end of january affirmations
im not doing anything wrong and no one is mad at me
there must be a place for me in this world because here i am
my art doesnt suck
instagram is nothing to me
Basically, it boils down to this:
- The preponderance of evidence is that most trending calling posts on Tumblr alleging sexual misconduct by trans women are fabricated by the same relatively small group of bad-faith actors, and that these bullshit callout posts outnumber the legit ones by a considerable margin.
- If you think you can tell the legit callout posts and the bullshit ones apart just by looking at them, you're almost certainly wrong.
- Like most mechanisms of social control which are based on ostracism, callout posts tend to be most effective against people who are already in a position of vulnerability, and concomitantly, tend to have no significant long-term effect when deployed against people in positions of power or authority.
What all this adds up to is that even leaving the moral dimension of the act aside, from a purely pragmatic perspective, reblogging that callout post accusing a random trans woman you've never heard of of being a dogfucker or what-have-you is an action which, in a worst-case scenario, will contribute to ruining an innocent person's life, and in a best-case scenario, is likely to accomplish nothing whatsoever.
Folks often justify reblogging callout posts without performing due diligence under the rubric of "better safe than sorry", but any realistic assessment of the likely outcomes will tell you that the true "better safe than sorry" course of action is to keep your damn mouth shut!
"But I thought we were supposed to always believe allegations of sexual misconduct" well, the thing is, "false allegations of sexual misconduct are rare" and "false allegations of sexual misconduct disproportionately target specific visible minorities" are both true statements. There's no algorithm for being a good person – you really do have to think this shit through every single time it comes up.

I honestly think Gen-Z and younger simply does not understand how recent widespread smartphone adoption is.
I am not that old, and I didn't have a smartphone until probably late high school. For most of my life, many if not most people were not walking around with a magic internet machine in their pocket that they pulled out and used constantly for everything.
reblog if you remember having to ration your text messages and accidentally opening the internet on your phone was the end of the world

this is from a "manipulation advice" video and it's just so fucking funny to me. why didn't I think of responding to insults like this
I can’t remember where I got the information now, but apparently if you stare silently for at least 4 seconds it triggers a feeling of rejection which I don’t have to tell you is uncomfortable and makes most people backpedal pretty quickly and awkwardly.
Immediately going concerned/extremely polite always throws people off their game, it's beautiful.
The Quiet Stare Of Disappointment is also super effective, indeed .
My sister and I were walking across a car park.
Random bloke: Maybe if you walked more you wouldn’t be so fat
My sister stops dead, stares him in the eye and goes: Is everything alright at home?
I’ve never seen a man’s face turn to horror so fast
We just walked to her car and drove off
The silent stare is so effective. I learned about it in social psychology in undergrad, and have often used it to great effect. Probably the best example is when I went to sign the papers on the car I was buying—I had already worked out a price and my trade-in with the salesmen the day before—and they decided they were going to take $1000 off the value of my trade-in. (I want to emphasize that I was buying a 10+ year old car; I ended up paying $8k total.)
"No," I said. "That doesn't work for me. If you're unwilling to honor the deal we made, I'm not buying a car from you."
Well, they talk for a living. So they talked. Here I am, a young woman on my own, and these two men at the dealership are giving me all the reasons they couldn't possibly honor the deal we made yesterday.
So I sat. I didn't say a word. I just stared at them.
They kept talking, trying to get a reaction out of me. After about 10 seconds, they abandoned all pretense of logical arguments and started hammering pathos. They weren't even buying my old car from me for the dealership; it was a personal favor for which they were using their own hard-earned money to help this poor guy at church who just got out of rehab and his house burned down and his children exploded and his dog left him for another man, etc etc
I didn't say a word. I just stared at them.
They began falling apart. They continued trying to hustle me, but their confidence left them. I think they might have been sweating.
Within five minutes they caved and signed the papers for our original deal.
I have been told for years I am intimidating, and by people who had never even seen me angry. Just in general, intimidating. This absolutely baffled me until a friend one day pointed at me and said — “This! Right now! You’re being intimidating!”
Friends, I was staring silently at someone while inwardly flailing desperately to come up with a response to something they’d said that wasn’t overly rude but also was holding my ground. In my mind, I was being hellishly awkward. I couldn’t summon any charm, I couldn’t figure out a sentence to string together. Silence spooled out horrifyingly between us as I got farther and farther away from being articulate and became more and more flustered by this failure to respond. From the outside, I guess, I just looked like a stone cold bitch waiting for them to get their shit together, lol.
I still don’t think I’m intimidating but you know I’ll take it.
grab somebody nuanced tell em perhaps




