someone: so what do you think is the solution to homelessness?
me, socialist:
Let homeless people occupy peopleless homes, build houses for use rather than exchange, 3D print comfortable houses in a day, convert corporate skyscrapers into housing and commercial malls into publicly-accessible community centers with living commons and entertainment
When you say it to people and they break
“But the money? … we can’t just? But, Money? We can’t just… help… people? Can we? The Money. We can’t just help people? Like that? We can’t just? Money?”
Whenever someone posits that people are ‘lazy’ I’m reminded of the fact that if you leave humans in a room with some blocks and no instructions they will literally make up their own tasks to carry out because humans just fuckin love having stuff to do and objectives to work towards
In one of my psych courses we learned about a study where a person was left in a room with nothing but a box that would SHOCK THEM painfully if they touched it. After awhile, everyone touched the box and got shocked to hell and back. Now, this isn’t that abnormal. What’s abnormal is that everyone then sat there for a few minutes and then TOUCHED THE BOX AGAIN. And got shocked AGAIN! Moral of the story: People fucking hate being bored. They would rather be in IMMENSE PAIN than be bored.
The idea that men’s careers will be ruined by false assault allegations is absurd considering how hard it is for credible allegations to have an impact. John Lasseter still works for Disney. Trump is President. Brett Kavanaugh was appointed to the Supreme Court without a proper investigation. Louis C.K. returned to comedy. Woody Allen has 16 Oscar nominations for best Original Screenplay.
It took 60 women accusing Bill Cosby for him to get 3-10 years. He got away with it for decades. He’s 81 so his career came, was celebrated, and is gone already, so no one can bemoan “oh, but think of his career!” as a pseudo-defence as to why he should go unpunished. 60 women came forward and he was convicted of 3 counts of assault…
Even the youtubers we all denounced years ago for their assaults have come back, making music, selling a book that takes advantage of the controversy, and earn thousands on patreon so it seems perpetrators of sexual assault are resilient as ever.
This is why women don’t come forward. They receive death threats, character assassinations, are harassed constantly, and all for what? For their assaulters to continue unaffected.
There are rare instances where something actually happens, like Harvey Weinstein, where Hollywood clawed over itself to go “oh no we don’t stand for that, we need to cut ourselves off from him immediately” to show how proactive they were and yet there are still countless actors out there we know have done horrible shit and continued to be celebrated. They just didn’t get enough news coverage while the #MeToo movement was fresh so there wasn’t any pressure to denounce them.
So ultimately it’s obvious that men can overwhelmingly get away with sexual assault. They do it constantly. The idea that innocent men will be ruined by sexual assault allegations is a fear tactic pushed by sexual predators trying to protect other sexual predators by enforcing the already common disbelief and hostility towards survivors of assault. It’s a bullshit. Don’t listen to it. Don’t be manipulated by it. Believe survivors.
Men are more likely to be victims of sexual assault than to be falsely accused of committing sexual assault. Believe survivors.
So Minnesotans showed the fuck up tonight (like we do) – thousands in the street protesting tr*mp’s latest executive disorders. And guess what happened? The old proverb “What if an emergency vehicle needs to get where it’s going” came to life, and the sea went silent and parted to allow it through (swiftly…literally the truck was going about as fast as, if not faster than, it would have been if there had been cars it needed to go around).
Please share this. This was a rare occurrence where an emergency vehicle needed to go through the route of a protest, when usually they have predetermined alternative routes, and it went completely fine. Also for the love of god, have more respect for firefighters/EMTs…they know how to do their jobs. They’re ready for anything, including working around protests.
So folks can stop using that tired old argument now (not that it was ever backed up by sources anyway).
It’s almost as though these protesters who are protesting for human rights are decent human people.
Basically, what’s going on right now is that the GOP is trying to push Heidi Heitkamp, democratic senator for North Dakota and first woman to hold the seat in our state, out of her seat by means of voter segregation. Following Kavanaugh being accepted onto the supreme court, she’s been seriously dropping in the polls. It’s been an absolute shitshow here because our state makes or breaks the Republicans gaining control of the senate. There’s a REALLY good piece on what’s going on here.
I know I have, like, two and a half fellow Fargo natives following me, so I’m gonna stress this: If you’re in North Dakota, your vote carries some serious weight! You don’t even need to go through the registration process, all you have to do is show up to a polling place with a valid ID. It’s that easy!
I do not know if this was just a pithy
response, but responses like this pissed me off so much I thought I was going
to start spitting blood when this Reddit thread first came around a few years
back, and every time this issue comes back. I tried to go to sleep.
But this kept running through my head, so here we are.
And this is addressed to all the redditors
with the hot take that these women were, indeed, just fun-hating, jealous prudes:
You really have no theory of mind when it
comes to women. You think they are just reactionary, shrieking, brainless, pearl-clutching
harpies who hate fun and are only ~jealous~ of their husbands going to
prostitutes. Marital rape was an oxymoron and the husband was within his legal
and physical bounds to do whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted, to his wife
and children. The women had no rights to property, to keep their own wages, to
hold a bank account, and there were few jobs for women other than domestic and
prostitute. Schoolteachers and nurses, aside from requiring education working
class women could not access, were paid a pittance, and in the former case were
required to be unmarried in many places. So the husband was well within his
rights to drink his family wages and leave his wife and children to starve in a
slum tenement, and beat them when they complained. Divorce was no practical
option, especially with children. The entire economic system was, and always
was, set up so that women could not survive on their own, to force them into
providing sexual access and domestic labor to men in exchange for sustenance.
This was the era before antibiotics. Condoms were
of poor quality and rarely used. (As if they could force their men to wear them in the first place; it would be a dreadful inconvenience for their poor dicks.) There was no cure for STDs like syphilis. These
STDs were not only ultimately fatal, in many cases, but caused untold misery the
whole way, and birth defects. And who is caring for the disabled child on top
of her other children? The woman. (Oh, and banish the thought of a safe abortion, or a way for the woman to control her fertility. She was constantly bred because the husband either wanted those children or wanted sex and there was no effective birth control.) The husband would carry STDs from the
whorehouses and give them to their wives. Stopping their husbands from
frequenting prostitutes was not merely an issue of jealousy—it was a matter of
existential survival for these women. Or a way of preventing themselves from becoming
penniless widows. And they knew that most of the prostitutes were not ~independent
working women~ in that era but exploited women, the worst thing you could
become. What awaited you if you stepped out of line. They thought making
prostitution illegal would liberate these poor creatures.
What were women to do? Speak about their sovereign rights? To
speak plainly about the remedies—economic sovereignty, sexual freedom, the
right to divorce and custody and education and standing—would get them laughed
at by men already pissed they had just gotten the vote. So they had to focus on
proximate causes: get rid of the alcohol, get rid of the whorehouses. A paltry,
palliative measure, but what else could they do? They had to dress their
concerns in the raiment of religion, one of the few acceptable fields women
were allowed. Women were tasked the stabilizing force in society, the ones to
marry off unstable, angry young men, absorb their violence, ‘settle’ them and
force them to work a job, and produce the next generation of labor. And with
that came their tasking to be the civilizing force, at that time inextricable
with Christian morality. But there was a material reason behind their proselytizing—there
always is, if you look closely enough, behind *anybody’s*. Sure, there were holy-roller
true believers, but I bet the majority of women (and I must so bet, as history
has seen to it their voices are lost) just wanted the beatings to end and food
on the table, and relative safety from debilitating disease. I bet this because
I see women as rational agents. Humans in an impossible situation, with no
voice, living with their captors.
The factory jobs available to men were miserable, back-breaking
labor, and hardly paid. This was the tail end of the era of radical labor
rights movements, but there was a lot of misery, and those movements were eventually
shut down, especially with the economic desperation of the depression. As it
leads to drug use now in desperate, hollowed-out, post-industrial communities,
so it led to drinking then. And disenfranchised groups have always found a
group even lower on the social ladder than themselves to take out their anger. Women
were always the punching bag and social safety valve. And a drunk, drugged population
is not in much position to organize politically. There were few diversions – no
television, no sports games, no entertainments – to mollify the working classes
after their drudgery, so the bar was an incredibly attractive option. Oblivion
was preferable to going back to the slums with screaming children underfoot in
a filthy, tiny shack and a pissed off wife. Her anger may have been justified,
but in the guy’s mind, she was just the shrew waiting to make his day worse.
And, to those guys with a shred of decency, there was the shame in being
reminded of how poorly his wages kept his family, how desperate and pointless
the struggle, how they were running to stay in the same desperate place with no
hope of advancement. Ashamed, depressed men lash out, even against those who
they feel they have wronged.
The dispossessed men take it out on their women. This
always, always, always happens.
Prohibition did not work. We know that now, with the power
of hindsight. And the social fabric is utterly different, now: while women are by
no means liberated, they can hold property, they can keep their own wages and
assets, they have rights to their children, they can obtain education and jobs.
Divorce from an alcoholic husband without landing in the gutter is a
possibility. But to advance the narrative that prohibition was started by a
bunch of fuddy-duddy no-fun busy-bodies who hated the idea of anybody having a
good time is monstrous and shows only your contempt for women. You cannot know
the fear and desperation of being trapped with a violent, alcoholic husband,
several children, pregnant every year from marriage to menopause, and listening
to your children crying with hunger while waiting for your husband to come back
from the bar. And then you must approach him and ask for money. And you have
nowhere to run. I wager you have never had to bury your own children dead of starvation and the diseases of poverty. There was nowhere for them to turn without you – orphanages a joke, these masses of children from these women who had no power to control their own fertility seen as labor at best and excess humanity, vermin, by most of society. And their alcoholic father would leave them to die while he drinks himself to death. So it’s you or nobody.
What do you do? The possibilities on the outside for you, a fallen, divorced
women, would be prostitution or penury. But you have one bit of power, now – you can vote. And women as a class share your interests. You would be shut down campaigning for full human rights, but if you dress your concerns up in religion, there is a chance.
Of course, a hundred years in the future, men will use this as an example of how as soon as women are able to vote, they ruin everything.
Andrea Dworkin’s Right-Wing
Women is a brilliant and deeply-researched work on the phenomenon of the religious,
conservative woman, and addresses why women are often the enforcers and lieutenants
of religious morality and social conservatism, when it benefits them least. It
is not because they are small-minded cunts with small spirits, any more than
men on the average. There is a material and strategic reason, and the
temperance movement is a perfect example of this. They are making a bargain
within the confines of the tiny shred of power they are given.
And ask, always, before you condemn a group of women as a
bunch of no-fun brainless shrieking reactionaries because they want to take
away your toys: what material, rational reason might here be? Give them at
least the dignity of being considered rational agents before you condemn.
“i don’t like either candidate so i won’t vote” what are you thinking, if enough people wuss out we’re going to have President None Of The Above? hey we’re counting the votes and ten percent of voters stayed home and jerked it to their own ideological purity, guess we just won’t have a president and all the executive level decisions will be made by a magic 8-ball for the next 4 years
i wrote this 2 years ago and – yeah. look, let’s just learn, ok? midterms coming up, pull up your big citizen pants and go do the thing.
The Supreme Court just issues a ruling allowing Ohio and other states to purge voters from their election registration rolls due to their failure to cast a ballot in previous elections.
This is a major victory for the Trump administration and the GOP, and a direct consequence of the Supreme Court being stacked with more conservative judges (the votes were 5-4). This is also a huge part of what Trump/the GOP were counting on to save them in the 2018 midterm elections, which is where Democrats have been hoping to take back a majority in the House, giving them more power to combat Trump’s abuses of power and Republican legislation.
What this means is YOU CAN NOT ASSUME THAT YOU ARE REGISTERED for the 2018 elections, just because you SHOULD be. Thanks to this decision, red states can purge voters’ registration based on their not having cast a ballot in even just previous federal elections, NOT just the national Presidential elections. Effectively, if you haven’t voted in previous senate races or for congressional representatives in the past few years, that’s all they need now to say you’re no longer registered and need to register again.
They’re deliberately counting on people assuming they’re still registered and so not checking until after registration deadlines have passed, or showing up to vote this November and only then finding out they’re no longer registered, when its too late to do a damn thing about it.
And this is absolutely targeted at marginalized communities, low income voters, disabled voters, and basically anyone who simply can’t always AFFORD to keep on top of every federal election and show up to vote in every senate race, etc. Which not so coincidentally happen to be all the communities and voters who have the most to gain from Democratic victories in the 2018 midterms and are the least likely to cast votes for GOP candidates at this point.
This was absolutely a calculated effort aimed specifically at keeping the GOP in power with a majority control of the government come November, and unfortunately, it has a DAMN good chance of accomplishing just that if it goes by unacknowledged. I’m not looking to alarm or panic anyone, simply to say:
If you are a registered voter in a red state at this point, please please please do not take your registered status as assumed. Check on your registration status, look up all relevant voter registration deadlines for your state and district, CIRCLE THAT SHIT ON YOUR CALENDAR, and check your registration status AGAIN right before those deadlines pass, so you can be sure of it before its too late to do anything about it til the next voting cycle.
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