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incorrectmahabharatquotes · 3 months

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Genuinely curious, because you seem to hate the Ram Mandir... or how you think one party/ruling government is using it for political gain/votes or how it's wasting money etc.

What do you have to say about the Waqf board act? Or the infamous Shah Bano case and the way the Rajiv Gandhi government went against the decision of the Supreme Court to favour Muslim patriarchy. Or the fact that the Congress government banned books like the Satanic Verses to please a certain community. Is this not politics of appeasement?

You say that the ruling party is playing politics over religion, but hasn't every party done it? It's not like BJP was even hiding it, they've been campaigning for the Ram Mandir rebuilding for decades. It doesn't make it automatically a bad move.

Besides, Ram Mandir is built through devotee donations, so why so much vitriol against it? If Hindus are giving money to construct a temple, it's solely their own decision. I genuinely don't understand why there's so much hatred for it. If a community is reclaiming their holy land, which had been forcibly ruined and rebuilt into another type of building, it's not a bad thing. Plus, a big chunk of land was given to the Sunny Waqf board to build a beautiful mosque in Ayodhya itself, which has begun construction this year (iirc). Both communities will have their interests restored.

Why can't we move on and celebrate the Ram Mandir rebuilding and inauguration? Is decolonization and reclaiming of a place of cultural significance not important?

(I know that some people are being too aggressive about it, but the majority isn't. They're simply celebrating and praying. And some of them actually got attacked for it.)

Okay. Since you're genuinely curious, I'll answer this.

"Why am I criticising the current ruling party for playing politics of appeasement and not any of the other parties?" I'm criticizing them BECAUSE they're the ruling party. They have been in power for close to 10 years now. That's more than 1/3rd of my whole life. This is a hilarious question because I would've been criticizing the same action if it would've been taken by any other political party. I don't have a problem with the party, I have a problem with what they're doing. All citizens are SUPPOSED to do this, my friend. Criticizing your government on what they're doing wrong is a fundamental part of a democracy.

"Politics of appeasement." I hope you understand the difference between appeasement and religious nationalism. The ruling party isn't appeasing anyone. Their acts are guided by their political ideology of Hindutva. I fundamentally disagree with their ideology. I do not agree with them when they say being Hindu is integral to being an Indian. I do not believe in maintaining a Hindu hegemony in India. I simply refuse to accept an ideology that was LITERALLY INSPIRED BY FASCISM AND THE IDEAS OF RACIAL SUPERIORITY.

"What do you have to say about so-and-so?" You know, I would've criticised things I believe are harming our country and power when the governments you speak of were in power. Unfortunately, in certain cases I was not alive then to criticize them and in a few cases, I was a child and I did not know how to form complex sentences. I do not believe in essentialism, you understand? I do not believe that any religion or political party is essentially good or bad. I believe in judging them for what they do.

"They've been campaigning for the Ram Mandir for decades. It doesn't make it automatically a bad move." It's imperative for you to understand this, it is politically a good move and in all other ways a HORRIBLE move. They get the support of all the Hindus who make up the majority of the population? Decent political move. Who could begrudge them for using DIVIDE AND CONQUER as a strategy? But in doing so, what kind of monster have they created? Have they created a billion people who think religious-nationalism is an okay direction for the country's future? Is that a good move, I ask you.

"Ram mandir is built through devotee donations so it's okay." That's close to ₹1,800 crores. (Estimated amount because of course, there's no transparency in the donation system so that we know who donated what amount.) Do you seriously believe all that money came out of the pockets of average working class Indians? Or did the ultra wealthy businessmen fund this religious project and get massive tax breaks in the process? But yes, I'm sure there's no fuckery going on with the money because it's out of DEVOTION. That makes it okay, I guess.

Now we come to the part that is the worst part of this anon message, according to me.

"Reclamation and decolonization." You use these words so lightly and I find that offensive. These words are HIGHLY tied to power structures. Who has the power right now? Is it the mythic evil Islamic conquerors of 400 years ago? Or is it a political party that believes in hindu nationalism and is funded by the ultra wealthy billionaires because said party helps them get even richer? Who is reclaiming what here? I want you to ask yourself this. Can a powerful majority claim reclamation when they tear down a building to build another building there?

"They tore down the temple and built a mosque there" And now you've torn down the mosque and built a temple there. Congratulations, you've won the game. Where do we go from here? Will everyone be happy now? Has peace been restored? A great evil destroyed? What story are we telling ourselves here? Will the religious fanaticism go away now? Will the hatred that has been cultivated in the hearts of Hindus against Muslims be sated? Or will it find more avenues to spread itself?

Decolonizing the mind, right? I wonder why we're only focused on decolonizing against the islamic past and not anything else. But it's okay that India is currently colonising Kashmir. We don't believe in decolonisation when it comes to Kashmir. We don't believe in decolonizing from the system of capitalism that is choking the lives out of us. HELL, WE DON'T EVEN BELIEVE IN RECLAMATION SEEING HOW WE HAVE A PROBLEM WITH GIVING THE BARE MINIMUM RESERVATION TO CERTAIN COMMUNITIES AS A REPARATION FOR THE HARM THEY'VE HISTORICALLY AND CURRENTLY SUFFERED AND ARE STILL SUFFERING.

I don't want people to talk to me about reclamation, reparation and decolonisation before they accept their own hypocrisy.

Anon, you say have so much vitriol and hate towards a mandir. I should let people celebrate. Did I stop you personally from celebrating? Did I beat up somebody for trying to shove their religious agenda on me? All I did was talk about how sad I am that this is what we've decided to do with our country's resources. Why is one voice of dissent such a big deal to you? Do you want me to shut up and fall in line? Will that be acceptable?

- Mod S

#mod: s #ask reply #mod replies

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crynwr-drwg · 4 days

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When ideology gets in the way of solidarity

>>>What follows below is, in my opinion, a very critical read for the Anarchist movement. If you are an Anarchist, I hope that you take a moment to read this statement by our Black Cross comrades in Belarus.<<<

In the 15 years of our collective’s existence, we have gone through several major political crises. During elections, protests, and political repression, the Belarusan anarchist movement has not met with isolation from its comrades. People from all over the world showed solidarity in the struggle against the Belarusan dictatorship and for a just and free society: from Los Angeles to Hong Kong. During this period, we only rarely encountered people who tried to explain to us that the Belarusan regime is not really that bad, and that all the horrors are just liberal propaganda. Since 2014, we have met anti-fascists or anarchists abroad who somehow believed Russian propaganda about the LDNR. But until 2022, we rarely met “experts” on Eastern Europe who confidently told us about a reality that existed only in the realm of political propaganda. After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the situation changed very dramatically. Suddenly, within the anarchist and anti-fascist movements, there appeared “specialists” of Eastern European realities who completely denied the facts in favor of a simplistic model of the world. Many discussions of the war as a conflict between NATO and Russia or the fascist regime in Kiev fundamentally ignore objective facts. In this text we would like to discuss how this attitude affects the development of international solidarity and how some anarchists choose to distort reality in the struggle for ideological supremacy.

International of Anarchist Federations (IFA)

In eastern Europe, few people have heard of the IFA, an international anarchist organization founded in 1968 in Italy. At the time of this writing, the federation consisted of groups from Europe, Asia, Central and South America. At one point it even included organizations from the former Soviet Union, including Belarus. With the decline of the Federation of Anarchists of Belarus (FAB), our group became the IFA contact organization in the country. For many years we worked closely together: we visited comrades in different regions and together with other organizations we held infotours in separate countries. Up until 2022, we hardly had any serious political conflicts with IFA member organizations. The invasion of Ukraine has greatly changed the attitude of many International members towards our group. One of the reasons lies in our initiative to hold informal online meetings with International members on the war in Ukraine: the main goal at that stage was to convey objective information about what was happening and to actively combat Russian disinformation. Such meetings were to take place every two weeks. Already at the second meeting, we encountered serious problems when some of the International’s participants started repeating Russian propaganda about NATO, fascism in Ukraine, and so on, almost word for word. The series of online meetings ended rather quickly. On the one hand, the unwillingness of many anarchists to accept objective facts hindered them. On the other hand, some of the International’s participants insisted on formalizing such meetings, which we regarded as a blatant attempt to “bureaucratize” inconvenient information. We encountered the problem of “selective bureaucracy” a year later, when at one of the formal meetings of the International we proposed to invite comrades from Ukraine and Russia to explain the situation in these regions and the possibility of interacting directly with local activists, rather than with information from social networks and dubious groups. The participation of anarchists from Ukraine and Russia was blocked, and after several months of constant attempts to exclude people from Belarus, Ukraine and Russia from discussions of the war in Ukraine, we decided to withdraw from the International.

This situation was the first in a long line of building barriers around the topic of the war in Ukraine by certain “expert” groups that prefer the same simplistic picture of the world. Unfortunately, in some countries, our former internationalist comrades play an active role in maintaining the myth of “NATO against Russia”. The conflict within the IFA has shown us how fragile international ties are in the face of government disinformation programs, ideological dogmatism, and the unwillingness of many anarchists to understand complex international conflicts.

Book Fair and Congress

In the summer of 2023, we applied to participate in the Ljubljana Anarchist Book Fair, where we gave a presentation about repression in Belarus, with a separate block discussing how the war in Ukraine affects anarchists’ political struggles. When we saw the “no war propaganda” signs, our collective members were somewhat confused, knowing that the position of the organizers of the book fair on the war is ambiguous. We never realized who the posters were aimed at, although at one point we were worried that we would be told to remove brochures with interviews about the war from various anarchists in Ukraine and Russia. At the event we met, among others, comrades who had previously organized benefit events and presentations for ABC. Some of them refused to talk to us at all, while others preferred to communicate in the format of political statements rather than dialog. At the anarchist congress in St. Imier we began to speak openly about our fears that our political position on the war in Ukraine was affecting solidarity with repressed comrades inside Belarus: the more we try to question positions that do not take into account the situation in the region, the more “untouchable” we become in certain branches of the anarchist movement, which used to be ready to provide diverse support to comrades from the BUR (Belarus, Ukraine, Russia). In Switzerland we also became aware that we started to be considered as militarists and supporters of the war in Ukraine, although nobody directly expressed it to us. We learned about this perception almost a year after our trip to Switzerland.

Partner organizations

Before touching on our “commitment to militarism”, we would like to briefly discuss how Western anarchists and leftists find “alternative” partners in the region to confirm their political views. In the situation with Ukraine, the main partner of the antimilitarists was the odious media group “Assembly” from Kharkiv, which prefers to disassociate itself from the rest of the anarchist movement and actively cooperates with the group of Vadim Damye, a Russian historian who has been spreading the myth of a fascist Ukraine since 2014. If you want to know more about the “Assembly”, ask Ukrainian anarchists. In the case of Belarus, the situation became quite strange, as anti-militarists and pacifists suddenly started working with the controversial Olga Karach, a “professional” NGO activist with a dubious background, which was already entrenched before the events of 2020. People familiar with the political environment of Belarus have heard about Karach, and understand the danger of political interaction with this person: disinformation for Olga serves as one of the tools for building political power and raising money. It turns out that the organization “Our House”, which Olga leads, is actively involved in creating a myth about a mass movement of deserters inside Belarus, who want to leave the country in an attempt to avoid mobilization. In November 2022, there were allegedly already tens of thousands of such evaders [2]. How many such souls Karach sold to the Western left remains a mystery to this day. Using the example of the above-mentioned organization, it becomes obvious that in their search for new “partners” in Eastern Europe, leftists and anti-authoritarians are ready to work with dubious figures, as long as they confirm the facts necessary for their picture of the world. The criterion of trust becomes not an attempt to understand the real situation in the region and a desire to support the struggle, but rather interaction with those who confirm already existing misconceptions. With this approach, some activist groups risk falling into the trap of fraudsters primarily interested in the money side of things. The inability or unwillingness to delve into certain issues makes anarchists easy prey for those who traditionally “dipshit” liberal and center-left political forces.

Does ABC-Belarus support the war in Ukraine?

A few months ago, ABC-Belarus applied to participate in a book fair in Berlin with an info table and/or presentation [3]. The organizers of the fair stated that they planned to pay much attention to the issue of the war in Ukraine. The response to our inquiry came categorically negative and contained the following wording: “…You are in favor of the war in Ukraine, so we have nothing more to say…” And it is obvious that this perception of anarchists from the BUR resisting Russian imperialism continues to strengthen in the minds of a part of the anarchist movement. Instead of critical analysis and attempts to build a dialog, we again and again run into a wall of blatant political ignorance. As a result, ABC-Belarus will not go to the fair in Berlin (our last talk in the city concerning the situation with repression in the country happened before the full-scale invasion began), and the organizers of the event will be able to conduct debates in an atmosphere of general “consent”, having secured themselves from the opposition of people who directly carry out activities in the BUR region. As the war in Ukraine continues and Western activists become “tired” of the topic, we expect this approach to our collective to only increase, and “weeds” of misinformation and outright lies to grow in the place of solidarity. We will not knock on the closed rooms of social centers in the west and try to tell the story of our struggle or repression against our comrades. We have plenty of room to direct our energies as it is. But do the people who censor solidarity groups realize that they would then have to take it upon themselves to support the repressed comrades with their own forces, if they are really committed to the ideas of internationalism and anarchism? It is then also the responsibility of such groups to inform the broader anarchist movement about the repression and to raise money for basic support for those who continue the struggle in prison. In turn, we want to express our gratitude to those who are still supporting our collective and our comrades in Belarus, in Ukraine and in other Eastern European countries. Despite all challenges and obstacles, it is you who show an example of international solidarity and readiness to stand shoulder to shoulder in the most difficult moments of our struggle, no matter how many kilometers and walls separate us!

#anarchist #anarchism #anarchist black cross #abc #belarus #anarchist belarus #anarchism belarus #abc belarus #belarus abc #ukraine #ukraine war #Ukrainian war #russia #russia war #russian war #crynwrdrwg

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feminismisstillahatemovement · 6 months

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Cowpatriarchy Theory

A rock-climbing trip to the countryside and a wander through its verdant fields of bovine ruminants led me to reflect once again upon a great truth about life, sex differences, men and women:

Put one bull into a field full of cows; come back a year later and you’ll find a field full of calves (and one very happy bull).

Put one cow into a field full of bulls and a year later you’ve only got one calf (and one very unhappy cow).

This seems to me a very good illustration of the differences between how the male and female of our own and other species came to be valued and treated: Eggs are costly; sperm is cheap. Women are valuable commodities; men are expendable utilities. This is the deepest and most fundamental reason we all - women and men - innately care for women more than we do men.

As a man, it certainly would be nice if women cared for and sought to protect every man they see more than other women - heavenly, in fact - but reality is what it is. And we are what we are. Men and women aren’t ‘equal’ because the sexes are - by definition- different. Those differences are necessarily strongest the closer we get to any matter related to reproduction (and hence sexual behaviour, experiences and expectations), but also when it comes to anything related to the survival and protection of the offspring such coupling begets: to protect the children, one has to also protect the women from which the children are borne, to put their safety and survival first, too.

And so this is why there is not now, nor has there ever been, any human society which sends its women down the mines and out to hunt and into war while the men stay at home and play with the children. If, hypothetically, there ever was a society that tried to exist that way, then clearly they died out (or were wiped out) without leaving a single trace of their existence anywhere (and for pretty obvious reasons).

This is not ‘patriarchy’ or ‘male privilege’ or any other ideological entry in the feminist lexicon: the universal division of labor between the sexes is something we evolved over millions of years because that’s how we best survived in a hostile natural world. As civilizations sprung up and cities appeared, the hunter/gatherer roles of man and woman rapidly became more abstract, complex and sophisticated: the man went out to work in an office instead of going out to hunt, and the woman kept house and cooked food in increasingly comfortable kitchens instead of tending the campfire in the rain.

It was only in the 20th century, with the rise of industrialization and the safety and simplicity of factory and office work - along with the introduction of the pill in the 1960s - that women could actually begin to enter the modern workforce on something like an equal footing to the men already there working to provide for their wives and families at home. But because of simple biology (men can’t bear children, so every human being must be carried and nursed by a woman) men are still going to have to work more hours and provide more resources than the women (which, of course, goes a long way to explaining much of the purported ‘pay gap’ in men and women’s lifetime earnings).

Anyhow, the point is: we didn’t invent our fundamental gender roles, any more than the birds or the bees or the zebras or the aardvarks or the cows or the bulls did theirs. Hence, human beings today gravitating towards these roles is no evidence of a secret conspiracy to keep the women down - indeed, the universally-practiced division of labor was introduced by society - and mother nature - only to put the needs and safety of women first.

And that, class, is the main reason the fundamental tenets of all feminist theory are so perplexingly wrong. I know you've been wondering.

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agp · 9 months

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@wasted-electricity where do i start? how do i know what else you believe people are born with or is inevitable? do you believe variation in race and culture comes from deterministic biology? variation in sexuality? do you believe cis men and women were born boys and girls? that sickness and health allude to some innate quality in an individual rather than describing social phenomena? in my experience people would much rather describe their relation to these things as passive.

so say you live in a society that actively punishes deviance from cisexist and transphobic norms, from the notion that boys will naturally and passively become men and girls will naturally and passively become women, from bioessentialism. you just cant go around reminding people that theyre actively punishing deviance and performing gender. that none of this is passive. instead youre somewhat cornered into conceding to biological determinism and making it more trans-friendly. "cis men and women are born boys and girls, and trans men and women were not born boys and girls, nor girls and boys (respectively), therefore some other thing". its expanding the political horizon of bioessentialism and allowing it to formulate and identify new forms of determinism.

i think that ultimately trans identity is a feature of a cisexist and transphobic society much like how being born this way is a narrative that emerged from a history of engaging with biological determinism as a dominant ideology. its a product of negotiations. i wouldnt need to call myself trans if no one cared. for example some women display their natural hair color while others get theirs dyed. we dont impose the use of nouns to classify people into "naturals" and "artificials" because we dont care like that. we still use "natural blonde" as an adjective but no one is going around pigeonholing the rest of society to uphold deterministic notions about "blondes"... (or do they? and to what degree? and how common are these people?)

i know part of what youre asking is also "what motivates people to transition?", and you might feel like im tricking my way out of addressing this. but again, the reason were forced to address this in the first place is because were such a curiosity in the realm of cisexism, as proof that maybe something is wrong with cisexist biological determinism - that not all boys become men and not all girls become women. we have to explain ourselves not as exceptions to the rules but as proof of more rules. and even that is never sufficient to quench the thirst for a "why".

what makes us different is fundamentally their insistence on our difference. the burden of responsibility is on us to maintain the biological determinism theyve internalized after our mere existence took it for a spin. were the ones who have to explain ourselves

#and just saying 'im born this way'#is a lot easier for you to internalize psychologically as a trans person in the midst of all this #its also an easier way to get ppl to fuck off when they continue to interrogate you about your gender

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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 1 year

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By: Hadley Freeman

Date: Feb 11, 2023

It wasn’t easy for Hannah Barnes to get her book published. As the investigations producer for Newsnight and a long-term analytical and documentary journalist, she is used to covering knotty stories and this particular one, she knew better than most, was complex. She had been covering the Gender Identity Development Service (Gids), based at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust in north London — the only one of its kind for children in England and Wales — since 2019 and decided to write a book about it. “I wanted to write a definitive record of what happened because there needs to be one,” she tells me. Not everyone agreed. “None of the big publishing houses would take it,” she says. “Interestingly, there were no negative responses to the proposal. They just said, ‘We couldn’t get it past our junior members of staff.’ ”

Whatever their objections were, they could not have been about the quality of Barnes’s book — Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children is a deeply reported, scrupulously non-judgmental account of the collapse of the NHS service, based on hundreds of hours of interviews with former clinicians and patients. It is also a jaw-dropping insight into failure: failure of leadership, of child safeguarding and of the NHS. When describing the scale of potential medical failings, the clinicians make comparisons with the doping of East German athletes in the 1960s and 1970s and the Mid Staffs scandal of the 2000s, in which up to 1,200 patients died due to poor care. Other insiders discuss it in reference to the Rochdale child abuse scandal, in which people’s inaction led to so many children being so grievously let down.

Gids treats children and young people who express confusion — or dysphoria — about their gender identity, meaning they don’t believe their biological sex reflects who they are. Since the service was nationally commissioned by the NHS in 2009 it has treated thousands of children, helping many of them to gain access to gonadotropin-releasing hormone agonists, known as “puberty blockers”, originally formulated to treat prostate cancer and to castrate male sex offenders, and also used to treat endometriosis and fertility issues. The service will shut this spring, following a deeply critical interim report in February 2022 by Dr Hilary Cass, a highly respected paediatrician who was hired by NHS England to look into the service. Dr Cass concluded that “a fundamentally different service model is needed”.

Gids should be an easy story to tell: many people have been trying to blow the whistle for a long time, but Anna Hutchinson, a clinical psychologist who used to work at the Tavistock Centre, told Barnes that those who spoke up were “always driven out one way or another”.

“It is really not normal for mental health professionals to talk to journalists as openly as they talked to me, and that shows how desperate they were to get the story out,” Barnes says. The clinicians struggled to be heard, just as Barnes later struggled to get her book out; some people prefer censorship to the truth if the latter conflicts with their ideology. And yet, concerns about the service had been in plain sight for years: in February 2019, a 54-page report compiled by Dr David Bell, then a consultant psychiatrist at the trust and the staff governor, was leaked to The Sunday Times. Dr Bell said Gids was providing “woefully inadequate” care to its patients and that its own staff had “ethical concerns” about some of the service’s practices, such as giving “highly disturbed and distressed” children access to puberty blockers. Gids, he concluded, “is not fit for purpose”. Many of Bell’s concerns had been expressed 13 years earlier in a 2006 report on Gids completed by Dr David Taylor — then the trust’s medical director — who described the long-term effects of puberty blockers as “untested and unresearched”.

“Taylor’s recommendations were largely ignored,” Barnes writes, and, in the decade and a half between Taylor and Bell’s reports, Gids would refer more than 1,000 children for puberty blockers, some as young as nine years old. It’s impossible to obtain a precise figure because neither the service nor the endocrinologists who prescribe the blockers could or would provide them to people who have asked for them, including Barnes. One figure they have given is that between 2014 and 2018, 302 children aged 14 or under were referred for blockers. It is generally accepted now that puberty blockers affect bone density, and potentially cognitive and sexual development. “Everything was there — everything. But the lessons were never learnt,” Barnes says.

Because this story touches on gender identity — one of the most sensitive subjects of our era — it has been difficult to get past the ideological battles to see the truth. Was the service helping children become their true selves, as its defenders contended? Or was it pathologising and medicalising unhappy kids and teenagers, as others alleged?

This reflects the fraught, partisan ways people see gender dysphoria: is it akin to being gay and therefore something to be celebrated?; or is it an expression of self-loathing, like an eating disorder, requiring therapeutic intervention? This has led to the current confusion over whether the planned conversion therapy ban should include gender as well as sexuality. “Conversion therapy” obviously sounds terrible, and politicians across the spectrum — from Crispin Blunt on the right to Nadia Whittome on the left — have loudly voiced their support for the inclusion of gender on the bill, which would thereby suggest that therapy for gender dysphoria is analogous to trying to “cure” someone of homosexuality.

But many clinicians argue that including gender would potentially criminalise psychotherapists exploring with their patients the reason for their confusion; after all, a doctor wouldn’t simply validate a bulimic’s desire to be thin — they’d try to find the cause of their inner discomfort and help them learn to love their body. Gids itself has long been conflicted about this complex issue. Dr Taylor wrote in 2005 that staff didn’t agree among themselves about what they were seeing in their patients: “were they treating children distressed because they were trans,” Barnes writes in Time to Think, “or children who identified as trans because they were distressed?”

How did the country’s only NHS clinic for gender dysphoric children not even understand what they were doing, and yet keep doing it? Thanks to Barnes and her book, we now know the answers to those questions, and many more.

Gids was founded in 1989 by Domenico Di Ceglie, an Italian child psychiatrist. His aim was to create a place where young people could talk about their gender identity with “non-judgmental acceptance”. Puberty blockers were available for 16-years-olds who wanted to “pause time” before committing themselves — or not — to gender-changing surgery. (Gids never offered that surgery, which is illegal in England for those under the age of 17, but it did refer patients to the endocrinology clinic, which provided the blockers. Blockers stop the body going through puberty, thereby making it easier — in some ways — for a person later to undergo the surgery.) In 1994 the service became part of the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust, which was known for its focus on talking therapies. By the early 2000s those working within Gids noted that certain gender activist groups — such as Mermaids, which supports “gender-diverse” kids and their families — were exerting an “astonishing” amount of influence on Gids, especially in regard to encouraging the prescribing of puberty blockers. Barnes writes in her book that Sue Evans, a nurse who worked at Gids at the time, asked a senior manager why Gids couldn’t just focus on talking therapy and not give out body-altering drugs. According to her and another clinician, Barnes writes, the senior manager replied, “It’s because we have this treatment here that people come.”

In around the year 2000, the trust asked Di Ceglie to draw up a report of who its patients were. The results were astonishing. Most of Gids’s patients were boys with an average age of 11. More than 25 per cent of them had spent time in care, 38 per cent came from families with mental health problems and 42 per cent had lost at least one parent, either through separation or death. Most had histories of other problems such as anxiety and physical abuse; almost a quarter had a history of self-harm. No conclusions were drawn and Gids continued to treat gender dysphoria as a cause, rather than a symptom, of adolescent distress.

It was a gender identity clinic in the Netherlands in the late Nineties that came up with the idea of giving blockers to children under 16, and in doing so furnished Gids with the justification it needed. The Dutch clinic said that 12-year-olds could be put on blockers if they had suffered from long-term gender dysphoria, were psychologically stable and in a supportive environment. This was known as the “Dutch protocol”. Pressure groups and some gender specialists encouraged the clinic to follow suit.

Dr Polly Carmichael took over as Gids’s director in 2009 and, in 2011, the service undertook an “early intervention study” to look at the effect of blockers on under-16s, because so little was known about their impact on children. Instead of waiting for the study results, Gids eliminated all age limits on blockers in 2014, letting kids as young as nine access them. At the same time referrals were rocketing, meaning clinicians had less time to assess patients before helping them access blockers. In 2009 Gids had 97 referrals. By 2020 there were 2,500, with a further 4,600 on the waiting list, and clinicians were desperately overstretched. “As the numbers seeking Gids’s help exploded around 2015, there was increased pressure to get through them. In some cases that meant shorter, less thorough assessments. Some clinicians have said there was pressure on them to refer children for blockers because it would free up space to see more children on the waiting list,” Barnes says.

Clinicians were seeing increasingly mentally unwell kids, including those who didn’t just identify as a different gender but as a different nationality and race: “Usually east Asian, Japanese, Korean, that sort of thing,” Dr Matt Bristow, a former Gids clinician, tells Barnes. But this was seen by Gids as irrelevant to their gender identity issues. Past histories of sexual abuse were also ignored: “[A natal girl] who’s being abused by a male, I think a question to ask is whether there’s some relationship between identifying as male and feeling safe,” Bristow says. But, clinicians point out, any concerns raised with their superiors always got the same response: that the kids should be put on the blockers unless they specifically said they didn’t want them. And few kids said that. As one clinician told Barnes: “If a young person is distressed and the only thing that’s offered to them is puberty blockers, they’ll take it, because who would go away with nothing?”

Then there was the number of autistic and same-sex-attracted kids attending the clinic, saying that they were transgender. Less than 2 per cent of children in the UK are thought to have an autism spectrum disorder; at Gids, however, more than a third of their referrals had moderate to severe autistic traits. “Some staff feared they could be unnecessarily medicating autistic children,” Barnes writes.

There were similar fears about gay children. Clinicians recall multiple instances of young people who had suffered homophobic bullying at school or at home, and then identified as trans. According to the clinician Anastassis Spiliadis, “so many times” a family would say, “Thank God my child is trans and not gay or lesbian.” Girls said, “When I hear the word ‘lesbian’ I cringe,” and boys talked to doctors about their disgust at being attracted to other boys. When Gids asked adolescents referred to the service in 2012 about their sexuality, more than 90 per cent of females and 80 per cent of males said they were same-sex attracted or bisexual. Bristow came to believe that Gids was performing “conversion therapy for gay kids” and there was a bleak joke on the team that there would be “no gay people left at the rate Gids was going”. When gay clinicians such as Bristow voiced their concerns to those in charge, they say it was implied that they were not objective because they were gay and therefore “too close” to the work. (Gids does not accept this claim.)

What if becoming trans is — for some people — a way of converting out of being gay? If a boy is attracted to other boys but feels shame about it, then a potential way around that is for him to identify as a girl and therefore insist he’s heterosexual. This possibility complicates the government’s plan — which has cross-party support — for including gender alongside sexuality in the bill to ban conversion therapy, if enabling a young person to change gender is, in itself, sometimes a form of conversion therapy.

I ask Barnes what she thinks and she answers with characteristic caution: “It’s a bit surprising that the NHS has commissioned one of the most experienced paediatricians in the country to undertake what appears to be an incredibly thorough review of this whole area of care, and not wait until she makes those final recommendations before legislating,” she says, weighing every word. (Dr Hilary Cass’s final review is due later this year.)

The sex ratio was also changing to a remarkable degree. When Di Ceglie started his gender clinic, the vast majority of his patients were boys with an average age of 11, and many had suffered from gender distress for years. By 2019-20, girls outnumbered boys at Gids by six to one in some age groups, especially between the ages of 12 to 14, and most hadn’t suffered from gender dysphoria until after the onset of puberty.

Some said this was simply because teenage girls felt more free to be open about their dysphoria. Some clinicians suspected there were other reasons. The clinicians Anna Hutchinson and Melissa Midgen worked at Gids and, after they left, wrotea joint article in 2020 citing a number of potential other factors: the increased “pinkification” and later “pornification” of girlhood; fear of sex and sexuality; social media; collapsing mental health services for adolescents, and so on. “It is important to acknowledge that girls and young women have long recruited their bodies as ways of expressing misery and self-hatred,” Hutchinson and Midgen wrote. And yet Gids’s response was to send these girls to endocrinology for puberty blockers.

The clinicians knew their patients were nothing like those in the Dutch protocol. The latter had been heavily screened, suffered from gender dysphoria since childhood and were psychologically stable with no other mental health issues. “Gids — according to almost every clinician I have spoken to — was referring people under 16 for puberty blockers who did not meet those conditions,” Barnes writes. The majority of children aged 11 to 15 referred to the clinic between 2010 and 2013 were put on blockers. The clinicians tried to reassure themselves by saying the blockers were just giving their patients time to think about what they wanted. They might even alleviate their distress. But in 2016 Gids’s research team presented the initial findings from its early intervention study, which looked at the effect of prescribing blockers to those under 16: although the children said they were “highly satisfied” with their treatment, their mental health and gender-related distress had stayed the same or worsened. And every single one of them had gone on to cross-sex hormones — synthetic testosterone for those born female, oestrogen for natal males. Far from giving them time to think, blockers seemed to put them on a pathway towards surgery. Clinicians were concerned that the service had abandoned NHS best practice. They repeatedly raised this with Carmichael and the executive team, but nothing changed. In just six months in 2018, 11 people who worked at Gids left due to ethical concerns. People who spoke up, such as David Bell and Sonia Appleby, the children’s safeguarding lead for the Tavistock trust, say they were bullied or dismissed. Appleby later won an employment tribunal case against the trust. Bell has said the trust threatened him with disciplinary action in connection with his activities as a whistleblower. He later retired.

Everything the whistleblowers tried to say has been borne out. A 2020 Care Quality Commission inspection of Gids rated the service “inadequate”, and pointed out that some assessments for puberty blockers consisted of only “two or three sessions” and that some staff “felt unable to raise concerns without fear of retribution”. Around the same time, the former Gids patient Keira Bell instigated a judicial review against the trust, arguing that at 16 she had been too young to understand the repercussions of being put on blockers, and that she bitterly regretted her transition. The High Court found in her favour that children are unable to give informed consent to puberty blockers. The Court of Appeal later overturned their verdict on the grounds that it should be up to doctors and not the court to determine competence to consent, but the damage was done: thanks to Bell’s case, it was now public knowledge how shambolic the service had become, unable to provide any data on, for example, how many children with autism they had put on blockers.

So what actually happened at Gids? And why did no one stop it? Barnes’s book suggests multiple credible factors. Activist groups from outside, such as Mermaids and Gendered Intelligence, came to exert undue influence on the service and would complain if they felt things weren’t being done their way. For example, Gendered Intelligence complained to Carmichael, the Gids director, when a clinician dared to express the view publicly that not all children with gender dysphoria would grow up to be transgender. In 2016 an expert in gender reassignment surgery warned Gids that putting young boys on puberty blockers made it more difficult for them to undergo surgery as adults, because their penis hadn’t developed enough for surgeons to construct female genitalia. Instead, surgeons had to use “segments of the bowel” to create a “neo-vagina”. But senior managers rejected calls from its clinicians to put this on a leaflet for patients and families. In the book, Hutchinson is quoted as saying, “I may be wrong, but I think Polly [Carmichael] was afraid of writing things down in case they got into Mermaids’s hands.”

Susie Green was at this point the chief executive of Mermaids and had taken her son, who had been on puberty blockers, to Thailand for gender reassignment surgery on his 16th birthday. In an interview, which is still on YouTube, Green laughingly recalls the difficulties surgeons had in constructing a vagina out of her child’s prepubescent penis. Green stepped down from Mermaids last year.

Money is suspected to have been another issue. When Gids became part of the Tavistock trust, it was such a minor player it wasn’t even in the main building. But by 2020-21, gender services accounted for about a quarter of the trust’s income. David Bell says this allowed the trust to be “blinkered”. The children and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS) possibly had similar blinkers. They were so overstretched it appears they were happy to offload as many kids as possible onto Gids, and then disregard what was actually happening there.

“It’s really striking how few people were willing to question Gids. As one clinician said to me, because it was dealing with gender, there was this ‘cloak of mystery’ around it. There was a sense of ‘Oh, it’s about gender, so we can’t ask the same questions that we would of any other part of the NHS. Such as: is it safe? Where’s the evidence? Where’s the data? And are we listening to people raising concerns?’ These are basic questions that are vital to providing the best care,” Barnes says.

And then there was the outside culture. Basic safeguarding failures at Gids seem to have accelerated from 2014 onwards, at the same time that there was a push for the rights of transgender people. Stonewall, having helped to secure equal marriage, had now turned its sights on the rights of trans people. Susie Green, at Mermaids, gave a TED talk that suggested taking her teenage son for a sex change operation was a parenting template to admire. Meanwhile, the TV networks weighed in. In 2014 CBBC aired a documentary, I Am Leo, about a 13-year-old female on puberty blockers who identifies as a boy — mainly, it seems, because of an abhorrence of dresses and long hair. In 2018 ITV showed the three-part drama Butterfly, about an 11-year-old boy whose desire to be a girl is expressed as a desire to wear dresses and make-up. Susie Green was the lead consultant on the show.

David Bell suggests that the Tavistock trust protected Gids “because they saw it as a way of showing that we weren’t crusty old conservatives; that we were up with the game and cutting-edge”. That the Tavistock clinic was briefly, in the 1930s, a place where homosexual men were brought to be “cured” probably also played a part in the trust’s embrace of gender ideology, as if it were an atonement for a past wrong.

As per Dr Cass’s suggestions, Gids will shut this spring and be replaced with regional hubs, where young people will be seen by doctors with multiple specialties. The obsession with gender, and the ensuing lack of intellectual curiosity at Gids about factors that might contribute to a person’s distress and sense of their identity will, hopefully, be gone.

On the one hand, it feels incredible that such a disaster happened. How did an NHS service medicalise so many autistic and same-sex-attracted young people, unhappy teenage girls and children who simply felt uncomfortable with masculine or feminine templates, with so little knowledge of the causes of their distress or the effects of the medicine? And how did Carmichael, still the director of Gids, suffer no repercussions, whereas those who tried to blow the whistle say they were bullied out of their jobs? On the other hand, it is a miracle that the information is now out. For too long, too many people have turned a blind eye to problems arising from gender ideology, including healthcare for gender dysphoric children — because they have been focused on trying to be on the right side of history, they refused to look at the glaring wrongs.

Barnes knows that some will be angry at her for having written the book. But she also knows that she had to write it: “There’s been this idea that the kind of treatment young people got at Gids — physical interventions — is safe treatment for all gender-distressed children,” she says. “But even among the clinicians working on the front line of this issue, there is no consensus about the best way to care for these kids. There needs to be debate about this, and it needs to come out of the clinic and into society, because this isn’t just about trans people — it’s bigger than that. It’s about children.”

[ Via: https://archive.is/Fv41w ]

Modern-day Lysenkoism.

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communistkenobi · 8 months

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Political knowledge and interest in public affairs are critical preconditions for more active forms of involvement. If you don't know the rules of the game and the players and don't care about the outcome, you're unlikely to try playing yourself. Encouragingly, Americans in the aggregate at century's end are about as likely to know, for example, which party controls the House of Representatives or who their senators are as were their grandparents a half century ago. On the other hand, we are much better educated than our grandparents, and since civics knowledge is boosted by formal education, it is surprising that civics knowledge has not improved accordingly. The average college graduate today knows little more about public affairs than did the average high school graduate in the 1940s. (Bowling Alone, p 35)

Putnam just got done saying voting is only a limited slice of American political participation and voter turnout numbers can’t be used to generalise about all public political engagement, but we are now back to “knowing about elected officials” as a generalised version of political knowledge (which, as he argues, is a pre-condition to political participation, eg voting).

Adorno’s comment about the widespread political ignorance of the American public comes to mind while reading this, although his diagnosis is very different from Putnam’s, pointing instead to the industrial capitalist standardisation of education that produces extremely rigid knowledge frameworks that encourage people to think in set types, to believe there are singularly correct answers to complex problems, and that these answers are discoverable only within the available range of options (contributing to “both-sides”-isms and a failure to imagine political discourse beyond what is presented by political candidates). I think there’s a bunch of idealism going on there too, but Adorno at least acknowledges that education in America is the result of capitalist economic production shaping cultural and educational standards, which are deeply revisionist and use american imperial interests as the basis for educational programs. Coupled with how poorly funded and decentralised public education is, the privatised nature of post-secondary education, and the deeply racialised and gendered dimensions of economic inequality, access to the types of education that would inform you about political matters is reserved for the select few.

And that’s still a very generous criticism, given that Putnam’s argument rests on the absurd notion that political participation is a function of education (even though he acknowledges in that last sentence that college degrees don’t necessarily mean you “know the rules of the game.”) Again I’m not like a historical expert or anything, but my understanding is that black civil rights movements, gay civil rights movements, women’s rights movements etc in the 60s and onwards were not resultant from all those people individually getting college degrees or learning who their elected officials were but rather mass organising and protesting - ie, a response to the failures of electoral politics to secure civil rights and protections for oppressed groups. This is again a bourgeois conception of political participation - if education is a necessary function of political engagement, then mass movements and demonstrations do not really “count” as political engagement.

it’s honestly laughable that this book is as well-regarded and heavily cited as it is. Putnam is fundamentally unserious about and uninterested in anything outside of the American mythological conception of bourgeois individualism and electoral politics. The term “social capital,” a centrally important concept in his book, is not interrogated for any ideological baggage or methodological limitations it may carry, and he has not provided any explanation for social change aside from the completely ridiculous idea that generational change is the driving factor in American politics. He claims that a lack of knowledge or interests in electoral outcomes prevents people from “playing the game,” with no allowance for anyone who declares the game itself is unfair, or any argument that we should change the rules of the game. He’s writing about the social life in America with the assumption that there is literally nothing beyond liberal electoral individualism, and any arguments to the contrary - any political activity that is illegal, unpopular to the white public, or simply uninterested in electoralism - to be unimportant in diagnosing the social ills of American society. What a fucking joke

#bowling alone #dont know how much more of this book I can take

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granulesofsand · 5 months

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hey there, good timezone. wishing you well. i've considered this for a while but never quite committed to the concept because.. hoo boy. anyway:

tbmc survivor here. do you personally feel that understanding the perpetrating organization's ideology could be useful in communicating, understanding, and figuring out how to work with parts? and, when their dogma/ideology is so complex/layered, how would you go about tracking and understanding it? especially when there's an excess of unusual vocab and concepts to be unraveled.

many thanks.

Unraveling Dogma

That’s up to you. I can tell you how we went about it, and if any of it sounds familiar we can talk again.

We’ve found a lot of good in unraveling our group’s ideology and what each alter was taught. It’s been smoother with the higher ups; not everything they learned was bad, but they couldn’t change anything until they understood what the different pieces meant to them.

They listed the principles, picked them apart, and put something together that was safer. It took a while, several cycles of picking and assembling, but a good few have come up with a healthy practice.

Part of the time spent in the spiral will be learning more about the heftier concepts— you can probably find a few fundamental beliefs and work out from there. It’s a spiral because you’re moving in more than just the same circle, even if it doesn’t feel like it.

You’re probably going to find conflicts in what you experienced versus what they claimed they were doing. Groups tend to work like that, and even abusive groups with abusive doctrine stray every so often. There’ll be times when people placed power over procedure, especially if it’s an offshoot of a nonabusive practice.

There were likely tricks to convince you the group or an authority was all-powerful or capable of defying the laws of physics. Even if you believe in some of what you were taught, you don’t have to believe they did it (talking with deities, for example).

Expect pushback from alters who were conditioned with all of it. Showing them new points to empower themselves where power was taken can help. Higher ups are often told they’re special or suffering for a cause; they might have to break down where they find meaning, but they can also build it back up.

The plain logistics with vocabulary and layers we did with charts and drawings. Every time we found a hierarchy, we drew it out separately. Every new word gets added to a list and a web connecting it to similar concepts.

Pull it apart and lay it out so you can see it, even if not all at the same time. We make books for our internal archive so others can learn without fronting, but that’s different for everyone too.

Researching other religions, starting with those entwined with that one, helps trace the origins of each bit. There’s a chance of finding other means of worship if you can trace the root

Our group was primarily dualist Christian, heavy belief in both God and Satan. Converts brought their previous culture with them, including some religious ties. The leaders prioritized power and balance, and thought their best bet was to trace those beliefs as far back as they could.

The end result was a convoluted and twisty belief system that sometimes contradicted itself. We learned about Crowley and sex magic and the Assyrian gods who used temple prostitution, and from that alone we got two of our higher ups participating in alternative methods.

You might be chasing word etymology and ceremonial history for a while. Ultimately, it’s good to have a better understanding of other beliefs. It might be too difficult to get into what your group had, but there is still benefit to exploring similar ideas and other options.

Grocery store school supplies are your friends. Get some 50 cent notebooks and pencils, get into it when you have a few hours free. It’s interesting if you can connect to it, and you can. Take notes on anything even vaguely relevant.

I’m not gonna lie to you, it’s hard. Sometimes you might end up learning a language to read old poems or counting in base 60 to understand numerology. It’s up to you whether it’s worthwhile for your system.

I do recommend it, though. With breaks and vacations where you hide the notebooks and do leisure activities only for a week. You get a lot of new information, even if it doesn’t relate back how you hoped. I cannot overemphasize the breaks, though.

Treat yourself and your system members well. Maybe pretend you’re an anthropologist. I believe you can do it, or I believe you can make the informed decision not to. Good luck.

#did osdd #osddid #ramcoa #tw ramcoa #cult abuse #cdd system

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haggishlyhagging · 7 months

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But while in many parts of the world socialist ideas (such as free public education and a graduated income tax) helped achieve greater social equality and brought relief from brutal poverty for millions of peasants and industrial workers, socialism and communism also retained important androcratic components. Part of the problem lay in communist theory. Marxism, which developed into one of the most influential ideologies of modern times, did not abandon the androcratic tenet that power is to be attained through violence, as attested by its well-known adage "The end justifies the means." And part of the problem lay in how Marxism was applied in the first nation that adopted communism as its official ideology: the Soviet Union. Marx and Engels had recognized that a profound alteration of relations between women and men during prehistoric times ushered in the class society they so abhorred. Consequently, in the early years of the Russian Revolution there were some efforts to equalize the position of women. But in the end, men—and just as critically, "masculine" values—remained in control.

Indeed, one of the most instructive lessons of modern history is how the massive regression to violence and authoritarianism under Stalin coincided with the reversal of earlier policies to replace patriarchal family relations with an equal relationship between women and men. As Trotsky was to remark (but only after his fall from power and exile), the failure of the communist revolution to achieve its goals in large part stemmed from the failure of its leadership to bring about a change in patriarchal relations within the family. Or in our terms, it lay in the failure to bring about any fundamental changes in the relations between the two halves of humanity, which continued to be based on ranking rather than linking.

During the nineteenth and into the twentieth century other modern humanist ideologies—abolitionism, pacifism, anarchism, anticolonialism, environmentalism—also emerged. But like the proverbial blind men describing the elephant, they each described different manifestations of the androcratic monster as the totality of the problem. At the same time, they failed to address the fact that at its heart lies a male-dominator, female-dominated model of the human species.

The only ideology that frontally challenges this model of human relations, as well as the principle of human ranking based on violence, is, of course, feminism. For this reason it occupies a unique position both in modern history and in the history of our cultural evolution.

-Riane Eisler, The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future

#riane eisler #marxism #androcracy #male violence #feminism #communist theory

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eelhound · 1 year

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"If your mental world is already one of extreme (and delusional) fear, mass shooters do not seem like an aberration. They are just another threat among many. The natural state of life, in much conservative literature, is 'nasty, brutish, and short,' and the forces of order and civilization only just barely keep the forces of evil chaos at bay. Conservatism is characterized by an extreme pessimism about our ability to improve the world; the standard argument is that progressives are naive and hubristic in their desire to effect change through social policy and whatever they do will 'hurt the very people they are trying to help.' The view of human nature that underpins right-wing thought is false, but it’s a compelling story.

If you view the world as a place full of virtually uncontrollable menacing evil, it’s easy to see why gun control doesn’t make sense. Under a conservative framework, it’s hard to understand why gun control would ever work. After all, we’re up against the forces of Pure Evil. Surely Pure Evil would not let mere laws stand in its way. If it was determined to kill, it would find a way to get a gun. As Arjun Byju noted for this magazine in a piece on the normalization of 'active shooter drills' in schools, 'we cannot legislate away evil' is a common GOP refrain, with shootings treated 'like the fates and furies of Greek mythology, something horrible that may strike us from without, and to which we are all but consigned.' But as Ryan Cooper notes, in reality, it turns out that a lot of gun violence is spur of the moment, and can be disrupted just by putting inconvenient obstacles between would-be perpetrators and access to a gun: 'If you can get a gun in a day or even a few minutes, then it’s easy for a stupid argument or moment of despair to end in a shooting death…But if you make it an expensive, annoying, and time-consuming process to get a gun, then this process is disrupted.'

This view sees perpetrators as fundamentally human, and reduces the distinction between the Bad People and the Good People. Gun control cannot work in the conservative view because, to use a favorite NRA slogan, 'if you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns.' The idea being that 'outlaws' are a class of people to whom the law will be no obstacle. But as the U.K. and Australia show, it turns out that many would-be 'outlaws' can in fact be deterred by extreme inconvenience.

For many people on the right, I don’t think it’s possible to change their position on gun control without changing their entire ideological worldview. Their fear and pessimism are not grounded in reality. To support gun control, they would have to believe in a very different kind of world, one where many of our problems were solvable through policy, perpetrators were human beings subject to ordinary human incentives rather than just Forces Of Evil, and where it is conceivable to not be afraid all the time. But for the American right, the world is teeming with antifa terrorists and BLM rioters, and there’s no choice but to arm yourself to the teeth (and possibly shoot anyone who rings your doorbell).

I am generally a proponent of trying to have constructive political conversations with people and find common ground. I believe in trying to argue and persuade. (I have previously been called 'the left’s debate bro.') I’m actually teaching a class this weekend (come join us!) on how to effectively respond to right-wing arguments and change minds. But one of the things I’ll be emphasizing is that often, dialogue is in fact quite hopeless, because a person’s ideology is very deep rooted, and you’re not going to change their mind on one issue without getting them to radically alter their entire worldview. I think gun control is an issue like that for many on the right. They don’t think mass shootings can be stopped, and it’s not because they are misreading the statistics, it’s because they don’t see how the forces of evil could be kept at bay by something as trivial as a regulation. Just as they’re skeptical of diplomacy with China and rehabilitation in the criminal punishment system (How can you negotiate with evil? How can you reform it?), they think that the only thing you can do to stop violence is kill the perpetrators. The right’s world is a world of menace, where all we can rely on is Good Guys using violence to stop the violence of the Bad Guys. (This is why many on the right see the murder of Jordan Neely as the act of a Good Samaritan. For them, Neely was, in part for racist reasons, coded as one of the Bad Guys, and white ex-Marine Daniel Penny is coded as a Good Guy.)

In situations where it’s hopeless to persuade people, and they’re doing harm, the only choice you have is to restrain their power. This is why the only hope for ending mass shootings involves reducing Republican political power. They are never going to change. If they changed, they would cease to be Republicans. They must be thrown out of office if we are ever going to build a country where we can feel safe going about our daily lives."

- Nathan J. Robinson, from "Why The Right Will Never, Ever Support Gun Control." Current Affairs, 8 May 2023.

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wanderingmind867 · 5 months

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My Political Manifesto

In order for an ideal society to come into being, there must be certain agreed upon elements. Number one: Extensive Social Programs are needed. I don't care if you're conservative or progressive. I'm probably a bit of both in different ways myself (I hate change in my personal life and I like monarchies, but I like things like socialism).

Whether you be Conservative or Progressive, you must acknowledge the importance of a social safety net. If you can't do that, then clearly you don't have empathy for those who can't care for themselves or who might not be able to work (like me). In all cases, social programs are a necessary facet of government.

And when I say extensive social programs, I mean extensive. I don't care fully if we get rid of money, but we really need to at least devalue it. Money is just paper. You can always print more. Economics are a scam created to support the idea that money is fundamentally a part of society. It isn't. It can be, but it doesn't have to be. If you need to print more money to provide for all these social programs, do it. Nobody can stop you. It's just paper, after all. Merely paper society has convinced us contains deep value and significance.

Getting back to the Extensive Social Programs, they truly will need to be expansive in their power. We need a UBI, a national healthcare system, Unemployment Insurance and Benefits, Disability Insurance and Benefits, etc. We will need all the social programs. A government that doesn't provide for its citizens cannot be said to be a truly compassionate government.

Once society has agreed to support all these extensive social programs unconditionally, then the main mission I have been pushing for will be complete. I still have other objectives politically, of course. But my first priority is making sure that the government knows to care for all of it's peoples. If you can't work or if you're incredibly shy or if you otherwise can't function in this cutthroat world of ours, the government should care for you and make sure you're not neglected. If the government isn't willing to do this, then they have abandoned the people. And once they've abandoned their people, no government can be fully and truly legitimate.

Once society has learned how to care for its citizens (cost be damned! You can't put a price on these services! Not when they help so many!), then my main goal is finished. Once we've learned that you can't put a price on helping people, then I will be at peace. I have taught people that economics and fiscal matters are all nonsense and idiocy invented by people in the 1700s. Economics were not around when humanity was first created. They are a social construct, and a useless one at that. The sooner they're stamped out the better I say!

Once I have destroyed the foul spectre of capitalism and economics, there's only a few more things I'd want to advocate for. I would advocate for pacifism and a promotion of peace on a global scale.

I would also advocate for the abandonment of most forms of social conservatism. I understand it's easy to be afraid of the unfamiliar (I've been afraid of new things too), but you can't use that fear as an excuse torment people who are different from you. We are all humans. We all think, we all feel. You cannot be so quick to judge. A little Conservatism in your personal life and affairs is one thing (lord knows I've been afraid of changes in my personal life), but conservatism should never be used an excuse to discriminate against those who are different from you. That's the opposite of my message with my Social Programs: For a society to function, you must have compassion for those around you. Social Conservatism tends to destroy that empathetic quality in people. It is not a good ideology, not at all.

I would also advocate for monarchism (or at least not for the abolishment of monarchies). Even in this ideal world of mine, I don't see the problem with monarchies. They are a good rallying point for people, and it would also just be unfair to get rid of most of them. I'd be fine with making them only symbolic figureheads, but we shouldn't abolish them. That usually leads to cruelty and unnecessary violence. Anyone who is so devoted to the abolishment of monarchism that they want to have a repeat of the French Revolution has ignored my tenant of compassion and empathy. You may not like royal families, but killing them is just inhumane. Monarchs are people too. And all people deserve compassion and empathy. Complete hatred of someone leads to violence, and that always ends badly.

Also, outlaw eugenics and impose harsh penalties on anything promoting survival of the fittest ideologies. I understand Charles Darwin was a genius biologist, but I legitimately think this world would be better off without evolution. Too many people use it to promote hateful beliefs and violence against people with disabilities.

Although I have a lot of other beliefs too, I think this is a good place to stop for now. If you want to establish a movement, there's got to be room for at least some mild disagreement between members of the movement. But as long as people can rally behind my core tenants of extensive social programs and a government/society that shows compassion to all its members, then I think I can really make this into a movement.

#politics #political #political beliefs #political manifesto #autism #asd #neurodivergent #autistic #adhd #audhd #actually autistic #actually audhd #anti capitalism #socialism #I think that's kind of what I supported here #at least there's elements of socialism here #my thoughts #my political beliefs

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thescreaminghat · 2 years

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thoughts about link click and its great characters (major spoilers)

I think what I really like about Link Click is the emotional maturity of its characters. Granted, our protags are all adults, and so we expect them to react to serious situations with more emotional intelligence than a child or teenager (even if they are goofy in other circumstances), but I really liked how Cheng Xiaoshi and Lu Guang never truly blamed each other for their actions. If this were a more generic/trope-y story with teenagers as the protags, we would probably see the two split and monologue dramatically about their ideologies and how the other is wrong (Lu Guang for focusing too much on the “big picture” of events, and Cheng Xiaoshi for being too emotionally invested in each client’s life). But besides Cheng Xiaoshi’s (justified) outburst of pain and anger after what he experienced from eps 3-5, he never blames Lu Guang for trying to be neutral, because he understands deep down that Lu Guang is right to a degree, and that they can’t fundamentally shift the past if they want the world to exist as it is now. Cheng Xiaoshi is also responsible enough to see and acknowledge the negative consequences of taking independent action from Lu Guang’s instructions while in the photos. He never uses the differences between him and Lu Guang to create a rift between them, because he trusts Lu Guang, has a deep friendship with him and Qiao Ling during a period of his life when he had no one else, and knows that Lu Guang is ultimately looking out for his (Cheng Xiaoshi’s) safety. There’s no drama and misunderstanding for the sake of drama and misunderstanding, because they have the same goal of helping their clients and friends to the fullest degree possible.

Additionally, Lu Guang, despite looking like the trope of “cold/detached/cruel white-haired boi who is juxtaposed with his emotional dark-haired counterpart,” is very much empathetic and driven by his emotions himself. When Xu Shanshan goes missing, he immediately takes the lead to find her, because he knows Cheng Xiaoshi is in a terrible emotional state and doesn’t want him to get hurt. Lu Guang isn’t above being silly and enjoying Cheng Xiaoshi’s and Qiao Ling’s company. He always tries to protect Cheng Xiaoshi and Qiao Ling, just like Cheng Xiaoshi always tries to protect everyone he meets. And his reserved nature seems to stem from loneliness and the burden of seeing the inevitability of outcomes in the clients’ photos rather than “edginess.” I think a nice example illustrating his personality is in the chibi specials:

Even though it’s a silly episode, like all the chibi specials, this is a nice microcosm of all the stress that Lu Guang needs to take on whenever he looks into a photo. He needs to be the calm one who guides Cheng Xiaoshi through the photos, because he knows Cheng Xiaoshi will be experiencing all of the unwanted turmoil of whomever he possesses. Even when he sees the misery of others, Lu Guang has to push that aside in order to ensure that he can at least save one person (the client or whomever he knows can be saved within the photo’s timeline). And considering how quiet he is by nature, Lu Guang has likely kept this burden all to himself. Yet Lu Guang never turns his back to helping someone when it is possible for him to do so.

That is to say, I fucking love Link Click and its wonderful characters - the writers, VAs, animators, etc. really knew what they were doing and they honestly deserve so much more credit for this show

#link click #cheng xiaoshi #lu guang #qiao ling #analysis #more like a ramble but i fucking love them #give me more emotionally well-rounded adult characters pls #yall NEED to watch this show fr its so underrated

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mueritos · 2 years

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I sent your post regarding destigmatizing transmasculinity to everyone I know because it hit the nail on the fucking head without diving into weird "Therefore, it is trans women's fault" rhetoric that I see a shocking increase of on this website. However, I do notice a lot of discourse regarding the relationship between gender and race being led primarily by white trans people who have fundamentally different interactions than I do, and I've had plenty of arguments about how no, black transmasc people don't have privilage over black transfem people because being percieved as a gnc black woman or a black man are equally dangerous (speaking as a butch black transfem). Thoughts?

First off, thank you for reading the post and sharing it. My main reasoning behind the post was because I was also frustrated by the white dominant ideology regarding trans identities, especially in regards to gender and race (and in how they use trans women as a scape goat for transphobia and colonialism). Gender is racialized, and unfortunately white trans people view their gender as outside of race because they already epitomize normalcy in terms of race. I want to also make it clear that I don’t speak for Black folks, and I’m simply relaying information of what I have learned over the years of interacting with Black communities, the history I have learned in my courses with Black professors over the years (both focusing on queer theory and Black history in the US), and the books I have been reading for my own research. If i have any information or ideas incorrect, I would be happy to adjust them accordingly ^-^

The lack of critical gender reading is also another issue within the community in terms of why we have so many issues with white trans people speaking over BIPOC trans people, especially Black trans people. I find that white queer people seem to only read about white queer people, and never want to explore outside of that. No Audre Lorde, no Bell Hooks, no Ida B wells, no Sojourner Truth, no June Jordan, no Marsha P Johnson or Slyvia Rivera, no Essex Hemphill or Arturo Islas, nothing. Race is already difficult to grapple with for white people, and they believe our shared queerness is enough to unite us all under the same struggle of sexual and gender oppression. This isn't true obviously, and quick historical knowledge about the history of ballroom, urban culture in cities, the policing of BIPOC bodies and identity in bars/clubs/street corners, even going further with the women's suffrage movement being anit-Black and saying that they supported all women (many suffragists tokenized Black women), but did not want Black men to have a vote/power, etc.

The history of the US has always made gender racialized. From the moment Columbus stepped foot into the Americas, thought the Natives were “sodomites” and “hemaphrodites”, they thought them overtly sexual and called them animals for their lack of clothing. The same was applied to Black people in the US; their dehumanization was racialized just as much as it was gendered; Black women were seen as “jezebels” to justify the sexual violence against them, and Black men were viewed as “beasts of burden” to justify the labor and the hypersexuality imposed onto them. Everything that gender is today has ALWAYS been because of white people. Theatre in the 20s and 30s used Black face to show “pansy” behavior against “normal heterosexual behavior”, making it clear that normal = white (my sources here are based on Michael Bronski’s A Queer History of the United States). This is quite literally not that hard to understand, but unfortunately white ideas about “male privilege” and misogyny fails Black communities, especially trans Black people.

Male privilege seems to only exist at it’s rawest form in white cisgender heterosexual men. White cisgender gay men are close after; historically they have always been able to obtain employment and housing and resources at rates much higher than even white lesbians throughout history. Anyone outside of this scope, however, does not have male privilege, and even Brown men, despite living and participating in the patriarchy (like we all do), don’t experience male privilege the same way white men do. Sure, maybe Brown and Black cisgender men will not have much trouble getting employment compared to Black and Brown women, but the rates at which they are policed, both by institutions and society/people, also places them at a disadvantage. BIPOC men experience a racialized manhood, one that inherently has already failed them on account of not being white.

This is why intersectionality is important, and white people just don’t have a good grasp on it, no matter how many times they watch Kimberle Crenshaw’s TEDx talk (lol). When your gender isn’t racialized, you have no reference for what a racialized gender feels like. Yes, female presenting and GNC presenting and “non-passing” BIPoC individuals face more discrimination and oppression than BIPOC men, but not all BIPOC men are cisgender, heterosexual, monogamous, or “male” presenting. I always say no bigot is going to ask what identity you are before calling you a slur, and the same is just as true for BIPOC queer people. No racist is going to make sure to ask if you’re Black or mixed before calling you the “correct slur”, many of them see anyone who is outside the white heterosexual cisgender norm and go with the first slur they can think of. THAT is why there is no clear hierarchy in terms of how much oppression you face according to your identities when you’re a queer BIPOC. Yes, colorism, yes cisgender privilege, yes heterosexual privilege, yes, this is why intersectionality exists, but I don’t believe oppression should always be quantified when it comes to racialized gender and sexuality. BIPOC queer people are already well versed in intersectionality; we already care and cherish for each other based on our shared struggles. I’ve quite literally heard more discourse regarding transmasc vs trans femme privilege from white queers than from BIPOC queers. THAT says enough about the difference of where our respective communities are at. BIPOC queer people are already leagues ahead when it comes to intersectionality; white queer people are still stuck quoting Kimberle Crenshaw on their email signatures.

I’m not sure if I answered this to the fullest of my abilities, but I wanted to make the effort to give you my thoughts. I thank you for such a wonderful question. I am not the first or last person to talk about this, and I encourage anyone who wants to do more research to look into the various authors I have mentioned, as well as BIPOC creators online. I also recognize that non-Black folks have their duty to learn about this as well, and if I can contribute to that conversation for other non-Black people so that they are more compassionate and understanding to Black experiences, then I’m grateful to have expressed my thoughts. (ps, if there r any spelling mistakes, im sorry, but I dont proofread my asks before sending them off)

Like I mentioned before, I’m happy to adjust and correct myself, This is a very complex issue and takes relearning years of history. It’s not easy, but it’s possible.

Have a great day my friend!

#muertoresponds #trans stuff #discourse #trans discussion

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