I know that GOP and right-wing Christian politics in the U.S. has been working for decades now on basically owning the concept of family in the discourse. "Family values" is a well-known euphemism for extremist Christian bigotry, and reactionary Christians have created a large number of political pressure groups that are purported to be "pro-family", by which they mean a narrowly defined ideal of "nuclear family" that wouldn't be out of place on a NSDAP poster or a commercial for dish detergent.

I'd love to destroy that political association, if it's possible. These people aren't "pro-family" because they're pro-poverty; they want as many Americans as possible toiling for capitalism, and nothing's more destructive of family than constant economic privation. But making families difficult to have also makes propaganda families more valuable and lucrative. It's like imposing artificial scarcity on family stability, so being able to have the ideal dish-detergent family is now a prized status symbol.

And, of course, they're also pro-child-abuse.

~Chara of Pnictogen

There's a small chance I could have ended up like one of the fashy STEM dudes. If things had broken differently when I was at Caltech, there's some chance I could have become captive to the starchy (and racist) science-nerd culture that flourished there. Good thing I was such a terrible student, huh? 😬

That was so long ago, and I've done and seen so much else in the meantime, that it's now quite difficult for me to imagine what it must be like to look up at Elon Musk and think, genuinely, that this is a great hero of science and engineering, a man who will take mankind to the stars. Even if most of his fandom sticks to Musk for cynical reasons—to enrich themselves in the wake of Musk's fame, for social posturing, or because they're into Musk's fascist politics—in some of them anyway there's a spark of genuine hope. They really want to believe in flying TSLA cars that pilot themselves, and SpaceX-branded Martian palaces.

I stopped believing in that stuff ever so long ago.

we've had a very uncomfortable and rocky road on the way to the sense of identity we now have. we weren't even aware that we were trans or plural before we happened to find ourselves suddenly among otherkin friends, partly thanks to a torrid love affair that I...don't feel equal to talking about in more detail right now. we rebounded hard from that experience into an awkwardly renewed determination to be the best possible human being(s) we could figure out how to be.

I suppose I was myself reminded of past collisions with reality. my RL mother despaired at my extreme tendency to flightiness and fantasizing, because she (and my older sibling) were so much more serious than I could make myself be, and they were better educated on serious matters. after the events of 2016-17 I suppose I felt like I'd forgotten the better half of my family heritage while I was getting lost in sensual pleasures and lotos-eating daydreams. I'd forgotten that there was a world in danger all round me.

so we wanted to be human—but only a video-game human would do, as it turned out. only that made sense. or so it seemed.

(shrugs) it's a bit too late to turn back now, isn't it?

~Chara of Pnictogen

Just me and a couple very normal people here, having some normal political discourse ~Chara