Claire Keane
Keni
PR's Tumblrdome
$LAYYYTER
YOU ARE THE REASON
KIROKAZE
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❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
@theartofmadeline
Stranger Things
we're not kids anymore.
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
cherry valley forever
dirt enthusiast
AnasAbdin
Origami Around
#extradirty
🪼
noise dept.
tumblr dot com
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@stardustandscotch
Oh wow the 250th Fourth of July parade has been cancelled lol
Fun fact: the DC area will be hotter than 99% of the earth tomorrow!
Also I get the sense that very few people in DC are aware that federal officials wrote detailed analyses warning of the air quality health risks of the enormous 850K fireworks set to go off — and that the admin did not release those findings to the public
The fact that you can’t raise taxes on billionaires even slightly without them pouring money into fascist political movements is, of itself, evidence that billionaires as a class shouldn’t be allowed to exist in the first place.
I’d just like to point out that every single thing that has happened in the 6 years since I created this post has only reinscribed its absolute moral correctness in my mind.
and honestly it's just fucking insane that every time we try to talk about harm to children in particular we have to talk circles around the fact that these things are very, very overwhelmingly done by parents/family members/teachers/religious leaders/known and trusted adults in a position of power over a child, to the extent that many people's suggested solution to child abuse is "give the people most likely to abuse a child EVEN MORE strangling legal and material power over the kid"
you're not supposed to actually address who is abusing children and what can be done to give those children recourse and the ability to leave abusive situations because nobody actually gives a shit about child abuse beyond the familial property rights violation it represents to them and the cudgel against minorities which it can be turned into
You see something broadly similar in nursing where you have to tip toe round the fact that nurses can directly and intentionally harm patients; one of the most common phrases you'll hear when trying to address an issue is something like "well no nurse is coming to work deliberately wanting to hurt their patients". I don't say this to derail from the issue of protecting children from their parents/guardians, i say it because i think it highlights the consistent problems that not offending the sensibilities of people in positions of power over vulnerable people is seen as more important then actually protecting those vulnerable people. "How dare you suggest I'm a bad parent, I'm not going to listen to anything you say because clearly you just hate me, and my feelings are clearly the real issue now" type mindset that means you end you talking circles around issues trying not offend anyone instead of directly addressing what is wrong
FDR already solved the "what are people supposed to DO in a post-scarcity capitalist society besides imploding and then overthrowing the government" with the New Deal and specifically the public works project/Works Progress Administration. the library doesnt really NEED a cubist mural, especially not a government-funded one, but that's the kind of shit you actually should be directing taxpayer money towards if you want to create a relatively stable capitalist socialist state. i mean we did and do actually need bridges and manhole covers and asphalt and apartment blocks which were also a major part of the program as i understand it, in current year of our lord a ton of American infrastructure is still running on top of New Deal concrete which desperately needs retrofitting and maintenance lol, but the new deal funded a lot of library murals too. borderline unthinkable in 2025 to imagine a widely-known and publicly-accepted presidential plan to occupy idle labor force during an employment crisis with building playgrounds and lawns and so on
“Let’s send archivists and historians around to interview old people about their memories of slavery and the Civil War.” 🤯
I mean, if you start thinking creatively about what is worthwhile, you can keep a lot of people employed, and generate incredible things for the next generations of citizens!
You have to actually care about people, now and in the future, though.
The thing that Democrats, as a party, have still not yet accepted is that they have to solve the problems. Incrementalism, by definition, solves only part of a problem, which to the regular people who suffer the genuine consequences is the same as not solving the problem. What does this mean, concretely? It means that you need to give people decent health care that they can afford, rather than boasting about taking minor steps down the long road towards that goal. It means that you must give people wages that they can live on, rather than boasting about small economic gains that still leave them too broke. It means that you must attack the power of billionaires until the billionaires do not have too much power any more, rather than advocating for modest tax increases that leave an oligarchy substantially in place. It means you have to expand the Supreme Court and put in term limits and end the antidemocratic unaccountability of the institution, rather than hoping that the inherent robustness of our storied institutions will somehow reassert itself in time to save the day. The distinction that I’m making here is less ideological than practical. The entire pseudo-civil war inside of the Democratic Party over “socialism” is a canard. Nobody really knows what socialism means, and the policy overlap between the socialists and the “progessives” is significant. What is propelling the popularity of the socialists in certain districts is less an upswell in Marx-reading and more the fact that these candidates are touting both policy positions and a fighting attitude that would solve the problems of the people. Medicare for All solves a problem; incremental improvements to Obamacare do not. Aggressive wealth taxes combined with aggressive promotion of mass unionization solve a problem; minor tax increases on the rich and “business and workers can thrive together” platitudes do not. Expanding the Supreme Court and imposing term limits on justices solves a problem; calling on the next Democratic president to appoint someone liberal does not. This list can go on and on and on. The point is that in each of these cases, the left-most position is the one that would actually make a significant positive material impact on the macro-level problem, whereas the incremental approach would mitigate the underlying problem to such a small extent that the average person could be forgiven for not perceiving the change at all. Instead of thinking of the differing approaches to these issues on a left-to-right or radical-to-conservative axis, it can be helpful sometimes to just ask: “What would it take to actually solve this problem, as opposed to just moving somewhat in the right direction on it?”
The moderate's delusion.
Moderates seem not to comprehend that it takes roughly the same amount of political capital to do a little bit of good as it takes to do a lot of good.
It is almost as hard to raise taxes on billionaires by 5% as it is to raise taxes on them by 90%, because it is the direction that generates the opposition, more than the magnitude. Billionaires are going to fight against you raising their taxes, period. If you’re going to have the fight, it might as well be over a change that would, if you win, solve the problem. Moderates are shocked when they can’t mobilize Americans over policies that would not meaningfully change their lives for the better. This is, frankly, stupid. Assess our economic and social and political problems honestly. Decide what measures are necessary to solve those problems. Then fight for those measures. Do not cut your request in half before you begin to fight, due to your mistaken belief that this will make winning your fight more realistic. It won’t.
“you’re such a ray of sunshine!” thanks! one day i chose to act happy and then i kept choosing it over and over and over and over until the neurological pathways formed like desire paths in the thicket. i dug and clawed my nails into the grooves of my brain and carved out joy. i retouch it every day.
when i was a kid i had moments of being so fucking diabolical because i realized at some point the best way to leverage power over my family was to do shit that would make everybody late
our house was in the middle of nowhere surrounded by woods so when i decided i didnt want to wear dresses anymore if we were going to some event & my parents insisted i had to wear a dress i would just go hide in the woods. was so committed i almost made us miss a flight once bc my mom packed a dress in my suitcase
i only promised to stop doing this if my parents got me formal boys clothes to wear which eventually they did. i don't feel bad about resorting to violence bc i asked politely and they said no. proud of 10 yr old me for evil annoying lesbian behavior
5th grade was the last time I wore a dress for school pictures. When my parents attempted to force the issue for 6th grade, I climbed onto our roof and pulled the ladder up after me. My dad borrowed the neighbors ladder. As soon as it touched the roof I pulled it up too. By the time I had 3 ladders they were willing to negotiate, and 2 hours late for work.
[Image ID: a tumblr tag reading "problems that can be avoided if you simply treat your child as a human being with the right to make decisions on what they wear". End ID]
One of my more niche but deeply held Critical Role headcanons is that, out of Vox Machina and their greater extended network, the character who is most likely to have ever been a client of Marion Lavorre's is actually Cassandra de Rolo.
#search your feelings you'll know it to be true#she's basically marion's ideal client. foreign noblewoman with residuum money who is extremely conscientious about boundaries and tips 100%
That “cringe” nonbinary xenogender genderfuck therian who uses neopronouns and may or may not go on HRT while being loudly, proudly themselves will always be more revolutionary and subversive than a binary trans person who aggressively reproduces the cis status quo and shames anyone who doesn’t do the same.
By the way, I threw “therian” in here as a bit of a litmus test for those responding to it as something widely regarded as “cringe” but ultimately completely harmless and benign that’s often maligned by people with conservative beliefs. And well. It did its job quite amazingly given how many of the negative responses I’ve seen have focused on that rather than the overall message of shaming people for their identities is bad and counterproductive. It’s almost like these people view all of those stated identities this way but used the silly furry one as a “weak point” they’d get minimal pushback on to dismiss the very clear point of the post. Literally hilarious honestly
That video of Alex Hirsch reading S&P notes for Gravity Falls conveys a few things to me:
1) the U.S. entertainment industry (especially animation) is run by older conservative types who make up offensive terms and get really mad about them.
2) the people who run Disney would be the first to fall in line with a fascist regime.
3) most of the media we consume is tailor-made and watered-down to appeal to the tastes of older, deeply religious conservative audiences.
4) conservatism, not the left, is and always has been the biggest voice of censorship in American culture.
J. Michael Straczynski, creator of Babylon 5, was before that a producer and writer for a number of cartoons in the late ‘80s/early ‘90s (The Real Ghostbusters and the original She-Ra, most notably). After a few years of dealing with the censors and their obsession with finding Satanism (or at least looking for Satanism to further political agendas) he wrote an article about the whole corrupt and bullshit system.
And published it in Penthouse, to force those same censors to buy a skin mag. The editor there asked, why Penthouse?
That one is from his autobiography, Becoming Superman. See also:
(As he goes on to say, he’s never worked in animation again–he’s effectively been blacklisted by the cartoon industry.)
Every time something like this comes up, I remember two stories about making media. The first is about movies, and comes from Quentin “Feet Man” Tarantino.
When he was making Pulp Fiction, he was worried that the MPAA would object to the high level of violence in the film, so he shot a bunch of extra-gory stuff that he didn’t actually want in the film, and added it in before submitting it to the MPAA. Predictibly, they asked him to cut most of it (without even commenting on some of the things that had him worried, like the bits of Marvin’s skull that lodge in Samuel L. Jackson’s hairpiece). The resultant cuts were actually more permissive than he’d expected, so he cut a little more and submitted it, and it got passed with an R.
The second story is about that artist on Morrowind whose name escapes me (I’m not a big ES fan tbh) who figured out that if he made two creature designs, one weird and what he wanted, and one even weirder, he could get Todd Howard to agree to just about anything by showing him the whopper first, then going back and “working” for another few hours on a second, “toned-down” version, and it worked every time.
The reason I bring these up is that the thing that drives censors isn’t some extant physical rubrick of what is and isn’t acceptable, it’s the idea that they can have absolute power over someone else’s creative work. It’s about the social dominance of the interaction.
There is nothing so innocent, so clean, that a censor will not find some fault with it. Because they must find something wrong with it to justify their existence, and because it makes them feel powerful.
This is true of all censorship.
very strange cottage industry on youtube of giving exhaustive "critiques" of harry potter that amount to things like "the magic school is dangerous and that's bad!!!" and treating that with equal severity as the fatphobia or the slavery apologia, then patting themselves on the back as if this amounts to some kind of praxis
cinemasins is not praxis lol. how about materially supporting and protecting trans people from joanne and forgetting about her wizard books
I loved harry potter growing up. it made me feel seen as an abused and closeted kid. I idolized and looked up to joanne, wanting to become an author like her
then she started funnelling all her wizard book money into destroying the rights of my people and I resolved not to give her any more of my money
I didn't have to reevaluate the quality of her writing to do this. whether she's good at keeping her worldbuilding consistent or whatever has nothing to do with my decision to boycott her work. who cares how good or bad her writing is. she's killing trans people
OP, you get it. This is exactly the problem.
This satire article resonated with me so much
Every single person I know who did football in high school, without exception, has a chronic injury. Many regret what it's done to their knees and back, even major organs like the brain.
There is no serious legislative push to ban high school football.
Also, like, if you want to talk about social pressure on minors to undertake activities that will result in regrettable, irreversible damage to their bodies:
No one, *ever*, tried to persuade me to transition.
My gym teacher tried to persuade me to try out for the football team almost every single day that I was in junior high.
Social pressure on minors to undertake activities that will result in regrettable, irreversible damage to their bodies? How about how many adults tried to get me to diet as a kid?
*stares*
Bosses and Coworkers: you've got a great work ethic, going above and beyond
Me: I am literally just doing my job. Everyone else is slacking off.
Everyone Else: (magically knows somehow the secret amounts of work the boss is actually asking of them, which the boss cannot tell anyone for Reasons)
There always seems to be a gap in instructions (from bosses, parents, teachers, friends, whoever) between 'required' and 'expected', and this gap is:
invisible
never explained
always a different size
you have to guess the size
if you guess wrong you either get Praised or In Trouble
At least on 'the price is right' you know (because someone *actually told you*) that you are playing a guessing game and that there is an over/under mechanic and that the conquence of guessing wrong isn't a punishment or damaged relationship or getting fired
On an unrelated note my psychiatrist has given me a referal for a formal ASD evaluation
This post is about the neurodivergent frustration of having to deal with neurotypical authority figures who don't say what they mean but I love the pro-union labor-rights energy I'm seeing in the notes
there are places in the world today that are experiencing 40°C for the first time in recorded history. of course there's no way to know whether chucking billionaires into volcanos will appease the sun god but i feel we're doing the scientific method a disservice if we don't at least try
