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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • Um… none of the things they listed have barriers to entry. You can take classes for them, and for something athletic like Lion Dancing it’s recommended to at least have some gymnastics training so you don’t get hurt, but you aren’t required to in order to perform.

    Same with things like painting or playing instruments. Do you think Yo Yo Ma has a license to play his cello or something? Or Van Gogh had a painter’s license? He didn’t even have much formal training, for heaven’s sake. Do you also think their works are ‘low skill’? Would you object to Yo Yo Ma reading to kids?

    Pretty much all art has no barrier to entry. What matters is how hard you work at it and how skilled you can become. And drag, as a performance art, is work.

    Anyways, where did you get this weird idea that only things with a proper ‘barrier to entry’ (which, historically, has been expensive schooling that denies minorities proper access, btw—see what’s going on with PoC and trying to work exclusively with braiding textured hair, for example) is the only way to judge quality or worth? Why can’t art especially be judged on its own merits?

    …And, um, did I read that right? You don’t like it when people empathize with others? Or are kind to others?


  • Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth.

    This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.

    -C. S. Lewis


  • Yeah, a couple family members converted a few decades ago and the Mormons sent us all a request to list all our ancestors so they could retroactively ‘save’ them. Most of my family being Lutheran, that didn’t go over well lol.

    My grandpa, my uncle, and a few other family pranksters got together and gave them the most outrageous list they could come up with. I had a Mormon kid as a friend when I was young, and some days I wonder if they looked me up, and actually believed I was related to the King of Sweden.



  • Because you are, darling.

    Drag queen reading hour is fun for kids and drag queens, and teaches kids tolerance.

    You are the one fighting against it, because, and I quote, ‘I don’t want my taxpayer money going towards teaching kids to do low skill and low talent things’.

    So that shows:

    1. You think being a drag queen requires neither skill nor talent
    2. You seem to think reading hour involves teaching kids about jobs they should have in the future instead of, you know, just reading to kids
    3. You want reading hour to be the exclusive provence of top experts in ‘high skill’ fields

    Since those three points are quite nonsensical, it would seem you are either a very silly person, or a bigot trying to skate around your bigotry. Possibly because you don’t even know it’s there.

    To be fair there might be a bit of techbro style ‘my child is only allowed to see things related to ‘high skill’ jobs and training for those jobs because little 5-year-old Timmy isn’t too young to be thinking about colleges and internships!’ nonsense too, I suppose, but that’s just as bad in a different way.



  • You don’t seem to like them or respect them—or actually know how much goes into being a drag queen, for that matter—if you think they’re ’low skill and low talent’.

    Showing kids you can dress up like that and it’s okay is a very good thing, actually. When I was in grade school there was a kid who liked wearing dresses and stuff. And most of the kids mocked him relentlessly, to the point he had to switch schools, because for us a guy in a dress was ‘weird’. Maybe if we’d had a drag queen reading hour, we would have been more understanding.


  • Some drag queens do make a career out of it. And have fun doing it, I might add.

    Or people just take it on as a fun hobby. Do you also have a list of approved hobbies kids can learn about?

    And you do realize that it’s not a zero-sum game, right? You can introduce kids to drag queens and firefighters and doctors and astronauts; there’s no rule where you’re required to just pick one.

    And, y’know, oh no, Heaven forbid kids don’t get read to by one of your ‘approved’ roll models once or twice in their lives. By that ‘logic’ should regular librarians be banned from reading books too? And maybe most parents, if they’re not in STEM?

    You may need to take a step back and look, really look, at your beliefs here. Because you’re veering very close to the helicopter parent attitude of controlling every single hobby, habit, and interaction of your kid to force them into your mental ideal, and that is way, way more unhealthy for kids than a one-time Drag Queen Reading Hour.


  • Even places like Switzerland, which have a high gun ownership rate, don’t.

    When my dad was young, he and his brother found one of great-grandad’s old revolvers in a storage trunk, and brought it to school. Once lunch rolled around, they took it out and showed it to the teacher, who thought it was a very cool antique, and they and the teacher spent the lunch period oohing and aaahing over it. A school shooting wasn’t even something people thought about. It just didn’t happen.

    Schools here also used to have firearms clubs and drill teams; my high school actually had an all-women shooting team if I remember correctly. And it was an inner-city school.

    Somewhere, something changed here in the US. I don’t know when or why. But a good deal of gun owners and 2A supporters grew up in those days and remember them well, and I think they don’t want to believe that change happened?

    Maybe it was when people started fetishizing guns? I don’t know, but I wish it would stop. No other countries deal with this kind of nonsense.