sure, when my grandfather fought nazis and fascism he was “a hero” and “on the right side of history” but when i do it im “way too sensitive” and “no better than they are”
That’s because when our white grandparents fought Nazis, it was for fear of them taking power away from other white people.
White Europeans and Americans were explicitly fine with genocide and the ideologies that led to it – a great many people, including Churchill, vocally supported most of what the Nazis were doing. Their only fight with Nazis was to maintain sovereignty from takeover.
Today’s Nazi-fighters usually have a problem with white supremacy and the antisemitism and racism etc behind it – which most of our white grandparents didn’t see a problem with and neither do many white people today.
This is why so many people don’t see any reason to stop the Nazis now, or why many others think it’s purely a struggle for Democrats or other neoliberal parties in other countries who might lose political power if they gain traction. Many people don’t see Nazis as a real problem unless they threaten the political power of other white people.
White supremacist organizations and movements have been a life-threatening scourge for people of colour and Jewish people this entire time. It’s really important that we focus on that as the real threat, or we risk having the same myopic perspective as generations past.
This was a great addition to my original post so I’m reblogging it.
they are legitimate questions! like if they really want people to embrace that rhetoric, do they not expect anyone to ask “hey, just how far does this extend?” if you make a claim like “watching m/m porn when you’re not a man is homophobic” then you have to be willing to follow that to it’s logical conclusion. I want to know what that means for genderfluid people. I want to know if that makes all straight men who view porn misogynists.
I knew antis were gonna ignore that post so I’m not surprised but I am disappointed that when faced with clarifying questions that completely tear down their ideology they can’t even come up with a half-assed attempt at an answer.
This. There are people I follow who talk about how fujoshi/“yaoi fan girls” fetishize them, but no one really gives details about what this means. Like when I talk about how yaoi helped me to understand I’m not broken for being female and a top because it was the first example I’d ever seen of role divorced from gender and anatomy… pretty much no one yells at me. But yet I am not a gay man.
Some people have said they’d like me to write switching in my slash, but that’s as much as I ever got, and usually they back up when I say the above anyway.
So it’s really hard for me to figure out what’s actually bothering people. Especially since I never see it from gay men I know offline so it seems very tumbly.
I think this is an example of the thing where it’s a lot easier to build broad coalitions if you keep your goals vague.
Ask a bunch of antis these questions and I suspect you’d get a bunch of different sets of answers. Any attempt at an official line on all these questions would probably alienate many antis, leading to numerous arguments, schisms, and defections. Even just answering questions like these as individuals might be harmful to coalition solidarity, because it would reveal differences between coalition members that everyone was previously unaware of. It’s much easier and safer to just point everyone at common enemies and let the power of the typical mind fallacy and “the enemy of my enemy is friend” keep the herd of cats together.
Note: this is the dynamic that both major USA political parties run on.
I suspect part of the reason the extremist groups are so notorious for having schisms at the drop of a hat is that extremism selects for people who Take Ideas Seriously and will actually answer questions like this.
Ferrai has this bullshit agreement that if you buy one of their cars new off the lot, you have to sign a contract saying you basically don’t own the car and have to uphold their brand standards with it.
It’s sets a startling example of not owning something despite buying it and the court needs to use this as a chance to strike it down as unethical.
This shit again? And I thought it was bad enough with ford and john deer telling farmers they didn’t own the tractors they bought from them….
Yeah, they have this really unethical clause in the purchase contract you can’t modify the car or do anything with it that they’d consider “unbecoming of the brand”, which is why they were able file this suit.
It seems kind of bizarre at first until you realize how horrifying that is in the age of “do you own what you buy?” being a huge a debate (especially in tech).
This is pretty much Ferrari’s philosophy from the start, they are extremely prideful of their cars like if they were made from God’s hands or something.
They are very snobby, infact the owner of Ferrari doesn’t like the people who buy their cars since because they are bought for “status”.
They also never test their cars on public tracks in comparison with other racing cars like when they wanted to test out the Porche 918 Spyder vs The McLaren P1 vs LaFerrari. Take a guess who bailed out on the performance test.
Just an update
Lambo are the perfect people to jump in on this because they make insane cars and they are never above clowning them up because Lambo are all about THE DRAMA ™
My dad is an automotive journalist (or was, he just retired) and that story is one of his favorites. If it’s not true, it is basically so enshrined in automobile industry legend that it might as well be fact.
I need a word to describe this thing I have where like…
If I am doing a mindless task or a semi-mindless task, that I have no emotional engagement in, I literally cannot focus on it or do it unless I have something I DO care about to pay attention to.
Like, my brain will refuse to pay attention to things that do not matter to it, and will wander off and mentally compose a three-page Tumblr post instead. Or worse, I will find myself having written a three-page Tumblr post when I was supposed to be working or paying attention in class.
It’s like things become mental teflon, and repel my brain.
So like, right now I have a temp job that consists just about entirely of mental teflon. Finding documents, printing them out in the right order, stamping them with the signature stamp, scanning them and making two copies, writing the addresses on envelopes, metering and sealing them and dropping them in the mail thingie.
I can do this all day long, but I cannot focus on it whatsoever because there’s nothing to focus on. It’s just a series of repetitive tasks. When there’s some interesting challenge I can create for myself, like “now let’s see if I can do TEN of them in an hour!” I can get more engaged, but I have to have the energy/spoons to go that fast and I don’t. (And this is literally like 4500+ separate mailings, so if I do push myself I will burn out.)
BUT if I put in my headphones and watch Netflix or whatever while I do it, I can go all day long.
I keep thinking about how the allistic world would view this. Imagining how ridiculous they would think that sounded – “I HAVE to watch TV while I work, or else I can’t focus!”
I imagine that they would be like “wow, what a load of bullshit excuses.” Because they have no concept for that. There’s no, like, “ah yes, you are engaging the blahblahblah part of your brain so that the other areas, that do repetitive work, can continue undistracted and undisturbed. Good job.”
I guess one way to look at it is like, if I have 100 units of attention, and only 1 one of them is needed to do my work, the other 99 are desperate for something to engage them. It’s like sensory deprivation.
(Sensory starvation, btw, is totally a thing for autistic people in particular, and you can even find books where “autism professionals” have talked about it causing meltdowns in the kids they work with. And how they avoid it by providing different sensory toys, those ball chairs to sit on, water tables, et cetera, and trying to make sure the kids get enough sensory stimulation during the day.)
So I guess I could say that I can’t function mentally if I don’t have enough to stimulate my attention.
It’s also kind of a special interest thing; I tend to gravitate toward shows that are related to my various special interests, or compulsively thinking about and writing about my special interests.
It’s like my brain is set up to engage only in these interests, and I can get it to work on other things if I also feed it enough of the special interests.
I would not be averse to renaming special interests “brain vitamins,” tbh.
And stuff that doesn’t take any mental energy is like brain junk food. Like I’m sure nobody wants to hear that their filing project or whatever is mental junk food, but if it’s…
ooooooooooo, I just thought of something!
anniegst has a theory that the whole “special interest” thing is an integral part of how autistic brains process the world differently than allistic brains. And from what I understand, this would fit into that.
We tend to get interested in things that we can master. That have systems and details that we can learn. Like, one of the appeals of a special interest is that, even though we have to spend time in the baffling allistic world whose rules don’t make any REAL sense, (they can be understood, but they are *ridiculous* rules tbqh), we can also spend time in these worlds where the rules make sense and are enjoyable to discover.
We can get that sense of power and self-worth and fitting into the world from that. Of having our own worlds and domains, whether it’s the world of Doctor Who, or of crocheting, or a tiny thing like, “I now know enough about why and how you would buy a specific set of headphones to buy the perfect set of headphones!”
So like: when people say “you can earn this money, but you have to earn it by doing something that your brain gets nothing from, doing things that you know nothing about except what we think of telling you, in a company and industry that you know nothing about,” it’s like “you can go up to Mars and do this work for the Martian companies.”
And I have to put on my spacesuit (headphones) and fill it all the way up with breathable air (special interests) in order to make my psyche be able to do this.
I suppose this is sort of like how doing things like household chores is the bane of my existence because of it’s tediousness and repetitive nature. And yet if I’m listening to my favorite album I can go about my day and do what I must because I’m actually just focusing on the stim provided by the music, rather than focusing on the chore itself.
The argument that I cannot possibly focus on something someone is saying to me if I’m bouncing my legs and staring at the floor seems to follow the same logic as someone thinking it’s impossible to watch netflix while doing a repetitive task. And yet the fact remains that we can engage better when we multitask in this manner.
I myself actually can really enjoy doing repetitive tasks cause it frees up so much brain space and I can literally entertain myself for hours just in my own head, cause it never turns off. I’ll be writing essays and going on adventures and plotting out novels and analyzing my favorite TV shows or thinking about the meaning of life in my head for hours while stuffing envelopes or whatever.
It has to be a truly repetitive task like that though cause household chores aren’t exactly repetitive to most extents and they involve a level of executive functioning that messes me up.
But my brain is never off. And it seems like some things that take a person’s full attention only take a portion of mine. This screws me over in class a lot because I get bored, honestly, understanding and mentally engaging with what my professor is talking about often times only takes a portion of my mental energy and the other part of my brain is just screaming. So then I might also start engaging it in something else. I used to read books while listening to lectures when I was in high school and I could honestly fully engage with and retain both sets of information.
The problem is when the second thing I’m engaging with becomes overall more mentally stimulating than the first thing, which it usually is cause it is usually an intense special interest of some sort. So I end up using all my brain space on that and the tiny bit of brain space used to pay attention in class is shoved aside. Sometimes it helps to just take over some of the excess mental space with stimming and listening in class but usually a large chunk of my brain is still screaming.
I feel exactly that, sensory deprivation, in my classes most of the time cause they’re never setup in such a way where you’re fully stimulated mentally but you’re supposed to be giving them 100% of your mental attention.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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