I nearly forgot! It’s a beautiful day to become immortal
Peter Solarz
dirt enthusiast

shark vs the universe

❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
styofa doing anything
Three Goblin Art
d e v o n
occasionally subtle
Monterey Bay Aquarium

Janaina Medeiros
Stranger Things

#extradirty
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Origami Around

@theartofmadeline

祝日 / Permanent Vacation
h
Cosimo Galluzzi
AnasAbdin
Xuebing Du
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@unobtrusiveintrovert
I nearly forgot! It’s a beautiful day to become immortal
sometimes a song is good because you saw it on a fan edit for your favorite ship like ten years ago
The Artemis II crew filmed an 80s sitcom style video on their way to the Moon
This is what hozier meant when he says he falls a little bit in love everyday with someone new
I once watched a girl in the produce aisle pick up a bushel of bananas that were precariously perched on the edge and move them farther back and under her breath she said “there you go sweeties - that will be more comfortable” before shuffling off and… I think about her often.
« Silent lovers » is such a sweet way to put it.
I was driving on the highway and passed a dude absolutely JAMMING alone in his car, doing those little half dance moves you do when you’re stuck sitting down in a small space, bellowing unheard lyrics at the top of his lungs, and my instant reaction was to think “I love you.” And then to pray he had a good day, or whatever, because those fleeting moments of connection are so incredible.
Was driving down the road from work on a really relly bad day and saw a young man who’d be deemed a “thug” based on his apparel walking on the sidewalk where city workers had recently blown a bunch of leaves into big ass piles (it was fall) the guy paused by one, tossed his hat to the side of the sidewalk, dropped his pack and fell into one like a big ol kid and just started playing. I’ll always remember that.
tuck him in Tuesday
tuck him in Tuesday once again
another tuck him in Tuesday is here
Tuck him out 😈
WHAT THE HELL IS YOUR PROBLEM
I'M PUTTING HIM BACK
So, you know how certain Christian missionaries are trained to act in a very obnoxious way, so that most people they preach to will reject them outright, so they feel like the world hates them for being Christian and they can only be friends with fellow Christians? You know that thing?
I think as activists, we sometimes need to stop and ask ourselves whether we're acting like those missionaries. I think this type of behavior is a little more ingrained into our society than some of us realize, and some of us have internalized it without realizing what it's actually meant to do.
OP I know that this is probably a different direction than you were going, but genuinely this advice would do so so much to help people not fall into secular political cults.
A lot of high control groups use this tactic to isolate their members. It’s absolutely not just evangelizing Christians. New age wellness cults often encourage their members to make outlandish and offensive accusations regarding the mental and physical health of other people or their children, because they know that the backlash their members receive will reinforce the idea that the “mainstream” simply has no room for people who like crystals and essential oils. White supremacist cults will seed the vocabulary of new recruits with Nazi dog whistles that fly over those recruits heads, specifically so that they will get clocked as possible neo-Nazis and shunned by anyone who might offer them another perspective and help them to get out before it’s too late. And a lot of left-leaning political cults strongly encourage members to share their views in the most inflammatory ways possible, and then say “you see? everyone outside of this small circle is evil and cannot be relied on” when, inevitably, that produces bad results.
Sometimes I think that activists fall into these patterns completely accidentally, either because they were raised in culturally Christian evangelical environments and never unpacked it, or else because they just aren’t any good at approaching things in a non-inflammatory way and no one’s shown them how.
…But sometimes, these structures emerge in activist circles because those circles are legitimately becoming high control groups.
I think some things to watch out for especially in this regard are:
Are you being directed to behave in an extremely hostile and alienating way? (even if it’s by someone who you trust!)
Does the group you are in immediately shut down any conversation about the effectiveness of an antagonistic strategy? In particular, do they shut that conversation down using in-group stock phrases?
Is experiencing harsh rejection seen as something of a rite of passage?
Do you receive more validation from the group you are in after you have been rejected by someone outside the group than at any other time?
Have you ever been concerned that the antagonistic strategy you are using hurt someone you cared about, only to be quickly advised by members of the group that that person was toxic and that you should actually completely cut them out of your life?
These to me are all pretty significant red flags about the group in question, whatever the specific thing that brings people together there is. If you start noticing them in a group that you are a part of, be that an in-person activist circle or a Discord server or anything in between, take a step back and seriously consider the possibility that the good thing that you joined is turning into something different, and possibly dangerous.
In the words of Jonestown survivor Deborah Layton, “Nobody joins a cult. You join a self-help group, a religious movement, a political organization. They change so gradually, by the time you realize you’re entrapped – and almost everybody does – you can’t figure a safe way back out.”
this is a pdf detailing the BITE model of authoritarian control, a method for determining whether or not you're in a cult.
even if you feel confident you are not and have never been in a cult, it's a good idea to familiarize yourself with the signs, just in case one begins to sneak up on you in the future.
Ok, I actually want to talk about this for a moment.
Jonestown, one of the most infamous cults in history, with a mass suicide / mass murder that left more than 900 people dead of cyanide poisoning, hundreds of whom were children… was a leftist political cult. That fact is an unambiguous and completely undebatable matter of historical record.
This isn’t a footnote in the story of Jonestown, and it isn’t a weird anti-leftist gotcha either. Jonestown attracted people to their cause with anti-segregation and anti-poverty activist work, and they did actual, meaningful good for those causes. The People’s Temple was a leftist org, unambiguously. They created mutual aid networks for food aid, and rent assistance, and job placement services, and clothing donations, and winter heating. They leaned heavily on the Indianapolis Human Rights Commission in order to push desegregation, and led sit-ins and boycotts and protests. They participated in significant voter registration efforts. They led the fight against the eviction of tenants from San Francisco's International Hotel.
People joined The People’s Temple because it was a good thing when they joined it. They didn’t start out as brainwashed cultists, and they didn’t gravitate towards the leadership of Jim Jones out of masochism, or inherent submissiveness, or a perverse love of creeping authoritarianism. They fell in line under Jim Jones because he’d built a community that was genuinely helping people, and was advancing a political cause that seemed worth fighting. They followed Jim Jones because he earned their trust.
Jim Jones then used the trust and the social capital that he had gained from all of the above in order to elevate himself to the status of a messianic figure, and abuse and profit off of his followers. Slowly but surely, he boiled the frog. It was all good – and then it was mostly good – and then, well there was some abuse, but it wasn’t that bad, and it wasn’t really his fault – and then there was a lot of abuse, but the outside world would destroy them if given the chance, so wasn’t it the lesser of the two evils? And then, eventually, it got so bad that hundreds of people poisoned themselves and their children at his command, and murdered everyone in the compound who refused and resisted.
Your cause of choice is not immune from abusers taking advantage of it!
It doesn’t matter if you’re right. It doesn’t matter if your cause is just. It does not matter if your good thing really is a good thing, because there is always the possibility that it will one day be co-opted by a monster. And if the fact that it started good is enough for you to ignore that gradual, subtle change, you could end up in a truly horrible situation.
One of my best friends in undergrad got sucked into a cult. Years later, we talked about it, and he told me something that I’ll never forget which is, it’s only when you look all the way back at things that they seem crazy. You start off with things that are totally normal and innocuous: “we’re stronger together”; “oppression is bad”; “you can accomplish more if you believe in yourself”; “empathy is important and we should all try to bring more of it into our lives”; etc. Then, you move to something that’s just a little step away from that. And then again. And then again. And then again. But it never feels like a big jump, because it’s not! A -> Z is crazy, but A -> B wasn’t, and B -> C wasn’t, and C -> D wasn’t, and…
This friend was smart, and rational, and independent, and normal, and by the time he and his wife left, they’d gone from just thinking that we should all practice more emotional mindfulness, to being terrified that leaving the cult and the cult leader would literally kill them, via the cult leader having magical powers.
If your only analysis is “Where I started was good, and no single step since then has been crazy” that is utterly insufficient to keep you safe.
“This can’t possibly be a cult, because when I joined it was a leftist political org and there’s never been a single instance where it suddenly changed” is literally the exact logic that kept people in Jonestown until it was too late.
what a good morning!! im gonna draw a dog!!
apRIL FOOLS I DREW TWO DOGS THEY’RE BEST FRIENDS
the only good april fool’s joke
happy april fools. please take this egg
hahahahahha………………..
youve been fooled………………by the april fools beeper……………..it was a fully grown bird the entire time…..no egg………………it tells u it hopes u hav a good april 1st
I just queued this for a year
happy april foold everyone did you know about………………… bofa
haha… bofa them
hey everyone its april fools. but dont worry i dont have anything planned. just going to sit here and...
I LIED !!!! GET PRANKED
POST BELOW ME GET FUCKING WET
Alright let’s get this over with
AHAHAA, GOTTEM
Every year the notes on this post make me so happy
I am yet again fueled by outrage for another year
M O R E
>:o)
me at any given time: can we just buckle down and focus on the task at hand please???
my brain:
my brain: ……….ranibow sprimkle……………
ranibow sprimkle……..
kepchup.
SPINCH
B A N C H
chichen nuggest
b R o G L e
strawbebbies..
this post almost moved me to tears
Tag yourself, I’m spinch or rainbow sprimkle
I’m kepchup lmao
Brogle and rainbow sprimkle
This is so charming I feel punched in the solar plexus and I’m here for this sort of gentle, sweet violence.
some additions from my own collection
World Heritage Post
I just want to love you
great tag addition by sepulchritude
"you can use ai to improve spelling and grammar"
if you’re wondering why spellcheck and grammar check is worse now, it’s because they replaced it with AI! 🥰
now, instead of maintaining a comprehensive, nuanced, and human-maintained encyclopedia by which to check your document, they have switched to an AI that just compares what you’ve written to what other people write in, say, Google Docs, and use the most commonly used iteration.
ever have it change something like “all intents and purposes” to “all intensive purposes” or “should’ve” to “should of”? that’s why!
people make the same spelling and grammar mistakes so often, AI thinks that’s the way you say it because it is a PATTERN DETECTOR and cannot THINK let alone use language.
"you can use ai to improve spelling and grammar"
It will get cold again eventually. The summer will not last forever. I’m not doomed to live in this unbearable heat for all eternity. <- said while gripping the countertop so hard that the tile is starting to crack