you ever see someone so coked-up on adulthood that they've replaced every shred of interiority with a regurgitation of normative power structures

every dream, every shred of empathy, every unique desire, all rotted away and replaced by what is needed for power and control. Someone who will, no matter how well you get to know them, never show anything beyond goldfish level thoughts behind those eyes, because there is nothing left. there is a history, there. you can learn what used to be, but for the rest of their life they will never seek anything beyond the most bog-standard socially-normative popularly-affirmed idle pleasures between working, eating, and rest. the death of childhood is the death of a human being.

you can't fix someone when they get like this, either. you try and break them out of their shell and they just give you this sad, hollow, patronizing look. a look that says "you haven't grown up yet, haven't you? you haven't finished becoming a real human being, like me." I think it's a fate worse than death, to be like that.

it's not about "NPCs"!!!! it's about adults who, in seeking to distance themselves from children and the youth, whom they wish to wield violent superiority over (as encouraged by the society which regards children as non-sentient legal property of the family), crush their own non-normative aspirations that might be seen as immature!!!!! it's about people who are so attached to the power and stability of Being Mature that there isn't room for anything else!!!!! Stop misinterpreting my post!!!!! Hits everyone in the notes who's interpreting me wrong!!!!!

I don't know how people came to think that "the banality of evil" means "evil people are people too". It's also true but it's not what the banality of evil means.

The term was coined by Hannah Arednt in her report on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the "final solution" in the Holocaust.

It describes the way in which the Nazis at large and Eichmann in particular have turned the horrendous act of mass murder into just another job, disconnecting themselves morally and emotionally from their actions.

Before the death camps and gas chambers, Nazi soldiers simply shot Jews into mass graves by the hundreds of thousands. It was a lot cheaper and faster, but it caused great psychological disturbance for the murderers.

Their solution was a massively upscaled version of the "gas vans" they used to mass murder hundreds of thousands Germans with disabilities and mental health issues.

Shooting bound civilians in point blank rank over and over is something you can't just pretend you're not doing or is no big deal. But if you're just the guy who sorts people into groups. Or just the guy that funnels them into a room. Or just the guy who opens a cannister on the roof. It's must easier to distance yourself from what you know is happening.

The same principle applies to much lesser evils, like soldiers operating drones from a distance, or insurance workers denying coverage for life-saving treatment.

Are Pinky and the Brain still trying to take over the world? Because at this point, I'm willing to hear the Brain's platform.

At this point, I'm willing to hear Pinky's platform.

One of the most important things to unpack and unlearn when you’re part of a white supremacy saturated society (i.e. the global north) and especially if you were raised in an intensified form of it (evangelicism, right wing politics, explicit racism) is the urge to punish and take revenge.

It manifests in our lives all the time and it is inherently destructive. It makes relationships and interactions adversarial for no good reason. It undermines cooperation and good civic order. It worsens some types of crime. It creates trauma, especially in children.

Imagine approaching unexpected or unacceptable behavior from a perspective of "how can this be stopped, and prevented" instead of "you’re going to regret this!”

Imagine dealing with a problem or conflict from the perspective of “how can this be solved in a way that is just and restorative” instead of “the people who caused this are going to pay.”

How much would that change you? How much would that have changed for you?

Please.

OP: Imagine approaching unexpected or unacceptable behavior from a perspective of "how can this be stopped, and prevented" instead of "you’re going to regret this!” [emphasis mine]

Punishment enthusiasts in the notes: "so you're saying we should never stop anyone from doing bad things? and we should just sing Kum Ba Ya until they stop being mean? you're an idiot and you should be punished, probably"

contemplate, for a moment, that you just might be able to stop someone from harming people while also taking care to minimize the harm you do to them

and if you don't think you should have to worry about that: why not?

I teach Intro to Psych, and I’m lecturing on operant conditioning next week. I always tell my students this story:

When I took this class, lo these many years ago, I remember thinking, if punishment doesn’t work very well on animals (because it doesn’t), why does it work on humans? Specifically at the time I was thinking about spanking kids, which I had grown up with as normal parenting behavior in the 80s, but also punishment in general.

And it wasn’t until years later that I realized that the answer is - IT DOESN’T. And research absolutely backs that up.

Punishment is one of the least effective ways of changing behavior in humans, too! The behavior change you do sometimes get is people trying to avoid punishment, but that doesn’t mean stopping the behavior you punished - it often means just finding ways to do it that are less likely to get you caught. Lying, hiding things, being sneakier about it. And that’s when you get any change at all.

Spanking, of course, has whole other issues - namely that it turns out children learn by watching others, not simple conditioning, so spanking them makes them more likely to be violent themselves.

Look, the behaviorists were wrong in that they thought conditioning was the be-all end-all of learning, when in fact life and psychology are far, far more complicated and messy than that - but even they knew that punishment isn’t nearly as effective as rewards. (Neither is as effective as addressing the underlying motivation behind the behavior, which they wanted to ignore entirely, but even they knew this much.)

If you’re telling yourself that your desire to punish people is rooted in wanting to change their behavior, please accept what decades of science has told us: IT DOESN’T.

this is such a profoundly stupid thing to be mad about but. i periodically think about how banksy made one of my single favorite pieces of art of all time, and everything else he's ever done has sucked. man, how did you nail it once

It's this piece, titled The Banality of the Banality of Evil. Because on first glance, you're like. Yeah, okay, it's obvious what it's saying. Even nazis, even evil people can appreciate beauty, too. But then you learn its name, and suddenly the interpretation shifts a bit. The idea that evil is banal has in itself become banal. my first response to seeing a nazi on a bench is "oh it's about the banality of evil" and not "jesus christ there's a nazi on the bench."

and like. i dunno i think that's a really interesting way for a title to recontextualize a piece. it's finding nuance by tearing out the nuance you want to project onto it. it's not the greatest piece of art ever made, but i'd be lying if i said i didn't have a huge soft spot for it

Okay but I have to add to this

what I find really interesting is how the way this is drawn (especially considering who drew it) the art style seems extremely deliberate. This type of nostalgic landscape painting is very reminiscent of nazi art and specifically, Hitler's art.

Nazis were extremely judgmental of "entartete Kunst" (degenerate art). Bansky's usual work very well fall into this category! So for him to go for this style of painting in particular is another choice I find very interesting, because I can see some people react to this painting with some variation of "oh, I didn't know he could actually draw! I thought he is a hack but he is a real artist!" - and that is where they would agree with the Nazis.

I dunno I just find this piece very compelling

oh that is actually fascinating. in fact, to add on- a detail I omitted because I just kinda forgot to mention it. The reason there’s two signatures in the corner is because it was a painting in a thrift shop, Banksy adding the Nazi, and then returning it to the shop.

I think there’s something interesting about recognizing the lineage of this type of art and wanting to mess with it, subvert the intent, and explore the topic and legacy. It’s potent. I really like this piece

tt/mustymemesjr

"Keep dancing! Joy is resistance."

A Classic Cyberpunk story.

© plutoxoxi via x/twitter

There is a subspecies of super chunky gigantic field mice that have rapidly evolved on a remote Scottish archipelago in the past 1,000 years. 😭

horsethoughtbarn 5 name

if horses werent called horses what do you think they should be called

quibbet /ˈkwɪ.bɪt/

from proto indo european *kswibʰ-éh₁-ti (to move quickly, stative form implying something moving quickly)

via proto brythonic *hwɨβid (to move)

spelling then latinized by roman empire to quibus, then frankified by norman invaders to quibbet

incredibly done my friend exactly the kind of thing i was hoping for

Soar, because usually when you're a little horse, your throat is sore.

Incredibly fucked up that flowering plants weren’t really a thing until the Cretaceous.

Think about it. We had all of these huge, big-brained vertebrates well before we had grass

Stegosaurus never ate fruit because fruit didn’t exist yet

I know in my heart he would have fucking loved berries

Thankfully, some stegosaurians lived until the mid-Cretaceous!

Hopefully one of them had the opportunity to try berries... 🥺

y'all know one of the favored hypotheses for stegosaur extinction is that they were so adapted for eating cycads that the rise of angiosperms caused their decline? like it's correlation at this point but in paleo that's often all we got

the point being, I really don't think stegosaurs would enjoy berries. it's entirely possible berries would poison stegosaurs