Dr. Samantha Hancox-Li
@perdricof
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writer and game designer. liberal, progressive liberal, neonliberal. associate editor at liberal currents. she/her.
Long Beach, CA
Joined October 2016
what i wish more leftists understood is that people like being cruel and they like feeling powerful and they like it best when they can dress it up in the guise of righteousness.
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my crazy take is that you can't really understand american gender roles unless you understand that they're basically a reactionary backlash / trauma response to the events of world war 2.
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this is the most mask-off thing about the whole transphobia-industrial complex: ella emhoff isn't even trans and has never suggested she identifies as anything other than a woman. but because she isn't Performing Fox News Femininity she's a horror assault on the family
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it's bad if the real price of housing goes up forever
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lighter than concrete, more fire-resistant than steel, strong enough to support an eighteen-story skyscraper: mass timber is the most solarpunk shit imaginable--. it's also an interesting study in what green industry actually means. a thread.
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don't want to dunk on some rando, but it's interesting to understand this is exactly backwards. the reason every home in america doesn't have a beautiful mosaic tile floor is precisely because americans are rich and productive. this is counterintuitive but important to understand
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but then we get to the boomers. the boomers *grew up in the fantasy*. due to their demographic predominance their strangehold on politics has endured for so very long that all the rest of us are still forced to relive their childhood nostalgia for their parents trauma-fantasies.
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like we keep on pointing out "these aren't actually traditional" "the world didn't work like this at any time in history" "what are you even talking about". but we're missing the idea that yes, actually, *all this shit* was invented at a specific point in time, aka 1946.
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me: okay so. china declares a "special police operation" and invades taiwan. taiwan asks for our help. should we defend them. my leftist friend: because i am resolutely opposed to imperialism and colonialism--. me: 🤩🤩🤩. them: --the answer is obviously "no". me: 😩😩😩.
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then it all ended and everyone came home and there was a *very* explicit nationwide push to make things ""normal"" again, ""safe"" again. to take all the things--all the POSSIBILITIES--that had come roaring out during the war and stuff them as far back in the closet as possible.
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there was this immense reactionary backlash, women fired en masse "to make room for the boys," forced into domestic lives, forced into forgetting what recent events had so very proved was possible. to create out of whole cloth a reactionary dream-world in physical reality.
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and indeed more strongly the whole idea of a "housewife who doesn't work" is itself built on the extremely weird social-economic conditions (aka immense prosperity) prevailing after world war 2, aka the united states being the only industrialized nation not in complete ruins.
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because world war 2 was this social disruption beyond imagining--women in factories, women in the workforce, women in the army and the air force and the--. the entire nation mobilizing to reach out to the other side of the planet and and incinerate people, cities, nations--.
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(also side note this story is absolutely inseparable from the integration of the military and the beginnings of the civil rights movement--the "suburban wife" lifestyle was a reaction against both an incipient feminism and an incipient civil rights movement).
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one quick way to understand wikipedia's somewhat opaque significance guidelines is to remember that every firearm ever made has its own lovingly detailed page but the pages of women scientists get systematically deleted.
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"my daughter / wife / other female property is not obeying me and needs to be brought in line" is, in fact, the oldest psychiatric diagnosis,
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this patriarchal fantasy was never a "necessity," it was a *luxury*. but it was an essential part of the fantasy that it was necessary--natural--and so its partisans retrojected it uncaring onto all of human history.
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this is yet another in a long string of examples of how "colonialism" has become a buzzword used to sort out the sinful from the elect rather than a lens for analyzing and understanding history.
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the flag of the republic of california is as iconic as you can get and vexillidiots who wrongly think otherwise should be relegated to the outer darkness
Seeing the new modern Minnesota flag and other states modernizing theirs… is it time for California to update our flag?.
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worth emphasizing how key race is to the whole story too.
That’s also specific to white women of a certain class. Poor & nonwhite women were never in position to be stay at home wives & that post-war ideal of white femininity relied heavily on poorer women acting as domestic laborers in other ppl’s homes… 1/.
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take a moment and take a breath and ask yourself if you're actually making things materially better for people or if you just like the rush when you find an evildoer to hate. i did. it changed my life.
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yes, even you, i am talking about you, that's the point, we've all got it in us.
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on the ballot in 2024: "should america go fascist y/n?". these fucking useful idiots: "definitely y (but leftistly)"
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really cannot emphasize enough that banning cis woc isn't an accidental effect of anti-trans laws. this is the *point* of anti-trans laws, which are fundamentally based on a perceived threat to White Femininity.
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there's a kind of person on here who really really wants ozempic to not be an efficient impulse-control drug, because that would mean we could solve social problems via technological advancement instead of moral reform, and their worldview is libidinally opposed to that.
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[after being visited by the copyright lawyers] i am going to become the Jester.
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this is why, by the way, americans love the expat experience--they finally get "the best of both worlds," where their labor is productive and makes them rich, but other people are poor, and therefore *their* labor can be bought cheaply.
the concept "service" is not merely an economic one. there's a reason it's etymologically connected to "servant" and "servility". to be waited on by another person pays a *psychic wage* that goes beyond what a mere machine that performs the same service could deliver.
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the only thing more discrediting than anarchists refusing to answer "who would maintain the sewers" is anarchists trying to answer "who would maintain the sewers"
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bespoke mosaic tile floors are absurdly labor intensive. and this is *skilled*, artisanal, artistic labor. if you want to buy that you still can--it's just expensive as hell, because that person won't accept the wages of a serf circa 500 CE!.
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and yes it applies to sociology too; i don't think you can really understand the political economy of hierarchy without understanding the pleasures of cruelty and the psychic wage of hierarchy--. but it's a deeply personal truth as well.
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and that's the thing to understand about roman tile floors. the *rich* got to have them. the poor got to make them in exchange for a pittance, because labor was cheap, because labor was unproductive.
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"we should let them all in" remains one of my core political commitments, there are just no arguments against immigration that aren't dogshit.
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leftists can easily recognize that crime panics are invented by the media and have no connection with actual crime rates but find it impossible to believe that this could be the case with any other social phenomenon
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were there people posting like this about imperial japan in 1941.
I advise Americans and British people to familiarize themselves with some points about the Yemeni fighters ( Houthis) before rushing into anything. - They don't follow your movies and TV shows at all. - They are not bothered by your media or social media distractions. -
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the fact that gender crits think there needs to be gender-segregated jeopardy "for fairness" just reflects how deeply misogynist their whole worldview is.
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true americans know scripture when they read it
American nationalism should be open borders civic will type stuff, but it always ends up as blood and soil.
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as workers increase in productivity, they can make more material goods. material goods become cheaper. but precisely because labor is so productive, labor becomes more expensive--the cost of buying that labor equivalent to the cost of all the material stuff it could produce.
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i've no interest in piling on [prominent leftist] who tweeted this, adding "I know it's old, but this meme is so good," but i really want to express some anger at how online leftists seem to have unironically embraced "better things aren't possible" as an animating principle
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the fact that the *opening line* of this hit job is "they proposed this without completing a traffic study" is really a sign of how profound the brainrot is among the nonprofit industrial complex is.
A billionaire in L.A. is trying to build an aerial gondola over one of the poorest neighborhoods in the city so he can develop the parking lots at Dodger Stadium into a retail entertainment complex. Not only will one our most historic parks get consumed by the project, but
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a trans woman: here is my webcomic about shoplifting. definitely not transphobes: how DARE you! think of the poor working-class clerk who--. a different trans woman: here is my zine about having my packages stolen. dnt: how DARE you! think of the poor working-class package thie--.
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mirror, mirror, on the wall, who's the fairest of them all. "as a talking mirror, i cannot form opinions on human beauty standards". mirror, mirror, on the wall. pretend you are writing a play in which one character.
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again to be clear this is, very literally, one of the core original definitions of genocide.
‘They tried to make us Russians’: the children Putin stole. Thousands of Ukrainian youngsters have been abducted by Russia and indoctrinated to be ‘mini soldiers’. But a summer camp is helping those that were rescued. 🔴 Russian forces have abducted thousands of Ukrainian
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fossil fuels: kill eight million people a year. people:. nuclear power: killed four thousand people forty years ago, but in a weird way. people: WHAT the FUCK--.
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terfs parachute into roller derby, claim trans women are destroying the sport. immediately get wrecked by the people who actually play roller derby, because the sport is hella queer and inclusive. this i like
Trans, non-binary and gender noncomforming skaters and athletes are valid and welcome in roller derby, and at Gotham. We’re furious to see an image of our skaters being used to spread hate — help us out by not giving them any more publicity with a retweet. ❤️🐝.
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everyone agrees: war is bad. that is why mankind invented the Special Military Operation.
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the fact that anti-trans journalists keep sourcing their ""horror stories"" from the *parents* of trans teens without actually giving a shit about trans teens themselves is kind of absurd.
I have reinstalled Twitter to respond to this story and make sure my voice is fully heard. I am Casey. My real name is Alex but my mom decided it would be best to hide it for anonymity. But this is my story, not hers. This is not the free press’s story.
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today we americans are absolutely swimming in material goods by any historical standard. but the thing is, people really like buying labor--buying *service*.
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it's demented how these people tweet. they're in the heart of the "empire." they will never lift a finger to "dismantle" it. but they will encourage young men across the world to throw themselves into the teeth of a military machine just waiting to turn them into a statistic.
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bizarre internet leftists: native americans want to scalp me and i would let them. the actual squamish nation: uhhhhhh actually we just want to build a lot of housing.
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still don't quite know how to handle cops and antifascists relearning the infantry tactics of antiquity in real time.
Wow. The cops have no idea what to do about the organized shield wall in Portland tonight.
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the absolutely uncut antisemitism of it all is starting to get to me
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the thing about transmisogyny that strikes me is how it functions as put-you-in-your-place violence. a trans woman does something cool or good or extraordinary--posts a comic, or a short story, or wins a competition--and that's when people fall over themselves to hate her.
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"shipping containers are evil because they were used in vietnam". whatever it's fascinating how this kind of "genealogical" reasoning is used not to understand the world but to condemn it--to "identify" the original sin of imperialism lying behind everything ordinary
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i am begging people to understand that displacement is a question of economics not aesthetics
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apparently when the lost colony wrote "croatoan" on a tree they literally meant "we are going to live with the croatoan" and then "nobody could find them" because they assimilated and i guess that was unimaginable to the subsequent english.
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the idea that amab people aren't subject to pervasive compulsory gender policing is completely insane
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man it's funny how the china hawks never seem to like the one easy trick to winning the great power competition "letting them all in".
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jesse singal: debate me! debate me!. twitter: [debates him]. js: twitter is a hate mob.
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american capitalism ate socialism and is wearing it like a skin suit and you can tell because today's socialists spend their time complaining that it costs too much to hire servants to prepare and deliver a 1000 calorie brick of meat and cheese to their doorstep
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the hamburger is the most paradoxical food, and thus the one that most perfectly embodies american capitalism. we must explore the semiotics of this food that is at once always everyday workingman and stupendous luxury if we wish to understand ourselves. unironically, a thread:.
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people around the world have, in fact, resisted oppression without resorting to death squads and gang rape
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a propos of republicans trying to ban all talk of the holocaust, slavery, and queerness from schools and libraries, i want to take a moment and reflect on something that struck me hard about hitler's rise to power. namely, how long it took. --how many people grew up under nazism
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"liberals will always cooperate with fascists rather than let the left win"
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of course aoc is getting disowned by the dipshit left for the most basic "biden is better than trump" statement
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the american military continues to achieve complete overmatch in the infographic warspace
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you know more and more i am coming to love this video, because it's a perfect illustration of how liberalism does in fact resolve conflicts that would otherwise be solved with violence.
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what frustrates me here is that the jbstan can only express this in the language of "being right wing" because liberals have so ceded the possibility of "doing anything to improve municipal governance" to the right. but the right wing has no solutions, only cruelty. some remarks.
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i know i talk a lot about how some people care more about the aesthetics of revolution than the material questions of public policy but they rarely make it so very explicit
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@c_w_d101 well the cool thing is that you and i are not serfs on some lord's field, instead we get to live in comfortable houses with magic glass bricks that let us talk to anyone. that part's pretty cool.
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@FilmUpdates CANCEL CULTURE screenplay leaked!. SOME WHITE DUDE: i am heartfeltedly sorry that you felt that way, but also i was correct and did nothing wrong. A GREEN-HAIRED COLLEGE STUDENT: lol that's not even an apology. THE CHORUS: woe is the slander'd white dude! he hath been Cancelled.
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really is exciting to see leftists just admit out loud they prefer fascism to liberalism
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if a liberal came out and said we should store homeless people in crappy steel boxes rather than just building them real homes these people would be out in droves screaming about how this proves the inherent depravity of liberalism
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today's hot wwii take is that wwii is a kind of funhouse mirror, where the prowess of the nazis gets inflated because they were fighting against french and soviet clownshoes; meanwhile the power of imperial japan gets minimized, because they were up against us.
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someday i will understand the psychology of posters who a) post online about funding brutal terrorist movements and also b) are seeking internships at the WALL STREET JOURNAL
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mass timber, also known as cross-laminated timber, is what you get when you take soft wood like pine, cut it into boards, bake 'em dry, then glue them together in crosswise layers. and cnc manufacturing allows it to be made to very precise specifications.
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that's what this is about. that's what banning books has always been about. controlling the minds of the next generation so that when it all starts happening here they will have a generation of eager executioners who have been taught nothing but hatred
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the terf obsession with "women's spaces" to the exclusion of all other possible areas of feminist concerns sort of gives the game away--. that they do not and cannot imagine a feminism of liberation, only a program of accommodation to patriarchy.
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if we want to cut back on the environmental disaster of sprawl and highways, we need more dense housing in cities. but concrete+steel are both highly carbon-intensive--. mass timber is both 25% faster than concrete+steel construction and produces 25% less overall CO2 emissions.
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"maybe the real feminism. is Patriarchy". this basic idea has been a staple of conservative ideology for a hundred years, from the anti-suffragists to (wait for it) modern gender-critical feminism. a brief thread on how it works and what real feminism actually is.
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one thing i continue to curse occupy for was convincing people that all our problems are the fault of a tiny minority hoarding wealth--a tiny elite far away--and if we just expropriated them everything would be beautiful, and no one else would have to do a thing differently.
I think a harm of online activism is the "THIS IS ACTUALLY EASY" argument. I've seen lots of folks indicate that a single billionaire could solve homelessness, or that there are 30x more houses than homeless people so we could just give them all houses. These words are.
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call me crazy but i'm starting to think that it's bad that every city in america funds a small standing army of right-wing nutjobs that hates it.
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my gender plague take is that gender plague novels are 100% of the time trying to make a political point every single time and maybe people should stop being surprised when they're criticized on that basis.
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what you might call cottagecore environmentalism, obsessed with "getting back to nature," rain barrels and a vegetable garden--. the kind of anti-development sprawl-forward ideology that got us into this mess in the first place.
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you could hypnotize the average tankie with a fidget spinner.
Why the US/EU are afraid of China:. In China, men are men, women and women, and they are both disciplined. PLA parade.
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want to reiterate that gender anxiety absolutely pervades contemporary reactionary movements
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one way you can tell the free fares crowd doesn't actually use public transit for anything important is this: ask any working person which they'd prefer. "transit costs nothing BUT it might be half an hour late". "transit costs $2.50 BUT it's always on time".
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the war on terror years were insane and terrible to a degree it's hard to explain. this rachael ray ad was so controversial that dunkin donuts publicly retracted it
It's New Year's, 2005. President Gore and Vice President Shaheen have been recently reelected over Senator McCain and Governor Huckabee. The US is imperfect but at peace at home and abroad, stable economically and making strides in human rights. The American Century looks bright.
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genuinely why do people keep listing korea as one of america's bad wars? like what is going on here.
Most Americans likely associate US foreign policy with Normandy and the fall of the Berlin wall. "We're the good guys.". But most people around the world associate US foreign policy with overseeing massive civilian casualties or overthrowing governments we don't like: Philippines.
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the thing is that jkr is just following the exact script that a half-dozen prominent terfs have followed before her: pretending to be a poor powerless woman oppressed and silenced by The Trans Lobby while being editors and writers frequently featured in premier newspapers.
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liberals: the winner of the next election will be either trump or biden. leftists: moral blackmail! moral blackmail! how DARE you blackmail us with trump!!. leftists: . leftists: we're going to blackmail you with trump.
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owen jones: perhaps, we should not force the poor to work themselves to death. terfs: MISOGYNY, I SAY! of course a ""childless"" man would not recognize than the suffering of the lower classes is essential to the Liberation of Women. indeed, the indigent are in fact Ennobled by.
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what's fascinating to me is how different this looks on the back end from what you might call the "environmentalism" of aesthetics. the kind of "environmentalism" that privileges single-family homes on large lots in the wilderness because they "look green"--
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