I’m not saying mindfulness can’t have serious benefits. However, I would caution anyone who’s into it to read the book McMindfulness. A lot of the “science” behind it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, there can be genuine drawbacks to it, and it’s often used in unethical ways–like to make CEOs of ruthless companies more able to shove aside their feelings of guilt, or to sharpen the minds of soldiers for killing.

one kind of dumbass will also be another kind of dumbass. worth knowing, but not especially surprising

yes i have, and his argument is fucking stupid. marx is all right, but i straight-up hate engels.

yes i have, and his argument is fucking stupid.

yes i have, and his argument is fucking stupid. “oh yeah??? well doing stuff is authoritarian!” isn’t the own you tankies seem to think it is.

if MODERATORS are landed gentry, what the fuck does that make rich bastards like him?

there are things you can do to start building a better world today, but it never feels like enough

yeah, but if all the kids starve to death at least the drag queens can’t groom them (by existing and sometimes reading stories aloud)

as a woke leftist, i hate tankies because y’all aren’t leftists in any meaningful sense. the only difference between you and libs is which countries whose atrocities you justify.

i’ve read marx. at precisely no point does he say anything justifying the various atrocities state capitalist countries have committed. i think he’s wrong about some stuff, but even if you accept that his word is gospel, tankies are still just people who took leftist principles as an excuse for the imposing the kind of brutal authoritarianism that leftists are supposed to be against.

Ahhh, the ole “You defend weirdos? Seems pretty sus. Sure you aren’t one of them?” response. To which I say: Of course I’m a weirdo! I’m a queer kinkster! Obviously I’m weird. Am I that specific kind of weirdo? No, but so what if I were? That wouldn’t undermine my argument. My point is this: Is it weird and fucked up and creepy? Yeah, arguably. So? It’s still not hurting anyone, and if you start moralizing based on your own personal feelings of disgust, that quickly leads you down a dark path of “anybody who does something that grosses me out is a bad person who must be stopped.” That’s exactly the same rhetoric conservatives use to go after anybody who fucks wrong in the privacy of their own bedroom, and I’m not about to become the thing I hate. Taking your side would make me a hypocrite as someone who cares about the freedom of adults to get off however they please.

You first.

Perhaps that content is more legally dubious than I realized, but claiming it’s outright illegal is nonsense, and it’s still true that almost nobody in the US is ever prosecuted for it.

I’m perfectly happy to die on the hill of freedom of expression because, as a queer person, I know that when people start coming for the harmless weirdos, I’m next. I’ve walked out of communities over this before, and I’m willing to do it again. Again, I have principles.

Absolutely no one is saying you should have to federate with instances like that if you so choose. I’m merely pointing out that it’s not illegal, and perpetuating the stigma against being into weird but harmless shit will eventually come back to bite not just you, but anyone who likes anything that’s not vanilla sex between a married man and woman under the covers with the lights off for the sole purpose of procreation. Puritans always go for the weirdos that even other weirdos don’t like first. Then when they move onto something less weird, everyone is shocked and all “leopards ate my face.” I’ve seen a disturbing trend of people equating what you enjoy in fiction to what you enjoy in reality over the past few years, and I feel a moral compulsion to fight back against it because I know that shit never ends well.

I’m not saying that this community should welcome it here. Like, not remotely saying that. Even leaving aside any other issues, this community disallows porn. I’m literally just saying that claiming it’s illegal is nonsense. Hell, I wasn’t even going to get into the moral side of things until alyaza took the tone they did.

It’s not “pedophile content.” It’s pixels that look absolutely nothing like real human children. And I don’t care whether anyone allows it on their servers or not. They’re free to ban it. I care that people make shit up about it being illegal when it isn’t.

Though it’s not something I personally enjoy, it is very important to me that I make a point of sticking up for even the weirdest and grossest content out there that isn’t hurting anyone, because a) freedom of expression must include art that disturbs me personally or it is meaningless, and b) if you ignore people going after art just because it’s gross, eventually someone will decide the art YOU like is gross. But even if I disapproved of lolicon and shotacon, I would still not be down with you lying about its legality, because I happen to have principles.

Ban me or whatever if you must, but someone has to point out bullshit when it crops up.

Exactly. Blaming individuals for systemic problems never gets you anywhere. If you can reduce your car dependency, sure, do that, but don’t beat yourself up if you can’t.

Agreed on all counts.

That’s not illegal, though, or even especially legally dubious.

See, I was born around 8:00 AM and I hate mornings. I figure it’s the trauma of being ripped out of my nice comfortable home into this weird, loud, cold setting I never asked to go to.