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Minke whales breaching: I will launch myself out of this ocean like a f***ing surface-to-air missile to seek and destroy my enemies

Not to be confused with Plural Space, which is a different project.

A system app created by Drex!

PluralSpace has customizable member profiles, with front tracking and custom statuses. Alongside the ability to register a profile as a fronting status, create relationships between members, and view them on a relationship map!

The app also features journal entries, poll creation, an inner system chat, and in-depth analytics on your system, from fronting frequency to journal entries and poll responses!

i've been reading the ugly laws by susan schweik, which is a free ebook in multiple places, and i really recommend it. it talks about the ableist, classist, and racist foundations of the ugly laws, and how they were used to enact ableism, classism, racism, and misogyny, and reinforce white supremacist beauty, gender, social, and moral standards. they stood alongside laws against crossdressing, for instance

but the ugly laws were actually more complicated than "they would arrest people for being visibly disabled". they were an excuse to remove homeless people from the streets, especially homeless people who either were visibly disabled/visibly different or who "claimed to be", and i put "claimed to be" in quotation marks because the people who wanted them off the streets more often didn't believe they were really disabled, however, some homeless people really did fake disability for money, and those people still didn't deserve to be arrested or demonized for it. other ways they justified pulling homeless people from the streets, besides sowing doubt and suspicion, were that they would argue that they were doing it for their own good, "taking care of them", or later that they were doing it for the good of the middle class, abled public; "they're all deceitful, violent criminals with bad intentions"

so while visibly disabled and visibly different people who weren't homeless and couldn't hide their disability would be subjected to them too, visibly disabled/visibly different homeless people were the primary target. they didn't expand to visibly disabled and visibly different people at large until later, and specifically in the context of freak shows. they didn't want people being exposed to disability in what was, for that time, a more positive light. you, as an abled person, could show people that their children would be born disabled if they didn't brush their teeth, or display a disabled, visibly different child as an interesting medical subject, but you couldn't, as a disabled person, display yourself and then solicit money for it either

also, most importantly in my opinion, ugly ordinances were spearheaded and pushed by one christian organization who were viciously against people giving financial aid to the homeless, and saw disabled and homeless people as gene pool pollution. they were white supremacist eugenics enthusiasts who encouraged states to pick up ugly ordinances, and even sent them after specific homeless people. there was even an ugly law that targeted just one man, a homeless, visibly disabled black man named william jasper franklin

Callout posts and harassment campaigns are a cornerstone of how Tumblr moderates itself. This is in good part because the moderation Tumblr actually does ranges from useless to targeted at minorities. If you feel that someone has done something wrong, the only guaranteed way to get results is to do something yourself.

It is very easy to get them rolling. Tumblr’s format rewards spreading information and is great at preserving it. When it comes to art, memes, and writing, this is fantastic for creators. When it comes to callout posts, it means that they’ll be around for months, if not years. Anger, as many social media algorithms have found, is great for engagement.

Even if the purpose is strictly to inform, the problem is the number of people who see it. There are going to be people who are going to look at the information and go “This person needs to be punished, and nobody is going to do it. So, I’m going to be cruel to them.” This is partly because of Tumblr’s known poor moderation. It’s also because a good number of people see causing harm to someone who hurt others as just, and therefore causing that harm as righteous.

Even if you agree with that view of justice, there’s a big issue here. That issue is that the vast majority of callouts are going to result in the person being called out being hurt far beyond what they actually did. Even that assumes that they hurt anyone in the first place, which is not always the case.

So, if things are that lopsided, no callout posts, right? Just block and move on in order to minimize harm.

Not quite. There is one narrow and rare category where I would say they are actually important.

Serial abusers who are actively trawling for victims are the exception that proves the rule. Callouts that show that this person is not safe and that you should watch out for them can actively work as harm prevention.

But like I said, that’s a rare and narrow case. I have seen maybe five callout posts out of hundreds, thousands if you count individual accounts on mass blocklists, that actually fall into that category. Those don’t work because they cause harassment campaigns. They work because their value as a warning exceeds the risk to the person targeted.

That’s it.

I have seen people who both get more stuck with their abusers because they end up having to defend both themself and the abuser from cruel "vigilantes" and having this prove to them that when the abuser tells them the world wants to hurt them, that is true, and, people who end up seeking an abuser out because they felt bad for them or thought they deserved someone in their camp or even because they had low self worth and wanted someone to hurt/punish them (self sabotaging by seeking out a known abuser)

I don't think I have actually seen an accurate callout where this did not happen.

It is also less prone to working on genuinely powerful people who have more opportunities to do harm.

So, yeah, my opinion is that we can't use this exception to the rule because it is not going to work either. Legislation to protect victims of online abuse is probably a better route to go, but it also takes hard work over long time with imperfect results.

This generally does not lead to the development of healthy methods for working with emotional pain, for the same reasons that children don’t generally know how to do first aid if you just leave them with an injury: they don’t have enough information to do that.

Emotional pain can include grief, heartbreak, and anxiety, but it also includes things people are less willing to name because they sound like moral failings instead of pain: envy, anger, and regret. Those often end up mentally relabeled as “hurt” because being hurt has no moral weight. This obscures what’s going on and makes it harder to figure out what to do. Bad managing of emotional pain leads to increased emotional pain, especially stress, frustration, and shame.

This is a system that I use that makes it easier for me to manage emotional pain. Feel free to take whatever parts of it are useful for you.

Step 1: What caused the feeling?

Figuring out why you’re upset is often easier than figuring out how you’re upset, and can help you to figure out what feelings you have about it. For instance, if the cause was in the past, then anxiety is less likely. If you know the feeling but not the cause, it can be useful to switch the order of this step and step 2.

Let’s say that I’m really upset and it’s really unclear to me how I'm upset. two questions I find useful are:

Am I upset because of something that happened in the past, is happening now, or will happen in the future? Am I upset because of a system, an event, an ongoing situation, or a person?

Let’s say for the sake of the example that I’m upset because a stranger made a passing cruel comment about my appearance. It happened in the past, and was because of a person. This helps to build the foundation for the next steps.

A common and false assumption is that the amount of emotion you’re feeling and the seriousness of the event should match up. This is untrue. Sometimes you have no real reaction to serious trauma. Sometimes you implode because you lost your shoe. It’s not useful to you to think about how much emotion you “should” have about something.

Step 2: What is the feeling?

The event was a person being cruel to me about my appearance. Knowing that can help me to narrow it down, but the answer may not be the one that seems to “make sense” for what happened. Instead, it’s one that makes sense for who you are, what you’ve experienced, and how you react.

Since they’re a stranger, it’s not betrayal. There could be rejection, but I’m not sure since I didn’t care about them before they were cruel. It’s definitely not shame- I know that’s incorrect as soon as I consider it because it’s just, wrong.

Instead, it ends up being a mixture of loneliness and frustration. Loneliness, because to me it feels more alone for someone to be cruel than to not interact with them at all, and frustration, because I am struggling with understanding why they did it.

Step 3: Is this within my control?

If what upset you was beyond your control, it’s time to take care of yourself, because the only thing you can change here is how you feel. Changing that feeling isn’t a matter of willpower. Instead, identifying the feeling informs how you take care of yourself to make that feeling lessen or go away.

I can’t control what strangers say to me. Since the appearance comment made me feel lonely and frustrated, I should address those directly. For me personally, finding someone to hang out with and to vent to about it, going for some exercise in a group, or chilling with a pet would all work. I really recommend writing down what works for you for different emotional pains, so that you’re not trying to solve what to do when you’re in emotional pain.

If it is in your control, then it’s time for Step 4: What’s between me and this being solved?

Let’s say that instead of a stranger making the comment, it was the first thing that popped up when I looked at myself in the mirror. That’s in my control. So why did it happen?

Sometimes the answer is that you hadn’t thought of it because this is the first time this has happened. Sometimes it’s that you never found the time. Sometimes it’s because you forgot. All of these are solvable. Perhaps I saw someone who looked similar get spoken to with the same cruelty, and I need to unpack that.

The tricky part here is that almost everyone has been taught that if something is in your control, and the barriers are solvable, then you should have done it already- causing shame to either show up or pile on, making the pain worse.

If shame shows up for you, the best thing you can do is put it in the queue. It’s an emotional pain that will need to be managed, but it’s not the one you’re working on right now. If you let shame derail you from figuring out your barriers, then you will struggle to reach any solutions. You cannot solve a problem you do not understand.

Sometimes the answer reveals a deeper problem. Maybe the person I heard say that is my main support, and their negative comments are affecting my emotional health, but I can’t afford to not have them.

Sometimes the barrier is that you don’t have money. That you don’t live in a safe location. That you’re too worn out to do anything. Problems that are either beyond your control, or need to be solved before you can even begin to address the problem that directly upset you. Whatever the root cause may be, not knowing it leads to frustration and shame, as you try to wrestle with something you can't do yet, or with the wrong problem entirely.

Trying to treat something you can change as something you can’t leads to frustration with the problem cropping up repeatedly. Trying to treat something you can’t change as something that you can is a recipe for shame. In both cases, stress piles on because you are using the wrong tool.

quick sketch inspired by manga reigen and mob's blank stares/resting faces, my smoking session and mccafferty's song "prolly"