DIMITRI ALEXANDRE BLAIDDYD
My September piece for the entwined #sheith 2023 calendar. For those of you with the calendar, I'll see you in a few months!
THIS IS BIG BIG BIG! YES!
NO MORE FED USE OF PRIVATE PRISONS!
President Biden signed the executive order January 27, 2021. This is the first time I’ve even heard of this. Here are a couple of links with more info:
Biden gets a lot of flack for being a generic neo liberal rather than a cool leftist, and trust me I’m 100% on board with criticizing Biden, but it occurred to me that, at least by my standards, he’s the best president I’ve lived under. Clinton was just “What if Reaganomics but with a saxophone”, Obama did pass the ACA, but he also cut it to bits to appease the republicans who didn’t vote for it anyway, and he constantly bombed middle-eastern civilians. I’m not even gonna bother mentioning any of the republicans since I don’t need to convince my intended audience that they’re bad.
Biden, while he’s obviously had some major bad decisions (breaking the rail strike, failing to defend trans rights), has done more actual good than I think anyone else I’ve lived under. He’s nearly completely ended drone strikes, he’s addressing the debt crisis (everyone knows about the $10k, but very few I’ve seen know about the changes he’s made to how federal student loans work that make them far less of a burden/deathtrap), and now there’s the above, which I’m just learning about.
Never let perfect be the enemy of good, and while Biden is very far from being a perfect president, I’m pretty comfortable calling him a good one.
For all the people who insist they never trust politicians, they are sure adamant about waiting until the stars align and political Jesus comes down from the clouds to save us. If you actually didn’t like or trust politicians you would accept that the great majority of the time we are going to have to work with mediocrity.
Biden is boring and uninspiring for sure, but he is significantly less offensive than the vast majority of other options and he is someone we can influence. We want someone we can influence and push towards our positions. Biden has shown that if he isn’t an ally, he at least can be persuaded or pushed into doing what we, the left, want. There are few candidates we can actually say that about.
The point is not that he’s perfect. The point is that he’s very clearly shown that he cares about using his political mandate to make things better. The point is that he cares about accountability. The point is that he cares about what historians will say about him in the future. The point is, these are good qualities in a leader. The kind of qualities that we can work with.
With regards to the rail strike, he continued working with the railways after the strike and just recently got them to give the workers their sick leave. https://www.ibew.org/media-center/Articles/23Daily/2306/230620_IBEWandPaid
“We’re thankful that the Biden administration played the long game on sick days and stuck with us for months after Congress imposed our updated national agreement,” Russo said. “Without making a big show of it, Joe Biden and members of his administration in the Transportation and Labor departments have been working continuously to get guaranteed paid sick days for all railroad workers.”
THE BANANAS ARE GAY
THESE BANANAS
THE BANANAS IN PAJAMAS ARE GAY
BELATED HAPPY PRIDE MONTH EVERYONE
I was thinking just one time Maybe the stars align And maybe I call you mine
— Electric Touch (Taylor Swift ft. Fall Out Boy)
We have GOT to stop being assholes to people with receding and balding hairlines. There's not a single person that it can't affect. It affects trans men, particularly on hormones, it affects trans women, particularly those not on hormones, it affects people with endocrine issues, something that's becoming more prevalent and common, and it can affect people without a particular cause, including cis women. It's a normal part of being human and we NEED to stop dehumanizing and humiliating ppl for it
My bf started losing his hair in his early 20s and the effect it's had on him is devastating.
He's an actor and he was dropped by his agent after he stopped hiding his hair loss. The roles he was cast in narrowed and shifted from more heroic characters to villains, and eventually he became so miserable about it that he stopped going to auditions altogether.
He used to enjoy dyeing his hair bright colours, and he lost that means of self expression. It alienated him from his own appearance, which knocked him back in coming out and exploring his queerness. The way he talks about it often feels dysmorphic. He says shaving makes him feel like he's "rotting" - like he's "scraping the mold off [his] head".
I've seen drunk people and teenagers yell at him in the street and mock his baldness. I've seen people come up to him and slap his head or touch it without asking for permission. I've witnessed this behaviour from other trans people and women who I know would absolutely kick off if he took such a degrading or entitled attitude towards a part of their body, but seem to think it's OK to do it to him.
Since going bald people perceive him as more masculine. He feels people are more suspicious of him. Women are less likely to approach him. Folks are quicker to put him in a box or misread his behaviour as aggressive or threatening, when the reality is that he's neurodivergent and can't conform to rigid social norms.
Baldness is a heavily gendered characteristic. If someone is conventionally masculine enough and/or is protected by other intersecting powers and privileges (eg wealth) then baldness can reinforce their maleness and the harm to their social standing is minimised. But if their performance of maleness is complicated by something like queerness or disability, it creates a dissonance. They have what is perceived as a hypermasculine trait standing in sharp contrast with their refusal/failure to perform normative, idealised masculinity.
And that's how baldness is typically read - as failure. Especially when it exists outside of wealthy, successful, heterosexual masculinity but tbh even there too - just look at all the jokes about Jeff Bezos' baldness or Elon Musk getting hair plugs. It's similar to insulting Trump over his weight. Like yeah fuck those guys but all you're really doing is revealing to the fat and bald people in your life that you think their bodies are deserving of mockery.
And God help you if you're a bald woman. All women with receding hairlines are at a huge risk from transmisogyny.
Sorry for the essay. Baldness is absolutely a body neutrality issue. It's an ageism issue, and a trans issue, and I WISH there was a broader recognition of this.
to be perfectly honest. i don't care if it is cheesy or cliched or idealistic. i like stories where the core of it is about kindness, the warmth we can offer others and the gentleness we receive in return. maybe the moral of the story IS love triumphs. it better fucking be
Tbh I think fandom generally needs to get better at sitting with the uncomfortable fact that a story/fanwork/meme/whatever can hurt one person and help another
This is why I think “tag warning” culture is kinder and more constructive than cancel culture / “no problematic content” culture. One size does not fit all, but if we learn to be more aware of the fact that the same thing can be emotionally validating or cathartic to one person and upsetting to another, and pick up a general mindset of thinking before we post, “what might people need a heads up for in this content?”, we grow more compassionate, more thoughtful, and more understanding of the differences in people’s experiences.
i think we as a society need to start accepting that fictional love stories need to be a bit toxic for us to go insane over them… like, sometimes you kinda need the two parties to be obsessed with each other and fucked up and willing to bring each other back from the dead instead of moving on and go to therapy i’m sorry😔
Two tigers,
Chillin’ in the hot tub!
Yes YES! Five feet apart
Cuz they’re not caged.
Source: fotki.yandex.ru
Ming-Na Wen | Accepting The Saturn Award for Best Actress in a Streaming Series for her work as Fennec Shand in The Book of Boba Fett
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.
To expand on the crumbling of the patriarchal edifice of the family.
If society agrees that children can know themselves, and have a right to self determination…. Everything else that Conservatives argue they have a right to exert over children crumbles. As just two examples….
ALL corporal punishment rightfully becomes recognised for the assault it is.
Failure to appropriately consider the wishes of children in medical care and provide information in an age appropriate way is recognised as child abuse and malpractice.
Children are entire people, they deserve all of the rights, privileges and protections afforded to adults.
let your imagery be a little violent let your imagery be a little weird let your imagery be a little sexual and by god let it be sacrilegious. at this point if someone looks at it weird im just going to assume theyve got the art-consuming palette of a four year old. stop making artistic chicken nuggets when you could be cooking an actual meal just because some people cant handle the flavor doesnt mean it shouldnt exist. damn