No longer looking down demure / But to the horizon

dear USAmericans,

VOTING WORKS!!!

French people showed up, French people voted, turnout was higher today than it has been since 1997, and we kicked the far right to 3rd place

a week ago, the far right was the biggest party in France, we were slated for a far right parliament, prime minister, and government

this week, we voted against them en masse and we won!

VOTING WORKS!

you're up next in November! it's very rare we get to say this, but this one time, take example on the French! show up and vote!

because VOTING WORKS!

A good summary of what's been happening lately in France.

It's pure madness.

Dude, how can it be that every single fucking thing about US politics trends on here immediately, yet when 27 countries in the EU vote and there's a historic, alarming lurch to the right (far right parties have won the elections in Italy, Austria and France), it's not even trending? In Germany, the AFD, a right-wing populist, anti-democratic, racist party with a wing that is officially extremist (read: Nazis) and is in parts monitored by the office for the protection of the constitution, is the second strongest party (also among 17-24 year olds!). Guess I'll die.

can’t criticize plastic surgery as an institution because it’s none of your business if a woman wants to “fix” her insecurities. can’t criticize the makeup industry or beauty standards because some women feel good when they shave and wear makeup. can’t bring up the challenges women face in the workplace because some women want to be stay at home wives instead of working. everything a woman does is automatically feminist and we shouldn’t stop to think about the context surrounding her actions because that would be misogynistic. here’s what i had for girl dinner. according to my girl math the barbie movie was a revolutionary piece of feminist media. i may not show it but i feel the life slowly draining from me day by day.

Really bizarre genre of post on here is whenever people are like "you don't see a lot of this on here so here's a positivity post for normal people whose lives are easy" like yes there's a reason for that. You don't. Need any

This applies to many different situations. This is the "but what about me 🥺" website. But this holiday season I'd like to give a special shoutout to those people who are like "it's okay to have a good relationship with your family" like Yeah it is. Good for you. This isn't a real problem. Everything in the world is encouraging this. Go log off and have dinner with your parents who are nice to you

I’m tired of advertising. All of it. I don’t want any ads even for things I like. Even if I would 100% buy it. It’s INSANE that we just accept that people can throw a business flier in our face at any time of day in any setting. Aren’t you mad? Don’t you just want to go apeshit?

like what happened to "women are capable of doing everything men can do". If this statement is true the reverse is also true. It doesn't mean they necessarily do but they could. Thats like THE feminist statement in my mind its the most important one and radfems are actively rejecting it. There is nothing but superficial differences between us!!! "Men" and "women" are fictions used to organize society and power in a specific way they're not essential truths. We can go from one to the other freely and easily because we are essentially the same. The massive gulf between us in modern society is political, its not in anyway concrete, essential or biological.

Its crazy how many people think everyone who works in tv and film is rich. The only rich people are the execs and the tippy top percentile of directors and actors. Listen to any actor who is well known for a tv show and they’ll tell you they make more money from cons than what they made on their show.

Support the writer’s strike and when the director’s guild and SAG go on strike support them too.

Not knowing that you have a villain inside you, a hero, and a bystander is a lesson that everyone should learn.

Sorry but the "a woman just died and her family is mourning" speech doesn't really apply for the woman who's responsible for almost half the world's colonisation and the death of millions of people everyday for like 70 years

I hate the monarchy but.... She is not "responsible for half the world's colonisation". Do you think colonialism happened in the last 100 years? Do you know anything?

"Do you know anything?" Really now. Did you even look into it before defending this bitch

Um, no. They're not "defending" her by pointing out the original statement is inaccurate—that's just correcting misinformation. I mean, I am extremely vocal on this blog about my anti-monarchy views, especially in regard to my distaste for British imperialism as somebody of South Asian descent. But the OP is misleading at best, and just flat out wrong at worst, and I honestly find it kind of offensive that people would disregard the actual, real-life violent history of British imperialism in favour of some half-cocked statement that lets so many responsible parties off the hook for their crimes.

Like, firstly, if you're really dead set on solely laying the blame for expansion of the British Empire on one single member of the royal family, then that person, without a doubt, should be Queen Victoria. To quote this article, she was the "matriarch of the British Empire," as well as a major propopent of its expansion. Between 1814 (just 23 years before Victoria ascended the throne) and the heyday of her reign in 1881, the population of the British Empire literally QUINTUPLED in size. By the time she died in 1901, Victoria was ruling over roughly 400 million "subjects," in British-ruled territory that covered approximately 25% of the globe. It hit its peak in 1919 (7 years before Elizabeth II's birth) under the reign of George V, after Britain acquired a bunch of German territories under Treaty of Versailles at the end of WWI. By contrast, when Elizabeth took the throne in 1952—about five years after India & Pakistan kicked off a major wave of decolonisation efforts—Britain's global territory had shrunk by approximately 68%. By 1970, it had decreased even further:

Now, there's absolutely no disputing that Queen Victoria's imperialism is part of Queen Elizabeth's family legacy. That's true both from a historical and financial perspective, and something about which I am extremely salty! Victoria fucking ransacked India, and today's royals still have the spoils. If you want to join Desi people in hating Liz & Co. for never giving us our fucking stolen diamond back, be my guest. In fact, we will make you cups of chai and feed you rotis while you bitch about it with us. But saying that Elizabeth II was directly responsible for colonising half 1/4 of the globe is not only factually incorrect, but factually incorrect in a way that either outright erases the most devastating periods of British imperialism (if you're only including events from 1952-present), or effectively absolves the people who actually engineered the violence (if you're mentally replacing Liz for Vicky). Now, I admittedly have more beef with Queen Victoria, because my grandfather and great-aunties on the Indian side were literally born under her reign (yes, really, I'm old), but even so, it seems weird to just... rewrite the whole thing. And speaking of absolving people, like... yes, the monarchy is a ridiculous fucking institution built on ill-gotten wealth and oppression of the working classes, no argument from me there. But they are not solely responsible for colonialism, and I don't like the implication that it was masterminded single-handedly by one figurehead with a crown whose political role is largely ceremonial. Like, first of all, look up the fucking East India Company, an evil-from-the-depths-of-hell-level corporation built on greed and human suffering. They were acting as agents of British imperialism across swathes of Africa and Asia, eons before Queen Victoria was even born. The British government only got dominion over India after they intervened to stop the East India Company from exerting too much political and commercial control. Like, read up on Robert Clive and the Battle of Plassey sometime, and then imagine Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk buying the French army to invade the Indian subcontinent. While we're talking about ye olden colonising CEOs, ever heard of Cecil Rhodes? Of course, he had a lot of help in fucking over South Africa from the PM, Lord Salisbury. It was actually Disraeli's idea to confer the title of 'Empress of India' on Queen Victoria. It's estimated that around 3.8 million people died during the 1943 Bengal famine, which was basically the result of a Winston Churchill policy failure. And it was not any monarch, but Secretary of State for the Colonies Joseph Chamberlain, who said "I believe that the British race is the greatest of the governing races that the world has ever seen… It is not enough to occupy great spaces of the world's surface unless you can make the best of them. It is the duty of a landlord to develop his estate." Like, yeah fuck the monarchy for the role they played, but don't act like one single hand-waving, ribbon-cutting inbred royal was the British Empire's master architect, when this was very much one of history's worst fucking group projects.

Finally, a smaller correction, but that above "List of sovereign states headed by Elizabeth II" is mostly comprised of former colonies/Commonwealth countries. Now, is the Commonwealth a vestige of Britain's bygone colonialism? Absolutely, no doubt. But nonetheless, that's still a list of independent nations with their own governments who—at some point between 1952-present—chose to have the monarch as a state figurehead (albeit not a choice I understand). Also, if you actually look at the chart, it's presently only a total of 15 countries who still have the monarch as a ceremonial figurehead (including the UK itself, Canada, and Australia). You'll also note that more than half of these countries have severed ties already, including Barbados, who just became a republic last year (way to go, Barbados!), and I'm hoping that Charles's relative unpopularity will see more nations follow suit. Still, the point stands: It doesn't really make sense to post that as "evidence" of the fact that Elizabeth herself was personally responsible for "half the world's colonisation," when 1) It only dates back to 1952, well after the peak of the empire 2) None of the nations listed are current British Overseas Territories 3) The linked chart actually shows a decline in independent states using the monarch as a figurehead since the late 1980s. It's quite literally making the opposite point as intended.

Anyway, as somebody who doesn't like the monarchy, and thinks a lot about the irrevocable damage wrought by British colonialism, I am begging you guys not to downplay or rewrite its actual history for the sake of a pithy sound-byte on Tumblr dot com. "Queen Elizabeth spent a lifetime benefiting from the spoils of her family's imperialist endeavours, and may have recently used some of that tainted wealth to help her son pay out a settlement to the woman who publicly accused him of sex trafficking" is a perfectly accurate, and scathingly damning statement; you do not need to rewrite British history to make it sound like the woman personally conquered India with an army of bloodthirsty corgis just to make your point.

There is no such thing as an unproblematic piece of media, production team, or morally-pure person. There isn't. There's only "what flaws I am willing to put up with," which is going to be different for every person. If your friend has a different level of acceptable bullshit than you, it's probably fine, actually? The sooner people learn that, the happier in general they will be.

There’s a particular attitude I often see on the internet that goes something like “If you aren’t part of a particular marginalized group, then you could never understand their experience, so don’t pretend to relate.” And while obviously you’re never going to relate to every aspect of that identity unless you are also of that identity, I feel like this attitude really diminishes opportunities for finding kinship and bonding in similar experiences even if those experiences aren’t exactly the same and/or are the result of different identities.

For example, I’m white and neurodivergent, and I was talking to a Black neurotypical friend about masking, and how I feel like I have to change the entire way I present myself in order to not be considered weird in public. She responded with “Oh, some of that sounds kind of like code-switching— how I have to switch away from using AAVE in white-dominated settings in order to be accepted.” And then we bonded over how frustrating and ridiculous it is that AAVE and stimming are both considered unacceptable in “professional” settings.

Another time, a straight Jewish friend was telling me about a book she had just finished reading, which was written by a Jewish author and had a Jewish main character. She was saying that it was really nice to read a book written by a Jewish author, because even when gentile authors do their research and write a pretty accurate Jewish character, they never quite feel Jewish— you can always tell the author was a gentile. And I said “Oh that sounds kind of like when I read queer characters written by straight authors— you can always tell the author was straight even if they do their research and get things fairly right. So even though I’m happy when any book features queer characters, it’s really especially nice to read queer characters written by queer authors.” And we bonded over this similar experience, and we were both excited that the other understood even if we were coming to this experience from different angles, and then we swapped book recommendations. This conversation is also a great example of when that internet attitude DOES apply— when someone outside of a particular group is trying to understand that group’s entire experience well enough to accurately write the world as seen through their eyes. They’re never quite going to get it right, and that’s ok! It just means it’s important to also have Own Voices authors writing those types of stories also.

Sometimes it seems like people who have been in internet circles exhibiting this attitude for too long are afraid to ever try to relate to the experiences of anyone in any groups other than their own for fear of causing offense, which is honestly pretty counterproductive. Understanding each other and bonding across groups should be the goal! Relating to each other is not a bad thing!

Not to sound like an old fart here but my philosophy about video games is like. A kid living out in the middle of bumfuck nowhere with no internet access for miles should be able to purchase a game from walmart, take that game home, put it in their console, and play the whole game with all of its features and the only thing lack of internet affects is the inability to play online with others. Nothing else. They shouldn't be missing entire chunks of the game becuase they can't download a patch. The game shouldn't be borderline empty or unplayable without a patch.

We live in a society in which everything is sexualized, and yet heterosexuality is somehow decoupled from the sex part of it.

Being straight is so ubiquitous, it’s somehow not thought of as a sexual thing most of the time. I think it has something to do with conflating sex and love, which is a whole other barrel of monkeys. But I think this explains so many homophobes and exclusionists’ views:

If I may add; the casual tone that cishets will discuss how they’re “trying to have children” etc. Which is literally just sex like that’s sex. You can talk about sexual reproduction and how often you attempt it but GOD forbid my girlfriend and I share a milkshake at the park