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[Image description start. The three panel, "Do you think Margaret Thatcher had girl power" meme, now edited so that the first panel shows the TV host asking: "Do you think you are protecting democracy by voting blue no matter who?" The second panel shows someone responding, "Yes, of course." Panel 3 has the TV host asking, "Do you think you are protecting democracy by announcing to all politicians who will ever exist from now on that they can commit as many genocides as they want and they'll still get elected because you literally don't care what they do as long as they don't do it to you?". Image description end.]

I explicitly encourage everyone to download and repost this and use it as a reaction image. You can copy and paste the image descritption into your post. If you're on mobile, if your phone has a notepad app, you can save it there.

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And the fandom argues that she's not doing the Happy Slaves trope at all...

Okay, I talk about about the flaws of fantasy racism and fantasy oppression done badly on this blog, for good reason; authors who have not actually done their due diligence in learning about the real world roots of oppression, of how systemic racism works and is upheld by oppressive systems for the benefit of oppressiors, who instead think that racism really truly is based on some quantifiable, *dangerous difference* between groups always, always fail to make meaningful racism allegories, because they end up upholding the very systems they are attempting to be against.

If you don't do your reading, if you don't better yourself, if you don't actually listen to and read and engage with Black people who are talking about both their everyday experiences with racism and Anti-blackness, if you don't read up on the history of racism and slavery, if you think that oppression is based on real dangerous facts and not propaganda....

if you try to write a fantasy racism, or scifi slavery story where oppression happens for a good, biology-based or mechanical-based reason?

You end up writing books that claim to be standing against racism and slavery, and end up unironically upholding slavery and racist conventions, quite literally quoting anti-abolitionist propaganda.

Thanks to humble bundle, (if you use that link, make sure you use Custom Donation to give 95% to charity instead of 1%) here's an extremely relevant quotes from the seventh book in a scifi series by Martha Wells released in 2023, that people claim "is so progressive and treats the slaves in the setting like real people!"

So, for some context on the exact racist tropes in question, here is an amazing video I've posted before and will no doubt post again:

If this video link doesn't automatically go to the 6 minute mark, please scroll there for the context of this post, and if you have not seen the full video, or not seen it recently, I encourage you to watch the whole thing through from start to finish.

Especially if you are a fan of Martha Wells, do not go any further in this post without watching the segment of video going from the 6 minute mark to at minimum, to the 13 minute and 48 second mark.

That's around 6 minutes, so if you're a fan who doesn't like criticism of your favorite series, and you don't have six minutes to watch/listen or read along to the transcript of the above video, save this post as a draft before going any further.

I have bolded certain sentences for emphasis.

Ratthi had asked me, “So you could”—he waggled his fingers at the side of his head—“to this one, set it free?” The humans were all watching my shuttle drone, like it was my face. That’s not disturbing at all. I said, “They’re not all going to be like Three.” What I didn’t want to say was that even though Three had saved my life, I still wouldn’t have left it alone with my humans, whatever threat assessment said, if ART-prime hadn’t been there to keep an eye on it. We hadn’t known Three very long, and we hadn’t seen it under much stress. It was still learning that it could make choices. We wouldn’t know to what extent it was trustworthy until it made some more choices and acted on them. Iris had her arms folded, her expression deep in thought. She had grown up with ART, and probably knew a lot about bot relationships. (She probably knew more about bot relationships than ART did.)

But SecUnits aren’t bots, we’re constructs, and we don’t have relationships like that. Governor modules don’t encourage that kind of thing.

(And I know Three had talked to Ratthi and Amena about the two other SecUnits in its task group, one of which the Targets had directly killed, and the other they had indirectly killed by forcing a human to order it to stay behind on the drop box station. (SecUnits have to stay within a certain range of our clients or the governor modules fry your brain and it is not pretty.) I know Three felt … whatever toward those two units, but I have lots of feelings toward the imaginary humans on my media, and I am perfectly clear on the fact that those relationships are one-sided.

There is literally no way to tell if the feelings among those three SecUnits were reciprocal in that situation, even for Three, because governor module.) (And frankly, the potential to blame all humans for killing its possibly apocryphal friends makes Three’s threat assessment rise even higher.) Tarik was slumped back in the pilot’s seat with one knee hooked over the armrest (how can that be comfortable) and his expression was opaque, but I also got the feeling he wasn’t unhappy to hear my reasons for why I wouldn’t be doing the thing. Ratthi was unhappy. He said, “Yes, but it seems … To not offer one the choice, given the opportunity…” He waved a hand. “I’m sorry, I believe you that it’s a bad idea, but I can’t help talking about it anyway. I’ll try not to, I don’t want you to feel like I’m pressing you to do something you don’t think is safe.”

Ratthi knows more about constructs than any human here.

The problem was, 2.0 had been in a unique position with Three. There was no way to replicate that here, even if I didn’t know that just replicating conditions doesn’t always give an identical or even similar result. I said, “We don’t know if they have a SecSystem or HubSystem, or whatever their branded equivalent is, on their shuttle. If I was willing to do this I’d have to take the controlling system over first to make sure the governor module didn’t trigger during the process. Then I’d have to kill its clients to cover up what I’d done.” Well, probably. And wiping out even a little part of the reinforced Barish-Estranza explorer group was not an option. Okay, it was an option, but it was not an option Seth or Iris or Mensah or any of the other humans seriously wanted to consider. Both Preservation and the University of Mihira and New Tideland would not be okay with it, for one thing. For the other, it was strategically iffy, now that their reinforcements had arrived. It led to a scenario where, at best, we wiped out the whole task group and then had to hide the evidence and just hoped none of the humans felt bad and reported it once we got out of the system. Whatever, we’re not doing it unless they try to do it to us first. Just to make sure everybody understood, I continued, “Even if I did free the SecUnit, I might have to kill it anyway, if it goes rogue and tries to murder all of you.” “I see,” Iris said. She looked like she was thinking through about half a dozen scenarios at once and none of them were panning out the way she wanted. Or maybe I was projecting. There are no easy answers, as Dr. Bharadwaj says. And this will never be an easy question.

So, to summarize:

Character A asks The Protagonist to free a random slave they've encountered.

The Protagonist replies "They won't all be like the last slave I freed, who I actually don't even trust, and I believe 100% there is a chance will go on a violent murderous rampage the second anything happens to set said slave off the deep end that I believe is inherently inevitable in all freed slaves who are not me., because I'm One Of The Good Ones (tm)"

The Protagonist then internally monologues about how this other feed slave claimed to have been friends with the other slaves in their group, but that's literally just the exact same thing as The Protagonist having attachments to fictional characters in TV shows, and asserts that any relationship Three perceived they had with their fellow slaves in their group was just them projecting a one-dimensional, parasocial relationship that was not actually real or meaningful, and that fake parasocial relationship could lead this slave to go around murdering all the people who kept them enslaved and killed their friends who The Protagonist says with Authorial Authority weren't actually their friends, because its impossible for slaves to have relationships with their fellow slaves.

The Protagonist says "If I freed that slave, I would have to kill all the slave owners in that shuttle. Plus, even if I freed that slave, what if they went on a violent rampage and tried to murder all of you good guy slave owners? I might end up having to kill that slave anyways if they tried to kill you, which they probably would, because slaves who aren't me are inherently dangerous and violent!"

Character B is *glad* to hear they won't be freeing another slave from slavery, but doesn't say this outloud to avoid hurting the Cinnamon Roll Slave Owner (aka Character A's) feelings.

Character A is unhappy, but says in therapy-speak: "I am sad we're not gonna free another slave, but I won't try to pressure you into freeing other slaves, because you, a former slave, know what is best for us slave-owners to keep us safe from the scary, inherently violent slaves."

The Protagonist then quotes random Wise Therapist Character C, and directly tells the audience in therapyspeak for legitimacy: "There are no easy answers to "should I free slaves from slavery?" and the question of "should I free this slave?" will never be an easy question to ask."

The Narrator Says So A really obvious sign that something has authorial endorsement is when the narrator themself endorses it. This is especially true with a third-person omniscient narrator. As the name implies, these narrators know everything, and so if they say something, it is assumed to be true within the context of the story. You can see this in the novel Space Opera, where the premise is that every sapient species must prove its right to exist by competing in a music contest. That’s absurd, but the omniscient narrator still tells us this is a good system. That gives the Music Contest to Avoid Genocide unquestionable authorial endorsement. Even if the narrator isn’t omniscient, their opinion carries a great deal of weight. In limited narration, the POV character is the narrator, and readers will trust that character unless they’re given a really good reason not to. This is doubly true if the POV character is the protagonist, which they usually are.

This entire scene exists in the *seventh book* of this series, released in 2023, to show that the Protagonist is 100% correct in how they've freed so few slaves, and gone out of their way to violently, brutally murder every other slave they've encountered, because in this series, as stated explicitly above, slaves lives inherently have less value than their slave owners, and any slave who's not The Protagonist(tm) can't actually be trusted around slave owners, because anything could set them off into a violent rampage.

"There's no point in freeing this slave, because The Protagonist would end up having to murder that slave anyway if they freed them, because slaves are just inherently dangerous and unreasonable and want to kill all slave owners!"

and this, according to the narrative spoken directly to the audience via the Always Right Protagonist, is a 100% true thing in this universe, and the author believes whole heartedly because she's using the allegory of enslaved robots vs humans, when the entire point is that allegories and metaphors inherently mirror and reflect the author's views on the real world equivalent (otherwise, why, exactly are you writing a direct metaphor?), which is *literal chattel slavery experienced by Black folk in America and British Colonization*

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@novella-november

I genuinely don't understand how Martha Wells thought dehumanizing cyborgs as a matter of course, and then never acknowledging the absolute nightmare it would be to exist as a cyborg in an ultra-capitalist hellscape would be, is a good idea. Obviously she doesn't care about disabled people, but like, you're not even going to care about the integrity of your setting? It's a capitalist hellscape, and you've got disabled people in the form of cyborgs, but you're never even going to take 5 seconds to think about how horrific it'd be to exist as a cyborg in this setting? And thus aknowledge how horrific it is to exist as a disabled person in real life under capitalism? Parts of your body that you can't live without literally do not belong to you. You literally cannot even replace the batteries on your prosthetic leg without being sued to death. Every step of the way you are dehumanized and treated as a second-class citizen.

sigh.

Pro tip, wannabe scifi writers: before you decide to write about cyborgs, you have to actually fucking care about disabled people and the struggles we face. Otherwise your story's gonna be ableist bullshit.

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Martha Wells said on July 2nd 2020:

The way of getting around the idea of enslaving humans is by claiming that they are not human, when actually they may not be human, but they are people.

Let's. break this sentence down.

Part 1: We admit the slaves are human:

The way of getting around the idea of enslaving humans

Part 2: We admit they are being dehumanized to justify slavery

is by claiming that they are not human,

Part 3: um. wait. so. so it's not actually dehuanization because they aren't actually human at all? Even though you literally just did admit they were humans who have been dehumanized?

when actually they may not be human,

Part 4: yeah for some gods forsaken reason she's now saying that the slaves aren't human at all.

but they are people.

Martha Wells is so racist she fucks up the single most basic sentence in the entire world about how dehumanization is used to justify slavery. By claiming it's not *actually* racist propaganda, it's actually true that the slaves are literally not human.

The thing that is being used to justify enslaving them is actually true. This is her argument. That it's not actually racist and ableist propaganda it's just basic biology.

Because she thinks cyborgs aren't human because "biology says so" because they've been mutilated at birth and have had computers installed in their brains.

So it's not actually racist propaganda to justify slavery it's just true.

what in the fuck.

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and, yes, the revelation that the most visible enslaved people in The Murderbot Diaries are cyborgs instead of robots does actually change the whole thing and make it all even worse.

Because first it was just biological essentialism saying "Well they're not human so it's okay to enslave them and murder them like they're mindless objects" and that's fucking bad enough.

But now it's "yes, we purposefully mutiltated these people at birth to violently strip them of their humanity, so this makes it okay for us to enslave them. And the author agrees they're not human. The people who have been violently stripped of their humanity to justify enslaving them. Yeah, the author says they're not human. This is why it's okay to enslave them and murder them like they're mindless objects. Because they're "not human" because that's just "basic biology". Even though they are literally humans who have been mutilated at birth to justify enslaving them.".

Like. this on top of all of the dehumanzation she's already done of cyborgs in the fucking story. IT's so much worse now. so much worse. Because now she's asking you to agree that the dehumanzation of literal fucking humans is true. And wants us to agree with her that if you mutilate babies and put computers in their brains and give them cybernetic prosthetics it means they're not human.

this is Nazi shit. This is the shit all villains in scifi where the plot of teh story is cyborgs fighting for equal rights say. She is literally saying the villain shit like it's a good thing and expects us to go along with it!!Q!!

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in order to remove the slavery apologism from The Murderbot Diaries you have to literally change every single fucking aspect of the story and the characters until it's fucking unrecognizable. The revelation that Murderbot is in fact a fucking cyborg, not an anthroid, and Martha Wells just purposefully fucking used confusing made up new shit to pretend the opposite for this whole gods damned time.........................................................................................................................do you understand how much worse this makes everything that was already bad enough? The slavery apologism is now literally inescapable. It is baked into every atom of this world and she wants us to agree with it. She wants us to agree that dehumanization to justify slavery is correct because ~that's just how biology works~

You cannot do anything to remove the slavery apologism from this series without taking the entire thing apart peice by peice and it won't even remotely be the same story by the time you're done, and the characters literally cannot even remotely be the same people.

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Fuck it. Meant to post this 5 days ago but got interrupted by a thunderstorm and now I'm just too enraged to finish writing it. So have an incomplete post. I fucking hate ableism and ableists.

Martha Wells said in 2019 (live link here)

I think cyborg is technically correct but I feel like it comes with a standard set of mental images that don't match the story, so I avoid using it.

Oh oh see now it all makes sense. It makes so much sense why she refuses to just admit that Murderbot is a cyborg and goes so far out of her way to confuse people on purpose into thinking it's an anthroid.

Because those "standard set of mental images"?

Cyborgs fighting for equal rights.

The dehumanization and oppression of cyborgs being done by the villains, as a bad thing, because it's a bad fucking evil thing to do.

That's what the "standard set of mental images of cyborgs' are. Cyborgs fighting to have their humanity aknowledged. Cyborgs fighting against oppression and slavery and dehumanization.

All the things she would rather die than write about.

Because she does not want to write a story about slaves fighting for freedom. Because she thinks the slaves should just stay enslaved because that's just what their biology naturally dictates they should do.

It's not the villains dehumanizing Murderbot or any of the other enslaved cyborgs in this story.

Martha Wells the literaly one who wants to and is dehumanizing them. She is literally the one who thinks it's a good idea to dehumanize physically disabled people by claiming that implants and prosthetics disbar us from the category of human because it's "just the biological reality".

This is why she's been doing this to the Known Cyborgs (which she calls ""augmented humans"" to seem like it's something brand new she invented when it's fucking not) since literally book 1 with never a single fucking moment where we're allowed to forget that physically disabled people in this setting are literally considered subhuman Even By The Fucking Heroes.

Murderbot thinks of itself as not human because Murderbot represents Martha Wells' absolute fucking disdain for physically disabled people. She has Murderbot agree with the dehumanization because she wants us all to believe the dehumanization is good and normal and natural.

Murderbot does not identify as human specifically to help Martha Wells push the idea that physically disabled people are not human. A thing she's been shoving down our throats every single time we have to read the word "augmented human" used as a synonym for "physically disabled person with futuristic prosthetics of any kind" which is used as a fucking antonym for Real Human Being.

Because if you try to push back against this dehumanization of cyborgs who were mutilated at birth in order to justify enslaving them, then you are now violating Murderbot's autonomy as a character to identify how it wants. Because that's what Martha Wells wants.

Because she wants us all to agree with her that the bioliogicaly reality does just dictate that humans who've had prosthetics implanted into them simply cannot be considered human anymore beacuse well, it's just the biological reality!

She is literally the villain of every single science fiction story ever addressing the oppression of physically disabled people through cyborgs. She is literally repeating the Nazi rhetoric that the VILLAINS in these stories say to show how blatantly evil they are.

She is literally the one dehumanizing these enslaved cyborgs and pretedning that their dehumanization is normal and natural because it's "biologically dictated" because she thinks having implants in your brain means you cannot possibly be human anymore. And if you're a cyborg who was implanted with cybernetics when you were a baby then you can never have been considered human at all.

She's been pretending that Murderbot is "just" an anthroid this whole time to stop people from realizing that she's. Literally just dehumanizing enslaved disabled people. She's literally created an entire class of disposable people who she's claiming are not human and cannot possibly be human because look,? see? look at their brains! Look at thier bodies! They've had cybernetics implanted into them! That means they're not human! That means anyone who thinks they're still capable of being human is just a sentimental sappy fool who doesn't know any better because They Don't Understand Simple Biology.

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I understand your frustration with 'having prosthetics' = not human in media, but in the Murderbot Diaries, that isn't the case- augmented humans are humans that have had augments put into their brain, which is what allows them to access the feed in a similar way to SecUnits, and not in the way humans (purely human neural tissue) have to access it. This is explained in the first book through Gurathin. It's mostly used for work purposes than disability. It also increases their reaction time because it brings them closer to the speed time of a machine, iirc?

There are augments to the body itself in the book, but those augments connect back to the port in the spine.

A human with a prosthetic wouldn't count as an augmented human unless they had augmented their brain. That's why augmented humans, in the book, will have those ports at the back of their neck. Also, augmented humans aren't considered nonhuman. As far as I've read, augmented humans are relatively normal in their society, enough that our Murderbot can fit right in without being noticed.

I can't tell you to like the book but I hope you understand the world building a little more, and that the author is not being malicious.

I can tell you have not listened to a *single* physically disabled person who's talked about the literal constant dehumanization of physically disabled people in these books.

You are literally making things up in this ask. You are lying, either through forgetting what is actually in the books, which is likely, or on purpose to downplay the ableism and dehumanization.

Why do you think I only have a problem with the dehumanization because I "just don't understand the worldbuilding". I'm not confused about anything.

The author has been ableist for decades now. I know this might be a radical concept to people who've only read The Murderbot Diaries but Martha Wells is not some brand new writer who popped up out of nowhere in 2017, she has been publishing since the 90s, and I've read all but 2 of her fucking books. She has been ableist this whole fucking time and the literal constant ableist dehumanization in The Murderbot Diaries that you don't recognize isn't anything new.

Instead of trying to "explain" to me why the ableism is okay by making crap up that's literally not true, how about actually listen when physically disabled people point out ableist dehumanization?

Search my blog for the words "pie chart".

Search my blog for the word "augmented".

Go actually learn about disability activism and what dehumanization looks like. There is literally not one single fucking moment in this entire series where we are ever allowed to forget that physically disabled people, cyborgs, augmented humans, are literally considered a separate category from normal, "real" humans.

Including literally all of the "units" who are actually all fucking cyborgs who have been dehumanized to justify enslaving them, straight from the horse's mouth. And then because they were all mutilated and have extensive prosthetics, Martha Wells, Known Fucking Bigot Who Worships Biological Essentialism, wants us to agree with her that this "proves" they're all nonhuman and couldn't ever possibly be considered human. Because they have prosthetics!

Instead of trying to lecture me maybe actually listen to what I am talking about and listen to the other physically disabled people who've pointed out the dehumanization. It literally starts in book 1 and then never improves. I was put off by it in book 1 but assumed it was on purpose and would get dealt with. But no, it's literally just there because Martha Wells thinks that if you have prosthetics you're not human anymore.

I even turned anons back on so you can apologize after you spend a week or two doing actual research. And yes I do genuinely expect you to spend more than a week thinking about this. Not just 5 seconds of going with your ableist gut instinct. Do. Genuine. Research. Look for the other people who've been talking about this problem since the first book came out in 2017 and listen to them since you don't want to listen to me.

You *literally* just dehumanized the disabled people in the series in your own ask without any sense of awareness or irony. The only people considered humans are people without any prosthetics in their brain. Do you understand the problem yet.

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Martha Wells says she wrote a story about a robot who doesn't want to be human.

But what she actually did was write the Mammy trope, and then made the character physically disabled, and then used this physical disability to justify dehumanizing it, which in-universe is used to justify enslaving it, and is now asking you, the readers, to agree with her, the real ableist racist white woman from Texas, and the in-universe slave owners, that physically disabled people are not human if you mutilate us at birth and put microchips in our brains to control us.

Murderbot literally not a "robot who doesn't want to be human".

It's a fucking cyborg that was mutilated at birth, dehumanized to justify enslaving it, and brainwashed into thinking it's subhuman.

Agreeing that Murderbot cannot possibly be fucking human because it's physically disabled isn't progressive it's literally just literal Nazi shit.

And Murderbot doesn't even get to be aware of any of this shit to *reclaim* a nonhuman identity. It's literally just fucking brainwashed to think its life is worth less than that of "real" humans.

Nothing here is progressive. It's literally just actual real Nazi levels of dehumanization of Black people and physically disabled people.

You are literally required to watch this fucking video if you read The Murderbot Diaries.

One of its slave owners literally calls it mom after it tells her to go to bed!

You literally cannot write about violently dehumanized and enslaved cyborg characters and then pat yourself on the back for writing about "a robot who doesn't want to be human".

You objectively did not fucking write about a robot! You are literally just disgustingly racist and ableist and are dehumanizing real fucking minorities and asking everyone to agree with you that this dehumanization is technically correct because "~it's just basic biology~"

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Party like a ground sloth, because it’s Fossil Friday! This image, snapped circa 1957 depicts giant sloths on display in the Museum. During the Pleistocene, a wide array of ground sloths lumbered across North and South America. Some, like the island-dwelling Megalocnus rodens, evolved to be long-distance swimmers. Others, like the mighty Megatherium, were among the largest land mammals to ever live. The biggest ground sloths could have weighed up to 8,800 lbs (4,000 kg)—the size of an elephant! Most of these mammals died out at the end of the Pleistocene. There is also evidence that ground sloths and early humans used the same caves, but not necessarily at the same time. See fossils of giant ground sloths like Lestodon in the Museum’s Hall of Primitive Mammals! Plan your visit.

Photo: Image no. 324981 / © AMNH Library

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Happy Indigenous Peoples Day

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hi! hope you don't mind the ask, i stumbled upon your blog and really appreciate your dedication to accessibility! i've been posting more images lately on tumblr and had a question about proper images descriptions. when there's text in an image and that text has spelling mistakes or emoji's, what's the proper way for writing that in the image description? should i included the writing errors and emoji's as written, or clean them up so it's easier for a screen reader can read it easier? thanks in advance!

Thanks for the ask :) I usually correct the misspellings, so the words are pronounced correctly by the screen-reader, and then add something like, "with the words purposefully misspelled for comedic effect", and you can then spell out the misspelling if it's particularly notable / a recurring meme.

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STOP assigning pre-modern characters the trait “would commit tax fraud” without understanding how hard tax fraud was back in the days when a tax collector would physically come to your estate and assess your sitch. Do you have any idea how easy kids these days have it? You can just claim a few fake deductions or lie on a form and be a tax criminal. Your ancestors and fantasy faves had to work for those pennies.

Look at this house. This house has no mortar so it can be collapsed or moved to avoid taxation. That’s the sort of innovation I need to be seeing before you can call anyone in a feudal society a tax fraudster. They need to be hiding warehouses of goods, shoving grandpa in the basement to dodge the censusman, starting small regional wars, fleeing their villages in a constant semi-nomadic race against the forces of government, registering twins as a single child, or putting their life on the line to sell blackmarket bread. Come back when you have some tax fraud I can respect, not just a guy who looks kind of sleazy and sometimes does paperwork.

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why bother caring about the environment when 1. It’s so obviously a lost cause and 2. There’s definitely going to be a nuclear war?

And what are you doing about it Anon? Learn about ecological restoration or get out of my way.

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otherwise known as the vast majority of liberal zionists

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when a character i love and care for has to face the consequences of their previous actions

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chonkster

Medium: colored pencil, ultra-fine-point artist pens