#gay love against fascism right

[dimonds456]

Alright guys, sit down, I have to tell you all something very important. It's something you already know, but you NEED to hear this again.

You only get ONE life.

You only get one shot at this. You only get one lifetime to live it to your definition of the fullest, be that skydiving, entrepreneurship, or a quiet marriage. You only get one shot to tell people the things you need to tell them. You only get ONE shot to make yourself happy.

Yes, we have many, many, MANY years and many, MANY, MANY opportunities to start any of these! But... do you really want to do that on your deathbed? After you can look back and decide if you were happy with your life or not? When it's too late to change it?

I phrased this as doom and gloom on purpose, so allow me to elaborate and bring this back down a notch.

This post is about love. Straight-up. You only get ONE life, and I want you to take a moment right now and ask yourself if you're satisfied with how you view the world. Forget your living situation or your mental state for just a moment! How do you like your view of the world?

Is it a dark, disgusting thing, filled with smog, hatred, and fire? Is it a bright, beautiful thing filled with Good Vibes™ and sunshine? Or is it somewhere in the middle? Don't take these words literally. If you were to tell me if you think Earth is a good place to live, what would your honest answer be?

Now, let's go smaller. What is your honest opinion of your own world. Not fictional, real. Your circle of friends. the news you see. You personally. Now, how do you view the world? Did your answer change?

Now, let's ask this: what can you do to improve your opinion of the world?

Your personal sphere is the more important example, here, but this does apply to overall as well. If you're not happy in your own sphere, then you NEED to make a change. Stop reading bad news. Take a breath and leave arguments. Go watch that show you've been putting off. Your Steam library needs dusting.

You only get to live one life. So why are you letting yourself be miserable?

Dogs are real. Cats are real. Music is real. Soft, huggable plushies are real. The sun, fluffy clouds, your friends, potential friends you've never met yet, and you. You are real.

Take a breath. Breathe it in. You are real.

You have the capability to make your own choices.

You have the capability to choose when to hold on or let go of a thing or person.

You have the capability to say no to someone.

You have the capability to do the things you want to do, no matter how bleak your situation looks right now.

And doesn't that sound amazing?

Why do we hold on to hatred? Is hating someone really making you happy, or is it putting words in your mouth?

You don't have to like everyone. Far from it. If you don't like someone, we live in a day and age where avoiding them has never been easier. Block, report, drive away, walk. Anything works.

But you don't have to hate, either.

I'm almost done, I promise, but I want to tell you one more important thing. You probably already know this one, too, but you need to hear it anyway.

Hatred comes from love.

That seems really weird, right? Contradictory? Well, it is!

Hatred of a person could start because someone you love got hurt, or someone you love said bad things about someone else. Hatred could come from witnessing someone you love get hurt by an entire group, or one person. Or, it could come from watching a clip on the news. It could come from listening to your family talk about how much they hate a group, and then you'll hate that group, too, because you love your family.

That's all it is.

Any form of hatred can be broken down in this way. We hate because we feel that something or someone we love is violated, and we want to protect them. This can be from things like lions, tigers, plagues, and oceans, but it could also be from race, sexuality, bodily autonomy, countries, or your very own neighbors

But... is that hatred justifiable?

Can you really hate the entire ocean because your friend almost drowned there? Can you really hate a lion for needing to eat? Can you really hate someone who just wants to feel right in this world?

Cuz guess what?

You only have ONE SHOT at life.

But so do they.

Every creature needs to eat, no matter what your relationship with their prey is. The ocean isn't even alive, your fellow man was just unprepared to face it, and that's no one's fault. And that trans person wants to live their life to the fullest, too, whatever their definition of fullest is.

Now that I have the transphobes' attention, is hating this group making you happy?

I'd bet the majority of you say yes, right? But stop and think about this. Really, really think about this. What is something you've always wanted to do? Paint? Fly? Study? It can be anything.

Now, is hating a group of people in any way getting you closer to that dream?

...

No, right?

So why are you wasting the energy?

This goes about any group, too. Jewish people, people of color, gay people, muslims, disabled people, ect. Is hating this group of people who also only get ONE shot really making you happy? Helping you achieve your dreams?

No, right?

So why are you wasting the energy?

Now, if a group IS getting in the way (or trying to get in the way) of you trying to achieve those dreams? Great! I hate fascism, too! But now you know why.

You only get ONE shot at life. The choices you're making now are building up to a grander whole, a tapestry you will see as you lay on your death bed. Did you live a good life?

Yes, we struggle. There are times when it's fucking unfair. The world seems out to get us sometimes, but that's not your fault. Your responsibility then becomes what you choose to do with those struggles. Crumple under them, or push through? It's easy to fall apart, but so, so worth it in the end to get that 1st place ribbon you've always wanted.

So, how can you improve your worldview today?

#sorry this is so long i've been thinking about this a lot #call me an optimist all you want (and you're right) but things DO suck right now #hi hello i'm trans and gay and disabled #so i get it life fucking sucks #but we only get ONE. #i want to do the best with my time here. maybe impact a few lives. #living life to the fullest for me is much more down to earth than a lot of people's definition of that is #but i dont care #i want to make people happy and then go out with a bang #i dont want to hate people #unless they're actively hurting those around them (fascism) and doing it on purpose then we can arm ourselves here #fighting back against hatred- things like cops or jk rowling- doesnt happen with more hatred #it happens via community #it happens via a stronger love #love that brings people together for more reasons than hatred #because a love formed on hatred isn't love at all #it's just more hatred #anyway thank you for coming to my ted talk. i gotta eat something before work #dimond speaks #ask to tag

[dotthings]

Welp. I've talked before about how parts of the Jared stan lane have fake woke, dino, pseudoliberal tendencies while they're actually very narrow minded and anti-progressive and anti-diversity wankers. They sure are going hard openly embracing homophobic and fascist dog whistle tactics aimed against Destiel.

They're screaming and kicking and yelling against their own irrelevance. Nobody cares that you hate Destiel, Susan.

Worse, though, some from the staff of jibcon are full on embracing homophobic dog whistles, concern trolling, and fascism. They, and the Jared stans, resemble the book banning efforts targeted against LGBTQ books in libraries and schools going on in different states in the US right now. It's the same. Underlying. Mentality. It makes THEM uncomfortable. So nobody else should be able to have access. THEY don't like it so it has to go. The arguments are also relying on a vile level of demonizing the entire Destiel lane, which is extra gratuitous and gross and hilarious when you consider all the hatred that Jared stan accounts have been spewing onto the internet on multiple platforms non-stop.

The real world political climate makes it even more alarming that this is happening in a fandom space. It's a reflection of real world problems and it's leaking in. I do not want to hear your "shipping isn't activism" and that it doesn't matter how welcoming fandom spaces are. It matters.

Argue with the wall.

This is malicious and the goal is to full on ban Destiel from fandom spaces and make shippers feel unwelcome. Someone even made the slippery slope argument, and tried to blame the existence of fanart.

So let me slippery slope this--if they get their own way banning Destiel at cons, the fandom fascist anti-Destiel brigade will start a concerted effort to try to silence it online too.

If you think this is ok stay away from me.

Argue with the wall.

A jibcon staffer sought out a fan on twitter who got blocked at jibcon from having her fanart signed, despite Jensen's willingness to sign Destiel fanart (and he signed others). The fan got Misha to sign it and was comforted. Jensen never even got a chance to see it.

The jibcon staffer replied to this fan with a screed shaming them for refusing to hide their "boy love," used the "I have a gay friend" excuse, and collective accused every Destiel shipper who ever asked to have fanart signed, by two actors who have been more than willing and both have been kind and supportive towards shippers in fandom spaces, of only trying to "look cool" and using it as a "toy."

While the usual suspects from the Jared stan lane opportunistically tried to incite even more hatred aimed against the Destiel lane and used homophobic dog whistle tactics and concern trolling.

Someone calling all j2 fans "moderate, sensible" and all Destiel shippers "Gross" is classic dog whistling and is a tactic used by the far right while they attempt to paint compassion and inclusion and equity as an extremist position.

Do not even try to tell me this isn't homophobic fandom style fascism.

Argue with the wall.

It's stifling and silencing and malicious and people who think because THEY don't like a queer ship, it should not be seen and heard. They're like puritanical far right groups who wail "protect the children."

I do not care even one ounce if you don't like destiel and you're not a shipper so you think this is all ok.

YOUR DISLIKES ARE NOT RELEVANT HERE.

Homophobic dog whistlers and concern trolls who target Destiel shippers: You're done. You are not welcome in this fandom. Leave.

#dot trolls fandom #jibcongate

[qqueenofhades]

Is it... bad that I just do not CARE about men's mental health no matter how many articles I see about it? "single men are lonely :(((" They made the manosphere roe is overturned and are railing against no fault divorce. I just... don't have energy for this right now. Like i've advocated for men's mental health before, but I'm seeing an INFLUX of "what about men??? they need WIVES!" sentiment from the right and i just. I'm just not feeling it.

No, you're not a bad person at all. The intense legal misogyny and widespread cultural revanchist toxic-masculinity grievance politics right now are absolutely exhausting, and I often feel the same way. However, I think it's possibly useful to differentiate what's actually upsetting you the most, and how that's not the same thing as what the peddlers of this narrative would like you to think. After all, you're not fed up with men's mental health per se; you're fed up (and rightfully so) with the reactionary right-wing fascist narrative that constantly insists that helpless men are victims of the evil women and gays, that the only way for a (white, straight, Christian) man to be happy or a "real man" is by engaging in toxic masculinity, traditional patriarchy, and the destruction of feminism, and that Manhood (tm) is under some kind of existential threat by those soft wimpy liberals who talk about feelings and other gross stuff, and not just Beer, Guns, God, and Freedom. (You know, as if the entirety of human history has happened just to get us back to this point of caveman patriarchy, but let's not talk about Bruno.)

Extreme and macho masculinity/insisting that there's only one way to be a man/any gender variance or departure from traditional norms is Bad, are all key social features of fascism. That's why a) there's such a backlash against trans people right now, and b) most of that concern has focused on the idea of "men in dresses" pretending to be women, "betraying" their gender assigned at birth, "preying" on (poor, helpless, unaware, feeble) women, and otherwise voluntarily relinquishing their manhood, which under fascism is synonymous with power and therefore the worst crime imaginable. After all, with these ludicrous state laws about being forced to dress as your gender assigned at birth -- who do you think is going to be most affected by that? I'm sure they'll get around to criminalizing women wearing trousers and plaid shirts eventually, but it's really hard to tell if a woman is "dressing according to her biological gender." If a male-presenting or AMAB person attempts to dress in more feminine fashion, however, that is the heart of the problem and what fascism is trying to restrict and outlaw.

After all, regardless of what the right wing carps and sobs and screams about, "manhood" is not a unitary, singular category, and rich, white, straight, Christian, Trump-loving men are not the "default" standard for manhood, no matter how many terrible books Josh Hawley might write about the subject. Black/Hispanic men, Indigenous men, trans men, queer men, disabled men, immigrant men, poor men, Muslim men, etc., are all also men, but obviously fascism doesn't value them or think they're complying with the heteronormative white supremacist paradigm. So yeah, obviously all their talk about "men's rights" basically boils down to "women should voluntarily relinquish all the legal and social advancements of the last 150 years in order to meekly serve men, uphold white theocratic fascism, and establish Gilead without a complaint, like good biblical helpmeets!" So THAT, or at least it feels like to me, is what you're angry about, and you should be!

Because the right wing has been so successful at casting "men" in general under this one category, it can be hard to pick apart or see any nuance in what's going on, and you don't have to give the time of day to those "poor mistreated men need tradwives!" nonsense pieces. But by continuing to push back against this awful definition of manhood, you can help show how it's interlinked with fascism and racism, it's inflicting terrible damage on men themselves, and help men understand that they DON'T need to live like that or force themselves into that paradigm in order to be successful. So yeah.

#anonymous #ask #politics for ts

[gaydiation-poisoning]

Very few things make me angry like the absolute and complete fetishization of non-violence in many (especially Liberal) circles. This idea that violence is inherently evil, and if you use it you're immediately abhorrent.

The idea that in the realm of dealing with Fascists and Nazis, people who directly or indirectly, cause MASSIVE harm and loss of life to do many innocent people, if you fight back you're a hypocrite and no better than they are.

Furthermore, even if they're not outright crying about somebody killing a Fascist, you'd better believe somebody you love should already have died/are about to die before you're allowed to fight back. Don't you dare organize preemptively to protect yourselves and your community otherwise you're a violent 'extremist'.

There seems to be this... belief that in order for marginalized peoples to be justified in protecting themselves, they should have to wait until the noose is already around their throat, because god forbid they fight against it being put on in the first place.

Actively preventing the loss of Jewish, Disabled, Trans, Gay, Queer, Black, Indigenous, and all marginalized lives is just as important. We shouldn't have to die to prove to you that our lives are worth protecting. We shouldn't have to pay a blood tax to earn the right to defend our lives.

Fascism and Naziism have only ever been stopped by one thing, brutally and swiftly crushing it. And that does not happen at the ballot box or over a debate table, if you've given them a seat at either, they've already partially won.

Pacifism is a great and noble thing, but only when you apply it to situations where it's appropriate and viable.

And in this day and age, there is no such thing as 'Pacifism'

There's just being okay with marginalized people dying.

#leftist #communist #socialist #anarchist #politics #rant

[brookheimer]

Riddled with the fear that the reason Logan wants Roman back is because he thinks he isn’t pc and not a liberal or left wing, meaning he is a perfect candidate for atn. But like Kendall or someone exposing roman for doing gay shit to make Logan and atn viewership turn against him

nah i think the reason logan wants rome back is because a) roman has an unconditional love for logan that the latter is very comfortable and adept at abusing and b) logan genuinely thinks roman has the best business sense and capability to run ATN at this point, but a lot of that is very tied to point a i think — it’s not that roman is a fascist or isn’t a liberal and therefore would be right for ATN, it’s that he’s emotionally/relationally driven rather than morally/ethically driven, and he cares more about his father’s love than any sort of political alignment. like i genuinely believe roman is not a fascist and personally would not really want mencken in office — “fascism is cool, uh, but… like… not… really?” — and there have been a lot of instances of him being very aware of the way certain decisions would read to the public that i just really don’t think someone who is genuinely racist or whatever would even be capable of noticing. like just set him against connor — clearly roman has a social awareness that connor does not, and he’s actually very aware whenever he’s doing something offensive (“what? it was just a simple, friendly, slightly racist question”) which, in my unfortunately ample experience with actual fascists, trump supporters, etc, is virtually unheard of. the issue isn’t that he’s actually a fascist but that politics etc doesn’t matter to him — only his family does, only his dad does. i think everyone knows that; roman wears his heart on his sleeve, and no one is aware of his desperate desire to be loved more so than logan, who of course will use that to his advantage. logan almost took shiv in in s2 despite her liberal leanings; it’s not about political alignment, it’s about who will follow logan best. and roman will.

also, i really don’t think sexuality will play a plot point like that, and i also don’t know if a) that information exists or would be available to kendall b) kendall would be willing to do that c) that would even be a course of action advisable to take. i think there is definitely a possibility the gerriroman dick pics situation will come back, and that’s what i’m most afraid of. but i really doubt there’s gonna be a revelation of Roman Gay?! via kendall exposé to stop mencken from being president lol so i wouldn’t worry too much ab that

#hope this was an adequate response lol wasn’t quite sure what u meant or how to answer it lmao #succession #roman roy #succession s4 #asks #anon #logan roy #casey shut the fuck up about roman roy #<new tag

[effieandtim]

I know that industry creations are not revolutionary and I agree with some people who talk about the the gay white capitalism aspect of this in concrete (especially knowing that some producers and actors are Zionists). But I like how intended or not the series take into account the class axis. In my opinion, Hawk also gets married to maintain his social status, be middle-upper class. It is the way the series insinuates that marriage and the heteronorm are the way to assimilate the queer or dissident and that anyone who does not accept it is doomed to loneliness, to poverty, exclusion and disease. But it simultaneously shows that that’s not the case, that it’s a deception of society to keep people from rebelling and can serve as a critique of today’s queer struggles that have marriage as the ultimate goal. It's something I've been thinking about since the beginning because of how they present the markers of class in Tim and in Hawk (the clothes, their houses, their friends, their leisure, their health). Also like, at the beginning, Tim presents the capitalist vision of "love is love" in that conversation on the beach. But it is Hawk who depoliticizes his identity (he is just a man who fucks other men) and it is Tim who understands the importance of community and the leftist struggle to confront his country's values ​​(imperialism, the monogamous nuclear family that Lucy and Hawk represent and that is a big lie, the fascism). The series has a lot of details and it is unfair to present it just as sex with plot. Sorry I know that is long and sounds confusing and pedantic.

oh wow i love this. i agree with everything you said really.

i noticed the commentary on class which is very subtle imo but it’s there definitely - esp during the early eps when we were still being introduced to these characters. like the look of wonder on tim’s face when he first sees hawk’s flat, to hawk having a fancy ass lunch with his mum then going to his family home, the differences in their lifestyle etc

its all there - and i think it futher highlights the imbalance in their relationship. in addition to the usual experience and age difference, there was always a class imbalance too that adds to the complexity of their relationship and power dynamics.

you know that is why i really like that they have two parallel storylines running together bc we can see how tim’s views have changed so drastically and the only thing left to explore is why and how. the bit about him denouncing the right and embracing an ideology that 50s tim was so vehemently against is something so interesting, i am so interested to see more of that

yeah exactly - the show is so much more than sex and i really hope people can see that

thanks for this ask though - i loved reading it🫶

#anons #fellow travelers meta

[ms-demeanor]

I believe in a lot of things but because I’m not gung-ho about murder and the destruction of the system, you’ll always say I don’t believe strongly enough. I know there’s nothing I can do to get you to respect me, I just want an answer to the question: where are these new, lefty voters going to come from, and why is “preventing total collapse into fascism” not a good enough reason for them to vote? To do this really minor thing? Why do you all default to guillotines?

And, like, as far as I can tell, your position is that I should die, everyone I love should die, all the fucking poor and queer and black people who live in this red state hellhole should die, so that you can build the beautiful anarchist future in our ashes and maybe call us “martyrs.” It’s cold fucking comfort. We have no chance of winning a fight and you want to force us into a fight because you “believe in something” and are therefore morally right, I guess.

"As far as I can tell, your position is that I should die, everyone I love should die, all the fucking poor and queer and black people who live in this red state hellhole should die, so that you can build the beautiful anarchist future in our ashes and maybe call us “martyrs.”

If that's what you can tell about my political positions then I don't have to respond to anything you're saying because I am *very* vocal about my positions and they are mostly "form parallel structures" and "join unions." (I will respond anyway because I'm a contentious fuck)

@politicalmissdemeanor and @how-to-do-activism are were I store my politics reblogs. You can go check them out. On both of those you will find several reblogs of the essay "against the logic of the guillotine," which I reblog frequently because my OTHER big political stance is prison abolition and prison abolition doesn't exactly sit comfortably alongside the idea of *any* executions; suggesting that I - or most anarchists - default to guillotines suggests that you're not familiar with many anarchists. It is, of course, not your responsibility to be familiar with many anarchists, but if you're going to accuse me of wanting you dead and a utopia built on your ashes then it IS your responsibility to be familiar with *me.*

Also I think that everyone should be clear, when I talk about "fully automated luxury gay space communism" that is a tongue-in-cheek way of discussing a post-scarcity world. I don't think we're actually going to *get* fully automated luxury gay space communism, but I also think that scarcity in the modern era is largely constructed and political, and that is something that should be addressed.

I mention that because utopianism is controversial among anarchists and if you see me talking about "in the future anarchist utopia" you should read that in the same tone that I am using in discussions about "fully automated luxury gay space communism." I don't think we're going to *get* a future anarchist utopia (and I actually think the idea of utopias specifically is harmful) however I do believe a better world is possible and that people should work toward that.

But what it sounds like is you've looked through my blog for the past week only and see me talking about the democratic party attempting to retain white, educated suburban voters instead of reaching out voters on the left or attempting to retain them and have extrapolated my entire political philosophy from a single paragraph and a link to an AP story.

So, point by point:

I believe in a lot of things but because I’m not gung-ho about murder and the destruction of the system, you’ll always say I don’t believe strongly enough.

Then you should probably base your arguments on why you support the system and think it works instead of building an argument out of "well it's better than what republicans want." I clearly exist within this system and I have posts about how it could be improved (postal banking, automatic voter registration, ranked preference voting, universal ID) even though I don't particularly want to perpetuate it.

You don't act like you actually believe what you're saying, you act like you're clinging to it out of desperation. You are not positively arguing for your system, you are holding it up as a shield against something worse. I'd recommend taking some time to sit down and think about what you consider the merits of this system are. "Checks and balances" are one of the things that people seem to like about the American political system; I will agree that it's good that presidents are not kings and can't just will law into existence (it's part of why I'm so critical about the use of executive orders!), and that a legislative system doesn't have to be terrible. However my criticism, as an anarchist, is that these checks and balances don't actually seem to be checking or balancing anything and that presidents *as a concept* are bad and there are probably ways to make this system more democratic while still protecting people from the tyranny of the majority so perhaps if you want to keep the system going you should investigate what ability you have, as a supporter of the system, to change those things. (the thing is, you don't actually have the ability to change those things and it's part of why I don't think the system works).

I know there’s nothing I can do to get you to respect me,

Friend. Buddy. Pal. I think that all humans are inherently worthy of respect. What I am never going to *agree with* is your political system.

I just want an answer to the question: where are these new, lefty voters going to come from, and why is “preventing total collapse into fascism” not a good enough reason for them to vote? To do this really minor thing?

I'm not sure if you're aware of this but, as time passes children stop being children and eventually gain rights as individuals, including the right to vote.

And actually, I am arguing that leftists and young voters already ARE voting for you, but they're doing so because - as you have stated - the other choice is fascism.

But "vote to prevent fascism" is not a party platform and it is a concession to let the fascists control the conversation. It enables the ratchet effect. Republicans get into power and drag politics further right and then Democrats run against them on the bare promise to "hold the line." Progressive candidates within the party rarely get support from the party because of the need to keep the centrist voters, to "heal the soul of America," and when progressive democrats DO get elected they are often blamed for falling approval ratings or low voter turnout or people switching parties.

I have been explicit about the fact that I voted for democrats; that was the harm reductionist stance in 2020, right? "Hold your nose, vote like hell, then hold their feet to the fire." You see why this doesn't actually work, right? Because I can't hold their feet to the fire. Because all I can say is "support policies I believe in or you'll lose my vote" but they don't have to worry about losing my vote because my alternative is to vote for the lesser evil or "not voting is a vote for republicans." So either I was going to vote for them anyway or I wasn't going to vote at all, so they don't have to give a shit about my vote, which is why many anarchists see voting at all as harmful.

You are saying "not-fascism is good enough, I have to accept what I'm given and be grateful that it isn't worse" and honestly take a look at what you're saying. That's slop. That's dreck. They are feeding you garbage and that should be more radicalizing than it has been. You deserve better than that. EVERYONE deserves better than that.

Anyway yeah the new voters are going to be young people. Young people have historically participated in elections at a lower rate than the rest of the population and your job as a supporter of electoralism is to convince them that voting for democrats will do more than not voting. That's kind of a hard sell when the democratic party pitch since at least 2017 has been "stop the fascist creep in America" but fascism has kept right on creeping (which I don't think is the democrats' fault, per se, just that they don't actually have the power to do anything to stop it so it's a bad pledge to campaign on).

Well, and also this:

"stop fascism by voting for dems" is also a hard sell when you can't raise the minimum wage but you can increase funding for police.

Here's the thing: you've got your votes. Leftists hold their noses and young people are voting in historically high numbers, and are generally voting for democrats. There you go. You've got the votes. People ARE doing this tiny thing. And democrats are still yelling at leftists and young people to vote harder while courting center votes.

Who are you mad at? Who do *you* think is not voting? How much do you think it's worthwhile to compromise your political goals to get their votes? Clearly the democratic party thinks that centrist suburban white people aren't voting for them and they're willing to compromise enough that "better than the other guy" is a platform.

Why do you all default to guillotines?

I've been over this but I don't think that support for execution is a coherent anti-state position. Again, here is Against the Logic of the Guillotine.

And, like, as far as I can tell, your position is that I should die, everyone I love should die, all the fucking poor and queer and black people who live in this red state hellhole should die, so that you can build the beautiful anarchist future in our ashes and maybe call us “martyrs.”

Did you *look* at any of my political positions? Or did you make up an anarchist to get mad at?

I've gotten yelled at kind of a lot for "well obviously your politics state that my people don't have value and should die" from people who seem to have never interacted with me or my politics. Do you think that all anarchists are anti-civ? Do you think that doctors and factories won't exist in an anarchist system? Have you ever looked at ANY mutual aid projects? Are you not aware of black anarchism? You know what I'm just going to post a quote from that link on anti-civ views because that seems to be the center of a lot of the belief that anarchists want all queer and disabled and marginalized people dead:

Civilisation comes with many, many problems but it is better than the alternative. The challenge for anarchists is in transforming civilisation to a form that is without hierarchy, or imbalances of power or wealth [...] To do this we need modern technology to clean our water, pump away and process our waste and inoculate or cure people of the diseases of high population density. With only 10 million people on the earth you can shit in the woods providing you keep moving on. With 6 billion those who shit in the woods are shitting in the water they and those around them will have to drink.

Of all your off-the wall statements in these asks this is the one that makes it the most clear that you don't know who I am or what my political positions are and are just yelling at a stranger.

anyway, back to your asks:

it’s cold fucking comfort. We have no chance of winning a fight and you want to force us into a fight because you “believe in something” and are therefore morally right, I guess.

I think there's a broad misapprehension that all anarchists are militant insurrectionist anarchists. I think that this is because most anarchists are operating from the belief that the existing system cannot be reformed, which people often interpret to mean "it must therefore be torn down in a brief and violent revolution and replaced only with the system that I say will work best."

I don't believe in reforming the system (though if you've got it and you want to yell about improving people's lives you might as well make it better but that is not what I'm putting my energy toward because even a united states with universal healthcare, postal banking, and constitutionally protected abortion is still a hierarchical power structure that will serve capital and its interests) but I'm also not a fan of violent revolutions (I am not 100% critical of them either; sometimes revolution is self preservation - the world is complicated and it's hard to model history and regional differences on different places in different times).

What I am a fan of is creating local networks of people to do things in their community for themselves, without anyone's permission or approval. I'm a fan of meal shares, I'm a fan of mutual aid, I'm a fan of libraries and free stores and community gardens set up in empty lots that nobody gave you permission to use.

If you want an example of this with something where a real-world need was not being met by a government and individuals took initiative to address it, look at the FIRST Collective in Columbus. Shelters were not providing adequate housing so a group of people have worked together to create a safe, sheltered environment for people who were not being served by the system. Is the solution ideal (where ideal is 'permanent safe housing with no limitations on residents')? No. Is the solution better than what was being provided by the state (limited-stay shelters with restrictions on possessions, pets, couples staying together, and whether residents would be locked in at night)? For the people in that camp, yes. It was a better solution. Does it replace the shelter system? No. Does it suggest an alternative to what is provided by the state, and by its mere existence illustrate that what the state provides is not enough? Yes.

Is this sort of thing possible on a large scale? And possible to improve on a large scale? Yes. Is it possible to do that *tomorrow*? No. Is it possible to *start* tomorrow so that you have a better place to work from in a week or a month or a year? Yes.

I am tired. I am tired, you are tired, we are all tired. My back hurts and I don't get enough sleep and if shipments of certain medications were stopped for three months my spouse would die. Quickly and inescapably. I don't know who you think I am, but I am not somebody who is shouting about guillotines and advocating for the immediate overthrow of society in all its forms.

I think the world is broken and needs to be fixed. Do I think that burning down everything wrong with the world and picking through the cinders to build something better is a good idea? No. I think it is possible to seek revolution without wholesale destruction, and I don't think that you need to tear the world down to ashes in order to rebuild.

I'm not trying to raise a gallows, I'm trying to grow a garden. If you are looking at one of those things and seeing the other, that is a failure of your understanding, not of my philosophy.

Also if anybody wants to donate to the FIRST Collective this is their GoFundMe.

#long post

[pamphlettyr]

JKR has always been a fascist and i can prove it mathematically

Exhibit A: Wizard School is British Public School. The School admits the elite regardless of origin. The Bell Curve had just been released, and basically the only 3 people who knew about it were scientists (disproved the concept) leftists (ethically negated the concept) and racists (loved it). Whether she had read the book, she reproduces the idea here. Hence why hermione must hyper-overachieve in order to prove her place. 

Exhibit B: Magic system is just servants. This is why it goes straight from ubermensch to slaves, because the servants have been erased. This is why the magic is dogshit, because instead of tapping into the divine, it is rendering the mundane as mystical. "carry this for me" "run and grab me the thing" "give me the chamberpot, and then take it away for me". This is why the three unforgivable curses are "kill him" "torture him" and "i don't care what it costs, make him do it anyway". The elimination of the caring labor that makes society actually run is deeply misogynist, but is also a cornerstone of fascist ideology. There are mothers, there are aurors, there are business owners, and there are slaves. 

Exhibit C: pottermore and the liberal brownie points debacles. Everyone pretends this was her being weird and the falling into reactionary ideology ass-first, but her behavior absolutely follows the patterns of other right wing ideologues, creating sensationalist, spreadable content which also contain right wing ideology. In her case specifically If she was a liberal but stupid, she’d have made dumbledore gay *and* tonks trans, tonks trans is a slam dunk, a no brainer. But that’s not what she did because she has always viewed queerness as degeneracy, and views tonk’s ability as an analog for getting a makeover by a team of professionals. You can tell she views queerness as degenerate because she displays the 3 types of gay experience that fascists will allow in society: You can be an invisible celibate monk like dumbledore, a victim who does everything right like lupin, or a pedophile rapist like fenrir.

Exhibit D: JK wrote House Elves as black people. Fascists constantly tell jokes which reproduce the idea that black people would be and had been happier under slavery (and if i understand correctly, segregationists said the same thing about segregation too)Indeed the speakeasy in Fantastic beasts has a House elf Jazz Singer. Her staunch argument in the story, and on Pottermore that slavery is good for the elves is a paternalistic one, and paternalism is the cornerstone of colonialism, which itself is the foreign policy of a fascist. Understanding this, we are legitimately lucky that she never had a reason to show wizard america in the 80’s because she would doubtless have introduced us to a little guy named rocky who can’t get enough of his crack pipe.

Exhibit E: the naming conventions. I know it’s innocuous, but fascist both require a teaching method that prevents you from imagining others complexly, and also find pleasure in reducing people to stereotypes. It is aesthetically pleasing to them, and fascism loves smuggling itself in through aesthetics, since it takes a massive fucking post to unravel them.

Exhibit F: The post HP franchise elements. The play where the kind guy who is murdered by a fascist, isn’t murdered and joins the fascist because it turns out you can be a nice dude and a wizard nazi. Same play where the woman who staunchly argued against slavery and was belittled for it was portrayed by a black woman. Black Hermione just tickled JK Rowling, that’s how she put it too. Also, nobody can say enough about How fucked fantastic beasts is, the movie in which we have to stop johnny depp from preventing the holocaust because the wizarding way of life is actually immoral, but that won’t stop the guys with the torture prison. Exhibit G: The casting. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that all the queer british actors, and queer allies didn’t wind up getting cast in the film, even as cameos, when the list of british actors who did wind up in the series is 20 miles long. Exhibit H: the goblins: A ton of ink has already been spilled about this, but I think something needs to be said. By “reading you into” the wizarding world, and giving you the secrets about what’s happening behind the scenes, you can already see where this is going, it flips the moral calculus about who is wrong in antisemitic violence, and creates a conceptual framework that a fascist could exploit. Crucially it doesn’t have to be jews, For the sake of argument, let’s say, she could expertly slip into this kind of rhetoric where she reads you into the secret way that the world is being ruined by trannies like me. Exhibit I: new labor. If you know you know, I'm not going to rehash the last 30 years of British politics for you, but JK supported new labor, even in their choice to attack Iraq in support of America's genocidal slush fund.

Conclusion: Orson Scott Card, noted bastard and Direct Descendent of Brigham Young, wrote the novel “Ender’s Game”. Ender’s siblings engage in a political project in order to catapult ender’s brother into political prominence, and inject his ideas about how to solve the world into the public discourse. To accomplish this Ender’s sister starts Demosthenes, and Ender's brother starts Locke. Demosthenes' job is to constantly pull in liberals with lowest common denominator crowd pleasing stuff, Locke's job is to bring in a dedicated audience of hierarchically minded fascism enthusiasts. Demosthenes will grow her audience, until she has sufficient margin, and then begin to signal how Locke has some good ideas, weeding out the savvy audience who would reject Locke anyway. This sets the stage for an accelerating rightward shift which takes people who might never have come to Locke on their own, and grabs the furthest left available audience and everyone between Demosthenes’ original position and Locke’s platform, and rapidly sweeps any who could be even temporarily bamboozled into supporting Locke into doing so at a critical juncture.

[fashionlandscapeblog]

I am not a religious person, but if I was, I would easily believe the Evangelical Christian far-right/MAGA people ruling Florida and other states making laws forbidding children and young people to learn anything against racism or history of racism in the US, banning anything remotely endorsing diversity or anything they consider 'woke' or social (they are banning and satanizing rainbows in schools, for Christ's sake), banning books that talk about the Holocaust, making it legal for kids to work, are the Antichrist themselves. These people have passed so many evil laws against minorities, it's not funny.

Now a doctor can deny healthcare to anyone they wish, based on their 'ethical views', which is so ambiguous that it could actually mean ethnic minorities, not just queer people (how 'ethical' is to deny healthcare to anyone in the first place? It's a fundamental contradiction). The Republican Party has already started a genocide against trans people and they have started it with laws that are essentially forbidding their existence and denying them healthcare, which will cause a lot of them to commit suicide, something that is already a problem in their community, because society doesn't accept them, let alone if they aren't allowed to transition.

I am pretty sure that if Jesus resurrected today, these MAGA people would crucify him again for being too 'woke' and a sinner loving commie (reminds me of The Grand Inquisitor in Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov). These people are talking even about banning women's rights to vote, they are criminalizing trans and gay people. Believe me, they already came for trans and gay people, the next big target is women (they already started with anti-abortion laws). When the Nazis rose to power, trans people were the first ones they targeted and exterminated, then came the Jews and ethnic minorities, gay people, then came communists and political dissidents. When something batshit crazy like this starts, at the end no one will be safe. But of course, this will all be dismissed as 'paranoid' and 'exaggerate' by the majority, that's exactly how and why fascism advances.

Even though there are so many urgent problems to solve like for instance climate change, poverty, etc, these people are focused on finding scapegoats (trans people are literally only 1% of the population, but they are, according to them, the biggest 'threat'), making laws and all their political discourse about them, deviating the attention of the general population away from the really important issues. This has happened before in history and that's what the right always did.

You guys need to stop watching this happen and should begin to seriously protest this, because if this continues, it will be catastrophic not just for your country, but for the whole world, given the power of the US.

#fascism #transphobia #homophobia #MAGA #far right #christian right #republican party #proto fascism #politics #misogny

[simonalkenmayer]

I’m sorry, could you explain more how humanism is linked to right wing fascism? My only prior knowledge of the term is the art movement, and even trying to read more about it is just telling me that it’s a belief system that prioritizes people over divinities, which strikes me as a good thing. I’m just not really understanding the link between these two.

Humanism is good. It’s about elevating the human experience in all its diversity, and protecting it. Making up for what humans lack through organizing a society. It’s what “liberalism” has been in the US for a hundred years.

Let’s see…how to say this without a chronological essay that you can get through your own reading…

Let’s start with Joe McCarthy. It goes all the way back to the slave trade, but for now let’s just start there. McCarthy and other conservatives in the post WWII era, were angry about how badly the Nazis had done. So were the remaining Nazis. Many of them went to South America and aligned themselves with dictators there. In dribs and drabs here and there, former Nazis joined right wing groups and began to say things like “in the power vacuum, communism will rise.” And so it did, but they vilified it. In fact, the World Anti Communism League was founded by a Hungarian Nazi sympathizer and death squad runner. They raised money for dictators, no joke, to “reject communism” but that is merely code for “keep Nazi ideals open”. Back here in the states, anti-communism became a dog whistle and a scare tactic. Any liberal who said a social welfare program might be good, was called a communist and their careers were destroyed.

When McCarthy tanked his career in back-biting narcissistic stupidity—as bad people often do— the communism scare fell apart. And those organizations split into two primary groups, reforming under different banners but with the same leadership. One wing targeted the end of segregation and the civil rights movement, and one began preaching moralism, specifically Christian moralism. This is when the myth of America as a Christian nation began, and through clever manipulation, they equated non-Christian to unAmerican.

Barry Goldwater jumped into that full speed, joining a group that evolved out of the anti-communist garbage. It was he who said extremism in defense of liberty is fine. When he ran for President, he allied the party to this new right wing religious stupidity. The several groups he was a part of folded up and flipped into the Christian Right and Moral Majority, and they are the Old Testament NeoCon radicals I’ve talked about. They’re the ones who are malicious and sneaky. Yes. I mean that.

Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson single handedly turned themselves into king makers, using their television platforms and the Christian Broadcasting Network to funnel shit into people’s ears. Their principle bone to pick? That Humanism, celebrating or protecting the human condition, is an act against god, who demands obedience. To them Gay people deserve to die. Anyone who isn’t Christian ought not hold office. To them, women should not have any rights, and the idea they can control their own uteruses is horrendous. It’s against god!

During his presidency, Reagan courted these radicals to use their clout. But he also sympathized with them. He had many ties to white supremacy and Nazis, but that’s another story. He destroyed the “Fairness doctrine” in broadcasting (easy to do since nazi-affiliated neocons had already gotten key positions in broadcasting) allowing for the new genre “infotainment” to exist. Television personalities who discussed news no longer had to give balanced coverage.

A couple months later, Rush Limbaugh put out his first episode, and within weeks was syndicated by over 200 stations. Roger Ailles, who worked for Reagan, loved his style, his crass, divisive, speculative hatred. It was on that model that he built Fox News for Rupert months later.

Conspiracy theory has often been used to influence voting, but in this case, conspiracy theorists and all their garbage, ties DIRECTLY back to Nazis. Humanism says being cruel to anyone is wrong. It is anathema to their way of life.

But wait! There’s Newt Gingrich. When he became minority leader, he put out a memo to all GOP candidates, specifically outlining how to manipulate voters. He listed words to use. He talked about how critical propaganda is. We have him to thank for “radical left” “leftist media” and other Trump phrasing. And then he rolled that over into his Contract with America, aka the GOP platform. During the Clinton years, when he wasn’t quietly passing these horrific changes, he was working with an entire group of right wing researchers to find dirt on Clinton and the mill it into something that would stoke the moral outrage of the right. When they found the Lewinsky scandal, they struck gold. Ken Star, recently fucked off to hell, was not even supposed to be investigating sex. He was supposed to be investigating the Whitewater business. He claimed that during the course of hearing from witnesses about the real estate deal, he’d uncovered an affair, and when asked about it, Clinton lied, because his wife didn’t know. And then? They impeached him for lying about a controversy they dug up.

Go google the news. McCarthy just enacted a new contract with America. In it? Abortion bans. It’s the same MORAL Majority, Nazi-backed platform it always was. Except that now they’re saying the quiet part aloud.

The problem was that the opposition never called a spade a spade and just let it happen.

That, my friends, is how we got Trump.

The GOP is so closely interwoven with these groups, it doesn’t actually know who it is. It really doesn’t. And it sculpts its base through vilifying humanism as an act of rebellion against God. They do not have solutions. They are a party built around gathering power, influence, and wealth. They hate anyone who is not male and white and Christian.

[angelkittycore]

not to invite discourse but after i've been on tumblr solely for a few months after leaving twitter i've sorta let go of a lot of things that i was vehemently against and my opinion HAS shifted a bit.

(just saying straight away that you're welcome to engage with me on this topic but i am not seeking to incite arguments, fighting, or heated debate whatsoever and you're not likely to get me to change my mind on this. also if you're going to yell at me for using the term monosexuality please shut up and stay in your lane. if your first thought to reading that word is "bisexuals are being homophobic" then you have a biphobia issue.)

so it's not that bi lesbians/gays don't exist, i think their experiences are very much real. it's just the choice of contradictory labels, and the inherent biphobia, lesbiphobia, and taking self-autonomy from both bisexual men and women by attributing our entire bi rights movement to being a product of terf lesbian separatists, that i have a problem with.

terfs/political lesbians/gold star lesbians did spur an exodus of bisexual women from the umbrella of lesbian, but what came after was all us. and i both feel and think that it was a natural evolution of the communities because bisexuality is more than just women who love women and men, it's also men who love men and women. and nonbinary, abinary, trans, cisn't, gnc, and whatever else. (not to say that the last few aren't also included in monosexuality but i'm talking about bisexuality here.)

attributing the fight for our rights and voices to be heard solely to terfs is ahistorical and insulting. the want to be seen as a whole, valid, separate identity and community than both lesbian and gay has absolutely 0 to do with terfism and similarly aligned political bullshit (such as fascism/white supremacy/plain ol transphobia.)

wanting to go back to lesbian being an umbrella term for all lesbians and bi women feels way too traditionalist and downright conservative (in terms of the literal meaning of the word) for the lgbt/queer community. it's not about challenging cishetalloamatonormativity by simply existing or being unapologetically queer in a word that wants to stamp us out violently in this regard, it's wanting to reclaim a space and label that is no longer theirs because they feel entitled to do so.

to me, lgbt/queer progress is about growing and changing, and adapting to the world, and thriving in spite, and despite it all. and not clinging to relics of the past, however recent or not it was. as some examples, the meaning of asexuality has changed from its original coining. same as bisexual, and pansexual has gone through it's fair share of bullshit as well. why can't and why shouldn't lesbian do the same? however i do not feel that a change backwards is a change for the better.

as an another example, lesbian also used to mean homosexual women exclusively attracted to homosexual women but now it includes every flavor of nonbinary you can think of, who may or may not be women, women aligned, or even feminine at all.

lesbian no longer includes bisexuality under it and that should be okay. lesbian is a monosexual label, and that's okay. you do not experience bisexuality by also being attracted to similar/same genders, regardless of binary or nonbinary umbrella. because bisexuality, inherently, means attraction to similar/same AND opposite/different genders. (note, my descriptions here also includes xenogenders, alternative alignment systems, etc. it's up to the individual if they want to be included in any attraction, including lesbian, gay, bisexual+, and straight. grouping a wider group under lesbian attraction just because they are nonbinary is inventing a trinary and misgendering at worst.)

on the reverse, having a preference, however strong, does not make you a lesbian, or a monosexual gay. you are still experiencing bisexuality, you just have a preference. that is all. not everybody is bisexual, and not everybody is monosexual, and that's okay.

(should also note that comphet doesn't make a lesbian bisexual.. that's comphet.)

anyway tl;dr i think the language, terms, and labels you use you justify your valid experiences is.. not great, to put it politely, lol. i think your insistence that you should be able to call yourself bisexual or a lesbian when you're the other has problems stemming from misunderstanding both labels and attractions, and misunderstanding what exactly nonbinary is. i've also seen definitions of bisexual lesbians that say they are bisexual because they are also attracted to trans women which is.. do i have to say it?

anyway bisexual is not a dirty word or attraction. bi is beautiful, and the convoluted ways people try to get out of identifying as bisexual or solely as bisexual (if they are allo) is internal biphobia, which is not something to celebrate or be proud of. you should work through it.

#replies only so i can control who engages with me

[petersaysthings]

Gays Against Groomers, their association with the Proud Boys, and the rise of fascism.

I’ll be making a more detailed blog post soon on the group Gays Against Groomers, their association with the Proud Boys and QAnon, and the dangerous surge of fascism that's now accepted and promoted as free speech in many online circles. For now, I wanted to give a little rundown.

I don't think I've ever been this disturbed by a group and its members gaining so much traction.

A large portion of their followers are either far-right or even alt-right themselves, or they're willing to turn a blind eye to the organization's harmful tactics, particularly if it removes a target from their own back. After all, no one wants to be called a 'groomer', because that association alone--regardless of any evidence--can and has destroyed lives. It's akin to when homosexuality was placed in the same bracket as pedophilia in the 1950's, weaponizing social fears.

Because the LGBTQ community struggled for decades to attain equal rights and standing to the rest of society, there's now a pervasive sense of fear among some that those rights will be taken away because of a misguided few. They reason it's better to call out the few and rub shoulders with the right to avoid that. But let's be clear--the right has never been the best allies with LGBTQ people to begin with, and the few were never much of a problem in this equation until the far right began amplifying the actions of a small minority, making them seem like a huge societal problem. Now, it would seem there’s little other choice but to fall in line and purge all instances of flamboyance.

So one has to wonder if that's what's fueling these attacks in the first place, because who started the rampant vilifying? They and their associated grifters (such as Blaire White, Arielle Scarcella and others) are lumping in potential actual groomers with people they merely suspect of being groomers, and often that’s enough to cause instances of stochastic terrorism and threats of domestic terrorism.

This is extremely concerning to me, especially considering GAG's (gotta love that acronym) association with the Proud Boys, a neo-fascist organization known for their political violence, particularly the Jan. 6th attacks on the Capitol. I recently stumbled across a Tweet from Gays Against Groomers in which they flat-out said:

(According to what I've seen of their posts, 'sexualization, indoctrination, and mutilation' can refer to anything from a 300-page book with one out-of-context graphic scene, to their unsubstantiated claims that hospitals 'offer hysterectomies to minors'. I even saw one in which they tried to frame that teaching kids consent would somehow be grooming...make of that what you will.)

Which begs the question, given their questionable associations, as to whether or not their Tweet is a veiled threat, lest you fall in line with their standards and steer clear of their arbitrary definitions of what qualifies as a ‘groomer’. Now I don't like comparing things to Nazism for a long list of reasons. It's lazy at best and trivializing the past at worst. But there's definitely something sinister in this about forcing compliance through fear that likens it to a burning of the Reichstag. There's also their branding (appropriating a logo design), their posting of doctored video clips in association with far-right media organizations (such as Project Veritas, Arsenal Media, X Strategies) with the goal of twisting narratives, their separatist language, encouraging members of the LGBTQ community to call out suspected 'grooming' to avoid targets on themselves.

It gives the impression if you don't keep your head down in compliance, you will be dealt with by their Proud Boy jackboot thugs.

And if you speak out on Gays Against Grooming in any way--if you present fact-based arguments on how gender-affirming care is important to the mental health of a small minority of people struggling with gender dysphoria, defend library books they want to ban, point out how they overlook important parts of legislation they protest that will negatively affect LGBTQ youth--you're automatically labeled a 'groomer of children' and harassed by their many followers, if not the organization itself.

Critical thinking and rationality is on the decline, propaganda and misinformation is on the rise (largely thanks to Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter), and between Gays Against Groomers and Libs of TikTok, it's only a matter of time before some unhinged person enacts real violence or makes threats of domestic terrorism. We saw it in PizzaGate with QAnon when someone shot up a pizza parlor. The association between when Tweets are posted, the measureable rise in hateful rhetoric, and the resulting action has a direct causal link.

And then what do they do? Plausible deniability.

It's also interesting to me how they can constantly call out people based on suspicion alone (Jeffrey Marsh is a huge favorite for this), but any suspicions leveled against them are unacceptable. The harassing actions of Gays Against Groomers and their followers are not beyond questioning or criticism, and to insist they are--whether they say so or their followers say it--is flat out authoritarianism and manipulation. The ‘with us or against us’ rhetoric that does not allow for critical thinking or pointing out of harmful practices is incredibly dangerous.

In summation, I want them taken down before they grow much larger, because they're fighting important legislation and vying for a political foothold. And as a far-right fascist organization, it's not something I want for wider society, and as a gay person, it's certainly not the kind of group I want having a voice for the LGBTQ community.

This goes beyond protecting kids, which of course is something we all want. And there are occasional valid instances and behavior harmful to kids we should be calling out, I will not deny that. But I'm not convinced, as with pro-life stances, that Gays Against Groomers is about protecting kids or ‘giving them a voice’ at all. On the contrary, it’s about removing the voices of LGBTQ youth and gaining political power through divide.

I'm not certain what their ultimate endgame is with all this, but I don't imagine it's going to bode well for the majority of LGBTQ people in a few years.

#lgbtq #lgbtq community #gays against groomers #fascism #twitter #groomer #groomers #grooming #libs of tiktok #proud boys #far right #alt right #politics #ok groomer #fascist #news #qanon #pizzagate

[sweeneytodddemonbarber]

On this day today; 53 years ago, the first Pride was a protest at the Stonewall Inn in New York City; all led by a black transgender woman named Ms. Marsha P. Johnson. Police raided the bar and she threw a brick at them…and that’s how Pride got start, and the march for LGBTQ rights.

Pride Month maybe ending in a couple days but we still have work to do: the Supreme Court overturned Roe V. Wade, and they are coming for contraceptives, for gay marriage and for LGBTQ rights. We have to stand our ground against the immoral laws that will come up by the Supreme Court and fight back against Christian fascism by the far right extremists in power…because that is who they are and what they are for; control: STRAIGHT, WHITE, CISGENDERED CHRISTIAN MALES who don’t like to be told what to do.

We will smash the patriarchy of the nation and BURN IT DOWN!!!! 🔥🔥🔥🔥

One final thing: do not be afraid to say gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, non binary, genderfluid, pansexual—or what have you! Be your most authentic self. Don’t let no one take that away from you, loves. Happy Pride Month! 🏳️‍🌈

@iloveyoutoinfinity

#sweeney todd #johnny depp #benjamin barker #sweeney todd rp #sweenbug #fuck fascists #fuck scotus #fuck the gop #fuck the far right extremists #separation of church and state #sweeney todd for disability rights #Sweeney Todd for women’s rights #Sweeney Todd for lgbtq rights #Sweeney denounces fascists

[angry-antifascist]

Between Ye going full Nazi and the rightwing basically endorsing the Q club shooting a week prior, I’m really terrified that we’re going to see the U.S. go the way of Weimar Germany — with conservatives turning a blind eye to the fascists overrunning their party until it’s too late to stop them.

I guess it’s nice that Mitch McConnell had the stones to say “there’s no room for antisemitism” in the GOP, but even if the US doesn’t perfectly replicate the Nazis’ antisemitic ideology we’re still inches from seeing the sort of fascist terrorism that preceded Hitler’s assuming power begin en masse in the United States. If it’s not synagogues, it’ll be gay bars. In all likelihood, it’ll be both.

There are already more guns than people in this country, and the people that know how to use them have mostly been brainwashed by the right-wing media machine that tells them democratic pluralism is a threat to their way of life. It’s not enough that these manipulative monsters enrage people into voting for a party that stands for nothing but fucking tax cuts — they have to turn that rage into violence against people who want nothing more than to live their lives in peace.

And because of half a century of neoliberalism and market fundamentalism, driven by conservatives and by the Democrats’ desperation to be centrists, there are a lot of people in the Republican base who are hurting, who are angry, and who feel like they’ve had the life they were told they’d have taken away from them. The thing is, they’re RIGHT. But FOX News is part of the problem and they think it’s got all the answers. Inadvertently — or maybe not so inadvertently — the propaganda machine Murdoch built to propagate neoliberalism has created the perfect conditions for the seeds of fascism to grow. People are disaffected, they’re pissed, and they’re desperate. You tell them the Jews or pronouns are causing their problems, some of them are gonna believe you. And some of the people who believe you are gonna be armed and dangerous.

I’ve always been a pacifist, but it’s now clear US minorities need to be ready to defend themselves. There’s no promise of a “good guy with a gun” being nearby when a fascist attacks. Be ready to be that person yourself. If you’re queer or Jewish or Muslim or nonwhite, look into it, please. And stay safe, loves.

#kanye west #news #politics #us politics #antifascism #neoliberalism #democrats #republicans #democracy #worried #be safe #please ignore this if you’re at risk for self harm #sad thoughts

[tilbageidanmark]

Movies I watched this Week #111 (Year 3/Week 7):

3 More young Robert De Niro - 2 accompanied by Ennio Morricone:

🍿 I finally found a good free copy of Bertolucci’s Novecento (”1900"), the full 5+ hours version, which I haven’t seen since it premiered. What an old-fashioned film-watching joy!

Retelling the history of Italy’s juggling the two opposing forces of fascism and communism as told through the lives of two men, one a land owner’s son and the other, still handsome peasant Gérard Depardieu. With lots of homoerotic subtext, De Nero frontal nudity, and other complex class-struggle subtexts. And with Ennio Morricone’s sweeping score and Vittorio Storaro’s spectacular canvases. 9/10.

🍿 The mission, one of the Vatican “15 recommended films about religion”. About a Spanish slave trader who turned Jesuit missionary in 1750′s Paraguay, full of search for redemption, Penance and struggles with faith. Exotic-Porn, shot beautifully out in the jungle. Produced during David Puttnam’s successful reign of the time. Featuring Liam Neeson and Goodfellas "Morrie" as the heavy. But like most films from the 1980′s, it lost all its luster for me. 4/10.

🍿 Greetings, Brian De Palma’s 2nd film, the first American film to receive an X rating and De Nero’s first major role. This ‘how to dodge the Vietnam war draft’ satire was so amateurish, I couldn’t stand more than 15 minutes of it.

🍿

All That Breathes, a new award-winning and Oscar-nominated Hindi language documentary. It poetically tells of 2 unassuming Indian brothers who rescue and treat injured black kite birds. 100% Rotten Tomato rating. The trailer.

🍿

2 more by Luca Guadagnino:

🍿 Bones and all, love among the cannibals. A vulnerable love story of two young, pretty outcasts who share an affinity for flesh eating. I loved his style in ‘A bigger splash’, ‘I am love’, and ‘Call me by your name’, but this horror-comedy was hollow and unnecessary. 3/10.

🍿 Guadagnino’s second feature, Melissa P. A semi-pornographic ‘erotic drama’ about a 15-year-old girl’s journey of sexual discoveries. It opens with her masturbating in her room, and soon it moves on to her giving a blow-job to some jerk, being forced to participate in a threesome, gangbangs and in a bit of S&M. All in the name of her right to explore her desires, and told mostly from an off-putting (gay?) male gaze point of view. 4/10.

🍿

Alice's Wonderland, the first Walt Disney short film, released exactly 100 years ago, in 1923, a seminal year for Hollywood and for movie making.

🍿

The creatures, my 9th by Agnès Varda, an experimental fantasy pairing Catherine Deneuve with Michel Piccoli, a year before ‘Belle de Jour’. He’s a science-fiction writer, and she’s his wife who went mute after a car accident. The line between reality and the writer’s vision for his book are blurred, but the effort feels dated and forced. Too artsy. 3/10 

🍿  

Life after death, a slight drama-comedy from Finland about an emotionally-stunted widower who wants to move on as soon as his wife dies, against his son’s need to mourn for her longer. 3/10     

🍿

Vesper, my first film from Lithuania (In English, unfortunately). A somehow different post-apocalyptic Sci-fi story about a 13-year-old bio-hacker girl who lives in the forest with her paralyzed father. Organic tech and biological magic. 4/10.

🍿

“... Is that dress is what you are going to wear in the concentration camp?...”

First watch: Ernst Lubitsch’s 1942 Nazi farce To be or not to be. Making fun of Hitler the Hollywood way, by showing Gestapo officers as lecherous buffoons, Ha ha ha. Carole Lombard’s last film, and with young, good-looking Robert Stack. To paraphrase another quote from the comedy: What Lubitsch did to Shakespeare here, the Nazis were doing to Poland. 2/10   

🍿

2 With Elliott Gould:

🍿 I was planning to follow-up with the Mel Brooks’ 1983 remake, but the original left such a bad taste in my mouth, that instead I randomly started a documentary in which Brooks stars - the irresistible The Automat. What a joyful surprise! A super-nostalgic love letter to the Horn & Hardart restaurant chain which thrived in NYC and Philadelphia in the first half of the last century. Absolutely enchanting from start to finish. With a delightful cover song, written and performed by Mel Brooks. (Photo Above). 8/10.  

🍿 American History X, a very disappointing first watch. What may have been a courageous and nuanced analysis of contemporary racial hatred, rehabilitation and tolerance, seems didactic and quaint 25 years later - just like the shocking Nazi swastika tattoos. 1998 extremism is 2023 slice of life. 3/10.

🍿

A hard day, a Korean thriller about a young, corrupt policeman who runs over a guy while drunk driving, and then, trying to cover the killing, buries the body in the coffin of his mother who had died the same day. Standard, unbelievable execution about the always-corrupt Korean Police force. 3/10

🍿

First watch: Cult classic Myra Breckinridge, “one of the worst films ever made” and the mess that brought Mae West out of her 27-year retirement. A confused early ‘70′s look at sexual roles, sex change operations, female-on-male anal rape, femdom and Hollywood. A complete waste of talent. 2/10.

RIP, Raquel Welch!

🍿

The concept sounds intriguing: A lowly Irish ‘Extra’ playing an English soldier on the set of Stanley Kubrick’s ‘Barry Lyndon’ falls in love with an assistant director. The trailer looked dope. But the short Kubrick by candlelight was undeveloped and underwhelming. 2/10.

🍿

Marc Maron X 2:

🍿 Not being very familiar with comedian Marc Maron, but he opened his latest stand up From Bleak to Dark with this line: I don’t want to be negative, but I don’t think anything’s ever gonna gets better again, which captured my sentiment so perfectly, I was immediately hooked. Genial observations, well-delivered!

🍿 Since he‘s also an accomplished actor, I looked for something he played in. Unfortunately, I picked Get a Job (2016), because it also starred my crush Anna Kendrick (and dozens of other names, Bryan Cranston, John Cho, Nicholas Braun). But this cringy sit-com style dud was so listless, I could only last 25 minutes, before adding it to my “Too-Horrible-Couldn’t Finish-List”. 1/10.

🍿

I felt compelled to watch Game Night again, for the 3rd (!) time, and I’m not sure why. The relationship between Jason Bateman and Rachel McAdams is so cute, and the story develops organically and perfectly. It’s such a fun and infectious action-comedy!

🍿

Some YouTuber Watched Every Oscar Best Picture Winner, so we don’t have to.

🍿

Lavatory Lovestory, a cute Oscar-nominated Russian Short about a lonely, romantic lady who works at a public toilet, a subject that is told not too often on film.

🍿

So this week I saw 2 great movies: Bertolucci’s '1900', the documentary ‘The Automat’, one repeat offender ‘Game night’ for the 4th time, plus Marc Maron’s stand-up ‘From Bleak to dark’. That’s a fairly typical number of good ones per week.

But I came to realize that most of the many other movies I watch every week are simply terrible. Under normal circumstances, and if I wasn’t on a mission (which I’m not sure yet what it is), I would never spend time on them.

Maybe I’ll try one week to only watch ‘Great’ movies, see how it feels to go through only the 'Best of the best'.

🍿

(My complete movie list is here)

#movies

[splathousefiction]

Radical

I’ve spent weeks researching it.

I watched countless people beat it with clubs, with police batons. I watched someone unload buckshot on it. Hilariously enough, it took the first shot well. The subsequent shots finally cracked it true, and obliterated it. Edged weapons and blunt objects however? No, it went right on working just fine with a few more scuffs. By the third week, I’d placed my order for Cold Steel’s Soldier’s Targe. A shield big enough to cover my chest, strong enough to take a blow. Something I could maneuver with. Something I could cover myself, my friends with.

Because the protests out there are getting fucking bloody. There’s no “nice” way to put that. People are getting beaten to death either by the nazis or the cops. Having a shield is yet another safety measure alongside black bloc, safety goggles, and means with which to cease the outpouring of teargas canisters. All things I never would have considered as little as two years ago.

The fact I would ever have to physically, perhaps violently, debate my right to exist was something in the back of my head, under a thick blanket of ignorance. “Oh, that’ll never happen,” I said, “We’d never have nazis marching in the streets. I and my friends are going to be completely fine”.

I was a fucking fool. All of us, including you, were. Because the nazis marched and then the people in my community started winding up dead, harassed into suicide, forced to flee the country for places only marginally safer than the US. The nazis and the white supremacists came, armed with the backing and support of law enforcement and the federal government. It all happened as a silent majority-people who swore they were cis-het allies to the queer community-stood by and watched.

You, the people who told us you loved the gays, that you had our backs, that we were all “good ones” who deserved happiness, were idle as you watched white supremacists kill us. In night clubs. In schools. In the street. You did nothing as they came for us because we weren’t you. No, we weren’t white enough or straight enough. Some of us were disabled. Some of us were sex workers.

That’s just a thing that happens to our kind, doesn’t it? An unfortunate part of our community that we need to look after. So long as it’s not in your fucking suburbs, you don’t care. You stay quiet. Maybe if you’re feeling particularly spicy, you’ll quote inaccurate crime statistics.

You watch the news and pretend everything will be okay because it’s not you.

As I sit writing this, I’ve told no less than three or four of my friends how to get a concealed carry permit. I’ve been openly conversing with my SW associates on how best to keep ourselves fed, how to keep ourselves employed. I’ve got to hear my BIPOC and disabled friends sigh, almost giving up against an insurmountable death machine that feasts upon them on the daily.

We’re all disposable to you under the guise of “god and country”, the good ol’ red, white and blue. Because we’re not you.

So, I’m here to tell you that you’re wrong. You’re absolutely one of us. One day your turn will come, and if you earnestly believe for even a moment that separating yourselves from the communities with bullseyes on them will save you, you’re just as ignorant as I was. The powers that be-white supremacists, cops, evangelicals and more-will kill you quick or slow. The time it takes matters not-fascism is patient. Fascism has unlimited resources. Soon enough, simply not being openly fascist will be all it takes to shove you to the ground, to restrain you, to tear you limb from limb in front of your family, your friends.

They’ll be next as well.

You’re wrong.

But you don’t even know why you’re wrong. You’ve done literally nothing, so how could you possibly be at fault? Right?

Oh, let me count the ways.

A Pus Filled Throat Wailing For Blood

Capitalism is a hideous machine that runs by cannibalizing marginalized communities. Its communion is a holy one, powered by tax shelters with crosses on the roof and people who hold absolutely zero qualms about openly embracing fascist ideology. Its maw widens like the fabled whale of Ahab’s hunt, and in a blink your neighbors are gone. Your queer kids and siblings are gone. It takes respite from its feast to vomit dollars at you, then goes right back to ripping the flesh of everyone and everything you love from the bone.

At the time of this writing, we cannot escape capitalism in the west. We can merely engage with it in a way that preferably has us wading through the least amount of blood. We do this by building communities (professional and otherwise), strengthening and safeguarding our connections in those communities, then perpetuating our communities by engaging the market on our preferred terms. Sometimes we succeed. Sometimes we don’t. Sometimes we just rejoin that beast, perpetuating human suffering by telling ourselves “at least it’s not us”.

The means with which we minimize that suffering are based within who and what our communities serve,  the power and financial disparity our communities have compared to others, and how best to elevate those to (at least) a position within which capitalism might deem us worthy of human rights.

It’s not easy.

The beast’s blessing doesn’t favor moral people. It doesn’t favor the kind, the meek, the empathetic or the sincere.

No, capitalism is a lapdog of oppression. As such, it will always ensure those who don’t fit the ideal of either consumer or worker become enslaved and broken within countless snares.You wake one morning and you can’t buy queer content because it’s a “morally unfit lifestyle” for payment processors. Processors who are pressured by hardline evangelicals like Exodus Cry. You can’t get paid for sex work for the same reason. All this and more gets told to you with a gore soaked pat on the back.

It’s for your own good, the beast barks, surely you understand?

Your community, this thing you’ve worked so incredibly hard to create, protect and perpetuate is light work to this hideous thing. It’s grown even easier to execute us via content catering algorithms, rituals that would sound arcane if you tried to explain them to a lay person.

But for you, I’ll try.

Algorithms focus on content that is a sure shot to ad revenue generation and profit for creators. Click a video about cats on Youtube, and more will show up in your suggested feed. What should be a morally neutral means of encouraging consumption becomes innately corrupted by its own drive. IE, algorithms across the web will show suggested content that is generating the most traffic/profit, which is often simply extremely similar content. Where this takes an insidious turn is via misinformation and outright propaganda. Seeing a critique video on a political figure will lead to speeches they’ve made, events they’ve attended, transcripts of their thoughts and much more. All for the low, low cost of your time and money.

Meaning, algorithms are a never ending game of “telephone” taking place in the deepest rabbit hole you never intended to trip into. Algorithms can build an entire subculture, lead to real world violence and destroy entire existences overnight. The utilization of them in the 21st century to oppress, harm, silence and kill marginalized communities at an unprecedented speed is a fascists/capitalists wet dream. No longer do you have to have an army. You can simply pay the right influencer, who via decentralization and virulent ignorance on the part of their audience will do all the work for you. It’s the war machines of the reich and Henry Kissenger’s darkest desire made manifest.

There’s a straight throughline between capitalist conquests and what we in the sex work community experience via deplatforming, harassment and destruction. There’s a direct pipeline between the puritans taking their first step in the new world, and the pressure placed upon payment processors to obliterate our industry by denying us a chance to eat, to live, to work.

It’s the overwhelming and obvious fact that we, by majority, are BIPOC, disabled and queer. Our multicolored flag offends the sensibilities of our oppressors for not being red, white and blue enough. For not engaging within the market via the “traditional” and expected means, and instead choosing to pursue our worth via jobs and lives that bring us joy.

That pursuit picked up exponentially during the plague, something capitalism and evangelicals tried hard to side step. Many of us within marginalized communities-specifically our disabled siblings and loves-took up sex work as a means to supliment wages lost due to layoffs, cut back hours, and the uncompromising position that working from home wasn’t “real work”. For some, it was a time of liberation and self actualization. We can, if we so desire, love ourselves and our bodies. If others chose to appreciate that financially, all the better. And yet, the grind culture of the west saw fit to destroy that and usurp any upwards mobility yet again from us. It preferred the disabled and neuro-divergent in compartmentalized boxes that it could clearly label-as accomplishments of mercy, or side shows to be laughed at and mocked. Damned be their medical conditions, that’s not how you were meant to be marketed. Capitalism wants to keep marginalized communities meek and pathetic in it’s own eyes, and the very concept that a disabled person could celebrate themselves and their own sexuality was simply too much to ask.

Capitalism is the root cause behind many of the NSFW, adult entertainment and queer communities woes. By its inescapable machinations all alternatives of payment processing and/or earning a living wage such as Bitcoin become shell games where our financial stability and mental well being are pawns for the same billionaires who delight in the lack of consequences at our abuse.

What’s more, algorithms have encouraged the manufacturing of discourse that in no way furthers the fight for human rights of the BIPOC, queer and sex work community. If you’re unfamiliar with COINTELPRO, now is the time to read up. The invisible, decentralized standing army built by political factions is aided in its goals through subterfuge, spy craft and intentional divisive dialogues intended to rip communities apart from the inside. Divided, we’re easier to conquer and destroy. Political party affiliation in the US more or less doesn’t matter so much as your usefulness for the dreadful, blood soaked machine of financial progress.

The concept of “simply existing” isn’t in the vocabulary of such adversaries. In the words of Gnostic The Poet, “non-violence only works when your opponent has a conscience”. Both parties play into that in order to encourage division. For republicans, failing to die and suffer for “god and country” means you’re a traitor. For the democratic party, you will never bleed enough for the cause to care, and if you did-they ultimately cowtail to corporate super PACs, no different than the boys in red.

All other political parties, movements or attempts at fighting for a better tomorrow have been met with assassination attempts (usually successful), media smear campaigns unseen since the cold war, intentional black book backing of harassment groups and intentional feeding into fear and paranoia within human rights focused advances.

The beast roars, and cries out in the tongue of computer science.

The world trembles, and we scatter for safety.

If you’ve ever asked yourself why your favorite creator has to resort to multiple platforms, multiple means of payment, creating content for free, starting go fund mes to cover medical expenses or simply pay bills, that’s why.

We are all victims of a death cult. One that will never be satiated until the streets run as crimson rivers up to their knees with the blood of those they deem disposable.

A Caustic Chord Singing Praise

Cults have their devotees, and in the case of capitalism, the largest and most prominent are organized religion-primarily north american evangelicals in the US and Canada.

I understand this claim is going to alarm and offend some of you. Frankly speaking, I don’t care.If a challenge to the reality of your ideals is all it takes to shake you, your god is weak and unworthy of praise or devotion. There. I finally said the quiet part out loud, the whisper that’s been haunting you in the long nights.

Back on course, churches of any shade in most countries can apply for tax exemption status. This means they have a disproportionate amount of believer fed money with which to influence city/state/national politics. Much like the bias of algorithms, organized religion is biased towards the sensational, the spectacle. Despite claims to the contrary, nobody likes a minister who whispers or a God that doesn’t enjoy a good scrap.

So organized religion tells you to go to war. Sometimes this comes via “god and country”, encouraging the (mostly men, mostly young) in its congregation to go fight a culture they’ve never encountered out of some divine mandate. If they’re to perish, all the better! You’ll be martyred for the cause and never forgotten! Teach those heretics by amassing a mountain of bodies!

Except, oh gosh, sometimes there’s not a physical war to go fight. Never the matter-the home front needs protection. You want to secure a future for your family, your children and race don’t you? Why, look at that mountain of dead! We’re dying out, man!

And so the machine churns and roars, spewing a smoke screen into the endless blue sky. The beast promises a blessing, and points its hoary hand towards…well, whoever is convenient at the time, really. In the last twenty years, that has increasingly become the same marginalized communities that have filled the beasts belly since time immemorial. If they’re not white, straight and cis enough? They’ll burn bright on the pyre.

Which is why hate crimes towards queer people have increased many fold. It’s why the life expectancy of black trans women is thirty-five. It’s why the queer cousin you have is afraid to go to school. War is profitable, and the church will happily pay to ensure anyone unlike them never gets a steady breath.

Sex work comes into this via the obvious-we’re composed of people society deems socially unacceptable, doing something incredibly “heinous” and immoral. Our actions often lead us to using contraceptives, which refute the beautiful gift of life. It leads to us taking proper precautions against STIs, which we should take as our punishment for being so wicked. If the entire country standing by during the AIDs crisis wasn’t enough to convince you, look at the lightning speed with which monkey pox was deemed “the gay virus” and something only queers could get. Organized religion influences these decisions with mountains of money that hasn’t seen an audit since Cotton Mather and Increase Mather decided witch hunts were a great way to seize property.

It’s easy to corral people and whip your devotees into a frenzy if you say the “enemy” is a sinful, plague carrying affront to god.

Except that doesn’t always work, so they decide to kill us via a multitude of tiny cuts. Applying pressure to payment processors, encouraging raging preachers to have us killed, getting local politicians to say they’ll “line us up against the wall and kill that grooming scum”. Couple this with those arcane algorithms, and what you get are darkly violent hymns and war chants not seen since the first crusade.

An army without ever lifting a finger, ready to kill and die against an “enemy” that is starving, homeless and dying in debt.

Nice “godly folks”, that lot.

We, as a community, have thus been forced into being nomads ever gazing over our shoulders.

Where We Lay Our Weary Heads Is Home

The hand wringing is earnestly the worst part.

“Oh, it’s not our fault,” the platform you’ve spent the better part of a year building an audience on will say, “We simply have to appeal to advertisers. It’s to deal with all those-you knows-that used the platform the wrong way! Surely you understand!”

They say this with a crooked smile, then follow it up with those age old lies.

“It’s for your own good” they say, “Think of the children!”

I’ve been told this at least once every four months since 2018, when Tumblr decided to do a NSFW purge. That I, and people like me, were an affront to common sensibilities even with proper age restrictions and law compliant means taken to ensure our content never reached the wrong people. Even with extensive tagging options. I’ve lost the energy to care when I hear news of a platform taking measures to exterminate us at this point. Instead, I take a breath and begin setting up counter measures, alternative platforms and more right away.

It’s an exhausting life, and several times I have asked myself if any of this was truly worth it. I could simply get a nine-to-five somewhere. I could bleed for the machine, this insurmountable and horrid thing I’ve no chance of beating. But then the idea passes and I’m logging into some new site a peer assured me would tolerate us, if only for a while. I give a silent prayer to gods I don’t believe in the people there are nice. I begin again, anew. As do countless others just like me. People who take every precaution to obey the law, to gate our content, to ensure we can live while also chasing the dream we’ve fallen into countless times.

At least for a while, we’re safe.

Make absolutely no mistake-an assault on NSFW/sex work content is first and foremost an assault on marginalized communities. The slide into overtly fascist politics in the west has increased these deplatforming methods over the last twenty years, though such policies were already being murmured well before 9/11. To engage in deplatforming communities deemed a threat to the American ideal-meaning anyone who wasn’t white and cishet-ensured that the machine got to keep running for a bit longer. The rise of the NSA, the horrendously invasive Patriot Act (followed by Biden’s recent homeland defense bill) and the counterproductive signing of SESTA/FOSTA gave the federal government unlimited power to attack us.

It doesn’t matter if you’re “one of the good ones”. There are no “good ones” in the eyes of fascists, save the ones they put themselves in the ground.

How many of your friends have left the industry and community already? How many queers do you know trying to “reach across the isle” politically, if only to ensure their own safety? How many times do you hear allies making completely tone deaf statements, as though they speak for the safety of us all?

How many more cis-het white saviors preaching from a mountain of our dead do we have to suffer before we realize the only people that can speak for us is us? That realization, if you’ve been in the community long enough, has been a forever ringing alarm bell that falls on ignoring ears within the greater political sphere of the US. Sure, some of us have run for office. Some of us have even been successful, despite character and real assassination attempts. But due to division within the community, the belching of dollars from the beast and lies, its rare policies and laws last more than eight meager years. Appeals to higher authority fail unless the circumstances are merited as a threat to national security.

As of this writing, we’ve endured well documented police brutality and violence towards the BIPOC community, queer people and sex workers at a rate equitable to genocide. Our president’s answer to that was “more police”.

So we’re all nomads. We word things carefully. We set up the equivalent of a community watch to keep ourselves safe, to keep our content platformed, and to ensure we can at least feed ourselves. This endless caravan grows weary, but we continue to march. For the alternative is to die in the wastes, another body for the pyre, the political machinations of people who will view our suffering from the pages of the local news.

To be in the NSFW/sex work/BIPOC community is to exist in a constant state of kinetic transition, praying that communications hold out another day. Because without them, you’d surely perish.

The cure is a united front based in fact checking, tracking of the financial routes of our oppressors, and being incredibly fucking loud and annoying to those that want us dead. Even louder than we already are, even more preposterously incapable of being marketable than we have ever dreamed. To fight means to wave your “freak flags” as high as we can and demand nothing less than control of the reigns of our lives.

“Become ungovernable” is a meek statement for people unaware of how deep corporate ties affect politics. No, I say unto you “become unmarketable”, be the radical boogeyman of gender identity and flesh that they fear you are.

Become the nightmare of the beast, wander no longer. Run your roots deep within your community, and never bend to the wind that blows from that beast. Let your will and being crack the concrete jungles of corporate america. Shatter their gilded halls with a thousand vines they can’t kill or ignore, that no amount of pruning will ever make pretty their modernist sensibilities again.

For our communities have always been. We always will be. They can kill us, they can strike at us, they can deplatform us. We persist regardless. Their genocidal ideals are modern machinations, and all machines are overcome by growth at some point.

And the caravan has grown so sagged with exhaustion, hasn’t it?

A Smirk In The Dark

You’re still probably just standing by.

But, I hope these words laid a few things bare. I hope it got across just how dire the situation is-and the length some of us are willing to go. But go on, ignore it all. Pretend I’m just some crazy person on the internet.

I’ll think of you fondly as I wake every morning. As I continue to stand against all of this, surrounded by my BIPOC/queer/disabled/sex work siblings I link arms with. Long after you’re gone, after the machine has used you and discarded your desiccated husk, I’ll look down. I’ll crack a grin.

I’ll still be fighting.

-j

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#splathousefic #splathousefiction #repost