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My roommates got married last week and said today that they’re planning on moving to somewhere else in the city, and asked me to move with them when they do.

Which I appreciate so much, they’re both fantastic roommates and I really don’t want to try and find another place on my own, but also. Jesus Christ what a look. “Hiii we’re the Thompsons, we just moved in down the street, that’s my husband and that’s the ghoul who used to live in our basement”

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artist tips

don’t save as jpeg

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Puberty blockers are older and safer than ivermectin, too.

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People on this website react to mentions of forcefem like it's a serious, real thing, when in fact it's more like... You're looking at someone who says "I'm a warlock" and panicking because you genuinely think they're communing with an evil force from beyond this realm, and not just being a nerd on the internet.

Basically I'm saying you're the same people who think D&D is satanic, or that pokemon is satanic, or that violent video games cause real life violence.

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what i’ve failed to understand since i was a kid is why these ghouls want war with iran so badly. is it resources? do they have money in defense contracting? is it just that iran is too strong an opponent to us hegemony? why specifically do they want to see iran destroyed?

There is not one singular motivation behind the drive to send the US to war with Iran. There are multiple motivations which often overlap, but which are held in different orders of prioritization by different advocates of war. Most of these motivations are irrational and/or immoral, while others are legitimate complaints that could be addressed through diplomacy far more easily than they could through militarism.

Here's ten common motivations and arguments for a US war with Iran which you might encounter:

Independence from the US: The Iranian government is among the world's least-willing governments to obey US demands and subjugate themselves to the US-led order. For certain US primacists, this independence means that their very existence poses an existential threat to US dominance (similar to North Korea, Cuba, etc.) To a particular type of US militarist, it is necessary for the Iranian government to fall in order for the US to remain the unquestioned leader of the world.

Real Fear of their Nukes: There is a substantial contingent who really does believe that Iran is close to developing a nuclear weapon and that they could well use it if they were to develop it. Logically, the best way to address this concern would be through a diplomatic deal similar to the 2015 JCPOA, which Iran complied with! But the intensity of anti-Iranian sentiment among US hawks tends to convince them that direct military confrontation is somehow a better option, thus explaining why Trump decided to break this deal.

Desire for Revenge: Many older foreign policy hawks in the US have never forgiven Iran for 1) the 1979 US Embassy hostage crisis, and 2) the 1983 bombing of the US Embassy in Lebanon, which was orchestrated by a terror organization with ties to the Iranian government. In their minds, both of these incidents were embarrassments to the US' military prestige which we have never properly gotten revenge for. (These people tend to ignore the massive wrongdoings which the US has carried out against Iran during this same time period, like the US destruction of Iran Air Flight 655). There are people in and around the Pentagon who have wanted to bomb Iran over a grudge for more than 40 years now.

Iran's Regional Proxies: Over the last several decades, Iran has engaged in an aggressive campaign to expand their influence throughout the region by supporting proxy paramilitary forces in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, etc. Many of these proxies have undeniably engaged in acts of terrorism. This strategy is both opportunistic (taking advantage of the power vacuum caused by the US overthrow of Saddam Hussein) and defensive (countering the regional influence campaigns of Saudi Arabia and Turkey). This is probably the most legitimate cause of US anger towards the Iranian government, but it is a grievance which will only be worsened by backing Iran into a corner militarily.

Israel (and Saudi Arabia) Hates Them: Iran is unfriendly with two of the US' closest partners in the region: Israel and Saudi Arabia. The Israeli government, in particular, has long been laser-focused on the overthrow of the Iranian government, and they are fully committed to dragging the US into such a regime change operation. For the most fervent defenders of Israel in the US, overthrowing the Iranian government is near the top of their wishlist.

They Got Oil: Oil is a factor which is often overstated in these discussions, but it definitely is one of the factors. Iran currently produces 5% of the world's oil and has the potential to produce far more were the current sanction regime against it to be removed. They also have the ability to shut down the Straight of Hormuz, an important chokepoint through which 25% of the world's oil flows. Regime change in Iran would significantly increase the leverage that the US and its allies hold over global oil markets and further weaken the strength of OPEC.

And Other Commodities Too!: Though the separation between the US and Iranian economies hurts the US economy as a whole, there are certain sectors of US industry that benefit enormously from having Iran so heavily sanctioned. Some of the big names in the US pistachio industry have lobbied heavily to keep US-Iranian relations unfriendly, because the elimination of US sanctions on Iran would allow the massive Iranian pistachio industry to compete with the US industry. As long as these two governments hate each other, a few politically-connected US businessmen make way more money.

Diaspora Pressure Campaigns: Most Iranian-Americans hold the following two opinions at the same time: 1) they hate the current Iranian government and want to see it replaced, but 2) they strongly oppose US efforts at regime change in Iran. However, there is a vocal minority of Iranian-Americans that do support regime change efforts, and they tend to cluster into two well-organized groups that wage pressure campaigns against the Iranian government. The first are the monarchists, who want to see the son of the former US-backed Iranian dictator restored to power. The others are those who are loyal to the MEK, a cult and former terrorist organization which has been extremely effective at building relationships with US politicians. Both of these groups work full-time to push the US towards overthrowing the Iranian government so that they can step in and take over; it's fairly easy to find both of these groups in online social media threads about US-Iranian relations.

Who Cares, We Want War: As I have written about many times before, the US military-industrial complex encourages the US government to engage in militarist behavior in order to boost their profits. Iran is one of their favorite boogeymen to justify increased levels of US military spending, second only to China. These companies fund think tanks and other policy initiatives to argue that Iran is an immediate threat to us, and then they fund political candidates who want to spend more money preparing for this "threat."

They're Crazy! You Can't Trust Them!: We are led to believe that the Iranian government cannot be negotiated with because they are irrational, they're anti-Western religious zealots incapable of reasoned decision-making. This is a convenient excuse for war, but it's entirely incompatible with the restraint that the Iranian government shows in responding to Israeli attacks, their continued willingness to sit down for diplomatic talks with their aggressors, the way that they helped the US government deal with al Qaeda and the Taliban after 9/11, and a million other indications that the Iranian government is just as rational as any other government in its geopolitical decision-marking.

Add all of that together, and you get a deranged political ecosystem obsessed with inflating the scale of foreign threats, finding excuses for maintaining the trajectory of our militarist status quo, increasing regional tensions, and rejecting obvious opportunities for diplomacy and a peaceful resolution of our differences.

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polish nuclear program, ukrainian nuclear program, armenian nuclear program, algerian nuclear program. there's no reason not to adopt nuclear weapons—in fact, it may be the best guarantor of state sovereignty—and no reason to deal with the US

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gentlemen we live in a rules-based international order and it has one rule: you can bomb anyone who looks at you funny.

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Amid all the discussion of various higher political ideals that goes on on this blog (and whose importance I absolutely stand by) the following must be said unambiguously:

The conditions that people are living under in the poorest places on Earth are extraordinarily horrific. The fact that these conditions continue, despite the very real possibility of ameliorating them from the perspective of production capacity alone, is a crime against humanity. Nearly any mass transfer of wealth from rich countries to poor—whether peaceful or violent, voluntary or forced, socialist or capitalist—would be an active good, and almost no matter its methods it would be a lesser crime than the current status quo.

We can argue over what an ideal solution looks like, and indeed I think this is important. I would vastly prefer non-violent solutions to violent ones, voluntary solutions to forced ones, and so on. And I will not buy in to the bad-faith rhetoric by which people try to defend wholly extraneous harm as being necessary for the above goals. But one way or another the current state of the world is unconscionable, and it cannot be allowed to continue.

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"you gotta play with the cards you're dealt" WRONG. i play pot of greed which lets me draw two additional cards from my deck

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"gambling addiction" is kind of like if people regularly opened pits with spikes at the bottom in public areas and made lots of money from people falling into the pit and so they started greasing the edges and putting these pits in every public space and lobbying to be allowed to install them in people's homes and when someone fell into the greased spike pit in their house they said "oh thats so tragic, they had an addiction to deadly spikes, we obviously support everyone having a safe and healthy responsible relationship with the greased spike pits we're building"

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So like, it's obvious to me reading the comments on my post that anti-porn people are largely like, afraid of porn. Like the concept of a sex video is really spooky to them. They're not making thoughtful critiques of the porn industry, which is genuinely a really fucked up industry, they're mostly just spooked by the concept of a sex video and what it could Do To You If You See It.

I said this in another post, but it's like, the difference between "a ton of coffee is produced using slave labor" (valid, important criticism of the coffee industry) and "coffee turns people into raving coffee addicts who forget how to interact with anyone because they're so obsessed with their coffee" (objectively not true, insane viewpoint).

It's literally just sex videos. They really cannot hurt you.

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any thoughts on the ethics of shotacon/lolicon? i've been unpacking some of my tumblr brainrot wrt sex and kink negativity but im not sure how to square this circle and the fact that it seems so straightforward-of course anime pedos are bad!-somehow makes me less satisfied with that conclusion than more. in particular it feels like there's a missing component here wrt the connection between shota and yaoi and the way in which the former is clearly a subgenre of a genuinely queer subculture that disparate yaoi fandoms represent. but then again maybe im trying too hard and it really is that simple.

my opinion is that playing pretend with pictures is fine

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"gambling addiction" is kind of like if people regularly opened pits with spikes at the bottom in public areas and made lots of money from people falling into the pit and so they started greasing the edges and putting these pits in every public space and lobbying to be allowed to install them in people's homes and when someone fell into the greased spike pit in their house they said "oh thats so tragic, they had an addiction to deadly spikes, we obviously support everyone having a safe and healthy responsible relationship with the greased spike pits we're building"

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like truly why should i have some special care for the full-time 'independent artist' as though they're more important than any other artist and more specially worthy of consideration in my politics than any other business owner? i thought art came free with our humanity! some of the best artists i've ever known do it on the side of their full time job for little to no money

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like truly why should i have some special care for the full-time 'independent artist' as though they're more important than any other artist and more specially worthy of consideration in my politics than any other business owner? i thought art came free with our humanity! some of the best artists i've ever known do it on the side of their full time job for little to no money