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why do we have to have this discourse every week except hating poor people. maybe explain to the middle class that poor people aren't their enemy. like I'm sorry but someone homeless or at constant risk of homelessness hating someone who lives in and owns a house does Literally Nothing to them. Grow up.

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it really is insane how little you hear about "america has the world's highest prison population by such a significant margin that it would be seen as excessively over-the-top if it was used in fiction"

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Yo I feel like the idea that the only historical women who counted are the ones who defied society and took on the traditionally male roles is… not actually that feminist. It IS important that women throughout history were warriors and strategists and politicians and businesswomen, but so many of us were “lowly” weavers and bakers and wives and mothers and I feel like dismissing THOSE roles dismisses so many of our mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers and the shit they did to support our civilization with so little thanks or recognition.

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i am yet again asking: are the well meaning cishet people who just call us slurs because they don't know any better (even though their values are actually a lot more progressive than some queer people) in the room with us right now?

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I don't really think it's fair to dismiss the idea that that guy might have been framed for killing the CEO as like an unfounded conspiracy theory when NYPD has a proven history of planting/fabricating evidence on people. in 2011 there was a massive investigation of the NYPD and hundreds of cases against people were dismissed after a former police officer testified that they literally have a name for planting evidence on people: flaking. you cannot be out here acting like considering the possibility that cops who do this shit under normal circumstances might possibly also do it when they're under intense global pressure and scrutiny is the same as republicans thinking democrats run a secret pedophile ring in the basement of a pizza restaurant

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Is there any more purely and nakedly theatrical form of performative outrage than shouting about the travesty and injustice of one boxer hitting another boxer in a sanctioned boxing match

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i have like zero sympathy for professors structurally speaking and a lot more for students but just as a matter of rhetorical efficacy i do wish more students understood that a lot of the dysfunction of university teaching is the result of university policy and ultimately the result of universities being businesses / landlords first and foremost. like some professors are also just huge fucking assholes for sure but, simply replacing them with people who Care A Lot About Teaching won't actually do jackshit to make the classroom experience better so long as the institution itself has a bottom line it's serving by being, materially, a granter of pieces of paper that exist to be class barriers. however (and here is where sympathy for students also becomes limited) most students find these facts incredibly hard to recognise or to reconcile with their own political demands (such as they are) because they view themselves as temporarily embarrassed degree holders & are often primarily motivated by their own sense of being 'deserving' of the kinds of upper management / petit-bourgeois professional positions that these degrees are marketed as granting them.

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everyone in the world is either a democrat or a republican. everyone in the whole wide world is a democrat and a republican and america is the largest and most populous country in the world and america is easily the most culturally diverse country in the world because the middle class white people in my state (like a little country) are very different than the middle class white people over there (another little country, once more called a "state") and you could never understand how bad it is in america, the main country in the world. where are you from again? it's bad in america and america is bad but the way that america is run is the only way a country could possibly be run unfortunately. i don't like it but it's the only right way for a country to be run and you don't get it because the main victims of the main country are all here and you aren't. where are you from again? they never told me about that place. i don't think you get that real people live in america. probably because you're a republican. real people live in america and real people are hurt by america but what can you do? god said america has to be like this. god said this because god is real so god is american. you don't get it because you're over there and we're all here in america, the realest country in the world. where are you from again? how can you talk like this with what's happening in america? you're a democrat, right? where are you from again? my country is so large it stretches over yours and presses down hard. it's not my fault that they never told me about that place. my country covers the world. you don't understand how bad this will be for real people in the real world, the first world, the only world. they never told me—where in america are you from again?

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“in order to create loving males we need to love males” means teach boys that they can be themselves without being less of a man. it means being encouraging and nurturing of their emotions so they don’t become cold and hateful. it means showing boys, early in their lives, that they have value outside of what our society deems proper masculinity. what it doesn’t mean is that it’s our job to handhold men who see women as walking sex toys through the concept of empathy, and maybe if we’re really really nice to them and don’t say things that hurt their feelings they’ll stop killing us for saying no

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just the fact that we have the concept of “conventionally attractive with no sex appeal” should tell you that there are two very different definitions of “attraction” being conflated culturally

like beauty standards or things which are called “traditionally”/“conventionally” attractive are not actually predictive of what aspects of bodies real people find sexually arousing and pleasurable to touch and look at, they are status symbols. but because sexuality is a huge part of how we allocate social and economic value, everyone is expected to perform attraction to beauty standards and publicly disavow attraction to whatever is currently deemed “ugly.” the fact of this standard being cultivated and incentivized and policed, using countless resources to do so, indicates how artificial this performance of “attraction” really is.

It’s just such an open secret how much of a farce it is. I’m sure this widespread attraction-theater is probably extremely confusing to asexual people— it’s easy to assume that everyone is faking it when that’s kinda true on this level. It’s just that for most people there is also a real experience of attraction too that is being hidden or shoved into these narrow “acceptable” channels.

It’s not like some politically correct truism or empty validation to say that there is no such thing as “objectively attractive”— there just definitionally isn’t anything objective about attraction (as much as everyone pretends otherwise).

Attraction is an experience. It’s impossible for it to be objective and universal. it’s like saying a food is objectively delicious or a rainy day is objectively sad. Experiences are definitionally subjective, whether they are common or uncommon.

It’s so frustrating to me how we are all made to feel as if we are physically disgusting or unloveable if we don’t match up to an extremely specific (and largely economically determined) set of physical characteristics that we all kind of know privately don’t match up neatly to anyone’s personal experiences of actual attraction.

it’s made up and it benefits none of us— and yet when anyone says this so many people act like it’s just like politely humoring the abstract value of people outside of that narrow collection of traits. and it’s like no! This is not about lying to people that traits that are devalued are actually not devalued at all (they are, and the mechanisms by which they are need to be understood and dismantled). This is about decoupling the actual somatic experience of attraction from the system of valuing and devaluing bodies that hides itself via pretending to be “objectively” describing attraction.

I’m tired of pretending a conversation is on attraction when it’s about power, you know? people with stigmatized traits are attractive to many people and that doesn’t translate into reduced suffering.

The mechanism of power is not attraction—we need to stop going along with this misdirection.

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lame ass gadgetjob

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when you look at actual working-class anarchist organizations in the US it's like, one of the biggest recurring things when discussing previous encounters with Marxist groups (which most of us have) is just that feeling of being talked down to, constantly. Of the fact that the leadership in these groups almost never shares that background, but are instead used to being obeyed by people in your position, and expect a certain amount of it from you to maintain good standing.

(That being a problem as old as Marxist-Leninist tendencies themselves, of course: Marx wasn't a worker. Neither was Lenin, and in fact basically none of the leadership of the Soviets hailed from that background. Ernesto Guevara, same deal; even Castro, Ho Chi Minh and Mao, coming from rural and colonial backgrounds, are notably elevated in class position above the rest of their social milieu from the start, though it gets awfully complicated for some of them further on. I do not think it's a coincidence that Marxist orgs tend to be led and founded by members of the managerial class, a pattern that shows up from country to country. and much of their behavior in power can be explained by the essentially bureaucratic/managerial approach to governance in an industrializing, capitalist economy).

and all of this assumes that you otherwise meet the expectations for like, respectability. if you are visibly disabled/neurodivergent, trans in a way that is not "presentable and pretty by ciscentric standards", if you're mad or crip, you speak with a racially-marked accent, if you seem poor, if god forbid you have ever actually lived outdoors... it's hell. you know you don't belong, pretty quick, and you know that the terms for acceptance are falling into line.

are there anarchists and anarchist groups like that? oh sure, absolutely. the children of the upper middle class, when infected with revolutionary sentiment, love to go slumming it in one sense or another, and theory-heavy scenes can be every bit as toxic in their own way. the visibility of these people is often the basis for attacks on anarchism as "lifestylist." I have met plenty of these people myself, people who think that grad students dumpster-diving and refusing to buy new stuff is a form of radical praxis. and if they were all or even a majority of the movement, i think i would have nodded my head and called it a day long ago. the online scene has the problem of echo chambers as well, though that's hardly unique to any one ideology.

but there's a balancing factor here, which is just that in real life anarchist groups are a whole lot easier for actual poor people to form and keep control of. there's the old tumblr post summarizing the FBI's attempts to infiltrate and subvert various anarchist groups, only to find that nobody's in charge and there is no funding, and like that's real. and in groups like that, it's a whole lot harder for the guy who read a bunch of theory to be the guy in charge (secretly or overtly, no matter what *The Tyranny of Structurelessness* wants to tell you). Existing social dynamics and their ability to distort accountability don't go away, but again that's true in any form of organization, no matter how formal or well-run. i'm not sure anyone on the left has room to be pointing fingers, considering we are all just trying to do our best to survive and take action in a world that exists on capital's terms.

and that is part of why these groups keep forming, again and again, in various times and places: the people who actually spend all their days being bossed around and dehumanized by and large do not like it, and are often very able to tell when they lack meaningful power and agency within a given relationship. if you know that the Marxian left is only going to ridicule and talk down to you until you convert to their way of thinking, you are going to either give up, or seek meaningful alternatives.

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I wish this was my job.

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cake is such an underappreciated band. i can’t believe we brought back low rise flare jeans before we brought back cake in the top 40

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it's a little ghoulish to read 'trans women of color and poor trans women don't survive' verbatim as someone who is both those things!

but the context was the question of: why are so many trans women white and middle class? and like. it's because people are racist and classist, and don't befriend, platform, or seek those types of trans women to where visibility would be at all equivalent. certainly being multiply marginalized puts you more at risk of harm, but we can't apply survivorship bias to such a question