PSA

here's your friendly reminder that firefox is a nonprofit organization and they've rolled out a bunch of ACTUAL privacy features in the past year alone, including complete built-in protection from tracking

It just gets better...

weird anti ideology finally leaking out into the mainstream

I'm so exhausted by all of this.

I think we're seeing the consequences of surveillance, honestly. Like they're policing themselves this heavily because they've never had privacy before, not from their parents, not from their peers, not from advertisers, not online, nothing. And with all that constant and conflicting criticism, there are no consistent rules for when they're going to be attacked so they're responding by making elaborate, false rule-sets as a coping strategy. LIke "maybe, if I act this way, I'll finally be safe" but it doesn't work so they get more desperate.

Add on all the school shootings in the US, inaction on climate change, and a pandemic that was allowed to rip through schools unchecked, kids and young adults have a deep sense that their lives are disposable. And they're right! Our society is systematically hostile and abusive to children in so many ways! However, the only child abuse society gets riled up about is pedophilia. Adults act like pedophilia is the only kind of child abuse that counts as abuse.

And that's why I think we are seeing kids stretching the meaning of pedophilia. They are looking for language that encompasses all of the kinds of abuse that they're experiencing. All of the emotional abuse of children is normalized, quite a bit of physical abuse is normalized, and the lack of privacy, agency, and bodily autonomy is all socially enforced. The truth is that all of these other forms of abuse can and do lead to sexual abuse, too. These kids are on to something, but it's getting deflected and warped by the fact that they still live in the dangerous environments they've been abused in. I think more specific language will be empowering here and will also bridge the gap between the current generation of young people and other anti-violence movements.

So if you are a child or young adult who resonates with any of the above, I want you to know that as a child abuse survivor, I believe you when you say that you've been abused. I think the anxiety about fandom websites and queer people and kink is misplaced because strangers don't usually have the structural power and access to you to hurt you but I know that there are people in you life who do have that power and I'm worried about you. I think ao3/queer/kink are just the issues that you feel safest speaking up about. I see you speaking up and I think there's more going on.

So what I can do for you, as a random stranger on the internet, is give you some resources and language so you can start to articulate your experiences and find solidarity with others.

Some terms you might find helpful:

Here's a copy of the UN's Convention on the Rights of the Child. The US has refused to sign this but it's still a good idea of what the rest of the world believes you deserve and what we know will help you thrive.

Here's a copy of the power and control wheel for child abuse. Power and control wheels are commonly used in many forms of victim advocacy to help map abuse. To be clear, we count these things as abuse because we know from research that they are traumatic. Many laws have not been updated to include all these forms, so you'll notice that many of the things on this wheel are completely legal even though we know they are harmful.

Additionally, I'm including a zine I found on peer support for suicide ideation. I know that growing up, my friends and I were always told to tell a trusted adult but we didn't have one and ended up trying to help each other through some really awful shit. This is a guide written by someone with a similar experience and it details ways to informally support someone who is feeling suicidal.

I'm so so glad to see a response to this other than:

This is a real problem with real causes. Things don't just happen for no reason because a group you don't like is inherently worse than you or incapable of making good decisions.

We are like this because of the unprecedented cultural conditions surrounding our development & socialization!!!

This little asshole keeps getting into a bird feeder, so we need to test how small is *too* small

3 inch opening: no problem

2.75 inch opening: Easy

2.5 inch opening: doing fine

2.25 inch opening: Bit of a struggle, but as Mr Meeseeks says: CAAAN DOO!

2 inch opening: Alright, lets try chewing the opening a bit, As long as we get the nuts into the mouth (huhuhu) we good I guess…

Uh-oh… Steve is getting greedy

:insert grunts of effort here:

Taking a break…

The guy who made the original video decided after a long struggle to help Steve out.

A New Challenger approaches!

1.75 inchs: Quote Mr Meseeks: “OOOHHH HE’S TRYING”

GIMME GIMME GIMME

He ends up giving up.

Source: Chris Notap - Squirrel ● literally ● bites off more than he can chew ! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sS4ach0CwN4

via imgur

Science

I love it

What I learned is that I am not the only person who calls all squirrels Steve

stop it steve

mood:

His little hands at the end sent me into a frenzy of laughter.

hnmmm what if i just HHEGGDHEHHDGGEGEGGDGGDGEGEGE

girl help I'm getting they/them'd by well-meaning people who don't know what a tomboy is

This feeling is strange and complicated. On the one hand it's legit quite cool that nonbinary pronouns are becoming more widespread! On the other, I've spent my whole life pursuing interests and hobbies and ideals that weren't seen as particularly feminine, and when I was younger this was a major source of bullying and stress alongside some generalized misogyny taking the form of "you can't do or be anything you think is cool because you are innately inferior and to do otherwise means violating your nature," and it took me a while to conclude that this was just straight horseshit top to bottom and I could do whatever I wanted and present myself however I wanted without in any way being Not A Girl, and now it's like the exact same concept has flipped sides and is coming from a point of theoretical validation but still calculates out to "that's not very ladylike of you, you must be something else". anyway she/her thanks gang

I think it's like. the understanding that the gender binary is a small part of a much wider space of identities is separate from the understanding that a lot of that gender binary is a false dichotomy that artificially walls off universal human experiences behind specific pronouns and while the first concept is gaining wider understanding the second is lagging a little, which means "I am a girl and I like doing boy things" reads as "oh I've heard about this, you must be one of the Others who don't do the binary" rather than "the concept of 'boy things' is stupid from the jump"

just to be 100% clear

what this post is NOT talking about: using they/them pronouns for someone you don't know, aren't sure of, hasn't had a chance to introduce themselves, etc.

what this post IS talking about: my highly personal experience seeing some people "correcting" my commenters that were using she/her pronouns for me, because, despite me exclusively using she/her pronouns and saying so whenever asked, through no action of mine they had gotten the idea that I was using "they/them".

girl help I put a nuanced personal experience on the reading comprehension website

It's incredible how people have been protesting pants and skirts not having pockets but not a single peep is heard over the fact that skirts no longer have underskirts by default. Underskirts (or lining) was a thing when I was a child, no skirt would be made without lining, you didn't have to think and check if your whole ass is visible in a skirt because lining was a thing!!!! Now most skirts don't and it's simply because it's cheaper, fuck the fact that a customer doesn't want their panties shown in broad daylight, it saves a couple of cents on material.

okay so this has definitely breached containment and I want to point something out:

I always thought it was like an exaggeration when horse people would talk about how silly it was for anyone to think that riding a horse does not require any particular level of skill or balance or anything, or even that they "drive themselves" (???) but just the tags on the reblogs of that "can you ride a bike and/or horse" post from me alone are demonstrating how overconfident some people are in their (often entirely theoretical!) ability to stay on an alive and moving animal with a will of its own.

like don't get me wrong, I've put young kids on horses & seen younger ride them entirely on their own.

but I've also watched grown-ass adults do things like back a horse straight into a bush because they couldn't follow basic instructions like "stop pulling back on the reins".

and those are just the horses I trust with 8 year olds.

I just think the "horses are scary idiots who eat fingers and break all their legs whenever they see a plastic bag" website was very quick to believe themselves to be the wayward city girl who trauma-bonded with the wild & troubled horse on her family's ranch & won the race & saved the farm all before summer break ended.

is all.

yes Anna May I'm sure riding a horse is much easier than riding a bike. those idiot country folk just don't know what they're talking about. your bond with Serendipity will be strong & you will overcome his troubled heart with the power of fresh apples and transcendant horse empathy.

theoretically, of course.

unfortunately I am beginning to understand why horse girls are so defensive about riding being a "sport".

you're so right besties! I'm rooting for you!!!

there's also - can you "ride a horse" aka some old, quiet, tourist horse in a cowboy saddle who doesn't mind you bouncing a bit in a slow jog

or do you know how to put a horse into a fast trot and follow it and rising and sitting or actually stay seated using your goddamn seat. (do you even know what your seat is?)

would you fall off if you were put in an English saddle?

do you know how to put a horse into canter? how to STOP it once it canters?

what if the horse jumps sideways because it saw a purple flower? will you stay on? (i'm 50/50 and I used to ride every day)

do you know how to collect a horse? how to do an extended canter? do you know that sitting on a big warmblood, nicely collected and then do a full extended canter is Better Than Sex?

do you know? do you know how to ride?

Everyone should follow what's happening at Columbia right now. This is the largest protest there since 1968, and the admin just stripped several students of healthcare and housing.

The NYPD arrested over 108 students camping on the South Lawn yesterday. Now, thousands have joined the demonstration. As Israel prepares to commit genocide, Palestinian and Jewish students are taking the lead in protesting institutional complicity around the world.

OP.. CHANGE YOUR URL OP

Sound. On.

Sound is far more imperative than you ever imagined

We’ve waited a year to reblog this. Happy Bread Anniversary!

Because it’s important to celebrate the little victories in life. 

We’ve waited a year to reblog this. Happy Bread Anniversary!

Because it’s important to celebrate the little victories in life. 

Pierre Fouché. 1994.77 or Lebenslänglichen Explosionsglück, 2020.

Rayon chords from a World War II parachute.

PBY Blister Gunner, Rescue at Rabaul, 1944, photo by Horace Bristol

collection

I posted this on my art account by accident and deleted it after 2 minutes how did this go viral lmao.

Because it’s hilarious next question

ngl I keep forgetting that Hobby Lobby is a real store that people go to. That people actually think of it as a craft store and not as a crazy Christian mass artifact smuggler. I google "Hobby Lobby" and get a page full of results that make me go "wtf is this craft supplies and operating hours shit, I thought we all knew this place for smuggling looted cuneiform tablets out of Iraq"

#sorry what??? #I knew them as the store with the Christian right wing owners that refused to pay for employee birth control as part of health insurance #what is this about cuneiform tablet looting

They are also that! And it comes from the same place.

Since 2009, the billionaire owners of Hobby Lobby started taking advantage of the wars in Iraq to buy stolen and looted cuneiform tablets and clay artifacts from ancient Mesopotamia. A lot of them were suspected to have been stolen from the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad in the chaos of the US invasion in 2003. The Hobby Lobby owners used HL profits to smuggle these artifacts into the US (taking them out of Iraq is illegal so they listed them as tile samples from Turkey and Israel, more friendly nations to the US). Eventually the customs officials seized them, and the US Department of Justice filed a lawsuit in 2017 when the news really broke about just how many ancient Middle Eastern artifacts were smuggled into the country. They were doing this to stock their "Museum of the Bible" that purports to prove the literal truth of the Bible... using stolen Mesopotamian cuneiform tablets, somehow. Idk.

They also had sixteen Dead Sea Scrolls that turned out to be forgeries but that's only tangentially related.

Hobby Lobby and its owners were fined and ordered to return, again, thousands of artifacts back to Iraq. For years they KEPT finding more artifacts of Hobby Lobby's that turned out to be stolen, looted, and smuggled. It's one of the biggest artifact smuggling scandals in recent history. And it separated artifacts from their context and permanently damaged the ability to learn new things from them, even though archaeologists subsequently have been trying.

The court case was called "United States v. Approximately Four Hundred and Fifty Cuneiform Tablets."

Here, have some audio in case that's easier to learn

one of the most infuriating things about becoming an adult is when you realize that it actually is 10x easier to solve problems by making a phone call vs literally any other communication method

Tech companies: we will spend trillions developing AI bots badly

Me: what if you properly staffed online chat and phone centers 24/7, paid workers well, treated them with respect, and built a solid career path with solid wages and growth instead?

Tech companies: THEMS NOT ROBOTS!!!!!!

<3 This is why its just as important to vote in local elections as it is in the Presidential one <3

It is vital to make sure awesome compassionate and decent people like this woman who will protect the LGBTQ community from oppression and persecution are in power in iindividual states <3