Impudent Sisyphus

A message from Traditional Canadians for the Preservation of...

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 15:54:36 -0400

A message from Traditional Canadians for the Preservation of the Traditional Definition of All Things Traditional. [x]

Heart Hungry: The Life and Times of Hamburger Jack: why "it's satire!" is a really bad excuse:

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 15:49:08 -0400

Heart Hungry: The Life and Times of Hamburger Jack: why "it's satire!" is a really bad excuse::

warcrimenancydrew:

i know this is not gonna sit well with people, but i honestly don’t think white people can and should ever make satires about race. it’s not that you’re making bad satire (well, it is actually), but it’s also that you think you can make satires about something which doesn’t actually affect you and where you actually have power.

satire is about resisting power and the status quo and being clever about society in a way where you’re actually criticizing in a socially meaningful way. and if you benefit from that system and are the status quo just in terms of your identity, you can’t successfully satirize that, and you have a social responsibility not to try.

as a straight person, i can’t satirize homophobia. i just can’t. i benefit from the system that privileges heterosexual identity, and i can’t honestly and faithfully speak to what it’s like to be LGBTQ.

that’s why all the blackface and the ridiculousness tina fey does on 30 rock is an issue. it’s satire written by white people and largely for white people but about experiences that white people don’t go through. it’s white people laughing to each other about how bad poc have it. it doesn’t accomplish anything except privileging white people’s thoughts and perceptions all over again and making the lived experiences of poc something white people can just have a private laugh about while we have actual funny brilliant amazing people of color whose racial commentary never gets heard or appreciated.

so I just realized something the other day.I’d never really quite understood it when people...

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 14:37:11 -0400

so I just realized something the other day.
I’d never really quite understood it when people criticize street harassment by saying stuff like “I’m not dressing for YOU, I’m dressing for ME; the way I dress is about making me feel good, not getting attention,” because obviously the way you dress in public is very much mediated by how you want other people to view you. Unless you’re the kind of person who sits around in your house alone in all your fancy clothes just because you feel like it (which I admit to doing occasionally, so I get that), it always seemed kind of disingenuous to claim that you would dress nicely without it having ANYTHING to do with wanting attention. Not that wanting attention for dressing nicely is bad, or that how you’re dressed should ever be an invitation for harassment, or that wanting some kinds of attention should require you to resign yourself to ALL kinds of attention — I guess it’s more that I just never could really connect with the rhetoric of this idea because of how it’s generally phrased?

But then a few days ago I was about to go out and I was trying to decide what to wear, and it hit me like a ton of bricks: generally the reason I dress nicely when I go out is not because I want people to notice me, but because I want them to NOT notice me. Because of my issues with social anxiety and low self-esteem, I’m terrified of people thinking I’m ugly/judging me on my looks whenever I’m out (which is an awful thing to care about, but there it is). I’ve also noticed that people tend to treat me with less respect and/or think I’m a lot younger than I am when I’m not dressed well, which intensifies my social anxiety by approximately an entire order of magnitude.

So when I dress nicely to go out, it’s very rarely about actually looking good to get positive attention — it’s about NOT sticking out (by being scruffy and disheveled), and about controlling the way people interact with me to reduce my own social anxiety (rather than to elicit a specific response in other people as an end in itself).

And now I finally get it. The “I dress for me and not for you” concept. Obviously my reasons aren’t universal, everyone dresses differently and has their own reasons for dressing the way they do, but it finally clicked with me how someone can dress in an “attention-getting” way for reasons that have nothing or very little to do with getting attention. Because I’ve been doing this unconsciously for YEARS; it just took me this long to figure it out.

Dear Feminist (specifically the really angry one reading this)

Sat, 06 Apr 2013 22:21:58 -0400

Dear Feminist (specifically the really angry one reading this):

robotaverage:

patrickandmarcus:

thetomska:

I’ll be brief.

We want to understand. We want equality. So you need to stop being such a raging fucking asshole whenever we try and talk about the subject. We’re going to get it wrong at first and you need to understand this because your ridiculously aggressive knee-jerk reactions to every little mistake we make is making us too scared to even bring it up.

Calm the fuck down. We’re trying.

- a man

Translation: I just wanna insult you by calling you irrational and angry while simultaneously playing the victim

Shut the fuck up

Dear Man,

This post was originally signed off, “Thomas Ridgewell (a man, trying to understand)”. So:

Dear Thomas Ridgewell who is trying to understand,

Thank you for being brief.

Maybe it takes a man to tell you this, because of the very reason I’m about to go over with you.

(And if you are really trying to understand, then you’ll listen to me, because it really is a basic concept.)

The onus is on you, Thomas Ridgewell, who is trying to understand.

You and me are agents of the patriarchy, which is a department - if you like - of the kyriarchy, whose business it is to keep ‘the other’ down.

It is not the job of someone who is oppressed to support us on our quest to understand, or to educate us, or listen to us, or even to be polite to us.

They owe us no favors, they are not beholden to us in any way.

If they’re angry it’s because they’re oppressed. And us men, however unwittingly, are agents of their oppression.

To be a good ally, we have to know our place. Because the people we represent have been deciding others’ places for a long time.

Your post has tone policing written all over it.

From a cisman’s point of view, there is no such thing as a feminist who is too angry. There’s no feminist who ruins it for the rest, as far as you’re concerned, it’s not your place to judge. And it’s definitely not your place to say it.

If you want to understand, try to understand.

You’re too scared to bring up feminism?

There are women who are scared to go into a club, or walk home at night, or leave the house because they get catcalled or grabbed or worse. There are women who are made to feel like everything was their mistake, because they shouldn’t have been out that late, or should have dressed less provocatively. And your feelings are hurt because sometimes you’re scared to bring it up.

There’s nothing tackier than two privileged men talking about feminism, so I’ll stop, and I’ll take this down if any feminist objects to it. I guess your post just rubbed me the wrong way.

Fuck men who think they can wade into feminism with their rights intact.

Yours sincerely,

Another man who is trying to understand.

Did A California Company Just Prove Marx Right?

Sat, 06 Apr 2013 15:02:48 -0400

letterstomycountry:

Morning Star is a California company that is responsible for processing 40% of California’s tomato crop. They also have no management. (Via Reason.tv):

Morning Star has many of the usual positions that one would expect at an ordinary company: there are floor workers, payroll personnel, folks that handle the mail and outside communications, and so on. The difference is that, from a bird’s eye view, no single person at Morning Star is anybody else’s boss. The entire operation appears to thrive on the power of collective expectations, and by giving workers a direct stake in the success of the company. Workers at Morning Star make their own decisions about how to perform their job, what tools they need to keep the machines running, and how to structure their work day to keep production running smoothly. As one employee put it, there is no bureaucracy that he has to fight through if he needs something for his lab. He just goes out and purchases it.

To some, this may seem like a frightfully inefficient way to run a business. If employees can make instantaneous discretionary purchases of lab equipment on the company dime, then where is the cost control? Such a system seems doomed to failure without a hierarchy of some sort to check potentially unwise exercises of indiscretion.

The answer is that these checks are built into the system of collective expectations. As another Morning Star employee put it, Morning Star’s business model presumes that employees who are closest to a particular business process are the most qualified to make decisions about how to keep that process running efficiently. Thus, one would expect an unwise purchase to be met with scrutiny by one’s peers on the factory floor. Morning Star’s firm model thrives by ensuring that one individual is never and uncontested decision-maker solely responsible for decisions related to a business process at the company. Every worker has a stake in the outcome of everybody else’s labor. The threat of discipline from management is unnecessary to achieve desired outcomes.

Morning Star is not the first company to adopt this business model. Valve Corp., a wildly successful Video Game company that currently dominates the Video Game industry through it’s Steam platform, also has no formal management. Gore Inc., the makers of Gore-Tex, are an 8,500 strong company that has no company organization chart. Though Gore does retain a few corporate officer titles for various purposes within the company, those officials have little direct power over other employees in the corporation. Those same officers are also not unilaterally chosen by the Board of Directors, but rather, in a more democratic fashion:

In Gore’s self-regulating system, all the normal management rules are reversed. In this back-to-front world, leaders aren’t appointed: they emerge when they accumulate enough followers to qualify as such. So when the previous group CEO retired three years ago, there was no shortlist of preferred candidates. Alongside board discussions, a wide range of associates were invited to nominate to the post someone they would be willing to follow. ‘We weren’t given a list of names – we were free to choose anyone in the company,’ Kelly says. ‘To my surprise, it was me.’

Other firms have shown that “non-management management” approach is feasible. At IDEO Corp., a Palo Alto engineering company responsible for such ubiquitous inventions as squeezable toothpaste tubes, or the mouse you are using to point & click things on your computers, there are no bosses, and no management structure. Sun Hydraulics is a $170 million dollar manufacturing firm with no job titles, no organization chart, and even lacks job performance criteria for its employees. There is a Plant Manager, but their job is not to supervise employees: it’s to water the company’s plants.

How are so many companies, in areas as diverse as tomato farming, hydraulics production, and video game production, running successful businesses without traditional management? In a society built on Capitalism, the common wisdom is that productive firms require managers with coercive authority to motivate people to do their jobs. Most ordinary people are shocked when they learn that there are companies who stay profitable with no bosses. How can this be an efficient way to run a company?

As it turns out, there’s a lot of evidence that top-down management is an inefficient form of firm organization. Gary Hamel, writing for the Harvard Business Review, noted several reasons to abandon traditional management hierarchies, one of which is the fact that managers add both personnel costs and unnecessary complexity to a firm:

A small organization may have one manager and 10 employees; one with 100,000 employees and the same 1:10 span of control will have 11,111 managers. That’s because an additional 1,111 managers will be needed to manage the managers. In addition, there will be hundreds of employees in management-related functions, such as finance, human resources, and planning. Their job is to keep the organization from collapsing under the weight of its own complexity. Assuming that each manager earns three times the average salary of a first-level employee, direct management costs would account for 33% of the payroll.

Top-down management also centralizes risk-taking in the hands of fewer decision-makers, which increases the likelihood of a disastrous event:

… As decisions get bigger, the ranks of those able to challenge the decision maker get smaller. Hubris, myopia, and naïveté can lead to bad judgment at any level, but the danger is greatest when the decision maker’s power is, for all purposes, uncontestable. Give someone monarchlike authority, and sooner or later there will be a royal screwup. A related problem is that the most powerful managers are the ones furthest from frontline realities. All too often, decisions made on an Olympian peak prove to be unworkable on the ground.

The personal whims of managers can also kill or disincentivize ideas that are good for the company, especially when ideas have to be filtered through multiple levels of management:

…[A] multitiered management structure means more approval layers and slower responses. In their eagerness to exercise authority, managers often impede, rather than expedite, decision making. Bias is another sort of tax. In a hierarchy the power to kill or modify a new idea is often vested in a single person, whose parochial interests may skew decisions.

Then there’s “the cost of tyranny:”

The problem isn’t the occasional control freak; it’s the hierarchical structure that systematically disempowers lower-level employees. For example, as a consumer you have the freedom to spend $20,000 or more on a new car, but as an employee you probably don’t have the authority to requisition a $500 office chair. Narrow an individual’s scope of authority, and you shrink the incentive to dream, imagine, and contribute.

The success of these business models demonstrate one of the fundamental criticisms of traditional Capitalist modes of production that Marx attempted to illustrate when he was writing Das Kapital. While Marx was wrong (in my opinion) about quite a few things, the success of the companies above demonstrates that Marx was correct to point out that divorcing employees from management decisions related to their own labor is an inherently inefficient means of production. Divorcing employees from the product of their labor separates them from one of the primary motivating forces to perform that labor. This process of alienation itself is what creates the necessity for “bosses”—employees whose primary purpose is to oversee & discipline other employees in their assigned tasks.

Thus, what we really see in Marx’s Theory of Labor Alienation was, inter alia, an argument about firm management: the need for “bosses” in the workplace only arises when employees are completely divorced from the means of production. When workers have a direct stake in the final product of their labor, they no longer need the threat of coercion from superiors to do their job. An employee’s direct interest in the outcome, combined with the power of collective expectations of their peers in the workplace, replaces the threat of, and need for, discipline from above.

With all this being said: I am not attempting to argue here that the success of non-managed firms proves that stateless socialism is viable, or validates Marxism writ large. Indeed, I’m sure that the folks at Reason have a much different view on Morning Star’s success than I do—and moreover, I remain, as I have always been, a fan of mixed economies.

What I think is clear, however, is that Marxist theorists are right to point out that there is nothing inherently “natural” or “necessary” about the way the workplace is organized in most Western societies today. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that top-down hierarchies in the workplace are neither necessary for profitability, nor an extension of natural human activities. Indeed, if Gary Hamel’s observations about the inefficiency of management are true, we appear to have been doing it wrong for quite some time. Though perhaps we could have come to the same conclusion more easily by just reading Dilbert comics:

sleepydumpling: abgron: thedarkchocolatedandy: sxeman69: sk...

Sat, 06 Apr 2013 14:53:15 -0400

sleepydumpling:

abgron:

thedarkchocolatedandy:

sxeman69:

sketchedsmiles:

vaginapowersactivate:

we-are-star-stuff:

ihopeyouareabletoable:

h-plus:

leftybegone:

I would totally put my face 4 inches from her chest and scream, “I’M SO HAPPY RIGHT NOW!” And I’d make a point never to take my eyes off her boobs until she got so uncomfortable and creeped out that she decided to leave, go back home, sit on her bed in the dark, and think about how completely stupid she was to write “STILL NOT ASKING FOR IT” while asking for it.

This woman’s a disgrace.

But she’s not asking for it. This is a human body, nothing more, nothing less. It’s not being sexualized, in fact, she’s covered her nipples too. I’m sorry, h-plus, that you feel that your body and the body of other women should be considered a disgrace. Do you feel uncomfortable when looking at pictures in the doctor’s office of a woman’s naked body? And do you, leftybegone, get uncontrollably horny at the same sight? Control your python (or garden snake), man, you’re not 12. Have some maturity over the matter. If you did that to that woman, leftybegone, you’d just be putting a bad face on us guys, making us seem like sex-crazed, immature horndogs. Maybe you are one, but I’m tired people making that assumption of us as a gender. It’s disgraceful. She wouldn’t think it was stupid of her to do that if you did. You’d just make her movement more powerful.

Rape (noun):the crime of forcing another person to submit to sex acts, especially sexual intercourse.

Men aren’t primal fucking animals. They’re humans that are completely capable of resisting their urges. I bet you (leftybegone) are a kid with some serious hormones since you, obviously, can’t control yourself.

“She was asking for it”. Really? Can you really blame an individual for someone else’s lack of control? The mere fact that a woman is more likely to be assaulted if she wears certain types of clothing does not make it right. She could walk around naked and that still doesn’t excuse rape. The solution to the problem is not for women to “dress less slutty” but for men to realize that a woman’s choice of dress is not an open invitation to sexual assault.

Snap Snap Snap Snap Snap

Snap

Snap

Snap

Snap

Snap

Snap

Snap Snap Snap Snap Snap

but then again, its kind like putting a meat suit on and telling a shark not to eat you

We (men) are not fucking sharks!

We are not rabid animals living off of pure instinct

We are capapble of rational thinking and understanding.

Just because someone is cooking food doesn’t mean you’re entitled to eat it.

Just because a banker is counting money doesn’t mean you’re being given free money.

Just because a person is naked doesn’t mean you’re entitled to fuck them.

You are not entitled to someone else’s body just because it’s exposed.

What is so fucking difficult about this concept?

Reblogging for bolded commentary.

SHUT. DOWN.

mamamantis: **please do not remove artist’s comments or repost...

Sat, 06 Apr 2013 14:45:54 -0400

mamamantis:

**please do not remove artist’s comments or repost this comic!!!**

okay so i finally finished this comic for my design class! i might eventually print it in small booklets or make multiple episodes/issues if enough interest is expressed. if you reblog this and you would be interested in purchasing/reading issues of this or comics like this, please say so so that i can gauge whether or not this is something i should pursue! <3

the final image is what the back cover will look like if i print it!

EDIT: the phrase “sorry my friendship is a crappy consolation prize” is adapted from a post by tumblr user pampampam! sorry, i meant to credit it and i was so relieved to have finished that i forgot to add this when i first posted.

applyforhugs: This is the best thing.

Sat, 06 Apr 2013 14:40:54 -0400

applyforhugs:

This is the best thing.

stfufauxminists: elizabitchtaylor: I’m such a nice girl, I’m so sick of being...

Sat, 06 Apr 2013 14:20:46 -0400

stfufauxminists:

elizabitchtaylor:

I’m such a nice girl, I’m so sick of being fuckzoned!!!!!!!

What’s the fuckzone you ask? it’s this zone that guys put you in where they only want to fuck you; they don’t want to have a friendship with you and they aren’t satisfied with emotional commitment, they just want sex!!!!!

I’m a nice girl!!!! Stop putting me in the fuckzone!!!!!!!

Oh my god can I marry the OP.

"Men who want to flirt with women have to realize: Women live in a state of continual vigilance about..."

Sat, 06 Apr 2013 14:00:21 -0400

“

Men who want to flirt with women have to realize: Women live in a state of continual vigilance about sexual safety. It’s like having a mild case of hay fever that never goes away. It’s not debilitating. You’re not weak. You’re not afraid. You just suck it up and get on with your life. It’s nothing that’s going to stop you from making discoveries, or climbing mountains, or falling in love. Sometimes you can almost forget about it. It doesn’t mean it’s not there, subtly sucking your energy. You learn to avoid situations that make it worse and seek out conditions that make it better.

If a female stranger is wary around you, it is not because she suspects you are a rapist, or that all men are rapists. It’s because a general level of circumspection is what vigilance requires. Don’t take it personally.

If this frustrates you, try to remember that women are blamed for lapsed vigilance. If a woman does get raped, everyone rushes to see where she let her guard down. Was she drinking? Was she alone? Was she wearing a short skirt? Did she go to a strange man’s room for coffee at 4am?

A woman must be seen to be vigilant as well as be vigilant. If she is deemed insufficiently vigilant, she will be at least partly blamed for any sexual violence that befalls her. If she’s regarded as downright reckless, that “evidence” can be used to completely exonerate her rapist. If it comes down to a he said/she said dispute over whether sex was consensual, as so many rape cases do, the dispute becomes a referendum on whether the woman seems like the sort of reckless person who would have sex with a stranger.

If a woman does go back to a strange man’s hotel room at 4am, even if she only wants a coffee and conversation, she’s more or less given him the power to rape her. No jury is going to believe she went up there for anything but sex. So, don’t be surprised if a stranger reacts badly to that suggestion.

”

- Attention, Space Cadets: Do Not Proposition Women in the Elevator (via ellielamothe)

sexistfacebookdudes: A new bingo card to go with the...

Sat, 06 Apr 2013 13:49:04 -0400

sexistfacebookdudes:

A new bingo card to go with the facebook-sexism one.

seriouslyamerica: TW: domestic violence quickhits: You can...

Sat, 06 Apr 2013 12:29:36 -0400

seriouslyamerica:

TW: domestic violence

quickhits:

You can stop pretending that guns protect women now.

New York Times:

Early last year, after a series of frightening encounters with her former husband, Stephanie Holten went to court in Spokane, Wash., to obtain a temporary order for protection.

Her former husband, Corey Holten, threatened to put a gun in her mouth and pull the trigger, she wrote in her petition. He also said he would “put a cap” in her if her new boyfriend “gets near my kids.” In neat block letters she wrote, “ He owns guns, I am scared.”

The judge’s order prohibited Mr. Holten from going within two blocks of his former wife’s home and imposed a number of other restrictions. What it did not require him to do was surrender his guns.

About 12 hours after he was served with the order, Mr. Holten was lying in wait when his former wife returned home from a date with their two children in tow. Armed with a small semiautomatic rifle bought several months before, he stepped out of his car and thrust the muzzle into her chest. He directed her inside the house, yelling that he was going to kill her.

What saved Holten was not another gun, but a phone. She dial 911, then hid the phone. “The dispatcher heard Ms. Holten begging for her life and quickly directed officers to the scene,” the report tells us.

“For all its rage and terror, the episode might well have been prevented,” NYT goes on. “Had Mr. Holten lived in one of a handful of states, the protection order would have forced him to relinquish his firearms. But that is not the case in Washington and most of the country, in large part because of the influence of the National Rifle Association and its allies.”

I know that the NRA would argue that Stephanie Holten would’ve been better off had she been armed too. But exchanging gunfire with a lunatic does not guarantee success. And since her kids were present, tragedy would be all that more likely. Gun fanatics live in a fantasy world, informed by action movies, where the “good guy” always comes out on top. But in the real world, criminals aren’t automatically incompetent. Justice is a human construct, not a law of physics. In a gun v. gun confrontation, either party can lose. This is why people with guns are more likely to be shot — if I’m a criminal and someone pulls a gun on me, they’re my primary target. And of course, belief in the “good guys always win” theory promoted by the NRA causes people to take stupid risks.

The fact is that there are people who should not have guns. More guns is not the answer here, fewer guns obviously are. There are situations — and this is one — where meeting the NRA’s definition of “pro-gun” is in reality just pro-crime. Cory Holton is obviously scum. He can live without his guns.

And his ex-wife and kids would stand a better chance of living as well. A woman’s chance of being killed by an abuser increases by 700% if he has access to a firearm. That’s just a fact. And it’s a fact the NRA doesn’t want you to know, because they want to be able to sell guns and ammo to criminals like Stephanie Holton’s stalking, abusive ex-husband.

“Gun fanatics live in a fantasy world, informed by action movies, where the “good guy” always comes out on top. But in the real world, criminals aren’t automatically incompetent. Justice is a human construct, not a law of physics. In a gun v. gun confrontation, either party can lose.”

“A woman’s chance of being killed by an abuser increases by 700% if he has access to a firearm.”

While I’m sure anyone on either side of the debate would define me as pro-gun-control based on the legislation I would support, I’m actually not opposed, philosophically, to “the right to bear arms.”
But the bolded quotes above are really, really important to keep in mind.

centrefolds: i’m sorry

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 17:56:58 -0400

centrefolds:

i’m sorry

crazygoingslowly: Basically every conversation I had this past...

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 16:30:01 -0400

crazygoingslowly:

Basically every conversation I had this past week.

The Pervocracy: Teenage Panic

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 16:28:27 -0400

The Pervocracy: Teenage Panic:

…I was so convinced that I had been bad and would be punished, I believed biology itself would punish me. It didn’t help that I’d grown up hearing about how pregnancy and STIs were “consequences” for sex. Health class, parents, teachers, media, and peers had always talked about these things not as risks that adults have to manage, but as dire fates (or worse, humiliatingly comical fates) for sluts. At age 15, I took a certain toxic-girl-hate pride in being Responsible and Pure. At age 16, I’d had a penis inside me.

This nasty mess of emotions did nothing to stop me from having sex, of course. There was a whole other mess of emotions telling me that you’re undesirable and you’re not growing up and you’re not in a real relationship if you don’t have sex, and those won out in the end. (Plus I was really horny.) And by “in the end,” I mean “within two hours”—I had sex almost immediately the first time I found out a guy wanted to have sex with me. So much for convincing kids to wait. All I was convinced to do was have sex, but feel absolutely terrible about it.

But you can’t say there was no deterrent effect, because I was powerfully deterred from seeking any kind of medical advice or testing. That would be humiliating beyond measure, I was convinced. It wouldn’t feel like asking for help; it would feel like turning myself in. Saying “I need an STD test” felt to me like saying “I’m a disobedient slut who probably got what she deserves,” and I couldn’t face that shame. I’d rather just take my chances. Even though I was terrified of my chances.

God we fuck up teenagers’ heads. We tell them that biological conditions are moral punishments and then we get all shocked when they don’t practice rational risk management of biological conditions. We teach them “sex is super desirable and all the cool kids do it, and it’s hideously shameful and will destroy your life” and we wonder why they act an eensy bit neurotic about it. If you tried to design a system for making sexually active kids confused and unsafe, you couldn’t do much better than the American media and school system…

television-and-tea: fandomsandfeminism: Things that ACTUALLY EXISTED FOR REAL IN EUROPEAN HISTORY:...

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 16:21:01 -0400

television-and-tea:

fandomsandfeminism:

Things that ACTUALLY EXISTED FOR REAL IN EUROPEAN HISTORY: Non-white people, mostly those of North African and Middle Eastern heritage who were immigrants, merchants, missionaries, mercenaries advisors, and scholars; female leaders, including the famed Warrior Queen Boudicca; and queer folk, seriously, Shakespeare wrote sonnets for dudes.

Things that did NOT actually exist for real in European History: Magic, faeries, dragons, wizards.

Q.E.D. The “well, there’s no black people/brown people/women leaders/gay people in this European inspired fantasy because that would be inaccurate” rhetoric is bullshit.

JESUS FUCKING CHRIST YESTHIS PLEASE AND THANKS

So much fantasy is set in quasi “dark ages” feudal Europe. Can we just take a sec and realize that Europe is that asshole who gets to be a continent even though he’s not really a continent. He’s the jerk who, when he has a bad day, everyone starts calling it The Dark Ages.

FYI, “The Dark Ages” were a golden age for almost everyone else. Islam was booming, spreading and gathering up classical knowledge that would have been completely lost otherwise. China was going through a golden age of its own unter the Tang empire and Song empires, during which China grew and traded so much and so widely that they ran out of metal for coins and had to invent paper money (they also invented gunpowder). And let’s not forget that, while we have relatively few written records from this region, the evidence suggests that Africa (ALL of Africa, both around the Mediterranean and in Sub-Saharan Africa) was booming as well, creating empires of their own, trading with Islamic travelers and building gorgeous goddamn cities.

During this massively diverse time period, there were gay emperors and female emperors in China, the most traveled man in the world was an Islamic scholar and one of the wealthiest men in the world was an African Muslim king.

“The Dark Ages” were a golden age for almost everyone else.

snitchesbecray: motegs: By far one of my FAVORITE signs I’ve...

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 16:18:07 -0400

snitchesbecray:

motegs:

By far one of my FAVORITE signs I’ve seen this week!

aw snap. I love the smell of logic in the afternoon

"When women scream you wonder what’s wrong with them. When men yell you get afraid about what they’re..."

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 16:13:44 -0400

“When women scream you wonder what’s wrong with them. When men yell you get afraid about what they’re going to do.”

- A girl in my creative writing class said this in response to a story we read about witnessing intimate partner violence and it really fucked with my head because I’ve never, ever, ever, thought of it that way. (via girl-hair)

kyssthis16: shartonnay: deadlydinos: If slurs are “just words”, why do the words “you’re a...

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 21:47:32 -0400

kyssthis16:

shartonnay:

deadlydinos:

If slurs are “just words”, why do the words “you’re a racist” offend you so much?

BOOM.

Yes, inquiring minds want to know……….

whoops

sexhaver: everything you need to know about reddit in one...

Sun, 24 Mar 2013 13:38:00 -0400

sexhaver:

everything you need to know about reddit in one picture

Evangelicals arguing against evolution/atheism and atheists arguing against anything they don’t like seem to have a really serious problem confusing “you are required to unquestioningly adhere to a strict and inflexible dogma, just like religion!!!11!” with “utilizing a cognitive framework to analyze your experiences and make ethical judgements”

and I would just like to remind everyone

that this

IS HOW THE HUMAN BRAIN FUCKING FUNCTIONS, YOU SQUALLING ASS SNORKELERS. THAT IS LITERALLY HOW IT WORKS. ALL THE TIME.
JUST BECAUSE IT’S A COGNITIVE FRAMEWORK THAT YOU DON’T USE DOESN’T AUTOMATICALLY MAKE IT DOGMATIC AND WRONG. There ARE cognitive frameworks that are dogmatic and arguably damaging to society. And there ARE ways to identify them. So when you reflexively label any perspective that you disagree with as DOGMA!!11!! RLEIGION OMg!!11! by pointing fingers at characteristics shared by ALL mental paradigms and hoping we don’t notice, you know what? it just makes you look like a FUCKING MORON.