There's An Old Probably Apocryphal Tale About Lyndon Johnson That Was Popularized By Hunter S. Thompson

There's an old probably apocryphal tale about Lyndon Johnson that was popularized by Hunter S. Thompson which goes like this:

This is one of the oldest and most effective tricks in politics.  Every hack in the business has used it in times of trouble, and it has even been elevated to the level of political mythology in a story about one of Lyndon Johnson’s early campaigns in Texas.  The race was close and Johnson was getting worried.  Finally he told his campaign manager to start a massive rumor campaign about his opponent’s life-long habit of enjoying carnal knowledge of his own barnyard sows. “Christ, we can’t get a way with calling him a pig-fucker,” the campaign manager protested.  “Nobody’s going to believe a thing like that.” “I know,” Johnson replied.  “But let’s make the sonofabitch deny it.”

Tumblr keeps making me think of this anecdote. There's a group of users on here who constantly demand if anyone mentions BDSM positively or even neutrally they caveat it by saying they aren't talking about abuse or if a man likes to call his boyfriend daddy they demand he disclaim that he doesn't support incest or if a trans girl likes to wear cat ears she needs to deny that she isn't into bestiality.

The point of this isn't that they actually believe it themselves or even a lot of the time it isn't about convincing other people that it's true but just to tar people by creating the association between two unrelated things by demanding that people constantly deny it.

https://twitter.com/HiveOfGhosts/status/1775240085732225056?t=Z8up6oe8E6syBpVYD3NE-g&s=19

General reminder to the pagans out there:

Making a supreme goddess figure part of your spirituality? Great! Worshiping a mother goddess? Wonderful! If that brings joy and meaning into your life, excellent!

"Once upon a time long ago, people all worshiped a great goddess until THE PATRIARCHY conspired to overthrow her and replace her with a CRUEL PATRIARCHAL GOD" - that's pseudohistory and conspiracism; there's literally no evidence for it whatsoever, and it can and does drag people down the new age to alt right pipeline.

idk dog i just dont think the nonbinary people who post shit like "you don't need to transition to be trans" are the reason that terfs and evangelical christians have restricted our access to healthcare

seems to me like they are very much a target of transphobic violence and medical exclusion in their own right!

Honestly, I think the fact that so many bits don't work if you're the type to buy into accepting death is something of a saving grace of the series.

Marcille, as a character, has at least become somewhat more accepting of death by the end — or at least she's less obsessed in the immediate moment — but what the ending reveals of the setting shows that such a feat is perhaps more achievable after the events of the story than it has ever been.

There's the strong implication that (human) speciation, including changing life spans, happened through the direct and intentional application of forbidden magic. (That is, a solution to the problem of longevity does exist and has already been implemented, if incompletely.) We're shown that transformation between species (human and otherwise) as well as a hybridization of features is very possible. We're told the ease of use provided by forbidden magic is no longer available, regular magic is fundamentally the same thing and is almost certainly safer than its ever been. The whole world is a dungeon now, after all!

Combine that with Falin's resurrection outside of a dungeon, and it seems as if very real, very measurable strides have been made toward the achievement of Marcille's wish, even if she herself might no longer consider it her highest priority.

Now certainly there's a lot in the ending that complicate this, particularly in the resolutions to many character arcs, but when you look at the actual material changes in the setting it really does seem like a significant extension of human lifespan is very much on the table. At the very least.

seeing people reblog dungeon meshi all the time is like, how I imagine something like made in abyss looks to normies