#radically subversive

[edonee]

Why do so many trans-identified people call themselves communists? Don't they see how extremely capitalistic the ideology they base their entire life upon is? Come on, really?? 😭😭 You think that your "true self" can be bought through cosmetic surgery and hormone injections and you still call yourself a marxist how are you not embarassed...

[yuri-alexseygaybitch]

Every time I see that picture of Putin in drag makeup it takes a year off my life. Get a different shtick than "lol what if homophobes were actually gay" it's 2023.

[wild-wombytch]

Reddit really be like :

- Butches get a lot of hate lately. Anyone noticed?

- Yeah, blame the TERFs and the witches

And like. LMAOOOO

SOMEONE GOTTA TELL THEM MOST OF US ARE GNC AND FIRST VICTIMS OF SAID BUTCHPHOBIA WHEN TRAs DON'T LIKE WHAT WE POST FJGKGOTOGKGKFJF

[thethirdman8]

The Masses was a graphically innovative American magazine of socialist politics published monthly from 1911 until 1917, when federal prosecutors brought charges against its editors for conspiring to obstruct conscription in the United States during World War 1. It published reportage, fiction, poetry and art by the leading radicals of the time such as Max Eastman, John Reed, Dorothy Day and Floyd Bell.

[vital-information]

"[M]ost often the figure representing the impersonal logic of protocol is Andy’s deputy, Barney Fife. Played by the immensely talented Don Knotts, Barney is both the comedic relief and bureaucratic foil to Andy’s localism. Running gags are built upon Barney’s trigger-happy nervousness and open love of the Law, with all its binding rules and jargon. He often urges Andy to modernize, to embrace the latest crime-fighting methods and gadgets. Barney’s flaw — and what makes him hilarious — is that he tries too hard to be a serious police officer in a rural town untouched by hard crime. He quotes legal codes to Andy, who either doesn’t know or has forgotten them. Andy doesn’t need to remember the technical name for a minor offense. He understands that townspeople, not codes, are the governing factor, even if that logic sometimes backfires on him.

Watching this show as an older viewer, I came to realize that Andy and Barney symbolize two competing ways of life that struggled against one another in the 20th century and continue to do so today.

...

Though Andy exhibits strength and virtue, he is not hotheaded. Nor is he the brawny hero that busts in at the last minute with guns blazing to vanquish the villain, who almost pulls off the caper. It may take him until the last minute to carry out his plan, but he does not represent the kind of heroic machismo so prevalent in superhero films today. More often than not Andy fights with his mind, inasmuch as he fights at all. He is strong in a silent way, a stoic fortitude without the sturm und drang of Brando or the social Darwinism of late-career John Wayne. Barney, on the other hand, is loud and quick to flashes of emotion. His wiry frame and nervous energy make him a wreck of a deputy, and it’s hilarious to watch him and Andy at odds, however low the stakes. Barney is a ludicrous figure, a clown, blissfully unaware of his arrogance, insecure and egotistical, and desirous of the kind of rules designed to control situations without thought. He exemplifies the neoliberal manager, the one that assumed control in the late 20th century. And though this figure was initially lampooned in American media, it came to be accepted as the only one to rule over a complex world.

¤ When several American television networks dropped most of the country-themed programming in the early 1970s — a move referred to as the “rural purge” — the likelihood that another Andy Taylor or Mayberry might be seen on TV was slimmed. In an attempt to market to suburban and urban audiences, major television networks mostly forgot about aging and rural populations. Suddenly there were fewer shows reflecting their lives. The kneejerk reaction is to consider rural audiences and their shows hillbilly, retrograde, simple-minded, or even racist. But it would also be callous to ignore other audiences altogether just to have around-the-clock Westerns and episodes of Red Skelton. I began to wonder what my parents would have watched without reruns of The Andy Griffith Show. Could it be, like some have said, that people enjoy the series because it presents a whitewashed utopia, a conservative paradise before Soul Train, MTV, and BET? In her article “Remembering Mayberry in White and Black,” memory studies scholar Kathleen McElroy writes about African Americans like herself who identify with The Andy Griffith Show even though only one episode in the entire series features a black actor with a speaking part (“a Chopin-playing football coach in Season 7,” McElroy notes). She cites several black writers who watch the series because it reflects their own experiences living in the rural South and who were not alienated by the paucity of black cast members. But even though some African-American viewers like McElroy conjure these “extra-memories,” as she calls them, to “complement […] Mayberry’s narrative,” what about the white viewers who voted for Donald Trump because they believed him to be a white, wealthy savior who could return the country to the conservative 1950s — in other words, to a time before civil rights? Why should anyone have to fill in the gaps of a television series with extra-memories to enjoy it? A site of both memory and oblivion, The Andy Griffith Show can be pleasing to some and uncomfortable to others. It’s a show that some might enjoy because it presents a white utopia and one that others can identify with because of its themes of doing good, serving communities, and reducing one’s ego. And viewers like McElroy and the writers she cites in her essay manage this tension by conjuring extra-memories to account for the erasure. It is possible that some people see in Donald Trump’s nativist message a return to Mayberry. But those who may suppose that miss the entire point of the series and equally misunderstand the philosophy of the character Andy Taylor. Writing for The Awl, Shani O. Hilton mentions that Griffith was often called “white trash” as a kid. When he created his series, Griffith didn’t “take a crack at edgier storylines involving race or gender,” which other series of the time did and usually failed offensively. Instead, he crafted a show about life in a small, working-class town where a given day’s itinerary might include little more than napping and watching the evening’s program on television. Mayberry is obviously utopian and overwhelmingly white, but Sheriff Andy Taylor not only believes society can always be made better but also understands no social project grand or local could usher in some kind of everlasting peace. The best you could do in Mayberry is good enough, and doing good is a daily job."

Grafton Tanner, "Make America Mayberry Again" for the Los Angeles Review of Books

[ryanxross]

No. Next question

[mariocki]

Susannah: Yes. Yes, he did risk himself. We all did. A lot of it... OK, a bit half-assed but at least... some of it will stick! You have to try. It's not going to work any more, running for the same old burrows... we're rafting off into space - God! Frank sees it. He said to me one day, 'Suse... you know what's going to do for us all? Not the failure of intellect, moral, muscle - but the failure of imagination! They're all too busy with their snouts in the trough to smell the fire.'

Crystal: Yeah, he says some really daft things.

-

Pam Gems, Loving Women (1984)

[milksockets]

'world wide web' by shane waltener, 2007 in radical lace + subversive knitting - david revere mcfadden (2007)

[idylls-of-the-divine-romance]

Other Christians: Yeah I’m a Christian, but don’t worry, I’m normal.

Meanwhile, Christian Tumblr: I worship a triune God who emptied themself to become a human. He was born a poor teenager and grew up in poverty and at risk of homelessness. He was fully God and fully Human. He taught and lived in radical indiscriminate self giving love and subversive peaceful resistance of oppression. He fought the cause of the widow, orphan, immigrant, poor, and oppressed. He loved the sinner so much they left their sin and followed him, and reconciled both the government allying capitalist and the rebel freedom fighter to harmony in himself. He invites us to take his prescience into ourselves by eating his flesh and drinking his blood. My God then enthroned himself as the exalted king of the world by dying the death of a cursed blaspheming slave. He then rose from the dead and decided his first witnesses would be women, whose witness is worthless in court. His followers then went on to live in voluntary communism, to advocate radical generosity, to destroy ethnic barriers, to elevate the inherent humanity of women and the enslaved, to self identify as exiled and enslaved refugees and pilgrims, to equate God with Love, to diagnose the government as a necessary evil worth responding to with equal parts submission and resistance, and to make the preposterous claim that we conquer the world by giving our lives in self sacrificing love. In my faith, normalcy is heresy.

[kp777]

By Jake Johnson

Common Dreams

July 1, 2024

A legal journalist described the liberal justice's dissent as "one of the most terrified and terrifying pieces of judicial writing I've ever encountered."

In her dissent against the U.S. Supreme Court's Monday ruling in Trump v. United States, liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor listed several acts that she argued the high court's right-wing supermajority has effectively sanctioned as unprosecutable exercises of presidential authority.

"Orders the Navy's SEAL Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune," wrote Sotomayor. "Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune."

The high court's 6-3 decision along ideological lines granted former President Donald Trump "absolute immunity" for acts that fall within the scope of the "responsibilities of the executive branch under the Constitution," as Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority.

The new ruling leaves it to the lower courts to determine whether the election-subversion acts for which Trump was charged last year in a case led by Special Counsel Jack Smith were "official" or "unofficial." The Supreme Court took more than four months to decide the case after agreeing to hear it, meaning Trump is unlikely to face trial before the November presidential election.

The Associated Pressnoted that the Supreme Court "further restricted prosecutors by prohibiting them from using any official acts as evidence in trying to prove a president's unofficial actions violated the law"—a move that Sotomayor condemned as "nonsensical."

While Roberts acknowledged that "not everything the president does is official," Sotomayor argued that the majority's expansion of "the concept of core powers beyond any recognizable bounds" means that "a president's use of any official power for any purpose, even the most corrupt, is immune from prosecution."

"Whenever the president wields the enormous power of his office, the majority says, the criminal law (at least presumptively) cannot touch him," wrote Sotomayor. "Even if these nightmare scenarios never play out, and I pray they never do, the damage has been done. The relationship between the president and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power, the president is now a king above the law."

Sotomayor expressed "fear for our democracy" as she closed her dissent against the ruling by the Supreme Court's majority, two members of which have recently faced intense scrutiny and calls to resign for accepting lavish gifts from right-wing billionaires.

"Justice Sotomayor's alarmed dissent was signed 'with fear for our democracy,'" U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) said in a statement Monday. "This is a blaring warning to voters of the anti-democratic forces pulling the strings both at the Supreme Court and in the Republican Party."

"Not only does this decision deprive the American people of knowing whether the former president is guilty of attempting to overturn the last election before they head to the polls in November, it also makes it much harder to hold a former president accountable for illegal acts committed while in office," said Whitehouse. "The far-right radicals on the court have essentially made the president a monarch above the law, the Founding Fathers' greatest fear."

Mark Joseph Stern, who covers the U.S. courts for Slate, called Sotomayor's dissent "one of the most terrified and terrifying pieces of judicial writing I've ever encountered."

Pointing to Sotomayor's dissent, U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) wrote Monday that "it is a dark day for democracy when presidents can commit any crime they want in their official capacity, and these justices are bribed for their decisions."

"Coup attempts are not 'official acts,'" she added.

Also writing in dissent was liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who warned that "in the majority's view, while all other citizens of the United States must do their jobs and live their lives within the confines of criminal prohibitions, the president cannot be made to do so; he must sometimes be exempt from the law's dictates depending on the character of his conduct."

"Indeed, the majority holds that the president, unlike anyone else in our country, is comparatively free to engage in criminal acts in furtherance of his official duties," wrote Jackson, who criticized the right-wing majority's "arbitrary and irrational" attempt to distinguish between official and unofficial acts.

"It suggests that the unofficial criminal acts of a president are the only ones worthy of prosecution," the justice continued. "Quite to the contrary, it is when the president commits crimes using his unparalleled official powers that the risks of abuse and autocracy will be most dire."

[transmutationisms]

a lot of radical-posturing academic humanities writing is like. decent-to-insightful as far as describing the problems but falls completely to shit when the authors try to present themselves as engaging in any kind of subversion or opposition to those problems because both by form and by institutional affiliation the work is constrained to operating in the domain of language and rhetoric. and it's not that speech doesn't matter or doesn't tell us anything about power structures or historical forces but if your radical action at root boils down to like calling something a different name or making a declaration or whatever then probably it's more useful for your own career advancement than as a political act and it would behoove us all to read such texts with these considerations in mind

[transrevolutions]

While overall I felt like the tbosas movie was well done, there's one part that really bothered me. When Sejanus gets involved with the rebels in the book, he's fully on board, stealing them ammo and weapons from the base, and planning to hold guards at gunpoint to free the prisoners. In the movie, however, he just wants to run away and then is surprised and upset by the fact that the rebels were planning an act of violence.

This doesn't seem like a major change, but from a political standpoint (as tbosas is a very political book), it's a big one and one I very much do not like.

In the text, Sejanus plays the role of the moral compass. Whereas both Coriolanus and Lucy Gray having complex and subjective motivations, Sejanus is always driven by wanting to do the right thing, even if it costs him. He acts as a baseline, keeping the readers from getting lost in endless loops of justification for atrocities just because Coriolanus's internal narration is rhetorically persuasive.

So when Sejanus (who up until this point has been relatively pacifist) joins up with the rebels in the book and agrees to participate in an act of revolutionary violence, the text is pointing out that that act of rebellion is morally permissible. That even violence against the oppressor class can be an altruistic action. Sejanus planning to fight the guards with the rebels is not a sign of his corruption, it's a sign of the fact that his society has become so corrupt that not doing it would be morally worse than doing it. After all, someone's going to die either way, so why not have it be the oppressors?

If movie!Sejanus is still occupying the role of the moral compass (which he seems to be), then his dismay at the possibility of the rebels using violence acts as a narrative condemnation of the violence, when the opposite is true in the book. The movie tries to make a distinction between the "good" dissenters (pacifist, nonviolent, morally superior) and the "bad" dissenters (violent radicals/terrorists). In the current political climate, this idea and narrative is extremely unsettling. And I'm disappointed they did this, but not surprised. Like the other Hunger Games movies, it was produced by a large media company, and they can't follow the satire of the book too closely lest people realize the fundamental irony of it. People in positions of power do not want to tell a story where violent activism is portrayed as moral--at least when it's against a society that obviously mirrors our own. (The brutalist architecture style is another complaint that I have, but that can be discussed in another post.)

Changing that seemingly small detail about Sejanus's involvement with the rebels doesn't do much to change the continuity of the storyline, but it does a lot to change the underlying message of his character and the story. This was almost certainly intentional, because the same sort of thing was done in the original trilogy movies as well. Companies are scared of subversive media because it makes them look like the 'bad guys' too, so they wrap rebellion in a lens of fantasy and moderatism.

[swordsandflowercrowns]

I was explaining this to a friend recently and I think it's an important distinction to make: not all queerplatonic relationships look the same.

A good way I've found to illustrate what exactly a qpr is, is to say "a qpr is to relationships what nonbinary is to gender". While both of these traditionally function on a binary (male/female, platonic/romantic), by defining our personal outlooks and experiences of the concepts of gender and relationships with new terms, we challenge the boundaries that society has put in place.

And yes, whilst redefining what actually constitutes romantic or platonic relationships, or male and female identities, and what makes them different (and acknowledging where they overlap, or where they can expand past what we traditionally expect) is important to increasing our understanding, so is providing options entirely outside of those two boxes.

And that's what it is - options. It's very easy to trivialise the concept of nonbinary and simply make gender into a trinary, rather than a binary. Male/female/nonbinary, which goes against the very purpose of the nonbinary label. This further erases the spectrum of gender. It's the same with relationships - by giving a strict set of instructions on how a qpr must look and act, you are simply creating a trinary. The point of the concept of qprs is to acknowledge that there are relationships between people that may overlap platonic and romantic, or fall partially within one and partially outside, or ones that are entirely separate from either category.

There are an infinite amount of ways a relationship can manifest, and if the people in the relationship feel that queerplatonic best describes their partnership without romance, or their affection without commitment, or their feelings towards each other that aren't quite what romantic or platonic is to them, or any other reason that rebels against amatonormativity, then they can choose to use that term. Queerplatonic covers the widest range of relationships that come in all shapes and sizes.

I think it's so important when discussing topics like relationships and gender to consciously make the effort to keep queering our ideas of the concepts - to remember that a spectrum is a spectrum. Labels can be useful for finding community, identifying your experiences and validating your struggles, but as soon as you try to start hyper-defining them, you lose the radical nature of queering our understanding of ourselves and our relationships. We name these concepts in order to give a voice to our subversion of society's arbitrary rules and expectations, not to police each other into conforming to a particular understanding of how a person (with a certain label) "should" act or be.

[21stc3nturyd1gitalb0y]

it’s so funny to me when people try to gatekeep punk. we’re literally the subculture of weirdos, misfits and oddballs and people complain when someone’s a little cringe? no, i’m not talking about posers with their amazon patch vests and shein clothing or conservatives who pretend they’re subversive for upholding the norm. you absolutely should be annoyed when people use the aesthetics or punk without understanding its radical history. but when it comes to beginner artists who are sincere in their interests in diy, politics, and music, i don’t see the point in being overly critical of young people who are passionate about something. everyone’s diy is shit at first, and there’s something beautiful about working to create something valuable out of what others consider worthless

[aronarchy]

Why we don’t like it when children hit us back

To all the children who have ever been told to “respect” someone that hated them.

March 21, 2023

Even those of us that are disturbed by the thought of how widespread corporal punishment still is in all ranks of society are uncomfortable at the idea of a child defending themself using violence against their oppressors and abusers. A child who hits back proves that the adults “were right all along,” that their violence was justified. Even as they would cheer an adult victim for defending themself fiercely.

Even those “child rights advocates” imagine the right child victim as one who takes it without ever stopping to love “its” owners. Tear-stained and afraid, the child is too innocent to be hit in a guilt-free manner. No one likes to imagine the Brat as Victim—the child who does, according to adultist logic, deserve being hit, because they follow their desires, because they walk the world with their head high, because they talk back, because they are loud, because they are unapologetically here, and resistant to being cast in the role of guest of a world that is just not made for them.

If we are against corporal punishment, the brat is our gotcha, the proof that it is actually not that much of an injustice. The brat unsettles us, so much that the “bad seed” is a stock character in horror, a genre that is much permeated by the adult gaze (defined as “the way children are viewed, represented and portrayed by adults; and finally society’s conception of children and the way this is perpetuated within institutions, and inherent in all interactions with children”), where the adult fear for the subversion of the structures that keep children under control is very much represented.

It might be very well true that the Brat has something unnatural and sinister about them in this world, as they are at constant war with everything that has ever been created, since everything that has been created has been built with the purpose of subjugating them. This is why it feels unnatural to watch a child hitting back instead of cowering. We feel like it’s not right. We feel like history is staring back at us, and all the horror we felt at any rebel and wayward child who has ever lived, we are feeling right now for that reject of the construct of “childhood innocence.” The child who hits back is at such clash with our construction of childhood because we defined violence in all of its forms as the province of the adult, especially the adult in authority.

The adult has an explicit sanction by the state to do violence to the child, while the child has both a social and legal prohibition to even think of defending themself with their fists. Legislation such as “parent-child tort immunity” makes this clear. The adult’s designed place is as the one who hits, and has a right and even an encouragement to do so, the one who acts, as the person. The child’s designed place is as the one who gets hit, and has an obligation to accept that, as the one who suffers acts, as the object. When a child forcibly breaks out of their place, they are reversing the supposed “natural order” in a radical way.

This is why, for the youth liberationist, there should be nothing more beautiful to witness that the child who snaps. We have an unique horror for parricide, and a terrible indifference at the 450 children murdered every year by their parents in just the USA, without even mentioning all the indirect suicides caused by parental abuse. As a Psychology Today article about so-called “parricide” puts it:

Unlike adults who kill their parents, teenagers become parricide offenders when conditions in the home are intolerable but their alternatives are limited. Unlike adults, kids cannot simply leave. The law has made it a crime for young people to run away. Juveniles who commit parricide usually do consider running away, but many do not know any place where they can seek refuge. Those who do run are generally picked up and returned home, or go back on their own: Surviving on the streets is hardly a realistic alternative for youths with meager financial resources, limited education, and few skills.

By far, the severely abused child is the most frequently encountered type of offender. According to Paul Mones, a Los Angeles attorney who specializes in defending adolescent parricide offenders, more than 90 percent have been abused by their parents. In-depth portraits of such youths have frequently shown that they killed because they could no longer tolerate conditions at home. These children were psychologically abused by one or both parents and often suffered physical, sexual, and verbal abuse as well—and witnessed it given to others in the household. They did not typically have histories of severe mental illness or of serious and extensive delinquent behavior. They were not criminally sophisticated. For them, the killings represented an act of desperation—the only way out of a family situation they could no longer endure.

- Heide, Why Kids Kill Parents, 1992.

Despite these being the most frequent conditions of “parricide,” it still brings unique disgust to think about it for most people. The sympathy extended to murdering parents is never extended even to the most desperate child, who chose to kill to not be killed. They chose to stop enduring silently, and that was their greatest crime; that is the crime of the child who hits back. Hell, children aren’t even supposed to talk back. They are not supposed to be anything but grateful for the miserable pieces of space that adults carve out in a world hostile to children for them to live following adult rules. It isn’t rare for children to notice the adult monopoly on violence and force when they interact with figures like teachers, and the way they use words like “respect.” In fact, this social dynamic has been noticed quite often:

Sometimes people use “respect” to mean “treating someone like a person” and sometimes they use “respect” to mean “treating someone like an authority” and sometimes people who are used to being treated like an authority say “if you won’t respect me I won’t respect you” and they mean “if you won’t treat me like an authority I won’t treat you like a person” and they think they’re being fair but they aren’t, and it’s not okay.

(https://soycrates.tumblr.com/post/115633137923/stimmyabby-sometimes-people-use-respect-to-mean)

But it has received almost no condemnation in the public eye. No voices have raised to contrast the adult monopoly on violence towards child bodies and child minds. No voices have raised to praise the child who hits back. Because they do deserve praise. Because the child who sets their foot down and says this belongs to me, even when it’s something like their own body that they are claiming, is committing one of the most serious crimes against adult society, who wants them dispossessed.

Sources:

“The Adult Gaze: a tool of control and oppression,” https://livingwithoutschool.com/2021/07/29/the-adult-gaze-a-tool-of-control-and-oppression

“Filicide,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filicide

[junglejim4322]

I’m sorry but the funniest shit ever is people on here who will post all day about how they’re super subversive radical queers and then say stuff like if a man doesn’t want to marry you within 5 years of dating you should dump him. Going protestant mode