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silvergeek · 2 years

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I had no idea that Tolkien fans were so nasty and racist.

Any time I try to look up any information about Rings of Power, comment sections are overwhelmed by racist freaks. I swear to fucking god, these people don't have anything worse going on in their lives other than a film studio hiring a Puerto Rican to portray an elf or a black English woman to play a dwarf. (Even Isildur is too ethnic for some of these fans. Like jfc, so sorry he's not a WASP.)

What blows my mind is the sheer number of complaints, just about each one of them starting with, "I'm not racist but..." and ending with this rant insisting that Tolkien wanted all of his fictional little magic characters to be white. (Ok. Fair enough. He probably DID envision them all as white. He's a dead guy who was born in the fucking 1800's.)

Lol. "I'm not racist but I can't stop obsessing over the hobbits' skin color!" Jesus christ.

1. I'm currently re-reading the Silmarillion and nowhere does it explicitly state that everyone must be Caucasian.

2. There are numerous citations about some people actually having darker skin (e.g. harfoots).

3. The people who are screaming, "But this is OUR contemporary European mythology! Stop shoehorning black people into it!" Newsflash: there are black Europeans, assholes. Born and raised in your fucking countries. They know no other culture aside from --whichever country they gotta put up with your shit in. (Yes, my grammar sucks. Fuck off.) Why the hell do you act like these people do not exist?

I can't say the USA is any better with these attitudes, but I thank the fucking stars for having visibly outspoken, politically active African American women to keep our bullshit in line.

Imagine being a woman or a POC (or both) and anytime you apply for a job, audition for a role, or enter into any sort of competition and actually win based on your talents/skills, just around the corner there's a legion of assholes screaming that you were only picked because of tokenism. Imagine going through life being told over and over that your effort means nothing and that anytime you succeed at any given thing, you're just being pandered to. And imagine that the people saying this shit to you are pretending to be on YOUR side. And imagine, just for a moment, that these same people happily watch white guy after white guy walk into success and never ever question if whether or not their white guy peers are playing favorites -- because surely those people are impartial in all of their decision making. (Did they pick a white guy? It's an impartial choice! Did they pick a black lady? WOKE BULLSHIT PANDERING::blood erupts from esophagus::)

Imagine all of that, then go take a nice big shit in your garage.

Also, this uruk hai is totally gonna eat this little boy. Off topic, really. The pic is just there to get your attention.

Between the nasty backlash of Sandman and Rings of Power, complete with death threats and everything, I have to say this takes me back to the uprising of Gamergate.

They performed all of these same hate rituals, but aimed squarely at women in gaming. Zoey Quinn caught the brunt of it -- people even figured out her father's home phone number and made threatening calls to him.

I remember Anita Sarkeesian would have to cancel expos due to bomb threats.

These are typically the actions of some subhuman demographic, mostly male, aged 20's to 50's, typically white (not always) and either straight or profoundly closeted. Politically... they tend to think of themselves as freedom lovers, but at the root of their ideologies, you'll find stagnant traditionalism dancing in rhythm with contemporary neo-conservatism. Freedom for them, not for anyone else.

These are the people who don't want women to design video games, they don't want black/hispanic/Indian folks in their TV shows except as forgettable side characters, and they don't want the gays. Never ever with the gays. (And anything beyond "gay" doesn't exist in their minds. It's made up.)

I remember all this back in 2014. They review bombed games, in fact. They were a bunch of keyboard warriors for the most part. They eventually lost, because now we have a more diverse gaming industry. Most of them can only find their male gaze fixations with the big-tittied anime girls in obscure JRPG's pumped out by Japan, China, and Korea -- at best.

They're just scum. They really are. And they hate change. And they're cowards.

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liskantope · 1 year

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Half a year ago, I got myself involved in a thread which compared trans rights to gay rights and tried to make a case that, in terms of arguments for each, the issues are not as directly comparable as a lot of people seem to think. A lot of my perspective comes from a sort of an empathy I feel with the non- religiously conservative, non- radical feminist motivations for doubting some of what this social movement is pushing for, particularly with regard to its disconnect with how more traditional people view identity categories.

This portion of a recent interview on the YouTube channel Nonzero (see until 47:43) is a stunningly crystal-clear illustration of the attitude and motivation I was trying to describe at the time, so much so that I think it's instructive and kind of fascinating to watch, even if it's almost so extreme and ridiculous as to come across as parody. (Warning: a certain kind of non-conservative, non-TERFy transphobia, which I'll quote bits of below.)

The interviewee, Norman Finkelstein, feels violently averse to using "they/them" pronouns purely because it would be implicitly affirming what in his mind is an untruth. (Presumably he would not want to refer to a male-presenting student as "she" or a female-presenting student as "he", for a similar reason, but this doesn't directly come up.) He appears to have no other motive, but the motive of not liking to "play along" with someone else's factual untruth is plenty for him. There is no particular social conservatism evident in him; he states plainly that he's fine with androgyny, of people dressing/presenting any way they wish, and that stuff doesn't bother him in the slightest, because that doesn't involve saying things that are untrue. Politically and philosophically he is obviously left-leaning, pro-science, and non/anti-religious in most areas: he repeatedly likens affirming someone's gender identity to affirming that the world is flat or that climate change isn't real or "all the craziness you attribute to the Trump base". Not pronouncing things that imply a factual untruth or deny objective reality is sacred to him as a professor and an intellectual, is what he is saying.

Also, this:

I'm not insulting anyone. If I'm calling you a "he", it's not like I'm calling you the N word or I'm calling you a c*** or something. It's just a relatively stable identifier.

Notice how completely uncomprehending Finkelstein is of the notion that not affirming someone's claimed identity (on the basis of what he believes to be objective reality or established definitions of words) could possibly be an insult or convey lack of respect or qualify as dehumanizing treatment of someone else. That a refusal to affirm someone's claimed identity (on the basis that it denies objective reality) is somehow a form of dehumanization is a completely unfathomable concept to many.

Now I find Finkelstein's perspective flawed on at least half a dozen counts, and fallacious on a particular fundamental level in conflating different types of "objective facts" (something that Robert Wright, who takes a much more reasonable, kind, and open-minded agnostic view on all of this, gently tried to push back on him about). I do think Finkelstein had some good points later in the excerpt about not forcing jarring changes in language down everyone's throats -- this is how I feel about artificial and ugly terms like Latinx, for instance, and I would have had some issues with xie/xir and the like becoming widespread nonbinary pronouns -- but in my opinion these points can't be applied well to using singular "they" for nonbinary people. Moreover, Finkelstein comes across as hardly more than a crusty, curmudgeonly jackass throughout, one who proudly and stubbornly adheres to a disagreeable absolutist view and refuses to open his mind to where his defense of that view might be flawed.

(More minor point: in arguing that mispronouning someone isn't a form of insult, he compares it to factually saying someone's hair is white or that their muscular dystrophy will prevent them from running a 4-minute mile. But, while maybe "insult" or "dehumanization" wouldn't be the best way to describe these things, they are certainly rude in certain contexts: you probably shouldn't call attention to someone's hair being white if they are sensitive about aging, for instance. Similarly, calling a nonbinary but male-presenting person "he" is pretty unkind if they don't want to present as male and are sensitive about it. But Finkelstein clearly isn't the kind of person to prioritize others' feelings over his duty towards "objective reality" in this way.)

But I contend that this is simply an extreme and rather dickish version of how tons and tons of people think, because in terms of the history of social justice and civil rights movements, it is brand new for a movement to be so heavily based in the objective truth of internally-felt identities and accusing people of fundamental dehumanization when they refuse to affirm them. And yet, activist rhetoric sounds as if this is simply part of how identities always worked and what dehumanization always meant, rather than something that appeared on the scene just yesterday.

There is certainly still a major constituency of conservatively religious people who believe that everyone should only do with their bodies what their bodies were "created to do" or whatever, but conservative Christianity is very weakened in our culture since it lost the last major culture war, and I think a lot of people in that camp still also fall into the category of finding it incomprehensible nonsense to say that an identity category is whatever each of us says it is and that it's dehumanizing ever to imply otherwise. I believe it's simply a misconception to assume that the pushback against trans activism is comprised mainly of fundamentalists and TERFs. Norman Finkelstein is an (albeit extreme) example of someone who appears to be neither, and my perception at least in the US is that most people are neither, but that a great many Americans, if not a majority, don't really get the "identity is whatever you say it is" concept and at best are bemusedly humoring it as long as it doesn't get too much into their faces.

(On each day of this past weekend, I was in a different public place -- a bar restaurant and a coffee shop -- and overheard part of a conversation about how "the people in such-and-such social group over there all ask about and share pronouns and a bunch of them go by 'they'", and in context this wasn't being attacked in any way, but it was being treated as bemusing and only semi-comprehensible.)

As Tumblr user Bambamramfan once said, people (particularly scientific-minded, non-faith-y people) really don't like to assert things they don't actually believe (don't have time to look up the post right now; the way they phrased it was something like "Americans don't like to lie about what they believe" and it was in the context of lesser-of-two-evils voting, a topic on which I emphatically disagreed with Bambambramfan, but I consider that particular point to be wise). I wish this were more recognized in social justice activism communities in general, and both that more rhetoric were crafted and ideological assumptions were more carefully examined with it in mind.

I'll end by saying, as I've probably said before, that I'm not claiming just because certain ideological assumptions in trans right activism are fundamentally brand new, that they are wrong or shouldn't become adopted by the wider community. Lots of fundamental ideological assumptions that we are obviously better off for making the default, such as "people owning other people is a gross moral evil", were once brand new at least on a society-wide scale. What I complain about is activists completely refusing to acknowledge or even be aware of this novelty, and so refusing to critically examine it, to defend it on its own merits, or to meet others where they're at.

#trans issues #robert wright #transphobia cw #racial slurs #conservative christianity #terf ideology #social justice

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glittter-vamp · 1 month

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My dad works at a gun and ammo store on the weekends, and a lot of the workers there are right wing nutters (“foreigners are taking our jobs” “border walls!” “Thin blue line” And all that jazz). But I still talk to and have conversations with them because my dad works there (he is economically conservative and socially liberal not that I agree with any conservatism). Sometimes you have to interact with those who believe extremely differently than you, and if they enjoy your interaction, you may slowly bring them to your side btw.

My own father is black Hispanic conservative male but weirdly enough he supports his two gay children and even my best friend who is trans and has gone far enough to call her his kid when my friends parents disowned him for that. He believes in a woman’s rights to choose & supports strong women in male dominated fields. (He’s literally shown me all about cars and motorcycles)

He’s a gun owner (as am I). Has many friends in the military and police so it’s crazy to me that people think it’s so black and white when dealing with people whose political views don’t align with your own. Like I understand this country is divided but open mindedness can lead to some crazy progress as you pointed out that you can make them see from your POV!

#asks #kurlyteuvo

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qqueenofhades · 2 years

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Does it ever strike you just how hyper-consumerism conservatism seems to be?

Like they have an obsession with Trump merch or a lack of Democratic merch somehow being indicative of Democratic people not being popular, their obsession with the destruction of property over people's lives, Fixation on wealth as an indicator of supremacy and superiority...

It's like they tie their entire identity to the most superficial aspects of society.

It's because capitalism (economic), patriarchy (social) and imperialism (political) all place their importance chiefly on owning things (and by extension, land and people). In the first instance, capitalism wants you to accumulate more stuff whether or not you actually need it, and as evidenced by the COVID shutdowns, if people stop spending money they don't have on things they don't need and your entire economy collapses, it just might not be that great in the first place. Late-stage capitalism, which exists in order to funnel mega-fortunes to a tiny handful of people (and to make ordinary people feel like these billionaires are poor, helpless, and persecuted, and the mean ol' government should just leave them alone), is the most obvious example of that. The more physical items that you own and the more money you have at your disposal, the higher your social capital is, and the more ability you have to live your preferred life, regardless of broader global circumstances. So in that case, of course constant acquisition is viewed as the only way to climb the ladder.

Patriarchy, in turn, is a social system that is deliberately designed to own and control supposedly "inferior" bodies: women, people of color, gay people, etc etc. White Christian heterosexual patriarchy, which is the kind that has most often existed in the West and has the longest-lasting historical effects, makes this rationale explicit. The pre-Civil War white slave owner had total control of Black/enslaved bodies; even today, evangelical men are given a religious mandate to monitor and control the "unruly" bodies of women (we are obviously not overlooking the role of white women in maintaining misogynistic, patriarchal, and racist systems, but that is a topic for another post); and straight society must enforce heteronormative behavior on LGBTQ people in order to prevent them from disrupting this entire dominant paradigm. This is also what gives rise to the kind of blinkered zero-sum thinking wherein if any (non-white, Christian, male, heterosexual) group has civil rights or social recognition, that must mean the original group of white men has less. It's as if they feel that civil rights are a limited, finite quantity, and putting some chips in anyone else's bowl means that there are fewer for them. Because they're used to owning everything and everyone, and having the final, unquestioned say, encountering any pushback at all makes them scream and scream.

Imperialism combines both of these factors and extends it to the realm of the geopolitical: obviously, building an empire requires more land, and getting more land often requires straightforward brute conquest of that which belongs to other people. (For the most up-to-the-minute example, see: Putin and Ukraine.) Once the political structure of an empire is in place, patriarchy, capitalism, and other controlling social and cultural systems are often used to keep it there: racial hierarchies, restriction and destruction of Indigenous people, forcing women to assume an inferior social role, using religion as a key justifying factor, etc etc. All of these concepts are, again, predicated on the idea of who owns what, and who can control it as a result.

Since modern Western right-wing politics and culture draw intensely from all three of these ideologies, of course that manifests as an idea that they're really in the majority, and they're better than Democrats and/or any other people who don't constantly rely on materialism to advertise their beliefs, as long as they have more stuff. Hence the avalanche of Trump merchandise, the MAGA hats, the signifying of belonging to an in-group by how many things they can buy. For one thing, Trump's entire political career is a grift and con on a massive scale, so he energetically seizes any and every opportunity to cheat his gullible cult members out of their money. It's also why we get all those MAGATS shouting that clearly nobody actually voted for Biden, because we're not walking around in Biden hats and shirts and sticking countless Biden signs on our lawns and/or giant obnoxious flags on our giant obnoxious pickup trucks. Of course they can't understand any kind of political system or ideology that actually doesn't rely on constantly owning, controlling, and coercing resources, territory, and people. It's at the heart of everything they believe and do.

#anonymous #ask #politics for ts

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counttwinkula · 2 years

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In many of those social contexts, especially in sexual institutions such as the bars and the baths, you were bound to meet all sorts of people you would never have encountered in your own social circles, along with numbers of people you would never have chosen to meet on your own, including a whole bunch you wouldn't have wanted to be caught dead with, if it had been up to you. But it wasn't up to you. You had to take the crowds that congregated in gay venues as you found them. You couldn't select the folks you were going to associate with according to your own criteria for the kind of men you approved of or thought you wanted as buddies. You had to deal with a wide range of people of different social backgrounds, physical types, appearances, gender styles, social classes, sexual tastes and practices, and sometimes (in the case of White folks) different races. Which meant that you were exposed to many different ideas about what it meant to be gay and to many different styles of gay life. You might not have wanted to be exposed to them, but you didn't have much choice. […] the new gay public culture virtually guaranteed that people who moved to a gay enclave would encounter a lot of old-timers who were more experienced at being gay and more sophisticated about it than they were. Moreover, those veterans of urban gay life often held shockingly militant, uncompromising, anti-homophobic, anti-heterosexist, anti-mainstream political views. People who had already been living in gay ghettos for years had had time and opportunity to be 'liberated'; to be deprogrammed, to get rid of their stupid, heterosexual prejudices, to achieve a politicized consciousness as well as a pride in their gay identity. By encountering those people, with their greater daring and sophistication and confidence, the new arrivals from the provinces often found their assumptions, values, and pictures of the right way to live, of how to be gay, seriously challenged. Their old attitudes were liable to be shaken up. The sheer mix of people in the new gay social worlds favored a radicalization of gay male life. It lent weight and authority to the more evolved, sophisticated, experienced, and radical members of the local community. And so it tended to align the coming-out process with a gradual detachment from traditional, heterosexual, conservative, mainstream notions about the proper way to live. […] many of the new recruits to the gay ghettos found themselves gradually argued out of their old-fashioned, rustic, parochial, unenlightened views—their ‘hang-ups’ and their ‘unliberated’ attitudes—including their adherence to rigid gender styles, inappropriate romantic fantasies, restrictive sexual morality, political conservatism, prudery, and other small-town values. Psychic decolonization was the order of the day: gay men needed to identify, and to jettison, the alien, unsuitable notions that the ambient culture of heterosexuality had implanted in their minds. […] The replacement of gay bars by online social-networking sites means that you can now select the gay people you want to associate with before you meet them or come to know them. You can pick your contacts from among the kinds of people you already approve of, according to your unreflective, unreconstructed criteria. You don’t have to expose yourself to folks who might have more experience of gay life than you do or who might challenge your unexamined ideas about politics. you can hang on to your unliberated, heterosexist, macho prejudices, your denial, your fear, and you can find other people who share them with you. You can continue to subscribe to your ideal model of a good homosexual: someone virtuous, virile, self-respecting, dignified, ‘non-scene,’ non-promiscuous, with a conventional outlook and a solid attachment to traditional values—a proper citizen and an upstanding member of (straight) society.

David M. Halperin, How to Be Gay, “Queer Forever,” 435-440

#how to be gay #david halperin #long post #pride #queer #edited for some typos

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the-feminist-philosopher · 1 year

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“They have put political correctness above common sense, above your safety, and above all else. I refuse to be politically correct.” -Donald J. Trump

There is an obvious contradiction involved in complaining- at length and to an audience- that you are being silenced. But this idea – that there is a set of powerful, unnamed actors, who are trying to control everything you do, right down to the words you use - is very trendy in right-wing circles. And it often leads them down a path of antisemitism.

"Bemoaning an overly PC culture is not as much a protection of your own rights as it is a political cudgel to wield against the opposition... there’s a certain thread of victimhood in modern conservatism."

Those who say there is “too much prejudice” are three times more likely than those who say there is “too much political correctness” to say discrimination, racism and sexism aren’t taken seriously enough.

Those who said that there is “too much political correctness” are disproportionately white, male, Republican and supportive of Trump...

People are more willing to police certain types of speech if that derogatory language is aimed at groups they consider to be part of their tribe.

"[L]iberals are more concerned with being politically right than being factually correct... the left has destroyed the idea of absolute truth and legitimate ends. … I think it's really dangerous what the left has done. They've created this effort to distort reality through vocabulary and they thought their agenda was enhanced by it." -Victor Davis Hanson

Conservatives have always stood opposed to protections for minorities and when people propose protecting said minorities, conservatives accuse the opposition of restricting their free speech.

Back in 2009, they stood in opposition to expanding the definition of "hate crime" to include crimes based on gender and sexual orientation. Why? Because they believed they would be harassed and punished for supposed "thought crimes" against the "gays." They were most concerned about the potential that "pastors expressing [their] beliefs about homosexuality could be prosecuted if their sermons were connected to later acts of violence against gays."

That's correct, they stood in opposition to expanding the hate crimes law to make it a federal crime to assault people for their sexual orientation because they wanted to be able to engage in stochastic terrorism with impunity. And they called the bill "thought crimes" legislation.

Take heart. They failed.

#txt #feminism #these people need to do some serious #introspection #because they sound exactly like #white supremacists I've had the displeasure of #coming face-to-face with #they too leave posters like this #around cities #and they too leave razor blades #beneath the posters #so people cannot take them off #and they too #tell people #that they 'cannot' show their face #without fear of losing friends and jobs #and they too express that their inability to discuss - in public...#the 'reality of race' is because of some 'thought crimes' social and political persecution

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womenfrommars · 2 years

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Your response to the seppie’s post about het sex killed me because it’s true. 💀 And we all know that these rad lesbians would have a complete meltdown if any of us suggests they abstain from recreational (gay) sex due to the TRA conversion rape rhetoric that is still raging on nowadays that have gotten so many lesbians raped and nearly impregnated. Gays and lesbians do have a strong hook up culture and have a lot of indiscriminate sex/NSA sex, and although I did felt bad about how they kept getting assaulted and raped when they go to bars, go on hookup apps, etc etc etc, because they wanted to continue to hook up casually with the same sex…. For them to turn around and tell straight people to stop fucking each other unless they’re okay with pregnancy or the risk of rape is just first rate hypocrisy. Like hello??????? 😭

I understand pregnancy is a natural consequence of heterosexual sex, and I feel like people who consent to sex therefore also consent to the possibility of pregnancy (not the pregnancy itself). It's kind of like going on a wild water ride in a theme park. You may or may not get wet, but despite not knowing the outcome, you go on the ride anyways.

When you hook up with someone, you are also aware that other person might have an STD. And you can carry an STD for up to twenty years without having any symptoms of it, so the other person may not even know they have one. But you still consent regardless, meaning you accept the possibility of catching an STD (which again is different from deliberately seeking out STDs).

Simply saying people should abstain from sex is not going to work because people have sexual feelings. Especially in more liberal environments there is also little to no social control anymore (i.e. people shaming you for it). It's unrealistic to expect abstinence from (heterosexual) women and ironically speaking it's a conservative talking point, though radical feminists want nothing to do with conservatism.

Previously I have compared ''PIV strikes'' and political celibacy to the Catholic Church's view on homosexuality. The Church expects homosexuals to abstain from all sexual relations, which is routinely criticised for being unrealistic. But somehow abstinence is realistic when it comes to heterosexual activity?

I don't know how the gay scene looks at hook up culture but I think gay men tend to be the most promiscuous. Not even because they are gay, but rather because men have higher sex drives than women do. In a heterosexual scenario, this is not going to work because women turn down men for sex more often than the other way around. But in a gay male scenario, the sex drives of two partners will likely match more.

Evolutionary biologists speculate that (heterosexual) men have a higher sex drive to have sex with multiple different women to ensure offspring. Women, on the other hand, tend to want a secure relationship before sexual intercourse to ensure she won't have to raise a child by herself in the case of pregnancy. Women have a higher share of the reproductive burden and therefore are less likely to engage in casual sex. Hook up culture is only able to exist because of inventions like anti-conception pills and abortion. Some even speculate the overturning of Roe vs Wade will lead to the death of hook up culture for this reason. Some conservatives also morally oppose birth control pills and condoms for religious reasons.

I don't know if hook up culture is big in a lesbian scene because on the one hand, women have lower sex drives than men, so you might expect that heterosexual couples have sex more frequently due to the man insisting. On the other hand, lesbians don't risk pregnancy when having sex, so that might remove a mental barrier for them. I haven't looked into it so I can't say. We should also keep in mind that reckless behaviours (i.e. unprotected sex, drug abuse, reckless driving) are also coping mechanisms for trauma and mental illness, which occur more frequently in homosexuals compared to heterosexuals.

But yes, I do feel like there is some hypocrisy going on, especially because some of the ''lesbians'' on radblr have a sexual history with men themselves lol. They also oppose the Church's approach to homosexuality whilst they themselves use the exact same argument in the other direction (''Just because you're attracted to men doesn't mean you have to act on it'')

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emptymanuscript · 6 months

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I may watch a lot of Steve Shives. XD.

But I deeply appreciate that he mentioned that these faults are universal and not specific to conservatives.

I know for myself, in particular, my own biases make the Barbie movie phenomenon essentially impossible to understand. I cannot conceive of why the Barbie movie feels dangerous to anyone. To me, it's great and hilarious, and my brain turns right the fuck off and glories in it. And my wife looks at me and asks incredulously, ' you don't get why people might be afraid of this?' And... yeah, I kinda just don't. I can't disengage enough from my own world view to be critical or literate. It's just funny. And in moments heart touching and beautiful. Enjoy the movie. What's the ish? I don't get it AND I get that is me being almost willfully ignorant in media literacy because the story works so profoundly well for me personally. It plays into my biases enough that I can't work on it yet. I'll have to watch it a couple dozen more times.

And I don't think that's different, fundamentally, from what's going on with conservatives. Things are following so close to a particular narrative that they can't disengage from it. The difference is that where my controlling narratives supports reading these stories, their controlling narratives resist engagement.

I think the most important statement I ever heard about conservatism passed right under my radar when I heard it in school. I was part of a group of four that were very much a political / religious spectrum. Me on the far left with 0 Christianity and quite low religiosity at all. My friend Chris on the far right, very deeply involved with his protestant church, and immersed in his faith. And The Bird Cage came out. The rest of us wanted to see it but Chris refused to see it on principle because: "Garbage in; garbage out," no matter the execution of the story or even the story itself, really, it was a story about homosexuality and was therefore tainted. To even consider consuming it was to consider homosexuality as an acceptable thing which was already on the path toward homosexuality since purity of thought was part of how you got to purity of living.

"Garbage in; garbage out," is a fundamental take on the right. It's the narrative that forces identifying of 'garbage' to explain and justify why what would otherwise be fine is junk that should be shunned.

Generally, we know that the reason Ben Shapiro hated Ep. 3 of the walking dead was because it was about 2 gay men. It's garbage in because homosexuality is definitionally garbage in the conservative movement. Everything except male dominated cisexual heterosexuality between two people who have only had and will only have sex with each other and only within the confines of a religiously blessed Christian union for the sake of producing a "functional" family that carries on this paradigm into the future is definitionally inferior and dangerous to the ideal functioning of society.

That's not hidden. That's not controversial for them. It's an axiom. It doesn't require proof for them. It is what they use to prove other things.

On the other hand, we are all equally aware that the ideal of sexuality being championed in the conservative world view is not the majority viewpoint.

The extreme majority of people embrace a much less restrictive definition of acceptable, even desirable, behavior. The actual majority of the US is fine with a mix of approaches and sees no threat in the difference. If anything, they see a threat in the mandatoryness of the conservative view of sexuality.

So, Shapiro and everyone else like him, knows he has to reverse the argument. He can't work out from the axiom and convince people. He has to work from the outside-in to prove the axiom. He has to make people believe that a piece of media is garbage, in order to get them to consider, even for a moment, that the homosexuality element is of a kind with the rest.

And that's what I think gets missed.

These arguments aren't for convincing conservatives to change their view. The conservatives already believe it is bad. At most it can be emotional reconfirmation. These arguments are talking points to help conservatives express the view they already have in a way that will travel. It's using media illiteracy to accomplish a goal of changing what media and literacy mean at a functional level.

#Youtube

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medusanevertalks · 3 years

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“Another force in the construction of transgenderism, according to David Valentine, is the conservatism of a gay male politics concerned to reject and sideline effeminacy. Whatever the balance of forces that constructed transgenderism in the late twentieth century, one puzzling element is the lack of criticism by male gay scholars, particularly since hatred of homosexuality so clearly played a role, and one group of those who aspire to transgender are men who love men. [...]

The absence of any critique of transgenderism from within the male gay community is sufficiently conspicuous as to need explanation, and David Valentine seeks to offer one (Valentine, 2007). He argues that the lack of protest by gay men points to the useful function that transgenderism performs for a new breed of conservative gay men post gay liberation. These conservative gay men assert their concordance with normative masculinity and seek to deny and exclude effeminate gay men by casting them into the category of ‘transgender’. This ploy protected the normality of the gay men and helped in his campaign to be accepted legislatively and socially as just another jock.”

— Sheila Jeffreys, Gender Hurts; 2014

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barbiegirldream · 2 years

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I don’t think people really grasp how much of a threat Dream is to conservatives. And not in like a he’s gonna solve conservatism but in that he’s everything they don’t want.

Like Dream was one of them. For all intents and purposes. He was from our understanding a relatively well off white guy from Florida who was raised to be conservative.

But then something changed he started learning about different politics and changed his. He’s a liberal now with unfathomably huge audience of young nuerodivergent queer and poc fans. And all those people from all over the world being a fan of someone who is anti crypto, supportive of queer issues, supportive of poc, open about his mental health, open about his own sexuality, openly affectionate with his male friends. Not to mention how covid cautious he is himself and how much of an advocate he’s been for vaccines and masks and social distancing.

And past all of that they try so hard to say Dream is gay, to make people think he’s fat, to make people think he’s wrong for his ADHD, to make people think he’s bad. Because seeing a tall and fit and probably standardly handsome, incredibly wealthy, and successful young man with lots of friends female ones who he respects in particular it must make those dude bros fucking livid.

Dream is just everything they don’t want to see. They need him to be that vaguely conservative 17 year old again and to promote their shitty ideologies onto his audience they want to be mainly other young white men just like Dream.

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commajade · 1 year

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I posted 15,880 times in 2022

2,514 posts created (16%)

13,366 posts reblogged (84%)

Blogs I reblogged the most:

@crystalpalacefc

@commajade

@sawasawako

@mizoguchi

@vympr

I tagged 13,806 of my posts in 2022

Only 13% of my posts had no tags

#asks - 830 posts

#march - 640 posts

#📻 - 522 posts

#april - 474 posts

#may - 466 posts

#personal - 462 posts

#september - 442 posts

#february - 425 posts

#june - 414 posts

#august - 379 posts

Longest Tag: 140 characters

#i was gonna be disappointed if fever isnt the title track but also seeing the concept pics i'm just 👁 👄 👁 l will accept anything he gives

My Top Posts in 2022:

white t*rfs literally trying to get into contact with skorean feminists because they have such a bad t*rf infestation already is literally colonizer shit these people are disgusting

2,542 notes - Posted June 1, 2022

shinzo abe was the face of japanese fascism and the amount of evil he inherited and proudly continued the legacy of can't be fully expressed in a social media post. a lot of korean ainu ryukyu southeast asian and chinese people (along with jpn people that oppose the state) are celebrating today with their loved ones that an evil man has been made to feel a fraction of the pain he caused and died like so many of us did at his and his ancestors' and political party's hands. it's really unfortunate that more of us could die because of this, that he could become a martyr for japanese fascism as they mobilize in retaliation and a reason for the US empire to tighten its hold in asia. japanese fascists are not subtle about their genocidal goals and have had a special grudge against the entire korean peninsula since the 1500s, when they failed to conquer us during the joseon dynasty. they annexed us with US permission from 1910 to 1945 and that was not enough for them. abe and the nippon kaigi's official platform is that they want a return of the japanese empire, it's genuinely terrifying thinking about what they will be capable of now.

3,574 notes - Posted July 9, 2022

8,261 notes - Posted July 8, 2022

8,555 notes - Posted July 8, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

link to article here

edit: this article is actually wrong on several accounts because it was a white guy that wrote it and probably didn't fact check! her name is actually yoon kim myung-woo and she is the third owner of lesvos starting 1999, which started in sinchon in 1996 and has moved to hongdae! it is in fact the first lesbian bar in seoul and there are now several more lesbian bars, clubs, and cafes. yoon kim myung-woo is a very respected and well known figure in the vibrant and fast growing skorean lgbt community that comes to speak at many gay and trans events.

also the article is primarily about the difficulty of passing the lgbt nondiscrimination bill and some key activists in the movement. please read it with a grain of salt because it does not mention at all the role of US neocolonial power and US militarism in south korean political conservatism! there would be no law prohibiting same sex relations in the military if the rok military was not modeled off of US military structure and law! and it would not be such a large factor in gay and trans people's lives if the US would let the korean war and armistice end so mandatory military conscription of every person assigned male in the country could finally end.

36,358 notes - Posted December 1, 2022

Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →

#personal #this is so funny lol #830 asks that's wild!!!!#that's a lot of asks!!!

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bulgingposers · 3 years

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Here’s an interesting—and very sexy—bit of bodybuilding trivia. In the late 70s and early 80s, male bodybuilders weren’t yet so freakishly huge that they stopped appealing to the masses. In fact, this was the era in which Arnold was breaking out and crossing over into the mainstream, and such ridiculously handsome men as Frank Zane, Chris Dickerson, Scott Wilson, Robbie Robinson, Clint Beyerle, and—very soon—Bob Paris and Matt Mendenhall were all at their competitive best. At the same time, the “sport” still wouldn’t veer wildly off from its homoerotic beginnings in exchange for a cartoonish and uptight conservatism for another decade and a half or so, meaning the magazines all featured photo spreads that blatantly presented these men as both impressive athletes and erotic objects, and the shows themselves were intentionally promoted to gay and straight audiences alike. Also, as this was the sexual “golden age”—following the introduction of the birth control pill and the legalization of reproductive choice, but preceding the AIDS epidemic—American culture was generally much freer and more open than ever before to all things carnal. An industry that revolved around the presentation and fetishization of nearly-nude, idealized bodies, far from being a weird and risqué subculture, actually met the National moment almost perfectly.

While Schwarzenegger was probably the most intuitive about how to deploy his bulky sexuality in exchange for fame—whether via his infamous remarks comparing “the pump” to cumming, or, soon enough, by actually simulating intense erotic pleasure and a powerful orgasm during the insane but incredibly hot “wolf witch” sex scene in the first Conan movie—it was actually his nemesis Mike Mentzer who was most frequently held up as the epitome of masculine beauty, raw sensuality, and hyper-virile horniness. A stunningly handsome man originally from The East Coast, Mentzer looks, to the modern eye, like the very prototype of the mustachioed, shaggy-haired, muscle hunk especially beloved by gay men of the time. He’s more Colt than pretty much any of the men Jim French actually photographed. Not only was he incredibly popular and in-demand as a guest poser for amateur bodybuilding shows in the off season, but he became noted far outside the niche and insular Iron Game, getting offered more than one astronomical sum of cash to pose nude for publications that ran the gamut from mainstream to fringe. Unfortunately, while known for being infuriatingly certain of his political and philosophical beliefs—which were pretty much cribbed whole from the appallingly stupid and reactionary novels of Ayn Rand—he was relatively modest about his physique and declined every offer. That’s the world’s loss, of course. However, at the very end of the 1970s, he, er, decided to throw the world a bit of a bone, so to speak, almost certainly at the urging of the Machiavellian Joe Weider, modern bodybuilding’s architect and kingpin, who knew how to recognize the zeitgeist when it was upon him. Mentzer, who even daytime talk show hosts of the period were referring to as a straight-up “sex object,” wouldn’t technically bare all for the financial gain of some sleazy pornographer. Instead, he’d keep it covered and “classy”—but, through the use of some sort of preternaturally thin cotton trunks, he’d still be offering up the goods in their full abundance, netting both him and Weider the spoils in the end. And, indeed, when the March 1979 issue of Muscle Builder and Power debuted on the stands, with Mike stoically yet unabashedly, posing in such a manner that there was nothing whatsoever left to the imagination, it was a massive seller. Gay men and straight women knew exactly what they were buying and, as for the straight guys, well, in point of fact those were some pretty wide-cut briefs, even for that era.

In a way, that cover and the accompanying photo spread ultimately proved to be Mike Mentzer’s crowning moment. The following year, Weider brazenly “fixed” the Mr. Olympia in order to crown Arnold Schwarzenegger—who had come out of “retirement” and looked every bit of it—a seventh time. Disgusted, Mentzer vowed never to return to the competition stage. He kept that promise, all the while making his own success by developing and marketing his “Heavy Duty” exercise program, often in the company of his younger brother Ray, also an athlete. Tragically, however, he spiraled over the ensuing decades into serious drug use, mental illness, and a dogged fixation on Rand’s “Objectivist” worldview. In a truly bizarre twist of fate, Mike and Ray Mentzer died within hours of one another in June 2001, both reduced to sharing a tiny apartment and living off cheap junk food. An ignoble end to a competitor who not only brought amazing looks and intelligence to the table, but whose body was genuinely magnificent.

Fortunately, he left behind these photos along with countless other visual reminders of his excellence. The videos of his various guest posing routines on offer from GMV are truly stunning. And while the man himself is gone, both Heavy Duty and the memory of his epic manly beauty remain.

#bodybuilder #hotbodybuilder #posing suit #sexy muscle #bodybuilding #mike mentzer

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samisadeangirl · 2 years

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You as well as I know very well that “woke” is just the latest dog whistle that people use when they really mean anything that isn’t straight and white. I agree that it is a far cry from being a n*zi and that list is absolutely wrong, defending conservatism by claiming reverse racism is ignorant and you really should do better. Don’t sell your soul for this fandom because as a whole, it treats POC like we’re not here. Hellers are awful miserable people but the rest of fandom really is just making it easier for them to claim bigotry with constant complaints of wokeness because let’s be honest. We know what they mean when they say it.

Hey Asshole Anon,

That may be your OPINION, but when I use "woke" (specifically with the dick-quotes), I'm referring to SJWs who make a big deal about supposedly caring about legit issues without doing anything substantive just to get online brownie points and/or due to an agenda--and I'm sure there are plenty of others who have similar opinions as well. Others who complain about "wokeness" don't like the PC trend of including women, POC, queers, etc. simply to check off boxes and/or of cancelling anyone who doesn't agree with them. YOUR assumption that it's because they're racist, homophobic, misogynistic, etc. is precisely what gives wokeness a bad name.

As for some of your other "points," being conservative isn't a bad thing and certainly isn't the same as being bigoted. People are conservative for any number of reasons, and that doesn't make them terrible people. I'm a progressive liberal and disagree with conservatives on just about everything, but I'm not going to lump them all in with diehard Trumpers, Nazis, white supremacists, and other bigots.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but reverse racism does exist. It obviously isn't a systemic problem like racism against POC, but we can't deny that there are POC who hate white people simply for their race, who blame whites as a group for various problems, and so on. Hate of ANY kind, whether toward a minority or group in power, is still wrong and doesn't help anyone.

As for the SPN fandom, you SJWs seem to miss the entire point, which is that this fandom is supposed to be about enjoying the show, not promoting social or political issues. SPN has never pretended to be about anything other than two cishet white males fighting monsters and saving the world. Complaints about SPN killing minorities are specious because it's a horror show that killed EVERYONE, including far more cishet white males than anyone else, and no character died due to their minority status. Sure, they did things early on that are pretty cringey now (like Dean calling Sam gay as an insult), but the show evolved with the times and got better. I agree that it would've been nice if there'd been more diversity in the major secondary characters, but in SPN's defense with the exception of Jack none of those characters (i.e. Bobby, Castiel, Crowley) were planned to be as important as they became (no excuse for Jack being another white dude though). SPN did however have plenty of women, POC, and/or queer characters who were important and/or powerful, including Chuck, Raphael, AU!Michael, Naomi, Crowley, Lilith, Abbadon, Dagon, Ellen, Jo, Rufus, Kevin, Charlie, Jody, Donna, Claire, Kaia, Patience, Max and Alicia Banes, and many more.

If you truly want to see social justice, then maybe look elsewhere than a genre show on a smaller network that never claimed to be trying to make any statements. And maybe stop accusing fans who are trying to enjoy said show and who may be minorities themselves of bigotry.

#asshole anon #fandom issues #sjw fail #spn is NOT racist #and neither is the fandom by and large #get over it #idiots on tumblr #the stupid it burns

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charmed-and-alarmed · 4 years

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In a historic ruling for the LGBT community, in Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, the justices held that an employer who fires an individual merely for being gay or transgender violates Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Guys, this wasn’t a partisan split. It was 6:3 because Neil-fucking-Gorsuch sided with the liberal justices. He wrote the majority opinion. I cannot believe this guy.

Here’s a quote from that opinion I’ve pulled from the article:

"Those who adopted the Civil Rights Act might not have anticipated their work would lead to this particular result. Likely, they weren't thinking about many of the Act's consequences that have become apparent over the years, including its prohibition against discrimination on the basis of motherhood or its ban on the sexual harassment of male employees."

"But” [it continues] the limits of the drafters' imagination supply no reason to ignore the law's demands. When the express terms of a statute give us one answer and extratextual considerations suggest another, it's no contest. Only the written word is the law, and all persons are entitled to its benefit." [emphasis mine]

I have never heard a more succinct “fuck you” to strict constitutional originalism - you know, that idea about how to interpret the constitution that acts as the foundation for American conservatism? Whose biggest supporter was Antonin Scalia, the justice that Gorsuch replaced??

i’m not going to suddenly like you Gorsuch, but I’m loving your sudden turn-and-burn on the ppl who got you onto the supreme court in the first place. Mitch McConnell is going to have a very bad day today, and we have you to thank for you.

#scotus #bostock v clayton county #news #lgbt rights

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qqueenofhades · 4 years

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“This is because poor white people have been systematically conditioned to support white supremacy at the direct expense of their own economic and social interests; it’s terrible, but that’s how it functions.” Do you think the rich white overlords have also been conditioned to support the system?

“while disdaining the government as tyrannical the rest of the time, unless it’s Trump’s actively tyrannical lot, but hey, we don’t have time to unpack all that)” Can you unpack some of that? I don’t understand. Thanks. Love your political posts.

Sure!

(If anyone’s wondering, this is carrying on from/in reference to this ask from yesterday on how to dismantle arguments about “I’m white and my life has been hard therefore racism isn’t real.”)

The third part of the white supremacist equation in America, aside from racism and capitalism, is religion, especially fundamentalist and evangelical Christianity. We didn’t get to that in the last ask, but it’s an equally important factor in the social and cultural landscape of this particular demographic -- especially because the GOP has essentially become its political manifestation, and religious conservatism has become tied so deeply to a set of hot-button social issues (immigration, the gays, abortion, etc). As a lot of social scientists and lay observers have noted, religious belief in America remains staggeringly high relative to the rest of the industrialized Western world. Ever since the rise of religious conservatives as a mobilised political force in the 1980s, we have had to deal with their influence and the GOP’s willingness to function as an eager and uncritical vehicle for their social agenda. Fundamentalist/evangelical Christianity in America has also served as a powerful tool of promoting white supremacy. In fundamentalist religions, it’s a sin to question anything you’re told and you have to trust that a “higher authority” has your best interests at heart. This lends itself easily to personality cults: think the charismatic mega-preachers and other high-profile figures that exist in mainstream and fringe American evangelicalism alike, as well as the cult of Trump that now exists around the Orange Fuhrer.

Some books on this:

The Sin of White Supremacy: Christianity, Racism, and Religious Diversity in America, by Jeannine Hill Fletcher

White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity by Robert P. Jones (you can also read a Washington Post interview with him here, and his piece in The Atlantic here.)

The Cult of Trump by Steven Hassan

When you intertwine the moral imperatives of fundamentalist religion (if you don’t believe the right things, you’ll go to hell), with the centuries-old American system of prizing whiteness at the expense of everything else, with the belief that your rich white overlords are more “your people” than your differently-colored working-class peers, you get an incredibly powerful and coercive system of mental conditioning that works on multiple levels, constantly reinforces itself, and is very difficult to break away from. And frankly, it’s difficult to tell if the most high-profile mouthpieces of these views actually believe it (maybe to some degree) or if they just use it to obtain a comfortable life at the expense of vulnerable people. Honestly, I’m not sure if it matters whether or not the overlords believe everything they themselves teach (and I’m pretty certain that they don’t). They know that it ends up as a good deal for them, and so it’s in their interests to maintain the system as vigorously as possible.

You may have heard of “prosperity gospel” evangelists, who claim to their poor followers that if they give them, the evangelists, all their money as a demonstration of faith, God will automatically reward them/provide for their economic needs, and it’s a sign of too little faith if you don’t believe this, therefore you will stay poor. You may have also heard of the recent sex scandal involving Jerry Falwell Jr., son of the famous Jerry Falwell and current president (though he was forced to resign) of the ultra-fundamentalist Liberty University in Virginia. This, of course, goes up there with all the other hard-right politicians who preached family values and Moral Purity and then turned out to be hypocrites who were failing to live up to these ideas in private. American evangelicalism is a deeply weird and self-reinforcing universe that provides adherents with everything they need to live in a parallel version of reality and feel holier-than-thou about not interacting with “infidels,” and yes, a huge part of that, especially white Protestant evangelicalism, involves preaching the gospel of white supremacy, implicitly or explicitly.

So at the end of this, we have a system which orchestrates and indeed insists upon complete obedience to the overlords (be they economic, racial, or religious) by the underclass at every turn. As I noted above, the rich white overlords themselves know that they benefit immensely from this setup, so the question of whether or not they actually believe it is less important. As also noted, they sure don’t make any attempt to live up to it in private, or at least trust that they won’t be found out if they don’t. That’s because (at least in my opinion) they know perfectly well that it sucks. They don’t want to be poor either, but it’s useful for them if there are poor people. Fundamentalism is also deeply predicated on suffering: it’s holy to suffer, poverty is a virtue, you shouldn’t worry about this world so much as what you will get after you die, thinking about material things is Sinful, God will magically provide everything that you need, so on and so forth. So even if they’re voting against their own self-interests, white working class religious people have been assured that is a virtue anyway and they should keep doing it. Only heathens like socialism.

That also makes it harder to get any dialogue of social justice going in (white) churches. Black churches have obviously been at the forefront of social justice struggles in America for their entire history, but that’s because white and black American Christianity are often very different. There are overlaps in places, but the black church was founded in the slave tradition, rather than the slaveholder tradition, as the establishment church in the 19th century was often a zealous supporter of slavery for the “moral good” of the slaves -- hey, they might be in terrible bondage, but at least they had the chance to be saved by becoming Christians! White Americans tend to go to church to be reassured that what they’re doing is good and doesn’t need to change, or if it does need to be changed, it’s to outlaw abortion or gay marriage or whatever social issue is the order of the day. It’s founded on repression rather than liberation. This isn’t true of every church everywhere, of course, but the overall trend is one toward social and religious hyper-conservatism.

This ties into the “civic faith” of America, i.e. the sphere of cultural Christianity that everyone participates in whether they’re actively religious or not, and which has also been the subject of political studies as to how it has been twisted into an organ of feel-good jingoistic American nationalism with very little reference to what Jesus Christ is recorded as having actually taught. The point again is that this entire belief system prizes absolute obedience and adherence to a (white and male) Supreme Leader, which is really easy for a fascist to exploit with populist rhetoric draped in the shabbiest veneer of religious language. The enthusiastic evangelical support for Trump, and the way the religious right has bent over backward from trying to impeach Bill Clinton for a blowjob in the Oval Office to defending serial rapist Trump is... both enlightening and terribly depressing. (Not to say that Clinton isn’t gross, because he is, but that’s beside the point; the GOP went on a frothing-mouth moral crusade over his behavior and it’s absolute crickets over Trump.)

In the end, we have this entire subset of people who have argued that they need their guns and their paramilitary organizations to defend against a theoretical “tyrannical” (read: non-white, non-Christian) body politic or American government. That’s why we had constant claims that Obama was going to throw people into concentration camps or send federal agents to arrest people off the streets or turn America into a military dictatorship; these proud AR-15-waving nutcases were happy to inform us that they would rise up and prevent that from happening. Of course, Obama didn’t actually do any of that, but you know who did? Trump. And his supporters, of course, didn’t make any attempt to stop it from happening. Instead they actively went out to help it happen more. (Side note: a little racist shitstain literally named RITTENHOUSE being the face of armed and murderous white supremacy in the Kenosha protests is like... ridiculously on the nose, PAGING GARCIA FLYNN.)

So when I say they’re protesting “government tyranny,” we’ve already gotten a good look at what they imagine tyranny to be: i.e. anything except the actual tyranny we’re already enduring, because it’s coming from their orange messiah and it is the culmination of everything that their religious, political, social, and cultural values have taught them. They mean “tyranny” of anything that is not their extreme right-wing, white-supremacist, religious-fundamentalist fascist version of things, which means respect or tolerance or room for anyone who isn’t exactly like them, which they can’t abide. Totalitarianism never can.

Anyway, I hope that was helpful. Thanks for the question!

#politics for ts #history of racism #history of religion #american history #long post #anonymous #ask

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