bnprime

[bnprime]

This is who is leading the NYC mayoral democratic primary rn

[bnprime]

i have a friend who is a bird scientist and she has synesthesia and she analyzes bird calls and this must be what it’s like

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[bnprime]

i bet this feels like getting dragged back into your hometown like, you’re out in the wider physical and spiritual multiverse, transcending your physical experience and personhood in every unknowable way. you are great, and you are anonymous. and then someone drags you back to your small place where everything is dull and the social circles are small and everyone acts like they know you, when they only know the old you. and god, christmas is coming and he christmas tree farm is being foreclosed on by a big bank and you’re the only one with the experience to fight it properly.

broooo did you seriously disturb my eternal rest & bring me back to this mortal coil just because my ancient enemy the eternal night has returned? after i sealed it away and everything? which one of you tampered with my binding runes 🙄

[bnprime]

lesbians are cool, guys. befriend lesbians. they are like, the realest people.

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🧵 THREAD: This #PrideMonth, don’t forget that the fight for queer liberation didn’t start or end with marriage equality.

💪✨ We need to keep fighting for our rights.

Here’s are a few examples:

💋 Before the 2003 Supreme Court ruling in Lawrence v. Texas, same-smex smexual activity was illegal in fourteen U.S. states, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. military

👶 Before 2015, LGBTQ+ couples couldn’t adopt in all 50 states. Before the Supreme Court ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, laws varied wildly by state.

🏳️‍🌈 Before 1973, the American Psychiatric Association listed homosmexuality as a ‘mental illness.’ In December 1973, a vote was successfully held to remove it.

🗳️ Before 1974, there were no openly gay elected officials. That changed with Kathy Kozachenko, who became the first openly gay American elected to public office in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

🎖️ Before 2011, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” banned LGBTQ+ people from serving openly in the military.

💍 Before 2015, LGBTQ+ couples couldn’t get married in all 50 states. At the time, laws varied by state, and while many states allowed for civil unions for same-sex couples, it created a separate but equal standard.

💼 Before 2020, employers could legally discriminate against queer and trans employees. It wasn’t until the U.S. Supreme Court held that an employer who fires or otherwise discriminates against an individual simply for being gay or transgender is in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

[bnprime]

i think the hill i'm going to die on here is that lasting anti-fascist activism begins and ends with unrestricted social services.

protests are great. kind of indispensable right now. but in times when we can be less reactive, you want to know what you're protesting *for*, not just against.

today i saw a post elseweb saying "why aren't white women fleeing maga? they have to know by now that tradwife means sex slave". and like... it's very simple. they can't leave because they would end up like me.

they're, we're, deliberately made unemployable so that we'll have to marry whatever mediocre white man picks us out. as it happened, i was unappealingly intersex, fat, butch, and autistic, so none of the mediocre white boys of my generation ever took a second look at me, but that didn't give me job skills or career connections.

i knew multiple women whose husbands divorced them and took the house as part of their midlife crises. they had to send the kids to live with relatives and take dead-end jobs like bagging groceries because they were in their forties with zero job experience. if they'd rejected the worldview, if they'd alienated their families and what few friends didn't victim-blame them for the divorces, they'd have had nowhere to turn.

it's been over twelve years since i got out. psychologically, medically, i'm healthier. but i've chased a fresh start through half a dozen states. i spent my inheritance getting a degree. none of it helped. there are no supports for abandoning (or being abandoned by) your support network.

you won't defeat fascism until my people are free to leave the cult if they realize they want out. until we can access free housing to get away from financial abuse, free comprehensive job training and placement services to help us start careers, national healthcare so we can flee across state lines if necessary without losing any medical care we're lucky enough to have access to, protections for children and teens so they can flee without needing a parent's help... universal basic income would be really good but there are smaller steps that could help with financial independence.

and it all has to be available to everybody, including people you think are "unworthy". people who hold the wrong opinions. drug addicts. people whose husbands or parents make too much money. people who aren't from around here. unrepentant bigots. if they want out, you have to give them a path out. minds can change later, once people are less scared and less pressured.

(i'm ex-catholic. do you want to hear about what happens when you force people to profess certain beliefs in order to access basic assistance? i have two thousand years of examples.)

"but if they really wanted out they'd do the Right Thing and leave without support!" Better to be one man's sex slave than turning tricks on the street. "staying just proves they're actually evil and there for the bigotry!" Live in your car for six months in 100°F heat, twice, and then talk to me again. There's no virtue in cutting yourself off from society just to prove some kind of moral point. All that does is get you dead or worse.

("JT, you're not dead" I'm a fucking cockroach. Most people would be dead by now. Survival bias goes both ways; we're not all the same model of airplane.)

[bnprime]

one thing that is GOOD about the historical moment we find ourself in is that we have the tools and the language to have this nuanced conversation. i mean the conversation about danger, harm, trauma, ptsd; and then about victims and data and rights and threat assessment. the language everyone has been installed with by age 18 treats and assumes everyone is rational, wise and courageous. but really, none of us are purely any of these. but really, none of our brave predecessors were purely any of these either.

so we have now the language to talk about how some of us need to be extra brave, and it’s not their fault they are afraid, but that they can overcome it. and how some of us need to lean on others of us to be wise, because we may not have enough experience to distinguish the complexity of a situation. and how some of us need to face history as it actually happened, instead of hoping that our ancestors were all virtuous heroes. trans rights are human rights. black lives matter. all children matter.

we have the language. now is the time to use it to support all of us moving together towards the future worth building.

Yeah, you don't want to make people in your community feel unsafe, but I also think that everyone has the responsibility to consider that their fears might be delusional reactionary bullshit.

[bnprime]

i read this article about how tesla makes “all its patents free” for other companies to use as a publicity stunt: all of their core technology is secret rather than patented. meanwhile musk bought up all the battery and storage startups in the early 2000/2010s to secure a monopoly on electrical cars. that was his plan anyway.

Do you know what this site thought of Elon Musk before he started supporting Trump and gave that Nazi Salute?

Going how far back? Ten years ago, we didn't talk about him and nobody cared. He was not in the wider public consciousness. Those who knew who he was mostly thought "oh yeah he's that rich guy who wants to look smart" and nothing much else was said. I think his first bump in popularity was when he married Grimes, and then he was just the weird rich dude Grimes married. I did not know who Grimes was and still kinda don't. She had a Tumblr blog and then made some music and had a baby with a weird name and then vanished kinda post-divorce afaik.

Then I think maybe five years ago ish he sort of started showing up more as a sort of weaboo man-baby deal? Pictures of him in Les Mis cosplay, dressed as a furby, and showing off empty Diet Coke cans and a fake replica gun on his nightstand circulated.

My impression was that he was just like. If that creepy awkward guy in class who unironically does the Naruto run and thinks katanas are magic was spawned out of the ether with infinite money.

And then I think maybe after that was how stupid he is? That became public knowledge shortly after-like how the safety vests in some of his factories are in washed-out neutral colours cause he doesn't like neons. Or like... how he seemed to be giving off the impression that he was a genius inventor, despite not actually making anything or having any kind of education se can speak of? All I know is like. He was an owner with PayPal and then bought Tesla?

And simultaneously if I remember correctly he was kind of always about "if we don't let the nazis talk on twitter then we're basically á dictatorship" or whatever, banging on the free speech drum and going on about how jokes used to be funny, then bluffed about buying twitter and somehow got legally shoehorned into ponying up and actually doing it for WAY more than it was worth, almost immediately making it worse and tanking its value.

Now it seems kind of like an Emporer's clothes situation where everyone knows the Emporer is naked, but instead of getting embarrassed and covering up, the emperor just keeps doubling down harder. Meanwhile his whole entire ass is just. Out

[bnprime]

[bnprime]

she’ll just cuss you up and down

your bones will be all dismantled.

fully cleaned.

meticulously laid to rest.

[bnprime]

[bnprime]

*puts a disk in u*

[bnprime]

OMG. Who else is having fandom flashbacks?!!! This was an official concept art for 1987 April before she got whitewashed. My memory banks are having so many wall collapses and I'm starting to recall a lot of conversations from the 90s. I'm starting to flap and rock. Holy SHIIT I remember. Rise April absolutely was not the "first black April" and if anyone tries to counter this with that "Visual History of April O'Neil" post I will point at its racism and I will laugh in Old Fan.

[bnprime]

my great uncle, a very unpolitical man and a hobby farmer his whole life, had a vegetable stand outside his house along the highway. anyway, in time he passed and his stuff and house were packed up. they found among his things a very old copy of “animal farm.” which jived with the rest of his books and things (books about clydesdale horses). as far as we can tell, someone gave it to him thinking that it was a cute story about a farm.

I guess this is what the new animal farm movie is going to look like huh...

[bnprime]

i knew he was naked the moment he launched a car into space without properly sterilizing it, and without any means to track its orbit. motherfucker.

Do you know what this site thought of Elon Musk before he started supporting Trump and gave that Nazi Salute?

Going how far back? Ten years ago, we didn't talk about him and nobody cared. He was not in the wider public consciousness. Those who knew who he was mostly thought "oh yeah he's that rich guy who wants to look smart" and nothing much else was said. I think his first bump in popularity was when he married Grimes, and then he was just the weird rich dude Grimes married. I did not know who Grimes was and still kinda don't. She had a Tumblr blog and then made some music and had a baby with a weird name and then vanished kinda post-divorce afaik.

Then I think maybe five years ago ish he sort of started showing up more as a sort of weaboo man-baby deal? Pictures of him in Les Mis cosplay, dressed as a furby, and showing off empty Diet Coke cans and a fake replica gun on his nightstand circulated.

My impression was that he was just like. If that creepy awkward guy in class who unironically does the Naruto run and thinks katanas are magic was spawned out of the ether with infinite money.

And then I think maybe after that was how stupid he is? That became public knowledge shortly after-like how the safety vests in some of his factories are in washed-out neutral colours cause he doesn't like neons. Or like... how he seemed to be giving off the impression that he was a genius inventor, despite not actually making anything or having any kind of education se can speak of? All I know is like. He was an owner with PayPal and then bought Tesla?

And simultaneously if I remember correctly he was kind of always about "if we don't let the nazis talk on twitter then we're basically á dictatorship" or whatever, banging on the free speech drum and going on about how jokes used to be funny, then bluffed about buying twitter and somehow got legally shoehorned into ponying up and actually doing it for WAY more than it was worth, almost immediately making it worse and tanking its value.

Now it seems kind of like an Emporer's clothes situation where everyone knows the Emporer is naked, but instead of getting embarrassed and covering up, the emperor just keeps doubling down harder. Meanwhile his whole entire ass is just. Out