"if we make america worse and more of a dictatorship that will be even harder to unravel and make it the way we want the country to be, maybe then everyone will join our Glorious Revolution!" bb girl you cant even be in the same room with someone who thinks you should vote, how in tf do you think you're gonna unite people to fight in The Revolution with you? it's gonna be you and your 5 friends, i hate to break it to you.
Thinkpieces about why people seem to become more authoritarian as they get older tend to focus on neuroscience and survivorship bias and such, but based on my experience in various activist communities, I think a big piece of the puzzle that these sorts of discussions often overlook is that a large chunk of people just never had any principled objection to authoritarianism in the first place.
It's easy to talk about fighting the power when you're under the boot, but when some folks get hold of any sort of power or authority for themselves and sticking it to the Man is no longer a proposition with no perceived downsides, they start backpedalling in a real hurry. Power didn't corrupt them. Nothing changed about their politics. Their commitment to anti-authoritarianism was only ever as strong as their perception that it personally benefited them.
(You absolutely can't tell who they are just from looking at them, either; a person can use all the right jargon and support all the right causes and show up at all the right protests, yet the moment their private emotional calculus determines, rightly or wrongly, that they have more to gain by putting a boot on your neck than by lifting it off, watch out!)
I saw this posted on reddit to a wholesome memes sub, and it was full of nothing but people being unnecessarily awful on a post trying to spread information about why these creatures are beautiful and worthy of living. (Interesting note: They don't need a reason to be allowed to live.) I got sick of trying to correct people on there who were more interested in hating wasps than hearing the truth.
Honestly, it's just exhausting sometimes.
Source: @shencomix - Thanks for helping to spread the word, buddy.
I remember when my mother told me "there's a lot of weird people out there" as a way of telling me to be careful.
But that didn't help at all, because it's not weird people who are dangerous.
The most dangerous people are those who take advantage of society's expectations, those who act like it's rude to set boundaries, and those who make sure they have as much of a power advantage as possible.
But that describes a very large percentage of authority figures. In order to teach me the truth about who's dangerous, she would have had to teach me that dangerous people have very similar patterns as people who she demanded that I respect.
Scary Project 2025 and its authoritarian backers have marching orders ready for the next conservative President that gets elected (while probably losing the popular vote again as usual).
RUSSIA’S SHAM ELECTIONS, where people are “helped” by armed soldiers who check to ensure they vote correctly—or else.
Does this look like they are helping to conduct a fair, peaceful and democratic election process? Or does it look like repressed voters under duress, who are being forced to vote for Putin under threat of armed Russian soldiers? (source) (source) (source)
I think Sonic would really like graffiti tagging as a hobby.
It's about freedom. It's about rebellion. It's about seeing a highway underpass, boring drab and gray, and deciding to fight back. It's about reclaiming spaces behind fences and barbed wire placed there by people who'll never actually walk there. Look at me, a graffiti tag says, in a place I'm told I cannot be.
It's about community. Sonic can look at a wall of what looks to be scribbles and pick out the names he recognizes from around town. He's seen "SENCE" on the bridge over 4th street; "DIAM" on the side of the shopping mall. It's a network of people coming and going, no social media needed, and it's always nice to see a familiar name pop up in a new place. Has he ever actually met any of these people? No, but he knows them, well enough to tell their mannerisms through their marker or spray can.
It's about anonymity. No one knows Sonic's graffiti tag, and he works hard to keep it that way. He's able to, for once, disappear into the night and have himself judged only by the quality of his actions, no reputation or fame proceeding him. And sure, he's able to cover an entire city in a few days what might take others a few weeks, but he's seen other taggers perform similar miracles, clinging to the side of bridges and leaving their marks just above the waterline. The playing field is equal. It isn't about "who you are", it's about what you can do.
It's also about slapping stickers onto the back of Metal Sonic's head so that Eggman has to spend painstaking hours scraping them off, but that's beside the point.
"How am I supposed to tell the difference between a child challenging my authority and a child asking for clarification because they have a disability?"
You're not. If you expect anyone to submit to your authority, you're inherently ableist. The system was designed to exclude disabled people and you're upholding the system.
You're always justifying your authority by saying that it's your job to teach them right from wrong. If you actually believe that and it's not just a bullshit excuse to justify your abuse, then you should be encouraging them to ask for clarification and reasons.