I made this tumblr because a girl wanted me to

I think somewhere people got confused and now think that "privileged" equals "oppressor" and "having privilege" equals "has the power to oppress".

It doesn't.

Would love to hear more about this, because I understand the first part, that privileged doesn’t automatically equal oppressor, but I don’t think I know enough to understand how having privilege doesn’t equal having the power to oppress.

Having privilege does not automatically grant you power.

I have working legs. This does not mean I am systemically oppressing people who need mobility aids, and it doesn't mean I have the power to do it, either. If I got elected to government and passed legislation that removed elevators and ramps on the basis of "Well I don't need them", then I'd be systemically oppressing people based on walking privilege.

It's exactly what I was saying on the other post; existing doesn't mean oppression.

You do not have mobility problems with your legs at the time of this posting. I do, but I can still walk with relatively little assistance as long as my pain is low and the terrain is not actively working against me. That doesn't mean the stairs in your house or apartment are oppressing me, or that your ability to climb them with no negative effects is oppressing me. You have the privilege of not needing to worry if you can actually make that climb and thus more avenues are open to you- you don't have to worry about the expense of buying a house with no stairs, you don't secondguess if you can actually take the flight, entire venues and employment/schooling oppurtunies and city streets and businesses aren't completely inaccessible to you because they exist on the third floor with no fucking elevator, you don't suffer sleepless at night when you were forced to take stairs you shouldn't have climbed. But unless *you*, specifically YOU, designed these stairways in these places with no other way to access the upper floors... it's not like you not needing to worry about that is directly oppressing me.

You CAN contribute to it- "why should stairs need to be accessible" "who even needs ramps and elevators" "I mean if you can walk you should be able to take a couple steps" "why do I need to make room for you on the elevator or wait for you to catch up" and my favorite "wow the world's youngest senior citizen" usually said when walking with my cane. But until that line is crossed, you existing as someone who can walk without pain unassisted is not directly oppressing me.

And that's the thing. Actions are oppression. Existing as someone with privilege does not mean you automatically oppress people.

"Having privilege" is morally neutral. Society is what bestows you privilege. That is completely out of your control.

"Oppression" is morally repugnant. Actions that contribute to the harm of others are terrible and bad and you should not do them.

Too many people conflate the two.

reblog to explode a landlord

Unrestrained summer fun

I'm joining the orca war on the side of the orcas

YOU. YOU GET ME

Continue Reading.

[...]

— James Connolly, Let Us Free Ireland! (1899)

It’s not even just “they’re doing to trans people now what they did to gay people then,” the Nazis did the same thing to trans people at the time because there were a lot of trans people in Berlin, in part because it’s where the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft was, which was hugely influential for trans people

I think it’s useful to point out how much anti-trans rhetoric overlaps with other forms of bigotry and broader enforcement of cisheteronormativity/white supremacy, but also important to recognize that trans people have been a thing the whole time, we aren’t some new invention of the late 2010s. Neonazis want us dead because the actual Nazis wanted us dead 90 years ago too

Bloodborne Official Artworks: Orphan of Kos, Fishing Hamlet Coast, & Mother Kos.

The Joshua tree is on its way to extinction because so-called green energy companies want to keep the death machine of civilization going by installing large swaths of solar panels over the desert floor, a big metal blanket that will kill everything it covers: the desert tortoise, the sage grouse, the hawks and snakes and beautiful flowers that have flourished for thousands of years. Gone. Gone.

All so that we can keep the dead heart in the rotting corpse of industrial civilization beating into the next decade. These are the "good guys" btw, these are the "renewable" "carbon neutral" options: covering the desert in miles of metal and microchips until every living being without a bank account is dead.

so this is a cool post because

1. it is outright stating what many 'anticiv' positionists will constantly deny everyone says, that is, that we should stop producing electricity, fuck everyone who needs it to, like, stay alive--guess that's fine because they are only 'the rotting corpse of industrial civilization' innit

2. it is proving my perennial and central critique of 'anti-civilization' rhetoric correct, which is that it reifies and uncritically accepts the narrative of 'civilization' as a coherent category in opposition to 'pristine' 'natural' wilderness' -- only with the valences inverted. these precious 'pristine' deserts have been untouched by 'technology'--the agricultural, social, ecological technologies of the indigenous people who live in and on the borders of this 'pristine wilderness' are, of course, immediately discounted from this category just as they are in the colonial mindset, only this time it is an exoneration rather than a dismissal.

3. any meaningful critique of extractive social systems is entirely sublimated into a fetishistic projection of the actions taken by people operating under the incentives of a particular economic system onto inert objects (metal and microchips, oh my!)--an immaterial, ontological destructiveness is projected into the (in reality passive and nonagentic) products and processes of generating electricity themselves instead of making any substantial critique of the economic system that is actually causing the lamented ecological destruction

the result being a politics that is totally immaterial, that is fundamentally bought into the very narratives of historical progress it claims to oppose, and that would be tremendously destructive if it had any potential to produce an actionable political program, which makes us all very lucky that it decidedly doesn't!

Heard some US army dude say something about propaganda; that often as not the point is to produce absurd propaganda, so that it calls reporting on both sides into question.

If your side makes some absurd claim about the enemy killing their own civilians for not clapping or whatever, and the enemy points out your real war crimes, then, while your fanatics might believe you anyway, the response of the Educated Moderate would be: ‘Well, there’s a lot of misinformation going around, so it’s not really possible to know the facts for sure’ - tacitly going along with your goal of muddying the waters, and feeling like they’ve outsmarted you for it.

Funnily enough, very applicable to Radio Free Whatever and its absurd reporting with, say, the DPRK.

Generally this ‘aim high, hit low’ approach applies to a lot of things. If you say an attack killed 60 people, and your enemy says it killed 5, people will feel that it probably killed something like 20 or 30. If you put out propaganda saying that blackouts are, actually good - whether you paint them as some noble sacrifice for the cause, or as secretly-beneficial, or whatever - then people who would otherwise hate them will be swayed to a comfortable neutrality.

The next best thing after someone who supports you is someone who tolerates you, and the best way to get lots of people to tolerate you is by making them think that, maybe, they should really be supporting you. It’ll be rare to get someone to believe that whatever political maneuver you’re pulling is actually righteous, but, if you make it (seem like) an opinion that at least exists, then the comfortable middle-ground most people will take will be to simply not oppose it.

There doesn’t need to be a difficult argument on whether something is good, or exists, there just needs to be an argument. That’s enough to make people steer clear of it.