I don't disagree that restaurants as an institution have numerous problems, but sometimes I'll see a restaurant-critical post cross my dash whose author clearly just looked up the history of the word "restaurant" and immediately started banging on about how the food service industry in its entirety is a bourgeois invention that sprang from the aftermath of the French Revolution, and prior to that time people only ever ate food prepared in the home, evidently completely unaware of the copious evidence that the public fried-food stand is literally as old as writing.

“Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers.” — Mignon McLaughlin

Tag yourself.

Context here

No, if I'm to be blunt: internet discourse people only care about culture when it's astrology &c. Actually that's not even true. But anyway, many people care very much about other forms of culture in both a normative and a personal sense.

In the personal sense, many people are very attached to the way they do laundry or the language they speak, and while you (reader, not just OP) might not care about these things in your own life, they are perfectly reasonable things to care about (as I've said previously: as reasonable as gender presentation or video games or large cardinal axioms). On the normative side, many people very much do desire to assimilate others into some arbitrary set of norms, to make everyone dress the "right" way and talk the "right" way and so on; this is the bread and butter of nationalism. If one disagrees with this agenda, as I do, one should be vocal about it, because it is very mainstream!

Obviously there is a sticky line between having norms at all (including norms of personal free expression) and forcibly maintaining norms, but a fuzzy boundary does not make a vacuous distinction. Return again to my "norms of stand-off-ishness vs. norms of chattiness between strangers" example and meditate on it somewhat.

But anyway, the upshot is that those axes of pluralism which you claim are not contentious are contentious, and the people invested in those debates have reasonable reasons to be invested, and some positions commonly articulated in those debates are worthy of opposition.

If you're sort of... thinking about this all in a purely symbol-shuffling way rather than looking at the reality of culture "on the ground", I could see how some claim like "the only two self-consistent positions are Chauvinist universalism which seeks to assimilate everyone to a chosen set of 'optimal' norms, or complete moral relativism which is indifferent to both the behavior and living conditions of others (or at least to members of the outgroup)" could make sense. But in actual reality these are not the two options, and I don't think either of them are very good options, and I think this is pretty evident on the face of things.

Just a reminder that people who still live with their parents as adults deserve respect and for you to stop being ableist. There are multiple reasons someone could still live with their parents! From invisible to visible disabilities, finance issues, and more!

Stop using the “well they’re gonna turn into a creep living in their parents basement” punchline! It’s disgusting. STOP. BEING. ABLEIST. STOP. FORGETTING. THE. POOR.

Marsha P. Johnson, co-founder of Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, at a gay rights demonstration in Albany, New York, March 14, 1971. Photo by Diana Davies.

You know how bullshit rent is? Elon Musk hasn't paid rent on Twitter's main offices in, like, 6 months, and has Twitter been evicted? Of course not. Apparently, when you're rich or a company, you can just tell your landlords to fuck off and the gov won't do shit to you.

society if good thing i like had happened instead of bad thing i don't like

The thing that really gets me is that a very large proportion (the majority?) of currently living, endangered indigenous American languages, at least in the US and Canada America, became endangered as a result of twentieth century policy and twentieth century developments. Residential schools, forced adoptions, and economic sabotage within the last century. And of course this is the case: languages that were already endangered 100 years ago are just dead now. But the point is that these historical wrongs are not wrongs of some distant past. The people fighting for the survival of their language here are not merely daydreaming about an imagined prelapsarian past. The are fighting for something that (depending on age) they or their parents personally experienced being robbed of. Tanadrin pointed out that the more time goes on, the harder historical wrongs are to right. This is the sort of historical wrong which is often in memory close enough that meaningful mitigation is possible.

say “yeah this book was so good it changed my life” and no one bats an eye

say “yeah this fan fic was so good it changed my life” and society goes wild

10 Body Horror Films To Consider For October/Halloween

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