how many people could be working on actual problems in the world instead of being forced to do jobs that they are over-qualified for just because they dont want to go homeless and starve?
climate change is threatening to kill us and people with biology degrees are working at starbucks if they didn’t get lucky in the nepotism department.
capitalism is possibly the least efficient way to allocate work.
You love art–have spent your entire childhood developing a style people love and appreciate? you could possibly work to improve the lives of millions with your beautiful creations?
sorry you need to work 12 hours a day at a walmart that doesn’t need you while some billionaire who took a painting class once sells some ugly bullshit for 3.5 million.
Millions of people want to be doctors but can’t afford medical school, it is a well known fact we don’t have enough doctors for the demand. hmm wow real efficient capitalism.
“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of
Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent
have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” - Stephen Jay Gould
I’m no longer holding Star Trek or Star Wars “accountable” for their clunky-looking sixties-and-seventies future technology.
Why?
Because the Enterprise is off on a years-long voyage through space. There’s no Verizon store, no Radio Shack, no Geek Squad out there. If the Klingons fire photon torpedoes and the bridge shakes and Spock’s head bangs against the fancy iPad72 touchscreen and cracks the glass, the ship’s toast. If Han Solo’s fingerprints get all over the starchart and the touch-calibration is off by half a centimeter, the Falcon is going right into a star. But if Mister Worf accidentally twists the command knob too hard and pops it off, he can just screw that thing right back on and it will keep working. Dust gets in there? Take it apart and clean it out. All the plugs are big and universal, all the power cells are functional and have a decent battery life, and nothing is built to expire in the next six months so you have to buy a new one.
That tech isn’t anachronistic or suffering a bad case of Zeerust–it’s practical, effective, and it works. Apple tried launching its own space exploration craft, it had to come back for full repairs within three months, and then it had to be upgraded over the next two.
But this? This is just good, long-lasting, fully-functional, and reliable craftsmanship.
The actual real-life space shuttles’ electronics looked pretty much like that for their entire lifespan and this is exactly why.
Oh my god, it all makes sense now. The Enterprise is the spaceship equivalent of a Volkswagen.Â
watching spiderverse makes me never wanna see another live action movie ever again like. why did we ever start making comic books into live action movies?? make it animated to explore the art form instead of trying to make it hyper realistic you fucking cowards
It really is pretty dramatic how almost every article about how trans people are placing unreasonable demands on society focuses primarily on transfeminine people and almost every article about how trans people are poor delusional victims of the medical-industrial complex focuses primarily on transmasculine people.
This point felt less obvious back when there wasn’t a book called The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters.
a what now?
I … did not realize that was actually real.
It sure is. When you search transgender on Amazon it is the first result! I’ve actually been going through the horror of annotating and reviewing it (worry not, I pirated it. I would rather die then give Abigail shier money). It’s won several rewards and is one of the best selling books in the western world. It is the book that popularized “ROGD” (Rapid Onset Gender Dyphoria) a term used to prevent trans masculine people and trans men from receiving trans and medical care and is often used to back anti-transition laws in both the united states and the United Kingdom (and likley many other places).
Wait, y’all are only finding out about this book now? It’s been like a year sjjdnd
Yeah, that fucking thing is like the TERF Bible. It’s the same thing I was talking about in my other post just now. The main title is ‘Irreversible Damage,’ and it promotes the idea that the medical-industrial complex is preying upon girls and young women (they infantilize teenage girls and young adult women a LOT in this book btw), especially neurodiverse girls/young women, and that transmascs cannot be trusted to make our own medical decisions and should be “protected from ourselves.” The concept of ROGD is specifically applied here to transmasc teenagers & college-age young women. The TERFs are REAL mad that they can’t control their sons/children in college, because those adults can make their own choices now.
This is actually a really good bit of coverage of it (if only part 1 of 2, I don’t think part 2 is up yet) from a scientifically critical, trans-affirming perspective, if you’d like to know what the TERFs are aiming at transmascs these days without actually having to like
read that shit
because it’s fucking horrible.
And like, I absolutely recommend reading that article, because this shit permeates the discussion about trans ppl, especially in the UK and on Twitter.
That Book was recently (like, this past week) included in an American Bookseller’s Association promotional ‘white box’ sent to independent booksellers in the US, and trans ppl and our allies got understandably really pissed that a book of unscientific, nasty-ass anti-transmasc propaganda that’s been out for a year is like… in a promo box. So they took the ABA to task for it.
The ABA put out an apology (full of passive language, like these things just happened rather than that someone did these things, which is pretty fucking rich for a bookseller’s association, like they thought that the kind of extremely literate people who run independent bookstores wouldn’t notice) and so like… the book is receiving renewed attention from the same sort of First Amendment transphobes who love to screech about censorship when their favorite bits of propaganda get pushback. You’ll probably see a lot more of the ideas this book pushes in the near future.
So, like, yeah. It exists, and people are talking about it a lot, so knowing what kind of garbage is in it and what we’re up against?
Unfortunately necessary, IMO.
Also, I need to underline that this book specifically also attacks transmasculine non-binary people, not just trans men. They don’t really see any difference between us.
A big part of these arguments involves denying agency to autistic people as well
Yeah, I said that. :) “especially neurodiverse… ”
It’s not just autistic people being denied agency in their arguments - they also discuss transmascs with anxiety and depression pretty often as ppl who just “aren’t capable” of making medical decisions - but they sure have some opinions about us autistic trans folx.
tumblr meme culture is really just a form of neo dadaism
I’d like to clarify:
dada was a largely european art movement that took place after wwi. this time and place is not a coincidence. let me explain.Â
dada art made no sense. the artists who made dada lived in a world in which nothing made sense - in which conventional logic led to the senselessness of a world war. so, making art that made no sense, making - well, you can’t really call it art, so making ANTI-art that rejected the conventions that brought about that atrocity in the first place - it made total sense. (if that makes any sense.)
so the artists did weird things. new things! putting things that were already made together and calling it sculpture, cutting up bits of pictures and putting them together and calling that something to frame - this site has some nice examples.
but from my perspective - there’s serious intellectual continuity between the absurdity of attaching a bunch of tacks to the bottom of an iron, rendering it useless, and say…. bath bomb posts. Put a fucking macbook in a bath. it’s useless now. Nobody fucking cares anymore. you want something funny? you want a punchline? gun. that’s your punchline. Take it. I am laughing
in a way it could be a method of venting some of the frustration and hopelessness and dissatisfaction that tumblr’s userbase (largely, disenfranchised millennials) feels in the modern day. I can’t really speak for anyone else, but… at least from a US perspective, there’s plenty to be disillusioned about. growing up in a constant state of questionably justified war, income inequality, an economic recession caused by the actions of a handful of wealthy fucks who didn’t even get properly punished, growing awareness of police brutality, being called lazy and self-absorbed by the generations that gave us these problems in the first place… I can’t help but think that these factors (and more) could produce a similar mindset to the one that precipitated the first dada movement.Â
so of COURSE we make nonsense jokes. it’s a coping mechanism for a world which doesn’t make any sense.
related: this isn’t by tumblr but I have to plug UCLA’s atrocity of a virtual gallery once more. it really needs to be experienced, but… it’s definitely also millennial neo dada. from the presentation (like an unplayable video game) to the content (THE DOGS HAVE ARRIVED), it is exactly what I am talking about. it is a fucking shitpost. and it’s high art, too! I love this
tl;dr: my generation is fed up with this bullshit, and the best way that we can express that is by shitposting. alternatively, dada was an early precursor to modern shitposting and we should all thank duchamp for signing a fucking urinal
a dear friend has given a perfect update to some of my phrasing, courtesy of their word replace extension:
you see this? this is exactly what I’m fucking talking about. the thing that I’m talking about is:
I’d also say that while Dadaism was obsessed with the technological aspects of Modernity, of newspapers, of industrial mechanics and factory made clocks, neo-dadaism (of which shitposting but also the increasingly broad reach of the New Aesthetic and net aesthetics) is obsessed with the technological aspects of our time, or at the beginning of our time.
As just a comparison, the Clock in Absurdist and Dadaist art is both a symbol of the uplifting beginning of industrial relations (as one of the first complicated machines made by manufacturers, as the symbol of mankind’s ability to triumph and analyze nature and better ourselves) and as the deified symbol of horrific modernity (of demarcated time, labor hours, the oppression of the working class via managerial time), Neo-Dadaism/Absurdism has a similar relationship with early computers, which both symbolizes the utopian attitudes which we entered the digital age with, and the horrifying period we live in now, where the Digital is ever present and semi-deified.
My favorite dada satire is probably from Georges Grosz who takes the kind of robotic modernist tube people of folks like Leger:
and turns them into these mindlessly patriotic broken automatons chanting rote phrases:
And it’s so so funny to me that there’s all kinds of Gen X artists out there creating art about the millennials on their damn cellumar phones who think they’re the inheritors of this aesthetic but really it’s people who use the Madden gif generator to shitpost because they’re taking the technology meant for a coherent purpose for a particular narrative and they’re breaking it and turning it back on itself.
Season 1: Nine gets the edge here, with about a third of the saying fuck rights. But the dark horse of the season is Jackie Tyler, coming in with a solid 21%. Season 2: Nine can say fuck but Ten cannot. Rose and Jackie are neck-and-neck with a third of the fuck rights each, and Mickey doubled his rights over the first season as well. Season 3: Martha takes the single “fuck” with an overwhelming majority of 65%. And honestly, she deserves it. Season 4: The pie chart of Donna Noble’s right to say fuck is a circle. S5 - 8 // S9 - 12
a while ago i attended this lecture on autism. guy in the audience said he had many of the symptoms that were presented and asked what should he do to get treatment and possibly a diagnosis. instead of answering his question the psychologist went on a tangent about how “the clinic reigns all powerful over guesswork”, and how actually it has become a trend amongst little children on the internet to claim that they are autistic for cool points, and that this hurts real autistic people. no she didn’t tell him how to get his symptoms looked into, she just made it very clear that to her, aknowledging your own symptoms is bad and evil and hurts the poor real mentally ill people.
an ex-friend of mine, then a psychology major and by now probably a full psychologist, once lectured me on how horrible and bad it was that i told her “i probably have some sort of neurodivergency”, and that if i were her patient she would never give me a diagnosis because “you aren’t like this now, but i know that if you get a diagnosis you’ll use it as an excuse to start treating people badly. that’s just how mentally ill people are.”
same ex-friend was extremely disgusted when she found out that fans sometimes make neurodivergency headcanons for characters that have the same symptoms as they do, and that authors sometimes write books with neurodivergent protagonists in stories that don’t focus on that (ex: she seemed horrified that percy jackson has adhd?)
multiple psychologists i’ve seen on facebook agree that they should refuse to treat patients that say “i’m here because i have symptoms of a disorder and wonder if i have it”, and that a patient should arrive to a psychologist as a blank slate.
school psychologist asked me how i was feeling about my trauma situation and i told him i thought my friends would leave me. instead of addressing the issue he said that that no i didn’t, that i was lying, that i had searched “bpd symptoms” online and now i was faking symptoms because i wanted to have bpd, that he shouldn’t have told me he suspected i had a personality disorder because now look what was happening. no, i didn’t search bpd symptoms online. yes, my friends left me, it was a completely founded belief and not a symptom, let alone a faked symptom.
so the next time you hear someone saying they’re “anti self-diagnosis” i want you to understand what they’re saying. what they’re saying is:
- i don’t want people to be aware of their own symptoms
- i don’t think my patients should have access to any information that doesn’t come from me
- i don’t think neurodivergent people should learn how to cope with their symptoms and live “normal” lives
- i think neurodivergent people should be denied a diagnosis because the moment they get one they will become evil and dangerous
- i don’t think people who don’t look like a stereotype could possibly be neurodivergent, even if they have all the symptoms, so i think they are faking it for attention and should be denied treatment
When all else fails you call me and if you gotta call me then you're screwed and I'm screwed.
I am a male black mental disorder-addled 20-something artist, writer, singer, dancer-, oh screw it, if it's an artistic endeavour of any sort odds are I'm pretty okay at it and i enjoy it.
