transcript of video by TikTok account thatannamarie from early December 2021

-begin transcript

Here's a word that every queer person should know: homonationalism is not the name of my new synth-pop album. It's a concept from sociology that acknowledges how queer people are used in conversations about global politics.

Homonationalism is when we use LGBT rights as a yardstick to judge how "moral" a society is. It's short for "homonormative nationalism"—say that five times fast—and it was first coined by Jasbir Puar to describe how the US presented itself as LGBT-friendly to contrast itself to "homophobic" Muslims during the War on Terror. It can also be applied to other contexts, like the way we talk about homophobic countries in Africa or the Caribbean while ignoring the role of European colonialism in those regions.

Put a finger down if you've ever heard something like:

Oh it's so weird. [Looks around as if hearing something from outside the room.] My neighbor's dog is going crazy...

You know you've lost the plot when you're talking about homophobia among Muslims, when white American Christians are the ones who made gay marriage illegal, ignored the entire AIDS crisis, and to this day don't have any national policies regarding conversion therapy, a trans-panic defense, or the forcing of trans women into men's prisons and vice-versa.

Barbados just became free of British rule this week; we should not be shocked if they have some homophobic policies.

And while I obviously believe that a more moral society is one with robust protections for queer people, LGBT rights can't be used to judge other countries, to make us feel better about bombing them.

As an aside, I live in Connecticut, an American state where it gets dark at 4pm now, and where LGBT rights are actually pretty good. We were one of the first states to institute gay marriage, transgender health care is part of our state insurance, and we're just generally more legally protected here.

And yet while legal support is very robust in our state, there's very little cultural support. Homophobia and transphobia in day-to-day life is roughly as bad as any other part of the country, and we have no gay cultural infrastructure. Only enough gay bars to count on one hand, and no known queer meeting spaces otherwise. It's obviously not as bad as living in a place where being gay is a crime, but it's still pretty lonely out here.

So for a variety of reasons, I don't appreciate queer and trans people being used as a pawn to further Islamophobia, anti-African sentiment, and general xenophobia. Mainly because it's racist and ignorant; many of these countries have a long, rich history of queer and trans and nonbinary identities before white European colonizers showed up, but also because western "acceptance" of LGBTQ people is very conditional and very limited in terms of material and legal protection.

White supremacy wins when we pit queer people and people of color against each other. We need international solidarity and an acknowledgment of colonialism to achieve equality and equity.

-end transcript

This is so funny what

At first I thought it was just a really funny guy giving a tutorial for ppl who didn’t know how to run bc the title didn’t say IN PLACE but when the supermarket came up I was like OH WAIT that make WAY more sense

When one half of your brain takes accurate information Very Seriously, and the other half just wants to make really bad puns...

As a lesbian, there’s so much of bi women’s experience that I don’t understand. I don’t understand the questions and the confusion about sexual orientation that’s not clean-cut and not necessarily the same over time. I’ve always just liked girls and I don’t udnerstand how that would be hard to realize, I haven’t felt the pressure to “choose a side” or “just pick one” or had my feelings doubted because I’m attracted to both sexes.

I’m not subjected to the same prejudices and stereotypes that bi women are: I have been called frigid and broken and an eternal virgin because of my lesbianism, but never have I been subjected to the “faking it for men”, “insatible cheater” and “never satisfied with just one” stereotypes. It’s not my experience to soldier through expectations of hypersexuality and doubts about my love being faithful or my orientation even being real, and I will never be in a situation where my partner might be a man or straight. Sure, bi women and lesbians share the attraction to women, but I won’t ever understand what it’s like to experience attraction to both women and men, and I won’t feel the need to sit on a fence or become alienated from my community because of the sex of my partner.

But what I do share with bi women is how hard realizing our love for other women in the patriarchal and heteronormative society is. We’ve felt the same yearning, we’ve longed for love between women in a society that doesn’t always even recognize the existence of such a thing, a society where women are pressured to center their lives around men and be sexual objects instead of active agents. The stuggles we are subjected to stem from the same root, our same-sex love. We’ve all feared homophobic discrimination and violence against us when we’re with our girlfriends, we’re all fighting the battle to make people see our relationships with women just as full, good, real and serious as straight people’s, and we all feel the pressure to “not give in to our deviant inclination and just be normal”.

And most importantly, both lesbians and bi women love women. We love women like no other loves women on this planet. We are women who love women and want to have everything with them; we want a woman to kiss and hold, a woman to share a life with, a woman to make love to, a woman to know us through and through and become a family with. That love is the same and the fight for that love is the same, and we share the possibility of dedicating our lives to women alone in this world, and we all inherit the history of women before us who have carved spaces for themselves to do just that.

As a lesbian, bi women are my sisters both in love and arms. We share the great gift of love for our own sex and our differences are diversity in our community, something to respected and valued and learned from. We teach each other and help each other to grow into better people. I love my bi sisters, we are united by love, understanding, resilience and pride.

Solidarity between women have changed the world, and it will continue to do so.

feel it with every cell of your body

A gibbon walks amid models of vehicles at a zoo in the park of miniatures in Bakhchisaray, Crimea.   REUTERS/Alexey Pavlishak

https://www.reuters.com/news/picture/top-photos-of-the-day-idUSRTXCKJR8

I'm at the zoo, I'm at the miniatures park, I'm at the combination zoo and miniatures park

https://uquiz.com/quiz/8hL5Xi/what-problematic-queer-trope-would-you-be

here have a uquiz uwu

yesssss I won!

Make Britain Chips Again.

Loughborough Fair, November 2016.

bring back Georgian-era sentence structure. fuck this single clause Hemingway bullshit; I want to string the reader along for pages, to link, however disparate, an endless array of actions using every form of punctuation I can imagine - even those I rarely use - and generally be as incoherent as possible (though it is to be said that this is for internet and casual use, and not for increasing the impenetrability of research papers, a far less noble goal than the one I proposed).

Stormwind ("Chihayafuru")

view on DeviantArt

“I can’t play karuta anymore. All 100 cards look completely black to me now”.

or Taichi as i see him after all the angst we’ve been through - wounded almost to death yet standing up straight. Oh god this guy is gorgeous even in his deepest pain T_T

So yeah give me more angst, moooar! *disperses the ash of her kokoro*

The tanka in the right corner is the 69th poem of the Hyakunin Isshu, and i put the rest ramblings about poems under the cut:

Keep reading

Why do we say that capitalism must be “dismantled”?

You’ll hear phrases like “Smash the state!” “Eat the rich!” and “Smash capitalism!”

And, yes, of course, but… :)

However relevant those sayings are, our work must be careful, highly organized and above all planned.

Because capitalism and all of its associated systems are not discrete, abstracted entities we can attack independently.

It is a structure, like a complicated machine with many thousands of working parts…

And right now it is connected to absolutely everything.

If we do this… [picks up huge hammer and smashes the machine]

Then a lot of vulnerable people will die.

The machine was built and improved and redesigned and patched over the course of generations. It is very good at its intended purpose, which is ultimately to generate profit.

Every human being alive today relies on the byproducts of the machine to survive, without exception.

The machine’s engineers want it to keep working like it does. In fact, they want to optimise it.

That will kill all remaining life on Earth.

So, we must destroy the machine, quickly and carefully

We must examine its deadly programs and mechanics and replace them with alternatives we built together.

The engineers don’t want us tampering with the machine.

However, we make it run…

So we can make it STOP. Together.

How will YOU help us to safely dismantle the machine?

iww.org

p.s. My computer is on its last legs. If you would like me to draw you a little cartoon and help me get a new computer, learn more at this post.

ppl w adhd and autism reblog and add what texture is so awful it haunts your dreams its okay if its incredibly specific ill go first: scratching my nails on a car

as someone with a doctorate in Education;

homework is fucking bullshit

this person is almost certainly onto something, but the other factor (or maybe the mechanism by which it’s achieved) is that teachers are asked to do more and more and more shit for larger class sizes. And they literally can’t fit it all into the day. 

Schools (in modern Western context) used to do like, the three Rs (reading, ‘riting, and ‘rithmatic) and maybe some songs, maybe some local crafts, maybe whatever the teacher was interested in. If you wanted a Well Rounded Education, with literature and languages and history and music and philosophy, you literally had a governess or tutor who could do that shit one-on-one or one-on-siblings or, later, you went to a really posh school for rich kids. And even 50 years ago, when general schools were definitely a thing, they were mostly aiming to prepare kids to be literate and numerate adults, not send every kid to higher education.

And now we’re like, okay, well, everyone should go to school (good) and be taught in groups (okay) and everyone should have the chance to go to college (good). So here’s 30 children in a room (uh oh) and one teacher (oh no) AND they should learn reading, writing, maths, literature, languages, science, geography, history, civics, sex education, maybe music and art and crafts, maybe home economics and woodwork, plus do 40 minutes of exercise, plus maybe a bunch of prayer and religious education, plus half of those subjects should be taught through project-work and group-work which take longer, plus everyone in the class should matriculate to higher education, plus there are at least a handful of kids in the room with disabilities or neurodevelopmental differences who may or may not be assessed or diagnosed or supported. And this one teacher is supposed to do all of that in fewer hours than a full time job, plus take the roll, answer a million questions, mix things up for festivals, do fire drills, etc.

Expectations for what school should provide to children in terms of education has massively expanded (good) but all those expectations are just landing in an increasingly overburdened and understaffed school system (very bad).

so a bunch of the work is shunted off into Homework

im a fondant anti. make your cakes edible

I don’t know who needs to hear this, but going to thrift stores and buying all the usable sheets and t-shirts and jeans and then cutting them up to make rag rugs or yarn or whatever for your shabby chic/cottagecore aesthetic isn’t solar punk.

It’s gentrification.

You are taking resources away from people who need them so that you can pretend to live a less consumptive lifestyle. You are cosplaying sustainability.

The whole fucking point of rag rugs etc. was that you made use of textiles you already had that could no longer be used for their intended purpose, and you extended the lifecycle of the item by turning it into something else useful instead of throwing it in the garbage. When you buy clothing that still has use *as clothing* just to cut it into rags to make a rug, you’re *speeding up* the consumption of materials. You’re shortening the lifecycle. You are consuming MORE.

And you’re doing it by buying up resources that marginalized people need. Those thrift store sheets would look so much better on somebody’s fucking bed, but since you wanted that Little House on the Prairie vibe, someone is sleeping on a bare mattress now whilst trying to save their pennies to go to fucking Wal-Mart for bedsheets. And that denim throw pillow probably looks adorable on your sofa, but somebody needed a pair of sturdy jeans for that job they’re trying to get, and now there’s nothing available.

But sure, your house looks cute. I guess that’s important.

If you do want to work with secondhand materials- put a message round to friends. I have a cashmere jumper I got for free because a friend was going to throw it out. Just 20 minutes of knitting some custom elbow patches and sewing them on and I had a jumper for free that would have cost £150 new and was headed for the trash.

When I was a teenager my brother saved all his jeans for me and I made them into a quilt- it's got a lot of heft to it so works similarly to a weighted blanket (I didn't know what they were when I made it!).

A friend of my mum is an interior designer. She gives me offcuts.

Get the word out there among friends, in your community, even through things like Craigslist. People hate throwing away a pair of jeans over a crotch hole, or a sheet with a blood stain, or a tablecloth with a cigarette burn.

Hi! I used to work at a thrift store and I largely agree with the sentiment that buying useable clothing/linens from thrift stores just to make projects can have its problems, here are a few things to keep in mind

these are just a few tips that i have from my experience working in that environment. it’s certainly not unethical to use fabric from thrifting in your projects, considering so much of what we get at thrift stores is sent back eventually anyways. however, there are ethical ways to do this and i hope this could help someone <3

im starting to have a like….. unironic philosophical hatred of astrology im not going to lie to you

like explain to me how it isnt just an incredibly straightforward form of essentialist thinking, and then explain how that attitude does not then bleed over to other parts of your general life philosophy if you well and truly buy into it? 

of course if its a dumb little thing you playfully engage with thats whatever, thats not what im talking about. there are people who unironically believe that being born in June means you are a fundamentally ‘toxic’ person like its fucking Elder Scrolls. it seems like a socially acceptable form of unregulated socially destructive mental illness in some cases i.e. arbitrarily seeing patterns that arent there and making flash judgments on people and then justifying it with nonsense you read online. its fucked!

also sorry but it is just not real. it is fake. 

im well aware im not breaking new ground here but its important to note. people will say hating on astrology is just being Le Reddit Atheist but i think theres a big difference between saying like, its dumb to believe in a spiritual God or an afterlife, and that its dumb to believe earnestly in the concept that people’s places in the world and their value relative to yours can be divined from the fucking stars! if you get that its on any empirical level completely lacking evidence and a fun little hobby to get into for a laff thats one thing but as soon as it genuinely impacts your view of the world its game over

also people should be thoughtful if they’re into it for funsies or ~ironically~ bc

1) perpetuating it and legitimising it is contributing to the kind of Taking It Seriously that powermonk is talking about; you know you’re just joking but do the people you’re promoting it to know that?

2) you are so susceptible to bias, we all are, your brain literally doesn’t know the difference between facts and fictions, or between vital information and jokes, it’s all just sparkly lil neuron firing patterns to your brain, and you can legitimately bias yourself towards people by accidentally getting your brain to believe astrology bullshit that you know is not actually true but still spent time forming associations about

3) it’s annoying lol