There was a recent wrecker post that did this a lot. It comes across as reactionary to me but sometimes I see leftists doing it too. Nerd culture being associated with being childish/nostalgic and easily exploited by sanitised consumption, etc.
As an autistic person who sometimes gets hyperfixations that could be seen as childish, it feels gross to have people paint these hobbies as some kind of uniquely hyperconsumerist thing, because 90% of the time it’s just because the hobby is seen as childish and/or neurodivergent coded.
For example: I was hyperfixated on gardening for a while. It was expensive, really hard to do ethically and the industry itself is massively corporate and responsible for some of the biggest environmental problems today. It’s a nice little escapist hobby where you can turn your mind off while you pretend you aren’t fucking up your local biome because Monsanto decided it would sell more soil wetter, plant disease cures and fertilizer ifs product kills the soils ability to self regulate. I tried to do it the organic permaculture way, ended up being too expensive and half of the products were not in fact as ethical as they pretended to be. Also I have a degree in Ecology, most gardners don’t have that luxury and are not trained how to garden ethically. Never once have I ever seen anyone call gardening a vapid corporate hobby or expressed concern that I was using my fake little biome to escape from the real world. Never once have I been lumped in with the same people who invented DDT. Because it’s a socially acceptable hobby for a well adjusted adult to have.
I can’t say the same for when I had a Pokemon hyperfixation. It was a relatively cheap hobby, I mostly just played the games and the rom hacks were fun. But I stopped because who wants to be associated with grown ass adults waiting in line for cards and playing a childrens game! They must be mentally ill in some way, right? Now adults who still like a hobby they grew up with get put into the same camp as Harry Potter fans, who we have apparently now have decided are bad because Harry Potter is childish and whimsical, not because the writer is a racist transphobe.
Just something that mulls over in my head sometimes, because social dynamics that make no sense to me are another thing I like to fixate on and dissect for fun. I tend to see how the flow of popular narratives can manipulate people into adopting reactionary talking points. All you have to do is trojan something onto a socially acceptable target without outright saying the target and you have even leftists redirected to attack a target that the right want dead. People are funny.
Thanks for reading my weird rant. I could just be coming across as insecure and making myself an easy target for wreckers to get a rant from, but eh who cares if I get a reputation as someone easily baited by this subject. Someones gotta deconstruct this kind of thing so it might as well be me.
I’ve often seen the same thing, with “grow up” and “arrested development” being used as thought-terminating cliches to pathologize predominantly neurodiverse people. It’s one of those things that turns everybody into an armchair psychiatrist, usually to misapply a psychology term to mean “bad inferior person I can righteously harass/abuse.”
Just to be a bit of a devil’s advocate, there’s value in broadening cultural horizons. As an example: I love me some anime and cartoons, and while they are not as stigmatized as when I was younger, they are often associated as childish.
However, I’m a grown ass millennial and have also watched The Seventh Seal and other “adult” films.
I think if you never bother to try other genres, texts, etc that’s not good even if you are hyper fixated.
This is, I think, also why the Harry Potter ppl must be disciplined even beyond the politics. If you haven’t bothered to go beyond the things you read in your youth, you’re not growing as a reader. You can have affection, nostalgia, love, etc. but part of being an adult is recognizing that those things are limited because of the youthful audience and leave things out of their stories that are enjoyable to experience.
Tldr enjoy what you like but if you only consume YA fiction (or insert thing here - anime, scifi, fantasy, genre etc.) consider broadening your taste and horizon. Then by all means continue enjoying whatever you enjoy. To some extent op seems to be articulating this best possible version, but there are ppl who haven’t gone there and need to be told to try new things
Yeah nowhere in my post did I state that people should only consume one form of media. It was more about public perception and assumptions surrounding that and how it is harmful. The problem is if you have have one childish interest, people assume that it is the only type of media you consume or that certain types of media are more mature than others simply because of perceived demographic.
I have found lot of stuff for adult consumers to be just as prone to being limited as stuff that people see is for children. Perceived demographic often isn’t the deciding factor on how deep something is or what you can get out of it. The thing that drew me back into pokemon in the first place is that the meta of the competitive scene has some pretty complex rpg elements. Pokemon is seen as a childrens game and I’m sure most of the marketing team sees it that way too, but the actual game has always had the message that pokemon is something for any age or gender to enjoy.
Yes, there are plenty of things out there that are very much for kids only but there is a tendancy to immediately assume the entire target audience of something based on aesthetics. Which can lead to some childish looking things being incorrectly diagnosed as shallow, and some gritty looking things incorrectly diagnosed as deep and mature. The Odyessy is for adults, it’s an okay movie and I enjoyed it but there was nothing intellectual or challenging in that movie that made me grow as a person, so should it really fit the criteria for ‘this is for adults’ if the only thing adult about it is that blood and death might scare kids?
To put it another way:
Me: “I like watching unique animation from time to time because I respect the technical artistic skill involved and the history of animation is very interesting to me. I particularly love when artstyles are experimented with.”
Chud: “I like Jack Reacher because he’s cool and manly”
Everyone else: “Clearly Chud here is the normal mature adult while Dort_Owl here watches cartoons so probably never intellectually challenges themself or grows as a person.”
I tend to go into things judging them by their own merits rather than worrying about who the market thinks it’s for. If a thing is good, it’s good. It might be a stubborn hangover from when people used to tell me “You can’t play video games, they’re for boys, not girls.”
But the idea that I’m somehow stupid or broken because of what I like without understanding why I like what I like and only seeing one or two of my interests as an indicator of my entire range frustrates me to no end. Especially as someone who has challenged myself in a lot of ways most people haven’t had to
Pokemon is seen as a childrens game and I’m sure most of the marketing team sees it that way too, but the actual game has always had the message that pokemon is something for any age or gender to enjoy.
I remember one time on the SomethingAwful forums a guy tried to do a Let’s Play of Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers and allowed users to submit original characters for recruitment. This lasted a few updates before a flood of people from one of the other subforums discovered the thread and immediately flooded it with comments calling the OP a disgusting pathetic broken manchild and speculating about the various mental defects they believed he had. Eventually one of the LP forum mods (who had previously approved the thread) locked it and told the original poster he couldn’t do the LP anymore.
A Let’s Play with X-Com that did the exact same thing with user-submitted soldiers was completely uncontroversial and in fact widely regarded by the site as one of its best because I guess pretending to shoot aliens is more grown-up and mature than pretending to be a cute monster.
A friend of mine keeps recommending Explorers of Sky to me because I liked Red Rescue Team back in the day, but yeah that whole attitude of judgement for being in my 30s playing Pokemon is keeping me from it. It’s hypocritical that I’ve let it sour my enjoyment I know. I’ve got the rom somewhere though so maybe I’ll give it a shot one day if it is actually something people think I’d enjoy.
I wish there was a mystery dungeon with Rowlet. I think they stopped making them by the time Sun and Moon was a thing.
It’s not hypocritical, it’s an unfortunately appropriate act of self preservation in response to a hostile world.
I’ve played it and I enjoyed it, though I strongly recommend having a fast forward button in reach.
Pokemon Mystery Dungeon
It’s funny that it is looked down on considering the gameplay is rooted in traditional roguelikes. A lot of the same Gamers wouldn’t touch a game with permadeath or the original UFO Defense (which I’m also a fan of)
the entire target audience of something based on aesthetics.
Even more to your point, the target demo being kids doesn’t actually make it so only children can reasonably get something out of it. There is lots of media that is clearly made overwhelmingly for kids (or for parents to get for their kids) that still has depth and lots of interesting things to engage with in it. As a personal example, I think that some of the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen are great and totally worth reading as an adult if one has any interest in them.
Yeah, just to be clear, I’m talking about the kind of person who finds out someone likes stuffed animals or whatever and immediately, without knowing anything else about them, goes DEFCON 1 with a non-zero chance of advocating eugenics.
The original meaning of the R-slur was literally that the person supposedly had a “delayed” development, so there absolutely is a connection between how we treat disabled people and how we treat children. There’s a wider discussion to be had about how the autonomy of children is contantly denied in most societies, and the USA is a particulaly bad offender in this regard outside all imperial core nations. I’ve always found it shocking and revolting how normalized it is in Amerika to be openly abusive to your kid, how unremarkable it is there to treat your child as your property. But hexbear never had that conversation because too many users immediately fell for the thought-terminating, sectarian and reactionary “there’s anarchists that want to abolish bedtime” jokes, and it shows in how we talk about the treatment of kids here. I think it’s part of the “bullying works” mindset, too, that always came off as “well i was beaten as a kid and it didn’t harm me” bs. Newsflash, having been bullied as kids absolutely has harmed you, it has harmed me, we constantly keep circling back to that harm and we will not be able to break that cycle and heal as long as we do not recognize that you can’t treat people like objects just because they’re 12 or “act like they’re 12”.
We need to relearn respect for human dignity and we need to start with recognizing this right in the people we most routinely deny it to, in children.
It was pointed out to me recently that the “debate” over under-18s being allowed HRT is as much a subfunction of this as it is transphobia, which I was like “woah” to but also isn’t really surprising, sadly.
It’s common for transphobia to reflect the worst fears of reactionaries. Our transitions require that we assert our autonomy in ways that radically deny what they imagine the natural order of things to be. Our name changes do not only fly into the face of their insistence to call their daughter Bobson Klansman jr., the dozens of document changes that follow it highlight at every step the encroaching panoptic nightmare that is datamining technocapitalism. Our HRT regimens demonstrate to all senses that gender is not a bioessential and immutable thing, but something you can hack and play with and influence down to the epigenetic level, and the earlier we start that the more their flimsy “you can always tell” excuses break down. Our very bodies remind them that their performative immitation of phallocentric heterosexuality as a form of male domination is a fraudulent hoax, and the fact that all of them secretly crank it to t-slur porn completely breaks them when they are confronted with us outside of pornhub, obliterating their mental faculties in a way that is as terrifying to them as coming face to face with Nyarlathotep on the high plateau of Leng.
To be trans is to be antifascist down to the molecular level. This is why as long as the fascists draw breath, they will do everything they can get away with to end our existence, as we are the living proof that all they believe in is a steaming garbage pile of lies.
“To be trans is to be antifascist down to the molecular level”, pretty good writeup ngl. Kinda makes me wish more trans people would take up a revolutionary stance. I wish I saw less nato queers…
I’ve seen a total of 2 trans people in the military over the course of the last 5 years, and that number goes up to 5 if we’re including “works for a non-military branch of an MIC corporation” or “owns stocks of such a corporation” or “has done contract work for the army once”. 5 out of a literal tripple digit number of trans people i’ve interacted with irl. And that’s not nothing, but it’s a tiny fraction of all trans women i’ve met and i barely interact with cis people nowadays and have met about as many of these who are in similar positions. And unlike with cis people who just dgaf about anybody owning Rheinmetall stock, i know trans comrades who have literally broken up with partners over that, so i’d say that’s really not enough to warrant making up the entire genre of trans drone pilot that so many leftists get super hung up about even on this site.
So many leftists still refuse to notice how overrepresented trans people in general and TMA people in particular are in their spaces, especially in outspokenly anti-imperialist ones, especially in ones that are solidaric with Palestine in this ultrazionist hellhole of a country i am living in. Do you think we would have 50% queer people on a sex-hating incel site like hexbear if it wasn’t for trans people being more into communism than anybody else out there? Yes, i get it, the majority of trans people are social democrats and progressive liberals well gues what the majority of cis people in my country are literally Super Hitler. The trans community skews left harder than any other demographic, it’s not our fault that in countries infested with anti-communist brainworms, that still means a majority of us are kinda lib. That’s just the norm for literally everybody, but we are expected to always have correct takes because otherwise we make trans people look bad, and as soon as somebody does that, everybody is like “well that’s just most trans people” even on here. That’s a textbook case of double standard. You can show MLs and MLMs literally one trans girl working for Thyssen-Krupp and they lose their shit and talk about how being trans is a bourgeois Western concept that you can’t expect working class people from the global South to be normal about when working class people from the global South are literally more than half of my neighbors and none of them have a problem with me.
Sorry, but i’m just fed up with hearing this shit. When a trans woman is not a comrade, it’s without fail made out to be something that directly links back to her transness. We never get the grace of that being seen as a personal failure that cis people get granted by default, it’s always because that woman is a “NATO queer”. When a cissie is not a comrade, nobody ever says “well, cis privilege literally makes it more likely that you are a lib or worse” even though that is demonstrably true. Cis people are, on average, less politically trustworthy than trans people. Why don’t we hold them accountable for being “NATO straights”? Because people would think that’s ridiculous. And they only think it’s ridiculous because being straight is the default that you do not have to justify to anybody, where being queer and especially being trans immediately means anything you do gets examined under a magnifying glass. I’m so fucking tired of people on here trotting this out.
Your whole comment reminded me of this XKCD:
Yeah, that’s basically it.
Yes, I don’t mean ‘literally in the military’. I do agree that the “trans drone pilot” thing is slightly wild as an idea. And we do have a ton of trans people here, it sure as fuck beats the shark instance. I didn’t refuse to notice, I’m one.
Yes, i get it, the majority of trans people are social democrats and progressive liberals well gues what the majority of cis people in my country are literally Super Hitler.
Germany
what a classic.More than the political leaning broadly, or working for shitass elevator companies or military support or anything though, I was thinking about how startlingly fuckin’ racist white trans people can be. Pretty harrowing thread if you ask me. And I know, twitter, bsky, but these are people that exist in real life.
You can show MLs and MLMs literally one trans girl working for Thyssen-Krupp and they lose their shit and talk about how being trans is a bourgeois Western concept that you can’t expect working class people from the global South to be normal
Funny enough the MLs asserting that you can’t expect working class people from the global south to be normal is a pretty bad take in and of itself. I hate to see the “queerness is bourgeois” take but when I think about Brand Israel, that kind of makes me feel ill. Not that it makes the take correct obviously.
We never get the grace of that being seen as a personal failure that cis people get granted by default,
Can’t say I disagree that we never get any benefit of the doubt, yeah. All kinds of spaces are always chomping at the bit to have a turn bullying trans women.
“well, cis privilege literally makes it more likely that you are a lib or worse”
I like saying this because it’s true, as it’s true of all identities that the imperial core privileges. Cis people, cishet people specifically, neurotypicals, white people. I do think that more than being the “assumed default”, a “NATO straight” is just the default in NATO broadly. As in, yeah, it’s a cishetero patriarchal white supremacist project. So I guess it’s more notable when “minorities” support it. Not that I don’t think cis leftists over-expose trans people in empire, but y’know.
I think in short, I just don’t have the same inherent faith in the revolutionary character of trans people as you do. We’re just people, it’s a bit like any other identity in that you don’t get “more revolutionary” just for being trans.
I think in short, I just don’t have the same inherent faith in the revolutionary character of trans people as you do.
I do not. I think revolutionaries are the exception in every demographic, i just think that trans people are more likely than anybody else to be that exception. It’s the same as with being left handed, that correlates massively with queerness and particularly with transness. But that does not mean left handed people are a majority in trans spaces, or that trans people are a majority of left handed people.
Well alright, I wish I felt the same. Maybe trans people do lean left more often, but in my experience I’ve seen a lot of unexamined biases, is all.
I wish I saw less nato queers…
Lots online unfortunately, sad to see, queers of all kinds. Lack of intersectionality is a real problem.
i thought name change stuff mostly originated in debt enforcement
Honestly we SHOULD abolish bedtime, like different people have different natural circadian rhythms that change with age, but we’re forced to live by more or less one standard time for sleeping, which is based on the standard working hours, which are themselves based on the most efficient way to extract value from the working class. The abolition of wage labor should mean the freedom to fall asleep and wake up when it is most convenient for you to do so.
But yes, up the dignity of children, down the bullying works mindset. Very good comment!
in particular the school start times are the wrong way around here. highschool starting at 7:30 am is abusive. there’s a lot of logistics and scheduling changes that should be made to western schooling for that matter, but we’re beholden to sports culture and early 20th century farming so it will never change.
Good post, no notes.
Except that I actually think pokemon fandom is having a moment in the sun, there have never been more cool fangames and romhacks. Seems weird to me that anyone would perceive Pokemon fandom the same way as HP, when there are endless multi-hour essays praising the pokeymans games and stuff.
But yes, cringe culture never died and it is horrible.
death to cringe culture
To answer your actual prompt yeah, that’s a shitty thing people do, and even though I don’t get it that much I’m already sick of hearing it from people who think the peak of cinema is Silence of the Lambs or Nolan’s Odyssey or whatever. As another commenter said, it’s good to be able to engage with other media and broaden one’s horizons and not just watch the same 14 episodes of Mr. Bean over and over again, but that applies as much to them as to you or me.
Granted, I usually don’t tell people about my reading a lot of manga, but that’s more because of the sicko shit that manga/anime is known for having when I just want to watch funny muscle men punch each other and shit like that (love the current Hunter x Hunter release, even though I don’t think a punch has been thrown in H x H in like 6 years).
I’m hesitant on the more general phrasing in the title because I think the issue in what I just discussed is a wrongful association between hyperfixation and childishness, or like an implied sicko virtue ethics view of childish people being morally inferior or something. We agree that maturing is a good and healthy thing to do, right? The disagreement between us and the people giving us these accusations is over a) what constitutes maturing and immaturity, which I think is the direct issue and b) whether an immature person should still be treated as a person rather than with moralizing contempt, which I think is a more fundamental issue motivating the former.
It is a two fold problem with maturity, as it is often discussed. If maturity is letting everyone enjoy what they like then telling a shopping addict that their hobby is quite environmentally destructive isn’t mature according to many, and most if I am being honest, if maturing is about contributing to the world then having an idle hobby or even neurodivergence which doesn’t contribute to something is not mature. Problem in my eyes is that we can’t ever win in the argument maturity because stigmatisation of people who don’t conform to a standard set by society are always looked down upon, being interested in science is good but only if it is physics, chemistry, or biology, social sciences or science about autistic (except trying to find a cure to autism that is popular even in leftist circles) is never taken seriously. No matter what we do, hobbies enjoyed by disabled and neurodivergent will always seen as lesser compared if a ‘normal’ person does it, a cis white able-bodied man can like super smash brothers but it’ll always be ‘a quirky hobby for a simple man’ but if a disabled person plays the same game as an interest then it is seen as a waste of time because disabled people are only meant to work and sleep 6 hours, if they need more then tough luck for them, this is how most of the able bodied people see the disabled people, undeserving people who constantly step out of line instead of doing their work with head down then eating their ration and going to sleep. No conversation on maturity will solve this problem, I know you didn’t say it will but maturity conversation is just a symptom of this phenomenon, see how they talk about maturity amount themselves, to them maturity-immaturity are dialectical and they keep learning whole life even if they learn to accept the other person who is different. All their problems are for us, we are immature for liking things, we are lazy for resting and not staying up studying/working like them, we are the scroungers who shouldn’t be accepted into a friendship or relationship of any kind, we are scum of the earth, everything the bourgeois says about the ‘normal’ worker, the ‘normal worker’ says about us.
I reiterate the issue about moralizing and the fact that it is not a necessity of considering maturity to be a good thing that immature people are morally inferior.
Beyond that, I think there are lots of other much more useful ways to define maturity, though of course we still shouldn’t moralizing about it. I think maturity in its most general sense is probably best defined by not letting one’s emotions get the best of them, e.g. acknowledging truths that are uncomfortable, not attacking people just because you’re mad, etc. This is obviously not an equally easy proposition for everyone, but surely we can agree that in general it is better for people to try to pursue it to some extent based on their circumstances and capacities, and other people should be supportive of them pursuing it rather than disparaging whatever current state of “immaturity” they have.
Yes I fully agree, I thought out loud a lot there. It wasn’t all meant as a reply, a lot was just rambling
Fair enough!
Yeah you are way better at describing what I was trying to say. Haha, thanks.
Granted, I usually don’t tell people about my reading a lot of manga, but that’s more because of the sicko shit that manga/anime is known for having when I just want to watch funny muscle men punch each other and shit like that (love the current Hunter x Hunter release, even though I don’t think a punch has been thrown in H x H in like 6 years).
I hear good things about Hunter x Hunter. It’s one of those animes along with One Piece that I keep meaning to watch but never get around to. I haven’t read manga in a long time but I enjoyed Dungeon Meshi. The little ecosystem in the dungeon is interesting and it has a great sense of humor. I’ve been meaning to see what the hype for Chainsaw Man is about too but I don’t know if it’s my thing.
Hunter x Hunter is my second favorite manga after Mob Psycho (and the anime is great, it just isn’t caught up). On the bright side, the pacing is incomparably better than One Piece with basically zero filler and between that and the lower amount of material it’s only like 1/9 as long as One Piece’s anime (like 150-something episodes, not 1000-plus). While there is goofy fantasy ecology at the start and, very loosely, some other kinds of ecology in specific arcs, in general it trends away from that pretty quickly and is all about the Hunters fighting other Hunters (except in the biggest arc at the end of the anime, where they fight humanoid magical beasts). What I really like about it is how focused it is on the perspectives of its characters and how they approach problem-solving, including how they sometimes fail to. This “problem solving” is usually expressed in the context of an action fantasy fight, but not always.
I think you’d like HxH if you bear in mind that overall it is going somewhere and has things to say despite it seeming weird and meandering the start, which is not to call the start a chore, it still has lots of interesting and entertaining things about it imo, it just reaches much higher heights later.
I won’t tell you not to watch Chainsaw Man, but I think it’s probably less likely that you’d enjoy it because the whole plot revolves around the sexual pathology of a teenage boy that is handled at certain points in kind of a dubious way. Overall I think it’s a very good manga/anime (the writing is interesting, the art is great, it’s frequently quite funny and sometimes does its horror pretty effectively), but I can’t blame people for bouncing off of it.
people who think the peak of cinema is Silence of the Lambs or Nolan’s Odyssey
I agree it’s reactionary and it also turns children into a thing that is lesser than an adult and re-enforces the lack of full humanity of children. Sort of similarly as the comparison between rational (manly) and emotional that works to undermine women.
Being “childish” as an insult is so much more to me than just belittling someone for behaving a certain way. It’s tied to all the nornative assumptions and is extremely privileged white western dude coded to me. As a neurospicy person I’ve always been deeply annoyed by it, as the norms are all so superficial and say nothing about things like the morality or character of the person. Not being childish is civility bs in disguise and using it as an insult kind of plays into these power differentials. A similar thing is “proper language use” and the way people with dialects get othered.
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I feel like once people hit middle age they primarily consume slop again so its w/e.
Pokemon is interesting because when we were kids it was a hyper exploitative system, trying to squeeze as much money out of kids as possible. But since gamefreak is so litigious playing romhacks as an adult is almost the opposite, no monetization whatsoever.
100% and I think you hit the nail on the head with gardening vs. Pokemon. Adult hobbies are supposed to be productive, because adults are supposed to be productive every waking hour. So adults get to have hobbies like gardening, woodworking, or fixing cars, which produce something. Children get hobbies like games, toys, or collections, which consume things, because children are unproductive leeches on society.
Except anyone who’s done adult hobbies (esp. anyone who’s tried to monetize such a hobby while keeping it casual) knows that most of those are a way bigger money hole than any kids’ hobby. Gardening is a blast, but my payoff is 2 lumpy zucchini and a comically small bell pepper. Yay, now my family won’t starve.
On a more individual level, I think people who yuck your yum for enjoying Pokemon are jealous that you didn’t buy into the mindset, and you’re enjoying things that they were pressured to leave behind.
The leftist thing is definitely true too. They see consumerism as a red flag and immediately jump on it. And there’s a Nirvana fallacy common with leftists that if you’re not doing everything perfectly, then you’re the problem. And they fall into the same productivity trap that enjoying something unproductive is time that could have been spent building your community or taking direct action or whatever. But all that said, I see this way less frequently from the left, and generally leftists are happy to find a new unproductive person to join their DnD group.
I am autistic and my special interest is Monster High. I have gotten to the stage in life where I realise that it is just way too short and I’ve basically stopped giving a fuck if it’s seen as weird for an adult to collect dolls. I don’t want to spend my entire life suppressing one of my greatest interests just because people I don’t care about think it’s odd.
Truth nuke incoming:
Karl Marx was way too harsh on the Lumpenproletariat, he described them as: “passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of old society”. This mirrors the behavior you’re describing. A lot of leftists go to the left because they see an ideology that, on the surface promotes a manly badass worker, who saves the world, lead by a very intelligent serious adult man club. A little introspection would go a long way.
It’s probably not a good idea to make Marxism appear like the most boring man-cave in the world.
I mean that description, without moralising about the individuals, describes the economic position people forced into being lumpen-proles reside within.
Calling people immature really isn’t my bag since my ass is casting stones in a glass house. I will say though my world of insults for chuds has gotten smaller since I started policing my language to be less ableist. So I do be wondering what insults I can use against the shitty people?
We could always vomit pellets at them
If I have to go for a single-word insult I usually call them “satans” or “shayateen”, I think — evil spirits who whisper temptations into people’s hearts, you know. “Dickhead” is a more conventional insult that’s very versatile. But for the most part it’s probably best to be specific, be accurate, and be a bit flowery, i.e. just call them what they are: racists, misogynists, transphobes, nihilists, trolls, class traitors, small business tyrants, etc.
Which is to say that it’s simply not accurate to portray fascism as coming out of a place of being ignorant and unable to learn better: it really takes a lot of creative and intellectual energy to come up with conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, and ever-changing sophistry to justify your own supremacy over your fellow human beings. Mental gymnastics is a real sport, and people don’t do it because they haven’t considered Occam’s razor, they do it because they want to uphold their privileges despite the inevitable march of the human race towards equality — or from another perspective, because we’re all playing the prisoner’s dilemma, and the fascists have chosen to defect.
a bit flowery
So I should call them a stingus, got it.
Some leftists are really keen on calling people childish and weird for liking cute and wholesome stuff but have no problem with straight up gore and porn, not that they’re morally bad but you can’t expect to moralize one type of thing and not expect moralization of another thing. I have really distanced myself from the wider world when I see people praise something like Attack on Titan and call One Piece stupid. It is a microcosm of everything going on with the world, everything that is about gore, violence, death, and inhumanity/misanthropy is elevated and everything about life is degraded.
but have no problem with straight up gore and porn
ironically the elevation of “gore, violence, death, and inhumanity/misanthropy” is just another form of childishness even though it sees itself in opposition to cute and wholesome stuff. So much of the discourse around dark, gritty, violent things like attack on titan or the boys doesn’t focus on the gore itself as an inherently good quality but that the gore is the polar opposite of cute stuff, that it’s what the “real world” is like, it’s just the stage of children’s development where they disavow their old fantasies and find new ones as different as possible to shown that they’ve grown and are no longer a ‘stupid kid’.
Adults still exclusively obsessed with this stuff in a way that focuses on its opposition to childishness rather than its inherent values are developmentally stunted in their own ways.
Yeah people don’t realise how that atritude has kind of made a lot of media miserable.
I was thinking about how we see less and less pure slapstick comedy for adults. The genre used to be extremely common. As anything joyful and silly has been designated childish, the genre has died down. I didn’t realise how damn much it had left a hole in the media landscape until I watched a couple of movies like The Naked Gun reboot and Hundreds of Beavers and thought “Holy shit, it is so refreshing to have something for adults that is just stupid and silly but executed skillfully”
The idea that every piece of adult consumption has to have some kind of self seriousness about it misses the point that adults are multifaceted and need a wide range of things in their lives, that includes whimsical joyful bullshit. During the 1930s life sucked so they had Charlie Chaplin. It’s human.
Parallel to this I’ve pretty frequently seen WW2 and revelations of the extent of the holocaust to the western world credited with the astronomical rise in grittier harsher media as many westerners idealistic view of humanity was shifted + all the european productions were being filmed in bombed out cities by people who’d been under complete occupation a few years earlier (WW1 apparently had a similar but lesser effect on silent cinema), but in the years since it seems much of the grittiness in media is made in reverence to the idea of fresh grittiness causing a revolution in film and assuming even grittier stuff will do that again (without thinking about why in the 40s and 50s everyone suddenly was hungry for violent, nihilistic media that reflected their new dissilusionment with the world), cribbing from previous films and media rather than real life until you end up with ridiculous spewings of misery porn like The Revenant that are practically comical by the end.
That’s so true yea, no notes no comments it is just true
Ageism is right up there with ableism as one of the most invisible forms of prejudice in capitalist society. At least with ableism, there is some very basic understanding that you can’t use certain slurs and whatnot. But ageism seems almost universal.
The world seems nowhere close to understanding ageism. I don’t mean merely being rude to children or the elderly, but the way those groups are regarded as socially inferior on a biological basis reminiscent of race science.
From a Marxist perspective, if we take history and contingency seriously, then we must value every age group, and see every member of society as a source of insight regardless of their age. Superstructure (ideology, culture, commonsense etc) always lags in time behind the base. Children are the most prepared and acclimated to the new world, before their elders are aware that a new world has even emerged.
you should try local plants! i find they grow really well with no intervention and sometimes theres some fancy arrangements you can do
I have, some of them did pretty well!
hell yeah
Using infantilization to falsify things, people and to twist narratives is always going to remain as factually and morally incorrect. This thing happens everywhere - a lot of the time within Lemmy itself; the factors can be age related or other but, the issues circles back to discrimination in general.
This is an issue that’s deeply rooted, as infantilization happens to a variety of minorities. Its hard to ignore once you perceive it. What you’re witnessing - the ableism, is the output of this machine.
Absolutely, and taking it a step further, children are a horribly oppressed class.
It’s an insult that swings both ways, it tears down children by associating them with negatively perceived aspects of disability, and it associates disability with negatively perceived aspects of children.
