https://nitter.net/dasuperbackup/status/1523700895011438592?t=dHNDvi-v_46BIsZYNcabjw&s=19
Showers are social control but not in this way.
They're social control because people without them are further denied access to other things and looked down upon for not having them.
If you have a fucking shower and you don't use it you're just lazy and stinky. The homeless don't choose to be lazy and stinky and don't deserve to be degraded for it, you on the other hand absolutely do. Be considerate to others. WASH.
The fact that major cities can't get their shit together to build public restrooms is a massive societal failure. There is absolutely no excuse what so ever.
Public restrooms should be like Roman bathhouses to be quite honest. And as commonplace. With modern concepts of privacy of course, but available and common.
They could be made really nice.
Basically a publicly owned gym.
"Modern concepts of privacy" weird me out. I'm old enough to have grown up with open locker rooms full of naked old men who dngaf. It's only been about thirty years since those days, but the change happened extremely fast. I can see a lot of arguments against them, but it's still such a rapid social change.
“Modern concepts of privacy”
Still some places in the "modern world" where its still perfectly normal to be nude around strangers (but usually of the same gender). Japanese onsens are a good example, and I understand that Finnish saunas follow a very similar protocol.
If you put the two side by side what would people choose? I wager the private ones mostly.
If you put a swimming pool at the same facility you can have a good argument for both because sports teams or school classes may prefer to use group changing for various reasons.
It's a policy choice, and they justify it with scare tactics surrounding drug use.
Then they ensure that their scariness is true by heavily criminalizing drug use and forcing it into secret.
If you have a fucking shower and you don’t use it you’re just lazy and stinky.
Or seriously disabled. Before I became effectively bed-bound because my spine is literally satan, I showered religiously. Now, managing to take a shower is committing to fifteen minutes of agony. I do it when I can, but there absolutely is such a thing as being too disabled to shower regularly. Some of those disabilities can be accommodated for. Others legitimately can't (If someone wants to invent and install a shower-bed for me, I won't complain, tho). Most of them also generally preclude spending much time in public, though, which I suppose is a counterpoint.
Yeah my spine is also satan, and unfortunately that does lead to bad hygiene sometimes on days that I don't need to leave the house.
But I make sure to shower if someone is coming over or if I'm going out in public, if I'm not well enough to shower I'm definitely not well enough to go out in public or hang out with friends.
Weird, I thought I replied to this already, I upvoted it.
Completely agree, you aren't the problem. Those that can but do not are.
I hate this comment a lot. The person you have imagined who has a regular situation and is totally fine but just doesn't care to wash and smells awful because they are just a dumb slob, they might very well be real, maybe they will see it. Idk I have never encountered that, I have encountered many many people however who are mentally ill or neurodivergent (also physically disabled as someone else said) and have trouble with it. That is who you are really talking about, that is who you are really calling lazy and stinky, saying are worthy of degrading
Nah there are plenty of lazy people. A lot of people here could attest to having had at least one roommate at some point or another who is simply inconsiderate. The tweeter in question is just that.
I think I made the point just fine. It's about means. If you have the means to wash and you do not then you are the problem. If you do not have the means due to ability or other reasons then it is completely understandable. People that do have the means and do not wash are disrespecting everyone that would like to but can not, and making life less pleasant simply because they are lazy.
please read the comment you responded to. What looks like 'just laziness' from an outside observer can be a manifestation of terminal depression, anxiety, and other conditions.
I'm sorry but the tweet is almost entirely unrelated. I'm not sure what you're getting at.
Yeah, but it doesn't represent the point I'm making. It's only relevant in that it's someone pretending to have an argument that sounds like what I'm talking about. Please don't do this.
If I will accept that this specific overly-online anime-pfp anarchist is not at all mentally ill for an absolute fact, and is as you assume personally very smelly and lazy, will you accept that other than in this case it is often difficult to judge what means a person has or what personal issues someone has from just a whiff? Although there is no common ground here for us really. I am unmoveable really because I think being so lazy you do not wash is itself a state of mental unwellness significant enough to invite compassion rather than hatred.
One of the reasons this bugs me so much is that when some people do it it really does come off as like. Nazi shit. Hygiene - not only racial hygiene, but physical cleanliness, was fundamental to the Nazi program of dehumanization. To this day I dare you go into any neonazi space online and count how long it takes you to get to someone using smell to be racist. Not you though, "These lazy assholes are ruining it for the rest of us with their BO, and disrespecting people with actual problems!" is not nazi shit, you just sounds like a bog standard middle aged conservative uncle
will you accept that other than in this case it is often difficult to judge what means a person has or what personal issues someone has from just a whiff?
I accept that.
I am unmoveable really because I think being so lazy you do not wash is itself a state of mental unwellness significant enough to invite compassion rather than hatred.
I won't accept laziness as a state of mental unwellness and even if I were to I would still end up saying that communists should not promote that position because it plays directly into the hands of those that claim socialists are just lazy and do not want to work.
This entire issue basically killed /r/antiwork's momentum. It is not a road communists should go down.
I think you may be right about it being a loser for communism, and to a lesser extent anarchism, as like. Online brands, which is you are correct to point out, the game here. And yeah I don't think I would ever raise this one at a meeting, aside from it being contentious its also not really actionable. But because it is my profession and since I don't watch much youtube any more I am much more of a disability advocate than I am a communist I guess
It is actionable in the same way invisible disability is actionable, the same way we work against ableism. But I wouldn't because it would distance the left very hard from workers who would see it as defending laziness and that goes down like a lead balloon with most people.
I do think we should push against the ostracisation of unclean people without the means to be clean or other mitigating factors though, primarily homelessness. However if teenage "anarchists" start spreading this shit with any frequency on twitter then it'll end up harming that as bringing it up at all will create the emotional connections in people which is the opposite of what we want.
The tweeter is similar to the children who keep calling bedtimes authoritarianism and opposing other general parenting things as "hierarchy". There are some people with incredibly bad takes.
Awoo, you're still the best and most correct hexbear poster :fidel-salute:
What would Lenin have done? The merciful Lenin would have bathed everyone in this room
Early Soviet Union had propaganda campaigns for basic hygiene like washing hands and brushing teeth.
I wonder what the next weird Twitter anarchist take will be?
Toilets are imperialist, shitting in the nearest river is praxis!
Well, there was that guy arguing that literacy was bad because it enforces hegemony a couple days ago
At least I think it was a few days ago
Time is a mystery to me since I got rid of all my clocks and calendars since measuring things is authoritarian
Schools = prison is definitely the next one in the twitter leftist pipeline
Foucalt wrote a whole ass book about that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discipline_and_Punish
The basic thesis is that factories, schools, and prisons all share the same goal of enforcing routine, predicable behavior by using constant surveillance, overt violence, and enforced self-discipline.
Self-discipline is such a sinister concept. Beating yourself in to compliance with an externally required norm.
Yeah, but even Fouacalt himself said that he took the principal too far initially.
And while schools can suck (I have loads of experience unfortunately), and there are things that can be compared, like the rigid structure, discipline, uniformity, violence, it's not fully comparable to a prison. And most teenagers on twitter will not be nuanced in their analysis here.
I think Foucault's thesis is more correct now than when it was written. There is now massive, constant surveillance of students. Phones, computers, and social media are all used to track students and control their movement and behaviors. Being outside without a purpose is de-facto illegal in many places and especially for poor and minority kids. The school-to-prison pipeline is a well honed machine for procuring slaves. The slightest disciplinary infractions result in the threat or reality of police violence and incarceration.
It's not like that everywhere, or all the time, but the methods of control and degree of control between schools and prisons have been on a convergent path for decades. Even teachers are subject to massive and oppressive surveillance and oversight to the point that it impedes their ability to teach.
Ahhhh damn.
Next one will be going full Anprim to show solidarity with the global south or something.
They kinda are, tho... And not just visually, although also visually.
Poor inner city schools have bars on the windows and barbed wire fencing in some places.
My very-privileged suburban high school had barbed-wire fencing and all of its external windows were on the second floor or were too small to get more than a head out of. When they were building it, before they put on the cladding, it legitimately looked like a prison.
One of the best public high schools in the US (although it was a little further down that list when I attended than it is now)! Teenagers are legitimately treated like a bizarre cross between prisoners and livestock here...
School as we currently know it basically only exists to teach children how to be good workers. Education is a very good thing, but what we have barely counts as education. Examination of historical forces is rare in western schools.
It's also worth keeping in mind that at this point schools are effectively equivalent to locking your child in a box with a 5% chance of the box having a serial killer in it.
Formal timekeeping. The clock exists as a shared measure, a necessary precondition of extortion and command.
This is pretty widely agreed on, though. Precise timekeeping is necessary to regulate the labor of factory workers. We've actually moved past that for many industries; office workers can complete their tasks in widely varying amounts of time, don't need to labor continuously throughout the day, and have productivity and output that are difficult to quantify. Yet capital still requires precise time keeping and attendence, and attempts to impose quantified productivity metrics as though their office workers were on an assembly line.
I chose a thing that sounds silly, but is still true because I wanted to subvert the narrative a little. Sometimes, facilely stupid sounding arguments hide a useful piece of analysis. It's even true of the other arguments. Training bed-times into children absolutely is training them to have their time regimented by capital, regardless of how silly the idea of not making sure kids are asleep at a reasonable time may be. The necessity of showers is imposed, in large part, because of the proximity in which we live and labor, and much of the ritual of showering is little more than an excuse to sell unnecessary cleaning products (which you can take from my cold dead hands, particularly given how rare being physically able to shower is for me sometimes).
These discussions are still worth having despite supposedly being meaningless, because when approached correctly, they always result in more insight in the cultural forces that influence all of us.
See that's a pure culture issue. There are no direct economic issues related to the question of what constitutes nudity and where it is acceptable. In various times and places standards of nudity have varied wildly and have applied differently to rich and poor, lords and vassals, men and women. There's absolute no reason that walking around stark ass naked in fancy boots with expensive tattoos and an expensive exercise regimine couldn't come to be the dominant expression of wealth and high status, while the police are beating the shit out of poor people for showing too much ankle.
Toilets are a hierarchy, squatting over a hole in the floor is equality
senator armstrong but he just wants you to be hygienic
I replied to the wrong comment dang it all :ooooooooooooooh:
"You see this nano-film? It vibrates the filth right off your balls. I dream of an America that is clean, and fresh, and exfoliated, where every man chooses his won scent! That he believes in!
I'm trying to turn "played college ball" into "wash your balls" but I can't get the phrasing right
fuck i hate internet leftists
you stink
wash yourself motherfucker
Or they are literal children who think homework and chores are oppression because that is the only hardship they have yet faced
I had a friend from highschool whose girlfriend at the time would fucking wash him like he was a mewling infant and claimed he just did not like being in water that much. She went on vacation for a couple weeks and he was telling me and the other people we lived with that he was going to wait for her to do it. "Bro if you don't go wash your ass by tomorrow I'm going to tell her you were cheating on her."
He was banned from several houses because he left a literal stench for a day after he had left.
I do wonder about the "Real men don't wipe their butts and leave shit tracks everywhere!" crowd. Is it massively self-destructive homophobia? Is it tied to some childhood trauma? Is it the result of some kind of sensory problem or discomfort? Or are they just totally fucking gross for no forgivable reason?
This particular person I'd very likely assume it was a sensory issue, he is basically the archetype of the greasy anime nerd on Twitter and traditional masculinity was never really his wheel house.
I mean they would be right about the discomfort because the western way is just to sandpaper your hole with the dryest paper ever
Tell me about it. My toilet isn't big enough to fit a bidet in. I have infinite regret.
Taking a bath feels nice, sure, but taking a shower is a chore for some. I genuinely don't enjoy it, and I don't feel good after one. I still do it, of course, because I'm not like OP's post, but you can't really assume everyone feels the same about it.
I mean people have legit sensory processing disorders and things. It happens.
Shower, use soap and a washcloth or sponge. Wash everywhere. Rinse. Do whatever routine your hair needs. Apply anti perspirant/deodorant afterwards. A little perfume or cologne if you want to be fancy. Please. For the love of all of all our noses.
If you don't have a shower, chicken/bucket baths are a thing. And if you don't have access to clean water, well then you have more serious matters and you don't need me to tell you that. I'm pretty sure no one with basic empathy is going to judge a homeless person for having bad hygiene, they can't change that easily.
I 100% assure you that these people are not talking about the hygiene struggles facing the homeless.
I hope we don't get there. But if we do, a sponge, a bowl, and a sliver of soap is enough to get reasonable clean. Washing your hair is what becomes a luxury.
Yup, the hair is the sad part. My waist-length hair is just not gonna cut it in the post-clean-water world, I'd have to keep it real short.
Stop trying to get me to clean my dirt! :bird-screm-2:
:jordan-eboy-peterson: did I hear that someone's not cleaning their room?
"Forcing people to clean themselves is like the age of consent. Each of us has the choice to do whatever we like with our private property, including other people. Anything else is tyranny."
I saw some tweet the other day that was like "just because you're queer doesn't mean you can't be an annoying person that people don't personally like" or something like that, and I think about that a lot when it comes to any sort of identity that prides itself on acceptance.
