Queer Metal Gremlin

i wanted to show everyone my favorite tiktok

the creator of this tiktok, zainah.mb, has many family members in palestine who have been martyred. at least 37, in fact. if you would like to help her out financially, she runs a hijab shop called modest behavior, and sells sister minnie merch. here's a link to her paypal as well.

as far as i know, she doesn't live in palestine, but she is palestinian. consider supporting her

I’ve figured out that one way to stump older people that complain about the current generation is to have an inflation calculator app on your phone.

I HAVE DONE THIS AND IT WORKS

I always roll my eyes at posts about what "true punk" is/was and how it was always a left-wing thing because, like, the Sex Pistols were on of the first popular punk rock bands and they were recognized right from the start as posers who had no coherent politics beyond trying to shock people

"Nazi Punks Fuck Off" would have not been a necessary statement if Nazi punks were not a very real thing and a very real part of the punk scene, just sayin'

You literally cannot be a Nazi Punk tho. You're either a Nazi, or you're Punk. Punk has ALWAYS been about kindness and freedom and making things better. Punk is about hope. Punk is about being so angry about injustices that you are going to start a fight over it. Being a Nazi goes against everything that Punk stands for and the two cannot coexist within a single movement.

No it hasn’t! This is literally exactly the kind of ahistorical take on punk that drives me off the wall, and you’re exactly the kind of person I was vagueing about!

Punk hasn’t always been about freedom, from the start it was being subversive, and what exactly punk was trying to subvert has always been extremely broad and open to interpretetion by different groups!

The Ramones were conservatives. The Sex Pistols had no intended political message beyond being offensive and their frontman supports Trump now. These initial groups were not acting to make a statement about freedom or kindness but to push against the increasing conformity, cleanliness, and smooth production of mainstream rock music. That did not necessarily entail standing up for freedom or left-wing causes. Of the initial “big three” old-school punk bands, The Clash were the only ones that were politically progressive!

Lots of punks in the 80s wore Nazi armbands for the express purpose of being shocking and offensive to mainstream sensibilities because that is what punk was about. And soon enough, the “ironically edgy” Nazi punks gave way to actual goddamned Nazis in punk. Fuck, have you even heard of Skrewdriver? Do you even know that Nazi punks were the reason that “skinhead” became modern shorthand for “neo-Nazi?”

It’s not possible to deny punk to fascists by is by playing “no true Scotsman.” All that does is make it easier to pretend they’re not there, and not a real problem. If you want to tell the Nazi punks to fuck off, you have to first acknowledge that they have a deep history in punk, and you have to face that reality and confront it! You can’t just bury your head in the sand and pretend the problem isn’t real.

Some of y’all really think racism in America looks like this:

When it really looks like this

You are not exempt from racism just because your country’s version is not the same as ours

Oh def reblogging this version

I just discovered foodtimeline.org, which is exactly what it sounds like: centuries worth of information about FOOD.  If you are writing something historical and you want a starting point for figuring out what people should be eating, this might be a good place?

CHRISTMAS CAME EARLY

this is awesome but the original link just turned into a redirect loop for me, here it is again (x)

OH HELLO

No more potatoes in medieval novels!

Just for once I’d like to tell the gate agents and flight attendants that my folding wheelchair is going into the onboard closet and not have them tell me there’s “no room”. Bitch that’s a wheelchair closet, not a “your bags” closet. Move your damn bags where they belong.

Ok, so according to my friendly aviation expert, this is a Big Fucking Deal. In fact, if an airline argues with you about putting your wheelchair in the wheelchair closet or even suggests there may not be room, unless there is already another passenger’s wheelchair in that closet, they have violated federal law.

CFR Title 14, Chapter II, Subchapter D, Part 382, Subpart E, Section 382.67, Subsection (e)

“As a carrier, you must never request or suggest that a passenger not stow his or her wheelchair in the cabin to accommodate other passengers (e.g., informing a passenger that stowing his or her wheelchair in the cabin will require other passengers to be removed from the flight), or for any other non-safety related reason (e.g., that it is easier for the carrier if the wheelchair is stowed in the cargo compartment).”

Source

This is hugely important because it means that if this happens to you, you should report their asses to the DOT. Why? Because these statistics are published every year for every airline, and the airline gets a huge ass fine for every violation. If we want to see change, we need to make airlines literally pay every time they treat us this way.

@annieelainey you should share this with your followers! This is important info!!

To my mutuals on wheels, print out the law before you fly and whip it out at the gate if they don’t accomodate your wheels.

Thanks a lot for posting this, bro! Flying while crippled is already difficult enough without people pulling this kind of shit. Also, make sure that if there is a piece of your wheelchair or something important missing off of it, that you make a big fucking deal out of it! I’ve had pieces fall off of my wheelchair and nearly lost a decoration I had on it that meant a lot to me because people were careless with my chair. Don’t let them mistreat your wheelchair.

Non-wheelchair folks:

Now that you know, speak up.

You never know when you’re going to see someone who needs an ally.

Yes! Let’s share this information and support our friends on wheels.

Pieces of media to watch to educate yourself on Palestine’s long history of suffering from the zionist Israeli occupation :

[this list will constantly be updated with more movies & documentaries that i’m reminded of, or with new pieces that i find and watch… if you have any suggestions please send them my way]

ISRAEL are currently attacking Al-Shifa Medical Complex in GAZA.. Families, Patients and displaced Palestinian people at the Hospital are fleeing Al-Shifa on foot as Israeli warplanes attack the hospital.

A fire broke out on the upper floor of the hospital, it’s reported that there are dozens of casualties and civilians are being forced to evacuate under heavy gunfire.

Source.

Okay so I just watched a video of a boy who once identified as trans still got bottom surgery after he realized he was cis and people were so fucking rude? Like just because this cis dude has a vagina people were calling him transphobic and wishing death upon him.

So this is a reminder that when we as a community advocate for bodily autonomy and gender surgeries that means everyone regardless of gender can do whatever they want with their bodies.

If someone who is cisgender wants top/bottom surgery THEY CAN GET IT. If someone wants facial plastic surgeries that we usually find creepy like buccal fat removal or eye lifts THEY CAN GET IT. And here’s the really controversial one but if someone wants to do things that harm their body like hard drugs or diy mods THEY CAN DO IT!

Because body autonomy isn’t just “I can get bottom surgery to pass” or “I can get an abortion” it’s also all the wild stuff that makes us uncomfortable and that’s okay.

Support cis people getting bottom/top surgery. If it’s available for everyone it helps everyone who needs it. Just because they don’t specifically identify with another gender doesn’t mean they can’t desire to have a body with different sex characteristics.

this day (march 16th) 21 years ago (2003), american activist rachel corrie was crushed to death by an israeli bulldozer while she protested the demolition of palestinian homes in rafah. she was 24. this april, she would have turned 45.

while we honor corrie's sacrifice, we must remember what she fought for. you can read her emails from rafah about her experiences in palestine at the rachel corrie foundation for peace and justice, organized by her parents cindy and craig who continue her work.

donate to UNRWA donate to Help Gaza Children donate to PCRF buy e-sims for Gazans

ramadan kareem and may we see a free palestine in our lifetimes.

Cw for a mention of medical rape and talk of all sorts of abuse centering around intersexism:

I get that people have trauma with men and everything. I, too, was chased for an hour by a man in a car at age 11 calling me a bitch and telling me to get in; I, too, have had a group of adult men discussing physically harming me in public; I, too, have had B*n S*apiro steal one of my tiktoks to throw me to the harassment of his audience

But why are yall so afraid of strange men and not strange women? My experience as an intersex little girl was extreme social torment by little girls and adult women and my own mom and the first person to rape me was a pretty blonde female obgyn who wanted to punish and humiliate me for clearly being sexually active at a young age since I was shaving and not having periods (you know. Bc of the high T puberty)

One of the things that drove me into hiding before covid locked everything down was going out to a carnival with a few friends and having a woman loudly and angrily start harassing me in line for a ride in front of fifty people, threatening to beat me for asking her to stop, asking why i thought it was okay for people like me to leave the house, and neither of my friends said anything, nor did anyone else! The only person who did was her boyfriend who told her to shut the fuck up and apologized to me for her lmao!! I am a dyke who loves being a woman and loves women and women have overwhelmingly traumatized me more than fucking any other demographic. Family, friends, moms and grandma's of friends, women in church, and total strangers in a multitude of settings for most of my fucking life

So when people are talking about how folks that look like me are scary bc I look like a man and men are inherently the scarier ones I have to fucking laugh and then feel miserable and alone because everyone acts like it should be so obvious that of course people are more afraid of men! I was a little girl in the 90s and grew up a girl on the internet and I should totally understand!

But for me, I'm not safe around fucking goddamn anyone and people act like bc I'm an afab woman I must be safe among cis women. It's fucking suffocating. The first person to inappropriately touch me was a girl my own age whose mom regularly beat her and abused her dad and I'm so sick of having it shoved down my throat that we have to be so fucking afraid of men, as queer people, because they are naturally and inherently more abusive and any woman would naturally understand. To the point of openly admitting to fearing people who LOOK what passes as masculine in queer spaces, regardless of their actual identity or gender

i do think there is a degree to which certain kinds of Instagram activists have convinced themselves that traumatising themselves in solidarity is a useful form of activism. "I'm having nightmares and crying so much I want to be sick because of all these videos of dying children but I can't look away while people are getting hurt" I mean don't you think you'd be able to help more if you weren't having nightmares and crying all the time?? don't you think this is a one-way trip to burnout? don't you think maybe increasing the amount of trauma going around is counterproductive? I dunno bro there's something to be said for bearing witness but there comes a point where you gotta look hard at yourself and go "am I helping, or am I just making myself suffer so I don't feel guilty for not suffering while somebody else is experiencing bad shit"

I say "there is no such thing as a thought crime" a lot on my blog. Well, the other side of the coin is there is also no such thing as thought heroics, thought charity or thought activism.

I remember an interview with Rachel Maddow where someone asked her if she felt doing her TV show was activism, and she said absolutely not. She had worked as an activist focused on getting better conditions and treatment for HIV positive people in prison earlier in her career and was very clear on the fact that taking in information, aggregating it, and sharing it with others is NOT activism.

When asked for an example of what she did consider to be activism, she talked about how they were once trying to improve the situation for people with HIV in a specific prison, so they were trying to figure out how to persuade the guy running the prison to meet with them. So they found out where his wife went to church, and who the pastor was, and then they figured out where he golfed, and that there was another member of that country club who was a lawyer that one of them had gone to law school with, so they asked the lawyer to golf with the pastor and talk him into doing a sermon on treating all people with dignity, with an emphasis on treating people with HIV fairly, and to talk about the issues at the prison with the wife of the guy who ran the prison, and they ended up getting that meeting and convincing the guy to take the necessary steps to improve conditions for people with HIV in his prison.

She emphasized that they had a concrete goal, and they developed a strategy made up of concrete steps that they could take and had a shot of working, and then took those concrete steps to reach it. That’s activism. Scrolling online is not and never will be activism.

Conflating taking in information online from unvetted sources with righteous activism and focusing on that instead of taking concrete steps to improve the world is probably a pretty good recipe for ending up as a fringe conspiracy theorist who is scared of 5G and chemtrails.

Please remember to send money to Mona's initiative! Thanks to all your previous donations, Mona was able to bake and distribute pizza to people in Rafah! With more donations she can keep providing people with basic necessities! Even 1 dollar goes a long way! P*ypal.

G*f*ndme to buy necessities to distribute in Ghazzah.

G*f*ndme to help her family leave Ghazzah.

Her IG to keep track of progress.

So far she hasn't found anyone to distribute food and supplies to the North, but she's still trying.

Update! She found a distributor in Northern Ghazzah and is now sending donations his way as well! Thank you so much guys! Every dollar counts!

They've distributed diapers to Northern Ghazzah which are severely lacking! Keep donating you're making a massive difference!

the way the war in gaza has been constantly about targeting flour, targeting hospitals, targeting universities, targeting water containers, targeting anything that brings life in order to "thin out the population" and "encourage palestinians to move to tent cities in egypt"

and then you have western media readily calling it a "humanitarian crisis" therefore fulfilling israel's goal of manufacturing a humanitarian crisis. this entire war was with the purpose of collectively punishing a civilian population of 50% children. that's why it was immediately understood and labelled as a genocide by multiple genoide scholars, by the lemkin institute, and is currently on trial for genocide at the hague

like the starvation and the blocking of aid and the dropping of parachuted MREs to just barely salvage the reputation of a few politicians is not a byproduct of the war. it's not collateral damage. it is a central pillar of the genocide. acquiescing to israelis blocking aid by building ports and dropping pallets of food means acquiescing to famine as a strategy instead of trying to stop it. famine is not collateral damage, it is a central pillar of genocide. killing children is not collateral damage. it is a central pillar of the genocide. we don't need hindsight to say this plainly, anyone who denies it now is another pillar of genocide.