@gwynnion I couldn't stop laughing, while in the waiting room of a health clinic, when I got to the part where Ben is stuffing dollar bills down the owlbear's pants. 🤣
I don't give a flying fig if Trump winds up in a damp, rat laden dungeon. I only care that he winds up in prison. He probably won't.
If he does wind up in prison, it will likely be far more comfortable than any prison the rest of us would be placed in for far lesser crimes.
The powerful take care of each other, including their criminal peers, because little separates those in power from those formerly in power who are convicted of crimes, other than having been caught and successfully tried.
I'm also going to point out what might be obvious at this point:
You know that tendency that some people have where they accuse others of racism in the hope that nobody will notice how racist they are being?
That's a primary underlying factor in more than a few political actors' discourse around antisemitism. It's a political ass-cover to distract from massive amounts of Islamophobia and anti-Arab/anti-Palestinian racism.
I think one of the things that separates liberals from the left is that liberals, to a fair extent, adhere to the "great man" theory of power and wealth, in which people believe that many of the people in political power or who have wealth wound up in that place because they are people of great skill and talent.
On the left, people tend to adhere to the "great bastard" theory of power and wealth, in which one has to be a rotten, abusive person to wind up with political power or wealth.
I am once again mentioning that for 55 of my 55 years of life, I have largely not given a shit about sports.
But cis people being bigoted fucks about trans women in sports has forced an activity that I have always found to be loathsome and boring into my awareness.
And they've left me with the conclusion that far too many cis people are as loathsome and boring as their bigoted, obsessive opinions about sports.
It's socially and emotionally unhealthy, and you train kids into this bullshit via sports from the earliest age.
This kind of "fuck over the out-group" mindset, by the way, also lends itself quite readily to undergirding hurting anyone who is in an out-group. It's the perfect way to groom children into bigoted ways of interacting with others.
And that meshes with bigoted attitudes against trans people, as a tiny out-group relative to most of the human populace.
So again, if it were up to me, sports would be driven into the culture's dusty corners as a hobbyist's pursuit that has no place in schools and it would not be an industry in which billions of dollars are wasted as a means of lining a few pockets with community funds siphoned off from taxes and ticket sales.
Play at your local park and leave the rest of us the fuck alone.
@timberwraith
I take a perverse comfort from the idea that god hates me and derives amusement from my suffering because as long as I'm still more amusing suffering than dead, I'm pretty much guaranteed to stay alive, right? I try to do a few pratfalls every episode to maximize my amusement factor. I'm not clumsy, I'm just a box-office draw. That's the ticket.
This video is something else. It does a fairly cogent and humorous analysis of the current state of the "man-o-sphere," its grifters, and its destructive influence over boys/men. It also delves into the impact of patriarchy and toxic masculinity on men's lives and how it cheapens and empties out their lives of emotion and meaning.
It's weird to say this, but now that I'm a younger member of the "olds," I can offer a half a century of perspective on some of this (fucking hell 😩).
Although the internet and its "how to be a manly toxic guy for fun and profit" grifters are sort of new, the cultural transmission of toxic masculinity, misogyny, masculinity driven queerphobia, and patriarchal ideation is not new at all.
This has been going on with virulent effectiveness via other avenues since my childhood and long before.
Personally, the way that cis women hold on to the parts of patriarchy that specifically elevate and maintain their power as cis people, as cis women specifically, has been a cold, icy bucket of political water tossed into my naive feminist face.
It has been a sad, depressing learning experience.
@chriswho@alexis@timberwraith I mean, if they’re anything like us, you’re likely going to be dinner but, hey, I can’t say I don’t feel entirely differently these days :)