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There was this guy in the 1800s - I can't remember his name, but his name is recorded somewhere - who honestly argued that if given the choice between a beautiful woman and a heron, deep down in their most earnest true heart, every man would rather fuck the heron. And he got mad when people denied this, continuing to deny this what he had decided must be an universal truth, instead of praising him for being the only one who was brave enough to finally say it out loud. Like he really thought that every single person telling him "Jesse what the hell are you talking about" was not only denying him, but denying themselves their true desires and perpetuating the apparently massive cultural lie that herons aren't fuckable.

Anyway what I'm saying here is that every once in a while whenever you find yourself in a situation where nobody else is willing to agree with something that you consider the most obvious truth, take a moment to meditate on the possibility that perhaps they do mean what they say, and perhaps they are right. Maybe nobody else but you wants to fuck the heron.

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Half Goblin, half Hobbit.

Goblit.

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In a truck stop bathroom washing my hands today and 2 boys, looked about 5 and 9, came in with their little sister who looked maybe 2. The following whispered conversation made my entire day

"We have to wait, there's a lady in here!"

"That's not a lady, he has a mustache! We can be in here!"

"Some ladies have mustaches! And she has boobs!"

"Well some guys have boobs! Like Uncle Jake!"

"Uncle Jake is fat!"

At this point I could not contain a chuckle and both whirled around with identical looks of panic on their faces. I smiled and said "it's alright for you guys to be in here so your sister has help, don't worry. And I'm both! That's why I have boobs and a mustache. Some folks are just built that way"

(In unison) "Ooooooh!"

(older boy) "So do you use Sir or Ma'am or both?"

"Both, but I prefer Sir"

"Cool! Well thanks Sir! We have to help our sister now!"

This was in a small town country truck stop and both boys had "Murica" type stuff on and neither of them had any issue at all with these concepts. Their mom approached me while I was in line about 10 minutes later and apologized for them bothering me in the bathroom (they had told her about the interaction) and she and I had a lovely little chat too. I got to introduce her to the term "intersex" and her reply was "I think I've heard of that before! I didn't know that was the word for it. Amazing how many different ways God can make people!"

Sometimes the world is good. More often than you might think, if you give it a chance. It's not all bad loves <3

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when i was a kid i had moments of being so fucking diabolical because i realized at some point the best way to leverage power over my family was to do shit that would make everybody late

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“Ariel sold her voice for legs just because of a guy“

Meanwhile Ariel with legs;

Ariel already loved the human world long before meeting Eric (you don’t get a collection like hers overnight) and when she finally got a chance to explore it, she took it.

Ursula made it more about Eric than Ariel ever did.

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Good US news because I think we all could use some of it:

The Marines are to be withdrawn from LA. The extreme escalation many of us feared did not happen thanks to the people of LA and the soldiers themselves who said "no".

The "Good Trouble Lives On" protests may not have been as big as the previous "Hands Off" and "No Kings" protests (likely due to heat + being planned on a weekday), but still 1.6k protests were held across the USA with thousands joining in with the peaceful protest.

The Trump administration has been ordered to restore $6.2 million in grant funding to nine LGBTQ+ and HIV-related nonprofits. This is fantastic.

Pittsburgh City Council has passed bills to protect its LGBTQ+ citizens.

California has stepped up to partner with and support The Trevor Project. Let's go, Cali!

Another win for California: Reports show that California is powered by two-thirds clean energy. This is a historic first and it keeps getting better!

The ACLU of Louisiana has secured the release of two wrongfully detained Iranian LSU students.

The Republican governor of New Hampshire has defied her party and shot down a book banning bill.

Shareholders have pushed back on corporations' anti-DEI proposals, forcing companies to face the fact that diversity is good for business... And reminds us that the majority does not agree with the removal of DEI, no matter what MAGA wants us to believe.

Since November, 69 of the 110 Supreme Court lawyers tasked with defending the Trump admin's policies have quit.

Don't let anyone tell you that there isn't hope, that there aren't people fighting and working and just as scared and angry as you are. You are not alone. Peaceful protests, contacting reps, and simple non-cooperation is how we sustainably and successfully push back against authoritarianism.

"We're cooked" is the devil talking. Giving up, rolling over, and perpetuating the idea that we've already failed is exactly what MAGA wants. Don't give them the satisfaction. Don't make it easy. Continue to look after each other and support your communities where you can. Keep protesting, keep calling, keep writing, keep loving. The heart is a muscle the size of your fist; we can get through this as long as we continue to stand up and say "no".

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maybe i am too old for tiktok

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Full offence intended, I sincerely hope that perverts dig up this worthless dog-raping nazi waste of organs corpse just to piss all over it and violate it repeatedly

"people" like this filthy worthless fucking cockroach are a PESTILENCE upon the planet

Their kind is a DISEASE that should be exterminated from existence

And I am DELIGHTED to see another one of these fucking roaches ROTTING IN THE GROUND where every last man, woman and child like them belong :D

GOOD RIDDANCE

Another one of these little cunts dying is what I refer to as "A good start at improving the world and the species"

#NaziLivesDon'tMatter

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When people stumble over their pronouns, stammer, blush, or apologize in embarrassment, I often think of Riki Anne Wilchins' description of her friend Holly Boswell: "Holly is a delicate Southern belle of long acquaintance ....S/he has tender features, long, wavy blonde hair, a soft Carolina accent, a delicate feminine bosom, and no interest in surgery. Holly lives as an open transgendered mother of two in Asheville, North Carolina. Her comforting advice to confused citizens struggling with whether to use Sir or Madam is, 'Don't give it a second thought. You don't have a pronoun yet for me.’” ... ...[T]o answer the homophobes becomes easy, those folks who want to dehumanize, erase, make invisible the lives of butch dykes and nellie fags. We shrug. We laugh. We tell them: your definitions of woman and man suck. We tell them: your binary stinks. We say: here we are in all our glory — male, female, intersex, trans, butch, nellie, studly, femme, king, androgynous, queen, some of us carving out new ways of being women, others of us new ways of being men, and still others new ways of being something else entirely. You don't have pronouns yet for us.

- Eli Clare in Exile & Pride: Disability, Queerness and Liberation (1999)

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I saw the post again where the OP is like "I don't care if you're autistic, you have to eat vegetables"

Sometimes a disability means you can't do a thing...That is what disability...Means.............

If you are an autistic person who sits around being judgmental and condescending toward every autistic person more disabled than you, you are a tar pit

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Dang, what DID happen during the reconstruction then? It's way more fun to have you say it rather than books or google

So 1865-1876 is one of the most important decades in American history like genuinely our failure to do this right is the root of all evil today. It is very complicated. Here is the best shortest answer i can give you.

After the Civil War, with the plantation south destroyed and about 5 million previously enslaved people freed, the American government faced two big questions: what to do to reconcile the South back into the union to prevent another civil war, and what the social, economic, and political status of freedpeople in the South was going to be. Note that at this time Republicans were liberal and Democrats were conservative.

Abraham Lincoln had a plan that was a bit too lenient to the South than his more radical party members in Congress liked, but he was more committed to Black civil rights than his Democratic contemporaries. Radical Republicans wanted to take steps to ensure none of this would happen again, including redistributing land to freedpeople as a form of reparations, mass industrialization in the South, and preventing white ex confederates from voting or holding office while giving freedpeople the right to vote. Southern Democrats (white supremacists. Not that northerners werent but christ alive these were evil people) resisted this at all costs.

Unfortunately for everyone to this day, Lincoln’s vice president was a southern democrat, so when Lincoln got shot in the hat and died, now-president Andrew Johnson decided to let mostly everything slide. He let the Southern states back in with very few guardrails, took redistributed land and gave it back to enslavers (they had to personally ask him because he liked when they begged), and generally neglected Black civil rights the entire time he was President because he was super racist. Congress (much more radical) ended up in the drivers seat of Reconstruction halfway through his admin.

Congress passed the 13th Amendment to end slavery except as a punishment for a crime. White ex-confederates retaliated by passing the Black Codes, state laws that made it a crime to exercise really any social or economic autonomy while Black so that freedpeople could be incarcerated or coerced into essentially doing the same plantation labor they previously had been. Many white plantation owners put Black people (later also poor whites) into perpetual debt with systems like sharecropping and crop-lien, so they could not afford their own land. A lot of it was recreating the conditions of slavery in the aggregate using capitalism and a white supremacist legal system.

The federal government passed the 14th and 15th Amendments, which nullified the Black Codes, protected Black citizenship, disenfranchised white ex-confederates for a while, and protected the right of Black men to vote. This was especially critical in states like South Carolina and Mississippi, which had Black majorities. Some Southern states had biracial (black and white) populist political parties, because poor whites had common class interests with many freedmen.

White ex-confederates responded to these civil rights milestones with what can only be described as mass terrorism: the formation of the KKK, sundown towns, widespread lynchings, voter intimidation, voter fraud, public beatings, etc. President Grant, who took office after Johnson, tried to combat this by putting chunks of the South under martial law, which sort of worked when the army was in fact there.

However, Grant was mired in scandal and not super popular, and it really came to a head during the panic of 1873: the economy got bad, and lots of white northern liberals lost enthusiasm to keep forcing the white south into modernity. They decided essentially that they had their own problems to deal with, that Black people could fend for themselves, and that white ex-confederates had “been through enough” (very little.) White Southern racists called “redeemers” gained a lot of political power during the mid 1870s as more white people got their right to vote back.

All of this comes to an end in the election of 1876: due to “voting irregularities” in SC, LA, and FL (an overt violent white supremacist coup in SC and some significant fraud in the latter states), the election came down to the House of Representatives instead of the Electoral College. Rutherford B Hayes, the Republican candidate, promised the white south that if they made him the president, he would pull all the US troops protecting civil rights and fighting the Klan out of the South and end reconstruction. They happily took that deal, actively condemning millions of African-Americans to a century of severe white supremacy.

After reconstruction, the white South passed Jim Crow laws like segregation and voter disenfranchisement to cement the electoral, social, and economic control of southern whites. The US Supreme Court also enforced these (racism is a national problem.) The biracial political coalitions of Reconstruction died out as more and more poor whites picked white supremacy over class solidarity.

Conditions for African-Americans obviously improved over literal slavery, but the South remained a deeply racist, largely agrarian, and economically regressive place for a long time. Many opted to flee the South for the urban north in the early 1900s. A lot of the damage done by the failure of Reconstruction did not get addressed until the Civil Rights movement, and a lot of it still hasn’t been addressed at all.

Watch this video it will help you with the basics.

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on one hand it’s often too much for my animal brain to know about so many people and events all over the world but on the other hand today on my socials I posted a video foraging mushrooms and one of my mutuals who liked it in California posted a video sewing a 17th century dress reproduction from an original piece and one of my other mutuals who liked it in Alaska posted a video celebrating his town bringing in an entire whale and another of my mutuals who liked it in Ireland posted about their efforts removing invasive plants from a pasture and I’m like wow we all lived such different days on the same day all around the world and i got to see all of their smiles today and we all got to share in all those things from so far away. and life is beautiful and the world is beautiful and its people are so beautiful

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Maybe this is a 'water is wet' statement, but: putting the Holocaust on a pedestal where it can never be compared to anything else doesn't just serve zionism, it serves the individual agendas of a lot of colonialist powers too because it ensures that their history of atrocities is never compared to the Holocaust and remembered in the way that our culture remembers the Holocaust.

The transatlantic slave trade? The deliberate British Great hunger in Ireland? The deliberate British Famines in India? The Holodomor? The multiple acts of ethnic cleansing and mass murders committed by the Netherlands in Indonesia and its other colonies? Leopold II's reign of terror in Congo? And countless others.

All of these exist in the relatively ignored field of 'lesser evils' and aren't remembered and used as national moral anchors in the way the Holocaust is. They're not at the center of our collective memory because this one great horror takes center stage and it is deemed morally unacceptable to place other horrors near it. The only exception I can think of is the US, where thanks to the endless hard work of African Americans, slavery is sort of kinda almost recognized in the collective consciousness as a second great horror. But it's still second fiddle and disputed, and meanwhile in the European countries that engineered the transatlantic slave trade and profited from it, the space it takes in the collective consciousness is tiny.

The Netherlands has over 70 World War 2 museums. It is yet to open its first museum about slavery and has no museums dedicated to it's other colonial atrocities. The budget of the national World War 2 commemoration is 35 times larger than that of the national slavery commemoration. Holocaust education is important, but something is out of whack here. And it's easy to see why colonial powers don't want to change that.

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Gotta admit the headline is a banger.

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part of being an ally to trans men is not being a dick to cis men for their appearance btw

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Been reading Witch Week by Diana Wynne Jones because Madison was telling me about the @eightdaysofdiana podcast episode about it and first of all it really throws into perspective how not a single thing JK Rowling was doing with Harry Potter was particularly original within the tradition of British boarding school stories but also more importantly it really understands, in a way few things written since YA became a huge marketing genre aimed at adults does, that childhood is defined by powerlessness and depersonalization. Basically it’s evident the author understands THIS:

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'People are panicking about AI tools the same way they did when the calculator was invented, stop worrying' cannot stress enough the calculator did not forcibly pervade every aspect of our lives, has such a low error rate it's a statistical anomaly when it does happen, isn't built on mass plagiarism, and does not obliterate the fucking environment when you use it. Be so fucking serious right now