A Reflection on Contradictions

[plaidos]

“If Alison Bechdel is a terf, that makes my ‘over 35 non-binary queer dyke friends’ who went to michfest terfs too I guess 😂” yes. Literally yes. That’s the whole point: terfism is a lot more commonplace & normalised than people think, even within TME trans people.

[reflective-justice]

I feel like you can very safely ignore anyone that would accuse Daryl Davis of being a member of the KKK. This is a black guy that sat down and had lunch with KKK members, again and again. Over 100 people left the KKK because of him.

We know what works! Reaching out and making connections. Building alliances.

Hate and yelling? Absolutely counterproductive.

But these people don't care about productive. They finally have an excuse to throw an entitled little tantrum!

[reflective-justice]

> "Liberals can't even define women in a meaningful way."

Look, I get that there's a lot of complex leftist philosophies that rely on concepts like "gender identity" and that aim to be maximally inclusive. But I'm also old enough to remember when you were only considered a gold-star Real Trans Woman if you'd already had bottom surgery. Apparently even "having a vagina" still isn't enough of a real, meaningful definition for the transphobes.

There are a laundry-list of incredibly simple definitions, and the transphobes have rejected all of them! Absolutely no one is arguing for "sane, common sense" definitions of womanhood: they just flat-out do not want trans women to exist. (And of course, these same people are equally opposed to the idea of men wearing dresses and acting feminine. The idea is that you are born in a box and by god we are going to keep you in that box.)

[dataandphilosophy]

Things that are much much better than expected: “we found evidence of rape culture in less than 5 percent of these 300,000 articles about rape. The overwhelming majority of articles generally stick to facts without downplaying the severity of the crime, blaming victims for their violations or expressing overt sympathy for the accused perpetrator.”

WaPo

[big-block-of-cheese-day]

Why men bottle up their feelings

A therapist on male clients talking about #metoo:

“As the #MeToo movement has unfolded, I’ve been disappointed at the lack of public male engagement with this moment, outside of witnessing men offer weak apologies and temporarily disappear from the public eye. As a man, I’ve had the curious experience of tracking my own occasional defensiveness at female rage and wrestling with uncomfortable self-reflection.

[…]

The majority of men who enter my office appear either flat and emotionless or superficially engaged but hiding behind impenetrable niceness. When I ask a man, for example, how he feels when his girlfriend says, “I’m so upset, I can’t even be around you right now,” I usually get an answer like “It’s frustrating.” That’s a word that is used a lot yet conveys essentially nothing. Most men have spent little time with their feelings and have very limited vocabulary to describe what is going on in their hearts.”

Why is this? Why can’t men perform emotions to the satisfaction of people who care about these things? How do we walk that narrow line between “male tears” and “men are emotionally stunted”?

A model would help: Women built an entire first person industrial complex: massive content factories churning out pre-processed emotion for your consumption, edited for maximum impact. From raped to dumped to just getting disagreed with in a classroom, there are plenty of models of how other women process what happens to them. The sameness of their content has as much to do with shared experiences of humanity as the presence of a template.

That doesn’t exist for men because very little can just “happen” to a man. Men do. This means, for example, an article about confusing signals on a date could be a confession to a crime. An article about being part of a couple that fights means crossing your fingers that someone with a Twitter following and an axe to grind can’t cherry-pick your words and re-arrange them into those of an abuser. The “it happened to me” model pioneered by XoJane is just not available to men because they can’t emote safely from behind the cover of passive voice or the second person.

Even in the supposed security of the therapist’s office, it’s safer for a man to assume that a confession of emotion about his relationship wouldn’t get compassion as much as homework.

I’m starting to think that emotions are a consolation prize for a perceived lack of agency.

Even if there’s no specific harm to avenge, a man who expresses emotions publicly runs a risk of expressing the wrong ones. There’s an established popular genre of feminist online mockery dedicated to male MFA students and the unacceptable expression of their inner worlds.

Men are simultaneously told to open up and that what’s inside is boring at best and problematic at worst.

A lot of men see the emotions argument like Mao’s Hundred Flowers campaign: tell people they have the freedom to open up and express their feelings, then come down hard at those who expressed unapproved feelings. It’s all a trap.

So yeah, that’s why I’m a dairy product online.

[gatherers-incorporated-deactiva]

Yikes, this is why I get a little concerned when men I know talk about going to therapy. Of course people will hesitate to express their emotions when the most glorified expression of emotion is a dramatic performance of guilt. I noticed that the author of this piece didn’t bother to talk about encouraging his clients to think about times when their own consent may have been violated, or to notice if the women in their lives are expressing anger abusively.

Forever pissed off (as a woman and a feminist) about stuff like this. Also, after seeing a male therapist use the phrase ~female rage~ approvingly, I need to go wash my hands.

[left-wing-heresy-blog]

[libertarirynn-deactivated202006]

This is quintessentially Tumblr.

[themodernmaccabee]

This is fucking life at this point

[unclebeanbag]

BUT MUH REPRESENTATION

[voxette-vk]

When Chris Blattman publicly asked, “As a development economist, what is one politically-incorrect research finding (a finding reflecting an unpopular belief) that you wish more people cared about?,” Lant Pritchett swiftly rattled off six responses.  I stitch them together here, with Lant’s permission.  Lant speaking:

1. One of course is that the income gains to movers from migration are an order of magnitude bigger than any in situ development project/program gain. 2. Another is that the variance of economic growth rates is much lower among democracies than non-democracies and hence (descriptively) nearly all episodes of rapid, sustained, (and hence poverty reducing) economic growth were initiated by non-democratic regimes (e.g. Indonesia, China, Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam). 3. Another is that on many individualized indicators of well-being (education, health, malnutrition, self-reported subjective well-being) the gaps between the sexes within poor countries are at least an order of magnitude smaller than the gaps between males in poor countries and females in rich (OECD) countries. 4. Another is the point Dani Rodrik has made (and Branko and me using Engle curves and food shares not income) that the rich in poor countries (e.g. 95th percentile) are much poorer than the poor in rich countries (say 20th percentile). 5. Another is that the high scoring students in poor countries on examinations like PISA (or equivalent) are much lower than even the average of the OECD–so while there are rich-poor gaps in the quality of education in poor countries this is not because the rich get a good education and the poor get a bad one but because the rich get a bad one and the poor get none at all (e.g. on a recent OECD study tertiary graduates in the capital city of Jakarta had lower measured literacy than high school drop-outs in Denmark, or when Indian states participated in PISA there were literally no students in the sample in the top two categories (5 and 6) of a six level scale of performance). 6. The reason I wish more people paid attention to the last three is that in my view in development today there is too much attention to inequality within poor countries and not enough to the very low levels such that things are pretty bad even for the, say, 80th percentile.

[ithelpstodream]

[yourownpetard]

>the male inability to understand consent The what???

[leviathangourmet]

are we just going to ignore that the 12 year old boy in this situation is expected to be responsible for the consent of an adult woman? Boy’s not even an adult and it’s still his responsibility for women’s comfort and safety even when he’s the vulnerable one in the situation. 

Does she absolutely not see the glaring double standard of men, regardless of age, having to take responsibility for women’s boundaries but women are not obligated to actually communicate their boundaries or respect men’s boundaries. 

Even when a boy is young and vulnerable he still manages to have empathy and take responsibility, and she makes it entirely about shitting on men.

[ima-fuckingt4ble]

!!!!!!!!!!!

[poorpoorpitifulme]

Honestly, this took a wild fucking turn towards the end, like, the most bizarre form of emotional whiplash. I was reading through it, completely expecting it to be about how she had gone out of her way to make sure the boy was comfortable and exactly how she achieved that, perhaps using her own positive behaviour as a call for other adult actors and directors to do better when it comes to the emotional well-being of their child co-workers.

 That would have been a good story, and one clearly needed, in the wake of how some adults in the wider world have acted towards the Stranger Things children and how the MeToo movement has more or less entirely ignored the child victims (particularly male child victims) of sexual abuse in Hollywood. But instead she took a story about a child being in a vulnerable position, completely ignored how he may have been feeling about the whole situation, and decided to make it an awkwardly contrived moral lesson about how adult men should treat women, once again brushing over and dismissing the real vulnerabilities and problems facing male children, particularly in the acting industry, in favour of painting adult women as the victims of every scenario.

[brazenautomaton]

And she will not stop, and she will not be stopped.

And their power will not diminish.

And all hope is lost.

[the-grey-tribe]

I reblogged with brazen’s commentary of despair for once because if you look in the notes enough people are reblogging this unironically and agreeing with the sentiment.

Remember Kids:

Sex is something women give to men.

Sex is something men do to women.

Consent is something women give to men.

Consent is something men must obtain from women.

Women have no agency.

Men always consent.

Even if a woman initiates sex, there might not be consent.

Due to social pressures, consent is always uncertain.

Women don’t really want or enjoy sex.

Women have sex with men only because otherwise men will be sad.

Even if a woman tells a man she wants a no-strings-attached meaningless affair, he should read between the lines and provide her a house and kids (because social pressures of hook-up culture)

Is a woman even really consenting to sex if she is only doing it for an ulterior motive?

It’s definitely the man’s fault if the woman fakes an orgasm.

It’s also the man’s fault if it is unsatisfying for him.

Being too explicit about what you want or feel too early is creepy and pushy. Being too reserved or subtle about what you want or feel is creepy and manipulative and entitled.

Gays and lesbians are pure and have none of these problems.

[shinelikethunder]

can we please bring back “in poor taste” as a concept

Because at some point it got folded in under “problematic,” and now every damn thing that has Unfortunate Implications or deals with sensitive topics indelicately enough to raise hackles or gores somebody’s sacred cow is treated as a grave injustice or a threat to society. Online activism culture has lost the vocabulary to express “this deals with touchy stuff in a way many people might find inappropriate, and you should probably avoid it if insensitivity on this subject gets you angry/upset, but it’s not promoting hateful ideas or demeaning people or affecting anything but my opinion of the creator’s sense of tact.”

[foxyfandoms]

I think this really an important post. We’ve fallen into such a rut of “everything is right or wrong, no inbetween” that stuff that’s merely in poor taste is conflated with things that are actually offensively malicious.

[qlazzarusgooodbyehorses]

this is so well worded like i been trying to say this for awhile thank you

[chicklette]

Damn. This is the thing.

[queeranarchism]

I also kinda dislike that people started saying ‘problematic’ when they could be specific about what someone did wrong. It becomes this vague scary this that someone ‘said something problematic’ and you don’t know whether they passionately defended nazis or made a clumsy joke about retail workers. 

[shin-red-dear-deactivated201812]

One of the things social media has sadly achieved is creating a constant tension in dialogues and an antagonisation of everything that doesn’t sit well with one person or another. And that drift is caused/reinforced by the abusive use of words, to the point of robbing them from their meaning.

I personally don’t use the term “problematic” as it has become too much of a flag that people use to rally people to their causes or harming others.

But I will surely warn my audiance of anything that could be considered “in poor taste”.

[shinelikethunder]

“creating a constant tension in dialogues and an antagonisation of everything that doesn’t sit well with one person or another”

Yes. Especially the regions of social media that love to sling around “problematic” as an all-purpose accusation.

That specific observation actually reminds me of an article I stumbled across a little while back. It’s mainly concerned with excavating the academic roots of the Cult of Social Justice, which is a worthy topic on its own, and the whole thing is an interesting read. But there was one particular quote that articulated something that had bugged me for years but I’d never been able to put my finger on, and it stuck with me so much that it was actually the search term I used to find the article again: “an explicit denial that differences can be other than oppositional.”

Derrida coined the term différance which he derived from the verb “differer” which means both “to defer” and “to differ.” This was to indicate that not only is meaning never final but it is constructed by differences, specifically by oppositions. The word “young” only makes sense in its relationship with the word “old” and he argued, following Saussure, that meaning is constructed by the conflict of these elemental oppositions which, to him, always form a positive and negative. “Man” is positive and “woman” negative. “Occident” is positive and “Orient” negative. He insisted that “We are not dealing with the peaceful co-existence of a vis-a-vis, but rather with a violent hierarchy. One of the two terms governs the other (axiologically, logically, etc.), or has the upper hand. To deconstruct the opposition, first of all, is to overturn the hierarchy at a given moment.” […]

We see in Derrida further relativity, both cultural and epistemic, and further justification for identity politics. There is an explicit denial that differences can be other than oppositional and therefore a rejection of Enlightenment liberalism’s values of overcoming differences and focusing on universal human rights and individual freedom and empowerment.

Like… that’s it. In a nutshell. Why the SJ mutation of social liberalism only ever seems to sow discord, polarization, collateral damage, and intolerance. Why the factions splinter so quickly and excommunicate each other so rabidly. Why it’s so hostile to diversity of experiences within minorities that don’t hew to the expected narrative. There is no peaceful coexistence or friendly respectful interaction between groups–and not just because a bunch of different cultures rubbing elbows will always be fraught with conflicts and miscommunications that require hard work to manage like mature adults. Not only is peaceful, roughly equitable coexistence not the end goal, it’s impossible, it’s inherently a lie, the mere idea can only ever be a malicious falsehood bandied about by the powerful to keep the oppressed docile. Even diversity in the sense of multiplicity of experiences just flat-out stops computing when there are more than two or they can’t be reduced to “oppressor” and “oppressed.” Because in the most poisonous and reductive form of this nasty little thought-virus, there is no diversity or tolerance or coexistence. Just an endless struggle over who gets to stab whom in the back.

[thetrippytrip]

I’m with this movement!  

[deadmugen]

me

[mangopapi-deactivated20210928]

Salute to this movement

[mega-purplezebracorn]

This is so important!

[ghostsisreal-deactivated2018050]

Everybody needs to value eachother!!! Yes!!!! I love this!!!!

[that-bi-guy]

Can’t tell you how many times I’ve been coerced into sex because some girl decided that she wanted it, and when I say no she turns it into some kind of criticism of her. Or I’m cheating. Or I’m actually gay. Or she starts groping me and playing with me trying to “get me in the mood”. Or she just won’t take no for an answer. After many years of this you know what I’m left with? Low self esteem, constant bad sex, depression, having all sex now feel like a chore, being terrified that if I have sex with someone I actually *like* then it won’t work out, and the feeling like I CAN’T say NO.

Ladies, “No means No” isn’t just for guys. Some of us have grasped the concept. Time for you to do so as well.

[17mul]

I support this movement 100%

[callmedeku24]

I’m here for this I’m tired of these double standards

[forgottenthot]

The move

[sinofgreedx]

🙌🏽🙌🏽🙌🏽

[hi-imkingdavid]

Mannnnn I had this conversation with this girl like the other week

[westafricanbaby]

I’m here for this!!! AND STOP CALLING MEN GAY OR “SUSPECT” BECAUSE THEY AREN’T SEXUALLY ATTRACTED TO YOU OR THEY AREN’T IN THE MOOD TO HAVE SEX WITH YOU‼️

[mintedwitcher]

NO MEANS NO ALL THE TIME.

[problematicparrot]

Male Victims Of Domestic Abuse Share Their Stories

Reddit post

47% of male victims of domestic abuse are threatened with arrest. 21% are arrested.

70% of non reciprocal violence is committed by women

221 empirical studies and 65 reviews and/or analyses, which demonstrate that women are as physically aggressive, or more aggressive, than men in their relationships with their spouses or male partners.

[fierceawakening]

Im too exhausted rn to dive into actual discussion but this is like the second time pro gun people have been like “huh wow USUALLY gun control people are not trying to parse out what’s reasonable” and I just

Are my views REALLY that unusual? Because they don’t seem especially out of the norm among people I talk to who think America has a weird gun problem that needs fixing

So I’m wondering if I just have odd nuance liking friends or if a lot of these people have a distorted idea of what the other side actually thinks

[thefutureoneandall]

Are my views REALLY that unusual? … So I’m wondering if I just have odd nuance liking friends

…yes?

Like, throughout your gun control threads, even when there was a thing you didn’t know about existing law or guns, you seemed interested in knowing what’s true and reasonable, and making sure gun laws actually do something about violence. This is… um… exceptional.

My basic experience is that in personal conversations, with activist groups, and even among politicians, gun control advocates don’t know or care how their proposed laws will actually work in practice. This seems widely true even with smart, knowledgeable people.

Without rehashing the debate, an illustrative story:

New York State decided to restrict magazine capacity, which is a common goal of gun control activists. The initial law restricted new magazines to seven rounds, which was immensely unpopular because many popular guns do not have seven-round magazines, and so it became impossible to buy new magazines for them.

This is obvious to most recreational shooters, and anyone with actual expertise in guns and gun laws. But zero of those people were consulted, because the NY SAFE Act was passed in 24 hours from first public draft to signing, and none of its supporters had meaningful knowledge of guns.

(It also strengthened the idiotic “assault weapons” ban on weapons with features like bayonet lugs. I know gun advocates keep harping on how ‘assault weapons’ are stupid, but it’s because people keep trying to legislate them.)

After passing a law restricting magazines to seven rounds, the governor discovered that it was a stupid law, and publicly stated “There is no such thing as a seven-bullet magazine.” He asserted that the law actually meant to restrict magazine capacity to ten rounds, but magazine loading to seven rounds. (And then, several months after asserting this was already in his law, got around to actually changing the law to match the claim.)

Meaning that you could have ten rounds of ammo, and a ten round magazine, but the state politely asked you not to combine them at risk of losing your gun license. Trivial to bypass, and also an easy offense to commit completely on accident. This was the result of an attempt to modify the behavior of spree killers.

That’s what happens when the fourth largest state drafts what’s intended to be a nation-leading gun law.

No one knew anything about what they were doing, and no one cared enough to ask for a single competent opinion. Everyone involved was either completely indifferent to ‘reasonable’, or completely incompetent to hold any sort of government power. (Or both.)

This is basically what I see every time American gun control gets further than a dinner-table conversation. It’s not that reasonable gun control advocates don’t exist, but honestly it doesn’t look to me like the 2nd Amendment crowd have a real distorted sense of the other side. 

I think you’ve selected for lots of thoughtful people with good goals, but my experience is that advocates like you are painfully rare. The people who have power and resources on the gun control side seem either shockingly indifferent to efficacy, or else utterly dishonest.

(Edit: I should add that a lot of pro-gun advocacy is comparably stupid, with the added evil of being utterly callous. ‘Status quo’ is just harder to implement wrong, even when your motives are dumb.)

[reasonandempathy]

Feminism Against Equality

It’s a common talking point among MRA’s, anti-feminists, MGTOW, conservatives, and others.  And, as loathe as some people are to admit it, it has solid roots, both on Tumblr (which need no more be addressed than the fact that the sun to the east) but also, as this will demonstrate, among Feminism writ-large, both among prominent institutions and feminist activists.

And the simplest way to demonstrate this is to look at how feminists treat other feminists when they break the prevailing narrative.

Erin Pizzey

Going in-depth on the abuses directed towards Erin Pizzey is almost old-hat at this point: the death threats and dead dog, the harassment, etc. etc. etc. to the point where even Mother Jones doesn’t discount its authenticity.  For daring to even try to research the numbers of abused men and abusive women she was forced by feminists in the UK to flee for her life to America.

But so many other feminists who break with orthodoxy and are then punished by feminism and feminists just go entirely under the radar.

Anne Cools

30+ year Canadian Senator appointed by Justin Trudeau’s father who started her activism as a black college student in the 60′s, where she got a B.A. is psychology and sociology (unlike oh-so-many feminist leaders).  

She was the first black woman in Canada’s senate, and at this point has been a political actor and activist for 50 fucking years (holy hell that dedication).  But when she started talking about men’s issues, how they may not be so star-spangled-privileged, women’s movements across Canada tried to discredit her and try to diminish her.  Her speeches since then have regularly been protested and stopped, but she doesn’t take it like that.  

Karen DeCrow

A long-standing feminist activist and worker, she dedicated her life to the work of protecting everyone’s civil rights.  She was a lawyer, president of NOW for 4 years (’74-’77), the first female mayoral candidate in New York history, pushed for women to go into NASA and collegiate sports.

But when she started working for male reproductive rights it all turned around on her.  Despite the fact that she couched her rationale in feminist philosophy and reasoning from Gloria Steinem, it didn’t matter.

Her legal defense of a man in a paternity suit where the woman lied to him about her birth control and tricked him into having a child was described as “patently anti-woman” by Marjory Fields, a celebrated feminist in the New York (where the case was taking place) Supreme Court.  

“ She certainly never stopped being a feminist. She also never abandoned the belief—often seen in recent years as a quaint relic of 1970s unisex feminism—that men and women are far more alike than different. But if she refused to see biology as destiny, she was equally skeptical of patriarchy as destiny. “  and for that an ex-President of NOW, who lobbied for more women in STEM fields, academics, and sports, was labeled anti-woman, anti-feminist.

And there are more.  So many more.  But it doesn’t matter what glass ceiling you break.  You can literally be the first black female senator in Canada and they’ll attack you, harass you, and try to no-platform you before including you in their “look at this amazing woman of herstory”.

[mailadreapta]

So based on the number of things I’m seeing lately that refer to the whiteness of someone in places where it’s not obviously relevant, it seems like the anticolonial Left is getting its wish, and whiteness is becoming decentered and is no longer treated as unmarked. Sometimes, at least.

The downside, of course, is that once a given identity becomes marked, people start incorporating that into their identity and then

[mitigatedchaos]

They can’t say they weren’t warned that this was a bad idea.

[genderfight]

“If you find it salient to bring up my whiteness to make points about/against me, I am allowed to find my whiteness a salient feature of my identity. Further, as someone who prefers to have aspects of my identity which are out of my control not used as tools of shame against me, I will have to find ways to take pride in…” Yeah. I can see that rejoinder coming up. And, honestly, I’m not sure I have a counter-argument at hand. As things currently stand, the left has a pretty good argument that “white pride” is an incoherent concept and exists solely to bolster the ranks of racists. But that requires “white” to be incoherent as a group around which pride movements might orient themselves. I think more has been done to codify, define, and therefore unify “white” as an identity category (at least in contemporary America) by the left’s assault on “whiteness” than was ever done by dippy neo-Pagans or hood-cloaked idiots. I want to reiterate: “white” is not presently a category it makes sense to orient pride movements around, but if people judge and lump heterogeneous groups together and a comparatively unified racialized experience takes hold? It could be. If a large enough bloc within the culture begins to treat “white” as a pejorative describing a particular group of people, that lumping-together makes it start to make sense to talk about a “white” race despite the lack of any sort of scientific or social rigor grounding the category. Part of what it means to acknowledge race as socially constructed is to acknowledge that it is possible to construct “new” races out of existing groups. I would prefer to be wrong about all of this.

[generationalskeptic-blog]

If you feel threatened by men advocating for themselves, trust me, you aren’t advocating for equality, regardless of what you call yourself.

A word, no matter how noble the definition, does not excuse your actions. Feminism is not the shield you get to hide behind when you tear men down.

[kontextmaschine]

Honestly the Rick and Morty thing, “don’t you get that this tortured asshole master of the universe is supposed to be read as pathetic”

Like they didn’t “get” that about Gordon Gekko, or Tony Montana, or First Blood PTSD longhair John Rambo…

[raggedjackscarlet]

two things.

number one, it’s just capital-R Romanticism, man.

“Better to be a beautiful monster than an ugly human being”

number two. nobody gets whats going on here because they think that the fanboys of Byronic Heroes are looking to them as the ultimate ideal rather than as a last glimmer of hope.

The message these characters send is that if you’ve fallen into the darkness, capital-R Romanticism provides a way out. “Pathetic” is transformed into “Tragic”, and while you may not be any happier, suddenly you have DIGNITY, and suddenly your capabilities aren’t cancelled out by your shortcomings, they’re thrown into even sharper contrast. Suddenly you’re not a grey blob, you’re a chiaroscuro composition. 

The message of the Byronic hero is that It’s possible to be fundamentally doomed without losing your agency or competence, and for people who feel fundamentally doomed, that’s hope. That’s a damn powerful hope.

It’s the hope that you can find some kind of value in the person you are RIGHT NOW, rather than having to live vicariously through a vaguely conceptualized Fully Undamaged Wokebro that the powers that be believe you should have been.

Even if you’re never truly happy, you can still be functional.

Even if you can’t be a hero, you can still be an antihero.

Even if you’re never good, you can still be great. (see: Edison, Ford, Jobs)

It stands in stark opposition to the more ~modern~ way of thinking regarding men, the Sensitive Beefcake/Threatening Dweeb dichotomy, which posits that men can be neatly divided into “Precious Smol and Harmless but secretly Alpha as fuck” and “everyone else, basically school shooters”

Which system would you choose?

“There are many pathways, some dark, some light, some kind, some cruel, but all lead to the Grail”

or

“If you’re not Dwayne Johnson just fucking die”

——————

But of course, there IS a problem.

and it’s the problem of stopping the intellectual wankfest and actually taking action.

But that’s got nothing to do with which heroes you choose to worship, and everything to do with how you choose to worship them.

[earlgraytay]

another thing you need to keep in mind with ‘status’ talk is cui bono

if a woman, to take a very pointed example, technically ‘benefits’ from not being drafted into a war, but is not being drafted because she’s ‘supposed’ to stay home and make babies and does not have the chance to enlist even if she wanted to… she’s not really the one benefiting.  she’s just getting screwed over in a different way.

[reflective-justice]

Oh yay, another exciting round of Oppression Olympics.

The draft sucks. Coercive Motherhood sucks. These are two totally unrelated sentiments. One does not negate the other. She is absolutely benefiting, because the alternative is not “the draft”, the alternative is “the draft AND coercive motherhood.” We should fix both of these issues.

[thelastmemeera]

What does it mean to be a billionaire?

So there’s been a lot of discussion floating around regarding billionaires and society, and I’ve noticed that most people have no idea what a billion dollars is for practical purposes - people tend to think of it as a vague, nebulous concept of “a lot of money” rather than something concrete you can wrap your head around. This is understandable, considering 1) a billion of anything is really hard to visualize and 2) the average person has no real reference point for an amount of money that large. So I’m going to try to break it down for everyone:

Okay, so imagine you have a billion dollars. What can you actually buy with that?

This is a mega mansion that will have an Imax cinema, a bowling alley, and a spa when it’s fully complete. It costs around 4.6 million dollars.

Now let’s buy one of these in every country in Europe - that’s 50 mansions you now own. So how are you going to travel between all your many homes?

This is a Bugatti Veyron Super Sport, the fastest street-legal car in the world. It has a maximum speed of a face-melting 254 mph and can go from 0 to 60 mph in 2.5 seconds. It costs around 2.5 million dollars.

Let’s buy a dozen of them - you know, in case you total a few of them racing around the highway. But maybe a sports car is still to slow for you:

This is an Embraer Lineage 1000. It’s private jet that can seat up to 19 passengers, and we’re going to buy it for 53 million dollars.

How about a boat? The Tatoosh is a 303 ft private yacht, meaning it’s longer than a football field. We’ll take it for 369 million dollars.

Do you like art? Just for fun let’s buy Monet’s most expensive painting ($90 million) Van Gogh’s most expensive painting ($151 million), and this monstrosity, which is made with 8,601 diamonds and costs 65 million dollars.

Now that we’ve gone on our ludicrous and absurdly wasteful shopping spree, how much money do we have leftover? About 12 million dollars, which is almost an order of magnitude more than the average American with a bachelors degree or higher earns in a lifetime ($1.8 million). So if you for whatever reason decided to buy the 50 houses, 12 sports cars, plane, yacht, art pieces etc. and immediately set them all on fire, you would still have enough cash leftover so you never would have to work again if you so chose. This is what it means to be a billionaire.

But we’re not done yet.

The richest person in the world is Bill Gates, with a net worth of 86 billion dollars. If he liquidated his assets, what could he buy?

Well, for starters, the Burj Khalifa - the tallest man-made structure in the world at 2,722 feet tall, costing around 1.5 billion dollars.

The Large Hadron Collider, the world’s biggest and most advanced particle accelerator for 9 billion dollars.

The Hubble Space Telescope for 10 billion dollars (including 20 years of operating costs).

The Three Gorges Dam, the largest power station in the world, more than a mile wide.

And to top it all off, a fleet of five Nimitz-class aircraft carriers, the largest military vessels ever built for around 8.9 billion dollars each. If you look at the picture very closely you can see the people standing on it for reference.

If Bill Gates bought all of this, he would still have around 2.3 billion dollars leftover. That’s enough to go on the billionaire shopping spree I described above twice over (so 100 mansions, 24 sports cars etc.) and still have hundreds of millions of dollars in the bank when it’s all said and done.

But we’re not done yet.

Currently, it’s estimated that there are 2,043 billionaires alive today, with a combined net worth of around 7.67 trillion dollars.

This is Russia, the largest country in the world, extending more than six and a half million square miles, with a population of more than 144 million people. The United Kingdom could fit inside Russia 70 times.

In 2016 Russia’s gross domestic product was about 1.28 trillion dollars. This means that if the two thousand and some odd richest people in the world - less than half of 0.1% of 0.1% of the Earth’s population - liquidated and pooled their assets together, they could buy every single product and service made in Russia for almost 6 years.

So yeah, make of that what you will.