Talking with some dudes in one of my online hobby forums, we got into a discussion about how so many personal care products are aggressively gendered and branded as FOR MANLY MEN, from soap to deodorants to accessories.

It took a bit for the light in my brain to go on and realize that capitalism is doing to men what it’s been doing to women for over a century: inventing new gendered needs and insecurities, then being like “no worries, we have a product to fix that.”

1/2

@Nonilex @MarvClowder Part of the reason our government never passed a comprehensive privacy law similar to the GDPR is that they wanted three-letter enforcement agencies to use the “data broker loophole” and now it’s coming back to bite us.

@emaytch @inthehands Elf on a Shelf is a cop

@Infoseepage So having seen it…I do have a couple issues with the show but my doubts about Alexander Skarsgård playing the title role are all erased. He really nails it and he is actually good at voiceover narration too.

@w7voa @bmacDonald94 John Roberts:

@futurebird @bmacDonald94 I stopped buying from Amazon and Target a few months ago. It raises the difficulty level of finding a bunch of stuff. Including my favorite soap which I bought through Amazon.

@MikeImBack The absurdity of other women yelling about these people being “men pretending to be women” when this male security guard barged in and was banging on the door is…something.

@RickiTarr @Thebratdragon She’d be on Fedi shitposting and being horny on main.

@RickiTarr @blogdiva Frederick Douglass would have been a star influencer, because he was a star influencer back in the 19th century too.

@MEActNOW @bmacDonald94 Starmer will probably do it too, it would be on-brand for him.

@GossiTheDog I have to say, as someone who lives in the D.C. area and is plugged into gossip networks of both civil servants and contractors…there is a lot of this kind of thing* going on lately.

*”This kind of thing” being “the contract is off, no, wait, now it’s back on.”

We in the great state of #maryland say fuck ICE

This would not have happened without a lot of citizen lobbying.

https://migrantinsider.com/p/maryland-slams-door-on-ice-raids

#USPol #USPolitics

@StillIRise1963 @GhostOnTheHalfShell This means we white people need to show up to more protests as cop repellent

Police, politicians, and the media engaged in a whole lot of consensus manufacturing and outright lying about the protests, the protesters, crime rates, the effectiveness of police, what they could do, and what they actually did.

One could be forgiven for getting the impression that the whole endeavor resulted in nothing good whatsoever, and arguably in a lot of bad things.

#USPol #USPolitics

/4

Now, there *have* been some positive outcomes at the local and state level in some places, like durable local organizing to unwind the power of the police state, more prosecutions and convictions for police misconduct, fewer people joining police forces, Colorado eliminating qualified immunity for cops, Baltimore getting local control of its police department, etc.

#USPol #USPolitics

/5

Overall, we didn’t get nearly the amount of local or national change we were hoping for. Or even what we might have reasonably expected.

This has a lot to do with politicians being both dependent on and afraid of the law enforcement bodies that nominally answer to them but that’s kind of beside the point.

#USPol #USPolitics

/6

The point is that it was incredibly demoralizing for a lot of people who were involved and almost certainly dampened the appetite for mass protests.

That’s not so say mass protests don’t work or won’t work or that there won’t be any more in America for the foreseeable future. I think there will be, and soon.

But don’t memory-hole the George Floyd protests or minimize their downstream effects on organizing, the police state, etc.

#USPol #USPolitics

/end

Non-USians wondering why Americans aren’t having mass protests should perhaps consider what happened *last* time we had a national protest movement here, all of - let me check my notes - 5 years ago.

Yes, I am referring to the George Floyd protests in 2020, by some measures the largest protest movement in American history.

#USPol #USPolitics

/1

The George Floyd protests looked a lot like what Canadians and EU citizens (as well as some Americans) say they want to see now.

People from all walks of life came out for mass demonstrations: in a few cities, especially Minneapolis, people went toe-to-toe with police.

In, e.g., New York and San Francisco, police attacked crowds of peaceful protesters and did things like firing tear gas indiscriminately into people’s homes.

#USPol #USPolitics

/2

Organizers were maliciously prosecuted, harassed, and had their lives ruined.

And what came out of this?

Cops got more money. Politicians made token gestures to protesters, licked the cops’ boots, and passed little or no legislation to curb police abuse (there were some positive counter examples in the years to follow but not much).

Some state and local leaders passed a bunch of anti-protest laws instead.

#USPol #USPolitics

/3