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who’s left- Mariame/Prison Abolition

by Flynn Nicholls

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I saw a post that stated that “found family” was the worst concept ever to hit fandom. I don’t think that, but I sure appreciate the original poster’s concerns.

Biologically unrelated people who did not have a parent-child relationship and were not raised as siblings cannot commit incest.

That’s not how incest works.

If you think there’s too much power differential between unrelated adult characters for their relationship to be okay, that can be a legitimate reason for you to decide not to read, write, draw, or reblog the ship.

You don’t have to approve of every ship in a fandom. But you have to be good to people even if you don’t like what they ship, because real people matter.

BUT:

* that doesn’t make it incest

* that doesn’t make it “paedophilia” (one of the characters involved has to currently be an actual child for that to be relevant)

* disabled people, even intellectually disabled people, are not kids

* that also doesn’t make it “bestiality” or “zoophilia” if one of the characters resembles an animal, but is sapient and able to communicate consent.

You must also keep in mind that your opinion is a headcanon.

See, I’m a Watsonian, not a Doylist; if you try to give me a real-world explanation about the writers’ constraints, goals and desires when I’m writing about my opinions of ships or characters, I’m going to try to be polite when I ask you to stop, because that’s irrelevant to my concerns. I’m not doing academic literary criticism.

I know that there were real-world reasons for creators’ decisions. I just don’t care. At all. I believe that the reason Ravage is never shown in a romantic relationship in canon is because s/he looks like a cat and Hasbro wouldn’t have liked it because it would not have helped them sell toys. But that has nothing to do with what fanfic writers are doing, and it’s also quitter talk.

All fanfiction is AU. Even if it contradicts nothing that verifiably happened in canon, it’s still not an addition to the actual canon, and it’s based on your personal interpretation of who the characters are, which is influenced by many personal factors, including your own life experiences.

Therefore, other people may headcanon the power balance in that relationship very differently from you, and if you don’t like it, that’s your problem.

Your personal life experience–including your personal traumas and other past experiences–may lead you to see a relationship as one-sided dependency with a huge power gap; another person may see that same relationship as healthy mutual interdependence, because they see both characters getting something out of the relationship that enriches their lives and fulfils their emotional needs.

People have different views on whether relationships between people who are not on the same level of the chain of command are okay, and most people view these relationships differently if the relationship existed before the work situation existed. Canon is not always clear on the chronology, meaning that this too is up to interpretation.

People have different views about age gaps, based on their personal and family histories; it’s hard to get morally indignant about two adults 20 years apart in age getting together when your happily married parents had the same age gap. 

If you are judging, harassing and doing emotional harm to another living human because you have different headcanons about the relationships between fictional characters, you are always The Asshole.

(Additionally, if people were comfortable thinking about fictional characters who are children in sexual situations, they wouldn’t bother ageing them up, so please shut up about that.)

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Remember that the calls for the national guard to intervene are calls to use state violence against Palestinian, Jewish, Arab, Muslim and other pro-Palestine students. They’re calling for deadly violence against Jews in the name of “anti-antisemitism.”

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“how would you feel if someone blocked you just because they found you annoying?” then i wouldn’t have to interact with someone who thinks i’m annoying? i don’t see a problem

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yeah, people do lie on the internet, however i am so passionate about things that if i lie it will feel like i committed an autistic sin

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My grandmother Naifa al-Sawada was born in June 1932. A beautiful girl with blue eyes, she was the only daughter to her parents. They were originally from Gaza but moved to nearby Bir al-Saba, where Naifa’s father Rizq worked as a merchant. She did well at school and in 1947 obtained the necessary certificate from the British – then the rulers of Palestine – to attend university. She did not do so, however. Her father was fearful about what could happen to her at a time when war in Palestine appeared imminent. At a young age, she married my grandfather Salman al-Nawaty and went to live in Gaza. Between 1947 and 1949, Zionist forces expelled approximately 800,000 Palestinians from their homes. Among those directly affected by the Nakba – Arabic for catastrophe – were Naifa’s own parents, who fled their home in Bir al-Saba for Gaza. Having witnessed the Nakba, Naifa encouraged her own children to defend Palestine. Naifa gave birth to four girls and six boys.Like so many mothers in Gaza, she experienced great loss. Her son Moataz went missing while traveling to Jerusalem in 1982. It is still not known what happened to him. Another son Moheeb, a journalist, left Palestine for Norway in 2007. Three years later he traveled to Syria. In January 2011, he went missing. The Syrian authorities subsequently confirmed to the Norwegian diplomatic service that he was imprisoned. But he has not been allowed to contact his family.We do not know his current whereabouts or even if he is alive or dead. My grandmother witnessed the first intifada from 1987 and 1993. On the streets around her, youngsters with stones and slingshots rose up against armed Israeli soldiers in tanks and military jeeps. During that time, her son Moheeb – the aforementioned journalist – was held for more than a year without charge or trial. That infamous practice is called administrative detention. My grandmother lived close to al-Shifa, Gaza’s largest hospital. She took great care of arranging everything in her home with her delicate hands. She used those same hands to comb her hair into braids. She memorized the Quran and took great interest in the education of her children and grandchildren. On 21 March this year, Israeli troops broke into my grandmother’s home. The soldiers displayed immense brutality. They ordered the women in our family to evacuate on foot and arrested the men. They would not allow the women to take my grandmother, who had Alzheimer’s disease, with them. The soldiers claimed that my grandmother would be safe. That was a lie. The invasion of my grandmother’s house took place amid Israel’s siege on al-Shifa hospital. My grandmother’s house was destroyed during that siege and she was killed. Her remains were found days after the Israeli troops eventually withdrew from the hospital earlier this month. She was killed – alone – in the same house where she had lived since 1955. We do not know if she suffered or if she died quickly. We do know that she was older than Israel’s merciless occupation.

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Hey it's my birthday!! All I want is coffee to give me energy, which I will use to draw comics and fend off the transphobes!

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Theodore Herlz, father of Political Zionism: Yeah, it's colonial

Ber Borochov, father of Labour Zionism: Yeah, it's colonial

Ze'ev Jabotinsky, father of Revisionist Zionism: Yeah, it's colonial

David Ben Gurion, founding father of the Settler state: Yeah, it's colonial

Small bean fandom Zionist: Umm, lol, it's literally not colonial???

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Watterson pulled no punches

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*places an orange just outside a fairy ring to see what comes out* science is more of an art than a science

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Wizards make all those funny hand gestures because they're selecting the spell from a terrible UI

­The reason spell slots are so limited is because your wizard refuses to buy premium magic.

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Another aspect of the Gaza Genocide that I want to talk about is the complicity of Internet banking and crowdfunding websites like GoFundMe.

I have seen multiple Gazans raise enough money to leave for Egypt, but the banks and the crowdfunding websites freeze their money or cancel their funds for "suspicious activity" or whatever. Every day that passes in Gaza supplies get more scarce, conditions get more deadly, and the price to cross into Egypt gets more expensive. I've seen people, like ghost-90 here on Tumblr, raise the full amount to get their entire family out of Gaza, but their money gets frozen for so long that the original goal is only a fraction of the price now needed to cross the boarder.

These financial institutions should not be allowed to get away with contributing to the death toll in Gaza. They are intentionally keeping people trapped in a kill zone by withholding money that is rightfully theirs.

I'm so pissed and angry that every avenue for relief for Palestinians is being cut of left and right. It is vile that Gazans are being extorted for 10s of thousands of dollars by the Egyptian gov just to save their family's lives, but even when they play by this corrupt game, the world still finds a way to make them suffer.

My heart is with every Palestinian for the rest of time, from river to sea you will all be free. 🇵🇸❤️

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Something that literally changed my life was working with a friend on a coding thing. He was helping me create an auto rig script and was trying to explain something to me but his words were just turning into static in my brain. I was tired and confused and there was so many new concepts happening.

I could feel myself working toward a crying meltdown and was getting preemptively ashamed of what was about to happen when he said, “Hey, are you someone who benefits from breaks?”

It broke me.

Did I benefit from breaks? I didn’t know. I’d never taken them.

When a problem frustrated or upset me I just gritted my teeth and plowed through the emotional distress because eventually if you batter and flail at something long enough you figure it out. So what if you get bruised on the way.

I viscerally remembered in that moment being forced to sit at the table late into the night with my dad screaming at me, trying to understand math. I remembered taking that with me into adulthood and having breakdowns every week trying to understand coding. I could have taken a break? Would it help? I didn’t know! I’d never taken one!

“Yes,” I told him. We paused our call. I ate lunch. I focused on other stuff for half an hour. I came back in a significantly better state of mind, and the thing he’d been trying to explain had been gently cooking in the back of my head and seemed easier to understand.

Now when I find myself gritting my teeth at problems I can hear his gentle voice asking if I benefit from breaks. Yes, dear god, yes why did I never get taught breaks? Why was the only way I knew to keep suffering until something worked?

I was relating to this same friend recently my roadtrip to the redwoods with my wife. “We stopped every hour or so to get out and stretch our legs and switch drivers. It was really nice. When I was a kid we’d just drive twelve hours straight and not stop for anything, just gas. We’d eat in the car and power through.”

He gave a wry smile, immediately connecting the mindset of my parents on a road trip to what they’d instilled in me about brute forcing through discomfort. “Do you benefit from breaks?” he echoed, drawing my attention to it, making me smile with the same sad acknowledgement.

Take breaks. You’re allowed. You don’t have to slam into problems over and over and over, let yourself rest. It will get easier. Take. Breaks.

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Israel has refused to cooperate with a United Nations investigation into the country’s claim that members of the UN Palestinian refugee agency were involved in the Oct 7 attacks. A dozen workers from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) have been accused of supporting the massacre of 1,200 Israelis by distributing ammunition, abducting hostages and coordinating transportation. The allegations, which first surfaced on Jan 26, resulted in the US, UK and 14 other countries freezing funding for UNRWA. Days later, the UN launched an independent investigation, run from its headquarters in New York, to examine the claims. However, UN investigators have yet to receive any evidence from the Israelis, according to three sources with knowledge of the probe, despite this week spending “several days” in the country on a fact-finding mission.

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