#billionnaire transphobes

[laziestgirlintown]

Are Mullenweg, Rowling, and Musk in a dare war 🔫

[lilyliveredlittlerichboy]

This post has been making the rounds on jumblr and I've had a few different reactions so I just wanna weigh into some things here.

First up:

Jews I love you and I'm so glad that this little thoughtramble I wrote a month ago resonated with so many of you. I hope it helps with educating some people on just how widespread and insidious antisemitism is.

Secondly: I'm a gentile so I'm by no means an authority on these things. But a couple fellow gentiles in the notes are saying stuff along the lines of, "but can't we criticise billionnaires?"

To which I say, watch where you step, cus you're on thin ice. I've learned a litte the past few years and here's my conclusions:

Of course a lot of stuff a lot of billionnaires do is reprehensible. On the left we should absolutely be criticising them! The best way to do this while avoiding antisemitism is to be specific about who you're criticising, and what for.

E.g. "The people running Exxon, Shell and BP have been sweeping climate change under the rug for decades while actively contributing it, they think their profits are more important than sustaining life on earth and that's abhorrent. We need better laws and processes to stop them from poisoning the planet."

E.g. "Elon Musk is a ridiculous manchild who's ruining Twitter and endangering people with his self driving cars and stupid ideas. He's an entitled dickhead and his wealth is mostly derived from colonial exploitation that his parents did. He does not pay enough taxes on what he earns. We need better inheritance laws and to close tax loopholes that allow him and people like him to hoard wealth."

E.g. "Jeff Bezos exploits his workers and has an unfair monopoly over online shopping and other convenience services. He needs to pay his taxes and pay his workers more and we need better monopoly laws to stop businesses from being able to control the market like this."

Also, please consider your motives:

Are you trying to make a positive difference for, e.g. Amazon workers? Go ahead, raise awareness of their plight and push for unionisation.

Are you just trying to find a group that is acceptable to hate? Stop right there and reconsider. No matter how privileged or powerful that supposed group, you're wayyyyyy too close to bigoted talking points.

Are you just making sweeping statements in order to rile up emotions and get people on your side? That's fascist tactics. Please don't.

And especially,

If you find yourself wanting to say, "I'm not antisemitic, but--" Please just don't say whatever you were going to say. If you have to make that qualification, there is an extremely high probability that what you're about to say is, in fact, very antisemitic. Compare to "I'm not racist but-" or "I'm not transphobic but-" followed by the most vile bigotry you've ever heard. Don't be that person.

Lastly I want to highlight these as well:

Absolutely correct. The amount of times I've come across online bigots who are like "George Soros is funding BLM!" or "LGBTs are elites trying to plunge this country into immorality!" This is all antisemitism. In general just be wary of anyone wanting to blame "elites" or "rich people" (yeah even that one cus historically Jews are stereotyped to have money!!! and also not all rich ppl are inherently evil!!!!) or "shadow government" or "globalists" or "lizard people" or really, literally anything that seems to imply that a small, select group of people is secretly running the world: That's antisemitism baby. It's all antisemitism. It's disgustingly common.

By all means, criticise billionnaires. But be specific. It's one of the best ways to make sure it's not veering into antisemitism. We know who these billionnaires are, for the most part; we know their names and we know their crimes. Talk about them specifically.

It doesn't help if you just swap out "elites" with "billionnaires" or "the 1%" if the rest of your rhetoric remains the same. It sounds exactly the same to antisemites, and they will feel empowered. In truth, it is much more complicated than "billionnaires are running the world and fucking us all over"; some billionnaires are using their fortune for good, and they don't directly cause our problems - they may exploit a system that was set up long before they were born, sure, but your problems are also caused by Sue from accounting and your neighbour ratting you out to the authorities and that kid across the road yelling slurs at you. Your problems exist because society lets them exist, and that includes everyone. The system makes it hard to fight this, and sure, most billionnaires don't help the issue. But again if you're just looking for someone to hate on, it's very likely you're actually reinforcing oppression rather than "punching up".

Sweeping statements are dangerous and a lot of your talking points have been used to justify genocide in the past. Just cus the world's been a lil less overt about its antisemitism post-Holocaust, does not mean antisemitism has disappeared, far from it. And it's being revived at an alarming rate just now so please, Gentiles, pay attention to what the dogwhistles look like and don't reinforce harmful stereotypes.

Thank you.

PS: A few blogs that have helped me unlearn and unpack antisemitism are @spacelazarwolf, @hadeantaiga and @gehe-lihiyot-androgynos-varda with a special shout out to @softness-and-shattering for being very patient with me rambling about jewish/antisemitism related stuff in dms. Youre all soooo great n I appreciate you soooo much <3

There's also lots of Jewish ppl in the notes of this post, I'm sure a lot of them have lovely blogs to follow.

There's some reading recs in the notes as well:

Jews Don't Count by David Baddiel,

People Love Dead Jews by Dara Horn,

The Holocaust: A New History by Laurence Rees

I haven't read these books myself, I've read a preview of Jews Don't Count and it's on my list of books to order when I have more money, but basically, go look at what actual Jewish folks have written on the subject, I'm just a random Gentile who doesn't like bigotry so don't take it just from me.

me a few years ago: its so weird how right wingers always wanna blame the "elite" given that alot of them are in the global 1% of wealth and therefore almost by definition the same "elite" they claim to hate. weird right? lol right wing logic makes no sense

me now: oh my god they mean Jewish people. its always been Jewish people. and the insistence of online leftists to use words like "elite" and "cabal" (to refer to a handful of ultra rich people who dictate a lot of how our lives are run) kinda makes them sound like antisemites too. maybe this whole idea that the world is run by a select few is a gross oversimplification which only serves to reinforce antisemitic stereotypes... oh no. maybe i have a lot of shit to unlearn. maybe i need to start vocally defending Jewish ppl. also local community building is the only way out of this

[alarajrogers]

OK, among other things I think people are confusing "classic" SF/F with modern SF/F?

Stuff written in or before the 1970's is classic. Anything you can pick off the shelves today is almost certainly not classic, with the exception of Dune having had a reprint revival because of the movie.

It is true that a lot of the best SF/F authors today are women, especially women of color like NK Jemisin and Nnedi Okonafor and so on. Also nonbinary people like Xiran Jay Zhao and JY Yang.

It is also true that there were classic greats who were women, or men of color like Samuel Delany.

It is also true that men who currently write SF/F are not necessarily, or even often, misogynistic or homophobic. Neil Gaiman is one of the modern greats, and he is very much not misogynistic or homo/transphobic. (You may have heard otherwise because he has said that the queer angel and demon who are in love in Good Omens are not gay. This is because he believes they have no gender and that "gay" is a term that requires gender to exist, not because he has a problem with gay. He does state that they are queer, and in love.) John Scalzi and Charles Stross are two writers I find every impressive who are male, not misogynistic and not homophobic. As a woman myself, I find their female characters to be as interesting and complicated as their male ones. Jason Pargin (aka "David Wong" from Cracked.com) is not a misogynist, and in fact the main villains of his most recent novel, "Zoey Punches The Future In The Dick", are incels and billionnaire misogynists who weaponize incels. TJ Klune writes very sweet cozy gay romances between middle-aged men where the female characters are very good and have as much agency as the men. Max Gladstone -- everything he writes has good female characters, and most of them have gay or trans (or gay trans) characters too. Tim Pratt's female characters are awesome. (Particularly Marla Mason. God I love Marla Mason.)

And it is also true that there are men who wrote classic science fiction who didn't understand women and wrote at a time when women were treated as second class citizens, who nonetheless wrote women with complexity and compassion, like Cordwainer Smith. Theodore Sturgeon was described as "being more careful with writing women" than others of his time period. Asimov plainly did not understand women, but he had one as a main character, Susan Calvin, who I as an autistic woman identified pretty strongly with. Pretty sure there are others, but I read them all as a kid or in my 20's, so I'm not sure how many would still ping me as "this writer thinks women are equal human beings even if he was socialized not to."

classic scifi novels by men r always like. page 1 here's a cool scifi idea i had. page 2 i hate women so much it's unreal