#and obviously there's response bias because voting is optional

[shmaroace]

now that i have polls, i just want to see. please reblog this!

(alloace/alloaro includes any acespec/arospec identities and allosexual/romantic)

#i think my followers will be a biased sample #and obviously there's response bias because voting is optional #but i genuinely want to see what this looks like #aro #aromantic #arospec #ace #asexual #acespec #aroace #aspec #alloace #alloaro #polls

[gendercensus]

On fae/faer pronouns and cultural appropriation

HOW IT STARTED

I had a handful, a very small handful but more than two, responses in the Gender Census feedback box telling me that fae/faer pronouns are appropriative. The reasons didn’t always agree, and the culture that was being appropriated wasn’t always the same, but here’s a selection of quotes:

“Fae pronouns are cultural appropriation and are harmful to use“ - UK, age 11-15

“I’m not a person who practices pagan holidays but, my understanding is that pronouns like fae/faeself are harmful because the fae are real to pagans and is like using Jesus/jesuself as pronouns“ - UK, age 11-15

“I know you've probably heard this a million times, so has everyone on the internet, but the ''mere existence''of the fae pronoun feels really uncomfortable for some of us. I'm personally not against neopronouns like xe/xim, er/em and the like, I am a pagan but apart from the, imo most important, reasoning of that pronoun being immensely disrespectful, I worry as an nb about people who banalize the usage of pronouns ''for fun'', and I'm quoting what some people have told me.“ - Spain, 16-20

“I don't agree with fae/deity pronouns just from a pagan perspective it's very disrespectful to the cultures they come from. Like Fae are a legit thing in many cultures and they hate with a fiery passion mortal humans calling themselves Fae to the point of harming/cursing the people who do it“ - USA, age 16-20

“only celtic people can use far/ faers otherwise it’s cultural appropriation, many celts have said this and told me this“ - USA, age 16-20

So that’s:

❓ Someone who doesn’t say whether they’re pagan or Celtic.

❌ Someone who definitely isn’t pagan.

✅ Someone who is pagan.

❓ Someone who doesn’t say whether they’re pagan or Celtic.

❓ Someone who doesn’t say whether they’re pagan or Celtic.

So, just to disclose some bias up-front, I am English so I’m not Celtic, but I do live in Wales so I am surrounded by Celts. The bit of Wales that I live in is so beautiful in such a way that when my French friend came to visit me she described it as féerique - like an enchanting, magical land, literally “fairylike” or thereabouts. Coincidentally I have also considered myself mostly pagan for over half of my life, and I can’t definitively claim whether or not the Fae are “part of paganism” because paganism is so diverse and pick’n’mix that it just doesn’t work that way.

To me the idea that fae/faer pronouns would be offensive or culturally appropriative sounds absurd. But also, I am powered by curiosity, and have been wrong enough times in my life that I wanted to approach this in a neutral way with an open mind. Perhaps what I find out can be helpful to some people.

So since we only have information from one person who is definitely directly affected by any cultural appropriation that may be happening, the first thing I wanted to do was get some information from ideally a large number of people who are in the cultures being appropriated, and see what they think.

~

WHAT I DID

First of all I put some polls up on Twitter and Mastodon. [Edit: Note that this post has been updated with results from closed polls.]

I specified that I wanted to hear from nonbinary Celts and pagans, just so that the voters would be familiar with fae/faer pronouns. I asked the questions in a neutral way, i.e. “How do you feel about...” with “good/neutral/bad” answer options, instead of something more leading like “Is this a load of rubbish?” or “are you super offended?” with “yes/no” options. I provided a “see results” option, so that the poll results wouldn’t be skewed as much by random people clicking any old answer to see the results. And I invited voters to express their opinions in replies.

Question #1: Nonbinary people of Celtic descent (Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, the Isle of Man, and Brittany), how do you feel about non-Celtic people using the neopronoun set fae/faer? [ It's good / No strong feelings/other / It's bad ]

Question #2: Nonbinary pagans, how do you feel about non-pagans using the neopronoun set fae/faer? [ It's good / No strong feelings/other / It's bad ]

The Twitter polls got over 1,100 responses each, and the Mastodon polls got over 140 responses each. With a little bit of spreadsheetery I removed the “N/A” responses to reverse engineer the number of people voting for each option, combined those numbers, and recalculated percentages.

Obviously this approach is not in the least scientific, but thankfully the results were unambiguous enough and the samples were big enough that I feel comfortable drawing conclusions.

Celts on fae/faer pronouns being used by non-Celts (561 voters):

It's good - 42.5%

No strong feelings/other - 44.0%

It's bad - 13.5%

Pagans on fae/faer pronouns being used by non-pagans (468 voters):

It's good - 47.2%

No strong feelings/other - 39.5%

It's bad - 13.3%

Here’s how that looks as a graph:

The limitations of polls on these platforms means that we have no way to distinguish between people who have more complicated views (”other”) and people who have “no strong feelings”, so we can’t really draw conclusions there. If we stick to just the pure positive and pure negative:

Celts were over three times as likely to feel positive about non-Celts using fae/faer pronouns than they were to feel negative.

Pagans were over three and a half times as likely to feel positive about non-pagans using fae/faer pronouns than they were to feel negative.

So Celts and pagans are way more likely to feel actively good about someone’s fae/faer pronouns, even when that person is not a Celt/pagan. That’s some strong evidence against the idea that fae/faer pronouns are appropriative, right there.

~

CORRECTIONS

To be clear, I haven’t done any research about the roots of fae/faer or the origins of the Fae and related beings, but my goal here was to get a sense of what Celts and pagans think and feel, rather than what an historian or anthropologist would say.

On the anti side, here were the replies that suggested fae/faer either is or might be inappropriate:

“I only worry that not everyone understands the origin of the word outside of modernized ideas of fairies.“ - pagan

“As a vaguely spiritual Whatever (Ireland), I think a mortal using "fae" as a pronoun/to refer to themselves is asking for a malicious and inventive fairy curse (on them, their families and possibly anyone in their vicinity, going by the traditions). I have not heard of this term before, so this is an immediate reaction from no background bar my cultural knowledge of sidhe/fae/term as culturally appropriate. My general approach is people can identify themselves as they want.“ - Celtic

So we’ve got a pagan who’s wary that people who use fae/faer (and people in general) might not have a fully fleshed out idea of the Fae. And we’ve got a Celt who doesn’t mind people using fae/faer personally, but based on what they know of the Fae they wouldn’t be surprised if the Fae got mad about it. No outright opposition, but a little concern.

There were not a lot of replies on the pro side, but not because people weren’t into it, judging by the votes. There were a lot of “it’s more complicated than that” replies, many of which repeated others, so quotes won’t really work. Here’s a summary of the Celtic bits:

“Fae” is not a Celtic word, and Celts don’t use it. It is French, or Anglo-French.

“Fae” can refer to any number of stories/legends from a wide variety of cultures in Europe, not one cohesive concept.

There are many legends about fairy-like beings in Celtic mythologies, and there are many, many different names for them.

The Celts are not a monolith, they’re a broad selection of cultures with various languages and various mythologies.

And the pagan bits:

Paganism is not closed or exclusive in any way. It might actually be more open than anything else, as “pagan” is a sort of umbrella term for non-mainstream religions in some contexts. A closed culture would be a prerequisite for something to be considered “appropriated” from paganism.

From my own experience, pagans may or may not believe in the Fae, and within that group believers may or may not consider the Fae to be sacred and/or worthy of great respect. (I’ve certainly never met a pagan who worshipped the Fae, though I don’t doubt that some do.)

And then we get into the accusations. 🍿

“this issue wasn’t started by Celtic groups or by people who know much about Celtic fae. It was started primarily by anti-neopronoun exclusionist pagans on TikTok.“

“[I’m] literally Scottish [...] and it’s not appropriative in the least and honestly to suggest as such is massively invalidating towards actual acts of cultural appropriation and is therefore racist. Feel like if this was actually brought up it was either by some people who seriously got their wires crossed or people who are just concern trolling and trying to make fun of both neo-pronouns and of the concept of cultural appropriation and stir the pot in the process.“

“It wouldn't be the first time bigots falsly claim “it's appropriative from X marginalized group" to harass people they don't like, like they did with aspec people when they claimed "aspec" was stolen from autistic language (which was false, as many autistics said)“

“It's been a discussion in pagan circles recently ... People were very quick to use the discussion as an excuse to shit on nonbinary people.“

“I think it would be apropos to note that the word "faerie/fairy" has been a synonym for various queer identities for decades, too. The Radical Faeries are a good example.“ (So if anyone has the right to [re]claim it...)

A little healthy skepticism is often wise in online LGBTQ+ “discourse”, and some of these people are making some very strong claims, for which I’d love to see some evidence/sources/context. Some of it certainly sounds plausible.

~

HOW DID IT START?

I had a look on Twitter and the earliest claim I can find that fae/faer pronouns are cultural appropriation is from 18th February 2020, almost exactly one year ago today. Again, tweets are not the best medium for this, there was very little in the way of nuance or context. If anyone can find an older claim from Twitter or Tumblr or anywhere else online, please do send it my way.

I have no idea how to navigate TikTok because I’m a nonbinosaur. (I’m 34.) I did find some videos of teens and young adults apparently earnestly asserting that they were Celtic or pagan and the use of fae/faer pronouns was offensive, but the videos were very brief and provided nothing in the way of nuance or context. For example:

This one from October 2020 with 29k ❤️s, by someone who I assume is USian based on the word “mom”?

This one from December 2020, that says “I am pagan and i find it rather disrespectful. It’s like using god/godr or jesus/jesusr.” That’s probably what inspired the feedback box comment above that refers to hypothetical jesus/jesusr pronouns.

If anyone is able to find a particularly old or influential TikTok video about fae/faer pronouns being appropriative I’d really appreciate it, especially if it’s from a different age group or from not-the-USA, to give us a feel for how universal this is.

For context, fae pronouns were mentioned in the very first Gender Census back in May 2013, though you’ll have to take my word for it as the individual responses are not currently public. The word “fae” was mentioned in the pronoun question’s “other” textbox, and no other forms in the set were entered so we have no way of knowing for sure what that person’s full pronoun set actually is. This means the set may have been around for longer. The Nonbinary Wiki says that the pronoun set was created in October 2013, as “fae/vaer”, later than the first entry in the Gender Census, so I’ll be editing that wiki page later! If anyone has any examples of fae/faer pronouns in use before 2013 I would also be very interested to see that.

~

IN SUMMARY

Obviously I can’t speak for everyone, as the Twitter polls are not super scientific and they only surveyed a selection of Celts and pagans within a few degrees of separation of the Gender Census Twitter and Mastodon accounts, but I can certainly report on what I found.

For a more conclusive result, we’d need to take into account various demographics such as age, culture, location, religion, race/heritage, etc.

As far as I can tell based on fairly small samples of over 400 people per group, a minority of about 13% of Celtic and/or pagan people felt that use of fae/faer pronouns is appropriative.

A much higher number of people per group felt positive about people who are not Celts or pagans using fae/faer pronouns. The predominant view was:

It can’t be cultural appropriation from Celtic cultures because fairy-like beings are not unique to Celtic cultures and Celtic cultures don’t call them Fae.

It can’t be cultural appropriation from pagan cultures because paganism is not “closed” or exclusive in any way, it’s too broad and open.

~

If your experience of your gender(s) or lack thereof isn’t described or encompassed by the gender binary of “male OR female”, please do click here to take the Gender Census 2021 - it’s international and it closes no earlier than 10th March 2021!

#fae/faer #pronouns #neopronouns #cultural appropriation

[snkpolls]

SnK Episode 62 Poll Results (for Manga Readers)

The poll closed with 314 responses. Thank you to everyone who participated!

Please note that these are the results for the Manga Readers’ poll. If you wish to see the results for the Anime Only Watchers’ poll, click here.

--

RATE THE EPISODE 303 Responses

There was an interesting contrast this week between anime only viewers’ and manga readers’ reaction to the episode. Anime only viewers overwhelmingly felt positively about the episode. But for manga manga readers, many of the cuts in the anime dampened their enjoyment of the episode, and for some ruined it entirely. Still, overall, the episode got positive reception, even if it wasn’t overwhelmingly enthusiastic. 

a little rushed but still very enjoyable. it defo got the point across about Reiner's struggles

It was... Fine. I'll give it a solid 8/10 on emotional value and finally seeing these chapters animated. But accepting that the anime and manga are not the same and that there will be cuts is hard.

Wasn't very good. The cut scenes really hurt the pacing and overall story.

i thought the pacing was way too fast :(

Stunning. Beautiful 

Another great episode. My only criticisms are the music that was used at the beginning of the episode, which didn't really work, and the cuts but I understand why that had to happen.

Disappointing

Impeccable. The adaption was both efficient and emotionally effective. Zero misses so far - I'm officially a MAPPA ho. 

Really great! Feels different from the manga and makes me excited for future episodes, because even if it's not perfect, we will always have the original material + some fun new scenes that the anime is adding, can't wait for more

WHICH OF THE FOLLOWING MOMENTS WAS YOUR FAVORITE? 304 Responses

The much-anticipated scene where we learn amputee-kun is actually Eren was the most favored of the episode, with 37.5% of the vote. Following behind that with more narrow margins were the introduction to Marley’s titans, Annie and Reiner’s fight and Reiner’s suicide attempt. 

The first part was very rushed and I wasn't as impressed by it. But I was very impressed by the second part of the episode once the warrior kids made it to paradise. I also very much enjoyed how they animated the scene of Annie taking out her anger on Reiner after Marcel's death. There was just something about the use of colours that really appealed to me. 

The Reiner and Annie fight and Reiner's suicide disturbed me a lot more this time around, partially because I haven't read the chapters in a while, but this is easily one of my favorite episodes now.

WE GOT THE FULL ED LAST WEEK. AFTER SEEING IT IN ITS ENTIRETY, HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT IT NOW? 294 Responses

The majority of the fandom are enjoying the new ending, with 65.6% loving both the song and the animation. 11.2% are enjoying the song… but not so much the animation. 11.9% feel that it’s “just okay.” Some are enjoying the animation, but not the song, and a few more dislike both. 

The song and the animation are truly beautiful and gorgeous. I couldn't imagine better. It is always so peaceful after the full of emotions episode. 

Beautiful song, although the bit with the streaks of shiny animation look like 480p and are a little boring. 

I didn't see it 

Bold of you to assume I watch the EDs and don't just skim ahead to the preview.

i'm not interested in the ending

There was a half ED?

ON A SCALE OF 1 TO 5, HOW MUCH DID YOU ENJOY THE SEQUENCE INTRODUCING ALL OF MARLEY’S TITANS? 303 Responses

A very tiny fraction of voters weren’t impressed with the way MAPPA executed the scene that introduces us to the Marley titans and why each warrior was picked for the titans they received. However, the majority of respondents felt very positively about the scene, with 221 even feeling they, too, will become a titan as a result of the awesomeness. 

I really liked the marley titan montage but why the hell were the female titan's boobs so big? It looked so out of poportion

It was awesome and I loved the introduction to the Titans

OUT OF ALL THE TITANS THE MARLEY MILITARY HAD 9 YEARS AGO, WHICH ONE WOULD YOU WANT TO HAVE? 299 Responses

Whether it’s for practicality or aesthetic reasons, we all have different titans that appeal to us more than others. This race was a close one, with the Female Titan holding on just slightly over the Jaw Titan in terms of favoritism. The Armored Titan came in at a distant third with the Beast Titan and Colossal closely behind. Only a very small fraction would like to inherit the Cart Titan from Piku-chan.

WHICH OG WARRIOR CANDIDATE WOULD YOU WANT TO ADOPT? 299 Responses

Overall, the majority (29.1%) wouldn’t want to adopt any of the OG warrior crew, whether because the responsibility is too much or because they don’t like kids at all (or perhaps, a missing third option being they don’t like any of them). But for those who would happily take on one of the OG warrior kiddos, 24.1% would most like to take Reiner home (and probably give him lots of hugs). 21.1% adore little Pieck and would shower her with parental love forever. 9.7% probably want to pinch little Bertolt’s cheeks, and 8.4% wish they’d adopted Annie instead of her father.

A LOT OF THE SHIGANSHINA BREACH HAS REUSED WIT ANIMATION FROM PAST EPISODES - THOUGHTS? 303 Responses

The majority of respondents felt positively enough about seeing WIT’s S1 style mixed in with MAPPA’s, with 42.9% feeling it flowed together well enough, and 26.4% understanding why they didn’t reanimate the event (despite preferring it if they had). 11.2% don’t care at all, and 8.6% think it was way too jarring. There are some who are reminded that they miss WIT’s style, and others who have a continued appreciation for MAPPA.

KAJI YUKI HAS LOWERED HIS VOICE A BIT TO DEPICT AN OLDER EREN. THOUGHTS? 301 Responses

Overall, nearly everyone seems to be pleased with Kaji Yuki’s more “mature” sounding Eren, with 76.4% feeling he is portraying an older and more jaded Eren perfectly. 11.6% are lost in their lust for a 2D drawing and are focused entirely on that (we understand lol). A few are simply indifferent to the lower tone, and a smaller percentage just prefer Eren’s voice prior to the timeskip. 

Anime onlys can spot him more difficult, which I like

Made sense to me, he’s not a teenager anymore after all, plus works better for this “new” Eren who’s less angry and shouty all the time.

I didn't even notice lol

Eren is adult so changing his voice was a very good choice. I like his new sound.

It was stupid that he ever talked so low before now. He was fifteen and he sounded like an adult, well they all do that bc it's standard anime shit but it makes it even harder when they become real adults.

NOW HE REALLY SOUNDS LIKE KENMA 🔥

WE’VE LOST COUNT OF HOW MANY TIMES WE’VE SEEN MARCEL GET EATEN. BUT OF THE OPTIONS BELOW, WHO DID IT BEST? 296 Responses

Seeing Marcel get eaten 2000 times seems to be a running gag at this point, so naturally we had to include this question. Whether it’s recency bias or objectively true, 44.6% feel that MAPPA’s take on Marcel’s death was the best. 30.4% feel that Isayama’s more recent art style truly does Marcel the most justice. 14.2% liked the way WIT Studio portrayed the scene and 10.8% like Isayama’s older, more grungy art style.

RIP Marcel

DO YOU THINK THAT REINER WAS CORRECT, THAT MARLEY WOULD HAVE HAD ALL OF RBA EATEN IF THEY HAD FOUND YMIR AND RETURNED HOME IMMEDIATELY? 292 Responses

In the hypothetical scenario that Reiner hadn’t convinced Annie and Bertolt to stay on the island, the majority feel that Reiner was wrong in his assessment that they would be executed practically on-site. 55.1% believe that the idea would have been out in the open, but ultimately rejected. Though, 35.6% feel that Marley is too ruthless and uncaring toward Eldians to care what the situation is, and would absolutely hand over their titans to others deemed more capable. Very few felt Marley would be understanding by default. Many write-ins feel that Reiner is the only one who would have been executed for the failure. 

Depends on if B/A emphasize that it was Reiner’s fault rather than their own.

If all of RBA got eaten then I think they wouldn’t use kids for their next attempt. Maybe teens around the age RBA were after training in Paradis military

Magath would have pointed out how wasteful it would have been, but probably even him couldn't have saved reiner

He was wrong. What would be the point of feeding them to other children, if they were the best candidates? Too much of work. 

Reiner said that there's a possibility that they couldn't find Ymir even if they try. He has a point. But I don't think Marley would have RBA eaten even if they lose Jaw.

They wouldn't go through with it because they seem to lack other qualified warrior candidates.

I think Magath and maybe Zeke would have tried to convince the government to not go through with it and that Reiner might have been the only one sacrificed.

Obviously. They would have indisputable proof that sending a bunch of kids to carry out a massively important mission is the dumbest shit they could have ever done and immediately they'd put the titans into older soldiers.

They'd let them live a few more years just for propaganda and used them for other battles, then they'd have them killed around their midterm.

Possibly, but they put a lot of time, effort, and money into training their warriors. It would be a big decision to execute all of them and start over. Maybe they would have executed Reiner as an example.

WHAT’S THE FORECAST FOR TONIGHT? 295 Responses

In our least-serious question of the poll, we asked you guys to try and predict the weather based on Bertolt’s sleeping pose. 18.3% believe his legs-on-the-wall pose means clear skies, 13.9% are certain it means rain. 13.6% are confident in an overcast night. At 11.5% foresee storms coming and 11.2% think it’s gonna be snow. 18% are probably just annoyed with the question. A few write-ins pointed out that Bertolt was, indeed, sleeping in the Hanged Man Pose.

It’s gonna be partly guilt ridden old man with a 90% chance of suicide by hanging

Blood and guts

HOW IS THAT EVEN COMFORTABLE?

Let's just call it hail

Hanged man posture, dreamed about the old man

raining titans

No one can make me like the warriors even if I don't blame them for what they were forced to do as kids. idc what quirky habits they have.

There'll be clear skies for some time but don't be deceived, heavy rain is incoming

This was amazing because it's a reference to The Hanging Man on Tarot cards: he's willingly being hanged for his sins. Look it up, it's so cool.

HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT MAPPA CUTTING A GOOD CHUNK OF REINER’S TRAINING? 302 Responses

With only 20(ish) minutes to fit in all of Reiner’s backstory, cuts were inevitable. MAPPA made the decision to nerf most of Reiner’s struggles training as a Warrior Cadet (among a couple other more lengthy scenes during and after the wall breach). 62.9% are sad that some of these scenes didn’t make the cut, but also understand that we can’t have it all. 13.2% actually preferred seeing Reiner’s backstory in MAPPA’s condensed version, while 12.9% feel it completely ruins the characterization of the warriors.

I don't even remember what was cut 😂

Slightly ruined the warriors’ characterisations (especially Reiner’s)

I thought they could have shown a bit more about Reiner's underdog, it's something that really made me sympathise with him in the manga. 

Kinda disappointed, since some scenes were essential for a little background on their lives

Honestly, even after all the cuts and the restrains it tells the story of a "warrior", Reiner.

Mappa fucked RBA backstory and I would bet it's because they are biased towards Eren and 104th...

I wouldn't say it ruined their characterisation, but it did leave it a lot more shallow. I would've loved to see those scenes animated, but I also realise that things will have to be cut to fit everything in, and I think these cuts still preserve the forward momentum of the story reasonably well. 

The important scenes were animated, so it's good that way

MAPPA cannot animate every panel and the best will be, if fandom finally understands that. Every episode has limited amount of time and MAPPA is doing everything they can to make episodes good and easy to understand for anime onlies. I was fine with cutting because I know that episodes aren't long and there are more important stuff to animate than every part of training.

WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS ABOUT NOT SEEING ANNIE PARTICIPATING IN THE FIRST WALL BREACH? 298 Responses

MAPPA completely glossed over Annie’s role in the wall breach, showing her being choked by Reiner and then waking up in the refugee camp later. 40.9% state they would have preferred seeing Annie play her part in the mission, though they accept that it isn’t there. 34.6% are concerned that those who don’t read the manga will just be confused as to where Annie was during all of the chaos (Oh no! Did RB leave her passed out in the fields!?). 16.1% are simply just disappointed altogether. A small fraction felt it wasn’t necessary anyway and have no problems with the cut. 

I feel kinda iffy about it because that was one of my favorite parts of the chapter, but oh well... it is what it is.

Kenny's scene should be eliminated.

I mean it's not like the female titan could destroy the walls herself. I think nobody expects it and then her absence makes sense

Yams did an oopsie in the first place retconing 

It really confused me lol for a moment I completely forgot what she even did in the manga and had to reread

KNOWING NOW THAT ANNIE IS ACTUALLY ADOPTED, DOES THE JOKE ABOUT HER BEING KENNY’S LOST DAUGHTER HIT DIFFERENTLY NOW? 299 Responses

We learn after Annie comes out of the crystal that her father is actually an adoptive parent. Annie, in an attempt to cover up why she’s stalking Kenny in the underground, claims (or jokes) that she was born to a brothel worker and is Kenny’s lost daughter. We asked if this made the joke any less funny to readers, though most of them didn’t think so at all. Only 14% of respondents say the new knowledge actually makes it a little sad. Some people forgot entirely that Annie is adopted and voiced their confusion in the write-ins. 

wait,,,,, she.,,,, she's adopted ??? wha- how did i completely forget about this

Kenny's gay anyway so it's impossible! Sorry, Annie :/

I don't really get this joke tbh 😅 Do people think she and Kenny look alike?

We're all Kenny's lost daughter

It just brings into question her true parentage, like how she can scream summon other Titans and if that’s a royal blood thing or not. But probably doesn’t matter since it hasn’t come up in the manga yet 

I hadn't thought about it before today.

She's adopted?!?

HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT MAPPA’S EXECUTION OF REINER’S ATTEMPTED SUICIDE? 302 Responses

With such a weighty scene, execution is of utmost importance. So we were curious if you guys felt that MAPPA hit the mark. Overall, MAPPA’s take on this scene got positive responses from the fandom, with 42.4% feeling they felt about the same as they did when the scene came up in the manga. 26.5% actually thought that MAPPA did a better job with the scene, whereas 26.2% felt that Isayama’s original take on the scene is still superior. 

I think that while the manga's intent is for the reader to feel Reiner's pain and emotions during what he thought were his last moments, the anime focuses much more on making it disturbing and depressing (both taking into account the same things, just choosing to highlight different aspects of the scene). Not a bad change but I prefer the manga's portayal, it made me feel so much more attached to Reiner

Actual scene was good, but the build up was lacking.

I really liked the flipping back and forth 

Not nearly as emotional as I expected

The lighting was so good in the anime version. 

Bruh we needed the flashbacks cause they depicted Reiner's journey and regrets

I think it was more impactful in the manga, but MAPPA did it amazing too

The scene looked more serious but the building of the characters didn't live up for the moment. 

It impacted me differently than in the manga. I prefer the manga scene, but the anime's was still really good

I was worried about it being overly censored so I’m glad it wasn’t 

The execution was about the same, but it had a bigger impact when you read it for the first time

The drool was a great touch

WHICH OF THE FOLLOWING CUTS WERE YOU DISAPPOINTED DIDN’T MAKE THE EPISODE? 292 Responses

While we shouldn’t dwell on cuts too much, there will still be things that people are disappointed didn’t make it into the anime. The scenes which were most missed this week were Annie’s role in the wall breach, Reiner passing along a tired Annie over to Bertolt atop the wall, RBA discussing their infiltration plans in the field (also known as the tree-uprooting scene), seeing Bertolt, Annie and Marcel surpassing Reiner in their training, and Reiner breaking up Eren and Jean’s fight (noticing Annie is exhausted). Well, at least the manga still exists, right?

I wish they didnt cut some of the flashbacks right before Reiner tried to kill himself. 

Really great episode, but Bertholdt looking up at the wall before breaking it was such an iconic panel, I'm a bit sad

Any cuts are a negative. I dont care how much it makes sense for the anime onlies, I just wish they somehow incorporate some of the small slice of life scenes that made the Marley arc special.

Truly loved it despite cuts and pacing, but just wish we could’ve seen that tree uprooting scene!

I still hold the sentiment that Mappa is cutting way too much from these episodes. The amount of small details getting cut from every chapter/episode results in losing out on smaller moments that in my opinion have a real impact. While I understand a 1 to 1 replica might not be possible, the amount of cuts is too much imo. Missing out on nearly all of RBA assaulting Shiganshina was a huge disappointment, and less Falco and Gabi scenes makes it tough for me to connect to them. Talking to my Anime-only friends though, they are very into this season, so I'm glad to hear it works for them. 

I'm not necessarily sad they cut so much, I feel like as an Anime only I wouldn't have noticed! The only thing I wish that had been kept was Annie's involvement in the destruction of wall Maria. 

I was sad they cut stuff but that’s inevitable.  The only cut I’m sad about is the scene before Bertholdt  breaks the wall.

some of the cuts made sense, some made other scenes kind of occur out of nowhere, like annie with kenny.

SO FAR, WE’VE LOST A FEW INTERACTIONS BETWEEN FALCO AND GABI AND SOME MOMENTS WHERE FALCO IS BLUSHING OVER HER. DO YOU THINK THIS WILL LESSEN THE IMPACT OF HIS EVENTUAL LOVE CONFESSION TO HER? 296 Responses

While the Falbi romance isn’t a major focal point of the series, it does play a big part in their storyline and overall character development as their involvement in the plot increases. MAPPA has had to let a few scenes go, so we were curious if manga readers felt it would lessen the impact of Falco’s inevitable confession just before the rumbling starts. 31.4% feel that the anime is doing just fine at portraying Falco’s feelings. 28.4% feel the impact will be lessened, but that it’s fine due to it being a minor plot point anyway. 14.5% are upset about the missing pieces and 11.8% think MAPPA will make up for it later. Smaller groups of voters either don’t understand why Falco likes Gabi or just don’t care. 

I'm more dissapointed about Zofia and Udo getting cut than those two.

Kid romance is lame anyway

It's not gonna hit like the manga but it's still pretty important plot imo

What works on paper doesn't always work animated, they're doing ok 

I hate gabi gahh

It is obvious he likes her anyway

Not really, they've established he has a big crush on her since he pretty much came out and told it to Eren

DO YOU THINK MAPPA DID A GOOD JOB OF HIDING EREN IN PLAIN SIGHT? 297 Responses

We failed to ask this question last week, but it still applied well to this week’s episode. When it came to anime only fans, we wondered whether manga readers felt MAPPA did a good job at making him as mysterious to anime watchers as Isayama did to us manga readers. 40.1% felt that MAPPA did a great job, as many anime watchers didn’t seem to catch on. 25.6% feel that they didn’t do any worse or better than Isayama did. 13.8% feel MAPPA did not do as well as Isayama, as some anime watchers easily caught on. 9.4% think they did completely awful at pretending it’s not Eren. Some write-ins felt we couldn’t objectively judge this as we already knew it was Eren anyway. 

I think the voice gave it away the most. The sneaky animation was great! 

Hard to answer because chapters were a month apart while episodes are weekly and I’ve already read the manga when it came out

well, I can't say much about this. since I know he is eren, I was just focusing on how Kaji Yuki will handle this important speech

They even didn't try to hide him. I'm disappointed because I wanted anime onlines to feel what we - manga readers - felt, when after few chapters we found that the hobo man was Eren. 

I honestly didn't even realize he was supposed to be hidden from the readers/viewers at this point. It was so obviously him in the manga and the anime. Genuinely confused by how many people did not catch on. 

Watching some reactors they were like "...wait...that *looks* like Eren...but his leg is amputated...his leg would've grown back??" but as soon as you heard his voice it was instantaneous 

I, being a manga reader, had a hard time getting how you couldn't see that it was Eren, but some of my friend only got it at the last scene.

Hard to say. WIth the manga, it took me a few reads to catch on, but now that I KNOW, it's hard to say anything.

Yes, I'm watching the episodes with my anime-only friend and he still hasn't figured it out

I think they did a good job, but with anime being the medium it was easier to guess due to both hair/eye color and voice.

It was nice, I was actually surprised that some of my anime only friends didn't even realize that it was Eren talking to Falco this episode

When Eren was finally revealed in the manga, I was *shocked! I had *no clue that was him! I think the anime did a great job, but of course had to reveal him sooner. It was perfect both in manga and anime imo.

It's obviously him once you see his eyes, but I don't think that the animation team were trying to make it a big shock reveal, they want this scene to say "this is probably Eren, but can you be 100% sure" to keep anime onlys engaged and reassure them that the main cast is still relevant.

Yes, but the manga hid him better, it took me way too long to realise it was him while reading

HOW WAS KAJI YUKI’S DELIVERY ON EREN’S SPEECH TO FALCO? 299 Responses

The vast majority of respondents were very pleased with Kaji Yuji’s delivery on one of Eren’s most prominent speeches. 38.1% felt it was exactly as they had hoped it would be. 28.1% were extremely happy, and feel that any delivery by Kaji Yuki as Eren will be 100% spot-on. 24.7% are simply just content with it. Smaller fragments of respondents just wanted to voice their thirst, or felt that the delivery could have been better. 

Better than I could have ever imagined

I don't really care

Eren is the best main character ever

Not my native language so I can't really tell how good it is, but Kaji's delivery seemed about right

It was a bit fast but good

Very good. You get a real sense of how clueless but trying to be tough Eren really is.

EREN TELLS FALCO HE HOPES FALCO LIVES A LONG LIFE. KNOWING WHAT WE DO NOW, WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT HIM SAYING THIS? 298 Responses

Eren already knows he will bring destruction upon the world, so it’s a wonder why he would bother telling Falco he hopes Falco will have a long life. 64.8% believe that he truly means it from the bottom of his heart, despite knowing his future actions will likely affect Falco. 10.7% believe he said this because he has already seen that Falco will survive the Rumbling. 10.1% aren’t really sure what to make of it at all. Smaller numbers of people think Eren was only trying to gain Falco’s trust and didn’t mean it at all, or believe that Falco will take part in Eren’s eventual demise and Eren is already aware of that. 

He saw him in his memories so imma believe what he says

I'm sure there is part of Eren that hopes for a good long life for Falco. Just like there was part of him that couldn't help but save the refugee kid. But that doesn't mean he isn't any less dedicated to his plan to genocide a whole lot of people. He has his conflicts, but in the end he's still going ahead with the attack on the square and later with the rumbling.

I think it's the same deal as him saving the immigrant kid when he knew that he would die in the rumbling.

In an ideal world Eren would want *everyone* to live a long life--he's been portrayed as someone who cries and disassociates while he commits his genocide so we're meant to understand he doesn't enjoy it. Sadly it doesn't matter what he hopes or wants when he's decided murdering everyone is what has to be done..

THE PREVIEW SHOWED PIECK AND PORCO NEXT TO REINER AT THE DAYTIME FESTIVAL. THIS WAS NOT IN THE MANGA. WHAT DO YOU THINK THIS MEANS ABOUT POSSIBLE ANIME-ONLY ADDITIONS? 298 Responses

Many of our respondents seem to be looking forward to Pieck and Porco’s inclusion in the daytime festival. 47% are hopeful that this will mean some wholesome bonding scenes between the Warriors and the kids. 26.5% don’t know what to make of it, but are looking forward to it nonetheless. A handful of people think it will be similar to how WIT included Sasha in the Clash arc - adding minor details without changing anything in the story-line. 7% wish that MAPPA wasn’t doing this at all, and 5% are hopeful this means that MAPPA will find a way to repurpose Pieck crawling on all fours next episode. 

I still want Pieck butt

IN THAT SAME VEIN, IT SEEMS LIKE EPISODE 4 WILL ADAPT CHAPTERS 97 AND 98, ENDING ON THE FINAL PANEL OF 98. HOWEVER, THE VAST MAJORITY OF CHAPTER 97 WAS ALREADY ADAPTED IN LAST WEEK’S EPISODE. WHAT WILL THIS MEAN FOR EPISODE 4? 293 Responses

Who wants to place bets on the contents of next episode? While the largest chunk of people don’t know what to expect in episode 4, others are happy to speculate. 19.8% feel (or are at least hopeful) that MAPPA will fill in some screen time by repurposing already-skipped scenes. 19.1% feel that there will be minor additions, but not too much. A solid 16% feel that there will be a few anime only additions during the daytime festival. 10.9% are placing bets that episode 4 will actually bleed into chapter 100 before the end.

Mappa won't have to cut a lot of stuff like they did to ep 3

The title "From One Hand to Another" immediately made me think we would actually be getting Eren grasping Reiner's hand and transforming at the end (meaning chapters 100 and 101), but that's just so much. The title may just refer to Magath and Willy's handshake. 

What about just enjoying the show?

WHICH SCENE FROM THE PREVIEW ARE YOU MOST LOOKING FORWARD TO? 298 Responses

As expected of the fandom! Reiner and Eren’s reunion is the most anticipated scene for episode 4, with 74.8% having voted for that. 17.1% are most looking forward to the daytime festival, and 6% are excited to meet Willy in anime form for the first time. One commenter is very invested in the banquet and how it’s executed. 

Not this ep but if they cut the Udo and Kiyomi scene I'll RIOT!

ADDITIONAL THOUGHTS ON THE EPISODE?

I'm upset so much was cut from Reiner's backstory but the cinematography is freakin' excellent I can't even complain

*cheers MAPPA animators for their hard work* ... Perfect for anime onlies, I think. Made me almost wish I hadn't read the manga so I wouldn't have missed the cut scenes.

Cuts aside, the animation was much better than the previous episodes. 

"The one scene I really wanted was Bertholdt looking over the wall and seeing the EMA trio. Of all the cuts, I think that was the only one that was damaging to the story. I also kind of wish that MAPPA animated the reused scenes. I kind of like comparing and contrasting the animation styles of both studios so its a bit of shame that we didn't get anything new from Episode 1.

I'm really impressed with how much MAPPA is managing to squeeze in each episode and I'm content that Reiner's flashback was covered in a single episode rather than two. It just makes sense pacing-wise. The only real criticism I have is that in the flashback scenes where everyone is supposed to be 12 years old, they don't sound 12 at all. Their voices are way too mature, especially the males, and I understand they're voiced by adults, but I feel like they could have at least tried to sound more like kids. Other than that, great episode.

Elaborating on the missing content: they really shouldn’t have cut Annie’s transformation prior to wall Maria being breached. It makes it look like Reiner choked her out and then a minute later bert was kicking the wall through. 

I'm in the boat, where i think it wouldve been better if Mappa didnt cut out so much, but considering what there is to cover, we will live,but i hope they dont end up butchering everything Also the bit with reiner’s dad would be confusing to anime-onlies since it cross-cuts between that scene and him on the parade. I’ve seen some reactors think it was a daydream, or that he left during the parade. 

It was quite rushed, but I understand why they did it, the flashback wouldn't have been as impactful over 2 episodes, and I do think when the Marley arc was first introduced in the manga, manga readers were quite inpatient to get back to the main cast, so they might be feeding off that feedback. 

Mappa has become my favorite studio of all time. Not just in regards to anime, but studios in general. Their discography is on another level (imo) and the fact that on top of every other masterpiece they’ve made, they’re doing an outstanding job with my favorite series of all time just solidifies them as the first and probably the only anime studio that I can truly Stan.

Lots of (I think) Important stuff cut, but the meat is still in place. I like my meat to be juicy and marbled, while Mappa cut out all the fat that makes for a flavorful meal. I completely understand why and I am apathetic about it.

disliked the fact the wall breach was so quickly glossed over, and the transition between mappa and wit style was jarring to say the least

Regardless of the cuts, i think it flows together nicely. The anime has always been more speedy than the manga so i kind of expected this. I don't think it'll get as bad as s3 part 1 in terms of pacing. I trust in Mappa, so far i haven't been disappointed at all. The animation and backgrounds are absolutely stunning. That warrior titan sequence was incredibly well done. Props to the animators!

It was a bit confusing mishmash of scenes, but there were some good moments sprinkled in like the introduction of all of Marley's titans. The emotional reactions, however, just weren't the same as they were when reading the manga, to be honest.

I’m really glad they cut the part with RBA hanging onto Female/Armoured neck by a rope. That whole thing seemed stupid to me. Doesn’t match up with previous chapters and I feel like SOMEONE would have noticed two kids hanging onto the Armoured Titan’s neck. 

I think MAPPA is doing a really good job so far, can't wait to see the battle in Liberio. I'm not bothered at all with the CG titans because firstly, they look really good, and secondly, I understand why they had to do it. I also hope they don't censor many things or cut out some dark scenes that are important to the season because I would love to see everything animated. 

Felt like watching a recap episode... And it wasn't supposed to be one, so

I'm really dissapointed that mappa cut so many things from manga. Reiner's backstory is my favoure part of snk. Suicide scene completly lacks impact. 

I really dislike the fact that MAPPA is trying to show only bad side of the marleyan officers. They removed the gate guards, they removed the scene where Magath is telling RBA to stay safe (on Paradis). One of the best parts of the manga is showing that the both races (Eldians and Marleyans) have good and bad sides. By removing positive aspects of Marleyans MAPPA is creating totally different picture. This way the anime onlines may find the whole rumbling even more justified. The episode was pretty good and the OST has made some scenes to feel more dark and serious (especially the moment where the new titans are introduced), but sometimes I feel like the characters are speaking and acting way too fast. I was waiting for the scene with Kenny and Annie, but it took only like few second and was cut. I love MAPPA's version of Kenny. He has more serious aura and looks more like his manga counterpart. In other words;  wrinkled grandpa with skinny neck :) 

It honestly wasn’t my favorite, but I still loved it. I feel as though they skipped around a lot and there wasn’t a lot of scenes that actually tied together and I’m worried anime only watchers might get confused. Definitely some of the stuff I wanted to see animated didn’t make the cut, but I still love the animation style, the characters and the story!

WHERE DO YOU PRIMARILY DISCUSS THE SERIES? 285 Responses

Thank you to everyone who participated! We’ll see you again next episode.

#snk poll #snk polls #shingeki no kyojin #attack on titan #snk #aot #snk spoilers #snk s4

[randomrainman]

american conservatism and the minds of people: a black man’s perspective.

Hi, it is I.

I often think long and hard about the mind states of the people around me, and my inevitable conclusion is that the vast majority of people are monumentally and irrevocably fucking stupid.  As it turns out, people have a really hard time letting go of things with which they have grown familiar or fond, and therein lies the basic principle of conservative thought.  

“But aren’t some things okay to keep?”

Well, obviously, not everything needs to be thrown out in order for improvement to occur.  In the Army, we have things labelled “sustains” and “improves”.  The two terms are pretty self-explanatory (as are most things in the military): sustains are the things that work, and the improves are the things you either completely nix or need to, erm, improve.  Of course, this begs a question: as it relates to a society of living, (mostly) breathing human beings, how does this apply?

"Don’t throw out the baby with the bath water,” it is commonly said.  I am not entirely sure who was throwing away bathing children, but that’s a discussion for a different time.  The baby in this idiomatic expression is whatever it is we are supposed to be maintaining.  Let’s start with an example: police.

Obviously, it is entirely infeasible to literally abolish police.  We absolutely need the police force as an institution, and good and effective policing is a pillar to a modern, functional society.  However, we can abolish unprofessional, unnecessarily violent, racist, or otherwise unbecoming behaviour from police departments, and also demonstrate that such things are intolerable and met with appropriate punishments every time these rules are broken.  NWA didn’t make “Fuck The Police” because they wanted to express interest in having thoroughly arresting cop sex; it exists because they don’t trust the police.

Above: An Autistic Swedish dude spitting shockingly accurate commentary-by-proxy about American society. Flames!

Due possibly in part to dubiously worded slogans such as “defund the police”, modern conservatives balk at the thought of changing anything of significance about how policing in many communities in the United States is conducted, even going as far as to label the reform for which we call as an attack on the very idea of police.

That said, historically, the very pillars of police forces in the United States have their foundations in slavery and post-slavery racist institutions, which means that, while much has changed on the surface, the way police implement policy reflects structural and societal racism.  As a result, simply attacking individual instances of misconduct will almost always fail to elicit any meaningful progress, which is why some do seek to dismantle police departments (an option I cannot fathom as being realistic, especially not in the short term). 

The lack of a centralised police organisation from which to implement policy certainly does not help, and while some police departments, to include the Department of Justice itself, have introduced implicit bias training, it would appear that change was difficult to measure. Additionally, many police departments have not addressed the more overt problem of explicit racism in law enforcement, which is a nigh-impossible thing to tackle expeditiously without a top-down structure to deal with it. It has improved steadily overall, however, but not without significant disapproval...

Pictured: “disapproval”.  A civil rights demonstrator is attacked by a police dog in Birmingham, Ala., in 1963. (Photo credit: AP)

The Origins

As I noted earlier, there is plenty of shit people want to keep, and most for relatively understandable reasons -- after all, those things provide a sense of familiarity.  “It’s always been this way -- why change it?” they ask.  One needs only to look at our, um, flowery history to see countless examples of things that required change...

The transatlantic slave trade transported up to 12 million forcibly enslaved Africans to the Americas, many of whom arrived in what is now the United States.  As unspeakably horrifying as the actual journey was, this was only the beginning of the tribulations that would befall the slaves and their descendants in the future.

While Europeans played a large part in introducing the idea of race-based caste systems into colonised lands, the American brand of discrimination is different in the fact that the idea that Blacks and Native Americans were genetically inferior to whites was endemic to our inception, and thus, formed the basis of the things enshrined into American democracy.

Photo credit: Alexander Gardner / Wikimedia Commons

Abraham Lincoln entered the chat.

Naturally, having someone even so much as threaten the idea of racial dominance after literal fucking centuries of treating Black people as property did not sit well with the slave-owning populace (even if Lincoln’s motives were not exactly altruistic).  While the Southern states did in fact operate an agrarian economy heavily dependent on chattel slavery, it was that notion of superiority combined with societal comfort they felt that ultimately catalysed the secession of the Southern states from the Union...

Pictured: Civil War reenactors (from the Confederate side) simulate the Battle of Antietam, the bloodiest battle in US history.  Also, why the fuck is Civil War reenactment a popular thing to do? It’s deeply weird. (Photo credit: MPRNews.org)

...and then they decided to have the deadliest fucking war in American history over that comfort.  Spoiler alert: the Confederates lost both the war and their precious bullshit institution of slavery -- but even after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued, many Southern slave owners did not even pass the news of freedom to their slaves for months.

In keeping with the preservationist and racist mindset which occupied most Southerners’ brains, any attempt to integrate Black people into society during the Reconstruction period was stymied at every turn.  To them, despite Black people being de jure full citizens in accordance with the Civil Rights Act of 1866, we were still subhuman.  Due to Jim Crow laws, Ku Klux Klan terrorism, and other assorted nonsense, we made virtually no progress toward equality until the Civil Rights Movement and resulting laws such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968.

“Well, you got what you wanted!  YOU’RE EQUAL!  Quit yer bitchin’!”

Ah, if only things worked that way in real life.  As previously noted, even if things are codified into law as changes, there are still people who try really hard to keep everything exactly the fucking same, so it does not end up happening in practice.  Things such as residual effects of redlining and continuing disproportionate and excessive imprisonment of minorities, amongst other issues, still affect people in the present day. In other areas, people exploit loopholes in order to lawfully discriminate against others they might deem “undeserving”.

Lots of things, especially when it comes to role of minorities in society, have historical precedents.  When arguing said precedents with conservative types, the conversation almost always leads to one of several (predictable) conclusions: the person believes that 1) negative historical events (e.g., slavery, Native American genocide, etc.) were not that bad; 2) those things did not happen at all; or 3) those things were bad, but somehow do not affect modern society.

Obviously, all three are emphatically wrong.  This is why typical conservative behaviour, even in this modern era in which information sharing is instantaneous, does not surprise me: often, the rhetoric is not rooted in reality, and often resorts to appeals to emotions to elicit a knee-jerk response.  This is not to say that this does not occur on liberal ends of the spectrum, but modern conservative rhetoric is rooted primarily in unjustified fear of change and anti-intellectualism.

Pictured: A screenshot I took of someone on a pro-President Biden post desperately trying to be oppressed.

This kind of shit is utterly exhausting.  Neoconservatism, in a nutshell, is people literally inventing problems and subsequently getting angry at their own creations.  It is the equivalent of setting up a bear trap, immediately stepping in it, and wondering why the fuck you’re stuck in said bear trap and your foot doesn’t work anymore. During the Obama administration, the only thing I would witness is people insisting (without any evidence, of course) that President Obama was the Antichrist and that he would usher in the New World Order and take everyone’s guns.  All zero of those things happened, of course, but when Donald Trump assumed the presidency, the rhetoric completely reversed, and he was named “God’s chosen" by evangelical figures, despite him having broken perhaps all of the Old Testament’s Ten Commandments.  Of course, as you can see with the above screenshot, clearly, they have returned to the Obama bitching method, but diminished, partially because President Biden is also an old, white male, and they don’t need to ask where he was born.

Pictured: what happens when you fuel millions of self-victimising people with QAnon conspiracy theories and possibly loads of Bang energy drinks.  Photo credit: ABC News

The hypocrisy is absolutely palpable amongst these types of people, and if I tried to sit here and continued to provide examples of conservative figures contradicting themselves, I would die either of old age or myocardial infarction, whichever happened first. The difference in the reaction to Black Lives Matter protests versus the storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 makes the double standard quite transparent: justice and equality, while technically codified into law, are clearly are not administered equally in modern-day America.  We’re still not like the others.

Our brand of conservatism, by and large, is the enemy of those two very important American ideals.

|the kid|

#conservatism #conservative #liberal #Donald Trump #Joe Biden #President of the United States #creative writing #article #political ideology #critical thinking

[saint-patrice]

In light of this post, about different types of ways you may feel about your favourite hockey players, getting an awful lot more notes than expected, I thought it would be fun to have a more detailed look into what kind of responses people were giving! I accidentally deleted the damn thing a few months ago and it took me a while to find it again, but on the plus side it accrued a lot more notes during that time - I have responses from 150 people, covering 119 different hockeys! This is pretty long, so all the good stuff is below the cut :)

So, as I said, there were responses from 150 different people (thank you all) - 119 individual names were mentioned for a total of 429 answers, accounting for 25 NHL teams. I’m going to link the Google Sheet at the end of the post, but first I thought I’d go through some of it :)

There is obviously going to be some bias towards the teams I am about on my blog since that’s where the post originated from, but with that many responses, the results are pretty varied. Anyway,

First are some of the most common players assigned to option one, which, as per the post, was “he’s perfect and i will not hear otherwise. i look at him like he hung the moon, because quite frankly, he probably did. he is the lord’s perfect creation and i would happily die defending his honor.” 

As you can see Jamie Benn is the pretty clear winner, and very satisfyingly so, as he has the same number of votes as his jersey number. From what I’ve seen, Stars fans are very passionate about their captain and I love that! I don’t think there’s really any surprise appearances on here, although I wasn’t expecting Crosby’s name to crop up this much, maybe that’s just because I’m not necessarily a Pens fan. These are just the most common answers. People’s opinions were far more varied on this than the other option; on a quick count, I tallied 75 individual players being named for this one! As a result, most players that were mentioned in this category only appeared once or twice, like Ben Bishop or Seth Jones (both good choices). There does appear to be a considerable bias towards Canadians, with (if I’m right) 10 appearing on this graph. The rest of the players are European, so not much love for the Americans…interesting.

Category 2: “this little bastard creature. how dare he. how dare he make me love him. he’s a gremlin that’s crawled up from the depths of hell and i hate him with all my heart even though i love him. he’s the literal worst man alive.”

 People were much more in agreement on this option - even as I was typing up the answers it was clear that TK and Seguin were almost unanimous across hockeyblr. It doesn’t seem to matter which team you support, you probably hold a little bit of rage for one of them anyway. 

I think Nolan Patrick making a pretty even appearance on both lists is interesting, and I can’t say that EJ or Jimmy Vesey were names I expected to see mentioned here. Matthew Tkachuk’s Friendship Tour runs rife even on Tumblr, it would appear. Most people probably would have predicted a lot of these names for this one.

(This post is from a fair few months ago, and from a quick scroll through the tags it does appear that most mentions of AMatthews are from before the allegations surfaced in September. Just something to note.)

This is where things get interesting - I noticed some players were appearing numerous times for both categories, so I thought I’d pick out some of the most common ones, and see how opinions were split. Of the 38 times Travis Konecny was mentioned, only 2 people thought he belonged to category 1 (represented by the green bar), so I hope those people are out there living their truths. Seguin showed a similar pattern, whilst Barzal, Patrick, and Tom Wilson had opinions split close to 50/50. Surprisingly, Marchand was deemed more “perfect” than “gremlin” but that may be the result of this post being circulated a fair amount among Bruins blogs. That being said, and we’ll get onto it in a second, it does appear that hockey fans on Tumblr were fairly evenly represented in this, so maybe not.

This is a summary of how the number of players mentioned were distributed by team. There’s some more info in the Google Sheet about how many players represented each team - e.g. the Capitals, despite only making up 7% of answers, had the most players mentioned at 14! This chart is interesting, and in my experience a reasonable portrayal of hockeyblr, although a few teams are probably a little under-represented. That being said, it is probably more reflective of hockeyblr on the whole rather than on a team-by-team basis. Players who tend to be pretty popular, or at least subversive, regardless of your allegiance - Konecny, Seguin, Marner - have definitely influenced this.

The Hurricanes, Red Wings, Kings, and Lighting have been omitted from the above chart as their players were only named once or twice, and so amounted to 0% in the grand scheme of things. No players from Ducks, Oilers, Panthers, Canadiens, Senators, and Winnipeg were mentioned at all. The Ducks and Senators weren’t really too shocking, but I did expect to see a player or two from the others in there. I would assume this is a result of those fanbases not being all that big on here. 

That’s all I’m going to get into here, but the whole workbook can be found of Google Sheets through this link: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1cUFz4eSM_j-Ipjz7lhsAkaXqpw5M_08NcYiWBM1Zxec/edit?usp=sharing

It has all of the tables I made the graphs/charts from, as well as the whole list of the responses, some of which gave me a good laugh. And like I said, there’s some info on how teams were portrayed which might be of interest. It’s certainly not an exhibition on how you should be presenting your data, but it gets the point across :)

Thank you again for the awesome response to that dumbass post, and thank you to anyone who has read this far! I spent way too long on this so I really really appreciate it. That being said, it was good fun, so please feel free to let me know if you enjoyed reading this :^)

💗💗💗💗💗💗💗💗💗💗💗💗💗💗💗💗💗💗💗💗💗

#not that anyone actually wanted me to do it but this took me the longest time #so if you gave it a look and thought it was at all enjoyable/interesting/[positive adjective] pls give it a like or some shit #i do love that validation #fr though this was fun to do and a good insight into the hocleyblr hive mind #how to tag... #gonna tag a bunch of teams tbh #dallas stars #philadelphia flyers #boston bruins #washington capitals #new york rangers #new york islanders #colorado avalanche #toronto maple leafs #eh that'll do #hockey stats #ish #❤️❤️❤️

[melnchly-a]

i was debating posting this but here are a range of things to think about re: police and reform. 

i’m seeing a lot of “abolish the police” posts, and while i know exactly where that’s coming from, it’s also a simple-seeming answer to a deep and complex problem, and one that’s likely to cause more problems than you’re likely thinking. (in the absence of police, it’s likely - - though certainly not guaranteed - - that those who can afford it will invest more heavily in private security for businesses/personal protection/etc, whether that need is warranted or not. in the event of situations occurring that would have required police presence, you would likely see more federal law enforcement/military presence. worst-case, imagine a country led by someone like our current president where the only option is to send in federal agents and believe me, you don’t want that.) neither do you probably actually want to call for a mass exodus of police of their own volition. i can tell you right now the ones you want out wouldn’t be leaving. you’d be left with departments entirely composed of people with no qualms about excessive force. you WANT those people staying on the force, and you WANT them to have the resources they need to report on fellow officers when needed. 

it’s also just not likely to happen in any widespead way. not in our current society. if you want to create real change, there are other things that need to be addressed, campaigned for, and fixed. things which will not be fixed if we’re trying to focus on overly simple answers for deeply complex problems.

this isn’t to disagree with the notion of reallocating funding to benefit schools/public services/etc. i think that’s entirely necessary. but there’s more to the story than simply cutting funding. 

police need to address and apologize for excessive use of force and abuse over the history of policing. if not for individual officers who may or may not have participated, than for the historical precedent as a whole. pretending there isn’t a problem isn’t a help to anyone. 

as i’ve said multiple times in the past, police unions and those who negotiate with them make it notoriously difficult for departments to get rid of officers with complaints against them. the department in minneapolis is headed by a black chief of police who had sued his own department based on issues of race in the past. he should have been able to get rid of officers like c.hauvin with no issues and yet....obviously, that man was still on the force. there need to be ways for a.) departments to fire problem officers without someone over their heads reinstating them and b.) ways for officers to report on their fellow officers without repercussions. i can tell you right now that those methods don’t currently exist in any wide-spread or efficient/effective form.

body cams, dash cams, and other oversight tools need to a.) be “sold” more effectively to the police as measures of protecting BOTH themselves AND the citizens they serve. there ALSO need to be real consequences for tampering with these, turning them off, etc.

police need more training and they need higher-quality recruits. understaffed departments lead to issues you’ll see in places like flint, where it can take three hours or more for police to respond to a call. not because they’re (most of the time) doing anything wrong, but because there aren’t enough of them in comparison to the total population. this could include decisions like requiring college or college-like degrees, but that would also mean higher pay for police officers. which i realize isn’t a popular idea at the moment, but is a fact of those requirements. (furthermore, many city police in small to mid size cities, not to mention suburban police, don’t have adequate crowd-control training. this is not an excuse for the way police have been handling crowds in recent days, but it is something that has come up in discussions. many of them are reacting with excessive crowd-control measures where lesser measures were needed.) this training should absolutely include recognizing police brutality in the past, the racism in the system as a whole, recognition and response to explicit and implicit bias, recognizing mental health issues, etc. training is a problem every law-enforcement officer i’ve spoken to in the last few weeks, in an attempt to understand what’s happening, has brought up. the people i’ve spoken to have dedicated their lives to establishing mental health education for police, who have actively removed aggressive or racist officers in the past, etc. they’re just as frustrated and angry with the reactions police are displaying as you and i are. and they’re actively doing things to try to help. unions, government, etc make that more difficult than it should be. 

many police, particularly in large cities, don’t live in the cities/neighborhoods they’re policing. (many smaller, particularly suburban, departments require that their officers live in the town they work in.) sometimes this is because they can’t afford to (nypd officers start at around  $42,500/year - about $3,541/month or  $885/week BEFORE tax -  in a city where the median rent for a studio apartment sits at about  $2,700/month. these officers can obviously make more as they spend more time on the force, but that’s the stated starting salary according to their website. the salary after 5 1/2 years is $85,292). this means they don’t know the areas/people/etc they’re policing, are more likely to make snap judgments based on false information, etc. it wouldn’t solve everything, but rules for employment regarding residency could mean better policing in cities and their neighborhoods. 

for a profession that includes seeing things like scenes of murders, assaults, suicides, and wellness checks that lead to decomposing bodies, mental health care for police is abysmal. i mean it’s....bad in the u.s. in general, but it’s notoriously bad for active-duty military, veterans, and first responders...including police. this isn’t to mention that officers who self-report mental health problems are often put on leave rather than given the resources they need. this means compounded stress, trauma, etc, going unaddressed in a highly dangerous and stressful profession.

police DO handle more than they likely SHOULD be handling, including things like wellness checks, nonviolent domestic disputes, etc. more often than not, they’re doing so without specialized training for those situations. these should absolutely be divided out into unarmed (or lightly armed, i.e. with pepper spray etc), specially trained units. you’re still going to want armed police units to exist in the u.s. - - i can tell you for a fact that in my fairly quiet suburban hometown ALONE there have been active shooter/barricade/hostage situations that could not be deescalated without use of force, despite attempts to do so.

qualified immunity needs reform. you can read more about that here. this allows not only for officers to get away with police brutality, but for all public officials to get away with a wide range of crimes. 

we need to campaign for citizens to be integrated into police oversight. police are paid by taxpayer dollars, and they are meant to serve and protect the people. again, this is an issue for your local government and police unions. when you’re communicating with gov’t officials, make it clear that you want something like this implemented. 

and, yes, there need to be strong and immediate consequences for excessive use of force. 

i’m not saying any of this to make it seem like police brutality or the racism inherent in the law enforcement and justice systems doesn’t exist. it does, and it needs to be addressed. what i am saying is that addressing that is a more complex problem that requires deeper thought for successful reform. Black people, particularly men, are at leas 3x more likely to experience police brutality, and that needs to end. 

tl;dr, some things to be aware of, petition for, etc: 

charging and convicting police brutality as a crime (with the understanding that this means it should be treated as any crime in a court of law)

holding all first responders accountable for their actions.

allowing and enabling officers to respond to police brutality they’re witnessing, including training on how to intervene, better reporting methods, policies that would not punish them for reporting, etc 

reform in police unions

better police training in general

national standards for police training (believe it or not, these don’t currently exist)

better mental health care and mental health policies for police and other first responders 

citizen involvement, including in oversight

voting in state and local elections for officials who have plans to respond to these issues, and who are actively listening to their constituents 

reallocation of funding so that the funding is more equally spread to education and community support

Some Sources/ Further Reading: 

“How to reform American police, according to experts” from Vox

Police officer salary and benefits, NY Gov

“Adopt minimum national police use-of-force standards and train cops for interaction” USA Today

“‘An Impossible Situation’: How Chief Arradondo Has Struggled To Change The Minneapolis Police Department” CBS Minnesota

“What We Should Expect of the Police: Experts Weigh In On Recent Police Violence,” Center for American Progress

Police Reform, The Flip Side

The Center for Policing Equity

#IVE HAD LIKE SIX COFFEES TODAY (ooc) #current events cw #(this is literally just things to think about based on conversations i've had with a variety of people and research i've done) #(i'm not trying to debate it's literally just my attempt at bringing more hidden problems to light for general knowledge) #(there's a list of more reading at the bottom!)

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s weekly politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

sarahf (Sarah Frostenson, politics editor): Last Thursday, the 2020 Democratic candidates covered a wide range of topics during the three-hour debate, including health care, race and criminal justice, immigration, gun control and climate change.

But what issues do voters care most about? In our FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos poll, conducted using Ipsos’s KnowledgePanel, we surveyed the same set of respondents both before and after the debate to find out what issue was most important in determining their vote in the primary. And what we learned was Democrats are most concerned about defeating President Trump — nearly 40 percent of respondents said this was their top issue. For reference, the next-most-common top issue — health care — was picked by just 10 percent voters before the debate and 11 percent after.

So what issues should the candidates be talking more about? Less about? And if Democrats care more about winning this year, what’s the best way to talk about beating Trump?

A lot of Democrats really want to beat Trump

Share of respondents to the FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos poll who said that each issue is the most important to them, before and after the debate

Share for whom issue is most important issue Pre-debate Post-debate Ability to beat Donald Trump 39.6%

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39.6%

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Health care 9.9

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11.0

–

The economy 8.0

–

8.7

–

Wealth and income inequality 7.9

–

8.4

–

Climate change 7.4

–

6.5

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Gun policy 4.2

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4.8

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Immigration 3.3

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3.7

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Something else 3.3

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3.5

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Social Security 3.4

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3.2

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Education 2.5

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2.4

–

Racism 3.0

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2.4

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The makeup of the Supreme Court 1.7

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1.7

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Taxes 1.3

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1.3

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Jobs 1.9

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1.1

–

Foreign affairs 1.3

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0.7

–

Crime 0.7

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0.4

–

The military 0.3

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0.4

–

Sexism 0.1

–

0.2

–

From a survey of 4,320 likely Democratic primary voters who were surveyed between Sept. 5 and Sept. 11. The same people were surveyed again from Sept. 12 to Sept. 16; 3,473 responded to the second wave.

nrakich (Nathaniel Rakich, elections analyst): Well, to state the obvious, the candidates should be talking about their ability to beat Trump.

It’s important to a ton of Democratic voters.

And the more it goes untalked-about, the more other candidates are ceding that ground to Joe Biden, IMO.

Electability is a very fuzzy concept without a ton of data behind it, so pretty much any candidate can make a plausible argument for their “electability.”

sarahf: What are some ways candidates can do that, though?

I know Biden has leaned into his performance in head-to-head polls against Trump, but as we know … general election polls don’t really tell us that much about the strength of candidates in the primary.

natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): I mean, it’s a little tricky. If you talk too much about electability, you raise the salience of the issue, which might work to Biden’s benefit.

ameliatd (Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux, senior writer): On the other hand, the fact that electability is a fuzzy concept can also be difficult for the candidates to address directly — for example, the female candidates.

nrakich: Amelia, if you ask me, the female candidates should be trotting out the studies that show women do just as well as men when they run for office!

ameliatd: Well, but those studies aren’t about presidential candidates! Most political scientists agree that people don’t cross the aisle to vote against a woman (or for that matter, to vote for a woman) — party loyalties are stronger than gender bias. But that’s not an easy sound bite, and it also may not be especially reassuring to voters who think sexism was a factor in Hillary Clinton’s loss in 2016.

natesilver: In particular, I think it’s risky (by which I mean dumb) for any candidate other than Biden to talk much about his or her head-to-head polls against Trump, because Biden still does better than any other Democrat in those polls by some margin.

sarahf: But is that what will convince voters someone is electable?

nrakich: Amy Klobuchar is pointing to her past election results, where she really ran up the score in the swing state of Minnesota, as evidence that she’s electable. The problem is that she just hasn’t gotten a lot of attention for it (although voters in our poll thought she was slightly more likely to beat Trump after the debate).

sarahf: How else can candidates talk about their ability to defeat Trump without getting into their performance in head-to-head polls?

natesilver: I thought Warren’s response to Delaney in the second debate was good. Basically, like, if you’re not running on ideas, then why are you even running?

nrakich: If you’re Klobuchar, you can also argue that a moderate candidate is better positioned to win over swing voters. Or if you’re Kamala Harris or Cory Booker, you can argue that a black candidate will have the most success increasing black turnout (which could help Democrats win back Midwestern states like Michigan and Pennsylvania and might put new states, like Georgia, in play).

natesilver: I’m not sure that the candidates themselves do a lot of good by litigating more complex points about electability with the public. Their campaigns might do it on background with journalists, but it’s probably best left there.

ameliatd: I agree with that, Nate. One recent study did show that people were more likely to rate female candidates as electable when they were first reminded about how many women won in 2018 — but I don’t think having the candidates make that pitch will necessarily work.

sarahf: But if the best way for a candidate to run is on their ability to beat Trump, how can their stances on other issues help them accomplish that? Or make them seem more electable?

Let’s start with an issue that a lot of voters also care about (it was the second most popular pick for top issue in our Ipsos poll) — health care.

Should Democrats being talk about health care more?

Less?

nrakich: Exit polls showed that health care was the most important issue to voters in the 2018 midterm elections, which obviously worked out well for Democrats. So I think that’s good ground for the candidates to focus on for the general election.

For the primary, maybe less so — it depends on their position on health care!

natesilver: I remain convinced that health care is the best issue that Sanders has going for him.

Although, according to our poll, Biden actually gained ground with voters who prioritized the issue. Warren and Harris have been somewhat stuck in the middle on health care, though, and I think it’s a real problem for them.

nrakich: But Nate, what about those polls that show that a single-payer health care system is less popular, even among Democrats, than building on Obamacare (with, say, a public option)?

natesilver: At least Sanders has leadership on the issue. True, Biden has the most popular position. But Harris and Warren got nothing.

sarahf:

Who voters think is best on health care

Among the 435 respondents who said health care was the most important issue to them in an Ipsos/FiveThirtyEight poll

candidate share of respondents Bernie Sanders 32.9%

–

–

Joe Biden 28.8

–

–

Elizabeth Warren 16.5

–

–

Someone else 6.4

–

–

Pete Buttigieg 3.3

–

–

Kamala Harris 2.8

–

–

Amy Klobuchar 2.2

–

–

Julián Castro 1.5

–

–

Beto O’Rourke 1.3

–

–

Andrew Yang 1.3

–

–

Cory Booker 0.9

–

–

Poll was conducted from Sept. 5 to Sept. 11 among a general population sample of adults, with 4,320 respondents who say they are likely to vote in their state’s Democratic primary or caucus

Yeah, going into the debate, Sanders had the lead among voters in our poll who prioritized health care. (But Sanders wasn’t the only candidate to gain potential supporters among voters who prioritized health care after the debate — Biden, Yang, Warren and Buttigieg all made bigger gains.)

ameliatd: Part of the challenge, too, is that people still don’t understand the details of all of these plans — for example, Medicare for All, as Sanders and Warren talk about it, involves getting rid of private insurance. That could be more and more of an issue for the candidates on the left. Warren and Sanders keep saying people don’t like their insurance — but that’s not really true.

The health care debate is hard because people want something better, but they’re also afraid of losing what they have.

sarahf: Yeah, the branding of “Medicare for All who want it” that Buttigeig and others are pushing is pretty ingenious, even if it’s just as difficult or costly to pull off as the version of Medicare for All that Sanders and Warren are pitching.

ameliatd: It is weirdly off-brand for Warren to not have a detailed plan on health care. But maybe she’s trying not to get beaten up in the fight over Medicare for All.

natesilver: It’s very off-brand. And, sure, there might be tactical reasons for it. All of which goes to my theory that Warren is more of a politician than she’s assumed to be, which you’d think is a pretty normal thing to say about someone who’s a professional politician but will probably come across as something of a hot take.

I dunno, sometimes Warren’s strategy seems predicated on the idea that she doesn’t need to throw a lot of elbows or make a lot of tight pivots to beat Sanders.

sarahf: Well, if part of the primary is to pitch voters on big ideas, it makes sense to me that Warren isn’t curtailing her vision for Medicare for All just yet.

ameliatd: I wonder also if she thinks there’s too much competition on health care. It can be pretty difficult to follow which candidate is proposing what and what the actual differences are. It’s simpler to just say she’s with Sanders.

nrakich: I do find it interesting that Warren is doing so well in the polls despite not really emphasizing the top two priorities that Democratic voters cited in our poll (electability and health care).

sarahf: In its analysis of swing voters in 2020, the Kaiser Family Foundation found that in addition to issues like health care, where Democrats have a big advantage among voters (18 percentage points), Democrats also have a whopping 38 percentage point advantage on climate change.

So … should the candidates be talking about climate change more?

(According to an analysis by Bloomberg, only 6 percent of the third debate was devoted to it.)

nrakich: I think you have to draw a line between the primary and general election for a lot of these.

As you alluded to with that poll, Sarah, I think the eventual Democratic nominee could have success by talking a lot about climate change next year.

But the differences between the primary candidates on climate change are pretty in the weeds, so I’m not sure whom it would help to talk about it more.

I also think the failure of Jay Inslee’s campaign to win on climate change showed that the issue just wasn’t a big differentiator either (although IMO he had other problems too, like not being very inspiring on the stump).

sarahf: That’s interesting, Nathaniel. So unlike health care, where there’s an incentive for the candidates to hash out their differences, maybe something like climate change should be saved for the general?

Do others agree?

nrakich: Yeah, I think there are pretty major differences between the candidates on health care. And having a nominee run on single-payer vs. a public option could be important to swing voters in the general. But I don’t think Republicans will attack a nominee any harder if he or she is trying to get the U.S. to net-zero carbon emissions by 2040 instead of 2050.

ameliatd: Well, another difference between health care and climate is that they’re both fairly technical, complicated issues, but one has a direct and personal impact on people’s health and bank accounts, while the other is more diffuse. It’s harder to get concrete on climate change, too. Which is sometimes why you end up with candidates talking about banning plastic straws.

natesilver: Also on climate — the political willpower to get things done when Joe Manchin is the median vote in the Senate is far less than any of the Democrats’ plans would like.

In some ways, I’m surprised Democrats haven’t spent more time talking about structural issues, like gerrymandering, adding new states (Puerto Rico, D.C.) and things of that nature.

sarahf: I mean, they did wade into blowing up the filibuster in the last debate.

Do you really think that’s good politics for the candidates, though?

natesilver: Oh yeah, sure. I think it’s a good way for Warren to differentiate herself from Sanders, for instance.

ameliatd: Blowing up the filibuster seems like it’s become a way for candidates to say they’re serious about passing their agenda. So it’s kind of a proxy for how far the candidates are willing to go, and how much they care about compromise.

nrakich: I think it has the potential to be good politics, Sarah. People don’t like it when they perceive the system to be unfair, and Democrats can pretty easily make the argument that the system is currently biased against urban dwellers, people of color, and others.

Gerrymandering is a good example of something that few people defend. But no Democrat is out there shouting about it from the rooftops.

Voting rights also don’t register very high on the priority list when voters are asked what issues they care about, but there is a lot of political science research that says that politicians can influence what voters care about. And I bet the issue would become more salient if a top-tier candidate talked about it more.

ameliatd: I have also wondered why the Supreme Court hasn’t been a bigger issue so far — it is more unpopular with Democrats than it has been in 20 years, and progressive activists are advocating for some pretty big court reforms, like increasing the number of justices on the bench. And if you’re talking about roadblocks for your progressive agenda — a Supreme Court with a conservative majority is certainly at the top of that list.

nrakich: Maybe it hasn’t been very salient in the primary because it’s assumed that every possible nominee would appoint pro-choice, pro-voting-rights, generally liberal justices?

ameliatd: But there are differences between the candidates on how to approach the Supreme Court — big ones! At least seven candidates still in the race are open to the idea of adding justices to the court, according to The Washington Post. And some have talked about changing its structure in other ways (adding term limits, for example) which would also be quite dramatic.

nrakich: Good point. Maybe Democrats aren’t bringing it up, then, because the issue risks activating Republican voters in the general election?

ameliatd: It is definitely true that the courts historically have been a motivating issue for Republican voters and not really for Democrats. But I think there’s potential for the Democrats to make the Supreme Court into an issue that their voters care about.

natesilver: And I think after Kavanaugh’s nomination last year, there’s still an open question about whether which party gets most motivated by the Supreme Court has shifted. In a Gallup poll just before the midterms, roughly as many Democrats as Republicans called Kavanaugh an important issue in deciding their vote.

That said, I don’t think calling for Kavanaugh’s impeachment is a very wise general election position.

ameliatd: No, I agree — a focus on impeaching Kavanaugh seems tailor-made to rile up Republicans. I think part of the issue is that there just isn’t a clear message among Democrats about the Supreme Court or the judiciary in general. Some people want term limits. Others want court-packing, or they want more talk about the type of judicial nominees the candidates would nominate.

sarahf: But what about an issue where Democrats don’t have an advantage (like the economy) and are in a weaker position among voters than Trump? In that same poll on swing voters, KFF gave Trump a 12-point advantage for his handling of economy. And in our Ipsos poll, we found that economy-focused Democrats gave candidates worse marks across the board than voters focused on four other top issues, suggesting that economy voters were maybe unsatisfied by what they heard in the debate.

nrakich: Yeah, I think Democrats could stand to talk more in the primary about the economy in the traditional sense, like jobs.

For the general election, though, that does seem to be a good issue for Republicans (for now).

natesilver: Isn’t the obvious way for Democrats to talk about the economy to talk about inequality and how the economy ain’t workin’ for some people?

Unless the economy actually goes way south, in which case you have a lot more things you can say.

nrakich: Yes, but we did offer “wealth and income inequality” as an issue in our poll, and those voters seemed to have different perspectives than the “economy” voters.

If we’re talking about the primary, I think Warren and Sanders have gotten pretty far by talking about inequality, but our poll does suggest there’s a subset of voters for whom that isn’t what they want to hear about the economy.

sarahf: And while trying to motivate voters around economic inequality sounds good in theory, in practice, I don’t think it actually moves the dial much. Although, there is evidence that voters are keen on a tax on the uber-wealthy, so maybe that’s a good tack for Democrats to take in talking about the economy more?

ameliatd: Right, talking about making the wealthy pay their fair share seems like a smart way for Democrats to approach this.

But what do you think voters want to be hearing on the economy front, Nathaniel? In our poll, “jobs” was listed as a separate option and not that many people seemed interested in hearing about that.

nrakich: Yeah, Amelia, I’m not quite sure. Given their candidate preferences (i.e., voters who prioritized the economy also liked Biden and were much less likely to be considering a vote for Warren or Sanders), maybe those are the fiscally minded voters who oppose Warren and Sanders’s efforts to redistribute wealth.

In other words, business-friendly Democrats?

natesilver: I do think Democrats need to be careful on this issue.

Socialism is still not a popular concept with swing voters. Maybe it will be once the millennials and zoomers take over. But for now, it’s a big general-election vulnerability for Sanders, for instance.

nrakich: Wait, this is the first time I’ve heard zoomers as a nickname for Generation Z and I love it.

natesilver: “Let’s get the economy workin’ for workin’ people and make the rich pay their fair share” is probably fine for a general election message. “Let’s topple the entire system” maybe isn’t.

sarahf: But as Nathaniel said earlier … this is the primary. And isn’t socialism more popular than capitalism among Democrats?

So, similar to some of the candidates being more radical on health care, isn’t there an argument to be made they should dream bigger on the economy, too?

natesilver: Well, yeah, but part of what smart candidates do is avoid driving wedges on issues where it might give you a slight advantage in the primary but a big disadvantage in the general election.

nrakich: And while it’s true, Sarah, that Democrats think more highly of socialism than of capitalism, their views of capitalism are still mostly favorable, according to the Pew Research Center. We’re also forgetting that 40 percent of Democrats think the most important thing is to beat Trump! I can imagine plenty of pro-socialism Democrats being persuaded to tone down the rhetoric (but maybe not the policies — Warren is basically doing this) in order to avoid being general-election poison.

ameliatd: Also, isn’t Warren’s wealth tax, which would be applied to rich people’s accumulated fortunes rather than just their income, be an example of Democrats dreaming big? She seems to be doing a good job of selling it as “just making the rich pay their fair share,” but it’s still a pretty radical change from the status quo.

sarahf: That’s fair, Amelia.

And to wrap, if candidates could only run on one issue — and it isn’t beating Trump, because let’s treat that as the overarching argument of everyone’s campaign — what would it be?

nrakich: I think it’s got to be health care, especially if you’re not a single-payer Democrat. Follow the playbook that worked in 2018.

natesilver: It depends on the candidate. For Biden, it’s electability. For Sanders, it’s health care. For Warren, it’s … I’m not sure, exactly? But I think probably inequality.

nrakich: Breakin’ Sarah’s rules (“and it isn’t beating Trump”), Nate …

Intriguing side question: Is it a problem for Biden if he runs on an electability argument during the primary and then doesn’t have a clear rationale for running come the general?

sarahf: What other issue does Biden have to lean into? Health care, maybe?

natesilver: Maybe Biden could adopt a signature issue — or two.

I’m not sure what it would be, though. Guns, maybe?

ameliatd: We didn’t talk about gun policy, but I’ll be interested to see if that has sticking power as the primary moves forward. That’s a big priority for voters right now, but maybe it’s also an issue like climate change where the candidates struggle to differentiate themselves.

Also, I am shamelessly dodging the question, but personal characteristics are also important to voters. A Pew survey from last month asked Democrats to name the most important factor for deciding which candidate to support, and 28 percent named something like honesty or competence. About the same share pointed to a policy. So … maybe policy just matters less than we assume?

nrakich: Great point, Amelia. We basically just did a whole chat on issues while ignoring the fact that people mostly don’t vote on issues!

ameliatd: Shut it down, guys.

natesilver: But you can still vote on the aesthetics of a candidate’s policy positions even if you don’t care about policy per se.

Like, people can like the idea that Warren has a plan for things, even if they don’t know what those plans are, exactly.

nrakich: Right, but to the original chat prompt, does it matter, then, what issues are and aren’t being discussed?

As you pointed out, Warren doesn’t have a meaty health care plan but still gets credit for being issue-driven.

ameliatd: I wonder if Warren’s focus on an overarching theme like corruption can also help with the perception that she’s honest, or something like that.

But then it does make you wonder how much the details matter, as opposed to how the issues fit into a candidate’s overall brand.

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #A FiveThirtyEight Chat

[atsuyuki18ahsgov-blog]

Legislative Action - Blog Post #5

Congressman Desaulnier has nothing to say on the issue of Abstinence-Only Sex Ed, however Kamala Harris was clarified her stance on Abstinence-Only eduction. She states that Abstinence-Only Sex Ed has only proven ineffective in response to Trumps redirection of funding to Abstinence-Only eduction. Harris and Desaulnier both have NOT sponsored any bills pertaining to the issue. Senator Diane Feinstein has both supported the idea of comprehensive sexual education and introduced and sponsored bills pertaining to the issue. There is no official title to the bill, but it aims to provide HIV/AIDS prevention programs with more flexible funding to make the most effective and comprehensive sexual lesson plan to fight the spread of HIV/AIDS. While it does not directly barre the teaching of Abstinence-Only sex ed, it would aim to redirect that funding from Abstinence-Only to comprehensive. 

Federally, there are bills that do pertain to my issue. One of them, the “Abstinence Education Reallocation Act of 2013″ or hr718-113 requires that all sex ed that is taught to any adolescent must be medically accurate and evidence based, however, can also teach the benefits of refraining from non marital sex, and well as teaching the benefits of sexual abstinence as optimal. This will have a negative impact on the progressiveness of sexual education. So far right now, we have made it barely legal and minimally required to teach comprehensive sex ed. Making also teaching abstinence only education legal, provides a loophole for those schools to teach Abstinence only and moreover, call it “optimal”. I would vote “nay” on this vote because it goes against everything I feel like we should be doing with the argument of sexual education. We should be trying to teach comprehensive sex ed in more schools and making it a requirement (or at least an option). This only destabilizes the already slippery slope we are on. It was introduced February 25th, 2013. However, it has only reached the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions. After that, the House has not voted on it and the President has not signed it. Overall, my optimal satisfaction would be when we completely demolish the teaching of Abstinence-Only education, and require comprehensive sex ed to be taught, and direct all of our funding to that. However, I am happy that the government at least recognizes that making Abstinence-Only sex ed an option, will only lead to bed things in the future. 

After the announcement of Trumps redirection of funding to Abstinence-Only programs, people on Facebook began to host live streams to educate teens on Comprehensive sex ed, with the hashtag #SexEdLive. This article published on CNN’s website titled “Advocates counter abstinence-only push with Facebook Live sex ed” by Jessica Ravitz, brings in some light after the terrible news of Trump. The intended audience is not just teens who SHOULD be watching these videos, but teachers too to see how even though it might be a blow to what they are doing in the classroom, that people with the same mindset can fight back against the decision of Trump. The bias of Ravitz is obviously on the pro side of all of this; she supports what these people are doing in helping fill those knowledge gaps. The significance of the article is to show the public push back against the announcement, and to display how much Trump really doesn't know about Sex Ed and the people that need it. I completely agree and support what this article is bringing light to. I find it amazing that people can do the smallest favor and have it make the biggest impact, especially at an extremely prevalent time. 

Link to the article:  https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/26/health/teen-pregnancy-prevention-abstinence/index.html

[altrightanalysis]

Why You Should Never Befriend Racists

So you fell into a coma in 2012 waiting for Nibiru to hit the Earth. Now you're just waking up, and somehow found your way to Tumblr. 

Congratulations: welcome to 2017 hell. You're probably wondering what happened - were the Mayans speaking in metaphor? Was the "end-of-all-time" a code word for the advent of backwards, right-winged fever?

I don't know. Maybe so: actually, that would explain a lot. All I can say is this: the first black president was finishing up his 8th year in the White House, all the most objective news sources in America said Hillary Clinton would be next, and the progress-train was chugging along nicely. Then like a bolt of lightning, Trump happened.

That's right. Donald. Fucking. Trump. 45th president of the United States, and he won by nearly half the popular vote.

So he just finished signing the "Ban Brown People, Because They're Brown" act, and now that half the country decided to sign up for the KKK, you're probably wondering what to do. Well I'm gonna tell you - hunker down and join the fight! You've got several good options, and one really awful option which you shouldn't take for any reason whatsoever. Let's dive in:

1. I like to call this one "racist island". First things first: make sure you're in a blue state, where racist germs haven't managed to turn everyone into Nazi scum. Secondly, carry around signs asking your state to leave the union. Throw in a piece of paper for good measure, collect some signatures, and maybe even start an online petition demanding that your state peel itself off the red-white-and-blue bubblegum so good, enlightened, non-trump-voting people can get away from the barbaric racist horde.

Your state now gets to be totally self-sufficient. It will be awesome. Best of all, you can build a giant wall to keep out the racists, and leave them to cannibalize each-other in their homogeneous, privileged hell-hole. You don't need the rest of America; if a lot of people disagree with you, you get to leave. That's how democracy works.

2. Flood newspapers like the New York Times with angry op-eds denouncing racism, and point out that Trump voters hate Muslims, Jews, gays, hipsters, transgenders, Hindus, Jains, Syrian Christians, and everyone else who obviously can’t be white. This step can be a little tricky, because big newspapers are really unbiased, and they represent both political sides fairly because they have a diverse audience from across the political spectrum, so it’s frankly a toss-up on whether you’ll get published in the first place or be ravenously gobbled up by people who already agree with you. 

But if you do this enough, your message will reach the right people at their heart: racists will read your op-ed in droves, and see for themselves the primitive cavemen that they actually are.

3. De-escalate rabid islamophobia and mass conspiracy theories about media bias by subtly changing the language of news reports so they mask the identity of minority perpetrators. Covering for Islamic terrorism is a great way to raise public support for Islam, and Islamic immigrants. Addressing the issue head-on, talking like there's an issue in the first place, or suggesting alternatives to Trump's Brown People Ban will only (say it with me now) escalate the hate!

It's worth pointing out just how important this step is. Apparently drawing inspiration from Obama's notorious Christian concentration camps, Trump is currently building concentration camps for Muslims. You gotta keep that from happening - steer clear of implicating Muslims, and racists won't bother to sniff out the sources, read the article, and they especially won't automatically believe Muslims were responsible with or without this tactic.

4. Punch Nazis in the damn face. You heard me right: sock those suckers right in the gob. Violence is always the answer for people who have dangerous and cancerous opinions. Innocent bystanders don't get hurt in riots against racist speakers, and anyways, punching Nazis is an American tradition, much like apple pie and date-rape.

Whatever you do, don't let the fools speak. The unwashed, brainless masses will absorb racist opinions like a filthy sponge. Scientific studies have also shown that a sound biff in the melon resets defective, racist neurons, soundly persuading your audience that you are right and they are wrong without any conversation or debate.

5. Befriend racists, and pretend they're just normal people with screwy minds. Listen to what they say, and try to show them why you're concerned.

Now this is the worst option by far, and it's very dangerous. First of all, talking to racists will probably turn you into a racist. Secondly, befriending racists won't change anyone.

People in this country talk to each other already.

We do not have a problem with extreme language.

We don't use strawmen and hyperbole to refer to our political opponents.

We aren't alienating anyone, or isolating ourselves to thought bubbles, thereby creating the very thing we want to destroy.

(Please for the love of Abraham Lincoln riding a bald eagle: befriend racists.)

#trump #nazis #punch nazis #racism #islamophobia #homophobia

[gendercensus]

A survey on the prevalence and pronunciation of the title Mx

I’ve run two surveys that focused on Mx in the past. One was in 2014 and had 118 responses, and the other was in 2016 and had 505 responses.

This one ran from 5th until 19th January 2019, and there were 3,204 responses, of which 3,179 were usable, meaning I deleted 25 responses that were abusive or obviously duplicates. Of the 3,179 that were usable, 579 were in the UK. (I single out the UK here because I’m in the UK and I’m particularly interested in collecting UK-specific data.)

The survey was promoted on Tumblr, Twitter, Mastodon, and /r/samplesize on Reddit. The promotional text that I wrote didn’t mention the title Mx at all, in an attempt to get more diverse points of view into the results.

Ultimately my goal was to find out how people are pronouncing Mx these days. I ran the first Mx pronunciation survey in 2014 because I kept seeing people condemning Mx on the basis of not knowing how to pronounce it, so I thought information about how it is most commonly pronounced might help. I’m curious to see if over time people are asking that question less and whether one pronunciation is becoming more popular than others.

Plus I figured it might be interesting to find out a bunch of other stuff along the way while I’m there quizzing you all anyway, so I collected information about

where people were raised and with which first spoken languages (so that people can compare the responses to all the other questions to this information and find out, for example, how Mx is pronounced in Australia or how often it’s on forms in the US vs. the UK)

gender

whether Mx is your title or you’ve just heard of it

how often you see Mx on forms

whether you think it’s gender-inclusive (anyone can use it) or gender-exclusive (nonbinary-specific title)

You can see the spreadsheet of responses and the associated tables and graphs here.

~

FAMILIARITY WITH MX

Here’s the ten countries whose participants are most familiar with Mx:

United Kingdom: 85.5%

France: 71.7% *

Australia: 71.6%

Finland: 70.4% *

Germany: 66.4%

United States: 65.9%

Ireland {Republic}: 65.5% *

Sweden: 61.8% *

Canada: 60.9%

Netherlands: 40.8% *

All countries had at least 27 responses. Countries with less than 100 responses are marked with an asterisk (*).

So at first I was like, “whaaaat, how is France more familiar with Mx than the US, even though the main language of France isn’t even English?” But France had only 53 respondents, compared to over 1,500 from the US, so I imagine there is some bias involved. People filling in the survey will notice that a lot of the questions are about Mx, and when at the end of the survey they’re prompted to share the survey URL they are more likely to do so if their title is Mx or they have friends whose titles are Mx.

So then I moved onto which participants had seen Mx on forms, and which countries they were from. Here’s the top 10 for “participants have seen Mx on English forms in the wild”:

United Kingdom: 36.7%

Ireland {Republic}: 21.7% *

Netherlands: 20.0% *

Canada: 18.0%

Australia: 17.0%

United States: 15.4%

Germany: 10.6%

Finland: 9.5% *

France: 7.3% *

Sweden: 4.5% *

Again, the asterisk (*) specifies that a country had under 100 respondents.

Someone from Australia said in the feedback box that Mx is on every government form, which I thought was excellent! It may not be surprising, since they were the first country to grant a passport with an X gender marker on it to someone who couldn’t be categorised as M or F, way back in 2011.

~

PRONUNCIATION

I guess the thing you’re most interested in here is the way most people pronounce it, right? If you answered an earlier question by saying that you had heard of Mx, this question asked: “How do you personally pronounce Mx when you're speaking English?”

For this question it was possible to select multiple answers, and there was an “other” textbox. None of the “others” got more entries than the least chosen pre-written option (Mixture, 4, or 0.2%).

Mix: 25.5% (573 people)

Məx, with a schwa (ə, toneless vowel): 9.5%

I don't know: 8.0%

Em Ecks, spelling out M-X: 3.9%

Mux: 2.7%

Mex: 2.3%

Mixter: 1.1%

Mixture: 0.2%

In the UK the pronunciation varied from this significantly - Məx (the schwa option) was in the lead with 41%, though this percentage is lower than both previous surveys.

The spreadsheet goes into more detail on pronunciation, including chart for pronunciation in the 10 most popular first spoken languages, but to summarise: In the US go with Mix, and in the UK go with Məx (with a schwa).

This is the biggest survey I’ve seen on the pronunciation of Mx in the UK at least, with 506 participants in the UK taking part who had heard of the title, so this is probably the best we have to go on right now.

~

MX AND GENDER

I did ask about gender in this survey, in quite a roundabout way. I wanted to group people into roughly three groups, while also acknowledging that gender is ridiculous and a lot of people who’d be categorised as cis and binary wouldn’t necessarily feel 100% their gender all the time.

Which of these statements is most true for you?

I'm a man/boy pretty much all the time

I'm a woman/girl pretty much all the time

Neither of the above options fully describes me

It was possible to check more than one box for this question, and several people did.

I then made a few comparisons between gender and other answers.

So we have some obvious details first. For example, of the people who said their title is always Mx, most people checked the “neither of the above” option (89%). And then there were more interesting details, such as that women and girls were significantly more likely than men and boys to use Mx for themselves “sometimes”. Could this be related to a few comments entered into the feedback box expressing discomfort with Mx because it sounds too much like Miss?

I learned that people who checked the “neither of the above” option for gender were the gender group most likely to have heard of Mx at 94%, and men/boys were least likely. Of the people who had not heard of Mx, men and boys made up over half. I’d love to suggest that men and boys are least likely to have heard of Mx in part because their privilege permits more obliviosity, but that would be pure speculation and possibly impure judgemental attitude and nothing more.

~

INCLUSIVE VS. EXCLUSIVE

I asked participants whether they thought Mx was gender-inclusive (anyone of any gender can claim it) or gender-exclusive (generally used when addressing or referring to someone of a particular gender, denoting that gender).

Do you consider Mx to be a title that is gender-inclusive or gender-exclusive, generally speaking?

Gender-inclusive - anyone of any gender can claim it for themselves

Gender-exclusive - it's broadly a title for nonbinary people, in the same way that Mr is broadly a title for men and masculine people and Ms is a title for women and feminine people

I don't know

People whose titles were not Mx considered it to be a nonbinary title by a wide margin, but people whose titles were Mx considered it to be inclusive. This is interesting compared to several of the comments written into the feedback box, which I would paraphrase and roughly generalise into the following:

I’m cisgender and binary and I would really like to have a title that doesn’t express a gender, but I’m scared that it’s a nonbinary title and I don’t want to take it away from nonbinary people.

I’m nonbinary and my title is Mx and I wish some binary people would start using it because I would really like to be able to have a title that doesn’t cause dysphoria but also doesn’t out me as nonbinary.

That’s going entirely on what was typed into the feedback box, of course. There were many other diverse points of view, this was just a pattern that I saw while browsing. It’s possible that other comments were entered elsewhere in the form that I didn’t pick up on, too.

It might be interesting to note that of the people who only said they were men/boys, 14% said their title was sometimes or always Mx. For women/girls it’s 15%. Because of other biases I’ve mentioned above this is probably not representative of the general public, but it shows that binary people are using Mx for themselves in a gender-inclusive way, and over half of people who claim Mx think of it as an inclusive title, the most popular combination on this board:

When you split the inclusive/exclusive vote by nonbinary/binary participants instead of people claiming Mx, the results are much closer:

But again, nonbinary people are more likely to see the title as inclusive and less likely to see it as exclusive.

~

NOTES

In most surveys I usually just ask whether or not someone lives in the UK, but this time I tried asking which country people lived in as a sort of experiment. I’m interested in collecting country-specific data for the much bigger annual survey, and I wanted to see how things might work out on a larger scale.

My hope was that enthusiastic people in other countries might be able to use the data specifically about their own country for their own cunning ends.

What I found was that lots of people said “I actually live in [location] but it wasn’t on the list” when [location] was a territory of another country that is probably culturally and linguistically very different from the governing nation. There were also a lot of people who complained about having to scroll too much to find their country (and language) on the list, so I’m sure there were many people who started to fill in the survey but then gave up and left no feedback.

The most popular country by a long way was the US with 49.6% of responses (1,567), and after that the number of people per country dwindled fast. Number 10 on the list, Finland, had only 27 responses (0.8%).

I think I will omit this question in the annual survey, and stick to “UK or not UK?”

~

CONCLUSION

Mx is pronounced Mix or Məx, with a schwa.

More nonbinary people use it than men or women, but there are binary men and women using Mx in a gender-inclusive way and most people whose titles are Mx are pretty okay with that actually.

The UK are totally winning at adoption of and familiarity with Mx, followed by (eyeballing it) Australia and the Republic of Ireland.

Nonbinary people and people whose title is Mx are both more likely to consider the title to be gender-inclusive, open to anyone who wants to use it regardless of gender identity.

~

CLOSING COMMENTS

Thank you everyone! Thank you for your honest and open answers, thank you for the interesting and helpful feedback comments (shoutout to the sweethearts who commented just to remind me to take regular breaks and to thank me for my hard work, ilu), and thank you for helping to boost the signal and get as many eyes on the survey form as possible. Without you, my survey and spreadsheet obsession would be 95.36% more boring. <3

So, this was kind of a warm-up. The past few weeks have been intense, and more intensity is coming, but I feel a bit more prepared for starting the 2019 survey. Hopefully I’ll be able to get started in a few weeks. Stay tuned...

#results #titles #Mx

[d2kvirus]

Dickheads of the Month: December 2019

As it seems that there are people who say or do things that are remarkably dickheaded yet somehow people try to make excuses for them or pretend it never happened, here is a collection of some of the dickheaded actions we saw in the month of December 2019 to make sure that they are never forgotten.

There’s something wrong with the British electorate when they look at nine years of austerity, massive layoffs in police and NHS staff, outright persecution of the disabled, the country’s economy and standing being completely tanked and housing safety reports being sat on until Grenfell went up and their thought is “I want five more years of that!”

...although nobody should overlook how Liberal Democrat supporters refused to accept any responsibility for the result, in spite their party being directly responsible in handing control of Kensington to the Tories by 150 votes, as well as splitting the votes in Tory marginals Cities of London & Westminster and Finchley & Golders Green

...while Blue Labour crawled out of the woodwork to say the reason why Labour lost was because they weren’t indistinguishable enough from the Tories (which makes so much sense...) while saying the party should have listened to Caroline Flint - the same Caroline Flint who said that Labour should shut up and fall in line with the Tories...and lost her seat as a result

Nothing sums up Laura Kuenssberg better than how, the day before the General Election, she appeared on Politics Live to either blatantly lie about seeing postal votes or casually break electoral law by discussing postal vote results she claims to have seen - which is a direct violation of the The Representation of the People Act 1983

...although with Laura Kuenssberg being Laura Kuenssberg it wasn’t long before yet another example of gross unprofessionalism reared its head when she forgot her job is to report the news and not create it according to her own personal bias when she said history would condemn all Remainers who tried to undo Britait, which not only happens to be a direct violation of the BBC’s editorial guidelines but also betrays a remarkable failure to understand history

...and she was hardly the only example of this, not when Suraj Sharma was putting up anti-Corbyn posters outside polling stations across Merseyside on election day in spite doing so being illegal

It shouldn't surprise anyone that proven liar Boris Johnson broke his election promises within a week of duping the electorate, with him binning off pledges on workers rights, raising minimum wage and taking No Deal off the table - yet somehow the ignorant foghorns defend this by saying something about four legs being good

...soon afterwards proven liar Boris Johnson also reneged on the campaign pledge to raise the national living wage to £10.50 and instead raised it to £8.72 - and of course the BBC tried to spin that as a good thing, crowing about the percentage that it had increased by instead of how the Tories have been pledging that figure since the 2015 election

Smirking halfwit Priti Patel decided she too wanted to exploit the London Bridge attack for political gain and was quick to claim that the laws that saw the attacker released were implemented by a Labour government...in spite the obvious issue that he was released due to laws passed in 2012, i.e. when the Tories were in government and Theresa May was serving as Home Secretary, but that’s not important right now...

...soon afterwards Godfrey Bloom also decided the best course of action was to go on the offensive against the deceased’s family, going so far as to say that as the deceased believed Jihadists should be released early he reaped what he sowed and, by the way, could the deceased’s father pipe down and stop saying nasty things about the Tories

Australians were happy when their Prime Minister Scott Morrison responded to the widespread wildfires torching the country by...not being there as he’d rather bugger off to Hawaii on holiday, and having begrudgingly cut his holiday short his next suggestion was to try and withhold compensation for the volunteer firefighters that were combating what had become the most widespread wildfires in decades

Tory donors Alan Howard and Jeremy Isaacs showed how committed the two are to the party and to Britait by...paying millions of their own money to buy Cypriot passports so they don’t have to leave the EU like the plebs who voted to Leave will have to

It’s not even a surprise that the BBC somehow mutated a story of fact-checkers revealing that 88% of Tory Facebook ads contained lies compared to 0% of Labour’s into a headline saying both parties had been warned about publishing untruths during the campaign as opposed to just one of them

...although ITV were not far behind with their reimagining of Stormzy saying “Yes, 100%” as an answer to the question “Do you think Britain is racist?” into the headline “Stormzy says Britain is ‘100% racist’” which (predictably) got those who get far more riled up by the suggestion that they’re racist than they ever are by the existence of racism to kick off on social media

Nobody was surprised that Allison Pearson responded to the photos of the four year-old boy sleeping on the floor of Leeds General Infirmary was to claim the photos were staged...and being the coward that she is, she played the usual “I was hacked” card as if she doesn’t have a track record for shit like this

Among the wave of inept tactical voting guides The Guardian published the most inept of them all, telling their readers to vote Lib Dem in seats held by pro-Remain Labour MPs - which worked out marvelously in Kensington, didn’t it?

...and right before the year ended Jeremy Gilbert further aided The Guardian’s credentials of not having a clue by writing a hit piece saying that if Labour want to win elections they need to not be Labour, as if Clement Atlee or Harold Wilson didn’t exist - or, more likely with the usual centrist idiocy, the belief that Labour didn’t exist until Tony Blair came along and made them Labour In Name Only

Of course the dogwhistling boneheads would find some excuse to foam at the mouth about Diane Abbott during the election campaign, and this time it was her wearing two different shoes, which begs just one question: “...and?”

In a remarkable act of cowardice Arsenal responded to the Chinese state broadcaster pulling a broadcast of their match of their match against Manchester City due to Mesut Ozil’s criticism of the country’s treatment of Uighur Muslims by...throwing Ozil under the bus and claiming he doesn’t represent the club

In the mind of Patrice Désilets the reason why Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey got remarkably average Metacritic reviews isn’t because the game has a boring gameplay loop and unintuitive controls, but because a couple of reviewers spoke about features that weren’t in the game (although he neglected to say who those reviewers were, as they don’t appear to be on Metacritic) that obviously mean that all reviewers didn’t play the game and just decided to be negative for the sake of it

As if going full Pravda wasn’t reason enough to doubt anything the BBC say ever again, the fact that they ran a story about Cats receiving glowing reviews further showed just how uninterested they are in reporting an actual story compared to their own interpretation of it

When it emerged that Caroline Flack had assaulted her partner by cracking him in the head with a lamp while he was sleeping her response was to come out swinging with a bullish attitude that she wouldn't leave Love Island really worked in her favour...for about a day, until ITV announced she’d been replaced, and it wasn’t as if they had to look too hard for a replacement

It’s the time of year where Kevin Spacey posts a video of him totally in character as Frank Underwood from House of Cards...which was the creepy side of weird last year, but this year weird’s gone out the window

Somebody opened the crypt in which Michael Howard sleeps his eternal slumber, meaning we had to hear him venture his opinion about how judges should not be allowed to use their knowledge or judgment and instead shut up and fall in line with what the government tells them to do

Somehow a story about how Jo Maugham killed a fox in his back garden with a baseball bat while wearing his wife’s silk kimono on Boxing Day morning wasn’t a headline from Guido Blog designed to whip up their readers into indignant and/or ignorant rage, instead something that Jo Maugham himself tweeted on Boxing Day morning having done just that

Of course Tom Watson crawled out the woodwork to say it;s terrible how Labour members hated him...while at no point mentioning his years of backstabbing or how he tried to disqualify Labour members from voting in a leadership election so he could install the centrist option that nobody wanted

Nobody was surprised to see Darren Grimes taking to Twitter to bemoan the lack of funding in public infrastructure in the north...just as nobody was surprised to see the penny clearly hadn’t dropped with him that he was campaigning on behalf of the people who slashed public service infrastructure funding in the north for the past nine years

Hard centre extremist Andrew Adonis thought it was a smart idea to say that Corbynism needs to be “eradicated” from the Labour party.  Just a hint: that’s what Tom Watson thought was a bright idea

It’s one thing for Youtube to play it safe with this year’s Youtube Rewind after last year’s downvote prison romance, but making the 2019 Rewind little more than a WatchMojo list video without the commentary goes beyond playing it safe and into being downright lazy

For a brief moment Giles Coren thought he was Rod Liddle, judging by his Times column where he spoke about Owen Jones getting a peerage and preying on the anal virginity of young researchers

There’s something pathetic about various WWE wrestlers taking to Twitter to mouth off about a badly-performed spot on an episode of AEW Dynamite that can either be explained by them being ordered to tweet that crap out by Vince McMahon or by their suddenly feeling threatened, which only served to make them look like the pro-WWE trolls that howl about everything AEW-related in a manner which stopped being amusing and started being concerning a couple of months ago

And finally, because of course, is Thanos wannabe Donald Trump and his belief that Justin Trudeau is “two-faced” because he said nasty things about the Orange Overlord - but of course, there’s no record of Trump ever saying nasty things about any nation’s leader after pretending to be all buddy-buddy with them

#dickheads of the month

[ocddays-blog]

Political Rant/Response: Written 19th October.

Hi John.

I disagree.

The short answer is: The system is broken, leave it! You will never get more than about 20%-30% of the people to do what you want: basic human psychology, too many vested interests, people stuck in the system etc. Basically as soon as you get any power or influence the drive is to protect the system that got you there, basic catch 22: you only want to change the system when it doesn’t work for you.

The longer answer: Five years ago I was becoming disillusioned with the state of debate and discourse on here. The general lack of critical thinking appalled me. (Due to many factors I’m sure: indoctrination, propaganda by the media, confirmation bias and other human psychology issues) I watched as people I’d once thought of as teachers, gurus, thinkers, went off the rails, or reached a dead end in their thinking, they became stuck or worse discovered conspiracy theories and completely lost the plot. The one that really gets me BTW is chemtrails, I’ve worked in the aviation industry for years, so know the bullshit is strong here – I’m not saying the technology doesn’t exist BTW, there’s just much easier ways to poison masses of people – sorry I digress … I joined council tax evasion groups after the bank bailouts when I found out about global financial structures and realised the criminality there – soon the nutters and conspiracy theorists took these groups over too – or possibly MI5 infiltration, you can never tell these days. I despaired at my left-leaning friends who should know better as they mocked the right, and the right as they mocked at the left. They all have some valid points to make and if they could stop being so outraged at the others point of views for a minute they might learn something. I joined the labour party, then left it when Corbyn didn’t get his MPs to vote for proportional representation when he had the chance. First past the post is inherently undemocratic, unfortunately those with the power to change it (Labour and the Tories) survive because of it – that catch 22 again. I joined the liberals when I met my local ex Liberal Democrat MP (who is wonderful) and went door to door with her, applied to become a councillor. Became disillusioned again when I realised just how corrupt and ineffectual local government is.

The system is completely broken (the real threat to the planet is global warming and who the fuck is doing anything serious about that?) and those at the so-called top are as much part of it and controlled by it and those at the bottom. They might be better off financially and have more power but are they really happy? Do the Tories or Labour MPs look happy to you? Do the rich seem happy to you? Some do obviously, but most I meet and see in the media seem more miserable and bitter than any of us.

The conclusion I’ve come to is that the system cannot be fixed, not practically anyway. So the only viable option is to leave it and encourage others to do the same. This used to be impossible, but fortunately we now have some tools to do this. (Whether these will stay within our power only time will tell). For example we have Bitcoin, we have the dark web, and we have a growing consciousness that there is really a problem with the current systems. Let those stuck in the old ways fight over the decreasing scraps at the table and let’s forge a new path is my advice! So channel your energies into leaving the system behind… And bring as many with you as possible, join the glorious revolution, John. Come with us … Or get stoned put your feet up and watch the world burn, that’s another option of course. The planet will be fine; aesthetically it’ll be a mess for a while, but eventually things will settle and we can get down to worshipping our new Cockroachian leaders.

#dailywriting #daily writing

[johnclapperne]

{#TransparentTuesday} Why Do We Still Need Feminism?

A man recently found out that I, the completely normal-looking and friendly young woman he had been chatting with, was a feminist.

This must have really shaken him up (I assume he’d never met one of us IRL before), because his next question was:

So you think women should be superior to men?

Naturally my first response was to assume he was kidding and laugh. Because… wut?

But no. This man was deadass serious. I have no idea what kind of people he had been exposed to, but he was completely under the impression that, since gender inequality no longer exists, feminists are trying to oppress men so that we can run the world.

The interesting thing was that this man really believes that since women are paid the same as men (false lol) and we can vote and own land now, so basically… any woman who feels oppressed at this point is just playing the victim card and want everything to be handed to them.

He also seemed to feel very strongly that identifying our movement according to gender is just “divisive” and that we should be focusing on “walking together” rather than “pitting ourselves against the good men trying to help us.”

Sigh.

Anyway, after this conversation turned sour, I got to thinking. Not about him, because he had nothing to offer but privileged nonsense, but about some of the beliefs we was spouting. I hear echoes of his views all the time, from good people who are genuinely struggling to understand why is feminism still a thing again…?

It’s very easy for people (aka people who aren’t actually reading feminist texts or following feminist leaders) to completely misunderstand the goal of feminism. They hear bits and pieces from snarky and inaccurate third-party sources like FOX news or whatever, and come away with the belief that feminism seems stupid, dangerous, or unnecessary.

If you frame it like “women whining about injustice instead of doing something about it” or “women wanting to oppress men,” then yeah, the whole thing is pretty unlikeable. Duh– that’s why so many anti-progressive (right-wing) sources spin it that way!

But those views are based on nothing more than malevolent gossip; a smear campaign designed to invalidate a movement that causes trouble for people who want to maintain the status quo.

That’s why I decided to set a few facts straight, and tackle some basic shit about what I’m fighting for when I say I’m a feminist. Obviously this is a much bigger topic than one essay’s worth, but I’ll do my best.

Q: Why do we still need feminism?

A: Because there is still gender inequality. There is still sexism, and discrimination based on gender, sexuality, and gender presentation. There is still exploitation and oppression based on gender.

Q: What is the goal of feminism?

A: There are many serious legislative and structural issues at the core of the feminist movement, like fighting for access to full reproductive health care and rights, access to affordable and high quality child-care options and paid family leave, an end to sexual exploitation and human trafficking, and fighting for better representation in media/entertainment as well as a more equal percentage of women in elected office, CEO positions, leadership positions.

Not to mention of course the right to not be sexually harassed/assaulted/raped, the right to not experience domestic violence, and equal pay for equal work. Oh, and the right to be LGBTQ or transgender without the barrage of violent and marginalizing fuckery that currently comes with that.

Note: It’s also important to acknowledge the intersections of oppression that cross categories such as race, ability, class, age, weight, etc. Intersectional feminism is about recognizing and fighting the various intersecting systems of power that marginalize and oppress people, because a black woman’s experience is completely different than a white woman’s experience, and a fat woman’s experience is completely different than a thin woman’s experience.

I wish I had more time to tackle the complicated intersectional landscape, but for the purpose of this essay, feminism’s goal is simply to end sexism, gender inequality, and gender bias.

Q: Who is the enemy of feminism?

A: Spoiler alert: it’s not men! Feminism is not anti man. Again, we’re just anti-sexism, anti-discrimination, anti-oppression, and anti-exploitation. The “enemy” is sexism, discrimination based on gender and sexuality, and gender inequality.

Q: What do you mean by sexism and gender inequality?

A: If you’ve never personally experienced gender or sexism inequality, they can be completely invisible.

Wikipedia says:

“Gender inequality refers to unequal treatment or perceptions of individuals wholly or partly due to their gender. It arises from differences in gender roles.”

So here’s the deal: Our culture is obsessed with gender differentiation. Before a baby is even born, we are consumed by the desire to categorize them based on their genitals (which is super creepy if you think about it), and we wrongly identify both sex and gender on a binary. You get to be just one of the two options, and anyone who doesn’t fit into one of those has to just pick whichever is “closest.”

Interestingly, intersex people are born all the time with a variety of unique reproductive organs and genitals that make it hard for them to check the box of either “boy” or “girl.” These people are often surgically altered at birth to make them fit whichever box is most convenient.

Isn’t that pretty fucked up? Like… we have a binary system and these babies don’t fit in with it, so we cut their bodies until they do. Oh, and in case you think this is a super rare occurrence, it’s not: intesex people are born at about the same rate as redheads.

Ok, so I take issue with the way our culture fetishes sex and gender right out the gate, and forces everyone to choose a binary option, but from there it only gets worse! Due to our obsession with gender, we shove gendered clothing, toys, and treatment on our children.

Our implicit gender biases (aka: biases that are below the level of consciousness) get passed on when we praise little girls for being cute, nice, pretty, and well-behaved, and we praise little boys for being smart, strong, fast, and clever. They get passed on when we buy our girls dolls and our boys trucks. They get passed on when we permit our boys to be aggressive and wild, but shame our girls for the same. They get passed on when we permit our girls to be sensitive and emotional, but shame our boys for the same. They get passed on when we put our little girls in dresses that limit movement and have no pockets, teaching her that her body is for looking at, not for doing stuff.

In short, we socialize our children to see their gender as the most fundamental part of their identity, and we teach them how to appropriately perform their gender so that they fit in with our sexist ideas of what gender should be.

It doesn’t get better from there though.

The perceptions we hold of each gender get stronger throughout a person’s life, and we chalk it all up to biology rather than the way we socialize children since before they’re born.

We perceive men as better at math and driving. We perceive women as better at nurturing and childcare. We see men as smart, and women as social. We assume men are better leaders, and women are better at domestic skills. We take for granted that men love sports and women, while women love shopping and makeup. We unconsciously believe men need to feel like useful providers, while women need to feel beautiful and desirable.

In short, most of us internalize the performance of gender that we got stuck with based on our genitals at birth, and apply it both to ourselves and to everyone else. We know that people who break the rules are severely punished and marginalized. Think: a feminine gay man who spends his entire life being shamed for not being “manly” enough, or the way a woman is slut-shamed and victim-blamed if she tempted a helpless man into assaulting her.

We all have implicit gender biases, and women and non-conforming gender individuals get the short end of the stick. Both men and women view men (especially tall, white, conventionally masculine men) as more trustworthy and competent, for example, so it starts to feel completely natural that they hold more positions of leadership, and make more money, and otherwise rule the world.

When we talk about living in a patriarchy, it simply means that this culture was historically built by men, for men, and most of us still view this as the natural order of things due to implicit gender biases that we keep passing on to our children. The patriarchy determines who is suitable for which job positions, who is believable in a trial, who gets access to bodily autonomy, and whose problems matter most.

Q: But… what about biology?

A: Many people really, really want to believe that men and women are each naturally drawn to all the gender roles and gender performance we shove on them, and they use “biology!” to defend their gender-obsessed actions.

First of all, I certainly recognize that there are some inherent differences between men and women beyond genitals, but it’s very difficult to tell the difference between which is nature and which is nurture when it comes to gender. Socialization is powerful shit, and we don’t have a gender-blind control group to see what would happen. (Trust me, I dream of this world often.)

That said, I feel like… if it’s really biology, then nobody should have a problem with us fighting the gender-based socialization. Because that would mean that even without teaching girls to be sexual objects and people-pleasers, they would become that way anyway! And even without teaching boys to feel entitled to women’s attention and bodies, or to repress all of their feelings except anger, that they would become violent, stoic, and emotionally stunted anyway!

I mean really, if biology is so strong, nothing would change if we stopped shoving gender performances down everyone’s throat. So maybe just let us try?

Most importantly though, using the “biology!” response is very rude, because if biology explained all of our gender biases and performances, then we wouldn’t have a feminism movement because nobody would be bothered by anything. But people are, well… bothered.

It’s kinda like how we used to think women weren’t capable of voting, owning land, having jobs, running a mile, being fulfilled without children, or anything else. They used to cry “biology!” to that shit too, and we’ve slowly proved it allllll wrong. When I hear the biology argument, what I hear is that you simply don’t want things to change because the status quo is working for you.

Q: Why do we need to talk so divisively about gender, why can’t we just focus on coming together as humans?

A: It has to be about gender because it’s already about gender. This question, though usually well-intentioned, would be like asking your doctor: why does my treatment have to be all about cancer? Well… because you have cancer, my friend. It would be silly to treat you as if you didn’t have cancer, just because cancer makes you uncomfortable, right? Yeah. That.

When gender is no longer a divisive issue, we’ll stop treating it like one.

But gender determines how people are treated and perceived, what life chances and opportunities they’ll get, what standards they’ll be held to, and how they’ll be encouraged to view their role and identity.

This isn’t healthy for anyone of any gender, but women and non-gender-conforming individuals are disproportionately negatively impacted by both implicit and explicit biases, discrimination, exploitation, and marginalization.

This is why we fight, my friends.

Whew.

Happy Tuesday.

<3 Jessi

The post {#TransparentTuesday} Why Do We Still Need Feminism? appeared first on Jessi Kneeland.

https://ift.tt/2zMzN36

#{TransparentTuesday} Why Do We Still Need Feminism?

[ruthellisneda]

{#TransparentTuesday} Why Do We Still Need Feminism?

A man recently found out that I, the completely normal-looking and friendly young woman he had been chatting with, was a feminist.

This must have really shaken him up (I assume he’d never met one of us IRL before), because his next question was:

So you think women should be superior to men?

Naturally my first response was to assume he was kidding and laugh. Because… wut?

But no. This man was deadass serious. I have no idea what kind of people he had been exposed to, but he was completely under the impression that, since gender inequality no longer exists, feminists are trying to oppress men so that we can run the world.

The interesting thing was that this man really believes that since women are paid the same as men (false lol) and we can vote and own land now, so basically… any woman who feels oppressed at this point is just playing the victim card and want everything to be handed to them.

He also seemed to feel very strongly that identifying our movement according to gender is just “divisive” and that we should be focusing on “walking together” rather than “pitting ourselves against the good men trying to help us.”

Sigh.

Anyway, after this conversation turned sour, I got to thinking. Not about him, because he had nothing to offer but privileged nonsense, but about some of the beliefs we was spouting. I hear echoes of his views all the time, from good people who are genuinely struggling to understand why is feminism still a thing again…?

It’s very easy for people (aka people who aren’t actually reading feminist texts or following feminist leaders) to completely misunderstand the goal of feminism. They hear bits and pieces from snarky and inaccurate third-party sources like FOX news or whatever, and come away with the belief that feminism seems stupid, dangerous, or unnecessary.

If you frame it like “women whining about injustice instead of doing something about it” or “women wanting to oppress men,” then yeah, the whole thing is pretty unlikeable. Duh– that’s why so many anti-progressive (right-wing) sources spin it that way!

But those views are based on nothing more than malevolent gossip; a smear campaign designed to invalidate a movement that causes trouble for people who want to maintain the status quo.

That’s why I decided to set a few facts straight, and tackle some basic shit about what I’m fighting for when I say I’m a feminist. Obviously this is a much bigger topic than one essay’s worth, but I’ll do my best.

Q: Why do we still need feminism?

A: Because there is still gender inequality. There is still sexism, and discrimination based on gender, sexuality, and gender presentation. There is still exploitation and oppression based on gender.

Q: What is the goal of feminism?

A: There are many serious legislative and structural issues at the core of the feminist movement, like fighting for access to full reproductive health care and rights, access to affordable and high quality child-care options and paid family leave, an end to sexual exploitation and human trafficking, and fighting for better representation in media/entertainment as well as a more equal percentage of women in elected office, CEO positions, leadership positions.

Not to mention of course the right to not be sexually harassed/assaulted/raped, the right to not experience domestic violence, and equal pay for equal work. Oh, and the right to be LGBTQ or transgender without the barrage of violent and marginalizing fuckery that currently comes with that.

Note: It’s also important to acknowledge the intersections of oppression that cross categories such as race, ability, class, age, weight, etc. Intersectional feminism is about recognizing and fighting the various intersecting systems of power that marginalize and oppress people, because a black woman’s experience is completely different than a white woman’s experience, and a fat woman’s experience is completely different than a thin woman’s experience.

I wish I had more time to tackle the complicated intersectional landscape, but for the purpose of this essay, feminism’s goal is simply to end sexism, gender inequality, and gender bias.

Q: Who is the enemy of feminism?

A: Spoiler alert: it’s not men! Feminism is not anti man. Again, we’re just anti-sexism, anti-discrimination, anti-oppression, and anti-exploitation. The “enemy” is sexism, discrimination based on gender and sexuality, and gender inequality.

Q: What do you mean by sexism and gender inequality?

A: If you’ve never personally experienced gender or sexism inequality, they can be completely invisible.

Wikipedia says:

“Gender inequality refers to unequal treatment or perceptions of individuals wholly or partly due to their gender. It arises from differences in gender roles.”

So here’s the deal: Our culture is obsessed with gender differentiation. Before a baby is even born, we are consumed by the desire to categorize them based on their genitals (which is super creepy if you think about it), and we wrongly identify both sex and gender on a binary. You get to be just one of the two options, and anyone who doesn’t fit into one of those has to just pick whichever is “closest.”

Interestingly, intersex people are born all the time with a variety of unique reproductive organs and genitals that make it hard for them to check the box of either “boy” or “girl.” These people are often surgically altered at birth to make them fit whichever box is most convenient.

Isn’t that pretty fucked up? Like… we have a binary system and these babies don’t fit in with it, so we cut their bodies until they do. Oh, and in case you think this is a super rare occurrence, it’s not: intesex people are born at about the same rate as redheads.

Ok, so I take issue with the way our culture fetishes sex and gender right out the gate, and forces everyone to choose a binary option, but from there it only gets worse! Due to our obsession with gender, we shove gendered clothing, toys, and treatment on our children.

Our implicit gender biases (aka: biases that are below the level of consciousness) get passed on when we praise little girls for being cute, nice, pretty, and well-behaved, and we praise little boys for being smart, strong, fast, and clever. They get passed on when we buy our girls dolls and our boys trucks. They get passed on when we permit our boys to be aggressive and wild, but shame our girls for the same. They get passed on when we permit our girls to be sensitive and emotional, but shame our boys for the same. They get passed on when we put our little girls in dresses that limit movement and have no pockets, teaching her that her body is for looking at, not for doing stuff.

In short, we socialize our children to see their gender as the most fundamental part of their identity, and we teach them how to appropriately perform their gender so that they fit in with our sexist ideas of what gender should be.

It doesn’t get better from there though.

The perceptions we hold of each gender get stronger throughout a person’s life, and we chalk it all up to biology rather than the way we socialize children since before they’re born.

We perceive men as better at math and driving. We perceive women as better at nurturing and childcare. We see men as smart, and women as social. We assume men are better leaders, and women are better at domestic skills. We take for granted that men love sports and women, while women love shopping and makeup. We unconsciously believe men need to feel like useful providers, while women need to feel beautiful and desirable.

In short, most of us internalize the performance of gender that we got stuck with based on our genitals at birth, and apply it both to ourselves and to everyone else. We know that people who break the rules are severely punished and marginalized. Think: a feminine gay man who spends his entire life being shamed for not being “manly” enough, or the way a woman is slut-shamed and victim-blamed if she tempted a helpless man into assaulting her.

We all have implicit gender biases, and women and non-conforming gender individuals get the short end of the stick. Both men and women view men (especially tall, white, conventionally masculine men) as more trustworthy and competent, for example, so it starts to feel completely natural that they hold more positions of leadership, and make more money, and otherwise rule the world.

When we talk about living in a patriarchy, it simply means that this culture was historically built by men, for men, and most of us still view this as the natural order of things due to implicit gender biases that we keep passing on to our children. The patriarchy determines who is suitable for which job positions, who is believable in a trial, who gets access to bodily autonomy, and whose problems matter most.

Q: But… what about biology?

A: Many people really, really want to believe that men and women are each naturally drawn to all the gender roles and gender performance we shove on them, and they use “biology!” to defend their gender-obsessed actions.

First of all, I certainly recognize that there are some inherent differences between men and women beyond genitals, but it’s very difficult to tell the difference between which is nature and which is nurture when it comes to gender. Socialization is powerful shit, and we don’t have a gender-blind control group to see what would happen. (Trust me, I dream of this world often.)

That said, I feel like… if it’s really biology, then nobody should have a problem with us fighting the gender-based socialization. Because that would mean that even without teaching girls to be sexual objects and people-pleasers, they would become that way anyway! And even without teaching boys to feel entitled to women’s attention and bodies, or to repress all of their feelings except anger, that they would become violent, stoic, and emotionally stunted anyway!

I mean really, if biology is so strong, nothing would change if we stopped shoving gender performances down everyone’s throat. So maybe just let us try?

Most importantly though, using the “biology!” response is very rude, because if biology explained all of our gender biases and performances, then we wouldn’t have a feminism movement because nobody would be bothered by anything. But people are, well… bothered.

It’s kinda like how we used to think women weren’t capable of voting, owning land, having jobs, running a mile, being fulfilled without children, or anything else. They used to cry “biology!” to that shit too, and we’ve slowly proved it allllll wrong. When I hear the biology argument, what I hear is that you simply don’t want things to change because the status quo is working for you.

Q: Why do we need to talk so divisively about gender, why can’t we just focus on coming together as humans?

A: It has to be about gender because it’s already about gender. This question, though usually well-intentioned, would be like asking your doctor: why does my treatment have to be all about cancer? Well… because you have cancer, my friend. It would be silly to treat you as if you didn’t have cancer, just because cancer makes you uncomfortable, right? Yeah. That.

When gender is no longer a divisive issue, we’ll stop treating it like one.

But gender determines how people are treated and perceived, what life chances and opportunities they’ll get, what standards they’ll be held to, and how they’ll be encouraged to view their role and identity.

This isn’t healthy for anyone of any gender, but women and non-gender-conforming individuals are disproportionately negatively impacted by both implicit and explicit biases, discrimination, exploitation, and marginalization.

This is why we fight, my friends.

Whew.

Happy Tuesday.

<3 Jessi

The post {#TransparentTuesday} Why Do We Still Need Feminism? appeared first on Jessi Kneeland.

https://ift.tt/2zMzN36

#{TransparentTuesday} Why Do We Still Need Feminism?

[joshuabradleyn]

{#TransparentTuesday} Why Do We Still Need Feminism?

A man recently found out that I, the completely normal-looking and friendly young woman he had been chatting with, was a feminist.

This must have really shaken him up (I assume he’d never met one of us IRL before), because his next question was:

So you think women should be superior to men?

Naturally my first response was to assume he was kidding and laugh. Because… wut?

But no. This man was deadass serious. I have no idea what kind of people he had been exposed to, but he was completely under the impression that, since gender inequality no longer exists, feminists are trying to oppress men so that we can run the world.

The interesting thing was that this man really believes that since women are paid the same as men (false lol) and we can vote and own land now, so basically… any woman who feels oppressed at this point is just playing the victim card and want everything to be handed to them.

He also seemed to feel very strongly that identifying our movement according to gender is just “divisive” and that we should be focusing on “walking together” rather than “pitting ourselves against the good men trying to help us.”

Sigh.

Anyway, after this conversation turned sour, I got to thinking. Not about him, because he had nothing to offer but privileged nonsense, but about some of the beliefs we was spouting. I hear echoes of his views all the time, from good people who are genuinely struggling to understand why is feminism still a thing again…?

It’s very easy for people (aka people who aren’t actually reading feminist texts or following feminist leaders) to completely misunderstand the goal of feminism. They hear bits and pieces from snarky and inaccurate third-party sources like FOX news or whatever, and come away with the belief that feminism seems stupid, dangerous, or unnecessary.

If you frame it like “women whining about injustice instead of doing something about it” or “women wanting to oppress men,” then yeah, the whole thing is pretty unlikeable. Duh– that’s why so many anti-progressive (right-wing) sources spin it that way!

But those views are based on nothing more than malevolent gossip; a smear campaign designed to invalidate a movement that causes trouble for people who want to maintain the status quo.

That’s why I decided to set a few facts straight, and tackle some basic shit about what I’m fighting for when I say I’m a feminist. Obviously this is a much bigger topic than one essay’s worth, but I’ll do my best.

Q: Why do we still need feminism?

A: Because there is still gender inequality. There is still sexism, and discrimination based on gender, sexuality, and gender presentation. There is still exploitation and oppression based on gender.

Q: What is the goal of feminism?

A: There are many serious legislative and structural issues at the core of the feminist movement, like fighting for access to full reproductive health care and rights, access to affordable and high quality child-care options and paid family leave, an end to sexual exploitation and human trafficking, and fighting for better representation in media/entertainment as well as a more equal percentage of women in elected office, CEO positions, leadership positions.

Not to mention of course the right to not be sexually harassed/assaulted/raped, the right to not experience domestic violence, and equal pay for equal work. Oh, and the right to be LGBTQ or transgender without the barrage of violent and marginalizing fuckery that currently comes with that.

Note: It’s also important to acknowledge the intersections of oppression that cross categories such as race, ability, class, age, weight, etc. Intersectional feminism is about recognizing and fighting the various intersecting systems of power that marginalize and oppress people, because a black woman’s experience is completely different than a white woman’s experience, and a fat woman’s experience is completely different than a thin woman’s experience.

I wish I had more time to tackle the complicated intersectional landscape, but for the purpose of this essay, feminism’s goal is simply to end sexism, gender inequality, and gender bias.

Q: Who is the enemy of feminism?

A: Spoiler alert: it’s not men! Feminism is not anti man. Again, we’re just anti-sexism, anti-discrimination, anti-oppression, and anti-exploitation. The “enemy” is sexism, discrimination based on gender and sexuality, and gender inequality.

Q: What do you mean by sexism and gender inequality?

A: If you’ve never personally experienced gender or sexism inequality, they can be completely invisible.

Wikipedia says:

“Gender inequality refers to unequal treatment or perceptions of individuals wholly or partly due to their gender. It arises from differences in gender roles.”

So here’s the deal: Our culture is obsessed with gender differentiation. Before a baby is even born, we are consumed by the desire to categorize them based on their genitals (which is super creepy if you think about it), and we wrongly identify both sex and gender on a binary. You get to be just one of the two options, and anyone who doesn’t fit into one of those has to just pick whichever is “closest.”

Interestingly, intersex people are born all the time with a variety of unique reproductive organs and genitals that make it hard for them to check the box of either “boy” or “girl.” These people are often surgically altered at birth to make them fit whichever box is most convenient.

Isn’t that pretty fucked up? Like… we have a binary system and these babies don’t fit in with it, so we cut their bodies until they do. Oh, and in case you think this is a super rare occurrence, it’s not: intesex people are born at about the same rate as redheads.

Ok, so I take issue with the way our culture fetishes sex and gender right out the gate, and forces everyone to choose a binary option, but from there it only gets worse! Due to our obsession with gender, we shove gendered clothing, toys, and treatment on our children.

Our implicit gender biases (aka: biases that are below the level of consciousness) get passed on when we praise little girls for being cute, nice, pretty, and well-behaved, and we praise little boys for being smart, strong, fast, and clever. They get passed on when we buy our girls dolls and our boys trucks. They get passed on when we permit our boys to be aggressive and wild, but shame our girls for the same. They get passed on when we permit our girls to be sensitive and emotional, but shame our boys for the same. They get passed on when we put our little girls in dresses that limit movement and have no pockets, teaching her that her body is for looking at, not for doing stuff.

In short, we socialize our children to see their gender as the most fundamental part of their identity, and we teach them how to appropriately perform their gender so that they fit in with our sexist ideas of what gender should be.

It doesn’t get better from there though.

The perceptions we hold of each gender get stronger throughout a person’s life, and we chalk it all up to biology rather than the way we socialize children since before they’re born.

We perceive men as better at math and driving. We perceive women as better at nurturing and childcare. We see men as smart, and women as social. We assume men are better leaders, and women are better at domestic skills. We take for granted that men love sports and women, while women love shopping and makeup. We unconsciously believe men need to feel like useful providers, while women need to feel beautiful and desirable.

In short, most of us internalize the performance of gender that we got stuck with based on our genitals at birth, and apply it both to ourselves and to everyone else. We know that people who break the rules are severely punished and marginalized. Think: a feminine gay man who spends his entire life being shamed for not being “manly” enough, or the way a woman is slut-shamed and victim-blamed if she tempted a helpless man into assaulting her.

We all have implicit gender biases, and women and non-conforming gender individuals get the short end of the stick. Both men and women view men (especially tall, white, conventionally masculine men) as more trustworthy and competent, for example, so it starts to feel completely natural that they hold more positions of leadership, and make more money, and otherwise rule the world.

When we talk about living in a patriarchy, it simply means that this culture was historically built by men, for men, and most of us still view this as the natural order of things due to implicit gender biases that we keep passing on to our children. The patriarchy determines who is suitable for which job positions, who is believable in a trial, who gets access to bodily autonomy, and whose problems matter most.

Q: But… what about biology?

A: Many people really, really want to believe that men and women are each naturally drawn to all the gender roles and gender performance we shove on them, and they use “biology!” to defend their gender-obsessed actions.

First of all, I certainly recognize that there are some inherent differences between men and women beyond genitals, but it’s very difficult to tell the difference between which is nature and which is nurture when it comes to gender. Socialization is powerful shit, and we don’t have a gender-blind control group to see what would happen. (Trust me, I dream of this world often.)

That said, I feel like… if it’s really biology, then nobody should have a problem with us fighting the gender-based socialization. Because that would mean that even without teaching girls to be sexual objects and people-pleasers, they would become that way anyway! And even without teaching boys to feel entitled to women’s attention and bodies, or to repress all of their feelings except anger, that they would become violent, stoic, and emotionally stunted anyway!

I mean really, if biology is so strong, nothing would change if we stopped shoving gender performances down everyone’s throat. So maybe just let us try?

Most importantly though, using the “biology!” response is very rude, because if biology explained all of our gender biases and performances, then we wouldn’t have a feminism movement because nobody would be bothered by anything. But people are, well… bothered.

It’s kinda like how we used to think women weren’t capable of voting, owning land, having jobs, running a mile, being fulfilled without children, or anything else. They used to cry “biology!” to that shit too, and we’ve slowly proved it allllll wrong. When I hear the biology argument, what I hear is that you simply don’t want things to change because the status quo is working for you.

Q: Why do we need to talk so divisively about gender, why can’t we just focus on coming together as humans?

A: It has to be about gender because it’s already about gender. This question, though usually well-intentioned, would be like asking your doctor: why does my treatment have to be all about cancer? Well… because you have cancer, my friend. It would be silly to treat you as if you didn’t have cancer, just because cancer makes you uncomfortable, right? Yeah. That.

When gender is no longer a divisive issue, we’ll stop treating it like one.

But gender determines how people are treated and perceived, what life chances and opportunities they’ll get, what standards they’ll be held to, and how they’ll be encouraged to view their role and identity.

This isn’t healthy for anyone of any gender, but women and non-gender-conforming individuals are disproportionately negatively impacted by both implicit and explicit biases, discrimination, exploitation, and marginalization.

This is why we fight, my friends.

Whew.

Happy Tuesday.

<3 Jessi

The post {#TransparentTuesday} Why Do We Still Need Feminism? appeared first on Jessi Kneeland.

https://ift.tt/2zMzN36

#{TransparentTuesday} Why Do We Still Need Feminism?

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s weekly politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

micah (Micah Cohen, politics editor): Welcome, all! Our topic for today: President Trump’s endorsement of Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore. (And the Republican National Committee decision to support him again.) My question is … what gives? Is this a political mistake?

First, takes?

harry (Harry Enten, senior political writer): I think it’s a stupid move. Trump is clearly trying to score a “win,” but it’s far from certain that Moore will get him one. All that’s happened in that case is that he’s endorsed an accused child molester.

julia_azari (Julia Azari, political science professor at Marquette University and FiveThirtyEight contributor): It’s not … not a mistake. It likely won’t substantially change anything, but it’s hard to see what good it could do for the president or Moore.

natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): Trump coming out to endorse Moore is extremely … unsurprising. And, yeah, I don’t think it will change very much.

julia_azari: I don’t mean to underestimate the moral outrage at stake. It’s just not clear to me that moral outrage outweighs many other factors in contemporary politics.

harry: I guess my question is: What is it that made Trump go from mostly endorsing Moore — essentially by attacking his opponent, Democrat Doug Jones — to fully endorsing him. Why do that?

natesilver: Have you ever known Donald Trump to take a half-measure? Everything plays out into the most extreme possible version of itself.

micah: He may have half-colluded?

harry: LOL.

natesilver: The collusion was spectacular, I’ll tell you that much.

harry: He ordered the code red!

micah: You’re goddamn right I did!

julia_azari: So the “I hate political correctness” narrative seems to have worked out well for Trump in general. I wonder if he thinks this can be filed under that somehow — i.e., liberals are going after someone for accusations that either didn’t happen, or were a long time ago, or weren’t as bad as they sound (to gather up a range of talking points made in Moore’s defense).

micah: Yeah, I buy that.

Supporting Moore fits snuggly into Trump’s larger message and image.

natesilver: It might also be more personal than that:

If Moore wins, I wonder if Trump would instinctually come out against expelling him because he'd see it as foreshadowing an impeachment proceeding.

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 15, 2017

And Trump might see himself as being unfairly attacked by the liberal media, just as Moore has been.

micah: No self-tweet-quoting allowed here.

julia_azari: Dammit. I saw Nate’s move there as an entree into quoting my own favorite takes of mine.

micah: LOL.

harry: I was reading this great book … “The Signal and the Noise.” Perhaps you’ve heard of it?

natesilver: Now available for just $9.99 on Amazon dot com.

micah: OK, so Nate and I had an argument about this the other day, but how about this theory: Trump moved to a full-throated Moore endorsement because he has internal polling that shows Moore’s lead increasing and so wants to hop on the bandwagon.

Any takers?

natesilver: Oh god.

julia_azari: It’s nice and simple, so that’s a point in favor.

natesilver: That line of thinking is like always wrong. If people start talking about Moore’s internal polls, I’m going to bet heavily on Jones, and vice versa. Also, the public polling tells a fairly confusing story.

The Emerson College poll showed the race moving slightly toward Jones, although Emerson has been on the Moore-leaning side of the consensus recently. And the Gravis Marketing poll showed essentially no movement and Jones still ahead.

julia_azari: When coming up with explanations like these, I tend to think the one with the fewest assumptions that we can’t really prove is the best one.

harry: Trump is likely looking at public polling. So it’s simple, and I like it.

natesilver: The simplest answer is that Trump supports Moore because birds of a feather flock together. And then the RNC backtracked so as to stay on the same page as Trump. Also, the GOP brand was already going to take the PR hit once Trump endorsed Moore, so why not drop a few bucks on him?

harry: If they’re so similar, then why in the heck did Trump not endorse him in the primary? Honest question.

natesilver: Endorsing Luther Strange was one of the most out-of-character things Trump has done.

And he might have felt a little burned by the experience when Strange lost.

julia_azari: The Strange endorsement was … please stop me before I make the joke.

harry: Haha.

julia_azari: I’m not sure how to say this politely, but I think Strange sucked up to Trump effectively and that explains the endorsement.

natesilver: Or maybe Mitch McConnell convinced Trump that Strange was a key vote on health care and taxes (which is not a totally crazy notion).

But, anyway, I think the media has a pretty big bias toward seeing all actions as deeply strategic. When sometimes, it’s just Trump mashing buttons and everyone else playing cleanup.

micah: So, do you think Trump or Republicans will pay a political price for supporting Moore?

julia_azari: It’s hard to see the case for a big short-term impact. There’s already a significant gender gap in the national vote. And there’s so much news, including many sexual misconduct revelations on the other side of the political spectrum, that it is easy for things to be drowned out.

micah: Yeah … that seems right to me.

Anyone want to make the case that this endorsement hurts Trump and/or Republicans?

julia_azari: I will say that presidents getting involved in congressional elections rarely goes well or adds anything

micah: Say more!

julia_azari:

1. It’s kind of a norm violation, although that norm is eroding. (See my piece about FDR from last week.) Congress is a distinct and co-equal branch.

This race is messy for Republicans (see my piece about their lack of good options for dealing with Moore), and as Nate has pointed out, Moore has lost a lot of support in a very solidly red state. Why highlight the party connection as Trump has?

Relatedly, it illustrates just how nationalized party politics are. That offers some advantages for presidents, who get to set the agenda for their parties. But if members of Congress are always running with the party’s national brand on their backs, it washes away some of their independence — their distinct, district-based political support because of relationships they have there.

I don’t think Trump endorsing Moore is a huge turning point for that phenomenon, but it doesn’t do anything to enhance the independence of Congress.

natesilver: It’s also one of a large number of factors that could have a drip, drip, drip effect on the Republican Party brand. And there’s some precedent for this sort of thing mattering, e.g. with Mark Foley. With that said, it’s going to be pretty hard to pick out the effect of Moore from everything else.

And seeming Democratic hypocrisy on Sen. Al Franken and Rep. John Conyers might dull the effect some.

micah: OK, so … speaking of Conyers. He announced on Tuesday that he’s resigning (well, sorta). Does that put the Trump endorsement in a different political light? Or does it help Democrats have a sharper, more coherent message on this issue?

julia_azari: I don’t know. That Nancy Pelosi clip (in which she called Conyers an icon when asked about the allegations against him) might be forever.

harry: Well, there’s still the Franken situation and the initial response to Conyers, but … what a contrast. On back-to-back days, you get the president endorsing Moore and Conyers being essentially forced to resign.

natesilver: Yeah, part of my critique of how Democrats handled the issue is that it felt like the discussion had reached an inflection point when the Franken accusations hit, and Democrats had an opportunity to claim the moral high ground, which they declined to take.

You can attempt to regain the moral high ground, I guess, but it isn’t as easy as keeping it in the first place.

We’ll see if there’s renewed pressure on Franken to step down, though.

micah: And the moral high ground matters, obviously, but does it matter politically?

julia_azari: ^ strong candidate for the 2017-est sentence ever.

But of course, Democrats — including prominent feminists — didn’t take a hardline with Bill Clinton back in the 1990s. As long as these misconduct cases are treated as individual problems, I think the broader political agendas will prevail.

micah: Wait, so imagine a world where Democrats have forced out both Franken and Conyers. Is the party better off in that world?

I’m trying to get at whether the moral high ground is important politically? Whether message coherence matters, basically.

harry: I don’t think they’re worse off.

natesilver: I think Democrats made a political mistake, yes.

micah: Nate, you’re not explaining how the mistake hurts them.

natesilver: Because they look like fucking hypocrites, that’s how.

harry: ANGRY NATE SMASH.

natesilver: And looking like hypocrites makes it easy for a Republican to default to partisanship in rationalizing a vote for Moore.

Or Trump for that matter.

micah: Couldn’t I argue that the default to partisanship is so strong that it would happen anyway? So why play by a different set of rules?

julia_azari: I can see both sides of this — to the degree that Democrats lose out politically because of an “enthusiasm gap” or a decline in support from people to whom consistency is important, I could see a case for this mattering on the margins.

Because a lot is happening on the margins now. (Because the country is closely divided.)

But mostly I assume that partisanship matters and the state of the economy matters and the duration of incumbency matters. Racial attitudes matter.

Everything else has a high burden of proof with me.

natesilver: For one thing, Micah, the Democrats are supposed to be the “woke” party on treatment of women (and good for them). So they look more hypocritical if one of their members abuses or harasses women, in somewhat the same way that an anti-gay-marriage Republican would look more hypocritical than a liberal (ostensibly straight) Democrat if they had a gay affair.

micah: You can tell Nate is mad when he uses my name in his response.

julia_azari: So I’m also certainly angry at the situation. It would be nice to think at least one party had consistency on this issue. And as a woman in a male-dominated field, yup.

harry: I tend to think about politics in this way: When you can do something that is morally correct and isn’t going to hurt you politically, why not do it? What’s the argument for keeping Conyers and Franken around?

julia_azari: But Democrats have consistently been inconsistent, and this has included women.

I’m getting into territory that’s not quite my expertise, but I’ve thought a lot about this lately. I think the answer to Harry’s excellent question is that the assumptions about these kinds of accusations run deeper than the more immediate political ideologies. It’s possible that Democratic women find it difficult to believe that people they like and respect and who champion their issues are engaged in truly wrong behavior.

micah: Yeah.

So it’s hypocrisy, but unintentional, sorta.

OK …

Back to Alabama. Let’s take Trump’s endorsement from the other side: Does it help Moore?

julia_azari: I find it hard to imagine that it will bring back Republican voters who decided to back Jones instead. Might it encourage people who had decided not to vote? That’s more plausible but not an obvious conclusion by a long shot.

harry: Remember when Strange got endorsed in the primary by Trump? That didn’t help Strange. Granted, it was one of the weaker endorsements I’ve seen.

natesilver: I guess the answer is … sure? Trump’s still reasonably popular in Alabama. But I kind of think a Trump anti-endorsement (coming out against Moore) would have mattered more than coming out for Moore, if that makes sense.

In other words, I think voters assumed that Trump implicitly backed Moore already. The only way it could hurt him, though, is if Alabamaians feel like it’s national politicians interfering in their election, which they don’t like.

But that explanation feels too cute by half for me.

micah: Yeah … that’s an easier line for a Republican to sell than it is for a Democrat, IMO.

julia_azari: So when I wrote that piece about the party not being able to get rid of Moore, I was surprised at how much discussion it provoked about national vs. state party organizations and interests. But that convo was mostly among party politics scholars on Twitter, not rank-and-file voters in Alabama. A national politician doing something unexpected might be seen as interference, but a Republican president endorsing a Republican Senate candidate is not that wild on its face

micah: We gotta wrap … so, before I ask for final thoughts, one more question: If Jones wins, does it hurt Trump? Or does it tell us anything about Trump’s standing with GOP voters? (Trump would have backed the losing candidate in the Alabama primary and general elections.)

harry: I have a very hard time believing that a generic Republican would lose in Alabama, even in this national environment that so favors Democrats. That said, if Jones were to win, it wouldn’t have been possible without the national environment being where it is — it’s a combination of Moore’s crummy candidacy and Trump’s low national standing.

julia_azari: I basically agree with Harry and would add that Trump’s political influence is maybe a bit inconsistent.

natesilver: I’m not quite sure what the narrative is going to be if Jones wins. Part of what I was trying to argue on Monday is that it’s really, really hard for a Democrat to win in Alabama — even against a candidate like Roy Moore! — so Jones coming close is a pretty impressive outcome. But I don’t know that I expect the mainstream media to interpret the race that way.

I do think Trump has mildly raised the stakes, though — a Jones win will be seen as reflecting the limits of his powers of persuasion, when it might not have been before.

julia_azari: Trump is unpopular generally, remains fairly popular with GOP voters, has prominent defectors like Sen. Jeff Flake — that is not normal — and has few real political alliances, which limits his influence.

micah: So a Trump endorsement is worth less than your average presidential endorsement?

julia_azari: The thing that strikes me about Alabama is it’s not a close state at least in presidential elections — it went from solid Democratic to solid Republican. This race being close could signal that Moore is a crappy candidate, but he is a crappy candidate who won the primary and maintained local party support. This could be evidence of the general crumbling of governing majorities in the country, if that makes any sense.

On balance I’d say yes, Trump’s endorsement has below-average value. He doesn’t have deep political roots. If he endorses you, it’s not clear exactly who comes along.

micah: Any other final thoughts?

natesilver: It’s a really weird dynamic — (i) lower turnout gives Democrats more of a chance (if the whole electorate turns out, we know Alabama is a really red state), but (ii) it’s good for Moore if the harassment/molestation allegations stay out of the news. Trump’s endorsement could help with GOP turnout, but it also sort of puts the race back in the news, which is risky to Moore. Still, I say it’s helpful on balance.

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