#just misdefined

[vamptastic]

i'm very far past arguing about it anymore but i still think the term pansexual is stupid. it'd be one thing if it was a simple reworking of the term to have more accurate etymology, like phasing out transsexual and transvestite in favor of transgender and gender non-conforming. you should still let people use the old term if they want, but coming up with a new one that conveys the meaning more precisely is fine.

but instead it seemed to be suggested as an entirely newly coined thing of its own. which is ridiculous, because it means the exact same thing that the term bisexual has meant for as long as the word has existed- being attracted to men, women, and people of other genders. and of course it implies that bisexual people have a sexuality exclusive of nonbinary people, which obviously has just never been the case, beyond individual bigots. if i call a historical figure bisexual, i generally mean they expressed attraction to men and to women at the same time, OR that they dated someone of an indeterminate gender, OR sometimes that they continued a romantic relationship with somebody through a gender transition. like, that's what the term means, it is identical to pansexuality in terms of who you might actually date or have sex with.

the only place where the terms ever diverge is that sometimes people say bisexuals are attracted to people with gender as a component, so, say someone who is only into a specific type of woman and a specific type of man. while a pansexual would date lots of different sorts of people within the male and female gender, or one type of person across multiple genders. but that's retroactively applying a new definition to bisexual than how people used it before. it's nicer than saying that bisexuality must actually mean bigotry due to its etymology, but it's still using an inaccurate definition that nobody has ever used until you decided it meant that.

basically i think the term was created because bisexual history is difficult to research and most people are entirely unaware that it even exists to be read about in the first place. so instead, people looked at the most literal etymological meaning of the term and decided that definitely must be what people mean when they say bisexual, so let's invent a new sexuality that includes more than two genders.

some people call themselves pansexual because they just like how the word sounds better, which is fine. i also don't care about stuff like omnisexual multisexual etc, it's true that bisexual has a misleading etymology. but generally when i ask somebody why they prefer that term they misdefine bisexuality to explain it. and that greatly frustrates me, because it is not particularly difficult to find writing from the 70s where bisexuality is clearly defined. it's like saying lesbians need to call themselves femalesexual because the root of the word implies they're from the island of lesbos. it's stupid.

basically i don't care what you call yourself, but don't misrepresent what another term means to justify it, just because you don't know anything about bisexual history.

[jewish-vents]

tw for slurs and nazism btw

i hate everything. im so angry i want to cry. i see all these goyim misdefining zionism and calling israel facist and calling us "zionazis" and shit.

JUST CALL ME A FILTHY JEW

JUST CALL ME A KIKE

JUST SIEG HAIL AND SAY YOU HOPE I GET GASSED IM SO SICK OF THIS!

at least the right is open about their antisemitism. at least they own it. at least they admit it. but tiktok """"""leftists"""""""" just say they're "condeming facism" and "speaking up about palestine".

NEWS FUCKING FLASH, YOU'RE NOT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

you're just being antisemitic. you just hate jews.

the israeli is definitely worthy of criticism. netanyahu is definitely worthy of criticism. palestinians DESERVE peace and liberation.

so do WE.

so do jews.

so do isrealis.

but no, these people don't have anything of value to say. they're just repeating misinformation and buzzwords.

and im not listening to anyone to pronounces israel "is RE al", or spells it isreal or calls it "isnotreal" or any of that shit.

FUCK TIKTOK LEFTISTS.

"punch a nazi!!!111!!!!" they cry

look in the mirror. you might as well be sieg hailing.

- sincerely, an angry, tired american jew

.

[mariacallous]

It’s telling that both Dave Chappelle and Ricky Gervais decided to end 2023 by releasing specials in which their comedy pivots to poking fun at the disabled. Could they be more obvious about finding new ways to punch down than targeting people physically unable to fight back?

In a false promise near the opening of his brand-new special and seventh for Netflix, The Dreamer, Chappelle boasts: “Tonight, I’m doing all handicapped jokes,” because “well, they’re not as organized as the gays, and I love punching down.”

Similarly, Gervais decides to have a bit of fun at how we’ve decided as a society to say “disabled” instead of “handicapped” and what that says about us, and suggests further in his special Armageddon, released on Christmas Day, that he’d mock Make-A-Wish kids if given the chance to make videos for them.

And, of course, both men take yet more cracks at the trans community.

Early in The Dreamer, Chappelle tells the audience trans people make him feel like he has to go along with them pretending, as if they’re method acting like Jim Carrey as Andy Kaufman: “If you came here to this show tonight thinking that I’m gonna make fun of those people again, you’ve come to the wrong show,” only to keep going back on his word.

He says he hoped to “repair” his relationship with the LGTBQ+ community – by writing a play for them in which a black trans woman only identifies as the N-word to trip up liberals. He also jokes that if he went to jail in California, he’d identify as a woman so he could tell the other inmates to “suck my lady dick.”

But it’s all just jokes, right? Can’t we just take a joke? Have we lost our sense of humor? Or have they?

Earlier this month, we lost two pillars not just of the comedy community but of our American community writ, as Norman Lear and Tommy Smothers stood taller than most anyone and everyone else in television, standing up to the establishment and protesting the powers that be for the sake of civil rights and humanity.

Now we’re left with Chappelle and Gervais—two titans in terms of Netflix ratings and paychecks—who are fighting for… the right to utter slurs onstage and tell already marginalized people that their existence is a joke for reasons that are nearly impossible to divine. Especially when there’s so much in the world to talk about right now, that they’ve chosen anti-trans rights as their comedy cause célèbre is dispiriting. As Mae Martin said in their 2023 Netflix special, Sap: “Big multimillionaire comedians in their stand-up specials are, like, taking shots and punching down at a time when trans rights are so tenuous and slipping backwards.”

Lear and Smothers used their clout on TV to speak truth to power about America’s involvement in Vietnam and Southeast Asia, the hypocrisy of religion, racism, abortion, homosexuality and civil rights. While great trans comedians such as River Butcher and Jaye McBride resorted to releasing their stand-up specials straight to YouTube this year, which famous straight comedians can you recall sticking up for the rights of trans people in America?

It feels so frustrating to sit and watch comedians with the stature of Chappelle and Gervais devote so much of their time and energy to bullying the LGBTQ+ community when they could be doing anything else on stage. And then they have the temerity to question us, the audience, for not laughing with them.

For his part, Gervais willingly misdefines and misuses “woke” by suggesting, “if woke now means being a puritanical, authoritarian bully who gets people fired for an honest opinion or even a fact, then no, I’m not woke. Fuck that.” Is Nazism or transphobia an honest opinion that shouldn’t get you fired? He then claims in his closing bit that “all laughter’s good,” a concept that would be news to 2005-era Chappelle when he cut ties with Comedy Central precisely because he could hear racism in the laughs during a taping of Chappelle’s Show.

In his Grammy-nominated lecture to students at his alma mater, Duke Ellington School of the Arts, What’s In A Name?, Chappelle claimed: “The more you say I can’t say something, the more urgent it is for me to say it. It has nothing to do with what you’re saying I can’t say. It has everything to do with my right and my freedom of artistic expression.”

But that’s not comedy, either—much like Gervais’ admission in his special that as a university student, his idea of a joke was calling his mother and pranking her by saying he was hospitalized and potentially blind. Gervais said her mom could’ve had a heart attack, but in his mind, he remembers it now as “they could take a fucking joke, right?”

At least Sam Jay, in her 2023 HBO special Salute Me Or Shoot Me, wrestles with her conscience and moral compass over the use of certain words in her act and concludes that having empathy for others is key. “How do the rest of us get here? I don’t know… I’m not going to pretend that I have the answers,” Jay says, adding: “So we’re doing things like we’re policing words, but we’re not policing behavior.”

Anthony Jeselnik, who has built his comedy career on brandishing himself as an offensive caricature of a comedian, told fellow comedian and podcaster Theo Von earlier this year that too many stand-ups would rather get into trouble by saying the wrong thing instead of focusing on their job and saying funny things.

“People think — oh, as a comic your job is to get in trouble. But they don’t want to get yelled at. It’s like, it’s OK to make people mad, but they don’t want any push back. And I think that’s wrong,” Jeselnik said. “As a comedian, you want to make people laugh. This is a quote attributed to Andy Warhol that I love: ‘Art is getting away with it.’ You know, if you put out a special and everyone’s pissed, like, you didn’t get away with it. You know. You need to make everyone laugh that they’re like, ‘Yeah, he talked about some fucked up stuff, but we’re all happy.’ That’s art. Otherwise, you’re just a troll.”

Kliph Nesteroff, a comedy historian whose newest book is Outrageous: A History of Showbiz and the Culture Wars, similarly told me last month that some while comedians see themselves sometimes as “philosophers” he believes they are “betraying their job description because you’re supposed to make people laugh, and philosophers are supposed to philosophize.”

Comedians may claim they can’t joke about anything anymore, but they joke about more now than ever before. The real problem with stand-up today is that too many comedians would rather kick people when they’re down, then lecture us on how we’re too sensitive for not laughing about it.

When Chappelle, Gervais or their acolytes have to incessantly explain that their jokes are just jokes, then they cease to be great comedians—or even comedians at all.

[spacelazarwolf]

lmao k we’re gonna talk abt ashkenormativity and the weird hostility some of y’all have toward non ashki jews.

so yesterday i was trying to have a discussion on this post, and the person responded with this:

and then promptly blocked me.

after which they posted a bunch of bullshit that i am now going to tear to shreds.

regarding the above screenshot:

- if you’re defining yiddish culture as “ashkenazi jews who speak yiddish” you are still erasing multiple communities of ashkenazi jews. italian ashkenazi jews migrated or fled to northern italy during the middle ages, long before the establishment of the pale of settlement, and have a culture that is distinctly influenced by italian culture, not eastern european culture.

- sounds like you’re outright excluding any group of ashkenazi jews who don’t speak yiddish or live in central or eastern europe. which is literally the reason i started the dialogue in the first place.

- talking down to me as if i don’t know what the difference between ashkenazi and sephardi is.

- immediately followed by incorrectly defining ashkenazi. ashkenazim are a group of diaspora jews who originally settled in the ashkenaz. there are many different diaspora languages that ashkenazi jews spoke, including judeo-french, judeo-provençal, judeo-czech, and different dialects of judeo-italian.

- kinda sounds like ur saying eastern european jews who speak yiddish are the only “true” ashkenazi jews????????

- yeah there’s lots of issues surrounding the way eastern european jews were viewed, but that’s not what the conversation was about?????

- it’s not really up to you to have or not have an issue with who identifies as ashkenazi.

- there are many ashkenazi groups that have ties in eastern europe. there are also plenty who don’t. there’s overarching similarities between a lot of different diaspora groups, but that doesn’t make them the same. and that’s ok.

- kinda weird how you say “this is a conversation for the jewish community, infuriating how people disagree with us about our own culture” as if i’m not also jewish?? do you not consider me jewish enough to talk about jewish culture or history?

- it’s clear you’ve researched a lot about eastern european jews. it’s also clear that’s the only group you know anything about.

- this conversation had nothing to do with zionism?????? very fucking weird for u to say this??????? especially when i was literally trying to express that ashkenazi jews are incredibly diverse and can’t just be boiled down to “basically eastern european”??????????

- also again homogenizing all ashkenazi jews under “yiddish culture” when you’ve defined yiddish culture as being distinctly eastern european. which. again. not all ashkenazi jews are.

- didn’t try to correct u on ur own culture bud! tried to get u to see that ur own culture is not actually The Only One.

- “because only a non ashkenazi jew can ever accurately represent ashkenazi culture right?” you’ve got some weird aggression toward non ashki jews you should prob unpack.

- again trying to make this abt zionism when i was literally arguing the opposite.

- also i don’t have a “giant blog” lmfao.

- this is funny to me bc u r literally the one who misdefined ashkenazi?????? and attempted to homogenize all ashkenazim under the label of eastern european????? hello?????????

- “irredeemable zionists” yikes bro.

- literally just me when i can’t read and have no critical thinking skills.

- this to me reads like someone who is trying to invert the concept of ashkenormativity and position themself as a victim of non ashki jews. which is absolutely fucking bizarre.

- you’re claiming i’m “denying yiddish culture” while many of your posts actively erase multiple ashkenazi groups from this culture while simultaneously lumping them all in underneath one umbrella eastern european label. like idk how you managed to be so ashkenormative that you managed to erase other ashkenazi jews but it’s almost impressive.

- gee i wonder what it’s like to have ur culture denied surely as a member of a tiny diaspora group that makes up 0.4% of the global jewish population i have no idea what that’s like!

- you are not advocating for diasporism. you are advocating for your culture and your culture only.

anyway, on to my other rant.

if i want to know how to recite a prayer in the ashkenazi rite, i google it. if i want to learn how to speak yiddish, i download duolingo. it’s easy to find these things because people have worked hard to preserve them. and also because ashkenazi jews make up over 60% of the global jewish population and over 70% of the us jewish population.

italian jews, however, including italian ashkenazim, make up 0.4% of the global jewish population. and i couldn’t even find a number for how many of us there are in the us bc there are that few. if i want to know how a certain prayer is chanted in the italian rite, i have to find 70 year old recordings of italian cantors and rabbis singing them for a musicologist who dedicated his life to keeping the italian rite and italki culture alive after it was devastated by the holocaust, bc the only synagogues that still follow the italian rite are in rome and israel. if i want to know how to speak the language my ancestors would have spoken, i have to take a zoom class at oxford at 6am where we study manuscripts from hundreds of years ago. in 1900, there were 20,000 native speakers of judeo-italian dialects. in 2023 there are almost none.

in order to participate in any sort of jewish life where i live, i have to know ashkenazi culture. i have to know the prayers and the songs and the customs. i have to know the food and the language and history.

but y’all don’t have to know mine.

and every time i try to infuse my own heritage into my practice i’m reminded of that. when i make italian jewish food, people don’t see it as “jewish food.” people hear my last name and assume i’m not jewish because it’s not a “jewish name.” when i use italki hebrew, people try to correct me. i frequently encounter other jews who don’t even know italkim exist. so yeah. it is infuriating when i experience constant pressure to assimilate into the dominant jewish culture of where i live only to be a excluded from discussions about that culture because i’m not part of it. i am part of it. i have to be.

ashkenazi culture is beautiful and diverse and i do genuinely enjoy taking part in it. but it is painful to get constant reminders that i don’t really have a choice. it is painful to have people in your own community see your knowledge of their culture as a given but their knowledge of your culture as optional or doing you a favor.

so basically,

you are not being erased by the reminder that jews who are not like you exist.

[fairuzfan]

You didn't even provide me a rebuttal you just said "his plans are delusional" and continues to misdefine indigineity I'm not going to take you seriously lol

[rokkazu]

got that damn tiktok misdefining the word necrophilia with a chain of a million people going "no thats x, necrophilia is like (definition of a word that kinda sounds like necrophilia)" on tha dash and i have the looming urge to just break the absurdly long chain and go "no that's a nanosecond, necrophilia is when you wanna fuck dead people" but i dont think the other people in the reblog chain would really find that funny or tasteful. but well it would be a little funny

[akajustmerry]

i'm sorry you're getting rude asks in your inbox, but at risk of being another rude ask- fair or unfair, you understand that many people have been called zionists because they shared misinformation with good intentions or tried to clear up misconceptions even if it fit the wrong narrative? or they made a mistake with wording? there's a lot of jewish bloggers i know who have been pro-palestine since the start and were quickly called zionists anyway because they misspoke at some point. there were self-proclaimed antizionists, some indigenousto to other regions, on a zionist blocklkst spread around on here. one of my swana mutuals was called a zionist for making a similar post to yours, sobthis reminded me of that. I'm not trying to cheapen the word "zionist" in your inbox or anything, but I think it's been cheapened and/or misdefined for a while now. it doesnt just mean "bad person". you're easily one off the most pro-palestinian non-palestinian posters on this site, always sharing timely information, and you still got called one. I just think there's something wrong with that and it isn't right. I feel dumb saying "words have meanings" , but they do. for ex., it's kind of like calling every transmisogynist a terf when they're not even a feminist. we all want the same things so we shouldn't lose the plot. felt like that needed to be said and hopefully your inbox gets less weird.

yes absolutely! thank u for saying :) I understand where my mistake was, why it was harmful, and apologise sincerely. people have every right to be upset so I'm not making excuses, and folks have every right to unfollow me. when it comes to genocide, spreading misinformation however it was intended means life or death and I won't be making that mistake again. in the meantime, I'll keep trying to help as much as I can and be more considerate.

[academicelephant]

Last year, 2/3 of the students misdefined the term "open source". My professor wondered about that, then fell silent for a moment, looked over the lecture hall and said "it's actually not surprising, considering how few of you are here." There's almost 120 people enrolled for the course, but as the course has progressed, the number of people attending has decreased and today there were maybe 20-30 of us. Well, there's no mandatory attendance on this course, but it would still be a good idea to be there. Just saying.

[pansexual-pied-piper]

Y'know, it was pretty annoying when most aspec content on here was just the definitions of aspec terms or "you are valid" posts, but considering how much of the aphobia I see people spew is based on misdefining what it means to be aspec, I catch myself thinking that maybe we gotta bring back those Aspec Terminology for Beginners type posts

Then again, most of those people probably don't want to know the real meaning of the words they mock and get mad at, they just want something to be mad about and acceptable targets they feel they can get away with being dicks to

[majinalia]

Thisthisthisthisthisthis. Please please please please. When you jam historical figures into modern systems of sexuality you are making the same assumptions that heteronormative Victorians made. Those heteronormative 19th and 20th century historians were not trying to fucking misportray the guys they dedicated their lives to studying, they just put them in their modern senses.

To them, if a young person had gay sex but later married, he was a straight person who “went through a phase.” Overcame their animal instincts. Because that’s how they understood that to work.

Meanwhile, we in our era would call that same person Bisexual. Yes, this take reads as less problematic and even logical to us. Because it is fit to our sensibilities. But for all you know they would have identified more with the first biphobic ass take more, or have a completely alien sense of self that made perfect sense within their life’s context.

You misdefine the 17th century Balkan sworn virgin if you were to call them a trans man. You misdefine the 19th century BCE Egyptian sekhet when you call them asexual. There’s not even a comparable modern label for how a Eunuch’s gender was treated in China or the Byzantine Empire, so you can be damn sure your 21st century queer boot doesn’t fit.

In personal conversation, feel free to use equivalencies to help others understand. In academic and professional speech, please understand that the entire world fits as neatly in 21st century culture as it did in the 19th Century’s.

seriously I had some little TikTok teenybopper burst out laughing on my tour because I said that a historical figure was “most likely what we’d now call gay”

like

listen

you’re free to take a ouija board out to the cemetery and try to explain the dizzying array of current queer terms and get a solid answer as to how he identifies within that framework but 

until then, I’m going to continue NOT definitively assigning someone identity terms they didn’t self-identify with, and might not have even known, when I’m responsible for representing them faithfully and they’re not here to correct me. even more so when they’re part of my own community

I mean, you know, as long as that’s okay with you. Bestie.

[autumnrory]

god i love going through a discourse blog or someone's tag for shit i agree with there's so much shit i can't articulate and then i'm just like yep that's exactly it like i don't reblog too much of it - okay maybe the bisexual stuff and how it's misdefined and everything bc it's personal lol - and i couldn't fathom running a whole blog of it (though i'm not gonna just sit there and assume that's all the person behind it does with their time lol like why do people think that, you can have multiple blogs for multiple things) but honestly i just like the validation

[corbinite]

Ecofascism is "environmentalism" through the lens of blood and soil. It's about the "purity" of what you put in your body, of the people who own a land, and of the land itself. It's about not wanting to be "tainted" by "savagery" (note this is not nonviolence even if it tries to look like nonviolence). It's about land Belonging to white people and white people being entitled to a version of stewardship through dominance and blood ties. And at its core it's about ownership over nature and over the people who are degraded to be seen as less human and therefore "ownable". That's why ecofascists treat marginalized people as if they were invasive species.

Veganism is about nonviolence. That's it. It takes many forms but it is inherently about nonviolence and a REJECTION of ideas about any hierarchical nature of humanity or the earth. Veganism is not eating plant based because it's more "pure" or "wholesome" or even because it's less environmentally impactful on average. It's just a commitment to nonviolence.

How many of you claiming that veganism is ecofascism can actually list off the traits of ecofascism? Was my first paragraph the first time you've actually seen the word defined instead of just being used as a vague "veganism is colonialism because of [insert whichever factoid you wanna play telephone with this time]"? Was it the first time you heard an explanation of what it was past "well the maga shaman guy didn't eat meat so you connect the dots"? (which wasn't even true, he eats *organic* and that includes meat). Do you think you can identify and fight ecofascism without a working definition of the ideology? Let me clarify, I'm not even saying your definition is wrong. I'm saying you don't have one. If you don't actually have a model of what ecofascists BELIEVE IN to reference, do you think you can pretend to be an authority on how to fight them? The end goal of ecofascism is genocide justified as "fighting overpopulation" and "keeping the land under its rightful protectors. It has to be actively and competently opposed at all costs. You cannot be an activist on vibes alone. You certainly can be a reactionary though.

[cgogs]

the ppl drawing lines between dsmp lore and the drituation are fucking stupid and if i see you doing that shit it is an INSANT block

[a-snails-pace-1917]

This is a common misunderstanding of the NEP I think,which comes from Deng and Gorbachev trying to use that period of time as a justification for their privatization schemes.

The NEP came about in response to war communism,a model of expropriations,conscription of labor for wartime production,and taking grain tributes from the peasants. A major issue was a decline in available food because the peasants had no incentive to produce surplus as they couldn’t profit from it (the peasantry in this way is comparable to the petit bourgeois). The NEP allowed the peasants to privately trade their surplus grain,which the state would instead purchase from them rather than just seize. It also allowed for small-scale private enterprise while most of the railways and big industry was owned by the state. This was not socialism,as Lenin clarified,the Soviet Union was not operating in the socialist mode of production.

The difference after the Great Break when Stalin’s clique took power was that the state had nationalized all industry (and collectivized the peasant agriculture but that’s a whole other complicated topic). It still fit within a state capitalist paradigm,just with all property nationalized and operating within the state’s planning. Eventually this for various reasons started to fall short,and in conjunction with political crises led Gorbachev to launch a two-pronged reform,liberalizing the government and liberalizing the economy. In the economy they privatized a bunch of industry and production,allowed more stuff to be done for profit,and invited western firms to come in and do business there. This is seen by most Marxist-Leninists as a bad move and a betrayal of socialism as established under Stalin (=\).

In China the primary difference was that they didn’t liberalize the government,the regime didn’t collapse like the USSR,and they’ve carried on the growth of private capitalism to a much larger extent. In China,wealthy business owners,capitalists,and bankers can all join the ruling communist party,workers have to form opposition groups, and the government does not recognize the necessity of class struggle,instead offering common prosperity (a line more befitting Mussolini or FDR than a “socialist” government!). China clearly falls in the schema laid pit by Lenin and others of a State Capitalist country ,and one dominated by capitalists and bureaucrats rather than the working class party. I think most of this derives from a misunderstanding of what socialism is that comes from Stalin and the USSR’s official line,which loses crucial elements from Marx and Lenin’s works,as well as most of the other Bolsheviks. In the future I’ll write about what I think socialism is and why Stalin completely misdefines it for his own gain.

Fun how the people who hue and cry the loudest about China's "Reform and Opening Up", condemning it as some sort great betrayal of socialism, so often consider themselves aligned with Lenin. Like some sort of defender of true socialism from the golden era against all those later revisionists. As though like the NEP wasn't something that Lenin himself very much supported and implemented. Our wise and tactical introduction of capitalist elements VS their revisionist selling out to the bourgeoisie, something like that

There's probably a couple of things at play here. One contributing factor likely the fetishism of defeat you see all too often among Western socialists, treating the dead and failed experiments of the past as somehow being more pure and truly communist than any still living socialist regime. Another is the excessive attachment to specific individuals you see among those who accept communist ideas without truly embracing dialectical materialist thinking; treating certain thinkers and leaders (i.e. Lenin, Trotsky, Mao) as though they were divine prophets while others (i.e. Deng) are devils sent to lead us astray. Policies are not evaluated in terms of their material effects, the prevailing conditions they were taken in or even their theoretical basis. Rather the focus is on who proposed them; similar policies are good when a good guy supports them and bad when backed by a villain. Finally there's likely an element of underlying racism to all this; these people have faith in the ability of Europeans make the right decisions and build a better society, while no such trust is extended to those "less enlightened" peoples of the world. Surely the end of Socialism in Europe meant the end of any Socialism that matters? Like any nation still calling itself Socialist must be lying or deluded; there's no way those barbarians could have anything to teach us...

[autumnrory]

why do ppl wanna insist gender matters to bi people and not pan people so bad it makes zero fucking sense what are you even talking about

[elftwink]

its just me and the one other openly leftist person in this class discussion against the world