#Culture Wars

[animentality]

[odinsblog]

🗣️THIS IS WHAT INCLUSIVE, COMPASSIONATE DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE

Minnesota Dems enacted a raft of laws to make the state a trans refuge, and ensure people receiving trans care here can't be reached by far-right governments in places like Florida and Texas. (link)

Minnesota Dems ensured that everyone, including undocumented immigrants, can get drivers' licenses. (link)

They made public college free for the majority of Minnesota families. (link)

Minnesota Dems dropped a billion dollars into a bevy of affordable housing programs, including by creating a new state housing voucher program. (link)

Minnesota Dems massively increased funding for the state's perpetually-underfunded public defenders, which lets more public defenders be hired and existing public defenders get a salary increase. (link)

Dems raised Minnesota education spending by 10%, or about 2.3 billion. (link)

Minnesota Dems created an energy standard for 100% carbon-free electricity by 2040. (link)

Minnesota already has some of the strongest election infrastructure (and highest voter participation) in the country, but the legislature just made it stronger, with automatic registration, preregistration for minors, and easier access to absentee ballots. (link)

Minnesota Dems expanded the publicly subsidized health insurance program to undocumented immigrants. This one's interesting because it's the sort of things Dems often balk at. The governor opposed it! The legislature rolled over him and passed it anyway. (link)

Minnesota Dems expanded background checks and enacted red-flag laws, passing gun safety measures that the GOP has thwarted for years. (link)

Minnesota Dems gave the state AG the power to block the huge healthcare mergers that have slowly gobbled up the state's medical system. (link)

Minnesota Dems restored voting rights to convicted felons as soon as they leave prison. (link)

Minnesota Dems made prison phone calls free. (link)

Minnesota Dems passed new wage protection rules for the construction industry, against industry resistance. (link)

Minnesota Dems created a new sales tax to fund bus and train lines, an enormous victory for the sustainability and quality of public transit. Transit be more pleasant to ride, more frequent, and have better shelters, along more lines. (link)

They passed strict new regulations on PFAS ("forever chemicals"). (link)

Minnesota Dems passed the largest bonding bill in state history! Funding improvements to parks, colleges, water infrastructure, bridges, etc. etc. etc. (link)

They're going to build a passenger train from the Twin Cities to Duluth. (link)

I can't even find a news story about it but there's tens of millions in funding for new BRT lines, too. (link)

A wonky-but-important change: Minnesota Dems indexed the state gas tax to inflation, effectively increasing the gas tax. (link)

They actually indexed a bunch of stuff to inflation, including the state's education funding formula, which helps ensure that school spending doesn't decline over time. (link)

Minnesota Dems made hourly school workers (e.g., bus drivers and paraprofessionals) eligible for unemployment during summer break, when they're not working or getting paid. (link)

Minnesota Dems passed a bunch of labor protections for teachers, including requiring school districts to negotiate class sizes as part of union contracts. (Yet another @SydneyJordanMN special here. (link)

Minnesota Dems created a state board to govern labor standards at nursing homes. (link)

Minnesota Dems created a Prescription Drug Affordability Board, which would set price caps for high-cost pharmaceuticals. (link)

Minnesota Dems created new worker protections for Amazon warehouse workers and refinery workers. (link)

Minnesota Dems passed a digital fair repair law, which requires electronics manufacturers to make tools and parts available so that consumers can repair their electronics rather than purchase new items. (link)

Minnesota Dems made Juneteenth a state holiday. (link)

Minnesota Dems banned conversion therapy. (link)

They spent nearly a billion dollars on a variety of environmental programs, from heat pumps to reforestation. (link)

Minnesota Dems expanded protections for pregnant and nursing workers - already in place for larger employers - to almost everyone in the state. (link)

Minnesota Dems created a new child tax credit that will cut child poverty by about a quarter. (link)

Minnesota Democrats dropped a quick $50 million into homelessness prevention programs. (link)

And because the small stuff didn't get lost in the big stuff, they passed a law to prevent catalytic converter thefts. (link)

Minnesota Dems increased child care assistance. (link)

Minnesota Dems banned "captive audience meetings," where employers force employees to watch anti-union presentations. (link)

No news story yet, but Minnesota Dems forced signal priority changes to Twin Cities transit. Right now the trains have to wait at intersections for cars, which, I can say from experience, is terrible. Soon that will change.

Minnesota Dems provided the largest increase to nursing home funding in state history. (link)

They also bumped up salaries for home health workers, to help address the shortage of in-home nurses. (link)

Minnesota Dems legalized drug paraphernalia, which allows social service providers to conduct needle exchanges and address substance abuse with reduced fear of incurring legal action. (link)

Minnesota Dems banned white supremacists and extremists from police forces, capped probation at 5 years for most crimes, improved clemency, and mostly banned no-knock warrants. (link)

Minnesota Dems also laid the groundwork for a public health insurance option. (link)

I’m happy for the people of Minnesota, but as a Floridian living under Ron DeSantis & hateful Republicans, I’m also very envious tbh. We know that democracy can work, and this is a shining example of what government could be like in the hands of legislators who actually care about helping people in need, and not pursuing the GOP’s “culture wars” and suppressing the votes of BIPOC, and inflicting maximum harm on those who aren’t cis/het, white, wealthy, Christian males. BRAVO MINNESOTA. This is how you do it! And the Minnesota Dems did it with a one seat majority, so no excuses. Forget about the next election and focus on doing as much good as you can, while you still can. 👏🏿👏🏿👏🏿👏🏿👏🏿👏🏿👏🏿

👉🏿 https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1660846689450688514.html

[nando161mando]

Your daily reminder that the culture war is there to distract us from the class war and it's working

[thecaptaintrout]

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Lois Beckett at The Guardian:

Attacks targeting American public schools over LGBTQ+ rights and education about race and racism cost those schools an estimated $3.2bn in the 2023-24 school year, according to a new report by education professors from four major American universities. The study is believed to be the first attempt to quantify the financial impact of rightwing political campaigns targeting school districts and school boards across the US. In the wake of the pandemic, these campaigns first attempted to restrict how American schools educate students about racism, and then increasingly shifted to spreading fear among parents about schools’ policies about transgender students and LGBTQ+ rights.

Researchers from UCLA, UT Austin, UC Riverside and American University surveyed 467 public school superintendents across 46 US states, asking them about the direct and indirect costs of dealing with these volatile campaigns. Those costs included everything from out-of-pocket payments to hire to lawyers or additional security, to the staff member hours devoted to responding to disinformation on social media, addressing parent concerns and replying to voluminous public records requests focused on the district’s teachings on racism, gender and sexuality. The campaigns that focused on public schools’ policies about transgender students often included lurid false claims about schools trying to change students’ gender or “indoctrinating” them into becoming gay. This disinformation sparked harassment and threats against individual teachers, school board members and administrators, with some of the fury coming from within local communities, and even more angry calls, emails and social media posts flooding in from conservative media viewers across the country.

In addition to the financial costs of responding to these targeted campaigns, the study revealed other dynamics, the researchers said. “The attack on public officials as pedophiles was one I heard again and again, from people across extremely different parts of the country: rural, urban, suburban. It speaks to the way that this really is a nationalized conflict campaign,” said John Rogers, an education professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the lead author of the study. The frequency with which both school board members and school superintendents were “being called out as sexual predators – it was really frightening”, Rogers said. Superintendents from across the country told the researchers how these culture battles had affected their schools, and cut into resources they would have preferred to spend on education.

[...] While disagreement, debate and dealing with angry parents are a normal part of local public school administration, the researchers noted, the political campaigns that schools have faced in recent years have been anything but normal. Many of them have been driven by “a small number of active individuals on social media or at school board meetings”, and fueled by misinformation. The school-focused campaigns, which started with claims that elementary and middle schools were harming white students by teaching critical race theory and later shifted to attacks on schools’ policies for transgender students, were nationally organized, with “common talking points” that could be traced back to conservative foundations and rightwing legal organizations, and were intensely amplified by rightwing media coverage, Rogers said.

Public schools across the US burned up nearly $3.2BN worth of money fending off right-wing culture war items such as book bans, anti-LGBTQ+ extremism, anti-student inclusion, and anti-racial equity policies.

See Also:

The Advocate: U.S. public schools lost $3.2 billion fighting conservative culture wars: report

[thenib]

Jen Sorensen.

[corporationsarepeople]

[madame-helen]

There is still a long way to go.

[mysharona1987]

Anti-trans crazies now think any girl with a pixie haircut is a boy or transgender.

And wtf at demanding certification. I didn’t realise you had to carry your kid’s birth certificate on you if they were competing in a sports event.

[katameme]

[velvet-vox]

Why Po from Kung Fu Panda and N from Murder Drones are the exact same character: an analysis of Po's and N's low empathy.

Hi.

If there is one thing that unites the Murder Drones fanbase and the Kung Fu Panda fanbase is the misinterpretation of their male lead character traits.

More specifically, the two fandoms in their fan works tend to leave out or outright forget one of the most interesting aspects of their characterization:

Their low empathy

So, today, I'm going to explain to you the difference between being kind and being empathetic, why both N and Po are only the former and not the latter, what are their similarities and how said similarities makes the other more interesting, and why it's ok and totally fine for someone to have low empathy as it doesn't make you a monster by definition (well, that's the case at least for Po; sorry N, but you committed genocide).

Let's get right in.

1. Defining kindness and empathy

For starters, I'm going to define the difference between kindness and empathy, as the two terms are often used interchangeably when in reality they are nothing alike. So:

A kind person, is someone who goes out of their way to commit an act of good towards the other, usually said act gets expressed in a physical way (hugs, gifts, favours etc) or a psychological way (pep talks, encouragement, comfort words etc).

An empathetic person, is someone who understands the pain and struggles of the others on an emotional level without necessarily having experienced it before and can relate to them through said connection even if they don't necessarily act upon it.

I'm a kind person, but I'm not an empathetic one. I always go out of the way to not inconvenience the people around me, and I even go out of my way to buy expensive gifts and surprise the people I care about the most, but I don't necessarily feel anything intense when they are present in my life nor do I really relate to their struggles and losses.

I wouldn't define myself as a Po or an N since I'm more on the introverted side of the low empaths, but I can use my extensive knowledge on the matter to demonstrate these next two points:

2. Demonstrating that N has low empathy

I expect this to be easier than Po, since despite the Murder Drones fandom being younger than the KFP one, I assume that most people would believe you if you told them that N is rather unemphatic, because when you really start to think about it for more than one second, you'll realise that N doesn't really feel directly bad for the people he killed, he more so feels remorseful for his past actions and uncomfortable whenever he inconveniences the drones who are still alive through his murderous nature.

In the pilot episode, he kills an entire room full of people and almost kills Uzi as well, and when it's time to apologise? He says that he's sorry for ruining their card game and making Uzi have an awkward moment with her dad. You know... aside from this being a horror comedy show with a tinge of romance, Murder Drones doesn't really make N feel awful for the horrible atrocities he commits, instead makes N feel sorry for the down to earth annoyances he produces.

There are many other examples of his uncaring nature towards life: the death of Uzi's classmates, both by his, Doll's and V's hands, his increasing anger towards V caused more by the fact that she kept secrets rather than her attitude towards the murders, and the speed at which he reacted to Beau and Tessa.

Despite his happy go lucky attitude and gentle treatment of others, N doesn't feel the need to cope with his murders that V and Uzi have (at least on the surface). V couldn't cope with her murderous actions, so instead she created this killer psycho girl persona that enjoys the thrill of death, while Uzi had an entire mental breakdown after taking out half of his classroom and needed N to calm her down.

N's main motivation throughout the season is being useful to the company and his friends, and more often than not this goal involves him being a violent killer to everybody who threatens the wellbeing and happiness of his owners.

N's lack of empathy isn't a flaw that he can overcome like Uzi's ego and V's insecurities, but rather an innate character trait that he has to live with for the rest of his life, and that's ok; after all, the show doesn't punish him for being unable to relate to other people's deaths and traumas, but instead punishes him for being submissive and following orders unapologetically; a flaw that he shares with J.

3. Demonstrating that Po has low empathy

And now, it's time for the hardest sell. Many of you up until this point might have been thinking: "How the hell did he even think about comparing Po from Kung Fu Panda to N from Murder Drones, they are from two completely different franchises with a distinct difference in tone between the two" but trust me, once I came up with the comparison, I was unable to not see it, so I had to write this article.

Much like N, Po has a happy go lucky attitude towards his fights, and uses humour to his advantage and to the disadvantage of his enemies. But don't let his cuddly appearance fool you in the same way pandas fool people in real life and Kung Fu Panda 1 fooled audiences when it first released: behind Po's childlike wonder for martial arts (which is already a red flag, if you think about it, it's similar to Lizzie's passion for murderous women) there's a strong, unyielding warrior who was ready from day one to do the necessary things to keep the Valley of Peace safe.

Don't believe me? Then just look at the photo above; the execution of Tai Lung is definitely the first thing that comes to mind when everyone thinks of Po lacking compassion, for obvious reasons, but there are way more than that: at the beginning of the second movie when Shifu receives the letter informing him that Master Rhino was executed by Lord Shen's weapon, Po is super enthusiastic about Rhino's legendary status right up until Shifu drops the truth bomb on him and reveals that he was killed, and Po's reaction is to instinctively reiterate one of his previous statements, and then moves on from it immediately without any second thoughts. That's not normal, right?

A minor portion of KFP2's conflict is Po's inability to see how much his dad did for him, a struggle overcome only by the end of it. Po, despite loving his dad dearly, is unable to personally relate to all of the things that he did for him, so he puts him off until he can find the answers that he seeks.

Side note: this is what makes their reunion at the end of the movie so impactful for me, I also tend to emotionally neglect people by accident, and when I realise it I go out of my way to make it up to them, like Po who comes back with a lot of ingredients that his dad doesn't need just to let him know that he cares even if he doesn't show it in a normal manner.

The only time in the trilogy where Po's lack of empathy becomes a noticeable problem for him, is in Kung Fu Panda 3, where, after his biological dad tells him that he lied to him in order to make him come to the village, Po, who clearly can't relate to his struggle and barely knew him for a day, immediately rejects him, going as far as to say that he lost him.

Other minor examples are his treatment of the Furious Five, especially the scene in KFP1 where he enters Crane's room and doesn't immediately realise the problem.

4. And now, with that out of the way, it's time to confront the two and explain why their similarities make the other more interesting

When comparing the two, the thing that comes to mind immediately is that Po has a lot less emotional baggage than N, and while that doesn't mean that Po doesn't have trauma (insert Po finds the truth from John Powell and Hans Zimmer), it means that Po compared to N has lived a pretty stable life; while N instead has never been fully safe from harm since he is a robot.

Po feels like a version of N that was not as scarred from tragedy and backstabbed as the other; Po, at least in the movies, doesn't have someone who takes advantage of his kind nature to trick him into committing something bad, while N instead suffers consistently from other people abusing his kindness and trusting nature and more often than not ends up almost dead.

While Po throughout the trilogy struggles to find who he is, who he was, and who he's meant to be, N throughout the show struggles with a worse version of that same concept by lacking self worth, which culminates in his blind thrust.

Po, thanks to his dad, has an internalised moral compass that helps him decide on his own what is right and what is wrong despite lacking empathy, while N never had anybody to explain morality to him, aside from his programming and maybe Tessa, so instead he just goes along with what anybody tells him to do, since he can't directly relate to the pain of others.

That's why comparing the two is so fascinating to me: in many ways, Po and N are each other's foil, because they are so similar in terms of personality and fandom portrayal; they are both genuinely kind individuals, but while one of them had the care and support he needed to become his best self, the other still struggles to find an healthy support system aside from Uzi.

5. Low empathy doesn't make you a monster

A lot of fans tend to dumb down their characters to just kind, sweet and innocent, despite the fact that in the actual canon works they have willingly and intentionally killed people; the general terror, it seems, is the idea that just because they have committed crimes before and they lack the societal traits that make a person traditionally good, then suddenly they are horrible people and you are glorifying violence.

But that's not the case; a lot of the mental conditions stigmatized by society, like sadism, sociopathy, BPD, are just that: conditions. They don't indicate that a person is inherently more good than the other, nor do they indicate that someone is more at risk of becoming evil than the other.

It's who you choose to be.

I hope this post gave both fandoms the insight they needed to write about these two characters properly.

You don't need to be afraid of not having the same personality type as most other individuals, we are all different people yet we all deserve to live in this world equally.

Don't you ever forget.

[charredasperity]

Difference between Tumblr and Twitter via new game release:

Hades 2 fans on tumblr are posting screenshots, making jokes, fanart, and headcanons, seem to be enjoying their new game.

Hades 2 fans on twitter are currently in a culture war because of one bait post from a known troll that compared Hades to an old anime unfavourably and are currently calling all anime fans coomers and pedophiles over it.

[odinsblog]

Anyone who doesn’t meet the European beauty standards represented by Sydney Sweeney isn’t “beautiful,” and if YOU identify as a woman but don’t look like this particular thin young blonde white woman, then you are not beautiful. That is the argument of transphobes who happen to be (surprise) disproportionately white and who are, more often than not, conservative + racist + classist + misogynistic.

Leave it to bigoted white conservatives to completely bastardize the original meaning of wokeness into meaning something negative that represents a threat to whiteness. But then again, racism and transphobia tend to hang out at the same parties.

Decades ago, white people hated disco music largely because it was a Black music genre that was welcoming to Black people and the LGBTQ community. Similarly, reduced down to its most basic essence, being “anti-woke” is yet another iteration of transphobia, homophobia and anti-Blackness.

[skeletonvintage]

These are the same people who keep saying that the voice actors don’t need to look like their characters.

Like is there any actual critiques about this show or are there a pandemic of people needing to go outside and socialize?

Also how desperate are you for views that you need a photoshop version of the actress’ breasts to get attention.

[mecha-gagagigo]

Culture war weirdos are having a normal one about a game they've never played.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Nathalie Baptiste at HuffPost:

Donald Trump promised over the course of his campaign to abolish the Department of Education. It’s been a pet policy goal of the right ever since the agency was created in 1980 under former President Jimmy Carter and is spelled out in Project 2025, the conservative playbook that Trump will probably use once he is back in the White House.

But Trump doesn’t need to shut down the department in order to launch an all-out war on public schools. He outlined his plan for education in a video last year, saying that not only will he close down the agency, he will bring back prayer in schools, end the supposed indoctrination of students and take politics out of schools. “We will ensure our classrooms are focused not on political indoctrination but on teaching the knowledge and skills needed to succeed,” Trump said, adding, “We will teach students to love their country, not to hate their country like they’re taught right now.” It’s the same agenda that right-wing culture warriors have been pushing in red states for the last four years — and Trump wants to spread it across the country. “This renewed push to go after the Department of Education isn’t so much a sincere push for smaller government or even reducing the federal role,” Jon Valant, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, told HuffPost. “It’s more about this continued attack on public education as a concept and eroding support for public schools in general.”

The Department of Education’s primary functions are providing funding for programs that serve low-income public schools and children with disabilities and protecting students from discrimination. If Trump were able to abolish it, it would spell disaster for the entire country. But public education has increasingly become politicized, and support for public schools, especially among Republicans, is now at an all-time low. The upcoming Trump administration will likely seize on that sentiment to further attack public schools through rolling back Biden-era rules designed to make them safe and equitable for all students, supporting the expansion of programs that take away funding from public schools and promoting laws that restrict books and censor teachers. “One of their first moves would be pulling back Title IX protections for LGBTQ+ students,” Valant said. Title IX is the federal regulation that protects students from sex-based discrimination. The Biden administration expanded it to include protections for students in the LGBTQ+ community. Republicans have fought against the change from the beginning, and several GOP-led states sued to block the rule. An overwhelming majority of transgender students have reported feeling unsafe or unwelcome at school. Then there’s the Office for Civil Rights. This arm of the Department of Education allows students, parents and families to sue their school districts over civil rights violations. Often, the department works with both sides to seek a resolution because it’s a low-risk way of settling civil rights violations. But Project 2025 proposes gutting the office and only allowing lawsuits to go through the courts, thus eliminating an avenue for addressing discrimination in our nation’s schools.

[...] Multiple states have already passed their own versions of parental rights bills, like in Iowa and Tennessee. These laws often ban books that conservatives believe are sexually explicit but usually target books with LGBTQ+ themes. Teachers are typically restricted in what they can say about gender identity and sexual orientation and are required to inform parents if their child wants to go by another name or pronouns at school — even against the student’s wishes.

The Orange Fascist’s war on public schools could have very costly consequences for the quality of education across America, and especially for LGBTQ+ students, staff, and faculty.