I wonder from where so many Americans get the idea that voting is supposed to be some expression of your deepest, most beloved values and virtues rather than a pragmatic, political move meant to shift your country as much closer to your ideal as possible. This strikes me as another example of extreme individualism. Voting isn’t about *you*. It’s about your city, state, and/or country. It doesn’t have to feel transcendently good deep down in your bones. It just has to *do* as much good as you can do, in this particular moment in time.
FUCK. I’ve done this exercise before, but it’s been factors like “if you’re male”, “if you’re able-bodied”, etc. Putting it in these terms is somehow more powerful because it shows the consequences of those kinds of privileges. And then when he says, “None of these statements have anything to do with anything any of you have done” … ugh, I started crying. It’s like the “It’s not your fault” scene; as kids we internalize all this shit as somehow our fault. And the looks on the faces on the guys in back. Fuck.
Think about what he says. Lots. It isn’t about what you do. Think about it right now. BEFORE you read more, cause what he says is more important.
It was a bit hard for me to grasp at first because I needed someone to transcribe it for me – so even as a white relatively-well-off person I would not have even placed in the race because the instructions were all verbal and I can’t understand speech.
and i’d be left behind despite my advantages because my two steps are slow and small and taken with a cane. but those of us who are disabled know this lesson already, of course.
what was a revelation to me was the faces of the handful of white men at the very front, the ones who’d taken two steps every time. they were proud at first, and only started getting worried at the end, i think. and when they turned to look back, i could see that very human urge to go back and help. it reminded me that a lot of the time, privileged guilt is like survivor’s guilt – it’s not that you did anything wrong, it’s nothing you earned, it’s a sign you care about your fellow humans.
you can’t change your advantages of birth and upbringing, nor should you want to. the takeaway is that when you reach the finish line and get your hundred bucks – when you reach adulthood and have financial security and mobility and so forth – you look for kids getting left at the starting line and see what you can do to help.
thinkpiece: The Millenials have cultivated a nihilistic, absurdist brand of satirical humor as a response to a cultural environment where
the traditional social order has collapsed into chaos because of rapid technological advancement, economic downturn, and endless war (much like the dadaists after WWI)
sincere admissions of despair are seen as somewhere between embarrassing and obnoxious and the only acceptable way to express negative emotion is by disguising it in witty, share-able quips
violence, sex, and profanity have become commonplace in the media and the only remaining frontier of shock value is absolute nonsense like “while you were having premarital sex i was dehydrating tangerines.While You Wasted Your Days At The Gym In Pursuit Of Vanity I Was In Hospital With Scurvy”
First thing, most people in prison are not rapists and murderers. If you do your reasoning about prison by thinking ‘what do I think the worst people in prison deserve? I guess that’s what prisons should be like’ then that will really suck for the vast majority of prisoners who are not rapists or murderers and the substantial share of people in jail who have not even been convicted of anything.
Secondly, I also want you to have access to medical care, and you being denied access to medical care is bad. Saying ‘prisoners being denied access to medical care is wrong’ does not mean it’s fine with me that you struggle to pay for housing and medical care. I want access to basic medical care to be universal.
Thirdly, if you want the government to spend less money on incarceration, well, making prison conditions less torturous, and ensuring that prisoners when released are able to integrate into society, is going to drive down prison costs in the long run. U.S. prisons make people likelier to commit crimes. Even if you don’t see any moral reasons to change that, it will also save the government money.
Fourthly, when we send people to prison we make it illegal for them to work for money to support themselves or pay for their own medical needs, and we make it illegal for them to access medical care even if they somehow could pay for it on the $.10 an hour we might allow them to earn, and we subject them to violence. Lots of people think that you have an obligation to people who you strip of their rights and lock in a cage, such as the obligation to feed them and provide them with basic medical care, which you do not have towards people you have not stripped of their rights and locked in a cage.
Fifthly, it is possible that it would benefit your economic situation if you didn’t have to compete with free forced prison labor. I don’t know how many Americans would be benefitted by this, it’s a bit hard to study, but it’s at least possible that you are struggling financially partially because it is cheaper for companies to use free forced labor than to pay employees.
Sixthly, denying prisoners healthcare is an inefficient way to torture them even if you think torturing them is just! For example, consider a man who gets behind on child support. We lock him up, of course, because he’s a criminal, and he dies, because why would our taxpayers’ hard-won earnings go to insulin for criminals?
Meanwhile someone who murders someone else but isn’t diabetic doesn’t die! If you think our prison system should be more punitive, that’s one thing, but surely you don’t think it should be more punitive specifically for diabetic people.
Lastly and most importantly, at least to me:
they broke the law! If they didn’t want consequences for their actions, they shouldn’t have done those things!
I think that this mindset is incredibly harmful and incredibly widespread and if I accomplish anything at all with this blog I want to get people to rethink it.
The law is not just. The law is not right. There are laws that are deeply unjust; there are laws that are impossible not to break if you’re in a sufficiently bad situation; there are innocent people serving long prison sentences because they thought it was better to plead guilty to crimes they didn’t commit than risk even harsher sentencing if they lost at trial. The vast majority of people in our prisons did not get a trial.
I will disagree with you if you say “people who have raped or murdered someone deserve to be slowly tortured to death at taxpayer expense and with a thin veneer of respectability, because, I mean, rapists and murderers, fuck those’. But I understand why you’d feel that way, and I want a legal system that works for you as well as for me.
But if you say “because people broke the law – because they are criminals – regardless of which laws they broke, or whether those laws should exist at all, or whether the punishment is remotely in line with the crime, or whether they got a fair trial, they do not deserve rights and should be tortured in a horrible inhumane catastrophe of a prison system -”
Well, when I say it like that it sounds terrible, right? But it’s an absurdly common way of thinking. People who broke the law are criminals, and criminals are bad, and if they didn’t want to be denied rights then they shouldn’t have broken the law, and I’m not a criminal, and I’m better than criminals, so why should I care about how we treat criminals?
The law is not just. Lots of things are illegal which shouldn’t be, and lots of punishments are more severe than the crime warrants, and almost no one gets a trial anymore, and whatever you think should happen to rapists and murderers, I beg you to realize that our system is not just doing that to rapists and murderers, it is doing that to everyone, and it gets away with it because people keep thinking ‘well, they’re criminals. In a world where people stopped automatically writing off anyone who has broken any U.S. law, regardless of whether they hurt anyone or did anything wrong or whether their sentence is remotely in line with the crime, as no longer worthy of moral concern, then these things would stop happening.
Anon: You have broken at least one law. I promise you, this is so. You can’t not have broken laws. There are a lot of laws. Do you speed? If you drive, in the US, you speed; I have met maybe one exception in my life. And if you don’t speed? You’re actually violating a law. There are many places in the road system where, if you aren’t speeding, you are driving at a speed so different from the rest of traffic that you are creating a road hazard. And that’s also illegal. But of course, your own crimes don’t count, because they never do. We always see our own motivations and circumstances and how those things matter. (It’s called the fundamental attribution error.)
More fundamentally: Let’s say you don’t care about any of the ways in which the position you advocate for is immoral. It’s still stupid. TUOC has already pointed out the issues with competition with prison labor. But think about the guy who got behind on child support payments, and got locked up, and died. Do you think that the fact that he no longer owes child support, because he has no income, benefits the child he is no longer supporting? It doesn’t. Do you think we all benefit from more kids having insufficient resources to grow up safe and healthy? We don’t.
The prison system in the US is an ongoing atrocity which survives because people like you got suckered into thinking that an organized system of what is basically slave labor is a Good Thing, because it’s happening to people who totally aren’t like you. Only, they are. Many of them did less to get there than you’ve done and not gotten there. Yet.
IDK about other Jews, but I want all goyim who see this – especially American goyim from Christian backgrounds – feel free to keep this in your pocket the “freedom of religion” birth control argument comes up. In fact, I encourage you to use it.
People adding Nazi apologist shit onto my posts like “but nazis invented cell phones and space rockets so without them we’d be less technologically advanced VuV” like buddy, if you think for one second we wouldn’t have eventually made it to the moon or made instant communication devices without mass genocide then I dunno what to tell you except to get the fuck away from me.
Your kind aren’t welcome here.
Also would I “trade” my cell phone for a world with no Nazis?
Are. You. Fucking. Kidding. Me?!?!
I’d trade my own life for a world without nazis. Fuck my phone. Fuck going to the moon. Human life should not be the cost of societal and technological progress.
What the fuck is wrong with you.
??? We’d have probably had cellphones sooner given the amount of inventors, theorists and artists the nazis killed. We’d have been to the moon sooner if we didn’t have segregation. God only knows where we’d be if women were given the opportunity to invent sooner. Disabled people come up with cool stuff too. It’s a whole new world of creation if you value human life equally!
*the sound of a thousand nuclear physicists laughing*
Buckle up kids, today we’re talking about why the Nazis never invented the atom bomb. We’re gonna do this
to white supremacist minds.
Ok. So the Nazis were all about physics … as long as it was with things you could see & touch. Rockets, improved motors, even radio tech (which gives tangible audio and/or visual results) were awesome and very good careers for good German boys.
Theoretical physics, on the other hand, was viewed as made-up Jewish bullshit. The German scientific old guard did NOT like little punks like Einstein. Who did they think they were, running around with their “time is relative” and “the interstellar ether doesn’t exist” and who the shit even cares what’s INSIDE an atom, Albert, it’s not like the INSIDE does anything. JESUS.
The Nazis saw modern physics as being the same thing as Freud’s psychology, Klimt’s modern art, and Kafka’s stories: a decadent waste of time, way too Jewish, and definitely not cool or manly. So to combat uncool Jewish science, pro-Nazi German scientists founded an actual movement– “Deutsche Physik/Aryan Physics”– all about real stuff like engines and bombs and it was gonna serve the SHIT out of the fatherland. No Jews allowed.
Every single one of them, and more, emigrated to the US in the 1930s. Jewish colleagues from Axis Italy, like Emilio Segrè and Enrico Fermi– aka the guy who built the world’s first nuclear reactor, and married to a Jewish woman– joined the brain drain as Europe hemorrhaged nuclear physicists right into America’s warm, heaving, bloodthirsty bosom.
*artist’s rendition
Albert Einstein’s application to become a US citizen. Dated Jan 18th, 1936.
Nationalist German scientists cheerfully joined the persecution of their Jewish colleagues, because Nazi scientists just really wanted Jewish physicists’ jobs. But the bummer was, the Nazi scientists couldn’t handle the mathematics that made relativity work. They were too dumb to do that science. Look– we’ve all been there. But the nationalist German scientists’ approach was– instead of leveling up their game, just discredit everything their rivals did. Declare it dumb, and made-up, and all the good parts of this stuff we just said was dumb and made-up were already invented by Aryans anyway, so why keep Jewish scientists around? Just forget about this atomic physics crap and keep giving us money to talk shit about Neptune, it’ll be great.
“Hahaha wut?” -Nazis
Eventually the Third Reich figured out that atom bombs were a thing and they should probably make one. They put Heisenberg– who, if you’ll recall, just had to have his mom call in an anti-bullying PSA to the Fuhrer’s secretary three short paragraphs ago– in charge. With every single other person who knew about nuclear fission having left Germany years ago, Heisenberg was pretty much on his own. The Nazi bomb project went nowhere.
A Nazi Germany with nuclear weapons would been able to do whatever the fuck they wanted.
The only thing that stood in their way? Their own. goddamn. antisemitism.
Director of Los Alamos weapons lab and Jewish American, J. Robert Oppenheimer, seen in profile as he oversees final assembly of the Trinity test bomb. Trinity was the first test detonation in the US nuclear weapons program. (x)
Is this a post in support of atom bombs? No.
This is a post about how being so high on your own inferiority complex that you’re down to murder people smarter than you, will fuck you in assholes you didn’t even know you had.
Thank you, Science Tumblr, for that deconstruction of Nazi bullshit.
This is excellent as is, but, I need to point out that the USA political situation is in many ways falling into this same hole now. We are becoming xenophobic and anti science at our top political level. The GOP is practically anti reality at this point. We need to fix this.
Holy shit, this is the best addition to any of my posts.
the difference is, american scientists aren’t on board with gop revisionism. cheetoface is like “it is totally science that the chinese made up global warming to cost me money, and coal is good for you, and if you don’t agree i’m cutting your funding” and the american scientific establishment is like “cut it then asshole” and flips him a big double bird while walking backwards to the unemployment line.
because quite a lot of scientists are, in fact, very smart, and paid attention in school. so they, unlike half the voting public at large, did learn from history.
Ooh ooh! The guy from TFA who called Peggy “your majesty” and both Peggy Princess Liz go “yes soldier?” totally straight faced
SOMEONE WRITE IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
And then Steve sees her AGAIN in the present day, and any and all other superheroes in attendance are trying very hard to live up to protocol, and Queen Elizabeth is like, “Steve. Long time no see.”
Following the ice, Peggy gets a call from her Army buddy Liz, offering condolences and any assistance she can. It’s the only call Peggy gets that isn’t from Howard or the Howling Commandos that matters.
1. Mass shootings are a daily occurrence. We only hear about the most “newsworthy” incidents. The Mass Shooting Tracker keeps a log, and it’s horrific to take in.
2. This level of gun violence is completely preventable. We absolutely already know that gun control saves lives, no matter what a politician has told you.
3. The government can’t seriously work on this problem because the National Rifle Association will not allow it.
But we should investigate Planned Parenthood some more.
when you grow up rich you’re kind of by default disconnected from reality. you learn that you can just… make things happen. an expensive education? top-quality healthcare? a fancy seat on the plane? you just wave your credit card in the right direction AND IT HAPPENS. you get your way, every time, immediately, and to your exact specifications. you’re also immune to failure by default because if you fuck something up you can afford to start over, so even if you reach your 70s with a trail of financial disasters behind you, you’re still rich, so they can’t have been that bad. you’re blind to your own incompetence. and you’re inevitably going to end up with very few, if any, genuine friends, especially if you’re inherently a bit of an asshole. instead you’ll be surrounded by people pursuing their own agendas, who will tell you literally anything you want to hear: that you’re a genius, that everyone loves you, that you can successfully accomplish anything you set your mind to. which you totally can, of course, but because of your money, not your personal merit.
trump is not a pathological narcissist with the under-developed mind of a child and a half dozen other mental disorders experts have not yet reached a consensus about. he’s too used to being obscenely rich and likely never had a problem in his life he knew he couldn’t solve by throwing enough money at it. and right now he’s angry that he can’t use that to get his own way anymore.
like, there’s enough stigma around mental illness without talking about it as if it’s the reason a rich entitled fuckhead is going to jump-start the nuclear apocalypse.
He also believes that “master race” bullshit. He thinks rich white people are genetically superior. This is a guy who has literally said he thinks success is genetic. Let’s be really explicit about this, most upperclass white people in the US do believe that bullshit that says they are genetically as well as morally superior to poor people and people of color. Old school eugenics is still the norm among the wealthy in the US. Trump isn’t pushing eugenics by accident, he’s pushing eugenics because it’s what him and his buddies firmly believe.
And using ableism as the basis for attacking him isn’t attacking his views and the ideas they rely on, it’s supporting them.
he isn’t mentally ill, he’s just a bad person! perfectly mentally-healthy normal people can still be evil!
“When I was 26, I went to Indonesia and the Philippines to do research for my first book, No Logo.
I had a simple goal: to meet the workers making the clothes and
electronics that my friends and I purchased. And I did. I spent evenings
on concrete floors in squalid dorm rooms where teenage girls—sweet and
giggly—spent their scarce nonworking hours. Eight or even 10 to a room.
They told me stories about not being able to leave their machines to
pee. About bosses who hit. About not having enough money to buy dried
fish to go with their rice.
They knew they were being badly exploited—that the garments
they were making were being sold for more than they would make in a
month. One 17-year-old said to me: “We make computers, but we don’t know
how to use them.”
So one thing I found slightly jarring was that some of these
same workers wore clothing festooned with knockoff trademarks of the
very multinationals that were responsible for these conditions: Disney
characters or Nike check marks. At one point, I asked a local labor
organizer about this. Wasn’t it strange—a contradiction?
It took a very long time for him to understand the question.
When he finally did, he looked at me like I was nuts. You see, for him
and his colleagues, individual consumption wasn’t considered to be in
the realm of politics at all. Power rested not in what you did as one
person, but what you did as many people, as one part of a large,
organized, and focused movement. For him, this meant organizing workers
to go on strike for better conditions, and eventually it meant winning
the right to unionize. What you ate for lunch or happened to be wearing
was of absolutely no concern whatsoever.
This was striking to me, because it was the mirror opposite
of my culture back home in Canada. Where I came from, you expressed your
political beliefs—firstly and very often lastly—through personal
lifestyle choices. By loudly proclaiming your vegetarianism. By shopping
fair trade and local and boycotting big, evil brands.
These very different understandings of social change came up
again and again a couple of years later, once my book came out. I would
give talks about the need for international protections for the right
to unionize. About the need to change our global trading system so it
didn’t encourage a race to the bottom. And yet at the end of those
talks, the first question from the audience was: “What kind of sneakers
are OK to buy?” “What brands are ethical?” “Where do you buy your
clothes?” “What can I do, as an individual, to change the world?”
Fifteen years after I published No Logo, I still
find myself facing very similar questions. These days, I give talks
about how the same economic model that superpowered multinationals to
seek out cheap labor in Indonesia and China also supercharged global
greenhouse-gas emissions. And, invariably, the hand goes up: “Tell me
what I can do as an individual.” Or maybe “as a business owner.”
The hard truth is that the answer to the question “What can
I, as an individual, do to stop climate change?” is: nothing. You can’t
do anything. In fact, the very idea that we—as atomized individuals,
even lots of atomized individuals—could play a significant part in
stabilizing the planet’s climate system, or changing the global economy,
is objectively nuts. We can only meet this tremendous challenge
together. As part of a massive and organized global movement.
The irony is that people with relatively little power tend
to understand this far better than those with a great deal more power.
The workers I met in Indonesia and the Philippines knew all too well
that governments and corporations did not value their voice or even
their lives as individuals. And because of this, they were driven to act
not only together, but to act on a rather large political canvas. To
try to change the policies in factories that employ thousands of
workers, or in export zones that employ tens of thousands. Or the labor
laws in an entire country of millions. Their sense of individual
powerlessness pushed them to be politically ambitious, to demand
structural changes.
In contrast, here in wealthy countries, we are told how
powerful we are as individuals all the time. As consumers. Even
individual activists. And the result is that, despite our power and
privilege, we often end up acting on canvases that are unnecessarily
small—the canvas of our own lifestyle, or maybe our neighborhood or
town. Meanwhile, we abandon the structural changes—the policy and legal
work— to others.”
just moving along like everyone else 