Hey guess what bitches Poland had a general election last Sunday and we said “fuck you” to the current fascist Orban-wannabes en masse, in a record-breaking historic turnout of 74% (that’s a better turnout than the 1989 election which toppled the Soviet regime), with people of all ages standing in lines till 3 am to vote, young people actually outnumbering the elderly for the first time ever; and the result is that the progressive pro-EU coalition won and will form the next government. Been in in a stunned-but-celebratory mood since Sunday night.
stupid leftists and their belief in *checks notes* the intrinsic value of human life
Reblog if you would burn down the statue of liberty to save a life
Here’s the thing, though. If you asked a conservative “Would you let the statue of liberty burn to save one life?” they’d probably scoff and say no, it’s a national landmark, a treasure, a piece of too much historical importance to let it be destroyed for the sake of one measly life.
But if you asked, “Would you let the statue of liberty burn in order to save your child? your spouse? someone you loved a great deal?” the tune abruptly changes. At the very least, there’s a hesitation. Even if they deny it, I’m willing to bet that gun to their head, the answer would be “yes.”
The basic problem here is that people have a hard time seeing outside their own sphere of influence, and empathizing beyond the few people who are right in front of them. You’ve got your immediate family, whom you love; your friends, your acquaintances, maybe to a certain degree the people who share a status with you (your religion, your race, etc.)–but beyond that? People aren’t real. They’re theoretical.
But a national monument? That’s real. It stands for something. The value of a non-realized anonymous life that exists completely outside your sphere of influence is clearly worth less than something that represents freedom and prosperity to a whole nation, right?
People who think like this lack the compassion to realize that everyone is in someone’s immediate sphere of influence–that everyone is someone’s lover, or brother, or parent. Everyone means the world to someone. And it’s the absolute height of selfishness to assume that their lives don’t have value just because they don’t mean the world to you.
P.S. I would let the statue of liberty burn to save a pigeon.
also, there is an extreme difference between what things or principles *i* personally am willing to die for, and what i would hazard others to die for. and this is a distinction i don’t think the conservative hard-right likes to face.
an example: so, as the nazis began war against france, the staff of the louvre began crating up and shipping out the artworks. it was vital to them (for many reasons) that the nazis not get their hands on the collections, and hitler’s desire for them was known, so they dispersed the objects to the four winds; one of the curators personally traveled with la gioconda, mona lisa herself, in an unmarked crate, moving at least five times from location to location to avoid detection.
they even removed and hid the nike of samothrace, “winged victory,” which is both delicate, having been pieced back together from fragments, and incredibly heavy, weighing over three metric tons.
the curators who hid these artworks risked death to ensure that they wouldn’t fall into nazi hands. and yes, they are just paintings, just statues. but when i think about the idea of hitler capturing and standing smugly beside the nike of samothrace, a statue widely beloved as a symbol of liberty, i completely understand why someone would risk their life to prevent that. if my life was all that stood between a fascist dictator and a masterpiece that inspired millions, i would be willing to risk it. my belief in the power and necessity of art would demand i do so.
if, however, a nazi held a gun to some kid’s head (any kid!) and asked me which crate the mona lisa was in, they could have it in a heartbeat. no problem! i wouldn’t even have to think about it. being willing to risk my own life on principle doesn’t mean i’m willing to see others endangered for those same principles.
and that is exactly where the conservative hard-right falls right the fuck down. they are, typically, entirely willing to watch others suffer for their own principles. they are perfectly okay with seeing children in cages because of their supposed belief in law and order. they are perfectly willing to let women die from pregnancy complications because of their anti-abortion beliefs. they are alright with poverty and disease on general principle because they hold the free-market sacrosanct. and i guess from their own example they would save the statue of liberty and let human beings burn instead.
but speaking as a leftist (i’m more comfortable with socialist tbh), my principles are not abstract things that i hold aside from life, apart or above my place as a human being in a society. my beliefs arise from being a person amidst people. i don’t love art for art’s sake alone, actually! i don’t love objects because they are objects: i love them because they are artifacts of our humanity, because they communicate and connect us, because they embody love and curiosity and fear and feeling. i love art because i love people. i want universal health care because i want to see people universally cared for. i want universal basic income because people’s safety and dignity should not be determined by their economic productivity to an employer. i am anti-war and pro-choice for the same reason: i value people’s lives but also their autonomy and right to self-determination. my beliefs are not abstractions. i could never value a type of economic system that i saw hurting people, no matter how much “growth” it produced. i could never love “law and order” more than i love a child, any child, i saw trapped in a cage.
would i be willing to risk death, trying to save the statue of liberty? probably, yes. but there is no culture without people, and therefore i also believe there are no cultural treasures worth more than other people’s lives. and as far as i’m concerned the same goes for laws, or markets, or borders.
Well said!
This is an excellent ethical discussion.
The first time I came across this post, randomslasher’s addition was life changing for me. I suddenly understood where the right was coming from, and I had never been angrier.
This is also why so many people on the right fail to see the hypocrisy of trying to make abortion illegal when they themselves have had abortions. They can tally up their own life circumstances and conclude that it would be difficult or impossible to continue a pregnancy, but they’re completely mystified by the idea that women they don’t know are also human beings with complicated lives and limited spoon allocation.
This is also why they think “get a job” is useful advice. In their heads they honestly do not understand why the NPCs who make up the majority of the human race can’t just flip a switch from “no job” to “job.” When they say “get a job” they’re filing a glitch report with God and they honestly think that’s all it takes.
This is also why they tend to view demographics as individuals. They think that every single Muslim is just a different avatar for the same bit of programming.
Borrowed observation from @innuendostudios here, but: there’s also a fundamental difference in how progressives view social problems versus how conservatives view them. That is, progressives view them as problems to be solved, whereas conservatives do not believe you can solve anything.
Conservatives view social issues as universal constants that fundamentally are unable to be changed, like the weather. You can try to alter your own behavior to protect yourself (you can carry an umbrella), and you can commiserate about how bad the weather is, but you can’t stop it from raining. This is why conservatives blame victims of rape for dressing immodestly or for drinking or for going out at night: to them, those things are like going out without an umbrella when you know it’s going to rain.
“But then why do conservatives try to stop things they dislike by making them illegal, like drug use or immigration or abortion?” And the answer is: they’re not. They know perfectly well that those things will continue. No amount of studies showing that their methods are ineffective will matter to them because effectiveness is not the point. The point is to punish people for doing bad things, because punishing people is how you show your disapproval of their actions; if you don’t punish them, then you’re condoning their behavior.
This is why they will never support rehabilitative prisons, even though they reduce crime. This is why they will never support free birth control for everyone, even though that would reduce abortions. This is why they will never support just giving homeless people houses, even though it’s proven to be cheaper and more effective at stopping homelessness than halfway houses and shelters. It’s not about stopping evil, because you can’t; it’s about saying definitively what is Bad and what is Good, and we as a society do that by punishing the people we’ve decided are bad.
This is why the conservative response to “holy fuck, they’re putting children in cages!” is typically something along the lines of “it’s their parents’ fault for trying to come here illegally; if they didn’t want to have their kids taken away, they shouldn’t have committed a crime.” It doesn’t matter that entering the US unlawfully is a misdemeanor and child kidnapping isn’t typically a criminal sentence. It does not matter that this has absolutely zero effect on people unlawfully entering the US. The point is that conservatives have decided that entering unlawfully is Bad, anything that is not punishing undocumented immigrants – due process of asylum and removal defense claims, for example – is supporting Badness, and kidnapping children is an appropriate punishment for being Bad.
not to be pedantic but it annoys me so much when people talk abt how chatgpt is “lying” or “making things up”. or esp when people say it “refuses to admit” to lying. like girl that is a toaster oven
“it REFUSED TO ADMIT that it LIED to me” it is a line of code generating letters in the most algorithmically probable order
So my husband is back on his medieval warfare and tactics special interest lately, and he was telling me about how so many battles were lost because the knights would just disobey orders and break ranks because they got too excited and just went full Leroy Jenkins. Prey drive switches on and they see somebody running and they just blank out and go.
Which seemed really dumb to me, like people couldn’t be that stupid, until I got walloped in the face by a memory from freshman year of college.
It’s almost 10pm in the dead of winter right before Finals, I’m out at college in a high altitude desert in the biggest city I’ve ever been in during my life. My dorm is on the second floor of one of the newest buildings, which are still surrounded by construction zones for the other new buildings going up. Just past the construction zones is one of the city’s major roads. There is still snow on the ground outside, the sidewalks are ice and rock salt, and the parking lot is a slush pile. (All of this is relevant in a minute I swear, stay with me here.)
We get a knock at the door. One of my roomies answers it. There’s 2 creepy looking muscle dudes asking for another roommate, E. E is creeped out and doesn’t want to go see them, but they won’t leave, insisting they see her and talk to her out in the hall. My spider senses are tingling, the social anxiety override kicks in, and I go full Mom Friend and ask them who they are and how they know her. And dudes just take off for the stairwell.
And I took off after them.
I need y’all to understand that I was an asthmatic at altitude in a mountain city in winter at night in shorts and a t-shirt and no shoes whatsoever, and I somehow made it down two flights of stairs, out the door, down the sidewalk, across a construction zone, across the parking lot, and halfway to the road screaming at two beardy dudebros twice my size to “get back here you little creeps”, all before I had consciously realized that I had left my apartment. Something about watching two creepy guys run for it triggered something in me, some latent instinct to Search and Destroy. Like Fight or Flight but I wasn’t the one being threatened, they were the ones doing the Flight, and I had this deep, ferocious need to FIGHT.
I full on blanked out, y’all. I literally have no memory of getting down the stairs or across the parking lot or anything at all until I was watching the headlights on the road thinking “wait, where are my shoes?” It’s a little black hole. I was in the apartment, they took off running, and then bam, there I was. It was like an out of body experience, I was hearing myself shout at them and thinking “I sound like such an idiot right now omg,” and then I realized What I Had Done.
Not only was it stupid, it was super dangerous. Even aside from all the environmental dangers, if they were some kind of kidnappers they could totally have snatched me. And yet there I was, barefoot in the snow and road salt with no phone, no inhaler, and I was still hollering after them like a dog on a chain when one of my roommates came down in boots and a coat to drag me back inside.
And honestly? I’m still miffed I never caught the guys. That was my takeaway from that incident.
So yes, I believe it now. People are so unbelievably dumb and the prey drive instinct is absolutely real.
Thoughts? I have had a few experiences like this before, and you seem the type to enjoy this story.
Yeah, this happened. Actually contributed toward the loss for the French at Agincourt.
It also contributed to Queen Zenobia’s loss to Aurelian’s legions at the battle of Emesa. Her infantry broke part of Aurelian’s lines and continued to pursue, drawing them out of formation and into flanking position by Aurelian’s reserves.
Ancient field-warfare relied very heavily on infantry maintaining formation, as a solid wall of heavy infantry like hoplites, phlangites, or legionaries lined up with weapons and shields ready was a formidable obstacle on any battlefield. One tactic was to try to goad them into breaking formation using archers, skirmishers, and other ranged units. Even though legionaries and hoplites and similar units wore heavy armor and bore heavy shields that were largely resistant to projectiles, lighter ranged troops might be able to piss them off enough to pull them out of formation and into a trap or flanking maneuver.
The first time I ever came face to face with a bear I was having a conversation with a roommate outside our rented house in Asheville north carolina. Its head popped up over the hood of my roommates van and we looked at each other and I think I said “… that’s a bear!”
Next thing I know I’m at a full sprint in my neighbor’s yard with an axe in my hand chasing the bear into the woods and I stopped and slid like a fucking cartoon character and said out loud to myself “what the FUCK are you doing?”
I honestly don’t think I had a conscious thought until some part of my brain realized that the bear was way faster than me and I wasn’t going to be able to catch up.
Exit pursuing a bear. Legend status.
Really. So much of army stuff is just teaching people to follow commands at all times, under all conditions. Because human beings are bad at that! (So are most other creatures, so it’s not a human thing per se.) This is the reason for drill, repetitive training, development of muscle memory, strict hierarchy, and insistence that you can’t question the chain of command no matter what.
This drive is so intrinsic that “this army is inexperienced, they’ll chase us if we run” or similar ruses were FREQUENTLY used to massive tactical advantage.
This is both useful reference for my writing and an absolutely hysterical set of anecdotes, so thank you all
The fight response, folks. Not just the obscure cousin of flight/freeze/feign death!
if you thought I was going to tell you to not do that, then you have fundamentally misunderstood my function in this world.
*looks at the cat formally known as two houses*
Yeah… you sure do function that function well…
I’m passingly good at a lot of things but I’ll only claim to be really excellent at a few–one of them is connecting people to the right cats.
One of my law school buddies decided she wanted her very first cat, and I took her to four shelters before I found the right one, which was a huuuuge ginger tom named Beans. She thought she was looking for a female kitten. (Incorrect! Ginger himbo!) Beans was in her wedding pictures last year. And when I finally convinced my mom it was time for a new cat, she wanted a Himalayan or a Ragdoll, with a long coat and blue eyes, ideally sociable but not needy. I found her Eleanor, a pedigreed Himalayan/Ragdoll cross, with blue eyes, fits the bill perfectly personality wise–and who was living only twenty miles away when her last owner decided she needed a new home. If matchmaker for cats was a real job, I would be at the top of the game.
The other thing I’m really good at is standardized testing, but that’s less enjoyable for me.
We are not going to let that fuckwad DeSantis gain a foothold in the 2024 election.
You are going to fucking vote for Joe Biden, and you are going to give us a fucking chance to save our country from fascism, and you aren’t going to fucking complain about it, because there is literally no other choice.
We will not let another election be a close call. Are you listening?
Vote for Biden. Vote for whatever Democrat is most popular in your local elections. Our system sucks, but this is what we’re working with. Just fucking vote.
“But he’s –”
It doesn’t matter. It does. not. matter.
Not every battle is about progress. Sometimes it’s just holding the line until we get reinforcements. And they are coming. The Gen Z vote was monumental in stopping the red wave, and there are increasing numbers as more and more come of age.
Hold the line.
the highest praise i have for democrats is that they’re not the fascists. but in a two party system, it’s enough
We are not going to let that fuckwad DeSantis gain a foothold in the 2024 election.
You are going to fucking vote for Joe Biden, and you are going to give us a fucking chance to save our country from fascism, and you aren’t going to fucking complain about it, because there is literally no other choice.
We will not let another election be a close call. Are you listening?
Vote for Biden. Vote for whatever Democrat is most popular in your local elections. Our system sucks, but this is what we’re working with. Just fucking vote.
“But he’s –”
It doesn’t matter. It does. not. matter.
Not every battle is about progress. Sometimes it’s just holding the line until we get reinforcements. And they are coming. The Gen Z vote was monumental in stopping the red wave, and there are increasing numbers as more and more come of age.
Hold the line.
the highest praise i have for democrats is that they’re not the fascists. but in a two party system, it’s enough
What does a stock photo of some random guy brooding have to do with my question
i’m so sorry to tell you that’s not some random guy brooding, that’s jensen ackles, the guy who played dean winchester in supernatural. i think this may be a screenshot from the show.
My mom calls him pouty and the other one squeezy
thank you, I didn’t do it intentionally
on the one hand im honored that my tags got noticed but on the other hand now everyone can see the fact that i got misha collins and jensen ackles mixed up
in my defense they look exactly the same
In your defense when you said this was Misha Collins I immediately believed you that this was his name instead of Jensen Shackles
This post gives off vintage Tumblr vibes
No the real vintage tumblr would already add at least one supernatural gif to the post
I couldn’t find the right image to explain why my mom called the other one squeezy (because he often kept his lips “tightly squeezed”, according to her) so here’s this image instead
Okay kids buckle up for the INSANE story I just heard from my little brother
**As a disclaimer my brother is a cis straight dude who only dates the most basic white girls you can find. He’s very emotionally aware but doesn’t linger on his emotions, just processes them and moves on (this is wild to me)**
He calls me on my break just to say hi, that he’s driving back to Denver from visiting his girlfriend, to which I respond “didn’t you break up with your girlfriend (of like a month) last month” and to which he says “yeah I have a new girlfriend, we’ve been together four weeks but I went up to spend the weekend and meet her friends” and I’m like ok great this is already ridiculous
So we’re chatting and I’m teasing him about how he doesn’t sleep with people on first dates and he says that he’s changed his policy, it’s just that he won’t have sex with them if he’d rather be doing something else, so I joke that I’ve had that where I’d rather be watching the show Chernobyl (true) and he says “yeah or watching a movie with my housemate” and I say hey bud that’s kind of gay and he says yeah I actually had a weird gay moment last night
And I go oh???? And he goes yeah, I was at the bar with the girlfriend and some of her friends and one of them was a guy and we were hitting it off, doing a little flirting as you do with your bros at the bar~
And then my cis straight brother goes on to explain that sometimes when you’re out with the homies and you’re having a good time and the vibes are right you just give em a little kiss, like just a kiss on the mouth between bros, “no tongue or anything like that but just to express that you’re close and having a good time”
I’m like “My dude that’s not a thing” and he’s like “between confident straight men it is” and I’m like “NO IT’S NOT"
So there we’ve got my brother having casual queerplatonic relationships with his homies at the bar, and he’s telling me this and I’m obviously speechless, so he goes on and he’s like “so because this guy and I were hitting it off I go in for a little kiss and he fucking swerves me” and I’m like yes my guy but because my brother is actually very good with respecting boundaries he was like “ok man great communication, won’t do it again"
BUT
Apparently my brother and the dude and my brother’s GIRLFRIEND who has been there the WHOLE TIME go outside (I assume to have a cigarette but he didn’t tell me that part) and the guy turns to my brother and is like “man I should have kissed you when you offered it” and my brother is like “cool good shit man” like in the most bro way possible and then the guy grabs his face between his hands and just PLANTS a big one on his mouth
And THEN the guy panics and shoves him down on the ground!! And my brother has the normal reaction to being shoved on the ground unexpectedly which is to say “what the FUCK” and the girlfriend says “what the FUCK” and the guy goes “what the FUCK” and leaves
And my brother ended the story there and was musing on it like “this guy obviously has some complexes to work through about his sexuality, no confident straight man kisses another confident straight man and then panics and runs away”
Which took me out at the KNEES lol
And that, dear readers, is the batshit story my brother told me!
OH MY GOD AND
AND
I told my coworker this and they were like I’m actually shipping him and his roommate and I was like HUH because I hadn’t considered that and then later my brother sent me a photo of his housemate wearing sexy handcuffs
aaron paul has done more for the lgbts by playing jesse pinkman and doing his weird little photoshoots with bryan cranston than harry styles and taylor swift combined
Announce it to the world right here and right now; tell it to the stars in the sky and the waves of the sea: say that you are free, say that you are wild, and say that you will damn well do as you damn well please.
Anonymous
