I wonder if anyone's ever done a project trying to trace back various assumptions people make about how certain things work to the media that helped create those assumptions.
There's a lot of ideas that seem almost entirely inspired by fiction that people still hold on to.
This seems to end up, ironically, further shaping fiction as those tropes get repeated forward.
Thinking about the "hardboiled detective" trope tweet from earlier. It seems like people embrace an idea that an investigator would have to be entirely impartial?
And then the detective being an asshole is a sort of defense mechanism to never get too close?
And then somehow trouble arises when a detective does let themselves open up at all?
Or sometimes it's just that they're so much smarter than others they can't connect?
But it all sort of feeds back into a general misconception about how bias and impartiality work and reinforces this notion that caring about something means you can't distance yourself from it, and therefore you can't examine it clearly.
Which in turn seems to have eventually reinforced this notion that you can be the smartest person in the room simply by not caring about what everyone else cares about, or at least convincing yourself you don't, making you the only person not blinded by bias.
And it's one of a number of concepts that people seem to have embraced where if you actually examine where it comes from it seems largely reinforced by fiction rather than based on anything demonstrable in the real world.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
IDK maybe be skeptical when someone's thread paints someone from a marginalized background as a vicious, plotting mastermind spanning years of hateful campaigns.
Especially when that thread seriously misrepresents at least one recent event to support the devious villain angle.
Fuck it, I'm just saying it.
No, Ana Mardoll wasn't behind a dozen different hate campaigns and if you're uncritically spreading this bullshit I'm strongly considering giving up on your critical thinking ability.
The Sandra Newman thing is a flat out lie, people were tearing apart the entire fucking thing, the premise of which was "Y the Last Man but maybe unreliable narrator?" for days before Ana's thread WHICH JUST WENT THROUGH PASSAGES FROM THE BOOK.
The soundtrack to Spider-Man is a reminder of a dark era in rock music.
I know it became somewhat of a meme to hate Nickelback but honestly among the whole crowd of faux-macho radio rock assholes Chad Kroeger's croaking really was just awful, and combining him with Josey Scott's nasal whine for the soundtrack's lead single was a fucking crime.
*the most awful
Nickelback didn't deserve the singular hate they got only because the field was so crowded with dudes whose whole personality was carefully crafted by record executives to try (and fail) to balance macho-man misogyny with soft-guy sensitivity.
I love that The Good Place starts with "Hell is other people" but is bold enough to conclude that "So is heaven".
Michael's whole idea for the Bad Place neighborhoods revolves around the idea that people will bring their insecurities with them and end up torturing each other.
But the Good Place redesign looks at once you've worked through those and sees joy in connections made.
Giving individuals whatever they want isn't heaven.
Giving people the time they never had with the people they love, letting them form new bonds, letting people experience new and old joys together...that's heaven.
I had a mixture heartwarming/heartbreaking experience on a shop the other day. I had a Petco order with a decent number of items, and in the location I went to they had some sort of behavioral training going on that day.
So while I was finding the various items, this couple came in that from the reaction of the employee who greeted them had brought their puppy in before.
The tiny thing, some sort of terrier mix, was damn near all fear.
The employee was incredibly gentle and patient with the pup, and over the span of time I was in there I got to hear as she demonstrated to the couple how to work with the puppy's behavioral quirks in a way that would help him be more comfortable.
I'm actually entirely willing to argue that yes, the "woke" left has moved farther left while centrists stayed closer to the right.
And that that's the problem with centrists.
The framing of the memes just asserts that moving left is automatically a bad thing.
These memes simply assume that the center is a specific instead of relative position, but never outline what that actually means.
I'd argue that the left has been pushed in the direction of more radical positions on subjects like healthcare, climate, wages, etc.
The more leftward position on climate with any popularity was once a reasonable, corporate-led effort. Now many of us recognize corporations won't fix this.
But centrists still largely grasp at the vain belief that the same efforts will still be enough.