Why are they all like this?
I think I can can kind-of answer this… In short “class morality”.
At this point in my life I live in the shadow of the world’s richest, depraved, and frankly moronic city NYC. One thing I tend to notice is that people who live inside its core vs its periphery quite literally “talk different”. They relate differently to people around them. When I visit friends who I have had for a long time in the city and we’re alone everything seems normal. We relate, we talk, in much the same way we have always done. The problem is that once the party gets larger things start changing.
They don’t start changing in the way of “personal vs group dynamics” because these changes don’t happen when I am at a large gathering with my fellow provincials. These changes include not just “what” is talked about, but “how” it’s talked about, and how social value is formed around the members of the group. To summarize it derisively I hate these gatherings because they are “Reddit”.
They aren’t “Reddit” in the way we use 
here. They’re “Reddit” in the inherent structure and valuation of how posting on Reddit works. Essentially each participant is encouraged to show their “value” in the conversation by “speaking” (read posting) shortly with a quick interesting factual statement that is contemporary in nature. In essence the conversations have the same structure as browsing the title of posts on the Reddit front page. In fact most of the actual topics are ripped straight from Reddit or from something popular on social media. This is the end-all be-all of conversation with cosmopolitans. You may be thinking “what’s so bad about this”? Well the problem is that the interest in these topics is not authentic. These conversations only scratch the surface because they are field reports of consumption. Topics get brought up for about 30 seconds, there might be 2 or 3 people following up on a topic, and then it’s dropped. True to form the follow up are quite literally the same if not word for word stole from top upvoted comments on posts that the topics are scraped from. “Reddit” in a sense has turned into a “class morality”, an understanding of value of each other’s worth, position, and correct form of relation for these people. They do not relate to one another on personal levels, it’s gauche to have feelings and problems in a group setting. This social relation is simply a display of “value” derived from one’s media consumption. It’s the most boring book-report ass way of talking to another human being. Imagine you had a friend and the sum of your interactions with them is that in a few short sentences over 5 or so topic they summarize what they read on the internet that day – and that’s the only way you communicate. Awful.
Conversely among provincials in my friend groups there is space for personal vulnerability in group settings. Though people talk about what they’re watching on TV, the conversation does not revolve around the consumption of media. It revolves around our lives, hobbies, families, and interpersonal relations. What’s really interesting to me is that the “Reddit” class morality of cosmopolitans has literally overtaken gossip. They do not gossip about their friends! If they gossip they do “big gossip” like deuxmoi style. Another popular style of gossip is the style you find on 
. The same ceaseless conversations about guys called “Ethan Klien” and “Hasan Abi”, who are apparently locked in an immortal battle for the fate of the world as if they’re Dio Brando and Joseph Joestar. Either way the “gossip” is entirely consumptive and parasocial, it’s not actually social.
So techbros are often subcultures to these cosmopolitans. Much like the greater cosmopolitan, the diminutive techbro has the same “Reddit” social relation. Despite their characterization as “smart” or “nerds” in the greater culture, these people are often no smarter than the average of their superset of internet addled email job city dwellers. They simply work in something ostensibly called “tech”. So their “Reddit” based dialogues are tuned much more around the bullshit that the rich guys they want to be like enjoy. As an autistic person I often get trapped by a techbro who is talking about something I have or can find interest in (I’m computer / systems / mechanical autistic, take apart and put a stereo back together at 5 years old autistic). Then at one point the conversation falls out from under me as I realize they are only presenting as “smart” because they have stolen all their talking points, and do not even understand them practically.
The lib comments on here never disappoint.
This isn’t about furries, personal expression or suppressing queer identity. This isn’t about Republican lawmakers falling for rumors. This isn’t about cruelty for cruelty’s sake. This isn’t about the fact that a teacher in high-school didn’t like the way you dress or the gotchas of how they legally encode “non-human behavior”
I read the bill. It’s a transparent cash for kids play. The bill instructs every school district to create a
code of conductemployee handbook for students that explicitly lays out 4 punishment criterion and 6 punishment dimensions to judgeconductviolations on.The 4 punishment criterion are:
The 6 punishment exception dimensions are:
conductviolation“cogent”worth money)Along with that it says they must use the furry shit as lorem ipsum in the final doc.
They want each school to develop a school to prison pipeline for each and every kid possible. Criminalizing these behaviors is a way to incense their moronic base who can’t tell shit from shinola to allow schools to use their children as fucking financial instruments. And y’all are no better because you fell for it too just in the completely opposite direction. Being a furry doesn’t fucking matter! They want to allow transferring children to private corporations so those corps in turn can charge the government for warehousing and abusing them.
And you know who are the actual targets here? #4 on the punishment criterion. Disabled students. I clocked that shitty language from a mile away.
Neoliberal austerity and mandatory funding guidelines have created a structural situation where school administrators hate disabled students. They don’t want to figure out if kids have disabilities (like they’re mandated by law), because then they will have to pay for them. Now if this bill passes and you’re a school admin? What an easy fucking way to shed all those SPED teachers and paraprofessionals from the budget and fill admin pockets for a couple of years before claiming the win on local taxes and getting a promotion to city politics. They’ve got an easy out to send all those kids, who to them are just annoying expensive detrimental line items, to jail.
And the cool part? Child jail and alternative education programs aren’t school, so they don’t need SPED teachers or paraprofessionals. They don’t need to give support. They don’t need to do much of anything at all but jump through some paperwork hoops and show that at least 1 kid a year can do 1+1 in their head, it’s Texas after all. Pure profit baby, just like adult private prisons.
It’s quite literally doing the OSHA / unemployment / workers comp play on disabled kids, where for the purposes of regulation in this country and in many of it’s states your employers employee manual is an extension of labor law in some cases regarding safety, unemployment eligibility and workers comp eligibility. Same thing here: Sucks you’re disabled, the law says this isn’t discrimination because we posted signs everywhere telling you all the rules that if violated you’ll be sent to jail for. It’s “objective”. Now we can finally fire your teacher.
That’s what this is all about.
https://capitol.texas.gov/BillLookup/Text.aspx?LegSess=89R&Bill=HB4814
Disabled students are already punished at significantly higher rates for subjective “conduct violations”.
https://hechingerreport.org/students-with-disabilities-often-snared-by-subjective-discipline-rules/
They are statistically overall suspended and expelled at higher rates and the discipline of disabled students exacerbates these problems and increases harms done to them because they are removed from their legally mandated support structure through these draconian exclusions.
https://epicedpolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/working_paper_disabilities4WEB.pdf
And because of this cool thing called COVID-19, there are statistically more children that need support and qualify as disabled, not just the children suffering from long COVID effects, but the children affected by learning loss and stunted development due to social outcomes of the pandemic years especially in children that lived through the pandemic at age 8-18.
This belongs to all of you:
Stop fucking playing they’re dabbing on us.