#oppressed vs oppressor

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

If you have the social influence to be able to redefine yourself as "oppressed" and enforce that definition, you're not "oppressed."

If you have everyone from government, legacy media, entertainment, industry and academia pushing your mantras, talking points, narratives and "representation," you're not "oppressed," you're the ruling overclass.

You can't be both the "oppressed" and the one doing the oppressing at the same time.

[reconstructwriter]

Rafeef Ziadah - 'We teach life, sir', London, 12.11.11

[thorough-witness-enjoyer]

Maybe it’s my experiences with my culture and having relatives who are immigrants, but the conflict between humanity and the eliksni reads more to me than just a message on xenophobia.

To me, it’s also about how groups who have experienced oppression are often pitted against each other by the circumstances created by their oppressors to keep them stuck in a cycle of violence and mistrust with one other. This cycle keeps groups who share similar pain and plights from extending mercy to each other and joining forces to fight against the systemic forces that brought them both into a hostile state, which is exactly what those forces want as it keeps those groups powerless and unstable.

[blue-thief]

that's not the point being made here and You People fucking know that

[cherrybomb107]

Okay guys, I actually managed to have a civil discussion with someone on Arcane twt who disagreed with me! Everybody cheer😭😂🤭

But fr tho, I admit that I did quote twt that person in bad faith. A friend of mine made a joke about how Caitlyn wouldn’t have missed(iykyk) and this person’s response rubbed me the wrong way. Think something to the effect of “violence is never okay. Shame on you for joking about this.” So, I saw his response to my friend’s tweet and decided to ask him who he thought the “true villain” of Arcane was. I had a feeling what his answer would be.

He said Silco was the main antagonist (fair enough) but then, ofc, he started talking about how, ultimately, “both sides” were at fault for all that’s happening in the show. Now I know that one’s opinions on the media they consume aren’t necessarily a 1 to 1 with their real life politics, but for the sake of the argument, I’ll ask: what’s this obsession that we, as a collective, have with making things more complicated than they should be?

A lot of times, situations really are messy and complicated. But in this instance, I don’t think that’s the case. I don’t think the situation between Piltover and Zaun is complicated at all. I see an oppressor (Piltover) being responsible for the centuries long disenfranchisement of the oppressed (Zaun). Then here comes Jinx, who has been victimized by Piltover for her entire life, becoming radicalized against them, and being violent towards them.

The idea that “violence is bad; full stop” is very dangerous. Violence against an entire group being conflated with violence on an individual level is not good. For example, let’s talk about stealing for a second. Is a poor, starving person stealing from a store that upcharges on necessities “wrong”? In my opinion, no. Is a corporation stealing wages(which is actually the most common form of theft) “wrong”? Absolutely! Now, if you wanna be technical, both examples are “in the wrong”. However, let’s be real here: one of these things is a hell of a whole lot more “wrong” than the other.

But to bring it back to Arcane, why is this idea that “the situation is so complicated, there are no good sides” so popular? There absolutely are! Violence against an oppressor is not a bad thing! I, a marginalized individual, am not anywhere close to being “just as bad” as the mfers responsible for my oppression!!! Why do so many of us feel that way? That doesn’t even make any sense! Stop feeling bad for people who don’t give nary a fuck, nor a shit, nor a good goddamn about you AT BEST! And at worst? They will GLEEFULLY partake in destroying your community!!!

I know the show is ultimately centrist asf(and therein lies the problem) but still!

Anyways, I say all that to say, it’s fine to disagree with people, cause I was able to have a nice discussion with this person, despite vehemently disagreeing with them. But like, I really wanna know WHY these people think the way they do. How could the situation between Piltover and Zaun be thought of as anything but chickens coming home to roost? If you’ve been paying even the slightest little bit of attention to the world we’re living in, and everything that’s going on rn, how could you not apply those same principles to the show?

[titleknown]

Thought: If I were to make a Warhammer 40K movie, I'd make it a Rashomon-type semi-anthology where we see the conflict from the perspective of each faction involved in it.

Basically, leading to a core theme of the film: Everyone thinks they're the good guys in a war. Even as we see everyone in a much more fucked-up light in the other stories.

Which leads to a core theme of the setting: There are no good guys in war.

[empyreasheart]

i usually dont comment on the discourse posts i see on this website but jesus christ. No one coddles men against the evilll trans women and lesbians like a tumblr user

[soulofamy]

im going to preface what im about to say by saying that i KNOW this sounds like im being down on my writing abilities but honestly i am not, i really love the things i write i dont feel insecure about my writing like that

but also, the way that mk literally gave me nothing to work with in terms of lore to build off of for the zaterran conspiracy kinda left me feeling like i didnt know what i was doing while trying to weave my own lore into it. like i felt like everything i was establishing was incredibly implausible and didnt make sense. BUT THEN ?? as im rewatching atla, im coming across so many details that remind me of the details and storybeats that im using. and with how incredible of a story atla wrote, how universally loved it is, and how much i personally love it as well, let me just say that it makes me feel SO good about my own writing when i feel like i can draw parallels and make connections between them

[cto10121]

Ser o no ser, güey, esa es la pinche pregunta

[ssaltlicker]

Ti/mebomb is just arcanes version of re/ylo dont @ me

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

[nando161mando]

1968 vs 2024

[haggishlyhagging]

The sado-ritual of excision and infibulation bestows acceptability upon gynocidal behavior— even to the extent of making it normative. This is illustrated in the precept of the president of Kenya, Jomo Kenyatta, that "no proper Gikuyu would dream of marrying a girl who has not been circumcised," since this operation "is regarded as the conditio sine qua non for the whole teaching of tribal law, religion, and morality." With these words, one chief in the Higher Order of phallocratic morality dictates its chief lesson: that women should suffer. Typically, the justification for the atrocious ritual under the reign of phallic morality involves a reversal in which the unnatural becomes normative. Only a mutilated woman is considered 100 percent feminine.* By removal of her specifically female-identified organ, which is not necessary for the male's pleasure or for reproductive servitude, she "becomes a woman." At first the reversal might seem astonishing, if one hears the term woman as representing a state of natural integrity. But if we understand this term to refer to an embodiment of the feminine, which is a construct of phallocracy, then the meaning of the expression becomes clear.**

* It is interesting to compare these attempts to feminize women with the feminization of male-to-constructed-female transsexuals. The latter, who consider themselves to be "women" (referring to "other" women as "native women") undergo operations which remove the testicles and penis and give them artificial vaginas, but no clitoris. Both of these mutilating attempts at feminization receive a large amount of legitimation by phallocracy. See Janice Raymond, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979).

** It may be helpful in this connection to recall Simone de Beauvoir's famous axiom: "One is not born, but rather becomes a woman." (The Second Sex, trans. and ed. by H. M. Parshley [New York: Vintage, 1974], p. 301). In this book of course, I use the term women to refer to females generally and reserve the term feminine to connote the male-created construct/stereotype. However, woman is often used by others to refer to the androcratically constructed (destroyed) female, who is, of course, considered "natural." There is, for example, the "total woman" of Marabel Morgan, and the "true woman" of Pope Pius XII and Pope Paul VI.

-Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology

[hotsweetcorn]

i love people tuning into war for the first time with gaza and now assuming that all conflicts are as directly good vs evil as palestine vs israel

[imbellarosa]

i thought about not writing anything bc I'm late to the discourse game this time round and bc I've been so unplugged for so long that I don't get anons asking me things anymore but then I was talking to @twopoppies and like actually - I have shit to say

the first thing i have to say is that the British economy is overwhelmingly failing the working class. Teachers, train workers, and the fire service have all voted to go on strike in the last month. and the reason that this is happening is twofold: the first is that the MPs are self-absorbed dicks. The second is that the UK pulled out of one of the largest single-market economies in the international community, which hit every sector of the economy bc new taxes tariffs trade agreements erc. So like - don't talk to a Brit about what their utilities are doing. The third reason that these towns are dying though is because of the practice of outsourcing labour to cheaper countries/cities/communities. This is why people began to blame immigrants for the decline of the working class. Which like - if a Brit wants to come and teach my kids and write my PhD, they can pry it from my cold dead hands.

That's a really roundabout way of explaining that if you don't live in a larger city, you're gonna have loads of poverty in the area. And that - for the most part - your distance from London is directly proportional to the poverty rate. I work in *small British coastal town* in a *large comprehensive school* (that's like a US public school), and my kids are about 13-16 years old. The 16-year-olds are doing their GCSEs (like GEDs) in the spring, and loads of them don't believe that they can do it. Out of the Y11s that I know, I know maybe one or two that have concrete plans to go to university. Most don't believe that they can succeed, and are unwilling to go anywhere far from home. A comparable region of the world would be Appalachia in the US. The school I teach at is right across the street from council estates, and some of the kids have never left the town - even though there's a 2 hr train that takes you into London. Loads of their lives are really tough. I obviously can't give specifics, but I've definitely had days I can't shake off at the end of them.

This is all to say that out of the hundreds of kids I know, I don't know a single one that's gonna win a Grammy in 15 years time. Or a Pulitzer, or an Oscar or a Tony or an Olivier or a BAFTA. and this is absolutely not because they're not capable of doing it - they 100% have the capacity to succeed and the talent to be amazing. We just don't have the resources to nurture that talent in a way that would make them competitive to the people in the first ring of the ladder to success. I have a kid who wants to be a detective, and another teacher (!) told me 'well that's just not realistic. kids like him don't get into the programs he'd need to get into to do that'. That's just the reality of life for them. To them, I'm the anomaly. I'm the one who made it out! I left a tough home and a rough couple of years to become a PhD student and a young woman with a stable job, a guy who agrees to watch my cat, and loads of good friends. And I'm DEFINITELY not winning any Grammys hahaha - but by their metric their TEACHERS are some of the most successful or educated people they know, and they don't see themselves as those people.

We do our best for these kids, but it 1000% makes sense that someone from a background like this would say that the kind of success and fame and resources it takes to be an international pop star doesn't happen to people like him. Because it's a million to one. For every Harry Styles, a million David Smiths (not a real kid) don't make it out. So maybe shut up, have some empathy and celebrate an unlikely success? Or like. Eat cake if that fails.

[spider-xan]

What is even going on with the new Spider-Man cartoon, like, I stg that every six months, something major changes and they can't decide what they want it to be, but beyond ideas simply evolving over time organically, like, first it was an MC* prequel, which made no sense based on what the movies had already established if they were going to have supervillains appear, and then it was reworked as an alternate universe or timeline set in the MC*, and first, it was going to be drawn in a Silver Age retro style inspired by Ditko's art, and now it's going to be CGI with mixed reports on if it will be 2D or 3D, and now the title suddenly changed after being in production for what feels like years now, and it's still not coming out until the end of next year.