Empress of Mars: Undisputed @zebratron2084@awoo.space

Aaaaand the closest thing there were to "good guys" on this thread seem to have come to an agreement that it's all the white people's fault.

Even though they're white. And I can almost even see where they're coming from, because the people who are griping seem to have very little notion of what actual suffering and social stigma are like.

But... given that the whole conversation was about NOT MAKING SWEEPING GENERALIZATIONS ABOUT PEOPLE BECAUSE OF A SUPERFICIAL TRAIT, could we not have maybe given this a miss just this once?

Now there's Discourse on Birdhell about how terrible crossdressers are because every single one of them just recapitulates feminine stereotypes "to degrade women" and they're all "just doing it for the attention" and these people are not even recognizing that these are all classic TERF lines EVEN AFTER IT'S BEEN POINTED OUT TO THEM and I swear to god my claws sing to be doused in Queer Puritan blood.

It's gotten bad enough that the poor transwoman who dared say "gee, maybe they're human beings who have a right to explore gender" is being told she should kill herself.

I have been trying SO FUCKING HARD to be less nasty online but they keep reeling me back in and there is gonna be extreme rhetorical violence in a moment here. If you hear about a distemper outbreak on Twitter tomorrow, yeah... my bad.

I'm forced to admit I do rather *like* a large amount of things humans do. Maybe it's time to take my own advice and refine the targets of my hatred.

I hate people---and yes, reluctantly, I am people--- embracing known cognitive glitches and finding excuses to nurture them rather than learn.

I hate social organizations like religions and corporations that seem to inevitably replace their initial purpose and morality with the need to grow and self-perpetuate indefinitely for its own sake.

I hate sociopaths, narcissists, and exploiters coming along to subvert any Nice Thing that we can have into something that fundamentally serves their malign psychological needs.

I hate social orders---like patriarchal masculinity AND queer orthodoxy---that put symbolic purity ahead of individual personal happiness, dignity, and most of all, practicality.

I hate economic systems that trap people in cycles of useless labor and consumerism instead of actually meeting basic human needs and giving people the freedom to become the kidn of educated, sophisticated thinkers we need to maintain a free society.

When I say "scrap it all, damn us to Hell, and hand it over to the raccoons and crows," I guess that's what I really mean. When you get right down to it, humans are just the hosts for these things..

And yeah. Setting the quarantine house on fire is a solution of sorts. I think there IS a time and place where The Thing has pretty much won and "nuke it from orbit" is the only solution.

But that's not the Good End, and I am forced to admit that as bleak as it seems sometimes, there is absolutely no reason we can't still get the Good End.

OK, there are a lot of reasons to think we can't actually. >___< I'm sorry. I don't think it's LIKELY. I can't pretend otherwise, and it's very frustrating to see people in denial about the possibility that we are not at all unlikely to fail and die. I think some of my morbidity and misanthropy is an attempt to deal with that.

But I also have to concede that we still CAN win, and there's absolutely no reason to give up before we've really tried. It's going to be extremely difficult, because it will involve us purging our society of bad human cognitive tendencies that have, if anything, only gotten MUCH WORSE recently.

But we've done it before. We'd need a rational & spiritual technology like nothing we've ever seen. I used to get flashes of it back in my stoner days; now, it seems so hazy I can't figure out how to talk about it. But I think it's out there.

There is one last frontier and it's not space; it's our fucked-up little brains. If we can go in there and figure out a technology for what people call "wisdom"... some kind of real memetic and ethical immune system... we might actually be OK.

I'm still gonna be nice to the raccoons and crows just in case though. 🤷​

@Soreth (Holy shit. Looks like I picked the right team... https://www.reptileencounters.com.au/news/the-5-most-intelligent-reptiles/ )

@Soreth How about 400 anoles in a trenchcoat?

@Soreth I take refuse in gallows humor a lot, and while I think there are some pretty valid reasons for it... I *will* keep the fact you're out there in mind.

Current mood is: I'd like for humans to continue to exist, thrive, and create bizarre things... but crows, coyotes, and raccoons get to make all the political decisions. Deal? *hug* :3

@001zlnv X-Man. The consequences for the monster if you boop and miss are just too potentially tragic.

On a more cheerful note: Peg and I spent a considerable amount of time before bed the other night, debating which category certain pop-culture figures fell into: "Boopable" or "Non-Boopable."

e.g.:
Cyclops: not boopable
Colossus: boopable
Superman: boopable
Batman: not boopable
Hera: not boopable
Prometheus: boopable
Odin: not boopable
Baldur: boopable
Inari: boopable
Ganesh: boopable
Coyote: good luck sucker

I'll just leave that there for you to do with as you please.

@Leucrotta Incidentally, have you seen the Harley Quinn series? That version of Ivy is just plain a great gal, my favorite incarnation... (Except for her shitty and inexplicably taste in men. >_< )

@Leucrotta I am horrified to be subtooted in this fashion!

(No, I'm not. 😺​ And you're dead right, Elon Musk is the WORST supervillain... Why can't Earth-Prime have ANYTHING cool?!? Even our evil isn't cool!)

@Leucrotta They're just doing it wrong. :p

#PamelaIsley2020

You have no idea how quickly I would sell everybody out to an omnicidal maniac right now.

Just about anything would trigger it. Offering a painless enough method to wipe everybody out. Having a plan to uplift a less crazy species and turn everything over to them. Sparing Peg and giving her an android tiger substitute to snuggle. Nice supervillain boots. Anything.

And if they were just gonna convert everybody into harmless drones, they wouldn't even need the nice boots or anything. >____<

I just have absolutely no fucking faith remaining that there's any good cause, any ethic, any faith, any principle that someone with Big-D Damage won't turn into the next excuse to fuck people over. Maybe some part of me just wants to give up and get in on that action.

Adrian Ozymandias Veidt? I hate your stinking smug pseudo-liberal elitist guts, but... are you hiring?

@kelseyhusky There's NOTHING Paul Rudd is bad in. ^____^

OH MY GOD THOUGH IT JUST DAWNED ON ME:

REGGIE WATTS.

@Phorm I think any man with those professed eating habits -- e.g. "extreme longing for cake" -- would be a shoe-in for Honorary Martian.

@Phorm Oh, hon, I was just saying it sympathetically/commiseratively, no apology necessary! *hug* It was just such a perfect suggestion...

@Phorm You're right and he's gone and it breaks my heart. 😿​

This came up after seeing a "what do you imagine my OC sounds like" meme on Birdsite...

If (gods spare us) they made an animated Calvin & Hobbes, what celebrity would you cast as the voice of St. Hobbes (PBUH)?

Missing the Good Old Days... but with an old samurai-like serenity of knowing that the Spirit Of An Age is fleeting and should not be pursued once it is gone.

The future belongs to the kids; that includes Olivia, K, Noa, Kirt, Yaz, and Stuart. I've had my fun. (Not that comics writing isn't... grueling, painful fun!) It's time to get my ass back in gear and give the next generation THEIR dreamworld.

@chimerror *30 identical raccoon clones fall suddenly through roof tiling* ​❤️​

#youdonotchoosethem
#theychooseyou

Shemp: him flope; prrrt

Shemp is best <3