sometimes i read or skim arguments/talking points with the sense that like…..you’re thinking way too hard about this. like not in a dismissive way, not “you just wasted your time lol what a loser go outside”, it’s more like “why are people being made to think SO DEEPLY about shit that doesn’t matter”.
something that seriously pisses me off is people who say stuff along the lines of “if you do/like/think X then think really hard about why you do” like 1) don’t tell me what to do 2) maybe i have thought really hard about it and this is how i feel afterwards 3) ITS NOT THAT DEEP
this is in all sorts of discourse and honestly it reeks of the guys i met in high school who tried to convince me i wasn’t really attracted to women cause they always told me to think about why i like women instead of men (i ID’d as a genderqueer lesbian back then) and if i said i had they’d tell me to think harder. they didn’t care about me. they just wanted me to not be gay. they just wanted me to be available to them.
people who tell you to think hard about some random aspect about you are not being ingenious. they are not encouraging self discovery. they just want you to admit that they are right and you are wrong because eventually you’ll run out of arguments and statements you’ve rehashed a thousand times and just get mad and then they’ll use your anger against you.
y’all. IT AINT THAT DEEP. queer discourse? it’s faster and easier than saying “nonbinary genderfluid and bi” and encompasses my identities and beyond. for me, that’s it. i’ve typed out paragraphs on why i use the word but it all boils down to that.
shipping discourse? sometimes we just fucking like things and it doesn’t mean shit in our brains because brains are funky things we still don’t understand. i’m not going to dive deep into the inner mechanisms of my psyche because i like a ship with dubcon elements. it’s not that fucking serious. you’re not going to catch me engaging with a lot of “reasons why shipping x is okay” because i’ve grown up with weird ships and characters ever since i was 10 and hey, look at me, i’m queer and mentally ill but i’ve never fucking killed anyone like i apparently would have done if fiction really was at a 1:1 ratio with reality. the irony is that so many shipping arguments are bunk if you use your goddamn brain for ten seconds and engage in some nuance and critical thinking for once.
ace discourse?? “think really hard about why you ID as ace”?? because they don’t experience sexual attraction you utter walnut. and whether that’s due to trauma or internalized xphobia or what, it’s nobody’s fucking business aside from that person.
all these people are doing are trying to worm their gross ideologies into your head and make you doubt who you are. when i was younger i fell into these traps and came out like “okay i thought about it and i still like this so what now,” and they don’t have answers beyond that. because it’s a subtle guilt trip to get you to admit that you’re a liar, that you’re actually cis/straight/not mentally ill/<insert other identity aspect here> because how dare you exist as one of those people.
ugh. that’s my semi-legible rant of the day, the point being that nobody is allowed to dictate or determine my identity aside from me and sometimes therapists, and people who try to guilt people into hating themselves over dumb arbitrary shit can fuck off forever.
It’s radical feminist influence from what I can tell. Started with telling kinky people to examine their desires and ballooned from there.
people who tell you to think hard about some random aspect about you are not being ingenious. they are not encouraging self discovery. they just want you to admit that they are right
And the thing is, examining that sort of stuff can be a good thing, if you’re up for it. I’ve put a lot of thought into what my kinks are and why I might have these particular kinks and how my kinks work. And I love when other people do the same sort of analysis. (Honestly, I’d be fascinated to hear a lesbian try to go into an in-depth analysis of why they’re attracted to women and not men.)
But they don’t want the kind of analysis I’ve done, because it hasn’t led me to decide to stop being kinky. Firstly, because you can’t just analyze your way into a new sexuality. And secondly, because my analysis has led me to be more accepting of my kinks rather than less, and more likely to act on them because I have a clearer idea of which SSC activities might twig my kinks and how to do them.
And I certainly don’t think it should be obligatory to analyze your preferences. Your beliefs, yes. Unexamined beliefs are very prone to being wrong. But preferences aren’t right or wrong, they just are.
i agree! i’m a very introspective person, idk about y’all, but i spend a LOT of time thinking about myself. examining yourself is good for you, as long as you’re doing it because YOU want to, because you WANT to.
if you want to analyze your kinks/gender/sexuality/etc, that’s great! go for it! i do it all the time, especially as someone with fluid identities. and yes, absolutely examine your beliefs and work on the bigotry and stereotypes in your brain. we all have them. it’s very important to stamp out bigoted opinions.
there’s a huge difference between “question yourself to learn more about yourself” and “question yourself to the point of insecurity and self hatred/doubt because i don’t like something about you and your labels.” i’m glad that a lot of people can recognize the difference between these.
Possible controversial statement here, but I really hesitate to believe what most people say their past lives were. Usually because their only reasoning comes down to “I’ve always loved x thing, so obviously in a past life I was x person.”
And I super hesitate to believe anyone who lives in a position of privilege now and claims that in a past life they were an oppressed person. Especially when they think that means they can somehow speak for that minority now. (i.e. a white person claiming they were Native American in a past life, so it’s okay to talk over actual Native Americans about current political and cultural issues they experience)
Of course, maybe they were. Not everyone’s an embellisher. (Though it is kind of interesting how you never hear that someone was simply just a farmer or something. Everyone did/experienced some wild shit in their past life.) Still, you know, I’ve always loved spaghetti, ever since I was a kid, I mean, it’s fucking amazing, but I also don’t think I used to be a bowl of spaghetti made by an oppressed minority in 1842. Might just be me, though. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
exactly. there’s nothing there. not a statue. not a plaque. nothing.
[drives over hitler’s death site]
Bloody amazing.
And you know what’s right next to it?
That’s right, the Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden, which translates to the Memorial for the murdered jews.
So if you wanna go have a look at the monument commemorating the victims of Hitler’s regime, you can park your car right on the spot he died and walk there.
Makes ya think, doesn’t it?
Germany gets why you shouldn’t have monuments to your bad points in history.
But try explaining to Americans they have bad points in their history.
Well part of it is that we also didn’t have, you know, HITLER
Not to like, compare tragedies or something, because horrible things in human history don’t need a measuring contest, but you know, slavery is uhhhhhh bad
Okay witches, check this out: It is totally fine to learn from and appreciate other cultures and practices, but not okay to appropriate them. Like, maybe a Native American shaman can teach you how to perform a proper smudging, but that doesn’t mean you can call on their ancestors to help you out. Like, you got your own ancestors; use them. Maybe a Voodoo practitioner can teach how to make a gris gris bag, but that doesn’t mean you know how to contact their deities and show them the proper respect. The point I’m trying to make is that you can appreciate without appropriating. Just respect the cultures and heritage of other people.
Magic is not yours to censor. It belongs to everyone, not just one culture. Same goes with the gods.
No. Many practices are closed and if you’re not initiated or born into them you keep your grubby hands off. Show some respect.
You’re absolutely retarded. Magick is a natural process, to try and keep people away from it just because they were not born into it is like discriminating because of race, gender or sexual orientation. Get fucking real.
“Retarded”? That word alone lets me know your argument is trash. There are types open for everyone. You don’t get to just take things because you want them like a selfish toddler. Some things are not for you and never will be. Screaming that you deserve them even though you’re not part of the tradition and have not been allowed into it by those closed cultures means that you don’t care about anything but taking things from other people.
You don’t get to do what you want. That’s life. Some specific practices simply don’t belong to you and you can either act like a grown up and deal with it, or prepare for some backlash to your tantrums. You don’t deserve other people’s things just because you want them
@thelonewarlock, Why are you getting so mad because some practices are closed? Also, I would like to point out that the meaning of the word warlock is “oath-breaker”, referring to someone who has betrayed their coven to practice dark magick, yet you say you follow the right-hand path. So you clearly don’t know enough about the magick you practice to be trying learn somebody else’s. Educate yourself and get back to me .
PS some practices were literally forged by people of color to survive white supremacy and colonialism so if you’re being an entitled asshole and trying to call on ancestors/gods that routinely work against people like you then lol good luck with that energy 👌🏽
but you realize that as a white american you have nowhere else to go, because the Norse gods arent yours the Irish gods arent yours the Greek the Egypt gods the Slavic Gods, you have nothing. If you say taht all white people can use all parts of white cultures you are hypocritical and racist and admit its not about culture its just about segregation.
I see it more as a question of connectivity.
As a Slavic person I know my spirits and they know me, if I would try to connect to Greek deities for example I think it would take a lot of time and work to build this connection but when there is one you can use it just like any native person.
Means if you feel the call of any sort of deity BUILD that connection and you can be a part of them as they can become a part of you.
“but you realize that as a white american you have nowhere else to go”
Ok but whooooose fault is that? Whose Fault is that?? WhOsE faULt is ThAt?
Like yeah we all get it that white Americans got chopped from their roots the moment they decided to colonize this country and send either criminals or people of non-nature based faiths here so yeah you guys are chopped and guess what? That’s your problem
But also don’t speak for all white Americans because I have friends that are like second-third generation Scottish/Irish and instead of using crocodile tears to excuse some type of entitlement to other practices cause they might be more Americanized than their parents, they do the work to reconnect with their ancestors and traditions.
Also im eye rolling at all this cause my whole blog is how connecting with local nature can help you find your own faith. Even though I’m half Haitian, vodou is a practice that occurs within a community and takes work and initiation to become apart of. I can’t just start practicing it. Even if I did know about any French folk magic practices I can’t dive into it cause folk magic tends to do with the immediate land surrounding them and the spirits that are attached to that land and people. That’s why practitioners of paths like vodou or mugyo travel to their homeland to practice it or folk practices have so much to do with the region it stems from.
Like yes there are little things from every culture that’s ok to use like I use lenormand that is French so I feel a little bit of a connection to my other half but if you feel disconnected the answer isn’t going into someone else’s shit to take what you want it’s digging your hands into the earth and reconnecting yourself. It’s making an eclectic path and rebuilding your roots. If you ever felt a need to do magic in the first place that magnetism will always be there where magic can always be found which is simply nature. And through that entities local to the area will work with you if you care about working with stuff like that. You need to rebuild your own home instead of busting into somebody else’s and using their shit.
Discourse aside, this is my first post to reach 1000 notes
Candlelight-magick 