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engage your brain

@psyread

kind of like bookmarking longer posts to read later when i want to think

I've said this before and I'll say it again: it's more important to know and understand fully why something is harmful than it is to drop everything deemed problematic. It's performative and does nothing. People wonder why nobody has critical thinking skills and this is part of it because no one knows how to simousltansly critique and consume media. You need to use discernment.

This is ultimately why propaganda is going to work on you. Because you never learned how to think for yourself and the actual ideology behind things. You simply rely on group think and the bare minimum explanations to tell you what's good and bad.

if u consider yourself a horror fan you like NEED to be aware and educated on the ableism thats been put at the heart of so much horror. like... is that character actually scary or do they just have a limp/scars/disfigurement that real normal people have irl and have to see depicted as horrifying and dehumanizing? if you think any of those things or things like it are scary in ANY context you need to step away from the horror genre and familiarize yourself with the fact that people can and do look like that and they do not deserve to be an object of fear

it's not even cringe; it's just personal and unpolished and you've been taught to flinch away from vulnerability which doesn't mock itself

everyone is all like "why does no one write love letters anymore" when the simple answer to that is, that vulerability and the unapologetic and unironic pouring out of ones emotions is almost always ridiculed in some way so

Credit: @pet_foolery

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salted-delights

I think I already reblogged this but im gonna do it again because this is a good reminder on how toxic gatekeeping it.

I’m reblogging this for the amount of thought that was put into figuring out the necessary configuration for a mertaur wheelchair.

MMMMM, the LAYERS to this. 

She’s technically a monster too. She might not look it at first glance and seems mostly human, but it isn’t deniable even despite her looks compared to the other monsters. 

But she realizes that she is still not like the rest of the monsters either and may not have entirely the same experiences as them, which is why she feels that she might not belong to or deserve to go to the support group. By sometimes passing as human, she feels she isn’t worthy of the space. 

The sad reality though is even though she’s mostly human in appearance, that tail she has undeniably would still cause her some struggle. Humans are still gonna look at that tail and think she’s a freak. There are probably still accommodations she needs because of the tail that she may still struggle to have access to. Even if it is just the tail, that tail is still enough to other her from humans and cause her problems and discrimination. 

She should get to belong in that support group even if she gets told she’s not monster “enough”. She still shares some of the same struggles as them that are caused by being a monster, and needs support. 

This is an excellent demonstration of the flaws in the concept of passing privilege. Bravo to the artist. 

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There are probably still accommodations she needs because of the tail that she may still struggle to have access to.

May I add some horror for this?

You know how it hurts to fall on your tailbone? Now imagine having more of that, while it’s still as spindly and vulnerable. Cow tails are stiff near the spine, and there’s a limit to the curve they can get. It’s not bendable like a snake.  That means some accommodations not available to her are most chairs. Like the dragon in the back, she needs foldouts.

She can’t avoid sitting in bad chairs for her entire life. Hell, she brought her brother. Likely in a van, where she’s either had to pay for a safe modification so her tail can hang down, or be in pain for the entire ride as she’s sitting on sensitive nerves and small blood vessels. Buses and trains are health risk. She’ll have ice and NSAIDS ready at home.

All it takes is a boss who decides she doesn’t need that ugly folding chair and should just sit like a normal human, it’s just a tiny tail what’s the big deal, and boom, go find a vet who will treat a humanoid because regular human doctors have no idea how to deal with tail gangrene due to restricted blood flow. Too far into gangrene already? Better hope a doctor who education about humans only knows how to safely amputate part of someone’s spine.

That’s probably why her father doesn’t have a tail anymore.

So yeah, this is an excellent example of something innocuous being dismissed that’s actually a big problem exactly because it gets overlooked.

I fucking hate the “explaining = invalidating” when it comes to apologies. Yes, sometimes a person means to invalidate you by saying this, but sometimes we genuinely just want to fucking explain our side so we can properly communicate.

I do not know what the fuck is wrong until I’m told what I’ve done wrong and feel the need to explain in order for us to see both of our sides

I like getting explanations with apologies because for me it helps lessen the damage that was done or can help clear the negative emotions.

I’ve had multiple people say it’s a sign that I’m a bad person that I don’t apologize right away, or that I’m giving excuses instead of owning up and apologizing (which is fucking hard for me to know if I’m actually in the wrong or not and people doing this shit does NOT fucking help). Apologies aren’t always just a “Sorry” one and done deal thing.

knowing that someone didn't mean to harm you, and in fact may have been trying to help, can be comforting! knowing how they came to choose actions that harmed you can help you both collaborate to avoid harm in the future! Knowing whats going on in the mind of your loved ones can be important and bring you closer together in times of possible conflict! An explanation is NOT an excuse, thats true, but that also means that someone explaining doesn't mean they're not ALSO trying to apologize on top of that!

I mean it's actually actively important to understand that people didn't intentionally try to hurt you. We have a real problem with assuming malicious intent behind actions, when the vast majority of people are actually just being a bit inept, or even might be coming at something from a different angle. The absolute insistence that you must never explain your actions, you must simply self flagellate before the Appointed Victim is... well, a lot of very problematic stuff can be enabled by that.

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I wonder if a lot of people get frustrated by explanations of mistakes because they want to take their anger out on their imaginary malicious version of you and they don't want new information that might challenge that

if so, sucks to be them, but that's no way to treat someone you want to continue a positive relationship with

i think a large part of the problem is how a lot of people seem to see apologies not as an attempt to mend the relationship and avoid future conflict, but as an signal of who is Winning between you. i ran into this a lot in christian circles; forgiveness is something you graciously bestow on the Bad Person who wronged you because you are Better Than Them, not like...a chance to improve things.

people like that get VERY upset when you instead want to tackle whatever the problem was as a team rather than just take your blame and go.

Every “Why my disability didn’t stop me from living” article written can be summarized as having access to resources materially and socially.  Which results in a fascinating intersection between ableism and classism, as the resulting inspiration porn - used against disabled folk via the “Why are you more impacted than this person in the article” - essentially boils down to shaming people for not having access to the resources required to mitigate the disability. 

Every time someone reminds me that Lady Gaga also has Fibromyalgia I want to scream. She is also rich enough to pay people to do things for her. Of course she has energy to perform when she didn’t have to spend all her spoons on doing the dishes and cooking and cleaning and all the little things that exhaust me and leave me with zero energy and lots of pain. I sure would love a personal trainer and dietician and premium healthcare and access to better meds to keep my body working but I can’t afford any of those things.

There is no "after the revolution." No "ideal world." I don't care how much progress we make, we will always fail someone, hurt someone, and the best thing we can do is accept that, and keep striving to make it better as we go.

And don't get me wrong, I don't say this to discourage anyone from trying to make that ideal world. Quite the opposite.

I feel like it's very naive to continue to approach these big changes we want to make in the world as if there's an "after it's all over" when we don't have to worry about it anymore.

We should always be striving to make life better, even when life seems pretty damn good.

Oh my god

I hadn’t thought to call it “rapture culture” but that’s EXACTLY what it is

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this work? it's not an epic battle. it's the dishes. it's laundry. and on good days, it's like cooking for a bunch of people you love.

As someone who worked actively in classist conflict, yes. We are not saviours, martyrs, heroes... We are part of the fight, it courses through us and our peers, like a river, and it is thicker than blood. The point isn't winning, the point is to soothe some of the suffering, lend an ear, build a house, offer sanctuary, stand shoulder to shoulder and chant our demands and dreams...

If this means nothing just because there's no finish line then you should reconsider the meaning of purpose, because capitalism taught us that there could be endless profit, and liberalism made the case that the answer to suffering is "making sure you get your share in life, fuck everyone else".

I say, our fight is endless too, and the answer is organised, collective and systemic fight. If the answer isn't collective, if it doesn't turns itself to those who suffer the most, the explored, the miserable, the sick and the famined, then the answer is a lie.

These lies are destroying any chance of a future, either for us in five years or to the kids in 20... whether you acknowledge it or not. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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Seeing bullshit like this unironically called wholesome and uplifting like this isn’t the most abhorrent and repulsive nightmare of every single writer on Earth just makes my blood boil. Having to become trending, be an influencer, have to deal with the ordeal of throating the algorithm of whichever God forsaken platform in order to make our work known and have any remote chance of making a living out of it someday is genuinely the waking nightmare of almost everyone who has set to publish anything they’ve created. Fuck platform capitalism.

traditional publishing houses pay pennies and dont even do the promoting to see the sales reach even and people wonder why authors are struggling

Rewatched The Good Place for the first time since s4 dropped and. Oh my god. The Good Place said "people are a result of their environment but we always have a moral responsibility to be better" and The Good Place said "every day the world gets a little more complicated and it gets a little harder to be good" and The Good Place said "even in the face of total nihilism, when nothing you do will matter, you still have to at least try. Because trying is better than the alternative" and The Good Place said "if you have bills to pay and shit to deal with you don't have time or energy to become a better person" and then The Good Place really said "people get better when they get external love and support. How can we hold it against them when they don't " and THEN The Good Place really said "no one is irredeemable. Everyone can try to be better today than they were yesterday" AND THEN! The Good Place said "Heaven is just enough time with the people that you love" OH MY FUCKING GOD.

Because AI image generators create new images by collecting data from old ones, their understanding of what an image is supposed to look like will logically be shaped by those who most frequently upload images online. On a global scale, this means biases towards the wealthy, "western," online, urban/suburban, etc.

"...seeing the relentless parade of toothy, ahistorical, quintessentially American, 'cheese' smiles plastered on the faces of every civilization in the world across time and space was immediately jarring. It was as if the AI had cast 21st century Americans to put on different costumes and play the various cultures of the world. Which, of course, it had...

In the same way that English language emotion concepts have colonized psychology, AI dominated by American-influenced image sources is producing a new visual monoculture of facial expressions. As we increasingly seek our own likenesses in AI reflections, what does it mean for the distinct cultural histories and meanings of facial expressions to become mischaracterized, homogenized, subsumed under the dominant dataset? In the AI-generated visual future, will we know that Native Americans didn’t smile for photos like WW2 U.S. Navy Officers?"

[Transcript: "Who's a historical figure people never talk about?"

Oh, I have one for this. Now, a lot of people talk about Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, who are towering figures in the civil rights movement. But, the person people do not talk about– and he might just be the most important person in that movement– is Bayard Rustin. He is the person who taught Martin Luther King about civil disobedience, he debated Malcolm X about integration, and the March On Washington– which Martin Luther King was just a speaker– as you can see down there, Deputy Director, the person who organized that event was Bayard Rustin. There he goes with MLK, there he is with James Baldwin, there he goes with Malcolm.

Now for the sad part. A lot of reason people don't hear about Bayard Rustin: he was an openly gay Black man during that time. And, he was fully aware of the stigma that was associated with that at the time, and he did not want to jeopardize the movement. Listen to this story. When Bayard Rustin would go meet with Martin Luther King, he would hide in the trunk of the car, because he didn't want his presence to taint the movement.

There is a great PBS documentary about him, and if you are not familiar with Bayard Rustin you should be, because he is a towering figure in the history of America, and especially the civil rights movement.]

A reminder that sell-buy dates or best-used-by dates are not the same as expiration dates.

I love that a food bank is providing this info as they are experts in stretching food budgets and knowledgable in shelf-stable food items

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I just saw the most Galaxy Brain gender take ever, from a cis man on reddit

[ID: a screenshot of a comment from reddit, with no username visible. The commend reads: This doesn’t make a ton of sense to me either. Setting aside the question of whether gender/sex is assigned or observed at birth, the gender I was assigned at birth was ‘boy.’ The gender I have now is ‘man’. Boys and men have different gender roles, and few adults identify as boys anymore. From this standpoint, every adult has a different gender than the one they had at birth. End ID]

Framing “girl” and “boy” as separate genders from “woman” and “man” is such an amazing take. it’s a framework that accommodates and explains so many trans experiences. Some trans people never were their AGAB. Some feel like they were their AGAB, but that that changed (usually when puberty hits, which is when you start “becoming a man/woman”. The accepted societal path is that girls grow up to into women, and boys grow up into men. But some girls grow up into men, and some boys grow up into women. This guy was a boy who grew up into a man, which generally works out pretty well for people. Some boys and girls grow up into people who aren’t men or women, even! It’s like this random cis guy skipped right over transgender 101, 102, 201, etc. and stumbled directly into Transgender Nirvana.

my problem with a lot of body positivity / progressive beauty culture stuff is that it focuses on expanding the definition of beautiful rather than deconstructing the idea that physical beauty indicates worth. my difficulties with living in a body (and therefore with living, period) often come back to the fact that no matter how tightly i control my body, i am viewed as either object of disgust or object of desire (occasionally both simultaneously). i can never be neutral. i can never be subject. my difficulty with existing would not be assuaged, at least not for long, by winning the game of “beautiful.” winning is not the same as having agency or personhood. we don’t need to change the rules of the game. we need to stop playing.

I need some of you to stop thinking that being visibly disabled comes with some kind of inherent privilege. I need some of you to stop thinking people are less ableist to us because they can easily tell we’re disabled. I need some of you to stop using us as a prop in your discussions about other disabilities, saying shit like “You’d never say or do X to a visibly disabled person so why-.”

I need some of you to stop telling physically disabled people that they’re the most privileged in disabled spaces. I need some of you to stop coming into discussions specifically about physical disabilities and the ableism directed towards physically disabled people and then claiming we’re excluding you because you’re not currently being centered. 

We are all disabled, all part of the same community. But that doesn’t mean you can’t be ableist towards other disabled people and I’m seeing a lot of you do it and it’s exhausting. So, take a minute, step back and think about it and stop. 

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i just saw someone describe a disabled person as "someone with beautiful abilities" i cannot do this anymore

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god can we stop softening the term "disabled". disabled isn't a dirty word. it's not "special abilities" or "differently abled" or whatever the fuck you want to call it. people have disabilities that cause life to be hard and there's nothing wrong with acknowledging that?? it feels so invalidating when people are like "ohh you're not disabled!!! you have special abilities!!" like. omg a) it feels so infantilizing. b) by saying that you're basically saying our struggles aren't real...? some conditions are disabling. it's not hard to understand?? like there is NOTHING wrong with being disabled & using the word disabled. it's not offensive it's not a dirty word can we take the shame out of it pls oh my god. this goes for physical & non physical disabilities btw

it's always so fucking funny to me when terfs are like "how can you say trans women and women are the same thing! being born as a man makes you different!" because like. yes. trans women and cis women are different. so are black women and white women. and straight women and queer woman. and women from different countries and different socioeconomic statuses. there's diversity in the experience of womanhood? what a wild concept

incidentally, this why terfs tend to be white women. from the combahee river collective statement, 1977:

...we reject the stance of Lesbian separatism because it is not a viable political analysis or strategy for us. It leaves out far too much and far too many people, particularly Black men, women, and children. We have a great deal of criticism and loathing for what men have been socialized to be in this society: what they support, how they act, and how they oppress. But we do not have the misguided notion that it is their maleness, per se—i.e., their biological maleness—that makes them what they are. As BIack women we find any type of biological determinism a particularly dangerous and reactionary basis upon which to build a politic. 

(emphasis mine)

"To argue that transsexual women should not enter [women-exclusive spaces] because their experiences are different would have to assume that all other women's experiences are the same, and this is a racist assumption. The argument that transsexual women have experienced some degree of male privilege should not bar them from our communities once we realize that not all women are equally privileged or oppressed."

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This. This is the core of it. This is why trans-exclusionary radical feminism is rooted in racism, colonialism, and imperialism. It excludes the idea that there can be any other type of “woman” except one very (white, colonialist, imperialist) definition.

Real talk…being born and raised in “communist” China didn’t make me communist in the slightest but getting into the French Revolution has made me a full blown socialist reading actual academic leftist theory

Hi!

I hope this doesn’t sound like a jab- I don’t mean it too. I am honestly curious and nobody has been able to answer this question for me.

What makes you think socialism will work? It’s an idea I’m fascinated by but can’t seem to find enough evidence that it could be successful. I love thinking about it in a fantastical utopian sense but cannot see it being implemented long term. I just want a better understanding.

I do hope you won’t be mad at me. I’ve asked a couple political questions on tumblr out of genuine curiosity and the person I’m asking usually just gets pissed.

With that out of the way- I read your post on a bus, laughed, and everyone stares at me 😂

Here’s the thing, I don’t think of socialism in a “this will definitely work” kind of way. I see it as an IDEAL to thrive toward. There will never be a perfect utopian society because there will always be greedy people out to exploit others and hoard resources, but it’s important to have at least an IDEA of what a utopian society could look like to know how to push back against the greedy and the conservatives. You have to know your destination to figure out which direction you should be going. It doesn’t matter if you don’t get there in one trip, or if you stumble along the way, what matters is that you’re closer to that destination than if you had done nothing and let yourself get dragged in the opposite direction. This is the biggest revelation that studying the French Revolution in depth has given me: just because things got wildly fucked up under a new system implemented in the name of progress doesn’t mean the system itself is unworthy of effort or is inherently unrealistic.

The revolutionaries didn’t know if democracy was going to “work” for France. They went for it anyway, because the alternative was living under the status quo of the ancien regime, and they made the decision to try and break out rather than languish without the rights they wanted. They stumbled in the dark because they had very little idea of what they were doing, and somehow turned into an Empire then a kingdom again then a republic 2.0 then an empire 2.0 then a republic 3.0 then a republic 4.0 and they are now on their 5TH TRY at this republic thing, and it is clearly still riddled with problems for them to have to riot again, but they never would’ve gotten this far if their ancestors hadn’t made that first clumsy attempt in 1792.

Reading all this drama and history made me realize I’d been wrong to give up hope on communism & socialism by association just because it was so disastrous in the 20th century and produced mostly oppressive totalitarian regimes, including my birth country. I’d been led to believe communism itself inevitably spawns hellholes where everyone starves, when there were really so many other factors at play, chiefly America and its militant capitalism doing everything it can to disrupt communist countries, with sanctions, CIA-backed coups, and outright invasions. I saw a parallel in how the rest of Europe went to war against the French First Republic because they were so terrified that the Revolution would spread. The First Republic would not have stumbled nearly so much if it hadn’t had to fend off like SIX OTHER INVADING COUNTRIES and could’ve focused on refining its democratic processes in peace. The pressures of war and the rest of Europe trying to sabotage them was what really led to the Reign of Terror.

After the Coalition defeated Napoleon and restored the French monarchy, I’m sure they thought they proved that democratic republics don’t work and inevitably lead to Jacobins chopping everyone’s heads off, just like how people nowadays think that communism has been proven to not work. Yet the French people remembered the power of direct action, how they once beheaded a king with it. When they became extraordinarily unhappy under Charles X, they overthrew him in 1830. They replaced him with another king, Louis-Phillip, because they were still wary of trying a republic and Louis-Phillip promised to be more liberal, but turns out living under even a liberal-seeming monarch was insufferable!! And so they overthrew Louis-Phillip in 1848 and went for that 2nd republic.

It should be noted that every time a republic was attempted, it inspired progressives in every country around it. Now, we think monarchies are weird and backwards and democratic republics should be the default, “civilized” mode of government. No one automatically associates democracies with terror & guillotines anymore. It wasn’t easy and took a LOT of trial and error, but we got here.

Could we not one day think the same of capitalism vs socialism, or even communism? Right now it seems like capitalism has “won,” but…what has it won, exactly? A handful of billionaires control a majority of wealth. The mass productions that allowed capitalist countries to flex on communist countries about how much better they had it, how many more shiny products they had access to, have proved unsustainable and are killing our planet. Is this really the best we can do? Is it not worth taking another stumble toward something different? What do we have to lose at this point?

“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.”

- Ursula K. Le Guin