Foul-mouthed queer

You might not want to hear this but people with anger issues and/or violent impulses need social accommodations. And no by accommodation I don't mean walking on eggshells around them, actual accommodations for people with these issues comes down to giving them a space away from what's triggering them to process their emotions and calm themselves down same as what kind of accommodations people who get sensory overload or just any kind of overwhelmed. There is no moral value to having anger issues or violent impulses, people with them are deserving of accommodation the same as everyone else.

I had severe anger issues growing up, and the only way I was ever taught to deal with them was deep breathing. For some reason, deep breathing just triggers me to get angrier. But it's the only coping skill I ever got taught for it. Here's a few better ones.

Some quick notes for people without anger issues that want to help someone who has anger issues:

Walking on eggshells is not and will never be a good way to treat anger issues. Recognizing that people with anger issues deserve to have their boundaries respected and to be treated like human beings is.

An end note: Anger issues are not the same thing as being abusive, because emotions are not abusive. Someone with anger issues can become abusive if they take them out on people, but so can someone with suicidal thoughts who takes them out on people. The issue is targeting another person in order to feel better, not having a mental health issue.

An end note for people with anger issues: It really can get better. You can find coping skills and perhaps meds that help cool you down and settle you. You can find people that will accept that doing that one weird thing spooks the fuck out of you, and will let you leave if you're scaring yourself. You can gain control of yourself without shutting down emotionally. It's achievable.

I’ve worked on a community support training about some of this once. Here’s some stuff paraphrased from that:

It is probably also worth speaking specifically about rage attacks. Rage attacks are a lot like panic attacks. They’re often a result of trauma or a build up of high stress. They’re your survival instinct going into overdrive for a bit because too much has build up and a release is necessary. Like panic attacks, rage attacks are waves of overwhelming emotions that generally have a build-up, a peak and a cool-down. The build-up and cool-down can take hours, the peak rarely exceeds one hour and is often much shorter. Recognizing these stages can help cope with them.

The build-up can feel like a tension in the whole body, especially in the chest which can feel like a weight is pressing on it. Trying to control the rage can feel like holding the lid on a pot of boiling water. From the outside, people in the build up of a rage attack seem irritated and non communicative with a short fuse. They might suddenly speak loudly or slam doors as the lid fails and bits of the pot boil over. This is often seen as being rude, when in fact it’s the person doing their best to stay in control. During the build-up fase, it’s sometimes possible to let the pressure off through acts of controlled destruction (pencil breaking, tearing up cardboard boxes, etc.). For some people deep breaths work, for some people exercise works, for some people writing down a violent fantasy and then tearing that up works. This will differ from person to person.

When not averted, the peak of the rage attack is an overwhelming phase during which the lid flies off and the rage can not be controlled, though it may to some extend still be directed at a point where it can do no or limited harm, such as punching a wall (or preferably, hitting the wall with some sort of stick so you do not damage your hands). People in this stage may ‘see red’ or see spots and may be nonverbal. There isn’t much you can do to support someone during a rage attack except keeping people away from them and trying not to redirect their focus towards a person. As long as the only things being hurt is inanimate objects (and maybe some bloody knuckles): do not intervene. Absolutely do not try to physically stop the rage attack.

NEVER call ‘emergency services’ when a person is experiencing a rage attack. A person in a rage attack can not control their actions, follow instructions, etc. Your phone call can very easily result in their murder-by-cop. Don’t do it.

After the peak comes to cooldown. Most of the rage has passed but the body is still full of adrenaline. Often at this point he person experiences shame and fear that the people who witnessed the rage attack will reject them. It’s quite common to self-isolate in this stage. If you’re supporting someone during this stage: give them that time to themselves. Once they return, you can check in with them in a nonjudgemental way, making it clear that you are still their friend and are not judging them for experiencing a rage attack. After a bit of cooldown, some people enjoy exercise, dancing or swimming to reduce the left over adrenaline in the body. Others might be too exhausted for such a thing.

Many rage attacks are harmless, but if a person did do harm during a rage attack: wait for them to fully recover (preferably at least one night of sleep in between) before engaging in a restorative conversation about the harm done. In such a conversation it is important to be nonjudgmental about the rage attack itself and to clearly separate the rage attack (something the person did not chose and could not control) from the harm (something the person does bear responsibility for). A person who has rage attacks can not ‘decide’ not to have them but can decide to work on repairing harm and avoiding harm in the future. You could work on a support plan together to figure out how better to recognize and re-direct a build-up, how to avoid harm during the rage itself and how to offer support during the cool down.

If you want Tumblr to lift the porn ban, you have to call your elected officials and loudly complain about the FOSTA/SESTA acts that are the reason the ban exists.

And you also need to be ready to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the sex workers who have been fighting the ban for years.

If you want porn back on tumblr but don't want to stand with sex workers having the right to run their business, then you don't fucking deserve porn on tumblr.

I feel like so much slur discourse could get solved by discussing intent. “I’m okay with faggot but don’t like when someone yells it out a car at me.” Yeah no shit. I like physical touch in the form of a hug but don’t like it when it is in the form of a punch. People have said the word “gay” “lesbian” “trans” what have you with the most hateful vitriol they can muster because they MEAN it like a slur. So many of us have heard the tone that may as well make the word a slur.

If I saw a sign that says “I hunt members of the LGBTQIA+ community for sport” it wouldn’t really feel different from “I want to kill faggots.”

Additionally, I LIKE that it makes people cringe. It used to make me cringe. Those words have history for me too. But they also are not able to be sanitized by corporations. Shitlibs who would never rock the boat to protect me are never going to NOT shrink away at me calling myself a dyke and I do not care.

MY intent IS vitriol back, sometimes. A bold statement of attack. But sometimes it’s a joke. “His faggy mannerisms have captivated me.” Sometimes it’s a badge of honor from older queers. Sometimes it’s not that deep. What’s behind the words, what the intent is is everything.

Pretend, for a moment, that you’re an 18-year-old teenager from a family living below the poverty line.  One day, you make a silly mistake and get a ticket for it. Nothing major - maybe you rode the subway without a ticket or smoked too close to the entrance of a building. Maybe you were loitering. Either way, one thing is for sure: you definitely don’t have the money to pay the ticket.  So you don’t.  Eventually, you miss the deadline to pay your ticket, and you get a letter in the mail that says you have to go to court. But your life is chaotic, and a court date for a missed ticket is the least of your concerns. Your family moves constantly, which disrupts your life and puts you behind in school. You have one disabled parent and one parent who is always working, leaving you to raise your younger siblings by yourself. You have no means of transportation. There is rarely any food in the cupboards. The utilities are constantly getting shut off. The week that you were supposed to go to court, your family gets another eviction notice, your cousin ends up in the hospital, and your parent finds out that their disability payments are being reduced.  So you miss your court date.  Since you missed the court date, you automatically lose your case - now you have no hope of arguing your way out of the ticket, which you still can’t afford to pay. You can do community service hours instead of paying, but you don’t have time to do that, now that you have to work part-time and odd jobs on top of everything else to keep your parents off the streets and your siblings out of foster care. You know that you probably won’t finish high school on time, let alone fulfill your hours. You might be able to explain your circumstances to the judge, but you have no idea how to go about doing that now that you’ve missed your court date, your literacy skills are years behind thanks to your constant game of school roulette, and even though legal help is available to you, you don’t know how to access it or if you can afford to do so. But that’s still the least of your concerns - since you missed your court date, the judge has also charged you with failure to appear. 

Which means you now have an active warrant out for your arrest.  And just like that, you’re now a part of the criminal justice system. A silly mistake that a middle-class teenager could have solved with Mommy and Daddy’s chequebook in a single afternoon has caused you weeks or months of stress and headaches over a process you don’t fully understand, and has ended in criminal charges. Instead of having a funny story to tell over dinner when you come home from college next Thanksgiving, you are now facing additional fines (that you still can’t pay), the possibility of a couple of nights in jail, the possible suspension of your driver’s license, and the possibility of being taken into custody any time you interact with the police. The next time your parent comes home drunk and violent, or someone breaks into the house, you think twice about calling the cops - you now have to decide if every emergency is “worth” the possibility of being hauled off to jail. And in the meantime, the circumstances that caused that first mistake haven’t gone away - you still don’t have the money to pay for the subway, you are still more likely to live in a house filled with smokers, you still can’t afford quit-smoking aids, you still live in a chaotic household that deeply affects your mental health, and you still don’t understand the legal system or who you’re supposed to talk to for information and resources. So while those other teenagers get to go through life believing that they were “good kids who sometimes made silly mistakes”, you now get to go through life thinking of yourself as a criminal. And that might be the most damaging thing of all. 

When I worked with homeless teenagers and young adults, I saw this process play out again and again and again and again. The kids often considered themselves “criminals” or “bad kids” because they had arrest warrants and criminal records, but few of them had ever actually committed a serious or violent crime - the vast majority were simply unlucky kids who did something stupid and didn’t have the skills or resources (or wealthy parents) required to get them off the hook. I had classmates in my upper-middle-class high school who did far worse things with far fewer consequences, because Mommy was a lawyer or Daddy was an RCMP officer, and some of those kids grew up to be lawyers or police officers themselves. The kids I worked with never got that opportunity. Second chances cost money, and the difference between a “crime” and a “mistake” has less to do with the offense, and more to do with the circumstances you were born into. 

So when we’re talking about crime, punishment and who is “worthy” of being helped, maybe keep that in mind.

Not to mention how constantly making previously common words or terms into ‘bad’ ones discriminates against older members of all kinds of communities, from queer people to disabled folks. So they suddenly become the enemies of younger community members over the use of words rather than behavior.

But yeah, treating any group like a monolith is a bad idea.

I’m 40 years old. This is relevant because in my lifetime, I have seen multiple renaming/rebranding efforts to find words that are not as hurtful to disabled people.

And each and every one of them failed. Within a very short time of going mainstream, the words that were supposedly neutral and less pejorative became, in practice, every bit as nasty and horrible as the word they replaced.

This is called the euphemism treadmill.

Why? Simple.

If someone thinks a group of people are scum who shouldn’t exist, and you tell that person “please don’t use [old word] for that group, use [new word] instead” you have not actually changed their mind about the group they hate one bit. They still think they’re scum who shouldn’t exist! It’s just now they have two words that mean “scum who shouldn’t exist,” [old word] and [new word]. There is no vocabulary change that will make them think about the group they hate any differently. You can shame them into not publicly discriminating (if you have the social buy-in from other people) and sometimes, sometimes if you have a relationship with someone you can over time influence them to be less hateful*, but just changing the word they use does absolutely nothing.

*If you want to work to change peoples’ perspective, the Hidden Brain podcast has an excellent episode on how to handle conflict that touches on “how can you influence people who disagree with you to move their position closer to yours.” Relationships 2.0: How To Keep Conflict From Spiraling

So while I try not to use words that will hurt people (because knowingly hurting people is a jerk move), I also don’t put that much effort into policing mine or other peoples’ language. Because there are so many other things that are more important to spend my time and energy on.

frankly the harder my disabilities are hitting me the more appreciation i have for the word ‘crippling’

honestly, the ableist word stuff makes me so angry nowadays.

Which. Historical context.

I cannot prove this, but I am about 90% sure that the way we talk about ableist words and ableist language has strong roots in the Ableist Word Profile series run by FWD, a blog by feminists with disabilities that ran 2009-2011. I was hanging around there from the start, guest-posted once, and not only was it the first time I had ever seen anyone call out the ableist underpinnings of some common terms like that, I remember it taking off wildly from there through the social justice sphere even at the time. By now it’s gd everywhere, but hey, things do start somewhere.

At this point I would like to quote the bloggers who contributed to the column:

It was never about saying “these words are bad, don’t use them”. Nor was it ever the main focus of the blog. I’d ballpark estimate that it was less than 5% of the overall posts. And my friends, there was so much cool stuff on there, media criticism, awareness raising, intersectionality guest posts, information on web accessibility, so many incisive thought-provoking posts that stuck with you. The site’s still up, you can check them out.

Even back in 2010, people noticed that there was a… weird imbalance… in exactly which of those incisive thought-provoking posts were getting spread more widely and which stayed consigned to a smaller readership. Anna’s post Why Writing about Language Isn’t Enough is still absolutely worth a read over a decade later:

and yet, and yet, of that amazing blog, the thing that seems to have made the absolute most impact in the social justice sphere in the long run is… language.

and not even in the nuanced, let’s examine how ableism influences our language historically and today, way it was intended as. In the incredibly reductive “hey, these are Bad words, use these Good words instead” way that the original bloggers actively wanted to prevent. The way that can make spaces hostile to non-native English speakers, people with specific verbal or cognitive disabilities or some people with OCD. The way that is both incredibly punitive and, at the same time, has ceded such important ground in the fight - oh, it’s a simple replacement, say Y instead of X, it’s just that the etymology is ableist you see, it’s that the word is triggering. It’s not like you need to worry that the concept you are trying to express in and of itself might have ableist underpinnings. no need to think about it that deeply.

ableism is just a language problem, don’t you know.

Even the goddamn web accessibility stuff hasn’t gone big to the same point, and that contained some serious low-hanging fruit for improvement. But I’m not sure I’ve ever seen someone be publicly berated for no image descriptions, no subtitles on video, or non-descriptive link text the way people get over language. and when’s the last time I saw someone talk about whether a website was screen-reader accessible.

But really. Every time I see the “X word is ableist, don’t use it” it’s like I’m seeing the horrible bastardized knock-off version of the beautiful work my friends and community put so much of themselves into back then. And yeah. It makes me angry.

hey netizens! i'm not sure how many people are aware, but youtube's been slowly rolling out a new anti-adblock policy that can't be bypassed with the usual software like uBlock Origin and Pi-Hole out of the gate

BUT, if you're a uBlock Origin user (or use an adblocker with a similar cosmetics modifier), you can add these commands in the uBlock dashboard to get rid of it!

reblog to help keep the internet less annoying and to tell corporations that try shit like this to go fuck themselves <3

Where do I copy-paste these to? "My filters"? "My Rules"?

'my filters'! if you look closely you'll notice the format is different between the two pages. the (website)(##)(additional text) format goes in filters

but most of all we love each other :)

So within two days of each other, Fox News writes an article comparing aromanticism and asexuality to pedophilia, and then Matt Walsh releases a video saying asexuality is a mental illness and asexuals are tricking teenagers into having depression.

Not sure what’s going on right now over in Conservative World, but it’s a hell of wild U-turn for them to suddenly switch from “Oh no! The left is sexualizing our children!” to “Oh no! The left is asexualizing our children!”

It’s a reminder, I guess, that they’re coming for all of us. The fash and the white supremacists will not make nice distinctions between the queers when they put us up against the wall. There is no gatekeeping, no label-policing, no purity-purging and no assimilation that any of us can do that will save us. They want us dead, and while they’ll start with whoever is most vulnerable at any given time, they’ll get around to all of us eventually.

Queer solidarity means all of us because the fash are coming for all of us.

All Dividers are Feds. Stand united or die separately.

ANYONE who is trying to divide our community is a fucking Fed. That includes other queers who like to argue about who is and isn’t “allowed” in our community.

I love living. Thanks for living at the same time as me

If you can't wash it off, paint over it, replace the item, or buff it out, turn a message of hate into one of love! I would never condone someone to do this discreetly and in mere seconds with a quickly concealed permanent marker, for example on a public bench or bus stop. Certainly not anything like whipping out a tat machine and adding to an unconscious white supremacist's existing tattoo. That would be illegal! :) And, dear followers, I would never encourage you to do something that's illegal. So, please only use this when someone has defaced your personal property to avoid breaking the law! Because that would be illegal, and following in the law is always in everyone's best interest. :) .... :) reblogs and even reposts definitely welcome

Tony Hawk’s Twitter is a gold mine honestly

We Stan this San Diego Man

this

C o m e d yy

Some recent gems:

And of course there’s

#where is race war tony hawk tweet thats my fav (via @laughingfish​)

I gotchu, bro:

i’m wheezgJmf stoP

Honestly every time this thread just makes me laugh. And new additions…excellent.

Joining the war on fetish and kink on the side of the fetish and kink

I don’t want to hear a fucking word about how drag queens won’t know how to behave around kids from the same people flying “FUCK BIDEN” flags where every neighborhood kid can see a huge swear word on the regular.

Images that make you enter a fugue state

Surrender to cars?

Jesus Christ, when was the last time a swede did anything useful?

What the fuck those streets were before cars, fucking playgrounds and parks with waterslides?

Or did people commute on them, on the level of whatever technology they were on, the vere purpose they were built for since the first city?

I’m trying my best not to automatically dislike artists, I really do, but sometimes I just wish I could send them milking cows or shoveling gravel.

@santaclausdeadindian “What the fuck were those streets before cars, fucking playgrounds?”

Yes, actually.

[description: a black-and-white photo from the 1900s of a group of girls in pinafores standing in the middle of the street; according to the website I found it on, this is a ‘street dance’. The girls are talking to each other in small groups. end description.]

Children used to play in the street all the time. And for most of recorded history, that was relatively safe. Running into someone on foot is not going to kill a child, and horses - let alone carriages- were relatively rare.

Streets used to be public spaces. People would hang out and talk in the middle of the road, or set up shop with a little cart at the side of the road. “Right of way” used to mean “your right to take up space on the street, because you are a free citizen and free citizens get to use the road.”

[description: a black-and-white historical photo of two children in the middle of a mostly empty street. One child is sitting in a wagon, and the other child is standing, ready to pull it. End description.]

It wasn’t until the 19th century that it became common enough for your average joe to own horses that it was unsafe for kids to play in the street (and they still did anyway!). And it wasn’t until the early 20th century that people got cleared off of the street in favour of cars- before then, people and horses and carriages had to share the road, and carriages had to go at the same pace as whatever was around them.

We laugh at the insanely low speed limits of the 1910s and 1920s - really, cars can only go at 3 mph?- but they were there for a reason, and that reason was “to keep the roads safe for horses and pedestrians”. If cars could go at top speeds on city roads, they’d only be safe for cars, and people couldn’t use their public spaces anymore. But thanks to lobbying by the auto industry and a whoooole lot of PR spin, that’s exactly what happened.

I’m going to leave you with two pictures. The first is Mulberry Street in NYC, according to wikipedia, in 1900. The second is Mulberry Street today.

[Description: two photos of city streets. The first photo is sepia-toned, from the 1900s. It shows a city street full of people and carriages. The foreground of the photo is taken up by a group of vegetable sellers, and a group of men and young children standing beside them looking at the camera. The second photo is a modern photo of the same street. It is a heavily decorated tourist district, but most of the street is taken up by cars. The sidewalks are crowded with pedestrians, but they’re shoved off to the side. End description.]

Little Italy is a tourist district. It is meant to be walkable so that tourists can browse and look at all the little restaurants and window-shop. And yet 75% of this picture is taken up by a fucking car canal, and people- the people this street was built for - are shoved off to the side, so as not to get in the way.

People got forced off the road in favour of cars. People got forced out of public space in favour of cars.

And if that doesn’t piss you off…

Our streets were stolen from us and our freedom to get around in anything other than a car was stolen from us

Automobile delenda est

original cartoon is very ‘thanky mr banky’ but the cartoonist does have a point

https://www.youtube.com/c/NotJustBikes/videos

‘stroads’ (an unholy gemisch of streets and roads, who offer the worst of both and none of the benefits) are detrimental to human flourishing. they’re all over the us, especially in the west and southeast (the former being built more recently and so more likely to accommodate the car, the latter still clinging to a largely-bygone agrarian image). stroads suck because they not only prioritize cars (in theory) but they make people NEED cars in order to get around. combined with suburbanization– the most environmentally wasteful and psychologically damaging kind of living– these bits of civil architecture and engineering damn whoever lives with them, too poor to move away, to a hellish future.

I grow our own vegetables. Many hybrid and heirloom varieties are bred for flavor rather than for commercial appeal and travel. There are entire species on the allotment that you can’t easily buy in stores because of this - like salsify, a root vegetable that tastes of fish and shellfish. Our neighbours happily take it to make vegan latkes of alarming similarity to fishcakes. You cannot sell it in stores because - despite looking like a white parsnip - it turns brown when you pick it if you scrape/bruise/cut the white root in any way, or damage the delicate little hairs, for some reason, it BLEEDS RED and is very upsetting to look at.

There are whole classes of foods like this. Foods that just don’t ship well or look good on supermarket shelves. Forbidden fruits. Vegetables that bleed and taste like meat. Sorry about this

This website is one of my fav places to find interesting heirloom stuff! I ordered a bunch of seeds to try growing next year I’m really excited about! 

https://www.rareseeds.com/

@angelsaxis

I’ve gotten and plants seeds from that site, Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds, and they grow fantastically well for me.

I’m really looking forward to next season

Baker Creek Heirloom has good seeds but bad politics. They were going to host Cliven Bundy of the Occupation of Malheur National Wildlife Reserve who’s also pro the Capitol Riots and has made a lot of racist nastiness, although backlash made them cancel their guest list (which included other racist folks) Good sources of heirloom seeds:

^^^

Highly recommend Native Seed/Search and Truelove. Baker Creek has an amazingly large catalog and has some very cool and rare stuff, but they are also Mennonites and as you might expect, they do have terrible politics as listed above, although they do some decent work preserving heirloom seeds from threatened communities.

An organization that does really interesting work preserving seed from threatened communities (and larger companies like baker creek often piggyback off of some of the work done by orgs like this and NS/S) is the Experimental Farm Network. They are very explicit about their (left-leaning) political views and you don’t have to worry about them being Problematic. They have lots of interesting and rare varieties and species you really cannot find anywhere else.

If you are looking for a wider selection of heirloom seed varieties, these two companies are very good resources as well, and carry many of the same things as Baker Creek. Afaik they are not expressly political beyond their general mission to preserve heirloom seeds (although southern exposure does a good job of preserving some very traditional african-American heirlooms from the Southeast US in particular).

Omg I hadn’t heard of the Experimental Farm Network and I am delighted! I am also completely thrilled to see people other than me remember that Baker Creek is a bunch of lying fash. They claimed they did not know about Cliven Bundy AFTER VISITING HIM IN JAIL. He was literally in jail for his anti-social bullshit when they first talked to him about the watermelons he and his mentor stole from Indigenous people and made their name on. They also take seeds from Indigenous communities globally and profit from them without sharing those profits with the communities they took the seeds from.

…I am blocked by them on Twitter after publicizing the Cliven Bundy crap, full disclosure, I have an actual feud with these people and their unethical practices.

I was trying to get signal in the goddamn Himalayas to argue with them about Bundy. *grumble*

I also second Native Seed/SEARCH as a great org doing great work. Some of their stuff is so desert-adapted it won’t grow for me, but I’ve had great luck with some of their bean varieties.

Federal troops were called against 13,000 miners.Three battles that led to the biggest armed insurrection since the Civil War. 

 Ask yourself why you were never taught this in school. 

Although there were planes used against the miners in the Battle of Blair Mountain, it is not true that this was the first time planes were used to drop bombs on American soil against Americans. 

The Battle of Blair Mountain took place in August and September of 1921. Just a few months prior to that, on May 31 and June 1, planes were also used to help destroy the Greenwood district of Tulsa, Oklahoma, a prosperous black neighborhood nicknamed The Black Wall Street. At least 39 people died during the event, which is known as the Tulsa Race Massacre. Hundreds were wounded, and 6,000 black people lost their homes. 

Both of these events were hugely important moments in American history. 

Ask yourself why neither was taught to you in school. Also ask your local school board. 

Artist, activist, and G.U.T.S. (Gay Urban Truth/Terror Squad) member Duane Puryear pictured holding his own panel of the AIDS quilt in 1988

despite, despite, despite!!