🔹 Saying that it's okay to write or read about dark and taboo topics but only when they're portrayed in a certain way is still censorship.

🔹 Wanting to ban or forbid media that you believe portrays a negative topic in a positive light, by glorifying, romanticizing, or fetishizing it is still censorship.

🔹 There is no objective metric to decide if a story is portraying a negative topic the 'right' way.

🔹 Just because a piece of fiction doesn't explicitly condemn or portray an evil action in a bad light in the text doesn't mean the author thinks its good or is trying to persuade the audience that it is good.

🔹 Survivors of trauma will not always write fiction about their trauma in a way that seems 'right' or 'normal' to you.

🔹 Banning fiction because it portrays dark, taboo topics in a way you consider gross or disgusting is still censorship.

[Tags reading, "#I've said it before and I'll say it again #I create art for adults #and as an adult I expect you to already know that hurting people is wrong #I'm not gonna hold you're hand through that like you're a toddler #"hurting people is wrong" is something you should have learned in kindergarten #not at 24 from an m-rated dark romance novel"]

it's so fucking frustrating to be in college and know everyone uses chatgpt and to be tempted by it constantly while also knowing intellectually that it doesn't work and it's a bad idea. like, i hang out in the library a lot, and i see people using chatgpt on assignments almost every day. and i know it isn't a good way to learn, because it's not really "artificial intelligence" so much as it is an auto text generator. and it gives you wrong information or badly worded sentences all the time. but every week i stare down assignments i don't want to do and i think man. if only i could type this prompt into a text generator and have it done in 10 minutes flat. and i know it wouldn't work. it wouldn't synthesize information from the text the way professors want, it wouldn't know how to answer questions, it just spits out vaguely related words for a couple paragraphs. but knowing my classmates get their work done in 10 minutes flat with it while i fight every ounce of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in my body is infuriating.

i think one thing that's been really helpful in keeping myself from using it is thinking about Why i have to do the specific assignments i have. like what is the actual goal. like some assignments the goal isn't "share a story about parenting styles in ur personal life" so much as it is "show you understand the concept of parenting styles thru a story". or it's not "how do hormones impact teenagers' decision making abilities" it's "can you understand, reword, synthesize, and explain the information in the text and videos to explain how hormones impact teenagers' decision making abilities". and looking at it as "this assignment is asking me to read some words and then understand and explain them, which is a skill i want to have" rather than "i have to answer these stupid questions that seem really obvious because all my professors want me to die forever" has helped. especially in a world where everyone uses chatgpt i want to know how to read with my own brain

if you give “stupid” characters rural/southern accents i don’t like you and if you give “smart” characters rural/southern accents but it’s a punchline i don’t like you even more

the other day I was out at lunch with some people I don’t know too well & they got talking specifically about West Virginian accents in the context of a movie that takes place there & that the movie opted out of doing accents & one of them laughed and said “I mean, can you imagine if characters sounded like that in serious moments??” I was like yeah I can because everyone where I’m from does sound like that. Y’all are so annoying.

no need for a more specific word because it all falls under classism and/or racism.

west virginia is home to some of the strongest labor & union movements in U.S. history, from miners’ strikes to the 2018 teachers’ strikes (where 20,000 teachers went on strike together with community support).

For the last 100 years it has become very beneficial to those in power for the rest of the country to think of us as very stupid, backward, “inbred,” etc. It’s not an accident. there were real efforts made to create & proliferate the stereotype of the stupid hillbilly.

Likewise it’s not an accident that dialects like AAVE are treated as a joke. Easier to dismiss civil rights leaders if you think what they say is inherently comedic or uneducated.

a lot of people in the tags saying they live in places where they hear people mock accents & dialects a lot & it upsets them. just want to remind you that it’s up to you to challenge that in the moment. when someone makes a shitty joke at the expense of someone else, someone else has to tell them it’s not funny & why. we don’t learn in a vacuum. maybe they’ll listen, maybe they won’t. still gotta try.

at some point you likely had an “ah-ha” moment where you realized an unconscious bias you held needed to be unraveled. likely someone else pointed it out to you, whether that was in a conversation or something you read/watched online.

it’s not enough to learn your own lesson and move on. you have to pass the lesson along.

All of the following is IMO, so YMMV.

"Accent bigotry" - Irish = stupid & possibly a drunk; Northern Irish = bigoted & possibly a terrorist; RP English = educated & probably trustworthy (though also nowadays possibly a villain) - is one of the reasons I'm ... let's call it "ambivalent", about what TVTropes calls "Funetik Aksent".

"Phonetic" misspellings and dropping letters in favour of apostrophes happen at both ends of the literary social scale, but there's seldom any doubt about who's in "Who's Who" and who isn't.

The person who said this:

didn't go to the same school as the person who said this:

Further lot development may and should reveal that neither of those speakers are what they seem - salt-of-the-earth working class or disdainful peer-of-the-realm - but what they SEEM is telegraphed instantly by the way their speech is set in print.

(Sharon McCrumb did this in "Zombies of the Gene Pool" - a big burly man who sounds like a hillbilly villain from "Deliverance" is a linguistics professor born in the region and doing it deliberately to mock the assumptions of the people hearing him.)

Unless there's a good reason for it (for example, a character revealing their true origins by accident or for emphasis) often the only thing writing speech like that does, is to indicate These People Here Speak Properly whereas Theyum Fohx Theah Tawks Funnih.

That comes complete with baggage which the writer either doesn't know about, doesn't care about - or is fully aware of and using deliberately.

*****

Other reasons for ambivalence: a little Funetik Aksent goes a long way; it's often tiresome to read (and to write); most of all, if readers are unaware of some important detail - such as what sounds the weird spelling is meant to imitate - it's pointless.

There's an example of Unaware right in the TVTropes article, which states:

No it doesn't.

For one thing, just looking at them would have shown that speech from Lovecraft stories (here "The Dunwich Horror")...

...is nothing like speech from "Shoggoth's Old Peculiar"...

For another thing - this is much more excusable - that writer clearly didn't know about "The Dagenham Dialogues", a series of British comedy sketches from the 1960s. performed by Peter Cook and Dudley Moore.

(Not knowing isn't a surprise. Those sketches aren't as famous as they might be because of the infamous BBC policy of wiping / reusing programme tapes to save on costs and storage. "Monty Python's Flying Circus" almost went the same way; a lot of "Doctor Who" and many other popular shows DID.)

What's actually being parodied are the "Dialogues" characters "Pete and Dud", playing two acolytes of Cthulhu. They're described thus:

Rather, or indeed very, like this.

The Defence rests, m'Lud.

These acolytes discuss H.P. Lovecraft's style and vocabulary (overblown and eccentric), the location of sunken R'lyeh (just off the end of the pier, but handy for the shops), Great Cthulhu who lies dreaming (though temporarily deceased), and so on and so forth.

It's an excellent simulation of Pete and Dud and yet, apart from a couple of dropped-letter apostrophes, der's nun uv d'yoojul kunstruksh'n trikz. Instead it's done by matching the repetition, pace and rhythm of the originals.

*****

Incidentally, "Shoggoth's Old Peculiar", the titular beer of the story, is itself a parody of Theakston's Old Peculier, a not half bad dark ale.

Note the difference in spelling: "PeculiAR" means strange or odd, "PeculiER" means a kind of Christian ecclesiastical court, so that's another beery association with a temporarily deceased god. Accidental, coincidental or deliberate?

Knowing @neil-gaiman, my money's on deliberate. :->

*****

Here he is, reading "Shoggoth's Old Peculiar": Part One, Part Two, Part Three.

And here are a couple of bits of "Dagenham Dialogues": One and Two.

I was really enjoying Peter's analysis and then suddenly I was reading about my story. He's spot on, on every point.

Also: Why would anyone in "Shoggoth's Old Peculiar" be speaking in a New England accent, good or bad, when the story's set in regular old Old England? In a Lovecraftian town, perhaps, but not a New England one.

I have said this many times, but I don't mind saying it again:

I grew up in coal country, in Northeast PA. The place where I grew up has gotten a lot more built up in the last ~40 years, but it's by no means suburban or urban, and when we moved there, it was ... well.

It was coal country. It's part of the Appalachian mountains.

I grew up with friends who survival hunted and whose meat during the winter was the stuff they shot in the fall. My school district closed for the first days of buck, doe, and bear season because so many people just didn't come to school those days (including teachers) that we just had those days off. My grandfather was a breaker boy, though he told us his job was 'picker,' and he went into the Navy so he could leave the mines.

I'm a fucking hick, in my heart and my soul. Those are my people. Canyon Bakehouse has a type of bread loaf they call 'mountain white,' and the wrapper of it is an in-joke between me and several of my friends.

But -- because of the part of Appalachia that I come from, and the fact that I moved to Philly as an adult and lived there for about twenty years -- I don't have the expected Appalachian accent. I'm like... a fucking stealth hick, for lack of a better way to put it, and I have an immense vocabulary. Because of those two things -- the lack of the expected accent and the fact that I write and sometimes talk like a 19th century dandy in terms of run-on sentences and voluminous vocabulary, I essentially fly stealth in most conversations.

The number of supposedly progressive people in Philly and PDX, where I live now, who say the most blisteringly racist and/or classist things about people like me in the most casual ways... it's fucking exhausting. Sometimes I have the energy to challenge it, and sometimes I don't, but man, it happens a lot, and people talk like that in front of me really openly, I think because I don't sound like they 'expect me to.'

Hicks aren't necessarily uneducated, and uneducated doesn't mean unintelligent, and intelligence isn't a marker of worth.

Good talk.

My grandfather grew up in working class Britain near the end of the Second World War. Port city where the most famous thing there is the Mary Rose (sunken ship from King Henry the Eighth’s era) and the amount of British accents among my way too many cousins (I have a lot of aunts and uncles) is insane

Great points here about how phonetic accents in writing should not be utilized anymore! When I learned more about my internalized classism and racism I went back through all my WIPs and was ashamed at it. It’s so ingrained!

Truly it is incredibly inconvenient how you have to write your stories if you want to read them

unless I come up with a series of words that form a series of sentences, I’m not going to read this story and nobody else is either and this is truly rude of the universe to work this way

government is trying to ban tiktok meanwhile millions of poor and disabled americans are about to completely lose their internet access at the end of april because congress wont renew funding for the affordable connectivity program

hell fucking world

if you want to help us convince congress to do something that actually benefits society, please check out the link below. we only have roughly 45 days of affordable internet service remaining from the time this post has been written

say that shit

As of April 19, 2024 we currently have just 10 days of ACP funding left

please spread this and reach out to your representatives before its too late to save this vital program

guys the email stuff seems super intimidating but it's so easy. put your name, email, and city and they'll send in the emails FOR YOU. all repaired and written

I guess for the sake of true clarity I should note that there are plenty of places where people do technically "have their dicks out" at Pride. That's pretty common in Seattle, where public nudity for non-sexual purposes is totally legal. Every so often at Seattle Pride I'll just turn around and hey, there's a penis, but it's ... just there, being a well-behaved floppy dick. I have yet to see an orgy break out at Pride.

And there are deliberately and specifically nude events in Seattle, as opposed to incidental nudity at Pride, so the fact that no one is clutching their pearls about the nude cyclists at the Fremont Solstice Parade is telling.

That's a great point.

I grew up vacationing in Provincetown every summer. I saw all sorts of kinky shit that I didn't understand. I saw whole asses on display. I saw drag queens coming and going from both bathrooms.

It was fine. My brother and I turned out fine.

My parents didn't explain that anything was or could be sexual. "They’re playing dress-up, I guess." "He must like the pants. Why? Well, he probably thinks he has a nice butt and wants people to see it. Yeah, it's pretty funn--NO YOU CAN'T ASK TO TAKE A PICTURE WITH HIM SHH." "Oh, they dress like that for fun. They probably use whichever bathroom has the shorter line haha!" And it was just no big deal at all.

Parents, it's not your job to prevent kink at Pride, it's your job to figure out what to say to your kids so that it's to big deal. You can explain more as they get older if you want, but that's up to you.

I don't keep drag under the kink umbrella, I should clarify - they just both fall under "things people insist parents will be unable to explain to their kids," and the thing is, parents don’t need to explain it. The magic word is "fun!" Do you know how easy it is to brush things over with kids if you use the word "fun?" It's for fun! They're doing it for fun! They must think those clothes are fun! They're having fun! Kids will accept "fun" as an explanation for almost anything, no further questions. And it's a perfectly valid one in this situation, too! They really are doing it for fun.

(I'm pretty sure if we said it was weird, our parents brushed it off with a "some people are weird, who cares though" sort of attitude. It was, once again, fine.)

Oh, man, Provincetown. Sometime when I'm not so tired, I should tell y'all about the summer we ended up in P-town for the day when I was like 17. My parents were not aware of Provincetown before that day.

I saw more when we accidentally crossed paths with some dudes from Portland's Naked Bike ride while my mom, some of her coworkers, my sister, and I were on a "Weird House Tour" then I've seen at pride. it was mostly just surprising bc we'd forgotten it was also that day.

it’s interesting learning which homophobic ideas are confusing and unfamiliar to the next generation. for example, every once in a while i’ll see a post going around expressing tittering surprise at someone’s claim that gay men have hundreds of sexual partners in their lifetimes. while these posts often have a snappy comeback attached, they send a shiver down my spine because i remember when those claims were common, when you’d see them on the news or read them in your study bible. and they were deployed with a specific purpose — to convince you not just that gay men were disgusting and pathological, but that they deserved to die from AIDS. i saw another post laughing at the outlandish idea that gay men eroticize and worship death, but that too was a standard line, part and parcel of this propaganda with the goal of dehumanizing gay men as they died by the thousands with little intervention from mainstream society.

which is not to say that not knowing this is your fault, or that i don’t understand. i’ll never forget sitting in a classroom with my high school gsa, all five of us, watching a documentary on depictions of gay and bi people in media (off the straight and narrow [pdf transcript] — a worthwhile watch if your school library has it) when the narrator mentioned “the stereotype of the gay psycho killer.” we burst into giggles — how ridiculous! — then turned to our gay faculty advisors and saw their pale, pained faces as they told us “no, really. that was real” and we realized that what we’d been laughing at was the stuff of their lives.

it’s moving and inspiring to see a new generation of kids growing up without encountering these ideas. it’s a good thing. but at the same time, we have to pass on the knowledge of this pain, so we’re not caught unawares when those who hate us come back with the oldest tricks in the book.

Even in the 90’s I met people who believed, with the utmost sincerity and a sense of sheer terror, that gay people were agents of Satan who chose to become gay so they could deliberately spread STD’s, deliberately die of AIDs as part of their “fetish” and deliberately offend god into accelerating the end of the world. This does sound like absurd cartoonish nonsense to most people just a little younger than me but I heard it and worse growing up. Millions of people completely, totally believed that kind of thing with the most dire certainty. Today’s lizardman hollow earth anti-vaccine theories actually kind of pale in comparison.

That is what LGBT people were up against not long ago and the remnants of that fantastical-sounding hysteria and fanaticism are not only still here but regaining power again in the U.S. pretty rapidly.

…and I don’t think people should forget that for all I just described and all OP just described, the hatred for trans people was several times worse. Their very existence was treated as UNSPEAKABLE by even the Satanic HIV Apocalypse theorists. This is why it’s so bizarre and ridiculous to see people today whining about “PC culture” like that’s the problem, like people who were condemned as loathsome hellspawn within most of their own lifetimes somehow have it “too good” practically overnight.

do you have any idea what the AIDS funerals were like back then

I will harp on this until the day I die. It’s not information that people have nowadays both because it’s not really needed - thank GOD - and it’s been erased - not so cool.

pastors would take payment to perform the ceremony and then not show up. crematoriums would sometimes refuse to handle the bodies; funeral homes were no better, and my dad once walked in on a mortician dumping rubbing alcohol all over himself after he’d BEEN IN THE SAME ROOM as the body of one of my father’s dead friends. the funerals were held in people’s basements, the very very few churches at funeral homes willing, meeting halls, and in the homes of lesbians, who were some of the most steadfast allies during that time period. The few straight allies pitched in where they could – like that one woman who buried a lot of them herself, in her own cemetery, because their families wouldn’t come claim the bodies – but it was awful.

my dad was a reformed catholic but he knew the words and twice he had to perform the funerals to lay these people to rest because he was the most qualified. I stood next to him as he tried not to cry over his dead friends and to let them rest in peace. I watched my mother, at the back of wherever she was, quietly sobbing, and her lesbian friends who had ACTUALLY watched the person in question die, still comforting her. 

I got told by other adults that my entire family was going to hell because we deigned to care for queer people (and my dad especially, as a nurse, deigned to “waste” his knowledge and time and energy on easing suffering).

I was six years old. Freddie Mercury hadn’t even died yet.

recently a friend and I formed a queer social group/activism group and some older gay men came. And they cried, because, and I quote

“This is how it started, back then. we just got together, ten or twelve of us, and decided we were going to do something about it. And we made it out, despite everything, despite AIDS, despite the stigma. And you will too.”

And I had to respond, because I was little, but I was THERE for that, and I grabbed his hands and told him that his history is our history and we need to learn it.

we need to remember. the dead, the living, and their stories.

if you know an older queer person, inquire if they’d be interested in writing down their memoirs. If they’re not writers but want to tell the story, hit me up – I am, and I am absolutely willing to do a living memory.

they’re the only history books we have.

THEY ARE THE ONLY HISTORY BOOKS WE HAVE! It’s so important to record them at last.

Because lgbt+ history hasn’t been recorded, nor told forward by others. What we learn we learn from morgues, criminal records etc. Only ‘unlucky’ persons have been recorded in any ways and most of happy couples, lives and tales have been lost to history as they were not spoken about. 

okay listen, i get what you guys are saying about the importance of listening to older lgbt people, obviously, that’s very right!

but you guys gotta know… they are NOT “the only history books we have.” because… we have actual history books. just because they are rarely taught in schools does not mean they don’t exist!

i’ve been keeping a list of all the lgbt books i want to read or reread, which are mostly history, and it is, at this moment, 239 books long. and that’s excluding quite a few that i was less interested in.

obviously, it can’t cover everything; obviously, it is skewed toward white american experiences; obviously, we should always be supplementing it by talking to older people in our community as much as we can. but it does us no favors whatsoever to pretend that all the knowledge in these books is lost to history, existing only in individuals’ minds, when actually so many people have taken great pains to write it down and make it available for us to explore!

so yes, meet older people and talk to them and take them seriously! but also please, i beg of you, read a book.

p.s. a note because i regret not making this clear enough in my original post: there is absolutely nothing wrong with gay men having many consenting sexual partners! homophobes’ statistics are obviously falsified for bigoted purposes, but that doesn’t mean those gay men who do have large numbers of partners are any less deserving of dignity and life, and they too deserve our defense.

I agree with all the above, but also if you are someone who wants to record history or hear more oral histories there are a few oral history archives dedicated to doing this already! It’s possible to engage in that history right now:

The Biden administration released rules Friday that protect the rights of LGBTQ students and change the way schools can respond to allegations of sexual assault and misconduct. It's a long-awaited answer to campaign promises made by President Biden to reverse Trump-era regulations he said were silencing survivors.

As a public college professor this is HUGE. Really great stuff here does a lot to fight against the massive issue of schools refusing to investigate Title 9 issues.

"the prefrontal cortex doesn't fully form until yr 25!!" y do u wish to take more agency away from teens and young adults. y do u refer to phrenology to inform yr worldview. I'm about to undevelop yr prefrontal cortex with a baseball bat if u don't shut the fuck up

for the ppl who keep saying this is an objective fact, from the Wikipedia list of common misconceptions:

it's pop science. it's pseudoscience. it's phrenology. it's not real. it's being used as an excuse to call older people pedophiles and take away the rights of younger people. shut the fuck up.

Who was your bisexual awakening and why was it Ardeth Bay from the hit films The Mummy (1999) and The Mummy Returns (2001)

literally illegal and a crime against me personally (which is the worst kind of crime) for a man to be that perfect

no sorry

it was Evelyn Carnahan (later, O’Connell) from the hit films The Mummy (1999) and The Mummy Returns (2001)

Ardeth Bay provided some very helpful contributions, however, it must be said.

May I offer Brendan Fraser from the hit films The Mummy (1999) and The Mummy Returns (2001)?

I had a crush on allllll 3 of them ngl. I watched at a later date than most being smol at the time of release but it stands

yeah and this lady was not exactly helping shore up the tottering edifice of my pretense at heterosexuality either

surely this is a good idea that doesn’t have the capacity to end real fuckin badly

Bridges aren’t supposed to have weight restrictions on them. That is, they don’t come with weight restrictions on them when they’re new. So a bridge with a weight restriction on it is a sign that something has gone wrong and the bridge does not meet current standards.

The maximum weight that a vehicle is allowed to carry on the Interstate System per federal law is 80,000 pounds gross vehicle weight (with a max of 20,000 pounds per axle). That’s 40 tons. That limit applies to every inch of pavement, not just the bridges. Since this is a known cap, a new Interstate bridge will be designed to accommodate an 80,000 lb GVW load on it. You could say the bridge’s weight limit is 80,000 lb/40 tons but that doesn’t really have much meaning, because a load higher than that would be illegal to transport on public roads anyway, and the road leading up to the bridge has the same weight restriction. (In practice, the bridge doubtlessly will be designed to have a little bit of let to it just in case some idiot tries to squeak by a few hundred extra pounds.)

Now, note that that law applies to the Interstate System only, because the federal government only has a governing interest in the Interstate System (and other roads that together make up something called the National Highway System) because they partially fund it. Most long-distance roads are owned and funded by the states. The states could theoretically set lower standard weight limits and/or design bridges with lower weight limits…but in practice they don’t.

One, because all of that 80,000 lb GVW traffic on the Interstate system has to go somewhere when it exits the system.

Two, because a group called the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO, who are best known for picking the road numbers) maintains a catalog of standard components for making bridges that meet Interstate System requirements. Engineers are expensive on a per-hour basis, so if you can direct your engineer to use standard components and make a standard bridge, that’s a lot cheaper than having them design a bridge from scratch to go over the creek in Nowheresville. As a result, most new bridges meet Interstate standards and have an 80,000 lb GVW rating even if they aren’t on the Interstate system. (This is also why all new bridges kind of look the same, but we’re not worried about how boring the bridges are for the sake of this post.)

So a bridge only has an explicit weight limit if it has been damaged in some way (through failure to properly maintain it usually) or because it predates the application of Interstate System standards and the standard AASHTO bridges.

Older bridges often have other problems in addition to the weight limits: many older designs are what we call “fracture critical”, which means that if one component of the bridge fails the whole thing collapses. Modern bridge designs have redundancy designed into them so that if one beam fails the other beams will carry the load until the damaged beam can be replaced. Older bridges also often don’t meet other standards, like height (16 ft clearance) and width (12 ft per lane plus 14 ft for shoulders) requirements.

Biden isn’t advocating eliminating weight limits and letting it be a laissez-faire free-for-all where trucks can just go wherever they want. He’s advocating for replacing bridges that carry weight limits with new ones that don’t have them.

wow i got absolutely schooled thank you for all this this is really informative. i have learned so much

This is a great explanation of what the fuck Biden was talking about in his tweet. because I will freely admit that I also went “…….wtf?????” when I read it. So thank you.

Today I learned about civil engineering.

are we sure that Biden understands civil engineering, tho?

*sigh*

Are we sure that the guy who has been in public service for longer than I’ve been alive - and I’m 46 - & is kind of famously obsessed with transportation infrastructure knows a basic thing about weight limits and bridges?

I can’t guarantee it, but I know where I’m placing my bets.

Whether or not Biden himself is a civil engineering expert is irrelevant. A President doesn’t need to be an expert in all things.

They need to listen to the experts they do have.

If Biden has a team of civil engineers on hand and he’s trusting the data they’re giving him and their expertise, then we’re good.

I want Biden to be good at Being President, which he’s doing by listening to people who know more than him on certain subjects.

something that biden is indeed VERY good at is listening to people. i like that in a president.

I used to watch CSPAN for fun. (For non-USians that’s the channel that broadcasts federal government stuff).

My favorite thing to watch was any senate infrastructure hearing where Joe Biden was running the show because he knew his shit and asked questions that got to the root of issues.

Back in the 90s I remember thinking, “I want to vote for this guy for president someday.”

He’s not exciting I suppose. He’s a policy wonk. WHICH IS WHAT WE NEED.

On Twitter there are currently a lot of Christians and Muslims getting really angry about ways that Jews work around restrictions on work during Shabbat, and, like, honestly I do not understand why they care? Just a lot of non-Jews telling nice Orthodox Jews that they’re doing their religion wrong for no reason.

I saw the same posts and will try to sum up:

Basically people who believe in God tend to get offended when they discover that another religion who believes in the same God has a bunch of ridiculous ways they think they can trick him.

Like, a lot of Christian denominations don’t follow every rule in the Bible, but they’ll either say “We should follow that rule, and we’re trying ” or “We don’t believe we should have to follow that rule and here’s why”.

The whole concept that mainstream sects of Judaism officially approve the practice of trying to try to TRICK God is really bizarre and offensive.

Like, you clearly don’t believe God is omniscient or at all impressive if you think he can be deceived by some mortals hanging a wire around their neighborhood.

It also shows bad character to not just be upfront and say “okay, we don’t believe we should have to follow this rule and here’s why” and instead to try and be sneaky and deceitful. Religions are supposed to promote good character, especially honesty, so this is another reason why it’s very disturbing to a lot of people.

And then back to my first point about how this shows they don’t believe God to be much of a God at all if he can be so easily tricked, (either that or they themselves and their magic wire is superior to God!) which…it should be obvious why that’s so offensive.

I think it's really interesting that you assume we worship the same god, when your god was a Jewish man and our G-d is, well, G-d.

Setting that aside for a moment, you also make a number of other assumptions about our processes and motives because you neither know nor understand them.

Jewish jurisprudence, halacha, is a living process that takes what would otherwise be dead words on a page and makes Torah into a process rather than just a book. A holy book, but simply a book nevertheless. Humans were given the ability to think for ourselves and to reason solely at the pleasure of the Divine. There is a reason: we were meant to engage, not just obey.

What you describe here is a rather infantile relationship to the Divine, in that it's always daddy's rules forever and always and there's no questioning or conversation or relationship there - just blind obedience.

Unlike you, we have a mature relationship with Hashem that involves ongoing dialogue and discussion, far more like spouses than mere fiat from on high. (Luckily for Christians, there are grown-up versions of Christianity too; not for nothing is the church called the "bride of Christ" and I have met plenty of Christians who question and wrestle and engage in open and active dialogue with their God.) Judaism is a living faith that evolves over time, and Torah, while its words are fixed, reaches across time to speak to us in each generation. Each time period and place are going to have unique struggles, questions, challenges, and demands, and the Torah is able to meet us where we're at in all of them because we were given the ability to interpret its words in light of the current day.

There is no trickery going on here; we are simply having a living conversation with our Creator and we are doing so using the exact process He gave us!

Besides; if it were really supposed to be a game and a trick, why would we write down six thousand+ pages of this commentary on exactly how to follow these rules??

But of course that's not the point you're actually making here.

Whether you know it or not, the argument that you are making is rooted in supercessionism, this chauvinistic idea that Christianity has "replaced" the Jewish people and that your new covenant is more valid than the covenant followed by your own god.

It's this fascinating and profound insecurity that lies beneath so many of these accusations: you can't stand that Jews still exist and still keep the Torah using the halachic process of our ancestors all the way back to Sinai, because it reminds you that your supercessionist religion is built on a house of cards. Your predecessors added to the Torah, abandoned the actual law, and instead chased power, expansionism, and idolatry. Today's decent Christians are only barely starting to peel back the layers of garbage to understand the actual teachings of their god, and meanwhile they have to deal with clowns like you going around harassing Jews over a religion that they diverged entirely from 2000 years ago.

So yes, we engage in the process of Torah because we understand it and it is our sacred relationship with Hashem. You are only offended (on G-d's behalf, no less! Really interested in how you think that you are allowed to speak for G-d) because you don't understand and choose not to. Luckily as a non-Jew, interpreting the Torah is neither your duty nor your privilege.

Wow those comments sure are extremely fucking antisemitic. Like, just to be clear, the sneaky, deceitful, (cunning, conniving) jew who tries to find ways around (Christian) authority is a classic antisemitic trope.

She may be talking about God's authority this time, but that's also how Jews are portrayed wherever we settle. "They're not real Germans/Americans/whatever, they're just deceiving us and pretending to follow our laws to further wily Jewish agenda." Straight up nazi rhetoric.

Actually no, I want to double back to this cause I'm still pretty upset.

Every time you see a Jewish law that seems like a "loophole" to get around another law, just know there are a dozen halachic rulings they do the opposite. Rules that make things waaay more difficult just to remove even the slightest possibility of accidentally breaking the commandments.

Like, We started at "do not boil a kid in it's mother's milk" and extrapolated out until we got to have two completely separate sets of dishes and cookware and utensils and if you can afford it stoves and fridges and sinks to make absolutely positive that no possible meat (including poultry) could come into contact with a single molecule of dairy. Just to make sure you don't accidentally cook a piece of a baby goat in its mother's milk. This is called Syag la Torah (your transliteration milage may vary) which literally translates to building a fence around the law.

So no, halachah isn't all about tricking God to take the easy way out. Halachah is about examining every detailed facet of the law to make sure we understand it and are follow it correctly in every possible scenario and to prevent accidentally breaking it. And this process continues to this day to account for changing society and technology.

It's not a goddamned loophole. It's never a "loophole". It's defining the rule to within an inch of its fucking life, because we enjoy that and that's part of our relationship with G-d. And what's more, HE LOVES THAT ABOUT US.

Like, this is just pure Talmud, including the end quote from G-d, who is exclaiming in delight.

I think his unwillingness to reframe this thinking is very telling. He is defending the Christian antisemitism, and when we point out the flaws in his thinking, his defense is "well thats what BELIEVERS think about you guys!"

The definition of a culturally Christian athiest.

The root of this argument though, is the Christian refusal to recognize the Jewish religion as a valid way of relating to God. In order to support the truth of their worldview, they have to deny that Judaism could be a positive/valid/functioning spirtual/religious system.

They are trying to resolve the cognitive dissonance created by these two conflicting facts - that their religion is the only way to relate to God, and that their religion is valid because it is based in Jewish texts which they view as divinely inspired. Therefore, their interpretations of these texts MUST superceded Jewish interpretations.

They MUST view "The Law" as an oppressive curse which is meant to punish/restrict Jews or which we are following vainly. Not only have 2000 years of Christian history shaped this cognitive dissonance, but this congantive dissonance has shaped 2000 years of Christian history.

(Is it possible to be a Christian and not anti-Jewish/not a replacement theologist/not supercessionist? Sure. But NOT if you are a 100% Biblical liberalist, and NOT if youre faithful to any mainstream historic stream of Christianity. Because the whole point is that they are claiming their legitimacy based on Jewish texts, which only works if the Jewish interpretation of Jewish texts (ie Judaism) is wrong.)

They cannot comprehend the idea of Torah as a social construct in which modern Jews are active participants. They cannot understand that its not a question of how GOD defines a building/house, that its a question of how actual living societies of Jewish people define a building/house. The idea that we have agency in how we interpret Torah scares them, as Christianity does not allow free interpretation in the same way as Judaism. The idea that we participate in Torah because it is our way of life offends them, because their worldview teaches us that our way of life is invalid and a punishment. For us to find and create meaning in Torah and halacha is meaningless and even offensive to them because 1) they are not part of our social paradigm and 2) we are not part of theirs.

i hate when the teacher’s like “write about a bad time in your life” like i ain’t tryna get a social worker up my ass, thanks tho fam

This ain’t no joke I had to write a essay about what your scared of so I did it (I was scared of growing up and where my life was going) it was great got a 100 but then I got sent to councilors office and was sent to therapy cause they thought I was suicidal and on the verge of breaking…Apparently they ment like spiders or some shit…

Also like, not everyone finds that at all useful or cathartic.

“Write about some difficulty you’ve experienced personally.” “Aight fam let me just break down into tears and skip the rest of my classes.”

Yes! I had a psych professor ask us to discuss outloud the hardest thing that ever happened to us literally two days ago and I said “you realize the position you’re putting us in? I feel obligated to lie to not only save my peers the awkwardness but also because I will find no relief in answering honestly but rather anxiety. The hardest thing in my life is having people repeatedly tell me I should find some sort of catharsis in reliving my trauma so someone else can feel pity for me!”

The whole class backed me up because they didn’t want to either! Those kind of exercises are only helpful for people who don’t have any real past/current issues– which is no one btw.

On par with this are those fucking self-assessments where they want to to be optimistic and positive about the future. You’re sitting there drowning in college stress and anxiety so bad you can’t look another human in the eye, fighting depression so that you can eventually achieve a piece of paper that might get you a better job if the economy doesn’t tank itself (guess what, it did), and the most optimistic thing you can think of is that the class ends in 20 minutes.

OH! I KNOW THE ANSWER TO THIS!

There’s a WIRED article that explains the history behind this practice. 

Basically, this guy named Jeffrey Mitchell had a traumatic experience, then after months of PTSD, he told a confidant about the event that traumatized him. Retelling the event to a confidant was so cathartic for Mitchell that his PTSD went away after. He did a bunch of research to see if his personal experience of catharsis and relief could be replicated in other people suffering from PTSD. Years later he published a paper proposing a formalized psychiatric treatment revolving around this idea that expressing a traumatic experience helps relieve it. The paper was so influential that the whole psychiatric community adopted “critical incident stress debriefing” (CISD) as a standard treatment for PTSD.

Unfortunately … it’s bullshit.

Not only does the CISD treatment program Mitchell came up with not help the majority of patients who try it, but it actually makes PTSD worse in the majority of patients who try it.

The WIRED article explains why:

Basically, Mitchell waited until he had some emotional distance before trying to recall the memory, and he had full control of the situation. It was fully his decision. Nobody was pressuring him to talk about it. So he felt safe. Thinking about the memory from a place of safety allowed his brain to re-contextualize the memory as harmless.

Conversely, pressuring a patient to recall a traumatic memory, particularly when it’s still fresh in their minds, makes the patient feel very unsafe. Recalling a bad memory in this unsafe context only serves to re-traumatize the patient. 

[link to the whole article]

basically, there’s a big damn difference between choosing to confide in someone you trust and being pressured to make a public spectacle of your trauma

THIS JUST IN: Forced Public Recalling of Trauma Not As Helpful As Voluntarily Processing Trauma In A Safe Space

Ok hi hello so I need to burst some bubbles on this post a little.

People confused two subjects on this post: the original post was about sharing in class for reflective writing prompts. Then we spiraled into discussing the actual therapeutic practice of sharing trauma. So here’s the deal off the bat—I’m not saying ANYTHING about whether or not that psychology stuff or the therapy approach works or doesn’t, I trust the research at face value there and I’m sure the people who posted are right about it, that’s fine.

HOWEVER I need to return to the original post’s intention which was devaluing reflective prompts or exercises in a class setting because everyone has missed the actual reason teachers do this and why it won’t ever go away and why it’s not actually people trying to hurt you or whatever.

Pedagogically, reflective prompts like the OP describes are often used because students are much more likely to remember what they’re taught when they personally connect with the material, the lesson, or the overall experience they had during the time they were meant to learn something. So reflective prompts that ask you to write about things like that are meant to have you CONNECT with something else that’s happening in the class, in the lesson. For instance when you read, say, Romeo and Juliet or something, you might get a reflective prompt during that asks about a time you were being kept from doing something you love or being who you want to be, etc.

Like, this DOES actively help students. It’s not a practice that bad teachers pull out of their asses to harass students, HOWEVER bad teachers do exist and I’m sure they’ve abused the practice as that’s what bad teachers do so I am not saying that if you’ve had an experience like the ones described here you’re invalid you are for sure valid for being pissed.

So my comments are that—if this is happening in your class, it’s likely because the teacher is trying a very normal and effective pedagogical practice. Not all of those work with all students and it may just not be the one that works for you and that’s ok, you’re not in the wrong for that. If you have serious trauma and you do NOT want help (like one of comments about social workers etc) yes do NOT tell your teacher unless you really really trust them because teachers are mandated reporters in many states and we are obligated to report to higher authority if we have reasonable knowledge that a student is in danger, either at home or from a different source, or is a danger to themselves or others. This is to help prevent child abuse as much as possible, obviously, but can backfire for complicated cases of course.

Anyway long story short most of your teachers who do this are not trying to torture you for the hell of it I promise they’re genuinely trying to help you learn from it they just might be underestimating how some of their prompts might hit for their students and should make clearer to yall that you’re not obligated to share anything you don’t want and/or anything shared will be confidential (my policy on all prompts).

Listening to podcasts while going about my day feels so powerful. They don’t know there’s gay people in my ears

“Omg I made this prom dress for only $10!”

- already owns $200 sewing machine, $100 dress form, full supply of thread/haberdashery

“You can recreate your favorite fast food menu items at home for less money and more flavor,” says the person with $3k in Le Creuset cookware, six professional kitchen appliances, living in the heart of a large city with ample grocery selection, sponsored by Hello Fresh and Skillshare.

"You can cook this full course meal for less than five dollars!" says the person who acts like you can buy $0.001 worth of salt, $0.05 worth of flour, and $1.27 worth of pork.

I'm sorry @chigrima but this just passed peer review:

My brain will just create new WIPs against my will, it’ll just start going, I have no say in which one I work on, in fact, WIP actually stands for Writer in Peril, help

I feel like. Part of the reason we're seeing hot takes like "video games like Stardew Valley are bourgeoisie and you should feel bad for playing them" and "if any actor in a TV show even hints at supporting any part of Israel then we need to boycott that entire show" and stuff like that is.

Online activism does virtually nothing. It does virtually nothing, guys. You can reblog and repost stuff all day and it does nothing. And so there's this desperate need in people's minds to Do Something, but social media platforms have so thoroughly trapped us into the idea that This Is How You Connect With People, that we think blogging = activism.

But nothing we've reblogged thus far has made a significant difference in the world. So we keep reblogging, desperately, convinced that if we root out the real evil in our media consumption or if we pare down our beliefs to the One True Ideal and force everyone around us to share that ideal, then finally Something Will Change For The Better.

Log off. Go give blood; there's a critical shortage right now. Help someone in your community; it might not fix wars that are thousands of miles away but it'll help that person. Call or email your local representative about issues that matter to you. Fucking vote. Do something in the not-online space. It'll matter more than 100 posts in a row about Important Things.