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transgenderteensurvivalguide · 3 years

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Why is it that people seem to always support trans women more than trans men?

Lee says:

If you’re part of an online forum community that is primarily transfeminine, for example, then there’s going to be a lot of resources for transfeminine people.

But if you’re part of an online forum community that is primarily transmasculine, for example, then there’s going to be a lot of resources for transmasculine people.

And just as there are particular online spaces and communities that tend to be predominated by a certain group, there are also IRL ones that are primarily transmasculine or primarily transfeminine even if they are not explicitly defined as such.

If you feel like you aren’t being supported enough in the space you’re currently in, see if you can find a community that does focus around the resources you’re looking for!

As an example- you may have noticed that the transmasculine post-op community on Tumblr is pretty small. There definitely are multiple bloggers out there, and I think I actually follow all of them, but this isn’t really a thriving hub of phalloplasty information or support, or a large community of transmasculine folks who are post-op and post-transition (Thanks, Tumblr NSFW ban!).

So instead, I seek out the spaces where the community I want to be a part of actually is gathering. Now I’m part of many different transmasculine lower surgery groups on Facebook (over 20 of em lol), I’ve attended IRL transmasculine lower surgery support group meetings in person, and now I’m in two different Zoom-based transmasculine bottom surgery support groups.

I also believe that if you want to see more of a particular thing, you should be a part of putting that thing out there! So I still maintain my transition sideblog here on Tumblr, where I will eventually document my phallo when I get stage 1 in May. And that’s how I support the transmasculine community, in my own way. So if you want to see more supportive posts for transmasculine folks, start typing!

We also have to remember that uplifting transfeminine doesn’t automatically occur at the expense of support for transmasculine people. We aren’t trying to tear each other down, so being resentful of the transfeminine community for the people who support them isn’t a good look. Transfeminine people can never have “too much” support!

I do think that there are certain spaces online that tend to focus on positivity and support for transfeminine folks, and there’s nothing wrong with that- again, yes, transfeminine people do deserve support! Transfeminine people often face the brunt of society’s violent transphobia, and it’s important that we recognize the way that trans women specifically are targeted more than other groups are.

Trans women are often hypervisible and a lot of transphobic movements are aimed at them as a result; bathroom bills because transphobes don’t want “men” in women’s bathrooms, banning trans athletes because transphobes don’t want “men” to take over women’s teams, trans people being banned from gendered homeless shelters because transphobes don’t want “men” to sleep in the same room as women, and so on. When you listen to any of these politicians who support these gross things, you’ll hear them constantly talk about the “danger” that trans women pose (while insisting on gendering them as “men” and refusing to recognize that they’re even women). Trans men aren’t even an afterthought.

Being culturally hypervisible in the media means you’re the target of a lot of hate and the recipient of a lot of support, which is all happening at the same time. On the other hand, the transmasculine community at large is less visible in the media which means we often slip under the radar as a community which of course does tie into the erasure of the community. Transmasculine people more often slip under the radar on a personal level too, because many transmasculine people are able to pass by at least 5 years on testosterone and many choose to go stealth as soon as they’re able to.

That doesn’t mean that all transmasculine people can pass or want to pass, or that transmasculine people don’t face transphobia and violence either, or that the vitriol targeting trans women doesn’t invalidate us as well or affect our rights too, or that we shouldn’t get to share our experiences or ask for support.

We can and should talk about transmasculine people’s experiences as well, and transmasculine voices shouldn’t be erased. Studies have shown that suicide attempt rate for trans boys is approximately 20.9% higher than it is for trans girls, for example, and there are many similar statistics showing that trans men struggle in many ways and face a lot of discrimination, which of course deserves acknowledgement.

Experiencing discrimination and subsequent mental health struggles isn’t something that should be glossed over, yet there are many pseduo-progressive folks in the LGBTQ/feminist communities whose posts can sometimes come across as “men are bad and trans men are men so they’re bad!” When you point out that there are plenty of marginalized men out there who need support, people are quick to say “Well, I’ll support you for being trans but I don’t need to support you because you’re a man since men have privilege and therefore perpetuate oppression!” But in the case of trans men, supporting someone for being trans is the same thing as supporting them in being a man, you can’t separate the two.

And you can spend all day talking about in what situations transmasculine people have access to male privilege and in what conditions the privilege applies and so on, but that is a separate conversation from the point here, which is everyone deserves support and that includes trans men (and gay men, and disabled men, and Black men, and Indigenous men, and Asian men, and so on).

Things like body-shaming men for having neckbeards or small penises is seen as okay even though body-shaming women for having body hair or having small breasts is recognized as misogynistic. Sometimes folks respond by saying something like “you can’t oppress your oppressor” which... makes no sense in this context. Making people feel that their bodies are bad goes against the whole body-positive feminist movement, and that’s true no matter which people you think you’re targeting.

It’s also pretty obvious that being a man doesn’t inherently make you a bad person, but a lot of the hate and anger directed at men (whether it’s posted as a joke or said seriously by someone who went through trauma) can make it difficult for trans men to recognize that they’re men because they don’t want to become the thing everyone hates.

So how do we navigate allowing marginalized people to vent about groups who have privilege without causing collateral damage to other oppressed people?

Some people have tried to solve it by saying “I hate only cis men, not trans men!” but then of course you’ve created a new issue which is the arbitrary distinguishment between a cis man and a trans man. A trans man can be just as misogynistic as a cis man, and being trans doesn’t mean anything about who you are as a person, all it says is something about the gender you were assigned when you were born.

When you say that you only hate cis men, you’re implying that you don’t hate trans men because you think they’re different than cis men in some way in their thoughts/behavior/actions which is a transphobic assumption.

Or you’re saying you know that trans men and cis men can be identical in their thoughts/behavior/actions because they’re all men, so the reason you don’t hate trans men is ... ?? because they had certain genitals at birth (which they may not have anymore) ?? And that’s also transphobic because it’s saying you hate people solely because of their bodies which they can’t always control or change and implies having a particular type of body is morally wrong somehow or that your body makes you a bad person.

When someone makes a point of telling a trans man that they hate men, it’s sometimes a deliberate transphobic tactic used to make the person feel like having a male gender identity is inherently bad and makes you bad because it’s who you are, so the only way to become a good person is to not be a man which means not being transgender. And this is some how TERFs try and convince trans teens who were AFAB to re-identify as women instead of embracing being men. It’s hard to embrace being something that people have told you is problematic so people try to repress their feelings and ignore who they are.

Yet folks who don’t say “I hate all men” and instead say “the patriarchy sucks but it’s okay to be a man and not all men are bad” have found that statement controversial too.

Even that phrase, “not all men,” is a red flag because it’s primarily used by the “men’s rights” folks who try and defend their misogyny and push their anti-feminist agenda while denying the ways that they personally benefit from the system. All men benefit from the system of patriarchy if they are recognized as men by the system, but that doesn’t mean every individual man is personally responsible for actively perpetuating oppression or that every man is a bad person.

So when someone points out the ways that men are taught to hate themselves by people who are constantly bashing on men in hurtful ways, or the struggles that men face (even if they aren’t struggles unique to men), there are people who just freak out because they think that acknowledging this is in some way trying to say that men can’t be oppressors, or that pointing it out is somehow delegitimizing women’s experiences or part of a pushback against women’s rights because the MRAs have tried to stake a claim over the entire topic.

So any nuanced conversation about ways that we actually can support men and break down oppression and uplift marginalized folks has been silenced because this toxic group has dominated the conversation and nobody wants to accidentally seem like they support those things, so they don’t support anything that focuses on men at all.

Similarly, when someone posts about something that affects trans men people (usually cis people TBH) often will respond with “trans women have it worse with that issue, and everything else too!” which isn’t a helpful response because while it’s important to recognize the way that trans women face multiple axes of oppression, uplifting trans women in a way that makes it impossible for another marginalized group to have a conversation doesn’t help anyone. It’s okay for some posts to not be about or for trans women without starting to play the Oppression Olympics games because transmasculine people also need support and space and allowing transmasculine people to talk about their experiences doesn’t mean that transfeminine people are being ignored.

All that being said, I would argue that people definitely don’t always support trans women more than trans men, and I wouldn’t even say that people usually do so. It very much depends on the space you’re in. While I do believe that there are a lot of positivity/supportive posts about trans women on Tumblr, this is, in many ways, a direct reaction to counter the large volume of hate that’s also actively being directed at trans women on Tumblr. And while there are plenty of “love trans women!” posts, there is also an issue with the lack of practical resources and material support for trans women because most of the content does not go beyond the surface level heart-emoji type post.

So in what I’ve noticed on Tumblr specifically (as this varies depending on the platform you’re using and the space you’re in), there can be more vocal (aka performative) support for trans women but it mostly tends to focus on their identities saying they’re valid women and so on but doesn’t give them much information or material support or anything else that I would deem a useful resource, whereas there might be less support for trans men in terms of “gender identity positivity for being male” but there’s more practical resources and information that they can use to aid in their transition.

Again, whatever you do, don’t complain that transfeminine people have too much support- that’s not the same thing as saying that you’d like more support for trans men struggling with X issue.

And yes, while we do have many things in common, there are some differences in the struggles the community faces and the experiences we have, and it’s okay to want to talk with other folks who are going through the same thing. That doesn’t mean that you don’t care about transfeminine people or that you think they should have a smaller platform or something, it just means you’d like support for your identity and transition (which is wholly unrelated to how much support there is or isn’t available for them).

So if you are looking for more support for trans men and feel like you aren’t getting what you need in the online or IRL spaces you’re currently moving in, you should try finding the spaces that are meant to be supportive communities for trans men and join them, whether they’re specific blogs, Facebook groups, Discord servers, or in-person/on-Zoom support groups, and also do what you can to create the support you want to see for your community!

#Lee says #not really sure what to tag this as #transphobia #discourse #suicide m #Anonymous #trans #transgender #nonbinary #lgbtq #lgbt #transgender teen survival guide #transgenderteensurvivalguide #TTSG

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bi-naesala · 3 years

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Fandom: Yakuza Rating: E Warnings: / Relationships: Majima Goro/Nishikiyama Akira Characters: Nishikiyama Akira, Majima Goro Additional Tags: Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, Trans Nishikiyama Akira, Genderfluid Majima Goro, Fuckbuddies, Blow Jobs, Vaginal Sex, Squirting Summary:

Nishikiyama has to attend to a formal event. The only problem? He has to bring a plus one with him. He has no idea what possesses him to invite Majima over, but it's too late to change his mind. Hope it's worth it...

(Also on AO3)

Nishikiyama hates upper class events, something so different from what he’s used to, but now that he has his own family, now that he is important, he needs to attend to them. He has to charm investors, bribe police higher-ups, become friends with politicians, which isn’t something he’d be able to do it he acts like a recluse in his family office, like some other older bosses do. He supposes they have other sources of power and wealth, but times have changed, and so the old ways should leave the way to newer ones.

Besides, hadn’t he always dreamed about glitz and glamour? This is simply the price to pay in order to get to experience it. After all, it’s not like it’s hard for him to be charming; if he has a specific target all it takes him is a mere night in order to conquer it.

What he truly hates about this situation is that, for some reason, he’s agreed to go with Majima of all people.

It’s only because it’s one of those shitty “bring a plus one with you so people don’t think you’re a loser” kind of event, and because he and Majima are… he’s not exactly able to tell, but they do go drinking together from time to time, and kiss, and fight, and fuck, not necessarily in this order. That, and he also knows that, if they do this, it’ll cause a big scandal in the clan; the prospective of seeing the old guard red faced from fury fumble with their words is a very big incentive.

He just hopes this is gonna be worth the chaos that will inevitably ensue.

Right now, it doesn’t feel worth it at all as he waits for Majima to be ready. He had given him the time for when he was going to pick him up, but of course now he’s got to wait for her, because lord forbit he’s on time for once.

He huffs, already irritated, and begins tapping his foot as he waits and waits and waits. He’s sure the only thing he’s accomplishing is making his driver nervous, and by nervous he means making him fear for his life, since Nishikiyama has become known for really dishing out his punishment - though come now, does he really do it that often? Not his fault these incompetents keep messing up - but for once, his rage is directed elsewhere, so he can rest assured that his boss isn’t going to unleash it on him, at least for now. It depends on how long he’ll still have to wait.

Sure, he could get out of the car and get inside the family office and drag her out, but he knows that, if he does that, minimum they’d fight because Majima would get mad at him for interrupting her beauty routine or an equally bullshit excuse, and he doesn’t want to ruin his expensive suit, so he remains there, waiting.

“Luckily” for him, Majima’s only half an hour late, and a quick glance at his figure as he walks to the car is enough to make Nishikiyama understand why it’s taken her so long to get ready.

The first thing that he notices are the long wavy black hair, curled to perfection, especially those couple of strands that are covering the left part of his face, partly hiding his eyepatch. From that far away he can’t make out the details of her make-up too well, except for the deep red lipstick that catches Nishikiyama’s eyes immediately.

His eyes then move to the long evening dress she’s wearing. He doesn’t think he’s ever seen Majima in anything that wasn’t snakeskin or of a tacky bright pink - with the exception of the tux he was wearing in the 80s, when they fought - so he’s quite surprised that she’s wearing something black, though there’s glitter all over it, but instead of subtracting from the appeal, it makes so that she reflects the light shone upon him by the streetlamps, making her seem almost ethereal.

Good thing he’s had the good sense to choose a gown that covers his chest and arms - and Nishiki hopes his back too, but it’s not like he can see it from here - because showing off her tattoo at a gala wouldn’t have been a very smart move.

It’s only when Majima gets inside, gets a good look at him and smirks, that he realizes that he’s been staring at her with his mouth hanging open like a fool.

“You’ll catch flies like that,” she chuckles, gently moving his chin with her hand so that he can close his mouth.

O-Oh, yeah… Nishikiyama’s supposed to be angry at him. He clears his throat, crossing his arms to his chest.

“You’re late,” he says, trying to sound as annoyed as he can, though it’s hard with Majima looking like that.

“So what? I had to get ready,” Majima replies, making a dismissive gesture, then turns to Nishikiyama and raises her eyebrows. “And didn’t I do an excellent job?”

Oh god, only now Nishikiyama realizes she’s also shaved her face - he bets it must feel so smooth now. He looks way younger like this, almost a little girl.

Nishikiyama forces himself to look away, trying to give off the impression that he’s unimpressed with Majima, and doesn’t deign him of an answer, talking to the driver instead.

“Just take us there…”

The driver gulps.

“Yessir.”

Everyone remains silent during the ride, but Nishikiyama knows Majima well enough by now to be aware of the fact that, even though she doesn’t speak, this doesn’t mean that she can’t be loud: now, for example, she’s pretending to adjust her make-up by taking a small case in her black pochette and applying some powder to her face with one hand, while holding a small mirror with the other.

It’s obvious that he doesn’t need to adjust anything - his make-up is perfect - but she still goes for the big gestures, with the intention of capturing Nishikiyama’s attention.

The worst thing is that it’s working: every time Nishikiyama forces himself to look away, his gaze still finds its way to Majima, unable to look at anything else but her.

Oh well, he supposes that, for now, it’s fine. He’s just getting a good eyeful before he’ll have to focus on the gala and what he’ll have to do there.

Yeah, that’s definitely it…

Nishikiyama is so mad, at himself, at this dumb gala, at Majima, at the entire world.

Since he came out wearing that, she’s all Nishikiyama has been able to focus on. During this entire event, all he would do was to stare at her as she did the talking, laughed with the other guests and drank like there was no tomorrow.

He didn’t do even half the things he was planning on doing that night.

By the time he’s got Majima to his place - because of course he’s going to take him to his place - he’s fuming. By the way Majima’s looking at him and giggling, she must know it too.

“What’s up, stud? Something’s wrong?”

In response Nishikiyama shoves her inside and then slams him against the door.

“You seem mad, did something happen?” Majima has the courage to ask, as if it’s not his fault Nishikiyama’s like this in the first place.

“You know what happened,” the other growls, face dangerously close to Majima’s. He looks like he wants to take a bite out of her.

“I really don’t,” Majima replies, though the smirk on her face says otherwise, then she closes her arms around Nishikiyama’s neck and keeps going, this time with a sultry voice. “You look stressed, Nishi-chan. Maybe there’s something I can do to help you…”

Nishikiyama silences him by sealing their lips together into a heated kiss, and doesn’t stop even when he hears Majima’s amused chuckle. He doesn’t care.

His hands travel to Majima’s body, touching everything they can, feeling the muscles covered by the fabric - it’s so adherent, and although that was clear ever before, only now Nishikiyama can feel just how well it hugs her body.

Still, he’s not here just to touch her clothes, and he wants to feel more. The only problem is that he finds himself too impatient to bother with the intricacies of Majima’s dress to take it off, but he easily finds a solution: force.

He grabs the fabric that’s covering her chest and rips it apart up to the belly, making Majima gasp.

“Oi! That’s expensive!” he exclaims, though by the ever growing bulge Nishikiyama feels against his own crotch, she mustn’t really mind it.

When he does the same thing, but this time at the edge of the dress, freeing his legs, she outright moans.

“Nothing you can’t afford to buy again,” he begins, pressing against her harder. He grabs her dick through the dress, causing her to buck her hips, hands tightening their grip onto Nishikiyama’s shoulders.

They kiss, more like devour each other, all while Nishikiyama keeps fondling Majima from under the ruined dress.

As good as it feels, eventually it becomes not enough, prompting Majima to pull away.

“Nishi-chan… I didn’t go through all this effort just for you to fuck me against a door. I’m a proper lady ya know?”

It makes him smirk as, in reply, he tightens the grip on her cock, then raising his lips to his ear when she moans. “You think? You can pretend you’re hot shit, but you’re clearly just a common whore.”

Majima’s legs almost give out, but Nishikiyama’s holding her, so she wouldn’t have fallen anyway. Point for Nishikiyama.

“So mean…” she moans then, but he gets silenced soon by another kiss, while Nishikiyama slides his hands from her hips to her legs, hoisting them around his waist.

Now that he’s secured, Nishikiyama can indeed move things to the bedroom, but just because he doesn’t want to do all this standing up, not because Majima asked.

Once they’re in, he has at least the kindness not to drop her on the bed like a sack of potatoes, but again, that’s just because he knows she’d complain about it.

“Such a gentleman,” Majima comments as he slowly begins taking off Nishikiyama’s suit, lowering it until it falls off of him. “You deserve a reward.”

She begins unbuttoning his shirt, pushing it open once he’s done and beginning to leave a trail of kisses from his neck to his shoulder, leaving lipstick marks all over his skin - her mark.

Nishikiyama doesn’t like showing his cards this soon, but he can’t help a small sigh at the feeling of her lips on him. It’s good.

Thankfully, he manages to regain his composure, and pushes Majima’s down, admiring the way her hair falls messily on the pillows; it’s everywhere.

It’s then that he notices that Majima’s reaching behind his back, probably to unzip the dress and get it off. It would make things easier, but Nishikiyama stops him nonetheless.

“Keep it on, it suits you.”

Indeed; there’s something that gets him really going about looking at her wearing that ruined dress.

Majima raises an eyebrow at him and she smirks.

“Alright, but only ‘cause you asked nicely.”

She motions for Nishikiyama to get closer, and he does it, drawn to her like a sailor to a siren, unable to resist. He leans over him, settling against her stomach, hands on either sides of her face, but as he observes her he’s taken by the uncontrollable desire to taunt him.

No words leave his lips, however, because Majima’s sneaked a hand between his legs, rubbing his crotch over his pants, which unfortunately greatly muffles the sensation of pleasure Nishikiyama would be feeling otherwise.

He moves like he’s possessed as he unbuttons his pants and tears them away, along with his underwear, throwing them away like they’ve had personally offended him, but Majima doesn’t say anything about it. He finds it cute, and at least now he gets to touch him directly, and boy oh boy isn’t Mr. Patriarch wet; Majima barely brushes his fingers against his entrance and they’re already drenched. Even cuter.

She chuckles, but Nishikiyama mustn’t hear him because if he did, he would’ve gotten mad and maybe even said something - he would’ve definitely told her to stop - while instead he moans, rubbing his crotch against Majima’s hand in order to get more friction.

As much as he’s liking it having Majima touch him like this, though, he needs his cock in him so bad, so he swats the hand away, then he goes back to the tear he made on the dress and deepens it even further, revealing a set of lace panties that makes the entirety of his blood flow go to his dick - like it didn’t already.

“You like ‘em? Bought them for the occasion…” Majima asks, looking quite smug at the effect it’s having on Nishikiyama, whose face is so red it looks like a tomato.

Alright, change of plans. He’ll get the dicking he deserves eventually, but now he can’t resist those panties.

He hops off of her, settling between her legs, hands caressing them, feeling the soft material of the stockings until it ends with the garter belt. The rest of him doesn’t move as gently as his hands: he leaves a series of bite marks all across Majima’s thighs, enjoying the way she whimpers and arches against his touch, like he wants more, like he wants Nishikiyama to bite chunks of meat off, which he would do if only he wouldn’t also be making a bloody mess with that.

What he does, instead, is burying his face against Majima’s crotch, nuzzling against it. The panties are so soft…

“Mmmh yeah, you like it,” Majima comments, but Nishikiyama doesn’t even deign him of a response, too focused on admiring the way her cock pushes against the fabric; he can almost see through them.

“You are such…” he begins, but he doesn’t even know how to continue. Besides, there’s something else he wants to do rather than talking, which is getting that dick inside his mouth.

First things first, he lowers the panties enough to free her cock - he can’t deny how pleased he is that it’s already erect - then he begins by licking the head, twirling his tongue against the slit. As he feels Majima shiver and moan at the sensation, he holds back a chuckle, but that’s just because he wants to focus on what he’s doing.

The temptation to tease him until all Majima can do is grab him by the hair and force his cock into his mouth is strong - he did this once already and he loved it - but he finds himself short on patience this time around, so he parts his lips and takes her cock in his mouth, going down until he begins to feel her pubes tickling his nose. Only then he goes back up, and then lowers himself again, going up and down, up and down.

“So good…” Majima praises, and Nishikiyama’s moans around his cock, his words inflating his ego and getting him just a bit more wet than he already was.

As much as he wants to believe himself above them, praises always get to Nishikiyama.

Deep down, he still wants to be a good boy, doesn’t he? To get some sort of recognition.

Luckily for him, Majima is always generous with her praises.

“Nishi-chan… You’ll make me come if you keep up like that.”

Well, we can’t have that now, can’t we?

Nishikiyama pulls away from Majima’s cock, ignoring the trail of spit and precum on his chin - he doesn’t mind the mess as long as it’ll get cleaned later - and crawls back over her, helped by Majima who, as soon as he begins to get up, grabs him by the hips and helps him to get in position.

He’s waited, but now it’s finally time to get what he wants: he takes Majima’s cock in his hand, lining it against his entrance. He’s so horny that he foregoes any kind of preparation, but it doesn’t matter; he likes the burn of the stretch.

Without waiting any other second, he sinks onto Majima’s cock, closing his eyes as he lets the feeling of suddenly being so full overtake him.

Majima moans, but she also looks a bit taken aback by all this rushing.

“Shouldn’t we slow down?” he asks in fact.

“Funny that you of all people would propose that,” Nishikiyama scoffs, opening his eyes so that he can glare at her. He’s gotta say, she looks way better when she’s under him.

He rests his hands on her stomach, a bit to steady himself, a bit to keep Majima still as he sets the rhythm, sliding up and down his length, huffing and panting, trying not to moan because he refuses to show Majima how much he’s into it.

It lasts just about a second before Majima snatches Nishikiyama’s hands, holding them still, making him fall forward over him, then she plants her feet on the mattress for better leverage and begins to truly go down on Nishikiyama, ramming his cock in and out of him.

Any effort from Nishikiyama to hold any form of dignity goes up in smoke once the first moan breaks through his lips. After that, there’s no stopping it.

He can’t even move, locked in place by Majima, who grins seeing him in difficulty, because he knows that as uptight as he acts, he loves to be put in his place.

Their faces are so close that they could kiss, but what Majima does instead is raising his head enough that he can whisper in Nishikiyama’s ear.

“Well well, if I’m a common whore, what does this make you? My bitch?”

Nishikiyama lips quiver, and he involuntarily moans as a spark of electricity spreads throughout his entire body.

“That’s right…”

There’s nothing Nishikiyama can do except taking Majima’s cock, and he does it eagerly even though he’d like to have more freedom of movement. Still, he goes along with her thrusts as much as he can, pushing down when she pushes up, and oh god he can swear that every time he feels her getting even deeper than before.

“Gonna make a mess?” Majima asks, though he looks like he already knows the answer. It pays that by now she knows Nishikiyama pretty well.

All Nishikiyama can do is to nod, unable to produce any kind of sound that isn’t moans. Yeah, he’s going to make a big mess, and soon too.

“C’mon pretty boy, lemme see…” Majima encourages him, still going, leaving Nishikiyama with no other choice but to obey him.

“Fuuuuuuuuck!”

His orgasm hits him almost like a punch, and Nishikiyama can feel himself getting looser and wetter as he cums. He can hear Majima exclaim something - he sounds excited - but his brain isn’t functioning enough for him to be able to also understand his words; he only knows that Majima’s got him squirting and there’s nothing he can do to stop it.

Does he want him to stop, though? Of course not. The more Majima continues, the better he feels, and who cares that he’s getting everything wet. The only thing that matters is how good this is.

He feels like he’s in heaven.

He’s clamping around Majima so hard that he too can’t help but to come from the weird mix of pain and pleasure that she’s very fond of.

“Such a good boy…” she says, filling Nishikiyama with her seed, while all he can do it take everything he gives him.

When Majima lets his wrists go, he collapses on him, every ounce of energy leaving his body. Majima too seems tired, and she sighs as he pulls away; her dress is completely ruined and dirty, but given how hot Nishi-chan was while he was doing those things to her, he gets a pass.

A frown appears on Nishikiyama’s face when Majima begins petting his hair, and a few strands begin to fall down, not held back by gel anymore, but he doesn’t have it in his to readjust them, so for now he’ll leave them like this.

Just when he was beginning to doze off, Majima pats him on the arm.

“Oi… You ok?”

“Peachy,” Nishikiyama replies, then, realizing that he’s still over Majima, he rolls off of her landing on his right, a habit that he’s adopted so that Majima wouldn’t have to turn every time to look at him - and he still acts like he doesn’t care about her.

She chuckles, then she raises herself on her elbows, looking at what used to be a very beautiful dress. “I should charge you for this?”

“Sure, why not?” Nishikiyama snorts. It’s not like he lacks the money now. “How much was it?”

Majima chuckles, sending a grin his way. “Weeeeell, since you’re kinda my favorite guy, I’ll let ya get off the hook this time…”

She turns on her side, hand creeping over Nishikiyama’s chest, fingertips brushing against his skin.

Nishikiyama has to fight with all his might not to smile, refusing to indulge in this soft moment; he won’t leave himself open like a fool. Still, even though he’s not actually smiling, his expression is at least relaxed, sated.

He says he’s not going to indulge, and yet he still hasn’t told Majima to leave, nor has he moved away from her touch.

He needs a cigarette.

Yeah, he needs one, but he can’t bring himself to move.

Maybe he could ask Majima to fetch him one, but he doesn’t feel like talking either; besides she isn’t trying to strike a conversation either, so he doesn’t see why he should bother with that.

Fine, he guesses he will allow himself to indulge in this calm, but this will be the only time he does it, and only because he doesn’t want to be rude to Majima - he doesn’t want to get on her bad side after all.

In the end he can’t really say he regrets bringing her as his plus one, despite everything.

Actually, if he ever has the occasion, he thinks with a smirk, he might do it again…

#manishiki #akira nishikiyama #goro majima #yakuza #rgg #yakuza kiwami #my fics #mine #spicy #koi son

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bigskydreaming · 4 years

Text

Biden does not have the nomination yet. It is not yet a matter of “a vote for Biden is a vote against Trump, anything else is a vote for Trump.”

And until it is, until either Sanders or Biden has all the delegates they need, peoples’ criticisms of Biden are absolutely relevant. And even should Biden GET the nomination, c’mon guys, there is STILL room to be aware of everything Biden IS and everything about him that needs OPPOSING, even WHILE still opposing Trump. This is not counter-intuitive....if you are against most of what Trump has done, because it is WRONG rather than it is just Trump who did it, and did it in obvious ways, then this is vital, I’d argue, because Biden isn’t going to address a lot of it once in the White House unless people DO keep in mind what is and isn’t likely to still be an issue in a Biden presidency.

This isn’t divisive, this is NECESSARY. If you can’t find a way to hold both truths in your mind: “Trump absolutely needs to be ousted, and opposed, and his works undone,” as well as “Biden has a long history of doing harm in his various seats, and he is the lesser of two evils ONLY in some respects and its important to know what those are because evil is still evil”....that’s something to WORK on, not just “Biden or bust.”

And to be clear, I’m not advocating for “Bernie or bust” either. I’m simply saying: This is all more complicated than accusing people of having brain worms for thinking “Guy who won’t expand health care as much” is the same as “Guy who is killing people.”

Let me be perfectly, 100% clear: If Biden gets the nomination, if it comes down to him or Trump, I am voting for Biden, hands down. But I will be doing so not thinking that Biden is in any way a more moral choice, but because I think the true danger of Trump is in him serving these past years as a rallying point for all the most vocal white supremacist and homophobic and misogynistic elements within our society, allowing them to feel emboldened and having no shame about expressing their hate openly. I think the true danger of Trump’s presidency is how little of it is actually Trump doing anything other than acting as a magnet that draws all focus and trains all eyes on him, even as his cabinet stocked to over-flowing with white-supremacists, antisemitic, homophobic and transphobic and eugenics-advocating assholes go about ACTIVELY advancing agendas of hate behind him while he serves as the catch-all for all opposition.

That absolutely needs to be opposed, and defeated, but fuck this self-defeating nonsense that this means the work will be OVER the second Trump is gone, whenever and however that happens. And I think for as much as people accuse some of us of doing the enemy’s work for them by sowing division and dividing our efforts and how this is doomed to be self-sabotaging and backfire on all of us, I think the same is true of saying things like the only real drawback to Biden is ‘doesn’t want to expand Health Care as much as Sanders whereas he’s otherwise not remotely comparable to Guy Who Is Killing People.”

Because BOTH ARE SELF-DEFEATING. Both set up only ONE THING as a goal or a focus that needs tackling and carries the implicit “and then we can rest” instead of holding up as a goal or focus that both need defeating or plenty of people are still going to die, as they’ve been dying all along.

If you’re going to go with the Devil You Know because he’s also the Lesser Evil of the two Devils You Know....

You still need to know who he is, and who he is is not just guy who won’t expand health care as much and claiming him to be such and nothing more is DANGEROUS.

Vote for Biden if it comes down to him and Trump, yes! But do so in a way that will let you get right back to work opposing all the shit HE prioritizes and stands for, every bit as much as you claim to oppose all the same with Trump!

Stop treating this as an impossible ask. It is not as simple as evil or not evil. It is as simple as making the choice that ensures most people survive....and then from there, actually ensuring that means that the most people survive.

Which can only happen when you keep in mind how Biden will still be dangerous even once Trump is gone, and who will still need protection from him and his administration and policies, even once Trump’s are gone....and especially because there are a number of those policies that Biden, based on his own policies of the past, is not likely to prioritize or even be helpful in getting dismantled.

Any posts responding to this with anything remotely on the lines of “you’re encouraging people not to vote for Biden and thus helping Trump win” will be ignored the same way they ignore that THAT IS NOT WHAT THIS POST IS, OR SAYS, OR WANTS. I am not responsible for your inability to read what this post actually says, or your unwillingness to hold two not actually opposing viewpoints and priorities in your head at the same time. I am being as clear as I possibly can be on what I will be doing if Biden is the nominee, and why, and how none of that makes Biden’s worst flaws or history irrelevant or a distraction from Trump.

First off:

“Won’t expand healthcare that much” IS actively letting people die. GoFundMe’s biggest usage is trying to raise money for people whose health care isn’t keeping them alive and most of those goals are never actually met, and that’s literally killing people.

Please be cognizant of what kind of people are most being killed this way. Ones who have the most trouble MEETING (often) impossible goals. The most marginalized members of society.

If anyone is still framing the health care issue in their own heads as a matter of whether or not they can always pay for their own medical expenses, or will always be able to, please understand this disregards the many people who flat out can’t, and die every day as a result. Homeless people, people kicked out of their homes for being gay or trans or neurodivergent, not having access to quality health care for those reasons or turned away by the specialists they desperately need because the specialists’ only concerns are they can’t afford to pay. Ex-cons who are largely barred access to jobs with good medical benefits, and are largely barred access to the goodwill of random internet strangers willing to shell out some money of their own for their gofundme campaigns. And so on, and so on.

Absolutely the camps and detention facilities are a huge ongoing issue, but its a huge ongoing issue MOST being talked about throughout these entire past four years by a lot of the exact same leftists being accused of taking focus away from the very issues they are doing the most to highlight.

Now onto Biden specifically:

Are Biden’s positions on everything identical to Trump? No, but for starters, Biden wrote the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, responsible for building more prisons, increasing prison sentences, deploying more cops, and increasing and furthering the exploitation of prison labor, etc.

He’s long been a major proponent of capital punishment, directly leading to the creation of over 60 new capital offenses including murder of federal law enforcement officers. And oh yeah, Biden also voted against limiting appeals and rejecting racial statistics in death penalty appeals.....which would be great if the vast majority of the new death penalty offenses he had a hand in creating - like the murder of police - haven’t been massively disproportionate in who they end up targeting and who ends up charged with and convicted of them:

Like carjackings, acts of terrorism (just hardly ever acts of domestic terrorism aka the mass shootings of white supremacists, antisemites and disgruntled white guys), and the many drug-related offenses that stem from him being known for decades as a ‘drug warrior’ behind many leading efforts in the war on drugs.

Such as how in the 80s he was the head of the Senate Committee responsible for passing most of the most punitive measures against drug users, during the crack epidemic that was largely created to target and make scapegoats of lower class drug users and PoC, whom were at the time denoted as statistically more likely to use crack cocaine than powder cocaine....

And given that Biden himself sponsored and co-wrote the Anti-Drug Abuse Act which specifically and deliberately laid out hugely harsher penalties for crack cocaine use than were received for being convicted of using power cocaine.....aka a particular favorite past-time of rich white guys (including politicians and political staffers)....all during and throughout the crack epidemic Biden and his cohorts happily whipped up public moral outrage about....

This directly makes him and his political career an inciting element in the huge disparities in prison populations, all stemming from this drug warrior’s leading role in a war on drugs he helped get underway and become what it eventually became in the first place. (Please keep in mind he was famously critical of REAGAN for not being strongly enough anti-drug, as well as George H. W. Bush.)

Granted, Biden admitted his role in crafting and enforcing legislation that led to such huge disparities, at least by the time he was asked about such things in the debates of the 2007 Democratic primaries.

But to my knowledge, to this day he has yet to ever similarly walk back his role in things like oh, the Comprehensive Forfeiture Act in 1983. Which directly empowered and has steadily more and more further increased the power of drug enforcement agencies to seize assets of even just those charged with anything from drug possession to intent to distribute. Which in turn, almost always directly affects the ability of defendants to pay for their own defense instead of being limited to the representation of overworked and underpaid public defenders. Not to mention limits their ability to repeatedly avail themselves to the unlimited appeals Biden nominally has always been in favor for.

Or there’s the Illicit Drug Anti-Proliferation Bill which was a bit of shady shitmanship that squeezed through thanks to being attached to an unvetted, unrelated and super fucking vague child protection bill that has often been criticized as overreaching in scope. And this IDAP Bill, despite its superficially stated intentions, has historically most often been used by DEA agents as an intimidation tactic wielded against drug-reform protestors at rallies and other such events.

Biden might never have openly had his support base chanting Build the Wall, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t vote for the Secure Fence Act of 2006, which partially funded the construction of 700 miles of fencing along the Mexican border.

And his stance for over ten years about whether he’d allow sanctuary cities to ignore federal law has been a clear and concise NO, which y’know, given that’s kinda the whole point of sanctuary cities....and given that sanctuary cities have been absolutely CRUCIAL to even attempting to stave off the worst of Trump’s anti-immigration efforts, travel bans, etc.....this may not make him worse than Trump, but I fail to see that particular stance helping all that much even after Trump is gone.

Because Biden might not have put the same efforts into motion as Trump has, had he been the one in office, but I do not for a second believe he will in ANY way make reversing or undoing some of them his priority. All of that is just as likely to be an uphill battle in a Biden presidency. His track record speaks to itself as to how much he’s likely to make anything like abolishing ICE or getting rid of the detention facilities his first order of business - or even second, third, or even tenth....UNLESS PEOPLE FORCE HIM TO MAKE IT THAT, INSTEAD OF JUST TRUSTING THAT HE WILL BECAUSE HE’S NOT TRUMP.

The caveat I have here is that Biden and his inner circle and support base are unlikely to ever be that visibly resistant to repealing Trump’s anti-immigration efforts, or that visibly in favor of what’s happened there, and he isn’t going to campaign on a platform of overt racism.....but that’s kinda the point. He’s never needed to, in order to still do a huge amount of damage to an untold number of lives over the decades, all while being able to claim to be nominally or superficially progressive and use that to advance his own career.

Trump doesn’t care about hiding his racism....and Biden doesn’t try all that hard to either. But he’s always known he doesn’t really have to try all that hard....just to hide it just enough to claim it isn’t there and its nothing worth anyone worrying about or pushing back against. Plausible deniability - made all the easier and all the more plausible by having someone like Trump to point to and know just by doing so people will breathe a sigh of relief because whew, at least he’s not Trump. Not that this is likely a huge comfort to the people killed long before now, due to his prison policies, capital offense expansion, and war on drugs that happen to not be the right kind of drugs, or being snorted in the right form of those drugs, or snorted by the right people.

And putting a face and a claim to things that absolutely none of his actual efforts back up or are even aimed in the same direction as....this is something that extends to pretty much everything else about him.

Yeah, he reversed his stance on voting for DADT and DOMA in years prior, when as Vice President he said he was totally fine with the idea of men marrying men and women marrying women and each enjoying all the same benefits and civil rights and liberties as anyone else. Course, that doesn’t actually reverse how he voted, nor did he actually have anything to do with striking down the results of his and others’ votes as unconstitutional.

And yeah, Biden drafted the Violence Against Women Act, which he’s famously called the most significant piece of legislation he’s crafted throughout his political career and the one he’s most proud of, citing it as the beginning of a ‘historic commitment to women and children victimized by domestic violence and sexual assault.’ Not that it helped Anita Hill that much, nor that he ever seemed all that interested in helping, believing or supporting her, despite whatever he may have claimed a couple years ago at the start of the #MeToo movement or around the Kavanaugh proceedings, when he stated he’d always believed Anita Hill and voted against Clarence Thomas.

(With Thomas of course still a member of the Supreme Court, alongside Kavanaugh now, thanks to Trump. And Thomas still being famously considered one of its most conservative justices. And still someone whose appointment to the Court might not ever have happened had not Biden - the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee overseeing Thomas’ nomination to the court - made the choice to never call forward four female witnesses who’d been waiting in the wings the whole time to testify on Hill’s behalf and speak to her credibility. With this decision of Biden’s only ever being described as the result of a ‘private, compromise deal between Republicans and then-Judiciary Committee Chair Joe Biden,’ after which all four other women’s testimony was deemed irrelevant, and thus a waste of the court’s time.

And sure, Biden as of just last year supports repealing the Hyde Amendment, that he’s only supported since as far back as ‘76. The Hyde Amendment, of course, blocks federal funding from being used to pay for an abortion except in the specific provision of an abortion being needed to save the woman’s life, or when the pregnancy is the result of incest or rape. Of course, even through all those decades that Biden did support the Hyde Amendment, he pretty famously never felt it went far enough, and thought it shouldn’t include a provision allowing for federal funds to be used to pay for an abortion that stemmed from incest or rape. But that doesn’t speak to his personality or priorities either, obviously, since he took it back (while preparing to hopefully run against pussy-grabbing Trump).

And Biden’s not as interested in giving billionaires tax cuts as Trump is, for instance, since he was always against even George W. Bush’s tax cuts for Americans who made more than one million dollars a year. He was always of the belief that this money should then be put in a dedicated Homeland Security and Public Safety Trust Fund, to invest specifically in increased law enforcement. Joey does love him some cops.

And Biden’s not quite as likely to go to war compared to how often Trump seems to have us poised on the brink of it. Biden only favored sending American troops to Darfur, is a self-described Zionist who has defended various acts of aggression by the Israeli army against Palestinians, and was of the opinion that the biggest problem with our involvement in the Syrian Civil War was that Europe didn’t trust we had a plan there.

Of course, much like with numerous other stances, its not like there’s not plenty to point to as proof Biden’s invested in keeping us out of any international conflicts. For instance, he’s been a longterm advocate for ‘hard-headed diplomacy’ against Iran that included pushing for coordinated international sanctions against them...except then he voted against a measure to declare the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization, said war with Iran wouldn’t just be a mistake, it’d be a disaster, and threatened to personally begin impeachment proceedings against George W. Bush if he attempted to start a war with Iran. This was in December of 2007. Course, then in September 2008, he said that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps was a terrorist organization and that the Bush administration already had the power and right to declare them as such, soooo......hmm.

And Biden did vote against the first Gulf War in 1990. Then supported the use of force against Iraq in 1998 and expressed a commitment to taking down Hussein, even if it meant being in it for the long haul....which as Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2002, he ratified by voting to authorize war against Iraq, going on record as firmly believing that Hussein possessed chemical and biological weapons and was seeking nuclear weapons.

Then again, in 2006, Biden did go on to say that the original authorization for going to war with Iraq had been a mistake that was due to Bush “using his congressional authority unwisely” (and that Biden had no role in unwisely helping him obtain), and that there were no stockpiled weapons in Iraq and likely never had been.

Which Biden then followed up in 2008 by saying in his opinion the real mistake had been in labeling Iraq the focus of the War on Terror, instead of Afghanistan, which he believed was really the focus all along, and that we should leave Iraq....and shift our focus fully back there. Because see, the problem was the war in Iraq was a war of choice, whereas the war in Afghanistan was a war of necessity.

And he did have this to say in 2011 about getting involved in the conflict in Libya: "NATO got it right. In this case, America spent $2 billion and didn't lose a single life. This is more the prescription for how to deal with the world as we go forward than it has in the past."

Course, five years later in 2016, in an interview with Charlie Rose, Biden stated he was "strongly against going to Libya" due to the instability it would cause within the country. He said, "My question was, 'OK, tell me what happens.' He's gone. What happens? Doesn't the country disintegrate? What happens then? Doesn't it become a place where it becomes a petri dish for the growth of extremism? And it has."

And then there’s his stances on North Korea...and Russia...and Central America....and Cuba.....all of which can be summed up as “that’s Joe Biden’s hot take on this issue, tune back in next week where he plays devil’s advocate with himself and argues the exact opposite.”

So yeah, all of that and more is who Biden is and always has been. Do not buy into him being someone who has grown and changed, because he’s more recently said the right things - especially as opposed to Trump. Biden has ALWAYS said the right things for the time he’s saying them at.....and history has always shown him willing to say the exact opposite, as soon as its more to his advantage to change his tune to that instead.

He is not the lesser of two evils, IMO, he is just the less overt of two evils. But make no mistake.....I can not tell anyone what to do, nor am I trying to, ultimately, beyond just asking people to BE AWARE of things like this. I can only really tell you what I’m going to do, and if Biden gets the nomination, I AM going to vote for him, not just to get rid of Trump....but everyone Trump brought with him, and the way Trump’s spent four years assuring every hateful piece of shit in America that they are not alone in their hate, and they have presidential approval.

I am simply ALSO saying, at the same time, that I do believe that even a Biden presidency can help push back against this, by virtue of at least being the American people saying We Do Not Support Trump or Want Him Back in enough quantities as to shame at least some of the more hateful and cowardly elements of our society back into silence.....

But that even while doing so, it IMO will remain MORE CRUCIAL THAN EVER to keep in mind.....none of those people or their hate simply sprang into being when Trump took office. They were here all along, and just because BEFORE Trump many of them weren’t brave enough to be seen out of the shadows, doesn’t mean that politicians like Joe Biden haven’t seen them and been fine with them and even agreeing with them and catering to them in various ways all along. Its just, unlike Trump, Biden cares too much about being seen as doing and saying the right things, the progressive things, to do any of those dealings openly, speak to any of those elements directly. But that’s never meant he’s above dealing with them, or profiting from their support.

So elect Biden if that’s what we have to do, even if only because his desire to be seen as progressive is at least a lever to ply between him and such elements of our society, where no such lever exists between Trump and them at all.

But it needs to be remembered that such a lever is only as effective as WE MAKE USE OF IT, AND FORCE HIM TO CATER MORE TO ACTUAL PROGRESSIVE PUBLIC OPINION RATHER THAN ALLOW HIM THE TIME AND ENERGY TO BE TWO-FACED THE MOMENTS OUR BACKS ARE TURNED.

And that if we do not keep this in mind, the latter is very much something Biden will do, just as he has done it countless times before.

AND ALSO PLEASE KEEP IN MIND:

HE STILL IS NOT THE NOMINEE YET, AND UNTIL HE IS STOP TAKING IT FOR GRANTED.

There is a marked difference between preparing for less than your preferred scenarios, and taking for granted that you might as well go ahead and settle for them already.

Too much of the latter has too much to do with the current state of our country, SO WHAT IF WE STOPPED DOING IT.

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hippyspacewitch · 6 years

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This has been building up for a while and this recent “bible” argument really bothers me. I can’t and won’t stay quiet about this. This is pungent with Fox News and the extreme Republican views. How can you not feel for people. It is genuinely upsetting and heart breaking. Those who stand on the side of coldness and disregard for life. You’re beyond despicable. There just aren’t words powerful enough to describe how much. Hypocritical. Sickening. These are words we could rightfully use to set the tone for an administration that strongly advocates putting children into concentration camps, separating families, while at the same time declaring it always necessary to follow through with every pregnancy. How cruel and lacking self awareness can you be? No, this is done in order to keep people down, and maintain control. Willful ignorance evolves into ultimate evil again.

I am not a sadness seeking person. I’m not the misery chick. Coming off a good high, actually. I’m living my life, feeling good. Aren’t I a lucky duck. Sweat is smelly, but it feels so good to get out of my skin for a bit. Looking more fit, take a pic, feeling happy. Whelp, let’s take a little trip to yon’ internet, gonna post another selfie of my cute face, look at those dimples! Wait, I’m not looking at my dimples anymore.

Looking at what’s going on in the world instead, so I continue reading NEWS, which is based on FACTS. I know. REALLY crazy to hear. Hopefully that catches on one day. Regardless, I am incredibly saddened. Only wish to repost the unpleasant articles I read, hoping it helps create awareness. It doesn’t feel like an appropriate time for sharing pleasantries or my happiness, because I’m truly very upset with the direction this current regime is leading our nation.

We weren’t too far from that standard already, but snowflakes are pushing back hard, trying to double down on ending crucial necessities needed to maintain a semi-capable, albeit heavily flawed, semi-civilized society. So many people have died to protect the right just to exist with dignity, relative to that previously stated fact alone, as it pertains mainly to the elongated fight for basic human rights. People of all races and cultural backgrounds have died for that much. I’m wholeheartedly dissatisfied and sickened by the actions of not just the notorious current administration, but the White House too, along with those who see the overall standard of humanity that so many people hold, as anything short of unacceptable. If you accept this, you should feel ashamed. I can’t say that enough, if you don’t hear your momma’s voice. If you continue to follow me, I’ll make sure you hear my voice enough.

I’ll make you feel something, whether you just stop reading because you can’t handle the truth, or if you’re feeling froggy, ready to speak against me, (I’ll weed y’all out.) or hey, you evolve at least far enough to want to see the world be better someday. (Work toward the latter.)

Therefore I am strongly urging and pleading with COGNITIVELY DISSONANT WHITE PEOPLE out there. It is long past time you MAKE A CHANGE, concerning the way you think about racism and race. SPECIFICALLY ADDRESSING people of PRIVILEGE here, anyone born into the Christian faith, not specific enough, here - WHITE PEOPLE! Yes, I am one, and I even fit all that above criteria. Well look at that. I can speak for myself and therefore others like me. Coming from a place where I was misdiagnosed AMAB (that’s assigned male at birth) I can absolutely say it is EASY for me to recognize the first 27 years of my life I was living with the highest standard of privilege in the United States. I still live with privilege as a white person, even as a transgender woman.

Anyone who knows me well enough, might say, “Well, Eris you’ve described what it’s like to live in an impoverished area, with high levels of crime, gang violence, and from what you tell me, you had reason to be afraid. That doesn’t sound like privilege” To which I would respond to myself as someone else, for the purposes of making a point in this hypothetical scenario that fits my point in the end, “Self that isn’t myself, because I’m not an idiot. We see comment sections for days, with white people fired up, wanting so bad to let the world know from their brand new iPhone, they experienced some semblance of living within poverty. White people essentially bragging about having a cup of coffee in the ghetto. It’s either that, or meth head white people living in a meth head white people neighborhood. Fox News’ most loyal demographic. White people who take unemployment, have tons of babies, vote Republican, damn liberals out there who are fighting to keep them off the street, with extremely limited resources given. Some viewers don’t know the definition of ironic, but isn’t it ironic? Ignorance isn’t at all self aware, until you spell it out for them slowly, and then there’s a chance they briefly acknowledge it before turning away, and forgetting it happened entirely. That said we must strive to look further than our individual experience for lessons.”

I heard that hot garbage living in Washington. Surrounded by meth heads. Working at the gas station, you here people talk. False arguments straight from hypocritical, entitled white people who are just looking to close the gap and get even more. So many of them are far too shameless, they’ll just admit it themselves. Who else are they going to tell? I can’t make this up. People who think like this are naturally afraid, as you should be. Fear clouds our minds far too often, but white people like this are next level.

Pissed off they have to share, like an overgrown petulant brat, ready to lick whatever unseen, promised hints of scum off a criminal inheritors shitty ass boot, as long as they feel like that boot isn’t treading on them. I’m not at all going to even get into my experience living in a bad neighborhood, here. I won’t even get into how long either. I can tell you, it was bad enough for me to want to know why. Now, I know why, and it’s more important to know. Privilege white politicians redistricting people based on race.

If you’re at all uncomfortable hearing white people, think how other people must be feeling about the whole sociology of race and everyday human relations. Oh I’m sorry, you can’t know, and neither can I. White people contribute to poverty maintaining class and privilege, institutionalizing racism through laws they create with that specific intention. Now they want to shut immigrants out entirely. The rich are a head of the curve in terms of closing the gap. Not out of strictly self preservation, the real goal is to maintain constant control and domination, basically keep people of color down.

This is barely getting close to just scratching the surface about race. A subject, I actually don’t like speaking a whole lot about. I don’t feel like I’m appropriate representation, for one thing. Personally, more of a reader on the subject. I will explain my experience learning about racism. It was fairly early on. I didn’t learn it, because of the area I lived in. The area I lived in was small, bad areas are small or larger depending on the states race issues and redistricting. I learned it before I moved there actually. There’s no way to put this without causing discomfort, so I apologize.

My biological donor called my former step dad the n word constantly. I actually asked him about it. I was very young, so I only remember my stepdad at the time, explaining certain things in a very delicate way, mostly to not harm my innocence. Saying he doesn’t actually feel like he’s a racist, that he’s just mad. It was hard on my mom and step dad to struggle with not wanting to shatter the image of my biological father, versus him basically doing it to himself. Being an empath, I recognized it was difficult, eventually I was calling them out on it. That doesn’t really have much to do with where I’m going, it’s just a bit of background to my mind altering experience as it pertains to learning about race.

Once I was older, around fifth or sixth grade, a few people would target me at school, because I’m white. It wasn’t until we got older, for the last couple years before I moved. I used to just be frustrated that we couldn’t keep seeing past it. I had yet to discover why that thought is selfish, but I was a good hearted kid. I thought it wasn’t fair, remembering how I felt, as it pertains to expecting people to learn English. How many extra languages are you fluent in, again. It isn’t easy for most people to casually pick up another language.

It’s important to realize, I’d been taught discrimination is wrong. I was taught not to blame other people for my problem. Once again, more learned behavior. My whole point is coming into fruition soon. Yes, I was discriminated against for being a white person. There it is, did you catch it? You might only be able to imagine why people of color would discriminate against white people; if you watch bullshit news and drink hot garbage for tea, wake up and smell the coffee!

If you are not lacking in awareness, you don’t have to look very far to see racism for what it is, and know the difference between perceived racism (discrimination) and racism as a contributing factor in our society. A real problem that effects people of color in so many complex ways, I truly can’t comprehend. It’s hard enough being trans and dealing with people hating you, before they know you at all. That’s one instance I can peel back in a big old nasty onion with many layers. Another privilege for white people, along with ignoring it, as far I am concerned it’s absolutely willful ignorance.

Deflate this desperate flotation mechanism and aesthetics. I hope this at least brings people the shame and guilt too many people are tired of feeling and want to just move past. Check yourself white people, you have no idea what it’s like to struggle daily as a disenfranchised person of color. You might have problems, but your privilege confines your experience.

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crstapor · 3 years

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Why I am so Cynical

“I say unto you: one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.” - Zarathustra

Part 3

Let me stop shouting - sometimes I get carried away. Because it needs be clearly stated that my perspective on the matter at hand is not based solely on 'personal' experience (of course one can never deny the importance such datum possess!) but also 'phenomenological' experience, which is, clearly, a different animal altogether. That this menagerie has informed my thought will surprise no-one who's ever tried it; thinking, I mean. How else, if one is being as honest as possible, can one arrive at any conclusions whatsoever? While the first part of this essay waxed rather subjectively poetic, allow me to offer this third as a sort of empirical respite. Facts, good reader, let me proffer facts to further found my cynicism most severe.

But let me first define the scope these facts will express. The working title for this missive to minds who want to think was 'A Polemic against American Modernity'. Allowing that my interests, here, lie not north to Canada or south of Texas, the parameters of this diatribe should be well understood by all with even meager cartographic skill.

Superficial perhaps I've structured these facts into three distinct phenomena; the surface, the self, and the symbol. I do so not to make any sweeping ontologic distinctions or assertions, rather, to help me think through them. System-building is not my purpose here - system-analysis is. The facets of modern America culture were well in place before I came along, and, unless I'm completely mistaken, I've done little to add to or enhance any of them. Apart from the clear truth of my having lived with and through them the vast majority of my mortal years. This 'truth', my citizenship and biography, allow me credence to present what follows as 'fact'; though of course it's still just one man's opinion!

Knowledge!

The Surface

Politics. Democracy. American Exceptionalism. Yeah right. So, help me out here, we have a great democracy because we vote for other people to get to vote on who actually becomes leader? Unless of course nine robes get that special privilege - based off of their admitted political preferences naturally! - like back in 2000. How the legislature is just a club for the privileged, connected, and the rich (which is almost redundant). How once 'money' became speech only those with 'money' had speech. The Founders are grave-rolling and Mussolini's having a laugh - fascism much? Let's remember Benito's definition of the term; which is when State and corporate interests converge (more or less). And we find that just about everywhere we look up in DC these days. Apparently we have the 'political will' to help banks, big oil, agribusiness, gun manufacturers, and all the other consolidated purveyors of terror, hate or control (sure, tobacco had to be sacrificed - occasionally you must throw the peasants a bone to keep the lie alive) but can't find the time to help out 'we the people': see continuing cuts to social programs; see the limp-dick governmental response to the housing/mortgage crisis of 2008 - ?; see the student loan pyramid scheme; see a 'minimum' wage that consistently fails to keep up with inflation; see a 'healthcare' plan that mandates private citizens purchase a product from non-governmental, for-profit companies - and taxes them if they don't; see how prohibition (here considered against natural, earth-born narcotics) continues to fuel a for-profit prison system and further erodes race relations; see how the gravest existential threat to the species (climate change, for realz) is perpetually laughed off and ignored; see how we lecture others on human rights while keeping Gitmo open and denying homosexuals equal protection under the law; see how NASA's (quite possibly, from a historical perspective, the greatest achievement of our modern society) budget keeps getting gutted while their priorities are schizophrenically re-ordered with each administration; see how children keep slaughtering children with weapons of war and no one can even attempt to do anything about it; see how voter ID laws are passed like Jim Crow; see how the innate sovereignty of the nation has been torn asunder now that private corporations can be 'to big to fail'; see an ever increasingly militarized police force; see the constitutional absurdity of 'free speech zones'; see democratic campaigns where one guy runs but once elected that guy's nowhere to be found and in his place is a carbon copy of the last guy who held the office ... See how our 'political parties' are two sides of the same coin ... But let's stop here and consider that last point in greater depth, as it is so vital to any understanding of 'democracy' in America ... Republicans, Democrats; Jefferson has been famously remembered, quoted, as saying once our (more properly his) democracy devolved into a two party system it would be a democracy no more. And I've certainly been a witness to that in my life. Sure, America isn't a dictatorship, but it sure as hell isn't the country Jefferson helped forge. And the main reason for that, to my eyes, seems to be the consolidation of power in the hands of politicians with more in common with each other than their constituents. R or D you can bet they're there for Wall Street or the military-information-industrial complex. Anyone else? Good luck with that citizen ... And while they're both complicit in gutting the middle class, let's take a moment to reflect, ethically, on that matter ... You can't blame the snake for its venom, but you can sure as hell blame the snake-oil salesman for shilling his bullshit wares. In case that metaphor wasn't clear enough allow me to decode it for you:

R = snake. D = snake-oil salesman.

Switching gears - though not by much! - let's shift to the state of modern American entertainment. To the uninitiated possibly a trite transition, any who've watched politics lately will surely see the connection. And just as our politics smell rotten, the main complaint with what passes as entertainment these days is how bad it tastes. Yes, it's a question of taste, as it seems most Americans have none. From 'reality TV' (which is surely anything but - though let's not forget Barnum's maxim!), to a pop-music ecosystem that's cannibalized itself to the point of parody, a movie industry that can seemingly fill ten months of releases with one script, the apotheosis of sport, the devolution of literature into a hobby for diarists, the way the performing arts are continually hoarded into smaller and smaller urban green zones, well, it's just hard to swallow most of that without gagging. Or throwing up. Yet a more concerted analysis along these lines is not called for here - we have much too much ground yet to cover.

Speaking of ground and covering it why not mention war? That old playground of glory now some video game where you might win many things; though honor's not among them. The full transition here is yet to occur, but we're definitely in the middle of it. Drones, air strikes, GPS targeting and bombs dropped from orbit (sure, not yet - wait for it!). The complete impersonalization of the other; that total objectification of the enemy (you better believe the pornographers have drone-envy). Let's not equivocate; it's one thing to look someone in the eye and take their life - quite another to push a button sixteen time-zones away and watch an image of indiscriminate carnage. How long will it be before we don't even let a homo sapien sapien push that button? How long before the machines are killing us on their own .?. Nothing to be cynical about here!

And if killing our 'enemies' has/is becoming so much more impersonal healing our 'own' has a fortiori. I'm not even going to start bandying about statistics but it's well known that of the 'first-world', 'post-industrialized' countries we're the only one that still considers healthcare a cash-grab instead of a human-right. And to what wonderful affect! Go ahead and try to ignore all the horror stories of your fellow Americans who lost it all because they couldn't pay their medical bills, or because they did. Pay no attention to record profit margins at insurance companies while the poor forgo all but emergency treatment and the wealth of the middle class is bled out and transferred to HMO executives. Sure, Uncle Tom tried to change all that - by passing a Republican plan even though the Ds had two branches of the federal government! - but when I tried to sign up for 'Obamacare' I still couldn't afford it even though I had $200 in the bank, no assets, and had been unemployed for over two years. If I lived in any other country where English is the primary language I'd be covered without paying a dime. My solution? To use the actual Republican plan - don't get sick!

But that should be easy since we all know of the three pillars of good health (diet, exercise, genetics) eating right is the easiest of all ... Hell. No, sorry, I was about to go all sarcastic and make it seem America knows nothing about sugar overload, HFCS, preservatives, the increasingly and horrifying inability of urbanites to access fresh foods (specifically the poor ones!), pesticides, pink slime, corn or corn or more corn or when will there ever be enough corn already, price gouging on foods that were produced the way they've been produced for centuries (read: organic, grass-fed, free-range), trans-fats, GMO proliferation in our breadbasket without an honest debate on the merits or looking at the science past what some corporation's panel has assured us is true, sodas, the food-gap, throwing away enough food daily to feed the world's hungry cuz it wouldn't make a dime, slaughterhouses like Auschwitz or Dachau ... That Quite Barbarism ... But that would be foolish - America knows all about that ... Why shouldn't it? America invented most of it …

And we invented the largest consumer-driven transportation system the world has ever seen to move all that food around. Sure, China will catch up with us eventually (if not already), but for the better part of three generations the US led the world in road-building and car-buying. Quite apart from the environmental effects this produced there was a profound psychological positive feed-back loop involved as well: one justifying the pre-dominate narrative of our consumer culture. Choice is sacred; you are special and unique and can reflect that through choice; so choose this product or this other one and express your uniqueness through possessing any one of these infinitely similar products; the choice is yours. Perhaps nowhere else in the market was this ‘story’ sold as diligently and aggressively than in the automobile industry. While it is true the US is, spatially speaking, a very large country, it is not true that every adult American needed or needs their own set of wheels to connect it. There are other options, other technologies that could’ve been employed to bring the masses together with more energy efficiency and communal cohesion. I admit it’s no Copernican Revolution, but the thought that Americans are so stubbornly self-interested and quick to discriminate opposed many of their European or native counterparts can not be divorced from the fact we all love to be in the driver’s seat. That commodified ‘freedom’ we are told awaits us on an open road with our very own internal combustion engine humming along in front of our feet; a freedom trains, buses, or carpooling can never provide. Again, notwithstanding the ecological impact of all this, the psychological dimension is impossible to ignore: even if we all owned Tesla’s that were powered by clean fusion charging stations it would still be me, me, me … which is quite naturally a completely uncynical disposition from which to hold a society together …

American’s fascination with their own value and freedom has of course been a dominate theme in the grand narrative of the country for some time; and while cars and roads were the major technological expression of that for much of the twentieth century, we have turned the corner here, in this regard, finding ourselves lost amid tiny little shiny screens that put the whole world inches from our eyes. With the advent of mobile computing the freedom so many seek isn’t conceived any longer by MPG rather MPBS. The new speed of information, and the promise of perpetual access, have enchanted the newer generations in much the same way vehicles did their antecedents. The technology is different while the story remains the same. It is still a self-centered freedom underlying the need, desire, to own the newest, quickest, coolest gadget. A freedom of information surely, yet one closely connected with the freedom cars brought their older relatives; it is as much economic as it is self-satisfying. The internet changed the game, naturally - and hail and well met etc. etc.! - but a claustrophobic observation remains … for a technology that has brought so many people together - and it has - it sure as hell does an awful good job sundering them as well … for you can’t find a public space anymore where a near-majority of your fellow citizens aren’t more interested in their precious little screens than those flesh and blood humans nearby. Perhaps this is just the necessary evolution of the social fabric - perhaps resistance is futile - though a social contract that has more to do with Facebook’s TOS opposed a Bill of Rights just (and forgive me for being so cynical) doesn’t seem like much of a society worth bothering with to this writer. Certainly not one worth the name.

Speaking of the modern technology we all now can’t live without, it seems to me a funny thing happened on the way to Google’s homepage … we now have access to all the information we can consume, on any topic, just a keystroke away, and look what we’re doing with it … I’m not just talking about social media or pornography, I mean the fundamental epistemological conundrum of an allegedly intelligent species that now has post-scarcity style access to information yet we’ve made of the web one colossal echo-chamber where the tribes huddle together in aggrieved resentment or ignorant bliss of the ‘others’ … look at it like this: in a day and age when the work of science (you know, that thing that made all this ((by which I mean ‘Modernity’ and all its toys)) possible) is more evenly, widely, and objectively disseminated than at any other time in history the public’s grasp and understanding of science and its work is at an all-time low. Basic data are disputed; empirical findings are called into question by anyone with a laptop, forget about a degree in the subject: what used to be considered non-issues, resolved subjects, are now argued over as if the Earth might actually be flat … all of which might just be good for a laugh if there weren’t actual existential threats to the species that only science can solve; yet we can’t even begin that discussion because some car salesman googled Glenn Beck and now we have legislatures that don’t think climate change is real; or they say the data doesn’t support an anthropogenic cause even though they never took a serious science course in their life; or that can’t be right because it doesn’t fit into our time-warp economy and a dollar today is obviously more important than our children’s future; or anyway shut-up idiot scientists just because you actually studied something other than law or business doesn’t mean you know any more than me because I have a high speed internet connection and I bookmarked the Drudge Report … how is it, philosophically speaking, tenable that the more information you have the stupider you become? I don’t know, but if you want a good example of the principle in action take a look at America today. Or just Google it …

Of course there is one thread that ties all these elements of ‘the surface’ together and that thread is consumerism as expressed by our current form of capitalism. The ascendancy of the dollar over all else (sorry God!). The desire to possess, acquire, consume. We are material creatures, we humans, and thus must consume to survive; fine: but do we have to do so in the manner we seem set on here and now? No, not at all, even suggesting that our’s is the only system, the only way to satiate the human hunger is absurd on its face as well as betraying an amnesiac’s conception of history. No, there are other paths, yet we have chosen this one, this ‘capitalism’ that mimics the terrors and rigors of the jungle at every turn. In the act of deifying money (more on that later) we have dehumanized ourselves. For the most part we are simple cogs in a vast machine that cares little or nothing for us; and so we care only for ourselves. The inherent egoism of the modern American psyche is spectacular to behold, certainly, in its primal vanity; at the same time giving the lie to any ethical system we still tenuously cling to as reminder of simpler days (sorry Christianity!). So we are, as a culture, no better than spoiled children grasping for another slice of pie. And while that’s certainly comical, it is also tragic, since such a system is not sustainable whatsoever (there is never enough pie). Neither history or science can provide any examples of such a system expanding into perpetuity (literature has given us a few but they are either satire or utopias ((same thing really))), and yet a sincere, concerted discussion on this issue has yet to percolate through the public sphere, or if so, only in the usual places and thus not given the sort of urgency it requires. But to have this conversation we all have to be ready to listen; it is not enough for the cynics and naysayers to keep shouting into the wild or the web: there has to be an audience, a receptive ear. Which brings us to our next section.

The Self

The problems elucidated in ‘The Surface’ are, to a great extent, symptoms of our sense of self, or, as is more often (if paradoxically) the case, our lack of one. While I am specifically referring to the modern American ‘self’, I’m going to be doing so with large brushstrokes; forming great swathes of colored splotches closer in kind to a rorscharch test than a pointilistic canvass. You may not see a reflection here so much as a sense of remembrance, or deja vu. That’s fine. I can’t be alone in thinking our lifespeeds have altered, and it’s just that alteration I want to discuss.

Lifespeed. Right. Let’s define that quickly so we can move on. By lifespeed I mean that facile quality of Being that tethers us to the ‘now’. Perceptually, our lives happen at a specific point in time, and I’ve conceived the word lifespeed to represent this point, as well as our conscious reaction to it. It’s just a word. Other than this meager definition it means nothing; has no other value. Right.

We were talking about choice earlier and there’s a clear connection between the act of choosing and the extant phenomena adjoining it. Just the relationship that lifespeed is meant to express. On its face, choice is neutral. Neither positive or negative, good or bad. The ‘designed’ choice of our consumer-driven society I find abhorrent, though not from some reactionary impulse, but a genuine longing for what it’s replaced. By making choices we define ourselves and I fear many of us are accepting a story that tells us we can only make this or that choice opposed to this that or the other. That we are told certain stories so many times we think we have no choice how they end; or wether to listen to them at all. In this way our lifespeeds have been damaged; like a bonsai pruned too severely.

Perhaps many are content defining themselves through ‘designed’ choice, or who ‘designed’ it anyway? Yes … there will always be sheep and lemmings in human form, and if that’s your angle you have my pity but nothing else. On the other hand, if you genuinely desire a leveling-up on the self-awareness front but have found this difficult to achieve thus far, you must realize two hard truths; the first that it is your business alone, none others - and the second, that it will be incredibly difficult to achieve because our society was not constructed to assist in this goal - quite the contrary! - it was designed to prevent it, at almost every turn. Here we return to the ‘designed’ component of American choice. Since the beginning the tiny tribes watching the throne have conspired to affect a marked class distinction in the land of the ‘free’. From the original agricultural workers of the new world, to the industrial workers who built a modern nation, to the current service sector workers slipping into poverty those with the firmest grip on the levers of power have continually strived to erect massive obstacles between those that labor for a living and those that live off that labor. Nor are these obstacles simply economic or aspirational in nature, no, due their pervasiveness through the generations they have percolated down into the most subterranean reaches of the mass conscious; into the very stories we use to define ourselves. Egads! a polite-hyper-modern-liberal-minded-triangulator might reply, don’t you know everyone has a TV! A refrigerator! Cheapest food ever! Why yes of course, there is an exception to every rule. While, for about thirty years in the middle of the last century, it seemed America was finally delivering on its promise, just look how long it took for us to devolve into another gilded age (the apparent default position of American society). It is foolish to define a thing based off aberrations, opposed its consistencies. In this way we clearly see the US for what it is … the second most successful marketing scheme in human history (naturally one must award Christianity top honors on that mark) … in the same way tobacco used to be good for you, that sodas were harmless, or how fast food is every bit nutritious as home-made, America cries ‘freedom’ when in so many ways the reverse is clearly the case. From ‘power’s’ perspective it’s nihilistically brilliant sure - give the people a semblance of freedom (in our case economic choice) and they’ll extrapolate that into a veritable cosmos of self-authorized-self-actualization - and you bet the monarchists, dictators, or petty politburos are jealous as hell at the level of control the political classes of America have been able to sustain generation after generation. A state of affairs that continues for no other reason than that an over-whelming majority of Americans keep believing the lies. We are forced to ask: why do they?

Let’s speculate wildly! Is it possible there exists some globe-spanning underground tributary of Lethe that constantly replenishes all the aquifers in the land? Or perhaps when we, on average a truly vain people, look into a mirror our historical consciousness is reset to zero? Or maybe we’ve all become so addicted to the stories we repeat about American Exceptionalism even the most destitute are content to sacrifice any chance they might have of another, better life, so as the stories can keep being told .?. the gyre is constricting at every turn, just like water flowing down the drain we’re becoming closer and closer to ourselves and ours; we’re losing a visceral sense of community and common cause through the ‘designed’ choices of a consumerist economy and specifically the newer technologies of self-absorption. So many of us don’t seem able to see past our own reflections, our problems, that even beginning to consider the larger problems facing our country seems as pointless as sending a manned mission to Mars.

The latent greed of the species is given free reign in America and this greed is destroying us. Making us sick. Stunted, withered, cloying little souls blighted with giga-myopia and eterno-amnesia. Greed. Most cultures have oft thought it a base emotion, one needing constant oversight - not the good ’ole US of A! We saw right through that ethical clap-trap - we saw that by harnessing the simmering greed of a people and putting them to work fulfilling that greed great things could happen … just absolutely amazing things … and we have accomplished quite a bit worth being proud over, and we sure have shown all those historical moralists just how wrong they were about the most solipsistic emotion … but this is a strange greed, our American one, one many may not even be aware of, so deep do its roots dive; a conniving greed that wraps in upon itself like a fresh burrito from Chipotle or those roller coasters you remember from Disneyland or Six-Flags … a greed that we have to learn to turn off, ignore, or quit seeing as so basic and benign in all our lives that there’s nothing you can do about it anyway - because it isn’t benign, it reacts to us and the environment as surely as we do it, and lately it’s been acting badly … yes, there are historical elements to this greed, there is also the question of personal responsibility, mutual complicity, systems of control and power as well - so many factors … I guess I’m nostalgic for another type of human being, one not fueled by avarice or beholden to the choices of others … qualities most seem to have lost somewhere on the way to Walmart … a human being that might never have existed except in a dream …

The Symbol

Human beings have long used symbols to represent value. Symbols are convenient, easy, and incredibly mutable. They can be transferred or translated almost infinitely. With a symbol ideas that might take an incredible amount of energy to explain or describe can be conveyed almost instantaneously. Logic and mathematics could likely not exist without them, nor, indeed, any language. And like any good thing, as is so often the case with any wonderfully useful thing, we humans have become dependent on them. Created for ourselves a world where we can not live without them. We are, in many ways, addicted to their utility. On its face there is nothing ethically challenging about this. Language and math are boons to humanity, practically describing our modern conception of ourselves. Symbols are naturally value neutral, like any high-level epistemological building block. And yet, we modern Americans have found ourselves in a tricky spot. We have crafted a society where one symbol is supreme. Where one symbol, and one symbol alone, holds all the power. A symbol that, if you find yourself without it, without access to it, without a stock-pile of it hiding somewhere, essentially makes you a non-entity. No longer part of the culture, the game. For it is certainly true that the only game in modern America is money. That collecting dollars has superseded all other activities; has supplanted any other endeavor as the only one with value. This state of affairs is the genesis of our cultural decline; of the death of the ideals that the Founders (who themselves were already playing the only game) attempted to instill in the New World: will in the end be understood by future historians as the single greatest crime of our time.

I say crime and I mean it. Don’t use the word for shock or awe. Nor do I want to dwell on this particular subject (not being the place for an extended analysis of this issue I will allow such a discussion its own essay, its own space, a place where it can be a bit more academic and dry, not so emotive or cynical) though we do have to mention a few more things before moving on. Crime. Yes. What was this crime? In short order here we go … it used to be the case that money was a symbol that referred to labor, actual work performed by one human that held value for another. So far as that is all money is, there is nothing ethically suspect about it. Then, at some point in the past, a few cunning paradigm-shifters saw an opportunity and changed the rules regarding what money was; they removed the labor as referent of value, replacing it with rare objects (typically gold) that few among any populace would ever see in their lives. Well, since the promise of alchemy was a lie, and the philosopher’s stone was never discovered, at least this money still referred to something real, something that couldn’t just be made up on the spot. Ah ha! the sons of the sneaky paradigm-shifters thought, that would just be the icing on the cake! Let’s remove the rare objects as value referent as well - let’s go all in on a communal mass delusion and see if anyone believes it … let’s just have money valued at whatever we say it’s valued at. Let’s create a massive shell game that only a very few will ever truly know the rules to, though the outcome, the results, will effect everyone … yes … let’s create the only game worth playing, and let’s give every live birth a turn … which leaves us with a system that, no matter how hard you work, no matter how industrious you are, if you don’t know the rules of the game (in modern America we can think of the Federal Reserve, Wall Street bankers, old money, select members of the Treasury Department etc. as the holders of the rule book) you will not win at it. You will play and play and play and keep losing and losing and losing all the while the rule keepers keep winning and winning and winning because for most players in this game the tokens of victory they collect (dollars) are bought at the hard price of actual labor, as if they never heard about how money grew up - no, they slave and slave for pennies without any chance of leveling up in this game and getting to that haughty echelon where money is no longer about work but having money make money off of someone else’s work … this little narrative I just outlined is a crime because there are clear stealers and victims (of course there are exceptions to every rule, but for every Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, there are a hundred and fifty million working at Walmart for a slave-wage). You see, the architects of the monetary symbol’s paradigm shift knew that by removing any referent to an actual act (labor) or object (gold) they were essentially hollowing out the natural relationship between the symbol and the symbolized, and in that empty space they would find their own El Dorado; their own little universe where they called the shots and none other. They essentially re-wrote the rules of symbolism, and clearly in their favor. And while symbols shift meaning all the time, especially in religious or political environments, these shifts are fundamentally harmless as neither religion or political discourse ever directly affects the physical well being of a human being as does their ability to acquire food, or energy, or health care, or shelter (I understand that by including ‘politics’ in this sense I might seem to be advocating a ‘post-history’ perspective; one where capitalistic-liberalism has won over all other political narratives, and while I hope that isn’t so, at the moment, and especially as an American author, one would be hard pressed to argue the point otherwise). To be clear, I’m not suggesting there was some shadowy cabal that gathered and planned out this great hollowing out of the monetary symbol; as is often the case it happened by fits and starts, here and there, as history would have it, propelled by the innate greed of the least amongst us. And yet they have scored a grand victory, these acolytes of avarice. Have pulled the proverbial wool over so many eyes - and in the process redefined a country that promised freedom into a vassal state completely enthralled to an ugly little strip of green denim that truly means nothing at all …

Of course this transformation did not just occur on American soil. But we sure as hell took the ball and ran it home. More than any other modern nation we are more readily defined by the empty symbology of the dollar than any others. This is not just an American problem; but we must be the first to address it …

America’s enslavement to the dollar is the singular cause of all the problems I put forth in ‘The Surface’, and, in many ways, ‘The Self’. We are a nation of suckers, rats, blind idealists, idiot sensualists, blatant thieves and the occasional dreamer … and knowing that, seeing my country in this way does nothing to alleviate my pathological cynicism … but allow me a query - do you still ask me why I am so cynical .?.

#Essay #Philosophy #c. r. stapor #cynicism #nietszche #modernity #philosophers on tumblr #writers on tumblr

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loudlytransparenttrash · 7 years

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This Week Within Our Colleges: Part 5

A University of Chicago student organization was pressured into changing the topic for an upcoming debate because some considered it to be “colonialism apologia.” The debate, hosted by the elite school’s “Political Union,” was initially set to ask if “the British Empire was a force for good,” but student outcry merely over the title of the debate eventually resulted in the name-change. “What is wrong with you people?” one student wrote on the group’s Facebook page, with another questioning why “you motherfuckers needed plenty of critical messages to see that ‘was the British Empire a force for good’ is deeply problematic? How many white people are in this RSO?” The organization changed the question of the debate to whether Britain should be forced to “pay reparations to its former colonies,” and apologizing for the way it had initially framed the conversation.

A black University of Pennsylvania student recently declared that his semester at the Ivy League institution was “traumatic” because he had three white professors who refused to acknowledge their white privilege. “Last semester was honestly the worst semester I’ve had at Penn so far. And all because of one thing: the white professors I’ve had at Penn. It appears that the term ‘privilege’ does not apply to them. Nor do they care to learn what it is.” Student James Fisher wrote. "My professor wanted to protect the voices of the white students who benefit from black oppression, the oppression unfortunately continued. It even led to me mentally breaking down in the classroom. With different emotions going through my head from not only this class but from the Trump election, I did not want to step foot into another white space until I made sure that my mental health was restored. The truth is, you as a single person cannot make up for the horrific things that white people have done to us throughout human history. But that does not mean that you do not have the power to stop yourself from oppressing the students that you teach every day.

American University is blocking whites from a cafe designated as a ‘sanctuary’ for nonwhites. As reported in my earlier posts, after black student activists issued a demand list to American University, the administration caved in and agreed to obey. One of the demands was a ban on white students using a new student lounge for the rest of the spring semester. The activists said they would take over the space as their own “sanctuary” and also demanded that all nonwhite students received extensions. They also asked incoming President Sylvia Burwell, to show how she will enforce “no tolerance for anyone creating a hostile environment for students of color” and punish such people.

A shocking new video shows a Western Washington University student screaming for at least two-minutes straight after seeing a Donald Trump sign on campus. The unknown student reacted to a street preacher’s pro-Trump sign by spiraling into a bizarre frenzy, at some points even splattering paint on the ground. Whether it was an attempt at an artistic protest or not, the fact remains: the bitch is bonkers.

The University of California, Irvine’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter once again disrupted and shut down a pro-Israel event, shouting “fuck you” at attendees. The SJP overtook a Students Supporting Israel event featuring Israeli veterans who are touring college campuses to share their firsthand experiences from on the ground. “You people are colonizers or occupiers and you should not be allowed on this fucking campus” they screamed and called Israelis “genocidal.” This is the same group that shut down a film-screening hosted by a Jewish student group on campus last year and as reported earlier, they have also been drinking cups of saltwater to show their solidarity with Palestine terrorists currently being detained in Israel. Nobody ever dares to question the vicious antisemitism inflicted by these students on campuses across the U.S and no one bats an eye when they refuse to condemn Hamas, because they are being funded by this terrorist organization who are hellbent on wiping out every last Jew. No one cares because they’re Muslim and saying anything would be Islamophobia.

A University of Hawaii professor recently claimed that universities should “stop hiring white cis men” until “the problem goes away.” Mathematics professor Piper Harron never gets around to specifying which "problem" would be solved by culling cis white males from academia, but insists that "real solutions require women of color and trans women." Piper Harron suggests, members of the “white cis” demographic should, “as a first step,” resign from their “hiring committee, their curriculum committee, and make sure they’re replaced by a woman of color or trans person.” “Having white cis women run the world is no kind of solution either,” she declares, pointing to the fact 53 percent of white women voted for Donald Trump. “Stop hiring white cis men (except as needed to get/retain people who are not white cis men) until the problem goes away,” she instructs university officials, adding accusatorially that “if you think this is a bad or un-serious idea, your sexism/racism/transphobia is showing.”

Black professors congratulate graduates who heckled Ed. Secretary Betsy DeVos at commencement. Over 200 black professors have signed a “love letter” to the Bethune-Cookman University graduates who booed DeVos during her commencement speech at the school last week. As mentioned in the last post, one professor alleged DeVos is representative of “white power.” The letter reads: “The world watched you protest the speaker you never should have had. We cheered as we saw so many of you refuse to acquiesce in the face of threats. Your actions fit within a long tradition of Black people fighting back against those who attack our very lives with their anti-Black policies and anglo-normative practices.”

At least DeVos got to talk even though she was still booed and heckled. Texas Southern University withdrew an invitation to Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas to address its graduating students. The university disinvited Cornyn because it wanted students to remember their commencement “positively for years to come,” and that couldn’t happen if a white conservative politician was their speaker. The petition to have Cornyn banned from talking cites his vote in favor of requiring photo ID in federal elections and against continuing federal funding for sanctuary cities who refuse to carry out the law against illegal immigrants. Oddly, it also cites Cornyn’s 2006 vote for a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage, at a time when same-sex marriage was far more popular with whites than blacks. Then-Sen. Barack Obama opposed same-sex marriage in 2006 as well, and didn’t officially change his position for another six years but hey, only white people can do bad things.

Minority students at the University of Michigan have expressed feeling intimidated by the interior wood paneling found throughout the historic Michigan Union building. Anna Wibbelman, former president of an organization that voices student concerns about university development, stated that “minority students felt marginalized by quiet, imposing masculine paneling” found throughout the 100-year-old building that is set to undergo a massive, $85.2 million renovation project.

A student group at the University of Washington held a teach-in Tuesday to promulgate the notion that America’s “food system is built on racism.” “It is a fact that today inmates, predominantly black Americans, harvest a lot of the food that we eat for less than $.50/hr,” the group explains. Let me get this straight, they want their rapists, pedophiles, wife beaters and murderers inside of prison, but once they’re there, they also want them to be paid and treated under the same conditions as law abiding citizens and if we don’t, it’s racism?

A Bethel University student issued an apology for wearing a Chicago Blackhawks sweatshirt to class after he was told the clothing was “offensive and hurtful.” The controversy unfolded during a class called “Social Perspectives, Human Worth and Social Action,” which delves into themes of culture, power and oppression in America, according to its online description. Student Cody Albrecht, who is from Chicago, came to the class wearing his home team’s apparel, then offered to turn it inside out “after becoming aware of the unease in his classroom because of his sweatshirt.” A week after he wore the sports apparel and after a “reconciliation” with the head of the Social Work department, his teacher and the whole class, Albrecht issued a formal apology.

Black students at the University of California, Los Angeles are demanding $40 million and their own “safe spaces” on campus as compensation for racially insensitive incidents. “Black students at UCLA are consistently made the targets of racist attacks by fellow students, faculty, and administration,” the Afrikan Student Union (ASU) begins. The first item on the list calls for “a physical location on campus to house the Afrikan Student Union Projects,” which would include “meeting/gathering/safe spaces” and be staffed by a director and an office manager who would be responsible for distributing funds allocated to the ASU. In addition, the ASU ultimatum demands a $40 million “endowment” to fund “a comprehensive effort to address the underrepresentation of African-American students, faculty, and staff at our university,” adding that the endowment should also provide financial aid to “dismissed black students.” The list goes on to ask that UCLA “deliver an anti-discrimination policy that assuages discriminatory and offensive behavior,” specifically “culturally insensitive” behavior, in conjunction with implementing mandatory “Cultural Awareness training” for all incoming students, faculty and staff members, and campus police officers. Finally, the ASU is insisting that UCLA provide “guaranteed housing for black students for 4 years, including on- and off-campus housing,” arguing that securing housing is especially difficult for black students due to factors such as “low socio-economic status and difficulties remaining financially stable amidst the rising living costs in Westwood.”

#college

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lesbian-ed-discourse · 7 years

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this just in: biological sex is not the only aspect of gender, oh my gosh how surprising. y'all act like what someone has in their pants automatically indicates exactly how they'll act and think, which is not feminist at all. y'all literally said you dont think transmen/women aren't actually men/women. good job on being "welcoming" and "positive" - while simultaneously treating trans ppl like shit. so yeah, thanks for that. (pt. 1)

And secondly, denying biological sex doesn’t deny someone’s gender. Insisting that they must actually be men/women depending on their sex does - which is what y’all are doing. Trans ppl may have some particular type of junk in their pants, may have been raised a certain way but that doesn’t make them men/women - it makes them fucking trans. (pt. 2)

Trans people experience the world much differently than cis ppl do, and our brains function and are chemically different to someone who’s fine with their assigned gender. The science behind this is there, and there are several studies which suggest that the brain structure of trans ppl is entirely unique to them, just like it is for men and women. (pt. 3)

Actively denying trans ppl’s gender - by saying stuff like, “well, they’re actually just a man/woman” does actually hurt them. It does actually get us killed. Bc you know who else says that? The guy that murdered a trans woman who fucked him and now thinks he’s gay. The parents of trans teens who deny their child’s gender, resulting in depression and oftentimes suicide. (pt. 4)

I’m not saying you shouldn’t talk about biological sex - of course that is important. I’m just saying there are ways to do that without calling transmen “females”, and transwomen “males”. Surprise surprise you can talk about biological sex and how it affects people without automatically assuming that everyone with that junk is a woman/man - and triggering dysphoria and possibly trauma. (pt. 5

Examples of treating people like more than just their junk include - talking about specific body parts without calling their owners any pronouns, ex. “People with vulvas” “people with prostates” etc. actually talking to trans women, and men to see how they feel about this. As a trans person, it makes me feel like shit to hear you say I’m not a man - but it’s not surprising either. (pt. 6)

A majority of the population thinks I’m not actually a man, so you’re not particularly special. Most people don’t give 2 shits about people like me, or they just dislike us/want us killed and gone. You know how many times I’ve been called a “fucking tranny”, and a dyke? The answer is a hell of a lot. And you don’t get to just come in here and tell me that that’s ok because I’m actually just a woman. (pt. 7)

Reducing people to their biological sex is transphobic. You can acknowledge that someone has certain bits, but you don’t know how trans people think or feel or how being seen as just a dick/vulva feels. We aren’t just sex, we’re actual people with feelings - who wanted to be treated like actual people. (pt. 8)

I just want to say that if you being gender critical plays into a societal norm of treating trans people like they don’t exist, what makes you any different than the homophobic and misogynist politicians who want to see us dead? Maybe if being gender critical makes people lapse into depression and dysphoria, you should think about why you think it’s a good idea. (pt. 9)

Because the fact of the matter is is that this kills people. It kills young people, maybe not actively, but it still kills people. Trans teens have such a high rate of suicide because of people like you who think it doesn’t hurt to be reduced to your sex, who think it’s ok to not listen to trans people and treat them in ways that hurt - even when they've told you very specifically what is transphobic. You don't get to decide what is and isn't transphobia. (pt. 10)

So, first off: we’re using totally different definitions of the terms “male/female” the way we use it, doesn’t mean “man/woman” (as in the gender and gender roles assigned to someone) but refer to a biological reality, what sex someone is, and what sexual characteristics they have. To us, using “female” is the same as you using “afab” or “people with vaginas” It’s merely a biological descriptor, it doesn’t come with any “you should be like Y, and act like Y, and follow these gender roles” It’s just stating what “junk” (and reproductive system and secondary sexual characteristics) someone has. No more, no less.

I’m sorry that this causes trans people dysphoria and distress, I get why being reminded of their bodies, and their “supossed role in society as a man/woman” like that would (but I don’t see why “people with vaginas” is considered more acceptable? Since it also reminds you of your anatomy?) And I would recommend that if any discourse that uses these words is too triggering for you, that you disengage from it for your own well-being.

Now, cis women also suffer from not aligning with what their supposed role in society is. That’s what gender roles are, and they’re a tool of women’s oppression, which we as feminists want to combat. To be able to do that, we need to look at the roots of it, why is patriarchy the way it is? And the answer, harsh as it may be, is that it’s related to bodies and the sex of them.

Being born a certain sex means you’re treated a certain way from birth. Little girls are raised to play with dolls (to learn to be “motherly”) and wear dresses, told that they’re less intelligent and inferior to boys, and that their only worth is how attractive they’re to men. Little boys are taught to be assertive, to be strong and to be leaders. This creates a divide, a hierarchy, and what each person is taught is completely dependant on the sex of their body.

This carries on to adulthood too, and yeah, there may be nuances, a non-passing trans man will be a lot more catcalled on the street than a trans man who passes as male. The same way, a non-passing or closeted trans woman (that’d be read as a cis man) may not experience misogyny BUT a passing trans woman will. And this is all because of the way misogynistic men assume what sex you are based on how you look. This is all because they see you as “female/afab” and that makes you a target for misogyny.

Now, I’m not gonna say that if the hypothetical passing trans woman I talked about revealed she was trans (so of the “male/amab/people with penises” sex) that was going to make people treat her like a man. Because society is transphobic and misogynistic and they’d see her as a “man deviating from their assigned gender role” which they hate.

And it’s this, this misogyny tied to what gender roles you’re supposed to follow because of your body, what causes violence against trans people, violence that is very often dished out by cis men. Cis men who in no way listen to anything radical feminists have to say because if they did, they’d be against gender roles.

Now yes, this also leads to trans women internalizing some “men” behaviours, because of being socialized as boys, including sexual entitlement (as we’ve seen with the cotton ceiling discourse, that lesbians are evil if they don’t open their legs for any trans woman) and we have to analyze that, but this doesn’t diminish the violence trans people face at all, and I want to reiterate that we don’t support that.

I’m sorry that this makes young trans kid want to kill themselves, but people shouldn’t stop speaking about important things just because it hurts you (and I’m saying this as someone who has struggled with depression and with wanting to commit suicide). We don’t want any trans kids to feel suicidal at all, but we can’t just not speak about sex when it’s relevant to us and our experiences, so again, I say that if this hurts someone that much, it’s better that they disengage from the conversation.

I support trans & dysphoric people treating their dysphoria however they see fit, I support them having legal protections and rights so that they don’t get discriminated against in any aspect of life, I support them in living free from male violence, and that they enjoy the same freedoms and obligations everyone else should. Calling them “male” or “female” when talking about feminist discourse (or about sexual orientation) where someone’s birth sex and the sex they’re read as is relevant to the conversation, doesn’t suddenly contradict the above.

We merely said we’d welcome any trans men that feel they could relate to our experiences in our positivity blog, because there is and has been historically a lot of overlap between the trans men and lesbian community (many trans men used to identify as lesbians and viceversa, many lesbians have dated trans men, etc) so yeah we share common experiences because of our shared sex, and if they’re female-attracted, even more so. So we just said they’d be welcome on our blog, if any of them wanted to. It doesn’t mean we want to force anyone to take on any label they don’t want to (re: straight trans men and the label “lesbian”) it just means that if any of them felt they could relate to what we post, that that would be perfectly fine by us. But we’re not going to make anything aimed specifically at trans men.

As for trans women, I personally don’t mind if any of them follow us if they’re able to relate to what we post. I don’t like obsessively policing who follows me or who other people follow (mod m speaking here) But, again, since our blog was made to be a space for female/afab lesbians, it’s the perspective we’ll be speaking from. So we’re not going to make anything specifically aimed at trans women either, because we feel there was a lack of spaces that focused on female lesbian sexuality and talked honestly about exclusive same-sex attraction, and what that entails (because with discourse like the “lesbian are bigots if they don’t like dick” we’re becoming less and less able to talk about our sexual orientation and desires and what that entails, because other people thinks us talking about our lives is inherently evil, when it’s not meant to hurt anyone, it’s just us speaking our truth)

This doesn’t mean we hate trans people at all or wish them any ill. All we want is a positive space for us and people like us to talk about our experiences.

Mod M :D

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ellesep · 7 years

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Elena of Avalor, Disney’s first Latina princess goes to Planned Parenthood to stand against the evil stepsisters of the GOP.

Disney Princesses Trying to Go to the OBGYN Under a Trump/Pence Administration

Written by Danielle Sepulveres, Illustrated by Maritza Lugo

Last year, I had an argument with a man whom I knew to be reasonably intelligent. At least I believed him to be until this particular conversation. We were having a heated discussion about the hit that Planned Parenthood had taken in their image from the bogus heavily edited videos in 2015 that were specifically designed to incite widespread outrage.

He believed everything in the videos and therefore believed that Planned Parenthood should be shut down. No amount of reasonable, logical points on my end would sway him. But the point where things took a particularly eye opening turn was when he scorned my statement about how Planned Parenthood provided cancer screenings. Practically lunging out of his seat towards me, he insisted that what I had said was just one of the erroneous things people believed about PP. I stared at him in disbelief while he shouted-literally shouted in my face-that I was grievously wrong and people only THOUGHT PP provided cancer screenings, but that they didn’t have the equipment or technicians necessary to perform mammograms. And I did the only thing that I could possibly do. I laughed. And laughed and laughed. Because it was so typical that a man would assume that the only possible cancer to be screened for had to do with breasts. And he was entirely smug in his assumption, he wouldn’t even let me refute it, he just kept interrupting me. It reminded me of a Seinfeld episode where Jerry calls his dermatologist girlfriend Pimple Popper M.D. (played by Marcia Cross) because he doesn’t understand why people thank her for saving their lives, completely overlooking the possibility of skin cancer. Pap smears and HPV co-testing is how cervical cancer screenings are done. And Planned Parenthood does that. Also there are other below the belt cancers (uterine, ovarian, vulvar etc) that have more of a chance of being caught early enough if someone regularly goes for annual visits to PP or an obgyn and establishes a base line for their bodily behaviors or at least consults with a medical professional. And all of those things are possible at low or no cost because of how Planned Parenthood operates.

The point is that this man who argued with me (and did end up voting for Trump and might possibly be one of those people who doesn’t know that ACA and Obamacare are one and the same ) is one of many who are woefully uneducated yet so confident in their false assumptions about how preventive healthcare works in this country for women. And yet we are ushering in an entire administration with these kinds of archaic and unsupported viewpoints.

January is Cervical Cancer Awareness month. A year ago Maritza Lugo and I collaborated on a tongue in cheek project that utilized reimagined Disney Princesses to garner attention from MSM to remind anyone with a uterus that they should make their annual pilgrimage to the gynecologist. Ask about the HPV vaccine. Get an STD test. Talk about birth control. I was frustrated with the lack of coverage that dogged the more “taboo” cancers, having been a part of the group Cervivor for years where I’d watched its founder Tamika Felder work tirelessly around the clock year round to educate people and provide a safe community for anyone affected by cervical cancer. But in general I’ve been battling this frustration for years in the way that health and sex ed classes by and large do not promote comprehensive education. I thought that combining recognizable pop culture with an often overlooked topic would spark conversation and luckily it did. We knew that our project wouldn’t automatically eradicate the cervical cancer diagnoses, but if we don’t start talking about it, we’ll never get to that point, and everything needs to start with a first step.

Since then Maritza and I have dedicated ourselves to doing other awareness collaborations but this year it felt particularly important for us to team up again as the inauguration of Donald Trump looms ever closer before us. While Paul Ryan announces that Congress will be looking to move forward in dismantling ACA and summarily defunding Planned Parenthood. (Which is a misnomer because there is no line item in the federal budget that goes to Planned Parenthood.) And those in favor of the ACA repeal and shutting down Planned Parenthood cheer for an end to “baby killers” while the underlying message of that rallying cry is actually for an end to women, trans, LGBTQ, disabled, chronically ill, people of color, and those with limited soco-economic means to have a right to healthcare. A right to choices. To dignity. And to their own lives. We’re staring down the barrel of a world where basic healthcare becomes a privilege. And being a woman could present as an uninsurable pre-existing condition. Make no mistake that the gauntlet thrown by the Republican party with these attempted measures spearheads a war on women and a direct attack on working families regardless of how often they claim their message to be otherwise.

ACA, like many pieces of legislation, can be improved. It has weaknesses. It has issues. The majority of people using it will not deny this fact. But the concept of taking it away piece by piece with no replacement plan is a catastrophically dangerous idea. Trump has waffled on exactly where he stands on the issue, but many Republicans (like Paul Ryan) have not. Trump’s stances on most things calls to mind the high school kid who ran for class president on a platform of longer free periods and pizza in the cafeteria and then once elected because his dad “made a call” went back to ranking the hotness of girls on the bathroom wall, cutting class and maybe showing up for the prom planning committee meeting because he heard there would be snacks. He’s repeatedly emphasized that it needs to be known that any failures of ACA needs to be blamed on the Democrats which stands to reason that without any thoughtful plan waiting in the wings to replace it, his only concern is to be seen as some kind of savior while demonizing the Democratic party. Healthcare for all who need it should not be a partisan issue. Government is meant to serve the needs and safety of the public. And the idea of blaming or congratulating one side of the aisle over another for the responsibility of “rescuing” the American people resonates with the level of maturity of middle school schoolyard taunting. But this is what we elected and this is what we will be dealing with for at least four years.

Where has empathy gone? When did all the millions of people who need healthcare and have benefited from it dissolve into a gelatinous inhuman pile? Deemed undeserving or a burden? Why are we ignoring the economic stimulus it has provided? Why is it so difficult to take existing legislation that is helping people and continue to improve upon it rather than stamp feet in the sandbox screaming, “La la la I can’t hear you! Get rid of it! My way is better!”

According to ACASignups.net, if ACA is repealed, approximately 12.3 million people on Medicaid/Chip, 9 million people on subsidized policies and 1.4 million young adults on their parents’ plans stand to lose their coverage. The American Public Health Association has contended that it’s ludicrous of politicians to claim that providers could somehow take on the 2.5 million Planned Parenthood patients that would be affected by a lack of funding.

The elephant in the room when it comes to Planned Parenthood is always going to be abortion and that’s just too damn bad. Because I love elephants. Are you morally opposed to abortion? Guess what, that’s your right and it’s cool you don’t have to get one! But you don’t get to tell anyone else how to live their lives. Or police their choices for their bodies. You cannot label yourself pro-life if your stance is to only teach abstinence education in schools, to take away healthcare options from women (yes say it with me, abortion is part of healthcare, deal with it) and then neglect and look down on these people as they try to raise children on government assistance because they’ve been left with no other options to break the cycle of poverty. It’s hypocritical to then try to pretend that it’s not all interconnected. That we’re all on the same level playing field with the same opportunities, income bracket and educational availability. Ignoring the reality of this perpetuates a broken system instead of actively trying to fix it, and I thought we were trying to make America great again?

This project was so important to Maritza and I because we are genuinely afraid. She as a WOC and me as a woman who has heavily relied on preventive care to keep a pre-cancer diagnosis from turning into a full-blown one. And again we know that Disney princesses are not going to solve the world’s problems, but using our voices will and that’s why we did this. We find the arbitrary nature in which members of this new administration dismiss marginalized voices to be frightening. They haven’t been properly vetted. Their lack of empathy, and understanding make us afraid for ourselves and we are afraid for our friends within specifically targeted communities. We stand with Planned Parenthood this month for Cervical Cancer Awareness. We stand with them every month. And we will work to take down every wall this new administration tries to erect to keep us from the basic human right to exist.

If you want to donate to Planned Parenthood, go here. If you need to get in touch with your representatives, you can find them here. In the Senate Kirsten Gillibrand is currently working on an amendment to protect women’s healthcare from possible fallout of a repeal of ACA.

#disneyprincess #disneyprincesses #obamacare #aca #planned parenthood #womens health

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gibsongirlselections · 4 years

Text

Making Democrats Own Their “Summer of Love”

Remember all those “peaceful protestors,” later amended to “mostly peaceful protestors”? You probably recall, also, the Main Stream Media’s determined effort to portray the people in the streets protesting the death of George Floyd as nothing but well-meaning reformers—until pictures and video made the spin wear thin.

Indeed, now even Democratic politicians are conceding that this wasn’t the “summer of love.”

With costly reality staring him in the face, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, on July 2, sent a letter to President Trump, formally requesting $15.6 million in federal disaster assistance for the damage done to Minneapolis and St. Paul during the protests/violence over the last two months. As Walz put it, “Nearly 1,500 businesses were damaged by vandalism, fire, or looting.” He added, “These corridors provide lifeline services like food, pharmaceuticals, health care, housing, and transportation to thousands of Minnesotans.”

In fact, Walz estimated that the total cost of the damage could be upwards of $500 million; he described the events in his state’s two largest cities as “the second most destructive incident of civil unrest in United States history after the 1992 Los Angeles riots.” Walz further observed, “The social and economic impacts of this incident will be felt for years, if not decades.”

So who, exactly, did all this damage? Here, Walz had to walk a fine line. Good progressive that he is, he couldn’t afford to be too critical of the protestors—because he might need their votes in his next election bid. Indeed, back in May, he tried to argue that most of the violence was committed by non-Minnesotans.

This dubious assertion was quickly knocked down, and yet in his letter to Trump, Walz offered a different slant on the same outsiders-did-it argument, writing, “Individuals bent on destruction infiltrated otherwise peaceful protests and began to incite violence and vandalism.” We might pause to note that Walz seems to be de-emphasizing, here, a word that he mentioned only once in the letter: looting. Why? Perhaps because looting is so singularly unattractive (to most people) that it’s best minimized when looking for bailout.

Yet in fact, the looting was so brazen that even The Minneapolis Star Tribune felt obligated to detail it on July 10; as the newspaper put it, “Near Hennepin Avenue and W. Lake Street, nearly 40 businesses were broken into or heavily looted, including large retailers like H&M, Timberland, an Apple store, Kitchen Window and Urban Outfitters.”

The Star Tribune further added that Walz’s $500 million estimate might be on the low side: “The full extent of damage to Twin Cities buildings—including residences, churches, non-profits and minority-owned businesses—could take weeks or months to calculate.”

Indeed, sometimes the damage done to a city in the wake of a riot unfolds over decades. For instance, Detroit has never recovered from the riot of 1967; the population of Motown fell from 1.67 million in 1960 to 713,000 in 2010.

In the meantime, on July 11, the Star Tribune reported that the Trump administration has turned down Walz’s aid request. The report included a quote from Rep. Tom Emmer, a Republican representing exurban Minneapolis as well as rural areas; it seems that Emmer had written a letter of his own to Trump two days earlier, asking the administration to “undertake a thorough and concurrent review of my state’s response to the violence and provide recommendations so that every Governor, Mayor, and local official can learn from our experiences and ensure appropriate plans are in place to prevent something like this from ever happening again.” In other words, Emmer was seeking, at minimum, to add strings to the aid.

As Emmer put it, the feds should analyze “the actions that were—or were not—taken by local and state officials to prevent one of the most destructive episodes of civil unrest in our nation’s history.” And to drill the point even harder, he cited news media headlines supporting his supposition of state and local fecklessness: “‘They Have Lost Control’: Why Minneapolis Burned,” and “Gov. Tim Walz Laments ‘Abject Failure’ of Riot Response.”

Emmer, of course, is a conservative, not in tune with, for example, the Twin Cities’ most famous lawmaker, Rep. Ilhan Omar, who has embraced “defunding the police.” By contrast, on July 11, Emmer tweeted a poll showing that 81 percent of residents in the small city of St. Cloud, in Emmer’s district, believe that the police there “have an excellent relationship with the community.”

We might also note that Emmer is more than just a Republican lawmaker representing a conservative district. He is also the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, the campaign arm of the House Republicans. Not surprisingly, the NRCC Twitter feed regularly zings House Democrats, and it’s a safe bet that Emmer and his rapid responders are now poised to target those who might take a progressive position on the national response, including financial aid, to recently afflicted cities. We can see the NRCC tweet now: “Rep. ___ supports bailout for mayors that looked the other way while their cities were vandalized and looted.”

In fact, between Trump’s opposition and Republicans on watch, it’s likely that the Democrats will say little about rebuilding vandalized and looted cities—at least until after the election.

However, if Joe Biden wins this November—and the polls show him nearly 10 points ahead, which suggests Democrats everywhere will do well—then it’s likely that a Biden administration will look more kindly on Walz’s request.

Indeed, we could expect that the whole federal government, starting with the Department of Housing and Urban Development, will seek to spend freely. After all, Biden tweeted, just on July 5, “We won’t just rebuild this nation—we’ll transform it.” And Sen. Bernie Sanders, fresh from his policy mind-meld with the Biden campaign, declares that Biden is shaping up to be the most progressive president since Franklin D. Roosevelt.

So one wonders: In such a heady ideological moment, how far could the Democrats go? Perhaps another “Great Society”? Or maybe a “Marshall Plan” for the Other America? And can the Green New Deal be focused on blue dot cities?

Yet even if Republicans are out of power next year, they won’t be without a voice. For his part, Emmer raises pointed questions about urban aid, and so some Democrats—especially those many now representing suburbs—will have to think twice about voting for blank checks to mayors and their lefty constituents. That is, if the city council in Minneapolis votes, as it did, unanimously, to defund the police, well, maybe most Americans will think that woke urbanites ought to be left to stew in their own crime juice.

Other Republicans, too, seem ready to pounce. On the floor of the Senate on July 2, Mike Lee of Utah blasted “mob violence,” including “dimwitted, phony drama addicts.” Lest he be misunderstood, Lee went on to rip “a privileged, self-absorbed crime syndicate with participation trophy graduate degrees, trying to find meaning in empty lives by destroying things that other Americans have spent honest, productive lives building.”

Then Lee got right down to the money issue: “The whole garbage fire that is the woke ideology depends on federal money. The mob that hates America on America’s dime. It’s time to cut off their allowance!” So put Lee down as a loud “no” on any big bailout.

Then on July 12, Sen. Ted Cruz tweeted, “Minnesota Dems willfully allowed Minneapolis to burn & then blamed the police whom they demonized. Now, they want the fed govt to pay the bill. I’m introducing legislation to make local govt liable to private property owners if officials deliberately withhold police protection.”

Cruz’s bill won’t pass this year, nor the next, and yet a line has been drawn. If Cruz and Republicans can figure out how to hold a vote on that liability legislation—or on other bills of a similar nature—they will be putting Democrats in a tough spot.

Of course, the typical legislative response to a “poison pill” bill is not to vote on it. Indeed, both parties have grown skilled at the parliamentary art of obscuring unpopular items with “omnibuses” and “continuing resolutions”; that is, the money gets spent, but with no specific fingerprints on any particular line item.

Yet in the long run, the voters will figure out who voted to bail out looter-friendly cities—and who didn’t.

Still, in the shorter term, Emmer, Lee, Cruz, & Co. will be dismissed as mere gadflies, especially if the Democrats win big this year. Indeed, Biden is ahead in Texas, and credible pundits even speculate that he could win the biggest victory for a Democratic presidential nominee since 1964.

And if Democrats were to win big this year, they’d be high in the water, indeed, in the 117th Congress convening next year. Why they might even seek to emulate the 89th Congress, which convened in 1965, and which did, indeed, dream big.

If so, then Republicans will have to rely on smart Congressional critics such as Emmer, Lee, and Cruz. One’s crystal ball for the future is, of course, cloudy, and yet the record of the past is clear enough, and so we can recall that in the mid 60s, when ebullient Democrats over-promised and under-delivered—on everything from urban renewal to Vietnam pacification— Republicans were ready with their counterstroke. And the voters were ready with their backlash.

Thus just two years after their 1964 triumph, Democrats were drubbed in the 1966 midterm elections; one of the GOP winners that year, we might recall, was that underrated actor-turned-underrated politician, Ronald Reagan.

Then in 1968, just four years after they had been crushed in the national election, Republicans won the the presidency.

Thus a half-century ago, Democratic hubris met Republican nemesis. Today, that’s something for Democrats to ponder as many plan, once again, to transform the nation.

The post Making Democrats Own Their “Summer of Love” appeared first on The American Conservative.

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theconservativebrief · 6 years

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The midterm election confirmed once again that black women show up for progressive candidates. But white women? Not so much. As a black feminist historian, I’m not surprised, but I am always disappointed by the ways white women vote.

As exit polls roll in from some of the high-profile races of 2018, it appears that black women voted overwhelmingly — specifically, 92 percent nationwide — for progressive candidates. In three key races where Democrats challenged conservative incumbents, such as Florida’s Andrew Gillum, Texas’s Beto O’Rourke, and Georgia’s Stacey Abrams, black women turned out in similarly high numbers for these progressive candidates. The election of black women such as Massachusetts’s first black woman Congress member, Ayanna Pressley, Lucy McBath in Georgia’s Sixth Congressional District, and Connecticut’s first black woman Congress member, Jahana Hayes, were also important outcomes carried by black women. In all the races in which exit poll data exist, black men were not too far behind in turning out for progressive candidates.

But nationally, white women were a much more divided group. Forty-nine percent of white women voted Republican nationwide (49 percent voted Democratic too). Forty-seven percent of white women voted for Gillum, while O’Rourke only received 39 percent and Abrams 25 percent of the white female vote. This early exit poll data follows a disturbing recent political trend: The majority of white women have not been part of a Democratic voting bloc throughout the 2000s.

While many white women and the majority of voters of color tend to vote more progressively, disaggregating these polls by race and gender reveals some hard truths about the potential for building a progressive coalition. White women and even Latinx voters of all genders continue to lag behind black voters — in particular black female voters — when it comes to showing up for Democrats.

One of most repeated statistics from the 2016 election is that more than half of white women voted for Donald Trump. Despite recent polls suggesting the percentage might be slightly less, the headlines for the 2018 midterms could and should be similarly scathing in its critique of white female voters.

And, to be frank, a vote for a large percentage of GOP candidates at this point in our nation’s history is largely a vote for white supremacy, xenophobia, and misogyny. The Republican Party has not distanced itself from the rise of contemporary white nationalism — Florida GOP gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis spoke at a Muslim-bashing event alongside white nationalists Milo Yiannopoulos and Steve Bannon. Texas Senate candidate Ted Cruz refused to denounce the racist comments of Republican Rep. Steve King.

Beyond embracing bigoted rhetoric, today’s GOP has refused to acknowledge the pervasiveness of racist policing, pushed for restrictive immigration, and confirmed an alleged sexual predator to the Supreme Court. In spite of this, white female voters show up by the millions for the GOP.

It’s been said many times that we should “trust black women.” Those platitudes expressed by nonblack women through GIFs, memes, and cute T-shirts mean very little if black women cannot count on nonblack women to faithfully show up for the best interests of those affected by white supremacy, poverty, sexism, ableism, xenophobia, transphobia, or homophobia. So where do we go from here?

Among women voters, white women voters continue to be the weakest link. They are also among the most visible in public discussions about the need for change. While white men remain the strongest opposition to electoral politics skewing left, white women heading to the polls continue to choose to uphold white supremacy and patriarchy. In the 2004, 2008, and 2012 presidential elections, the majority of white women voted for the GOP candidate. The numbers don’t lie.

The historical record bears a brutal truth: White women have always been active participants in sustaining white supremacy in America. Elizabeth Gillespie McRae’s groundbreaking book, Mother of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy, offers a robust history of how white women reinforce white supremacy. White women educators censored textbooks and downplayed the role of slavery in the Civil War as a way to infuse the public education curriculum with white supremacist politics. White women were also an integral part of the Ku Klux Klan. White mothers virulently and violently protested the integration of schools. This abundance of evidence contextualizes what happened in this most recent election — it’s tradition.

Calling out white women’s continued support of conservative politicians isn’t excusing or ignoring white men’s commitment to electing these candidates. It’s an assertion of a profound and perpetual sense of betrayal. Far too many white women are willing to throw women of color under the bus — and, indeed, vote against their own best interests — in favor of white supremacy and, often, misogyny.

Digging deeper, we also need to ask difficult questions about the growing Latinx voting demographic. In all but a few races such as the New York gubernatorial race in which 93 percent of Latina women voted for the Democratic candidate, Andrew Cuomo, both Latinx men and women fell below 70 percent in their support of more progressive candidates. For example, in the Florida gubernatorial race, only 49 percent of Latino men voted for Gillum and only 58 percent of Latina women voted for him. In the Texas Senate race, only 66 percent of Latina women voted for O’Rourke and only 62 percent of Latino men voted for him.

Exit polls don’t account for racial differences among Latinx voters. Nevertheless, it is unnerving that such a significant percentage of Latinx voters could vote for candidates who aligned with a president hell-bent on rhetoric and policies that criminalize and demonize people from Mexico, Central America, and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean. Because Latinx voters are composed of different nationalities and races, many may distance themselves from the Latinx people they see the Trump administration targeting.

Sociologist Helen Marrow refers to some anti-immigrant sentiments among Latinx voters as “racialized nativism,” whereby Latinx citizens and permanent residents feel they suffer a loss of economic opportunities as a result of undocumented Latinx immigrants. Additionally, religion plays a significant role in shaping a conservative segment of the Latinx electorate, including those opposing birth control, abortion, marriage equality, and the rights of trans people. This social conservatism has and does lead millions of Latinx voters to support conservative candidates, in spite of explicit racism and xenophobia.

Latinx voters are not yet a fully reliable progressive voting demographic. This is and will be a formidable challenge for organizing around progressive candidates — but perhaps not as insurmountable as galvanizing white women to repudiate white supremacy and sexism with their votes.

The exit polls from the 2018 midterms don’t give us the whole story. But the snapshot they provide does tell us that black women continue to lead the charge for progressive electoral politics. Despite voter suppression and disenfranchisement and gerrymandering, which are significant barriers for black voter participation, black women flip districts and make formerly “unwinnable” races highly competitive. If you’re not voting like a black woman, you are probably on the wrong side of history.

At this juncture, the building of a broad coalition of voters requires intentional work from progressive white female and Latinx voters, which includes voter education and organizing with these voting blocs in the years between and leading up to elections. Women as a cohesive progressive voting bloc may never be a reality, but progressive white female voters must continue to work in their communities to move more white women to the left.

Treva B. Lindsey is a professor at Ohio State University. Find her on Twitter @divafeminist.

First Person is Vox’s home for compelling, provocative narrative essays. Do you have a story to share? Read our submission guidelines, and pitch us at [email protected].

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newssplashy · 6 years

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Cities and towns across the US are celebrating Pride throughout the month of June. Nearly every city has some sort of big event. Here is a handy FAQ that explains what Pride Month is all about.

June is Pride Month, when cities across the US show support for LGBT+ rights, culture, and communities.

It's a tradition that goes back to the early 1970s, when cities began hosting events to commemorate the Stonewall Riots and highlight issues that LGBT+ Americans still face.

Here's what Pride Month is all about.

What is Pride Month, and how are cities celebrating it?

Pride is a monthlong LGBT+ celebration, protest, and act of political activism in the US. Nearly every city has some sort of big event — usually a large parade with plenty of rainbow iconography, glitter, and floats driven by local companies and organizations.

Several cities have already kicked off the month with Pride parades and LGBT-centered events, ranging from protests and dance parties to poetry readings and drag shows.

Why do Americans celebrate Pride, and when did it all start?

The history of Pride — as well as the larger LGBT rights movement — dates back to the late 1960s at the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Manhattan. The venue was known as the rare spot where same-sex patrons could dance with each other without the fear of harassment.

At the time, it was fairly common for police to raid gay bars and nightclubs, especially in big cities like New York City and Los Angeles. Sometimes these raids would result in violence on behalf of the officers.

In the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, the police raided Stonewall, but this time, the patrons fought back. Marsha P. Johnson, a black trans woman celebrating her 25th birthday at the time, is credited with starting the uprising.

The Stonewall Riots, consisting of thousands of people, lasted for the next six days.

Does Stonewall still exist today?

The Stonewall Inn — a two-story establishment on Manhattan's West Side — still operates today as a gay bar and entertainment revenue. Throughout the week, it hosts dance parties and drag shows.

In 2015, the City of New York designated Stonewall as a historic landmark. A year later, President Obama named it a national monument.

"The Stonewall Inn is a rarity — a tipping point in history where we know, with absolute clarity, that everything changed," Manhattan Borough President Gale A. Brewer said in a statement to BuzzFeed in 2015.

What's the difference between the Pride Parade, the Dyke March, and the Trans Day of Action?

These three events, usually held on separate days in June, focus on different LGBT+ communities. The Pride Parade is more or less for everyone, while the Dyke March is a protest march for the rights of queer women and nonbinary people, and the Trans Day of Action (or Visibility) is a rally for trans and gender non-conforming folks.

Pride Parades, Dyke Marches, and Trans Days of Action are held in most major US cities, including New York, Seattle, Atlanta, Boston, and San Diego.

An official straight-pride month does not exist, because straight identities are considered normative in the US.

How did the rainbow flag come to represent LGBT+ pride?

The LGBT pride flag was invented in 1978 by Gilbert Baker, a gay rights activist, army veteran, artist, and self-declared "gay Betsy Ross."

He created the flag for the 1978 Gay Freedom Pride Parade in San Francisco, at the request of Harvey Milk, a gay local politician who was assassinated later that year.

The original flag had eight colors, each carrying a specific meaning. In 1979, the palette was condensed to six colors (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet).

In recent years, the flag has been adapted to include black and brown, for racial inclusivity and HIV/AIDS awareness.

As Forrest Wickman wrote in Slate, closeted queer people have historically used bright colors to signal their homosexuality to each other.

"We needed something beautiful, something from us. The rainbow is so perfect because it really fits our diversity in terms of race, gender, ages, all of those things," Baker told MOMA two years before his death in 2017.

Is the US the only country that celebrates Pride?

Although LGBT+ Americans face issues specific to living in the US, the country is not the only one to have Pride.

Cities across the world — from Tokyo to Sydney to Rio de Janeiro — recognize their own Pride Months that fall at various times throughout the year.

What progress has the US made on LGBT+ rights since the Stonewall Riots?

At the time of the Stonewall Riots, many states still criminalized same-sex relationships. The last states to decriminalize same-sex sexual intercourse were Texas, Idaho, Utah, Kansas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, the Carolinas, Virginia, and Michigan, in 2003.

Over the past five decades, LGBT+ rights have significantly improved. In 1975, the US introduced the first federal gay-rights bill to address discrimination based on sexual orientation. Under the Clinton administration, federal funding for HIV/AIDS research, prevention, and treatment more than doubled. In 2009, Congress passed the Matthew Shepard Act, which expanded the definition of hate crimes to include gender, sexual orientation, gender-identity, and disability.

"Don't Ask, Don't Tell," the ban on gay and lesbian people from serving openly in the military, was repealed in 2011. A year later, the US issued a regulation that prohibits LGBT+ discrimination in federally-assisted housing programs.

In 2015, the US Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage in every state. In 2017, the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that workplace discrimination against LGBT+ employees was unconstitutional, and Washington, DC residents became able to choose a gender-neutral option on their driver's licenses.

Isn't the fight over since same-sex marriage is now legal? What rights are LGBT+ people still working toward?

Same-sex marriage is just one step toward full equality for LGBT+ people, who are still fighting political battles in 2018.

These include police brutality and profiling, anti-trans "bathroom bills," limits on transgender members of the military, non-LGBT-friendly healthcare policies, the decision to erase LGBT+ Americans from the Census, discrimination at retail stores and in the workplace, and more.

Even before the shooting rampage at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, in 2016, LGBT+ people were already the most likely targets of hate crimes in the US, according to FBI data. At the 2018 Utah Pride Festival in Salt Lake City on June 3, a mob of white men yelled slurs and physically attacked gay attendees.

What are the important terms I should understand?

Some terms you might hear this month include:

Asexual — A word that describes people who do not feel sexual desire toward any group of people. Asexuality is not the same as celibacy (i.e. the choice to abstain from marriage and sexual relations).

Biphobia — An irrational aversion toward bixsexual people, often due to negative bisexual stereotypes.

Cisgender — A term that describes people who identify as the sex they were assigned at birth.

Intersectional Pride —A phrase that acknowledges LGBT+ people have a variety of identities — including race and income level — that give them varying levels of privilege in society. The philosophy here is that the LGBT+ movement should fight for everyone in the community, especially those who have less privilege.

LGBTQ+ — This is an acronym for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, plus other non-heterosexual identities. Sometimes, "I" for intersex and "A" for asexual or agender are tacked on the end, but not all intersex people identify under the umbrella of LGBT+.

Nonbinary — A term that refers to people who do not fit within the male-female gender binary. Many nonbinary people use the pronouns "they/them."

Pansexual — A word used to describe people who feel attracted to others of any gender, which can be on a spectrum.

Queer — The meaning of "queer" is debated within LGBT circles, but most often it's used as an umbrella term for non-heterosexual attraction.

I've heard that some people are upset about the growing presence of corporate sponsors and/or police at Pride Parades. Why is this?

Some members of the LGBT+ community, particularly people of color, have a contentious relationship with police, due to a long history of raids and discrimination — which prompted the Stonewall Riots in 1969. In 2017, several Canadian cities chose to ban uniformed police officers from marching in Pride parades, according to the BBC.

A number of LGBT+ groups have also expressed disdain toward the growing corporatization of Pride in major cities like San Francisco and New York. They argue that, in recent years, Pride has become too commercial and has strayed from its history of resistance and revolution.

As Vice noted in 2017, at Washington, DC's 2017 Pride Parade, protesters from "No Justice, No Pride" formed a human chain around Lockheed Martin's float, bringing it to a halt.

I'm a straight person. Should I go to Pride?

Everyone can partake in Pride Month. However, LGBT+ people should remain at the center of the celebrations and marches.

If you are straight and choose to attend a Pride Parade, it's important to remain respectful as an ally. Support an LGBT+ friend, or better yet, donate your time by volunteering at your local Pride Parade or other Pride events throughout June.

Most cities have sites that list ways to get involved.

Several LGBT+ organizations, like GLAAD, the Audre Lorde Project, and the Anti-Defamation League, have posted resources on these topics as more. You can also find out about your local Pride events here.

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sheminecrafts · 6 years

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Facebook urged to make GDPR its “baseline standard” globally

Facebook is facing calls from consumer groups to make the European Union’s incoming GDPR data protection framework the “baseline standard for all Facebook services”.

The update to the bloc’s data protection framework is intended to strengthen consumers’ control over how their personal data is used by bolstering transparency and consent requirements, and beefing up penalties for data breaches and privacy violations.

In an open letter addressed to founder Mark Zuckerberg, a coalition of US and EU consumer and privacy rights groups urges the company to “confirm your company’s commitment to global compliance with the GDPR and provide specific details on how the company plans to implement these changes in your testimony before the US Congress this week”.

The letter is written by the Trans Atlantic Consumer Dialogue, and co-signed by Jeffrey Chester, the executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy in the US and Finn Lützow-Holm Myrstad, the head of the digital services section at the Norwegian Consumer Council.

“The GDPR helps ensure that companies such as yours operate in an accountable and transparent manner, subject to the rule of law and the democratic process,” they write. “The GDPR provides a solid foundation for data protection, establishing clear responsibilities for companies that collect personal data and clear rights for users whose data is gathered. These are protections that all users should be entitled to no matter where they are located.

“We favor the continued growth of the digital economy and we strongly support innovation. The unregulated collection and use of personal data threatens this future. Data breaches, identity theft, cyber-attack, and financial fraud are all on the rise. The vast collection of personal data has also diminished competition. And the targeting of internet users, based on detailed and secret profiling with opaque algorithms, threatens not only consumer privacy but also democratic institutions.”

Zuckerberg caused confusion about Facebook’s intentions towards GDPR last week when he refused to confirm whether the company would apply the same compliance measures for users in North America — suggesting domestic and Canadian Facebookers, whose data is processed in the US, rather than Ireland (where its international HQ is based), would be subject to lower privacy standards than all other users (whose data is processed within the EU) after May 25 when GDPR comes into force.

In a subsequent conference call with reporters, Zuckerberg further fogged the issue by saying Facebook intends to “make all the same controls available everywhere, not just in Europe” — yet he went on to caveat that by adding: “Is it going to be exactly the same format? Probably not. We’ll need to figure out what makes sense in different markets with different laws in different places.”

Privacy experts were quick to point out that “controls and settings” are just one component of the data protection regulation. If Facebook is truly going to apply GDPR universally it will need to give every Facebook user the same high privacy and data protection standards that GDPR mandates for EU citizens — such as by providing users with the right to view, amend and delete personal data it holds on them; and the right to obtain a copy of this personal data in a portable format.

Facebook does currently provide some user data on request — but this is by no means comprehensive. For example it only provides an eight-week snapshot of information to users about which advertisers have told it they have a user’s consent to process their information.

In denying a more fulsome fulfillment of what’s known in Europe as a ‘subject access request’, the company told one requester, Paul-Olivier Dehaye, the co-founder of PersonalData.IO, that it would involve “disproportionate effort” to fulfill his request — invoking an exception in Irish law in order to circumvent current EU privacy laws.

“[Facebook] are really arguing ‘we are too big to comply with data protection law’,” Dehaye told a UK parliamentary committee last month, discussing how difficult it has been to get the company to divulge information it holds about him. “The costs would be too high for us. Which is mindboggling that they wouldn’t see the direction they’re going there. Do they really want to make that argument?”

Whether that situation changes once GDPR is in force remains to be seen.

The new framework at least introduces a regime of much larger penalties for privacy violations — beefing up enforcement with maximum fines of up to 4% of a company’s global annual turnover. So the legal risks of trying to circumvent EU data protection law will inflate substantially in just over a month.

And Facebook has already made some changes ahead of GDPR coming into force (and likely to try to comply with the new standard) — announcing it’s shutting down a partnership with major offline and online data brokers, for example.

“Consumer groups and privacy groups, human rights groups, civil rights groups will all probably be watching how GDPR is implemented,” Finn Lützow-Holm Myrstad tells TechCrunch. “And will be ready to probably go to court to establish that these are fundamental rights for European citizens at the moment. So we’re definitely going to pay attention.

“But obviously we really want the industry to work with us and to take this seriously because if they don’t there will be a very negative spiral of court cases and a chilling effect for consumers because they will be afraid of using these services. And they will be caught in the middle because of the lack of options that they have when it comes to these services. And I don’t think that’s good for anyone. So we really hope that this is sign of change — real change — from Facebook.”

The company remains under huge pressure following revelations about how much Facebook user information was passed to a controversial political consultancy, Cambridge Analytica, by a developer using its platform to deploy a quiz app as a vehicle for harvesting personal data without most users’ knowledge or consent.

Facebook has said as many as 87M users could have had their data passed to Cambridge Analytica as a result of them or their friends downloading the app in 2014.

Zuckerberg is due to give testimony on this and likely wider issues related to privacy and data protection on his platform to US politicians this week.

One line of questioning might well focus on why Facebook has so studiously ignored years of warnings that it was not adequately locking down access to user data on its platform.

The Norwegian Consumer Council actually filed a complaint about Facebook app permissions all the way back in 2010, writing presciently then: “Third-party applications should only be given access to the information they need in order to function. Facebook should not be able to renounce responsibility for the way in which third parties collect, store or use personal data. As a facilitator and operator Facebook must take direct responsibility for the applications available on the platform.”

Myrstad says Facebook’s historical response to these sort of privacy complaints has been “sadly very, very little”.

On the contrary, he says the company has made it “really, really difficult to opt out of their tracking, their profiling”. He also describes Facebook’s default settings as “a nightmare” for people to understand. In terms of GDPR compliance, he says he believes Facebook will need to make changes to their business model and alter default settings — at very least for users whose data gets processed via Facebook Ireland.

“They will definitely need to have much better consent mechanisms than they do today. Much less take it or leave it,” says Myrstad. “I think there will be a discussion also in Europe, and I think it’s not yet written in stone yet how this will turn out, but we definitely also think that the amount of tracking that Facebook does by default on other websites will need an actual explicit consent — which there is not today. It’s not possible to opt out of the tracking.

“You can opt out of behavioral advertising but that’s not the same as opting out from tracking. And I think the way they do that today is not in line with GDPR… I think they will actually struggle [to comply]. They’re already struggling under current law in Europe. So they will need to make some fundamental changes to their business model.”

At the time of writing Facebook had not responded to a request for comment.

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1nebest · 6 years

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Facebook is facing calls from consumer groups to make the European Union’s incoming GDPR data protection framework the “baseline standard for all Facebook services”.

Whether that situation changes once GDPR is in force remains to be seen.

Facebook has said as many as 87M users could have had their data passed to Cambridge Analytica as a result of them or their friends downloading the app in 2014.

Zuckerberg is due to give testimony on this and likely wider issues related to privacy and data protection on his platform to US politicians this week.

One line of questioning might well focus on why Facebook has so studiously ignored years of warnings that it was not adequately locking down access to user data on its platform.

Myrstad says Facebook’s response to these sort of privacy complaints has been “sadly very, very little”.

At the time of writing Facebook had not responded to a request for comment.

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endenogatai · 6 years