Sometimes the point of a protest is to put yourself in a position to get knocked down.
this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2026
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Is this a state roadway? If not, crazy that the state has the authority to do this.
Daniella Mestyanek Young, aka Knitting Cult Lady observes authoritarian movemens hate color and seek to deface all public art and expression that doesn't specifically belong to or represent the movement.
I've always seen the Thin Blue Line flag as the diametric opposite of the Pride flag.
This mindset always frustrates me.
Of course it was performative, all public art is performative. This is no different than tv promoting the "traditional american family", or statues "honoring the troops", or memorials, or any other art promoting propagandized values.
But life imitates art. Even if the intent was insincere pandering, it still has an effect on how people perceive their society. We should want our propaganda to reflect our values. We should want statues of MLK and Harvey Milk instead of Robert E Lee and Jefferson Davis. We should want rainbow streets and pride flags in public spaces. We should want their agenda to match our values. We should want the next generation growing up in a society that shows it's support for marginalized people, instead of nationalism.
In my country people, especially teenage boys, try to avoid walking over the rainbow crossings. Since they don’t want to be seen as gay, because other boys will call them gay if they walk on the rainbow. My country is the Netherlands btw.
Yes they might be pandering but they also reveal how people in society still have ingrained bigoted views. You can only really tackle these shortcomings in society if they reveal themselves.
pandering was always pandering,
But pandering is a great canary
For me the LGBTQ colours displayed by the city are meaningful. It feels safer gay kissing in a square painted with rainbows, sitting on pink benches. It made it easier to ease into my own self. It’s like a big sign saying "IT’S OK".
My city put a rainbow-themed art installation in the most heavily trafficked park in the city back in 2019. It was supposed to be there for one year, as a temporary memorial to the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots. It's been there for 7 years now, and half the city would lose their minds if someone tried to take it down now.
It's neat how "temporary" installations can become part of the identity of a place. The Eiffel tower was also supposed to be temporary.
This is how I find out that my city has/had a pridewalk?!
They did this to Houston, but they did an extremely half-assed job. It was one thin layer of additional asphalt covering over the whole intersection. But you can still see the pride crosswalk peeking out from underneath at the edges.
I'm still very upset.
Especially now that the sidewalks have been defaced with hate messages, which were then blacked out with spray paint. Is there a way to get the spray paint off the concrete and go back to chalk?
Both can be true. The installation can be a bit naff, but the choice to remove it is an act of deliberate hatred.
you have to become the bully. Just need one generation of LGTQB to get really petty and beat the bigots at every game they consider to be their domain.
They have us fighting over crosswalks while our house burns down.
As if the queer people they've marginalized in the work force even have houses. As if more kids won't be bullied because it's official government policy to hate gays. As if a generation of queer people will struggle to discover themselves, never seeing themselves represented because we are forced to hide ourselves from view.
It's not about the crosswalk, it's just one particular facet of fascist oppression. It isn't a distraction and it doesn't invalidate any of the other harm they caused.
You cite the greater problems I’m talking about but somehow manifest that a crosswalk is a solution.
My friend, you prove my point. All those problems are being hidden while we fight over the crosswalk.
Fuck you, cis het. Go ally somewhere else
They are just like rainbow capitalism. They don't improve the rights of anyone but they are an indicator of the acceptance.
Exactly. People are all "TaRgEt jUsT waNtS yOuR mOnEy."
Well, yeah, but also it just shows an overall acceptance. It makes people more at ease in general. It lets non queer people also feel more open to showing support. It's about the overall mindset of society.
Right? Easy to overstate the value of it as we see now, but it sure was nice being a demographic worth pandering to, especially when that meant that the homophobes weren't worth appeasing.
It was a good feeling but always had the aftertaste of instantly disappearing when the political wind changes. We will sadly never truly be free under capitalism
Historically speaking, under communism... Oh no. Oh no
Communism was never achieved by the two countries you're thinking of. They only claim to have achieved socialism.
Communism was achieved in Australia, 60,000 years ago. It was enabled by advanced psychological and sociological technology.
Yes comrade, and I'm sure that once the tankies get rid of capitalism, it will cause an LGBT utopia the likes of which has never been seen.
The comment is meant to be food for thought : blaming capitalism on social ills is unwise and idealistic about what will happen after the current economic system.
Tankies? Those arseholes will never manage to get rid of capitalism. They couldn't get rid of capitalism in Russia, and they still haven't got rid of it in China. An elite class of billionaires still own the means of production, because tankies can't do shit to improve the world.
Anarchists are the only group with a track record of successfully implementing communism. We did it in Catalonia during the Spanish Civil war, and we'll do it again.
the last point still stands
In Australia, communism was very kind to queer people.
THE LAST POINT STILL STANDS. We aren't in Australia during the walkabout/dreaming era, we're in modernity and people are blaming the wrong things the same way they were since the dawn of time.
Depends on what time you look at. In the starting years of the USSR and DDR gay, trans and womens rights were very good in comparison to western states at the time. It started getting worse when the economic problems accumulated due to war and outside pressure.
Sure. My point isn't communism bad, it's that the idea isn't capitalism "causing" LGBT oppression and communism is sunshine and rainbow flags.
Like when atheists bitch about how "imagine no religion" would make everything great, and neglect to explain how they would get there. Like when the atheist Khamer rouge killed 50,000+ religious people in the name of atheism.
Folks, turns out it's authoritarianism that causes oppression of civil liberties, not economic systems.
The khmer* rouge didn't kill people "in the name of atheism". They were largely copying the Chinese "great leap forward" pushing to cultural unification through genocide of minority groups. Yes, many of those groups were religious minorities, but to say they killed them in the name of atheism is like saying that the soviets killed people because they hate freedom. It's obscenely disingenuous and clearly said to push an agenda.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_Rouge#Relationship_to_religion
Nevertheless, it has been estimated that nearly 25,000 Buddhist monks were killed by the regime.[71]
They were largely copying the Chinese “great leap forward” pushing to cultural unification through genocide of minority groups.
And this is ok?
No, but I clearly didn't say that. I just said you're assigned the wrong reason for their actions. They didn't do it because they were atheist. They targeted waaaaaay more people than religious groups. They did what China is doing now to the uyghurs. It's clearly a terrible thing, you're just trying to manufacture an atheist pogrom when this was your standard totalitarian cultural genocide.
But capitalism does cause the oppression. It's the us vs them mentality engrained deeply in society. People always have to be better and greater than others and everything is about competition. This makes people reject change because they fear that their status might be harmed by trying something new and the state spending money on other things.
It's also not as direct of a solution as just killing all capitalists because the underlying system would remain the same and just produce more capitalists.
Capitalists do everything to distract from class-consciousness and creating outgroups helps a lot with this.
Free capitalism without "authoritarianism" also leads to oppression as one group would start hording wealth and indoctrinating the people to fight difference so they can keep the wealth they accumulated. This happens without forcing anything unto people by convincing them that they can also achieve wealth.
The people profiting from the status quo will always defend it
you can spin that about anything.
But it's the case. Do you knows who owns most of the US media and the mass media in other countries?
CaPiTaLiStS.
But it is the material conditions leading to oppresion. All other explanations are either idealistic in the sense that they attribute some magic human nature or they are heavily simplified without addressing the root causes
Oppressive threats to their livelihood makes people unsympathetic and some people hateful and jealous.
Threatened by some colors - truly pathetic
TBF I'd feel rather threatened if they start doing swastika sidewalks, and that's just some lines in the shape of an Indian peace symbol.
Or black-white-red stripes (German Imperium, popular with Nazis here because the actual Nazi flag is forbidden).