wobblegong

Thinkin' about animals....

  • 🐟/🐠/they/them

deviantArt: jWobblegong

*tiny furry cheeps*


trail-markers-in-the-sky
@trail-markers-in-the-sky

Some people you will meet in life are Actually Bad– scammers, abusers, toxic cesspits, and so on. This essay is NOT about them, those assholes you dislike for extremely reasonable reasons. This essay is about people you dislike for petty reasons, or reasons much smaller than the dislike warrants, or no reason you can point to at all.

There is a fallacy installed in some people that goes something like:

It is morally wrong to dislike someone, especially to act on that dislike, UNLESS they are a bad person.

And this is completely incorrect, but the bigger problem is it invents problems out of thin air.


wobblegong
@wobblegong

~1600 words about why it's fine to just dislike someone sometimes!
I may have written this mostly so I don't have to go over it repeatedly in other essays
There is an argument to be made that this is rather first draft-y given that I wrote it in a sleep-deprivation fugue, but besides potentially omitting some of my points (because I said them really clearly in my head and then forgot to type them out #skilled) I think this is most of what I wanted.


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in reply to @trail-markers-in-the-sky's post:

Honestly, it has been INCREDIBLY liberating for me to go "I am a petty creature, and that is okay! I don't have to be a statue on a pedestal for 10000 internet strangers! I can have little a pettiness, as a treat!!"

Also, I'm reminded of an anarchist zine a friend sent me some time ago: Against Community Building, Towards Friendship. It has my usual issues with leftist Writings(tm) (namely, it's loaded with jargon) and I'm not sure I agree with every point raised here, but wow, was I doing a lot of vigorous nodding!

That sense of liberation was part of why I wanted to write this! Very nice to know I'm not the only one. :eggbug-uwu:

That zine reminds me that I have at least one essay in me about networking, wherein networking means what it actually means instead of what people fear/loathe it for. I would summarize my thoughts as something like, your post about it = BIG YEP. Online interest-focused groups are a great place to encounter strangers, loot your favorite ones to keep as friends, and then wander off again whenever things stop being cool.

...come to think of it, I wonder if a big problem with Communities is that humans were just not meant to exist in them. (and again, this is using the definition of "community" to mean "group of mostly-strangers who are sharing a space over a common interest.")

I'm not well read on ancient human sociology and stuff, but working off of the assumption that humans of the Past(tm) mostly lived in small social groups that they knew for their whole lives, like, the idea of joining a space of hundreds of people you don't know and aren't guaranteed to have anything in common with beyond the Shared Interest is like... no wonder our brains keep breaking? They weren't built for those!

While I think some people going down the "omg humans 10,000 years ago didn't live like this!!" route can be prone to ignoring the present wholesale to fixate on the past, I think it is a fairly true criticism of online spaces. Most meatspace analogs simply had/have more barriers to entry, more interweaving of individuals, more tugging on each others' bonds (for weal or woe) to kind of... if not smooth out the whole thing, at least make it less of a flash in the pan. The speed at which people can join, leave, make, destroy or whatever else an online space is lightning fast compared to meatspace equivalents. Combine that with the rather notorious distance between actions and consequences (the rate of telling a stranger to go kill themself online vs offline is not the same) and yeah. YEAH. This is a ripe ground for things to not go right the first time without trying, to put it mildly.