#everyone's a little bit racist

[lonelylittledot]

so yesterday I told my brother about the 2019 JCS

me: Jesus is played by John Legend

him: huh, so they have a black Jesus? interesting, though it's hard for me to imagine Jesus being non-white...

me: ...

this exchange fully reminded me of this one:

[bobbyfiend]

OP said a thing, and some commenters added their own thing which was not what OP said. OP very kindly suggested this was an issue of reading comprehension.

It probably is, don't get me wrong; it's also potentially an issue of stereotypes. When our brains are not firing at tip-top, fully-engaged, super-conscious, definitely-present 100% maximum, the stereotypes and biases come out to play. That's what they're for. They're to give us some ability to function when we're on autopilot or overwhelmed or anything else that steals a few brain cycles per second.

So yes, the commenters suggesting that bi/pan wasn't what OP was talking about where probably having too-fast reading comprehension issues. And, for some of them, at least, that probably allowed a teeny bit of bisexual erasure to squirt out.

This doesn't mean any commenters are consciously or actively or willingly anti-bi/anti-pan.

As Patricia Devine demonstrated in the 90s with some fairly inspired research, if you grow up in a bigoted society, your brain crunches the numbers without you knowing and gives you stereotypes. Those are just... there. They're how your brain has organized information. They're not under your voluntary control. They're going to come out sometimes. It's not your fault.

The only thing you have control over is what you have control over.

all goofing aside I genuinely don't understand the urge to reimagine Taylor Allison Swift as a secretly queer icon when the pop music scene(TM) is like. literally overflowing with women who actually like women. Gaga and Kesha and Miley and Halsey are right there. Rina Sawayama and Hayley Kiyoko and Rebecca Black and Kehlani and Victoria Monét and Miya Folick if you're willing to get slightly less top 100. Janelle and Demi for them nonbinary takes on liking girls. like what are we doing here. like I'm not even saying you can't enjoy Taylor but why would you hang all your little gay hopes on her.

[lord-squiggletits]

Reread/skimmed my oldest Pharma apologism posts (mainly the ones about Pharma not being a functionist) and it just occurred to me that possibly another reason the fandom saddled Pharma with the "functionist bigot" label is because his introduction by First Aid says that everyone hates Decepticons, but Pharma really really hates Decepticons. Mix that with the portion of the fanbase that lionizes and whitewashes the Decepticons, and I can easily see it entering common fanon that "Pharma hates Decepticons -> the Decepticons are freedom fighters wrongly maligned by the Autobots/the franchise -> Pharma must be a bigoted functionist since he hates Decepticons who represent freedom."

The simpler explanation is just that Pharma is an antagonist and therefore gets the "everything about him must be evil and wrong" black-and-white analysis so common in fandoms in general, but given some of the bizarre Decepticon takes I've seen I can also easily see Pharma's Decepticon hatred being taken as a sign of him being bigoted and evil.

Though AGAIN in this case it would still be singling Pharma out as a bigot for crimes/flaws that multiple other Autobots are guilty of like.

Oh, Pharma hates Decepticons? Well a lot of other Autobots hate Decepticons too, First Aid's narration about Pharma even says "we all hate Decepticons"; for that matter, there are a lot of Decepticons who hate Autobots. It's a massive civil war that's lasted for a lifetime causing two groups of people to be stuck in a near-permanent blood feud, you can't assume that every Autobot who hates Decepticons (and vice versa) hates them because they're a bigot. Maybe there's been a war where both sides have been building an ever-increasing mountain of reasons to hate each other, so hating the opposite faction is a social problem caused by war and politics rather than a sign of individual moral failing.

Pharma worked at the New Institute so that means he must be evil/bigoted? Chromedome and Brainstorm also worked at the New Institute, but there's no widespread fandom shunning of them or headcanoning them as bigots.

Hell, even the very premise of assuming Pharma is a functionist bigot for hating Decepticons is ignoring the very premise of Pharma's motives, which are, uh... being blackmailed by the leader of the Decepticon Justice Division, who represents the ultimate form of Decepticon ideals to the point of literally wearing their symbol as his mask? So how were we jumping straight to "oh Pharma hates Decepticons bc he's a posh bigoted functionist" when there was a far more immediate interpretation/headcanon of "Pharma hates Decepticons because he's being tortured and blackmailed by one."

That's not to say that Pharma couldn't have hated Decepticons before Delphi, and I think you could make interesting headcanons/extrapolations based on either idea. But still. It kinda feels like people saw Pharma and just wanted to make him the Token Evil Autobot who's the opposite of our Good Heroic Autobots regardless of whether evidence from canon supported it or not.

Good riddance to bigoted functionist Pharma fanon, I'm so glad that the majority of Pharma fanon these days actually gives him a chance and puts him on equal footing as other Autobots.

[itwoodbeprefect]

obsessively rewatching mash season 2 episode 2 "george" and starsky & hutch season 3 episode 6 "death in a different place" back to back because i'm an intellectual. and also queer

[toytulini]

splat fans be normal about japanese players challenge

[thekimspoblog]

OH THE IRONY!!!

Season 1 came out in 2018; even then, I feel like they should have known better.

[mx-paint]

Idk man maybe if you're only defense as to why something isn't racist is "some people that aren't part of the minority group that it's being racist towards are racist towards me so it means it's okay" maybe. you aren't the correct person to answer the question that is being asked

[slut-lord]

sorry to add this as a reblog it's too long for a reply

as an autistic japanese american: i think the issue is more complicated than "laios is just racist" or "shuro is just ableist" we're dealing with two autistic men who are from completely different cultures. laios felt like shuro was unfair because he culturally expects bluntness-- from what we see of his upbringing and history, people have always been very blunt and forthcoming with how they feel about laios, so he misinterprets politeness as friendship, because he assumes that if shuro disliked him he would just bluntly say so.

but shuro is japanese, and not even from a modern setting. he has a noble upbringing. for him, politeness is kind of a baseline, and culturally he's accustomed to people taking his quiet avoidance as a sign to fuck-off. and because the kind of boundaries that would be clear and recognisable to laios are things that would be unthinkably rude to him culturally (and he makes it clear he knew laios wasn't trying to be malicious, so he likely felt crossing that line was an overreaction), shuro probably made the conscious choice to just endure it for the sake of the party (maizuro even mentions he has difficulty making "selfish requests", so he may have felt that pushing the issue would've been "selfish", particularly considering how falin might feel about the conflict). i also feel shuro is likely also autistic, but because he masks and laios doesn't, he may feel frustrated at the feeling laios isn't making the same "effort" he is (not an uncommon interpersonal conflict between autistic adults).

they both kind of acted like dicks, but they were also both acting "in the right" according to their own cultural contexts, and the problem here wasn't that either of them was a menace to the other so much as that both of them have severe issues communicating, and their individual needs + cultural contexts ended up clashing. i think that's why they end up friends by the end of the series-- because they talked (and punched) it out, and gained an understanding of each other. i think post canon shuro would probably be a lot more forthcoming with laios, particularly given the conversation he has with fallin where he resolves to be "a more active participant in his own life". laios knows he's awkward, he's visibly mortified to find out he'd been on shuro's nerves the entire time, and he shows that he's willing to work at that. shuro acknowledges that he has a problem with passivity and avoidance, and he resolves to work on that.

both of them are just regular flawed dudes and i don't think any of them need to be excused or vilified. the story is frankly better for showing these two exactly as it did. because in real life these interpersonal conflicts are never a black and white AITA post.

The way some White Autistic People talk about Laios makes me very uncomfortable, especially in relation to Shuro. The way they jump to defend Laios’s microaggressions towards Shuro makes me think they are trying to excuse themselves of the weird shit they’ve done/said to people of color in their own lives.

yeah i've talked about this a bit but people are SHOCKINGLY unsympathetic to Shuro when if you actually read the manga you see he's basically literally Just A Guy and his biggest crimes are "falling in love with a woman who doesn't feel the same way" and "daring to get kind of bitchy upon learning (while running on several days of no sleep and food) that the woman he fell in love with was transmogrified into a sin against god"

[camelliassinensis]

I love the way challengers is structured and told so the audience can interpret as much or as little as they desire and that each rewatch can give a viewer a new experience. however this means so many people have categorically wrong takes and it makes me want to Murder stab kill attack murder murder kill whenever I peruse the tags

[6qubed]

these motherfuckers have gone from complaining about heteronormativity in media to proudly declaring with their whole chest that There Is Only One Correct Way To Be Horny without the faintest shred of self-awareness

also they're racist

this was the best take about anything revolved around BG3 and it got SOME attention but ultimately was shuffled past and everyone moved on

[lizardsfromspace]

Okay this was left by @yourknightinshiningplastic on my megapolismancy post & I don't want to detract from a serious reply by tacking it onto a bit so

But yeah, you're right. It goes mostly unnoticed bc, well, small towns but small town cops are worse than city cops. In large part because they have so little to do, but need to justify their budget, but there's another factor too

Bc while it often feels like city governments are a police force with a government tacked on, in many small towns, this is literal, and the town is essentially run by cops who constantly fine and harass the citizens to prop up their budget. Like everyone knows about "speed trap" towns, where cops always lie in wait to catch passing speeders, but this is worse

There's an Alabama town with a population of a little over 1,000 that suddenly went from having a single cop to a whole department, who wanted to turn the town's community center into a jail, who spent lavishly on military vehicles in a town that had one robbery and no murders, and who would only let inmates go if they converted to Christianity. In this case many of the cops resigned & the force downscaled, but it's not alone. There's a town in Texas with 250 residents and 50 cops. There's a town in Mississippi where the white cops harassed black residents with impunity. The amazing part is, none of these are even the town I was Googling, there's just so many cases (most famously Ferguson, MO runs like this)

Basically it's the same militarization city police departments have undergone...but in an environment with no one to oppose them: no media scrutiny, no advocacy groups, and little government. In large swathes of America, the collapse of the government and the rise of fascism isn't a hypothetical, it's daily reality. They live in towns with relatively little crime but a vastly outsized police department that "finds" enough crime to keep up their massive budgets in fines; towns that either never had any benefits to their citizens, or are shuttering them to replace with policing (like that town that wanted to close the community center and make it a jail); towns that have no real services to their citizens, but have many ways to punish them, and where the city's police are both the only visible government workers & actively, openly hostile to their town, seeing them not as fellow citizens but in the same way an occupying force sees those they're sent to oppress. They're free to run the towns as their little dictatorships, out of eye of the public, unless their victims are lucky enough for a case to attract big-city media scrutiny; how many do we not know about?

None of this is new, towns have always run like this, but they weren't able to buy a tank before.

But the thing is, nothing actually happens in these towns. These people are as paranoid as city cops (not even in the top twenty most dangerous jobs in the US ftr), but in a place with no murders and very few violent crimes. It's paranoia that's wildly out of step with the Mayberry ass environs they're living in. Not to say that there isn't an inciting incident that caused all these towns to scale up into unchecked police states: it's just that the inciting incident is racist backlash to Black Lives Matter protests, and old school small town fears of the "city people" (read: minorities) coming into their towns to "wreck the place" (read: exist after sundown)

[anhedonicaddict]

This is the whitest shit ever. Racism exists in any space you dunce saying white people are the nessacary component to racism is itself racist. Also as a white person I am VERY VERY AWARE OF THE RACISM. Maybe it was a shocker to you but growing up it was never about race, color, religion or sexuality. Good people were good, bad people were bad. All the bad ones thought that you could group people into easy categories and then forget about them.

white ppl have no concept of the pain of finding a community that you belong to and then discovering the deeply entrenched racism in said community

[animentality]

Dude I'm so confused

Why are the redditors refugees here-

Whats up with the tag 196

AND WHY IS EVERYONE BEING SO NICE WITH THE TWITTER REFUGEES CAME WE GAVE THEM HELL (almost)

The Reddit refugees are here because several subreddits have gone private in protest of reddit's new policy of charging third party developers for access to its API.

Hence the term reddit blackout.

196 specifically was a very queer friendly subreddit that had one rule: that you post before you leave. 196 is trending because those Redditors have come here and they're basically sharing their memery here instead as they protest reddit's greed.

As for why we're welcoming them when Twitter refugees were seen with a little more irritation, well.

Think of the culture similarities.

Tumblr and reddit have far more in common than Tumblr and Twitter.

Twitter is about clout and manipulating algorithms and discourse in 280 characters or less. It's about bad takes that reach the right people and it forces you to see things you don't want to see and it's crawling with the worst people imaginable and you're forced to see them, all the time. They also brought bad tagging and 2016 Tumblr discourse with them, because Twitter culture really involves starting fights for clout and braindead opinions that no one really wants to come back to Tumblr culture.

There was a time when Tumblr did the same thing, but worse, with more words...but nowadays, it's really calmed down.

The worst people...went to Twitter after the porn ban. Ironically, it made the site less toxic and hostile.

But then they came back.

And it was like...hm. no thanks. Stay back where you came from.

But Tumblr and Reddit have much more in common.

Both have a more streamlined way of customizing your online feed. You can choose what subreddits you see on your home screen, just like Tumblr only shows you the content of your followers, on your dashboard, and in chronological order rather than what's trending. You can join a very specific weird niche group of freaks with a shared obsession, and not care about the rest of the site at all. You also don't have a character limit on either site, which lets you ramble more and share weird detailed stories.

Reddit might have karma, but like Tumblr, the majority of people are lurkers and not posters. It also allows you to downvote bad opinions, and moderators who have to adhere to certain guidelines of behavior, which means a lot of banning disruptive people.

Granted, sometimes their mods are power hungry, but. You know.

It does more to control its users than Tumblr do, and that's a good thing in terms of keeping toxicity and illegal shit off its subs.

Reddit also has a way more leftwing attitude than you would think.

It has a reputation for being full of incels but I honestly think that's outdated.

It's cleaned up its act quite a bit since the old days.

I see way more vile shit from Twitter and TikTok. Like seriously.

Twitter is crawling with conservative bots and propaganda machines and just outright inflammatory lies. TikTok literally has the worst comment sections I've ever seen, like edgy teenagers cracking racist and misogynistic humor and acting like it makes them different and special. Its algorithm also spoon feeds you garbage and is designed to be as addicting as possible.

At least reddit's culture, while chauvinistic and regressive in certain subcultures, is mostly on the tech positive, atheist libertarian side.

It can be a little pretentious and caustic about certain subjects, and a little full of itself. Some reddits are also very male leaning and disregard female concerns in favor of moaning about how men have it worse than anyone else on earth.

But for the most part?

...well.

I welcome them here, because if they left reddit in protest, then we always support protests. But 196 specifically is also a queer subreddit, and we support that even more.

Plus they're funny as fuck.

What's not to like, really?

You should welcome them with open arms too.

[ifyouknowmenahyoudontt]

btw no where in the books is it stated that any of the deatheaters (marauders or golden trio) were forced into anything. they chose that road. they are literally racists. people are allowed to hate. regulus black was a racist. its stated in the book that not even walburga and orion were but that regulus WAS. he loved that shit. severus snape was a racist. no matter how hard you try to baby them and make them a pretty little boy toy they are FACISTS. and you literally cannot compare james potter being a bit of a bitch when he was a teenager to them being facists.

most of you have forced this idea of them being forced to be evil but you know what real characters you can like for that? the potters were a pureblood family that resisted that ideas. the weasleys as well.

if you need to change completely the characters entire person to make them likable maybe it’s just that they’re not likable.

you are erasing such an important part of it.these people were apart of jt because of how hard they believed in their superiority. they wanted everyone else dead because they weren’t like them.

this fandom kind of needs a wake up call.