this is comically delusional and shows a complete lack of understanding of the way americans as a population think bc if there is ONE THING that is a constant in the american psyche, it is RAVENOUS consumerism and an utter refusal to endure any kind of hardship for ""the common good""

I am typing this on a years-old cell phone. My tablet predates the pandemic and I’ve never had a video game console. I am a cautious person who has money put away for retirement. GUESS WHAT MY RETIREMENT ACCOUNT LOOKS LIKE RIGHT NOW!!! GUESS WHAT ALL OUR RETIREMENT ACCOUNTS LOOK LIKE RIGHT NOW!!!

”u do not NEED the new video game console”

yeah good luck telling all the incel gamers that bs

Yeah also. If no one buys things guess what happens to those businesses and their stock prices and their employees... Good luck explaining that to Wall Street or to anyone who's employed or has a saving account. This is full on delusional.

"The trolley problem makes you ethically complacent because it releases you from a third option" the Trolley Problem is a fucking thought experiment, idiot, and a real-life comparison to matters where you DO NOT HAVE A THIRD FUCKING OPTION.

Shut the fuck up, oh my god.

(via @cicadahaze )

I feel like they did pick a third option. When given a messy decision, where good and evil isn't black and white, they will break down and scream at clouds, rather than make a decision.

But in practice, this means no lever is pulled, simply by inaction. You don't have time to think, and only one of two things is going to happen, however you dress it. Choose to walk away, or waste time cursing god for putting you there. In the end, the result is the same.

The trolley problem speaks to what is in someone's heart, when all the chips are down, and you've got a terrible decision to make. We all know that the objective correct decision is to flip the switch to save the most lives. But could you really make yourself do it, if you were in that situation? Could you choose who lives and who dies, even for the greater good? Is that even your decision to make? And that's why it's such a good thought experiment.

But is it the objectively correct decision? I think most people would instinctively agree. It’s the most harm reduction, after all. But then you look at it more- is personally killing one innocent more moral than watching as five people die?

We look at variations- what if the single person is someone you love dearly? What if the single person is the sole scientist working on life saving research? What’s the most moral option to you? What do you think is the most morally correct? Which do you hold more responsibility for?

There’s the- I did not name or come up with this- fat man variation. You’re standing on a bridge over some train tracks. There are five people tied to them and the train is coming. You are the only one who can do something. You’re too small and too high up to do anything, but next to you is a man of the perfect size and weight to stop the trolley. All you have to do is push him off the edge and into the path to save those five. Is it more moral to murder him, or to let the five die? How different does it feel now? Is there an objectively correct option here?

And another one of my favorites. You are a surgeon. There are five people who desperately need organ transplants fast, or they’ll die. You do not have matching organs available to you. However, there is a perfectly healthy person in your custody whose organs would match all of the patients. He does not want to die to save them. Is it more moral to take his organs and kill him, or to let the five die?

That one has a very different result than the original trolley problem, doesn’t it? Sure, there’s other factors that we’ve created in the medical field, but ultimately, the medical field has decided that it is NOT more moral to save the five by killing one. The “objectively correct” decision would be to let the five die. When people and places do take organs by force, it’s horrifying.

What people see as the “objectively correct” decision changes completely based on context. It would also change based on moral philosophy. Utilitarianism, if I remember correctly, would always say that saving the five is more moral than saving the one… even in the organ donor problem. Some moral philosophies would say that inaction would not be a moral wrong, and that the moral wrong would be to personally take a life.

The trolley problem is wonderful. It makes you uncomfortable, it forces to you to make a binary choice, and more importantly, it forces you to think about why you made that choice. It questions underlying assumptions. If an option is “objectively correct”, why is that? If you’re so uncomfortable that you need to search for another option, why? What moral concepts are motivating that?

I love the trolley problem.

yeah the point of the problem is to force you to defend a position and say why pulling or not pulling the lever, or pushing the man, or not doing so, or whatever other variant is the best option given a binary choice. You can come up with a lot of reasons to defend either choice, it’s not a binary “this is why someone would pull the lever”, but you have to be honest with your consequences. People complaining there isn’t a third option are missing the point because they’re not answering the question.

Let’s use a physics example since the notes seem to like this metaphor. You are asked to give the rate at which something is accelerating down a slope. Complaining that the problem excludes the third option is like answering this physics problem with “well who put it on the slope”. Sure, it might be meaningful in a bigger picture, but it does nothing to answer the question in front of you. Every number in existence is a valid answer (though many are wrong), but “why is it on the slope?” isnt an answer.

However, by criticizing the problem people manage to avoid actually defending their positions. “I think 5 people dying is preferable to me killing 1 person” is a lot harder to say than “I shouldn’t have to make this choice”. What these people miss is that in life, you will be faced with hard choices, and even though it might not be fair that you have to make them, “this isn’t fair” is not its own choice.

Superman: Man of Tomorrow #12 - “Superman’s Day Off” (2020)

Pokémon Human Character Tournament: THE FINAL SHOWDOWN

The fact that this poll managed to be close enough to show a 50/50 result when there was 111,329 votes - and people can't see the results before voting - is a testament to everything good and pure about this hellsite.

Do you know how badly you have to fuck up for this to happen

Truly, the world is a better place for having skilled people who are willing to use their skills in the pursuit of incredible silliness.

Undercover Spring 2024

I noticed a lot of people in the notes mentioning that they can relate to this comic, and some people saying some not-so-kind things, and I thought it might be helpful to add some context to why people with borderline may feel these ways.

BPD is theorized to be a traumagenic disorder, which means that it's caused by trauma. Not in the same way as classical PTSD, which we typically imagine as coming from One Big Trauma, but from something called C-PTSD. That C can alternately stand for "childhood-onset" or "complex", depending on context. C-PTSD, along with traumagenic disorders such as BPD, NPD, RSD, DID, etc., is most often caused by growing up in an environment where you were under constant stress. That stress can vary- if you were constantly on-guard for emotional or physical abuse, or neglected, or faced constant rejection from peers due to race, disability, gender, all of that can contribute. When you're under constant stress, your system will accommodate to survive, and you may not be able to develop the social and emotional skills you otherwise would have been able to in a healthy environment.

This is why we think BPD and other personality disorders are very likely to be traumagenic. Imagine a person who grew up with dismissive, cold, neglectful parents- their emotional needs were not met, and they were taught from the beginning that there were unsaid negative undertones to things that other people said to them. If you spent years in that situation, would you assume that other people were likely to treat you the same way? Would you be sensitive to unsaid undertones? Do you think that your system might try to protect you from further emotional harm? That example isn't the only situation where someone might develop these kinds of responses.

Someone might also be deeply sensitive to lacking communication and not happen to have borderline. These types of emotional responses might occur in someone who is autistic, has ADHD, has anxiety, or has any of a great myriad of other personality disorders. A person might also need clear communication and have intense feelings without identifying with any of those conditions.

People with borderline personality disorder are not inherently different from you. It's incredibly common for people who have suffered abuse to develop personality disorders, and those people are then far more susceptible to further abuse from their doctors and their loved ones. When we continue the narrative of personality disorders as "abuser disorders", we contribute to & reinforce a deeply ableist cultural norm that results in institutional neglect and abuse. If you hold a belief that people with BPD or any other personality disorder are more likely to hurt others than the average person, I urge you to think deeply about where you learned that idea, why you believe it now, and if there could be evidence that it isn't an accurate assessment of the reality of these people's lives.

Tired of your baby girl being seen as a genderless imp? Afraid strangers might not recognize your sexless proto-human as the soft femme heartbreaker she is? Well now you can glue some shit on her head! That’s right, just glue some gender conformity right onto her unclosed fontanelle! Say goodbye to awkwardly explaining that no, despite her bald head, your androgynous poop machine is actually a demure coquette! Glue your fucking baby today!

Vital bit of context here is that my older sister (green) literally has a baby

I'm CACKLING at this "where's Murph" bit in this Variety piece about Titan Takedown. Invokes an image of:

I often think about how loneliness is a more powerful emotion in theatre because you’re in a room full of people who all powerless to do anything but watch and I saw Eva Noblaza as Eurydice in Hadestown the other day and I cannot get her guttural “is anybody listening” out of my mind, she was screaming for someone to listen and you’re sat there mere metres away unable to let her know that you are, that her story is being told and she matters, so many people are listening but she doesn’t know that

nothing funnier to me than when AI does math wrong. like I get why it happens, it's a language model that's treating the numbers you feed it as words rather than integers and then giving you an answer based on how those words typically appear in a block of text instead of actually performing a calculation. but the one thing computers are genuinely incredible at. you fucked up a perfectly good calculator is what you did, look at it it's got hallucinations

the funniest thing in the entire pirates of the caribbean series is definitely that one scene in At World’s End where they have parlay but davy jones is part of it, and rather than have him stand in the shallows or something they get a big bucket of water and have in stand on it on shore

who thought of that idea? who thought “put davy jones in a bucket of water” and had the guts to suggest it aloud? and then who went “hey that sounds like a great idea!”

at some point someone told davy jones their idea was for him to stand in a bucket of water and he agreed to it

*stands majestically in a bucket*

ok but notice the trail of buckets behind him meaning he walked from the ocean through three other buckets of water before he got into the one hes standing in

It’s even funnier when you consider how he must have figured all this out in the first place.

Some folks are asking “well, if he can avoid the no-dry-land curse simply by standing in a bucket, doesn’t that ruin his whole motivation?”, but he’s not on dry land here.

The parley takes place on a sandbar - which, for the unfamiliar, is a temporary “island” of sand deposited by breaking waves, unconnected with the shore, that spends most of its time submerged, being exposed only at low tide.

What Jones is doing here is rules-lawyering his curse. Can you imagine the trial and error he must have gone through in order to determine that this would actually work?

“Okay, do islands count as dry land? How about parts of the shore below the high tide mark? Reefs? Shoals? What if I stand in a pool of water on a shoal? Does it have to be seawater, or will any water do? Does it have to be a natural tidepool, or can it be something artificial, like a bucket?”

What I am saying is that there must have been a process.

Pretty sure that this implies that the reverse - a bucket of sand, floating on the water (big bucket with just a bit of sand), would qualify as dry land. That’s absurd, so I’m pretty sure that his lawyer pulled a fast one over the curse governor.

It may be absurd, but the text of the film bears it out. Davy Jones can sense the presence of his heart while it’s at sea, but not while it’s on land (indeed, that’s why he buried it on land in the first place: to break his connection with it) - yet placing the heart in a simple jar of dirt conceals it from Jones’ awareness just as surely as burial on land does, even if the jar is on a boat at the time. Suitably prepared vessels filled with dirt absolutely count as dry land for the purpose of Jones’ curse.

Then the reverse should also be true. If he buried it in a jar of water, no matter how far inland it is, he would be able to sense it. So by this logic, any container of seawater counts as not dry land, ergo, the bucket is a perfectly viable loophole.

Not necessarily. It’s traditionally a lot easier to accidentally get whammied by a curse than it is to weasel around it - I figure that’s why he’s using multiple layers of indirection here. He’s forbidden to set foot on dry land, but it’s technically not dry land (it’s a sandbar, a non-permanent landform exposed only at low tide) and he technically didn’t set foot on it (he’s standing in a bucket of water). It’s entirely possible that either one of those things alone wouldn’t make the grade.

okay but this all raises one further, very important question: if it’s specifically “dry land” he’s forbidden from, what about wetlands. can Davy Jones fight you in salt marshes? can he throw down in a peat bog?Swamp Battle?

This is the quality content I come to Tumblr for.

could he step on land if his shoes are wet?

No matter how ridiculous PotC gets I will love it. Especially when it results in conversations like this

What if he crawls around on his hands and knees, with his feet raised slightly into the air? Can he walk on his hands? Can he ride around in a litter or a wheelchair?

can he be in a wheelbarrow?

What if he flies over dry land? Like in a hot air balloon, or in the claws of a giant bird?

What if he’s carried by two swallows using a strand of creeper?

European swallows or African swallows?

this whole thread reads like a conversation between these two:

In fact im not entirely sure that it wasn’t their idea in the first place

It is not enough to get into a comfy sleeping position- one must go through several and spin like a rotisserie chicken to arrive at the position you started with.

"free brother??? free brother!!!"

Smallfry AU has claimed reign over my free time. Please take this and know I'm somehow still managing to get my essays done. (My social life is forfeit.) Sorry for the long post.

Part 2 <<

while being depressing, this is also sort of fascinating to me bc there’s something so…inauthentic here. what i mean is that if you saw something like this back in say 2001 (which you probably wouldn’t, at least for carl’s jr. but i digress) it would seem tacky but in a “sex sells” sort of way.

seeing this in 2025, it’s clearly purely a political statement and you can tell partially bc the image itself is so oddly sexless. it’s like there’s more titillation in the prospect of “owning the libs” than in the image of the scantily clad blonde white woman itself.