my dad got arrested for doing sit ins in selma when he was a teenager while i am not nearly a dedicated activist as he is i will not let a sixteen year old on the fujoshi website try to hold a moral authority on whether or not you can enjoy pop culture when there is a war going on. literally what else are you supposed to do.
Black cats are lucky. (via leahweissmuller)
MAN [IN THICK ACCENT]: Black cat bring good luck. Not bad luck. I have black cat - See, him face - And I am not dead today: Good luck!
“See him face”
I sure fucking do see him face
Him face
Reblog him face for good luck in 2021
Reblog him face for good luck in 2021 (2)
Reblog him face for good luck in 2022
It’s a good day for him face. :)
thanks, I hate this
Just overheard two teenaged boys at the front door of their friend’s house. One was on the phone and gently said, “Oh, did you just wake up?” And the other one yelled “OPEN UP, FUCKNUGGET!” while slamming his hand on the door. I gotta say I love the friendship dynamic
I can’t believe I forgot to mention that the guy who lived there answered the door while wrapped up in his blanket, and it was way past noon at the time, which really sold the entire interaction as a whole
From now on, every time someone calls gay marriage or gays in the military an "assimilationist" thing or an "assimilationist victory," they owe me $5. If they're under 35, they owe me $10.
Come here. Sit down, @thegreenbisamurai, and shut the fuck up for 5 fucking minutes so maybe you can pull your head out of your ass.
Sometimes, I forget that some of you are young enough to not understand what it was like 25+ years ago, and that you really can't fucking comprehend what it was like to live in even the greatest bastions of liberalism back then, but you really fucking can't, can you?
And some of you are just so fucking happy to throw poor and red-area queers under the bus because our lived reality is just not radical enough for you, and that's so fucking obvious.
The only way for my grandfather to not go back into the coal mines as a young man was to join the Navy. There was functionally zero other economic opportunity for him. This is still the reality for a lot of people, including a lot of queer people, because, wait for it:
There are approximately 2.1 million active servicemembers. Counting civilian employees, the DoD employs approximately 3.2 million people. For comparison, the largest private employer in the US is Wal-Mart, which employs ~2.3 million people.
Do you think that it might matter to our overall civil rights to have the largest employer in the country (and one of the largest employers in the world) change its position on whether us dirty fags can have jobs there? Do you think that it might make a difference in whether we can work in other, better jobs to have an employer have to make a decision on whether they're going to fire ✨️a veteran✨️ for being queer?
I do not actually think it's fucking great to join the armed forces. I am not fooled by the flag-waving bullshit that I was raised with, and in fucking fact, I have an extremely low amount of tolerance for worshiping the military and the country and all the OORAH fuckshit precisely because I was raised by a father who worshipped his Greatest Generation father. Okay? Mistake this for some idolization of the military or some wilful ignorance of how shitty it is you should not.
What you should do is understand that for a lot of people, joining the military is a ticket to eating. Joining the military means being able to get health care and a roof over your head. That is done on purpose because the military fucking preys on poor kids, and that fucking sucks, but it's still reality right now. Shutting queer kids out of that means shutting them out of the ability to get out of where they are economically. And, again, more than that, it means shutting them out of the public commons. It means that when gays gained the right to serve openly, the biggest employer in the US said "FAGS CAN WORK HERE AND YOU CAN'T FIRE THEM FOR FAGGOTRY, ACTUALLY."
And that changes things in other places much the same way that Medicaid changing a policy almost invariably causes insurance companies to follow suit.
This is why you will often see, when you look at timetables for employment rights, that people gain the right to be out at work and have employment protections first in state & local employment and then those protections are extended to private employers. This is because - as I've said before - it is easier to accomplish getting state employers not to discriminate first. It's easier to make the argument that the state shouldn't discriminate rather than that the state should enforce non-discrimination on private employers, so you make that argument first, and then you continue on to the private employers. It isn't an end point. It isn't the final answer to the problem. It's a strategic step along the way that immediately improves life for queer people and creates precedent for further improvement.
This is also why when people try to take rights away from queer people - like with bathroom bills - they often start by trying to remove those rights in state-owned locations. This creates precedent.
So, like, unless you're going to show up with jobs falling out of your pockets and a strategic way to accomplish the same fucking thing while still leaving in place the precedent of the largest employer in the US thinking it's A-OK to fire fags, dykes and trannies, kindly shut the fuck up, because your words are more than pointless.
I know that's not as like, cool, hip, and groovy to think "hey, this is a load-bearing pillar of society, maybe we shouldn't be shut out of it," and it doesn't make you feel like you've got the Purest Of Leftist Ideology as saying ASSIMILATIONIST seems to for you, but it does have the upside of actually doing something that measurably improves the lives of queer people and sets a precedent for future improvement rather than being pointless [wanking gesture] posturing for leftist clout.
That will be $10. :)
Nah, man, I just have no patience for people squirting juice out their assholes and pretending they're performing a symphony.
My grandfathers served in WWII. All three of 'em, because my grandmother remarried after my granddaddy died. I have plenty of complicated feelings about all of it, but fuck you if you think I'm talking about it with you, buddy.
You got me! You're in the right! It sure doesn't matter whether the biggest employer in the country thinks fags are dirty or not. We can't try to dismantle the military industrial complex and set meaningful legal precedent at the same time! We are just silly people who can only hold the most pure thought in our heads at any given time.
Your praxis sucks and I'm not wasting any more time on you.
You still owe me $10.
I got up and switched the laundry and I'm still like
Do... do people like this think the military stops existing if queer people aren't in it? What... what is the point of that point?
it occurs to me that to people like this, "queer people collectively refuse to enlist" and "queer people are banned from enlisting" probably sound synonymous
Yes, it probably does.
I have to admit that i think it's really funny that this person thinks they triggered some "innert" [sic] trauma in me bc I wrote a lot of vehement words. Like, I guess you're new here.
I love how this person's attempt at a rebuttal didn't actually address any of your main points. Like my bro I think I figured out why your opinion is so shitty, sorry about your reading comprehension.
I think there's something broken in some people's brains in that they claim to have totally dismantled the idea that the US is inherently superior in their own minds but they will speak in such a way that makes it clear that they don't think that anyone in the US starves to death or dies from exposure or dies because their perfectly treatable medical condition... wasn't.
Like, if the argument is that it's only death that matters, like, people do actually die from poverty, y'all. And like, having the right to do something doesn't mean you have to go and do it. I have the right to do a lot of fucking things that I don't do.
Funny that, innit?
va worker here: yeah the military sucks. know what else sucks? almost losing your job and your livelihood while an administration thinks about forcing you back into the closet you left. the trump admin floated a lot of anti-trans military policies, up to and including kicking out out trans people (who were supposed to be safe being out because that's how it works right now). the "compromise" position was reinstating dadt (don't ask don't tell) for trans people. like, do i even have to draw the line between that and where we are right now?
wanna know what else sucks? people killing themselves or losing their workers' benefits because someone found out they were queer. which, yes, happened (and still does but to a much lesser extent). most people in the us military right now never see combat. those that do? it can fuck them up. seriously fuck them up. wanna guess what happens when they don't have access to teams of doctors who know this shit inside and out? go ahead, fucking guess. or read a newspaper, there are plenty of stories out there about what happens when vets can't access the vha. when they're not allowed to? yeah.
know what else sucks? having a uterus and being unable to get an abortion because of the state you live in. the military, right the fuck now, is offering to pay the travel expenses for their members who need an abortion, queers included. my local vha hospital is also getting the discharged folks abortions or performing them. but, and this is crucial, this only applies to people who were honorably discharged. aka their fucking benefits weren't yanked because of xyz.
yeah, the military sucks and has a billion and one problems right now. know what problem it doesn't have? queers losing the benefits they earned and signed a contract to get. the military and vha are now upholding their end of the contract instead of exploiting queer workers and tossing them out when the bill comes due. and that's fucking important.
I'm forever stuck on being grateful of the fact they can't hatecrime queers in the military and get away with it as easily anymore.
do people like this forget/not know military queers were endangered by their own squads?
Also, and this is a comparatively minor point compared to the rest, but do these people not realize that non-combat military roles exist??? Please explain to me how a trans lawyer who wants to join the JAG Corps because they want to make a difference in the treatment of rape survivors in the service is "exterminating brown people". Explain to me how a poor person who pays for medical school by working for the Medical Corps instead of doing a residency is "stealing native land" or committing murder. Fucking explain to me the problem with a queer person joining the Merchant Marine or the Coast Guard.
The answer there is that by being part of it at all, you're complicit. Remember that this mindset hounded a trans man who handles software license renewals for a defense contractor off of Twitter entirely bc he's "complicit in war crimes."
That any American is that level of complicit does not seem to occur to them.
I disagree, that any American is that level of complicit is actually an important part of that mindset.
In the same way that TERFs believe that every man is a threat and must constantly check himself to make sure he isn't accidentally indulging his nature as an aggressive abuser, but also can never escape the fact that he has male privilege, every American is guilty of being American.
Even if they want to do better, every American is complicit in and responsible for the violent actions of their government, and every American should be held accountable for their personal decisions because they all have the privilege of making choices that affect the actions of their government. So if you're an American and choose to join the military, you must want all of the terrible things that the military does because you had the privilege (because you're American) to do anything else you desired. But you chose the military, of course, because that's just how Americans are, and trying to argue nuance is just trying to escape accountability for being American.
Just look at that popular post that was circulating about how the OP was going to "hold every American accountable if Trump gets elected again, because collective responsibility and all that" as if every American has a voice in that. We ARE all complicit to them. I think some of them just haven't realized they believe that, yet.
I ... don't think so. The people making this argument, like thegreenbisamurai, are Americans who truly believe that they are not complicit because they have managed to divorce themselves from what they feel is visible complicity. I'm genuinely not talking about international perception of Americans but of internal perception of one another.
These are the people who -- again -- hounded a trans man off of Twitter because he renews software licenses for Lockheed Martin or whatever, but don't comprehend that -- for example -- banking with pretty much any major bank makes you complicit, because I guarantee you that any major bank not only has significant investments in the War Machine, but they have an entire team of people whose whole job it is to specifically make investments in the War Machine, and those investments are not a small part of that bank's investment profile. Not at all.
This is sort of a 'no ethical consumption under capitalism' thing, honestly, and I don't think that a lot of Americans are truly honest with themselves about exactly how intertwined with their daily lives the US Military actually is, and how absolutely impossible it would be to live a life which is not complicit in varying degrees.
Does this mean 'throw your hands up and give up, because we can't not be complicit'? Does this mean 'people actually doing war crimes with their own hands are as complicit as someone who enlists as a medic or does firejumping to avoid going to Vietnam?' No. It means being honest with yourself about what's going on. It means thinking about what you say when you say things like calling the places the military is sent to a 'godforsaken corner of the earth' or drawing a bright line between 'brown people' and 'queer people in the US.' (Boy, that was telling.) It means being honest with yourself about the fact that when you put things that way, you're saying that it's okay for brown people in the US to die from malnutrition or unaddressed medical needs, as long as they die in an ideologically pure way.
People will do a lot to avoid starving. A hungry man knows no G-d but bread. So the answer is not to judge people for survival-based complicity in a system that is designed to keep them hungry and subservient, but recognize that yes, the system is designed that way, accept where reality is right now, not judge people for the things they do to stay alive, and continually work on harm reduction. This is, in essence, a trolley problem, and the only real solution to a trolley problem is to build a third track.
Bringing this one back for Reasons.
Also, a TON of DoD positions aren't even military. There are hundreds of thousands of civilians (many vets, many not) who make sure people get paid and get fed and get medical care and have their insurance forms correct and take photos and do all kinds of other things that aren't "killing brown people." A *lot* of us are queer/trans/whatever. There are at least FIVE queer peeps just in my office of ~25, military and civilian. It's a secure job - barring a second Trump admin - it's supportive, and plenty of us are disabled vets.
I was on active duty when DADT was repealed, and while there were folks that everyone knew were queer, the relief was *palpable* that it was now safe.
Having a job you're good at is hugely important for stability and enjoyment of life.
There is so much good stuff in here. Goes right to the same issue im seeing with "protest abstention" in voting: It's about how being SEEN, even by yourself, to be "complicit" in something by ACTION is somehow worse than genuinely being complicit in something by INACTION.
It's a scary trend. Because it drives more people toward inaction. Which is precisely what puts power in the hands of those who would abuse it most.
"The only solution to a trolley problem is to build a third track."
And one doesn't do that by just... checking out. The only thing necessary for evil to flourish is for good people to do nothing.
That reminds me of a line I've seen here on tumblr, about how the big problem with online leftist spaces is that they are full of people who believe that it's more important to never do anything wrong, than to ever do anything right.
Yeah, hi all. My job was weather in the Air Force. 1W0X1. I was active duty (and in Germany!) in the Air Force when DADT was repealed. I had (have because we're still in contact) a friend come out as gay to me before that was repealed. I could have reported that, and he would have been discharged after they investigated.
When I was in Tech school, I was told of a story by a Master Sergeant there, warning of how things can go down due to DADT as well as a general be careful of where you are. The story was about an airman being drugged and raped by several mean. He reported it, but because it was 'sodomy' it fell under DADT and he was discharged from service. Yeah. Sorry you were raped, but bad gay stuff, shoo.
The day DADT was repealed was a very good day indeed because of shit like this.
My job there, I got to help with all sorts of missions. Humanitarian, war, and aircraft and people moving around. It's complicated.
Long story short-there are many leftists here that don't even try to understand the thing they criticize and just fall back on 'military bad, servicemembers/vets bad' and that's it. It's been telling on how I've had to call out what some people have said because it's clear they don't know their hand from their ass on what is a war crime and other military stuff.
Nah, they just fall back into that same Puritan shit they thought they got away from, but never actually deconstructed.
There's a lot of good discussion here already that I won't try to reiterate, but I want to add a related point to this, about the whole idea of the military, and complicity, because I think this is really, really crucial to understand, and yet never seems to appear in these conversations:
The military does not decide where they get sent.
I don't just mean that individual soldiers don't decide where to get deployed. I mean that the military as a whole is subject to the dictates of their government.
The US military, or the UK military, or the Canadian military do not simply decide to invade a country.
They get sent there, by their government. A government that, to some degree, works for the people. Military invasions don't happen because a general thought it was a good idea, they happen because elected officials thought it was a good idea.
The US invaded Afghanistan because the vast majority of the American public were crying out for a big, bold, public backlash against the people who had hurt them. They were angry, and scared, and they wanted to point a giant gun at the people they blamed for it all.
Your average soldier doesn't want to go to war. Some do. Some feel that they need to prove themselves, that they need to test the skills they've spent a lifetime building. Many more don't, or at least, they don't want to go to war over bullshit. War sucks, and it sucks the most for the people fighting it. The average soldier isn't super jazzed about living in a trench, shitting in a bucket, getting all kinds of diseases, getting constipation from an endless diet of MREs, not having access to your phone, not being able to listen to music or play video games, being thousands of miles from your family, your partner, your children, your friends, getting shot at, getting blown up, getting killed by friendly fire... It's a pretty bad time. Sitting out your contract at home sounds a lot nicer. If you are going to go through all that shit, you'd probably want it to be for something that matters. There's a lot of soldiers who'd be very up for going to defend Ukraine, because Ukraine is clearly and definitively the victim, and if you're going to go through hell you want to go through it to save lives, protect a democracy from fascism, fight back against an imperialist autocrat. Y'know, stuff you'd feel proud telling your kids about.
Soldiers, by and large, actually tend to be fairly anti-war, because they're the ones that get to be in the line of fire when wars happen. When you're asking yourself why wars happen - why it was necessary to blow up large chunks of a country like Iraq over a complete fabrication - don't blame the people fighting. Blame the people standing for the anthem at baseball games to "honor the troops" and slapping "Support our Soldiers" bumper stickers on their trucks. The people who vote for violence, while happily sitting at a comfortable remove from it.
Back during the first couple of years of the Afghanistan occupation, there was an incident where a British soldier accidentally killed a civilian. He was in a firefight, he returned fire, and the civilian got caught in the crossfire. He got pilloried in the press, even though he did everything right in that situation. He wasn't to blame; we were. The British public, the people who agreed to send that young man overseas, to put him in the middle of that firefight where he had no choice but to return fire in order to defend himself and his squadmates.
Militaries exist because they have to. Because we live in a fucked up world, and people like Putin (see note) exist, who will gladly put all of it under their bootheel if given the opportunity. We don't get a choice in this matter. No matter how idealist you want to be about peace and diplomacy and solving problems without violence (all good things), eventually you have to deal with the fact that we do not live in a world where total widespread demilitarization is an achievable goal (yes, the US military is much, much bigger than it needs to be; saying that we can't go without militaries is not the same thing as saying that they need to be as big as they are).
Wars happen because enough people want them to. Not everyone; plenty of people protested against the wars in Afghanistan, in Iraq, and so on, but enough people for an elected government to say "Yeah, this is worth it." You can "Military industrial complex" all you want, at the end of the day if it's losing them enough votes it doesn't matter how much their friends with deep pockets want it.
Don't blame soldiers when brown people are getting shot by Americans in the Middle East. Blame the voters who put them there.
Note: Don't even fucking start. Seriously, if you're here to suck daddy Putin's dick and tell me that he's not actually a revanchist autocrat, just leave. And on your way out, maybe take the time to listen to his speeches where he openly identifies himself as a revanchist autocrat. Yes, sometimes people actually are just autocratic dictators, and the fact that he hates America just as much as you do doesn't magically make him your friend. Non-violence and appeasement failed with Hitler, and they failed just as hard with Putin. That doesn't mean I'm advocating for an invasion of Russia, but it does mean that we have to have the ability to stop him from invading and subjugating neighbouring countries like he's openly stated that he wants to.
I hope this picture of a quetzal makes your day at least a little bit better :)
its goTS A FUZZY HEAD!!!!!
The Resplendent Quetzal: a birb
He is resplendent!
And while we're talking about ai theft: turn. off. grammarly. Disable it. Delete it. Get that shit off of your computer ASAP.
I never realized how much of my shit is scanned by grammarly until today. It scans my emails, my text posts on this bewitched platform, my wips on google docs, my youtube comments--literally everything ive ever typed on my laptop is scanned by grammarly. And I've been allowing this to happen for years.
Turn. Off. Grammarly.
Unmute !
Oh my goodness, that's a lot of opinions.
Rolling AND crispy meows.
huh. so. i didn't totally get the "nobody comments on ao3 anymore" thing at first, and was a little annoyed bc i don't think commenting should be an obligation, but also... i looked at my most popular fic and it's 451 kudos and 27 comments. i mean sure, kudos-ing instead of commenting makes sense if you liked it but didn't love it, but that feels like an unrealistic ratio of liking it to loving it? anyway the point is i get what people are talking about now. i don't resent people who didn't comment but also, yeah, like wow.
I like AO3 kudos, I truly do. I think they allow for engagement by people who otherwise wouldn't identify themselves as having read your work in any way.
But I also sincerely think a lot of people who would otherwise be commenters use the kudos and wander off.
It's part of why the whole "I wish we could leave more kudos" thing makes me so crazy.
Just say that to the author then. That's the entire reason you can comment on every chapter multiple times but can only kudos once.
The ratio of hits to comments used to be a lot closer on sites where commenting was the only method of feedback, let alone the ratio of completed reads (which I find kudos often correlate to) and comments.
I personally know plenty of people who may love a fic to death, read it three times a year, adore it, and... left a kudos on their first read and never interacted again. So I definitely don't know that comments=high affection for a work.
But I do know that when there's a lower resistance move than "speaking to a relative stranger in an emotionally honest way," people will pick the path of least resistance.
i think it would be cool to have a multiple-kudos option also tho, so that you could see that such and such a person kudos'd your fic four times or w/e
so i think it wasn't always this way! a comment doesn't need to be something to say content-wise, it can just be "i really enjoyed this fic!" what i've heard from fic authors is that receiving a bunch of comments, even if they just say "loved this!!" is really motivating
and not just because they're being cheered on but also because then it feels like they're part of a community that's collectively supporting and invested in their art
I know this isn't ninjago guys but I finished this 17 hour painting for my art class and I was proud of it so...enjoy.
I love Egypt fun fact about me. :)
A PAINTING????
obligatory
This is a distance of roughly 625 miles and we are going to assume that the speed does not include the time penalty of Spain having a different Rail Gauge than France.
At 890 miles of rail you can get New York to Chicago which would be the ideal first route, but what can you get with 625 miles that makes more since than Columbus?
Well at that distance you can get Raleigh-DC-Philadelphia-NYC- Boston
With intermediate stops in Richmond, Baltimore, New Haven, and Providence
That is a route that is not only good, but has potential to be one of the most used rail lines in the world if it were at high speeds and a cheap price
How about putting some more rails, especially high speed, out here in the midwest, so those of us stuck out here can travel without hours in a car or spending hundreds on a plane ticket?
I guess another route of equivalent length would be St.Paul-Madison-Milwaukee-Chicago- -Indianapolis-louisville
I remember when Obama put aside the money for a rapid light rail system from Chicago to Minneapolis. And the loathsome then Governor of Wisconsin gave the money back, and blocked the project.
I don't know how to explain to people that if they fail to show empathy to others, it will most likely not be shown to them. if you treat people like shit, they will not want to be around you, and you will end up feeling lonely and rejected. it's really not complicated and yet I know adults who cannot get that through their heads.
this includes mental health + neurodivergence btw and I know personally how hard a pill that is to swallow. your reasons for being a bad friend don't really matter to most people; the bottom line is when they turn to you for basic friend stuff like compassion or support and you snub them or lash out, they will not do it again and they will not show you any kindness in return. this is why therapy helps; learning to more easily navigate interpersonal relationships is a major therapeutic domain.
When I was a very suicidal trans activist in Texas, Benjamin Sisko saying “sure, you would [die for your people]. Dying gets you off the hook. The question is: are you willing to live for your people?” changed and possibly saved my life. It’s up there with “if we are going to be damned, let us be damned for who we really are” from Picard. Star Trek not only shows us a better world, it teaches us how to make it there
