honestly i think the biggest perpetrators of ‘nonbinary is a third gender’ on here are people who refuse the concept. 'im not male or female or nonbinary, im a fourth thing’ okay, so as long as that thing isn’t 'male’ or 'female’, you’re nonbinary. nonbinary isn’t a gender in itself, it’s literally just a descriptor for any gender other than male or female. 'yeah well im not agender either’ okay but again as long as you’re not male or female then nonbinary, as a descriptor of whatever your gender actually is, is valid. it’s literally just saying 'you are neither male or female’ and nothing else. every single gender other than those two is nonbinary. it isn’t a gender any more than 'not australian’ is a nationality. the concept is an entirely necessary one and, again, is literally just a negation of the western gender binary system. if you’re anything other than the two genders of that system, you’re not on that system. you’re not on the western gender binary. you’re non-binary.
like. 'i dont like the label i don’t identify with it’ alright, and that’s a personal thing - but, ultimately, the lgbt community isn’t a personal thing. you can experience gender completely privately without any labels - the *point* of having labels, of developing a *community* is to organise towards lgbt rights. the only reason an 'lgbt community’ exists is that it was created by the lgbt rights struggle as a means of organising disparate people affected by a common axis of oppression under a common umbrella.
the sole reason the term 'transgender’ exists is to rally together people who are marginalised by forced gender assignment at birth - if you are not the gender you were forcibly assigned at birth, you are transgender. you can dislike the term personally and not identify with it, but as a descriptor it applies, and it *needs* to apply for reasons bigger than personal comfort. having language that can describe these things, having terminology, is fundamental for forming a rights movement. fundamentally, the term is not a personal statement of identity, it is a description of a social relationship towards an axis of oppression, being transphobia. the coherence and solidarity of that rights movement is in general more important than the aesthetics of a certain term.
everyone’s experience of gender and sexuality are personal, but the reason we have these terms is to enable discussion and analysis of ways gender and sexuality exist as axes of oppression. these terms are descriptive and theoretical, they identify who is a target of a certain oppression. we *cannot* have a rights movement without them. the basis of all these terms, which have become labels, which have become identities, is in *political organisation and action*. the lgbt community was not formed as a fun club, a self-contained thing for its own sake. it is a means to fight for our rights. to do that we need to be able to concretely describe who we are and what fights we’re fighting for.
languages, like people, have been made into the objects of politicized aesthetics—not only is this about the dichotomy between “melodious”, “soft”, “musical” &c. and “harsh”, “guttural”, “rough” &c. as generalizations applied to entire languages (even language families), but also (and more importantly) the fact that these descriptions track non-linguistic attributes like racialization and class at least as often as they track phonology. please think about who, historically and presently, is most likely to have their language(s) described in one vs. the other way.
i think people kind of forget that many forms of fascism were really a sort of reactionary communitarian modernism that rejected both socialism and capitalism, and it becomes very apparent from that perspective—contrary to popular belief—that merely embedding yourself in a (rhetorically) communitarian and anti-capitalist position is not enough to keep you from being an ardent reactionary or even systematically fascist in your thinking
“Let us put it generally: if a regime is immoral, its citizens are free from all obligations to it.” – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago.
[Pictured: Captain Pia Klemp sitting in a chair beside her controls.
@VivianAngrisani on Twitter wrote on 6/8/2019: “Pia Klemp, a German biologist & boat captain faces 20 yrs in prison for rescuing 1,000+ migrants at risk of drowning whilst crossing the Mediterranean. Seeking asylum is a human right. Only 1 in 100 sea captains are female. This woman is a humanitarian, not a criminal. #FreePia”
@Galactic_Rabbit quote-tweeted on 6/10/2019 and wrote: “Thinking about all those videos of people honored in their old age for hiding/protecting Jewish people.”]
To all the people commenting that she’s an accessory to “illegal immigration,” note that seeking asylum is a human right. Countries which refuse asylum are in violation of the Geneva Convention. They get away with this and propagandize complacency towards the victims by using bureaucracy to complicate immigration proceedings. During times of genocide, this is tantamount to hearing a would-be murder victim knocking on your door and locking the deadbolt.
People who risk dying getting smuggled across borders do so out of sheer desperation because the situation they’re leaving is worse. Finally, you are missing the entire point: violation of the law is warranted when the laws violate human rights and criminalize existence. Laws which call immigrants “illegal” are tools of a systemic negligence designed to condemn those who need legal protection the most.
we have to ban growth hormones for our trucks :( it’s hurting them
Okay, not be the that guy, but I do want to talk about this.
So, you might be saying, it’s not a fair comparison since one of those is a half-ton or three-quarter-ton truck (can’t tell if that’s a 150 or a 250) and the other is an Asian-style compact pickup (the Toyota in the foreground). BUT! Actually this is very funny and very true.
Say that’s a F-150 in the background. I’m nearly sure from the body styling that it is. 2010’s, which places it firmly within what we call “NBS” or “New Body Style” Fords.
At one time, the f-150 would have been much lower and much less likely to have a four-door cab. It would still have been clearly a much bigger truck and a different class of vehicle than that Tacoma in the foreground, but not even nearly to that extent. From about the late 60’s to various points in the 90’s and 2000’s, an equivalent light pickup from Ford, GMC, Chevrolet and even Chrysler/Jeep were about the same dimensions. With modification and effort you can even take a 60’s Ford body and mount it on a 90’s Ford frame.
But something changed in the late 90’s. With the 1997 model year of Ford F-150, suddenly the cab was much taller, significantly longer, with far fewer flat panels, the bed was substantially redesigned and did not tend to be as long proportionately. Rear seats became more common and the depth of the rear seating increased across both two door and four door trucks. Front bench seats vanished, and 40/60 seats quickly followed, to be replaced with oversized bucket seats.
I’m sure different market forces drove this change. But the consequences could not have been fully intended. After this point, Americans started to buy trucks that replicated the functionality of an SUV but with added cargo space. Suddenly the market is incentivized to build these gas-guzzling land battleships with luxury interiors, a full SUV plus a full or slightly abbreviated pickup bed, all on a frame and drive-train set up for towing and all-terrain driving.
And like, if you’re rich and own a farm or if you’re rich and move a lot of furniture or whatever, I see the fucking appeal. I can imagine wanting bucket seats in my old F-350. I can imagine wanting full AC, a good radio, more passenger space, power windows and power seats in my old F-350. What I cannot imagine is PAYING for it.
So essentially pickups have been gentrified away from their original market, and you know what has had to fill the vacuum? The same pickups that were filling that role twenty-five years ago and counting. So now anything you NEED a pickup for, if you don’t have Mercedes-Benz levels of cash to drop on it, you have to use a vehicle that potentially has 300,000 miles of heavy use on it, without modern conveniences and more importantly modern safety aparatus, and which are almost certainly worse for the environment. And more and more older pickups are aging out of service, while ten-and-fifteen year old pickups hold just enough of their market value to still be out of the working person’s price range, while beginning to suffer failures of all the plasticky electronic gadgets and doodads that were crammed into them. This means that prices go up on all trucks, not just the new ones, and leads to a genuine scarcity.
And because capitalism is irrational in its pursuit of profits, the arms race between truck manufacturers has led to taller and taller trucks among other things, leading to a case where, as you can plainly see, that F-150 is, unlike even the gen-10’s that began the new style, totally unsafe to drive around pedestrians. It’s just too big and too tall.
And the Asian light trucks, the Mazda-based Ford Ranger, the old Toyota Tacomas, what some people affectionately or perjoratively call the fishing truck? Gone, disappeared largely from the market.
TL;DR:
OP raises a great point even though they chose a jokey example: new pickup trucks have become, almost as a class, gigantic luxury SUVs, which means that the people who actually need pickup trucks for utility purposes are forced to rely on older models, which are at the same time aging out of service and not being replaced, causing a horrible crisis in this segment of the market.
That source leaves out the key detail that the Wagner group are NeoNazis.
In fact it also leaves out a lot of the more extreme, blatant red flags Wagner members have been saying that make it clear when they say the Kremlin is compromised by a “clan of oligarchs” they mean Jews and “degenerates.” ABC is just posting the more sanitized comments that anti-Putin western audiences would agree with, which is pretty upsetting because again these are literal NeoNazis and no one should be supporting them.
The Wagner group were not helpless soldiers following orders in a war they didn’t believe in, they were the group doing some of the worst atrocities who are only mad now because they’re losing.
Begging people not to fall for the trap of “hating Putin” meaning someone is good. A fascist imperialist is suffering military defeats which makes him look weak, so his Nazi death squad is trying to seize power. This is a “bite each other’s dicks off” situation where we want both sides to lose. You do not, under any circumstances, have to hand it to the Wagner group.
Wagner Group has also been sabotaging the war effort for months (“shell shortages” turned out to be the Wagner Group stockpiling for this). They’re not even mad that the war is being lost: they’ve been doing that on their own, after all. They just want to be even more transparently committing atrocities without (and I must stress now: VERY VERY VERY MINIMAL) oversight. This mutiny is a firsthand lesson in what happens when you let Neonazis be an influential part of your military, much like the Azov Battalion.
