And I’m sorry but sometimes horrible people write good books or make good music. If you keep acting like this isn’t possible, you might find yourself making excuses once YOUR favorite artist gets outed as a bigot and you can’t just pull out the “I always hated their stuff anyway.”
Not that anybody asked, but I think it’s important to understand how shame and guilt actually work before you try to use it for good.
It’s a necessary emotion. There are reasons we have it. It makes everything so. much. worse. when you use it wrong.
Shame and guilt are DE-motivators. They are meant to stop behavior, not promote it. You cannot, ever, in any meaningful way, guilt someone into doing good. You can only shame them into not doing bad.
Let’s say you’re a parent and your kid is having issues.
Swearing in class? Shame could work. You want them to stop it. Keep it in proportion*, and it might help. *(KEEP IT IN PROPORTION!!!)
Not doing their homework? NO! STOP! NO NOT DO THAT! EVER! EVER! EVER! You want them to start to do their homework. Shaming them will have to opposite effect! You have demotivated them! They will double down on NOT doing it. Not because they are being oppositional, but because that’s what shame does!
You can’t guilt people into building better habits, being more successful, or getting more involved. That requires encouragement. You need to motivate for that stuff!
If you want it in a simple phrase:
You can shame someone out of being a bad person, but you can’t shame them into being a good person.
Fun fact, that was literally what inspired me to make this post!
Not that anybody asked, but I think it’s important to understand how shame and guilt actually work before you try to use it for good.
It’s a necessary emotion. There are reasons we have it. It makes everything so. much. worse. when you use it wrong.
Shame and guilt are DE-motivators. They are meant to stop behavior, not promote it. You cannot, ever, in any meaningful way, guilt someone into doing good. You can only shame them into not doing bad.
Let’s say you’re a parent and your kid is having issues.
Swearing in class? Shame could work. You want them to stop it. Keep it in proportion*, and it might help. *(KEEP IT IN PROPORTION!!!)
Not doing their homework? NO! STOP! NO NOT DO THAT! EVER! EVER! EVER! You want them to start to do their homework. Shaming them will have to opposite effect! You have demotivated them! They will double down on NOT doing it. Not because they are being oppositional, but because that’s what shame does!
You can’t guilt people into building better habits, being more successful, or getting more involved. That requires encouragement. You need to motivate for that stuff!
If you want it in a simple phrase:
You can shame someone out of being a bad person, but you can’t shame them into being a good person.
Fun fact, that was literally what inspired me to make this post!
Not that anybody asked, but I think it’s important to understand how shame and guilt actually work before you try to use it for good.
It’s a necessary emotion. There are reasons we have it. It makes everything so. much. worse. when you use it wrong.
Shame and guilt are DE-motivators. They are meant to stop behavior, not promote it. You cannot, ever, in any meaningful way, guilt someone into doing good. You can only shame them into not doing bad.
Let’s say you’re a parent and your kid is having issues.
Swearing in class? Shame could work. You want them to stop it. Keep it in proportion*, and it might help. *(KEEP IT IN PROPORTION!!!)
Not doing their homework? NO! STOP! NO NOT DO THAT! EVER! EVER! EVER! You want them to start to do their homework. Shaming them will have to opposite effect! You have demotivated them! They will double down on NOT doing it. Not because they are being oppositional, but because that’s what shame does!
You can’t guilt people into building better habits, being more successful, or getting more involved. That requires encouragement. You need to motivate for that stuff!
If you want it in a simple phrase:
You can shame someone out of being a bad person, but you can’t shame them into being a good person.
Fun fact, that was literally what inspired me to make this post!
Not that anybody asked, but I think it’s important to understand how shame and guilt actually work before you try to use it for good.
It’s a necessary emotion. There are reasons we have it. It makes everything so. much. worse. when you use it wrong.
Shame and guilt are DE-motivators. They are meant to stop behavior, not promote it. You cannot, ever, in any meaningful way, guilt someone into doing good. You can only shame them into not doing bad.
Let’s say you’re a parent and your kid is having issues.
Swearing in class? Shame could work. You want them to stop it. Keep it in proportion*, and it might help. *(KEEP IT IN PROPORTION!!!)
Not doing their homework? NO! STOP! NO NOT DO THAT! EVER! EVER! EVER! You want them to start to do their homework. Shaming them will have to opposite effect! You have demotivated them! They will double down on NOT doing it. Not because they are being oppositional, but because that’s what shame does!
You can’t guilt people into building better habits, being more successful, or getting more involved. That requires encouragement. You need to motivate for that stuff!
If you want it in a simple phrase:
You can shame someone out of being a bad person, but you can’t shame them into being a good person.
Fun fact, that was literally what inspired me to make this post!
Not that anybody asked, but I think it’s important to understand how shame and guilt actually work before you try to use it for good.
It’s a necessary emotion. There are reasons we have it. It makes everything so. much. worse. when you use it wrong.
Shame and guilt are DE-motivators. They are meant to stop behavior, not promote it. You cannot, ever, in any meaningful way, guilt someone into doing good. You can only shame them into not doing bad.
Let’s say you’re a parent and your kid is having issues.
Swearing in class? Shame could work. You want them to stop it. Keep it in proportion*, and it might help. *(KEEP IT IN PROPORTION!!!)
Not doing their homework? NO! STOP! NO NOT DO THAT! EVER! EVER! EVER! You want them to start to do their homework. Shaming them will have to opposite effect! You have demotivated them! They will double down on NOT doing it. Not because they are being oppositional, but because that’s what shame does!
You can’t guilt people into building better habits, being more successful, or getting more involved. That requires encouragement. You need to motivate for that stuff!
If you want it in a simple phrase:
You can shame someone out of being a bad person, but you can’t shame them into being a good person.
Fun fact, that was literally what inspired me to make this post!
Surrealist humor sure is taking on a new flavor huh
I have finally identified my only two braincells.
In 3d video games at least, objects that clip like this bump around and make so much noise because they are gaining speed as they rapidly cut between being pushed and pulled by the surface’s collision box. These objects can possess immense speed even if they look relatively stationary.
Touching the chair may well result in releasing this enormous amount of confined speed into your body, which is a fun way to meet the dev team.
What to do if You Don’t Like an Author’s Fanfic or Take on a Trope:
Stop reading.
Find another fanfic that is more suitable to your tastes.
Read that one instead.
Bonus tip If you’re considering sending the author unsolicited messages about how much you disliked their fic, consider one of the following options instead:
Sooooo ummmmmmm this is something that’s probably going to piss a lot of people off, but I feel like I really need to say it.
If you get a message from an account claiming to be a Palestinian fundraiser, it is a bot. It is a scam. You need to report & delete the message and encourage others to do the same.
I know because I get messages on this account DAILY. I have a very high follower count and I’m pretty active and I interact with my followers a lot, and apparently that all adds up to one big bot magnet.
Bots following and messaging this account was a MASSIVE problem before Tumblr fixed its new account policies. I used to spend literally hours blocking and reporting the hundreds of bots that I would get following me each day.
I learned a lot about bots and how to identify them. The easiest way is with no avatar, “untitled” in the blog description (BTW if your avatar is still set to default PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD change it because you run a substantial risk of being accidentally blocked & reported as a bot).
One of the dead give aways of a bot was what I call “word salad” names. Three seemingly random words strung together making no sense, always adjective, adjective or noun, noun. If you reported a lot of these bots, you’d notice the same words kept showing up.
Nowadays, I am bombarded with fundraiser requests and sometimes, they don’t even bother to hide the fact that they’re a bot. The avatar is default, the blog title is “untitled,” and the blog name is a classic randomly-generated word salad.
However MOST of the requests I get come from at least semi-legit looking accounts. There are pictures, a name, a story. Never mind that I’ve gotten that message three times from different accounts.
Sometimes, they claim to be vetted, but the whole vetting system essentially adds up to “trust me bro.” There is no way of guaranteeing that this account isn’t just lying about being vetted, claiming to be vetted by a false person, or are using the identity of a real Palestinian to scam people.
Previously, I’ve seen a lot of people getting attacked for raising questions about these fundraisers and getting attacked for being racist or for harming Palestinian families in danger, like Tumblr isn’t a website famous for its scams and the words “The Arkh Project” “All or Nothing” or “Miss Officer and Mr. Truffles” mean nothing to you.
I personally have been scammed by people claiming to be charities on Tumblr before, specifically, The Leelah Project which used the name of a trans teenager who died by suicide to swindle people out of their money.
Luckily, there are actual, respected charities out there you can give money to if you want to help the cause:
One of the hardest things to accept about the situation in Palestine is that realistically, there is very little that your average outsider can do to change it. However, these large, well-respected and trustworthy charities are out there doing the hard work to keep people alive, and should be where the donation money is going
These scam bots feed on people’s naïvety and need to believe that they are making a difference, and even worse, feed on the fear that by ignoring them, it somehow makes you a racist doing direct harm to a refugee family, when in fact they are using the suffering of Palestinians to take away money from those in need.
As far as fundraisers that don’t send out random asks for donations, I honestly don’t know. You’ll have to do the work yourself and approach with much caution.
Be careful out there.
another really heartbreaking aspect of this is if you give money to a homeless guy who lied to you, that dude still gets some money which he probably needs anyway. with these scambots the money is probably going to bot farms, which are nontrivially reliant on human trafficking.
it’s not just a waste of your money, it’s a payment to actual literal criminal organizations. donate to vetted charities.
If you feel powerless, and you just do something to feel less powerless, without actually making it be something that works, you’re doing it about your feelings, not about the situation you’re unhappy about.
There are a lot of people in the notes claiming it’s easy to just check a vetting blog, entirely missing that this post addresses how easy it is for those vetting systems to be taken advantage of (people can take the identity of a vetted person by these blogs very easily).
I honestly don’t know what to think in terms of if there are actual real people anywhere at all buried in my inbox, but considering the plethora of supposedly vetted people asking for money in my inbox in exactly the same way there were a plethora of “people” in my inbox with completely bare accounts and “dying pets” asking for money with the same verbiage as each other…
Tumblr has always been a place where scams are pretty rampant. Yes, Tumblr is also a social media website where people are posting their legitimate fundraisers, but that’s exactly why scams can run as rampant as they do here.
Because it’s easy to prey on people who are already tuned into an issue. And with this one in particular, when even this post has people screaming at OP about how supposedly racist they are for this post, people are taking their own feelings of helplessness and reckoning with the fact that they are privileged and feel like they’ve finally been presented with a low-effort way to help and are lashing out at the people who are claiming this low-effort “help” they’ve glommed onto is rife with scams with that guilt they were feeling from reckoning with privilege—“I’m doing a thing which helps me feel less racist in a world where I’m privileged, and so you making a post like this one and telling me I’m not being less racist is a threat to me not being racist; you must be the racist!”
Anyway. The takeaway from this post shouldn’t really be, “do or do not donate to tumblr fundraisers for anything,” and certainly shouldn’t be, “and so you’re saying we shouldn’t donate our money at all?” like so many people are jumping to.
No, the takeaway should be that you need to be extremely careful with where you’re giving your money. Make absolutely sure you know where it’s going. The easiest way to do that is to pass off that responsibility to charity organizations which are much more equipped to be able to get your money where it’s needed and much less likely to put your money toward disguised human trafficking.
others to watch out for include not only “sick pets” but also scammers claiming they need money for insulin, to get (or reverse) transition surgery, and pretty much anything else that’s in the public mind
basically: if someone (bot) writes you (stranger) out of the blue asking for money, that’s almost certainly a scammer
if they’re using real-world suffering to appeal to the very human urge to help others, it’s especially egregious because they’re siphoning off resources that could help actual people rather than enrich criminal enterprises
with the rise of LLMs (“artificial intelligence”), you can expect to see this trend to only grow
if you want to really help others, there’s a dozen real nonprofits and NGOs out there for every cause: use a scambot request that triggers your desire to help as a spur to donate to a real charity
also? giving your credit card info (or, gods forfend, your bank info, or any means to access your accounts) to random scammers is a guaranteed way to get robbed and/or identity-thefted in a big way
honest.. it needs to be better known that you can get phalloplasty without a vaginectomy (= keeping the vagina), you can get phalloplasty with or without ‘burying’ your t-dick (aka its either in the phallus or remains outside of it/accessible), you can get phalloplasty with or without creating testicles, you can get phalloplasty with or without urethral lengthening, and there are multiple options for graft sites outside of arm or thigh grafts.
i knew pretty much none of this before i happened upon the blog of someone who had phalloplasty without vaginectomy. this is all stuff a surgeon would explain to you - but you may never consult a surgeon if you, like i did, think the only option available for phalloplasty is forearm graft phalloplasty with testicles, vaginectomy, clitoral burial and urethral lengthening, and that doesnt work for you.
phalloplasty in general is misrepresented terribly all over the place and many, many people say “i dont want bottom surgery because phalloplasty cant give me (x) result” and the one thing holding them back will be something thats entirely possible. meanwhile the main thing you hear about phalloplasty in the community is “the technology isnt there yet” “it doesnt look good/natural” “its not functional” etc etc, and while that may be true for many people, i suspect the lack of information about what a post-op phallus can actually look, feel and function like and the options you have regarding the surgery play a big role in the really bad reputation it gets and makes a lot of people completely give up on a surgery theyd really want because theyve been fed outdated and incomplete ideas about it.
me: i wish there were some way to signal a footnote, censor profanity, or signify the correction of a typo
the ever-dependable asterisk:
hm. I do not think that is an asterisk. I think that may be An Bugs.
me: jeez there’s so many flying insects here in the forests and woodlands of southeastern australia and tasmania, if only there were an apex predator to control their population
the godless fools over on reddit will gleefully lap up regurgitated slop in the form of my posts but patently refuse to screenshot anything actually good I put on this website, like the post where I just say the word “maid” 37 times in a row
we all got really lucky that alexander fleming wasn’t allergic to penicillin huh
imagine the guy who happens to discover the Mold That Heals You but unfortunately he’s part of the 10% of people who’s bodies turns it into the Mold That Kills You Harder
interesting how transmascs & transfems alike think losing weight is the answer to pass as our chosen gender…. almost as if fat people are never Truly afforded a passing gender regardless of trans status. as fat people we are never Truly seen as Men or Women. anyway fuck that notion & if u think u need to lose weight to pass that’s the devil talking
i’d also like to point out that this is a problem with people seeking to present androgynously. even androgyny must be skinny in the eyes of the world. in order to even be a person outside of gender, you mustn’t be fat
i want fat nb folks to know that you aren’t any less of a person or any less androgynous for being fat
To be fat, in white societies, is to be inherently de-gendered - fat women aren’t ‘worthy women’ because they’re not considered fuckable, fat men aren’t 'worthy men’ because they’re considered unathletic/lacking in self-control, fat enbies are just 'seeking attention’ because androgeny is supposed to be thin and they’re just pretending because they failed at their assigned gender.
If you’re fat, you’re only considered passable if you make extra effort to perform your assigned gender. Fat women get a pass if they do the busty lipsticked pin-up girl thing, or they’re motherly and once again unfuckable. Fat men get a pass if they’re wealthy in a good suit, if they’re a beer-drinking funny guy, or a muscle-chubby type. Fat enbies barely get a pass anywhere, and even then it’s if we do the quirky-cute creative thing, but we can’t be too quirky because then we’re freaky and freaky is barely a step away from perverted or disgusting.
Fat people are, as far as thin people see us, our fatness before we’re anything else. And we shouldn’t let their obsession with our fatness get in the way of living our lives, or expressing our gender.
And fatness comes along with a lot of intersex bodies, so we not only are degendered due to whatever specific intersex traits we have, but we often are even fat the “wrong” way for other fat people to gender us right! Because our fat will be stored in ways that their fat doesn’t for their sex!
I can’t explain how much I love baguette child. I would protect them with my life.
At first I was amazed and delighted and then I realized this is exactly the level of wit you should expect from a child who chose to dress as a baguette for trick or treating and I was even further delighted
people who use the queue function fill a necessary role in the tumblr ecosystem. they keep posts alive. if u miss a post bc ur entire mutualcule was reblogging it from each other in a 30min span and u were offline, the queue mutual provides u an opportunity to see that post again in 1-8 business days. they put posts in stasis in little cryogenic freezers for u to discover and enjoy later. everyone thank their queue mutuals right now
people who use the queue function fill a necessary role in the tumblr ecosystem. they keep posts alive. if u miss a post bc ur entire mutualcule was reblogging it from each other in a 30min span and u were offline, the queue mutual provides u an opportunity to see that post again in 1-8 business days. they put posts in stasis in little cryogenic freezers for u to discover and enjoy later. everyone thank their queue mutuals right now
tumblr classics major who really likes halsey and thinks that the romantic poets were the only people to ever make contributions to english literature: you once made flowers grow within my ribcage but you were like icarus flying too close to the sun and your ichor wings are melting and now divinity stains your bronze fingertips like a pomegranate and you are holy holy holy
Remember when I reblogged this and a tumblr poet told me to kill myself
the fact that neonazi slogans pretty much seamlessly slip into common lingo is both obviously frustrating towards efforts to distinguish dogwhistles from background noise, but also testament to the oversized influence that reactionary, functionally comforting and nonconfrontational, rhetoric has. like it’s both the case that someone saying ‘hell yeah brother, reject modern degeneracy, embrace tradition’ could just as easily be a dedicated klanner as much as a he/they cottagecore fanartist, as well as that the average westerner will need to overcome a lot more discomfort with 'the people’s republic of china has the best green energy policies and affirmative action in the world’ than with 'we must return to traditional lifestyles and secure a future away from Urban life’, because one of those things is associated with all the comfy apolitical animated films they loved as a child, and the other is something they’ve been explicitly taught is dangerous ideas they should be afraid of considering
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