there's a weird misconception amongst some people that the problem with our society is that it's hedonistic and materialist. it's the opposite... nobody is having any fun and almost nobody owns anything
The problem with society is that a very small percentage of people are hedonistic and materialistic and buddy they view the rest of us as materials.
That video of Alex Hirsch reading S&P notes for Gravity Falls conveys a few things to me:
1) the U.S. entertainment industry (especially animation) is run by older conservative types who make up offensive terms and get really mad about them.
2) the people who run Disney would be the first to fall in line with a fascist regime.
3) most of the media we consume is tailor-made and watered-down to appeal to the tastes of older, deeply religious conservative audiences.
4) conservatism, not the left, is and always has been the biggest voice of censorship in American culture.
J. Michael Straczynski, creator of Babylon 5, was before that a producer and writer for a number of cartoons in the late ‘80s/early ‘90s (The Real Ghostbusters and the original She-Ra, most notably). After a few years of dealing with the censors and their obsession with finding Satanism (or at least looking for Satanism to further political agendas) he wrote an article about the whole corrupt and bullshit system.
And published it in Penthouse, to force those same censors to buy a skin mag. The editor there asked, why Penthouse?
That one is from his autobiography, Becoming Superman. See also:
(As he goes on to say, he’s never worked in animation again–he’s effectively been blacklisted by the cartoon industry.)
That nearly all of it is ultimately owned by some rich old conservative is a good thing to keep in mind about ALL US Media: Hollywood, Radio, Social Media, and Yes, even the news. All their talk about ~The Liberal Media~ is misdirection.
There's a REASON Republican pols hate PBS and NPR as much as they do, and it's because, as milquetoast as it often is, Public Broadcasting is one of the few institutional voices in the US not entirely reading from the conservative hymnal.
Do we just have no standards whatsoever about what things are worthwhile to talk about
Remember when Nat Geo was a prestigious publication?
Oh. I see.
For those unaware, NatGeo fell victim to a common thing we're seeing with publications of all types: Some company or hedge fund buys a publication with a good reputation, whether that's a local paper or a national magazine; they strip it for parts, cutting out all of the expensive people and/or infrastructure that allowed it to deserve that reputation; and then they hope no one notices.
This has happened a lot in the last 20 years or so and it's honestly a catastrophe for news media.
Anyway, support outlets like ProPublica.
When studies show that underage drinking is harmful, it's banned easily. But when studies show that spanking is harmful, it remains legal and parents still insist on doing it.
Age restrictions on purchasing cigarettes pass easily. But laws prohibiting smoking where children are forced to breathe in secondhand smoke are much harder to pass.
Children under a certain age are prohibited from using most social media websites. But adults are allowed to post videos of their children's meltdowns.
Teenagers need their parents' permission to get body modifications. But parents can get their babies' ears pierced.
Anyone who genuinely wants to protect children would not panic about the children's own choices while ignoring what adults force on them. Anyone who genuinely wants to protect children would not insist that studies on the dangers of children's own choices be fully trusted and obeyed while ignoring and arguing with studies on the dangers of how adults treat children.
But many adults just want to control children, not protect them.
But parents can get their babies' ears pierced.
They can do much worse than that.
I work with kids as a research assistant and we have to get their assent before we can do anything involving them. If a kid says no, we can't go forward with the study. I've honestly lost count of the number of parents that screamed at me over this. The idea that they can say yes but their kid can say no, and we have to listen to the kid, it genuinely doesn't compute with them
“trans men don’t experience misogyny because they’re men thus cannot experience women’s oppression”
I hate to tell you this but even cis men experience misogyny if they step a toe over the line of what our incredibly sexist society sees as “proper” for a man. You really don’t think that a man with interests or expression the world sees as “female” aren’t treated with violence?
“would you say that of other privileged groups? do you think white people experience racism?”
I mean sometimes they do yeah. I know a white guy with monolid eyes and zero known Asian ancestors and he absolutely experiences anti-Asian racism on a fairly regular basis because people think he’s mixed Asian/white. I know a woman who was told throughout her life that she was Native as an adoptee with no known history or background who experienced incredibly violent amounts of anti-Native racism until she discovered as an adult through DNA test that she is 100% white. I know white people who tan incredibly dark in the summer comparatively that are constantly accused of being mixed race and experiencing racism due to that, usually anti-Mexican racism perpetrated against white people with Greek or Italian ancestors.
Their ability to make it stop by saying “hey, I’m white actually” only goes as far as the person enacting violence on them is willing to believe them. They still have to live with the trauma and physical scars from the altercations. We live in a racist world and thus there will be violent people who force all others to pass a whiteness test and eliminating or harming the rest.
Got an ask that I just block/deleted but it was basically “so you think cis people experience transphobia!?!?!?!?” and uh
If you think cis butches don’t experience both transphobia and misogyny and homophobia for daring to be women who break gender roles while still holding onto their womanhood you’ve sorely misunderstood just how bad butches have it in this world sorry. If you don’t think cis queens experience transphobia and homophobia and misogyny for daring to be men who break gender roles while being loud and proud about it and still holding onto their manhood then you’ve sorely mistaken just how bad they have it in this world as well.
Not to mention all of the cis men who wear dresses and skirts and makeup and nail polish and heels simply because they like them who experience all of these things. All of the cis straight women who simply just exist but something about them doesn’t pass society’s “woman enough” test, leading to them being caught in bathroom bills and sporting rules and being attacked by people who mistake them for being transgender or gay.
Just like how straight people experience homophobia to such a degree that they literally beat their children out of any potential deviance from rigidly upheld gender roles and let politicians make jokes on national TV about how they’d drown their pre-teen kids if they came out as LGBT. Do you really think a straight kid still figuring themselves out hears that and doesn’t internalize that homophobia? Doesn’t rigidly hold themselves to some impossible standard so that no one could ever possibly think they’re gay? You don’t think straight teenage boys who maybe don’t pass some bully’s straightness test are getting the shit kicked out of them for “being gay” when, surprise, they aren’t? You don’t think all those kids being attacked by their priests and coaches and teachers are being told “this wouldn’t have happened if you weren’t gay” when they’re literally not gay? Do you know how many straight kids had close calls at my school that famously expels all gay kids, because someone made up a believable enough rumor? Do you know how many of them still got their shit kicked in even though administration ultimately decided to let them stay?
All bigotry is violent and all bigotry catches people it doesn’t “intend” to and hurts them as well. It doesn’t matter what someone’s label is, or if they even have one. It matters if the person enacting the violence is doing it because their victim didn’t pass whatever “acceptable enough” test they didn’t know they were being subjected to.
Everyone is at risk. Oppression doesn’t care what your label is. Some people are more visible targets than others, and as a result those people are the more common targets. That doesn’t mean no one else experiences it.
My first post to reach 2k without people clowning in the notes I feel so proud
At 40.5k I regret to inform everyone that there have been so many clowns in the notes, I might as well call it a circus. It was fun while it lasted I guess.
Anyway this is just how hate crimes and systems of oppression works, literally the legal definition of a hate crime deliberately states that it doesn’t matter what the victim’s identity is, it matters what the perpetrator’s reason was, so people who are not [oppressed group] absolutely can be victims of [violence towards oppressed group] and have it be labeled a hate crime. Hope that helps.
The full archive—sent to me, and other journalists—contains every email Shupe sent or received, from both of her two email accounts, between 2017 and 2023, the years when she was most active as a member of the organized anti-trans movement. There are years of media, legislative and tactical strategy outlined in those emails; there are conversations in which some of the most well-known TERFs in the movement coordinate strategy and brainstorm talking points. It is a playbook for how anti-trans organizations operate and a compressed history of how the TERF movement joined forces with the Christian right to create the current moment.
Most important, it is a record of how Elisa Rae Shupe was crafted into a weapon; how her narrative was established, edited and eventually taken out of her control, even as her name appeared on testimonies, Supreme Court briefings and highly circulated op-eds. This is the making of a “detransitioner.” More like her are being made every day.
[…]
There is a long history of extremist movements recruiting damaged and isolated individuals to do their dirty work. Yet Shupe’s crusade wrecked her life, and in the end, the movement that elevated her also chewed her up and spat her out without hesitation. There was no big fuck-you-I’m-out moment for Shupe, no definitive point when she knew it was over; the tide just turned on her. A fellow TERF named Karen Davis started publicly attacking Shupe for her supposed autogynephilia. Shupe says she received death threats.
“I was gradually waking up to the fact that, you know, I was just a useful idiot, are the two words I would use,” Shupe tells me. “I got the vibe that they wanted me to help them, they wanted me to use them, but they wouldn’t trust somebody like me around their kids.”
This is such a sad fucking story. A part that jumped out to me in particular:
During our phone call, she recalls the night the Daily Signal op-ed went live: “I sat there at my screen, watching these high-powered Twitter accounts, a lot of them anonymous, with tens of thousands of followers, tweet it one by one. It was an orchestrated event. Less than 24 hours later, Fox was on the phone going, ‘Hey, we want you on Laura Ingraham tonight. We’ll send a car to pick you up.’”
That would be a big moment in anyone’s life, and it was particularly huge for a middle-aged veteran living on disability. Shupe, for what it’s worth, agrees with this: “I’m just sitting at home, adrift, every day,” she tells me. “So, you know, what is it like when somebody like Marchiano sends me a new mission to go on? I got something to do. I’m useful now. I’m no longer this loser on disability. I’m a useful person to a movement.”
How pernicious, the idea of usefulness; this ideology that says a life isn't worth living without purpose, that life needs it? This idea our society plants in all of us that if we aren't Important, Known, Famous, Active, then we're Losers. That losing is the worst possible thing a person can do. As if competitions, as if fucking GAMES, were more relevant than our very lives.
I know this article is about how conservatives manipulate and exploit detransitioners but it low-key lays out the ways our hierarchical, competition-obsessed society makes us susceptible to such manipulation so powerfully.
If you point out that mass produced vegetable crops destroy land and flood the ecosystem with poison you’ll always have someone saying that an omnivorous diet is still ostensibly worse because “most corn is grown to feed cows,” and on a related note, there’s still a popular narrative that cattle are responsible for more climate change than anything else. But here’s the thing: Cows are not supposed to eat corn. They can’t digest it. Feeding corn to cows actually makes them produce abnormal amounts of methane to begin with, and we do not at all need to feed corn to cows either. We actually just over-produce corn so badly that it gets used as animal feed just so the corn lobby can dispose of it all at a profit.
This land used to sustain buffalo as far as the eye could see, far more biomass than all of America’s cattle put together. Buffalo ate nothing but grass and wildflowers and all the shit we now consider “weeds” and poison to death. Nobody had to feed them corn for them to exist and the environment only thrived in their presence. Most of the carbon they produced was sponged up by the healthy meadows and wetlands and old growth forests we’ve since turned into the fucking cornfields, artificial toxic lawns or just big grey valleys of dust.
There are so many things wrong here interconnected so many ways I couldn’t even keep this on the track of “stop feeding corn to cows” we just built our whole American society like the biggest fucking idiots we possibly could
The thing thats getting me here is that apparently, a lot of american society, and I guess by extension the global economy, seems to be set up to appease specifically corn growers (corn barons?). Also cheese producers? I don’t understand, why do these people have so much power the world has warped around them, what did they do
It’s a complicated history, but decades ago when America was still undergoing massive economic growth, many businesses saw it as the time to strike; the time to put everything they had into aggressive marketing and lobbying, hoping that their products would come out the other end of the boom as ubiquitous to our culture as toilet paper and soap. Unfortunately, several succeeded on nothing but money, power and luck. They weren’t actually the best products or the most efficient to produce, but they were good at making deals with other industries and even government programs.
When it comes to food, the Corn Lobby is pretty much an unstoppable evil dictator. Only a small fraction of corn (something under 10%) is eaten by human beings directly in its natural state and almost everything people buy at the grocery store is made with some combination of corn filler, corn oil or corn sweetener even if it actually makes the product worse. It’s environmentally damaging, it requires so much fertilizer that the resulting pollution also causes an estimated 4,300 human deaths per year (a quarter of all air pollution deaths), it significantly increases diabetes and rots teeth worse than any other source of sugar but the lobby is also wealthy enough to wage non-stop war against the ongoing publication of unfavorable data so those are just the things we’ve had the chance to hear before it was bought and buried. This monopoly over so many markets and so much sheer land is insidiously the very thing that keeps cheaper, healthier alternatives from being able to meet the demands necessary to threaten corn’s supremacy in the first place, and it’s SO bloated, so powerful that its impact spills out into the rest of the world. Corn is one of America’s only major exports besides beef, which as established also has a forced dependency on the corn industry, and because we make enough corn to basically throw it in the garbage without losing money, we can export it cheaply enough that hungrier, poorer countries are forced to depend on it as well. Unable to compete, their own local farms either sell out to U.S. corn themselves or slowly die. It’s like a running gag that I hate corn because I also just find it gross as food but for anyone who doubts that it’s this bad for society there’s plenty more resources out there. The real worst part is that it’s one of only several things that have this kind of megalomaniachal empire going on, like food equivalents to the fossil fuel industry.
I remember my parents visiting the US a decade or two ago and talking about how surprised they were that the US media scarcely talks about things happening outside the country. That kind of made sense, I thought. There’s a lot of the US to talk about. Whereas the entire population of Australia is less than the population of Texas.
Then I found out how little they tell the population about things that happen inside the country. I remember seeing multiple Americans being like, ‘What do you mean other countries give us help when we have wildfires.’
And I – an Australian – was like, uhhh. We send over people and specialised firefighting choppers regularly. (And Australian firefighters have specialised knowledge there – the reason that Californian wildfires are so bad is because there was a mass planting of eucalyptus trees, which are oil rich and well adapted to surviving bushfires.)
I grew up with the evening news reporting on our bushfires saying things like ‘the US has sent over a crew and additional choppers to help fight the blaze in country New South Wales, and the CFA expects that they should have it under control soon.’ But the reverse doesn’t seem to be true in the US.
That brought home to me just how much of the US news is filtered to emphasise the US’s emphasis on individualism. It’s harder to sound believable about how little you need others when other countries are regularly pitching in to help keep your wildfires under control. It’s hard to keep a consistent message going about US exceptionalism if you admit that the country you vilify regularly as being full of people who are champing at the bit to invade your country are actually there on the ground helping you recover from a natural disaster.
do you ever think about how if bart or homer simpson got diagnosed with adhd and given the resources to address their neurodivergence they could finally get a chance to break the cycles of abuse and self-sabotage they live in and then feel kind of sad because they’re just cartoon men and their recklessness and carelessness and self-destruction and emotional volatility have been analyzed to death in feminist circles as toxic masculinity but you recognize so much of the way your own brain fails you in the constant cycles of frustration and despair and you just want someone to sit down with bart and say look, there’s a reason you can’t pay attention, can’t sit still, can’t behave, can’t think ahead, can’t control your impulses, can’t trust yourself or anyone else, can’t even imagine what it might be like to be as competent as your sibling, there’s a reason and it’s not because you’re a bad kid. it’s not because you’re a boy. there’s a word for what’s gone wrong and there’s medicine for it and you could be a better person. your dad could be a better person. your dad could stop spacing out at work and binge-eating and binge-drinking and getting so angry he hurts you and getting so sad he cries at night when he thinks you can’t hear. there’s help. there could be help.
but they’re cartoons and men who fuck up are men who fuck up are men. you either laugh it off because men should get to fuck up all they fucking want to, or you get angry because men should take some goddamn responsibility for themselves for once– like we don’t see how awful homer feels that he can’t figure out how to be any better than he is, like we don’t see how much caring about himself hurts bart because he’s just a kid with the exact same inherited brain problems as his dad and he can’t fix what everyone tells him is wrong with him, and no one else can fix it either.
there’s an episode where lisa wants to understand why her dad and brother are such fuckups and if she’s going to end up the same way. it’s concluded that all the simpsons men inherit being stupid and this can’t be changed and bart looks sad for a minute, before shrugging and running off to do something stupid, and it’s funny. it’s supposed to be funny. men can’t better themselves and it’s funny. cartoons can’t show us growth and change and hope because apparently no one wants to see that and it’s funny.
these men will never age and they’ll never stop fucking up and they’ll never get any better. but they could. i got help. i got better. and it makes me sad sometimes.
We should probably also use this as a time to destigmatize staying home when you’re sick instead of muscling through and making everybody else sick…
one of the worst myths perpetuated in fiction i think is the idea that teenagers get angry and hate their parents for no real reason. it's one of the endless ways older folks trivialize the real hurt and frustration and pain that teenagers experience - which, with no small amount of irony, can come from that very kind of trivialization.
when i was an angry and hormonal teenager, i was taught i was having a rebellious phase. my mother taught me i was being disrespectful to her. media taught me it was a product of being an irrational teenager. but when that shit didn't fade as i grew up, when i grew even more bitter towards her, i started learning that it was actually a completely rational response to the literal years of abuse from her. i wasn't just angry, i was traumatized. still am.
and to this day, I've never met a teenager who is "irrationally" hateful towards their parents. and maybe that's a product of not knowing any entitled rich kids, but my point stands. teenagers are real people with real emotions, which don't come out of nowhere or exist for no reason. teenage anger and pain may be harder for them to express or control, but its existence is not irrational. and i HATE every depiction of the irrational, parent hating teenager in media who opposes all adults just because they are teenagers, rather than because of any of the very real reasons teenagers have to be angry and hurt.
Important to note that the “irrational teen” trope was constructed explicitly by US media to trivialize the youth-based protest movements of the 1960s and 70s. It has always existed, as OP says, to encourage adults and society at large to ignore serious objections and critiques over serious issues brought up by young people.
(TW: my catholic school trauma)
Reading “The Boy Who Could Change the World”
It’s difficult to even imagine what America was like before the industrial revolution. Their notion of freedom was far stronger than the one we have today. For many Americans, life wasn’t about showing up at a job at a specified hour, following orders all day, and returning home for a couple hours of “free time”—that would be considered slavery. A free American was one who worked on their own or with their family, worked from home, worked whatever hours they liked, and got paid based on what they accomplished.
Under the putting-out system, for example, merchants would deliver raw materials like cotton to your house. When you felt like it, you’d card, spin, and weave the raw cotton into cloth. And then the next week the merchant would come by to buy from you whatever cloth you had produced.
He goes on to discuss mill workers in New England, who were mostly young girls, some around the age of 10. This was before our modern day labor laws, so the girls were working fourteen hour days. They still found time to read & discuss books/ideas, though.
And through all that thinking and learning and discussing, they began to question the less pleasant aspects of their situation. When, in 1836, the Lowell mill owners decided to cut their employees’ pay, the girls walked out.
What these young girls accomplished is truly amazing. They organized their own newspaper, the Voice of Industry, which they wrote, edited, printed, and sold themselves. Through it they organized more protests and strikes, as well as organized their own slate of candidates in the state elections to fight for better working conditions and a ten-hour day. Amazingly, their slate won. The owners, outraged, got their legislators to declare the election results invalid and hold a revote. Before the revote, large signs were posted threatening that anyone who voted for the ten-hour slate would be fired. And yet the slate won again.
[..]
But their writing in the Voice shows that they wanted much more than simply better working conditions. They saw themselves as slaves—wage slaves—and concluded that the solution was not simply to demand that the bosses be nicer to them or pay them more, but to abolish the bosses entirely.
Their bosses didn’t like this, at all. The mill owners fired the girls, blacklisted their names, and then did something strange: they sent girls to school.
The schools they built—the common schools—would be easily recognizable by any modern student. “The door [of each school] shall be closed precisely at the time fixed for the opening of the school, and in the morning religious exercises will be performed, for which purpose 10 minutes are allowed.” (Today we just say the pledge of allegiance.) “Each teacher shall call the roll call of his or her classes … in the morning and afternoon, and shall keep an accurate record of all absences.” The day was then divided into separate lessons, allowing “30 minutes for the study of each lesson and 10 minutes for each recitation.”
Instead of corporal punishment, teachers were encouraged to secure order “by the mildest possible means” to instill “a regard for right, and thus a standard of self-government in the minds of the children themselves.”* Students were tested on how much they learned and, just like today, working coordinating other students was considered “cheating” and punished. (Perhaps they were worried that if students learned to coordinate they might be more likely to foment strikes once in the mills.)“
[…]
Careful records kept by the mill owners allow us to compare mill workers who did and did not go to school. Just as with modern students, there is no evidence of any impact of increased education on worker productivity.*
So why did the mill owners spend so much money building and running these schools? They were quite clear about their intent. The classes were justified not for their usefulness but because memorizing them was a form of “moral education” leading to “industrious habits … and the consequent high moral influence which it exerts upon society at large.”
As one Lowell manager explained it, “I have never considered mere knowledge, valuable as it is in itself to the laborer, as the only advantage derived from a good common-school education. I have uniformly found the better educated, as a class, possessing a higher and better state of morals, more orderly and respectful in their deportment, and more ready to comply with the wholesome and necessary regulations of an establishment.””
As the Lowell School Committee summarized their findings: “The proprietors find the training of the schools admirably adapted to prepare the children for the labors of the mills.” Why? “When [their laborers] are well educated … controversies and strikes can never occur, nor can the minds of the masses be prejudiced by demagogues and controlled by temporary and factitious considerations.”*
Indeed, school was so important that the mill owners quickly decided to make it mandatory. “No language of ours can convey too strongly our sense of the dangers which wait us from [those who] are not and have never been members of our public schools,” warned the Lowell School Committee. Universal schooling is “our surest safety against internal commotions.”‡ The children who didn’t attend school “constitute an army more to be feared than war, pestilence and famine,” warned the committee. “Unsuccessful attempts, during the past year, to burn two of our school-houses … are an index to the evils which threaten from such sources.”
More accurately, such burnings were an index of public resistance to such coercion. In 1837, 300 teachers were forced to flee their classrooms by riotous and violent students.║ In 1844, the Irish population went on strike from the schools, reducing attendance by 80%. The School Committee stepped up their anti-truancy efforts to force them and others back to school.“
And so the spread of schools and factories destroys the American model of freedom. Instead of being independent farmers or self-employed manufacturers, Americans are herded into factories enmasse, forced to work for someone else because they cannot earn a living any other way. But thanks to schools, this seems normal, even natural. After all, isn’t that just the way the world works?
The effect on the students is almost heartbreaking. Taught that reading is simply about searching contrived stories for particular “text features,” they learn to hate reading. Taught that answering questions is simply about cycling through the multiple-choice answers to find the most plausible ones, they begin to stop thinking altogether and just spout random combinations of test buzzwords whenever they’re asked a question. “The joy of finding things out” is banished from the classroom. Testing is in session.”
School hasn’t seemed to have changed much since the early 1800s, at least the not sort of schooling geared for the masses. As a child, I was strongly discouraged from risk taking, ridiculed by teachers when I gave the wrong answer, punished for asking questions, had to ask permission to use the bathroom (and was often refused), refused permission to get a drink of water (the school had no air conditioning & it was June in Pennsylvania. Yes, multiple children got heat exhaustion, daily. Our parents commiserated, but thought this was normal. Teachers treated this as normal. We were told to “toughen up” and respect our elders when we complained.) We were taught to need someone’s permission to get medical attention.
I was once refused when I needed to see the nurse (I was going to vomit.) The teacher accused me of lying & told me to sit down. I sat down, and about two minutes later threw up. I half expected to get a demerit for dirtying the floor. I burst into tears, blubbering out humiliated apologies to my classmates and to the teacher. Above my concern for my dignity and health had been placed my teacher. That was my mentality as a kid.
(Normal is whatever you’re used to, but people shouldn’t be used to this.)
The thing that stands out in all of this, now, was how the other students remained frozen. I don’t know how to interpret their freeze – they didn’t move to get me a tissue, or towels, or anything. The teacher had forbade me from moving to clean up myself, so I had to wait for the nurse to arrive in a puddle of my own vomit. I obeyed. My classmates were staring at their desks, at the wall, anywhere but the teacher or myself. Maybe they were suffering second-hand embarrassment, or pity, or even fear that the teacher would lash out at them, next.
That was the sort of environment we grew up in, for 14 years of our lives.
In all of this, I notice this kind of moral fragmentation that society today seems to encourage. There’s a sense that people have abrogated all responsibility: “oh, that’s not my department, I’m not the one who makes the rules.” So we ignore people in pain, and accept on an instinctive level that there’s nothing we can do.
Except that isn’t true, even that asshole Lowell said, “The children who didn’t attend school “constitute an army more to be feared than war, pestilence and famine.””
This submissive attitude people have comes from fear, from an underestimation of our own strength and compassion.
—
Like, do people get what this does to a person’s self-esteem? Maybe not, because they’re all suffering from the same blindness.
Last week during the heat wave, I started experiencing heat exhaustion and my instinctive thoughts were to move as little as possible, and wait for it to be over.
I mean, what does that sound like to you?
Like, maybe my experiences at school were unusually bad, but it looks to me a lot like our society is systematically abusing kids into submissively accepting poor treatment by their superiors.
Don’t believe the false narrative being peddled by Trumpists and other right-wing agitators.
The vast, vast majority of Americans, regardless of politics, supports the scientific consensus that staying home is the best way for us to work together to get through this pandemic.
We really are united, no matter how hard Trump tries to divide us.
my utopia
I won’t speak for all liberals, but I’d like to see a future where it isn’t a big deal for a woman in full modesty garb to sit next to a drag queen in NYC. It’s become a bit of a sensation, but her and I were just existing. The freedom to simply be yourself in a sea of people who aren’t like you is a freedom we all deserve.
The central irony is that this isn’t some hypothetical future–it’s just present day reality. This is a picture of two ordinary people going about their normal lives despite how haters want to politicize it lmao. So the underlying message is not “future liberals want” it’s “people conservatives want to eradicate”
the underlying message is not “future liberals want” it’s “people conservatives want to eradicate”
Always reblog.
Worth repeating: This isn’t “the future liberals want.” This is the present we already have. And conservatives want (1) to convince you it’s not happening and that (2) we need to stop it (plz ignore that they already said it’s not real).
They’re not trying to prevent a future they don’t want. They’re trying to end freedoms that already exist, a cultural habit that’s already in practice: people just going about their business near other people who are different.
I think this is super important to remember.
