#moral purity

[echosofthedamned]

some moral ocd haver with 4 followers: hmmm.... i dont know... saying puppies dont deserved to be kicked seems kind of risky. what if im not as well-spoken as i think and people misunderstand me and think im actually pro puppies getting kicked? maybe this can just stay in the drafts. i dont want to come off as an deplorable force of evil

[river-sludge]

Not sure I can express this succinctly but there’s something vitally important about exploring, expressing, revelling in The Shadow in art, media, creative works.

By shadow I mean all the things we usually suppress in polite society; impulses & desires that are (self)destructive, harmful, shameful. things that would be Wrong, maybe a bit inappropriate or outright monstrous, if we did them in real life, can find expression in fantasy & imagination, in play & games. Nobody gets hurt and we’re just having fun

— or maybe we’re being confronted with uncomfortable truths about our psyche, but we have a safe container to really go there, go deep & not shrink back from it, go past the point we would have allowed ourselves to admit is in there. & it can be ugly & shocking & gross, like truly disgusting.

But again, it’s not real & nobody was hurt. It’s cathartic, but more than that: It allows us to be honest with ourselves and see what’s in us. It’s simultaneously repulsive and harmless. We can safely accept these parts of ourselves, we don’t have to push them down, deny them, disavow them, project them onto others.

Because that happens all too easily.

We end up seeing our own demons in others if we can’t allow them in ourselves.

And it’s not necessarily a one-to-one projection. Often our fears get mixed in with just a little bit of uncomfortable lurid excitement, but if we can’t allow ourselves this “moral failing” (an emotion, a thought), then we can end up on “righteous” crusades against imagined monsters & perverts.

I’m not armchair analysing rightwingers here btw, I’m speaking from my own personal experience. There’s something intoxicating about imagining yourself as morally pure, upright; bravely standing up against the corruption & crimes of those Others who are not like you, are persecuting you. You become, in your imagination, an innocent victim and righteous saviour at the same time. Any cruel, repulsive, evil thing your creative mind can conjure up gets a home away from you, in the perverts & criminals threatening your way of life, & any violence against them is justified.

You get all the lurid pleasures of imagining horrible things without any of the discomfort, shame or responsibility of considering they might be part of you. You’re free. You can’t understand that anyone could enjoy their bad thoughts, impulses, desires without acting them out in real life. You’re trapped.

Of course this is just one extreme, & certainly not inevitable.

Or you might recognise that darkness inside you & conclude that you’re a monster, a ticking time bomb, a danger to everyone around you. When chances are you’re just a normal human with normal thoughts. We’re animals and people, both.

& it’s such a tragedy to me, such a monumental source of shame & suffering, when the solution could be so simple: just be free to explore that shit in the safety of our own minds, in fantasy, and in art, media, games, creative expression.

[agent-alyss-wolf]

i swear to fucking god if fandom culture doesnt stop forcing moral purity upon new readers/viewers of black butler, im going to lose it. the extremely new and wholly western "dadbastian" view of the series isnt whats disturbing. its fandom culture screaming that if anyone ships the ship black butler literally teases in every possible way, they are the scum of the earth.

nobody's forcing you to ship sebaciel, but alternatively people DO react like rabid animals if you do. i PROMISE you, not a single fucking person ever thought that they had a parent/child relationship the vast majority of the series' run, and they still wouldnt if fandom culture hadnt started recently making people do backflips to allow themselves to enjoy series that are obviously written in twisted ways that arent deemed acceptable or currently palatable.

like congrats! your fandom peers are allowing you to feel okay for liking the story by totally disregarding the most fucked up and multi layered dynamic that drives the series!! like jesus, learn to think for yourself.

[unsolicited-opinions]

Performed moral purity, tribalism, and the algorithm have made nuance into a liability.

It you say 'it's complicated,' you're deflecting.

If you ask for (or bring up) context, you're defending the indefensible.

In order to defend themselves from social punishment in these circumstances, some people oversimplify everything.

Sometimes it's deliberate, but mostly it's reflexive. War, identity, oppression, and history get flattened in their minds until the world they perceive fits inside a meme, a slogan, or a false binary which is easy to remember, emotionally resonant, and socially rewarded.

Meanwhile, in reality:

The world is messy and nobody is in charge

People are often contradictory and always more than one thing

History is long, complex, difficult to grasp, and gets more distorted with each attempt to flatten it

If your politics can't survive the complexity of reality, they're just a performance of your brand.

[glamrockmike]

ok so the original repost of this onto tumblr was posted by a neo nazi so i’m stealing the image and putting it on my blog instead because i think this has a good message

[morwentrouble]

Real talk: we absolutely cannot afford moral purity moving forward. Everyone deserves due process and basic civil rights, even pedophiles and rapists and other horrible horrible criminals. When you exempt any category of humans from basic civil rights, you open the door for others to define other categories of people as exempt. It is already happening to Latinos and Palestinians. It will happen to queer people. We will be disappeared, imprisoned, tortured, and murdered.

In case you missed it, Trump had a hot mic moment on 4/14/25 in which he tells El Salvador's President Bukele,

"Homegrown criminals are next. I said homegrowns are next. You've gotta build about five more places." [like human rights violation incarnate CECOT]

"Yeah, we've got space," Bukele responded as Trump officials in the room could be heard laughing.

"It's not big enough," Trump said.

He says he's taking about "really bad people" & tosses out the example of those who physically & sexually assault elderly women in public places. But his people showed us years ago that their definition of "really bad people" is dangerously expansive. Project 2025 includes language explicitly equating queer people (especially trans people) and allies with sex offenders in the name of protecting children from predation:

Project 2025 calls for outlawing pornography—and equates that with materials that acknowledge the existence of LGBTQI+ people. Pornography, they say, is “manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children.” It’s hard to escape the implications of what this means: If affirming LGBTQI+ people = pornography and pornography must be banned, that sounds an awful lot like criminalizing respect for our existence. They take it one step further: They say that people who make this material available should be imprisoned, and teachers and libraries who share it should be forced to register as sex offenders.

"Except pedos and rapists," I've seen commented over & over on this kind of post. "Pedos and rapists are scum who deserve anything that happens to them."

No exceptions, especially not those, is exactly my point. Because powerful MAGA Republicans believe that trans people specifically and queer people in general ARE pedos and rapists. They will leverage that "except" to destroy our lives and our communities simply for existing.

If you can't believe that no human deserves cruel and unusual punishment, believe this: they will come for us any way they can. Don't make it easier. Human rights are either universal or they are meaningless.

[simplysebby]

handy flow chart for my obsessive moral peeps (or anyone, really). made by me for me first and foremost but I thought I'd share. Feel free to add-on/make your own!!!! /not forced /genuine

[vamprincessss]

— when the preacher’s daughter is marked by the vampire