Fucked Up How Society Can Be Like "okay, Go To School" For 12-17 Years And Then Be Like "okay Enough

speakng from a place of privilege (favorite character who is alive),

Anytime I see someone complain about leftists who use too much “jargon” I instantly dismiss whatever else that person is about to say. Babygirl sometimes you are going to have to learn words to talk about economic theory.

Dulce María Loynaz, tr. by James O’Connor, from Absolute Solitude: Selected Poems

[Text ID: “Your hands have a strange clarity. Have you been walking among the stars?”]

"you are addicted to screens" no no you see i am actually addicted to my friends. unfortunately they live in there

‘don’t you want your favourite character to be happy???’ no? i want my favourite character to be interesting. i want me to be happy. which sometimes involves my favourite character being in exquisite agony

tumblr is gonna make more money off blaze, checkmarks, crabs, and shoelaces than it has under verizon and yahoo combined all because the users here have a sense of humour incomprehensible to most of civilisation. this website would spit on you before it'll buy something from an ad but by GOD does it know how to spend money on bullshit

Talking with someone about something serious and typing "Olay" instead of "Olay".

i love shakespeare academics. i fucking love them. there’s this one guy who wrote an essay about how claudius is actually possibly innocent, or at least didn’t kill the king by putting poison in his ear, and the ghost was in part a hallucination (it’s a really interesting essay with many good points and i’m using it in my final synthesis for this class) but. BUT. some guy read it on a train. and he lost it.

this guy literally said this essay drove him to “insanity”. he went off the fucking rails about it so much so that he wrote a book over the course of EIGHTEEN YEARS about what ACTUALLY happened in hamlet and dedicated it to the guy who wrote the essay as a big “fuck you”. and that exchange between them is literally inescapable when reading about the play today. here’s an excerpt from the beginning:

this is like. the equivalent of someone making a well-thought out discourse post and then out of nowehere someone reblogging it with thousands of words of pure furious rambling about why op is wrong YEARS LATER. this bullshit started a hundred years ago, literally in the middle of the first world fucking war, and i STILL cannot escape it while reading a book on hamlet published in fucking 2000 because it’s so iconic. and i love it.

I am extremely not going to dignify that 'walkable cities ARE ableist actually' post which has crossed my dash with a reblog, but four things to keep in mind:

'Walkable cities' is almost always a shorthand for 'cities which deprioritise cars as a mode of transport and make it possible and enjoyable to travel by other modes instead', rather than a call for everybody to walk and only walk everywhere all of the time. We live in a golden age of micromobility options, for starters. And when most people do not need to use cars, it will be much easier for people who do.

Advocacy for walkable cities and active transport often does slide right into ableism and fatphobia and this needs to be directly challenged whenever it appears (as someone who has been a cycle commuter my whole adult life and overweight for all but five minutes of my whole adult life, if I never hear "if everybody cycled we would solve the '''obesity epidemic'''!!!" again...)

AT THE SAME TIME, while this will change in degree from place to place, the Venn diagram between 'people who advocate for walkable cities' and 'people who advocate for accessible cities' has a significant degree of overlap. There's probably at least one car-centric conservative out there who genuinely advocates for accessibility by the law of averages, but it's neither a coherent nor common position. Walkability IS a form of accessibility. It is not accessibility for everybody but no single kind of accessibility is, which is why we need cities with MULTIPLE kinds.

Therefore, as with goddamn near everything in life, if you actually want to see more accessible cities...advocate for more accessible cities, and what that means for you. Going 'but there are some people who will always need cars therefore walkable cities is ableist' does exactly nothing except turn people off the idea of change. Say what you want to see. Be specific. Imagine better futures. TL;DR - cui bono when we lock ourselves into "cars vs walkability"? you guessed it - people who benefit from the (observably harmful) car-prioritising status quo. so is this assertion always a cynical psy-op? No. Does it function as one in practice? fuck yes. be smarter.