Idk if you also grew up hearing outcries about how horrible it was that the divorce rates were so high/increasing but I’m here to tell you:
High divorce rates are a good thing. They mean that people have the capacity to leave relationships that they do not want to be in.
Lower divorce rates do not mean that people are happier in their relationships! They mean that people (disproportionately women) are unable to leave relationships that are not good for them! Whether because of economic insecurity, social stigma, or other external forces.
All of this is coming from a person who is grateful every day to have had the means (barely) to leave an abusive marriage. Divorce is fucking great and I hope that every person who needs one gets one 💕
Btw divorce rates hit a 50-year record low in 2019, which is Not Good.
Divorce rates, btw, are linked to actual marriages. This decrease in the divorce rate is not reflective or impacted by the marriage rate also decreasing.
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Tips, tricks, and things to consider in radicalizing people to the left, a thread:
First off, attend to how you see *yourself* in the process of radicalizing others. Are you treating other people as vessels in which you can pour your “superior” knowledge into? If so, you aren’t going to be radicalizing anybody.
Liberatory education is a process of mutual growth. It’s making liberatory relationships with people. Challenging them and letting them challenge you in turn. You are not, and cannot, “give” someone liberatory education as if they are an empty vessel to pour yourself into.
The Goals of Police and Why We Avoid Cop-Jacketing, a thread:
The Role of Police: Police exist to violently enforce the State’s sovereignty in all communities.
Every law is a police order. The State can only exist so long as it has means to make people obey its laws by force.
The Reality of Police: Police forces are relatively small in comparisons the communities they occupy and operate within. To fill their role, they have to *project* their power over large areas that they are inherently unable to be physically present in at all time.
So many of y’all have gotten so caught up in the numbers-game logic of electoral politics that you’ll sacrifice any values that gives your movement any actual meaning so long as you can say 10 more people joined your org or whateverthefuck.
Adding 10, 20, 100 more people to your political movement won’t mean shit if a handful of them are subverting your goals, endangering your other comrades, snitching to cops, and/or passing along information to their fascist friends.
Mainstream politics has taught you that all that matters are numbers and bodies, so you can say “X people voted for us/showed up to our protest!” But where does that get you when you’ve demolished any sense of shared values that no one can actually act in meaningful solidarity?
Recognizing that far-right organizers have a manipulative radicalization process that they deploy on people susceptible to their message need not come with denying that people who radicalize to the far-right have personal agency in that process they need to be accountable to.
Yes, even people who radicalized to the far-right as young people and teenagers! I don’t give a fuck how old you are, what process brought you there, you don’t get to dismiss being a fucking genocide enthusiast as a weird teenage phase!
It’s #TransDayOfVisibility! Let me introduce y’all to my favorite transgender performance art piece, “Becoming an Image” by trans performance artist and body builder, Cassils.
In “Becoming an Image” Cassils attacks a 2,000 pound block of clay in a room of total darkness in front of an audience. And is only illuminated by the flash of a single camera.
I love this piece so much because it is so intensely centered on the body, Cassils’ trans body, as an active subject of transformation and power. The audience/spectators of trans embodiment can only see flashes of what the actual experience and power of transness really is.