#also do NOT start with 'you're just mad because you still like XYZ and everyone knows you're a cringe baby haha

[inklingofadream]

I hate videos/posts/articles/etc about why people used to like [person] and now they don't. Because the headline or title is always phrased like there's some real juicy stuff in there, probably definitely a reason that YOU shouldn't like [person] anymore! They probably did something bad! And no. They didn't. When they do, the title is "how [person] destroyed their own career" or "[person's} [racism/homophobia/meanness/etc] problem." But it's not, and they didn't.

This is a story you've seen play out on at minimum an annual basis since you started being on the internet unsupervised. It's the exact same internet darling on a pedestal to extremely cringe fallen idol who maybe had An ill-advised remark/story element/lyric/haircut would not be too petty for this category/5 minute doodle/normal action that people aren't being normal about because [person] is [marginalized identity] so they have to be 8 times as perfect and they WEREN'T, gasp!/tweet. It's like the passive aggressive version of a callout post. At least a callout post tells me what it is up front and often has either a specific summary or section heading in a google doc so if i buy it at all i can skim past the "made a joke about feeding the cat anchovies, cats cannot have anchovies it's bad for them" caliber stuff. This stuff always positions itself like it's going to be a Serious Analytical Essay/Video, journalism even! we promise this time!

But the essay etc is pointless. Analyzing why one specific person is experiencing this is entirely useless and boring to me, and has been since, like, the second one i so much as skimmed. There is, hypothetically, an interesting essay or paper to be written about the broader repeating phenomenon since it follows the same pattern so closely every time, but again by that i do mean An essay, one, no more, possibly slightly less even. But that's not what keeps showing up in my feeds! It's carbon copy number 78 about the same thing!

[sizzlingpatrolfox]

You're right about speaking up thing. I remember that time when that bangtan bomb or whatever that is dropped from the day of BTS's at white house and im the video they used a word which is actually used by jm's korean antis so kpjms got mad and others explained that things to international pjms and then we started tagging them and trending. I was in jkkrs space more than pjms back then but i still used to follow some pjms and when we got to know all pjms and jkkrs i know we were tagging them asking them to correct the subtitles and hrs later they changed the subtitles and since that day i know that if something is wrong you gotta speak up. There's this account on twitter @/NoabsNolife something they're either a k-pjm or they do translation and all, i have been following them for yrs now and from that account i actually got to know about them using anti word in subtitle. I remember many armys saying it's not a big deal and trying to shut us down but we didn't listen and made them change the subtitles.

We have done that multiple times, the recent one was how they made jm look insecure in that BTS game and we made them change the subtitles and they even apologized for using those.

About the RIAA idk if it's because of the trucks or not cause kpjms sent those trucks just 15-20 days before ig and this RIAA certification thing takes atleast a month(idk how true that is but i read it on twitter during jk's RIAA). But i as a pjm do not at all feel emabrrased for the truck thing. Atleast we're asking for clarification and not why our fav is dating xyz so I'm not at all embarassed no matter what others say.

Embarrassing companies and putting them on the spot has always seemed to me like the most logical thing to do idk 😭

We literally got abortion rights in my country by protesting and demanding for it.. I'd say historically everyone has had to ask for their rights.

I know this kpop thing is not even close to being as important as human rights, but my point is... Whole laws get approved because people complain and protest. It does make a difference.

Of course, yeah, nobody really knows if it was because of the trucks or not. I think most people (me included) are just connecting the two events because they happened in more or less around the same days; another song getting the certification (which meant that the company was asking for those only for one member), and the trucks. Because the truth is that we've also asked for other stuff and they didn't comply with that, so. Maybe it was because of the trucks, maybe not.

They definitely didn't do it before getting Jungkook's, and we know why. That in itself is problematic, even if it happened now; it should've happened earlier. As someone pointed out a while ago, Jimin gets his song on Spotify #1 and the versions get split. Another member is given MORE versions added together so he can get that #1.

It's not embarrassing, especially considering that there really aren't many ways for the fandom to get in touch with the company. Mailing doesn't work. Tagging didn't work. Trending hashtags didn't work. Stuff that has worked when it came to a different member's release, mind you. So what other choice was there?

I'm honestly so tired of having to constantly be in this "don't look a gift horse in the mouth" mindset when it comes to Jimin and the company because none of what they did for him should ever be considered a gift. If anything, he's gifted the company more than they've given him; they're just paying him for his job with the same money he's earning them. They should be giving him unbridled support and should be doing all the paperwork in proper time and work just like they're capable of doing for other people.

[thedreadvampy]

I had a conversation on Friday night that's really got me mad about some stuff but I have tried to gently bring this kind of thing up directly and it never goes well but I am gonna vent it here for when I start feeling like I'm going insane/being a bitch.

this is anarchist infighting babes xoxoxo

Why are people who grew up rich Like That?

Now I to some degree include myself in the category of People Who Grew Up Rich. I had some shit in my youth but one struggle I never had was being a child in a financially precarious home. I never worried about going hungry. I never was at any risk of homelessness. Have I been homeless, hungry and otherwise precarious since then? Yes, but I have a baseline of knowing what security feels like, and I have a network of people who do have money to fall back on. And I have the confidence and education and class-specific social knowledge that comes with that so even if I'm poor I'm still middle class socially.

Both based on observation and statistics, I think it's pretty clear that economic precarity in childhood is one of the most potent single things that impact your lifelong wellbeing. Being precarious as an adult is traumatic and miserable and awful but it isn't the same as having precarity as your baseline state.

However there's a certain ahhhhhh subset of Anarchists From Upper Middle Class Backgrounds who might recognise that intellectually but who act. As if being from a wealthy background is irrelevant to their current life. And it's not.

Like ok this is where I get bitchy. But moving in anarchist and activity circles see how there's often people who seem to be counting up traumas and operations they face specifically as a reason why you should listen to them? and they often seem to count "childhood trauma" and "childhood trauma and precarity" as the same single point? like "oh you had a bad childhood I had a bad childhood we've both been there."

but no! no we haven't both been there! they're not the same experience! childhood poverty is its own enormous and far-reaching trauma, and it not only doesn't lessen the impact of traumas that can happen to anyone (eg CSA, DV, parental addiction, loss of a loved one), it lessens the space people have to deal with those traumas, both emotionally and practically.

And that's not to say If You're Middle Class You Have No Problems because obviously you do. like. I didn't deal with financial precarity in my childhood and adolescence but I did deal with a lot of instability, violence and abuse throughout. and that's significant and worth giving space to. but like many of my friends were dealing with similar stuff at a similar age AND with the far-reaching trauma of poverty (and other systemic traumas like racism and xenophobia)

and like it's not productive or helpful imo to start the Who Suffered Most competition interpersonally. trauma-as-currency is a plague.

buuuut. with the types of person I'm thinking about THEY'LL be the ones implicitly or explicitly bringing it up, either in a "you have to be nice to me bc I've experienced XYZ" way or, even more obnoxiously, an "I own and know the most about X bc I experienced XYZ". Like this sense of ownership and this idea that your experience of X is everyone's experience of X seems to me to most often come from usually white but always upper middle class activists, who are maybe poor now but were very financially stable growing up.

It gives you. A certain confidence. Growing up rich or well-off. And that can be really useful - definitely sometimes the people most able to just bulldoze through beaurocracy and Get It Done in confronting authority are these folks bc a gift and a curse of being raised in classes higher up the ladder is a lessened fear of authority, an assumption of your own rights and knowledge, and a certain self-assurance. even if you're also a neurotic mess personally, idk how to describe it but I'm positive you've seen it - an upper class upbringing brings with it a type of confidence that's almost entirely separate from who you are as a person, it's like an aura, it's baked into you like your accent. it's a specific texture of entitlement and self-assurance and it can be REALLY USEFUL but it can also be. really really really damaging.

When you grow up rich, however bad shit is at home or in your life, you are taught to understand certain things as your right - you expect to be worth listening to (at least by anyone not more powerful than you), you expect to know what you're talking about, and you expect your life to be valued by others (if not by everyone or by yourself, but by strangers).

You can shake it consciously, and it can be knocked around and come into conflict with other trauma, but it sticks with you when you're born into power - when you're raised rich (or white, or a man, or not overtly disabled). It follows you through poverty and trauma - it's baked in early on. and that's not in and of itself a bad thing, it's just a Thing - class affects your behaviour and self-image, like most systemic social constructs. And again it doesn't mean your struggles are less real - your trauma is still traumatic, your anxiety and self-esteem are still fucked up - but it does affect power dynamics.

People who are raised rich are more sure of ourselves, and almost always more immediately able to assert ourselves, our ideas and our wants than we would be if we had grown up poor. And we kind of need to be aware of that because otherwise what happens a lot of the time is a domination of space, and a dismissal of other people's knowledge and experiences because they're less assertive about them than us.

and I'm so fucking sick of it because what it super often looks like is a combination of people going "I have to get what I want because praxis because radical self-care because I'm saaaaaad. You can't tell me no or tell me off because I'm struggling" and going "We have to do what I want because I'm right. Because I have the most knowledge and experience of this thing and I know you've experienced it too but you're wrong about what you experienced."

like (and here's where I've got SURE gone bitchy) there's this really common Type of anarchist who's super involved and super activisty and also their trauma is always the biggest trauma. their ideas are always the only ideas. anything they did that hurt others was justified by their mental illness or stress or lack of knowledge and anything others did that hurt them was twice as bad because of the fact they're So Marginalised. they need people to go easy out of their comfort zone to help them because things are So Hard but they can't offer help that's inconvenient to them because things are So Hard. They're in charge of every protest and they decide who's allowed to protest because they're allowed to Protect Their Boundaries. When someone crosses their unspoken boundaries it is unforgivable but when they repeatedly willfully ignore other people's boundaries it's because they weren't clearly stated enough.

and the thing I'm saying is. the thing I have noticed about this specific type of Anarchist Guy. is in my experience they're literally always from a wealthy background. they may be utterly fucked for cash and homeless now, and that's a real experience they have every right to be scared and vulnerable about and speak to, but they have always had a childhood and adolescence where money wasn't a concern.

poverty is always a traumatic and marginalising experience. but you don't forget the assurance and entitlement you learn if you're raised rich. becoming poor isn't the same as being raised poor. the default assumptions of what's possible and your own importance are different.

and a) I think we need to be really mindful and self-aware about the types of confidence and self-assurance that we might have got from childhood and adolescent privilege, even if we don't have it now. and also b) I fucking hate when people are That Guy and I have like 6 That Guys in my social circle right now and it drives me insane bc it's utterly impossible to get through to them about it bc ppl end up in such denial of the ways being financially stable as a child produces privilege over those who don't.

like I am thinking of a friend (private school, Oxbridge, academia, family own their home, clearly bad but financially well off childhood) who explicitly and repeatedly believes themselves to have meaningfully the same background (or maybe Worse Trauma) as people who were financially supporting their families from 14, people who spent their childhoods seriously housing insecure and spreading food out across the month, and people who grew up in social housing with a disabled single parent. IT'S NOT THE SAME.

I know it's not the same, and while we're both posh I'm WAY less posh than this friend, but that matters a LOT less than that I'm way MORE posh than any of the other people I mentioned and that does affect things! I don't have the experience of precarity! My mum was a very frugal and money-conscious parent but we had the money, even if we weren't spending it, in a crisis it was there! We were never going to become homeless as a family. We were never going to starve. If things were unsurvivable as they were - ceiling falls in, black mould, boiler broken - we could fix it! Our experiences of childhood instability, mine and this friend's, are of relational emotional and physical lack of safety - people around us cause us harm or can't be trusted or need looking after. But the other friends have that plus the emotional, physical and existential lack of safety that is poverty. That's not the same! It's not at all the same background!

and sometimes it's like. the flipside to class reductionism is class erasure. They think we're from the same background as the people who grew up poor bc we're white, we're queer, we're neurodivergent, we're trauma survivors, we're afab, we're whatever else. but stuff like poverty, lack of educational opportunity, social exclusion on the basis of class - those things just don't register. They're unknown knowns - they're the stuff that we take for granted, we tend to assume everyone who's like us in terms of race, gender and ability was basically financially stable in childhood, finished school and went to university, is treated as we're treated by police and authorities, etc.

Writ large, what this looks like is politicians claiming that £82k a year is basically poverty and genuinely making policy on the belief that when people say they're poor it means "can't afford to do everything I want" not "can't afford to live"

But writ small, what this means is that often the loudest voices leading communities of people who've Been Through It - the people who get their way - are people who think that their experience as raised-rich is exactly the same as the experience of the raised-poor. At worst we get Common People cosplayers who you never find out actually have a trust fund and an allowance but even before that. like.

Anarchist spaces, both organising and social spaces, are full of people who are legit struggling, who say at the good words and think all the good things, but who are fundamentally so entirely blind to the power that a middle class upbringing (particularly but not exclusively a white middle class upbringing) has given them that they just plough right through other people bc they assume they're on an even keel. The assumptions we make about people's confidence and assertion based on what's normal for us often takes a really familiar shape where one person's needs consistently take precedence over anyone else's.

and like. All of us deserve to have our needs met. Your needs aren't less important because you're middle class, or white, or straight, or cis, or male, or whatever else. The problem is when it's always one person's needs and never the people around them.

when somebody who's used to having a safety net falls down, people who are used to having to buckle down and do the impossible bc nobody else will pick them up, will pick them up. when somebody else falls down, people who are used to having a safety net see that picking them up is impossible and don't because they haven't got the experience of Having To Do The Impossible. when somebody who's comfortable asserting their needs assumes that all needs are vocally asserted, people who are used to subsuming their needs, not talking about them and dealing with them solo do not get their needs met. and when this carries on consistently across multiple relationships and multiple years, we got a problem.

And specifically part of the problem I think in anarchist circles is that born-wealthy anarchists are a lot more likely to be heavily socialising with born-poor friends, whereas if you buy into the class system you are likely to mostly hang out with other people who ARE actually from a similar economic background and so ARE likely to assert themselves in the same way you assert yourself.

This is why it's so important to not leave abolitionist relationships with power structures at rejecting or refusing them. As much as we should abolish class, racial, gender etc hierarchies, we have to engage with the world as it is. We can't just divest ourselves of hierarchies by wanting to - we have to actually engage and keep engaging with the ways that hierarchy continues to exist inside us. However poor I am, I still was raised middle class. However antiracist I am, I am still white. However aware of gender I am, I am still cis. That's going to affect the relationships I have with people who have different experiences.

but too many middle class anarchists imk talk a big game about class solidarity but ultimately consider themselves working class by choice. but you can't choose how you're raised. and ignoring the privilege of financial stability in childhood leaves you with enormous blind spots on how you treat others and how you recreate those power dynamics.

doesn't mean middle class people can't or shouldn't be anarchists. lots of us are. but for the love of fuck we need to make sure we're aware of the huge and lasting impact that different childhood economic experiences have on who we are as adults. even if we're down and out now, socially we remain middle class. and that gives us power beyond how we're seen - it's a power in how we act and how comfortable we are asserting ourselves over others.

and I'm so fucking sick of seeing it tbh. and I'm so sick of how shitty it makes a lot of friend group dynamics where a few culturally middle class people dominate every decision and take precedence in every discussion of need.

[doubleddenden]

What your favorite pokemon opening says about you

The first: you're nostalgic for simpler times and days and are a sucker for singing in groups. Bonus: if you still jam out to the movie remix, you are probably the coolest among your friend group.

Pokemon World: refined tastes. Underrated, really captures the 90's aesthetic, you SCREAMED when Charizard finally became friends with Ash and 2000 is probably your favorite movie. The movie remix was your jam as a kid and sometimes you can slip it in for a night with the friends.

Johto: you like bops. You do the "do do do do do dooo" thing alongside the singers and ain't ashamed. The movie version is such a relaxed, feel good version that you feel like a kid again and melt off about 15 years of stress off of you. Everyone loves this one, even if they didn't hear of it.

Johto League Challenges: YOU. I like you. You have a lot of good taste. You get goose bumps at the initial guitar riff and basically know the song by heart. This would be your theme song if pokemon championships were like wrestling irl. The movie version, OH THE MOVIE VERSION.

Master Quest: there wasn't an official movie remix but that's okay considering THIS IS QUALITY. You're probably super into the games and probably REALLY love guitar solos.

Advanced: You were robbed of a full version but by God do you know that one minute of awesome by heart. You like new things! You love fresh starts!

Advanced battle: Destiny Deoxys is your favorite movie and nobody can change that. You sing this song in the shower when you remember it and probably REALLY like Grovyle.

Advanced Battle: listen, there was something really special about this era in terms of music and this one was really good. You jam out to the full version whenever it comes on in Lucario and the Mystery of New. Unironically, you thought Lucario was Mewthree or a legendary before they revealed its name.

Battle Frontier: you really know these lyrics very well and Phanpy or Aipom are probably your favs. You're still miffed Pidgeot and Butterfree didn't make guest appearances.

Diamond and Pearl: you're a rare guy my amigo. You really love drums and more hardcore rock. Turtwig is your favorite starter.

The second and third DP op's: lumping these together because you love going on musical journeys, don't you? They cranked it from a soft 6 to a real 12 with these, didn't they? The Darkrai movie is your fav and you would punch Paul for mistreating Chimchar

Sinnoh League Victors: you are such a sucker for underdog stories and CRIED LIKE A BITCH when Infernape and Ash beat Paul and Electivire. You SCREAMED when the only thing to make him lose the league was a guy with a Darkrai and Latios and you're still bitter. You also like drums.

All the BW openings: listen, we are all so mad that the anime wasn't nearly as good as the games. You dig these songs because they honestly sound really good? You're very afraid of country music.

X and Y 1: your previous fav was the first. You unironically jam out super duper hard to this. You liked the reboot movie too.

The others besides the last: you ship Ash and Serena, eh? It's cool dude. You also really like Clemont and a good adventure. (To be honest I don't remember these). You also unironically love Alan and wish we got more mega episodes with him.

XYZ: WE WERE ROBBED! No pokemon Z, Greninja lost to Charizard, GOD DAMN MAN! You unironically screamed and thought just this once the boy might win. The had goose bumps for every fight. You sincerely thought we'd be going Digimon Frontier in gen 7. You also really dig the hype af music, it really makes you feel good. You really like We Will Rock You by Queen.

Alola 1: haven't watched the series much but I've heard these: you really like musical numbers, dontcha? You love goofy stuff and spastic characters, and really like Sun and Moon's anime.

Alola 2: you love Destiny's child and miss music from the 2000's. You're chilled tf out amigo.

Alola 3: you love tropical aesthetics and really want to go to Hawaii. The Lion King is probably your favorite Disney movie