the-feminist-philosopher

[the-feminist-philosopher]

The Mandela Effect makes me so angry because it's so stupid but it also reflects the way some people in the first world see the rest of the world. Nelson Mandela was not like, some actor, he was one of the greatest political leaders of the 20th century, the father of the modern nation of South Africa, a key if not the key person to bring down apartheid which was one of the greatest crimes against humanity of the century. A South Africa and indeed a world without Nelson Mandela would be very different, we're talking about 58 million people who would still live under an oppressive racist regime or a devastating civil war; this was all avoided thanks to the tireless effort of Mandela and others to create modern South Africa. If you ever picked up a newspaper or watched the news or watched the 2010 World Cup, you MUST have at least heard of him.

And then some dumb pseudoscience "paranormal researcher" doesn't remember him and says that's proof of parallel dimensions and the whole internet takes it as a meme, and the other examples, together with a political leader spoken about in the same tone as Ghandi or Martin Luther King, are a children's book and Pikachu's tail. Just say you're a fucking dumbass who lives in a bubble and doesn't pay any attention to the world around you, it would be less embarrassing. Fucking hell.

[the-feminist-philosopher]

Bigenitalia vs Ambiguous Genitalia

[the-feminist-philosopher]

Don't ignore my messages my friend I apologize for asking for help but I have to

My friends, I am Rabab from Palestine from Gaza City

I have six children, We now live in a tent ⛺️ in Mawasi Khan Youn,

We are exhausted by displacement and our minds are distracted by the repeated bombing and death everywhere. We want to live like any family in this world. We want to live in peace. We want to live without bombing. I want my child to live like other children. I cannot provide food or drink for my family. Everything here has become expensive and we do not have the money to be able to provide that. We lost everything when the occupation destroyed my home in Gaza and now we have nothing left. We need your help and support in order to I hope that you donate to us so that we can provide a living for my children, including food, drink and clothes for the winter. I hope, my friend, that you donate to us so that we can save ourselves. I will not forgive you if you can donate to us and you do not donate $25 from each person. It is enough to save my children and save us all. I hope that you donate to us and share my campaign with your friends and family so that they can donate to me as well. Thank you very much.

[the-feminist-philosopher]

any post that implies butches are necessarily dysphoric about femininity; having boobs; having a high voice etc is inherently transmisogynistic. you can account for the large overlap between butch and transmasc without pretending butch transfems don’t exist all the time, i really shouldn’t have to explain why this is transmisogynistic.

[the-feminist-philosopher]

Damn. TERFs really do see themselves as white nights fighting on behalf of black & brown women against an aggressive hoard of black and brown men. I cannot go into the #feminism tag without seeing some of the wildest takes…

Because a TERF will really get on the Internet and say some shit like,

“Trans-exclusionary ideas are globally popular ideologies” and fail to see how public discrimination against a group is maybe a symptom of the current power structures, structures like the patriarchy, white supremacy, and colonialism.

and then follow that up with,

“Because the global majority isn’t white, my activism for those women isn’t white. Also because the women fighting against the patriarchy globally aren’t majority white, my brand of feminism can’t be white,” and fail to see how this is white-night activism and an attempt to co-opt other feminist movements globally, many of which actively resist their country’s neo-colonial resource exploitation and imperialist extraction of their country. But positioned in argument alongside the take that trans-hate is globally popular, it’s also an attempt to make non-white people look uniquely or predominantly hateful compared to those within their lofty country.

Which is exemplified by the fact that when a trans person—regardless of location—shows support for any cause in the global south, the popular response is to tell that trans person the people of that country would behead them or throw them from a roof. Because in addition to believing the brown other is uniquely “backwards” and “brutish,” they also believe that any oppressed group’s “salvation” is contingent upon good behavior. Whose salvation? Theirs, of course. These people will freely repeat talking points about things that don’t happen in whatever foreign country of their picking to support their argument because the intention is to show they have credible reason to believe “those people” are not the perfect model of “(western) civility,” and as such, are in need of the TERF’s ideas, resources, and “activists.” It’s a reframing of “The White Man’s Burden” to center women.

(I’ve always found the “defenestration threat” a particularly disingenuous take. There’s the apparent racism on one hand, but clear pink washing, too. I—a gay—cannot care about the suffering of others in another country if gay rights in that country is not on par with that of its imperial oppressor? Are these trans-exclusionary radicals disagreeing with the existence of transphobia in another country? Or are they disagreeing with the purported tactics? “My enlightened policies that mass incarcerate, push children to suicide, and strip strangers of bodily autonomy; their barbaric policies that do much the same, oh, and defenestration.” They do realize that they, the trans-exclusionary radical, are more of an existential threat to me in *my own country* than a stranger half a globe away, no?)

And this worldview becomes ever so apparent when, after pointing out their attempt to co-opt feminist movements led by black and brown women, the usual comeback is to ask the person who disagrees with their take if they think that black and brown men are “too stupid” to “know” to or how to oppress women. “Do you think it’s not worse in other countries?”

Not only is this an attempt at purple washing; an attempt to benefit from purported support for women’s rights as a way to distract from the issue at hand: Western paternalism and chauvinism, this is also an attempt to turn it back around on the other. The TERF could not avoid being critiqued for supporting imperialistic ideas that downplay the significance of white supremacy and the struggles of black and brown women by arguing that because the majority of women aren’t white, any advocacy for women couldn’t possibly be racist. And they couldn’t avoid being critiqued for supporting imperialistic ideas that downplay the significance of white supremacy by deflecting with a “what-about’ism” about the state of affairs in a foreign country. And now they’re faced with the fact others may think that they think black and brown people are uniquely brutish. So, their last hope is to argue that no, actually you 🫵 are downplaying the oppression that other women in other countries face at the hands of “their men” and engaging in the “noble savage” trope.

(Of course, this ignores how such a trope refers to positioning Indigenous people as people uniquely removed from societies—when in reality they had complex societies, social structures, and politics—who live in harmony with nature. Suggesting that someone’s ideas and characterization of other peoples is influenced by Western Imperialism and white supremacy is in no way the same as suggesting there is “innate goodness, pureness, and moral superiority” among an “uncorrupted” “primitive” other, but a TERF’s ideology often depends on equivocation, usually as a means of distraction.)

But, when someone points out that this is in no way what they said; the TERF is attempting to create a strawman to argue against, the final play in the book is to literally @/ the one brown TERF they know of on this site or conclude by saying “well, my brand of feminism has had Black and Jewish thinkers, so…,” fully blind to how this is quite literally tokenism.

All this because “I can’t be racist; I’m a feminist” really isn’t the argument they think it is.

[the-feminist-philosopher]

This whole thing is just reminding me how…

While men will fail to see the misogyny in their own words and actions every time, many women will fail to recognize the man’s misogyny, too.

A man can get on here and use a knight shielding a white maiden with the caption “Me protecting TERFs from tr**nys,” and someone with the url rad_feminine_XX will respond, “Girls! He’s not actually here to protect us even if he uses the t-slur!” 1.) Do you not see the misogyny inherent in his post? 2.) Do you not see the racial implications in this post, given his chosen representation of a woman in need of protecting? 3.) Have you ever analyzed why you feel the need to be protected by a patriarchal actor or the masculinist state? 4.) Have you ever analyzed why he sees you 🫵 and not other women as “deserving” of his protection? 5.) Have you ever stopped to ask yourself “why do all these homophobes and racists and misogynists ally themselves with us”?

[the-feminist-philosopher]

Because slurs are so funny??? Maybe to hobbyless, unemployed men who’ve never left their mother’s basement.

Love (/sar) that this reblogger here can’t even recognize that I was calling attention to what the featured POS was doing in the name of TERFs, and that this was ultimately a block list call-out about racism from an Andrew Jackson stan blog (one of the most likely blogs to find racism).

This 👇 was also one of the original points of this thread:

What does a notorious misogynist have to gain from denigrating black people and queer people for your (3rd person, general) supposed protection? Why does he feel you 🫵 are worth his paternalism and other women are not?

What a wonderfully non racist, pro-black community that TERFblr/Radblr has (/sarcasm). I certainly didn't have to black out the n-word that's featured in the meme of the original post (/sarcasm). Amazing that after being told that the n-word "reblog chains" (where every new reblogger adds the next letter in the n-word) are tasteless and racist, they admit to being a transphobe and use a meme featuring the n-word.

Come get your own @/radblr. Hold community members like this accountable like you claim you do.

Saw the original post come across my feed with the featured/screenshotted tags from someone I follow (@/canichangemyblogname). Caught the OP's reblog in the notes.

[the-feminist-philosopher]

Israel cancels agreement with UNRWA

The Israeli Foreign Ministry has informed the UN that it has ended the 1967 agreement that recognises the UN’s relief agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), according to The Times of Israel. The move came after the Israeli Knesset passed several laws banning the agency from operating on Israeli-controlled territory. Al Jazeera’s Mohammed Vall reports from Amman, Jordan.

[the-feminist-philosopher]

It’s true that America has one of the lowest voter turnout rates in the industrialized world, with only 62% of eligible adults turning up to the polls on a good year, and about 50% on a typical one. But if we really dive into the social science data, we can see that non-voters aren’t a bunch of nihilistic commie layabouts who’d prefer to die in a bridge collapse or of an untreated listeria infection than vote for someone who isn’t Vladimir Lenin. No, if we really study it carefully, we can see that the American electoral system has a series of unique features that easily account for why we find voting more cumbersome, confusing, and unrewarding than almost any other voters in the world.

Let’s take a look at the many reasons why Americans don’t vote:

1. We Have the Most Frequent Elections of Any Country

Most other democratic countries only hold major elections once every four or five years, with the occasional local election in between. This is in sharp contrast with the U.S., where we have some smattering of primaries, regional elections, state elections, ballot measures, midterm elections, and national elections basically every single year, often multiple times per year. We have elections more frequently than any other nation in the world — but just as swallowing mountains of vitamin C tablets doesn’t guarantee better health, voting more and harder hasn’t given us more democracy.

2. We Don’t Make Election Day a Holiday

The United States also does far less than most other democracies to facilitate its voters getting to the polls. In 22 countries, voting is legally mandated, and turnout is consequently very high; most countries instead make election day a national holiday, or hold elections on weekends. The United States, in contrast, typically holds elections on weekdays, during work hours, with minimal legal protections for employees whose only option to vote is on the clock.

3. We Make Registration as Hard as Possible

From Denmark, to Sweden, to Iceland, Belgium, and Iraq, all eligible voters in most democracies are automatically registered to vote upon reaching legal adulthood. Voting is typically regarded as a rite of passage one takes part in alongside their classmates and neighbors, made part of the natural flow of the country’s bureaucratic processes.

In the United States, in contrast, voter registration is a process that the individual must seek out — or more recently, be goaded into by their doctor. Here voting is not a communal event, it’s a personal choice, and failing to make the correct choice at the correct time can be penalized. In most other countries, there are no restrictions on when a voter can register, but in much of the United States, registering too early can mean you get stricken from the voter rolls by the time the election rolls around, and registering too late means you’re barred from voting at all.

4. We Make Voters Re-Register Far Too Often

In countries like Canada, Germany, and the Netherlands, voter registration updates automatically when a person moves. In the United State, any time a person changes addresses they must go out of their way to register to vote all over again. This policy disadvantages poorer and younger voters, who move frequently because of job and schooling changes, or landlords who have decided to farm black mold colonies in their kitchens.

Even if a voter does not change their address, in the United States it’s quite common for their registrations to be removed anyway— due to name changes, marriages, data breaches, or simply because the voter rolls from the previous election year have been purged to “prevent fraud” (read: eliminate Black, brown, poor, and left-leaning members from the electorate).

5. We Limit Access to Polling Places & Mail-in Ballots

In many countries, voters can show up to any number of polling places on election day, and showing identification is not always necessary. Here in the United States, the ability to vote is typically restricted to a single polling place. Voter ID laws have been used since before the Jim Crow era to make political participation more difficult for Black, brown, and impoverished voters, as well as for those for whom English is not their first language. Early and absentee voting options are also pretty firmly restricted. About a quarter of democracies worldwide rely on mail-in ballots to make voting more accessible for everyone; here, a mail-in ballot must be requested in advance.

All of these structural barriers help explain why just over 50% of non-voters in the United States are people of color, and a majority of non-voters have been repeatedly found to be impoverished and otherwise marginalized. But these populations don’t only feel excluded from the political process on a practical level: they also report feeling completely unrepresented by the available political options.

6. We Have the Longest, Most Expensive Campaign Seasons

Americans have some of the longest campaign seasons in the world, with Presidential elections lasting about 565 days on average. For reference, the UK’s campaign season is 139 days, Mexico’s is 147, and Canada’s is just 50. We also do not have publicly funded campaigns: our politicians rely upon donors almost entirely.

Because our elections are so frequent and our campaigns are so long and expensive, many American elected officials are in a nearly constant state of fundraising and campaigning. When you take into account the time devoted to organizing rallies, meeting with donors, courting lobbyists, knocking on doors, recording advertisements, and traveling the campaign trail, most federally elected politicians spend more time trying to win their seat than actually doing their jobs.

Imagine how much work you’d get done if you had to interview for your job every day. And now imagine that the person actually paying your wage didn’t want you to do that job at all:

7. Our Elected Officials Do Very Little

Elected officials who spend the majority of their hours campaigning and courting donors don’t have much time to get work done. Nor do they have much incentive to — in practice, their role is to represent the large corporations, weapons manufacturers, Silicon Valley start-ups, and investors who pay their bills, and serve as a stopgap when the public’s demands run afoul of those groups’ interests.

Perhaps that is why, as campaign seasons have gotten longer and more expensive and income inequality has grown more stark, our elected officials have become lean-out quiet quitters of historic proportions. The 118th Congress has so far been the least productive session on record, with only 82 laws having been passed in last two years out of the over 11,000 brought to the floor.

The Biden Administration has moved at a similarly glacial pace; aside from leaping for the phone when Israel calls requesting checking account transfers every two or three weeks, the executive-in-chief has done little but fumble at student loan relief and abortion protections, and bandied about banning TikTok.

The average age of American elected officials has been on a steady rise for some time now, with the obvious senility of figures like Biden, Mitch McConnell, and the late Diane Feinstein serving as the most obvious markers of the government’s stagnancy. Carting around a confused, ailing elderly person’s body around the halls of power like a decommissioned animatronic requires a depth of indifference to human suffering that few of us outside Washington can fathom. But more than that, it reflects a desperation for both parties to cling to what sources of influence and wealth they have. These aged figures are/were reliable simps for Blackstone, General Dynamics, Disney, and AIPAC, and their loyalty is worth far more than their cognitive capacity, or legislative productivity. Their job, in a very real sense, is to not do their job, and a beating-heart cadaver can do that just fine.

You can read the rest of the list for free (or have it narrated to you on the Substack app) at drdevonprice.substack.com!

[the-feminist-philosopher]

@staff — why do blogs that support antisemitic, homophobic, and racist language like this get to operate with impunity?

What a wonderfully non racist, pro-black community that TERFblr/Radblr has (/sarcasm). I certainly didn't have to black out the n-word that's featured in the meme of the original post (/sarcasm). Amazing that after being told that the n-word "reblog chains" (where every new reblogger adds the next letter in the n-word) are tasteless and racist, they admit to being a transphobe and use a meme featuring the n-word.

Come get your own @/radblr. Hold community members like this accountable like you claim you do.

Saw the original post come across my feed with the featured/screenshotted tags from someone I follow (@/canichangemyblogname). Caught the OP's reblog in the notes.

[the-feminist-philosopher]

it’s just all so stupid bc the ppl that get mad when you “‘make everything about race” seem to not understand that it literally..is all about race, you are more likely to have asthma and allergies and breathing problems if u live close to large populations of black people bc during segregation and redlining less diverse sexed trees were planted in the areas made up of predominantly black and brown people, black people have higher rates of plant related allergies and higher rates death from asthma bc young male trees were planted in addition to poor conditions regarding pollution, redlined areas get worse treatment structurally, if u live in a city u are more likely to die from lung cancer bc of segregation, and ppl act like im just saying stuff and making shit up and it’s like no dude statistically that is the truth, it should bother u that u get the short end of the stick simply bc some government official didn’t want black ppl to have “good” stuff

[the-feminist-philosopher]

“This means, in the case of an American Negro, born in that glittering republic, and the moment you are born, since you don’t know any better, every stick and stone and every face is white. And since you have not yet seen a mirror, you suppose that you are, too. It comes as a great shock around the age of 5, or 6, or 7, to discover that the flag to which you have pledged allegiance, along with everybody else, has not pledged allegiance to you. It comes as a great shock to discover that Gary Cooper killing off the Indians, when you were rooting for Gary Cooper, that the Indians were you.”

-James Baldwin

[the-feminist-philosopher]

idk to me it’s just like,,,black people coined the phrases say her name and rest in power for a reason and im gonna focus specifically on say her name because it was black women who wanted to call attention to the systemic violences that we have faced that have resulted in the deaths of so many of us which were left unrecognized. it was specifically addressing an issue within the black community wherein black femicides (particularly at the hands of the police/intimate partners) were not given the same spotlight as the murders of black men. we are always forgotten in life and in death and that is part of why the violence against us has been permitted to continue to the point that we are at a significantly higher risk of homicide than any other race. and the statistics are even more grim for black transwomen and femmes. for every nonblack victim of transphobic violence that gets recognition in their horrific death, there are 10 black victims whose names we never know. like that is the whole point of the phrase this shit is life or death for us and we know that the moment race is decontextualized from the nature of the phrase then that is when we are once again forgotten. but yall are acting like we’re trying to start genz tiktok lingo/aave co-opting discourse.

[the-feminist-philosopher]

“It was obvious that gender as category was not elastic enough to encompass the radical differences in the lived experiences of black and white women. In slavery, violated flesh, and negated maternity (black women were legally denied a mother’s access to her child or choice about reproduction) had defined this difference.”

— from Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments by Saidiya Hartman

[the-feminist-philosopher]

“I’m thinking of how surveillance never seems to be in service of protecting black people, especially black women; the intentional lack of policing around issues that affect black women is instrumentalized through police brutality.”

— Doreen St Felix (via unusualmodesofresistance)

[the-feminist-philosopher]

cosmo wanda i wish every nonblack who thinks acab is about not liking people telling you what to do and not about opposing the systemic abuse and murder of marginalized individuals especially bipoc would die and go to hell no matter what