Man, i love looking at classified government documents

>documents about OPSEC

>left Improperly secured

Kek

did codename kids next door write this shit

compilation

When I was in college, round about 2002 or so, I did a paper on hate groups that necessitated a couple of visits to Stormfront, a white supremacist website and message board. One of the pages on the site was a "children's page" operated by the child of Storrmfront's founder, which was a unique form of horrifying. But I also remember looking at a photo of the kid on the site and thinking, that poor fuckin' kid, what kind of chance did he ever have?

But it was just a paper and that was just a photo of a child I didn't know, so I turned in the paper and graduated and got on with life.

In 2016, @archwrites posted a link to an article by the Washington Post titled "The White Flight of Derek Black" (sorry about the paywall, Arch's post quotes some relevant parts here). I thought it looked like an interesting read: it was about a white supremacist named Derek Black and a group of campus activists at the school Black eventually attended, who set out to see if they could change his mind about race with radical kindness. In large part because of their work, Black eventually renounced white supremacy and became an antiracist.

And then I hit a photo in the article and gasped, because I recognized it. I'd seen the same photo on the Stormfront children's website. The kid I'd seen and pitied was grown up and had gotten out. Immensely satisfying to see.

But it was just a news story about someone I didn't even know, so I posted about how pleased I was to see it, and I got on with life again.

This morning, I woke to the news (sorry, it's the Daily Fail) that R. Derek Black, now 35, has just published a memoir, The Klansman's Son: My Journey from White Nationalism to Antiracism. And in the epilogue, they come out as trans.

I can't imagine better news I could have heard about them -- that they're out, they're thriving, and they're embracing themself.

Congratulations, kid. It's a great new photo.

[ID: A recent photograph of R. Derek Black, with long curly red hair, wearing a floral collared shirt and a red cardigan, smiling for the camera.]

hope you don't mind but I found the Post article extremely good, so here's a gift link for anyone who wishes to read it in full.

Oh I don't mind at all -- that's actually great, thank you! Reblogging so people can access the article through the link.

I love the angle of this photo. Usually you only see photos of what’s on stage or of an empty proscenium. Here is where you come in contact with both worlds. The brink between stage and life. It’s magical. 

"Kill them with kindness" CORRECT!!!

@charlezarrd

I know unicorns in modern media are kind of relegated to cutsie, MLP, rainbow plastic toys, or shitting rainbows, 'lets go to candy mountain' but man. I WISH more fantasy media would put them in unironically. There is so much symbolic and narrative potential in a creature that is, depending on your mythology:

I made a weird poem/short story out of the text seen in the thumbnails of Tom Scott's videos!

I fucking knew it, I SAID it: they're making ADHD people the next culture war targets. They will 'just ask questions' until we lose every scrap of ground we've gained in the last decade and more. We may not quite inspire the same level of hatred as a sexual minority, but we can very easily be made to inspire disdain and that also works.

They will strip us of our accomodations and our medications and try to stifle any sense of shared identity, and if that kills some of us, oh well. So long as it fuels another outrage cycle, fine.

So many of the tropes they've been using on trans people work extremely well on ADHD people too! "There are too many of these people suddenly! It must be a fad! It spreads through friend groups! And online! People are going private for diagnoses and that's bad! They are using pOwERfUl medical interventions and we think it's freaky!"

I saw the first ripples of this in terf circles about two years ago. And of course it's spread.

6% of British ADHD people lost their jobs in the last year thanks to the meds shortage. SIX PER CENT! And that just made these ghouls go "ooh, tasty, what else can we do?"

Recently an 'expert' was on the BBC saying people see ADHD diagnosis as a "golden ticket." Laurence Fox has been ranting that the condition doesn't exist and threatening "'you won't poison my child's body [with ADHD meds] against my consent"

People need to be aware this is going to get worse. Maybe, if we're lucky, it won't get really bad. But it's going to get worse than it is now.

I feel like maybe I should throw my hat in the ring and point out that…I don’t know if this *is* the culture war thing everyone is worried it might be.

When they draw parallels to the opioids crisis, there’s a reason for that, and it’s because that was a BIG scandal in the medical world when it came out that OxyContin was getting pushed by pharmaceutical companies as a side-effect free, easy-access pain-relief drug, and a lot of doctors that should have known better or done the research began pushing it…and then a bunch of people got addicted to a highly addictive substance when what they really needed was medical help (or could have used a more suitable pharmaceutical to do the same job that didn’t have half the potential issues with it)

The fact of the matter is that it is significantly easier these days for doctors to just prescribe things like Ritalin or Adderall and go “there, see? You’re fine!” than it used to be. And these substances are not without their side effects either, they are controlled substances for a reason. If the pharmaceutical companies are pushing these as solutions to the current mental health crisis, and the doctors involved aren’t doing the research or the work to make sure their patients get the right medication and support that they actually need for their issues…that’s a potential reason to spotlight the fact that such drugs may have seen a sharp increase in usage lately.

And, again, these meds *do* have side-effects, they’re not cure-all stimulants, if used in the wrong context, they will cause more problems than they solve, and if someone is just having these thrown at them when they need a different kind of support (or need more support than just the drugs), that’s a problem, because they aren’t getting the right attention and help that they need.

Now. It could be wrong. This could be a case of “well yeah we know now that these actually help and that we’ve been under-diagnosing things for a while so the increase in usage is justified” and some people are just being overly concerned in the media.

But I don’t actually mind some people being over-concerned given the absolutely awful things that the pharmaceutical companies have inflicted on people just wanting help in the past.

In this case, I think some of their skepticism is warranted. It’s how we make sure the pharmaceutical companies (and lazy doctors that will just take their money) don’t wreck us.

Because they will. And have. If they can get away with it. They don’t give a shit about you. They just want your money.

reblog to give a strawberry to the person you reblogged this from

imagine if you will, a fairly dry survival crafting game in which you live in a bunker and must periodically venture out to scavenge food, set up turrets for attacking monsters, etc

now, your computer inside the bunker has a game-inside-a-game on it which is a charming farming sim of undeniably greater quality and scope than the survival game you're playing. therefore, the object of the game becomes to keep your bunker secure so you can play the farming game more.

now, once you achieve the highest rating in the farming game, a secret shop inside it unlocks, and one of the novelty items you can purchase is a game console, giving you access to games-inside-a-game-inside-a-game. most of the games for it are typical mobile shovelware, but one of them is a highly polished, extremely brutal precision platformer with amazing level design and production values exceeding that of the survival game and farming sim combined.

it is only at this point that the purpose of this entire contrivance becomes clear: to create the most deranged speedrun community the world has ever seen.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/tendril/

Satsop nuclear plant, Washington state

Void. (2021)

I fucking knew it, I SAID it: they're making ADHD people the next culture war targets. They will 'just ask questions' until we lose every scrap of ground we've gained in the last decade and more. We may not quite inspire the same level of hatred as a sexual minority, but we can very easily be made to inspire disdain and that also works.

They will strip us of our accomodations and our medications and try to stifle any sense of shared identity, and if that kills some of us, oh well. So long as it fuels another outrage cycle, fine.

So many of the tropes they've been using on trans people work extremely well on ADHD people too! "There are too many of these people suddenly! It must be a fad! It spreads through friend groups! And online! People are going private for diagnoses and that's bad! They are using pOwERfUl medical interventions and we think it's freaky!"

I saw the first ripples of this in terf circles about two years ago. And of course it's spread.

6% of British ADHD people lost their jobs in the last year thanks to the meds shortage. SIX PER CENT! And that just made these ghouls go "ooh, tasty, what else can we do?"

Recently an 'expert' was on the BBC saying people see ADHD diagnosis as a "golden ticket." Laurence Fox has been ranting that the condition doesn't exist and threatening "'you won't poison my child's body [with ADHD meds] against my consent"

People need to be aware this is going to get worse. Maybe, if we're lucky, it won't get really bad. But it's going to get worse than it is now.

Change a single letter and change the word game

I want to play a game with you all.

You have to make a new word by changing only one letter of the last word.

Dirt

Dart

Dark

bark

Lark

Lurk

Lure

Sure

Surf

Serf

Self

Seld

Meld

Mold

Mole

Hole

Bole

Bolt

Boat

Boar

Soar

Soap

Soup

Soul

Sour

Soul

Foul

Fowl

Bowl

Bawl

Ball

Fall

Fill

Pill

Hill

Hall

haul

Maul

Mail

Bail

Bait

Brit

Crit