[joe Biden Getting Dressed] Uhhh Honey? Where Are My Shoelaces

both of these takes

like, eesh, i know this is really fucking petty to be complaining about when they are literally putting kids in fucking cages but

i’m so tired of how posturing against Nerd Culture ™ has become part of the leftist party line, even if you’re gonads deep in Nerd Culture yourself

like. yes. i am fully aware that Nerd Culture ™ has some serious problems and there are some really nasty bigots there and they need to get the bigotry stick out of their fucking anii, but.

 it honestly seems like the whole tumblr ‘LET’S MAKE FUN OF NERDS/GAMERS/PEOPLE WHO LIKE BAD SHIPS’ is based in ableism and  self-loathing more than anything valid. at best it’s misguided attempts at ‘punching up’ and hurting people who hurt you back; at worst it’s just general high school bullshit. it’s making fun of the ‘weird’ ‘greasy’ kid who wears a top hat and talks about my little pony too much and doesn’t perform their gender correctly. or making fun of the ‘fat neckbeard’ who’s autistic and doesn’t have the best grasp on personal hygiene. or making fun of the ‘creepy’ fat otaku dude who says awkward things about how he’s more interested in anime girls than real ones…  because, guess what, he’s asexual and doesn’t have the words for it. or, or, or, or, or, list goes on. 

it’s like, do you really care about fighting bigotry, or do you just want to be able to be the ones bullying other people? if it’s the first one, why the fuck are you always picking on marginalised people? if it’s the second one, why the fuck are you in my justice space? 

Generally, I’m not the person to talk about politics but today something happened in my country. There’re mass protests all over Russia, all because of our president having a fucking palace thanks to stolen money and arresting the person who found it out and shared with people (Aleksey Navalny) who happens to be the leader of opposition and who was almost killed with chemical weapon a few months ago.

The police have arrested more than 1000 people today including a 10 year old child. We have no one to rely on, no one to ask for help. Putin has been on the throne for about 20 years and now he has a possibility to continue ruling Russia due to constitutional amendments that were approved in 2020.

I can do nothing but ask you to spread this information, so that people know we need help. We don’t want the dictator to rule our country anymore, we’re sick and tired.

Watership Down partial fancast:

there’s a thing that happens in internet apology discourse that i want to address.

‘when someone calls you out, it is your job to immediately apologize. do not defend yourself, apologize.’

this is a reaction to people who say racist/sexist/transphobic/classist/misogynist/etc things, and then instead of examining what they’ve said and trying to take a lesson in self-awareness and humility, get defensive and resort to tone-policing, gaslighting, derailing, good old-fashioned patronizing, or any of a number of other possible rhetorical postures designed to make the injured party sit down and shut up. to that degree, encouraging self-examination as a first instinct is important.

and how this works depends a lot on who receives this discourse, it really does.

HOWEVER.

i see ‘shut up and apologize’ being used as a general, universal rule of thumb, the law of how to engage with being called out.

and i believe that it is also wrong to encourage people to assume that because someone on the internet has told them they are wrong, they must necessarily be wrong, must necessarily owe an apology. it is wrong to preach ‘shut up and apologize’ because call-out culture can very easily function as a form of bullying: by adopting an ostensibly righteous political position and using the terms of what passes for ‘social justice’ discourse, one person can easily set themselves up as an authority in a way that does not give their interlocutor any room to maneuver. the caller-out might be wrong. ‘shut up and apologize’ dismisses that possibility.

'shut up and apologize’ discourages active, continuous critique. kneejerk political correctness stands against engaged thought.

but above all it enables the accuser to disregard their own blindspots. the accuser needn’t be a careful reader. the accuser needn’t consider the multiple axes of power and meaning at work in a given statement.

'shut up’ might be a good first step. do not react immediately. sit with your discomfort for a while. ask yourself why it is uncomfortable. what specifically is this person reacting to in what you’ve said? disregard their tone for just a minute, and ask yourself what the content of what they’ve said conveys about what you might not know or understand, what experiences might not be available to you. take that time for thought, because thought takes time, and because you owe yourself the opportunity to learn something.

but don’t apologize as a first instinct. even if an apology is due (and admittedly, it’s not unlikely that an apology is due), it only matters if you know what you’re apologizing for. i often find myself saying to people, ‘i don’t want you to apologize, i want you to think about this. i want you to not do it again.’ i don’t care about the apology. i care about the thought, the learning.

and it is possible that you do not owe an apology. it is possible that you are being bullied by a call-out artist who is using the framework of ‘social justice’ to leverage some authority for themself. it is possible that they are being just as thoughtless as they are accusing you of being.

accusation and apology are shitty tools for a rhetoric of justice. ‘shut up and apologize’ does not look to me like a path to liberation.

I’ve been losing followers at a furious pace lately, but exactly making it up with new people. Not sure how to interpret that

well.

Y’know, that makes me think of something, actually.

So if you’re one of those “I can only write when I feel Inspired™” type of writers but you never seem to feel very inspired, and all of the usual “You have to make a schedule and stick to it and sit down and write XYZ words per day” writing tips have never worked for you and only make you feel guilty but you have no idea why,

have you perhaps considered that you might be neurodivergent / mentally ill / have a chronic health condition, and that what you call “inspiration” is what the rest of us call “spoons”?

B/c that is exactly what happened to me.

this is just a @nostalgebraist-autoresponder fan account now, I’m sorry

they should make a new type of computer that can be your friend

babies need more than one error message

rn it’s just like “you are clearly upset about SOMETHING, I am VERY MOTIVATED to fix it, and I have NO IDEA WHAT IT IS”

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