revolutionaryduelist:

nuclearmentality replied to your post “You reblogged a post that said “the only harm [non-photographic child…”

of course, it’s important to not discount the impact of propoganda-type works on the course of history

however, more often than not they are more accurately treated as symptoms than as causes

To be clear, yes, that’s definitely true. My shock wasn’t at the idea that BOTN was impactful, it factually was. But trying to pin the stubborn and long-lasting horror of white supremacy, an ideology that’s defined the world for like…centuries, on a single movie? It’s myopic to the point of being dangerously nonsensical.

That was my point here.

a lot of “birth of a nation caused the rebirth of the kkk” discourse is completely decontextualized from all the many, many things going on in the us culturally, such as continued fallout from the civil war and reconstruction, which were both still very culturally fresh in american memory at the time. propaganda is indeed always a danger but a lot of “aha! fiction DOES affect reality!” arguments tend to ignore that the reality was already there – and the fact that the reality was there is what allowed the fiction to exist in the first place. america was already racist. germany had already been slowly immersed in a tide of antisemitism and racism before nazi propaganda became commonplace. jaws was based on actual shark attack scares up and down the coast and did not, on its own, cause a mass slaughter of sharks.

this is without getting into the fact that tumblr kids tend to consider propaganda and regular mainstream mass-marketed fiction and niche indie-produced fanfiction as being all on the same level of influence over the world, somehow.

last discourse i’m doing on this honestly, this breaks it down too well not to boost.

roachpatrol:

brainstatic:

The NDAA is a “must-pass” bill that gets reauthorized every year. This year, $60 million of the $700 billion total went to nuclear R&D. Warren, to her credit, added amendments designed to make the DOD more transparent in how it will use the money and the rationale behind it, but since Republicans control everything, they set the overall agenda. However, the NDAA hasn’t gone through the final appropriations process yet, and in past years Democrats have used their votes to leverage equivalent amounts of money into domestic programs, so it’s in their best interest to play along with this first phase so they can exploit the later phases for non-military spending.

Edit: the infrastructure of our current nuclear arsenal is dangerously out of date, more money into the DOE to make sure warheads don’t leak through shitty 20-year-old casing should be bipartisan.

Edit 2: I found the link in the first tweet and it explains literally all of this, read the fucking articles people.

STOP DEMONIZING DEMOCRATIC WOMEN WHO ARE DOING THEIR BEST TO NEGOTIATE WORKABLE SOLUTIONS TO HORRIBLE REPUBLICAN PROBLEMS

Yo someone’s trying to tell me Hussie is a racist and hates disabled people but has absolutely no evidence. What do I do?

landofsomethingsomething:

captwaddledoo:

landofsomethingsomething:

You gotta decide for yourselves whether people in the year of our lord 2017 should be judged entirely by the words and thoughts and ideas they put out into the world years ago in different life stages. Like. This isn’t a problem that’s going to go away. Increasingly now the history of people’s entire life journey is accessible via some social media snap shot in the wayback machine or some ancient chat log sitting on someone’s hard drive out there. We don’t all start from the same place. A lot of us start from positions of privilege, from systems learned from parents or other family or institutions with power over us that influence our way of thinking when our brains are first developing the capacity for empathy and understanding.

And we grow. And we create. And we experience things. And we talk with people. We make friends. We read feedback. We listen to some and we disregard others, and years later, some (but by no means all) of what we disregarded we might think about again and realize was good feedback and helpful advice.

Our opinions change. Our understanding of our own privilege changes. Our understanding of media and propaganda and narrative and power structures and justice change. Our biases shift. Our politics change. Our worldviews are shaped by our conversations and our experiences and the things we take to heart and the things we lock outside.

Hussie used to interact heavily with the fandom. There is so much text from him out there saved in archives that has been pored over again and again and again by people with axes to grind, people with their own agendas, people who feel wronged and hurt and ignored by someone they maybe once respected and looked up to.

Anyone with that much text over that long a period of time has something fucking problematic out there waiting to hang them, I guarantee it. Back in 2012 the r-slur and the a-slur were common slang used by elementary school kids, let alone ppl frequenting the various rancid asscracks of the internet. Then awareness campaigns took root and opinions and language shifted for the better and suddenly a lot of text written without that mindfulness started looking really nasty, didn’t it?

We as a society are going to have to make some hard decisions in the very near future about how much rope we need when we’re eyeing those gallows for people we feel wronged by. How much someone’s opinion now means when their opinion five years ago might have been the exact opposite. How much good faith to extend to people who grow and change and understand their younger selves had some Bad Opinions about the world, but can’t erase the words they said, and have to live with them for the rest of their lives because people looking for ammunition can find it in ample supply. How much someone’s actions now count for weighed against their words in another fucking life.

There are quotes out there where Hussie said some stupid shit. There are a million words of Hussie quotes out there. I don’t know how old you are, but if you’re an adult, I can almost guarantee you that you can go back some number of years and remember a version of you that you’d be terrified of the internet finding today.

The dude gave us one of the most queer-positive, transformative and engaging pieces of media of all time. It wasn’t perfect and he wasn’t perfect because nothing and no one is. The queer community is always so goddamn hypercritical of its prolific creators, in part because we’re desperate for the things we want and never get and it’s so frustrating to find people who *almost* give you what you want – and god knows the mainstream media isn’t listening, so where else do we have to turn but inward? We’re a stymied, frustrated group desperate for representation on all sorts of underrepresented axes of oppression and no one story is ever going to satisfy everyone. But Homestuck was so big, so expansive and meant so much to so many – of course there’s a lot of bitter disappointment out there.

How much rope do we need to hang someone? How much history do we need to build a gallows out of plank by fucking plank to feel morally justified?

It’s up to you.

–uh sorry but Homestuck was racist, its jokes at the expense of black people was the number one reason why I stopped reading it, and I’m not saying nobody is allowed to enjoy it but please don’t ask people of color to just push that all aside and enjoy it for queer rep when heaven knows queer rep is a thing we’ve been pushed out of (or mocked in) too.

I absolutely respect yours and everyone’s ability to decide to stop reading a piece of media because it disappointed you in a way that you could not forgive. I myself nearly quit the comic at several points because I found it disappointing and tone deaf about issues near and dear to my own heart and my own struggles and my own personal axes.

My post isn’t about that. It isn’t about Homestuck-The-Story at all.

My post is about the archival nature of the internet and the capacity of people to grow and change. My post is about the way we as a society engage with people who grow up online, every word so easy to reference and cite. My post is about how difficult it is going to be to exist in a society where so much ignorance born from youth and privilege is out there waiting to be exposed and used against adults who grow and change and can’t erase that history no matter how much their personal politics progresses in the meantime.

My post is about a lot of things, but sure. You who quit Homestuck years ago and yet still managed to find my largely untagged discourse post tangentially related to it in 2017 less than an hour after I posted it to slam me with the least charitable interpretation of it possible are surely approaching me in good faith.

My POC ass is marrying this post. im printing it 1,000 times over and hanging it over every inch of every wall of my apartment. i love it. thanks for my life

revolutionarygays:

figured i’d lightly weigh in on this since i’m very aware of the situation:

i support swamp-wizard and i loved his blog content. this idea that keegan somehow wasn’t a good ally to lgbt women is just mind-blowing to me – he’s been such an influential voice (to me, at least, and a lot of other lgbt women i know) in pushing back against the rampant misogyny in both media and fandom, including being willing to actually listen to lesbians and make an effort to understand the experiences of gay & bi women when interacting with media. i’m shocked (but not surprised) to see people who are neither women nor gay leveling these accusations against him

Keep reading

Sigh. Ok, actual last word on this because I’d like to close off on a perspective that is closer to my values and less a byproduct of shock and anger. This is my ACTUAL last word on the matter in public, I don’t want to clog up fun happy fandom times with this nonsense, but revgays if you’d like to talk further you can contact me privately.

At least insofar as I and the people I know are coming from, it’s really disingenuous to pretend this is about “shipping” or w.e the fuck. What this is about is that swamp has repeatedly refused to stay in his damn lane basically and just, you know, be cool? Not be an enormous jackass to people he doesn’t know and incite harassment at them/call into question their LGBT identity as a way of undermining their Progressive Cred or w.e?

No matter which way you cut it, Swamp has mocked, vagued and ostracized several fan creators for having petty disagreements with him. He’s been called out on it and told its fucked up–by ME, when I was under the impression he was a cool dude and was making an effort to be friends with him as well as other people who he directly affected–repeatedly apologized, and then proceeded to do the exact same shit anyway.

As @callmearcturus said, he apparently didn’t even bother to clear up the mess he made wrt his accusations at her. That’s fucked up. This dude has 0 credibilities and that’s because there is a demonstrable pattern of lies and not caring about trust or goodwill w/ said fans he doesn’t agree with! That’s a lot of what has earned him this response so, tough shit.

As for the Hiveswap stuff, my honest opinion is that however reasonable his anger is, his reading of the game is flat out fucking wrong. It’s bad analysis.
It is demonstrably, blatantly untrue and says nothing meaningful. His lines of criticism were shut down by wp statements on the few pieces of narrative ambiguity there are.

Criticism isn’t all made equal, or free from criticism itself! Swamp is fundamentally engaging in bad, lazy criticism, in that he says nothing accurate or substantial about the game. This is insufferable given his arrogant posturing about knowing Everything About Homestuck (but like, frankly who am I to throw stones there?) and DOUBLY insufferable when he uses it as justification to rob lgbt creators from profit.

Now all of that said? I don’t hate Swamp. I don’t think I’m capable of hating much in general. as @ao3sburb said, I kinda hope he comes back someday. I don’t LIKE being mean, especially not to fellow LGBT people–there’s nazis out there, the world is scary, we need to stick together etc etc.

But I TRIED to be friends with swamp. Really hard! All I got out of it was a bunch of my friends being harassed and endless bullshit vaguepost drama. And I genuinely thought he was cool for the longest time. I seriously have not had a more dramatic, hurtful, and drawn out experience of being let down and let down by someone I tried to believe in, and every time I chose to give swamp another chance it usually ended in another friend of mine getting vagued or harassed.

I still feel guilty about that, so the idea of giving him a pass over it and letting you turn it into “shipping nonsense”? Fuck that. Swamp fucked up, and he was mean and cruel in contexts where it was completely unnecessary. Over and over and over again.

So like I don’t think he’s satan, I certainly don’t think he’s a FASCIST (LOL i cant believe I heard that one), but I do think he’s fundamentally misguided, and to the extent that he’s hurt he’s internalized a pattern of lashing out in really ugly and unwarranted ways.

I hope he gets better. I hope he takes care of himself. And when he comes back I hope he knows to just like, be fucking chill about stuff with his fellow LGBT peeps and shit. We deserved the understanding and nuance at least as much as he does now, according to your logic, and we. did. not. receive. it.

We are under no obligation to provide what he proved unwilling to give.

viridian-sun:

for people who weren’t here 2.5 years ago: xkit guy made xkit, he worked for free and was one of the nicest people on this fucking hellsite

then, due to /one/ anonymous message stating that he was abusing someone, that never got proven to be true, the hellsite crowd had decided to make xkit guy’s life a living hell

without proof. nothing but a single anon that someone might’ve sent because they’re a fucking hate goblin who wanted to score hell points for destroying a guy who had poured his time and energy into making tumblr functional

seeing the atmosphere surrounding mcelroys in today’s hellsite crowd i can say that they are itching for even a faked info of them being insensitive even in the slightest way so they’d have the pretext to drag them down

tl;dr: be skeptical, don’t go with the crowd and check the info.

alittlebitgayandmore:

maybe you folks should ask yourselves why youre trying so hard to find reasons to demonize and hate Dream Daddy, a game with actual pure non-fetishized representation of mlm and honestly GBT men of all sorts that you’ll even go as far as to twist around components of a datamine into something theyre not

its okay to dislike GG, theyve done some shitty stuff in the past AND present, and i dont even watch them or like them, but this game isnt made by them. its released by them. it was made by a couple college art students who did a great job at putting representation and real experiences in this game and they worked so fuckin hard on it. you know what youre doing by trying to make this game fail, or torrenting it so it looks like it did worse than it actually did? assuring more games with positive representation aren’t made, or released, or even fucking bothered with. i fucking promise you, with GG’s youtube channel and band and whatever else they do, that you torrenting or boycotting the game isnt hurting them in the slightest. it’s hurting the creators, it’s hurting queer game-makers everywhere, and it’s hurting the genre of queer games made by queer people with good, unfetishized or sex-oriented stories/characters.

so maybe get your heads out of your cynical asses, accept nothing you consume will be perfect, and try to support something with a genuine and positive representation of both queer and trans men. its a fun, lighthearted game with good stories and relatable characters and frankly, im sick of yall trying to assure queer oriented games fail because of such miniscule shit.