“Goodbye, Cruel World” as an expression of intent to suicide
The song “Taps” as marking a military death
Drowning victims would raise their hands above water precisely 3 times before succumbing
Now we criticize with our fists like adults
Everyone who said fistcourse on this post is gonna have to criticize with me
you made us this way
This is the most accurate meta-commentary on the relation between social media and a corporation I’ve ever seen.
okay, so what’s the workaround for opening other tumblrs in new tabs now
(I suppose alternatives include(d) putting dashboard ads on our home tumblrs or violent expropriation)
what was yalls first internet community you were in? mine was toontown in 2008
the Focus On The Family forums on AOL (keyword:FOTF), somewhere in the 14.4k or 28.8k modem eras
Actually now that I think of it the three things I really paid attention to on AOL were
the Focus On The Family forums (keyword:FOTF)
Alison Bechdel’s “Dykes to Watch Out For” (keyword:DTWOF)
why not a movie with an 8-bit chip tune soundtrack, not because it’s a movie about games or other geek topics but just because it sounds cool
wait crap that Tron reboot
my whole childhood I was like “when *I* grow up music is going to sound like Mega Man!”
and then they kinda started getting it
and then they really got it
and I was like UGH, this is *human*
Female employment rate as a % of male employment rate, NUTS1 of EU and EFTA, 2015.
interesting little bit of SoCal skateboarding history. There was a huge ‘70s boom and then bust in skateparks? I did not know that.
WANTED: an auto-transcriber for podcasts that links the text to the audio file so if I’m like “no, that can’t be right” or just “I gotta hear this” I can click and hear those few seconds in particular
I could probably hit up ye olde googleheim for this but I wonder how they chose the order for LGBTQIA like … what type of alphabet
have you seen the white gays reorganize it to have the G first lmao
no but not like it would change anything anyway that’s basically how it is
This is something I know a lot about, so pardon me for this…
Prior to the Stonewall Riots, even activist groups tended to default toward some variation of the word “homosexual” in their titles. Until the slang term “gay” began to catch on in the 60s.
So in the 70s, it was simply the “gay liberation movement” - at a time “gay” (sort of) functioned as a catchall for all sexual and gender minorities. It was thought of as an umbrella term, even if it wasn’t.
As time passed, because lesbians felt that they were (and they actually were) excluded in many cases from the movement, “gay and lesbian” became commonplace throughout the 80s and into the 90s.
“Gay and lesbian” is still on the founding documents of many organizations that sprang up in the post-AIDS-crisis era of Human Rights Campaign-style activism that was primarily concerned with visibility politics and increasingly focused on the concerns of white, middle-to-upper class assimilationist queers (the “we’re your doctor, your lawyer, your neighbor, your cousin, and we’re just like you” crowd). Examples:
- GLAAD (Gay and lesbian anti-defamation league)
- The Task Force (founded as National Gay Task Force, then the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force in 1985. They started going by just “The Task Force” in the early 2000s, before officially changing their name to National LGBTQ Task Force only in 2014)
- NGLJA (National Gay & Lesbian Journalist Association)
- National Gay & Lesbian Chamber of Commerce
- PFLAG (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays)
But because of this assimilationist trend in the political movement and the style of activism with the most visibility, people who felt excluded began pushing back. Some advocated for better representation of bisexual and transgender people, hence GLBT began to get added to mission statements. Some, particularly nonwhite communities, rejected the terms altogether, proliferating terms like “Men who have sex with men”/MSM, and “same gender loving”/SGL or even the problematic “Down Low” (DL) into certain activist spaces. As GLBT became common in the late 90s, more groups started pushing for inclusion: Intersex (I), Asexuals (A), Questioning (Q), Queer (Q), Two Spirit (TS), etc.
Meanwhile, some folks thought we should avoid the alphabet soup altogether and run with Queer. An umbrella term that would also encompass things like polyamory, fetishism/kink, etc., without excluding anyone.
Groups coming into play around this time tried to avoid wading into the debate altogether, thus we have organizations like “Equal Rights Nevada” “Equality Utah” “Empire State Pride Agenda” “MassEquality” “Out & Equal” and “Pride at Work.”
It was in the early 2000s that feminist and lesbian leaders convinced people to switch from GLBT to LGBT. Queer never quite caught on for activist circles and organizations, in part because it was too broad, and sometimes you need a little more specificity in your mission statement… otherwise you run the risk of getting hijacked by cisgender, straight allies intent on pushing an oppression narrative about how they’re discriminated against for liking to get spanked. But, probably more importantly, a lot of people of an aging generation had extremely bad connotations around the word and weren’t interested in reclaiming it. Anyone over the current age of 45 or so probably grew up being bullied under the word queer. Queer was too controversial for risk-averse organizations depending on the fundraising support of older gay men and women.
So by the time I was in college (late 90s), GLB or GLBT was the default for most.
I remember the debate around changing GLBT to LGBT (or even TBLG) very well. I worked in the queer press at the time (2000-2005). It made a lot of people very mad. It still makes some people mad. But the idea was to emphasize that gay men were not primary. It was a feminist thing. Sadly, the argument for TBLG (which argued that we name them in order of most oppressed and/or least visible) never really caught on beyond a few academics and some hardcore activists.
We made the editorial decision in 2001 to officially switch to LGBT unless quoting someone or as part of a proper name (e.g. the title of an organization). So did many other papers. GLAAD pushed this standard into the mainstream press. It caught on.
Most groups/editorial boards/journalists/activists put their foot down around the lengthy alphabet soup stopping at 4 - although Q, I and A are sometimes added depending on the group. Whether A stands for asexual or ally and whether Q stands for queer or questioning all depends on the group in question.
As far as I can tell, LGBT is the settled default. I’m not aware of any concentrated political push to move on and change it now, at least not like there was in the late 90s and early 2000s. Although it could happen. I would welcome it. Language, and how we frame our movement, must evolve.
Sorry, I know I wasn’t asked, but I wanted to throw some history out there.
Asuka (full name: Asuka Langley Soryu) is a fighter pilot who becomes the great enemy of SEELE. A fourteen year old girl, she is the love interest of Evangelion’s tormented hero, Shinji. But she is also a warrior in her own right, destroying SEELE’s weapons, giant humanoid robots called Evangelions. (Fittingly for the dark series, these efforts are ultimately unsuccessful and catastrophe rains upon Earth.)In other words, and again oversimplifying somewhat, Asuka is the warrior against the secret Illuminati/Jewish conspiracy to take over the world. And in the meme posted on my Twitter thread, she is Trump, wearing his signature hat.
Having decoded the meaning of the image, I then set about trying to document how and where it entered the employ of the white supremacist fringe.
I didn’t find much — but I did find something. On a reddit-like thread from January, 2016, I found a different image of Asuka-as-Trump as well as one post saying “If elected, Trump will bomb the shit out of SELEE [sic] and take their oil.” While this would seem to align SEELE with Arab states rather than Jews, if one takes the conspiratorial worldview that, in fact, the great conspiracy (Jewish, UN, Masonic, whatever) controls everything, then of course they also orchestrate the world’s wars over scarce resources. SEELE is as much behind Saudi Arabia and Iran as it is behind Israel.
please god put me in a coma for the next five months
Launches Tuesday, June 21.
the question then becomes: if everyone knows that anyone running anything is a complete clueless moron these days, who exactly is it doing the moroning?
Another great SSC comment:
From Dan Simon this time.
“There is a common misunderstanding that politicians get embroiled in “scandals” when they say or do embarrassing or appalling things, which result in “political damage”, or even their “political demise”. In reality, the cause-and-effect relationship is the opposite: a politician’s opponents are constantly trying to characterize what he or she says or does as embarrassing or appalling, and the politician’s friends and allies are constantly dismissing these accusations as minor and irrelevant. If the politician is politically strong–that is, if his or her friends and allies are more numerous and powerful than his or her opponents–then the friends’ and allies’ dismissals work, and the accusations don’t stick. Conversely, if the opponents are more numerous and more powerful, then their characterizations win out, and the politician is embroiled in a “scandal” with potentially serious consequences.
Note that the actual nature of the allegedly embarrassing or appalling words or deeds is scarcely relevant–a politician with sufficiently numerous and powerful friends and allies can, say, drive a woman off a bridge to her death and flee the scene without reporting it, without significantly damaging his career, while a sufficiently embattled politician can be utterly destroyed by, say, repeating a sentence too many times in succession during a debate.”
News: the accused assassin gave his name as "Death to traitors, freedom for Britain". Me: Christ, nominative determinism much?
“bitch” as “far diagonal” is poss. my favorite single bit of English
