so on top of the FCC voting to repeal Net Neutrality, fundamentally our basic right to access to equal internet, but Trump quite literally BANNED “evidence based” words in the CDC’s budget report for next year. As in, restricting freedom of speech.
hey gays please blow this up he’s trying to ban our existence basically
But he said he was gonna be gooood for trans people pfft hahaha
anyways gay men are still being tortured and killed in Chechnya but western media doesnt give a rats ass but keep talking about it. don’t let lgbt people suffer just because they arent in your country.
how come conservative students think they’re smarter than professors with doctorates and shit
conservative students swear that every university professor is some radical leftist with an agenda when usually it’s a professor that just uses critical thinking skills, context, and has empathy
if you swear all the professors you encounter are wrong, it might actually be that your opinions are outdated, bigoted, and incorrect lmao
This is actually the reason behind the popular notion within conservative circles that universities have a “liberal bias.”
Consistently, conservative students will leave higher ed because they perceive critical thinking, self-critique, and open discussion as attacks on their selfhood, rather than as a process of refining ideas and arguments. All of their accusations about how the people who disagree with them are just “too sensitive” are nothing more than projection, because they very idea that they should question their own assumptions is something they believe would only make them weak.
It’s become increasingly obvious to me that conservative people are just those who have never developed critical thinking skills
My father, who teaches drafting, CAD, and technical math at the local college, told me once that the reason he was a liberal was because “When you start learning about the world with an open mind, when you start meeting and talking to people with an open mind, when you look at the world as a whole and think about it critically, you come to realize that reality has a liberal ‘bias’, and that it’s less a bias than just the logical conclusions of intelligent, compassionate, and emphatic people who want to leave the world better than they found it. To be a conservative Republican, you have to be able to shut down and not acknowledge any of that, and get mad at anyone who tries to point it out.”
Let me make this clear here. It’s actually impossible to hoard millions in personal fortune and also live an ethical life.
Some people are taking this as a personal attack against their families, who make something in the six figure range. This post is not about you. In full scale, families like that are not what I’d consider to be “wealthy”.
I’m talking about the multi-millionaire/billionaire CEOs, politicians, and media moguls. This isn’t about your uncle who’s a surgeon and saves people’s lives. Please don’t misinterpret that. They’re not nearly on the same scale of “wealthy”.
But if your uncle is the head of a multinational corporation that utilizes cheap overseas labour and exploits third world countries, fuck that guy actually.
(NB: US-centric economic discussion. Long post. Press J to skip.)
Americans think that the country’s wealth looks like this:
Above is is a rather famous graph that shows where Americans think the money is. Americans think that the distribution of income in America looks like these pretty colors. The very richest people, the top 20% (all the fancy millionaires and Bill Gates and, like…. the richest rich Hollywood celebrities???) are the yellow bar, and Americans assigned them a little more than half the money in the country. Next comes the orange, the Really Rich Folks. Americans think that the Rich Folks (whom we picture as the brilliant cardiac surgeons and brilliant bankers and eccentric uncles with mansions – the Rich Folks you can realistically dream of being), have a good chunk of the wealth in the country; maybe 20%. And they believe the upper middle class (red) has almost as much wealth as the Rich Folks (Those in the red are the ‘rich’ people that we know personally, after all, so that sounds sensible.) The working class and poor folks (dark blue – the bottom 20%) even holds some of the country’s wealth as well. You can see the rationale. There are lots of working class and poor people in the USA, so all of their money put together must add up to something.
What if you ask Americans to sketch out the ideal income distribution?
If you ask the Americans where they think the money should be, they say it should be distributed the way it is in the graph above. Look at that nice, fair-looking distribution. This isn’t particularly revolutionary. It wasn’t a poll of leftist Tumblr children. This is a fairly good, balanced study presented by Harvard. The polled Americans say that in an ideal world, there should be more money in the class with the upper-middle-class folks (red) than they think there currently is; there should be more wealth resting with the hardworking folks, the happily-white-collar people, the normal-rich ones. America thinks it’s only fair that we have more wealth resting with those folks, and a little bit less wealth with Mark Zuckerberg (yellow). America believes firmly that the orange (brilliant cardiac surgeons, famous musicians) are okay where they are – that they have a fair amount of the wealth and their portion can stay the same. In their ideal world, Americans also expanded the ordinary middle class (light blue). These normal Americans generally think that this class, which almost all Americans believe that they belong to, should have more wealth. And the working class (people who can’t afford vacations or new cars, and everyone poorer than that) should have more general wealth than they do. That’s only fair, Americans say, as they arrange this ideal distribution of wealth. This would be a satisfactory balance of money.
Here’s the actual distribution of wealth in the United States:
Yeah… yeah.
Here’s all the graphs together:
Yeah. The wealth of the nation disproportionately belongs to the top 20% of rich people. The rest of the middle and lower classes are crushed into less than 20% of the rest of the wealth, savaging each other for crumbs.
So, no, nobody cares about your Rich Uncle Joe. Nobody is particularly thirsting to put Rich Uncle Joe ‘first against the wall when the revolution comes’ if that’s what people are afraid of.
Rich Uncle Joe the surgeon probably makes about $300,000 per year if he’s a decent general surgeon at an ordinary American hospital. Rich Uncle Joe’s decent, hardworking, saves-lives-every-day income is the orange-ish line in the graph below. (These are deeply shitty colors, by the way.) Rich Uncle Joe is definitely richer than a poor person, but his six-figure income isn’t influencing the nation.
Because the runaway red line in this graph is the 1%.
This graph is also showing you time. In 1979, when incomes were more equal, Rich Uncle Joe would have been Handsomely Rich, a man who commanded respect and moderate wealth, a man able to hold up his head in the company of the truly wealthy people in the nation. He might even perceive himself as being in the same social class as the Rich. He might build himself a fine mansion, golf with political influencers, hire a personal secretary, and invite the rich folks over for dinner (fondue, natch, in a wood-panelled den with a Persian rug) and count himself as an equal.
By 2007, the super-rich had separated themselves utterly from Rich Uncle Joe. Their money makes more money than Rich Uncle Joe makes. Rich Uncle Joe might impress a starry-eyed tumblr teen who really needs the $50 that his wife slips into their birthday card (“I have rich people in my family and ACTUALLY they’re lovely!”) but he has been left behind. Like OP says: Uncle Joe is not located on the same scale. His wealth is a fraction, which the oligarchs don’t stoop to notice. Also note: 2007, where this graph leaves off, was ten years ago. When The Economist published a graph of American wealth inequality in 2017, they had to break it into pieces to look good in the magazine, because they couldn’t show the 1% on the same graph as everyone else and have it look meaningful. Even with Rich Uncle Joe working his little butt off during all the hours God sends him, he can’t raise the average wage of the 99% until you can see it on a nicely formatted graph. He’s in the top 20-40% of wealthy people in the USA but he is closer to us than to them.
And, given that general surgeons work themselves to death and have mounting levels of educational debt, Rich Uncle Joe’s best hope for his earthly reward is to have all of his debts (including his mortgage) paid off and his retirement savings secured before he loses his hands, meaning that he will have to work 60+ hour weeks at antisocial times in order to be able to stop working when he’s 65, with enough money to cover the remaining 20 years of his life, including the expensive eldercare that he and his wife will require. Since one or the other is statistically increasingly likely to come down with a debilitating illness as they age – cancer or dementia or a stroke, and so on – and the costs of healthcare and eldercare are skyrocketing, Uncle Joe will always feel like he has to hustle to ensure comfort and survival in his winter years. Rich Uncle Joe is ‘rich,’ so he’ll want a private room if he has to go into a nursing home for the end of his life; the average cost of an ordinary private room in the USA in 2016 was $253 per day, so if he wants him and his wife to die in comfort, he will think of this increasingly as he gets older; a fact he is never able to forget or set aside, because he works in healthcare and knows what happens…
And those are the people that Americans assume are comfortable and happy and positively rolling in their well-earned wealth…
Because here’s the thing: Americans, we all think we’re middle class! We think we’re doing okay, and if we work really hard, we’ll probably get rich. Maybe if we win the lottery or publish that fantasy novel, we’ll be super-rich. So we, Americans, we don’t ask too much of the rich. We make things nice for the rich, because we imagine that one day, we will be one of them. AMERICANS DON’T EVEN KNOW WHAT THE RICH ARE. Americans picture ourselves being “rich” and we picture ourselves shopping at the expensive store, going out to eat, living in The Nicest House On the Main Street of Lobster Neck, Massachusetts and going on one (1) vacation to Italy. We say, “Oh, let’s not make things TOO hard for the rich, because that’s what I’m going to be someday.”
STOP THIS. THAT FANTASY LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL, BUT IT IS THE TINIEST SLICE OF THE HUMBLEST PIE. THE RICH HAVE THE WHOLE BIG PIE, LEAVING THE REST OF US A SCATTERING OF CRUMBS TO FIGHT OVER, AND THAT FANTASY LIFE IS SIMPLY A SLIGHTLY LARGER CRUMB. You are picturing yourself rich, but you are picturing simply an ant on the table, holding up that large crumb, going “ooh, this piece of crust has a tiny dot of cherry filling stuck to it! I’m rich!” and somewhere someone in the distance has an ACTUAL CHERRY and everyone’s like “WOW YEAH one day I’ll win the lottery and get the BIG CHERRY TOO!” but, you know, we aren’t exactly dividing up the pie. The Republican guy who votes to make things nicer for rich people, and votes to make things worse for poor people, genuinely thinks that he’s a middle-class guy with an enviously high standard of living, who is absolutely going to be rich someday. He’s good and moral, he thinks, and he is going to get the big crumb like Uncle Joe.
His whole world is crumbs, in which looms that beautiful mental picture of the slightly bigger crumb.
He can’t conceive of the pie. He cannot picture what pie looks like. He thinks pie is what happens when you get, like, three whole cherries together. So he votes, thinking he is supporting the possibility of cherries for Normal Guys Like Him.
Stop picturing Uncle Joe when you picture “the rich.” The rich we’re talking about wouldn’t even give Uncle Joe a seat at a dinner party.
Anyway, I myself don’t really believe in revolution. and cutesy leftist slogans make me a Tired. But I hate it when people shovel shit and call it sugar. And then get mad when people point out that it’s shit. Like, if you’re doing this, the people you’re stanning for hold you in contempt, if they think of you at all! Have a little gotdamn dignity.
There is literally no chance of us civilians being able to overpower giant telecommunications megacorporations and their lobbyists from killing net neutrality
dont wanna sound like some fucking nihilist but democracy is dead, whoever has the most money always wins, folks need to go out and destroy the rich in able to achieve anything
government agencies don’t care for you, they wont listen to your petitions, being a citizen voter doesn’t matter on the federal level as the bourgeoisie will just pay for laws that provide them more profit, the proletariat don’t have $50,000,000,000 to slip into the pockets of the FCC chairman to “persuade” them
what does work though folks is direct action, the bureaucrats aren’t going to even consider your thoughts or needs unless you torch their $100,000 cars and throw cans of paint on their $4M houses
Seriously folks, if it gets destroyed, which it WILL, you people need to go out into the street and cause property damage to telecomm conglomerates and scream at the FCC until they bring it back
If net neutrality is killed and all we see are angry posts and a few buzzfeed articles discussing how Disney characters would react then there is absolutely no hope for the people of this country to stand up to any sort of authoritarian control if they can’t do anything besides blog about their rights being taken away
And don’t listen to any of the propaganda being spewed by bourgeoisie institutions like Bloomberg or CBS or NBC saying this is a good thing, literally every argument for it is saying “the internet is too chaotic and messy”, who else would say this besided the owners of the parent corporations who will make TRILLIONS off of the earnings of us proles
Another effect of this will be restriction of freedom of speech, the working class won’t have a way to communicate and express themselves when you have to pay 15 bucks a month just to use a website. And you bet your ass that those that do are going to be presented content that aligns to the corporation’s political, social, and economic leanings
Tumblr, which is owned by Yahoo and it’s parent company Verizon (which would be one of the 3 telecomm megacorps that would make tremendous amounts of money off of net neutrality being killed) has begun to delete posts regarding net neutrality awareness, as well as automatically removing the net neutrality tag from people’s saved tags
Corporations have the ability, and will enforce it, to silence opposition against their profits, spread this like fucking wildfire
anyway so i feel like the western obsession with romantic love is symptomatic of the absence of community we experience in our socially isolating society,
Holly Boswell, creator of the transgender symbol and trans advocate and organizer, has passed away today, 8/14/17. Details still unknown.
apparently she died of sudden heart failure
i found this letter to…what looks to be the local paper where she lived, from her partner apparently, that gives more information. she also appears to have been the one to coin the term “transgender”
Elbe was a Danish artist and illustrator and one of the first trans
women to undergo gender confirmation surgery. […]
Her case became a sensation in both
Germany and Denmark and a Danish court invalidated her marriage to
Gottlieb. She was able to get her sex and name legally changed.
Elbe began a relationship with French art dealer Claude Lejeune, with
whom she wanted to marry and have children, and was looking forward to
her final surgery involving a uterus transplant, so that they could one
day have children.
With no medication to prevent organ rejection, she did not recover
from her final operation and died September 13, 1931 […] Elbe’s life is the
subject of the 2015 Oscar nominated film “The Danish Girl”.
Wendy Carlos
Wendy Carlos is an Americn Composer and keyboardist best known her
electronic music and film scores. Carlos help oversee the development of
the Moog synthesizer, and help to popularize the instrument by
recording an album of music by Johann Sebastian Bach called Switched-On Bach which won her three Grammy Awards. She also composed the scores for both, A Clockwork Orange and The Shining as well as Disney’s Tron.
Tracy Norman
Tracey “Africa” Norman was the first black trans fashion model,
though she hid the secret of her gender identity as she rose through the
industry in the 1970s. Norman was recruited for the Italian version of
Vogue and quickly became a model, appearing in magazines and
advertisements for such brands as Avon and Clairol. Norman said that she
only went into modeling to avoid sex work, which she thought of as the
only other outlet for a black trans woman from Newark, New Jersey, who
had just begun taking hormones.
Around 1980, an assistant on an Essence magazine photo shoot
who recognized her from Newark exposed her secret, and Norman stopped
getting modeling work after that. She worked abroad in Paris and Milan
before moving back to Newark, and only decided this year to tell her
true story.
Sally Mursi
In 1988, Egyptian Sally Mursi sent a shockwave through the Muslim
World when she changed her sex from male to female in Egypt. The case
led to such a crisis in the country that the Grand Mufti was asked to
decide on it. Muhammad Sayyid Tantawy, the Grand Mufti, released a fatwa,
making it spiritually legal for a transgendered individual to change to
his or her appropriate gender.
Martine Rothblatt
Martine Rothblatt is a lawyer, author and entrepreneur. She also
happens to be the highest paid female executive in the US, and for good
reason. She was a leading proponent of satellite communications, as well
as former CEO of the Geostar Corporation and founder of Sirius
Satellite Radio.
Fallon Fox is the only out trans mixed martial arts fighter and the
subject of the documentary Game Face. She has used her influence outside
of the ring to bring attention to issues affecting trans youth, like
ending conversion therapy.
Sadie Switchblade of G.L.O.S.S.
Sadie is the badass frontwoman of G.L.O.S.S. (Girls Living Outside
Society’s Shit), a hardcore punk band out of Olympia, Washington.
G.L.O.S.S. is crucial listening for punks who are hungry for music that
vocalizes queer and trans experiences with brutal honesty Check out
their bandcamp here: (https://girlslivingoutsidesocietysshit.bandcamp.com/releases)
Landa Lakes
Landa Lakes is a Native American two-spirit individual from the
Chicasaw Tribal Community in Oklahoma, and an activist and drag
performer. Regarding their self-chosen name, Landa said, “It’s a
tongue-in-cheek reference for the famous butter mascot because I like to
point out that even in today’s world we’re still using native people as
mascots.”
Archive 