fracture

What he found was much more complicated. The leftist Parties—both Social Democrats and Communists—were unable to halt the spread of what he came to term the brown plague. He documents the sectarian and ideological operations of the respective parties, showing how the Communists acquiesced to the rise of the Nazi Party because they foolishly imagined that Nazi repression would mobilize the working class toward proletarian revolution. Many considered a Nazi regime a necessary step toward a socialist state, itself allegedly a step toward a stateless society.

ah,

i think you might have some decent thoughts surrounding what happened with ellen, OP, but good lord did you pick a terrible short to present them

cause hey, yeah. it turns out that you should be nice to people. EVEN IF YOU'RE A GAY ICON. i don't think that's an incorrect thing to worry about, and portraying people who do as "babies" reeks of what's possibly the same insensitivity that got ellen here in the first place

i also don't see why you think this is smart or funny, you're going to bat for a tremendously powerful person on the basis of... comedians shouldn't have to be nice? that doing one good thing for the world means you shouldn't be subject to scrutiny about your actions going forward? he honestly makes terrible points and his humor is painting moral standards as immaturity, like, idk what you see in him

anyways, there are a lot of intelligent, interesting discussions we could have about ellen. we could talk about how maybe she was subject to higher standards or increased scrutiny because she's a woman / gay / a gay woman. there's a lot to look at with regard to the allegations surrounding her show. it speaks highly of her that she took responsibility for those things when they happened, and that none of them implicated her

but, i mean, she also helped a handful of celebrities clean up their image when maybe she shouldn't have. there were a handful of things that showed, not that she's necessarily a bad person, but she's a rich person. hiring a non union crew for her show, getting buddy buddy with bush... like, i don't want to go to bat for her. you can be kind to people without being friendly, and the company you keep says a lot about you

and again, she's ungodly wealthy, and that has some known effects on the psyche. from someone who didn't really have a horse in this race, that's what it kind of seems like to me. she's not really a bad person, but needs to be liked really desperately. maybe that came about after the money, not before, idk. but at the end of the day, idk if i can say you can be rich and be kind. even if you give a lot to charity. at some point, it just becomes unethical to have more than a certain amount of money

but no, we can't have those discussions bc your "comedian" here made it all about how people criticizing ellen are babies for being concerned for being nice 🙄

sourcing mostly https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/features/ellen-degeneres-show-ending-allegations-b1846389.html, this seemed like a reasonably fair take on the situation

these people are real heroes

more than the content of the video, which i am already pretty much sold on, is a passing line mentioned in the video - "resilience is built on uniqueness". that's an idea i've never encountered before, would love to hear other people's opinions on it

i would have appreciated hearing how the author, personally, found capitalized pronouns to be affirming, because, absent that reasoning, it really does seem like it's to set up a deferential power dynamic. i don't really mind respecting the pronouns anyways, but it does mean i don't really want to be friends with Them until i understand what's going on there better

it's highly personal, so ideally you ask the individual and include their consent in your article. that said, generally speaking, trans people will use their current pronouns, even referring to their pre-transition selves. this is also what's generally considered polite if you don't know them, so it's pretty suspect that the article is not doing that

still, something about malice and incompetence....

rather than talk about my experience, i tend to think it's more helpful to have cisgender people imagine themselves in similar hypothetical situations:

1. imagine everyone in your life started using she/her pronouns for you. how would this make you feel? how does this affect how you react to them? how does this affect how they react to you?

2. imagine you woke up in a female body. how would you feel? imagine you had to adjust to it for a week. then a month. then a year. then ten years. what adjustments to your life would you have to make? how does this affect how people treat you? how does this affect your behavior? how would you feel about this situation? what would you miss about your previous body?

the second experience is essentially what it's like to be a transgender man, except it's from birth and you don't (necessarily) get to start with the knowledge you're a guy (some people more intuitively figure it out than others)

these questions hopefully help you develop a sense of what gender means to you, which should help you understand what gender means to us (obv it's not the same for everyone, and it's pretty binary, but it's a decent starting point)