#the political climate in the US has me scared for real

[annihilate-this-week]

Limp Wrist - Want Us Dead

Two men were hung in the Middle East just for being gay. Some Texas punks got killed cause someone thought that they were strange. Trannies are beat and murdered by some sick fucks full of hate.

They want us dead.

[genderkoolaid]

was thinking about why marginalized people often use slurs in describing oppression. like in the phrase "magical negro", or using the term "cripple" or "tranny" when talking about how people see us. its not reclamation, it's more about specifically forcing the dominant group to face their bias.

bc when it comes to overt forms of bigotry, there isn't really the need to do this. the bigot will very directly tell you why they hate you- because you are a [slur], a stand-in for everything the believe about the group they hate (being unnatural, criminals, dirty, sinful, ugly, a drain on society, etc).

but generally those kinds of overt bigotry are harder to have in polite society, especially when the marginalized group in question has enough visibility and has been loud enough about their treatment that people have to acknowledge it. now, saying you hate black people or trans people or immigrants is a social faux pas, and people acknowledge that hating those groups is Bad.

but anything less than hatred is still looked over, because critically examining how our actions contribute to social patterns is Hard and requires abstract thinking, and it's much easier to just get rid of the most blatant forms of bigotry and wipe your hands of the whole nasty "systemic oppression" issue. overt bigots are bad, ostensibly because of their bigotry, but largely because they just are so gauche about it, you know? it's easy for Good Liberals in the US north to mock the gun-obsessed fat Southern man caricature who doesn't believe in climate change and says slurs, but they often get quiet and awkward if someone brings up the liberal white woman from New York who quickly locks her door when a Black man walks by her car on the sidewalk. She doesn't hate black people, so she can't be racist- there's a world of difference (in her mind) between herself and the Racist. even if, whether it's through gun violence on private property or calling the cops because she feels scared, a Black man gets killed because a white person's racist bias.

getting back to the original point about slurs: using them in this context forces people to recognize that all of that bias is the same. your racism, transphobia, ableism, isn't different just because you use nice words. dominant groups get uncomfortable when marginalized groups use slurs to point out their bigotry (i.e "you want me to be a good tranny") because it draws a direct connection between the blatant, socially unacceptable bigotry and the socially acceptable, low-key bigotry. a lot of times, society reacts to oppressed groups fighting for liberation by addressing the most obvious elements while allowing and encouraging the subtle elements, so that way they calm down and stop causing problems, but society doesn't have to meaningfully change. drawing that connection pulls the cover off of society. no more "but I don't hate immigrants so I'm not xenophobic!", because xenophobia isn't just ICE officers keeping kids in cages, it's also getting annoyed with people who have strong accents because why can't they just learn to speak English better and making every movie set in Eastern Europe have a blue filter so you know it's Foreign and Sad.

basically, slurs are used as a weapon to remind marginalized groups of every stereotype about them, and "put them in their place". but they can also be used to force polite bigots to face their own bigotry, blowing away the smokescreen of "only violent oppression is real oppression". There's a power to be found in bringing your issues into the light when the world would really rather you sit pretty and smile and thank it for doing the bare minimum while still making your life hell.

[tomorrowusa]

There is "a tiny window" of hope remaining for keeping the climate from spinning out of control. But to keep that window open we need to keep professional climate deniers out of power.

Increasingly severe weather impacts had also been long signposted by scientists, although the speed and intensity of the reality scared some. The off-the-charts sea temperatures and Antarctic sea ice loss were seen as the most shocking. The feeling of entering a new age of devastation was the result of the return of the natural El Niño phenomenon, which has temporarily turbocharged global heating, they said. Another factor was many people being confronted with extreme weather they had never experienced before, as climate impacts began to clearly stand out from usual weather. The scientists were clear the world had not yet passed a “tipping point” into runaway climate change, but some warned that it got ever closer with continued heating.

The scientists also warned that the “crazy” extreme weather of recent months was just the “tip of the iceberg” compared with the even worse impacts to come. In just a decade the exceptional events of 2023 could be a normal year, unless there is a dramatic increase in climate action. Some further warned that the tendency of climate models to underestimate extreme weather meant we were “flying partially blind” into a future that could be even more catastrophic than anticipated. However, a “tiny window” of opportunity remained open to tackle the climate crisis, they said, with humanity having all the tools needed. The researchers overwhelmingly pointed to one action as critical: slashing the burning of fossil fuels down to zero. “Climate science’s projections are pretty robust over the last decades. Unfortunately, humanity’s stubbornness to spew out ever-higher amounts of greenhouse gases has also been pretty robust,” said Prof Malte Meinshausen, of the University of Melbourne, Australia.

There's a relatively simple prescription to keep things from getting worse.

“We need to stop burning fossil fuels,” said (Imperial College's Dr. Friederike) Otto. “Now – not sometime when we’ve allowed companies to make all the money they possibly can.” Others said the world was on “code red alert” to stop fossil fuel extraction and to fight to halt new exploration projects.

The stats are pretty damned clear about what's happening.

The first step in making things better is to stop them from getting worse. A certain political party in the US pretends that climate change is just "politicization of the weather". Making sure these people are not put in power gives us time to work on solutions.

Why Republicans can’t get out of their climate bind, even as extreme heat overwhelms the US

Even as more Republican politicians are joining the consensus that climate change is real and caused by humans, Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric has driven the party to the right on climate and extreme weather. Trump has called the extremely settled science of climate change a “hoax” and more recently suggested that the impacts of it “may affect us in 300 years.”

Even if some Republicans grudgingly admit that humans cause climate change, the influence of their party's Dear Leader will keep them from taking any action.

And if The Donald choked on a triple cheeseburger tomorrow, don't expect the party to abruptly swerve away from its extremist anti-science positions. It's not just Trump himself, it's Trumpism as exemplified by his Mini-Me Vivek Ramaswamay.

Vivek Ramaswamy calls climate change agenda a ‘hoax’ during debate

Here are some of the current "hoaxes" which Trump lickspittle Vivek doesn't want you to think about too much.

[sweetfirebird]

I know part of it is extreme weather changes because of climate change and all, but the sudden appearance of "bomb cyclones" in the news irritates me so much. First of all, suddenly calling severe storms "bomb cyclones" is designed to scare the shit out of people without actually telling them anything about it or what to do for them. Are they truly unprecedented? Then maybe tell people what you mean by "cyclone." The first one that hit us up here in 2021 was just called a big storm up until the last second. Then they called it a bomb cyclone, sent everyone into a panic (but not enough of a panic to order businesses to close early and send people home while roads were still passable and power was still on, btw. My whole separate rage for how America handles increasing natural disasters is for another time.) Then they acted like, well that was weird, anyway while we were all without power for days or stranded in our homes.

Keep in mind that no storm here in my lifetime has ever been deemed a cyclone before. So everyone here was sort of??? about what that meant for us the first time as well. Sounds real scary (because it is) but what are we supposed to do? What does that mean in practical terms? Oh you just wanna fearmonger and not be helpful? Cool.

Then now there have been two this year so far, with people buried and starving or freezing to death under snow or isolated by water/mud, and the media sort of treats it like, "we've just decided to slap that label on extreme weather I guess."

And it's the least helpful thing they could be doing, honestly. If they said, "hey we are possibly about to get winds up to whatever mph and that on its own is going to cause serious problems even without the heavy rain or snow--though we will also be getting that--and here is what needs to happen before this storm arrives" that would actually be helpful.

You'd think after the handling of Covid, I'd be less surprised by how incompetent the people in charge are, but... here I am still shocked at the constant mishandling of shit.

Also when severe weather is predicted, I don't care how used to it your area is, workers and schoolchildren all need to be sent home. Period. And frankly, even if you are used the occasional storm, we don't live in normal storm times anymore. Send people home before the roads and trains and buses stop being available and stop expecting like... fast food workers to come into work during this shit.

(oops here's that rant now)

Also with rising costs to live in urban centers, most poorer workers... actually most workers... do not live near city centers, which means they have to travel to come into work. Nope.

(Also those people expecting like a Subway sandwich shop to be open during a hurricane.... what is wrong with you?)

....I am avoiding formatting. But my rage is valid. When we had the first big fire up here, once the phone lines and towers went back up, which took a couple of days *while the fire was still burning out of control* my manager got calls from people mad about businesses being closed. People had fled across the county/state and were waiting to learn if their homes burned. People died, a lot of people. Businesses burned down. Communications were down. Absolutely no business was getting done anyway.

Honestly the most selfishly stupid stuff from humans who did not deserve politeness.

[blood-starved-beast]

Thinking about the massive influence Irelia has on the Ionian politics despite trying to distance herself from them. All the different political groups present in current Ionia sprang up from her Stand and her resistance. (Excluding the traditionalist pacifists, and even them they’re reacting to her stance too.). The Order of Shadows, the Navori Brotherhood, they’re all inspired by her actions in some manner or form.

The assassination attempts alone tell us how important she is to Ionian politics. The Brotherhood wouldn’t be trying to scare her into action otherwise unless she had that amount of political influence. (Let’s be real, that’s what it is, at least to the higher-ups. They can’t reasonably think that Irelia, Defender of the First Lands since she nearly killed the high general of Noxus at 14, would die at the hands of a random mook. There has to be politicking involved in that. Shame Riot clearly gives no shits to explore that.) Makes it all the more interesting that refuses it regardless. That she isn’t pressured either and only jumps back into the fray when Noxus comes crawling back in the Second Invasion.

In an indirect way, it reminds me of George Washington and how he lead the revolution against Britain but for the most part refused the trappings of power he could have so easily been ensnared by. (He only became president at the insistence of the other politicians, and even then tried to restrain from overexerting any power or influence). Only with Irelia, there is a lot of pressure (rooted likely in Ionia’s current unstable political climate) for an acting leader, but of course Irelia does not want to take the call even if she must. 

[tacticalhimbo]

grandson band via twitter || image of band lead, jordan edward benjamin, via twitter

Transcript, emphasis added by me:

Recently I was approached, along with a handful of other artists, to gauge my interest in performing at a Biden re-election rally in 2 important swing states. This was quite an opportunity for me, as I have dedicated much my career to encouraging and empowering fans to participate however they can in making their community, city, or country more reflective of them, of us- more inclusive, more just, and yes, more progressive. It also would have given me a larger platform to denounce the corrupt, hypercapitalist, misogynistic, undemocratic, climate change denying, fundamentalist religious platform that serial liar and convicted felon Donald Trump, and ultimately an entire faction of American politics too scared to challenge him, has been pushing for.

However, after the past decade spent on empty rhetoric, after consolidating power towards the center and edging out real progressive change, in the face of ongoing war machine efforts to fund and arm horrific atrocities in Gaza, coming up short on issues like student debt forgiveness, transparency around insider trading and term limits on sitting congressmen, getting money out of politics and elections, Supreme Court reform, climate change adaptation, marijuana legalization, for-profit healthcare reform, or heavier taxation on the ultra rich, I cannot in good conscience attach my music to this current administration. If Democrats were at all in touch with us and really cared about the advancing of their values and stopping Trump, Biden would step down tomorrow for someone with more energy, charisma, and conviction for how to actually make this country better for working people.

Where does that leave us? I'm scared that my silence, or active denouncing of being a democrat, helps create the conditions for a second Trump presidency, a thought that repulses me and many of the people I talk to about it. I support many policies from The Green Party, but I remember the feeling of disappointment watching Trump and his corrupt cabal sworn in, wondering as I looked around at my friends that voted third party, or didn't vote at all: are we responsible for this?

Ultimately, while I don't feel comfortable endorsing a candidate at this time, I do just want to say that our voting block-young, progressive, online, with some amount of radicalization through what we see and read on the internet- is not represented in politics proportionately to our outrage because we simply don't actually leverage our feelings at the ballot box. Our turnout rate is always lower than old, scared television watchers from the past generation. The system will largely maintain its power and expand the empire regardless of who is the "commander in chief", and so my focus is on civic engagement and participation beyond the narrow scope of President.

Our attitude towards the future in this current system will be taken seriously through our participation, by supporting grassroots, young candidates locally, and influencing change through the many candidates, referendums and measures that appear on ballots in midterms and elections. When we get closer to the election, I will be working with progressive voting guides to make it easy to decipher what is at stake in November and how to make your voice heard in ways outside of just choosing which of these geriatric, unfit, for-sale men deserve to be President.

[flint9]

What Radicalised Me?

If you don't want to read all the paragraphs, you can skip to where I restate this question near the end for the answer, although it will be missing a lot of context.

Anyone who has looked through my blog may have noticed that I am not speaking out against the atrocities happening in Gaza. Unfortunately, I plan on keeping things that way, but I wanted to take a moment to talk about why. For reference, this entire thing is not a justification. It is not a defence. It is a study of what has happened in my life for me to have the attitude I do towards politics.

To start, I should say that I would describe myself as a left-leaning moderate. No, the title saying I have been radicalised is not a lie. Being a moderate has slowly radicalised me.

Some people may already have speeches prepared for why I should be ashamed of myself and how moderates are the most evil thing in existence. In fact, I am quite scared to even say this because I know that the general response will be very negative.

But please at least read what I have to say first. Not because I expect it will change your mind, but maybe your approach.

1. What made me a moderate?

I would say that it began in the earlier years of primary school (Australian primary school, which is different years to US primary school). From an incredibly young age, I have been told over and over again that the world is dying.

Climate change was and is an explosive topic, and it was something that I was forced to comprehend before I was in my double digits. I was told that everyone I loved was going to die early, and that, as a 9-year-old, I could do nothing about it. This story stayed the same when I was 10, 11, 12, and into the future.

I was faced with two choices. Rebel or conform. And at that young age, with the incredibly limited power I had, I chose to conform. To accept that I was going to be helpless for years to come and that that was normal.

This is as opposed to trying to attend political rallies when I had no real knowledge of the broader picture and with moderately conservative parents who sigh in pity at protestors.

However, this internal helplessness soon became learned helplessness. I had decided that there was nothing I could do, so I stopped trying. Then comes the internet and social media.

2. Why am I still a moderate?

Especially after joining Tumblr, I have seen essay after essay about many political issues, the most notable of which being the genocide of Gaza. There were many links and many resources for how to help, yet I decided to remain helpless.

In my learned helplessness, I was averse to even trying to help. After all, I had seen so many posts about being careful with what resources I trust that I came to the conclusion it really wasn't as easy as pressing a single button. I had to do proper research to make sure what I did would actually help Gaza.

But because I did not act, and because I have been surrounded by posts whose goal is to guilt people into acting, I was forced to make another choice.

Rebel.

Or conform.

So I conformed.

Not making a decision soon became my decision, and it has stuck to me like glue. If I wanted to escape that decision, it would require me justifying not acting already.

Sunk cost fallacy.

And yes, I do have reasons for why not acting is justifiably better in my situation than acting. But those reasons are not the point of this. Instead, I want to talk about...

3. What radicalised me?

Let's reframe that question to fit my exact context. What made me feel so strongly against rebelling?

Because I have been told by the people I would have to call my allies that I am the enemy.

If I am your enemy, then that must mean that you are my enemy.

And why would I become the ally of my enemy?

Again, this is not a justification, it is a case study of what is happening in my subconscious mind.

I have been told that I am vermin and scum, leaving me either the choice to decide that I am the worst thing to ever exist and then use that guilt to drive action, or to refuse that notion and decide that the person telling me that is the true vermin.

When I hear protestors shouting in the street, my gut instinct is not to listen, but to cower. If activists think I am the enemy, then these angry, shouting activists must want to hurt me. It's an instinct, not a fact.

But instinct is hard to shake.

4. What is the actual point of all of this?

The point I want to make is that villainising people does not encourage them to help.

Guilt is a powerful force, but we humans can only tolerate so much of it. Once it gets too much to bear, a person is forced to address it. And the easy way out is deciding that the people creating the guilt are actually against you.

Instead, I would recommend providing resources for how to help alongside reputable sources that demonstrate that these resources are valid.

Also, at this point, I am so far behind the movement that I simply do not understand half the points being made. What actually is anti-zionism? What is the goal of the international encampments? What are the protests that people are standing in streets recruiting for actually against and how is a strike going to achieve that?

If we want people to join the cause, then they need to know what cause they are joining.

To make change requires the hands of many.

We are in this together.

[papirouge]

“Vilhelm Junnila, of the far-right Finns Party, quit amid a new furore over comments he made in parliament where he said a solution for the climate crisis is to give more abortions to African women.

He called the concept "climate abortions".

"It would be justified for Finland to shoulder its responsibility by promoting climate abortions. Climate abortion would be a small step for a person, but a giant leap for humanity," he said at the time.”

They won’t leave us ALONE. Knowing damn well what abortions mean, so they ban it for their women while they want it legal and free all across our countries. Clinics are popping up left and right, they say we have to start using contraceptions. They’re scared of us. Their women don’t want babies (look at their males, I can’t blame them. None white European males are attractive). So these racists want to destroy us and blame us for the climate change when they put out twice more carbon emissions than us. The fact that he QUIT and wasn’t banned or kicked out after acting like he did tells me they all agreed with what he has said and done because there was more foolishness from him.

Tbh the fact that he quit doesn't mean he hasn't be forced to do so (behind curtains)... That's how it works in the politics/diplomatic world. They don't want things to get publicly messsy so they don't fire people

But yeah, the obsession unmelanated people have with Black people/Africans needs to be clinically investigated 🤷🏾‍♀️ melanin envy is real 🤎

I will forever side eye the people fake concern about Africa rapid demographic growth. Hm. Since when do yall even care about Africa???

We all know that demographic growth is linked to economy, so inquiring Africans to stop having as many children without any previous economic shift is delusional.

The Western has a literal epidemic of homeless people yet they feel entitled to lecture Africans about popping child only to abandon them... Excuse me but ...don't these homeless folks in the West have parent/family too?? Why are they leaving their child/relative sleeping outside and die alone??

Funny how these condescending judgement about family and child accountability only works for Africans 🙃

If there's a White genocide bc of White people own stupidity (killing their 👱‍♂️White baby👱‍♀️ offsprings logically made their fertility rates tank), there's definitely an Black genocide agenda explicitly perpetuated by White people.

We all know that big pharma consider Africa like its little playground. God protected Africa during c0vid but idk for how many longer.

Those demons have something against us and idk what. There might be some truth about the tinfoil saying there's a gene/ADN stuff that can only be found in African women containing humanity genetic heritage blueprint and that these ghouls are lusting after. Satan hates what makes us human bc God created humanity

[noodlenibblescribble]

HELLO PEEPS, IT'S BEEN A WHILE, BUT HERES SOME RANDOM AMPHIBIA SWAP AU THOUGHTS, particularly with Anne->Newts, Marcy->Toads and Sasha->Frogs. This switch makes me the most emotional I think.

First thought, the Plantar's kindness getting through to Sasha through a slower and more climatic way than it did with Anne. I imagine Sasha can get away for a bit with her manipulations, wearing a mask that stuff isn't bothering her. She slips and gets annoyed, scared, and anxious at times, especially at the beginning when she finds Sprig and is told she can't search for her girls until the winter passes, but once she's settled into the Plantar's basement, she begins the facade of 'being nice and gaining control of the frog family so that whatever she wants whenever she wants goes.' It works. Hop Pop favorites her because of her sweet talks, she gets Sprig's friendship and loyalty easily and Polly is all over having an enabler badass. Then consequences pile up. Responsibilities get put on her shoulders. She's now an older sibling to two impressionable kids who are copying her beliefs and her actions. She has chores Hop Pop is trusting to her because of how responsible she's talked herself into being. The townsfolk eventually also come around her flattery and always ask for her time. Sasha thinks she's detached from everyone. Despite the goofy adventures she goes on and some moments where she snaps from annoyance at the craziness (particularly with the kids and maybe even also coming around to talking to One-Eyed Wally) where she shares bits about her anxieties and her anger, and she's always comforted and taken seriously and shown that she's being accepted. Loved. She doesn't allow herself to accept it. She's using them, just biding her time, making things more comfortable for herself until she can leave and find her girls. But then, she's made frog of the year. The townspeople genuinely love her and cheer for her. She feels. Nice. And in the middle of the night she sees her.

Marcy.

Switching to how it's been for her,

It's interesting for me to think about her dynamic with Grime. She's softer, more innocent with her wonder. She absolutely believes she can befriend the toads and is always asking then questions about the world. It annoys some of his guards, but she forms some friendships with others that find her fun to talk to. And eventually, maybe even before the Heron attack, Grime sees her value as a strategist. He strikes a deal easily with her. She helps him with responsibilities, research, paperwork, and he DOESN'T keep her in a cage. Even eventually offers to help her travel to look for her friends. Maybe. Marcy is having a blast being leaned on by someone. This is her time to show how useful she is, even if it's by creating new weapons and traps for political adversaries. Grime is very impressed by her mind... but also becomes a dad much faster with how often he has to save her from herself. He's soft on her after like a week of accidents. Hell, maybe these accidents even started in her cell and the real reason he got her out was because he hadn't realized how many ways someone could accidentally almost kill themselves while being chained and behind bars. He's seen things. The toads generally leave Marcy alone with some exceptions that were interested in teaching her stuff and playing games with her. She's accepted.

I don't want to have to rewrite the entirety of the episode (note from future me, I GUESS I DID) on the Toad Tower but the differences are their motivations. Marcy constructed the plan to invite the town and talk to them diplomatically into giving up Hop Pop for the better good. They would execute Hop Pop in front of everyone as an example. When she found Sasha and saw her family, she was surprised. She started worrying that what she was doing would be wrong. But in her time spent alone with Sasha, the blonde girl talks big and makes it clear she was just waiting to find either of her friends to ditch the frogs. She could stay in the tower with Marcy from now on! Marcy is relieved. This means she can still put her plan in motion. So, laughing, she explains what she's doing that night to Sasha, who slowly drops a fry in shock. The ditzy nerd she knew is talking about taking a life like its just another statistic. Something needed to keep balance. And more than that. The frog she's going to kill is someone who has taken care of her. Someone who saw her as family now. Someone who took her in and never backed away from helping her. Even with all her bullshitting, after all her masks and lies, Sasha starts to sweat. Her hands shake. She smoothly tells Marcy she needs to use the bathroom. She's none the wiser. Sasha runs to the frogs. She tries to get them to run away. Something in their ineptitude frustrates her enough to take charge and be the lead of their group through the sewers. She's angry. She shouldn't be doing this. She's trying to come up with excuses as to why she cares enough to wade through shit for them. And through her heavy thoughts, they get caught.

Now they're in the top of the tower. Marcy has been told what happened. She's confused. She asks Sasha about it in front of everyone. What happened to the plan? To not caring about the frogs? Was she going to run away... and leave her behind? Sasha falters as she sees Marcy's eyes. She's hurt. Sasha feels terrible, this wasn't what she wanted! She tries reaching out, to comfort her like she always did. But a hand wraps around hers and stops her. Sprig's. He's looking at her. Scared of what he feared she'd do. What she would have done, if she hadn't had a change of heart. She resolves herself. Squeezes his hand back. And she hardens, putting on her leader persona. Marcy can feel the shift immediately and flinched at Sasha's tone as she tries coaxing her into letting them go. Isn't an execution too extreme? Come on, Marmar, this isn't like her. She's not a killer. She's good.

Marcy shakes. Is she right? Should she stop? But Grime steps up. Reminds her of the King expecting results. It's their necks on the line. He's right... both sides are right. Morally right. But what about her? What does she value? She holds her heart as she asks a question. The deciding factor. Her voice quivers. "What about you? If we let them go, who are you going with?" Sasha's pause is a lifetime. The answer was... unexpected for both of them. "I, I can visit! Now that we know were we are! It'll be like... sleepovers!" Marcy dropped her hand. Her demeanor changed. She blinked a few times, fighting the sting in her eyes. "I see. Hah. Yeah. We always loved those, right?"

"Yeah! It'll be just as fun, I promise!" Sasha saw a tear drop. Concern grew. She took a step forward. "Marcy... are... are you... ok?"

"Yeah," Marcy looked back up. Smile in her face. "I'm ok. But. I'm sorry for what comes next."

She threw a ball. It rolled under Sasha. And it binded her, making her fall hard into the floor. Grime smiled and followed the plan. Gave the orders to subdue the rowdy townsfolk. Separated Hop Pop and Sasha from everyone. Sasha screamed, begging for them to stop. Not believing what was happening. Marcy talked over her. Assuring her she'd come to see this was necessary. They need to stay together!

And as Hop Pop almost falls into the plant, the shrooms explode. Chaos erupts. The Plantars are on Sasha immediately, helping her out of her bindings just in time for her to see the stunned Marcy staring at her. And the ground crumble beneath her. Sasha flings herself to catch her. Barely gets a hold of her hand. Marcy is crying. Sasha tries desperately to keep hold of her. Shes slipping and the frogs come to help. Sasha is surprised by them. She chokes a laugh as they tell her they've got her. Marcy's gut twists. Misinterpreting her face, Sasha tells her that its going to be ok. She's got her. She'll always have her.

Marcy's eyes furrow. Sasha... is a good friend. And she... again. She failed her. Because of her neediness. Because she can't let go. She keeps dragging her down. She closes her eyes. She accepts her fate.

"Sasha..."

"Mar...cy?"

She opens them again at her name. She smiles, painfully.

"You deserve better friends than me."

And she lets go.

Grime catches her. Sasha is pulled up and hugged as she sobs. She failed her. She feels that she's failed her. But. Surrounded by these frogs, what pains her the most is. She's glad they're ok.

They have become her family.

~

I'll try to wrap up my thoughts faster, this was seriously supposed to be a quick ramble of points but I went storymode again, good gravy.

Sasha is embarrassed by how much she cares about the dumb frogs and the dumb town, but she accepts it. Opens up much more after that.

Marcy is... lost. Like Grime, she gets lost in trying to escape from what happened by drowning in hyperfixations instead. Crying whenever Grime brings it up, so they both avoid it because he does NOT want to be responsible for kicking a puppy. It's not healthy, and Olivia brings them both back into action by making them work together in outthinking her.

When Grime proposes taking over the kingdom, Marcy gets swept back into action. So she had a breakdown with a friend. That doesn't mean she can't enjoy living the rpg life now that she's here. And it's not like taking over the palace would affect the frogs and Sasha much. In fact, it could help them! Yes. This was for the good of everyone. She would help Grime become king.

~

While all this happened with these two, Anne's life in newt society has been... relatively ok. Anne's easy for Andrias to manipulate. She's never questioned anything and she's always ready to be of service. It's the least she could do for the person that's housing her. So he lets her do whatever she wants. She spends time with the newts, helping Olivia losen up a bit, learning combat from Yunan, doing odd jobs all around the city and befriending everyone in sight. It's great PR for the king. Really. It's been far too easy. The only annoying thing to deal with has been...

.... eugh. Emotions. Days where Anne gets homesick. Days when she asks too many personal questions. He has to keep up the nice act, but her perception is scary to him sometimes. She comes to know when something is bothering him. She's always ready to hear him out. Hed... never tell her the whole truth but... he has sometimes... shared bits of it. He'd always get mad afterwards. It's like the kid is a walking therapy session. He involuntarily softens just the slightest bit around her.

Out of spite, he agrees to his master's demands. She may be useless in the ways that truly matter but. As a conduit of the stones, she can still do something good for him.

One last thought, Anne's betrayal comes in the form of the opposite of Marcy's. She wants everyone to go home, regardless of the attachments they made in this world. Andrias convinced her of the urgency to return when Sasha left her. It was like she didn't need her anymore. Like she was discarded. And after needing Sasha for so long... she got scared. She misses home. She misses her family. She misses school. She misses her friends. They need to go back. They need to be back to normal. As soon as possible. And her friends...

They don't want to leave.

[autogynocrat]

I hate how all the media and political class decided as a whole to turn "climate change" into "climate crisis". Like I get it's a problem we have to solve I just hate the whole psy-op angle. Also it's probably impossible to actually reverse because even if we culled the population and went back to a pre-industrial level of technology not only would billions die but there would still be all the CO2 in the atmosphere. And even then it's a degree or two of warming over the next several hundred years. That's not a crisis. We could wait a hundred years to do anything and we'd still be in largely the same position as we are now. We're better off investing in sea walls to defend against rising sea levels and investing in reusable carbon scrubbers than trying to convert the whole world to renewable energy (which we don't have enough materials to reasonably do, even if we were to sacrifice the developing world and get every country on Earth on board). There's already work being made towards bioengineered algae that absorbs CO2 and produces biofuel that can be used to produce more energy. Ultimately this manufactured panic serves to control the population into doing the bidding of those in power who are heavily invested in gaining even more power, rather than actually making any kind of meaningful, effective change.

i get that my sugar consumption is a problem but i don't get why the doctor keeps trying to psy op me by telling me im diabetic and need to change my diet. besides, the guy i get my food from says diabetes isn't even that bad

you wanna know a psy op? the oil elites had been suppressing studies for decades that pointed to this and lobbied for decades to get ppl to think theres nothing to worry about. yea rich people who want us to eat bugs are exploiting the issue but it's still a real issue

and bro we have had record high heat waves for the past 5 years. England of all places has had California summers. India has gotten so hot some regions are inhospitable. it's gonna fuck up habitats and biomes for farming. it's being described as a crisis now bc we're beyond preventing it now its about mitigating the long term damage bc some things are too late.

funny how nuclear is the most green energy tho the renewable energy issue wouldnt be a problem if dumb hippies oil execs and scared suburban nimbys didn't destroy its reputation

[lochsides]

Yellow Metal - cathartic Review

Here’s something I did not expect to be reviewing this week but when Zayn drops a 24 minute rap track, you fall in line. I had to listen to it a couple times through before I could even begin to make sense of my thoughts because my brain sort of malfunctioned. I have never been prouder to be a Zayn fan. He’s such a nuanced songwriter and there is so much to unpack here.

I think this is the most unfiltered version of Zayn that we have ever been exposed to (and possibly will ever be). I am grateful that he said his piece in this because it needed to be said. As a brown woman, I felt so seen by this and I cannot explain what that means to me. Thank you Z, for your unvarnished truth in addressing racism and various forms of discrimination.

I’m doing a short lyrical analysis below the cut, but the TLDR is that this is a fantastic piece of art that deserves to be heard.

I wish he had released this as an EP because that would be easier to review than a single 24 minute song, structurally speaking. So instead, I have picked out some key lyrics, going from top to bottom, that really spoke to me and decided to study the song that way. His lyricism is hard-hitting in this track. It is beyond anything he has ever released before.

“The planet bleeds, the damaged trees. It’s never leaving until we ascend so fuck the fence.” — I have not seen this lyric being talked about in the fandom, because the lyrics that follow this steal the show, rightly so, but I wanted to give this line a moment because it’s important too. To me, this lyric speaks to where Zayn is at with his relationship with the physical world. He’s out on the farm (about which he even goes to say “tell you what I like, farm life and the tractor”) and I believe he’s happy in his space and he feels connected to nature (also see River Road). So it is a poignant and slightly jaded, but valid perspective that he shares on climate change. It’s never leaving until we ascend. The damage human beings have done to the planet won’t be undone until there are no humans left to do damage. It’s a single sentence that says so much about the depth of the climate crisis. I’m doing my PhD on urban air quality so this is something I care really deeply about and I resonated with.

“And until they stop killing colour, it’s fuck the feds.” — Yeah, agreed Zayn. The systemic racism that he calls out here is echoed throughout the song, in equal parts anger and boldness. I love that he isn’t glossing over it with metaphors, which he could easily do and it would be beautiful in a totally different way, but this makes it harder for racists to overlook. There is so much power in calling it like it is.

“Never lose me to fentanyl, scared when I take a Benadryl, keeping it green in general.” — It frustrates me to no end to see Zayn painted as this drug-addicted lazy musician that doesn’t care about his work, because we know how untrue that is. This narrative is tired and simply boring too, and I won’t get into the racist connotations of it when you consider it against his white colleagues who smoke as much as him but that isn’t one of their defining traits in the media.

“I’m racking up excuses while I’m slacking off on work … it was hard work that got me heard” — I love the juxtaposition in this verse. The public/media perception on his career is that Zayn doesn’t put in effort or that he doesn’t want it. This obviously stems from his leaving the band. It goes back to what I was saying before about narrative, when in reality, as Zayn has said on various occasions, he fights to make his own choices. And that doesn’t have to look the way everyone else expects it to (“I beg you, don’t include me. I might write it on my shirt”), he has his own struggles that have helped forge his path, but it is his path that he paved, himself. He works hard to be heard. He has to. It reminds me of something my parents used to tell me when I was younger about being immigrants: you have to work 10 times harder for the same opportunities just because of the colour of your skin or your name on the cv. It’s a harsh truth to grow up with but it was my reality, as it is for most POC.

“This life doesn’t give you no armour, a lot of myself can harm you. I swear on what’s good, that I’m here ‘til they take me. I pray that I’m wrinkled, at least over 80…” — There is something about the simplicity of these lyrics are the messaging that I love. He isn’t trying too hard to sound poetic but he still manages it perfectly.

“All I've been achieving, clocking miles in this region, moving like a legion. Promise that I made to myself, an allegiance. Do you still believe I’m a fool for ever leaving? Staring at the ceiling, can never put a cap on achieving. I’m just here for the rap, then I’m leaving. // I’ve had about enough of being my own enemy. It’s time I grew up, a long way from 17. Always went against the grain, struggles in my life. Got some things to say when I stand up on the mike.” — This is the only 1D-related lyric I’ll make reference to because this song is about so much more than that. That said though, we cannot overlook Zayn’s experiences in the band because that is part of his story. The tongue-in-cheek of “I’m just here for the rap, then I’m leaving” is hilarious to me. The line about not wanting to be his own enemy anymore and growing up from 17 reminds me of that quote Taylor (Swift) mentioned in Miss Americana about celebrities getting stuck at the age they got famous. I think this verse is similar to that. None of them ever wanted to be in the band and I don’t care what anyone says, Zayn leaving and proving success outside the band gave the rest of them the courage to follow their own solo careers. Sure there was drama surrounding the split but he did it for himself, to tell his stories the way he is now. Whatever else you have to say about him, you cannot deny his authenticity.

“I ain’t dropping this for fame, I need this time, like therapy, it’s just to keep me sane.” — I think this line tells us 2 things, the first being that this song was not leaked. Z knew what he was doing and his twitter likes tell us as much. He didn’t release it for any sort of attention, otherwise it would be widely available on streaming platforms and for purchase. Which leads to my second point, he released this song to get everything he talks about on the track off his chest. Its referenced in other lyrics too, like “now you see where I come from, the world don’t.” This was for whoever cared to listen, not the world. It’s inaccessible for a reason. I love that he threw those lyrics in. It makes the song feel more like a private conversation or listening to a friend rant. It creates a different form of intimacy between himself and his fans.

“Lessons that I’ve learned, I’ve tried teaching to myself. What I’ve learnt from certain people is that they’re better than myself. So I surround myself with real ones, and you feel the plastic melt.” — This one is for anyone that buys into conspiracy theories surrounding Zayn’s personal life. He surrounds himself with real people, real friendships, real connections. I have never bought into the bullshit that he has zero autonomy over his personal life. I love the use of plastic melting as a metaphor for ridding his life of fakeness.

“Feeling trapped. This industry is a cage.” — Zayn is obviously not the first person to say it. Many artists talk about how suffocating the industry is ( which he further comments on in the sung portion: “I don’t wanna be, I don’t wanna be, a part of this, no, I don’t wanna be, I don’t wanna be, a part of this”). Fame is such a wild and unnatural concept and the exploitation and politics of the music industry only feed further into it. The industry being a cage makes me think of zoos and how celebrities are animals on display, when they should be free in the wild. I also really like the musical interlude following this part.

“Nobody’s speaking the truth, I’m offended by the State. Look at the state of the news, I’ve decided the argument, reciting my views.” — Zayn toes the line between keeping to himself and speaking out on important issues, sometimes not very well. I am his biggest cheerleader, but I’m not up his ass. There have been many occasions where he could’ve done better. But I cannot fault him for being offended by the State because same, Z, same. I love that he took this song as an opportunity to real speak out, no punches pulled.

“See I’ve been facing the racists from back when I were a kiddie. Born up in 93’. Living in Bradford City, they kicked me out of the school. Said they had a problem with me hitting the kids that would call me p***, still sit in the classroom, chilling. I’m angry now that I’m older cause I see they treat us different. Got me thinking I’m the problem ‘cause they never dealt with these issues.” — See what I meant about no punches pulled. He said that! He said it like that too. There is so much in this verse that I relate to, it hits a little too deep. I grew up as a brown in predominantly white communities where the colour of my skin was the reason I was outcasted. We know when that’s happening, clear as day. The lyric “got me thinking that I’m the problem cause they never dealt with these issues” says it all. I have many racial traumas that I’m dealing with as an adult because the adults around me when I was a child didn’t deal with racism in the classroom. They do treat us different!

“20 years later, I’m still in the same boat. Tryna treat me like my grandpa, say I came up off the boat. Came to tell you what I stand for. Man I think you’re shit, a joke. How can I be civil when they got me by the throat? // Pushing my feelings down, you ain’t got it like them. ‘Boy your skin is so light.’ Ok motherfucker, take my name up on a flight. Try to convince immigration that your bloodline’s half white.” — Zayn talking his shit is my new favourite art form. How can I be civil when they got me by the throat? Something that I will always be enraged by is that POC are expected to de-escalate situations of racism. We have to push our feelings down, as Zayn says in the verse, because the institution is against us. All of the institutions are against us. The fact that he takes it a step farther to say that his name makes him a target for racism, even though he is half-white just nails his point home. Also, can we please quit the whole ‘Zayn is white-passing’ bullshit. He alludes to it again later in the song (“asian in my face, but still my race you can’t define”). Its not a compliment to erase someone identity in favour of white-washing them.

“My name ain’t on the list unless they label it ethnic.” — Oh, the amount of times we have heard that age old (v. racist) saying ‘{celebrity of colour} is the new [insert white celebrity here]’ as if POC aren’t allowed to succeed in their own right. It is wild to me that Zayn has to deal with this given his level of success.

“Start to understand why they think that I’m threatening. I move in certain ways, couldn’t slow me with ketamine.” — There is a subtle nod to racism (and Islamaphobia) in this line, because of course the brown man is a threat, but I like the way Z turns it around. I also like the rhyme scheme.

“Raised on the benefit for whose benefit? They’ll never learn shit, man, if the shoe fits.” — Okay I might be reaching here, but this is just my interpretation. We all know the benefit system in the UK sucks. Being raised on benefit implies a lack of money growing up, but the benefits aren’t really all that beneficial to the families that rely upon them.

“Dealing with the hurt, they should know cause they don’t deserve it, it hit deep cause I hit the nerve.” — Well, okay then, just call me out. It’s fine. I seriously feel like he’s talking to me directly with this line. I imagine a lot of us do. Its one of those lyrics that are a bit too honest but that why we love them.

“Cathartic, I’m an artist. Trying to put my heart in” // “Freedom fighter, Yellow Metal is my name.” — So do we have an alternate persona for Zayn now? Alright, I’m down. I think these two lines are tied together, because both are mentioned in the song title. (I think of the song as cathartic, by Yellow Metal, aka Zayn, or Yellow Metal as the name of the EP if this was officially released). The lyrics that accompany both title lyrics, along with the subject matter of the song as a whole, suggest that his heart is in standing up against injustices. I said it earlier, this is the most unvarnished version of Z that we have ever been exposed to. Almost like the complete picture to the puzzle pieces we’ve been putting together over the years.

“They’re tryna kill us with disease.” — Why did this line scream out ‘COVID-19 outbreaks in developing countries’ to me? Again, I might be reaching, but there is a disparity between how COVID is treated amongst minorities, along with many other diseases, and not to mention rich, primarily white countries hoarding vaccine supplies while places like India (and my beautiful Bangladesh and I’m sure Pakistan too) suffer needlessly.

“Started something sick and on my mind is what’s next. Just became a dad so now I’m taking all the cheques. Better know I’m staying and paying like it’s debt. Imma get it done, if it’s taking all my breath, sweat, and down I ain’t messing around ’til I’m the best.” — I think this lyric shows off Zayn’s sentimental side more than it does his ambitious side, because we know he’s in this for the long haul. Others may doubt that but his fans never have. But hearing him talk openly about being a father on a song is something else. It’s like Khai added this whole other layer of meaning and purpose to his life and it’s beautiful to watch. I’ve been here since the X-Factor auditions guys!! It makes me so emotional to witness him like this.

“Aint many of me around, p***, I’m just different. Certain stages to this level aint here because fame is to the devil, fuck a label, imma do this from the ghetto.” — God, we’ve been waiting for a fuck the label moment in this house, haven’t we? I won’t get into my theories on his label or his team, but none of us deny the fact that they should be doing more for him than they are. He has the potential to be the biggest thing with the right team and promo because he has a built-in fan base that would go the mile for him. Obviously, there’s also his aversion to promo to contend with and that’s his decision. Even without it, he could shatter every ceiling. Another thing I want to mention about this verse is the nod to the complete lack of South Asian representation in contemporary Western media.

“Don’t know what’s worse: the way that you live your life or the way that you write a verse.” — I’m just putting this in here because it made giggle. Also going to take this space to say how much I love his energy in this song. He knows he’s the shit, as he should!

“Can’t be louder … so free Gaza on my banner.” // “They’re hating on Palestine ways.” — I love that Zayn has always supported this movement, years ago, before being ‘woke’ was a thing. But now, he has a daughter that has Palestinian heritage and I’m sure that makes this hit that much deeper for him, personally. The apartheid in Palestine is heart-wrenching. It’s so strange to me to watch it happen, because I never thought I would witness something like this happening in 2021, yet here we are.

“Like vipers, I see the sly ones, the snake that’s called Biden, none of them abiding what they might put in writing. We should be used to it by now, say whatever for the vote and then just choose another route. Say they’d never kill another unless that brother’s skin is brown. I’m just telling you the facts, if you can’t take it, the truth naked, to bare bones and my thoughts lately, spitting politics.” — This verse is straight up savage and I am living for it! I find it hilarious that he called Biden a snake. This verse addresses the truth about politics, that even electing a left-wing leader doesn’t fix the system.

“I’m Tony Stark, still embarking on a dream” // “Gone green like Bruce Banner” // “He taught me like Ra’s Al Ghul. Felt like living in Gotham, the people were rotten.” — And to tie it all off, I wanted to take a goofy moment to mention all the superhero lyrics Z added in this song, really showing his personality because I’m such a nerd when it comes to this stuff and it makes me wish that we were friends so I could annoy him to death about it.

[shadowfae]

We’re all pretty aware that the tumblr otherkin community is at a huge decline; I was wondering if you have any theories as to why that is?

American Protestantism, the decline of queer oppression in North America and the AIDS crisis, helicopter parenting, web 3.0, morality politics, and  Tumblr’s porn ban; roughly in that order and rolled up into one bombshell that was a few years in the coming but nobody really saw it and understood it until it was far too late.

That was a mouthful and probably only made sense if you follow current cyberpolitical theory. For some of you reading this, as with every other hot take I have this has a chance of being passed around, that alone is enough. But for others who had no idea what I just said and need the ELI5 version, let me explain that. Buckle up, this’ll be a long one, and will go into fandom history a bit as well because it is actually relevant.

As we know, tumblr is a very American-centric platform. Twitter is also this way, but less so, but tumblr has it bad. Now, I’m ‘lucky’ in the fact that I’m Canadian and a twenty minute drive from the American border, so that puts me in the ‘privileged’ majority. (I say privileged because I’m not really sure what else to call it. Most of the information going around about politics either directly affects me or indirectly affects me approximately one or two links of contact away. Someone who’s only influenced by American politics because it makes their sister’s online friends sad is not going to be privileged in that way.)

This means that American politics and their social climate overwhelmingly affects tumblr’s social climate. This also bleeds through into other fandom spaces, on twitter, instagram, and Pixiv to name a few places; but here’s where I spend the majority of my time so here’s what I’ve witnessed.

America’s main religion, as far as I understand (from the raised agnostic and currently neopagan view I have), is some weirdass capitalistic-Protestantism that is so many miles from what the actual Bible says that if I were a betting man and knew more about cults than I did, I’d say it’s some weird fucking cult and never set foot in the country again for any reason that isn’t gaming free shipping through a PO box. If you have no idea what I just said but are at least vaguely familiar with Christianity, this graphic explains it pretty well. So we can see there’s some glaring issues with that ideal.

The decline of queer oppression and the rise of queer rights in North America, which is to tenderly include my own country but we all know when people say ‘in NA’ they mean ‘America, and Canada where it applies because the right-wing Republicans are really good in the propaganda department to convince everyone that Mexico is a drug-lords-and-anarchy wasteland to the point where even I don’t actually know what’s down there other than bad drivers and heat’; means two things. One, it’s a good thing by a long shot and do not mistake this as me thinking queer oppression being lessened is a bad thing. But two, it means that thanks to the AIDS crisis, queer folks lost a lot of first-person sources as history.

The queer elders in NA who survived are typically either a) bitter anarchists who are often POC, probably still dirt poor and do recreational drugs or b) university-tenured TERFs (trans exclusionary radical feminists). Category A are the people who Republicans have deemed worthless in every way, because racism, queerphobia, ableism, and all the other ways to be wrong and different and Evil that they can’t handle, because Jeezus would never want them to actually learn to love someone who wasn’t just like them, and they don’t have the compassion to do better. Category B are the people who want to be different in just a teensie little bit, typically with TERFs they want to be lesbians, but they don’t want to challenge the status quo. They’re fine with the way things work, they just want to be on top oppressing others over ripping the whole damn thing down and building a more forgiving system.

Now, due to all those ‘isms and the cheerfully malicious aid of the Republicans, pun not intended but drives home the cruelty of it all, we also see the rise of helicopter parenting. The invention of the internet did not really help this. Basically what you’ve got is a whole bunch of parents who saw the civil rights movement, just got access to the internet and things going viral, know the world is changing, and like all parents, they’re scared for their children. Now instead of parents knowing one or two people in their classes who just went missing one day and everyone assumed they ran away, they hear about eight homicides in the city of kids going to parks at night and dying. The Satanic Panic was another event around this time that contributed to that, but I’ll let you research that one.

This means that all of these parents, instead of doing what their parents typically did and let their kids wander off for the day so long as they’re back by sundown, they can’t let their children out of their sight. There might be a freak accident where their child is decapitated on the playground swing! Their baby might get murdered by an evil Satanist walking home from school! Their dearest darling might go online and tell their address to someone who’s got a 100% chance of being a pedophile who will show up and kidnap them in the night!

…You get the idea. 

Combine those three things I just established, what we’ve got is a lot of queer kids who have a lot of internalized shame for being different and wrong, because they’re queer, and they can’t find spaces offline to be themselves, because all of the elders who would do that are dead and/or inaccessible and their parents won’t let them go to any clubs that aren’t school-related, which they’ll never find a GSA or queer club because Republicans, ‘isms, propaganda, and the war on Category A queer adults have all done their best to ensure that those spaces don’t exist.

So you have a generation of kids who I am the youngest of. The first generation on the internet. The late Web 1.0 (usenets and Geocities) and early Web 2.0 (livejournal was the big one, ff.net too, also 4chan but fuck those guys) generation. What we were taught was: trust nobody on the internet with your real info no matter how much you like them, this is a wilderness and any crimes that happen won’t be punished or seen so don’t put yourself in a position where you’re going to be the victim of one, and everything you put online is never getting taken down so don’t put anything up that you’re not willing to have on the front page of your local newspaper.

This worked out pretty well, actually! You had kids who knew that if they got in trouble, there was no backup coming to save them. Because the form that backup might take - parents and police - wasn’t going to help. Best case, they’d be banned from their friends and online support groups for being queer. Worst case, they’d be jailed and put in juvie and conversion therapy and turn to drugs and become evil Satanists just like everyone says they secretly are already. So they learned very quickly to take care of themselves. Nobody was going to save them, so they learned to not need saving.

And then, well, Web 2.0 shifted to Web 3.0. Livejournal died because parents - the Warriors for Innocence was the big name - went “gasp how horrible my children are being exposed to the evil pedos and homosexuals they’re going to do drugs and die of AIDS!”. Which is uh. It’s filled with a lot of bigotry, and I’m not excusing them - absolutely I am not - but you can kind of see where they’re coming from, if you tilt your head and squint.

Either way, LJ died, tumblr took its place, Facebook was fast taking off, and the fandom folks who had seen mailing lists go inactive, web admins take their fanfic sites down due to copyright, entire fandoms burnt to the ground in flame wars, said ‘fuck that we’re making our own place’ and that’s how AO3 got made.

That’s important. A lot of folks move to AO3, because well, the rules let them. The rules say ‘you can throw literally anything up here so long as it’s fan content and is not literally illegal, so we don’t get taken down’. It’s a swing for the first generation internet users, those kids who know this place is a wilderness and are carving out our own sanctuary.

But. The children under us. The children for whom AIDS is a nightmarish fairy tale, for whom the ghost stories are conversion therapy, for whom know they can’t really talk to their parents about being queer but can trust they probably won’t get kicked out over it. The children who haven’t spent ten seconds without supervision except online, and their reaction isn’t ‘oh thank god I’m finally free to express myself’ but ‘if I get in trouble, who will protect me?’.

And there’s nobody there. Because we went in knowing there was no backup. And that was fine. But now, the actual adults have figured out that hey uh, maybe we should make cyber laws? Maybe we should make revenge porn and grooming children over the internet crimes? And they grew up with that. They grew up learning that no, even if your parents are suffocating and controlling, they’re always be there for you! Some adult will always be there to protect you!

That isn’t the case. It’s not. But they expect it, because it’s always been done for them. They don’t really want to change the status quo, because that means doing it themselves. They can’t do that, because they don’t know how, they’ve been controlled for every single part of their lives thanks to helicopter parenting and without that control, they don’t know how to keep their lives together, and they demand someone come and control it for them, without restraining them.

Effectively, they want someone to ensure they never face the consequences of their actions. Helicopter parents will rescue you from whatever you did, because you’re their precious baby and it doesn’t matter if you punched a kid, you can do no wrong and the other kid clearly started it.

But being queer is doing wrong. Being queer is something Jeezus doesn’t approve of. So they want to make it something he could approve of! But if it’s too off what they consider to be okay, if it’s too different and weird and wrong and evil, that can’t do, that’s still bad, and they’re precious angels, and children, and minors, why are we the adults not protecting them and letting them see it? Why aren’t we being just like their parents  but queer-friendly, why aren’t we protecting the children?

The adults who taught us were the children of those who died as a result of AIDS. The eldest of my generation knew some of them personally. My therapist’s younger brother died at 20 of AIDS, and she told me what it was like. But they don’t have that. These kids of web 3.0, they don’t have that. What they have is over-controlling parents, and the expectation that someone will always be there to protect them but hopefully in ways that don’t hurt them this time, no real understanding of why Category A queer elders are the way they are, and so much internalized shame that they have to do some pretty fancy logic-leaping to keep them from collapsing entirely.

They can’t turn into Category A queer youngsters, because they don’t know how to unravel the system around them, because they’ve never had to actually make choices in their lives and live with the consequences, because they don’t have the example of how to do it. They can’t unravel their internalized shame because again, that’s hard and they don’t have their parents to take away the consequences and pain. It doesn’t come easy to them, so it may as well not come at all.

But, you ask, if Category A queer elders aren’t around to teach the kids, then how are they learning anything positive at all? Well, Category B, our university-tenured TERFs, who don’t want to change the status quo but want to just be at the top of it instead.

For a lot of kids who don’t know how to make hard choices but want to be queer, this is an extremely attractive option. But when they go online to queer spaces, a lot of them say fuck terfs, we don’t support your hate, and they go ‘yeah okay that makes sense’. They can say fuck terfs without ever actually questioning why terfs are bad. They’re Bad and Evil, just like drug addicts, just like fairytale nazis, just like the evil homophobes.

And we saw them say ‘yeah fuck terfs’ and we were like, ‘aight you got it’ and we never questioned if they actually understood us. They didn’t. They didn’t, and we didn’t do enough to fix it, because not enough of us realized the problem. So terfs got a little sneaky. They hid behind dogwhistles and easy little comments, hiding their rhetoric in queer theory that you’ll absolutely miss if you just memorize it and never actually question it and understand why that point is being made.

This goes back to America sucking, because their school system is far more focused on rote memorization over actual logic and understanding of the text. They’re engaging with queer theory the way they’ve been taught, which is memorize and don’t think, don’t question. Besides, questioning and understanding is hard. Being shown different points of view and asked what they think is not only hard but requires them to go against all of the conditioning that says to just listen and agree and never question it, which goes back to tearing the system and internalized shame down, and we’ve established they can’t do that so naturally they don’t do that.

This begets, then, the rise of exclusionary politics. They’re turning into Category B queer youngsters, because we told them ‘hey that’s a terf talking point what are you doing’ and they never questioned why. They learned you can do all sorts of things, just don’t say X, Y, or Z, because they never thought deeply about it.

The children who have grown on Web 3.0 do not want to do any heavy lifting to make things easier for themselves long-run. They want to do as little as possible and have things get better for them. There isn’t enough of us left in Category A, because Category B terfs are very good at recruiting young folks and Cat. A is overwhelming poor, dead, and easily dismissed in the system as evil and bad, so we can’t exactly convince the young folks to listen. If all of the young kids could agree to tear down the system, a lot more older folks might listen. Change always starts with the young, and there’s a reason for that.

But Republicans have figured out, if you get people fighting, they never put together a force that can actually stop you. TERFs, who want the exact same thing as Republicans but with themselves on top, are doing this to queer youth, and Cat. A elders can’t fight back because there isn’t enough of them and the odds are against them, and the young folk like me who follow their lead.

People can kinda handle gay people. It’s not so far from the acceptable normal that it’s impassable. But you want them to handle kinky people? Gay people of colour? Kinky gay people of colour? Trans people? Those are bridges too far to step across. The original idea was to get the foot in the door with marriage equality and inch our way through with racial equality, sex positivity, dismantling ableism and perisexism (forgive me if that isn’t the word for anti-intersex ‘ism), and see if we can’t patch up the system instead of inciting a civil war over this and have to tear down the system entirely.

Well, we might’ve managed that if not for AIDS being the perfect ‘Jeezus is killing all the evil gay people for being sinners’ propaganda machine. As it stands now, not a chance in hell. So long as Republicans and terfs keep everyone fighting, nobody has the power to dismantle their empire, and they stay in power.

So then, you ask me, “Lu what the fuck does that have to do with the decline of otherkinity on tumblr???” and now that you’ve got all that background knowledge, here is your answer.

Those children who want their experiences curated for them and the evil icky content they don’t like to be gone because it disgusts them and anything that disgusts them is clearly sinful problematic and should be destroyed, are what we call ‘antishippers’, or anti for short.

They like being progressive. Sort of. They learned what Republicans and terfs have honed to a fine talent: keep people fighting, hold them to a bar they have to constantly make or risk being ostracized, and harass the people who don’t play along into getting out of your sight forever. Sound familiar?

They learned of otherkinity, and particularly fictionkind, because web 3.0 means if something goes viral on one site, it doesn’t just go viral on that site, it makes it to worldwide newspapers and twitter and nobody ever, ever fucking forgets it. They realized the following: “Hey wait, if I’m this character for realsies, not only does it help me deal with the internalized shame I’ve done nothing to actually fix because that takes work, I can also tell these people who draw gross content I don’t like they’re hurting me personally, and that actually sounds credible, and I can shame them into stopping”.

If this is your first time here and that sounds sickening, it damn well should, and I am so, so sorry that any of us had to witness this, and I am more sorry I and everyone else who personally witnessed this didn’t realize what was going on and put a stop to it. I answer asks and browse the tags and clear up misinformation and it isn’t just a genuine desire to help. It’s damage control, and my own way of trying to deal with the guilt of not stopping this. I’m well aware I couldn’t have seen it coming, I was a teenager myself still learning and no one person has that much power. I still feel like I should have done more, and I’ll do what I can to fix what’s within my power to fix.

So back to the story. This all culminates around 2016 or so. Trump wins the election, and every queer person ever knows they’re fucked, and the younger generation’s only ever heard horror stories, never seen actual oppression that this could bring. We’re all scared. We all don’t know what to do. Nobody has any answers or any control over the situation.

So they lash out. They attack others for drawing things they don’t like, for challenging them in literally any way, for asking them to reconsider the vile shit they just said, for so much as defending themselves from the harassment they just got. And when challenged, they yell “But I’m a minor! A literal child! How dare you attack me, clearly you get off on this, you evil pedophile!” and they sling around every insult in the book until one sticks. Pedophile is a pretty good one, so is abuser, and sometimes zoophile works out too. Freak is great, everyone gets right pissed off about it.

The fact that Category A queer elders were called pedophiles and freaks is not a fact they know or care about. The fact that they are quickly making every fandom community super toxic is also not a fact they care about. The fact that the ‘kin community has words and terminology and they actually mean shit, and the fact that they’re spreading misinformation faster than we can keep up with, are not facts they care about.

So they come in, take our terms, make it impossible for us to find new folks. They realize our anger is easily a power trip, because we’re already made fun of, so they get off on the little power they can find and make fun of us too, and then when we get rightfully annoyed and pissed off, they can hide behind being minors.

Then tumblr implements their porn ban, because nobody’s stopping them, because it isn’t profitable to have porn on here. Considering most of the otherkin community, and most fandom communities, are full of adults who do occasionally talk about NSFW things, and the fact that they’re just banning everyone who so much as breathes wrong, this begins the start of a mass exodus, scattering already fragile communities to twitter, pillowfort, dreamwidth, and a few other places. Largely, twitter, where you can’t make a post longer than a snappy comeback and where the algorithm is literally designed to piss you off as much as possible.

So community elders have largely left, because they can’t stand the drama and the pain of what’s happened, and that’s if they didn’t get banned for being kinky furries who do talk about how their kintypes merge with their sexuality. Most community members have also left or stopped talking about being ‘kin, because they get associated with antishippers and toxicity and it’s just not worth it. Those of us who are left get drowned out by misinformation and trolls and wishkin and antishippers who appropriate our terminology because it supports them getting a power trip, and whenever we argue, we get called pedophiles and freaks and worse.

And now there isn’t much left. I hope we get to find a better place. Othercon was a good place to talk about it, I did a whole panel (it’s on Youtube!) about what we want to do about it. But I don’t really have any answers. 

But to sum it all up... America’s political climate ultimately culminated in destroying queer spaces, and we survived, and then people who wanted to destroy smaller communities to get on top showed up and we were all but defenseless against something we had never, ever dealt with before on this scale.

One of my twitter mutuals mentioned how kinning and otherkin are now completely separate communities. It’s really the best I can do to keep hoping that continues, until nobody realizes the words are at all connected to each other. It’s the best anyone can hope for, now. I hate it. I hate every part of this. But maybe we can salvage what’s left.

[hedgewitchgarden]

It’s Pride Month and I’m Scared

 Jessi-James Grey

Posted on June 23, 2022

When I decided to write something about Pride month again this year, I struggled to decide how I wanted to approach the topic; I have written quite a bit about Queer topics, ranging from coming out and celebration to solemn remembrance, to the importance of chosen family, community elders, and (a snippet of) our history. In the hellscape that was 2020, I wrote about reigniting “true spirit of Stonewall and reclaim Pride as a rebellion against the oppression of ALL of our intersecting communities, rather a corporate-sponsored party.” Each time I’ve written on these topics, I’ve outed myself—explicitly or implicitly—to the Sweatpants & Coffee community and I’ve often disclosed aspects of my personal experiences as a Queer person; in fact, this community has witnessed me evolve as I have realized and began to embody my genderqueer identity.

What I haven’t done yet: express my fear. That fear has grown over the last year and I need to acknowledge it.

Not long ago, I was browsing Facebook—like you do—and I came upon an ad for a trans-owned clothing company. I clicked through and began browsing that website and a shirt caught my eye: a black muscle tee—absolutely my aesthetic—emblazoned with the words “visibility is vulnerability.” Maybe I hadn’t been able to find those words because of the extent to which I overthink things but, upon reading that shirt, it clicked: that is the most accurate and succinct way to articulate my growing unease. I have made myself very visible online and in meatspace and, as the political and cultural landscape has become increasingly hostile to marginalized communities and identities of all kinds, that means I’ve made myself quite vulnerable too. And, as is the case with all kinds of vulnerability, it’s scary.

In addition to being Queer, I am also chronically ill, which means I interact with medical institutions A LOT. Most of those interactions are with a major university medical system. I’ve recently had the pleasure of contacting that medical system’s chief audit and compliance officer to lodge a formal complaint against one of the clinics I attend regularly because they continually, even after repeated correction, misgendered me and used my birth name—mind you, they have ways of noting both in my record and this is a medical system that, supposedly, offers gender affirming care. As I put it in my letter: “I am, during visits to the office, routinely addressed by my birth name and referred to as “Miss” and “ma’am”—most embarrassingly (and, in an increasingly hostile social climate, potentially dangerous) for me, in the waiting room in front of other patients.” Living in the home of the infamous HB2 “bathroom bill” and a shiny, brand new “don’t say gay” bill, the potential threat to my safety is real—though it is mitigated by my whiteness, which is important to acknowledge because visibly Queer and gender expansive BIPOC are much more at risk of discrimination and violence than I am.

I was contacted by both Patient Services and the clinic about my complaint. Patient Services apologized and said they were taking my complaint seriously. So seriously, in fact, that they shared my letter directly with the clinic which is great because now they are aware of what exactly the problematic behavior is. It scared the ever-loving crap out of me, though, because they know who made the complaint and, while they may have easily deduced that it was me just because of the nature of the complaint, I am visible. For what it’s worth, someone from the clinic called me to apologize and I was told they were taking corrective action. I suppose I’ll find out if that is actually the case when I go to my next appointment at the end of next month.

Since the death of our mom last year, I’ve tried to be very diligent about visiting my sister quarterly(-ish). That means that I regularly make a ten-hour drive through The South. It’s a beautiful drive, if you don’t count the two enormous Confederate battle flags I have to drive past—seriously, they’re two of the largest I have ever seen. I pass through the Great Smoky Mountains and gorgeous, rolling countryside. This last trip, the weather was perfect and I drove the whole way with my windows down and my music up and it was just pure joy… until I had to make a stop somewhere. I make sure that I only stop in populated areas or at large gas stations and truck stops with camera surveillance and more staff than just one person at a register. I do this because I know how I look, I know that I don’t pass as cishet anymore—I am visible and, therefore, vulnerable—and I live with the threats of “corrective r*pe” made against me since high school hanging over my head.

Visibility is desperately important for all marginalized groups. Visibility is necessary to fight against the willful ignorance of the white supremacist, Christian dominionist, ableist, cishet patriarchy. Oppressive cultures are not going to acquiesce to the righteous demands of marginalized groups for our safety, civil rights, and the respect due us as human beings if they’re not regularly confronted with our existence. And though visibility is vulnerability, it is safer for some of us to be visible than it is for others—as I mentioned before, my whiteness insulates me to a degree, so does my being child-free. It is important to me that, despite how scary being truly visible can be, I use the relative safety that my privilege affords me to be seen, to protest, to demand, to fight because there are so many in my community who can’t without much greater risk to their personal safety.

So, here I am before you, this Pride month. Visible. Vulnerable. Scared. Righteous.

And demanding that you look past the glitter and rainbows and chants that “love is love” and “love wins” to see that Queer and trans folks are in danger. As I write this, we’re only half way through Pride month and, already, there have been numerous threats of violence against, dangerous disruptions of, and narrowly-avoided attacks at Pride events across the country—all of which have been organized—not just random mob violence. This is not something y’all can write off as “lone wolf” situations. I need y’all who “identify as” allies to stop calling yourselves allies and actually be allies: be aware of the political climate; participate in state and local politics, which is where so many of the dangerous, anti-Queer and trans policies are being made, AND object to those policies before they become law; call out the stochastic terrorism of churches, politicians, and influential community members and organizations that all but guarantees violence against trans and Queer folks.

It is Pride month. And I am frightened.

[betelguwuse]

I’m starting to think maybe I don’t want to get married. Hypothetically I’d love to be in a godly marriage with a man who respects me and sees me as the person that God does (and not only me but women as a whole), but realistically do christian men like that even exist? Mainstream christianity, especially gender discourse, is so watered down and twisted into something that’s more political than biblical. I feel like this is gonna piss off both the christians and feminists, even though I’m both (though some might say I’m not a real feminist, whatever idc lol). Might also tag as Side B because I feel like this is also maybe a Side B mood? But here goes.

Color coded by vague topic, bolded so it’s easier to read.

Like I recently heard of a pastor being criticized for saying it’s a woman’s duty to look good for her husband, and the boomer conservatives were acting like criticisms of this pastor was the end of christianity. There’s no way “looking good” in a biblical sense was anything more than basic hygiene, nowhere near the beauty standards of today; and that is if the idea of looking good for your husband is even in the bible. These people siding with the pastor were saying that any woman who doesn’t shave or hide her “flaws” with makeup or basically completely embody the tradwife meme are bad wives. Like what the literal hell.

Honestly the entire tradwife aesthetic seems to be the goal for a lot of young christian couples, when it’s not inherently biblical. I used to be into it myself because heck yeah staying home, housekeeping, taking care of children, and wearing cute flowery dresses sounds like a dream. But my goals aren’t universal! Some women don’t want kids. Some women want to work. Good and God-honoring women of the bible didn’t all have kids and stay home. I mean the timeline of the bible spans so long, so yeah maybe there were times when most women did. But that doesn’t mean women who didn’t were bad wives or lesser women. Not to mention there’s such a blurred line currently between cute tradwife lifestyle and creeps who fetishize the idea of a traditional (and by traditional they mean submissive) wife. Gross.

Another thing too many christian men do is say women can’t be in any position of power in the church. There is the whole specific issue of whether or not women should be the highest up actual pastor of the church, and I don’t know enough about that whole debate to validate or debunk it, but I’m not talking about that specifically here. Aside from that one position, a lot of christians think women can only teach other women and girls but not guys, even like literal child boys. That’s so weird, like imagine thinking a little boy has more authority than, or even equal to, a grown woman? Couldn’t be me. And this whole idea comes from an out of context “I do not permit women to speak in the church” from a regular human guy. And the reason he said this was that the women around him were spreading heresy. I still think it’s flawed logic to exclude all women from speaking in that situation just because most of them were wrong, but again, this wasn’t a command from God. This was just a guy recording his church experience and doing his flawed human best to manage it. Various women throughout the actual bible outside of this one leader’s timeline held positions of power in various churches. And modern day american christian men think biblical womanhood is all about subservience? Bro what bible are you reading?

I just want to make it clear that these are all just generalizations, but having been in various actual biblical communities and conservative christian communities, I can kinda pick up on the general sexist behaviors of the latter. But unfortunately in today’s political climate more and more young christians are only being exposed to political opinions that are surface level americanized good christian morals, but not actually biblical.

Even on top of that, even if a man knows of these biblical misconceptions, we live in a society. Like we’re constantly exposed to women’s sexualization, and it’s pretty impossible to escape that. I don’t want to spend my life with someone who’s grown up in a world where women are seen as weak, objects, pleasure machines, etc. And yeah we can unlearn these biases (honestly I hate the word unlearn but I can’t think of a substitute rn), but it feels like a hassle to casually figure out whether a guy can make an effort to understand what women go through, and if I were to just bring it up I’d scare them away. And that’s not to say I’m some perfect person who’s never sexualized men, we are all sinners after all and we live in a fallen world etc etc. But a whole society where women are so objectified that it’s normal for little boys to be watching porn, that just doesn’t really happen with little girls. I can’t speak for all women, but when I started seeing men sexually it was in my late teens when I realized like ‘oh I can sexualize men too? wild. ok I’m an adult lemme check it out’. Still sinful, but not ingrained in me from porn ads as a kid the way most young boys have been since like the creation of the internet.

Even the men currently in my life who genuinely want what’s best for me are so incredibly misogynistic it’s baffling. My male family members see any woman who breaks an imaginary dress code or ideology is some kind of deviant. I just want to make it clear that this is MY family and I’M the only one who gets to complain about them. We all love each other here even if the males are horribly wrong.

So I shaved my head for halloween and my dad could barely look at me, not because he was exactly mad or anything but just because I looked ugly to him. He always says ‘close the windows in your apartment because men will spy on you changing’ but after my hair was gone he was all ‘actually don’t bother because nobody will look at you looking like that’ like wow I wasn’t aware men only sexualized women for their hair. Like you really think a gross creeper is gonna be turned off by a fully naked oblivious vulnerable woman just because she’s bald? That’s not how any of this works. And just today my sister was watching a goth youtuber egirl or something, I didn’t see her makeup but my dad said stuff like ‘ew why does she look like that, maybe it’d be cool as a costume but how is she going to get a job’. Like, I’m not one to go ‘women don’t wear makeup for men’ (because most women who only use makeup to hide their insecurities and follow beauty standards very much just do it so they don’t get backlash from others, if not directly to please men), but when it’s a fun crazy look that’s not meant to be pretty, I’m all for that shit and generally I hate when men lose respect for a woman just for wearing something they don’t like. Like fashion isn’t real and your appearance should be as costumey or weird as you want without people losing respect for you. Also like...do men know that makeup isn’t permanent?? Like if she wanted a job that required no makeup she could easily wipe her face off and get one?? Not only that, but people can work from home and/or be self employed. Maybe youtube itself was this girl’s job. Who the hell cares man. And the worst thing here is my brother outright said one time “the root cause of feminism is pride”. B r u h. And this was back when I considered myself an anti-feminist, even then I knew that feminism started for good reason and I was absolutely furious. I think I kept it to myself like a coward lol, but if anyone said that to me now I’d tear them apart. In a debate I mean, not like literal violence.

Tldr: I’m not trying to say men are inherently more evil because there’s evil in everyone, but the way it takes shape in men in most societies is so insidious and inescapable. I love my family and guy friends, but I don’t want to deal with one in a romantic/sexual relationship because I don’t know if even the most educated and goodest christian boi in this world can see me as a true equal. It sucks because I want sex and children, but when the mainstream idea of hetero sex is female submission, it just makes me shrivel up and contemplate becoming a nun. I’m not even catholic. But even nuns are sexualized and degraded in coomer’s disgusting brains. In conclusion I’m going feral and starting my own woman-only church in the woods let’s go ladies.

[jayflrt]

i fucking hate this sm .. why does this stuff keep happening in the us , like going to school genuinely terrifies me now esp since im in high school … i just feel like crying , so many shootings are happening nowadays & im just so scared all the time, worried about getting hate crimed or what if smtg happens when i go out into public :( sorry for ranting alice i’m just so scared abt everything

i genuinely hate this country sometimes and hate how politicians would rather literally let children die instead of giving up their stupid guns. it’s been terrible since 2018 and now it’s 2022 and it’s STILL bad and no one does anything about it. 27 school shootings this year and it’s only may. this country is beyond repair like no one NEEDS to own an assault rifle. we are failing these children.

i’m so sorry tho anon :(( i understand how that must feel and i remember being terrified going to school the year the parkland shooting happened, especially since it got to a point where it was happening once a week and one was at my school as well </3 i feel like the internet has watered down the term “hate crimed” as a joke but it’s so real and so scary.

i know this political climate is suffocating rn and everything happening around is horrible. i hate that i even have to say this about a seemingly “free” country, but stay safe love and make sure you’re around people you trust when you go out 💗 i know you’ll be safe but it’s always good to keep your guard up & you don’t have to apologize ab ranting !!

[mugasofer]

It seems like many, perhaps most, people historically believed in some immanent apocalypse.

Many philosophies claim that the world is passing into a degenerate age of chaos (Ages of Man, Kali Yuga, life-cycle of civilisation), or divine conflict will shortly spill over & destroy the Earth (Ragnorok, Revelations, Zoroastrian Frashokereti), or that the natural forces sustaining us must be transient.

Yet few panic or do anything. What anyone does "do about it" is often symbolic & self-admittedly unlikely to do much.

Maybe humans evolved not to care, to avoid being manipulated?

Many cults make similar claims, and do uproot their lives around them. Even very rarely committing mass suicide or terror attacks etc on occasion. But cults exist that don't make such claims, so it may not be the mechanism they use to control, or at most a minor one. "This is about the fate of the whole world, nothing can be more important than that, so shut up" may work as as a thought terminating cliche, but it doesn't seem to work that strongly, and there are many at least equally effective ones.

Some large scale orgs do exist that seem to take their eschatology "seriously". The Aztecs committed atrocities trying to hold off apocalypse, ISIS trying to cause it. Arguably some Communist or even fascist groups count, depending on your definition of apocalypse.

But even then, one can argue their actions are not radically different from non-apocalypse-motivated ones - e.g. the Aztecs mass-executed less per capita than the UK did at times & some historians view them as more about displaying authority.

I'm thinking about this because of two secular eschatologies - climate apocalypse and the Singularity.

My view on climate change, which as far as I can tell is the scientific consensus, is that it is real and bad but by no means apocalyptic. We're talking incremental increases in storms, droughts, floods etc, all of which are terrible, but none of which remotely threaten human civilisation. E.g. according to the first Google result, the sea is set to rise by 1 decimeter by 2100 in a "high emissions scenario", not to rise by tens or hundreds of meters and consume all coastal nations as I was taught as a child. Some more drastic projections suggest that the sea might rise by as much as two or three meters in the worst case scenario.

It really creeps me out when I hear people who confess to believe that human civilisation, the human species, or even all life on Earth is most likely going to be destroyed soon by climate change. The most recent example, which prompted this post, was the Call of Cthulhu podcast I was listening to casually suggesting that it might be a good idea to summon an Elder God of ice and snow to combat climate change as the "lesser existential risk", perhaps by sacrificing "climate skeptics" to it. It's incredibly jarring for me to realise that the guys I've been listening to casually chatting about RPGs think they live in a world that will shortly be ended by the greed of it's rulers. But this idea is everywhere. Discussions of existential risks from e.g. pandemics inevitably attract people arguing that the real existential risk is climate change. A major anti-global-warming protest movement, Extinction Rebellion, is literally named after the idea that they're fighting against their own extinction. Viral Tumblr posts talk about how the fear of knowing that the world is probably going to be destroyed soon by climate change and fascism is crippling their mental health, and they have no idea how to deal with it because it's all so real.

But it's not. It's not real.

Well, I can't claim that political science is accurate enough for me to definitively say that fascism isn't going to take over, but I can say that climate science is fairly accurate and it predicts that the world is definitely not about to end in fire or in flood.

(There are valid arguments that climate change or other environmental issues might precipitate wars, which could turn apocalyptic due to nuclear weapons; or that we might potentially encounter a black swan event due to our poor understanding of the ecosystem and climate-feedback systems. But these are very different, as they're self-admittedly "just" small risks to the world.)

And I get the impression that a lot of people with more realistic views about climate change deliberately pander to this, deliberately encouraging people to believe that they're going to die because it puts them on the "right side of the issue". The MCU's Loki, for instance, recently casually brought up a "climate apocalypse" in 2050, which many viewers took as meaning the world ending. Technically, the show uses a broad definition of "apocalypse" - Pompeii is given as another example - and it kind of seems like maybe all they meant was natural disasters encouraged by climate change, totally defensible. But I still felt kinda mad about it, that they're deliberately pandering to an idea which they hopefully know is false and which is causing incredible anxiety in people. I remember when Greta Thurnberg was a big deal, I read through her speeches to Extinction Rebellion, and if you parsed them closely it seemed like she actually did have a somewhat realistic understanding of what climate change is. But she would never come out and say it, it was all vague implications of doom, which she was happily giving to a rally called "Extinction Rebellion" filled with speakers who were explicitly stating, not just coyly implying, that this was a fight for humanity's survival against all the great powers of the world.

But maybe there's nothing wrong with that. I despise lying, but as I've been rambling about, this is a very common lie that most people somehow seem unaffected by. Maybe the viral tumblr posts are wrong about the source of their anxiety; maybe it's internal/neurochemical and they world just have picked some other topic to project their anxieties on if this particular apocalypse wasn't available. Maybe this isn't a particularly harmful lie, and it's hypocritical of me to be shocked by those who believe it.

Incidentally, I believe the world is probably going to end within the next fifty years.

Intellectually, I find the arguments that superhuman AI will destroy the world pretty undeniable. Sure, forecasting the path of future technology is inherently unreliable. But the existence of human brains, some of which are quite smart, proves pretty conclusively it's possible to get lumps of matter to think - and human brains are designed to run on the tiny amounts of energy they can get by scavenging plants and the occasional scraps of meat in the wilderness as fuel, with chemical signals that propagate at around the speed of sound (much slower than electronic ones), with only the data they can get from input devices they carry around with them, and which break down irrevocably after a few decades. And while we cannot necessarily extrapolate from the history of progress in both computer hardware and AI, that progress is incredibly impressive, and there's no particular reason to believe it will fortuitously stop right before we manufacture enough rope to hang ourselves.

Right now, at time of writing, we have neural nets that can write basic code, appear to scale linearly in effectiveness with the available hardware with no signs that we're reaching their limit, and have not yet been applied at the current limits of available hardware let alone what will be available in a few years. They absorb information like a sponge at a vastly superhuman speed and scale, allowing them to be trained in days or hours rather than the years or decades humans require. They are already human-level or massively superhuman at many tasks, and are capable of many things I would have confidently told you a few years ago were probably impossible without human-level intelligence, like the crazy shit AI dungeon is capable of. People are actively working on scaling them up so that they can work on and improve the sort of code they are made from. And we have no ability to tell what they're thinking or control them without a ton of trial and error.

If you follow this blog, you're probably familiar with all the above arguments for why we're probably very close to getting clobbered by superhuman AI, and many more, as well as all the standard counter-arguments and the counter-arguments to those counter arguments.

(Note: I do take some comfort in God, but even if my faith were so rock solid that I would cheerfully bet the world on it - which it's not - there's no real reason why our purpose in God's plan couldn't be to destroy ourselves or be destroyed as an object lesson to some other, more important civilization. There's ample precedent.)

Here's the thing: I'm not doing anything about it, unless you count occasionally, casually talking about it with people online. I'm not even donating to help any of the terrifyingly-few people who are trying to do something about it. Part of why I'm not contributing is, frankly, I don't have a clue what to do, nor do I have much confidence in any of the stuff people are currently doing (although I bloody well hope some of it works.)

And yet I don't actually feel that scared.

I feel more of a visceral chill reading about the nuclear close calls that almost destroyed the world in the recent past than thinking about the stuff that has a serious chance of doing so in a few decades. I'm a neurotic mess, and yet what is objectively the most terrifying thing on my radar does not actually seem to contribute to my neurosis.