#cn uncharitable

[youarenotthewalrus]

Attention conservation notice: Line-by-line takedown of an obviously wrong take. Probably a waste of time, but it felt good to write. CN: toxoplasma, uncharitable

http://satanicdoki.tumblr.com/post/168132402665/morphodyke-advertising-is-so-normalized-we/embed

This is incredible. Let’s take this from the top:

advertising is so normalized we rarely talk about what it is and what it does

it is designed to catch your attention on a subconscious level, to utilize all known tricks of psychological manipulation to implant a subconscious desire toward a certain commodity,

No??? Advertising is there to a) alert you to the existence of the product, b) tell you who the product is for, and c) tout the superiority of its product. Budweiser doesn’t need to fucking hypnotize people into drinking their beer, just remind people that it exists.

which it does by catering to the desire-structure of the most socially dominant, meaning that it at all levels structurally reinforces white supremacy, patriarchy, cis supremacy, heterosexuality, ableism, antisemitism, classism, islamophobia, settler-colonialism, etc, etc.

As we all know, society is entirely dominated by straight cis able-bodied white men who hate women, the LGBTQ, and ethnic and religious minorities. This is why advertisements never depict ethnic minorities or gay couples.

it is a massive worldwide concerted effort at brainwashing and behavior modification to serve the desires of the ruling classes.

This is awfully strong language to use for “our paper towels are 80% stronger than the leading bargain brand.” I wonder if the local businesses I see ads for know they’re part of the ruling classes. Damn petty bourgeoisie. Off to the guillotine with them, I guess. Sorry Bill, but trying to let people know about your selection of musical instruments was all just a sinister effort to lull them into complacency. 

this isn’t some secret or conspiracy, that’s literally what it openly aspires to be, just framed in other terms.

Man, I bet all those marketing people outside of the Western world are gonna feel silly when they realize they joined a field openly dedicated to promoting white supremacy.

and we learn to treat it with blasé disregard because of its omnipresence. but it is deeply psychologically damaging to us.

O hai Adbusters. Do tell us how billboards cause us psychic harm.

it is driving the divides between form of life, data self, social self, embodied self, addictive drives, survival drives, etc that is rendering us all increasingly unstable.

I bet it’s increasing our body thetans too. Man, I’m never gonna make Clear at this rate! Seriously though, this is gibberish.

it is trying to turn us into things we are not. it is trying to shape how we talk and think, and what we talk and think about.

and you can see it working. you can see the effects on people, see them being restructured away from certain drives and towards other, more productive or consumptive or self-destructive ones.

Yup! Just like how communist propaganda in the USSR molded its populace into obedient, hardworking new Soviet men who continue to this day to support the communist system- Hold on...

it grows reactivity, it grows addiction culture, it grows abuse culture. it alienates people from themselves and each other.

More buzzwords. Gosh, it sure does suck how seeing Tide ads destroys our sense of connection with other people. “Addiction culture”-wise, you could probably make an argument around ads for tobacco and alcohol increasing abuse of those substances, maybe tie it into the opioid epidemic somehow, but I don’t think OP is equipped to make that argument.

it subverts and corrupts the radical potentials of new media. it is pervasive and reinforced by the military-industrial death machine.

“As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug.”

advertising is designed to cultivate stockholm syndrome relations to capital. identification with the abuser.

See, this is actually an interesting angle, if not one I’m inclined to agree with, but instead of explaining what they mean or trying to back it up, OP ends the post right there, one half-formed thought at the top of a pile of anger and conspiracy theories. How the everloving fuck does this have 950 notes? Is OP themself a master of brainwashing? No. OP is angry, and so it gets reblogged by other angry people, people who share OP’s anger and (hopefully) agree more with the spirit than the letter of their words, and people like me who are angry at the OP, who got bit by the damn toxoplasma bug and can’t help but respond. That’s a hell of way to manipulate people into spreading your message. Why haven’t advertisers caught on yet? Stupid ruling classes, so inefficient...

[youarenotthewalrus]

The amount of gender politics on this site that boils down to “boys have cooties” is kind of ridiculous tbh.

[youarenotthewalrus]

[epistemic notice: this is like at least 50% vent post and 100% toxoplasma, please disregard]

This bit of Blanchardianism [cn: transphobia] got linked on SSC and it’s terrible, frankly. Most of it is fairly unremarkable bullshit–there’s a vain attempt to prove that trans women are objectively men, there’s the standard Blanchardian “feminine trans women are really just extremely gay men and masculine trans women have a fetish for being ladies” bit (debunked to my satisfaction here and here), which as usual fails to engage with the existence of trans men, there’s the author carefully avoiding ever referring to trans people as members of their identified sex, there’s “some cis women feel uncomfortable having non-passing trans women in women’s only spaces so should we really have to let them in?” Nothing too unusual.

This stood out to me as particularly stupid, though:

The subconscious perceptual systems by which we notice people’s sex aren’t going to turn off because a sign said so. If you need a sticker to get people to gender you correctly, your transition has failed.

In a free Society, everyone should have the right to express themselves, to modify their body and social presentation however they see fit. But having done your best to present your true self, you can't—not even shouldn’t, but can't—exert detailed control how other people perceive you.

All you can do is incentivize them to lie.

In other words, if I encounter, say, a masculine-looking cis woman and read her as male, intellectual integrity demands I refer to her as a “him.” Why should this stop at gender, anyway? If I meet someone who looks like he’s 16 but insists that he’s actually 34, well, him demanding that I don’t treat him like a high school student is clearly an unreasonable attempt to impose his own self-perception on me. What kind of shitty system is “you may be treated as a woman, but only if you pass” anyway?

This is the other problem with gender-as-self-identification: passing is hard and not-passing hurts, so kind-hearted people try to protect their trans friends from the pain of not being read the way that they would prefer—with the inevitable result that the laudable instinct to be kind gets corrupted into universal socially-mandatory lies. Even if you don’t need predictively-natural categories for any particular practical decision—even if we were to collectively agree to integrate previously sex-segregated bathrooms and sports leagues and prisons so that no actual policy decision depended on what “gender” somebody is—as an aspiring epistemic rationalist, there’s something spiritually deadening about a world in which the mental representations you need to make sense of the world can’t be spoken about without layers of obfuscating euphemisms.

Being an asshole because you don’t think gender is a social construct does not make you a heroic maverick standing for the truth.

[W]hen a man can do nothing but wear a sticker that says “SHE” and say, “Who are you going to believe, my sticker, or your lying eyes? There’s no rule of rationality saying that you shouldn’t believe the sticker, and there are plenty of rules of human decency saying that you should” and the finest minds of my generation can permit themselves no other response than, “She’s absolutely correct; the categories were made for man, not man for the categories,” I can only plead—

This is not rationality. This isn’t even kindness. We’re smarter than this.

"The only reason people call trans people by their preferred pronouns is because they’re stupid, and they’re also hurting them, somehow” fuck you.

Then after that there’s some riffing on the off-hand comparison between Emperor Norton and trans folk made at the end of the SSC post this whole thing was in response to. I can’t criticize this, mainly because I have no idea what kind of point OP was trying to make with it. It was probably a bad one, though.

[youarenotthewalrus]

The secret to making the world anarcho-capitalist is just renaming shit. Sick of paying property taxes to the US government? Good news! You’re just paying rent on the land you’re leasing from a non-profit Private Defense Agency. Hate how your taxes go to lazy welfare bums? It’s just your landlord and PDA spending your freely given rent and subcription fees on services to some of their other customers. Wish there were open borders so people could freely choose between competing landlords and security services? Well, there’s nothing stopping you from doing just that! Just go fill out a citizenship subscription application and in as little as ten years, you can be living in the closest place to your dreams the market has to offer. Ah, doesn’t it feel good to live in a world free of coercion?