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franks23:

theactualcluegirl:

dancinbutterfly:

firebirdeternal:

crazy-pages:

xprmnt626:

quasi-normalcy:

blackjackgabbiani:

quasi-normalcy:

The fact that you can’t raise taxes on billionaires even slightly without them pouring money into fascist political movements is, of itself, evidence that billionaires as a class shouldn’t be allowed to exist in the first place.

You, ah, don’t think it’s unfair to judge people’s morals based on their finances?

I, ah, think that it’s perfectly fair to judge people’s morals based on the amount of money they pour into neo-nazi political movements, yeah actually.

I, ah, also think it’s 100% fair to judge someone’s morals based on their finances whether they support neo-nazis or not.
You can’t have that much money and be a good person. I’m sorry. I don’t care how many “”nice”” billionaires yall try to show me to prove me wrong.
Nobody in the history of mankind has worked hard enough to earn BILLIONS. Even if they become philanthropists, they almost solely become billionaires by profiting from the labor (underpayment, abuse, etc.) of others. How can you say “hm..they could be a morally good person..”
You also can’t be a billionaire in a country where people don’t have clean water or a world where people are starving and claim to be a good person. 
There are a few people with enough wealth to end world hunger MULTIPLE TIMES OVER, yet here we are. 
There is no such thing as a good billionaire as far as I’m concerned. 
Nobody is deserving of that much money.
Nobody has earned that much money.
Nobody can sit on that much money and claim to be a good person. 

I have spoken with Nobel prize winning physicists. I have spoken with their colleagues. I have worked with people who have led teams to make discoveries that twist my mind into knots. I have worked with scientists whose concept of hard work and dedication would beggar the belief of a robot. I’ve gone to talks led by scientists who head forty-people teams, synchronizing the efforts of others so efficiently I could scarcely believe it. 

These are people whose life works exist entirely in conceptual space, where the limits of what they can achieve are only their And they are impressive, don’t get me wrong, but few of them would I value more than a team of decent scientists. The amount of skill, intelligence, and diligence required to outwork even half a dozen of your fellows is pushing the limits of human ability. 

Even Albert Einstein, famed example of the brilliant lone scientist, was not that special. I’ve read his papers in detail, and those of his contemporaries (took a class on it actually). Without him the discovery of general relativity would have been delayed two or three years at most, the mathematical and conceptual groundwork that enabled his brilliance was laid down by others and being investigated by others as well. And I’d pit a decent team against Einstein any day of the week, an individual can only do so much. 

For the amount of money Jeff Bezos earns working for a day, $215,000,000 (x), I could hire a thousand such hardworking geniuses for a year. Maybe ‘only’ a hundred if they were from an exceptionally competitive and valuable field.

For the money Jeff Bezos earns in a year, I could hire a village. I could create a project with so many educated minds it would be larger than the Manhattan Project. About a dozen times over. 

No one is that irreplaceable. No one has a percent of that worth. If someone is a billionaire, they are earning beyond their contribution to society, at the expense of other’s well-being. 

So yeah, fuck billionaires. 

Holding onto quantities of money that it would be impossible to spend in a normal human lifetime when people die every day is also evil.

Like Imagine having 10,000 cheeseburgers in a room, you literally cannot eat them all. You *can’t*. You eat them for every meal and they’ll all go bad before you make even the tiniest dent in their absurd mass. And into the room walks 1000 starving people. *Literally* starving, actively dying of hunger starving, and you don’t give them some cheeseburgers. 

Look. I have wealthy family and for a brief period of my life? My nuclear family was securely upper middle class (a parent who made 6 figures a year) although that is well and truly over now.

You can have money and not be evil. You can make a few million in your life through legitimate hard work on your own part and save it and not use it all and have it make sense, numerically.

But when you hit the Bs? Nah. No. Sorry. If you are staying a billionaire and not giving and being taxed enough to drop back down into multi-millionaire status?

You’re no longer a person.

You are Smaug the Terrible wearing a flesh suit and I’m not surprised you are involved in global warming because what do western dragons do but hoard and burn?

J. P. Morgan – the most unbleievably wealthy man of his era, the dude who personally inspired most of the anti-trust laws of the early mid-century in the US – J-fucking-P-fucking-Morgan himself, if his wealth were translated to modern scale?
Would not be a Billionaire.
Just fucking sit with that for a minute or two.

It’s posts like this that make me want to burn them all.
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butts-bouncing-on-the-beltway:

redmagus77:

kaylapocalypse:

thatadult:

The Stanford prison experiment tapes were so stupid when I watched them in AP psych and so stupid when I watch this film about them. Literally they could’ve all sat and played cards and got $15 a day to tell ghost stories all day and be best friends. But masculinity and whiteness and power created this violent irrationality that positioned young ass men to be met with brutality and trauma and disrespect even when it was obviously taken too far. and it makes no sense. If someone put me in a room with Black girls and said I would get paid $90 a day (that’s the equivalent apparently) to be a prison guard, do you know how fast I’d be sitting with them and learning about them and exchanging Instagrams and like.. sleeping.. like what the fuck was the point of any of that…

My psych teacher introduced us to this study and literally before she showed us was like “don’t ever confuse a study based on one type of person (white men/boys) to be an example of an Everyman situation. There is strong evidence that if this was recreated with diversity, or even just with girls, that the results would have been drastically different. This is an example of bias and sexism in the medical research community.”

“Other, more subtle factors also shaped the experiment. It’s often said that the study participants were ordinary guys—and they were, indeed, determined to be “normal” and healthy by a battery of tests. But they were also a self-selected group who responded to a newspaper advertisement seeking volunteers for “a psychological study of prison life.” In a 2007 study, the psychologists Thomas Carnahan and Sam McFarland asked whether that wording itself may have stacked the odds. They recreated the original ad, and then ran a separate ad omitting the phrase “prison life.” They found that the people who responded to the two ads scored differently on a set of psychological tests. Those who thought that they would be participating in a prison study had significantly higher levels of aggressiveness, authoritarianism, Machiavellianism, narcissism, and social dominance, and they scored lower on measures of empathy and altruism.”

http://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/the-real-lesson-of-the-stanford-prison-experiment

The thing about this study is that whether or not it’s generalizable to the public is debatable at best.

But it’s certainly generalizable to the population of people who tend to be drawn to prison system and law enforcement jobs because that’s exactly the demographics that tend to show up in those positions.
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gothiccharmschool:

winneganfake:

runcibility:

ms-demeanor:

chrisevans-sexualfrustrations:

Steve?

Okay but he’s right and he should say it.

“Smart” and “Cloud” also mean data gathering. I need to have a tangent, so pardon me while I run with this…

Here’s the thing: I’m a nerd. I want to be able to automate things in our home and to have usable data. So I want smart electrical plugs that allow me to have rules and show me what’s hooving up a ton of energy. That’s useful to me, but that’s not the bargain that tech companies are willing to strike with me, because they want to be able to gather data and sell it.

What’s annoying as hell is that every currently supported thing that does this wants to be a cloud-based application that requires me to install an app on my phone.

I. Do. Not. Want. This. 

I want my plugs on a network so I can flip open a browser on my laptop or phone or tablet and access them that way. I do not want them on or touching the goddamned internet. I do not want an information-gathering-and-data-leaking-phone-app.

The one thing that I’ve found that semi-reliably does this is no longer supported by the manufacturer. Every other goddamned option requires me to have it be app-controlled and I can’t control the data gathering from the manufacturer.

In this case, I am DEFINITELY an old-coot yelling at THE cloud.

Honestly, same. This is one of the few things that I’m glad to be too poor to afford the cool toys on. 

Same here. I don’t want my household appliances connected to the cloud. I don’t need my thermostat, fridge, or TV connected to the internet. I absolutely do not something like an Alexa. 

“Smart” and “Cloud” also mean data gathering.“

I work(ed) in tech. I have a decent understanding of what sort of data can be harvested through those things. I’m not ready to go off-grid and become a witch that lives in the woods, but there are days when it’s a tempting idea.
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vaspider:

ohaugustine:

sherokutakari:

eighthdoctor:

sherokutakari:

eighthdoctor:

vortisaurus:

vortisaurus:

the idea of two aromantic platonic partners having a “convenience marriage” is like my favorite thing right now I’m both getting really excited and cracking up over the possibilities I mean just imagine:

“we got married because of tax benefits”

“we got married because it gave us an excuse to have sleepovers every night”

“we got married because it seemed convenient to ‘pool our assets’ (aka our library is now twice as big, as is our collection of Disney movies)”

“we got married because it gave us an excuse to ask for toasters from people as wedding gifts”

#we got married because weddings are really exciting and we can plan it how we want it and it doesn’t need to include kissing bc that can be weird#but it gives us an excuse to have a dessert table#because dESSERT TABLE#I just want dessert table festivities#festivities around a dessert table#ahh#desssseeeeerrrrrt#CHEESECAKES THOOOOOOOO#YOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO 

this is the most important addition anyone has made to this post bless you and may the Force be with you my friend

#aromantic couple that learns about the practice of getting married again to ‘reaffirm your commitment’#and proceeds to get married every year#and every year the dessert table is bigger and more extravagent#and they start experimenting with variations on the ceremony (x)

#we got married because we only needed to buy one copy of each book #we got married because then no one goes to the movies alone #we got married because then we got to design WEDDING CLOTHES #we got married because pillow fights #we got married because this makes emergency contact info much easier #we got married because weirding out conservatives (x)

 We got married because broadway duets while doing chores, we got married because HALF AS MANY CHORES, we got married because surprise cookies on bad days, we got married because surprise cookies on GOOD days, we got married so we’d never have to ask the other if we could come over today again, we got married so our parents would stop asking (x)

#we got married because someone will get meds when we’re sick #we got married because secondary income #we got married because joint big finish account #we got married because two people can walk more dogs than one person which means more dogs #we got married because broadway duets while doing anything #we got married because only one of us likes cooking and the other is fine with dishes #we got married because both of us like cooking and we can trade off #we got married because help with disabilities and someone who doesn’t judge #we got married because of the satisfaction of hearing ‘have you found someone yet’ and getting to say ‘yes’ and hang up #we got married because anniversary parties are even more fun than weddings #MORE DESSERT TABLES #we got married because couples discounts on things

(

x

)

#we got married because two people can walk more dogs than one person which means more dogs PERFECT

I want y'all to pause for a moment and consider this: all of the things that people have cited above? Those are the things, in my experience, that make marriage ACTUALLY work in the long run. Splitting the work, taking care of each other, walking the dogs, sharing tasks because I am okay with folding laundry while my spouse hates it but he’ll carry the heavy baskets for me, because singing duets in the car is fun, because sometimes I worked all day and he’s on leave right now so he made dinner and made my favorite pasta dish with fresh tomatoes… those are the REAL reasons a marriage works.

So think about this for a moment because romance is, frankly, very secondary to what makes a marriage work in the long term. Partnership, task-sharing, friendship, all of those things are the true thing that will tell you whether a marriage will stand the test of time.

So it’s not that I’m saying that aromantic relationships are like taking a “normal” relationship and taking out the romance, I’m saying that IF YOUR RELATIONSHIP WOULD NOT STAND UP WITHOUT THE ROMANCE IN IT, DON’T GET MARRIED.

We should in fact consider the aromantic “platonic lifemate” as the ideal BASIS for a marriage in the long term. We should be looking at platonic lifemates and saying, “do we measure up to that standard? Is our love for each other aromantic TOO? Are we at that bedrock?”

Because you will go through periods in your life, and your marriage, where even if you love one another romantically and deeply, there won’t be much romance. Maybe, you know, your spouse just got part of her spine removed, or you are really stressed out by work, or a move, or your dog/cat/kid/mouse/pet tarantula is sick, or your neighbor is crazy and intruding on your space, and you will NEED EACH OTHER but there won’t be much romance in it.

If you can’t be platonic partners, if you don’t stand up to that ideal, seriously consider this. Consider BUILDING this as part of building your relationship – and use it as a good test for whether or not sex/romance is covering up serious communication issues, or abuse.

I submit that we should refer to this as the New Platonic Ideal.

Thank you.
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gahdamnpunk:

Some places don’t even name the charity like you’re just donating to the corporation’s tax writeoff. You’re better off giving that money to a homeless person on the street who needs it more..
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intersex-ionality:

alarajrogers:

findingfeather:

I’m putting this over here rather than on the thread: https://star-anise.tumblr.com/post/187301803839/just-a-zuki-star-anise-donna-dot-paella 

I’m on mobile and it’s really being a PITA about hyperlinking, so forgive me on this one. But I’m putting this over here in part because that thread is already getting long, but also because the point here has wider application. 

Because even when you look at what’s discussed, and you recognize that the majority of the people in the pyramid scheme are fucked over and supposedly only a small percent are getting rewards … 

… but then you look at how that small percent experience the universe … 

 … you realize that for the most part the super-rich and powerful are also actually miserable, most of the time. It’s one of the hideous fucking ironies of the whole thing: the top of the wealth class actually have similar rates of pathology, addiction, suicide, mental illness, abuse, neglect, failed relationships and general just Fucked Upness, as those facing the most challenges in the world. 

This is not to say you should pity the poor fuckers: that’s not what I’m talking about. My point is more that the actual meaning of “money can’t buy happiness” is on this end, not on the “you should be able to be happy when you can’t get the necessities of life”: that’s obviously bullshit. 

But what isn’t is that extreme wealth and privilege are, ironically, not correlated with happiness. Or even basic mental health. 

Ditto every other kind of privilege. And this seems absolute madness, until one realizes one very central, very important thing about human society and human existence: 

Systems do not actually have to benefit anyone to survive. They just have to self-perpetuate.

A system can literally harm all its members but as long as it manages to perpetuate itself, it will survive. And in fact some of the most resilient systems of thought and belief are actually inherently guaranteed to make their holders miserable and unhealthy and that very fact means that they will get passed on. 

Like, well. Toxic masculinity.

It’s one of the biggest emotional challenges, I find, of figuring out how to fix any of these things. Surely, you think, as you’re looking at (for example) the ways in which ablism fucks you over (fucks me over) those goddamn people who fit in the “acceptable” box, the “able” box, the “mentally well” box, surely - given how attached to it they are, given how much time they spend attacking me and mine for its sake - surely it must be rewarding them! Somehow! Materially! Continually! 

It isn’t. At most there is a very small, very short-term brain-chemical reward from being an enforcer of social norms. Now, that’s very powerful - of such things are life-destroying gambling addictions made - but it’s not actually, materially, very….well, useful. 

And that’s because the only requirement of a system of belief, of understanding, of approaching the world, the only thing it needs to actually keep existing? Is the ability to get people to sign on, and pass it on. 

It doesn’t need to actually benefit anyone. Systems just need to self-replicate and self-perpetuate, they don’t need to do anything else. 

Some of the most ardent supporters of all kinds of shit - of homophobia, of toxic masculinity, of white supremacy, of classist bullshit, pick your poison - who are supposedly among the people it purports to uplift, are actually among those most damaged by it, because it doesn’t need to actually help them at all: it just needs their buy-in. 

And there doesn’t need to be a mastermind. There doesn’t need to be someone who’s secretly driving it all with a master-plan to do … something. In the same way that we don’t end up with physiological traits - body-traits, things about our physical being - because of some guiding hand, but because for some reason on a species-wide scale they self-perpetuate? Same thing with our behavioural systems. 

Nobody has to win; the system just has to self-perpetuate. And an aspect that many systems use to self-perpetuate is in fact making absolutely damn sure that nobody, nobody caught in the system is ever actually satisfied. Actually content. 

Because then they’ll get out there and push the system more. 

Now, I don’t think that’s “destiny”. I don’t think that’s an irreparable aspect that we’re just trapped dealing with forever: after all, that’s also more or less how viruses and other infectious diseases reproduce, and we’re learning how to stall, slow, and in some cases even eradicate those. We are learning how to make that kind of behaviour (making people metaphorically suffer until they metaphorically spew the contagion out where someone else catches it) unrewarding as a survival strategy. 

But I think realizing this aspect is actually hella useful to getting there. I think it’s useful to let it inform strategies and temper how we work so that it’s potentially more effective in getting these toxic, poison systems of belief and behaviour out of us. 

[nb: now, in any human interaction, there are in fact system within systems: obviously people on a small scale use the systems I mention above for smaller-scale goals all the time. And yeah, I’m including things like “getting to be president of the USA” in “smaller scale goals” here because compared even with the history of humankind this is a tiny, temporary sliver of time. But if you look at even the Cheeto’s life, and that of his family, it takes barely a scratch at the surface to see this deep, ugly misery, insecurity, gnawing terror of impermanence, and bitter/resentful anger all the time - and yet they “should” be blissfully happy, being at the top of the heap. The system doesn’t actually reward them, insomuch as “reward” means “end up not suffering”. It just plays on their fear and their greed and their envy and their resentment to drive them to amass useless piles of money and power they’re unsuited for, to the MASSIVE MASSIVE detriment of EVERYONE ELSE - and they AREN’T EVEN HAPPY. 

That’s the point here. That’s what I mean by “systems don’t actually have to fully benefit anyone.” 

I am reminded of a story about George W. Bush, how when he was 7, his beloved little sister, who was 3, died of an illness. From his perspective she disappeared and never came back. His parents went golfing.

I don’t feel sorry for W – he participated in the destruction of my country as much as Reagan and his dad did, and there are enormous quantities of blood on his hands – but I feel sorry for the little boy he once was, whose parents were so disconnected from emotion, they didn’t acknowledge that their son needed to grieve for his dead sister, regardless of whether they were cold enough to shove their feelings about her in a box and bury them.

Some of the super-rich may be happy. The ones who got there through doing something they truly love, maybe. Bezos and Musk reportedly have terrible marriages and/or divorces, but Bill Gates as far as I know is genuinely devoted to his wife and is enjoying his life of philanthropy after building one of the most powerful and influential software companies on the planet. But I strongly suspect that most of them, especially the ones who got there because it was handed to them on a platter, are absolutely miserable. 

Personally, I’d like to be as wealthy as, say, the Obamas. Two professional highly paid incomes and money from writing books? Financial security and the freedom to travel at will? Sign me up for that! But more wealth than that, I don’t see how you live with yourself, with what you need to do to yourself and to other people to achieve it.

You live with it by repressing anything negative you feel, until you end up repressing everything you feel.

It’s wildly unhealthy. I’ve a friend who worked as a therapist for the ultra-rich in the 90s. Most of them have so fundamentally lost touch with their own emotions–let alone the emotions of anyone else–that they live in a state of permanent dissociation.

If they weren’t the most powerful people in society, we would call that complex PTSD as a result of severe and sustained childhood trauma.

But they are the most powerful in society, so we all just kind of call it normal. Or, at best, we call it monstrous and inhuman, without recognizing the fundamental humanity that caused them to move down this path of exploitation, violence, and repression.

Systems just need to self-replicate and self-perpetuate, they don’t need to do anything else.
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phantoms-lair:

It the same with the companies saying video games need microtransactions to stay profitable. Because I remember they being plenty profitable for a couple of decades before microtransactions were a thing.

burnitalldownism:

People who are old enough to remember ad free YouTube, FB, Twitter and Instagram believing that capitalism drives innovation are fucking hilarious.

Like, all of those platforms were still profitable…massively profitable before they had targeted ads on your feed and unskippable ads before videos. They didn’t need to bring them in. They weren’t going to go under, their CEOs weren’t living in the backseats of their cars, they were living in mansions already. They just wanted more money.

Greed was the only reason. Capitalism is the reason they made their platforms and the user experience worse. That’s it.
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vaspider:

queerdorian:

ferguson-is-my-lord-and-saviour:

aristoteliancomplacency:

oodlenoodleroodle:

transkrem:

Like, people who identify as Queer know the word is used like a slur. Trust me, we know.

So when we say “queer is a slur” was started by terfs, maybe use some critical thinking and try to understand what we mean. That is, if you actually care about queer people and the damage terfs do, rather that just screaming “queer is a slur!” and ignoring the actual point.

Terfs did not like that queer was reclaimed. End of. This is a fact. Queer was too broad, too accepting, and embraced all the people they wanted gone. And I know y'all exclusionists feel the same but get pissed when we point it out so you deny it, but sit down and listen for a minute.

Queer was the preferred term for poc. For bisexuals. For trans people. For people with multiple identities. It neatly encapsulated everything, and was a friendly community to those who felt thrown under the bus by mainstream LGBT activism. It was a political and social statement, “you treated my like I was different and weird, and guess what? I am and that’s something to be proud of.”

So the response? “You can’t use that word. Its bad. Its a slur.”

And at the time, a lot of people rolled their eyes. Everyone knew why they didn’t like the word and brushed that off. It was fine.

So they started more subtly. “Just so you know this word is very harmful and is a slur so be careful how you use it :))) in case you didn’t know :)))) its a slur :))) friendly reminder :))) for the sake of other people of course :))))” type shit on every post involving the word, including and especially posts simply mentioning self identification.

Always worded in friendly, concerned ways, like the derailment was meant to be nice and considerate, and not about normalizing their rhetoric.

And what happened because of that was a younger generation of community kids growing up with these statements being thrown at them and absorbed on every. Single. Post. That. Mentionioned. Queer.

The result? That same generation of kids cutting it all short, removing the meant-to-be-palatable niceness, to just say “queer is a slur.”

Exactly how it was originally intended. “Queer is a slur.” People drop on posts where young queer people talk about it being a self identifier that actually fits them. “Its a slur,” they comment, with nothing else, on posts they clearly didn’t read past that word, written by people twice their age who had reclaimed it before they were even born.

Its nasty. Its disgusting. It’s plain old bigotry, whether the people saying know it or not. It is a terf tactic, plain and simple.

And no one wants to deny that it is indeed used as a slur (right along with all the rest of our identities.) No one wants to be insensitive and force it on people who haven’t reclaimed it.

But invading queer people’s posts to spit “queer is a slur” is flat out queerphobic. You do the dirty work of terfs, of cis straight oppressors, by saying in one simple sentence: “its a dirty word, there is no pride in it, you haven’t/can’t reclaim(ed) it.”

And regardless of your actual intentions, when you do this, that is EXACTLY what you are communicating and doing.

“Queer is a slur” is a terf movement. Stop fucking supporting terfs just because you want to pretend like it isn’t.

This is why I block people who say ‘Queer is a slur.’ 

You quack like a terf, I block you like a terf. 

This thing was so weird to me when I first encountered it on tumblr, because like… in academia

queer studies

 is a thing. Queer Theory is a thing. If I search my Uni’s library for ‘queer’ I get 138,481 results. Here are some of them: 

Queer in Europe : contemporary case studies / edited by Lisa Downing and Robert Gillett.

Queer Phenomenology, Sexual Orientation, and Health Care Spaces: Learning From the Narratives of Queer Women and Nurses in Primary Health Care, / Cressida Heyes, Megan Dean, Lisa Goldberg.

Playing With Time: Gay Intergenerational Performance Work and the Productive Possibilities of Queer Temporalities / Stephen Farrier

Postcolonial and queer theories : intersections and essays / edited by John C. Hawley.

Queer Dickens : erotics, families, masculinities / Holly Furneaux.

Showing Your Pride: A National Survey of Queer Student Centres in Canadian Colleges and Universities / John Ecker, Jennifer Rae, Amandeep Bassi

Mad for Foucault : rethinking the foundations of queer theory / Lynne Huffer.

Do those look like queerphobic texts? And do you think that most of the writers writing about queer theory are straight? Lols. If you don’t want to be personally be called queer, that’s cool. You don’t get to stop other people using the word though. It’s ours now and we’re keeping it.

Being against anyone other than gay people, reclaiming a word used as a slur against gay people, makes me a terf?

Where the FUCK does it say that and the FUCK does this mean

Case in fucking point.
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otahkoapisiakii:

amphiaria:

lil-mizz-jay:

black-nata:

rad-roach:

hexmaniacmareen:

what they say: cats are evil and unable to love

what they mean: i dont know how to handle small animals and consider them lashing out in SELF DEFENSE an insult

Usually what it boils down to is “I’m mad because the cat didn’t act like a dog”.

Pushing fragile things off tables and breaking them: Self defense. 

Destroying Christmas Trees: Self defense, I mean the tree attacked them. 

Scratching their owner’s eyeball: Self defense. 

Scratching their sleeping owner’s face: Self defense. 

Jumping on their owner’s back and clawing into their spine: Self defense. 

Admittedly yeah 

A dog doesn’t do those things because a dog’s version of self defense is to be a good animal who loves you and doesn’t attack you unless you attack them first. 

I mean if a cat feels that threatened by everything in their owner’s household maybe the owner shouldn’t have gotten a cat. 

Pushing fragile things off tables and breaking them: Playing. Cats are well-known to like to play with small objects. Your cat does not know what “fragile” means and does not understand the distinction between toy and not-toy objects. Place fragile things out of a cat’s line of sight and reach, and if you don’t provide them with enough enrichment items that they go looking for them, that’s on you.

Destroying Christmas Trees: Cats like to climb things. They’re not doing it to spite you.

Scratching their owner’s eyeball: Probably an accident, due to overstimulation when playing. It wasn’t trying to hurt you. Don’t anthropomorphize animals by attributing spite to them. Animals don’t do spite the way that humans do.

Scratching their sleeping owner’s face: Trying to rouse you with its paw, probably gently, because it loves you and wants to play with you.

Jumping on their owner’s back and clawing into their spine: Come on. If a cat is jumping on you, it loves you and wants to be close to you. Digging in with its claws is how it balances itself on an unstable surface and is purely a reflexive reaction. It isn’t intending to hurt you.

99% of cat behavioral problems stem from bored cats. Cats need to climb, need to scratch, and need small objects to play with. I only recommend adopting cats in pairs, so that they can keep each other entertained. Cats are not purely solitary. They get lonely, and lonely cats act out. Once again, your entire problem with cats as a species seems to stem from the fact that you don’t understand how cats express affection and it upsets you that they don’t do so the way that dogs do. Cats aren’t small dogs and cannot be expected to behave as such.

FELINE PROTECTION SQUAD
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I have to comment on the fact that when it comes to the serum, Bucky is souped UP on that stuff. Steve probably tones back how much he’s hitting normal humans, but GOOD LANDS. Bucky’s not just knocking someone down, he’s getting them air borne. With a kick. We know the cyborg arm is really strong, but BUCKY is insanely strong. Reminds me of the comic where he throws an arrow through someone’s face with his good arm, not even the cyborg one. Bucky is scary ramped up in the strength department.

This is why when people talk about Bucky having received an “inferior” version of the serum, I kind of raise my eyebrows. The overall effects of Zola’s serum might have differed from Erskine’s, but it certainly doesn’t seem to have left Bucky physically weaker. There are a lot of fics that assume Bucky would not be a match for Steve if Steve were actually willing to fight him, but Bucky more than proves his strength in Winter Soldier.

This should also make people realize that he isn’t some lost puppy. He can take care of hisself, even if he doesn’t have memories. He got the Smithsonian by himself right? He got those clothes himself right? He can take care of himself.

He was manipulated to be a predator. He is strong enough, swift enough to take down prey. He is intuitive enough to find who or what he wants. Even before The Soldier, Bucky was smart as a whip and could hold his own in a fight. But now? Now he is the perfect weapon, whether or not he wishes to be. He adapts, he fights, he wins.

You know what else bugs me? When people act in fics like he’s just going to snap and kill everyone around him.  Bucky is not a violent person.  I don’t think the Winter Soldier is a violent person either.  He killed because he was ordered to, but if he wasn’t ordered to?  TBH I think the Winter Soldier would probably be pretty chill and quiet.  Like, you wouldn’t want to startle him or whatever, because yeah, scary ninja personification of death, but if you were just, like, sharing a train car?  Or sitting in a waiting room?  Not a randomly violent guy.  No homicidal urges.  Probably largely just wants to be left the fuck alone to, like, contemplate Dostoevsky or something.

I recently re-watched Cap2, and this scene — it’s basically Bucky’s equivalent of what Steve did on the Lemurian Star — he takes out a whole squadron (???) of pilots single-handedly.  And it’s … stunning how brutallly effective he is.  No fancy Cap parkour.  Just straight up killing machine.

Which I think gets at the above meta/commentary — WS is not just a soldier, he’s a highy trained Super Soldier.  He can go toe-to-toe with Steve on basically everything — hand-to-hand combat, leading a team (he leads a team when he’s tracking Nat/Steve), and taking down a large # of machines/men single-handedly.

The difference, then, is the drive.  Which is that WS has none.  He is a ghost that simply follows orders (and when he doesn’t, he gets wiped.)  Bucky has no direction, so he goes where he’s pointed.  One thing I find so interesting about mcu!WS is how neutral he is.  There’s no Soviet brainwashing (we see Pierce giving him The Talk, but he doesn’t seem to actually care), no misguided sense of right or wrong.  Just … nothing.

Of course, Steve was like that, too, at the beginning of the film — just following orders and muddling through life.  But Steve knew enough to be dissatisfied by that, to Want Out.  Which is why he’s Steve.

And this is one of the larger themes of CA:TWS — it’s about a bunch of highly skilled people who no longer find satisfaction in following orders, and want to find meaning outside of their jobs.  Sam did it, Nat and Steve are looking, and Bucky is just starting.

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