So, I made the mistake of picking a performing arts degree, so I spend most of my days pondering how pointless of a degree it is. I did manage to pick a module about performance protest, and while some of it gets a bit bullshitty, there’s been other parts like looking at native American performance/protest at the Dakota pipeline and stuff, which have been interesting and useful.
Yesterday there was some group work. It was a bit of a brainstorming exercise but as a group we settled on the idea of spamming the illegal immigrant report line/letterbox with shit so that new reports wont go through. Ok, it’s nothing amazing, but it served the purpose of the exercise we were given.
Then this girl speaks up. Previously her contribution to class has been telling everyone about how she culturally enriched herself by going on holiday in places where poor people exist.
On our idea, she says that it might be illegal to do, so we should create a fake website and have people fill that in as a symbolic message.
A FAKE WEBSITE FILLED IN AS A SYMBOLIC MESSAGE
At that moment I realised why the arts seem so useless at changing things. It’s jam packed with trust fund kiddies.
that is complete insanity. what could possibly drive someone to have that thought at my young age? To remove all potency from the tiniest little act. Seriously ghoulish.
Was at a bar and this lady and her boyfriend decided to talk politics with me. I’m hammered, as my girlfriend was the bartender at the place at the time.
The discussion starts slow but eventually they bring up climate change and I drop the 100 companies produce 70% of greenhouse gas line.
Then this lady looks at me and laughs and says “Yeah so? Do you drive an electric car? What do you personally do to help the environment?”
I sort of begin to foam at the mouth at this line and that was the end of the Convo. They left and my gf yelled at me for scaring the patrons away.
It was just so weird, this otherwise normal lady had this gut reaction to defend companies that were poisoning us. Not only that, she felt the need to blame me, the individual, in their stead.
Shit still fucks me up
:very-intelligent: They’re everywhere. :very-intelligent:
Also, lol and lmao at electric cars being an indulgence purchase that absolves your sins.
electric cars being an indulgence purchase that absolves your sins
Holy shit I hate how accurate that is
i saw a zizek interview that talked about this more generally, i know hes hit and miss but i thought he had a good point on this
that back in the day you bought your commodities that you needed or wanted and that was an act you would feel ethically neutral or bad about (especially if it was an unnecessary treat). and you (as joe middleclass) would absolve your guilt separately by donating to charity or whatever - still in a commodified way, but entirely separately. whereas now with green capitalism (or other “ethical” capitalism), the two become intertwined in the same action, and purchasing these commodities becomes the good deed in and of itself - absolving the consumer of the perceived need to do anything else and also absolving any sense of a guilty, wasteful purchase. buying commodities becomes the way you save the planet. he was talking about rainforest friendly chocolate bars or something as the example, but the principle is the same.
“Yeah so? Do you drive an electric car? What do you personally do to help the environment?”
Driving an electric car doesn’t help the environment. At most, it hurts the environment slightly less than a comparable ICE car, but far more than more sustainable forms of transport (public transport for example). This is so stupid. “I’m a good person for buying a nice car”.
“Yeah so? Do you drive an electric car? What do you personally do to help the environment?”
Love for someone to pull this line on me since I’m too poor to have a car right now :tofu-cool:
There’s a good movie called “Soul on a String”. It’s a Chinese film set in Tibet, with a mostly Tibetan cast and based on a book by a half Han half Tibetan author. Me and my sister saw it at a film festival together. Like a year later she went on a rant about how China “wiped out all the Tibetan and suppressed their culture”. And I was like “uh, we saw a Chinese movie set in Tibet like a year ago”. She said they must have censored it in China, but like no, they didn’t it was released there. I literally pulled this info up on my phone. She just rolled her eyes and went “okay commie”.
I’m genuinely convinced once someone is that lib brained they’re a fucking lost cause, gonna feel real bad when I gotta gulag my own sister.
when these little stupid notions pile up its easy to write them off as a fucking moron, but at the end of the day all it reveals is that they have no idea what they are talking about. i hate that we have to learn a new way to talk to people with these prepackaged beliefs because even the rare attempt to remove the veil seems to them as if all we want to do is make them feel wrong and/or stupid. like, you are, but it’s your fault you feel that way and there’s nothing i can do about it. fuck.
One time my mother yelled at a homeless man for having a phone
One time my burger joint owning cousin fired two high schoolers for speaking Spanish to one another
One time a college classmate gave a presentation about why gay people should be segregated into an internal country within a country because this would somehow sell more consumer goods
gay people should be segregated into an internal country within a country because this would somehow sell more consumer goods
:jesse-wtf:
His reasoning hinged upon some very shaky math and a claim that gay men “buy both female and male products.” It was some kind of bonkers idea you could test out how well certain clothes, foods, and cosmetics sell because in his words “gay people do both.” So he was coming at it both from an angle that gay people are abominations who should be removed from public, and that gay people are good test subjects for whatever pointless consumer products capitalism makes.
The professor didn’t stop the presentation and the other students mostly nodded along
I assume of course that he in no way offered any basis for the claim that gay men buy products aimed at women basing the idea solely on the foundation of gay men and women both being stereotypically effeminate
I got suspended once for an art project in high school that involved portraying nazis as literal demons that were burning in hellfire. After my art teacher (who gave me the assignment to portray the most evil I could think of) defended me, I could return on the condition I would change my artwork to remove references to nazis. Meanwhile, I had literal white power necklace wearing skinheads in my class. I remember that one of the main demons had a swastika on its forehead, and I changed it to a dollar sign after. (okay remember I was a 14-year-old edge lord at the time that wasn’t very subtle). A week later, the art piece got ‘lost’ and I got a passing grade.
Looking back, it was a pretty successful art piece. It made me aware of how people like to put evil things under the rug/ignore it for comfort rather than to expose it and fight it.
One time in high school I wrote an essay about how it would be cool to track down and burn every confederate flag in the country. I requested this essay be read aloud in the class, but was told it was too extreme. The teacher had a whole litany of notes in red ink on my essay, criticizing my hatred of the confederacy and southern reactionaries. At one point he even wrote “Think about the heritage the flag represents, not the hatred you say it represents”
My essay was returned to me, I was told to pick a different topic, and I had to go to the school counselor for three days for “violent thoughts.” A few days later someone carved a homophobic slur into my locker.
Yes I grew up in the south
“Think about the heritage the flag represents, not the hatred you say it represents”
ah I see, YOU are the problem here, not the people who fought a war to own slaves. Lovely stuff.
I got sent to the counselor after writing an essay with the prompt “what can students like you do to stop climate change?”
Luckily, the counselor was a lefty, and just said “It’s my professional duty to ask the following: you gonna hurt anyone?” Then we chatted about radical Hip-Hop for the remaining 25 minutes.
Getting sent to the counselor for violent thoughts isn’t the worst.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zNbiopIAARQ Same, kinda
Some of my coworkers regularly get into debates about how they would run out workplace if they owned it (they never will). And you’d think they’d talk about running it more efficiently or more rights to the workers? Nope, they’ll fantasize about reducing PTO, lowering pay, and mandating longer work hours for everyone. One guy regularly says “when I started I made $8 per hour and that was enough.”
They’re so ingrained with neoliberal conservative nonsense they have ceased to identify with their own interests and instead live on imaginary bourgeois interests.
And I tried unionizing there
