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The amount of suicide glorification on this website is fucking atrocious. You should all be ashamed of yourselves.

I'm fully uninstalling Tumblr until I'm in a mentally well enough place to go through and mass unfollow people. I'll be around when I'm around again.

#cross posting #even with a blacklist i can't escape it #short of just blacklisting the palestine tag #which i don't want to do #so leave it is

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Former Anon current cryptid here to say: Oh my god thank you so much for reblogging somewhat negatively about bushnell's impact on suicidal folks I was like "where is the caution??? where are people saying that this might get people to put themselves in danger??" like. thank you for giving me examples of people saying "hey we should be careful" (especially with the depressed leftist thought trap I'm like. always in the bear trap teeth of!!! it's important to remember that it's not the solution!!)

Of course. It's something I feel extremely strongly about because of my situation with my dad, so my feelings about Bushnell are very muddled with my own grief and anger, but the underlying feeling is something I've always felt even before my dad took his life.

I do also think I'm in a very unique position to criticize Bushnell's actions as an anarchist who was raised by an anarchist who killed himself because of that grief and anger too though, yk?

Because realistically? The biggest crater caused by Bushnell's death will not be in the government. It will not be in the public. It will be in the lives of his widow and his children. I know. I've been there with my own family.

I simply don't think there is anything rhetorically positive to be gained from the death of a man who has left behind a young, widowed, single mother of two babies to take care of under the age of 3 for the sake of a political cause that will not be impacted by his death in the slightest.

Not to mention, the social contagion of suicide is very real and - this is just a personal feeling as someone who has dealt with suicidality/the direct impact of suicide - but I truly think that the people who don't think about that haven't fully unpacked their own suicidality. I think that it just feeds suicidal fantasy in indirect ways. If you die for the cause it's not suicide, it's martyrdom. And that sucks.

I'm very of the mind that people who treat suicide as valid political action are dangerous, especially in leftist movements where you are dealing with vulnerable populations who are already at higher risks of suicidality. Praising suicide as a positive, viable, or powerful political action is actively dangerous. It's literally what leads to people like my dad.

It destroys people and families and we should be doing better as anarchists and leftists to combat the idea that suicide can be a powerful statement when it is absolutely not.

#asks #yes-an-rpg-guy #aaron bushnell #suicide / #parent death /

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karol l. jensen, from lesbian epiphanies: women coming out in later life, 1999

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I do wish more posts about Aaron Bushnell would get tagged with a suicide warning honestly. I don't really want to have to blacklist his name outright but it's likely I'll have to unfortunately - just to save my own sanity for a little while.

#the way people are talking about it is very triggering for me honestly #because i keep thinking about his kids and in turn i keep thinking about my brothers #speaking as a suicidal person who has been impacted by suicide - specifically the suicide of an anarchist father - #killing yourself is the most selfish thing you can do in this life #especially if you have a family you are leaving behind. especially if it's a young family with children. #kids cannot grasp that shit #my brothers barely could as teenagers #i barely could as an adult #those babies are 1 and 3 #how disgustingly selfish can you be to traumatize your own children for politics #that's sick to me #but that's also trauma #chatty post #suicide /

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So many thoughts on Aaron Bushnell

1. Even he acknowledges his sacrifice doesn’t compare to the suffering of Palestinians and so we mustn’t treat his action as worth more of a statement than those killed and/or fighting

2. By making his connection to the military a focus, he forces opponents to tread carefully for fear of disrespecting an institution that America holds above all others. Insult to his service would piss off even those who disagree with his actions

3. Despite his military path, his community involvement and protection and service rivals that of keyboard activists who wish to discredit him

4. Damn near every screenshot of his final facebook post by non-anarchist leftists and non-leftists crops out the circle A banner for his twitch. Even in death leftists who don’t like anarchism will remove the reference to it to suit their specific brand of leftism and claim his action as part of a larger “left”

5. You do not have to agree with the method to comprehend the action. It IS horrific, that is the point. If one horror does not shock you into action, another might. One that happens to a most (symbolically) coveted category of American

6. The military is highly worshipped in the US and yet it is an extremely predatory body. What circumstances led to his enlistment? Does his community good offset his role? Does his death? Can his death reignite the conversation for allowing servicemembers a way out? What do we do with “leftist” vets? How do we reconcile their positions past and present?

7. If this act horrifies you above anything else you’ve seen out of Palestine, why? What’s special about him? What’s unworthy about Palestinians to you? While you debate his sanity and his politics and his humanity, where are yours?

#rb'ing bc even though i have much more negative feelings about bushnell #that's because i keep thinking about his kids as the kid of a dead anarchist #and this is a really good convo that i want to #save #on this blog #suicide /

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Keith Haring: Art is for everybody

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the thing about the "um excuse me if you're as poor as you say you are why don't you just sell all your most treasured possessions" thing that people love to trot out as some kind of "gotcha" is that they do not acknowledge how fucking soul-crushing it is to be in a situation that is already destroying your mental health and then be forced to sell one of the few things in your life that still bring you joy

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i hate to be that guy, but the idea that gender, sex, and sexuality are ontologically pure concepts that can be rigidly defined if we simply police our language enough (our english language, because of course) is—i cannot stress this enough—a total waste of time. you may as well spend your afternoons teaching a brick how to swim

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as someone who's aromantic but very allosexual I just feel like queer people and allies who get up in arms at the idea of people fucking their friends and remaining completely platonic friends just really aren't the type of people who are gonna be actual allies to me. Like idk I don't think sex has to be some special intimate thing and I just think its age old conservative dogma being used to shame people this time just coming from people who claim to be more progressive. its dumb. its just "save sex till marriage or else you're impure" again.

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"The nearest exit may be behind you" by S Bear Bergman (2009)

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Getting called an MRA while saying trans men can experience misogyny and a TERF while saying masculinity shouldn’t be demonized is so interesting. And all this for the crime of thinking transmascs should get to talk about their oppression

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Tumblr does not seem to understand that intersectionality exists and that lateral aggression is bad. Deeply painful.

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I'm gonna say it

as someone who has had suicidal thoughts as recently as yesterday, the primary factors keeping me personally from killing myself are:

It would make other people sad

I can accomplish more by living

From my conversations with other depressed people, these seem to be similar threads. It's well-known that the majority of tumblr users suffer from one mental illness or another, with depression being arguably the most common among them. Whether this airman was mentally ill or not, and whether that mental illness played a factor in his suicide or not, the example being set by tumblr users is incredibly dangerous. The reactions I've seen to his death have made two things very clear:

People are proud of him for his actions

People think his suicide has helped in an important way

If you're paying attention, you will have noticed that those two reactions exactly contradict the reasons why many depressed people abstain from suicide. This is going to put people's lives at risk. People with depression do not need another reason to think they should kill themselves. Gazans have already spoken out about their disapproval with these methods. This needs to stop before more people die

If you or a loved one are considering suicide, call 988 to be connected to the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline

#yeah. #my own dad killed himself for a number of reasons #but political hopelessness was one of them #i think there can be political power in suicide like bushnell's #like genuinely there can be #but it has to be talked about so intentionally and carefully #otherwise you get people like my own dad #otherwise you lose compassion for the people impacted most directly by the death of a loved one #can you imagine being a child - a small child - and growing up in a world where you are going to be constantly told by people your parent #took their own life for a cause greater than you? #that's traumatizing #you have to be so careful talking about suicide #we have to talk about it but we have to be careful and mindful #suicide /

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So. A transmasc child is dead. Assaulted by their classmates, left to die by school staff, misgendered and deadnamed by the press. And it's about fucking time we have a serious talk about the way we discuss transmasc victimisation - or rather, the way we don't.

The dynamic is especially evident in the way we talk about terfs, and exemplified by the dichotomy: "terfs recruit trans men, but they want trans women dead". This does three separate things:

It minimises the harm terfs do to the transmascs they recruit. Terfs don't just want transmascs to join them; they want transmascs to live as women. Coerced detransition kills. Suicide rates are extremely high among transmascs, and lack of support raises them further. To want trans men to detransition is to want them dead.

It positions trans men as a threat to trans women. As, essentially, terfs waiting to reveal themselves. What should be seen as a common enemy instead becomes a new vector for division. This fear is such that a common retort against transmascs who are seen as misbehaving is "you're gonna become a terf". Trans men are scrutinised for signs of this inevitable transformation, inundated with prophecies of their induction into the cult that wants to drag them back into the worst period of their lives.

It boosts the narrative terfs want to spread about themselves. Terfs love to say they are a safe space for transmascs. It helps them sound less hateful, and it helps them recruit. In reality, terfs are extremely hateful against transmascs they see as too far gone to be targets for recruitment. They see rape and hate crimes as just desserts, they wish death on transmascs who disagree with them, they talk about trans men on hrt as roided up monsters. And yet all of that has seemingly gone under the radar, because we're just not willing to acknowledge it happens.

More broadly, transmasc victimisation is seen as a joke. There was a hilarious post going around a while back about transmascs in abusive relationships with cis men who won't let them transition - the joke being on the transmasc in that situation. Multiple posts about specifically nonbinary transmascs, characterising their fears of transphobic violence as the oppression fantasies of privileged women, their experiences of dysphoria as laughably immaterial. No negative experience is serious enough once it's stacked up against murder, and trasnmascs who have been murdered aren't exactly in position to use that fact as a gotcha, are they?

There is a broad resistance to understanding transmascs as the victims of any situation. Part of it is a sort of trans-inclusive sexism: we don't think of cis men as victims, so we can't think of trans men as victims either. But they are.

Another is plain transphobia: dismissing trans people's experiences as not that bad, irrelevant to their trans status, or entirely fabricated is old hat at this point.

A third is a kind of... weaponised transfem advocacy? Any discussion of transmasc experience can be derailed by claiming transfems are somehow being harmed by it, and any harm that befalls a transmasc person can be dismissed by conjuring a hypothetical transfem who would have had it worse. And it sure seems like great allyship at the moment, despite the fact that it doesn't actually help transfems at all.

We often urge transmascs to be the protectors of transfems. Trans solidarity is crucial. But unless we are able to also conceptualise transmascs as needing protection, our solidarity will remain incomplete. And transmascs will continue to die, and be buried twice, both outside the trans community and inside it.

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I need us all to be aware and awake at all times. As elections approach you are going to see many misleading headlines, it hasn't gone unnoticed by those in power that the average usamerican at the very least sympathizes with the palestinian plight. Please put in the work of actually reading past headlines, of researching what is being done. Ask yourself: is it enough? why until now? can I expect them to keep on doing this once my vote has been cast? And again please, please spend more than two seconds reading a misleading headline.

I've seen this headline be passed around as a win. It is not.

Those two are not the same things. Kamala Harris is saying she wants a 'cease-fire' which implies a finality. A permanent end to this genocide, something potential voters are asking for. But she's actually proposing a 'pause' a six week pause. Don't let them fool you. Keep pushing.

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I just realized the fundamental disconnect for people who think they can "boycott" voting:

People who threaten to withhold their vote are thinking of the government like a business. If you don't like what a business is doing, you can refuse to shop there, and that hurts them.

But your government is not a business, no matter how much the GOP tries to pretend it is, and refusing to participate doesn't hurt it. If you refuse to vote, you still have to live under that government. I know we're all fundamentally broken by late-stage capitalism, but you get that you can't "Well, you just lost a customer" this one, right? YOU AREN'T A CUSTOMER.

Refusing to vote isn't like refusing to buy McDonald's. It's like walking into a McDonald's, handing the cashier $20 (because you still gotta pay taxes whether you vote or not), and saying "Surprise me."

(Oh and during this particular trip, one of the two McDonald's options is maybe not your favorite food, and the other is deadly poison.)

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2024 RISK map for transgender people in the us