i love watching arguments start on that terfs post and blocking the radfems after someone responds to their argument so they can’t respond to it and it looks like they lost and didn’t have a comeback
They really do this
it shows bro
of course OP is unemployed lol
It’s not collecting unemployment it’s called “Pimping the system, like a boss”. Not that you would know.
“Ford introduced the V-8 engine in 1932, and this poster for the following year’s model showcases its promotional message ("Ford lets fly this arrow to show the road of progress”) with a striking Art Deco take on classicism. Ford was the first company to cast a V-8 engine block in one piece. It was many years before the company’s competitors learned how to mass-produce a reliable V-8; in the interim, the car and its powerful engine became the preferred choice of performance-minded motorists worldwide" (Crouse/Deco, p. 46).
I can’t remember if I posted about this before, but our new office manager is the store managers sister
Andboy is she outdated.
1. Keeps using slurs as if they were regular adjectives
2. Makes passive aggressive comments about “professionalism” in regards to dress and the way I talk to other receptionists
3. And most recently she wanted to know “since when did June 1st become the beginning of LGBTQ Pride month ”
and when I said it’s been least a decade she wanted wanted to know more, so I looked it up (Bill Clinton declared it in 1999) and she pulled out the classic “when is straight pride month ”
“If I only had a common illness like diabetes I’d be able to access competent medical care without having to go doctor shopping.”
No, you wouldn’t.
The more time I spend talking shop with other diabetics the more I see doctors routinely screwing up our care and treatment. Everything from bullying us into weight loss to the point of developing eating disorders to withholding needed medication because they’re worried we’ll get fat if our bodies are able to process carbs into energy. People with symptomatic, urgently high blood sugars being given 500mg off metformin and sent home from the ER before they’re even stabilized.
It ain’t about disease rarity it’s about fatphobia, racism, classism, and sexism.
I wish that anti-bullying campaigns would stop arguing that “anyone can be bullied”/that “it’s completely random who the bullying victim is” cause it’s usually not just “anyone” who’s being bullied - it’s the disabled kids, the neurodivergent kids, the kids of color, the fat kids, the mentally ill kids, the poor kids, the transgender kids, the gender nonconforming kids, the non-straight kids. We won’t get anywhere with stopping bullying if we don’t confront the underlying reasons causes it’s no accident that it’s the kids belonging to marginalized groups who ends up being bullying victims. Bullying is not just a “random” evil it’s an expression of the ableism, racism, classism, sexism, homophobia, fatphobia and transhobia in our society and it’s about time that we confront that in our anti-bullying campaigns.
Edited version. Please reblog this version instead if you’ve reblogged the unedited version.
middle class is closer to poverty than being a multimillionaire
“The rich” does NOT include children of billionaires (come on we’re at least slightly better than the plagues of Egypt)
Upper middle class children SHOULD NOT feel guilt over having money
Being aware of privilege and using your privilege to help others IS NOT a guilt trip
Constantly feeling guilty helps no one
Billionaires, however, should feel guilty over hoarding wealth.
Upper middle class is NOT rich
Black Lives Matter
Trans rights are human rights
My uncle was one of the top surgeons in the country. He was upper middle class definitely. When he got cancer, his insurance didn’t cover all the treatments he would need and after 5 years he drained his savings on cancer treatments (while still working most of that time) and eventually died because he couldn’t afford the expensive treatments that might have saved him.
If you are upper middle class and you get sick, it will likely bankrupt your family. It’s fucked.
For all of the idiots in the notes ^
Honest to god - even if you make 6 figures a year? you’re closer to poverty than true wealth. Check your shit and remember who your real allies and enemies are guys.
A 6 figure income is a lot right? That’s say: 223,000 dollars a year Which is 112 dollars an hour. Most people would consider that upper middle class. That’s enough money to have a nice house, go on fun vacations. That’s slight more than the average doctor makes.
223,000 dollars is what Jeff Bezo makes in a minute
i wish all affluent people who are in college and make nonstop jokes about being poor a very understand that poverty is not a temporary condition
if you are poor for four years and know the exact date at which it will end, you have not experienced poverty.
this is the same reason that “politicians should have to live a month on minimum wage to see what it’s like” doesn’t work. poverty is a lack of resources beyond monetary ones. it’s not having family members you can borrow money from. it’s not having a place to stay if you were outdoors for a bit. it’s not having the nice kitchen equipement with which you could make food more cheaply. it’s having to buy cheaper things which will break sooner because you can’t afford the better ones.
the bit about knowing the end date is not a semantic point to make me feel better. if you know you’ll be out of this soon, it enables you to make choices you otherwise couldn’t. you can splurge on pizza delivery or spend half your paycheck on good shoes because it isn’t real. if a crisis comes, the irreality of this situation allows you to deal with it. you can ask your parents for money, you can stay with someone for a while. impoverished people can’t.
i think a lot of times otherwise progressive people come out of college more classist because they think they know what it’s like to be poor now, and they made the right choices, so why doesn’t everyone else? you weren’t, and you didn’t. poverty is more than that.
Don’t mind me I’m just screaming about all the empty neighbourhoods in my country that no one can move into because private builders want to charge hundreds of thousands of euros for them and no one can pay so they sit empty while children and adults sleep on the streets here in the cold and dumbfucks blame refugees instead of the government who should fix this by seizing the properties and publicising them
Also I don’t care how much was spent on them, it’s evil to create homes and deny them to people because you’re not making the exact amount of money you want
People need homes, affordable homes, fuck the rich who built these places and allow their greed to damage the community
i wish all affluent people who are in college and make nonstop jokes about being poor a very understand that poverty is not a temporary condition
if you are poor for four years and know the exact date at which it will end, you have not experienced poverty.
this is the same reason that “politicians should have to live a month on minimum wage to see what it’s like” doesn’t work. poverty is a lack of resources beyond monetary ones. it’s not having family members you can borrow money from. it’s not having a place to stay if you were outdoors for a bit. it’s not having the nice kitchen equipement with which you could make food more cheaply. it’s having to buy cheaper things which will break sooner because you can’t afford the better ones.
the bit about knowing the end date is not a semantic point to make me feel better. if you know you’ll be out of this soon, it enables you to make choices you otherwise couldn’t. you can splurge on pizza delivery or spend half your paycheck on good shoes because it isn’t real. if a crisis comes, the irreality of this situation allows you to deal with it. you can ask your parents for money, you can stay with someone for a while. impoverished people can’t.
i think a lot of times otherwise progressive people come out of college more classist because they think they know what it’s like to be poor now, and they made the right choices, so why doesn’t everyone else? you weren’t, and you didn’t. poverty is more than that.
“I can’t empathize with Aboriginal people. I am comfortable with my rich lifestyle, unlike them, who are comfortable with being poor. Until they work harder and want a lifestyle like mine, I can’t care about their issues. They choose to be poor.”
Why have I only just found out about this. I knew about the British Government’s debates over if people doing creative courses (Art, theatre, ect) should even be eligible for loans, which was bad enough, but this? If someone fails their Maths and/or English GCSE once, they can never apply for a loan? Even if they resit that exam and get an A? Even if they get As in everything else? Possibly never in their life are they going to be able to go to uni, because of this. Wtf. “Weed out low quality courses”. This is the most clasist and ableist thing they could have possibly done. I’m not even surprised.
Also, before there was a petition to stop this. The government rejected it.
How Disney Movies Program Your Mind by The Cracked Podcast The Disney filmography from the 1930s to today perpetuates an antiquated American value structure that depicts misogyny, racism, classism and narcissism, yet as kids watching these films and parents showing them to our children, we never think twice about it. Should we be more vigilant in deciphering what these movies are really about instead of just blindly trusting the logo on the Blu-Ray case?
Should we be so cavalier in showing Disney movies to our kids without any kind of pretext or decompressing post-film discussion? I mean, when was the last time your parents sat you down after, like, a spirited viewing of Dumbo to explain that those crows are super not okay, or that like, running away from home when you’re sixteen to marry literally the first human man that you’ve laid eyes on is probably not going to be quite as romantic if you do it in real life? There’s usually not a castle involved. And I’m going to go ahead and say that that’s probably happened zero times. Parents have never tried to do that or unpack any of these things with us, and that’s kind of the problem with all of these movies. DumboandSnow WhiteandSleeping Beauty and like, two-thirds of the Disney catalogue, they were all released in theaters over half of a century ago. The country was a very different place back then. It was dominated by an entirely different value system, a lot of which was actively harmful to lots of people. And our parents, and previous generations, their parents too, helped sort of keep these values alive just by continuing to show their kids these classic Disney movies.
Sexism
When you look at Snow White, […] her superpower is being pretty only when she’s asleep. Her life is saved multiple times – the seven dwarves are about to pickaxe her in the head, and then she rolls over while sleeping and they’re like, “Whoa! She’s so pretty! Whoa, that chick is hot!” And then at the end, the prince comes and kisses her to raise her from the deep sleep from the poisoned apple. Any time she acts with agency, like when she runs away from the castle, she’s just like, running into trees and is just like a dizzy idiot and when a clear witch walks up and is like, “here’s an apple,” she makes the obviously wrong decision. The moral is just, “Women, this is what happens when you think for yourselves – just, better seen, not heard. Better unconscious, actually, if possible.”
Friendship
There’s an undercurrent in almost every big Disney movie of, a lot of weird lessons about how romance works, and also a lot of weird lessons about how friendship works. For movies that can depict everything from the Grimm’s Fairy Tale cannon to Huns invading China to, you know, animals under the sea, they basically depict every romance the same way, and they depict the friend that works – at least for princesses – in a really weird…it teaches you to be selfish, almost, I think, the way they depict friends.
So when you look at most of the princess movies – and I think those movies are almost like the central Disney movies – they make a weird point of almost all the princesses having animal friends or, in Beauty and the Beast’s case, having household object friends, in Snow White’s case it’s a mix of dwarves and animals who come and land on her. But like, Pocahontas has an entire tribe of humans to hang out with – all the other humans in her tribe hang out with humans – but what Pocahontas does is hang out with a raccoon, and a hummingbird, and a talking tree. And Ariel hangs out with fish under the sea, even though she has all these other mermaid friends she could hang out with, and they hang out with each other, and I think it makes a lot of movies have best friend characters for the main character who are kind of subordinate – like, especially romantic comedies will have a subordinate best friend idea, or a less-cool best friend idea – but I think Disney movies push it in a really weird way. They make it very specific that the main character, who you’re supposed to identify with as an impressionable kid, all their friends are not as important. All of them are just a candlestick or a flounder that is there to support you, and help you become a princess, and help you get a prince and live your own life, and I feel like that suggests and implies to a kid that friendship is about gathering companions to help you with your quest.
They’re almost gods in comparison to their friend group because they’re like this higher species that is able to communicate with them. The friends are always cleaning up after them, usually to their own detriment. In The Little Mermaid, Ariel about gets Sebastian executed and like, gets Flounder in trouble, and she’s just ruining all these people who are her friends because she just has to keep pursuing this prince who she’s seen once. […] In Disney movies, every friend is the “ugly best friend”, if you notice. Like, the only attractive characters are the main characters. Like you know instantly if you see an attractive person, oh, they’re the main character, or maybe the bad guy. But like, every other supporting character is either the most cartoonish looking goofball, or like, an animal.
I feel like we give a lot of credit to like, the self-esteem movement of the 90’s for like, raising kids who always think that their point and their point of view is important, but it’s really like, deep down in the Disney universe. You are important – the world literally revolves around you – and other people who look like you, they don’t really matter. You’re better than them, they don’t like books as much as you…
Romance
In addition to not really depicting friendships that are two-way streets, where you can gain so much by giving to people in addition to having them help you win a generic guy, in terms of how the romances work, it’s a very set pattern in a way that feels beyond the reductive that a screenplay needs to make the story interesting. It’s always somebody’s first love, the woman is always in her early 20’s or maybe younger, and also they always pretty much jump from meeting each other and maybe completing some sort of danger (defeating a villain) to kiss and marry at the same time (which I know is, like, working around the realities of sex and everything), but it’s strange to make a whole series of movies that have no room for stories about someone who has dated someone before, or someone who’s like, still getting to know someone, or just any of the different steps in a relationship because there’s so many compelling stories you can tell with that.
It suggest that, once you like someone, they’re going to immediately like you back (because you’re the prettiest person), and if they don’t, you become like, this ruined, weird…you stake your life on it, in all these stories.
They put so much pressure – with that narrative – on kids. So when you hear stories about how, oh, this couple has been married for 50 years and they were high school sweethearts and they were their first boyfriend and girlfriend or whatever and we think, oh, that’s great. Like, why do we think that’s great? Like, sure, I mean, it’s fine for them, but why is that…it’s like, they’ve made it, so that’s like, something to shoot for, or something?
So nice to know that they weren’t out banging around, you know.
Right, so they end up – maybe indirectly, I don’t know – putting a lot of pressure on kids when they first get into high school or middle school or whenever you have your first serious relationship, where it’s like, it feels so serious because it’s your first step, finally, into this adult world that you’ve been learning, or I guess, watching since you were a kid.
It treats the romantic aspect of your life like it’s a video game speedrun. Like, the sooner you get this done, the sooner you have a relationship that works and you did it, you win. There’s nothing meaningful in, like, dating someone once, getting to know them, breaking up amicably or not breaking up amicably, having experiences… And I know that’s a lot to unpack as we talk about it, but there are so many complicated things in these movies that you would think they could do something, at least a little bit, along those lines.
And I don’t know how many exact relationship lessons people are taking from those moments in the movies, but it really does lead you to believe that at least what you care about and who you like is going to like you back. It’s such an unhealthy idea to implant in kids’ heads. Like, Charlotte’s Web is like, oh, you like this spider? The spider is fucking dead now. Because that’s what happens in the world. But Disney princess movies in particular seem to just be really about wish fulfillment in a way that’s super unhealthy.
Classism
The thing I’d never noticed before, and once I saw Anna do it in Frozen, I realized it had happened in every Disney movie I’d ever seen, which is, in the beginning, when she’s singing her song about how excited she is to have her party – her big ball – she runs through the castle and all her servants are there preparing, and she’s there grabbing plates off stacks and putting them on other people’s stacks and shoving them around playfully and is so happy, and all her poor employees – servants – are just like, yeah, this is how we do it. And she’s obviously an aspirational character. And it’s everyone. Everyone in the Disney universe treats anyone who works for a living like a prop that they just have. Simba, when he’s excited about one day being king, torments Zazu by – not just Zazu, everybody, he’s dancing on the heads of his subjects, literally frolicking, climbing over their face and, if any of them defy him or screw up or hurt him…they’re going to get eaten by king lion, they’ll be beaten.
The overall philosophy of The Lion King, like that circle of life speech, when he’s like, “ah, that makes sense, Dad,” is basically like, other people, other beings who also have the same amount of ability to think and act as us, they’re not as good as us, so we eat them…and poop out their bodies. So many rich fathers have given that speech before, like, verbatim. “Well, this is why. It’s the natural order of things. It’s…they’re happy doing what they do for us.”
It’s just shocking how you can pause and think, at any point during any Disney movie, “What about poor people right now?” Elsa freezes Arendelle and like, everyone’s huddled in the castle – all the rich people are huddled in the castle – but if it gets much colder, they’re going to freeze. What about everyone who doesn’t have a castle right now? It’s a coastal village, too. Did Elsa kill everyone? How many people froze to death that are not even mentioned in the movie?
There’s more. Aladdin starts off living in abject poverty and then, he gets the lamp, and his first wish is, “oh, I want to be a prince.” Somewhat of a selfish wish when you live at the bottom of the greatest wealth gap ever seen, and, two scenes ago, you were sharing one lump of bread with two starving children. But then later, Jasmine meets those same two kids who are starving and also shares food with them […] and at no point does that ever come up again. What happened to those kids? Aladdin gets to go and be wealthy, and all the poverty he came from – like, clearly the system of government is not… The point is that life sucks for everybody except the Sultan, Jafar, and Jasmine, and her white tiger pet.
And we see how business as usual is because when Jasmine goes out there, she’s not necessarily being, like, charitable, she just doesn’t understand because she’s been in the palace, so she steals because she’s just like, “oh, here you go, you’re hungry.” She doesn’t understand that the kid can’t pay for the apple, she just thinks that he can’t reach it or something. She’s totally ignorant. And then that dude is about to chop her hand off – like, that’s how business as usual goes in Agrabah, like, that’s just it! And she does nothing with this information. There is no comprehensive reform of Agrabah, of its justice system. She goes back to the castle and is like, “what happened to Aladdin?” not, “what happened to that child?”
It is interesting that before the rise of Disney in the 30′s, 40′s, America had unions and was, you know, labor-conscious, and then Disney rises up and suddenly capitalism and anti-communism – which, Disney actually helped with – they fall out once Disney goes away, dies, if you believe their version of events. And once Disney classics start coming back – The Lion King,Frozen,The Little Mermaid – we’re suddenly…we don’t care about poor people anymore. Disney controls our attitudes toward poor people.
I transcribed a large portion of this podcast episode because it was so good. It may be easy to say, “oh, it’s just a kid’s movie,” or, “it doesn’t matter,” but these movies shape our culture, especially as things that were integral to our childhoods. I can connect with another person really quickly by singing “I’ll Make A Man Out Of You” with them (which I’ve totally done before), but I’ve never then said, “our society’s concepts of masculinity are fucked up, right? why is it that even though Mulan touches on this, and is all about how a woman can excel in what is thought to be a man’s role, we’re still conditioned to think that it was a happy ending because she got a man in the end?”
We accept the ridiculous portrayals of romance, friendship, class structure, gender roles, etc. present in these movies because “they’re just movies” and we’re smart enough to realize that they’re not how real life works – or are we?
You people realize the body positivity movement is literally a political movement right. Like it’s a movement that was started to improve the rights of fat people and stop discrimination against fat people. You realize that. It’s not a tea party where everyone just compliments everyone else on their looks.
One time I was teaching undergrads and we were talking about how you can even define what is “fair” in employment. And I was explaining how there have been court cases about employers forcing their employees to wear makeup or do their hair/nails, etc, so of course we end up talking about flight attendants. And my students, predictably, are like, “Well ok but in the case of flight attendants, being good looking is literally just part of the job description.” So I point out how applying this principle universally would basically make it so that any employer could refuse to hire someone who was fat or ugly. And That One Kid was like, “Well if it affects the business’s ability to make money, I mean, that’s just smart.” And so I say, “Yes, that is certainly what a capitalist would say. But don’t you think that allowing that capitalist interest to take precedence would lead to a world in which it’s legally permissible to refuse to hire someone just because they’re fat or ugly? Basically legalizing discrimination and blocking access to work and livelihood?” And this motherfucker is like, “Well, yeah. ”
When I tell you I almost had to leave…I was full-body shaking and afterward, my queer students came up and were like, “omg are you okay?”
So yeah, it’s fucking political. What you think is about personal aesthetic preference is actually oppressing huge groups of people, so.
This is a fascinating example because I actually am a flight attendant, and no the fuck it isn’t a part of my job description to “be good looking.” It hasn’t been since the 60s. We’re literally first responders. Should your ER nurse have to wear makeup in order to save your life?
Some fifty years after the infamous Salem Witch Trials, the British colonial city of New York was itself subject to a period of murderous mass hysteria in what became known as the Conspiracy of 1741.
In the spring of 1741, thirteen fires sprung up around Lower Manhattan, with no official culprit found, rumours began to swirl around that it was a result of Catholic saboteurs, born of the then contemporary war between Britain and Spain, as well as supposed competition between enslaved people and poor white settlers. Combined with a particularly harsh winter, tensions were high in what was, at the time, the second largest hub of the slave trade outside of Charleston, South Carolina, with New York City becoming a power keg awaiting a reason to explode…
The metaphorical match for this powder keg being a 16 year old indentured servant Irish girl by the name of Mary Burton, who when arrested while in possession of stolen goods, immediately accused others of being part of a conspiracy by slaves and poor white people to burn down the city, kill all the wealthy white men, and form their own government (complete with a king).
Just as with Salem, the hundreds of people arrested under the suspicion of being part of the conspiracy (a conspiracy that historians claim likely never existed), with many of the slaves, freed black people, and lower class white people absolving to save themselves by accusing others as “also” being involved.
In all, 34 people were executed in relation to this possibly fictional potential uprising, including 17 black men, two white men, two white women were hanged, and with an additional 13 black people who were burnt at the stake as, again, being suspects in an uprising that likely didn’t exist. The two supposed ringleaders, a white cobbler and tavern owner called John Hughson and a slave named Caesar, where gibbeted and left out to rot as an example to other potential revolutionaries in the future.
An additional 84 men and women were transported to the Caribbean to be sold into slavery for their part in the “conspiracy“, while 72 men where spared death with the lighter sentence of just getting exiled from the colony.
Again, all of these deaths came about over a fear of an revolt against slavery that historically probably was never real in the first place. Unlike the Salem Trials, which were less about actual witchcraft and more about paranoid superstition (possibly combined with ergot poisoning) being used by locals as an excuse to settle grudges against their neighbours, the 1741 “conspiracy“ was itself likely a product of those with an investment in the status quo violently protecting their wealth against even the suggestion of emancipated slaves and lower class white people. There was no conspiracy, but the authorities demonstrated in no uncertain terms what they would do to those who dared to seek freedom on their own terms.
