Why None Of Them Got Into The Good Place

gay announcement: just randomly had the thought of “wait a minute, I’ve never seen a female sumo wrestler before, is that a thing?” out of the blue and so naturally I did a quick Google search and uh. uhm.

that is all thank you for your time

What is your favourite small, painfully human gesture?

and also if we can just:

htn act v… pour one out for gideon nav

In the darkest chapter of German history, during a time when incited mobs threw stones into the windows of innocent shop owners and women and children were cruelly humiliated in the open; Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a young pastor, began to speak publicly against the atrocities.

After years of trying to change people’s minds, Bonhoeffer came home one evening and his own father had to tell him that two men were waiting in his room to take him away.

In prison, Bonhoeffer began to reflect on how his country of poets and thinkers had turned into a collective of cowards, crooks and criminals. Eventually he concluded that the root of the problem was not malice, but stupidity.

In his famous letters from prison, Bonhoeffer argued that stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice, because while “one may protest against evil; it can be exposed and prevented by the use of force, against stupidity we are defenseless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here. Reasons fall on deaf ears.”

Facts that contradict a stupid person’s prejudgment simply need not be believed and when they are irrefutable, they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this, the stupid person is self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack.

For that reason, greater caution is called for when dealing with a stupid person than with a malicious one. If we want to know how to get the better of stupidity, we must seek to understand its nature.

This much is certain, stupidity is in essence not an intellectual defect but a moral one. There are human beings who are remarkably agile intellectually yet stupid, and others who are intellectually dull yet anything but stupid.

The impression one gains is not so much that stupidity is a congenital defect but that, under certain circumstances, people are made stupid or rather, they allow this to happen to them.

People who live in solitude manifest this defect less frequently than individuals in groups. And so it would seem that stupidity is perhaps less a psychological than a sociological problem.

It becomes apparent that every strong upsurge of power, be it of a political or religious nature, infects a large part of humankind with stupidity. Almost as if this is a sociological-psychological law where the power of the one needs the stupidity of the other.

The process at work here is not that particular human capacities, such as intellect, suddenly fail. Instead, it seems that under the overwhelming impact of rising power, humans are deprived of their inner independence and, more or less consciously, give up an autonomous position.

The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us from the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with him as a person, but with slogans, catchwords, and the like that have taken possession of him.

He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and is abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil – incapable of seeing that it is evil.

Only an act of liberation, not instruction, can overcome stupidity. Here we must come to terms with the fact that in most cases a genuine internal liberation becomes possible only when external liberation has preceded it. Until then, we must abandon all attempts to convince the stupid person.

Bonhoeffer died due to his involvement in a plot against Adolf Hitler, at dawn on 9 April 1945 at Flossenbürg concentration camp - just two weeks before soldiers from the United States liberated the camp.

—Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Theory of Stupidity

IDGAF if the women in my fiction are empowering or aspirational, I'm an adult, I don't need role models, I want the women in my fiction to be interesting, and if that involves being pathetic, hypocritical, amoral, or trapped in a delightfully dysfunctional relationship so be it

one of the funniest things ive noticed rereading gideon is that there are MULTIPLE times when cytherea is clearly trying to radicalize her but gideon’s too stupid and gay to notice and then palamedes interrupts to do something chivalrous for his crush

maybe not the absolute best thing about les miserables the novel (it’s a long book) but the one that stood out the most to me and has remained with me most strongly is that when the book is explaining to us the plight of fantine, who basically like finds herself poor and knocked up bc iirc she hooked up with some fuckboy who was never gonna stick around, victor hugo really takes pains to be clear that fantine did a lot of really dumb shit. she made stupid ass choices. she was naive and impulsive and unwise and myopic. it’s not a story where a tragic heroine did everything right and still got screwed. but the moral argument put forth by, i mean, to some degree the entire novel but particularly (to my recollection) by this section is essentially like, isn’t it so fucked up that we live in a society where someone can be functionally condemned to a life of suffering for the crime of being a fallible human being in their youth? isn’t being young and stupid and getting to move on from that a human right that we are denying people? shouldn’t you be allowed to be kind of an idiot without ruining your entire life? it’s such a clearly and expansively empathetic view and it’s an idea that people obviously continue to struggle with based on Any Time Anything Happens Ever and also one that i feel like continues to be rare in narrative art or media, at least expressed this fully or strongly.

so i've been reading gideon the ninth

sat bolt upright in bed at 12:38am to deliver this extremely hot take.

I would like posit that Gideon has no fucking idea what a cow is, and that Jod, self-aware memelord that he is, decided to decorate his inner sanctum with engravings of cattle.