Oh I disagree with this one anyone who says "I'm a progressive" means "I'm a good person". That one has been dispossessed of its original meaning and re-imbued with a very clear new one.
It's epithet context used by conservatives means "we don't think you're fascist enough".
maybe someone is going to come problematize those philosophical arguments in 4 hours
Wdym? In the history of the internet nobody has ever had posting wars about fuzzy concepts. Nobody has ever had posting wars about the concept of fuzzy concepts.
I was not trying to denigrate feminism. The West's mainstream feminism is extremely syncretic now that it's not even liberal / bourgeoisie feminism anymore. There's no real word for it. Naomi Wolf is a perfect example. In ideology the Naomi Wolf who wrote The Beauty Myth is not the Naomi Wolf who polices women's vocal fry. Both Naomi Wolfs are synthesized within the Western mainstream feminism in 2025. It's only practical effect on the world is reflected in things like Space Katy Perry, which are re-emergent forms of mid-century advertisement patriarchy.
We have gone from Mad Men controlling economic machinery to convince women they need to buy things to enforce a fake beauty standard. To the 90's and 2000's where women took on the roles of men in that system. To a systemic patriarchy (e.g. a social structure where patriarchy can exist without patriarchal attitudes) that sells things to women in a Schrodinger's feminism. Every idea is held in a superposition until society observes it, and society does not categorize it in a logical or consistent way. Society simply collapse the wave function and whether the idea ends up as "pro-women" or "anti-woman" is not deterministic based on the ideas of any specific strain of feminism or even the basic idea of equality between genders.
To explain it in complicated philosophy instead of complicated physics, mainstream feminism is a signifier without the signified or as Lacan put it a pure signifier. I hesitate to say this, but in layman's terms a pure signifier is "a label that doesn't mean anything". I hesitate to use that phrase because it is used in causal conversation that is meant to be simplistic and dismissive. Mainstream feminism isn't inherently meaningless, it's part of a dialectical process that has hollowed it of meaning. It's real meaning should be the history of how it became meaningless. Mainstream feminism is great example of the real social processes that govern how our world works.
To offer an analogy, the last name Carpenter has the same problem as mainstream feminism. Last names were given to people based on certain social meanings. There would be various systems like a literal lineage name like Johnson e.g. Son of John. Occupational names are also a thing like Smith, Miller, Carpenter would literally denote the person's trade. John Smith would be the guy in your town that makes nails, Tim Miller would be the guy in your town that makes flour, etc. You wouldn't even think to ask Sabrina Carpenter to make you kitchen cabinets because Carpenter has through dialectic social processes become just a label. So in effect "Sabrina Carpenter" sings, "John Carpenter" makes horror movies, and "mainstream feminism" sells things -- all of these labels have been imbued and dispossessed of significance from the same dialectic process of meaning making.
It's this.
The most hollowed out form of liberal feminism. Not even corpo feminism. Not even white corpo feminism. A feminism that is itself as a vehicle for marketing and driving consumption.
This is a losing game because like "freedom" in the West for normal people "feminism" is in practice a treat-based ideology. Now you can heap Islamophobia on top of that.
Hezbollah is the best out of all these groups to women. They allow women to participate in all parts of society. They have women-led politcal steering committees setting political positions based on Islamic feminism. Hezbollah has a unique risk because their primary benefactor Iran has a much more conservative political position on the issue.
However Islamic feminism is a tenuous balancing act. Like any other religion it Islam is not coherent or consistent in its texts and oral traditions. Coherence and consistency is made based on social views on choosing what passages to elevate and what passages to deprecate. As such Islamic feminism often has very rough edges and looks different based on different political contexts.
Hamas is lower than Hezbollah here but still not comparable to the Taliban or ISIS. The status of women in Hamas and by its governing principles are not equivalent to Hezbollah or the PLO. Hamas has been changing slowly by allowing more women into leadership and changing some of its views since 2021.
You are absolutely wrong about Ansar'Allah. Ansar'Allah is not as organized as the Taliban but ultimately has the similar views and worse practices. Ansar'Allah does gendered child soldiers. Boys as young as 7 become soldiers. Girls as young as 13 become liaisons in the gendered traditional militaristic sense they do "women's work". They do intelligence, logistics, support, and involuntary sex work. Like female military liaisons in other traditionalist armies including in the West they are extremely vulnerable to abuse and are effectively prizes and play things for the officer class. Ansar'Allah has some women's units but there is actually disagreement about militarization of women both official (as soldiers) and unofficial (as liaisons) within Ansar'Allah on "social cohesion" grounds. The Zainabiyyat batallion (women's battalion) also sources the must vulnerable women in Yemeni society so the poor or groups like the Muhamasheen. The Zainabiyyat batallion's general is a man and it's not really a fighting force, it's a policing / occupation / intelligence force. Zainabinyyat has been accused of being given the duty to create the intelligence networks as a compromise and preventative measure but I haven't seen strong confirmation of that, nor have I seen any strong evidence that if it's happening that outcomes are changing for women and girls forced into these networks.
The US might miraculously find deposits of rare earth metals and then the war could get very long and very bloody.
If there was a realistic enormous certified deposit of every single rare earth mineral in the most Goldilocks location and the deck was stacked for this deus ex machina miracle, it wouldn't matter.
In mining a deposit of minerals is a concentration of minerals. Think Minecraft, in a 9x9x9 cube the vein takes up an 8x8x9 space and runs into the next 9x9x9 cube. That's what mining companies look for.
Rare earths are called rare earths not because there are few deposits, it's because they're more uniformly distributed in low quantities in mineral deposits. Again think Minecraft, but for every 9x9x9 cube there is a single block of antimony.
Rare earths cannot create mining economies of scale. The reason China has the most rare earth production is because they "use every part of the Buffallo" more than other country's mining companies do. Rare earths are usually not refined from minerals that contain them in America because the labor to do so is too expensive. America's access to rare earths has always been an economic question of cheap labor, not a question of locating the resources.
Biden was part of this. Trump's plan is a rootless generalization of what Biden had tried. But instead of "high tech manufacturing", "national security", and "sanctions", Trump's trade war is based in "manufacturing", "making America great", and "tariffs". This is just CHIPS without the subsidies and a more unrealistic plan that isn't backed by NatSec blob. CHIPS has been an absolute failure too. It's simply mystified by the technocratic ghouls of the DNC where if you question them you're "too stupid to get it".
Biden literally put all his chips in the Intel basket. Intel the company who had been riding on financialization and market dominance for so long its bean counters forced it to sleep walk into a complete production failure -- then it was revealed that the same bean counters had painted it into a corner by cutting R&D. They have no answers to the architectural problems in their chipsets.
TBH any time you see a "gun guy" video and the main character is a femme woman it's 9 times out of 10 going to be a dangerous setup and misogynistic.
The classic "we're gonna let the hot girl shoot the Desert Eagle as her first gun so she breaks her nose" comes to mind.
This is in Brazil. This shooting range is essentially a private club which is very much a tacticool/MMA/No Touch TKO/Warrior style place. https://www.instagram.com/gunfightoficial/
The primary red flag in these kinds of things is always what caliber gun they'll hand someone who's never shot before. If it's anything other than a 22LR it's often a bad sign. The Glock she's holding is at least a 9mm and she's clearly scared of it.
I'm not certified or anything but every time I've taught someone to shoot I've started them on a 22LR rifle. The first 40 minutes is literally going over how to use it multiple times. The last 20 is pumping out a couple of mags. If they like it then you move up to higher calibers. Often the worst is when you're teaching someone new/skittish in an indoor and someone's playing around with their "9mm doesn't have stopping power" compensator in the next stall.
Basic safety courses (the kind that states mandate as a bottom of the barrel minimum e.g. NRA basic) are taught on 22LR because it's a safer way to learn.
Also Weaver foot stance + Isosceles grip + open toe platform shoes + trigger squeeze is why she's swaying from recoil. Her center of gravity is fucked is so fucked. Looking through their insta they teach some incredibly bad shooting posture consistently. Very "we trained them wrong as a joke" vibes. This place blows so much.
This is what they use in their intro course. Fucking lol
Who/where?
Thanks! I'll message them!