capitalism is fucking scary because it will commodify literally anything. it commodifies the rebellion culture that is supposed to strike against the system but capitalism turns it into “punk rock”. it commodifies spirituality to make you buy self help books that teaches you to stay away from capitalism. it commodifies minimalism and makes you buy things to maintain your minimalist aesthetic. it commodifies global warming, one of the deadliest consequences of capitalism itself and guilt trips you into buying “green products”. it commodifies itself and creates the idea that vanity is fashionable. it will eat everything up.
I actually feel sorry for the likely unpaid intern sitting at tumblr HQ dealing with all our bullshit and snark while those actually in charge watch the world burn from a safe distance and blame it on us damn kids not buying more products. Because ultimately this is what this about. Verizon needs to make money from Tumblr, and Verizon can’t make money cause Apple says “no adult content” and Apple has a stranglehold on the app market.
The fact that a lot of us use tumblr to host our own services and products as independent creators, often as our only source of income, is irrelevant to them. The fact that to many of us this is our community is meaningless to them. We’re acceptable collateral damage to furthering corporate greed and that’s the fucking tea on that.
Also to the hypothetical unpaid intern: leave, sweety. You can do better, and you’re worth so much more.
Absolutely. @staff we know most of you poor bastards didn’t come up with this bullshit. Run.
Interestingly, if your apology language is showing insight then it actively benefits from a lot of things that are discouraged in modern social justice contexts. Like, I appreciate it if someone says to me ‘hey, I was hostile towards you because I was brought up in an awful purity-culture religious environment and I never really learned that people like you were people’.
But I think that’s exactly the kind of behavior that often gets a reaction of “so do you want a cookie for basic human decency?” or “stop making excuses”, mostly from people whose apology-need is accepting responsibility and who read that as refusing responsibility.
It’s not an apology, and what’s appropriate for apologies is a little different, but recently I read a touching, smart and self-reflective post by a woman exploring the horrible sexism she experienced and the way it’d made it hard for her to sympathize with men and caused her to have the habit of starting interactions with men on a confrontational footing, and how she wanted to address that. And she ended by worrying that maybe the post focused too much on her history of experiencing and being harmed by horrible misogyny, and how this might come across as justifying the habit she wanted to change instead of explaining it. And I could totally imagine someone having that complaint, but wow, I really hope they don’t, because it’s way easier to connect with people when you get why they’re making the mistakes they do and why they have the needs they do and where they’re starting from, and we’d have lost something if the start of that piece carefully avoided explaining critical pieces of the picture.
Making excuses is actually easy to fall into, and it’s harmful and unhelpful. But making yourself understood - to yourself, not just to other people - and getting where you come from and what is actually making it hard to do the right thing is so important that I’d rather err on the ‘making excuses’ side than the ‘don’t make this about you’ side.
And if people know their apology languages then maybe they’ll have the vocabulary to communicate “I need to hear that you’re sorry, and it’s not helpful for me to hear about what caused it, because I experience that as a shift of the emotional burden” or alternately “I find it really helpful to know where you were coming from”.
Donate to your local Black Lives Matter group instead of buying new sneakers.
Y’know, as true as this is…
The corporations deciding there’s more money in being woke than in conservatism is always a significant indicator that progress has reached the ‘effectively unstoppable’ stage - witness the turn away from the ecclesiastical dollar for the pink dollar a few years ago that directly preceded a cascade of US states finally legalising gay marriage.
Yes, of course Nike are doing this to stay relevant and make more money. But this shows the money is moving away from blue lives to black lives, and especially under current administrations, that’s major.
That’s totally valid and I agree– I don’t mean to detract from the cultural importance of the moment at all in terms of indicating that BLM has made tremendous strides in consciousness-raising efforts (racist police brutality has become a household discussion even within white families and that’s huge)– just to say that it’s important that we understand this cultural shift as the result of years of on-the-ground activist work by black folks and not giving credit to a corporation for making a economic decision to cash in at a strategic moment.
I don’t think any leftists need the reminder, but a lot of white liberals I know do. Similar to “pride” merchandise coopting Act Up and other radical activism to sell clothes and accessories, it’s tremendously successful in giving liberals a capitalist-friendly outlet for their anxieties over awareness of oppression. There is this carefully created illusion that if you support the right capitalists then you can relieve oppression, and it’s effective at funneling resources from oppressed people out doing work to liberate themselves to capitalists that rely on oppression for their wealth to continue accruing.
Recognizing the gravity of the situation is vital, but those complex feelings need to be consciously channeled into materially supporting black people, not into brand loyalty to alleviate cognitive dissonance and white fragility.
My mother also talked about periods to my brothers.
When I first got mine I had terrible cramps. Crippling cramps. I once was camping with my family and a few of my big brother’s friends when my period came. My cramps were so bad that my mom gave me a full pain killer ( I was 13 and before that she only gave me pills cut in half).
I literally laid down on my parents’ air mattress and cried in pain for an hour before the pill kicked in.
My brothers friend came in to the big tent and I was just curled up and sobbing. Now, I was quite the tomboy and was known to rough house with my brothers and their friends and made sure I wasnt seen as just “a little girl.” So my brother’s friend was confused to see me openly weeping in the fetal position (seriously, these were the worst cramps I have had in my life. My vision went white). He asked what was wrong with me.
My big brother stood up immediately and suggested a nice long hike. During this hike I am sure he had a pretty awkward conversation with his friend explaining menstrual cramps, because when they got back the pain pill had (mostly) kicked in and I was sitting up at a table when my brother’s friend sheepishly asked me if I was feeling better. I said I was better, and he said good.
When we made s'mores that night my brother and his friend kept me well supplied with chocolate.
Making sure sons know as much about periods and menstruation as daughters makes them better brothers, better sons better fathers, and better men. A man that understands a period will not lightly accuse a woman of “being on her period” if the woman is in an argument.
Raise better sons Teach them about normal bodily functions.
Because treating people fairly often means treating them differently.
This is something that I teach my students during the first week of school and they understand it. Eight year olds can understand this and all it costs is a box of band-aids.
I have each students pretend they got hurt and need a band-aid. Children love band-aids. I ask the first one where they are hurt. If he says his finger, I put the band-aid on his finger. Then I ask the second one where they are hurt. No matter what that child says, I put the band-aid on their finger exactly like the first child. I keep doing that through the whole class. No matter where they say their pretend injury is, I do the same thing I did with the first one.
After they all have band-aids in the same spot, I ask if that actually helped any of them other than the first child. I say, “Well, I helped all of you the same! You all have one band-aid!” And they’ll try to get me to understand that they were hurt somewhere else. I act like I’m just now understanding it. Then I explain, “There might be moments this year where some of you get different things because you need them differently, just like you needed a band-aid in a different spot.”
If at any time any of my students ask why one student has a different assignment, or gets taken out of the class for a subject, or gets another teacher to come in and help them throughout the year, I remind my students of the band-aids they got at the start of the school year and they stop complaining. That’s why eight year olds can understand equity.
