my notifications are once again devolving into a spirited debate about the ethics of actions that could potentially make someone uncomfortable, and at risk of sounding like someone about to get a lot of irate anons I think we're frankly giving way too to much moral weight to hypothetical discomfort
the thing about discomfort is that it's an extremely nebulous category that can be triggered by virtually anything and that's far too broad a category to have any inherent moral quality to it. like. my mom was mad uncomfortable when I stopped shaving. that didn't mean I was doing violence against my mom it just meant she needed to get over herself. many such cases it must be said.
anyway rn my notes are full of a lot of "you should never try too hard to befriend people because you might make them uncomfortable" and "you should never tell people you're attracted to them because you might make them uncomfortable" and I guess I'm just wondering why we're acting like a little social awkwardness is the worst thing that could happen to a person
With Oct 14th now being officially a "day of remembrance" for Charlie Kirk as declared by the US government, I propose that we instead celebrate and remember it as the day that the Jewish people imprisoned in the Sobibor extermination camp staged an assassination of the SS officers there and freed themselves. They did so on Oct 14th, 1943, and since 300 of the approximately 600 imprisoned at that point managed to escape, the Nazis were forced to shut down the Sobibor camp to hide the evidence from the approaching Soviet military. This revolt led to the shutdown of the 4th most deadly Nazi extermination camp, and did so in October of 1943, while there was still over a year left to the war.
This October 14th, and all October 14ths to come, let's honor those who killed fascists, rather than dead fascists.
my close friend from uni was a cis girl who had the audacity to wear pants and cut her hair short and like nobody at this school, a place OBSESSED with ârespecting everyoneâs gender identities,â would call her âshe.â after MONTHS of this she started wearing a fucking pronoun pin to work and i dont even think that fixed it. me, im sorta androgynous; i have shaggy self-cut hair and go by a neutral name, but i always say my pronouns are she/her, and people ive worked with for months and have introduced myself in front of fifty times will STILL reflexively say âtheyâ for me. i respect the progressive circles i run in, but this IS evidence of misogyny. peopleâs definition of âwomanâ or âgirlâ is so narrow and high-maintenance that even the tiniest deviation from the norm gets you forcibly defeminized. but itâs a compliment, right? like who would wanna be a girl anyway?
i think the single most unrealistic part of superman 2025 was when it was announced that superman's kryptonian parents told him to have a harem and it was exclusively met with fear and disgust. I KNOW there would've been at least five dedicated subreddits that would have thousands being like HOW TO GET INTO SUPERMAN'S HAREM PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE ONE SHOT BIG BLUE THAT'S ALL I'M ASKING
And then there would be people on Tumblr who also want to be in Superman's harem, but the difference is that they would be trying to get Superman pregnant.
please actually reblog this post this time, as this one will gut national parks for more fucking paper. we have 14 days to stop it, giving us literally no time to do so.
they are literally betting on us to not do anything about it, because they're that desperate on keeping control, and ruining lives for everyone, but themselves.
The proposed rule would rescind the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule (2001 Roadless Rule) (66 FR 3244, 36 CFR Subpart B (2001)), which prohibits road construction, road reconstruction, and timber harvesting in inventoried roadless areas, with limited exceptions.
Do you want to be politically pure in theory or help your neighbor. Is it fruitless to help your neighbor because there's no Perfect Pure way to do it ?
When the pandemic hit this old church lady joined our tattooed queer leftist mutual aid group bc her church soup kitchen closed. We shrugged and told her she was welcome as long as she didn't proselytize.
That woman never gendered me right once, but she shut up about Jesus long enough to feed people next to us bc she cared more about action than ideology. She also had a whole network of other church people who helped contribute $ to ingredients. We provided more and better meals together than in our "correct" silos
âRape has been a constant feature of class-divided societiesâa weapon of mass terror and reinforcement of patriarchal ownership and control. Rape, the violence and the threat, has enforced enslavement, racist domination, oppression of women and punishment for those who bridge or blur the partitioning of the sexes.â
James Gunn is responding to the backlash surrounding his comments about Superman being an immigrant.
They're angry over one of the most basic components of his character?
I was kind of joking about that post about how you couldn't make Blazing Saddles nowadays, but I guess it's just true. You can't even make Superman these days without them complaining he's woke.
Back in the 1940s, a guy named Stetson Kennedy went undercover to infiltrate the KKK in Georgia.
(Okay, actually, a bit of a note here first- Kennedy is the guy credited with all of this. He's also said that there were other infiltrators who he worked with, but didn't want to reveal their identities. Some people have said this should put his whole account into doubt. But whether he was the one who did it all himself or was just the point man, there's plenty of evidence he did a lot.)
So he infiltrated the KKK and decided to gather information to take them down- and quickly realized why that wouldn't work.
âIt was obvious with the police uniform blue and the Khaki uniforms of the sheriffâs deputies sticking out beneath the Klan robes â and there were prosecutors and judges â they were all in the Klan.â
When he tried to go up the ladder and work with the federal government, basically ran into the same problem.
Stetson recalled trying to pass information on the Klan to agents of the FBI and âthey showed less than no interest. On one occasion, I recall an FBI agent waited until he followed me out to the elevator â may have had his desk wired and didnât want it on the record â but saying, âWell, what do you know about black militants â thatâs the real threat to America.â He didnât consider the Klan a threat at all.â
He did get some stuff done- like putting together the reports that got the KKK to lose their status as a tax-exempt organization in Georgia. But if he wanted to do more, he needed to go bigger. So he went to a higher authority.
He went to Superman.
Specifically, he went to the people who made the radio show, The Adventures of Superman, and helped them on creating a story line where Jimmy Olson has been managing a youth baseball team and his star pitcher- an Asian-American kid- is getting terrorized by a group called the Clan of the Fiery Cross, a bunch of bigots who wear hoods and hassle minority groups- an obvious stand-in for the KKK.
But with Kennedy's help, it was a very specific stand-in for the KKK, to the point of supposedly referencing specific Klan secrets. And it didn't hesitate to make the villains appropriately, openly evil, while making Superman the defender of truth and justice.
And apparently, it made the KKK look dumb as hell. Members would see their kids playing "Superman vs. the KKK" and that the KKK were pathetic villains. And it pissed them off. The head of the KKK in Georgia tried to organize boycotts against the sponsors of the Superman radio show. (Cancel culture, tsk tsk.)
And, in the radio broadcast, when things are going downhill, and Matt Riggs, the local leader of the Clan, tries to go to the top for help? Well. He finds out what's really going on there.
Yeah. The writers of Superman were very straightforward about how the KKK's whole philosophy was dumb shit, and the people at the top were just using the outrage to manipulate the lower ranks.
And... Apparently this really had an impact on the recruitment of the KKK in the 1940s. So, yeah. Superman fought the KKK in our world, too. And he put them in their place.
It's unfortunate that we have to keep teaching people this lesson, though.
The radio shows are up on YouTube if you want to listen to them:
Also, the indented quotes above, I got from here:
By James Cusick â October 5th marks the birthday of folklorist, activist, writer and Klan-fighter William Stetson Kennedy (1916-2011). He w
Aaaaand the clip of dialogue from the show, I got from This American Life:
And let's not forget this classic image from the 1950s with Superman telling a group of kids that talking badly about anyone because of their race, religion, or nationality is un-American:
I've found that most people whining about comic books being "woke" and, in particular, characters like Superman being that aren't actually long-time comic book fans. They're just a bunch of misogynists and/or racists who use the popularity of comic book movies over the past decade or so as a talking point platform to push their own right-wing agendas, if not just using it to outright grift from people who fall for their uninformed babble. (The same was true when it came to that GamerGate nonsense some years before as well.)
Another possibly relevant Stetson Kennedy tidbit: when he ran (extremely unsuccessfully) in the 1952 election for Florida governor, his good buddy Woody Guthrie wrote a campaign song that included the lines
If we fix it so you can't make no money on war
Well, we'll all forget what we was killing folks for
It is a luxury to speak of nonviolence and the virtue of compromise when your stomach does not cramp with pitiless hunger and when your ruined streets are not lined with your unburied dead. You are virtuous only in your luck.
hey wait! i know you! we used to be chained next to each other in the cave! wow, so good to see you, how are ya? man. remember how we used to talk about the shadows on the wall together. gosh that was a long time ago. but hey. sure is one heck of a sun out here, right? it's good to see you.
i wrote this post with happy tears in my eyes sitting in a parking lot after getting coffee for 3 hours with someone i did youth shakespeare with when we were teenagers and hadn't seen in 15 years, in which time we both transitioned, got into nerd shit, found a job that feels good, found people to spend our gay little lives with, and coincidentally moved to the same city. this is exactly how it felt. never ever ever kill yourself
like the king arthur problem of how were these people always accidentally sleeping with the wrong person? well 1) no glasses 2) no lights and candles are so expensive 3) royal couples didnât even sleep in the same bed a lot of the time anyway 4) arranged marriage how much do you really know your spouse anyway? maybe not very well a lot of the time 5) people are drinking a lot idk. maybe not as absurd as one might think
this post is brought to you by the one time i woke up at a sleepover and realized that without my glasses i could not distinguish one friend from the other. haunting. all of arthurian literature was unlocked to me at that moment
Hey, random writing tip: Instead of having something be a ridiculously unlikely coincidence, you can make the thing happen due to who this particular character is as a person. Instead of getting stuck on "there's no logical reason to why that would happen", try to bend it into a case of "something like this would never happen to anybody but this specific fucker." Something that makes your reader chuckle and roll their eyes, going "well of course you would."
Why would the timid shy nerd be at a huge sketchy downtown black market bazaar? Well, she's got this beetle colony she's raising that needs a very specific kind of leaf for nest material, and there only place to get it is this one guy at the bazaar that sells that stuff. Why would the most femininely flamboyant guy ever known just happen to have downright encyclopedic knowledge about professional boxing? Well, there was this one time when he was down bad for this guy who was an aspiring professional boxer...
I know it sounds stupidly obvious when written out like this, but when you're up close to your writing, it's hard to see the forest for the trees. Some time ago I finished reading a book, where the whole plot hinges on character A, who is 100% certain that character B is dead, personally getting up and coming down from the top rooms of a castle, to the gates, at 3 am, to come look at some drunk who claims to be this guy who died 17 years ago. Why would A do that, if he's sure that B is dead?
Because he's a Warrior Guy from a culture of Loyalty And Honour, and hearing that someone's got the audacity to go about claiming to be his long-lost brother in battle, there is no other option than to immediately personally go down there to beat the ever-loving shit out of this guy. Who then turns out to actually be character B, after all.
this is why, when someone tells me "there are only two sexes, it's basic biology!" my favorite response is to ask "what, you never made it to advanced biology?" like don't load the gun and then hand it to me lmao
You reblogged this from me, and Iâm doing this new policy where, when people announce their intention of showing their asses, I ask them if theyâre sure. Sure of your ground here? Anything you want to rephrase? Maybe reread?
Iâve been doing this privately, but you seem like your shoulders are broad. Are you sure about this? Are you sure of your ground here? You want to go ahead and reread the graph you are reacting to, make sure you understood it correctly? Want to gather any information first? Reread anything? Reflect upon what youâre trying to accomplish? Reconsider any life choices or ideology? Take a little break, run around the block, and see if you still stand by your statement. No shame in backing down.
Apologies for those hoping for a beatdown. The trick here is that this was it.
Youâll note they didnât come back - although when someone else wanted to talk about intersex conditions, bees, and lizards, they responded to them, saying âintersex is not a sexâ and âhumans are not bees and lizards.â The other person brought up keywords that they could reply to like a bot. This is an example of how TERFs just repeat sentences.
In a back-and-forth conversation in which a TERF says âShow me an example of having multiple mating types in biologyâ and someone replies âhere are some examples of mating types in biologyâ - the TERF genuinely believes that a response to that is âhumans arenât bees and lizards.â And they believe that response âwins.â
Youâll note that this sentence does not match the question and answer. They asked a question and you answered it; now they announce a completely different statement, in the tone of a âgotchaâ. The fact that this sentence doesnât match the question and answer is irrelevant! because they perceive conversations like chatbots, as scripted encounters, with the âwinnerâ being the person who repeats a sentence that the TERF has decided is a âwinning sentence.â
They canât go off-script. They can only do scripts. They canât even answer the question âare you sure?â
They were already beaten down, of course, I was just showing off.
this is so late renaissance early mannerism. the controversial male nudity? the lighting and value on the figurenof emphasis?? him bathed in light and placed ABOVE while the police are clad in dark and BELOW?? Uh HES HITTING THE CONTRAPPOSTO??
May I introduce you to "The Ricotta Eaters" (1585), a painting I could only describe as Ontologically Evil:
I know it's technically competent, but it just has a horrid aura surrounding it. I don't even care about disrespecting the Italian master Vincenzo Campi anymore, he should have looked at this painting and destroyed it like a sick beast.
