WHATS UR FAVORITE ERA OF IAN

the pride flag industrial complex

but seriously: thinking about how ppl in the west are OBSESSED with symbols and visual indicators and little markers and acknowledgement of identity as a manifestation of marketing and brand culture & as a product of this particular ‘late’ manifestation of capitalism, and how this has affected how we approach the marginalisation of LGBT people and liberation politics as a result

EDIT (4/2/22): this post is about rainbow capitalism and is not specifically about microlabels. (this concept also applies also to broader and older labels like queer lesbian bi trans etc. you’re not necessarily exempt from this).

this post is about how focusing on flags and pins and stickers and markers of identity *as activism* has limited political efficacy. it also argues that people seeing symbolism AS a primary form of activism shows a lack of understanding of some of the broader issues that queer & trans people face.

(limited of political efficacy =/= lack of value, especially personal value)

It also is an example of how capitalism commodifies everything, including our political strategising.

it is specific to the west because I am from a western european country and can only speak to that experience. specifically, I do not want to speak for how indigenous ppl in the americas & australia approach gender & sexuality.

it is a behaviour examined more often online because it is often easier to engage with the politics of symbols, words, & signifiers and feel one is contributing to a valuable discourse online, compared to other issues which one can only signpost. (People calling this a ‘terminally online take’ are ??? to me, because I mean, yeah, sort of? You have not contradicted this argument lol, people online are still people engaging in LGBT discourse.)

if you’re going to call me a transphobe/aphobe and want me to take you seriously I expect dated receipts.

t*rfs can fucking die without exception. enjoy being blocked forever.

now can you please STOP being obnoxious and giving me grief on a year old post. it’s shut the fuck up friday everyone :)

actually, this is a good story: I developed generalized anxiety when covid first broke out (final drop in the bucket), finally got around to seeing a therapist specializing in it two years later, he infects me with covid on our very first session.

thanks! I’ve been in bed watching tv and drawing literally from I wake up until I go to sleep so all in all it’s been alright. main downside has been isolating from my wife and also that one day where I sneezed a few times each minute on average.

biologists in the pokemon universe are fuckin idiots. imagine excluding entire countries’ worth of animals and saying “yeah these are all the species in the world”. and these arent even like. undiscovered continents. each of these countries has enough history to show that it’s been populated for countless generations. fuckin professor oak or whatever professor is just straight up neglecting to include entire continents in his research papers

The first 4 Generations aren’t even different countries, just different regions in the SAME country. And according to the remakes have known about each other for ages. Which makes it worse.

professor oak, travelling 10 km west: what the fuck are all those

From The Washington Post. Damn

Do not let them make you numb.

Jury nullification. Pass it on.

Jury nullification is so fucking important.

This is something that more people should be aware of, if only because (in many states, at least) defense attorneys are actually prohibited from mentioning it to jurors. The law allows a jury to return a “not guilty” verdict contrary to the facts of the case, but not for the defense to inform them of that power or to argue for its application in the current trial.

I didn’t know about this. Wow.

always reblog

This is SUPER IMPORTANT and also a good reason to show up for jury duty. You know all those laws you think are stupid? This is your chance to maybe do something about it. 

I…. I thought this was common knowledge… signal boosting this because it obviously isn’t!

Did not know this

Jury nullification in the United States has its origins in colonial British America. Similar to British law, in the United States jury nullification occurs when a jury in a criminal case reaches a verdict contrary to the weight of evidence, sometimes because of a disagreement with the relevant law.

YALL REMEMBER THIS WHEN JURY SUMMONS START GOING OUT IN AUGUST AND SEPTEMBER FOR THE PEOPLE WHOVE BEEN ARRESTED PROTESTING IN MAY AND JUNE

I remember lots of media when I was younger where someone definitely broke a law but the jury decided to let them go. I bet a lot of you have seen that too. It is not a fiction trope. The jury has a say based on how they *feel* about the defendant’s unique situation.

A Good Thread about The Hobbit and Bilbo from yesterday. Didn’t realize it was the anniversary!

‘Tolkien is profoundly disinterested in war except as a backdrop for men to love each other as fumblingly as they can manage.’

It’s how you can tell that he’s seen actual war.

“If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.”

Funny how that works

I am so pleased at how many notes are some version of “I don’t fear the science, I fear the corporations who control it” because that is EXACTLY the attitude you should have. GMOs can save us. Monsanto will kill us.

what people fear about GMO- ‘theyre gonna make frankencarrots that crave human flesh and cause diarrhea ’ what GMO actually is- ‘we made rice crop that is both drought resistant and flood resistant which will prevent about 20% of major famine disasters, also it now makes vitamin A because vitamin A deficiency in poverty stricken areas is a major killer of kids as most vitamin A rich foods dont grow there’ what people SHOULD be upset about- ‘i made all crops sterile so all farmers have to buy the seed from me in perpetuity and i will sue anyone who tries to go back to crops that produce their own seed’

^^^ THIS

cannot stress enough, this is literally what is happening. and if a farmer’s crops aren’t killed off, when their crop *inevitably* cross-pollinates with the modified crop, they get sued into oblivion.

— Excerpt from Episode 1 of Lingthusiasm: Speaking a single language won’t bring about world peace. Listen to the full episode, read the transcript, or check out the show notes. (via lingthusiasm)

This is such an important and genuinely terrifying post. I could completely go off on the rise of anti-science, but for now I’ll just add: it isn’t just boomers that get deceived. This is a warning to all of us.

Pay ATTENTION to what you are being told. If you think you cannot be deceived, you leave yourself open to deception. Question, doubt, research research research. Learn about your personal biases, dig up any subconscious cognitive dissonance. Keep an eye on your mind.

It needs to be stressed that biases, not a lack of intelligence, is very much the issue here. Being aware of the need to fact check yourself is key: Intelligence won’t protect you from bad or unhealthy mental states, or keep you safe from cults of any sort. Intelligence will just make it easier for you to rationalize and attempt to justify the malformed tools you’ve taken/been given to yourself and others. You need to be wise enough to challenge yourself.

As a cult survivor, this is lethally accurate.

Every single person saying "sex is real, it's gender that's not real" to support trans people needs to sit down and think about how that affects intersex people.

Sex is literally made up. Sex characteristics? Real. Genitalia is real, hormone levels are real, chromosomes are real... But dividing those into two boxes isn't real. We arbitrarily threw together the two most common combinations of these traits, called them male and female, and said fuck everyone who doesn't fit into that.

Sex isn't some holy thing that only the most radical people want to destroy, it's a farce used to justify the medical abuse of intersex people. If you want to be an ally to intersex people, please take the time to think about these things. Think about the way we talk about sex and how it might be hurting intersex people.

Using "assigned gender" language, legitimating the idea of a sex binary, calling intersex types "conditions"/"disorders"/etc., comparing intersex people to animals with diverse sex characteristics, and not listening to or acknowledging intersex people are all things people need to stop doing if they want to be allies to intersex people.

I'm trans as well as intersex, I know that supporting trans rights is incredibly important, but it should not be done at the expense of intersex people.

Traces of coca and nicotine found in Egyptian mummies - WTF fun facts

well DUH. a lot of historians are still trying to process the fact that ancient egyptians knew how to build boats, which is ridiculous. why would they not be seafarers and explorers?

this is not new or surprising information at all. it pretty much day one of any african-american studies course.

the egyptians knew that if they put their boats in front of the summer storm winds it’d blow them right across the sea to the Americas and they shared that with the greeks.

It’s really hard for people to understand that everyone had boats, exploration, and trade interactions without the same level of murder, colonization, and violence that the Europeans did. It’s really hard for people to get that.

Well, no people find hard to understand that one of the earliest civilizations could build a boat sturdy enough and reliable enough to cross a 8,766 mile stretch that gave people thousands of years of technological progress later great difficulty.

The notion that technology is a steady upward climb of “progress” is, itself, part of a Eurocentric historical narrative revolving around the tacit teleological assertion that Western European civilisation represents the culmination and endpoint of history.

In reality, technologies are frequently discovered, lost and rediscovered, often multiple times, and frequently in parallel. A Dark Age in one region may be a time of rapid technological development in another region, and it’s not uncommon to encounter evidence of ancient civlisations using technologies a thousand years out of whack with the “proper” order of discovery… where “proper” is defined in terms of the order in which those technologies were discovered in Western Europe - there’s that Eurocentrism again.

I mean, just to give you an idea of how flexible the order in which technologies are developed can be and how ultimately wrong-headed the notion of linear technological progress is, there are Central American civilisations that had indoor plumbing, central heating and hot and cold running water before inventing the wheel. Some of the First Nations in what is now Eastern Canada had sophisticated climate models and reliable weather prediction - including functioning barometers and other simple meteorological instruments - before they figured out metallurgy.

So no, it’s not particularly incredible that the ancient Egyptians had boats far more advanced than they “should” have given their overall level of technology. That stuff happens all the time.

People invent the technology they need. They can even invent a technology, then not use it.

The Inca are often accused of “not knowing about wheels.”

Except, they did have wheels. They just didn’t use wheels for long distance transportation. They had a huge road system. On which everything was moved by pack animals and people. The Inca road is an incredible feat of engineering.

So, why didn’t they use wheels?

Because their land was so freaking mountainous that the road would repeatedly turn into this:

Tell me what earthly use a wheel is when your road keeps having to have steps and narrow bridges because you live on top of a mountain.

But that image shows us what they did have.

That’s a suspension bridge. Europeans didn’t invent those until centuries after the Inca did.

Because when the most efficient route through your home hits chasms, guess what?

You get real good at making bridges!

And when the best way to move goods through your desert homeland is a big river?

You get real good at making boats.

The technology a culture develops and uses is the technology they need. In Europe that was one suite of technology, and because white folk are so dang arrogant, we think that’s the superior means of development. It’s not, it’s just how technology develops in Europe.

The Minoan civilisation in Greece, around 2,500 BCE, developed huge technological advancements, including fully operational water and sewage systems, complete with flushing toilets. This would be around 3,000 years before one was invented in England.

Minoan Greece was also a sea power. They had huge fleets of ships, which meant they did a lot of exploration. They also built one of the biggest trade networks in the world, reaching as far as Egypt, Cyprus, Canaan, Syria,  the Iberian Peninsula (modern-day Spain and Portugal), the Levantine coast, Anatolia and Mesopotamia (modern-day Turkey, Israel and Iraq).

A volcano eruption on a nearby island, which caused a tsunami, possibly destroyed their sea power and left them vulnerable, which is why most of their technology was lost.

The Late Bronze Age Collapse a few centuries later led to the simultaneous destruction of advanced civilisations in Greece, Egypt, the Near East, Asia Minor, North Africa, Caucasus, Balkans and the Eastern Mediterranean. This caused a dark age across two continents which created isolated village cultures, and is the reason most of their advancements were lost.

The notion that technology can only advance is some white nonsense.

That too.

(Minoan Crete may have been part of the inspiration for Atlantis).

This is also why Egyptians didn’t bother with the wheel* for like three thousand years. What fucking good are wheels when EVERYTHING IS SAND?

But on the flip side…they came up with a way to use water to basically hydroplane those giant stone blocks in their buildings across the desert. Which is a hell of a lot more useful in an unpaved sandy region.

Likewise let’s not forget the Aztecs, who came up with a farming system so efficient (chinampas) that parts of it are still used today and really ought to be revived on a wider scale as part of sustainable farming. And also Native Americans, and I’m using that term BECAUSE it’s so broad: look at tribes across the country and you’ll see something interesting. Iroquois, living in a cold, well-forested, and often icy land, built immovable longhouses—which would survive the bitter northeastern winters. Plains tribes developed the tipi/teepee—while they also faced long, even dangerous winters, they also lived in a place where travel was far easier and the worst of winter could be weathered by heading south. Or down where I live, the Sinagua (later assimilated into the Hopi) built their homes IN CLIFFS. And by that I mean “off the ground, built into the cliff face with adobe.” Aka, some of the best pre-refrigeration insulation against the heat that you could possibly hope for. We still don’t know how they did it, incidentally. “With ladders, dumbass” is an obvious answer in some of their dwellings, but in others it’s not clear how they just….hung over a sinkhole, a quarter of a mile or so above the water, and chipped out the front doors so they had a place to sit while they made the rest. Scaffolds? Very well-balanced rope ladders? Smaller cliffs they chipped off afterward to prevent enemy incursion? We don’t know, but we do know they found a way to make the extreme heat survivable and even sort of a nonissue. They never bothered with stuff like modern central AC because they found a way to let the stone and clay do the job for them.

Technology isn’t always a race. Sometimes it’s just an evolution.

*nominally. We have extant toys from this period that have wheels to make them move.

Queen Mami No Swami @myeshxa

"Y'all notice a sharp decline in protest videos and content in the last couple of weeks?"

Joshua Potash @JoshuaPotash

"I don't think people understand.

This is NYC right now. Day 30. In a row.

The #BlackLivesMatter movement is just getting started."

[Video Description: a very large parade of masked protesters changing and cheering. One of the more distinguishable chants from the crowd is "I believe that we are one!" End ID]

The dwindling amount of videos and media coverage of protests is honestly worrying to me. In my opinion, protesters, especially Black protesters, are more at risk because of this. Cops tend to act up and hurt people less if they know they're being filmed and especially if they know that a lot of people are filiming. But I worry that as soon as they feel no one is looking/not enough people are looking, they'll start shooting us, and this time, it won't be with """rubber""" bullets and tear gas.

Document everything, y'all. Don't let them think we aren't watching. Don't let them feel safe enough to kill us.

As of today (7/7/2020) PromotePositivityMovement in Atlanta has been protesting for 40 straight days at the Olympic Rings in Centennial Park.

On Saturday alone I attended 4 protests in a row. And that was 4 out of many.

Protests are still happening, daily, but unless they're "exciting," they're not on the news.

“The people who cling most tightly to this “punching up vs punching down” paradigm are those who really, really want to punch people, and want to know which people it’s okay to punch. Remember, this was originally a moral principle for regulating comedy. Insofar as comedy involves ridicule and mockery, comedy is “punching” as an art form – as entertainment – and “punching up vs punching down” is a professional ethic for comedians, people who “punch” others for a living. As such, comedians have an a priori desire to get on with the punching, and thus a need to identify which targets are fair game. But there’s plenty of other people who just want to get their “punching” on, and are delighted to have this “punching up vs punching down” principle because otherwise they didn’t have any principle at all which said that punching was ever acceptable. As far as they knew, being mean was always morally bad, which is a total bummer if you really, really, really want to be mean but also want to not think of yourself as someone who does morally bad things – or don’t want other people to think you’re bad for being mean. For people nursing this kind of covert aggressive impulse, this moral principle, that it is totally licit to “punch” people of more privilege, was like a declaration of open season. I expect there will be a lot of yowling and hissing about this post from people whose favorite toy I just took away, like cats protesting being deprived of their half-dead mice. Yowling from people who aren’t actually standing up for social justice - just getting their vicious jollies on.”

—from “The Problem with Punching Up”, siderea

Where’s that post that’s like ‘tumblr is populated by people who wanted to be middle school bullies when they grew up’ cause yeah

An even more important section, IMO:

i genuinely don’t get cishet monsterfuckers. for context, in the wake of shape of water i participated in this loving-the-monstrous type discussion event slash publishing party wherein i debuted a short story about a woman who “befriends” a cave monster—but that isnt the point. the point is i had to hear straight women talk for hours about how the appeal of monsters is some kind of weird “taming the beast” fantasy—loving a monster until it loves you back, sounding like every bad beauty and the beast take ever.

And there’s my queer ass being like literally none of you get it. this isn’t about power, this is about love and alienation and acceptance. you dumbasses, I’m the monster. this isn’t a metaphor for your shitty boyfriend, this is a metaphor for my own alienation from a society that tells me a the way i am and the way I love are grotesque. this is a fantasy of love free of judgement, separate from societal standards that I’ll never live up to anyway. that ghoul doesn’t care if I’m fat, they think it’s hot that I eat well. that immortal fae creature doesn’t care if the gender on my birth certificate matches the one I use now, they barely have a concept of gender in the first place. that tentacle monster doesn’t care if I shave, they don’t have eyes

monsterfucking is queer culture, everyone else go home

Oh. I'm guessing those were all yt women, too. Del Toro isn't Queer, afaik, but he -is- Mexican in the us. It wasn't really that long ago that interracial relationships were just as forbidden and taboo as Queer ones and there's still obviously race tensions going on. The other in Shape of the Water is just as much, and likely written as, being a different race and the feeling of alienation of having a different place of origin. It happens to resonate with everyone who's ever been considered a monster by society, and there's not just one way this has happened.

The whole “love someone until they're not a monster” is extra, super gross in that context because people don't feel BIPOC are actually capable of human emotions who need to be taught to be human by some benevolent yt person who's fetishised their body.

Literally the whole point of the movie is her finding solace in the love of someone who loves her for HER and doesn't judge her for difference. That is the whole theme of the movie. She doesnt change him and he doesn't change her. They find each other in acceptance and that's the point.

do you ever think about how Steven Universe created the concept of Fusion as a rather beautiful meditation on the concept of collective identity, how we are naturally different people (in small ways) with every single person we have a relationship with, how your relationship with a person (or persons) is so unique and specific compared to your relationships with anyone else that it’s practically its own person, Fusion being the personification of the very abstract idea of the collective you that relationship is, how a relationship isn’t just a combination of the traits of the people involved but actually has its own traits unique to the relationship that each individual doesn’t have (or doesn’t outwardly express or not to the same extent), that a relationship is essentially its own fleeting often-temporary person, the concept of a collective you being an I and not a we

and then a whole wing of people just decided “oh, it’s sex???” beyond all logical reason and even when the show had children fuse and people with parent-child relationships fuse decided that that must mean the show was condoning pedophilia and incest and rape rather than realize that they just catastrophically misunderstood the entire premise of Fusion, even though the show literally had the main character sing a silly little song about it in the very first episode it came up in which blatantly spells out the concept of Fusion as “the person you are together”

and get mad about it? ‘Cause I do!

this pisses me off even more because as an aroace the concept of fusion to me really resonated with me and my identity, that there were these incredibly strong bonds that were neither romantic nor sexual. And for some people/characters it was romantic but it didn’t have to be. It’s so fluid and defined by the people in it. Even when its romantic there are shades -from garnet who wants to stay together as ruby and sapphire for most of their existence to connie who specifically wants her own life despite her love for steven. Fusion is just such a beautifully queer concept.