All Black

At one point, Mr. Kaminsky was asked to produce 900 birth and baptismal certificates and ration cards for 300 Jewish children in institutional homes who were about to be rounded up. The aim was to deceive the Germans until the children could be smuggled out to rural families or convents, or to Switzerland and Spain. He was given three days to finish the assignment.

He toiled for two straight days, forcing himself to stay awake by telling himself: “In one hour I can make 30 blank documents. If I sleep for an hour 30 people will die.”

Mr. Kaminsky died on Monday at his home in Paris, his daughter Sarah Kaminsky said. He was 97.

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“They’re trying to discharge her constructively. Do you know what Constructive Discharge means?” She asked.

As soon as I heard the term ‘Constructive Discharge,’ I knew I’d never seen it on a vocabulary quiz.

“No. What does it mean?” I asked.

She explained.

“Constructive discharge is a fancy way of saying “being forced out.” It’s not good. And if you’re not a lawyer or in human resources, you’ll probably learn what it means when it’s happening to you.”

“Oh my God. I’ve seen this my entire career and never knew it even had a name.” I thought.

You’ve seen constructive Discharge too. You may have experienced it. We’ve all made choices to avoid it.

Constructive discharge defined

“We can’t fire you, but we’ll make you so miserable you’ll quit, and then we won’t have to pay your unemployment.”

Then there’s the textbook definition:

“A constructive discharge occurs when your employer has made working conditions unbearable, forcing you to resign.”

Or as one person put it.

“I didn’t get handed a pink slip, but when you’re not wanted, people have a way of letting you know.”

HR isn’t always the secret police.

Employees aren’t always victims of evil-doers.

However, employers push employees out all the time to maintain and protect the, “We didn’t do anything wrong, YOU did,” power structure.

Constructive Discharge looks like this:

— Meeting invitations slow to a trickle, and you’re excluded from emails and generally looped out of what’s going on.

— People stop talking to you or stop talking when you walk in.

— Your emails don’t get answers, or they arrive too late to be of value.

— Suddenly, your work is not good enough, though nothing about your work has changed.

— Reviews, once good or even glowing, are now mediocre or bad.

— Instead of a bonus, you get a Performance Improvement Plan.

— Warnings and write-ups start so they can justify your eventual termination with documentation of your “poor performance”

— Your work, clients, assignments go away, or they overwhelm you with work.

— The words “Set up to fail” were practically invented to describe this scenario.

Constructive Discharge is illegal

It isn’t easy to prove you’re a target, and it’s even more challenging if you don’t even know constructive discharge is a real thing.

If you’ve ever experienced this and don’t fully understand what’s happening to you beyond knowing you’re in the process of being excommunicated, it can be hell. It’s not uncommon for the experience to leave long-lasting scars.

Talk to anyone who’s ever been through it. They’ll tell you.

Knowing constructive discharge exists and how it’s used gives you power to predict what’s coming and to protect yourself.

Seeing the endgame helps you in two ways.

You know what to expect. Having a sense of what’s coming next is enormously empowering. You can go on the offensive and protect yourself. Constructive discharge works to crush your ego, making you feel you did something wrong and deserve this treatment.

Without strategy, you end up being a miserable pawn in your employer’s endgame.

Remember, they’re almost certainly building a case to fire you in the event the hellscape they create for you doesn’t persuade you to quit.

If you’re getting pushed out, and you know what to look for you can prove constructive discharge and you can get unemployment benefits, be released from payback obligations on a signing bonus, and protect your mental health.

You’re not crazy, incompetent, or a failure. This is real and it’s carefully executed to leave you holding the bag and feeling like you did something wrong.

To prove it, I started throwing living room movie shows for my friends. I would give away my screener copies and show segments of my favorites. It was like I was offering free rocket tickets to the moon. My neighborhood audience was fascinated—and completely inexperienced. The living room got a little bigger—I created an educational show-and-tell clips lecture called “How to Read a Dirty Movie,” and another one called “All Girl Action: The History of Lesbian Erotic Cinema,” which I started premiering at independent theaters like the Castro and the Roxie. I hit the festival circuit all over the world, including a daring mission by the British Film Institute to get my movies in, despite ironclad UK customs rules against them.

One college-tour memory stands out. In rural Blacksburg, Virginia, a closeted gay student got ahold of student union funds for Friday Night Fun! at Virginia Tech to bring me out there for one of my clips shows. This is a school with a history of devotion to Southern white boys and military service. The students weren’t even allowed to watch R-rated films on campus. I didn’t find out this history until I was moments away from the podium. My young sponsor looked like he’d just detonated a bomb and his face was covered in sweat. “My Dirty Movie” clips show started, which happens to begin with excerpts of two young handsome army cadets making out on a firing range. I thought the roof was going to cave in. Blacksburg boys were running for the doors, making vomiting sounds, screaming. The students who stayed in their seats watched a full spectrum of sexual and human emotion, delivered by porn’s finest auteurs. They got more sex education in one hundred minutes than they’d had in their entire lives.

The stunned president of the Young Republicans, a co-sponsor of Friday Night Fun!, took me out to a fast food dinner afterward. He told me that he found it curious that the scenes of lesbians making love had pleased him, while the scenes of gay men had given him a stomachache. I was impressed that he was calm enough to observe his own reactions.

“I don’t disagree with all of what you do,” he said, “but I think it’s entirely unjust that you receive checks from the government for your homosexuality.”

I stared at him with my mouth full of fries. “Oh, it’s not that bad,” I said, “I only get half as much because I’m bisexual.”]

There's a huge sense of social isolation that comes with being perceived as male, because now people are subconsciously treating me as a potential predator. All strangers, no matter their gender, keep their guard up around me.

It made me realize that there is no inherent camaraderie in male socialization as there is in female socialization—unless, of course, it's in very specific environments. And the fact I don't amnbiently experience this mutual kinship in basic exchanges anymore is an insanely lonely feeling.

Absolutely, because it's an extremely sticky issue.

Frankly, this is something I would've never understood without living the experience.

It's now blatantly clear to me that most cis men probably experience chronic emotional malnutrition. They're deprived of social connection just enough for it to seriously fuck with their psyches, but not enough for them to realize that it's happening and what's causing it.

It's like they're starving, but don't know this because they've always been served 3 meals...except those meals have never been big enough.

This deprivation comes from all sides of aisle, by the way.

In the case of women: When I'm out in public and interact with women, all of them come off as incredibly aloof, cold, and mirthless. I have never experienced this before even though I know exactly what this composure is—the armor that keeps away creepy-ass men.

As someone who used to wear it myself, I know this armor is 100% impersonal. Nobody likes wearing it, and I can say with absolute certainty that women would dump the armor in favor of unconditional companionship with men if doing this didn't run the risk of actual assault. (Trust me when I say women aren't just being needlessly guarded.)

But I only have a complete understanding of this context because I've experienced female socialization. If I hadn't, I would've thought this coldness was a conspiracy against me devised by roughly half of the human population. Even now, with all that I know about navigating the world as a woman, I'm failing to convince my monkey-brain that this armor isn't social rejection.

And as for male socialization? Again, it seems taboo for a man to be platonically intimate with men for reasons I have yet to fully understand, but I think it boils down to a) the fact society teaches boys that it's not okay to be soft with each other, and b) garden-variety homophobia. Our media only shows men being intimate with one another when they're teamed up against a dire situation, and I'd bet real money it's a huge reason why men gravitate toward activities that simulate being teamed up against an opposing force.

But men are not machines of war. Yes, testosterone absolutely gives you Dumb Bastard Brain, but that just makes you want to skateboard a wagon down a hill or duct-tape your friend to the wall, not kill someone.

The human species looks so much colder standing from this side.

I can see how men might convince themselves that their feelings of emotional desperation is personal weakness as opposed to a symptom they're all experiencing from White Imperialism. Because this human connection, this frith, is as essential for our wellbeing as water is.

read works of literature before the last 50-100 years and you will find yourself extremely culturally divided from those works' image of masculinity.

Honestly, this is a big part of a lot of the "homoeroticism" people often see in classic works of literature, not that it isn't there, but that our culture is so, so repressive about men showing affection to other men that affectionate behavior is seen as automatically homoerotic.

Discourse on this subject is brain-rotting simply because no one wants to acknowledge that there's a wide range of behaviors that are neither exclusively romantic/sexual nor exclusively platonic, and what specific behaviors "mean" is often only known to the people doing them. Two people can want to cuddle and hold each other as romantic lovers, and they can also want to cuddle and hold each other as friends, and the idea that platonic feelings/behaviors and romantic feelings/behaviors never overlap, or that there's no state of stable ambiguity between the two, is making everyone stupid.

I recently read the book Jesus and John Wayne which was about the American idol of hyper-masculinity and how it's intrinsically connected to the Christo-fascist evangelical faction dominating politics.

A "strong military" needs "strong men," and people who see the world as made of outsiders, enemies and hostile Others to be subdued have channeled their anxiety about America and/or Evangelicalism losing dominance into a gigantic panic about "sissy boys" and "effeminate" men.

The men in today's United States have mostly grown up in a world where "men" shouldn't have affection or tenderness, where "men" shouldn't cry, where "manhood" is about violence and aggression and "conquest," whether that's conquest of stolen land and territory or conquest of the literal physical bodies of women (these things have a weird cultural analogy between them). The depth of how horrible it gets is really shocking.

BITE stands for Behavior Control, Information Control, Thought Control, and Emotional Control.

The more points a group “scores” on the model, the more of a cult it is.

I think this model is the best one for several reasons:

It’s more nuanced than “cult” or “not cult” and doesn’t make false equivalences between groups

It’s versatile, applying to groups big and small, and cults of all kinds, religious, political, financial, etc.

“I know that I didn’t say very much, so what exactly did you say to them?” 

“I said that you were African American women, I needed to explain what that meant. You see, many of the people in the audience are […] the ones who had been stolen away. They were chanting at you, ‘Welcome home.’

Reposting these tags with consent from the person that wrote them. The post about the Sex Offenders Registry is locked, but these tags are too important to go unnoticed.

noooo, no no no.

first of all, the text wasn't written as a manifesto. this matters because most manifestos are written as manifestos, this text just came to be known as the bisexual manifesto, but it actually was first published as the introduction to the bisexual magazine anything that moves (the exact version that is commonly being quoted first appears in issue #3).

secondly, here's a direct quote from the introduction in 1991 issue #1:

"do not expect a clear-cut definition of bisexuality to jump out from the pages. we bisexuals tend to define bisexuality in ways unique to our own individuality. there are as many definitions of bisexuality as there are bisexuals."

does that sound like the intention was to clearly define bisexuality?

the magazine's purpose as expressed by the byline "beyond the myths of bisexuality" was to clear up misconceptions and to give bisexual people a space to express themselves, to showcase a plurality of bisexual voices. nothing so restrictive as defining bisexuality in one singular way.

read anything that moves here:

old instruments get played all the time and this is a normal thing

she's literally a professional flute player

fuck james madison, it fucking rules that a black woman got to play his stupid fancy flute

it's NOT like the kim k marilyn dress thing. kim k paid to wear a historical item that was custom fit to a particular individual's body and damaged it, as anyone who knows about textile preservation who saw that going down KNEW was going to happen

i trust the motherfucking library of congress with loans of its holdings more than i do the goddamn ripley's believe it or not museum of hollywood are you shitting me

ANYWAY the real magic of the evening was after they’d finished their main programming, one of the violinists stepped forward to thank everyone for coming and give a quick plug for how to support similar programming at the Library. He lauded the Library’s interest in music and thanked them for a private tour through their musical instrument collections earlier that day.

And then he dropped the absolute bombshell that this entire evening, we’d actually been listening to not one, but three Stradivariuses—a violin, a viola, and a cello, I think, which the Library had loaned to them for the performance.

THREE. OF 14 MUSICIANS ON STAGE THREE OF THEM WERE PLAYING STRADIVARIUSES. AT A FREE CONCERT. This violinist was holding one of them as he told us. When I tell you this geriatric audience fucking GASPED. He went on to play a solo to the most silent audience I’d ever heard. He got a standing ovation, and they all got a standing ovations for the next two pieces they played, because even though we’d been listening to them all night, knowing the history of the instruments made the experience much more special. As a side note, only one of the Stradivariuses was played by a white musician.

I know something as unusual as a crystal flute owned by the author of our constitution probably registers differently than a Stradivarius in the world of music, and I realize the audiences at a Lizzo concert and a small chamber orchestra concert are comically different. I’m just trying to highlight the fact that the LoC loans out their extremely valuable instruments with at least passing regularity, so this was absolutely not a stunt. These things were meant to be played, after all, and played by true masters. Lizzo is (aside from being the creator of some absolute bangers) an insanely talented flautist, classically trained. These musicians I got to see were insanely talented at their respective instruments. I never heard a single peep of complaint from the almost 100% white boomer audience. Some of them were crying just to see and hear such special instruments live, something I assume many of them had never thought they would get to do—I know didn’t!

People who are upset about Lizzo’s performance don’t give a shit about music or that flute. They’re racist gatekeepers of both history and of music. You only just now learned that James Madison had a crystal flute, and you’re upset you got to hear such a unique treasure played by a master???? That the Library of Congress is sharing, after 200 years, a small piece of our nation’s history that can bring people both joy and the chance to be included in an unexpected new bit of history?