Hello! I'm Kit and I will be using this blog to post my thoughts, analysis, and hot takes about various historical, sociological, and political topics.
I’m a student and often busy but I try my best to engage in discussion. Please be patient with me!
Some topics I'm interested in :
Anything US History related!! I love US History, my favorite era is either the 1900’s-1910’s or the 1960’s! Please feel free to talk to me!
Prison system, modern day slavery, and how poverty is a trap
Misogyny in the post-feminism world and how it manifests
The staunch anti-communist (and anti-leftist in general) stance the US takes and what that says about its government
The psychology behind social darwinism
How pop culture and art shift based on political/historical events
DMs are open if you wants to discuss! I try to post regularly but I'm still in school.
My tag is #indigo-and-stardust, I use it for anything original that I write!
Psst, hey, Marilyn Monroe’s image as a freewheeling sexpot was a carefully constructed lie. The real Marilyn Monroe was a roiling tragedy and her life was an indictment of our society as a whole. She was orphaned after her mother had a schizophrenic breakdown, bounced around between foster homes where she was sexually abused, and married a 21-year-old at 16 to get out of being sent to an orphanage. Hugh Hefner published nude photos of her without her consent that were taken when she was 23 and desperate. She suffered severe anxiety and depression, which she coped with by drinking and using barbiturates, and was already a full-blown addict when she became famous in the mid-50s. Her career was one of exploitation, condescension and alienation, and she killed herself at 36. That Hugh Hefner, a man who was at best an unpleasant footnote in her life, felt entitled to be buried next to her is one more humiliation in a pop cultural landscape we should all be ashamed of.
Can I just also say, in addition to all this, that I’m still pissed off about the fact that Joe DiMaggio swooped in and gave Marilyn a Christian funeral before her Rabbi could return from a trip overseas? ‘Cause that shit is fucked up.
So many men who claimed to be in love with her, and not one could fucking respect her wishes, even in death.
“I’ve never fooled anyone. I’ve let people fool themselves. They didn’t bother to find out who and what I was. Instead they would invent a character for me. I wouldn’t argue with them. They were obviously loving somebody I wasn’t.”” — Marilyn Monroe
Also:
As one of the biggest Ella Fitzgerald fans, she literally helped desegregate her performances. Ella was not allowed to play at Mocambo because of her race.
Ella Fitzgerald: “I owe Marilyn Monroe a real debt… she personally called the owner of the Mocambo, and told him she wanted me booked immediately, and if he would do it, she would take a front table every night. She told him – and it was true, due to Marilyn’s superstar status – that the press would go wild. The owner said yes, and Marilyn was there, front table, every night. The press went overboard. After that, I never had to play a small jazz club again. She was an unusual woman – a little ahead of her times. And she didn’t know it.” thisisnotmyfairytaleendingg (Source: dmvnessa)
ALSO:
In August 1956, Monroe began filming The Prince and the Showgirl, with Laurence Olivier staring and directing. The production was complicated by conflicts between him and Monroe. He angered her with the patronizing statement “All you have to do is be sexy” and his attempts to get her to replicate Vivien Leigh’s interpretation.
She became pregnant and miscarried during the production, which heavily worsened her depression and increased her drug abuse.
A L S O , I will never forget watching a documentary about her once and, speaking about her marriage with Arthur Miller, the narrator said, verbatim: “America’s Brain had married America’s Body”. Like, literally, because he was a famous writer, he was entitled to personhood; she, being an actress, and a beautiful woman, was reduced to being “a body”. I have never been more enraged with her portrayal in the media. If you want to be dismissive of her, literally come for you.
She was also chronically ill her whole life: she suffered from endometriosis with pain so debilitating that a clause was written into her contracts accounting for the days when she would not physically be able to work during her periods.
She was on courses of strong medication, had invasive surgery to try and limit the damage caused, and despite trying for a baby numerous times, suffered many miscarriages because of her condition. The miscarriages especially sent her into deep depression, since she desperately wanted to be a mother.
There is speculation that the condition may have been one of the triggers in her drug dependency as well, because when you have endo, you will take whatever you can to stop. it. hurting.
Marilyn Monroe was smart and strong as hell in a world that saw her as a sexy doll and nothing more.
Marilyn was a founding member of the Hollywood branch of the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy and had lifelong left-wing political views with a particular emphasis on racial equality. She formed her own independent production company that survived for several years and earned a credit as an executive producer on several films. Additionally, she was not only concerned for workers rights, she acted for them, using her own fame to stop staff being unfairly sacked from several of her films. She was a loyal, kind woman and her early death remains a great tragedy. Worse still, as OP notes, is the co-opting of her image by exactly the sort of people she would have loathed in life.
You know, I personally think it's scarier and more shocking that there's more people who are completely politically apathetic than people who are completely polarized.
The fact that an entire mass of people are just apathetic the fact that our tax dollars are bombing children in the middle east, there's pedophiles running our government, and innocent people awaiting immigration trials and being kidnapped and disappeared is horrifying to me.
I live in the south where staunch MAGA support is something I'm constantly surrounded by, but as I've talked to more people, I've realized that half of these people aren't even truly MAGA. They just support it because it's what their parents believe and they, by an extension, conform to those beliefs because that's what's easiest for them.
It's sad. Appalling. "I don't do politics" but you reek of privilege because those who live paycheck-to-paycheck off food stamps, those who fear that their healthcare could be taken away at any moment or they'll come home to their parents kidnapped and deported don't have a choice. You think we want to be political? People are tired of living it, hearing it, having it consume every moment of our lives. Quit being "neutral" to straight inhumanity and stand up for something for once.
no, the bombing and deaths of thousands of palestinians, lebanese, yemenis, iranians, iraqis and people in west asia and africa are not 'distractions' for the epstein files. we get it you see our lives as less but it's just not. we matter.
I’m fucking sick of this narrative. Not everything is a distraction from the files. Sure, it might be convenient, but wars happen. Genocides happen. Saying everything is just a distraction doesn’t just devalue the lives of those directly affected, but it’s also a slippery pathway down antisemitic conspiracy theories (Jews control everything, etc.)
I hate the term “gender war”. like is it really a war if on their side they’ve been raping and humiliating and murdering us for centuries and we just decided in the past 20 years that we don’t really want to marry or have kids with them anymore ??
This was an essay I wrote over the summer for an essay contest. It's not my best work and I would've definitely added more nuanced arguments to it if I had more time, but I wanted to publish it somewhere so here it is :]
In a representative democracy, elected officials are entrusted to serve the people with honesty and integrity. However, politicians throughout history and present-day have shown countless breaches of public trust. The role of a politician within democracy is not to serve personal interest, partisan or donor interests, but rather to represent the will of the people and serve as a steward of the public good. Democracy depends on politicians being accountable and truthful to the people they serve because public trust is essential to a functioning representative government. While lies that protect personal, partisan, or donor interests must be reprimanded as to prevent establishing a precedent, those told out of duty (especially in times of uncertainty or crisis) are responsible decisions and should not be held to the same standard as the former. However, as a long-term solution, neither punishment nor acquittal alone is sufficient; in order to ensure a more durable democracy, we must address systemic issues that allow for the fostering of political deception.
To understand this topic thoroughly, there needs to be an understanding of the difference between accountability and punishment. Accountability ensures politicians to be answerable and responsible for their actions. As David Robertson states in A Dictionary of Modern Politics, democratic societies fundamentally contain systems that allow a politician to be held accountable, ensuring that “those in public answer to the public" (Robertson 3). Elections are the most effective and reliable form of accountability, as they allow the public to remove leaders who have acted against their interest, serving as a non-violent institutionalized check on political power. Thus, if a politician’s lies are exposed and deemed corrupt or in violation of democratic values, they will almost always face some sort of accountability, if not through removal than through loss of public trust and damage to their reputation. On the other hand, punishment involves formal consequences such as legal sanctions. Whilst accountability focuses on the responsibility of the politician to the public- one that involves the politician admitting fault or being answerable to voters- punishment is a more severe consequence and would require a legal or institutional process to determine guilt. Punishment would therefore be most efficient in extreme cases where politicians have violated legal or ethical standards, or in those deemed a serious threat to democratic integrity by the public.
It is unreasonable to expect politicians to never lie. In times of crisis, lying is necessary as a strategic choice made in service of the greater good. In The Prince, Machiavelli famously stated that leaders should use “force and fraud,” and that political lies are sometimes justified- in certain circumstances (Newey 93). Because a politician’s role is to protect the public interest, citizens have the right to be lied to in certain circumstances if the deception is for the greater good. The most prominent instance of this is during national emergencies, where politicians may lie by omission as a strategic move to prevent mass panic. In 1940, British intelligence cracked the German Enigma code and learned that Germany had planned a bombing raid of Coventry. Churchill, despite being warned in advance, chose to lie by omission and did not order an evacuation (Clapson). Though controversial, this was a strategic move to prevent the Nazis from realizing their codes had been compromised. Protecting the secret of the Enigma saved many more lives in the long run by allowing the Allies access to crucial information to anticipate future attacks. This lie was meant to protect future lives and maintain national stability; it is rooted in responsibility, not self interest. It is the duty of a politician to weigh short-term consequences against long-term outcomes, even if it requires them to make morally complex decisions. The choice to lie illustrates the epistemic risk leaders face, having to act under uncertainty without full knowledge of the outcomes of their decisions. Churchill could not have known for certain what the consequences of revealing such a secret would hold, but he had to make a judgement based on limited information and perceived greater good. To demand total truth in all scenarios is impossible and ignores the burden of governance as well as the nuanced realities leaders must navigate during times of crisis.
Those found guilty of political dishonesty that benefits personal, partisan, or donor interests without the intention of benefiting the greater good must be punished as to prevent establishing a social precedence. Allowing these politicians to continue their careers without consequences will only create a positive feedback loop of corruption. The normalization of public deception undermines the legitimacy of governing institutions and could potentially erode democracy. Democracy depends on the consent of those governed- the action of lying subverts that consent because it interferes with the public’s ability to make an informed choice- therefore, politicians who lie (especially during election seasons) violate the legitimacy of our democratic systems (Longstaff). Not only do these lies betray public interest, they are also harmful. They destabilize the democratic norm and edge the country towards autocracy (Celse & Chang). One of the most infamous examples of political deception is the Watergate Scandal in 1972 following the DNC break-in that led to widespread cover-ups by President Richard Nixon. Watergate served as a wake-up call to Americans, diverting the nation’s attention to issues preceding the scandal such as the influence of big business over politics and the threat the government “can pose to civil liberties (Smoller 225). Following the scandal was a massive decline in public trust. The Pew Research Center found that 58% of Americans wanted Nixon tried for criminal wrongdoing (Kohut). This signified a democratic instinct: the public found him guilty of violating their trust, and therefore believed he should face some sort of consequences to uphold the integrity of democratic governance.
So, how do we determine whether or not a lie should be punished? Going off the principle of a politician’s role: they must represent the will of the people and serve as a steward of public good, and it is critical for them to maintain virtues of honesty and integrity for reasons previously established. In a situation where a politician betrays public interest in favour of personal, partisan, or donor interest, punishment reaffirms that power must be exercised with integrity- and in extreme cases, it reaffirms that no politician is above the law.
While punishment and accountability via democratic systems may deter individual acts of deception, it is insufficient as a long-term solution because it fails to address the system incentives that enable corruption. Therefore, if we wish to prevent dishonesty and corruption altogether, punitive measures are ineffective as they only target corruption on an individual basis. A research study done by Gustavo J. Bobonis et al. shows that current democratic systems of accountability are actually futile in preventing long-term political dishonesty (Bobonis et al. 2372). The researchers used audits to monitor Puerto Rican politicians before and after the election season and found that politicians were increasingly honest during elections in fear of losing votes, but once audits became less frequent, corrupt behavior resurfaced. The authors concluded that while audits temporarily reduce deception, they do not guarantee long-term change. Because of factors such as the entanglement of big business and politics under capitalism, it is extremely difficult to expect minimal corruption, as financial interests often exert significant influence over political decisions. This creates incentives for dishonest behavior that accountability, punishment, and monitoring cannot fully address. Punishment, as a solution then, is reactive, not preventative, as it focuses on catching wrongdoing after it happened instead of addressing systemic factors that enable dishonesty. While punishment is necessary to hold individuals accountable, it cannot by itself reform underlying political and economic structures that foster corruption.
Bibliography
Bobonis, Gustavo J., et al. “Monitoring Corruptible Politicians.” The American Economic
Review, vol. 106, no. 8, 2016, pp. 2371–405. JSTOR,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/43956916. Accessed 28 June 2025
Celse, J., Chang, K. “Politicians lie, so do I.” Psychological Research 83, pp. 1311–1325 (2019).
This research analyzed whether political leaders make people lie via priming experiments. Priming is a non-conscious and implicit memory eff
Clapson, Mark. “Air Raids in Britain, 1940–45.” The Blitz Companion: Aerial Warfare, Civilians
and the City since 1911, University of Westminster Press, 2019, pp. 37–76. JSTOR,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvggx2r2.9.
Kohut, Andrew. “From the Archives: How the Watergate Crisis Eroded Public Support
for Richard Nixon.” Pew Research Center, 25 Sept. 2019, pewrsr.ch/2lwRSvT.
Longstaff, Simon. “Lies Corrupt Democracy.” THE ETHICS CENTRE, 17 Apr. 2025,
ethics.org.au/lies-corrupt-democracy/.
Newey, Glen. “Political Lying: A Defense.” Public Affairs Quarterly, vol. 11, no. 2, 1997, pp.
Lightly quoted from another creator, but “eat the rich” isn’t talking about your upper-middle class family who owns a beach house and a yacht. “Eat the rich” is talking about billionaires whose net worth could solve world hunger yet they choose to hoard money for themselves.
Elon Musk is worth ~500B and it would take 40-50B every year till 2030 to fix world hunger. People truly don’t know how much one billion is.
I often think about how people (including me back in the day) talk about "oh well old people are all right wing. Everyone gets more right wing when they get older."
And now I am older, I realise it's not that I've become right wing. My values have not changed at all, I am still firmly on the left side of politics. What's changed however is that I understand the world a hell of a lot better than I did when I was 20. I've spent half a decade at uni, I've worked and paid taxes since before the pandemic. I'm involved in political things in a way you don't have the opportunity to as a kid.
What's changed is that I now understand how much more complicated the world is. I understand that some things, much as I'd love them, are not possible, or are at best impractical without loosing something else. I see the ways I want the world to change and I have to think about what is sacrificed for them. Minerals, food, technology, health; everything costs money. We don't live in a society where everyone looks out for eachother no matter how much I wish that were true. We don't live in a world where all country leaders wish for peace, or even wish the best for their citizens. We sadly live in a world where there are multiple leaders who have expansionist tendancies and don't care how many people die to get what they want.
I watched my cousin, one of the most left wing people I know - a journalist regularly on TV debating some of the most deranged right wingers in my country - not lose her left wing values, but adjust to a pragmatic view of the world. What is the situation now, what do I want, what's the best way to do this in a safe, and legal manner? They're just as involved in activism, however what they do now makes a difference because it's realistic goal orientated rather than based around ideological puritism.
Now yes, some people absolutely do get more right wing and they get older (there are also those who go in the other direction) and money absolutely has a lot to do with that. I personally view paying tax as a civic duty and a privilege but I know that this isn't a universal feeling.
The world is shit, but pretending anything other than realistic pragmatism is possible in the immidiate future without the deaths of thousands of people ("the revolution" etc etc) and the installing of an authoritarian regime is complete detached from reality. And I don't have the time to deal with people who don't bring value to the conversation.
I still think back to this post every once in a while. Probably one of the best pro-pragmatism Tumblr posts I've seen. As much as a moneyless classless society would be liberating to all, it's unrealistic. There has to be an acknowledgement that it's just not possible in the world we live in, as OP said, "We don't live in a society where everyone looks out for each other no matter how much I wish that were true."
If you want to create real change in the world, I believe the best plan of action is to support the most pragmatic approach possible, not dwell on a vision of society that will inevitably never exist. (Ex: being staunchly for a society without the existence of a nation-state, despite the creation of nation-states being inevitable due to geography and human psychology).
I don't have much to add to this conversation. I think OP summed up all my thoughts really well, as someone who used to be pretty far left (borderline communist) but has scooted a bit back towards socialism as I matured and learned to exist within the context of our world.
On a completely unrelated note, I'm writing this on Sukkot, so I hope you are having a good Sukkot, OP!! @jewreallythinkthat
Men being horny for women isn't inherently about power though. Like this is so odd. OP is completely correct and y'all should really acknowledge that yes, straight men being horny for women IS in fact morally neutral
Mens attraction being inherently predatory and destructive and needing to be restrained is, in fact, part of evangelical ideology, and i think a number of people have unrecognised evangelical beliefs, left over from their youth or gained from societal permeation of whatever. And maybe they should recognise and critically examine those beliefs. And think a bit about where they got them from, instead of thinking up feminist justifications for them.
"Mens attraction being inherently predatory" is an excuse to pretend men are mindless beasts who aren't in control of their own actions, which by extension also means they cannot be blamed for said actions.
It's "Boys will be boys" taken to the extreme.
It's the attitude that leads to bullshit like blaming rape victims for the way they were dressed.
It's not feminism, it's the exact opposite, it's a fucking scapegoat for the people these "radical feminists" claim to hate.
The belief that men are “inherently evil” within any sort of heterosexual attraction they feel is counterproductive to the feminist movement because it only furthers the belief that being a creep is just inherent to their nature. It actively discourages men from seeking help (or even wanting to get better).
It always frustrates me that there's such a social stigma against people on the spectrum in the first place. Autistic people are painted as incompetent, when in reality many of them just have neurological needs differing from the average person.
A lot of the smartest people I know are on the spectrum- and it's partially *because* they have autism. I just don't think someone should be viewed as socially inferior just because they neurologically function differently.
It probably originated from the lack of research on the topic-- and maybe Darwinism/natural selection played a role as well. We weren't aware that this was a genuine disability, thus treated people as just people "stupid" or "incompetent." Also the social stigma around just general mental illnesses didn't help, imagine how many "high-functioning" (put in quotations because the term is outdated, I believe) autists in the past never knew about their autism because they could keep up with the pace of neurotypical expectations more easily.
It’s sad how much of what is taught in school is useless to over 99% of the population.
There are literally math concepts taught in high school and middle school that are only used in extremely specialized fields or that are even so outdated they aren’t used anymore!
I took calculus my senior year of high school, and I really liked the way our teacher framed this on the first day of class.
He asked somebody to raise their hand and ask him when we would use calculus in our everyday life. So one student rose their hand and asked, “When are we going to use this in our everyday life?”
“NEVER!!” the teacher exclaimed. “You will never use calculus in your normal, everyday life. In fact, very few of you will use it in your professional careers either.” Then he paused. “So would you like to know why should care?”
Several us nodded.
He picked out one of the varsity football players in the class. “You practice football a lot during the week, right Tim?” asked the teacher.
“Yeah,” replied Tim. “Almost every day.”
“Do you and your teammates ever lift weights during practice?”
“Yeah. Tuesdays and Thursdays we spend a lot of practice in the weight room.”
“But why?” asked the teacher. “Is there ever going to be a play your coach tells you use during a game that requires you to bench press the other team?”
“No, of course not.”
“Then why lift weights?”
“Because it makes us stronger,” said Tim.
“Bingo!!” said the teacher. “It’s the same thing with calculus. You’re not here because you’re going to use calculus in your everyday life. You’re here because calculus is weightlifting for your brain.”
When it’s taught right, learning math teaches you logic and how to organize your brain, how to take a problem one step at a time and make sure every step can bear weight before you move to the next one. Most adults don’t need to know integrals, but goddamn if I don’t wish everyone making arguments on the internet understood geometric proofs.
Scientific concepts broaden our understanding of how the world is put together, which does not mean that most adults ever really understand how light is refracted through a lens or why spinning copper wire creates electricity–and they don’t need to. But science classes in general are meant to teach the scientific method: how to make observations and use them to draw conclusions, how to test those conclusions, how to be wrong and grow stronger from it.
History isn’t about dates and names of battles, it’s about people, patterns, things we’ve tried before and ought to learn from. It’s about how everything is linked, how changing one circumstance can lead to changes in fifty others, cascading infinitely. Literature is about critical thinking, pattern recognition, learning to listen to what somebody is saying and decide what it means to you, how you feel about it, and what you want to do with it.
Some facts matter: every adult should know how to read a graph, how global warming works, some of the basic themes and symbols that crop up in every piece of fiction. But ultimately, content is less important later in life than context.
The good thing is, students who learn the content are likely to pick up at least some of the context, some of the patterns of thinking, even if they don’t realize it. (The unfortunate thing is how the current educational system prioritizes content so much that a lot of students, and a lot of adults, don’t see the point in learning either, and teachers are overworked and held to standardize test grading scales such that it’s hard for them to emphasize patterns of thinking over rote memorization, etc etc etc, but that is a whole different discussion.)
I would also add that giving as broad an education to as many as possible gives everyone the opportunity to follow a career that might use calculus. Or colour theory. Or electromagnetism. Or [insert specialism here]. If we gatekeep specialisms, those careers are only available for the ones who were privileged enough to have the background training. That’s why Classics as a degree subject is full of private school kids: it’s not offered in state education.
