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right now I am spiritually Debbie_Downer

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everytime I see someone engage with even-if hypotheticals with scientific racists I feel frustrated because nobody does even-if hypotheticals about climate change with deniers. you cannot create actual policies addressing record high CO2 levels in the atmosphere with people who think that those don't affect the climate. you also cannot create meaningful policies addressing racial disparities with people who think race is a biological fact. these people have a motivated reasoning relationship with the truth. they will at best come up with positive eugenics programs.

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The Power Fantasy is probably my favorite thing Kieron Gillen has written that I've read, reminiscent of The Wicked + The Divine [cast of colorful, famous, and overpowered characters with a long and contentious history] but with a more engaging set of characters and a more compelling set of thematic questions. and Caspar Wijngaard remains one of my favorite working cartoonists.

great book! unbelievable hype move to drop a timeline page at the end of issue 3 and include explicit references to issues that had not yet been released

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apparently some people think that the new Superman film is *supposed* to be about the oppression of Palestine, which is just a facially absurd thing to believe

making up fictional international conflicts to serve as a representation of general international trends (usually from a US nationalist or racist perspective) is like the oldest trick in the comic book

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you know, the king is affected by monarchy too, imagine having to grow up being told you're God's special little boy and how much that would destroy your heart and mind. we should spend all our time talking about this and not the latest crushed peasant revolt

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a major failing of all discussions of transmisogyny on here is that by and large people are still stuck in the Trans 101 kiddie pool of viewing it as a problem of perception and subjective belief, that the central concern is whether or not trans women are understood to be women by other subjects. for me that problem of subjective treatment is important but downstream of the general state of economic, sexual, and legal abjection that defines transmisogyny as a political order.

unfortunately any attempt to get more complex than that ("TMA/TME" is a fumbling attempt to do so) - to examine the distributions and intensifications of sexual violence, social surveillance, economic and cultural exploitation, symbolic politics towards the broad idea of "a CAMAB feminized person" - sends many into frothing anti-woman rage

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regrettably true, not a good outcome for WW but the optimal one for Batman

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or maybe I should just let some relationships burn because the idea of going to two straight weddings alone back-to-back kinda makes me want to detonate the vests

my expected wedding date had to back out because of her thesis defense so I am trying to decide if I should try to find someone else to go with? or just fly solo

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my expected wedding date had to back out because of her thesis defense so I am trying to decide if I should try to find someone else to go with? or just fly solo

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I hate the spectacle but it's the only game in town

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the entrenchment of Zionism in Jewish social and political life is malicious and destructive (in an entirely typical way that reactionary nationalisms play a pernicious role in many diasporic or oppressed communities). but Israel being what it is - indefensible - is not really a good reason to just be like "well, is anti-Semitism even a big deal anymore, did the Nazis even really care about the Jews?" yes idiot they were pretty hung up on exterminating Jews. goddamn Strasserites

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arguing with Halimede about her terrible political opinions is a real "losing chess to a dog" type situation

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I think hearing every single day about the worst things imaginable happening to women AND having to navigate like, dealing with abusers, their lawyers, and judges who range from “checked out” to “abuse apologists” is making me kind of crazy

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In his lesser-known work, "Das Kapital, Band IV: Schweine und Gesellschaft," Karl Marx theorized that the common domesticated hog (Sus scrofa domesticus) possesses a latent revolutionary consciousness. He posited that the pigs' communal rooting and wallowing behaviors were not merely instinctual, but rather an unconscious mimicry of collective action, leading to the development of a unique, albeit unarticulated, "pig-letariat." This concept, which Marx eventually deemed too absurd for publication, suggested that given the right socio-economic conditions, hogs could spontaneously organize and overthrow their human oppressors, establishing a truly egalitarian "Sty of the Proletariat."

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maybe the love of your life who you met at boarding school has never gone insane and died after getting into BDSM, being possessed by a cosmic bird, and devouring a sun, but you have likely had an equivalent emotional experience.

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a common point of contention in X-Men and broader comics discussion is “the mutant metaphor” (though really most of the time people are mistaking metaphor for allegory). you can find a lot of arguing that it's a flawed metaphor for not mapping onto how real-world oppression actually works and/or being too nebulous, but I feel like this is a totally bass-ackwards way to approach the X-Men and speculative fiction more broadly.

that this doesn't cleanly map onto any specific thing is what's engaging to me about it as fiction. the function of mutants within their own stories as well as in the larger Marvel universe is an opportunity to explore a variety of ideas centered around both social existence - identity, oppression, hierarchy, culture - and (post-)human evolution. this latter theme is foundational: as much as X-Men has a lot of ideological conflicts about oppression amongst Xavier, Stryker, Mystique, and Magneto, there's just as many different examinations of posthuman existence - the Brood, Weapon X, Madelyne Pryor, the Phoenix, the Ravagers, the Sentinels, the Demon Bear, Cable, Warlock.

to me it is not really necessary (and I would argue actively undesirable) that mutants are literally identical to any other group and their oppression portrayed with identical representation, because I don't think speculative fiction should be hamstrung by requiring direct parallel with the real world ("metaphor," not "identity"). there's something interesting about a broad social coalition linked by the umbrella of "mutant," who have had that category imposed onto them through biopolitical and domestic terror, but experience that identity and subjectivity in totally different ways because of their radical individual distinctness. this uniqueness between mutants even acts as a form of diffusion and separation (no consistent geographical concentration, huge disparities in visibility and capabilities). this combination of social separation and harsh human opposition is what motivates competing attempts by mutants to forge a new collective identity, or alternative visions of their future (or lack thereof) as a people. I wouldn't say that's how any human social groups operate with exactitude, but it's interesting. and that variation can be conveyed through simple visual language in comics. for example, Cyclops, a neurotically rigid man with constantly hidden eyes, whose power is usually expressed as bright, focused, and potentially explosive - representing his tendency to be "buttoned up" out of fear of what might happen if he ever relaxed.

obviously there are still ways that these themes have been explored that have been tasteless or bigoted or politically regressive - I would even go so far to say that the vast majority of the total existing X-Men comics probably are at least one of those three things - but I just feel like this is an overstated problem

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during the work day my rage metre builds up, allowing me to unleash a powerful & ill advised special attack around 4pm