disorder of written expression

Is there a reason why women aren’t supposed to wear socks? I mean casually. I suppose it has something to do with an unbroken leg line being more attractive, but I loathe the feel of a naked foot in a shoe, so much that I wears socks with every shoe, even heels. At one point I had a collection of crazy patterned ones I wore with big chunky platforms (shut up, it was the 90s) and jeans. I even had fishnet trouser socks. I thought I looked like Johnny Thunders. Glam rock > being a big dork.

I need to re-read Bob Mehr’s Replacements bio that came out last year. I remember someone on a fan group saying that Paul Westerberg had a lot in common with Lennon, something I never really believed to be true (anymore than I think someone is this generations “Dylan”), but I got a Lennon-vibe from the book, too, which I think says more about Mehr as a writer than Paul as an entertainer.

I maintain that Paul’s and Tommy Stinson’s dynamic is more like Ray and Dave Davies, minus the shared DNA.

The Republican healthcare plan: should we screw over poor people or old people? Wait… you mean we can do both?

“Democrats still have literally no idea why they keep losing elections,” [Tucker] Carlson said on his Tuesday night show. “If they did, they would have run a real candidate with a real job who understands the constituents he is attempting to represent.”

He continued:

“Instead, Democrats put up a 30-year-old semi-employed documentary filmmaker who can’t even vote for himself because he doesn’t live in the district.

He’s got a ton of trendy, rich-people positions on just about every topic. The abortion people love him. He is gravely concerned about climate and childhood obesity and the availability of organic kale. He thinks illegal aliens are noble. He went to the London School of Economics. He’s super fit and way smarter than you are.”

Handel’s messaging largely hit the same notes. Anti-Ossoff ads tried to link him to figures on the left like Kathy Griffin and Nancy Pelosi. They made hay out of the fact that he lived outside of the district. One of the ads literally said, “He’s just not one of us.”

Vox is praising the insight of… Tucker Carlson?

The “not one of us” trope has been leveled at dems long before the last election, though self-reflection is warranted if you want to stop losing votes. To be honest, I don’t think it’s in the dems best interest to court Mr. Average working white guy, not because I think the concerns of working-class white voters are unimportant, but I can’t conceive of a way to garner those voters generations lost to Republicans without alienating a host of other voters. One big problem is that there isn’t a platform sympathetic to people who are economically centrist or liberal, but socially conservative. I’m not advocating to a return to traditional values, but those people are easily swayed by populist appeals (though not the “hippie socialism” of a Bernie Sanders).

(Source: vox.com)

Something I’ve been thinking of as I watched a video on the Guardian’s Facebook page about a little girl whose parents thought she was gifted who turned out to be autistic (or both) is how my generation, and generations past, before the DSM-IV, which expanded the parameters of many disorders, and the advent of direct-to-consumer marketing of psychotropic drugs (these two things, as most people have probably figured out, are not mutually exclusive) defined disorder – and normality. I’m not saying we had it better, but it’s baffling to me, to see a little girl not wholly unlike myself at that age, being labeled “disabled.” Growing up even in the ass-end of the eighties, my working-class parents for whom therapy was a luxury, my catholic school that deemed errant behavior a “problem” not a disorder, I wonder if we were, in fact, better off. Being labeled early in life, while giving shape to your experience, can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

One of the hardest things to do in the Tumblr universe is coherently argue that just because something is real, or you feel it real hard, doesn’t mean that it’s a problem when a lot of people are using it as a “get out of privilege free” card. This is why privilege arguments often fail when they’re applied to individuals – it sets in place a system where we’re the sum of where we place on various axes of privilege, and at the same time makes it acceptable to refer to someone as your “literal oppressor,” therefore, your opinion is meaningless. I bring this up again because I just read a post on a reddit sub about stretching the meaning of disability to the point that now common aliments can be considered a disability. (I’m nodded along as I remember one of my peak liberal whatever moments was watching someone quite seriously claim to be disabled because of… seasonal allergies.) Granted, that’s extreme and I’m pretty sure if someone did that now they’d be rightly called out, but there’s a sort of forced compassion where you’re not allowed to question someone’s… here we go… lived experience, even when they’re being ridiculous. For the same reason, I’m against “big tent” neurodiversity even though it puts me, someone who likes to blog about neurodiversity and mental illness, in a kind of weird gray area, like “maybe… maybe not so much.” But I’m okay sacrificing my own comfort for the sake of discourse or whatever.

I have some broader theories on how things like disability and queerness (I know some people don’t like that word, sorry) are viewed by the general public and how they are at Tumblr, but again, using Tumblr as a platform to criticize a very crucial piece of the whole Tumblr mindset is like, ooh, don’t wanna go there.