boss makes a spider i make a slime. that's why i . thas why, tthats why i uhhh. t. thawhy

t.gats why i can't think up an end to the rhyme

GET BACK TO WORK

I feel like it would take a very specific band of awareness for Mitch McConnell to be the moment you ask why God lets good things happen to bad people.

They’ve been rebuilding the Tower of Babel, but this time they have a team of linguists on site. Every time God smites the builders and invents a dozen new languages, the linguists have a dozen decently sized translations in about a month and work can start up again.

The linguists have been really into it. They say the new phonemes are fascinating. As for God, I assume that at this point he’s just curious to see how far this goes.

To keep us on out toes, God gives the next group of builders an extra place of articulation called the flongus between the pharynx and the glottis, creating an entire new column of the IPA chart with sounds between sounds that are literally physiologically impossible for non-flongled people to replicate.

Improved symbols for the flongal plosives ("gacks"), flongal trill ("hacks"), flongal fricatives ("groans"), and and the flongal lateral approximant ("moans")

Update: The builders have now simply switched to communicating entirely through a universal sign language like they should've done to start with. No sounds need be spoken, flongal or otherwise. The Tower steadily rises. Be seeing you soon, God, you little bitch.

update: the builders are all speaking different sign languages now

linguistic pyramid scheme

They really thought they'd beat God fracturing their shared language by inventing a new shared language, at that point you're just inventing languages to feed God.

Shooting through some axes like that guy in that film.

Smiling, laughing, and vomiting on people you don't like when you hand him off.

I think the learned helplessness crisis is almost as bad if not worse than the literacy crisis. Because it’s one think of your parents and educators have failed you and now you cannot or struggle to read and comprehend texts. It’s a whole other thing to just throw your hands up at any friction in life. There’s so many resources that even if you don’t know how to do something you can look up how to do it, or find someone who can.

Okay I already put something in the tags but upon reflection I have something important enough for a comment, too.

Pennsylvania is currently working on its budget, and one of if not THE main sticking point is funding for public transit—all transit in the state, but mainly for SEPTA, the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, which serves Philadelphia and its surrounding counties and is facing a $213 million budget deficit. The PRT, which serves Pittsburgh, is also in danger.

As of this morning, SEPTA has to start the process of cutting services by 45%—canceling some train and bus lines entirely, implementing a 9pm curfew on subway lines, reducing frequency, and canceling sporting event services (all of our professional league stadiums are accessible by one subway line and a significant number of fans take it)—all because politicians in rural counties have been demonizing SEPTA as a “chauffeur service for city residents” that doesn’t benefit the rest of the commonwealth. I am not joking. A state rep literally sent a letter to constituents describing buses that way.

But what is so fucking infuriating to me is that at one of the rallies, I learned ONE SIMPLE FACT that, in my mind, should have ended the entire debate: Philadelphia and Allegheny Counties are the only revenue-positive counties in the commonwealth of Pennsylvania. The money to fix roads and bridges in every other county comes from Philadelphia’s economy, which is supported by the fact that people take the train in from collar counties to work here, and people go to sporting events here and spend money, and residents who are paying significantly higher rents than anywhere else in the state but still living in poverty can get to their jobs without having a car. (Not to mention the fact that our cash-strapped education department saves money by having kids take SEPTA instead of school buses.)

If no agreement is reached and these cuts fully go into effect—some of them are starting by the end of the month and a second round in January—it very well may cost thousands of jobs and millions of dollars in revenue, which will have reverberating effects on every county in the commonwealth, including the poorest who are most reliant on state funding.

But, you know. Fuck cities.

A lot of people need to face the truth that rural and suburban areas are legitimately privileged in American society, and the bigotry agaisnt cities is inherently tied to anti immigration sentiment, racism, queerphobia, and Christian supremacy.

Are y'all ignoring the decades of how the Midwest has been called "flyover country" by smug urbanites?

This isn't unidirectional.

How convenient that every opinion you dislike is held by people with every other opinion or trait you dislike, so you can just ignore everything they actually say.

Tell some poor rando living in a shack on a mountain and surviving on roadkill and food stamps that they're privileged, and they're going to laugh at you.

Even living in a suburb doesn't make you privileged. Take a gander at Detroit.

Also, plenty of bigots are not actually privileged, and most anti-city sentiment I see is driven by things like high prices, high crime, and lack of nature.

I'm not afraid of cities, I just don't want to live in a place full of people that gets hotter in the summer than the suburbs and rural areas.

Also the idea that Rural areas, which are often way poorer, are somehow "Privileged" is a perfect example of how leftist urbanites just plain do not live in tangible reality and don't understand a single damn thing they talk about.

LA County is massive, saying that many people live there is not the flex you think it is, especially considering how much of it is still rural farmland.

"[Big City] IS America" showcases exactly why we have measures in government to prevent the city with the biggest population from outvoting the rest of the nation.

Fandom Problem #15,541:

I need all the "NOT ALL ART IS POLITICAL!!!!" people to understand that the things they're able to view as being apolitical are in fact informed by politics. You think things are "not political" in the same way that some people think they "don't have an accent". Yes, you do. You just incorrectly consider it to be the "default" because it's what's normal--to you.

Just say you want art to reflect only your current political talking points and if they don't, they deserve to suffer.

For everyone in the back who thinks "all art is political". You've probably seen it 100000 times, but you need to see it again, because you're clearly too fucking stupid to not realize that no, not every piece of art is political, you dumb fucking shit.

"Something something Captializism something something Imperialsim something something Colonerzism something something Facist something something Misogynist"

Look I'm too tired to even do a joking 'break down' of what the art means like I did with Sonic games.

Your self righteous pareidolia shouldn't be everyone else's problem.

'Voter fraud' and 'election fraud' are so obviously Republican projections. MAGA/GOP cheating and conniving are manifest. #SAVEAct

Several homeless people in Los Angeles are claiming they were paid to vote for a specific candidate. Different people were giving different names, but it was always one of the two Democrat candidates.

And, I'm gonna be honest, I believe them. Specially since they were only saying they got paid $2-5 each.

Did this change the outcome of the election? Who knows. But it's still a massive problem. And I can't help but feel that if the Republican candidate were being accused of this, the media would be more willing to talk about it.

Can we stop acting like corruption is a one party issue? Humans are corrupt.

I want all election fraud prevented and prosecuted.

OP only wants Republican fraud prevented and prosecuted.

We are not the same.

reaction image

I fuck with this

[image description: screenshot of writing formatted as a question and answer exchange. headline of piece is: The Proposal to Raise Every Boy as a Girl. (author not listed)

Q. You want to raise every boy as a girl? Yes.

Q. Why? A boy will learn to hate girls as long as he is raised in such a way where he is treated as better, and superior to, his girl peers, whenever he is cruel to girls. So, instead, we raise boys as girls.

Q. What if they say they are not a girl, and want to be acknowledged as boy? Then you know they are a boy, so you must make sure to understand them as boy, and not a girl.

Q. What does it mean to be 'raised as a girl'? That's up for you to decide. The only difference is that you should not raise boys any differently than you raise girls, since you raise every boy as a girl.

Q. Girls and boys are raised in specific ways for specific purposes, so it does not make sense to raise boys as girls. If you raise every boy as a girl, then there is no being which is not raised as a girl, so anyone raised as a girl necessarily must learn to do anything and everything to grow up, without restrictions on tasks, labours, or interests.

Q. But boys and girls are different. All two girls are different, and raising girls in one specific way destroys this individuality in favour of moulding girls to serve the same master. Still, the girls resist to live life on their own terms. If girls can be raised such that they know they can do anything they want, including not being girls, so too will boys raised as girls.

Q. Why not raise every girl as a boy? Because if a girl does not exist among boys, then the girl is made.

Q. Why not raise girls and boys as themselves? The self must be made in a world where girls and boys can first and foremost be themselves. One step towards this goal is to raise every boy as a girl.

Q. The way people raise girls is cruel, so why would you raise boys with that cruelty? If you raise girls with cruelty, then you should stop being cruel to girls.

/end description]

The blog post this is screenshot is from

the title made me wary but i do think this is an interesting proposal to chew on!

as i understand it the core point being made here is challenging the concept of "raising a child as a gender" entirely by going straight to the misogyny that is fundamental to patriarchal gender. to me this suggests "raise boys as girls" is about raising boys to identify with girls, rather than to develop an identity as a boy around opposition to girls. this is not being depicted as simply "genderless parenting" because it is making a specific point about misogyny & its role in gender socialization and identity formation. to deviate from patriarchal demands of masculinity is to become associated with femininity / girls regardless of intention or actual intentional performance of femininity (what i assume is meant by "a girl is made"). rather than trying to pursue an almost apolitical gender neutrality that fails because it doesn't engage with the role misogyny plays in preserving patriarchal gender as a whole, gender neutrality is presented as synonymous with identifying with girls, as under patriarchy the entire construction of gender is built (not exclusively but fundamentally) through sexism that is both oppositional (exorsexist) and traditional (misogynistic).

the point is that raising a girl should not involve cruelty, or stereotype, or stigmatization, and boys should be encourage to feel no shame or identity conflict in identifying as the same kind of being as girls. so its a purposeful act of provocation to say "boys should be raised as girls" which to me sends the message that challenging misogyny and challenging the construction of gender itself are the same project. and that being (raised as) a girl should not mean anything other than being raised as a whole person, as part of a community of whole people.

i feel like this is less of a practical, literal proposal and more of a thought experiment and consciousness-raising effort. i think there's some quibbles i could make with how this goes about it but its interesting regardless! i think this is an overall good kind of feminist provocation & its more nuanced than some people in the notes are giving it credit for.

"Because if a girl does not exist among boys, then a girl is made."

I had trouble understanding this part, so I reframed it in my head as:

"Because if [the other] does not exist... then [the other] is made."

Which might not be exactly what this is going for, but it helped me understand it a little more, at least from one angle.

And also I agree with what @genderkoolaid said.

I think that's a good translation of that line! Its in line with feminist work on woman-as-other a la Simone de Beauvoir.

I think following that reading, you could sum up this work's ethos or message as "in order to destroy the concept of the Other, we all must identify with the Other, rather than trying to achieve equality without challenging the model of identity-through-othering which still preserves the patriarchal hierarchy that creates and maintains the binary of dominant / other itself"

You know, honest to fuck, I hate to be that person but every so often I have to remind everyone that there is a fucking reason why Dr Money is reviled as a figure who's actions have permanently stained every discussion of trans identities and why his position was literally disproven by his own experiment.

Because guess what? You're proposing the actual core that his barbaric 'experiement' was centered around.

dark souls 3 is ten years old ????

this isn't the gif i thought it would be .

"adventurers are actually more scared of you than you are of them"

"he's literally just doing what an adventurer is supposed to do"

"do you think they think of us as Giant Adventurers?"

"do you know how many other creatures would be infesting our cave if there were no adventurers?"

"how would you like it if you were bumbling along on your little adventurer day, and some giant dragon thing squished you for the crime of being yourself?"

"y'know, so many dragons are grossed out by them, but i think they're fascinating! Did you know some adventurers form symbiotic relationships with small monsters? Some of them even do a simplified form of spellcraft! Like, with actual magic and everything!"

"Of course they are swarming your cave, you dolt! You captured a juvenile queen and took it home with you, what did you expect!?"

One of the paradoxes of the modern internet is that I genuinely understand sites need to get revenue somewhere, and while I don't love ads I'm actually okay seeing relatively unintrusive ads on a free site, hearing words from sponsors, etc.

But the modern internet is so full of modal popups and video ads on autoplay and trackers that using it without an adblocker is basically impossible, so everything gets blocked.

Right? Developers had three very, very simple rules that they needed to follow as part of the unspoken agreement between us and them that let them generate revenue from us looking at content:

And that was fine! It worked! But sometime in the past ~decade 90%* of sites decided that was too hard, and that they'd really just like to make money off of the plebs without any sort of accountability packaged in, and so the average web user had to start protecting themselves with countermeasures that up until then had been relegated to small and relatively unobtrusive circles of privacy enthusiasts. The users didn't start this war.

#to have the confidence of a mediocre white man #speaking on matters he knows nothing about

Hey @adamtheredbeard did you notice the image suspiciously cut off before the end of the tweet? I wonder if that softlib had anything else to say...

I see a lot of tags from Communists gloating in the reblogs, very confident that they know better than this guy...

But I'd wager that basically none of them do. It isn't just a matter of historical knowledge, either. For instance, "#mediocre white men" is part of a push for a form of scientific racism (based on "correct" race ratios that are just made up), and you didn't notice.

They talk about it a lot in others, but they tend to be pretty weak in their ability to spot when they're giving in to hatred and it's distorting their thinking.

I'm really sick of people dissing on figures like MLK because they weren't violent activists. They assassinated MLK because his activism was actually fucking WORKING. And that only made him a martyr and furthered progress for black America. Black America owes a LOT of its success in the fight for civil rights to MLKs pacifist approach.

Guillotine worshippers misrepresenting their opposition. A practice as old as cake.