(2) none of these mentors ever did anything
remotely inappropriate to me, neither did any of their male colleagues
they helped me consult with, i got support for my disability and as an
academic and a human being from mentors that i was not getting at
school, many of them disabled themselves. mentorship is CRUCIAL for
people like me, who are often denied academic opportunities and benefit
from support and it upsets me to see it written off as “basically
pedophilia”
======
I haven’t seen that post, and I’m fucking grateful because what the fuck, holy shit that is the worst fucking concept I’ve ever seen, and it’s horrible that it’s finally translating from subtext to just plain fucking text.
Mentorship is absolutely and especially necessary for disabled people, as well as for people who are denied opportunities for other reasons, such as being queer or brown, but like fuck, it’s also just necessary for fucking everyone.
Do these people think that all teachers are child predators? All parents? Girl scout leaders? Big brother/big sisters? Fucking training managers?
Do they think that everyone just magically learns all possible skills without any kind of guidance at all?
The second one of these kids tries to replace a busted electric socket without help, they’re going to have a nasty time of it. Or make a fucking pancake. Or do some public transit transfers in an unfamiliar city. Or literally fucking anything.
Holy shit.
Holy fuck.
You know, If these people actually cared about mentors behaving inappropriately, they’d be doing things like listing tips for how to tell if your mentor is shady, and reminding you to trust your gut and leave if you aren’t comfortable with something. But they never do that.
Yeah, that. No one is immune to being targeted by a predator. NO ONE. And you can’t tell if someone is or isn’t a predator just by how old they are. There isn’t an age at which the “predator” switch just flips and a perfectly nice and helpful non-predatory individual suddenly gets the urge to groom children for abuse. And there isn’t an age at which an individual magically becomes unattractive to any and all predatory individuals – elder abuse is also a thing.
Learn about red flags so you know what to be on alert for. Learn to set and enforce healthy boundaries in ALL your relationships (this limits the ability of predators to harm you, and also good people generally appreciate knowing where your boundaries are and being able to trust that you’ll speak up if you feel uncomfortable about something). And then go live your life with the understanding that really, most people are pretty basically decent most of the time. Doesn’t mean you have to like, get along with, or agree with everyone who’s not Actually An Abuser, but just… know that “personality conflicts”, “incompatible lifestyles” and “bad days” are interpersonal sticky points that exist and aren’t necessarily even red flags.
If internet discoursers actually cared about children, they would express support for children having more legal rights, for resources that help children escape abusive homes, for all kinds of, idk, community support (which means OMG ADULT strangers helping any children that need help).
But no, they just keep repeating age old “think of the children” conservative talking points, with new awful twists added. They seem to think that
all people under 18 are tiny snowflakes that have no agency and need overbearing protection exclusively by the Approved™ classes of adults (parents, teachers… idk, fuckin cops too?)
(what if these supposed protectors are actually abusers?? uhhhhhhhhh… ummmm…)
and when someone turns 18 they SUDDENLY turn into a fully responsible adult that also can and will abuse others and MUST NOT talk to anyone under that arbitrary number of 18 because of that
It’s really bad that this idea has infected Tumblr discourse.
Theory: they want to isolate potential victims, so they insist up and down that any adult outside their weirdo internet communities is a threat. That’s why they include people who are over 18 as being, effectively, minors – they don’t care about protecting minors from pedophiles so much as having a steady supply of vulnerable, naive people joining their grimy little cults.
What annoys the FUCK out of me about the ‘all historians are out there to erase queerness from history’ thing on Tumblr is that it’s just one of those many attitudes that flagrantly mischaracterises an entire academic field and has a complete amateur thinking they know more than people who’ve spent fucking years studying said field.
Like someone will offer a very obvious example of – say – two men writing each other passionate love letters, and then quip about how Historians will just try to say that affection was just different ‘back then’. Um…no. If one man writes to another about how he wants to give him 10 000 kisses and suck his cock, most historians – surprise surprise! – say it’s definitely romantic, sexual love. We aren’t Victorians anymore.
It also completely dismisses the fact of how many cases of possible queerness are much more ambiguous that two men writing to each other about banging merrily in a field. The boundaries of platonic affection are hugely variable depending on the time and place you’re looking at. What people mock us for saying is true. Nuance fucking exists in the world, unlike on this hellscape of a site.
It is a great discredit to the difficult work that historians do in interpreting the past to just assume we’re out there trying to straightwash the past. Queer historians exist. Open-minded allies exist.
I’m off to down a bottle of whisky and set something on fire.
It’s also vaguely problematic to ascribe our modern language
and ideas of sexuality to people living hundreds or even thousands of years
ago. Of course queer people existed then—don’t be fucking daft, literally any
researcher/historian/whatever worth their salt with acknowledge this. But as
noted above, there’s a lot of ambiguity as well—ESPECIALLY when dealing with a
translation of a translation of a copy of a damaged copy in some language that
isn’t spoken anymore. That being said, yes, queer erasure happens, and it
fucking sucks and hurts. I say that as a queer woman and a baby!researcher. But
this us (savvy internet historian) vs. them (dusty old actual historian)
mentality has got to stop.
You’re absolutely right.
I see the effect of applying modern labels to time periods when they didn’t have them come out in a bad way when people argue about whether some historical figure was transmasculine or a butch lesbian. There were some, of course, who were very obviously men and insisted on being treated as such, but with a lot of people…we just don’t know and we never will. The divide wasn’t so strong back in the late 19th century, for example. Heck, the word ‘transmasculine’ didn’t exist yet. There was a big ambiguous grey area about what AFAB people being masculine meant, identity-wise.
Some people today still have a foot in each camp. Identity is complicated, and that’s probably been the case since humans began to conceptualise sexuality and gender.
That’s why the word ‘queer’ is such a usefully broad and inclusive umbrella term for historians.
Also, one more thing and I will stop (sorry it’s just been so long since I’ve gotten to rant). Towards the beginning of last semester, I was translating “Wulf and Eadwacer” from Old English. This is a notoriously ambiguous poem, a p p a r e n t l y, and most of the other students and I were having a lot of trouble translating it because the nouns and their genders were all over the place (though this could be because my memory is slipping here) which made it hella difficult to figure out word order and syntax and (key) the fucking gender of everything. In class, though, my professor told us that the gender and identity of the speaker were actually the object of some debate in the Anglo-Saxonist community. For the most part, it was assumed that the principal speaker of the poem is a woman (there is one very clear female translation amongst all that ambiguity) mourning the exile of her lover/something along those lines. But there’s also some who say that she’s speaking of her child. And some people think the speaker of the poem is male and talking abut his lover. And finally, there’s some people who think that the speaker of the poem is a fucking BADGER, which is fucking wild and possibly my favorite interpretation in the history of interpretations.
TL;DR—If we can’t figure out beyond the shadow of a doubt whether the speaker is a human or a fucking badger, then we certainly can’t solidly say whether a speaker is queer or not. This isn’t narrowmindedness, this is fucking what-the-hell-is-this-language-and-culture (and also maybe most of the manuscripts are pretty fucked which further lessens knowledge and ergo certainty).
Also, if there’s nothing to debate, what’s even the fun in being an historian?
All of this.
I had a student once try to tell me that I was erasing queer history by claiming that a poem was ambiguous. I was trying to make the point that a poem was ambiguous and that for the time period we were working with, the identities of “queer” and “straight” weren’t so distinctive. Thus, it was possible that the poem was either about lovers or about friends because the language itself was in that grey area where the sentiment could be romantic or just an expression of affection that is different from how we display affection towards friends today.
And hoo boy. The student didn’t want to hear that.
It’s ok to admit ambiguity and nuance. Past sexualities aren’t the same as our modern ones, and our understanding of culture today can’t be transferred onto past cultures. It just doesn’t work. The past is essentially a foreign culture that doesn’t match up perfectly with current ones – even if we’re looking at familiar ones, like ancient or medieval Europe. That means our understanding of queerness also has to account for the passage of time. I think we need to ask “What did queerness look like in the past?” as opposed to “How did queerness as we understand it today exist in the past?” As long as we examine the past with an understanding that not all cultures thought same-sex romance/affection/sexual practice was sinful, we’re not being homophobic by admitting there can be nuance in a particular historical product.
I know a lot of very smart people who are working on queerness in medieval literature and history. And yes, there are traditions of scholars erasing queer history because they themselves are guided by their own ideologies. We all are. It’s impossible to be 100% objective about history and its interpretation. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t good work being done by current scholars, including work that corrects the bad methodologies of the past.
also yeah, the key thing that’s helped me as a student of history is learning that using language outside of modern labels shouldnt erase queerness, but should complicate it.
Jesus Christ all of this
i think a lot of kids of tumblr have this vague grudge against ‘straightwashing academics’ that they actually picked up from their highschool curriculum, which is kind of a completely different thing. like, it’s not ‘academics’ that’s the problem when it comes to american teenagers being fed an extremely white, straight, patriarchical version of history; it’s your fucking government.
I have a culinary degree, and have worked as a professional cook, and have been a restaurateur. The “gastronomer” in my url is quite serious. I have Opinions about how people use the word chef (”chef” is a job title, it’s a French word that means “boss” and is a cognate of chief; only someone who actually runs a quality kitchen should be called a chef – you can’t be a “home chef”), about how “spaghetti bolognese” is used (it’s not just any spaghetti with meat sauce, Bolognese is a specific style that includes beef, pork and pancetta), about what a proper key lime pie is like (don’t even get me started).
Because of this, people expect me to be a food snob. I am NOT. You like what you like, and you should eat what you like, and anybody who looks down their nose at you for it isn’t a “foodie”, they’re a fucking asshole. You like Li’l Smokies in your box mac’n’cheese? Right on! You like Taco Bell? So do I! Let’s go get a crunchwrap and a gordita! You buy cheap pink box wine? Sure, I’ll have a glass with you, if you’re offering.
I have food I don’t like, and food I will offer what I find more enjoyable alternatives to (oil packed canned tuna has a very fine taste, while water pack tends to wash out the richer flavors), but hey, if you like the stuff I don’t, you eat that all you want!
I want to make fresh, delicious, high quality ingredients available to everyone, but don’t you dare take away my $1.99 “chocolate” covered waxy-tasting mini donuts! I will fight you!
Foodie-ism has stopped being about just enjoying food for yourself, and has, far too often, started being about sneering at the food other people like. It’s food hipsterism. And it’s bullshit. It’s often classicist and racist and ableist/healthist as well.
Don’t pull that shit around me. I will take you the fuck apart.
Okay, but what IS a proper key lime pie? And what isn’t? I presume it’s not just a lemon pie but with lime-flavored or lime-based filling instead of lemon?
Now you’ve got me curious.
You got me started.
OK, first of all, a key lime pie is NOT made with “regular” (Persian) limes. It is made with key limes, aka Mexican limes. They are smaller than Persian limes, about the size of a ping pong ball. They’re also not a deep green, but more of a yellow-green, and the juice is yellowish. They are considerably tarter than Persian limes, and have a distinctive flavor. They’re also kind of a pain to juice if they’re not fresh-picked, so personally I always buy bottled up here in Seattle. (I’m from Florida, where part of the year you can get good ones from groves or even off your own backyard tree.) Nellie and Joe’s Key West Lime Juice is the only brand I know and trust, and if your grocery store doesn’t have it, Amazon does.
A key lime pie is a custard pie made from key lime juice, egg yolks, and typically sweetened condensed milk, in a graham cracker crust (none of your bullshit butter cookie crusts, save that for some other, appropriate, kind of pie). Traditionally, you *can* put meringue on top, but only to use up the egg whites you separate from the yolks. It’s not fucking lemon meringue pie, there should not be a huge mound. Personally I don’t like wet French meringues (made with granulated sugar, as opposed to Italian meringues, which are made with syrup), I think they feel like sweetened snot in my mouth. You can also add a small amount of sweetened whipped cream when you plate it, but only a dollop.
A key lime pie should never, EVER be green. If it is, the baker doesn’t know what the fuck they’re doing, and you should skip it. Even a custard pie made with Persian limes shouldn’t be green, ffs.
A key lime pie SHOULD be both very sweet and very tart, as well and very smooth and creamy. My personal standard for the flavor is that when you take a bite, the first thing you taste should be the creamy and the sweet, and then the tart should hit you, but your mouth shouldn’t pucker until you take a sip of water and wash the sugar away.
A key lime pie filling should not contain flour, starch, gelatin, or other stabilizers. It should be as simple as possible. Key lime pie, historically, is poor people food from the Florida Keys, using the basic ingredients they had lying around: limes from the backyard, eggs from the chickens (they still run around loose on Key West), a can of sweetened condensed milk, some graham crackers, sugar and butter for the crust. You’d stir it up, pour it into the pie shell, pop it in the over with dinner, pull it out and stick it in the icebox (with literal ice) to cool, eat it the next night. (Unless you used a no-bake version, where the key lime juice itself denatured and “chemically cooked” the egg yolks. But it’s too easy to get salmonella that way these days, in the US.) They’re meant to be simple, dammit.
Key lime pie was the kind of thing they made in shotgun shacks. (Which frequently look a little different in the Keys than they do in those pics. The hallways often have rooms built off both sides of the hallway, and the roof’s peak sometimes runs perpendicular to the hallway, and then additional sections might get added to the back as the family grew, leading to rooflines like ^^^^.) Just a bit of history.
So then. Key Lime Pie Recipe Time! This is the recipe my family has always used, it’s the recipe I used in my restaurant, it always gets rave reviews, and it is thoroughly authentic. Because I hate meringue, it does not include meringue.
You will need:
Hardware:
one mixing bowl
one wooden spoon, stirring spatula, or spoonula
one liquid measuring cup
one small bowl for separating eggs into
one graham cracker pie crust, recipe to follow, or use a store-bought one, I don’t care
Ingredients: 1 – 12oz can sweetened condensed milk 3 egg yolks ½ cup key lime juice
Preheat the oven to 350F.
Mix those things together until smooth. Don’t beat them hard, you’ll incorporate air into the mix, that will mess up your texture and give you bubbles. When it is completely smooth, your oven should be hot, stick your filling in the fridge for a little while. Pre-bake your crust for 15 minutes, trust me, it is so much better if you do this. Do this even if it’s a store bought crust. If you don’t, your crust can get soggy. Pull it out, let it cool 10 minutes. Pour in the filling, bake 15 minutes. Pull it out. Let it cool for 30 minutes of a countertop, then stick it in the fridge for at least four hours, preferably overnight. Share and enjoy. (Or eat it all yourself.)
Graham cracker crust recipe:
You will need:
Hardware:
one mixing bowl one glass bowl to melt butter in one gallon ziplock OR a food processor a wooden spoon
Ingredients:
1/3 of a box of graham crackers 1 stick butter 1/2c sugar one 9″ pie plate one heavy glass with a smooth flat bottom
Dump the graham crackers into the gallon ziplock or work bowl of your food processor. If using a bag, crush them up real good, until you have a lot of fine meal and some small pieces. If you’re using the food processor, break them up roughly, then pulse until you get the same thing.
Put them in the mixing bowl. Add the sugar, and stir to combine. Melt your butter. Mix that in. It should reach the consistency of wet sand, like you’re making a sandcastle. If you pick some up in your hand and squeeze it in your fist, it should hold its shape until you poke it.
Press this firmly into the bottom and up the sides of your pie plate. Then use the bottom of your glass to press it in even more firmly. Really compact it. Then bake it as above.
Great all-purpose graham cracker crust recipe, good for cheesecake too.
If you lose track of this recipe, look on the bottle of Nellie and Joe’s, that’s where we got it!
If you want to get really ridiculous and over the top, make a triple batch of filling and put it in the same crust. That’s what we did at the restaurant. But you might want to find someone to share the slice with!
There. I told you, don’t get me started. It’s a whole fucking thing with me. In the restaurant, if somebody asked in the key lime pie was authentic, the servers would go, “Oh, the owner’s from Florida, she has a thing about key lime pie. I can go get her if you like, she’s got a whole rant. It’s really funny.” And they would go get me out of the office and I would do a whole little standup bit about key lime pie. Much shorter than this was. I just wrote like 1200 words on this. I could write more. I won’t. I’m done.Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk?
I have never liked key lime pie.
Apparently I’ve been eating bad key lime pie and need to home make some asap.
Thank you, random chef on the internet. You may have saved key lime pie in this household yet.
I would also like to say thank you to random internet chef for:
1. Defending the right of people to like what they fucking please, and smacking down classist bullshit.
2. Giving me a fantastic key lime recipe. My dad used to make it properly. He died some years ago, and I could never find a recipe for it. But this looks very, *very* similar to the spread I used to see in his kitchen when he was making it. I’m going to try it, and if it’s even remotely similar to his, I will sit there happily sobbing into my key lime pie. Thank you.
Oh I would love a rant on red velvet cake… and that it is actually chocolate. Cause a lot of them taste like… nothing actually.
I’ve done it at least twice, you should look through my archives.
Technically, cocoa, not chocolate, since there’s no cocoa butter in it. You have to use natural cocoa powder, not Dutched, and buttermilk and/or vinegar. The reaction makes the brick red color that the origin of the name.
RIO DE JANEIRO — Brazil on Sunday became the latest country to drift toward the far right, electing a strident populist as president in the nation’s most radical political change since democracy was restored more than 30 years ago.
The new president, Jair Bolsonaro, has exalted the country’s military dictatorship, advocated torture and threatened to destroy, jail or drive into exile his political opponents.
He won by tapping into a deep well of resentment at the status quo in Brazil — a country whiplashed by rising crime and two years of political and economic turmoil — and by presenting himself as the alternative.
“We have everything need to become a great nation,” Mr. Bolsonaro said Sunday night shortly after the race was called in a video broadcast on his Facebook account. “Together we will change the destiny of Brazil.”
He appeared eager to dispel concerns that he would govern despotically, saying his government would be a “defender of the Constitution, democracy and liberty.”
Mr. Bolsonaro, who will take the helm of Latin America’s biggest nation, is farther to the right than any president in the region, where voters have recently embraced more conservative leaders in Argentina, Chile, Peru, Paraguay and Colombia. He joins a number of far-right politicians who have risen to power around world, including Italy’s deputy prime minister, Matteo Salvini, and Prime Minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary.
“This is a really radical shift,” said Scott Mainwaring, a professor at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government who specializes in Brazil. “I can’t think of a more extremist leader in the history of democratic elections in Latin America who has been elected.”
With 98 percent of votes counted, Mr. Bolsonaro was ahead with 55 percent, guaranteeing him a win over Fernando Haddad of the leftist Workers’ Party, who had 45 percent.
Hundreds of supporters gathered outside Mr. Bolsonaro’s seaside home in Rio de Janeiro, jumping and hugging each other when the results were announced. As golden fireworks lit up the sky, they chanted “mito,” or legend, paying homage to their president-elect.
Reeling from the deepest recession in the country’s history, a corruption scandal that tarnished politicians across the ideological spectrum, and a record-high number of homicides last year, Brazilians picked a candidate who not only rejected the political establishment but at times also seemed to reject the most basic democratic tenets.
Mr. Bolsonaro’s victory caps a bitter contest that divided families, tore friendships apart and ignited concerns about the resilience of Brazil’s young democracy.
Many Brazilians see authoritarian tendencies in Mr. Bolsonaro, who plans to appoint military leaders to top posts and said he would not accept the result if he were to lose. He has threatened to stack the Supreme Court by increasing the number of judges to 21 from 11 and to deal with political foes by giving them the choice of extermination orexile.
Mr. Bolsonaro, 63, a former Army captain who has been a member of Congress for nearly three decades, beat a crowded field of presidential contenders, several of whom entered the race with bigger war chests, less baggage, and the backing of powerful political parties.
Part of the reason for his victory was the collapse of the left. Many cried foul after former President Luiz Inácio da Silva, the longtime front-runner in the race, was ruled ineligible to run after he was imprisoned in April to start serving a 12-year sentence for corruption and money laundering.
His Workers’ Party had won the last four presidential elections, and Mr. da Silva, a former metalworker, retained a devoted following among poor and working class Brazilians who felt represented by him personally and had benefited from his party’s social inclusion policies.
But many more Brazilians showed through their votes that they’d had enough of the Workers’ Party, which steered the country from 2003 to 2016 through a boom-and-bust cycle that ended in an economic morass and the impeachment of his successor, President Dilma Rousseff.
Despite his influence, Mr. da Silva was not able to pull off the last-minute transfer of votes to the candidate chosen to replace him on the ballot, the bookish and urbane — but less charismatic — Fernando Haddad.
And for those Brazilians who saw the political establishment they inherited from the Workers’ Party as venal, Mr. Bolsonaro was an enthralling candidate.
He accomplished little in his long legislative career, but his roster of offensive remarks — he said that he’d rather his son die than be gay and that women don’t deserve the same pay as men — was interpreted by many as bracing honesty and evidence of his willingness to shatter the status quo.
“The way he’s run his campaign is very clever,” said Matias Spektor, a professor of international relations at Fundação Getulio Vargas University. “He has managed to align himself with the institutions that Brazilians still believe in: religion, family and armed forces.”
Mr. Bolsonaro, the patriarch of a family from Rio de Janeiro that includes three sons who are also lawmakers, ran an insurgent campaign that defied the political playbook that brought his predecessors to power.
A year ago, Mr. Bolsonaro’s bid was widely regarded by political veterans in Brasília as fanciful in a nation renowned for the cordiality and warmth of its people. Some of the candidate’s remarks were so offensive the country’s attorney general earlier this year charged him with inciting hatred toward black, gay and indigenous people. In a country where most of the population is not white, this alone might have seemed to disqualify him.
Yet, the vitriol and outrage Mr. Bolsonaro brought to the campaign trail as he traveled around the country largely mirrored Brazilians’ dystopian mood.
Nearly 13 million people are unemployed. The homicide rate is among the highest in the world — last year, 63,880 people were killed. And Mr. da Silva, the former president many had idolized, had left office with an approval rating of 87 percent only to become the most prominent scalp taken by a corruption scandal that has ensnared dozens of the country’s political and business leaders.
Part of Mr. Bolsonaro’s appeal lay in the extreme solutions he proposed to assuage the population’s anger and fear of violence.
He vowed to give the police forces in Brazil — some of the most lethal in the world — expanded authority to kill suspected criminals, saying with trademark bluntness that a “good criminal is a dead criminal.” He also promised to lower the age of criminal responsibility, impose stiffer sentences for violent crimes and ease Brazil’s gun ownership restrictions so civilians could better protect themselves.
“Violence must be reduced because otherwise we are headed toward total chaos,” said Roberto Levi, 36, a police officer in Rio de Janeiro who voted for Mr. Bolsonaro.
Over the past two years, while many of Brazil’s traditional political parties and powerful kingmakers were busy defending themselves against corruption allegations stemming from the investigation known as Lava Jato, Mr. Bolsonaro flew around the country, drumming up support, particularly among young men, and in comparatively wealthier and whiter parts of the country.
While rivals spent small fortunes on marketing firms, video editors and consultants, Mr. Bolsonaro relied primarily on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and the instant messaging service WhatsApp to communicate with voters and expand his base.
Opponents enjoyed far more advertising time on television and radio — which is allotted by party size — and rolled out slickly edited campaign materials. But Mr. Bolsonaro’s campaign drowned them out with a bare-bones, scrappy communications strategy. He and his sons broadcast shaky, poorly-lit videos on Facebook and Instagram in which Mr. Bolsonaro cracked jokes, took aim at adversaries and bemoaned the state of Brazil.
On WhatsApp, supporters created hundreds of groups to share memes, videos and messages that often contained falsehoods and misleading content that cast Mr. Bolsonaro in a positive light and disparaged his rivals.
One dominant message, spread widely via WhatsApp, asserted with no evidence that Mr. Bolsonaro’s opponents encouraged schoolchildren to become gay or reconsider their gender identity by employing sex education materials referred to as “gay kits.”
“I like what Bolsonaro stands for,” said Cintia Puerta, 55, an architect in São Paulo said Sunday after casting her vote. “My sister works in a school so I know they are teaching “gay kits” to children, teaching them about sexuality at age five and six. They’re indoctrinating children in the school.”
Mr. Bolsonaro’s presidential ambition nearly ended on Sept. 6 when a man sliced a knife into his stomach during a campaign rally, slashing several organs and his intestines.
After that, Mr. Bolsonaro declined to participate in debates and did few probing interviews, leaving significant gaps in the electorate’s understanding of his position on pivotal issues, including pension reform and the privatization of state enterprises.
In the wake of the attack, Mr. Bolsonaro’s standing in the polls rose steadily after languishing in the low 20-percent range for weeks. Last-minute endorsements from the influential evangelical lobby and agribusiness leaders gave him a boost.
After the first round of voting, in which Mr. Bolsonaro received just shy of the 50 percent required to win outright, some political analysts expected he would moderate his rhetoric in order to appeal to centrist or undecided voters.
They were wrong.
Last Sunday, he issued a threat to members of the Workers’ Party that critics called downright fascist.
“Those red good-for-nothings will be banished from the homeland,” he said during an address, delivered via a video link up, to thousands of supporters gathered in São Paulo. “It will be a cleanup the likes of which has never been seen in Brazilian history.”
For the Workers’ Party, Sunday’s presidential defeat leaves a political movement that won accolades from much of population for affirmative action and inequality-reducing policies significantly weakened and effectively leaderless.
Party luminaries hoped that the former president, Mr. da Silva, a lion of Latin America’s left know by his nickname of “Lula,” would return to the presidential palace. Even after Mr. da Silva was jailed, party leaders said that “an election without Lula is fraud.”
When courts made clear Mr. da Silva would not be allowed to run, and the Workers’ Party nominated Mr. Haddad, a former education minister and mayor of São Paulo, the campaign’s slogan was “Haddad is Lula.”
During his campaign, Mr. Haddad visited Mr. da Silva in prison multiple times, and did little to take responsibility for the party’s mistakes. This lack of atonement pushed many hesitant Brazilians toward Mr. Bolsonaro, said Mr. Mainwaring, the Harvard professor.
“The Workers’ Party strategy was centered too much around Lula and too little around thinking about the future of the country and about winning this election,” he said. “An important part of the Brazilian electorate would have voted for the P.T. if it had drawn a line in the sand and renounced the corruption of the past.”
Here’s a cool trick to see if a man actually respects you: try disagreeing with him
A friend of mine did something with online dating where, before meeting a person, she’d say no to something minor without a reason for the no. For example: “No, I don’t want to meet at a coffee shop, how about X?”, or “No, not Wednesday”, or “No, I don’t want to recognize each other by both wearing green shirts”. She said how the potential dates reacted was a huge indicator of whether she actually wanted to meet them, something I readily believe.
I’ve mentioned this to a few people and sometimes I get very annoyed and incredulous responses from guys about how are they supposed to know that it’s a test if the girl is being unreasonable? How are they supposed to know that and let her have her way? I find it difficult to explain that if you find it unreasonable for someone to have a preference of no consequence which they don’t feel the need to explain, then you are the one being unreasonable. You can decide for yourself that it sounds flaky and you don’t want to date her, but you don’t have a right to know and approve all of her reasons for things in order to deign to respect that she said no about it. Especially in the case of someone you haven’t even fucking met yet.
The point isn’t to know it’s a test, the point is that if you would only say “yes” if you knew it was a test, then what if it’s not a test, but because she hates coffee shops, or because she’s attending a funeral Wednesday and doesn’t know you well enough to want to share that, or whatever else? Because if you’re making rules for when other people can have preferences and not explain why… yeah, that is a thing they can reasonably want to avoid.
@ all the angry dudes in the replies: the point is not to trick or manipulate men. The point is to see how a potential romantic partner reacts to a minor inconvenience. If they say, “oh, ok, would seven work instead?” or “well there’s this Armenian tea house I’ve been meaning to try out, want to go there?” then that’s a good sign that they’re safe to date. If they throw a fit and/or demand to know every little detail about your rationale over something as simple as rescheduling dinner plans, that’s a bad sign. A really bad sign.
It’s like this, dudes. Women in Western society are socialised to cooperate and compromise. Some men are socialised to get all their own way, all the time. These dudes are incredibly dangerous to women their partners,* and the only way to tell them apart from the OK guys is to pay close attention to how they react. If you’re one of the OK ones, this isn’t about you. Learn to take “no” for an answer, and you’ll be fine.
*Updated to reflect the fact that abusive men can target any gender, and the fact that I used this screening tactic to good effect during my Big Gay Slut phase.
The thing a lot of the men reblogging don’t get – they think this post is telling women to lie. They think this post is telling women to start a fake argument and to be manipulative.
Actually, this post is doing the opposite. This post is telling women to be straightforward, and forthright, and upfront about their values and opinions.
This post is telling women, “I know you’ve been socialized and conditioned to nod and smile at everything a man says your whole life, since you were 4 years old and your grandma told you that little girls should be seen and not heard. I know that by now it’s second nature to you, and you probably don’t even realize you’re doing it half the time. You don’t even realize that the laugh that just came out of your mouth is a laugh of appeasement, rather than a laugh of genuine humor. ”
It’s telling women, “Force yourself to resist your conditioning. Consciously make an effort to be open and honest in that initial conversation, when you’re making small talk, about small things. If he says something you don’t quite agree with (and he inevitably will, because nobody agrees on everything), don’t smile and concede the point like you’ve been trained to do. Consciously make a point of vocalizing your real opinion.”
It’s telling women “If a man doesn’t respect your real opinion about a small, insignificant issue when you first meet him, then he’s not going to respect your real boundaries later on when you’re in a serious relationship.”
Seriously, ladies, read this to men already in your lives. If they get outraged…maybe reconsider their place in your lives.
“how am I supposed to know it’s a test” is basically saying “how am I supposed to know up front that at first I should manipulate you a bit into thinking I’m respectful so that you’d date me” and that is absolutely abhorrent
you are most certainly not supposed to know it’s a test, also, here’s a wild idea: if you ARE a respectful person, it is not a test. it’s simple conversation. if any woman’s opinion or varying choice annoys you, you don’t need a test, you need to stay the fuck away from women, end of story
You have three islands. Divide them into groups of one. The straight island, the gay island, and the lesbian island. The straight island is going to reproduce and keep going strong for millions of generations to come. The gay and lesbian islands will both wipe out in not even one century. This isn’t just about religion or morals, it’s just simple common sense. Being gay is unnatural, and not just because God said so, but because you yourself wouldn’t even be born without a REAL natural man and woman. And no, there is no such thing as a lesbian bone marrow “thing” to have children. That’s a biased fact that came from a lesbian scientist who has false opinions. If it’s not a real penis or vagina, then it’s fucking false and you’re just opinionated by dumb facts. I’m done here. Read over what I said and if you still think that being gay is normal and natural, then I hope you achieve some common sense one day. Bye
Where is this gay island located.. asking for a friend
I just have SO MANY questions. Why were we all separated onto different islands? Did the government sanction this? If so, why? Why didn’t we revolt against this tyrannical government? Where are these islands? How were they chosen? Are the continents of the world abandoned? What kind of resources are on each island? Are they the same or different? Does each island have a right to form its own government or does the government that segregated us still rule? If so, what island do they rule from and how do they communicate with the other two islands? If they can communicate with the other two islands, can all three islands communicate with each other? If the straight people keep reproducing, won’t their island become overpopulated and their resources depleted? Islands only have so much space right? Do straight people stop having gay kids? Isn’t it a fact that, to date, straight people are the largest manufacturers of gay kids? If a gay kid is born on straight island, do they get sent to their appropriate island? Wouldn’t that aid in the re-population of gay and lesbian island? What about people who are attracted to more than one gender? Are they just lost at sea, floating aimlessly? Is the ocean full of listless pansexuals, floating nowhere? Or are they trapped in some sort of purgatory because they don’t fit on any one island? Are there trees on lesbian island? Is it conceivable that if there were, a large group of lesbians could build a boat? Have you ever seen lesbians around timber? If they built a boat, could they travel to gay island? How far apart are the islands? If they could travel to gay island, would they be able to collect semen, return to lesbian island, and repopulate the island? Would they be able to send some of those children to gay island? Do trans people exist in this world? If so, wouldn’t they be able to aid in repopulation? If the lesbians decided to declare war on the heterosexuals, would they be able to reach their island? On the way to heterosexual island, could the lesbians pick up the gays and scoop the floating bisexuals from the sea? If so, would they all be able to go and attack heterosexual island together, wiping out its people’s, stealing its children and taking all its resources? Does this fantasy world get you off at night? Please write back soon!
Speaking up from the pansexual archipelago: I too have these questions
Checking in from bisexual bay: The boats are nearly complete and are equipped with a special invisibility function. We attack at dawn
Fuck the questions, lemme on that boat, I’m coming with you
*random ace just floating away into the sky like a balloon*
I am so here for an asexual sky nation. We live in floating cities and master the wind currents. Newly minted ace youths are sent up to us in baskets suspended under hot air balloons. We breed giant birds to bear us through the skies, or else build ourselves wings and gliders to fly in their midst. The only land we know are the tallest mountain peaks and the world is a bright blue gem spreading out beneath us.
(And we will of course be providing air support for the impending attack on Straight Island)
OP’s nasty-ass post got turned into a goddamn sci-fi dystopian adventure and I’m so here for it.
oh my god Bisexual Buccaneers from Both-Ways Bay is both a porn tile and my new life goals
i’m an asexual homoromantic does this make me our young heroine torn between worlds
You spend part of your time on lesbian island, learning the stories, and traditions, and part of your time in the vast floating asexual cities, training with your eagle so that you can one day become one of the chosen few: the messengers, who carry letters and passengers between islands, jumping the heterosexual blockades. When you enter this select group, you’re assigned the job of collecting reports from spies pretending to heterosexual on straight island, flying in at the dead of night, risking discovery to collect vital intelligence. You fall in love with a pansexual girl who’s chosen to hide her orientation so she can aid the Resistance. At the climax of the novel, you swoop down from above on your giant eagle to rescue your lady love from a frenzied mob. As straight island burns in the background, you share a chaste kiss and cuddle while discussing the possibility of a mountain-top pansexual outpost.
IT CAME BACK AROUND AND IT GOT BETTER!
…would anyone mind if I actually wrote this?
Frankly, I would read an entire anthology of this.
Would read the fuck outta this if it became a book
The gay and lesbian would strive still cus transgenders, pansexuals, bisexuals. Pans and bis could be on either island. Also adoption. Also sperm and egg donors.
Im gonna join the sky nation(visit the lesbian island to look for a gf)
A Christmas Carol is so wild to me because it takes not one, not two, but like four fucking ghosts to convince this dude not to be the biggest douche in the universe. Like, four fucking ghosts came back from the dead, rose from the Goddamn grave to be like, “I came back from the dead because you need to quit your shit.” Fuck. How big of an asshole do you have to be to have four fucking ghosts tell you to stop?
Have you ever met a rich capitalist
Also, one of those ghosts was a rich capitalist douche. He needed to reform Scrooge to work off his own sentence, didn’t he?
Marley’s ghost basically told Scrooge that if he kept being a greedy douchebag he would go to hell and Scrooge still needed convincing and that honestly is 100% believable to me
That an old rich white guy being told “Your going to hell unless you help the poor” would respond by going “I still kind of want to NOT help the poor tho?”
Charlie Dickens knew what was up.
Dickens had to work in a factory hos entire childhood. His father was thrown in a debtor’s prison. Thats why all his stories are about rich fucks getting owned.
The thing I love about A Christmas Carol is that
at the time he wrote it, Christmas, as a holiday, was on par with our Arbor Day. And Scrooge held the Majority Opinion.
Dickens originally set out to write a Very Serious Pamphlet About the Plight of the Poor in Modern Times, with numbers, and statistics, and gruesome details about the state of debtors prisons. And he realized that it would probably not change a single thing, in the end.
So he changed it to fiction, and made it emotional, and focused on the lives in one specific family. And he also self-published it, because he realized that a for-profit publishing house wouldn’t want to touch it. And gave it to friends.
Not only did it help change people’s attitudes toward charity organizations and help reform labor laws, it also (pretty much) revived the whole custom of celebrating Christmas at all.
That, my friends, is the power of a well written ghost story.
I just looked up this to see if this was true and it is!
The pamphlet was going to be called ‘An Appeal to the People of England, on behalf of the Poor Man’s Child’
He decided to write the story because he realised that soap-boxing factory workers and their employers on the importance of educational reform wasn’t going to work on a society-wide scale.
A Christmas Carol is literally a leftist/socialist story about not being a dickwad to your employees because they’re human too, your ‘fellow man’
then the capitalists appropriated it and now we have sickening consumerism passing itself off as the christmas spirit
You want to know how we got Conservative Protestantism in a Gay Hat?
We got it through “shut up, check your privilege, listen, and amplify.”
Through “you don’t get an opinion on this” and “educate yourself on why I’m right before you dare claim the right to participate in this conversation.”
Through “any expression of marginalized anger is ipso-facto justified, hdu tone-police it.”
We got it by refusing to allow anyone to question the conclusions that people–fallible humans raised in conservative societies–drew from the events of their individual lives, as long as they threw the words “lived experience” around and claimed the relevant group memberships.
We got it through every single social norm put in place to silence criticism of minority voices. To automatically boost the credibility of anyone claiming to speak on behalf of the oppressed. To dismantle every vector through which that credibility could be thrown into doubt. To pressure people into taking credible speakers on faith and becoming enforcers for views they hadn’t even been fully persuaded of.
We got it because we stopped tolerating doubt of anything dressed in a legit-looking gay hat.
So how can we do this better? I mean no malice or anything, but all of your quotes came from well meaning spaces to make us listen to marginalized people instead of speaking over them, so should we replace them, and how?
“Shut up, check your privilege, listen, amplifie” was made to make people less likely to go into the defensive immediately and making themself the victim, without considering what other people know and have gone through to make such claims in the first place.
“You don’t get an opinion on this” and “Educate yourself on why I’m right before you dare claim the right to participate in this conversation” came about because marginalized people are near constantly being over-talked in debates, arguments and conversation by people with more cultural and constitutional privilege, regardless how little or how much they know of the subject at hand. This (and other factors) makes us stepping over the same basic step over and over again instead of being able to move forward and being able to come to new conclusions and understandings. It’s like if a group of trans people disgusted their research and experiences regarding healthcare through their hormone treatment, but they would have to stop everything they talked about because a cis person came and said “Why does this matter when trans people don’t even exist in the first place???”. It’s a bad example I know, but I hope you understand where I’m coming from, and if not let me know and I’ll try explaining it better.
“Any expression of anger of marginalized anger is ipso-facto justified, hdu tone-police it” comes from a mix of 2 points.
1. How different cultures de-humanize specific marginalized groups, like black people and latin americans in usa and rromani people in europe, by correlating them expressing strong emotions to “animalistic” or “monstrous” reactions; subconsciously or consciously. At best it makes people around them not take these marginalized groups seriously and at worst can result in people of these groups getting in danger because people around them feel like they need to defend themselves and their communities, like through police brutality. English isn’t my first language and I hope I’m making myself clear, but if there’s any confusion about what I’m trying to convey, feel free to ask!
2. The other reason this way of thinking came to be is just how this site is build. Tumblr is a mix of a social site and a personal blog site, with no clear line between the two. So if someone wants to treat this as a personal blog that they feel comfortable ranting in and they write lets say “Fuck this week cis fucking sucks!!! 👿👿👿”, they can’t control if someone that follows them sees this post social site-ish and reblogs. All it takes is one reblog and then the ranter have no control over who sees it or how it’s seen.
You likely already knew all of this but what I’m trying to get at is that, in contexts of this site with our personal and collective knowledge, these were the best least harmful social rules we could agree on. So what social rules should we use instead that acknowledge these points problems I just described while countering this wave of conservative Protestantism? How do we make sure these new social rules will be abused as little as possible, or at very least make sure the abusers of the new system are as easily spotted as possible?
I don’t want you to feel like you have to have all the answers; I don’t think only one person can have all the answers. But I also think criticism without solutions can only take us so far. I truly don’t mean to hurt anyone through this respond so if anything I said made it seem that way or was just confusing, please let me know so I can explain and/or apologize as needed
So one of the big things that needs to be grappled with is there isn’t one, single, rigidly-consistent, universally applicable social rules that can Always Be Followed with no problems.
These don’t exist anywhere. They don’t. There is no area of human endeavour and interaction where this is even possible, and where seeking this doesn’t end up with, well, basically the problems we have.
Trying to replace even those currently identified as Causing Problems with NEW rigid, unified, rigidly consistent, universally applicable social rules will simply cause new and different problems. And that includes rigid, uncritical adherence to a universally applied ideal of “tolerance” or “nuance”.
There’s no situation wherein people get to opt out of making an actual, thoughtful decision about what you’re engaging with and what you believe.
This is really stressful to realize, mind you? For one thing, a lot of the OTHER reason that we’ve gotten here is that most people really want to be good people? So they want nice clear simple consistent Rules about How To Be Good.
For another, the implied flipside of this is that we never get to opt out of being aware that both we and other people exist within a matrix of continually changing circumstances and situations, we all have to make judgements based on our best guesses, etc.
The things OP described are seductive because they are nice hard, fast rules. How do you Be A Good Person? You identify your Position on All Axes of Privilege-Vs-Oppression, and then you identify where the other person is. If they are More Marginalized, you shut up, don’t argue, support, and accept what they say as Truth, accepting all behaviour on their part. If you are More Marginalized, they have to do this for you or they are a Bad Person. There! Solved it!
In order to get out of this kind of binary-rigid stuff where we just flip things and maintain the same toxic dynamics you have to, well. Engage with the fact that the universe is not a rigid simple binary.
Where people usually go wrong with THIS is that they then go “okay so everything is nuance and no judgement can be made???” which is … just a different hat for a rigid application of one-size-fits-all Social Rules. IRONICALLY.
The practical upshot is that while you CAN’T have Hard Fast Rules, you CAN usefully have “everything else being equal” rules.
Everything else being equal, the tendency of society is to suppress marginalized voices (that’s what “marginalized” means), so everything else being equal, if you’re not a member of a marginalized group you should probably err on the side of listening to what they have to say, stepping hard on your own defensiveness, make sure you’re not playing a “gotcha” game where you decide you don’t have to listen to anything if it’s not “nice” enough, and that you’re not talking over insider voices.
You can make guidelines like that. You just have to be aware that sometimes, all things AREN’T equal.
Sometimes, even if someone is a member of a marginalized group, they are also wrong. Or a dick. Or selfish. Or self-focused to the point of narcissism. Or … any number of things, including sincere to the best of their understanding but that doesn’t mean OTHER people of the same identity don’t passionately disagree.
And you’re always going to have to bring your JUDGEMENT to every situation to figure out if all things are equal or there’s another factor. And you’re gonna have to do the best you can, and sometimes you’ll be right and sometimes you’ll be wrong. And that’s being human.
You want to know how we got Conservative Protestantism in a Gay Hat?
We got it through “shut up, check your privilege, listen, and amplify.”
Through “you don’t get an opinion on this” and “educate yourself on why I’m right before you dare claim the right to participate in this conversation.”
Through “any expression of marginalized anger is ipso-facto justified, hdu tone-police it.”
We got it by refusing to allow anyone to question the conclusions that people–fallible humans raised in conservative societies–drew from the events of their individual lives, as long as they threw the words “lived experience” around and claimed the relevant group memberships.
We got it through every single social norm put in place to silence criticism of minority voices. To automatically boost the credibility of anyone claiming to speak on behalf of the oppressed. To dismantle every vector through which that credibility could be thrown into doubt. To pressure people into taking credible speakers on faith and becoming enforcers for views they hadn’t even been fully persuaded of.
We got it because we stopped tolerating doubt of anything dressed in a legit-looking gay hat.
What got us is that humans are fucking fallible. [….]
We instilled a culture of relying on group membership, ideological allegiance, and familiarity with social-justice jargon as a proxy for credibility.… and then placed a big fat fucking taboo on every mechanism that might force someone “credible” to come up with anything more than an appeal to authority to justify the unexamined opinions they pull out their ass.
Bolding mine. I want to draw this out and underline and underscore it, especially the bit I’ve bolded.
This is a natural human thing: we want to know what the cues are, what the signs are to Indicate Who’s In Charge. And that’s what this is about, at heart: indicating Who’s In Charge, Who Makes The Rules, and What The Rules Are. We’re wired to look for that in social situations.
The problem is that all simplistic rigid attempts to do that are fucking doomed to end up in hideously abusive socially toxic systems for two reasons: one is that humans suck, and are fallible, and are wrong a lot of the time, and another is predators love to game rules and yes every single fucking “demographic” has social predators, aka people who are out to serve their own power, influence and domination of a social milieu above and beyond all other factors.
Sometimes they do this consciously, deliberately and with self awareness; sometimes it’s a manifestation of their own Issues. This is just like every other situation where this is at play, including romantic relationships, work environments, theatre organizations and strata councils. 😛 But either way, people who are doing this are absolutely going to use the rules to their own best advantage and in order to shore up their own power.
There will be potentially abusive dynamics that arise in anything that is humans interacting with other humans. This is not avoidable. And in fact if you approach a situation with the idea that it can’t or won’t happen, it’s that much more of a guarantee that it will.
But when it does, you will have no mechanism to deal with it. At all.
And this is what the loose conglomerate of “queer people who write fanfiction on the internets/do fannish shit out there and also are concerned with social issues” have in fact done.
Of course, we’ve done it because the shitty oppressive threads of society like to use as a weapon “all people arguing about this are doing it in Bad Faith and if we approach it that way we can silence them”. But the reality is that running to the other end with “no people doing this are ever doing anything but acting in Pure and Fair and Correct Good Faith and are inherently right all the time” is not a solution that ends up with “people not being shitty and abusive”: it just changes WHICH people get to be shitty and abusive. And which people are acceptable targets for abuse.
The problem is that there is no hard-fast universally applicable rules that will guarantee you are Good and On The Right Side and Doing It Right every single time. This is not how being human works.
The best you will ever get is that in a lot of cases you can make “all other things being equal” statements, with the awareness that sometimes all other things are not equal.
All other things being equal, lived experience is more relevant/weighty than outsider theory. All other things being equal, if you’re an outsider and an insider is speaking, you should probably hush and listen and not argue. All other things being equal, it’s probably a better idea to amplify insider voices than risk speaking over them.
This is sort of like how when all other things are equal, you shouldn’t hit other people. All other things being equal, you shouldn’t yell at other people. All other things being equal, it’s a better idea to be kind and patient and forgiving than the alternative. All other things being equal, seatbelts are a REALLY GOOD IDEA. All other things being equal, setting your house on fire is a REALLY BAD IDEA.
And then sometimes all things are NOT equal, and you have to adjust accordingly.
There’s no way around having to have that flexibility, that situation where things may be different than the norm.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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