philalethistry

[philalethistry]

As a Canadian I need to know. When offered a choice for your poutine do you choose:

-shredded cheese

-cheese curds

-i don't eat/have never had poutine

-bald

[philalethistry]

[philalethistry]

Once brain-computer interfaces work, they can go get that beach night too.

Check out the bonus panel on the site!

SMBC ◆ PATREON ◆ INSTAGRAM ◆ BLUESKY ◆ STORE

Buy this comic as a print!

[philalethistry]

Congrats once again to @zohrankmamdani on his victory last night. His NYC mayoral primary win should be a lesson to those in the Democratic Party. There is no middle ground between a democracy of the people and an oligarchy.

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it was worth a try

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MAMDANI WON THE FUCKING NY MAYOR PRIMARY

THATS RIGHT

AN OPENLY SOCIALIST

OPENLY PRO-PALESTINE

OPENLY PRO-TRANS

MUSLIM SON OF IMMIGRANTS

JUST KICKED THE ASS OF AN ESTABLISHED DEMOCRAT ENDORSED BY BILL FUCKING CLINTON WHO HAD 35 MILLION DOLLARS BACKING HIM

MAMDANI HAD LESS THAN TEN MIL, MOSTLY FROM INDIVIDUAL DONATIONS

BETTER THINGS ARE POSSIBLE. GET INVOLVED AND PRIMARY THE FUCK OUT OF ALL THESE MUSTY OLD DEMS

[philalethistry]

“i don’t even live in nyc but im happy” you should be!!!!!!!!!! outside of all the local ramifications this is a win that can serve as an example to guard against defeatist loser democrat establishments in other cities and states who count on you believing that we can never Go Further Left because that is the realm of thought experiments and not electoral power… look around you! hope is one of our most powerful weapons and this is a sign that change is not only something to feel wistful about as the unknown future but a real tangible possibility when you let young people organize and mobilize and put forth a clear message. it’s coalition building!!! this is good for EVERYONE!!!! he was endorsed and supported by the dsa for fuck’s sake. also this is not diminished by whatever happens in the general and whatever his tenure ends up looking like. tbh. we can continue to run campaigns like this and win like this.

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oh also? An absolutely freaky thing I'm seeing yt leftists do?

STOP TRYING TO TRACK DOWN PROTESTORS THAT DO 'BADASS STUFF'. STOP POSTING ABOUT IT ONLINE.

PEOPLE FUCKING DIE.

AND IT'S USUALLY SOMEONE MELANATED.

THE GOVERNMENT IS WATCHING YOU FUCKING DUMBASS.

y'all are so stuck on egoistic heroism that every time someone does something 'sick' at a protest you wanna turn them in to the next celebrity to have a parasocial relationship with and then they go missing.

Tf is wrong w y'all.

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"Cuomo conceded defeat late Tuesday night and said he called to congratulate Mamdani." As my friend Bernie Sanders says, "They've got the money, but we've got the people." Congrats to @zohrankmamdani.

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“He would not fucking say that” except its the badly written source material so he did, in fact, say that

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you sad little pervert

im happy big & sexually normal

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a child came into the nature center and saw tadpoles for the first time and when i told him they're baby frogs he thought i was lying and i suddenly realized that if you're 3 and don't know that tadpoles become frogs it does sound pretty fake. this kid will not fall for made up shit online he is a born skeptic.

[philalethistry]

Openly admitting to being in a death cult (which doesn't involve your own death, but that of a different religous group to fulfill your religious prophesy) is still wild in and of itself, even if you want to "stay of our prolonged wars," Shermichael.

I don't think a lot of normal people understand that the Evangelical Christian rapture prophesy says that a modern Jewish state must exist in Palestine where all Jewish people must move to and then be sacrificed in a large-scale war to allow the return of their Messiah.

People in the highest levels of our government believe this which really informs a lot of policy making around the Middle East

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[philalethistry]

In general, understanding radical feminism for what it is and why it appeals to many people requires an understanding that the greatest strength of radical feminism as a tool for understanding misogyny and sexism is also its greatest faultline.

See, radical feminism is a second wave position in feminist thought and development. It is a reaction to what we sometimes call first wave feminism, which was so focused on specific legal freedoms that we usually refer to the activists who focused on it as suffragists or suffragettes: that is, first wave feminists were thinking about explicit laws that said "women cannot do this thing, and if they try, the law of the state and of other powerful institutions will forcibly evict them." Women of that era were very focused on explicit and obvious barriers to full participation in public and civil life, because there were a lot of them: you could not vote, you could not access education, you could not be trained in certain crucial professions, you could not earn your own pay even if you decided you wanted to.

And so these activists began to try to dig into the implicit beliefs and cultural structures that served to trap women asking designated paths, even if they did wish to do other things. Why is it that woman are pressured not to go into certain high prestige fields, even if in theory no one is stopping them? How do our ideas and attitudes about sex and gender create assumptions and patterns and constrictions that leave us trapped even when the explicit chains have been removed?

The second wave of feminism, then, is what happened when the daughters of this first wave--and their opponents--looked around and said to themselves: hold on, the explicit barriers are gone. The laws that treat us as a different and lesser class of people are gone. Why doesn't it feel like I have full access to freedoms that I see the men around me enjoying? What are the unspoken laws that keep us here?

And so these activists focused on the implicit ideas that create behavioral outcomes. They looked inward to interrogate both their own beliefs and the beliefs of other people around them. They discovered many things that were real and illuminated barriers that people hadn't thought of, especially around sexual violence and rape and trauma and harassment. In particular, these activists became known for exercises like consciousness-raising, in which everyday people were encouraged to sit down and consider the ways in which their own unspoken, implicit beliefs contributed to general societal problems of sexism and misogyny.

Introspection can be so intoxicating, though, because it allows us to place ourselves at the center of the social problems that we see around us. We are all naturally a little self centered, after all. When your work is so directly tied to digging up implications and resonances from unspoken beliefs, you start getting really into drawing lines of connection from your own point of interest to other related marginalizations--and for this generation of thinkers, often people who only experienced one major marginalization got the center of attention. Compounding this is the reality that it is easier to see the impacts of marginalization when they apply directly to you, and things that apply to you seem more important.

So some of this generation of thinkers thought to themselves, hang on. Hang on. Misogyny has its fingers in so many pies that we don't see, and I can see misogyny echoing through so many other marginalizations too--homophobia especially but also racism and ableism and classism. These echoes must be because there is one central oppression that underlies all the others, and while theoretically you could have a society with no class distinctions and no race distinctions, just biologically you always have sex and gender distinctions, right? So: perhaps misogyny is the original sin of culture, the well from which all the rest of it springs. Perhaps there's really no differences in gender, only in sex, and perhaps we can reach equality if only we can figure out how to eradicate gender entirely. Perhaps misogyny is the root from which all other oppressions stem: and this group of feminists called themselves radical feminists, after that root, because radix is the Latin word for root.

Very few of this generation of thinkers, you may be unsurprised to note, actually lived under a second marginalization that was not directly entangled with sexism and gender; queerness was pretty common, but queerness is also so very hard to distinguish from gender politics anyway. It's perhaps not surprising that at this time several Black women who were interested in gender oppression became openly annoyed and frustrated by the notion that if only we can fix gender oppression, we can fix everything: they understood racism much more clearly, they were used to considering and interrogating racism and thinking deeply about it, and they thought that collapsing racism into just a facet of misogyny cheapened both things and failed to let you understand either very well. These thinkers said: no, actually, there isn't one original sin that corrupted us all, there are a host of sins humans are prone to, and hey, isn't the concept of original sin just a little bit Christianocentric anyway?

And from these thinkers we see intersectional feminists appearing. These are the third wave, and from this point much mainstream feminist throughout moves to asking: okay, so how do the intersections of misogyny make it appear differently in all these different marginalized contexts? What does misogyny do in response to racial oppression? What does it look like against this background, or that one?

But the radical feminists remained, because seeing your own problems and your own thought processes as the center of the entire world and the answer to the entire problem of justice is very seductive indeed. And they felt left behind and got quite angry about this, and cast about for ways to feel relevant without having to decenter themselves. And, well, trans women were right there, and they made such a convenient target...

That's what a TERF is.

Now you know.