Me: “Here are some free masks if you didn’t bring your own.”
Father: “We can’t, we have medical issues.”
Son: “What? No we don’t.”
Hey so fun fact, the ADA does not protect your right to go inside a business/building without a mask during a pandemic. If you’re disabled and unable to wear a mask, the business or organization must do their best to provide an equivalent service - say curbside pickup of groceries or a food order, or providing the same information on paper for a nature center. They do not have to let you inside.
As a disabled person who educates on the ADA, this abuse of disability law by abled people who clearly don’t give a flying fuck about disabled people and our civil rights infuriates me. If your center requires a mask and they won’t (or can’t) wear one, kick them out.
All of the recipes don’t require any more cooking than a microwave or toaster, and don’t require any utensils other than a fork or spoon. I tried to make as many ingredients as possible shelf stable so that you can pick and choose as needed. It’s made to minimize dishes, time, and gross motor skills required.
You don’t like Joe Biden? I hear you! And 102 days from now, I hope to be right there with you harassing him into supporting Medicare for All and defunding the police. But we have to get the Biden administration into office first for that to even be a possibility. Voting is not the end. It’s the beginning.
of course, my frustration with how The Left handles people trying to become informed about their ideas is partly motivated by fear. I swear being online is like I’ve been sent back in time to stop a disaster that’s already happened.
On some level y’all get that the far right extremists are good at recruiting and radicalizing, but generally speaking The Left curses at and attacks people who are trying to ask questions, constantly reiterates that its people’s own responsibility to be informed, repeats the exact kinds of propaganda right wing media spews out because they think the concept of Christians being oppressed or whatever is funny, encases all their discussions in jargon that is impossible to understand without context, refuses to define the jargon even as right-wing media “educates” them about its Real Meaning, and spreads the idea that having a discussion with anyone right of center morally taints you. A part of me is screaming internally every second I’m online because of this. If you think of this as a cultural and ideological battle of sorts, the Right is actively recruiting soldiers while the Left is busy chasing anyone who doesn’t already have military training, a uniform, and weapons away from their recruitment office (which is boarded up with signs saying that anyone who asks where they can join will be forcibly removed from the premises) with baseball bats.
Like we can debate “performing emotional labor” until the sun burns out and probably some good points will be made but at some point it’s gonna be either emotional labor or living under a fascist dictatorship because all the people it wasn’t our job to educate went out and finally educated themselves, just like we wanted them to, using their free Google…
…which showed them how to find nazis that would happily answer all of their questions, without cursing or implying that they should already know everything, and lots of free, non-paywalled, easy to read and jargonless articles about how it’s a minority’s fault that things suck.
If we’re fighting back we’ve got to fight to win. That’s it.
Please listen to me, a person who knows the American Christian Right inside and out.
The Right weaponizes our unwillingness to educate. When we scoff at a person that doesn’t understand what “white privilege” means, there are comforting voices that will be there to tell them that the Leftists are just people who have never suffered or hurt a day in their lives, that speak of “white privilege” because of their bitter hatred of anyone with differing opinions than they have. That person will return to the familiar narrative that the Left is filled with violent, hateful, destructive people that are both incapable of understanding their needs and struggles and completely indifferent to them. THIS IS HOW THEY WORK. The confrontational attitudes and confusing language are used as essential tools by the Right.
“I shouldn’t have to explain what privilege is!” we say.
“They respond that way because what they really mean is that they think no white person has really struggled or suffered,” other voices say. “They don’t care about you because you’re white. Isn’t that what real racism is?”
And that narrative makes sense to them because no, they don’t know what real racism is, because anyone who asks questions about what racism is is “sealioning,” and anyone who googles racism is probably met with the dictionary definition, and anyone who says “but this is what the dictionary definition of racism is?” is assumed to be acting in bad faith and probably cursed at.
I am not asking marginalized people to constantly be available to answer questions about their traumas and shit. I don’t want people to go through that. But as someone who’s extensively seen the inside of the group that elected trump, I am BEGGING people to understand what I’m saying and be as frightened of its implications as it deserves.
I don’t know!! If you’re white you have no excuse to not AT LEAST SOMETIMES perform racism-related “emotional labor,” start memorizing responses and spreading definitions and stuff!! Instead of “deconstructing our patriarchal colonialist capitalist mindset” or whatever, let’s deconstruct the long words we use to discuss literally everything for a hot second! I have answered very strange ignorant questions before and I will do it again! Because no matter how ignorant the question is, the person still went to ME. And I’m not throwing that away so they can look for answers on google and end up with the alt-righters on reddit in a place where they can educate instead.
I’m realising recently that one of the major reasons for this trend is that the web is fkin huge and people don’t often venture very far beyond their own circles. Which means that within a circle and just at its outskirts, the questions and arguments people make have honestly been addressed and re-addressed so many fkin times that it really is just “oh my god ugh” when there’s another one who’s missed all of those learning times. And it seems like it’s out there and it’s obvious and why do I need to be doing this again when it’s right there. Except that it’s only really right there from a specific spot.
So, in conclusion, I think we need a FAQ to redirect people to.
The left needs an on-ramp which incrementally builds up all of its concepts. It has to start from common sense and truths that are obvious to someone not on the left and get from there to the insights the left has to offer in ways that most non-lefties can find intuitively logical.
Most people on the left can’t actually offer that. They are too far removed from the actual philosophical justification of their views. Too willfully unable to put themselves into the perspective of the right. Too uncritical of the left’s ideas. You can’t lead people who don’t already mostly agree to your perspectives from that position.
To be fair, some of the left’s progress in the culture has been due to reliance on the mechanisms of offendedness, outrage, and ostracism. But the success this achieves is hollow. It gets you disagreement becoming resentfully hidden rather than disagreement becoming agreement.
There was a time when this “get offended and ostracize” strategy was more common among the right. Sociological pendulums and all that. It is a strategy you do when you have the power to shut people up and the privilege to get away with being an ass about it.
(Contrary to the Abridged Lefty Theory for Children most people get from Tumblr or Twitter or wherever, power and privilege are not the same across a society - power and privilege constantly change depending on where you are and who you are with, both in meatspace and online.)
But it is a toxic strategy regardless of who does it, with a high risk of being more harmful than helpful in ways that are not immediately obvious. And it becomes more harmful the more progress and success you achieve.
So, let’s get started. What are the essential words and phrases that need to be defined in order to start the conversation? I’m serious. Let’s start a dictionary.
# dictionary of the American Left
Let’s start with what privilege is—not just white privilege or male privilege but privilege generally speaking. There has been discussion about what that is, but still I’ve seen widespread misunderstanding among republicans or similar about what is meant when people say it. And that means that people are REALLY DEFENSIVE when talking about it—they feel like their lives and their personal struggles are being attacked when someone says “privilege.”
I really think the misunderstanding is partly because of “white privilege” being defined apart from the context of what privilege is. Because people on the right don’t really consciously think of the world as consisting of systems of oppression. So even the best attempt to define “white privilege” is going to fall a little short.
I had to learn this—to check myself a bit, and realize that I sounded super condescending when I talked about privilege to people who were first generation college students and abuse survivors or who had grown up poor or who had been in the foster system, et cetera.
Here’s where I think you’d start—start a discussion about fairness. Because fairness isn’t a loaded word in the same way that “privilege” is. Privilege is often seen as very presumptive just because people don’t really know what you mean by that. The first question is, “Well, does the world treat people and judge people fairly, or are there ways in which it’s unfair?”
And it’s very hard not to see that the world is unfair. A person who is born rich has a lot of advantages over someone who is born poor. Someone who has loving, supportive parents has a better chance at being brought up in a way where they can succeed than someone who never had good parental figures. Metaphors about privilege don’t get through to these people because they don’t explain why they apply to the real world. A metaphor about a fence or running a race is just a metaphor. Talk to them (if you’re comfortable with it) about times when you have experienced unfair treatment, or get them to share their own experiences.
The problem you will run into is that people will not see these things as systemic, because the idea of systemic injustice is probably kind of foreign to them. They get really tripped up on the idea that someone can participate in an unjust system without themselves doing unjust things because they already read everything related to these discussions as aggressive and blamey. They probably don’t see examples of racism or sexism as a fundamentally ingrained part of society—they’re the actions of individuals who are wrong, yes, but people tend to see them as isolated incidents.
So provide examples. Lots of examples. Don’t just talk about one axis of oppression (and don’t say axis of oppression because they don’t really know what that means). DO NOT, by any means, assume they have the historical context for these things…because they don’t. American public school history education is propaganda. Have reliable sources on hand for the history of racism and sexism and other prejudices in America because people usually don’t know there has been, for example, really any legal/institutional aspect to racism since the 60’s. American history textbooks stop talking about racism with MLK. Talk about the history. Talk so much about the history. Almost everything I know that convinced me racism was still a real and important threat ingrained into our society I had to research outside of textbooks.
Talk about how the assholes that anyone could identify as racist don’t just “end up” racist. Why are they racist? Maybe they grew up hearing that kind of stuff as a kid. Well, racism being basically normal in a whole group or community is an example of something bigger than individual choices that causes racism. “A person is this way because their parents raised them like that” is the simplest and most accessible way to introduce the idea of actions and beliefs being part of a system.
Don’t talk about privilege about being just in terms of gender or race. Talk about class privilege. Talk about privilege as broad and flexible and a thing that doesn’t fully 100% define an individual person, because “White privilege” refers to something that exists in a whole society, not just “you, a white individual, are privileged for being white, regardless of your individual experiences, and you never struggled.” It’s not an attack and it’s not meant to be a way of broadly simplifying a group’s experiences. The necessity of explaining this isn’t all because of “white fragility,” it’s definitely at least partly because they’ve probably heard very inflammatory and dishonest things about what the Left means by privilege and that has to be dealt with. There is a lot of prejudice and bigotry in our history and there are still ways of thinking and laws and structures that don’t treat people fairly because of qualities they can’t help. And we want to make the world more fair. If they shut down, go back to that—it’s about treating people with fairness.
to check myself a bit, and realize that I sounded super condescending when I talked about privilege to people who were first generation college students and abuse survivors or who had grown up poor or who had been in the foster system, et cetera.
So much this. And while you’re at it? Be aware of what privilege you may have in the convo including that which may be invisible to you. Because you don’t know someone’s history. You don’t KNOW if they’re an abuse survivor, or a survivor of extreme poverty; you don’t know their disability status. (Hell THEY may not know how ablism is affecting their life.) Unless you know someone VERY WELL INDEED these things WILL be invisible to you. Which means you may well be acting your own privilege out, without noticing it - and yes, you may well have some at play. And the far right absolutely exploits that hypocrisy, too.
dont get me wrong this is #mood but just try eating a piece of bread with salt. please, seriously. ok? at least a tiny bit. salt helps with nausea, bread calms the stomach acid. if you really can’t face eating anything, just lick some salt like a damn elk, then wait and see if you can manage the bread. make some broth if you’re into that kind of thing. no spices, yes salt. if you’re feeling too weak and shaky to do much, just have a cup of tea with sugar (energy) and lemon (again, good against nausea). nibble on the lemon first, it will feel good, but don’t overdo - citric acid on an empty stomach is a majorly bad idea. take care of yourself, you’re the only you we’ve got
Oh, so that’s why saltines are a good stomach bug food!
A good thread on whether “queer” is a slur and if it should be used or not.
“If I am unashamed of being queer, you do not get to give that word BACK to the fuckwits who made it a slur.”
you do not get to give that word BACK to the fuckwits who made it a slur
EVERYBODY WHO CAME OUT BEFORE YOU HAS TAKEN THE ROCKS AND BOTTLES AND MADE THEM INTO SHIELDS AND WINDCHIMES
Holy motherfucking shit. Don’t fucking come at me about Queer is a slur. I FUCKING KNOW IT IS. It was hurled at me like a fucking spear all through my youth. I know it’s a god damn slur. And it’s mine. You don’t get to take it away from me because you can’t take also away the scars it gave me while I was standing in front of my younger queer siblings in this community.
always, always reblog this one.
If my enemy swings a sword at me and I take that sword away from them, it’s my sword now. And the person telling me I can’t use it because it belongs to my enemy and I have to give it back to them sounds quite a bit like an enemy themselves.
This came around again, but it’s worth sharing and remembering. You have the right to only accept certain words be used to describe you, but so does everyone else.
I have this bookmarked to through at people who DM me about using the word Queer.
unfriendly reminder that dehumanizing people - even the worst people - is a shitty tactic and you should employ it basically never.
look I’m too tired to explain this properly but when you erase the humanity of the scummiest people on the planet you erase the fact that the all those shitty, shitty things were done by a person. a real human chose to do those things. you erase humanity’s capacity for evil. you misrepresent reality. that’s…really not good. at all. and in addition to that dehumanization as a tactic has always been used against marginalized people - to harm and kill us in vast numbers - and turning it against bad people is also just pushing the idea that it’s an okay rhetorical tool to use, and that will always end up harming marginalized groups
Saying, “those people aren’t human; they’re monsters,” both avoids placing blame for how they got that way, and abdicates responsibility for making changes in the future to prevent more people from being like that.
Assuming that “rapists are monsters” means not blaming parents, schools, and the media for teaching boys that “a man’s got needs and it’s a woman’s job to provide sex!” It means pretending that there’s no way we could discourage rape in the future, no way to teach young men not to become rapists.
It also dodges the question of whether some of them could be redeemed, whether they could learn to understand what they did wrong and not do it in the future. But even if you don’t care about criminals’ redemption possibilities, you should care about creating a society that produces fewer criminals.
And we can’t do that, if people claim that criminality is a matter of “evil souls” instead of a combination of societal influences and personal choices, and how people learn to be criminals (or “monsters,” who may be doing horrible things that aren’t technically crimes) based on the consequences provided - or not provided - for their early actions.
It also neatly sidesteps the idea that you or someone you know can do shitty things. This is bad for victims, for two reasons.
The first is that it isolates victims and keeps them from being believed. “My best friend has been accused of rape? Well, the accuser must be lying, because rapists are horrible monsters and my friend is a wonderful person, therefore they can’t be a rapist.”
The second is that it keeps victims from realizing that they are victims. “My girlfriend can’t be abusive, because abusers are monsters and my girlfriend isn’t a monster. I must just be overreacting.”
Hey this is true when creating media, too! Be thoughtful about what language you use to describe your villains, and for what reasons.
