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[nothoardingifbooks]

Media Literacy Rant...

Ok, I've been on a reaction binge lately on YouTube and had the thought "what about M*A*S*H"?

So I'm watching these army and medical people in their 20s and 30s commenting on excerpts and saying how it's not in any way realistic and COMPLETELY FORGETTING THAT IT WAS MADE IN THE 70s AND SET IN THE 50s!!!!!!!

This is like looking at a show set in the 1600s in a European palace kitchen and comparing the food to today's nutritional guidelines or comparing a political drama set in the Aztec empire to the politics that would be used in modern international relations.

And all of this is setting aside the 45+ years old thing. Were some of the jokes tasteless, racist, misogynous, and homophobic? Yes absolutely! Was this show responsible for some of the most progressive storylines of its day with sensitive topics treated with care and delicacy? Also Yes Absolutely! Are there episodes that you could not make today due to changing values? Oh yeah, some episodes have NOT aged well. Are there episodes where you could swap the characters to a modern setting and have it be declared edgy? So true.

A piece of media should be examined both from a modern perspective and also with a clear understanding of the cultural and political climate in which it was made.

It's Pride month in the US so lets pick an LGBTQIA+ storyline:

There was an episode that aired in 1974 regarding the treatment of gay soldiers by their comrades. Private Weston comes in with wounds from both the enemy and his fellows. (remember the draft is in place in the US for the Korean war) It's immediately obvious to the staff that the wounds are not all from combat and after some digging from the MCs he confesses that there are two soldiers who are treated poorly in his unit - the one who is African American and one who is homosexual. Hawkeye listens to this, turns to the very anglo actor and says "So you're a n***o" (not intended as a slur at the time but has not aged well). The cast of characters then all need to grapple in their own way with the cultural, moral, social, and legal ramifications of outing this poor kid (18-22ish) in 1951 in a warzone. There are a lot of issues with the episode and not much discussion of structural inequalities but Private Weston is a whole character not a caricature and he is generally treated fairly by today's standards and is very sympathetic by the standards of both the production and the setting.

M*A*S*H is a period piece. Period pieces actually have a lot more freedom to tackle difficult topics because they can frame the morality as "back then" and "it wouldn't be like that now lol". Even the medical procedures being ridiculed were accurate to the time period. I've done CPR updates annually for the last 20 years. Part of the reason you are expected to do them annually is so that you have gotten the latest update - and the guidelines are reviewed regularly (kids and babies have changed the most but adults have changed a bit).

So all of this is a very longwinded way of saying that sometimes I want to reach into my computer and slap somebody.

[teathattast]

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Went out with my parents and grandma for mother's day and made them all feel like the cryptkeeper by mentioning my age. They think of me as twenty in the same way as I think of my adult cousin as being seven. They did not like hearing the truth.

[nothoardingifbooks]

OK so this OP disabled reblogs for a mini rant about kids at a wedding but I HAVE OPINIONS!

OMG I went to SO MANY WEDDINGS as a kid.

(also funerals, baptisms, confirmations, 18th birthdays, 21st birthdays, NYE parties etc)

There was always a certain unstated (?) time that the parents would attend, there would be a family-friendly component, and then the parents would take the kids home to bed and the remaining adults would continue on after in a less family friendly way.

Attending these important milestones is important in developing social skills! As you increase in age you are gradually allowed later into more adult spaces in a supervised way and this allows you to learn how to interact in these situations as an adult.

But also... I mean... Don't you love your family and want them to be a part of your life? I get not asking the kids of more distant acquaintances. If you don't know the kids personally (they can recognise you on sight) I don't see why the parents would want to take them to your event. If you do, don't you want them to share in your joy?

I have richer, more rewarding relationships with my older relatives because of these interactions. My two favourite cousins are 15 and 20 years older than me. I understand that not everyone has the same (highly informal) family dynamic and that the presence of overlapping generations is far less predominant today. Even so. I cannot imagine getting married when my best friend's kids were very young and NOT wanting to have a fun photo of them messing up the cake/bouquet/dress/boutonniere/ceremony/hair/suits to laugh at when I'm old.

These ceremonies are about community and memories. Getting married at the registry office with two near strangers in clothes you already own is just as legal as a full religious ceremony, expensive clothes, and a $100k reception. You can have nearly every religious and secular milestone ratified with a minimal number of near-strangers. The reason we have these displays is so that the family and community can signal their acceptance and blessing of the occasion.

Ultimately it's your life and your decision. But maybe think about what you are trying to accomplish here.

[frogeyedape]

if your main position is "i don't know how you people can support harm reduction. as for me, i'm for harm abolition. no i don't have a plan. no actually i mostly just bitch at people advocating for harm reduction as a way of making myself look pure" your opinions on political strategy are irrelevant and you yourself are beneath contempt you need to examine your beliefs, your need to feel righteous, your actual impact on the world, and how you can go about making an impact that aligns with your beliefs.

If you really believe harm is bad, and eliminating harm is a worthy goal, you have to start with small steps: eliminate a small harm, not all harms all at once. Reduce a great harm a little, perhaps by helping one individual impacted by that harm, and then another individual, and another... You cannot tackle all harm at once; you must take smaller bites. Set this reality against your need to feel right & correct & pure & perfect. Reducing some harm instead of all harm is not failure! You are not a failure! You may fail now and again, but failing once or twice or ten thousand times doesn't change the fact that you can still try again and succeed! You are not a failure even when you fail to reach your impossible goal of perfection.

You may not be able to complete the work of eliminating harm. But you can do your part to work toward that goal, reducing harm where you can. Your work layered with all the work of everyone who came before you, everyone who works beside you, and everyone who picks up the work when you set it down--all this work layered into making things besmal--that's a goal both possible and worth fighting for.

[fierceawakening]

This is exactly why my response to prison abolition is blinking. I can’t figure out what step one would be if the question is, “how do we close these all down when there are unrepentant murderers and rapists in some of them?”

Whereas if it’s “who should really not be in here because they did something minor or arguably not even bad, like use drugs? How can we make a plan so when we let them out, they aren’t so stressed out or bad at adjusting that they either cause problems or have problems? Since they’re the least dangerous, things should work out as long as we don’t completely fuck it up?”

I can literally start letting people out.

Now.

Today.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Foreigners tend to assume that the big cultural confusions between Australians and most other countries are gonna be based on our food, or social services, or weather, or weird animals. But it’s never that. In my experience, the real cultural confusions re: Australians are about The Respect Thing almost one hundred per cent of the time.

[deathsmallcaps]

? I realize im proving your point but what

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

The broader Australian culture doesn’t, as a whole, have status-based respect. Some individual groups might, because they’ve brought it from other cultures they’re involved in, but the general culture doesn’t. There’s no sense that your boss or scout leader or the guy in charge of your country deserves more respect than you, or that you should behave differently to them than you would to any random person you know similarly well. (The very rare exceptions include ritualised settings, such as courtrooms, and for some reason the fact that children use “Miss/Ms/Mr” honourifics for teachers at school.) 

I don’t mean Australians are a “stick it to the man, fight back against those in power” kind of people – we’re generally not. And I don’t mean we have a “we’re going to do the status thing but pretend we don’t and pretend to all be equal in mixed company” thing that middle-class Americans do. I mean the status-respect system does not exist, and if you try to use it, it weirds people the fuck out at best, and insults them at worst. Treating someone most countries would say is ‘above’ you differently in Australia is basically telling that person that you hate them; it’s saying “I’m forced to interact with you due to our current circumstances but I don’t see you as a person and won’t grant you the basic respect of treating you like an equal”. (When I was in America, I was constantly suppressing the instinct that random service people were sassing me because they overuse honourifics and were so keen to help me.)

This makes interacting with foreigners really baffling in a lot of circumstances. In university, my international friends would often describe Australians as “friendly, but very rude”. They thought we were all arseholes because of the way we spoke to our PhD supervisors and soforth, and wouldn’t believe us when we explained that our behaviour was respectful and that being deferential would be weird and awkward and insulting to them. Learning Japanese had a similar problem; everyone in the class could get the concept of different levels of formality and deference in language, ans was happy to memorise the usage of various words for Japanese people, but using them on each other was super weird, and we’d only ever use the most casual form of anything unless specifically instructed otherwise by the teacher.

The reason I’ve been thinking of this lately is because I’ve recently become aware that a lot of countries have like… a special respect for their country’s leaders? I don’t just mean “yeah, that guy makes the rules”, but that having that office makes them better than everyone else, somehow. Which I expect from countries with royal families, because Tradition, but I’ve recently found that Americans feel this way about their President, too. (Except the current one, who seems to be enough of a dick to break the system.) Like, if six Americans were in an aeroplane that was going down and there was only one parachute and one of the Americans was A Generic Non-Trump President, it’s just assumed that that guy gets the parachute? Like he’s automatically the life worth saving over the others, and they’d just give up their chance in favour of him? And that’s so weird to me. An Australian prime minister would have a 1 in 6 chance at the parachute; however the people decided, “this guy happens to be the leader of the country” wouldn’t be a factor. 

When Americans don’t like a President, they usually feel the need to work in how he’s “not my president”, either through sheer denial, or by finding some way he’s theoretically illegitimate (different ways votes are counted, wild conspiracy theories about birth country, etc.), and while making sure those rules are obeyed IS extremely important, I’ve recently noticed that part of the motivation seems to be that they’re invested in whether he’s Really The President because being the President somehow makes someone Special rather than just a normal dick who’s been put in charge of the group project. (You see the same thing in “THIS IS TRUMP’S AMERICA!”, like him becoming President gives him superpowers or something).

This is getting off-topic. Point is, in Australia you can run into the Prime Minister and ask him to help you fix your phone and if he’s not busy but refused to help you out he’d be kind of a dick; of course he should help you out. And if I walk into your restaurant and you act like I’m a movie star and you’re going to be super attentive to my every need because I’m The Customer, I’m gonna get creeped out. We’re suspicious and insulted by what most people in the world consider to be basic manners, and vice versa. And it makes interacting with foreigners super weird because I always feel like they’ve got some invisible heirarchical flowchart in the back of their minds that I don’t.

[becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys]

I have long noticed that Americans have absolutely the same cultural attitude to the President as they would to a serving monarchy. They just think they don’t on a technicality.

[drferox]

Can confirm that if I call someone ‘Sir/Madam’ I generally mean ‘asshole’ (unless talking to an animal or tiny child) and that if I get called Ma’am I feel like I’m being called the asshole, which made time in Atlanta, Georgia suoer weird.

[materassassino]

Australians have a very good attitude to respect

[onionhighonionandrenown]

…so this explains why I have spent the last fourteen years low-grade pissed off at nearly every Australian I meet, because every time I try to be American Polite at them it pisses them off. And, for that matter, why my second boss here, the one I was so careful to be Formally Respectful of and always called “sir,” took such an intense dislike to me.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Yeah, even if that boss understood that you were American and what that meant, their instincts would’ve been screaming at them the whole time that you were being a dick. It’s a difficult thing for us to get used to even when we know the culture is different’.

[earhartsease]

As a Brit visiting Australia, the most vivid experience I had of this is: in the UK it’s really uncool to get into the passenger seat of a cab - you’re expected to get in the back. In Australia the reverse was apparently true.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

… I am only just now realising that inAmerican and British movies and stuff, people don’t get in the passenger seat of a taxi.

[whitmerule]

covid update: you’re now meant to get in the back seat for social distancing and IT FEELS SO RUDE. sorry taxi person I AM NOT TRYING TO SHUN YOu just I know there are rules and we’re protecting each other. let’s be intensely awkward for a while.

[makaeru]

Reblogging this because I just remembered the time Molly Meldrum absolutely horrified Prince Charles by describing meeting the Queen as “I saw your mum last week”.

[love-lays-bleeding]

One of my favorite travel books described humanity as, broadly speaking, having two types of culture: one where formal is respectful and informal is rude, and vice versa. Australian culture sees formality as hostile or unfriendly and familiarity as warmth. It’s decidedly not the case in USA as a whole, though as with any broad category the dichotomy changes as the group gets smaller.

[wolverrina]

YOU PUT THE THING INTO WORDS!

[padeko]

Different cultures are fascinating.

[searchingcassiopeia]

Look there’s honestly a lot of history that build our culture today to be like this. We never really had a true aristocracy or class system in Australia and was still considered the dirty colonies up until federation in 1901. Even when we had the gold rush in the 19th century there were rich people but also anyone could dig up a nugget and get rich so no one really bothered with the rich = better than you thing because old johnno down the road who normally is on the piss all day and lives in a swag just picked up a 2lb piece of gold that’s worth thousands of dollars so now he can go buy his own pub and sell his own beer but everyone will still think of him as that guy who was always cracking bad jokes at the end of the bar and drinking a minimum of 8 beers a day. Sure we have rich people but we also pull them back down to earth when they get hoity toity. Australia is one of the most unionised countries in the world and yeah its true we dont get upset by much but when we do, all hell breaks loose. Look up some of Australia’s biggest protests and union movements like the convict rebellions, Eureka stockade, the campaign for the 8 hour day, and he general history of our Australian Labor Party. Australia was the second country in the world to grant women’s suffrage. So many unions and strikes and demands we made in Australia demanding equal and fair rights to working class in the 19th century that by federation in 1901 we were ahead of the world with workers rights and equality. Really the only class system we had was the employer employee divide but we still never bowed down and took it from them just because they boss. I’m not going to go into what happened in the 20th century but if you’re interested definitely look up post war Australia, the women’s working unions in the middle of the century, definitely look up the late Bob Hawke and his legacy, the nurse’s strike in Victoria in the 80s, the land rights movement and Eddie Mabo, and go from there.

I remember in school we were always taught to treat others how you wanted to be treated. You were no better or worse than anyone else. You want to be treated equal to everyone else and that meant being polite and showing decency and helping each other out. It’s true we only use titles for teachers or elders (indigenous Australians use “Aunty” and “Uncle” as a show of respect to their elders) but outside of that if someone calls you Miss y/n or sir or whatever it’s just uncomfortable. In hospitality and retail some of us will still use sir/ma'am mainly because we don’t know customers names but even then that’s rare and usually applied only to elderly. We personally don’t want to be addressed by titles or even surnames (unless it’s a nickname which I’ll get to) so we don’t use the titles or surnames for other people. With surnames often we use them as a nickname if we dont/can’t shorten their names. Getting a nickname (a good one, not one that is intentionally meant to bully you ofc. E.g. ScoMo is the nickname for our PM but he’s a piece of shit and ScoMo sounds a lot like Scum-mo) is the biggest show of respect in Australia. Usually it’s simply just adding a vowel or changing it up a little. I.e. John = johnno, Darren = Dazza, etc. If we can’t do it to your first name we do it to your last name. If we can’t do it to your last name it’s either a feature or behaviour and we put it in a good light. You ever notice that Australians like to make fun of each other and “insult” each other? There’s a very subtle difference when it’s truly meant to be insulting but that’s our way of being affectionate for each other. We will point out your flaws and make fun of you (and stop if you say no) and we will give you a nickname and it’s all in good humour. It’s one of the things I find foreigners get really upset about because they dont understand why we are so rude to each other. You build up a hard skin in this country and forget hat sometimes that stuff IS a bit insulting.

It’s a very backwards system of respect but it is a very honest one. No one is better than you. No one is worse than you. We are all humans.

[silvergryphonart]

We treat our acquaintances like friends and our friends like family. Teasing your friends is expected the same way it is for siblings. If you act like someone is above you, in a not-joking way, that’s basically declaring that you don’t see them as potential friend material—that something about them repels you and you want as many barriers between you as possible.

It would hurt my dad so badly if I ever called him “sir.”

[confusementation]

Yep, and the automatic assumption that you think I’m an idiot/bitch if I’m called ma'am. The only time it has ever happened and I haven’t taken offence has been brand new army recruits/cadets, who are required to use it while in public to show deference to civilians.

I legit take less offense from being referred to as a pigdog cunt than I do being called ma'am. Getting a sweary character reference or having a friend call you a mad cbomb is totally fine in Aus. Ma'am is not something I associate with respect, being included as part of the group, or acceptance in any way - it’s pointing out rather emphatically that you are “other”

[alwaysfrowningslightly]

This is interesting as hell as an American raised in an Active Duty environment. As a kid I called everyone Ma’am or Sir and I wonder how jarring that child would be in Australia

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Whenever I watch an American show and a kid calls their parents ‘sir’ and/or ‘ma'am’ I immediately assume that the intention is to clue the audience in on the fact that that child is being very severely abused. Addressing an elderly neighbour or something like that would be seen as charmingly respectful from a kid, but doing it to all adults would set off alarm bells in the heads of any Australian adult who wasn’t familiar with your past. They’d get it once they learned you were raised around American soldiers though, and expect you to grow out of it.

[achronicallive]

I played an Australian teacher in America in a oneact play earlier this year who repeatedly called a highschool student “Miss [Lastname]” and I know you said it’s different for teacher-student interactions, but now I have to assume that that would also be taken very differently in Australia. He wasn’t originally written to be Australian but now its really funny to think about what is theoretically going on in his head, because there’s no actual reason for him to hate this student but given the context of the rest of the play it Decidedly makes me wonder lmaooooo

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

If he does that to all the students, it would indicate (to an Australian audience) that he’s very recently changed jobs from a super fancy private school that rich people send their kids to to pretend to be foreign royalty or whatever. If he does it only to that student, he fucking hates her and thinks she’s a snobbish airhead who thinks too highly of herself, and he wants everyone to know it. Teachers don’t ‘miss’ students except in weirdo niche private schools.

[omgthatdress]

ily, menswear guy

[trankinstein]

Less magic schools. More magic universities. Unlearn the simplified models of your secondary education. Discover how to reference scrolls written by a wizard possessed by a different wizard. Identify bias in the voices that whisper from beyond the veil. Have your institution be accused of promoting a Merlinist agenda. Become addicted to energy potions.

[earhartsease]

start an onlyacolytes account to pay for tuition

[nerdlordvidal]

Magical internships. Apply your knowledge in the real world. Sell your figurative soul and be a technomancer for google. Sell your actual soul and sign on as part of a neuromancer hivemind for some awful ai shit.

[captainjonnitkessler]

So many political posts I hate boil down to "I don't want to organize and work with people I hate and fight for small, incremental victories, I just want to start a revolution where everyone magically becomes an automaton who acts exactly the way I think they should act"

Like damn man, I want that too. Unfortunately I live in reality though so we're stuck with the first thing.

[kiwimintlime]

not aromantic but I believe in their beliefs.

"there's no platonic explanation for this" try harder bucko

[kiwimintlime]

love is a beautiful wonderful multifaceted nebulous thing that shouldn't be reduced to the strict bounds of Tier One: Romance and Tier Two: Friends. get weird with it. love your friends deeply, wildly, passionately and platonically. cowards

[bententeren]

ok so. so we’re just. not reading now. wow ok. ok!!! booktok says we should remove half of the fun from reading!!! wow!!! (i found this in a video and apparently it’s not just this person doing it. it’s. quite a few of them. just to make that clear.)

[froxictog]

This hit me with a killing blow from three different directions.

"Skipping everything but the dialogue when reading" seems like it would make everything except, like, the scripts for radio plays (or podcasts or what have you) incredibly confusing to read. I've only read one book (that I recall) in an almost-entirely-dialogue format (MCA Hogarth's Defence of the Fiddler), and that's because it was basically the script of a play rather than a traditional prose novel. I am reeling.

"I only add descriptions to my writing because I feel I'm obligated to, not because I think it adds anything" feels like this person would much rather be writing radio plays as well as reading them, but they are reading and writing novels instead. (I guess this is analogous to all the people who wrote TTRPG sourcebooks because what they really wanted to do was write 500 pages of worldbuilding with no associated plot, but you couldn't get a publisher to look at that unless there was a d20 system hack stapled to the front.) This one I'm actually somewhat prepared for after the first one, because it's just the same thing from the opposite direction.

And then from out of fucking nowhere it hits me with the enormous crab claw of "reading 30+ books in a year is impossible and anyone who says they do must be skipping most of the book" and sends my mangled corpse flying out the window.

[true-neutral-kobold]

I think if you are reading for fun, you should be allowed to skip any parts of the book that you want to, and read in any order that you want to.

Skipping large portions of a book would make for a different reading experience, for sure.

It is not terribly difficult for a fast reader to read 30 easy-to-read books in a year. For reference, it typically takes me around 6 hours to read 1 Discworld novel, so I could read one novel a week and get over 30 in several months. The same is not true of all books. Reading a math textbook usually takes me many weeks, and I will usually skip portions that I don’t find interesting.

So.

If you only want to read dialogue, please, enjoy. It is a different experience than most people are having, but maybe that’s all of the book you care about.

[nothoardingifbooks]

Sure read however you want - It's your life.

But also... HUH? 30 books per year isn't actually that many if you are in to reading. Even mixing up reasonably complicated ones and longer ones from a variety of genres.

That's like telling someone who's into knitting or woodworking, or hiking, or writing, or computer games that XYZ goal/target/output is unreasonable.

Completing a new computer game from scratch each month would be completely unreasonable for me but one of my friends did it last year.

Kayaking the Bass Straight seems absolutely ridiculous to me but I know someone seriously considering doing just that.

My most complicated crochet project was a fancy scarf with a 3mm hook. My grandmother on the other hand was fully capable of ornate lace with hooks smaller than 0.5mm, and she could hold a conversation while doing it.

Just because you can't do a thing doesn't mean that it would be hard for everybody.

[going2hell4everythingbutbeingbi]

honestly yall just gotta be comfortable reading books that make you feel stupid

[defilerwyrm]

Let people grow.

When I was younger I was very right-wing. I mean…very right-wing. I won’t go into detail, because I’m very deeply ashamed of it, but whatever you’re imagining, it’s probably at least that bad. I’ve taken out a lot of pain on others; I’ve acted in ignorance and waved hate like a flag; I’ve said and did things that hurt a lot of people.

There are artefacts of my past selves online – some of which I’ve locked down and keep around to remind me of my past sins, some of which I’ve scrubbed out, some of which are out of my grasp. If I were ever to become famous, people could find shit on me that would turn your stomach.

But that’s not me anymore. I’ve learned so much in the last ten years. I’ve become more open to seeing things through others’ eyes, and reforged my anger to turn on those who harm others rather than on those who simply want to exist. I’ve learned patience and compassion. I’ve learned how to recognise my privileges and listen to others’ perspectives. I’ve learned to stand up for others, how to hear, how to help, how to correct myself. And I learned some startling shit about myself along the way – with all due irony, some of the things I used to lash out at others for are intrinsic parts of myself.

You wouldn’t know what I am now from what I was then. You wouldn’t know what I was then from what I am now.

It distresses me deeply to think of someone dredging up my dark, awful past and treating me as though that furiously hateful person is still me. It distresses me to see others dredging up the past for anyone who has made efforts to become a better person, out of some sick obsession with proving they’re “problematic.”

Purity culture tells you that once someone says or does something, they can never go back on it. That’s a goddamn lie. While it’s true that some remain unrepentant and never change their ways and continue to harm others, it’s important to allow everyone the chance to learn from their mistakes. Saying something ignorant isn’t murder. Please stop treating it that way. Let people grow.

[got-zayn]

Still call it out and question it ….

[defilerwyrm]

Bruh. No. Listen. Call out what people do now, absolutely. If they haven’t changed, call them out on their record. This post is explicitly not about people who HAVEN’T changed. What this post IS saying is, if someone is making an effort to be a good person, don’t go digging around in their past for evidence that they were once for what they’re now against, or once against what they’re now for, as “proof” of what they “really think,” because people’s opinions and beliefs can change. 

The obsession with finding shit in someone’s past and then claiming that a questionable or even sordid past negates all possibility of a good present needs to become extinct. Gold-star activism and purity culture are bullshit and we need to collectively reject the fuck out of them.

If someone has changed for the better, don’t harass them about what they were like before they fuckin’ changed. That’s shitty and it needs to stop.

[sepdet]

We can’t change the world if we decide people can’t change.

[sarasa-cat]

Gold-star activism and purity culture are bullshit and we need to collectively reject the fuck out of them.

We really need to start asking where this purity bullshit came from. I’m not  Christian and was not raised Christian but there has been a lot evidence that much of gold star activism and purity culture originated in of evangelical youth movements and then infiltrated progressive left-wing and center-left politics when those youth left their churches but failed to leave behind the black-n-white puritanical “you’re going to hell if you stray one inch from the righteous path” style of thinking they were taught.

I distinctly remember some conversations I had in the late 00s and very early 2010s with long time social justice activists who were baffled and disturbed by the new crop of youth activists who were practicing something that was decidedly NOT social justice despite stealing that phrase from us.

In the decade and a half that has passed since then, all of this gold-star activism and purity culture has done exactly what I predicted back then: empowered the far-right while sowing division everywhere.

Folks. This shit needs to stop.

[kvothes]

a good thread

[cryotrash]

Did you know that most plot holes can be fixed by making your characters canonically stupid

"This doesn't make any sense, why would he ever-" my man hasn't stumbled onto a thought in years

[lesbianbettyboop]

not to sound like a crazy sjw but parents putting little girls in frilly dresses/lavish clothes and telling them not to run, climb, play in dirt, etc lest they ruin their outfits or somebody look up their skirts is one of the most direct ways we as a society teach girls that they are only ornamental and cut their childhoods short

[weevil-mastermind]

Imagine if we did the “public libraries are punk” thing for other subcultures. Imagine if people made shirts that said “Soup kitchens are grunge” or “Mixed Use Urbanism is Juggalo”.