#Critical Models

[philosophybits]

If philosophy is still necessary, it is so only in the way it has been from time immemorial: as critique, as resistance to the expanding heteronomy… It is incumbent upon philosophy to provide a refuge for freedom.

Theodor W. Adorno, "Why still philosophy?", Critical Models

#philosophy #quotes #Theodor W. Adorno #Critical Models #criticism #critique #freedom #liberty

[spaceshipsandpurpledrank]

#talkin #tik tok #aapi #florida #ron desantis #model minority #crt #model minority myth #critical race theory #racism #white supremacy

[showtoonzfan]

Bro we finally got to see Lilith’s card and we don’t even get to see her face come ONNN.

Viv you already spoiled so much regarding the show, might as well show off Lilith, like…why is she keeping her in the shadows so much? Also I would say it’s too early but I think this card is borderline proof that she’s a villain, they’re making it so obvious lol like there is no reason why we’re going THIS long without seeing or knowing anything about her while Lucifer gets all the attention and is going to be painted in a more sympathetic light.

It legit pisses me off cause in the pilot they indicate Charlie actually had a close relationship with her mom considering she was the one who got called by her daughter for advice, but from what we’ve seen Charlie’s going to be interacting with her dad in the show a lot while Lilith will probably get no more than a brief mention or a cameo. Viv is keeping her in the shadows for a reason, she’s 100% a villain and ngl I’m starting to believe the “Lilith separated with Lucifer because he wasn’t evil anymore”- allegation.

And again, I wouldn’t have a problem with Lilith being a villain had we not known that Viv is aiming for Lucifer to be “not that bad he’s just uwu goofy” and sympathetic. It’s once again biased/favoritism writing and I really don’t want another Stolas and Stella situation. Obviously this is mostly speculation and guesses, I’ll wait and see till the show comes out but I am 100% expecting more misogynistic and biased writing.

#vivziepop critical #spindlehorse critical #hazbin hotel critical #anti vivziepop #Hazbin critical #also Lilith looks so off model she looks like Alastor and you can tell the artist didn’t know what to do without showing her face

[harveyguillensource]

Harvey modeling his Christian Siriano look before the 2024 Critics' Choice Awards.

#harvey guillén #harvey guillen #christian siriano #critics' choice awards #wwdits #guillermo de la cruz #photoshoots #plus size model #january 2024

[brjeauregard]

These new merch photos will be the death of me

#critical role #Laura bailey #Ashley Johnson #taliesin jaffe #robbie daymond #they all look so good omg #I’m actually obsessed with the molly shirt #whoever decided to have the cast model their merch deserves a raise

[heartru]

my least favourite thing from the watcher discourse has been people saying “WE never asked for higher quality” or “your most popular shows are where you just sit around and talk!!” - babes its likely not what THEY want to do for the rest of eternity lol. they’re allowed to want to grow as creatives and make things they are proud of?

#like i absolutely didn’t agree with their move to a paid model platform but this response isn’t the criticism u think it is #that and also the continious shit i saw about steven owning a tesla #like babes its HIS money? he’s allowed nice things and upgrades in his life lol? #AND the stuff about them making 100k from patreon with eat the rich comments #100k per month likely doesn’t cover all operating costs like you guys r thinking it does #they likely didn’t want to keep doing ad reads that interrupted their content structure and how they THEMSELVES percieved its value #as a former business major tho i def think even a little bit of market research could have stopped this lol #respectfully no one wants to pay for another thing #and the communication on it was unfortunately shit #but its not that big of a mistake that we tear em down like this #watcher #ryan bergara #shane madej #steven lim

[sergle]

this might just be the pessimism talking but there are times when I feel the body positive movement is straight up Over. even stuff from now that’s meant to be body positive, or is packaged in that way, is of a lower caliber. like it feels like it’s gotten worse.

#this shit has LEFT #the standards are even lower rn than they have been before #and 'body positivity' has been overtaken by images of bodies that are already socially accepted #and commercially accepted #all the way up to and including bodies that are literally just like. plastic surgery shaped #and none of it is for fat people anymore #and where I saw people more openly criticizing shitty depictions of women's bodies in the past i don't see that shit anymore #and the term 'body shaming'. god how far that has fallen #that gets used if someone so much as implies that kim kardashian esque plastic surgeries that people get #are not fucking Women Empowering Operations #like it's gotten so bad that ppl are saying it's feminist and empowering that so many women are getting bbls #and conversations abt how people get pushed into WANTING to make these alterations w constant negative feedback about their bodies #gets put into a neat little 'smh not very body positive of you' argument #where AM i. #sergle.txt #plus size models are getting smaller. conversations abt body positivity have gotten worse. concerns get shut down faster.

[isa-styles28]

Instagram edit : @isa_lincoln28

#jeremy allen white #the bear #shameless #the bear fx #shameless us #lip gallagher #male model #calvinklein #models #actor #critics choice awards #emmys 2024 #gallagher #jeremyallenwhite #edits

[hollowtones]

Baffling Steam sales moment this morning looking at Sonic titles. I'm interested in "Sonic Origins" because I want to see how these new ports handle & I want to see their take on playable Amy. But it's not on sale. Like, at all. Yes I know it's entirely new rebuilds / remakes of these games on newer engines & yes I know a lot of work went into rebuilding it all & yes I know there was a bunch of legal / licensing weirdness going on when this game was being put together. But "Sonic Frontiers" IS on sale. And it's a little funny putting them side by side & seeing that the brand-new, critically-acclaimed, massive-scope game is cheaper than four Genesis games together.

#I know one of the criticisms about ''Sonic Origins'' was it had a fucked pricing model at launch. #And that it's supposedly less bad and weird now. But it sure feels like some bones of that are still there. LOL

[spitblaze]

If you guys could talk about the existence of generative software and nerual nets without suggesting artists nuke their portfolios off of the Internet for their own safety (the datasets have Already Been Scraped btw so that won't even help) that would be very nice. Thanks

#spitblaze says things #theres a lot to criticize about how commercial models are made and utilized #but if ur encouraging ppl to hide everything they make bc big bad ai is gonna get it #maybe ur putting a little too much on the artists whose work gets scraped rather than. yknow. the pwople that made the shitty models. #the capitalists and grifters exploiting and cutting real artists out of the picture to feed their bottom line. #i dont know maybe stop fearmongering and start putting that energy somewhere a bit more helpful

[yashley]

"It’s at these places that dangerous metaphysical energy leaks through from these other realms into ours. Some refer to it as “magick”, if we want to be a bit colloquial with it. But when it comes into our realm, it leaves an impact."

#critical role #candela obscura #arlo black #ygifs #girl I simply cannot wait 2 know u more u are Doing It #literally couldnt not include arlo clenching her hand as alex spoke Ms Bailey im on my knees for your art #laura pcs who are also the sickest hand models actually

[philosophybits]

The more reified the world becomes, the thicker the veil cast upon nature, the more the thinking weaving that veil in its turn claims ideologically to be nature, primordial experience.

Theodor W. Adorno, "Why still philosophy?", Critical Models

#philosophy #quotes #Theodor W. Adorno #Critical Models #reification #concepts #abstractions #language #nature #reality

[bitchin-tubs]

When drawing my Blitzø redesign I realized even I had trouble with perspectives and profiles which was ironic since I literally criticize inconsistencies in character anatomy Soo I decided to make a simple model of my version as to have a better grasp of his features and draw him more consistently

#long faced blitz my beloved #I also plan to make models of the rest of IMP but I don’t have the dynamic problem with them as much as with Blitz #helluva boss critical #my art

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Anonymous

Published: Oct 16, 2023

When my first son claimed he was trans, I eagerly ‘affirmed’ him. When his three-year-old brother decided he wanted to be trans, too, I realized I’d made a terrible mistake.

I was a social-justice organizer and facilitator before social justice took over the progressive world. I was at the nascent movement’s forefront, introducing the concept of intersectionality to organizations and asking people to share their pronouns.

My friends and I felt like we were the cool kids, on the vanguard of the revolutionary wave that would change the world. We were going to achieve what people in that milieu call “collective liberation.”

Within this context, I came out as a lesbian and identified as queer. I also fell in love, entered a committed relationship, and gave birth to a son. Two years later, my spouse gave birth to our second son.

Having children and experiencing the love and devotion I felt toward them, was a game changer for me. I began to experience internal tensions. My thinking was split between what I felt instinctively as a mother; and what I “should” be feeling and doing as a white anti-racist social-justice parent.

Because I’d felt victimized by my parents’ rejection of my sexuality, I wanted to make sure to honor my own children’s “authentic” selves. In particular, I was primed to look for any clues that might suggest they could be transgender.

My spouse and I raised our sons with gender-neutral clothes, toys, and language. While we used he/him pronouns, and others called them boys, we did not call them boys, or even tell them that they were boys.

In our everyday reading of books or descriptions of people in our lives, we did not say “man” or “woman”; we said “people.” We thought we were doing the right thing, both for them and for the world.

Even when our first son was still young, he already struck us as different from other boys—being both extremely gifted and unusually sensitive. By age three or so, he started to orient more toward the females in his life than the males. “I like the mamas,” he would say.

We started to attribute some of this difference to the possibility that he was transgender. Instead of orienting him toward the reality of his biological sex by telling him he was a boy, we wanted him to tell us if he felt he was a boy or a girl. As true believers, we thought that we should “follow his lead” to determine his true identity.

At the same time, I was taking a deep dive into the field of attachment and child development. This made me understand that attachment is hierarchical; and that parents, not children, are meant to be in the lead. This obviously conflicted with my insistence on letting my child decide his gender. Sadly, it was the latter impulse that won the day.

At around age four, my son began to ask me if he was a boy or a girl. I told him he could choose. I didn’t use those words—I imagined that I was taking a more sophisticated approach. I told him, “When babies are born with a penis, they are called boys, and when babies are born with a vagina, they are called girls. But some babies who are born with a penis can be girls, and some babies born with a vagina can be boys. It all depends on what you feel deep inside.”

He continued to ask me what he was, and I continued to repeat these lines. I’d resolved my inner conflict by “leading” my son with this framework. Or so I told myself.

His question, and my response to it, would come back to haunt me. In fact, I remain haunted to this day. To the extent I was “leading” my son anywhere, it was down a path of lies—an on-ramp to psychological damage and irreversible medical interventions. All in the name of love, acceptance, and liberation.

About six months later, he told my spouse that he was a girl and wanted to be called “sister” and “she/her.” I received a text message about this at work. On the way home that night, I resolved to put all my own feelings away and support my transgender child. And that is what I did.

We told him he could be a girl. He jumped up and down on the bed, happily saying, “I’m a girl, I’m a girl!” We—not our son—initiated changing his name. We socially transitioned him and enforced this transition with his younger brother, who was then only two years old and could barely pronounce his older brother’s real name.

When I look back at this, it is almost too much to write about. How could a mother do this to her child? To her children?

Once we made this decision, we received resounding praise and affirmation from most of our peers. One of my friends, who’d also socially transitioned her young child, assured me that this was a healthy, neutral way to allow children to “explore” their gender identity before puberty, when decisions would have to be made about puberty blockers and hormones.

We sought out support groups for parents of transgender children, so that we could find out if we’d done the “right thing.” It hadn’t escaped my notice that our son hadn’t exhibited any signs of actual gender dysphoria. Was he actually transgender?

At these support groups, we were told, again, what good parents we were. We were also told that kids on the autism spectrum (which our son likely is) are gender savants who simply know they are transgender earlier than other kids.

At one of the support groups we attended, we were also told that transgender identity takes a few years to develop in children. The gender therapist running things told us that during this period, it’s important to protect the child’s transgender self-conception—which meant eliminating all contact with family or friends who didn’t support the idea that our son was a girl. I believed her.

Looking back, I now see her comments in a shockingly different light: this was part of an intentional process of concretizing transgender identity in children who are much too young to know themselves in any definitive way. (One set of parents attending the group had a child who was just three years old.) When identity is “affirmed” in this manner, children will grow up believing they are actually the opposite sex.

The therapist endorsed the same approach that many adolescents use on their parents, who are urged to write letters to grandparents, aunts, and uncles to announce the child’s transgender identity. In these letters, the conditions of continued social engagement are made clear: Recipients must use the new name and new pronouns, and embrace the new identity, or they will be denied contact with the child.

After about a year of social transition for our older son, our younger son, who was by now only three years old, began to say he was a girl, too. This came as a complete shock to us. None of the things that made our older son “different” applied to our younger son. He was more of a stereotypical boy and didn’t show the same affinity for the feminine side of things that his older brother did.

The urge for “sameness” is a primal attachment drive in many family members. We felt that our younger son’s assertion of being a girl likely reflected his desire to be like his older sibling, in order to feel connected to him.

His claim to be a girl became more insistent when both brothers went to school part-time, because their program included pronoun sharing. Why could the older sibling be a “she” when the younger sibling couldn’t? Our younger son became more insistent, and we became more distressed.

We made an appointment to see the gender therapist whom we’d met at the support group. We truly believed that she would be able to help us sort out who, if anyone, was actually transgender.

To our shock, the therapist immediately began referring to our younger son as “she,” stating that whatever pronouns a young child wants to use are the pronouns that must be used.

She patronizingly assured us that it might take us more time to adjust, since parents have a hard time with this sort of thing. She added that it was transphobic to believe there was anything wrong with our younger son wanting to be like his older transgender sibling.

When I pushed back and asserted that I wasn’t yet convinced our younger son was in fact transgender, she told me that if I failed to change his pronouns and honor his newly announced identity, he could develop an attachment disorder.

We were unconvinced. But, again, we wanted to do what was right for our son and for the world. We decided to tell him he could be a girl. And that night at dinner, we told him that we would call him “she/her.”

Right after dinner, I went to play an imaginary game with him, and I wanted to be affirming. So I put a big, warm smile on my face and said, “Hi, my girl!”

At this, my younger son stopped, looked at me, and said, “No, mama. Don’t call me that.” His reaction pierced me to my core. I didn’t turn back after that.

For the next two years, my partner and I dug deeper, agonized, and then continued digging again. Everything we thought we knew or believed that had led us to socially transition our older son began to unravel.

I continued to study the attachment-based developmental approach to parenting and learned more about autism and hypersensitivity. We decided not to socially transition our younger son. Not only was he not transgender, we now realized, but our older son probably wasn’t either.

He was just a highly sensitive, likely autistic boy who saw a girl identity as a form of psychic protection. It also provided him a way of attaching to me through sameness.

My spouse and I decided that since we’d been the ones who’d led him down this path, we were the ones who needed to lead him off of it.

A year ago, just before our older son’s eighth birthday, we did just that. And while the initial change was hard—incredibly hard—the strongest emotion exhibited by our son turned out to be relief.

In the days following my first conversation with him about going back to his birth name and pronouns, during which I told him that males cannot be females and that we were wrong to tell him he could choose to be a girl, he got very mad at me, then sad. Then, the next day, I felt my son rest. I felt him release a burden, an adult burden that he, as a child, was never meant to carry.

Since that time, we’ve all been healing. My son is now happy and thriving. We’ve watched him come to a deeper peace with himself as a boy.  

Our younger son is also thriving. Once his older brother became his older brother again, he happily, and almost immediately, settled into his identity as a boy.

I feel like someone who’s escaped a cult—a cult whose belief system is supported by our mainstream culture, the Internet, and even the state.

I fear for the future—the future of sensitive, feminine, socially awkward boys. I fear what the world will tell them about who they are.

But no matter what the future holds, I will never ever stop fighting to protect my sons. I am no longer a true believer.

#gender ideology #queer theory #genderwang #gender cult #social transition #autism #social justice #critical social justice #affirmation model #gender affirming #gender affirmation #trans identity #gender identity #child psychology #religion is a mental illness

[clangenrising]

I want to take a second to talk to those of you who find it funny that Scorch has been calling the Clans a cult. I agree, it is kind of humorous, but I do want to be a wet blanket for a sec and point out that the Warrior Cats Clan structure IS actually very cultish. As far as I can tell, the Clans meet at least three out of four criteria laid out in Steven Hassan's BITE model of Authoritarian Control.

The BITE model lays out 4 kinds of control that Cults and groups like them use to keep their members in check:

Behavior Control Information Control Thought Control Emotional Control

And Warrior Clans exibit most of these traits (keep in mind I haven't read past Omen of the Stars). More below the cut

Behavior Control

Dictate where, how, and with whom the member lives and associates/isolates (Clans live in specific areas and only really socialize with their own clan)

Dictate where, how, and with whom the member has sex (half clan and outsider mates are extremely discouraged and even punished)

Major time spent with group indoctrination and rituals (Warrior Clans are full of ritual ceremonies that create group cohesion)

Rewards and Punishments used to modify behaviors (breaking the code results in punishments ranging from disliked duties to physical harm and cats can be rewarded with things like the best patrols or getting their warrior names early)

Impose rigid rules or regulations

Separation of Families (if a kittypet joins they are discouraged from ever talking to their family again.)

Information Control

Compartmentalize information into Outsider vs Insider doctrines (Clans discourage their members from listening to kittypets, loners, and rogues)

Extensive use of Cult Generated information and propaganda (I would argue the ubiquity of StarClan in Clan life would count. StarClan's word is seen as pure truth not to be questioned.)

Thought Control

Require members to internalize the group's doctrine as truth including organizing people into us vs them and adopting the group's reality as the only reality.

Change a person's name and identity (this is a big one! If you join a clan you are highly encouraged to take a Clan style name. You become a warrior and that is your new identiy)

Forbid critical questions about leader, doctrine, or policy allowed (The leader's word is law. StarClan is not to be questioned.)

Labeling alternitive belief systems as illegitimate, evil, or not useful (A warrior rejects the soft life of a kittypet)

Emotional Control

Promote feelings of guilt or unworthiness such as Identity guilt, not living up to full potential, etc (Half Clan and kittypet bigotry within clans ticks this box when applicable)

Instill fear of enemies, thinking independently, the outside world, leaving or being shunned by the group, losing one's salvation, etc (Again, more present in Clans that are depicted as 'evil' by the books but things like fear of losing one's salvation is present in kit tales that warn cats about ending up in the dark forest)

Phobia indoctrination: instilling irrational fears about leaving the group or questioning the leader, saying things like there is no happiness outside the group, shunning those who leave so people fear losing their friends and family if they do, never allowing for legitimate reasons to leave aka anyone who does was weak or selfish or brainwashed. (This one is fairly self explanitory)

So yeah. The clans tick all the boxes that cults do.

Now, I want to be clear, im not saying you should start hating the clans or that you're bad for thinking they're cool. Part of that is that Cults inherently try to sound cool to draw in members and part of it is that its okay to enjoy fiction about things that are bad or immoral. The important part is being able to recognize and understand those things.

So my real intent here is to get you to examine the media you engage with more critically and, most importantly, as someone who was born into a cult and managed to escape:

Be careful not to let fun depictions of cults normalize cult behavior. You are not immune to propaganda and I would hate for any of you to get sucked into a group or religion that will control you in these ways. I recommend you take a look at the BITE model in its entirety and really think about how it may apply to groups you are in. Cults are really good at painting themselves as welcoming and fun and they are not. Look out for yourself.

I love you. Your regularly scheduled Warrior Cats content will resume shortly.

#not art #warrior cats #warriors #warrior clans are a cult #cult tactics #BITE model #cults #The BITE model #please look out for yourselves <3 and don't feel bad if you are in a cult #being tricked doesn't make you stupid #anyone can become indoctrinated #the only way to avoid it is to be aware and critical

[nights-at-crystarium]

wolqotd

Does your WoL consider themselves a nice person? Is that true?

#vivi's critical mindset doesn't exclude himself #he sees himself as 'good enough' #if someone disagrees they're entitled to their opinion #and vivi's entitled to not waste his time on them /o/ #ffxiv #vivien rell #text post #wolqotd #i wanted a grey wol before vivi was even properly born as a character #and i'm trying to keep that in perfect balance throughout the story #he's not a role model that's for sure