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play OneShot or else

@firefly7probably

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         What is the family? So deep runs the idea that the family is the exclusive place where people are safe, where people come from, where people are made, and where people belong, it doesn’t even feel like an idea anymore. Let us unpick it, then.          The family is the reason we are supposed to want to go to work, the reason we have to go to work, and the reason we can go to work. It is, at root, the name we use for the fact that care is privatized in our society. And because it feels synonymous with care, “family” is every civic-minded individual’s raison d’être par excellence: an ostensibly non-individualist creed and unselfish principle to which one voluntarily signs up without thinking about it. What alternative could there be? The economic assumption that behind every “breadwinner” there is a private someone (or someones) worth being exploited for, notably some kind of wife—that is, a person who is likely a breadwinner too—“freely” making sandwiches with the hard-won bread, or hiring someone else to do so, vacuuming up the crumbs, and refrigerating leftovers, such that more bread can be won tomorrow: this feels to many of us like a description of “human nature.”          Without the family, who or what would take responsibility for the lives of non-workers, including the ill, the young, and the elderly? This question is a bad one. We don’t hesitate to say that nonhuman animals are better off outside of zoos, even if alternative habitats for them are growing scarcer and scarcer and, moreover, they have become used to the abusive care of zoos. Similarly: transition out of the family will be tricky, yes, but the family is doing a bad job at care, and we all deserve better. The family is getting in the way of alternatives.          In part, the vertiginous question “what’s the alternative?” arises because it is not just the worker (and her work) that the family gives birth to every day, in theory. The family is also the legal assertion that a baby, a neonatal human, is the creation of the familial romantic dyad; and that this act of authorship in turn generates, for the authors, property rights in “their” progeny—parenthood—but also quasi-exclusive accountability for the child’s life. The near-total dependence of the young person on these guardians is portrayed not as the harsh lottery that it patently is, but rather as “natural,” not in need of social mitigation, and, furthermore, beautiful for all concerned. Children, it is proposed, benefit from having only one or two parents and, at best, a few other “secondary” caregivers. Parents, it is supposed, derive nothing so much as joy from the romance of this isolated intensity. Constant allusions to the hellworld of sheer exhaustion parents inhabit notwithstanding, their condition is sentimentalized to the nth degree: it is downright taboo to regret parenthood. All too seldom is parenthood identified as an absurdly unfair distribution of labor, and a despotic distribution of responsibility for and power over younger people. A distribution that could be changed.         Like a microcosm of the nation-state, the family incubates chauvinism and competition. Like a factory with a billion branches, it manufactures “individuals” with a cultural, ethnic, and binary gender identity; a class; and a racial consciousness. Like an infinitely renewable energy source, it performs free labor for the market. Like an “organic element of historical progress,” writes Anne McClintock in Imperial Leather, it worked for imperialism as an image of hierarchy-within-unity that grew “indispensable for legitimating exclusion and hierarchy” in general. For all these reasons, the family functions as capitalism’s base unit—in Mario Mieli’s phrase, “the cell of the social tissue.” It may be easier to imagine the end of capitalism, as I’ve riffed elsewhere, than the end of the family. But everyday utopian experiments do generate strands of an altogether different social tissue: micro-cultures which could be scaled up if the movement for a classless society took seriously the premise that households can be formed freely and run democratically; the principle that no one shall be deprived of food, shelter, or care because they don’t work.

Sophie Lewis, Abolish the Family

Anonymous asked:

You want to know a fun trick? Hold the "R" button on your PC while on a Tumblr post

I want everyone to know that after I answered this @pink-wisp tested it out without knowing what it does and GUESS WHAT HAPPENED

STOP HOLDING R, JESUS CHRISTMAS THIS HAS LIKE 700 NOTES HOLY FUCK PLEASE

This is the internet equivalent of a “Do Not Touch! HIGH VOLTAGE!” sign and watching everyone ignore it.

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If you think you're a boy read all the letters in this post that are blue in color. If you think you're a girl read all the letters in this post that are pink in color. If you're nonbinary read all the letters in this post that are orange in color.

shouting “DERIVATIVE!” at an art school kid just walking down the street from a moving vehicle, they break down and sob

okay but if i, a guy driving a car, yell that at somebody walking on the sidewalk, that’s not really an insult, that’s just what they are

I read the first part of the post and thought OP was just scaring art students with calculus

stating to think there’s an inverse correlation between how good media is and how easily fandomizable it is 😁

good media should make you stare at wall for 2 hours instead of immediately starting shippings wars and coffeeshop au and slowburn fics

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no no you’re not wrong but also

there’s a reason for this.

My personal theory is that if Media is REALLY good, there isn't really... space, if you will for fans to add or change perspectives on it. Too dense, too complete. Like how coral won't grow on plastic because it's too smooth

Whereas some half-baked hot garbage has got ALL KINDS of plot holes, incomplete characterization, warped timelines, missing worldbuilding and other Spaces for fans to colonize, like coral growing on a sunken battleship.

And then if a series just sucks too much, it's not fun to interact with at all, and people won't fandomize it because it's toxic. Like how coral won't grow on sunken piles of burnt-out tires.

I call this the Fandom Barrier-Reef Theory.

pi wou,ld not be popular if it started with 6. like imagine pi but it has like 6 or 8 at the front nobody wopuyld like that. would be fucking intimidating not cute. pi's greatest asset is thaty its first four digits add to 9 it's small and digetsable that way

this is stuill the trueest tyhing ive siad

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why are there so many proclaimed communists and anarchists on the internet but they haven't taken down a single corporation... like we should be hearing news stories like "group of self-identified 'catgirls' bombs Target headquarters" every week but we aren't. what gives

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I would hope it’s because they’re too busy working to unionize their workplaces or make mutual aid groups or provide people with legal support, instead of getting extrajudicially murdered by military contractors before they even make it to the corporate offices.

what happened to “you’re a communist if you want to make the world a more humane place and you recognize the cruelties of capitalism” when did it become “don’t even call yourself a communist unless you’ve personally assassinated a lobbyist”

I dunno. I just think that pointing out that a better world is possible and pointing to examples of that better world while highlighting the flaws of our current systems has a greater likelihood of creating lasting and meaningful change than a flashy action that insurance companies will pay to fix within a week.

For example, tearing down the wall of a prison doesn't get many (if any) people out of prison and convinces a huge portion of the public that actually prisons are good and that you specifically should be inside of them. But if you do jail support, educate people about the violence of the carceral system, and share examples of alternatives that benefit incarcerated people and their communities while doing no harm to the population at large, you can begin to convince non-communists and non-anarchists that actually maybe prisons are fucking terrible and a culture of snitching on your neighbor instead of talking to them is bad (and by doing jail support and inmate outreach work you actually materially help incarcerated people).

This is, of course, a long and incremental process that isn't as sexy as exploding Target headquarters to kick off a violent revolution, but is exploding Target headquarters going to kick off a violent revolution or is it just going to make people who are keen on revolutions subject to greater state violence? Doesn't it seem like perhaps the Atlanta Forest Defenders are facing a backlash against everything from the 2020 defund movement to the 90s ecoactivism? Doesn't it feel like they are, perhaps, being so harshly punished because popular uprisings that looted Targets and burned police precincts scare the shit out of the legal system?

There has been at least a literal century of discourse on the propaganda of the deed, and interpretations and reinterpretations of whether it works (sometimes) or doesn't (sometimes) but I think this essay from CrimethInc does a reasonable job of addressing the question of whether fragging fossil fuel executives is a worthwhile use of your time. This paragraph in particular stands out:

As we see it, anarchism is not a cult of revenge. Our ultimate goal should not be to mete out punishment according to an economy of vengeance, but to organize so effectively that we render assassinations unnecessary. Focusing on targeting men like McKinley seems to imply a great man theory of history in which specific extraordinary individuals are to blame for all the ills we suffer. Yet were it not for the structures that concentrated so much power in his hands—capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, the state—McKinley would simply have been an arrogant and unlikable buffoon. Those structures are administered by men like McKinley, but they are built on social constructs such as the idea that state authority is inherently legitimate and the habit of conceiving of one’s interests on an utterly individualistic basis. If we are to arrive in a world without oppression, the important question in regards to any tactic is whether it serves to undermine those constructs and catalyze others into action.

While an attack on property is certainly not the same as the assassination of a living human person, blowing up Target headquarters does not seem to meet the standard of catalyzing others to action or undermining oppressive structures. (Context is important, of course, and looting a Target is sometimes a worthwhile action to take.)

Blowing up Target headquarters isn't revolutionary, it's semiotics.

This is not to say that it's not incredibly cool and a potent symbol when a lesbian kitten does a silly :3 and releases the no fly list. That IS incredibly cool and I absolutely do applaud it, but there's other, less visible work to be done too.

The revolution is now. And it was yesterday. And it's tomorrow. The revolution is happening in stories that don't make the news, in people feeding their communities and helping their neighbors. It's happening when people design open-source medical equipment or when they leak police documents. It's happening when you send a book to a prison library or contribute to a bail fund.

Blowing up Target Headquarters doesn't actually do any long-term harm to capital. Unionizing Target and fighting back against their long anti-worker history might, and if it doesn't then at least it materially improves the lives of workers.

(Also my entire post has been extremely US-Centric, the revolution is also happening yesterday today and tomorrow in Rojava and Myanmar and Brazil and Ethiopia and Mexico and Canada and Iran and pretty much anywhere else you can think of. It happens in big ways like fighting a war in Myanmar, and it happens in little ways like providing access menstrual hygiene aid in Senegal.)

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My original post was a joke but this is actually a really insightful response, thank you!

Oh! In that case yeah I'm right there with you we need to molotov more banks.