“ewwwww he thinks that the self is something more than just a bundle of correlated qualia”
You ever just realize that, pre Internet, maybe even pre social media, none point none none percent of us fucks would have ever even heard the word qualia before?
I mean, okay, maybe some of us would’ve taken an intro to philosophy course in college. But probably very few of us would’ve bothered to seek out knowledge that would lead us to run into this topic.
I saw this meme and I instantly knew what it meant. Anyone using the internet while having an almost completely passive level of curiosity about human existence would be exposed to the word qualia in less than a decade. Maybe less than 5 years. Based on my own experience.
That’s just wild to me. Having that word. Being a person who knows what that word means. A thing doesn’t exist as a known concept until it is described and attached to a word. And I can just apply that concept to other ideas any time it feels applicable. I can associate that idea with other concepts.
The internet as a thing that fosters interdisciplinary understanding is maybe my favorite invention that humans have created. (Besides obvious life saving stuff.)
Imagine it. Memes fostering the sharing of concepts between academic disciplines by putting those concepts into the lexicons of young people. That’s some future shit. That’s some 2037 shit.
That’s an interesting quale.
why are Americans so obsessed with quale? I’ve tried it a couple of times, and I just can’t see how it competes with spinach.
Kale is way better than spinach, wtf are you talking about. It doesn’t bruise and get gross at the slightest touch even when raw, and you can cook it in a sure and end up with softened by still discrete and reasonable-textured kale instead of a bunch of goop.
okay, sure, qualia are nice, but consider all the p-zombies sitting around starving because yuppies think they need qualia.
‘that’s pornhub, simba. you must never go there.’)
we all see plenty of posts about how adults on the internet need to remember that ‘kids’ (read: teens) are around and we must bear that in mind. and these posts are not entirely without merit. It’s important to keep conversations being held with teens carefully teen-friendly and appropriately distant. but the entirety of tumblr and twitter aren’t designed to cater to the safety of minors, and all the adult self-policing in the world won’t make all the kid-unfriendly content go away.
not all teens believe the internet should have gutter bumpers for them, either. but those that do have mystified me for a while … until I started to understand just how pervasive ‘helicopter parenting’ is in parts of American (and UK) culture, and how that affects the adolescents and young adults of today.
anonymous asked:
a thing worth noting re anyone who pulls the ‘you can’t blacklist on mobile, minors can still see it’ thing to say even tagged content isn’t okay: even if washboard didn’t exist, the tumblr app is rated 17/18+ in app stores. if people under that age get on the app and see things they shouldn’t, that’s on them and their parents/guardians, because they shouldn’t actually have been using the app in the first place.
agreed.
Honestly, though, the argument has moved past this in some ways. It’s not so much about whether or not teenagers are allowed to see this thing or that thing; it’s a well-known fact that most teenagers will break rules if it suits them and they can get away with it, and internet time is a prime space wherein they can do so.
What’s happened is that some adolescents – teens with parents that are overly protective and crowd their schedules with supervised activities, usually – have been taught by their life experience that:
all adults in their vicinity are there to protect them. and no wonder: the large majority of their contact with adults will have been as supervisors. Teachers, teacher assistants, instructors, daycare employees, and coaches are all adults who are paid to watch their activity and will be held responsible for the teen’s wellbeing by their guardians. when have they ever spent time with adults who aren’t in charge of making sure they’re safe?
any space they are in will be designed and maintained with their safety and comfort in mind (no matter how they obtained access). all spaces they enter are specifically meant to revolve around them: schools, sports, playgrounds, etc. The few occasions that they have to enter spaces not meant specifically for them (stores, etc) they are closely watched by adults and any harm they experience will be blamed on adults as a result.
if they can get access, it must be a space that’s safe for them. Having spent very little of their lives unsupervised, they have always been actively prevented from entering spaces that are not meant for them. They’ve never had to learn to set boundaries for themselves, so they naturally reason that if a boundary is not actively enforced, it must actually be a space they’re meant to enter.
they are not responsible for themselves. adults around them are responsible for them. if they come to harm, it’s because an adult wasn’t doing their job properly.
for teens of this mindset, ‘18+ ONLY’ warnings are merely a suggestion. Nobody is stopping them, after all, and it has never been their job to stop themselves. and if they can get access, the space is now theirs – because all spaces they are in are theirs. they couldn’t get there unless it was meant for them; that’s how it works, right?
This is why some teens are utterly flabbergasted by the idea that adults on the internet want to interact with fellow adults on an adult level in a space the teen can access. They’re here! That means the space is specifically meant to cater to them! The adults are automatically tasked with their safety! If teens do get into trouble, it’s because the adults weren’t responsible enough! that’s how this has always worked.
And when adults say ‘no, I do not take responsibility for your actions, the internet is full of things that may frighten or harm you and you must set your own boundaries,’ it’s distressing and scary all at once.
(no wonder so many people in their late teens/early 20′s want to still be considered as children.)
This explains a lot. I grew up with sane parents a long time ago, and as a result, I tend to assume that the world is full of things that could potentially hurt me, but that are very unlikely to if I exercise reasonable caution. This has worked out quite well.
I see a lot of posts going around talking about the need to be critical of fanfic, and how we gotta watch out for the messages we’re sending
Well, here’s one thing I’m gonna need us to be critical about:
Every statistic I’ve ever seen says fanfic authors are heavily female (or nb)
And Tumblr, which is a fairly US-centric cross-section of fandom, is filled with this discourse about fanfic writers who create pornography
I need us to stop and think about why we’ve decided that fictional sex is the most damaging thing anyone could ever find on the internet
I need us to think about the culture we live in, which encourages us to be sexually available (to straight men) but punishes us if we (sluts) enjoy it
Because here’s the thing: fanfic is not coming from a position of power and prestige in our society
It is a niche genre primarily written by women, for women, for free
And it is a place where many of us do find power in exploring our own sexuality (or asexuality)
Even when that exploration takes us to gritty, horrifying (or cathartic) places
I’m going to need us to think long and hard about why we’re prioritizing fictional characters over the needs of real women
And I’m going to need it to stop
Fandom purity wank is absolutely about control over women and women’s sexuality. There’s nothing ambiguous about it.
Just think about the hot-button issues in the fannish community, the topics that consistently and reliably get people worked up into a lather, the themes that provoke the nastiest conflicts and inspire the most dedicated resistance movements. Think about the fights that are most likely to spill out over their cyber boundaries and start affecting people in the real world – in public harassment at cons, in doxxing and ‘outing’ to family and employers, in malicious legal allegations.
It’s about sex. It’s always about sex.
From the constant tantrums over ‘problematic’ shipping to the righteous doxxing of ‘pedophiles’ (which in current tumblr parlance means anyone who draws or writes canonically underage characters in romantic or erotic scenarios), fandom’s big efforts at moral reform always seem to revolve around restricting and controlling the sexual expression of the majority-women community. You won’t meet many people who stay up past their bedtime to scream at strangers on the internet about unethical portrayals of non-sexual violence – unless, of course, they suspect the women involved in its creation are getting off on it. You’ll struggle to find an anti blog dedicated to the insidious social ills of torture whump fic, or goopy hurt-comfort where all manner of human suffering is put on display for the viewer’s enjoyment. The purity crew dress up their agenda as a desire for collective self-improvement and raised moral standards, but they don’t seem too worried about aspects of public morality that don’t somehow tie back into sex. What they’re upset about is the same thing conservative minds have been upset about since basically the dawn of time – there are women out there in the world doing icky sex things without the permission of their communities.
And these people, these moral guardians, they’ve gotten really good at couching their fundamentalist views in progressive language. They don’t say ‘you’re to blame if you provoke men to rape’ – they say ‘your fic normalises sexual violence and contributes to rape culture’. They don’t say ‘women ought to be chaste’ – they say ‘your fantasies are socially harmful and you owe it to the world to be more self-critical’. The messages are the same and the desired outcomes are literally identical.
The core assumption underlying all of it – an assumption that I’m sure our puritan forebears would find deeply comforting – is that women’s sexual expression is a matter of public concern, and that women are directly responsible for upholding the moral standards of their communities by restricting themselves to a narrow repertoire of publicly controlled, socially condoned sexual outlets. Anything beyond that repertoire is a grave moral breach.
To anyone who’s reading this – and there’s always a few – thinking, “this is just deflection! [X hot-button topic] is really bad and harmful!’, I’d like to encourage you to sit back for just a moment and think about why it is, exactly, that you feel the best and most important place to wage your war against moral corruption is in one of the only pockets of popular media that women unequivocally control. Of all the spaces in the world where you could be fighting for your view of a better society, you’ve chosen a place where women come together to share the fantasies that mainstream culture refuses to let them indulge. Why?
“…women come together to share the fantasies that mainstream culture refuses to let them indulge.”
I was just telling a friend of mine I attribute my (fortunate) comfort with my own sexuality to a chance encounter, at a very young age, with a paperback titled “My Secret Garden: Women’s Sexual Fantasies,” by Nancy Friday. Found it in a stack of mystery novels, and man, I remember blushing so hard… It was reading all these fantasies other women had that normalized what, at that young age, I considered to be pretty extreme desires, all in the context of this authority saying, “Anything you fantasize in the privacy of your own head is perfectly natural and okay.” She asked hundreds of women to share these fantasies so that others could read them and see we aren’t alone; most everyone has these thoughts and fantasies and desires, and that’s perfectly fine. Since then, I’ve discovered fan fiction as a whole universe of people’s fantasies writ large, and goddamn it, that is perfectly fine. Anyone who wants to argue the point and try to stuff us all back into the cramped cupboard of shame should have a talk with Ms. Friday. I believe she’s still around.
Agreed. Women are shamed for exploring dark themes everywhere else. Fandom does not need to be a safe haven for people who never want to hear about that: the entire rest of the world is a safe haven for anti-kink, anti-sex, anti-woman feelings.
Ship and let ship, don’t like don’t read, and your kink is not my kink and that’s okay: these are the maxims that make fandom a welcoming, creative space.
“Fandom does not need to be a safe haven for people who never want to hear about that: the entire rest of the world is a safe haven for anti-kink, anti-sex, anti-woman feelings.”
There are a lot of corners of fandom that need this (metaphorically) branded on their foreheads.
When I first started in fandom over a decade back the predominant attitude (at least in the fandoms I was in) was ymmv… your mileage may vary…. can we go back to that please.
it is incredible to me that writing pornography about minors somehow fits in to this otherwise interesting and informative post about “problematic” fandom behaviour
telling pedophiles to quit it is not a bad thing btw
Molesting and abusing children is literally pedophilia. Grooming children for molestation and abuse is literally pedophilia. Viewing and disseminating actual child porn is literally pedophilia.
Teenage shippy fanfiction is not literally pedophilia. It’s not even figuratively pedophilia, and I don’t buy for one split second that any of the people trying to derail this post with ~but think of the children~ actually believe that the entire Harry Potter fandom is a malicious network of predators. It is so, so incredibly belittling of CSA survivors to equate their actual real-world suffering with the benign hobbies of fucking Katniss/Peeta shippers. It is so, so cynical and disrespectful to use real live vulnerable children as a weapon in your goddamn ship wars.
Pedophilia is not a joke. It’s not an accusation to sling at anyone who pisses you off on the internet. It’s an incredibly real, incredibly serious issue and I am so, so tired of seeing it trivialised.
You gotta decide for yourselves whether people in the year of our lord 2017 should be judged entirely by the words and thoughts and ideas they put out into the world years ago in different life stages. Like. This isn’t a problem that’s going to go away. Increasingly now the history of people’s entire life journey is accessible via some social media snap shot in the wayback machine or some ancient chat log sitting on someone’s hard drive out there. We don’t all start from the same place. A lot of us start from positions of privilege, from systems learned from parents or other family or institutions with power over us that influence our way of thinking when our brains are first developing the capacity for empathy and understanding.
And we grow. And we create. And we experience things. And we talk with people. We make friends. We read feedback. We listen to some and we disregard others, and years later, some (but by no means all) of what we disregarded we might think about again and realize was good feedback and helpful advice.
Our opinions change. Our understanding of our own privilege changes. Our understanding of media and propaganda and narrative and power structures and justice change. Our biases shift. Our politics change. Our worldviews are shaped by our conversations and our experiences and the things we take to heart and the things we lock outside.
Hussie used to interact heavily with the fandom. There is so much text from him out there saved in archives that has been pored over again and again and again by people with axes to grind, people with their own agendas, people who feel wronged and hurt and ignored by someone they maybe once respected and looked up to.
Anyone with that much text over that long a period of time has something fucking problematic out there waiting to hang them, I guarantee it. Back in 2012 the r-slur and the a-slur were common slang used by elementary school kids, let alone ppl frequenting the various rancid asscracks of the internet. Then awareness campaigns took root and opinions and language shifted for the better and suddenly a lot of text written without that mindfulness started looking really nasty, didn’t it?
We as a society are going to have to make some hard decisions in the very near future about how much rope we need when we’re eyeing those gallows for people we feel wronged by. How much someone’s opinion now means when their opinion five years ago might have been the exact opposite. How much good faith to extend to people who grow and change and understand their younger selves had some Bad Opinions about the world, but can’t erase the words they said, and have to live with them for the rest of their lives because people looking for ammunition can find it in ample supply. How much someone’s actions now count for weighed against their words in another fucking life.
There are quotes out there where Hussie said some stupid shit. There are a million words of Hussie quotes out there. I don’t know how old you are, but if you’re an adult, I can almost guarantee you that you can go back some number of years and remember a version of you that you’d be terrified of the internet finding today.
The dude gave us one of the most queer-positive, transformative and engaging pieces of media of all time. It wasn’t perfect and he wasn’t perfect because nothing and no one is. The queer community is always so goddamn hypercritical of its prolific creators, in part because we’re desperate for the things we want and never get and it’s so frustrating to find people who *almost* give you what you want – and god knows the mainstream media isn’t listening, so where else do we have to turn but inward? We’re a stymied, frustrated group desperate for representation on all sorts of underrepresented axes of oppression and no one story is ever going to satisfy everyone. But Homestuck was so big, so expansive and meant so much to so many – of course there’s a lot of bitter disappointment out there.
How much rope do we need to hang someone? How much history do we need to build a gallows out of plank by fucking plank to feel morally justified?
I gave up Holier-Than-Thou ‘Social Justice’ back at the end of 2015 when I realized it was neither productive nor appropriate.
1) it makes you stressed out chasing and giving off the image that you are perfect and free of mistakes or ‘problematic behaviors’
2) it stops you from growing as a person and activist
3) it makes you come across as an actual asshole
4) it makes you defensive in the face of being held accountable. You think you can do no wrong and do not respond well to any challenge of that.
5) it makes you blow things way out of proportion. You get so busy trying to be Wokest of Them All that you’ll argue and send incredibly aggressive and sometimes violent messages to people over things like iPhones.
6) you start to lose sight of your goals as a person passionate about social equality. It’s all a performance now.
I learned before I got really bad and I’m so much better for it.
I’m reblogging this not as a nock on online activism or the stuff we do, but rather the culture that’s formed around it and warped how we do it. All of this is relevant and its become a bad place with unproductive “activism.” There’s a better way.
u know what’s wrong with tumblr now?? too many kids who weren’t here for glee. y’all have no idea. none of u understand the suffering we went through. the hell. the endless war. u come in here and u try to start The Discourse but u dont get that we already made these mistakes. we already had the discourse and its done now. its over. its all over and u should let it stay dead but u wont and that’s why we all hate u
I was not here for the days of glee but please relay that fandom history
its not history, its blood. i still see it all over this website. the vague posts. the deactivated urls. where do u think the word problematic became popular. where do u think the representational anger started. glee was the hungry gaping void that consumed us all. it said watch us and find yourself. there is someone for everyone. santana is a lesbian and kurt is gay and brittany is bisexual and quinn, god knows what quinn is, she’s straight but we have her say things like “you were singing to finn and only finn, right?” and artie is disabled. mercedes is black and our outlet for body positivity. we are all oppressed by something and we are different and we are outcasts and we are you.
and we fell for it. we watched glee and we related to its characters and we fought its wars until it was too late. until it was nothing but a distorted picture of a parody of reality, a cracked mirror in which our souls were sucked and encased in glass. finn outed santana but it’s fine because he had good intentions. sam was supposed to be gay but we’re bringing blaine anderson in for that instead. the q in quinn is for queerbait. brittany was maybe raped but it was a one liner so who really knows. will schuester was a horrible fucking adult and should never have been allowed to care for children. finn, the white straight boy, did everything wrong but it was narratively presented as right. we turned on each other. klaine vs kum and finchel vs faberry. santana fought everyone so brittana stans fought everyone. character vs character, ship vs ship, blogger against blogger. we fucking hated each other. there was no glee fandom. there were character fandoms and ship fandoms and that is it and our mottos were all fuck glee.
we won every popularity contest, every online poll. we voted our fingers to the bone. we created art and wrote fanfic and made such excellent photo manips they were published in newspapers. we were prolific. we were consumers of the hell we created and we just kept producing more in a fucked up dystopian fandom chain of supply and demand. don’t get me started on the rpf. dianna wore a likes girls shirt on tour and made a statement an hour later revoking it. some people still say heya is real but it’s like a breath of the wind, a sound so bare i can’t quite make out the words.
u asked for history. theres no history, only rage and pain and regret, the image of anonymous with a grey face and sunglasses telling u to kill urself because u thought artie was a dick for calling brittany stupid that one time. this website is a reflection of the hole glee left when it finished taking all it could from us, when the void could not consume anything more, and the posts on it now, the social justice “discourse” that is just giant piles of steaming, unsifted, unrefined shit is from those who refused to learn from us. the history is here and it followed us and we can never ever escape it.
none of yall know how to just enjoy shit normally thats how we get ppl writing essays about how rick and morty is only for intellectuals and titty animes are actually feminist
just moving along like everyone else 