inqnel

Happy National Library Week!! A great time to ask everyone you know if they have a library card.

In my first ever article for a print magazine, I'm analyzing Elon Musk's DOGE from the perspective of contractor capture: the notion that for-profit contractors like Musk desire not only money from the government, but also control over government itself.

You can read the full piece below, or pick up the April 2025 edition of The American Prospect at a local bookstore once it's available!

If you don't stick around till the end, you will miss him ❤️

Crazy how many people want characters in fiction to speak and act like they’ve had 20 hours of intensive therapy. Could NOT be me I want these bitches fucked up insane

my friend briar and i lovingly call this one ‘therapy speak joker’ and it almost caused her to drop biological samples one time

i think the joker should start talking like this for real. no other character should do this only the joker. i want batman to have to deal with this

join the praxis discord - sign up - github

Moreover, overpopulation is an ecofascist myth specifically scapegoating ‘developing’ nations in the global south for climate disaster.

In reality, populations only rise so sharply as people begin to receive better access to healthcare and maternal and infant mortality in particular decrease. Eventually, as healthcare access is more evenly distributed through a population and people on a larger scale are able to access family planning care, the population stops increasing and levels out and decreases.

Which is why so-called ‘developed’ are all now manufacturing a crisis about population decline and not having enough bodies to fill out the labor force while simultaneously fearmongering about overpopulation in racialized groups. It’s eugenics shit.

This video is almost 10 years old and is so good at educating against ecofascist ideas of overpopulation. Makes me angry 10 years later we're still dealing with eugenics

I LOVE THIS VIDEO AND I LOST IT FOR AGES AND NOW I FOUND IT

Everybody go watch Hans Rosling destroy ecofascism thank u

i genuinely think ocd is incredibly underdiagnosed bc i will see people posting what are obvious rituals, compulsions, intrusive thoughts, spiralling, hyper morality, etc and its like Have You Considered This Might Be An Issue

it isnt actually good or normal to have moral dilemmas every day about which posts you reblog. it isn't actually good or normal to check and recheck every message you send "just in case" you sent porn instead of a 'hi how are you'. it isn't actually good or normal to believe that your day will only go well if you have a specific keychain or whatever with you. like i'm not going to diagnose you but i do think some of you need to look into obsessive-compulsive disorder beyond "ha ha funny man wash his hands" portrayals.

I always tell people that even if they’re not pursuing diagnosis they should at least look at OCD support organizations’ pages on moral scrupulosity because that mindset is one you can literally see people developing in real time online.

I find this can help chip away a bit at stigma and confusion for people who have misconceptions that rituals can’t be mental (much of what people will describe as “checking for thought crimes” sounds a LOT like a mental ritual), as well as guide them towards tools for breaking the cycle of intrusive thoughts, obsession and ritual—or at the very least help persuade them that rituals reinforce, rather than “fix” those obsessions.

Like I do absolutely think people, especially ones who have access to counseling already, should raise and ask about these issues, including “I’m wondering if I might have OCD because…” (that is part of how I got diagnosed!), but these resources can be helpful for those who maybe haven’t had that kind of thought pattern before but encouraged themselves to do so because of social pressure to the point where they now have to un-learn it (essentially where it’s become disordered thinking) but will maybe balk at the idea of diagnosis because it hasn’t always been like that, or similar situations.

I try to emphasize that tools like this are open to anyone for whom they might be helpful, whether or not they have diagnosed OCD. Especially because some people who may get a diagnosis in future can still educate themselves now, and perhaps work towards one that way.

But for real, since I’ve started talking about OCD on my blog I’ve had literally half a dozen people talk to me (anon or not) about “…oh shit I had no idea OCD could look like [xyz thing]” and have The Realization, some of whom I know got diagnosed later and others of whom felt empowered to look into it when they hadn’t before because they were worried that seeking help with scrupulosity would be “appropriating OCD experiences” (people struggling with scrupulosity being scrupulous around needing help is definitely a bigger thing than I realized—it’s not just stigma or ignorance!).

Which is why I try to emphasize that everyone can and should take some time to learn about this stuff! The worst that can happen is you go “hm that doesn’t describe my experience” and you still know more about OCD and are better-prepared to support people who do have it.

A qinggong master

English added by me :)

really good tiktok

Transcript:

Girl, just do it fat. Don’t wait until you’ve lost enough weight. You’re worthy of taking up the space that you fill. Live your life now. Don’t wait for some future version of yourself that you think will be more deserving. You have every right to pursue your passions and dreams just as you are today. Your worth isn’t tied to a number on a scale or the size of your clothes; it is inherent in who you are. You’re allowed to be seen, heard, and celebrated in whatever body you inhabit right now. Don’t let anyone or anything convince you for too long. So go out. Do it fat! Wear the clothes you love, pursue the opportunities that excite you, and live unapologetically. There’s no reason to put off living the life that you want, waiting for a moment that you’re not even sure will come. You deserve to be happy and fulfilled just as you are, and the world needs you exactly as you are today. Everything good that has ever happened to you, happened in this body. Girl, just do it fat.

Hannah Arendt, who fled Germany in 1933, later wrote that long before Jews, Roma, gays, Communists and others could be herded into death camps, they had to be “denationalized” — excluded from the society that guaranteed their legal rights. Enlightenment thinkers had posited that just by virtue of existing, each person has inalienable rights. Arendt, however, observed that the “right to have rights” could be guaranteed only by a political community. Without a state to claim them as their own, people have no laws, no courts and no political mechanisms for protecting rights.

Arendt once said that “the generally political became a personal fate when one emigrated.” As a stateless person, she experienced that loss of rights — unable to get papers, hiding from the police, interned as an enemy alien in France — before making it to the United States. She was lucky. Her friend Walter Benjamin committed suicide in his eighth year of exile, when the French authorities blocked him from crossing the border ahead of advancing German troops...

A country that has pushed one group out of its political community will eventually push out others. The Trump administration’s barrage of attacks on trans people can seem haphazard, but as elements of a denationalization project, they fall into place...

The message, consistent and unrelenting, is that trans people are a threat to the nation. The subtext is that we are not of this nation...

The rights the Trump administration is taking away from trans people are relatively new. Only in the past few decades, for example, have clear legal procedures existed for changing the gender marker on identity documents, and only in the past few years have federal and some state authorities made the process fairly easy. But before transgender, gender-nonconforming and intersex people were recognized as a group — or groups — of people who had rights, many could blend in, fly below the radar. Now, in their new rightlessness, they are exposed...

Living with documents that are inconsistent or at odds with your public identity is no small thing. It can keep you from opening a bank account, applying for financial aid, securing a loan, obtaining a driver’s license and traveling freely and safely inside a country or across borders. I was once detained in Russia after a routine road check because an officer thought I was a teenage boy using his mother’s driver’s license.

It’s not just American identity documents that are being scrambled. Like all things American, Trump’s denationalization campaign affects people far beyond the United States. In late February, Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued visa guidelines, ostensibly designed to keep foreign trans athletes from competing in the United States, that seem to direct consular officers to deny entry to anyone whose gender markers appear different from their sex assigned at birth.

The new regulations require visitors, when filling out the paperwork to cross the border into the United States, to indicate the sex they were assigned at birth. Lucien Lambertz, a German curator who is trans and was planning a professional trip to the United States, told me they worried that they would be denied entry if they complied, indicating a birth sex different from the gender marker in their passport, but also if they didn’t comply.

Lambertz emailed the Foreign Ministry in their country to ask for guidance. “The issue is the subject of tense discussions here at the ministry, and your concerns are absolutely understandable,” the response read, in part. Ordinarily, the Foreign Ministry would suggest asking the U.S. Embassy, but by doing so, as the letter noted, Lambertz “would then ‘out’ yourself to them.”

Trans and nonbinary Germans fear that their country’s incoming conservative government may take its cues from the Trump administration. Far-right parties, ascendant in Germany and other European countries, have made the specter of “gender ideology” a centerpiece of their politics.

“Something has changed,” Heinrich Horwitz, a German choreographer, told me. Horwitz, who is nonbinary, was recently assaulted at the main train station in Vienna. The attacker was demanding to know whether Horwitz was “a girl or a boy.” Before they could make out what the attacker was saying, Horwitz instinctively tucked the Star of David they wear around their neck inside their shirt. “I thought that would be safer.” Horwitz, who was born in Munich in 1984, is the child of a Holocaust survivor. “I grew up with this idea that I could always go to the U.S. if the Nazis came back,” they told me. That no longer seems like an option.

You know how this column is supposed to end. I rehearse all the similarities between Jews in Germany in 1933 and trans people in the United States in 2025: the tiny fraction of the population, the barrage of bureaucratic measures that strip away rights, the vilifying rhetoric. The silence on the part of ostensible allies. (Trump spent about five minutes of his recent address to Congress specifically attacking trans people and 10 minutes attacking immigrants; the Democratic rebuttal mentioned immigrants once and trans people not at all.) Then I finish with the standard exhortation: The attacks won’t stop here. If you don’t stand up for trans people or immigrants, there won’t be anyone left when they come for you.

But I find that line of argument both distasteful and disingenuous. It is undoubtedly true that the Trump administration won’t stop at denationalizing trans people, but it is also true that a majority of Americans are safe from these kinds of attacks, just as a majority of Germans were. The reason you should care about this is not that it could happen to you but that it is already happening to others. It is happening to people who, we claim, have rights just because we are human. It is happening to me, personally.

People are trying to bring back 1880s-era anti-ASL sentiment. Worst timeline.

You'd be surprised how often I'm told there is no interpreter at an event, there are no captions at an event, and they act like I'm asking for something absurd.

This isn't a performative dance routine interpreting what is going on.

But hey, deafies, we're woke now because we require interpreters.

This is all absolutely true. Also, to add, many deaf people receive a much worse education because the schools are unwilling/unable to invest in proper education for deaf people. So there are deaf people out there who struggle to read English because the structure of English is completely different than the structure of Sign Languages.

Also, Sign Language is NOT international. Signing in London is different that Ireland, or Paris, Toronto, Mexico, New Zealand, India-- some of the signing may be similar or even related but they are all different languages. So if you see several interpreters at an event or a news broadcast or en EU summit, and they are doing different signs, this is why.

And for the idiots who still don't comprehend that for many people English is a second language, even signers who were born in an English speaking country-- and still argue 'you get captions what's the problem' - Have you ever watched the auto-craptions on the news or a live event, or even a film on Amazon that they couldn't bother to get a human to properly provide subs? Yeah. A good percentage of the time, it's just word salad that means absolutely nothing. You're likely to just get a pile of words that may or may not have to do with anything going on in what you are trying to watch.

Some time, put on the news with no captions or sound. Put on a film or show you have never seen before, and try to lipread what is being said. Try to figure out what the plot or context is from just the actor's faces. Just try to engage when the only queues you have are facial expressions and movement on the screen-- if you can even see them talk at all, a lot of films and shows are shot over a shoulder with the back of someone's head.

Wear ear-plugs when you are out having a coffee with a friend and try to figure out what your friend is even saying. No music, no nothing-- just earplugs and trying to figure it out.

Do all of this for a week and then tell me that craptions are enough. Then tell me we don't need interpreters. After two days, you're going to be angry and frustrated because you don't know what the fuck is going on.

Interpreters do more than just tell you the exact words. They INTERPRET English language and put it into sign. They aren't just randomly throwing around their hands and looking silly. And they do it on the fly, live, as something is going. A good majority of the times, Interpreters have no idea what is going to be said. In those moments they are hearing something in English (or French, Spanish, what have you), figuring out what the best way to sign these words back to a sign-user base, and they have to do it all in seconds. It's a LOT of work.

So if you are at an event or you see two or even more signers who keep switching off after half an hour or an hour, know that the money is NOT being wasted having multiple interpreters there. They are not being lazy. They are doing a whole helluva lot, and their brains and hands and faces occasionally need a break.

So if you are hiring interpreters for an event, don't be surprised if they say you'll need to pay more to have several interpreters there. The interpreters are incredibly skilled, and they work bloody hard. If they tell you they need more than one, don't have a fit at them and try to talk them into just having one interpreter, thinking you can pay less. Understand that they work their arses off, and it's a very intense job that requires a lot of brain power and body power. So please, PLEASE be kind to interpreters.

And for chrissake, STOP DOING THIS. STOP DOING THIS. STOP FUCKING DOING THIS.

like we really hate to hear this - but power is in every human relationship. unless you are the exact same as your partner in age, class, race, ethnicity, religion, language, nationality, citizenship status, gender, sexual orientation, physical and mental ability, salary, education, etc, you have to negotiate the problems material power differentials pose to love, to treating others well. the response to this seems to have been to make certain points of difference - like age - load-bearing, in a way that erases others - class would be my example: far bigger a power disparity than, say, a ten year gap in age between adults is class and inheritable wealth, but you almost never see that acknowledged in the same way. and even if you were at parity in all those areas (gay twincest sweep??) there is still the emotional power that someone’s love and desire for you gives you over them. you can’t get rid of it. you cannot find the perfect relationship where it doesn’t exist by steadily winnowing down your “ethical” options via widening designations of “problematic relationships.” you have to confront the power you have over other people and think how you will wield it most lightly. sorry!

Today, March 21st, is World Down Syndrome Day. World Down Syndrome Day is celebrated on the 21st day of the 3rd month, in honor of the 3rd copy of the 21st chromosome that people with Down syndrome have. At ASAN, we uplift the self-advocacy of all people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD), which is why we recognize World Down Syndrome Day!

so many of the transfems i know spent their time pre-transition performing a kind of lifelong exercise in self-deprivation, the goal of which was to find out exactly how little a person needed to live. they starved themselves, dressed carelessly, shunned friends, and hollowed themselves out so as not to be burdens on anyone but themselves.

i see it now, too, in the girls around me. i'll ask if they want care – a home-cooked meal, relaxed company, sex without the expectation of reciprocation – and they say no, no, thank you, i don't need it; what would you like, what do you want, because in their head they're still doing that awful calculus, still training themselves to disappear in the eyes of the people around them.

i don't think i'd have died without transition – not in the conventional sense, at least – but to take that leap, i had to stop thinking of myself as a human experiment in fuel-efficient living and start nurturing the anemic, atrophied flame of desire in my heart. i had to learn to eat well, to exercise, to style myself beautiful, but harder than that, i had to learn to ask the people around me to work on my behalf in order to enrich my life and give me the things i wanted.

and i did it; i learned. and it was agony, but courage is a muscle you can train, and every day i get better at accepting gifts with the hungry gratitude i never learned in my years and years as a sad, scared, lonely boy.

so be patient with the trans girls in your life. better than that: be proactive, attentive, generous; be forceful, if you have to, and learn to distinguish real discomfort from the terrified reflex of self-denial that so many of us once learned to rely on.

and if you are so lucky as to love a trans girl, you must insist upon her. you must insist upon her happiness, her comfort, her pleasure, and her rest, because she may still not yet know how to make those demands for herself. if you can devote any amount of energy to becoming an engine that nurtures the flame of even a single tgirl then there is a place for you in trans heaven, which as far as i'm concerned is the only one worth going to

i love this fucking post. just thousands of deeply and profoundly wounded people in the notes recognizing their past and present selves in a picture of self-abnegation, ignorance, and despair. some are weary, some are shocked, some are hopeful; all have tried at some point to make themselves disappear. they failed, and must now work thanklessly to undo a lifetime of shame and starvation in favor of the happiness, abundance, and pleasure which is their birthright.

so many of my siblings, especially those who are awaiting or beginning transition, step into transgender life as fragile, apathetic beings who have spent their lives being coerced, beaten, and tricked into winnowing themselves to nothing, doing the work of the murderers for them, because they have been taught to believe that trans people deserve to live suspended, half-dead lives as punishment for their abhorrence.

they do not. you do not.

if you put your thoughts in the tags or the notes on this post, whether they were hopeful, despairing, reminiscent, or terrified, know that i have read it, and i love you. keep fighting.

they said it couldn't be done etc etc [x]

Some more from their IGN press release. If there's anyone at GDC right now: they have a booth with more details. And a zine with membership information. 🥺