Alt Right goes Alt Banksy with amazing(ly dumb) Adidas meme

> Viscaria, History Nerd, Scildfreja Unnýðnes
Oh, ok, thank you for the explanation. It makes sense.

Ah, after all, it will not be the first time Nazis steal symbols rather than create them, the Small Mustachio had already done that with a Buddhist symbol.

> Scildfreja Unnýðnes
“elf-wife” : oh, pointy ears to nibble, yummy !
(Sorry, sometimes the fantasy take over.)

> Catalpa :
Not to forget the “usted” “ustedes” in Spanish.

Anyway, indeed, the realization that sometimes gender is undesired in a sentence hits the wall in France, where langage is pretty descriptive. The only neutral pronoun remains “on”, which is a bit of catchall pronoun : it can be used in place of any other pronoun, regardless of genders and quantities. But “on” is seen as a bit to “vulgar”, to be used only by the “common people”.
As some commenters have said it before, there are attempts to create more neutral pronouns like “el” or “ille” or “iel” or even “ol”, which can be used by or for persons who do not have or do not want to have their gender clearly specified. A neutral pronoun could also be good to designate all the non sentient things, as currently French attributes a gender to anything, even things which can do without. The only weak point i can see on this is that it can be a factor of discrimination, as long as the gendered pronouns are still used.

If I had a magic wish I would wish for English third-person pronouns to be replaced by Finnish non-gendered ones. Linguistic drift is going in the “they” direction, which I still struggle with after encountering it as the “neutral singular third-person” pronoun for my entire life. When I was a child, I tried for a period of time to get “he” and “she” replaced with a simple “‘e”, but that didn’t work out on account of me being a child. Also no clearcut replacement for his/her presented itself (“han” would work fine for this, with the umlaut lost because the English language has long since decided that it knows better than diacritical marks).

As a cis aro person, my opinion is not the most important in these matters, but I did grow up objecting to the male-as-default concept from a pretty early age, and am still having trouble accepting the “they” solution.

I think you’ll find that the plural of “you” is “youze”.

Au contraire. It is y’all. And the super-plural of y’all is all y’all. Y’all has a possessive: it is y’all’s, as in, “What are y’all’s hours?” when you call a business.

@Joekster

The radical conception of power was first outlined in Power: a Radical View by Steven Lukes. But you should start first with the mobilization of bias, which was first described by Bachrach and Baratz in 1962 in an article called “The Two Faces of Power.” I’ve seen this scanned online in a few places. It’s pretty accessible to a new reader. For Steven Lukes’ book, I recommend the library (or an interlibrary loan) rather than buying it.

Foucault … is not accessible to new readers. He was a professional philosopher and not writing for newbies. If you want to go to the primary source with him, you will need to be prepared to spend a lot (a LOT) of time with him, and for a bunch of what he says to go over your head. A non-trivial amount of time, he’s talking directly to other philosophers, especially Nietzsche and Marx, and if you aren’t familiar with what Nietzsche and Marx had to say, you won’t really get much out of that.

He was French and wrote in French, so I read translations. If you want to give it a shot and you read in English, I would recommend Power/Knowledge and Other Writings edited by Colin Gordon. Bring a notebook.

If you don’t want to go there (and I wouldn’t blame you) there is an okay overview of Foucault’s conception of power written by Peter Digeser. It’s called “The Fourth Face of Power” published in The Journal of Politics. I’ve also seen this scanned online occasionally. It’s pretty dense but it’s much less dense than Foucault himself. If you get a copy of this article, it references a ton of other resources on Foucault in the footnotes on the first page.

Good luck!

@Alan:

Ah yes, the whole ‘tu/vu’ thing. I understand there’s a similar thing in German.

Similar, but not the same. In French, for example, the second person formal is the same as the second person plural (vous). In German, though, the second person formal is the same as the third person plural. So if you’re talking to one person you know, you use ‘du’ (you). If you’re talking to multiple people you know, you use ‘ihr’ (y’all). If you’re talking to one person formally, though, you use ‘Sie’ (They; and yes, the capitalization is required).

@Axe

I’m so sick and tired of the white middle/working class and people tryna understand them. Fuck em. You’re not special.

Kinda tangential to this idea is the whole who is a “real American” thing. It’s always implied that rural/small town people are somehow better than those who live in urban areas. As someone who was actually born and raised on a farm and still lives in a very rural part of the country, it pisses me off that I’m used as an example of a “real” American. My ideas and needs are no more important than someone who lives in New York City. Of course, the whole rural/urban is pretty much just code for white/black.

Matchstick,

Thanks. That was a fun read. This is my favorite part

Instead, she lets them moan about how hard it is to be a dude in 2016, endorsing their anecdotal complaints about unfair family courts, incidents of men being tricked into being fathers and — I didn’t quite follow this one — one father’s conviction that the women who had custody of his son were systematically trying to make the boy fat. That story drags on forever, and Jaye cuts from it to footage of herself tooling around in her car, driving past a Super Cuts.

This is a pressing men’s rights issue? Having a fat son? I knew that feminists were conspiring to make young women fat so that we won’t lose the men we hate so much to them. I didn’t realize that we were supposed to be conspiring to make boys fat too. I’m not sure how that mission squares with our mission to ride alpha cock carousel though.

It also amuses me that half the movie seems to be footage of herself driving or doing Google searches. Sounds riveting!

How did the author see the film, as it’s not played anywhere yet?? Has he really seen it?? It premieres Oct. 7, today is the 4th. Has this pre-written hit piece been published early by mistake??

I’m sure Gary would be equally aghast at Ghostbusters being downvoted on sites like IMDb before it was ever released as well, right?

You is plural. The singular form is “thou”, obviously.

The plural “you” in my local dialect is “you guys,” but that runs into the same gender issue as Occasional Reader was talking about with “ils” et “elles.” It’s worse, actually, because even if you have a group of all women and girls, it’s still “you guys.” To combat that, I try to modify it online to “you folks” or “you all” or just the bare, sad, unadorned “you.”

Spontaneous speech is hard to change, though, so I still use “you guys” in my day to day life. Almost everyone I know irl speaks the same dialect, so it goes unremarked upon.

Like many amateurish Kickstarter docs, The Red Pill doesn’t always have visuals worth regarding on a screen, but I do cherish one flourish: an animated sequence of falling snowflakes, each with a different MRA complaint printed on it, meant to illustrate the movement’s diversity of grievances. There’s “Misandry”! There’s “Restraining Orders”! Even the metaphor is hilariously white.

Oh, this is so special.

You is plural. The singular form is “thou”, obviously.

Only in America. In Japan, the singular “you” is “Doki Doki Panic”.