My fellow cis ladies, here's three transphobic arguments I want you to know now so you don't fall for them later because this is the hot topic gateway into conservatism for women.
Just to be clear, it's-it's-it's the Nazi kind of conservatism as well.
Remember "divide and conquer" is the name of the game, so don't be divided!
First thing transphobes are is they're gender essentialists, so they will tell you "men are inherently bad and evil and it's in their DNA, and women by contrast are good and fragile and precious." And it's the same logic as like "oh, women are more sensitive and nurturing, which is why they should stay at home." It's bullshit because women are not inherently anything, women are human beings with free will and idolization is just dehumanization with better PR [public relations]. I, as a woman, have capacity for evil, which makes my choice to be good that much more important.
Number two thing, and you will notice if you listen to TERFs [trans-exclusionary radical feminists] long enough is that they hate being women, they have a lot of internalized misogyny, they think being a woman is about pain and suffering. The attitude that women are predestined to suffer and men are predestined to make us suffer is a very defeatist attitude, it means that you can never see a future without misogyny in it.
And the number three thing, and this is the stupidest argument: They will tell you that cis men are pretending to be trans women to go into women's bathrooms. Men just simply don't need to do all of that. This is stranger-danger rhetoric which is based around this fear of "oh, strangers are the most dangerous thing to your child or to you" when it's statistically not true. Abusers are more likely to be people that you already know, which is bleak, I'm sorry, but that is the truth. Abusive men simply don't need to go to that effort.
Trans women are our sisters, they're our allies, and a world where a trans women is free and safe to express herself and her gender presentation as she wants to is a world where all women get to do that.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
The core of the prepper fantasy: "What if the world ended in the precise way that made me the most important person?" The ultra-rich fantasize about emerging from luxury bunkers with an army of mercs and thumbdrives full of bitcoin to a world in ruins that they restructure using their "leadership skills."
The ethnographer Rich Miller spent his career embedding with preppers, eventually writing the canonical book of the fantasies that power their obsessions, Dancing at Armageddon: Survivalism and Chaos in Modern Times:
Miller recounts how the disasters that preppers prepare for are the disasters that will call upon their skills, like the water chemist who's devoted his life to preparing to help his community recover from a terrorist attack on its water supply; and who, when pressed, has no theory as to why any terrorist would stage such an attack:
Prepping is what happens when you are consumed by the fantasy of a terrible omnicrisis that you can solve, personally. It's an individualistic fantasy, and that makes it inherently neoliberal. Neoliberalism's mind-zap is to convince us all that our only role in society is as an individual ("There is no such thing as society" – M. Thatcher). If we have a workplace problem, we must bargain with our bosses, and if we lose, our choices are to quit or eat shit. Under no circumstances should we solve labor disputes through a union, especially not one that wins strong legal protections for workers and then holds the government's feet to the fire.
Same with bad corporate conduct: getting ripped off? Caveat emptor! Vote with your wallet and take your business elsewhere. Elections are slow and politics are boring. But "vote with your wallet" turns retail therapy into a form of civics.
This individualistic approach to problem solving does useful work for powerful people, because it keeps the rest of us thoroughly powerless. Voting with your wallet is casting a ballot in a rigged election that's always won by the people with the thickest wallets, and statistically, that's never you. That's why the right is so obsessed with removing barriers to election spending: the wealthy can't win a one-person/one-vote election (to be in the 1% is to be outnumbered 99:1), but unlimited campaign spending lets the wealthy vote in real elections using their wallets, not just just ballots.
You can't recycle your way out of the climate emergency. Practically speaking, you can't even recycle. All those plastics you lovingly washed and sorted ended up in a landfill or floating in the ocean. Plastics recycling is a hoax perpetrated by the petrochemical industry, who knew all along that their products would never be recycled. These despoilers convinced us to view the systemic rot of corporate ecocide as an individual matter, chiding us about "littering" and exhorting us to sort our garbage:
We are bombarded by real problems that require urgent solutions that can only be resolved through collective action, which we are told is impossible. This is an objectively frightening state of affairs, and it makes people go nuts.
At the start of this century, in the weeks before 9/11, a message-board poster calling himself Gecko45 went Web 1.0 viral by earnestly bullshitting about his job as a mall security guard, doing battle with heavily armed gangs, human traffickers, and ravening monsters. Gecko45's posts were unhinged: he started out seeking advice for doubling up on body-armor to protect him while he deployed his smoke bombs and his partner assembled a high-powered rifle. Though Gecko45 was apparently sincere, he drew tongue-in-cheek replies from the other posters on GlockTalk, who soon dubbed him the "Mall Ninja":
https://lonelymachines.org/mall-ninjas/
The Mall Ninja professed to patrolling a suburban shopping mall while armed with 15 firearms as he carried out his duties as "Sergeant of a three-man Rapid Tactical Force at one of America’s largest indoor retail shopping areas." His qualifications? Mastery "of three martial arts including ninjitsu, which means I can wear the special boots to climb walls."
The Mall Ninja's fantasy of a single brave individual, defending the sleepy populace from violent, armed mobs is instantly recognizable as an ancestor to today's right wing fantasy of America's cities as "no-go zones" filled with "open air drug markets," patrolled by MS-13 and antifa super-soldiers. And while the Mall Ninja drew derision – even from the kinds of people who hang out on a message board called "GlockTalk" – today, his brand of fantasy wins elections.
On Jacobin, Olly Haynes interviews the political writer Richard Seymour about this phenomenon:
Seymour's latest book is Disaster Nationalism:The Downfall of Liberal Civilization, an exploration of the strange obsessions of the right with imaginary disasters in the midst of real ones:
You know these imaginary disasters: "FEMA death camps, 'great replacement theory,' the 'Great Reset,' fifteen-minute cities, 5G towers being beacons of mind control, and microchips installed in people through vaccines." As Seymour writes, these conspiracy fantasies are proliferated by authoritarian regimes and their supporters, especially as real disasters rage around them.
For example, during the Oregon wildfires, people who were threatened by blazing forests that hit 800'C refused to evacuate because they'd been convinced that the fires were set by antifa arsonists in a bid to "wipe out white conservative Christians." They barricaded themselves in their fire-threatened homes, brandishing guns and prepping for the antifa mob.
Seymour says that this "disaster nationalism" "processes disaster in a way that is actually quite enlivening." Confronted with the helplessness of a real disaster that can only be solved through the collective action you've been told is both impossible and a Communist plot, you retreat to an individualistic disaster fantasy that you can play an outsized role in. Every crisis – the climate emergency, poverty, a toxic environment – is replaced by "bad people" and you can go get them.
For authoritarian politicians, a world of bad people at the gates who can only be stopped by "the good guys" makes for great politics. It impels proto-fascist movements to electoral victories, all over the world: in the US, of course, but Seymour also analyzes this as the phenomenon behind the electoral victories of authoritarian ethno-nationalists in India, Israel, Brazil, and all over the world.
I find Seymour's analysis bracing and clarifying. It explains the right's tendency to obsess over the imaginary at the expense of the real. Think of conservatives' obsession with imaginary and hypothetical children, from Qanon's child trafficking conspiracies to the forced birth movement's fixation on "the unborn."
It's not just that these kids don't exist – it's that the right is either indifferent or actively hostile to real children. Qanon peaked at the same time as Trump's "kids in cages" family separation policy, which saw thousands of kids separated from their parents, many forever, as a deliberate policy.
The forced birth movement spent decades fighting to overturn Roe in the name of saving "the unborn" – even as its leaders were also overturning the Child Tax Credit, the most successful child poverty alleviation measure in American history. Actual children were left to sink into food insecurity and precarity, to be enlisted to work overnight shifts in meat-packing plants, to fall into homelessness – even as the movement celebrated the "culture of life" that would rescue hypothetical children.
Lifting kids out of poverty and building a world where parents can afford to raise as many children as they care to have is a collective endeavor. Firebombing abortion clinics or storming into a pizza parlor with an assault rifle is an individual rescue fantasy that escapes into the world.
The older I get, the more I realize the Cold War never really ended, and that’s why I want to talk about Timothy McVeigh on this post.
For those too young to remember, in 1995 Timothy McVeigh turned a Ryder truck into a bomb and parked it outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. He unknowingly parked it under the building’s daycare.
Nineteen children died.
And his first thought on hearing this was “fuck, they’re going to focus on the kids, not my message.”
His message: the US government was an evil empire akin to the one in Star Wars, and needed to be wiped out. (Yes, really. He envisioned himself as Luke Skywalker.)
But before McVeigh was a bomber, he was a member of the prepper community.
And as you may guess by the date of the OKC bombing, that community grew out of “but what if nuclear war?”
In the context of “we may reach nuclear Armageddon,” early preppers did actually have a point: they wanted a fallout shelter for their family. The radioactivity from the bombs would only last a couple of weeks, but you’d probably want to wait about six months before trying to live aboveground again—you’d want to give time for the ash and smoke to be washed out of the air so you weren’t breathing it in. And so that’s what early preppers did: they stocked small fallout shelters with food, water, blankets, radios, a few toys for the kids, all the stuff you’d need if you had fifteen minutes to spare for the next year of your life and didn’t have time to go shopping. In the context of the 1960s, this was extremely practical—a bit paranoid, but with good reason. It wasn’t much different than, say, keeping a go-bag if you live in a wildfire area, or keeping some nonperishable food and bottled water in your cellar if you’re in Tornado Alley. More dramatic, yes, but an understandable precaution.
But then someone came up with the idea “What if someone else tries to attack my bunker, and is desperate enough to kill my family if it means food for them?”
Well. You’d better have a gun, right? To protect your family.
And then someone pointed out bullets are finite.
Maybe you’d better also have a military-grade knife. Just in case.
From there, it spiraled out of control. Nuclear Armageddon preppers wanted more weapons, longer-lasting food…
…and then the Cold War was declared over.
Fifty years of paranoia, the whole world on a knife-edge, just…gone. Just like that. Not a single shot fired. Yes, it did take a couple of years, but the USSR went out with a whimper, not a bang.
Let’s go back to Timothy McVeigh.
McVeigh served in the military. He was steeped deeply in anti-Soviet propaganda. Some of it was true, some of it was false (or at least exaggerated), but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that he was fed the idea that there was A Great Big Enemy Out There and he was one of the last Defenders Of The Free World.
…..and when the Iron Curtain fell he had nowhere to channel that.
A lot of early-modern preppers—that is, the ones you think of today when you hear the word “prepper”—were Cold War-era military men. They were never debriefed or deradicalized. And so they had to go on believing there was A Great Big Enemy Out There, because otherwise what was the point? What had they done it all for?
And this is the point where many of them started to turn on the US government.
There was an event called “the standoff at Ruby Ridge” that led to this major pivot. I suggest looking it up for more context because it’s outside the purview of this post, but for now imagine “the Bundy standoff, but gone horribly, horribly wrong.” In fact one reason the Bundy standoff went the way it did is because of what happened at Ruby Ridge.
So now you have these former military men, trained, spring-loaded…and they have only one thing left to aim at. And so they do. And they blow up an office building in Oklahoma City because that blind rage and paranoia is all they’ve got left, and those long-ago practical bomb shelters have become miniature military bases in which they will defend themselves from The Great Big Enemy Out There, which is now the US government, because what else could it be? Nobody else is powerful enough to try to tip over the US, the entirety of Russia and Eastern Europe combined couldn’t do it, no single country is going to do it, but Ruby Ridge and the David Koresh massacre in Waco showed the US would happily tip over “free-thinking individuals.”
And then they pass that paranoia to the next generation. A generation that doesn’t remember the Cold War. That has no context in which to place all of this. The US doesn’t like teaching about the Cold War much, because doing so means admitting it wasn’t “fighting the good fight” so much as “two playground bullies making the smaller kids fight while they place bets.” And so raised on a deadly mix of blind patriotism, lack of education about our immediate past, and a cognitively-dissident view in which YAY AMERICA but also FUCK THE GOVERNMENT….we are here.
The Cold War never ended. And that is why we are where we are.
If you want to effectively deradicalize preppers and their ilk, you have to start by learning about the Cold War. Because even if they don’t know that’s where it all started…that’s where it all started.
genuine question why are charter schools to blame for decreased literacy in your opinion? Because of the remote learning aspect or smth else also?? I went to one & honestly did better with it than traditional hs but I had very high reading comprehension already, had no busses in my area & no parent that could drive me to school so it was a pretty specific situation where that environment worked out better for me
Well I’m glad it worked out for you but institutionally charter schools are so detrimental to public education. Let me explain why:
The principle behind charter schools, that increased competition will force public schools to be better, frames education as a product rather than a public utility. If education quality is determined by the free market, the winners and losers are children, which is just a morally unacceptable outcome to me.
Shouldn’t ignore that the school choice movement started as a way to advocate for the perpetuity of segregation. On average charters are more racially segregated than publics.
The way in which public schools receive funding varies state to state, but most states do some amount of funding per pupil. What that means is that when students switch from public schools to charter schools they take that per people funding with them if you’re leaving an underperforming public school that’s underperforming because it’s underfunded you are making the problem worse. Not everyone can leave.
Charter schools can legally kick students out if they want to. This means if students stop performing well, or if disabled or english-language learner students need extra support, they can just be removed. A lot of “charters have higher test scores” is just charters only admitted high-performing and low-need students, which puts even more of a strain on public schools.
They are really unregulated. Many “charter-friendly” states have minimal accountability measures for charter schools in a way that leads to many running the gamut between negligence to committing literal fraud instead of providing free and appropriate public education. Charter networks are multibillion dollar businesses this system gets exploited by private equity all the time.
That lack of regulation or accountability also shows up in disciplinary outcomes. The school to prison pipeline is already unforgivably bad in a public environment, but unregulated charter schools often implement draconian “zero tolerance” policies that result in black and brown students getting treated like they’re in a police state. Public schools can’t suspend or expel you or call the cops on you for how you wear your hair. They can’t escalate to dramatic consequences as quickly or do a 3 strikes demerit system. There are no legal guardrails against this in charters.
Often exist to circumnavigate teachers’ union contracts and other labor laws. This means teachers at charters are often overworked, underpaid, micromanaged, and have EXTREMELY high turnover. The additional strain on teachers and overrepresentation of first-teachers who burn out in the system and get replaced makes for bad educational environments in a lot of places.
All of these are even more of a problem because of the way that charter networks like KIPP were marketed as a way to fix public schools in black and brown areas, and have just kneecapped public schools while providing students with subpar educational outcomes instead.
do you have any ideas about why so many students are struggling with literacy now? I know that illiteracy and reading comprehension have been issues for years and most americans read at like a 5th grade reading level but I’m curious why it seems to be worse now (pandemic? no child left behind?)
It is everything. There’s not one answer. I could talk about this forever so instead I set a five minute timer on my phone and wrote a list of as many of the many things that are causing this on a systemic level that I could think of:
It’s parents not reading with their kids (a privilege, but some parents have that privilege to be able to do this and don’t.)
It’s youtube from birth and never being bored.
It’s phasing out phonics for sight words (memorizing without understanding sounds or meaning) in elementary schools in the early aughts.
It’s defunding public libraries that do all the community and youth outreach.
It’s NCLB and mandating standardized tests which center reading short passages as opposed to longform texts so students don’t build up the endurance or comprehension skills.
It’s NCLB preventing schools from holding students back if they lack the literacy skills to move onto the next grade because they can’t be left behind so they’re passed on.
It’s the chronic underfunding of ESL and Special Ed programs for students who need extra literacy support.
It’s the cultural devaluing of the humanities in favor of stem and business because those make more money which leads to a lot of students to completely disregard reading and writing.
It’s the learning loss from covid.
It’s covid trauma manifesting in a lot of students as learned helplessness, or an inability to “figure things out” or push through adversity to complete challenging tasks independently, especially reading difficult texts.
It’s covid normalizing cheating and copying.
It’s increasing phone use.
It’s damage to attention span exacerbated by increased phone use that leaves you without an ability to sit and be bored ever without 2-3 forms of constant stimulation.
It’s shortform video becoming the predominant form of social media content as opposed to anything text-based.
Cannot believe I forgot to also blame charter schools, voucher programs, and the conservative push to lower the teenage working age and get poor kids tracked out of college prep and into vocational training for this. i have let everyone down
Btw, privatization is stealing from *you.* You are the public in "publicly owned." Oligarchs are coming in to take the things we all share ownership of as Americans, like Medicare, Social Security, National Parks, PBS and scrapping them for parts they find profitable.
The right is planning to rob us and quite literally want us to thank them for the privilege by calling it "government efficiency."
i think i said this one before but i remember we used to go to church and one day on the way i just out of the blue asked the car "how do we know god is real? what if people just made him up" and the adults all got super mad at me and gave me generic answers like "we just know" and stuff and my ass was fucking CURIOUS so when church started i asked the Sunday School teacher and she was like "well the bible was written about him" or something like that and i was like "but someone wrote Curious George and hes not real, what if someone made him up too" and she was like irritated but was like "he's a talking monkey of course hes not real, children just like fun stories" or something like that and i don't remember exactly what i said but it was something very close to "but adults like stories too! how do you know he's not made up so because adults want to believe in something too?" and she got SUPER mad and i had to apologize in front of the church but i saw an opportunity so i was like "but no one answered me so i still dont know and i guess you guys don't either" and [everyone] got super mad and none of us could go to that church anymore
the adults were okay to go to church again but me and my siblings had sundays off from that point on and that was kind of a catalyst for the way my brother and sister perceived religion
at my wedding yes i will have a maid of honour but why stop there. ill give all my maids titles. we will have a maid of hope. a maid of horror. a maid of horticulture. a maid of harm. a maid of healing. and of course. a maid of hogs
People fail to understand the degree of insane bloodthirst and dehumanization taught to 'israelis' like the one in front of this image. She genuinely sees the woman in the back as vermin and finds fun in tormenting her. This is a core tenet of their culture. They will humiliate Palestinians in whichever way they can on any given day ranging from petty to lethal. Their textbooks have caricatures. They draw unibrows on themselves and dream about Disneyland in Gaza on TikTok. They make fun of dead babies by comparing them to food.
This photo is 'israel'. There is no peaceful conversation with people whose heart's desire is to do this. There is no peace or dignity while the occupation lasts.
I like the fact that the two most well-known uses for lithium are treating people who are bipolar, and making batteries, which are also bipolar but in a completely different way.
Tesla is tanking so hard it is dragging the entire EV segment's sales down into the negative. When you omit Tesla from the equation, EV sales are up 13% across the board.
Don't let anyone tell you EV sales are in a slump.
kill the rhetoric that americans are so lazy that they won't take farm jobs. americans take labor intensive jobs all the time. the reason no americans will take farm jobs is because agricultural work is exempt from the vast majority of labor laws and labor protections, including the use of child labor. so only immigrants - people who have little to no protection from the law or other options for work - take most of these jobs. we have created a permanent underclass of labor and then say that americans are just lazy for not volunteering to be part of the underclass.
there are actually good discussions to be had about how alienated many americans are from food production (hi hello that's what my only popular post is about), but the real solution to this problem is to protect agricultural workers, citizens or not. ban child labor in its entirety. punish corporations and farm owners that abuse and poison their workers. reform the immigration process so that these people aren't barred from legal protection and recourse.
agricultural workers have been exploited since the dawn of civilization, but the US in specific has been doing this since slavery, and it evolved in the 30s when FDR's labor laws excluded them specifically because most agricultural workers at the time were black. now it's mostly latino immigrants.
food doesn't fucking pick or slaughter itself. but citizens aren't going to take these jobs when the entire industry is rife with abuse - both legal and illegal - and horrific wages and working conditions.
“Rich kids should go to public schools. The mayor should ride the subway to work. When wealthy people get sick, they should be sent to public hospitals. Business executives should have to stand in the same airport security lines as everyone else. The very fact that people want to buy their way out of all of these experiences points to the reason why they shouldn’t be able to. Private schools and private limos and private doctors and private security are all pressure release valves that eliminate the friction that would cause powerful people to call for all of these bad things to get better. The degree to which we allow the rich to insulate themselves from the unpleasant reality that others are forced to experience is directly related to how long that reality is allowed to stay unpleasant. When they are left with no other option, rich people will force improvement in public systems. Their public spirit will be infinitely less urgent when they are contemplating these things from afar than when they are sitting in a hot ER waiting room for six hours themselves.”
I love the x-men so much because that's just what leftist infighting is like! that's literally all it is! xavier is a sellout and they all hate him but he's the only one with any money. everyone complains about "they keep switching sides and dating each other it's so fucking confusing" like my dudes have you never been a part of any socialist organisation, ever. then people will go "magneto is so strong how has he not killed a bunch of teenagers" HE DOESN'T WANT TO KILL THEM! this started in a goddam basement over coffee he does not want to hurt them he just wants them to shut up and listen and will fling cars to do so
Magneto one drink in: I love Charles but hes such a kiss ass we don’t need to be FRIENDS we just need mutual aid communities and to be left alone
Professor X one drink in: what the fuck is his self sustaining mutant community going to do for all the mutants born to human parents, which is MOST OF THEM, he’s so gay he’s forgotten how babies are made and I want to kiss his stupid face
My first question to someone who’s like, “You should give up writing and learn to code!” would be to ask, “Is that how you entertained yourself during the pandemic? With long videos of people coding? Or did you read books and watch TV and movies like the rest of us?”
On this, the anniversary of the lunar landing, let us also celebrate the greatest post-mission achievement by a crewman.
I refer, of course, to the time Buzz Aldrin (age 72 at the time) cold-cocked a moon landing conspiracy theorist straight in his smug face after being accused of being a coward, liar, and thief.
Yes, someone was indeed dumb enough to tell a man so unafraid of death that he was willing to go into the void on a fragile explosive rocket, a coward.
Said dumbass was filming this confrontation as some sort of proof of moon fraud, but has instead captured this glorious moment of near-cosmic justice for us to loop for all time.
Aldrin was not charged with any crime. He should have been given another medal for public service.
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