Photography by Juuso Hämäläinen

LINKS TO DONATE TO DIRECTLY SUPPORT CHARLOTTESVILLE

I am a citizen of Charlottesville, Virginia. Today (August 12th, 2017) and yesterday (August 11th, 2017) our city saw violent and chaotic rallies by Nazis and white supremacists. Counter-protesters, many of them students of the University of Virginia, which is here in this city, met the Nazi rallies bravely. People have been injured and arressted. People threw bottles filled with cement or urine, and mace and tear gas filled the air. A state of emergency was declared, and store owners nearby cited having police in riot gear blocking the doors of their buildings.

If you wish to donate to directly support protesters, citizens, and minority students at the University of Virginia, here are four links for you.

Solidarity Cville Anti-Racist Legal Fund

#A12 General Fund

The Charlottesville Chapter of the NAACP’s PayPal

UVA’s Donation Page for their Black Student Alliance

These are all links in which the money is guaranteed to directly go towards helping Charlottesville citizens specifically, whether through legal fees, or through raising support and awareness for the minority members of our community. I especially recommend choosing either the Solidarity Cville Fund or the Black Student Alliance’s donation page.

Thank you for all the support being sent our city’s way. #DEFENDCVILLE

Yep. 

LET’S NOT FORGET: THE COPS ALLOWED THIS VIOLENCE TO HAPPEN. BLACK LIVES MATTER ARE MET WITH TEAR GAS, K9’S AND RIOT POLICE WHEN THEY ORGANIZE PEACEFUL PROTESTS YET THE POLICE DON’T GIVE A SHIT WHEN A BUNCH OF LITERAL NAZIS RUN AROUND WITH TORCHES ATTACKING STUDENTS. FUCK WHITE PRIDE. FUCK THE POLICE. AND IF YOU “DON’T AGREE”, FUCK YOU.

I want to _____ you.

Interesting..

I’VE LITERALLY HAVE NEVER DONE ANYTHING TO YOU PEOPLE

I was just reblogging for the above post I didn’t think I’d get any

apparently you guys want to do a lot of different things with/to me

Okay, guys. Go ahead. I know what’s coming.

*cautiously reblogs this*

doubt many will do this, but why not.

Why not indeed.

“whos your main” is like “whats your sign” for gamers

There is a massive difference between expressing your discomfort with dating women because it is objectively, numerically harder to find partners, and socially much more difficult to walk down the street or get an apartment or go to the grocery store in a relationship with a woman, and sexually more difficult to learn about the kinds of sex you want to have with other women and even get access to information about safe sex, and how those have impacted your dating choices and discuss some sadness around that (a very, very common problem, one major reason “bi women always end up with men and therefore don’t experience homophobia” is so wrong because that RESULT itself is often due to how those women are impacted by homophobia and how it manifests wrt their sexualities and dating choices) and saying, “I am always in straight relationships and it makes me feel Less Queer” and expecting lesbians to bend over backwards to express how that’s so valid and how we are so sorry people don’t harass or stare at you when you walk down the street with your partner. Of course sometimes the wires get crossed, and one message is expressed as another, but the whole trend of focusing on m/f relationships as valid sites of Queer Love is so silly when those relationships have always been legally validated, and it does absolutely no good to people in same gender relationships, who desperately need prioritizing and access to resources- including bi women!

The second message is being deeply misunderstood by the lesbian community.

When bi women reference “not feeling queer”, they’re not saying, “gosh, all this straight privilege is sure getting me down! I wish I could have it AND be included in the lesbian community! ”

They’re saying, “I am suffering from severe effects of oppression even when I am in relationships that are perceived as straight.

“And there is so little acknowledgment of this in the queer community that it not only means the problem isn’t getting addressed,” (like the fact that less than 1% of LGBT grant money goes to bi-specific issues), “but it also makes the psychological effects of the oppression much worse.

“To the point that I don’t even have the words to explain this to you, and you don’t have the information to put it together.”

The repeated message that bi/pan/omni/ply people are only oppressed/“actually queer” when we’re in same-gender relationships is a huge part of the constant erasure of bi experiences.

That erasure contributes both to the fact that bisexuals are consistently poorer, more suicidal, more likely to be mentally ill, and more likely to experience relationship violence and sexual assault than our gay and lesbian peers.

(Same thing goes for aces, for that matter. People say, “well why would anybody know you’re ace on the street, you aren’t oppressed unless you ‘look SGA’.”

Meanwhile, both bi and ace people have extraordinarily high rates of suicidality, homelessness, poverty, harassment, and assault. And nobody knows, because both groups are so erased. Don’t even get me started on intersex people….)

For example, 25% of bisexuals in the US are on food stamps; around 13% of gay men and lesbians are.

(This is actually worse than it sounds, because there are also more bisexuals - so it’s a larger percentage of a larger group.)

If the only kind of oppression you can see is whether someone can marry their partner and how people react to them on the street, you leave out most of what gay people experience as well as the rest of us.

A lesbian who breaks up with her girlfriend doesn’t suddenly stop being oppressed. A lesbian who puts on lipstick and goes shopping alone doesn’t suddenly stop being oppressed.

For that matter, a passing, gender-conforming trans person doesn’t suddenly stop being oppressed.

Passing as a cis and straight person doesn’t even mean any of those folks will feel safe on the street.

Cutting our oppression down to “how likely are you to get assaulted or harassed on the street” is handy for gatekeeping all sorts of people. But it screws absolutely everybody over.

My name is yves, and I’m a chronically ill, disabled, trans person who needs help, I’m really desperate or I wouldn’t be doing this. I have two really big e.r bills that I need to pay and I currently am broke from trying to survive on less than minimum wage. I don’t even have enough to pay for all my prescriptions that I NEED to survive, I don’t even have enough money for food so I just eat at work when I can. Anything helps honestly, and I’m grateful for you time. Thank you and Miigwetch!

If you donate please message me so I can thank you personally ♥️

If you can’t, reblogging and boosting helps too ♥️

I’m still no where near where I need to be! Please help out if you can, I’m working my hardest but it’s not enough unfortunately.. If you can’t donate reblogging and boosting helps a lot ❤️

Please donate if ya can.

I just got let go of my job and I REALLY REALLY NEED YOUR HELP MORE THAN EVER NOW

PLEASE boost this if you can’t donate you can post this link where ever you can with my story to get it around! If you can even donate 5$ I’d be so grateful. This month has been hell and I’m seriously just trying to survive and it’s gotten much worse.. I love you all. Thank you ♥️

Anon, if it helps, think of it like this:

When I was 17, it finally came to everyone’s attention that my eyesight wasn’t normal but extremely messed up.  I ended up seeing a specialist in Berlin (we lived about 5 hrs away from Berlin at this point btw), who gave me a lovely speech about how my vision impairment didn’t mean I would have to give up my dreams, and that I could do anything I set my mind to.

I looked him straight in the eye and said, “that’s great, I’ve always wanted to be a bus driver.”

This doctor – one of a few specialists in the country who could work with my congenital defect – started to stutter, because of course with a vision impairment that made me legally blind, I could not drive a bus no matter how much I wanted to.

Now, in truth, I have never wanted to drive a bus, so I wasn’t too heart-broken by that announcement.  But the point is that making those statements about how you just have to try hard and how you can accomplish anything if you put your mind to it just don’t apply when you have a disability.  Using accommodations, yes, you can end up doing a lot of things that might have been assumed impossible in the past.  But there will still be things you just cannot do, and there are other things where you have to weigh the gain of whatever it is versus the cost.  A person with mobility issues might theoretically be able to walk a mile, but they would expend so much energy and be in so much pain afterwards that in practicality, they can’t.  Part of being disabled is learning what your limits are, and accepting them.

So no, I will never be able to drive a bus.  I am also unable to take a full semeter’s worth of classes at a time, because while I theoretically could, in reality it would leave me a wreck.  And that’s okay: my health and well-being come first, and my uni and financial aid people know that I am doing what I can.

revisiting the good old underwater theme.

kingsguard

I never realized that Killer Croc is such an amazing boyfriend…….

“Don’t call Trump supporters nazis, it hurts their feelings.”

Yes, this is real (link to tweet). Yes, Tucker Carlson is literally repeating Nazi propaganda that aided the genocide of the Romani during the Holocaust. Yes, I am furious. 

(Also, although there is a large population of Romani in Romania, they aren’t indigenous to Romania. They’re a diasporic group originally from northern India.)

Romani and Jewish have been screaming at the top of their lungs for years about neo-fascism in Europe, and Americans were totally aloof.

Then neo-fascism reared its head in America, but Roma and Jews were left out of the conversation in terms of people being impacted, because our oppression was “over.”

Now Tucker Carlson is on live TV using slurs and Nazi propaganda about Romani people, and I’m 90% most people on the left are just going to ignore it.

It’s fucking starting y'all. It’s happening again.

If you’re not Jewish or Roma PLEASE BOOST THIS.

outsider-my-ass:

There are some people who really seem to think the only true “heroism” is picking up a gun to defend your imperialist state.