And Fade to Feathers

RB for a bigger sample size please!

like ou (c) jogodoamor

I am not unaware of the negatives of Biden’s presidency, and I am not trying to elide or forgive them. I’m reblogging posts about the Biden administration because I think it’s really important that potential voters in the US realize that there is, in fact, a very big difference between the two parties, and voting for Biden is not just damage control–it actually does good. It’s okay, you can actually feel a little excited about making meaningful progress, and not just hold your nose.

He’s been very unflashy. He’s not a great leader, he’s not charismatic and he knows it, but he’s an adroit politician and administrator, and he’s been getting things done. Letting Trump win at this point would be tantamount to throwing the entire country on the bonfire. It’s not a choice between bad and bad, it’s a choice between meaningful, if imperfect, progress and fucking doom.

I keep doing it because I don’t hear any buzz about the real progress that’s happening, and that’s frusterating.

I keep doing it because fear isn’t actually all that effective to get people to do something. But I just want to be screaming “What the actual f*ck!” when folks act like the dude who sent unmarked vans to scoop up Black Lives Matter protesters and stans Andrew *Trail of Tears* Jackson is the equivalent of the dude lowering the price of prescriptions drugs and standing on the picket line with auto workers. Mainly by giving Biden somewhat more power than he actually has.

I keep doing it because I regularly volunteer with a marginalized group who are very aware of what’s at stake.

Some things Biden and Congress have done:

I’m reblogging stuff about Biden when I can because I actually care about engaged democracy. And Biden is great at democracy, but really bad at engagement. (in many ways, he got elected exactly because of that, because The Other Guy is extremely engaging, but cares not a whit about either democracy or integrity). Biden cares about democracy, and he is engaged, even though lacking the ability to engage people. Which is so fucking frustrating, because now is a great time to make sure that every elected official understands that the American public actually wants democracy. Like, the GOP has become a death-cult. Giving the Democrats an actually significant win this year, while making it clear that election reform is something that should be considered top of the agenda? Ending the Electoral College and Gerrymandering, at the very least? Maybe adding some Ranked Choice Voting? Maybe restoring voting rights for felons? The GOP knows that they can’t win elections without the current system in place, because they’ve rigged the system very very carefully. If enough Americans get out and empower the Democrats this year, the political map of this country could change forever. Because the Republicans can’t win elections unless they cheat. They’ve said it themselves that significant voter reform would make them incapable of winning elections. The schism would finally sunder them. And probably that would in turn sunder the Democrats. And instead of the current state of affairs, where we have Violent White Nationalism vs Politics As Usual, we might actually arrive at a state of affairs where we are balancing between Radical Progress vs Politics As Usual, instead. If we get lucky enough, we might even get more than two options. That is to say, a moderate amount of voting reform would probably change the bipartisan system into a Centrist Career Politicians Party (the great reunion tour of the motherfucking Democratic Republicans) vs an Actually Progressive Politicians Party (who might finally even decide it’s finally safe to gather under the Democratic Socialists flag 🍞🌹✊). And the tug-of-war would change into the speed with which we could implement progressive policies. Or, if there’s actually engagement enough to call for real voter reform, for a new amendment to the Constitution (or perhaps a full rewriting of the Constitution, like most actually functional democracies do once or twice a century?)… the political scene could change in real ways. Like. I’m reblogging about Biden because he’s showing that he wants to engage with the issues. If the voters make it clear that the top issue is election reform, and then follow through and empowers Biden’s party to do something about it? The likelihood is that he would actually do it. (But this is only possible if, you know, the Democrats get all the majorities they need to push things through, which requires actual wide-spread ENGAGEMENT.

MONKEY MAN (2024)

I'm so glad that y'all are so into Monkey Man and the badass hijra priestess army, but friendly reminder that hijra are NOT trans women. Hijra are their own distinct gender; trans women are women. India has both :)

This is really...weird to post if you yourself are not a trans woman or hijra, op. Many (I would even say most) hijra are women. So many of us use the term hijra women instead of just hijra to emphasise this point. A lot of the hijra identity (and other trans identities in India like Jogta/Jogtini, Aravani etc.) is tied to the arts and religion in a way that the modern term "trans" does not fully encompass or represent, but that doesn't mean that these non-secular (i can't find a better word rn) trans people are not. Well. Trans. Hijra, Aravani and other transfeminine people and women have been active in LGBT and esp. trans activism at the grassroots within India for the longest time. I'm Indian and trans myself and I'm really so tired of this constant third-gendering (and thus misgendering) of trans Indians. (Not to say that many trans people don't view themselves within the third gender framework, but that that term has done more harm than good in the practical sense.)

Here's an excellent thread by an Indian trans women tearing apart the seminal anthropological text that has cemented the idea of Hijra "third gender"ness for its racism, orientalism, and transmisogyny.

https://twitter.com/talia_bhatt/status/1779895088266592638?t=HKXcxNoIXgo0pgWcMR-mzQ&s=19

Hijras are primarily considered "third gender" (which is similar to many other culturally embedded trans women in the global south being seen as a third gender) because western anthropologists and later Indian anthropologists uncritically accepted the degendering and marginalization trans women experience as ontological evidence of a third gender which was later taken up by state policies.

This has been done by ignoring hijras for decades who have self identified as women and using transmisogynistic talking points such as a lack of their wombs making it impossible for them to be women, their forced prostitution and begging because of their exclusion from the formal economy as "cultural practices", and their experiences detailing how despite their wishes and efforts society refuses to see them as women as evidence that they are not women. The vast majority of hijras are women; they exist as women, they take HRT, they get their legal names changed, etc. Calling them a third gender is structural transmisogyny.

the older I get, the more the technological changes I've lived through as a millennial feel bizarre to me. we had computers in my primary school classroom; I first learned to type on a typewriter. I had a cellphone as a teenager, but still needed a physical train timetable. my parents listened to LP records when I was growing up; meanwhile, my childhood cassette tape collection became a CD collection, until I started downloading mp3s on kazaa over our 56k modem internet connection to play in winamp on my desktop computer, and now my laptop doesn't even have a disc tray. I used to save my word documents on floppy discs. I grew up using the rotary phone at my grandparents' house and our wall-connected landline; my mother's first cellphone was so big, we called it The Brick. I once took my desktop computer - monitor, tower and all - on the train to attend a LAN party at a friend's house where we had to connect to the internet with physical cables to play together, and where one friend's massive CRT monitor wouldn't fit on any available table. as kids, we used to make concertina caterpillars in class with the punctured and perforated paper strips that were left over whenever anything was printed on the room's dot matrix printer, which was outdated by the time I was in high school. VHS tapes became DVDs, and you could still rent both at the local video store when I was first married, but those shops all died out within the next six years. my facebook account predates the iphone camera - I used to carry around a separate digital camera and manually upload photos to the computer in order to post them; there are rolls of undeveloped film from my childhood still in envelopes from the chemist's in my childhood photo albums. I have a photo album from my wedding, but no physical albums of my child; by then, we were all posting online, and now that's a decade's worth of pictures I'd have to sort through manually in order to create one. there are video games I tell my son about but can't ever show him because the consoles they used to run on are all obsolete and the games were never remastered for the new ones that don't have the requisite backwards compatibility. I used to have a walkman for car trips as a kid; then I had a discman and a plastic hardshell case of CDs to carry around as a teenager; later, a friend gave my husband and I engraved matching ipods as a wedding present, and we used them both until they stopped working; now they're obsolete. today I texted my mother, who was born in 1950, a tiktok upload of an instructional video for girls from 1956 on how to look after their hair and nails and fold their clothes. my father was born four years after the invention of colour televison; he worked in radio and print journalism, and in the years before his health declined, even though he logically understood that newspapers existed online, he would clip out articles from the physical paper, put them in an envelope and mail them to me overseas if he wanted me to read them. and now I hold the world in a glass-faced rectangle, and I have access to everything and ownership of nothing, and everything I write online can potentially be wiped out at the drop of a hat by the ego of an idiot manchild billionaire. as a child, I wore a watch, but like most of my generation, I stopped when cellphones started telling us the time and they became redundant. now, my son wears a smartwatch so we can call him home from playing in the neighbourhood park, and there's a tanline on his wrist ike the one I haven't had since the age of fifteen. and I wonder: what will 2030 look like?

My grandfather, who is 100, remembers his dad’s accountant doing math on an abacus. Now he texts me “<3” on his flip phone.

dev patel really said "i support trans ppls rights....... trans ppls rights to kill bigots with guns and metal pipes and chairs and cool knives'' anyway watch monkey man

AUSTIN BUTLER. Los Angeles Times.

We're on a new platform with a totally different audience...we have to prove ourselves all over again...convince a totally new group of people to think we're funny and worth your attention....so allow me to drop some of my "A" material....the funniest thing I got.......here goes....... jeef berky

I've rarely seen a more validating sentence in my entire life.

High fives all around, friends. If we’ve accomplished nothing else today, we still have this.

I feel the need to add this

Death Of The Author is out, Bullying Of The Author Out Of A Forum About Their Own Work is in

Put in the tags a piece of media that’ll never fail to make you cry.

happy stimming

This is one of my favorite comics of all time.

Autistic stimming needs this, more representation of stimming a positive, pure, happy thing.

!!!

Keanu Reeves as Neo