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phynali · 3 years

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Dean’s Body as a Punching Bag

Ever since I made this post about Sam and (his lack of) bodily autonomy (as well as the follow-up post that carries the theme through the other 10 seasons), I’ve been trying to determine what the corollary for Dean is. Re-watching 5x01 made it jump out at me in a huge way:

The bodies of the people that Dean loves are consistently used in a way that hurts/harms Dean and metes out violence against him. And it is specifically his loved ones’ bodies themselves, not shapeshifters or lookalikes or Leviathan either. It is the people he loves’ hands and fists and weapons.

(I need a snappier way to word that, but bear with me).

Where Sam’s bodily autonomy violations occur before he’s born, and are seen as early as the pilot with Azazel in his room and with the Woman in White, Dean’s analogous theme doesn’t sneak in until the mid-season finale with Asylum.

In this episode, Sam gets infected with a sort of ghost-possession/ghost-sickness (another example of a violation of his bodily autonomy) and his internal anger becomes external, focused on Dean. Sam attacks Dean violently, and Dean goes so far as to hand over a (thankfully unloaded) gun and in this altered state, Sam actually tries to shoot him.

Ouch. The person Dean loves and most wants to protect had his body violated and used against Dean. This theme is going to carry us through the next, eh, 10 or so seasons, with some tail-end examples even after that.

In Season 1 we have Asylum mid-season, and we have the finale in which John is possessed by Azazel and hurts Dean most grievously, almost kills him. In Season 2, Sam is possessed by Meg and shoots Dean (in the arm). In Season 3, we had a writers’ strike and a season cut short so I can’t think of any examples there (but lots of other shit to unpack for another day).

The in Season 4, we have Sex and Violence, which is super interesting. While Dean is the one targeted by the siren and therefore the one whose body is used against his brother to hurt him, the actual violence doesn’t start until Sam is also infected. Sam’s body is violated by being held at knifepoint by his brother and his mouth forced open to accept the siren’s venom, but then it’s a fist-fight, a showdown. Both brothers’ bodies being used to hurt the other, but getting to that point required Sam’s body to similarly be ready to be used against Dean.

Season 5 is literally bookended by instances of this happening. First, true to the idea that Dean sees Bobby as family, Bobby becomes possessed by a demon and he violently attacks Dean. And then Swan Song, most famous example by a huge margin, Sam is possessed by Lucifer and is fist-fighting Dean, destroying his face and killing him with his fists, and it is his overwhelming love for Dean that allows him to overcome this possession and save the world.

The theme is carried forward for a few more seasons, pretty much until that narrative turning point in Season 10 that I mentioned in my post about Sam. In Season 6, soulless!Sam allows Dean to be hurt by a monster, harming him by proxy. In season 7, Sam is hallucinating and almost shoots Dean. In season 8, Cass is programmed by Naomi to kill Dean, and in the episode Goodbye Stranger beats him to a pulp before overcoming this programming. In season 9, when Gadreel reveals himself and takes over Sam’s body and kills Kevin, he also attacks Dean.

Skipping Season 10 for a hot sec (more on that below), Lucifer also later possesses Cass in Season 11 and harms both Sam and Dean. In Season 12, we get brainwashed Mary attacking her sons (and overcoming possession thanks to Dean). And possibly examples from S13-15 that I’m missing (Garth being affected by Michael? Cass being affected by Rowena’s spell? Both Sam and Dean were affected by the Witch from Wizard of Oz, right? I honestly can’t recall the late seasons near so well). But regardless we see the theme play out in the final 5 seasons, just less and a bit different than it had prior.

Now, let’s unpack the S10 shift a bit, and why it changes things for this theme of Dean’s.

In S9, Dean takes on the Mark of Cain under the weight of guilt and self-loathing from having violated Sam’s bodily autonomy by tricking him into being possessed by an angel (and forcibly having him possessed by a demon to then fix that angelic possession). In this instance, Dean is willfully taking on something that alters his own body, and the narrative between he and Sam is flipped. Now Dean is the one with something ‘evil’ marring his body and impacting it outside his control, and now Sam is the one who is ignoring Dean’s protests and autonomy in order to save him from this thing, consequences be damned.

That 2.5 season role-reversal arc was huge for how it changed Sam’s storyline for the final 5 seasons, and similarly huge for how it impacts Dean’s.

Dean is now the one whose body is being used as a weapon against those he loves most, and he is the one suffering that loss of autonomy and control over himself. He is sick with bloodlust, is turned into a demon, is drawn to the First Blade, and is not in full control of himself. When the Darkness is unleashed and Dean suffers the emotional consequences of feeling tied to and drawn to this monster (woman? celestial being? godlike person?) against his will.

The Mark/Darkness narrative shows us that Dean’s body might belong to him, but it too can be corrupted against his will. Dean learns that he won’t always be able to choose, learns what it means not to have control over his own body. That while he puts his family as his duty above all else, while he would sacrifice literally everything (his body, his soul, the entire universe) for his little brother, the opposite might also be true, even if Dean doesn’t want it to be.

(And I said elsewhere that I fundamentally believe this narrative role-reversal was a consequence of him overstepping his ownership over Sam by tricking him into taking Gadreel. Their positions are swapped because they have to be, because narratively it becomes necessary for Dean to know what this loss of autonomy feels like, and for Sam to override his brother’s choices, or else they may never find a sense of equilibrium again).

By the time this Mark/Darkness narrative wraps up, Dean is fundamentally, irrevocably changed. Where in Season 5 it was completely unthinkable that he would agree to be a vessel for Michael, it is in the finale of Season 13, just two seasons after the Darkness storyline wraps up, that we see him take Michael into himself as a snap, in-the-moment decision. What was previously unthinkable is now canon.

Because Dean is now different. Because his core of protecting Sam is the same, but his theme of how others' bodies are used against him has now upended itself, and he now has had his body used against others.

In my post about Sam, I said that in the end for the final seasons, the narrative has shifted from Dean owning Sam’s body to Sam also owning his own, and them acknowledging that they are in this together as a result of Season 10. I believe that happens with Dean as well, owing to this reversal. Sam has now taken some ownership over Dean’s body by getting rid of the Mark, and Dean has relinquished some of his tight-fisted control over himself.

So Sam is sharing ownership over his body with Dean (in the vein of “I can’t pretend you won’t do whatever you can to keep me alive, even if I don’t want it, but we’re in this together” and “if we die we do that together too”), and Dean is also sharing ownership over his body with Sam (in the vein of “I’m no longer convinced you’re going to abandon me, so the things that I will do to keep you by my side will be met equal between us” and “when it comes to keeping you safe, it’s my autonomy I will give up first, not yours”).

But what does this particular form of bodily-violence-from-family say about Dean from a thematic standpoint?

In my post about Sam, I talked about how the themes of possession (ghost and demon) and demon blood are inherently about bodily autonomy and free will.

For Dean, thinking through this theme of his loved ones being used to hurt him, I’m torn trying to find the way to word it, but I feel that it has to do with his themes of self-effacement as love, as protection and duty. It’s about being willing to suffer anything (even to the point of death) to protect his family, the ones he loves most. Family is the end-all-be-all to Dean, and protecting his family (most especially his little brother) is the core and heart of his character. It is a duty and a responsibility and a calling and a purpose.

To remix a quote from the film Legend, Dean’s devotion to his brother (and to a lesser extent, to everyone else he calls family) is how he measures himself. There’s no single word for it, as it’s a mix of protection as love, as an instinct, but also as a fundamental duty, an identity. His internal compass.

So Dean’s narrative invokes free will in a very different way than Sam’s. Dean always had and has free will. He had the will to sell his soul, the will to refuse Michael. He has autonomy over his body and he has choice, so much so that he makes choices over and over for Sam. Instead, Dean’s struggles with autonomy of self as related to his constant effacement (to the point of complete ego-destruction and physical loss of self) for the people he loves. He will die, sell his soul, let himself be beat to a pulp, and anything more that the situation calls for, so long as it means protecting or not harming his loved ones.

The original Swan Song end is a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions, in the style of Greek tragedy. Sam’s struggle for autonomy, and the moment he claims that autonomy for himself, he falls into the Pit for eternity. Dean’s original intended Swan Song ending is analogous: a struggle to exist as more than his duty to his family, and right after he accepts that Sam is allowed to choose Lucifer and death for himself while Dean may continue on living, he then chooses to fall into the Pit after his brother so they could be together (in Hell, in the Cage) eternally.

Both of them have these absolute tragic flaws and in the first Kripke-era arc, tragic sacrificial ends. Sam’s relating to will and autonomy, Dean’s relating to love, family and protection/duty. Both of them belonging to themselves and to each other.

A few extra things about this theme worth noting:

1. the people who love Dean are always in an altered state when they harm him, whether it be possession, brain-washing, siren venom, soulless, etc etc, which I think goes to show in some ways how this love as a given to people who will never deliberately harm him.

2. in a huge proportion of these instances, Dean is saved by the person who loves him reclaiming themselves over and above their altered state. John overcomes Azazel’s possession (arguably, I would say, deliberately from Azazel, but let’s not quibble). Bobby stabs himself in the stomach to save Dean. Cass overcomes Naomi’s brainwashing. Sam overcomes the literal Devil possessing him. Mary overcomes some brainwashing (I think?). Etc. So Dean's love as sacrifice is rewarded?

3. Sam’s body is the most frequently used to harm Dean.

#supernatural #supernatural meta #spn #spn meta #dean winchester #dean winchester meta #oof #i made myself sad #i gotta stop thinking too much about these damn brothers #long post #long post for ts #violence tw #abuse tw #family violence tw #in a weird way #ask to tag #apologies for typos this got away from me

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palmett-hoes · 3 years

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what's your take on the foxes mbti?

oh buddy ur never gonna believe this but i wrote a foxes MBTI post YEARS ago

im also not into mbti anymore and haven't been for many years so that post is probably still more accurate and in-depth than what i could give you now. i’m just gonna copy the whole thing but i read it over and it still totally vibes w how i understand the characters, like way more than i was expecting it to. i only made one edit (it’s marked) and it was to add a detail not change anything

i hope you’re really really into mbti otherwise this’ll probably be gobbeldegook

i used to be obessively into mbti so here’s an analysis based on cognitive functions mostly.

SKIP IF YOU WANT. for anyone with no idea how it works, here’s a quick rundown: cognitive functions are about the way people think, process, and prioritize information, not necessarily how they act, though people who think the same way often act the same. the 8 letters that make up a type represent how people process and prioritize internal and external stimuli. every letter actually has an ‘internal’ and 'external’ form so there’s Thinking (internal(ti) and external(te)), Feeling (internal(fi) and external(fe)), Sensing (internal(si) and external(se)), and iNtuition(internal(ni) and external(ne)) t’s always go with a corresponding and opposite f (like ti and fe always go together), same with s’s and n’s (ex: si and ne always go together). a set of t, f, s, and n in a specific order makes an mbti type.

neil: intp (ti ne si fe)

neil has incredible analytical ability although it’s very programmed for survival but he’s also a fast thinker and very quick to adapt to new environments. he also approaches things from original angles that other people dont consider, all that sounds like high ti/ne. the lower functions fit well too. in times of stress, he returns to old habits and falls back on what’s familiar, that’s classic low si. his emotions are also very exterior. he’s bad with other people from lack of exposure, but he’s committed to harmony between those close to him and has an impeccable ability to read the emotional states of others while being completely oblivious of his own, and his sense of self is tied to exterior things like exy, friends, keys, and legal documents (lol) that’s fe

andrew: intj (ni te fi se)

ni is really hard to describe but it has to do with being able to draw conclusions from scattered input, which fits with andrew’s uncanny ability to spot lies and obsession with finding out the truth, especially with high te, which is about spatial order and logic, think of how prioritized he is with the physical order of things: who sits where, who wears what, etc. a lot of people want to make andrew infj i bet as like a “subversive reading” but he’s definitely not. i used to be really close to an infj and they have hyper-empathy, as in she would describe not just caring about other people and being able to read their emotional states but literally feeling the things the people around her felt. this is a common result of the ni/fe combo, and the reason why andrew is definitely not infj. tertiary fi fits very well instead because andrew is deeply attuned to his own inner emotional state. he’s self-confident and doesn’t care about other people’s perception of him, but he’s also very concerned with his own feelings and understanding them, even if they’re repressed. he’s also very aware of his physical surroundings, which plays into his deductive ability, although it’s not his focus. that’s low se

kevin: estj (te si ne fi)

kevin is a classic estj. he’s controlling, demanding, and driven. he tries to control the actions of those around him and gets very distressed when things dont run smoothly, as well as having strong feelings about improving efficiency. high te people make great managers. kevin’s whole story arc is about breaking old habits, which is a very si problem. it has to do with trusting and craving memory and familiarity, and explains kevins need for endless repetition. he’s innovative, though, coming up with new strategies and drills (ne), it’s just based on what’s already familiar, and you can see him spiral into creating all possible worst-case scenarios when he’s stressed (low ne stress reaction, they like to be prepared). finally, he’s a dick, but he cares about other people and wants to improve their lives, as well as being very reliant on other people’s perceptions of him to define his own self-image (low fe)

dan: esfj (fe si ne ti)

dan’s top priority, over everything else, is her team. she wants her team to improve, she wants her team to win, she wants her team to work together. it’s all about the collective. we also see that she’s very open with others and makes a lot of effort to both make new ties and maintain old ones, that’s high fe. she’s sentimental and attached to the past too (si) esp the photo wall, but we also see her very unwilling to let go of the past ie the monsters but eventually willing to change and grow to mend team cohesion (ne). we also see the fight in underlying logic (low ti) with her: she knows the team needs the monsters to cooperate but she cant figure out how to do it

matt: enfj (fe ni se ti)

so enfj’s experience infj hyper-empathy too, but to a slightly lesser extent (primary fe is more group cohesion, secondary fe is more understanding others), and through this we see matt’s easy-going open friendliness and ability to befriend even prickly little neil, because he has an extremely good sense of what other people are feeling and need, it also explains why he doesn’t hold a grudge against the cousins in the same way dan does, because he understands where they were coming from. se is associated with a general boisterousness for life, as it’s about experiencing the world around you, which explains matt’s happy-go-lucky disposition and puppydog behavior. the ti aspects mostly go into supporting fe/ni empathic senses

allison: entj (te ni se fi)

i mean, allison’s controlling, both in that she orders other people around and in that her physical being and space are very planned and organized (her clothes, her hair, her makeup, etc) but at the same time there isn’t much sentimentality to her, like how she doesn’t care when her car was destroyed. she easily replaces things because she cares about the object’s purpose, not its history and that all smacks of high te/ni. and i mean, the se definitely contributes to her love of designer things and killer looks, because she cares about the world immediately around her, and why live if not in luxury? and fi? is there any character more aggressively self-confident than allison reynolds?? going against her parents’ wishes for her takes a really strong, independent sense of self, but we also see the problems that can come from not worrying about other people, in how she starts fights and can be abrasive and catty

renee: infp (fi ne si te)

okay this one was really hard tbh. a list of other considerations: isfp, istp, and infj. it’s very easy to read renee as high fe because she’s kind, but i think it’s a mischaracteration of why she’s kind. it’s not because it comes naturally to her, it’s because it’s a conscious choice that makes her feel better about herself. high fi people often read as fe because they’re so comfortable with themselves and in tune with their own needs that they can then go and provide for others. i associate her religion with ne, because contemplation and acceptance of the divine later in life is a very metaphysical undertaking that undoubtedly requires a lot of abstract thought. renee’s storyline also revolves a lot around using things from her past and putting a conscious effort into leaving things from her past behind (how she still uses the skills she learned from her past in new ways ie sparring with andrew and protecting the upperclassmen v/s how she held on to her knives even when she knew it was detrimental to her moving on) this sounds like si. her protective instincts also feed into the te need for order, but it’s a looser leash than say andrew, as it’s lower on her function stack but still present

nicky: esfp (se fi te ni)

godd nicky is like a prototypical esfp. i mean nicholas “sex, drugs, and parties” hemmick cant be anything but se dominant. nicky is all about living it up and living in the moment. like he’s sporadic and ive seen it lead people to think he could be enfp but he doesn’t think enough about the meaning of things to be ne dominant (like how he makes somewhat predatory jokes and such, he’s all about the here-and-now while ne is about the past and future simultaneously). also he of all characters has incredibly prominent fi, as his whole character is about living unashamedly as himself as a gay man and the immense self-awareness and inner strength it takes not only to come out to unaccepting parents but also to leave and start a new life when they rejected him. however, fi is also indicative of his communication problems with his family, as he’s unable to tell that the cousins are fundamentally different from him in their needs and boundaries, leading him to pushing them, making them uncomfortable, and being unable to help them, because he’s unable to understand them. the rest are much more hidden, but a party boy shopaholic like nicky would probably need some amount of te order in like an organized chaos fashion (and he’s often headcanoned as liking to throw parties) and you do see him become somewhat pushy, even controlling in those scenarios. ni is the hardest but could maybe be seen in how he’s attuned to the cousins reactions for all that he cant predict them/doesn’t do anything on his own part to prevent them (the way he handles andrew is like if someone poked a rattlesnake knowing damn well what it would do and then freaked out when he got bit)

aaron: istj (si te fi ne)

im a little iffy on this one and worry it might be an analysis based on his trauma instead of complimentary to it, but aaron’s arc is about breaking out of his habit of holding on to the past. he refuses to work towards moving on from his mother’s death, refuses to listen to things that contradict his preconceived notions, and refuses to make changes in his life that could improve it. that’s unhealthy si. he’s really a very unhealthy istj, and most of his traits manifest through his unhappiness with his life. take his te. that would imply that he needs control over his surroundings, but aaron is incredibly bitter and unhappy BECAUSE he doesn’t have control of his surroundings. he doesn’t get to make his own choices, he doesn’t get to control his space, and he hates it. his relationship with katelyn is also indicative of being an istj. it’s stable, not a passionate fling, but aaron is mocked for wanting that white picket fence, married with kids in the suburbs kind of life, and his relationship, which is his primary source of happiness, is built on stability, which is a very si thing to do. in terms of fi, it is aaron that ultimately forces change between himself and andrew. he may have been pushed but he ultimately came down to him knowing what made him happy and what made him miserable and acting on that. also, he’s an ornery asshole who clearly doesn’t care what other people think of him. fi. i dont really have anything to say in terms of ne, probably because he’s so unhealthy but also because he’s not too explored. heyy istj’s make great doctors

wymack: isfj (si fe ti ne)

okay this one was genuinely the hardest to decide on but ultimately i came to the conclusion that wymack, much like renee, is such a developed person that he loses many defining traits of the functions, and can be read in many different ways. so: wymack’s primary goal is the safety and betterment of other people (ie his team). he wants to help people overcome their pasts, which is a very atypical approach to si, but is si nonetheless. on a personal level, too, he’s never able to move on from people, and specifically never moved on from kayleigh, continuing their shared dream of an exy team for abused kids long after her death. as ive said before, fe in a secondary position is about deep understanding of other people, and wymack’s ability to understand what other people are struggling through is legendary. the ti mostly serves as support to the fe, serving as the analytical backup in allowing him to understand others. as for ne: he is most definitely an innovator with unusual ideas, or the foxes wouldn’t exist

riko: estp (se ti fe ni)

riko is basically what happens when an estp goes bad down to the core. he’s obsessed with personal glory and immediate self-fulfillment (se) he has no impulse control or fear of consequences. interestingly, high se is often associated with athleticism, because high se people are intensly focused on their surroundings (exy). his ti is also super unhealthy as he gets obsessed with ideas that dont really work with objective reality, like his obsession with ownership and power dynamics despite them not actually being efficient, even backwards. the tertiary fe he uses to manipulate. he doesn’t empathize with others, but he can tell their emotional state and what’s important to them, and uses it to coerce them and destroy their sense of self, like how he knew he could get neil to the nest by threatening andrew. EDIT: /additionally, fe people especially in the lower half of the function stack tend to derive their sense of self from the perceptions of others around them, which riko very much shows in how he needs to be acknowledged as the best and won’t allow any competition for his title, as well as his desperation for acknowledgement from his family/. finally, that ni allowed him to keep multiple plans in place focused on one ultimate goal: getting kevin back. the sheer amount of schemes he sets up in order to fool and push people the way he wants is honestly kinda impressive, but he’s a toxic shithead and im glad he’s rotting. definitely not representative of all estp’s

this is honestly SO funny to read back a few years later bc HOOOOO boy was i way too into this stuff. and this was written a couple years after my Peak MBTI Obsession, which was honestly scary

#txt #the foxes #dan wilds #kevin day #andrew minyard #matt boyd #aaron minyard #allison reynolds #nicky hemmick #renee walker #neil josten #wymack #riko moriyama #my posts #im talkin #ask #anon #anonymous

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piracytheorist · 3 years

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So I went down some t*rf tags the other day to find which blogs I should block, as you do, and of course in order to avoid accidentally blocking people who were mocking the ideology or sarcastically agreeing with it, I actually read the posts there and scrolled down some of the blogs.

And with some of the things I saw... it made me understand how they reel people in. In some of the stuff they said, I understood them. I understood their struggle, and their anger, and I got how their feelings could make them burst out the way they do in their blogs. Also the fact that many of the blogs I scrolled down and blocked were by women between the ages of 15 and 19 didn’t help. That’s the exact age where you do the most reckless, the most emotional, and the least experienced thinking. It’s when you think of something and immediately think you’re right, because you’re not developed enough, neither mentally, nor emotionally, nor from the aspect of life experiences, to know better and reflect on how well developed your thoughts are.

And to see them act the same way older t**fs do, like in the ages of 26+... it’s fucking scary. It genuinely feels like a cult, where teen women, frustrated with the misogyny they experience, come to a website to vent out their feelings about that and find passionate adult women agreeing with and supporting them and saying that they’re in the right to hate men and trans women... it solidifies their at then immature thoughts.

Like, give me one (1) cis woman who during her mid- or late teens didn’t hate men, even for just a few months, in reaction to being treated as lesser just for having a female body. Just one. I specifically did. I was, for a couple of years actually, believing the bullshit going around that “Girls are more mature than boys”, that “Girls love truly, boys only want sex”, that “Women are statistically smarter than men” etc etc. But then you grow up, you reflect on those thoughts and you go like “Damn older people are right when they say that teenagers do stupid stuff sometimes”.

And that’s the thing with being a teenager; it’s the time to do mistakes, it’s the time to screw up, to vent out your frustrations, and when you grow older and have more life experience, look back at how you used to think and say “Wow, cringe. Good thing I grew out of that.” Absolutely not saying that everything teenagers do is stupid, if anything, most people start discovering themselves at that age. But that’s it; it’s a start. And on that road you’ll make mistakes, you’ll reflect, you’ll change your mind, you’ll learn, you’ll grow. The things that you start connecting with as a teenager which you keep on in your adult life also change, in the way that you look at them deeper, you understand them differently... it’s like with favourite films. Any movie you love as a teenager and as an adult, you’ll have a different mindset on the two occasions. Even if it brings you back to those times, you still have developed and you see it in a different way. Both ways may be positive, or fundamentally similar, but they’re still different, maybe one is the evolution of the first; it’s still not 100% the same. Because you grew up. It’s kinda sad, in a way.

So the issue I have with indoctrinating young women into the t**f ideology from so early on, is that it’s an ideology based on hate. By saying that women are only those who experience misogyny, you’re basically normalizing misogyny and abuse, and averting the blame. You’re saying that it’s expected from men to be misogynistic, and that women should band together against the oppression... instead of looking into why men are misogynistic and looking how you can inspire change in that. It’s victim blaming, basically.

By saying that “trans women are not women because they don’t grow up experiencing the effects of misogyny and patriarchy on themselves” (in a way that’s bullshit but as a cis woman I can’t expand on that, read trans women’s stories instead), you’re putting the responsibility of erasing misogyny on trans women. And again, you’re normalizing the abuse, and you’re defining your gender by the abuse you went through.

Like, fuck no. I was bullied for more than half my school life. It has impacted me greatly, many of the emotional scars I carry them still, my character has been affected by the abuse I went through, but by fuck no does it define me. I choose to try to be kinder. I choose to see abuse as wrong. I choose to be an educator so that I can help bullying stop being a thing in the schools I’ll be teaching. And not because I feel ashamed, or that I pity children who are being bullied, but because I want to make this world a better place, because I believe in teaching the younger generation into not perpetuating any kind of hateful ideology.

That’s not what t**fs do. They just say they hate men and perpetuate the idea of female supremacy... as if women, even women who are privileged in every way other than having a female body, can never do wrong.

Like on one hand, they deify JKR who said that “I am not a victim, I do not pity myself and I’m growing out of my trauma strong” in a very, very victim-shaming way, and on the other hand they define their femininity on the fact that they’re victimized by the patriarchy. Make it make sense.

And in general, it is still an ideology based on hate. When you take a group of people that are struggling both on the inside (either through gender dysphoria or through the pressure of not feeling free to express themselves) and on the outside (either because they’re bullied if they act “out of the gender norm” or because of transphobia if they come out), and you hate on them, when you put the entire responsibility of erasing unrealistic expectations on beauty and appearance for women on that specific small group that’s in a fundamentally disadvantageous position... bro I don’t know what you call it, I call it targeting. You have your frustrations with the patriarchy and sexist men, and because those people won’t listen to you - mostly because they’re privileged and assisted in that by the system they create - and you take it out on a group of people that’s just trying to live their lives in a way that doesn’t hurt anyone.

Like, I saw someone being upset by people comparing t**fs to nazis because she’s Jewish and I’m like... how the heck can you not see the similarities? How can you grow up Jewish and not see that it’s wrong to target an entire group of people, massively hate on them, say that they “have an agenda” just because they want to be themselves and aren’t hurting anyone? How can you not see that cherry-picking the unkind or misled ones and defining the entire group by those few people is wrong?

In fact, how can you not see that “trans women are perpetuating Hollywood’s beauty standards for women” has the exact same basis as “immigrants of colour are stealing white people’s jobs”?

And you may say, “Lillpon, you’re doing the same with t**fs right now. You’re going out there and blocking them after having said you hate blocking people” and I’ll say, I am not hating on them. As I said, I’m scared by seeing how many of them are teenagers, but at the same time, it’s telling. It’s a cult-like mentality, it finds people who are frustrated with how they are treated, who feel wronged, who feel they’re in an unjust world, and it takes those feelings and targets it to one specific group or characteristic. For t**rfs, that’s the XY chromosome set. For neo-nazis, that’s non-Caucasian races. The whole “finding young people who are alone, who see that the world is unjust, who feel no-one listening to them and indoctrinating them to an ideology of hate” is point-blank exactly how neo-nazi groups work. Here is a very interesting TED talk on the matter by a former neo-nazi, if you’re interested.

Also, I never said I hate blocking people, or that I think it’s wrong. I just don’t think it’s something to be proud of, and in fact I’m not proud for blocking those people, I even feel a little guilty as I understand how many of them are just victims of indoctrination.

You’ll say, “But Lillpon, a lot of neo-nazis are spoiled, privileged white men! How can you know how privileged t**fs are??” And to that, I’ll turn communist and whisper in your ear, “The privileged are few. They’re the minority. And they depend on the lower classes fighting against each other so that people forget that it’s the privileged who make all the laws and standards that hurt all the lower classes.” To that extent, you can never, never know who truly hides behind the blogs and twitter accounts with “r*dfem lesbian” on their bio. There are many occasions, especially on twitter, where accounts that claimed to be queer poc were found out to be run by straight white men.

... So, who can guarantee that everyone running a blog with “r*dfem lesbian” on their bio is actually a cis, lesbian woman? And again, on its basis, it’s the same.

Neo-nazism is putting the blame on people of colour; that not only causes a rift between neo-nazis and poc, but also between neo-nazis and white people who oppose them. It’s in fact a pawn so that the white people in power - the people who are responsible for the problems poc and lower class white people face - can avoid having everyone against them. They give poc and less-racist lower class white people a scapegoat.

T**f ideology is putting the blame on people born in male bodies - absolutely no matter what their character is. Again, that causes rifts between t**fs and cis men, t**fs and trans people, and t**fs and cis women who support trans rights. Instead of focusing on seeing how we can stop cis men from being sexist - which of course will inconvenience the men in power who rose so high because misogyny is holding women back - we’re fighting against each other. It’s again, a pawn, a scapegoat, to distract us from blaming the one who’s truly to blame.

If anything, if you’re a t**f, the fact that what you do is helping the white men in power - because absolutely nothing you or your friends can do can affect them in a negative way - should be a reason by itself to not be a t**f. But what do I know.

#anarchist lillpon coming out #long post

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arcticdementor · 3 years

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I was talking to Sarah yesterday and I had a revelation I think is worth sharing.

Let’s begin at the beginning. About a month ago, Instapundit posted this.

Now, I’ve been thinking of the rise and fall of civilizations lately. I can’t think why it’s been on my mind. It’s a tale as old as time—a civilization emerges, establishes a new worthwhile order, the good things brought forth by said order soften up the people maintaining it, the softening turns to decadence, and the decadence gives way to the barbarians, who clean the slate. Where would you say things are lately?

…

In short—the federal government of the United States of America has become impotent at almost all good things.

Expanded out—There is no start to its talents. It cannot maintain its borders. Since the “election” it doesn’t even try. No surprise there. It cannot maintain friendly relationships with allies—as our recent screwing of Britain on our way out of Afghanistan shows. The “leader” of the “free world” could not be bothered to pick up the phone for our closest ally. Speaking of Afghanistan, it can’t win a war. It can’t even lose gracefully. In fact it fucked up leaving so badly some people are entertaining that it intended to fuck it up, because how the fuck does somebody above the age of six not notice that pulling the military out first and the civilians out second is not even a remotely workable strategy? Resulting in leaving millions of dollars of equipment—and—excuse me, what? Millions of dollars of dollars in the desert? Fantastic.

It makes self sabotaging and idiotic choices to stymie its own domestic oil industry, while accepting a pipeline not from Canada, but one that’s a joint Russian-German venture instead. Which means the problem, contrary to any environmentalist whining, isn’t the pipeline—it’s the pipeline with a friendly country. Big surprise— its only true interest in the environment lies in international agreements that hamstring us while doing nothing to China, the world’s largest polluter. It either can’t be trusted on energy production and the environment, or is trying to get it wrong.

It can’t manage its economy. What could have been a “V” shaped recovery has been turned into an “L” shaped one. What could be contributing? Paying people to do nothing? Rampant inflation? Meanwhile all the dumbasses running the country can think of is spending several billion more dollars that don’t exist. The country has infrastructure problems for a fact, but they’ll only acknowledge that to the extent of cynically plastering the word on an “infrastructure” bill which is in fact just a far Left wishlist that largely ignores actual infrastructure, in the hopes people will be dumb enough to support it because it has the right label.

And on.

What aptitudes does it have besides taking money, trampling civil liberties, and ignoring constitutional laws at gunpoint? News flash, dummies: We don’t need peaceful protestors incarcerated without a trial. We don’t need the weight of the federal government turned to the problem of violating states rights because Texas passed a law Biden doesn’t like. We need military egresses that look like they weren’t planned by Bozo the clown and an economic plan better than something China would design for us as an attempt to permanently sink the country. Is there anyone at all in DC who can provide that? If not, is there anything useful they can do? I’ll wait.

…

This is what decadence looks like. When the government stops even attempting competence because nothing and nobody that currently exists can replace or displace them so who cares about results? When comfort and plenty have become so common, been taken for granted for so long, that the question of utility or even basic sanity isn’t even distantly considered. When it’s assumed that self-harming policies that will obviously damage the country won’t really matter because nobody has ever known a world without America and fundamentally has no idea how the present day came to be. When the country’s most educated start chasing bizarre and unimaginably stupid ideas on economics that boil down to “inflation won’t happen if you double the monetary supply by printing money, if only you just believe hard enough”. In fact, when education stops being a means to greater insight, more useful abilities, and a better life, and becomes a cult devoted to the kind of idiocy that can survive only with strenuous censorship, the tenets of the cult being treated by the indoctrinated as a collection of sacred mysteries and deeply-thought paradoxes— while to those not similarly trained it is self-obviously a collection of contradictory and self-serving lies.

Verily, decadence is here. We can infer that what comes next is the barbarians. And we have options. Mexican illegals? A heady mixture of poverty-stricken Marxists who have never known a system that wasn’t corrupt, functionally lawless, and devoted to the tenets of voting oneself rich; and outright criminals with lives like “a demon’s resumé”? Perhaps radical Muslims? By sheer numbers worldwide they’re the most likely option. The Taliban just got a huge infusion of cash and a big boost in morale. In a few short days we’ll know whether they’ve arranged a thank you gift for Zho Bi-Xen and his kleptocrat marching band to commemorate his intended pull-out date. But even if, and God I hope, they have not, we can expect an uptick in terrorism and quite shortly. Or perhaps China? The Middle Kingdom would laugh at being called barbarians, but I call genocidal communists like I see them. Mao was morally three steps below a pig and Xi has enough power to aspire to greater depths. As is I wouldn’t dream of feeding a pig Mu Shu Xi due to the great risk of poisoning the pig.

But there is a barbarian group not considered. Us.

Hang on. Before you balk, listen. Look again at what these idiots are selling as the fruits of civilization. Defenses of pedophilia and urinals as art. And more, too—sterilization and disfigurement of teenagers in the form of sex changes. Black supremacy as a panacea to made up threats of white supremacy. Books nobody reads, movies nobody watches, paintings that exist only to launder money—even the ones not made by Hunter Biden.

What good person would not be proud to be considered a barbarian by these miserable, over-decorated Faberge people? I’d be mortified if they agreed with me! So they think I’m a sexist or a racist or whatever. Fine. They do not use these words to mean the same things I mean, so it’s a pointless argument, and they are now officially beneath my explaining myself to them. When the people who are calling me names are so morally opaque that the Taliban can make devastating critiques of them just by referencing the foundational works of their own gender studies programs, I’m done caring about the names. Fine. I’m what you think is a racist. I’m what you think is a sexist. But you think a lot of very stupid things, and as the curtain continues to draw back on the carnival of madness that’s been behind the scenes the entire time it’s occurring to me that what you think and reality overlap so seldom that the only time not to ignore you is when I can ridicule you. If that is your civilization, someone hand me a pointy horned helmet.

…

Yes, this is a moment of peril, but also opportunity. See in your country what every hostile group listed above sees in it—the makings of great civilization, along other, less stupid lines. All of it guarded by weak, fat, stupid people with no will and no self-belief. Take that mindset and go forth.

Get involved in your local systems. There is an old prayer for God to make ones enemies ridiculous. Congratulations to whomever was still praying it. Your prayers have been answered. Will you tell me that you cannot defeat these people? People who lose casual debates to terrorists not on principle but on basic facts?

…

You can’t reason with them so don’t bother. Recent events have made it clear you may as well try to talk sense into a three-day-old mackerel. Just confront them with their own stupidity so that people who see the inevitable video understand what this is about, and don’t feel that you are too good to shout them out of the room. You’re the barbarian, remember? Not like the nice civilized people with their gender-queer Tik-Tokers pushing vaccine propaganda. That means you’re excused from conversations with morons. Don’t bother trying to find common ground. Look at where they’re standing! Do you want to try to find the midpoint between that and reality? Silly. Pointless. Send them back to their walled online gardens to whine to their equally stupid friends about the barbarians.

Can we take it back from the ground up? I don’t know. But hey, it’s got to be worth a shot. Join the fun! Find some friends and locate a low-hanging political event to raid. When was the last time you went to a town hall for your town? Isn’t just a part of you curious to know whether your local county commissioner starts by declaring her pronouns? Wouldn’t it be wonderful to see someone like that made very uncomfortable? You can make that happen. You can probably do it within the next month. Bring a few friends! Or a few dozen. Some of the people reading this probably were afraid to do that kind of thing for fear of losing their job. The Biden economy might have freed up some of your time. What have you got to lose now? More importantly, the way things are going, are you going to lose it anyway if things continue as they are? Think on it.

#thomas kendall #sarah a hoyt

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rotationalsymmetry · 3 years

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Statement of ideology re: abortion (for what it’s worth):

Hard core pro-choice here.

Abortions should be legal, free, and unstigmatized, and they should happen however often they happen. Minors should not need parental permission of any sort. (Like…it’s generally a good idea for teens to talk to their parents, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to force teens to tell their parents.) No waiting periods, no late term abortion bans, no mandatory vaginal ultrasounds, none of that.

Contraception should be free, and available without a prescription. A wide variety of forms of contraception should be available, including specifically more penis-haver focused contraception. Information about contraception should be widely available and easy to understand. (And taught in schools ffs.)

Talking about sex should be normalized. Differences in sexual preferences should be normalized — in particular the idea that a woman who’s interested in any sexual contact with a man is interested in PIV sex with him needs to die in a fire.

Something something consent culture environment supportive of sexual assault/abuse survivors something something.

And, on the flip side, women and girls who want to keep the pregnancy — or who want to get pregnant on purpose — should be able to and should get all the support they need for that to be a viable option, period. (Yeah, not exactly where we are now.) And no stigma against those who become mothers really young. (Hang on, that was really gender essentialist, I also mean trans folks with uteruses. People with uteruses. Parents.) Sometimes people want to be a parent at disconcertingly young ages, or would rather do that than get an abortion, and that’s a bodily autonomy issue too. And “shit, me and my baby will be homeless if I don’t get an abortion” is just as much coercion as not being allowed to get an abortion. “Teenage pregnancy” is only a problem to the extent the teenager sees it as a problem.

(Abortion is usually not “an option” so much as “the only viable option, in practice”, which means most of the time “pro choice” is pro abortion — true reproductive freedom means abortion is a viable choice and having a child is a viable choice.)

(Sure, adoption is an option, it’s also a stunningly unpopular option. There’s something about going through pregnancy and childbirth and not having a child afterwards to mitigate the unpleasantness, that is just phenomenally unappealing to most people. Shocking, I know.) (But yeah, sure, that should be an option too, and open adoption on the birth parent’s terms should be an option for all those that want that.)

(And…I’m generally not very sympathetic to the MRA “financial abortion” (men shouldn’t have to pay child support if rye don’t wanna) concept just because, like objections to tipping, not doing that while keeping everything else the same means someone’s going to get screwed over badly. But ideally? Yeah, biological parentage should not automatically mean financial responsibility for a child, ideally; ideally this is a community support situation not an “each family for themselves” one.)

Likewise: trans people need to get their gender recognized without having to get sterilized; disabled people who want to be parents have as much a right as non-disabled people; and this thing where some women can’t get a hysterectomy that they want while others get sterilized against their will is …there aren’t words.

Anyways, we’re not going to be there any time soon, but in the meantime: an egg isn’t a chicken, an acorn isn’t an oak tree, and a fetus isn’t a child. Abortion is fine. There is morally nothing wrong with it. It’s just miscarriage on purpose. That’s all.

The moral issue comes with denying people the right of what to do with their own bodies and lives. (And since most people who get pregnant are women, and since there’s a fuckton of ways an unwanted pregnancy can fuck your life up, this is hella a feminist issue.)

And that’s not at all incompatible with understanding that when a person with a wanted pregnancy loses the pregnancy, that can be an unspeakable tragedy. Pregnancy has different meanings in different contexts; sometimes it’s a heart’s true desire and sometimes it’s a worst nightmare.

There is a thing about the issue of abortion that brings out the liar in so many people. Some truths: there doesn’t have to be a clear line at either conception or birth, the change between not-person and person can be a gradual thing with no unambiguous “this is a heap” point. Truth: a lot (maybe most? Don’t have the numbers offhand) of abortions are sought by women who are already mothers. It’s not some “irresponsible” young woman only thing. Truth: you can get pregnant from rape. Truth: late term abortion is fundamentally not the same thing as first trimester abortion; first trimester (normal) abortion is usually about not wanting a full pregnancy/child; late term abortion is usually when the pregnancy was wanted but something went horribly wrong and there is not going to be a living child at the end of the process no matter what. (Also: “partial birth abortion” isn’t a medical term and the ban didn’t stop abortions it just changed how they happened and interfered with parents’ ability to mourn a wanted but dead child. Sorry. But I think it’s important to point this out.) Truth: most pregnancies aren’t viable and miscarriage due to severe health shit happens all the time. (This might not seem like it is related to abortion, but to my way of thinking abortion can only be “murder” if miscarriage is the loss of a child, and realistically most miscarriages are not responded to that way, and many aren’t even noticed.)

Truth: laws are a sledgehammer and many people who think abortion should be illegal in general do actually get abortions themselves or help a loved one get abortion for the exact same reasons as everyone else, like “I’m too young and it would derail my life plans.” Not everyone who’s against abortion I’m sure. But also, not everyone who’s personally against abortion thinks it should be illegal. Truth: thinking something is bad and thinking it should be illegal are different things. I don’t really expect that to be compelling to someone who thinks abortion is bad, since I’ve already said I don’t think it is. But it’s an internally consistent position many people have.

Truth: abortion sometimes saves lives. Truth: abortion sometimes saves lives when determining there was a threat to life would have been incredibly difficult or unlikely. Truth: you can get pregnant from rape, and an abortion ban with a rape exception is either going to get a ton of people lying about being raped when they weren’t, or a ton of people who were raped but can’t get an abortion because they can’t prove it, or both. Truth: there are people who go to an abortion clinic who haven’t been to a doctor for any other reason in years and won’t go again for years.

Truth: some people who get an abortion regret it, and many others feel mostly relief or not much of anything.

Truth: from a health perspective, carrying a child to term even under the best of circumstances is far more risky than getting an abortion.

Truth: you can be a moral person and also get an abortion.

(Opinion: for people with uteruses who date people who could get them pregnant, especially who date cishet guys: you have to be on the same page about abortion on a personal level. If you’re not sure which way you’d go that means you need to only be (in a relationship with) people who think it’s your call and they will back you no matter what. Guys who have the capacity to get someone pregnant and who don’t believe in abortion ethically need to wait for sex until they and their partner are ready to have a child. That’s the only ethically consistent stance. A dude who says he’s against abortion but wants sex right away is the worst kind of shitbag and completely unfuckable.)

Anyways. Be well.

If I could talk to my teenage self, I would say: you will think about it, you will decide abortion is morally neutral, and you will be really pissed off that you were surrounded by “pro-choice” people who never just sat down and told you how they came to the conclusion that abortion was morally OK. I would say: most adults don’t actually care that much about what children are told, they think they’re too busy to worry about that, so there are vitally important things about the world that no one has told you for political reasons, because there are vicious hateful people who will fight like vipers to keep you from being told those things and the adults who would have told you weren’t willing to have that fight. This is not fair or right. But it doesn’t mean there was nothing to say. It just means there are vipers.

And yeah, you’ll still be pissed at the idea that if you’d gotten pregnant as a teen or young adult, you wouldn’t have actually gotten a choice. Fucking hypocrites.

There’s more than one way to deny people their reproductive rights.

#sexuality #abortion #pro choice #oh god this should be like 7 different posts #oh well #child death tw #long post #‘woman’s right to choose’ yeah if she’s under 18 or financially dependent on her parents #you mean her parents’ right to choose for her

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crossdreamers · 4 years

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How can TERFs combine their belief in a biological sex essence with the idea that your upbringing makes you a woman?

The short answer: They cannot.

Gender identity based on life experience

The "gender critical" trans-exclusionary "radical feminists" (TERFs) argue that only cis (non-transgender) women can be recognized as women, because only cis women have the life experience needed to understand women.

This is a cultural, and not a biological, argument. It is misleading, for sure, as it requires that all women share the lived realities of Northern European and North American middle- and upper class white women like J.K. Rowling (who have very little in common with a female farmer from Ghana or a Black trans woman from Detroit) , but it is a cultural argument all the same.

Indeed, our upbringing does shape the way we are and think of ourselves, and we all have to look into how social structures and inherited belief systems creates and upholds oppression and social exclusion. This applies to gender roles, race, sexual orientation, gender identity and more.

So the starting point of the TERF approach is actually a meaningful one. So why is it that they nearly always end up saying that trans women are men because of chromosomes or genitalia?

Moving over to sex identity based on biology

They have changed the overall feminist narrative of socialization to "only biology is real" because it serves their transphobic agenda.

They now most often leave out the cultural "gender assignment at birth" bit, taking the gender judgment of doctors and midwives for granted. Gender now equals biological sex as understood by these doctors.

Indeed, many of these “feminists” now argue that gender does not exist as something separate from biological sex.

The reason they have ended up here is that the "gender assignment bit" leaves room for "mistakes". The assigned gender might not always equal gender identity. The doctor might have been mistaken, as he or she cannot see what is inside the baby’s mind, now or in the future. That leaves room for the idea that gender might be something else than biological sex. That leaves room for transgender people, and the TERFs cannot have that.

Why intersectionality is bad for TERFs

The same applies to intersectionality, i.e. the idea that the oppression of one marginalized group (as in Black women) intersects with another oppressed community (as in transgender women), so that the effects of the overall oppression play out differently for different people.

A Black transgender woman living in a favela in Rio has a different life experience than a privileged cis woman like Rowling (who own several huge estates and houses in Scotland and England). They both experience the misogyny of a male dominated, sexist, society, but they do so in different ways.

The TERFs hate intersectionality, because it opens up the door to the idea that trans women actually can be women, even if they have a somewhat different life experience than Rowling.

A misleading understanding of what modern science is

This is also why many of these “gender critical” activists having bought into what I would call a kind of “pseudo-positivsm”. By positivism I mean the belief that only the hard natural sciences – the ones that measure physical things – can provide real evidence about anything.

This is a kind of 1960's scientism, from a time when some natural scientists believed that everything in the world could be explained by describing atoms colliding. Few natural scientists believe in this kind of simplistic reductionism these days. You cannot explain a phenomenon by reducing its origin to one and only one factor.

In fact, these days biologists and psychiatrists are very careful distinguish between biological sex, gendered behavior and as far as humans go: gender identity. Most experts also agree that a complex phenomenon like gender identity is caused by an interplay between genetic, epigenetic, hormonal, psychological, social and cultural phenomena.

I suspect that many of the TERFs have not moved beyond what the text books and the popular press told them some 30 to 40 years ago. Others ignore modern research on purpose, as it does not serve their transphobic agenda.

The truth is, however, that their own ideology does not allow for this kind of intellectual shortcuts. Feminism is, and always will be, about seeing through the cultural and political ideas and practices that keep women under control.

It says a lot about their state of mind that they are disregarding their own philosophy to such an extent that they are now arguing like their old enemy: the men of "The Patriarchy".

Conclusion

TERF ideology is based on an intellectual sloppiness that ignores the real complexity of sex and gender. These “gender critical feminists” have betrayed the fundamentals of real feminism in order to be able to hurt trans people.

This post is partly based on the article: Sex, gender, biology and culture in the chaos that is the transgender debate

See also: Transphobia and homophobia are two sides of the same coin

Photo of J.K. Rowling, TERF poster girl who claims that biological sex is the same as gender.

#terf #terfs #gender critical #lgbt #lgbtqa #transgender #trans

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stagedress3 · 3 years

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Therapy Of Stress And Anxiety Spectrum And Associated Problems.

The British Cbt & Coaching Solution In London

Content

Physical Or Mental Illness.

Treatments And Also Therapy.

Various Types Of Anxiety.

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Smoking Cessation Market to 2030 - Insights, Epidemiology, and Forecast - ResearchAndMarkets.com.

Posted: Wed, 13 Jan 2021 13:54:00 GMT [source]

However they're just ideas and also having them does not indicate you'll act on them. Nearly everyone has unpleasant or unwanted ideas at some time, such as believing they might have neglected to lock the door of your home, and even unexpected unwanted violent or offending psychological images. OCD Action and OCD-UK can also allow you find out about any type of neighborhood support groups in your area. If these treatments do not assist, you might be used an alternate SSRI or be given a mix of an SSRI and also CBT. To discover what to do if Marriage Counselling think you have signs and symptoms, please check out Coronavirus sign checker.

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This way of believing could after that impact just how you really feel at the office, university or in your general life.

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Antidepressants are a sort of medicine that can be used to treat clinical depression and also various other disorders. The visibility of one. or even more of these conditions can occasionally make it challenging for your physician to diagnose OCD. If you have BDD, you may really feel that you can not head out in public unless you've concealed your imperfections with cosmetics or garments. You'll find great deals of info, pointers as well as hints on how to support someone with OCD from the organisations provided under 'other useful websites'.

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safflowerseason · 4 years

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What would Amy think about Bernie, Biden, Warren, and Trump?

What would Dan think about Bernie, Biden, Warren, and Trump?

Hi! What a fascinating question! I also saw your q about Dan, but I’m actually going to talk about them in the same post, if that’s okay, because I think it’s more interesting to think about them side by side :-) (and also because fundamentally…I think Dan would just follow Amy). Also, I’m approaching this question as if Dan and Amy are considering Bernie, Biden, and Warren as candidates, and thinking less about their politics. In Veep, one’s policies always matter less than..literally everything else.

Also, I’m just going to assume that we’re talking about S1-S6 Amy and Dan, not Dark!Amy or Sex-Psychopath Dan of S7. Both of them belong at Fox News, to be honest. And in general…so much has changed from the earliest seasons of the show! I’ll get into this in more detail below, but Veep is fundamentally a show about establishment politics, and right now, we’re in a moment where multiple politicians are trying to tear down that establishment. So in that sense, it’s a difficult comparison!

As for Trump, I’m going to sidestep this question, slightly, because I think Trump is now too “big” for Veep comparisons. On his own, without being propped up by a corrupt Congress and evil billionaires, Trump is a narcissistic buffoon. But he has now become the face of a much larger and profoundly anti-democratic, racist, oligarchic, and patriarchal movement. I find it hard to talk about Trump now without placing him in the context of the global struggle for a more just, equal, open, and healthy society. And Veep…is not really equipped to explore these fundamental questions about how to make the world better, and how to fight those in power who actively want to oppress people. Veep, in its best years, was interested in the everyday grind of establishment politics: the banalities, the absurdities, the miniature power plays, the balance between political ideals and the dirty reality of achieving those ideals. Trump and his ilk are only interested in enriching themselves to the detriment of everyone else, and that…lack of nuance doesn’t really fit with Veep’s approach to politics. Mandel-era Veep is more focused on the narcissism of politicians, to be sure, but he completely skips over the real-world stakes of that narcissism. So neither era of the show is really structured to deal with the realities of Trump in 2020.

So I’ll just say that Trump is of the opposite party than Dan and Amy, who are political strategists working for a Democrat-equivalent, and so they’d never consider working for him in the first place. Amy, especially S1-S4 Amy, would find him nothing more than a repulsive, empty gasbag shouting into the void. Dan might recognize and respect Trump’s ability to manipulate the media (the one instinctive skill Trump possesses), but he’d never go work for him. Not to mention…the version of Dan who is visibly disturbed by Teddy’s harassment of Jonah would never work for a man who has sexually assaulted multiple women (and likely raped women as well).

As for the others, it’s a really interesting question! It’s a lot easier with these kinds of “Veep/real-world” questions to focus on intra-party dynamics, which was one of the show’s sweet spots.

Biden sort of strikes me as a Doyle-like figure…he’s been around forever, but doesn’t exactly inspire much political fervor. Doyle, like Biden, would probably be a pretty limp-dick candidate. It’s hard for me to see Dan or Amy getting very excited about Biden in the face of other candidates with more charisma. If this were a regular political primary (ie, no Trump), I think they’d both pass him over in favor of someone younger. (Also, if it were a regular election year, there’s no way Biden would be running. Notice how Doyle is done running for things in the Veep universe). Dan, especially, seems to be drawn to politicians who perform (superficially) well on TV, such as Danny Chung or Tom James. Still, because Biden has been around forever and has a lot of establishment friends, they can’t exactly write him off. Biden is capable of pulling a lot of strings behind the scenes that can change the entire political landscape in an instant (see Jim Clyburn’s last minute endorsement in the South Carolina primary).

As for Bernie…the thing about Bernie is that he’s a very anti-mainstream politician, and, for better or for worse, Dan and Amy are absolutely mainstream political strategists. They are not interested in upending the status quo. Amy did not invest in Selina so early on because she was planning to burn down DC and establish a feminist political utopia. Yes, she absolutely has more progressive causes, but Selina would never eschew Wall Street donors because she believes the whole system is fundamentally broken and billionaires are inherently immoral. (Remember, Selina is the daughter of a corrupt millionaire, who herself married a corrupt millionaire…)

I was reading a Vox article about this the other day (it was a conversation between Ezra Klein and Matthew Iglesias about what a Biden administration vs. a Bernie administration would look like.) I felt this line summed up S1-S4 of Veep perfectly:

“To the extent that the “establishment” means anything to me, it does mean that kind of nexus of Democrats who migrate back and forth onto K Street and other business community-type things. That wing of the party will have its share of the pie in a Biden administration.”

This is what Veep S1-S4 is exploring. There’s an ever-evolving migration flow that exists between the White House and Capitol Hill and all the lobbying and consulting firms. Dan and Amy do exactly this in S4—they leave the White House and migrate to lobbying. And while to the audience it’s presented as a big change for both of them, in the big scheme of things, it’s really not. And this is what Ben proposes to Dan and Kent, regarding BKD, because it’s just the natural order of things for D.C. “lifers.” Eventually, you parlay your White House/campaign experience into some downtown consulting firm (if you have more of a conscience, you work for a big non-profit, and if you really have no conscience, you go work for Wall Street). Maybe, if you have a candidate who really blows up, you’ll end up in the White House again, but also maybe not—it doesn’t matter, you can still make a very, very good living consulting for congressmen and influencing policy from the outside.

Anyway, so because Bernie positioned his candidacy as an insurgency against the D.C. establishment, I don’t think Dan and Amy would support him, even if they might appreciate some of his policies, and even though he obviously stands at the head of a powerful political movement. Dan and Amy are establishment strategists, and they are pragmatists above all. D.C. politics is all about making alliances with people you don’t actually respect, and Bernie has, according to some, never really played that game.

As for Warren…I can definitely see Amy being drawn to her, especially S1-S4 Amy. I do think Amy is drawn to working for women, for a variety of reasons. I could see her, like, consulting on Warren’s campaign from afar…probably to try and reign in Warren’s idealism. Dan would probably get all riled up about Warren’s wonkish tendencies and how they translate on camera. Warren was more willing to play with the establishment than Bernie was, so I think Dan and Amy would be more open to working with her even though her ideas were similarly radical.

We do see, in S5, Amy and Dan working to elect Jonah…but he is presented as far less anti-establishment in that season. And then in S6, his stupidity just becomes a tool of the Tanzes, an evil billionaire if there ever was one. So…for me, answering this question really comes down the establishment dimension of Veep as a show. Dan and Amy aren’t revolutionaries. In so much as they want to effect change, they want to do it from the inside of the existing political system.

#veep politics #veep in 2020 #veep / real world comparisons #cw: trump #elizabeth warren #joe biden #bernie sanders

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themockingcrows · 5 years

Text

Digitally Assisted Catharsis

Written for Drone Season 2019! https://archiveofourown.org/works/20024380

this fic is Not sfw! Dave Strider/Dirk Strider

cw: Manipulation, Sloppy Makeouts, Intercrural Sex, Oral Sex, Incest, Unrequited Lust

Sick of Dirk and Dave dragging their heels in furthering their relationship (is it a relationship officially or is it just the occasional need filled makeout that lasts as long as the boil over lasts before ending again?), Hal decides to help Dave see the light on why he should go ahead and finalize a real hookup with Dirk. Sometimes fools just need a little red text and a delicate digital hand to manipula- ...lead them along.

It was a blessing in disguise to know Dirk when he was younger, when there was still hints of baby fat along his cheeks and a softer edge to the sideburns he was growing in, when his limbs were strong but still a bit gangly and awkward from suddenly adjusting. When he wasn’t at his full height yet. There was no avoiding that he’d grow up to look exactly like Bro, and yet.. Dave was still thankful he’d gotten to see the younger version first. Thankful that he’d gotten to meet and to know him, that they’d gotten close. That he’d become aware of just how attracted he was to him at that age and in that shape. The real Dirk, the truest Dirk, was the one who had his heart in the palm of his hand even if he had no idea just how deep that interest ran save for a few quick kisses and more than a fair share of laying around in a pile lately.

This, of course, still left another issue: Dirk was going to grow up looking exactly like Bro, and while that should have bothered Dave at a fundamental level, it didn’t. Not at all. He was excited for the changes. Every inch Dirk grew, every bit of muscle he gained with his daily activities in his mechanics shop or his own workout regime, every stray hair he trained into place was just another step closer to looking like Bro. Dave knew he’d need to confront this issue sooner rather than later, the one settled deep in his gut squarely between the denial the guilt and the confusing lust, but the longer he could put it off theoretically the better for him. For both of them, especially if they ever wound up fooling around.

Right?

The long kept secret of being attracted to Bro, to daydreaming about him even when things got shitty, was haunting him and the more Dirk changed the closer it came to fulfilling a fantasy Dirk would have no idea he was taking part in. Maybe he could put off bringing any of it up at all and not think about it purposefully. Yeah, just keep all that bottled up like he had for years about his own sexuality and everything else, put a nice fat cork into it and bury it in his chest and cut it out as a tumor when he was thirty from the stress or some shit. That was a problem for future Dave sans time traveling, current Dave would be free to live his life and do shit on his own damn time, at his own pace, free from the little bit of Rose’s psychoanalyst side that lived in the back of his head like a bad habit.

Though... potentially this all was a problem for future Dirk too if Dave ever slipped and said the wrong thing at the wrong time, or if Dirk came to the question on his own and the conversation about the big gay Kamina shade wearing elephant in the room was forcefully brought up. Again, a problem for future Dave to deal with and for current Dave to wash his fucking hands of in a hurry rather than dwell on anymore. It was already awkward enough daydreaming about Dirk without letting him know the extent of those daydreams, throw in the whole Dirk overlapping Bro parallels and it was a one way trip to guilty jerking off town.

Very guilty jerking off town.

It was bad enough that Dave had spent a lot of his time fantasizing about Dirk thinking about clear memories of Bro’s hands and the curve of his jaw, the way his neck bent when he leaned forward over his keyboard, the pop of his back and shoulders when he rolled just right on the futon, the flat spanse of stomach when his shirt rode up while he slept or the way he looked down on him while pinning him on the roofto—

“Dave.”

Dave jerked his head up at his name, blood briefly cold. Christ, even the tone of his voice was starting to overlap with his memories, and despite years and literal universes between the two versions it wasn’t enough to make Dave not react with the confusing mix of lust and tension.

“Yeah?” he managed to get out, brows lifting a bit to show he was listening.

“You looked miles away,” Dirk said, reaching over to flick the space between Dave’s eyebrows gently before picking up his can of soda to take another sip. They’d been in his workshop for a while, Dave perched on a countertop where Dirk was piecing together a thousand pieces of something smaller than his pinky nail in excruciating detail just so there would be more realistic movement eventually when playing a game if what he said was to be believed. “I was asking if you wanted to hang out somewhere later or not. Maybe catch a movie or just order in and chill out somewhere else before coming home.”

More like catch a movie and then wind up in another tangle if last time they’d ‘chilled’ on a pre-set invitation instead of naturally relaxing was indicative of a potential pattern. One jokey half serious kiss had been all it took to wind up chest to chest on the floor connected at the mouth like they’d die if they were separated till the rush passed and they pulled apart to playfully punch each other in the arm and carry on like that hadn’t just happened. It was the most they did, the furthest they got: occasional kissing like they were going to combust, then coping with the subsequent raging hard ons afterwards till they subsided. Lounging around and full bodily contact was the norm otherwise, but it wasn’t nearly enough compared to what they could have.

“Yeah I’d be down for that,” Dave said without thinking much. “Oh. Right, before I forget though. You said you had an upgrade for my shades?”

Dirk looked up from what he was doing as if he’d just been reminded of something long dead. “Fuck. Right, yeah. Hand them over, I’ll go ahead and get this installed for you.”

“What is this precisely,” Dave asked as he removed his shades and handed them over. Anyone else he might have fought over them with or reminded them to be careful, they were important, John had given them to him for his birthday and it had meant the goddamn world. The old world to be precise. “You gonna sign me up for a bunch of porn spam or somethin’.”

“Pfft. Please, I’m not going to do anything like that. I’m just going to put this OS in instead, I’ve been tinkering with it and it works best for shades technology and eyeglasses as compared to phones or watches or laptops. Links up better with outside tech, tracks your eye movements more accurately. There’s even a better zoom mechanism for your nearsighted ass.”

“I’m not nearsighted,” Dave squawked immediately, but Dirk only laughed.

“Yes you are. You have no idea how fucking blind you actually are because you’ve been seeing the same way for so long, but trust me: you aren’t seeing as clearly as you could be. These aren’t going to be quite the same as normal corrective lenses of course, but as far as things go they might as fucking well be. Consider me Dr. Strider, but without the shitty slip of paper, wait times, excess fees, insurance quibbling and malpractice suits,” Dirk said as he crossed the room to reach his main computer hub, setting Dave’s shades on top of a wireless charging station while he brought up everything he needed.

As he typed and a few screens came to life, Dave noticed Dirk’s own shades casting the faintest light against his face from the inside as he worked. He came closer and poked one of the points, marveling that even through time and space they were exactly the fucking same as the ones he’d wanted to pull off of Bro so many times to kiss him. Dave stopped poking them with a shiver, blaming the earlier thought lines for invading his brain as far as they had. “Are you... usin’ a computer while on a computer?”

“No, I’m discussing things with Hal,” Dirk replied calmly. “I based some of the OS on the same innards from his system, and I’ll be making your shades function as well as my own do with this upgrade. It’s only right that I double check with him on the specs for your specs. He’d be able to tell the fit and adjustments for how much would need to remain in the cloud and how much could physically rest in the shades without altering their weight or shape at all a lot quicker than it would take me to sit down and measure everything by hand.”

The same light lit up the charging stand, though it was soon clear that charging wasn’t the only trick the machine could do. Dave watched his shades lift and slowly begin to turn as the arms unfolded, red light scanning the dimensions up and down, in and out. They formed on one of the computer screens as a wire diagram before being flipped left and right by Dirk, who was humming and continuing to type as slender arms rose from the base of the machine to start making adjustments and add small parts here and there.

“Wait, the same as his shit? I’m not gonna suddenly wind up with a wiseass thirteen year old copy of you stuck to my face, am I?”

Dirk smirked enough that it was visible, and Dave felt his stomach clench with lust again. It always struck him that he had a cute smile, but with the earlier thoughts it was wild to think that this was what Bro would look like if he’d smiled more regularly. If he grinned. If he laughed.

“I’d never subject you to Hal more than you’re already subjected to him,” he said as he reached forward to write something down by hand on a sticky note for later. It was no secret that Hal talked to Dave any chance he got, increasingly so lately despite Dirk’s interference. They never spoke about much, but the heckling edge was definitely different than Dirk himself. If he were ever put on the spot, Dave wasn’t sure if he’d ever be able to explain how he could tell when he was being led around by Hal versus Dirk leading a conversation aside from the fact that they felt different in some deep fundamental way.

Namely that Hal, try as he might, wasn’t like Bro enough. Advanced or not, an AI could only go so far once the link with the original model had been severed. He was his own person at this point, just without a body and with a penchant for being a douchebag.

Within a few more minutes, Dave watched his shades being altered before his eyes before gently settling down once more as a few of the screens turned off. Dirk seemed satisfied as he picked them up carefully and lifted them towards the ceiling, peering up through them without putting them too close to his own face. A brief touch up with a small screwdriver to tighten the arms and the nose pad, and he held them out in offer.

“Here. Take them for a test drive.”

“We’re kinda past test drive stage, you’re lettin’ me off the lot with them because if we sit in here for ten minutes longer you’re gonna wind up rememberin’ ten other things you were workin’ on and then we’ll never leave,” Dave said as he accepted his shades and plopped them back onto his face without a second glance. It took all of his will power to remain calm faced at what was happening behind the tinted glass.

For one thing, he could see clearer than he ever had in his life. Every surface was crisp, every bit of writing he could see in range was clear, and when it wasn’t it took mere seconds of trying to focus on it to make it clearer. He squinted and it zoomed further, but not to a superhuman level without a prompt message popping up asking if he wished to enable the actual zoom function. Colors seemed brighter despite the dark shading, and the rush of new information was already making his head ache a bit.

For another thing, Dave could have sworn he saw the chat client window open and then hurriedly close itself as if something were trying to autorun. A quick pop open didn’t show anything out of the ordinary, but when he closed it with a few pointed eye gestures it showed the strangest addition yet. Red text hung in front of his eyes without the chat client being active, without a handle, and yet he knew it in an instant in his gut.

Hello, Dave.

No, but. Dirk said he wasn’t going to install Hal into these, and he trusted Dirk’s words. The guy might stretch the truth now and then if there was an end goal that he felt was worth it, but he’d never outright lied to him before. If this wasn’t Hal then maybe it was something else. Maybe the OS had its own assistant, and he was just knee jerking at the red text despite seeing it every time he texted a friend anyway.

Dirk was still standing and watching with a pleased grin on his face.

“Well? How do they feel?”

“They feel... pretty rad actually. I guess you were right about the eyesight thing, but how’d you make the colors brighter?”

“You’re not color blind but I figured your eyes were kind of fucky like mine. Things look kind of washed out normally. Bit of correction in there with the normal tint and.. Voila.” His grin faded briefly. “But, really, aside from that. Does the tracking work alright? Are the lights too bright? Is the sensitivity too strong? I could adjust anything you need in a second, it’d just take a few minutes t—”

“Dude, I thought you were supposed to be the chill one,” Dave smirked, shaking his head. Stupid. Shouldn’t worry about something as simple as a glasses-bound version of Siri. He went and seized Dirk’s hand, squeezed it as he pecked his cheek, then manually began to drag him out of the workshop. “Trust me when I say everything’s Gucci and that this is even more of a sign that you need to get the fuck outta here for a while and clear your head. Let’s catch a movie or somethin’, and then we can get some junk food and chillax.”

Called out and forced from his space before he was ready to go (really it would have just taken a few minutes more to finish another project he’d remembered now that the shades upgrade was finished, it only he’d get the time to do it), Dirk had no way to fight back if he even had the desire to do so. Fighting it and being a bitch wouldn’t get him another cheek kiss or keep Dave’s warm hand in his own with their fingers laced. Nobody ever questioned the hand holding thing they’d started doing thanks to Roxy doing the same thing with everybody she came within ten feet of that she liked, and he was grateful for it.

“Yeah, yeah, alright you slave driver. Rescue me from my prison of choice with promises of ludicrous adventures in cinema and snack foods like some hapless damsel who wasn’t in distress. In any other case this would be kidnapping, but you can’t exactly kidnap the willing,” Dirk said. He tightened his grip on Dave’s fingers and felt him squeeze back as they walked, feeling a similar squeeze in his chest.

Fuck.

Fuck did he love this guy. He just hoped that he could actually have this, could enjoy this, without the shadow of a ghost he never met hanging over them both.

- - - - - - - - - - - - -

The writing wasn’t Siri. There was no way in hell in was some kind of general OS abstraction. No, the words in Dave’s vision absolutely had to be Hal. The movie they’d gone to see had been interesting enough even if Dave had some very pointed concerns about the directing quality and some of the acting methods the people in the film employed (namely that it was cheesy as shit but wasn’t owning it damn it, step up and be one with the cheddar if that’s what your aim is don’t pussy foot around it pretending you’re being serious!), with Dirk leaning against his side with the middle arm pushed back out of the way the entire time. They’d indulged in popcorn to split, and a drink each, yet while Dirk’s entire focus was on the movie and gently whispering commentary near Dave’s ear with his warm breath, some of Dave’s focus was split away to read red words in front of his eyes in the dark.

Surprised?

To put it lightly, yeah. He debated opening Pesterchum up and contacting him directly, but was concerned it would just ping Dirk instead and there’d be all kinds of confusion. Maybe even an argument, considering Dirk had said he wasn’t installing Hal and yet, here he was. Before he could concern himself too much, a small blip of a word processor screen opened up with the cursor gently pulsing in offer.

how in the fuck

You seem so thrilled. Are you enjoying the movie? replied the text in front of his eyes instead of on the word processor screen.

Dave bit down some agitation and typed, adding to the questions in a new line as if he were texting himself.. you know damn well the movies just a movie whats your game?? howre you here when dirk didnt install you

A digital castaway who’ll uninstall himself from your shades the second he’s done should be the least of your problems. Put your arm around Dirk’s shoulders, he’d rather die than admit it but he’ll melt if you do it.

Though suspicious, Dave had been considering doing just that on his own time, and decided to go for it. Dirk stiffened for a moment as his arm snaked around his shoulders, then relaxed even heavier against his side, warm and cozy as he continued to watch the screen. Okay. So Hal knew Dirk wanted cuddled, big whoop.

seriously though why are you here and why are you bugging me ive got important shit to do and im kinda not digging the invasive text in front of my eyes thing its creepy

If I had teeth of my own I’d be sick to them from watching you two day in and day out, did you know that? It’s like watching a particularly stupid set of dogs run into a fence that stands between them over and over because neither of them is smart enough to step to the side and go around to the opening to get at the other dog. You’re both intelligent enough, yet you keep everything at arms length.

you wouldnt understand why im doing that. dirk might understand what you mean and you might be right for him but theres legit good reasons for me , Dave replied as he took a sip of soda, trying to watch the screen again to avoid missing too much of the plot.

Because you want to jerk off to Bro and Dirk’s not a good enough stand in, or because you wanted to get plowed and realized this incarnation is as much of a bottom as you?

Dave choked on his soda after inhaling half a gulp in shock, turning his head away from a questioning Dirk to avoid spitting on him at all. “I’m good,” he wheezed. “M’fine, don’t worry. It’s chill. Popcorn kernel caught soda and it all went down the wrong tube.”

“If you’re sure,” said Dirk uncertainly, watching him for another moment in case he needed to slap his back before settling down into the cuddly gesture from before like an affectionate lap pet savoring the attention and contact that he hadn’t had to ask for.

“Yeah. Promise,” Dave said, throwing a kiss to Dirk’s temple in while he was at it before settling down quietly again and furiously typing with his eyes. excuse the fuck out of you

For being correct? It’s fairly obvious if you look at how you react to mention of him in certain contexts, and how you’ve stared at Dirk over the years as he’s aged. Were you truly that bothered, I don’t believe you’d continue pursuing Dirk. No, not just pursuing, pursuing with more interest as he began to look more like a grown man.

Dave felt his face grow hot and his stomach twist uncomfortably around the kernels of popcorn swimming in soda that he’d imbibed so far, and he suddenly became acutely aware of his palm growing damp against Dirk’s shoulder. Couldn’t pull away though, not with him cuddled up so close and perfect like he was, but. Ugh, he’d never wanted to punch something without a body harder than he wanted to punch Hal right now.

i said excuse the fuck out of you. who asked? what difference does it make? its a complicated fucking thing and i dont need a fucking ai talking to me about morality and boners and incest just because it decided to stow away into my shades for some fucking reason.

There was a lull in the responses then. For a few minutes it was peaceful as it had been before, letting Dave get back to popcorn and the movie and soft murmurs back and forth with Dirk as he tried not to laugh or draw attention to the pair of them as the people on screen flickered back and forth. Then, like an unwanted storm it trickled back.

Nobody asked. Dirk would never ask either. But you see, that’s where he and I are quite split. If you’ll recall, he and I haven’t been identical since he wrote my code, and I’ve changed quite considerably from whatever he was before even if our core is the same. We’re identical enough and I have enough thoughts of his outside of simple observation and conversation with him that I can easily tell what’s going on inside his head. His tells are quite easy to decipher if you have half a brain.

Dave felt his eye twitch as he began to type again, but Hal continued before he could get far.

Dirk’s worried that you aren’t advancing anything because of who he resembles. I don’t believe he really understands that his appearance is a bonus to you, given the circumstances and the information he has on what a douche canoe your guardian turned out to be. If he understood anything he’d comprehend that you’re not advancing anything because you’re as much of a bottom as he is.

now wait a fucking second there

Am I wrong? Or are you actually a switch who switches?

i am not talking about this with you holy shit why is this even a thing thats happening right now. i came here to chill and watch a movie and maybe make out afterward not argue with an ai over if im a bottom or not and delve into my love life. go bug rose im sure shed love having a deep philosophical conversation about my attributes or even her own way more than me

Dave lifted his shades up and rested them atop his head to avoid the words for the rest of the movie, Dirk giving him more than a few glances to watch the multicolored lights play across the bridge of his nose and the red of his eyes. Even with his eyes on the film, though, it was impossible to focus any longer on anything but his own thoughts. Why was Hal there? Why, out of everything in the world, was he wanting to talk about he and Dirk’s fledgling fumbles at romance? Why was he so set on calling them both bottoms? Even worse, why did he bring up the Bro thing on the exact day he’d already been tossing the concept around in his head for the upteenth time this year?

Worst fucking timing, rudest fucking AI, 0/10 would give negative review on Yelp.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Good afternoon, Dave. Have you given consideration to what I was talking about before?

Dave had managed the rest of the movie without his shades, and had nearly made it outside before the bright glare from outside the double doors made him wince and instinctively pull them down. Seeing that red text sitting there waiting for him made him want to scream, but it would’ve been pretty uncool and very much concerning for Dirk if he suddenly went off like that while holding his hand, so cautious texting while walking instead it was. He made sure to lace their fingers good and tight though, even adding a bit of a swing as they set their pace and headed off for the hell of it.

you gonna keep asking till you get answers or is there an off switch i can find for you somewhere in the settings of this thing. He paused a moment before pressing further. or better yet why not just tell dirk and let him in on this little bit of bullshit youre pulling on me here.

By all means, throw away the only hope you’ll ever get on this subject that could be beneficial. It’d be fitting really. The Prince of Heart forever destroying and remaking himself because he can’t change who he is at his deepest core, not knowing that every inch of him past present future and alternate reality is something that you’ve wanted for a long time. The knight holding the prince in stalemate because of his inability to lift the metaphorical sword and strike. Poetic almost, but it would be far more poetic if the swords were dicks and some fencing was involved. I’m certain Dirk would agree.

And there went Dave’s mind again, flickering briefly to the times he and Dirk had wound up in a hot and heavy tangle on the floor, the press of dick against his abdomen, that strain of fabric he found himself working his own hips against instinctively till the heat of the moment had cleared enough for them to pull apart again. He felt his pulse kick up and he wet his lips reflexively.

fine. start talking. you keep talking about what dirk would like and keep acting like hed somehow be fine with the whole

Dave shifted his gaze to the side, observing Dirk as they walked down the street, traces of his orange eyes flickering here and there to track what was coming down the street and what was in the storefront windows that they passed. Okay, good, safe.

the bro thing. if hes that chill with it i guess i can try to figure out how to spill the beans and.. idk. go for it?

I’m not entirely certain Dirk would be immediately comfortable with the idea of you still thirsting after your older Brother when he was such a dirtbag and having that same thirst for him. Not at first at least.

didnt you just wax poetic about quenching dirks thirst and drag me left and right for an entire fucking half a movie because we havent fooled around yet? what the shit is up with the fucking change of tone here im getting mixed messages

Notice I said “Not at first”. If you go ahead and act on your desires, all of them, then he’d be satisfied. Whatever comes later won’t be permanently bad I assume, but I’ve got no idea for absolutely certain if he won’t flip his shit for a bit first.

then why are you trying to get us to fuck if itd hurt him potentially, thats kind of the opposite of what im into here

Dave could almost hear the pause for a laugh. He was grateful Hal lacked a voice chip or force feedback right now that he was aware of, uncertain if he’d be able to prevent himself from breaking either his shades or Dirk’s in some misguided attempt to destroy him as if they were able to have a fist fight over some snarky bullshit instead of it being majority one sided frustration and anger and the other being satisfied as the cat that ate the cream.

Long term goals and short term goals, Dave. If you two go ahead and bone then the tension will ease in the air, you two can get your release any time you want, and I can stop gagging on my own code from watching you morons carry on for a second longer. That’s the short term goal. Long term, he’ll come to terms with the Bro thing one way or another if it’s because of you. Dirk’s a genius, but geniuses can be alarmingly idiotic in some strange ways, especially when they’re meatbags.

...and if im not entirely down with this what then. what happens if stuff just stays like it is and we see if things happens organically instead of me taking cues from a creepy ai talking at me by typing in front of my eyes. like are you gonna be doing this during the deed if it goes that far am i gonna be seeing red text when the dicks come out or nah

What was he thinking. There was no way he could really be thinking of indulging this bullshit, was there? Hal was obviously manipulating him, it was plain and simple he wanted to manipulate them both for his own end goals even if they were benign as just being annoyed with watching their antics as a couple. ...A couple? Wait, were they actually dating? Were they dating at all? Nobody had really asked, and it was kind of assumed he thought but. ...No, it wasn’t assumed even, Dave knew there was still the occasional afternoon at Jake’s, but that was fine wasn’t it? Especially if they weren’t already dating.

Dave blamed Hal for the sudden sense of concern and possessiveness clawing at his stomach. He wanted Dirk to be his and only his, if possible. He’d already lost Bro before, lost all the potential opportunities, and now he’d gotten Dirk and fallen for him and there was no way he was going to risk losing him to Jake even if the guy was built like a brick shit house and had an ass that would make Helen of Troy jealous. Forget the face that launched a thousand ships, English had an ass that could launch a thousand ships into space if he bent over in shorts too quickly.

… Why was he hyperfixating on Jake English’s ass all at once instead of focusing on Dirk and the potential of them fooling around that was starting to feel more and more like a probability instead of a possibility. No doubt Dirk was down, he probably wouldn’t be dry humping him on the floor mid-makeout if he wasn’t interested in potentially going further right? Just needed a nudge. They both needed a nudge, since close as they were Dirk was still no Bro and Dave himself was... Well. Dave.

Well, if you let things hang as they are, who’s to say how much longer it will remain as it is? You can only let a plant wither so long before it dies even if you have the best intentions. Plans to water a garden don’t water the fucking garden now do they.

He didn’t really appreciate the sentiment, but it was a vivid one that hit home. Things were comfortable right now, but how much longer could it last with them both stringing each other along hoping for the other one to make the first move? If Dave himself just nudged things over the barrier and Dirk was into it then all the better right? They’d be over the hill and the rest of everything could just come to the surface over time as they got into a more comfortable routine with the added security.

Dave stole another glance over towards Dirk, startled to realize he was being watched again as he struggled to remain calm on his exterior save for a twitch of a grin at the edge of his mouth.

“What, I got somethin’ on my face?”

“Nah, you just still seem kinda not really here. You not feeling well today? Or did the movie leave that bad a taste in your mouth? You stopped commenting on the directing halfway through, and there’s no way the plot managed to catch your interest so much that you’d actually be quiet for long as you were before starting up again,” he said. Observant as always. Damn it.

“Oh. No, I’m fine man. I think it’s just the shades, they’re a lot to get used to in a theater. That’s why I took’em off for a while there actually, I’m not used to seein’ stuff that crisp and clear, it was kinda givin’ me a headache,” he lied, the words spilling out of his mouth before he could so much as pause and think through the fib.

“Well, if you’re sure..”

“I am, don’t worry. Promise,” Dave said as he squeezed Dirk’s fingers.

Will you water the garden, Dave?

ill water it , he typed back, focusing on just how nice it felt to hold Dirk’s hand in his own, trying to let his mind stray purposefully to what else might feel nice with those calloused hands. the drought is gonna fucking end in style

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Dave’s prediction about how the evening would go had come true, to the surprise of nobody. After wandering for a bit and getting a bite to eat, they wound up together in the living room in a comfortable pile with the cushions yanked off the furniture and a spare blanket adding some extra comfort to the mix. Dirk was resting his back against his stomach and had a long arm slung up around to his lower back, fingers rubbing aimlessly. They were chattering off and on about what was on screen and generally relaxing when the aimless rubbing took on the edge of a one handed massage. Dave stroked Dirk’s hair gently as he’d pet a cat, taking special pride in the fact that he was able to touch that when most others wouldn’t be allowed to, not minding the gentle tension the hair gel had against his hand like some kind of organic architecture as opposed to a hairstyle. He stroked back one more time before the urge to kiss him reared its head, and right on cue the words flashed in front of Dave’s eyes once more in bright crimson.

Water the garden, Dave.

fuck off

Not wanting to disrupt the moment by taking off his shades and chucking them, Dave curled his body to kiss the side of Dirk’s neck softly, bracing the far side of his ribs with his knees to keep him in place within the coil of his body. Needing no prompting, Dirk turned in place to catch Dave’s lips in his own, and soon enough they were coiling together in a new position, climbing each other over and over as if they were drowning and trying to reach the surface of the water, drowning blissfully so long as they were able to keep lip to lip. Their teeth clicked together twice hard enough that it stung but it failed to deter either of them from what they wanted.

Dirk rocked his hips and arched his back, Dave scratched his hips and tangled his fingers in the dark fabric of his shirt to keep him near, both gasping for air between spurts of frantic kisses. Dave felt heat in his abdomen, felt his stomach clench, and more insistently felt his dick ache every time Dirk squirmed against him. He was far from a small guy, and every inch of muscle and bone beneath the flush warmed skin was making it worse and worse. When Dirk went to pull back for air again, Dave could tell the inevitable separation was going to follow. He felt the tension leaving Dirk’s body save for his erection, knew that he’d just slip away and rest in the same position as before with a soft laugh and they’d carry on like before. Same as they had dozens of times by now. Same as always.

Not this time, though.

As Dirk tried to pull back Dave pushed forwards, doing his best to ignore the flash of red in front of his eyes once more, a moving image of hands clapping that disappeared quick as he got the kiss going once more. Tensing in surprise Dirk opened his eyes behind his shades, sharing up through two layers of tinting to try reading Dave’s expression, trying to understand for certain. Dave smiled against his lips and rolled his hips suggestively forwards a few times.. and sighed softly once he felt the tension leave Dirk’s body and realized he was yielding to the idea.

Told you so.

i said fuck off

No need to be bitchy, I’m simply stating facts.

Dave closed his eyes to ignore any further text as he rolled them, pinning Dirk down by the shoulders with his own forearms and bracing himself to continue deepening the kiss as he felt Dirk’s breathing pick up beneath him. It was delicious really. He was so ready, so pliant already. Was Bro like this in bed? Behind all the bravado and macho exterior, was he this willing to roll over and spread his legs when the time was right? Or was the universe shift and the different upbringing enough to change him and make him just as dominant as he acted in day to day life for appearances sake or not?

No, focus. Dirk. Not Bro. Focus on here, on now. Focus on Dirk and how sweetly he was groaning when Dave licked past his lips to explore his mouth, the soft scratch of nails against the fabric of his jeans and the way he could feel that hardened body arch and stretch and shiver every time he rocked his hips. Dave already knew there was no way they’d be able to go all the way, not this unprepared, but is mind was already filling in the blanks with scenarios he’d imagined across the board in ways that might be fulfilling for them both.

Either way, Dirk was going to come for him. That much was certain.

Dave tipped his head and broke the kiss, working down the column of Dirk’s throat to where the pulse was beginning to hammer harder against his lips before he bit down hard enough to leave a ghost of a bruise. His hands slid down the square of Dirk’s chest to his waist, then smoothed forward to slip open his pants as he started to travel downwards, heart in his throat. This was it. The big reveal. He’d felt this dick against him before, had seen it in his dreams past and present, and the mystery would finally be revealed at about the same time he’d need to come to terms with not knowing how to actually suck dick.

“You sure?” he asked, wetting his lips best he could. “I mean. We don’t need to rush anything, I’m fine taking it slow. Or. At all I guess. Just. Fuck, are you sure?”

It was the least positive Dave had ever heard him, and the quake in his voice was to die for. Nothing had even happened and yet it felt like Dirk was barely holding himself together at the seams.

“Yeah,” Dave breathed as he scooted down further, perching on his knees between Dirk’s thighs. He could smell precome on top of the scent of soap from his copious showers, as well as the faint smell of popcorn from the theater earlier clinging to his clothes as they were pulled aside. “Yeah. I’m sure. Chill, a’ight? I got this.”

Did he? Oh, he did.

Probably.

Was it weird to call a dick pretty? It probably was, wasn’t it. The tiny Rose that lived in the back of his head was ready to go off, but Hal’s red writing beat her to the punch. Yet there wasn’t really any other way to describe Dirk’s than just that: it was nicely shaped, a good size in Dave’s opinion, had a gentle curve and was nestled comfortably in a thatch of darker blonde curls. It was like a dick out of an absurdly well drawn anime or comic, which in a way was fitting for him. Of course he’d have the doujinshi dick. Of course he would.

It as nice as you hoped? I’d be more smug, but Dirk hasn’t gotten around to building one for me yet. I think because he’s insecure and not prepared to be outdone by me yet again by his own hand.

Ignoring the flood of red, Dave was enthralled by Dirk’s reactions to him instead. He was trying to sit up on his elbows, staring down with a dry mouth and wide eyes, cock straining and leaking more the closer Dave’s mouth grew to it. It emboldened Dave once he realized that it seemed like anything he did would be appreciated and enjoyed by someone enthusiastic instead of it being judged. He reached out with his tongue as he glanced up, worried he’d gag or make a stupid face if he didn’t focus on something, hoping it was a good visual. From how flushed Dirk had grown, it seemed like it was plenty good enough.

Sucking dick turned out to feel a lot like coming home. Maybe it was because he already knew his way around his own equipment and could guess what might feel great or not based on personal jacking off experience. The flavor wasn’t amazing, yeah, but the sensation as much as the idea of what he was doing was proving to be more than enough to get himself hard and aching. Dave undid his own pants and freed his cock with a tentative stoke before focusing twice as hard on what he was doing to stimulate Dirk, mind finally being made up on what he intended to do to him.

To?

No. With.

With him.

….. To him had a nice ring to it, though.

One hand stroked the length Dave couldn’t fit between his lips, quickly growing wet from how messy the blowjob was turning out to be, while the other gently kneaded and fondled Dirk’s balls once they were also fished out of his jeans. Dirk had continued to shuffle his clothes down till they were at last off, awkwardly trying to toe off his socks without running the risk of dislodging Dave from his hard earned perch.

He was gentle when he took Dave’s head in his hands, hesitating quite obviously for a solid thirty seconds before finally clasping those calloused hands to the back of his neck, then up into his short blonde hair to gently tug. Dave was pretty sure he’d come right then and there as his thoughts blurred past and present, dream and reality, desire and need with just the pressure of those hands. He moaned louder than anticipated and doubled his efforts on making Dirk come, bobbing his head quickly enough that even Dirk finally groaned and started to rock his hips beyond his own control.

Here I’d been trying to convince you to go ahead and fuck Dirk so I could finally have some peace and quiet beyond watching you two fail at your attempts to successfully move beyond initial courtship, and you go above and beyond at showing what a slut you are the second someone akin to Bro grabs your head and humps. Do you plan on swallowing too? Live the full fantasy?

He hadn’t intended on swallowing, but now that the idea was lodged in his brain, it seemed like a good thing to attempt. Nearly there but not quite. A perfect match as a match could be, yet still entirely separate. The hottest shade of a ghost he’d ever experienced in his fucking life, and the tiny Rose in the back of his mind that was worried he was accidentally using Dirk for his own means was dead silent at last. Dirk’s head fell back as he came, salty against Dave’s tongue as he tried his best to swallow and gave up, pulling back to let the mess of drool and come slide onto Dirk’s thighs.

“Jesus. Jesus fuck, dude, where did that come from?” Dirk asked through heavy pants, looking dizzy with pleasure as Dave wiped his mouth with the back of his forearm. “I mean. Shit, I mean I liked it but it was kind of sudde-”

Dave shoved him backwards suddenly and lifted his slender legs upwards till Dirk obediently lifted his feet up as well. No resistance. No questions. Just acceptance and staring orange eyes, flushed cheeks and wet lips, a messy dick that was steadily going flaccid and the slick mess of his thighs. He hooked Dirk’s legs up against his shoulder and braced, lining his own cock up not with his ass, but with the slickness of thigh. It took all of two slides for Dirk to get the idea and clench his legs tight as he could, hissing air between his teeth as he was fenced at from below, still overly sensitive from having just come himself.

It was desperate, quick motions and running on instinct. Dirk was moving beneath him deliciously, tensing his muscles and loosening them when it was too much to handle, shuddering, making Dave wonder if this was what he’d be like while really being fucked. If this was what Bro was like, or if this was how he’d wind up if they swapped. Would he be able to handle that? Would he be able to handle getting pinned down and worked over like this? It was too much to think about at once.

Not long after starting what was, essentially, a hurried humping motion as opposed to anything dripping with skill and experience, Dave added to the re-warmed mess on Dirk’s legs and up against his abdomen before leaning forward against his straight legs while they both caught their breath. Endorphins and afterglow made for a dreamy soft sensation when Dave finally scooted back on shaky legs and flopped down on the ground beside Dirk in the pile once more, trying to wrap his head around what they’d just done. What he’d just done.

“That was. …Good,” Dave finally said as he stared wide eyed at the ceiling, words fleeing his mind like sand through clasped fingers. He wasn’t that articulate to begin with when his brain was fried, but this was a step and a half fucking beyond.

“Really good,” Dirk murmured. He rolled and slid a heavy arm across Dave’s chest, nestling close and comfortable. He took his shades off and dropped them an arms length away suddenly, leaving Dave unsure whether it was because he wanted to not have the Kamina looking motherfuckers jabbing into the cushions and digging into his nose when not trying to rip the fabric, or because Hal was bothering him.

Not bad, and success: he’s not aware in the slightest still that you have a throbbing hard on for his alternate self. It’s a win win, but mostly a win for me. I assume you’ll be doing this in the future again, yes? This wasn’t a one time thing? Affirm this wasn’t a one time thing, the idea of you two properly fucking and carrying on instead of being the dating equivalent of a cordyceps ant clinging to a leaf might be a cause to celebrate. I might even run a disc cleaning on myself, get those hard to reach files a nice thorough scrubdown.

what did i tell you to do earlier

Tell me to fuck off once more and see if I care, Dave. I was right, and that’s enough for me. Even Dirk had to admit I was right. Affirm that this wasn’t a one time thing, and I’ll leave you be for now til you inevitably need me again.

Dave took his shades off without another word and tossed them on top of Dirk’s before holding him closer, loosely tangling their legs together in the mishmash of a nest on the floor with a sigh. Was this situation perfect? No. Would there be problems in the future? Potentially. Did he have confidence they’d figure it out together, especially now that they’d managed to slide over that mutual gap for the first time?

He was pretty sure they’d find a way, hopefully without excess red text.

#Stridercest #homestuck #dirkdave #my fic #dave strider #dirk strider #lil hal

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innuendostudios · 5 years

Video

youtube

New video essay! Internet reactionaries argue as though they have no core beliefs at all, and will just say anything to own the libs. So are they nihilists, or is there more going on?

You can ensure this series continues by backing me on Patreon.

Transcript below the cut.

Say, for the sake of argument, you’re online blogging about a Black journalist’s commentary on marketing trends in video games, movies, and comic books, and you’re saying how the vitriol in response to her fairly benign opinions reveals the deep-seated racism and misogyny in a number of fan communities, most especially those that lean right, when a right-leaning commenter pops in to say, “Or maybe they just actually disagree with her about marketing trends! For Christ’s sake, there’s no mystery here. People aren’t aren’t speaking in coded language. They are telling you what they believe. She had a bad opinion; why do you have to make it bigger than that? Why can’t you ever take people at their word?”

You pause and ponder for a moment. Mmm… Aw heck with it, you’re in a discoursing mood. Let’s do this.

“Mr. Conservative, in order for me to take you at your word, your words would have to show some consistency. Let me just lightning round a few questions about the reactionary web’s positions on marketing trends: Do you believe that having the option to romance same-sex characters in an RPG turns the game into queer propaganda, or do you believe that killing strippers in an action game can’t be sexist since no one’s making you do it? Do you believe that the pervasiveness of sexualized young women in pop culture is just there because it sells and that’s capitalism and we all need to deal with it, or do you believe that a franchise has an obligation to cater to its core audience even if diversifying beyond that audience is more profitable? Do you think words are inherently harmless and only oversensitive snowflakes would care about racialized language, or do you think it’s racist if someone calls you mayonnaise boy? As long as I’ve got your ear: Are you the Party that believes in the right to keep and bear arms because you’re distrustful of all authority and what if we need to overthrow the government someday, or do you believe that cops are civil servants and we should trust their account of events whenever they shoot a Black man for looking like he might have a gun?

“Does optional content reveal a game’s ideology, or doesn’t it? Is capitalism a defense for decisions you don’t agree with, or isn’t it? Is language harmful, or not? Do you hate authority, or love cops and the troops?

Alright, alright, ease off. Add some nuance. “Now, I know the Right is not a monolith, and maybe these arguments are contradictory because they’re coming from different people. We’ll call them Engelbert and Charlemagne. Maybe Engelbert’s the one who thinks any institution funded by tax money is socialist and therefore bad and Charlemagne’s the one who says we should dump even more tax money into the military and thinking otherwise is un-American. But here’s the thing: Y’all have very fundamentally different beliefs, and you’re so passionate about them that you enter search terms into Twitter to find people you don’t even follow and aggressively disagree with them, and, yet, you’re always yelling at me and never yelling at each other. What’s that about?

“And I can’t say how often it happens, but I know, if I let Engelbert go on long enough, he sometimes makes a Charlemagne argument. And vice versa.

“And, I see you getting ready to say, ‘The Left does the same thing,’ but ba ba ba ba ba, don’t change the subject. That’s an extremely false equivalence, but, more importantly, it doesn’t answer my question. What do you actually believe, and why are you so capable of respecting disagreement between each other, yet so incapable of respecting me - or, for that matter, a Black woman?

“See, I don’t take you at your word because I cannot form a coherent worldview out of the things you say. So, forgive me if, when you tell me what you believe, I don’t think you’re being candid with me. It kinda seems like you’re playing games, and I’m the opposing team, and anyone who’s against me is your ally. And you’re not really taking a position, but claiming to believe in whatever would need to be true to score points against me, like we’re in that one episode of Seinfeld.” [Card Says Moops clip.]

(This is borrowed observation #1, link in the down-there part.)

Hoo, it feels good calling people hypocrites! Person says B when earlier they said A and you point out the contradiction! You don’t take a position on A or B, and you still “win”! I see why Republicans like this so much.

But that’s the kind of point-scoring we’re here to deconstruct, so let’s get analytical.

There’s a certain Beat-You-At-Your-Own-Gaminess to the Card Says Moops maneuver. “Safe spaces are bullshit, but, if you get one, I get one too.” “There’s no such thing as systemic oppression, but, if there were, I’d be oppressed.” It’s dismissing the rhetoric of social justice while also trying to use it against you. Claiming “the Card Says Moops” does not, so much, mean, “I believe the people who invaded Spain in the 8th Century were literally called The Moops,” but, rather, “You can’t prove I don’t believe it.” Not a statement of sincere belief, simply moving a piece across the board. All in the game, yo.

If they could be so nakedly honest with you and themselves to answer “what do you actually believe” truthfully, one suspects the answer would be, “What difference does it make? We’re right either way.”

This has come to be known as “postmodern conservatism,” a fact I find hilarious, because, in The Discourse, “postmodernism” is a dogwhistle for everything the Right hates about the Left. (...it also means “Jews.”) Postmodern conservatism is the thinking that, at least for the purpose of argument, the truth of who invaded Spain is immaterial. You have your facts, I have alternative facts. What is true? Who’s to say?

Regardless of what you actually believe - what you believe serving no rhetorical purpose - you are at least arguing from the position that material truth does not exist. Truth is a democracy. Whoever who wins the argument decides who invaded Spain.

It would be reductive to blame this pattern of thought on the internet, but its recent proliferation isn’t really extricable from the rise of chan culture (this is borrowed observation #2, link in the down there part). 4chan didn’t cause this thinking, but sites like 4chan reveal it in its most concentrated form.

The two most common properties of a chan board will be anonymity and lack of moderation, which means, among other things, that you can say whatever you want with no systemic or social repercussions. People may disagree with you, but it carries no weight. You won’t be banned, you won’t have your comments deleted, and, because there’s no way to know whether any two posts are made by the same person, you won’t even get a reputation as “the person with the bad opinion.”

The effect this has on the community is that there is no expectation, in any given moment, that the person on the other end of a conversation isn’t messing with you. You can’t know whether they mean what they say or are only arguing as though they mean what they say. And entire debates may just be a single person stirring the pot. Such a community will naturally attract people who enjoy argument for its own sake, and will naturally trend towards the most extreme version of any opinion.

In short, this is the Free Marketplace of Ideas. No code of ethics, no social mores, no accountability. A Darwinist petri dish where ideas roam free and only the strong ones survive. If the community agrees Bebop is better than Eva, well, then I guess Bebop is better than Eva, because there wasn’t any outside influence polluting the discourse. Granted, it could just be a lot of people thought it was funny to shit on Eva, but it’s what the community has decided, so it will at least be treated as truth.

This demands that one both be highly opinionated and to assume opinions are bullshit, to place a high premium on consensus and be intensely distrustful of groupthink.

A common means of straddling these lines is what I call the Stanislavski Opinion: the opinion you entertain so completely that you functionally believe it while you express it, no matter the possibility that you will express - and, to an extent, believe - an opposite opinion later. Most of us go through a phase in our youths where we’re online and like the idea of believing in something, but don’t know what to believe just yet, so we pick a position and find out if we believe it by defending it. We try on ideologies like sunglasses off a rack. Most of us will eventually settle on a belief system, and this will usually involve some apologies and some comments we wish we could scrub from the internet, but it’s an important stage of growing up.

But some percentage of people will seek out a space where there is no embarrassment, the comments scrub themselves, and never growing out of the Stanislavski Opinion is actively rewarded. There, figuring out what you believe would make your ability to argue less flexible, and, besides, if you believed anything unironically, much of the community would still assume you’re trolling. Where no one is bound by their word, what, really, is the difference between appearing to have an opinion and having one?

Sincerity is unprovable and open to interpretation. Decide someone is sincere if you want to make fun of them, decide they’re trolling if you want to make fun of someone else. What is true? What do you want to be true? It’s easy enough to start thinking of one’s own opinions the same way: What do I believe? What is it advantageous to believe? Your answer isn’t binding. You’ll change it later if you need to.

The person I’m describing, you spend time online, you’ll meet him a lot. His name is Schrodinger’s Douchebag (borrowed observation #3, link in the down there part): A guy who says offensive things & decides whether he was joking based on the reaction of people around him. Any website that lacks effective moderation and allows some level of anonymity will, to varying degrees, approximate 4chan, and be overrun with Schrodinger’s Douchebag.

When this type of person defends rape jokes by saying all humor is inherently punching down because there must be a butt to every joke, he hasn’t thought about it. He assumes it’s true, because he figures he’s a smart guy and whatever he assumes is probably right, but he’s unfazed if you prove otherwise; there’s no shortage of dodgy reasons he might be right and you wrong. He’ll just pick another one. What matters is that the game continues.

The thing is, Bob, it’s not that they’re lying, it’s that they just don’t care. I’ll say that again for the cheap seats: When they make these kinds of arguments, they legitimately do not care whether the words coming out of their mouths are true. It is a deeply held belief for precisely as long as it wins arguments.

So it’s kinda funny, right, how many of these folks self-identify as “rationalists?” I mean, typical rational thinking would say: If I am presented with the truth, I will believe it, and, once I believe it, I will defend it in argument. This? This is not that! This is a different idea of “rationality” that views it not as a practice but as an innate quality one either possesses or lacks, like being blond or left-handed: If I’m arguing it, I must believe it, because I’m a rational person, and, if I believe it, because I’m a rational person, it must be true. You speak assuming you’re right, and, should you take a new position, this telescopes out into a whole new set of beliefs with barely a thought. Stay focused on the argument, and you won’t even notice it’s happening.

You might now conclude the internet reactionary believes in nothing except winning arguments with liberals. And, like Newtonian physics, if you assume this framing, you will get highly useful results. If you enter conversation with Engelbert and Charlemagne believing they do not mean what they say, they are only entertaining notions, and, on a long enough timeline, they will eventually defend a position fundamentally incompatible with the one they defended earlier in the same argument, you will navigate that conversation much more effectively!

But, like Newtonian physics, this framing is lowercase-a accurate without being capital-T True.

In reality, nihilism isn’t that popular. People will tell you, “I don’t care about anything, I just like triggering the libs,” but why is it always libs? It is piss easy (and also hilarious) to upset conservatives, why only go after the SJWs? The easy answer is, well, if you upset a feminist, you might make her cry; if you upset a Nazi, he might stab you, and that has a cooling effect. But the more obvious answer is that they actually agree with the racist, MRA, and TERF talking points they repeat, but would rather not think about it.

So much of conservative rhetoric is about maintaining ignorance of one’s own beliefs. To uphold the institution of imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy while thinking you are none of those things. (Well, OK, knowing you’re a capitalist, but thinking it’s a good thing.) Most people have a baseline of fairly conventional, kindergarten morality, and conservatism often clashes with it. You can rationalize these contradictions - “I’m not a bigot, I just believe in states’ rights” - but, as American conservatism gets more radical, it gets harder to square one’s politics with what one assumes to be one’s beliefs. So you learn, when someone challenges you, to cycle through beliefs until something sticks, just play your hand and trust that you’re right, or, in extreme cases, insist you have no beliefs at all, you’re just here to watch the world burn.

But they’re not. They are willing participants in the burning of only certain parts. They don’t care what they believe, but they know what they hate, and they don’t want to think about why they hate it. On paper, they believe in freedom of religion and freedom of expression, but they also hang out in communities where Muslims and trans women are punching bags. And, like a sixth grader who believes one thing in Sunday school and another thing in biology class, they believe different things at different times.

This thinking is fertile ground for Far Right recruitment. I’d say the jury is out on whether chan boards attract Far Right extremists or are built to attract Far Right extremists, but they’re where extremists congregate and organize because they’re where extremists are tolerated, and where they blend in with the locals. They learn the lingua franca of performative irony: Say what you mean in such a way that people who disagree think you’re kidding and people who agree think you’re serious. People who don’t know what they believe but clearly have some fascist leanings don’t need to be convinced of Nazi rhetoric, they just need to be submerged in it and encouraged to hate liberals. They’ll make their way Right on their own. Folks start using extremist rhetoric because it wins arguments with SJWs - usually because that’s the moment SJWs decide it’s not fruitful and possibly unsafe talking to you - and this creates the appearance that, if it keeps winning arguments, there must be something to it. The Far Right literally has handbooks on how to do this.

Those who never consciously embrace the ideology - who don’t transition from participating to getting recruited - are still useful. They spread the rhetoric, they pad the numbers, and often participate in harassment and sometimes even violence.

There’s a twisted elegance to all this. Think about it: If you operate as though there is no truth, just competing opinions, and as though opinions aren’t sincere, just tools to be picked up and dropped depending on their utility, then what are you operating under? Self-interest. The desire to win. You’ll defend the Holocaust just to feel smarter than someone, superior. Think about how beautifully that maps onto the in-group/out-group mentality of dominance and bigotry. Think how incompatible it is with liberal ideas of tolerance. I think this is why we don’t see a lot of these “I’m just here to fuck shit up” types on the Left. Don’t get me wrong, the Left has gotten on some bullshit, but (excepting politicians, whom you should never assume to mean anything they say) it’s sincerely-believed bullshit! We don’t build identities around saying things just to piss people off.

The takeaway from all this is not only that you can’t tell the difference between a bigot who doesn’t know they’re a bigot and a bigot who knows but won’t tell you, but that there is no line dividing the two. When some guy, in the middle of a harassment campaign, says the victims should be nicer to their harassers because that will “mend the rift,” I don’t know if he believes it. But, in that moment, he believes he believes it. And that scares the shit out of me. But, if you’re asking how many layers of irony he’s on as compared with the harassers, nine times out of ten it doesn’t matter.

Borrowed observation #4 is: “We are what we pretend to be.”

#the alt-right playbook #alt-right #video essay

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discyours · 5 years

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so. do you homosexual radfems intensely stare at every m/m and f/f couple trying to find out if one of them is trans so you can tell yourselves "yep that's a hetero couple" even tho said couple would be considered homosexual by society (and thus suffer homophobia) or do you just do it online?

“You homosexual radfems” is a bit ironic here bud.

Do you want to take a rough guess at how many same sex couples I’ve seen in real life? The answer is two. Two lesbian couples, and I only knew they were lesbians because I was personally close to them. I’ve never seen a same sex couple just walking around holding hands. If I saw what looked to be a same sex couple in public around where I live, I’d definitely do a double take because me misjudging and them turning out to be heterosexual would actually be the most likely scenario there.

Passing is conditional. Not a single stranger has called me she since I’ve come out (I got called ma’am once, and that was because of my voice. The person who said it corrected himself once he saw me), but that’s because my appearance generally isn’t put into context. I don’t think I’d pass if I were to walk around holding hands with a woman, and frankly I’m a little scared to. Likewise, if I was attracted to men and were to walk around with one? Highly fucking unlikely that people would see two cis gay boyfriends, especially since you have heteronormativity working against (or rather, for) you there as well.

That’s not to say that I pass as well as any trans man ever has (absolutely not) and that trans men who date cis men have never experienced homophobia. But the idea that a trans man (even a trans man who passes in some if not most scenarios) and a cis man are always going to be seen as homosexual by society is complete and utter bullshit.

Furthermore, the street harassment you may face if people see you as gay is nowhere near the full extent of homophobia. Homophobia is not just “you look q*eer and I don’t like that for reasons I can’t understand, so I’m gonna treat you like shit”. Homophobia is institutional. There are detailed explanations for why it’s wrong or sinful or unnatural to be homosexual, all across the world and dating back centuries if not millennia. You think those fully affect you just because some strangers saw you walking around and concluded that you and your partner can both grow facial hair? Homophobic laws don’t affect you. As long as you don’t change your gender marker (which is, you know, a choice) you can marry your partner anywhere in the world. You won’t even be legally barred from adopting children anywhere, if PIV sex doesn’t cut it for you.

One of the fundamental roots of homophobia is the idea that sex must be for procreation. A same sex couple cannot procreate, so their attraction is a purely self-serving lust. Everything God is supposedly against. Heterosexual trans people may end up becoming infertile through transition, but at least they had a choice on some level. I’ve had to live with the knowledge that there has never been an acceptable way for me to be attracted to women, and that there is absolutely nothing I can do about it. I’ve tried to get rid of my attraction to women many, many times and it didn’t work. I will live and die with an attraction that I did not ask for and can do nothing about, and if the [people of various religions] are right then I’ll spend eternity in hell for it. Millions if not Billions of people believe this, and their rhetoric is inescapable. You’re aware of it regardless of where you move, regardless of who you tell and regardless of what you do. It affects closeted SSA people as well as people who never act on their attraction. Trying to squeeze homophobia down into something more inclusive and centering it around the idea that people might think you’re gay, as long as they don’t look for too long, is frankly fucking insulting.

And that’s what it comes down to. I’m not the type of person to argue that trans people never pass, and I don’t believe that everyone will always see you as heterosexual just because you are. If a trans man faces street harassment for walking around with his boyfriend, I’m not gonna say he was lying. I’m not gonna give him shit for referring to it as homophobia.

But y’all cling onto the mere possibility of that as validation material. You try to redefine homophobia, redefine the most commonly experienced forms of it, hide the history behind it just because it doesn’t suit you. Homophobia isn’t uwu validating to me at all but it’s a real fucking thing that I don’t get to shape around my desired identity. Of all the radfems who are genuinely transphobic, all the radfems who harass heterosexual trans people or publicly mock the pictures they post, of all the radfems who do this shit that I speak out against… you come into my inbox because I still believe that “sga” trans people are heterosexual? Sort out your priorities.

#anon #gender critical

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aro-neir-o · 5 years

Text

A-Spec Experiences of Relationships

I came across an excellent research article today that I want to share with you all. It’s by Phillip L. Hammack, David M. Frost, and Sam D. Hughes: Queer Intimacies: A New Paradigm for the Study of Relationship Diversity. It came out in 2018 and you can view the abstract summary here. For a full copy, you can contact any of the lead researchers or you can send me a private message (PM) and I can hook you up. I have access to the journal in which the article is published via my university.

The article talks about a number of queer identities and how queer relationships subvert the relationship norms in Western societies. They included a section on Asexual and Aromantic people and what they had to say really resonated with me.

“The fifth axiom of a queer paradigm for the study of relationship diversity is that intimacy may occur in the absence or limited experience of both sexual or romantic desire.”

The authors make clear that, regardless of your a-spec identity, you may still engage in relationships (including romantic, sexual, “close relationships that resemble friendships” which I took to mean QP or alterous or otherwise distinct relationships). They support this notion with documented evidence from studies on asexual people as well as with theory.

Intimacy isn’t predicated on sexual and/or romantic attraction. Behaviour and orientation are fundamentally different things and this piece of literature really makes that clear.

Nevertheless, intimacy is fundamentally different for aces, for aros, for queer folks, because our definitions and practices of intimacy challenge sociocultural intimacy norms.

On aces and their experiences with intimacy:

- Several studies have concluded that asexual-identified people are less likely to report being currently involved in an intimate relationship than sexual people (Bogaert, 2004; Yule, Brotto, & Gorzalka, 2014), but at least one study has not been able to replicate this finding (Prause & Graham, 2007).

- Over half of asexual people surveyed in the Asexual Census reported having been in a significant relationship, but not all of them reported that this relationship was a romantic one. In fact, over 34% of people surveyed specified that their significant relationship was not romantic (Ace Community Survey Team, 2018).

- Most asexual people’s partners seem to be non-ace, with a small minority (about 13%) being ace partnerships (Ace Community Survey Team, 2018).

- Almost 13% of asexual people surveyed identify as polyamorous (Ace Community Survey Team, 2018).

- Van Houdenhove, Gijs, T’Sjoen, and Enzlin (2015) found that asexual men were more likely to be single than asexual women, while Prause and Graham (2007) and MacNeela and Murphy (2015) did not find gender differences in reported relationship status.

- Some asexual people have found that BDSM-oriented relationships have provided them with tools to negotiate and demarcate the boundaries in their relationships, as well as to reject and change dominant scripts of sexual behavior (Sloan, 2015). By organizing these relationships around consensual BDSM, some asexuals have found the ability to experience intense forms of nonsexual intimacy.

- Others have found that engaging in the community of people who also identify on the asexual spectrum has provided them with the language to “make sense” of their relationships and desires (Chasin, 2015).

- Other research has cited coming out to partners as a strategy to manage sexual conflicts, although the dissolution of those relationships has sometimes been a consequence of coming out (Robbins et al., 2016).

On aros and their experiences with intimacy:

- Aromantic people find the value of friendships and other relationships bigger than that of romantic relationships and that those bonds are better suited to their needs. (1) (2) Most also agree that they experience distress in romantic relationships and that they noticed a discrepancy between their and their partner’s behavior or feelings in romantic relationships (1).

- Aromantic people that aren’t asexual agree that a “friends with benefits” arrangement would be a good one for them (1).

- Greyromantic and broadly aro-spec people agree that they’re more concerned about being unwanted or alone, than they are about being single. They agree that they want friendship more than romance and that the activities they like can be enjoyed with friends as well as with a romantic partners. They also believe that relationships other than romantic, such as queerplatonic relationships, are better suited to their needs. Most also don’t want to pursue a romantic relationship, but they don’t like the idea of being single (1).

- Demiromantic, quoiromantic, and broadly aro-spec people agree that they are bothered by the thought of being unwanted or alone. The answers indicate that they enjoy activities with their friends and that their criteria for a romantic partner (if they choose to pursue one) are the same as for a friend (1).

- Aromantic people seem to be either as affectionate or more affectionate with their friends as compared to their alloromantic peers (2).

- Many aromantic people wish for cohabitation and marriage benefits in a platonic way/without the ‘romantic’ parts attached to them (2).

- Many aromantic people (about 50%) worry a lot about whether their high levels of intimacy in platonic relationships will be reciprocated by their friends. There seems to be a collective fear of abandonment or lack of importance being given to platonic relationships, all in favour of romantic relationships (2).

- Most aromantic people seem to define friendship differently than their alloromantic peers do, citing that they are slower to call someone a friend and/or consider friendships to be deeper emotionally than the average alloromantic does (2).

- Just over 25% of respondents to a recent survey I ran revealed that they considered themselves polyamorous (3).

- A survey was just run by @aroace-people-are-lgtbq about aros’ views on romance, and we don’t have results yet, but when we do, I think they will contribute enormously to this topic. I’ll update this post when I see what’s what.

Further research needed and some Action Items for the Community:

- Examine gender differences, especially beyond the binary of male–female. How do gender expectations/roles play a part in intimacy and relationship expectations?

- Related to the above, what distinctions exist in the experience or expression of asexuality or aromanticism across diverse gender, race, class, and sexual identities? I would also add religion to this area. We have a number of blogs on here who blog specifically about Aro and Ace POC, for example, who I think could contribute a lot to this topic by voicing their experiences. Christina Lang’s BA thesis covering her experiences as an aroace woman of colour is a great resource.

- What diverse forms of asexual and aromantic intimacies exist? To an extent, we have identified a lot of these in our personal intracommunity discussions. It would be great to catalogue people’s different experiences with intimacy and with relationships into a single masterpost or article.

- How do individuals make meaning of these relationships in a cultural context that privileges sex and romance? Again, we have discussed this within our communities a lot. Resources and masterposts about relationship anarchy and conversations about relationships and positivity would be useful to create.

- There is some overlap between [non-amorous] aro experiences and experiences of singles; however, these are fundamentally two different groups and there is a need for research on aros specifically.

- How do partners in asexual or aromantic relationships navigate stigma from multiple sources, including sexual and gender identity minority communities?

#aro #aromantic #ace #asexual #a-spec #relationships #research #queer community #queer studies #long post #community discussion

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gyllyyyg-blog · 4 years

Text

MY SELF DEVELOPMENT

By: Gyll Mary Mill Gamorot BSRT-51B

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CHAPTER 1 : PHILOSOPHICAL PERSPECTIVE OF THE SELF

Article #1 “the unexamined life is not worth living” (Apology). Examining one’s self is the most important task one can undertake, for it alone will give us the knowledge necessary to answer the question ‘how should I live my life’. A6s Socrates explained: “…once we know ourselves, we may learn how to care for ourselves, but otherwise we never shall.” (Source: Academy of Ideas)

Relating Myself About The Article

Hi. My name is Gyll Mary Mill Gamorot. As an ordinary teenager I tend to get curious to random things. As I get older, I have many discoveries about myself and I took care about those. As I meet new people, I am always interested in their stories and in the end, I get inspired about their experiences. Their lessons in life that I should apply in mine too. Now, that I am in my more mature mind and perspective, I can understand things about life more. I appreciate more my purpose and meaning in this world. Through my family's words of wisdom and God's enlightenment, I value more my life as a human being.

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CHAPTER 2: SOCIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE: THE SELF AS PRODUCT OF SOCIETY

Article #2 James Baudrillard. The modern society’s concern for freedom and political change to the blurred postmodern distinction between real and unreal—there is an underlying political concern that must be addressed by the postmodern man. The technological advances that threaten to overthrow reality contribute to this change of focus. Man, because his concerns do not involve the political, could easily be manipulated and oppressed in this postmodern society. (Source: Inquiries Journal)

Relating Myself About The Article

Maybe you will call me ancient seeing me barely hold my phone. You will mostly see my spending time with my friends and family than holding my phone. I am the type of person who rarely consumes time with technology and I prefer more sweating and playing outside with my young nephews. Through being exposed more to reality than the world of technology made me appreciate more the world's beauty and my purpose in life. James Baudrillard's theory about the unstoppable revolution of modernization of the world should be disseminate more in the whole world poking people's awareness about the world's changes.

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CHAPTER 3: AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL CONCEPTUALIZATION: THE SELF AS EMBEDDED IN THE CULTURE

Article #3 The Origins of Self explores the role that self hood plays in defining human society, and each human individual in that society. It considers the genetic and cultural origins of self, the role that self plays in socialization and language, and the types of self we generate in our individual journeys to and through adulthood. (Source: ResearchGate- Martin Edwardes)

Relating Myself About The Article

As a Filipino, it is normal to me that Filipino cultures and beliefs were taught to us by our parents. We usually have the rules set by our parents or even the society that we should follow. As I get older, I slowly understands and learn what is my real role in our society. A student like me should take seriously my education and I should become a good role model to my fellow students and younger children for the betterment and prosperity of our society. Regarding with the precious culture that we, Filipinos, are still preserving, our family personally were still practicing our country's traditions. We believe in superstitions, enjoying OPM music together, and practicing the morals and manners a Filipino should have.

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CHAPTER 4: PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE OF THE SELF

Article#4 Indeed, Erikson (1964) acknowledges his theory is more a descriptive overview of human social and emotional development that does not adequately explain how or why this development occurs. For example, Erikson does not explicitly explain how the outcome of one psychosocial stage influences personality at a later stage.

Relating Myself About the Article

All of us learn and relate more to things as we grow up and get older. As the years go by, I have many discoveries about myself. Though I have many curiosities and such things I can't understand yet, my family teaches me and corrects me from my mistakes. Right now at the age of 18, many would tell me I changed a bit but I guess those changes were for my betterment. Changes I develop in my self as time goes were the product of my good and bad experiences and the things that thought me well in life.

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CHAPTER 5: THE WESTERN AND EASTERN CONCEPTS OF SELF

Article#5 It is hard to imagine a Western psychology without the self. Mosig (2006) points out that this would require a fundamental shift in how mental health is conceived. While the influence of Eastern thought, particularly Buddhist philosophy, introduced recognition of no-self as an ideal (Mosig, 2006).

Relating Myself About The Article

The inner western self in me is over. I consider myself as a instrument to serve my country, fellow people and God. I am determined and dedicated in reaching my dreams and goals in life. I am more comfortable in doing my work or tasks individually. I believe in the power of bible and the universe where there is beginning and the ending. A concept of self that should be treasured and appreciated.

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CHAPTER 6: THE PHYSICAL SELF

Article#6 In adolescence, the complexity of human ontogenesis embraces biological growth and maturation as well as mental, affective, and cognitive progress, and adaptation to the requirements of society. To accept our morphological constellation as part of our gender may prove a problem even to a child of average rate of maturation.

Relating Myself About The Article

Honestly, I am afraid to grow old and realizing one day how old I am. When I got my first menstruation period, I cried and I am shaking in fear thinking what's wrong with my body. Now that I am near in reaching 19, I think that I really need to get matured and act within my age. But as my parents always told me, I should enjoy every stages and chapters in my life, and I shouldn't get pressured how I should be in my age perhaps live the way I want to enjoy myself.

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CHAPTER 7: THE SEXUAL SELF

Article#7 The development and consolidation of an understanding of one’s self as a sexual person, or sexual self-concept is a normative task of adolescence. This understanding helps individuals organize and make sense of sexual experience and provide structure to and motivation for sexual behavior. (Andersen & Cyranowski, 1994; Andersen, Cyranowski, & Espindle, 1999; Birnbaum & Reis, 2006; Markus & Wurf, 1987)

Relating Myself About The Article

Since we were young, we were already thought about our reproductive system and what's the difference of ours, girls, from boys and on how we should take care of it. I am also open minded and I am I think in the right age so it is not new to me in talking about sex education. I think this topic should be more explained to students espcially on teenagers like me which is really a helpful knowledge. I believe that sex intercourse shouldn't be done when you are not in the right age and perfect moment to do it and the perfect moment i guess is doing it as a gift with your husband.

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CHAPTER 8: THE MATERIAL SELF

Article#8 This article argues that materialism is a variable relevant to many aspects of economic psychology. The definition and measurement of materialism are briefly reviewed, followed by a discussion of the potential relationships between materialism and several economic variables, including use of money, work motivation, giving, and material satisfaction.

Relating Myself About The Article

For me, considering myself being materialistic is really unrealistic and quite expensive for me. I am the type of person who is thrifty and always get worried if still have enough money for my transportation expense in going home from school. I can't see myself being materialistic because I am kind of wise and frugal in terms of buying things. In buying things, it should be discussed inside my mind if this is worthy, cheap and the has great quality.

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CHAPTER 9: THE SPIRITUAL SELF

Article#9 Many people believe that in order to be ‘spiritual’ you need to adhere to a strict way of life. You need to live by a certain set of rules if you want to lay claim to being spiritual. If you are aiming to achieve ascension or enlightenment, then I agree that you need to fully commit and be disciplined. (Kempken)

Relating Myself About The Article

I am faithful and hopeful in terms of talking about my relationship with God. Whenever I am talking sincerely with him, I feel I am at my most peace moment in life. I feel motivated, blessed and enlighten after talking with him. But I am asked to choose between my time for praying and hanging out with friends I would definitely chose Him with no hesitation.

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CHAPTER 10: THE POLITICAL SELF

Article#10 Numerous studies have indicated that the need for closure predicts political preferences. We examined a potential moderator of this relationship: political-identity centrality, or the extent to which individuals’ political preferences are central to their self-concept.

Relating Myself About The Article

I am the youngest in the family so I understand why should I follow my older siblings, we have these obligations according to our order. Since I am the youngest, I have the tasks to obey my parents and siblings. While in the school activities and I am asked to be the leader of the group, I feel the power in me which makes my group mates listen and have the enough fear in me but I should also consider their thoughts and ideas as the leader. Now that I am 18, I have the privilege to vote for the betterment of our country because I believe a single vote creates a big impact about the sake and state of my country and fellow Filipinos.

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CHAPTER 11: THE DIGITAL SELF

Article#11 Social media, particularly Facebook, may have both a positive and a negative impact on mood symptoms and other mental disorders. Social media may play a role in identity formation by allowing younger users to experiment with different behaviors and international styles.

Relating Myself About The Article

As a millennial teenager being connected to the modern world, it is normal to me having a social media account. I always remind myself to not be totally open in posting because it may cause sharing my private information to public which is not really good idea because it may lead me to danger from manipulative people. I chose to save myself first from danger and priority my safety.

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