Ideology - Tumblr Posts

my theory is that between 10pm-6am 30hrs of work can be done. But between 6am-10pm 30hrs of work is impossible.

I actually have so much more respect for people who can't bring themselves to believe anything than I do for people who get so deeply entrenched in ideologies that they might take years or even their whole lives to ever come to reevaluate their values. Even though they, on average, tend to bring less effective results.

Like, evolution does what is affective, not what is objectively correct, since, like, the "objective" meaning of the world is that our perception cannot accurately model anything and therefore nothing we know is ever true and we just gotta commit to the bit and try to reduce that annoying bug of nature called "human suffering" by as much as possible, because our sense of pain is what our entire idea of "bad" is based on, but also it doesn't "objectively" matter because nothing ever does. But thinking in terms this abstract all the time is just... Kinda ineffective, and there is a sense of numb bliss in it that can be dangerously addictive if our collective understanding of morality has screwed you over in one way or another. And my respect for the people who get addicted to nihilism over people who get addicted to ideology is probably purely pavlovian, but like... One of them IS more closely correlated with intellectualism than the other, and misguided ideology tends to involve... Much more DIRECT denial of harm than simply going "I don't know".

a big problem I've noticed with anyone who follows any ideology is it can get to a point where instead of being like

"this is my ideology to hopefully better the world"

it becomes

"this is my ideology because I'm such a good person and the other side is disgusting and should all die."

(I'm not saying everyone's like this but it seems pretty common tbh)

In an ideological economy of power, using someone's terminology is an act of submission towards that person.

One thing I see between American conservatives and leftists is that the leftists are operating in an economy of power and they view conservatives in that light, while conservatives don't seem to feel that's what is going on.

Naturally I cringe when I hear conservatives comfortably using terminology that originated with leftists. I seem to see them weighed down by the massive chain of implications hanging off that terminology.

When I think of wabi-sabi, I think of bts.

HELPPP MY MOM JUST CAME AND SHOWED ME A WHOLE VIDEO OF A MOM WHO EXPLAINED HOW GENDER IDEOLOGY KILLED HER TRANS SON

The video literally said:

“My ‘daughter’ identified as a boy and i tried to show her the light of God but she left and never communicated with me again.”

“Months later she su1cided for the bullying she suffered for ‘being trans’”

Like, in what moment is the fault of gender ideology that this stupid world isn’t capable of basic respect 🫤

Christianity, as a religion, is very unorganized and messy. 10% of the reason being the Christian Bible itself and other 90% because of the Protestant Reformation.

So, let's elaborate; The first 10 percentages of the reason why Christianity is so messy comes from the Christian Bible itself.

Long story short, the Christian Bible is a junction of the appropriation of the Tanakh and the letters sent to kingdoms by the apostles. And heavy on the appropriation of the Tanakh, friends.

It seems that Constantine was goin nuts when he created the Christian Bible, because he took the entire Jewish sacred book, took it out of context, left easily misunderstood shit without explanation and put it as the old testament. And then, he grabs the writings and annotations of the apostles, mix all of them, and call it new testament. And that nigga decided to mix all that shit together and boom: Christian Bible.

And that makes the Christian ideology already very messy; Judaism has absolutely nothing to do with Christianity, except the fact that Jesus was a Jew. He's not mentioned or hinted on any of the Jewish prophecies. Jesus as the Messiah is incompatible with Judaism, so mixing the Tanakh with the apostles's writings will get the Christian belief very unorganized.

But, okay, the Catholics did their little jumps and modifications so it would be at least 2% coherent. Okay, fine, and everything was kind of alright until Martin fucking Luther.

And here we get to the other 90% of reasons why Christianity has such an unorganized theology.

All this crusty dirty smelly white european boi did was get the damn Bible, translate it the way he wanted, give it to the people and say: “Go, do whatever you want with it. Read it, translate it, modify it, hell, you can even interpret to your criteria! Just spread the chaos. ❤️”

Do y'all realize how fucking dangerous is doing that? Well, we all do because we're living the consequences of it right now.

Christians can't decide what is literal and what is metaphorical, and can shape it to however they like. A proof of that is that when I was trying to be Christian, I wouldn't be a church Christian; I would study the bible according to my interpretation. On my own will. I was literally deciding to make a personal religious strand of my own. This is the capacity that Luther gave us. And it results of people being fucking hypocrites. Creating cults on god's name. And that is fucking wild.

So, yeah, Christianity is an unorganized, messy religion and not even the Christians are sure of what they believe in.

WTF happened to Slavoj Zizek?

I was just reading Mapping Ideology on the exercise bike and like... he used to be cool?

He lost me a couple years ago with some bass-ackwards essay bitching about the existence of trans folks and them daring to ask for rights over on Terf Island or w/e.

Also, I really ought to read Marcuse.

Conservatives will be like “Why are you holding me accountable for my bigoted beliefs? Whatever happened to tolerance???”

I have to agree. I write and many of my works are BASED around the complexity of human nature and how indecisive "right" and "wrong" are. I come from a Christian family and had considered writing Christian books, but ran into the same block. With Christian books there was this expectation for it to be perfect and clean and pure. It's simply unrealistic. I don't believe in completely good characters or completely bad characters. All of my characters have some flaw or another. I don't believe in a perfect world and the most gripping and intriguing stories I've read have been about people with demons and internal struggles of their own. Personaly, I think the ideology of a perfect character is, well, childish. The world is so complex. You can't put people in categories of "good" and "bad". Maybe a few, but the majority is in the smudgy grey area in between. And those are the ones I'm most interested in. How they think, how they act, how would they react in this situation? You don't know because they're not automatically going to do what's "right" or what's "wrong". They have their own ideals, instincts, and impulses. That's what makes us human and that's beautiful and interesting and I'll never stop being amazed by how complex people are as a whole.

I’m really nervous to write about this but

When I was younger, I read a lot of Christian books. In high school, I wrote a paper on Christian literature, specifically, what it is about Christian literature that makes it often flatter and less compelling than other genres. I’m not saying it all sucks, but I am saying that somehow, I’ve noticed through my life that Christian books suck more than their secular counterparts on average. I found them to often be juvenile, one-dimensional and derivative, and I didn’t think it had to be that way. I didn’t think that being Christian made a book bad, but I observed that the genre was stuffed with a lot of bad books, and the bad books were far worse than bad books outside the category. 

I’m not intending to start a discussion about Christian literature; I’m not alone in feeling this way or noticing this phenomenon if you believe it’s a thing. Online, you can read a lot of articles discussing the same thing: that Christian lit tends to be lower quality. So I wanted to know why. 

To answer the question, I looked at interviews of Christian authors and submission guidelines for Christian publishers. I wished to understand the intent behind writings in the genre and what might lead to the difference in quality. And what I found was very illuminating. 

Essentially, many Christian authors and publishers feel that: 

1. their books have a responsibility to promote morality in their readers, and authors are somewhat responsible for the moral fiber of their readers  

2. there has to be a strong delineation between “moral” and “immoral” behavior in books 

3. many topics either can’t be addressed at all or must be very clearly pointed out as “bad” if they are 

4. certain topics and ideas ought to be brought up in a book and pointed out as good as part of the purpose or meaning of the book

The conclusion I came to was that these ideas were resulting in flat, one-dimensional characters and dull plots. The responsibility of promoting moral integrity, and having to make absolutely sure that nothing you write could condone or promote immoral behavior, was of paramount importance. 

And what that caused was preachiness, one-dimensionality, a lack of compelling moral conflict, flat characters, and intellectually numbing stories. 

Why am I talking about this? 

Because a lot of the ideas I’ve been seeing spread around in writeblr and in the online writing and reading communities as a whole are identical. 

A lot of the posts I see online now about writing are almost exact echoes of the ideas I wrote about in my paper. 

Nowadays, I see posts constantly urging people to think about why they want to write their stories, and whether they are good or helpful or edifying. I see authors being slammed for not condemning characters with disgusting beliefs hard enough. I see people being dragged for liking characters that are not morally and ideologically pure. I see posts telling people to approach any difficult topic with extreme caution and crisp, unmistakable condemnation. Media is widely vilified when its fandom becomes toxic or nasty, assumed to be at fault for the moral fiber of its fans.

I see authors and publishers advertising their books as “feminist”, as if that makes any sense at all (is the author feminist? Does it just handle female characters well? Are the characters feminist? Is it focused on women’s issues?). I open a book and see poorly-integrated lines of dialogue dropping ideas about prejudice or gender that seem like a Tumblr post or part from a nonfiction book on racism inserted directly into a character’s mouth. I don’t think feminism is bad. I think feminism is great. And I don’t think talking about prejudice or gender is bad. I think these things need to be talked about. I definitely don’t think these ideas can’t be expressed in fiction. On the contrary; I think fiction is one of the best ways of expressing important ideas. 

But, I see some kind of preoccupation with the ideas your writing promotes, prominently including the idea that you must promote and you must condemn certain ideas, and that everything you write makes a statement about morality, and you’re responsible for edifying your audience and making them better people. And it’s really, really familiar. 

The conclusion that my paper came to is that you can’t clean up the reality of humanity. You can’t make the messiness of existence crisp and clear so you can feed your readers the ideas you want them to absorb bite by bite. You can’t have light without darkness, and you can’t have either without shades of gray. 

In life, racist people will not always be obviously horrible. (Even though sometimes they are…) Sometimes they will be people who love their spouses and kids and are generally “nice” and adopt dogs and love kittens, and they will still be racist. Sometimes even “good” people will say or do racist things and have to realize their mistakes and then make mistakes again and have to realize THOSE mistakes. Sometimes getting out of ideas you grew up hearing is long and difficult and you have to catch your brain repeating them even years after you tried to change. Racism can be passive, subtle, it can exist in people who are “good” in some ways. Sometimes people make progress toward changing but still have problems. How do we show this in books? Is it an author’s responsibility to solve all this and sort out everything? 

Is it racist for a racist character who is seeking redemption  to not have entirely overcome their prejudices by the end of a book? Is it the author’s responsibility to make sure racist behavior in the book is clearly labeled? Is it a reflection of the author’s views if a character says something racist? 

Note that I’m asking these questions. I’m definitely open to and would like perspectives from other people on this, people of color foremost and especially. The idea I am exploring is, does giving an author the responsibility of making sure their book clearly and unequivocally promotes certain ideas and condemns others impair them? Could it make it more difficult to address the ideas they want to? 

When I analyzed Christian literature, the conclusion I had to reach was that it does. I found christian lit as a whole to be excessively black-and-white, simplistic, shy of tackling anything with complexity, and almost dishonest about human nature. Is there an analogy in this situation? 

In life, relationships aren’t always pure and unproblematic. People don’t fall neatly into “people who have never done anything to hurt their partner” and abusers. People can sometimes have problems in their relationships and have to change their behaviors to preserve their relationships. Relationships have difficulties and arguments. Sometimes a person needs to change or become better in order to have a healthy relationship. Sometimes a relationship can be unhealthy without being abusive, and sometimes relationships are abusive. Must the author draw lines about “toxicity” and “problematicness” in super clear neon spray paint so people know the difference? 

These arguments come up about all sorts of morality-related things in books. And on some level I agree, you shouldn’t promote racism, and you should be careful and sensitive about portraying some things, but I am also extremely apprehensive about certain aspects of this culture that has sprung up. 

It’s really almost totally identical to what I noticed about Christian literature, and imo there it has done a lot of damage. I don’t really believe that authors are totally past being responsible for damage their ideas do, quite the opposite. But there is this expectation of dictating what’s bad and what’s good on a very clear level. 

That was part of the problem i noticed in Christian literature, the teaching of ideas rather than forcing readers to consider them. 

I’m not trying to talk over anybody at all, esp with things about racism, I’m white after all. And I really urge and ask my white followers and people-who-see-this-post to listen to the opinions, ideas and feelings of people of color who reply on the topic of racism. What I really want is everybody to consider this: is it an author’s job to make sure all “bad” and “good” things in their book are clearly delineated? If not, what is the best practice for an author? If not, might this cause problems? The culture I am seeing in the writeblr community seems to hold that it is, and rejection of redemption for villains, morally ambiguous situations and characters, addressing of complicated topics, and portraying anything “bad” without making absolutely certain that it’s clearly wrong is growing. 

Personally, I have a bad feeling about it. 

Thoughts? 

Society's current feelings on veganism were totally planned. It was an entire smear campaign for the sake of the meat and dairy industry. I mean, my generation grew up on milk being shoved down our throats constantly. "Got Milk?" The history on that is pretty neat. There's a documentary. Anyway, meat and dairy (some of the largest industries in the world) will do literally anything to prevent progressive norms. We quite literally have all the technology, money, time, manpower, and resources to produce lab-grown meat that's (in every way that matters) the exact same in texture and taste. And we wouldn't need to kill a single thing ever again. We could do it right now. We could be Star Trek right now if we wanted. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

i've recently realized i've been using veganism as a litmus test for how willing someone is to engage a niche ideology in good faith.

how many mental gymnastics and whataboutisms someone uses to shit on vegans is such a good indicator for how bad faith someone is going to be about literally anything they don't completely agree with

i'm not even vegan, i just think people are so fucking abnormal about veganism