an archive

RE: talking to conservative parents, I’ve found a good method to de-worming their brains is to not get riled up, just act a little bored and remind them “the news cycle only shows salacious stuff. They want you to be mad and scared because it makes you easier to control. Think about it for a second. Do you REALLY believe everything they have to say?” Or “you can’t believe everything you read or see on the internet. Remember, they earn money every time you click on their video.”

And especially when my dad starts getting huffy about Prices or Artists He Doesn’t Like, I tell him “that’s the beauty of capitalism. they have a product to sell and the freedom of expression if you don’t like it you don’t have to buy it.”

Might not work for everyone but dad’s KRYPTONITE especially is saying “but dad that’s capitalism! You LOVE capitalism!” And he either has to stop complaining or admit capitalism is bad and so far I haven’t lost

So within two days of each other, Fox News writes an article comparing aromanticism and asexuality to pedophilia, and then Matt Walsh releases a video saying asexuality is a mental illness and asexuals are tricking teenagers into having depression.

Not sure what’s going on right now over in Conservative World, but it’s a hell of wild U-turn for them to suddenly switch from “Oh no! The left is sexualizing our children!” to “Oh no! The left is asexualizing our children!”

It’s a reminder, I guess, that they’re coming for all of us. The fash and the white supremacists will not make nice distinctions between the queers when they put us up against the wall. There is no gatekeeping, no label-policing, no purity-purging and no assimilation that any of us can do that will save us. They want us dead, and while they’ll start with whoever is most vulnerable at any given time, they’ll get around to all of us eventually.

Queer solidarity means all of us because the fash are coming for all of us.

All Dividers are Feds. Stand united or die separately.

ANYONE who is trying to divide our community is a fucking Fed. That includes other queers who like to argue about who is and isn’t “allowed” in our community.

no joke we need the 'free the nipple' movement back. what the hell happened.

i have to watch my spinach cook so without getting too into it i genuinely believe the desexualization of bodies and nudity could solve a shit ton of political problems faced with.

i dont know if anything i say ever makes sense, like obvi not eveything. but i think it would be a huge start in equality and treatmeant in not only women's lives but trans and gay people as well; groups of people who are so often sexualized that doing something as simple or innocent that's seen ok from (most, but i'm aware not all) cis men as literally, walking around without a shirt on, is seen as perverted and dangerous. removing this ideology is giving respect to the bodies of those (that is deserved if and when showing sexuality regardless) who often don't have it by just like. existing within a body. anyone here read the left hand of darkness.

The whole point of writing fascist characters as human beings is that real fascists are also human beings. If you think of fascists as somehow less than human you are falling into the trap of letting their mentality frame your worldview, thus legitimizing their course of action!

When you start looking at fascists as subhuman the debate becomes 'which group is actually subhuman and which is being unfairly maligned?' And personally I'm not fucking comfortable with that question being on the table ever.

#ADDITIONALLY #it makes recognizing fascist ideology in the people around you so much harder #bc if you know someone as a person #and a fascist isn't a person #then clearly this person can't be a fascist #or have fascist views #they're your colleague or your neighbor or your family member #they are way too human to be fascist

DING DING DING ✅

Disgust has absolutely no ethical weight. If you are basing your ethical positions on the emotion of disgust you should stop, it is entirely unjustified and leads to a huge amount of harm.

Word for today: wisdom of repugnance

The logical fallacy that because something disgusts you it must be bad

this is probably the funniest example of a tumblr user simply not reading the post theyre reblogging at all

That elderly couple who volunteers at the soup kitchen after church on Sundays and attends every town hall meeting has done more community direct action than 99% of internet leftists 🤷🏽‍♀️

#lol this post is stupid spup kitchens were created by the gov after they literally destroyed black radical organizers lives#and since when does going to a town hall meeting and working within the system help anybody in any significant way

100% agree homeless people should just starve and dumpster dive till le epic revolution happens!

and for sure local politics is so stupid it only handles dumb things like your schoolboard, judges, infrastructure, and rent laws! now tweets? Thats where the real work happens! 

These are all noble and worthwhile things to do. People should do them. But they’re not gonna get us any closer to ending injustice. After the protest scene collapsed in Seattle, I watched people take up mutual aid, and it’s an endless black hole of effort for them. Meanwhile the cops are still kicking homeless people around and the sweeps are still happening. You can give people food, tents, tarps, and cigarettes all you want - the cops are still going to come around and throw everything in the dumpster AND eat the food you were trying to give them. I’ve watched it happen. 

Also…attending town meetings? We used to FLOOD public comment trying to get the police defunded and members of city hall would ignore us and vote against us anyway. What the FUCK are you talking about. 

Nothing short of an armed insurrection is going to make the suffering stop. I don’t give a shit about town hall meetings. 

You and I both know you’re not gonna do any of that go pick up a ladle cornball. elderly trump supporters did an armed insurrection before the left

“The only thing that’ll change anything is violent revolution!” people make me roll my eyes because they never go and do their violent revolution. They always just use it as an excuse to not help anyone. “Nobody vote because the system is broken and the less evil candidate still sucks!” oh yeah? You gonna change the system before voting day? No? Then how does not voting help? “Poverty is a constructed problem, working at a soup kitchen won’t solve it, only overthrowing the system will!” oh yeah? You gonna overthrow the system tonight? You gonna do it before that single mum with two jobs and her three kids go to bed hungry? No? Then feed them, too!

“The system is broken, you’re being used, pain is inevitable under this regime!” Yeah. We KNOW. But are you out there fixing it, or just using that as an excuse to not help people when you can? Because if you’re using that as a shield for inaction without doing anything about it, if you’re not doing anything but complaining on twitter between sessions of your favourite computer game, you’re not an activist, you’re just larping as one. Go volunteer at a soup kitchen.

I worked at a volunteer center for many years. It was part of my job to match people with volunteer positions based on their abilities and skills. I knew everything there was to know about volunteerism at a local level and let me tell you something; for every social problem someone on the internet is complaining about, there is a volunteer position that is doing boots on the ground work on that problem. And that position is going unfilled. Old people volunteer more than anyone else - at least 80% of the people I placed were retirees. Unfortunately, the nature of being Old is that you can only do so much - for so long. Younger generations are NOT showing up to volunteer like past generations. They are all too apathetic. They wait to be asked for help. They think yelling about a problem on the internet does something to change it. They think the actions of a small group of dedicated individuals is worthless. If it doesn’t change the whole world, it’s not worth it. Volunteerism doesn’t solve the problem - so why bother with a bandaid?

I’d like you to look into the face of a disabled mother who was just told that habitat for humanity is going to build her a safe house (using volunteered labor and donated supplies) for her family after a year of them sleeping in her van: and tell her she doesn’t deserve that bandaid. Tell her the volunteers that took extra care to make the house wheelchair accessible for her youngest - didn’t REALLY make a difference. They wasted their time, right? You can tell her that her problems are systemic and explain the social issues and politics at play that allowed her to fall through the cracks all you like, but she’ll probably tell you to go tell it to someone else because she allready KNOWS. She lived it. If you’re not going to actually do something constructive about it - Ｆｕｃｋ off. Pick up a hammer and help build the house- or get the Ｆｕｃｋ out of the way.

If a child is starving, you feed them. They will starve before your protests are heard by politicians. They will starve while you work to prevent starvation in the future. They will starve while you try and solve the problem. If you aren’t willing to personally make a bowl of soup to feed that child - your words are meaningless to me. They are meaningless to that child.

When I was a kid, we were poor. My brother slept in a pile of clothes because he didn’t have a mattress. He wrote to Santa and asked for a bed and sent the letter in the mail and someone at the post office read it and they decided to volunteer their time to raise money and buy my brother a bed. They dropped it off on Christmas Eve. They told my brother that Santa sent them. They didnt even leave their name. I started volunteering shortly after, and then made nonprofit work my life until I was too disabled to continue. In my work I know I saved at least 2 lives because those people told me so - but potentially there were more. 2 human lives, that I might not have been there to save, if a volunteers actions hadn’t inspired me to continue the good work. Every ounce of good I did, was because of that mattress.

The thing is - volunteering and helping other people makes a direct and tangible difference in the lives of people. Not just feeding them and putting a roof over their heads - It reminds them of the best of what people can be and inspires them to do their own good. It affirms to them that we SEE the injustice that they face and we are going to HELP them in whatever way we can, even if it doesnt solve the systemic problem. Even if if just looks like helping one person. It ripples out. It always ripples out.

So you can yell on the internet about injustice and volunteering not solving the problems all you want - but no amount of your yelling is ever going to build a house or feed a starving child. If someone’s bleeding, just give them the fucking bandaid.

I agree with the sentiment, but who is this trying to convince? The transphobes don't 'not get it', they know. They know perfectly well. They already know that they use ambiguous pronouns, and that cis people already use pronouns, and (most of them) know that 'cis' just means 'not trans'. They know. Saying this stuff doesn't convince anyone, you are just playing their game, where they win by making you have to explain, because if you have to explain, you're already on your back foot. It's the goldwater strategy. You say some wild, outrageous shit, and when your opponent has to defend themselves, they look weak. The response to that kind of blatant bigotry isn't to backstep and explain and clarify and seek communication, because they *hate you*. The productive answer is to take a fucking tire iron to their jaw. Barring that, if you don't want to perform literal assault, as I'm sure most civil people don't, the next best thing is to just fucking stare them down. Ignore their bait and their smokebombs. Don't respond when they start talking about how 'pronouns and trans ideology are a jewish plot', because most of them don't ACTUALLY mean that. But they know that when you have to start explaining, you create a link in the perception of the conversation between you and the idea of some 'jewish plot'. It *does not matter* if you have a good response. It *does not matter* if you have evidence, because they are not interested in legitimate discourse. They just see it as you proving yourself weak. Every time you can't resist explaining about how crime statistics are based on biased data or whatever, you are looking at their bear trap, and then locking eyes with them and stepping into it. They KNOW we want to communicate, to come to an agreement, an understanding. They know we want to have a dialog, and they think it makes us inherently weak. When someone tells you that trans people don't exist, just respond with something along the lines of 'Funny, that's what your mom said last night. That's why I didn't pay her after I fucked her.' Because posturing and winning is the ONLY thing they acknowledge.

And this goes for me, too, by the way. I SEETHE when I see people talking about social aid programs. I shake and howl and froth at the mouth like a dog with rabies when I see someone on facebook talking about how trans people are inherently pedophiles. You think I don't want to start posting links to data? You think I don't want to have a 30-minute-long argument that results in a better mutual understanding of the nature of truth? Of course I do! But I'm starting to realize that that strategy is why we have gotten to this point!

reblogging ^this^ response to this post because it is very true. fascists don't care about truth. they just want to bait a response. they want to muddy the waters of discourse and destroy the conversation. they want to tie everything up in meaningless and ineffective combativeness. they want to tire out the argument to the point where the truth doesn't matter to anyone so that they will simply get their way. because that's all they want. they're giant babies who just want things to be their way or no way.

however, in terms of who the original tweet is for: probably lukewarm liberals and apolitical centrists who could easily be coaxed over to right wing ideals if they watch enough propaganda. we aren't fighting fascists with this particular tweet. or any words or statistics or anything remotely intellectual. but we are fighting in the propaganda meme war. many of us are surrounded by people who get it but you'd be surprised how many people out there don't get it and don't even have these topics cross their radar until its given to them in the form of some insidious right wing propaganda video trending on instagram.

we can't convince fascists of anything but we can try to help steer people out of falling into the fascist sinkhole.

Still remember when a homo- and transphobic acquaintance tried to bring up JKR’s views on trans people in conversation and I shut it down with «oh yeah she’s been saying a lot of dumb shit on Twitter after she finished writing Harry Potter, like when she claimed Dumbledore was gay, just to be politically correct», which made it absolutely impossible for him to admit that he agreed with anything JKR had ever said. Sometimes you just have to weaponise people’s homophobia against their transphobia.

Other ways to stop family members/acquaintances from going on bigoted rants:

The point is that I’ve used all of these in various contexts and they’ve saved a good number of dinner table conversations from derailing into pointless debating. You don’t de-radicalise friends and family members by entering into political discussions they initiate just to stir up shit. You de-radicalise them by shifting the focus away from their shitty opinions and onto the things you have in common and the practical everyday stuff that exists outside their internet echo chambers.

As someone who took etiquette lessons, politeness is an incredibly effective tool for disarming bigots. You can either force them to reconsider their words/actions by directly and calmly confronting their behavior (by using the rules of society in your favor), or you can dip entirely while they appear to be in the wrong.

Both options are great.

Because the thing is, when bigots pick fights, they are 100% counting on you to get louder than them. Or meaner. They want you to react emotionally and provide fodder for their 'You're Too Emotionally Immature To Understand' cannon.

What they aren't expecting you to do is say one of the following phrases in a polite, concerned tone:

For those of you who'd are spiteful and/or dealing with Fundamentalists/Evangelicals/generally shitty Christians:

And my all time favorite:

"It sounds to me like there are some seriously dark and angry forces at work in your heart."

(Nothing stops a Christian bigot in their tracks faster than implying the Devil is causing their bigotry. But you MUST be calm, polite, and gentle with your tone and wording. It is absolutely fair to twist the rules and play them at their own game, but you gotta play hard.)

TLDR: It's much faster to use etiquette, politeness, and rhetoric reversal when eviscerating idiots online and in person, because they aren't expecting you to weaponize their behaviors back in their direction. Don't get angry, get spitefully polite! :)

I once witnessed a very soft-spoken young Southern man take a hateful older woman’s hands gently in his and say “Sister, I am so sorry that the Devil has carved a home for hatred in your heart. I’ll pray for you.”

It was glorious.

This works with all sorts of inappropriate behavior. I work as the archivist in a public library, so I end up on the reference desk a lot, and sometimes patrons will say or do things that aren't exactly appropriate. When patrons try to hit on me, I put on a teacher voice and calmly ask, "Is that an appropriate question to ask someone at work?" and it shuts them down immediately.

This sort of thing always does the trick.

“humans don’t do anything for free” somewhere out there there is a guy who spent days if not weeks of his life cataloguing every stupid thing you can do on stardew valley so that you can minmax the fuck out of growing potatoes on a pixel grid for quite literally no reason but that it might help someone else

“Why are you so upset about adult content bans? You don’t even post that stuff. can’t you just look at porn somewhere else?”

Well, you see, I have this small problem where my very existence is considered adult content by a small but very powerful group of people and I actually rather enjoy being able to exist in public without restriction so uhhhh put that in your bong and smoke it kiddo.

Maddison Stoff, Why gender essentialism is a white supremacist ideology

and further to this article, this grim perennial reinforces this with historical force: 

The Eradication of “Talmudic Abstractions”: Anti-Semitism, Transmisogyny and the National Socialist Project

but no yeah lets have the conversation:

"the CEO doesnt want to run that kind of website" Excuse, shouldnt have bought the 'go nuts show nuts whatever' website if thats the case. APPEAL DENIED

"we have to follow the TOS of the appstores we're hosted on" Excuse item one, no you dont, item two, you have since those days implimented infrastructure that would allow pornography and sex work on this platform Without violating TOS of any applicable app store. APPEAL DENIED

"we own the site we get to make the rules" Incorrect, this site has only ever made profit when the users willed it. we collectively own the site as a hive mind and no legal change in ownership will change that. APPEAL DENIED

"we have to keep this website safe for the children who use it" Argument based on fallacy banning pornography and sex workers does not prevent pornography and sex work from occuring on the site, it only forces aforementioned users to hide and avoid labling their content appropriately, which REDUCES the safety for children and sex workers alike instead of increasing it, this has been shown to the point that making this argument at all is tantamount to admiting fascist intent APPEAL DENIED

Reblog it. I want this to be on Tumblr radar by end of the week, i want my notes to be useless from the discourse, i want every single person on Tumblr to have seen this post at some point

"No Child should get Gender Affirming Care" turns into "No one should get Gender Affirming Care". "No Trans Person should be in Children's Media" turns into "No Trans Person should be in Media". They use Children's "Safety" as a method to get a foot in the door. They then expand their previous statements to ensure the near complete erasure of Trans People and Queer People.

"Well, since we already agreed it's harmful..."

contemplates writing a detailed guide to deradicalizing republican evangelicals for the billionth time

i've written out parts of my thoughts before, but nowadays is a different time with the absolutely unhinged paranoia about lgbtq people trying to "groom" your kids and weird ideas about "critical race theory" being promoted by politicians to stir fear

So...I would say that the key is, do not challenge people's deeply held feelings, impulses and beliefs about things, but rather argue based on values they share with you

I mean okay first of all, this is definitely going to be a controversial take, but if someone feels distaste and repulsion at the idea of a man dressing in drag, you're not going to "convince" them not to—and you don't have to, because feeling distaste about something someone else does is just...a feeling. Maybe they will unpack it on their own time, maybe they won't, but as uncomfortable as it may be to admit, feeling completely arbitrary distaste over another person's harmless action is a normal human thing and you've experienced it too. What actually matters is whether you learn to deal with this feeling in a healthy way or if you decide the feeling must be telling you that [thing] is objectively evil.

I get a lot of mileage out of saying things like "This is America and it's a free country, and we get to live how we want and express ourselves how we want even if the government doesn't like it." And I know people who, personally, believe that gay sex is "morally" wrong, but are staunchly pro-gay-marriage because they believe that it's a fundamental American value for people to be able to live their lives the way they see fit and to be treated equally to everyone else.

And I honestly do respect that? I respect people with a mature understanding of the fact that "My personal opinions and feelings on someone else's choices are not as important as their right to make those choices." I think this is something we all need to learn, because there will always be things that we will find we don't FEEL positively about, or don't personally think are good (nose jobs, recreational Benadryl, tattooing Dobby's face onto your chest, that one weird kink you think is gross) and that does NOT mean our personal feelings should be made into law and used to punish and harm people.

One thing that is a pretty consistent stated value among most American conservatives is personal freedom.

Recent events like book bans, drag bans, abortion bans, and trans healthcare bans are all attacks on personal freedom—the government stepping in to legislate what an individual can and cannot do. That is something that people across the political spectrum in America can and should be concerned about, even if they disagree on the issues involved.

Express your concerns that book bans open the door to the government arbitrarily restricting what information you can have access to. "I just don't think the government should be able to control what I can and can't read, as if the individual can't be trusted to think for themselves."

Likewise, banning drag gives the government the power to control how individuals dress and express themselves. If a public performance can be illegal based on how the performer is dressed, that can be used to arrest anybody that says anything in public that the authorities don't like. Clothes are assigned gender arbitrarily: pants used to be inappropriate for women, and men used to wear heels. Who is to say that a robe or a kilt is different than a dress? Ultimately, people have the right to live how they want in this country, and if a man wants to wear a dress, he can whether his neighbors like it or not.

Talk about how banning abortion and trans healthcare sets a precedent for the government controlling people's medical decisions. Why should someone need an outside authority to decide what medications they can and can't take?

DO remind people that what they see claimed by politicians and the internet is wildly out of touch with what the average person thinks and believes.

If someone tries to go the "But what about the children?" route, just straight-up "So you think that we need to reform public schools? See, I agree with you, I think it's very harmful for kids to be spending so much time in a public school environment being primarily influenced by the pressures and stressors there. If kids spend 8 hours at school and then have 5 hours of homework, of course they're parroting whatever their schools teach—they don't even have time to talk to their parents or other trusted people in their lives, and they're being forced to memorize so much stuff that they can't think critically about it! See, I would want my kids to have access to a big library with a wide variety of views, and teach them to think critically about different perspectives on a subject. These book bans are going to make sure kids never even get exposed to alternative viewpoints, and that's how you get adults that can't think!—"

Honestly censorship is hard to defend with a straight face, so the main thing here is to just defuse the irrational panic over critical race theory. If they try to allege some hypothetical book with hypothetical sexually explicit material, ask for details and watch them squirm.

Abortion is another one of those things you will not be able to change someone's feelings on, so you must focus on several things:

And honestly? A lot of people who would have considered themselves "conservative" DO find recent developments alarming, so again, your main job is to defuse the cult-ish fear and paranoia of thinking disloyal thoughts

Yup, 100% no notes.