alarajrogers

[alarajrogers]

But that is the reason -- it's just cultural rather than the actual truth.

In society, random people feel entitled to tell a man who is an abuse victim that aktually, women are afraid of being abused... because culturally, societally, it never occurs to anyone that men can be abused or that women can be abusers.

So we don't have a song about a man burning his ex's house down because everyone would interpret that the same way we interpret Blue October's "The End", which is about a man murdering his ex and her new boyfriend, then killing himself. "The End" has no hint or inclination that the woman was abusive, just that she left the main character, and from the fact that he murders her for sleeping with another man after she left him, we can see why! Same deal in "The Regulator" by Clutch, where a man returns after a year away to find his wife has taken up with another man, and he decides to kill her. We know nothing of the circumstances. Maybe she was told he was dead, maybe she has to sleep with the new guy to keep from losing the house, but all the main character cares about is, she's sleeping with another man, so he has to kill her.

To write a song where a woman does a man wrong, seriously wrong, and instead of just crying about it, he does something, and we all perceive him to be justified... we'd be pushing against a very heavy cultural headwind. Most "my ex did me wrong so I want revenge" stories from male POV in music are "my ex slept with someone else so I want her dead." And most people, obviously, do not view that with the same "Yeah! Do it!" fervor that we would a song about a woman who sets an abusive husband's house on fire.

The song would have to be very, very clear that the woman is a shithead, that she is abusing the guy, and that his revenge is not murder, but something that hurts her without invoking the spectre of male violence. And people would probably still misunderstand it.

A song about something like "you told me I was worthless and would never amount to anything, but now that I'm free of you, I'm successful and I'm happy and so that email you sent me about can we get back together? Hell no, go crawl back in your hole" would probably do the trick. Or "my new girlfriend is hotter than you, my new girlfriend is smarter than you, my new girlfriend is kinder than you, and she didn't want me to tell you so because she's nicer than you -- but I'm not, so here are the facts". You gotta establish incontrovertibly that this isn't a guy whining about his girlfriend left him, this is a guy whose girlfriend hurt him, was bad for him, abused him, and he's celebrating that he's free of her.

I'd love to see it, though. There is not nearly enough cultural understanding that it's even possible for women to abuse men, and we need to fix that.

men deserve more breakup anthems. I know and respect the societal reasons this genre is dominated by women, but where is my guy version of Miranda Lambert singing about burning your abusive ex's house down, metaphorically, for legal reasons

[alarajrogers]

I feel like we should just classify dwarf planets as planets and solve the whole thing. I mean, my dwarf apple tree still makes apples. If it revolves around the sun and its orbit is mostly sort of regular and it's big enough to fuck us up if it hit us, it's a planet. Dwarf, sure. Still a planet.

That way instead of losing Pluto we gain like 30 additional planets.

the thing is that whenever someone says "pluto IS a planet" you don't know if they're actually a space fan who is prepared to love and cherish all the other bodies that would become planets if pluto was promoted again or the dumbest motherfucker on earth who thinks science should have stopped when they left 3rd grade

[alarajrogers]

At the turn of the 20th century, Irish people were defined as not white.

Irish people.

The people with some of the palest skin on the planet. Not white.

I call myself white because it's a societal box that I was born into, but honestly, yes, I'd love to live in a world where I can be defined as "American with Irish and Italian ancestry, with pale pinkish skin and brown hair with reddish highlights" and just not have the question of race come up, at all. Because race as we understand it is a fiction -- it has very little basis in biology -- but it's a fiction we all have to live with, and until black people can get out of being called "black" I don't get to get out of being white.

But dismantling whiteness, getting rid of it as a concept, would be enormously beneficial to pretty much the whole world. There are a lot of white people it would make things worse for, but my feeling is, if the world is not fair, in your favor, and then it becomes more favor, and that takes away some of your unearned benefits... suck it up.

[alarajrogers]

Money is a prerequisite for happiness, most of the time. There are happy poor people, but that's a matter of personal disposition and not a thing anyone can just wish themselves into. Most people can't be happy if they're under constant financial stress.

However, depressed and unhappy wealthy people do exist. So no, money can't buy happiness; but it can clear obstacles to happiness.

[alarajrogers]

I think it's also kind of important to understand what Zionism even is, because it's become this huge bugaboo?

People seem to think "Zionism" means "I support everything the state of Israel does, including bombing innocent children in order to forcibly take their land," and... no. Not what it means. Zionism means "I believe the Jews have the right to have a homeland, and on the whole, the best place for that homeland is probably their ancestral lands, which they were largely forced out of 2000 years ago by imperial Roman colonizers because they wouldn't stop fighting against occupation and they wouldn't give up their culture."

Those who believe Israel has no right to exist are either massive fucking hypocrites because they believe the USA, Canada, Australia, and all the nations of South America have a right to exist, when none of those nations involved taking back ancestral land -- they're all straightforwardly occupying colonizers took over indigenous land, no "but it was ours before colonizers threw us off of it" complexity -- or they're as weirdly obsessed with "blood and soil" as Nazis and they think somehow it would make sense for all the white people in the US to move back to Europe, like we aren't all mutts with twelve different European countries plus maybe some native or African genes or maybe both in our ancestry. By the true definition of Zionism -- Jews have a right to their own homeland, on the territory they're indigenous to -- you are, 75 years after the existence of Israel was established, either a Zionist, a hypocrite, or so weirdly extreme in your leftism you've gone all the way around to the Nazi position.

You can believe that and still believe that Benjamin Netanyahu is a fuckhead who ought to die in a landslide, that what Israel is currently doing to Gaza is unforgivable (but not worse than what the US did to Iraq or any number of other places in our history -- Israel's not a special snowflake of evil here, and thinking they are is antisemitic), that whether you want to call it a "genocide" or not it is still war-crime-o-rama and no, "but Hamas uses civilians as human shields" is not an acceptable excuse for carpet bombing the fuck out of children. You don't have to excuse Israel or make up reasons why they're justified, any more than Americans had to make up reasons why what we were doing in Iraq was ok. You can be disgusted by the actions of Israeli leadership. But if you then take it out on Israelis, you better not be from the US -- or Britain, which has done far worse -- or you're an antisemitic hypocrite. And if you take it out on Jews because they believe Israel has the right to exist -- or because they haven't been sufficiently vocal about appeasing you and claiming it doesn't -- then you're kind of a textbook definition antisemite.

So yeah, if you're against Zionism -- the belief that Jews deserve a homeland and probably the best place for it is where it was already established, on the lands they are indigenous to -- then you're either someone who has no idea what Zionism even is and you're willing to spout uneducated opinions on the Internet, or you're an anti-semite. (And if you are Christian or you were raised Christian and you spout shit about "no, actually the Jews are not indigenous to Israel", oh my God are you being antisemitic and stupid, because every part of the Old Testament is about the Jews being from Israel. Also, all the archaeological evidence. Also, all the independent historical evidence.)

Note: I'm not Jewish! I was raised Catholic and am now an atheist (or at the very least, an agnostic anti-Christian; I'd be willing to accept the existence of a Creator, but that entity cannot be the Christian God, because the Christian God shows no special love for beetles and tries to encourage sexual taboos and gender-based behavior that are actively bad for human beings and counter our evolutionary niche.) I consider myself an ally to Jews, but I am very much a goy. So if you're the kind of asshole who discounts everything Jews say on the topic, maybe listen to me.

*This poll was submitted to us and we simply posted it so people could vote and discuss their opinions on the matter. If you’d like for us to ask the internet a question for you, feel free to drop the poll of your choice in our inbox and we’ll post them anonymously (for more info, please check our pinned post).

[alarajrogers]

I was in college, in Philadelphia, where winters are pretty chilly -- not by, say, Minnesota standards, but freezing temps are not abnormal -- so I had this great hat. It was sold in a box labeled Thermal Puff Fur Ring, which was such a pretentious name my brothers and I gleefully mocked it for years. It was white, and it had a fake fur ruff all around. It looked kind of like this:

So, there was a weekly humor newspaper at Penn, and there was a column called "Fashion Faux Pas", mocking people on campus for fashion "mistakes", and one day, I saw myself in the column. Wearing my Thermal Puff Fur Ring. The column asked "Do you think she asked the salesgirl, 'Do you have anything that looks like a rabbit died on my head?'"

OK, truth time, never admitted this before: it hurt. What the fuck, man. That hat is awesome. You just wish you had something as warm as my hat. But, I learned a long time before college that when people mock you, pretend it's praise and make it look like you are mocking them back. So I cut the article out and hung it on my dorm door with the caption "Alara is famous" and a note, "Actually, it's a Thermal Puff Fur Ring (tm)." The note might have made me sound pedantic, but I meant it as a joke, taking on an overly pedantic persona and being really pretentious about my hat. And I told all my friends it was hilarious.

Nowadays I think I'd have gone after the rabbit comment too, but mostly, I stand by the decisions I made back then. You cant do anything to someone who wears your mockery with pride. You can snicker at them behind their back, but the moment you bring it to their attention, they can turn it around and make you look like an idiot by being condescending or pretentious and making it sound like you're a peon making fun of something you don't understand. Exactly like artsy people do about Modern Art. It's not my fault that you don't grasp how awesome my Thermal Puff Fur Ring is, but I do wish you'd educate yourself before speaking in public, darling.

Do you ever wonder how many stories have been told about you? I don’t mean rumors or gossip. A story like “ one time I was at the mall and this girl dropped her hotdog but she picked it up and ate it” what if I’m that girl??how many times have people seen me do something I thought no one saw and is now being used as an ice breaker at a family dinner? Hmmmmmm?!???!

[alarajrogers]

This was the series that invented fuck or die, sex pollen, "everyone gets drunk on some environmental toxin and confesses their true feelings/gets undressed and runs around with a sword", and "species where the sex is so hot it ruins humans for human sex so they're not allowed to have sex with humans."

And that was just TOS and the first movie!

Incredibly based take.

[alarajrogers]

Fun fact: you can actually never write what color your characters' eyes are!

Eye color is one of those things that is treated as really important in prose, but in fact I couldn't tell you the eye color of a single casual acquaintance, and while I know the eye colors of my family and friends, it's almost never important to me.

You can get away with never describing the color of your characters' eyes. It's all right!

Every time I try to write dialogue my eyes glaze over and I fall on the floor convulsing like a victim of the dancing plague

[alarajrogers]

Understand that Congress does not have Medicare.

Congress has a much more extensive, and expensive, plan, that is far more comprehensive, has always covered prescription drugs, and unlike Medicare, where coverage for female reproductive issues has been historically underwhelming because most Medicare recipients are too old to need anything in those lines other than maybe hysterectomies, Congresswomen and the wives of Congressmen can get shit like birth control. Dunno about abortions, that still might not be covered even for them because of the Hyde Amendment.

"We need service as good as Congress gets" is something I can get behind wholeheartedly, whereas "Medicare for All" will need considerable tweaking to cover the needs of children, young people, and women of reproductive age, and every time Republicans are in power it will not cover birth control or trans care. That's not a reason not to have it -- it'd be vastly better than what we've got now -- but it's not the full panacea we're wanting.

Health insurance inflicts more terror, pain, trauma, and suffering than we know.

If you had a seven year old who died because billionaires needed to be persuaded to give him life-saving care and they took too long, you would walk this Earth forever thinking of how your child suffered. For what? Shareholder profit?

Health insurance has to be phased out immediately and replaced with Medicare For All.

Health care good enough for Congress is good enough for all of The People.

[alarajrogers]

A lot of problems attributed to capitalism are in fact caused by exploitation, which is a human phenomenon that has existed in practically every culture.

And it's very frustrating to hear about cutting corners as a problem of "capitalism" when you know the story of Laika the Space Dog and how communists caused her tragic death by cutting corners to give her no means to get down from space.

Or to understand how much older than capitalism slavery is.

I mean, I'd rather hear "this is a problem with western civilization" when it's global than "this is a problem with humanity" when it's western civilization and no one else has this issue, but it is frustrating.

Approximately 50% of the posts that start with "It's a huge problem in western culture that--" are actually about something which is a global problem, experienced in various degrees across many cultures. But OP is American with no global knowledge and is super afraid of looking conceivably racist so they have to include the part where this is a western culture problem, only, for sure.

[alarajrogers]

Also, misandry is a real thing.

No, it's not "systematic hatred of men by people who have power over men, pervasive through multiple societies." That doesn't exist, it's true, but it's a fundamental misunderstanding of the origin of the word misogyny to believe that that's what misandry would mean.

Misogyny as "hatred of women" is formed similarly to "misanthropy" meaning "hatred of people." And there is no systemic hatred of humans by beings who have power over humans, pervasive through multiple societies. There are cranky assholes who've decided they hate people. And there are people -- radfems, mostly -- who've decided they hate men. Whose praxis is that they hate men, who think they can actually accomplish something good and beneficial for the world by classifying all male humans as "oppressors" and then writing them all off as evil. Thus, misandry exists.

Does it have systemic power over men? No, and it doesn't have to. That's not what misogyny means, either; because it's based on misanthropy, it does not actually mean "systemic and all-pervasive hatred of women." That's covered by sexism and patriarchy. it just means hatred of women. Many misogynists get their start in situations where they don't have power over women -- as little boys, for example, being abused by adult women. The fact that they grow into people with power over women does not change the fact that when they became misogynists, they did not have that power.

Misogyny has come to be associated with "systemic hatred of women" because hatred of women is systemic, but that's not what the word means or implies. A person who hated women in an imaginary matriarchal society where women cruelly dominate men would still be a misogynist. And a person who hates men is a misandrist.

You know who really, really wants you to believe there's no way the term that means "hatred of men" describes anything in the real world? People who hate men. Who, disproportionately, take out their hatred on trans women and female sex workers, because they have no power over men.

So yeah. A, compound words don't work like that (there is no actual English word "gruntle" meaning to soothe or comfort, to be the opposite of "disgruntled" -- maybe there once was, but if you tried to use the word that way now, almost no one would understand you) and B, misandry/androphobia does exist. The only reason trans men are using transandrophobia rather than transmisandry is that the acronym for transmisandry would be TMA and oh god, the people who want to classify everyone by what forms of oppression they don't suffer would scream about that so much, so they decided to adopt transandrophobia instead.

Folks. Are you a radical feminist? Do you believe that everything wrong in the world is because of men? Are you against intersectionality because it implies you should give a shit about men who are disabled, men of color, poor men, men of minority religions, queer men? If the answer is no then for the love of god stop shitting on trans men's attempts to describe their own experiences. You're being disgusting.

transandrophobia isnt real the way transmisogyny is real because thats not how intersectionality works. transmisogyny is specifically the intersection of oppression transfemmes face of transphobia and misogyny. for transandrophobia to be real, androphobia itself would have to be real. men are not an oppressed class. there is no systemic disenfranchisement men face for being men when living in a patriarchal society. transmascs absolutely face transphobia, and there are certain aspects of transphobia that may be different between transmascs and transfemmes, but that is not transandrophobia.

This is a fantastic explanation for why the term faces skepticism and I appreciate it because it's finally made the argument against it click for me

The remaining issue is, I don't have a different word to use when I specifically reference "transphobia that is distinctly directed towards trans men in ways that combine transphobia bioessentialism and mysoginy, that is similar to but also slightly different from that which is directed towards trans women" that still acknowleges that trans men are not women

IE, "You're not a man, you just hate facing oppression as a woman", "You're not trans, you just have internalized mysoginy", "You don't have to be a man to accomplish your goals, You're just pretending to be one so you don't have to face female gender discrimination", "Transitioning to male means you're eager to oppress women", "Now that you're a man you don't have to deal with mysoginy or gender-based violence", etc

I think the men's rights movement is bullshit, don't get me wrong, but walking around being an openly trans man, emphasis on trans man and not just man, seems to read to a lot of people as "female gender-traitor pervert", and I don't have the VOCABULARY for that experience

[alarajrogers]

When you think about it, the world implied by chess is really interesting.

The Queen is unbelievably powerful. She wields the power of the Church and the nobility; only the trained cavalry can do anything she cannot. The game starts out with one Queen, but any front-line soldier who survives and reaches the back of the enemy lines can become Queen, so the King can have a harem. All the Queens serve the King, who is ruler, but the King is almost powerless in and of himself. He can kill a soldier who's directly in front of him, that's it.

This kind of implies that either all soldiers are female, or that Queens can be male, or that soldiers have no gender and can only be gendered if they get promoted, or that maybe nobody has a gender? King is a title and so is Queen but they're not gendered? Or, that male soldiers can be forcefemmed/voluntarily trans in order to marry the King and wield the power of the Queen? Man, the possibilities are fascinating.

[alarajrogers]

I'm not sure Q is unemployed. I personally always thought that running around putting species through tests is his job, and that in the case of humanity at least, it was absolutely sanctioned and authorized by the Continuum, up to the point where he tried to make Riker a Q and failed. ("Your test to see if this species is worthy is to try to stick us with one of them for eternity? Without actually yet knowing if they're worthy or not? What the FUCK, Q.") He got thrown out of the Continuum, not for testing species -- that's his job -- but for doing it in a really loose-cannon, chaotic way where the results of some of his antics were having negative blowback on the Continuum. Like, imagine you hire a guy to be an anthropologist and you find out that while he was studying "primitive tribes" he was teaching them about Communism and colonial imperialism and giving them hints about how to make gunpowder.

At the point where he's teaching Amanda how to be a Q, or chasing down Quinn after Voyager accidentally freed him from the comet, or even in All Good Things, he's very much doing Continuum work. He's only clearly unemployed in Q Who and Deja Q. In Tapestry, Q-Pid and Q-Less, he's off doing his own thing, not Continuum work, but he's doing enough stuff for the Continuum around those episodes that it's clear he has a job. It's just he's doing a lot of extracurricular stuff as well.

it's crazy how by writing q and picard tng perfectly predicted the relationship between a tumblrina and a blorbo. like yeah here is this emotionally constipated middle aged man and the omnipotent homosexual who wants nothing but to put this guy in fucking Predicaments. also the omnipotent homosexual is considered a weirdo by his peers. he is also unemployed. that's a big plotpoint actually

[alarajrogers]

And if you actually cook something you should get $500... $750 if it involved using a slow cooker so you had to prepare for it hours and hours in advance and maybe even get up early

every time you make freezer food for dinner instead of buying takeout like you actually want you should earn two hundred dollars cash and a round of applause

[alarajrogers]

Everyone except the toaster. I am the only exception to the "you" rule because I am the SCP toaster that everyone refers to in the first person.

Inadvisable narrative frames #137: second person omniscient viewpoint. Every character is "you", simultaneously and without differentiation; oblige the reader to rely purely on context cues to determine which "you" they currently are.

[alarajrogers]

This applies to a lot of things.

I recently read a series that was, quite literally, "what if MLP was crossed over with FLCL and then I filed all the names off, dropped a ton of music theory into it and tied it in with the magic, and published it on Amazon as an original series". And don't get me wrong, as a fanficcer with pro ambitions I absolutely approve of that. The MLP and FLCL origins were obvious to anyone familiar with those stories, but it was a sufficiently different story to justify making it original.

Anyway, while it was a good story overall, the author's conservative politics kept seeping through in ways that kind of ruined the suspension of disbelief. Check this out: there's a nation that is literally over a thousand years old, was a former colonial empire, is ruled by an active Queen who is not a figurehead, and it's clearly mapped to the US. Ok, so far so good though I gotta wonder why most of the people are white and not Native American. Different world, maybe white people came over to this continent much earlier due to the influences of two powerful aliens. OK.

One of the main character hates the federal government. But respects the military and is deeply respectful of and loyal to the Queen.

Huh?

This is not a democracy! The Queen is the federal government! We don't hear about senators and congresspeople; we get the impression there may be some constraints on the Queen's power, so maybe she's not an absolute monarch, but she's definitely the ruler, not an elected official. So how can you separate the concepts of "the government" and "the Queen" when the Queen is the executive ruler, and has been for hundreds of years? When your entire nation was built around being ruled by immortal giant alien women with vast magical powers, and the changeover from one immortal giant alien woman to the other as the supreme ruler happened longer ago than the entire existence of the United States in the real world?

This person plainly has the conservative ideology "the federal government is dangerous and not to be trusted" ingrained in their head, but they haven't begun to think about why they feel that way, let alone how that could apply to a nation that does not have an elected executive ruler but an immortal Queen. They also haven't even begun to think through the implications of "what if the federal ruling body over a coalition of states was over a thousand years old", let alone wondered how, if the aliens came and established a government over a North America-analogue and absorbed various native groups as they did so, how did they end up with a majority white population? (The religion aspect, everyone here worships the same Goddess the aliens do, who has a lot of similarities to the Judeo-Christian God, except that the people in the Middle East worship the actual Judeo-Christian God, except he's not Judeo-Christian at all because the people who are plainly supposed to be the Jews worship the Goddess also, and did before the aliens showed up, so what we get is the very uncomfortable implication that the Muslim God in this universe is a different monotheistic construct and is not real, unlike the Goddess, who is.)

...I don't really expect good worldbuilding from modern conservatives anyway, the days of the conservative movement being able to produce a Larry Niven are long over. But it's disappointing when an otherwise good story has such dramatic failures of political worldbuilding, and it really feels like it's on the level of "the nobles get their clothes from the mall" kind of jarring.

i think one of the reasons i get mildly annoyed about worldbuilding threads that are 200 tweets of why you should care about where blue dye comes from in your world before saying someone is wearing blue is that so few of them go up to the second level of "and that should impact your characters somehow" - i don't care that blue dye comes from pressing berries that only grow in one kingdom a thousand miles away if people are casually wearing blue

[alarajrogers]

I wonder if Betazoid "imzadi" serves the same function. We've only seen it used to describe someone who was once a sexual partner, and the translations we've been given impoly it's something like "first love", but the word seems to carry much too much weight to cover situations like "my first boyfriend, who was a puppy love crush I barely think about anymore."

The Betazoids were based on the Deltans, who were essentially telepathic bonobos who share sex to mean "I like you, you're fun" (but are generally not allowed to have sex with humans in Starfleet because humans take sex more seriously than that.) Betazoids always seemed to me to be pretty free sexually; I feel like putting enormous weight on your first sexual partner is out of character for them. Maybe the term means something closer to t'hy'la, but Betazoids are extremely likely to have sex with anyone they are that emotionally close to, precisely because they don't put the weight on sex that humans do.

So two separate telepathic species in Star Trek came up with a word that means "my best and closest friend, my dearest one, the person I would die for, and it's honestly none of your business whether I'm having sex with them or not." This kinda tracks with Gene Roddenberry's philosophies of life, tbh.

I, personally, have never been a Kirk/Spock shipper, because as a very small pre-sexual child I imprinted on them too hard as perfect platonic soulmates, people whose love goes far too deep to be described sexually. I like the idea that t'hy'la means something deeper than sex, deeper than romantic love, and sex can be part of it but the Vulcans don't really give a shit if it is or not; that's not what's important, to people for whom sex is a biological burden that requires arranged marriages for safety's sake. Obviously Vulcans can have sex outside of pon farr (in Strange New Worlds, Spock and T'Pring are obviously getting it on, when their schedules allow), but the existence of pon farr means that sexuality has an entirely different kind of weight than it does with humans, and it literally cannot safely be tied to love.

You know what I think t'hy'la means?

It's not an ambiguous term, like it could mean three different things. But I also don't think it always means all three. I think it's a singular concept that we don't use on Earth, but maybe we should.

You know how some people's number one person is their spouse, while other people, married or not, have a best friend who's the one they really tell everything to? You know how you might have a queerplatonic relationship but whether or not you have sex with them is just ...not an important question?

I think t'hy'la means your number one person. And humans don't have a word that says most important without distinguishing whether we're blood-related or whether we're having sex.

Vulcans do. So I don't especially like the idea that all t'hy'la pairs have to be lovers in a sexual sense. It's not that at all. It's that they have this deep bond that transcends everything. You could have that with your brother. You could have it with your friend. Or if you're attracted to that person, you would probably be lovers.

Kirk and Spock love each other deeply; everyone who knows them knows that. The word they use for each other doesn't say whether they're having sex because Vulcans don't care about that. Humans are all "weird, the dictionary definition won't tell me whether they're boning, which is information I'm used to having publicly announced!" Well, too bad. Vulcans have arranged marriages usually, and some of them have sex once every seven years. So I just don't think sex is the defining point that makes a relationship serious to them.

If a Vulcan says "this is my t'hy'la" that lets everyone know they are bonded in the deepest level of the katra and any arranged spouses or temporary pon farr surrogates they might have don't even rank, by comparison. That's uncomfortable to humans.

Now Kirk and Spock are definitely having sex, but Spock doesn't consider that to be the fact that makes their relationship serious and primary over all others. So that's why he chooses a word that is about the soul bond, not the flesh.