Obsessiforge

White people are like little kids who make up new rules and obnoxious powers to keep themselves from losing….

At the end of it all, they are happy that you are so civil and can debate things rationally and clearly without getting upset. Everyone shakes hands and thanks everyone for being able to discuss “conflicting” viewpoints. Because after all everyone needs to hear the opposing side to truly be sophisticated. Even if you’ve heard that side all your life and it completely devalues you as a human being.

What i hear is that the mark of civilization to white people is being dehumanized and taking it like a champ. 

Sealioning is the name given to a specific, pervasive form of aggressive and willfully intentional cluelessness, that masquerades as a sincere desire to understand.

 A Sealion is someone who, when confronted with a fact that they don’t care to acknowledge, say, the persistence of systemic racism in America, will ask endlessly for “proof” and insist that it is the other person’s job to stop everything they are doing and address the issue to their satisfaction.

The purpose of Sealioning is never to actually learn or become more informed. The purpose is to interrogate. Much like actual interrogators, Sealions bombard their target with question after question, digging and digging until the target either says something stupid or is so pissed off that they react in the extreme. The other major reason why people hate Sealioning is because responding to it is a complete waste of time.

It’s an insidious trap. Responding to questions asked reasonably is, of course, a natural thing for people to do. I like to do it myself; educating others is generally pretty entertaining, especially if they are receptive to learning. Dismissing those questions can appear condescending or rude, especially if you actually are condescending or rude.

Of course, these questions are not asked because the person asking them genuinely wants to know the answer. If they did, they would do their own digging based on your statements, and only ask for obscure or difficult-to-discover information. This is the “debate principle”. It is best explained thusly: When you go to a debate, you educate yourself on the topics at hand, and only request evidence when a claim is either quite outlandish or unflinchingly obscure.

No, these questions are asked to make a responder waste their time. It works, too; I’ve responded to Sealions before, answering all their questions and claims for evidence, only to be greeted by even more willful ignorance. It’s a way to force people into responding to questions phrased neutrally but asked in bad faith.

The name “Sealioning” comes from a most splendid webcomic, “Wondermark”, by David Malki.  

It can be found here: http://knowyourmeme.com/photos/873260-sea-lioning

Sealions are just “asking nicely” but they are asking questions that have been asked and answered fully many times, and are unwilling to so much as open a new tab to look up the answer, nor will they recognize the validity of your sources, your experience or expertise no matter what you do. It is impossible to satisfy a Sealion.

Make no mistake.

A) Call them out on their inability to admit they were wrong. This sounds pretty simple, but it’s very easy to get dragged into whatever they say next instead of just pointing out that you’ve proven their first point is bullshit yet they’re still yakking on.

B) They try to box you into a corner? Box them back. If they won’t accept a link, laugh at them for failing to understand it/read it. Call them out for trying to veer the conversation in another direction without yielding the point. Specifically state that you see their cheap tactics and find them weak and a sign of a poor debater.

C) Never let them move onto the next question. Demand they answer yours instead. Why should they get to set the terms of the debate? Why is it always them who deserves explanations?

D) Suggest that they’re arguing in bad faith. That they don’t really want an answer. And if they say no way? Then point out that someone arguing in good faith would do all the things they refuse to. They’d read links and evidence. They’d agree on at least *something*. And failing that, they’d walk away. Good faith arguers will reach a certain point and then just say agree to disagree. But these guys? Won’t. They will not leave it alone no matter what. That’s the hallmark of a sealion trained to demoralise us.

And when they indirectly admit that, you call them out on it.

She was pregnant at least fifteen times, had over a dozen children. Raised all of them in a big rambling farmhouse in central Pennsylvania.

And I thought about her this afternoon, lying in bed with my spouse after my lazy weekend nap, snuggling him and burying my nose in his hair, taking deep breaths of the scent of his skin. This man who is the center of my universe, my best friend, one of two reasons why I literally decided I had to live and kept fighting through the pain after surgery when I really wanted to just let go and die: I held him closer and I thought of her.

I thought of how family myth tells us that after a decade of being pregnant pretty much constantly, she kicked my great-grandfather out of their house. How she made him go live in his workshop, and he came to the house for meals and to check in.

But he slept in his workshop.

Not because she didn’t love him, but because she did.

She loved him, and if they slept in the same bed together, these two people who had crossed an ocean together, had built a life together after getting out of Poland together, they’d have sex. And because cheap, reliable, universal birth control wasn’t available then, and she was terribly fecund, apparently, she’d become pregnant again, inevitably.

My great-grandmother was TIRED of being pregnant.

So she kicked her love out of the house, and he went. He lived in his workshop, on their farm, and they stopped sleeping together, in every sense of the word. My father tells me he remembers as a child his grandfather sitting outside his workshop, leaning back on his chair, and looking up at the house in which he couldn’t sleep anymore, just… sad.

They missed each other desperately from across the yard.

I listen to @adhocavenger sleep, to the sound of his breathing, a sound that’s as familiar to me as my own heartbeat, and I can’t imagine having to sleep away from him for long. To have to separate myself from my spouse or to have to completely eschew having the kind of sex they obviously enjoyed having. To not have him close enough at night that I can curl up to him and breathe in the scent of his skin.

And that, I think, is the sort of thing that I think maybe I take for granted. That I know I can be secure in the knowledge that I can have sex with my spouse when I want to, and not have a baby.

The personal is political. I do not want our country to continue to slide backward on reproductive freedom. I do not want us to lose our freedom, threatened and small as it may be.

There are a thousand small tragedies that we talk about from the Olde Days. The unwanted baby of the unmarried lass, of course.

But my heart breaks tonight for the story I was told as a child, of the lovingly married couple who had to sleep apart because she was just damn tired of being pregnant.

You know, these looks all silly but… they are perfect! Is your cat annoyed? Is your cat depressed? Does your cat eat too fast and suffocated itself? Does your cat eat too much? Is your cat castrated? Do your cats fight over food?

These are all perfect for that! Your cats like to hunt and have fun with their food so it’s better to give them some “difficulties” and way to use their brains: this is why a lot of these are called “intelligent toys”, because they stimulate play and hunt.

“I don’t have money for that!” DON’T WORRY! You can create your own intelligent toy with whatever you have at home!

This is better for cats than dogs, mostly because dogs try to destroy the toy first so I won’t suggest you to use toiler paper rolls or plastic bottles!

star wars meme: [1/10] characters » palpatine

BONUS:

so i told her to add alchemy’s first law of equivalent exchange. she just sent me the essay to look over it and

for example, healthy people outlining the tasks they need to do that day might be something like 

- class - work - homework

if a healthy person is having a low energy day, maybe it becomes 

- make breakfast - go to class - class - go to work - work - come home from work - work on an essay - do 2 readings 

a depressed person, on a high energy day will probably see that same day as 

- make breakfast - eat breakfast - take meds - shower - get dressed - walk to bus - take bus … etc

a depressed person, on a low energy day will see that same day as

- wake up - get out of bed - walk to bathroom - use bathroom - stand back up - walk to kitchen - open fridge - take out juice - set on counter - go to cabinet - reach up arm - take down glass - unscrew lid of juice carton - pour juice - drink the juice - finish the juice …etc

the sort of chronic exhaustion manifests in how each ‘task’ takes a certain amount of energy and when you have depression, what begins to take that amount of energy- and thus, cognitively count as a ‘task’- are smaller and smaller subdivisions of what other people consider tasks. 

And the more ‘tasks’ you do, the less energy you have, and the smaller the subdivisions must be to take equivalent amounts of energy. And the longer that “to do” list of tasks is, the more exhausting and overwhelming and hopeless it feels, which creates a feedback loop of dysfunction.

So say our depressed person on a low energy day gets all the way to finishing their glass of juice. They’ve actually gotten through a lot of tasks! They’ve tried really hard. 

But to a healthy person, even on a low energy day, that probably looks like not having done anything- not having gotten through any tasks. And when our depressed person is surrounded by healthy people, they will likely internalize that they haven’t done anything, and further that they can’t complete any tasks no matter how hard they try. And that feeds worthlessness and suicidal ideation 

That, I think, is why it’s so important to encourage your depressed and chronically low-energy friends when they accomplish tasks, even if they’re operating at a level of subdivision that you don’t recognize. It is an accomplishment to get water and actually drink it for some folks. It is an accomplishment to get to class or to work. 

Stranger Things is an amazing show. I can’t recommend it enough.

“When Millie auditioned, she had long brown hair down past her shoulders. But Eleven was written as having hair “buzzed almost to the scalp.” Millie and her parents were understandably hesitant to chop it all off. Would it look ugly? Would it cost her other roles? Fortunately, Mad Max: Fury Road was about to come out, so we pulled out a magazine photograph of Charlize Theron as Furiosa and showed it to Millie. “Charlize looks totally badass, right?” Millie agreed; Charlize looked badass. And that was it: She agreed to buzz it all off.

“When the day of the haircut finally arrived, Millie’s mom brought out a camcorder, while her dad ran away with tears in his eyes, unable to watch. It was a pretty dramatic scene. But also very quick. Within 10 minutes we had shaved it all off and slapped a fake “11” tattoo on Millie’s wrist. Millie looked at herself in the mirror, gave her best Furiosa scream — and Eleven was born.”

(source: ew.com)