white gays need to read up on pinkwashing and homonationalism before ever even thinking about opening their mouths talking about homophobia/transphobia in the global south
why are you so obsessed with a country’s laws regarding lgbt people when you will never visit it and only ever invoke its name as a way to a) uplift your own (homophobic & transphobic but western imperialist) country, or b) make it seem more backwards/“barbaric” vis-a-vis your own (again, also homophobic & transphobic) country.
not to mention the millions of tasteless “i’d be illegal there” quips, because the only way to care is to relate it back to yourself instead of extending support and empathy to fellow lgbt people who actually live there. and then the cherry on top being the withholding or withdrawal of support purely because of this perceived homo-/transphobia that is more hearsay and fearmongering than rooted in truth.
lest we forget, western imperialist powers are the main reason so many of these “backwards” countries have lgbtphobic laws in the first place.
Recommended readings:
Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Timesby Jasbir K. Puar (Puar coined the term “homonationalism” so I would consider this book and her work foundational)
mithrun’s whole deal is delightful bc he’s basically that “i saw her at the devil’s sacrament/girl, what were YOU doing at the devil’s sacrament?” post, only his answer would be “i wasn’t having a good fucking time, actually, which is why i think we should stop letting people just wander into the sacrament and also we should kill the devil”
adults are always talking about how “kids will do anything to get out of school” and okay, first of all that’s not true, but I think we really need to ask why that idea holds so much sway.
children’s brains are hard-wired to take in new information and acquire new skills. consider, for a moment, just how thoroughly our society had to fuck up the concept of education for it to be a normal thing to assume kids are universally desperate to avoid learning.
couple things here:
multiple things can actually be bad at the same time
I’m 32
couple more things:
Little kids really aren’t equipped to work full time without damaging their physical, mental, and emotional development and health, and when you play the “but adults work all day!” card you sound like a nineteenth century textile baron.
Highschoolers can easily be “working” 40+ hours a week, between school, homework, and extracurriculars and/or part-time work, and still hear this smug “:/ wait til you get to the real world sweaty” rhetoric all the time.
The original claim here wasn’t even “school is too hard,” it was “school is failing to perform its most basic function,” which is different.
from an adult point of view:
- When my work day is done, it’s done. I don’t need to spend hours each night to study or do homework.
- I don’t have tests and exams.
- I MAKE MONEY.
Sometimes I’ll be at home and start freaking out that I haven’t done any homework yet before I realize “Wait I’m 30.”
Or I’ll be asleep dreaming that I’m at school but suddenly realize at the end of the semester that I’ve missed all my classes and don’t know what’s going on
School/homework has to be a stressful thing if it gives people anxiety and nightmares over a decade after graduation.
On a serious note: I agree with all of this.
On another note “you sound like a 19th century textile baron” is my new fave insult.
If you write down the results and properly format the paper, it even counts as science!
When I was in college, there was a solid year where our lgbt group did this with two bathrooms at the end of a hall that were used by like, maybe 20 people. They would put up gendered signs and we kept stealing them. And then we started writing random things on the walls INCLUDING full word for word copies of personal ads from the back of 1980′s advocate magazines.
It got to the point where the building management was on a hunt trying to find who was doing this and we had to start hiding our faces so as to not get caught on the security cameras. Our faculty advisor came down to the office one day and was like “do you guys know anything about this” essentially as we’re trying to close a comically full drawer of stolen bathroom signs, and we’re like “no” and they were like “great.”
They never caught us.
Achievement Unlocked:
The Gay Science
Perform gender perception experiments without getting caught.
Hey guys, I know there are a lot of really severe tragedies in the world right now and I in no way desire to push those aside, nor do I really want to load another thing onto people’s plates, but anyone here in the US needs to be aware that on March 11, 2024, an agricultural company known as NEW Cooperative spilled 265,000 gallons (1500 tons) of liquid nitrogen fertilizer into the East Nishnabotna River. This is the ecological equivalent of dropping a nuclear weapon into the river. Over a 60 mile stretch downstream of the spill its been a near total ecological wipeout for the river. So far, an estimate of 850,000 fish have been killed from this spill, and that’s to say nothing for the insects, amphibians, reptiles and birds that relied on or lived in this river. It is literally filled with animal corpses. This river flows into the Missouri River and the impacts will likely continue to spread far past this 60 mile stretch. And this disaster has barely made local tv in Iowa, let alone national tv, despite the fact that 60 miles of river ecosystem were just wiped out in a way that may be impossible to recover from. And what’s the punishment for this heinous act of destruction through negligence, you might ask? As it stands, its looking like a 6k fine from the DNR to the company. Not 600k. Not 60k. 6000 dollars. The maximum fine that the DNR can charge in Iowa is 10k unless they decide to take it further in court. That’s why these spills are so frequent in Iowa: it’s literally cheaper to eat the fines than it is to bother properly storing fertilizer. I don’t know exactly what the proper course of action is here, or who needs to be contacted to enact change–I’m hoping someone more knowledgeable than me will chime in with that information–but at the very least, every one of us should know. Every one of us should make sure we don’t forget this. And every one of us should blacklist NEW Cooperative fertilizer unilaterally.
ALT
