Posts you had second thought about and decided not to post - put them here

I would like to point out that I generally try, with perhaps one exception, to criticise people’s posts, rather than the person themselves.

I don’t understand why some find this such a hard distinction, or whether the person is a good person irl matters. I mean, I’m sure they are, but it’s not relevant to the side of them they’re choosing to show on ilx, which is the only side we know in most cases. I know some of you irl now which is great, but then again the people I tend to gravitate to for that don’t tend to make these kinds of posts. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

And finally, I like how my posts are quite calm and tbh even bland and yet several of the responders have characterised them as “shouting”, obtuse or otherwise irrational. I know that just one point has been discussed to death here but the attitudes are the issue - the comment I quoted was a useful example but it certainly wasn’t the only one.

Tbh I think it was clear you were criticizing their posts in what they wrote.

Otm about "good person" being a red herring in the convo

I like how my posts are quite calm and tbh even bland

tbf they do not read as "calm" or "bland" ... though the fact you feel that they are makes your responses to others' defensiveness and criticism make a lot more sense to me

Yeah I didn’t mince my words, but that’s not what I’m talking about. A reply can be angry and not crossing the line into a frothing rant, you know? And to read the very deliberate comment that I was “shouting” - yeah, I know exactly what’s going on there and so should you.

I think of this exact scene in the TV version of Dear White People where a mixed group of students at a party listening to rap and one of the white students says the n-word as he's rapping along to the song.

His Black friend tells him gently, with a smile, "don't say that word", and instead of saying "oh sorry", he starts focusing on how it hurts that the guy is suggesting he's racist and he begins escalating the Convo until a fight breaks out.

That seems to be how these things always go.

And to read the very deliberate comment that I was “shouting” - yeah, I know exactly what’s going on there and so should you.

oh ... yeah ... there were a bunch of different people piling on and I wasn't keeping track of all of it ... but for sure, being told you are "shouting" when you, as a woman in a field of dudes, tend to be ignored or have dudes speak over you, that is problematic af.

His Black friend tells him gently, with a smile, "don't say that word", and instead of saying "oh sorry", he starts focusing on how it hurts that the guy is suggesting he's racist and he begins escalating the Convo until a fight breaks out.

yeah, that was ... there were a lot of good bits in that show!

I don't know why it is that certain threads about things (music/films/etc.) which I like become completely unbearable to read, to the extent that I swear never to open them again, but I suspect this may be the one case where the problem isn't just with me.

Threads about stuff I hate otoh are always fine.

srsly it's easier when the stakes are less personal sometimes

key reason why I don’t vote in the music polls anymore tbh

Also w movies or shows too much of the threads can be spent patiently explaining obvious things to people who don’t get it

I avoid threads about recently released films but tbh that's by no means just an ILX thing, always better to check in after the dust has settled and everyone's got their Take out of their system.

I feel like the fact that people who like (x) don't want to post in The (x) Thread, while people who hate (x) love posting in The (x) Thread is probably not a great thing for The Discourse, but idk maybe this is a sign of intellectual weakness which disqualifies us from contributing (I do not actually believe this)

wrt year end music polls i realized i spent a decent amount of time in past years thinking about what music i liked or loved, and then 3 things would show up, and much of it wasn't to the taste of the ppl who can't just shut up about music that isn't to their taste, and i got kinda tired of it. couple things would have made the 77 if i'd voted but who gives a shit.

Cams I hope you’re talking about The Last of Us thread

I don't know why it is that certain threads about things (music/films/etc.) which I like become completely unbearable to read,

Guys Have Opinions.

(I am one of those guys and I know I've been unbearable too).

be pretty funny if there's a vault somewhere with a barely survived phonautograph of some french dude just reciting all the profanity he knew.

don't bite
don't bite
don't bite
don't bite
don't bite
don't bite

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9P1KxVrrWM

there are several kinds of flushes of shit. sometimes it just flushes right down and all is bueno. other times it swirls slowly but surely, until it gurgles off to shit hell. other times it barely makes it to the last gulp, and leaves shit behind. one must then determine whether another attempt is wise at all. finally, there's musk's twitter. it swirls, or more accurately circles slowly, with much hope from the onlooker. but it has no likelihood of leaving the bowl. in fact, water is flowing in and that shit morass is growing. now you are only afraid that the shit, the wipe-age, the turgid broth-- it's all gonna flow over to the floor. if it's not your space, it's best to flee. if it is your space? what then? *remove bookmark from this Thread*

Dud

thanks for the confirm, thats why its here not there.

Sorry, it was unrelated - I just want to post that whenever the "Donald Trump: Classic or Dud?" thread pops up, but it would probably get old very quickly.

ha no worry. part of this thread is formless exhaustion frustration self restraint zone

haha camaraderie there are many people who have gone ahead and posted "dud" in there (probably me included, haven't checked). it is the clear answer

Sorry, it was unrelated - I just want to post that whenever the "Donald Trump: Classic or Dud?" thread pops up, but it would probably get old very quickly.

― Camaraderie at Arms Length, Wednesday, March 8, 2023 10:23 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

lol please do, i for one find it funny every time

dud

yep i've heard of it

ha, yes I also want to post that

can we leave the post, but add a classic

(user was banned for this post)

to the bottom of it? or is that too memey? lol

and the serious part-
i admit to having misused the flag post button in the past for weird reasons. so now, and for the past few years, i use it with extreme caution. i'm not even sure of the last time i used it, or even thought about using it.

i hope i've never done anything to make anyone press it. i'm sorry if so, please call me out.☮️

rly it's more of a caterpillar/butterfly deal

i don't know that the island in the tempest works the same way as arden in AYLI. prospero's domination of the island, psychic deformation of caliban, stringing along of ariel, stunting of miranda etc are all signs of the world's disharmony, which can only be repaired by returning the island to caliban/setting ariel free/letting miranda go. colonialism in the tempest is not the solution to anything but a manifestation of the problem, a symptom of a vain disease of control; in order for prospero+alonso's reconciliation to be effected, the island must be un-fucked.

in contrast if the aristocratic hipsters in AYLI were fucking up arden (and they might be! roz/celia strolling in and buying someone's house on a whim is literally gentrification) that really would be framed by the play as the acceptable price of their revitalization. but the inequity between the vacationers and the locals is only v lightly ~problematized~ (there seems to be a lot of space in arden) whereas in the tempest it is the whole play, the source of everyone's fear or rage.

2014 me says great band. 2016 me says best band. Now me sez i hope they get ALL your money that was fun. it’s the only way i have to deal with like— this and not wanting to deal with all— this stuff and those ppl

Shocked to my core that the centre sided with the right, who could have seen this coming

this thread needs to be quarantined and kept away from the rest of ILX in case the contagion spreads

the poetics of My Dick

semiotics, surely

dialecdick

can the dialecdick break bricks?

how much dick could a dickchuck chuck if a dickchuck could chuck dick

put away those semiotimatic weapons

I feel like completely abolishing the military is kind of a moralist kink for some. And I don’t think militaries should exist, but the idea one of your descendants is going to get mowed down or subjugated because you decided all defense was bad is a projection someone’s making in their mind and probably horny about it

it's almost like some smug bourgeois comfortable motherfuckers have such an innately incurable self preserving resistance to class politics that they can't get out of their bore-space of posting lots of long and really boring as fuck, barely readable without losing the will to live. One after the other, posts that reveal nothing other than you are an absolute arsehole - chat gpt is getting jealous though!

b-b-b-but what about all that heart-stopping, brain-numbing, ear-destroying, cgi-enhanced action!

i got some trepidation about this but i wanna talk a little about my experience of queer trauma.

i was taught early and often to hate myself and to be ashamed of myself, to think of myself as a Bad Person. villains in movies like Dressed to Kill and The Silence of the Lambs were the closest thing i had to trans role models. i didn't admire these people. i didn't want to be like them. i found them repulsive and disgusting.

i hated myself, hated my body, found myself repulsive and disgusting. but that was different.

the truth about me, the truth about who i was, was literally unthinkable to me. it was worse than the worst thing i could imagine. so i thought about the worst shit i could imagine instead.

it's certainly an oversimplification, but there's these transfem memes. there one using the kid looking at the two castles and one's labelled "trans woman" and the other is labelled i don't know "fascist", and there's another with the evolution of some pokemon, i don't know all their names but one is vileplume i think, showing two evolution paths, where vileplume is "white supremacist" and the other one is "trans lesbian communist". and again i don't think it's _true_, i think that's just how a lot of us see ourselves.

most of us have a lot of internalized self-hatred. we work with it, we learn to live with it. but we also have to be careful around each other, because sometimes people will externalize it. growing up thinking of myself as disgusting for being trans created a sort of cognitive dissonance in me. i thought my transness made me repulsive, but all the other trans people i saw, i thought they were amazing and hot and awesome. there's two basic ways to resolve that. i learned to stop hating myself. some people decide instead to hate other trans people.

or, fuck it, why stop with just trans people? why not just hate _everyone_? why not conclude that human beings are disgusting, vile creatures, and it's better not to be born? i did that for a while too. i fucked around with antinatalism. there was some show called "true detective" or something where one of the characters was an antinatalist. a ligotti type. i had friends into ligotti. i was more into cioran, because he basically wrote funny tweets decades before twitter, which means that he wasn't stuck in the capitalist hellscape cesspool that is the twitter ecosystem. there are tons of sorts of antinatalism, i'm sure, millions of dead antinatalisms. mine was just one kind. i don't think i'm necessary _like_ someone because i used to be into antinatalism.

my particular antinatalism? it was fucking bullshit. it was me hating myself for being queer and not admitting it and turning it into some fucking _universal fucking truth_, like no it's not better that i wasn't born, i haven't felt that since the day my egg cracked. being trans sucks a lot of the time but i understand that my existence is of enormous positive value to the world, that the shit i was most ashamed and afraid of, the stuff i thought was literally unthinkable, wasn't nearly as bad as some of the "worst stuff i could imagine" that i was putting myself through.

so when i read certain stuff, the lens i read it through, i tend towards that lens. and that don't say anything about the author. when i apply that lens, i don't think it _can_ be anything but a barthes thing. i'd write these long theoretical pieces and i was trying to suppress some shit very very badly, it came out sideways. i look at what i now consider "egg art", some of the stuff i wrote, and some of the lies i told myself about that i wonder how i could ever have believed it.

so when i read certain stuff i look for the stuff that comes out sideways. if someone's writing a long essay making a theoretical defense of, like, pedophilia, ugggh it's always these most taboo subjects, pedophilia and nazis and you know yeah i read "answer me!" when i was younger, edgelordy bullshit written by some piece of shit asshole. i'm not like him. obviously. (you know, if i'd lived in portland in the 90s... maybe it wouldn't have taken me quite so long to figure out how completely and totally queer i am.)

but sometimes you run across this stuff and... ok, here's someone saying that they're attracted to people who are like them, here's them complaining about specifically _gay men_ who oppose pedophilia, calling them hypocrites, here's him "joking" about being a bottom. maybe what's unthinkable for them, maybe what's worse than the worst thing they can imagine, is being railed by a hot tall twink.

and i'm not personally into being railed by a hot tall twink, but you know what, i don't think being into that is somehow worse than the total extinction of the human race. personally.

anyway. that's me talking about me. i don't know shit about other people who do horrible things. i sometimes think of myself as a horrible person who would do horrible things, but that's obviously not true. that's just what i was taught about myself.

YMP, just so you know, your smug liberal complicity in a system of violence doesn’t impress anyone except yourself. Fuck off.

"what kinda music you like?"

"...(quizzical look) so there's this band from iceland and they play rock music but not like---"

"---are you talking about sigur ros?"

"...YES!??!! You know them???? I LOVE THEM!"

and then he told me about his travels to iceland inspired by his favorite band. don't know how many times he saw them, but it was enough for him to casually lament that he "missed them on their home turf." absolute legend. rip johnathan.

"... Hinn íslenski Þursaflokkur, actually"

did it define your personality though

literally a Viking