Fun Fact Of The Day

so as a third world transfem there's a bit of a parallel that ive noticed and it goes kinda like this:

if you live in the Imperial Core (or maybe even first world countries in general tbh), you never have to consider the third world in your worldview. what i mean is, you can be born, have a long, rich, fulfilling life and then die of old age, never having thought of any of us beyond the 5 minutes after you get shown some sort of news piece. there's vast, vast swathes of people that think of mexico, or nicaragua, or argentina, or or or or - as basically just names on a map, if that much. we're not people to them, not really. and when we stand up and say "no actually, we are human beings, people worth just as much as any citizen of the Imperial Core", they get upset! because we are shaking the fundamentals of their worldview.

and there's not necessarily any malice involved! like, obviously some people that feel like this are malicious, but their personal feelings are irrelevant. the point is that their position insulates them both from knowing us and from any consequences of not knowing us, while we most assuredly are not protected from either of those things in response.

if you are not transfem, even if you are also queer in some way, a similar concept applies. you can have a full, rich, fulfilling queer existence while never having to take us into account! you can go to queer and inclusive events, watch queer and inclusive creators and shows, read queer and inclusive books, and so on and so forth, where we don't feature at all, or if we do, we are a throwaway! and so, when we stand up and say "hey actually we deserve as much space and respect as anyone else", they get upset! because we are shaking the fundamentals of their worldview.

im not saying they're related but ultimately both of these worldviews stem from a position of privilege, and can only be eliminated by destroying that privilege. i dont really know how we do that but this is mostly meant as an observation rather than a solutions post.

the fandom experience is seeing someone make a joke that twists your blorbo's characterization for comedic purposes and not saying anything because you know its just a joke and you don't want to be a killjoy but also knowing this kind of thing definitely influences unironic depictions of the blorbo so you just stand there like that meme of the guy with his lips pursed and his veins popping

this is almost certainly a post ive made before but when a character's grief is so strong it fully alters the form of the narrative itself... moby dick being so much longer than strictly necessary because ishmael's grief made him stall for time in the telling of the tragedy... harrow the ninth being in second person because harrow was so grief-stricken that she herself was not capable of making narrative sense of the events of the novel and so someone else had to do it.... do u know what i mean

the HtN exchange between harrow and ortus leaves me weeping because. ortus was only a child during the creche massacre. he was left with no peers, no friends, with an abusive father pushing him to fulfil a role he was never going to be able to fill. and he grew up into an adult who did nothing as two children were hurt, beaten, poisoned, starved. 

and harrow was a child deprived of nothing a child needs to live but everything they need to thrive. deprived of love, and care, and warmth and touch; born into a blood debt she can never hope to repay. it’s no suprise then that she grew into an angry and cruel creature who hurt others just because she could. 

and their exchange abt this in HtN just gets me because. like.

ortus tells her he is sorry, because he was an adult and they were defenseless children, and he knows his parallel suffering cannot absolve him of his inaction. he knows he cannot change the past but he can stand for her now, and maybe that can still count for something. and harrow apologizes to ortus, because she realizes nothing, not even the hell of her childhood, will never excuse how she treated him. but she can honor him now, defend him now, belive him now.

im just. idk. something abt two people who were hurt, who are hurting, who hurt each other, coming together and saying that they will stop. that the cycle will not continue. even though nothing they do now can fix the cruelty of the past, even though they both know that whatever they do now could never even begin to tip any kind of cosmic scales; despite all of this, they will do right by each other now, even though it is too late. even in death and after it. weeping.

We'll meet again someday

sometimes I think too hard about like. how the ability to record audio fundamentally changed how humans interact with music. can you imagine if the only time you ever heard music in your whole life was when you or another human being in your actual physical presence decided to create it. and 99.99% of the time that person was not a professional but just like your wife or your dad or your co-worker or church choir singing or playing whatever they happened to know. i honestly don't think we can fathom it

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

Coming from your aro buddy here. It’s going to be okay if you discovered that you are aromantic. It will be okay. Even if you’re 100% sure that you are. I know that not all of you are feeling comforted by realizing you’re aro- and why wouldn’t some of us be unhappy? Society puts so much pressure on youth to seek out love and emphasizes so much that romantic love is what makes us human, that its easy to forget that its possible to be happy without it. Its easy to slip into the mindset that you are either never going to be happy, or that you are not human at all.

You can be happy without it. Its possible to live a meaningful life without a romantic partner. And you don’t need a romantic partner to know that you are not alone. 

And if it is a prayer, it might as well be a confession.

MONKEY MAN 2024, dir. Dev Patel