monkey d luffy as an in-universe concept is so fucking funny to me because like…
you just live peacefully on your island and you keep hearing tales of this like crazy monstrous pirate crew who will come and destroy half your island and overthrow your government and then one day they show up and it’s just some scrawny little Noodly Boy in a farm hat and jorts with his weird teenaged friends and you’re like oh damn he’s not threatening at all??? he just wants to be friends and eat all our food??? and then before you know it half your island is destroyed and your government is overthrown
A tall muscular undergrad walking purposely toward the English building, talking on the phone in a loud, assertive voice: I’m gunna kill it! I’m prepared! I’m confident! I’m ready! I believe in myself! After a moment of silence, in a much quieter voice: Yeah, thanks, mom. That helped. I’ll call you after and let you know how it goes. Love you.
the idea that people nowadays are more sensitive and easy to offend than they were in the past is such horseshit. people used to throw hands if you stepped on their shadow and calling a person a coward was legally justifiable grounds for them to challenge you to a duel with pistols.
since some people are having trouble understanding what i meant here, i would like to clarify that i am 100% mocking the hypocrisy of people who idolize the “good old days when people weren’t offended by everything” and then turn around and whine about how sjws are ruining their lives
if you’re whining about sjws in the comments of this post please know that i am making fun of you and that the old white relative you idolize for “giving no fucks” probably cried himself to sleep last night when he saw an interracial couple in a target commercial
And the thing is most of those complaints about “sensitivity” are, themselves, examples of offense-taking. Every article ever written about leftist campus protest was written to complain about some millionaire not “being allowed” to speak, unchallenged, at a university and get paid(with those students’ fees) for the pleasure. Every article ever written about “PC Campus Culture” or “Leftist Academia” was written to complain about right-wing views not being accepted and propagated uncritically as university policy. Hell: Republican state govs, like that of Missouri, are going so far as to cut funding for their state schools in an attempt to force them to cover subjects in a particular way(and suppress student speech the pols in the lege don’t agree with).
The point of this offense-taking over “sensitivity” has always been shutting up people the offense-taker doesn’t want to listen to, rather than a genuine concern for how thin-skinned contemporary society is. What these folks complaining about “sensitivity” and “pc culture” are really longing for is a past where women who talked about rape and harassment were shamed; where non-whites who complained about racism were ignored; where gays and transfolks and queers were not only silenced, but erased. What they’re praising isn’t really some non-existent past when their ancestors “gave no fucks”, but the very real and deadly past when the only voice that mattered in our culture was male and white.
My psychiatrist, a relatively-well-known expert in his field: Here’s the thing about doctors: you can’t trust us. You should never trust doctors, because we do not know what we’re doing. Some of us THINK we –
Me: I mean, some of you – I feel like you pay attention to –
Him: No!!! I don’t know what I’m doing, no doctor ever does! It’s part of the job, it’s – just, do your own research, go on PubMed and stuff, tell me if you think I’m wrong, get a second and third and fourth opinion if you think I’m – it’s just, medicine is a bad field! It’s so unscientific and we’re not held to any real kind of STANDARD and we’re just so SMUG – just, don’t trust us! NEVER TRUST DOCTORS.
Me: Okay, so, I swear you this solemn oath: I will look up every medical thing I am ever subjected to on PubMed.
Him, now feeling uncertain of himself again: …except, of course, don’t spend TOO much time on there, don’t tired yourself out – because, you know, we don’t need you getting all hypochondriac and anxious about – everything. And look at the – methodology and everything, obviously, you have to keep in mind that most research is also bad, it’s just – doctors! WE don’t have ANY standards, so –
Me: Yeah, I know, I know, you gotta strike a reasonable uh – paranoia balance?, or, uh –
Him: Yes, right. It’s important to have a REASONABLE LEVEL of paranoia.
First of all: wow, I’m so sorry!? That’s incredibly fucked up. Hang in there, anon. If there’s anything that would help you out don’t hesitate to mention.
Second: im so fascinated!? By this choice…??? Entitled is right.
I’d be curious to know: are they telling you to block them based on your relative ages? Or are all of the antis attacking you with this demand 21 and younger? Because I can see that fitting a certain ‘adults (that is: anyone older than me) have to look out for my safety even if they’ve never met me’ attitude that I find lines up with the increase in ‘trust authorities to protect you’ culture shift that followed 9/11 in the US.
Either way: isn’t it interesting how antis are insisting you are dangerous to them, and yet trusting you to block them instead of try to harm them if they put themselves in contact with you?
It’s almost like they know you’re not actually dangerous to them and this is all performative outrage and playing at activism.
Wild.
[image ID: anonymous says:
I’m the DMMD thread person who said the very controversial statement that kids shouldn’t be playing DMMD since it’s meant for adults. That really rustled their jimmies. I’ve honestly not looked at their profiles, just reported the really offensive ones and muted the others. But everyone demands I block them, and from friends who been curious, apparently there is an anti culture precedent of refusing to block people they consider bad because they think that means they lose.
End ID] (emphasis mine)
Blocking people who ship things they hate means they lose?
Well that’s the most 4chan thing I’ve ever heard.
I’ve said before that I think anti-shipper circles have learned their argument style by watching people from the alt-right argue on YouTube comments and twitter chains, b/c their ‘argument’ method is an extremely effective trolling and harassment style. This seems to reinforce it.
Bless you for your maturity in dealing with them.
The reason why this precedent exists is because internet bullies need a way to declare victory when people ignore them. Here is the thing: Bullies need a rise out of their target in order to get their satisfaction from bullying, proof that they have hurt their target. If the immediate response to a bully is block and ignore then the bully has usually put effort into their bullying and gotten nothing out of it – objectively, at best, they can hope that they hurt their target, but they will never get the actual satisfaction of knowing they did.
So they have redefined blocking people is a sign of deficiency – cowardice, moral inferiority, and most importantly trying to equate it to admitting defeat. This way they can still get their violence thrill when someone ignores them. They know they won, they know they hurt their target, because they have defined blocking to be irrefutable proof of such.
But it only works if they believe it. They have to convince themselves, not their target. Which is why people go in other’s inbox and demand that they be blocked. They have built up their world view so that they are unable to block or it is actively admitting that they are cowards, morally deficient, and are and always were wrong.
And, unfortunately, because anti culture is based on bullying and abuse they have managed to convinced a lot of younger people that this is the case, so now lots of people are unable to block people because it makes them feel that they are cowards and morally deficient.
This is yet another way in which anti culture actively harms minors. It has rendered many minors incapable of using the tools that allow them to protect themselves in online spaces.
This is an incredible analysis! Thank you.
Unfortunately it is not just analysis. I know a girl who is being stalked and harassed by a man on social media but she refuses to block him because “blocking is cowardly”.
I figured out all this by talking to her, trying to address her concerns about blocking people, and trying to convince her it is ok to block this guy. This has been going on for 4 months and still she refuses because people have drilled it into her head so much that blocking people makes her a bad person. I finally got her to turn off anon asks though, so progress is being made.
I’m really glad you went to that effort. You’re a good friend. Unfortunately, I know it’s not just theory to think over … it’s seriously screwing up a lot of lives. That’s why I think it’s so important to understand the mindsets of the people doing it, so you can see it in yourself and others before you hurt yourself or anyone else, and before you get tangled up with people who are spouting that rhetoric before you meet them.
Also: thinking back to when I was younger, blocking was considered the ‘cowardly’ thing to do even before antis were shitting things up in a particular way. On LJ, on FB, on MySpace … only assholes blocked people, at least in the geeky spaces I hung out in. Which makes me think that maybe the Geek Social Fallacies also play a part in this? ‘If you exclude people you’re a dick.’ ‘You’re a coward who won’t confront people. You just avoid them.’ Which of course, feeds into an environment where even people who don’t buy into anti-shipper rhetoric are set up to be afraid of blocking people, lest they be seen as the ‘real’ problem for failing to negotiate a ceasefire and excluding other nerds from their nerd experience.
It’s all just conveniently feeding into a space where abusers have full time access to victims and denying that access makes the victim equally abusive. 😦 I hate it.
I hope your friend ends up okay.
Blocking is not cowardly. Blocking is taking control of your time and attention, and refusing to give energy to the people who want you to waste it on them.
If you are entertained by antis, you are under no obligation to block them – if they don’t want to read your words, they can block you. If someone is bothering you, feel free to block them – your time and attention are limited; don’t waste them on people who only detract from the enjoyment you get out of life.
(Originally posted this as a reply, but I’m copying it into a reblog for safekeeping and expanding on it slightly.)
This is making me wonder if we need to revive another Old Internet term: signal-to-noise ratio. Blocking mindless hate and copypasta’d harassment is usually less about threat than about nuisance. Removing useless, irrelevant, foul-smelling garbage from your local slice of internet so you can spend your finite time and attention on the stuff you’re actually there for. This was less true on platforms like LJ that made it easier to maintain a high signal-to-noise ratio. But on Tumblr and Twitter, with high posting volume, feeds clogged with reblogs/retweets, sitewide tags instead of moderated communities as the only common spaces, and extremely limited filtering capabilities, blocking becomes a vital tool for junk control. In some ways it’s a replacement for basic mod functions like “clean up the mess if a troll starts shouting insults, baiting participants into flamewars, or otherwise interrupting useful conversations to draw dongs all over everything.” Or spam/off-topic control–my blocklist is mostly bots and blogs that post stuff I’m not interested in to a tag I’m browsing.
Related: I suspect the motivation for content-less harassment comments like “tl;dr”/“bad post op”/etc isn’t just signaling allegiance or demoralizing the OP, it’s also shitting up the signal-to-noise ratio of the post notes and inviting your followers to join in. It’s why long substantive posts are more likely to get the Tumblr-hate equivalent of a dong scrawled in sharpie–the *existence* of signal in the “enemy” camp is what’s being targeted, and trolls don’t fight signal with counter-signal. They fight it with noise.
Noise attacks are some real shit right now, too. Information bombardment is one of the cornerstones of information distortion (which was literally how 4chan and Russia drop-kicked Trump into office.)
Of course 4channers would say that blocking is cowardly – they depend on the unchecked ability to generate noise.
I encourage blocking those who maliciously generate noise.
I think for a lot of white people, when you call them out on their casual racism (microagressions and non-overt things), they see it as a case of hurt feelings from your point of view as opposed to a discussion of harmful practices that aid the vehicle of racism. So in response, they take it as a personal attack, rather than a learning experience, and go on the defensive by bringing up a time that you made them upset as leverage. Or they defend their actions by doubling down on the behavior at hand and dismissing your criticism as over sensitivity and emphasizing their “harmless” intent. And I think that is one of the reasons why it’s so hard to address casual and interpersonal racism with the general white population (and also other poc tbh).
I think white people NEED to read this and let it sink way deep down inside them.
i'll apple your turnover 