awareness of "the abused can become the abuser" is useless without the knowledge that abuse is a choice anyone makes that is made for self-benefit. recently I watched an interview on the psychology of domestic abuse and the woman who interviewed those who inflicted the abuse always made sure to ask "why didn't you take it further?" because the answer would always show the abuser hadn't simply lost control. for example one man said he pushed over his girlfriend but didn't kick her once she was down because he didn't want any noticeable bruising that caused suspicion. human psychology is much less poetic than you think. too many psychology enjoyers only enjoy the poetic

Please put on your N95s. The same ones used for covid will filter particulate pollution. I lived in a city with yearly winter pollution levels like this. If you can pay for it, you might as well get an indoor air filter to sleep in.

something that's always stuck with me is Adorno's critique of liberal research on fascism - that liberal scientists believe you can approach fascism in good faith by simply asking Nazis what they think about the world and then writing it down. He argued that fascism is itself a bad faith ideology, and that Nazis will not usually answer the question "do you want to exterminate all minorities?" truthfully, especially not when asked by academics (who are all Marxists/Jews/etc plotting to destroy civilization). So in order to accurately capture fascist sentiment, you have to conceal your intentions and basically lie to them. And there are real moral imperatives for social scientists to do this, in the same way that journalists go undercover in white supremacist groups to report on their activities and beliefs. There's even that famous East German documentary where the directors lied to a Nazi military leader about being West German filmmakers, got him drunk, and then just filmed him saying Nazi shit lol. So like the conventions of science itself, the idea that good research is necessarily always transparent, is a political assumption that shapes how you conduct research and acquire knowledge

We should popularize more hispanized phonetic spellings of classic character names like we did with esnupi

the term feminist is like "leftist". it describes a group of ideologies that often oppose each other, and so, beyond the idea that women are oppressed and shouldn't be, it doesn't actually tell you anything about what the person in question believes. they could be an imperialist feminist, a class collaborationist and bioessentialist feminist, an outright fascist, or a Marxist

there are people with mostly decent opinions who I can not stomach because like. I do believe they genuinely care about the stuff they talk about. but the way they communicate it almost exclusively in "I told you so" tones and painting themselves as like, sooo much smarter than everyone else is truly fucking exhausting and makes it seem like their superiority is more important to them than the issue they're talking about. like can we find a way to talk about it that doesn't focus on how you don't understand how people can be so stupid and how this list of specific people are so much dumber than you.

like there's a point where your ego eclipses whatever message you're trying to communicate and it becomes exhausting. do you care about the issues or do you care about your own moral and intellectual superiority

lust winning and sloth losing. ok so you are all Pandas