a lot of people blame the proliferation of conspiracy theories on social media as if it were a first cause, but there's probably something to be said about how the death of the commons sets the stage for it

https://twitter.com/emilynussbaum/status/1488411604689555459

you go through primary school picking up an understanding of the world mainly from your peers (more than parents/teachers, even) and what you do get from authority figures paints a completely incoherent and incomplete picture of history/politics

i would go for eviction proceedings rather than criminal court personally but really there's no reason it couldn't be both. in fact the entire curriculum should be primarily experiential instead of the abstract nonsense it is now

https://twitter.com/LolOverruled/status/1489391963203846145

lawyers tend by necessity to be incredibly specialized in terms of their day-to-day work, and even the classes that directly apply to your eventual area of specialization usually aren't that related to what you learn in law school

the best model for deradicalization isn't coddling people into being better, it's more like what started happening re: casual homophobia in the late 2000s. reinforcing the message that something has no place in society works, it's why conservatives get so pissed off about it if your goal were to cut youtube nazis off at the root one of the best things you could do is free college for everyone lol

not even because of the education itself but simply in terms of getting kids out of an environment where that's, at least, implicitly tolerated

umineko: "here is this heartbreakingly awful portrait of a dysfunctional and abusive family, and Beatrice is basically a manifestation of all their collective neuroses made manifest and coming back to haunt them"

me: i want her and Battler to kiss and make up i'm on chapter 4 and have seen the famously awful TV adaptation so i'm in a weird state of kind of knowing spoilers and kind of not. it doesn't impact my enjoyment much but it does lead to a weird condition of speculating around the few things i do remember & if i can trust them

Put simply and in my own words, I'm willing to defend spontaneous acts of property destruction/theft because they are visible proof of the power ordinary people could wield at any time, and the hostility behind them is directed at systems that do, in fact, need to be destroyed. This is not to say that rioting or looting are the best or most effective form of political action. In fact, it's almost the complete opposite: they're just one step up from doing nothing. But that one step is still important.

@AnnMemmott @__INSA__ As an autistic person with a pathological fear of making mistakes, I am compelled to say -- paraphrasing Lacan -- that what makes a fear pathological is not that it is incorrect, but that it interferes with your ability to live. @AnnMemmott @__INSA__ The classic example is a man who flies into a jealous rage, imagining that his wife is cheating on him. His wife is, in fact, cheating on him -- but the jealousy is pathological in the sense that his reaction will only make it harder to figure out what he wants and to realize it.

I want to point something out: even the shittiest, bad-faith conservative troll's favorite line is "hah! that good thing isn't actually possible, it would cost too much, be an adult."

The troll themselves are filth, no mistake. But ask yourself -- who does this line prey on? I think the main answer is, in fact, poor people. When you're poor, your entire life is a series of questions about what you can afford to give up. What privations you can withstand.

This becomes the cornerstone of your identity -- your capacity for endurance, for sacrifice.

I think that poor white people do actually experience something close to double-consciousness. The difference is that there is no escape from actual double-consciousness except liberation; the alternative (self-negation) can be attempted but only actually achieved in death. For white people the crushing pressure isn't as uniform or absolute. Racial capitalism views black people as expendable and subhuman because of their race; it can't get rid of them because they have utility, but it constantly tries to push them as far away as possible.

I have a theory that abolition, the Civil War, and Reconstruction basically broke America's brain and were huge contributors to the specifics of modern political "decorum". Before the war, and while the abolition movement was still relatively small and marginal, there was a willingness to discuss "oh yeah, sure, slavery is a moral evil but we also need the labor force" that's shocking not just for its inherent evil, but for its open self-awareness.

@ChromeOvum droids are fucking WEIRD. everyone's heard the take about droids being slaves, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. give me a sec @ChromeOvum Okay, so, let me ask what might seem like a stupid question: where do droids come from?

We see Anakin build one, and we see the mass production of a droid army in Episode II... which scandalizes C-3PO because that's *not how it's done*.