vulpesvulpum

[vulpesvulpum]

I’m not usually much for generational generalisations, but it strikes me that there’s something very distinctly Millennial about “I became a supervillain because the other supervillains assumed I already was one and I was too socially awkward to correct their misconception” as an origin story.

[vulpesvulpum]

Yes, there was a pretty interesting dynamic where autonomy for (certain) indigenous tribes was supported by conservative factions of Mexico and it was the liberals with their utopia universalism who most had it out for them.

I’m not going to defend Columbus, who, by all accounts, seems to have been a maniac.

But every square inch of earth is soaked in blood a hundred hundred times over, and the more flowery hagiographic paeans I see calling the second-to-last conquerors of an area its “rightful owners,” the more it seems like, tactically, the error that the latest conquerors made was leaving survivors, a habit entirely unfamiliar to their predecessors.

[vulpesvulpum]

Moldova no!

lmao

[vulpesvulpum]

We'd be much better at our imperialism if our conservative nationalists would let us

the thing that always amuses me about NAFTA conspiracies is that, like, the united states has the majority of the population of North America by a comfortable margin (to say nothing of just US + Canada + Mexico), and the overwhelming majority of North America’s GDP, like 95% according to Wikipedia, so any configuration of a North American union would functionally be a Greater United States with some more Spanish and French speakers. but i guess more Spanish and French speakers is actually what these conspiracy theories fear most.

[vulpesvulpum]

Pretty sure Hindustan refers only to the northern ethnically Indo-European region of India

Countries whose local names are extremely different from the names they’re referred to in English

[vulpesvulpum]

Did you not pay attention at all? It doesn't count as bullying unless they're in a protected class. Anon needs to send a bio and genetic test so we can determine how much bullying was done.

“Bullying is the use of force, coercion, hurtful teasing or threat, to abuse, aggressively dominate or intimidate. The behavior is often repeated and habitual. One essential prerequisite is the perception (by the bully or by others) of an imbalance of physical or social power. This imbalance distinguishes bullying from conflict.”

Bullying is dictated by perceived power imbalances. If you’re getting bullied for “looking gay/transgender” the perceived power imbalance is that gay or transgender people are less than. This is how you can be affected by homophobia and transmisogyny even if you aren’t gay or trans.

We use bigger words to describe being mean when we are adults, it’s not that deep.

I don’t know what point you’re trying to make but I also don’t really care.

[vulpesvulpum]

My cat would like nothing more than to hunt and kill birds. I see him sometimes looking out the window at them. I think his teeth must be full of wanting. And I can understand that. Blood is warm. But I do not let him. And sometimes he looks at me and it seems as though he is trying very hard to tell me the things he thinks I must not know. He looks at me and thinks, this person does not know that blood is warm. And it is a difficult life, to live under the capricious whim of someone who does not even know that blood is warm, who labours under such vast and total misunderstandings. What cruel joke landed me with the ability to open doors and him to want in ways I cannot understand? But that's the way it is and so every effort must be made to show me, to teach me the pleasures of rending flesh from flesh. But I do not learn it. Why?

Sometimes I sit with him and watch the birds. And I tell him in a language he cannot possibly understand that I do know that their blood is warm. I tell him I do know what it is like to have teeth. And I tell him, that even so, we do not do that. I do not imagine that he asks me, even so? But, even so.

Of course he doesn't think any of this. He's just a cat. He would like to kill birds though. And I don't let him.

[vulpesvulpum]

Because they turned off replies:

Ethnospiritualism is unhinged. Every! Race! gets a pantheon! Do mixed race people go to double hell and double heaven? Do they have to split their worship based on how much of each race they are?

Putting aside the assumption that apparently all gods (except the Christian one maybe?) are real, the idea that each person has a "true religion" they must belong to based on their genetics is so race-essentialist it makes one's head spin.

And a quick laugh at the idea of choosing your religion based on what google says your (known) ancestors (may have) believed 2000+ years ago. It's just... incredible.

[vulpesvulpum]

Lol ethnospiritualism. Every! Race! gets a pantheon! Do mixed race people go to double hell and double heaven? Do they have to split their worship based on how much of each race they are?

Another small lol at the idea of picking your religion based on what google says some of your ancestors may have believed 2000+ years ago just.. incredible

For the spiritual culturally appropriating white ppl:

Before you try to culturally appropriate a religion or spirituality that isn’t yours, you should be aware that your people have their own religion that isn’t Christianity. You just have to look hard enough to find it. The spirituality could be easy to find with a 5 min google search or you could have to look through 1000s of years of history to find it but it’s there. So find your ppl’s spirituality and leave mine alone, thank you❤️

[vulpesvulpum]

LOVE OUTLIVES BOTH THE LOVED AND THE LOVER

(i) JMC toynbee, beasts and their names in the roman empire / (ii) dog sleeping on dog mosaic in pompeii / (iii) george a. reisner, the dog which was honored by the king of upper and lower egypt / (iv) grave stele for helena, 150-200 CE / (v) assyrian dog figurines found beneath a palace doorway at nineveh, c. 645 BCE / (vi) tracing made by archaeologist henri breuil from font-de-gaume cave, c. 17,000 years ago / (vii) JMC toynbee, beasts and their names in the roman empire

[vulpesvulpum]

I've only started paying attention to Yglesias and Klein in the last 2 or 3 years, so I may be missing context but. Hasn't Klein basically always held fairly radical positions? He talks consistently about how "if left politics spins off into fantasizing [about major national restructuring] rather than strategizing those people are going to get hurt."

I myself subscribe to far left political positions but barring a violent revolution I struggle to see how he's wrong? It seems to me like the main difference between him and Yglesias is where he is somewhat depressed by the reality, Yglesias is smug about it.

If anyone has more context I'd love to hear it

But it’s not just the right. The financial press, the cable news squawkers and even many on the center-left greet news of labor shortages and price increases with an alarm they rarely bring to the ongoing agonies of poverty or low-wage toil. 

[…]

I suspect the real political problem for a guaranteed income isn’t the costs, but the benefits. A policy like this would give workers the power to make real choices. They could say no to a job they didn’t want, or quit one that exploited them. They could, and would, demand better wages, or take time off to attend school or simply to rest. When we spoke, Hamilton tried to sell it to me as a truer form of capitalism. “People can’t reap the returns of their effort without some baseline level of resources,” he said. “If you lack basic necessities with regards to economic well-being, you have no agency. You’re dictated to by others or live in a miserable state.”

But those in the economy with the power to do the dictating profit from the desperation of low-wage workers. One man’s misery is another man’s quick and affordable at-home lunch delivery. “It is a fact that when we pay workers less and don’t have social insurance programs that, say, cover Uber and Lyft drivers, we are able to consume goods and services at lower prices,” Hilary Hoynes, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley, where she also co-directs the Opportunity Lab, told me.

This is the conversation about poverty that we don’t like to have: We discuss the poor as a pity or a blight, but we rarely admit that America’s high rate of poverty is a policy choice, and there are reasons we choose it over and over again. We typically frame those reasons as questions of fairness (“Why should I have to pay for someone else’s laziness?”) or tough-minded paternalism (“Work is good for people, and if they can live on the dole, they would”). But there’s more to it than that.

Makin a start but gotta radicalize Ezra Klein further

[vulpesvulpum]

I think the aggregation and advertisement of other reddits sort of negates the forum-like qualities

i think gen z ppl need to stop trying to moderate social media– which is impossible to moderate– and just go on forums already. “this is for mlm, wlw dni” bruh i’m telling you, if you discover mlm forums you’ll go bananas. everyone there will be mlm, i promise. this is genuinely friendly advice. stop wasting your time trying to control your twitter and tik tok, it won’t work because it’s designed to not be controlled.

[vulpesvulpum]

Fuck yeah

Don't know if anyone shared this here first, but whatever. Fresh off the /r/parahumans discord! Tagging @st-just

EDIT : i didnt make this btw

[vulpesvulpum]

watching steven universe is the polar opposite of eating pussy

[vulpesvulpum]

I like how in Mario Sunshine Mario gets arrested despite having an alibi corroborated by upwards of six different people (his being on a fucking plane/out of the country for nearly every crime he was being tried for), tried but not permitted a defense lawyer or any testimony to be given in his favor, and convicted based solely on crude eye witness testimony which didn’t even match his description (the illustration is literally blue, just like the actual Shadow Mario).  Then within minutes of his sentencing, the actual perpetrator strikes again in broad daylight in front of even more witnesses, and attempts to kidnap someone, only to be stopped by Mario, but Mario is nonetheless still held responsible and held to the task of carrying out his sentence?

Isle Delfino is canonically a police state

[vulpesvulpum]

what issue in america could possibly be “race-neutral”? that doesn’t make any sense when race is a salient factor in how one navigates basically every system in the country. genuinely ?

So like there’s a way one could squint and describe virtually any issue as having a racial justice angle if one wanted to. But it’s unclear why we would want to in many situations. It’s unclear what light it actually sheds on the issue, unclear it says anything meaningful.

For example, lead poisoning in the United States is a huge issue. Poor people are disproportionately likely to live in substandard housing with lead pipes and lead paint, or nearby to some source of industrial lead pollution, and so by extension people of color are disproportionately likely to be exposed, because they’re disproportionately poor.

You could choose to litigate where this was historically the result of specific racist discriminatory intent, or whether it was a “purely” class issue (meaning like its just how the market works: poor people get fucked). But it’s unclear why we would want to. What would be accomplished by doing that? The solution to the lead issue is simple and obvious: a government program of lead remediation. Refit all the pipes, re-do all the paint, clean up all the industrial sites, nationwide, across the board. If one were a racial identitarian who sees this race-neutral approach as unsatisfactory, there’s nothing you could actually change to make it better. The problem would be addressed 100%. There’s nothing you could add to improve this in a racial-justice sense except to make a lot of purely symbolic statements about how important this is to solve historical injustices, blah blah blah.

The only reason one would even see a need to inject race into the situation is if one is coming at this from an austeritarian mindset, where no universal program of lead remediation is forthcoming, and all we can expect is for the government to spend a few pennies to clean up some lead in one or two ZIP codes. In that situation, I can see a racial identitarian arguing that people of color should receive extra attention from this program, as they are currently being extra exposed to harm. I could sympathize with that argument. But I don’t want to even approach that headspace, that austerity mindset. The only program we should accept is a universal program that addresses all lead everywhere.

This is why people say that identity politics is neoliberal. It simply takes it for granted that there won’t be enough to go around for everyone, so people are going to have to fight a vicious dog-eat-dog struggle for their share. And I don’t see why we would want to inject more racial ressentiment like that. We already know you can convince racist white people to oppose welfare if they think black people are going to benefit from it. And the identitarians merely add more racial resentment onto this fire by promoting the opposite: ostensible progressives now opposing unions, infrastructure spending, and single-payer healthcare because they think too many working-class whites will benefit. This is why I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say identitarianism is a neoliberal pro-capitalist project aimed at dividing the working class by race and then setting them against each other.

It’s not helping. We already know white identity politics is a reactionary anti-egalitarian force that upholds class rule. Isn’t that the basic insight of whiteness studies? That the “white race” as a concept was invented by colonial authorities to divide the loyalties of the free or indentured white working class from the enslaved black working class? Why make the socialist project even harder by attempting to somehow “counteract” this with more identity politics?

So I think “race-neutral” solutions make sense in a lot of situations. Clean up the lead, organize every worker into a union, legalize drugs, raise the minimum wage, etc. None of these policies can be improved by adding a racial angle to them, indeed many can only be undermined or made less politically popular by doing so. It doesn’t mean racism doesn’t exist. It doesn’t mean you should ignore racism where it exists. It doesn’t mean “we should just keep quiet and overlook racism, to keep conservative whites onside.” It simply means you don’t need to add a racial discourse onto issues where it makes no sense and doesn’t help anything. In many cases it is at best simply confusing and ineffective, and at worst it actively and maliciously undermines the whole project.

Hillary Clinton gave the whole game away in 2016 when she said “if we broke up the banks would it end racism?” Just pointlessly injecting race into the issue specifically as a way of arguing implicitly “it won’t, and therefore we shouldn’t break up the banks.” The proposed solution didn’t need a racial angle, and by injecting one the proposal was thereby defeated.

[vulpesvulpum]

Why is it so hard to be against genocide and exploitation in ALL cases? It seems significantly more principled than trying to sort the world out into "good countries" and "fake bad countries I don't like"

“Damn, and if almost all countries were settler colonies at one point or other, then it’d really undermine the incoherent basis of my crackpot Maoist politics... so it can’t be true.”

So close to understanding lmao.