Last Visible Dog

I have thoughts about stuff.

[transgenderer]

I miss max pretty badly. I hope they get better someday. I think they made all of us better thinkers

[vruba]

“I don’t like this expression “First World problems.” It is false and it is condescending. Yes, Nigerians struggle with floods or infant mortality. But these same Nigerians also deal with mundane and seemingly luxurious hassles. Connectivity issues on your BlackBerry, cost of car repair, how to sync your iPad, what brand of noodles to buy: Third World problems. All the silly stuff of life doesn’t disappear just because you’re black and live in a poorer country. People in the richer nations need a more robust sense of the lives being lived in the darker nations. Here’s a First World problem: the inability to see that others are as fully complex and as keen on technology and pleasure as you are.”

— Teju Cole  (via feminizt)

[artofmaquenda]

Devotion

Saw this news and I had to make a rough sketch about it. 🥹 We humans always underestimate the empathy and care of other animals..

[yaldabaothadeez]

(Source - 159cm0630 on twitter)

[yaldabaothadeez]

(source - 159cm0630 on twitter)

[wolfythewitch]

Honorary eridian

[liskantope]

Not to open a whole can of worms again, but a few points have been rattling around in my head since the big discussion I got into about gender identity and pronouns and so on last month (please find it in my archive if you're so inclined). These serve to refine my previous arguments, particularly about how one should characterize the debate over using trans people's pronouns, and somewhat to concede a little ground to the people I was arguing with (and mainly to Morlock Holmes I suppose).

First of all, I argued that, while my moral calculus about calling people by the pronouns they ask for clearly falls on the side of using their pronouns as the right thing to do, there is a fundamental difference between letting people identify however they choose even if from your own perspective it's a "religious" belief you really don't ascribe to, and being compelled to actively vocalize something (i.e. using pronouns) that reflects the "religious" belief you don't hold. I compared it to a non-Muslim being compelled to say "praise be to Allah" whenever in conversation with a Muslim. The response (coming from Morlock) was that for the transgender person who has to continue interacting in a normal manner with someone who won't use their pronouns, that is an equal form of being compelled to affirm a belief they don't hold to the non-gender-self-identity-believing person who is compelled to use pronouns they disagree with.

Reflecting a little later, I realized that I'm in pretty much the exact equivalent of Morlock's position whenever I argue about, say, the ethics of compelling people to get COVID vaccines, or more broadly about a lot of libertarian principles. Someone arguing against COVID vaccine "mandates" (to the extent that they ever existed) from a libertarian-ish standpoint will say that they hold a fundamental value that it's wrong to compel anyone to have to have anything done to their own body. For the past half-decade I've gotten very impatient with this way of thinking, on the grounds that if COVID is/was sufficiently dangerous (and I would say it did happen to be), then having to be around people who by not being vaccinated would increase your exposure to COVID was in its own way just as much an infringement on your bodily autonomy. In other words, each side can claim a violation of bodily autonomy for one of the choices of policy between "require people to get vaccinated" and "leave people completely free to choose whether they get vaccinated".

I guess the best way to reconcile this mentality with the way I talk about the issue of pronouns is to say that, however much my convictions are in favor of vaccinating against COVID for the common good, I do have to recognize that in some (to me naive) direct way, making someone get a vaccine is forcing something on their body in a way that bringing about a society where everyone has to be exposed to a lot of unvaccinated people is not. I may find this very clear-boundery-lined and literal interpretation of bodily autonomy to be pretty dumb, but on some level I have to empathize with it. Then again, one could argue it's pretty dumb to be so particular about what pronoun you have to utter when referring to someone else, so we're back at square one.

I think Morlock is probably on the same side about COVID vaccines that I'm on, so I'll give him credit here for having more consistent convictions than mine on the meta-level I suppose, even though I'm not sure whether my set of beliefs is quite inconsistent.

Things get even trickier when I think of my disdain for libertarian conceptions of "positive rights" versus "negative rights" and things like that (I had a libertarian colleague once who insisted that we all have "negative rights" but nobody has "positive rights" -- extreme examples to illustrate the point are that, according to him, we have a right not to be killed but we don't have a right to life, whatever that means). I've always held that the distinction between so-called "positive rights" and "negative rights" is poorly defined to the point that it doesn't really exist, so that type of libertarian framework is a bad one. This is going a step further from my attitude about compelled vaccination, where I do recognize it in some sense to be more directly and literally forcing something on someone's body in a way that the opposing policy does not. Probably many people view the pronoun culture war struggle in such a way (as in, there's no dividing line at all between the right to not be compelled to speak in a certain way and the right not to be spoken about in a certain way), although I'm not sure it can correctly be fit into this paradigm. It's worth mentioning that I've always been fairly dismissive of Jordan Peterson's argument that having to use someone's chosen pronouns is "compelled speech" in a way that refraining from using racial slurs isn't, on the basis that there's only a finite (and usually quite small) set of terms for each person/thing one is referring to at a given time, so this dividing line doesn't really exist.

Another thing that came up in last month's discussions, with both Morlock and some other people -- and I remember people making this point to me years ago as well -- is that my contention that there's no analog in the gay rights debate where one side can claim being compelled to verbally affirm things that don't reflect objective reality in their belief system is questionable, since (I am told) there have always been anti-gay-marriage people who claim that a same-sex marriage, however legal it may be, isn't true marriage, and that they're being forced to articulate something they don't believe in by referring to a man's/woman's partner with the word "husband"/"wife". I don't remember ever running across this conviction in all my (many) interactions with anti-gay-rights people back in the '00's, but I don't know, this was before gay marriage was legal anywhere near where I was, and I possibly didn't run into the "right" people here. Anyway, I think the analogy at least one other person made to me which didn't sink in properly at the time was to one's gender being printed on government-issued documents. That is, I think maybe the idea is that someone can have convictions about marriage that completely override a marriage certificate in the same way that someone (on either side of the trans debate!) can have convictions about gender that completely override the gender listed for someone on a government document (whether under a more Biden-ish policy of allowing people to change their gender listed on documents or under a more Trump-ish policy of disallowing this).

I didn't quite acknowledge the strength of this argument at the time. I think I would still respond with the following point: marriage has only sometimes, and to some people, not been ultimately defined in legal terms (e.g. someone might deride someone else's marriage as a total sham -- they kind of hate each other and haven't spoken or slept in the same bed in forever -- and still use words like "wife" or "husband" in referring to that person's partner). Whereas gender has never been defined in legal terms except when being evoked in a completely legal setting. That is, nobody ever -- either under the traditional default everyday-interactions concept of gender pre-2010's or under the more recent everyday-interactions concept of gender advocated by the trans movement -- defined anyone else's gender to be what was printed on their birth certificate (terminology like Assigned Male At Birth notwithstanding) even if traditionalists have held that someone's gender is identical to what's written on their birth certificate.

I had another point of afterthought from last month's discourse, but it's on a more personal and less argumentative note and isn't so much about pronoun usage, and I think it'll work better in its own separate post.

[loki-zen]

I would say that there's a big difference between this and the vaccine thing inasmuch as sickness is impersonal and can actually physically affect you. That's even true of vaccines: vaccines are very safe but have a non-zero rate of side effects and complications, whereas the number of people who have gotten even a slightly achey arm from saying "she" instead of "he" remains zero.*

So, for me, it's much more like using 'Ms" instead of "Mrs/Miss" when a clear preference has been stated, or saying "David" when the guy has told you he doesn't like to be called Dave.

You (generic you) aren't really being asked to state that something is True About Gender (I don't even believe in gender!), you're literally just being asked to use someone's preferred form of personal address. For me, trying to position this in this way feels a bit like someone citing their Right to Free Speech in defence of their refusal to learn their co-worker's name because it's a bit foreign and they're not used to it.

*(There is a non-zero cognitive load to learning to use singular they for the first time, for some people, however. But that's the same with a lot of kinds of politeness. Neopronouns are outwith the bounds of this discussion.)

[self-winding]

That's even true of vaccines: vaccines are very safe but have a non-zero rate of side effects and complications, whereas the number of people who have gotten even a slightly achey arm from saying "she" instead of "he" remains zero.*

No one's gotten an achy arm from being misgendered either, but it's still unpleasant on an emotional level. Similarly, calling another person a set of pronouns that feels intuitively wrong to you can be an unpleasant experience, even if it's just a background hum of cognitive dissonance or the equivalent of a distracting red "error" light blinking in the corner of your vision.

You don't even have to intellectually believe in gender or believe anything in particular about gender for this to be the case. All of us (for whom English was a first language) had the Gender Pronoun Programming installed at a very early age and so our brains want to default to that and working against it takes a continual effort. Which is part of why passing is important to a lot of people.

[self-winding]

More puppygirl discourse.

Recently came across this article, written in response to the "dump the puppygirl" blog post: https://drdevonprice.substack.com/p/defining-white-woman-victimization

And what strikes me is the writers' desire, both in this article and in the original post, to root puppygirl's behavior in some kind of privilege, even if it's a covert privilege.

The original post likens it to male patterns of behavior which are disguised by puppygirl's very soft, girlish aesthetic, which is what (quite understandably) caused a lot of people to read the original post as transphobic. Though Tara Knight doesn't go as far as to say that puppygirl is a man, she does suggest that by dodging certain types of labor she is not truly being a woman.

The linked article, on the other hand, diagnoses puppygirl's behavior as a symptom of whiteness and specifically white womanhood. Of course, they acknowledge that non-white, non-woman people can still partake in this behavior, but also suggest that this places them adjacent to white womanhood and that the closer they are to white womanhood the more they can get away with it.

Both of these moral diagnoses feel like a stretch to me; both feel like the writer's contorted attempts to criticize the behavior but avoid criticizing anything about progressive ideology or suggesting that certain progressive values held by the participants might have enabled or worsened the situation.

But it is significant that puppygirl's behavior exists in the environment of a trans Marxist polycule...and the way it's described in the post, what makes the enablers feel so helpless in this situation, what keeps them enabling for so long, is specifically puppygirl's marginalized status, the sense that ever saying no to her or asserting a boundary or asking her to do the dishes would be ableist (even though all polycule members have diagnoses, puppygirl's issues are perceived as more severe and therefore are given priority). And as the writer observes, because of this and because of her womanhood and transness, she gets away with stuff that her partners would never have accepted from a man.

The idea that puppygirl is specifically leveraging whiteness also strikes me as a stretch. Again, this is a trans Marxist polycule. I don't think the original post specifies the races of the polycule members but let's just assume puppygirl is white. Given the polycule's values, I can only imagine that puppygirl being nonwhite would make her partners feel even more obligated to give her the benefit of the doubt and more squeamish about ever making demands of her or saying no to her. (In the real life situation I observed which came closest to this dynamic, the "puppygirl" was not white and her enablers were white, and a lot of their enabling did seem to be motivated by a kind of white liberal guilt.)

Of course, these types of relationship dynamics can occur across ideologies and independent of ideologies. But if we are to blame an ideology for the situation described in the original post, I think it makes more sense to say that this is a common failure mode of progressive values. Unsurprisingly, there is a reluctance to do this from progressives commenting on the situation.

[misanthropymademe]

as a progressive i always struggled with this type of thing, until i found the ideal solution: it's a sign of neuroprivilege to be able to utilize these tactics, consciously or subconsciously

after a certain level of intellectual disability, one simply does not possess the ability to pull off such moves

[lighttailoring]

What I'm noticing about this whole thing is that there's a very big elephant in the room namely people my age's (millennial, gen z) absolute inability to handle being 'the bad guy' for even a moment. It's why we get so hung up on trying to solve the trolley problem even though the entire point of the problem is that it's a situation with no 'good' outcome. People with otherwise 'good' politics, who've read the theory and done the volunteering and gone to the demos and all the rest of it, still can't stomach the idea that the puppygirl isn't the one somehow at fault here because the other conclusion - that the writer just doesn't have the capacity to care for puppygirl, that the writer might have to say 'no' to somebody, might have to break up with puppygirl and as a result change the dynamic of the polycule, might have to be 'selfish' for a moment, might have to let people down - is too uncomfortable.

(It's also why so many people my age are in polycules that feel more like house-shares in the first place IMO - we can't even cope with the idea of turning down a date, so instead we tell ourselves that our capacity for love is infinite and end up with a blocked-out calendar app instead of a meaningful relationship).

So: puppygirl needs must be the more privileged one in this situation, must be leveraging that privilege over the writer by needing help, in order for the writer to be able to say 'no' to helping without that icky guilty feeling. It's also why said privilege must be covert, have been hidden from the writer at first, because otherwise the writer would actually have been a bootlicker and therefore a bad person for doing anything for this privileged person in the first place. (Which loops back around to transphobia, really, doesn't it: that old "I thought she was a woman until XYZ"...)

Anyway I really have no attachment to this discourse I just find it very interesting seeing who's coming out in support of the writer and who in support of puppygirl

[lighttailoring]

Like, tl;dr: sometimes telling somebody that they need to start doing some things for themselves because otherwise they are going to completely stagnate is the kindest thing you can do for a person, and by refusing to even entertain that idea because you don't want to seem like you lack empathy (the horror!) you are actively harming your relationships with other people. Grow up lol

[self-winding]

This, basically.

Like, the comment about "neuroprivilege" from the other reblogger strikes me as true but also completely irrelevant to the situation and to most situations. Obviously, if you have the ability to think and plan and utilize strategies then you have an advantage over someone who can't do those things, and there are people in the world with intellectual disabilities so severe that accusing them of manipulating or exploiting others would be absurd. But no one in the puppygirl polycule has that kind of severe intellectual disability, so having this basic ability does not make puppygirl privileged over the others in any way.

This also ties into a broader beef I have with the modern progressive definition of the word "privilege." Many progressives seem to use it to mean literally any conceivable advantage that any person might have over any other person, and to treat this as fundamentally the same as the type of privilege that flows from actual laws and powerful social institutions treating different types of people differently in order to maintain artificial power structures.

[thememedaddy]

[ralfmaximus]

Just got a new Roomba.

The last one (acquired sometime in 2012) finally died, so it was time for a replacement. The new model 105 is the cheapest one they make but by golly it's an upgrade in every conceivable way.

However.

The startup/unpacking procedure has changed. Where, before, you just charged the thing for 8 hours then turned it on... now you gotta configure it:

download the app

create an account & login

connect Roomba to the app/internet

use the app to configure Roomba

use the app to designate "forbidden" areas

use the app to schedule Roomba's start/stop times

Etcetera. Upon unboxing it I was >this< close to returning it, because nowhere was it stated on the web store that the app was REQUIRED to utilize the small floor cleaning robot.

But then I had an idea.

I set New Roomba down and pressed the Power button, without installing any apps or connecting it to wifi. And you know what?

IT STARTED CLEANING

It bumbled around the house mapping everything itself and did a marvelous job, without my having to do any of the recommended crap in the Quick Startup instructions. And without configuring its wifi there's no way it's sending data to iRobot's servers. Yayy.

In 2025 some things do just work right out of the box.

[jenroses]

Can confirm my wireless enabled air filter does not require any Internet connection to work exactly like its non wireless predecessor. I tried connecting it once and it did not work as well as it did when I disabled the wireless connection. It was flashing a small "can't connect" light so I put tape over that light and it still all works fine.

[hatsinspace]

My stove, dishwasher, and washing machine all have apps. "Install the app!" the manuals all say. "Get access to fancy cycles and features!" they all say.

I have installed exactly none of these apps, and have connected exactly zero of these appliances to the wifi.

They all work fine.

Like seriously 99% of my dishwasher cycles are "auto" and the remaining 1% are "express", neither of which I need an app for. Allegedly the app can tell me when the dishwasher needs more rinse aid but so does the little red light on the display. Which is handier than the app because the rinse aid lives in the cabinet next to the dishwasher and so when I see the little light I fill the rinse aid and am done, instead of an alert on my phone stressing me out everywhere and impinging on my brain.

The washer? 95% of what I was is cold water on the colors cycle. The rest is towels in hot water or delicates in cold water. Sometimes I get fancy and delay the towels an hour so it's not competing with the dishwasher or the shower for hot water. None of that needs the app. Allegedly the app can tell me when the washer is done but so can a timer I set to the wash time handily displayed when I start the washer, and that doesn't send any data to the manufacturer.

Honestly I don't even know what the stove app does because I can do fancy things like "turn the oven on in 3 hours" without it.

Yes, it is incredibly shitty that these all have apps now and that some features are app-only and that we are all pushed to give up more and more of our control and privacy in order to feed the gaping maw of corporate "profit". HOWEVER. Sometimes you can still just not.

And if you HAVE installed the app and connected the thing to the wifi, you can change your mind in most cases. Change your wifi password and uninstall the app. Sometimes for big appliances you can find instructions on how to physically remove the wifi module. If it literally won't turn on without a wifi connection, you can almost always make a separate network for it on your router that you then block from internet access.

[can-i-make-image-descriptions]

[Image ID: Tweet from verified user Redhead Ranting (TM) (@/ redheadRanting) reading: You know what I miss? Turning on something and having it just work. No registering on another device. No signing into an account. No downloading an app. Just plug it in and it does the thing it's supposed to do. /End ID]

[mereologic]

There's a type of media criticism that really grinds my goats on here, roughly along the lines of "I really wanted a cherry pie, but this is a chocolate cake"

But they can't ever leave it at that, and say that this isnlt their preference, and move on. Instead they then need to write a long in-depth analysis of all the different components of the cake and describe how the ganache is not a good pie crust, there arent any cherries and the syrup is all spongy. also it's way too tall and doesnt fit in a pie tin.

online, by far the worst offender of this is every review that expects a piece of fictional media to have coherent "worldbuilding" and then docks points for how many alleged "inconsistencies" there are in the world model the reviewer attempted to construct, as if the most important marker of quality is how easily something can be transformed into a major media franchise like star wars or tolkien.

golden age scifi authors like heinlein and asimov were not doing worldbuilding, they were constructing linked vignettes that criticized the society of their day through the lens of speculative fiction. if you're trying to analyze how the military works in starship troopers you have missed the goddamned point. if you hold it against heinlein that your vain attempt to make a coherent military out of his military novel turns up incoherent garbage, your head is so far up your own ass that it's coming out your ears. maybe go back to reading star wars expanded universe books and writing video essays about them, it's clearly what you prefer reading and likely about the edge of the limit of your intellectual capacities.

[weaselandfriends]

Do you really think how the military works in a story about a soldier in the military in a society run by the military doesn't matter?

[mereologic]

i think analyzing YA fiction as an adult is already circling the drain but it's far more embarassing when you fail to do so except using a method of media criticism that you learned from watching youtube video essays

But to answer your question directly, no it absolutely does not matter. You've been trained by star wars to expect that the "worldbuilding" behind a narrative is and must be coherent.

you're a conneisseur of frozen chicken nugget brands and you think this makes you have refined taste rather than just being a picky eater. when you stray out beyond "fictional media made for 10-12 year olds" into "fictional media made for 12-14 year olds" you cant handle the fact that it's not designed to have an authorized Disney encyclopedia explaining the history of the Old Republic.

[weaselandfriends]

What should I read to expand my taste? Could you give me some recommendations?

[mereologic]

im not terribly optimistic that you're asking this in good faith, but I will attempt to answer in such.

if you want 50s scifi but don't like Heinlein, you could always give Asimov a try, The Gods Themselves is a pretty good story if you want to analyze the setting of the story specifically, especially the third part, though I'd warn you that if you deconstruct the socioeconomics of his moon colony it's probably not going to be coherent. I, Robot is not Asimov at his best per se but it is a very good example of the "linked vignettes" i was discussing in my original post. Lovecraft's later and longer works also fit in the "slightly more complex scifi/horror" category and are training wheels for weaning you off of worldbuilding addiction so long as you avoid the "mythos" of later authors, but i hesitate to recommend them because while I enjoyed them at 14 or so, they're just not that well-written and he is often kinda racist (though he got a bit better later in life).

Moving outside the genre and towards more mature fiction, Thomas Pynchon tends to be pretty popular with people who like science fiction, so if you want a book that's much more unambiguously anti-Nazi than Starship Troopers, Gravity's Rainbow is a good bet. Something a little more modern and a bit of a lighter read in the same sort of vein of "literary not-quite-scifi" is White Noise by Don DeLillo. And I suppose Infinite Jest fits the same category too, though David Foster Wallace's writing style is not to everyone's taste.

But these are all respectively essentially the main sorts of books that middle and high schoolers respectively who have "graduated" from star wars and the like were reading back when i was one of those.

[weaselandfriends]

Oh, Thomas Pynchon! I think I've heard of him. He did One Battle After Another, right? I'll have to check that one out. Thanks for the recs!

[mereologic]

No problem, happy to help! And good luck with the aspiring author thing, I hear the publishing world is hellish these days, especially for people whose most well-known work is homestuck fanfiction.

[the-grey-tribe]

> implying Star Wars has internally consistent world building

[self-winding]

This treats "worldbuilding" as something almost completely detached from and irrelevant to the story's characters, plot, and themes, which is kind of strange to me. Possibly OP just has a different understanding of the word than I do, but I think in a well-written story those things are all interlinked. If the world/society of a story fundamentally doesn't make sense then the plot won't make sense and the characters' actions and motivations won't make sense.

Granted, with big sprawling franchises like Star Wars there is a lot of extended universe lore and supplementary material that doesn't necessarily matter for the individual story that a given person is trying to tell. Like, I don't care that much if Andor has stuff in it that contradicts something from one of the 5,000 or so Star Wars novels, I like it mainly as a self-contained story. But I do definitely care about the fact that the worldbuilding of Andor is internally consistent, and I think the story and its themes and characters would be worse if it wasn't internally consistent.

And there are caveats here about unreliable narrators and the like; I haven't read Starship Troopers but have heard people say that it's meant to be "in-universe military propaganda" and as such kind of has an excuse for the society it describes to not make complete sense. But if a story's worldbuilding is meant to be taken at face value, and if it trying to make some kind of comment about the society it's portraying, and if the portrayal of that society is fundamentally broken and illogical and collapses under the slightest scrutiny, then the story's theme is not going to be coherent. The intended message won't land. Worldbuilding done right is not a bunch of irrelevant lore that you memorize for trivia, it's the skeleton that supports all the other elements of a narrative.

[loki-zen]

I'm not gonna reblog the actual post and I cropped out OP's name: will still likely get in Discourse for this but oh well:

I am annoyed by a trend I see on this website to overcorrect for historical disparity in gains from art by taking things which emerged from cross-pollination between different artistic/linguistic/cultural traditions and collaboration and mutual inspiration between artists of differing backgrounds and ethnicities and denying that part of them in order to frame them as solely Black.

Yes, it sucks that Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Rosetta Tharpe etc.al. - people who made foundational contributions to rock and roll which were at least as significant as (say) the Beatles and also prior to them, such that the Beatles wouldn't have been possible without their inspiration - achieved lesser levels of fame and fortune because they were black and the Beatles were white. If people are unaware that rock music wouldn't have happened without Sister Rosetta and other black performers that's bad and they should absolutely be told.

But it's also, imo, an important and no less progressive message to make it clear that so many great things do not happen as a result of people "staying in their lane", artistically segregated. They happen as a result of people from different backgrounds sharing their art with each other, collaborating, being inspired by each other, being part of the same artistic conversation.

This framing of "we" (the implied audience for this post is kinda specifically not black!) owe it all to "them" just doesn't sit with me right in this context.

[gayhoediaz]

“it sounds like you’re justifying their actions-“ i am. they’re a fictional character. i’m okay with anything they do all the time. hope this helps.

[some-stars]

this shit from the comments is unironically so fucking sad to me. this is where we’re at now? “aren’t books supposed to have morals?” genuinely let’s all just pack it in and go home, we tried the whole “experiencing life and art at a greater complexity level than an eight year old can handle” thing and it didn’t work out, somebody break the news to oscar wilde, we’re done here. “books are meant to teach you something.” christ.

[napalm-waistcoat]

[bioloyg]

@astromachinations I actually need this on the post

[cookingwithroxy]

Hays Code - Wikipedia

Seduction of the InnocentIn 1948, Dr. Fredric Wertham, a respected New York psychiatrist, began a campaign against comic books. Wertham, the

These people are so bullshit they want to bring back shit like this.

[qqchurch]

[hypokeimena]

image description: tweet by madoka magicock @/rifflexielian, reading: my preferences for fiction often run dark but i genuinely cannot handle 'no one showed up to their birthday' 'no one showed up to their event they worked really hard on' etc. Just give me the cannibalism I can't do this shit man /end description

[the-grey-tribe]

When I was 23, I did documentary night. I cleared out the living room and put up camping chairs, and we watched a documentary I had downloaded from the pirate bay on a projector. I did this because there used to be monthly documentary thing organized by the university during my undergrad, and I wanted to have that again, with my friends. Then one night my friend said she'd bring a friend. She gave her friend my email address, and I replied with the details and the next movie. A lot of people had said they wanted to watch that one, so I made some food I normally wouldn't make for myself, and special popcorn.

Except nobody came, except for the new girl. You see, my friend had tried to set us up. New girl thought this was a ploy on my side, and she was convinced there was no documentary night. I had just cleared out the living room and set up the lawn chairs and projector in some elaborate scheme to get her to watch a movie with me. But it was just her and me, so I did ask her if she wanted to watch the documentary. She didn't. We watched some other movie of the pirate bay. I never met her again.

Our mutual friend later came clean and she told me she had mailed the whole documentary night crew (they weren't on BCC) except for me, asking each of them not to come that night.

It was really awkward sitting in the kitchen with her, because I insisted to wait to start the movie for another half hour. I was sure somebody would come.

[garmbreak1]

Our mutual friend later came clean and she told me she had mailed the whole documentary night crew (they weren't on BCC) except for me, asking each of them not to come that night.

good lord, how is everyone you know totally deranged?

[self-winding]

Kinda fucked up that society places such a high value on physical attractiveness and then treats vanity as a vice.

Yes, I understand the mechanics of it, this is kind of like saying "fucked up that unhealthy food tastes so good and yet gluttony is a vice," the fact that the incentive/temptation exists is why the condemnation of excess exists as a counterweight.

But still, it seems like with "vanity" the condemnation is in the wrong place. If we're going to say "caring too much about attractiveness is a vice" then we should be more condemning of people who over-value it in others rather than the people who are putting effort into maintaining their own appearance.

[cheshireinthemiddle]

[afrozenbee]

Since none of you assholes seem to get it, the person responding to the news article is saying that because of the fact that they exist in a gender separate from their sex their very existence is seen as sexual in nature so they would receive the death penalty for merely existing in proximity to children under this law because of transphobia

[cheshireinthemiddle]

"To those who commit sexual crimes against children."

Hope that helps.

[marinemas]

They’re saying that some people believe a trans person existing near a child is a sex crime, which would bear the death penalty in Florida

If you want examples of that belief, go look in the comments section of any post by a trans teacher or other childcare worker.

[brazenautomaton]

I'm not going to claim trans people don't face discrimination, since they do. I'm not going to say they should stop trying to fight discrimination.

But when trans people are victims of homicide (for any reason) at less than 20% the rate of the general population, stop talking about how people want to kill you for being trans. If people wanted to kill you for being trans, that statistic could not possibly be true, no matter what. If evil conservatives held such desire to kill you that they pass laws to kill you, that desire to kill you would also manifest as people being motivated to kill you. Murderers are not good at controlling their emotions and waiting for the secret plan to advance sufficiently so that they can commit the murder legitimately.

[self-winding]

Do you have a source for the 20% statistic? I'd find it very surprising if it was true.

I'd have less trouble believing that the homicide rate was actually the same as it is for the general population, but I can't think of a reason that it would be dramatically lower.

[mafuyuh]

let's copy papa

[aniconist]

when people are like “he’s not even attractive you could find a guy that looks like him at any gas station” i’m like….. well you see there’s beauty everywhere actually

[what-even-is-thiss]

You can also find a sunset at a gas station

[thriftedspacesuit]

time to break out my favorite photo I ever took

[mortalityplays]

I highly recommend developing a tolerance for polite low level conflict, not just because it will serve you well when employers or whoever try to impose bullshit on you with the expectation you'll fold rather than expend energy arguing, but because it will make you a genuine asset to your friends and allies whenever they're in positions where they're less able to fight for themselves.

the first and most important step is learning to stay calm when someone with authority tries to pressure you. take a breath, think about what you actually believe, and respond in your own time. if they try to brush past or talk over you, you can say "excuse me, can I think about that for a moment. I'd like to give you a proper answer." self esteem. you're both just upright monkeys.

[cazort]

Another great line is: "I'm not sure I agree with that."

You reserve the right to later say: "Yeah, I've thought it over, listened to your explanations. I agree now."

You haven't yet said you disagree.

But you've effectively communicated to the other person: "This point is not 100% self-evident. It needs more discussion or explanation if you are to convince everyone of it."

It also doesn't share much about your own viewpoint. It throws the ball back to the other person. Do they want to backpedal and say: "Well, okay, yeah, I was exaggerating. I really mean this other slightly less overgeneralized thing." or do they want to try to explain why they believe it is correct? Or ask you what you don't understand about it? Or ask you what other perspective might seem more compelling?

There are a lot of options and in my experience they all lead to a better place than just letting someone bowl you over with a point you weren't 100% on board with.

[roseapprentice]

Yeah!

A major skill in polite conflict is making sure you're not expecting to convince the other person. The minute you're invested in getting someone else to agree or understand, you're setting yourself up to get agitated.

Your job is only to calmly and gently lay out that no, you don't agree, and no, you aren't going to comply. The other person may or may not believe you, but you are just giving them information so they have the freedom to act on it or not.

Sure, if the other person gives you a good opportunity to explain, then it's great to communicate your perspective clearly and charitably. Someone can take on the task of trying to understand you, and you can support them in that goal.

But you can't dictate any aspect of what someone else is going to think or do.

Accepting that is the first step in not getting stressed and exhausted every time you find yourself at odds with other people.