#and that OP of that viral post is a human fucking being

[marypsue]

I am once again begging people to stop trying to make my post about grieving for someone who's become a vampire into a metaphor about being insensitive or bigoted towards real-life queer people. I absolutely understand the impulse to read it as metaphorical! I also find sympathy in fictional monstrosity! However! Queer people, as a group, do not generally kill and eat humans.

Thank you for your time.

#also. vampires are pretend and made-up and do not exist. except in the animal kingdom. #and saying 'you can't think about pretend made-up things in this way because it MUST be a metaphor for your real-life feelings> #<about THIS specific real-life thing!' is uh. you guys know why that's not a great mindset to have right #thoughtcrime isn't real yall #also to everyone who's smugly like 'well op clearly you've never loved someone who had dementia' #a) how the fuck would you know that you smug fucking self-righteous cunt. why the fuck would you think that's okay to say to someone #b) Selfish! This Man Found Time To Build A Birdhouse While Jon-Benet Ramsey Is Still Missing #i am. so tired. #anyway this is your periodic reminder that OP of that viral post has to see all of your replies reblogs and tags #and that OP of that viral post is a human fucking being

[ninakaina]

the parasocial relationships ppl have developed with some palestinian journalists (motaz azaiza and bisan owda in particular) is really kinda gross to me like im not gonna lie it looks pretty dire to me the way western social media users are treating them like celebs and like the primary reason they/you should care about palestine. the way these figures get referred to by first-name-only on platforms they don't even use. you guys can't even talk about genocide unless it's a fandom huh. i know youve learned to care about things only if you have a relationship with an individual affected personally by it but you need to understand there are many journalists risking their lives as much as these viral ones and TENS OF THOUSANDS of non journalists who have died without getting to tell their stories and you should care more about that. you need to care more about that. and if those journalists you love stop reporting you need to keep the focus on what's still happening and not get caught up with them individually. the way people talked about azaiza crossing the border felt super fucking weird. idk i just saw a post about someone saying theyd riot if bisan dies and op saying you should riot before bisan dies but i cannot express enough that over 20,000 human beings just as real and lovable as bisan owda have ALREADY died. ppl should ALREADY be fucking rioting if theyre gonna talk like that

#idk i think before you post about bisan or motaz you should replace their name with 'misha' #and see if the post has the same tone as if you were talking about a convention #bc i see a lot of posts that use 'reporting on twitter drama' tone to talk about palestine #and it seems super disrespectful

[patronizing]

can people on instagram stop sexualizing the post i made when i was 14 (the one about my teacher roleplaying with me in a formal email)

it’s really getting on my nerves.

it’s why i’m barely active here. that joke was meant to stay in my circle my freshman year with friends i had on here in my freshman year of high school. it wasn’t even meant to go viral.

and anyway now that it is getting reposted, i would expect people to have the human decency not to sexualize a post when they don’t know op’s age. but i was fourteen, so kindly keep your freakish comments to yourself.

not to mention the context of the email was me venting about my recent suicide attempt, at the time, and my teacher saying “the thing about linear time” to talk about recovery isn’t linear.

you are making suggestive student x teacher jokes about a kid telling a teacher they just tried to kill themselves.

i’ve already dmed big meme account admins to take down the posts of me or moderate comments, but not shockingly, i get no response. anyway, if you see that “meme” being reposted, please mass report it if you can. seeing people make sexual jokes about it disgusts me and i’ve been seeing it more and more recently and that freaks me out.

it’s not “self-centred” to establish boundaries like that. doing the online version of making sexual jokes towards a teenager and then going “i didn’t know her age!” when someone calls you out on it (when you should’ve checked beforehand regardless) is still bad, actually. you shouldn’t make jokes like that when you don’t know the age of who you’re making those jokes about. i’ve already deleted the post off this account to try and stop it from spreading but that hasn’t worked. not to mention that i’m a CSA survivor, so being sexualized without my consent freaks me out.

fuck people sexualizing my suicide attempt at 14.

that’s all.

#important #psa #◞ personal.txt ⋅ #meme #funny #patronizing #◞ patronizing.txt ⋅ #patronizing.txt #instagram #social media #funny stuff #funny post #funny meme #memes #!!! #mental health #mental health awareness #not to mention #that i’m a CSA survivor #so being sexualized #freaks me out #textpost #text post #shit post #tumblr heritage

[emphasisonthehomo]

Super hero!Obes w/ Villain!Maul inspired by this fucking post. Vaguely modern human au? Imagine if Coruscant was like uhhhhh *spins a wheel* New York?

CW: for violence and murder and death. Usual super hero stuff.

-

Obi-Wan wouldn’t describe Mo as… dangerous. Not really. Absurdly clever? Yes. Massively irritating? Absolutely. But dangerous? No. Despite the smoke bombs, despite the many knives he carried, dangerous somehow never really came to mind.

Anytime Obi-Wan felt self-conscious about the whole “masked vigilante” thing, Mo tended to show up, with his over the top outfit emblazoned with a large ‘M.0’ (hence the moniker), monologuing dramatically about good and evil, throwing smoke bombs, and generally acting like a super villain from a children’s cartoon. Obi-Wan wouldn’t put it past him to have a literal Secret Lair™ hidden somewhere underground.

Nothing like a cackling mad man in a horned helmet to make one feel better about hiding one’s identity from the public.

The media had a field day with him, of course. Unending discourse and speculation about what the ‘M.0’ could stand for, various op-eds questioning his motivations, etc. A local theater student had gone viral a few months back, for performing one of Mo’s particularly verbose monologues about the Nature of Human Kind. It was a whole thing.

Mo was the scourge of the financial district, for the most part. Maybe that’s why he was so popular with the average person. He didn’t bother to try and rob the nearest corner store, nor did he pickpocket any unsuspecting tourists. No, instead he focused on repeatedly breaking into the many branches of the Bank of Coruscant, re-arranging the exhibits in local galleries or museums, and trashing the offices of wealthy CEOs. Through a convoluted combination of hacking, acrobatics, and hand to hand combat, he stole ludicrous amounts of money, and caused untold amounts of damage.

One time Mo had busted through the ceiling in a high raise during an Important Quarterly Financial Meeting. He’d demanded everyone give him their watch and then leave the room, before somehow managing to flood the entire executive floor, and exiting the building without being caught or seen.

Theft and property damage. And chaos. That was what Obi-Wan associated with Mo. Disruptive but ultimately harmless. No one has ever had more than a minor scrape or bruise, after a run in with Mo.

So when Obi-Wan receives a request for The Negotiator to make an appearance at the Bank of Coruscant’s central location, he’s expecting more of the usual. Perhaps this time Mo will have an even bigger knife with him. Perhaps this time his smoke bombs will be glittery. Perhaps this time his rant with be in iambic pentameter.

Obi-Wan isn’t expecting a hostage situation.

He’s not expecting the limp body of a teller slumped in the lobby, a huge hole in the left side of their face, and blood oozing across the tile floor.

•

“This isn’t Mo,” Obi-Wan observes, watching the grainy security footage that SWAT has pulled up.

It must be serious indeed, if the police want them involved. Usually, they keep him and Anakin at arm’s length, and Obi-Wan honestly prefers it that way. It does make it more convenient though, to have been asked to be here. At the very least the cops have a perimeter of the bank, and it’s be easier to sneak in and help someone, if he and Anakin don’t have to worry about an idiot with a flash bang bursting in.

On the screen, two figures in clown masks, both armed with what appears to be automatic rifles, stalk the lobby. One of them has a heavy look duffle bag slung over his shoulder, probably containing wads of cash. The remaining hostages are huddled on the floor, hands on their heads.

“What makes you so sure?” Grunts a large man in a bullet proof vest – Captain Louz, who looks every inch the stereotype of a SWAT officer, his neck is as thick as his head.

“He’s never used a gun,” Obi-Wan points out dryly, “And I don’t think he’s ever taken hostages.”

“If it was Mo, he would be shaking his ass for the cameras and rambling about the inherent human need to dance naked in the rain by now,” Anakin says.

Obi-Wan delicately hides a snort of laughter behind a cough. Judging from the fact that Captain Louz has frown lines instead of laugh lines, he probably won’t appreciate any jokes.

“What are their demands?” Obi-Wan changes the subject, glancing up from the security footage.

Across the empty street, cordoned off and surrounded by a phalanx of police officers, the front of the bank is a mess. Last week Mo had busted every single one of the windows, and they still haven’t been replaced. The clowns are hidden behind a wall of plywood, safe from any snipers the police might post on the neighboring buildings.

Yet another reason Obi-Wan doubts that it’s Mo. Why would he come back so soon? What could he accomplish now, that he couldn’t have done five days ago?

To operate without risk of snipers. A whisper at the back of his mind supplies.

Obi-Wan frowns.

No need for snipers, unless hostages were taken. No need for hostages, unless the robbery was botched somehow.

Mo hasn’t botched anything before.

“A helicopter within the hour, promise of a safe getaway, otherwise they’ll shoot ‘nother hostage,” Captain Louz heaves a huge sigh, “They won’t talk with any of our guys, we’re hoping you can-”

Suddenly, Anakin grabs Obi-Wan’s arm and squeezes.

“Look!” He hisses, gesturing back to the security footage.

Obi-Wan looks.

There are three screens, each split into four, each with a different camera angle. In the bottom left corner of the middle screen, a hallway ceiling tile moves. It shifts, shudders and then starts to fall. Quick as anything, a gloved hand darts out from the ceiling, and grabs it.

Slowly. The tile is hauled up, disappearing into the hole it left behind in the ceiling. It’s replaced by a figure, dropping deftly to the floor.

It’s Mo.

It’s so obviously Mo.

Obi-Wan’s stomach sinks.

The usually vibrant red pattern of Mo’s suit has been muted by the cameras, dull and pixilated gray on the black fabric.

“Still think it’s not Mo?” Captain Louz sneers.

“There’s a first time for everything,” Obi-Wan murmurs, blood beginning to run cold.

He shouldn’t be surprised.

He shouldn’t.

Mo’s escalated, of course he has. That’s how it always goes, with this kind of violence. Relegating him to cartoonish supervillainy was a mistake. 

Obi-Wan watches as Mo strides confidently down the hallways. Vanishing from view for one camera angle, only to reappear in another.

Except.

Except –

Mo doesn’t walk directly into the lobby.

He stops and crouches down, back pressed against the wall, next to the closed Employees Only door that leads into the lobby.

Slowly. Slower than the movement of the ceiling tile, he reaches out and begins to turn the knob. The door inches open. Across the lobby, the men in clown masks are oblivious to the creeping movement behind them. They’re focused on the hostages, on the heavily armed police on the other side of the plywood.

With barely enough room to squeeze through, Mo slips out of view of that camera, and into view in the back corner of the lobby. Just as slowly as he opened the door, he closes it. Mo lowers himself out of the crouch, stomach practically against the carpet, and begins to crawl. It’s almost cat like, graceful and fluid as he moves across the floor.

“What in the sweet hell?” Captain Louz mutters, brow furrowing.

Mo crawls until he’s tucked behind the teller desk. And then very deliberately, reaches up a hand, and knocks a pen onto the floor.

It causes an instant commotion. The clowns, clearly already on edge, whirl to look at the teller’s desk.

“Check on it!” The clown with the duffle bag demands of the other, jerking the barrel of his gun in the direction of the noise.

The other hunches his shoulders up, and begins to walk towards the teller’s desk.

Still tucked behind it, Mo doesn’t move.

Obi-Wan realizes what’s going to happen just before it does

Mo explodes into motion. Reaches out and grabs a handful of the front of the clown’s shirt, and yanks. Mo slings out a leg in a sweep at the same time, kicking the clowns’ feet out from underneath him, even as his head slams the desk with a bang.

There’s a scuffle, yelp of pain.

Obi-Wan has seen Mo in various states of hand-to-hand combat. It’s brief, usually. A punch or a kick here or there. Mo prefers to toss off a one liner and disappear in a cloud of smoke, rather than actually fight if confronted. What Obi-Wan sees now, is something completely different.

Mo twists, his left arm snapping down to drop an elbow on the back of the masked man’s head, smashing his face back into the desk. Then Mo lifts and shoves, and the clown staggers back and falls over with a groan.

“DON’T FUCKING MOVE!” The other clown shrieks, pointing the gun in Mo’s direction. His grip is shaking. He’s aiming from the hip.

Mo straightens up. The rifle is now in his hands, Obi-Wan has no idea how or when that happened. Mo lifts the gun casually, settles the butt against his shoulder. His grip is steady, firm. A gloved finger rests lightly against the trigger.

“I SAID DON’T FUCKING MOVE!”

Mo says nothing, instead he takes a deliberate step forward.

Off in the corner, a few hostages look up in terror. One sees her chance, stumbles to her feet, and starts to run for the door.

The movement is enough to distract the clown, and Mo sees his own chance.

Obi-Wan watches, almost in disbelief, as Mo adjusts his aim and fires.

The clown jerks backwards, and he crumbles down. The duffle bag filled with money lands first with a heavy thump, before the clown follows, flopping on top of it.

A few of the hostage’s scream. Another two bolt for the door.

Behind him, Obi-Wan can hear Captain Louz yelling something, knows that the assembled SWAT are running for the bank doors. The commotion seems secondary to what’s unfolding on the security footage.

“YOU FUCKING- YOU JUST SHOT HIM!” The other clown is still on the ground, wheezing. His voice cracks in panic.

“Holy shit.” Anakin breathes.

“I did,” Mo says.

His voice has no inflection, none of the grandeur he usually infuses into his villainous monologues. The audio is tiny, distorted by the speakers on the screen.

Mo raises the gun again, aims, and fires.

•

“I apologize, I prefer not to leave this kind of mess,” Mo is speaking directly to the security camera.

He drops a small sphere. There’s no theatrics, no drama.

When the smoke clears, Mo is gone.

•

The death toll at the end of the day is five.

The teller.

Two security guards.

And two men in clown masks.

Nothing is missing from the bank.

#aron's fic #star wars #star wars fic #obi wan kenobi #maul opress #anakin skywalker #super hero au

[bending-sickle]

I'd recommend looking at credible sources regarding the H5N1 thing. The post you reblogged fails to mention that a) There has been only 1 case in humans this year and b) It's not transmissible between humans. Unless it mutates to be passed between humans, this poses no significant risk to us.

The post in question.

If you have any suggestions for credible sources, please feel free to reblog the post with your own additions, or contact the post's op directly with your concerns and/or corrections.

But also fine, I'll do it.

From the World Health Organization: Avian Influenza A(H5N1) - Viet Nam (2 April 2024)

"The World Health Organization (WHO) was notified about a case of human infection with an influenza A(H5N1) virus on 25 March 2024 by the national authorities of Viet Nam. The patient, who had no underlying medical conditions, developed symptoms on 11 March and died on 23 March. Exposure to birds was ascertained to have taken place in the third week of February. Samples collected from close contacts tested negative for influenza A(H5N1) virus. This is the first human infection with an avian influenza A (H5N1) virus reported in Viet Nam since 2022. According to the International Health Regulations (IHR) 2005, a human infection caused by a novel influenza A virus subtype is an event that has the potential for high public health impact and must be notified to the WHO. Based on available information, WHO assesses the risk to the general population posed by this virus as low."

and

"From 2003 to 25 March 2024, a total of 888 worldwide human cases of infection of influenza A(H5N1), including 463 deaths, have been reported to WHO from 23 countries. Almost all cases of human infection with avian influenza A(H5N1) have been linked to close contact with infected live or dead birds, or contaminated environments.

Since 2003, 129 human infections with influenza A (H5N1), including 65 deaths, have been reported in Viet Nam. The most recent avian influenza A (H5) case was reported in October 2022 from Northern Province of Phu Tho, Viet Nam."

and

"These A(H5N1) influenza viruses, belonging to different genetic groups, do not easily infect humans, and human-to-human transmission thus far appears unusual. As the virus continues to circulate in poultry, particularly in rural areas of Viet Nam, the potential for further sporadic human cases remains.

Currently, available epidemiological and virological evidence suggests that A(H5) viruses have not acquired the ability of sustained transmission among humans; thus, the likelihood of human-to-human spread is low.

Based on available information, WHO assesses the risk to the general population posed by this virus as low. The risk assessment will be reviewed if additional virological and epidemiological information becomes available."

Here's WHO's Surveillance - Avian Influenza page for more information on types and case numbers.

PS: "Unless it mutates to be passed between humans, this poses no significant risk to us." Yeah, that's the concern. Like "unless the brakes fail, the car will stop" okay but they're making some real funky noise, chief. Let's keep an eye on them? "Unless shit goes wrong, we'll be fine." Fuck's sake.

Like epidemiologists have been worried about avian flu human-to-human transmission on a large scale for ages. The first outbreak was in 1997, with 18 human cases. The first human-to-human transmission was likely in 2006. That's eighteen years ago. Epidemiologists were very concerned at the time, and have continued to be so, about the potential for viral mutation.

Also? Just because it hasn't happened yet doesn't mean we shouldn't be worried about how the conditions are pretty ripe for it to happen.

But also? Dude. It is still very much a concern if people are contracting this illness from zoonotic sources. Like. They still get sick, y'know? That is still very much a concern. So even if it is only rampant in animal populations, that still increases the risk of humans being exposed and getting sick. Those people still count.

Also also, I don't know, man, but like. Food security is also something that'll be affected even if human-to-human infection doesn't happen. The chickens are still dying, and if farmers have to cull entire flocks (as has happened with other livestock during outbreaks), then that risk is nothing to sneeze at either.

And by the way, the articles linked in the post literally quote credible sources. The CBC article quotes:

Louise Moncla, "an avian influenza researcher and assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania"

Caitlin Rivers, "an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in Baltimore"

Dr. Joe Armstrong, "a veterinarian with the University of Minnesota who regularly travels the state to educate dairy and beef producers"

U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)

And was written by a credible reporter: Lauren Pelley Senior Health & Medical Reporter

Lauren Pelley covers health and medical science for CBC News, including the global spread of infectious diseases, Canadian health policy, pandemic preparedness, and the crucial intersection between human health and climate change. Two-time RNAO Media Award winner for in-depth health reporting in 2020 and 2022.

The OnlyMyHealth article references:

Dr Suresh Kuchipudi, "a prominent bird flu researcher based in Pittsburgh"

The World Health Organisation (WHO)

U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Preention (CDC)

Department of Animal Husbandry, Dairying and Fisheries, Ministry of Agriculture, Government of India

#seriously buddy you could've just reblogged and schooled us all #but fine here's your credible source and data #~oh only one person died this year~ #ya This Year being the operant term #sorry anon but you got me riled #ask box adventures #i was editing shit but now i've just spent what? an hour? on this

[anamatics]

can you add anything about studying tiktok academically? That sounds v interesting. I just saw you post on a text post about it. apologies if you’ve mentioned it before; I just started following you.

the post in question 

To specifically address that post:

Firstly, I think we need to divorce ourselves from the idea that it is just “Zoomers” or “Children” on TikTok. I don’t have specific statistics on the demographics, but there there are certainly as many Millennial, Gen X and Boomer users of the platform as there are Gen Z and younger users. 

Secondly, let’s talk a little bit about the mirroring discourse between 2014 Tumblr and 2021 TikTok. The commentary on this particular post does a poor job at framing what the actual problem is on TikTok. So let’s start there. 

Tumblr was a website of networks. You follow people and you see what they share on their blogs on your dash and you can share your own content into that stream. It produces what are called information flows, where content flows across various nodes (blogs) through interconnected edges (the person to person connection made by act of you sharing something). Here’s a blog explaining how this works. Here’s a good book that discusses virality and  information flows. Tumblr is also a bit complicated, as people can add to posts. This is why there are like 5 versions of every great tumblr meme with different people riffing on the OP. As the post grew, as did the spread of the people who commented below it. But here’s the thing. You, as a user on Tumblr, a conscious choice whether or not to reblog a post and to your blog and therefore your followers. "Discourse"* on Tumblr was curated by social networks of individual users that individual users self-selected into by following various blogs.

TikTok, on the other hand, is curated by an algorithm. You, as a user of TikTok, can shape what you see on your For You Page (FYP). The whole purpose of the FYP is to show you what you want to see, to keep you on the platform. As per TikTok themselves, you are put into a specific space based on what you consciously or unconsciously directed TikTok to believe you fit into. This is done consciously by following people, liking/commenting on/sharing content. It’s done unconsciously too, by watching TikTok content. This is why sometimes you’ll see people complaining that all they’re getting is like, queer discourse. It’s because you watch it. Maybe multiple times to get everything that was said because the app has no built-in captioning feature.

What this means, in essence, is that unlike Tumblr, the user has no real and/or direct control over where, potentially, their content could flow to. In interview studies that I've done with TikTok users, I've found that many TikTok users are careful about the content they produce because they're afraid of it attracting "the wrong kind of attention" - this could be say, a BLM activist getting harassed by white supremacists, or a Native American creator getting harassed by WitchTok for discussing how using certain kinds of sage is appropriative**. The pile on can be aggressive, as that post says, but what that post is missing is that you, as user on TikTok have no control over where that information goes or flows to. This gets more complicated with stitching and dueting.

So, if Tumblr has a more linear flow of information from node to node, TikTok takes information apart, splices it together, and all of it is made more complicated by peoples' faces being attached to it. Then it essentially pingpongs around an essentially closed network determined by algorithmic identity derived from measurable types. This is the part that concerns me. That post is right, people's faces make it more complicated. It complicates privacy. It complicates repercussions for people because it doesn't allow people to learn and grow and change. With video evidence, however, these things get harder. Which the internet writ large needs to get fucking better about. 

However. I was on Tumblr in 2014. I essentially content moderated a fandom for three years as a side gig to my day job. The conversations that are being had on TikTok are the exact same ones that were being had on Tumblr half a decade ago because -- get this -- a whole new generation of young, emergent thinkers, are trying on theory. They're trying on identities, they're experimenting with who they are and they're trying to talk it out***.  It is as mean and as nasty and as unpleasant and we should sit with the fact that Tumblr was fucking toxic because we made it that way. The problem is that the kids have picked the world's shittiest platform to do it on. Like Twitter, TikTok is limited in what you can do/say. So nuance is lost. What this means is that pile-ons can spin out of control, because these are kids who've just discovered debate and theory and ugh, "discourse" and therefore wield it with gusto when they could be more humane, more gentle, and more understanding of the fact that no one's perfect. 

(*sidebar that I high-key hate how discourse has gained a negative connotation because of this hellsite.

**And it is appropriative so stop doing it if you are.

***Baby leftists plz stop being Tankies do you have any idea how many People Stalin/Lenin had killed.)

#posting about the day job on main #disciplineandpunnish

[adamsvanrhijn]

by and large i think users of this website do not understand how reactionary radicalization works

saw the hot take today of “15 year olds are old enough to know right from wrong” okay like,

if 15 year old kylee from bentonville arkansas who is growing up in a traditional values religious community and constantly faced with sexism and stereotypes but is developing liberal ideas through tumblr and beginning to feel empowered makes a misguided comment about transgender people on a post that goes viral, and 95% of the people she interacts with about this comment are telling her it isn’t their job to educate her and she should know how to use google and honestly they cannot believe a human being is acting like this op is rancid, but 5% are sending her direct messages that say things like, “hey, are you okay? you got such a harsh reaction! people on this website can be so rude, they really hate when people think for themselves and ask questions like you did. let me know if you want to talk. i know a lot about this topic and i’d be happy to answer any questions you have!” 

who the fuck is she going to talk to, do you think?

and maybe she develops friendships with these people and gradually starts to trust them, and they have lots of books and articles and websites to share and are a very supportive community who defend her whenever anyone else on tumblr is mean to her

it is not an overnight transition from calling cisgender women “real women” because you don’t have a full understanding of 21st century ideas about sex and gender to thinking that all transgender women are [insert negative thing to be here] and don’t deserve rights

“old enough to know right from wrong” means nothing when your perception of right and wrong has been molded - if she believes she’s threatened she’s going to feel like she’s in the right, and she’s been actually threatened by the people her crowd has a vitriolic hatred for in the past, so the neurons are going to fire a certain way lmfao. she is CONFIDENT that she knows right from wrong, and she is confident that you are wrong and she is right, and is in the perfect environment to continue to develop viewpoints like this without any opportunity for reflection on other ideas

god

[thatlittleegyptologist]

hekatontarch replied to your post: I love it when I don’t post much for a few days,...

Regarding checking dates… on the phone and iPad there are no dates shown at all. So I’m probably one of the people happily commenting on stuff from 5 years ago. Sorry ��

You can open them in mobile web browsers and the date is on the bottom of each post. The date isn’t written on the bottom of posts on the dashboard on desktop either, but on posts where there seems to have been a lot of strife, or I don’t trust the information I: 

a) look through the notes, as often you’ll find updates from OP either apologising or clarifying their post, or someone else clarifies or corrects, so I don’t reblog a version without the clarification/apology and thus don’t continue to dog pile onto the OP for out of date information that they long ago apologised for or clarified. If OP is an unrelenting asshole I don’t reblog either because they don’t deserve air time. 

b) open a post up back to its original post permalink and look at the date it was posted (I do this on both mobile and desktop because sometimes you have to go outside the app to get your information) and original tags (if there were any). 

By doing this, I can determine when something was posted (because dog piling someone for a post made in 2014 when op has specifically apologised or begged people to stop reblogging is...in bad taste), the intent of OP (often you’ll find tags on an original post indicating it was a shitpost or a one off post in anger, and it’s got 50k notes of people ignoring the original context and intent in order to yell at someone for something they didn’t even say for woke points), and whether my reblog/comment would add to whatever has already been said or would it just further OP’s suffering (as someone who has posts like this, seeing the same hot take 60 times a day for days on end makes you want to scream). 

Idk, I just tend to think about the person on the other end of the reblog. Am I adding to them already feeling like shit? Does my comment on a 6 year old post actually matter or has it already been covered in the intervening years? Do I involve myself in something that isn’t important and isn’t harmful if I just let it be consigned to history? I mean, there’s a reason so many ‘viral’ tumblr posts have an OP with a deactivated blog. Imagine making a dumb post when you were 15 and then people are still yelling at you for it when you’re 20? I’d delete my blog too. If the drama is more than a few days old then it’s not worth bothering with. Everything has probably already been said, OP has either apologised or doubled down, and if they’ve doubled down they’re not worth bothering with. Sometimes you have to resist the urge to be reactionary, and just let it go. 

To this day I still get the occasional anon hate for the ‘pub post’ (y’know the one where I won a pub quiz by being able to read hieroglyphs and drunkenly told the 100 followers I had at the time about it because it was funny?) telling me that a 31 year old woman is sad and lonely if she feels the need to make up a story for notes or anons that tell me they don’t get why it’s funny. That post was made in April 2016. I was 27 when I made that post. It’s been 4 years, and I had to delete the original (I still have a reblogged version set to private) just so I could see my dashboard again. I still get anon hate for a 4 year old post that doesn’t even affect people’s lives in any significant way, yet they’ll come into my ask box like I made that post yesterday in an attempt to make me feel bad. I don’t give a fuck if people believe it or not, but damn just check whether you’re sending hate for an event years in the past that didn’t hurt anyone. 

So, yeah, I check the dates. I know the internet feels anonymous and people feel they can behave however they like with no consequences, but I try to remember that an OP of a post is still a human being and in some cases it’s better to leave them alone.

#hekatontarch #repeat after me folks: sometimes you don't need to comment or reblog with comment #sometimes your input is not required #especially when a post is years old

[aimmyarrowshigh]

aheavenlyrush replied to your post “I’ve been on tumblr since 2012 and I was even a John Green fan for a...”

i checked and it happened in 2015

aheavenlyrush replied to your post “I’ve been on tumblr since 2012 and I was even a John Green fan for a...”

i saw that jg post on my feed and i had no energy to comment on it but truly when i saw that you had i felt such relief!! i remember making that one post about stiefvater defending him and telling teenage girls to be quiet and the response to it still fucking haunts me i swear

Oy, was it really that recently? The last three years have taken 900 years. And yeah... Maggie Stiefvater’s post about it was a Really Bad Look, and iirc that was the environment that spawned the beginning of the batshit “Keep YA Kind”* concern-trolling thing (yep, also 2015) that was mainly used to silence girls and women and people of color whenever the four white cishet men in YA fucked up between 2015 and 2018, when it finally publicly came out that most of them were, yk, fucking up because they’re legitimately horrible people and maybe the people calling them out should have been taken seriously.

* The other notable “why the fuck is this happening???? why is HE the one getting the sympathy here?????” events from “Keep YA Kind,” which, listen, I would bet you anything that it was very very nearly called “Keep Kidlit Kind” until the only person involved with 1/4 of a braincell managed to realize the acronym on their Twitter handle looked REALL BAD:

Andrew Smith, a straight white adult man, says out loud with his human adult man mouth, that he knows he can’t write female characters well and relies on fetishization and stereotypes because he never really met a girl until his daughter (??? SO WHAT IS YOUR WIFE, ANDREW? CHOPPED LIVER?) and, being as that is Bullshit and also his books were also being lauded as though they were Infinite fucking Jest Jr. even though the interview in question was for a book in which mutant grasshoppers take over the earth and a teenage boy gets trapped in a bunker with a teenage girl who eventually has to git to birthin’ babies she doesn’t want and isn’t medically prepared to have safely For The Good Of Humanity, he’s called out.

He’s called out mostly on a technical, writing level at first, even! Like, “Here’s how to write a female character: you write a fully considered, well-rounded character. They’re a girl.” And Andrew Smith FLIPS HIS SHIT, does some op-ed about how his mother used to beat him so he can’t see girls as people, and makes his twitter private. The “Keep YA Kind” sycophants support him HARD.

And then this happens to pop up on a mysterious Twitter that just HAPPENS to start while HIS twitter’s offline...

NOTE: Jay Asher, author of 13 Reasons Why, was literally dropped from his publisher and SCWBI for being a sexual predator. So like, I don’t think he was bullied, I think his predation was being remarked upon. Like, idk, maybe that he was being called creepy or sth idk idk idk

And then when A.S. decided to unsockpuppet to promote his next book, The Alex Crow, which is about mutant crows and a bunker or whatever:

The “asshole” in specific that Andrew Smith was calling an asshole was delightful human being and fellow author Kate Messner, who, coincidentally, was one of the victims to come out against Lemony Snicket’s sexual harrassment, so she’s had a BULLSHIT time just trying to do her JOB of being an author while female.

Which leads to Tommy Wallach! All-around fucknut! Whose major interest seems to be being That Guy In Philosophy 101 Who Always Has To Be Devil’s Advocate, Even Though No One Asked, and has a deeply vested interest in making sure that teenage girl readers -- who are his target audience, because he chose to write YA, as an adult man who made a choice in what he wrote and chose to make it YA, and not, like, any of the hundreds of genres that AREN’T largely written about and for teenage girls, yk -- know that teenage girls are Dumb. Victoria Schwab actually wrote an essay for YA Books Central about the incessant problem that IS/WAS Tommy Wallach called “We Need To Talk About Tommy” back in -- you guessed it! -- 2016, but it’s offline now and I’m not going to go Wayback it rn.

I’m just going to copypasta YAinterrobang’s Wallach timeline because he’s exhausting, he reminds me of undergrad.

Wallach’s continual pattern of behavior is worth discussing, especially in the context of sexism in YA and the continual marginalization of “diverse” voices in the community despite the efforts of the We Need Diverse Books movement.

Wallach’s problematic behavior runs back over a year, starting with a defense of Andrew Smith where he ignores the opinions of author and advocate Tessa Gratton in favor of a dictionary definition of sexism. (Andrew Smith’s behavior and the fallout around his statements have, of course, already been documented on YA Interrobang in “The Curious Case of Andrew Smith, Twitter & sexism.”) Wallach postures that women are inherently “other” from men, accuses Gratton of “gin[ning]up the controversy” and explains that he is a feminist because he was “raised by a single working mother and she’s still my best friend in the world.”

[View Wallach’s defense of Smith and attack on Gratton as a .pdf.]

Fast forward to later that year. Author Justina Ireland takes to Twitter to discuss a book where she feels the black character is self-hating. Ireland, being black herself, is asked about the book in question; she says that it’s Wallach’s debut novel We All Looked Up. Though Wallach is not tagged, he swoops into the conversation and demands Ireland provide proof that his character Anita is self-hating before claiming that author Dhonielle Clayton, who is also black, is friends with him and “engaged” with him on the issues in the book.

Clayton later stated publicly that she had not done any sensitivity reading on We All Looked Up.

What brought Wallach’s behavior to the attention of the YA world as a whole came this past November in the wake of the horrifying terrorist attacks in Paris. When the hashtag #prayforparis went viral, Wallach responded with multiple social media posts and a blog post about how atheism was the only belief that could make the world a better place. (Though Wallach argues that it is not, in fact, a belief: “The fact that we have a word for it makes it seem like it’s equivalent to other belief systems, but it’s not. The absence of something is not equivalent to the thing itself.”)

[View Wallach’s comments on atheism as a .pdf.]

After Wallach Tweeted that he was a “a rabid atheist, and the world would be a better place if more folk were” – a Tweet he subsequently deleted before deleting his account in its entirety – he doubled down in a block post that outlined all the way religions failed and all the reasons atheism was awesome.

Those who tried to explain to him why this behavior was – to say the least – problematic found themselves quickly blocked or shut down; at once point, Wallach tried to explain anti-Semitism to Jewish author Hannah Moskowitz before claiming that “if [her]parents are atheists and [his]dad is Jewish, [he’s] as much Jewish as [her].”

(For those wondering, Wallach blocked me during this incident despite being friendly with me and having taken my advice previously; while he did believe me in regards to his behavior towards Justina Ireland, which you can see in Tweets above, my snarky comment to him about “the only good people are the people who are exactly like me” was, apparently, too much for him to take. As Wallach’s account has since been deleted and I purged my social media account in January, that interaction is no longer publicly available.)

Take this behavior in comparison to author LJ Silverman, who recently received a sea of anti-Semitic hate mail – including crude manipulated images of her in an oven – for Tweeting that she was worried about the upcoming election in the context of history. Wallach painted himself to be the victim, somebody “attacked” for insulting all of the religious folks in the YA community, while Silverman, who simply shared a worry plaguing her, became a victim of virulent trolls.

While Wallach deleted his social media accounts after this, there were no public consequences to his actions despite ill-will from the YA community at large. If another member of the YA community had spoken out – one of our Catholic or Islamic or Jewish or Mormon authors, for instance – the backlash would have been substantially worse, possibly career-ruining.

Wallach’s career, however, was not ruined; he recently landed a six-figure deal for a book trilogy centered around a “holy war.”

And thus, we return to Wallach’s dismissive comments on suicide – which, it turned out, were neither new or original. In a blog post deleted after it came to light during this discussion, Wallach rated “the top ten literary suicides (organized by emo-ness)” which included all of the characters of HBO’s Girls – “It’s really just a fantasy of mine.” – and, ranking at number one, Sylvia Plath – who is not a character but a real person who suffered from depression before taking her own life at a young age.

[View Wallach’s post on suicide as a .pdf.]

“I’m only going to talk about the fact that a successful YA author found it appropriate to glorify, romanticize, and mock what for many of his readers is among the highest causes of death,” wrote Schwab in her “We Need To Talk About Tommy” post. “That this author could be so very careless and flippant and insensitive about such a very serious issue is abhorrent. That two years after penning this post he still sees suicide as something to be made light of, to be used as a marketing tool.”

Simon & Schuster made no public comment about any of Wallach’s comments. His career, save for making enemies of some fellow authors, seems relatively unscathed by his callous actions.

Anyway, the moral of the story is, like, if you wanna read books by straight white dudes, go for it, but check them out from the library. Spend your book-buying money on books by women, nonbinary/other folks, and dudes who aren’t straight and/or white. Straight white men, PARTICULARLY in categories of literature that are largely targeted towards girls and women, and largely written by girls and women -- but published, edited, and marketed by other straight white men -- are lauded FAR above what they’re actually worth, as like, storytellers or human people go.

The Glass Escalator is a one-way trip to wonderland, but YA is a skyscraper that was built by women and I PROMISE you, whatever book by one of these dudes you’re considering reading, there’s a better version by a woman and/or person of color on the shelves nearby that just didn’t get 1/10th of the marketing money.

And of course there should be an effort to be kind on social media, but “keep YA kind”... to whom? To the people who were being silenced when they were pointing out legitimate problems with the behaviors of men in social power? (And one of whom, in the case of Jay Asher, was LITERALLY DANGEROUS BC HE IS A SEXUAL PREDATOR.) Like, really? There had to be a hashtag campaign to silence dozens of people with legitimate, not-bullying-just-pointing-out-problems-that-are-problems-with-stuff-you-did-dude problems, to make social media feel more comfortable for four middle-aged straight white men?

As though the outside world isn’t comfortable enough for middle-aged straight white men????

#asks #aheavenlyrush

[eunych-born-eunych]

tell us more about witchcraft tumblr

oh boy. follow @alkaloidwitch​ for my unironic witchcraft opinions. I’m a witch! and a materialist with a background in empiricism/scientism, also a materialist in the marxist dialectical sense! you can be all of those things at the cost of your popularity among idealist witches, non-witch materialists, and most of all:

Normies.

my materialism and my witchcraft both grow out of madness; human beings are computers complex enough to perceive things that are not real. For things I know to be real, there is materialism; for things I know to be chimerical, there is witchcraft. as the chaos magicians, wankers that they are, put it: belief is a tool. believing something now may serve a purpose, even if you do not intend to continue believing it later. Playing make-believe with my literal demons now will help me try to make sense of the material world better later.

And it is imaginative play, much as it is deadly serious; much of what we do in life is imaginative play of some kind. let’s pretend there’s a thing called money and let’s pretend it belongs to this specific kind of paper, these specific bits of metal. let’s pretend a corporation is a person. let’s pretend sex is simple; no, let’s pretend sex and gender are different; no, let’s pretend to stop believing in gender and start pretending to believe in ungendered sex.

materialism, again, is the resolution. imaginative play doesn’t have to be bad, but things that are only imaginary play by certain rules; we learn them as children. so when your imaginative play, witchcraft, seeps into your view of the world (as it must), other people calling themselves witches are sometimes going to believe or imagine mutually-contradicting things; the politest way to resolve an imaginary conflict is to come up with some imaginary solution, the more minimal the possible, and stop talking about that because it’s gonna harsh yr witchcraft to get snippy.

entirely different things happen when people come, materially, into conflict. and witch tumblr frustrates me a lot because my tacit acknowledgement that

“none of this is real like rocks are real, so when your imaginary collides with the material world, the material world is always going to trump. if it is materially bad, I don’t care that your imaginary justifies it, and if it is entirely immaterial there’s no point arguing about it”

…is not super popular with tumblr witches. there’s lots of, like, arguments and discourse and positivity posts about the wildest shit.

a three-screens-of-scroll witch tumblr textpost: positivity post for lazy witches! uwu // • positivity for lazy witches who [emoji-capped bullet points all the way down]me: it’s so inspiring that lazy witches can be positive despite the incredible scrutiny and terrible hardships the morning people witches subject them to, ⭐⭐⭐⭐🌟

so, like, I don’t have the same reaction to the idea of demon apologia that OP did. thinking highly of demons just isn’t that uncommon in my circles. to me, that post’s fucking ridiculous because why would you ever bother making it? if you wanna work with demons, do it, but like… other people don’t like demons, and make their own witchblr posts from that perspective, and you can resolve that conflict by just ignoring the imaginary content that is not meant for you.

a clarifying example is in order.

‘don’t use sigils you find on the internet, anyone can upload a curse and say it’s a different spell!!’

my guy. that is so far from being anybody’s real, substantive problem. you would never know unless they told you. their imaginary isn’t accessible to you and you can ignore it. if someone tells you they made a sigil you used to be a curse, and you feel like you have indeed been cursed, that’s still an event internal to you. and after all, someone could lie and tell you their beneficial sigil was actually a curse after you’ve already used it, just to fuck with you.

I can’t get this level of panicked about that level of made-up problem! if the idea of curses hidden in graphics created by random Internet denizens appealed to me, I’d engage with it on my own and not waste time trying to convince other people they should care about my niche paranoia.

the thing is, cultural appropriation is way less imaginary than witchcraft. there’s a real, economic impact to the mass-production in the West of symbols indigenous to ‘exotic’ colonies. there is a real dehumanization involved in treating someone’s proudest and most mundane garments, alike, as being a gaudy costume purchasable cheaply from any two-bit metaphysical store.

(privilege claim for the next bit: I’m a white, American settler-colonialist. that’s a me. I’m a that.)

and on the subject of metaphysical stores…

… run by white settler-colonialists who claim to have spirit animals and have no sense that there might be something inappropriate about shopping for toys in the cultures and religious practices of living indigenous populations whose homeland we are still occupying by force, whose access to their own cultural history we are still actively sabotaging, to sell bastardized sweatshop lookalikes whose significance is less than half-remembered and wholly stripped of context to other white settler-colonialists

there’s endless newb questions in this form:

Q: “can I use this color candle to mean this thing?”A: “I don’t care?”[a reblog insisting that actually they CAN’T use that color candle to mean this thing is the version that went viral]

, which indicates extreme hesitancy to break the rules of the imaginary.

on the other hand, witch tumblr is actively resistant to any demonstrable criticism. these same people fretting about candle colors also throw bizarre tantrums mocking the concept that they should stop cleansing with smoke from white sage, a critically endangered sacred herb that isn’t farmed, and how dare you say they shouldn’t call their white ass waving burning herbs in the air on occupied land ‘smudging’.

no-one cares if you think about the candle differently; stop asking for our input on that shit, because you don’t need it and we have better things to do. on the other hand, people very much do care if you engage in the alt religious scene’s rampant bigotry, but you don’t wanna listen to us on that. those priorities are fucked.

also witch communities have long, long memories, and some things happen again and again. a sampling:

the annoying

‘fluffy bunnies’ who read one barely-researched pop-Wicca text and are here to tell non-Wiccan witches what they’re doing wrong.

relatedly, ‘curse-shaming’, a practice in which even ‘respectable’ Wiccans participate, is genuinely aggravating if you’re at all into, like, historical witchcraft, because for a very long time (Wicca under that name had no public presence before 1954) there’s been not much more traditional for a witch than a curse.

arguments about “male witches” (that no-one acknowledges arose out of transmisogynistic practices in Dianic Wicca, and not really in reaction to men).

‘the Burning Times’ (not real, any historical events embarrassingly misrepresented).

“Easter is a pagan holiday;” relatedly, “Easter is Eostre is Ishtar”.

“Christmas is a pagan holiday.”

the ugly

an entire alt-history of Europe and European magical practice in which Jewish people play no perceptible part.

neo-Nazi physiognomies being passed around as “correspondence charts”.

every reputable resource on Norse mythology, Heathenry, or Asatru has an explicit public disavowal of Nazis, for very good reasons.

anti-Black propaganda, dated to the sixteenth century, about Afro-Carribbean syncretist esoteric/religious practices being repeated with all explicit reference to race left out on Tumbler Dot Com in 2017.

gentiles doing Kabbalah.

an all-white vision of the Hellenistic Mediterranean.

that one girl who stole black people’s bones from burst/eroded graves in a Louisiana graveyard and posted about it on Tumblr (one of witchblr’s few big mainstream crossover posts), leading to her arrest.

the (mostly) harmlessly bizarre

god-marriage

god-phones

what is a familiar really? (& relatedly: sex with spirits. EXTREMELY traditional, by the way),

etsy shops where you can buy custom spirits (NOT as in alcohol),

chemically-treated quartz named as if it was a real mineral,

“correspondence charts” broken alphabetically into individual readmore posts listing the magical properties of various objects (with a reblog later on in the chain complaining that people need to be more obsessed with pointless minutiae)

minors-only witchcraft discord server drama that you’re actively, unsuccessfully trying to avoid learning about

looking for witchcraft podcasts that aren’t run entirely by dudes

“my dog is horrifyingly sick, what spell should I cast?”//”GO TO THE VET”

a wealth of incredibly shitty and boring and unreadable esoteric PDFs by snake-oil salesmen

skyclad discourse

my tarot cards just read me for filth

thirty-year-old woman who should know better by now: christian witch is an oxymoron

christian witchblr: the Law of Attraction is just the prosperity gospel for Democrats

someone’s angry about the existence of secular witchcraft again

#madz #witchblr exposé #asks #j0ules

[thejgatsbykid]

Give your opinion on: the growing influence of fake news

So, this is a really complicated question, and I’m studying linguistics and English lit, so my perspective on it is going to be more from the lens of, like, how we interact w the world through language.

(Also, before my response, here’s a pretty rad resource post about bias in major news outlets!)

First of all, I think “fake news” as a phenomenon is invented and very recent. Propaganda and sensationalism and poor journalism and media bias have always existed. There’s a hell of a lot more now, yes, and it’s one of those side-effects of the availability of instant information on the internet (and the fact that, like, humanities and arts education is being reduced in schools in favor of STEM stuff, but I’m not bitter). People will believe the first thing they read without thinking about it, which, again, isn’t at all new, but it’s really easy to get information published and disseminated now, which is how sensationalist, untrue headlines go viral and end up being believed. And I won’t say that, like, the mainstream news media is The Best Place to get all of your facts either. The crux of it is that people want to believe whatever sounds wild, which, again, has always been true, and now the, like, foundations of what we assume to be true are being a little bit shifted.

Oh, and, obviously, I’m talking about actual fake news, ie news headlines that are either completely or mostly untrue, or very deeply misrepresent the truth. Republican accusations of “fake news” are basically an infantile tantrum based on the fact that the media is, you know, reporting things that really happen sometimes, instead of just acting as a conservative propaganda machine (with the exception, as always, of the dumpster fire going on at Fox news).

But I’m going to go back to my point about education. They don’t teach people to read properly, and by that I mean they don’t teach people to critically read and dissect nonfiction. I was fortunate enough to have a lot of really passionate English teachers in grade school, one of whom made us do a semester-long project where we wrote op-eds about current events for a grade, and we had to get our information from like five different sources. They try, and god I have deeply loved every librarian I have ever known and I know they aren’t appreciated enough, but they really just don’t put the kind of effort and focus into teaching people how to examine things for bias, and compare sources, and do a five second fucking google search to see if things are happening the way they thing they are. And I think that’s a lot more valuable than getting fucking fifteen year olds to learn basic quantum physics or whatever, because if you know how to read properly, you can learn anything on your own, basically. They don’t build foundational skills for self-education the way they should.

And there’s another conversation to be had about the “sudden” surge in fake news- is it really sudden, or is it just that the information age allows us to access firsthand accounts of current events without the filter of the media in a way we couldn’t before? All media is, in its way, propaganda, and I think now is the time when we have access to the truest and most accurate vision of current events that we’ve ever had. I think the difficulty is that there’s no way to individually gather and dissect and summarize these firsthand accounts in a way that’s accessible or palatable to the average person, and they’re putting their trust in the media as they always have, and obviously the media has to compete now with Average Avery on their smartphone live-tweeting the protest, so the media becomes more sensationalist, so they become less committed to the truth, etc.

Also the Overton Window, but I can’t summarize that very well, and I don’t really have a thesis to connect it to the rest of this rambling mess of a response. It’s a thing, it’s relevant, I’m only good at projecting my depression onto poetry, sorry.

Anyway I guess my opinion is that people need to take responsibility for their own ignorance and laziness and stop blaming the media for the fact that they’re unwilling to do a five second google search to see if whatever wacky shit racist uncle kevin put on their facebook feed from RightWingGunEagleAmericaNews dot net is even remotely true. Basically we need to stop depending on other people to do 100% of the work for us (and I’m guilty of this too, don’t get me wrong, we all are, especially on Tumblr, it can be like the inverse of RightWingGunEagleAmericaNews, I hate conservatives with a burning passion too but that doesn’t mean it’s right of me to automatically believe every awful thing I read about them on this hellsite without fact checking first). We need to do, like, at least 30-40% of the work for ourselves, which isn’t really asking much, when it’s as simple as googling whatever Buzzfeed’s telling you to see if anyone else is backing it up.

#said Jamie #long post #cw politics #answered ask games #princesse-de-la-rue

[samdelpapa]

Se sapete l'inglese capite meglio={Oh, What a Lovely Race War! - Taki's Magazine

photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

Anders Behring Breivik

I don’t revisit my old work. I’ve been writing this weekly column for four and a half years now, and I never reread old pieces. Because for me—and I’m sure I’m not alone among opinion journalists in this regard—each essay I pen represents a catharsis of sorts. I had some bee in my bonnet, I wrote about it, and now I’ve had my say. What reason is there to go back? If what I’ve written resonates with readers, the piece will go viral. If not, it won’t. But regardless, I’ve relieved myself of whatever was busting to come out.

Not to be crude (a phrase inevitably uttered by those who are about to be crude), but it’s a bit like having a really good bowel movement. After you’ve had a fully satisfying bathroom experience, your body feels free, emptied, unburdened. And you’re ready to move on.

The sense of release that comes from having your say and being heard, though it may seem trivial to those with no opinions to share, can in fact be quite powerful.

Which brings me to the recent crop of right-wing mass shooters: Robert Bowers in Pittsburgh (shot up a temple), Brenton Tarrant in Christchurch (shot up a mosque), and John Earnest in Poway (shot up a different temple). As an old-timer with a morbid fascination for these things, there’s an odd twist to this new breed of gunslingin’ whiteys, compared with the ones from my youth. Before James Huberty shot up a McDonald’s full o’ Mexicans in 1984, he tried to seek medical help for what he knew was an incipient psychotic episode. Huberty had no political goals. He was feeling compelled to “hunt humans,” and deep down, he knew there was something wonky with his wiring.

In 1989, Patrick Purdy opened fire on a bunch of Asian schoolkids at Cleveland Elementary in Stockton, Calif. (our crappiest cities love naming their schools after even crappier ones, as a reminder that things can always be worse). Purdy started his day by calling in a threat to the school, telling them what he was going to do. Then he drove his car behind the school and set it on fire…loaded with fireworks! Still, the teachers and staff laughed it off, displaying the keen intellect that so exemplifies California public school employees. “We got a threat of a mass shooting? And now we have an exploding car? Crazy coincidence, man. Jupiter must be in renegade or somethin’.”

Sadly, five Vietnamese and Cambodian kids soon realized it wasn’t just a “crazy coincidence” as Purdy’s bullets shattered their bodies. Having defeated the dastardly tykes, Purdy killed himself. Authorities found that he’d carved the words “freedom,” “victory,” “Earthman,” and “Hezbollah” into his rifle, and on his flak jacket he’d scrawled “PLO,” “Libya,” and “death to the Great Satin [sic].”

“I’m not saying the recent spate of racist shootings can be entirely pinned on the silencing of the far right, but I do believe it’s a factor.”

And on that very day, a homicide detective coined the phrase, “the fuck?” Because how disjointed can you get? There was no coherent agenda. Death to America, hooray for PLO and Hezbollah, yet he targeted Asian kids and practically dared the school to stop him before he killed. Like Huberty, this was no ideologue. He was a loon with a bunch of loose screws.

But today, the white dudes who commit these types of shootings leave behind lengthy, detailed manifestos. More than that, they leave themselves behind. Mass shooters in the ’80s and ’90s rarely survived, typically dying by their own hand. But these guys seem to really, really want to be taken alive. Anders Breivik in Norway was the first. Lengthy manifesto, taken alive, and he stood trial with no apologies, like a political dissident facing a kangaroo court (which it kinda was; the bastard got only 21 years for 77 murders). The Pittsburgh, Christchurch, and Poway shooters, same deal. Lengthy manifestos and 8chan posts, taken alive, now awaiting trial. Charleston’s Dylann Roof? Lengthy manifesto, taken alive, unapologetic at trial.

This is the age of the “intellectual” (and please note the scare quotes) racist killer. Black mass shooters continue to excel at their preferred specialty—workplace massacres. But white mass shooters have evolved, so to speak. Now they all want to be op-ed writers. Which brings me back to my initial point: the cathartic nature of ranting in an essay and putting it out for the world to see. It has a cleansing, purgative effect, like (again, not to be crude) a really good poop. I’ve read every one of those racial murder manifestos, and you know what? They’re as good as anything on any leftist race-baiting site. Roof? Tarrant? Earnest? Breivik? In terms of writing ability, in terms of effective polemics, their work is no worse than what you find leftists spewing on BuzzFeed, HuffPost, Salon, ThinkProgress, Vox, etc.

Leftist antiwhite sites that are allowed to exist by our benevolent internet overlords—sites that are allowed to have advertisers, sites you can post on social media—employ writers who are no more skilled than these murderers, and just as hateful. In terms of writing ability, I’d put Breivik and Tarrant up against any of the semi-tards who post at Salon. Hell, those two guys, whose manifestos together total more than 1,574 pages, are exactly the kind of prolific ideologues who, were they leftists, would be highly sought after by the editors of high-quantity political sites.

But ay, there’s the rub. See, the right-wing versions of left-wing race-haters aren’t allowed the catharsis. Banned from social media, banned from websites with traffic, they write their “masterpieces” knowing that the only way their work will be seen is if the media has a reason to publicize it. So, they give the media a reason.

I’m not saying the recent spate of racist shootings can be entirely pinned on the silencing of the far right, but I do believe it’s a factor. Groups like the ADL and SPLC, and cowards like Zuckerberg and Dorsey, have so effectively cleansed the ’net of rightist thought (including the commonsense, nonviolent kind), extremist whites are not allowed the release of taking a good figurative shit (oh wait, I forgot to preface that with “not to be crude”). Yeah, they can write stuff for their eyes only, but any real opinion journalist knows that the catharsis comes not just from the writing, but from knowing that your words will be seen. That’s where the feeling of satisfaction comes in. That’s what allows you to move on.

Since Breivik, every racial mass murderer with a manifesto has stated that he hopes his words and actions will provoke a race war and foment racial conflict. Same exact goal as the leftist race extremists at CNN, The L.A. Times, HuffPost, and BuzzFeed. Stir shit up between the races. But leftists get to do it with words. They’re allowed to do it with words…words that are seen and heard. When Don Lemon comes home after a hard day of yelling at white people, as he greases his backside with Vaseline, don’t doubt for a moment that he feels a sense of satisfaction that his hate has an audience. Again, this is the catharsisthat ideologues feel when they know their words are actually reaching people.

A feeling of helplessness and the frustration of being ignored often accompany mass killings. This helps explain why blacks prefer workplace shootings to ideological ones. D’Quanté Jones can scribble a barely literate “essay” about how “white people be racist when they be chewin’ they food,” or “white people need to STFU and quit havin’ babies,” and it will get published, guaranteed, at HuffPost, The Root, Ebony, The Grio, etc. His screed will be allowed on Twitter and Facebook, and he’ll see, from the cheers and jeers in the comments and the retweets and reposts from friends and foes alike, that he’s had an impact. He’ll get that purgative release. But at work? D’Quanté feels left out, ignored by his white colleagues, who, oddly enough, don’t enjoy socializing with someone who hates them.

Eventually, D’Quanté will deal with those feelings of frustration by coming to work with a gun. “Now y’all pay attention to me, motherfuckers.”

The increase in verbose, “literate” white racist mass killers is not unrelated to the banning of far-right thought from popular internet platforms (and, in some cases, from the internet itself). Do you think it’s gone unnoticed by extremists that the only way these manifestos get seen by a wide audience is when they’re accompanied by murder? Several of these manifestos have expressed a hope that the concomitant murders will provoke governments into imposing more censorship, more gun control, and upping the antiwhite rhetoric, thereby creating even more racial conflict. And the left has responded exactly as these killers hoped. More censorship, more gun control, and more antiwhite rhetoric, thus disrespecting the victims by carrying out the wishes of the nuts who murdered them.

After 9/11, the left’s favorite line was “Don’t let the terrorists manipulate us into doing their bidding! They want us to start bombing Muslim countries! They want us to initiate a war between the West and Islam! We honor the victims of 9/11 by understanding what the terrorists were trying to bring about, and not letting it happen.”

Notice how that’s never the talking point in the wake of a racist mass shooting. You know why? The left genuinely did not want to go to war against Muslim nations. The left genuinely did not want conflict with the Muslim world. But the left really does want the same race war that Roof, Tarrant, Bowers, and Earnest seek to foment. So leftists ignore their own post-9/11 advice, and play right into the killers’ hands.

To be clear, neither side will get its beloved race war. As is the case with all wars, the vast majority of ordinary people want none of it. They go about their lives, generally getting along well with others, reserving violent impulses for domestic situations and personal squabbles, rather than grand ideological goals.

But still, the clown parade will march on. Leftist race extremists will continue to be allowed major platforms to spew antiwhite hatred with a clear desire to provoke, while rightist extremists, denied platforms to do the same, will continue to find “creative” ways to be heard. There’ll be no race war, but lots of small-scale bloodshed. And the twisted, unspoken “partnership” between far-right killers and the media and government leftists who do their bidding will continue.

And everyone will live happily ever after (except for the victims and their families, but c’mon, who cares about them when there’s a race war to wage!).}

[literateape]

American Shithole #22 — FLOTUS, She Wrote (Us)

By Eric Wilson

It’s been seven days since we last connected, Shitholers, and I am confident our country has cleaned up all this nasty business of torturing impoverished children. Having taken a break from all media for an extended weekend, let me just bring myself up to speed, old school.

(If you were to listen closely, the rustling of old-timey newspapers could be heard at A.S. headquarters.)

Let’s just take a looksee here at what is happing in this fine country (rustle, rustle) as I am certain the powers that be have reunited the thousands of (rustle) migrant toddlers and adolescents (rustle, rustle) that they themselves scattered across America after they themselves and no one else enacted a ruthless policy (rustle) ripping them from the loving arms of their mothers and fathers.

(rustle, rustle, rustle)

Let’s just see here… there are an awful lot of think pieces about a restaurant.

The Red Hen must serve some amazing grub to garner this much copy. No, it’s not the food. Apparently someone of some importance didn’t get their meal?

So, metaphorically speaking, the fucking plane is crashing, the kids are all stuffed into the overhead, but some people are pissed because the lady sitting in 17C that helped set the aircraft on fire, didn’t get her fish sticks?

This seems to have upset the current occupant of the Lazy D Dude Ranch as well, who seized the opportunity to cattle prod his moron herd into chewing cud outside the Lexington restaurant this week — although I found the colorful characters that descended upon the quiet Virginia town in protest documented in the Washington Post to be thoroughly entertaining.

I’m sure there’s some news in here about torturing kids. Restaurant (rustle) restaurant (rustle, rustle) ah-ha! Here we are!

Now before I read the good news — the good news that will with absolute certainty both assuage my fear and confirm my belief that the United States would never allow the torture of migrant children — I’d just like to say, how proud I am to be an American.

I just wanted to get that in there before I read what is definitely going to be good news.

(If you were to listen closely, the short silence would be followed by the careful folding of old-timey newspapers, and the gentle flick of a Zippo.)

I see this administration has gone… a different direction.

It appears this president desires to do away with the constitutional provision of due process for all. Instead of taking this catastrophic failure of epic proportion and showing some humility, some decency, some semblance of compassion and empathy, Trump has elected to do away with courts of any kind, stripping immigrants and asylum seekers of their constitutional rights.

It’s like we’ve fallen into a bottomless well, and we’re hitting history all the way down — and the history we’ve ignored is hard as steel.

“Not so fast, Mr. President,” says U.S. District Court Judge Dana Sabraw — who granted a preliminary injunction to the ACLU Tuesday requiring all immigrant children under the age of 5 to be reunited with their parents in less than two weeks, and for those children over the age of 5, no more than a month.

“Not so fast to you,” says our Commander in Chief, “I’ve got a Space Force.”

Every few months the malignancy is noticeably worse. The pain is constant now, and the will to fight is stretched thin. Let’s face it, we are dying of cancer, America.

“So, um, you all know where each and every one of these thousands of kids are, right?” asked millions of worried citizens looking to hold onto their last shred of American integrity.

Seventeen states and the District of Columbia are suing the Trump Administration over the family separations, so far. This hellish nightmare is the summer’s new hit series and it is definitely renewed for election season.

To offer further perspective into just how toxic this situation is, even before the shit hit the fan, the two Texas companies deemed capable of doing the job, turned down lucrative no-bid contracts worth upwards of a billion dollars to expand the child immigrant camps — so Trump’s plans to enlarge the operation were scrapped. 

But hey, I hear the First Lady is set for a second trip to visit with the kids still living it up in Cagetown. Her first trip was quite the fashion statement; I’d say a smashing success, even — with sociopaths. Since so many people found her coat that read “I really don’t care, do U?” confusing, American Shithole has employed the services of three psychologists, five sociologists, a score of linguistics analysts and one relative who just needed a job, to decipher Melania’s cryptic message to the world.

Unfortunately they all failed, because it makes no fucking sense that FLOTUS — or anyone for that matter — could or would be either that callous or that clueless. My brain literally shut down late last week when that image splashed across the back of my retina. It acted like a kill switch.

It dawned on me (rather late) that the distraction was likely a choreographed event. It does not compute, my brain decided, so I turned the news off for five days. With crying, terrified children on every screen on the planet, the immigration debacle is the first to nearly break the spell — the only solution for Trump was to get everyone to tune out. Melania was either instructed to wear that coat or she is party to all this madness.

Look, I came here to kick ass and chew bubblegum, and I’m all out of coincidences.

Wondering what she’ll wear next? Well muse no longer!

American Shithole has secured secret footage of the possible wardrobe choices considered by/for FLOTUS for her next visit with incarcerated toddlers. We have it on good authority that she is going with another winter jacket in the blazing hot summer that will offer one of three significantly clearer messages for the country.

1.      I’m hungry, U bring me the chubby ones.

2.      South Lawn needs weeds pulled; graves dug.

3.      Barron requires one lucky playdate, niñas.

Not that some opportunist from Slovenia could ever break into the top 1,000 problems we face as a country — even if she is the First Lady. She's just a distraction.

The real disaster is that the ultra-conservative, uber-rich spent the past 70 years manipulating three generations of Americans, dumbing down middle and lower-class citizens in states all across this country, inciting people to hatred, stoking their fears, driving away empathy, championing tribalism — all while stripping them of value — and now we have a nation of imbeciles too scared and too stupid for critical thought.

A month or so back you might remember I suggested Trump supporters don’t deserve to suffer (because no human deserves to suffer in my opinion), but I am clearly not above wanting them to suffer — which I do.

I do feel emptiness sometimes, in a way I have never felt it before, when I reflect on how much rage this presidency instills in me. The Yang of a terrible Yin, I suppose. I’ve never experienced the desire for revenge, the way I want for it now.

I need everyone involved with any of the treasonous actions leading to the theft of the presidency or the subsequent obstruction of justice, to spend the rest of their fucking shitty lives in prison. Not rich-people prison, either. None of this country club with bars bullshit, I mean shiv-dodging, soap-dropping, salad-tossing prison — preferably with a cellmate named Lamont or Jesus.

I also hope the multi-millionaires and billionaires responsible for turning America against itself for their own selfish reasons lose absolutely everything. They are grossly, obscenely overvalued, and they need to be revalued according to their worth to humanity; which is zero. Less than zero, actually. Then I want those motherfuckers to go to prison too.

Finally, I want every fucking MAGA hat wearing zealot to eat crow in public until the end of their bootlicking days, with a full-understanding that history will be remembering early 21st century conservative America for the scared senseless, shallow, stupid, pitiful shithole it was.

They may not deserve to suffer, but I fucking OWN my desire to see them suffer. I am not proud of this; it is just part of my inner workings — these motherfuckers must pay.

Like this shambling mound of overconfidence that shuffled her way across the street like some fugly fucking peacock, in her fucking socks no less, to wag her fat middle finger in the face of a  brown-skinned American working on the job. She can be heard parroting Trump in her assertion that all his kind (Mexicans, she assumed) are rapists and drug dealers.

Fuck that fucking house troll in rolled-up mom jeans.

My friend Chris echoed some of my sentiments recently:

“Trump makes these assholes feel comfortable to be openly racist. Let’s make racism socially unacceptable again. Force these bigots to bite their lip out of fear of being outed, embarrassed and ostracized. The process of learning one’s culture, enculturation, isn’t just learning from parents (racist or not), but also through peers, social norms, etiquette, shame/praise, etc. If we can’t change minds, we can at least change interpersonal behavior — for collective peace. Find this lady’s name and spread it around. She should be embarrassed. So let’s make it happen.”

I agree, but unfortunately I can’t find her name, at least as of Tuesday.

Whoever she is, she needs to eat crow on a daily basis. Same for any other racist we witness and capture on camera. Share it, get it viral. I get a boner like concrete anytime a Nazi loses his or her day job. Get the word out about who these emboldened racists are, where they are, what they do, and let’s make their shitty life decisions costly — and this should ring some bells — as a deterrent for other racists looking to express their fear and hatred out in the open.

Remember, even five years ago, if the (then) hypothetical question had been put to the American people “Would you support the impeachment and incarceration of an openly racist president guilty of treason?” almost no one would respond, “Well, that depends upon their party affiliation.” What they would say is, "Oh, that could never happen here."

B.S. Report

The Parkland Survivors are wrapping up their June tour dates for March For Our Lives, where unlike every effort before them, they are actually moving youth to register to vote all across the country in record numbers. No small feat, indeed. You can check their website to find cities near you that are on the itinerary for July and August. Show your support for these fine young Americans, if you have the chance.

In the best of ways, they are the vanguard; this is how nations change.

4LWjr.

#Red Hen #Space Force #Melania's jacket #racists