Pixelated Toys

However, he reminds everyone that it's still a limited release, and the only way it'll stay in theaters is ticket sales. So... y'all know what to do if you wanna support the Looney Tunes and 2D animation in theaters. Buy more tickets. Hype the film up. Spread the word to as many folks as you can.

VOTE IF YOU ARE ELIGIBLE

Voter turnout last election was around 44%, which is sad. Voting in any election is so important, so if you have that right, use it!

Why is that a problem? Well, in the late 1800s/early 1900s, eugenics (the opposite of degeneration; "de" means down, "eu" means "good") became a popular "scientific" theory. It's the idea that every bad thing that happens to or is done by a person is actually a result of their genes. Not just actual genetic disorders, like Tay-Sachs disease, but also being poor or committing crimes. Literally, their thought process was, "We see that the children of poor families tend to also be poor. That must mean that poverty is genetic." (this was actually pretty well debunked in like 1911 but weirdly it kept being popular in/promoted by super racist people hmm I wonder why that would be)

If you were genetically perfect, then of course you'd be healthy, strong, intelligent, hardworking, wealthy, moral, and, most importantly, white; lacking any of those qualities meant that there was something wrong with your DNA somewhere. The best way to ensure that everyone was successful would be to just get rid of anything – that is, anyone – genetically bad, so that only the best people could breed with each other and have perfect children.

How do you do that? Well, for one, you make it illegal for anyone to marry outside of their race, and you make the requirements to be white incredibly difficult to prove (it wasn't based on skin color, but on any non-white heritage, no matter how white you actually looked) and draw the lines for everyone else very broadly (in the US South, it was literally "white" or "colored," with "colored" meaning anything from "just immigrated here from Africa" to "mostly white with a bit of Native American"), and require all of them to have some kind of identifying document or badge so that you can tell which is which. And you make it legal to sterilize undesirables: disabled people (both physical and mental), nonwhite people, and people of poor moral character (remember, being bad is genetic, and also in this era you think being gay is also a sign of poor moral character), just to ensure that there's absolutely no chance that someone might accidentally or deliberately sneak in.

(Eventually, you can also just kill them. Because that other stuff is taking too long.)

But remember! Evil is genetic! So of course there are always going to be nefarious actors deliberately trying to bring the whole race down and make it worse/weaker! And what's their evil plan? They'll encourage mixing good people with bad people with diabolical schemes like "making modern art" and "thinking it's okay for white people to listen to jazz" and "promoting civil rights for minorities." And what do we call "people who bring the whole race down"? Degenerates!

DNI lists do not stop people you don't like from interacting with you.

Even people using them know this. Yet there's this doublethink that happens in these groups that having a DNI is to keep you safe. How can something that doesn't actually keep these people from interacting with you keep you safe then?

Well it's function isn't for material safety, it for social safety. It's gives the user what Naomi Kline has called "the social currency of victimhood".

If a user finds out that someone they've been interacting with has an affiliation with one of these groups, they can then turn around go "I said that I didn't want to talk to them and they talked to me - I am the victim!" They can then use that social currency to get sympathy or, in many cases, launch harassment campaigns against the person.

I would also argue that DNIs mostly serve as a flagging function, a way to signal to other users in similar groups that they're "one of the good one" because they're against the same things - quite literally virtue signalling. The issue with this is that because the emphasis is on the signaling and not the the virtue, anyone can coopt these signs and gain access to the community and it's harassment norms.

We see this happening with right wing operators all the fucking time right now. As a key part of their playing book, they've coopted social justice language to repackage their fascist ideas. And I do literally mean fascist here. It's why you're seeing huge swathes of the wellness, alternative spirituality, and eco communities splinter and align with folks like Steve Bannon. A growing number of queer folks voted for Trump in the last election due in part to these repackaging tactics.

So not only do these DNIs not keep people materially safe, they open the door for material danger, for bad actors to exert unchecked influence in these communities.

But hey I thought this was about the word degen?

It is. Degenerate is literally the term the right has been using to refer primarily to trans people and queers and progressive women secondarily for literal decades. And they absolutely mean it in the original terms the calamitousgumption outlined - in the eugenics way.

"but it usually means pedophile!" - then say pedophile. Does it not feel like pedophile means pedophile any more? There's a reason for that. The right has also been actively - there are literal playbooks out there for this - trying to take the language we use to identify harms and coopt them for their agendas. They've been conflating pedophile with any form of gender binary crossing - mostly trans people - for decades. When you avoid using the word pedophile when you mean pedophile, you play into their hand. When you opt for degen instead, you pick up a eugenicists term they've weaponized for the specific association you're trying to distance yourself from.

So bringing it full circle - adding degen to your DNI lets the right weaponize the cancel culture tactics of these communities where it's popular against the very people they want to destroy. Online harassment campaigns increase the likelihood of someone committing suicide and that is absolutely a feature that appeal to fascists.

You are doing the work of the very people you say you don't want to interact with.

Given that Republicans have, in fact, only won the popular vote once in this period (2004), this is a strategy, not a statement of fact.

The “don’t vote” left’s point is basically that, if Biden gets a second term, it’ll basically signal that “They’ll vote for us as long as we’re not Republicans, why don’t we do some REAL fucked up shit, if we can get away with it?” It takes the power out of the people’s hands and places it firmly in the party’s.

I can’t completely disagree with that, my caveat is that there’s no real alternative system or party in place, because top-down change is ineffective; a third party president has to contend with a two party congress.

Except no. This whole "Biden just wants to do as much fucked up shit as possible while not being a Republican, and if you give him a second term he'll do more fucked up shit deliberately to spite you" mindset is only possible as an interpretation if you a) deliberately and comprehensively ignore everything he has done to date, and b) you approach the situation with the maximum bad faith possible. Not to mention, the ultimate outcome of this Big Important Teaching Biden A Lesson is that Trump gets back into power and makes everything orders of magnitude worse, because he does in fact want to deliberately do evil shit to everyone and says so at every opportunity. There is not some magical happy alternative that springs into existence by not voting. If you choose this as a year to Teach Biden A Lesson, you are enabling Trump. Trump will be much, much worse. If you don't care about that, I still do not care what your Great Ideology is. You are not helping anyone and you are directly and irreversibly hurting everyone.

I made a post a few days ago wherein I mentioned that I want to assess Biden fairly, taking into account both strengths and weaknesses, but the rampant bad-faith, lying, misreading, misrepresentation, and open sabotage of him (especially by the online left; the GOP sometimes only wishes they were as good at turning Biden's voter pool against him) makes it really difficult to do that. My frustration with those people makes me just want to go "BIDEN IS GREAT THE END." I know he is a flawed old man (though by literally every account of a career spent in public service, he really does care about making the world a better place and any remotely good faith reading of his accomplishments thus far can see that). It is also very likely that he goes MORE left in a second term because he won't have to face the electorate again, he has always gone more left when pushed before, and he's not actually the scheming genocidal mastermind that leftist social media paints him as. Shocking, I know.

If you don't like the fact that the leftmost candidate of the two major parties isn't left enough, the solution is neither to refuse to vote, nor to "send a message" by voting third party. Both result in an advantage to the rightmost candidate.

The solution is, vote for the guy that's not quite good enough, and then lean on him hard.

Biden has moved farther to the left than any president since Roosevelt. Yes. He's gotten more of our agenda done than Clinton or Obama. And there's many things he's tried to do that the right wingers in Congress or in the Supreme Court have stopped him from doing. He's also moved farther to the left than any president I know of when you look at his whole career; at one point he was Liberal Lite, "moderate", pro-corporation, etc... and it seems he learned from it. He changed. So we're dealing with a guy who is capable of moving left, has done so, and could be asked to go farther.

The other candidate literally wants to become a dictator, eliminate freedom of the press, and spend our tax dollars persecuting his "enemies."

Do I like the fact that Biden is supporting Israel militarily when they have caused such an enormous and horrible death toll in Gaza? No. But we have treaties with Israel and we can't easily break them. Meanwhile we have actually seen him call Netanyahu out. Including saying basically "You keep this up and no one will be your friend", implying that he is threatening to withdraw support. Trump, meanwhile, is cheerfully Islamophobic and would happily murder every single Palestinian. You care about Palestine, there is only one legitimate choice. I'm sorry, I know you want to believe there are multiple moral options you can take, but there is really only one. In the US's winner-take-all first-past-the-post no ranked choice system, the guy who gets 51% of the vote and the guy who gets 90% of the vote are exactly the same.

Look, we can win this. The right's abortion bans are wildly unpopular; many people will be voting to try to restore the right to control our own bodies. Republican support skews older, but in four years millennials didn't magically reach a point of comfortable status quo where they're likely to start voting Republican; instead Republicans have doubled down on the crazy. Anti-maskers and ant-vaxxers, who are likely Republicans, are much more likely to have died of COVID than the reality-based community on the left, since Biden won by 7 million votes 4 years ago.

But Trump will do everything in his power to cheat. We can't just win by 51%. We have to trounce him and as many Republicans at the ballot box as we can, because they have lost the plot. Even the best ones refuse to do anything to stop the spread of this evil-for-its-own-sake movement that wants queers, Jews, and Muslims dead, POC subservient, and women of all races securely under the thumb of men. We have to stop this movement by sending a message to politicians, "these are not winning ideologies. Embrace these ideologies because of the fanatic fringe, and you will lose." Most of them aren't true believers; they're pandering. The only way to stop the Republicans being pointlessly destructive is to make so many of them lose, the rest realize, shit, the grownups are back, we better start acting like politicians and not demagogues again.

And one of the best ways to do that is to make sure Biden wins by such a large margin even Trump can't cheat his way to victory. Because he's ready. He's promised, there will be violence if he loses. (There will also be violence if he wins, but it will be state violence against us. If he loses, there will be rioting white thugs in red states, but the federal government will still have both the power and the will to try to stop that.) He's going to pull every dirty trick in the book to win. The only way to stop him is to win overwhelmingly. Then we get four more years of relative safety, where if Clarence Thomas dies or gets arrested we get a young liberal judge in his place, and in that time, we can push the Democratic party farther to the left, because they'll know why they won. They'll know who voted for them, and why, and they'll move in that direction because they want to keep winning.

You cannot save Gaza by making sure Biden loses. That is actually the worst possible thing that could happen, in terms of anything any American could do. Netanyahu wants Trump to win because Trump will back him up no matter what he does to the Palestinians.

Also a reminder that they were better at tumblr than most of us, comrade interloper was great at memeing. Like, the talent!

Keep this shit off AO3

Would you be in favor of creating a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion committee? Why or why not? I see no reason creating another committee would help anything in light of the continued staffing issues, and see several ways it could hurt. Lumping nonwhite, and non-English-speaking, and non-American volunteers together in one committee is just tokenism with a bow on top. Those experiences are not singular or universal. The DEI consultant to be hired by the organization will be able to speak to this far better than I can. The cost of becoming a member/voting in elections is prohibitive for many users, particularly disabled, international and POC ones. Do you have any ideas about how this could be improved to make the otw more inclusive and less privileged? No.

Also, just for some proof of the "Republican" part, from Twitter:

like, it's not a pejorative, it's how she's self-identified

GOOD.

It's kind of the opposite of transmisogyny- instead of fear and revulsion, it's constant condescension, the implications that we've been whisked away from femininity by scary bad guys, that we're going to cause 'irreparable damage' because we don't know what's best for ourselves, somehow. People fearmonger a lot about the "ugliness" of transfem people, but for transmasc people that 'ugliness' is used as a warning- you'll look like THIS! You'll go BALD! Your top surgery scars will leave you MUTILATED! A lot of aesthetic concerns. Worry about our 'beauty'. Because it comes from that same stupid reactionary 'we gotta SAVE the WOMEN' shit, but this time they have to save them from getting 'stolen away', as if we're being seduced or pressured into this. As if we can't make our own decisions.

For TERFS specifically, they're losing one of their own. We're 'gender traitors', willingly aligning ourselves with the half of the population they consider unilaterally dangerous and evil.

We aren't REALLY trans, we just want the benefits that men get. You don't actually want to transition, you're just trying to avoid misogyny.

You aren't actually a man, you're just a self-loathing lesbian.

Why can't you just be a butch girl? Why can't you just be a tomboy?

Why can't you just be something that I don't think is icky?

Anyway. Like all things, it boils down to misogyny. Women stupid and gentle, dont know what best for them, evil men trick into taking man juice, must save because lady stupid and dont know what best for them (having babies and being Feminine).

Keep this shit off AO3

Would you be in favor of creating a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion committee? Why or why not? I see no reason creating another committee would help anything in light of the continued staffing issues, and see several ways it could hurt. Lumping nonwhite, and non-English-speaking, and non-American volunteers together in one committee is just tokenism with a bow on top. Those experiences are not singular or universal. The DEI consultant to be hired by the organization will be able to speak to this far better than I can. The cost of becoming a member/voting in elections is prohibitive for many users, particularly disabled, international and POC ones. Do you have any ideas about how this could be improved to make the otw more inclusive and less privileged? No.

Also, just for some proof of the "Republican" part, from Twitter:

like, it's not a pejorative, it's how she's self-identified

ALT: [I am in favor of allowing same-sex marriage, because I tell people all the time, I’m pro-1A, pro-2A, pro-3A. I am pro free speech, I am pro-gun, and I am pro keeping the government out of your home. I believe that regulating marriage is a church issue, it is not a government issue. As far as I’m concerned, whatever gender combination you want to make between two consenting adults is none of my business. I believe that America has far bigger problems, so I would have voted in the affirmative.]