Tootfinder

Smashing the Patriarchy auf dem Campingplatz is serious business!
So serious, dass ich jetzt mal zwei Wochen nix anderes mache 👋

Just finished "Decelerate Blue" written by Adam Rapp and illustrated by Mike Cavallaro. It's a dystopian graphic novel that I found... not that great. Maybe the best thing about it was the world-building around the propaganda language everyone is forced to speak, but overall I found the plot construction and characters to be underwhelming.
Despite being a book about resistance to fascist oppression, it doesn't meaningfully engage with any major axes of oppression like patriarchy, racism, capitalism, or colonialism, and it doesn't offer an interesting lessons on how to conduct resistance or what long-term outcomes one might hope for.
First graphic novel I've checked out in a while that I didn't really like that much.
#AmReading

Sometimes I wonder if Elon Musk isn't actually an <agent provocateur> for the fossil-fuel based patriarchy.
It seems so obvious that his various companies, in particular Tesla, have done all they could to discredit electric vehicles, and to undermine space exploration. He shoots up satellites with no plan for their end-of-life, and they disintegrate, polluting the air. Among many other things!

Refugees, intergenerational trauma, child death, abusive family
Also just finished "The Best We Could Do" by Thi Bui, which is the second memoir I've stumbled upon recently that deals with the Vietnamese exodus after the end of the war (House Without Walls by Ching Yeung Russel is the other one, which is written in verse, not illustrated). Bui traces more of the political landscape and history of Vietnam through the stories of both of her parents, and also unpacks a lot of intergenerational trauma, but has less focus on the boat trip out and refugee camp experience, presumably because hers were easier than Russel's.
My thoughts after reading this return repeatedly to all of the impacts that patriarchy and toxic masculinity had on her father, from setting up his father and grandfather to be abusive towards him and the women in their lives, to pushing him deep into depression when he feels unable to fulfill the role of a protective husband, ironically leaving his wife to pick up the slack and ultimately ruining their relationship, to how it teaches him to despise and shirk the caregiver role he's left with, ultimately passing on some measure of trauma to his children. For sure war, abusive family, and child death can happen in the absence of patriarchy and those are in some ways perhaps bigger factors here, but at the same time, Bui's mom copes with most of the same factors in healthier ways.
#AmReading

Speculative politics
As an anarchist (okay, maybe not in practice), I'm tired of hearing why we have to suffer X and Y indignity to "preserve the rule of law" or "maintain Democratic norms." So here's an example of what representative democracy (a form of government that I believe is inherently flawed) could look like if its proponents had even an ounce of imagination, and/or weren't actively trying to rig it to favor a rich donor class:
1. Unicameral legislature, where representatives pass laws directly. Each state elects 3 statewide representatives: the three most-popular candidates in a statewide race where each person votes for one candidate (ranked preference voting would be even better but might not be necessary, and is not a solution by itself). Instead of each representative getting one vote in the chamber, they get N votes, where N is the number of people who voted for them. This means that in a close race, instead of the winner getting all the power, the power is split. Having 3 representatives trades off between leisure size and ensuring that two parties can't dominate together.
2. Any individual citizen can contact their local election office to switch or withdraw their vote at any time (maybe with a 3-day delay or something). Voting power of representatives can thus shift even without an election. They are limited to choosing one of the three elected representatives, or "none of the above." If the "none of the above" fraction exceeds 20% of eligible voters, a new election is triggered for that state. If turnout is less than 80%, a second election happens immediately, with results being final even at lower turnout until 6 months later (some better mechanism for turnout management might be needed).
3. All elections allow mail-in ballots, and in-person voting happens Sunday-Tuesday with the Monday being a mandatory holiday. (Yes, election integrity is not better in this system and that's a big weakness.)
4. Separate nationwide elections elect three positions for head-of-state: one with diplomatic/administrative powers, another with military powers, and a third with veto power. For each position, the top three candidates serve together, with only the first-place winner having actual power until vote switches or withdrawals change who that is. Once one of these heads loses their first-place status, they cannot get it again until another election, even if voters switch preferences back (to avoid dithering). An election for one of these positions is triggered when 20% have withdrawn their votes, or if all three people initially elected have been disqualified by losing their lead in the vote count.
5. Laws that involve spending money are packaged with specific taxes to pay for them, and may only be paid for by those specific revenues. Each tax may be opted into or out of by each taxpayer; where possible opting out of the tax also opts you out of the service. (I'm well aware of a lot of the drawbacks of this, but also feel like they'd not necessarily be worse than the drawbacks of our current system.) A small mandatory tax would cover election expenses.
6. I'm running out of attention, but similar multi-winner elections could elect panels of judges from which a subset is chosen randomly to preside in each case.
Now I'll point out once again that this system, in not directly confronting capitalism, racism, patriarchy, etc., is probably doomed to the same failures as our current system. But if you profess to want a "representative democracy" as opposed to something more libratory, I hope you'll at least advocate for something like this that actually includes meaningful representation as opposed to the current US system that's engineered to quash it.
Key questions: "Why should we have winner-take-all elections when winners-take-proportionately-to-votes is right there?" and "Why should elected officials get to ignore their constituents' approval except during elections, when vote-withdrawal or -switching is possible?"
2/2
#Democracy

Feminist Coalitions that Erode the Patriarchy: New Realities for Old Problems
https://ift.tt/Z8eGMgE
updated: Thursday, July 24, 2025 - 2:24pmfull name / name of organization: Northeast Modern Language…
via Input 4 RELCFP

How popular media gets love wrong
Okay, so what exactly are the details of the "engineered" model of love from my previous post? I'll try to summarize my thoughts and the experiences they're built on.
1. "Love" can be be thought of like a mechanism that's built by two (or more) people. In this case, no single person can build the thing alone, to work it needs contributions from multiple people (I suppose self-love might be an exception to that). In any case, the builders can intentionally choose how they build (and maintain) the mechanism, they can build it differently to suit their particular needs/wants, and they will need to maintain and repair it over time to keep it running. It may need winding, or fuel, or charging plus oil changes and bolt-tightening, etc.
2. Any two (or more) people can choose to start building love between them at any time. No need to "find your soulmate" or "wait for the right person." Now the caveat is that the mechanism is difficult to build and requires lots of cooperation, so there might indeed be "wrong people" to try to build love with. People in general might experience more failures than successes. The key component is slowly-escalating shared commitment to the project, which is negotiated between the partners so that neither one feels like they've been left to do all the work themselves. Since it's a big scary project though, it's very easy to decide it's too hard and give up, and so the builders need to encourage each other and pace themselves. The project can only succeed if there's mutual commitment, and that will certainly require compromise (sometimes even sacrifice, though not always). If the mechanism works well, the benefits (companionship; encouragement; praise; loving sex; hugs; etc.) will be well worth the compromises you make to build it, but this isn't always the case.
3. The mechanism is prone to falling apart if not maintained. In my view, the "fire" and "appeal" models of love don't adequately convey the need for this maintenance and lead to a lot of under-maintained relationships many of which fall apart. You'll need to do things together that make you happy, do things that make your partner happy (in some cases even if they annoy you, but never in a transactional or box-checking way), spend time with shared attention, spend time alone and/or apart, reassure each other through words (or deeds) of mutual beliefs (especially your continued commitment to the relationship), do things that comfort and/or excite each other physically (anywhere from hugs to hand-holding to sex) and probably other things I'm not thinking of. Not *every* relationship needs *all* of these maintenance techniques, but I think most will need most. Note especially that patriarchy teaches men that they don't need to bother with any of this, which harms primarily their romantic partners but secondarily them as their relationships fail due to their own (cultivated-by-patriarchy) incompetence. If a relationship evolves to a point where one person is doing all the maintenance (& improvement) work, it's been bent into a shape that no longer really qualifies as "love" in my book, and that's super unhealthy.
4. The key things to negotiate when trying to build a new love are first, how to work together in the first place, and how to be comfortable around each others' habits (or how to change those habits). Second, what level of commitment you have right now, and what how/when you want to increase that commitment. Additionally, I think it's worth checking in about what you're each putting into and getting out of the relationship, to ensure that it continues to be positive for all participants. To build a successful relationship, you need to be able to incrementally increase the level of commitment to one that you're both comfortable staying at long-term, while ensuring that for both partners, the relationship is both a net benefit and has manageable costs (those two things are not the same). Obviously it's not easy to actually have conversations about these things (congratulations if you can just talk about this stuff) because there's a huge fear of hearing an answer that you don't want to hear. I think the range of discouraging answers which actually spell doom for a relationship is smaller than people think and there's usually a reasonable "shoulder" you can fall into where things aren't on a good trajectory but could be brought back into one, but even so these conversations are scary. Still, I think only having honest conversations about these things when you're angry at each other is not a good plan. You can also try to communicate some of these things via non-conversational means, if that feels safer, and at least being aware that these are the objectives you're pursuing is probably helpful.
I'll post two more replies here about my own experiences that led me to this mental model and trying to distill this into advice, although it will take me a moment to get to those.
#relationships #love