seventytwo-waterellens

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‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves A stately pleasure-dome decreed. And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

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Gilbert Baker helps hoist one of the two original rainbow flags created by the decoration committee for San Francisco Gay Freedom Day | 1978 | ph: James McNamara, lead seamster of the flags

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Being like. Post-suicidal is so strange. Like hiiiii everybody im new I spent a good chunk of my life languishing and have like 3 or 4 lived experiences. But now I'm ready to fuck and party or whatever. Can we be friends. Im so happy to be here. Can we be friends

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Reblogging for this excellent and helpful addition!

You should absolutely seek to verify how accurate informations is, whether from news sources or social media. But if you’re concerned that the info you’re getting from traditional media is biased or wrong, social media is absolutely worse.

Follow reliable sources like the above, check your facts, and remember that just because something you hear aligns with your worldview doesn’t make it true.

I am begging you guys to get your news from somewhere other than social media. Of course social media can be valuable, but it is NOT a replacement for actual news outlets that have reporters, researchers, fact checkers, experts to interview, and years of background.

Do not learn everything you know about Iran from tumblr or Instagram or tiktok. Information is important and accuracy even more so. No one is immune to misinformation and propaganda (from MANY angles) and we have to do better.

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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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I Won't Hurt You

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maaaaan if you put the youth of today into some kind of old style situation they would struggle but adapt over time much like those of the past.

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I am begging you guys to get your news from somewhere other than social media. Of course social media can be valuable, but it is NOT a replacement for actual news outlets that have reporters, researchers, fact checkers, experts to interview, and years of background.

Do not learn everything you know about Iran from tumblr or Instagram or tiktok. Information is important and accuracy even more so. No one is immune to misinformation and propaganda (from MANY angles) and we have to do better.

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Lets go All Over The Fucking Place with mama

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I think every lesbian who says she wouldn't date a bi woman is functionally on the same wavelength as men who say they would only marry a virgin

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Le poisson Steve, the 259th Known One.

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