Tumblr Users Be Like Instead Of Giving Your Money To Those Scammer Genocide Victims Who Make Me Feel

Galaxy Science Fiction, December 1954 (Ed Emshwiller)

Merry 2000 Trained Rats, everybody

"oppression olympics"

remember the wise words of leroy...

It's legit terrifying whenever I step out of my little bubble and realize the level of copyright cocksuckery that is normalized in online artist communities.

the short answer is that babies are just goated at phonology. the working theory is that in order to acquire language as fast as possible, our brains need to be receptive to any and all phonetic information from birth (and possibly even earlier; there's some evidence that prenatal infants pick up on rhythm and pitch information from the sound waves that travel from the parent to the womb). linguists have been testing them on this for a long time, and until they're about 6 month babies can distinguish phonemes from languages they've never been exposed to and who's phonology is completely different to their own. eventually the brain starts to lose that ability in order to focus on correctly articulating those sounds, which is an incredibly complex task, not to mention once you have to start arranging them into patterns to form words and sentences. basically to do takes up lot of cognitive effort that then can't be used to maintain such a massive inventory of sounds.

as for adults, I don't think it's quite accurate to say that it's impossible to learn phonology, since in order to fluently speak a second language you have to be able to understand and produce all the sounds, even if they're not 100% perfect. but in terms of why it's so much more difficult to perfect than something like syntax, it's partly of your brain not being as flexible anymore and, consequently both having a worse memory and a deeply engrained phonemic inventory, to the point that it's difficult for non-native speakers to even "hear" the difference between contrasting sounds your not familiar with (to be clear it's not that you physically can't hear it, it just doesn't register phonologically). this is also why people have consistent accents instead of making pronunciation errors at random; they're still following a set of structural rules, most likely very similar to the ones of native speakers, but with the influence of their first language changing it slightly.

so like. as i understand it, at any age, if your exposure to language is restricted to a single language, you will learn that language. like it just sort of happens, your brain figures out its grammar, semantics, etc, formal training HELPS but is not required. but this is *not* the case with the language's phonology! people will live in a foreign-phone country for years, primarily exposed to its language, they will understand it perfectly, generate it perfectly, and yet will still have a strong "accent" if not trained how to avoid it. that's weird, right? why doesnt the brain learn the phonology? (and why does it learn it perfectly as a baby?) is it too "low level", muscular-level, and that stuff gets "hardened" while higher level stuff is more flexible..?

I have gripes with booktok for publishing industry reasons but I could give a shit what women are cranking it to. I've seen what dudes jerk off to. May a thousand flowers goon, as far as I'm concerned.

Excuse me if this has been asked before, but what are books/essays/authors you recommend looking into from a Marxist-Feminist standpoint? Also is there something I should know before delving into Marxist-Feminism? A lot of materialist feminists I've been reading have made anti-transgender sentiments, or have ignored the existence of transgender politics entirely, so I'm a little wary.

The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir is not technically Marxist, but it’s very influential globally for Marxist feminism. She also interprets gender in a way that I think lends itself to transfeminism, in that she says that humans always have to interpret nature instead of just immediately appropriating it “as it is” and that gender is one such way that we interpret nature (and implicitly that we collectively have a freedom to alter this interpretation through political struggle).

Alexandra Kollontai is a very influential Marxist feminist, though I think her idea of sexual liberation was still subordinated to the idea of the national state’s camaraderie and fraternity. Make Way for Winged Eros is a very interesting essay arguing for free love as an element in social revolution.

An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman by Claudia Jones is very important as a response to the de-classing of Black women’s struggles and the dismissal of them as particularistic. The work of Jones gives a much more concrete and human sense to who the proletariat is, instead of the image of the white man-machine that a lot of socialists fantasize about.

Mary Inman is very important for being the first Marxist to extensively analyze unwaged domestic, reproductive labor, pairing well with Jones who had begun to analyzed waged domestic labor. Her essay The Role of the Housewife in Social Production is arguably the beginning of the housework debates in Marxist feminism, which were about the role of housework in the total reproduction of capital, the reproduction of labor-power, and the production of surplus-value.

The essay which really kicked off the housework debates was The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community by Selma James and Mariarosa Dalla Costa. This is still one of the most important Marxist feminists texts that people still come back to in these kinds of debates.

The Arcane of Reproduction by Leopoldina Fortunati takes the housework debates into a more complex level by connecting it to Marx’s full discussion of the production and reproduction of capital in Capital and Theories of Surplus-Value. This is probably the highest theoretical point of the debates.

Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution by Raya Dunayevskaya is very important for the reconsideration of the role of feminism in “orthodox Marxism,” or the generation between Marx and the Third International. I do dislike that Dunayevskaya neglects the housework debates almost entirely, and especially because this is due to very petty personal beef with Selma James (they had formerly been part of the same political circle via CLR James).

Night-Vision by Butch Lee and Red Rover is an interesting Pantherist-Maoist analysis of class struggle, gender, and neocolonialism. They give a lot of attention to the development of a highly gendered proletariat in the late 20th century, marking shifts in the gendered structure of the wage away from the patterns of the father’s family wage and couverture.

The Point is to Change the World by Andaiye is a collection of essays analyzing similar themes. As an organizer she was on the ground in Guyana dealing with these new realities of the structure of the proletariat and trying to figure out a new global strategy for it.

Kinderkommunismus by K.D. Griffiths and J.J. Gleeson is a very good essay analyzing the patriarchal family in the 21st century and showing the importance of communizing kinship to communist political strategy, feminism, and transgender liberation

I HATE MORAL OCD. well i shouldnt say hate thats a strong word. and i dont want to sound like i hate people WITH moral ocd because i dont of course. i just hate having it. but i shouldnt think that, i do like having morals, its just stressful to be thinking about them so constantly and scrutinizing every little thing i do or think. but really thats the least i could do so i should at least try, right? just because i suffer from— no, struggle with moral ocd doesn’t mean i should just stop thinking about things all together, thats not what im saying and i should make that clear, but i

i get high & start actn like joe biden

nothing I take less seriously then people who say "oh my gods" come on now girl