hey writers if you want to make a metaphor for racism, please maybe remember that racism is literally based on nothing. Africans weren’t enslaved en masse because the Robo-Musa threatened to destroy the world, they were enslaved because it was economically rewarding and politically convenient. If at any point your allegory for racism includes “so <oppressed group> did this major catastrophe and” then you have not only missed the point but you are literally reinforcing the ideas that racism have let racism self-perpetuate (that e.g. black people are naturally dangerous and violent and must be contained or begrudgingly accepted by the Nice White People)
Anonymous asked:
Hey there, how would you define a "liberal"? I'm not tryna fight I'm just genuinely curious because I think my definition might be different
yeah so you might be using the word as it's defined in the US political mainstream, where it means 'the democratic party and its voters'. when i talk about 'liberalism' i mean the political ideological tendency that dominates most of the world that centers 'individual rights' and specifically the 'right' to private property and upholds 'free-market' capitalism as the optimal way to structure society. a 'liberal' is then somebody who believes in private property, free market economics, and capitalist liberal democracy as vital organizing principles for society. this of course includes the democrat party, but also the republican party and in fact also the green and libertarian parties and every mainstream US politician including the USA's 'radical' social democrats like bernie sanders & co. i say 'liberal' not as opposed to 'conservative' but as chiefly opposed to 'communist'.
honestly i think the biggest perpetrators of 'nonbinary is a third gender' on here are people who refuse the concept. 'im not male or female or nonbinary, im a fourth thing' okay, so as long as that thing isn't 'male' or 'female', you're nonbinary. nonbinary isn't a gender in itself, it's literally just a descriptor for any gender other than male or female. 'yeah well im not agender either' okay but again as long as you're not male or female then nonbinary, as a descriptor of whatever your gender actually is, is valid. it's literally just saying 'you are neither male or female' and nothing else. every single gender other than those two is nonbinary. it isn't a gender any more than 'not australian' is a nationality. the concept is an entirely necessary one and, again, is literally just a negation of the western gender binary system. if you're anything other than the two genders of that system, you're not on that system. you're not on the western gender binary. you're non-binary.
like. 'i dont like the label i don't identify with it' alright, and that's a personal thing - but, ultimately, the lgbt community isn't a personal thing. you can experience gender completely privately without any labels - the *point* of having labels, of developing a *community* is to organise towards lgbt rights. the only reason an 'lgbt community' exists is that it was created by the lgbt rights struggle as a means of organising disparate people affected by a common axis of oppression under a common umbrella.
the sole reason the term 'transgender' exists is to rally together people who are marginalised by forced gender assignment at birth - if you are not the gender you were forcibly assigned at birth, you are transgender. you can dislike the term personally and not identify with it, but as a descriptor it applies, and it *needs* to apply for reasons bigger than personal comfort. having language that can describe these things, having terminology, is fundamental for forming a rights movement. fundamentally, the term is not a personal statement of identity, it is a description of a social relationship towards an axis of oppression, being transphobia. the coherence and solidarity of that rights movement is in general more important than the aesthetics of a certain term.
everyone's experience of gender and sexuality are personal, but the reason we have these terms is to enable discussion and analysis of ways gender and sexuality exist as axes of oppression. these terms are descriptive and theoretical, they identify who is a target of a certain oppression. we *cannot* have a rights movement without them. the basis of all these terms, which have become labels, which have become identities, is in *political organisation and action*. the lgbt community was not formed as a fun club, a self-contained thing for its own sake. it is a means to fight for our rights. to do that we need to be able to concretely describe who we are and what fights we're fighting for.
my gf is developing new and exciting and really good locked tomb takes
"humans were meant to-" "we were put on this earth to-" no we were not, the telos is a trap, find a less obnoxious way to phrase whatever point you want to make i am begging you
what is art about? blood. what is love about? blood. what is hate about? blood. what is sex about? blood. what is history about? blood. what am i about? blood. what is blood about? idk ask a biologist i guess
hi, biologist here! blood is about gay sex
Anonymous asked:
since you enjoyed that ask about the Discord hater, I thought you might be amused by this - I have a friend who only uses Tumblr to look at my blog, and he quickly took umbrage with some post you made and went off in our groupchat about how ‘Tumblr leftists don’t understand nuance’ and whenever I sent or reblogged a post by you he would grumble about it
Then later on I sent some other posts by you to our groupchat, including one about Bionicle (which he loves) and he started to change his tune
now whenever he sees dumb twitter discourse he tries to guess what your take on it would be and says stuff like “txttletale would never say something like this. i’m becoming txttletale-pilled”
as far as I know he has never looked at your blog directly
everyone everywhere is getting more txttletale-pilled day by day
the txttletale pill has a tiny mafalda pritned on it
Anonymous asked:
What if the businesses are minority-owned? It seems bad to hurt the profits of people already so very marginalized by society...
more expansive answer: minority business owners don't have the same interests as minority working class people. immigrants who start businesses tend to employ other immigrants--which is to say, they exploit other immigrants. where there is a shared front on, say, issues of race or gender or sexuality between marginalized business owners and marginalized workers, it is secondary to the fundamentally differing economic interests of the two. i have v. little politically with a trans or latina small business owner--those people are not on my side in the struggle against oppression because when push comes to shove they will lobby for me to be exempted from laboru regulations and minumum wage laws if i work for them!
Anonymous asked:
(bc i saw ur post abt chatgpt and ppl thinking it kills ur brain or wtvr) what do you think abt similar claims for tiktok?
yea my response to any such claim about a 'weakening' of the intellectual faculties due to [social or cultural factor or change] is basically always the same, namely: that is blatantly eugenic logic, it's ahistorical, it's moral anxiety invoking biological terminology to justify reactionary political diagnosis and prognosis, &c &c. wrt social media in particular i also see a lot of appeals to crass evolutionism (as in, "humans weren't evolved for this form of stimulus" and other such), which is also very poor reasoning on multiple counts (essentialist, appeals to a vaguely-defined state of nature, the perceived technology–nature antinomy, &c). i dislike a lot of social media because of the ways it's frequently designed to promote profit-generating conflict; the outsourcing of necessary moderator functions to predominantly impoverished and global south workers who are underpaid and frequently traumatised by this very work; the wilful refusal to grapple with the colonial and imperial resource extraction committed to build and maintain the physical technology upon which 'cyberspace' depends; &c. but i'm so turned off by 'critique' of tiktok and other social media that fails to grapple with these and related issues and turns instead to reactionary ideas about mental degeneration 'loss of critical thinking' or however we're phrasing it now
having a child has taught me that every toddler is completely justified in their frustrations and tantrums because learning how to do something you have literally never encountered or heard of before is insane. and being expected to be completely calm in the face of this constant barrage of overwhelming information is doubly insane.
i got charlie a sticker activity book and it occurred to me i have to TEACH someone how to unpeel stickers. it's SKILL that requires DEXTERITY and FINE MOTOR ABILITY. i thought it was obvious that you have to curl the page a little bit to create a break in the cut so the sticker comes up.
obviously a fucking BABY wouldn't know that because they have no background experience to inform their thought process. OBVIOUSLY. and OBVIOUSLY the LITERAL BABY wouldn't get it right the first few times. it would OBVIOUSLY take practice. lots of it.
i hate this feeling. it's so obvious. why are children treated so badly when they're learning everything for the first fucking time. why do people treat children so horribly and expect so much. they're brand new. why didn't i get the same grace i give to my child? why did no one have patience for me? why, when it's this easy?
it's so easy. it's so fucking easy.
WHAT is that one poem (?), abt a modern worker contemplating the numerous forgotten who were actually responsible for all the ‘great’ deeds of history
found it!!
A Worker Reads History Bertolt Brecht
Who built the seven gates of Thebes? The books are filled with names of kings. Was it the kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone? And Babylon, so many times destroyed. Who built the city up each time? In which of Lima’s houses, That city glittering with gold, lived those who built it? In the evening when the Chinese wall was finished Where did the masons go? Imperial Rome Is full of arcs of triumph. Who reared them up? Over whom Did the Caesars triumph? Byzantium lives in song. Were all her dwellings palaces? And even in Atlantis of the legend The night the seas rushed in, The drowning men still bellowed for their slaves. Young Alexander conquered India. He alone? Caesar beat the Gauls. Was there not even a cook in his army? Phillip of Spain wept as his fleet was sunk and destroyed. Were there no other tears? Frederick the Great triumphed in the Seven Years War. Who triumphed with him? Each page a victory At whose expense the victory ball? Every ten years a great man, Who paid the piper? So many particulars. So many questions.
So I just went through three notebooks to find this, because I knew it was there.
I was at the ROM, about six years ago, at a special exhibit on Babylon. And there was a brick, formerly part of a palace. And Nebuchadnezzar, the one who built the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, had had his name in cuneiform stamped on every single brick, to emphasize that he had built it.
And on this one, a workman had carved his own name, Zabina’, into the block too, in Aramaic. Here’s the brick. It’s 2600 years old.
All the people in the notes saying they would deliberately fuck there as if they somehow don’t recognize exactly the kind of habitat where 1000 ticks will find their way into every crevice of your human flesh
its amazing how many people who do the whole "i support any good faith identity" thing also have cartoonishly bad ability to recognize what isnt in good faith. like sorry "im not into xyz gender unless its a trans person i dont have to see as that gender" isnt the peak of weird socially unacceptable queerness its just a pretty average normie kind of misgendering. "anyone of any personal relationship to gender can be a lesbian but only if they were cafab" isnt some brand new radical genderfuckery its literally just a rebranding of transmisogyny.
yankee-defenders are really funny about their military defeats. 'we didn't lose, we just decided to stop fighting and leave.' why did you decide to do that? 'because it simply wasn't in our interests to continue fighting any more.' why wasn't it in your interests? 'a lot of factors, it was more trouble than it was worth.' weird, and the other side was causing that trouble? the trouble that was making continuing the war overall a loss for you? they caused enough trouble with your invasion force that you had no real choice but to stop the invasion and leave? so they defeated you? 'no we just decided to leave'
it's the geopolitics idiocy version of logistics idiocy's 'no really the german tanks could have won the war if only they weren't so terrible to produce that they could only build a dozen. if it were a one-on-one Fair Fight they would have won'. this weird view of war as like, bashing action figures into each other to see which is, detached from any real context, Cooler. yeah sure if the US completely ignored its material incentives and devoted all its imperial resources towards the singular pursuit of destroying a single guerrilla force, maybe they could succeed in their occupation. but they're not going to, are they, so all that the guerrillas need to defeat them in the real world is to make occupation more costly than beneficial.
somewhat related being the derogatory connotation of reverse-engineered weapons. 'you just copied our tech' - lmao really? nice! we got good guns and made you guys do all the work? that's a bonus! in case you forgot, the point of wars is to defeat the other side, not to look smart. like sunzi said: a wise general makes a point of foraging on the enemy. One cartload of the enemy's provisions is equivalent to twenty of one's own, and likewise a single picul of his provender is equivalent to twenty from one's own store.