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flags don’t become a symbol for a movement unless they’re widely accepted. I made that flag to reflect my own values, it’s my artwork. it’s up to the people to decide how they use it. I don’t expect everyone to want to use it or for it to be “officially” adopted as the symbol of the movement. I’m not the authority on fat liberation. I actually like that the flag I designed makes people uncomfortable. I feel like that aligns with what I know about fat liberation. yeah, it will poke at insecurities for some people, but so does the word “fat.” I know folks who can’t even say that word, they have to use euphemism. that’s the reason FAT is front and center in the name of our movement. one major pillar of fat liberation is to not play into respectability politics. we are about taking up space, rejecting the idea of being a “good fatty.” this movement is for people who call themselves BAD FATTIES, fat bitches, fat freaks, whales, and deathfats. our mentality as a movement is “we don’t make ourselves smaller to be digestible, you can choke.” I took those values and applied it to the flag. and I like that it’s tongue in cheek with a bit of humor! the group of activists that began the fat liberation movement called their group the Fat Underground for the initials “F.U.” !! and I wanted to capture their spirit in this flag. the KILLER whale is a play on stereotype that also represents liberation. we’re taking away the power of an insult by embracing the majesty of the creatures we’re compared to. killer whales are fiercely protective of their community. so if the folks who look at that flag and assume it’s mean, they’re not understanding what this movement is even about and frankly, I’m not concerned about that. the people who find their way into the movement will eventually realize what it means. as for your comment about being taken seriously: any flag representing fatness will come off as a joke to people who don’t believe that fat people are an oppressed demographic. anything and everything we say is a joke to them, no matter how delicately we put it. so I’m not interested in playing to them. I’m interested in making fat art that resonates with bad fatties and makes them feel powerful. check my tag #fat lib flag for all of the amazing art folks in my community have created with this flag. don’t like it? don’t use it!

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A hill i will die standing on is that picky eaters deserve respect and accommodation and to eat food they enjoy too. Sensory issues, disliked flavors, allergies, intolerances, cultural differences, religious restrictions, moral or political choices, they all deserve to be given consideration if you know you're gonna be cooking for them and to not be excluded from the fundamental right to food & access to the many important social bonding acitivities centered around food

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In my experience as a third culture kid who travels a lot the best indicator that you as a non-x is appreciating x culture is if the locals actively invite you to participate in it with them

Yes, you are allowed to buy those handmade Inuit winter clothes if an Inuk is literally selling them to you. They would not be offering you a price point if they didnt want you to buy and wear them. And you might discover that theyre the best winter clothes youve ever worn because of COURSE they would be if theyve kept this culture warm in harsh winters for thousands of years.

Yes, you are allowed to join those Cambodians in that local holiday theyre celebrating during your visit if they literally invited you to it. They would not have invited you if they didnt want you to participate. And in the process you might learn a lot about a culture you never wouldve interacted with and you can all have a laugh together about your clumsy but genuine attempts at getting your footwork right in one of their traditional dances.

Yes, you are also allowed to ask if you can participate in something from the local culture you are visiting. Sometimes you will get "sorry, thats a closed practice" but in my experience most of the time you'll get "of course, let me show you how to do this!" And in my experience people tend to appreciate when others make an active effort in sharing their culture and wont stone you to death if youre clumsy about it while youre learning. I guarantee that the local children doing all of this for the first time too make the same mistakes you do and they can tell if youre being disrespectful or genuine.

So much "cultural appropriation" discourse really starts to sound like "you cant participate or visit any other cultures if youre from a Colonial Culture and have to stay in your little box and never relate to other people"

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the more time passes, the more convinced I am that one of my friends (or perhaps a few of them) are doing mental gymnastics that allow them to imagine me abled. I'm a full-time rollator user, but somehow this never crosses their minds when they suggest places to hang out. it comes as a surprise every time I ask about stairs or accessible bathrooms, or literally anything else that a physically disabled person may need to know about a location. anyway, it reminded me of this quote by Rosmarie Garland-Thomson:

Some of my friends, for example, have measured their regard for me by saying, “But I don’t think of you as disabled.” What they point to in such a compliment is the contradiction they find between their perception of me as a valuable, capable, loveable person and the cultural figure of the disabled person whom they take to be precisely my opposite: worthless, incapable, and unlovable. People with disabilities routinely announce that they do not consider themselves as disabled. Although they are often repudiating the literal meaning of the word disabled, their words nevertheless serve to disassociate them from the identity group of the disabled. Our culture offers profound disincentives and few rewards to identifying as disabled. The trouble with such statements is that they leave intact, without challenge, the oppressive stereotypes that permit, among other things, the unexamined use of disability terms such as crippled, lame, dumb, idiot, and moron as verbal gestures of derision. The refusal to claim disability identity is in part due to a lack of ways to understand or talk about disability that are not oppressive.

even as someone who loudly makes their presence known as a disabled person in most parts of my life (including the fact that my phd is in disability studies), people do so much work to negate disablement from their understanding of me as a person. the human mind! truly fascinating

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I know everything is shit fucked sixteen ways before lunch time, but it remains a fact that you should not trust anyone who wants you to feel like the whole world hates you all the time. That's a person trying to sell you something, swallow you whole, or bleed you dry. Especially those times when it feels like they're right.

No one wants anything good from you who wants you always feeling scared and hated. They will wear you out and leave you in the bin the second fashions change. Things are extremely high levels of fucked, but you are not hated like that. It's scary and isolating but you are not alone like that. Worst case, come and shiver like a wet dog with me, I won't say anything and we can dry out.

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"I'm not one of THOSE disabled people."

Good for you. I am! Get fucked!

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Everyone who got annoyed at me over the cis woman who couldn't understand a man knowing what experiencing misogyny is like post is proving my point btw.

Everyone who had something to say about "do you want to be seen as a man or not" is proving my exact point that people cannot fully accept the notion of men who are not welcomed into the boys club of cis manhood. The notion of "Man" is entwined inextricably with Power, Control, if I am a man that must mean I wear The Boot because Man means Wearing The Boot. You want me to chose between my sense of self and my lived experiences because to you, a "real man" would not have had my experiences.

You people are incapable of understanding gender as an internal sense of self and not as a magic spell. You fail to progress your feminism past a no boys allowed sign hung on the door of a playhouse. You are deeply fucking unserious and it's frankly embarrassing.

There's a serious problem in progressive spaces wrt seeing people as entire people with flexible experiences and not just identities listed like Pokémon types. Be better.

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The more trans men there are, the better the world is, actually.

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“So I was in the fifth grade, right, and our teacher told us that we were to write a report. I love this concept. I’m not sure what that’s supposed to prepare you for in life. Writing a report. It’s not…it’s not…a business report. It’s writing about something you feel passionate about that you that want to share with other people. I’m not sure that the rest of the world after elementary school encourages you to actually do that. But…but so I mean…I remember going, ‘Aww man, I’m going to write about dragons.’ Cause I was a young man who loved dragons. And unicorns. That’s right. Magical and mystical things. But I had a lot of experiences as I went along through late childhood and adolescence that sort of…hardened my skin a little…and put a crust around my heart. So when a girlfriend of mine, one of the sweetest people I’d ever known, gave me a coffee cup with a unicorn on it as like the first present that we had exchanged, my eighteen year old self looked at it like, ‘I used to like that stuff as a kid.’ And immediately, the voice of my younger, truer self convicted me and said, “Have you betrayed the noble unicorn? Who sought only the best for you? Who wronged you in no way? Whose innocence you have turned your back on?’ But I had not entirely, and I drank from that coffee cup until it broke. This is called ‘Unicorn Tolerance.’”

— John Darnielle (via notsoterriblymisanthropic)

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Tracklist: 1. Will It Rain in Soho? No! No! No! No! 2. Andy’s Back in Town 3. Let’s Go and Meet the Grey King 4. Goths Live Everywhere! 5. You Can Still Have Fun When You’re a Goth 6. Let’s Learn Car Safety, with the Goths! 7. Goths Can Dress Themselves 8. Goths Go to the Beach 9. Then and Now, Goths Are Great! 10. Goths Use a Computer! Wow! 11. Let’s Meet a Goth from Portugal 12. So Long Goths! See You Soon!

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i think any time a politician so much as suggests creating a national public registry of a minority group they should lose their job immediately, and then be shot

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Friendly reminder that health isn't a moral subject. The idea that being unhealthy is wrong is ableism plain and simple, despite living a very healthy lifestyle I will never be healthy.

I would love it for everyone to thrive. I do encourage everyone to take care of yourselves. But not because it is right or wrong, not because you're bad if you don't.

I could talk for hours about all the different reasons someone might not take care of themself. Disability, being neglected as a child, personal crisis, financial difficulties, sedentary working conditions, time poorness. But even if someone is completely able bodied, neurotypical, finaically well off, and in the upmost position of privilege. Even them. They aren't doing anything wrong by being unhealthy.

Including. This may be hard for some of you to hear. Including if they're fat. Even if they are fat for no reason other than loving high calorie, 'unhealthy' food.

Your health isn't a topic of morality where you are good or bad. It's no one else's business. You aren't bad for being unhealthy.

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Okay, so here’s the updated plans for fighting against youtube's new ai age policy and privacy violating rule (I believe in us!)

Plan 1. Black out and leave youtube/ youtube boycott (August 13 to the point where the policy is gone)

It’s a very simple plan, but this time we just leave until it’s fully reversed. That way YouTube doesn’t just ignore us and the original black out. We have to stand our ground and show them we aren’t going to give up. We have to last as long as possible and let their revenue drain until they concede or someone else comes in and makes another platform (that isn’t based on politics but the same ideas as the original YouTube)

Plus I would like to add some small extra things that will help with the blackout though. That being mass downloading YouTube content. Now this might be the easiest thing for certain people, but it’s something.

Mass downloading YouTube content can help in case there a couple of videos or channels you want to watch during the blackout.

(I use something called a ytdlp but there might be better options for you out there, there might even be built in ones in a web browser or two, just search around the place, you'll find it eventually)

Forget what I said about alternatives that block YouTube, avoid anything that even remotely connects to YouTube. If it connects to YouTube it still provides traffic and helps it out, we want to disconnect from it completely, don’t let it have a drop of traffic

Plan 2. Bugging the crap out of them.

Now since they have a mail box for us to use, that can be used for our advantage here. So here’s what we do, send them letters asking them to reverse the decision, that way they will be overwhelmed by letters that have to eventually give up. Now I don't want you guys to send out slurs, curses or whatever. I need you guys to be kind and critical. I want you to point everything wrong with this and why it is destined to fail and leave the company crumbling

In addition to these letters, if at all possible, I want you guys to include photos of comments made by other people (Twitter, tumblr, whatever) criticizing this and making it known that it’s not just you guys who are angry, but people all over too.

Now we can also include emails in this, but that might be harder than excepted, but in case you do want to send in a email, you can send it that way

I can't find any other way of sending them an email, but good to you if you do find it (though I would recommend a letter much more)

UPDATE, someone has pointed out that we should all send out our letters on a single day, Im taking around August 5th about a week before the thing actually rolls out and than maybe we’ll do another batch on the 8th just in case

Make sure you mass send a bunch of letters

WIP plan 3, legal bull

I wish I could say this plan was finished, but unfortunately, it is not at all. All we have to go for here to filing a complaint towards the FTC about this and or using what this user recommneds (though I can't fully say if it'll work or not)

This plan will be worked on as much as possible

I want everyone if they can to spread to outside of tumblr, talk about it on twitter, facebook, blusky, youtube itself, this plan has to spread to as much people as possible.

I believe we can do our best and shine a light through these horrible times, we can be light in the darkness that will help others shine a burn a hole in this horrible system of censorship

I believe in every last one of you, I believe you can do good and spread good, because in your hearts, you are good

If you have any other ideas, let me know, cause i know more minds are better than one.

Good luck!