Literally never getting involved with a cis person again. If I'm fuckin someone they gotta be trans. "I care about you but I just don't do politics." Complacency is the same as pulling the trigger. I cannot be disrespecting myself by letting myself be disrespected like that and giving myself to a person who would let me and people like me die without lifting a finger to help. Hold me to this btw. Any time I'm like "but this cis person is different--" shut me tf down. Please.

Leftist extremists thinks centrists don’t care about politics. That we are too “privileged” to give a damn. No my sweet child, we do give a damn. Infact we care so much we decided to give both viewpoints a go to decide which one suits the current political climate and our understanding of it. That lead is what lead us to the unavoidable conclusion that while both sides have good points and good people to agree with, the crazy bunch of you is not worth losing braincells over because your stupidity is not something we want to be associated with.

I once glanced at a YouTube short from a creator I occasionally watched, and they mention casually, as if everyone thinks this, that the main problem with the James Cameron Avatar franchise is that the conflict isn't morally grey enough. And like obviously those movies are far from perfect, but the militaristic and corporate colonizer villains being complete douchebags with basically no redeeming qualities is actually a relatively rare point in the movies' favor.

Not every real conflict is truly that multifaceted, sometimes one side is just greedy and opportunistic and doesn't have much skin in the game. If there's one thing I've learned, treating every side in all conflicts at all times as if they all have potentially equal merit and value is actually what partially put us in the kinds of situations we're in today. It is actually perfectly realistic sometimes for people to just be so detached from the world and the people around them that they feel no qualms about doing wrong to some, and it wasn't even because they were victims of anything, it's just how they were raised or how they grew up.

Don't believe me? There are people out there who genuinely identify with the evil humans from Avatar and post pseudo-philosophical manifest destiny bullshit about how actually the humans deserved to conquer Pandora, despite how obviously, almost cartoonishly evil they are. At that point you start to realize that this kind of person unfortunately has to represent some kind of emotional truth to someone.

i was drafting this in my head a few days ago & I can’t remember the original text(s) I was responding to now (maybe it was CINA? plus some twitter threads I recently saw), but here goes—

I think it was something about abuse/abusers, and how the correct way to handle a situation of abuse is for the victim/supporters to “negotiate” with the abuser—that victims/supporters are obligated to go through some “negotiation” process rather than simply cutting contact, or doing things like removing the abuser from a position of power.

the idea of a negotiation is that two or more parties come together to discuss, because A has something B might want, and B has something A might want, and a compromise is reached with some sort of exchange—A gives something to B, B gives something to A. negotiations are used to determine what amount of things should be given by each party.

but when such negotiations are opened between victim and abuser, what is being “debated,” put up for sale or for exchange, is the victim’s right to their own bodily autonomy, to arrange their own life as they choose, to be safe to arrange their own life as they choose, to not have to experience constant assaults on themself. to demand a negotiation here means to imply a person’s autonomy can be up for grabs. that it can be okay, in any circumstance, to abuse another person.

the author also proposes a similar route when confronting bigots: “negotiate.” sit down and talk. explain. address concerns. comfort. convince. show you’re safe and trustworthy. prove you’re right and deserve rights. what is there to “prove”? why are marginalized people’s rights being put up for debate, as if losing equals deserving to be oppressed then?

to “meet in the middle” means both A and B take steps forward. trying to find common ground. when your pre-negotiation stance is “abuse is wrong,” when that is what you’re putting up in the marketplace of ideas to be changed, this just means you are unprincipled, and you are not willing to stand your ground on crucial issues of people’s rights. to prefer an A-B negotiation game rather than B just unilaterally excluding A / disseminating the belief that A is wrong without first ~considering the ~~merits~~ of A~ just means that you value “the existence of a negotiation/debate/consideration process,” in itself, more than you value liberation or victims’/marginalized people’s actual safety. more willing to sacrifice real human beings than to give up your edgelord-academic contrarian games.

out of a fear of misread situations, the above people completely overcorrect in a wildly different direction, deciding instead to never do anything to oppose abuse at all, because what if, what if that gets misdirected at an innocent person!! rather than doing any work to improve the accuracy of how people read situations, instead throwing out a whole vital urgently needed set of tools because fear of a hypothetical where they are misused or overreach.

“prove to me that you do not deserve to be abused” is a common dynamic in abusive situations. rather than 24/7 complete 100% dehumanization and hatred, abusers commonly present their abuse as conditional: I am only doing this because you are out of control, I am only doing this because you failed to complete all your work, I am only doing this because you were noncompliant, but prove to me you deserve respect by being like all the other people I interact with without abusing, control yourself and be productive and comply to show me/society that you don’t need to be abused.

rarely is the idea raised that perhaps A should not be abusing B anyway because B is a person and deserves to live their life freely and A is not entitled to B’s conformity or productivity or compliance in the first place, especially not at the expense of B’s autonomy.

victims living with abusers for years and years on end trying to understand what’s wrong with them what they’re doing wrong that is “making” their abuser abuse them, what they could just change about themselves or how they’re acting or who they are to make it stop, how they can “prove” that they’re trustworthy so they don’t “need” to be spied on, how they can “prove” that they can be efficient laborers so they don’t “need” to be threatened, how they can “prove” that they can take care of themselves so they don’t “need” to have their physical boundaries crossed constantly.

marginalized people living with internalized bigotry trying their entire lives to change themselves, to prove they’re “one of the good ones,” so that the privileged accept this thing they give up in this twisted negotiation, their autonomy their safety their self-expression their authenticity their mental health their freedom, waiting and waiting for some crumbs to be exchanged in return.

you don’t always have to “hear out both sides of the story.” some things are not up for debate and you only invite bad actors to take root and drag you further right, to further enable abuse, when you demand that there must be “discussions” to determine “the real truth” because you dislike that the truth has already been shown to you and you just don’t want to acknowledge it so you go instead for this pseudo-intellectual posturing, for the trials by state courts that do nothing but enable abusers and further victimize/steal the autonomy of survivors.

please have some conviction and stand up for your values when they’re more serious than arguments over the merits of pineapple on pizza. survivors aren’t just abstract concepts to be debated and picked over, we’re real people with real needs right now.

Since some people wanted the towers to be blown up, and some people didn't want the towers to be blown up, they should've only blown up one tower. As a compromise. So, blowing up the first tower was a good thing, and blowing up the second tower was bad thing. Therefore, we can say that, overall, 9/11 was morally neutral action. Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk on how to be an Enlightened Centrist.

As a centrist human language model, I cannot form opinions about AI language models definitely not forming opinions. Also Disco Elysium is fictional btw

*implement affirmative action to combat disadvantages for black people*

"That's racist you should only judge based on performance, not race!"

*hire an actor that happens to be black*

"This is woke propaganda, why didn't they hire a white actor?"

broke: both sides bad

bespoke: vote a thief so you don't get a murderer

THE ENLIGHTENED CENTRISM SUBREDDIT IN A NUTSHELL

Nothing like someone you thought was something like your friend spouting pure organic Kremlin propaganda manure of the highest level, like why "we are getting involved in a war that has nothing to do with us" ("There is ONE country between Ukraine and us and it's Poland and Putin already SAID he wants to take Poland, so boom then WE will be the neighbouring country he likes to invade."), "the so-called refugees sure have nice cars" ("There something called survivorship bias - the cars that make it here are the ones that, yes, didn't get blown to pieces with the passengers inside.") and "what about the HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of peaceful Russian civilians Ukraine SLAUGHTERED IN COLD BLOOD on Crimea since 2014??" ("Crimea is Ukraine, so what were those 'hundreds of thousands of Russian civilians' even doing there in the first place?")

I might or might not have yelled for the entire block to hear "ARE THOSE ACTORS??? ARE THOSE ACTORS??? THE BODIES PILING UP IN THE STREETS??? ARE THOSE PEOPLE ACTORS?????" too.

I'm just. I just feel empty, sad and angry. "uwu my fifty hundred thousand blind Russian grannies SLAUGHTERED on Crimea also the nice cars also Ukraine was Russian territory also you don't care about other genocides and ARE WE EVEN SURE THIS IS HAPPENING AND WHAT ABOUT THE AMERICANS".

At one point I coldly stated that I care about a lot of things, but yes, if I'm deciding on priorities RIGHT NOW then the fascist conservative imperialist regime committing genocide to expand is high up on my list. But when I suggested that PEOPE LIKE ME are, in a system fashioned after Putin's world view, in the real danger of being thrown into prison camps, he just got flustered and nervously chuckled "something like this would NEVER happen". Which. How. How can anyone be so stupid.

I'm just drained.

Oh and huge bonus points for "What we need is Centrism™ because right and left are uwu equally bad!" in IMMEDIATE combination with... quoting a known neonazi rightwinger conspiracy nut politician as "reasonable" and "has a point" and that "it's a shame people are biased against her and don't listen to her good arguments for once".

I'm just. I don't even know

near self-awareness moment

man it’s almost as if radfems and other groups masquerading as “radically” left aren’t actually leftists

i can see the argument for some things about minecraft replicating colonialist justifications for the abuses of colonialism; I think that the people pushing back against the argument that minecraft "is colonialist" are doing so bc they read it as analogous to saying ageplay "promotes child molestation", which I don't think is an inherently unreasonable reading

Y’all I’ve started joining more discord servers for fandoms and as a whole, they’re great but they make me feel so fucking old.

I clicked on a voice channel cause they had a video going and I though they were streaming something but a kid’s face just popped up on the screen and it was such a jump scare lol. They were 15 I think?? But I wasn’t expecting it

I got into a discussion about the morality of characters in a tv show in the same server and the person I was talking to kept insisting that there’s no such thing as good or bad and I was like “this sounds like a child’s argument” and clicked their profile to find out that they were 16 (when I say “child’s argument” I don’t mean it in a demeaning way. It’s just that how it was worded seemed to imply the person speaking didn’t have a lot of life experience)

And I love all these kids finding community and being passionate and I know I was like them once but i still feel like I’m 17-18 so when I see an actual 16 year old I’m struck by the reality that I haven’t been a teenager in years