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Hope Comes in Circles

@hollye83 / hollye83.tumblr.com

she/her, fan, misanthrope, old
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reblogged

So, I don't do stuff like this but I am desperate. I need major work on my vehicle and I don't have the funds. I'm the only income in my household and I live with my disabled mother. These repairs are necessary for me to work and get my mom to her appointments.

I am ashamed to have to ask for money but I'm desperate. Any help would be appreciated and I am so sorry to have to ask.

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Image of a text that reads: In conversation with some coworkers, today, one of them said that homeless people should have to work for their meals just like the rest of us.

I said, "Okay, I know a man who is homeless. He'd be happy to work. He's got a business degree. He would be happy to come clean your house, do your yard work, or help you with your filing, walk your dogs, babysit your kids, or just about any office job. What time tomorrow should he come see you?"

They all just looked at me.

I said, "Mind you, he's homeless, so he hasn't showered in a while and the only clothes he has are the ones on his back because he lost all his stuff last week when ge got picked up for vagrancy and they wouldn't let him go back for his bag. It would be a few weeks before what you are paying him is enough to get shelter and such."

And still they stared at me.

I finished, "See? It isn't that easy. He can't get a job because he's homeless with no access to hot water or clean clothes. He can't get access to shelter, hot water or clean clothes without a job. You want him to work for his meals? Give him a hand out of the vicious circle. Stop pretending that all he has to do is get a job."

Unhoused people are not intruders into our communities, they are our communities’ failure to take care of their own.

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weaselle

hey, i've been homeless about three times, depending on what you count as homeless. And there is something else very important that people need to realize.

you know those studies that show that if you don't physically touch a human baby it will die even if it has everything else it needs? And the ones that show that as an adult being ignored by everyone around them can drive a person mad?

When you are homeless, no one ever touches you except in an abusive way, and the only people that don't pointedly ignore you are usually treating you negatively.

Being surrounded by people who treat you like a pariah is like a form of mental torture, and it breaks you down mentally.

It only takes a few weeks of that before you are doing things like having imaginary conversations out out loud. Being homeless will take a person with a normal mental deficiency like high stress or mild depression (you know, things you are likely to feel if you become homeless) and it will tank them all the way down into delusional or dissociative etc in a pretty short amount of time.

(incidentally this is why so many homeless people wind up drug addicts. You do ANYthing to escape your situation, and it's not the physical situation you are trying to escape, it's the mental one)

the point is, when you see a homeless person doing something like screaming at an empty park bench, you don't know if they are homeless because they were already crazy, or if being homeless is the thing that drove them crazy.

Every time i see a discussion about homelessness that asks what to do about the mentally ill people on the streets, i never see this point addressed, and it's an important one.

Either way, they need help. You can't just say something like "they should have to work for their dinner"... often that's not even really relevant to the situation. If you help them regain their sanity and stability enough, yeah, a lot of homeless people would actually prefer to work for what they have, be a normal person and live a normal life, but behaving "normal" just isn't possible for most of them in their current state.

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asneakyfox

the idea that restrooms, locker rooms, etc need to be single-sex spaces in order for women to be safe is patriarchy's way of signalling to men & boys that society doesn't expect them to behave themselves around women. it is directly antifeminist. it would be antifeminist even if trans people did not exist. a feminist society would demand that women should be safe in all spaces even when there are men there.

btw this is maybe the single most key distinguishing feature of the terfy strains of radical feminism, the seed all the rest of it springs out of: they have absolutely no faith in the ability of feminism to actually destroy patriarchy. they do not think feminism can truly build a better world. they cannot really even imagine that possibility. they think patriarchy is an inevitable natural consequence of unchangeable biological facts, and therefore the goal of feminism can only be to mitigate the worst effects of patriarchy, not to get rid of it.

they can imagine a society where women get some designated safe spaces without men around. they cannot imagine a society where the presence of men is not inherently a danger to women.

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reblogged

(◡‿◡✿)

(ʘ‿ʘ✿) “what you say ‘bout me”

(ʘ‿ʘ)ノ✿ “hold my flower”

✿\(。-_-。) “Kick his ass, baby.  I got yo flower.”

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sgt-paul

PAUL MCCARTNEY THE BEATLES: GET BACK (2021) episode 3: day 21 → the rooftop concert

The greatest revelation, to a casual like me, is young Paul McCartney. My perception of him coming in was almost certainly a product of not studying the subject deeply enough, but I thought of McCartney as a sort of happy puppy dog figure, a la Mr. Peanut Butter in Bojack Horseman, a poppy contrast to the brooding, poetic/psychedelic genius of John Lennon. (…) In Get Back, I realized within minutes exactly how wrong I’ve always been. Above all, the two things that struck me most were McCartney’s sheer intensity and his ridiculous, irrepressible talent. The latter might sound awfully obvious — this is Paul McCartney, idiot, of course he’s an otherworldly talent — but watching him rehearse, riff off his fellow Beatles, and invent melody from thin air makes it clear that I never came close to understanding the scope of it. (…)
But McCartney’s intensity is something else entirely, and totally unexpected. Far from an innocent, he’s infused with pure energy; in ways subtle and overt, he can’t help imposing himself on everyone around him. Even when he’s in his “unfailingly polite” mode (…) he’s brimming with hidden force, the biggest person in the room. (…)  
What’s so compelling about Paul McCartney is that more than any of the others, he seemed to want to break free. (…) He’s a one-man army, a force of nature, pick any term you want — they’re all true.
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you know i have never heard a convincing arguement as to why AO3 should not moderate the content that is posted to their website and i think a lot of the arguement against moderation on AO3 boils down to, terminally online people thinks community moderation is the same as government censorship and personally sending the cops to someone’s house to arrest them irl/

Just because you don’t agree with an argument doesn’t mean it’s a bad one. When it was founded the people made a promise to its users. “We will host all transformational works(fanfic) allowed by US law.” This promise came about after other sites had routinely purged fanworks without warning. Not just the same things people call for moderation on now but far more reaching and random. Like FF.net purged ALL mature/NC17 fics from their site, they also purged and banned the ENTIRE genre of songfics(written equivalent of fan made music videos made by putting song lyrics between paragraphs of story prose)

Ao3 bringing in any sort of content moderation or limits on what fics they will host would be breaking that initial promise to their users.

I guess if you’ve never woken up and found chunks of your fave fandom, some fanworks you yourself created just gone, because whoever was hosting it decided to change the rules on you, you wouldn’t understand. And unless you primarily read fics at sites other than Ao3 because of their determination to keep that promise you won’t have to.

see that is the thing that i really do not get, Like the thing that i cannot understand about this arguement is that bad moderation means no moderation should be allowed? It’s ok for AO3 to host racist fanfics and child porn, because the alternative is just random deletions? Like why is the alternative to no moderation bad moderation? Why do AO3 defenders keep on acting like the only options are either no moderations at all, or else it will be fanfics deleted without rhyme or reason? Like why is the argument always in black and white extremes?

One. Ao3 does not host child porn. You can stop with that lie right the fuck now. Child porn(or the more correct term Child Sexual Abuse/Exploitation Material) is when someone has a child under their control and forces them to perform sexual acts and either photographs or films it. It is a recorded documentation of abuse and is in fact illegal(and therefore not allowed to be hosted on Ao3) It is wrong, immoral, and illegal because a real live, breathing child with thoughts, and feelings is being hurt and will have to live with the memory of their abuse for the rest of their lives.The term does not apply to non-photorealistic fanart, or to written words depicting events that did not actually happen(meaning there is no victim and no-one has to live with the memory of the events).  Treating either fanart or fanfic as the same as  real life abuse is an insult and dis-service to every single child that has ever been sexually exploited because you think their suffering is equivalents to lines on paper.  That you think the immorality of CSEM is because it makes you feel “icky” and not because they were being hurt and exploited.  People writing fanfic of two teenage characters making out is in no way equivalent to a real life child having their rape recorded, but I routinely see people calling for moderation on Ao3 acting like it is.

Two. As for the racist(and every other kind of bigotry that can be depicted) I’m going to be honest. I don’t trust the various fandom communities to make a set of standards that aren’t just one group of fans forcing their will and preferences onto the rest of fans. I don’t know what fandoms you’ve been in, but I’ve seen fandoms with interracial ships where if you have the black character top you’re being racist because it’s playing into racist mandrigo tropes. But at the same time you would have people claiming that having the black character bottom you’re also being racist for making the black man submissive. So are both depictions/options racist, are neither of them, or are people just trying to make their personal fic preferences/interpretations some sort of moral issue and force people to cater to them?  I’ve been in fandom communities where the admin/moderators refused to let anyone post fics that didn’t match their preferences(despite claiming to be friendly to all fics) So it’s very much coming from a place of experience that says trying moderate Ao3 based on racism, or any other problematic metric/rubric you want to use will just end up being used to silence people(including other fans of color)

Racism exists in fandom because we live in a racist society and that will filter into ALL media, including fanfic. Trying to remove so called racist fanfic won’t make society any less racist. All it does is give a tool for bullies to try to control and harass people. Everyone has their own personal biases some conscious, some only in their subconscious that they haven’t bothered to unpack  Trying to moderate content based on standards like racism, homophobia, xenophobia, etc… will inevitably lead to the moderators own personal biases leaking through resulting in uneven, inconsistent moderation resulting nothing but hurt feelings and fighting. 

Third. I would just like to mention just how heartless and unempathic you sounds when you act like random mass deletions and purges are no big deal. You have no idea how much it hurts to wake up and find something you created just gone. To find large swaths of fics that you enjoyed again and again, that you found comfort in, deleted never to be recovered. To say nothing of when Livejournal caved to a bunch of right-wing christian evangelical trolls and deleted a bunch of users and communities. People were devastated. people lost support communities and were frantically trying to find the friends they had made in those communities.

I know it may be hard to believe but fiction and art do not cause harm just by existing. A story that may be upsetting and triggering for one person, may bring healing and comfort to another, because everyone brings their own set of experiences and persepctives into every story they read, and therefore each takes something slightly different from it.  But you and every other person calling for moderation on Ao3 act a story causes harm to everyone, again just by existing.  It’s an insane perspective that makes no sense to me. A story I am not forced to read can’t hurt me any more than someone practicing a different religion can hurt me.

There are several ways that you can moderate AO3.

  1. Use filter tags to browse for tags you want to see, and exclude tags you don’t want to see.
  2. Use blocking functions to hide authors you don’t like so you don’t have to read them.
  3. Make your own curated collection of works that you want to share with others as stories that have passed your personal editorial standards for good writing, appropriate character being on top/bottom, etc. Or you can use your Tumblr blog or other spaces to make recommendations!
  4. Use bookmarks to mark works you like.
  5. Subscribe to works you like.

If you read a story and have strong opinions on it, e.g. you think it’s racist to write Adeline as a bully when she’s such an amazing hero character in the source material or you think that author CerseiFan69 writes such creepy stories that you never want to interact with them ever, it’s great that you’re thinking for yourself and trying to do some critical analysis.

You deserve the power to control your own reading experience, which AO3 gives you. However, I don’t trust you to tell the difference between a badly written story by a young writer who is black and wrote Adeline as a bully because Adeline’s accent reminds her of her real life high school bully, versus a badly written story by a writer who’s actually horrible. Likewise, you shouldn’t trust me to tell you which authors you should read as spine-chillingly excellent takes on dark content versus authors who make you want to scrub out your brain with steel wool.

I love the freedom of AO3, where I might write a bad story but at least I know that some moderator won’t judge me harshly and take it down.

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elismor

Listen. The 11th Commandment is not “Thine beliefs are codified and just”. It’s “Don’t like, don’t read.”

You have no right to censorship. Period.

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