#Political Commentary

[catgirl-kaiju]

workplaces should have to legally provide unlimited paid sick leave available immediately upon hire. the limits that companies that even provide paid sick leave put on it is so fucked up. no one can control when they get sick, how often they get sick, or how long they are sick for, and they shouldn't have to suffer for the transgression of being ill.

"oh, but some people might take advantage of that and just stay home all the time and get paid for it!" if there is really a statistically relevant amount of people you have hired staying home on paid sick leave for months or years on end, perhaps your workplace sucks to be at, and you need to change.

give them reasons to come in to work. make it safer and easier to do their jobs. give them work that they can get invested in and talk to them about what that looks like. make sure you aren't overloading them with too much work or making unreasonable demands. pay them an amount that makes the work worth doing to them. actually form a working relationship with your employees instead of treating them like infinitely exploitable wage slaves.

only allowing your workers to accrew "2 hours a week of sick time starting after 6 weeks of employment" or some shit just doesn't match the reality of how sickness or human health works

[alwaysbewoke]

[phoenixyfriend]

I try not to make a lot of original posts on topics I don't actually have any expertise on, but I haven't seen a whole lot of posts going around that actually... explain what happened and why? Like, the actual order of events, the history, and so on. I want to reblog reference posts and explanations by people who actually know what they're talking about, but I haven't seen anything that hits the buttons I need to actually get a political situation... but I have seen some stuff on other platforms.

So here are some videos I've personally found useful in understanding Israel-Palestine, because that's the format I've found most useful in processing information of this nature:

Why Israel was Originally Attacked from RealLifeLore (explains the decades of political dynamics, internal demographic tensions, and power shifts leading up to the current conflict; notably the best I've seen at actually explaining what 'Israeli Occupation' actually means)

Israel-Hamas War: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) (commentary on the actual current situation in terms of who's getting attacked, why, and what the international ramifications so far are)

What's Happening in Israel and Why with Nathan Thrall from Adam Conover, series Factually (a discussion with an on-the-ground journalist about what life was like on the ground for Palestinian people in the areas under Israeli control during the last few years, just up to the attacks themselves)

I'm not going to claim these are comprehensive or completely unbiased (there are a few moments where I'm not entirely sure of the bias levels myself), but for people like myself who came into all this unsure of what the actual situation even is, I think these are a solid set to build up an basic understanding from which to put together opinions on future information.

I can't tell anyone what to think about how or why any of this is happening. I can only really tell you that what's going on right now is a crime on the level of attempted genocide, and that the years leading up to that have been an absolute mess on almost all fronts.

Again, I have no expertise on this subject. I just know what kind of video essay, political commentary, and interview style makes things understandable to me, personally, and might work for others. Please be courteous and kind in the comments and tags, as I am only sharing this because I haven't seen such a resource making the rounds yet, not actually trying to sway anyone in a particular direction beyond "the mass death needs to stop."

If you know of similar, relatively unbiased* resources, feel free to share.

* By 'relatively unbaised,' I don't mean taking or not taking a side; I just mean that it doesn't try to hide some information or other in favor of pushing a narrative, doesn't try to generalize a population, or doesn't seem to be trying to use emotional gut reactions to get readers or viewers to jump past reason or compassion.

[joshthewalkingtrainwreck]

the only difference between the weepy wendsday club and myself is that I've been fucked by the system longer than they have (D or R, both parties fuckin' 𝕝𝕠𝕒𝕥𝕙𝕖 the disabled), and now they're sad because there's a chance they might have to experience it themselves.

i am a reflection of what i deal with as shaped by the environment i occupy. people literally tried to argue that sometimes genocide is acceptable and that doing less than the bare fuckin basic minimum (e.g. 1% of the 43 million student loans forgiven) means we shouldn't criticize or talk bad about my betters otherwise trump will win.

trump still won, you dumb motherfuckers.

trump still won and none of these hateful pieces of shit will learn anything from it. losing to trump once can be a mistake, benefit of the doubt covers that. losing to him twice is a pattern of deliberate, willful decisions by those within the party that everybody else swears will defend democracy yet simultaneously are also too fragile to withstand criticism from someone who would have really liked for her to win. considering how fucking smug everybody had been about it before the election, even i thought harris had it in the bag. turns out that if i handled a fucking surgery the same way harris handled her campaign, i would still be in fuckin prison.

the same group of people who watched a genocide unfold and said nothing are now subject to the big sads. folks, nobody has any reason to be sad about something your candidates willfully chose to do.

if anything, y'all should be getting angry. get angry at the people responsible for this in your own goddamned party. or don't, because gosh we all know how much of a fuckin hassle it was actually giving a shit during the 1st trump admin.

i guess that's why a lot of harris voters are now talking about wishing more hurricanes on the south (even though black people will be the most likely to be hurt by it) or calling ICE on latinos for having the fucking gall to not vote correctly; makes sense to just go full-on masks-off.

that's why i'm just waiting for the other shoe to drop and all these sadsack assholes start switching over to full-blown fascism. i would fucking jizz my pants if i was proven wrong, believe you me, but a lifetime of experience and a neurodivergent hyperfocus on world history has told me a lot of people simply ain't got that shit in them.

so fuck em, i will cuss them out if to provide some modicum of consequence for the democratic party failing the people they allegedly care about because god knows a lot of these motherfuckers have been sheltered by their economic status.

[cleopatrachampagne]

can’t stand the argument “well what if your mother had aborted you” less for the fact that it’s a childishly reductionist attempt at an emotional gotcha and more for the fact that i love my mother and the idea of her being forced to keep an unwanted pregnancy breaks my heart even in a hypothetical. i love my mother — and plenty of other women in my life — therefore if she had felt the need to abort me then i would want her — and any other woman — to be given the dignity, option and safe access to do so. it’s a stupid “argument” but ultimately it reveals the true colors that this person hates (or at least has never actually loved any) women and doesn’t actually give a damn about the issue of abortion. i love my mom and i trust her judgment. i’m grateful for my life but i don’t want to be alive at the expense of someone i love suffering and being deprived of her humanity. my mom is much more than just the person who birthed me; she has her own mind, life, dreams and passions outside of being my mom and if your argument hinges on me reducing my mom to solely her capacity to give me life then you’re selfish, sexist and wasting both of our time. it’s really that simple.

[nastasya--filippovna]

💅 😎 ANYWAY 😎 💅

[theotherpacman]

look I think death note is a really poignant satire of the japanese justice system.

(im not japanese but i am american so. im not saying the japanese justice system is worse than my country's or anything)

japan has one of the lowest homicide rates in the world, and one of the reasons for that is because homicides aren't fucking reported as homicides. they're reported as heart attacks or suicides, because the japanese police just want to say that they have a low murder rate and a high solve rate for murder cases: on a personal level they want good numbers so they can get promoted, but on a societal level they want the police to remain the good guys in the eyes of the public. and that's light. "heart attacks" and "suicides" and "accidents" all actually murders, covered up to uphold the societal ideal of the law as the ultimate good.

in japan, 99% of people charged with crimes are convicted. innocent people falsely accused are put under enormous pressure to confess, at which point they often crack under the pressure and accept conviction. and that's L. he put a lot into the theory that light was the culprit even when he had nothing to go on and indeed evidence to the contrary, because he had no other suspects. and remember when he fucking had misa tortured ????? bound standing up with her eyes covered even when it couldn't have been clearer that they weren't going to get a confession out of her and it had been weeks? and he kept it up pretty much solely because he was too proud to admit that he had been wrong, or at least that this wasn't working.

in that way, light is the corrupt police force, and L is the corrupt judicial system. together they make the system of justice, but do either of them actually believe in that? they say they do, but light's "justice" is deference to the law, or rather, the status quo that the law represents; L's "justice" is having someone in prison, someone to blame, and the same perpetuation of the status quo. ideally they'd be able to keep each other in check - the police to arrest a corrupt judge, the court to convict a corrupt officer - but they're really exactly the same. light killed lind l. tailor, but L is the one who sent him to die.

it isn't 1:1 allegorical but it doesn't have to be. it's a thought-provoking and scathing criticism of what the japanese government calls justice. I think it's solid social commentary

[matcha-goblin]

People when a human rights issue doesn't affect them: Oh, I'm not really involved in politics haha

People when a human rights issue does affect them: This isn't about politics! It's about people's lives!!

[ohsalome]

Often in online conversations about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Ukrainians are not included in the conversation, and their perspective is not shared. This is not only true of main stream news, but alternative news outlets as well. This also includes conversations had in the streaming place, and streams broadcasted by Twitch's top political streamer, Hasan Piker. So I gathered 4 Ukrainians from all across Ukraine, with varying political beliefs, to respond to statements made by Twitch's top political pundit. - DylanBurnsTV

[velvet-vox]

Oropo; the ideology of power behind being god: Part 3

Doing an analysis on Oropo proved to be a messy, disorganised process, not all that different from the actual character's actions themselves.

Every time I have tried doing this, I ended up saying nothing worthwhile and mostly just rumbled for a bit without reaching any meaningful conclusion; but I feel like I've finally found something that's actually important and can help the discussions surrounding the character.

Buckle up cause it's time for me to introduce to you all a little something also known as:

The complex of Oedipus

Conceived in 1909 by the Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), the Complex of Oedipus is a section of the written paper "Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy" in which Freud outlined the fear of horses of a boy known as "Little Hans".

The psychoanalyst determined that the boy's terror was due to feelings of anger he had internalised. According to Freud, all small boys choose their mother as their primary object of desire. They subconsciously wish to usurp their father and become their mother's lover. These desires appear between the ages of 3 and 5, when a boy is in what Freud defines as the "phallic" stage of development.

This stage represents an important point in the formation of sexual identity. The analogous experience for girls is known as the Electra complex, in which girls feel a desire for their father and jealousy of their mother. The child, however, suspects that acting on these feelings would lead to danger, thus he/she represses his/her desires. This leads to anxiety.

In order to resolve the conflict, the boy then identifies with his father and the girl with her mother. It is at this point that a superego is formed; it becomes an internalisation of the parental figure that strives to suppress the ID's impulses and make the ego act upon these idealistic standards.

The ID, ego and superego are, as described by Freud, the three main parts of the human mind that develop our personality through their interactions.

The ID is the most primitive. Within the ID are all the inherited components of personality we are born with, including the sex instinct, the Eros and the instinct towards aggression. The ID operates entirely unconsciously; it does not change with time or experience, since it is not related to the external world.

The ego is the rational, pragmatic part of our personality. It's less primitive than the ID and is both conscious and unconscious; it represents what may be called reason and common sense. Freud used the word "ego" to mean a set of psychic functions such as judgment, tolerance, reality testing, control, planning, defense, synthesis of information, intellectual functioning and memory.

The superego is concerned with social rules and morals, and covers what many would refer to as "conscience". It develops around the age of 3-5 and it consists of two systems: the conscience and the ideal self. The conscience is a part that can punish the ego by making it feel guilty. The ideal self, on the other hand, creates an imaginary picture of how you ought to be, and deals with ambition and social behaviour, including how you treat others and how to be a useful member of society.

According to Freud, the ID, ego and superego, are in constant conflict so that adult personality and behaviour are directly from the results of these internal childhood struggles.

The parallels

So, now that we have established what the Complex of Oedipus is, it is time to see how it connects back to our deranged owl man and to the entire race of the Eliotropes.

At this point though, I have to make a brutal yet sad confession: I have not watched the fourth season of Wakfu nor the Oropo special with all of the new Eliotropes, so all I'm going to focus entirely on Oropo for this analysis and hope that somebody else who has watched season 4 can piece together what aspects of Freud research are present in which Eliotrope and how it all ties back to Yugo.

For now, we can see how the first four paragraphs of the document have unsettling similarities to the entire concept and actions of Oropo and the Eliotropes.

Now, we need to consider that Freud at the time probably didn't take bisexuality and other gender identities as things an individual was born with; because in the case of the Electra complex we need to remember that all female Eliotropes are canonically lesbians, as reiterated by @cocogum in this post , thus, the more modern (or at least the most Wakfu relevant) interpretation of the two complexes that we should consider is: "the child wish to usurp the parent whose at the recieving end of the kid's sexual attraction, and to overcome said urge, identifies with that parent". I could make a different case for bisexuality, but it's not relevant.

The important thing about these two complexes is explaining why Oropo feels so much attraction for Amalia to not be able to contain himself even with Lady Echo. The entire concept behind the Eliotropes is that they were incomplete parts of Yugo that came into existence by accident and couldn't survive nor have an identity of their own without Yugo.

For how much Oropo plays himself up as this secretive master planner, he's actually a mere sexually repressed clone-child that's unable to grow up due to the very nature of his existence.

Finally appreciating canon Oropo: the trilogy's finale.

I feel like, once I learned about the connection between Sigmund Freud and Oropo, I finally started to care a little bit about the guy and the entirety of the Eliotrope's race. Granted, this analysis does fix the many problems and qualms I have with the character; like, if his writing problems limited themselves to the season 3 finale then I could pass it off as just the sad, miserable conclusion of a doomed existence, but no. Unfortunately, Oropo has problems even in the manga and ova created solely to expand on his character, it's like Tot is completely unable to give his writing pet the necessary traits to make him an antagonist worthy of the Wakfu's standards, and instead just uses him for cool visuals and to fill in the untold parts of the lore.

He came up with a truly brilliant concept reminiscing the psychoanalysis of the 19th century, and couldn't find a way to explore said concept in a meaningful way because he had to turn it into a fight. Naturally, this isn't just a Wakfu problem, this is an anime and media problem at large, where we necessarily have to resolve conflicts into a battle because otherwise the audience could feel bored and disinterested in the final product.

This is a problem that carries over to the Avatar franchise, where the creators tried to have meaningful political commentary and couldn't find a meaningful way to have it that didn't involve a fight, because, if they don't turn it into a fight of good and evil, then the audience could feel scared at the prospect of such a challenging, morally compromising story.

To me, Oropo would have been a far more interesting character if he just wanted to overthrow the gods for their selfishness and wanted Yugo to approve his decisions because he was his creator and he loved him.

Could have made for a far more interesting story than just simply going back to the status quo and compromising it only through the inclusion of the Necromes, who pretty much just sought destruction and didn't really change the hierarchy in a meaningful manner.

<<<<Previous part

Nox analysis

Qilby analysis

[glenn-nielson]

[jadeseadragon]

"the grievance babies are just getting started.

the MAGAsphere has never been treated so unfairly!

imagine having everything — and being never satisfied.

imagine having your own hand picked Supreme Court declare that you are A Very Special Boy who can do all the criming you want, forever, without consequence.

imagine having all that — and at the same time, never ever shutting the fuck up about how no one has ever been treated so unfairly as you have.

imagine being born into obscene wealth, and being handed every opportunity on a silver platter. imagine being allowed to fail repeatedly, upwards and ever upwards, bailed out in turn by your father, the banks, and Russian mobsters, until finally, you fall ass-backwards into the United States presidency — not once, but twice.

welcome to the grievance-fueled world of being Dear Leader."

- Jeff Tiedrich

[sixpossumsinaclownsuit]

Remember kiddos, polygamy and polyamory was only demonized for four core reasons:

Tw: homophobia, sexism, religious commentary, political commentary, oppression

1.) America wanted more taxes

Part of the legal institutionalization of marriage is that there is tax benefits for the individual parties when they get married, and financial ties/power is attorney between married people. It becomes messy when these ties extend to multiple people/marriages and the I*RS wants they tax money, and America would rather just make an entire way of life illegal than make laws and systems that accommodate people. See point #4 for more on that

2.) Puritan culture (aka thinly veiled sexism)

Puritan culture relies heavily on systems of control that villainize sex and women (that's a whole other conversation but I won't digress), and lots of marriages/polygamous marriages having sex with each other is obviously bad bad bad!! Hard to control!! Save the defenseless women from their pimp husbands! Orgies, the devil's work! And...

3.) Homophobia

Good god, women being in marriages together! Married to a man, but what if these women end up by being married to each other by extension! And having sex with each other! And what if a woman marries more than one man! Would these men become inferior to their wives? Would one of these husbands be less dominant than another? Would the men function in these complex marriages like a woman?! Disgusting! That's gay (derogatory!) Would these husbands be having sex with each other? But that's gay and gay is bad! Sex is bad! God, purge these sinners of their Sodomy!

(Surprise surprise, homophobia has very little to do with actual gay people and has everything to do with puritan culture, control, sexism and the demonization of sex, and points two and three are actually the same thing)

4.) Christian nationalism

Polygamy and nonmonogamy is normalized and integrated with several non-Christian and alternative Christian cultures going back thousands of years, like Islam, Mormonism, feudal Japanese/samurai cultures, Hinduism, several Native American cultures, etc... even in the Bible in Judeo-Christian history and biblical era cultures nonmonogamy was normalized. Banning nonmonogamy in America is banning the right to engage in non-christian religious rite and practice. It's only something criminal to post-puritan Christians and those beliefs becoming law, regardless of other religious beliefs and practices also existing in America, is the unseparation of church and state.

So before you tell a polyamorous person "oh that's cheating with permission" or "I could NEVER do that," or "I love my partner too much to do that/cheat like that," remember that these are the institutions and the propaganda you're upholding with your judgement. Supporting/ being kind about polyamory is religious tolerance, and biting your thumb at the I*RS.

Tl:dr, the dissolution of separating of church and state, puritan culture and the sexism/homophobia associated with puritan culture is why nonmonogamy is demonized and why polygamy is illegal in America.

Tone indication/post intention: satirical and exaggerated tones criticizing longstanding institutions of oppression with the intent to explain why judging, hating or criticizing nonmonogamous practices is oppressive and a result of propaganda. This post is not intended to persuade people who practice monogamy to practice nonmonogamy instead or to demonize monogamy. It is intended to advocate for breaking the stigma around nonmonogamy.

[politics-fish]

I am so pissed

Project 2025 is going to be a real thing and I am so pissed. I can feel my blood BOILING and my ancestors are screaming for a revolt.

this is an injustice to the highest degree. Anyone with common sense: LEAVE this goddamned country. I don't care where we scatter to, just leave this place.

[weird-gay-fan-frog]

liberty girl and red scare by @atomiksaico (on insta) watching the presidential debate

either way vote Kamala!

[lovetanvir14]

Mother and baby during a period when nutrient requirements are significantly increased https://bit.ly/3wzAZFh