okay jesus fuck this conversation has gone far enough so:
hey, so you like bernie sanders! i like bernie sanders too! i agree with his politics! he is doing better than people expected in the democratic primaries, which is cool!
what are you going to do if he loses?
because given the tone of the conversations i hear on this website right now– given the sheer hatred of hillary that’s emerging, given the overwhelming feeling that bernie sanders is amazing and the messiah and the only candidate that’s worth voting for in america– here’s what i see happening in mid-2016:
bernie sanders, who despite his better-than-expected performance still has an unbelievably low chance of winning the primaries, loses the primaries to hillary clinton
the leftist wing of the democratic party (that’s us– tumblr, yeah, but also the whole occupy-black lives matter-third wave feminist-young educated millennials crowd), having spent the past 10 months campaigning against hillary clinton, is overwhelmingly disappointed
while a few people are willing to bite the bullet and campaign for hillary, energy is low, disillusionment is high, and many leftist americans don’t campaign, don’t donate, and don’t vote (or vote for third-party candidates, like the green party or the peace and freedom party)
the republican party wins the presidential election.
(i literally shivered as i typed that last bullet point, btw– i know there are people voting in 2016 who were ten years old when obama was elected, and y’all may not remember much of the bush years. i was only 13 when bush left, but jesus christ– remember when hurricane katrina was overwhelmingly badly handled? remember when the patriot act passed? remember when the housing bubble collapsed? remember when the president said god told him to invade iraq? y’all wanna do that again?)
so what are you going to do if bernie sanders loses?
i need you to think about that now. i need you to not be surprised when it happens. i need you to not put all your hopes in one basket.
you think the gop won’t be pouring all their resources into this election? you think the superpacs and the koch brothers and the oil lobbyists won’t be throwing their money at ballot boxes until they spit out the result they want? you think the rich and powerful and conservative won’t be bringing their best game?
they will, and if we don’t work twice as hard as they do– no matter who the democratic nominee is– we are fucked.
i need you to be okay with the idea of hillary clinton being president of the united states, and i need you to make peace with that before she wins the primaries, so that you’re prepared and ready to campaign for her with all your might if she’s the democratic nominee.
because i honest-to-god believe this country will not survive another four, eight, twelve years of a republican administration.
my hand to god i have seen so many posts on my dash that have been both heartbreakingly optimistic and absolutely mind-bogglingly uninformed (and naive, but that comes with time; information comes with googling the way the government of your own country works. fun fact: not all primaries are open primaries! i know! this is inconsistent! it is also the world that we live in and i don’t think we’re going to get around to redesigning the electoral system before november 2016. just saying) and, like every election year, i have sat down and thought, albeit briefly, about this possibility:
the republican party wins the presidential election.
that is not a possibility that i can or will accept. i know we like to mythologize our figures here and put them on can-do-no-wrong pedestals, but, for god’s sake, to paraphrase: can we live in the real fucking world here, please? by all means, know that we can do better. by all means, know that we should. but here are some facts:
the us electoral system is not going to change by november 2016.
the notes on your tumblr post about bernie sanders’ ideology are not going to translate to votes.
those votes are not as big a percentage of the voting population as you think they are.
even if they were, bernie sanders is not going to be able to wave a magic wand and:
turn those ideas into policies
get those policies signed into law
get those laws implemented
they aren’t going to be perfect anyway.
can you imagine the reactionary voting in the election immediately following that anyway.
this is not how politics works. you don’t vote a politician into office and then stand back and watch the world fix itself! you don’t get to do that. it takes work and it takes time and it takes, sometimes, the willingness to accept and keep pushing through lowered expectations. i’m happy for your optimism and i’m happy for your energy. we need those! don’t lose them. do, however, remember that there is context to this, because we live, again, in the real fucking world.
And this has an embarrassingly low number of notes.
I know how a lot of people here feel about Hilary. If I had my druthers, I would MUCH rather have Bernie Sanders as president because his politics so closely align with my own. Like, stunningly close. A-breath-of-fresh-air close.
But consider these words from an ancient, jaded, 34 year old fuck who voted for Ralph Nader in 2000…
NONE OF US agreed with Gore. I mean, not really, at least. He was Republican-lite. First off, his wife Tipper was a friggin’ censorship Nazi, Gore was a Southern Baptist who was mum on gay rights, and while he gave lip service to climate change, please note that An Inconvenient Truth had not been produced or filmed, and there wasn’t much in the way of supporting the Kyoto protocols in his platform. He supported the limited military action in Iraq, supported NAFTA, and supported driving our production overseas. There wasn’t much to his platform other than “less scary alternative to Bush”. In other words, he was problematic as hell.
Then there was Ralph Nader, a consumer rights advocate, a proponent of gay marriage before it became a mainstream cause to champion, against NAFTA, spoke out against the military industrial complex, was pro-union, and anti-corporate.
And I voted for him. Proudly. In the general election. My reasoning was that nearly everyone I knew was voting for him (and everyone I knew were fellow college age leftists) so if enough of us got together and enough of us wanted that change to happen, then it would, right?
“Well, we’re talking about the primaries,” I can already hear you say. And yes, we are. But consider this: if Bernie ends up not winning the primaries, and no one turns out to the polls to vote for Hilary so they can “make a statement” or because she’s “problematic”, or turns out and votes Green or some other third Party for those same reasons, then history will repeat itself with disastrous consequences.
Here’s what happened on election night, November 7, 2000:
We waited. We watched Gore lose in battleground state after battleground state by just about the same number of votes that went to Ralph fucking Nader. Bush took all the dip shits who thought he’d be a swell feller to have a beer with. And then Florida and the recount and the Republican Party-led coup that stormed the voting recount, triggered the Supreme Court ruling and handed George W. Bush control of the country.
The first thing Bush did was reverse each and every executive order Clinton had put in place over the protestations of a crybaby Republican Congress, and most of those executive orders were designed to protect the middle class from corporate America and protect our budget surplus from the military industrial complex. Then Bush instituted legalized class warfare: the tax cuts that benefited the wealthy and still do to this day.
Then 9/11 happened.
If you’re 22 right now, then in 2001 you were 8 years old. In 2001, I was 20. I watched friends of mine who had joined the military because there were few other opportunities for them after high school get shipped to Iraq and Afghanistan and get their limbs blown off by IUDs. There are people I knew, people I ate lunch with every day, who are FUCKING DEAD right now.
Torture. Suppression of the press. Siphoning the nation’s wealth to the upper 1%, creating our current aristocracy. Investments made by principle members of the Bush regime in for-profit military-industrial corporations that were tasked with murdering hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. Sunsetting the assault weapons ban. The Defense of Marriage Act. The creation of the Department of Homeland Security. The loss of an entire city and fucking nothing done about it as people were drowning and starving to death in New Orleans. No Child Left UnTested Behind. A color coded number system on every day of the news telling Americans how frightened they needed to be that day that hilariously enough coincided with how far Bush dipped in the polls that week. He dipped, we went up to terror threat: orange. His poll numbers went back up. Like clockwork.
Between 2001 and 2005 us leftists who thought that there was no different than center-left Democrats and right wing Republicans got hit by a giant clue by four and watched the fucking Republicans dismantle our safety, economic security, and our entire way of life. No, the centrists are not the same. THE DEMOCRATS AND REPUBLICANS ARE NOT THE SAME. One faction sort of listens to us. The other doesn’t give a shit about us and actively promotes policies designed to kill and silence us.
So please Support Bernie Sanders. Support him because if enough leftists make their voices known through his candidacy, then NO MATTER WHAT it will influence the DNC platform next summer. Support him because we’re all passionate about returning America to a thriving, working democracy and flushing out the corporate lobbyist corruption that has held our entire government hostage for a decade.
But if he doesn’t win the primaries then you need to support Hilary Clinton. And I’m not kidding, I’m not being hyperbolic. If the Republicans win, then you need to start preparing yourself for life under a fascist state.
Hint: it will help if you’re fundamentalist Christian, wealthy, white, straight, male, and cisgender.
Otherwise, you’re fucked.
All of this. Read it. I also lived through the Nader debacle. Vote for Bernie in the primaries if you agree with him. I like a lot of his politics too. But then you MUST SHOW UP FOR HILLARY IN THE GENERAL ELECTION OR WE WILL END UP WITH A THIRD PRESIDENT BUSH.
Three Supreme Court Justices are very old and may die in the next Presidential term.
“HIGH SCHOOL
This is how to run a stick of Chapstick
down the black boxes on your scantron
so the grading machine skips the wrong
answers. This is how to honor roll. Hell,
this is how to National Honor Society.
This is being voted “Most Likely to Marry
for Money” or “Talks the Most, Says the
Least” for senior superlatives. This is
stepping around the kids having panic
attacks in the hallway. This is being the
kid having a panic attack in the hallway.
This is making the A with purple moons
stamped under both eyes. We had to try.
This is telling the ACT supervisor you have
ADHD to get extra time. Today, the average
high school student has the same anxiety
levels as the average 1950’s psychiatric
patient. We know the Pythagorean theorem
by heart, but short-circuit when asked
“How are you?” We don’t know. We don’t
know. That wasn’t on the study guide.
We usually know the answer, but rarely
know ourselves.”—HIGH SCHOOL By Blythe Baird (via farfromhomee)
The people of Greece still face uncertainty. Greek unemployment stands at 25%, among 16-24 year olds it is an almost unimaginable 50%, hospitals are running short of medicines and basic supplies, old people’s homes are running short of food and fuel.
I am working with Greek foundation, Desmos who have a huge network of charities that they co-ordinate the distribution of surplus goods with.
Desmos will help me with my primary aim to get as many 16-24 year olds into work as possible. I want young people to have hope, to learn skills, to drive forward their economy and invest their wages back into Greece. These young people will work in charities, technology and other worthy causes to help the humanitarian and economic situation in their country.
This is so perfect because how heated would white southern racists be to see two black millionaires buy the rights to their symbol of hatred.
honestly just think about it Jay-Z and Bey sitting in their mansion talking about how shitty it is that people still fly that goddamn flag and Jay-Z kinda stopping and thinking for a minute and saying “well…. why don’t we just buy it”
“She pins you to hotel doors—
not a goddess anymore,
but she still looks like religion in high heels.
She kisses you godless. Whispers,We dress like princesses to go out and kill kings.”—Ashe Vernon, from “Old World Gods,” Wrong Side of a Fistfight (via yea-lets-do-this-shit)
So Steve finally manages to track Bucky down and brings him back to the Tower. Things are understandably tense between everyone and Bucky.
Meanwhile Darcy and Jane have both been brought into the Tower as well.
Most of the Avengers are out saving the world, leaving only Bucky in the Tower when H.Y.D.R.A decide they want their asset back. Bucky is pinned down and Steve is desperate to get back to him,
When he does, Darcy and her trusty taser is standing there with a stunned Bucky and numerous unconscious H.Y.D.R.A agents.
And that is the story of how Darcy Lewis gained a H.Y.D.R.A profile that only states; WARNING. EXTREMELY DANGEROUS. FLEE ON SIGHT.
How could you be against free college. Like if I think about student loans for more than a few minutes I think about jumping off a cliff have some pity damn
Because hundreds of thousands of people have already paid for their tuition. Should they be reimbursed? It’s not fair to the people who have already paid/ are paying for college. That’s why.
Yeah I love thinking how my kids are gonna cry and have panic attacks because of the heavy student loans they’re gonna have just because they want to go to a good school. Yeah I really want them to suffer just like I did bc yknow I paid why should they have it any easier than me?? I don’t want America to be better than I found it. Fuck future generations.
i dont think we should use cars because it’s not fair to the people who had to travel via horseback. should they be resurrected with necromancy and allowed to apply for a drivers license? think logically here
Speaking of linguistics, there’s one particular linguistic tick that I think clearly separates Baby Boomers from Millennials: how we reply when someone says “thank you.”
You almost never hear a Millennial say “you’re welcome.” At least not when someone thanks them. It just isn’t done. Not because Millenials are ingrates lacking all manners, but because the polite response is “No problem.” Millennials only use “you’re welcome” sarcastically when they haven’t been thanked or when something has been taken from/done to them without their consent. It’s a phrase that’s used to point out someone else’s rudeness. A Millenial would typically be fairly uncomfortable saying “you’re welcome” as an acknowledgement of genuine thanks because the phrase is only ever used disengenuously.
Baby Boomers, however, get really miffed if someone says “no problem” in response to being thanked. From their perspective, saying “no problem” means that whatever they’re thanking someone for was in fact a problem, but the other person did it anyway as a personal favor. To them “You’re welcome” is the standard polite response.
“You’re welcome” means to Millennials what “no problem” means to Baby Boomers, and vice versa.The two phrases have converse meanings to the different age sets. I’m not sure exactly where this line gets drawn, but it’s somewhere in the middle of Gen X. This is a real pain in the ass if you work in customer service because everyone thinks that everyone else is being rude when they’re really being polite in their own language.
Gryffindors don’t give a shit about rules. The most hardline of them don’t even care about people. They care about justice. Right or wrong, black or white, there are no shades of grey. If it’s just, it’s always just; if it’s unjust, it’s always wrong. Hermione’s ruthlessness makes her a Gryffindor. She is absolutely sure that she is on the side of justice in everything that she does, and it’s such a Gryffindor trait.
Because Slytherins are ruthless, but they care about rules. Their own rules, usually, but rules nonetheless. They will impose parameters and limitations on themselves just so they have a framework to operate within. If doing something means violating their own internal code, then they’re not gonna do it. Even fucking Voldemort is like that. He broke every single fucking rule the Wizarding World ever put in place, but damn if he’d break his own.
This is actually remarkably true, at least as far as the Gryffindor one goes. The people I’ve just met kind of blink at me when i tell them I’m a Gryffindor and go “You would literally murder someone in cold blood if you thought they were going to hurt your people.” And for some reason this baffles them. Nerve and chivalry are well and good, but it’s the vicious, all-consuming determination to follow honor at the cost of all else that makes a Gryffindor, as far as I’m concerned.
I picked my niece up from school today because she got suspended and I asked the principle what happened and he said “she was talking about something she shouldn’t even know about and it’s wrong for her to know it. You should be ashamed of yourself for teacher her” he didn’t say what she was talking about.
So When I dropped her off at home I asked her what happened and said “My friend was being bullied so I stood up in front of the school and said something. I can’t remember it but you would of been proud!”
After she said that I went back up to the school and asked one of the teachers what she said and she replied back with “This is what my aunty told me. If you look at it properly, hangman teaches you that by saying the wrong things you could end someone’s life. If you say the wrong letters in hangman the man is hung which means game over. That’s the same in real life. Some hang themselves, shoot themselves, overdose, cut too deep and even jump off high places. The majority of suicide victims are bully victims. Suicide means killing yourself by the way. When you bully someone your words stick to them like glue. Each word, every day. Soon they start to believe the words and they can’t take it anymore so they end their lives. And that is why you should never fucking bully someone Jason. I hope you piss your bed tonight!”
If they are old enough to understand death then they are old enough to understand this.
Your niece was suspended for standing up against bullying? For talking about suicide? And the principal told YOU that you should be ashamed to have taught her that?
to be honest, i am never going to not love fury road. and i am never going to not love fury road for the exact same reason that i am never going to not love pacific rim: because they are movies that focus uncompromisingly on women and on the stories of women and do not pick at them or highlight their flaws or put them in conflict with other women so that the dudebros in the corner can yell “catfight!” and whistle.
pacific rim doesn’t pass the bechdel test of course, but it is still a movie where i can very readily believe that guillermo del toro asked somebody “do we really need a mildly attractive white boy who isn’t portayed as a sack of shit for the majority of the movie as a protagonist?” and some stuffy hollywood exec informed him that he had to have at least one so he sighed and picked charlie hunnam out of a lineup and informed him that his job was to stand there and look pretty with his shirt off and smile adoringly at rinko kikuchi whenever she was onscreen, which he did fantastically. also idris elba and a narrative centered around a found family featuring a black father and a japanese daughter that culminates in the kind of love so profound that the last words she says to him don’t even need to be translated for a non-japanese-speaking audience.
fury road is a movie that was edited by a woman because george miller literally did not fucking trust a man to do it justice, and even our beloved sad puppy protaganist still has his moment where we all yell at him to just let furiosa and the girls in the truck you miserable bastard you all want the same thing and then they turn an MRA into a feminist willing to die for the cause, and they put naked women on the screen without making me want to curl up inside and die, and killed women to show us how that made other women feel, and brought literal fucking hellfire down on the patriarchy to grind them into rubble. also, ALSO, the only reason this ridiculous fucking plan even worked in the end was because LITERAL CHILDREN and enslaved women lowered the platform and opened the floodgates to water, which is essentially the same as salvation when you live in a post-nuclear desert hellscape run by god-kings who waste thousands of gallons of gasoline just to track down their escaped sex slaves. also actual polynesian actresses in a movie set in australia. also a complete lack of rape scene or discussion of sex, crude or otherwise. also the person who everybody knows is the protag of fury road in the same way everyone knows mako is the protag of pacific rim even though the trailers will do their best to convince the MRAs otherwise is an amputee driven by the same immense boiler of screaming fury that i, as an abuse victim and as a feminist and as someone who has had friends go through way worse shit than i did, feel on a regular basis, and we don’t need to know the full story of what happened; we know that she was kidnapped, we know her mother is dead, we know that it’s probably been twenty years of literal hell for her, and we know that she is not above dying to save four girls who yell at her when she tries to kill someone that has been sent to bring them back to immortan joe.
this is not the wink wink nudge nudge feminism of joss “i quit twitter bc feminists were harassing me” whedon. these are movies that make me feel like they are opening floodgates to stories where megan fox can show up onscreen and be taken seriously instead of objectified, and lucy liu can play any damn character she wants in reboots of stories that used to just be about arrogant white boys, and laverne cox doesn’t have to be asked what her fucking crotch looks like before people can hold a conversation with her.
pacific rim and fury road, as colorful (literally, there is an entire post on this site about modern hollywood and it’s shitty, drained-of-color-to-feel-”gritty” movies) narratives about hope and love, actually make me, a decrepit, sarcastic husk of a human being, 1) cry about two people nodding at each other and touching foreheads, and 2) actually believe that our cinema will one day stop being such a white sausagefest.
1. Take the binder off. I don’t care how dysphoric you are, I don’t care how bad you feel, I don’t care who is around. DO NOT PUT IT BACK ON.
2. Go to the doctor. Or to a nurse. When I broke my ribs, I went to the nurse at my school because that was free and that worked fine.
3. Accept that there isn’t anything you can do to heal faster. The most likely thing that doc is going to tell you is that you have some bruised ribs, and you need to let them heal. Sometimes broken ribs can break lungs, which is potentially fatal, so no matter what, you still need to do step two, but that’s probably not going to be the case.
4. Treat yo’self. Get some icecream, and settle down with your favorite tv show. This is gonna be rough on your mental health.
5. Tell people that you are injured (make up a bull-riding/bungee-jumping story if you don’t wanna tell em why). This will garner you some sympathy points, and people will go easier on you. Maybe your boss will let you wear a hoodie to work.
6. Don’t reflect too hard on it. The first thing you are going to think is not “oh I have an injury so I better take care of myself” it’s going to be “this is the physical manifestation of my dysphoria and why does being trans always ruin my life”. Try to refrain from that particular thought. You have an injury. Treat it like any other injury or illness you could get.
——————————————
What not to do.
1. Put that damn binder back on. Don’t. I see you tempted. Don’t.
2. I SAID DON’T.
3. You could end up with a warped ribcage if you don’t allow yourself to heal. Don’t put it back on.
4. Really. Don’t.
Here’s the original, for anyone who wanted it.
Good advice from someone who isn’t an asshole who changes people’s important trans posts.
Straight up nobody hugged Harry Potter from the ages of 2-11 can we discuss this
Nobody hugged Severus Snape from the ages of 0 to 38, just saying.
Nobody hugged Severus Snape probably because if someone shows Severus Snape kindness he becomes insanely obsessed with them and refuses to leave them alone and calls them racial slurs when they express that they want to be left alone and will one day walk over their husband’s dead body and cradle their lifeless form in his arms while the baby screams
i actually like asshole couples best like the couples that pick on each other so much and call each other names but it’s okay because you know they’re actually totally in love and none of it is meant in a mean way and every insult is punctuated by a sweet comment to remind the other how much they actually adore them and i’m sorry but there isn’t anything cuter ok
do other girls actually go to bed with their bras on or is that just in movies because i would never wear a bra to bed its like going to bed with tape on your mouth
Him:
This is the vehicle by which they will force feminism down my throat. This is the Trojan Horse Hollywood leftists will use to insist on the idea that women are equal to men in all things, including physique, strength, and logic. And this is the subterfuge they will use to blur the lines between masculinity and femininity, further ruining women for men, and men for wo -
Me, turning to the waitress, screaming:
hi excuse me could you please WITNESS ME????????????
Me:
[hurling every single breadstick on the table at him as if they're projectile weapons]
Waitress, while handing me more breadsticks:
WITNESS!!!!!!!!!!!
Since I know there’s probably a fair amount of you out there who haven’t seen the first three Mad Max movies, I’m here to tell you a li’l secret about them:
All the people complaining about how Max “isn’t the main character” in Fury Road are big ol’ Fake Fanboys cause Max’s primary character trait in literally every movie is “I hate this, why is it happening, please leave me alone to brood in the desert in peace”.
He’s much more the central focus of the plot in the first movie but in Road Warrior and Thunder Dome he basically just gets kidnapped or beat up by wankers in weird bondage outfits and spends the rest of the movie trying to leave as soon as possible while other people are like “please solve our absurd post-apocalyptic problems”. There is not one single point where Max actively seeks out being a hero until it is forced upon him. He ACTIVELY TELLS PEOPLE WHO ASK HIM FOR HELP to take a hike.
Mad Max himself would like nothing better than to never, ever, ever be the main character.
He would also like for people to stop stealing his fucking car.
