So I have this really cool RP idea it’s called “we both talk about doing it a lot but nothing happens and we’re both not sure how to initiate so the entire thought of it just gets shoved to the back of our minds until we eventually jokingly say we should RP and then the cycle starts anew” what do you guys think
does anyone have a convincing explanation for why homophobia declined so precipitously
femmenietzsche said: Byproduct of making sex and marriage about individual fulfillment.
that doesn’t really feel sufficient, I mean yes it’s obviously correlated with all kinds of other social change, most of which boost the value of individual lives over traditional institutions, but we’re still going from mental disorder to officially sanctioned love-is-love within 20 years, few other changes seem this fast.
It’s namby pamby liberalism, basically.
You know that black guy who befriended the KKK to get them to give up their robes? Daryl Davis? It turns out bigots actually are reasonably persuadable if you can get in under their defenses. Not to go all Saturday Morning Cartoon very special episode and everything, but the power of empathy and brotherhood is real and just knowing a member of an oppressed group on a personal level makes it hard to keep oppressing them.
And gay people had advantages even Daryl Davis didn’t have. We could and basically had to remain hidden for a long time. Before we came out of the closet, we were sons and daughters, best friends and pupils, the kid on the debate team or the co-worker. The fundamentals of the situation required that the intense personal confessionals and bridge building to bigots happened naturally and on a massive scale. One agonizing conversation with family after another, one difficult decision about whether to hold hands at thanksgiving or invite grandma to the commitment ceremony at a time, we won hearts and minds.
The strategy scaled, and in fact was made easier and easier as time went on. Some people come out, which made it a little safer to come out, which let more people come out, and on and on until everyone had a daughter or a mechanic that they knew was gay.
It baffles me that this is supposed to make me a naive and unsophisticated when most of those same progressives yelling at me about it either were queer themselves or involved in gay activism when all of this as going down. I saw dozens of people go from bigots to grudgingly accepting people to enthusiastic advocates of gay rights, And I’m betting you did, too, so where the current pessimism about converting the bigoted comes from is a mystery to me. Sometimes the spiritually uplifting and optimistic answer happens to be the right one. And the attitude of the modern-day to conversion of bigots strikes me as an intentional decision to stick to comforting and politically easy facts when the truth is obvious to anyone who has been paying attention to the past 20 years.
yay for namby pamby liberalism!
I’ve seen people argue that Will and Grace was hugely influential, just because “prime time TV”. You see something weird and scary and unfamiliar, and nothing happens, and you see it again, and nothing happens, and after a while it’s not scary anymore.
But think about the famous judge saying he’s never met a gay person, and his clerk saying “uh, actually”. Back in the 80s, when a kid in my school came out as gay, it was a huge fucking deal. I saw one other kid openly claim to be bisexual, and… like, that was it. That was what we had for anyone talking about being gay or admitting to it or anything.
So that kid came out in his senior speech, and said “you know, people keep saying they think I’m gay, and you know what? Yeah, I am.” And he got a standing ovation. And all the kids at that school got the impression that being gay was something that a cool person you really liked might be doing, and that it was hard on them when people were jerks to them.
And honestly, a big part of the reason it became a massive shift was precisely that homophobia was weaponized as a get-out-the-vote strategy. For a long time before that, the actual degree of active hostility was actually lower in most of the US; people just avoided the topic. So some of this was a result of the realization that this could be used as a topic to motivate people to vote. But that meant making it a major topic. And doing things like pushing for a law banning gay marriage, when no one had seriously been talking about it before that. (Almost no one. I know Quakers whose church was doing same-sex marriages in the late 80s.)
So suddenly it became a major thing people talked about, and it turns out that when it keeps getting talked about, and influential people keep saying “hey, this is… just sorta stupid really”, and stories about kids getting kicked out by their parents are heartbreaking and awful… People just kept moving over, and moving over.
One of my friends decided to come out as a trans girl at school, by showing up at a party in a dress and makeup. No one gave her a hard time about it. We asked.
But we asked “did anyone give you a hard time about it”. Not “was anyone okay with it”. Not “did you get seriously injured.” Because that’s where the question is, now, in most of our culture.
So, yeah, you can absolutely persuade bigots. It’s stunningly effective. And I know someone’s gonna jump in with “well, it wouldn’t work on the KKK”, but obviously it does; Daryl Davis has proven that.
And someone’s gonna say “okay, but it wouldn’t work on Aryan Brotherhood people”, but actually it can and does. One guy talked to reporters about it a fair bit; he went to jail, ended up with the Aryan Brotherhood, hated Jews, and all that. Got out, got a job working for a guy who was Jewish, was just dreading the Jewish guy stiffing him on his salary. First paycheck rolled around, guy gave him a bonus and said “you’re a really hard worker, you deserve this bonus, thanks for being a good worker.” Boom. Loyalty to Aryan Brotherhood: Gone. They lied to him and he knows it.
And someone’s gonna say “but it wouldn’t work on someone involved with Stormfront”, but it turns out the kid of the guy who founded Stormfront, who was active in promoting Stormfront, ended up getting outed at school, so some of the Jewish kids said “hey, let’s invite him to dinner since no one else will talk to him”, and now he’s actively speaking against white nationalism.
It’s not just that it works. It’s that it works extremely well, and most of the competing strategies backfire more than they work.
i think a lot of the panicky-hostile reaction against the idea of talking to bigots comes from people thinking “it works” means “you personally have to do it instead of any other thing” and they freak out because they don’t feel confident they can have a civil conversation with a douchebag without becoming a doormat.
folks, it’s fine if you’re not the one to do that. it takes social skills, luck, and guts. it also takes a lot of focus, so even if you have the ability you might not have the time/attention/energy.
Seeing some people on Tumblr still bitching about how it’s too late for voting and the only thing that will fix things is revolution.
How about you fucking vote anyway? It’s not going to seriously cut into your “sitting on the couch waiting for a revolution to start” time.
There’s no “none of the above” option here. You want a revolution, fine, but there’s still little shit to do in the meantime.
You can vote AND protest. They’re not exclusive. Hell, you can even protest the person you voted for when they fuck up. You’re not signing a blood oath with your ballot. But a desire for an ideologically pure candidate or nothing only serves the status quo right now.
Today I learned that Van Halen have that rider in their contract about “a bowl of M&Ms with all the brown ones removed” in order to know at a glance if the promoter read the entire contract. And the reason they do THAT is because they once had a stage collapse because a promoter hadn’t read the proper way to set up all the specific technical stuff.
So if the band goes in the dressing room or catering and sees brown M&Ms, they know they have to double-check the stage setup for safety.
I heard about this on Freakonomics Radio. Turns out the bit about no brown M&Ms is HUGE, in BIG font, bold, underlined and quotated like they’re on the Group W Bench.
The band was all, “We have fifty-pound lights hanging over our heads and fire being shot out of cannons. We had to know whether they read our safety regs so we didn’t flamebroil any roadies.”
interesting how this has become a meme in the music industry about divas. i’ve always heard jokes that amount to “this stuck up celebrity hates the green gummy bears!! they’re refusing to perform just for that???” and its reading stuff like this that i realise how that joke might have come about. people get grumpy that the band refuses to play but cant admit its because THEY’RE incompetent, so they make it all about the M&Ms. another example of artists using a creative method to ensure they have a perfectly reasonable request fulfilled that is then bastardised by lazy people who wanna make money off them.
my problem with the ‘harry becomes lord of 2/¾/5 ancient noble houses’ trope is so unbelievably petty because its that fic writers don’t take it to the potential extreme. like, okay, you wanna make harry the bossest of bitches i get that, i understand, i have that urge too from time to time, but c’mon, be a little more creative about it please
so how about a fic where harry goes to gringotts after the fighting is all over to try to make peace with the goblin nation because this boy does not need more problems and after much hostility and some groveling and promises of future payments for damages caused a plucky goblin lass comes and shuffles harry into her tiny cube office to discuss the nature of his financial situation
(this is a grave insult among goblins. getting handled by a female, first of all, because they are supposedly less capable bankers, hello misogyny among other species, and because they consider anyone who needs help with his money to be lower than cave scum. harry doesn’t know about his. and if he did, he wouldn’t care because he does, desperately, need help)
and plucky goblin lass (who we will call PGL for short) brings out this MASSIVE tome of parchment and slams it down on her desk. a cloud of dust rises. harry sneezes and gets a terrible feeling. some of the parchment is mildewing. the stack is taller than his hand is wide. this can only end badly
PGL tells him that he’ll need to read the entire book to fully comprehend the new scope of his property and harry kind of weakly says “what??”
and it turns out that heyo, when the death eaters swore to follow voldemort with all their lives and souls and magic in their little racist hearts they actually swore a modified liege lord oath which also has the coincidental side effect of ceding all titles (and property connected to said titles) held to the lord in question too. haha how funny who knew
and that’s an ongoing thing. so voldemort was the de facto head of two dozen magical houses at the beginning of the war and he just picked up more as he gained more followers and he probably could have just voted himself and his crew into every position of the government and run the country like that if he cared to do it but voldemort was not about dat political life. he wanted change and he wanted it now. he wanted to MAKE AMERICA MAGICAL BRITAIN GREAT AGAIN. so he started a civil war and just never informed his loyal death eaters of that little fact because they didn’t need to know.
and you might think that gringotts vaults are tied into bloodlines but they’re really not. the malfoy family vault belongs to whoever is the current head of the malfoy family. normally, that’s a malfoy and his malfoy spawn becomes the next head and so it passes through the family, accumulating inherited wealth. it was a working system until voldemort got involved and exploited the ever-living hell out of it.
now this all becomes harry’s problem because it turns out that Right of Conquest is an actual thing. what was voldemort’s is now his and voldemort has has the time to accumulate A Metric Fuck Ton of stuff.
also connected to titles are votes in the wizengamot. and whoo boy, this is where harry’s problem becomes really really really problematic. because the noble families squabble over those votes like children, hoarding them and passing them down, occasionally trading them for advantageous marriages and such, but mostly jealously guarding them like the politcal gold they are. it’s such a bitterly tight-fisted market that any one family has ~maybe~ three or four votes.
and now harry bloody potter has a hundred of the things and a completely unintentional stranglehold on the government. whoops
and then hermione would shotput harry straight into the
wizengamot
against his protests and things would become so hilarious i just
some jerkass attempts to increase his own salary for doing basically nothing
“how about no,” harry and his hundred votes say.
somebody attempts to tighten restrictions on where magical creatures like vampires and werewolves can work
“how about no.” harry crosses his arms. “actually, how about we repeal those bullshit laws already in place that make it almost impossible for werewolves to get a job right now, hmmmm? and how about we put something in place to catch abusive owners of house elves? and make sure they get paid? and vacation days? and healthcare? actually how about we get healthcare for EVERYBODY HOW ABOUT T H A T?”
ten generations of purebloods cry out in horror. look upon him ye mighty and despair.
the years after voldemort’s defeat don’t go down in history as The Golden Era. in fact, thanks to harry bloody potter (and some incessant nudging by hermione granger), they go down as The Decade of Frankly Astonishing Strides Toward Equality *cough* enforced by a semi-plutocracy.
(all thanks to a third tier plot never really explored by a would-be dictator YOU’RE ALL WELCOME)
Omg this is beautiful.
Harry as an accidental Lord Vetinari, oh my god.
Harry dealing with that all these pureblood families outright hate him. They were loyal to the Dark Lord, loyal to blood supremacy, loyal to their own enrichment and empowerment via the casting down of others, and now here’s Harry Potter, who opposes all of these things, who killed the Dark Lord and vanquished their dreams: their new Lord and Master.
And they can’t do anything about it because not only is it a binding magical contract but it’s their tradition, their law, their way of doing things, and they can’t attack Harry without shattering their own foundations in the process; they can’t even really convey their dislike of Harry because it would be disloyal to their own House.
So, all these pureblood wizards from old families who both hate Harry Potter and everything he stands for but also as a point of honor are perversely proud of him. He’s a wizard; he’s a half-blood, but he’s also the scion of a House of the Sacred Twenty-Eight, and he’s a powerful and talented wizard who vanquished the greatest Dark Lord history has ever seen. And he’s the Head of a dozen great and ancient wizarding Houses, he’s their Head of House so to speak, and they tie themselves in knots trying to figure out how to feel about him.
And the ones who don’t have a noble House, but only have their votes in the Wizengamot that Harry Potter owns, and you just don’t throw tradition out and start casting votes on your own inclination, well, they aren’t honor-bound and pride-bound to claim and embrace him, but they make their social standing from copying the greater Houses, and when their betters are quietly and gracefully saying “he’s a chaos-minded tyrant, but he’s our chaos-minded tyrant,” well, they buck up and agree.
Harry Potter, unlike Voldemort, isn’t lashing out at random or threatening to kill their children, so it’s sort of an improvement in many ways, even as they want to scream and throw things over all his reforms.
And after all, the old Houses value power. And Harry, above all, has power.
He goes down in pure-blood history as the Tyrant. The most powerful Lord their family lines have ever known. The man who reshaped their world. Elderly wizards tell their great-grandchildren long after his death that “I knew the Tyrant.” “I beheld him when my father took me to the Wizengamot, and he spoke to me.” “When I went to Hogwarts, he gave a guest lecture.” This far removed, at the end of their lives, the details of his rule are forgotten, the overturnings of tradition lost to history, and he is remembered with pride, even with adoration.
Their Tyrant. Their Lord. Harry Potter, the Greatest Wizard that Ever Lived.
(There are pictures of Harry at Hogwarts, at the Ministry, at St. Mungo’s, outside the Auror Office and in front of the Minister’s Office and in the entrance hall to the Wizengamot and in both the entrance hall and the Headmaster’s office at Hogwarts, and in every House he ruled. He wears stately robes and an impressive hat, gold jewelry, a beard (dark in some pictures, silver-shot in others, pure snowy white in still more, for he lived to be an old man himself, older than Dumbledore, older than Griselda Marchbanks, who lived to dance at his wedding), his glasses accentuating his brilliant green eyes, his scar more prominent in the pictures than it ever had been in life, surrounded with such trappings as the Sword of Gryffindor and the Elder Wand and a skull that purports to be that of Lord Voldemort.
Also at Hogwarts, in a back corridor next to a set of of dancing trolls and an overzealously combative knight, is a portrait commissioned by the executor of Harry Potter’s estate, in response to directions left in his will. This portrait depicts an eleven-year-old boy in brand-new wizard’s robes, with broken glasses and untidy hair that happens to cover his forehead. The portraits of his older selves go wrapped in the lofty dignity of the position he attained later in life; this child, filled with the untarnished wonder of the magical world, goes freely among the portraits with an anonymity Harry Potter never found in life, and loves it.)
GIVE ME THESE BOOKS.
it turns out that Right of Conquest is an actual thing. what was voldemort’s is now his
also connected to titles are votes in the wizengamot.
and now harry bloody potter has a hundred of the things and a completely unintentional stranglehold on the government. whoops
Here’s how I’d end it:
The sudden accumulation of power to Lord Potter means that the long delayed proposals to reform the Wizengamot into a fully elected body suddenly become very popular. Strange bedfellows are made between muggleborn reformers whove been campaigning for decades and pureblood plutocrats. Suddenly press elements ike the daily prophet discover a long held belief in representative democracy. And a popular movement rapidly forms.
Lord Potter is a reform minded fellow himself, so is naturally onboard with such proposals, not having wanted to be in charge of anything anyway, so the laborious process of drafting the legislation begins. The question of franchise is a bit difficult, as noone had ever bothered to make a proper census of the wizarding population. But a compromise is reached that any individual who can perform an act of magic on rquest is allowed to vote.
The purebloods are quite happy with this arrangment. They’re quite happy to surender their symblic status for a system where, as the richest, best connected and most politically experienced segment of the population they expect to be able to exercise more actual power.
With great fanfare and ceremony the last session of the old Wizengamot is closed. And they wait for hte results delivered via floo and apparation from across the land.
Harry Potter wins by a landslide. He seems just as surprised as everyone else by this development. Though later historians will debate whether he really was.
His victory is attributed to his personal celebrity and popular among the younger and muggle born voters. Also the, seemingly overlooked minor detail, that “individuals able to demonstrate magic” does not specify those individuals have to be human. House elves do not forget their friends.
Okay, but @akaltyn is basically describing how the English parliament passed the Reform Act 1832 which was the first major expansion of voting rights in England. All it’s missing is the king threatening to create a hundred more Whig-leaning peers to get the bill out of the House of Lords.
Anyone still unsure of how (or even whether) they’ll vote in the midterms should consider this: All three branches of government are now under the control of one party, and that party is under the control of Donald J. Trump.
With the addition of Kavanaugh, the Supreme Court is as firmly Republican as are the House and Senate.
Kavanaugh was revealed as a fierce partisan – not only as a legal advisor who helped Kenneth Starr prosecute Bill Clinton and almost certainly guided George W. Bush’s use of torture, but also a nominee who believed “leftists” and Clinton sympathizers were out to get him.
He joins four other Republican-appointed jurists, equally partisan. Thomas, Alito, and Roberts have never wavered from Republican orthodoxy. Neil Gorsuch, although without much track record on the Supreme Court to date, was a predictable conservative Republican vote on the Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit – which is why the Heritage Foundation pushed for him and Trump appointed him.
Even under normal circumstances, when all three branches are under the control of the same party we get a lopsided government that doesn’t respond to the values of a large portion of the electorate.
But these are not normal circumstances. Donald Trump is President.
Need I remind you? Trump is a demagogue who doesn’t give a fig for democracy – who continuously and viciously attacks the free press, Democrats, immigrants, Muslims, black athletes exercising First Amendment rights, women claiming sexual harassment, anyone who criticizes or counters him; who treats the executive branch, including the Justice Department, like his own fiefdom, and brazenly profits off his office; who tells lies like other people breathe; and who might well have conspired with Vladimir Putin to swing the election his way.
Trump doesn’t even pretend to be the president of all the people. As he repeatedly makes clear in rallies and tweets, he is president of his “base.”
And his demagoguery is by now unconstrained in the White House. Having fired the few “adults” in his Cabinet, Trump is now on the loose (but for a few advisors who reportedly are trying to protect the nation from him).
All this would be bad enough even if the two other branches of government behaved as the framers of the Constitution expected, as checks and balances on a president. But they refuse to play this role when it comes to Trump.
House and Senate Republicans have morphed into Trump acolytes and toadies – intimidated, spineless, opportunistic. The few who have dared call him on his outrages aren’t running for reelection.
Some have distanced themselves from a few of his most incendiary tweets or racist rantings, but most are obedient lapdogs on everything else, including Trump’s reluctance to protect the integrity of our election system, his moves to prevent an investigation into Russian meddling, his trade wars, his attacks on NATO and the leaders of other democracies, his swooning over dictators, his cruelty toward asylum-seekers, and, in the Senate, his Supreme Court nominees.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has emerged as Trump’s most shameless lackey who puts party above nation and Trump above party. The House leadership is no better. House intelligence chair Devin Nunes is Trump’s chief flunky and apologist, but there are many others.
Now that Kavanaugh is on the Supreme Court, you can forget about the Court constraining Trump, either.
Kavanaugh’s views of presidential power and executive privilege are so expansive he’d likely allow Trump to fire Mueller, shield himself from criminal prosecution, and even pardon himself. Kavanaugh’s Republican brethren on the Court would probably go along.
So how are the constitutional imperative of checks and balances to be salvaged, especially when they’re so urgently needed?
The only remedy is for voters to flip the House or Senate, or ideally both, on November 6th.
The likelihood of this happening is higher now with Kavanaugh on the Court and Trump so manifestly unchecked. Unless, that is, voters have become so demoralized and disillusioned they just give up.
If cynicism wins the day, Trump and those who would delight in the demise of American democracy (including, not incidentally, Putin) will get everything they want. They will have broken America.
For the sake of the values we hold dear – and of the institutions of our democracy that our forbearers relied on and our descendants will need – this cannot be allowed.
It is now time to place a firm check on this most unbalanced of presidents, and vote accordingly.
This is so important. I am not American but as somebody who has studied politics and as a German growing up with the history of my country let me tell you – never take democracy for granted, you gave to fight for it. Democracies don’t always die with a big bang bloody revolution, more often they are slowly sabotaged by people in power and they die if the majority stays silent. Vote. Demonstrate.
This means you vote the Democratic party ticket, for the record. The time to shift the party to the left is during the primaries. Right now? You vote the goddamned ticket. Even if that means voting for Manchin, or some equally despicable Democrat.
Because let’s be very, very clear about this: if Manchin isn’t re-elected, it’ll be Patrick Morrisey in that seat: a Republican, who will vote the Republican party line on basically every fucking issue (because Republicans tend to have better party discipline than Democrats, at least at the Federal level), and a Republican who helps keep committee control in the hands of the Republicans and procedural control in the hands of the Republicans, instead of a Democrat who helps shift both those things into the hands of a group of people who actually want to block Trump’s agenda. By all means, vote Manchin out—but we cannot afford for you to do it right now. Do it in the primaries in 2024. Right now? You show up to vote, and you vote the goddamned ticket.
Yes, political parties suck. Yes, they force you, frequently, to gather with people who don’t believe 100% the same things as you. Suck it the fuck up. Sometimes compromise is necessary in adult life! That’s just how it works! This isn’t about one Democrat. It’s not about your Democrat at all. It’s about blocking the Republicans. And the only way to do that effectively at this point in time is to vote the Democratic ticket. Top. To. Bottom.
Reblogging for the @greywash comment especially. Vote like a grownup.
Thank you for saying this! Yes, it has to be democrats! Third party cannot win this one guys!
Death By Catchphrase 