I think a lot about how we as a culture have turned “forever” into the only acceptable definition of success.

Like… if you open a coffee shop and run it for a while and it makes you happy but then stuff gets too expensive and stressful and you want to do something else so you close it, it’s a “failed” business. If you write a book or two, then decide that you don’t actually want to keep doing that, you’re a “failed” writer. If you marry someone, and that marriage is good for a while, and then stops working and you get divorced, it’s a “failed” marriage.

The only acceptable “win condition” is “you keep doing that thing forever”. A friendship that lasts for a few years but then its time is done and you move on is considered less valuable or not a “real” friendship. A hobby that you do for a while and then are done with is a “phase” - or, alternatively, a “pity” that you don’t do that thing any more. A fandom is “dying” because people have had a lot of fun with it but are now moving on to other things.

I just think that something can be good, and also end, and that thing was still good. And it’s okay to be sad that it ended, too. But the idea that anything that ends is automatically less than this hypothetical eternal state of success… I don’t think that’s doing us any good at all.

X

The murder of Palestinian children and ethnic cleansing of Palestinian communities is being supported by the US. Americans' taxes are funding these atrocities.

Please include Palestinians in your activism 🇵🇸❤️

Our hearts go out to Saeed Odeh's family, to the residents of Sheikh Jarrah & Silwan resisting ethnic cleansing, and to every Palestinian in exile waiting to return to their homeland 🇵🇸❤️🕊

An eye-opening perspective (Source)

[caption:

I recently saw a tweet that went something like this:

My defensive response was immediate.

*Man looking at his phone with a thought bubble* Is this putting people down for reading about anti-racism?

Then:

*Man looking more curious* Wait a minute. What if I switched ‘anti-racism’ with ‘mountain climbing’?

Let’s try it out:

*Man reading a book about brain surgery* Right. You can read about something, but then there are a whole series of actions and experiences that lead to you doing that thing.

That takes: expert advice, trial and error, humility, setbacks, and regular practice.

Not to mention: racism is nuanced with hidden levers, built in secrets, unwritten rules, and over 400 years of social conditioning. *Man thinking with speech bubble: “Crap. The word ‘racism’ set me off.”*

*Man disappointed* The point here is upsetting: I almost missed the truth of that tweet because of my white defensie response.

As a white person in this culture, I need to question my defensive reactions constatnly, or I’m just repeating history.

Signed: BH 20

]

Because I’m sick to fucking death of viral posts about zip ties, or those scam signs about selling houses or needing cheap labor, or mini-vans hanging out at the gas station. That shit isn’t real, and it VICTIMIZES! real victims by covering up what really happens with fake 1980s stranger danger BS and makes it harder for real victims to get support and sets up a blame the victim narrative. So fucking stop it god damn. 

and most victims of child sex trafficking fall into two categories:

One of the best ways to reduce sex trafficking is to provide resources and a robust safety net to allow people to escape from abusive situations. Housing first initiatives, safe injection sites with addictive drugs provided by local governments, and support for nontraditional family structures can all help to reduce sex trafficking.

Most of the victims of sex trafficking are safe to traffic because they’re people society has already decided that they don’t care about. Most are easy to traffic because they don’t have anyone they can go to for help.

I know these tweets are from 2019 but 2020 saw a massive surge in discussions of sex trafficking with almost no talk about who the victims are, and even less talk about how much more common labor trafficking is (and how hard things are for trafficked workers).

So. Like. Please shut the fuck up about the wayfair conspiracy theory and direct that energy to harassing your city council about housing first plans and expanding city services resources for abuse survivors.

So I found the letter that the Animorphs author and trans ally K. A. Applegate wrote after the series ended and I’m FLOORED

I mean

You want something even crazier? Animorphs ended in May 2001.  She didn’t know what was coming, but damn if she didn’t give her readers a much needed dose of reality about the horrors of war right before we were really going to need it.

If you enjoy easily-digestible sci fi, and can get your hands on the animorphs books, I really recommend it. They’re fucking great and thoughtful in a lot of ways you might not have picked up on as a kid. I’ve read the first dozen or so books over the last couple of years and they’ve literally changed the way I look at the world.

Not to butt in since the series came along when I was in high school and thus a bit after my time, but I am a librarian and as such I am ALL ABOUT matching people to the books they need in whatever format is available.. You can download the entire series. It’s free.

Applegate’s statement on the piracy subject is quoted from an AMA here for those that have moral issues with it. for those that don’t want to click, she says: “We do not take them down. Or ask for them to be taken down. I think once the books are available to buy—paper or e—it would be nice if people who could afford it would buy. (our kids have very expensive tastes. You know: food and whatnot.) But for years they’ve been unavailable except by ‘pirated’ means. These men and women kept the series alive. They kept the books available. So no, we did NOT take these books down.”

Go forth, and read.

I’m sorry if no one’s explained this to you before but a content creator telling you that their work isn’t for minors and it’s not their responsibility to jump through hoops to keep it from you is an adult looking out for kids. they’re modeling good boundaries and setting the expectation that you’ll engage with the online community like a person and take responsibility for your choices. if you cannot understand that you need to look out for yourself and take people seriously when they say their work isn’t suitable for young audiences then you are not ready to be unsupervised on the internet.

Holy Tree of Bunny Butts

(It's a......my Twitch channel thing....🤣)

In 8th grade, a huge kid thought I bumped into him in the lunch line and he started swinging at my head yelling “Ch*nk your dad killed my dad in the war.” At detention, his dad picked him up. Never forgot that. Scapegoating is an excuse to dominate and overpower.

Once at a business setting, a CEO physically grabbed me at the door and said “You can’t go in like that” and redid my tie. Kept pushing me in the chest tsk-ing at me. This was at the height of covid; I don’t like to be touched, much less then. Why was this okay?

At a grocery store (where I’ve had multiple racist encounters) the cashier asked me “How do you make fried rice?” The bagger behind her, a wonderful Black woman, said to the cashier “Honey are you out of your mind?” Never forgot that intervention. Thank you.

We remember every racist encounter. As they say, death by a thousand cuts. It stays in our bones. But I also remember every intervention. I remember every time a stranger spoke up at the cost of their own comfort. Which do you want to be remembered for?

just a thought - call me by my fucking name

Been thinking about this a lot ever since before the recent news spike; never was sure how to say it gracefully, so fuck it, I'll just say it ungracefully. We all saw various pronunciation guides for the victims' names pop up in the aftermath of the Atlanta shootings, which I and I'm sure many others of Asian descent hugely appreciate. Most white Americans will never truly experience of having every school teacher, classmate, colleague, customer service rep, and so forth mangle your last and/or first name, especially for first gen kids or kids whose parents didn’t give them an English nickname. It's hard; I get it. Many phonemes in my native Mandarin, for example, have no common English equivalents. They're literally not in your lexicon. So I for one appreciate any good faith effort to ask people of Asian descent how to correctly pronounce their name.

But I also want to bring up the converse: if your Asian friend refuses to divulge their name in their mother tongue, or looks really uncomfortable as you repeatedly fail to master the pronunciation, please just drop it. I cannot count the number of times I've seen white people try to say my Chinese or Korean or Indian friends' names; it usually goes something like this: Asian friend gives pronunciation; white friend repeats it back while sounding nothing like what they heard; Asian friend repeats it again; white friend tries again all while looking at Asian friend with puppy dog eyes like, did I get it right? Did I get it right? Meanwhile my ears are bleeding.

Or the weird thing where white guys are really interested in our Asian names because they think it's sexy or exotic? ? Like my creepy weeb colleague back in New York with a serious case of yellow fever: I told him my Chinese name just to get him off my case, because he thought it was more romantic (??) that instead of my English name which is what I go by. It's far from the first time that's happened. Anyways, that turned out to be a stupid decision as he wouldn’t shut up about it; I ended up changing my Tumblr and Ao3 names which were based on my Chinese name out of fear that he would find me using it. Four years later, I still get random messages from him using my Chinese name and begging me to come back and see him. Jfc

Look, it's not on Asian people to coach you through your linguistic hurdles. We already feel foreign enough in this country without you emphasizing to the entire classroom or office break room how exotic or fetishized our names are; there's no need to draw out the torture in the name of misplaced social justice. Just try your best the first time around and work on it yourself later. No one will judge you for not getting it right the first time, but everyone will get pretty damn sick of you if you insist on trying to get it right the second, third, fourth time, and so on. If your friend would prefer to give you their English name, go with that. It's not about you being "less of an ally", but rather about them being more comfortable.

Scientific American article points out there is no real reason to exclude transgender athletes

The Scientific American is one of the world’s leading science journals, so when they print an article about transgender athletes, it is a safe bet that it is science based.

Jack Turban is a fellow in child and adolescent psychiatry at the Stanford University School of Medicine, where he researches the mental health of transgender youth. 

He addresses the arguments behind the American anti-trans bills:

Read the whole article here!

Photo by roibu

No but moralizing about how you don’t deserve the vaccine yet is greatly reducing vaccination numbers it’s not your job to worry about if you’re “stealing” a vaccine from someone else there is a National supply and when it’s your turn it’s your turn. Refusing to get vaccinated is not going to magically vaccinate a bed bound rural person. It’s just going to get vaccine doses thrown in the garbage. God.

i feel like people have a lot of misconceptions about what majoring in psych is like…  i majored in psych and literally only took 2 classes relating to neurodivergence / mental illness, and both were optional. most of studying psych is about like, basic mental processes. cognition, memory, sleep, development, the different parts of the brain and how they work, neurotransmitters, etc. so if anyone tries to say “oh im a psych major i know so much about neurodivergence, way more than you!” in an argument, they’re definitely lying lol. they just know what a cerebellum is

It’s important to know that hijab is banned in schools in most of the european countries, such as france, belgium, switzerland etc. Millions of girls have to take their hijab off everyday in order to have access to education, and I am one of them. Please spread this as much as possible, it has become so normal here that I feel like a fool for even mentioning it, but I’m pretty sure it goes against the human rights. This senseless law has been on since 2004 and pretends that all the students have to be “equal” and it is prohibited to show that you belong to any religion, any religious sign must be set aside. However, most of us have to take our hijab off in schools where you can clearly see a christmas tree or a christian cross. “Yeah but it’s not the same”, they say. Tell me about double standards. I pray for days when we don’t have to chose between religion and education.

This, but don’t read the notes. It’s all just French people and/or Catholics going “I’m totally not racist or antisemitic, it’s just that I think that Xmas, a holiday celebrating the birth of Jesus, is secular, whereas a Muslim or Jew wearing a hijab or kippah is somehow forcing their religion on me by existing in public.” LOL

“If you are not attracted to an individual, because the individual has a trait, that’s okay”

1) This is a very good twitter thread.

2) the notes are full of terfs (in part bc OP put it on terf tags intentionally) and it’s gross af but it makes a damn good blocklist

Reblogging the good stuff from Laura Kate Dale, the gay autistic transwoman gamer we deserve.

Thanks for stopping by for tea with our positive bunny friend! ☕ We can be so critical of ourselves and not even realize, so sometimes we just need someone on the other side of the table to tell us what they really see.

Chibird store | Patreon | Webtoon

I hate these fucking cannibals so fucking much

Love that AOC became Nancy-Pelosi-In-Waiting so goddamn fast

–Elsée Reclus, “Evolution, Revolution, and the Anarchist Ideal” (1898)

While I don’t disagree with the Elisée (forgot an i here bud) Reclus quote, it has no place in a post that peddles such blatant misinformation.

1) This tweet comes after a thread that starts like this :

2) Goes on to condemn the carceral framework of immigration policy as a whole :

3) And as for the tweet screencapped by op, it’s a response to this :

So here’s what AOC, quote-unquote “cannibal”, is actually saying in that tweet :

- no immigration facility should be carceral

- immigrant children who come in the country alone (which is a situation which has always existed and. will. always. exist.) and/or children who’ve been torn apart from their families should be taken care of in (separate) facilities which need to go through a tougher vetting process

- none of these facilities should be sub-contracted by the gvt

- and some facilities which have had problems in the past should maybe just be closed

- all of these solutions should be short term before a deeper reform can occur.

ALL. OF. THESE. ARE. VALID. AND. PERFECTLY. NORMAL. POINTS. TO. MAKE. NONE OF THEM ARE IN CONTRADICTION WITH AOC’S EARLIER TWEET.

Seriously some people have this idea that advocating for radical reform means you’re exempt from thinking about the meat-and-potatoes day-to-day inner workings of any policy. You’re all for immigration ? Great, me too. How do you plan to house migrants when they arrive ? What kind of facility would you need ? Who would run it ? How do you survey and vet the people running it ? What extra services do you need to provide for immigrant minors who come in unaccompanied and need to be protected in a country they don’t know ? And how do we deal with the damage already caused by the current system ?

AOC is absolutely not saying, as the framing suggests, that “concentration camps” would be fine with a few tweaks. She is saying that such a system is not okay and that deep change is needed, while providing concrete solutions to the most pressing issues with the current way the system works. These two statements are not incompatible.

I understand that we are basically all traumatized with the way we cannot trust any fucking politician, but behind every post calling out AOC as a “corrupted idol” I detect a real anxiety of being “ahead of the curve”, of denouncing progressives for “selling out” before they actually do, so we can’t be disappointed if and when these progressives water down their ideals. AOC is not perfect, nor should she be treated as such. But what’s happening in this post is disinformation, pure and simple. It’s twisting someone’s words for the pervert pleasure of making people feel disappointed and betrayed and dividing us. It pains me to see people fall for it when the tweets in actual context are only a click away. Be better. If we take this shit at face value and discard allies so readily, what chance do we have against people who actually want to cause us harm ?

If you really care about preventing government tyranny, your #1 priority must be making sure criminals have rights.

And that's not a joke or an exaggeration.

If criminals don't have rights, then all the government has to do is find some excuse to label people as criminals, and those people will no longer have rights. It's what literally every tyrannical government in all of history has done.

If you believe that people who break the law should forfeit their rights, you're literally as pro-tyranny as a person can get.

If it can be taken away from you, you don’t have it as a right, you have it as a privilege based on sometimes arbitrary or unfair rules that wealthy people who don’t follow them with no repercussions made up. 

Criminals MUST have the same rights as wider society.