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I grew up in a family that depended on disability benefits. I remember the sobbing panic attack my mum had when David Cameron introduced austerity measures that meant my dad would be reassessed and might be declared "fit for work". My dad was diagnosed with a brain tumor when I was 1 year old and slowly declined despite surgery and treatment for 25 years until he died 3 years ago. There was no possible world where he would have been able to work, the tumor and the process of removing it left parts of his brain while destroying others, but the reassessment standard was to be able to walk up and down a couple of steps and lift a light object overhead. The change to benefits policy was in retrospect obviously based on the idea that there are infinite mindless menial jobs for lazy people who are trying to "get away" with being on benefits.

My family being kicked off disability benefits was a constant threat that I felt present throughout my childhood, and even the looming threat of it and the stress that it put on my mother made my already difficult, sad and isolated childhood terrifying. Changes to disability benefits that systematically eject people from money they need to survive ruins countless lives. People never imagine disabled people having families, probably because society tells us to imagine the disabled as less. The reality of these policies is a font of generational and community trauma visited upon the working class by those in power.

Starmer is explicitly trying to cut disability benefits by £5 million, there isn't a way to pitch the changes to PIP that doesn't involve ruining scores of lives.

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TERFs alwayssssss find my reproductive health posts just to complain about the gender neutral language. That’s it. That is all they have to say. They’re like sharks in the water waiting to derail the whole message of the post because I said ‘people’ instead of ‘women’.

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The average Tumblr user is desperate to have a target that not only deserves to be bullied, but that it is a moral duty to sexually harass, suicide bait, and doxx, without restraint or mercy. History of ethics on this website

Yeah...

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You know we only ever really "learn" how to bathe in our youth as it is taught to us by our parents and from then on most people kinda just bathe the same way right. And like barring actively deciding to do it the only way most people change their bathing habits is if they bathe with a loved one and get convinced to do somethi g different in the bath bc its cleaner/faster/whatever bc of them. Ok heres the thesis statement. The lack of communal bathing in society is holding us back from discovering The Ultimate Bathing

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I think that conservatives have never actually really been about small government but they keep saying that they are

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Reconstruction of bust of Roman emperor Caracalla.

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I want everyone who makes or reblogs moral ocd unsafe posts to throw their electronics away, sleep on the floor, and eat nothing but the grass growing in their backyard since that's what they've got me feeling like I should do

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Brandy (You're A Fine Girl) - Looking Glass

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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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ALT

ALT

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Inner peace 🕊️🐱😌

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English added by me :)

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"I don't want to see anyone blaming abstaining voters for this!"

Of course you don't. The entire idea of abstaining was that you could pretend this didn't involve you. Not getting blamed was more important to you than doing any kind of damage control, more important than protecting any of the people you said you wanted to protect. And in this moment, I don't really care what you want. Of course, this isn't entirely your fault. Of course other people made this worse. But if you're going to pretend you had nothing to do with this, forgive me if I ignore you.

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From that moment i knew they weren't killers 🤣

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Rings my fucking bell, like a perennial fucking plague maiden:

Center harm, not disgust!

When in doubt (and when not in doubt, just swept by problems bigger than you and assured by someone that they know the answer, so don't think right now, just Do!), center harm.

Focus on what specific harm you're reducing with your actions. Make sure it's tangible and concrete. If your actions are minimizing hypothetical harm at the cost of real, tangible harm on others, 9 out 10 times you're on the wrong fucking side, being weaponized by propaganda.

If a conversation revolves around disgust as a driver for action, you're being radicalized. If a call to action depends on your emotional response, you're being manipulated. I'm sorry, this isn't the 90s anymore, social media has eroded the web of respectability of the pre internet society. The primary axis for misinformation to spread in this day and age is emotional response: half the things you believe are true and share as such are not based on fact, expert opinion or personal research. Social media has conditioned us (all of us! You and me and most dangerously of all, the idiots we put in power) that if something feels true, it probably is.

But do you know for sure it is? Do you think it's true because you have first hand experience or actual time spent on reputable sources learning it to be fact? Or just because it aligns with your worldview and it would be nice for you if it were true?

Are you taking action because you're angry and a group of fellow angry folk invited you to join them? Do you have a plan or is this just catharsis? Are you aware of the consequences of your actions or are you drunk on rage and focused only on the immediate future?

Center harm. Center specific actions and their consequences.

Discomfort is not harm. Disgust is not harm. Hypothetical paranoia is not harm.

The reactionary pipeline is real and your self-image as a progressive is not actually enough to save you from falling down the hole. Radicalization is not hinged on politics alone. Saying you're a leftist is worthless if your thought process and actions themselves are indistinguishable from qanon losers. Conspiratorial thought has literally no politics inherently, and your insistence it does is pure lack of critical thought on display.

Center harm, not feelings, not politics, not group think.

Center harm, and remember that individual actions cannot dismantle systemic structures on their own, so anyone who calls for individual action at the cost of community structures is not actually trying to change anything, and instead actively suppressing efforts to make anything better in any way.

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it's true and you should say it.