Tag: rightward shift

I know the Religious Right had been pushing hard to get more power for a while, having watched it. But, I am still kind of amazed at how relatively quickly that “if you ever have sex without a condom, you’re gonna die in gruesome ways!” message got backlash-flipped over into “condoms don’t even work!” abstinence garbage.

Both approaches leaning pretty heavily on the scare tactics, of course. But at least they were trying for some scientific accuracy before the religious nuts gained as much influence. Come back less than 10 years later, though 😵

clatterbane:

This post I reblogged earlier is well worth a read anyway. But, I was interested to see someone do such a good job of wrapping words around some observations:

I don’t mean stay closeted — I didn’t manage that for very long, I’m a terrible liar, and this was the early 90s and my college hosted Queer Nation rallies — I mean don’t get caught…

At some point the world changed. Part of that change is that the people who believe gay to be the literal worst and most disgusting thing a person can be or do, worse than murder, they feel outnumbered and threatened now. And now that they feel threatened, outnumbered, small and powerless, they enact their insecurity and fear in great grand gestures.

Yeah. It’s all very disturbing. In some ways, the social and political atmosphere around a number of things has turned so much more polarized and frankly scarier–when it was far from great before. As she points out. And with not much obvious to be done besides just keep trying to ride it out.

I have had to think about some of this stuff a lot, too. And it gets overwhelming sometimes.

Ran across this, from a couple of years ago, when I was (unsuccessfully) looking for something else. Seemed worth bringing back.

deducecanoe:

smallworldofbigal:

amaditalks:

buffy-sainte-marie:

Buffy breast feeds Cody on Sesame Street (x)

This was 1976. Big Bird understood and was wholly accepting and empathetic toward Buffy breastfeeding in public, and Big Bird is meant to be the equivalent of a preschool aged child, but every single day on social media, adults exclaim disgust toward breastfeeding in public and misogyny at the parents who do so. People, you’re less evolved than
Big Bird was 38 years ago. Grow the hell up.

holy shit.  I had NO idea Sesame Street covered this topic.

And Buffy was Native American. And she breastfed. In front of muppets and children. No one died.

Source: buffy-sainte-marie

imgetting2old4diss:

screamingburritoes:

quick survey: please reblog if the way someone chooses to dress themselves has NEVER had a negative impact on your education

I was at school/collage between 1984 and 1997 and was in uniform till 87 then my own clothes till i left full time education in 87 we never got told what to ware in school, only not to have racist,sexist or rude slogens on our tshirts or tops.we could (and did) colour our hair what ever way we wanted (i started year 9 with purple hair and left collage with a bleached blonde pixie cut)the class was mixed sporty, preppy ,hippy, rocker and gothsand we all did well and worked together how we dressed had no effect on our work some times it even helped with conversations in group work .the only people that had problems with our clothing were the pervy teachers and we told them to fuck off if they made a comment “as it wasnt being very inclusive to students.”

I have to add again that, IME, the return this stuff is fairly recent in the US too.

I graduated from HS in 1993, and we never had anything like that. What did get described as potentially “distracting”? The main restrictions I recall: “no hats inside, no obscenities/nudity/obvious drug or alcohol references on clothing”. You were covered to where you wouldn’t get arrested on the street? Fine.

Applied in a totally gender neutral way. Even that one crank of a middle school principal I mentioned there who hated shorts and tank tops (but was fine with any skirt length) didn’t want any students wearing them, period.

They at least didn’t seem to think they could get away with blatantly sexist regulations like that in public schools, even if some of them probably would have been fine with the idea otherwise.

It wasn’t until later in the ‘90s-early 2000s that I started hearing anything about "unnatural” hair colors getting turned into a problem, for that matter. And my mother (who did grow up under similarly restrictive dress codes) was complaining then that she thought this shit was settled by the early ’70s. So many things.

The changes there are still pretty disturbing. Not least because of the creepy attitudes from adults on open display 😨

shinelikethunder:

Re-reading The Authoritarians is making me wonder all over again whether the Gen X / Millennial gap will ultimately end up being far less significant than the split right down the middle of the Millennials: do you remember the world before 9/11?

More to the point, before the United States’ epic authoritarian meltdown in response to 9/11. Because there is a whole psychology of fear, attack, and solidarity that most of us have fallen into at some point, but at least have the ability to retreat from. And I fucking worry about the kids born into a world that’s never run on anything else. I worry that they don’t have a working model of a civilized, pluralistic, individualistic society where there are rules that apply the same to everyone, no matter how afraid they are or how vehemently they disagree, and where not every risk is a risk of annihilation.

I worry because before 2008, pretty much all the factions who weren’t the Religious Right or the neocons were at least standing united as a voice of anti-authoritarian moral clarity. And then the Democrats inherited Cheney’s imperial executive branch, the security state, and the siege mentality, and completely, utterly, catastrophically failed to dismantle any of them. All they did was get corrupted by trying to use them “responsibly.” (Helped along, of course, by the Republicans’ scorched-earth descent into obstructionism, extremism, and delegitimization.) And everything just… splintered and went muddy. It’s not a coincidence that 2008 was when left-wing authoritarianism, rebranded as “social justice,” really started taking off. Monkey see, monkey do, especially in the tumult of an anti-establishment faction that suddenly became the establishment, and found out that being on the right side of history didn’t make the opposition go away.

I’m only starting to figure out how angry I am that the left has been pissing away its energy trying to put out every last ember of trashcan fires like homophobia when the entire edifice of American democracy is in flames. I’m gay. Given a choice between keeping Obergefell v. Hodges or repealing the Patriot Act, I would happily throw gay marriage under the bus. There’s an entire generation just coming of age who point-blank do not understand that, who think it means I don’t give a shit about something that affects me personally, because to them the Patriot Act is background radiation. It’s bad, but it’s not shocking and it’s not an aberration–it’s part of the normal fabric of their reality.

And it’s going to take a long time to unwind all the implications of how terrifying that is.

Four successful Republican scams that have changed American politics in the last 40 years:

politicalprof:

1. That income tax cuts are good for poor, working and middle class people. (Compared to property tax and sales tax cuts, income tax cuts affect poor, working and middle class very little.)

2. That “they” – racial and ethnic minorities – benefit from social programs like welfare, housing subsidies, public transportation, and higher education, but “we” – white people – don’t. (Since there are LOTS more white people in America, even now, than “not white” people, simple math suggests most beneficiaries of social programs are white. And they are.)

3. That the “free market” can lead to the least expensive, highest quality solution to social and political problems. (Many social and political problems, after all, involve situations where no one has any money, so the “free market” has no reason to touch them.)

4. That the “free market” means that government must not intervene in the market, and must allow whatever the market determines to actually take place.(The “free market” requires government to pass laws, create courts, and run a stable banking system to make the market work smoothly.)

These four ideas have convinced millions of Americans to smile and wave as rich people rob them blind.

Too relevant: Why right-wing populism works

I get that Millennials aren’t perfect or absolved of the issues that Boomers have, but shouldn’t Boomers tale the brunt of the blame seeing as they are the ones with all the powers in government right now and make up most of the work force? And if there are issues in the Millennial generation, well, who raised us?

apparentlyeverything:

Look, I’ve got a long-standing beef with Millennial v. Boomer discourse that I could spend a few hours on, but lemme try to sum it up briefly. 

Many of the modern economic problems that affect many Millennials that are often blamed on Baby Boomers (unemployment/underemployment, soaring costs of education, loan debt, comparative lack of opportunities, poverty, etc. etc.) started well before our generation came of age. Most of these same economic issues fucked up Generation X before us, but because they were a smaller generation, people didn’t hear about it as much. And most of these problems grew directly from right-wing political and economic policies that began in the Reagan presidency in the 1980s, before the Boomers were in political ascendancy. (Yes, there were a few young Boomers in Reagan’s administration, but the leading neocons/neoliberals, using the actual meaning of the term, not the tumblr left’s version of it, who led the move rightward were older.) Boomers, by virtue of their age, enjoyed the unique benefits of the post-War (1945-1980) economy and many managed to escape the worst effects of the Reagan Era cuts, but not all did equally (see below.) And many of them, personally, are total clueless assholes about how unique their experience was. I have Boomer parents born in the early 50s, so like I know.  But one of the biggest problems I have with Millennial/Boomer discourse is that it de-politicizes and de-contextualizes important social/political/economic shifts that were the direct result of Republican policies. It reduces it all to just a generational conflict in which one selfish group of people just didn’t want to share their toys with their kids. And even if you accept the idea that one generation can personally screw over another via political means, the idea that Boomers would target their own children specifically is particularly odd. Though I’ll also point out that the “who raised us” issue is more complex, as the Boomer generation ends in 1964, and quite a lot of people born in the 90s who could still be considered Millennials, have parents born after that. 

As for the idea that Boomers make up the majority of the workforce, actually Millennials are now the largest segment of the workforce, slightly ahead of Gen X, with Boomers well behind. The oldest boomers are 71 now, and the youngest are 53. A lot of the oldest ones have retired and the younger ones are on their way there. X  As for having “all the powers in government” that’s a pretty hard thing to quantify. Trump and many of his key advisers are Boomers, but there are a number of GenX and Millennials too. Which is why I get annoyed at the idea that Millennials are somehow innately more compassionate and kind than older generations, because not really. Millennials overall are more democratic/left leaning than older voters, but Trump still won among white millennials.  Many baby boomers, too, were very liberal in their youth, and became more conservative with age, especially the white ones. It’s a pretty common thing to happen. It’s not as if that fate is going to magically spare our generation, so most of this discourse is not going to age well.

Which brings me to the other issue, that you can legitimately talk about Millennials and Baby Boomers as distinct groups with similar characteristics and experiences. Most of this discourse is highly race and class based but people don’t seem to acknowledge that. It’s focused around the experiences of middle to upper class white boomers and their kids, who presumably don’t have it as easy. And in many cases, this is probably true. Though if you’ve read any financial news in the last few years, they’ve been talking a lot about the huge amount of “wealth transfer” that has started from well-off Boomers to their kids. But for many other Boomers, this wealth never materialized. Plenty of people never had access to it thanks to their race or immigrant status. So the idea that one generation “owns everything” or needs to “take the blame” blurs the fact that within any generation there are huge differences in wealth and access to power.

Basically millennial/boomer discourse is ahistorical, apolitical, and focused on the experiences and expectations of middle class white kids, and that’s why I’m not here for it.