Also happens on the wrong side of Reddit. Granted, shitty subreddits have all the hospitality of Sentinel Island and would never use this kind of language to get people to stay, but if you do anything besides perpetuate the circlejerk they will say just about anything to get you to shut up, conform, and/or jump off a bridge
I have a subreddit where we only post cats on saturdays and we temporarily ban you if you post a cat on any other day (you're allowed to post anything BUT cats on any other day). It's glorious. Reddit is whatever you want it to be, although sometimes I do feel like engaging in the drama because I'm a chaos goblin.
It's 99% Québécois cats but we welcome cats from all around the world. Just be careful to post them on Eastern time. I once banned my irl friend for two days because she posted from Japan at the wrong time. It was funny.
it happens to all sides of reddit unfortunately-all major subs have some definite opinions on topics and well if you go against that, oh boy you are in for a treat
The "reddit hivemind" notion has been a thing for as long as I've used this site which is over 15 years at this point. It's definitely not new. It just doesnt get talked about as much now cause half the fucking site is just bots and countries paying for astroturfing.
Yeah people were calling it that in 2011 and nothing has really changed on that front.
I feel people were talking about it less even before the onset of slopageddon though, mostly because meta reddit which used to be massive died on its arse in the late 2010s, so there was nowhere people really discussed that kind of thing any more. /r/subredditdrama is basically the last vestigial remnant of meta reddit and it's slow as fuck (a few posts a day) compared to its heyday. Even SRS of all places and its once-sprawling empire of affiliated subs is completely inactive. That lot used to be the final bogeyman of reddit, and now nobody even remembers them.
I tried saying the words “I’m a libertarian” with every single important caveat to that statement I possibly could in this very place, and I think I would have had a more amicable response if I said I worked for the IDF and ate babies raw instead
Insane right wingers are not the only people calling themselves libertarian. I remember a friend of mine being confused by the right wing connotation of the term, because they had primarily associated it with some left wing groups in France.
If they were from the US trying to use a French political affiliation then like. That's on them for being a fucking idiot. If they're French and that's their only exposure to the term then that makes sense.
It also does not matter where people think they lie on the political spectrum. Far right extremists dont believe they are far right, they just believe theyre justified no matter what. The actions, behaviors, and policies dictate their place on the Overton window, not their personal belief on where on the Overton window they think they fall.
Because left libertarian is a thing, but in the USA libertarian is primarily associated with the Libertarian Party and also a bunch of right wingers who say they are libertarian, but are actually Republicans Who Smoke Weed
There are left libertarians in the US, in the anglosphere, and in the canon of anarchist writing
Pretty much any anti-capitalist free marketer is a left libertarian, a lot of anarchists are, there are left libertarian subreddits
Just if you say "libertarian" in the anglosphere you are going to conjure images of the Mises caucus libertarians, Rand Paul, etc
I mean it depends on the context and qualifiers you gave. Most people on this site don’t really believe in libertarianism as an ideology and there aren’t any great representatives for it really.
Okay so I actually went to go double-check, and even though I was pretty sure I was working with the most ideologically pure version of the idea, “supporting the free market” is half the definition, and all I actually care about is that everybody gets to fuck around and find out as they desire. “Anarchist” is probably more accurate if I didn’t hate what we’ve done with the place
I advise looking into left wing libertarianism vs right wing libertarianism. You might also want to look into philosophical anarchism and post-left anarchism, which might be closer to what you identify as.
Idk if you're a right wing libertarian or not. If you're not, then you should know that when you talked about Ayn Rand you actually made it seem as if "libertarian" means "right wing libertarianism" to you. Even if you were saying you don't like her. A left wing libertarian wouldn't usually mention her because it goes without saying.
Yeah, at this point calling yourself a "Libertarian" in any context relevant to America will usually get you mistaken for a Republican who 1: knows they'd be judged as deserved if they admitted they were a Republican, 2: thinks pot should be legal, and/or 3: wants to abolish the age of consent even more than Republicans usually do.
I work for the IDF and eat babies raw. I renounce whatever abstract cloud of notions you attach to libertarians unilaterally regardless of what they actually believe and say
r/pluribustv banning you if you dare to suggest Koumba Diabate isn't a rapist for having sex with the hivemind (Carol and almost every other survivor does the exact same thing)
fun fact, when crabs panic on the sea floor they grab onto each other, this prevents other crabs from becoming loose and being picked off by predators. so within buckets they try to huddle together and when they see one of them crawling out (ergo being easily taken by a predator) they pull them closer so they can't be grabbed that easily, unintentionally trapping them all
A lot of negative behavior is just stuff that works in some situations misapplied to the wrong situation. It's interesting to watch what look like illogical actions and ask yourself, "When and how would this actually be helpful?"
That's what therapy is about. "This coping mechanism got you through a traumatic situation, but the situation is over and now you have to stop doing it because it's hurting you."
My favorite therapist talked to me about how my fight or flight response is basically my body, which has several millennia of evolutionary experience with learning to keep me safe from a wild animal attacking me, and about 30 years worth of experience with keeping me safe from an email that may or may not inform me that I’m unemployed because I messed up too badly on a project.
Dumb as it is, having my wife read the emails with me for a bit helped. It was embarrassing, but it was also what I needed when my confidence was shot after a truly awful boss who liked to write unconstructive and mean comments on my code.
More than anything else, it’s been helpful to take on a “just swallow the frog” mentality. The email says the same thing whether you read it or not; may as well read it.
My favorite version of this is the sum total of all the cognitive biases that we as human beings experience. We're subject to a wide variety of instinctual, automatic mental shortcuts that are supposed to help us survive in a harsh wilderness environment filled with threatening weather and animals, but many of those shortcuts are ill-suited to living and thriving in modern society, as we're bombarded with more information than we've ever had access to before. Part of that is all the tribalism we still have even though we've arguably reached a stage where we could do away with competition over resources, if not for our wealth inequality.
For those reasons, I like to say that we people are just chimps with fancy clothes and expensive toys. Fascinating stuff
I’ve seen people online genuinely argue that it is Problematic to have good/improved mental health because of all of the problems in the world right now.
Ah, see, it actually peaked a decade before I was born, because my dad was really into movies from that period, and passed it on to me as a bonding activity, so I and obsessed with it to this day. This is clearly the most objective way to determine when the world was at its best.
A big part of the antipsych movement on Tumblr is based on the same principle, that anything that improves your mental health is pro-capitalist/pro-status-quo and needs to be destroyed.
The only difference now is that we can see the entire earth all at once all the time, so we're aware of all the people dying, instead of being able to live in our own little worlds like our ancestors.
I've had this come up in a few conversations, and every time I point out that no leftist utopia is going to cure my social anxiety / autism / gender dysphoria. I am always going to need help with those.
they all saw that post that was like "what if adhd and autism are actually the most useful and helpful type of brains" and then leaned so hard into owning those symptoms that they refuse to work on improving and becoming a cog in the machine
I'm so glad my ADHD is being managed. I felt subhuman for the longest time since I wasn't able to function, constantly being distracted and unable to focus on anything that'd actually bring me joy. I can't imagine why anyone would want to be in that state.
for real. its been hellish to enjoy anything for me at times because i feel guilt for not being miserable for the several atrocities going on in the world
As a Ukrainian, I can tell you, the closer you get to actually sitting under the bombing, the more you learn to value all the happiness and the joy. All this "you need to be sad for other people to be a good person" is fucking bs, you need to fight for other people's lives and freedom, but there is no pride in suffering. Like, because of recent bombings we got blackouts for 7 hours straight and I can't go celebrate Christmas in my friend's house because it was damaged by the shock wave. And that's why we will go to a Christmas fair and we will have fun; and I'll visit my family tomorrow and go ice skating with my lovely partner and my little sister.
And I'm not saying it to you to mean "look I have it worse, how could you not be happy when you are free of these struggles", I want you to consider that the biggest resistance is to live and to be happy no matter what. My enemies want me dead, if not dead - then scared and miserable, and I won't give them any of that, and you shouldn't give your enemies this win too
I just left a creative space like that. Very queer, very inclusive, no real appreciation for the craft outside the singular appeal of the artistic assets, and it had this underlying push for propagating mediocrity because most of the folks there were just...off, and not willing to take accountability for it or what it did to the final product.
I don't know what else to say there's other than that Tumblr fell into it early and is most visible about it.
Edit: The one thing that stood out is there was no real community support. All the big names pulled up the ladder and only advertised their (already successful) friends' work, and there was a kind of party line you had to toe (in the server and in your content) in addition to dumbing stories down for the bulk of the audience.
As you get older, and you see how the world by default tries to tear people down, the less you have time for that. Like stuff is hard for everyone; I’m not joining anything that doesn’t try to lift this boat because it might be all that keeps me from drowning in all this.
Marginal groups are especially bad about it because, in addition to touting inclusivity and acceptance (that's only if you do things their way, and their way is like leading a camel through the eye of a needle), there's a great deal of learned helplessness and externalization of every problem, not just the direct ones that are, in fact, external.
I think the hope is that, related to what I mentioned earlier that it’s partly an age thing. When you get to a certain point, you just don’t have time for the bs anymore. You become ruthless with your time
Honestly that would be a red flag for me right there.
I know queer spaces are important for people who've gone through abuse, and I'm perfectly content with my sexuality, but I've found those spaces to be almost... Militant. You have to use the exact precise correct language or it's a heinous sin.
They're so divorced from the real world that you have to buy in fully or not at all.
Come to think of it, I imagine that's how cults form.
Excuse me while I write a thesis...
EDIT: Oh look, I dared criticise queer spaces and get heavily downvoted. More fool me for not toeing the party line! How very dare a queer person have had experiences in queer spaces!
This is quite an extreme way of saying it but it's true that queer spaces are only there for people who are queer enough to count. You just get horrible nastiness thrown your way if you're in support of men, like being straight, or don't particularly buy into being a yas queen type gay.
They also do have the crabs in a bucket mentality and will absolutely hate you if you transitioned and put enough effort into it to pass as cisgender as a young person. Like im just as queer as any drag queen or whatever but because ive just spent my life as a random bisexual lad since 13yo its like, not for me ig.
however inclusivity Is "buying in fully" that's like the whole goal, they just also didn't include you. Also the precise language thing is what? I don't know or pretend to know exact terms or micro labels, or ever use them if I'm told. just describe people as they are and use the right pronoun and nobody cares.
However real inclusive spaces for everyone and anyone of any identity exist!! they just aren't explicitly queer, they are industrial and darkwave music shit. You can LITERALLY be an alien and nobody gives a fuck. We're here to dance as beings.
i avoid hangout spaces that explicitly advertise themselves as queer, since they tend to be not very inclusive in practice. something something to be welcome to the full spectrum of queerness you cannot police queerness.
but there's plenty of chill queer spaces. they're just not called that. They're chill places that make sure bigots arent welcome but everyone else is.
Maybe I'm awful for thinking this, but this is how a lot of beginner artist spaces sound like to me
Someone posts their drawing with poor anatomy, airbrush shading, inconsistent lighting, linework that breaks the shape, incoherent perspective and there will inevitably be a bunch of comments going "so good omg"
No. There's a difference between encouraging begginers and straight up delusion enforcement. It's doubly heartbreaking when these exact people later make posts saying "why can't I get commissions". Cause it looks bad, which is fine, and nobody told you, which is disastrous.
I think maybe there should be art spaces that specify what kind of "beginner" they cater to.
Because there are "beginners" who have ambitions of getting better - of exiting the "beginner" stage. And there are "beginners" who do not.
I'm in the later camp, but I'm not part of any community art spaces. I dick around with acrylic paint and make the embarrassing decision to put some of it on my wall.
As someone in a high achieving career, where ambition is always being pushed, it is such a relief to have a pursuit where I can relish doing something with mediocrity and no pressure to ever improve. I often times even end up genuinely liking some of what I make.
I have no desire to keep anyone with ambition of getting better from doing so, and I think there should be spaces for that.
But I also deeply appreciate that there are spaces where people encourage each other to just relish where they are and to find joy in doing something despite limited skill or talent or desire for more.
These are different spaces, and I think maybe that could be recognized instead of asking them to haphazardly co-exist.
for this reason, i like when subreddits have tags for posts like “feedback accepted” or “just for fun/no advice please” or whatever. cause sometimes you do want to get better, and sometimes you just wanna post a thing you made
I think that already exists in that if your doing an art for fun and then don't really display it anywhere but your own home, people will presume you're doing it for fun and relaxation and won't criticize it. Or there exist casual painting therapy groups etc. But now people are posting their works online, specifically wanting feedback but then get upset of it's anything but praise. It's gotten to The point that even if you say you want critiques, people still fear giving it because so many people say they want it and don't mean it.
I've seen this in some writer groups. It can be hard, I saw a teen upset their brother gave them harsh (and hilariously bad) advice. People rightfully said the brother's advice was bad, but the person's writing did need improvement. Like, it was a good start for a 15 year old, but also had some obvious things that could have been improved on, such as the poor sentence structure and plot inconsistencies. However, the teen posted they wanted feedback, but only if it was mainly praise. I hope they improve since they seem to want to, but I was not about to don the egg slippers.
Online art spaces used to be so different. You could post on DeviantArt or Gaia or wherever and people would just politely give tips/critique. It was a really good experience as a young artist. Now that's an egregious faux pas.
It’s a conversation that comes up regarding fic on the ao3 sub a lot as well. I get the arguments both ways, and at points in my life have been in places mentally where I was very fragile and just needed full bore escapism from my hobbies, but all I can say is personally, I’ve only benefited from over time growing a slightly thicker skin to at least occasionally hear things I may not want to.
Funny enough I've been on the other end of that before.
I was trying to ask why my art wasn't getting any views on Instagram and Twitter. Not engagement, literally views, I was wondering if there was a possibility I was shadowbanned or not using the right tags.
But people saw that post and kept talking about how my art wasn't a high enough quality to get engagement, which 1) wasn't what I was asking about. And 2) isn't true because there are "worse" artists than me who are popular.
Anyway I ended up solving my problem by abandoning Instagram and Twitter for other sites.
I once saw a guy selling art prints in a con. They were priced super cheap and I saw nobody coming to his booth because, quite frankly, the prints looked like they were drawn by children. I almost bought one out of sympathy but he didn't have a character I liked and I don't have much space in my flat. I really hope that guy is doing well and getting the right feedback.
I agree but also: 1) many people don’t do art at all so they see something better than what they can do and think it is great. This is universal, not just in art spaces. And 2) so many people are bad at critique, they don’t know how to give feedback so they either critique so harshly it becomes discouraging to the beginner, who gives up, or they just clap and say it looks good to them. The middle ground of complimenting what they’ve done well while providing valuable feedback on improvements is, sadly, rather rare.
From Wikipedia because I’m bad with words: Crab mentality, also known as crab theory,[1] crabs in a bucket[a] mentality, or the crab-bucket effect, describes the mindset of people who try to prevent others from gaining a favorable position, even if attaining such position would not directly impact those trying to stop them. It is usually summarized with the phrase: "If I can't have it, neither can you".[2]
I’m not quite certain nor authority, but I believe it’s referring to scenarios where someone is working to “fix” (for a lack of a better term) their mental health issues and other members of the community have a problem with that because they don’t want or feel a need to “fix” those issues
Additionally, more on Reddit than tumblr, I see the general advice of exercise, diet, staying irl social met with “thanks I’m cured”. Even people saying they have started to help themselves with some mix of those are met with that.
I know those to not solve everything. I get it. I live it.
But someone saying it helped them and getting that kind of dismissive comment feels very crab bucket
As someone who has been guilty of that internally, it’s tough. To half paraphrase something that I don’t recall the origin of, people tend to feel like “well if it can be fixed or helped, then what was I suffering for?”
“well if it can be fixed or helped, then what was I suffering for?”
It reminds me of a quote: "The best time to plant a tree was 10 years ago. The second best time is today."
The quote is about accepting that, yes, time has been used up on needless suffering. But now that you have a way forward, you can stop using up more of that time.
That’s a really beautiful quote. It’s something I struggle with, thinking that I’ve missed my chance, even though each day is a new chance to do it anyways. I appreciate you sharing!
Another one in a similar direction I like goes something like
Sometimes you think of something that you regret you didn't do 20 years ago and you can't go back there.
But you can think of 20 years in the future, and that version of you regretting then that you didn't do something 20 years ago - and you can fix that future you'd regret, because for you, that 20 years ago is now
I think there is also that reaction due to frankly assholes who say that depression isn’t real and just exercise. It creates a bad taste in the mouth of many because while ok advice it is said as an absolute cure all by a stupid irritant of a person
That is completely fair too. It can be hard to separate the assholes from the people trying to help, though it should also be pretty clear when those “cures” aren’t the whole answer
Sometimes when someone tries to improve their situation, others in their community take issue with it, and try to discourage people from even attempting change.
In my experience, there is this thing where people internalize their negative or disadvantaged status as part of their identity, and improvement represents a threat to that identity. Also often it’s because people are forced to reflect on their own efforts to improve their situation, or lack thereof; IE “This person is putting in effort, why am I not doing the same? This is uncomfortable to think about.” “Misery loves company” is very much a thing.
An example I would point to is when Adele decided to lose weight. She received backlash from the “body positivity” community for “betraying” them. They identified with her for the shared trait of being overweight, a trait that Adele was now rejecting, and so she was a traitor to her “people”. As a person who struggles with weight and body image I found the whole discourse to be at best asinine, at worst incredibly caustic and counterproductive.
Another example that comes to mind from outside my direct experience, something I’m getting secondhand from members of the trans community. Apparently there is a problem with some trans people viewing gender dysphoria, and its accompanying misery, as the central part of the trans identity and are actively hostile to people shedding that in favor of gender euphoria and a better quality of life. If you no longer feel gender dysphoria, and are becoming happy with your body and identity, then you are no longer trans in these people’s view. I remember when Haus of Decline began her transition, she received a fair amount of hate for her approaching transness from a place of joy and acceptance instead of a place of suffering. Idk how prevalent this is, (it seems like it’s mainly coming from the usual suspects of the terminally online 4chan and Tumblr crowd, who cause problems no matter their particular identity), and maybe a trans person can weigh in on it, but I found it really interesting.
As the other comment said, no monoliths, but this is a very prevalent thing in the 4trans space. Sometimes it may seem like just a vent space, where you'll see someone throw out all their anguish, and that would be okay, but this isn't a space about getting better. They, intentionally or not, want you to overanalyze everything about yourself, to think you're an ogre, a hon, a luckshit passoid.
It's an othering space, that rallies against hug boxing, to the point it's the opposite. Getting out of those spaces was the best thing I ever did for myself. I'd love to try and help other dolls and tboys out of it, but they usually don't want help, and I risk falling back in if I try too hard.
While not in the same terms, a similar mindset has unfortunately infected a large part of trans tumblr. Less than half a year ago, a well known trans femme account gave the mildest possible pushback to crab bucketing and advised trans women to carefully seek out allies outside of other explicit transfemmes, and was harassed for the better part of a month by large chunks of trans Tumblr because she was “fake trans” and “literally trying to get trans women killed”.
Oh I see it all the time sadly. Bottleneckloser mentioned that trans girls should have cis girl friends, and for like the 8th time Twitter blew up on her about something. Infighting just seems to be everyone's favourite thing in the online space.
I've even seen it here, this sort of trans blackpill movement that basically says "there are exactly two types of people in the world, transfems and transmisogynists. Everyone on earth who is not the former is absolutely guaranteed to be the latter, and all of them secretly want you dead, no matter how friendly they pretend to be to your face. We are the only people you will ever be able to trust. Toe our line or we will throw you to the wolves."
The trans community is nowhere near monolithic and dissenting opinions and experiences are often buried. And discord servers are rotted and cancerous, so I'd believe it based purely on what I've seen elsewhere.
There's a tendency for people to become helpless to not only their specific issue (which is fine, some are that severe), but all issues, and drag others back in because to do otherwise would mean that those problems can be addressed. If you ever get the chance, watch what happens when someone spends a few months working through a shitty childhood and has results (however small), and the response to it. Or how eating right, getting the right amount of sleep, and exercise does, slightly, alleviate depression for most people and allow for more resilience in tackling other stressors.
If you put crabs in a bucket, they'll pull down other crabs who are tying to get out. This is because they're also trying to get out, and they aren't very smart so they try and use the other crabs as ladders.
Through memetic shift, using this as a metaphor has become less about coordination problems and more about people who want to stay in the bucket pulling people back down into the bucket with them.
Potentially hot take, but now that weight-loss drugs like Ozempic have reached the mass market, it feels like a certain part of the body positivity movement has been revealed to be people who didn't genuinely believe that anyone can be attractive at any size, but simply hated their own bodies and wanted everyone to be as miserable as them.
Because the viciousness shown by overweight people to other overweight people who have voluntarily lost weight is frankly breathtaking.
Apparently, someone's bodily autonomy and how they choose to feel about their own body is less important than how it might indirectly make you feel about yours.
People glorify mental illness and immediately shoot down anything that even vaguely resembles moving forward because to accept someone moving forward would be to accept that you've wasted time you're never getting back because you could have all this time but didn't.
This is one time I wish I didn't know context because this had always been a problem particularly in Tumblr even 10+ years ago. I had to do some serious pruning (and this was part of the reason I just left) because some of the "advice" just triggered me back to when I was really depressed and I didn't want to relive that.
this is true but the other genre of internet advice (mental health, skills, etc) is stuff that's so vague with no additional pointers it's not even worth mentioning
ADHD people online when you suggest using a planner can be helpful.
(I have ADHD as well, obviously a planner won’t fix everything, but I was so much worse off before I started using it. Yes it’s hard to do. Yes it’s 100% worth it.)
I think that's also because of a fallacy some people have where if something doesn't work for you, it must not work for anyone with your condition. I see a lot of ADHD advice like planners be completely written off or even actively shot down by people with ADHD who don't benefit from said advice.
Also happens on the wrong side of Reddit. Granted, shitty subreddits have all the hospitality of Sentinel Island and would never use this kind of language to get people to stay, but if you do anything besides perpetuate the circlejerk they will say just about anything to get you to shut up, conform, and/or jump off a bridge
I have a subreddit where we only post cats on saturdays and we temporarily ban you if you post a cat on any other day (you're allowed to post anything BUT cats on any other day). It's glorious. Reddit is whatever you want it to be, although sometimes I do feel like engaging in the drama because I'm a chaos goblin.
do you also get banned if you post something other than a cat on saturday?
Yes
The old 4chan traditions still going strong, I see.
well, what's the sub?
r/chatmedi
It's 99% Québécois cats but we welcome cats from all around the world. Just be careful to post them on Eastern time. I once banned my irl friend for two days because she posted from Japan at the wrong time. It was funny.
I love that the pun works in english and french
it happens to all sides of reddit unfortunately-all major subs have some definite opinions on topics and well if you go against that, oh boy you are in for a treat
The "reddit hivemind" notion has been a thing for as long as I've used this site which is over 15 years at this point. It's definitely not new. It just doesnt get talked about as much now cause half the fucking site is just bots and countries paying for astroturfing.
Yeah people were calling it that in 2011 and nothing has really changed on that front.
I feel people were talking about it less even before the onset of slopageddon though, mostly because meta reddit which used to be massive died on its arse in the late 2010s, so there was nowhere people really discussed that kind of thing any more. /r/subredditdrama is basically the last vestigial remnant of meta reddit and it's slow as fuck (a few posts a day) compared to its heyday. Even SRS of all places and its once-sprawling empire of affiliated subs is completely inactive. That lot used to be the final bogeyman of reddit, and now nobody even remembers them.
I tried saying the words “I’m a libertarian” with every single important caveat to that statement I possibly could in this very place, and I think I would have had a more amicable response if I said I worked for the IDF and ate babies raw instead
Well you're going to get disagreement if you say you're right wing on a left wing subreddit
Insane right wingers are not the only people calling themselves libertarian. I remember a friend of mine being confused by the right wing connotation of the term, because they had primarily associated it with some left wing groups in France.
If they were from the US trying to use a French political affiliation then like. That's on them for being a fucking idiot. If they're French and that's their only exposure to the term then that makes sense.
It also does not matter where people think they lie on the political spectrum. Far right extremists dont believe they are far right, they just believe theyre justified no matter what. The actions, behaviors, and policies dictate their place on the Overton window, not their personal belief on where on the Overton window they think they fall.
Because left libertarian is a thing, but in the USA libertarian is primarily associated with the Libertarian Party and also a bunch of right wingers who say they are libertarian, but are actually Republicans Who Smoke Weed
There are left libertarians in the US, in the anglosphere, and in the canon of anarchist writing
Pretty much any anti-capitalist free marketer is a left libertarian, a lot of anarchists are, there are left libertarian subreddits
Just if you say "libertarian" in the anglosphere you are going to conjure images of the Mises caucus libertarians, Rand Paul, etc
I forgot that they believe in the free market like they’re seven. I may be stupid
I mean it depends on the context and qualifiers you gave. Most people on this site don’t really believe in libertarianism as an ideology and there aren’t any great representatives for it really.
And the fact that the vast majority of libertarians are just conservatives trying to avoid the stigma of that label
The good ol "I'm a conservative but not a Boomer" techbro starter pack.
Okay so I actually went to go double-check, and even though I was pretty sure I was working with the most ideologically pure version of the idea, “supporting the free market” is half the definition, and all I actually care about is that everybody gets to fuck around and find out as they desire. “Anarchist” is probably more accurate if I didn’t hate what we’ve done with the place
Yeah things like “Social Darwinism” and the free market are some of the main driving forces of libertarianism. Glad you learned something new.
In the future you could just say you’re “socially liberal” and that makes it easier to understand where you’re coming from.
Pure Libertarians are normally defined as socially liberal and fiscally conservative.
And also the most common definition of it in the U.S. has become hardline conservative who thinks Republicans are too soft.
That's because "modern libertarians" co-opted the term libertarian from the anarchist groups that coined it.
I advise looking into left wing libertarianism vs right wing libertarianism. You might also want to look into philosophical anarchism and post-left anarchism, which might be closer to what you identify as.
Idk if you're a right wing libertarian or not. If you're not, then you should know that when you talked about Ayn Rand you actually made it seem as if "libertarian" means "right wing libertarianism" to you. Even if you were saying you don't like her. A left wing libertarian wouldn't usually mention her because it goes without saying.
Yeah, at this point calling yourself a "Libertarian" in any context relevant to America will usually get you mistaken for a Republican who 1: knows they'd be judged as deserved if they admitted they were a Republican, 2: thinks pot should be legal, and/or 3: wants to abolish the age of consent even more than Republicans usually do.
I work for the IDF and eat babies raw. I renounce whatever abstract cloud of notions you attach to libertarians unilaterally regardless of what they actually believe and say
You cannot kill me in any way that matters
Nobody is trying.
Lot of people who left Tumblr in 2018 after the porn ban came to Reddit.
r/pluribustv banning you if you dare to suggest Koumba Diabate isn't a rapist for having sex with the hivemind (Carol and almost every other survivor does the exact same thing)
fun fact, when crabs panic on the sea floor they grab onto each other, this prevents other crabs from becoming loose and being picked off by predators. so within buckets they try to huddle together and when they see one of them crawling out (ergo being easily taken by a predator) they pull them closer so they can't be grabbed that easily, unintentionally trapping them all
A lot of negative behavior is just stuff that works in some situations misapplied to the wrong situation. It's interesting to watch what look like illogical actions and ask yourself, "When and how would this actually be helpful?"
That's what therapy is about. "This coping mechanism got you through a traumatic situation, but the situation is over and now you have to stop doing it because it's hurting you."
My favorite therapist talked to me about how my fight or flight response is basically my body, which has several millennia of evolutionary experience with learning to keep me safe from a wild animal attacking me, and about 30 years worth of experience with keeping me safe from an email that may or may not inform me that I’m unemployed because I messed up too badly on a project.
Do you have email anxiety? Because that’s one of my biggies and it’s been really tough finding constructive ways to tackle it.
Dumb as it is, having my wife read the emails with me for a bit helped. It was embarrassing, but it was also what I needed when my confidence was shot after a truly awful boss who liked to write unconstructive and mean comments on my code.
More than anything else, it’s been helpful to take on a “just swallow the frog” mentality. The email says the same thing whether you read it or not; may as well read it.
to paraphrase a post “humans are great at adapting to trauma, but we suck at adapting after trauma”
I have nothing to add to that other than to say that's a great point.
Great description of therapy.
My favorite version of this is the sum total of all the cognitive biases that we as human beings experience. We're subject to a wide variety of instinctual, automatic mental shortcuts that are supposed to help us survive in a harsh wilderness environment filled with threatening weather and animals, but many of those shortcuts are ill-suited to living and thriving in modern society, as we're bombarded with more information than we've ever had access to before. Part of that is all the tribalism we still have even though we've arguably reached a stage where we could do away with competition over resources, if not for our wealth inequality.
For those reasons, I like to say that we people are just chimps with fancy clothes and expensive toys. Fascinating stuff
This is the most insightful addendum to the crab bucket analogy I've seen
Panic! On the seafloor (sorry)
[deleted]
me not grab: crab get eaten
me do grab: crab not eaten
no crab eaten: good
ME is GRAB
CRAB is not EATEN
They don't need to, the ones that didn't do that died
No, but it nevertheless is the reason they do it.
I’ve seen people online genuinely argue that it is Problematic to have good/improved mental health because of all of the problems in the world right now.
As opposed to all the times in history when there were no problems anywhere in the world, I suppose?
Well yeah obviously. Don't you know that history peaked during the decade that I was a kid and therefore too young to understand what was going on? /s
Ah, see, it actually peaked a decade before I was born, because my dad was really into movies from that period, and passed it on to me as a bonding activity, so I and obsessed with it to this day. This is clearly the most objective way to determine when the world was at its best.
A big part of the antipsych movement on Tumblr is based on the same principle, that anything that improves your mental health is pro-capitalist/pro-status-quo and needs to be destroyed.
"You cannot be happy if there's unhappines in the world" is such a cope for depresed people.
It's also super temporally myopic.
As if unhappiness in the world is new.
The only difference now is that we can see the entire earth all at once all the time, so we're aware of all the people dying, instead of being able to live in our own little worlds like our ancestors.
That's such a hopeless way to look at things goddamn
It doesn't sound at all like some deranged "influencers" or whatever you call it on Tumblr have found a huge niche of vulnerable people to gaslight.
Nope.
I've had this come up in a few conversations, and every time I point out that no leftist utopia is going to cure my social anxiety / autism / gender dysphoria. I am always going to need help with those.
To be fair, eventually medicine will create a perfect method of transitioning. What we have now is crude and ineffective at best.
Anti Psychiatry is pretty based though. The way our society treats mental health (hell, even the whole concept of mental “health”), is fucked, imo.
That genuinely sounds like an argument The Joker would use.
they all saw that post that was like "what if adhd and autism are actually the most useful and helpful type of brains" and then leaned so hard into owning those symptoms that they refuse to work on improving and becoming a cog in the machine
I'm so glad my ADHD is being managed. I felt subhuman for the longest time since I wasn't able to function, constantly being distracted and unable to focus on anything that'd actually bring me joy. I can't imagine why anyone would want to be in that state.
I feel that. What helped you?
For the longest time I thought it was treatment-resistant depression, but my psychiatrist prescribed me Azstarys. It was like night and day.
for real. its been hellish to enjoy anything for me at times because i feel guilt for not being miserable for the several atrocities going on in the world
As a Ukrainian, I can tell you, the closer you get to actually sitting under the bombing, the more you learn to value all the happiness and the joy. All this "you need to be sad for other people to be a good person" is fucking bs, you need to fight for other people's lives and freedom, but there is no pride in suffering. Like, because of recent bombings we got blackouts for 7 hours straight and I can't go celebrate Christmas in my friend's house because it was damaged by the shock wave. And that's why we will go to a Christmas fair and we will have fun; and I'll visit my family tomorrow and go ice skating with my lovely partner and my little sister.
And I'm not saying it to you to mean "look I have it worse, how could you not be happy when you are free of these struggles", I want you to consider that the biggest resistance is to live and to be happy no matter what. My enemies want me dead, if not dead - then scared and miserable, and I won't give them any of that, and you shouldn't give your enemies this win too
Wishing you and your fam a safe and merry Christmas.
And we ALL know why this is problematic, so you should NOT place a burden on me by asking any clarifying questions at all
Crab solidarity means never asking follow-up questions, got it
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I’m tired of crab buckets. When do we go oyster fishing
I just left a creative space like that. Very queer, very inclusive, no real appreciation for the craft outside the singular appeal of the artistic assets, and it had this underlying push for propagating mediocrity because most of the folks there were just...off, and not willing to take accountability for it or what it did to the final product.
I don't know what else to say there's other than that Tumblr fell into it early and is most visible about it.
Edit: The one thing that stood out is there was no real community support. All the big names pulled up the ladder and only advertised their (already successful) friends' work, and there was a kind of party line you had to toe (in the server and in your content) in addition to dumbing stories down for the bulk of the audience.
As you get older, and you see how the world by default tries to tear people down, the less you have time for that. Like stuff is hard for everyone; I’m not joining anything that doesn’t try to lift this boat because it might be all that keeps me from drowning in all this.
Marginal groups are especially bad about it because, in addition to touting inclusivity and acceptance (that's only if you do things their way, and their way is like leading a camel through the eye of a needle), there's a great deal of learned helplessness and externalization of every problem, not just the direct ones that are, in fact, external.
You can't call any of it out, of course.
I think the hope is that, related to what I mentioned earlier that it’s partly an age thing. When you get to a certain point, you just don’t have time for the bs anymore. You become ruthless with your time
This... isn't a certain webcomic set in space's discord server is it?
Honestly that would be a red flag for me right there.
I know queer spaces are important for people who've gone through abuse, and I'm perfectly content with my sexuality, but I've found those spaces to be almost... Militant. You have to use the exact precise correct language or it's a heinous sin.
They're so divorced from the real world that you have to buy in fully or not at all.
Come to think of it, I imagine that's how cults form.
Excuse me while I write a thesis...
EDIT: Oh look, I dared criticise queer spaces and get heavily downvoted. More fool me for not toeing the party line! How very dare a queer person have had experiences in queer spaces!
This is quite an extreme way of saying it but it's true that queer spaces are only there for people who are queer enough to count. You just get horrible nastiness thrown your way if you're in support of men, like being straight, or don't particularly buy into being a yas queen type gay.
They also do have the crabs in a bucket mentality and will absolutely hate you if you transitioned and put enough effort into it to pass as cisgender as a young person. Like im just as queer as any drag queen or whatever but because ive just spent my life as a random bisexual lad since 13yo its like, not for me ig.
however inclusivity Is "buying in fully" that's like the whole goal, they just also didn't include you. Also the precise language thing is what? I don't know or pretend to know exact terms or micro labels, or ever use them if I'm told. just describe people as they are and use the right pronoun and nobody cares.
However real inclusive spaces for everyone and anyone of any identity exist!! they just aren't explicitly queer, they are industrial and darkwave music shit. You can LITERALLY be an alien and nobody gives a fuck. We're here to dance as beings.
i avoid hangout spaces that explicitly advertise themselves as queer, since they tend to be not very inclusive in practice. something something to be welcome to the full spectrum of queerness you cannot police queerness.
but there's plenty of chill queer spaces. they're just not called that. They're chill places that make sure bigots arent welcome but everyone else is.
What's that quote about people who say "queer spaces" but really just mean "my discord server"
Put this in the Louvre.
Don't forget arguing who's actually the one that's at the top of the bucket
"If you want to get a girlfriend/partner/job, you need to work on yourself!"
"What are you doing? Working on YOURSELF? Not today, you shitlord!"
"You should be happy being miserable, because you don't deserve not to be, because other people are miserable".
Maybe I'm awful for thinking this, but this is how a lot of beginner artist spaces sound like to me
Someone posts their drawing with poor anatomy, airbrush shading, inconsistent lighting, linework that breaks the shape, incoherent perspective and there will inevitably be a bunch of comments going "so good omg"
No. There's a difference between encouraging begginers and straight up delusion enforcement. It's doubly heartbreaking when these exact people later make posts saying "why can't I get commissions". Cause it looks bad, which is fine, and nobody told you, which is disastrous.
I think maybe there should be art spaces that specify what kind of "beginner" they cater to.
Because there are "beginners" who have ambitions of getting better - of exiting the "beginner" stage. And there are "beginners" who do not.
I'm in the later camp, but I'm not part of any community art spaces. I dick around with acrylic paint and make the embarrassing decision to put some of it on my wall.
As someone in a high achieving career, where ambition is always being pushed, it is such a relief to have a pursuit where I can relish doing something with mediocrity and no pressure to ever improve. I often times even end up genuinely liking some of what I make.
I have no desire to keep anyone with ambition of getting better from doing so, and I think there should be spaces for that.
But I also deeply appreciate that there are spaces where people encourage each other to just relish where they are and to find joy in doing something despite limited skill or talent or desire for more.
These are different spaces, and I think maybe that could be recognized instead of asking them to haphazardly co-exist.
for this reason, i like when subreddits have tags for posts like “feedback accepted” or “just for fun/no advice please” or whatever. cause sometimes you do want to get better, and sometimes you just wanna post a thing you made
I think that already exists in that if your doing an art for fun and then don't really display it anywhere but your own home, people will presume you're doing it for fun and relaxation and won't criticize it. Or there exist casual painting therapy groups etc. But now people are posting their works online, specifically wanting feedback but then get upset of it's anything but praise. It's gotten to The point that even if you say you want critiques, people still fear giving it because so many people say they want it and don't mean it.
I've seen this in some writer groups. It can be hard, I saw a teen upset their brother gave them harsh (and hilariously bad) advice. People rightfully said the brother's advice was bad, but the person's writing did need improvement. Like, it was a good start for a 15 year old, but also had some obvious things that could have been improved on, such as the poor sentence structure and plot inconsistencies. However, the teen posted they wanted feedback, but only if it was mainly praise. I hope they improve since they seem to want to, but I was not about to don the egg slippers.
Online art spaces used to be so different. You could post on DeviantArt or Gaia or wherever and people would just politely give tips/critique. It was a really good experience as a young artist. Now that's an egregious faux pas.
It’s a conversation that comes up regarding fic on the ao3 sub a lot as well. I get the arguments both ways, and at points in my life have been in places mentally where I was very fragile and just needed full bore escapism from my hobbies, but all I can say is personally, I’ve only benefited from over time growing a slightly thicker skin to at least occasionally hear things I may not want to.
Funny enough I've been on the other end of that before.
I was trying to ask why my art wasn't getting any views on Instagram and Twitter. Not engagement, literally views, I was wondering if there was a possibility I was shadowbanned or not using the right tags.
But people saw that post and kept talking about how my art wasn't a high enough quality to get engagement, which 1) wasn't what I was asking about. And 2) isn't true because there are "worse" artists than me who are popular.
Anyway I ended up solving my problem by abandoning Instagram and Twitter for other sites.
"Maybe they're not looking to improve their art, hmm?"
How would they even know that if someone doesn't tell them they have areas for improvement?
It's one thing to acknowledge your limitations and live within them, it's another to be ignorant of them.
worst thing is it depends on sites like ive seen the entire opposite effect on instagram/tiktok where theyll tear a beginner artist apart
I once saw a guy selling art prints in a con. They were priced super cheap and I saw nobody coming to his booth because, quite frankly, the prints looked like they were drawn by children. I almost bought one out of sympathy but he didn't have a character I liked and I don't have much space in my flat. I really hope that guy is doing well and getting the right feedback.
Not limited to beginner artist spaces. On Reddit it is a massive crime at times to actually care about writing and the craft that goes into it.
Yes, it is great that people read. No, not all writing is of equal quality.
I agree but also: 1) many people don’t do art at all so they see something better than what they can do and think it is great. This is universal, not just in art spaces. And 2) so many people are bad at critique, they don’t know how to give feedback so they either critique so harshly it becomes discouraging to the beginner, who gives up, or they just clap and say it looks good to them. The middle ground of complimenting what they’ve done well while providing valuable feedback on improvements is, sadly, rather rare.
Can someone explain the metaphor to me? I don’t really get it.
From Wikipedia because I’m bad with words: Crab mentality, also known as crab theory,[1] crabs in a bucket[a] mentality, or the crab-bucket effect, describes the mindset of people who try to prevent others from gaining a favorable position, even if attaining such position would not directly impact those trying to stop them. It is usually summarized with the phrase: "If I can't have it, neither can you".[2]
Oh okay, thank you. I’m not sure how that relates to mental health but maybe I’m just not in many mental health spaces to notice it.
I’m not quite certain nor authority, but I believe it’s referring to scenarios where someone is working to “fix” (for a lack of a better term) their mental health issues and other members of the community have a problem with that because they don’t want or feel a need to “fix” those issues
Additionally, more on Reddit than tumblr, I see the general advice of exercise, diet, staying irl social met with “thanks I’m cured”. Even people saying they have started to help themselves with some mix of those are met with that.
I know those to not solve everything. I get it. I live it.
But someone saying it helped them and getting that kind of dismissive comment feels very crab bucket
As someone who has been guilty of that internally, it’s tough. To half paraphrase something that I don’t recall the origin of, people tend to feel like “well if it can be fixed or helped, then what was I suffering for?”
It reminds me of a quote: "The best time to plant a tree was 10 years ago. The second best time is today."
The quote is about accepting that, yes, time has been used up on needless suffering. But now that you have a way forward, you can stop using up more of that time.
That’s a really beautiful quote. It’s something I struggle with, thinking that I’ve missed my chance, even though each day is a new chance to do it anyways. I appreciate you sharing!
Another one in a similar direction I like goes something like
Sometimes you think of something that you regret you didn't do 20 years ago and you can't go back there.
But you can think of 20 years in the future, and that version of you regretting then that you didn't do something 20 years ago - and you can fix that future you'd regret, because for you, that 20 years ago is now
I think there is also that reaction due to frankly assholes who say that depression isn’t real and just exercise. It creates a bad taste in the mouth of many because while ok advice it is said as an absolute cure all by a stupid irritant of a person
That is completely fair too. It can be hard to separate the assholes from the people trying to help, though it should also be pretty clear when those “cures” aren’t the whole answer
Sometimes when someone tries to improve their situation, others in their community take issue with it, and try to discourage people from even attempting change.
In my experience, there is this thing where people internalize their negative or disadvantaged status as part of their identity, and improvement represents a threat to that identity. Also often it’s because people are forced to reflect on their own efforts to improve their situation, or lack thereof; IE “This person is putting in effort, why am I not doing the same? This is uncomfortable to think about.” “Misery loves company” is very much a thing.
An example I would point to is when Adele decided to lose weight. She received backlash from the “body positivity” community for “betraying” them. They identified with her for the shared trait of being overweight, a trait that Adele was now rejecting, and so she was a traitor to her “people”. As a person who struggles with weight and body image I found the whole discourse to be at best asinine, at worst incredibly caustic and counterproductive.
Another example that comes to mind from outside my direct experience, something I’m getting secondhand from members of the trans community. Apparently there is a problem with some trans people viewing gender dysphoria, and its accompanying misery, as the central part of the trans identity and are actively hostile to people shedding that in favor of gender euphoria and a better quality of life. If you no longer feel gender dysphoria, and are becoming happy with your body and identity, then you are no longer trans in these people’s view. I remember when Haus of Decline began her transition, she received a fair amount of hate for her approaching transness from a place of joy and acceptance instead of a place of suffering. Idk how prevalent this is, (it seems like it’s mainly coming from the usual suspects of the terminally online 4chan and Tumblr crowd, who cause problems no matter their particular identity), and maybe a trans person can weigh in on it, but I found it really interesting.
Edit: additional context.
As the other comment said, no monoliths, but this is a very prevalent thing in the 4trans space. Sometimes it may seem like just a vent space, where you'll see someone throw out all their anguish, and that would be okay, but this isn't a space about getting better. They, intentionally or not, want you to overanalyze everything about yourself, to think you're an ogre, a hon, a luckshit passoid.
It's an othering space, that rallies against hug boxing, to the point it's the opposite. Getting out of those spaces was the best thing I ever did for myself. I'd love to try and help other dolls and tboys out of it, but they usually don't want help, and I risk falling back in if I try too hard.
While not in the same terms, a similar mindset has unfortunately infected a large part of trans tumblr. Less than half a year ago, a well known trans femme account gave the mildest possible pushback to crab bucketing and advised trans women to carefully seek out allies outside of other explicit transfemmes, and was harassed for the better part of a month by large chunks of trans Tumblr because she was “fake trans” and “literally trying to get trans women killed”.
Oh I see it all the time sadly. Bottleneckloser mentioned that trans girls should have cis girl friends, and for like the 8th time Twitter blew up on her about something. Infighting just seems to be everyone's favourite thing in the online space.
I've even seen it here, this sort of trans blackpill movement that basically says "there are exactly two types of people in the world, transfems and transmisogynists. Everyone on earth who is not the former is absolutely guaranteed to be the latter, and all of them secretly want you dead, no matter how friendly they pretend to be to your face. We are the only people you will ever be able to trust.
Toe our line or we will throw you to the wolves."It's depressing to watch
I mean that’s the exact same culture that 4chan fosters elsewhere. It’s how young straight men get sucked down the reactionary pipeline.
The trans community is nowhere near monolithic and dissenting opinions and experiences are often buried. And discord servers are rotted and cancerous, so I'd believe it based purely on what I've seen elsewhere.
I've never been in those communities (thankfully), but I've heard a lot of pro-ed spaces are like this.
ED communities are like, several orders of magnitude above any other in pulling each other down. The contagion is inherent to the disorder.
There's a tendency for people to become helpless to not only their specific issue (which is fine, some are that severe), but all issues, and drag others back in because to do otherwise would mean that those problems can be addressed. If you ever get the chance, watch what happens when someone spends a few months working through a shitty childhood and has results (however small), and the response to it. Or how eating right, getting the right amount of sleep, and exercise does, slightly, alleviate depression for most people and allow for more resilience in tackling other stressors.
The crabs ain't even doing that.
If you put crabs in a bucket, they'll pull down other crabs who are tying to get out. This is because they're also trying to get out, and they aren't very smart so they try and use the other crabs as ladders.
Through memetic shift, using this as a metaphor has become less about coordination problems and more about people who want to stay in the bucket pulling people back down into the bucket with them.
Its also a metaphor because crabs are spiteful little fuckers and it definitely seems intentional when they do it.
Potentially hot take, but now that weight-loss drugs like Ozempic have reached the mass market, it feels like a certain part of the body positivity movement has been revealed to be people who didn't genuinely believe that anyone can be attractive at any size, but simply hated their own bodies and wanted everyone to be as miserable as them.
Because the viciousness shown by overweight people to other overweight people who have voluntarily lost weight is frankly breathtaking.
Apparently, someone's bodily autonomy and how they choose to feel about their own body is less important than how it might indirectly make you feel about yours.
People glorify mental illness and immediately shoot down anything that even vaguely resembles moving forward because to accept someone moving forward would be to accept that you've wasted time you're never getting back because you could have all this time but didn't.
This is one time I wish I didn't know context because this had always been a problem particularly in Tumblr even 10+ years ago. I had to do some serious pruning (and this was part of the reason I just left) because some of the "advice" just triggered me back to when I was really depressed and I didn't want to relive that.
this is true but the other genre of internet advice (mental health, skills, etc) is stuff that's so vague with no additional pointers it's not even worth mentioning
ADHD people online when you suggest using a planner can be helpful.
(I have ADHD as well, obviously a planner won’t fix everything, but I was so much worse off before I started using it. Yes it’s hard to do. Yes it’s 100% worth it.)
I think that's also because of a fallacy some people have where if something doesn't work for you, it must not work for anyone with your condition. I see a lot of ADHD advice like planners be completely written off or even actively shot down by people with ADHD who don't benefit from said advice.
I honestly agree. Like my adhd brain hates writing in planners but the times it does, more gets done.
half of r/thanksimcured unfortunately
inb4 people start trying to call out 'crab bucket mentality' in situations where it actually makes strategic sense to stay together
also on twitter. see this a lot in circles that are supposedly about coping and recovery from eating disorders and self harm ("shedtwt")
Oh thank the stars for 2071