1. Giving Examples Of Oppression Is Not Trying To Control Someone Unless You’re Using A Very Strange

Other examples:

-The Aeneid is fanfic of the Iliad and the Odyssey

-Romeo and Juliet is fanfic of Ovid

So, when I was doing my thesis on whether or not fanfiction should be considered a legitimate genre of literature, my advising professor asked me for examples.  I gave him the generic ones, of course - “Pride & Prejudice and Zombies” is a horror fanfic of “Pride & Prejudice”, “50 Shades of Grey” is an erotica fic of “Twilight" - and that seemed to make him understand what fanfiction is, but not how it’s useful.  So I thought about it, and, after about a minute, I said, “Paradise Lost is basically a fanfiction of the Book of Genesis.  And The Divine Comedy is an epic self-insertion fic for Catholic doctrine.  So, basically, you were teaching us fanfiction last semester.”  I had never before seen a grown man’s eyes widen with such fear, incomprehension, disgust, awe, and understanding.

harry: professor do you think this is a good idea

dumbledore: its okay harry. im with you.

harry: dude parachuting off the astronomy tower is a bad plan no matter who youre with like seriously how does this help us at all

Note: The phrase “the chart” refers to the graph in iamretrograde’s post, titled “Comparisons of Intimate Partner Violence Against Various Categories.”

I did a reverse image search on the chart, followed by searching for the text. This led me to this site http://chart-mining.com/comparison-of-intimate-partner-violence-against-various-categories/, which has the graph followed by a source. They source it as being from http://www.frc.org/get.cfm?i=IS04C02 . I followed the link, but it didn’t have the image, just a page telling me that I could use the website’s search bar to help find what I was looking for.

I tried searching for some of the keywords used on the image with the site’s search bar and discovered two things:

1. The site has an extreme anti-LGBT+ agenda and is extremely biased.

2. I could not find any mention of the supposed statistics. I did find this article: http://downloads.frc.org/EF/EF08L44.pdf , which says, “ ‘Domestic violence is reported to occur in about 11 percent of lesbian homes,’ the article [this is referencing another study] states. It goes on to claim that this is ,about half the rate of 20 percent reported by heterosexual women.’ However, this comparison fails to note that the highest rates of domestic violence among heterosexuals occur among those who are divorced, separated, cohabiting, or in sexual relationships outside of marriage; married women experience the lowest rates of domestic violence of any household arrangement.” Which, as far as I can tell, is claiming that this is study doesn’t count because heterosexual married women are less likely to experience domestic violence than unmarried heterosexual women who have a male partner. This may be true, I’m not sure, but I fail to see how this proves their point. In addition, these figures are significantly lower in both cases than the figures given on the graph.

I then looked up the article they reference. It’s here: http://www.glma.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=Page.viewPage&pageID=691 . The organization publishing it, the Gay and Lesbian Medical Association (yes, they will also be biased) has removed the statistic and didn’t cite their sources, so that’s mostly a dead end. I found a few other sources, but all of them have various flaws (convenience sampling, over-specificity, etc.) that make them not useful.

Overall, I could not find anything to back up the statistics in that graph. If we accept the statistics provided by an anti-LGBT+ organization, who have a vested interest in the opposite result, then we have clear evidence that domestic violence occurs at lower rates among two-woman couples than one-man one woman couples. Since two-woman couples would have twice as many opportunities to occur, this would seem to indicate that, from a domestic violence point of view, it is safer for a woman to be in a relationship with another woman than with a man. Furthermore, it is safer overall for everyone than that chart indicates. (This does not mean the given statistics are good! However, they are less bad.)

If someone can find a source to back up the chart, I will absolutely reconsider this; until then, it looks like its claims are false.

Heterosexuality is Stockholm Syndrome

reproductive rights issues:

abortion

birth control

also reproductive rights issues:

doctors performing c sections during births without informed consent

eugenics via sterilization requirements for trans people to change documentation

eugenics via forced/nonconsenting sterilization of disabled people

eugenics via forced/nonconsenting sterilization of people of color

eugenics via selective abortion of disabled fetuses (fetuses with Down syndrome especially) (these are abortions sought by people who WANT to be pregnant–but only with non-disabled children, when there’s absolutely no guarantee that a non-disabled child won’t become disabled)

if your reproductive rights activism doesn’t incorporate ALL OF THE ABOVE, i want no part of it.

I would totally attend a Utopian service.

HUMANISTS:

Expectation- Grow! Strive! Excel!

Reality- Government of, by, and for the most insufferable shitheads you knew in high school

BRILLISTS:

Expectation- Unlock the mysteries of the human psyche!

Reality- Your president is a smug sack of shit who’s also computer-racist

EUROPEANS:

Expectation- Unbreakable bonds of cultural tradition

Reality- “You seized my borderlands, you executed my hero, you conquered me a thousand years ago, and I remember.”

COUSINS:

Expectation- Altruism, community, common good

Reality- Some rando’s crashing on your couch six out of seven nights and it’d be too awkward to say anything at this point

UTOPIANS:

Expectation- Join our constellations and build the future! Also, Fursona-Pokémon are real and you can have one!

Reality- I Fucking Love Science + ENDLESS SCRUPULOSITY HELL

MASONS:

Expectation- Power. Order. Eternal tradition.

Reality- Facebook feed is endless unironic “when did THIS [modern architecture] become hotter than THIS [Byzantine spires]”

MITSUBISHI:

Expectation- Noble stewards of our terrestrial inheritance

Reality- Everyone’s least-favorite rent-seeker, and you don’t even have close to enough property to have a say in anything

WHITELAWS:

Expectation: Morally upright, clean living, stable communities

Reality: Mormonism but without the pretense of spiritual development

GRAYLAWS:

Expectation- Join the one group that isn’t directly run by lunatics

Reality- Somehow even more milquetoast than just becoming a Cousin because your ba'pas are

BLACKLAWS:

Expectation- Proud, honorable libertines, shining example of voluntary self-governance

Reality- The worst possible overlap in the Venn diagram of ancaps and LARPers

Alien Invasion?

Here’s a different take on the alien invasion trope: 

The world is going to shit: overpopulation, deforestation, pollution, global warming, everything. The only question is if we’ll kill ourselves off before we kill the planet out from under us. Then one day ships appear in the skies all over the world- not just America and countries with trendy landmarks, but EVERYWHERE. Efforts are made to stop the “attackers” but humanity is still rounded up and carted off to some strange alien facility. 

Food (of a sort) and shelter are provided, but no answers are forthcoming because humanity’s captors don’t bother talking to us. Maybe select individuals are taken off for testing, but they all come back in more or less the same condition they were found, except maybe with immuno-boosters or a few troubling terminal diseases cleared up. There’s massive speculation about what’s going on and probably religions are formed based on various beliefs about what the aliens are doing with us, but no one knows for sure. 

This goes on for years (or longer) and then one day everyone is rounded up again and taken back to Earth. Everything is exactly how we left it (except maybe dustier and overgrown) except now there’s no pollution, the ice caps have been repaired, global temps stabilized, ozone holes patched, everything. There are more forests, more crops, and maybe a few critical species (like bees) have been given a population boost. There probably isn’t a lot of thought to where people get dumped so a lot of folks end up in the wrong countries and whatnot, but eventually we sort ourselves back out and either make our way back home or settle down where we are. In a world that’s a little better than the one we left.

And that’s how humanity finds out they’re just an alien terrarium and the owners have stopped by to clean the tank.

This is by no means an original take, and I probably did not spend as much time as I should have editing the writing into being a coherent take, but:

In an awful lot of movies, Steve Rogers would have been right.

(Or, well, treated-as-right by the narrative, at least; in some of those movies many, many people would have died for his idealism, but this wouldn’t have been treated as wrong.)

When faced with this sort of explicit trolley problem, there are two main messages in pop culture: either you should never pull the level (you might kill a named character) or you should find a way to save everyone. For instance, take The Last Jedi: the narrative treats it as correct that Rose stopped Finn from sacrificing his life, not because his plan wouldn’t have worked, but more-or-less because we don’t trade lives. (Other examples: every fucking YA novel ever. ‘You can choose between your significant other... or saving the world.’ ‘Bye, world.’)

(She is absolutely trading lives, just not in the direction that, you know, saves people.)

(This is not to say that characters never trade off lives! The really obvious example here is that most movies are totally fine with killing the villain to protect innocents, although I’m pretty sure the message is generally closer to “the lives of villains don’t matter” than “pull the lever.” Characters will also sometimes do things like choose which of multiple locations to go to, which is generally understood in their narratives to be trading off lives at least a little. But when there’s this sort of explicit setup, the correct answer as portrayed in the narrative is almost never “pull the lever.”)

Now, I actually can think of counterexamples -- Wrath of Khan is very clear that you should pull the lever, for instance, and since I brought up The Last Jedi earlier I might as well mention Holdo’s choice at the end. But in said counterexamples, the person making the choice is almost always choosing to kill themself, not another person, and they usually would have died anyway.

But when characters are faced with the explicit choice of killing someone, maybe multiple someones, or letting far more people die, the treated-as-correct choice is almost never to kill them. 

And I’m glad that we have a movie where that’s not the case.

Get out.

Are you okay? Do you need someone to talk to?

and now I’m just mad. no one is answering me. great.