Shadowdancer

She/Her ✧ 31 ✧ BEGONE: minors, terfs, magats, fancops, antifeminists Not a themed blog. I love video games and books. Feminist and atheist. Interested in purity culture, censorship and cults.

[shadowdancers]

Currently reading 📚

[tributary]

i don’t think the people who use the term “epstein class” have defined their terms. they think it makes them sound very smart. it does not.

[tributary]

yes, i know what the implication is. i’m trying to get them to realize it or say it out loud.

[boringkate]

You listen to music regularly? Why? Have you even tried quitting? Could you quit? You get music stuck in your head? Wow. You're so ruined and music brained. I bet you make your partners listen to music with you when you have sex. Music addiction has really ruined a whole generation. You know it's not realistic to expect reverb in real life, right? You're probably so desensitized that you don't even feel anything anymore when you hear a bird singing that it wants some fuck.

[paradigm-adrift]

I don't have a problem with people listening to music per se, but I do have a problem with the music industry exploiting & mistreating artists.

Personally, I abstain from all music in order to keep my hands clean but really music should just be illegal outright to protect musicians from abuse.

[terramythos]

holy shit this person in the notes

[lancrewizzard]

[russianblush]

#ilya baby get behind me

[spirit-of-art]

Maxfield Parrish, The Young King of the Black Isles, 1909

[purlturtle]

Enya, The Memory of Trees, album cover, 1995

[importantcatpics]

[theinternetarchive]

Massive Attack, Mezzanine European; Britain, 1998 TripHop; Standard LP

[sailermoon]

having unwashed hair will have you believing shit like i can’t be saved

[the1920sinpictures]

1910s Barefoot kids enjoying watermelon, perhaps with their teacher but definitely with one older young woman to supervise. From Paul Holbrook, FB.

[socialmaya]

Occasionally forget people genuinely think capitalism is thousands of years old

One time I was talking about Robin Hood with some coworkers and one guy was like “he was bad because the people he helped learned to expect handouts” and I wanted to be like… okay can you explain how that flawed capitalist propaganda applies to feudalism

reminder that capitalism was literally invented in the 16th century

[tayefeth]

That’s an exaggeration. What was invented in the 16th century was mercantilism. Capitalism really dates for the beginning of the nineteenth century, with the rise of industry and cash crops over artisans and merchants. Vulture capitalism, with the notion that companies have no duties other than generating profit, is even younger.

Capitalism is only 200 years old and I have to say, they have not been an impressive 200 years

[downtroddendeity]

I think a lot of this comes from the fact that most people don’t know the formal definition of capitalism. We all know the word, we’ve all seen the jokes, but very few people bother to actually define it unless they’re talking about political theory and philosophy, so it’s easy to end up with the impression that Capitalism = Money Can Be Exchanged For Goods And Services.

Capitalism is the economic system where most of the means of production (i.e. everything people need to have to make the stuff that everyone wants) are owned by private individuals or corporations, who then hire people to provide the labor necessary to produce things, with the intent of selling the output at a profit. It’s the difference between “you’re a carpenter and you make a chair and you sell it” and “you’re Richard Q. Richington who owns a chair factory, and you pay people to sell the chairs you paid other people to make and then all the excess money goes back to you.” There have been Richard Q. Richingtons on and off throughout history, but that being the norm for every single industry is a pretty recent development.

[implicatures]

I scrolled past this and like two posts later saw this absolutely perfect example of the way people use “capitalism” completely divorced from its meaning.

People have been dangerously adulterating their products to make a bigger profit for THOUSANDS of YEARS. Rome famously had problems with people selling counterfeit bread and doctored wine.

Capitalism might make these problems worse by concentrating power in the hands of fewer and larger corporations, but ultimately the problem vastly predates actual capitalism. Unscrupulous sellers have been endangering and ripping off their customers since there was such a thing as a marketplace, and governments have been regulating the market for almost as long.

[tuulikki]

Time to deploy my favourite history meme:

[jaydenskyle]

Hasan Piker blaming gay people—sorry “homofascism”—for his preferred candidates losing in a primary so maybe can the gays stop thirsting over him now?

[thesunxlx]

Coming out (2026)

read about this illustration shop + commission enquiries + snail mail + more

[storm-of-feathers]

yeah yeah rainbow capitalism is bad and whatever but like. when I was a child, being pro gay was not the popular or lucrative choice. I'm happy that times have changed.

[storm-of-feathers]

I miss rainbow capitalism. I do. I miss when it felt like public opinion was still pro gay. I understand it was always an empty gesture, but it mattered in a sense of knowing how socially acceptable being queer is. If that makes sense.

[the-big-mood]

[curseworm]

the secret cheat code for women is realizing you dont have to date men

[curseworm]

this doesnt just go for lesbians it goes for bi women and straight women too. i cant even count how many times straight women have told me “i wish i was a lesbian so i didnt have to date men” but guess what … u Dont have to date men 

[curseworm]

to be clear this also isnt necessarily saying ‘go date women instead!!’ its just saying…. u dont have to date men. u dont have to be dating women in order to not date men! in fact if ur not attracted to women at all please dont date women just as a substitute for men. but if dating men isnt making u happy… u dont have to do that. u dont have to make a space in ur life for men

[curseworm]

im singlehandedly destroying every mans mental health by telling women its ok to not date them

[json-derulo]

I'm not gonna articulate this well, but there's this phenomenon I keep seeing on the left that I'll call "bean soup rhetoric," wherein someone fails to understand that they are not the target audience for a particular message, or just can't conceptualize why a speaker would craft their message differently to resonate with a target audience that doesn't already completely agree with them.

"The 'God Made Trans People' billboard is stupid! God didn't make me! I'm an atheist!" Okay. The billboard sits along a major highway in Kansas. We can deduce that the target audience is not you—it's the centrist evangelical Christians driving along that road who could probably be persuaded to become allies as long as we choose our words carefully and don't make them feel attacked for not already knowing everything about trans rights issues. Another one I see a lot is, "We shouldn't be talking about how right-wing legislation catches [privileged in-group] in the crossfire when [marginalized out-group] suffers far more!" I know. I agree with you. Which is why you and I are not the intended audience of this argument!

The entire point of rhetoric is to win over someone who doesn't already fully agree with you. In this case, let's say that someone is Jennifer, the moderate center-right mom in your neighborhood who doesn't really know or care about transgender issues but would be absolutely horrified by the idea of her teenage daughter having to submit to an invasive inspection of her body just to be allowed to play soccer. Tell her, "Banning trans students from sports will inevitably subject all student athletes to invasive gender-policing," or "Legal restrictions on gender-affirming care will make it harder for you to access the hormone replacement therapy you take to treat menopause symptoms," and she is more likely to question her existing beliefs and listen to the rest of what you have to say than if you lead with leftist talking points that she already has a calcified opinion about or which she thinks do not personally affect her.

Tailoring the argument to the things she already cares about does not mean we're forgetting that she has more privilege than most—entirely the opposite, in fact. A privileged ally can be extremely valuable. Jennifer votes in every election. And so do all the other ladies at her book club, and church, and in the PTA, and those folks listen to Jennifer. There's a reason both parties were courting suburban women so hard in the last election cycle! If we can find common ground with her on this, if we can get her calling her representatives and talking to her friends and phone-banking and door-knocking and making a stink, that's how the needle starts to move. If I can convince her to take her support away from the candidates who are actively restricting my rights and throw it toward those who want to restore and expand those rights...then I'm sorry, but Jennifer is a more valuable ally to me than the people who agree that the legal boundaries of gender ought to be abolished altogether but refuse to actually do anything except complain online about how both sides are equally bad because the right is trying to force everyone to drink the cyanide kool-aid while the left keeps serving bean soup and they don't like bean soup

[thecollectibles]

Crow by Konstantin Dvoytsov