Day: July 16, 2018

argumate:

arjan-de-lumens:

argumate:

argumate:

there’s a lot of confusion about what it means to be a Nazi in this day and age, and while you could get pedantic and say that only some Germans between 1920 and 1945 could be considered Nazis I think it’s reasonable to extend the title to anyone if:

 – you think of the world as a struggle between ethnoracial groups, not social classes or individuals

 – you identify the nation with the race and the race with the nation

 – you expect an imminent race war and intend to win or die trying

 – you believe the usual gamut of antisemitic conspiracy theories

 – you prefer society to be organised on military lines, a hierarchy of appointed leaders with absolute authority and no democratic oversight or opposition

 – you believe in conformity to traditional social norms and are willing to maintain them by force if necessary

Japanese and Italian fascists ticked most of these with less emphasis on the antisemitism, as do various other groups, but having the complete set makes you pretty damn close to Nazi (although it needs a note about the whole “Aryan” thing, obviously).

What I’m used to seeing here in Norway (and this appear to be fairly similar in much of Europe) is that – when political activists without personal ties to the Third Reich are seen to deliberately adopt or mimic the ideology and symbolism of the Reich, they rather consistently get called Neo-Nazis; the “Nazi” label, when applied to people without neo-type prefixes, seems to be mostly reserved for the people who actually served the Reich in some capacity back when it still existed. (This doesn’t seem strictly limited to Germans; it used to be fairly common here in Norway to have “he was a Nazi during the war” as a dark family secret, for ethnic Norwegians who actively supported the German Nazis back when they occupied Norway in the early 1940s.)

Examples of the kind of people/movements that have been getting the Neo-Nazi label here include e.g. Richard B. Spencer, the South African AWB movement, the Greek Golden Dawn party, and a lot of smaller movements throughout Europe.

I’m kind of thinking that a reason for making the Nazi vs Neo-Nazi distinction here at least is that when these sorts of movements started arising here – e.g. Erik Blucher’s Norwegian Front, founded in 1975 – a lot of people still had a rather fresh memory of what the Third Reich and the World War II Nazi occupation were like, and saw things like Blucher’s silly little organization and similar as – not really the same thing as the original German Nazism was, and as such, it got its own label.

yes, Neo-Nazi is more accurate and also sounds super lame.

aroluna:

creativeusernahme:

autismlookslike:

aroluna:

I’ve seen very little talk about hyper empathy so here’s some examples of it:

it can feel like the emotions of others are permeating a space and/or spilling into you causing high anxiety even when they’re not directed towards you/you’re not expected to react to them.

some people experience it by not being able to handle world tragedies or negative news reports because they feel a highly personal connection to the pain in those people with no way to help them.

it can also be empathy directed towards objects or animals that seems disproportionate to others.

this is something that a lot of autistic people deal with, so it makes me sad that I’ve seen basically no information about it in the communities on here

I’ve seen this before and it MESSES ME UP EVERY TIME because I was ALWAYS LOOKING FOR A WORD FOR THAT EXPERIENCE.

Like, after watching the Wikileaks video of the two journalists being killed, I could not leave my house for two days. I could barely get out of bed. It was the most depressed I have ever been.

On a less terrible note, one time when I was little, my mom said a lima bean on my plate looked like “a baby,” so I decided I had to save it, because it was a baby, and I kept it in a little jar for a month and I opened it again and it was moldy and I had to throw it away and I cried because I had failed to save the baby.

THE “BABY” THAT WAS, IN FACT, MERELY A SMALL LIMA BEAN

Isnt that being highly sensitive because i read once that autism and hsp are sometimes very similar except that hsp have usually a very high empathy or am i talking shit educate me

At least in the US, HSP (highly sensitive person) is not in the DSM. That doesn’t mean it can’t be a useful term/concept for some people (lord knows I have little to no respect for the DSM), but I think it’s interesting to note the way that some people who like to talk about HSP use it as a way to describe an experience without having to group themselves with “actually disabled” people. 

in general, I think most people who fit the qualities of HSP would also fit under the label of autistic. It’s of course up to each individual to decide what words and communities are helpful to them, but I think those people could probably benefit from autistic self advocacy communities. 

I would be especially suspicious of anyone who tried to describe a dichotomy between autistic people and HSP, especially if they describe the difference between the two being about empathy levels. Autistic people have vastly varying experiences with empathy.

kurt-vaagner:

assassinationtipsforladies:

mszombi:

fussyconcussy:

a girl whos tummy is sore because she ate dairy: is a bit quiet
a guy:She was perfect, pure maddening sex, and she knew it, and she played on it, dripped it, and allowed you to suffer for it

This reminded me of an article I read years ago covering some lolita event. The reporter wrote something about how lolitas claimed lolita fashion was non-sexual, but he found it hard to believe after seeing the way they “seductively nibbled on cookies”

I don’t remember what the article was or what event it was covering, but I remember that one line because it just, like, filled me with so much rage. Like goddamn, maybe they just wanted to eat some fucking cookies, its not their fault you got a boner over it. 

“it’s not their fault you got a boner over it” is such an important statement in way too many contexts

And got damn, I know cishet men have no concept of makeup and how it works, but like, I absolutely promise you it wasn’t seductive nibbling, it was them doing their best not to get lipstick and foundation on their food

If You’ve Never Lived In Poverty, Stop Telling Poor People What They Should Do

sinesalvatorem:

bimuslimhoe:

“The assumption that “simple advice” can dramatically change a person’s economic outlook assumes that a person’s poverty is solely the result of personal failings, rather than very real and costly systems of oppression, including legacy poverty, systemic racism, mass incarceration, punitive immigration policies, medical debt, and more.

Regardless of the personal choices a family might make to save money, there are some unavoidable costs that are baked into our financial and social systems.

Overdraft fees, late fees on missed bills, high-interest credit card fees, and payday lenders are just a few ways that poverty begets higher expenses. The average payday loan borrower – who is usually short just a few hundred dollars between paychecks – ends up paying more than 300% interest on their initial amount.

These companies make billions each year by offering people a necessary service that costs them an outrageously inflated price.

…

No amount of cutting back on luxury spending or driving extra hours for Uber can change the fact that there is literally nowhere in the country where a minimum wage job can support a family, that good union jobs have been in decline for decades, or that housing costs have priced people out of their homes. Cutting coupons, commuting by bike, and enjoying outdoor activities can’t really fix that.

So, instead of telling poor people what they should do to work around a system that’s leaving more and more people behind every year, we need to consider how the system can bend and change to better fit the needs of all people.”

I totally get where this is coming from, in that advice about how to escape poverty from someone who hasn’t been poor will necessarily overlook a lot of the problems poor people have. Because it’s not really possible to see all the hurdles that would be in someone’s way from the outside, plus everyone’s circumstance is different anyway.

However, as a poor person, encountering advice on how to save money in specific areas, or find additional sources of income, can be super useful to me. So many things that can significantly improve someone’s life are information-gated, because learning about them is hard.

For example, after some research, I recently found a restaurant where I could spend $2.50 a meal – in San Francisco of all places. I’ve also calculated which McDonalds item has the most calories per dollar (at my local one, the sausage McMuffin w/o egg). At one point, I even had a list of which staple items are cheaper at which stores, but homelessness means I keep moving too much for that to ever stay relevant.

The problem with hacks like this is that they require a significant amount of mental effort to go around figuring out systematically. Finding each place in your life where you can get a little more value for money is hard, even if it’s so so necessary for a lot of people. Worse yet, if you have an unstable housing situation and have to keep moving every few weeks, suddenly half of your local knowledge is suddenly useless and you have to start over.

Which means I benefit a lot from learning from other people who’ve done some of this work for me in a given domain. And, as it happens, this is something that’s easier when you have more privilege, because you’re in a better position to think about the best sources of food when you aren’t already hungry, and you can make better choices on where to buy clothes if you aren’t already cold. And you can compile more detailed information if you actually have a house and can stay in the same place for a whole year.

The problems usually come in when someone offering advice assumes that the act of giving advice should by itself fix a poor person’s life. This is what I meant about not knowing all of the hurdles that may stand in someone’s way, and so assuming that the advice you gave is the only thing they’ll need. And, like, it might not even work in their specific circumstance! But the provision of information isn’t the problem, it’s expectations about what may result.

Giving people information resources to optimise their life is like a booster rocket. It can help them go further. But it can’t clear all the obstacles out of their way, just give them a little more help in getting around them. And, for whatever reason, someone might not take your advice. It doesn’t matter why – other people are living their own lives and making their own choices, and those won’t always line up with the ones you think they should be making.

And honestly, at that point, I think what people need is emotional distance. Poverty is a societal problem that hopefully we as a society will try to do something about. But it isn’t the responsibility of each random middle class bloke to Fix All of Poverty Forever.

Which I think is part of what leads to the impulse to offer a ‘solution’ and then think badly of anyone who doesn’t take it. But, like, your responsibility is bounded. Giving advice is doing some good, donating to charity is doing some good, but reaching into someone else’s life and forcing them to live it a different way so you can feel like you’re helping is not.

On that note, if anyone who reads this has any life hacks wrt saving money or earning extra income, or knows online resources that have compiled a bunch of them, please tell me! I already know of quite a few, but I’m always looking for more. I’m a pretty big fan of getting out of poverty, and I’d like every booster I can get, even if they don’t all fit. I anticipate being in [San Francisco / Daly City / Berkeley] most of the time, so local knowledge for there is also appreciated.

(And yes, I know the obvious advice of moving to a cheaper place. I’ve tried that temporarily. It turns out that a very wide spectrum of things are much harder  when living in places where I don’t already have roots, so at least for now the trade off leans in favour of staying around here.)

If You’ve Never Lived In Poverty, Stop Telling Poor People What They Should Do

the idea of “good people will be grateful for setting boundaries” is like… a complete fantasy. the best lesson a person can learn in this life is that nobody will ever like… genuinely care about anybody else, ever. idk what money you get from pumping out feel-good waffle nonsense on social media, or what blessings have fallen into your lap to have such a laughably false outlook on life, but I’m glad it’s working out for you.

theunitofcaring:

I don’t know if this will be helpful, and if it’s not helpful then you should obviously ignore it, but just so you know – most of the people I know who have believed ‘nobody will ever genuinely care about anybody else, ever’ were depressed. Their depression was making instances of people treating each other badly feel really salient, and convincing them that instances of people genuinely caring about each other had to be fake. Also, typically their lives sucked, and didn’t contain very many good, generous or caring people. They were wrong about what the world was like, but they were right about what they were experiencing and what they were experiencing was awful and destroying them, and to stop experiencing that they had to fix both of those things. 

There are lots of better life situations, and you can absolutely find one. But also, people who are depressed wrongly evaluate situations because only the awful things seem memorable and the good things all seem fake. So if this is what’s going on with you, adding good things won’t fully fix it; you’d also need to be able to notice the good things and believe that they’re actually good things instead of just cleverly-hidden bad things.

That’s a hell of a task for anyone to have in front of them and as a horrible, awful bonus, depression makes accomplishing tasks harder. I’m really sorry. That is every bit as profoundly unfair as it sounds. I’m pretty sure if the world had handed me that particular deck of cards I’d conclude it was an awful bullshit world, and I wouldn’t be wrong. But it’s an awful bullshit world with good people who respect each others’ boundaries, and I hope you find them and come to believe they’re real.