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@hauntedarcadewolf
Climate change is not a threat, it's a lived reality in Pakistan. Pakistan is paying a heavy price for climate change, even though it only contributes only 1% of all global carbon emissions.
More than 33 million people have been affected by the devastating floods across Pakistan. Over 1200 people have been killed and 200k+ homes have been destroyed so far.
One important thing to remember in life: Do not coddle men. Do not do their work for them. Do not perform uncredited labor for them, including intellectual labor. Do not bend over backwards to help them. Do not tell them they are good at things they are bad at. Do not smile at them when you don’t want to. Do not laugh at their terrible jokes or stroke their egos or let them think they are better than you when odds are good that they are almost definitely not. Do not even deal with men whose presence bothers you when you can get away from them/when you aren’t regularly forced to be near them for things like work. Do not include men in your life who don’t deserve to be in it any time that you can avoid it at all.
this post pairs well with this one:
This is the best pair of separatist manifestos I’ve seen.
I have noticed that in what few fictional books there are about matriarchies, the plot is pretty much always “but the matriarchy was bad, and by the end of the book a new order is established where women and men are treated equally.”
This really irritates me.
You might think “oh but isn’t equality the thing that we should all strive for? Isn’t this good?”
We live in a patriarchy, and pretty much 99.99% of all stories, movies, shows, books, etc that exist take place in a patriarchy. And in pretty much none of those stories is the patriarchy overcome by the end of the story in order to reach an equal society. The stories just take place in a patriarchy from start to finish, and female audiences/readers just have to accept that women are, have always been, and will always be second-class citizens in this story. In pretty much every single story. Just like in our current real-world society.
Even the stories where there’s some strong female protagonist who achieves something don’t overcome the patriarchy: first off, she pretty much always needs to be young and pretty in order to have importance in the story. Second, even if she achieves something great in the story, the vast majority of important, strong people in the story will still be male, and most of the females in the story will still be second-class citizens. The patriarchy is not overcome in these stories. It continues to exist.
So why is it that in the extremely small number of stories out there that take place in a matriarchy, the matriarchy can’t just go on existing? Can’t we have at least some stories where males are treated as second-class citizens from start to finish, the way that females are ALWAYS treated in ALMOST EVERY SINGLE STORY IN EXISTENCE?
Why is it always “but then the [young and beautiful and sexy] female protagonist recognized that the male was so SMART and so POWERFUL and so SPECIAL and so BRILLIANT and she realized how he needs to be as important as she is!!” - FUCK THAT, every single story in existence ALREADY tells you TIME AND AGAIN AND AGAIN how fucking important males are!!! Stop apologizing for writing a matriarchy!
To elaborate on one of your points, in patriarchal stories, the women aren’t just young and pretty but will often actively gain power through patriarchal means: through seducing, marrying or gaining the trust of powerful men who she then betrays or persuades, patriarchies are not defeated but an exchange of power does take place. The plots are justified by suggesting that this is women’s only form of power and she’s powerful for using it to subvert expectations. But this always follows patriarchal logic in the first place: women read this and become more convinced that femininity will give them power. Just how many stories do we need about “ruthless, powerful women seducing their way to the top/out of a bad situation”? Yet you never see matriarchal stories feature men seducing their way to the top or being auctioned off to powerful women they need to placate, etc etc. These patriarchal stories are never about destroying the patriarchy they’re about the woman’s “character development”.
The majority of patriarchal stories aren’t even about character development, they’re just for regurgitating the foundations of patriarchy and spoon feeding it to an impressionable audience in order to continue patriarchal worldviews and narratives. Women are not allowed alternative narratives because then they might get ideas!
where r those memes of the stick people or crudely drawn people going absolutely feral n just biting ppl n ripping off arms
Woman posting
How come slurs like gold-digger (a woman who looks for her and her children's economic security) and witch (a well read woman) that actually empowers women directly or indirectly never got reclaimed as fast as slurs like "slut" and "whore".
#reclaim gold digger #reclaim witch #please use your brain
Limitations in implicit bias research aren't always communicated to the public.
By: Lee Jussim
Published: Mar 28, 2022
KEY POINTS
There is no consensually-agreed upon definition of implicit bias. This makes communicating about implicit bias quite difficult.
The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is the most common method for measuring implicit bias. Yet it has several flaws and limitations.
Those limitations, which are well-known among psychological scientists, are rarely acknowledged to the wider public, including students.
Implicit bias is in the air. Hillary Clinton famously declared that “implicit bias is a problem for everyone.” When she was California Attorney General, now-Vice President Kamala Harris expanded implicit bias trainings for police and has attributed many things to implicit biases on her Twitter feed.
Given widespread distress over unconscious racism, many consulting firms now provide implicit bias trainings and assure you that they deliver. A simple Google search for “consultant, implicit bias training” yields pages and pages of hits. Is this kind of corporate response to the problem of implicit bias justified?
In a 2018 essay, West Virginia University sociologist Jason Manning argued that “unconscious racism” bears a resemblance to older superstitions about the evil eye and sympathetic magic—but rather than mysterious unseen supernatural forces, we have mysterious unseen unconscious forces. There are, of course, some differences between beliefs in the evil eye and unconscious racism. There is no evidence that people can harm you by looking at you, whereas there is a wealth of studies on implicit social cognition. But I argue that the comparison may still be justified because the evidence for unconscious racism is so weak.
A moral panic occurs when some substantial portion of a society creates a “folk devil"—members of the community considered deviant and dangerous—and exaggerates the dangers they pose. In one research report, for example, people massively overestimated the number of unarmed Black people killed by police in 2019, with more than half of all liberals surveyed estimating the number at 1,000 or more (when data indicated it was more likely to be around 27). And many people have been denounced or socially ostracized for opposing things like affirmative action and diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, even though the majority of Americans, including majorities of Black and Hispanic respondents, oppose basing college admissions or hiring on ethnicity or race.
Others have been denounced or publicly shamed for a maladroit compliment of a supermodel or for sharing a peer reviewed sociology article, if doing so is viewed as deviant behavior or contrary to widely-held views. I personally have witnessed a talk in which a Jewish professor was publicly called a "grotesque Nazi” by physics professors for having described Obama as “half-black” (he has a Kenyan father and a White American mother). Such responses can be seen as evidence of a moral panic and the creation of “folk devils” surrounding the topic of racism.
Returning, however, to the implicit bias consulting firms—it’s possible to find powerful testaments to the effectiveness of their trainings. But what does the science actually say—not just about the trainings, but about implicit bias more generally?
The workhorse method for assessing implicit bias is the Implicit Association Test (IAT). You can take several of these here to see what they are like for yourself. But before you do, you should consider these reasons to be skeptical about any claims about implicit bias.
1. The peer-reviewed scientific literature has witnessed a great walking back of many of the most dramatic claims made on the basis of the IAT and about implicit social cognition more generally.
Several researchers in this domain have put together this repository of over 40 articles (and growing) identifying flaws, artifacts, limitations, and threats to the validity of the IAT. Here are the titles of just a few of those articles:
“More Error than Attitude in Implicit Association Tests”
“Unconscious Racism: A Concept in Pursuit of a Measure”
“Implicit? What Do You Mean? A Comprehensive Review of the Delusive Implicitness Construct in Attitude Research”
In fairness, there are still plenty of research articles that take implicit bias seriously, such as this one. The point is not that the notion has been completely debunked or the IAT shown to be completely worthless; I even do research using the IAT! Instead, the point is that most of the most dramatic claims about it have been debunked or, at least, shown to be dubious and scientifically controversial. These are not firm grounds on which to sell the public on the power and prevalence of unconscious racism or trainings to mitigate it.
2. There is no consensually-accepted scientific definition of implicit bias.
Across five articles, there might be three with different definitions and two that do not even provide a definition. No one knows what “implicit bias” even is—at least if “know” is taken to mean “a clear understanding shared by most scientists.”
3. The IAT measures reaction times, not things that most people think of as bias.
Whether reaction times might be considered bias in some technical sense is beyond the scope of this essay. Reaction times are not what most people think of when they think about bias; the IAT does not directly measure racism, oppression, or unfairness. (Whether it does so indirectly with any reasonable success is controversial, as described next.) To claim reaction times constitute any sort of bias in the common understanding of the meaning of “bias” is to import a conclusion by fiat rather than evidence.
4. At best, the IAT measures the strength of association of concepts in memory.
When reaction times are faster for some pairs of concepts than others, it is possible that the two concepts for which reaction times are faster are more closely associated in memory. That’s the only thing the IAT can directly show: the closeness of association of concepts in memory—not “bias,” not “racism.” But it goes downhill from there; a slew of statistical issues and methodological artifacts suggest that the IAT is not even a clean measure of strength of association.
5. The IAT may capture prejudice, stereotypes, or attitudes to some degree, but, if so, it is not a clean measure.
Critiques of the IAT have concluded that it contains more error than attitude or reflects actual knowledge about actual group differences and conditions; and that IAT scores reflect four separate phenomena, of which attitude is just one.
6. The IAT, as used and reported, has a potpourri of additional methodological and statistical oddities.
Although a deep dive into them is beyond the scope of this blog, the interested reader can find them laid out in gory and technical details here and in the online repository of articles.
7. Many of the studies that use IAT scores to predict behavior find little or no anti-Black discrimination specifically.
If “unconscious racism” was as powerful and pervasive as its advocates claim, one would expect some, and probably a great deal, of anti-Black discrimination in these studies. Its absence in many studies justifies significant skepticism about claims about the power or prevalence of implicit bias.
8. Whether IAT scores predict behavioral manifestations of bias beyond self-report prejudice scales is unclear, with some studies finding they do and others finding they do not.
Racial prejudice is real and is readily measured by self-report scales assessing attitudes towards various racial and ethnic groups. It is not clear that the IAT captures much beyond these self-report scales, though.
9. Procedures that change IAT scores have failed to produce changes in discriminatory behavior.
One might ask, then, the point of such procedures and why is there such enthusiasm for these trainings.
10. There is currently no clear evidence that implicit bias trainings accomplish anything other than teaching people about the research on implicit bias.
It’s not that there is “no evidence.” This is not a case of “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” It is a case of “there is tons of evidence, but most of it shows little or no effect.”
11. There is no evidence that IAT scores are “unconscious.”
Research finds that people are quite good at predicting their IAT scores.
12. Critiques and discussions of its limitations or weaknesses are often not presented when the IAT is taught to introductory psychology students. Gambrill & Reiman, 2011, defined propaganda as “encouraging beliefs and actions with the least thought possible” (p. e19516). Does extolling research on the IAT without presenting its limitations and weaknesses constitute “encouraging beliefs and actions with the least thought possible”? I leave that to you to decide. Regardless, this omission is contrary to the aims of science.
What This All Means
Here is my advice to you: Take an IAT or two (which you can here) if you have not already, just to see what the buzz is about. But now you are armed with enough information to reject any simple-minded proclamations about unconscious racism or the supposed power of implicit biases.
==
WIGGUM: OK, here’s how the process works. You sit on the broom and we shove you off the cliff. MARGE: What?! WIGGUM: Well, hear me out, if you’re innocent, you will fall to an honorable Christian death. If you are, however, the bride of Satan, you will surely fly your broom to safety. At that point you will report back here for torture and beheading. SKINNER: Tough, but fair.
A new google drive of radfem literature has dropped. Go wild gyns!
Hey so I still see people utterly baffled by how religious fundies (still a majority in America and moreso its senate) react on certain issues so uhhh is it actually not common knowledge what the antichrist is all about? You guys know his defining characteristic is ending war, right? That he’s foretold to unite the world under his leadership by preaching global peace and solving basically every single problem in the world? So you know when you try to talk to these people about equality and togetherness they literally believe that’s what makes you an agent of the devil right???
im sorry what. so. ok im assuming they think that this is all like. to gain trust and then take over or something? because.
Yes, he’s called the “antichrist” because he’s an imposter Jesus and the majority of the world will love him when he ends all class divides and erases all borders, creating one world government with him at the top. That’s the “new world order” they’re terrified of. But they think he’ll oppress true Christian believers who see through his ruse, which is why they’re constantly looking for signs that they’re being discriminated against and panic when they lose any control over government. This is why they fear diversity, immigration, socialized anything. The less religious right are pretty clearly still running on the same logic; they might drop some of the spiritual lore but this is where they get the idea that all progressivism leads to the “real” fascism. Some believe the antichrist isn’t a literal person either but just that entire set of beliefs, so everyone protesting against war and trying to feed the hungry is a *collective* antichrist.
So from the notes it turns out people are MUCH less familiar with all this than I suspected and that’s honestly kind of alarming, guys, you should really really pay attention to things that affect so much of this country. No these are absolutely not obscure or fringe beliefs, these are MAINSTREAM with megachurches, Trump voters, the GOP and a vast proportion of the wealthy. Alex Jones and multiple Fox News hosts openly believe word for word what I described here.
And yeah as several people pointed out it isn’t even explicitly in the bible, but something some radicals pieced together in maybe only the last century. My uncles all believe it to the letter and they all believe it’s what the Bible is “supposed” to be communicating.
A lot of people are also confused as to why they would believe the peace and unity are villainous things and what the difference even is then between the “antichrist” and actual Jesus, which brings me to another thing I realize some folks CRITICALLY overlook about American Christianity, which is that they do not believe in good or bad deeds. They believe the same deed can be right or wrong strictly according to whether or not it’s performed by a believer with God’s stamp of approval. Like, they KNOW the Satanic Church and Witch Covens do community service or donate to cancer research and they are not confused, surprised, bitter or embarrassed by that at all. It’s exactly what they’re taught to expect. They believe the forces of Satan do primarily “good” things so people will think he’s just as good or better than God. So if a pastor heals a sick child with a prayer then that’s good, but if a “witch” heals the same sick child with “magic” (not something I believe exists, but they do) then that’s a false miracle from the devil and the child was better off dying because now everyone involved is a sinner who deserves hell. They’re taught to view you as a ridiculous fool if you don’t grasp this difference, and every single argument you might make is a part of the satanic trickery.
After all, they think our entire existence on this Earth is an insignificant speck in the grand scheme of things. The suffering in the world isn’t a bug to them, but a feature that God set up to test everyone’s worthiness, teach them lessons and filter out the faithless, so they actively do not believe it’s always morally right in itself to help people or save lives. Rather, certain people are just intended to suffer and die and it can be MORE wrong to help them.
Sorry to put this big ass thing on your dashboards again but I’m downright awestruck by the notes. There’s 15,500 of them at the time of this reblog and almost zero disagreement, just hundreds of people expressing absolute terror that they didn’t realize they were living under the thumb of a doomsday cult, and I’m really really sorry for that because I really did not expect to be the bearer of that news to so many. If you haven’t looked at the notes for yourself though, they’re pretty eye opening even to me, especially the next most common type of response on it:
….And something I’ve heard before but still neglected to mention:
…..so that’s all pretty nightmarish confirmation of how pervasive this mindset is around here, but you know, if the majority of reactions to this information have been either “what the fuck are you talking about?” or “yeah I WAS taught this and I’m better now,” maybe that’s a sign that it’s slowly but consistently fading with every generation?
I actually wasn’t raised religious AT ALL, and it was still impossible for me to not hear this shit constantly in the 80′s and 90′s from basically everyone outside my immediate family. It’d even crop up on television and radio stations that weren’t even supposed to be christian-oriented. Just boom, there’s an evangelist suddenly talking about how Only God is Allowed to End War and Satan Takes the Form of Kindness, like these were just normal banal perspectives to toss in between a relationship advice segment and the latest movie reviews. I’m really proud of every person saying they escaped from that indoctrination and actually feel much better and more hopeful about the whole thing. It might not be fixed completely in our lifetimes but clearly it is fixable.
W.I.T.C.H manifesto
W.I.T.C.H. Manifesto – 1968, W.I.T.C.H. (Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell)
“ WITCH is an all-women Everything. It’s theater, revolution, magic, terror, joy, garlic flowers, spells, It’s an awareness that witches and gypsies were the original guerrillas and resistance fighters against oppression—particularly the oppression of women—down through the ages. Witches have always been women who dared to be: groovy, courageous, aggressive, intelligent, nonconformist, explorative, curious, independent, sexually liberated, revolutionary. (This possibly explains why nine million of them have been burned.) Witches were the first Friendly Heads and Dealers, the first birth-control practitioners and abortionists, the first alchemists (turn dross into gold and you devalue the whole idea of money!). They bowed to no man, being the living remnants of the oldest culture of all—one in which men and women were equal sharers in a truly cooperative society, before the death-dealing, sexual, economic, and spiritual repression of the Imperialist Phallic Society took over and began to destroy nature and human society.
WITCH lives and laughs in every woman. She is the free part of each of us, beneath the shy smiles, the acquiescence to absurd male domination, the make-up or flesh suffocating clothing our sick society demands. There is no “joining” WITCH. If you are a woman and dare to look within yourself, you are a Witch. You make your own rules. You are free and beautiful. You can be invisible or evident in how you choose to make your witch-self known. You can form your own Coven of sister Witches (thirteen is a cozy number for a group) and do your own actions.
Whatever is repressive, solely male-oriented, greedy, puritanical, authoritarian—those are your targets. Your weapons are theater, satire, explosions, magic, herbs, music, costumes, cameras, masks, chants, stickers, stencils and paint, films, tambourines, bricks, brooms, guns, voodoo dolls, cats, candles, bells, chalk, nail clippings, hand grenades, poison rings, fuses, tape recorders, incense—your own boundless imagination. Your power comes from your own self as a woman, and it is activated by working in concert with your sisters. The power of the Coven is more than the sum of its individual members, because it is together.
You are pledged to free our brothers from oppression and stereotyped sexual roles (whether they like it or not) as well as ourselves. You are a Witch by saying aloud, “I am a Witch” three times, and thinking about that. You are a Witch by being female, untamed, angry, joyous, and immortal. “
W.I.T.C.H. (Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell) is a New York City–based radical feminist group founded in October 1968 by socialist feminists or “politicos” Robin Morgan, Peggy Dobbins, Judy Duffett, Cynthia Funk, Naomi Jaffe, and Florika. The group opposed the idea that radical feminists should only campaign against patriarchy alone. Instead, they argued that feminists should fight for a range of left-wing causes to bring about wider social change. The group was known for theatrical public actions such as hexing Wall Street in 1968 and protesting a bridal fair in 1969.
Watched a great talk today about web/technology accessibility, and the speaker pointed out that yes, accessibility is important for people with permanent disabilities, and we should definitely care about that. But also accessibility helps EVERYBODY, because everybody will, at some point in their lives, find themselves in situations that accessible technology can help with. Here are permanent, temporary, and situational disabilities that accessible technology can help with:
Remember that whether something is disabling or not depends on the situation, the environment, the technology, etc. We’re ALL disabled at some point. It is important to support permanently disabled people, but it is also important to remember that accessibility helps us all!
This is what colorism in media looks like.
K.C. Undercover: dark skinned men, light skinned women. the one dark skinned girl is portrayed as mean, apathetic, sadistic, and cruel.
The Proud Family: dark skinned men, light skinned women. dijonay, the only dark skinned girl, is portrayed as "ghetto" and "rachet" alongside her entire family. and suga mama, who can be argued is dark skinned, is portrayed as mean, cruel, and abusive. additionally, trudy, the mother, comes from an entire family of dark skinned people. yet she herself is portrayed as very much light skinned.
trudy proud's family (left) vs trudy proud (right).
The Hate U Give: the dark skinned main character starr on the cover of the book (left), vs. in the movie, where she is played by amandla stenberg (right); a light skinned biracial actor.
nina simone (singer, left) vs zoe saldana (actress, right), who played her in the 2016 biopic "nina".
stagecoach mary (right) vs zazi beetz (left), who played her in "the harder they fall".
ororo munroe (storm, center) vs the actresses that played her in the x-men movies (alexandra shipp - left, halle berry - right).
monster high: clawdeen wolf (right), vs. the actress that plays her in the upcoming monster high live action movie (miia harris, left). it also appears that they artificially darkened the actress' skin for the role.
strawberry shortcake franchise: orange blossom, who was lightened between her 2003 design (left) and 2009 design (right).
The problem is there. You see it. This whole "we're all black at the end of the day" bullshit is the exact mindset hollywood uses to justify the erasure of dark skinned women. None of this will EVER be okay. And the fact that y'all consistently find the same goddamn excuses to justify shit like this is exactly why dark skinned people don't fucking trust y'all.
When you consent to drive, you consent to possibility of an accident and hence under no circumstances do you deserve medical attention if you are caught up in a road accident.
Now, if all of this sounds absurd to you then, why does it not when you take away a woman's reproductive rights away who is dealing with misogynistic bullies (trucks: men with more power who like to exploit women) or when there are rule breakers who find a thrill in doing so (rapists who do not care about a woman's boundaries and consent).
No one asks you if you took your car out to buy some milk for tomorrow (casual dating) or when you are going to visit your doctor (having seggs after marriage). you get no questions asked medical attention. And all of this is much more worse because unlike traffic rules, dating rules are not universal. You are literally driving with no surveillance or guidance at times which makes it a lot more worse for women. But they should not be punished for it.
“Students in our “Psychology of Women” classes have routinely argued that the act of a man opening a door for a woman has nothing to do with sexism. It is simply one person being polite to another. If they are right, then men should feel complimented when women (and men) open doors for them. To test their presumption, we ask the women in the class to open doors for men and the men to wait at doors until a woman opens the door for them. We also ask them to record the responses they receive. (We invite readers to do the same.) The women learn that there is a sizable minority of men that refuses to go through a door held open for them by a woman, becoming irate if the women insist on “just being polite.” The men report that women will open the door for them, but that the women frequently give them disapproving looks or say unkind things “under their breath” to them. These class observations are somewhat similar to the findings of Ventimiglia (1982): the most confusion by male recipients of door-opening by females, and the most disapproval and avoidance by male recipients of door-opening by other males.
Social norms are often invisible to us until we violate them. And social norms regarding what is considered polite depend on the sex of the individual, which suggests there is more going on here than people “just being polite.” What could it be? We then ask students to look for underlying themes regarding what is considered polite for each gender. Do the behaviors considered polite for men have anything in common? Do the behaviors considered polite for women?
It is not a cultural accident that the personality traits associated with a male’s performance in rituals between the sexes are precisely those traits which this culture values the most and considers socially desirable and mentally healthy activity: efficacy, authority, prowess, independence. Nor is it a cultural accident that the personality traits associated with the female’s performance are exactly those that our culture writes off as immature and childlike: passivity, dependence, weakness, frailty, ineptitude. The effect of chivalry, then, is to reinforce sex roles, a system geared to the creation of dominant males and submissive females.
Social norms of politeness for women require women to wait for men, the actors. We are forced to conclude, then, that social norms regarding politeness in males and females are not just about being polite: they operate to maintain sex roles that champion action in males and passivity in females. One has to question the psychological healthiness of social norms that oblige women to be passive if they are to be perceived as polite. Pitting action against politeness affords women no real, or healthy, choices about how to behave.
Though it is apparently ironic, the man who insists on opening doors for a woman often is the same man who argues that a woman should not be considered for a high-level job and that women should make less money than men. Similarly, it is entirely likely that the man who marries his wife to protect her from harm is the same man who beats her. Ted Bundy, a mass murderer of women, walked women to their cars at night to protect them from violent males. This behavior made it difficult for his friend, Ann Rule (1980), to believe he could have committed atrocities against women. Acts of protectiveness appear inconsistent with acts of violence. However, there is another way to look at this behavior: male protectiveness embodies an admission by men of men’s malevolence toward women.
These kindnesses wrap in a chivalric cloak the misogynistic core of our culture, disguising the actual situation of women. If men’s kindnesses toward women were really only kindnesses, a man would be pleased if another man or woman offered these kindnesses to him. He would be pleased if another man or woman lit his cigarette or pulled out his chair for him. He would be pleased to derive his income, prestige, power and even his identity from his partner. He would take pride in another man’s or woman’s offer to walk him to his car at night. But in fact, “one of the very nasty things that can happen to a man is his being treated or seen as a woman, or womanlike” (Frye 1983, p. 136).”
- Loving To Survive by Dee L. R. Graham
The Marxist
Karl Marx’s anthropology is tied to an entire narrative that is, in fact, degrading and dehumanizing. Marx’s narrative is “redemptive” in nature, promising as it does an eschatological consummation of human history. In this narrative, material equality is Lord, class struggle and material inequality are Evil, and Marxist revolution is Savior. Instead of churches, Marxists envision pockets of classless people preaching revolution in an evil capitalist world. Instead of priests or pastors, he posits socialist vanguards training the masses to unify themselves around the oppressor-oppressed narrative. His utilitarian ethic spares nothing to achieve a socialist state; his eschatology is one in which the state withers away, thus eventuating in a society without war or crime; his philosophy of history is a closed system in which meaning is found within history itself.
In other words, Marx’s anthropology dehumanizes by flattening the individual. It locates evil primarily in human (capitalist) institutions and salvation focally in human (socialist) prophets. But the socialists are wrong; man is not merely an “economic man.” Economics is not the sole motivator of man, the definer of man, nor the primary lens through which we should view humanity. Man cannot be made better through revolutionary action—socialist or otherwise. His problems lie not with evil actions in history, but with the spiritual break between every individual and God himself. The Bible shows us that we can never expect full salvation to come in history before the return of Christ and his judgment. In the meantime, therefore, we must mitigate the effects of sin by establishing moral and social guide rails to seek the common good. We must work with the institutions we have inherited, seeking to reform them rather than clear the decks and start over again.
In response to the Marxist, we must say that the best therapy for persons with Marxophilia is to encourage them to align their expectations with the real world. In reality, human beings are both finite and fallen. Because we are fallen, our cultural institutions will inevitably always fall short of perfect justice. Additionally, we are finite, the implication of which is that even our best social managers, bureaucrats, and politicians will be unable to create “just” institutions from scratch.
The Western seekers of a revolution that will restore meaning to man and justice to our institutions must recognize the fact that, historically, the West’s social revolutions extirpated the very institutions that allow human beings to exercise their individuality. Consider, for example, the French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions. I submit to would-be revolutionaries that if they are concerned about the restoration of humanity, they should seek it by reforming the institutions bequeathed to us rather than by burning them to the ground.
~ Bruce Ashford
When humans interact with cats, we make cat noises. Imagine if they did human noises back.
Except that they do!
Cats don't communicate with adult cats by meowing. They usually do so using inaudible frequency and body gestures. Cats meow only to call their kittens because kitten ears are underdeveloped and cannot hear low frequencies of sound from far.
Cats don't often meow to other adult cats, but they quickly learn to use sounds to talk to humans.
Cats learnt to meow only after they began to be domesticated by humans. They literally adapted to "meowing" only to talk to us :)
the whole concept of toxic masculinity has not been used to pressure men to reevaluate their patriarchal behaviours but to give them praise for wearing makeup or the colour pink or a skirt and to guilt women about not caring enough about their supposed repressed feelings, which just goes to show how useless it is to talk around the actual issues of misogyny and patriarchy
“Despite the term’s recent popularity among feminists, toxic masculinity did not originate with the women’s movement. It was coined in the mythopoetic men’s movement of the 1980s and ’90s, motivated in part as a reaction to second-wave feminism. Through male-only workshops, wilderness retreats, and drumming circles, this movement promoted a masculine spirituality to rescue what it referred to as the “deep masculine”— a protective, “warrior” masculinity—from toxic masculinity. Men’s aggression and frustration was, according to the movement, the result of a society that feminized boys by denying them the necessary rites and rituals to realize their true selves as men.” [x]
toxic masculinity is not about dismantling patriarchy but indulging male narcissism
I have thought a great deal about how a feminist, like myself, addresses an audience primarily of political men who say that they are antisexist. And I thought a lot about whether there should be a qualitative difference in the kind of speech I address to you. And then I found myself incapable of pretending that I really believe that that qualitative difference exists. I have watched the men’s movement for many years. I am close with some of the people who participate in it. I can’t come here as a friend even though I might very much want to. What I would like to do is to scream: and in that scream I would have the screams of the raped, and the sobs of the battered; and even worse, in the center of that scream I would have the deafening sound of women’s silence, that silence into which we are born because we are women and in which most of us die.
And if there would be a plea or a question or a human address in that scream, it would be this: why are you so slow? Why are you so slow to understand the simplest things; not the complicated ideological things. You understand those. The simple things. The clichés. Simply that women are human to precisely the degree and quality that you are.
[…]
I came here today because I don’t believe that rape is inevitable or natural. If I did, I would have no reason to be here. If I did, my political practice would be different than it is. Have you ever wondered why we are not just in armed combat against you? It’s not because there’s a shortage of kitchen knives in this country. It is because we believe in your humanity, against all the evidence. We do not want to do the work of helping you to believe in your humanity. We cannot do it anymore. We have always tried. We have been repaid with systematic exploitation and systematic abuse. You are going to have to do this yourselves from now on and you know it.
The shame of men in front of women is, I think, an appropriate response both to what men do do and to what men do not do. I think you should be ashamed. But what you do with that shame is to use it as an excuse to keep doing what you want and to keep not doing anything else; and you’ve got to stop. You’ve got to stop. Your psychology doesn’t matter. How much you hurt doesn’t matter in the end any more than how much we hurt matters. If we sat around and only talked about how much rape hurt us, do you think there would have been one of the changes that you have seen in this country in the last fifteen years? There wouldn’t have been.
[…]
And I want one day of respite, one day off, one day in which no new bodies are piled up, one day in which no new agony is added to the old, and I am asking you to give it to me. And how could I ask you for less—it is so little. And how could you offer me less: it is so little. Even in wars, there are days of truce. Go and organize a truce. Stop your side for one day. I want a twenty-four-hour truce during which there is no rape.
I dare you to try it. I demand that you try it. I don’t mind begging you to try it. What else could you possibly be here to do? What else could this movement possibly mean? What else could matter so much?
And on that day, that day of truce, that day when not one woman is raped, we will begin the real practice of equality, because we can’t begin it before that day. Before that day it means nothing because it is nothing: it is not real; it is not true. But on that day it becomes real. And then, instead of rape we will for the first time in our lives—both men and women—begin to experience freedom. If you have a conception of freedom that includes the existence of rape, you are wrong. You cannot change what you say you want to change. For myself, I want to experience just one day of real freedom before I die. I leave you here to do that for me and for the women whom you say you love.
From Andrea Dworkin’s “I WANT A TWENTY-FOUR-HOUR TRUCE DURING WHICH THERE IS NO RAPE,” a speech given at the Midwest Regional Conference of the National Organization for Changing Men in 1983.
this video is making me SOB
I just love women so much
