#same thing with a lot of other leftist political topics. i see so many people going hey guys i think i cracked the case/connected something | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

alpaca-clouds · 7 months

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How to Blow Up a Pipeline (or: why the climate movement is failing)

Okay, talking about politics this week, let me talk about this amazing book that you all should read, because it is not that long and it really makes a lot of good points. I found this book through the Philosophy Tube video a couple of years ago.

So, what is this book about?

To put it lightly: It is about how the climate movement is failing over their refusal to use any sort of violence or sabotage. And it is about the ethics of violence.

Which is not only important to the climate movement, but all sorts of progressive movements. Which again brings me back to what I talked about so many times before: Being against a revolution is being against change. And the left in general has a problem with idealizing parcifism to an unhealthy degree.

Let me explain: The left has in general very much drunken the cool-aid to accept that there is no violence happening right now, so using violence against the perceived non-violence is wrong. But that entire idea is bullshit.

Letting people starve, while there is enough food around for everyone, is a form of violence.

Letting people die of preventable deseases, because they cannot afford health care, is a form of violence.

Letting people die in extreme weather, just so that a few people can profit from fossil fuels... Well, that is a form of violence, too.

But left people - especially white, leftists - have very much accepted that non-action can never be violence. So, not giving someone the food they need, cannot be violence in their point of view. So, using violence to act against the system that lets this happen again and again... that is "out of proportion" in their point of view. Because they do not suffer themselves, they do not perceive the violence.

The book talks about how specifically the climate movement refuses to use any form of violence, even just in the form of sabotage, in which no human would ever come to harm. Which is why the title is "how to blow up a pipeline". Because blowing up a pipeline would harm those, who profit from climate change, from the fossil fuels. The book is also about how the climate movement then goes ahead to appropriate civil rights leaders, without really understanding the context they were in. Because they will name Martin Luther King, Ghandi or Nelson Mandela as examples of people who succeeded with non-violence, without acknowledging that all three of those leaders were leaders of a non-violent group that closely associated with a violent movement that aimed for the same changes. And through that contrast - of a violent group and a peaceful group with widespread support - the people in power were forced to make a move to work towards them to some degree.

Now, technically the book involved nothing new to me. Because I thought about this topic - about the ethics and visuals of violence - for a long while now. It also is fitting with the entire French Revolution thing I spoke about on Sunday. Because we see it in the judgement of the French Revolution as well. On how there a) was a peaceful group first, and b) the violence that happened, happened in response to other violence.

And as the book points out: The fossil fuel industry does not care. As a German I know this too well. And I think it is no accident that a lot of the examples of this in the book come from Germany. Our climate movement here is very tame. It is mostly just kids (like people between their teens and early twenties) doing protests in forms of blocking streets and the likes. Yet, the fossil lobby and those in power will call that "terrorism" and will call that one time when folks tore down a fence at the coal mine as "extreme violent behavior". They are doing massive and at times violent police action against those KIDS, who organize the street blockades. Having thrown literal teenagers into prison for at times weeks, before judges intervened clearly saying that "the kids have done nothing illegal".

They do not care that the movement is non-violent. And the movement will not get anywhere, without some group standing in and doing some damage to the most important thing those people can think of: Their base line.

#how to blow up a pipeline #climate movement #fridays for future #climate action now #anarchism #anti fossil fuels #protest #solarpunk

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centrally-unplanned · 1 year

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Hello. Our discussion the other day left me confused about what exactly you consider the term "Leftism" to mean. So as a clarifying example, would you describe the USA Democrats as a "Leftist" party? Thanks

Starting at the direct level, the democrats in the US contains leftists but is not wholly or primarily leftists. Its dumb US stuff, since its a harshly two-party system both republicans and democrats are actually a grab bag of coalitions. At different times the democrats are either cooperating with or opposing their own leftist faction, so its contextual.

I don't find this framing too useful in the modern era honestly. Like yes, Hegel was *sigh, ugggh* right, human preferences are diverse but aggregated social dynamics work such that a 'left-right' binary emerges in almost all socieites. However, its not what self-identified capital-L leftists tend to mean, they treat Leftism as a cohesive, cross-country faction distinct from conservatives, liberals, etc. This made sense at the end of the 19th century - opposition to imperialism, support for expanded franchise, legalizing unions, etc, made a unified political platform in Europe. But political faction aren't a constant, its downstream of the political, social, and economic forces of the day.

These days I don't see a strong "leftist" political party in the same way of much note. On some topics is because its too diffuse - oh leftists support queer rights? So do most liberals, so do a lot of conservatives even, progress on queer rights wasn't wholly or even primarily a leftist achievement depending on the country. On others its because its way too specific - are the german environmentalists shutting down nuclear power plants to prop up coal plants leftists? They think they are, to me they are fools. For an issue near and dear to me, left-NIMBYs think they are preserving their communities, I think they are gatekeeping low income housing and degrading our cities. Are the leftist for queer rights also NIMBYs? What do they think of open borders? There isn't a coherent platform of leftism even within countries, let alone across them.

(A lot of this is because the goals of 19th century leftism were achieved in many fronts, though certainly not all - expanded franchise, end of imperialism, large welfare states, etc. Those solutions ofc brought ther own problems and history marched on)

Instead I view modern capital-L leftism as primarily a cultural thing - lots of Against Capitalism energy, but when you are in office debating budget allocations between transport modalities or immigration regulations suddenly that energy provides contradictory answers. It does exist, im not saying its all vibes; instead when analysing the political party of country X, its not a simple question. The Democratic party in America has its left moments and it has its liberal moments and its straight-up right moments; the Socialist Party of France has had gone back and forth on what that actually means because it turns out governing is hard, and has done a ton of conservative stuff in its day.

I suppose it is worth mentioning that for some forms of leftism it *is* all vibes - no actual plan for obtaining and utilizing political power, just vague hand-waves at ~revolution~ that is never going to happen and would probably be a disaster if it did. This isn't the majority by any stretch, its often an insult hurled at actual leftists who absolutely are doing real work. But they do exist - they aren't political figures at all, and I don't consider them worthy of discussion; they can continue writing their mislabelled fiction. (The right, of course, has this faction too) So i don't factor these people into an analysis of capital-L Leftism any more than I have to.

#political ideology discourse

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inazuma-fulgur · 3 months

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Read the damn article before you pretend this is me just auding Trump in getting reelected

Democrats are stopping their own candidate from getting elected ny refusing to put up someone other than Biden/someone equally unfit and racist

The thing is, the difference between Trump and Biden is their fanbase, their image. Apart from a few Bandaids and otherwise empty promises Biden does indeed continue the same politics as Trump or let's things running undisturbed.

So whether you vote blue no matter who or whatever I don't give a fuck.

But what I do give a fuck about it liberals pretending voting Biden is the end all be all of progressive politics and mandatory to prevent 'the Bad™' from happening going forward. Because it isn't stopping anything as far as we can tell from media coverage

In fact, voting third party is an option, nit voting is an option, doing anything is an option. It's probably worth more to give a random houseless person five bucks than vote Biden.

This annoys me greatly because I don't just see USians say this, I see activists and casuals from other countries with similarly corrupt issues spread the same misinformation about the US. And also about their own countries, act the same way.

Having spend a lot of time within my own countries, Germany, activist spaces and being involved I can tell you with certainty that many people have similar attitudes towards our own government. Campaigning and running ads for political parties involved in funding wars, defending police and police murders, etc.

You might have heard about 'der hohe Repräsentant' (lit. the high Representative' but likely not. Because topics like that largely go ignored by not just the media and our fucked up politicians but our fucked up activists and progressives as well.

Leftists here largely hate Palestine, deem any critique of Israel antisemitic.

Heck even small things, like our progressive parties even try to make healthcare and education worse, push for more cars over public transit. Shit like that

And then hearing people pretend they're a solution on their own, that just voting for them is sufficient. I can't. And they'll attack you for criticizing these parties, which even a supporter who believes in a lesser evil should do, has to do.

Because if you don't critique them and discourage critique (often disingenuously framed as helping the opposing parties, the myth of leftists infighting aiding the right more than the left. A liberal lie I might say), you expose yourself for how you don't send letters, don't go to protests, are in no way involved in anything. You just want their hateful and dangerous politics to continue because they protect your cozy life in a rich white 'western' country.

I think that sucks and I want you to rethink your positions. Because I believe with some tiny bit of introspection you'll realize that this is a messed up thing for you to advocate for.

Again, for the people in the back, if you genuinely believe in the lesser evil that's fine idc even if I don't, but you can't assure yourself you've done enough and you should at the very least stop people from leveraging necessary criticism against politicians.

If you keep defending Biden I'll keep thinking you consider murdering brown* people abroad and invading and destroying their countries a necessary evil to stop... *checks notes* stop Trump from starting wars and enacting racist policies?

#*for why I specifically highlight brown people instead of other marginalized groups #well first of all none of you care about black people getting murdered just within the US already. or not very genuinely #second of all check what I posted about Palestine and the US bombing Iraq just today #also do your research about countries like Sweden Germany France the UK and other european places that enjoy being seen as largely #progressive and 'better than the US at least' and their neo colonialism and just everything else they do #have you heard of Fortress Europe? of Frontex beyond what Jan Böhmermann might've told you?#btw Jan Böhmermann is an open Zionist. fuck him.#a lot of people had requested for him and his team to talk about Palestine. but because he works for german state media he instead #talked about Israel and antisemitism. and downplayed everything. barely addressed any facts about what is going on #despite him being usually being highly critical of german politics and politicians. at least for a liberal #he has still made ambiguously presenting police propaganda in the past where no one was sure whether it was meant to critique police #or celebrate them and make racist jokes about 'clans' and criminality in Germany #dude is not uncontroversial even when he covers important topics more or less well and factually accurate

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rf-times · 11 months

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Since I barely see people touch on this subject often and you are one of the best radblr accounts, I want to share a thought with you and see what do you think about it. This will be a bit long...

So lately I have talked to a friend about how the conceptualization of the so called “peak trans” disconnected from the whole understanding of the neoliberalism ideology was regressive to radical feminism in many points, to the point of becoming one of the strongest backlashes we have to deal with currently. At first sight, this perception can sounds exaggerating because radical feminists like Janice Raymond and Sheila Jeffreys had always touched on this topic criticizing the MEDICAL COMPLEX who profits from countless people's agony due to misogyny, homophobia and overall hatred for gnc people. Unfortunately, this powerful and accurate criticism of transgederism was gradually replaced when be a gc became so popular, almost like a queer identity without the glamour ofc but still interesting enough to appeal to some people. The main unity factor? Be able enough to define what is a woman! From the white supremacist to the liberal “leftist” /“feminist” who is just upset bc was called “transphobic” after devoting themselves to transactivism and want to vent about it to apolitical women who think men in dress are the only dangerous men on earth, everyone is welcomed and then the feminist resistance(called 'gender critical'), that was initially created to oppose to the censorship in academic feminist spaces who only accepts liberal approach of feminism while reject the rest, don't exist anymore but the effect of what was left of the gc movement is permanent. “radfem” also became an identity, “terf” too and anyone, literally, ANYONE who disagrees with transactivism/queeractivism, even if a little bit, are thrown in the same bag as “radfem” and “terf” and these labels CAN MEAN ANYTHING and the worst part is that we aren't even able to define ourselves bc transactivists/queers are doing it instead of us because they receive political capital from the liberal right and we have nothing.

Radical feminists aren't anti trans people in any sense, our criticisms are POLITICAL, not individualist. With that said, due to this polarized debate, many people do get attracted to radfem spaces bc of a lot of things except for feminism. Many women don't want to at least read feminist books, they just want to talk all the time about transactivists and think peak activism is fighting TRA's all day. There are also women who consume radical-leaning content like we consume products. They tend to think if they have enough feminist knowledge, they're shielded from misogyny and it also gives them a free pass to ignore/belittle other realities, since the other women are so inferior to them. But sometimes it just drains them bc the constant negativity without any real changes is emotionally damaging and add nothing in a personal level let alone collectively.

All these examples above are integral parts of the neoliberalism, this alienation, disconnection with reality and inability to uniting as a class bc things can have so many meanings and oppression can't be oppressive if you are empowered enough lol

This is why I think the conceptualization of “peak trans” often ignore strong social/political forces that controls our society and appeal away too much to a moralistic approach that was never present in Radical Feminism. I often see women here bragging about how rf can't be infiltrated by men(or male ideologies) and I wish it was real but it isn't. Radical Feminism does have a admirable story of resistance to male ideologies but thinking it wasn't already infiltrated with neoliberalism is bs. Even communism was taken by liberals and has been losing its essence day after day, since even some political communist parties in countries like Brazil are funded by the USA liberal right. Besides the negativity of my ask, I still believe in better days to all of us but I think the first step is to fight for radical feminism, the real one, not what people generically label as “radfem”.

Thank you so much for the ask, I really love getting stuff like this. It's definitely because people would 'peak trans' from different ideologies, many of which have little in common, from those who still believe in some form of medical transition as a good form of treatment to dysphoria, to conservatives, to people who have never questioned the medical industrial complex. Radical feminism is devalued and turned into an identity as you say and indeed many women who buy into radical feminism don't go into it with a sense of empathy or goodwill towards other women. At this point I find most trans discourse tedious and it's so clearly noticeable on here how a post making fun of trans ideology > post connecting trans ideology to larger feminist concerns > non-trans feminist concerns, in terms of attention. It isn't enough for us all to agree what a woman is, that isn't a coherent political movement.

It gets to the point where if I see a post where someone is talking about genocide or women being murdered or a graphic horrific cultural institution I find myself waiting for the inevitable part where they say "AND YET TRANS PEOPLE THINK THIS OR THAT" Like the only way so many radfems even talk about feminism anymore is solely through the lens of making a point about trans ideology.

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perfectlyvalid49 · 5 months

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I just want to say that your words about feeling like you yourself are becoming radicalized resonated with me. I was already growing fed up with the current state of leftism and this just seems the last straw. The black and white thinking, the purity culture, the blood thirst – I’m just done.

I’m not even Jewish in any meaningful way (my mom hid/disavowed that part of her ancestry growing up in the soviets). I’m just a very mixed queer person whose ethnicity is best described as ‘uhhh.’ But my social circle has always been largely Jewish, and recently many of said social circle have had to up and leave their home country. In many cases, Israel was their only option. So seeing thousands of people who are supposedly on my side thoughtlessly chant ‘from the river to the sea’ just broke me. Seeing people try to prove that it’s not antisemitic has been mind-boggling. “It doesn’t explicitly call for violence against Jewish people.” Well, nor does ‘Jews will not replace us,’ and yet…

I deleted my social media at a really low point, and now that I’m back I find myself mostly following Jewish blogs. And I feel my worldview shifting because where before I had hopes that things that frustrate me on the left could maybe be fixed, now I no longer think it’s fixable.

Sorry for rambling from this Schrödinger’s gentile

Hi Anon,

I’m glad I could write something that spoke to you.

Before this blog became so focused on the conflict in Israel, I talked a lot about US politics, a topic I’ve been interested in since I was in middle school (I’m weird and nerdy – get over it). And to be clear, I’m “old” for the internet, so middle school means the 1996 presidential election, which I remember discussing with my friends at lunch (they were also weird and nerdy, there’s a reason we were friends).

So when I say that I’ve been watching other people get radicalized for a long time, I mean it. I’ve watched friends fall into information silos and have felt helpless to stop it. I mean, the best man at my (very Jewish!) wedding is now a trad-Cath who thinks I’m going to hell because I refuse to accept Jesus into my life.

There has always been an antisemitism problem on the left. You can scroll through just about any blog on jumblr and look at posts prior to October and you can see that we were all bitching about it before the 7th. I’m not sure if it has actually gotten worse or if it’s just more obvious now, but we can say they seem radicalized now. Honestly, there’s nothing I can do about it, because they certainly aren’t going to listen to me – I’m a filthy (((Zionist))) after all.

But there’s at least a handful of Jewish people who are listening to me. I’ve picked up a score of followers in the last few months, so clearly you all think what I have to say is worth reading, so read this: I worry that at least parts of the Jewish community are headed down a bad path and I don’t know what to do about it. I know why we are blocking and unfollowing so many – the things they say are hurtful at best and terrifying at worst. But it leaves us in a situation where it’s the same few voices being repeated over and over. It doesn’t mean that we are radicalized, but I worry that we’re headed toward an echo chamber at least, and that’s not good. I’ve left a lot of leftist spaces behind. I’d prefer to not have to do that with Jewish ones as well.

I don’t have a solution other than that we need to be really careful and think about how we’re thinking about things if that makes any sense. The example I gave last time was moving from “you can be anti-Zionist without being antisemitic” to “anti-Zionism is antisemitism.” How did we make that move? Was it motivated by logic or emotion? It’s ok to change your stance, but with the way things are I think we really need to think about why we’re doing that, or it could lead to a bad place.

Back to the anon who is losing hope – that’s tough, and I can see why you feel that way. There are two thoughts that I repeat to myself to keep me hopeful. The first is that on a long enough timescale, things tend to improve. There’s lots of small steps forward and stumbling backwards, but overall we tend to move in the right direction. The other is that trying and failing and not trying at all have the same result. Maybe we won’t have a big effect. But if I can tell 30 people and even three of them can tell 30 people and so on, then maybe my words can reach at least one person and help them pull their heads out of their ass. And that’s better than nothing.

#thanks for letting me ramble #also I counted #and 23/35 of my followers (yes I'm a tiny ass blog) have shown up since the beginning of October #and I assume it's because of the stuff I've been posting about the conflict #I don't know why y'all are listening to me - I'm an idiot #but I'll keep posting and you guys can keep reading #also like 6 of you have shown up in the last 24 hours and I have no idea what I posted to bring you all in #I logged in this morning and tumblr was like '5 new people are following you'#and I was like 'oh shit the pornbots are back'#but you all look like real blogs

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seventhfracture · 2 years

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We’re talking about something very tricky this week. Finding your own artistic voice, or style. Every person who makes things has a unique voice.

I’d know a Stephen King/Phillipa Gregory/Anne Rice book even if you stripped all identifying information. I have friends who could drop things anonymously into the archive and I’d know it was them running on 3hrs of sleep with my belly empty of all but tic-tacs. Seeing them in their art is instinctive. It’s like facial recognition. No two people are identical and, while there might be a family resemblance between you and your mother, very rarely would anyone get either of you confused.

Having your own style is part of growing up as an artist. It’s when you stop being a blobby little infant and start to take shape as your own distinct person. Once someone has a style you can’t miss it and style is often the hallmark of someone who knows what they’re doing. But how do you get one? When does your acceptance letter come with your own personalized State Alchemist title? ‘Hannah of Canberra, the Comedy-with-Politics Writer.’?

What is style/voice?

Style is your perspective becoming visible in your writing. It’s the inescapable fact that is the feds dusted the story for prints they’d find your signature. It’s putting things in your own words.

Give twenty writers the same writing prompt and you’ll still get twenty different stories. Because each of those writers has a different history, culture, focus, and baggage. Especially baggage.

The most obvious sprouts of your style are your ‘tells’. Little blotches in the paint that forensics piece together. I use the word ‘ropable’ in my stories which is an Australian colloquialism. I spell ‘Mom’ as ‘Mum’ because that’s the Australian spelling and I’m not changing it for you. Pulling back a little I tend to zig when people think I will zag, I’m willing to pull the trigger on major character death, I like twists, and I write a lot about evil trans boys (most of whom aren’t on HRT).

All of this comes from a bedrock of you. What are you passionate about? I’m passionate about queer topics, kink, horror and nostalgia. You can see that in what I write. I’m also a filthy leftist. A lot of these things inform my deeply held views and beliefs about the world. And that trickles down into my stories. A pessimist and an optimist will write two very different endings to an impossible situation. What you believe, deep in your guts, directs what you write. One way or another your characters are an interrogation of your beliefs.

Your beliefs are your own and they mean you always have something to say. The surface level stylistic choices are harder to manufacture but they do come eventually. They are the tool kit you use to express the deeper parts of your voice. They are the ways you decide to tell your stories. Ultimately this is great news because if you write long enough, whether you mean to or not, you’ll naturally develop your own voice.

But Van, how do a develop a voice/style?

Okay, don’t fear, most of this stuff you will be doing naturally but let’s break it down. However, an important thing to note before we start is that your voice is an extension of you. You will grow and change. So you style will grow and change. This is totally normal.

READ

If you want to make things you need to know a lot about those things that and that culture. If you want to paint you’ve got to consume and appreciate paintings but other artists. Great artists, shitty artists, unknown spectacular artists… And if you wanna write you’ve got to read. You’ll never know the full scope of your possible toolkit until you see all the different ways words can be used.

Read things that excite you first. Read the kind of stories you want to make. See how high the ceiling goes. See how many amazing things over people have done and see the losers who have still gotten published. Take the skill from the first group and the confidence from the second. Then read things outside your wheelhouse. Movies, anime, manga, graphic novels… they can all teach you things about telling stories. Expand your horizons. You want to have a healthy diet of media and health is all about diversity.

STEAL

If there’s something you love steal it. Claim it. Rewrite it. All art, going back centuries, is theft. Dante wrote fanfiction with self inserts and Shakespeare was so cringe he wrote real person fanfiction. You are not too good to steal. And, yes, you will write it badly at first. But you’ll learn things too.

COPY

Your style is a collection of all the other styles you have loved. Let those elements mix inside you. You’re allowed to be a mosaic of stolen parts. You are the sum of all your pieces. If you love Neil Gaiman spend a year trying to write like him. It won’t work. Your voice will inevitably colour things and crack through but that’s a good thing. You’re giving your voice enemies to fight so it can get stronger and clearer. Level up. In seeing how you’re different from the artists you admire you’ll see where you’re strongest (and weakest). You’ll lean what you are by seeing what you’re not.

Don’t be the next anyone, be the first you.

EXPERIMENT

You’ve got to try new things. Every stranger is a potential friend and every excursion is a possible new obsession. The same is true of art. Explore. Try stuff out and make a mess. Again, yes, you will do some of this badly. Some of this you’ll probably fuck up publicly. But that’s okay. You can’t get any better at writing if you never practice and part of learning is challenging yourself. Letting things stay new.

CHASE THE FUN

There are going to be topics you naturally gravitate towards. Let yourself. This is the stuff you’re passionate about. This is the stuff you have opinions on. This is your voice peaking out. And, no, not all of it will be ‘popular’ or ‘profitable’ or even ‘socially acceptable’ but your voice doesn’t give a shit about any of that. It’s a little kid who likes bugs and damnit it wants to watch the bug documentary for the 60th time. Do you know how many murder mystery novels Agatha Christie wrote? Write the same thing twelve different ways. Eighteen different ways. Who cares!

Sometimes you’re going to think it makes sense to write X but every part of you is going to want to write Y. Write Y. This is your unique approach scratching at you. And sometimes it will take you down the road less travelled. This is nothing to be afraid of. Some people will hate it, sure, but people will like it too and some people will even have desperately been needing it. Needing it like medicine.

WRITE A LOT

At the end of the day you have to practice but its more than that. Five poems can be very different. It’s hard to see how they have anything in common. There’s not enough data points. But if you have 200 poems you’re going to start to see a few reoccurring themes. Between them all there’s probably only going to be a handful of topics, really. That’s your voice.

You can’t be everything. You can only be yourself. It’s hard sometimes to see who you are because you’re looking from the inside out. Your voice sounds very different to you because you hear it from inside your head and mouth. Your ears perceive it differently from the people around you. Your artistic voice is exactly the same. It’s only till you give yourself more data you’ll see the major features of yourself.

CRINGE IS REAL

Yes, for ten years you might write about feminism. But then you might only write about civil wars for the next decade. That’s okay. You can’t be stagnant. People will come, people will go, but when you’re churning out the same thing, over and over, with no love or joy that’s when it becomes crap. And no one will read crap. The trashiest movies with heart are still a thousand times better than some generic air brushed blockbuster.

Honestly? You’re going to be a foreign traveller in some ports. You’re going to try some things that don’t work. You’re going to write some shit. You’re going to try some things you love and then one day just don’t. For a while all I wrote were meet-cutes and comedy pieces. Now I write things that are very different. But I learned some valuable skills about timing and delivery. About making people feel the way I wanted them too. That wasn’t wasted time.

Imagine your favourite author or artist. Hell, let’s take…. Don Bluth? He animated some truly spectacular children’s movies it he 90s. Thumbelina, The Secret of Nihm, etc. I love his art. And I love his art enough to love discovering the weird, random, other things he did before he found his niche. Turns out he can draw sexy as well as magical! Then there’s Jim Henson. I’m not huge on his mega franchise Muppet stuff. Not a fan. But Labyrinth? And that tiny 90s TV series he did? The Storyteller? One of my favourite pieces of media ever. I watch it on repeat. You are going to be these artists to someone else. They are not going to judge you for finding your way. They are going to revel in the different facets of you they can explore. Don’t be scared.

#writing #creative writing #fanfic #fanfiction #how to #how I do it anyway

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lilolilyr · 2 years

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Just thinking about Nerys/Jadzia/Lenara in my college AU rn... So many feelings...

Submitting this rant to @discoveryfemslashfortnight under the 'Free Choice' prompt!

spoilers for the fic below the cut!

Dax and Lena would invite Kira into their relationships with open arms, of course their marriage is open but it's not just that, Jadzia has been pining after Kira for ages and didn't know that Kira felt the same because in some ways they are such opposites in how they act, Kira is watching from the shadows trying to catch her eye while Jadzia is in the middle of everything trying to catch her attention, and for ages neither spoke to the other, always in each other's orbit but never within arm's reach, and as soon as they finally talk sparks fly... And Lenara sees how much Kira means to Dax and resolves to get to know her better, and she quickly grows to appreciate Kira and her dry wit that comes out when she isn't so in awe of finally being around Jadzia anymore or when she's just around Lenara, they don't really have much in common when it comes to jobs or hobbies but they both have strong opinions about a lot of things and while Jadzia often likes to pull a discussion back to safer shores to see the funny side of things, Nerys and Lena can get lost in political discussions and arguments, typical leftist infighting that can get quite heated at times, but neither of them minds, as they can both tell they agree on the topics that matter... Jadzia still half lives on campus in her small dorm room that she shares with a roommate and pays for herself instead of completely moving in with Lenara both because it's more practical (she doesn't need to get up so early on days with morning classes when she's already on campus) and because she's someone who needs her own space, but Kira gradually moves into the city flat, and two semesters later she doesn't renew her lease on her own dorm and instead officially moves in... It's Dax who suggests in, and Lenara immediately agrees, and that's when Nerys finally believes that she's a real part of this relationship, not just casually dating the married couple but in love and loved by them... She tells Lenara to go to sleep when she stays up too late working, Lena makes her breakfast in bed some mornings, or sometimes Dax surprises them both with breakfast (more likely because she's Still awake than because she's awake Already, of course), Nerys lets Jadzia drag her into wild adventures, and she introduces the both of them to her friends especially to Michael, Jadzia finally gets some close friends who aren't just college and party friends but people she can actually talk to, and Lenara lets them drag her away from her studies and to gettogethers (sometimes, at least)... They have so many similarities and so many differences as well, and they are good for each other, both because they just fit together and because they're actively trying for just that, they want to be good together, want it to work out, and their love never stops growing <3

Tl,Dr: I'm feelin lonely and I wish I had two gfs or a wife and a girlfriend and I'm projecting heavily onto those three <3 rly shouldn't write university AUs I know how that always ends for me xDxD

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fatasselmerfudd · 1 year

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I don't talk about abolition on tumblr anymore but like I'm thinking about #her. In relation to that last post, convicted sex offender is not an identity that marginalized people have the liberty of questioning or fighting. If you want to bar a marginalized community from larger society, criminalize their habits and put them on a registry. If you want to justify your extreme violence towards them, lower the threshold of sexual assault, like whistling at white women or cross dressing, Now you have free reign to defend yourself and your community with as much force as you can muster.

In the same way that cops are not legally obligated to help others or deter harm, registries and a punitive system are not designed to actually prevent sexual assault, deal with perpetrators, or provide any relief for those assaulted.

TW for SA under the cut

One of the worst things to come out of this is that idea that sexual assualt is something that can be neatly defined and must be dealt with between two people in private. That's something a community needs to know about, and address to assist others. And so many of the adverse sexual experiences that particularly children experience will never be classified as sexual assault despite inducing trauma. We can't conflate legality with morallty!

Politics about permitting the most inhumane way to punish people for perceived wrong doings have no place in leftist spaces that want to address violence against people of color, disabled people, the working class, children, women etc. It always comes back to bite us almost exclusively. When we say things like, "You can always be on the side of the aggressor rather than the victim," It doesn't mean that there's a high possibility you sexually assaulting someone, I mean that they can legislate your ass into the role of the abuser. They could (honestly... feasibly) declare defending trans women a marker of being predisposed to a pedophile gene and boom! You're on the registry when they find your Tumblr of anti-terf rhetoric.

Also, one of the worst things to come out of this is that idea that sexual assualt is something that can be neatly defined and must be dealt with between two people in private. That's something a community needs to know about, and address to assist others. And so many of the adverse sexual experiences that particularly children experience will never be classified as sexual assault despite inducing trauma.

Sexual assault is usually too controversial of a topic to start these convos with, and I don't blame anyone who just can’t start here. I don't think a lot of us will see eye to eye and thats fine. Just know, I'm talking about systemic, legal responses to SA, not the multiple forms it can take. So few people who commit are jailed because they're not the demogaphic who we want to keep out of schools, or nice neighborhoods, or keep an eye on. Actual Sexual Assault is so ignored, victims are demonized and it's just too normal in our society. This isn't saying that suddenly its okay you’re exaggerating if you feel like the left doesn't talk about it enough, thats true too, leftists don't talk enough about it either!

#not rebloggable for abundently obvious reasons #anyone saying something stupid or bad faith is just blocked lil ugly mayne

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anarcho-smarmyism · 3 years

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How would prison abolition deal with murderers, serial killers, paedophiles, torturers,kkk members,neo-Nazis and terrorists? Some people are a legit danger and cannot be allowed to roam society.

So I didn’t answer this at the time, because the anon who sent it is almost definitely the racist troll sending me shit I’m not going to publish (so like uhhh bear that in mind lmao), but I’ve blocked them now and it’s been a few days, so hopefully they’ve fucked off by now. Plus, I’ve been thinking about this question a LOT since before I received it. It’s a question that I think most people have about the concept of prison abolition and reparative justice, and not everyone with these concerns is asking in bad faith. Besides which, with the recent attempted coup and the way it looks like people who participated are actually going to face legal consequences for it (which alone was somewhat surprising to me tbh), I’ve been seeing a lot of leftists discoursing over whether it’s morally okay and intellectually consistent to be happy about cops beating up, killing, and arresting KKK members and Neo-Nazis, so it is now actually topical! Under the cut due to long response~

So the first thing I want to point out, is that literally every single one of the groups of “legit dangers who cannot be allowed to roam society”, are already out there right now. In our current “justice” system, it’s common knowledge that monsters often get off on a technicality, or because they just have the money to throw lawyer after lawyer at the charges, or because they outright bribe someone, or countless other ways to get around the law. You can look on my own literal tumblr blog and watch me argue with grown ass adults who will bold faced admit to consuming child porn with half-assed excuses, and you’ll find more open pedophiles on sites like twitter, reddit, or 4chan, or porn sites where “teen” is usually one of the most popular categories. Besides which, have you ever looked at the average sentences for convicted rapists, wife beaters, or pedophiles, as compared with the sentences for getting caught selling drugs? In middle school I had to walk a mile or two to get to school through a neighborhood we’d been warned had a convicted pedophile in it, who had just been released after less than 15 years. In that same city, I heard a story about a woman shooting and killing her rapist, and prosecutors were discussing giving her the death penalty for it (she was bragging and laughing about it on video, it was definitely premeditated, but still). Have you ever looked at the statistics of how many rapists and abusers aren’t reported, or if they are reported aren’t prosecuted, or if they are are prosecuted with a slap on the wrist (remember Brock Turner????) Also I notice how you didn’t even mention domestic abusers or rapists in your list of people who need to be locked up lolololol shows where your priorities vis a vis “public safety are I’m sorry, but the system just does not work the way you think it does, the we are taught it does.

People who make this argument always act like the systems we have now are efficient and nigh on flawless when it comes to “not letting dangerous people roam society”, but it isn’t and it can’t be and it never will be. That very fact ought to be enough to shake your faith in the idea that society will become a nonstop Purge of indiscriminate violence if everyone who’s committed a sufficiently despicable act of violence isn’t locked up for the rest of their lives -but you might say, “okay, but those are flukes, the system still works because most of the people who are “a danger to society” are usually locked up.” I’m not completely sold that that’s even true (have you ever heard of the opportunities cops had to bring in serial killers and murderers, who just didn’t care enough to try? Jeffrey Dahmer is a good example of this), but I’ll assume it is to move on to my next point.

Even if we assumed that the system as we have it, worked flawlessly as designed, that doesn’t change the fact that a lot of the categories mentioned here are people that are actively running the very systems that this rhetoric is defending. It’s well-documented that American white supremacists of various stripes have infiltrated law enforcement and the military for the express purpose of not just “roaming free”, but getting to exert the power of the State over people of color. Cops and soldiers kill people all the time, and not only are they not penalized, they’re celebrated for it. Agents of the State fucking torture people all the time, and I don’t just mean Guantanamo Bay or war crimes by soldiers; cops have been caught on camera spraying protesters with pepper spray and beating them once they’ve already been handcuffed or while they’re chained to trees or whatever -not because they think they “need” to, because they want to, and they know they’ll get away with it. Cops also systematically torture people in prison with solitary confinement. Heads of state drop bombs on civilians for “politically motivated reasons”, they do all kinds of shit that would be called “terrorism” if anybody but a State did it; and people might disapprove, but they don’t (generally) claim that the politicians and generals who made that call are “a danger to society” that need to get life in prison. If you genuinely believe that whether these acts of violence are “legal” or not changes whether they’re okay, or that a person who engages in illegal violence is “dangerous” but people who engage in legal violence aren’t... I’m honestly not even going to try to refute that here lol, prison abolition is level 5 shit and you’re at level -1, study how authoritarianism in general works before trying to understand prison abolition (not trying to be a dick here, it’s what i would tell my younger self when I believed the same thing).

It simply does not hold up to rational scrutiny to believe that society will collapse into an orgy of violence and mayhem if we abolish prison (or that we’ll have to resort to medieval punishments instead??? lol funny take i remember from some racist troll or other over the years), when those dangers are already present (and in some cases widely celebrated as “heroes” and given the power to indiscriminately brutalize “acceptable targets” with the State’s monopoly on violence) under the current system.

The next thing people need to understand is that contrary to popular belief and despite how counterintuitive it sounds, even the brutality of our current prison system is not an effective deterrent to crime (linked a Guardian article that looks like it has some good info on this, but I recommend a book called Unfair: The New Science of Criminal Injustice by Adam Benforado for more information). Let me say that again: the threat of prison has been empirically shown to be INEFFECTIVE as a deterrent to crime. Do you really think that a serial killer or someone who wants to blow up a building full of people is going to be more likely to follow the law for fear of prison, than regular people doing regular people crimes like selling drugs or getting into drunk fights that go too far?

I don’t think anyone is actually willing to argue that prison “rehabilitates” anyone, or does anything besides make regular criminals into angrier, more antisocial, more desperate criminals with more criminal connections and less options for any kind of a legitimate living, so I’m just going to point out that having such a large prison population arguably creates more people who have shitty lives of poverty and are surrounded by people who are in and out of prison. It’s not like that “makes” anybody into a serial killer, but I feel like you’d have to willfully ignorant to act like it’s not a factor in increasing violent crime in affected community.

So, I’ve so far argued that prison is an ineffective solution to the problems it claims to exist in order to solve, and that in many cases, it actually makes the problems that lead to these sorts of dangerous people (”regular” murderers and the radicalization of Neo-Nazis and KKK members in particular, I think) becoming dangerous, or at least more dangerous, in the first place. What I haven’t done, is talk about what I believe is the real core of the issue when it comes to prison abolition: nobody wants to fucking peacefully rehabilitate these people. I am arguing for a system that would handle these people basically as gently as possible, with the goal of releasing them back into society eventually, and I still believe these things mostly intellectually, not emotionally. I don’t want the men who sexually assaulted me and/or my loved ones to get off scot free (they did, of course, but that’s beside the point), much less serial killers or Nazis, and I’m not about to get on my high horse about wanting revenge on people who’ve committed these kinds of atrocities. The reason I’m a prison abolitionist in spite of these feelings is that I do not believe the desire for revenge, for punishment for punishment’s own sake, is an impulse we should indulge when creating social and political infrastructures that have ultimate power over millions of lives. In the words of someone talking about abolishing the death penalty, the question isn’t “do they deserve to die”, the question is “do we deserve to kill”; and here, the question is not “does anyone deserve to be imprisoned in this system”, the question is “do we deserve to brutalize people in this way for virtually zero practical benefits to our society”. What any person “deserves” is a subjective moral and philosophical question, one that no conceivable human justice system could ever actually answer. We as a society need to build alternatives to prison (and police!) that can actually address these problems, actually prevent the conditions that create and enable monsters, and actually rehabilitate (to whatever extent that is possible) criminals -even the ones we, personally, despise. Any long-term incarceration that may end up being 100% required should be designed to reduce the suffering of the person in it, no matter how despicable of a person they are. Trying to solve “the problem of evil” instead of trying to create a more functional and just society is a fool’s errand that can only lead to more evil existing, in the end.

At the end of the day, the “irredeemable” people you listed off as justifications for the continuing existence of prison, are only a tiny fraction of the people in prison, even the ones with life sentences. A full understanding of the horror and oppression the prison industrial complex enacts on the people in it and their communities (and how the system is designed to make a profit off of human suffering and death) is something you’ll have to read some actual books about in order to acquire. However, I don’t think it’s controversial to say that any horror we as a society deem “acceptable” to do to the worst of the worst, will also be done to regular criminals, as well as to innocent people who are wrongly imprisoned. Any brutality you design with a serial killer in mind WILL eventually be a punishment for a petty thief or drug dealer or sex worker, or a person who didn’t commit the crime they were incarcerated for. Is it really worth it? Is it really, really worth all the misery and oppression prison causes, to satiate our sense of justice? I don’t believe that it is. I believe that we have a responsibility both to the incarcerated and to their communities to base our policies and institutions on actually solving these societal problems however we can, and leaving our “eye for an eye” mentality in the dark ages where it belongs.

If you are interested in prison abolition as a concept, I can recommend some good books on it. You also need to understand that concept of “reparative justice”, which I’ve alluded to here but not really explained because OH MY GOD THIS POST IS TOO LONG ALREADY. Short explanation of it is that it aims to repair the harm done by the crime and rehabilitate the criminal through through therapy and trying to get them to actually understand what they’ve done and empathize with who they’ve hurt, while also providing therapy and resources to the victim of the crime (when it’s something violent and the reparation can’t just be “give them their money back plus extra for damages” or something). The point is not to satiate anybody’s sense of justice or revenge, but to proactively try to solve the problem the crime has caused and prevent the offender from doing it again. It would need to work in conjunction with the abolition of police (and replacement with better infrastructure for the few things cops do that we actually need done) and various other social programs and measures to prevent the circumstances that lead to crime. This sounds like a long shot because it is, but just because it hasn’t been done on a wide scale before doesn’t mean it can’t be, and just because it will be difficult doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing.

#prison #prison abolition #reparative justice #anarchist #anarchism #prison industrial complex #asks #anonymous

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max1461 · 3 years

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An observation:

I find that, when discussing the concept of tolerance (especially in its political incarnation, but also more generally), people tend to frame it in a very particular way that is somewhat foreign to me. Tolerance is presented as something that does not really come naturally to anyone, but that some people are compelled to engage in by their moral compass. Like, the assumption seems to be that by default, we'd all constantly be up in each other's business being judgmental or hateful or whatever, and those of us who don't do that must simply be restraining our natural urges because we believe that they're wrong.

You see this sentiment implicit in the way a lot of right-wingers frame their opposition to certain forms of liberal toleration ("we're rebels, free from the liberal mind-prison of having to tolerate everyone all the time" etc etc.). You also see it in how a lot of left-liberal or left-ish people talk about their own values of tolerance ("unlike those right-wingers who give in to hate, we're going to be the grown-ups in the room and respect people who are different from us"). Judgement, sectarianism, and dislike of the Other are presented as seductive urges we all share; to practice them is hedonic and rebellious, to resist them is mature and restrained.

I fundamentally cannot relate to this understand of, let's say, the emotional experience of tolerance.

[this part lapses into mild tangent, but I think it's worthwhile]

I get the impression that for a lot of people, the act of value judgement is like... actively enjoyable? Or something they otherwise seek out?

When encountering a New Thing, it seems that many people's immediate reaction is to try and decide if it's a Good Thing or a Bad Thing. There are of course people who are critical of this gut tendency, and stress the need for nuance in one's analysis of things etc etc. But I find that even these people still tend to act as though the appropriate course of action when presented with something novel is to assign it a value judgement, they just demand that the judgement be more complex than "Good" or "Bad". Maybe they even argue that before making the judgment, you are obligated to spend time and effort learning about and contemplating the thing in order to come to an informed assessment. But, again, they still tend to take it as a given that the eventual goal is to decided the The Goodness Of The Thing, and to act accordingly.

I have trouble relating to this set of desires. I tend to find the act of value judgement itself to be basically... a hassle? Like, just, on a very basic level as a cognitive task it doesn't feel good to me. I find it draining very quickly. Answering the question "How Do I Feel About This Thing?" is not any fun.

(sidenote: I do not find it similarly draining to think up reasons why someone else might approve or disapprove of a thing, which suggests to me that the task I dislike is not producing value judgements, but evaluating them.)

Of course, I recognize the necessity of value judgement: if you want to have any ethical system at all, you need to be able to look at potential courses of action and give them some measure of ethical evaluation. You need to be able to say "it would probably be good if I did this, and not so good if I did that" etc. You've gotta be able to say "the Nazis were bad, actually". I am not arguing that we should all abstain from value judgement or anything like that. It would seem that value judgement is a cognitive task we're all ethically obligated to engage in, at least some of the time.

Therefore, for me, the act of value judgement is something that I do out of duty. It's a drag. I do it because I have to. When I encounter a New Thing, my default reaction is generally to go "huh, well there's that thing I guess". I might also ask myself "do I find this thing interesting", and if the answer is "no" I ignore it, and if the answer is "yes" I try to learn about it. But if the New Thing is the sort of thing that seems clear to have some ethical implications, I also ask myself "is this good or bad (or some mix of the two, etc.)", and try to act accordingly. I just don't really enjoy that part.

[back on topic]

This is were my alienation from a lot of discourse about tolerance comes from, I think. Being judgmental of people, or hating them, or being angry at them or whatever requires a value judgement. It requires me to decide "these people are Bad, they've done something Wrong, etc". And all ethics aside, I just have an active distaste for doing that. What comes most naturally to me is a kind amoral absolute tolerance. "Who cares what anybody else does".

As I've moved farther to the left politically, I've actually become less tolerant, and I think this is one of the reasons that it's a mistake to associate tolerance with the left.

When I was a teenager, I was basically a sort of secular political quietist. My general take was "the government will always be basically bad and corrupt, but they'll also do some good things too, like keeping the roads paved. The best thing to do is ignore the system as much as you can, circumvent it if it gets in your way, and focus on producing intellectual achievements that will outlive you and make the world lastingly better that way." Honestly, I still think certain aspects of this are very reasonable. I've just become more of a utopian as I've aged.

Anyway, at that point in my political evolution, I was in an absolute sense probably the most tolerant I've ever been. Whether speaking about cultural differences, ideological ones, or immutable traits, my general attitude was "who cares, it's all the same anyway". (also I was an edgy teenager, so I expressed this belief by becoming ironically pro-cannibalism, but I digress). As I got older and moved to the left, most of the changes involved become less tolerant of things. Less tolerant of injustice, less tolerant of hierarchy, etc. I can't really think of anything that moving left made me more tolerant of. And, just to clarify, I think this is probably a good thing.

For me, becoming a leftist was essentially the process of saying to myself "I know it's a drag to judge things, but actually you have to do it anyway sometimes". This is the exact reverse of the framing I described at the beginning of this post. The easy path for me was always non-judgement, and maturing involved realizing that I did, in fact, probably have to judge certain things.

#navel gazing #society #for posterity

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demoisverysexy · 3 years

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An Open Letter to the Person who Blocked Me for Being Mormon

For context:

If you’re reading this, I hope it finds you well.

This letter is mostly for me, so I can get my feelings out. I’ve already talked about this with a few of my friends, and I’m feeling better than I was than when you blocked me. I’m still upset. Mostly because of general trends I see on tumblr of hatred for Mormons. A lot of it comes from ignorance and misunderstanding. Some of it comes from a place of genuine hurt that can’t go unaddressed. I don’t want to be dismissive of those who have faced trauma at the hands of my church. I am one of those people, and I know how deeply pain associated with my church can be. After our interaction, I felt that talking about it would help me process this.

Before I go on, I must be clear that this is not an attempt to get you to unblock me. As nice as it would be to be able to see your blog again – you’re very witty, and I enjoy your content! – I can live without it. This is more a response to the trend on tumblr specifically of hatred against Mormons, and assuming that they’re all bad people who are complicit in every single bad thing that the church does. You just happened to force me to be a little introspective about my church and my relation to it. Thank you for that.

First, however, I would like to clear up some misconceptions:

Your initial joke that prompted me to tell you I was a Mormon was a joke about Mormons and polygamy. The largest two organizations that can be classified as “Mormon,” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and the Community of Christ (which incidentally allows for gay marriage and has female clergy, though I am of the LDS sect), both disavow polygamy. There are other, smaller offshoot Mormon groups who do still practice this, which is where horror stories of polygamists marrying teenagers arise. These people are also Mormons, though I wish they weren’t, in the same way that problematic Christian groups are Christian, though many Christians wish they weren’t.

I do recognize that mainstream Mormonism has been labeled as a cult by many people, though the reasons people provide generally don’t hold up. Often the proof that people provide of my church’s cult-like nature is to take note of corruption that can be found in almost every church. These issues – such as racism, homophobia, and misogyny, to name a few – while real and important to address do not a cult make. Sometimes the proof is to point towards practices that are demonized in my church, but are practiced in other religions with no comment, or even celebration. Other times people will point to their own experiences with toxic church congregations, and while those issues are very real, they are by no means universal. My experience growing up Mormon was a lucky one in many ways. I personally don’t think that most people who study my church from an academic vantage point would call it a cult. I would consult them on this matter. After all, someone in a cult is rather hard-pressed to be able to tell whether they are in one or not.

Another point often levied against Mormonism is how it leaves its queer members with religious trauma due to its homophobic teachings. I understand this well. I have experienced deep religious trauma associated with my political stances in favor of LGBTQ+ rights (though that wasn’t the whole story). I won’t go into detail about this right now, but suffice it to say, I had a very traumatic time on my mission that led me to a very dark place, and ended with me contemplating choices I would never be able to take back. I’m fine now of course, but I carry those memories with me.

So why would I stay despite all this? Is it because I’m brainwashed? You would have to ask a psychologist about that, but I would say probably not. I knew, and know now, that the ways I was being treated were unfair and wrong. I don’t have time to go point by point to address every grievance I or anyone else has with my church and explain my position on it, as much as I would like to clear the air once and for all on this topic so there is no misunderstanding. Here’s the reasoning that has kept me here so far:

I think that every person of faith must, at some point, deal with the problematic aspects of their church’s history and doctrine. This comes with the territory. Whether it be disturbing stories in scripture, imperialist tendencies, doctrines that chafe against us, or problematic leaders, no person of faith is exempt from wrestling with the history that accompanies their faith. I have studied my church’s history in depth. Many of the horror stories I heard were provably false. Many were true. Where does that leave me?

I believe that God is bigger and better than us. We make terrible, awful mistakes all the time. But I don’t think that makes God less willing to work with us. If anything, I think it means he wants to help us more. He wants to help us move past our histories and become better. My church has a long way to go in this regard. For too long we have been silent when it mattered, and people have been wounded by our silence. Or even the words we have said out loud! If you look at my Mormonism tag on my blog, you will see some examples of what I am talking about. I have been wounded by the things my church has said and not said. It hurts awfully, and I ache for those who have been wounded more deeply than I.

But at the same time, I cannot deny the healing my faith has brought me. Whatever problems my church has – and it has many, deep and pressing issues – it is because of my faith that I am the person I am today. I can draw a straight line from my religion to the positions I hold today. Because I am a Mormon, I became a Marxist. Because I am a Mormon, I became nonbinary. Because I am a Mormon, I became a leftist. I cannot ignore that my religion, flawed as it may be, has led me to where I stand now. I am at the intersection of the hurt and healing the church offers. It is a difficult line to walk. But I hope that in walking it, I can bring healing and love to those who hurt in the ways I do. To let them know that they are not alone, and that they have a friend who can help them wherever they choose to go.

Yes I am queer. Yes I am a Mormon. I am here because I am trying to fix things. If at some point in the future I realize that I cannot change things, perhaps I will leave. I hope it does not come to that. And things are changing. They have changed before, and they can change now. I am confident that my God is willing to lead my church where it needs to go. I hope I can help speed things along. We shall see.

But spreading unequivocal hatred and disdain for Mormons does not help those of us who are Mormon who are trying to fix things. Yes, those who have left Mormonism due to trauma need a safe place to be away from that, and acknowledging the church’s many faults can be helpful to those people. I myself have criticized my church quite vocally. But refusing to listen to the stories of those of us who choose to stay, telling others that we are evil or stupid or what have you, is also quite traumatic to us. We are people too, with thoughts and feelings. It is easy to dismiss us out of hand if you assume we aren’t.

I try to be open about my religion and political stances on my tumblr. See for yourself: It’s a mix of Mormonism, LGBTQ+ activism, Marxism, and pretty much every other leftist political position you can find. Along with all the furry stuff, of course. But despite all this, I am still terrified every time someone follows me to tell them I am Mormon. More than I am to tell them that I’m queer. Tumblr is not representative of how things work in the “real world,” of course, but I have received hatred for being a Mormon there as well. And it’s mostly other Christians. So on the one hand I’m hated by LGBTQ+ folks, on the other hand I’m hated by my church for being queer, and on the third hand (as apparently I have three hands), I am hated by other Christians. I do not face hatred to the same degree from other Christians. I saw it most on my mission. But still, it exists.

(Incidentally, Evangelicals, who you seem to have problems with, and perhaps rightly so, though I have not done a study of the matter myself, largely despise Mormons, from what I have heard. Something to consider.)

I want allies. I want help. I want understanding. If I am to push back against bigotry in my church, I need your help. I need everyone’s help. Fighting bigotry wherever we see it is a worthy pursuit, I think. And if we can succeed, we can make the world a better, safer happier place. I want to fight off the ghosts that haunt my church. You don’t have to fight them with me, but I would appreciate it if I could have your support. It would make my job much easier.

We aren’t enemies. At least, I don’t think you’re my enemy. We both have been hurt by homophobia and bigotry. We live in a capitalist hellscape where police brutality and racism are on the rise. Fascism is looming over the political backdrop, along with the ongoing threat of ecological disaster. I think we would be better off helping each other than going after each other. I ask that you please listen to us when we say you are hurting us. The Mormons you blocked knowingly followed you, an openly queer person who calls out racism and bigotry and pedophilia. Yet you assume we are in favor of those things. Someone can at once be part of an institution while recognizing it’s flaws. (Aren’t we both Americans? Why not move if we hate it so much?) And perhaps we have used the “No true Scotsman” fallacy to justify why we stay. I don’t believe I have. I don’t feel I need to.

I hope that you consider what I’ve said here. I hope we can work together. And I hope that no matter what, you find peace wherever you end up.

Yours truly,

Demo Argenti

#religion #leftism #mormonism #LGBTQ stuff #marxism #racism #misogyny #feminism #homophobia #queerstake #shouting into the void #ok to rb

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bustedbernie · 3 years

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I don't think it's fair to attribute statements from his voters/supporters directly to Mélenchon. And using France's place in the EU to renegotiate the treaties and reform the EU to a more social institution was actually his plan if he was elected. I personally doubt it would have succeeded since many countries have no interest in that and I doubt his negotiation skills. Regarding patriotism I was specifically refering to the concept of "xenocentrism" mentioned by another anon. I would be very 1

Distrustful of such concept which looks very close to an argument to dismiss local leftists as under the influence of foreign ideologies and reminds me of McCarthy. That's why I brought up patriotism as used to dismiss ideas as foreign anf by attacking the speaker's relation to the us. I would still argue that US patriotism is particularly loud and expansive (to absurdity imo). The US not alone in that phenomenon and I actually think what made me jumped at this concept of xenocentrism is that 2

We're seeing something to the same effect in France with many newcomers in research, especially in political science and sociology, being accused of parroting anglo-saxon doctrine to destroy the local ethos. Their work are dismissed as incomplete, unscientific, subjective and biased because they don't refer on locally approved concepts and I feel like the same mechanism is at play with this notion of xenocentrism tied to left leaning ideas and people. I hope I was clearer :)

Well I’d disagree to an extent with the first bit. I think a politician is at least partly responsible for their followers statements and behaviors. That’s been a big part of this blog, but also I think on the right-wing we saw how violent things can become when leaders don’t shut up their vocal supporters (McCain vs Trump might be a good example, or Obama vs Bernie in the left). And yeah, on the EU, I don’t know that he was really willing to negotiate things in a fair way. His statements were very aggressive.

On your other points, yes it is much more clear. I do think the context of that anon as in how leftists in the USA use a mythological Europe as an ideal being for Americans to obtain. Much of the critique to this isn’t that there aren’t good ideas from European nations - there are - but that it is divorced from the history of Europe as a constituent whole as well as a continent of many nations. More importantly, it is used to attack the Democratic Party in the USA as “right-wing” based on an imaginary political spectrum which isn’t useful or cogent. I think this is the crux of the anon, because the Democratic Party IS quite left-wing, even in comparison to its European analogs (yes, even economically hah) and this meme also separates the Democrats from their context (American politics, two-party system, federalism, republicanism, etc).

I do think on the broad-left there is a large thirst for foreign ideas and policies, so there are limits to a lot of this. In urban planning, American planners are finally starting to get research that backs up data about bike lanes and infra, housing policy, road design and transport. The USA has a gigantic blindspot toward essentially anything outside its borders and I think that is starting to change for the better.

A lot of my academic background studies some of the issues you highlight. There are lots of friction points in what you speak of between the Anglo-American viewpoint and the francophone, one. I do think many in France are right to worry, though I also think some of it is a bit much. On the other hand, I do think there are lots of holes in the way that thought and research is done in Anglo nations that ought to be considered as well. The antagonistic form of writing and research in America is not something I am happy to see creeping into Canada and France, and writing my own research in the USA I still hate the ways in which a problematique is handled in the American format. But I think there is a virtue to both systems and perhaps the solution is in allowing some fluidity between them. But I think in France this is felt so strongly because the theoretical frameworks of some political and social thought is a bit shifted from the Anglo-American perspective. To generalize, I think the Anglo-American fascination with the individual is part of the reason why there is such friction on topics such as laïcité, feminisme and gender studies. I was recently reading an article that posited that the French philosophy on these matters was an adaptive marxist formulation that simply tends to view collectivities as more legitimate than in the Anglo-American formulation which often separates individuals from collectives. Although a lot of this is really just relevant to academia.

I think I agree that there is a danger though as you underline and there is always the need to outline exceptions, generalities, etc.

On the point toward patriotism, yes I think most American nations have a much more forceful patriotism than (west) European nations. Canada, USA, Mexico, Brazil... It’s very different. But I still find Europeans, or at least French, Spanish and British folks, to simply express patriotism differently. But I do remember the collective eye-roll in France when Macron stated he wanted schools to start the day with La Marseillaise hah. He does get called an American a lot, anyhow haha.

#Anonymous

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qqueenofhades · 4 years

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Could you expand a bit on the "death of expertise"? It's something I think about A LOT as an artist, because there are so many problems with people who think it isn't a real job, and the severe undercutting of prices that happens because people think hobbyists and professionals are the same. At the same time, I also really want people to feel free to be able to make art if they want, with no gatekeeping or elitism, and I usually spin myself in circles mentally thinking about it. So.

I have been secretly hoping someone would ask this question, nonny. Bless you. I have a lot (a LOT) of thoughts on this topic, which I will try to keep somewhat concise and presented in a semi-organized fashion, but yes.

I can mostly speak about this in regard to academia, especially the bad, bad, BAD takes in my field (history) that have dominated the news in recent weeks and which constitute most of the recent posts on my blog. (I know, I know, Old Man Yells At Cloud when attempting to educate the internet on actual history, but I gotta do SOMETHING.) But this isn’t a new phenemenon, and is linked to the avalanche of “fake news” that we’ve all heard about and experienced in the last few years, especially in the run-up and then after the election of You Know Who, who has made fake news his personal brand (if not in the way he thinks). It also has to do with the way Americans persistently misunderstand the concept of free speech as “I should be able to say whatever I want and nobody can correct or criticize me,” which ties into the poisonous extreme-libertarian ethos of “I can do what I want with no regard for others and nobody can correct me,” which has seeped its way into the American mainstream and is basically the center of the modern Republican party. (Basically: all for me, all the time, and caring about others is a weak liberal pussy thing to do.)

This, however, is not just an issue of partisan politics, because the left is just as guilty, even if its efforts take a different shape. One of the reason I got so utterly exasperated with strident online leftists, especially around primary season and the hardcore breed of Bernie Bros, is just that they don’t do anything except shout loud and incorrect information on the internet (and then transmogrify that into a twisted ideology of moral purity which makes a sin out of actually voting for a flawed candidate, even if the alternative is Donald Goddamn Trump). I can’t count how many people from both sides of the right/left divide get their political information from like-minded people on social media, and never bother to experience or verify or venture outside their comforting bubbles that will only provide them with “facts” that they already know. Social media has done a lot of good things, sure, but it’s also made it unprecedently easy to just say whatever insane bullshit you want, have it go viral, and then have you treated as an authority on the topic or someone whose voice “has to be included” out of some absurd principle of both-siderism. This is also a tenet of the mainstream corporate media: “both sides” have to be included, to create the illusion of “objectivity,” and to keep the largest number of paying subscribers happy. (Yes, of course this has deep, deep roots in the collapse of late-stage capitalism.) Even if one side is absolutely batshit crazy, the rules of this distorted social contract stipulate that their proposals and their flaws have to be treated as equal with the others, and if you point out that they are batshit crazy, you have to qualify with some criticism of the other side.

This is where you get white people posting “Neo-Nazis and Black Lives Matter are the same!!!1” on facebook. They are a) often racist, let’s be real, and b) have been force-fed a constant narrative where Both Sides Are Equally Bad. Even if one is a historical system of violent oppression that has made a good go at total racial and ethnic genocide and rests on hatred, and the other is the response to not just that but the centuries of systemic and small-scale racism that has been built up every day, the white people of the world insist on treating them as morally equivalent (related to a superior notion that Violence is Always Bad, which.... uh... have you even seen constant and overwhelming state-sponsored violence the West dishes out? But it’s only bad when the other side does it. Especially if those people can be at all labeled “fanatics.”)

I have complained many, many times, and will probably complain many times more, about how hard it is to deconstruct people’s absolutely ingrained ideas of history and the past. History is a very fragile thing; it’s really only equivalent to the length of a human lifespan, and sometimes not even that. It’s what people want to remember and what is convenient for them to remember, which is why we still have some living Holocaust survivors and yet a growing movement of Holocaust denial, among other extremist conspiracy theories (9/11, Sandy Hook, chemtrails, flat-earthing, etc etc). There is likewise no organized effort to teach honest history in Western public schools, not least since the West likes its self-appointed role as guardians of freedom and liberty and democracy in the world and doesn’t really want anyone digging into all that messy slavery and genocide and imperialism and colonialism business. As a result, you have deliberately under- or un-educated citizens, who have had a couple of courses on American/British/etc history in grade school focusing on the greatest-hit reel, and all from an overwhelmingly triumphalist white perspective. You have to like history, from what you get out of it in public school, to want to go on to study it as a career, while knowing that there are few jobs available, universities are cutting or shuttering humanities departments, and you’ll never make much money. There is... not a whole lot of outside incentive there.

I’ve written before about how the humanities are always the first targeted, and the first defunded, and the first to be labeled as “worthless degrees,” because a) they are less valuable to late-stage capitalism and its emphasis on Material Production, and b) they often focus on teaching students the critical thinking skills that critique and challenge that dominant system. There’s a reason that there is a stereotype of artists as social revolutionaries: they have often taken a look around, gone, “Hey, what the hell is this?” and tried to do something about it, because the creative and free-thinking impulse helps to cultivate the tools necessary to question what has become received and dominant wisdom. Of course, that can then be taken too far into the “I’ll create my own reality and reject absolutely everything that doesn’t fit that narrative,” and we end up at something like the current death of expertise.

This year is particularly fertile for these kinds of misinformation efforts: a plague without a vaccine or a known cure, an election year in a turbulently polarized country, race unrest in a deeply racist country spreading to other racist countries around the world and the challenging of a particularly important system (white supremacy), etc etc. People are scared and defensive and reactive, and in that case, they’re especially less motivated to challenge or want to encounter information that scares them. They need their pre-set beliefs to comfort them or provide steadiness in a rocky and uncertain world, and (thanks once again to social media) it’s easy to launch blistering ad hominem attacks on people who disagree with you, who are categorized as a faceless evil mass and who you will never have to meet or negotiate with in real life. This is the environment in which all the world’s distinguished scientists, who have spent decades studying infectious diseases, have to fight for airtime and authority (and often lose) over random conspiracy theorists who make a YouTube video. The public has been trained to see them as “both the same” and then accept which side they like the best, regardless of actual factual or real-world qualifications. They just assume the maniac on YouTube is just as trustworthy as the scientists with PhDs from real universities.

Obviously, academia is racist, elitist, classist, sexist, on and on. Most human institutions are. But training people to see all academics as the enemy is not the answer. You’ve seen the Online Left (tm) also do this constantly, where they attack “the establishment” for never talking about anything, or academics for supposedly erasing and covering up all of non-white history, while apparently never bothering to open a book or familiarize themselves with a single piece of research that actual historians are working on. You may have noticed that historians have been leading the charge against the “don’t erase history!!!1″ defenders of racist monuments, and explaining in stinging detail exactly why this is neither preserving history or being truthful about it. Tumblr likes to confuse the mechanism that has created the history and the people who are studying and analyzing that history, and lump them together as one mass of Evil And Lying To You. Academics are here because we want to critically examine the world and tell you things about it that our nonsense system has required years and years of effort, thousands of dollars in tuition, and other gatekeeping barriers to learn. You can just ask one of us. We’re here, we usually love to talk, and we’re a lot cheaper. I think that’s pretty cool.

As a historian, I have been trained in a certain skill set: finding, reading, analyzing, using, and criticizing primary sources, ditto for secondary sources, academic form and style, technical skills like languages, paleography, presentation, familiarity with the professional mechanisms for reviewing and sharing work (journals, conferences, peer review, etc), and how to assemble this all into an extended piece of work and to use it in conversation with other historians. That means my expertise in history outweighs some rando who rolls up with an unsourced or misleading Twitter thread. If a professor has been handed a carefully crafted essay and then a piece of paper scribbled with crayon, she is not obliged to treat them as essentially the same or having the same critical weight, even if the essay has flaws. One has made an effort to follow the rules of the game, and the other is... well, I did read a few like that when teaching undergraduates. They did not get the same grade.

This also means that my expertise is not universal. I might know something about adjacent subjects that I’ve also studied, like political science or English or whatever, but someone who is a career academic with a degree directly in that field will know more than me. I should listen to them, even if I should retain my independent ability and critical thinking skillset. And I definitely should not be listened to over people whose field of expertise is in a completely different realm. Take the recent rocket launch, for example. I’m guessing that nobody thought some bum who walked in off the street to Kennedy Space Center should be listened to in preference of the actual scientists with degrees and experience at NASA and knowledge of math and orbital mechanics and whatever else you need to get a rocket into orbit. I definitely can’t speak on that and I wouldn’t do it anyway, so it’s frustrating to see it happen with history. Everybody “knows” things about history that inevitably turn out to be wildly wrong, and seem to assume that they can do the same kind of job or state their conclusions with just as much authority. (Nobody seems to listen to the scientists on global warming or coronavirus either, because their information is actively inconvenient for our entrenched way of life and people don’t want to change.) Once again, my point here is not to be a snobbish elitist looking down at The Little People, but to remark that if there’s someone in a field who has, you know, actually studied that subject and is speaking from that place of authority, maybe we can do better than “well, I saw a YouTube video and liked it better, so there.” (Americans hate authority and don’t trust smart people, which is a related problem and goes back far beyond Trump, but there you are.)

As for art: it’s funny how people devalue it constantly until they need it to survive. Ask anyone how they spent their time in lockdown. Did they listen to music? Did they watch movies or TV? Did they read a book? Did they look at photography or pictures? Did they try to learn a skill, like drawing or writing or painting, and realize it was hard? Did they have a preference for the art that was better, more professionally produced, had more awareness of the rules of its craft, and therefore was more enjoyable to consume? If anyone wants to tell anyone that art is worthless, I invite you to challenge them on the spot to go without all of the above items during the (inevitable, at this rate) second coronavirus lockdown. No music. No films. No books. Not even a video or a meme or anything else that has been made for fun, for creativity, or anything outside the basic demands of Compensated Economic Production. It’s then that you’ll discover that, just as with the underpaid essential workers who suffered the most, we know these jobs need to get done. We just still don’t want to pay anyone fairly for doing them, due to our twisted late-capitalist idea of “value.”

Anyway, since this has gotten long enough and I should probably wrap up: as you say, the difference between “professional” and “hobbyist” has been almost completely erased, so that people think the opinion of one is as good as the other, or in your case, that the hobbyist should present their work for free or refuse to be seen as a professional entitled to fair compensation for their skill. That has larger and more insidious effects in a global marketplace of ideas that has been almost entirely reduced to who can say their opinion the loudest to the largest group of people. I don’t know how to solve this problem, but at least I can try to point it out and to avoid being part of it, and to recognize where I need to speak and where I need to shut up. My job, and that of every single white person in America right now, is to shut up and let black people (and Native people, and Latinx people, and Muslim people, and etc...) tell me what it’s really like to live here with that identity. I have obviously done a ton of research on the subject and consider myself reasonably educated, but here’s the thing: my expertise still doesn’t outweigh theirs, no matter what degrees they have or don’t have. I then am required to boost their ideas, views, experiences, and needs, rather than writing them over or erasing them, and to try to explain to people how the roots of these ideas interlock and interact where I can. That is -- hopefully -- putting my history expertise to use in a good way to support what they’re saying, rather than silence it. I try, at any rate, and I am constantly conscious of learning to do better.

I hope that was helpful for you. Thanks for letting me talk about it.

#history #long post #anonymous #ask

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things2mustdo · 3 years

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As you probably have heard in the news, earlier in August a Pennsylvania grand jury handed down a 1,356-page account of sexual abuse which involved around 1,000 kids and 300 priests during a period of approximately 70 years. It is another pedophilia scandal within the Catholic Church that adds up to their collection of countless other ones reported in recent years.

The commie pope—while on his two-day visit to Ireland—begged for forgiveness again, just the way he did in Chile back in January of this year.

You can notice how quick and scathing the mainstream media is to denounce these recurring events, after all we know who owns the MSM and the (real) Church has a long, well-known history of “anti-semitism” and resistance against the tentacles of globalism. I wish the media had the same commitment to inform the existence of other pedophile rings full of high-ranking people as well.

Is the problem of the church’s innumerous sexual abuse allegations really pedophilia? To me there is a deeper explanation for it, and that explanation is: homosexualism. 81% of the alleged victims are male and three-fourths of them are post-pubescent. As you guys are certainly aware of, the Church has a very big issue with homosexualism among its clergymen.

I have a theory for the high presence of gay men inside priesthood: until not long ago being gay was definitely not ok, homosexuals were not accepted as they are now, so they became priests.

The developed Western world of today encourages people to become gay, it applauds individuals for their gayness, but it wasn’t always like that. Now, try to imagine a closeted homosexual man living in the 50s, for example. What a better place to go than the Catholic seminary? People wouldn’t look you down, you wouldn’t have to get married, the place was filled with other young men (potential sexual partners) and that’s how the Church got corrupted by perverts.

Pedophilia x Homosexualism

One normie could argue “how homosexualism relates to pedophilia?” Any red-pilled person who has ever wondered what causes someone to become gay will notice that there is an undeniable link between pedophilia and homosexualism.

Let’s remember the occasion of Milo Yiannopolous’ resignation from Breitbart over comments which seemed to endorse sex between “younger men” and older men. Something that is—as he pointed out—extremely common among gay men. A 2009 report revealed that 74 percent of bisexuals had been sexually abused as children, I am pretty sure homosexuals follow the same numbers.

I won’t say homosexual behavior is exclusively caused by pedophilia because human (or animal) sexuality is a very complex topic which can certainly involve many variables. I just don’t buy that “born this way” hype, until this day not a single reliable proof of the existence of a gay gene or anything like it was discovered.

The Vatican once bought a £21 million apartment block above ‘Europe’s largest gay sauna’.

Pope Francis, a champion of the left-leaning agenda inside the Church, has been accused of covering up former Cardinal McCarrick’s abuse allegations (one of the many cases in Pennsylvania). The accusations were made by Carlo Vigano, a former Vatican ambassador to the US, and if it proves to be true–I am positive it is—that should result in pope Francis’ resignation. As a traditionalist Catholic myself I would be delighted with such an event.

Francis has already been complacent with other pedos before. One good example is the 2015 ‘Synod on the Family’ when the pope invited Godfried Danneels, a Belgium Cardinal convicted of covering up pedophiles in the 90s, to attend the meeting. Danneels is a hard-left priest that tries to push the Church ” liberal reformation” and admitted that he was part of a plot against (right-leaning) Pope Benedict and in favor of the election of leftie Francis.

To affirm that the Church’s gay/pedos are exclusively part of the left-wing priesthood would be too Manichean. I am sure there are tons of sick people who lean right also. But it can’t be denied that the liberals make up the vast majority of these issues involving sexual misconduct.

“Religious progressives”

For those who don’t know, the Catholic Church, just as any other political institution, is divided in factions that tend to be more liberal or orthodox. The liberation theology, for instance, is a movement created inside the Catholic Church (and some Protestant denominations) which aims to mix Christianity and Marxism.

Even if you are an agnostic don’t underestimate the influence they played in various regions such as Europe, Latin America and even New England. Brazilian Workers’ Party attributed their success to this movement and Unions.

Be wary of any religious leader that tries to push a liberalization of dogmas and traditions. Because all religions are intrinsically conservative according to their respective contexts, they establish doctrines that dictate sets of rules that must be followed properly in order to attain their objectives (whether is Salvation in Christianity or Nirvana in Buddhism). There are no (real) religions without their traditions.

Whenever you see liberal religious men doubt their characters. There is a good chance they don’t even bother with religion or spirituality, perhaps they are closeted atheist. What they do care about is the religious platform, which can offer various benefits such as large audiences, political influence, money and even sex.

Estimates of the number of gays in the priesthood are all over the lot, from 20 percent to 60 percent, although a Los Angeles Times poll in 2002 found only 15 percent of priests saying they were homosexual or “somewhere in between but more on the homosexual side.”

Every time pedo priests’ cases pop up in the MSM, secular people are very quick to point fingers and show their moral superiority, but they “forget” the existence of secular institutions that are way more sexually perverted than the “gayish” modern Church, such as Hollywood, the political and corporate world.

Real Church x Sissy Church

It is also important to notice that the Church was emasculated, an emasculation that took place during the process of secularization and establishment of liberal democracies across the Western world (e.g. French Revolution).

The Church had to be softened, becoming an institution that barely resembles the once powerful and great Church of the Crusades or the Inquisitions. This same phenom of emasculation can also happen in other secular institutions too, the Military, mainstream Music, Politics, Sports and even Boys Scouts. And it will only get worse as liberal-democratic globalism advances, so secular people: watch out!

St. Basil the Great, a 4th century bishop and Doctor of the Church, defended that gay/pedo priests should be publicly flogged. That was the (real) Church, not this sissy catholicism created after the Second Vatican Council (a modernist reform imposed in the Church from 1962 to 1965). A lot of things got bad in the 60s.

The (real) Church has a very important and vigorous story in the construction of the West. Always being a target to the globalists and that breed who rules the world, a clear obstacle to their goals.

Examples are many: Gabriel García Moreno, Catholic Equatorian president, who made a terrific job in a Confessional Equator and was killed by the Freemasons; Saint José Sanchez del Rio, who was killed by Mexican secular, freemason and leftist government with the support of the US, for refusing to abbandon his faith.

Inconvenient truths are ignored

The media only goes after what is convenient to their narrative, don’t expect them to expose Hollywood pedos nor the obvious link between pedo priests and homosexualism. The left has already pushed the normalization of pedophilia many times and I didn’t see the indignation of the MSM.

Late Vatican’s Chief Exorcist Gabriele Amorth once said, “The Devil resides in the Vatican and you can see the consequences”.

“The floor of hell is paved with the skulls of bishops”. – St. Athanasius

Read More: The Vatican Has Disgraced True Catholic Values

I have noticed that many people have been falsely conflating what comes out of the Vatican as Catholic. Thus it is my duty to present to the esteemed readers of this fine site the true teachings of the Church which stand, ever more so today, in stark opposition to the rot of cultural Marxism and the effeminacy of the Papal pretenders in Rome.

Vicar of Christ?

Church authorities are not legitimate

It is a dogma of the Catholic faith that the Church cannot substantially change. This means that the church cannot contradict nor change her teaching from what has always been universally taught or has been solemnly defined. Any one who claims to be Catholic and knowingly professes a faith which contradicts a teaching of the Church is considered to be a heretic and is considered to have a removed himself from the Church.

As St. Thomas states: “[one] who disbelieves [even] one article of faith does not have faith, either formed or unformed.” This is known as the unity of faith which means that all Catholics profess the same faith. Likewise it means that heretics cannot hold a clerical office in the Church. Thus if a heretic were to be elected even to the Papacy they could not be considered a legitimate Pontiff because a heretic has separated himself from the Church (source).

Would a real Pope bow to a religion declared false by the Church?

Simply put, you have to be Catholic to be Pope, and the absurdity of a heretic claiming the See of Peter is where we find ourselves today. For just as the institutions in the West have been infiltrated and seized by the enemy, likewise have the institutions of the Church been usurped by apostate forces. The hierarchy currently residing in the Vatican are not legitimate authorities and do not represent the perennial teaching of the Church. Therefore I have listed for your benefit the actual Church’s positions on some current areas of contention.

The only time Francis has ever smiled at a Crucifix

On Communism

The Catholic Church is vehemently opposed to communism. Without Pius XII valiant efforts, communism would have prevailed over postwar France and Italy. The Pope went so far as to issue the Decree against Communism in 1949 which excommunicated any Christian who professed communist doctrine.

Catholicism is the enemy of Marxism as it teaches that there can be no separation of Church and state, and an atheist government is immoral. Catholicism believes private property is a natural right going so far to say that depriving workers of their wages is a sin which cries to heaven for vengeance (compare that to our socialist tax code!).

On Migration and Culture

The current Muslim invasion of Europe would be met with the utmost resistance. It has always been the Church which has sought to safeguard Catholic Culture and in ages past has gone so far as to issue a call to arms against non-Catholics who have sought to destroy it.

Pope Urban II issued the Crusades and Pope Leo the great even went so far as to personally travel into the heart of the Hun army—to Attila himself—to deliver Rome from the sack that was to come. In 1571, St. Pope Pius V formed the Holy League that would go on to defeat the great Muslim Turkish Armada that was plaguing the Mediterranean.

“Then I pointed like so and told them where to take their cultural enrichment”

The tradition of the Church has been to unite the West against external non-christian threats in order to preserve Western Christian culture.

“The natural law enjoins us to love devotedly and to defend the country in which we were born, and in which we were brought up, so that every good citizen hesitates not to face death for his native land…. We are bound, then, to love dearly the country whence we have received the means of engagement this mortal life affords.” – Sapientia Christiana Encyclical Pope Leo XIII

On Abortion and Contraception

So what is the real teaching of the Church in regards to abortion and contraception? The teaching is any member who has an abortion or supports abortion is automatically excommunicated from the Church. That’s right: every single Democrat who claims to be Catholic is actually excommunicated, including Nancy Pelosi who likes to sanctimoniously drone how she is a good Catholic grandmother.

Contraception is also considered a mortal sin because it is an unnatural stoppage of life.

“Hence, after the sin of homicide whereby a human life already in existence is destroyed, this type of sin appears to take next place, for by it the generation of human nature is impeded.” -St. Thomas Aquinas.

I know this is unpopular with the readers, but the teaching is that those who engage in contraception have already committed murder in their heart. Contraception is what allows people to engage in recreational sex, because the natural end of sex has been set aside so too then has the institution of marriage, whose end is children.

Likewise, because we have committed murder in our hearts, we have become a petulant, immature, vain, and a sterile people similar to any other people who have taken the risk from reward or the consequences from pleasure. This is the most difficult pill to swallow.

On Feminism

The Church condemns feminism in the strongest terms. There cannot exist feminism without birth control.

“…any use whatsoever of matrimony exercised in such a way that the act is deliberately frustrated in its natural power to generate life is an offense against the law of God and of nature, and those who indulge in such are branded with the guilt of a grave sin.” -Pius XI Casti Cannubi

The Church asserts that Man is the head of the household and that a woman finds her vocation from being a good mother and housewife:

“This … does not deny or take away the liberty which fully belongs to the woman both in view of her dignity as a human person, and in view of her most noble office as wife and mother and companion; nor does it bid her obey her husband’s every request if not in harmony with right reason or with the dignity due to wife; … For if the man is the head, the woman is the heart, and as he occupies the chief place in ruling, so she may and ought to claim for herself the chief place in love.” -Ibid

The Pope has even gone so far as to condemn women’s suffrage:

“Woman can never be man’s equal and cannot therefore enjoy equal rights. Few women would ever desire to legislate, and those who did would only be classed as eccentrics.” -St. Pius X

On Pacifism

The Catholic Church is not simply just a religion of love and mercy. Christianity is not a weak religion, for our God is a God of Battles. Catholic Tradition encourages us to live our lives in the manner of our Lord Jesus who spoke of the struggle that his Church would have to endure.

“Do not think that I am come to send peace upon earth: I came not to send peace, but the sword.”-Mathew 10:34

Christians are not meant to sit idly as bystanders to the great struggle of good and evil in this world.

“For our wrestling is not against flesh and blood: but against principalities and power, against the rulers of the world of this darkness: against the spirits of wickedness in the high places.” -Ephesians 6:12

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geminipdf · 3 years

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what are the extracts abt education that you just posted from? It seems really interesting but I didn't entirely understand it. No worries if u don't want to lol but could you explain what point the author was trying to make?

the excerpts are from a book by Mark Fisher called ‘Capitalist Realism. Is There No Alternative?’ which i want to kind of binge-read in one day cause it’s a good compilation of points that can be made about capitalism and its effects on our everyday lives, the economy, education, etc. it doesn’t really discuss anything in-depth but i personally think it does a good job of pinpointing the central issues with capitalist reality!

mark fisher’s point is that educational institutions are currently in a pretty fraught position and that position affects teachers, since they are the one dealing with students directly. there’s been a shift in dealing with students and enforcing discipline - the author is a college professor himself and he brings up his own students as an example - since disciplinary structures are buckling in institutions and being replaced with other kinds of “softer” modes of control, he observes that students have no motivation to work and study or even pay attention in class, they’re unable to focus, read, work on stuff that used to interest them. capitalism grips us not with rigid control, but with something Fisher describes as “systems of perpetual consumption”. once we’re cut off from the things that give us instant gratification, we become basically helpless. if we don’t have youtube, instagram, facebook, TV running in the background we become bored and fall into a stupor, if we’re not interacting with a videogame/a virtual reality, we are understimulated and depressed. we don’t really read anymore, since reading stuff online is more like data processing and has little to do with reading a book. and that’s what Fisher sees as a cause for so many students being diagnosed with dyslexia - he sees it as a political/systemic problem since it has recently become a very popular diagnosis. his own college students can’t read shit for class because they see the process of reading as something too boring, too slow, not interactive and gratifying enough.

in the case of that second excerpt with the smoking oscar isaac gif - Fisher explores the topic of the position teachers are in right now. since i am a teacher rn i really Felt it, cause it’s literally like that!!!!!!! we are supposed to be someone with authority over students, someone that tells them what to do, when, where and how, someone they listen to and respect, we’re supposed to use discipline, but discipline is outdated, so students get bored and simply ignore most of the disciplnary measures teachers can threaten them with (pls keep in mind that i would never want to punish/discipline my students in any way lol and i don’t do it, but it’s something that the system expects from teachers). at the same time teachers are burdened with providing students with enough entertainment to keep them interested in education AND caring for the students and act as people who teach them how to navigate personal life, emotions, relationships, social norms, etc., something that’s traditionally ascribed to parents. so teachers are caught between the discipline-enforcer and care-taker role which kind of fucks u up. you have to be a good, loving teacher that teaches kids how to live but you also have to test their knowledge using a standardized test that doesn’t reflect their abilities and potentials at all, and fail some of them, even though you know they worked as hard as they could, because that’s how the educational system works. it sucks :(

the entire book is based on the point made by a lot of leftist academics which can be summarised in the notion that rigid control and discipline isn’t the thing that controls us anymore. there isn’t a one Big Bad Set of Rules which, if disobeyed, disciplines and punishes us in a visible and direct way, the control that is most persistent in modern societies is of a different kind - one that allows us to choose between a lot of options, one that seems “softer”, but it can actually control us in a way more effective way because it kind of supervises every single sphere of our lives.

this got really long... but i hope i made it a bit clearer lol

#<3 #Anonymous

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