qhazuban

[qhazuban]

[“What’s considered normal is so fenced off from the multitudes of realities that confront and beckon us with their rich differences. The rigid boundaries that define “normality” has thwarted more orgasms, more wet cunts, more stiff dicks than any other single impediment to erotic bliss. Is it any wonder that I should embrace and adore those “not-normal” ones, the ones who wear on their sleeve their departure from the narrow, socially sanctioned path? I feel both inspired by their difference and safer in my own.

I love butch women because, in their big black boots, they step squarely across a line. I love butch women for the same reasons I love sissy men, the transgendered, the slutty, the outrageous queers of every stripe; the women and men who sell sex, and the ones who use sex to heal; the fetishists whose eroticism is more complicated than anyone ever let us on to eroticism could be. I love butch women because, in the face of ridiculously constricting gender imperatives, they have the balls to say Fuck it— and to carve into our culturally empty space a different and powerful confrontative way to live as a woman.

And that turns me on. Though I still can’t altogether explain why my  lover’s “masculinity” was what aroused me, it’s clear that I like masculinity better in women than in men! (Just as I love femininity better in men than in women.) My second lover’s tales of teenaged fast-car adventure, the kinds of adventure I was never likely to have, got me incredibly hot. Hearing that she’d once driven a car through the wall of a house was not a stunt that I wanted to repeat: It just made me want her to fuck me. The manifestations of our greatest difference, in fact, called up that response in me, as if fucking was the one way I could bridge our disparate experience. I think part of my sexual attraction to men stems from that same desire— to connect with that which I don’t experience. But butchness is not the same as masculinity— it’s a version of masculinity reflected in a wavy mirror, masculinity where our culture tells us not to look for it; in women, or in “macho” gay men, where a very male presentation throws a curve ball— a fey lilt to the voice or a hungry, up-raised butt. Loving butchness amounts to an attraction to what’s not “supposed” to be there.

“Female maleness,” “female masculinity”: These simplistic ways of reading butch energy do not entirely miss the mark, but they do mislead. Maleness isn’t male on female, honey— it’s something else again, a horse of another color, something our gender-impoverished language doesn’t offer us words to describe.

I love butch women even if their butchness is nothing more than cussedness: :“If there are only two ways to be in this world, I’ll pick the other one.” I love butch women because they make straight people nervous. I love butch women because they resist. And even if I’m decked out in Frederick’s of Hollywood fluff, if I’m on the arm of a butch woman, you can see that I’m a gender resister, too.“]

carol a. queen, “why I love butch women”, from dagger:  on butch women, edited by lily burana, roxxie, and linnea due, cleis press, 1994

[qhazuban]

I think folks have really lost the plot when it comes to AI.

Imo, the issue we are faced with is not how to prevent ai from being utilized or advancing, frankly I think that ball is already rolling. The issue also isn’t designating sacred work that can’t be touched by AI (I’m sorry to say, art is not inherently better than manual labor). The issue we are really faced with is now that we are embarking on a world wherein AI is rising and gaining genuine ability to match or exceed humans, how will we ensure we are taking care of our people?

A lot of folks seem to be really concerned with protecting the idea of intellectual property, but at the same time don’t we believe in an egalitarian sharing of knowledge? Should we really be prizing exclusivity of access to media or materials? I don’t really think so, but the challenge we face is how to ensure that a society that will increasingly have less and less need for human labor (particularly in data analysis or data entry jobs that AI tends to be the best in) will still see its citizens financially secure.

I have no problem with AI making art, regardless of whether I think that art is “good” or whether someone a machine makes can even be defined as “artistic” to begin with. Frankly, I don’t care. I do care that many artists will be out of a job and we don’t have a mechanism for ensuring they’re taken care of.

And that is where the discourse is so often falling short in my eyes. Many leftists who claim to want to leave the idea of personal ownership behind become the most forceful advocates for protecting intellectual property. A development that should be spurring on the greatest advance in humankind’s ability to universally take care of everyone is instead demonized on the left for somehow being theft and largely ignored on the right as a pipe dream.

AI is growing more powerful exponentially. Our lifetimes will see a shift on the level of the invention of electricity or the internet (if not much much greater) and we need to be prepared for that. The outcry cannot be “You used AI tools and therefore your work is invalid” but rather it must be “How are we restructuring ourselves to better absorb this new change?”

Universal basic income has to become a default. Removing healthcare from being tied to a job is a necessity. Eventually moving past currency might even be a possibility.

You can’t stop the world from turning, you can’t stop this progress from happening. But we still have time to focus our efforts on taking this change and handling it well. History will watch what we say, what we do, and how we addressed this.

[qhazuban]

yes! thank you all for this

the average ai hater would sooner create a dystopian world where image-based copyright is as much or more draconian than the music industry (which itself has gone as far as it can to suffocate any creativity or originality under claims of copyright infringement due to there being such overreach that even original works, let alone derivative ones, can be struck down). the average ai hater would rather see the technology they barely understand be struck down in its infancy than oppose copyright. copyright is the absolute enemy

[qhazuban]

i love this so much. thank you @drdemonprince 💜

it’s taken me so many years to get to a better place with accepting that risk comes with everything in life; it makes more sense (and feels better, often) to try to cultivate a balance between taking certain risks and mitigating other risks, rather than constantly trying to eliminate risk (which is not possible anyway).

also i really love the critique of “safe sex” as a far too binary term

Is "safe sex" even real? Never done it so idk but you mentioned risk profiles once. I feel like demographically I've got a higher risk profile and the anxiety about that really prevents me from going and trying anything. Do you think that's overly anxious in a negative way?

"safe sex" is a really misleading and binary term. There is never any guarantee of safety in anything we do. Every choice we make comes with risks. Hell, choosing not to connect with other people sexually (if you have any desire to) does ITSELF come with its own risks and costs over time.

The chase after perfect, guranteed safety will only lead to us feeling powerless and afraid, because it is an impossibility. All that we can do is inform ourselves of the risks, mitigate the risks we are the most concerned about and that affect others, and then knowingly accept what risks we still face as the cost of leading a full, enjoyable life.

When we inform ourselves about risk mitigation, we learn there are certain steps that we should probably take to protect ourselves and others if we are engaging in behavior that carries risk. If you're having sex with a complete stranger, it's probably smart to use a condom. If you have sex regularly you might want an HPV vaccine or to be on PreP to prevent HIV transmission. When you meet up with people you should get tested for COVID. You should get vaccinated against COVID. If you want to get suspended in rope from the ceiling don't use a hardware store $3 carabeener, get the good shit from the rock-climbing supply store. Things like that.

But even if you use a condom, you might get herpes or HPV or crabs or a yeast infection. Even if you never have sex, you might already have herpes or HPV or crabs or a yeast infection. I've had several of those things, including some of the "scarier" sounding ones, and they're really not that big a deal. They're just a thing that happens in life. Most people have them. You pop a Valtrex when you have symptoms, you shove a suppostiory up your vulva when it itches, you sleep without underwear on, you communicate with partners, you move on with your life.

Sure, I do what I can to avoid the risks I am most concerned about. I take PreP right now because not getting HIV would be preferable to me. But I could still live if I got it. I am informed about the realities of living with HIV today, which makes that fear more manageable. It is easier for me to make carefully considered and yet realistic decisions surrounding my risk profile because I can confront the realities that scare me and learn more about them.

The body is not separable form its environment. We are connected to our surroundings and the people around us, and our bodies get sick, catch viruses, grow old, get messy, and die inevitably and return to the earth. With our one life, we each have to choose what is most important to us and what potential costs we can stand. But with each year that passes, a cost to our bodies is already incurred, and there's nothing we can do to prevent aging and death from coming our way.

So what would you like to do while you are around? Would you like to have sex with condoms? Go on PreP? Get the HPV vaccine? Take random loads in a glory hole? Make out and dry hump with a cutie at a party and catch her cold sore? Cross the street in the dark after looking both ways? Go out dancing so late that your sleep is disrupted for the whole week? Get your heart broken? Have a great all-consuming love? Have children? Endure a torn labia while giving birth? Try psychedelics? Go on a swinger's cruise? Get a UTI from spermicide? Roleplay online instead of meeting in person? Fuck people with a strap-on?

The choice is yours. And no choice you make will be perfect or come without risk. No life is safe. Accepting loss is one of the necessary tasks of leading a life. But you can educate yourself, reflect on what you most want out of life and what you fear, and then take steps to demystefy your worst fears and mitigate the risks that loom largest to you and the people you care about.

Whatever you decide, I hope you have some fun.

[qhazuban]

i believe in accessibility so ive been trying to keep the tone of my posts entry-level and relatively civil. i can afford this much because im not palestinian so i have some degree of removal. but if you guys saw the state of my inbox, you would understand why refusing to justify, explain or clarify anything might be more dignified. there are almost ten thousand people dead right now. i feel like a lot of people are just not understanding the weight of this. more children have been killed in gaza in the past three weeks than in all of the world’s conflicts combined in each of the past three years. this is so far beyond crime, so far beyond mass murder, that sometimes i think entertaining questions about it at all is complicity in and of itself. in a normal world, the entire global apparatus, every international body, would be falling over itself to stop this. the prospect of so many civilians—and most significantly children—dead is actually the worst-case scenario. it is what international law was created to prevent. i say children specifically not because adult palestinians are not equally valuable, but because this is a war on children. gaza's population is 50% children. these airstrikes are most lethal on the smallest and most vulnerable bodies. entire buildings are crumbling on kids. they are being murdered in their homes, by their homes.

deliberately. by people with the most advanced military and surveillance technology in the world. by people who know exactly where every single civilian in gaza is. by people who have their phone numbers and send them threatening texts. by people who have drones observing their every movement. by people who are watching them starve, bombing their bakeries, barricading their water. they bring down buildings on children on purpose.

it's a genocide. and still we talk.

[qhazuban]

love “hot allostatic load” always 💔💔💔

and i wish i had more people in my life to have critical conversations about disposability and accountability with

This is an old article, but it's relevant, and I want to revisit it. I really recommend folks read the entire article; I'm just going to pull some excerpts, but there's no way they can do justice to the reading in full.

"Very few people want to defend a target of disposability."

I was told by one person that she couldn’t risk losing her job, another that she didn’t want to become a target too. I was threatened into not defending myself, gaslit into silence, told that people knew “things” about me that were never explained. When I asked how I could do accountability, when I said I would do whatever they wanted, they said that I was “incapable” of accountability, that my crime was unknown and my sentence was permanent.

"Accountability" is to callout culture what "justice" is to the punitive justice system: an empty word to wrap around your actions in order to justify them. Anything is okay as long as it's in pursuit of accountability.

Callout culture does not actually want accountability, though, and all attempts at real, honest accountability will be avoided, ignored, or outright rejected. If accountability is achieved and you are left intact, callout culture has failed.

My attackers were expert pathological liars who had been getting away with it for years—entire fictional realities playing out on their social-media accounts like soap opera. Escaping from abuse is the most certain way to become painted as an abuser, and being an abuser is the most sure way to be believed. You know how movies are realer than reality? How the sound effects and physics become so normalized to us that reality seems flat and fake? Talking about abuse is kind of like that. Abusers know what sounds “real.” They are like expert movie-effects artists. Victims are stuck with boring fake reality.

Feminist/queer spaces are more willing to criticize people than abusive systems because they want to reserve the right to use those systems for their own purposes. At least attacking people can be politically viable, especially in a token system where you benefit directly by their absence, or where your status as a good feminist is dependent on constantly rooting out evil.

Think of these things the way you think of any other system ostensibly designed to change people's behavior for the better: what methods have been proven to work? What methods haven't? Why do those systems exist anyway?

Systems that reduce crime rates are designed around rehabilitation. They seek to remove people from toxic environments, heal them, equip them with better tools and resources, and send them back into the world ready to do better.

Systems that actively increase crime rates are designed around punishment. They remove people from society, hurt them, teach them they're trash, force them into either worse and more toxic communities and ideologies or into altogether isolation, and if they ever re-emerge, they are so irreparably blacklisted that there is no hope of them ever rejoining the society they were originally torn from.

So when people write all those apologist articles about call-out culture and other instruments of violence in feminism, I don’t think they understand that the people who most deserve those things can usually shrug off the effects, and the normalization of that violence inevitably trickles down and affects the weak. It is predictable as water. Criminal justice applies punishment under the conceit of blind justice, but we see the results: Prisons are flooded with the most vulnerable, and the rich can buy their way out of any problem. In activist communities, these processes follow a similar pragmatism. Punishment is not something that happens to bad people. It happens to those who cannot stop it from happening. It is laundered pain, not a balancing of scales.

Consider who callout culture most often targets. Consider how often people like them are defended not only by others like them, but by the larger feminist and queer community.

Not only that, but account for the position that individual is in, and the tools they have available to them. Do they have stable housing, work, and income? Do they have the ability to sink valuable time and energy into defending themselves? Can they risk trying and failing, or is their livelihood attached to any attempt to do so?

One of the most common tools of exclusion is through mobbing, which is rarely talked about because unlike rape, murder, etc, it’s not easy to pin it on a single person (or scapegoat).  Mobbing is emotional abuse practiced by a group of people, usually peers, over a period of time, through methods such as gaslighting, rumor-mongering, and ostracism. [...] Here is why it is horrible: 1) It has an unusually strong power to damage the victim’s relationship to society, because it can’t be written off as an outlier, as some singular monster. It reveals a fundamental truth about people that makes it difficult to trust ever again. People become like aliens, like a pack of animals that can turn on you as soon as some mysterious pheromone shift marks you for death. 2) The insidious nature of emotional abuse: How do you fight ostracism and rumors? They leave no bruises, they just starve you. 3) Mobbing typically occurs in places where the victim is trapped by some need or obligation: work, school, circles of friends. This can prolong exposure to damaging extremes.

Consider what tactics are being used to punish this person, and what is being demanded. If the people appointing themselves judge, jury, and executioner turn out to be wrong, is there any hope of recourse?

From a report by the Australian House of Representatives Education and Employment Committee: “90 percent of people being bullied make the comment: ‘I just want it to stop.’ They don’t want to go down a formal path, but just want the behaviour to stop.”

"RESISTING DISPOSABILITY"

— Let marginalized people be flawed. Let them fuck up like the Real Humans who get to fuck up all the time — Fight criminal-justice thinking. Disposability runs on the innocence/guilt binary, another category that applies dynamically to certain bodies and not others. The mob trials used to run trans people out of communities are inherently abusive, favor predators, and must be rejected as a process unequivocally. There is no kind of justice that resembles hundreds of people ganging up on one person, or tangible lifelong damage being inflicted on someone for failing the rituals of purification that have no connection to real life. — Pay attention when people disappear. Like drowning, it’s frequently silent. They might be blackmailed, threatened, and/or in shock. — Even if the victim doesn’t want to fight (which is deeply understandable—often moving on is the only response), private support is huge. This is the time to make sure the wound doesn’t become infected, that the PTSD they acquire is as minimized as possible. This is the difference between a broken leg healing to the point where they can run again, or walking with a limp for the rest of their life. They’ve just been victim-blamed by a huge number of people, and as a social organism, their body is telling them to die. They need social reintegration, messages of support, and space to heal. — Be extremely critical about what people say about trans people, especially things said in vagueness. The rumor mill that keeps trans people out of spaces isn’t even so much about people believing what is said, it’s about people choosing the safest option—a staining that plays on the average person’s risk aversion. — Ask yourself if the same thing would be happening if they were white/cis/able-bodied. — “Radical inclusivity recognizes harm done in the name of God.” —Yvette Flunder Marginalized spaces can’t form healthy community purely from rejection of the mainstream. There has to be an acknowledgment of how people have been hurt by feminist spaces and their models. — A common enemy isn’t the same as loving each other. — Don’t be part of spaces that place an ideal or “community leader” above people.

[qhazuban]

thinking a lot about how phrases like

“I’m at capacity, I can’t engage [with you] right now” / “I don’t have the capacity to reconnect” / “I don’t have capacity for more connections” / etc.

“Thank you for sharing [your vulnerability]”

“These are my boundaries, I’m articulating them so we can better show up and care for each other / be in community with each other”

“I want to honour your needs and boundaries” / “What do you need / what are your boundaries?”

“What’s bringing you joy these days?”

“I want to be intentional with our plans” / “I’m setting an intention to…”

“Let’s unpack that” / “There’s a lot to unpack here” / etc.

“Let’s practice authenticity”

“I’m looking for slowness and intentionality”

“That’s so valid”

“I want to be mindful of…”

& other such vocabulary popular in the lexicon of western social justice communities, gentle parenting and nonviolent communication circles, tenderqueer social circles, various new age / woo / healing social spheres, etc etc

just feel like lies, codes, ways of obfuscating and justifying, getting away from really being direct and honest (while ironically purporting to be direct and honest forms of communication), ways to say “wow you’re toxic / oversharing / crossing boundaries / immature / clearly in need of healing / etc, get away from me” without actually saying it

I need to articulate this more, but I guess it all feels related to my thoughts on liberal boundaries discourse

I do use some of this language too, sometimes, both out of necessity and exposure and habit and whatever, often because it feels like the only way to communicate with all these people who don’t even realize how deeply individualistic and alienating this kind of communication is, I’m not saying it’s always terrible or should never be used or whatever, it’s complicated obviously

but then I have to feel guilty both for using the language when it feels so fake *and* for feeling angry about the language itself since apparently that means I’m just a terrible person who doesn’t believe in boundaries or respect or whatever at all 🙄

anyway I need to articulate this more & there’s so much constantly swirling in my head about it but it all feels very very much part of disposability culture, the thing we do not name or talk about enough or properly, all these ways to seem so “evolved” and “self-actualized”

honestly i would just prefer if you said

“I’m exhausted I can’t deal with this”

“I’m angry about [xyz], I don’t want to talk to you anymore”

“yeah I don’t trust you, bye”

“why are you oversharing so much” / “that’s too much information” / “just shut up now”

“yeah if you do this again I’m leaving, bye”

“if you can’t communicate in a healthy way then I don’t want to talk to you”

“why are you so upset all the time, can’t you be happy sometimes”

“you’re too chaotic to do things with”

“this is too overwhelming”

“I don’t want to deal with all that”

“you’re overwhelming me”

“yeah you’re being too real, stop it”

“that’s crazy, get away from me”

“okay whatever but that’s too much again”

or whatever else

and, you know, it’s valid (haha) to feel overwhelmed, tired, scared, etc

and I wish we could just say that

instead of inventing all these ways to obfuscate and act like we’re so “in touch with our feelings” when we are really, really not

[qhazuban]

i think it’s very important to critique and deconstruct the colonial and pathological structures of psychiatry, psychology, mental disorder, etc.... and we are also living in a world where we are inevitably informed by these material histories and constructs. so complete rejection is impossible.

also i find it helpful to fuck up those structures but also “tell it slant” (in the words of emily dickinson), in the sense that mad pride and neurodivergence involve a complex interrogation of the norms alongside attempts at rejection, reclamation, and also just trying to survive and make sense of everyday “symptomology”

i think there has to be a greyness of existence that’s somewhere between “reform everything from the inside” and “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” (audre lorde)

i think this greyness overlaps with audre lorde’s sensibility, and is generally critical of reform strategies, but also acknowledges that survival in this world involves complicity in systems

i guess i also constantly see the people who are claiming to reject pathologization and colonial structures etc. still behaving in ways that are incredibly situated in those ways of thinking…. and i think that’s the reality of material contradictions, but it really would help if they acknowledged that rather than continuing to be self-righteous about it & proclaiming complete rejection! (this is me being bitter about a lot of bullshit i’ve seen in radical mental health & disability justice ~communities~)

i’m much more interested in all the contradictions that we are all constantly living with!

[qhazuban]

hey did you know that uhh

i. the monster's body is a cultural body

ii. the monster always escapes

iii. the monster is the harbinger of category crisis

iv. the monster dwells at the gates of difference

v. the monster polices the borders of the possible

vi. fear of the monster is really a kind of desire

vii. the monster stands at the threshold… of becoming

[qhazuban]

how is "nationalism of the oppressed" mythological

In a dual sense - 1) like all nationalisms, it relies on central myths, and 2) the idea of an innately revolutionary "nationalism of the oppressed" is itself mythical, not a useful analytical or political tool but basically a way of handwaving difficult tactical questions.

All nationalism is in some sense myth-making - it posits an underlying, intangible unity among a group of people with highly diverse and divergent interests and traits. This is part of the reason why nationalists so often talk in the abstract language of "national spirit" - abstraction is kind of the point. This intangible unity doesn't *have* to be ethnicity, it's frequently (for example) the highly nebulous concept of "culture." But the inevitable slide towards ethnicity - and I do think it is inevitable - is unsurprising.

If you identify the unifying force of a people, the thing that makes it a "nation," with something like language/religion/culture, those things are fairly fluid both in space (taking a variety of different forms across different places) and time (changing over time for any number of reasons). This is especially the case because those traits are basically "open," at least theoretically: other people can move in, learn a language, convert to a local religion, and/or learn the techniques and style of local cultural production (and in the process change the character of the culture). So the supposed unity of "culture" is very obviously made up. (It's also worth noting that, insofar as nationalism is coextensive with statecraft, we often see efforts to preserve or create a "national culture" or "national unity" that leaves out or represses certain groups and practices; figuring out what constitutes "the nation" is a highly arbitrary process.)

Ethnicity is also fake - it is a "myth of common descent" - but that quality counterintuitively makes it a more stable foundation for a nationalist political project, because it is 1) derived from something in the past, making it harder to contest or observe, and 2) an immutable trait within the myth's context. You can't identify or convert or learn your way into being a part of the ethnos, you either are or you aren't. This makes for a much more stable boundary line around who is included or prioritized within the polity and who isn't.

As for why "nationalism of the oppressed" is mythological: it is not a meaningful historical category. When people invoke it they are collapsing a bunch of different projects and movements, some of which are conservative and some of which are revolutionary. I also reject the idea that nationalism's goodness is contingent on whether it is practice by an oppressed or oppressor group and nothing else - lest we forget that Zionism was once considered a kind of "nationalism of the oppressed."

For the socialist or the revolutionary, nationalism should be considered a kind of tactic; it is not a good in itself. Any revolutionary or liberatory movement is going to have to make decisions about what they want the movement to look like - its positions, rhetoric, propaganda, goals, etc. Nationalism is a historically popular means for doing things like rallying people to your cause, establishing basic principles for statecraft, cultivating a new political and social culture, etc. This is basically Frantz Fanon's argument in Wretched of the Earth - consistent with his arguments in his previous book, Fanon rejects the notion of a prepolitical national unity. He does not want to wade around in the primordial soup for a "true history" for colonized countries to return to or emulate. But nor does he reject nationalism as a strategy for combating colonialism on the field or in the body. Rather, he wants a class-driven national culture that is emergent from within the process of anti-colonial resistance and that ultimately gives way to an internationalist, universalist humanism once its purposes have been achieved. It's an extremely qualified kind of argument. I don't totally agree with it, but it's an argument that I can wrap my head around and endorse in the broad strokes, because above all it is talking about nationalism as a means towards something.

The kind of people who bastardize Fanon and try and recuperate him into their insipid microwaved politics have this entirely fictional idea of nationalism as an innately revolutionary end, that if you put nationalism in the hands of the right people it will automatically gravitate towards liberation and will not introduce the same kind of problems that the nationalism of colonial powers or capitalist countries has. This is just demonstrably not true (*gestures vaguely at cross-pollination between black nationalisms and black conservatisms, the historical relationship between nationalism and liberal statecraft, the success of right-wing religious or ethnic nationalist movements like Hindutva or Ba’athism in post-colonial countries, etc.*), and is basically just weird, idealist nonsense about how being oppressed makes you morally virtuous.

It also has the effect of obfuscating class politics - ironic, since the people that most frequently utter this line are ML(M)s. There are quite a few "nationalisms of the oppressed" that presume the working-class of a country or a group has more in common with its local bourgeoisie or professional-class counterparts (frequently the spearheads of nationalist movements, if we wanna talk about "class character") rather than the working classes and oppressed groups of other countries.

What the "nationalism of the oppressed" myth does is effectively evade hard strategic questions. Instead of asking "how will this help the cause? what problems might it introduce? does this conflict with long-term goals and are the short-term victories going to be worth it?" it just assumes from the outset that none of those questions are worth asking. It assumes that nationalism is an automatically better foundation for a movement than humanism, or cosmopolitanism, or internationalism.

[qhazuban]

antipsychiatry does not mean the same thing as anti medication. i firmly believe in antipsychiatry and part of the reason is because I’ve seen how hard it is for people to get the meds they actually want. the amount of friends I’ve had who’s doctors refuse to prescribe them meds for their ADHD even though they can prove that it’s helping them, the amount of people I know who want to get psych meds but can’t because psychiatrists refuse to prescribe them meds once they learn that they use criminalized drugs, the amount of people I know who can’t get psychs to prescribe them meds for the symptoms that are actually distressing them unless they agree to be on other meds that don’t help them—easy access to psych meds is a right that goes hand in hand with the right to not be medicated against your will. it comes back to autonomy and how psychiatry gets in the way of autonomy in so so many ways. psychiatry operates in a paradigm where the most convenient justification for the psychiatrists view of cure becomes the one they cling to in the moment. Which means that mad/mentally ill/neurodivergent people who have to interact with the psych system are constantly at risk both for being drugged against our will and for being prevented from taking medication.

mad/mentally ill / neurodivergent people deserve authentic, informed consent that allows us to make the choices about what risks we are willing to take, what symptoms are liveable, and what side effects are intolerable. The psychiatric system has a million barriers that get in the way of this type of decision making, and fucks over all mad/mentally ill/ neurodivergent people, no matter our personal relationship to medication.

[qhazuban]

it goes against so much of what i stand for to share "palestinians are humans, they have hobbies, they have pets, they laugh and cry" kind of posts because i've spent so much of my life and career completely rejecting the notion that we should humanize ourselves, that we should ever be defensive, that we should entertain this racism at all

but it breaks my heart when i have to share them from people in gaza, who are using their five minutes of internet connection, their 25% of battery charge collected from a macguyvered car battery, emotionally exhausted, thirsty and hungry, sleeping in schools that have turned into refugee shelters and still making the time to say "please, i am human too, i am still alive, please fight for me" in english to appeal to the only people who have the power to help

i shared a tweet from a jjk artist in gaza i follow about a bts photocard being found in the middle of the rubble. even the love of anime and kpop and sports is no longer just a hobby, but an appeal to humanity. what was once a source of joy is now proof of life.

the worst part is that you won't find this content in arabic. palestinians don't post like this in arabic. but when they translate themselves, they recognize that they must humanize themselves first. it's an unspoken understanding of dehumanization, one that has dictated a whole region's understanding of the value of human life. in arabic they speak with dignity, with anger, with sorrow. in english, they appeal for their existence.

i share these posts not just because we have to reach everyone we can, because im being asked to and i will not refuse. but i also share them because they're evidence of how deep the racism has run. at what dehumanization leads to. of war crime after war crime. this too i will not forget.

[qhazuban]

Across the US, people speaking out on behalf of Palestinian human rights and against Israeli war crimes, apartheid policies, and settler-colonial expansion that have been unfolding over nearly eight decades are facing a wave of McCarthyite backlash directly targeting their future careers and livelihoods. Students at other prominent universities have faced the same: the leaders of Harvard University student groups were doxxed and smeared for signing a statement also expressing solidarity with the Palestinian people. Their names and faces were plastered on a mobile billboard truck that roamed around campus for days, and a “College Terror List” circulated online accusing them of antisemitism. Several also lost job offers. A Berkeley law professor published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal imploring legal employers not to hire his own students and smearing them as antisemitic. [This piece was originally commissioned by an editor at The Guardian, who asked me to write about the wave of retaliation and censorship of political expression in solidarity with Palestinians that we’ve seen in the past two weeks. Amid my work as an attorney on some of the resulting cases, I carved out some time to write the following. Minutes before it was supposed to be published, the head of the opinion desk wrote me an email that they were unable to run the piece. When I called her for an explanation she had none, and blamed an unnamed higher-up. That a piece on censorship would get killed in this way—without explanation, but plainly in the interest of political suppression—is, beyond the irony of the matter, a grave indictment of the media response to this critical moment in history.]

[qhazuban]

yeah. sad fucking truth

it might not be possible to get a good grade in therapy but if you get a bad grade they do put you in prison

[qhazuban]

Israeli combat tactics show we should be cautious of the military’s respect for any of these considerations. In 2008 and 2014, they dropped leaflets on Gazans to take shelter and then deliberately targeted the UN infrastructure that provided shelter, claiming the buildings were Hamas weapons depots. In other cases, they would engage in a practice called “roof knocking,” where the army would tap a Palestinian home with a small missile and then give the family three minutes to leave before striking it with another, more deadly, missile. Imagine the paralyzing anxiety that comes over somebody in a moment like this. Yet Israel claims they are the most moral army in the world because of things like the provisions of warning. And they have done this successfully because of the racial construction that will not have us believe that Palestinians can be victims—that whatever happens, they are to be blamed for their own deaths.

Noura Erakat, “The Crimes Are Plenty”

[qhazuban]

it is remarkable how much some people want to fantasize away power dynamics by controlling everyone around them. ugh. yeah. such a clear relationship between policing fictional relationships & real-life relationships, and vice versa.

while i admit that i'm a little glad to see people starting to take anti's and their conservative bullshit a bit more seriously it is incredibly frustrating to see people being.... surprised? that antis would start trying to dictate what counts as a 'problematic'/predatory/grooming relationship in real life in ways that are incredibly harmful and ableist and queerphobic like

we've been telling y'all this is where they were headed for years now, you don't get to surprised pikachu face about it just because they've moved on to harassing people over their real life relationships as well as the fictional shipping ones when y'all were the ones going 'i'm above this debate and everyone involved in it is a fucking idiot'

we told you to take this seriously, we told you this would happen, and here we are. the antis have been sending us death threats, doxxing people and engaging in endless harassment campaigns for decades - over increasingly queerphobic, racist and ableist ideas of what is a 'problematic' ship - and it's been fucking ignored because it was just 'stupid fanwank'

and now we have people saying shit with their whole chest like

'if you knew your partner as a minor you're both predators getting off to the memory of them as a kid' - which comes from 'aging up characters to write about them having sex is bad'

'finding an autistic person attractive is predatory because people with autism are basically children mentally' - which comes from 'characters can be ""minor coded"" because of disability, behaviour and even height'

'even if you're both adults having an age gap over 2 years (or some other arbitrary number) means the older person is grooming the younger person' - which comes from similar age-gap 'discourse'

'african american people being in a relationship with white people & non-black POC is predatory because white people/non-black POC don't have the same depth of experience and mental maturity as black people (yes this is one i have actually seen someone say, not a straw man, tiktok is a wild place - i've also heard of similar musings about trans people being in relationships with cis folk but i can't recall a specific instance)' - which stems from the idea that all relationships must be equal in every way lest there be a power imbalance, because all power imbalances are inherently abusive

i have yet to stumble across a single accusation of 'problematic' real life arguments that doesn't have a deep root in anti-ship rhetoric and discourse. it's just now it's escaped the containment of fiction and people are getting harassed or judged over real life relationships as well.

[qhazuban]

I think people need to understand that when someone says the situation in Israel/Palestine is complicated they are not necessarily saying that the discussion of who the oppressor vs oppressed is complicated. The Israeli government has been oppressing the Palestinians for a very long time, that is clear, and it is not complicated to understand that at least since the 80s they have had dramatically more financial and military power to keep control of the territory in the way they like.

However, it is reductive and dismissive to insist that there is no complexity in the potential ways to move forward to bring peace to the region. Despite what people on tumblr.edu like to believe, "Israel should never have been created" is not a practical solution to an incredibly heated geopolitical situation in the present day. Israel was created and it does exist. 10 million people live there. 74% of the population is native born and the country has existed for 75 years. Hand waving these fact away with the opinion that "they should move back to where they came from" may make you feel good about being a Radical Leftist, but it does not give anyone a road map for how exactly millions of people without dual citizenship are supposed to just up and evaporate. Nor does it acknowledge the reality that 21% of Israelis are Arabs, the very people you are claiming to want to give the land back to.

Insisting that there's nothing complicated about expecting an entire country's population to willingly dissappear with no consequences is not a productive way to think about this conflict. It ignores the many massive superpowers that have an interest in proping up different states in the region, the power dynamics involved in any land back movements, and the inevitably negative consequences of totally dissolving an established state without a plan. It is also completely and almost comically unrealistic, so much so that it makes it hard to believe that anyone who's opinion starts and ends with this idea really gives a shit about anyone who lives in the area as much as they care about their online leftist clout.

There's nothing complicated in understanding that the Israeli government is and has been maintaining an oppressive apartheid state for decades. It is, however, very complicated to come up with a realistic way to resolve some of the most intricately entangled land disputes on the planet without plunging the region into total chaos. Not everyone has to be deeply educated on every geopolitical situation, but it is very hard to take people seriously when they know nothing about the politics or history of a region and yet insist that there is nothing complicated about it at all.

There's a lot of people on this website who are getting dangerously smug about their own ignorance, and are starting to go down Qanon type anti-intellectual paths in the name of being sufficiently radical. Not knowing the details of a very convoluted land dispute isn't something to brag about online as you call for intentionally reductive solutions. You can support the Palestinian cause and be aware of the oppression they have faced while also holding off on calling people trying to do real analysis and de-escalation work bootlickers. We need to get control of the urge to fit every global issue into a simplistic YA novel narrative structure that appeals to Western revolutionary fantasies.