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Woman: *does something sexual*

Tumblr users: Yas, queen! *applause*

The same woman: *does something sexual but this time she's being "submissive" *

Tumblr users: okay but this is actually super problematic because she hasn't earned enough feminists bingo points

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Nice people make the best Nazis. Be mean, be tough, have a fascist tooth/skull collection.

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I do actually care marginally about the guy in that reddit screenshot who voted for Trump and is now worried that he might lose his medicaid funding because I did not fucking stutter when I said healthcare is a human right but the people losing their internships and job offers to the hiring freeze are straight up hilarious.

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Source: alexhaagaard.bsky.social‬

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having anti punitive justice morals sucks because you want to say "man that guy sucks he should get hit with hammers until he dies" but you also want to make it clear you don't think anyone should be put in charge of the 'hit people with hammers until they die" machine.

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Honestly being overworked makes people unobservant and passive and it literally kills people every day. People don’t seem to realize that an overworked nurse might not notice your sepsis symptoms and a tired truck driver might not notice your car when he’s merging into the lane. Failing to protect worker’s rights impacts nearly everyone

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The nazis that you see in movies are as much a historical fantasy as vikings with horned helmets and samurai cutting people in half.

The nazis were not some vague evil that wanted to hurt people for the sake of hurting them. They had specific goals which furthered a far right agenda, and they wanted to do harm to very specific groups, (largely slavs, jews, Romani, queer people, communists/leftists, and disabled people.)

The nazis didn't use soldiers in creepy gas masks as their main imagery that they sold to the german people, they used blond haired blue eyed families. Nor did they stand up on podiums saying that would wage an endless and brutal war, they gave speeches about protecting white Christian society from degenerates just like how conservatives do today.

Nazis weren't atheists or pagans. They were deeply Christian and Christianity was part of their ideology just like it is for modern conservatives. They spoke at lengths about defending their Christian nation from godless leftism. The ones who hated the catholic church hated it for protestant reasons. Nazi occultism was fringe within the party and never expected to become mainstream, and those occultists were still Christian, none of them ever claimed to be Satanists or Asatru.

Nazis were also not queer or disabled. They killed those groups, before they had a chance to kill almost anyone else actually. Despite the amount of disabled nazis or queer/queer coded nazis you'll see in movies and on TV, in reality they were very cishet and very able bodied. There was one high ranking nazi early on who was gay and the other nazis killed him for that. Saying the nazis were gay or disabled makes about as much sense as saying they were Jewish.

The nazis weren't mentally ill. As previously mentioned they hated disabled people, and this unquestionably included anyone neurodivergent. When the surviving nazi war criminals were given psychological tests after the war, they were shown to be some of the most neurotypical people out there.

The nazis weren't socialists. Full stop. They hated socialists. They got elected on hating socialists. They killed socialists. Hating all forms of lefitsm was a big part of their ideology, and especially a big part of how they sold themselves.

The nazis were not the supervillians you see on screen, not because they didn't do horrible things in real life, they most certainly did, but because they weren't that vague apolitical evil that exists for white American action heros to fight. They did horrible things because they had a right wing authoritarian political ideology, an ideology that is fundamentally the same as what most of the modern right wing believes.

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Images from LA's resistance to a Fascist goon squad (aka ICE) yesterday.

"Putting up a fierce fight at the opening of the poem is the way to stop the rest of the poem from coming true.

The fight for migrants and to stop ICE is the same fight as the fight to protect LGBT people (citizens or not), reproductive autonomy, and everyone else the fascists want to fuck with.

Not in some abstracted ‘we're all in this together’ way but directly and literally. When they come for one of us, and realize it won't happen without a fight, they lose their nerve to come for other people.

It is worth standing up for migrants for their own sake, because they are people, but it's more than that too.

Whether you approve of their actions or not, they are earnest activists who are directly and materially opposed to capitalism and have paid a high price for their commitment.

Furthermore, again whether you approve of their actions or not, rowdy protesters are on the same side as peaceful protesters in a way that the police, systemically, will never be. To ally with the police over actual allies is disastrous strategy.

Will the state react strongly to strong resistance? Yes. This doesn't mean that strong resistance isn't warranted.

You have no reason to believe me, and I have my biases, but I have been studying the nature of street rebellion and activism and revolution for decades, as essentially a full time job. I don't have clear answers about what works but I have clear ideas of what doesn't.

Dividing protestors into "good" and "bad" is what the state wants us to do. Rowdy and peaceful protestors learning how to coexist and develop strategies that dovetail with one another is what threatens power.

When granddads deliver sandwiches to kids throwing bricks, the state shakes. When [we’re all out there] together, refusing to let us be divided, the state buckles."

-Margaret Killjoy

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I actually do feel like the "unemployed friend on a Tuesday" meme actually helps de-stigmatize unemployment because it frequently affirms that when you don't have a job you're more likely to be getting up to some weird shit rather than just lazing around. But I also feel like the unemployed friend is frequently up to some random shit because there's a whole pile of miscellaneous life tasks that full-time employment keeps people from. The unemployed friend is helping their cousin move, or babysitting, or checking in with a neighbor with mobility issues. The unemployed friend is a walking thesis on the inflexibility of our current labor landscape and just how much work exists outside of work.

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Happy March 15th to those who celebrate.

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Fom the Watson Institute for International & Public Affairs at Brown University:

Threats to journalists in conflict zones are increasing at a time when journalism is under unprecedented threat and the news industry is mired in a decades-long downward spiral. Since the 2000s, national governments and terrorist groups – from Israel, Syria’s Assad regime and the United States to the Islamic State – have found ways to curtail conflict coverage through myriad means, from repressive policies to armed attack. All have killed journalists and helped to foster a culture of impunity, turning conflict zones like Syria and Gaza into “news graveyards.” The war in Gaza has, since October 7, 2023, killed more journalists than the U.S. Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War (including the conflicts in Cambodia and Laos), the wars in Yugoslavia in the 1990s and 2000s, and the post-9/11 war in Afghanistan, combined. It is, quite simply, the worst ever conflict for reporters.

[Read the full study here.]

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Yes, yes Vincent Benitez is a foil to all of them, but it is very important that he is a foil to Aldo in specific, because it exposes the shallowness of Aldo Bellini's liberalism, which in my opinion is a vital position to meditate on nowadays. Aldo is the kind of political personality who talks the talk, but does nothing. And this is canon! This is why Aldo can only say "you should be ashamed" to Tedesco, as if that's enough. Vincent's rebuke of Tedesco works because it exposes Tedesco to real life experience, to the reality of the Universal Church beyond the walls of the Institution - an Institution which Aldo, like Tedesco, is very concerned about safeguarding.

Both in the movie and the book, Vincent's rebuke is primarily about Tedesco, but it is also about Aldo's (and the rest of the liberals) inability to actually do things that contribute towards change. To a greater degree, the commentary is also that someone like Aldo can be as divisive to the Church as Tedesco is.

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Look, I get it, disability support is not as trendy as being an LGBTQ+ supporter or against racism, we might not have all that cool music and colourful parade floats, our flag has a lot of black. It’s not fashionable. No business puts the disabled flag in their logos on July.

Some of us make non-disabled people uncomfortable (to their own admission) because of how we exist in this world. Some of us slouch and drool, some of us have tics and spasms, some of us are missing limbs or parts of our faces. We might have bulky mobility aids and big and noisy equipment, some of us can’t avoid to attract attention, some of us are shaped in a “weird” way. We might walk and move too slowly or take a lot of time to express ourselves, to form thoughts and words. Some of us don’t speak. Many of us can’t fit in, can’t hide our disabilities and the way we look.

No, it’s not trendy or fashionable. I get it.

But the problem is that society has decided that there is only one standard to exist, to look, to be. The rest is abnormal, wrong, sick, broken…

It’s the mindset that needs to change. We should open up to all the different possibilities we could encounter, to the idea that what we are used to see is not necessarily the only right thing. Because there is no a “right” way to exist, to go through this World, to live, to look, to be. The more we open up to all of this, the more liberating it will feel. And it will be easier to accept the possibility of a future disability that might happen, to us and the people we love.

It’s not enough to just say “yes, disabled people deserve rights”. There should be an active step forward. Be uncomfortable. Get used to the idea of being around people who are not the “standard”. Be uncomfortable with the idea of a body and a mind that don’t work like you are used to.