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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 1 year

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By: Allan Stratton

Published: Jul 23, 2023

Toronto is one of the most tolerant, multicultural cities in the world. And yet, according to many of its progressive journalists, academics, and politicians, it’s actually a den of systemic racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia. Unless you’re a straight white man, daily life is supposedly an exhausting and dangerous struggle. If you live in the United States, the UK, Australia, or elsewhere in Canada, I’m guessing you’ve been told similar things about your own society.

I’m a gay man for whom these reports bear no relationship to the real world. Certainly, hate-crime statistics show a sharp increase in physical and verbal abuse against specific demographics, including my own. And there are even rare incidents of murder and arson. But to suggest that minorities live under constant threat from a bigoted majority is apocalyptic nonsense. This is especially true of Canada, an especially open, diverse, and welcoming country. Western nations, more generally, are incontrovertibly the most tolerant on the planet.

My heretical view (among fellow progressives, at least) may be due to my “positionality” (this being a faddishly woke jargon term that most English speakers would call “perspective”). The Holocaust and the internment of Japanese North Americans ended a mere six years before I was born. The pass system that turned Canadian Indigenous reservations into open-air prison camps was still in force. The United States was segregated by Jim Crow and redlining. Cross burnings and lynchings went unpunished. Marital rape was legal. Spousal abuse and unequal pay were commonplace. Gay sex and cross-dressing were criminalized, with outed individuals losing their jobs and children. “Fag bashing” was treated as public entertainment.

In the relatively few decades since, western governments have implemented universal civil and human rights protections for racial and sexual minorities. The speed and depth of this transformation has been so remarkable that it seems inconceivable that we ever lived as we once did. Has any other culture critiqued its failings and set about reforming itself so quickly?

This is not to suggest that everything is sunshine and lollipops. Human nature has not been repealed. Police departments without effective civilian oversight, for instance, continue to invite corruption and abuse. Nonetheless, we now have the tools to press for accountability, such as human rights tribunals and whistleblower protections.

It’s also important to acknowledge that while the relative increase in reported hate crimes may seem shocking, that rise is based on a remarkably low baseline. For instance, 2021 saw a 65 per cent increase in incidents (over 50 per cent of these comprising verbal slurs) targeting Canada’s LGB and T communities. But that still represents just 423 cases in a country of 40-million people. That’s hardly a “tsunami of hate.” The number is infinitesimal compared to the 114,132 domestic assaults and 34,242 sexual assaults recorded against women.

One often hears that a reversion to the backward ways of the past is just around the corner. And it is true that abortion rights now hang in the balance in many conservative U.S. states. But the idea that any Western country (especially Canada) is on the cusp of a wholesale rejection of liberal principles is absurd. Women will never again need their husband’s signature to open a bank account. Racial segregation is unthinkable (except, ironically, in certain progressive institutions). Marriage equality for same-sex couples is constitutionally protected in North America, and enjoys a historic 70 per cent level of support in the United States.

So, unlike those on the left who came of age in the 90s and the decades that followed, I don’t see an intolerant society destroying civil rights and minority safety. Rather, what I am now witnessing is a period of progressive overreach, led by ideologues with no (apparent) historical memory or understanding of how our liberal social contract evolved. They have turned language inside out so as to render words such as “woman,” “safety,” and “genocide” essentially meaningless; pursued policies that lock one-time progressive allies in a zero-sum culture-war conflict; recast free speech as hate speech; confused wishes (and, in some cases, fantasies) with rights; and punished dissenters from their Borg-think with social exclusion, “re-education,” and firing.

This radical attempt to unilaterally impose a new social order based on race and gender essentialism has ignited a widespread public backlash, which has been weaponized by the far right, destroyed public goodwill, and done more damage to the progressive cause than anything its reactionary enemies have done in recent years.

The civil-rights movements of the last century won victories by liberal means based on liberal values. This included an insistence on free speech and civil liberties; and an appeal to the universal values of dignity and equality, which in turn underpin the case for protecting individual human rights and freedoms.

In part, this was because we liberals understood math. We needed white, straight, male legislators to support our causes, a project that could only be engaged through free and open debate. Empathy-based co-operation enabled us to create bridges among our diverse groups: The Gay Liberation Front raised money for the Black Panthers. In turn, its leader, Huey Newton, supported the gay liberation and women’s liberation movements. Meanwhile, Jewish groups applied their historical understanding of discrimination to help lead the fights for women’s rights (Betty Friedan), gay rights (Larry Kramer), and black voting rights, with some even giving their lives as Freedom Riders

By contrast, today’s illiberal left explicitly rejects the principles of free speech and universality. It ignores the lessons of past civil-rights successes, often denying that such successes even took place. After all, how can one insist on the dismantling (or “decolonization”) of a system that has shown itself capable of self-correction and continuous improvement? The only framework that validates the progressive narrative of ongoing oppression and white supremacy is one that ahistorically presents mainstream liberal values as a failure.

The switch in social-justice circles from liberal to authoritarian ends and means has at least three major causes. The first is structural: As (originally) liberal rights groups such as the ACLU achieved their objectives, they were required to rewrite their mission statements and pretend away their past successes — this being the only way to justify their ongoing existence.

Far from seeking to “burn it all down,” most of us within the original LGB and T movements simply wanted equality within existing social structures. We used liberal “respectability politics” to make our case, and (for the most part) folded our tents when we achieved our goal. The unwitting effect of this was to leave our old organizations to the radicals, who had long condemned us as sellouts to the patriarchy. Their goal is nothing less than the remaking — or “queering” — of society, a vaguely defined project infused with a deep suspicion of, or even hostility to, capitalism and the nuclear family. The liberal LGB and T wish to live and let live is now the authoritarian “live as we live.”

The second factor is generational change. Just as children separate from their parents in their passage to adulthood, so does each generation define itself in contradistinction to its immediate predecessor. Without personal memory of past struggles, present conditions are taken for granted. And so the battle against current injustices (real or otherwise) is seen as humanity’s defining and timeless struggle.

My generation mocked our parents’ conformity and stoic, suck-it-up ethos, forgetting that these traits had been necessary social adaptations during the Great Depression and World War II. Similarly, activists of this generation attack our commitment to free speech and integration within society, forgetting that these strategies were necessary for us to be heard during the Cold War, when outsiders were suspected as potential fifth columnists.

But perhaps the most significant factor has been the academic trend toward postmodernism, which instructs adherents that neither objective reality nor human nature exist in any certain, provable way. Reason, logic, and objective facts are rejected — or at least put in scare quotes — as are appeals to history and science. These are all held to be mere artifacts of language, which is itself presented as a reflection of existing power structures. And since these structures are presumed to systematically oppress the powerless, they must be deconstructed, dismantled, and decolonized, root and branch.

This kind of thinking isn’t just claptrap that flies in the face of day-to-day human experience. It also encourages a kind of intellectual nihilism that precludes amelioration of the injustices and power imbalances that supposedly concern many postmodern thinkers: After all, what could possibly replace our current power-based intellectual constructs except new power-based intellectual constructs?

Nonetheless, postmodern habits of mind (often flying under the banner of “critical” studies of one kind or another) have infected academic humanities and social science departments all over the west, much like the fungal parasite on The Last of Us. Its professorial hosts now work to dismantle their own institutions, attacking the “colonial” concepts of science and empiricism in favour of undefined and unfalsifiable “ways of knowing.” Meanwhile, their students have incubated its spores and spread them into the wider society, including corporate human-rights offices.

Progressives (rightly) have denounced Donald Trump and his supporters for their paranoid belief that the 2020 U.S. election was “stolen.” But these right-wing conspiracy theorists are not so different from campus leftists when it comes to their à la carte approach to accepting or rejecting reality according to passing ideological convenience

In particular, the idea that pronouns serve as magic spells that can turn a man into a (literal) women is no less ridiculous than anything Trump has ever said. The same goes for the mantra that while girls who cut themselves need therapy, girls seeking a double mastectomy require “affirmation.” Likewise: Racial segregation is a bigoted practice … except when it represents the very acme of progressive enlightenment. “Defund the police” doesn’t mean abolish the police, except when it means exactly that.

And then there’s Schrödinger’s Antifa, which presents these street thugs either as a very real force that rose up as a morally laudable reaction to fascism … or as something that exists only in Tucker Carlson’s fever dreams, depending on context.

But postmodernism and critical theory have done more than just damage our societies’ intellectual cohesion. Their denial of universal human nature eliminates empathy as a tool to bridge differences among groups, which are instead presented as warring sects prosecuting unbridgeable race (or gender) feuds. Since power is presented as the singular currency of the realm, the ability to shut the other side up is valued more than the ability to persuade it.

Gay men such as Andrew Sullivan and Andrew Doyle have been among the most prominent dissenters against wokeism — in part because we instinctively recognize the destructive nature of this power-fixated mindset. Our experience suggests that empathy and reason are far more important than threats and cultural power plays.

Dave Chappelle has said that the LGBT movement won public support more quickly than its black counterpart because of racism. But I believe the truth is different: Unlike racial and ethnic minorities, we exist in every demographic, every family, every ethnic category. When we gay men came out en masse during the 1980s AIDS pandemic, all communities realized that we were among its children, parents, and siblings. People have a harder time discriminating against their own than against outsiders.

Traditionally, the left has appealed to a sense of camaraderie and shared purpose. The resulting project of alliance-building has entailed negotiation among different groups, all of which may have different priorities and perspectives. But that alliance-building project becomes impossible when one sect or another demands that disagreement be treated as a form of thoughtcrime. Deplatforming doesn’t just hurt the target; it also hurts the movement, since the summary excommunication of dissidents means that adherents never need to acknowledge or address counterarguments, internal logical inconsistencies, or the off-putting nature of their message.

Indeed, ideologues such as Nikole Hannah-Jones claim that politics has a colour: Blacks who aren’t “politically black” are traitors who collaborate with “whiteness.” As seen through this lens, Asian-Americans who fight anti-Asian discrimination in the context of affirmative action are supposedly puppets of white supremacists, and the LGB Alliance, by standing up for same-sex attraction, is smeared as a transphobic hate group. (For asserting that biology is real, Stonewall UK even tried to destroy the career of one of the LGB Alliance’s founders, Allison Bailey, a lifelong social justice advocate who happens to be a black, working-class lesbian, and the child of immigrant parents. Thankfully, Stonewall did not prevail.)

Opponents of cancel culture often focus on its negative effects on conservatives. But it’s often woke organizations that end up imploding under its strains, typically due to internal battles over victimhood status and linguistic control. In recent years, many of these groups have been driven off the rails by single-issue gender activists who are willing to support misogyny and homophobia in the name of trans rights; or BLM activists willing to permit racism directed at “model minorities.” Even antisemites have been allowed to infiltrate left-wing political parties, the arts establishment, and anti-racist education initiatives. No wonder everyone involved with this movement is always complaining about how emotionally “exhausted” they are: They’re surrounded by toxic fellow travellers who gaslight them as right-stooges if they dare raise a complaint.

Another notable feature of militant social-justice movements is the sheer joylessness of their leaders and supporters, a condition that often seems to blur into a collectively embraced state of clinical depression and paranoia. This posture flows from their presupposition that they suffer endlessly due to the malignant primordial character of “whiteness” and heteronormativity (or, yet worse, cisheteronormativity). The language of individual agency and hope, which animates liberalism, is replaced with a soul-dead idiom by which the activist presents as a self-pitying victim of oppression, constantly at risk of suicidal ideation, erasure, and genocide.

Even privileged “allies” are encouraged to dwell on their whiteness, straightness, cisness, “settler” status, and other marks of intersectional Cain. By erasing the possibility of redemption, the movement alienates liberal allies who are seeking to build bridges with others en route to living successful and fulfilling lives in a way that escapes the politics of identity. The social-justice puritan, being primarily concerned with advancing his status within a cultish inward-seeking subculture that’s constantly inventing new grievances, on the other hand, finds such a goal unthinkable.

The use of words such as “harm” and “violence” to describe the microaggressions known to the rest of us as “daily life” is a particularly unattractive feature of social-justice culture. In the 1980s, gays and lesbians responded to daily discrimination with the chant, “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it.” Today, the children and grandchildren of that generation, now enjoying full civil rights and perches within elites sectors of government, culture, and high society, instead tell us, “We’re here, we’re queer, and … we’re terrified to step outside.” As a gay man, it’s humiliating to hear this kind of maudlin rhetoric uttered in my name.

The broad public, long sympathetic and accommodating, has had it. People have no time for hysterical activists who whine, bully, and hector them about things they didn’t do and over which they have no control. This is particularly true when those same activists demand the elimination of women’s sex-based rights, the medical sterilization of children and teens, and the explicit exclusion of job applicants by race. The more that ordinary men and women came to learn about gay marriage, the more they accepted it. By contrast, the more that ordinary men and women come to learn about trans-activist demands and critical race theory, the more they’ve become repulsed.

Support for Black Lives Matter collapsed when the woke trivialized the arson and looting that accompanied the George Floyd protests. The public was completely onside with the left’s demand for police reform, but horrified by the extremist push to dismantle public security, and enraged that the left justified breaking pandemic restrictions for protests while insisting that grieving families be kept from their dying relatives in hospitals.

Likewise, Lia Thomas tanked support on gender radicalism. The public had long welcomed trans civil rights, sympathized with those suffering dysphoria, and accepted that even non-dysphoric trans-identified individuals should be able to live and present as they wished. But the sight of a strapping, butch male taking women’s prizes and opportunities was a breaststroke too far.

Facing resistance, the woke doubled down, insisting on automatic gender affirmation for everyone, including rapists and children. The result gifted social conservatives an issue of concern to majorities across the political spectrum. Now, progressives in the U.S. face a raft of bills that, among other things, resurrect false charges of Alphabet paedophilia. No wonder LGB groups are jettisoning the T: In the space of just a few years, trans activists have undone the good work that gay activists did over multiple generations.

The progressive movement must stand up to its extremists. We must restore the liberal social compact that won our civil and human rights. That means we should root our claims in areas of common ground, demanding fair treatment, but not the right to dictate what others think.

The most intense theatres of culture-war combat involve the education of children, an area in which liberal attitudes must be allowed to hold sway. Popular free speech principles should be applied to school libraries and curricula — which means opposing campaigns to root out books demonized by both the left and the right alike. In classrooms, an open exploration of history can provide a context for kids to discuss how injustices were overcome in the past and how they might be handled in the present. Students can be taught to brainstorm how to use their advantages to help the less fortunate, and how others in their situation have dealt with adversity. But they should never be taught that personal relationships and moral hierarchies are determined by the colour of one’s skin.

Likewise, boys and girls should be allowed to play and dress free of gender stereotypes, with a no-bullying policy strictly enforced. They should learn who they are by themselves, and be taught that they are more than the sum of their parts. They should not be labelled by ideological adults consumed by a mania for gender theory. In school, I skipped with the girls, had a lisp, and liked to play with china elves. That didn’t make me a girl, just as dressing butch and dreading the effects of a puberty doesn’t turn a lesbian into a boy. (I shudder to think what might have happened were I a child today.)

We should also return to the left’s traditional focus on class. Diversty, equity, and inclusion initiatives enrich the small group of well-educated profiteers who proselytize the DEI faith, but they’re actually worse than useless when it comes to workplaces, exacerbating intolerance among the hapless workers forced to submit to tedious seminars and questionnaires. Resources from the DEI industry’s rapidly metastasizing bureaucracies should be redirected to programs that materially help the poor: Unlike affirmative action programs, investments in deprived neighbourhoods disproportionately assist minorities without the creation of double-standards and racial left-behinds that serve to energize white nationalists. They also support social mobility and economic inclusion.

“I just want to say—you know—can we, can we all get along?” is how Rodney King put it in 1991. While many of us might read the underlying sentiment as self-evident, the militant social-justice left now treats it as a forbidden lie, since the entire movement is based on the conceit that peaceful and harmonious coexistence is impossible within a pluralistic liberal society that doesn’t forcibly “queer” itself, endlessly hector citizens about their bigotry, and segregate workers and students by skin colour.

I believe we can all get along. As a progressive, a gay man, a Canadian, and a liberal, I want no part of any movement — whatever it calls itself — that insists we can’t.

[ Mirror: https://archive.is/es3Q4 ]

To the extent that liberal principles are actually being rejected, it's coming from both the authoritarian reactionary right, and the authoritarian postmodern left.

#Allan Stratton #liberal ethics #liberal values #liberalism #illiberalism #antiliberalism #anti liberal #critical social justice #social justice #wokeism #cult of woke #wokeness as religion #woke #toxic wokeness #religion is a mental illness

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athinginmotion · 6 months

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I’m seriously so exhausted by the way self-identified progressives/leftists constantly are creating a new group of women to whom it is acceptable to be sexist/misogynistic. It depresses me how misogyny is so adaptable and resilient in some people that it’s like it’s constantly migrating into new forms.

Calling a woman a “pick me” is now a way to abuse any woman who expresses discomfort with female stereotypes or dissents from the braindead platitudes that constitute feminism on TikTok. Even actual “pick mes,” women who are desperate for male validation at the expense of other women, receive a level of vitriol from men and women alike that is so disproportionate, with whole comedy accounts devoted to mocking them.

“Girlboss feminism” started out as a justified critique of neoliberal women who cynically use the rhetoric of female empowerment for self-serving ends. Now it’s just a catch-all term to abuse women who dare to complain about misogyny while being (or being perceived to be) wealthy or privileged. Or a way to be snide about women who are literally just ambitious, assertive and unapologetically invested in their careers. I used to use this term a lot but honestly I can’t pretend that it hasn’t breached containment and become just another gendered term of abuse. Like I was watching a movie recently with my friend and his flatmate and his flatmate mockingly described one of the female characters as a “girlboss” because she was… characterised as competent and intelligent?? Hello?? It’s so fucking transparent.

Same with “white feminism” which, again, started out as a legitimate critique of feminism that fails to consider race and now is just like… pretty much anything that is explicitly concerned with women’s issues like periods, body hair removal…as though it was only white women who were affected by those things. It’s just nakedly a way to trivialise and undermine women issues. “Basic white girls,” again, is a way for people, usually men WHO ARE ALSO WHITE to make age-old sexist comments about women being silly, frivolous, air-headed…often for doing things that aren’t even particularly unique to white women. I’m fucking sick of it seriously!!!

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taylortruther · 1 year

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The way ✨the internet✨ looks at life seems very transactional. It’s like people say they don’t expect people to be perfect, but when you make a mistake - in this case, by association (and I’m caught up in this changing how I see Taylor), they think she needs to do something to make up for it, like release a statement, or platform activists, or publicly donate money to a related cause. But the same type of people wanting that, would also call it disingenuous.

It’s like the social pressure to be perfect representatives of our communities and perfect allies to one’s we don’t belong to is actually making society at large (at least the constantly online) become less interested in getting equality, and more interested in looking like they care. It’s exhausting

it's funny you say that because last night i was going through a pretty popular blog, who i've seen reblogged a lot on this matter. they've been pretty harsh about it, which is fine, but while going through their activist posts i saw them reblog a post that made your point, anon - that no one is perfect, that the expectation that good people will never do/say/align themselves with problematic things is misguided, that true equality means accepting some people where they are (which might mean there's traces of bigotry in their mindset), etc.

like... it was a pretty radical post they reblogged because that opinion is fairly unpopular in practice! and i just wish they'd explained how that applies or doesn't apply to this situation. i'm guessing they'd say taylor is a rich white straight lady and matty is a rich white straight man, they both have platforms, so they don't get that grace. but the way we talk about this celebrity situation can inform how people think about social issues as a whole and, we know that matty considers himself a leftist or at least progressive... so there's value in discerning his politics, as they have now entered the public square. but idk.

tldr i agree with you and it makes me sad and a little scared lol

#hot taykes

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rosethornewrites · 2 years

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TERFs be like: You insulted the TERFmother by pointing out her racism, you must be a terrible teacher!

Me: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Die mad about it. /blocks

The sheer peace of never dealing with them again is delicious. But lol, based on one conversation with one student, mmkay. You must be a barrel of laughs to attempt to have a conversation with.

Back when I was a grad student, I went to a Halloween party. It was the year all the professors dressed as Joe the Plumber. Ran into someone there who went to my undergrad institution, which was unusual since I was 2000 miles from there.

The conversation was going well until she mentioned her favorite professor. This was a professor I knew, first from leftist organizations and second from a frankly terrible class I would’ve dropped if not for the fact it was required for my minor.

This professor tried to tell us that war is a result of patriarchy because violence is a masculine tendency, showed documentaries with misinformation, etc. AKA shit a freshman might buy, but I’d taken classes on hate and violence, stereotypes and prejudice, and I mostly learned how not to teach. In essence, she was indoctrinating, not teaching.

I’m honest, so I told this fellow alum that I was part of several organizations with the professor but had not enjoyed the class I took with her.

Just like with certain authors who shall not be named, daring to say anything negative about the professor this woman idolized was a cardinal sin.

The conversation devolved to the point where, when I used the word “brotherhood” in reference to human unity and also referring to the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., she outright called me sexist.

I was not drunk enough to bother with further conversation, so I turned on my heel and walked away, never to return to ever speak to her again.

My project for one of my grad courses that year was researching and analyzing a knock-down-drag-out vitriolic academic fight in an English scholarly journal, wherein an academic wrote an article about the problems of indoctrination in college composition courses by professors who abused their power, and several academics felt called out and responded in a knee-jerk way with what were essentially academic diatribes.

Interesting project, but exhausting. I can, as a teacher, have social and politics opinions. If I make parroting my opinion part of the course requirement? That’s when I’d be a shitty professor. A conversation with a student that is unrelated to course material and is not figuring into the grade in any way is innocuous compared to the truly ugly shit I’ve seen in academia. (And if I’m honest the ugliest shit I’ve seen in academia is from either white cishet males or rad-fems. Equally, so I guess congrats on shattering that glass ceiling.)

I will never be drunk enough to put up with “gender critical” “rad-fem” TERFs. They will always go on my block list, and their opinions on my life have no value.

I don’t babysit toddlers, either.

#terfs

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michaels-blackhat · 4 years

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So You’re Feeling White Guilt and You Don’t Know What To Do

I’m not going to rehash the most recent Roswell New Mexico fandom news. I’m not going to rehash any of the difficult and necessary conversations surrounding race and racism that have been happening over the last week. They are important, they shine an important light on fandom racism, and they have caused many to reflect on their own unconscious bias and how it has manifested itself in fandom. That’s important. That is the constant work of an ally: to reflect on your bias and your actions and take steps to inform yourself and do better. As participants in a racist society and a culture that tries to say that racism is only an overt, obvious thing, we must always take the time to listen to others and change our own behavior.

This post isn’t necessarily about that either. It’s about how you can do other, small things, for yourself to help a community and individuals who are continuously mistreated, whose suffering is continuously erased, and whose culture is continuously stolen. Political involvement is always an option, but it’s also not always possible. I know for myself, I work two jobs that leave me with 14 hours days multiple times a week, and only one day off a week to relax, do household chores, and prepare for my grad school classes. I can exercise my right to vote, right to assembly, etc. but sometimes doing more isn’t a viable option.

So what else can I do?

Below I have accumulated links to different relief funds, bail funds for protesters, language programs, native artist collectives and stores, musicians, and conservation project.. Some of the links will take you to a larger project that you can explore. Some of the links will be for direct donations. This is not exhaustive. This is limited to what I’m able to find and authenticate to the best of my ability. But I wanted to put this out into the world, as an example of different ways you can support people, cultures, and communities. I invite anyone to add on to the list, particularly people who are Native American.

Special thanks to @jocarthage for being an amazing resource and adding to my already long list. And @litwitlady for the bookstore link. Additionally, I was writing this and realized how long this got, so I started limiting to two or three links per area. Please, add on.

Relief Funds:

An article from Navajo Times that highlights different Coronavirus relief funds, including the Navajo Department of Health, John Hopkins Center for American Indian Health, relief for families and children, and Food Baskets for Elderly.

https://navajotimes.com/coronavirus-updates/relief-for-coronavirus/

Reply with recommendations

Bail Fund:

A thread on the O’odham land & water protectors: https://twitter.com/LaikenJordahl/status/1315707808470503427?s=20

And the bail fund: https://t.co/yzyDnEi0x6?amp=1

Generally, the National Bail Fund Network’s twitter page is a good place to go to keep up about bail funds for protesters for many leftist causes. They also help with immigration detention and the cause to end money bail in general. https://twitter.com/bailfundnetwork?lang=en

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Language Programs:

https://www.firstnations.org/projects/native-language-immersion-initiative/ : The Native Language Immersion Initiative aims to build the capacity of and directly support Native American language-immersion and culture-retention programs. They work with the National Endowment for the Humanities, along with support from the Lannan Foundation, Kalliopeia Foundation and the NoVo Foundation. The linked website has the list of grantees from the previous years, so you can go and explore the different language programs that have benefitted from the initiative. The NLII aims to support the cultural and linguistic preservation of all Indigenous Americans, including Native Alaskan and Native Hawaiian cultures.

The website also allows you to explore their programs, learn more about topics such as environmental justice within native communities, and donate directly.

Duolinguo has short courses in both Navajo and Hawai‘i. They’re not perfect, but they’re a good starting point. Spending some time getting used to the sounds and cadences can be really grounding in the realities of the language and grammar (and if everyone who read our fics downloaded it, it would give Duolingo a strong indicator of interest in these languages, which might encourage them to invest in making them full courses).

Reply with recommendations

Art & Clothing & Holiday Presents:

Art and clothing are grouped together, as a lot of the websites feature both.

Beyond Buckskin: https://shop.beyondbuckskin.com/

A shop/collective started by a member of the Turtle Mountain Chippewa tribe. They have a variety of products and you can learn more about their individual artist. They also have events, news, and a lot of cool things to explore on their website.

+their buy native list:

http://www.beyondbuckskin.com/p/buy-native.html

b.Yellowtail: https://byellowtail.com/pages/about-us

The clothes are designed by Bethany Yellowtail, a Northern Cheyenne & Crow fashion designer. The art and jewelry are made by hand by a collective of Native Americans, First Nations, and Indigenous creatures throughout North America.

SheNative: https://www.shenative.com/

A shop that primarily focuses on leatherwork, but does have other products as well. The aim of the company is to empower Indigenous women, so Idigenous women work on all levels of the manufacturing of the products. Additionally, they donate at least 10% of profits towards causes and charities that aim specifically to help Indigenous women.

Etkie: https://etkie.com/

This collective of Native American artists all hail from New Mexico. They specialize in beaded cuffs, all of which are gorgeous. Personal note, I very much want the Dawn Glass Cuff.

There are a lot of people who sell Native American art who are not, in fact, Native American people. Here are some sources:

The Indian Pueblo Store is owned and operated by New Mexico’s 19 Pueblo tribes. Find our physical location at the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center in Albuquerque https://www.indianpueblostore.com

The bookstore in the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian has one of the best collections of books about Native American life, by Native American authors, anywhere we’ve found (if you become a member for $25 a year, you get their excellent quarterly magazine) https://americanindian.si.edu/store

Weirdly for a museum named for a man famous for playing a white cowboy in American movies, the Gene Autry museum in Los Angeles has one of the other really good collections of books by Native American authors on modern Native American life, as well as historical books: https://shop.theautry.org/collections/books

I haven’t been, but the Heard Museum gets recommended a lot and their shop has a lot of authentic Native American pieces: https://www.heardmuseumshop.com/

Birchbark Native Arts seems to have an extensive collection: https://www.birchbarknativearts.com and is associated with the bookstore mentioned below

Note from JoCarthage: In 2016 I drove to all 58 counties in California and started my collection of books on Native American tribes living and working in California, both as research for what I thought might be a book and because I was curious. A lot of the books I found are not on Amazon, you can only buy them in reservation book stores or National Park bookstores or little county museum bookstores. When the world opens back up again, that is a good process I have found for building my own understandings.

It’s not a perfect system, but when you’re shopping, look for the term “Authentic Native American artworks” and a seal like this one; here is a longer guide to buying Native American art:

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Music:

Spotify & website links are provided. This is also limited to what I know and already listen to.

A Tribe Called Red: Website: http://atribecalledred.com/ | Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/2jlWF9ltd8UtoaqW0PxY4z

Mary Youngblood: Website: http://www.maryyoungblood.com/ | Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/0pRrf0i6X4uUIdzYrA2mDz

Buffy Sainte-Marie: Website http://buffysainte-marie.com/ | Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/5exO2eW84QucBhrRhcK76x

youtube

[Video: A Tribe Called Red’s “Burn Your Village to the Ground”]

Books:

Based on the theory that the best information is closest to the source, all of the books below are written by Native American authors; the bookshops are owned by Native America booksellers.

Bookshops:

Birchbark Books, a bookshop in Minneapolis: https://birchbarkbooks.com/ They also have art, jewelry, and community events. When available, the links for the books below are provided through the store’s website.

Book Recommendations:

Nonfiction and hilarious: Custer Died for Your Sins, by Vine Deloria Jr (Standing Rock Sioux): https://birchbarkbooks.com/all-online-titles/custer-died-for-your-sins

Poetry: New Poets of Native Nations, edited by Heid E. Erdrich (Ojibwe): https://birchbarkbooks.com/all-online-titles/new-poets-of-native-nations

Novel (murder mystery): Chenoo, by Joseph Bruchac (Abenaki): https://www.oupress.com/books/14415530/chenoo

Poetry: When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry, edited by US Poet Laureate Joy Harjo (Muscogee Nation): https://birchbarkbooks.com/CatalogueRetrieve.aspx?ProductID=9713772&A=SearchResult&SearchID=11528255&ObjectID=9713772&ObjectType=27

Art book: First American Art, Edited by Bruce Bernstein and Gerald McMaster (Plains Cree and member of the Siksika Nation) https://americanindian.si.edu/store/books-and-products#1845

(The Mitsitam Cafe Cookbook: Recipes from the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian by Richard Hetzler (Not a Native American person but the recipes reflect a huge range of modern Native American recipes and are worth cooking through ) https://birchbarkbooks.com/CatalogueRetrieve.aspx?ProductID=9685880&A=SearchResult&SearchID=11528257&ObjectID=9685880&ObjectType=27)

Here is a selection of children’s books, YA, memoir and biography, and Native American fiction and poetry, Native studies, and Native language

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Diné and other Native American actors’ accounts to follow:

Why include fun social media stuff: because we’re humans and we like nice things. It’s very hard to keep learning about something that challenges our whiteness and privileges if everything we read and consume is painful and grim. It also fundamentally limits the stories we consume about modern Native American lives if all we do is wallow. So read good poetry, cook recipes that are shared freely, follow pretty actors on Instagram. When Jo went through her house to find the above book recommendations, 4 of them were on her Native American section, one in her poetry section, and one in her cookbook section. Native American stories and food and life are part of modern American life and integrated them into your bookshelves and menus and IG scrolling is a good way to stay aware and learn more osmotically.

Kawennáhere Devery Jacobs (kanien’kehá:ka from ⁣⁣⁣ kahnawà:ke mohawk territory⁣⁣⁣) https://www.instagram.com/kdeveryjacobs/?hl=en

Tatanka Means https://www.instagram.com/tatankameans/?hl=en

Jay Tavare https://www.instagram.com/jaytavare/?hl=en

Forrest Goodluck seems to not be active on social media, but he’s worth keeping an eye out for https://twitter.com/forrestgoodluck?lang=en

Check out more here, from pocfansmatter https://pocfansmatter.tumblr.com/post/632180141361119232/my-favorite-native-american-men

Reply with recommendations

News Sources:

Note: none of these are perfect. They all have their own biases, foci, and weirdnesses. But if you subscribe by email to a few of them, you’ll get a pretty good idea of what issues are important, generally.

Native America Calling: https://www.nativeamericacalling.com/

Navajo Times: https://navajotimes.com/

Indian Country Today: https://indiancountrytoday.com/

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Conservation:

A petition to close Mt Rushmore and to return public lands in the Black Hills to the Oceti Sakowin (Seven Council Fires of Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota Nations).

https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/petition-to-close-mt-rushmore-and-return-all-public-lands-in-the-black-hills-to-the-oceti-sakowin

From the site: “Standing in solidarity with our ancestors, families, our allies, and the Oceti Sakowin (Seven Council Fires of Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota Nations), we are calling on Director Bernhardt and Representative Deb Haaland to close Mt. Rushmore and return all Public lands in the Black Hills to the Oceti Sakowin as negotiated in the 1868 Treaty of Ft. Laramie, as Indigenous treaties are the supreme law of the land.”

The Kumeyaay people are currently protesting against the illegal destruction of their sacred lands to build the border wall. You can keep up with their work and support them directly through their twitter account.

https://twitter.com/kumeyaayprotest?lang=en

The Native American Land Conservancy aims to reacquire Native American land, particularly in Southern California, to preserve and protect sacred sites and areas.

The group has a mix of board members from a variety of tribes, along with members who are not affiliated with a tribe but have a focus and background in environmental conservation.

Reply with recommendations

Thank you for sticking with us through this whole list. It’s long, yes, but it does not even begin to show even a small percentage of places and artists you can support.

And as for what to do about your white guilt? Live with it. It’s not going to help anyone if you express your guilt continuously. It’s not going to help anyone if you push it aside. Live with it. We benefit from a racist system and we should not forget it. Do what you can to help others, lend your voice in support of others. And for fuck’s sake remember that it’s not about us.

#resources #native american #Tyler Blackburn #native american artists #indigenous peoples #I'm sorry I actually have no idea how to tag this #but also i'm not sorry for tagging the actor because I think it's a thing that people who maybe want to avoid the truth should see

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swamp-world · 4 years

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God you know i actually fucking hate internet leftists??? like. jesus christ. get your head out of your “““theory”““ and step out of the fucking echo chamber for a minute. i get that liberals “aid fascism”, and i don’t put that in air quotes because i think it’s false, but because you need to do more than just SAY that. for the LOVE OF GOD PLEASE try interacting with people outside of your own political fucking bubbles. you are NOT going to “overthrow the government and replace it with unionism and a truly democratic system”, you are NOT going to “replace your boss with a coop workplace”--all of which are excellent ideas--if you just sit around going “LIBERALS ARE TERRIBLE”. like, holy FUCK, stop blaming people for being optimistic. no, I also don’t think that capitalism can be reformed, but you don’t fucking LEARN that overnight, you don’t just go from being a fascist bootlicker to being a tankie in the span of 24 hours and a single conversation, it takes TIME and building GENUINE POSITIVE FUCKING CONNECTIONS WITH PEOPLE. no, i’m not telling Black people or queer people or POC or disabled people to go out and debate their own humanity. you do not have to do that. i’m saying that you need to stop taking ““liberals”“ who are genuinely well-meaning and well-intentioned but simply do not have the experience and knowledge that you have, and YELL at them and talk about “hope they learned their lesson” and all of those “woman who voted for face-eating leopard party surprised when leopards eat her face” things because like. fuck. people are human and believe things, im SO sorry that you don’t realize that. were you birthed into this world holding Das Kapital? did you just fucking, pop out of the womb, and your first words were “workers of the world unite”? or did it take you years, possibly decades, to grasp even the basic concepts of this?? let alone actually dive into “the theory” and connect to communities that put that into practice?

stop telling liberals to “go read theory” because that’s useless. you’re not helping people. you’re telling strangers, new to the scene, to dive headfirst into what is genuinely dense political, economic, and philosophical work. i do that full time and it’s fucking draining, bro!! i wouldn’t know where to start if someone said “go read theory”, the only reason i had any idea was legitimately because a professor handed me a book that got me into modern center-left politics, and then a friend lent me Kropotkin, and then I hit the stacks and walked into the library and picked up a book called On Anarchism because it was the first book that I saw that was relevant. theory!! is!! exhausting!!! it’s hard to understand!! and if your first reaction is to go “haha liberal they got what they deserved” when they inevitably get fucked over by the people they believed in? if your first response to someone genuinely trying to get more information, genuinely reaching out and trying to learn? asking questions? is to say “go read theory”? your political position isn’t based on genuinely caring about people, it’s about superiority. you think that you’re SUCH a good person, that you’re SO MUCH BETTER than “those fucking liberal cucks” because you rEaD tHe ThEoRy when you turned 18. if your response is “they got fucked over, hope they learned their lesson” in a condescending way? yes, i understand that harm has been done. but for the love of fucking god, show some compassion. i don’t know what brand of leftist I am. i don’t sit down at my desk staring at seven different ideological streams of philosophy and communism or anarchism. i want people to have food. i want people to have healthcare and childcare. i don’t think people should have to work their asses off just to live and have a roof over their head or not freeze in winter. i think that we can’t trust the government in its current form, and that capitalism is bad, and that workers are exploited by their bosses, and that worker-owned cooperatives or housing cooperatives are great ideas. beyond that, I don’t know. because quite frankly, I don’t consider it my job to know.

listen to me--it’s not my job to have the answers to “what will we do when the glorious revolution comes about?”. What IS my job, is to talk to people. to listen to people. to reach out and help them. my job is to also learn from people, because i am not perfect. LEFTISTS: YOU ARE NOT PERFECT. if you go around thinking that you just need to convince everyone to “the way”, then you are not interested in learning from the people around you, you are interested in converting people without having to challenge your own beliefs, or without having to consider that ACTUALLY most of the world doesn’t understand the concepts of “alienated labour” and like, genuinely, how many people do you actually think understand in a way that can be applied terms like “proletariat”? of COURSE people are freaked out by leftists. of course when you say “Defund the police” white moderates get scared. i agree with MLK--that the white moderate is the biggest threat to justice and equality. but what are you going to do about it? a tyrrany of the (leftist) minority? eliminate the moderates? or are you going to actually reach out a hand and try to help?

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jspark3000 · 4 years

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(Pt.1) Could you maybe identify what policies or laws are racist? Or perhaps you could elaborate on the part where you said you encountered people who were limited from jobs, housing, custody rights, resources due to racism. What happened for you to come to that conclusion? I’m not dismissing you but asking genuinely. If there is something racist about our systems, I would like to know too. Trust me. Please don’t feel rushed or pressured to respond to these right away btw

Hello there, you’re referring to this post.

Here’s part 2 of your question: Pt.2 I think many are just concerned that all disparities/suffering are seen to be a result of sys. racism. This may not be helpful when addressing complex/multifaceted issues. There are many Black & non-Black voices alike who are truly concerned about the problems and suffering in the Black community but do not agree with the systemic racism narrative, but they are silenced/cancelled. I say this with respect, but why give yourself the authority to assume another’s intentions? Ty for answering

—

I think these are excellent questions, and I’d like to gently point out two things.

1) I have received dozens of messages and comments like yours with the exact same phrasing. Really. It’s eerie. It’s to the point where I wonder if they’re all coming from the same individual. You used keywords like elaborate, asking genuinely, and just concerned. The whole Just Asking Questions type of concern trolling is practically a meme by now, in which you’re “not dismissing” the issue and that “many Black and non-Black” people are “truly concerned about” not buying into the “narrative.”

Now I’m not saying you’re a concern-troll. You may be genuinely interested in these answers. Certainly I’d like to think so. I’m simply weirded out at how often I get these sorts of messages with the same sort of “what about” type of curiosity, with the same words verbatim, like a preprogrammed script. I have had this conversation many, many times. It never goes well, mostly because it’s not seeking to learn, it’s seeking to win.

I’ll try to save some time. This is usually how the conversation goes: I’ll bring up redlining, or Jim Crow laws, or how the super predator laws in the 90s still disproportionately affect Black individuals today, or that proportionately a Black individual is 2.65 times more likely to be killed by police than a white individual, or multiple experiments have shown that a “Black-sounding” name with the same exact resume as a “white-sounding” name is statistically less likely to get the same job, or that Black individuals are far more likely to be given greater sentences for the same exact crimes, or impoverished Black communities also trap these communities into less funded education, which has trapped generations with fewer resources. This is the tip of the iceberg.

Then you’ll systematically attempt to discredit every one of my sources (I didn’t post them because at this point, who even reads them anymore), you may say I’m a radical leftist or antifa or that my numbers are off or that I’m not seeing the bigger picture, you’ll quote the 13/50 statistic, you’ll point me to Ben Shapiro or Candace Owens or PragerU or Steven Crowder or even Shaun King for some reason, you’ll tell me about the dangers of welfare and the need for personal responsibility, you’ll bring up Chicago and black-on-black crime, you’ll tell me you agree with protests but hate rioters, you’ll bring up David Dorn and “what about Tony Timpa,” you’ll say Ferguson was a fraud and Nick Sandmann is proof of deep state, you’ll eventually tell me that Black people got themselves into this mess and need to dig their way out and they need to “get off the government teat” and “stop having kids” and “stop making excuses”—and the whole time you’ll tell me you’re just concerned and Just Asking Questions.

I mean, this is always how it goes. Maybe you’ll surprise me? But in the end, probably neither of us will change our minds. You’ll tell your friends you tried. You’ll use me as an example of close-mindedness. You’ll most likely never look up any of these stats. If our conversation goes differently than this, then I am very glad to be wrong.

Perhaps I’m being too jaded and cynical. I apologize that I sound so tired (my daughter is turning three weeks old tomorrow and it’s been exhausting). It’s just—someone who doesn’t believe in systemic racism despite the evidence probably has an entire worldview that must support this anti-view, no matter what. I’ve already said that systemic racism exists plus there is social responsibility involved. It can be both. But to invalidate the former simply destroys all available potential for learning how to best heal. No, I don’t think you’re a bad person for not believing in systemic racism. But misinformed? Yes.

So as much as I love to build bridges, I find it hard it to trust that these conversations are real dialogue. They seem to me some kind of secret conversion tactic, or trying to make an example of me. If you’re really, really concerned, then my hope is you take some days and weeks to enter these situations and find out for yourself.

2) I would like to kindly address your statement here: “I say this with respect, but why give yourself the authority to assume another’s intentions?”

So this is the third time you’ve said “You’re assuming my intentions,” and this time you said “why give yourself the authority to assume another’s intentions.”

I am not a therapist, but I think you may be inadvertently reenacting the Karpman Drama Triangle. I’ve done the same thing, and it took me years of therapy and mentoring to overcome this. Basically, the Karpman Triangle creates a dynamic of Persecutor, Victim, and Rescuer. By constantly saying “you’re assuming my intentions,” you’ve placed me in the role of the Persecutor and yourself as the Victim. This was obvious when you said “why give yourself authority”—by using a lite ad hominem to call me the authority, you’ve now placed yourself in the innocent hapless role of victim. By turn, you now will eventually become the Rescuer by saving yourself through my conversion or yourself from the “persecution.”

Now this is only my speculation and you may not know you’re doing this, if you’re even doing this at all. I’m saying this to you because, well, I’m concerned. You may have been deeply affected by certain family dynamics or trauma to reenact the Karpman Triangle. I’ve unfortunately re-enacted this Triangle many times, and perhaps even did so unwittingly in some of these posts. But it’s good to get some counseling for this; please believe me on that. Re-enacting the Triangle can seriously affect all your relationships and will make it much harder to have real conversations or to challenge your beliefs. I would know: it has nearly ruined me many times. Even if you’re not in the Triangle, I still highly advise counseling anyway. If you’re in counseling already, I would bring this up and see if this rings true for you.

— J.S.

#race #racism

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arcticdementor · 3 years

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Kayfabe is a treasured part of pro wrestling culture. Kayfabe refers to the commitment of everyone involved (the wrestlers, the refs, the announcers, and to a certain degree the fans) to maintaining the shared fiction that pro wrestling matches are unscripted. (Wrestling is real, in the sense that the athletes are taking real punishment and risk really getting hurt, and there is a degree of improvisation, but the outcomes are predetermined.) Kayfabe has had a kind of mythical importance to many in the pro wrestling community: you keep kayfabe no matter what, even in the event of serious injury, out of a sense of sacred commitment. Crucial to understanding kayfabe is that it is not an attempt to deceive the audience. Modern wrestling is in some ways perfectly open about the scripted nature of the matches. Fooling people is not the point. If every fan signed an affidavit saying they knew the outcomes were predetermined the wrestlers would still keep kayfabe, out of commitment to the culture. Kayfabe is a mutually-approved illusion. It is artifice, but it is mutually agreed upon artifice, a consensual fantasy.

Our current political culture is kayfabe.

The illusion that we pretend to believe is that we are in some sort of uniquely politically fertile moment for progressivism and social justice, that we are experiencing a social revolution or “Great Awokening.” Further, we keep kayfabe by acting as if we believe that certain policies like police abolition or abolishing border enforcement (or if you prefer utterly meaningless sloganeering, “abolishing ICE”) are tangibly viable in anything like the near future. I say that these are kayfabe to emphasize my belief that most people who endorse these beliefs are well aware that they are not true, and to underline the sense in which the commitment to unreality is mutual, an expression of a strange kind of social contract. Most thinking adults comprehend the current moment and understand that the hand of establishment power and the influence of social inertia are as strong as ever. (Why would you feel otherwise?) But because people have understandably been moved by recent righteous calls for justice, they feel they must accept the fiction of a new awakening to show solidarity with the victims of injustice. This is emotionally understandable, but strategically counterproductive. And indeed one thing that has defined these new social movements is their relentless commitment to the emotional over the strategic.

…

Living in a culture of political kayfabe is a strange experience. It feels the way that, I imagine, it feels to live under a truly authoritarian government, where you’re constantly having exchanges where everyone involved knows that what they’re saying is bogus but you push right through the cognitive dissonance with a smile on your face. Only you’re not compelled by the fear of torture or imprisonment but of vague-but-intense social dictates, of the crucial priority of appearing to be the right kind of person. So often political conversations today have this dual quality where you feel forced to constantly evaluate what your interlocutor actually believes even as propriety compels you to take seriously what’s coming out of their mouth.

A major negative consequence of our commitment to kayfabe lies in our acceptance of behaviors we would ordinarily never accept, under the theory that this is such a special time, we need to shut up and go along with it. Take our broken discourse, as frequently discussed in “cancel culture” debates. My experience and my intuition tell me that almost everyone in the progressive/left/socialist world knows that our discourse norms and culture are totally fucked up. Trust me: most people in liberal spaces, Black and white, male and female, trans and cis, most certainly including people in academia and media, are well aware that we’ve entered into a bizarre never-ending production of The Crucible we can’t get out of. They’re probably just as sick of Woko Haram as I am.

But they’re either empowered and enriched by this state of affairs, and don’t want the party to end, or they’re holding on for dear life trying not to get their lives ruined for speaking out of turn. Look past self-interest and self-preservation and you’ll find that everybody knows that the way left spaces work now is horribly broken and dysfunctional. The problem is that thinking people who would ordinarily object don’t because they’ve been convinced that this is some sort of special moment pregnant with progressive potential, and that is more important than rights, compassion, or fairness. So we maintain a shared pretense that things are cool the way you go through the motions on an awful date where you’re both aware you’ll never see each other again.

If I say “cancel culture,” normies indeed don’t know what I’m talking about, because they are healthy, adjusted people with a decent set of priorities who value their own time and lives too much to get caught up in all of this horseshit. But if I say “cancel culture” in front of a bunch of politics-obsessed professional-class shitlibs they will pretend to not know what I’m talking about. They’ll put on a rich fucking show. They do an impression of Cletus from The Simpsons and go “cancel culture?!? Hyuck hyuck what’re that? I’m not knowing cancel culture, I’m just a simple country lad!” These are people who have read more about cancel culture in thinkpieces than I read about any topic in a year. But pretending you don’t know what cancel culture is happens to be a key part of the performance, a naked in-group signifier, so they pretend. The “I don’t know what cancel culture is” bullshit performance is kayfabe at its most infuriating. I know you know what cancel culture is because you’re currently using it to demonstrate your culture positioning by pretending you don’t know what it is. You fucking simpleton.

People say and do weird shit and it’s all wrong but you just pretend like it isn’t. Who wants to be the one caught making waves? When you’re in a group of people and someone engages in something patently ridiculous - when, for example, someone says “AAVE” in an ordinary social situation with no academic or political reason to use jargon, even though everyone there knows the phrase “the way Black people talk” is more elegant, useful, and true - and the moment passes and there’s this inability to look each other in the eye, when everybody starts studying their drink and clearing their throat, that’s life under kayfabe.

Getting to this is not normal. It’s not a healthy state of affairs. It can only happen when people come to believe that self-preservation requires pretending things are OK.

…

It is at this point that people say that “defund” does not mean “abolish,” which is true, and Defund the Police indeed does not mean “abolish the police.” Defund the police means nothing, now, though I’m sure that the people who started using it had noble intentions. At this point it’s a floating signifier, an empty slogan that people rallied around with zero understanding of what semantic content it could possibly contain. If it’s meant to be a radical demand, why use the vocabulary of an actuary? If it’s meant to mean a meaningful but strategic drawdown of resources, why use it interchangeably with “abolish”? I cannot imagine a more comprehensive failure of basic political messaging than Defund the Police. Amateur hour from beginning to end.

I take the political concept of alternatives to policing seriously, in the same way I take many political ideas seriously that are not likely achievable in my lifetime. I know there are deeply serious people who are profoundly committed to these principles and who have thought them through responsibly. I appreciate their work and become better informed from what they say. But their ideas did not reign last year. A faddish embrace of a thoughtless caricature of police abolition reigned, pushed with maximum aggression and minimal introspection by the shock troops of contemporary progressive ideas, overeducated white people with more sarcasm than sense.

Policing will not end tomorrow or next month or next year. And whoever you are, reading this, you are well aware of that fact. The odds of police abolition in any substantial portion of this country are nil. Indeed, I would say that the likelihood of meaningful reduction in policing in any large region of this country, whether measured by patrolling or funding or manpower, is small. Individual cities may reduce their police forces by a substantial fraction, and I suspect that they will not suddenly devolve into Mega-City One as a result. (Though I can’t say initial data in this regard is encouraging.) I hope we learn important lessons about intelligent and effective police reform and more sensible resource allocation from those places. But the vast majority of cities will not meaningfully change their policing budgets, due to both the legitimate lack of political will for such a thing - including in communities of color - and broken municipal politics with bad incentives.

…

Living under kayfabe makes you yearn for plainspoken communication, for letting the mask fall. The professed inability of progressives to understand why woke-skeptical publications like this one keep succeeding financially is itself a slice of kayfabe. They know people are paying for Substacks and podcasts and subscribing to YouTubes and Patreons because it’s exhausting to constantly spend all of your time pretending things that don’t make sense make sense, pretending that you believe things you don’t to avoid the social consequences of telling the truth.

When you’re someone who spent the past several decades arguing that the American university system is not hostile to conservative students, that it doesn’t try to force extremely contentious leftist views onto students, and then you watch this video, how do you react? I think many people, most people, even most people committed to the BLM cause, see that video and wince. That is not how we get there. Browbeating 20 year olds for not parroting your politics back at you is not how racial justice gets advanced. But if you’re caught in this moment, how do you object? Acknowledge that, yes, in fact, it is now plainly the case that many professors see it as their job to forcefully insist on the truth of deeply controversial claims to their students, berating them until they acquiesce? Well that would be an unpleasant conversation with the other parents when you pick up your kid from Montessori school. So you just choose not to see, or keep you mouth shut, or speak in a way that maintains the illusion.

I mean there is the absurdity of what she’s saying to contend with - the now fairly common view that policing was literally invented in the antebellum South purely to enforce slavery, because in ancient Rome if someone came in your house and stole your stuff you’d just be like “oh damn, that sucks.” Is there a relationship between modern policing and slavery? Of course. Does the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow infect modern policing at every point? Sure. Should we make political and policy decisions that recognize that historical influence on policing, especially given the racist reality of policing right now? Yes. But what good does it do anyone to pretend that the concept of “the police” is 250 years old? Why on earth would we get the correct shit we do believe tangled up with this bizarre shit we don’t believe? (The professor in that video does not herself honestly believe the police were invented to support African slavery in 18th and 19th century America.) Because this utterly ahistorical idea is being promulgated by people who claim to speak from a position of justice, we are forced to assign seriousness to it that it hasn’t earned, seriousness that it could never deserve. Because we live in a world of mutual delusion. Because of kayfabe.

…

And the fact that some will wrinkle their noses about this piece and its arguments, go about their days of progressive performance art, and pretend they don’t believe every word they just read? That’s kayfabe, my friend. That’s kayfabe. And we’re trapped in it, all of us, you and I. You know it’s all bullshit. Will you keep the code anyway? I’m willing to bet that the answer is yes.

#freddie deboer #substack #woko haram

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things2mustdo · 4 years

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Emasculation mixed with extreme masochism is the best way to describe those men who opt for Democratic candidates in local, state, gubernatorial, congressional, and presidential elections. By basically every measure, Democrats regard the most trivial issues for women (such as Twitter “abuse”, manspreading, and mansplaining) as more important than the most significant issues for men (male suicide, homelessness, overrepresentation as victims of violence and many others).

In objective terms, voting Democrats only benefits those men who can publicly capitalize on defining themselves as a liberal, including authors, public commentators, Hollywood celebrities and others who need clear and incontrovertible self-promotion. And this itself depends on substituting one’s own self-interest for the health of the American nation.

This all said, cuckservatives exist in growing numbers. They and even proper conservatives are not blameless, far from it, for standing by and giving declared leftists significant room to eviscerate society. The engine rooms for stigmatizing men, however, are Democratic electoral and legislative offices, Democratic rallies and all manner of other breeding grounds for the Democrats’ pathological hatred of masculinity.

Lobbied by SJWs, whose demonstrations attract a minuscule number of people, the DNC and its representatives continue to make decisions that unabashedly demonize 50% of the population, most notably heterosexuals of Caucasian descent.

1. Democrats blame men for the state of American finances but court female and minority votes with welfare programs and privileges

There’s no point taking a current photograph of the National Debt Clock. It’s always rendered outdated less than a second later.

America is broke. End of story. With debt at over 100% relative to GDP, all that happens every time Congress avoids a debt crisis is that the proverbial can is kicked down the road. Democrats conveniently blame men, the male leadership class or (male) Wall Street bankers, forgetting that the biggest accelerant of the gargantuan US national debt has been the debilitating welfare programs initiated by liberals. The zealous faithful following the DNC Donkey have mollycoddled for years entire demographic groups with the promise of an ever flowing welfare tap.

The problem is not just that the Democrats have sucked in millions over decades to try and pursue their catastrophic policies. They have also tragically primed many in multiple generations to seek the instant gratification of welfare and spending via massive public deficits. Democrats win elections on the basis of training their targets to never care about the United States in 20 years’ time. Much or most of the population is unwilling to forgo rewards now to escape disaster or ruin in the future. The teat must keep on flowing, they scream, and much like Pavlov’s Dog, they salivate when Democrats ring the welfare bell.

While women of all races can play the (single) motherhood, domestic violence, and workplace discrimination cards to claw many more advantages, men of color are institutionalized into thinking that the old white capitalist and patriarchal society is against them and only the government, not their own drive and skills, can save them from abject poverty. The juxtaposition of “we believe in you, black men of America” and “but you need our support all the time” has the effect of the latter dominating and then totally eclipsing the former. Democrats need victims and they must continually create them or maintain them.

2. Democrats treat every white male as a beneficiary of immense privilege and a potential violent oppressor

Or so SJWs say…

Ignoring the vast socio-economic disparities between different Caucasians in America, Democrats play the perennial race card of white privilege, particularly for white men. Many white people, especially young students, even get a kick out of constantly emphasizing how they are unfairly privileged. This may bode well for people happy to participate in the further regression of society (or those pursuing lucrative political or SJW careers) but it speaks volumes about a growing bigotry against individuals just because they have a certain skin hue and biological sex.

If Democrats feel this way about what is a majority of men, it says enough already about why only emasculated men vote for them. According to this narrative, girls like Malia and Sasha Obama are bigger victims and non-beneficiaries of privilege than a Scots-Irish-descended trailer-park dweller in the Florida Panhandle. In less dramatic comparisons, the daughters of the American middle-class receive a cut-out pass to label themselves as eternal victims while the sons of white blue collar workers who didn’t finish high school supposedly gained a winning lottery ticket at birth.

Hitherto untouchable white SJW feminists are already finding themselves on the receiving end of the “Shut up, I’m a woman who’s a person of color” slingshot. To cover their bases and maintain SJW unity after an overextension that is now biting them in the ass, expect that white and other feminists will shake off many of their previous inhibitions about drawing in larger numbers of non-white male targets. And this means you if you or your recent ancestors were named Jose, DeMarcus, Ming or something similar.

3. Democrats support finding a man guilty of rape by SJW academics without a trial

It is shocking to think that Democrats like Senator Kirsten Gillibrand have sons. They support the ability of universities to publicly find someone to be a rapist without a trial and have them kicked out of college, ruining their lives.

Was your neighbor accused of dodging his taxes last year? He had to face a court. Was his wife accused of shoplifting? She had to face a court. In countless American universities, however, self-congratulating academics and other officials have handed down rape “conviction” after rape “conviction,” fully supported by a vast majority of Democratic representatives in almost every state legislature and certainly in the US Congress. This legal anomaly, coincidentally, only affects men, at a time when responses to surveys are perceived as findings of fact about rape.

Despite men not being sent to jail over college “convictions,” the consequences for those caught in the web of Orwellian pseudo-jurisprudence are bleak. “Guilty” defendants are thrown out of their degrees and expelled for perpetuity, exposed to a lifetime of professional blacklisting, and constantly in fear about the next exclamation of “Rapist!” Time and time again, this reality is brushed aside by the Democratic Party.

The people who fill so-called college rape tribunals come from the same crowd of folks pumping out patently false theories that all women are oppressed by all men, that society itself oppresses all women and that all men are beneficiaries of rampant male privilege, from the Walmart cashier earning eight dollars an hour to the billionaire tycoon raised in poverty.

It is terribly unsurprising that Democrats would support this mob, as every faulty university craze from the wage gap myth to the idea of systemic police brutality against African-Americans is picked up by the DNC and used as a template for crafting their purported policies.

The modern Democratic Party is an existential threat to men and the United States

…or just avoid voting for them…

In their endless quest for an era of total dominance over the Republicans, Democrats have ignored any concept of national interest in favor of politics itself. Aside from a gated elite, men and male interests are regarding as pawns to be used in keeping their power.

When the race card is exhausted, guaranteeing the votes of black and Latino men and women, the DNC and its agents move to the gender card, knowing that their minority male voters and self-loathing white male voters have already been inculcated sufficiently and will not shift.

One of the easiest ways to practice using your masculinity is to not support the party constantly trying to emasculate you.

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sunshineinmyveins · 4 years

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what the actual fuck happened here?

i’m not trying to start shit with anyone on this site. y’all aren’t worth it tbh but let me tell you the number of “stop complaining about biden” posts i see???

let’s talk about it because:

I’m sorry, did I hallucinate a months’ long campaign against progressive politics that centered Joe “I’m a Rapist and a Racist but I’m Not That Other Guy” Biden and Kamala “I’m a Cop’s Cop” Harris in the wake of a summer of uprisings? Was there not a concerted effort to shame, guilt, and bully marginalized folx into voting for Biden by claiming they were all privileged white leftists who cared more about politics than lives?

I abandoned twitter about two years ago and to come back and see that the place that radicalized me is now soft-shoeing for politicians who literally do not care if they live or die? What the fuck happened to you people? Where’s your rage? Where’s your spine??

At the very least please do not continue to lie to my Black-ass, queer-ass face about how it’s unfair to complain about Biden when YOU FOLX were the ones who promised to hold him accountable. YOU were the ones who vowed that after he was elected, the “real work” would start. Now we’re trying to hold you to your word and you’re upset??? What the fuck did you expect??? Accolades? Cookies? Free blowjobs and pizza for life because you voted in a shitty white supremacist system?

Like congratulations. You voted how the fuck you voted. Now do what you promised you’d do.

(And for the record, being a leftist isn’t exhausting. Being Black in America is exhausting. And after a year of watching my people be murdered in front of y’all’s fucking faces while you put up a little black square,went radio silent, and called it even? I’m not playing with you anymore. You can get upset and demand action now, or you can continue to be part of the problem. But this??? This attempt to re-write history so you can feel okay about voting in another piece of shit into an imperialist system that kills people no matter how good your intentions are or how cute your selfie with the I Voted sticker is? Not on my watch.)

#i'm fucking livid #i just come here for some spn memes #and i gotta get furious because y'all are on some ahistorical shit #fuck #i hate neoliberalism more than conservatism tbh #at least conservatives know who they are

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megrimlocke · 5 years

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How We Are All Going to Die Laughing

The other day, I was looking at a post made by one of my favorite internet comic artists. The guy used to be something I’d read in the army newspapers, next to the adds for cheap TVs at the post exchange, but these days it’s mostly a facebook feed I occasionally read. The artist and writer behind “PVT Murphy” (though these days Murphy’s a sergeant, I’m aging after all it seems) was annoyed at Facebook showing him a shopping page offering what amounted to white nationalist (US neonazi, if you prefer) paraphernalia.

Now, I pointed out that this was what the robot had concluded he wanted to see, and honestly none of us should be surprised by this. Military members lean right, and in the age of Trump this means that radicalization is around every corner- though for the record it always has been. In some insidious ways with a cancer of racists and bigots among our ranks, sure, I know because being gay I was targeted by a few myself, but also in more subtle ways.

I once watched a man scream at some Iraqis who were emptying a waste bin nearby, screaming that they didn’t get him, because he’d been the target of an IED attack two hours prior. Those men had no way in hell of having anything to do with it, but the guy that hit us got away free and the trash guys looked like someone he could defiantly vent his feelings of helplessness and victimhood upon in a vain effort to reclaim his power. I’m not condoning it, I’m just saying that sometimes the path to prejudice isn’t paved with propaganda and privilege.

I have every faith in the artist who draws PVT Murphy himself, but if you attract the attention of a lot of white supremacists, then probably the robot is going to conclude that you might want to look at some of the things that all the people who like your posts are looking at. Hence the shop page that offered a wall pinup of a templar knight preparing to smite the saracen to defend (white) Christendom with a few crass remarks about Islam written on it.

Now I explained, in truncated terms, how the robot made this call. The artist wasn’t excited about this explanation, and in fairness no one is excited about the black mirror showing them something ugly, it’s almost like an automated attack. But the machine was really just trying to be helpful. It wasn’t programmed to be sensitive to racial issues, and certainly the people who took out the add didn’t take that into their considerations. It identified a pattern and arranged the delivery of data that conformed with its instructions based upon the data input.

Now, some right wing dude decided to join in this discussion to point out that the robot didn’t know what it was talking about, included the terms “lib” and “snowflake” in his post, and suggested that if the robot had any idea who he was it wouldn’t keep showing him liberal content- after all he always used the laugh react on it. I pointed out this part as well, but I’d like to go into a deeper analysis for this discourse.

The right, and perhaps a lot of people using the reacts on facebook, has decided that you can use the laugh react to express a dismissive chuckle to the words of others. I think this has several sweeping, problematic implications.

First, the people using the internet are using it to each other, and are either unaware of the robots they share the internet with or ignorant regarding how they function. The robots do not interpret Laugh as a dismissive gesture. The data they gather from this is that you were paying attention to something and decided to put a reaction on it. The Laugh react is not a downvote on reddit, the robot, innocent little helperbot it was made to be, assumes you are amused by the thing you clicked on, and so endeavors to further tickle your funny bone. In short, it’s your good-natured wholesome friend who doesn’t understand the difference between you laughing with liberals and laughing at us. It thinks we’re all friends.

This leads to the second problem. If you are a conservative and you do not care to be bothered with leftist posts, then using the laugh react doesn’t help you at all. It further engages you with the content that annoys you. The stuff that caused you to try and put on your dismissive “ha ha tawdry communist drivel” mid-atlantic aristocrat voice is going to keep appearing. If you’re the sort given to conspiracy theories (and you are my bro, you still hate Hillary for the pizza thing), you might draw the conclusion that you are being targeted by leftist internet operatives, spamming your feed with leftist propaganda.

The truth is you’re spamming yourself with leftist content because your socially clueless helpful robot pal is gonna go out and find more things for you to laugh at. You’re not special or important enough for leftist internet operatives to target your facebook feed with propaganda attacks, and you have damned yourself to an experience on facebook in which you are bombarded with annoying or even blood-boiling content. All of this guidance, by the way, is equally applicable to left leaning users of the laugh react as a dismissive gesture.

What this does is contribute to people’s paranoia. It makes them believe that an enemy that doesn’t exist is trying to get into their heads. It fills their electronic lives with incendiary content that makes them angry and it encourages them further to continue to have generally unproductive electric arguments with people that they disagree with, leaving them exhausted by a brain full of cortisol.

Personally, I think the Left’s electric sin is more to do with our frankly superior witticisms (sorry Right, you invented and stuck to Nobama, you’re just not witty) and the craving so many of us seem to have for delivering that sick burn one-liner so cutting and succinct that it stops the conservative dead in his rhetorical tracks seems to consume online political discourse on the left almost as aggressively as call-out culture does when arguing among our own.

In the effort to sell us more things by pandering to our professed passions, the capitalist internet has created an electric rage engine that wraps you into one heated argument after another among people who are not listening to one another and who are learning to disengage from hard discussions. This last part is so dangerous to our democracy.

To be clear, I’m not lamenting the death of compromise specifically. There can be no compromise on the income gap, healthcre, free elections, or the rights of people who are darker in skin than I. But the electric rage engine makes it difficult to even have conversations about these things in the real world, and if you’re not talking to the people you disagree with face to face in the here and now, your chances of finding compromise are precisely zero percent, nevermind actually changing their views.

Have you noticed yourself having conversations with people that could just be copy pasted almost word for word off the tumblr where they “informed” themselves about this topic? I’ll bet that you have. Or else, more dangerously, you have begun to avoid having such conversations at all with people. Have you ever been in a discussion turned friendly debate with your friend and realized after a few moments that the debate isn’t suddenly so friendly? I’m willing to bet it’s been a while, so much so that you might even be shocked if it happens.

People like to go on about how fraught the holidays can be because of how politically charged family dinners can be, but I can’t remember such an experience within the past ten years. No throw down arguments, no discussions about the merits of one tax policy or another- we can’t even seem to discuss weighty matters with people who are blood kin anymore unless we already know they agree with our own views- and thanks to the electric rage engine, we can know, in precis, what their views are and what we think about them as a result long before we ever think about what to put in our covered dish. The opportunity for someone stepping into a landmine social or foreign policy issue at family and social gatherings has been eliminated, and with it the ability of the dinner table to serve as a place for families to reach consensus by resolving their arguments. We don’t talk politics with people who disagree with us in the real world anymore, we all just avoid it and spit our venom on the internet, achieving nothing but our mounting unhappiness and dislike for one another.

I have a young colleague at work, maybe 25, who demonstrated the ability to just promptly end a discussion last week. Now it was a nonsense discussion and in fairness the participants had gotten into trolling him for kicks, saying a blue shirt was green on purpose or some other nonsense, I don’t remember the particulars. But what I do remember vividly was the ease and efficiency with which he was able to simply end the discussion, how disengagement came so very naturally to him. I despise the phrase “agree to disagree” because it means that the argument hasn’t been resolved, but it is at least a sign that there was actual thought going on between participants. No such gesture here. My colleague put down the conversation and simply went back to his work with all the ease with which you might put down your phone when you decided you were done arguing with someone, and the ability to do this in realspace chilled me to the bone.

Moreover, there is a certain epistemological nihilism that has arisen among us, suggesting that no one can truly know anything because the sources of information, with whatever omissions or biases they may possess, are a matter of consumerist choice rather than objective fact. We can’t agree on what is real anymore because if you dislike someone’s account of events, you can simply get someone else to present a more palatable story and declare the other people liars.

If you don’t like what you read on NBC, you can simply tune to Fox to hear it told in a way that you choose to consume, often playing to your appetite for validation rather than your need for actionable information. We like feeling right, and the consumerist information economy has identified that as a means to get our attention long enough to upload some ads along with our news video of choice.

If the very identity of a person can be expressed by a computer algorithm and 4 or 5 hundred clicks across news articles, think pieces, and shopping pages, how easy will it be for the people who do understand how the machines work to begin influencing who we are?

In closing, I think every single one of us is developing a progressively more toxic relationship with the internet, particularly when it comes to political discourse, and I think that if we aren’t especially careful our ability to simply shut down and switch off, while healthy on the web, is going to begin invading our lives in the waking world in insidious ways that will hurt our ability to function as a cohesive society. I think that the marketing robots and the very act of making a profile and posting to it things that are important to you are dangerous influences on our sense of identity, and that by wrapping our sense of identity in the ideas and products that we consume in such a contrived, calculated fashion that we are restricting our ability to be flexible in our thinking, making us less able to get along with one another.

I’ve been on a soft departure from Facebook for a good while now, making it my loose rule to stick to messenger and instagram because I like indulging my vanity but for the most part I want to be interacting with people directly and not selling myself for likes when I use these things. Real attention from real people is much much better.

In 2020, I invite you to join me in kicking facebook or your own social media vice altogether and bringing our political lives and our debates back into the real world so that we can practice and re-acquire the skills of persuasion and discussion; not as a cynic call to begin trying to convert every conservative we can find, but for the sake of a political discourse that serves as less of a battleground with immovable ideological fortresses and more of a crucible in which the useless can be burned away and useful consensus and meaningful, mind changing-discussions can be had once again. We cannot afford to keep unsubscribing from one another if our democracy is to survive. (<- leftist witticism addiction in demonstration)

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allbravado-archive · 5 years

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I’m sorry to pop off on here like this but people follow me on here and I’m feeling kind of upset and idk

when I was younger, I was a tr*nsmed. I was deeply closeted and hated myself, and didn’t want to acknowledge my own identity as non-binary. now that I’m an adult, I feel so lucky to have my community, and the fact that I ever worked against us upsets me. I’m more than aware of tr*nsmed ideology, but honestly? they’re not even my problem right now.

I don’t expect cis men who couldn’t stop being nazis until a wealthy white woman on youtube told them to quit it to be particularly empathetic, which is why I’m not shocked by the onslaught of hatred towards non-binary people from Natalie’s community. we’re the ones who are abusive, despite her platforming a tr*nsmed asshole on her latest video. despite her being honored that he participated. that man outed a trans woman. how is he not an asshole?

the non-binary community should be at home in the community of a leftist trans woman, but unfortunately, as always, cis white guys take priority and don’t actually know how to shut up. I used to hate seeing people say “I don’t trust ex-alt righters”, because I thought that was silly. but now I get it. I feel like this whole thing has caused a lot of my hope for people being able to change to die.

the beliefs may have changed, but the shitty behavior remains. you might not lurk on i*cel forums anymore, but unsurprisingly, you dismiss any criticism of your hero as ridiculous and you STILL call people sjws. you might not make attack helicopter jokes, but you still prioritize the voice of a rich, white, “passing” trans woman over the voices of young non-binary or non-passing trans people, the majority of which I’m sure won’t make what Natalie makes in a year in four years.

I just feel exhausted. I don’t dislike her, I genuinely don’t. but her fandom has just left me disappointed.

#「 ᴛʜᴇ ꜱᴍᴀʟʟᴅᴏɢ ᴊᴏɴᴇꜱ. | ooc 」#transmedicalism //#transphobia //#enbyphobia //#i just feel genuinely sad honestly #i dont know why this is weighing so heavily on me

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jackshithere · 5 years

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Till and Schneider in an interview with the "Stern"

source

They sing about child abuse, incest, necrophilia. In a video they show excerpts from Leni Riefenstahl's body-cult Olympia movie. And when singer Till Lindemann rolls the R, it roars out of the speakers as it once did from the Volksempfänger. The Wall Street Journal stated, "Woah, that's German!" Rammstein, a german band. A [politically] right band? Since its founding in early 1994, the six musicians from Schwerin and East Berlin are suspected of doing right-wing rock.

In fact, the lyrics with their portrayals of sex and violence are often close to censorship - but fascism is not even between the lines. Now Rammstein, with around three million albums sold, the internationally most successful German-language band since Kraftwerk end of the 70s, a new CD on the market: "Mutter" is by pre-orders even before the release on 2 April for the top 3 of the German charts written down.

The 'Stern' spoke with singer Till Lindemann and drummer Christoph Schneider about their youth in the GDR, Rammstein as a therapy - and provocation as a stylistic device.

On your new album you have underlined the title "Left 234" with the sound of marching boots. That sounds like the newsreel 60 years ago.

Schneider: The piece was the first attempt by Rammstein to deal artistically with the eternal reproach that we are a right-wing band. It's almost funny that this will cause some discussion again.

But you could have omitted the marching sound. Would not the message that your heart seems to be "leftist" be less clear then?

Till: That's the intention. One lets something march and then answers.

Schneider: We hate to express ourselves clearly. Rammstein always has room for interpretation.

That makes for misunderstandings.

Till: That was right from the start. We all grew up in the GDR, come from the punk scene. If we wanted to perform there, we had to present our repertoire before the so-called rating commission. Of course, you had to think very carefully about what you say, what you sing and sometimes how you play. Any criticism of the system was prohibited. So you had to try and make a loop. That's probably why it's still within us that we like to respond ambiguously.

Schneider: When you look at lyrics from GDR bands, you can see how good they are in part when they rewrite a subject with lyrical means. This past is closely connected with us. We can not get away from it. That was our youth. If we came from the west, Rammstein would not exist. At any rate, we would not be so violent.

Why not?

Till: What do you want to do to get you to play in front of more than ten people? You start using provocative means and being extreme. There we were certainly more courageous than East Germans. It started when we sang that kind of hard music in German. And then something has also unloaded what had accumulated in our GDR youth, because we have reacted abreacted. Finally we were allowed to say everything, do everything. Basically it was quite simple: look into your stomach, look into your soul, and start making music.

Out of your seemingly very dark soul came out lines like:

"My black blood and your white flesh / I'm getting hornier from your shrieks". [Mein schwarzes Blut und dein weißes Fleisch ich werd immer geiler von deinem Gekreisch]

Was that more than a provocation?

Schneider: The provocation is exhausted at some point. There are only a few topics that are good for it. We used them up.

Till: What's the use of writing the same kids fuck song for the third time?

Schneider: We started with the tank at that time, regardless of left or right or losses, and we broke through. We have been heard. Now we're going to deal with the pieces left over. And start to realize what we really are - a German metal band. With the new album we often asked ourselves: Is that still Rammstein? Are we starting to make only beautiful music? So far, the new record is no longer provocative. That's certainly mainstream. But good mainstream.

The provocation of Rammstein is not only based on the ambiguous texts, but also on the aesthetics of the band and their show. Military headlights [basically Batman signal thingy] shining in the sky are evoking images of Nazi Nazi party rallies; Lindemann's throaty chant reminds us of the rolled-up R Nazi sizes. Does it have to be that way?

Till: The R comes on its own. When I sing so deeply and expressively, my vocal cord flutters, and then it just rolls. By the way: Peter Maffay's vocal cord reacts similarly, but also rolls the R. And the light dome, which looks good, right? It's not about more. Just because it's associated with those twelve crappy years, should not that be allowed anymore? Then tear down the Olympic Stadium and all the other Nazi buildings in Berlin! This is twelve years that this idiot named Hitler has on his conscience, and again and again one comes back to it. It's about art. There is no relationship between one and the other.

Schneider: This discussion shows that there seems to be no coping with the past in society. You can say: Okay, there is the light dome, I think that's good, and there's the Reich Party Rally, I think that's shit. You can separate that, everyone for yourself. Only in this way can one find the way to one's own history. I can not always think, oh, it's all so loaded, I can not talk about it, and the others could think ... No, open dispute! The task of Rammstein is also the search for an independent music, a German music. Of course, we come across our story and get all these allegations. But I see that rather positively: We try to find our own identity, which many musicians or artists in Germany have given up long ago.

This also means that you show no emotion on stage and Lindemann beats his head bloody with the microphone?

Till: We're actors on stage, that's show. You do not notice the pain when you hit the same spot every night on the head. Schneider has even received a broken neon tube in the shoulder. Paul, our guitarist, burned my ear in Australia now.

Schneider: It's probably like this: Rammstein is like a self-help group for us. Like a therapy.

When did you first learn about the era of National Socialism?

Till: We grew up with Auschwitz. With us was the everyday life: group travel with the school to the camps, see Buchenwald, flowers lie down at monuments, join the concentration camp march through Mecklenburg, to Güstrow along the highway. There are such monuments on every corner.

Schneider: In the GDR civics and history lessons were strongly antifascist-colored. Everything except communism was evil: fascism, West Germany, capitalism. These were all taboos. I think that's why we now have this pronounced right-wing extremism in the East: I'm shit, and I want to draw attention to myself. So I use the worst of what I know - and become a neo-Nazi.

Why do not you participate in concerts like "Rock against right-wing violence"?

Schneider: We do not want to be tense with these carts. That would be ridiculous. Then it is said that we used it only to become even more popular. Besides, what's the use? The right ones are there. They are part of our population. We have to accept this problem and finally accept that there are these tendencies in Germany. It does not help to always exclude the right. We have to talk to those who solve their problems.

Rammstein reaches the Far right scene.

Till: We reach many, including the advertisers in Hamburg. And as far as the right is concerned, for me the state is too soft-spoken about the problem. You have a black half-dead, and there are construction hours as punishment. We used to beat ourselves with skins even before the turnaround in Schwerin - why do not you go through harder today? I grew up with a girl who is a mulatto. She still visits Mecklenburg every summer. She is afraid of people and does not dare to go to certain places. I'm just ashamed of that.

Nevertheless, you play with a Germany image that evokes certain memories.

Schneider:DRammstein is not a concept. We've come together to do this music and show, and we work like a support group. We do what we like well, nothing more. Maybe that's why our fans think we are authentic. Following the motto: Rammstein do their thing and are not like the others. This may also explain our success in the US. But with that our critics get a problem again: They fear that the American kids will not associate with Germany any more than Rammstein. The Americans are really only on our artistic skills. This is politically overrated.

Till: One does not ask Ricky Martin which political attitude he has. You listen to a song, find it good or bad. That's all.

#Rammstein #long post

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sharingshane-blog · 6 years

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Why I am a Leftist

I thought I would spend some time discussing some of my socio-economic beliefs and how I came to where I am today. My battles with poverty, disability, chronic illness, and discrimination (being genderqueer and bisexual) have largely informed my current beliefs about how society should function. Just like anybody else, my environment and struggles have shaped who I am and what I believe today.

I have been registered in every party with the exception of the libertarian party. Currently I have no affiliation. I have become increasingly more frustrated with the socio-economic and political climate of today, and it is not due to how divisive people are after the orange was elected in 2016. That divisiveness was always there, and it was always meant to be there. The so-called problems in this current system are not really problems at all. They are simply injustices, but those injustices were meant to be there. The United States was never founded as a land of freedom and democracy. Hell, only about one-third of the population in the American colonies actually wanted to break away from England. The vast majority were either ambivalent or actively opposed separation. The Constitution was drafted and ratified by a legislature that consisted solely of white, cisgender, heterosexual, wealthy, privileged men. Some were rapists such Thomas Jefferson. Some were frauds such as George Washington. Some were narcissists such as Benjamin Franklin. All of them were racists. They all possessed power and influence in their given states. The America today is exactly what America was always meant to be, a place where those privileged few controls and uses the rest of the population for their own personal gain. It is an oligarchy disguised as democracy and exploitation at its finest. I am completely pessimistic about the future of America unless the entire system is uprooted and we begin again from scratch. Anyone who believes that the system can be fixed are unfortunately sorely deceived.

I came to this understanding during my one-year hiatus from college in 2017. During this time, I was working at Panera Bread as a cashier. As the year progressed, the job became more difficult. I was unable to work full-time because of my health. I was in intensive therapy for the first half of 2017 spending about 10 hours doing that and 20 hours working each week. It was emotionally exhausting and my chronic fatigue was weighing heavily on me. During the course of the year my anxiety and PTSD became more intense. Near the end of my intensive treatment, I began to develop these disassociative episodes or stupors when I was triggered or overwhelmed. It happened to me once while I was driving causing me to have car accident and total my car. They began happening more at work and I would have to be sent home. During these episodes, I cannot respond to most external stimuli and am largely unresponsive. I am unable to speak or speak very little. I lose track of reality. I cannot feel different parts of my body particularly my arms and legs. There became an increase fear that they may be seizures. Sometimes it appears I am having a stroke. So far there is no evidence of either. I developed more chronic pain. It is highly suspected that I have endometriosis although I haven’t had the opportunity to have the surgical procedure to confirm the diagnosis. There is more, but I will not get into that now.

During this time, I realized how little my health seemed to matter to my employers. They could make some accommodations for me, but in the end, it was their priority to make sure that business ran smoothly. If my health got in the way too much, then I could face the chopping block. I watched as two other fellow coworkers got fired for taking too many sick days. Both have debilitating chronic conditions that could become life-threatening if not treated. Of course, it would be outright discrimination to fire them based solely on their health conditions. So, they took another route. I was terrified of losing my job. I pushed myself as hard as I could and would neglect my health in the process. It became clearer; however, that I could not maintain the work. My managers began cutting hours. I was already not making enough to satisfy basic necessities and now I was making even less. I was forced to have to live with my parents which was an unhealthy situation for me (which I will refrain from explaining why for the time being). I felt like a burden on everyone which took a toll on my mental health. I attempted to return to school after my hiatus while still working my job at Panera and living with my parents. This proved to be too much for me to handle. I quit college and moved in with a friend. I came out as transgender and my hours were cut more at work. I was eventually forced to quit. I caught my manager complaining about my health issues behind my back to other coworkers. This is actually a HIPPA violation, and I could potentially press charges. In the end though, I am poor. I do not have the financial and emotional resources to fight her.

Be patient. I promise you this is all relevant.

In all this, I tried to develop a better way to organize the business in order to make the employees feel less like they are part of a massive machine and more like individual human beings. I felt as though I was part of that machine, and if I became too weak, the machine would break. Another thing I realized was that I was easily replaceable. There is not much incentive for employers to work with me when they could easily switch me out for a stronger part. No matter how nice they seemed, their primary duty is business. If they are not successful at it, they will lose their position of power. The system requires them to be exploitive towards the lower-wage workers. I could not develop a system in my mind that would fix this unless capitalism as a whole was completely abolished. If we remove CEO’s and had the workers run the industries democratically, that would fix the problem. However, this would require a complete uproot of the system today. I became more familiar with the term class-consciousness.

I am a hard worker and a fighter. However, I am human and limited. Because of my disabilities, employers consider me to be a malfunctioned part. I cannot lift heavy things or be on my feet for too long without feeling like I’m about to collapse. I have now been reduced to a cane. There is nothing that I can do to change this. The phrase, “pick yourself up by the bootstraps,” did not work for me. It did not matter how much effort into the system, I was stuck. It would have to take sheer luck and a willingness to exploit others to rise up in the ranks. The latter goes against my moral compass. I realized that I could never bring myself to ever be a manager. I cannot ethically justify being in such a position where I have to treat money with greater importance than the human beings that would work under me.

However, in order to create a society in which people are treated as human beings, and true equality is obtained; it would mean that those on the top would have to relinquish their power and wealth. There is this narrative in which people believe that it is perfectly natural and necessary for there to power figures; otherwise, society would turn to chaos. It is true that we make decisions on our self-interest, but that is why an anarcho-communist society could honestly work. It is in the workers’ best interest to distrust power figures, to have control over industry, to regain their humanity, to maintain industry and do their part in society, and to be a part of a society. It will not happen without a fight though. Millionaires and billionaires will not relinquish their power easily. The system was created to keep those people at the top. Racism, xenophobia, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia have been perpetuated to pin those on the bottom against one another, to keep them from uniting. The police were established to enforce this narrative and protect capitalist interests. In the North, they were established to protect the transportation of goods and keep poor workers, largely immigrants, from collectivizing and prevent them from having a voice. In the South, the police were derived from overseers with the intent to preserve slavery. The police system is not broken. It is running exactly how it was intended to run. The narrative that there must always be people on the top and those on the bottom was a common defense of African-American slavery. It is an idea with the sole intent to keep people oppressed.

Helen Keller, the famous activist who fought for the rights of those disabled, understood that equality for those disabled could never be obtained in a capitalist society. Disabled people will always be seen as inferior. Safety was secondary; so, businesses can maintain their quotas increasing the possibility of accidents causing workers to become disabled. It is not commonly known that she became a socialist herself and became a member of the Industrial Workers of the World, an organization which believed that that the workers must run industry. It is a workers’ union dedicated to democracy and solidarity. Their core belief is that you have nothing in common with your boss.

Bernie Sanders is not a true socialist. He is a social democrat, and lately he has had to tame his speech in order to maintain his power and influence. He believes in a highly regulated capitalist system. Socialists believe in abolishing capitalism altogether.

I am an actual socialist. I do not believe the system is flawed. I believe the system works exactly how it is supposed to function and it is disgusting. This ended up being a loner post than I had planned it to be, but I do have much to say on the subject. It is something I am passionate about even though I will probably not see this come to fruition. I hope this was insightful to how I have come to my beliefs which I hold today.

#capitalism #socialism #personal experience #leftism #oppression #solidarity

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