I learned women actually don’t have the same access to higher education as men. That misogyny and rape culture is real and heavily affect people’s lives in present day. And that it’s about isolated incidents with bad apples, but about the structures around bad incidents, and how they systematically facilitate bad situations, don’t help or silence victims.

I genuinely believed it was safe to give my peers the benefit of the doubt and assume that their ironically bigoted jokes weren’t their actual views. And it was heartbreaking to realize that that is not an assumption you can make. You don’t know people’s values unless they tell you, seriously and genuinely, straight from the heart. You cannot infer values from ironic jokes, and you cannot assume that the nice people around you share your core values, that you’d otherwise take for granted that everyone but lunatics agree with. You don’t know before you ask.

I learned that humor isn’t always innocent. That not everyone who hears you make an “ironically bigoted” joke laughs because of its absurdity - they laugh because they agree. They think you agree with their bigoted views and values, and your joke further cements their worldview, that everyone thinks like them, everyone else is just too scared to say it openly. That jokes can be used as a weapon to create a culture where i.e. overt “ironic” racism is considered normal, and genuine conversations about real racism is taboo.

None of this was in the curriculum. It came from experiencing the social setting and viewing the effects of a broken administrative system at an “elite” engineering college.

I was not a feminist when I walked into my STEM education, and I was when I left.

When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.” To this day, especially in times of “disaster,” I remember my mother’s words and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers – so many caring people in this world.

- Mister Rogers

I’m not going to give them my fear

- AOC

Hope is what we have in the face of adversity. Do not accept defeat. There is so much worth fighting for.

Sustain and nourish your hope.

The best thing that can happen to your opposition is you losing hope. Losing hope, losing the ability to imagine a different, better future drains you from even making the attempt. Making you hopeless, paralyzed, complacent is part of the oppositions strategy.

This rapid horrific change is still proof that change is possible.

Consciously nourish your hope. Consciously combat the attempts to make you hopeless.

Stop looking at the monster until that’s all you see, and you’re locked, frozen to the ground.

Look between the monsters’ feet. Look at all the people gathering, organizing, helping each other fight these skyscraper tall monsters.

If you won’t hope, there is no better place to find it than in community with likeminded people. Turn your dispair into action. Look at people around you. What do they need? What is a small thing that you can contribute right now. A small thing. Go do that. Believing that your actions matter and your contributions make a difference is a muscle you need to train.

Small things can be: Put up stickers. Talk to your neighbor. Looking up groups in your area. Bring food to someone who needs it. Help someone with groceries. Check in on a friend. Look into mutual aid programs in your area.

Every little kind action matters. It’s an antidote to dispare. Both for you and the people around you.

Consider how you can use your skills.

Help people away from META and on to the fediverse like Lemmy. People in my area are setting up hang outs where they help each other migrate platforms.

A lot of activists aren’t necessarily skilled with tech or social media. Is that something you can help with?

What do you do for work? No matter what you do, those skills are directly transferable and needed in your community.

Genuinely - There’s SO much super easy, practical stuff needed in your neighborhood, in your community, in your movement that would be SO easy to pick up and make SUCH a big difference. The biggest need is more hands. Always. You don’t have to know how to help. It becomes apparent SO quickly as soon as you step in the door.

There’s still a lot of work left to do. Keep fighting, cause there’s a lot worth fighting for.

If the American Government spent half the energy on improving the lives of the working class that the American Government spend on fucking over governments and working class people, globally, the American working class would have a utopia by now. Or at least less lead in our pipes.

FTFY

I think that part of the essay might have been about how addressing him as Mr. Firstname is actually more formal than Mr. Lastname, even though Firstname is not his family name

Could it be Turkish? Just stumbled on this section on the Wikipedia article on mononyms

Surnames were introduced in Turkey only after World War I, by the country’s first president, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, as part of his Westernization and modernization programs. Common people can be addressed semi-formally by their given name plus the title Bey or Hanım (without surname), whereas politicians are often known by surname only (Ecevit, Demirel).

To add; Having indigenous or African ancestry doesn’t automatically protect you from adopting white supremacist beliefs

The BLM stuff moved a lot of minorities (Asians and others) away from the left

Can you expand on this? I haven’t stumbled upon this before

Racism is still free speech which sucks but the alternative is high censorship and fear

This is incorrect, and only serves those who target marginalized groups.

I wanna make it very clear that the conclusion that restriction of hate speech is a slippery slope for freedom of speech is not a given or universally held position

You can absolutely introduce laws prohibiting hate speech without introducing high censorship or fear. Many countries have laws prohibiting hate speech, including most European countries and a majority of, what Wikipedia calls, developed democracies.

Even countries that don’t have limits for hate inducing speech towards marginalized groups, with reference to the importance of freedom of speech, rarely have complete freedom of speech.

As an example, the US limits to freedom of speech include “fraud, child pornography, speech integral to illegal conduct, speech that incites imminent lawless action, and regulation of commercial speech such as advertising.”

The claim that intolerance to intolerance is dangerous, only serves the spread of intolerance.

The paradox of tolerance states that if a society’s practice of tolerance is inclusive of the intolerant, intolerance will ultimately dominate, eliminating the tolerant and the practice of tolerance with them.

Rosenfeld contrasts the approach to hate speech between Western European democracies and the United States, pointing out that among Western European nations, extremely intolerant or fringe political materials (e.g. Holocaust denial) are characterized as inherently socially disruptive, and are subject to legal constraints on their circulation as such,[13] while the US has ruled that such materials are protected by the principle of freedom of speech and cannot be restricted, except when endorsements of violence or other illegal activities are made explicit.

source

This planet is just one part of it and in order for the universe to have a healthy gut we would have to terra form the planets and make healthy worlds.

…

I want to question the assumption that an increase of Earth-like planets would be better than the current state of the universe.

The idea that the current state of the universe is unhealthy, and needs us to save it by increasing homogeneity by altering other planets to look more like ours…

I’m just gonna say it.

It’s eerily reminiscent of the colonizers’ mindset of “saving the world by making it more like us”

It comes from the assumption that others’ current state of being is inferior to ours, and need to be fixed, by us assimilating then into our, superior, state of being. It comes from an assumption that there exists inferior and superior states at all, and that superior states of being should be strived towards. Rather than assuming that diversity is better than homogeneity, and different states of being are neither inferior or superior, they simply are.

I question the idea that us changing the universe to resemble us, would be superior to the current state of the universe

Scandinavian colonizer

People using they/them pronouns:

The couple in this situation are lucky it worked out, but generally what happened here would be a big overstepping of boundaries. Media heavily encourages guys to do these big moves and big gestures, but very often these big moves are written without respecting boundaries, without checking in and without worrying about consent. Actually - it’s often written as if not checking for consent are what makes these big moves great.

That’s fiction. That is NOT real life. It looks nice on film, but in real life, more often than not, it’s disrespectful and uncomfortable. There’s lots of ways to show you care, and the most fundamental one is checking in, asking for consent, asking about boundaries and comfort levels.

This couple is lucky that it worked out without serious boundaries being crossed without those conversations. But I want to stress - that’s luck. Check in