is anybody else unsettled by how a lot of protests have turned into a “who can make the most clever sign” contest
right and i feel like that distracts from and decontextualizes the original intent of the protest. protest slogans become another thing to consume, another commodity to produce and to enjoy
it’s really alarming. i also come from a different school of protesting, where it’s like… 101 to not name names, show faces, etc. and the fact that people take photos of everyone’s faces and tag as many people as possible in their protest selfies is super alarming. you are doing the cops’ job for them.
I think this stems from two different, but not unrelated, issues:
1) A lot of this trend can be blamed on that damned Stewart/Colbert stunt rally. It might have been meant as a joke, but it turned out to be some kind of manifesto for moderation, a kind of stealth conservatism that feeds into the myth that agitation for political change is “divisive” and “uncivil” (and worthy of ridicule).
2) The Women’s March and the March for our Lives (where, if I’m not mistaken, most of the pictures of cute/funny signs are being posed for and taken) are more akin to parades than protests.
They remind me of the kind of events I was involved with in when I was teenager, working with Planned Parenthood to get a clinic built in our mid-sized Midwestern city. We reserved space in local July 4 and Memorial Day parades, tossed candy, and held up signs promoting women’s healthcare. We didn’t bury the pro-choice message, but it was definitely sanitized for max consumption. It was a(n effective) PR campaign, but wasn’t agitating for much in the way of radical change. (Abortion was legal; the bullshit laws limiting its practice hadn’t yet been put into effect; we were pretty much establishing a community presence until PP’s lawyers challenged all the illegal zoning bullshit that the city was throwing at us to keep PP from buying any real estate in the city.)
It was also a movement run almost entirely by middle-class and upper-middle-class white women, so while we faced some danger from the violent fringe of of the local anti-choice movement, we could count on protection from the local police.
Writing a pithy sign and smiling for the camera (and then posting the photo online) may not be something only white protesters/marchers are doing, but I imagine that even when POC are doing it, class privilege is playing a role in their decision making as well.
I’m intuitively certain that the best reported numbers of trans people grossly underreport actual prevalence, because the concepts and lexicon weren’t out there on the mainstream culture table till quite recently
in Gen X and preceding age cohorts, maybe some older millennials, the trans people who actually figured out their shit and ended up getting counted as trans people were those whose dysphoria (whatever type, this isn’t a specifically medicalist point) was so severe and constant they literally couldn’t repress it or interpret it as anything else so it was basically own it or death. I bet money there are four or five times as many people in middle age looking at all the trans visibility this last few years and slowly going “… oh” internally (and maybe doing something about it, but quite likely just carrying on with their lives and the adaptations and compensations they’re already adept at: these are the ones who could survive if not thrive in their birth gender assignments in the first place and their sunk costs are high) as people that age getting counted as trans by the official statistics
the average young USian person on this website is growing up in a world where trans is a thing that some people are. it’s a tough af position to be in, there’s still a hellish zip code lottery kind of like there was for being gay in 1990, etc, I’m not suggesting it’s a bed of roses or easy to claim, my point is that it’s a position that exists to be in. it’s there in the differential as a possibility. and I don’t know if young people realize how novel that is
I agree with this, because I’m pretty sure I’m one of those people. Whether I’m “a gnc woman” or “a person who needs T” matters less to me than whether I can present in the way I want to, though I won’t be surprised if I ever try t and go “well yep”
If I could ask only one thing of the community, it would be that we stop arguing over what ‘bi’ and ‘pan’ mean. they can have heavy overlap – they can have the same fucking meaning, even – and still both be valid identifiers. I identify as bi but others might have the same attraction experiences as me and identify as pan. it’s fine! they are both fine! can we stop arguing about this please? especially people who are neither bi nor pan???
To expand on this, my revolutionary idea includes
people who identify as bi not defining what it means to be pan
people who identify as pan not defining what it means to be bi
You can define why you identify as bi or pan without including an explanation for why you don’t think the other identity describes your experience
this post is my big ‘fuck you’ to the people who respond to someone IDing as bi or pan with ‘but why don’t you identify as [the other orientation]?’
it’s seriously screwed up that bi and pan ppl are being pitted against each other like this, as if our experiences have to be completely different for both labels to exist. As though if it turns out we have even slightly overlapping definitions of bi and pan, only one (1) orientation label will be allowed to continue being used
Don’t ask people why they don’t identify as pan if they say they are bi
Don’t ask people why they identify as bi if if they say they are pan
Fun consequences of industrial agriculture: literal shit winds
Behind each barn, millions of gallons of liquid hog waste are kept in
colossal open-air lagoons – essentially pits dug into the clay, many
without a concrete or plastic liner. To prevent overflowing, farms spray
it out as fertilizer on crops, which can create a mist that drifts onto
nearby homes and into their inhabitants’ lungs, causing all manner of
respiratory and health problems. The waste can also leak through the
clay pits into the water table, or flood the whole region, as happened
in 1996 and 1998 when hurricanes inundated the area. Eastern North
Carolina is packed with more than 9 million pigs; the state’s top five
hog-producing counties alone produce 15.5 million tons of manure
annually. An analysis by the Environmental Working Group found that
160,000 people living in the region may be harmed by pig waste. And
those victims are disproportionately minorities, according to studies
conducted by the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. As Naeema
Muhammad, co-director of the North Carolina Environmental Justice
Network, says, “What’s happening in eastern North Carolina is that poor
people are literally getting shit on.”
“The Chinese government had a track record of using nominally private entities as proxies for state power” love to try to use rolling stone anti Chinese propaganda for a “leftist” position. only these clowns
agreed. there is nothing that chinese capitalism can do by chasing underdevelopment-caused low wage labour and lack of environmental protection in the capitalist core that isn’t a good thing.
underdevelopment lmao so now the poor US is being exploited by China
agreed, investment by the capitalist class in one country in another has never been for the purpose of securing a higher rate of surplus labour than an investor could get at home. they just think it’s a fun thing to do, that’s all.
Minisoc fell in the shit lagoons after posting
That headline weirds me out, though, it’s like “wait why are you treating us like this, we’re supposed to be real people!”
Here’s my periodic apology to everyone who’s sent me a message I haven’t responded too: I get a lot of messages and I’m bad at responding to all of them, nothing personal at all, my apologies
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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