I didn’t think this before, but the more I keep seeing this yqy/sj debacle discourse, the more I am convinced that this is another wwx/jc golden core situation, from both a story standpoint—both wwx and yqy sacrifice for jc and sj, respectively, but keep their sacrifices a secret for fear of the likely negative response to it, for which wwx is validated while sj never finds out about the sacrifice—and a fandom standpoint—“wwx/yqy is sooooo selfish for sacrificing for jc/sj and not telling him!” “The beneficiaries of someone else’s goodwill are entitled to know who helped them, how, and why, and to withhold this information makes the goodwill and the person who did it actually bad!”

not proshipper not anti but a secret third thing (person who has a career in the media and, through covering legislative politics, has watched "associating with problematic fiction or entertainment is an indicator of moral degeneracy" rapidly become a mainstream GOP position that they are encoding in legislation to target the queer community under the guise of protecting children, thus coming to the conclusion that positioning the "can people enjoy things that would be immoral IRL in their fiction" debate as a proship v anti fandom debate is akin to pretending that "should we have the death penalty" is a discussion that only matters in Death Note discourse — the extent and manner to which fiction affects reality is an issue that is immediately relevant to today's US politics, and to summarize my opinions on the matter in fandom terms would be to diminish the ways this debate is affecting america Right The Fuck Now. and i have stopped taking "this person is bad for shipping the wrong anime thing and being horny about it" in any sort of good faith ever since I saw it literally used as part of a GOP smear campaign against a transgender state legislator in an attempt to defend the right from backlash after they used their supermajority in the Montana house to prevent her from speaking on the floor. Anyway I think everyone on this site, especially Americans, could benefit from ceasing to think in proship v anti vocabulary and instead developing coherent political positions on the nature of fiction that do not directly align with current fascist political tactics)

fatphobia and ableism is so insidious. You can look up like, food, and it'll say "eating a lot of food causes diabetes" and you're like oh dang what? I thought we didn't know the cause of diabetes. So you look up what causes diabetes and it says "we still don't know what causes diabetes" bruh they're just making shit up to give people eating disorders

#irl if you saw let’s say a car hurtling towards a crowd of people #and your immediate thought was ‘which group of people would it be more acceptable to run over’ #and not ‘holy shit how do we stop this car?!??’ #you would be considered a terrible person! #people would talk about how you have the mind of a serial killer! #there’s a reason why so many philosophical brain teasers have no practical application #they can *only* be debated in a sterile environment where all inhibitors are insurmountable because ‘i said so’ #because it’s simply not like that irl #most problems actually have blatantly obvious and simple solutions #and it is only the human factor of ‘but i want to be a terrible person and i have the power to be so’ that leads us here #the trolley has a driver; the people tied to the track have kidnappers; none of this irl is an act if god #and we do not live in the world of Saw

“Tgcf is like the trolley problem except it’s Xie Lian’s fault that everyone dies because he wants to stop the trolley.” No, Tgcf is “like” the trolley problem if the problem was that every time Xie Lian attempted to stop a trolley, the trolley owner builds another trolley and sends it hurtling down another track to mass murder another set of people to prove to Xie Lian that the only “reasonable” response to witnessing mass death occurring is to stand to the side to watch the trolley kill the people you think least deserving of life, maybe while asking the trolley driver—who wants to kill—to slow down a little (but only maybe). In that regard, the op of that wretched take and the trolley owner seem to be on the same wavelength.

New discourse: it's actually predatory to date someone with a different star sign than you, because the differences in your personalities means you'll never be able to have exactly the same life experiences, thus leaving a knowledge and power gap between the two of you which will inevitably lead to an abusive relationship!

also if you're a Sag and you're dating a Taurus, that means you're secretly seeking a May-December relationship, which is age gap coded!

actual criticisms of academia:

cost of education acting as class barrier

exploitation of graduate workers

colonialist past and present

ties to military industrial complex

danger of power structure entrenching and justifying orthodox views on social issues

criticisms of academia that get made:

those damn ivory tower academics are wasting money learning about things

SV AU where Shen Yuan transmigrates into a dragon.

It's not so bad, at first. He's an extremely magical sort of dragon so he can easily take on a humanoid shape, and he has dominion over an entire mountain, with a magical gate that leads to his palace. Said palace has a fully stocked treasury, a library, garden, etc, with the only real downsides being that the place is kind of huge and very difficult for a neet with limited housekeeping or landscaping skills to keep up with. The original dragon had enslaved a bunch of fairy spirits to do it for him, but since Shen Yuan has moral objections to that, he'd let them all go and they'd run off before he could even think to offer to hire any of them as paid employees instead. Not that he can blame them for being in a hurry to get gone.

He does his best, and generally enjoys being a dragon lazing on his mountain, or wandering the beauty of his palace and investigating the books and scrolls kept there. He doesn't actually seem to need to eat or drink, so that's not really an issue, and nobody looks keen to bother him. But after a few months the dust starts to really pile up, and trying to figure out how to do his own laundry without modern equipment leads to several disasters, and even though he doesn't need to eat he's starting to think it would be quite nice to have a fancy sit-down dinner and enjoy it for its own sake anyway. He has an enchanted larder but his food prep skills aren't up to much.

So, Shen Yuan ventures away from his mountain. He keeps to his human disguise when he's not traveling, and at first tries to hire on some help from a nearby city. But when he explains that he lives on the mountain, he realizes the difficulty, because everyone in the area knows that only the dragon lives there. So they all think he's either a liar or a fraud, or some servant of a nefarious supernatural creature angling to trick and possibly devour them.

Shen Yuan tries approaching another town in his dragon form, to see if anyone will actually deal with him if he's being upfront and honest about the situation, but the townspeople just panic. He returns to his mountain to rethink his strategies, and in the meanwhile the alarmed locals hire a swordsman to go after him. The guy gives him a few very painful cuts before Shen Yuan mostly-accidentally sends him careening into a boulder. One broken arm later the swordsman is gently persuaded that the pay he was offered isn't worth the effort on this job, and leaves.

Discouraged, Shen Yuan decides he's gonna give this one last try. He picks the second closest city, flies up, and is like yes hello, yes I am indeed a dragon, no I'm not trying to burn down your walls, yes it would be excellent if you stopped shooting arrows at me, look they don't even get past the scales? It's kind of silly? Okay, yes, thank you very much. Good. Now, the thing is, I'm looking for some people. I want to take them back to my mountain with me, to my incredibly nice palace, and -- what was that? A princess? No no I don't want a princess, what would I even do with one? If anything I'm looking for the complete opposite of a princess!

Anyway, the locals take this to mean that the dragon is demanding a sacrifice in the form of a pretty boy of no particular pedigree, and Shen Yuan takes this to mean that he's finally made his case clear and they're going to dig up someone who is willing to overlook his being a dragon in exchange for free room and board and fair wages out of his massive treasury.

SY's a bit disheartened when the entire city could only apparently turn up one such person -- an underfed teenage boy who looks at Shen Yuan like, despite the situation, he is still expecting to be eaten at any moment. Poor thing! But at least having one servant means he can potentially get more, especially if it all goes well. The lad can tell others that working for a dragon isn't so bad! Well, provided that he doesn't give up in alarm at the state of the mountain palace.

For his part, Luo Binghe at first thinks he's definitely going to get eaten, and then that this dragon is weirdly nice about planning to eat him, and then that maybe the dragon has other (even less savory!) plans for him, until finally he sees the state of the dragon's laundry and the foot-thick layer of dust in the corners, and gets completely distracted. Mortal terror forgotten, those floors should not be that filthy, Lord Dragon respectfully that isn't how anyone should prepare rice either, but oh Binghe has never seen a kitchen so nice before in his life...!

Anyway, needless to say, it works out just fine.

Republicans need to stop blaming the poor for being poor. because this is a violation of their human rights.

The agonising feel when a character tag is full of shipping that you Simply Do Not Vibe With. The solution is, naturally, to keep scrolling. But the wince, the WINCE.

Bit telling that for years and years evangelical religious extremists have been allowed on university campuses with their bullhorns and horrific imagery where they harass students into physical altercations and when students complain to the university’s administration they just shrug their shoulders citing freedom of speech but when those same tuition-paying students start protesting against war and genocide they call SWAT

holy shit this is like the holy grail :0

I’ll never forget the time I was sitting with this guy, nice kid, didn’t know him well, I think we must have had a bottle of wine or some questionable hashish or something, and in response to an awkward silence I just started talking and ended up going on a long meandering rant about how ugly American robins are. I’m talking a full monologue. I had an intro and conclusion. It was pointlessly vehement. I have never been so mean or loquacious about anything in my life.

Consider my horror when this perfectly nice guy wordlessly lifted his shirt to reveal a full-torso prismacolor tattoo of his spiritual soul animal, the American robin.

Same-sex marriage in 2003 vs. 2013 vs. 2023

(20 years of change)

More info below:

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2003:

Marriage : Netherlands, Belgium, British Columbia (CA), Ontario (CA)

Civil unions : France (including overseas territories), Germany, Denmark, Iceland, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Greenland, Rio Negro (AR), Ciudad de Buenos Aires (AR), California (US), New York (US), Hawaii (US), Vermont (US), Canary Islands (ES), Aragon (ES), Catalonia (ES), Andalusia (ES), Extremadura (ES), Castilla-La Mancha (ES), Castilla-Leon (ES), Madrid (ES), Valencia (ES), Asturias (ES), Basque Country (ES), Navarre (ES), Balearics (ES), Quebec (CA), Alberta (CA), Manitoba (CA), Nova Scotia (CA), Geneva (CH), Zurich (CH), Portugal.

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2013:

Marriage : Netherlands, Belgium, Canada, Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, South Africa, Spain, Portugal, France (including overseas territories), Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Iceland, New Zealand, Washington (US), California (US), New Mexico (US), Minnesota (US), Iowa (US), Maryland (US), DC (US), New Jersey (US), Delaware (US), New York (US), Connecticut (US), Rhode Island (US), Vermont (US), Massachusetts (US), New Hampshire (US), Maine (US), Hawaii (US), Mexico City (MX), Quintana Roo (MX).

Civil unions : Greenland, Colombia, Ecuador, Merida (VZ), United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany, Czech Republic, Austria, Finland, Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, Australia

Recognizes marriages performed abroad : All 32 Mexican states and Israel

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2023:

Marriage : Netherlands (including overseas territories), Belgium, United States, Canada, Mexico, Costa Rica, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Colombia, US Virgin Islands, Ecuador, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Malvinas/Falklands, France (including overseas territories), Spain, Portugal, Andorra, Germany, Slovenia, Switzerland, Austria, Malta, Guernsey, Jersey, United Kingdom, Isle of Man, Ireland, Gibraltar, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Iceland, Greenland, Luxembourg, Faroe Islands, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, Northern Mariana Islands, Guam, St. Helena, Pitcairn Islands, Gibraltar.

Civil unions : Bolivia, Italy, Cayman Islands, Bermuda, Aruba, Curaçao, Czech Republic, Hungary, Croatia, Montenegro, Greece, Cyprus, Estonia, Liechtenstein 

Recognizes marriages performed abroad : Namibia, Israel, Nepal, American Samoa

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Future :

Same-sex marriage is under consideration by the legislature or the courts in Aruba, Curaçao, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Greece, India, Japan, Liechtenstein, Namibia, the Navajo Nation, Nepal, Thailand, and Venezuela, and all countries bound by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR), which includes Barbados, Bolivia, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, and Suriname.

Civil unions are being considered in a number of countries, including Lithuania, Peru, the Philippines, South Korea, Ukraine, China, Hong Kong, Japan, Latvia, Panama, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Thailand, and Venezuela.

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