#And how fundamentally different our ideologies were.

[slow-drowned-angels]

[image id: A screenshot of a tweet from the New York Post. It reads:

“Carl’s Jr. Super Bowl ad brings back bikini-clad burger models after yearslong clampdown.”

Attached to the tweet are two images of said ad. They both show the same scantily-clad, blonde, white woman posing with a burger and cars. She is wearing a bra that is made up of two star shapes and a jean miniskirt.

End image ID./]

Some notable parts of the Vox article:

It harks back to the idea that was dominant in the Bush era, a moment when our culture was capable of prizing Girls Gone Wild and purity balls in equal measure, when pop stars like Britney Spears were expected to serve their audiences sex on a platter while avowing their virginity at the same time. It’s the ideology that unites Republican raunch and purity culture, that makes them two sides of the same coin: one based on the idea that women’s sexuality should exist in the service of men. The right once again championing this brand of bawdiness while working relentlessly to restrict women’s autonomy and denigrating the women they don’t like isn’t a departure. It’s a return to form.

…

The joke was that it was funny when girls were sexy and it was sexy when girls were degraded — especially when they played along.

…

“The more attractive women around us are, whether in real life or fiction, the less one is able to maintain two important leftist delusions,” Hanania writes. “That the sexes are or can be made interchangeable, and that sexual selection either is or can be made to be an unimportant part of human affairs. If Sydney Sweeney’s boobs walk into a room, even Chris Hayes is going to experience a physiological transformation.”

Hanania’s take, if I’m deciphering it correctly, is that it is fundamental to human nature for men to publicly ogle women’s bodies and value women accordingly, and that when feminists object to the ogling, they are attempting to put some sort of vise around human nature. Sweeney’s star power, combined with her willingness to show off her curves, he argues, is proof that this vise has vanished and men can go back to the way things should be: sexualizing women pretty much whenever they feel like it.

All of this is a willful misreading of contemporary feminism. There’s a clear difference between Sweeney being proudly boob-forward — while still getting taken seriously as an award-winning actor with major star power — and other people getting rich by exploiting the breasts of beautiful underpaid women, as was the case with Girls Gone Wild, The Man Show, and, heck, even today’s Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders

The radical idea of pop feminism in the 2010s was that you should be accorded basic human dignity regardless of what your body looks like and how you choose to display it, even if you are an entertainer in a visual medium. Raunch culture looks at this request and declares it regressive, prudish, delusional. Raunch must be compulsory or it is nothing.

…

This basic fact is why raunch culture and purity culture co-exist so closely. It’s why the online right can think of themselves as being pro-sex and also be in favor of outlawing abortion and making it harder to access contraception. All of it is about men controlling women’s bodies: controlling how they look, how they have sex, and how they have children. The point is always that it’s not the woman who chooses.

…

“If we were to acknowledge that sexuality is personal and unique, it would become unwieldy. Making sexiness into something simple, quantifiable, makes it easier to explain and to market,” Levy writes. “If you remove the human factor from sex and make it about stuff — big fake boobs, bleached blonde hair, long nails, poles, thongs — then you can sell it. Suddenly, sex requires shopping; you need plastic surgery, peroxide, a manicure, a mall.”

…

The claim that sex belongs to Republicans should not be understood simply as a bizarre and self-deluding brag. It’s a threat.

while being depressing, this is also sort of fascinating to me bc there’s something so…inauthentic here. what i mean is that if you saw something like this back in say 2001 (which you probably wouldn’t, at least for carl’s jr. but i digress) it would seem tacky but in a “sex sells” sort of way.

seeing this in 2025, it’s clearly purely a political statement and you can tell partially bc the image itself is so oddly sexless. it’s like there’s more titillation in the prospect of “owning the libs” than in the image of the scantily clad blonde white woman itself.

[coremilk]

COMBAT TRANSMISOGYNY

What's your reasoning for finding it to be a problem that tansfems use TME to mean non-transfem people because it "implies" that nobody but transfems can be affected by transmisogyny but not finding it a problem for "transandrophobia" to imply the existence of general androphobia as a structural oppression in analogy to the construction of other intersectional terms? Why must only transfems be held to a standard of literalism? Why is it impermissible for transfems to reject the terms that other trans people use to describe their oppression but not for non-transfems to reject the terms transfems use? Why must transfems eternally be subjected to this kind of sadistic sophistry that reduces the space for analysis that we are allowed to occupy to less than nothing? Why is every attempt at communicating our own experiences and understanding thereof seen as an invitation for smarmy rhetorical reversals?

I feel genuine despair about how non-transfems talk about and to us on this website. I endlessly have to listen to people engaging in idealist amateur psychoanalysis that absurdly focuses on the mental state of my oppressors telling me "but transphobes perceive you as a failed man" as if transmisogyny was a mental defect that some people carry instead of a structural force that manifests (among other things) in a variety of mutually contradictory ideological claims.

Why must I ceaselessly suffer the incorrect and """indirectly""" misgendering claim that I, a transfem, am treated like a (failed, gender non-conforming, etc.) man (a purposefully selective view that strictly implies that either transfems cannot be identified as a distinct group and the specifics of being transfem have no bearing on how we are treated, or that trans women genuinely are men - as the only people who are actually treated precisely like transfems are transfems)? The ends to which this is done are totally transparent: so that men can claim the oppression suffered by trans women as data points of their own oppression with a gesture like "because you were perceived as a man, the way you were treated is actually indicative of how men are treated" (which neither logically follows nor is it actually true). When a trans woman is "treated as a man" that's transmisogyny. I completeley reject a framework that centers the psychological state of my oppressor. The ideological claim that trans women are men is no different from the ideological claim that trans women are raping the bodies of women by reducing the female form to an artefact or that they are colonizing womanhood or are grooming children into transitioning: It is a fundamentally incorrect idea on the basis of which no correct analysis can be formed, you cannot grant these things even for the sake of argument. When trans women are mistreated for being "seen as men" that's transmisogyny in the exact same way that these other claims are transmisogyny. To claim that it is transandrophobia (which is constantly claimed by users of that term, usually as an illustration of the idea that "all trans people are affected by transandrophobia") is an illegitimate appropriation of transfem experiences and it's absurd. It's like saying that when disabled people are perceived as faking their disabilities they actually suffer a sentiment directed at non-disabled people rather than ableism because they're "seen as non-disabled". If trans women are "seen as men" then that's the problem that needs to be addressed, not how men are treated. If trans women are "seen as predators" then that's the problem that needs to be addressed, not how predators are treated. If trans women are "seen as objects" then that's the problem that needs to be addressed, not how objectes are treated.

According to most transphobes we are not trans because there's no such thing as trans people. Should we take that to mean that trans people suffer from cisphobia? That the way trans people are treated is really indicative of how cis people are treated and not trans people? No! We cannot rely on transphobes to provide us a coherent framework for understanding their transphobia. They don't have to "see" us as trans to recognize us as trans. In the same way they don't have to "see" us as women to recognize us as trans women. It is their transmisogyny that leads the way from recognizing us as trans women to conceptualizing us as cis men.

I barely even want to explain myself anymore. I'll just get called a baeddel by people who are fully aware that it's an intersexist and transmisogynistic slur. I'll be subjected to hypocritical double standards where if my analysis has any remote implications about non-transfems I'll be told in so many words to stay in my lane, as the experiences of others are unknowable to me, but non-transfems can give direct explicit wide-reaching transmisogynistic accounts of our experiences (e.g. that we suffer from androphobia of some sort) and I ought to accept this as some kind of perverse eu-misgendering "inclusion". I'll be infantilized by complete misogynists who pretend that my grounds for rejecting their ideas (e.g. "trans women are treated as men by transphobes") aren't genuine ideological disagreements and I am instead just too weak-willed to face reality (which they think their own antifeminist analysis amounts to). I'll be hounded for sources and proof when I discuss my own lived experiences and I am told incorrect categorical statements about what I do and don't experience and why. I'll have transfeminism dismissed as an irrelevant niche ideology by people who follow a significantly more niche ideology themselves. And most despair inducing of all is having the opinions of transfems who disagree with me presented to me as if they override my analysis simply be existing - as if everything (e.g. misgendering by reference to a rhetorical observer or calling trans women "baeddels") had to be agreed to by all transfems everywhere to be transmisogynistic for non-transfems to even consider stopping.

It is grueling to constantly hear people espouse universal mores about how trans people ought to treat one another only for those exact same people to make no attempt whatsoever to actually apply those mores to how they treat transfems. I want you to feel how hollow appeals like this sound to me, especially when they command me to abandon my objectively correct materialist analysis of my own experiences and adopt views that are actively transmisogynistic (and not just a little). It's painful when people think materialism means "when stuff is made out of physical matter" as opposed to society being shaped by material (economic) factors and then justify equating people who were AMAB with cis men with appeals to this kind of vulgar "materialism". "Trans women are murdered so much because they are seen as men and people are more ok with killing men" I am forced to read with my own eyes with barely a thought given to the extreme structural (economic) marginalization of trans women of color that pushes them not just into sex work but also any number of other positions of extreme precarity (abusive relationships, addiction, homelessness, incarceration etc.)

To bring it back to TME/TMA: These terms are not their own definitions. TMA doesn't mean everyone who is ever affected by transmisogyny in any way and TME doesn't mean it's impossible to be affected by transmisogyny. The demand for literalism here is a mean spirited rhetorical game and there is no winning. If I hit you with the classic intersexist argument that since the "inter" part of intersex just literally means "between", it either ought to apply to perisex trans people whose sex characteristics are altered through hormones and surgery or be abolished in favor of a more precise term as the components of the term itself don't describe its precise meaning fully by themselves - you'd know that that's an absurd demand to make of terminology and you'd know that I was being not just a dumbass but also intersexist. Terms don't need to encapsulate the entirety of their meaning. They are allowed to have definitions and usages that go beyond what is implied by the literal meanings of the words they are constructed from. This is true for english terms just as much as it is true for latin and greek terms. But getting transfeminists to change their terminology is not the point of this exercise, the point of this exercise is to always put trans women on the back foot, to never give them an inch, to deny them completely any and all avenues for framing the discourse around themselves and their own experiences. Either you allow trans women the use of language in its normal capacity or you are a transmisogynist.

If you are TME, the way transmisogyny affects you is as a TME person. You can shoot through bulletproof vests, you can see invisible ink, you can eat inedible substances, you can say unspeakable things and water can be liquid below its freezing point. Your relationship to transmisogyny is a different one than that of a TMA person and that difference is what TME/TMA describes. The literalist angle is obscurantist on purpose. It is instrumentalizing the epistemic marginalization of TMA people against them to deny the epistemic marginalization exists to begin with. You deny us the right to exercise authority over what our own terminology means and use your own willfully transmisogynistic interpretation to imply that we hold reactionary views that we do not hold in order to further our epistemic marginalization. You can wrongfully accuse transfeminists of actually wanting to uphold binarist, essentialist and reductive categories and there's not much we can do about it because we don't get a seat at the table where our own oppression is discussed unless we say exactly what you want to hear from us.

I want to appeal to you to consider our positions, our terminology from an angle of self-advocacy in light of how invested others are in transmisogynistically misexplaining our own experiences to us, over us and against us. "Everyone can be affected by transmisogyny" is true in the same way that "everyone can be affected by intersexism" and "everyone can be affected by racism" and "everyone can be affected by ableism" are true. It ceases to be true when it's used to deny that there is a meaningful qualitative difference in how intersex people and perisex people relate to intersexism, how racialized people and those who aren't relate to racism, how disabled people and non-disabled people relate to ableism.

TME/TMA aren't essentialist, they don't reinforce a binary and they're not reductive if you understand them the way they are supposed to be understood instead of applying a hostile bad faith reading wherein transfeminists are a bunch of selfish greedy tyrants who want to hog all the transmisogyny for themselves in order to lord the immense standpoint epistemological social capital they derive from having their oppression over-specified and over-acknowledged over everyone else.

I'll remind you of this most famous example of intersecting discrimination: A targeted layoff of black women at general motors, which could neither be attributed to them being women alone nor them being black alone because black men and non-black women weren't laid off. Acknowledging the specificity of the oppression is the explicit point of intersectionality (because that specificity can and will otherwise be used to deny that it is oppression at all, that it is targeted at all) - it's not an "essentialist" misunderstanding of intersectionality. This neither implies that everyone who is ever laid off suffers from misogynoir nor does it imply that only black women can be laid off. It doesn't imply that black men and non-black women aren't discriminated against in other contexts either.

To say that there is a specific intersection that happens to people who are transgender women is not essentialist, we don't attribute any essential characteristics to anybody. Tautologies aren't essentialism, rejecting tautologies is a denial of logic itself. All it is saying is that some things happen to transfems specifically because they are transfems. To deny that specificity is straightfowardly anti-intersectional. To say "all trans people experience transmisogyny" as a rebuttal to discussions of the specificity of transmisogyny is reinforcing precisely those malformed patterns of argumentation that intersectionality is meant to address to begin with. If you redefine transmisogyny as something that can affect all trans people in comparable ways then what you defined is transphobia and the intersection is rendered conceptually invisible again. It ends up being a more roundabout, rhetorically involved way to deny the existence of transmisogyny altogether.

Reductive, transmisogynistic ideas of transmisogyny like that we only suffer transmisogyny when we are recognized as transfems (regardless of whether those doing the recognizing consider trans women to be women or not) or mistaken for men ignore the fact that even those of us who are "seen as" cis women all day every day have to completely structure their lives around transmisogyny. The fact that I'm a trans woman renders interactions with people who have no idea and even passive states that would have nothing to do with transmisogyny otherwise into transmisogyny because of the way they interact with the objective fact of reality that I am a trans woman. Transmisogyny is not a mental defect of transphoboes and it cannot be reduced to individual interactions or attitudes.

If a trans woman tells you something is transmisogynistic but you think it's not because you fundamentally disagree about the basic axioms of your analysis you have to recognize that. "If you agreed with my analysis you wouldn't consider my analysis transmisogynistic" is a totally inane statement that holds true for even the most obviously transmisogynistic analysis. Even terfs don't consider themselves transmisogynistic. Even terfs have some trans women who agree with them. You have to either make a good faith attempt to sort out that disconnect or move on in the knowledge that your views are fundamentally at odds with each other and it is logically consistent for a transfeminist to consider the things she considers transmisogynistic transmisogynistic and she's not just accusing you of transmisogyny in an attempt to unfairly smear you.

When you are transmisogynistic the reason you don't see it is that the ideology you check yourself against to determine if you are being transmisogynistic is the same ideology that led you to your transmisogynistic views to begin with. When you say "I'm not a transmisogynist" your reasoning is logically consistent but it's as self referential as saying "I'm not a transmisogynist because there's no such thing as 'transmisogyny' and there's no such thing as 'transwomen', just delusional men"

You might think that because you occasionally take umbrage with a few of the most egregious examples of transmisogyny coming from non-transfems, you have sufficiently fortified yourself against transmisogynist biases and occupy a somewhat neutral position from which you judge our views according to a higher-order ideological framework than the one transfeminists use to judge your views, but it is in fact just an opposing ideological framework. You deny the existence of transmisogyny not by saying "transmisogyny doesn't exist" but by supplanting it with your own homonym, a definition of transmisogyny that is alien to ours. You argue "A thing called transmisogyny exists, but not the thing you mean by it. And because it would be essentialist/binarist/reductive to say the things you say about transmisogyny if you meant by it what I define as transmisogyny, your analysis is essentialist, biniarist and reductive." You are engaged in two entangled efforts to deny us our language and framework for analysis: You redefine the term transmisogyny and then use that redefinition to argue that the derived terms TMA and TME have reactionary implications when you take them literally.

[krems-chair]

Fermented Fruit Juice

I saw a post a while ago talking about how Varric ended up "winning" against Solas, and really liked it. I've been revisiting a lot of Inquisition dialogue lately and found perhaps my favorite conversation between the two when it comes to highlighting their ideological differences. It also foreshadows why Varric "wins" at the end of Veilguard (within the confines of the endgame choices we're given) even in death.

The crux of it: Varric lives in a world in which his very existence is an act of resistance, while Solas sees resistance as a trial that must be endured to get desired results.

As always, once I get started I'm sure this will be very long, but I love that we got the chance to see a very rare instance in which Solas concedes a point to one of his companions.

Solas: Once, in the Fade, I saw the memory of a man who lived alone on an island. Most of his tribe had fallen to beasts or disease. His wife had died in childbirth. He was the only one left. He could have struck out on his own to find a new land, new people. But he stayed. He spent every day catching fish in a little boat, every night drinking fermented fruit juice and watching the stars.

Varric: I can think of worse lives.

Solas: How can you be happy surrendering, knowing it will all end with you? How can you not fight?

Varric: I suppose it depends on the quality of the fermented fruit juice.

As always with Inquisition dialogue, I am obsessed. But this moment does such a great job of laying out the fundamental building blocks of each character.

Solas comes right out of the gate and lets us know who he is. He is united with the man living in the ruin of all that his life used to be.

Solas, too, is living alone in a world where all he once knew has been taken from him. Before his sleep he had a master to serve, and then a rebellion to lead. He fought, he was relentless; his people were suffering but they were whole. There were opportunities to find comfort, familiarity, or even just a new normal amongst new lands and people, but he rejected them (I think perhaps this is best shown through the murder of Felassan/the plot of the Masked Empire). Now, he lives as much as he possibly can in the fade and waits for his opportunity to restore the world he believes he ruined in his quest to save it (imprisoning the Evanuris through the creation of the veil).

Varric, conversely, has been tearing his way through this (to Solas) new world his entire life. I also think it's worth noting that his attitude is probably an absolute smack in the face to Solas, who knows what the dwarves once were and is responsible for the loss of their dreams and the ruination of the titans. But Varric doesn't need to know what was lost in order to know what an uphill battle he faces in Thedas as a dwarf. And fuck, he's from Kirkwall, he knows exactly how much worse life can get than a quiet existence with food, drink, and the stars for company.

But because these two have such a cool dynamic of agree-to-disagree/mutual admiration for each other, Varric thinks the story over and renews the discussion.

Varric: What's with you and the doom stuff? Are you always this cheery or is the hole in the sky getting to you?

Solas: I've no idea what you mean.

Varric: All the "fallen empire" crap you go on about. What's so great about empires anyway?

Varric: So we lost the Deep Roads, and Orzammar's too proud to ask for help. So what? We're not Orzammar and we're not our empire.

Varric: There are tens of thousands of us living up here in the sunlight now, and it's not that bad.

Varric: Life goes on. It's just different than it used to be.

Solas: And you have no concept of what that difference cost you.

Varric: I know what it didn't cost me. I'm still here, even after all those thaigs fell.

God I love what the dialogue in these games used to be. There's so much I could talk about, but I think what I want to focus on is the idea of empire being so smoothly fitted in to the discussion.

Varric, knowing Solas isn't fully satisfied with his answer, ruminates and comes back swinging. This is also where I'll add that part of the reason I think Varric throws Solas so badly is because he's what Felassan could have been with more time to form his arguments. When Solas made the choice to take Felassan's game piece off the board, our favorite slow arrow was just coming to terms with the idea that there is beauty in taking what an imperfect world offers you and making the best of it. Varric is comfortable in this viewpoint, and Solas can't just kill him on a mission or at Skyhold. He has no choice but to hear the argument he fights to ensure he doesn't have to hear.

And damn, what an argument. Without meaning to, Varric cuts to the quick of what has been haunting Solas. You cannot snap your fingers and re-establish Empire as it once was. Orzammar has cordoned itself off from the rest of the world, does not ask for help, and clings to an ever-crumbling old order. Even if you tried, too much has changed. Dwarves are not what they once were, and more and more have returned to the surface. Life goes on. It's just different than it used to be. And Solas has never been able to confront that possibility.

True to form, he pushes back. But why not give it a try? Why take what you've been given when you could wrest what you've been denied from the hand that holds it? How can you do nothing?

Solas: You truly are content to sit in the sun, never wondering what you could’ve been, never fighting back?

Varric: Ha, you’ve got it all wrong, Chuckles. This is fighting back.

Solas: How does passively accepting your fate constitute a fight?

Varric: In that story of yours—the fisherman watching the stars, dying alone—you thought he gave up right?

Solas: Yes.

Varric: But he went on living. He lost everyone, but he still got up every morning. He made a life, even if it was alone.

Varric: That’s the world. Everything you build, it tears down. Everything you’ve got, it takes—and it’s gone forever. The only choices you get are to lie down and die or keep going. He kept going. That’s as close to beating the world as anyone gets.

Solas: Well said. Perhaps I was mistaken

And then Varric hits him with it: a life alone is still a life. There is nothing that time will not take from us. What Solas fails to understand (and we can blame this on his pride, on his crusade he cannot lay down until he is free of his duty to Mythal, or his straight-up sentimentality) is that if Elvhenan hadn't fallen through the actions of the Evanuris and those he took to stop them, it would have been something else. Life is a wailing gnashing unrelenting song that will never be satisfied and can never cease dragging all that falls before it into its maw in the hopes that finally something will be enough. When it tears something down, your only choices are to "lie down and die or keep going." And again, as a Kirkwall survivor, Varric knows this. An occupying force remove your political leader? Quell the violence and try again. The chantry explodes? Save the city's mages from their bloodthirsty jailer and make sure there's a tomorrow where you can fight to fix it.

We know this doesn't dissuade Solas, the burden he's placed upon himself it too great, the ways that war has shaped him have scarred deep. Part of the tragedy of Solas is how he's been walking the dinan'shiral so long that he is incapable of turning around. Every step he takes has sent sharp rocks cutting into his feet, and it would kill him to turn around and see just how little of a distance he's covered. He cannot let go of resistance as a concentrated action, as fighting until there's nothing left but ruination.

But it is no small feat on Varric's part to get the Dread Wolf himself to concede a point. And a step further than that, Solas respects his friend, and respects the life he's built amongst the scraps of what once was. I don't doubt for a minute that Varric was a key part of why Solas was able to start seeing the world around him as a little more real.

And then of course we get Veilguard.

It is here that Solas dooms himself.

"You came a long way and made a valiant effort, Varric, but this story does not end with my downfall."

But it does. Because even if Varric, like Felassan, is taken off the table, Rook endures. And what is Rook in this game if not the very continuation of Varric's fighting spirit: an absolutely untested newbie who through miracle after miracle (regardless of the issues I may take with that) is the very portrait of "But he went on living" ?

Varric may not get to be the one to talk Solas down at the very end of the game after Mythal waves her hand and unleashes her second-in-command, but by delaying long enough to stop the ritual, by refusing to give up on his friend that stares at the stars every night with nothing but his fermented fruit juice for company, he ensured someone would be around who could.

In one of the less kind endings that person is Rook, dragging themselves into the fade with Solas out of sheer spite or sending him there against his will. In the kinder endings, it is the Inquisitor, letting their friend/heart know that at last, merely surviving another day is enough. And I like to think that it is within those kinder endings that Solas thinks of Varric each time he works to soothe the titan's dreams and make life just a little better for the tens of thousands living in the sunlight. Perhaps, in this world where he is finally free, he appreciates the gravity of ensuring others have a chance to keep living in a world that is hell-bent on taking. Maybe he even finds a cup of that fermented fruit juice in the fade, sits with his feet dangling over an endless abyss, and drinks to his friend's honor.

I'll leave y'all with a final bit of dialogue I love.

RIP Varric Tethras, an absolute fucking baddie who forced Fen'harel himself to part with just a smidge of his pride and recognize someone that reminded him of what he once was--wiser than most--and in the subtext of this conversation, wiser than a pining spirit of wisdom himself.

Solas: Do you ever miss life beneath the earth? The call of the Stone?

Varric: Nah. Whatever the Stone - capital S - is, it was gone by the time my parents had me.

Solas: But… do you miss it?

Varric: How could I miss what I never had?

Varric: But say I did have that sense, that connection to the Stone. What would it cost me?

Varric: Would I lose my friends up here? Would I stop telling stories?

Varric: I like who I am. If I want to hear songs, I'll go to a tavern.

Solas: You are wiser than most.

[odinsblog]

🗣️This is an illegitimate and deeply corrupt Supreme Court

Justice Samuel Alito spoke candidly about the ideological battle between the left and the right — discussing the difficulty of living “peacefully” with ideological opponents in the face of “fundamental” differences that “can’t be compromised.” He endorsed what his interlocutor described as a necessary fight to “return our country to a place of godliness.” And Alito offered a blunt assessment of how America’s polarization will ultimately be resolved: “One side or the other is going to win.”

Alito made these remarks in conversation at the Supreme Court Historical Society’s annual dinner on June 3, a function that is known to right-wing activists as an opportunity to buttonhole Supreme Court justices. His comments were recorded by Lauren Windsor, a liberal documentary filmmaker. Windsor attended the dinner as a dues-paying member of the society under her real name, along with a colleague. She asked questions of the justice as though she were a religious conservative.

The justice’s unguarded comments highlight the degree to which Alito makes little effort to present himself as a neutral umpire calling judicial balls and strikes, but rather as a partisan member of a hard-right judicial faction that’s empowered to make life-altering decisions for every American.

(continue reading)

[xclowniex]

from a realistic point of view, i dont see how zionism doesnt lead to non-jewish palestinian death or at least repression. if you have a state which has it enshrined in its founding documentation that it is For "Jewish People" (israel has been carefree about fucking over people they dont consider to be Jewish in the right way). two state solution doesnt even solve it since the assumption is just to have another israel and shove all the people they dont think count as jews over to palestinian state and pretend like they didnt just make an ethnostate

The reason you do not see how it doesn't lead to palestinian death is because on a fundamental level, you do not understand zionism from a jewish perspective.

Jews can and have, taken DNA tests and proved that we are descdant from cannanites who lived in Southern Levant. There is history too proving our orign from the region. A lot of jews were forced out due to various empires wanting to kill us, however some jews remained in the region.

Zionism is simply about self determination for jews as one of the indigenous peoples to the region. It does not inherently imply that palestinians are not indigenous as you can very much have two indigenous groups in a region, eg Moriori and Maori for example, both are indigenous to land which is part of New Zealand, but are two different groups.

I'm not going to say that no zionist ever wants harm to palestinians as there are, however the majority of zionists want a two state solution or a land for all solution (which is different to a one state solution of israel or palestine).

Indigenous groups do deserve self determination. This applies to all indigenous groups world wide. One indigenous group gaining self determination does not inherently harm another group of people, indigenous or not.

Ideologies can be implemented badly and not mean that the inherent concept is bad. For example, communism. No country has ever sucessfully implemented communism as they never leave the transition phase without something going wrong. Saying that zionism always hurts palestinians is like saying that communism is inherently genocidal because of China and Russia.

There are plenty of zionist solutions which does not harm palestinians which are deemed as ideal solutions by zionists, such as versions of a two state solution and land for all solutions.

Israel is also not an ethnostate. The percentage of israeli jews is almost equal to those who are New Zealand European in NZ, yet no one calls NZ an ethnostate. There are plenty of other countries whose majority population is around a similar percentage of 70% - 75% of a country and that country does not get called an ethnostate. Either, all countries with the majority ethnicity percentage above are ethnostates, or the threshold percentage needs to be higher for a country to be an ethno state, or if its only Israel who is an ethnostate and other countries with similar percentage are not, then you hold an antisemitic belief as the only jewish state should not be an exception for purely being a jewish state.

I would also like to touch on yoru usage of "non-jewish palestinian".

Whilst palestinian jews do exist (and I do know one personally), they are a very small minority of palestinians. It is illegal to be jewish in Gaza and the West Bank, so there are no rabbi's there for palestinians to convert. So I am very confused as to what you mean as there are no palestinian jews in palestine, and those that exist in the diaspora are a minority in both aspects, so whilst they deserve recognising and care, your wording is very strange and dogwhistle like. The reason I say dog whistle like, is because it is a common dog whistle for people to say that palestinians are the real jews and who we refer to as jews today are fake jews, which is obviously antisemitic.

[transmascpetewentz]

i meant wrapped not trapped, I do not blame you for misunderstanding me, thats entirely my fault

I think you seem to believe that my issue with transandrophobia as a label is the idea that trans men face oppression (which they do), when instead its the idea that the oppression transmasculine people face is something completely unique to them, instead of being the underlying current of tranphobia

I literally spent the first paragraph explaining my issues with the *concept* of it before segawaying into my issue with it as a conterpart to transmisogyny due to them not sharing an underlying ideological framework

And to touch on some of doberbutts points, trans women are also correctively raped and have suicide rates, and the issue of access to abortion is for every person with a vagina, not just trans men

A frustrating thing that he does there is that instead of giving a counterargument to one of my points (what i personally believe to be a misnomer about the purpose of the label of transmisogyny, were you (nonspecific) view it as a threat to the validity of the trauma we face, and not as a way to describe their own, and what others believe to be just attention seeking) is to bring up severe (often sexual) trauma as a way to put a landmine on that specific point, because any attempt to explain why they are wrong becomes a personal attack on the traumatized parties

this got quite long, so response under the cut. @doberbutts this is the same anon you responded to (by reblogging my post) earlier.

ok

no form of violence experienced under an oppressive system is truly "unique" in that i don't think there are any experiences of violence or oppression that apply to only one specific group, but the motivations behind the violence can differ depending on the demographic it's being done to. i do not think that any specific example of transandrophobia is something that no one who isn't transmasc has experienced, but transandrophobia is the oppression specifically targeting transmascs. i and doberbutts have already pointed out how this works, so i don't feel the need to reiterate that.

you do not understand the concept of transandrophobia, and you regularly demonstrate that your understanding is surface-level and comes from people who have an interest in making it seem less credible. instead of asking people who theorize about anti-transmasculinity (including me and doberbutts!!!) you immediately become hostile and make many incorrect assumptions about our beliefs. i find this highly disrespectful and encourage you to stop getting all of your information about transandrophobia from people who misrepresent it to argue against the concept of anti-transmasculinity.

yes, abortion access is something that everyone who can get pregnant has to deal with, but trans men face unique discrimination wrt abortion access and access to reproductive healthcare that trans women do not. this is because there is a fundamental misogyny component to anti-transmasculinity that you and others who deny it because "it's transmisogynistic!!!" seem to have a failure to grasp. transandrophobia is transphobia, misogyny, homophobia, and the specific modifier of maleness on this oppression all at once. i wish there was a better word for how maleness adds to and modifies oppression in an intersectional way that wasn't associated with mras, but alas there is none that i am aware of. also: anti-transmasculinity never says or implies that trans women don't face some of the issues that trans men do! you are treating this like a pissing contest for who has it worse and that is an attitude i'll need you to drop.

denying transandrophobia is a sentiment that is directly hostile to transmasc survivors of sexual assault, abuse, hate crimes and other things that arise from living under a patriarchy that systemically excludes you from both the male and female classes. the reason why we use this rhetoric is because these types of things arise from the specific intersection that trans men face, and how that can further intersect with sexuality. you are simply making up what we believe on the spot and not actually listening. if you want to come off anon and have a conversation in dms, i'd be willing.

talking to people like you is frustrating because you make these claims about what transandrophobia theory is as if we're a monolith or a homogenous group instead of hundreds of trans men on tumblr dot com all contributing to a larger conversation. no matter how much you claim to be in good faith, you continue to disregard actual transandrophobia theory in favor of some bastardized version you got from someone with "white tme/tma" in their bio. i hope you take this criticism and reflect on how you may be wrong.

[incorrectmahabharatquotes]

i love the incorrect quotes, but i dont agree with your political views. if its not much, could you explain why ur so anti bjp?(thats what i assume anyway)

You know, I actually think that the memes and the quotes are sort of a natural extension of our political views. I'll explain but it might get a little long. Stay with me here.

Firstly, I want to say that I think this way of perceiving politics is so fundamentally wrong.

"Anti-BJP", "Pro-BJP", "Anti-Congress", "pro-congress" etc etc. This isn't a cricket match where you're rooting for your favourite team. Politicians, as a general rule, are a bunch of liars. They lie to gain power and control. It's OUR duty, as CITIZENS, to keep them accountable and in their lane so they actually do their goddamn jobs. That's how the democracy is supposed to work. If they don't do their job properly, you vote them out of the seat. They work for us, and not the other way around.

In India, we grow up with this idea of not questioning your elders. Papa ne keh diya, bas keh diya. As children our natural instinct of curiosity and inquisitiveness is stifled. We go to schools and the same pattern follows. Don't question the authority. Keep your head down and colour inside the lines. We internalise this lesson to colossal degrees. Is it any wonder that we all struggle with critical thinking? If you're spoonfed "the correct answer" your entire life, you never learn to find if what you were told is correct or not. This exact thing is used by all politicians across the entire political spectrum. They use our learned behaviour of deferring to authority and never questioning power against us. The leader of the country becomes the patriarch. Papa ne keh diya, bas keh diya.

I have various issues with various political parties in India, in fact. I have no love lost for any of them. I don't exactly believe in unconditional loyalty to politicians.

Since you brought up the BJP, let's talk about that. My biggest issue with them is their politics of communal hatred. All they keep yapping about is hindu-muslim this and hindu-muslim that. For what? They could spend their time talking about actual issues but the low-hanging fruit of stoking communal hatred is easier to grab onto. Remember when the British did the same thing? It was bad then and it's bad now. All this unrest just to get votes. Imagine fucking up the mind of an entire nation like this and then demanding to be praised for it.

Their foundational roots are from the RSS and that entire organisation's existence is just insane to me. It's even more insane that they managed to go from a fringe ideology to becoming mainstream. "Hindu rashtra", it seems. Who even wants that? WHY do they want that? Is it such a bad fate to live in peace and harmony with other religions? A lot of their talking points are about how much they hate the islamic nations and how those are horrible and then they want to turn around and do the same thing?!? Is the hypocrisy not clear? So what if other countries are religious states? Why can't we try to be different? Maybe I'M the stupid one for thinking all humans are the same that we should treat everyone the same. Who knows.

There are also a bunch of other issues that the BJP has racked up during their rule. The demonetisation disaster, mismanagement of government funds to create public infrastructure, letting the interests of billionaire business ruin PROTECTED FOREST AREAS for mining coal that they didn't even need, introducing and passing HORRIBLE bills through the parliament without any thought or discussion, literally ignoring the plight of people dying in riots, CORRUPTION, destroying the public sector and letting for-profit capitalists free reign in a country which has practically no proper labour laws, aiding in creating a historical record of INCOME INEQUALITY that is higher than it was during the fucking colonial era, fucking up the press even more somehow to the point where they control all of the media houses.

This is not even scratching the surface. I could keep going.

My issue is not whether people vote for the BJP or not. Even if you like the BJP, my issue is that people seem willing to turn a blind eye to all the issues with the government and not even hold them accountable for it.

Vote for whoever you want. My only request is to keep your government accountable. Keep the power in check. The politicians should be SCARED of the citizens fury if they do something wrong. They shouldn't be free to do whatever and get off scot free.

That's our political stance, really. It's Pro-Exercise-Your-Democratic-Rights-As-Citizen.

We will always encourage others to be wary of people with too much power.

Now coming back to why I said the memes reflect our political stance, it's because it's obvious to see why we happen to be willing to risk being a little critical of a literary text. You have to be a little transgressive, in a sense. Perfect obedience and perfect reverence stifles people from engaging with something to their full potential.

I'm sorry to say that if you enjoy the memes and the quotes, you are also being a little transgressive like us. You're also questioning the authority of a religion to an extent. Perhaps our political leanings aren't as different as you might believe.

-Mod S

[drdrizzey]

(possibility part 1) of Putting Arcane characters, events and politics into our world's perspective! (Because why not?)

That french guy on tiktok pointed out the sociopolitical implications in arcane, linking them with actual political events or politically engaged individuals and dynamics in France and in the US, and I couldn't agree more on a lot of things he says.

I won't cite most of the french politicians he named because it's not that relevant, but I will break down a few of his points and add up on them. I find the captions pretty tricky when it comes to translation so I'm going to use my bilingual powers for that one<3

Silco :

For starters, he points out the way Silco portrays the instances where left wing revolutionaries who purposely intended to fight against capitalism (piltover) ended up reproducing said capitalism at their own scale (the shimmer empire). On that I'd like to add the fact that Silco's actions keep entertaining this whole concept of "becoming the person you're fighting against". In wanting his nation of Zaun, protecting Zaunites, he actually ends up making their lives worse in many ways, creating addicts, and insecurities. The same way piltover uses Zaun for its own cause, Silco ends up doing the same with many Zaunites.

Vander :

On the other hand, Vander is more of a portrayal of people giving up on activism to protect their personal lives, the same way that would be the case with activists stopping their actions after receiving death threats, or people that were very active in their communities when they were younger but gradually stopped when their priority switched to their family and when they got the occasion on going back on it they simply didn't, but never gave up their initial morals and values, simply the will and ambition to put them into actions. It's pretty self explanatory.

Jayce :

Then, jayce would portray the kind of people who due to their heritage are fundamentally more left sided socially speaking, but are more prone to range alongside more right wing politicians and elitists as a way to grab opportunities whenever they show up, suddenly brushing off their background, not that they are ashamed of it, but more that they need they "have to" in order to succeed and meet the expectations people might have of him, or to "open more doors" for himself, constantly leaving a bitter taste to any of his success. To a certain extent it could lead to him feeling like the lines of his own morals are constantly blurring, the same way it's shown in the scene where due to his fatigue he tells Victor that Zaunites are "dangerous". It's not only due to his mental struggles and tiredness at the moment but also due to his exposure to very closet minded people on the subject, enforcing ideologies that he maybe wouldn't have had on his own. It doesn't take much for him to switch from one way to the other, making it hard for him to make concrete decisions sometimes.

Jinx and ekko :

Jinx and ekko are the manifestations of the consequences of sociopolitical conflicts. They are a result of it. That much is also pretty self explanatory especially with jinx being a woman and ekko being black, and them both being late teenagers, even with the matter of racism not being directly a subject in Arcane, it is something that speaks to us as viewers. They both unwillingly are stuck in a position where their communities (Zaun in this case) are being minimised and dismissed in a way and they struggle to make their voices be heard (the same way this is often the case in both feminism and BLM movements.) It's a clear overpoliticalisation, and even if it's not on purpose (since arcane has a brilliant way of normalising diversity in the best ways possible), the fact that they are who they are just makes sense to a lot of people and reminds them how activism can be in real life as well. Ekko and jinx also have very different ways of manifesting their engagements in their actions. You could as well see ekko like those people making smaller communities and associations for exemple.

Caitlin :

Caitlin could be a right wing from a very elitist and more conservatism oriented household who's racist but "I'm not racist! My friend here is black." Or "x is different." And thrives off claiming wanting to help people and helping getting "insecurities and street violence" off and making the (higher classes) people (her own community) feel "safer" by simply converting their ideas into socially threatening actions and opinions towards minorities. Sugar coating hate speech or justify cop violence, basically.

Vi :

Vi would be anyone who came from more precarious households or minorities and ended up switching sides, turning up against her own people. It's kind of a more extreme Jayce case in a way. (Which makes them an even more interesting pair when we have that in mind.)

There's actually so much more to talk about, I've added a lot of my own interpretations but he also says that Mel is basically Kamala Harris (which is a bit funny, it is accurate.) those are just most of the characters he talked about but I could easily think of other things to say for pretty much any arcane character, it's part of why Arcane is so good.

Also a French moment here, can I point out how great it is that a french studio got to make a show with so much political implications and will for revolution and change while France is currently in a pretty politically complicated state at the moment? (When is it not honestly? but you get it.)

There's so much more to talk about so let me know if I should go over more characters, everything and everyone is a bit political when you really think about it.

I'm a bit tempted to go over more stuff on the subject now))

[notawomanimagod]

Today I realised the reason I love Silco so much is because maybe I relate to him in an uncanny way? ( And that I unintentionally have a Silco+Jinx tattoo?)

Some backstory first

I'd gone to college with my childhood best friend/partner and we had a whole plan for our futures and I was a big dreamer. I got us into all the schools/opportunities we wanted to purely by planning a lot. By constantly making sure we had a way out. By keeping us moving. By being the one that put their head down and planned. They had fire initially, which made us bond, but later they sort of showed up and came along for the ride.

Our campus was on the outskirts of a city which coincidentally had a polluted river flowing through it, where dead bodies were found. The water contained so many chemicals, it foamed unnaturally and your skin could feel it.

We would sit on the shores of this river and plan how we'd make it out of here and move to a better place. How we'd break the cycle. How we'd live in a nice house, eat good food and simply live a peaceful life. Away from the violence and chaos of the families we came from.

But things started falling apart, and both of us had vastly different ideologies. We didn't fit like perfect puzzle pieces anymore.

After months of tension, an ongoing fight blew up to the extent they choked me and shoved me down while I clawed at them to get away.

I grew so bitter and felt so betrayed.

This was my best friend. Young, hopeful me considered them my other half in every sense. This was the person I grew up with, we'd gotten each other through so much trauma in our lives and we'd barely survived everything together.

We've both stopped each other from early deaths and yet, there they were, throwing our future away, while I tried my best to acquire it.

I always felt like I didn't resent them for abusing me, I hated them for giving up. On our dream, on our future.

Suddenly I was thrown away.

That dynamic felt eerily similar to Silco/Vander, down to the size difference.

Around that time the only way I knew how to cope was to imagine myself reborn. I became a new person, being betrayed changed me so fundamentally, I had to change.

I viewed everything as pre-incident and after. Pre-betrayal, post-betrayal.

My younger self had no means of understanding why I'd been left behind to rot. While they got a comfortable life. Got to keep our friends. They got the better end of the deal. They got everything.

And I was absolutely alone, isolated. Driven to the point of insanity by everything they'd done to me.

I swore to only trust in myself after that.

I got this tattoo to symbolise my "rebirth" and how to find strength solely in myself.

My younger self had a lot in common with Silco/Jinx and it's a funny coincidence that my tattoo ended up having both their motifs.

Anyways, I didn't understand how much of my own life I saw in Silco's until my brother pointed this out recently. But it helped me process some of the feelings I felt when I began to read more on Silco/Vander's dynamic and why I was drawn to it.

I have always been that dirty little thing, scraping it together and clawing my way out.

No wonder I loved Silco's Rebirth narrative. It truly is the realest arc anyone who experiences trauma/ abuse/betrayal goes through.

And now years later, even though I have a peaceful life, my own apartment, sometimes I get reminded of how I could be hurt and that little part of me that is always on the run comes back in ropes of rage. I need to be in control.I have tried to harden myself and yet, I am still soft. I would often think my caring for others was my biggest weakness, though now I treasure it.

No wonder I love this little rat man. I am what he is. (Down to the black hair and scribbling in journals and leather jackets and cigarettes and being fruity lmfaoo)

No wonder I absolutely love everything about his characterization in season one.

[dailyadventureprompts]

Due to a unique confluence of dashboard alchemy this March 15th (A Merry Ides to those that celebrate 🗡️🗡️🗡️) I had an interesting thought regarding fallout new vegas:

If you strip away the rhetoric and the goofy football pads, you'll find that the fundamental motivating factor of Caesar's Legion is male insecurity, with everything from how they treat women to their primitivist view of technology drawing from the same fear of immasculization that fuels all "redpill" movements.

(This is to say nothing of the use of roman iconography and the "retvrn" dogwhistle about abandoning modern "decadence" and harkening back to the rigour of an imaginary past)

This casts Caesar as our Andrew Tate figure, a charismatic ideologue who pitches a worldview that promises to impose order on the frightening chaos of reality. His philosophy is a salespitch targeted directly at his listener's insecurities but meant only to benefit him: " you are afraid of being weak. I know what strength is, listen to me. by internalizing my words and spreading my message you will become strong." Of course the difference is that Caesar's empire is built on expansionist violence where Tate's is built on insecure teenagers feeding misogyny into the algorithm for the sake of engagement. Either way it creates a hierarchy that doubles as an information bubble, where position within the hierarchy is determined by who best can adhere to/rebroadcast the leader's message, identical to how an mlm ships product.

This quite fits with a watsonian reading of fallout: the wasteland is a hostile and terrifying place formed in the shadow of an objectively failed 50s (styled) traditionalist patriarchy. Though society may have collapsed, the people who survived inherited that society's rigid view of what a man should be like (strong and driven by the acquisition of material and status) a view largely incomparable with the new environment (starvation, radiation, and mutant dinosaurs will kill you no matter who you are or how much stuff you have). Since institutionalized masculinity had failed, people in the wasteland were forced to look for new paradigms of what masculinity (read: strength) looked like, a void into which Caesar's ultraregresive worldview fit perfectly.

From a doylist perspective however, I'm not sure the writers were really thinking about gender all that much during the rushed development of FNV. Like just about every other aspect of legion society that wasn't cut for time, everything about them seems to be evil for the sake of evil. However If there's one thing you can say about the underbaked concept it was a real hit with social regressives incapable of reading deeper. Unironic pro-legion discussion of Caesar's ideology has been an on ramp to turn insecure nerds into fascists the same way that ideologies like Caesar's have been turning insecure jocks for decades. It's poe's law in action: the developers gestured at fachism but failed to do enough with it to prevent a portion of their player base from becoming radicalized.

[family-discord-server]

We were the first planet in the consortium to purposefully step away from individual emotions and instead turn to collective emotional processing. Excluding planets where that’s the norm, usually because of telepathy or some other equivalent quirk of biology.

As it turns out, experiencing emotions individually doesn’t create a lot of space for people to think of others. You’d assume that people who experience sadness and loss and heartbreak and outrage and joy would realize that other people go through all the same emotions they do, but our planet was a little more self centered than that. Individuality became some sort of ideal in a way where people felt that no one could understand what they, in particular, had gone through. That no one experiences grief like they did, or joy how they did.

And maybe that stemmed from how people were taught to express emotions? Some people put on very big shows of emotion and others needed to be alone to process anything. Or, culturally, different expressions of anger were more socially acceptable in one place than another.

All this to say, emotions became marketable. There were advertisements centered around creating a perfect emotional experience, or political campaigns that would seek to produce a given reaction from a subset of people prone to expressing a certain emotion in a certain way. And no one really believed that anyone but themself was able to feel how they felt. People convinced themselves and each other that specific types of people were unable to feel, or weren’t people at all, to justify hurting them. So that they wouldn’t feel guilt for hurting someone who could feel pain like them.

The implants were the solution.

To step over some of the difficulties in the beginning, I really wanted to focus on how they’re in use now that they’ve been around for the last 100 years, given that this is the anniversary of their implementation.

And to be more specific, I wanted to talk to you all today about grief.

You see, for as much as we have changed as the result of the implants, we can’t help but stay the same.

Yes, large scale conflict decreased significantly when all people on the planet were able for feel each others loss and hatred and fear. To realize, fundamentally, what others went through and we tried, and partially succeeded, in creating a world where the more extreme emotions were rare and not commonplace. Where starvation and ideological hate could no longer take root in ignorance. That the only way to eradicate them was to make them felt by those who benefited from them and yet were free from their suffering.

Rape, murder, abuse, bigotry and other atrocities that perpetuated through the separation of suffering and enjoyment went from common to periodic to infrequent to rare. And while nothing is nonexistent, it’s remarkable what the world can make scarce.

But to set aside intentional violence for a moment, we must remember that life is full of unplanned, yet unavoidable tragedy. Life ends with death, and the largest negative emotion still being broadcast through the implants is grief.

The Remembered Project, which has been around for the last 27 years, has been responsible for assigning grief over people who no longer have loved ones to grieve for them.

Many people have signed up to participate in the voluntary project, which increases the amount of grief a person can expect to feel in their lifetime. It is random and unannounced until the weekly broadcast of the names of those who have been lost.

The people in the program don’t know exactly who they’re grieving for, but some tend to go through the list and pick a name and try and learn about the person who was lost.

We must remember that at our core, we try to replicate individuality.

So there is now a phenomena of people who treat the names of the deceased as though it is a draft, picking someone to care about based on the uniqueness of their name or a shared last name or a hundred other factors that make them the ideal pick, and more deserving of grief, than any other candidate on that list.

There are people who will spontaneously burst into tears and a trans-net trend of people making huge scenes in public over the randomly felt grief. Thousands of videos tagged with people crying or wailing over the emotions they volunteered for. That they subscribed to.

And we have just begun to see the counterculture to that trend. The people who post themselves going about their daily lives, nothing notable or out of the ordinary except that the video ends with a screenshot from the broadcasts of how many losses they have been assigned.

What I have to tell you today is not something I had planned on sharing in my lifetime, and yet there may be no better time to have this discussion than at this anniversary. So I apologize for the publicity this story will receive and ask you all to donate to the charities that fund the relief efforts in the wakes of natural disasters and fund families that are seeking asylum from intentional violence. As has been said, “Use your platform for collective and not individual benefit as progress is best shared.”

I use a random number generator to assign me a name from the list of loss. For the first week, I don’t look anything up. In fact, I do my best to think only of the name itself. To think of the name in the way a parent would, weighing it against other names and yet having that undefinable inkling that you’re going to go with this one anyways.

I am also prone to the pitfalls of most parents, trying to guess at what their child might become in life, what they might achieve.

I try and avoid assumptions each time, but I fail. I have hopes and dreams for this person and eventually I go the public records route of trying to assemble their life into a narrative. Of trying to reconnect with my lost child that I gave up at birth and am now getting to know.

Some of them were very present on the trans-net. Whole lives posted about and I go by year, catching up on all that I’ve missed.

Others have subscribed to the net-free lifestyle and I have to contact public institutions in order to piece together a trail of the life they lived. Whether they graduated, what job they held, what projects they pursued.

After I’ve learned as much about them as I can, I ask them if I can meet them in person. The responses I get are from the sanctuaries where they’re buried and the hours for public visitation.

I go to each of their graves and bring with me things I have gathered they liked. I am an estranged parent bringing a holo-tea set to the grave of a woman who I know took up solar surfing in her 20s, but in all the pictures I have of her as a child, she was always drinking out of a pink tea cup.

Many of the names on the list are of people who are older than I am now. So you are right to be asking why I look at each of them as though they are my child.

And that is because when I was 25 I lost my daughter.

There were many who felt my grief through the implants or felt their own that I had echoed back at me.

I had felt grief before her loss, that of my family members or friends who had died and all the echoes of those who mourned them. We all have felt that grief.

But it is scarce to feel the loss of a child and I was unprepared for its strength and the depth with which I was unaccustomed to feeling.

I feel her loss daily and cannot stop myself from inflicting my own emotions through the implants.

It is the burden of parenthood I never got to experience and through the Remembered Project, I have been trying to imagine her name being on the list after my own death. A world in which no one had been there to feel her leave. We cannot control who passes first, even if it should never be your child, and I refuse to let anyone else’s child be left without at least a parent to mourn them.

Sometimes I imagine my daughter meeting all of these siblings of hers in the afterlife and the parents who were waiting for them, as she is now waiting for me. I hope those parents look after her until I am able to join her, just as I will look after their children’s memory when no one else is able to.

I cannot tell others how to express their grief and I would never seek to do so. But I also cannot help the part of myself that asks them to remember the person being lost and not just those of us left to feel it.

[grison-in-space]

Hi! Just wanted to say, re:veganism discourse: Excellent Opinions, Great Delivery, Immaculate Vibes 👍 have a great day :)

cheers, ty! it is honestly sort of surprising to me that folks are reading along--as I said to someone else in DMs, I kind of figured that response was mostly something I was putting together in my own head, so I'm pleasantly surprised it's resonating with other people.

I am also just. :| not thrilled to have to be typing up all these "and here's how caring about animal welfare can radicalize you down all these shitty pathways if you add X and Y and Z" because at the end of the day I do think all species are worthy of basic respect; at the end of the day I do think there's nothing fundamentally better about me as a human than any other species. At the end of the day it actually matters a lot to me that my research mice are kept with as much enrichment as I can give them and that their lives and bodies and effort are honored and used wisely. It matters to me that the dogs I teach and the people I teach to train their dogs are learning with minimum stress and maximal confidence. These are all really important planks of my personal code of ethics!

It sucks to feel like I need to sit down and enumerate all the reasons that I think this other perspective of people who start in the same place I do--animals are neat individuals who encompass both the alien and the familiar, which share our lives in a multitude of ways--has developed in such a way that I think it encourages a really toxic way of relating both to animals and ourselves. In general I prefer to focus on places where I can agree with other folks, even if their opinions are different from mine. Someone in the notes brought up "struggle sessions," which are kind of the epitome of toxicity within the left: good values and a desire to help one another get so channeled through perfectionism and backbiting that you wind up with people gathering to literally torture and destroy each other. (Not just in China, either; it keeps happening, cf. Synanon in the US and the dissolution of the Japanese United Red Army.) That's not the kind of way I want to interact with people I'm supposed to be working together with.

So I try not to do that shit too much. I think about the places where people who have values just like mine go down rabbit holes and wind up in bad places, and I try and build barriers so I don't get burned out and angry and dissolve in a puff of flame. (I'm not directly engaging further with this anon for that reason, actually.) But just--aaaaaaaaauuuughhh, ARAs really irritate me because I can see where the roots are, and yet the entire ideology means that there essentially can't be listening. You can see that in the way I'm sitting here going "No, I know what your ideas are, here's why I have rejected them," and still I am getting exhortations to just listen and understand about ARA ideology. No. I did that, the last time there were protests about it in my workplace I went ahead and read the actual detailed IACUC reports released by FOIA that the protestors were shouting about, and bluntly it was a) not convincing and b) exactly the same appeals to emotional knee-jerk reactions and emotional flooding that I decried yesterday. Twenty years I have been checking my responses to these people, and it's never anything different.

I don't think that removing emotion totally from ethics and morals is wise or even possible--we use emotion for decisionmaking and encoding our values, after all, a person without emotion literally cannot decide things--but I do not like or tolerate subcultures that won't leave space to sit, think, and let the first knee-jerk rush of gut response die down. Sometimes, often, I do decide that my gut reaction is right! But I need the space to sit the fuck down and think about it, and if you take that to an ARA space you will mostly get flooded with more emotionally reactive imagery until you agree or leave. And that is coercive.

[bestworstcase]

@tumblingxelian from here

As the person who started the "Give that girl a cult" tag, I kind of disagree. RWBY Beyond already made it clear Ruby has a lot of people focused on her in a Great Uniter sense. Add in how many issues she's been having and judging by the movie continues to have with playing the role needed of her. & that there's a nationalistic/fascist movement being aided by the villains & I feel like Ruby being admired not playing into it makes zero sense. The memes of Jax just screaming in frustration cos Ruby is much, much, much closer to the icon he only pretends to be are just memes and not realistic expectations for the volumes story. I should also clarify, cult was just picked cos "Fan club" doesn't have the same connotations.

mm to clarify where i’m coming from, my main point of disagreement with the "ruby gets a [celebrity] cult" angle is with Where and How it will have narrative impact (i think ruby’s celebrity will be more of a personal stumbling block for her tied into the summer rose mystery and an issue that exacerbates the nascent civil war, not smth she can take advantage of in the political conflict vs the crown) and how prominent it’ll be in terms of the amount of specific focus put on people adoring her.

but the main bone i have to pick is with specifically the "ruby is literally going to be deified / silver-eyed ascended savior / tea as communion wine" type stuff (like this other anon) where "cult" is being used explicitly to mean religious veneration. THIS variant makes me want to bite people 

but anyway, to your actual points: i get that the jax meme-ing is largely exaggerated joking around, but at the same time the main thrust of all the real speculation in this vein is that ruby’s celebrity functions to set up a personal conflict between herself and the asturias twins and strengthens her coalition’s hand against the crown because she’s admired, an inspiration to the people, etc. 

in the same way that "salem’s gonna show up a year late with starbucks to explain her ninety step plan for beating the gods" is an unserious joke that follows from things i do seriously believe, that salem’s ultimate goal is to get rid of the brothers and the heroic side will hear her side of the story as probably the last major narrative turning point… no one is joking about jax going "NOOOO!!" while he bleeds supporters to ruby’s accidental cult of personality because they don’t think her celebrity is going to play a meaningful part in defeating the crown, yeah?

i’m also using the memetic joke phrasing in the prev post mainly because i didn’t want to just repeat stuff i’d already said in the one right before, but—well, okay:

1 - the crown isn’t a vanity project. jax is arrogant, but he does also fundamentally believe that he’s doing what is best for his nation; it’s an ideological project. and the ideology is more or less, "vacuo was broken and exploited by foreign invaders long ago. outsiders and those who aren’t willing to fight to the death for vacuo make this nation weak; to become strong again, loyal vacuans must band together to get rid of these people and fight for ourselves and our way of life." when jax imagines the "old ways," he envisions himself as the kind of king who holds himself equal to all his people ("he wasn’t going to hold himself above them")—he’s tying himself in a mental knot here to hold this belief while also putting half his forces under mind control, obviously, but the cognitive dissonance here is buried very deep. 

2 - the MAINSTREAM, NORMATIVE city vacuan cultural view—expressed by many different vacuan characters, including sun—is "we lost our identity and our way of life because people were too soft and content; we let the other kingdoms come here and take what they wanted, and then they left us with nothing but sand, heat, and bitter memories. but hardship and fending for ourselves for so long has made us strong, so we don’t need anyone telling us what to do!" <- i am condensing but much of this is lifted verbatim from the speech sun makes to rally eleventh hour support against the crown. in that speech, he rhetorically equates the twins to the "other kingdoms" who, like the crown, "promised prosperity and paradise."

3 - now. i don’t believe rwby is going to play straight this idea that vacuans were to blame for the conquest of vacuo, because a) the nomadic vacuans in after the fall hold very different cultural attitudes, b) in the 9.11 animatic oscar explicitly refers to all this as a "history of colonization," and c) rwby doesn’t blame faunus for being persecuted or the people of mantle for being repressed, why would vacuo be different?—these are cultural views that i expect to be challenged in v10.

4 - notice how similar these normative/mainstream views are to the crown’s ideology! the crown is more extreme, more violent, but it’s really not that far off from stuff the good-guy vacuans say. before the 9.11 animatic, this was the whole basis for my thinking that the crown would be the arc antagonists in v10—at the end of the book, the defenders turn the tide by flipping the nationalist rhetoric around; ideological victory to the crown. dump tens of thousands of refugees from another kingdom into this situation, and what happens? popular support for the crown explodes. 

5 - BTE is a villain origin story. it’s just the prelude that sets the stage for this explosion of popular support; the main event is in v10, and i think this time the crown is going to be much stronger. in the book, it’s a fringe movement extremists and a roughly equal number of unwilling "recruits" under jax’s thrall, but almost every city vacuan character we meet expresses hostility toward "outsiders" and "traitors" and a lot—not all, but a lot—of what the crown believes is normalized to some extent; a really significant number of vacuans were just one refugee crisis away from breaking for the crown. vacuo has had two refugee crises in swift succession and there’s atlesian and mistrali warships allied with the faction that welcomed the refugees flying over vacuo now.

6 - it doesn’t matter that those foreign ships are there to defend vacuo too; vacuan nationalism is grounded in centuries of colonial occupation and the optics are really, really bad for the coalition. here is what jax is going to be screaming from the rooftops: "half or more of vacuo’s population is outsiders now, people from atlas and vale who never lifted a finger to help us but expect us to sacrifice everything to save them—give up our food and water when we scarcely have enough to sustain ourselves, give up our homes, spill our blood and defend them with their lives. they’re weak, pathetic cowards who came running to hide behind us instead of fighting for their kingdom, and they expect us to believe they’ll fight for us when the time comes? no, they’re just here to do what the other kingdoms have always done to us—they’re the real threat. are we really going to sit by and let these foreign invaders take our country from us again?"—and a lot of vacuans are gonna buy that bullshit.

7 - not least because a lot of it is… kind of true. vacuo has a very long, very real history of suffering at the hands of these other kingdoms whose people it is now being asked to make very real sacrifices for. both CFVY novels emphasize that food and water are already scarce before the kingdom doubles in size and vacuo is weathering onslaught after onslaught of grimm because of the refugees. it’s a really tough situation, and for someone like jax it is a massive political windfall because it’s so easy to twist that reality into a justification for hatred and violence.

SO,

here’s what really stands out to me about the 9.11 animatic and ruby’s celebrity in B4:

nora’s section: establishes that the vacuans are really angry, like "throwing junk at small orphaned children in a screaming rage" angry

oscar’s: the shade coalition is holding on by its fingernails against grimm drawn to the city in droves.

ren’s: the asturias twins get broken out of prison, and he reflects that salem has the advantage because it’s easier to exploit fear and anger than to overcome them. 

winter’s: popular support for the crown is booming ("atlas go home" and "long live the crown" grafitti)… and then the second refugee crisis arrives, provoking what is quite likely another days-long unrelenting assault of the city by grimm. also, when the shade coalition isn’t running itself into the ground fighting grimm, they’re distributing food and water to refugees. (=the crown’s talking point here is "see? they only care about helping THEM, not US")

qrow’s: he feels optimistic because he sees the refugees coming together, trying to support each other through this crisis and atone for past wrongs. the old divide between atlas and mantle is healing. every single character in this section is a refugee, and the "remember her message!" mural seems to be something the happy huntresses organized. 

"it was a relief for us," says nora of reaching vacuo, "but for the vacuans…"

and boba: yang takes ruby to specifically a boba shop that relocated from patch to vacuo after vale was evacuated; so this is likely a neighborhood where a lot of valean refugees settled and that means the vacuans who live here are going to mostly be the type of people who were willing to open their community and absorb that second wave of refugees, i.e. the shade coalition’s support base, people like the nomadic vacuans in ATF who would never be swayed by jax’s rhetoric at all because they weren’t already xenophobic… which BTE implies pretty strongly is a minority position within vacuo proper.

B4 is a character-driven piece focused on ruby’s personal struggle, and the beyond spots are all pretty light, pretty hopeful, and pretty opaque about the situation in vacuo for reasons of being optional side content.

the 9.11 animatic, on the other hand, was meant to be an episode of the show proper, so it does not hold back on the foreshadowing / setup at all: from nora to ren to winter there’s a pattern of escalation with vacuan support for the crown gaining ground, getting louder and bolder, and then qrow’s optimistic conclusion is focused very tightly on the refugees, with an acknowledgment that things are "bad, probably never been worse" beyond the small good he chooses to focus on… which conspicuously does not include any vacuans participating in these small acts of kindness or atonement: it’s klein and willow and the happy huntresses looking out for other refugees.

here’s what i think is going to happen with ruby’s celebrity in v10: the refugees from atlas and mantle will adore her—she’s the girl who rallied the whole world to come help them, and got them out alive when salem attacked and their general lost his mind. the refugees from vale will love her—she’s theirs, after all, born and raised in vale, and look at what she’s started. the minority of vacuans who threw open their doors to welcome the refugees will think the world of her—if atlas hadn’t fallen so quickly, these are the people who would have done whatever they could to send help, and her example is an inspiration. 

and the rest of vacuo is going to fucking hate her. she’s the girl who asked the whole world to come running to help atlas and then the very next day dumped atlas and its problems into vacuo’s lap. is it fair to pin the blame for everything on ruby? fuck no, but she’s the face of this crisis for better and worse.

she’s not a threat to jax; he literally could not ASK for a more perfect scapegoat. she’s the girl from beacon who abandoned her school instead of fighting to save it. (<- explicitly how the crown and basically the entire shade student body views the beacon survivors.) she’s the girl who begged the world to come help atlas and then not even a full day later ran away AGAIN, dumping atlas on vacuo. she’s the reason the sky is crawling with atlesian and mistrali warships. she’s the reason grimm attacked the city every few days for months on end. the satellite she used to send her message is a fuckoff huge battleship looming over vacuo now. she keeps asking vacuans to set aside their differences and work together with the tens of thousands of refugees burdening the kingdom, and all of those refugees think she’s the best thing since sliced bread…

i think ruby will be a polarizing figure—possibly divisive enough that her return might be the final straw that rips the kingdom in half. ’cause like. the people with the most reason to admire her are also the ones the villainous nationalist group despises and wants to get rid of, and the 9.11 animatic flags hard that the crown’s support among vacuans has skyrocketed since the refugee crisis began. they’re not a fringe group anymore.

so on the one hand, the pressure put on ruby is going to be orders of magnitude more intense than ever before because she’s a celebrity beloved by the coalition’s supporters, most of whom are refugees, and between that and finding out vale is just gone now right after getting back, to judge by her characterization in rwby x jl2, ruby is NOT going to be coping well in the wake of her resolution to be all summer was and more. 

and on the other hand, to the crown’s supporters, who could very well now be the majority of vacuans living in the city proper, she’s the perfect scapegoat and they’re going to utterly despise her, inflaming the existing divide and maybe splitting what fence-sitters still remain at this point one way or another. ruby is both the girl who united the world and the girl who tore vacuo apart—rwby does love its contradictions!—which is a) not going to help her mental health situation at all, and b) a problem she and the rest of the shade coalition can only solve by winning the ideological argument. 

to put vacuo back together again they need to beat the idea that "outsiders" make vacuo weak and therefore to be strong vacuo has to drive out everyone deemed un-vacuan. more to the point, they’ll need to overcome the feeling that vacuo is suffering because the rest of the world came together for the refugees. which… is difficult and unfair, because the crown are the ones refusing to play ball and making everything harder than it needs to be, and because if the crown goes into open revolt then the coalition is going to have to fight back and that will make it even harder to make a convincing case that the coalition really does want to be fighting for vacuo, for all vacuans, not against them. it SEEMS impossible. but saving everyone in atlas and mantle seemed impossible, too. 

also, waves vaguely, i expect the vacuo arc will mirror atlas in various ways and this is one of them: the ascendant political movement are bad guys this time, reactionary nationalists, and the heroes are going to defeat them the hard way, no cheating, which will incite the healing of vacuo.

[maxx-the-queer]

One thing I wish we'd gotten a little more of with Taash is the exploration of gender in the various cultures they're aligned with.

For one, I'm a big believer in the idea that gender fuckery is a lot more common in the Tal-Vashoth specifically because of the way the Qun is so rigid about gender. For Qunari, gender isn't just a personal thing you simply are, it's a role you fulfill.

Even with the concept of Aqun-athlok, Qunari gender is incredibly binary and rooted in their fundamental belief system as a group that things are as they are meant to be. "Asit tal-eb." One can choose to accept the life they have, or struggle and suffer unnecessarily against nature.

For the Tal-Vashoth, leaving the Qun is often a rejection of that ideology, and an assertion that things aren't always the way they're meant to be. The role that they were assigned was one they left behind, and the struggle comes in finding a way to define yourself outside of the Qun.

Some would cling to what they know, for sure. But many would also seek out new things and adapt to their new life. They might try a new name, new words to fix the new changes in their life, and they might find the new parts of Thedas they like and reincorporate that into themselves to make it feel easier to fit somewhere new.

They might find that their role can be theirs to define, and with that definition comes a new understanding of what it means to be.

Gender is as much cultural as it is personal. Our understanding of gender is wired into our language and guided by our practice, and I think Taash's story could've been enriched so much more by the exploration of how those kinds of things differed between their cultures.

The Qunari may not have a word for being non-binary, but maybe the Tal-Vashoth do. Maybe they took the Rivaini term for that experience and translated it into some kind of bastardised Qunlat, something linking themselves to their history and their future.

Maybe when Taash begins to deconstruct the idea of themselves, they don't have to choose between being Rivaini or being Qunari, because the truth is that they're not one or the other. They're both and neither at the same time. They're a Vashoth who grew up in Rivain and is influenced in equal measure by their Tal-Vashoth mother who still emotionally follows the Qun, and the people of Rivain they grew up around.

Maybe they have other Trans and Queer Tal-Vashoth to lean on a little closer to home, rather than having to lean on others like the Crows or Shadow Dragons who are just as distant and strange to them as the Qun itself.

Maybe, just maybe, Taash gets to explore what it means for them to be non-binary and for that exploration to have some actual connection to the cultural issues they struggle with as well.

[sapphia]

From my post about how NZ’s far right wanted to abolish the human rights commission but instead installed a gay racist transphobe instead.

…The more [TERF] beliefs became incompatible with core feminism, and the more core feminism became interested in exploring gender, scientifically and sociologically, as an ever-changing construct informed by but not limited to base biology, and the more radfems became consumed with their “cause” of getting trans women out of their spaces and away from “LGB resources” (actual argument that used to get propagated), the further away TERFs pushed themselves from mainstream feminism until they found themselves on the same side as the groups to which they were once fundamentally opposed: anti-feminists, homophobes, conservative religious groups, anti-abortionists, and neo nazis. Thus, radical feminism is perhaps one of the few true demonstrations of the horseshoe theory, where a group became so radicalised it jumped the iron gap and travelled all around to the other end of the horseshoe.

TERFs were great boons to the cause, and came with a huge inbuilt advantage for the right: many of them are lesbians, giving them a rare LGBT ally and a demonstration of the ‘harm’ trans people were causing.

The reason why so many TERFs are lesbians is partly because of queer intracommunity politics, and partly because the academic and social roots of TERFism originate in the UK and from UK academic feminism, led by their universities and which was always particularly ‘anti-men’ in its approach, producing student movements back in the 80s and 90s that discouraged women from dating men, encouraging them to remain celibate or to date women instead, and it’s this separatist ideology where radical feminism finds its roots. If the concept sounds familiar, that’s because there is currently a South Korean feminist trend based on similar ideals making waves in the West.

In fundamental ways, radical feminists and the far right are well matched: they’ve always shared a particular lack of complex understanding of varying structures of oppression, as I remember very vividly from online discourse back before radical feminism devolved so much it fully segregated itself from the mainstream.

Radical feminists were obsessed with working out who had privilege over others, or who were less privileged, and this resulted in complicated and very flawed calculations of compounding oppressions. For example, does a gay black man have more or less privilege than a straight white woman?

Boiling this down to its essential premise of how much is a marginalisation “worth” is what aligns the mindset of radical feminists with that of the far right. Neither group truly includes a full variety of perspectives to contribute to demonstrating and explaining the complexities in the ways our society treats marginalised groups. Such transgressive thinking is antithetical to their worldview and contrary to the norms they are invested in enforcing.

You don’t have to be highly educated or culturally engaged to see the inherent issues of trying to so distinctly define people into categories. Common sense would also tell you different groups have different privileges, different concerns, and that these would reveal themselves in different ways and need addressing with different solutions. Both a black man and a woman may be disadvantaged in finding a job vs your average white man, but one would have more reason to be worried accepting a drink from a stranger in a bar while the other might be more worried being pulled over by the cops. These real-life concerns can’t be differentiated down into a finite value.

(Not that either of these situations aren’t a threat to the other individual — women have plenty of reasons to fear the power of cops, and gay men who are victims of hate crimes are regularly picked up in gay bars.)

Common sense also would make you wonder how much it matters. If you want to add up all the different ways people can be disenfranchised, you’ll soon end up with a checklist of -isms too long to be of any use and able to find ways to fit anyone inside at least one of them, which is sort of the whole point. And in checklisting everything you’ll still be managing to ignore any nuance and the entire concept of classism, probably.

This was roughly the outcome of discourse between the left and radical feminists: “Your math doesn’t work out.” And like a true ally of the right, the TERFs said, “Doesn’t matter, we believe it anyway.”

Comment

Like the right, radical feminists struggle to conceptualise and explain the effects of compounding marginalisation, usually because they themselves tend to be quite privileged. Radical feminism was born from those first generations of women able to attend universities, and their demographic reflects that. Most radical feminists (actual radical feminists and not just people jumping on the transphobia bandwagon) were white women, able-bodied, on the richer side of the poverty line — and in fact, the exclusion of black women in the UK from feminist studies in universities has become a recent subject of criticism from black feminists, as Western concepts of norms have been drastically affected by the narrowness of the perspective of the field, and so in this way, defining ‘male’ and ‘female’ as distinct categories with distinct traits particularly disenfranchises Black people and other people and cultures of colour who maintain different ideals and norms, who have different physical features, and who resultantly find themselves alienated from a conversation dominated by the white voice.

Although their views on how gender should be divided in society are transformative, TERF positions on gender themselves are regressive and conservative, leaning into anti-scientific understandings of sex, gender, and the wider world that have steadily put the movement more and more at odds with academia and also, sometimes, with reality. TERFs, both women and lesbians, are members of marginalised groups who feel their space is being encroached upon by people who, by their own rubric, are evaluated as more ‘privileged’ than they are, yet are seen as ‘more harshly oppressed’ by others within their community, threatening their status and position within established movements. Having quite literally been the subgroup of feminists attempting put a value on oppression in order to determine who is “most oppressed” or navigate oppression dynamics, anti-trans feminists were women who found their position threatened by new groups and by their transformative ideas around the structures upon which their shared oppression was based.

Thus, the response of TERFs became to deny trans people, and particularly trans women, a position within the rubric in an attempt to stymie the growth of a group and ideology who threatened their position, authority and, they felt, their identities.

Conservative branches of movements formed by attempting to uphold outdated, unscientific ideals were ever-branching offshoots in leftism at this time. In the 2010s, within the LGBT community, radical feminist lesbians found allyship with ‘Truscum’ — trans people who believed that only people who experience clinical levels of dysphoria can be transgender. This movement almost entirely died by the end of the decade, but those sparse people and ideals remaining from the movement too have become very valuable allies to the far right. Like detransitioners, these rare examples of trans people holding non-normative subversive beliefs around gender and transness are frequently referenced, presented and paraded by anti-science fringe groups like the Free Speech Union as examples that prove their points and that some minorities support their ideas.

Truscum groups too were a response to new ideas of gender and sex threatening established science, identities, and ‘power structures’. Truscum-identifying trans people were generally individuals with a personal belief in the gender binary, were deeply affected by self-directed transphobia, and invested in the medical model. Truscums upheld the medical model of transitioning (that would eventually leave them behind), the gender binary, and then positioned themselves as scientifically-verified “outsiders” relative to that binary, a position that became threatened by the growing self-identification of non-binary individuals who signified a shift in thinking within the trans community away from gender as immutable and based in science, and instead used science to further question the sociological underpinnings of our concepts of sex.

I explain this to give you a cause-and-effect, psychosocial explanation of how these reactionary movements and beliefs spring up within movements in an attempt to demonstrate where positions like Stephen Rainbow’s come from — people in a marginalised community who turn on what many of us would see as a fellow marginalised group and what some of us (and many more bigoted or distant perspectives) would see as the same marginalised group.

Lesbians and feminists were not the only groups to have conservative social elements that felt threatened by encroachments of new marginalised identities within their community of marginalisation; it was demonstrated by gay men as well, just more bluntly and without them really forming an identity or body of academia or psuedoscience around their discomfort. But it’s through this ostracisation from their own communities caused by their unfavourable perception of, and then bigotry towards, new-entrant groups threatening the status quo, that groups like TERFs and gay men like Stephen Rainbow are pushed towards the radical right.

I also explain this to so you can get a sense for the categorical thinking that underpins these shared philosophies, and the way both groups put ‘value’ on these distinct categories of marginalisation. Radical feminists do put value on oppression in pretty much the exact way the right believe the mainstream left put such value on oppressions, and this has morphed into TERF ideas of status that the right think dominate left-wing thought.

The right count the monetary value of affirmative action initiatives and reparations, note the attentiveness of the public to marginalised issues, confuse the raising of diverse voices with the raising of status, and hold that the effects of these actions are a sort of ‘privilege’. The actual reasons behind these groups getting different levels of money and attention at different times is complex and much more to do with equity or recompense than value, but in dismissing this complexity, the right are attempting to ‘solve’ an unsolvable equation asking which marginalisation is worth what value to the left, while using entirely the wrong variables.

Because the far right are very strong believers in the value these marginalised identities must hold, ACT see appointing a gay human rights commissioner as “justifying” itself through marginalisation “points”, expecting him to be more acceptable or palatable to the left and to the public. They believe his oppressions qualify him or make him suitable, or somehow shield him from scrutiny, and they believe they can select by marginalisation in the same way Clarence Thomas was a Black Republican placed on the Supreme Court. They fail to recognise the way the majority of the LGBT community has embraced and incorporated the social, scientific, and gender theory behind current demographics and understandings of trans people and that, for the vast majority of the LGBT community, this is a point of unity and understanding between groups and identities.

Right now, gay men are frequently targeted by homophobic hate crimes, but that is not necessarily going to make them any more grateful to see an anti-trans gay man as Human Rights Commissioner because while it doesn’t affect his ability to advocate for gay men per se, his advocacy for queer rights ad a whole is likely to be compromised due to not truly sharing the same perspective as the community he supposedly serves.

This will not stop some conservative, privileged gay men from viewing any attempts at Rainbow’s removal as further alienation from their own community by “the left”. Rainbow’s placement in this position is a victory for the right either way.

In appointing Rainbow, ACT entirely miss the irony of what they are doing; they are the ones appointing people to positions entirely because of identity. The left, the wider population even, genuinely see the value and perspective different relevant minority groups can bring to these positions, and that is the basis for which minority identities can “favour” applicants for such roles. It is the right who have themselves boiled someone down to what “label” they can bring the role in order to better disguise their corrupt, bigoted appointment implicitly placed to further their race war.

Who’s playing identity politics NOW, Seymour?

[fuutaprotectionsquad]

you guys ever think about how. how in the beginning of Milgram, Jackalope was like "you can vote however you want, you can vote someone innocent just because you think they're pretty. it doesn't matter." And despite how hard we (or atleast me, but i imagine most of us) try to vote objectively and not succumb to the bias he expects of us, we do. Our votes are all biased because fundamentally, law and sin itself is built off of emotion, which is the root of bias.

And thats what causes such a debate in the Milgram fandom over verdicts: bc even though we think we're thinking logically, we're not, we are biased. Our biases don't overlap, though, and thats why we can't agree with each other. And on top of that, we are rigid in our biases. We are stubborn, we refuse to see subjective things from other points of view, because we can't. Opinions are hard as fuck to change.

Hence why the Amane debate, despite infuriating me, is subsequently my favorite. Neither side is right or wrong, no matter how much I think I'm right or other ppl think they're right. Its subjective what age is too young to be held accountable for your crimes, its subjective whether or not you should be blamed for the abusive ideologies you were raised under. And I could rant all day about why I believe one thing or the other, and I can get really mad at people who disagree, but its subjective. Just as the sole fact that Amane's cult teaching are bad is also subjective. Murder being bad is subjective.

People trying to change the prisoners' opinions using their verdicts is biased just as voting them based on our own opinions is also biased. We are trying to force our own beliefs and opinions on prisoners who have different ideas of whats right and wrong.

Es cannot see any of this. Most of the prisoners do. We see it mostly with Yuno, Fuuta, Amane and Kotoko, who criticize/take advantage of Es' god complex. Meanwhile, Haruka and Mahiru invite Es to decide for them (i think haruka does??? i dont fully remember). Muu and Shidou are both initially opposed to it, but become more willing to follow Es' verdicts because it benefits them. Even though Shidou's a little hesitant to see himself as innocent, he starts to. Kazui attributes Es' verdicts to a lack of knowledge on his situation, with the ideology that only his opinion on it matters, because he's the only one who knows the full story. Mikoto's kinda just confused (understandably). And don't ask about John idr.

Anyway I could rant for hours about how the specific prisoners act towards Es in regards to their verdicts + milgram fans' voting ideology + the philosophical undertones of milgram. Technically i did cuz this took 2 hours to write. But. maybe another day.