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Not seeing constant acts of resistance doesn’t mean it isn’t happening all around you all the time. Some very effective methods require silence and secrecy.

So the government just defunded PBS and NPR which is fucked. That being said, the public can cover the damage if we orginize and donate.

Only about $1.60 of tax dollars per US citizen per year are spent on the public broadcasting budget. NPR and PBS offer beong able to make small monthly donations, some being 7$ per month or lower if you want.

If you want to donate 1.60$ per month to your local station, you can multiply how much funding they get from you by 12. If you do their monthly donation of $7 per month, your donation can equal the tax dollars of 54 people spent on public broadcasting per year.

If you want to donate to your local station, look them up by your town here to make sure your local stations get helped specifically:

At least my instant turn offs that are Dude Things are "is an egotistical manchild that doesn't like the word no" and "has a chronic case of useless husband disorder" and "treats the women in his life poorly".

Genuinely, the straight men OP is talking about are the type that has such a poor vocabulary, they literally don't have the tools to describe relationships. Those traits, the laté snaps, septum piercing, cat ear headphones, those are all stand-ins for character types that they're unable to describe using specific terms.

Lots of men grow up with this idea that they're supposed to die in battle; men get off the Titanic last, so they find meaning in "being of service" in a "manly" way. This is usually accomplished by working jobs that destroy them, also resulting in utter neglect of their education and relationships. The whole "tradwife" attitude revolves around this idea that "since men are socially disposable, but also sensitive creatures, the female companions in their lives should notice their hardships, appreciate their sacrifices, and support them by making up for their deficits."

I shouldn't need to outline how fucking flawed that worldview is, but it's a common one that many men internalize.

So you get these "poor, hard done by" men who see their daily misery as some fucked up noble sacrifice, and who generally don't spend time enjoying life outside of destructive, manly persuits like after work drinking, womanizing, or drugs. Or sports, because that's a proxy for masculine violence, and another avenue to destroy your body and ""die in battle.""

They don't know how to relax, they don't know how to enjoy their own company, they don't know how to manage a household, they develop unhealthy attitudes and coping mechanisms, their relationships are all based on money, their routines revolve around work and nothing else, and their home lives and family dynamics suffer as a consequence.

What's laté snap girl doing, really? She's cultivating an online following, she's slowing down to note small details that please her, she's taking time for herself to enjoy a moment. If these men did that, they'd suddenly be confronted with the emptiness of their lives, the futility of capitalism, their substance use problems, and the various aches and pains that riddle their bodies, as a result of their flawed lifestyle.

So, these men construct a type; the anti-their lifestyle type, that's empowered, educated, and self interested. This type finds meaning in others and in themselves, not in lives based on imagined noble self-sacrifice. This type has blue hair and piercings, is aware of social issues and patriarchy, is independent and self regulates well, and doesn't put up with the "poor him" attitudes of the shitty men out there.

As a result, "women with cat ear headphones" represent anti-matter to the "poor him" bros, and they can't use more specific language to describe this, because that would require awareness of their pathetic worldviews and systemic disfunction in their lives.

💯

I can only add observations based on the way that -- as a straight woman myself -- I was raised in a world that taught contempt for women. That women were Bad Drivers and Airheads. That women were Nags and Talked Too Much and Spent Hours On Their Stupid Hair And Nails. These things were in the air I breathed as far back as I can remember. I was literally coached to make fun of my own sex as silly, flighty things with the brains of a cup custard, while the little boys I knew, except one who had a sort of kindergarten crush and was "going to marry me when we grew up," performed the "ew girls" attitude. And since I was told that you were indeed expected to do the hair and nails thing and be "ladylike," for a while -- at an age when I had the muddled idea that people could choose their eventual gender as easily as choosing what you wanted from the ice cream truck -- I decided that I was going to grow up to be a man, not because I was actually trans, but because the other choice seemed to be membership in a category of human that got fleeting scraps of praise for their beauty or comportment while being generally looked down on and never doing anything worthwhile or interesting.

My uncles -- hard working heads of households all -- expected me to laugh at their jokes: "Why hasn't a woman run for President? Because there are too many splits in the Democratic party already, splits, get it?" My supposedly feminist father would tell me I'd never have to depend on a man, and then when I, a devourer of rocket-ship stories, asked why there were no women astronauts (I'm Old), reply "What would they do with all the Tampax?" Har har. Boys my own age, once we hit our teens, joined the sniggering at periods and bras and everything feminine-coded. If I had a time machine, I'd wear it out in a day zapping back to ask each and every one of these clowns what was so fucking funny.

Straight men have modeled nudge-wink contempt for women for generations - it didn't exactly start with Andrew Tate, and decades of feminism have only made some proponents of that attitude double down. And that implies that if you want to keep your Straight Guy Card, your only prospective mate is a lesser lifeform that you're obliged to tolerate if you ever want to start a family or even just get your rocks off. It results in the weird mindfuck that happens when a guy expresses attraction to a woman yet simultaneously projects negativity onto her . It took the queer couples in my life, once people began leaving the closet, to show me that life partnerships could exist without all that baggage. And I think that might be why queerness produces a particular terror in a particular type of person who's mired in the status quo. It upends the entire myth that a life partnership or even a casual hookup can only occur between people whose interests, capabilities, maturity levels and values are virtually irreconcilable. These are the same people that panic whenever anyone suggests encouraging girls to be strong, self-determining and have boundaries, or boys to be gentle, playful and emotionally literate.

So anyone who tells you men act in awful ways because, "this is just how men are!" are just making excuses for shit behavior- AND reinforcing for any boys in earshot that there is something wrong with them if they act OTHER than in those shitty ways.

8 months pay with the ability to get a new job is very tempting, especially for lower-paid workers. All that extra money could really cover some gaps and relieve financial pressures. It’s tempting. I get it.

ITS ALSO NOT LIKELY LEGAL AS WRITTEN AND YOUR AGREEMENT COULD ACTUALLY SCREW YOU. There’s a reason so many of the recent EOs and initial memorandums are getting halted or rewritten - no thought or research was given to what they can do given actual regulations and union contracts. Because many are coming from Musk via DOGE, and Musk has NEVER had to deal with unions, federal employee regulations, and strong opponents capable of fighting back HARD with decades of legal precedent at their back.

Right now, r/fednews is the biggest social media hub for federal employees anywhere; you can find resources, advice, news, memes, and encouragement there.

If you're not a federal employee, feel free to pop over anyway for information, and please send well-wishes! They really need it right now, as their jobs are so so so important but not very popular or prestigious, and now the wealthiest and most powerful people in the world are trying to take their livelihoods.

The architect of Project 2025, Russell Vought, is now Trump's director for the Office of Managenent and Budget -

ie, the main guy who created Project 2025 is now the topmost-level manager and coordinator of all federal agencies.

His vision for federal civil servants, in his own words:

"We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.

We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can't do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so.

We want to put them in trauma."

Project 2025 specifically targets federal civil servants for a reason. They are the essential first and second lines of defense of the US democracy and the fascists know it.

Support civil servants, support your rights!