Your Personal Post Just Now About Your Genetics Exam Is A Whole Fucking Mood. I Have Incourse Exams This

This lady is Alethi and you can’t tell me otherwise

By Jan Lehner for Russh Magazine

So I do wonder how many children growing up during this pandemic are going to end up with like six thousand allergies.

this also happens prospectively (as opposed to retrospectively) which may possibly be worse

Is anyone else forever frustrated that hearting a single post in a long and vicious argument on here means every previous iteration is hearted too and how will people know which side I’m rooting for? I dunno

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:

Hmm, I rather think that the central question - whether there's a moral difference between action and inaction - is in fact very relevant, certainly in my life and probably in a lot of people’s. Like, I'm really great at negative morality, avoiding doing bad things by simply not doing anything. Which would correspond to someone who feels that they can avoid any involvement or blame by never moving the lever. But intellectually I don’t actually endorse that: I believe that inaction is a type of action, which implies that I should be more active in life despite the risk of inadvertently hurting someone and getting cancelled. Writing this rather than using my tumblr exclusively to reblog others’ posts isn’t much, but it’s a start.

my issue with the trolley problem is, and still will be, for the vast majority of people on the planet, the trolley problem is not, like, relevant

not in the sense that “OH YOU’LL NEVER BE IN THE SITUATION WHERE YOU HAVE TO PULL A LEVER TO STOP A TROLLEY FROM HITTING FOUR PEOPLE THAT A MANIAC HAS TIED TO RAILROAD TRACKS”, but in the sense that when you’re in scary and dangerous situations, you are not as in control of yourself as you think you are.

in a situation like the trolley problem, outside of like… first responders, soldiers, maybe ER nurses? … I doubt most people would be able to react to a situation like that in anything approaching the way that they would game it out from ethical principles. you’d fight, flee, or freeze, and it’d have less to do with “what you strongly believe in as a person” and more to do with “what your hindbrain has learnt is effective to get you to survive emergencies in the past”. 

i think that’s what a lot of discussion about “maybe the person to blame is the one tying people to the train tracks?” is trying and failing to get at.

LMAO I just found out that it’s Stress Awareness week.

i know an engineer-type dude who said fiction bored him, because fiction is mostly-formulaic and tropey, and you can generally guess what’s gonna happen next, and yada yada

so his solution for this problem was… to solely read serial web novels in languages that (1) he did not speak, and (2) for which there was no actual translation, fan or otherwise

apparently, the combined forces of “trying to figure out WTF is going on via the power of Google Translate" + “cultural differences in storytelling conventions” + “the inherent randomness of where the hell amateur authors are gonna take their plots”—those all mashed up to make stories that were unpredictable enough to keep him guessing all the time

then he described to me this totally batshit-sounding Hungarian story he’d been obsessively reading once a week for years

and god i think about him all the time.  like.  that is the most wild way to process fiction that i have ever heard of, but also, i’ve gotta admire the sheer chaos energy of it

another day, another dollar, another instance of wanting to write a long post calling out the 2015 discourse’s massive, massive classism problem but not wanting to invite the wank and criticism it would induce

but in short: the rural poor are not your punching bags for jokes about homophobia, trump supporters, and fat ugly americans, and poor people as a whole are grossly underrepresented in talking about marginalization and are not included in discussions about the issues that affect them directly. and a massive part of that comes from there not being a vanguard of like, Poor Academics the way that there are Feminist Academics and Queer Academics and Black Academics and so forth. every other institutionally marginalized group is represented in academia but because of the inherent lack of opportunity to pursue higher education that comes along with being poor, poor people’s voices aren’t really heard to the same degree. 

not to mention that structural and institutional poverty is a problem that can only really be solved by politicians, and the problem is that right wing politicians have a vested interest in keeping poor people poor and uneducated so that they will continue to vote against their own interests and effectively continue to marginalize themselves, and meanwhile said conservative politicians keep their jobs and nothing changes. and even well-meaning leftist economists can’t do anything about it.

and MEANWHILE, youth activism is so intently focused on gender and race to the exclusion of class because most activists are college students, who have not really had to deal with the effects of Poverty with a capital P. see also: the difference between being poor and being broke. and activist language policing is so inherently classist in the first place because it serves to exclude and silence anyone who doesn’t have an academic background or the free time to read blog after blog on the internet to figure out why, exactly, using that word or that asterisk is so offensive and makes you such a terrible person even if your intent is, actually, good. so much of activism requires a significant time investment and a certain level of education that people who work minimum wage jobs and have families just cannot afford. so because they’re insufficiently educated, they’re regarded as insufficiently oppressed or treated like they’re actively part of the problem. 

(not to mention the internet’s obsession with degrading service workers who are employed by problematic – ugh that word, but it’s the one that fits – companies. “we went to party city and threw all the racist costumes on the floor!” “we vandalized the ‘girl toy’ and ‘boy toy’ signs at target!” literally nothing enrages me more than this.)

see also: the co-option of the term “emotional labor,” which originated as a phrase coined to describe the mental and physical toll of the requirement for service industry workers to display cheerful, positive emotions toward customers, which has been bastardized by middle-class feminists to refer to standard politeness and talking about feelings within any form of relationship, be it with a friend, significant other, or parent. 

i could go on and on. i won’t, because i already wrote way more than i intended. it’s a massive, massive intersectionality fail. i’m just so tired of it.