Don't Feed the Bunnies... they bite

A phenomenon I’ve seen in fandom with a large central ship is that people will have their shipping goggles activated at such an intensity, they doggedly erase character traits that don’t contribute to pushing forward romance. The two individuals in the relationship are rendered utterly one-dimensional through the loss of any individual aspects of their story or personality that could be interpreted as an obstacle to shipping.

This makes fanon interpretations of the characters boring and uninteresting to read about because they have no character traits other than being in love with their romantic interest. I like shipping as much as the next guy, but I hate fandom-at-large’s tendency to only engage with a story through shipping, and especially to the extent that the characters are barely individuals, and do not exist outside of the central romantic relationship

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More dispatches from the front lines of the culture war aka Texas. The rage is never ending and exhausting

I'm not trying to be a shit about this but like we *need* solidarity over this because the alarm was being sounded almost 20 years ago when W let Texas (and other southwestern states) start cutting out Mexican and Chicano history.

As a reminder, Texas constitutes one of the largest textbook markets. Whatever they remove, smaller and/or poorer states will struggle to put back or compensate for when they make their textbook purchases.

That means how Texas goes a disproportionate amount of school resources go.

This is an extremely, extremely important addition ^ Texas has an enormous sway on textbooks everywhere. When it comes to almost any issue...Texas isn't "just Texas." The people in the notes that are like "Texas should just secede" or "can we just get rid of Texas already" are missing a critical point here. (And throwing the community activists who are trying to combat this stuff under the bus, but I digress.)

As I (and many others for longer and better than me) have tried to explain: Texas is a state of 29 million, and very powerful. The state government is NOT acting in the interests of the majority of the people, they are trying to maintain their decades long stranglehold on power, by doing everything they can, including miseducating youth with propaganda.

Even in the best of voter turnout years, only 52% of the eligible voting population casts a ballot in Texas. Communities of color, low income communities, disabled voters and all kinds of other marginalized folks have had their voting access nearly strangled to death. What happens in Texas is coming for everywhere. We should be talking about national policies to curb this shit.

I worked in textbook publishing for ten years, and I cannot overemphasize how important Texas is to the textbook market. What Texas decides should be taught affects what the rest of the US teaches.

In case you were wondering why American history is so heavily Confederatized...this is why.  Texas has been affecting the nation’s textbook market for decades.  And because publishers want to sell textbooks in Texas and the South, they adapt their textbooks to be supportive of historical myth (Columbus, the Pilgrims, the Alamo, the Confederacy) rather than unwelcome facts. Unions and civil rights are downplayed. Black, Mexican, Chicano, and Native American history gets minimized, twisted or erased. 

All this is pandering to a very specific audience, because if Texas doesn’t approve of a book--if Texas’s textbook review boards don’t feel that the book supports “American values” or if they see admission of racism as “inflammatory” and upsetting to (white) students and their families--that book will not, as a rule, be sold in Texas or the South. If it is, there will almost certainly be lawsuits over the “radical” nature of the book and how it could cause “unrest” in schools.

If I sound disgusted, it’s because I am.

So, I was reading the terms of the Accords and found something rather… odd

It specifically states that prosthetics, even if they give you superpowers, don’t count.

Why would they add that it?

Then, I realized something:

Tony’s suit is powered by the Arc Reactor.

We, as the audience, know he no longer needs this to live.

The public, however, is not aware of that, meaning the Iron Man suit technically falls OUT of the jurisdictions of the Accords because, in the most literal sense, it can be considered a prosthetic, and legal jargon is all about the most literal sense.

…

Tony Fucking Stark wanted everyone to sign a goddamn document that had a clause specifically designed to keep him from having to go along with the Accords written right in them.

He wanted to force Steve and Wanda to sign something that would specifically infringe on their rights when he knew damn well the Accords could not be applied to himself.

Accountability? Give me a break.

No wonder he broke the damn thing several times before the ink had even dried…

Autistic Person: "We need these accommodations."

Neurotypical Person: "But if we give them to you, we'll have to give them to everyone else too."

Autistic Person: "Then do that. No, really. We would love it if everyone got these accommodations. Not only would it help to remove the stigma, but it would also help those who need them and haven't been diagnosed."

Neurotypical Person: "Hey! I was just trying to bully you! How dare you respond by making sense!"

The number of people I have known who have pretended to be more ill/disabled than they really are: almost none.

The number of people I have known who have pretended to be less ill/disabled than they really are: almost everyone.

When people tell you they have a chronic illness/disability, believe them. Otherwise you are an Ableist asshole.

This messed with me for so long and it still does because I’m like,,,, am I faking it??? Is it actually that bad??? And then I have a good day and I’m like well I imagined the pain I’m the first place I’m a fraud,,, then I get a bad day and suddenly I’m dying

i was gonna say “the only times ive pretended to be more disabled than i am was to get accomodations i really needed but wouldn’t have gotten otherwise” and then i was like wait.

That’s just being honest about how disabled i am.

ok wait that last reblog messed with me so much thats so true

August 2 - International Roma and Sinti Genocide Remembrance Day

But seriously, give money

And it’s way better food, too, anything you get prepackaged has A TON of sugar and/or salt in it…collecting cans may be more exciting than writing a check, but if the point is to help people, the check is going to get a lot more done

Yoooooo heads up for those of you with kids, I know this time of year schools start holding canned food drives so keep this in mind if you’re able to give.

collecting cans may be more exciting than writing a check, but if the point is to help people, the check is going to get a lot more done .

hint: the point should be to help people.

love live disco

Caption: [ (Stitch with @/oldbruhh): What’s a music opinion that genuinely pisses you off? I shall commence the-

The idea that disco was some frivolous, soulless music genre… when instead it was like this time of unprecedented power that people of color and queer people had over the music industry. And that it simply “fell out of fashion” instead of being pushed out of the industry by people who hated the fact that people of color and gay people were kind of like having sway in the industry.

Honestly I really blame the Disco Demolition Night of 1979. This was an event hosted by the Chicago White Socks and uh 97.9 WLUP in Chicago. It was organized specifically by this dude Steve Dahl. He was an anti disco shock jock dj for the radio station. And Mr. Dahl’s plan was basically that you would get 50% off your ticket to the baseball game if you brought a disco record to destroy at half time.

Here he is next to a dumpster with a bunch of the records. Over fifty thousand people showed to this event and it quickly got out of hand. And the Chicago police had to show up in riot gear to break up the event. This is a great article that speaks to the racism and homophobia of the event if you want to check it out.]

I've never seen people claim disco was soulless before (don't doubt it though). Disco??? Soulless????? Maybe i'll give you frivolous because people often see fun and think frivolous but who on gods green earth thinks fucking DISCO is soulless? Anyway sorry for the rant, disco is so much better than people give it credit for and it's entirely due to racism.

In the last weeks in Palestine

Don't look away from Palestine. Israel will keep on doing these crimes if they think they can get away with it. The best we can do is to clog zionist propaganda. Palestinians have been systemically silenced on social media and news outlets, and Muna El Kurd, one of the leaders of the Save Sheikh Jarrah movement, has already said that spreading the word is very important to fight zionism.

Be angry and amplify Palestinian voices. The above links go back to activist accounts, follow them and share their updates. Attend protests (here's a constantly updating list of pro Palestine protests) and follow organizations to know when the next ones will be held. Some of them: USCPR, Palestinian Youth Movement, Within our Lifetime, Arab Resource and Organizing Center, and Mohammed El Kurd (he often posts calls for action from all over the world on his stories).

fast enough to get away from anything that could hurt me, but always leaving people behind. story of my life.

"If only the paddies could just conveniently forget and forgive the state-sanctioned murder of members of their community then we all can put this nasty business behind us" If you want truth and reconciliation, first you need the truth.

These men, who admitted to their crimes in tribunals, did things like shot a 12 year old girl in the head when she was coming back from the shops with milk, shot a man in the head while he was waving a white hanky and trying to help someone else they'd shot dead, shot a disabled man in the back as he was fleeing from them in fear, used the skull of a man they had shot dead as an ashtray...

These are the things that the British establishment are calling for an amnesty on bringing to trial. They are cartoonishly evil war crimes that we cannot let lie. This wasn't ancient history this was the 1960s-90s.

RESPECT BLACK SCHOLARSHIP

Unfortunately, the people who are pushing it as a huge boogeyman that Trumpers must fight are intentionally misconstruing and misapplying it. That’s always the problem: they’re arguing in bad faith on purpose, because they don’t have a leg to stand on.