Anti-Capitalist Fandom

this took me far too long to learn, so I’m going to tell you something that you need to internalise.

you don’t have to tell people anything you don’t want to tell them. it’s not rude or disrespectful to be private about things. you don’t owe anyone that information, so how could it be wrong to withhold it?

queer but don’t want to come out? don’t!

have a trauma disorder but don’t want to tell people what your trauma was? don’t!

disabled but don’t want to talk about it? that’s right, simply do not!

practice telling people to go away when they ask invasive questions.

the responses I’ve been using in particular are “that’s between me and my therapist/doctor”, and “why does it matter to you?”

you don’t need a “reason” to want to keep things to yourself. you don’t need to tell someone your entire history so that they can label you as “valid”.

don’t tell people information you don’t want to share.

ALOK VAID-MENON Getting Curious with Jonathan Van Ness 1x03 (2022)

Alok’s book report of The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century by Dr. Kyla Schuller

People will think that people who are willing to be an active participant in sex, especially if they have a dick or are dominant, directive or, guiding, are ontologically evil and devoid of innocence.

Top or Bottom: How do we desire?, Billy-Ray Belcourt, George Dust, and Kay Gabriel

Solidarity with children is often neglected or even made a joke of, so I wanna take a second and tell y'all what I wish I could go back in time and tell myself:

You're right. School is bullshit, homework is bullshit, waking up early is bullshit, going to bed early is bullshit. Some adults are just pointlessly cruel, even those in positions of authority over you. Sometimes adults are wrong, and, in fact, sometimes you are right

You were born with an innate sense of justice and fairness and adults have spent your entire life trying to beat it out of you so you'll shut up and do what you're told in an unjust and unfair society. Don't let them. Many of us have to take effort to relearn the wisdom you have right now, the ability to tell when something is bullshit even if you can't articulate why yet

You deserve happiness, fulfillment, and liberation just as much as any adult. Those first 18 years are just as important as any other time in your life, and it's time you'll never get back. Don't let anyone take them from you just because you're too young to fight back

Question everything, and never take "that's just the way it is" as an answer. Sometimes when things don't make sense to you it's because they just don't make any goddamn sense

Pick your battles, and be strategic. Don't take this post as permission to go starting fights for no reason. But remember that you have worth, and our society tends to not respect that. And you're right: that is bullshit

(also, read Anarchy Works)

also also, read The Teenage Liberation Handbook

Haven’t read it myself, but if it interests you then you can read it here for free in case paying for a book online and having it shipped to your house isn’t an option for you

Also check out No! Against Adult Supremacy

All it means when people say “you’re speaking from a place of privilege” is that you’re likely to underestimate how bad the problem is by default because you are never personally exposed to that problem. It’s not a moral judgement of how difficult your life is.

^^^^^^ read it. say it out loud. keep repeating it until you understand.

[image description: A tweet from @jodikantor with the words “Excellent questions from the wall of my daughter’s classroom.” The attached picture reads: Always ask yourself, -Who writes the stories? -Who benefits from the stories? -Who is missing from the stories?

i’m so sick of news articles that look like this 

it builds itself up like OKAY WE FOUND THESE DEVASTATING RESULTS

and then you go in to look and you find it had a sample size of 40 

and then you’re like okay, what was the fantastic difference between these 40 people when sleeping with and without a dog

and the article is like

…so you get through it and you’re like you’re trying to tell me you think this is substantial in any capacity, this 40 sample size 3% difference ass bullshit??????????? you fucking shitforbrick bad at math fake ass science losers?

these scientists hate dogs

Your sample sizes are small your standard deviations are high your conclusion means nothing and YOU SHOULD FEEL BAD

Scooby Doo (2002) dir. Raja Gosnell

you know what there were a lot of jokes in this movie that went over my head as a kid

that’s because this movie was filmed as an R-rated (18+) parody, but at the last moment before release, warner bros decided it would loose them too many fans of the cartoon for children and sully the good name of Scooby Doo and had the film re-edited down to PG. why do you think so much smoke was coming out of the mystery machine? why shaggy’s girlfriend is called mary jane? daphne and velma were lesbians and one of the first instances of cgi costumes on human actors was used to raise the neckline on their blouses. Freddy was played as gay with only the scene where they admit it deleted.

if you don’t know about this, seriously look it up. here’s a very toned-down wiki article but there’s much more out there. this film sounds like it was written for tumblr ten years early

just wanted to remind everyone again not only of the 3,000+ resources offered through our Liberation Library but also of the study guides for beginners offered under each of our social justice topics!

resources can be organized by type (article, novel, podcast, video, etc.) as well as filtered and searched through. we’ve tried to make our system much more accessible than our former platform on google docs so this is such an exciting development to share with everyone.

please share to promote equitable access education!

OKAY IVE GOTTEN A CHANCE TO CHECK IT OUT AND HOLY SHIT PLEASE EXPLORE THIS THING ITS SO FUCKING COOL

ahhh seeing reactions like these make me so happy, thank you so much!! y’all don’t understand, this all started as one random list in sophomore year of high school that i made to just help out a friend and then i shared it with my classmates and now… we’re here :)

to everyone, some gentle suggestions:

— @reaux07

In honor of some national March holidays that directly apply to our volunteers and supporters:

PLEASE SHARE! And consider volunteering to help out with the Liberation Library’s upkeep. We’ve still got a lot of empty tables that need filling. The task is easy but a bit tedious, so the more the merrier!!

some folks will encounter a normal self respecting woman who is 2% less of a doormat than other women and say: "she's got a mouth on her! wait till she talks like that to the wrong person! surprised she hasnt been murdered and left in a ditch with the way she talks to people!"

Reminder that capitalism is the death of art

are you whiny bitches seriously acting like faster and more affordable and more accessible translation is bad? it’s a bad thing? it’s a thing we should be against now? is that seriously where we’ve arrived? can you people think for ten fucking seconds just ONCE?

machine translation is really good for many languages - esp the romance ones - and while its not perfect or anything, like.. i don’t know how to tell you it’s a good thing we’re able to instantly speak to people, 80% accurately, from anywhere in the world

I went through the notes on this post specifically to find this reply - or one like it. Because it has a point, and it’s a decent point for you, the person. But it’s also missing the info of the larger scale problem.

(Or it isn’t; as you rightly point out in the tags, it’s a capitalism problem. But I’ll expand on this point of “capitalism”. I need to rant. I need to scream.)

I’m a professional translator. I work in video games and software, with an occasional dash of literary translation. I’ve worked in translation proper, I’ve worked on editing other people’s work, I’ve led a couple of translator teams. I’ve worked the occasional miracle, working around some Really Dumb Choices the developers made.

(Spoiler alert: other languages have different syntax and grammar, if you give me a list of nouns to translate, and then give me the plural “s” to translate separately, this is not good. Even in English, woman -> womans is dumb.)

I am a fan of making things affordable and accessible. I am really happy that Google Translate and similar things can tell me the gist of what people are saying in conversations I only half care about. As the poster above says, it’s great! Not perfect, but ok!

Do you know what’s not great? Do you know what the OP in the original image means?

The client the original image is talking about isn’t you. It’s not some person on the internet trying to find out what someone said in a Post. The client they’re talking about is, essentially, the corporation: the translation agency, the publishing house, the IT giant.

You, the individual, do not have the power to demand how I do my job. If you come to me and say, “Sarshi, I want you to take this 300-word post, run it through Google Translate, and then charge me half of what you usually do for translating it”, I can take it or leave it.

But I get contacted by agencies - half of them want this. “We have a game, Sarshi! Just post-edit the results of a machine translation!” “We have support articles, Sarshi! We’re paying you a lot less to post-edit the results of machine translation!”

You say it’s ok to have 80% accuracy, and I feel you! Yes, sometimes it is! But companies are like “lol, this works”, too!

It’s happening over and over. And these aren’t… they’re not people, you know? They’re not Auntie May trying to figure out what the dough recipe she got from her niece in Indonesia says. They’re agencies, trying to increase their earnings by promising top quality to companies, then going, “gosh, we said we’d do it for cheap, how can we manage that?”

Or they can even be large companies themselves. Oh, you’ve spent a bajillion trillion dollars trying to create the CryptoNFTVirtualRealityAI hybrid that everybody knew wouldn’t work and now you panic because your earnings are lower than usual? Oh, and you want to “cut costs” by screwing over every contractor you have? Great. Just great.

This is going to screw you over - you, the individual. Not my client, not the translator’s client in general - the company’s client. The corporation is too big to really care about how you feel about their product - the employees individually might, but the company’s only metric is if you buy it or not. And the company makes decisions based on what brings the most money for the least cost.

So your hardware manuals might be crap and you might be in tears because you have no idea how to make your new appliance do the thing. You’ll go on YouTube and you’ll find a solution, and you’ll eventually figure it out. And maybe you’ll forget about the crap manual in time. So next time, they still won’t get a good translator, because they already have a cheaper solution that seems to work.

So your game looks like it was translated by a bunch of rats in a bunker and you can barely understand what anyone’s saying? Well, maybe they got a bottom-feeding agency overpromise that they totally have legit translators working for $1/hour. Pinky swear! Did you buy the game? You did. So… the system worked! They’ll hire the same agency again!

It’s like the clothing industry all over again. We could have better clothes, but it’s cheaper not to. They’re doing us a service by selling us shoes that won’t last a season, and T-shirts that will look like crap after washing them twice - they’re cheap, aren’t they? They’re affordable. Anyone can get clothes. (So you pay more in time are are more frustrated? Who’s counting!)

And meanwhile, it’s easy to forget things might be different. That we have the ability to create good things, pleasant things. That manuals can be easily readable, that games can sound great, that books can be awesome to read. It becomes harder to trust the market, harder to believe in quality, easier to say that this is normal, this is how things just are.

And if you speak English natively, well… You’re at a huge advantage. A lot of stuff is created by your people, for you. For countries like mine, that are small enough to import a lot, nearly everything is translated. I want you to imagine almost all movies subbed, every appliance made elsewhere (with menus needing translated and all), every app in a foreign language. And everybody who can cut costs will try to.

It’s not… it’s not great.

#excellent breakdown #i promise no translator worth anything is against individual people being able to use mt to understand texts and communicate #i’m a translator and i’m a big fan of machine translation in my everyday life but it should not be used commercially #machine translation in commercial products is at worst a health and safety risk #but NOBODY who actually understands the matter is saying that mt shouldn’t exist. for fuck’s sake

via @nailgun-nali

she was so real for this

THANK YOU, from the disability community, for doing the actual research and not just relying on your first assumptions and stereotypes.

Organization of nurses with disabilities: http://nond.org/

Association of medical professionals who are deaf or hard of hearing: https://amphl.org/

When I was growing up, I was around people who were mostly pretty good at staying positive about my range of career options as a deaf person and who encouraged me to dream big. But one of the few things I was told that I likely couldn’t do would be to be a doctor. This is because they weren’t sure how to work around the “need” to listen to certain things through a stethoscope. No, it didn’t have a real impact on my career-related decision making because I didn’t really have an interest in the medical professions anyway, my interests took me in other directions. But it was one of the few limits that some people put on my vision, and even though it didn’t have a practical impact on me I still felt the constraint a bit – just the idea that something random like a stethoscope could potentially shut me out from an entire field.

Now flash forward to when I’m in my 20s, back when I was interviewing people and writing articles for a university staff/faculty publication and alumni outreach magazine. And one day I find myself interviewing a deaf EMT for an article I was writing on deaf women working in various professions related to the various sciences. And this deaf EMT had a specialized stethoscope designed to be SO LOUD that even I, a severely to profoundly deaf person, could actually hear a beating heart or the sound of nerves working! And that was with putting the buds for the stethoscope directly into my ears, which meant that I actually took out my hearing aids in order to listen instead of having to figure out how to get headphones to directly funnel sound into the eeny tiny microphone in my hearing aid.  The kind of headphones designed with buds going directly into the ear just DO NOT WORK FOR THAT, period full stop. And most things designed for hearing people DO NOT WORK for deaf people because they only use the little bitty baby amplification that hearing people use to protect their incredibly fragile ears that start to hurt at just about the point I’m starting to be able to hear that there even IS a sound to be heard. Hearing people run in terror from the kind of BIG LOUD amplification that us deaf people need. (Unless they are the kind of rock music fans who think all good music ends with actual, noticeable hearing loss at the end of the concert.) And on top of that, most things designed for hearing people naturally don’t compensate for the fact that I hear low pitch sounds MUCH better than high pitch sounds. Meaning, I can actually hear low pitch sounds if they are amplified loud enough, but for high pitch sounds – well, the first 32 years of my life they basically didn’t exist in my life, for the past 14 or 15 years the only reason I can hear high pitch sounds is because these days, with the advent of digital (not just analog) hearing aids, it’s now possible to have hearing aids that take high pitch sounds and process them so they sound like low pitch sounds. So this is what water sounds like! When it’s processed so that it’s actually something I can hear.  But somehow this stethoscope–invented when (most? or all?) of us deaf folks were still wearing analog hearing aids–managed to be loud enough for me.

Until the deaf woman EMT loaned me her stethoscope for a minute and explained it to me, I didn’t even know that you could actually hear the nerves working, not just the heart or breath in the lungs! And never imagined actually hearing it myself

And the deaf EMT told me that, for deaf people who really can’t hear anything at all even with that LOUD stethoscope, there are other machines to pick up basically the same information that you can get through a stethoscope. And she also pointed out that’s a fairly small part of being a doctor or EMT, anyway. You don’t have to be able to use a stethoscope to join the medical professions.

And … somehow, even though I had never personally actually wanted to be a doctor anyway, and still don’t want to, and still don’t miss having tried it, it was still so awesome realizing that this one last barrier that had been put on my old childhood imagination could just fade away.

People need to know.

PEOPLE NEED TO KNOW.

That people with disabilities can do all kinds of things

THAT people with disabilities ARE ALREADY DOING all kinds of things.

Because … on one hand, yes, there are a FEW things that people with certain disabilities actually can’t do. They do not yet have driverless cars on the open market for everyone to buy, so until that’s ready, blind people still can’t do jobs that by definition have to involve driving (like taxi cab driver, bus or truck driver, etc). And deaf people can’t be phone operators. And although deaf people could translate between written languages, and although there are certified deaf interpreters who translate between signed languages (yeah that’s an actual thing), people who are really deaf (and not just a little hard of hearing) can’t interpret between spoken languages on the phone. 

But most of the things that people THINK are impossible for people with disabilities to do?  Can be worked around with the right technologies, devices, software, adaptations, and a little resourcefulness and creativity. 

More people need to be like @scriptmedic, meaning they need to do the work to actually research the options and find out what is already being done. And they need to talk with people who have the actual disability to see what ideas they have. Because we often have a lot of these ideas, and we often see some of our supposedly more “innovative” ideas as being actually rather boring and ordinary because we’ve been doing them since before our memories even start. Just by example – As far as I can tell, from the bits I know (I’ve only known a few adults without hands at all well), many babies born without arms seem to just naturally do all kinds of things with their feet instead, because that’s what they have to explore the world with. It seems like a “gee whiz” creative answer for people who haven’t needed to adapt to life without arms, but isn’t so innovative from the perspective of an adult who has been doing all kinds of stuff with their feet literally since infancy. As a deaf person who has been using writing as a tool of communication since, like, age 7 or something, it baffles me when I still occasionally meet hearing adults who seem to find the idea remarkable. And all that is before you even get to the stuff where we have to actually work to come up with a solution, by drawing upon more sophisticated adult experience, knowledge of available technologies, and opportunity to talk with other adults with similar disabilities who are working to solve things too. We usually have a lot, a lot of practice working to come up with solutions for things we haven’t tried before, so we are often likely to see solutions that everyone else misses–and not just for disability related accommodations.

People with disabilities don’t want to set themselves up to fail any more than anyone else. So if they seem to believe there’s a way for them to do it, you should give them a chance to show you, or explain what they’ve already been doing in the past, or explain what they’ve seen other people with the same disability do, or explain what ideas they have that they would like a chance to try out. Don’t just assume and then stop trying. Talk to us.

This. All of this.

Are you looking at creating a disabled character? Then you need to think not about what they can or can’t do, but about how they might approach the same task with different tools at their disposal.

Don’t say “X can’t do Y or Z”. First, ask, “what is actually NEEDED to do Y? What’s the process? How could I adapt it?”

I’ll be the first to say that medicine is an ableist community. We are. We almost have to be, because the whole point of medicine is to reduce disability and disease. We assume total health is the baseline, that other states are “abnormal” and to be corrected.

And sometimes that leads to misunderstandings. Misconceptions. False assertions.

And I’m going to tell you this, because I think @andreashettle would like to know this: I am, functionally speaking, a person with “normal” hearing. (I have a very slight amount of loss from working under sirens for a decade, but functionally I do just fine).

But you know what? I’ve never heard the sound of nerves. Never. I didn’t even realize that that is a sound you can hear.

So you, with your deaf ears, just taught me something about a tool I use every. single. day. of. my. life. About a sound I’ve never heard, with my “normal” ears and my “normal” stethoscope. (Okay, it’s a pretty kick-ass stethoscope, lezzbehonest rightnow.)

And for the love of all that is holy, I want to see these characters in fiction. Deaf doctors, one-handed medics, bilateral amputees running circles around other characters just to prove that they can.

I apologize for my misconception, for assuming that disability meant “can’t”. It’s a cultural part of medicine that I dislike. But now that I know it’s a thing I want to see it everywhere.

But if you’re going to do it… do the godsdamned research. Have respect for those who live with disabilities. Write better. Write real.

And above all? Write respectfully.

xoxo, Aunt Scripty

Experience being disabled is a very relevant thing.

If you’ve got a task that you don’t think you’d be able to do one armed, think about it like this: do you think you could do it one armed if you had 10 years to figure it out?

Most adults who were born disabled have 20+ years of experience figuring out how to do shit while disabled.

That’s a very real expertise, and it’s relevant to other situations as well.

The expertise and experience of disabled people is such an important factor. So many people without a disability think of it like: “what if I suddenly lost an arm, or lost my sight (or just closed my eyes); how would I do X?” And if they can’t think of a way (usually fairly quickly), assume it can’t be done.

There is so much about accomodations and adaptive technology and just plain skills that abled people generally don’t even know that they (we) don’t know. It’s a whole other universe of possibility.

Despite every moment of life being indescribably precious and a wondrous mystery, I will spend it caring about dividends and how many rental properties I have.

Rich people are truly dead inside. 

I can't imagine caring this much about numbers that absolutely will never impact my life. This person is making more in passive income than I've ever made in my life and he's just like "but but I need more :(".

I mean, fuck that guy, but psychologically it's interesting.

Some desperate remnant of his soul knows what he needs. As soon as his debt is cleared, he goes on to live what many would call an utterly charmed life: working no more than 20 hours a week, travelling and spending time with friends (which he, at $150,000 a year and no mortgage, has ample money to do). He has a loving relationship also.

But his brain is so rotten that he cannot understand happiness anymore. He is incapable of conceptualising it other than in money.

A man who has everything except the ability to feel it.

How poetic.

But fuck that guy.

I want to hit this man.

I want to rob this man.

Meow appears beside Rogue, holding a sign: "Heist? Heist."

This man is so so so close to realizing a fundamental truth to how humans operate, but I genuinely don’t think he’s going to get there. Although I’m not sure he realizes it this man views the money he earns as a direct translation of his sense of personal achievement and engagement. 

Which means that when he says he regrets the months he didn’t pick up more hours to earn more money, what he’s describing here is boredom. He’s doing it in the crassest, shallowest, most income-obsessed and unattainable for most of us way possible, yes. But this man is expressing that once he achieved a certain financial goal he relaxed, enjoyed himself, got bored, realized on some level he was understimulated, and then started working more hours to meet whatever stimulated activity threshold he personally needs. 

This is infuriating because this man experienced the counter-argument to that nonsensical talking point that if we meet people’s financial needs with a universal basic income they’ll grow lazy and won't do anything. 

Anyone trying to develop $200,000 in passive annual income is not working three minimum-wage jobs to live paycheck-to-paycheck. This man’s basic financial needs were met. Working more hours to make more money is just his own personal code for ‘I still needed to use my mind to do things’ (using what might be the only metric of personal achievement he might actually have). This man lived the argument for universal basic income and I genuinely don’t think he realizes that. Once his basic income needs were met he still needed to do things to keep himself stimulated and engaged with his own life.

You see a version of this play out with retirees who leave their jobs, go home, and very quickly find themselves in need of new activities or friends or engagements to keep them present and stimulated in their lives. Ensuring someone’s basic financial needs are met doesn’t make them stop doing things, humans don’t work that way.

Reblogging for the psychology lessons

There is, I believe, a line in an Agatha Christie story about a man so desperately unhappy he doesn’t know he’s unhappy. “Ah, a rich man,” responds the nun.

I'm grateful to have gone to a college that requires honorifics in class bc otherwise I'd probably assume like most that "Mx. [surname]" is the only nonbinary option. I personally hate the tendency to put x in every gendered term and call it nonbinary so here are some other honorifics (but certainly not the only ones) I've seen nonbinary people use. For the sake of simplicity let's say the surname is Jackson.

Ind. Jackson- honestly this one kind of fucks. Ind stands for individual, and it gets bonus points for being the nearest equivalent to literally just referring to yourself as comrade.

Misc. Jackson- this one is ok, runs the risk of being pronounced like Miss. Honestly a little too on the nose for my taste. Also not really sure what it's saying? Miscellaneous? It seems odd with my name so I personally stay away but go for it if it sounds neat.

M. Jackson- *chef's kiss* mwa. This is the one I use. It's classy, it's elegant, and I personally like how you have to form your mouth in an entirely different way than Ms. or Mr. It forces people to make more of an effort to learn it, in my experience. They can't really play it off easily when they misgender you. However M. is also used shorthand in some languages for gendered honorifics (ie. Monsieur is M. in French) so if you're not comfy with that association this might not be your best choice

Anyways! tldr: honorifics are important for nonbinary people to have for formal environments, but Mx. isn't your only option. If anyone has more they use hmu in the notes bc I'm really curious what yall use.

Also consider:

Ser. (from spanish) - I use this one and Mx.

Mé. (pronounced "May")

Le (the fancy kind, pronounced "lay", very 2009 sheek)

Msr. (pronounced "Misser" and is a direct combo of Miss and Mister)

Mt. (pronounced "Mount". Be a force of nature! 🗻⛈)

^^^Along those lines... Folks use pronouns inspired by nouns they like all the time, so why not use nouns as a basis for honorifics? If its important to you what's not to like about it being a more personal form of address?

I've heard people use the full title Mystery in place of Mister/Miss, but I don't know how they shorten it. Could do My. , Mst. , Myst. ...

https://vm.tiktok.com/ZTdQuxw52/

I think I found my new favorite rabbit hole. This voice actor does Shakespeare scenes in a southern accent and I need to see the whole damn play. Absolutely beautiful

if you're not from the us american south, there's some amazing nuances to this you may have missed. i can't really describe all of them, because i've lived here my whole life and a lot of the body language is sort of a native tongue thing. the body language is its own language, and i am not so great at teaching language. i do know i instinctively sucked on my lower teeth at the same time as he did, and when he scratched the side of his face, i was ready to take up fucking arms with him.

but y'all. the way he said "brutus is an honourable man" - each and every time it changed just a little. it was the full condemnation Shakespeare wanted it to be. it started off slightly mock sincere. barely trying to cover the sarcasm. by the end...it wasn't a threat, it was a promise.

christ, he's good.

the eliding of “you all” to “y’all” while still maintaining 2 syllables is a deliberate and brilliant act of violence. “bear with me” said exactly like i’ve heard it at every funeral. the choices of breaking and re-establishing of eye contact. the balance of rehearsed and improvised tone. A+++ get this man a hollywood contract.

I’m not from the South but let me tell you something: I have never understood or felt any of Julius Caesar as clearly in any other interpretation as I did with this actor. Just. Gave me chills.

Seriously the beard scratching moved me which sounds weird but that was like the he is being sincere and this is coming from the heart kinda thing because honestly idk how to explain it but yeah this is gold and I wish we had seen this when we read Caesar in 10th grade English

The really funny thing about Hobbits dressing like 19th century gentleman farmers and everyone else looking generically renaissance/medieval is that it kind of heavily implies that Hobbits are the only ones who developed advanced sewing techniques.

Hobbits are the best tailors #confirmed

Merry: do you have any scissors?

Éowyn, who lives in the early medieval period: what are scissors

They also had advanced irrigation techniques, postmen, and clockwork.

In The Hobbit, Bilbo has *matches* for fucks sake.