Exactly. I asked earnestly because we already know that it wouldn’t be okay to use the n-slur in the same context. I want to challenge people to take ableist slurs more seriously.

Ironic.

If you were parodying a racist, would you use the n-slur?

Can we not use r-slur derivatives here please?

I just noticed his name is an ableist pun. Yuck.

It is definitely used by most people to mean that they’ve never been with a man. But of course, transphobes don’t see trans women as women, so… 🤢

Didn’t we just finish telling off people on Blahaj zone for making ableist comments like this?

Or, god forbid, use their Eminent Domain to take some private land along the sidewalk to improve life for poor people without impeding the ability of wheelchair users to navigate the city.

But that would anger the landowners, of course.

For the unfamiliar: “la sombrita” is the name of the corrugated metal piece on this bus stop post. It is designed to provide shade to people waiting for the bus, because the areas where these are installed have very little shade.

Due to a multitude of reasons from NIMBYs to building codes, it’s difficult for the city to install anything much bigger or better than this.

If you find this interesting, you can learn more by listening to episode 545 of the podcast 99% Invisible. It’s called “Shade Redux”

It’s a song that lures in discontented working class types with lyrics that court their hatred of their bosses and rich people who flaunt their wealth, but it also promotes right-wing talking points like “welfare queens.” It’s being talked about here because it has become very popular on social media recently. You do not have to listen to the song, it is not very good.

You just did, now. I’m saying that we know that not all of those are bot views simply because of the number of people talking about the song, and we shouldn’t dismiss its impact because it is absolutely having an impact.

Yes, I understand that. What I am trying to say is that they are dismissing the song’s impact as if every view was from a bot, when they are not. Real people are listening to and talking about it.

I think a simple part of the problem is that fascism “has it easy” when it comes to messaging: they get to scapegoat easy targets, and appeal to populism. We do not have the luxury of such easy-to-consume messaging. This is also why our memes get made fun of for being wordy or hard to understand, whereas right-wing memes can be easily distilled to “haha minority bad.”

We’re also fighting against decades of entrenched liberal propaganda in each individual we try to reach, whereas fascists get to build upon that foundation.

I feel like we need to make an effort to understand what people are trying to say and not shame them for communicating their ideas in a way that we don’t understand. To do the latter can be unintentionally ableist.

Am I reading something different than everyone else here? Because I completely understand what she’s trying to get at.

Leftists are dismissing the song because its early interest was astroturfed. This is throwing the baby out with the bathwater, because it has actual interest among people now, because of the astroturfing. How do we combat this problem? Just because we dismiss the song as astroturfed right-wing propaganda doesn’t mean the listeners are. The right is changing minds with content like this, and it’s problematic for us.

“It can’t be viral because it was astroturfed” isn’t a helpful assessment, because the song absolutely is viral now. It even came up in my feed on a music community. I clicked it because it looked like it would be up my alley based on the title and thumbnail (I enjoy folk music that shits on capitalists) and I only realized it was that song once I got to the line about people “milking welfare.” The astroturfing may have raised the song up the hill, but at a certain point it had enough views and such to carry it based on momentum.

What I think the author is trying to say is that the right is succeeding here, and largely leftist media fails to make the same impact. Probably because we don’t have the same connections that allow astroturfing that the people who pushed this song do. But that does leave a meaningful question: how do we reverse this trend and get people interested in leftist topics through arts and culture? How do we promote the material we have already created?

Edit: Oh no, I just heard it on the radio.

They call leftist spaces the “echo chambers,” yet they are the ones rushing to shut up opinions they don’t agree with by defederating. Kind of funny.