your weird obsession with moral purity is degrading your critical thinking skills and poisoning your ability to empathize with other people btw

#also our job market is a hellscape and a lot of us aren't wealthy either and neither are our workplaces #many museums especially have SUCH a hard time affording anything rn #the days of museums as institutions and the humanities being a realm of wealth and prestige are well and truly over #this is a field that is being devalued constantly in a world that would love to believe everything important is digital #or about making money #and that's a fucking problem bc the whole thing of museums is that they offer easily accessible education #HOW is the “go to your local library” website so indifferent or even hostile towards museums#academia (via @veilchenjaeger)

tumblr users will be like "human rights! acab! blm! free palestine! We must liberate everyone from our capitalist overlords!! BUT! We must do so using the framework for understanding the world and good and bad and morality that I was raised with or else you're pedophile Hitler"

"Build your local community! Share sugar with your neighbor! And don't forget about stranger danger! Addicts will ruin public bathrooms. To protect children from pedophiles we need to give adults even more power over children, ESPECIALLY their parents. But don't hit your kids with that power! Instead you should invent even more esoteric abuses so that it doesn't count."

"We need radical systemic change yesterday!! But if you try to disassemble any of the constructs I buy into about how abuse and harm is committed by Special Evil People with Tainted Souls, you're just running cover for the Evil Abusers to Abuse More and I will reject every idea you have presented to me with extreme prejudice, and also chalk them up to being abuser shit without so much as thinking twice, because critical thought is how The Demons trick you into letting them in. I'm a leftist!"

in real life you will probably not respond to harassment in a sexy, clever, scripted way where you come out with the upper hand and everyone claps. you will freeze up and your moment will pass, or your voice will shake when you tell them to stop and you’ll realize two minutes later that you’re gross and sweaty and sticky from the adrenaline. maybe you’ll be on the ball and answer in a way you actually think is pretty smart and get ignored, or they’ll get more aggressive when you mouth off to them. you almost never will walk away feeling victorious. you walk away feeling uncomfortable and relieved that it’s over. you’ll think about it later and imagine that maybe you could have said something else. maybe you’ll feel ashamed that you weren’t quicker-witted, weren’t able to cut them down to size, weren’t able to avoid that lingering sick feeling in the pit of your stomach, as though there’s some kind of magical words you could have said that would have left you feeling less powerless. there really aren’t. 

Honestly this is such an important lesson to learn. If someone threatens, belittles, or verbally assaults you, you will likely feel bad, no matter how you respond. Please don’t beat yourself up for feeling emotions that are perfectly healthy and justified. 

"I dont think you should full on ruin this persons life and all their chances of existing online forever over something that could very well be a shitty mistake that can be corrected" seems to be a real hot take among the same crowd who claims to support prison abolition

cutting child porn from ao3 is not going to be a ‘slippery slope’ to full blown ‘censorship’, you guys are just pedophiles

bc bullies choose smaller targets

also im growing to hate the phrase ''hold accountable'' in discourse because its always so.... empty? like you see people saying ''sure this person apologized, but we need to hold them accountable!'' like cool. what does that mean. how can you get any more accountable than a public apology. do you want them to apologize... again? more? get a tattoo explaining their crimes so everyone they meet is informed? do you want accountability or are you repeating buzzwords because you cant find a nice way to say you just want them to disappear.

self-flagellation and self-bullying are all bad motivators for change BTW. it can be hard to escape from a spiral but genuinely u have to be nice to urself or nothing will change

you have to take care of yourself and not punch yourself down because you feel like you 'deserve it'. if you feel like the world is against you, you should at least be on your own side while you work through things.

I see it a lot in my students that the ONLY mode they can engage with literature on is one in which they either say it's good because it's "relatable" or it's bad because they "can't relate to it" as well, and I feel like this is a symptom of the same problem. An unwillingness to engage with fiction outside of its ability to be a mirror to your specific worldview and set of morals. But art doesn't exist to give you moral purity badges--it's a mode of expression that produces conversations between artists and readers. And to engage in those converesations on an adult level you need to learn to process the discomfort of flawed human realities productively.

reminder that when you start getting angry online, go offline. i know lots of people know this already but lots don’t and plenty others need a reminder. there’s a lot of stuff online meant to make you mad. there’s a lot of people who get off on making you mad. there are people out there so convinced of their own beliefs that there’s no point trying to discuss with them. blacklist tags, block people, scroll away, and sometimes, take a breath and step back. hate-scrolling is so easy to fall into but you might not realise how much it’s affecting you until it’s too late