BAMN

22 Leftist Trans Himbo

[moondeetoo]

[drtanner]

Wizard spell battle

[lunasilverpelt]

I like that none of the cars slow down

[violentoffender]

[rightleaninglibertarian]

This guy after 7 minutes of thinking about it:

[kitsnicket]

Alpha male this sigma male that. What happened to ligma

[kitsnicket]

[phantomrose96]

my personal reason for saying tiktok sucks is everything has to be a performance there. impossible to be anything but try-hard. even if I were saying the same stupid shit I post here suddenly I'd have to perform it? on camera? hair clothes makeup so i can film myself saying something that takes 4 seconds to type? "it's raining absolute penis" while im wearing my sunday best? you couldn't pay me

[mysharona1987]

[gay-irl]

Gay📑Irl

[eilti]

[random-shit-writing]

[violetbeetle]

I know it wasn't their fault, but I blame this old XKCD comic for NFTs

[pwesident]

two small indie bands on two different stages facing each other. first band plays their own original music but the band across from them plays it all backwards perfectly.

[brucebocchi]

if you stand at the exact midpoint between the stages all you hear is silence

[pwesident]

you were there

[pitbolshevik]

i love when you can just tell that someone has never been outdoors

[pitbolshevik]

absolutely incredible

[gayplanets]

[grundoonmgnx]

Javier Mayoral, The Motel and the Iguana, 2021 

Acrylic on panel, 8 x 9.5 in.

[bashircore]

cannot get across how much this speaks to me

[santijpg-gone-deactivated202303]

americans are like i was gifted child but also i didnt learn other countries existed until i was 35 years old

[mikkeneko]

not everything bad that happens in the world is because of an oppressive conspiracy actually

“the 40 hour work-week is deliberately designed to keep workers exhausted and downtrodden –” no the forty hour workweek was negotiated by labor power to block the eighty  hour workweek. “american food is full of corn syrup in order to make people obese and sick and weak and unable to revolt against the government –” there are a lot of reasons why Corn is the way it is in the US and this is not any of them. “the concept of ‘coming out’ is a straight conspiracy designed to murder queer people –” please stop

stop assuming that every bad thing that exists is the result of active malice. there is so much in the world that’s bad just by accident, or as an unintended consequence of something else – maybe even something with good intentions. please don’t turn yourself into a conspiracy thinker just with shinier woker labels

[lastvalyrian]

also it doesn’t NEED to be a conspiracy for you to make your point. you can still say the 40 hour work week keeps people exhausted and makes political participation harder, and that corporate interests like it that way!

there doesn’t need to be a conspiracy of the evil 100 richest people on the planet (I see that idea way too much btw) to make this happen. In fact if you are a communist you SHOULD believe that the current conditions are the consequences of the historical forces shaped by material interest. believing in an evil conspiracy is the precise opposite of Marxism and actually what fascists love to do. so maybe consider stopping

[quasi-normalcy]

Yeah, like, the whole point or historical materialism is to show that these things happen without needing conscious decision making. That’s why it’s materialism.

[steveyockey]

Sometime back in the middle of the first decade of the AIDS epidemic, I was picking the brains of a friend of mine, the activist scholar Cindy Patton, about the probable natural history of HIV. This was at a time when speculation was ubiquitous about whether the virus had been deliberately engineered, or spread; whether HIV represented a plot or experiment by the U. S. military that had gotten out of control, or perhaps that was behaving exactly as it was meant to. After hearing a lot from her about the geography and economics of the global traffic in blood products, I finally, with some eagerness, asked Patton what she thought of these sinister rumors about the virus’s origin. “Any of the early steps in its spread could have been either accidental or deliberate,” she said. “But I just have trouble getting interested in that. I mean, even suppose we were sure of every element of a conspiracy: that the lives of Africans and African Americans are worthless in the eyes ofthe United States; that gay men and drug users are held cheap where they aren’t actively hated; that the military deliberately researches ways to kill noncombatants whom it sees as enemies; that people in power look calmly on the likelihood of catastrophic environmental and population changes. Supposing we were ever so sure of all those things—what would we know then that we don’t already know?”

Eve Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re so Paranoid You Probably Think This Introduction Is about You” (1997)

[anarchapella]

Yes it’s very important for solidarity with workers but, and maybe this is an unpopular opinion, workers should have solidarity with poor customers. Like ignore shoplifting, be sensitive when ppl are using EBT cards, that kinda thing.

[stonehengemony]

If you work retail and you worry about shoplifters I beg you to remember how little money you’re being paid to do this

[guerrillatech]

[commander--salamander]

Anti war activist Harvey Milk. That Harvey Milk. Cool cool cool cool cool

[big-pizza]

Fun fact. Harvey milk was dishonorably discharged from the military for being gay. Years after his death, the military sought to make amends and change the status of his discharge, however, Harvey Milk’s family refused. They preferred that Harvey’s dishonorable discharge stay on record indefinitely so no one would forget the military’s history of discrimination.

[natalieironside]

One of the key differences between conspiracy-theory bullshit and "talking about things the government actually did" is that conspiracy-theorist mindset treats political engagement as an ARG. The idea that an average American citizen can engage with intelligence kerfuffles and backroom financial dealing if they're sufficiently perceptive because the powers that be can't help but leave "hints" in odd places everyone can see.

To be sure, the United States government is evil, and it has done and is doing a lot of shady shit that could be called conspiratorial. But, for instance, when the CIA was running Operation Timber Sycamore, they very much did not call up Nikki Minaj and be like "Hey we need you to release a concept album about selling guns to ISIS"

[natalieironside]

Speaking of things the government has actually done, you'll notice that this stuff only really flourishes around things that are fabricated or unfalsifiable, like Qanon stuff, as opposed to anything that actually happened. Like nobody believes you'll learn the truth about the government murdering Gary Webb by decoding the super bowl halftime show.

[canadianwheatpirates]

There’s an Italian anarchist group who coined the term “conspiracy fantasy” for this, because a bunch of non-English languages translate “conspiracy theory” with a neutral connotation and they needed a way to say “conspiracy theory (derogatory)”.

They have some good discussion in the second half of the episode about how to differentiate between conspiracy theories and fantasies, and they say the same thing; actual conspiracies have a concrete and narrow goal, are focussed on a particular time and place, and get more likely to be discovered the more people are part of them.

Conspiracy fantasies, otoh, are exactly the above: ungrounded in a particular time or place (e.g. they allegedly reach back hundreds or thousands of years), constantly escalating and adding new supposed members despite the difficulty in keeping so many people quiet, and the goal becomes more and more broad.

[athelind]

One of my own conspiracy theories:

I have long suspected that the prevalence of conspiracy fantasy in the Untidy States has been encouraged by the intelligence community and other entrenched interests in order to discredit any legitimate investigation into actual conspiracies as "lunatic fringe nonsense."

[natalieironside]

That wouldn’t surprise me at all.  Disinformation and psyops are some of the few things US intelligence is actually almost good at, for example [gestures vaguely at the last 100 years of Latin American history] or [gestures vaguely at the last 100 years of Middle Eastern history] or [gestures vaguely at the last 100 years of the American labor movement], and it’s extremely advantageous to have the public consciousness associate “critically examining the things the government does on account of the government being objectively evil” with weird Facebook dads posting whatever the fuck this is:

[normal-horoscopes]

The other thing with conspiracy thought is that it gives the conspiracy theorist a feeling of agency over their life. They can insert themselves into the narrative in a way that gives them power, but also doesnt involve gay ass communist things like working together with other people. Conspiracy theory is fantasy, but it's specifically a power fantasy.

I wouldn't necessarily say that the government disseminates disinformation to create conspiracies, but they gladly allow conspiracy theorists to have platforms because it muddies the informational waters.

Does the government benefit from you believing UFO's are aliens? Yes. Are they going to spend money convincing you that UFOs are aliens? Probably not.

[justsomeantifas]

wild how joe biden has done so many fucked up things that everyones just kind of forgotten he buries dogs