The Beauty of the House is Immeasurable

Oh look it’s that short comic that’s haunted me for a decade.

This 100%. Several students in my ethics class a few weeks ago wanted to discuss "Luigi Mangione killing a healthcare CEO" and were very confused when I said that no, we do not know that he did it. One person even told me they thought he confessed. This narrative that we know he did it, and we now must only consider our thoughts on his actions has become insanely prevalent. Even the professor went along with it without question.

fucked up the roster for the week and accidentally scheduled two guards who only tell the truth on the same day. fuuuuck now anyone can find out which is the right path to go down

asked my guards what i should do about it and one of them said "stop relying on convoluted puzzles to protect your castle" and the other said "yeah i agree with him" maybe theyre both liars

Ive said this before but swear the biggest skill to learn as an adult is how to resist high-pressure sales tactics. You do NOT have to answer questions with anything other than "Sorry I'm not interested." No matter how nice they are or no matter how many follow up questions they ask or even how agitated they get when you stand your ground. Just keep saying I'm not interested. Don't answer their questions. Don't give them an opening to try to push back on your reasons. Be a fucking brick wall of I'm not interested.

there's a fine line between being wary of manipulation and becoming completely paranoid because you get very close to the realisation that pretty much all human interaction involves doing things we hope will lead to a result we like

this post is about a lot of things. it's about my ex saying it was manipulative to talk to them in a cute voice because that influenced their emotions. it's also about someone on this webbed site saying being funny is "engagement farming". like yeah every single conversation you have is going to be "manipulative" if your standard for that is "did something with the goal of eliciting a response". if that bothers you go live in a hut in the forest and speak only to the trees. I'll be over here manipulating my friends into being happy by giving them compliments

buying microsoft products funds genocide

i understand we cant be perfect in this, and microsoft has wormed its way into almost every aspect of our lives so its not like we can just cut all ties with a single mouse click, but like. you dont need that that video game.

listen to me, really. I am holding your two hands tenderly in mine. being part of a privileged group and benefitting from systemic exploitation without meaning to is not the same thing as being an inherently trash person who makes the world worse by living it in. that's not what that means. I'm telling you this for two reasons, 1) so you can chill the fuck out and be at peace with yourself without feeling like you're draining the universe of value, and 2) so you don't go onto oppressed people's posts about systemic privilege and exploitation and react like they've just told you that you, personally, should not exist because you're a man who lives within the vicinity of a supermarket that sells chiquita bananas. you're just gonna have to put some trust into your own brain and hold on to both the ideas that you're on one of the dominant sides of a set of global scales of injustice and that you don't have to shrivel out of existence about it. it can be difficult to reconcile those ideas at first, but it's completely possible and worth doing. if you don't, then you start constructing a worldview where you believe that either you have a civic duty to self destruct or you start vehemently denying that these systems of oppression exist, both of which are Bad and Not Good. peace and love x