I Thought It Was Fairly Normal To Feel Empathy For Bad People.

I am exceptionally lucky in that my parents never hit me, grounded me, confiscated my things, banned me from my hobbies or threatened any of these actions to make me behave as a kid. as an adult it has made me realise how very very long a road most people have to traverse before they can take a statement like 'no rule that must be enforced by threat is legitimate' seriously.

NO ONE knows how to use thou/thee/thy/thine and i need to see that change if ur going to keep making “talking like a medieval peasant” jokes. /lh

They play the same roles as I/me/my/mine. In modern english, we use “you” for both the subject and the direct object/object of preposition/etc, so it’s difficult to compare “thou” to “you”.

So the trick is this: if you are trying to turn something Olde, first turn every “you” into first-person and then replace it like so:

“I” →  “thou”

“Me” →  “thee”

“My” →  “thy”

“Mine” →  “thine”

Let’s suppose we had the sentences “You have a cow. He gave it to you. It is your cow. The cow is yours”.

We could first imagine it in the first person-

“I have a cow. He gave it to me. It is my cow. The cow is mine”.

And then replace it-

“Thou hast a cow. He gave it to thee. It is thy cow. The cow is thine.”

spaci1701 replied to your post “Just in case you’re ever embarrassed about doing something silly or…”

So nice that he’s willing to offer his professional opinion of your husband’s teeth for free. Did he have some good news for you? Does it involve pliers?

So I had a CT scan, and lots of other stuff done, and they “couldn’t find anything immediately wrong” on film, which he very quickly assured me, didn’t mean there wasn’t a problem.

He thinks the pain coming from one particular tooth (the one making me want to rip my face off) is a filling I might be allergic to which is causing the tooth to self destruct, so before he takes the whole tooth out he wants to see if he can fix the filling and pack it with something I wont be allergic to and just try to save me from any more surgery. So that’s what I will be doing next week to try and get me out of pain. (We need to wait for some testing to come back before he feels happy putting things into my jaw)

He’s also willing to extract my root canal teeth because in his own words “there’s no way they should hurt like that”, but first he wants to send me to an orthodontist, to evaluate my bite because my jaw muscles are a mess, and it’s because my teeth have been ground so far down by the previous dentist none of them touch, so I’m performing gymnastics just to be able to chew and eat. And braces would help with that.

We also discovered that I also have a cluster of excess of nerve bundles, all on the lower left side of my jaw, which is why I can get drilled on the right side of my face and not flinch, but the left side never goes numb. Which is why no matter what they are doing, they are not able to get me numb for procedures.

Which is why the root canals on the left side of my face all feel like they are failing, despite appearing fine on film and upon re-opening. It’s my face recovering from the trauma of being fully “live” while having the roots stripped out. When I described my root canal experiences he sat with his eyes closed gripping his head in his hands. He also doesn’t think with my inflammation issues I am a candidate for root canal or implants, he thinks my body will reject them based purely on the fact that my root canal teeth just won’t heal, like my jaw is trying to push them out.

He also thinks one of those nerve bundles might have got hit by a needle when they were trying to get me numb—based on some residual bruising I have inside my mouth. So now my nerves are all freaking out and healing from being quite literally stabbed multiple times, which explains why NONE of my pain killers are working either.

He was very much “why are you not screaming from pain right now” and I was very “I am too tired to scream, just help me, please help me”. He promised me he’d find a way or find someone else who could.

I cried.

Several times.

Because someone believes me.

And they think they might know what to do. Also they made me a cup of tea when I started crying and held my hand.

They seem like good people who care. So I’m hopeful.

I’m still in a LOT of pain, but I’m really hopeful.

I come from a culture that has no nudity taboo - nudity is not considered inherently sexual, or somehow traumatising to witness. What that means in practice is that there is a clearly drawn line between sexual and non-sexual nudity. There is nothing wrong or inappropriate about nudity in a sexual context, and nothing wrong or inappropriate about nudity in a non-sexual context. However, it is 100% inappropriate to be nude in a situation where it is not obvious from context whether this is sexual or not.

I've seen random kids who briefly escaped from their parents bolt across a public park buck-ass naked after they were playing in the water fountain and their parents were in the middle of changing their kid from wet clothes to dry clothes when the small nudist escaped. Changing your small kid's clothes right there in public is ok because there is obviously nothing sexual about a child whose clothes got wet. But although people will have baby pictures of their kids in the bath or just running around the house like that because sometimes little apes hate clothes for some reason, it's considered common sense to not share those pictures on facebook mom groups and such, because you have no way of knowing who's seeing them, and that blurs the line of context.

It all boils down to the clearly defined context. Bathing nude in the same sauna with five of your co-workers at the office christmas party? Clearly nonsexual, therefore completely fine. Your friend-with-benefits inviting you to come over and opening the door in nothing but a doggy collar and the most porn-scented perfume? Clearly sexual, therefore completely fine. A woman checking her breasts for lumps in the gym lockers just before or after a shower? Clearly non-sexual, therefore completely fine.

But if you went to the bank today and there's some guy who walks in and immediately strips naked, doing his banking business wearing nothing but a deep smile and being clearly very content with this situation, you have no way of telling whether he's getting kicks out of this or not. There is no contextual reason for him to be nude. Therefore, that is inappropriate.

Then you go home and post on tumblr - as one does - going like "there was some dude completely fucking buck-ass naked in the bank today. That was fucking weird and I wish he had not done that." And someone immediately swoops into inform you that actually nudity is not inherently sexual or inappropriate, and there are cultures out there that have no nudity taboo. It's not fair to call somebody a freak for something like that, maybe that guy was just finnish.

Friendly reminder that bisexual, pansexual, asexual, and aromantic people do not experience “straight passing privilege”.

Identity erasure is not a privilege, it is oppression.

This is potentially life saving information everyone should know.

(Bluesky's nuclear block function means the original post isn't visible here, but the context is yet another leftist doing the "Dems bad, don't us for refusing to support Dems, etc., etc." song and dance)

You know, the second to last post is true for a lot of these Very Online leftists, I think. They actually do know the parties aren't the same, deep down, but they can't possibly risk being seen as Cringe and a bootlicker by saying so, leaving them to hope everyone else acts like an adult and does the work for them

imma have a lil rant now

“you can’t say crippled it’s a slur” fuck off with that stigmatizing bullshit! i know what crippled means.

when i was going to the gym in my wheelchair, that wasn’t crippled. when i was fiercely sweating my way through agonizing medical procedures, that wasn’t crippled. when i was laughing through my tears because my spine was so on fire it was funny, that wasn’t crippled.

the days when that meant i couldn’t DO anything? THAT was crippled. it happened, i got through it, i’m proud. i don’t need some officious little shit telling me i can’t use the most apt term to describe the event of my disability keeping me from acting. crippling pain is crippling. crippling executive dysfunction is crippling. don’t try to force me to minimize my experience just because you’re uncomfortable with the english language.

say it until it loses all meaning if you have to. cripple cripple cripple. it starts to sound like an english beverage involving nutmeg and whiskey. mmm, hot cripple.

Something that’s been very interesting to me, in this new wave of post-miniseries Good Omens fandom, is the apparent fannish consensus that Crowley is, in fact, bad at his job.  That he’s actually quite nice.  That he’s been skating by hiding his general goodness from hell by taking credit for human evil and doling out a smattering of tiny benign inconveniences that he calls bad.

I get the urge towards that headcanon, and I do think the Crowley in the miniseries comes off as nicer than the one in the book.  (I think miniseries Crowley and Aziraphale are both a little nicer, a little more toothless, than the versions of themselves in the book.)  But maybe it’s because I was a book fan first, or maybe it’s because I just find him infinitely more interesting this way–I think Crowley, even show!Crowley, has the capacity to be very good at his job of sowing evil.  And I think that matters to the story as a whole.

A demon’s job on Earth, and specifically Crowley’s job on Earth, isn’t to make people suffer.  It’s to make people sin.  And the handful of ‘evil’ things we see Crowley do over the course of the series are effective at that, even if the show itself doesn’t explore them a lot.

Take the cell phone network thing, for instance.  This gets a paragraph in the book that’s largely brushed off in the conversation with Hastur and Ligur, and I think it’s really telling: 

What could he tell them?  That twenty thousand people got bloody furious?  That you could hear the arteries clanging shut all across the city?  And that then they went back and took it out on their secretaries or traffic wardens or whatever, and they took it out on other people?  In all kinds of vindictive little ways which, and here was the good bit, they thought up themselves.  For the rest of the day.  The pass-along effects were incalculable.  Thousands and thousands of souls all got a faint patina of tarnish, and you hardly had to lift a finger.

In essence, without any great expenditure of effort (look, I’d never say Crowley isn’t slothful, but that just makes him efficient), he’s managed to put half of London in a mental and emotional state that Crowley knows will make them more inclined to sin.  He’s given twenty thousand or a hundred thousand or half a million people a Bad Day.  Which, okay, it’s just a bad day–but bad days are exhausting.  Bad days make you snap, make you fail at things, make you feel guiltier and more stressed out in the aftermath when you wake up the next day, makes everything a little worse.  Bad days matter.

Maybe it’s because I’m a believer in the ripple effect of small kindnesses, and that means I have to believe in its opposite.  Maybe it’s just that I, personally, have had enough days that were bad enough that a downed cell network (or an angry coworker because of a downed cell network) would honestly have mattered.  But somebody who deliberately moves through the world doing their best to make everyone’s lives harder, with the aim of encouraging everybody around them to be just a little crueler, just a little angrier, just a little less empathetic–you know what, yes.  I do call that successful evil.

It’s subtle, is the thing.  That’s why Hastur and Ligur don’t get it, don’t approve of it.  Not because Crowley isn’t good at his job, but because we’ve seen from the beginning that Hastur and Ligur are extremely out of touch with humanity and the modern world and just plain aren’t smart enough to get it.  It’s a strategy that relies on understanding how humans work, what our buttons are and how to press them.  It’s also a strategy that’s remarkably advanced in terms of free will.  Hastur and Ligur deliberately tempt and coerce and entrap individuals into sinning, but Crowley never even gets close.  We never see him say to a single person, ‘hey, I’ve got an idea for you, why don’t you go do this bad thing?’  He sets up conditions to encourage humans to actually do the bad things they’re already thinking of themselves.  He creates a situation and opens it up to the results of free choice.  Every single thing a person does after Crowley’s messed with them is their own decision, without any demonic coercion to blame for any of it.

You see it again in the paintball match.  “They wanted real guns, I gave them what they wanted.”  In this case, Crowley didn’t need to irritate anybody into wanting to do evil–the desire to shoot and hurt and maybe even kill their own coworkers was already present in every combatant on that paintball field.  Crowley just so happened to be there at exactly the right time to give them the opportunity to turn that fleeting, kind-of-bad-but-never-acted-upon desire into real, concrete, attempted murder.  Sure, nobody died–where would be the fun in a pile of corpses?  But now forty-odd people who may never have committed a real act of violence in their entire lives, caught in a moment of weakness with real live weapons in their hands, will get to spend the rest of their lives knowing that given the opportunity and the tiniest smidgen of plausible deniability, they are absolutely the sort of people who could and would kill another human being they see every single day over a string of petty annoyances.

Crowley understands the path between bad thought and evil action.  He knows it gets shorter when somebody is upset or irritated, and that it gets shorter when people practice turning one into the other.  He understands that sometimes, removing a couple of practical obstacles is the only nudge a person needs–no demonic pressure or circumvention of free will required.

I love this interpretation, because I love the idea that Crowley, who’s been living on Earth for six thousand years, actually gets people in a way no other demon can.  I love the idea that Crowley, the very first tempter, who was there when free will was invented, understands how it works and how to use it better than maybe anyone else.  And I really love the idea that Crowley our hero, who loves Aziraphale and saves the world, isn’t necessarily a good guy.

There’s a narrative fandom’s been telling that, at its core, is centered around the idea that Crowley is good, and loves and cares and is nice, and always has been.  Heaven and its rigid ideas of Right and Wrong is itself the bad thing.  Crowley is too good for Heaven, and was punished for it, but under all the angst and pain and feelings of hurt and betrayal, he’s the best of all of them after all.

That’s a compelling story.  There’s a reason we keep telling it.  The conflict between kindness and Moral Authority, the idea that maybe the people in charge are the ones who’re wrong and the people they’ve rejected are both victim and hero all at once–yeah.  There’s a lot there to connect with, and I wouldn’t want to take it away from anyone.  But the compelling story I want, for me, is different.

I look at Crowley and I want a story about someone who absolutely has the capacity for cruelty and disseminating evil into the world.  Somebody who’s actually really skilled at it, even if all he does is create opportunities, and humans themselves just keep living down to and even surpassing his expectations.  Somebody who enjoys it, even.  Maybe he was unfairly labeled and tossed out of heaven to begin with, but he’s embraced what he was given.  He’s thrived.  He is, legitimately, a bad person.

And he tries to save the world anyway.

He loves Aziraphale.  He helps save the entire world.  Scared and desperate and determined and devoted, he drives through a wall of fire for the sake of something other than himself.  He likes humans, their cleverness, their complexities, the talent they have for doing the same sort of evil he does himself, the talent they have for doing the exact opposite.  He cares.

It’s not a story about someone who was always secretly good even though they tried to convince the whole world and themself that they weren’t.  It’s a story about someone who, despite being legitimately bad in so many ways, still has the capacity to be good anyway.  It’s not about redemption, or about what Heaven thinks or judges or wants.  It’s about free will.  However terrible you are or were or have the ability to be, you can still choose to do a good thing.  You can still love.  You can still be loved in return.

And I think that matters.

There is a distinct technique used by capitalists to bypass the legal and contractual rights of workers which to my knowledge has no name currently - so I’m giving it one - Lunch Grinding.

Lunch Grinding is a manipulative erosion of worker rights both in and out of the workplace. It bypasses legal and contractual standards through informal social pressures which the bosses cannot be held directly accountable for.

Lunch Grinding is named after one of the most common examples. It begins by asking a few employees to skip lunch in order to finish a project. Workers who are already insecure about their position due to economic anxiety will see this as an opportunity to prove they are a good employee. Those who refuse to do so may receive blame for failing to finish the project on time.

The issue becomes compounded when the bosses begin to purposefully schedule less time to complete the same projects. A distinct class begins to appear ignoring their contractual right to a lunch break - who become hostile to those who refuse to work during lunch for being “lazy” or “the reason we didn’t finish on time.”

At this point the management no longer needs to influence anyone directly to work through lunch break, simply by keeping up the sense of constantly being a little late for the project they have ensured the lunch-grinders will apply pressure to their peers who aren’t working through breaks.

As workplace hostility increases towards the “unproductive” members who are expressing their formal right to a break - they will be replaced with new individuals who may not even realize they have the right to a lunch break because working through the hour has become normalized by their peers.

Thus formal written standards from contracts and legal code become functionally non-existent. After which a new standard will be identified by management for erosion some examples include:

+Accepting uncertain hours. +Working off-the-clock. +Staying “On-Call” at all times. +Finishing projects / responding to emails at home. +Never using time off or sick leave.

All of which are socially conditioned in the same format - starting with “The Good Worker” who does a little favor for their boss - and ending as a peer enforced pressure and a perpetual hostility from management claiming productivity isn’t as high as expected.