one of the lefts big problems is our tendency to treat capitalism like feudalism or some other system with direct political/legal/economic rule. i think we shoot ourselves in the foot when we do that because everything becomes a sort of illuminati-esque class conspiracy and our goal somehow moves away from structural anti-capitalism toward the less ambitious (and ultimately liberal) hatred of rich individuals as a kind of end-in-itself

u lie down and its like (• ) ( •) and thats just how it is

You lie on your side and it’s just (•)(• )

what kind of eyes do y’all have 

Weaklings! (• •)

Looks the same going out as coming in.

Why. What in the god damn fuck. Everyone who has contributed to this winding up on my dash hates me.

If 👏 you 👏 are 👏 at 👏 uni/college 👏 register 👏 to 👏 vote👏 this 👏 is 👏 not 👏 a 👏 drill 👏

i don’t care where you are, this is good advice.

Do it now! If you're a student you can be registered at home AND at your term time address, so you can vote in whichever place you happen to be when the election comes around. https://www.gov.uk/register-to-vote If you're not 18 yet but will be by the time the election happens? You can register now! If you don't get round to registering at your uni address by two weeks before the election? Go on the council website for the area you're registered in and check if you can apply to vote by post or proxy! I voted by proxy when I was at uni and I just had to fill out a form, then tell my mum who I wanted to vote for.

What if we just remove men from politics? 🤔

Men don’t realize what stuff like this does to young girls growing up. The effect it has on us, never seeing ourselves in power. Just like young children of color never see themselves in power. It’s just picture after picture of white men in black suits, over and over and over again. They’ll never understand what that’s like.

A related problem is what this does to young boys—and especially young, white boys. This creates the idea that white men are the default members of society, and this is partly why, by the time they’re 18, so many white men are completely incapable of empathising with marginalised peoples.

This is true, but I have a tremendous problem with “leaky pipeline” narratives that pretend the reason why women aren’t in power is because there aren’t enough women in power, as if women are a kind of rare bird that only flocks to areas where they see the right kind of fruit, and can be attracted with the clever use of bird-shaped decoys. “We just keep losing the women before they get to the top,” the Leaky Pipeline narrative says helplessly, “we put them in the pipe but they just slither out, in a fine mist. They don’t get to the top! It must be because they don’t see enough pictures of women who got to the top.”

This argument is applied to women in STEM, particularly academia. “Why aren’t there more young female physics professors?” The narrative says, “clearly we need to have more cartoon characters aimed at little girls, and have early-career women burdened with the extra work of being Token Representation for their gender. They can, like, do their whole fulltime jobs AND ALSO go into schools to explain how great their lives are.”

This is clearly NOTHING to do with the fact that something like … 0.45% of PhD students will become professors. That’s less than one in 200. While that person actually has a reasonable chance of being a young woman, young women are also capable of looking at a career path that offers insecurity, low wages, and incompatibility with work/life balance, coupled with a vanishingly low chance of a small prize at the end, and simply taking their skills out of the field.

“Why don’t women stay in working relationships where they aren’t valued?” The pipeline wonders, stuffing more schoolchildren into a pipe where half of them will leap for safety as soon as they gather marketable skills.

So in politics? There are plenty of young women at the lower levels in the US and UK, and plenty of young girls who are passionate about politics and changing the world. And we all saw what they did to Monica Lewinsky.

In 2016, we watched as Jo Cox, a British Labour MP known for being a nice pretty friendly young white mother who helped people and Cared, was assassinated in broad daylight by a white terrorist. She fought for refugee rights, she had two young kids, she engaged with the public and was friendly and pretty and nice, she was anti-Brexit and pro-immigration, and she was murdered brutally by a man who screamed white supremacist slogans and cut her down in an English street. We saw that. We saw how there was a flicker of performative sadness, but nothing really came of it, and Brexit stormed ahead regardless. People have largely forgotten it now. Imagine if it had been one of those loud old men, assassinated by a terrorist with darker skin. Politics would have exploded. The world would have changed. But for Jo Cox - a woman in politics who we might have identified with, a woman who seemed Relatable - that’s what happened, she was just murdered and three years later it’s shrug.emoji and Brexit and “oh yeah… the husband was really cut up about it, wasn’t he?”

Oh, and believe me: Hillary Clinton! You could write essays about what we learned from Hillary Clinton.

We all watched the differences between how the press handled Theresa May and the rest of her party. We saw the platform given to those jokes.

We hear about when female politicians mention how much hate mail they get. We don’t pay too much attention to their security arrangements. We assume they make lots of money (most of them don’t) or receive lots of validation and positive attention behind closed doors, that there must be some huge perks of the job, like feeling powerful, but lots of women don’t look at the price of it and say “Dream job!!!” You know??

I mean, obviously we can separate fiction from reality, but everyone watched on Game of Thrones how every female leader was ripped apart by wolves, and the wolves explained to each other, loudly and publicly, that It Made Narrative Sense, You See. We saw the platform the wolves got. The wolves got audiences of millions. The wolves get to make television shows. We are supposed to make small amounts of money and small humble strides, and be bright and brilliant and caring, and then be torn apart for the narrative. Which we will deserve. Because women who hunger for political influence and power deserve this.

We saw how Doctor Who destroyed a female prime minister with six words: “Don’t you think she looks tired?” And then we giggled! because! fandom!! when people made memes with that quote over Theresa May.

We all see how AOC gets treated by the people who hate her, and the platform they get. We see how Mainstream America wants us to feel about her. We see how deliberately, violently lonely her position is made to be, how the conditions are set up for her to fail and snap so she can be picked over for easy meat. Like Monica Lewinsky. Like Jo Cox. It will make narrative sense. There will be no particular justice. That’s not what narrative sense means, for women in politics! The platform is for picking over the meat, not for making the woman look powerful and brave!! The platforms will do backflips to justify the actions of most men in power, but they all agree that the Most Narratively Sensible way to treat women in power is to make them walk naked through the public who hates them, while the platform chants “Shame.”

(In fact, the platform explains, this is actually very narratively empowering for women in politics.)

We see that it doesn’t matter if you’re pretty or nice. Or passionate and powerful. It doesn’t matter if you’re relatable, or cold and distant, if you have Dignity or if you seem like someone that people could drink a beer with. We see that women who enter politics don’t get to Google themselves. That they’re subjected to threats and harassment and abuse. That this is justified constantly because they chose to become Public Figures. We see that the reward for Caring, and Trying To Be Powerful, is to be punished, publicly, forever.

We see that the punishment looks an awful lot like The Worst Nightmares for Women. Or what we’ve been taught the worst nightmares should be. Loss of control. Loss of the narrative. Loss of dignity and reputation. Loss of friendship. Loss of respect and safety. In the worst cases, loss of choice and loss of a future.

“Oh well,” we say, as we create this culture, as we join in the mocking of another woman on the internet who is slightly unlikeable but dared to get attention anyway, “they get to live in big houses, don’t they? Women in politics? They play the victims, yeah, but they live in big houses, we think. Which is why they grab power, because women like to live in big houses. So it’s fine. This is the fair price for them to pay for that… idk, big house and that sensible pantsuit.”

“Oh dear,” we say, as we create this culture, as we sell the dream of power to children and then publicly crucify the ones who try to get Attention and Power and Influence with the wrong tone or the wrong gender or background. “Oh dear,” we say, mercilessly twisting every image of a woman in power into a monster, whether she’s wrong or right, real or fictional, soft or cruel, into a monster who is hated by half the population at any given time, who can be hunted down like game, whose name can be made into mud, who needs to accept the consequences of her actions, who SHOULD be forced to relive her worst moments and mistakes endlessly on television, to a background of laughtrack and millions of people racing to make the most cutting comment on social media, because she deserves it, because she’s a public figure, because that’s what you do to public figures, see, we do it to the men too! and it’s different but it’s not different; you see it’s okay, she WANTED this, she agreed to become public property: “maybe,” we say, looking up from this for a moment, “it’s because kids don’t see enough women on television.”

(ETA: cleared up typos and math issue spotted after posting on mobile.)

Do you ever just think about how if they reduced the working week, it’d contribute massively to waste reduction?

I mean, cutting out commuting is obvious, but, like, most people with more time on their hands use it for something.

Like, cooking more meals at home, or taking up crafting hobbies like soap-making.

We wouldn’t need as much ready-bought shit.

And even people who physically can’t, say, cook regularly or make their own things would benefit because friends/family members who could wouldn’t be so strapped for time.

I stayed at home while at uni, so I didn’t have to work a lot, and my uni hours weren’t too taxing.

And yeah, if a family member says “hey, can you pop around and help me with this”, it’s much easier to say “yeah, no problem”, if you’re not having to add it to the massive to-do pile in the short time you have outside of work.

And when I make things - like bread, I used to bake a shit-ton of bread - I tend to make way more than I need, so I give it to other people.

Idk, starting on drugs for my ADHD that have made handling things easier has also given me more free time - because it’s not spent struggling to do basics - and one of the biggest changes has just been remembering to keep a reusable coffee cup clean and in my handbag, along with a tote bag for shopping.

5p bag charges did nothing. Being able to think straight was the thing that helped. You know, the thing that overwork prevents?

And, like, imagine if you had a whole extra day? Like if the 4 Day Week campaign succeeded.

I’d be fucking sewing clothes that are actually durable and fit me properly. I’d get into soap-making. I’d look into how to protect the garden from feral cats enough to actually grow some veg in it.

And yeah, that’s probably a lot for one person, but it doesn’t have to be one person. Like I said, I tend to make too much food for just me when I bake. And I imagine soap-making is done in batches. And if I could get a veg patch going, I’d probably have too much for just me to eat.

So, if, like, every other person or every third person decided to have a hobby in making things… Well, I imagine we’d use a lot less packaging and shit, is all I’m saying.

Plus capitalism’s whole deal with producing a thousand nearly identical options for products is SO wasteful and unnecessary. Think about all the waste that could be avoided if factory workers (and warehouse workers and transport workers and retail workers) didn’t have to spend all their time churning out one trillion versions of disposable plastic toys and three hundred near-identical varieties of toothpaste!

a side effect of not believing that you have any sort of influence is an inability to critically engage with how you harm others, and even more insidiously, a belief that other people are primarily responsible for your actions

Funny how all these voting machine “glitches” always benefit republicans….

Isn’t this literally a joke in an episode of the Simpsons

Hey! I’m an election worker! If you ever have an issue like this please tell the people who are working at the polls! I don’t know about other states, as ours got new machines two years ago and we have some of the newest polling machines in the country, but I’m sure that your local polling place will do something about a machine like this.

If you don’t trust the machines to allow you to vote for who you want, you ALWAYS have the right to ask for a paper ballot. If they refuse, get that shit on video and blast them on social media. Election offices HATE having people complain about them on social media. Be sure to specifically get them denying you a paper ballot. PAPER BALLOTS ARE NOT INVALID BALLOTS AND WILL BE COUNTED.

Know your rights, be nice to election workers, be sure to register to vote, and actually get out there and vote!

(Also, if you are willing and able, you should sign up to be an election worker. In the US there is a serious problem with most election workers being Republicans. Most election offices try to have a balance between Democrats, Republicans and Independent, but that’s kind of hard when Republicans are the only ones who sign up. It pays pretty well, and its wayyyy less difficult than most retail jobs. You also can learn so much.)

This still happens a lot! During this past midterm election, if you didn’t fill in a choice for Senator (options were Ted Cruz and Beto O’Rourke), it would automatically select Cruz for you. And here’s the kicker – it also glitched so it would skip that page when you hit “next,” so lots of people didn’t even see it. It only showed up on the final confirmation page hidden in lots of text.

This is one of the reasons I prefer Oregon’s system. You get the ballot mailed to you. You fill it out at your leisure at home. You drop it in the mail, or a ballot box (looks like a mail box only bigger and a different color) or you can take it directly to elections headquarters yourself. You can confirm online the status of your ballot, for example, if there are any signature irregularities that need to be addressed, or that it was in fact received. We have some of the highest voter participation in the state. It is highly accessible. If you have a place you can access to receive mail you can send your ballot back in. There is broad support for making ballots post-paid, where in future years you may not even need a stamp to vote. The ballots are paper, and more re-countable.  Fraud is damn near non-existent, and the priority is on making registration as automatic as possible. If you get a driver’s license or interact with state services in any way, you’re probably registered, and you can check online to see the status of your registration.  I started absentee voting in the 90s and then the whole state moved to vote by mail, which means I’ve NEVER had to deal with an inaccessible poling station. I’ve never worried about harassment during the voting process. It means there’s no ready target for voter intimidation, and “Voting happens on X day” scams just don’t get much traction here because people get their ballots a couple weeks ahead of time and it has the date and time on it.  I think I missed sending in ONE ballot in the past 20 years. It was a spring election for an uncontested judicial position. 

How do people with no fixed address, or who can't safely access their post, vote?

Landlords can choke

If the NY law is anything like the UK law, then the way to deal with this is to pay the fees, move in, and *then* claim them back. In England & Wales if you do this, the landlord is legally obliged to refund you, and if they don't then they can't ever evict you without refunding you first.

Me around gays and girls: dirty joaks

Me around straight men: no I do not know what sex is, and I am not interested in knowing. Also, if you mention it I am calling the police

This article includes a pretty thorough summary of trans exclusionary feminist ties to anti-choice conservatives. Here are some highlights of these connections (emphasis mine), but the article as a whole is worth the read: 

_________

WoLF has made no bones about partnering with misogynistic and anti-LGBTQ organizations like the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) in order to oppose the livelihoods of trans people to the Supreme Court. […] WoLF’s relationship with ADF extends beyond just filing briefs in key cases. LGBTQNation reported in fiscal year 2017, the most recent year for which the feminist group’s financial records are available, WoLF applied for and accepted a $15,000 grant from the ultraconservative group. The LGBTQNation report additionally revealed in 2017 that WoLF contracted with Imperial Independent Media for help with fundraising, promising a 20 percent commission. At the time, IIM was run by Zachary Freeman, who made a name for himself over a lawsuit to leak abortion clinic employee names to the Center for Medical Progress, an anti-choice group known for propagating heavily doctored videos purporting to show Planned Parenthood profiting off the sale of fetal tissue.

[…]

Though it’s unknown who funds another prominent gender critical group, Hands Across the Aisle, one of its co-founders is Kaeley Triller-Haver, an anti-choice conservative who has reportedly admitted to committing statutory rape of a teenage boy when she was a youth counselor. What’s interesting about Hands Across the Aisle is how many journalists are seemingly involved with the activist group. A web archive from June 2018 suggested that former New Statesman editor Helen Lewis, recently hired as a writer for the Atlantic, as well as ultraconservative outlets the Federalist, the Daily Caller, and the Daily Signal are associated with the group.

[…]

During the Irish referendum on abortion rights in 2018, some British gender critical feminists withheld support for pro-choice campaigners citing the trans supportive attitudes of Irish feminism, going so far as to schedule an anti-trans meeting in Dublin at the height of the campaign season.

[…]

In February, the conservative Heritage Foundation held an event in Washington, DC, featuring prominent British anti-trans feminists Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull (also known as “Posie Parker”) and Julia Long, who came together to denounce the trans rights movement at large as well as a medical community that’s increasingly becoming more open to supporting trans children. The next day, the anti-trans feminists, who had allegedly been flown to the US on Heritage’s dime, stormed a Capitol Hill office where Human Rights Campaign national press secretary Sarah McBride had just concluded a meeting between parents of trans children and legislators. They filmed themselves yelling and taunting McBride with their personal gripes with the trans movement, accusing her of not caring about “lesbian girls.” McBride, to her credit, didn’t take the bait, remaining stone-faced and focused on her computer screen while a coworker attempted to de-escalate the situation.

[…]

In the US, Baltimore gender critical feminist Julia Beck has made a name for herself in conservative circles, appearing on Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News and testifying before the House against trans inclusions in the Violence Against Women Act and the Equality Act.

[…]

Just this month, gender critical feminists who have been banned from Twitter for extensive transphobic harassment have recently organized under alt-right message board Gab to form “Spinster,” a social media platform for TERFs. It remains to be seen whether British message board Mumsnet will remain the epicenter for gender critical messaging, but the movement’s growing connections with anti-choice and violent misogynist movements should concern both cisgender and transgender women.

[…]

Conservative groups, in turn, have made a conscious decision to use feminist language and framing to oppose trans rights, which is how we ended up with some of the most vehemently anti-woman politicians in the House voting against the Violence Against Women’s Act in the name of “protecting women and girls.”

- Raoni Metuktire, environmentalist and chief of the indigenous Brazilian Kayapó people

Boston Straight Pride

It was a fucking mess. Here are some highlights.

-there were probably like 10 white women and about 200 incel white men

-a bunch of the dudes made a point to set up right next to the holocaust memorial, as someone pointed out on twitter

-my personal twitter feed today was just bostonians taking pictures of the dumpsters outside their apartments and being like, “look at the straight pride parade, everyone!”

-businesses along their march route prepared by putting up lgbt flags or signs that said “go home alt-right scum”

-the floats were just trump 2020 floats

-milo fucking yiannopoulos showed up and made a speech but there were so many counter-protesters that no one could understand what he was saying

-legit there were counter-protesters flooding the streets. lots of rainbow and trans pride flags out today

-small bands along the route popped up to drown out the white supremacists’ hate with good upbeat tunes

-this dude in a clown suit and his buddy in green face paint drove 8 hours to protest the ban of a legit incel subreddit. yes you heard me. apparently incels are “reclaiming” clowns?

(im not showing a pictures of him or milo or anyone else like them because im not giving them the attention they’re so clearly begging for)

-people legit just flipped off the marchers as they walked by

-then the police decided to start arresting people. apparently there were 34 arrests of counter-protesters in total

-eventually fights broke out

-BPD started punching and driving motorcycles at counter protesters who refused to move out of the way for the straight pride parade

-the police ended up using mace on the counter-protesters towards the end of the parade

-there are reports of tear gas use also though i haven’t seen any photos of it yet

That’s basically where we’re at rn in MA as of about 8pm.

I was there and the police were so openly and needlessly violent it was horrifying. I watched as a protestor was beaten by a crowd of police for bringing a plastic shield to protect themself. Beaten and carried away by four cops, one holding each limb.

In areas where protestors were already surrounded by cops in roads that had been blocked off specifically for protestors, police rode in on bikes and motorcycles for no other reason than to clash with protestors. Several people refused to move out of the way and were beaten and arrested.

Several times throughout the day I found myself being pushed along in groups of people who were running to get out of the way of cops who had pepper spray. Whenever the cops wanted people to move they attacked them with mace.

Some people were beaten and sprayed so horribly that they couldn’t walk and they were either dragged away by their comrades or by police.

At the end of the protest, the alt-right speakers overstayed their permit in the plaza. The police did not force them to move and did not pepper spray them. Pepper spray was reserved for us queers, not the fascists.

While people stood outside the plaza at the end of the protest, police actively mocked and taunted protestors.

From the arrests that I witnessed the police seemed to be specifically targeting people who were visibly trans, POC, or disabled.

Between the alt right rally and the protestors was a fenced off section where the cops stood. They were facing towards the protestors. Many had their badge numbers covered with black tape or were hiding their badges. Some of the cops took out their batons to intimidate peaceful protestors.

Cops are not our allies. Cops do not serve us. They do not protect us. They are instruments of the fascist state used to keep us silent and obedient. It is their job to silence us. It is their job to specifically target poc, disabled people, queer people, and the working class as a whole. They know this when they commit to their job. There are no good cops. There are no cops for the people. They are class traitors and are a military designed to be used against the people. Do not forget what they have done today. Do not let this get quiet. Get angry. Get loud about it. It doesn’t matter what state you live in, you are not safe from police brutality. None of us are. Protest it wherever you are. Protest in the name of the 34 people who were arrested today and the many peaceful protestors who are washing pepper spray from their eyes tonight.

So “queer” isn’t just an identity that’s broadly inclusive because, I don’t know, we like big parties. There’s actually an underlying ethic, a queer theory, that has political implications.

Its name reclaims a slur because the point is to say, “I am different, but that’s not a bad thing.” The queer movement is about upholding the right of all people to deviate from an oppressive cisgender, heterosexual, patriarchal norm. Broadening the spectrum of acceptable diversity; questioning and dismantling the social pressures that police and punish deviance. Changing not just our own lives, but how our entire society thinks about sex and gender.

That’s why “queer” embraces so many different groups. It’s not trying to erase their differences, but to try to coherently understand the complex overlapping pressures that affect each of them, and to extend our reach beyond the LGBT+ community. It’s about the right of lesbians to live without men and the right of trans and nonbinary people to be who they are, the right of asexuals to define for themselves what’s significant in their lives, the right of straight men to be vulnerable and emotional and nonviolent. When the great queering project is done, you will see the changes everywhere, not just in small LGBT+ enclaves.

It’s recognizing that something that harms or oppresses one of us is pretty likely to harm all of us, so we all benefit from taking it down together.

For everyone who’s like “Whoa, I was with you until you threw straight men in there”:

Homophobia is a huge part of how all men are policed. If a man isn’t strong, tough, aggressive, and dominant? He gets called gay. So this isn’t “Soft straight men are totally LGBT+ and belong in your gay support group!” but it is “Part of the work of disassembling homophobia is changing how it affects straight men.”

It’s the same way that men aren’t the primary intended beneficiaries of feminism, but part of the work of feminism is addressing and changing toxic masculinity. If you’re effective enough at changing the system, you change it for everyone.

Also getting really tired of that criticism of any activism that dares talk about how it might benefit Straight™ men

Maybe straight men not being as miserable … shouldn’t be an automatic negative, especially not if the whole idea before that addition was to benefit marginalized groups?

Also it’s not just homophobia, it’s toxic masculinity which is the manifestation of hating women so much it impacts their own gender, and also transphobia and transmisogyny, where any deviation from the gender assigned at birth is heavily policed with violence

I really disagree here, and not because I don’t think straight men should have more occasions to be vulnerable and emotional, but because they as a group benefit from the oppression of everyone else

I get it, of course they would in some ways know some positive changes in a less patriarchal/heteronormative society - but maybe let’s not forget who patriarchal/heteronormative society benefits to? Because like. A straight man who is vulnerable and softspoken won’t be as oppressed as a gay man, no matter said gay man’s personality!

I don’t think anybody thinks it’s a good thing straight men are miserable but like are they really? are they miserable? Compared to everyone else? 

They’re the norm the queer movement deviates from!

Do they? Broadly, as a class? Is every single straight cis man benefiting from privilege more than every single gay cis man? 

I think that men are promised the rewards of privilege. They are told that being homophobic and straight will make them fundamentally better than gay men. They are told that being male and masculine will make them fundamentally better than women. And yes, the people reaping the rewards are generally straight cis men.

But it’s like a pyramid scheme: Every member, when they join, is promised the INCREDIBLE REWARDS they could receive, if they only get a few people to join at a lower level than them! And some members ARE making absolute bank. But when you look at the balance sheet, you see that 90% of active members are earning absolutely no money, and meanwhile the top 1% are fucking millionaires.

I think that, yes, if you look into the lived experiences of men in our culture, masculinity is making them actively miserable. There’s a reason men are, on average, more depressed, more isolated, more violent, and more likely to die by suicide. “Toxic masculinity” wasn’t a term coined to talk about women’s experiences.

The straight-cis-men-always-win argument especially falls to pieces once you look outside the realm of sex and gender–there’s no arguing that things like class, money, race, immigration status, incarceration, disability, and mental health don’t also have huge impacts on peoples’ quality of life. There are a lot of ways queer people can have, comparatively, a lot of privilege compared to straight cis men.

So really, does it benefit us, as a group, to outcast and demonize groups of people who are fighting the same forces as us? Do we want to pit large swathes of the population against each other and stage the Oppression Olympics endlessly? Or do we want to recognize that it’s probably 99% of the population getting fucked over by the massively powerful people at the top and doing something about that?

I want to recruit straight cis men to be my allies, not typecast them as my enemies because I think that homophobia is the only kind of evil in the world.

When I said, “cops are oppressed under capitalism,” this is the kind of shit I mean. Oppressor/victim isn’t binary. I particularly like this ‘pyramid scheme’ conception of privilege.

Particularly because pyramid schemes rely on an endless chain of recruitment. The way to move slightly up the ladder is to have people under you. Just slide into a higher role…

Be a shift manager. Get promoted to Corporal. Move from floor staff to the sales desk. Make it onto the police force. Put all your effort into being the best little cog in the whole machine. Someday it will pay off. Someday you’ll move up high enough in the ranks. Oh, you’re still poor? Work harder. Get a better job.

Be a man. Catcall women. Get dates. Have a girlfriend. Have children. Produce an entire family of people who have to respect you as its patriarch! Oh, that’s not happening? You must not be manly enough.

It’s similar to the way colonialism works, where the children of one conquered country are used to fill the ranks of the army that invades the next one, because when colonialism has destroyed your country, being your oppressor’s footsoldier is one of the last viable careers left.

The biggest lie the system sells is that if you cooperate well enough, you’ll get to run the show someday. We have to have the wit and awareness to understand that the entire system is rigged, and we need to take apart the systems that dominate and control people, instead of just replacing the people on top.

Which is part of why I get very nervous about straight-white-cis-abled-man bashing. A lot of people don’t sound like they want people to not be treated badly based on demographic characteristics they have no control over; they just want to be the people wielding the whips.

Privilege is as much about what doesn’t happen to you by default as it is about “what you have”. And the thing about homophobia and transphobia is that they’re used as weapons against EVERYONE at some point or another. 

Stephen Colbert, who is obviously privileged, and will be the first to talk about it, also talks about being called queer when he was a kid. Whatever you may think about his penchant for kissing guests regardless of gender and wearing drag, he describes himself as a cis, het, white, Christian man, and I tend to go with people’s self-identification. And he spent a lot of time in school being bullied for perceived gayness.

I know a child close to me who loves her assigned gender so much that we describe her as “Gender euphoric” who was actively teased for “wearing boy shoes” because her sandals were black and red. Another child close to me, with a slightly less deep attachment to his assigned gender but who still uses male pronouns, has always had a deep and abiding love of sparkle and twirl and glitter and now picks the plainest clothes he can to avoid teasing at school. It doesn’t matter that the school has strong antibullying policies and a clear policy of support for trans kids… they don’t have support for kids stepping outside the binary, and they don’t know what to do with “teasing”. 

I honestly think most people with cis, binary, het identities who present that way have no fucking clue who they would be if that overwhelming social pressure to conform wasn’t there. “Masculinity” as a concept has changed SO much just within my lifetime. I think about hair bands in the 1980s and how from the time I was born until the early 90s the absolute most popular singers, bands, etc. were incredibly androgynous in presentation, in voice… and then it shifted and there was this huge binary pressure that just kept getting worse. 

Most of these things have pendulum swings, but the fact that it shifts so much, so quickly speaks to how fucking arbitrary it all is. 

One of the core ideas of the feminism I learned from infancy was that feminism is for everyone because patriarchy hurts everyone. That the problem is not, for example, housework and childrearing, but the idea of gender roles being mandatory, that men are even worse for crying and being emotion and wanting to caretake for their children than women might be for going to work. That calling women less than men and defining things as women’s work limits both women and men. (The language was very binary growing up.) And the thing that became obvious in the past few years is that sexism is the heart of homophobia and transphobia alike. 

Sexism benefits people in power and the status quo. It is a huge inertia that cannot be overcome without careful attention and effort. And yeah. It hurts everyone. 

"Yeah Boris is unelected and yeah shutting down parliament is bad but that's ok because he's doing it to make sure the democratic will of the people is served by pushing through a No Deal Brexit that nobody was ever given the option of voting for."

This is what happens when you don't raise people to understand that posh people are the enemy. In a better world, everyone would understand that Boris Johnson doesn't give a shit about anyone but Boris Johnson.

Sorry to go all "class war" on you but we have a Prime Minister who only a handful of people voted for and he's been given permission to shut down parliament by an unelected monarch, and there are people who have absolutely nothing that sincerely believe that these rich assholes care about them. Those people have been horribly fucking failed by a society that should have taught them different.

Children should be taught that people with power and money are not to be trusted. People should be taught that politicians are not our friends. If you are working class and you haven't been taught to hate the Tories, you've been badly let down.

Jesus can you imagine all the white people failing

I can’t tell you how frustrating it is to have been in the queer movement for 20+ years, to have studied queer theory, to have contributed to you potentially enjoying the rights you have today because I was part of a groundswell of lobbying and direct action in the 1990s….

…to have a 15 year old who’s spent maybe 8 months being political and has never inquired about queer history anonymously message me, “EXCUSE ME QU**R IS A SLUR LMAO OMG EMBARRASSSING AN aCTUAL ADULT WHO THINKS IT’S OKAY TO USE QU**R!~!!!!”

Dude, we are a slur. Queer folks are a slur to conservative straight people. Everything we are will be used as a slur by everyone who hates us. Gay is a slur. Lesbian is a slur. People will try to use all of our words against us. Don’t fucking let them get into your head to the point at which you’re telling actual queer people not to use the words we’ve used to unite ourselves and empower ourselves for decades. 

Landlords are something else

JOIN THE TENANTS' UNION, FUCK LANDLORDS https://acorntheunion.org.uk/

Okay this is going to sound weird, but I kind of need it:

Can you guys please reblog this with just something quick telling me how it was bad of my abuser to force me to get rid of any personal items that didn't fit inside of a single (large) box? Keep in mind we lived in a 3bd home with plenty of storage space. She didn't want me to keep any books or anything.

For some reason it's sticking with my brain right now, like it's trying to make that seem like a rational request when I know it isn't. But I can't turn it off. If people could respond to this, I think it would help tremendously

Like the other option my brain is giving me is texting my abuser and reminding her of the time she did this, and I think we all agree that that is not a good way to process this

This would kill me. I know I'm especially bad for this, but having control over your environment and living space is an important part of establishing emotional stability and security. Being able to decide what your space looks like, how it's going to be organised and laid out to suit you, and making it function in a way that's convenient for you is really powerful. She did this to keep you on tenterhooks and prevent you from ever really settling into the space or feeling in control of your day to day life.