#and among them i don't think i know any who *can* self advocate about this

[thespacesay]

one thing I feel like people miss in the discussions around the ridiculously low pay rates allowed for certain groups of disabled individuals is that in order to effectively change that, we first need to tackle funding for programs that support the types of disabled individuals who receive these pays. while i'm speaking to my personal connections to this, those low pay rates typically are social programs. these programs create jobs that are applied for via social workers assigned to disabled individuals by the state, and not through job applications. they are notoriously underfunded, primarily run by companies or groups who want to be seen as progressive, and typically are shut down rather than given increased funding.

for example: a recent change in a local pay rate for disabled individuals made it so my downs syndrome brother got like... $7 every two weeks (low hours + low pay) instead of $3. cool! for people who need more hours and the money it gives them, that sounds great!

but the thing is, at least for all the programs I know of, these programs are typically designed with people like my brother as the primary goal: adult disabled indiviuals for whom the goal of work is not to have a job, not to make money, but to provide a consistent socialization system. my brother is financially supported by our family, and he's disabled in ways where financial wellbeing is beyond his cognitive abilities. almost no money is put into the programs beyond paying a program manager, and it's generally used as a public "look at us, being so nice to provide for disabled adults!" thing. when my brother's pay went up due to legal changes... the company decided to simply end the program rather than invest in paying more.

again, i'm fully for raising their wages. I think the absolutely pitiful amount of money they're paid for legitimate work is terrible, and i'm well aware that my brother works with others who need what finances they can get through these jobs. but there's more to this than just wages. there's campaigning for better social programs so that there's something for them to fall back on. there's looking into how your local programs for disabled individuals are run, and ensuring they have enough money and equipement to provide a safe working environment for their workers. there's understanding who is paying these wages, what their goals are, and holding them accountable to helping disabled people instead of using people like my brother on an endless stream of advertisements to show how socially progressive they are.

and i'm really not joking about those ads. god, I really, really wish I was. my brother is visibly disabled, adores public attention, and very friendly. he's in like... 3 programs and featured in newsletters or ads probably 3-5 times a year. those programs have also let him wander out the door and not noticed for over an hour, fired program managers for manufactured reasons after they request funding for small but meaningful changes, and... been the local police. guess which group is the only one that never shuts down from a lack of funding?

I honestly can't tell you how best to help disabled people in your area. my needs as a disabled person are vastly different than either of my brothers, and all of us have terrible problems with employment not providing for us in vastly different ways. but if you're just tacking on "disabled people deserve better wages" to a broader "people deserve a living wage" with no nuance, you have got to understand that you can be actively harming the very people you want to support.

[drdemonprince]

Your blog is like a breath of fresh air. Thank you for all the wonderful thoughts and writing.

That said I actually have a question. I am pro-palestine(it feels stupid to call it that, as if it should even be a debate) and in a very left leaning friend group. But also a very white academic one. You know the type, read Marx, dream of the revolution but continue studying to end up in 9 to 5s instead of doing anything(I am guilty of it too, this isn't meant as insult just a description)

Anyways, as you can imagine they have been extremely hesitant when it comes to having any opinion on Israel or Palestine. That wouldn't be a problem in itself, I know how to start topics with them and get them thinking usually but in this case there is an additional problem. Whenever I try to broach the topic I get shutdown with "Look at all the shit that is going on here, our country is falling into fascism, I just don't have the energy to deal with this conflict. Please don't talk about it because it's triggering". And I have zero clue what to do. Forget getting them to go on protests with me, I can't even speak to them about it and feel really guilty. Its me bringing up a heavily triggering topic after all. It feels wrong to feel guilty though. I know at the end of the day it's not important if I could convince some people to give a fuck but do you have any advice? How to get over this guilt or maybe how to broach a topic with that considered?

My main problem is my fear of losing my friends because I have been ill for some time(as in physically unable to leave the house for more than a short grocery run, or my visits to the doctor, because of pain and my friends are what keep me alive) and losing their help would be not good.

My exact situation aside, do you have advice for someone to broach a topic that others describe as unpleasant/triggering without causing a huge rift in the group?

Thanks for your kind words and your question, Anon.

I think your friends suck and that you can do better than them. I think you should get out there and find yourself some Black, brown, working class anarchist and anarco-communist buds (and Marxists who show up for others in a real, observable way in their regular lives) as soon as you can.

I know that wasn't the answer you were looking for. But I have seen this kind of entirely theoretical, jaded, self-superior, passive, white well-off Marxist type a thousand times before, and I've failed to ever see them show up for other people in any kind of consistent way.

And it's not only the people systematically crushed beneath the wheel of Capital half a world away that they neglect, either. They tend to be pretty shitty friends and neighbors when it all comes down to it on the micro-level, too. Their smug over-intellectualism and dispassionate cynicism allows them to justify remaining disengaged and going along with the status quo in a way that ultimately serves capitalism very well.

There is a theoretical basis to this selfishness and disengagement, I will admit. This type of overly academic Marxist typically believes that the fall of capitalism is inevitable, that humans lack free will and only behave as befits their obvious material interests, and that there is nothing that one can do on a personal level to hasten any kind of Revolution, so there is nothing left to do but wait, and take care of oneself, and allow the future to unfold.

This is a perspective explicitly advocated for by people like the Chapo Trap House guys, and among academic white boy communist types, it is incredibly popular. I remember hearing Matt Christman saying on his vlogs that he essentially does not believe the conditions allowing capitalism to fall will happen in his lifetime, and so his only responsibility is to just take care of himself and his family and be comfortable.

Ultimately, these types wind up sounding and behaving exactly like capitalist economists who believe that everyone is rationally motivated only by increasing their personal wealth. They are disengaged from politics except insofar as they like to make snide jokes about current events for their own entertainment and enrichment, and they don't see themselves as having the capacity to exert a positive influence on the world, nor any obligation to. It's bleak shit.

At the same time, if your friends are in the circles that tend to read and listen to and promote this kind of stuff, surely they have also been exposed to popular leftist voices advocating loudly for the Palestinian cause. And yet still they have done nothing.

Hasan Piker has been vocally pro-Palestine his entire career, and his Twitch channel has been providing near constant coverage of Palestinian issues since October 7th. True Anon has had multiple episodes on the Israel Lobby, the suppression of pro-Palestinian activism and journalistic coverage, and has aired interviews with Normal Finkelstein. Palestine is the central topic of nearly every Trillbilly Worker's Party podcast for months now.

These are widely popular voices among the very types of Marxists that you say that your friends are, and many of these creators are close friends with the Chapo Trap House guys, whom your friends almost certainly are taking notes from. So it's nearly impossible to imagine that your friends have not encountered the near constant coverage of the struggle of the Palestinians that all the rest of us have. And yet still your friends do nothing. Still they do not care, and dismiss you when you share with them how despairing you feel.

Your friends have turned off an essential part of their hearts, I think. And I don't mean they lack empathy. Not having empathy is fine, I don't have it either -- but I make the conscious choice to care about the Palestinian cause and to advocate for it, because it aligns with my values. I give a fuck. My giving a fuck is conveyed through my actions, not through what I think about or how I feel.

Your friends are showing no interest in learning more about this genocide or doing anything about it. Perhaps some degree of ignorance or hesitancy could be justified early on because the Israeli apologist propaganda is so far reaching, but we're well past the point of that explaining away inaction by now. Over 100,000 people are missing and over 30,000 are known to be dead and little girls are being shot by snipers while seeking medical care while babies are left to rot in their NICU beds.

Your friends know this. Maybe not everyone in the world does, but if they're so well-read about leftist issues, your friends do. And they have chosen, for some reason, not to care. They've disconnected from the pain the Palestinian people are in, unplugged from the steady stream of upsetting information, sought comfort in a politics that says all too conveniently that nothing they do matters, and when you try to share with them how much anguish you are feeling about the mass deaths happening throughout the world, they're dismissive toward you.

Your friends suck. If acknowleding reality and confronting the horrors of a genocide is too tough and triggering for them, then a lot of horrors here at home will be too much for their fragile egos too. There are so many leftists you could be surrounding yourself with instead, I promise -- people who give back to their communities, people who are in the streets doing the tough work of feeding and housing and fighting for the release from prison of people every day, instead of using those local struggles as a shield for their inaction on a more global scale.

Fuck these people for real. This is a big glaring red flag and it will be relevant to your friendship and your life. One day many of them might see you and your problems and your human needs as too much of a distraction from their dry academic jerk-off sessions too. I've seen it a dozen times. Sorry to be so blunt. But you seem like a person who is putting their attention in all the right places and I don't want to see that compassion squandered on people who won't ever show you the same consideration. You can find people who actually walk the walk, they're everywhere.

[tirsynni]

Years ago (crazy to think about how many years, honestly), I started Sands of Time as writing practice to see if I could get into the practice of writing on a regular schedule (it failed). I had a bunny inspired by thinking too much about Ganondorf and his role in OoT and WW, decided it was as good as an excuse as any to work on writing regularly (failed so hard), and it ended up becoming a love letter to a game series which I've loved almost my entire life.

That fic kept going and going and taught me so much about writing, both in general and fanfic-specific. It ended up being far longer than planned, more detailed than planned, and even when I was distracted and tired and side-eyeing this massive WIP, it reminded me of how much I loved the Zelda games and the many details, overt and subtle, in them. Writing was more than just putting words on paper: it was translating the things I was passionate about. Even if there are some definite issues in the fic due to the many distractions occurring during its creation and how sometimes I wrote less because I was passionate to write and more because I was just stubborn about seeing the fic through, it's still a fic I'm very proud of. It is also, without a shadow of a doubt, my most popular fic. It is a fic that someone refused to rec because they wanted to hit lesser known Zelda fics, and holy shit, I preened when I read that.

I have been struggling with fic and fandom in the last year for many reasons, including some serious RL stressors. The other big reasons have to do with the evolution of fandom itself. I'm not talking about the rise and fall of the popularity of certain things. For example, while I'm not a fan of "reader" fic, I feel like it's a fantastic example of the things that can be done with the fanfiction medium and also a way to explore how tropes/genres/random things in fanfiction reflect different cultural changes in the same way horror movies do. What I hate, though, is the rise of negative feelings and negative takes in fandom, transforming it from a fun, collaborative atmosphere into an arena full of witch hunts, deliberately bad takes, and people terrified to write because they are afraid of being attacked for their content, pairing, writing styles, grammar, etc. I love fandom as a love letter to canon, an exploration of canon, an exploration of self and writing styles, among other things. Now it feels like it's no longer that.

Back in the Old Days, people put disclaimers on fics because they didn't want to be sued. Now people put disclaimers on things assuring readers that of course they don't advocate these things, these things are bad, they know it, they aren't a criminal, they aren't a pedophile, they aren't a Bad Person. Now I see people skip summaries just to tell people to stop attacking them for their pairing and to just let them write what they like.

I see people indulging in deliberate bad takes of the original content, of the original creators, of other writers in fandom, of different tropes, of game mechanics... fucking everything. Sometimes it's just a nasty circle. Sometimes it's done to elevate something else, because we all know the only way to elevate something is to put something else down. I understand vent sessions. I understand going to a friend and going "Holy shit, did you see that summary??? Wow!" It should stop life as a quick vent. It shouldn't make up the person's entire personality. It shouldn't require a full online presence. Hate should never be detailed in the comments. Call-out posts should be left to actual nazis, terfs, etc., not to someone who wrote a "gross" or "unhealthy" or whatever pairing. Seriously. If you waste so much time on that, you need to look into some self-exploration and therapy. In all sincerity.

Fanfiction is not a published work. It should be fun. It is put online to be shared with fellow fans. It is something where someone gets excited about something or has an idea about something or wants to explore something or just wants to write some kinky porn and then share it with fellow fans. That's why writers post work and then sit eagerly .02 seconds later waiting for people to comment on it because they want to share their thoughts and love and happiness and excitement and sadness and grief and their general emotions with others and they want those others to respond and share their thoughts and reactions, too!

I just saw a post tearing into Moffat's Sherlock series because it lacked sincerity for the audience and source material and instead indulged in its arrogance, contempt, and self-righteousness. My immediate thoughts turned to the Lord of the Rings movies. If Sherlock is remembered, it will be purely in the critical sense, an example as to how a popular series was forgotten and dismissed. LotR remains loved. It is a classic. It is something people repeatedly marathon despite the lengthy watch time. LotR was a love letter to its source material. It wasn't just the writers and directors: everyone involved was sincerely, fiercely passionate about it, and it shows. It drags the watchers in, prompted people who had never read the original to pick up the books, inspired so much fanfiction. It was sincere and passionate and loving and, in turn, its fans are sincere and passionate and loving.

The LotR movies explored and loved the genre, the characters, the message. Even when characters faltered, it didn't make them terrible people. It made watchers hold their breath, it made watchers cheer them on, it made watchers hope. Check out people who do bad takes of Frodo and his struggle with the Ring and watch how many people come out of the woodwork to defend Frodo. There was no tongue-in-cheek humor mocking the source material. There was no critical analysis of "Well, you see, this is how the hero was actually stupid." No. It was sincere. It was loving. It still makes people cry and cheer and happy even when they're wiping away a sad tear or two.

I've read fanfics where the writers insist on the worst takes for the characters. It isn't done out of humor or a teasing love or an exploration into the characters/writing styles/etc. The writers want to drag the characters down, put themselves on a pedestal, and do it not through sincere analysis but by doing the worst possible takes on the situation. This usually relies on going into the source material with a negative mindset and desiring negativity in return, feeding primarily on the negative takes of others rather than looking into the source material or looking for positive takes, or just having a "bad faith" mindset. They go into it with an axe to grind and want to drag everyone else down with them. It isn't one or two fics: it's a growing, poisonous movement which is one of the things driving people out of fandom. It isn't a love letter to the source material. It is hate and disgust and contempt and Moffat writing Sherlock, patting himself on the back all the while and surrounding himself with people doing the same exact thing.

I'm a strong believer in people writing whatever they want to write. You want to write this character being evil? Sure! You hate this character and want to make them OOC to bash them even more? Go for it! I've written so many things testing how far I could go or feeling angsty and wanting others to feel angsty or even feeling happy and grinning like a feral gremlin as people wrote comments talking about how the angst in the story made them bawl. Want to write vore? Want to write character death? Whatever! It is fucking fiction, and it should be something you can enjoy doing. Hell, an asexual person can write two people fucking without wanting to get fucked. A lesbian can write two men fucking. A pacifist can write a murder mystery. It is fiction. Write whatever you want, and I hope that you feel better after doing so, even if it is only in the catharsis way of having a bad day and getting it out by making characters bleed.

Already, I can fucking hear people insisting that all of this makes you a bad person. No. No. If you truly believe that, it means you don't understand writing. You don't understand art. OR it's not a misunderstanding but a deliberate Bad Take, an extension of the poison I described above, because you want to attack someone and you want any opening. See: Republicans going after Drag Queens now, probably not actually believing that Drag Queens are harmful but recognizing vulnerability and knowing they can manipulate others through hatred. If you truly believed that, you would be wondering about Stephen King and other writers, but instead, you use conservative attacks and uncritically promote purity culture and are oblivious to the day when the leopard turns around to eat your face.

It's exhausting. It's a growing trend that is poisoning the water that is fandom and is not only playing a part in driving people out, but is keeping people from ever trying their hand in the first place. It is keeping people from enjoying what should be a fun thing. It is fucking poisoning minds, because this is a damned slippery slope. Hammer/nail and all that. It is seeing one thing as "problematic" and knocking over one tile and then seeing a full domino effect because they never bothered to analyze what "problematic" meant or why they found that "problematic." It is people grabbing a torch with the hope they won't find themselves on the stake.

Let people enjoy fandom. Try having positive takes. Let fanfiction and fanart and fanworks in general be something enjoyable again. Maybe some people use it as a way to vent current political issues. Maybe some people want to explore certain sexual kinks and writing these two (or three or five or seven) characters going at it is a great way to do it. Maybe they had a funny thought and want to share it via fanfiction. Whatever. We can't go online and bash people like Moffat and then casually do the same exact thing. We can't bitch about conservative politicians attacking people and then use the same exact thought processes and methods to attack others.

Let people be sincere in their enjoyment. If you don't like it, find something you do like. Maybe take some time with some tools and explore things which make you happy instead of indulging in deliberate bad takes to tear others down and use those takes to bind yourself to others and their bad takes like barbwire. Remember why things like LotR lives on and makes people so happy and why Moffat's works are going to be used in classes in the future as to what not to do.

[aclosetfan]

Hey hope you don't mind me rambling in your inbox but I have a lot of thoughts and I want to dissect how people actually create their Rowdyruff redemptions. I am so sorry how long this is in advance.

Ok so like, I'm working on a a fic currently and one of the aspects of it involves a Rowdyruff redemption (well, sort of... it's complicated lol) and color code shipping when they're older, and I've been reading a lot of fic to see how people actually do this. I've noticed a lot of things that really bug me about it how this is handled by fic writers.:

1) The Puffs are used as props, development, and eventual love interests for the Ruffs. They don't usually get much development, nor do their perspectives change much outside of "hey those ruffs are good now! Time to make out with them!". It's boring and it feels like the Puffs don't actually gain any perspectives from the Ruffs. As superheros and especially as characters who are getting with characters who often characterized as people who were directly abused by the system they uphold, wouldn't the Puffs gain some perspective from them? Give me puffs who learn about the ruffs experiences and become more disillusioned by the police force and start advocating for fighting against crime by supporting those who need it and filling in inequalities as opposed to arresting every thief out there. The Puffs and Ruffs have black and white perspectives in regards to good and evil. A great way to develop them is to mess around with their perspectives and make them question things.

2) The Ruffs don't seem to change much either, I think the main issue is that they're toned down from the beginning without any good explanation. Yeah sure "maturity" can be one, but if you're gonna change their personalities for your redemption fic, there needs to be a good reason as to why these personalities changed. Redemption fics aren't fun if they just start out as "mildly annoying boys" without reason as to why they're toned down. Either make them total shitheads and legitimately develop them or give a very good reason as to why they're not as intense. It's not interesting if they stay mildly annoying throughout the fic with little development but get with the Puffs anyway.

3) Mojo and HIM as parental figures are often very absent and are just usually explained away as "lol they were abusive". While I don't really mind this angle of Mojo and HIM ending up as shitty parents, it's never really developed. I want to know HOW they're shitty parents, why they were bad for the Ruffs. A lot of fan backstories in this fics involves the ruffs being used as tools by Mojo and HIM without caring about their needs as little kids, how about we show how that was done throughout their lives? You don't have to get like, graphic and explicit about what abuse and neglect they experience, but it needs to be developed and seriously impactful if you're gonna add it. I want to see how those impacts still mess with them, especially with interactions with their parents. Trauma like that doesn't just go away. If that can't be done, just keep their parents, have the ruffs be intentionally rebellious against their wishes. They are self driven after all and will often do shit that pisses people off and is enjoyable to them.

Especially if you're doing like... shipping, I want more elaboration on Mojo and HIM's perspectives. I want them to seeth and lose their minds over the prospect, I want Mojo to become a laughing stock among villains for not only failing to beat the Puffs, but creating their eventual romantic partners. I want Mojo to confront the very exhausted professor who's also not happy about this idea and have Mojo fucking lose it while the professor is just... so exhausted.

4) We need more of the other villains and cast to show up. Where the fuck did they go? Why is it only HIM and random monsters that can be used as villains (not even Mojo is, he's just thrown to the side which is such a massive shame). Lemme see Princess be something besides a mean girl, lemme see Sedusa or Fuzzy or the Amoeba boys. Let's see some one-offs from the OG series show up! I'm always a Boogie Man advocate, would be delighted to see him in a fic for once (although he's somewhat niche so I could see how it would be difficult to involve him). Hell if you can make them interesting, I'd be down to see reboot villains too. Just, anything to mix things up and add more action.

5) Not enough is done with the Professor, he's usually just a supporting character to the Puffs who shows shockingly minimal apprehension of the Ruffs, let alone their relationships with each other. I need a professor who's braver and plays a more active role in these fics. I need him to be a strong father figure who loves his kids so much and shows himself to be deeply intelligence. I need a professor who can be kind to the ruffs if need be and deserved (while he's protective and distrusting of the ruffs, I don't think he'd be spiteful to them especially if they're still children), but won't stand for any bullshit that they do and is willing to fight to keep his kids safe. Is is such a loving and substantial figure in the OG show and so few people actually bother to dive into the depths that the Professor would go for his kids.

6) interpretations of the ships are so fucking cishet it's so boring. Even if you want them to be m/f and cis, you can still make their dynamics and perceptions queer. You do not have to fall into tired cishet characterizations or dynamics (with the reds by far getting the worst of this). I think this can be hard depending on time setting and the ages of the characters, especially the Ruffs and how deep their toxic masculinity is embedded into them. Granted that I headcanon that their birthdays are their debuts and they'd be 29/30, I think that the time period would make it more difficult to explore queer aspects about them depending on how old they're portrayed, but I think that could make things even more interesting tbh especially if they don't have the language for what's going on with them. Example of a trope that's common in fics but can be twisted to be queer: High school fic #2728732. It's 2010, Buttercup is turning 17 soon and she doesn't feel like the other girls and hasn't for years. Buttercup doesn't have the language to describe her experiences as genderqueer since it's 2010, she sticks to the tomboy and girl label even though neither feel quite right.

My older takes on these ships tend to usually fall into Brick/Blossom who are both bi and gender apathetic but tend to have a male and female preference respectively, and navigating their unique perspectives of their attraction and dynamics to one another in that regard. Very very very very pan blues who are gay about everybody and proud of it, and (of course) genderqueer and genderfuck greens. We need more trans (particularly enby) greens rep out there and I'll do it myself if nobody else does. People write the ships (especially the color codes) so cishet I appreciate takes that drive them outside of that circle of "cishet boys and girls with hetronormative dynamics like each other now kiss mwah".

7) Inverse to the "the Puffs are just stepping stones to redemption and objects for the Ruffs", I'm really tired of fics that just end up neutering the ruffs once they're redeemed and have them be the second in command lapdogs to the Puffs (once again... a particularly big problem with the reds). I want more fics where the ruffs are their equals, where all of their voices are taken into account.

8) I want more of these stories to happen when they're not in high school. I want elementary and middle school redemption stories. I want full grown adults redemption stories. I'm so tired of the high school setting and I know it's mainly used for shipping, but not making them too old that they're boring and gross or w/e. Give me these characters past the age of 21 or under the age of 16 I beg. Hell please we need more stories of them at their canon age, the idea of The Professor and Mojo hosting a play date for them and all of them just having fun playing with toys and making up their own games is so cute.

9) This ties into my point of the ruffs history with law enforcement. It's very, very difficult for me to believe that they'd completely jump to the good side and just be the Puffs but slightly shifted over personality wise. They'd be distrusting of the superhero system. Maybe they'd be willing to kick monster ass, but they're not going to be knocking down thieves and working side by side with cops. If anything, I think it would make sense for redeemed ruffs to work to fight against current police system standards and help those who are most affected by it the most. The ruffs aren't and shouldn't just turn into the Puffs but a bit spicier. It's boring and it doesn't make sense.

10) I am sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo tired of all the weird sexualization in high school fics, especially when you can tell they were written by somebody who's not in high school and hasn't been in years. I swear people who write these hypersexualized Riverdale style high school AUs haven't actually looked at a 16 year old in years. They wouldn't look like full grown adults and most likely wouldn't be diving deep into sex and drugs. There's also a lot of sexual assault, especially casually? I read a fic recently where Butch groped Buttercup's chest without consent just randomly and it was played off for laughs. Closed it instantly and physically facepalmed. I somewhat get when teens write stuff like this, but adults? It's ridiculous.

11) I feel like people make the Puffs and Ruffs parallel each other a bit too much? It takes away from existing tension and ways they can clash. Make Bubbles care way too much and Boomer struggle with the ability to take things seriously. Make Brick smart but not academically so, his intelligence lies in other places and he specifically spites the rigid authority of academia, while Blossom loves and embraces it. Show Buttercup being able to be more calculated and intelligent about her fighting while Butch is a berserker. Give them parallels and differences, and differences within their parallels!

Again I'm so sorry about how long this is, I've been full autism mode about PPG again and my old fic idea I never got around to writing. Reading up on people's takes on RRB redemptions for my own research and I notice that there's a lot of things that just bug me about how they're played out, and it inspired me to do a full dissection of how RRB redemption plot lines tend to be done.

This is another ask that I've tried to answer a thousand times, but really honestly, every time I read it, I'm just like:

Like come sit right next to me because we're in this together. I've been riding this train for a while now and if I've learned anything, ya gotta be the change you wanna see. There's no other way!

[rametarin]

Personally I think a lot of the shit happening in the states on the right wing side of politics has less to do with any genuine concern of "the harmful LGBT ideology attacking our children that's evil and wrong" and more just the latest in a long line of "the republican party can't function without some group to point at and say 'that's the enemy you must hate them'" I mean think about it. Mcarthyism, the war on terrorism, the Mexicans, now its the LGBT. I'm not saying the democrats don't have similar issues so don't take this statement as clearing them of any wrongdoing. But yeah in a couple years I bet they won't be able to generate enough public outrage over it and will start to target some new group instead because it's all politics not genuine moral concern. Sorry for rambling.

Gonna stop you right there at the McCarthyism; that's wrong. Socialists and communists throughout the US through the early 1900s right up through the cold war got their literature and inspiration from leftist college professors, advocates, guerilla agitators and that cross pollenated with partisans and pseudo-intellectuals, that deliberately fed into American counterculture.

That one was not incorrect. They did, actually, conspire with labor unions not for the purposes of securing rights for labor or people, but consolidating power and taking over businesses from the sidelines. Which was their intention of co-opting and parasitism, to begin with. "There is no you, without us."

"McCarthyism" is revisionism by those that seized the means of printing the history books in the federated school system.

The War on Terrorism was never solely a right wing war, either. And while one is forgiven for believing it started at 9/11, it very much was only officially kicked off at that point.

but there's more.

It's also incorrect to think the religious people and the social reactionaries with particular animus against homosexuality and transgenderism are only doing it now and only against LGBT because "they need someone to fight against." That is a very egregious misunderstanding of their actual problem, and even though their issue with it is either misguided or VERY wrong depending on the case, no, it is absolutely a mistake to think, "those republicans just always need someone to fight against." That is a fiction I will not support. It's a wishful misinterpretation of the situation, and no positive or productive resolution can come from trying to handle it this way.

The reason 'the republicans' have issues with LGBT are a few fold, and actually are an overlap of a few different interests. The only thing they have in common is the outcome, but the reasoning for their concern comes from different places. And it's not limited to republicans, it's just louder there since the competing interests that believe the same things among the democrats are shut out by the overarching party values and populism there. And they're not dividing enough for Vote Blue No Matter Who to jump ship to vote republican.

The Religious Interest: This particular group among what today are right leaning republicans have a particular religious lens through which they see reality. This can vary dramatically between individuals, as religious cultures do, but all of them err on the side of religious culture sentiments on what reality means and how it works. And to them, God/nature created things a certain way. They see male and female not just as self-evident biological reality, but immutable characteristics applied to man by divine mandate that should not be modified. When you believe good and evil are effectively more real in the souls of man than periodic elements on the table, and that God's intention and spirit and word are absolute and not to be questioned or told, "I know better than you," everything from marriage rites under God, to sexual policy under God, to reproduction under God, to the way one sex relates to the other under God, is thrown into jeopardy.

These ones are ideologues and are themselves diverse, and while they may not all follow the same literature or preacher of said literature, they agree on the same things; that to be gay is to be at its most innocent, incorrect or defective, and at worst, possessed by the devil to various degrees of willful to unknowing. Everything must fit into the way their religion subscribes to reality, everyone must march in lockstep to their values of right and wrong and what something is and why and how, or else it's either in error or evil.

But the religious LGBT-phobes are not alone.

The Sociologists: These ones may have a few sentiments borrowed or sympathetic with the religious ones, either as vague interests or guides, even secularly, but they largely err on the side of earthly things. Even though they do try to rationalize why a society doing or not doing a thing may be in error, it's largely but not necessarily totally on the basis of secularism and science. Except when it isn't. And that's a crucial distinction.

And, unfortunately, this does include some of the worst examples of trying to use a social value system to arbitrarily determine something "harmful" and not. You'll know these ones by their constant use of the term, "degeneracy" for "icky" things, and tend to conflate "pedophile" with LGBT the way far-leftists try and make everybody that disagrees with them into fascists. Even if their beliefs do not include celebrity focal political figures, militarism as the source and center of their movement, or a culture that subsumes the individual to the will of the idea of the nation or collective.

The alt-right sits at the far end of this spectrum when they talk about how LGBT are "degeneracy" and "signs of a crumbling civilization" and "corruption." But they themselves do not embody every sociological reason someone may have LGBT views. I'll speak of them next, but they do not embody the pure sociological anti-LGBT view.

Secular anti-LGBT tries to come at anti-LGBT from the idea that somehow not suppressing homosexuality among males and females leads to a destruction of art, science and culture the way letting 2 year olds draw whatever they want inevitably leads some naughty jerk to just drawing dicks and vaginas everywhere and turning the classroom into a bawdy fight cloud of chaos. That it breaks down marriage and disrupts a healthy, ordered society and leaves behind a wreck for the generation to follow, purely because gay was considered a thing to permit. Similarly, to transgendered rights and validation. But also, the view this sexual openness will inherently and inescapably lead to socially sanctioned zoophilia and pederastry

This is not inherently true, but sadly, it's coincidentally not 100% untrue if you know too much about Foucoult and Simone de Beauvoir. But by and large, the conclusion comes from not knowing anything about actual leftist initiatives to "liberalize" sexuality involving childen and animals and comes purely from their own cynical assumptions about where we'd be if not for only validating cisheterosexuality as the end all be all of sexuality. It's untrue, because they reached this conclusion in the absence of worldly data, and then they find worldly data that fits their preonceived or desired notion. The fact that you can find such LGBT sympathetic organizations just reinforces their worldview.

And then we come to the unholy marriage of these two things.

The alt-right view: Considered the most dangerous is a mix of the two. These things are a marriage of the rationalist secular view about societies and social contracts and moralism mixed with religious traditionalism and originism.

Unrestrained by singularly real things, this can encompass everything from a literal take on Reagan's, "shining city on a hill" seeing the United States, or your home nation here, as a holy and wholly wonderful space and construct endowed by creation as a singularly amazing thing in time and space. They may see LGBT as intruding on that glorious image they concoct for themselves at best, and a corruptive, corrosive element that seeks to unmake it, at worst. It's a gradient and no two alt-righters likely share a similar mythology, but they'll agree that LGBT doesn't fit into their grand vision of what they like, is.

But here's the thing: Alt-righters are fewer in number than literal communists across the United States. They're insignificant. The only purpose they serve is to create an end-stage bad guy with some characteristics tangentially similar to those that are either not religious fundamentalists, nor national socialists, and a magnifying glass is held up to them to go, "SEE!? SEE!?!? I TOLD YOU THAT REPUBLICAN WAS JUST AN ALT-RIGHTER!" Because to them, any opponent with any opposing views is as bad as the worst of the worst, and it's important to make people think not only are the worst of the worst more populous than you think, but more people than you think are among them, and if they share any of those characteristics, owing to being similar to the worst example caricature, they must also be an example or but a few nodes removed from the most threatening caricature, and hence, be imminently dangerous.

Far-leftists have a thing where they desperately want any resistance to be seen as Nazis, without exception. Because if you are a Nazi and oppose their beliefs, your reasons are never good and can be discarded without even a rebuttal beyond a punch in the face. So, their goal becomes to undermine and redefine all your opposition as either Nazis, in league with Nazis and acting in bad faith, or part of a sprawling system that means even if you're acting in good faith, just the fact you're resisting them proves you're tangentially and subconsciously motivated by Nazism so far removed from you that it permeates you unconsciously through your society's default state, and you don't even know it. So when constantly calling someone a Nazi doesn't work, in the past, they'd call them far-right, which they made synonymous with Nazi; until the kids started rejecting that just because you were nationalistic and individualist that inherently made you a Nazi, just because you weren't open borders and collectivist.

When the actual social collectivist more self-identifying right wingers collaborated to distinguish themselves, the left HAPPILY took to putting the fact they existed under a microscope and started screaming about how, "THE GRAND RIGHT-WING MOVEMENT IS IMMINENT! QUICK, PUNCH A NAZI, QUICKLY!" in what had to be the most transparent and political psychodrama ever to stir up negative sentiment and give their group social points and the kids something to rebel against. Even if the actual threat posed was nill and they just saw vague fascimilles in mostly unrelated but similar organizations.

So that brings me to this point, explaining the sources of their resistance. And it's a mistake to think that the only source of it is erratic irrational rage, or just needing an enemy to fight to spur up the troops.

The source of conservative and republican apprehension for LGBT comes from the initial disgust at the idea of trying to pathologize and normalize non-standard sexualities and genders, but also it comes from suspecting ulterior motives from ideological opposition as to why they're being given platforms. Most haven't researched it, most haven't found actual evidence or proof, but they smell a rat, and therefore conclude not only is LGBT inconvenient, but a poisonous pill being pushed under perilous pretenses.

And to their credit, it's not 100% wrong. Look at the history (embarrassing) of ideological political lesbianism that was popular socially among radical leftist sapphic/gynophilic feminists throughout the 60s to 90s. That social culture that pushed the idea, based on using Marxist and class struggle theorist political lenses, that A.) woman was oppressed B.) by the transitive property of oppressor/oppresed class dynamics, the sex of man was therefore her oppressor. C.) there could be no ethical sex and romance under 'patriarchy.' D.) All marriage and relationships between males and females, under this ridiculous view, were therefore incapable of being consented to and were therefore a form of rape.

Because this is what Marxist and similar political ideologies do. They latch on to a natural phenomenon and pathologize it and try to imagine a cause and source into being that fits their preconceived notion, which just so happens to be trying to convince one party that the other party in the room is threatening to kill or abuse them, and "help the underdog fight back against their oppressor!" then celebrate with them right after. Right before making them dig their own grave and supplanting them with bullets to the head.

Political lesbians made a ruckus trying to understand and push this psycho-social view of how sexuality and society and relationships and theory works while choking back their own heterosexuality, and it made them as miserable as any gay person that tries to suppress their own homosexuality to exist in a society and culture where being gay isn't considered legitimate at best and acknowledged but considered wrong or dangerous. When left wing political groups are picking up your cause, if they're the authoritarian socialist or communist types, there's always an angle and an area of subversion and exploitation to them.

In the United States, picking up a minority to use them as a spear tip, an undefeatable argument that you need to argue against and thus incriminate yourself as against that minority to stop what they've been weaponized to do and thus alienate yourself to your next generation in the history books, is old hat. But eventually, this exploitation breaks down.

Trying to argue black rights and black nationalism and cultural/ethnic separatism was a social justice throughout the 60s and then a resurgency in the 90s and leading up to the 10s; People silently got tired of it and abandoned ship, and it collapsed and imploded. Trying to argue gay rights from the position that sexuality is a "choice" and being "queer" was a decision and a political minority culture, and not just an indivisible and natural state of being (one might call that, 'bioessentialism' today) eventually culminated in LGBT shrugging off the social constructionist views and arguing for gay rights on the basis of immutable and unchangable and benign sexual attraction, not arbitrary rebellion, or sexual trauma, or conspiracy, did more for progress than political lesbianism and the values and legislation imagined for that, could ever do.

Whether ethnic rights or sexual minority rights, trying to use them to argue for more "social justice" and seize power and narrative of legislation for their ideological solutions, seldom works. But they're going to keep trying to elevate minorities out of the interests of politicizing and exploiting their cause, as cover for their own.

Which kind of does the work of society for it, which is why I think they let only the most uninformed morons argue against them. It creates victims and reveals the faces and thus gives fodder for caricaturizations opposing them, and creates a tone and conversation for the younger generation to study and learn from before making their decisions on how to resolve it, without too awful much effort on behalf of the state.

In my view, the consensus on trans rights will be such that the process to clinicize the dysphoria will continue on the basis of medical diagnosis and a better, more accurate criteria based not on bias or preference by the state or the diagnoser will be used to more astutely differentiate gender dysphoria from ideological dysphoria, and devices or clinical tools developed to tell the difference.

Having a more objective method to diagnose gender dyshphoria will mean the argument, "gender is a purely self-identification phenomenon" will go away. The same as the argument for a deist, creationist, geocentrist universe went away with the revelation we revolve around the sun, and so any religious view where the cosmic bodies revolving around the earth is wrong.

And similarly, that will mean the movement occurring between the lines and in the corners in the far left that is trying to argue that there should not BE any biological or empirical origins to whether somthing is considered male or female based on biological states, merely self-identification, will by necessity go away. Because it argues through appropriation of gendered language that chromosomes and secondary sexual characteristics should no more determine whether you are linguistically and socially male or female gendered, than your blood type or stool sample should affect your pronouns. Just like sexuality being revealed to be inborn and static and not at all "chosen" made Political Lesbianism into a mockable phenomenon, after society asked itself whether sexuality was a choice or part of your makeup, and determined definitely, the only people that could choose, were themselves bisexual. For everybody else, it was not a matter of preference. It was a matter of immutable taste.

After that you will have transgendered people welcomed more often among mainstream republicans and the wing of conservatives opposing them will be as marginalized as the ones that believe all vaccinations are wrong are marginalized; and yes, outside the COVID debacle, even the republicans marginalize the ones that see all vaccinations as snake oil.

It is true that there are republicans that get visibly outrageously mad about homosexuals, racially integrated schools, vaccinations, etc. But those ones will absolutely get more screen time and space in the papers, specifically because ideological opposition wants others to think these are normalized, mainstream, dominant positions held by most right wingers. It will always be like this. Especially among newspapers that do not want to print similar things about the way hate is expressed among progressives, and in fact seek to neutralize anything that may give them and by extension their beliefs and movements, bad press.

It's not true that the only thing keeping them going is outrage. And anyone banking on that simply will not understand what keeps them going if that outrage ever runs out and the conclusion they live with seems anathema to what they are. They may even come to the conclusion that there's been any sort of transformation or change. When no.. you aren't really seeing them for what they are.

[inmymind-blogs]

In An Unrelenting Storm, With a Solace

-Bhavika

Have you ever felt the pressure to be subtle all the time?

Imagine this: an outward sign of unshakeable confidence concealing an outbreak of uncertainties and fears beneath.

For the past couple of months, I had felt a void within me.

Why do I want to pour my heart out by crying? Every morning when I got up, I had no clue what to do. Each day has been rough and usual.

Why am I afraid to try so hard? When I know better than anyone what I have awakened, I need to put it into practice, even when facing intense internal rejection again and again.

Like I’m trapped in my head, then diving into the ocean of thoughts. Just to keep getting on the same boat, "What and why am I doing this?" confused.

At times, you don't understand what you're doing and why you're doing it. 

Like you're swimming and swimming, can't find the land only to end up in the big ocean. 

With a numb heart and wounded head, I knew I was lost.

I decided not to care about anything else but myself and tried to be okay doing things I liked even when I didn't want to do them. Yet, I felt pleased living one of those phases of my life, even those are darker.

That's when I decided to find solace by taking a pause, embracing my flaws, and recognizing every emotion I was feeling.

That doesn't mean I need to be dull and gloomy. Also, I just can't shake off the feeling of dismal. In this cold world and among people who don't pay enough attention to others, I believe we must endure the hurt.

So then, I learned it's okay to feel blue.

With tired eyes, a numb heart, and unconquerable pain, she trudged through the darkness, seeking solace amidst the relentless storm of emotions. It is hard for most of us going through a difficult time to accept that it is okay to not be okay. 

What helped me to comprehend my inner self from what she has been going through was writing, reading, breathing in fresh air, and listening to my comfort songs.

I’m amazed at how today's world is filled with optimism.

People often encourage others to make positive choices and focus more on the brighter side of things on their social media.

And even if one has a positive outlook, there's no way to be happy and buoyant all the time. 

The most difficult truth to embrace is that life has its highs and lows. There will be challenging situations to face at some point. 

If I try to be positive at a time like this, it can quickly spiral into toxic positivity as I suppress or reject my negative emotions. 

In a society wherein it frequently advocates perfection, let's explore our liberating realization that owning up to our shortcomings is not simply acceptable but also an essential step towards developing self-compassion and personal growth.

So, if you're going through a tough time, remember it's okay to not be okay (:

Make sure to pour your heart into something or with someone. Their support can make a world of difference. Recognize that it's a sign of strength and not weakness to ask for help.

You can also do things like reading a book, writing down your thoughts, listening to your favorite podcast or uplifting songs, and watching your comfort shows.

Allow the turmoil inside your mind to fade.

You are stronger than you think (;

In this new year, let's open the door of light by accepting our genuine selves.

Here, You have reached the end of this blog.

Thank you for reading (:

Please take care of yourself 🤍

(All the pictures are sourced from Pinterest. I do not own any of the images.)

[multiplicity-positivity]

i don't even know if you guys are okay with this kind of ask, but im in a rough spot and any input or positivity would be delightful

cw for questioning? i don't know if i need to say that but i am haha. self fake claiming too

so uh. around a year or two ago was when I started learning about DID and OSDD. at that time, i felt like it explained a lot. like a lot a lot. the memory loss, the disassociation, the fluid identity feeling, the lack of memories before i was 13, among other things. i was really close to the host of a system I've known for years, and i was trying to figure things out. then i just lose the time, and suddenly, it's not 2021 anymore, it's 2023.

i do not have the resources to seek professional help, or i would. so I'm trying to research more. but the more i look, the more things get confusing.

for example: some people say you MUST be able to see an innerworld and hear your alters, and others say you don't. ive heard very little (that i don't even know if it was real), and can't see shit.

i know i have a lot of symptoms of DID, but i feel like even saying i could have it makes me look like im trying to latch onto a trend (which im not.)

i dunno. some people i know have said they think i have DID, but others say it's just Bipolar Disorder. it's not great and i just wish i understood everything happening

hey, sorry you’re going through a rough time trying to figure this out :(

for what it’s worth, no, you don’t need a visual inner world in order to have did. here’s the requirements (as we understand them, paraphrased from the dsm)

1. two or more distinct personality states

2. amnesia surrounding trauma, important information, or every day life events

3. symptoms that cause you to have significant distress or impairment

4. with symptoms not able to be attributed to spiritual belief/practice or

5. the effects of a substance (like drugs or alcohol)

that’s the official criteria in the dsm. here’s a link to the icd criteria - it’s a bit more complicated but there’s still no requirement of having an inner world.

if you’re a host, anp (apparently normal part), or main fronter of your system, it’s likely you won’t be able to have access to the inner world, other headmates, or many of your system’s memories at first. did works by hiding, masking, and disguising trauma, and it does this in a few different ways. one major way is by keeping those who handle day-to-day life separate from those who hold traumatic memories that otherwise would be too much to handle. in fact, it works so well as a covert disorder, many people don’t realize they have a dissociative disorder until well into adulthood, if they ever learn about it at all. so not having access to an inner world, other headmates, or certain memories is definitely normal, especially early on in the recovery process.

i understand you don’t have resources to seek professional help. here’s some free resources that may help you if you’re going to attempt self-diagnosis. we’re advocates of self-diagnosis (not everyone can afford quality mental healthcare), but it’s important to make sure you’re doing proper research.

truly we cannot recommend enough getting therapy to help with this. dissociative disorders are complex, and it can be incredibly difficult to try and navigate recovery on your own. if you tell us your country (you’re welcome to dm us) we can try to help you find affordable, state-funded, or otherwise non-profit therapy organizations in your area.

also, “self fake claiming” is a very common experience in did systems. some parts may want to deny the system’s existence as a means of protection from others, some do it to reasonably deny trauma, some do it because they’re afraid of what having a dissociative disorder might mean for them, some do it because dissociative disorders today remain heavily stigmatized. we’ve been officially diagnosed for around 6 months (after questioning for years), and we still have parts who adamantly deny that we’re a system at all. we understand this will change with time as we continue to grow, heal, and build trust and communication with each other.

sorry if this response was a bit fragmented or all over the place. we’re not trying to diagnose you here. we just want to provide you with some tools to continue your research along with dispel some worries or concerns you may have. hopefully this was able to help a little bit - best of luck to you!

🐢 kip and 💫 parker

[fruityyamenrunner]

The correct political position is Blue.

from the Blue lunatic fringes:

Richard Kulisz

Then there was the stupid suggestion by someone that the nuclear industry emphasize how "green" it is. Except that too is self destructive since “green” is a propaganda word owned by the enemy. And what's so laughable about green is it's the colour of money in the USA. Hence the colour of the rich. Which is of course who bankrolls the anti-industry anti-human movements.

I of course have an obvious proposal to all this aimless useless confused scratching of heads among pro-nuclear advocates. I propose we call nuclear a BLUE power source. Mmmm blue. In fact, it’s a GLOWING BLUE power source. And since we all know from cartoons and anime that Power Glows it behooves pro-nuclear advocates to use this obvious selling point.

...

The corollary is that so-called “green” energy sources don't glow because they are WEAK! And equally obvious, to me anyways, is the reason why Gaians hate nuclear energy. Because it is powerful. And this conflicts with their submissive worship of Gaia.

Robin Hanson

Since the future is far in time, thinking about it tends to invoke a far mode of thought, which introduces other far mode defaults into our image of the future. And thinking about the far future makes us think especially far. Of course many other considerations influence any particular imagined future, but it can help to understand the assumptions your mind is primed to make about the far future, regardless of whether those assumptions are true.

For example, since we expect things further away in time to also be further away in space, we expect future folk to live further away, such as in space, and to habitually travel longer distances. Since the distant past is also further away in time, we also expect past folk to live further away and travel longer distances, but the many concrete details we know about the past reduces this effect.

Since blue light scatters more easily than red, far away things in our field of view tend to look more blue. So we expect future stuff to look blue. And since blue stuff looks cold, we expect future stuff to look cold. Finally, since we expect far away things to have less detail, we tend to imagine them with fewer parts and flourishes, and less detailed textures and patterns.

The future is not paisley.

from the sensible moderates:

Carl Sagan

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that [pale blue] dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

Kim Stanley Robinson

So they sailed west into the wind, day after day, talking or not talking. Many times they came back to what it might mean to be brown. “Perhaps the combination should be called blue,” Ann said one evening, looking over the side at the water. “Brown isn’t very attractive, and it reeks of compromise. Maybe we should be thinking of something entirely new.”

“Maybe we should.”

...

Then one winter evening they were sitting on the westernmost bench, in the hour before sunset, everything still, the Hellas Sea like a plate of glass, the sky cloudless and clean, pure, transparent; and as the sun dropped everything drifted over the spectrum into the blue, until Maya looked up from her salade niçoise and clutched Sax by the arm, “Oh my God, look,” and she put her paper plate aside and they both stood instinctively, like ancient veterans hearing the national anthem from an approaching parade; Sax swallowed hamburger in a lump, “Ah,” he said, and stared. Everything was blue, sky blue, Terran sky blue, drenching everything for most of an hour, flooding their retinas and the nerve pathways in their brains, no doubt long starved for precisely that color, the home they had left forever.

When you go out and look at the world from low heaven, it takes the form of a Blue Marble:

I claim this is something of a shibboleth. Of course, everyone loves the Blue Marble picture, environmentalists especially because the whole world is there. But Greens are loath to use this picture - they frequently fall back on little cartoons:

The world is not very green at all, but in sentimental gaian representations, it is. There's green there but once you get past the overwhelming blueness of it, it is evident that the world is as brown, and white and black as it is green. To see the world as green is to see it from below. To see it as blue is to see it from high above, and also as you see it if you lift your view ever so slightly above the horizon.

I find their use of the sunflower as a logo faintly disgusting too. Using the sun as your banner is a very bold statement, and people who do so tend to be egomaniacs. Floralising it is both a very familiar kind of false modesty and also a turning away from the sun towards an imagined likeness of it - this is another case of looking down instead of looking around, and up.

Say what you will about the blue EU and the blue UN, but they were at least founded on somewhat Blue principles of using science and technology to better man's ends.

[isabellehemlock]

pluto taurus scorpio 2H 11H :D

Aw thanks for the ask Wolfie! 🤩❤️ It's another long one so I'll put it under a break :)

pluto ⇢ tell something supernatural that happened to you

Oh boy ~ well bearing in mind that I'm in a shared space and likely could have someone rolling their eyes at me for any of the stories I got, maybe I'll have you DM me and I'll share those there lol.  But basic gist: I've had enough experiences where I feel very secure in my belief of an afterlife.

taurus ⇢ what's your favorite food?

I don't know if I have a fave food per se, for multiple health reasons, but I can say I tend to lean towards bread and pasta options that are fairly plain when I do order things (I don't tend to be able to taste multiple ingredients in a dish - mostly in relation to chronic sinuses, so no sense in spending money on complex dishes when some noodles and cheese will do the trick lol).  I do joke that since I'm not too much into sugary stuff this body of mine is a pasta and bread body, not a sugar one lol.

scorpio ⇢ do you feel comfortable talking about taboo things?

I think it depends on what, and for what purpose?  Like I have worked in human services and done mediation work and am very open to discussions of trauma and the healing journey.  I've heard some heavy things, I've lived through heavy things, that society would consider "taboo" to discuss - only we can decide the boundaries around discussions of these things (like trauma is valid, *and* you cannot use it as a weapon to lash out at others), and depending on how detailed someone wants to get I might need to schedule that sort of heavy subject matter, but I'm definitly open to being a sounding board as someone is processing feelings and gently encouraging resources they might like to look into, or even virtually sitting in the discomfort with them for a moment because trauma likes to declare "you are alone in this" and I think in a moment where I'm able to say "I'm listening with an open mind, and open heart" that that can help combat that narrative.

Of course I'm only speaking for myself, and in general we should always do check ins first - even among friends - before we start, and even during the conversation, so if someone needs a break they can tap out and tap back in when ready. And also everyone has their own emotional boundaries and no one should feel forced to be more vulnerable with someone, or be held responsible for someone else's journey - or be guilted to holding space for someone. Just yeah, check in with someone first ;)

Since I'm in fandom for the fun, light stuff, I do have a fairly firm self policy on the kind of content I want to invest energy consuming - this is partially because I do a *lot* of emotional and mental labor with both my own healing, but also because I'm an advocate among my family's health issues (including my own), a legal co-guardian of an adult family member, special needs children, and volunteer where mediation and inter personal dynamics are fairly at the core of it - but anyway, it's a big reason why I don't engage with certain tags in fandom because the work it would require to consume would tap me out. And like I said, I'm here for some art therapy for processing and healing sure, but in general I use fandom as play therapy to lighten things up with the rl things I got going on.

However all that being said, I'm very open to someone sharing a hard time they're going through, because I know my boundaries and capacity for holding space for someone - and if I need a break, I'll gently point that out *and* plan for a time to come back to it.  If it becomes a subject matter that I'm unable to hold, or validate (like someone with toxic behavior who is trying to harass etc), then I'll place a boundary around that as well.  But all in all, I've heard plenty, been through plenty, and am good one on one talking about heavy things, especially under the context of processing to heal and growing on our journeys.

2H ⇢ do you have any object that you like a little too much? what is it and why?

I'm fairly decent about not placing too much importannce on materialistic items (probably because I grew up poor lol), however one object I've been wearing for years is my St. Dominic medal - I received it when I made my temporary promises as a Lay Dominican, and use it as my scapular essentially.  About a year later a local priest gave me a Miraculous Medal, that had been blessed by the Holy Father, so they both clang around my neck for some three years now lol.  I'm making my final promises next month, but I'm not sure if I'm adding anything else to the necklace!

11H ⇢ describe your friends in 3 words

Loving, playful, inspiring ❤️

[tjmystic]

Related to this post I reblogged about some idiot Christian's notion of holy envy (read: proselytizing like his self-centered life depended on it), I would like to share some genuine things that I appreciate about other religions:

Judaism: I could pick a lot of things, because I think that Judaism is fascinating and we don't give it enough attention as a belief system, but I like that Jewish people aren't afraid of questioning anything, especially God. Christians are raised to think that questioning God is a sign that our faith isn't strong enough and we're doing something wrong. Jewish people, probably more than any other religious group, are raised to believe that questioning God is normal and even expected. If they believe in God, they have no problem going to Him with the mindset, "Hey, this is fucked up, what are You doing here??" Or, better yet, questioning why the people in power were so adamant about making "God's word" so fucked up when they wrote it down. I think we could all benefit from a more questioning attitude.

Islam: In my experience, Muslims are the most charitable people in the world. I don't know if it's because charity is one of the 5 pillars of their religious doctrine and they really take that seriously, or if it's because of something less easily codifiable. All I know is that the Muslims in my life are among the most giving people I know, and they do so without thought or expectation of getting something in return. Their mindset seems to be, "Life is shit for all of us, why not help when we can?" And I think that's beautiful.

Hinduism: There's an ease about Hinduism that I really admire. I don't know how else to put it. Other religious groups seem obsessed with proving how pious they are, how well studied they are, how "good" they are in terms of following their doctrine. None of the Hindu people I know have that. They believe what they believe, they do what they do to convey that belief, and then they get on with their day. I'm sure that, like with any religion, there are Hindu people who attend their temple on a frequent basis or pray multiple times a day or what have you, but I'm just as sure that you'd be unlikely to know that about them from a single conversation. They aren't constantly talking themselves up or trying to make themselves seem like the most devout members of their faith. They just embody what they believe.

Buddhism: Buddhists focus a lot more on the here and now than other religions, in my experience. They have an idea of the afterlife, but they don't seem as hung up on it as everyone else. They're more worried about making a positive difference now, being a positive influence now, being a positive source now. There's a reason that so many mental health advocates look to Buddhism as the roadmap for mindfulness, because that's one of its most powerful tenets. Everyone, religious or otherwise, could benefit from learning to focus on our immediate world more than some distant future.

Wicca: I think Wicca is great because it puts power in the hands of the individual. It can be comforting to think of some overseeing being who guides you through life (God knows it brings me comfort), but I think it can be just as comforting, if not more so, to believe in yourself as the divine instrument of your own fate. You determine what happens to you. You determine your energy. You can draw support and inspiration from the world around you, from nature and your dreams and anything else you so desire, but you are the catalyst. And I think that's incredibly empowering.

This list isn't exhaustive, obviously, but they're my first thoughts. Feel free to add your own holy envy in reblogs :)

[hillbillyoracle]

Hi! Just wanted to say I love your blog and I am so thankful for the resources you’ve shared online. Your info about tarot has helped me a ton and I’ve really enjoyed learning about myself through tarot. I wanted to ask, do you have any good book recs about tarot? Not necessarily the meanings of each card, but books about how to approach tarot reading and ways to make tarot a part of your life. Sorry if this has been asked before, I’m kinda new here. Thanks! ❤️❤️❤️

Thank you so much for your kind words! You have no idea how much they mean to me. Genuinely. <3

As for books, I don't really have many to recommend. I haven't read a ton and I don't feel like I can recommend the ones I have read so far.

Even among the books I've read, I'm not sure I can think of any that quite fit this criteria but it's something I'll be keeping an eye out for in the future.

It's no book, but some thoughts from me if they're at all helpful -

Tarot is ultimately a tool. It wasn't usually a path unto itself but rather reflected a given path it was sometimes used along side - think Rider-Waite-Smith + Golden Dawn and Thoth + Ordo Templi Orientis. It's kind of like asking, how do I make using a hammer part of my life?

And the answer is...well, what do you want to use a hammer for? Make that a part of your life and using tarot will naturally follow.

So when it comes to making tarot a part of your life, it deeply depends on whatever path or practice you work with outside of tarot. The path is what determines whether it's tarot versus another tool that gets used. Kind of like how knitting and embroidery will both tell me to use a sewing needle but at very different points in the project and alongside other tools as well.

If you don't currently have a path - tarot can help direct you to one that could be a good fit given your current needs.

My stock "path" I recommend to folks who are new to pagan and pagan adjacent practices is essentially what Daniel Foor outlines in this article on a deep level.

On the more concrete level it looks like:

learning two divination systems

establishing a relationship with the place you're in through care, communication, and offerings

creating rituals of connection with ancestors both in mundane life and for celebrations

doing self work to radically and lovingly tend to our pain so that it does not spread or multiply

learning at least one magical system to affect the changes we need and want to see in our lives

How does tarot fit into this? Well it's one of your two divination systems. When you're establishing relationships with spirits of place and ancestors, it becomes a tool for communication/to receive messages. When you do self work, it serves to reflect and highlight what needs mended and what paths are most likely to assist you. When you use a magical system, it can be used to suggest spellwork and to check if the spellwork actually, you know, worked. Though with each of these it's best to check with a second tool as well.

When you're working on a path like this, tarot becomes a part of your life because you need it, it's the tool you have to use for the job.

Pick one of those bullet points, schedule time for it once a week and you'll be well on your way to using tarot often.

Apart from that, I'm not a big advocate anymore of divination for divination's sake so card-a-day practices aren't my first suggestion. Challenges can be good structure but do best when they align with your needs in my experience.

Paying attention to need would probably be my other suggestion. Need is an overlooked and important part of divinatory work so being mindful of needs as they're arising can give you the opportunity to use tarot for clarity and guidance on a regular basis.

Part of why I can read cards as well I do at present is because I needed them a lot for the work I was doing in service of my goddess - empowering people to take decisive action in their life (preserving their sovereignty in her eyes) through divinatory clarity. Without that, I'm not sure I'd even still read tarot.

It's only been in the last half decade or so of practicing that I've seen a real uptick in people who seem to think they need to use tarot very frequently, like daily. It's odd to me. I don't feel like I'm failing if I don't use my crochet hook daily. Or my pen. Tarot is no different to me. I use those things when I need them and I'm glad to have them.

TL;DR - for folks who want to make tarot a more regular part of their life, my personal recommendation is looking at your spiritual practice and where tarot might serve that rather than developing a practice around tarot specifically.

[adhbabey]

Hi! I'm sorry for bothering you. I just started to follow you recently because of all the material about adhd. (The checklist is great btw)

I am afab and I've been thinking for some time now (three years more or less) that I might have ADHD. Of course I made quite a lot of research and I present many of the traits (and my dad does too) but I have imposter syndome because I was never diagnosed (even though my mom is a psychologist for children) and I always did good in school (I know that adhd people can do good in school but still it contributes to my imposter syndome). I mentioned once to my mom that I thought I might have it and she said it doesn't exist so I never mentioned it again with her.

Anyway, I noticed that things have gotten worst lately. I can't focus at all and I don't get anything done even though I make lists of the things I need to do and I'm having quite a lot of mental breakdowns about it. So I finally decided to talk about it with my therapist after making all the tests and checklists I could find online. Of course I was super anxious because obviously I expected her to say I don't have it. I prepared the checklist but when it told her I thought I have it i was so anxious I couldn't bring myself to pull out the checklist and also couldn't remember more than like four traits. She said she didn't think I have it which made me feel the imposter syndrome so much more I cried afterwards. This was a week ago and I still feel that way and even now I feel like I shouldn't be here talking about this because I don't have ADHD and I have no idea what to do. And I don't know I think I just needed to vent about it with someone who knows what it feels like. Again sorry for bothering you and I hope you have a nice day. 💕

"" she said it doesn't exist so I never mentioned it again with her. "" yeah thats the huge sign of a parent that just denies their children's disorder </3 !! Imposter syndrome should just be a symptom of ADHD at this point, literally almost everyone with undiagnosed ADHD experienced some type of denial surrounding ADHD.

Send them an email about the ADHD checklist and give them your answers along with it. Because you do have these symptoms if you relate to the whole thing. And this is proof. Anyone who has any questions about this can send me and ask about it. I've been diagnosed with ADHD and wrote that checklist based on my own experience. I know it's reputable, and it's validating. People can just look up the symptoms words themselves if they don't believe me.

I know you are scared, but please, you need to self advocate! You are not going to get a diagnosis unless you wholeheartedly believe and stand up for yourself. People don't know your internal symptoms unless you tell them! I am certain from the way you speak to me, that you have it, but I unfortunately cannot test you. I would if I could.

It's 100% okay to self diagnose, I did it before I got an official diagnosis. There's nothing wrong with you for self diagnosing. There's nothing wrong with it. It's okay to say it, please believe in yourself. I believe in you. I know how common your feelings are among those with ADHD. It's so clear.

Also, ADHD can get worse esp with bad days. It's gotten worse for me when I have no structure in my life (out of highschool), also if you have no medication, it can be hard to just live with executive dysfunction in general. So, please, please believe in yourself about your symptoms. Your experience is SO COMMON among the community, you're not alone. Please trust yourself, please.

My apologies for not answering this sooner! I'm off my meds so it's hard to do things sometimes! But yeah, please, trust me. Your experience is real.

[uncloseted]

there's a part of me that still thinksa bortion is murder. i act like i support it to fit in but deep down i dont. please just listen. i think forcing someone to go through a pregnagncy they don't want is inhuman but it also feels inhuman to kill a baby and i dont like thsi idea that if youre 4 weeks pregnant and you want it its a baby but if youre 4 week pregnant and dont want it then its just a clump of cells thats just not how scence works. so theres this woman who was forced to get an .

Anonymous asked:

abortion and she was 6 months pregnant and apparently th baby waws born alive but it died shortly after from ashpyxia and i just dont know what to think. i know forcing smeone to get an abortion is just as bad as forcing them to give birth and that theres no such thing as a six month abortion and at least wher e i live abortions are only available until week 14 but like wwhat if someone is 15 or 16 weeks or 7 months, do they not have a choice anymore? please dont think im a bigot im not im so

Anonymous asked:

sorry i just dont want to be brainwashed by ANYONE, pro life or pro choice and im just so easily influenceable i just want to support whats right you know

No worries at all! I don't think you're a bigot and I'm glad that you want to engage with this issue critically. I'm happy to give you the facts as they stand and offer you my perspective on the issue. Apologies in advance that this is a bit long, but please try to stick with me until the end! All of this is important in understanding the different sides of this discussion.

There are a few main categories I want to talk about in this answer: legal, science, politics, and culture. For now, I'm going to avoid delving into any religious or metaphysical questions about what is and isn't considered "a person", since while those conversations are interesting, I don't think they're particularly useful in the context of discussions about abortion. As Harry Blackmun wrote in the court opinion for Roe v. Wade, "we need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins. When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of man's knowledge, is not in a position to speculate."

Legality

Starting with legal issues, there are a few points I think it's important to make in order to get a sense of how we relate to abortion. Abortions are legal in 98% of countries. 34% of countries, including the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand most European countries, and China, allow abortions on the basis of a the pregnant person's request, without needing to prove that there is risk to life, risk to health, risk to the fetus, economic or social reasons that abortion is a necessity, or extenuating circumstances (such as the pregnancy being a product of rape or incest). The vast majority (93%) of countries with highly restrictive abortion laws, such as outlawing abortion except in cases where the pregnant person is endangered, are in developing regions. There are five countries that completely outlaw abortion. These are: Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Malta, Nicaragua, and the Vatican City, all countries where the Catholic church has significant influence.

Of the countries that do allow abortion, there is always a limit on how far into a pregnancy a person can be when they choose to terminate. Beyond that limit, the person doesn't have a choice anymore, and must carry the pregnancy to term (except in extenuating circumstances). The most common limit is 12 weeks (3 months), although some countries allow abortion up to the point of "viability", where the fetus can live outside the mother's womb with artificial aid. Typically, the point of viability is around 24 weeks (6 months). In the US, 87% of abortions are performed before 12 weeks, and 92.2% were performed at 13 weeks or fewer. For reference, pregnancies are typically around 40 weeks long.

Forced abortion is illegal in almost every country, including the US and the UK, and it is considered an act of violence against women. It is just as bad as forcing someone to give birth, which is why all countries do their best to prevent it from happening. While forced abortions can and do happen, particularly to victims of sex trafficking, I think the solution to this issue is to put policies into place that protect vulnerable women, instead of trying to ban abortion entirely.

Science

So, most countries allow abortions up to 12 weeks. What does that actually look like in terms of the fetus? Here's a timeline of fetal stages of growth:

Weeks 1-4: at this stage, the "baby" is actually an embryo. It starts out as just a fertilized egg. The amniotic sac forms around it, and the placenta develops. The eyes, mouth, lower jaw, and throat are in very early development. Blood cells are taking shape. By the end of week 4, the embryo is smaller than a grain of rice. It is very literally "just a clump of cells" at this point.

Weeks 5-9: the "baby" is still an embryo. Its facial features begin to develop, folds of skin that will eventually become ears grow, tiny buds that will eventually grow into arms and legs form, the neural tube, digestive tract, and sensory organs all begin to develop. Bone starts to replace cartilage. At about 6 weeks, a heart beat can be detected. After week 8, the baby is considered a fetus instead of an embryo, at which point the fetus is about one inch long.

Weeks 9-12: the fetus' arms, hands, fingers, feet, and toes are fully formed. It may be able to open and close its fists and mouth. Ears are formed, and its reproductive organs begin to develop. By the end of week 12, the fetus has all of their organs and limbs, and their circulatory and urinary systems are working, but everything needs to continue to develop in order to become functional. At the end of week 12, the fetus is about 4 inches long.

It is important to know that the miscarriage rate is highest in the first trimester (before week 12). Among women who know they're pregnant (typically further along than 6 or 7 weeks), 10-20% will miscarry. 30%-50% of all fertilized eggs miscarry.

Other important developmental markers include:

During month 4 (weeks 16-20), you can see the sex of the fetus.

During month 5 (weeks 20-24), the fetus starts moving around.

Between week 22 and week 24, brain waves appear in the cerebral cortex.

At week 24, the fetus may be able to survive if it is born prematurely, provided it has intensive care.

Somewhere between week 26 and week 30, the fetus may be able to feel pain, although we don't know that for sure.

A fetus is not capable of thinking, communicating, reasoning, self-motivation, feeling emotions, or consciousness. They don't have a concept of the self, and they don't know that they exist. They are essentially sedated for the entirety of the pregnancy. Since we use "brain death" as the primary criteria for death, it makes sense to me that we might consider "brain life" (the point where a fetus exhibits brain activity) as the point at which a fetus becomes a person.

While some people will refer to an embryo as a "baby" from the time they discover they're pregnant, scientifically, it is a clump of cells, whether that clump is allowed to continue to grow or not. It's not something we would recognize as a baby, or be able to interact with as if it were a baby. An embryo is a precursor to a baby, kind of like how a seed is a precursor to a plant.

Some other arguments

I want to quickly touch on some other arguments for abortion rights that people make. I'm not going to delve deeply into them, but it didn't feel right to leave them out entirely. These are arguments that don't depend on whether or not a fetus can be considered a person.

Bodily Rights

There are many situations in which we prioritize individual bodily rights over the right of someone else to live. For example, we don't force people to donate organs to people who are dying, even though a donated organ would save their life. Advocates for abortion rights argue that those same bodily rights should be extended to a pregnant person.

Deprivation

This argument usually looks something like, "but what if that fetus was going to cure cancer when it grew up!" Basically, it's saying that abortion is morally wrong because it deprives the fetus (and the world) of a valuable future. To me, this completely ignores the deprivation that already exists by forcing a person to carry and birth a baby they don't want, and potentially the deprivation that comes with raising that child. People who make this argument never seem to ask, "what if the pregnant person was going to cure cancer?"

Slippery Slope

Some people argue that normalizing and legalizing abortion may lead to people also accepting euthanasia. I am unconvinced by this for two reasons. 1. Slippery slope is a logical fallacy and 2. I absolutely do think we should legalize euthanasia for certain situations.

Religion

I don't want to dig too far into this one, but what I will say is that the US is a country that (at least nominally) has a separation of church and state, and the religious beliefs that other people hold should not infringe on a person's rights to make choices about their own life.

History and Politics

The practice of abortion itself is incredibly old. The Sanskrit epic Ramayana, which dates to the 7th century BCE, describes abortion being practiced by surgeons and barbers. In the Assyrian Code of Assura, circa 1075 BCE, a woman is allowed to procure an abortion except when it's against her husband's wishes. The first recorded evidence of induced abortion is from the Egyptian Ebers Papyrus in 1550 BCE. Japanese documents show records of induced abortion from as early as the 12th century, and it became more prevalent during the Edo period. It is considered to be unlikely that abortion was punished in Ancient Greece or ancient Rome. All major Jewish religious movements allow abortion in order to save the life or health of a pregnant woman, and often support abortion for other reasons as well. Christianity has a more complicated relationship to abortion, for reasons that I'll go into in a bit, but for now let's just note that there very much were ancient Christians who believed abortion was morally permissible at least some of the time. Before the 19th century CE, first-trimester abortion was widely practiced and was legal under common law throughout the English speaking world, including the US and UK.

The reason I bring all of this up is because the political debate over abortion isn't really that old, and the debate tends not to actually be about the morality of abortion as an act so much as it is a proxy for other issues. The first backlash against abortion in the English Speaking world was in the 19th century, and was a direct reaction to the women's rights movement, which was starting during that time. In the US, anti-abortion laws began to appear as early as the 1820s, but picked up in earnest by the late 1860s. These laws were introduced for many reasons, including the fact that abortions were being provided by untrained people who were not members of medical societies and concerns about the safety of abortifacients. By 1900, abortion was a felony in every US state, but they continued to become increasingly available. By the 1930s, licensed physicians performed an estimated 800,000 abortions a year.

Jumping forward a little bit, let's talk about the history of abortion in the US just before Roe v. Wade. It's estimated that in the 50s and 60s, between 200,000 to 1.2 million abortions were being performed per year, even though they were illegal. Throughout that same time, the second wave feminist movement was growing, and was increasingly advocating for birth control and liberalized abortion laws. As a reaction to second wave feminism, a number of anti-abortion organizations, primarily led by Catholic institutions, cropped up to mobilize against the legalization of abortion. It should be noted that, at the time, abortion was not an issue for evangelical Christian groups. In the 1960s, 17 states legalized abortion for a variety of different circumstances. Then in 1973, Roe v. Wade happens, ruling that a pregnant woman has the right to choose to have an abortion without excessive government restriction. The ruling was 7-2 in favor of legalizing abortion. Even after Roe v. Wade, Christian Evangelicals were neutral to positive on the ruling. It's only after 1980 that Evangelical Christians started to organize around abortion as a political issue and joined the Catholics to form what we now think of as the Christian Right. There's a lot to say about that and why that switch happened, but for the sake of brevity, just know that the evangelical backlash against legalized abortion in the US started not as a moral crusade, but as a way of convincing people to vote for Ronald Regan instead of Jimmy Carter (who wanted to de-segregate schools). No political debate happens in a vacuum, and it's important to understand what other factors might have been at play when looking at where these debates come from and how the sides formed.

Culture

Lastly, let's talk a little bit about the cultural impacts of banning or legalizing abortion. The right to have or not have a child is necessary in order for women to achieve equality with men. Countries with high gender equality, such as Iceland, Finland, Norway, New Zealand, and Sweden, also have easily accessible abortion options. Criminalization of abortion disproportionately impacts poor women and women of color, and does nothing to address the systemic issues that may cause them to require abortions in the first place.

Researchers from the WHO and University of Massachusetts found that banning abortion is an inefficient way to reduce abortion rates; in countries where abortions were restricted, the number of unintended pregnancies actually increased, and the proportion of unintended pregnancies ending in abortion also increased. When abortion is banned, women aren't not having abortions; they're having illegal abortions that are done unsafely.

There is also some evidence to suggest that legalized abortion actually decreases crime rates. 20 years after the legalization of abortion in the US, there was an unprecedented nationwide decline of the crime rate (including murders, incidentally). The drop in crime is thought by some to be a result of the fact that individuals who had a higher statistical probability of committing crimes (people who grew up as unwanted children in poverty) were not being born.

Which brings me to my next point- the majority of people who are "pro-life" (at least in the US) aren't really pro-life. They're pro-birth. If they were truly pro-life, they would be interested in making sure that all of those babies had their needs met after they're born. They would be interested in making sure those babies can lead long, healthy, safe, and productive lives. They would be for universal healthcare, expanded social safety nets, parental leave from jobs, universal basic income, raising the minimum wage, mandated vacation time, increasing funding for public schools, decriminalizing drugs, abolishing prisons or at least reforming the police. They would be against the death penalty (ironically, some of them are actually for the death penalty for women who have had abortions), and for increased access to birth control, comprehensive sex-ed in schools, increased gun legislation, against war and nuclear weapons, for enforced mask wearing to prevent people from needlessly dying from a global pandemic... but those issues don't factor into their "pro-life" stance. They're for "the baby gets born and then has to pull itself up by its bootstraps like the rest of us."

Closing Thoughts

Look. I'm not super jazzed about abortions. I understand how they can feel like an ethical issue. I think we should do what we can to reduce the number of abortions that are performed- teaching comprehensive sex-ed in schools, making birth control and emergency contraceptive options widely accessible, letting men know that reversible vasectomies are an option. I think we should make abortion easier to access, so those who do need it can make the decision early in the pregnancy. But I also think that it's a very personal decision, one that's irreversibly life altering, and the person who's going to experience the life altering event should be the one who decides what happens. 65 year old conservative, Christian white men who will never be pregnant (and frequently don't really know how the female body works) shouldn't get to make that decision for them. As someone for whom pregnancy would be life threatening, I want to know that I have options should that situation present itself someday.

[alines7777]

right now i'd like to talk about kankri from homestuck

people talk about him like he's the absolute worst piece of shit who ever lived, and that his intentions must be less than admirable, especially karkat, and people take karkat's word for it because we like karkat — but here's the thing, that wouldn't be the first time that katkat's been wrong about someone he hardly knew.

( image artist : @n0pies )

but first, i'd like to provide a little context from the text of homestuck about the planet alternia/beforus

alternia and beforus and their rulers

starting with alternia, troll society engages in a practice known as "culling", in which disabled and 'mutant-blooded' trolls are slated for extermination, as per the condesce's will for trolls to become stronger through violent division, as was meenah's intent in trying sew division among her fellow players in sgrub by starting trouble.

but culling means death, so naturally, every troll on alternia dreads the thought of being culled, so feferi, the heiress to the throne, has an idea, "why don't we simply change what it means to be culled?", she even tries to get practice in her new form of culling by rounding up wild cuttlefish to live under her custody in her abode, yet when the text brings that up, it even says that they don't need to be in her care, but she takes them in anyway, which shows her disregard for the independence and autonomy of other beings. that was a roleplay scenario — her rulership over beforus was this idea put into action.

on beforus, troll society engages in a practice known as "culling", in which disabled and 'mutant-blooded' trolls are slated to be placed in the custody of trolls of higher blood and be coddled, as per the empress's will for trolls to live in comfort through disparaging unity. text on feferi and recounting on the part of aranea basically confirm it, beforus is quite plainly coddle country.

but culling means indefinite tutelage, so naturally, every troll on beforus dreads the thought of being culled.

the intentions of both meenah and feferi for trolls to be strong and well off respectively are all well and good, but the methods of both are all wrong.

the knight of blood

fortunately, there is a lot of canonical text providing exhaustive documentation and insight into karkat's background.

we know that his predecessor, the signless, encountered a troll of higher blood who took pity on him upon his emergence from the brooding caverns, where if that hadn't happened he would have been alternian-culled. we know that he advocated the abolition of culling and the bloodcaste system. we know that his followers took it upon themselves to create a sign and breed a lusus for his successor, in order to prevent his successor's alternian-culling, and we know that karkat was highly secretive about the color of his blood to avoid being alternian-culled, and also to avoid being pitied. we know that this was all tailored specifically so karkat might live to enter his session.

we also know that the signless and kankri are virtually one and the same.

the seer of blood

unfortunately, there is virtually no canonical text regarding kankri's background. if it existed, surely many would be as sympathetic toward him as they are toward karkat, even in spite of karkat's conduct. but thanks to canonical text into the signless and karkat, and the method of cross-reference, we can make a highly educated guess.

starting with karkat's beforan counterpart, we might say that he, like karkat, was secretive about the color of his blood so as to avoid being beforan-culled, which is virtually one and the same as being pitied, assuming he wasn't beforan-culled or maybe he found the friendship of someone who didn't and wouldn't particularly hate or pity him. (perhaps the beforan counterpart to sollux or vriska? who knows?)

either way, nobody is killed on account of beforan-culling, "besides, we're only taking care of him because we already know he can't take care of himself, so what's the harm?", nobody would feel any compelling need to create a sign or breed any lusus for a mutant-blooded successor, after all the intent would be to coddle him, to treat him as an invalid or perhaps even as a pet, so he would live to enter his session regardless.

now onto kankri himself, knowing the story of the signless, it would probably be fair to estimate that he would meet a higher-blooded troll who would pity him for having no corresponding sign or lusus, thus he might have been slated for beforan-culling.

i'm not saying with certainty that kankri was beforan-culled, what i'm saying is that it would make sense. i mean, we might also in some sense regard the death of the signless as alternian-culling.

what also makes it make sense is how kankri reacts to the way he is regarded by porrim. when she reaches to wipe his face, he becomes upset, when she calls him "kanny", he becomes upset, and voices that he'd rather be called "the insufferable" than be addressed as a "wiggler".

i mean, he's probably taking porrim's pale feelings toward him the wrong way, and there are probably better ways for porrim to express them, but it's almost as if kankri knows that he doesn't need her pity and doesn't want her pity, and to be clear, the operant emotion behind moirallegiance is pity. and he probably also takes her regard toward him as an attempt on her part to coddle him, which he clearly doesn't like, he is perhaps no stranger to being coddled, or he at least understands the concept and why it should strike him as offensive, and yes, dreadful.

kankri wants to be regarded as independent and autonomous, and he at least makes it convincing that he wants the same for others, so, like his alternian counterpart, kankri advocates for the abolition of culling and the bloodcaste system.

so if we want to regard the intentions of the signless as genuine and noble, then we ought to insist on kankri being treated with the same amount of good faith. they're the same person, with the exact same set of fundamental principles and ultimate goals, the only difference is the circumstances behind their reasoning.

yea, kankri was a total hypocritical dick in the way he spoke to mituna, in belittling mituna's legitimate need for headgear in retaining his autonomy, yet as kankri might rightfully fear, headgear could be construed by beforan bluebloods as a reason that's as good as any other to engage in beforan-culling, because, "he's so helpless, if he weren't then why is he wearing a helmet?", and then they might decide that all trolls who wear helmets for whatever reason might be slated for culling. but yea, that doesn't excuse kankri's conduct, besides, they're all dead anyway, so nobody is going to get culled, get a grip, kankri.

but karkat routinely antagonizes his friends, even while bearing remorse over having previously antagonized his friends, so he knows it's wrong and yet he still does that, and then he dodges culpability by compartmentalizing his actions as being the actions of his "past self" and not actually as his own actions, or did we somehow manage to forget that?

and then karkat talks a mountain of shit about kankri behind his back as kankri happily abides a seemingly pointless and arbitrary request from a friend whom he doesn't regard as disciplined or interested in his beliefs, a request that was intended as a ploy to trick him.

yea, in some ways, kankri is worse than karkat, but in some other ways, i also think he's far better as a person.

seriously, if we think kankri is the negative stereotype of 'sjw' tumblr, well, then i frankly think that his portrayal might in some sense be doing us too much honor.

yet for some reason, we are duped into hating his doctrines praising autonomy and condemning mollycoddling tutelage and genocide, doctrines that we all should cherish in principle, but we throw him out because he is shown as not very well-liked, even though we aren't very well-liked either. so whatever.

"but he talks too much"

that's already known to be a very typical tendency for seers and blood players, so why shouldn't it be doubly so for a seer of blood?

seriously, don't act surprised.

o, one other thing

with this shit of alternian-culling being about killing and beforan-culling being about mollycoddling, i guess we could say the two troll planets correspond to the troll emotions of hate and pity respectively.

so if karkat was inauspiciously encouraged by alternian culture to hate himself, then it seems fairly likely that kankri was encouraged by beforan culture to pity himself, especially if he were culled.

on alternia, if it's, "you were born with mutant blood, and everyone hates you, so why haven't you died yet, you sorry waste of space?", then on beforus (let me reiterate that it doesn't seem very likely to me that kankri had a lusus or a sign to his name, and if that's the case, it would merely have been difficult for him to go on without being discovered and beforan-culled, instead of impossible), it might've been, "you were born with mutant blood, and you don't have a sign or a lusus. how would you even be able to take care of yourself? if you could then why doesn't anyone believe it? it's so sad that everyone else thinks you need someone else to care for you, it's sad, you poor little thing."

if alternia instills hate, then we can be sure that beforus instills pity. if alternia taught karkat to self-hate, then why wouldn't beforus teach kankri to self-pity? (even assuming he wasn't culled, the threat of losing his autonomy and independence by being extensively mollycoddled constantly loomed over his shoulder.)

we all know that karkat made himself out as an asshole because he desperately wanted to find someone more deserving of his own hate than himself, so i think kankri makes himself out as an asshole the way he does because he hopes to find someone, really anyone, who would be more deserving of his own pity than himself.

so yea, i don't think it's fair on any account to talk shit about kankri, that is unless we also want to talk excessive levels of shit about karkat, which i don't

[mbti-notes]

[1/2] I have a question. If I work together with other people then everything goes well and I have normal human relationships. I have no idea on how to build relationship outside of work scope. Every time I try I fail because I don't understand what to share and when and how and then people stop communicating with me and I don't even know why. Did I do something to upset them? When I ask them they ignore me. It feels so bad and I don't know what's wrong with me and why I can't express myself.

[con’t: My type is ENTJ plus I have ASD. Do you know some resources on how to build intimate relationships for people with ASD? Do you have any advice from your experience?]

I’m sorry to say that my knowledge is mostly theoretical as I haven’t had many real-life opportunities to work closely with ASD individuals. There are still some general things that I can say. You mention work, so does that mean you are relatively high-functioning and have a job (i.e. adult life)?

Working with people means that you have a shared objective, everyone is focused on meeting a goal, which means that the focus ISN’T on being friends. Of course, teamwork goes more smoothly when everyone gets along, but the relationship is a “professional” one, not personal. Generally speaking, I don’t believe that making friends in a work environment is always a great idea. Firstly, not everyone is looking for friendship. Many people go to work as a way to make a living or for some goal other than friendship. They might already have a social circle outside of work and don’t want to get too close to their colleagues, so don’t take their distance personally. If most of the people are there for a “job” rather than personal passion, then they’re less likely to have things in common on a personal level, which makes it more difficult to find a friend. Secondly, mixing the personal into the professional makes relationships much more complicated because you introduce things like emotional conflicts (e.g. guilt, jealousy, resentment), power differentials, competitiveness and rivalry, status or monetary stakes that push people into self-centered or greedy behavior. Conflict among work-related friends messes up everything really quickly. Thirdly, a lot of neurotypical people are terrible at relationships because everyone has their own set of psychological issues to deal with, so they might not have the capacity to understand you and your needs, which means that you shouldn’t automatically assume that you’ve done something wrong when a relationship goes sour. Sometimes, it’s not you, it’s their issue.

Friendship is a choice, you get to choose your friends. When you go to a supermarket to shop for products, you look for the products that are well-suited to your own tastes and preferences so that you don’t waste money on things you won’t like or won’t use. Similarly, when you’re “shopping” for friends, you have to seek out people who are well-suited to you, your interests, your lifestyle, your personality. There’s no need to feel hurt or offended if someone doesn’t want to be friends with you, because each person should be free to choose the friends that they think are best for themselves. If you try to befriend any and every person that comes your way, you’re playing with luck, and bad luck means a lot of disappointment. Think on what kinds of people you want in your life. What qualities, characteristics, traits, interests, etc, should a person have in order to be well-suited as a friend for you? You have to know yourself well enough to answer, which requires some reflection on who you are and what you want out of life (i.e. Ni development). Also, think about relationships that have gone badly for you in the past and notice if there are certain kinds of people you should avoid, and think about relationships that have gone well and what kinds of people they were. Once you have some concrete criteria, it’s easy to set a concrete goal, then you go to where those people are more likely to be found. For example, I value lifelong learning, so I join clubs with people who like learning the same things that I do.

As for resources, most ASD books are geared to parents for raising their ASD children, so it was actually a bit difficult to find ones that might be developmentally suitable for you and your place in life. I don’t know the specifics of your capabilities and environmental conditions, so it’s hard to make very specific recommendations. You might still benefit from the books already listed on the resources page about relationships and communication skills.

The Science of Making Friends: Helping Socially Challenged Teens and Young Adults (Laugeson). I like this book because it teaches an empirically-based method for learning social skills that covers all the points that I believe are important to learn. The book is for parents/teachers and I think it could be written and organized better, but all the basic concepts are there.

How well do you understand ASD? It’s important to understand it well so that you can communicate your strengths and challenges to people. Part of having good relationships involves being able to advocate for yourself and communicate your needs and desires to people in a way that they can understand. These titles might help:

The Unwritten Rules of Social Relationships: Decoding Social Mysteries Through the Unique Perspectives of Autism (Grandin and Barron). Grandin speaks from personal experience and knows a lot about ASD.

The Journal of Best Practices: A Memoir of Marriage, Asperger Syndrome, and One Man’s Quest to Be a Better Husband (Finch). Another personal perspective that you might be able to identify with.

Uniquely Human: A Different Way of Seeing Autism (Prizant). This book tries to bridge the gap in perception between the neurotypical and the neurodivergent, written for neurotypical people, but it might help you understand how neurotypical people perceive you.

Ten Things Every Child with Autism Wishes You Knew (Notbohm). This book tries to promote understanding of ASD by taking their perspective. It might provide useful language and concepts for expressing important points about yourself to others.

[diallokenyatta]

You were on point with the atheism as a white people thing episode of your radio show. Black folk who say that lack knowledge of self. There aint a more violently religious people than white people. Jews, Arabs and Anglos all descended from the caucasus. Wherever there are jews, anglos or arabs, atheist are either suppressed or killed. So I don't know what black folk are talking about atheism being a white people thing. Maybe they see vocal white atheist on the net and think it a white thing lol

Thank you Anon.Many Black people don’t want to cede Spirituality or Religiosity to Whites cuz then they would have to admit that they don’t have a special arena all to themselves. You will her Black people state all the time that “We Are A Spiritual People.” That’s something that has been hammered into to me from the moment I’ve embrace African-Centered Ideologies and Movements. This notion of Blacks being more Spirituality endowed than Whites is an Ego Defense Mechanism. We’ve had to live under Whites having almost absolute power in the material world, economic, military, political, and even religious (in an institutional context) power.  So many Blacks constructed this narrative that Blacks lack power in the Material World because our true power is in the Ethereal World, or in the After World. This myth was fed by Whites who enslaved and colonized us; they told us that our lot in life was ordained by God(s) and that our true rewards were in the afterlife, in heaven, in paradise; where we could “lay our burdens down.” This notion has been greatly developed over the decades to what it is today, it has not only held strong among Blacks who worship the Alien Gods imposed on them by their oppressors, but it has contaminated traditional African Religious Systems like Vodun, Yoruba, and Khemetic spiritual traditions and practices. 

The problem with false notion that Blacks are more spiritually endowed or inherently religious than Whites or any other race is that it has led to Blacks neglecting the cultivation of power in the material world, it has also led to a level of anti-rationality, anti-intellectualism, and anti-materialism (in an productive, not consumption context).Blacks are not more Religious or Spiritual than other Races, but we do have our own, culturally specific approach that is different than how Whites and other Races engage their Spirituality and Religion.  

Amos N. Wilson worked hard to dispel this myth of “Black Spiritual Endowment” but I don’t think he had much success, I’ve also worked to promote secularism, rationality, and anti-theism within the Black Liberation Struggle and I also have encountered violent Resistance, even from those who claim to be scientific and rational in their approach to Black Liberation. But I think we have to develop and advocate aggressive for African Secularism and Black Atheism because we’ll can’t be a liberated people, we can’t govern a State, or defend our resources unless we are a fully rational people with secular administration and governance of our people, lands, and resources.So, remain vocal and don’t allow yourself to be silenced on this issue. People always tell me to just keep quite about my Atheism or the lunacy of Religion and Spirituality for the sake of Black Unity, but the kind of unity that cannot withstand critical engagement and though is not a unity that can withstand protracted Black Revolutionary Struggle, so it’s not a unity worth protecting.  Please take a moment to share these insights, and if you can support my effort to build a Revolutionary Pan-African Media Appratus. Thank you.www.patreon.com/diallokenyatta : SaveTheBDShowwww.diallokenyatta.com : #BroDiallowww.africanworldorder.com : #AWOApparel