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if i shouldn’t use my cane because i can sometimes technically walk without it, it would just hurt like a motherfucker then abled people should no longer be allowed to use potholders to take things out of the oven because i mean

“I would never have known you were disabled if you weren’t using potholders.”

“Here let me get the pot for you.”

Well? Is it?

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When the contestant was singing his song, they also showed this:

No it hasn’t! This is literally exactly the kind of ahistorical take on punk that drives me off the wall, and you’re exactly the kind of person I was vagueing about!

Punk hasn’t always been about freedom, from the start it was being subversive, and what exactly punk was trying to subvert has always been extremely broad and open to interpretetion by different groups!

The Ramones were conservatives. The Sex Pistols had no intended political message beyond being offensive and their frontman supports Trump now. These initial groups were not acting to make a statement about freedom or kindness but to push against the increasing conformity, cleanliness, and smooth production of mainstream rock music. That did not necessarily entail standing up for freedom or left-wing causes. Of the initial “big three” old-school punk bands, The Clash were the only ones that were politically progressive!

Lots of punks in the 80s wore Nazi armbands for the express purpose of being shocking and offensive to mainstream sensibilities because that is what punk was about. And soon enough, the “ironically edgy” Nazi punks gave way to actual goddamned Nazis in punk. Fuck, have you even heard of Skrewdriver? Do you even know that Nazi punks were the reason that “skinhead” became modern shorthand for “neo-Nazi?”

Moment to moment niceness is worthless if you deliberately, through malice or ignorance, put bigots into positions of power. 

“Oh but Birdie-Blaire is always so nice to me!” well Miss Birdie also thinks we should lionize the folks who fought a wholeass war over whether white people should be able to own Black people like they own ding-dang leaf rake. 

(Well Miss Birdie would not hesitate to call the police on her Black neighbors for five whole seconds if she was “afraid” and “thought they looked suspicious”.) 

And if you take it a different direction: 

Madalyn Murray O'Hair was a deeply unpleasant person nay some would even say a bitch, but she’s still a significant part of the reason why non-Christian children in American public schools don’t have to stand up and pray to Jesus every morning. Without jumping through hoops and still being harassed about it. 

The older I get the more I realize that people who extend personhood without condition to all people are more important than the ones who are just nice to (blue-eyed-blonde-haired-white-passing-cis-female-gender-conforming) me. 

people don’t just deserve clothes, they deserve nice clothes that are well made and fit their personal style

He knows those are normal people. Some people are just jerks. And you don’t “fix society” by outlawing jerks or imprisoning them or executing them. You don’t “fix society” by carefully educating everyone into not being jerks.

You fix society by making it so that petty selfish jerks can only be petty selfish jerks, not commanders of industry who can ruin the lives of thousands (or millions) instead of punching the milkman who doesn’t deserve it. 

He especially knew that the vast majority of people who lash out at their neighbors, the petty spiteful lying cheating “scum” people, just want to be comfortable. Raise their standard of living, and most of them will stop using casual cruelty to cope.

just gotta “borrow” my sister’s alarm clock

get that twitter api, write the bot in some python bc god is dead n slap together some fuckin UI with legos

your idiot self wants to sleep in???? hit that snooze button a couple times???? (maybe 4 times in a row)?? disgusting.

twitter knows! bc it posts how many times youve hit it. fuck you

You’re referring to this post.

It’s complicated, but it boils down to “Since so often the research isn’t done and appropriate respect isn’t given to the originating cultures, it is better to err on the side of caution; as part of that, abstain from using those entities (especially as they’re typically presented in pop culture), and instead use these substitutes.” 

I mean, is there something to be said about sharing parts of stories?

Yes, there is something to be said about sharing–when it’s shared by someone who it belongs to.  Otherwise, it’s theft.  And cultural theft–of dominant cultures taking the “fun bits” of cultures that they find interesting and discarding the rest–is a massive problem right now.  

Let me give an example that’s particular to my culture.  My culture is Jewish–or, speaking more specifically, Rabbinic Judaism, which developed from Pharisaic Judaism after the destruction of the Holy Temple by Rome almost two millennia ago.  For the last 1900 years, my culture has been living in diaspora at the (dubious) mercy of gentiles, and we’ve developed a wide array of religiously and culturally meaningful rituals, stories, foods and so forth.  These cultural artifacts are ours, and I can say without hyperbole that we have been brutalized and killed for practicing these parts of our culture.  We have paid, in blood and lives, for our right to these practices as part of who we are.

Now, after centuries of having killed us for our culture, Christians are instead stealing bits of Rabbinic Judaism’s cultural practices for themselves.  Christian “Seders” at Passover are a thing.  Christians write thinkpieces on why they should celebrate Channukah.  After centuries of persecuting Jews for practicing Judaism, It’s considered cute and trendy to take the “fun bits” of Judaism for themselves.  (And that’s not even touching “Messianic judaism” and it’s wholesale theft of Rabbinic Judaism’s cultural practices in an effort to convert Jews by trickery).  

Imagine how I feel about that sort of theft, seeing it again and again and again…

So you’re asking me if you can use the Golem in your stories?

Well, why should you?  Do you know that the Golem was made as a protector by the head rabbi of Prague to protect the Jewish community against the Christian community during a period of repeated accusations of Blood Libel?  That it was essentially made as a defender that wouldn’t abandon us, that wouldn’t take our money and turn on us like mercenaries did, when the mobs came with torches and knives to kill the Jews who they believed were kidnapping Christian children to use their blood?  That it was a story told by Jewish parents to Jewish children that we would have a magical bulwark to stand between us and a world that wanted to kill us in horrible fashions?  

Why should you take that and get to turn it into a generic constructed monster built by a wizard as a dumb defender of his wizard’s tower when there is a perfectly acceptable substitute in the form of elementals, which don’t have that baggage of coming from an abused culture watching the stories that they’ve kept for themselves be torn away from them and used for the enjoyment of the people who persecuted them?  Why do you have to take it?  Why does your desire for it outweigh our wish that you leave it to us?

Or are you asking if they wrote that story with input from the group in question, would that count as accurate and respectful?  (I think that’s what you’re asking, but that thing with the “presume literal, complete copies” is really throwing me)

For the first… no.  That’s just plagiarism.

And so, rather than the discussion being about a representative of an historically-and-currently oppressive culture interacting with a specific instance of an historically-and-currently oppressed(usually--by-them) community, it turns into ‘but it’s just an idea ideas want to be free!” Or “How dare you tell your stories/sing your songs/create your artwork/sell them or share them and then be offended when we re-interpret them and claim them for our own?!?" * 

Ignoring the part where re-interpretation happens (not infrequently in ways which belittle or completely invert the original culture & message), usually drowning out the original, or where somehow magically most of any actual profit from that cultural heritage just naturally seems to accrue to individuals in the majority, oppressive culture. 

So one of my neighbors has a lawn Roomba or whatever they're called, and this thing trundles around looking like a background robot in the background of the original trilogy, and ABSOLUTELY BAFFLING THE DOGS.

What happened is the lawn roomba belongs to the guy that does most of the maintainence on the neighborhood park, and he had it out grazing on a different section of lawn when my parents came down for a walk and Arwen was siezed by 200 years worth fo Kelpie Instincts, rolled out of her Harness and proceded to herd the shit out of this tiny, oblivious robot.  

Everything was on display- mock-stalking, intimidating eye contact, barking, running in front of it to try to get it to balk, the scariest barking she can muster (which is actually.  pretty scary if you’re not used to Loud Dogs), looking back at my parents for directions.  or rather, looking at my Mom while Dad tried unsuccessuflly to capture her.

After about ten minutes they realized she wasn’t biting it, and decided to let her play Sheep Simulator 5000 for a while. She eventually figured out that 

It  doesn’t respond to Yelling, Posturing or Aggressive Eye Contact

It does respond to having it’s wheels or bump hazards hit 

It would respond to its side being nosed or slapped by moving in a different direction

Conent that this was apparently some kind of blind, deaf and particularly stupid sheep, she could now manage the robot by smacking it if it got too close to the creek bed or fence for her liking, and was eventually content to sit on the highest point of the field and Supervise (TM) it.

“Hey.” Said Roger, owner of the robot. “Do you think if I put the ramp down she’ll herd it into the back of my pickup?”

Arwen was mostly asleep in the afternoon sun as roger put the ramp down but woke right up when mom Whistled, then pointed at the truck.  She immediately went after the robot and did something that wouldn’t have occured to me, an allegedly more intelligent being: the robot is roughly triangular, and when it hits an obstacle, will change direction so that one of its other sides (rather than points) is now the ‘front’.  So to get it to move in a straight line in the direction she wanted, Arwen would smack the two sides of the robot that she didn’t want it to go in in quick sucession, and got it across the field, over a small hill and up the ramp as fast as it’s clumsy little wheels could go.

“I didn’t know you had a fully-trained sheepdog!” Said Roger

“Me either.” said Mom.

Like imagine you lived in that world and you didn’t really know WHY it went from Stark Industries, Stark Enterprises, Stark-Fujikawa, Stark Resilient, Stark Unlimited.