you have a brain, you are capable of critical thinking, you can sift through the material and keep what is edifying for you and discard what isn’t
flaws don’t necessarily make material worthless
all right i queued this last night because i was already posting a lot and didn’t want to flood anyone’s dash but you guys i need to talk about this more.
like, okay. i grew up REALLY STRICT christian. like. every piece of media i consumed underwent a fine-toothed comb by my parents to be sure there wasn’t anything “sinful” in it. I got into a tearful, screaming fight with my mother over whether I was allowed to watch a piece of educational children’s material on PBS because one of the characters said “damn” once.
(I’m still not sure they did. In retrospect, I think my purity-focused mother misheard something and, having her suspicions confirmed that you couldn’t trust any “secular” source not to be sinful, reacted accordingly.)
(Pay attention, that parenthetical was also relevant.)
Do you know what my teenage rebellion was? Listening to the oldies station in the car when I had my driver’s license and could go places on my own. That was my big fuck-you to my parents: listening to the Beatles and Simon & Garfunkel and the Fifth Dimension when they couldn’t tell me how I shouldn’t be listening to them because the creators of that music were drug-addled, free-loving atheists whose own disregard for God and religion might just infect my impressionable spirit. Like I was gonna listen to “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” and go do LSD and become an atheist. This was my teenage rebellion in the year 1999.
I’m 35 now. And all right so I became agnostic. But I didn’t become a drug addicted prostitute because I loved listening to psychedelic rock music as a teenager. (And you know what? Even if I had become a drug addicted prostitute, I’d still have worth as a human being, so dissect that one.) And it wasn’t even the psychedelic rock music that turned me agnostic: It was Christianity itself. But that’s another story altogether.
My point here is: Y’all are on here acting like my goddamn parents, “don’t watch this” and “don’t listen to that” because this character does XYZ problematic thing and this author said ABC ignorant thing two years ago at a con when they were put on the spot in an interview. If you watch this movie where a teenager falls in love with someone five years older than them, you’re going to become a pedophile! If you read this book by an author who once used an outdated term for someone in the trans community, then you’re a transphobe!
Y’all need to sit the fuck down and stop acting like nobody ever taught you to think for yourself, because I know damn well that you’re capable of critical thought and you don’t need your media chewed up and spit into your mouth like a baby bird. And I’m an adult and I sure the hell don’t, so stop telling me I’m going to choke because I’m consuming something complicated, complex, and not already pre-morally-dissected for me.
ok so I got added to this facebook group where people post bad pictures they’ve taken of boats and do you wanna see maybe the funniest thing i’ve ever seen
People here actually think tumblr chose to ban those accounts because they were going through every social justice tumblr and thought “this is just too subversive, it must be Russian.” They were banned because their IP addresses were from confirmed Russian troll farms.
Where are you getting this information? Because I’ve seen dozens of posts from people complaining that long time bloggers they followed and at least one person who was banned who wasn’t even Russian showing posts from their blogs and they’re largely BLM-related or criticizing Clinton. Where’s the evidence they’re Russian troll farms?
They…they didn’t claim to be Russian on the blogs. The anti-Clinton posts were the point of the propaganda. That’s why they were doing it. The BLM-related things were to gain credibility, which clearly worked, because here you are saying that they couldn’t have been Russian trolls because of those posts. It’s incredible how effective this was.
god March for Our Lives discourse is like a fucking minefield of bad politics and galaxy brain takes. i got called a conspiracy theorist for saying that the movement and its policy proposals are spearheaded by adults using kids as figureheads when that should be glaringly obvious to anyone who has talked to/been a high schooler
see this is literally exactly what im talking about. nobody is saying kids can’t have political opinions; we’re saying that a nationwide movement with multiple simultaneous protests, legislation proposals, and celebrity appearances cannot be organized by a bunch of high schoolers. this is real life, not the Jimmy Neutron movie; adults absolutely had a hand in every single step of this process (do you really think their parents would let them send a fucking legal proposal off without having an adult look it over?) and saying that those adults shaped the politics of the movement isnt a conspiracy theory so much as a reasonable conclusion
and even if we say for the sake of argument that all of the proposals put forth were drafted entirely by the high schoolers – so what? yes, they survived a traumatic mass shooting, but that doesnt mean that their proposals for giving cops the right to rifle through mentally ill ppl’s medical history at will and increasing cop presence in schools (fucking lol) are any less heinous or exempt from criticism. BLM was a social movement for years and somehow managed to not tweet shit like this:
we can simultaneously feel bad for these kids for surviving a school shooting while also criticizing their political views that are being railroaded along without any critical review beyond “omg those poor kids, let’s give them what they want”
So, I too received the “We’re not mad you reblogged Russian propagandists, we’re just disappointed” email from Tumblr. As per @copperbadge‘s suggestion, I searched for the posts by typing the usernames into “paxpinnae.tumblr.com/search/RussianTrollGoesHere” (Note that you have to have Tumblr search enabled in your profile to do this, but that’s a quick fix.)
Now, I’ve deleted all the posts, because better safe than inadvertently complicit in undermining American democracy, but for those who are interested, this is the quality content the Russian IRA was putting out:
That post with the Google results showing the Obamas as the President and First Lady and saying “reblog this it’s the last day they’re true.”
A post bitching about how Howard the Duck might be getting a(nother) Marvel movie before Kamala Khan, America Chavez, or Miles Morales saying “When Marvel would rather make a movie about a duck than a person of color.”
A post with a Twitter screenshot of a guy saying feminists don’t have loving dads and getting dragged for it.
A post about Imran Yousef, the marine vet bouncer at Pulse in Orlando who helped save people, which actually was a twofor on Russian trolls, with one reblogging the other to give an assist.
That post about Hillary Clinton’s interview where she says she keeps hot sauce in her back, which the troll framed as “admitting to pandering to black people.”
A post promoting Solomon’s Shield, an app that will give you your rights during a traffic stop and help you livestream the stop to Facebook and urging me to “OMG STOP POLICE BRUTALITY!!!!!”
A post about some A+ queer moments from Betty & Veronica with the caption “heteros explain this” that I’m actually really mad about deleting because it was GR8.
A post with a bumper sticker reading “Proud Parent of a Child who has Resisted His Teachers’ Attempts to Break His Spirit and Bend Him to the Will of His Corporate Masters” which I am also really mad that I had to delete.
There are a few trends I noticed as I went through the posts that I want to take a moment to highlight, for the sake of my own critical thinking skills as well as others’:
Most of these posts seemed to come from a standard Tumblr left-wing point of view… BUT:
Most of them ALSO promoted a defeatist attitude toward our current systems and cultures. “Why is no one talking about Imran Yousef?” “You know why.” “Just admit you don’t want equality for all”
The fundamental goal of the Russian propaganda machine is to undermine Americans’ faith in our political and cultural institutions. If everything is inherently terrible, how can we fix it? If both sides are equally bad and corrupt, then it’s better just to give up on government and try to live as best we can.
Which is an interesting take, but a few counterpoints:
No.
Fuck that.
American democracy has many problems, but the solution isn’t to give up; it’s to fight harder.
Change is slow and hard and yes, involves compromise, and doing a few things that you don’t like in the short term, and talking to people who you personally disagree with, and that’s okay! If you continually subject everything to a rigid test of moral purity, the world will always fail you, but if you approach things with an attitude that even people with whom you disagree can have valid points, you might find something good.
(I’m still mad about how good that Betty & Veronica post was. I mean, I know it was probably intended to undercut American culture somehow, but that thing was AMAZING.)
Part of the real punch to the guts here is that:
1) The things they point out aren’t *wrong*. We ARE a racist society. We ARE a a sexist society. We ARE a deeply hetero-normative society. Insert a justice problem, and it probably applies.
2) It’s super easy to agree with and promote the defeatist attitude because these are giant systemic problems it’s super easy to feel defeated by.
3) I fully expect to be hoodwinked by more such accounts in the future. Just look at how tumblr people and people of a certain age talk all fatalistic about the future, how we make our depression and low expectations for our lives into jokes. You can try to be more aware about WHO you’re reblogging, but you’re gonna make a mistake on that someday, not cause you’re an idiot, but cause it’s just that hard not to.
So what to do about it?
Do like Pax and use the tips from @copperbadge to delete the posts you’ve reblogged. Then, in the future, if you see a post that, per @paxpinnae‘s comments, takes a defeatist stance towards a real problem, by all means, reblog it. But add to the post – add a call to action. If it’s about trans bathroom bills, include a form letter for your state reps. Do something similar if it’s about lack of representation in the media – why not send emails to movie studios saying we want Miles Morales and Kamala Khan cause they’re fucking rad as hell and could totally bring in Black Panther $$$. If it’s about police brutality against black people, link to BLM fundraisers.
That way, you’re being civically engaged. You roll your eyes and feel sad about the ways in which our world is shit, but then you do something about it, even IF it seems small and useless. It’s still something, and then you’re maybe – hopefully – perhaps inspiring someone else to take incremental action along with you. And bonus, you’re undermining some asshole’s attempt to undermine you, so if nothing else, you’re getting spite points.
And that’s my thought. Time to do some research and gather rebloggable resources so I can do my best to put my money where my mouth is here.
I did not plan to mire myself this deeply in this whole event when I made An Humorous Post about being in league with Russian agitators, but it has led to some really awesome analysis that I wanted to share with everyone, so this is well worth reading. Thanks for tagging me, guys!
This is so weird to me because I knew very, very butch girls in middle and highschool who dated guys.
Yeah, this idea that butch and femme are specifically about “rejection of men” seems really new to me. I mean, there were always “political lesbians” around, who were all about “rejection of men” but in my experience they didn’t tend to be especially masculine or feminine. They tended to be new agey in a Mary Daly kind of way and didn’t seem especially sexual.
In contrast, when I first started lurking on butch/femme websites I distinctly remember articles like “the straight butch” about the life and experiences of a, well, straight woman who considered herself butch. Right alongside articles by lesbians. Where nowadays I’m sure that person would be deemed a trespasser.
Or like… back around 2009-10 or so, my exgf and I called ourselves “a butch/femme couple” and like… had usericons with images of butch and femme leatherdykes, and labeled those icons butch/femme rather than stag/doe or the like even though we’re both bi.
We weren’t incredibly loud about it, and digging into someone’s Lj icons to yell at them WOULD take a bit of effort, but… we were in some pretty big communities. You’d think someone would have said something, if people really cared.
I don’t know when this arose but I suspect it can’t be older than 2014 or so.
My dad’s a classic motorcycle guy, and that whole community is full of straight leather-clad butch women. As was the music scene in my old town, which was particularly metal and punk oriented. When I shaved my head back then, barely anyone raised an eyebrow. And then there’s pretty much every blue-collar job I’ve had, some of the women I’ve worked with will be feminine as fuck on the weekend, but a good portion of us use the work boots as day-to-day shoes.
I know I’m in my mid 20s but about 80% of the butch straight women I know are over 40. This has always been A Thing and honestly I’m just not sure if it’s deliberate ignorance or that the bulk of the people who claim otherwise have had especially white collar/suburb/upper middle class lives, but I’m inclined to think it’s the former.
Yeah. I’ve known a lot of bi leatherwomen and… maybe I was in The Dumb Hettish Kink Scene but im pretty sure we all considered some of them butch.
I’ve said it before but I honestly wonder if this started as a terf thing. Like… the sudden popularity of butch women seems to me to go hand in hand with people saying “the transcult pressures our wonderful handsome butches to think they’re men!” Where from what I understand, the really intense Lesbiany Lesbians thought of butches as patriarchy bearers before this sudden Save The Females thing started happening.
Of course you don’t. Free college might hinder the school-to-prison pipeline your prison owning donors depend on
👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆
welp;
Actual quote, in context:
“I believe that we should make community college free. We should have debt-free college if you got to a public college or university. You should not have to borrow a dime to pay tuition… I disagree with free college for everybody. I don’t think taxpayers should be paying to send Donald Trump’s kids to college.“
Don’t spread misinformation just to fit a narrative, Clinton is advocating for there to be a cap on who gets free college so that the government doesn’t have to subsidize the education of people with enough disposable income to pay for it themselves. The plan she’s proposing would have a better chance of being passed, is more cost-effective, and still opens up higher education to low-income individuals who previously couldn’t afford it.
the op lagonegirl literally ended up being a russian psyop im losing my mind
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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