for anyone too young to know this: watching The Truman Show is a vastly different experience now, compared to how it was before youtube and social media influencers became normal
before it was like, "what a horrifying thing to do to a human being! to take away their autonomy and privacy, all for the sake of profits! to create fake scenarios for them to react to, just to retain viewership! to ruin their happiness just so some corporate entity could harvest money from their very humanity! how could anyone do something so evil?"
and now it's like, "ah, yeah. this is still deeply fucked up, but it's pretty much what every influencer has been doing to their kids for a decade now. probably bad that we've normalized this experience"
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Now that the post is over 10k and my notes are straight-up unusable...
One thing I wish I'd spelled out more explicitly in the original post because I see this point getting lost on a lot of rebloggers who don't understand why the healthcare thing was such a big deal is like
The subtext I thought would be understood bc I lived back then but apparently has been lost today is that making sure queer employees and their partners had healthcare in the early 90s meant Disney was paying for a lot of AIDS treatment.
This is one reason fundie Christians were so upset and queer employees were so grateful. It's one reason why it was such a controversial decision. It was a major talking point amongst my family, who believed back then that AIDS was a punishment from God.
(Some still do, I think. We don't talk.)
I keep seeing people saying that Disney only chose that option "because of their bottom line" and it's like??? Were you listening??? Disney has been paying for that decision for literally decades, but they've stood by it.
Like... the 90s weren't like now! It wasn't profitable to cater to the queer population of the country back then. They weren't raking in money with this.
It's in no way a perfect company but I fully believe in criticizing people for the specific things they do wrong and praising them for the specific things they do right. Disney has fucked copyright, monopoly, and labor laws and I'm not about to defend that. But they are well known in FL for being friendly to both queer people and disabled people, and that is unambiguously a good thing.
(Like side note, I could talk about Disney and accessibility for days. I have traveled extensively while disabled and no one does it like Disney.)
I've had people reblogging the post like "I straight-up don't believe Disney is an industry leader in equal protections for queer employees" and it's like ??? do you think I just pulled this out of my ass? If you want more information, go look it up! You'll see that this is well-established history. It's not my fault y'all don't read! :|
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a trans woman gets wrongfully deleted, falsely accused of making threats and is harassed by automattic's ceo, after years of trans women talking about how they are constantly having to deal with things like this, and days later, someone pedojackets another trans woman because they failed to read her website rules in their entirety, and less that a month after that, someone pedojackets yet another trans woman because of a months-old comment replying to a stranger, which she has already addressed repeatedly. not a fucking thing has been learned.
respect trans women. support trans women. actually treat them like human beings deserving of compassion and reflect on how public accusations of wrongdoings do not accomplish anything good, and are especially harmful to trans women, whether they're true or not (and most of the time, they're not true). and yes, love trans women too, but that goal cannot be reached without everything else.
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Batman fun fact! Did you know that Scarecrow’s toxin doesn’t always cause fear? Sometimes it does the opposite! In Detective Comics #571, he wields a variant that completely inhibits the biochemical fear response, preventing people from feeling any concern for themselves or using basic common sense. He runs a racket administering it to star athletes, who take huge risks and get badly injured. Then they’re willing to cough up a lot for an antidote. Batman and Robin - here Jason Todd - catch on, but Bruce is dosed with the reverse fear toxin; since his intelligence is his greatest strength, being too overconfident and reckless to think twice about anything makes him his own worst enemy.
This premise was adapted in the Batman: The Animated Series episode “Never Fear”. There we see that with no fear of losing his moral integrity, Bruce becomes cold and merciless to criminals. Robin - here Tim Drake - has to catch somebody he leaves to fall off a building, tie him up to stop him endangering himself and others and give him the antidote to prevent him murdering Scarecrow.
But in the comic book, Jason is kidnapped by Scarecrow. (He gets gassed, and hallucinates Bruce dying and telling him that it was his fault.) He isn’t around to keep Bruce in check as he goes to rescue him through a series of death traps that he can’t resist cutting it as close as possible in. So how does Bruce not go off the deep end? How does he not lose sight of what’s important? Not lose himself?
Because even a drug designed to shut down stress at the most fundamental level can’t overpower his true worst fear. The Dark Knight might feel fearless…
but a parent never is.
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anyways not doing any further label discourse on here, how u label urself and what a label means to u is entirely up to urself and no one else and anyone who tells u otherwise can shut the fuck up
like its not that deep, words inherently just mean what meaning u give to them and theyre words FOR YOU and ABOUT YOU and only u decide what u are.
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everyone loves to talk big game about how they hate carceralism and punitive justice until it comes to the topic of sexual violence in which case half of the prison abolitionists will revert immediately to being constitutional literalists for the code of hammurabi without missing a beat--good thing that the accusation of sexual violence hasn't been historically leveraged against people of colour or gay people or trans women or anything or this capitulation to kneejerk reaction would be uhhh pretty bad!
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