Untitled: A Collection Of Random

Literally just reblogging an assortment of content.

[awed-frog]

Met an old teacher today and we got talking about ‘the good old times’ and ten minutes into the conversation I jokingly said the one regret I have from middle school is that I never won anything at her magnificent tombolas? Because, like, she used to hold this game about once a month so we’d learn the numbers in French and it was never big prizes, but as a 12-yo I desperately craved them - a cactus-shaped eraser, a bright blue notebook with slightly larger-than-usual squares, a set of coloured pens - and never ever got a single one of them. 

(Actually spent a good few months thinking I was genetically unlucky and researching ancient family curses with my grandma.) 

So today I don’t know what I was hoping for - nothing, really?

(I mean, that part of me that’s still twelve was probably expecting this sweet old woman to have a set of glitter stickers in her purse and just go ‘You know what, you’re right - I’ve been saving this one for you all these years, here you go’ but I’m a solidly rational person and I know that’s stupid.)

No, I thought we’d just laugh and it would be a good shared memory and that would be it. Instead, my teacher got flustered and a bit embarrassed and explained the game was rigged. It was never about learning French at all. She’d just noticed some kids couldn’t afford even basic stationery, so she’d buy a few half-fancy items every month with her own money just for them. She didn’t want them to feel different or left out. And obviously the way she used to walk around in the classroom, looking over our shoulders - it wasn’t to prevent cheating. It was because she was cheating herself, wanting to see which number a particular child needed to get a Minnie Mouse pencil case.

Guys - the world is fucked up, but so many people out there are just good and kind and humbly heroic it honestly gives me hope. 

It’ll be alright, you’ll see.

[millenniumfucko]

[kleeklutch]

[headspace-hotel]

of course, my frustration with how The Left handles people trying to become informed about their ideas is partly motivated by fear. I swear being online is like I’ve been sent back in time to stop a disaster that’s already happened.

On some level y’all get that the far right extremists are good at recruiting and radicalizing, but generally speaking The Left curses at and attacks people who are trying to ask questions, constantly reiterates that its people’s own responsibility to be informed, repeats the exact kinds of propaganda right wing media spews out because they think the concept of Christians being oppressed or whatever is funny, encases all their discussions in jargon that is impossible to understand without context, refuses to define the jargon even as right-wing media “educates” them about its Real Meaning, and spreads the idea that having a discussion with anyone right of center morally taints you. A part of me is screaming internally every second I’m online because of this. If you think of this as a cultural and ideological battle of sorts, the Right is actively recruiting soldiers while the Left is busy chasing anyone who doesn’t already have military training, a uniform, and weapons away from their recruitment office (which is boarded up with signs saying that anyone who asks where they can join will be forcibly removed from the premises) with baseball bats.

Like we can debate “performing emotional labor” until the sun burns out and probably some good points will be made but at some point it’s gonna be either emotional labor or living under a fascist dictatorship because all the people it wasn’t our job to educate went out and finally educated themselves, just like we wanted them to, using their free Google...

...which showed them how to find nazis that would happily answer all of their questions, without cursing or implying that they should already know everything, and lots of free, non-paywalled, easy to read and jargonless articles about how it’s a minority’s fault that things suck.

If we’re fighting back we’ve got to fight to win. That’s it.

[headspace-hotel]

Please listen to me, a person who knows the American Christian Right inside and out.

The Right weaponizes our unwillingness to educate. When we scoff at a person that doesn’t understand what “white privilege” means, there are comforting voices that will be there to tell them that the Leftists are just people who have never suffered or hurt a day in their lives, that speak of “white privilege” because of their bitter hatred of anyone with differing opinions than they have. That person will return to the familiar narrative that the Left is filled with violent, hateful, destructive people that are both incapable of understanding their needs and struggles and completely indifferent to them. THIS IS HOW THEY WORK. The confrontational attitudes and confusing language are used as essential tools by the Right.

“I shouldn’t have to explain what privilege is!” we say.

“They respond that way because what they really mean is that they think no white person has really struggled or suffered,” other voices say. “They don’t care about you because you’re white. Isn’t that what real racism is?”

And that narrative makes sense to them because no, they don’t know what real racism is, because anyone who asks questions about what racism is is “sealioning,” and anyone who googles racism is probably met with the dictionary definition, and anyone who says “but this is what the dictionary definition of racism is?” is assumed to be acting in bad faith and probably cursed at.

I am not asking marginalized people to constantly be available to answer questions about their traumas and shit. I don’t want people to go through that. But as someone who’s extensively seen the inside of the group that elected trump, I am BEGGING people to understand what I’m saying and be as frightened of its implications as it deserves.

I don’t know!! If you’re white you have no excuse to not AT LEAST SOMETIMES perform racism-related “emotional labor,” start memorizing responses and spreading definitions and stuff!! Instead of “deconstructing our patriarchal colonialist capitalist mindset” or whatever, let’s deconstruct the long words we use to discuss literally everything for a hot second! I have answered very strange ignorant questions before and I will do it again! Because no matter how ignorant the question is, the person still went to ME. And I’m not throwing that away so they can look for answers on google and end up with the alt-righters on reddit in a place where they can educate instead.

[abhumanaex0-deactivated20220418]

I'm realising recently that one of the major reasons for this trend is that the web is fkin huge and people don't often venture very far beyond their own circles. Which means that within a circle and just at its outskirts, the questions and arguments people make have honestly been addressed and re-addressed so many fkin times that it really is just "oh my god ugh" when there's another one who's missed all of those learning times. And it seems like it's out there and it's obvious and why do I need to be doing this again when it's right there. Except that it's only really right there from a specific spot.

So, in conclusion, I think we need a FAQ to redirect people to.

[mentalisttraceur-long]

The left needs an on-ramp which incrementally builds up all of its concepts. It has to start from common sense and truths that are obvious to someone not on the left and get from there to the insights the left has to offer in ways that most non-lefties can find intuitively logical.

Most people on the left can't actually offer that. They are too far removed from the actual philosophical justification of their views. Too willfully unable to put themselves into the perspective of the right. Too uncritical of the left's ideas. You can't lead people who don't already mostly agree to your perspectives from that position.

To be fair, some of the left's progress in the culture has been due to reliance on the mechanisms of offendedness, outrage, and ostracism. But the success this achieves is hollow. It gets you disagreement becoming resentfully hidden rather than disagreement becoming agreement.

There was a time when this "get offended and ostracize" strategy was more common among the right. Sociological pendulums and all that. It is a strategy you do when you have the power to shut people up and the privilege to get away with being an ass about it.

(Contrary to the Abridged Lefty Theory for Children most people get from Tumblr or Twitter or wherever, power and privilege are not the same across a society - power and privilege constantly change depending on where you are and who you are with, both in meatspace and online.)

But it is a toxic strategy regardless of who does it, with a high risk of being more harmful than helpful in ways that are not immediately obvious. And it becomes more harmful the more progress and success you achieve.

[pale-chartreuse]

So, let’s get started. What are the essential words and phrases that need to be defined in order to start the conversation? I’m serious. Let’s start a dictionary.

# dictionary of the American Left

[headspace-hotel]

Let’s start with what privilege is—not just white privilege or male privilege but privilege generally speaking. There has been discussion about what that is, but still I’ve seen widespread misunderstanding among republicans or similar about what is meant when people say it. And that means that people are REALLY DEFENSIVE when talking about it—they feel like their lives and their personal struggles are being attacked when someone says “privilege.”

I really think the misunderstanding is partly because of “white privilege” being defined apart from the context of what privilege is. Because people on the right don’t really consciously think of the world as consisting of systems of oppression. So even the best attempt to define “white privilege” is going to fall a little short.

I had to learn this—to check myself a bit, and realize that I sounded super condescending when I talked about privilege to people who were first generation college students and abuse survivors or who had grown up poor or who had been in the foster system, et cetera.

Here’s where I think you’d start—start a discussion about fairness. Because fairness isn’t a loaded word in the same way that “privilege” is. Privilege is often seen as very presumptive just because people don’t really know what you mean by that. The first question is, “Well, does the world treat people and judge people fairly, or are there ways in which it’s unfair?”

And it’s very hard not to see that the world is unfair. A person who is born rich has a lot of advantages over someone who is born poor. Someone who has loving, supportive parents has a better chance at being brought up in a way where they can succeed than someone who never had good parental figures. Metaphors about privilege don’t get through to these people because they don’t explain why they apply to the real world. A metaphor about a fence or running a race is just a metaphor. Talk to them (if you’re comfortable with it) about times when you have experienced unfair treatment, or get them to share their own experiences.

The problem you will run into is that people will not see these things as systemic, because the idea of systemic injustice is probably kind of foreign to them. They get really tripped up on the idea that someone can participate in an unjust system without themselves doing unjust things because they already read everything related to these discussions as aggressive and blamey. They probably don’t see examples of racism or sexism as a fundamentally ingrained part of society—they’re the actions of individuals who are wrong, yes, but people tend to see them as isolated incidents.

So provide examples. Lots of examples. Don’t just talk about one axis of oppression (and don’t say axis of oppression because they don’t really know what that means). DO NOT, by any means, assume they have the historical context for these things...because they don’t. American public school history education is propaganda. Have reliable sources on hand for the history of racism and sexism and other prejudices in America because people usually don’t know there has been, for example, really any legal/institutional aspect to racism since the 60’s. American history textbooks stop talking about racism with MLK. Talk about the history. Talk so much about the history. Almost everything I know that convinced me racism was still a real and important threat ingrained into our society I had to research outside of textbooks.

Talk about how the assholes that anyone could identify as racist don’t just “end up” racist. Why are they racist? Maybe they grew up hearing that kind of stuff as a kid. Well, racism being basically normal in a whole group or community is an example of something bigger than individual choices that causes racism. “A person is this way because their parents raised them like that” is the simplest and most accessible way to introduce the idea of actions and beliefs being part of a system.

Don’t talk about privilege about being just in terms of gender or race. Talk about class privilege. Talk about privilege as broad and flexible and a thing that doesn’t fully 100% define an individual person, because “White privilege” refers to something that exists in a whole society, not just “you, a white individual, are privileged for being white, regardless of your individual experiences, and you never struggled.” It’s not an attack and it’s not meant to be a way of broadly simplifying a group’s experiences. The necessity of explaining this isn’t all because of “white fragility,” it’s definitely at least partly because they’ve probably heard very inflammatory and dishonest things about what the Left means by privilege and that has to be dealt with. There is a lot of prejudice and bigotry in our history and there are still ways of thinking and laws and structures that don’t treat people fairly because of qualities they can’t help. And we want to make the world more fair. If they shut down, go back to that—it’s about treating people with fairness.

[insomniac-arrest]

Reviewing 1950s Nuclear Family Barbecuing Art

Notice how the wife is in the background waving for help before she plans to toss her son into the river, she wishes the husband would look at her, but the husband only cares for MEAT– pay attention to these themes for they will show up later.

wife is still in the background and MEAT is still in the foreground, but she is happy this time in her virginal white dress and all is right with the world. There son has yet to be tossed into the river.

TWO children now with a girl child learning to dispense not only MEAT but alcohol, the wife is in the background, but her smile is frozen and stiff on her face. She knows what the raggedy anne doll at the bottom knows.

everyone is so fucking HYPED for this new meat STICK– no longer limited to the round, finite circle. The father is the most excited of all. Watch as friend Tommy enters the scene from the background and the wife is now wearing pink instead of white. She will never return to her perfect unknowing ways.

1950s gay fucking panic. the circular meat is burning. the wife is wearing red. Jimmy and Tommy are going to go on a “fishing trip” and he won’t look her in the eye when they return. The other wife in white lives in ignorance, but not for long as DOUBT enters her expression.

the wife has finally taken center stage. She sets the table without looking at her husband who stands guiltily with his weird magic stick in the background. The daughter rushes away from her brother who has emerged from the river to hover across the ground and seek vengeance.

They are a broken family with only MEAT in the center left to remain.

[whitepeopletwitter]

[pseudodesigner]

[sameboot]

This is such an important and genuinely terrifying post. I could completely go off on the rise of anti-science, but for now I’ll just add: it isn’t just boomers that get deceived. This is a warning to all of us.

Pay ATTENTION to what you are being told. If you think you cannot be deceived, you leave yourself open to deception. Question, doubt, research research research. Learn about your personal biases, dig up any subconscious cognitive dissonance. Keep an eye on your mind.

[oldmanyellsatcloud]

It needs to be stressed that biases, not a lack of intelligence, is very much the issue here. Being aware of the need to fact check yourself is key: Intelligence won’t protect you from bad or unhealthy mental states, or keep you safe from cults of any sort. Intelligence will just make it easier for you to rationalize and attempt to justify the malformed tools you’ve taken/been given to yourself and others. You need to be wise enough to challenge yourself.

[gardenofroseandthorn]

As a cult survivor, this is lethally accurate.

[seraphic-sapphic-safehaven]

In case this isn't glaringly obvious by now:

White people do not and cannot experience racism and oppression on the basis of their skin color when they are the majority and the ones in power. Reverse racism is not real. Someone telling you that they bet you like casserole is not the same as Black and brown people getting gunned down in the streets for existing while Black/brown, Karen.

[seraphic-sapphic-safehaven]

As with all my posts about racism, you're encouraged to reblog this. Especially if you're White.

[pillmanize]

I made a difference in the world!

[pennie-dreadful]

REBLOG TO SAVE YOUR QUEER HEART FROM BREAKING

[omgkalyppso]

I’ve seen a bunch of people in the notes concerned (like I was) of comparisons of members of the lgbt to dogs: but upon visiting their website I was reassured that they monitor a variety of content, including (but not limited to):

[curface]

THIS IS A GOOD SITE

[jenniferrpovey]

Yeah, this site is literally so people can check for content they don’t want to see…or in some cases content that would make them physically or mentally ill. (I have strobe issues myself…)

It’s highly useful for a lot of people.

[gingersnapwolves]

I had no idea they warned for strobe effects, that’s awesome! They give me headaches and nausea.

[tiktokarchive]

[ruelukas22]

The best about this is she clearly planned this but actually seeing it made her crack up so hard she could barely get the timing right for the second bit.

[smingrid]

This legit made me laugh so hard I had to show my family

[princesstigerbelle]

Sometiiiiiimes I feel I got to FLOOPFLOOP run away

[loloftheday]

If anti-maskers existed during WWII

[sixfrigates]

Okay, here’s the thing though. It isn’t a question of if. They existed and this is exactly what they did.

After the United States entered World War II at the end of 1941 and Germany subsequently declared war upon it, Great Britain recommended several steps the United States should take in order to safeguard their ships from Nazi u-boats. Recommendations included sailing ships in convoy (preferably with escort, but records proved ships in convoy without escort were still safer than ships sailing alone), if a ship had to sail on its own, it should avoid known navigation routes and markers, and towns and cities along the East Coast should adhere to strict blackouts at night. These recommendations came from the previous two years of experience in which u-boats absolutely ran wild in the North Atlantic and North Sea, obliterating British shipping. This period of time was referred to by Nazi u-boat captains as “The First Happy Time”. 

Despite British warnings, the United States was slow to follow them and impose restrictions. Ships continued to sail along marked navigation routes and run standard navigation lights at night. Boardwalk communities along the coast were only requested they turn off their lights at night and the cities weren’t even asked that because they didn’t want to offend the tourism, recreation, and business sectors. 

Blacking out coastal communities would have made it infinitely harder for Nazi submarines to find and sink targets. A ship running with no lights is still visible against the backdrop of a lit city.

Conversely, a dark ship running against a dark coast is virtually invisible.

But because citizens living on the coast refused to adhere to wartime suggestions for amenity reasons, merchant ships sailing up and down the East Coast became sitting ducks of u-boats. The US government did not begin strictly enforcing blackouts until roughly August 1942. By then, the Nazis had been given 8 months to run rampant along American shores. This time period was referred to by u-boat captains as “The Second Happy Time” or “American Shooting Season”. 

By August, Nazi u-boats had sunk 609 merchant vessels, totaling 3.1 million tons and costing thousands of lives, mostly of merchant mariners performing their essential jobs. 

By comparison, only 22 u-boats were sunk.

While the failure of coastal blackouts were not the sole reason the Nazis had such success during this time period (the Navy was slow to implement convoys and remove notable aids to navigation along the coast), I do not think it can be argued they did not contribute significantly to such great loss of American lives.

[www-wlw]

If you can, please read the reply above or save it for whenever you have time. We need to break the habits of our history and that starts with applying our past to our present.

[filmtribv]

‘ Humans for the most part, don’t have a clue. They don’t want one or need one either, they’re happy. They think they have a… good bead on things. ’ Men In Black (1997) dir. Barry Sonnenfeld

[sugarweregoingdownswinging]

You would not believe Bill Nye

If ten million Science Guys

[the-strawman]

As I fell asleep

[be-more-chaotic]

*slams keyboard*

[theanimalmemes]

Sweetest sound ever 😍❤️

[butiknewyou]

I’ve seen a lot of things going around where you can put in your name and some form will generate an email for you to send to officials but I just saw this from Bernie Sanders’s former organization director for his presidential campaign:

So it’s fine to use ideas from things online, but it’s probably not as effective to use those auto generated emails.

[alloverthegaf]

in case you didn’t know, The Dixie Chicks, an extremely successful country singer trio in America, recently changed their name to The Chicks, as ‘Dixie’ is apparently a nostalgic name for the Civil War-era South.

They have also released a new song and video, which is what I really wanted to bring up - I would never have known about it, because I am in no way involved or subscribed to country music, but my mum learned about it and passed it on to me and I’m so glad she did - it’s called ‘March March’ and is absolutely worth listening to but 100% MORE worth watching. It REALLY doesn’t matter what music genres you love or hate I really think you, like me, if you believe in activism and progressive change, will at least feel a little moved by this music video. It’s very well done and quite powerfully edited. Here’s the youtube link.

[alloverthegaf]

awesome other stuff to know about them, thank you @littleredruns​ and @dancingatbraebent​

[knottahooker]

No, seriously, you need to watch this.

[clockways]

Give it a watch.

This isn’t what most of us think of country these days- the nationalist pop songs where the twang supposedly makes it country. This is some proper old school Johnny Cash sort of music and it’s got something to say.

[scifigrl47]

in 2019, Ken Burns and PBS just did a really fascinating retrospective on Country Music.  And one of the things that resonated with me was that if you were interested in the folk tradition, or female singer-songwriters in the 90′s, chances are you listened to country.  Because that’s where the women who were forced out by the pop machine ended up.  

9/11 changed that in one fell swoop.  Almost overnight, I went from listening to, and buying, a LOT of country music, to feeling alienated and frightened by it.  The aggressive, jingoistic, and very, very masculine wave of post 9/11 country music swept away a lot of excellent artists, and left us with the ‘bro country’ that we’re still dealing with today.

BRB, off to dust off a few cds.

[notenufcaffeine]

Not Ready to Make Nice:

And Gaslighter

[alanaisalive]

(this thread)

Had a bit of a rant this morning. Gender is a construct and biology is a joke. Trans lives matter.

[politicalprof]

Maps matter. Map 1 over-represents territory. Map 2 is weighted by where people live … 

[randomheresy-deactivated2020110]

Right.  Plus, a lot of blue people live in those red areas.  Rural districts tend to be dominated politically by those who control the land and resources.  The owners are overwhelmingly conservative, and they are able to control the politics of the lands and people they own, but a lot of people suffer for it. 

[cecaeliawitch]

boy, he’s super close to admitting that a straight-up vote can’t win the republicans anything so they feel entitled to cheat.

[butt-princess]

people who all cram into apartments in los angelos and new york, alot of which are fucking illegal immigrants, shouldn’t decide the fate of a whole nation when they have no idea the needs of rural america. 

[fandomsandfeminism]

So, first of all, this is a GREAT example of how racism feeds into the Electoral College. Undocumented immigrants don’t vote, and the idea that cities somehow breed more voter fraud BECAUSE they are more diverse, or that POOR people, people who, say, live in APARTMENTS instead of being LAND OWNERS is such old-timey classism to be laughable.  

And that’s SO MUCH of the rhetoric around the EC. People talk about how they don’t want “Urban” or “City” people making choices, and 99% of the time, that’s just code for “black” and “brown” and “Jewish” and “Gay” because you bigots think that 1. Only minorities live in cities and minorities ONLY live in cities and 2. You don’t want anyone who isn’t a WASP-y Farmer voting apparently. 

Like, you’re argument is literally “cities have more poor brown people, and I don’t think their votes should count.” So FUCK YOU.

Also, cities WOULDN’T dominate in the popular vote.

Really? What about the BIG CITIES?

#1 New York City. 8,601,186

#2LosAngelesCalifornia 4,057,841

#3Chicago,Illinois 2,679,044

#4Houston,Texas 2,359,480

#5Phoenix,Arizona 1,711,356

#6 Philadelphia,Pennsylvania 1,576,596

Those 6 cities, combined, have less than 22 million people. The US has 327 million.

And this is my point- the US is not made of a small handful of huge cities. The vast majority of the country lives in SMALL cities and towns, under a million people each, and their suburbs.

So, no, with the Popular Vote, you could not pander just to the biggest cities and be done with it. If you add up EVERY SINGLE CITY with more than 100,000 people in it (Which is 311 cities), that’s still only 94 million. 28% of the US population.

Even if ALL the ~poor brown people~ that you want to stop from voting lived EXCLUSIVELY in cities (which they don’t, you fucking racist), the popular vote DOESN’T actually empower cities. 

The EC ALSO doesn’t actually help rural (”white land owning”) populations (you fucking racist, you don’t even know the racial or economic breakdown of the rural areas you claim to care about). In fact, the EC makes things worse for rural areas. 46 states have an urban majority, and  “winner-take-all” laws that have been enacted by state legislatures in 48 states. So if there is a stark divide between rural and urban populations, in 46 states, the urban votes will win and 100% of the electoral points will go to the urban side (Where YOU think all the poor brown people live, again, you fucking racist).

However, in a popular vote system, no one’s vote would get thrown away like that, and everyone’s vote would be counted equally in the final tally.The popular vote would actually give MORE voice to rural populations that are all but completely erased in our current system.

And it is important to remember that in reality cities do not vote in perfect blocks. Neither do states. Even the most liberal city has conservative voters and even the deepest rural hellholes in Texas has progressives (I was one of them until I moved for college!) Those people matter. Those people should count.

Why not have a system where CITIZENS elect the president? Why does it matter which state someone lives in, if all votes should count equally? (I mean, I know YOU think that POOR BROWN PEOPLE shouldn’t be voting, you fucking racist, but ya know, for the rest of us who actual value the idea of a democracy) 

This is a REALLY good website about the popular vote and it debunks a lot of common myths about the Electoral college.