take a hike

man for a country that loves its guns the lot of you cant aim for shit

we lost the second people started believing that neurodivergency is an ontological state/medical diagnosis and not the sociopolitical term it was created to be

people seriously pretending EEAAO is overrated suddenly bc it swept awards? it swept awards largely because it is very very very good. I cried like someone who's just had a religious revelation BOTH times I watched it bc it touched something raw and real and beautiful but it was also just very, very funny. everyone's performance kills and the concept is creative and interesting and doesn't distract from the emotional core. you guys are just contrarian.

oh my god I just saw like 20 people solemnly agreeing that it "looked nice but was written for children" because it. because it. has. immature jokes about hot dog fingers and butt plugs and because the ultimate message is "be kind".

written for children

as if it isn't extremely written for adults dealing with adult problems that are keeping them from finding space in their life for joy and whimsy and silliness.

it is about a woman doing her taxes!!!!! it's about being weighed down by age and responsibility and the sense of the turns you missed in your life and being so exhausted from Being A Grown-up that you burn all the most important relationships in your life!!! it's about being a mother and a wife and a businesswoman and a human person!!!!! it's about trying and failing to hold it together in the face of your own well worn traumas and cycles of abuse for decades! it's incredibly specific to an adult audience!

the message of the film isn't even "be kind" as much as it's "be silly. fuck around. laugh it off. find joy in being ridiculous. fuck cynicism."

like I just. the amount of contrarianism you have to be huffing to fuck up your sense of media literacy this bad. there is a lot of childish humour and absurdity and silliness in the film because the thesis statement of the film is that silliness is profound and important. the message isn't "be kind" it's "find joy." literally it's so on the nose the character Evelyn is reaching for is Literally Called Joy.

like how do you watch a film where the triumph over nothingness is symbolised by sticking googly eyes on everything and think "oh, the reason this film is full of absurdities that seem immature is clearly an unconscious failure of the film to be mature or deep" rather than "oh the way this film is constructed is Specifically About This Explicit Theme that the whole film has been repeatedly reifying, that both stoic responsibility and chaotic nihilism are paths to self destruction and the real hard important work is allowing yourself to be earnestly naive, vulnerable and silly."

I do not understand. how multiple people seem to have decided the theme of the film was "be kind to one another" and not "engage authentically with the absurdity and joy of the world because nothing matters except what you make matter!!!!" Simone de Beauvoir did not die for this!!!!!!! kill both the sensible man and the nihilist and revel in the absurd!!!!!!!!!!

If you feel like telling someone that a common word is ableist:

Learn about wheelchair accessibility standards (text alternative), find a local business that flagrantly ignores them (which is very easy) and contact the manager to say, “My disabled friend would love to visit your shop/bar/restaurant, but it isn’t wheelchair accessible!” (If the staff have to move or unlock something, that isn’t accessible —especially if you have to go inside to request it)

Boom. You’ve done more for disabled people than 50 callouts for the word “lame”. I hate that word used as a pejorative too! But of the two methods of activism, this one gets way more shit done.

The other thing that gets me about ableism dialogue on the broader Internet being 90% centered on word choice is that… I think it serves to make conversations and socially aware spaces less accessible to some people. Me, for example: I find that the additive cognitive load of monitoring my vocabulary for potentially ableist words and turns of phrase to be an extremely reliable overload trigger. I’m constantly semi-consciously monitoring my everything anyway when I’m communicating–hi, I’m autistic–and when I overload my ability to manage that cognitive load, I get very anxious, generally erode my mental health, and stop being able to participate in conversation at all. I have effectively lost access to the community or discussion where these modes of politeness take root. 

(What I generally do instead is keep note of certain words that certain people I know cannot handle because they are poisoned forever for them, and I avoid those words around those people. That’s a cognitive expenditure that is worth it to me: I’m willing to budget the cognitive energy if it’s a use that is actually directly helping someone else. One thing I find that a lot of currently non-disabled people don’t think about is that not all accommodations and access needs for disabled people are compatible with one another at all times, and this is a common example of that sort of thing.) 

Moreover, a lot of people have begun using a “fence around the sin” approach to ableist language: I have been “corrected” for metaphorical references to disability that aren’t necessarily pejorative, like “willfully blind.” Not only does this re-emphasize the cognitive load concerns that I I’m concerned that this trend of treating all references to disability as off-limits in language increases the euphemism treadmill that tends to affect several types of disability, effectively acting as if there is something shameful about referencing disabled people at all. Which… doesn’t solve the problem of the ableism in the language. It’s just that the slur is in the opinion that the slur-thrower has of the people the word applies to, and that’s often what people are really doing when they use ableist slurs. You fix the slurs not by placing them off limits entirely but by changing the opinion that the general public has about the people they refer to: think about reclaiming “queer” and pushing back against “that’s so gay”; these successful movements work because they reaffirm the humanity of queer and gay people in the minds of people who would otherwise use those identities and comparisons to them to denote bad things. If that doesn’t happen–and the disability euphemism treadmill is notorious for this–you just cycle through acceptable and unacceptable words for the same concepts, because the concept of a given disability is the origin of the insult. As long as that concept is poisoned, any word that describes it will become poisoned, too.

And the thing is, I just pointed out that my own experience of disability is such that I have been known to actively request that people not police my language as an accommodation, because I can’t handle the cognitive load of balancing that with the semi-conscious load of balancing the cognitive demands of monitoring the nonverbal shit? Yeah, uh, I have known people to respond to that request for accommodation with total rage, and by telling me that I am being hateful, and dropping me completely. If your disability activism involves reacting like that to a good-faith accommodation request over word choice, your disability activism is not good. 

The problem with hard and fast rules (like “you must be able to take your own notes to succeed in college,” or “this word is never acceptable”) is that by its very nature, hard and fast rules without any thought taken to consider accommodation and accessibility for people with a wide variety of unexpected needs create barriers for disabled people. I don’t see a lot of awareness of this in people whose disability activism focuses largely around call-outs for word choice, and I really do not see people really interacting with the super useful concepts for disability, like the curb cut effect or accessible design or varying models of disability or conflicting accommodation or or. It just… winds up being about word choice and social signaling that one is The Right Sort Of Person. 

(I’m pretty sure you know all of this already, star-anise, but I figured: maybe someone reading me doesn’t. So.) 

Holy fucking little demonlings this.