nonbinary

In this scenario that’s considered “analog” and you need to look at where the little-hand is in relation to the big hand.

Depends. If you’re a straight male, haha no that will never happen, we have done everything as a society to ensure it will be a thousand years before gender roles are abolished enough that we will treat men and women as equally-powered individuals in any relationship.

If you’re a straight woman, then congratulations, you’re in a “brave” hollywood perspective of homosexual relationships where gay people are never allowed to have a “normal” relationship, and it always has to be either tragic or unrequited, because we broadly associate being gay with something negative and we never want to see gay couples live happily ever after, particularly lesbians, they die faster than people of color in a horror movie.

If you’re a lesbian or bisexual woman, then you’re entering some world of mystery and fear that mortals will never know without the aid of a warp navigator and a series of ancient artifacts that grant protection from the arcane.

Yes, but the problem is gay media will turn our children gay and the secret magic formula from SATAN is so clever that it only works in one direction and watching straight media doesn’t turn gay kids straight! Look, it makes sense when you don’t think about it!

She was also immediately identified as such a threat to status-quo that a lot of effort went into associating her name with “cringe” and people pushed that kind of reaction real hard and it worked. I cannot believe how many arguments I had with other environmental leftists and liberals on places like reddit who hated her but had no idea why.

“Her message is great, but maybe we don’t want her representing these causes” is the line a lot of people defaulted to, and when pressed, proceeded to drop the flimsiest and most half-assed reasoning like “Well her parents are wealthy so it looks bad” or “she’s going to be a distraction” and other nonsense where people simply couldn’t connect the lines and realize they were already influenced by manufactured “online reactions” and memes that associated her name with a “child doing public speaking” which makes people really uncomfortable.

Now she’s an adult, she’s remained consistent in her tone, messaging and passion, and people STILL connect her to “child making an ugly face while shaming grown ups” and this is why she’s in so much danger right now. She’s a threat to power and they used a lot of their bigger cards to smear her enough that a large portion of the world wouldn’t mourn if she were “accidentally” killed in service of her messages.

It also makes the left broadly look like people who character-worship their own “leader” just like the right has “their guy.”

I can’t speak for all liberals, but I kind of think this is one of the primary “dividing lines” between the political spectrums in America. There are the people who latch onto simple narratives and power-structures like “USA GOOD LEADER GOOD” and people who are very skeptical of power and look at your government like OUR employees and should be held to account no matter what their politics are. Both sides keep projecting their own values onto the other and are making ZERO progress because of this.

At least he really pushed back against the ongoing genoci- oh wait, no, he did the opposite of that.

I would wager that a lot more do.

My mother got drunk one night and sat me on her bed and described in detail when she got raped as a teenager, and the resulting abortion and the details of how that went. I was eleven.

Of course, being a male I can’t go around talking about the lasting effects of many such incidents that happened to me, and I’m not really expected to even connect those things to any feelings about sexual shame. So instead what it does, and what it does to many men who had any kind of sexual trauma, is we just block out the incidents and internalize the feelings and associations inward and it just wrecks our self-esteem, our standards for ourselves and our perceptions of attractiveness in ourselves.

A lot of guys process this in different ways, and trauma like this can take many forms. But it’s often expressed as later over-compensation and bravado and an image of being “in control” sexually and performative masculinity and hyper-objectifying notions of sexuality, or for more people I suspect, just an internal, festering self-esteem that doesn’t want them to be happy or feel good about themselves. For every loud, angry incel, I suspect there are thousands of men who have the same background or traumas and they just sit quietly on it forever and it robs them of joy.

Yeah, maybe my people just messed me up.

I’m pretty sure we’re now in a situation where most of our society’s contention is driven by childhood-induced shame over sexuality in some form or another.

And there’s not shit we can do about it because every time someone tries to make a campaign to encourage better sex-education, or even scarier, sex positivity among children, those people or groups get attacked for being pedos and predators.

This is going to be a social dividing line that gets sharper as time goes. There will be people who have a shred of intellectual capacity and haven’t been hollowed out be capitalism, who raise their kids to be free from shame and shackles of toxic social norms and let them just live and discover on their own what sexuality means to them.

And the orcs, who want literal dark-ages levels of shame, hate and fear and of course power-imbalances as deeply rooted foundations to anything and everything related to sex, and they will only want children associated with sex when it involves controlling them or worse.

No really, you’re right, the reason this is never going to be a rival to reddit because this site network doesn’t have the diversity sauce to actually bring in large scale users. Reddit didn’t explode until they made it feel unified and comfortable for women and older people to join the conversations. This site is like reddit was about 15 years ago, a deep basement of nerdy little boys sperging out about linux and underground memes, the only difference is some of the communities here have a much further left slant and reddit appealed to… absolute scum incels and illegal porn traders.

Man, we just can’t win. I’d love a site where they just check if you’re a reasonable, sane adult before you can get in. Like how Somethingawful had a $10 gate at the front which kept the bullshit down, and when someone did decide to burn their $10, it was a public spectacle and they were driven in shame… to form 4chan which is partially responsible for the destruction of democracy.

People do not care about other people. People are not empathetic.

All people really want is validation, and for liberal, middle-class straight people, feeling validated means supporting a company that displays a rainbow for a week out of a year so they can say they’re not hateful bigots and thus feel validated.

You all need to understand this, not so you can give up and be doomers, but so you can more effectively advocate for human rights. Knowing what dark, selfish dials and levers are set behind the average person’s values gives you the opportunity to find ways to get your better results without spinning in circles. Yes, their personal values on equality are selfish and hollow… but so are most values until they become so standard in society that the alternative becomes to shameful to contemplate. We’ve done this many times in history, but we lose progress the moment we expect people do to the right thing for its own sake.

The right is great at leveraging people’s desire to be validated and accepted to further their own goals. Can YOU think of ways to make people feel a desperate, panicked need to support YOUR values? When we all start thinking like villains just a little we will have fewer villains in the world.

ITT: naive children who think someone saying their demonstrably ineffective activism needs reworking, is actually advocating for right-wing ideology. We’re so cooked.

Nor can you redistribute the combined assets of a population, but that would be deliberate obtuseness in translating the point of the message if you think that’s what it’s advocating for.

Seriously, if someone reads this and thinks “we should literally redistribute wealth so everyone has a half million bucks” you have the civic acuity of a mollusk.

This is a point about how wealth/assets/value-from-work is being horded by a select few. This line is to highlight that inequality is much worse than you think.