:funny-clown-hammer:
Why is this in the dunk tank?
Isn't the meme saying Le Guin's Left Hand of Darkness doing NB aliens is chad and Atwood's Handmaid's Tale doing borderline TERF shit is crying rage soyface?
Is there TERF shit in HT? I read it in highschool during my nu-atheist phase and my takeaway was "Christianity = misogyny," but since I was 16 or whatever I easily coulda missed a lot.
Handmaid's Tale begins in the book by doing away with all black people by calling them the " Children of Ham " who have been relocated to concentration camps in the Midwest, and then proceeds to tell none of their story.
As it is written it is a second wave white feminism story that completely erases black people. Black women are just not good enough to be in Atwood's concern bubble, even though they suffer worse fates than the white characters they get less than a paragraph in the entire book.
Well shit, Oryx and Crake out of my "fiction that I want to read if I can gather the focus to do anything worthwhile" list I guess.
I kinda just thought she was, so it's cool I just envisioned correct reality with no evidence.
Same tbh, before I was just going off of "second wave feminism has produced a lot of terfs and absolutely nothing of value"
White CIS women got into positions of power and then kicked away the ladder.
Don't get me started on "political lesbianism" which came out of second-wave feminism. Literally straight women swearing off men and being gross about it, has def done a lot of harm to public perception of and stereotypes about actual lesbians lol. I hate it so much
I haven't read enough books to know what's going on here but I'm prepared to be furious with just a mild explainer comment pointing me in the right direction
There was a post earlier today about how there's in jokes that makes it hard to follow what's posted on here sometimes, but I think the real issue is random obscure things in the news being alluded to without any explanation.
this insulates the community against wreckers, because even avid users can't be sure what is happening.
wtf is with folks so freaked out by 'person with vagina' phrase? I posted a Lancet study about systemic racism in policing, and some chud/dork commented about the Lancet using that phrase as a way to just disregard the study
I guess covid conspiracies and TERFs are getting more aligned in the face of the BIG MED TRANS AGENDA or something
There's a webcomic I follow called Sinfest that started out very obviously doing teenage-tier horny fan service stuff, transitioned into post-liberal woke, and is now on a huge TERF kick where they try to make transitioning sound like a capitalist plot to get people to consume hormones.
Some of this stuff is very obviously confused - simultaneously claiming to be pro-women, against gender identity, against commodification, and then suddenly against anything that acts or appears leftist because leftism is just a commodity too.
Now its veering into anti-vax territory. I can't help but see it as this kind-of grand rejection of modernity. As if just poo-pooing the capital will somehow spare them from Capitalism.
the theory I just came up with is that this is part of the whole reactionary is-ought fallacy, so in their worldview a healthcare genocide is only possible through positive means (vaccines and chemtrails etc), but negative means (denial of care, food deserts etc) are not even remotely real in their understanding of the world, so all those people dying or living shitty existences are not a problem unless BIG AGENDA X is actively trying to cause them harm through some clandestine and clockwork conspiracy
my new line of questioning with some of these folks is to talk about the big bad AI future a la Musk etc, but then show that all those horrible things are already happening, and then turn them to thinking about how the evil AI is actually capitalism running on wetware via business majors and fintech etc
That's definitely deep in the AnCap philosophical pudding.
But I don't know how many lay-people are into it and how many are simply like "Shots hurt me and I don't like them." The number of COVID vaccines given out so far is tracking pretty neatly with the number of flu shots normally administered in a given year. So we could just be running into a soft ceiling of needle-aversion.
Checking back with the comic that did the very heavy handed anti-consumerist allegory in the Bush years and finding out it was about terves and cancel culture was a fuckin trip. I assume people are still reading it because he's still makin' it, but it's wild, despite the art being pretty creative and technically solid, I've never heard of anyone at any point being like "yeah this is my fave webcomic."
I'm coasting on inertia at this point. So many of my Bush-Era favorites ended.
But I stopped patroning him a while ago.
Atwood self-describes as a red tory; she's just very appalled at the aesthetics and excesses of the north American conservative movement. I get the impression that she's a pretty typical modern lib. She's concerned about the bad places that society can go, but I don't think she has a vision of what a better world can look like. That's Le Guin's bread and butter, as she always wrote about alternate societies and what the implications of them would be for the suffering and flourishing of the people living in them.
The Handmaid's Tale is /r/atheism on steroids.
That said, she's got some very David Graeber-esque critiques of debt. And The Penelopiad shamelessly scratched my nerd-itch for Greek mythology.
More like the other way around, her works on debt are actually quoted by David Graeber in Debt as a reference.
