she was telling them team skull members are banned from mantine surfing, because they keep trying to dance while surfing and falling off
not because they’re part of a group of pokemon thieves or anything, just because they’re that bad at surfing and people are tired of having to rescue them
class and gender presentation is a particular Thing for me cause like. I've been poor my whole life, like malnourished-since-seventh-grade kind of poor, and I'm quite feminine, and my femininity inevitably makes people read me as wealthy. when I was a young kid, my classmates would phrase it like I dressed "fancy" or "old fashioned" ("fancy?" I would think, looking at my outfit that was just a single dress, literally one dress, the most simple and easy outfit a person can wear), and as I and my peers got older, that changed to people thinking I was some kind of like, old money heiress. because girlies who get free school lunches are incapable of wearing perfume, apparently.
multiple times a semester, I would have to explain and re-explain to teachers that I couldn't pay for mandatory field trips or extra-credit private tutoring, and every time they would think I was lying because I was too smart and too feminine to be poor. in some circumstances, when I tried to speak out about queerness or misogyny, it would get dismissed as hysterical privileged whinging because I had the audacity to wear dangly earrings and sit with my legs crossed while talking about domestic abuse.
like I Know there are ways that certain standards of femininity are locked behind paywalls or incompatible with manual labor jobs, but I honestly think a lot of our perception of femininity as upper class comes from the way that femininity / womanhood (not the same thing, but often considered as such) are seen as artificial, fragile, and frivolous. I would stand next to my classmates, me in my threadbare sundress that I'd been wearing for eight years and them in their brand new designer athleisure wear, and they'd say "okay obviously you're going to play the rich bully in this educational skit about classism."
anyway. I've never played disco elysium but I love this screenshot so much.
“Authors should not be ALLOWED to write about–” you are an anti-intellectual and functionally a conservative
“This book should be taken off of shelves for featuring–” you are an anti-intellectual and functionally a conservative
“Schools shouldn’t teach this book in class because–” you are an anti-intellectual and functionally a conservative
“Nobody actually likes or wants to read classics because they’re–” you are an anti-intellectual and an idiot
“I only read YA fantasy books because every classic novel or work of literary fiction is problematic and features–” you are an anti-intellectual and you are robbing yourself of the full richness of the human experience.
"you are functionally a conservative" is such a good and clarifying insult
Literally right after I saw this post, I saw another post in a discord chat for BOOK EDITORS in which an outspokenly liberal editor talked about how Nabokov should have never been published because he wrote about p*dophiles and described women's bodies in ways that made her uncomfortable. She described his writing as "objectively terrible" and said she wanted to burn his books. And other editors were bringing up classics they didn't like and talking about how they wanted to throw them in the trash. This wasn't like a light "unpopular opinion!" conversation. This was actual book editors talking about how books should be destroyed and censored.
There is something so scary and toxic in global culture right now. The revival of fascism is influencing everyone's mindset and approach to art, regardless of where they fall on the political spectrum.
I see far more books being censored today than when I was a kid. Librarians handed me The Catcher in the Rye, The Sexual Politics of Meat, and Animal Farm when I was literally 8-11. My mom would never have taken a book away from me. I read everything from the Tao Te Ching to the Qur'an to atheist texts under my desk at school. Teachers thought nothing of it or encouraged it. Books seemed universally acknowledged as sacrosanct to me.
Now I can't find any adults who don't hesitate or want to make exceptions when it comes to censorship. Even the most liberal social activist librarians I know go, "well except for book X..."
Functionally conservative. It's so important to have the language to express that.
The only reason a book should be removed, the ONLY reason, is “we are keeping it in the restricted section for research because its only intended function is to cause harm.”
And to be clear, when I say this, I’m talking about shit like To Train Up A Child and The Protocols of Zion. One is a text responsible for the deaths of multiple children because it’s an abuse how-to, and the other is entirely fabricated “protocols” from a group that never actually existed but is claimed to represent all Jews, and it’s basically one long antisemitic screed.
And even these should be available. Just. Not where they’re gonna be used to start a white supremacist cult.
Play a warlock character who calls himself Vithimorex or something like that. Always mention how grateful you are to your patron, Frank, for the wondrous powers he gives you.
Slowly reveal that the powers you get from Frank are things like “sense of smell” and “verbal communication”. As it turns out, Vithimorex is an extradimensional Thing possessing the person formerly known as Frank. All the eldritch blasts and shadow conjurations are boring powers according to Vithimorex. He can’t wait for the level 14 ability to understand and appreciate music.
I've seen the use of the "crazy sjw feminist" stereotype from gamergate days die down a little but one thing that remains ever present is the way fat activists are treated. Anything they say is dismissed and ridiculed, they have insults hurled at them with so much cruelty and disdain. The moment a fat person asks any group of people to change their worldview on fatness, it's immediate insults and brick walls. This includes left leaning people. Everyone loves to gang up on fat people, it hasn't changed a bit.
I find that left-leaning people almost always justify their fat bigotry in science-y terms (not actual science on fatness, which they never know anything about when questioned), and right-leaning people in terms of character traits they believe are associated with fatness.
To me, it's all excuses to keep enjoying higher social status and apparent moral superiority for the non-act of existing in a thin(ner) body, or having lost weight. In other words, people are addicted to their thin privilege and are not about to let reason stand in the way of their enjoyment of said thin privilege.
![Text reading, "Rhetoric [Heroic: Failure] - Alright, here we go. We're devoting all your available brain cells to coming up with a question about communism. Scratch that, to coming up with *the* question about communism, the alpha and omega of communism questions, and that question is: 1.- (Whisper.) 'Are women bourgeois?' 2.- Oh god, that's bad. Surely I can think of something better."](https://64.media.tumblr.com/62ea2f94a45cb9ea2c1aabbe66c6ea69/d88f583b72ad229d-76/s540x810/d208c3a7cc2065a5fda4924f9651385b4d833f64.png)
