xthehatchick]

holy shit

[finnslay]

This is the only correct way

[transarsonist]

[Patchnotes]

swapped purple in bisexual and asexual flags for better saturation matching and color theory

[thepromiscuousfinger]

[fuckyeahanarchistposters]

"How to reason with a War CRiminal"

Graphic designed by Rafeal Pereira

[trigona-necrophaga]

my devoted but dangerously unstable knight will be hearing about this

[normalmammal]

to all the warriors who will feel pressured to shave their legs now that it’s warm enough to wear shorts… HOLD THE LINE!!!

[normalmammal]

as this post gets closer to hitting 1k i can hear the “i just hate the feeling of hair” people approaching in the distance & when they get here im turning off reblogs

[vigilskept]

kill north america normal and fair statement from anyone in the global south. and ultimately just an expression of frustration at the global hegemony of the west. however. pleading with u to remember the genocide of the indigenous peoples of this continent and the genocidal exploitation of africans brought to the continent against their will is not only historical but ongoing. in conclusion: abolish the carceral state, reparations now and land back.

[vigilskept]

you understand.

[animentality]

[depsidase]

[funny-tik-toks]

[saint-end]

The Sanguine Vow for @/bloodgoremurderfuck

[mydignityisinflames]

Been working on this on and off over the past year as a birthday gift for a friend and it's finally done and gifted! 🌸🐍

Tumblr eats quality. Please click on the images for better quality.

[thememedaddy]

[viktor-sbor]

Off the coast of Australia Macroctopus caught the shark, wrapped all its tentacles around it and soon released it. Most likely, he scraped all the parasites off her.

[alkthash]

The octopus

[meshugenist]

me when i fucking get u

[sayhelloanimalfriends]

prev i loved your tags

[grapnel]

An example of why one should use the Oxford comma.

[silvermoon424]

Bro absolutely COOKED with this.

[ohnoitstbskyen]

If you ever hear the phrase "fascism is aesthetics as politics," that's what this post is talking about.

It's not about being tough on crime, because the absolute toughest most brutal measure you could take against "crime" as a social problem is to alleviate poverty, and increase access to education, healthcare and social mobility.

It's about performing "tough on crime" as an aesthetic by enacting violence against a prop, i.e. minorities and the impoverished, who are fetishized and objectified to represent "crime." They are brutalized as punishment for crime, but never with the purpose of alleviating the problem of crime.

This is why a lot of conservatives and other right wingers can get straight up angry when you suggest things like reform or social measures to reduce crime. They don't want crime to be reduced, they want an eternal war against "crime" because it provides an arena for the righteous to demonstrate virtue by brutalizing their enemies.

[reach-one-moment]

Having grown up around conservatives, I think many of them simply see crime as a fact of nature like earthquakes, or people who are jerks.

The idea that you’d reduce crime is like saying you’ll reduce thunderstorms or droughts, the point is to harshly punish criminals so the law-abiding citizenry feel that they are valued, protected, and are the priority of the state. Similarly, they support harsh penalties not out of a belief that it’ll lead to rehabilitation but out of a sort of desire to balance the moral scales of the universe. “To each what he has sown” and all that

I’m not endorsing this idea, I’m simply trying to explain it, as someone who grew up around these people. For what it’s worth, my red state small town really was “town of Mayberry” level safe, at least until the oil boom happened. The rig pigs more than earned their nickname haha, and they were just as, if not more, conservative than my neighbors. Not everyone was on the same page about what conservative values meant.

[uboat53]

Yeah, I also grew up in a small town conservative area and I've written a couple of things (like this and this and this) over the years on exactly this.

There certainly was a time at which we didn't really know a lot of these things and/or couldn't measure them, but now we can and the natural conservative resistance to chance has become a resistance to acknowledging reality.

Modern conservativism often feels to me as if it had descended into being a conspiracy theory even before Trump came along.

[thathopeyetlives]

I'm gonna be real with you: reading those linked posts, for me, was something like reading a carefully written and rigorously logical argument that the vast majority of people who use contraceptives do it specifically to affront God would be for both of us.

It's just obviously incorrect and a simpler motivation is easily apparent.

I also think those contradict both themselves and similar but more typical left wing arguments on similar topics.

(And to be fair, there very much is a certain level of tribalist conceit. A lot of medium-severity crimes are done by people who have done those crimes numerous times in their lives and a lot of "respectable" people have never done any of those crimes. And so there's a distinction, and then tribalism. However, this is more a matter of habit and habits can be changed with enough sustained pressure.)

I think the general conservative view of crime is more very much about a voluntary choice albeit one made under the influence of habit. I think many conservatives have a pretty harsh view about people who do self-destructive things that you and I would never do.

Frequently conservatives accuse *you* of believing what you accuse them of.

Under this concept, draconian penalties are 1. To incapacitate criminals long term and 2. To shock them out of their habits. (Sometimes it's also a bit, uh, eugenic. And that's terrible.)

Social measures, to these right wingers, often resemble danegeld or are (unfairly) presumed ineffective if there's still no harsh cost to doing crimes.

Gun control is hated by conservatives for approximately the same reason you probably wouldn't accept society being a surveillance hellscape with government cameras in every private bedroom under almost any circumstance (obviously, guns being familiar is a big influence.)

[uboat53]

So I think you may have missed the point. I don't think that anyone is arguing that societal conditions constitute some form of mind control, obviously anyone who committed a crime makes a choice in that moment to do so and having made that choice in the past makes it easier to do so in the future.

I also understand that conservatives view it in the three ways that you described, but the point is we now have mountains of evidence from decades of studies that show that these ideas don't actually work to reduce crime.

If you read the posts I linked then you saw that I also linked study after study after study that shows that harsh punishment for crime does not deter or reduce it but that materially changing the conditions of society does. It's not that people are mind controlled, it's that the same person under different conditions will make different choices and we can show that this happens consistently.

At this point the differences between how liberals and conservatives think about addressing crime are no longer just a difference of opinion, conservatives are actively denying all the evidence we have about how crime happens and advocating policies that we know don't work. It's one thing to say that harsh punishments will take criminals out of commission or make them rethink their choices when data is lacking, it's another thing to do so in spite of mountains of evidence.

Your "simpler explanation" just doesn't hold up. Either conservatives are holding to their ideas in spite of the evidence or they simply don't care what the evidence is in the first place. In either case, reducing crime cannot be their primary motivation.

Maybe we're wrong about what that motivation truly is, but our explanation fits what we've observed and any competing explanation must do so as well in order to be plausible.

[thathopeyetlives]

I think many people have an extremely hard time believing the studies/evidence you cite. And, at some level, they seem to amount to a claim that people don't have free will and don't choose what to do based on expected consequences.

[uboat53]

I'd say it's more accurate to describe them as saying that people do, in fact, choose what to do based on the expected consequences, not just of the thing they're choosing to do but in what they're choosing to risk.

If you're dirt poor, unemployed, and bills are piling up, your decision on whether or not it's worthwhile to rob someone could be very different than if you're financially comfortable. A consequence for an action doesn't exist in isolation, it also has to be compared to the consequence of not taking the action.

In other words, in theory, you could reduce crime by making the consequence of doing the crime worse but you could also do so by making the consequence of not doing the crime better. Research is fairly clear that the latter is far more effective than the former.

The fact that conservatives don't trust the studies makes sense given that those studies disprove what I think we can safely describe as deeply held beliefs, that's a natural fact of human psychology, but at a certain point, especially when you've tried very hard and can't come up with countervailing evidence, holding onto that belief becomes a rejection of reality and conservative preference for punishing crime rather than preventing it becomes evidence of a desire for performative morality over actually doing good.