It's funny, I feel like I spent a lot of time pointing out that there's almost always a third path of some kind of balance between two things being treated as a false dichotomy, and I'm just waiting for someone to tell me I'm politically a moderate or centrist.

But I'm not.

Because, at least in the US, "Moderate" and "Centrist" haven't actually described finding the necessary balances on various axes of ethical philosophy in general in a very long time - if they ever did. They're people trying to hold some kind of middle ground between what I find fairly reasonable and compassionate in ideal, if a bit lacking in practice, and what I find downright abhorrent in ideal and cruel in practice.

It's not ethically centered or moderate to try to hold a line between "Everyone is allowed to exist" and "Except those people, who we've decided aren't people". "Everyone is allowed to exist" is already a centered place. Pulling it off center, drawing a line at one ridiculous extreme, and then drawing a line halfway between the two and saying "This is the middle now" isn't ethics. It's barely geometry.

But we don't really get anywhere coherent by turning everything into a false dilemma just so we can demand everyone be "with us or against us" even when that doesn't actually make sense.

Yes, there's no middle ground between "Live or Die" but few things are actually that clear-cut, and it's not actually valid reasoning to try to reduce everything to that for the sake of feeling like we have the moral high ground. We're not solving any practical problems with that shit. We are, at most, soothing our feeling of overwhelm from seeing how big the problems really are.

And they ARE big. Far too big for any one person to solve. Any one person has got to pick their battles, narrow their focus, to be effective. That doesn't mean we as a society have to pick our battles - that's another false dilemma. Nothing gets solved by only one person, so the limits of a single person to solve things are only relevant to that single person. All solutions to big problems are, by definition, group efforts.

So... yeah, being centered is important to me. Being centered in the things that actually fucking matter.

The axes I care about being centered on are things like:

Compassion and Wisdom

Freedom and Equality

Individual and Community

Functional and Ideal

Accommodations and Boundaries

And the distribution of resources and responsibilities.

In all things, moderation - even moderation.

really do not think people understand the extent to which palestinian sites/landmarks (especially muslim ones) were destroyed, beginning in 1948 until now, even in cities. the oldest extant mosque in jaffa (al-bahr mosque) was built in 1675, even though islam came there in the 7th century

"listen to [minority] voices" is something that's all well and good on paper but I feel like it's something a lot of people use to avoid having to do any intellectual work of their own. I really don't think you're capable of enacting any positive change in anything if you outsource all of your thinking to someone else

Life as a JGY stan is so hard because sometimes I want to make posts about the ways his very justified paranoia turns against him sometimes, rare moments where I think being more trusting or vulnerable would have helped but he felt like it couldnt, or talk about how his brutal survival instinct intersects with society's existing bigotries in a such a way that most of his violence is actually aimed at people lower on the ladder than him, with people like Jin Guangshan being the exception not the rule. Because he's a fascinating character and these parts of him are interesting!

But when I do that I have to live in perpetual fear of the moment that it escapes its target audience and someone takes it to go "Yeah he's a monster who fucked over everyone and is incapable of love! I wish he was killed earlier and his death was a thousand times more painful 🤪"

I mean, take my last example. Due to existing hierarchies it is, at any point, easier and safer for jgy to harm people less powerful than him instead of more powerful than him, even if the more powerful are the ones threatening his safety in the first place. Even knowing how it harms him and while working against it, Jin Guangyao is not immune to internalizing the mindset of the world he lives in. Even when killing Jin Guangshan- one man- it ends up costing the lives of 20 sex workers. You think I can bring up the sex workers in this fucking fandom? You think that will go over peacefully? The well has been so thoroughly poisoned here it feels like any conversation around morality automatically turns into a courtroom to determine a sentence for this fictional fucking character who's already dead.

The thing that gets me the most about intersexism is the fact that... it doesn't matter how many intersex people there are - no matter if they are as common as redheadheaded people or anybody else - when the intersexist sees human bodies and their states as a inherently a political battle, an agenda to be "won," the intersex body will always be an "anomaly," something crude and unnatural, regardless of how oxymoronic the "unnatural natural body" is.

fucking wild when your dog is approaching 3yo and suddenly a lot of your problems just kinda go away.

The most obvious means by which a queen might exercise influence at court was through her close contact with the king in much the same way as other nobles did, although the nature of such influence is impossible to judge because it does not leave records behind. That women would advise their husbands, even kings, was accepted and expected: Christine de Pizan maintained that the wise princess would urge her husband to discuss matters with his councillors, and encourage others to advise him. Jacobus de Cessolis, recognizing that queens would thereby be privy to important matters of state, advised that a queen's 'wysedom ought tappere in spekynge that is to wete that she be secrete and telle not such thynges as ought to be holden secrete'. Queens were of course not exempt from the traditional misogynistic fear of the power of women's words to lure men, as Eve had done, into sin and folly. The fourteenth-century author of The III Consideracions Right Necesserye to the Good Governaunce of a Prince warned

And how be it that a kinge or Prince shulde love his lady and wyf in maner as him self, yit it is nat expedient that he uttyr unto hir, and discloosc the sccrccs, grcctc conscillcs and greet thingcs that he hath doon for his estate and for his landc, nc that in such thing he be governed aftir hir at som tymc, but he shulde allc daycs reserve unto him self the lordship and souvereyntee, or ellys many perilles may betide.

But to be governed was not the same as to be advised and there was also a strong tradition and rich literature of women wisely advising their husbands at all levels of society. This included encouraging a husband to make peace with his subjects or to be more generous to the poor or the Church as well as the familiar motif of intercession in response to a particular plea.

-J.L. Laynesmith, "The Last Medieval Queens: English Queenship 1445-1503"

joongdok university au but kdj is professor brick wall and yjh is professor overshare

I’m so fucking tired of hearing news sites explain how higher education levels are linked with voting a particular way, but then treating it as some isolated fun fact and never asking why. Like the ABC discusses how higher education is a huge predictor of voting yes to the voice, and then it just leaves it at that.

WHY DO YOU THINK THAT IS, HUH? I wonder why having more knowledge, more exposure to other views, and more critical thinking skills makes you do things like support the voice and support progressive policies???? I wonder what that says about the opposite, that you tend to be less educated to support conservative causes??? Gee, isn’t it a fucking MYSTERY??

people seeing the fallout of the hbomb/somerton situation and acting like academia is free of all of these issues and doesnt have its own content mill source of horror. lol. lmao

Can you explain more what you mean when you say “an identity based framework is inconsistent with material analysis”?

I'm incredibly critical of the idea that simply having a particular social identity renders one 'oppressed' or 'oppressed enough' to speak on particular issues; if your biggest grievance is how people speak to/about you and not your material reality, then you're doing comparatively well.

For context, I think there are four main forms of structural disadvantage that we should structure our discourse around:

being institutionalised on the basis of one's group, e.g. imprisonment, confinement in certain places like residential schools, confinement in mental health facilities;

being subject to violence on the basis of one's group, e.g. domestic violence, conversion therapy, forceful removal from family/culture;

being impoverished on the basis of one's group, e.g. living in poverty (not just being poor), being prevented from earning or owning money; and

lacking institutional representation, e.g. in politics, in administrative decision-making, in planning decisions.

I find that a lot of online 'activists' can't actually describe what they believe without relying on an identity framework; they'll say that [x] is oppressed, but they won't be able to explain how [x] fits into any of those categories (or whether there should be a fifth category) - they'll just assume that material consequence follows group identification.

I will say it's laughable to claim that it's 'not a coincidence that Israel's attacks coincide with high profile events' (i.e. the met gala). That's the most US centric thing I've ever heard. Do you really think war officials are designing their onslaught based around a fashion party in the US? Like they're criminal masterminds using the influence of the global cultural powerhouse that is the US to distract the people of... Checks notes... The entire world so that they can bomb Palestine unsuspectingly?

Youse sound like conspiracy theorists.

No one actually gives a fuck about the Met Gala. For those who like it, it's just about the fashion photography that comes out a day later. For most it's an event detached from place and from time and it's occurrence actually has nothing to do with the recent attack. But it's the idea that 'high profile events' like the Met Gala are deliberately being used to distract people from ongoing genocide that assumes that the event itself is iconic enough to be distracting, and that the distractable people are only North Americans thereby omitting the nuance of the rest of the world's populace in life extracted from the US hegemony.

y'know despite the pervasiveness of modern au in les mis fandom i don't think i've ever come across a fic that has an interesting and well-executed answer to the question of what enjolras's politics would be/what he would actually be doing in a modern au

Brief history of anti-LGBT legislations in Russia

Throughout 90s and 2000s there were no discriminatory laws in Russia. There were openly queer celebrities (whether they said they were for PR alone or not is a complicated subject. Nevertheless, there were people who gained popularity and presented queer)

In 2013 the first legislation passed. It was an "anti-propaganda" law to "protect children" from becoming gay. The way to work around it was putting +18 on any piece of media or an event that contained even a mention of the subject.

In 2022 anti-propaganda law stopped being for children only. LGBT was mentioned next to pedophilia, both in the same regard. The law was rushed (like many of the oppressive laws since the invasion in Ukraine) and it was not clear what exactly it meant. In practice it mostly affected movies, TV and internet publications.

Earlier this year, in june 2023, ban of transgender transitioning was put in place. Once again, very poorly worded. This one and the previous one had two main functions:

To censor opposition. Most of those, who disagree with the current state of politics in Russia, if not outright support LGBT, at least don't mind. This information can be dug up and used against said people.

To create an enemy. The war was supposed to be won quickly. They promoted their army to be the second greatest in the word, they promised to take Kyiv in 3 days. Nothing of that happened, but life for everyday people got worse. One of the ways to redirect that frustration is fight an enemy that doesn't exist.

The russian government does not care about queer people nor understands us. They preach to their electorate that they nurtured to hate any "other". They make russian believe that our neighbors are nazis, the whole world wants us dead and they take our children by making them gay. I believed this is where they would stop.

There is no "LGBT organisation" in Russia. Before that they tried to find any minute reason or make up a reason to silence the opposition. Now they don't even need the organisation to exist.

Once again, the words are very loose, so they can use the law in any way they see fit - a very popular practice. It is not yet active, the court decision does not specify that exactly. Some sources say it will be 10th of January, 2024.

Any display of "non traditional values" will be equated to terrorism.

Big reminder that your country is not immune to bigotry. I've seen so many people, for example, pretend like antisemitism doesn't exist in the USA because we were part of the allied forces in WWII (of course, they conveniently don't remember that we rejected jewish refugees when WWII broke out and we only really joined because Pearl Harbor was bombed, but I digress).

If you think your country is immune from antisemitism, racism (including anti-Indigenous racism), class issues, ableism, whatever else it may be, look deeper because you will find it.

I do believe that Black characters can be set up by the creative team to be disliked by the dominant audience, I’ve seen it, but if you’re applying that to every Black character with a complex personality then you’re skewing closer to respectability politics than thoughtful media criticism.