See the thing is I’m actually very aware of other people’s emotional states, if I’ve spent any decent length of time observing them I can reconstruct their internal narrative. I’ve figured out dark secrets they’ve never told anyone based on how they time the pauses in their speech

At any given time I’m aware of what they want, what they’re protecting themselves from, what strategies they’re using to achieve their goals, why they decided to choose that strategy

Once upon a time I thought if I could just demonstrate this to people they’d appreciate my empathy and we could put bullshit aside and be vulnerable together but jesus christ do people not appreciate you reading their minds

Honestly I’m starting to appreciate people putting on/performing a calculated, fake personality, it keeps this from getting to me (which is to say the “read” I get is “this is a calculated, fake personality”, and maybe some guesses why, but I don’t have to like, dive into the well of their souls and drown myself in their self-loathing)

And yeah that’s why I’ve built this cynical, aloof shell around myself, because it’s the only way to keep my own internality from being overwhelmed by everyone else’s

Well one of two ways, the other is to go arrogant, weaponize my empathy and use it to manipulate people if not straight up flay them alive

I do do that sometimes and if I did more often honestly I’d be happier, I’d get laid more, I’d be in a higher and better place in the world

But I’m not entirely comfortable with doing that at other people’s expense

So I just do it in my head and keep it to myself

Honestly it’s here online - tumblr, livejournal, blogs, comment sections - that I’ve used to let it out

Which is weird if I’m trying to keep it from people because why put it up if I’m not trying to find an audience and people are just as real when I’m not in the same room

I’ve gotten so good at it that now I can construct an innocuous series of stimuli that lead people to flay themselves alive, which is useful against people with good psychological defenses

There’s stories that involve me being absolutely terrible and I’m very proud of them.

OH MY GOD

I just realized something

Scott “Cyclops” Summers is the same way

I never really got his character before but that makes perfect sense.

That explains how he became the leader, that explains why he alternates between being such an arrogant prick and such a needy bitch, that explains why the only people he can feel comfortable with and defer to (and, in turn, the ones that are most drawn to him) are literal mind-reading empaths.

He’s got a power in his head that he keeps bound so he doesn’t hurt the people around him

I JUST DEVELOPED SYMPATHY FOR CYCLOPS

haha what the fuck

And this is all bullshit because the ability to empathize with others isn’t a superpower granted to me by my amazing intellect, it’s a common human thing and my reticence isn’t a self-sacrificing act of amazing restraint which in turn excuses periodic lapses into pointless cruelty but instead a public and clearly readable declaration that I find other people’s selves intolerable, combined with a refusal to allow others reciprocal access to my own vulnerable internality

And let me say how weird it is to see the fascists and the communists memorializing Chavez together

Like, they don’t agree on what he represented (the workers’ state or social nationalism?) but they sure do appreciate someone sticking it to international capital

I was almost joking about my sympathies lying with the CIA but moments like this make me wonder

I was real ticked about Gaddhafi, though. If you want to talk d'Annunzian, guy was definitely in the Italian tradition, had all the pomp and spectacle, and basically realized the League of Fiume

How “Who lost the Maghreb?” WASN’T a campaign issue last year I’ll never know

Scott Brown - Roll the Track (Gammer Remix)

pyrrha-la-folle:

yourfriendlyscop:

Here we go

I’ve highlighted things I have felt, and things my mother did, and under the “Understanding Abusive Relationships” I’ve also highlighted things I experienced as a racist, fat-phobic, ableist bully.

Under “Basic Rights in a Relationship” I highlighted rights my mother violated.

Sometimes I need to see things like this to realize that my abuse was real and wasn’t me just feeling unreasonably entitled to better treatment; self-blame is sometimes the worst part

One of my friends was in a textbook abusive relationship once, this girl would make things up to get him angry at his other friends so she could alienate and isolate him from everyone but her, she would end every night by making ridiculous demands and escalating them every time he fulfilled them until it was finally His Fault For Ruining Things, whenever they broke up she would just happen to cross paths with him everywhere he went in the City of Los Angeles until they got back together.

And the funny thing is this happened in front of everybody for years, How Terrible That Bitch Is was a regular topic of conversation among our circle whenever she wasn’t there, and it wasn’t until I dropped acid one Halloween and had an existential crisis that I connected the dots and thought to bring it up with him.

She was the only person I’ve ever gotten physical with out of anger, I literally don’t recall it as volitional but I grabbed her by the throat, immediately felt terrible about it, and then in shock went to an afterparty where I was roundly toasted. Later he fondly recalled that moment as being a big morale boost seeing someone stand up to her.

For a long time she’d threatened to fake a domestic violence case on him if he tried to break up with her and at the end when it was clear he wasn’t getting back together this time she did, and had him jailed though didn’t end up pursuing the charge.

So when I hear people say that We Must Prioritize And Protect Survivors through things like mandatory arrest laws and the suspension of various rights tied to restraining orders issued without adversarial trial, well.

Also I knew a girl in college who had falsely accused someone of rape, I know this because she told me so in a four-hour soliloquy about her life history that certainly did not skimp on terrible things that people had done to her. It does bother me that if she hadn’t recanted and pushed to trial, rape shield laws might exclude from consideration the fact that she bedded 130 guys that year, many of them by walking into their rooms and taking off her clothes. Not because it would establish her as an unrapeable slut, but because it’s a pretty key data point in understanding that she desperately needed attention and validation and had a tendency to seek them using the bluntest tools at hand.

So in conclusion those are the experiences with women and abuse that make it very difficult for me to adopt the Proper Line On Women And Abuse.

Man, Homestuck is the closest thing I’ve ever seen to a literary representation of the experience of being on ketamine

After WWII, West Germany really did ideologically refound itself on the idea of

“Yikes, let’s make absolutely sure fascism never comes back, let’s also make absolutely sure the threat of communist revolution that (regrettably justified as necessary/was cynically used as a pretext for, depending on individual politics) fascism never comes back”

Then East Germany merged in with its particular streams of “Yikes, without fascism you end up with communism, so full speed ahead” and “Yikes, without communism you end up with fascism, so full speed ahead”, that’s an interesting tension that hasn’t resolved yet.

The “LEGO (X)” games are the most prominent use of pantomime in popular culture since movies got sound

It helps for pantomime and puppetry to use stories and idioms people know already, or at least some well of meaning lying outside the performance itself

Jolly Ship the Whiz-Bang had music and plus even if the plots were novel pirates are a familiar idiom

Or you can take the alienation effect and just run with it

Oh man LEGO Utena would be AMAZING

I guess my ideal governmental form right now isn’t liberal capitalism, or communism, or fascism, or anarchism so much as enlightened despotism

And I see myself in the philosopher king role, of course, everyone who favors that form does, but in my defense I have spent my life preparing to be A Good Ruler.

Dibs on Cascadia

 — But you don’t even come from here!

Dude do you even know how dynasties start? —

(honestly though I just realized this is probably one of the few places where royalty would still run a real chance of being assassinated by anarchists)

I mean I guess Bloomberg’s basically made a prince of himself, though in a weird and backward way, literally taking on the role of incarnating the polis in human form and somehow using it to dehumanize Government further

But I suppose the man already had an identity as the physical incarnation of capital

I guess neomonarchism is Moldbug’s big thing too, but honestly his “neocameralism” just strikes me like he reformulated the Divine Right of Kings in a modern corporate idiom which, clever enough, but then expanded that into a weirdly specific origin myth for something that hasn’t originated yet

Did Napoleon even have an origin myth? Well he had the refounding event of the Revolutionary/Napoleonic Wars, and I guess he stole charismatic thunder from the Revolution itself.

And I mean talk about updating your idioms, within one generation of the world starting to kill kings and locate sacred authority in the people he managed to reformulate monarchy on the basis of THAT VERY IDEOLOGY

For a while I’ve been thinking of history as cyclical rather than linear in either a Whiggish or dialectical sense

The 2010s are the 1970s which were the 20s-30s

Which explains why the ‘70s left saw the end of the era with the ascension of Reagan and Thatcher as so ominous over and above the entrenchment of a neoliberalism that predated them.

Boy can you see this in the British Invasion comics. I remember an issue of Swamp Thing that was basically like “yuppies are demons”. That was it, that was the entire issue, that one metaphor, and it was dripping with rage.

Then again the Brits had their own peculiar socialism, and with it certain expectations of how the stagflation crisis of capitalism would resolve. I honestly didn’t appreciate this fact until one or two years ago. I can kind of grok the NHS and even the fact that labor unions were kinda constitutive of the state. But the idea that for the past few decades there haven’t been enough houses because the government hasn’t been building them and the main public response has been to get kind of pissy about it still blows my mind.

We didn’t talk about that much here, we saw the UK in continuity with Merrie Olde England and ourselves in continuity with them. Partly because we, like everyone, refounded ourselves on WWII and we tried to avoid awkward questions like “why the hell did we just join with Communism to crush the apparatus of Institutional Anti-Communism only to rebuild it ourselves?”

Honestly the adoption of trans inclusion as the sine qua non project of the avant-garde absolutely shouts ＦＵＬＬ  ＷＥＩＭＡＲ

On the subject of housing in England one thing to appreciate is for quite a while there Europe faced a chronic wood shortage. Wood used to be the primary construction material AND fuel source, and the population outraced the supply, Malthus-style.

Germany used to be covered in woodland, the British Isles too. Those stories where the mean ol’ sheriff wants to hang the poacher or cutter of wood from the king’s forest, who just wants to feed his family and keep them warm? That was the only way to keep forests from being rendered completely barren. Easter Island used to have trees.

The iconic Tudor daub and wattle house? Designed to minimize the use of wood beams while maximising their display, in an era when they meant luxury.

The colonies in New England - rocky, subpar soil tbh, though sweet lord the cornucopian seafood - were in large part set up to feed trees into the maw of the Royal Navy. Planks for hulls, huge old-growth trunks for unspliced masts, pine tar for sealing.

The iconic American log cabin, where you build a house by just cutting down a ton of trees and piling them up into solid walls, don’t even bother to saw them into planks - to a contemporary European, that really would’ve been like paving the streets with gold.

There was a reason the steam engine was invented to service the coal mines instead of vice versa.

I see all these acupuncture/massage places around town that make such a big deal about billing your insurance or giving you your first session free if you’ve been in an accident. And I can’t help but wonder exactly what kind of dynamic that’s got going on.

I mean, I guess it’s nice if there’s a system to sustain all those people who realized that college doesn’t make you nobility anymore and decided to get Continuing Education In Something Practical but weren’t booky library school types or earthy nurse/midwife types, but medical economies that are clearly tied into power somehow raise my eyebrows a bit.

Down in LA I had medical weed papers. The stores were actually a kind of cool institution - every time retail space opened up in a marginal location you could stick one there and cover the rent and then some, and they were really a kind of charmingly old-school experience in a really alienating town. Like, you’d walk in and the worker behind the counter would recognize you as a regular, chat you up and talk up their new goods, you’d tolerate them working some mildly uncomfortable flirting in there sometimes, then they’d weigh out some bulk goods from a container behind the counter, maybe throw in a little extra treat, and wish you well.

But the doctors were ridiculous. There had been a plan to set up a system through the legislature but they rejected it, and on the back of cancer and AIDS patients an initiative passed that was intentionally full of loopholes, you ended up with this system where it was like “in return for funneling money to quacks and cynics, we’ll give you a license to circumvent the law!”

The first time I went to a doctor was kind of before it got huge. I claimed torticollis of the neck which has the virtue of being true and I like my virtues sometimes. He took my blood pressure, listened to me for a bit was like “oh, perfect, weed cures everything!” and elaborated for seriously 10 minutes, then recommended that I suggest my mom consider wearing ear magnets to quit cigarettes, charged me $200 and sent me on my way.

By the time I renewed I was going to a Persian doctor with her headshots on billboards in an office next door to a Santa Muerte temple/botanica. The waiting room was velvet wallpaper, crystal chandeliers, tons of mirrors with gold-painted frames, barred teller-windows like an Old West bank and 30 chairs facing a TV playing some pretty random movies and documentaries. She had glossies of the headshots lying out on a side table, I wonder if anyone ever asked her to sign them. There were tiny examination rooms lined up where assistants took blood pressure and she did a circuit, spending about 2 minutes with each patient. The session was $100.

By the next time she also had glossy headshots of her lawyer sister, she spent about 30 seconds with me, no assistants, it was $50.

In Florida they have a similar system but with hardcore opiates.

It’s funny how crime and fraud is such a big part of the Florida economy and sad that this plays out not according to stories about the Thieves Guild being big in this city but according to stories about the business lobbies being big in this city.

Like, houses are immunized from bankruptcy and some civil judgements, no matter how ridiculous they are, and the state’s not the most enthusiastic about regulating or pursuing accountants and lawyers, or tracking down white-collar fraud, and there are the pain clinics, and Miami’s physical infrastructure was largely built for the purpose of laundering money.

Miami’s capital of the Caribbean, and so there’s all the offshore banking links of course. CIA territory too, with all the little expat governments-in-exile (and of course the big Cuban one). I’m sure there are real people like Bruce Willis in that one episode of Miami Vice, I’m sure there are real people like everyone in all those episodes of Miami Vice.

Well if your state isn’t dominated by the shadow economy I guess it’s going to be dominated by some kind of sunlight economy, extractive or manufacturing or transport or tourism, or by ethnic ethnish machines. Though since coming to Oregon I’m actually starting to get less cynical about the whole New Hampshire, Iowa “retail politics” pageantry that kicks off every election cycle. Maybe you really can have an honest republic if, pace Moynihan, you’re close enough to the Canadian border. (Not Michigan though, jfc)

I sure have been mentioning the CIA and doing google searches to get my ideas together a bunch lately and now I can’t help but wonder what I should be thinking about all the perfectly innocuous drivers of perfectly innocuous cars that have found some reason to pull over directly outside my kitchen window and be doing perfectly innocuous things when I look out lately.

I bet Misato was both good, giving, and game yet she did not remotely have a consent fetish