Help us out: what do you think “First World,” “Second World,” and “Third World” actually mean? The terms referred to cold war political alignment: the U.S.-led bloc, the Soviet-led bloc, and countries aligned with neither. It was not a tidy ranking from rich and civilized to poor and backward.
Yes those were the original definitions but colloquial usage has shifted from the original meaning. Although these days the preferred terminology is developed/developing/under developed.
Or "2/3rds world" (as in the majority of countries neither aligned with Soviet Communism nor US Capitalism and therefore not as exploited or industrialized/polluting)
Being more concerned with the words used than the intended meaning is an internetism that harms us all. I'm guilty of this too..
It's tricky though, because words have meaning- and that meaning really depends on context. Not just the context in which it's spoken, but also the context is the one speaking it. And often people online who think they're arguing are really just misunderstanding each other's definitions.
You're absolutely right. In this instance I mistakenly thought it was obvious for most that I did not mean im the strict literal definition. Oh well, no big deal
I mean it in the colloquial sense based on how well taken care of the people are. No I am not writing a dissertation. This is a discussion on a message board where people may use hyperbole to make their opinion clear
taking the lord's name in vain or cultural appropriation
America
The USA, not the rest of America
backwards
reproduces the notion of the linear progression of civilization, a liberal colonialist fabrication
shithole
a shithole implies a shitter outside of it, but the US is not being shat upon from the outside
filled with
implies there are no others, which isn't true
evil
binary thinking and possible essentialism
-tards
slur against the mentally disabled
is a fuck.
Correct, v-coding is rape.
Wow, I knew the USA structurally empowers people to engage in great cruelty, but I hadn't imagined this in particular. It's probably recency bias but this feels like a new low.
our prisons, mental institutions, and boarding schools are all reflective of the European patriarchal colonial system that composes the framework of the foundation of the united states. just as Phoenicia made a colony so huge it supplanted Phoenicia's empire in Carthage, so too has America shifted the center of the eurocentric settler colonial project. you ask why America is why it is, the answer is because Europeans were so sure of the righteousness and superiority of their civilizations that they traveled to this continent and raped, killed, and enslaved the societies they found here.
Nah, Europe, Mexico and Canada all had the same influence but managed to avoid the prison/slavery complex with profit driven sexual torture, there's probably something else at work in the US
this is a form of American Exceptionalism that ignores that Mexico and Canada both have legacies of prison/slavery complexes with profit driven sexual torture. Mexican people have reduced (perhaps even eliminated, i'm not an expert on current Mexican affairs) the presence of this influence through generations of education, healing, and resistance to imperialist tendencies coming into mesoamerica to extract everything of value. In Canada the scars of the provincial school system are still felt today with the last residential school having closed in 1997, 29 years ago. There are 34 year olds alive today who remember first hand the sexual violence they experienced at the hands of Canadian sponsored torture facilities. Canadian police continue the practice of driving indigenous women far away from the warmth of their homes, forcing them to walk through the cold, condemning them to death.
There is nothing special that makes America more wrong than any other State. it is merely a coagulation of the worst tendencies present in all states concentrated by the capitalist necessity to extract everything of value from the land and people. The solution is for the people of the world, everywhere they are, to block the barricades until Sudan, Congo, Ukraine, Palestine, the Dakotas, and everywhere else the imperial tendencies of the global north torture, lynch, and enslave the people are free. America's torture is resistable just like the tortures conducted in Mexico and Canada.
absolutely. the extractive capitalist imperial project found safe haven in our governments hall's (more arguably, founded and defined our government since the origins of the US are an alliance of Virginia's purely capitalist project and Massachusetts' purely theocratic project)
Canadian police continue the practice of driving indigenous women far away from the warmth of their homes, forcing them to walk through the cold, condemning them to death.
practice was officially ended in 2018, but the most recent death that matches this motus operendi was in 2021 in case anyone thinks this is some forgotten thing we're relitigating
Neither have had for-profit prisons with systematised sexual torture, but even if they did I'd lean into the recency bias and ask: if they could move past it, why did the US double down when faced with better alternatives?
Places do not torture, enslave, and rape. People do. I am not interested in absolving or shifting blame, but rather in deconstructing the fascist ideologies used to justify these behaviors. In the case of American Exceptionalism the notion is that white straight cisgender males are superior to all other people, and then violently enforcing that norm.
We're not blaming Europeans, we're acknowledging that we are Europeans and that our current society and culture are rooted in European settler-colonialism. As a white man born in America I can trace my roots directly back to Europe, and our culture and political system reflect those roots. If that makes you uncomfortable then perhaps you should do some self-reflection.
It's not so much nonsense as it is uncomfortable truth. It's very, very uncomfortable. But it is also true. None of us alive today chose to benefit from the things our ancestors did, the systems they built, the territories and resources they claimed, the wars they won, the people they killed. But we did benefit from them, we still do, and we are responsible for understanding and acknowledging that. It does not really have to be a big deal, but the longer and harder we refuse to genuinely accept that, the bigger a deal it becomes.
It's not "white guilt" to understand that exactly the same things you worked hard for are also things other, much poorer people are also working just as hard for, and quite possibly much harder, while objectively accomplishing much less because of exactly that history. It also hurts to admit that some of that racist colonial history isn't actually history, because it actually isn't totally gone yet. Nobody's saying we have to instantly paint the entire globe with fairness. It's no person's sole responsibility, but it is a shared responsibility that we need to be making an honest effort towards, and we should be held responsible if we ignore, minimize and deny those things.
There's a lot of different directions I could go in defense and support of these principles, but I don't think it would lead to productive discussion and I think it would be better for people to simply dismiss me as a naive, idealistic bleeding-heart liberal who can't possibly grasp reality. But whether you agree with it being achievable or not, I think we should agree that whenever it is possible to move the needle at all, we should try at least to some degree. The first steps of any sort of improvements towards equality require acknowledging the premise in the first place. We have to understand the problem, that equality does not yet exist because genuine harm was done in the past and those consequences have continued to the present, not because some people and groups of people are inherently lazy or stupid or bad. A lot of people are very, very resistant to even admitting that, because they're afraid that it will make them liable, that it will cost them something. And ironically, by denying it, I think it actually should cost them something. Only the truth shall set us free.
It's Europe's fault that transgender persons are assigned to rapey cellmates in us prisons? That is the dumbest fucking shit I have ever read, but I guess in a weird way you did answer my question.
Not present day Europe's, but we have to understand what the outcomes and origins of settler colonialism are in order to understand how to resist it. American Exceptionalism is rooted in the notion the white Europeans are superior to Black Africans, indigenous Americans, and Asian and Pacific Islander people. There is an America today because in the 1500-1700s the European monarchies under the protocapitalist framework of mercantilism sought to own the entire world, including the inhabitants therein. America's founding fathers were Europeans influenced by the enlightenment movement, and the country they built was reflective of the Eurosupremacism of the time, which quickly gave way to scientific racism formulated by anglosphere thinkers to justify the industrialized rape of Africa in the 1800s.
All I'm saying is that to resist these things we have to look at the history of how they started and then resist the tendencies that brought them about
That is some primary grade deflection. Imagine being so far up the ass of their own country that they can't even admit that their country has problems of its own that needs fixing.
All this fucking shit happens in the US, and not to the same extent in most European countries, so much for your precious "it's all Europe's fault" theory.
i have not said that the US does not problems. far from it. I even said it is a coagulation of all the things that make States bad and wrong. what needs to happen is the power of the authority of the United States must be dissolved so that the process of communal healing can actually begin. the settler colonial tendencies that america promotes in the world will continue to go on unabated, just as they have for the last 6000 years, unless we resist these tendencies together
You could have used the word "combination" or "mix" or any other common word that everyone understands, but you chose for some reason to use "coagulation".
Now I'm not saying I don't know what my blood does when it gets exposed to air, I'm saying why are you using 5 dollar words to sound smarter than you are?
Your replies are so on point I'm saving this comment thread. This also really opened my eyes to the narrow mindedness of others. Sometimes broader historical knowledge is necessary to understand present day conditions.
well i'm glad. i do my best to maintain an empathetic approach while also speaking the truth into the world my government wants to kill. this thread has been more mentally taxing than i would have preferred, but i keep reminding myself that it still connected with at least a few people even if all the comments are saying i'm in denial about that very same government's core nature and trying to deflect blame from it.
I'm convinced they put something in the water and/or air and/or food to make some of us greedy self centered seething pieces of shit. Unfortunately those are the people in power.
i would say there's something to be said for the broad impacts idustrialized food has on the gut biome, and the gut biome's influence on persona. that's more of a critique of capitalistic tendancies though than a direct endorsement of any hypothesis that some central cabal intentionally poisons us.
that said, if you told me nestle, nabisco, monsanto, and unilever do intentionally poison us to keep us fighting and themselves on top, i'd endorse that notion, too, and have put at least some thought into the possibility
2017 study by the Sylvia Rivera Law Project found that 75% of trans women respondents in New York state prisons were subjected to sexual violence by a correctional officer
Its my fault for coming to lemmy hoping for some mindless escapism.
I get gut punched each time I open my feed. My understanding of the world shows me a bleaker, more disgusting image every time. I appreciate you sharing this and opening my eyes, thanks.
You either gotta use an app/front-end with filters, or accept having your mind expanded, be it for good or ill (or both, since one can lead to the other).
I prefer the second option 99/100, but I do have an app that's heavily filtered for when I just can't bear the ugliness of the world for a few hours.
I used to frequent 9gag when it was mostly ragecomics, countryballs etc. (and also quite some time after that), but nowadays its just xenophobia, racism and incels.
Also keep in mind: trans women are toys in prison. They want to keep them in longer, they give them sex offender charges for resisting (the trans sexual predator claim comes from this partly, other than that is that many trans women turn to prostitution to survive, which is a sex offence)
On top of that, BOP policy is to cut off hormones and do conversion torture. So they toss you in a cell to be raped like a woman, while trying to torture you into not being one.
Cutting of hormones is worse than simply forcing a detransition. Suddenly stopping produces effects similar to menopause until her natural testosterone return to typical male levels. Depending on what other procedures she has had done, a transwomen without artificial hormones may never return to healthy hormone levels for either gender.
That’s insane. I don’t have it in me right now to look further into this. I’m sure there are plenty of testimonies and accounts that are terrible and difficult to read. I just can’t. The spectre of that being part of the deal for our incarcerated sisters makes me fear prison even more.
Rape is practically universal in US prisons. The problem is vastly underreported, we'll never know the true extent of it. It's not just inmates (of all kinds), the guards revel in it.
... and we have more prisoners than any other country, there are millions of inmates.
Of course, we could make the guards wear cameras with every room being monitored, but I guess why bother? We're not going to charge them anyway.
Our entire culture is one of raping. We rape the land, our neighboring countries, the oceans, the financial system, and each other in every way conceivable.
Been to jail. Dropping soap is a real thing when theres also dudes who will try to get new people locked in their personal cell during shift change for an hour.
I always like to point out that it's just the highest reported incarcerated population on the planet. There's countries way bigger than America that don't have as much freedom of information, like we're reading right now.
In the context of incarceration in the United States, V-coding is the common practice by carceral staff of subjecting trans women to sexual assault by placing the woman in the same prison cell as an aggressive male inmate in order to placate the male inmate.^[1][2][3]^ This practice has been known to have caused the daily rapes of multiple trans women, and the sexual assaults of 58.5% of them.^[4][5][6]^ V-coding is done to pacify the male inmate, with the goal of reducing their propensity for violence against other inmates, according to prison authorities and one inmate.^[1][2]^ The term has also been used to refer to the broader systemic sexual abuse of trans women in male prisons.
This article is a bit tough to understand. What is the expected logic of such practices? I know its a horrific phenomenon all-around, but what was even the initial idea of how this could possibly be a net good for any entity involved?
The "net good" here is that it's torture for us. It's good sport for those in power in prison. There's also the fact that those in power can earn a little side hustle from relatively zero risk: you don't need to smuggle anything into the prison to sell, you just sell one prisoner to the next. That is the society we live in.
Things are pretty fucked up right now for us literally everywhere. We're fucking dying here. Educate yourself.
They take aggressive men and let them vent some steam off by raping a woman. This reduces their aggression towards other inmates and makes them more controllable.
Since trans women are basically treated there as subhumans, no one cares of them in this equation.
116 replies
Jesus America is a third world country.
No. The US is very much a first world country. It's literally the definition. It is the US.
And this is what a capitalist country does. This is what first world countries look like.
Nah. The Scandinavian countries are what I consider true first world.
Help us out: what do you think “First World,” “Second World,” and “Third World” actually mean? The terms referred to cold war political alignment: the U.S.-led bloc, the Soviet-led bloc, and countries aligned with neither. It was not a tidy ranking from rich and civilized to poor and backward.
Yes those were the original definitions but colloquial usage has shifted from the original meaning. Although these days the preferred terminology is developed/developing/under developed.
under developed is only preferred in academic circles, particularly economics. most other places refer to such places as "over-exploited"
Or "2/3rds world" (as in the majority of countries neither aligned with Soviet Communism nor US Capitalism and therefore not as exploited or industrialized/polluting)
I agree with you and you are correct but this is linguistic prescriptivism, which is one of the things the what is a woman crowd cling to
but the other people using third wold country to mean allows sex abuse makes my skin crawl
Examine your preconceived ideas, before they examine you
I did not mean third world to mean that, but rather in the colloquial sense of how much a country takes care of its people.
Understood that so many on this platform strictly care about historical definitions and prescriptive language policing though
Being more concerned with the words used than the intended meaning is an internetism that harms us all. I'm guilty of this too..
It's tricky though, because words have meaning- and that meaning really depends on context. Not just the context in which it's spoken, but also the context is the one speaking it. And often people online who think they're arguing are really just misunderstanding each other's definitions.
You're absolutely right. In this instance I mistakenly thought it was obvious for most that I did not mean im the strict literal definition. Oh well, no big deal
I mean it in the colloquial sense based on how well taken care of the people are. No I am not writing a dissertation. This is a discussion on a message board where people may use hyperbole to make their opinion clear
:::: spoiler Q. What do you call a third world country that takes care of its people as well as Scandinavia?
A. Overdue for a CIA coup
::::
::: spoiler 🇺🇲🧑🚀🔫🧑🚀 has always been. :::
No, they aren't and that is the sad thing. They could be a great country. They choose this instead.
FTFY
:::: spoiler CW: nitpicking
taking the lord's name in vain or cultural appropriation
The USA, not the rest of America
reproduces the notion of the linear progression of civilization, a liberal colonialist fabrication
a shithole implies a shitter outside of it, but the US is not being shat upon from the outside
implies there are no others, which isn't true
binary thinking and possible essentialism
slur against the mentally disabled
Correct, v-coding is rape.
Wow, I knew the USA structurally empowers people to engage in great cruelty, but I hadn't imagined this in particular. It's probably recency bias but this feels like a new low.
::::
when you see people argue that trans women should be in men's prisons, understand that this is what they argue in favor of.
And they think it’s part of it. They assume everyone who goes to prison deserves everything they get.
The cruelty is the point.
Fucking Hell americans. Why are you like this?
our prisons, mental institutions, and boarding schools are all reflective of the European patriarchal colonial system that composes the framework of the foundation of the united states. just as Phoenicia made a colony so huge it supplanted Phoenicia's empire in Carthage, so too has America shifted the center of the eurocentric settler colonial project. you ask why America is why it is, the answer is because Europeans were so sure of the righteousness and superiority of their civilizations that they traveled to this continent and raped, killed, and enslaved the societies they found here.
Nah, Europe, Mexico and Canada all had the same influence but managed to avoid the prison/slavery complex with profit driven sexual torture, there's probably something else at work in the US
this is a form of American Exceptionalism that ignores that Mexico and Canada both have legacies of prison/slavery complexes with profit driven sexual torture. Mexican people have reduced (perhaps even eliminated, i'm not an expert on current Mexican affairs) the presence of this influence through generations of education, healing, and resistance to imperialist tendencies coming into mesoamerica to extract everything of value. In Canada the scars of the provincial school system are still felt today with the last residential school having closed in 1997, 29 years ago. There are 34 year olds alive today who remember first hand the sexual violence they experienced at the hands of Canadian sponsored torture facilities. Canadian police continue the practice of driving indigenous women far away from the warmth of their homes, forcing them to walk through the cold, condemning them to death.
There is nothing special that makes America more wrong than any other State. it is merely a coagulation of the worst tendencies present in all states concentrated by the capitalist necessity to extract everything of value from the land and people. The solution is for the people of the world, everywhere they are, to block the barricades until Sudan, Congo, Ukraine, Palestine, the Dakotas, and everywhere else the imperial tendencies of the global north torture, lynch, and enslave the people are free. America's torture is resistable just like the tortures conducted in Mexico and Canada.
Yeah but the US did it at a scale an order of magnitude greater. We have more prisoners than most of the world combined.
absolutely. the extractive capitalist imperial project found safe haven in our governments hall's (more arguably, founded and defined our government since the origins of the US are an alliance of Virginia's purely capitalist project and Massachusetts' purely theocratic project)
This is a hilariously demented delusional rant.
They're right, cry about it
Is your avatar Jay Leno?
It's Flabber from the show BeetleBorgs, but also yes they definitely designed the character to look like Jay Leno
No they don't.
the most recent incident i could find for the stretch of highway i have Friends near was 2023
Highway of Tears is one thing... But there are also years of starlight tours.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlight_tours
practice was officially ended in 2018, but the most recent death that matches this motus operendi was in 2021 in case anyone thinks this is some forgotten thing we're relitigating
You're losing
It’s just the place where those forces were concentrated the strongest. It could have happened anywhere but it happened in the USA.
Lol, and it just so happened that everywhere else has had the self control and ethical standards to avoid it.
The US sure is supremely and consistently unlucky in that regard
Delusional
that’s revisionist as fuck
east India company anyone?
what about the literal Aztec empire and human slave sacrifice
we just tend to be temporally biased
Neither have had for-profit prisons with systematised sexual torture, but even if they did I'd lean into the recency bias and ask: if they could move past it, why did the US double down when faced with better alternatives?
wait you think east india wasnt about profit and had no sexual abuse?
they didn’t ‘move past it’
the British got fucked militarily and aztec society collapsed
we’re on schedule for either end atm
the us isnt gonna stop doing any of this before them either
rich abusive fucks wont stop because you protest peacefully or virtue signal on the interwebs
What are you talking about?
Just Americans trying to cope with their shithole the only way they know how: blame it on someone or some place else.
Places do not torture, enslave, and rape. People do. I am not interested in absolving or shifting blame, but rather in deconstructing the fascist ideologies used to justify these behaviors. In the case of American Exceptionalism the notion is that white straight cisgender males are superior to all other people, and then violently enforcing that norm.
We're not blaming Europeans, we're acknowledging that we are Europeans and that our current society and culture are rooted in European settler-colonialism. As a white man born in America I can trace my roots directly back to Europe, and our culture and political system reflect those roots. If that makes you uncomfortable then perhaps you should do some self-reflection.
when even the .ml users are like "wtf is this nonsense I am reading"
It's not so much nonsense as it is uncomfortable truth. It's very, very uncomfortable. But it is also true. None of us alive today chose to benefit from the things our ancestors did, the systems they built, the territories and resources they claimed, the wars they won, the people they killed. But we did benefit from them, we still do, and we are responsible for understanding and acknowledging that. It does not really have to be a big deal, but the longer and harder we refuse to genuinely accept that, the bigger a deal it becomes.
It's not "white guilt" to understand that exactly the same things you worked hard for are also things other, much poorer people are also working just as hard for, and quite possibly much harder, while objectively accomplishing much less because of exactly that history. It also hurts to admit that some of that racist colonial history isn't actually history, because it actually isn't totally gone yet. Nobody's saying we have to instantly paint the entire globe with fairness. It's no person's sole responsibility, but it is a shared responsibility that we need to be making an honest effort towards, and we should be held responsible if we ignore, minimize and deny those things.
There's a lot of different directions I could go in defense and support of these principles, but I don't think it would lead to productive discussion and I think it would be better for people to simply dismiss me as a naive, idealistic bleeding-heart liberal who can't possibly grasp reality. But whether you agree with it being achievable or not, I think we should agree that whenever it is possible to move the needle at all, we should try at least to some degree. The first steps of any sort of improvements towards equality require acknowledging the premise in the first place. We have to understand the problem, that equality does not yet exist because genuine harm was done in the past and those consequences have continued to the present, not because some people and groups of people are inherently lazy or stupid or bad. A lot of people are very, very resistant to even admitting that, because they're afraid that it will make them liable, that it will cost them something. And ironically, by denying it, I think it actually should cost them something. Only the truth shall set us free.
It's Europe's fault that transgender persons are assigned to rapey cellmates in us prisons? That is the dumbest fucking shit I have ever read, but I guess in a weird way you did answer my question.
Not present day Europe's, but we have to understand what the outcomes and origins of settler colonialism are in order to understand how to resist it. American Exceptionalism is rooted in the notion the white Europeans are superior to Black Africans, indigenous Americans, and Asian and Pacific Islander people. There is an America today because in the 1500-1700s the European monarchies under the protocapitalist framework of mercantilism sought to own the entire world, including the inhabitants therein. America's founding fathers were Europeans influenced by the enlightenment movement, and the country they built was reflective of the Eurosupremacism of the time, which quickly gave way to scientific racism formulated by anglosphere thinkers to justify the industrialized rape of Africa in the 1800s.
All I'm saying is that to resist these things we have to look at the history of how they started and then resist the tendencies that brought them about
This is what it sounds like when someone from a middle class background does meth.
i grew up in poverty
^ This is what anti-intellectualism sounds like.
I've never known anyone on meth to write such a thoughtful analysis of the United States' European settler-colonial origins.
They're right, cry about it
That is some primary grade deflection. Imagine being so far up the ass of their own country that they can't even admit that their country has problems of its own that needs fixing.
All this fucking shit happens in the US, and not to the same extent in most European countries, so much for your precious "it's all Europe's fault" theory.
i have not said that the US does not problems. far from it. I even said it is a coagulation of all the things that make States bad and wrong. what needs to happen is the power of the authority of the United States must be dissolved so that the process of communal healing can actually begin. the settler colonial tendencies that america promotes in the world will continue to go on unabated, just as they have for the last 6000 years, unless we resist these tendencies together
You could have used the word "combination" or "mix" or any other common word that everyone understands, but you chose for some reason to use "coagulation".
Now I'm not saying I don't know what my blood does when it gets exposed to air, I'm saying why are you using 5 dollar words to sound smarter than you are?
coagulate because American power is a dangerous blood clot that will give the world a stroke death if it isn't dissolved
Your replies are so on point I'm saving this comment thread. This also really opened my eyes to the narrow mindedness of others. Sometimes broader historical knowledge is necessary to understand present day conditions.
well i'm glad. i do my best to maintain an empathetic approach while also speaking the truth into the world my government wants to kill. this thread has been more mentally taxing than i would have preferred, but i keep reminding myself that it still connected with at least a few people even if all the comments are saying i'm in denial about that very same government's core nature and trying to deflect blame from it.
I appreciate the poetic word choice even if yucandu doesn't lol.
i'm not who chose it. it's a very popular word to describe the bloody and violent concentration of authority that abolitionists resist
Eh, actually fits better, though I don't think the guy you're replying to intended it that way.
America was founded by the crazies that weren't allowed to be as repressive as they wanted to be in Europe.
Do you really think people on the fediverse are unfamiliar with the word coagulation?
And if they are, they can look it up. Learning new words is a good thing.
https://www.wisdomofpeterson.com/
you know Jordan Peterson, famed white supremacist, always saying how white supremacy is a bad thing
I'm convinced they put something in the water and/or air and/or food to make some of us greedy self centered seething pieces of shit. Unfortunately those are the people in power.
i would say there's something to be said for the broad impacts idustrialized food has on the gut biome, and the gut biome's influence on persona. that's more of a critique of capitalistic tendancies though than a direct endorsement of any hypothesis that some central cabal intentionally poisons us.
that said, if you told me nestle, nabisco, monsanto, and unilever do intentionally poison us to keep us fighting and themselves on top, i'd endorse that notion, too, and have put at least some thought into the possibility
We let McConnell pack the courts with fascists for decades, now the chickens come home to roost.
But have you tried blaming Europe?
Holy fuck
Its my fault for coming to lemmy hoping for some mindless escapism. I get gut punched each time I open my feed. My understanding of the world shows me a bleaker, more disgusting image every time. I appreciate you sharing this and opening my eyes, thanks.
For you it's mindless scrolling. For us it's daily life. Help us.
You either gotta use an app/front-end with filters, or accept having your mind expanded, be it for good or ill (or both, since one can lead to the other).
I prefer the second option 99/100, but I do have an app that's heavily filtered for when I just can't bear the ugliness of the world for a few hours.
Knowing the truth is important. So is staying strong enough to fight. Part of staying strong enough to fight is tending to your emotional well-being.
Please take breaks when you need. Friendship and sunsets and butterflies still exist. Use them as often as you can🫂
Go to imgur, 9gag, krazframe, 4chan, memify, etc
Lemmy is like reddit- an unhealthy mix of trolls and legit discussions
I used to frequent 9gag when it was mostly ragecomics, countryballs etc. (and also quite some time after that), but nowadays its just xenophobia, racism and incels.
Oh wow you're right. I hadn't been there for a while.. jeeze..
Jesus Fucking Christ.
I feel sick. :(
Also keep in mind: trans women are toys in prison. They want to keep them in longer, they give them sex offender charges for resisting (the trans sexual predator claim comes from this partly, other than that is that many trans women turn to prostitution to survive, which is a sex offence)
On top of that, BOP policy is to cut off hormones and do conversion torture. So they toss you in a cell to be raped like a woman, while trying to torture you into not being one.
Cutting of hormones is worse than simply forcing a detransition. Suddenly stopping produces effects similar to menopause until her natural testosterone return to typical male levels. Depending on what other procedures she has had done, a transwomen without artificial hormones may never return to healthy hormone levels for either gender.
That’s insane. I don’t have it in me right now to look further into this. I’m sure there are plenty of testimonies and accounts that are terrible and difficult to read. I just can’t. The spectre of that being part of the deal for our incarcerated sisters makes me fear prison even more.
Rape is practically universal in US prisons. The problem is vastly underreported, we'll never know the true extent of it. It's not just inmates (of all kinds), the guards revel in it.
... and we have more prisoners than any other country, there are millions of inmates.
Of course, we could make the guards wear cameras with every room being monitored, but I guess why bother? We're not going to charge them anyway.
Our entire culture is one of raping. We rape the land, our neighboring countries, the oceans, the financial system, and each other in every way conceivable.
sodomy in US prisons is a JOKE to Americans.
ever hear one of them say: 'dont drop the soap' like its something to laugh about?
Propagated as a scare tactic to keep men subservient to law enforcement
Been to jail. Dropping soap is a real thing when theres also dudes who will try to get new people locked in their personal cell during shift change for an hour.
Every conservative you have ever met supports this. Every single one.
I just want to puke
Given infinite opportunity for good, and we chose… violence.
We've always chosen violence. For centuries.
So make a change
since when are prisons “good”?
Learn to read
To quote Mama Ru, “Reading is, what?”
then let's abolish
The proper answer is that, Reading is Fundamental.
I hope to see educating then.
wait until folks comprehend who has the highest incarcerated population on this planet.
I always like to point out that it's just the highest reported incarcerated population on the planet. There's countries way bigger than America that don't have as much freedom of information, like we're reading right now.
Anything's possible when you make shit up
FUCK. THE. USA!
Yep, it's pure evil. Every guard involved is morally culpable for the rapes they cause
Internet outrage is utter dogshit trash
Fuck :,(
Genuinely fucking disgusting.
::: spoiler CW: exactly what you would expect.
V-coding
Causing rape of trans prisoners for social control
Not to be confused with Vibe coding.
In the context of incarceration in the United States, V-coding is the common practice by carceral staff of subjecting trans women to sexual assault by placing the woman in the same prison cell as an aggressive male inmate in order to placate the male inmate.^[1][2][3]^ This practice has been known to have caused the daily rapes of multiple trans women, and the sexual assaults of 58.5% of them.^[4][5][6]^ V-coding is done to pacify the male inmate, with the goal of reducing their propensity for violence against other inmates, according to prison authorities and one inmate.^[1][2]^ The term has also been used to refer to the broader systemic sexual abuse of trans women in male prisons.
nemec, blake (2015). "No One Enters Like Them: Health, Gender Variance, and the PIC". Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex (2nd ed.). AK Press. p. 306. ISBN 978-1-84935-234-5. 2. [12]
"Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism And Restoring Biological Truth To The Federal Government". whitehouse.gov. January 20, 2025. 3. [13]
Harmon, Amy (January 27, 2025). "Inmate Sues the Trump Administration Over Transgender Executive Order". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Archived from the original on January 30, 2025. Retrieved January 30, 2025. 4. [14]
Raymond, Nate; Scarcella, Mike (January 27, 2025). "Transgender inmate sues over Trump's order curtailing LGBT rights". Reuters. Retrieved September 24, 2025. 5. [15]
Schwartzapfel, Beth (February 21, 2025). "Trans Women Federal Prisoners Told They Will Be Housed With Men". The Marshall Project. Retrieved September 27, 2025. 6. [16]
Raymond, Nate (January 30, 2025). "US judge blocks Trump administration from transferring transgender inmate". Reuters. Retrieved September 24, 2025. 7. [17]
Levin, Sam; Johnson, Kaley (March 7, 2025). "Trans women transferred to men's prisons despite rulings against Trump's order". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved September 27, 2025. 8. [18]
"Transgender women moved to men's prisons amid judicial block". The Advocate (magazine). Retrieved September 27, 2025. 9. [19]
Fiorillo, Victor (June 6, 2025). "Philly Trans Woman Raising Money on GoFundMe So She Can Escape to Canada". Philadelphia Magazine. Retrieved September 27, 2025. 10. [20]
"Hundreds of people gather at state Capitol to protest Trump administration". Arkansas Democrat Gazette. April 12, 2025. Retrieved September 27, 2025. :::
Ropefuel
This article is a bit tough to understand. What is the expected logic of such practices? I know its a horrific phenomenon all-around, but what was even the initial idea of how this could possibly be a net good for any entity involved?
The "net good" here is that it's torture for us. It's good sport for those in power in prison. There's also the fact that those in power can earn a little side hustle from relatively zero risk: you don't need to smuggle anything into the prison to sell, you just sell one prisoner to the next. That is the society we live in.
Things are pretty fucked up right now for us literally everywhere. We're fucking dying here. Educate yourself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-coding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender_rights_in_the_United_States#V-coding
They take aggressive men and let them vent some steam off by raping a woman. This reduces their aggression towards other inmates and makes them more controllable.
Since trans women are basically treated there as subhumans, no one cares of them in this equation.
Also reduces aggressiveness towards guards
Farmers do this shit with cattle and horses, wow, gross. So cool how already normalised it was before 2016, great /s
All your brainpower occupied with breathing?