The primary virtue is control

Rothko probably wouldn't have minded this. And anyway, I guess he got off easier than Lucian Freud, of whom Bacon said, “I’m afraid Lucian has what’s called the smallest cock in England and of course you can’t go far in the queer world with that.”

me: catches you in my arms and twirls around with you giggling and laughing!!!

the sacred egg: completely safe on the desk in its ornate stand

mostly inevitable meteor: (hurtling towards my study at 320,000 km/h but just barely gets redirected by the subtle gravity of a passing blue moon)

the decorative egg swindler: (breaking into the neighbors instead because he sees my sister's old car parked in the drive way, they were lovers ten years ago but broke up on good terms)

airplane of stunning destiny: (runs out of fuel due to a clerical mistake and begins plumetting towards my house, but the grizzled pilot manages to pull a hairpin maneuver that allows the plane to perfectly coast for 3 more minutes before crashing & exploding in a nearby farmstead)

evil spirits of grand possession: (whispering wickedly) our powers are significantly weakened by the membrane of this egg but after ages of studying this prison, it is becoming evident that therw is a slight imperfection in the binding seal.. we may have just enough power to sway the will of small vermin

starving mouse of particular tastes: (scurries out of a crack in the wall, eyes lock onto the egg but gets entirely distracted by the scent of a bowl of cherries coming from the next room)

maid of utmost devotion: (sweeping around the desk with a feather duster and isnt paying full attention because it's watching us play out of the corner of its eyes, yet it doesn't make a mistake at all)

me: (suddenly hits the egg with a hammer because I'm bored)

filthy liberal /jk

I just think everyone on earth deserves the same rights and privileges as a nobleman with tracts of land!

these are all just more slogans that sound good the moment they come out of your mouth and let you accuse others of being morally inferior, but don't actually mean anything

like you're omitting so many things and twisting everything into the most pat and po-faced "actually I am so brave and humble for saying you shouldn't be evil, everyone else is so wicked and morally inferior to me" interpretation, it is genuinely hard to even start, you have a perfect self-reinforcing perimeter of smug dishonesty

okay I can try to start here: the individual is sovereign, so all preferences you like are those of individuals, and all preferences you dislike are inflicted by states as malignant alien entities. the fact that you don't agree with a thing enacted by a state to fulfill a near-universal human preference means it is not legitimate and you need to smugly moralize about it, a standard you do not apply to any other thing at any other time.

your logic falls apart the moment you try to look at literally anything else in the same lens, and people have done this numerous times, and you just smugged it away by saying it doesn't count due to <thing that does not affect the actual underlying logic at all and would not be considered exculpatory if it wasn't for a thing you already liked>. "I should have the same rights and freedoms to enter your house as you do" illustrates what is wrong with your position, you sneak in a completely indefensible interpretation of "equal rights" as "every single person has to extend to me every accommodation they might extend any one person upon the Earth" and then you smugly moralize about how other people don't think people should have equal rights.

stop being a smug, lying hypocrite, argumate

it's lame to call people "smug" because everyone is smug, everyone believes their moral convictions are correct, that's what it means to have moral convictions, whether you're pro-slavery or anti-slavery you're going to see your position as simply correct and obvious in a way that seems insufferably smug to people with the opposite position, who are equally convinced not only that you are wrong but that you must know that you are wrong, that you are being actively insincere since the correct position is so easy to see, etc. etc.

accusing someone of being smug says absolutely nothing about whether they are right or wrong, or how convincing is their argument, does it rest on premises of dubious veracity or have implications they have failed to address; smugness allegations add nothing to any debate and lead to the natural rejoinder that the accuser is butthurt, which is equally vacuous and unhelpful.

so I'm going to beat the smugness allegations by ignoring them, smugly, and note in passing that I would love to drop this topic and never mention it again, and that can easily happen if everyone agrees that our current approach to enforcing national borders across most of the world is irritatingly tedious, perversely counterproductive, and often shockingly cruel to millions of people.

I'm not brave for saying that, it's a basic bitch opinion and this is tumblr, people discuss Transformers pornography here openly in public, that's brave.

I certainly never claimed to be humble, and given that I have a casualness that borders on arrogance what I most aspire to is accuracy, so please offer corrections where necessary that I might upgrade my opinions and become even more smug in the future.

there are lots of near universal human preferences I don't like, that is true, and some of them we have steadily shifted over the past hundred years and looking back we say wow, back then there was obviously a right side of history and most people were not on it, either because they stubbornly clung to bad ideas or because they didn't pay attention to ideas in the first place.

consider this news from 2021:

Ninety-four percent of U.S. adults now approve of marriages between Black people and White people, up from 87% in the prior reading from 2013. The current figure marks a new high in Gallup's trend, which spans more than six decades. Just 4% approved when Gallup first asked the question in 1958.

from just 4% (four fucking percent!) of Americans approving of interracial marriage to 94% in sixty years! clearly one of those opinions is wrong and it was nearly universally wrong and I claim that the people in that 4% were on the right side of history back in 1958 and whatever the motivations of everyone else for saying what they did and believing what they did they were wrong, obviously and tragically wrong.

I wonder how smug the 4% were about it though, hmm.

anyway the state passed various laws to enforce this near universal fucked up human preference and those laws were all bad and it is good that they were overturned.

look, this is an easy win! obvious legal discrimination is the most straightforward moral issue we have! time after time we tear down unfair barriers and get to smugly pat ourselves on the back about being more enlightened than our benighted ancestors and the world gets a little bit better and we can move on and stop talking about stupid shit like married women needing to quit their jobs or gay people being unable to have their marriages legally recognised or people having different rights and protections depending on who they are or who their parents were or where they were born, it's so simple to be on the right side of history! take the win!

Then let me into your house.

I think you mean “let me into the house of somebody in your general vicinity, when they have already agreed to that”. Individuals have property rights to their houses which are a good idea to protect. Individuals do not have property rights to other peoples houses who live vaguely near them*. When a migrant moves in, they don’t move to your house unless you’ve agreed to rent it out, they move to the house of somebody nearby, who has agreed to rent it out, or sell it. You do not get a veto over this.

The government, which is also just a bunch of people, also does not get a veto over this. It’s a cherry on top that they enforce their veto with horrific violence, which is what most people focus on, but the philosophical underpinnings are corrupt as well.

*people often think they do, which leads them to attempt to regulate things like what structures their neighbours can build, or what colours they paint their house, or how long their grass is, or what visitors they can have. The instinct against migration is partially derived from the instinct to form a home owners association.

If you define a trans person as "someone who identifies as a trans person", you lose the ability to make any claims whatsoever about trans people. For example, you could not claim that trans people are oppressed, because under this definition anyone whatsoever can be trans. What you CAN identify is that there is a group of people, who's gender identity no longer matches their birth sex, who are often mistreated by society. Usually, we call these people trans. If you define trans to mean something else, however, it cannot still point to this group. It has become untethered. The only way it's possible to get any use out of it at all is by secretly using the old definition.

Consider the analogous statement "a ratch person is someone who identifies as ratch". Would you, based off this, be able to make any claims about ratch people at all? Of course not, it doesn't point to any natural groupings in reality, it's entirely self-referential. The only way that you can say that a trans person is "someone who identifies as a trans person", and have people not ask "so what is a trans person then" the same way they'd have to ask what a ratch person is, is because everyone has the old definition loaded in their heads already, and can connect that to your new definition. And if you're using the old definition anyway, what purpose does the new one serve?

im deeply sorry, but... the entire first paragraph can be said about women, too. we do not have a set definition for "a woman" due to the complexity of identification as a woman besides "someone who identifies as a woman." are you secretly using the definition "human female" to redefine it in your head to discuss misogyny? this argument is entirely nonsensical.

defining a group of people by their oppression doesnt work. as i already brought up in the post, there is already people who still identify with their birth sex who also identify as trans—who likely still go through transphobia due to transphobia often being 1:1 with hatred of people who are gender non conforming.

people already have notions about what a trans person is. the definition of "someone who doesnt identify with their sex assigned at birth" (i did not say 'birth sex' because birth sex is not real, i am intersex) already leaves a wide range of people out of its definition, and lumps a wide range of people in to it that dont want to be there. if you want to redefine it to better suit a society without the coercive practice of assigning sex at birth, be my guest. but i truly do not see a need to flounder about trying to find a definition that includes absolutely everyone when we can accept sometimes words are agreed upon to be complicated and amalgamous (ie. woman, queer, gay) without trying to worthlessly redefine them.

I don’t know what the perfect definition of trans is either, the one I provided was just an example. I definitely agree that defining trans people by their current gender being different from the sex assigned at birth is imperfect, but my point was that the circular definition, that “a trans person is someone who identifies as trans” is worse than imperfect, it’s completely useless, because on its own, it provides 0 information about what being trans is. If you told someone who hadn’t heard of the concept before that a trans person is someone who identifies as trans, they would still not know what the word “trans” meant.