#sociopolitics

[shaffyreads]

There was a trend where pseudo-intellectual dweebs were like, "Thanos was right! We're struggling to survive because the earth is overpopulated," and now, years later, these same dweebs are suddenly panicked about human extinction because of declining birthrates lol.

[beyond-mogai-pride-flags]

Transvestite Pride Flag

Transvestiteness, or transvestment (TV): a prescriptor of individual(s) capable of transvesting themselves/being transvestic; considered outdated in economically Westerner cultures, specially in Anglophone and Francophone ones (additionally Germanophone), it's a reclaimed trans* term, specially in (post/neo)Latin countries, for people dressing corporeally themselves with vestuary commonly extrapersonally seen/socialized as the antigender of themselves in the binary spectrum. Also a historical term prior to the terms transgender and transsexual (TS), erasured/silenced nowadays from woke transcentric circles in English but still used largely in ample groups.

[lemonsharks]

Everyone deserves more

Everyone in the world deserves a comfortable life. Everyone. Me, you, my parents' old drug dealer, the guy with 12 kids across 9 baby mommas, teachers, sanitation workers, underemployed, unemployed, disabled, caretakers, citizens, undocumented, stateless, EVERY freaking person deserves more.

A safe, comfortable home they enjoy living in

Clothes that fit and don't hurt to wear

Clean, fresh water

Enough healthy food and fun food to eat

Activities they enjoy and enough time to do them in and money to pay for the supplies

Healthcare and health-maintaining care, including mental health, physiotherapy, and dental care

The medicines and treatments they need in order to live their healthiest and least painful possible life including medical devices and mobility and sensory aids

Mutually meaningful relationships with people they like

Pets if they want them (and the means to cate for those pets)

Children if they want them (and the means to care for those children

A safe and healthy planet for those children to inherit

Meaningful work in a field they want to contribute to and if that field is flipping burgers at McDonald's they STILL deserve all of the above

probably more but

The fact that I can throw a skilled medieval laborer's annual salary worth of masala in my chai a few times a week and own more than two sets of clothes doesn't change the fact that FAR to goddamn many people haven't got what they need to live, let alone to thrive.

We should not and cannot fall prey to the idea that the ability to have a nice cup of tea and and crack the window when it's too hot inside makes up for the fact that the planet earth is barreling toward a late-capitalist apocalypse.

Or that it makes up for the fact that many of those tea-drinking, window-cracking people also don't know where next month's rent is coming from.

Tl;dr wanting more when were forced to take our joy in so very very little is COMPLETELY REASONABLE and also I long for a world where no one is left wanting, even people I personally dislike.

[leam1983]

On Cultural Respect

So, unless you've been living under a rock, chances are you've heard of Air Canada before. It's my country's biggest privatized air transportation and freight providers, and you'd sort of expect it to follow along with its native country's two official languages. Things were apparently more flexible back when Air Canada was nationalized - Federal overwatch left posts open for Francophone and bilingual executives at all levels - but now, in the years following its privatization, spotting someone at an airport gate who speaks French is a bit of a gamble. It wouldn't be a problem for much of my generation, if not for the fact that the half of the deux solitudes I actually don't come from wallows in its self-isolation and tends to shift the blame on the other cultural group...

If you visit Montreal, one of those days, you'll realize the city's informally split between East and West. The island's Eastern half is largely bilingual and Francophone, and caters to our diaspora of cultures as well as French. We Francophones feel entitled to expect basic pleasantries in our language, as far as the service industry is concerned - and in the East, that's mostly how it goes. Either that 22 year-old from Dawson or Concordia doesn't fluently speak French but makes an effort to append a bonjour or an au revoir, or they're fully bilingual - and thusly grasp the cultural richness that's found as soon as you have access to two or more languages.

Then there's Westmount - and other parts of the province like it. See the Eastern Townships in a few rare cases, or a few boroughs in Saint-Lambert; or even as far up north as a few south-shore boroughs of Quebec City. Little islands - pockets of a sort - where buses have unilingual ads plastered on their sides, where storefronts reduce French to chicken-scratch Legaleze, and usually where the locals' roots in the province's legislative aspects comfort them in their notion that they just don't need to make an effort. They listen to CHOM-FM or Q92 - excellent radio stations in their own right - they read at Borders and Indigo, and watch Global, CTV and our local pickup of Vermont's ABC substation.

Everything's provided for them. It's comfortable and cozy.

Contrast with my situation, where I was more or less brigaded into Enriched English lessons from a very young age like a lot of people in my generation, because our parents had realized just how damning it is to not be able to communicate with your neighbours - especially when they won't make an effort.

So I picked up English. When the day's young and I'm not too tired, I can pass for a BC or Prairies native. Past six or seven PM, my québécois roots show a bit more; smoothing out my Rs requires a bit more effort. I don't stop putting it in, though. It's part of my job. Clients won't give a shit if I momentarily sound like Mel Blanc's Jacque Blacque Shellacque; I still have to speak to them in their preferred idiom. From very early on, we're taught that bilingual abilities are a mark of respect, of cultural openness, of greater understanding. Paradoxically, we're almost not shocked at all to see that the other half of the province doesn't share this attitude.

Not only that, but when we're left to politely ask for a bit of consideration, the unilingual Anglophones now steal bits from the Social Justice crowd, calling us racist for requesting that we at least have the option of being served in our own language!

I've had friends from the other half of the deux solitudes for many years. They're never coaxed into learning French, never shown translated works from Molière, Voltaire or even Alfred Jarry to so much as evoke some interest; and they aren't even told of what happens when initially unilingual English-speakers like Samuel Beckett did, when learning of the expressive capacity of my native language. Dude's a Scotsman by birth, and he penned an entire freaking novel in French.

Waiting for Godot? Originally written in French, by a depressive and alcoholic Scot who spotted some sort of beauty in my consonants and my love of adjectives.

And these friends' responses were always contrite, at first. It's not their fault, French wasn't really favored on their curriculum, or it just wasn't reallly spoken at home. It's not their fault, they've spent thirty-plus years getting by in Longfellow's tongue by never leaving the West-Island or Saint Lambert's more Anglo sectors!

That makes you wonder: who's actually isolated, here? Who's bricking themselves up? Sure as shit isn't me; I'm writing in English right now, in all of my native québécois status! Who actually promised these kids that sort of ease, this condescending assertion that they'd never need to speak more than one language in a country with two official idioms? What if I told you that Innu communities are pushing hard so that Inuktitut, Algonquin or even Mohawk also reach Official Language status? I've made some effort as far as Cree locals are concerned, seeing as people near Maliotenam speak French, English and Cree. I won't be able to carry an entire conversation in one of the local Native American idioms - yet - but I've at least reached the point where my Kweih is usually well-timed. As for things beyond hellos and goodbyes, I'm still actively following classes online.

As to why, I've always seen that Francophones and Natives share the same basic relationship with the country's Anglophone infrastructure. We're grudgingly-tolerated annoyances, and it's easy to sense that the Other Half would love it if we could just shut up and speak White. That's actually part of the problem: I'm White as the driven snow, but Francophones spent generations being talked down to the same level as POCs elsewhere in North America. We were ushered to the backs of buses, assigned our own bathrooms - hi there, Rosa Parks! - and told to stick to "our" part of town.

The working-class part. The ghetto. Where the have-nots congregate.

Except, that's changed, since the sixties. Not only that, but French is a hot commodity, now. The media have noticed that there's a lot of expertise in Quebec, and it's led to the establishment of giants like Framestore or Ubisoft Montreal. They're all based in those parts of town where the uneducated used to pile up in row-houses while subsisting on bread and molasses, and those same streets are well and truly gentrified, now. They're also the bastion of the local LGBTQA community, where there's much less resistance to expect.

Again, as with the Natives, misery loves company. It's easier to hook up, find someone to share a few drinks with and get closer to, if all linguistic barriers are left aside. I'm not much for empty dalliances, but I've shared a few drinks with delightful guys named anything between Andrew, Peter, James or Eric - with their Anglophone surnames, who handled my native tongue with a pleasant lilt and the kinds of omissions you just have to chuckle to, and immediately forgive. Zero shame, no fear of malaproprisms - all in the certainty I'd meet them halfway if they felt their linguistic floor more or less bust out from underneath their feet.

Me, one of the White Niggers of North America. If that usage of the N-word offends you, know that's it's been established for generations, in the current context. The guys I drink with at the Café Kilo don't have the same baggage with French as their parents and grandparents do, but the Boomers and those of the Greatest Generation still see an albatross hanging from my neck: I'm only a second-language English speaker. Friends of these same guys reap the drawbacks of that approach: they don't learn a bit of it, then enter the service industry as so many students do, and are forced to flash contrite smiles when someone who didn't have a bilingual English education steps into their Hipster shoe store.

I probably picked up the grammatical uses for Kweih as fast as they picked up Désolé, je ne parle pas français...

All of that, to circle back to Air Canada. Michael Rousseau, the current CEO, is on the hot seat for refusing to so much as pick up the local pleasantries for all of his fifteen years in Montreal. He, as expected, lives in Saint-Lambert and works in Westmount, and never felt the slightest bit of compulsion to pick up his own employees' language.

Today, it's ridiculously tough to get an Air Canada gate with a stewardess that speaks French. Service counters are as difficult to handle as Canada Post's online and phone-based components.

If you're from the Canadian or Anglo-Québécois arm of Tumblr and you read this, commend yourself if you're one of those making an effort, even if it's just to land the occasional Merci beaucoup. If you aren't, ask yourself what's stopped you. Did you pick up on the internalized shame of a lot of the unilingual Anglophones in the province? They were never taught, they're afraid of being embarrassed - so they never try.

Don't be afraid. Yeah, sure, there's jackasses on both sides of the issue, fuckers who'll cuss you out for speaking in English and morons who'll condescend if you speak French - but most of us are moderates, here.

Just try. Once or twice, just a little. Don't be a Michael Rousseau, don't lie to yourself and say you're too busy or that you never needed to work on that, before. I never needed to work on my English, and I still did. I did so because I wanted to read more books, watch more TV and play more video games.

I see it as a mark of respect - and you should, too.

[hermitthrush]

I think that what happens in our mythology here in the West is that the mythological archetypal symbols have come to be interpreted as fact... Unfortunately, in our age of scientific skepticism we know these things did not actually happen, and so the mythic forms are called falsehoods. The word 'myth' now means falsehood, and so we have lost the symbols and the mysterious world of which they speak. But we need the symbols, and so they come up in disturbed dreams and nightmares that are then dealt with by psychiatrists. It was Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Jacob Adler who realized that the figures of dreams are really figures of personal mythologization. You create your own imagery related to the archetypes. At present, our culture has rejected this world of symbology. It has gone into an economic and political phase, where spiritual principles are completely disregarded. You may have practical ethics and that kind of thing, but there is no spirituality in any aspect of our contemporary Western civilization. Our religious life is ethical, not mystical. The mystery has gone and society is disintegrating as a result.

Joseph Campbell, Myths of Light (2003) | Introduction, The Humbling of Indra.

[aimmyarrowshigh]

ANYWAY, because additionally, y’all can’t fucking read and have never had any interest in learning one single fact about the Holocaust until this week when you desperately needed to shit on your local Jew, intergenerational Holocaust trauma does not mean “we lost the potential for a generation’s worth of people to advance our culture, and that is a traumatic loss,” it’s literally a medical term for the psychobiological state of PTSD that is genetically passed down by Jewish and Romani (ONLY! ONLY JEWISH AND ROMANI!) Holocaust survivors to their children and their children’s children, leading to increased susceptibility to stomach disorders, STSS (Secondary Traumatic Stress Syndrome), anxiety, depression, OCD and OCPD, and assorted nervous system disorders, as well as maladaptive coping mechanisms. IT’S SOMETHING YOUR PSYCHOLOGIST DIAGNOSES YOU WITH IF YOU HAVE FAMILY WHO SURVIVED THE HOLOCAUST AND YOU MATCH DIAGNOSTIC CRITERIA, LIKE BEING FUCKING JEWISH OR ROMANI.

It’s why, for example, we all talk about spending our childhoods playing “hide from the Nazis and be very very quiet in a tiny hiding space” with our siblings, which is not actually a normal child game for children with healthy mental health to play!

Y’ALL DON’T FUCKING HAVE THAT, in part because THE QUEER COMMUNITY IS NOT DESCENDED FROM ITSELF GENETICALLY THAT WAY. That’s like... part of our whole THING. Most queer people have straight parents! And many queer couples have straight kids! Genetics don’t give a shit about what your parents were, sexuality-wise, in deciding whether you’re gonna be born queer, and therefore you are not born with Queer Trauma because THAT’S NOT A THING. And inb4 some dink calls me homophobic again, I’m a GODFORSAKEN MOTHERFUCKING LESBIAN. I CAN SPEAK TO THIS SHIT FROM THE LESBIAN SIDE OF THE ISSUE AS WELL AS THE JEWISH SIDE, AND LET ME SAY: THE QUEER SIDE OF THIS “DISCOURSE” DOES NOT HAVE A LEG TO STAND ON. YOU’RE JUST FACTUALLY WRONG.

And at this point! It’s not even that you’re TRYING to argue a specific point anymore! You just want Jews to be quiet and let you guys #alllivesmatteredintheholocaust which like!whhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh???????????????????? that’s not how genocides work either?????????

[glorious-spoon]

i think one of the most endlessly fascinating things to me about tumblr culture is the number of people who insist that ‘queer’ is an irredeemable slur while casually using ‘bitch’ as punctuation

[philosophybutch]

sorry to be controversial but all ideologies are marked by cognitive dissonance……acknowledge it for sure, and continue working to amend inconsistencies on a collective and individual level, that’s cool, but at the end of the day it’s like. a human thing. we can’t escape it, and if we did we’d come up with an ideological framework so bland and spineless as to be completely without application