baffling how much of this site is just conservative protestantism with a gay hat
you know what i’m in just enough of a bad mood that i’m ready to nail my grievances to the church door so let’s fucking go
black and white morality wherein anyone who doesn’t believe/think/live exactly as I do is a dirty sinner Problematic and probably a predatory monster
everyone is a sinnerProblematic but true believerspeople who activist the right way according to my worldview are still better than everyone else, and I will act in accordance to this belief in my own superiority to let everyone else know I’m better than them because I found Jesusam the most woke
casual and fucking omnipresent equations of womanhood with softness/goodness/purity/nurturing to remind every woman who isn’t/doesn’t want to be any of those things that they’re doing it wrong
aggressive desexualization (particularly of women’s sexuality, to the point where it may as well not exist at all) accompanied by pastels [not a criticism directed ace ppl having a right to sex-free content and spaces but specifically targeted at a wider problem resulting from the previous point]
YOU’RE VALID AND JESUS LOVES YOU and neither of these platitudes achieves a goddamn thing
historical context is for people who care about nuance and we don’t have time for either (see: black and white morality)
lots of slogans and quotes and nice little soundbites to memorize but does anybody actually study the source material with a critical eye to make their own informed analysis
the answer is no
I’ve been to bible study groups don’t @ me I know what the fuck I’m talking about
Good Christians™ Nice Gays™
don’t fraternize with/let themselves be influenced by non-Christians those terrible queers
all the media one consumes must be ideologically pure or it will surely harm the children
it is Our Sacred Duty to protect the children from Everything, thus ensuring their innocence/purity/etc until such time as they are idk probably 25 years old
literally just “think of the children” moral panic y’all can fuckin miss me with that
people who don’t conform to the dominant thinking WILL be excommunicated/driven from the social group, and any wrong treatment they suffer will be seen as a justified consequence of their wrong thinking
I Saw Goody Proctor With The Devil And She Had A Bad Steven Universe Headcanon
Thank you for breaking it down like that because so many of us have been saying it but to see a play by play breakdown comparison is just…Thank you.
sipping tea and judging people as a group bonding activity
oh, man, speaking as a queer Christian who gets regular tumblr flashbacks to my childhood in the Bible Belt, YES
-belief that small snippets of text can be analyzed out context to understand the whole work/ judge the whole person -Desire for moral choices to be easy/ black-and-white leads to belief that it is possible to find a one-size-fits all answer to every situation -Literal, rather than literary analysis, with weird fixation on etymological roots that have nothing to do with source material -Belief that there is “one true interpretation” that is self-evident and will be understood by everyone encountering the same material regardless of background -Overwhelming, internalized sense of culpability for other people’s actions/integrity/souls -Overwhelming, internalized sense of personal guilt -Pressure to evangelize aggressively -Tendency to value broad ideals before individual needs -Hostility towards coexistence/tolerance/neutrality -Hostility towards lack of consensus in viewpoint -Knowledge as contamination -Guilt/contamination by proximity -Fixation on the sexual as uniquely dirty/sinful -Belief in “thought crimes” -Argumentation via appeal to higher authority/feelings of revulsion rather than internal, verbalizeable logic -“conversations” that are actually stealth soapboxes because one side isn’t actually interested in listening -“polite requests” that are actually commands because “no” is not considered an acceptable answer -in-group language -virtue-signaling and hostility towards the outgroup -gatekeeping -communities strongly built around the idea of being the world’s underdog -appropriation of other people’s persecution/victimization -treating the concept of oppression like a trophy -glorification/fetishization of victimhood
baffling how much of this site is just conservative protestantism with a gay hat
you know what i’m in just enough of a bad mood that i’m ready to nail my grievances to the church door so let’s fucking go
black and white morality wherein anyone who doesn’t believe/think/live exactly as I do is a dirty sinner Problematic and probably a predatory monster
everyone is a sinnerProblematic but true believerspeople who activist the right way according to my worldview are still better than everyone else, and I will act in accordance to this belief in my own superiority to let everyone else know I’m better than them because I found Jesusam the most woke
casual and fucking omnipresent equations of womanhood with softness/goodness/purity/nurturing to remind every woman who isn’t/doesn’t want to be any of those things that they’re doing it wrong
aggressive desexualization (particularly of women’s sexuality, to the point where it may as well not exist at all) accompanied by pastels [not a criticism directed ace ppl having a right to sex-free content and spaces but specifically targeted at a wider problem resulting from the previous point]
YOU’RE VALID AND JESUS LOVES YOU and neither of these platitudes achieves a goddamn thing
historical context is for people who care about nuance and we don’t have time for either (see: black and white morality)
lots of slogans and quotes and nice little soundbites to memorize but does anybody actually study the source material with a critical eye to make their own informed analysis
the answer is no
I’ve been to bible study groups don’t @ me I know what the fuck I’m talking about
Good Christians™ Nice Gays™
don’t fraternize with/let themselves be influenced by non-Christians those terrible queers
all the media one consumes must be ideologically pure or it will surely harm the children
it is Our Sacred Duty to protect the children from Everything, thus ensuring their innocence/purity/etc until such time as they are idk probably 25 years old
literally just “think of the children” moral panic y’all can fuckin miss me with that
people who don’t conform to the dominant thinking WILL be excommunicated/driven from the social group, and any wrong treatment they suffer will be seen as a justified consequence of their wrong thinking
I Saw Goody Proctor With The Devil And She Had A Bad Steven Universe Headcanon
Thank you for breaking it down like that because so many of us have been saying it but to see a play by play breakdown comparison is just…Thank you.
the reason male comic book fans work themselves into a frenzied rage over “fake geek girls“ is because they think they can’t get a girlfriend because of their love for comic books (a.k.a nerdiness). if they accept that geek girls genuinely love comic books, then they’re left with the cold harsh reality that it’s not their nerdiness that makes them unattractive to women, but the fact that they are misogynistic condescending dickbags who need to be avoided AT ALL COSTS
It goes beyond just geek girls, too. There’s this recurring thing in male-dominated nerd circles where they reach a certain level of dependence on the concept that they are shunned rebels in an unjust world, and they just cannot fucking let go of it. They break their own communities into factions to ensure there’s always someone to judge and feel cheated by. Look at the gamer variety’s arguments over consoles, or how much they enjoy complaining about ‘casuals’ and ‘care bears’.
This is why the idea that women are invading male nerd’s happy places is at it’s core bullshit obfuscation that cannot be defended by the excuse that oh they just don’t have good social skills. They don’t want to get away from their issues with pals they can trust. They want to feel wronged. They want to feel like someone has stolen their victories from them. They are kings dethroned by rabble, and the only thing left is to live in the wilderness with their objectively correct opinions while the cruel and stupid masses devour themselves. Clinging to that scornfully righteous feeling of being hampered by society’s foolishness and betrayal is their driving goal, no matter how small the group they’re defining as society has to be to get it. So long as they manage that, the world is simple and they have no reason to grow or learn anything.
Women undeniably catch the most shit from this. Basic american misogyny has done half the work for them, making women both easy targets and easily otherized. The vulnerability that comes from desiring anything that might reject you threatens their narrative of uncomplicated and unquestionable superiority, so women must be EVEN MORE out to get them than most people! The thought that someone so perfect to act as the face of the enemy might be in the same position as them is anathema.
Essentially, they are really fucked up.
As OP said, avoid at all costs.
this is the best and most insightful commentary anyone has ever added to this post, let this version get the next 100k reblogs
As a nerdy gamer girl, you took all of my feeling that I couldn’t describe over the years and out them into words. Thank you.
“But women earn more degrees” and still get paid less, so eat my whole ass
Something I see a lot of people missing in the reblogs: KIDS KIDS KIDS THIS IS LIKE 92% ABOUT KIDS
Yeah, there’s other factors too, but “women don’t ask for raises” and “pink-collar jobs aren’t valued” are smaller factors than the simple fact that caring for your own children is mandatory for women and optional for men.
Here’s the life story of, I’m going to say, about half the women I’ve ever worked with:
– Had children. Possibly voluntarily, possibly through lack of contraception education and/or funds.
– Broke off relations with the father. Frequently this was for a reason that was not a choice on her part, like he abused her or went to prison or just plain disappeared.
– Kept the kids. Even if it was an amicable split, she likely has weekday custody and is the one who takes charge of the vast majority of their needs.
– Dad may or may not pay child support, but even if he does, the average child support is $2550/year and the average cost of raising a child in a low-income family is $8610/year.
– The mother can’t afford paid childcare, but she has some friends/family members who can will agree to watch her kids, but they can’t commit to a consistent schedule, which means she can only work limited hours and has to take a lot of unplanned time off.
– This drastically limits both which jobs she can take and how much she can earn from those jobs, and completely locks her into poverty until the youngest child is old enough to be home alone. But by then she’ll have an unimpressive resume of assorted part-time gigs, plus likely health problems from 15 years of eating junk and barely sleeping, so it’s not a fabulous career launch point.
There’s lots of factors in why women get paid less than men, but lack of childcare is hugely, gigantically more important than stuff like “women don’t speak up enough in meetings,” or even stuff like “female neurosurgeons make less than male neurosurgeons.”
On a related note: we need to talk about the inaccessibility of homeless shelters.
This is relevant to a lot of groups. Shelters are often run by Christian groups and unwelcoming of LGBT people, for starters, or in a less obvious route they will often accept LGBT people into their shelters but do little to nothing to combat homophobic and transphobic harassment or violence that takes place within them. Sometimes that violence doesn’t happen inside- but in queues or simply within groups of people who frequent them. But the shelters know, and they know that they build up a reputation for not being safe for LGBT people, and they do nothing about it deliberately.
The buildings themselves are often inaccessible, especially with DV shelters. They’re built to be inconspicuous and often have stair cases just to enter the building- never mind that disabled people experience higher rates of abuse.
Most shelters will boot you out for drinking or consuming drugs, whether it be on premises or simply be that you are effected by it while on premises.
Plus, shelters often ignore violence and harassment towards those who are noticeably mentally ill. Many have strict rules such as enforced curfews, anti-swearing policies, etc. that often make mentally ill people feel unsafe and unwelcome. Imagine experiencing paranoia at the same moment that someone tells you you’re not allowed to get out of bed- in spite of being an adult who has paid for the privilege of being there.
And then, of course, is the big one. Shelters in my city vary costs between $12 and $30 a night. The money is used in part to fund the shelter, and in part as a form of triage to decide /who to turn away/, because there aren’t enough beds. Imagine not being able to afford to spend even a dollar on getting yourself something to eat but somehow having to scrounge up $30 to be able to sleep indoors that night. Seriously.
The shelter system is not ‘charitable’. Religious groups receive huge tax cuts for running them and still charge a fucking entry fee. This is a privatized business. They might claim they aren’t making a profit, but that’s /before you take the tax breaks into account/. Nothing about this system is designed to protect or serve vulnerable people, but to create the image of ‘helping’ while saving some cash.
@dreagentry oh fuck I forgot the underage bit! Yes! Okay, in my state you legally can not be forced to return to your family (or foster care) once you are over the age of 13. But in spite of that, you also can’t legally sign a lease, consent to just about any kind of guardianship situation without the signature of your legal guardians, and access the vast majority of shelters. Because legally you’re considered too high risk. And yeah, the few that will take in someone underage are usually the hyper religious ones.
Please reblog this complete version with this addition:
I failed to mention racism in discussing ways in which shelters are inaccessible, which really isn’t good enough. I don’t have the personal experience to comment on the ways in which this manifests, but shelters are 100% built for white people and that inaccessibility is a major issue which needs to be acknowledged.
Interestingly, part of the reason that, until now, Trump has been supported in Russia is due to translation. If you read the Russian language papers like I do, you’ll notice that the Russian translators don’t verbatim copy what Trump says. Instead, they’ll translate what he’s saying into short, professional, statesman-like statements, instead of what he really says. So instead of “I think nuclear weapons should be way down, and reduced, that’s part of it.”, the Russian audience gets a statement that translates back into English as “I think we’ll start with a substantial decrease in nuclear weapons stockpiles.” When Trump calls something “dumb” or “sad”, the Russian press will have him call it “damned”. “Bad hombres” becomes “armed bandits” and so on.
The Russian support for Trump becomes a lot easier to understand when you realize they’re literally not listening to the same person we are.
It’s really weird to see translation add nuance to a politician’s talk rather than take it away, but this makes so much sense.
But some interpreters, like Tsuruta, are concerned that translating the U.S. president too accurately might reflect badly on them. Alina Cincan, a Romanian interpreter and translator, tells Newsweek: “He’s not known for his eloquence nor his diplomacy. Either you translate exactly what he says which means it’ll be repetitive and sometimes gibberish—you’ll be saying ‘tremendous’, ‘very’ or ‘great’ a lot, or you try to make some sense out of it and ‘beautify’ it. If you choose the former, some may judge your interpreting abilities as poor, whereas if you choose the latter, you’ll make him sound better.”
‘Make America big again’? The headache of translating Trump into foreign languages.
“Most of the time, when he speaks he seems not to know quite where he’s going,” Viennot said. “It’s as if he had thematic clouds in his head that he would pick from with no need of a logical thread to link them.”
She is left with a dilemma: either translate Trump exactly as he speaks — and let French readers struggle with the content — or keep the content, but smooth out the style, “so that it is a little bit more intelligible, leading non-English speakers to believe that Trump is an ordinary politician who speaks properly.”
Reading some of the responses to this is hilarious because it’s all people who simply have no concept of how translation works. Their outrage is almost as nonsensical as Trump’s average daily blatherings.
Dr Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine, warns against complacency and estimates as many as 12m Americans are living with a poverty-related neglected tropical disease.
A fish has a part of their body – their physical, incarnate body, what they were born with – that makes them very happy and that they are very proud of. They also have an unfortunate habit of thinking that they are better than other fish. That part isn’t good, and causes the other fish to be unhappy with them and avoid them.
The fish is now very sad. The only person who likes the fish anymore tells him to go to the octopus, the animal framed as the adult in the story.
The octopus tells the rainbow fish that they have been a snotty jerk and that the only way to make people like them again is to take off their scales and give them away. That in order to have any friends and make up for their behaviour, they have to rip off pieces of their own body and self and give them away to other people to make the other people happy and make up for their transgressions.
And the rainbow fish is upset. And then another fish comes and asks them for a scale. And the rainbow fish takes off a piece of themself, their body, the thing they were born into, and gives it away. And now that fish likes him, and is materially benefitted by this piece of another fish’s actual body that has been given to it.
And then the other fish come, and the rainbow fish rips off more parts of its body – all of the parts that used to make it happy and that it was proud of – and gives them to the other fish, because it’s not fair that the rainbow fish’s body was so much nicer. And when the rainbow fish has ripped all but one scale off, tearing out of themself all but one of the things that they possessed in their self that made them happy, then all the fish are friends with them! And everything is great! And everyone has a fair share.
Of the rainbow fish’s, and I do quite mean to keep hammering this point, own body.
What the book says is:
1. if you are born with something nice – like, for instance, an attractive body or a clever mind or a talent or whatever – and it makes you happy and proud, you are a horrible person and deserve to be shunned. Absolutely no line is ever drawn between Rainbow Fish’s self, their actual own body, and their behaviour. In reality, it’s their behaviour that’s the problem: they are mean and aloof to the other fish. This could be the case whether or not their body was all covered with magnificent scales. However, the book absolutely conflates the two: their behaviour is framed as a natural and unavoidable outcome of being happy about and proud of their special, beautiful body. So don’t you dare ever be happy or proud of anything you have or can do that everyone else doesn’t have exactly the same amount as, because if you do, you are horrible and by definition snotty, stuck up and mean.
2. That in order to make up for the transgression of having something about your actual self that makes you happy and proud (which, remember, has automatically made you selfish and snobby, because that’s what happens), you must rip pieces of what makes you happy out of yourself and give them to other people for the asking, and you must never ever EVER have more of that part of – again, I hate to belabour except I don’t – your self than other people have, and that makes you a good person that people like and who deserves friends.
To summarize, then: to be a good person you must never have something about yourself that makes you happy and proud and if you happen to be born with that something you must absolutely find a way to give it away to other people and remove it from yourself, right up to tearing off pieces of your body, in order to be a good person who deserves friends.
This, I am absolutely sure, is not what the author intended: the author definitely meant it to be a story about sharing versus not sharing. But the author then used, as their allegory/metaphor, the fish’s own actual body. Their self. It was not about sharing shiny rocks that the rainbow fish had gathered up for himself. It wasn’t even about the fish teaching other fish how to do something, or where to find something.
The metaphor/allegory used is the fish’s literal. body. And so the message is: other people have rights to you. Other people have the right to demand you, yourself, your body, pieces of you, in a way that makes absolutely sure that you have no more of anything about your body and self that is considered “good” than they do.
And that might just suck a little bit except, hah, so: Gifted adult, here. Identified as a Gifted child.
This is what Gifted children are told, constantly. All the fucking time.
(Okay, I overstate. I am sure – at least I fucking HOPE – that particularly by this time there are Gifted children coming to adulthood who did not run into this pathology over and over and over and over again. I haven’t met any of them, though, and I have met a lot of Gifted adults who were identified as Gifted as children.)
Instead of being told what’s actually a problem with our behaviour (that we’re being mean, or controlling, or putting other people down), or – heavens forfend – the other children being told that us being better at something doesn’t actually mean moral superiority and is totally okay and not something we should be attacked for, we are told: they’re jealous of you. That’s the problem.
Instead of being taught any way to be happy about our accomplishments and talents that does not also stop the talents and accomplishments of other children – whatever those are! – from being celebrated, we are left with two choices: to be pleased with what we can do, or what we are, or to never, ever make anyone feel bad by being able to do things they can’t. And the first option also comes with two options: either you really ARE superior to them because you have skills, abilities and talents they don’t (or are prettier), or you are a HORRIBLE stuck up monster for feeling that way.
(It is not uncommon for Gifted kids to chose either side, which means it’s not uncommon for them to choose “okay fine I really AM better than you”; this can often be summarized as “intent on sticking their noses in the air because everyone else is intent on rubbing them in the dirt”; on the other hand I have met a lot of Gifted women, particularly*, who cannot actually contemplate the idea of being Gifted because to do so is to immediately imply that they are somehow of more moral or human worth than someone else and this means they are HORRIBLE HORRIBLE SELFISH PEOPLE, and so will find literally any reason at all that their accomplishments are not accomplishments or that they don’t deserve anything for them.)
Instead of being given any kind of autonomy or ownership of ourselves, we are loaded down by other people’s expectations: we are told that because we can accomplish more we must, and that daring not to do what other people want to the extent that they want with what we are capable of we are selfish, slackers, lazy, whatever. We are taught that we owe other people – our parents, our friends, even The World – excellence, the very best we can possibly do, and trust me when I say people are ALWAYS insisting We Could Do Better. And we should, or else we will be disappointing them, or letting them down, because (because we are Gifted) the only reason we could possibly be failing is not trying hard enough.
We are, in fact, told over and over and over and over again, to rip off pieces of ourselves to give to other people to make them happy, because those pieces are valuable, but forbidden from enjoying the value of those pieces – pieces of our selves – for our own sake because that would be selfish and arrogant. And we owe this, because we were born a particular way.
Because, metaphorically, we were born with rainbow scales, so now we have to rip off those rainbow scales in the name of Sharing, and otherwise we are selfish and horrible and deserve to be alone.**
That is why I fucking hate The Rainbow Fish.
Because whatever the author INTENDED, the metaphor they chose, the allegory they picked, means that THAT is the story they actually told. (And is the story that child after child after child after child I have encountered actually takes from it.) I don’t hate the author; I’m not even mad at them. But I do hate the book with a fiery passion, and it is among the books I will literally rip apart rather than allow in my house when I have kids, because I’m not going to give it to anyone ELSE’s kid either.
*but, I would like to note, not UNIQUELY: this is something I encounter in Gifted men as well.
**I can’t remember who it was, in relation to this, put forward the thought: if people actually talked about the access and use of children’s bodies the way we talk about access to and use of Gifted children’s minds and talents†, the abusiveness would be absolutely clear? But they’re right.
†because sometimes it is Gifted children’s bodies in an abstract way, in that its their talent for gymnastics or their talent for ballet or sport or whatever, so I mean in a very raw way, the actual physical embodied flesh we are.
just moving along like everyone else 