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Have you ever seen a violinist going APESHIT?!

Be sure to check out IAmDSharp!

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I’m so fucking angry I can barely function right now

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Humans as a collective need food to be produced. Not every human needs to work in agriculture.

Humans as a collective need buildings to live and work in. Not every human needs to work in construction.

Humans as a collective need medical services to stay healthy. Not every human needs to work in medicine.

Humans as a collective need clothes to wear. Not every human needs to work in textile manufacture.

Humans as a collective need babies to be born to continue the species. Not every human needs to reproduce.

Just because someone needs to do a certain thing for humankind to survive doesn't mean everyone has to do it.

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Childfree people have been saying for a long time that yes actually, we're marginalized, we're harassed and pressured by family and partners to produce children we don't want, we have a limited dating pool, we face medical discrimination, we have to crowdsource finding doctors who will respect our bodily autonomy, coworkers expect us to overwork ourselves because we "don't have family to care for" (ignoring partners or elders who may need us), and are socially penalized in ways small and large because we choose or are instinctively compelled not to have children . . .

And if there's any silver lining to fascistic pro-natalists like JD Vance and his ilk going mask-off - enacting laws that aim to trap us into marriage and childbearing, saying that childfree people don't have a stake in society or the future, calling for our votes to literally be counted less than those of people with biological children - I hope it's calling to widespread attention what we've been screaming about forever, and that people outside our community listen.

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hi. just a reminder

your anger is not ugly your fury's not too loud

something that should’ve been safe wasn't but you had to smile through it like the curves were the shape of healing.

of course you’re mad and on fire. that heat kept you going.

it's what kept you alive.

love, someone who knows your spark isn't the problem

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normalize fictional characters saying they don’t want children and then not inevitably changing their minds later in the narrative~

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...Maybe because a lot of people are pressured into having children even if they don't want to since a large part of society treat not having a child like some sort of moral failing?

Like, if you want to have kids? Amazing, I'll always support parents and children with all I have.

If someone don't want to have kids? That's also amazing, it's not a moral obligation to do so after all.

But there're so many stories where a character want to have children. And so many more with character who said they don't want children only to end up changing their mind afterward.

And that's fine, but just like how people that want children enjoy seeing themselves on screen, childless people would also want to see themselves in stories as well.

...is something wrong with that?

normalize fictional characters saying they don’t want children and then not inevitably changing their minds later in the narrative~

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[ you meet god and she is mostly dead fish. ]

a comic based on this post:

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Because of how common it is for men to be absolute douchebags, if you just show women basic decency, you'll have an enormous advantage over a large percentage of men.

That should make it easy, right?

Well, not quite.

Being nice actually isn't that easy. There are actually many rules about how to be nice the correct way, which men often fail at.

You must not take advantage of other men being douchebags. If you're less careful about how your actions affect women because you know you only have to be nice in comparison, then you're a douchebag. If you automatically assume that any man chosen over you is a douchebag, then you're a douchebag.

You must be nice in a way that actually helps her. That doesn’t include doing random favors that she never asked for. If you actually want to be seen as a nice guy, learn about the oppression women experience and what you can do to actually help.

No one is born a douchebag. When men are douchebags, it's because of social conditioning. It's not possible that they were socially conditioned to be douchebags and you weren't. Being nice requires actively resisting that social conditioning and consistently making sure you're not one of them.

You are allowed to decide who you feed your connections with. You can choose to feed your connections with women who you find attractive, with women who touch you more often, with women who you perceive as more likely to have sex with you, and with women who boost your ego. But when it comes to basic human decency, you must show that to everyone.

Being nice prevents turning off women who otherwise would have liked you. But it won't cause women to like you who otherwise didn't. If a woman rejects you and you try to win her over by being nice, it won't work.

Requiring people to like you is one of the douchebaggiest things you can do. If one man is openly proud to be a douchebag and knows damn well that people are going to hate him for it, and another man is nice and expects to be liked for it, it's completely reasonable for women to feel safer around the one who believes that she's allowed to not like him.

If you have trauma, it's only natural that you'll occasionally hurt others in response to it. And when a man hurts women in response to his trauma, it's often normalized. If you want to be seen as nice, you must put a conscious effort into making sure you're not doing this.

Even if a woman earns your disrespect through her actions, your disrespect must be in direct response to those actions. You must not show her aggression that you wouldn't show in response to a man doing the same thing. You also must not give her a free pass if you wouldn't give a free pass to a man.

Avoid over-the-top gestures. Other people's struggles are not yours to solve. If you're able to do something that's a big help for someone and only a minor inconvenience for you, you should do it. If you're not able to do something consistently without expecting something in return, it's better not to do it. If someone isn't a close friend of yours, you have to reason to make their problems become yours.

Unless you've already established trust with her, do not offer to do any favors for her that require her to be alone with you or otherwise vulnerable.

Do not insist on doing a favor. If you insist, you'll only be showing her that you don't respect boundaries.

You will encounter women who take advantage of you in response to you being nice to them. But it's not exclusive to women. Taking advantage of people who are nice and who struggle to set boundaries is something studies show that humans in general do and is not specific to any gender.

You will encounter women who actually like douchebags. Just look at how many women voted for Donald Trump and still to this day celebrate him. But again, it's not exclusive to women. Liking a douchebag because "he hates the same people I do" and "the leopards won't eat MY face" is something humans in general do and is not specific to any gender. Also, becoming a douchebag will not cause her to like you.

Sometimes, it's not possible to be nice to everyone. Being nice to one person can be inherently hurtful to another person. When you start developing social skills and becoming more popular, this will be more likely. There will be times when you have to choose between people. Sometimes, it's beef that you can stay out of. For example, you can stay out of beef between on-again-off-again friends, or between two people who hate each other after dating the same person. But if it's between an abuse victim and their abuser, or between an oppressed person and a bigot, being neutral is impossible.

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Discussion

What do other children's rights activists think about advocating for mandatory free parenting classes for new parents?

I think the community should do more to ensure that all parents know how to be good parents and are held accountable to prevent child neglect or abuse.

However I'm also mindful of the fact that indigenous communities often have their children unjustly taken away by social services because of racism and colonialism. I'm interested in solutions that can improve the children's rights situation while considering the violence that cps can inflict on marginalised groups. Do we know any activists who have some solutions in mind around this?

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Fun and Whimsical ideas to block or barricade streets during a protest

Bbq on tram line!

Tire barricades

Bricks! Either as a wall or as fun smaller structure (equally annoying tbh)

Garbage + Bins!!

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Images from LA's resistance to a Fascist goon squad (aka ICE) yesterday.

"Putting up a fierce fight at the opening of the poem is the way to stop the rest of the poem from coming true.

The fight for migrants and to stop ICE is the same fight as the fight to protect LGBT people (citizens or not), reproductive autonomy, and everyone else the fascists want to fuck with.

Not in some abstracted ‘we're all in this together’ way but directly and literally. When they come for one of us, and realize it won't happen without a fight, they lose their nerve to come for other people.

It is worth standing up for migrants for their own sake, because they are people, but it's more than that too.

Whether you approve of their actions or not, they are earnest activists who are directly and materially opposed to capitalism and have paid a high price for their commitment.

Furthermore, again whether you approve of their actions or not, rowdy protesters are on the same side as peaceful protesters in a way that the police, systemically, will never be. To ally with the police over actual allies is disastrous strategy.

Will the state react strongly to strong resistance? Yes. This doesn't mean that strong resistance isn't warranted.

You have no reason to believe me, and I have my biases, but I have been studying the nature of street rebellion and activism and revolution for decades, as essentially a full time job. I don't have clear answers about what works but I have clear ideas of what doesn't.

Dividing protestors into "good" and "bad" is what the state wants us to do. Rowdy and peaceful protestors learning how to coexist and develop strategies that dovetail with one another is what threatens power.

When granddads deliver sandwiches to kids throwing bricks, the state shakes. When [we’re all out there] together, refusing to let us be divided, the state buckles."

-Margaret Killjoy

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my favourite thing about history (and the reason why social history matters to me above anything else) is the reminder that there's no emotion i've felt, no grief or trauma, no joy or laughter, that hasn't been experienced by other people across time and space, and the idea of slipping into another life so different on the surface and yet so fundamentally similar to my own, and understanding them as a life like my own, with inner worlds that can't be easily articulated, with loved ones and favourite foods and days they woke up having slept wrong and the acute experiences of standing in a quiet room and watching the light catch on dust floating in the air, of the smell outside after it rains heavily, of mornings after having dreamt something feverish and strange, or the knowledge of an impending loss and trying to prepare for it emotionally. peeling fruit and giving a piece to a friend. being awake at an hour that feels like you're the only person alive in the world. that feeling when you know you need to eat and that you're hungry but you just don't find it appealing at all and it kind of makes you feel nauseous. i like imagining people in all different places and times experiencing those things, it makes me feel less alone and afraid of myself and my experience feels less daunting if that makes sense. others have lived with experiences like this too, and do, and will.

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Just a little light reading,,,

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I am small and I can't do very much. That is the despair of an individual in a big and violent world. But the plants teach me it is okay to be small. Everything is either small, or made of things that are small. We are all connected. Symbiosis.

So, on the subject of bugs.

It is the fourth summer of the Meadow. My plants grow strong and wild and cover more space than ever before. I have worked to eradicate the invasive lawn grass and carefully curate large clumps of only native species (with a few esteemed naturalized weeds allowed---I have no quarrel with Chicory, it has a positive effect on the ecosystem).

I have tall, huge native Field Thistles, multitudes of tough and aggressive evening primrose, wild strawberry spreading everywhere, a dozen vigorous gray-headed coneflowers, giant clumps of cup-plant, and so many asters and goldenrods that I've had to start targeting them in my weeding.

Yes, yes, I have the showy ones like purple coneflowers and black-eyed susans, but I also encourage and cultivate weird little weeds that are too inconspicuous or ugly to be often planted on purpose. White avens, lanceleaf frogfruit, nettle-leaf vervain.

There are too many plants. I'll spend forever listing them all. What is really interesting, is what's happened with the bugs.

Every year, there has been a much bigger variety and population of insects. I am both seeing many more species, and seeing the same species in much, much larger numbers. Even on the same plants that were already there 4 years ago, I can see way more bugs.

Flower flies, for instance. There are tiny yellow and black flies known as flower flies that are very beneficial for gardeners, because their larvae are predators that attack aphids. It used to be that I could often see a dozen, but now I see hundreds of them every time I go outside!

Or wasps. There are more species of wasps than I possibly could have imagined. It used to be that I would only see the reddish paper wasps, the ones that make big paper nests in the eaves of your house, but now, there are dozens of different wasps. Some are black, others black and white, others black and yellow, others black and brown, and they come in all different sizes. A bunch of blue-black wasps with white stripes live in the log next to my pond.

I identified them and looked up the species, and they had not been studied at all since the 1960's. Supposedly they are solitary species, but several different wasps have made nests inside the log right next to each other. That's the first interesting thing. The second interesting thing is that the nests were first inhabited last summer, and the same species of wasp still lives in them, so their town has been inhabited for multiple years instead of being abandoned when the larvae emerge. Has the next generation taken over the old nests? I am observing something about the species that is not known to science.

Wasps are hated and feared, but my wasps have never been anything but peaceful and polite, and they have so much beauty and importance in the ecosystem.

And the bees! I am observing bees this year that I had never even heard of before. Many of them are so tiny, I doubt they could even reach the nectar in large flowers like purple coneflower. What if the small, inconspicuous flowers are essential for smaller pollinators like the tiny bees? That would make sense. Different flowers evolved to attract different bees.

Beetles, ants, leafhoppers, flies, moths, butterflies, all kinds of bugs. Specific plants attract specific bugs, but it is not the plants individually that restore insect biodiversity, it is the way the plants interact and form a bigger ecosystem.

What I mean is, as my garden grew, the increase in bugs was not linear in relationship to the plants, it was exponential. The combination of the many different plants into an ecosystem attracted many more bugs than would be expected from the sum of each plant individually.

I remember the emptiness and barrenness before. I see it around me when I visit other places. The disappearance of bugs. The insect apocalypse. It's so clear to me now. The cause is biotic homogenization. I call it plant sameness.

Everywhere around me, landscapes have been made into expanses of the same few plants. But when plant sameness is replaced by variety and diversity, many plants interacting in many different ways, everything changes.