Jack, the Cinephile

the last time I reblogged this post right before I got a great job, in a permanent work-from-home position, with benefits, retirement, and a salary literally 3x what I was making before, doing something I really like. 

So you know. 

While the opposite of toxic masculinity is men wearing skirts and dancing to pop music and reading Maya Angelou.

So if there’s one thing I hope people take away from this Ezra Miller shittery–besides don’t watch The Flash if you have an ounce of integrity about all that MeToo stuff–is that men can be as effeminate and gay and look as much like Tom Holland as it gets, and still be abusive assholes.

The guy who looks like this and enjoys outdoorsy shit and doing stuff with his hands can still treat the people around him with respect and compassion… why wouldn’t he?

While the guy who looks like this can be a fucking terrorist.

Historical oppression matters when talking about systemic racism, but bring up Irish, Italians, and Slavs and suddenly it isn’t relevant because it doesn’t happen anymore.

Wealth disparity matters when talking about male privilege and the patriarchy, but somehow doesn’t count when applied to asian and jewish Americans.

The fact that one ethnic group is shot more often by police is proof of a justice system that’s dedicated against them, but bring up gender and it’s simply stated that men get shot more often because they commit more crimes and fight with police more often.

Palestinians are being occupied by settler Israelis, but the fact that they conquered the land from Israelis first is irrelevant.

European countries owe a debt to their previous colonies, but why on Earth would Turkey need to pay reparations most of Eastern Europe?

Racial disparities in higher education mean the institutions are biased against non white people, but not against men, and not against asians, even after openly admitting to discriminating against both 

First off, big noses isn't even a solely Jewish thing assuming it's a true stereotype in the first type, but it also boggles the mind that they see "Big nosed creature" and immediately think Jew.

It's entirely and purely them looking at racist caricatures (Most all of which are entirely inaccurate to anything resembling life) and internalizing the messages from those bigoted things, then turning around and claiming anything that they can find that vaguely resembles that bigoted caricature must be a reference for the group.

Just like that Hello Future Me video I complained about, Adam Millard virtue-signalled by denouncing Lovecraft’s racism, even though it adds nothing to his game design analysis video.

Second, is that people seem to be uniquely obsessed with him specifically being racist, and I have literally heard people talk about how genuinely wonderful of a person he was, how he was absurdly generous to and deeply invested in everyone he met and how his funeral was attended by hundreds of people who knew him personally and whos lives he affected in positive ways. Then immediately disregard all of that by saying he was a disgusting evil man full of hatred.

Similarly, they will talk in depth about he legitimately fucked up childhood and the mass amount of abuse he suffered and how it impacted his health and mental state as an adult, then deliberately avoid making any connection between that and his negative traits.

He was raised in an extremely sheltered environment by extremely xenophobic (and frankly unwell) people, and his views on the world reflected that especially in his early work, but then over the course of the man’s career you can see a distinct and steady reduction in racism with almost every successive thing he published. We have numerous letters he wrote to his friends talking about how much he wished he could go back and redo all his early stories, knowing what he knew now.

So on top of all his incredible talents as a writer, and how hugely influential he was to pretty much all media in the century after his death, Lovecraft is a story of self-improvement, of recognizing one’s own flaws and growing past them to become a better person and influence others to do the same.

And if you build your entire worldview upon the concept that people are just inherently Good or inherently Evil, that can’t be allowed. If an evil person is capable of becoming good, then how can you justify the abuses you heap upon people who have been declared (usually without basis) to have done something vaguely Wrong in the distant past? And if you can’t be confident that the designated Bad People are still bad… you might have to take another look at the designated Good People and what they’re actually doing. You might, god forbid, even have to stop and think about your own actions, and whether you can still be called good.

Is it that reviewers keep having bad views about self improvement by focusing only on some glaring issues in his early work or is it that most people only read a couple things if that and have very weak analysis skills so this narrative of “the main theme in Lovecraft is racism” just seems reasonable to everyone who reads it?

I’ve read several Lovecraft stories without noticing racism in them, and anyone can tell you I’m a nitpicker.

>but the people perpetuating it do not have an agenda

That is not a logical conclusion from what you’ve said up until now.

>Also, even an expert has to know in discussion of Lovecraft audiences will expect a view on his racism

What “audiences”?

>any review that touches on him to make your stance clear to avoid being inundated with “okay just praise a racist then :/” comments.

This as written by a man with from a family wiith a history of chronic physical and mental illness whose parents, both of them, died in a Sanitorium suffering from horrific Mental and Physical debilitation.

I happened to stumble upon RPG.net forums while I was looking for a book quote. I found the quote in a Let’s Read thread, but it also had banners about Asian Hate, BLM, and Reproductive rights*, and how you basically had to support their politics, or else.

They are still up this year. 2022. On a site that doesn’t actually have a news or political forum. At all.

If they were as thought policing this hard back in 2018, I can’t imagine they’ve gotten any better.

No wonder they’ve been dying for years. I gather that https://www.therpgsite.com/ is supposed to be a replacement.

It honestly seems like open hatred of someone who encourages men to be someone they respect, as opposed to being pathetic and easy to walk on

They don't think Incels should ever have good things. Even, especially if those good things are redemption and becoming better human beings.

Remember that shrimp guy green text? Where people said that nobody should praise his growth because he was using terms that offended them?

Are a lot of incels despicable people? Absolutely. Does that mean they are unworthy of redemption? No.

Literally stated that’s not what I’m referring to.

> Even then. Who the fuck cares if they don’t actually have DID? Who gives a fuck if they’re faking?

You should. Because it reflects badly on people who actually have a condition when there is a massive amount of people without the condition claiming to represent it and giving wrong impressions to others. If they are faking then they clearly have other issues that need to be addressed that aren’t being addressed if they are enabled.

> If your main priority is to call out fakers and not lift up people with dissociative disorders either by educating others about these illnesses or donating to disabled people then you have some problems that you need to work out. Trends come and go.

Wild concept, but I can do both. And especially if the goal is to educate about what and what is not a part of a certain condition, then acting to draw attention to people who are lying about or faking that condition seems like a good place to start.

You should find a serious issue with people faking illnesses and diseases for what is ostensibly internet clout and you should be concerned if it has gone far enough that you consider it a trend.

>We’ve had this conversation since 2019 and it’s getting old. There’s not even that many people you’d call ‘fakers’ around anymore.

That’s literally just not true. People might have shifted about what condition they are faking, but the fact that they are still faking it shouldn’t be disregard because you’ve seen it a lot. In fact, the fact that it’s “getting old” should tell you that it is a problem that is going unaddressed and unremedied. There are compilations posted basically daily of people on tiktok faking mental illness, especially DID. If you search the hashtags the same things come up on Instagram. It seems like every other week another person gets exposed for faking DID, Tourette’s, etc.

> Not supporting all of us, unconditionally (with a few exceptions), is ableist and only drives more and more people to doubt and gaslight themselves over their disorders. That travels far outside the realm of ‘syscourse’. Nobody should have to explain that to you.

Unconditional support is uncritical dogshit, and I don’t play that way. You literally only cause harm to people with mental illnesses by validating any mfer who comes out and claims to have something while they clearly just want to LARP.

I am disabled. I am a trauma survivor. I have struggled with my mental health for the better part of a decade. I shouldn’t have to explain to you that not letting people ask questions about disability and mental illness is not ableist, it’s using common sense and actually helps us in the long run. I get that struggling with mental illness is fucking rough and that it can be easy to doubt yourself despite things being obviously off about yourself and even despite diagnosis sometimes, but that doesn’t mean that you should remove criticism from your life entirely.

It’s not “gaslighting” to sometimes step back and listen to what people are saying and understand that when certain things involve enough people it can have a ripple effect, especially when concerning groups that already don’t have a great view in society like people with mental illnesses.

Leilah Zahedi-Spung, a high-risk obstetrician in Chattanooga, Tenn., recently saw a pregnant patient with rising blood pressure who the doctor believed could be facing a serious health emergency. The patient was in her second trimester of pregnancy and her unborn baby had been diagnosed with genetic abnormalities that meant the child wasn’t expected to survive. Dr. Zahedi-Spung feared the mother was at risk of a severe form of preeclampsia that can cause seizures and ultimately death. The doctor said she thought the patient needed an abortion, but Tennessee has a total ban on the procedure. The state law, in effect since late August, allows doctors to argue the procedure was necessary to save the life of the patient, but Dr. Zahedi-Spung said she wasn’t confident the woman’s condition was dire enough to meet that standard and feared that being charged with a crime could upend her life for years, even if she eventually was vindicated. She decided to send the woman on a roughly six-hour ambulance ride to end her pregnancy in North Carolina, where she arrived with dangerously high blood pressure and signs of kidney failure, the doctor said. “She kept asking if she was going to die,” Dr. Zahedi-Spung said. “I kept saying, ‘I’m trying, I’m trying, we’re going to make it happen. We just need to get you to the right place where you can be taken care of.’” When she saw the patient a couple of weeks later, alive, the doctor said she felt a wave of relief.

For all forced birthers, may you have pregnancy complications, and may you be trapped in Tennessee.

The only defenses I've seen about no-exception bans are either that people should just die instead of having a life-saving abortion or that prosecuters won't actually prosecute. If you subscribe to the first, you're a Hitler wannabe. If the latter....what the fuck are you on!?!

No one would buy that for any law. "We don't want to prosecute doctors! We just made it illegal for them to save pregnant people's lives, but we won't actually uphold that law."

Bullshit. So may each and every one of you be trapped in Tennessee, pregnant with complications.

An affirmative defense is the same thing that lets you use force to defend yourself when normally that force would not be allowed.

Also, this law does not in anyway prevent the doctors from doing a c-section, which is the actual appropriate response to severe preeclampsia.

You remove the baby, make him or her comfortable (from what details are given in the article the baby wasn’t expected to survive even at full term), stabilize the mother and, if possible, give the mother the opportunity to say goodbye to her child.

This is NOT an abortion. It’s a medically necessary early delivery.

No one is flawless, by any standards. Everyone, even the least "problematic" people, have done bad things. MLK had multiple affairs and may have watched his friend rape a woman. Ghandi was a sex addict who abandoned his dying father to have sex. Einstein had an affair with his cousin and treated his wife so badly she had a mental breakdown. Does that mean we need to stop celebrating MLK day? Is the entire civil rights movement so tainted that we should just undo everything it accomplished? Should we stop teaching general relativity in schools? Should we start a movement to give India back to the British?

Modern standards for purity change constantly. 10 years ago everything JK Rowling has ever said about trans people would have been mainstream feminist thought. Anyone disagreeing would have been a misogynist. 10 years ago calling a black person "black" instead of "African-American" was offensive. 7 years ago questioning the outcome of an election was a patriotic duty. What is and isn't acceptable, or politically correct, changes all the time. It's impossible to hold anyone alive today to those ever-changing standards, let alone people who lived hundreds or thousands of years ago and were held to very different standards.

The people who are held to these impossibly standards, both now and throughout history, are only held to those standards because modern leftists want to destroy their accomplishments. Just look at Joe Biden. If the standards of #MeToo were applied evenly, he should have been thrown off the Democrat ticket. The internet should have been flooded with articles and posts demanding he back out. Instead, those articles and posts demonized his accuser literally weeks after pushing "believe all women". If the standards for racism were applied evenly, there are a bunch of black comedian and celebrities who would have lost their jobs and been blacklisted from Hollywood for the things they said about white people. Brie Larson would have been fired from being Captain Marvel for saying her movie wasn't for straight white men. If the people inventing these standards aren't going to apply them evenly, then why should we ever adapt those standards for anyone? Ourselves or historical figures?

The trick is recognizing SOCIETIES progress. Yes many ppl were brilliant but every brilliant discovery was fostered by millions of humans before them. Each innovation could have been discovered by someone else (and the level of technology of many natives across the world before white imperialism prove this).

Is it great that this intelligent racist asshole invented X? Yes its great. Are they significant to history? Yes. Should we honor them? No. Recognizing history is something that never requires worship. We build statues to people we review and write warnings in books and plaques for those we dont. Everyone knows about many bad ppl in history. There isnt a single non idiot who thinks taking down confed statues is erasing history cus we all learned that history.

Don't go see the movie.

But yeah, it's silly. Look, I love Charles Martinet's Mario, but you can't do a full length movie with "It's-a me! Mario!" for 90 minutes. Mario isn't even from Italy. He's from New York City. So the stereotypical Italian accent doesn't fit his character.

Like in the same breath this dude says that anyone who disagrees with him should be violated intimately, he also says you’re a “fascist”