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ITS APRIL 13 YOU KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS

FETCH ME NEIL

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If you all lived in the 1800s you would've been won over so hard by the term "manifest destiny", it only takes nice words and feel good gestures for you all to commit genocide.

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the olympics are inherently rooted in eugenic ideals (who is the “best” of humanity, as decided by ability) and it’s no surprise that they repeatedly result in discourses and practices of racism, intersexism, and transphobia. no matter how it’s whitewashed through the liberal lens of hard work and achievement, the underlying currents of policing bodies, which are integral to the practice of judging ability, will continue to emerge.

even the sort of surface-level 'anti-TERF' discourse I see still cedes ground that I never want to cede, personally. people will bring up that an athlete is cisgender and has “naturally” higher testosterone levels as a way to articulate the irrationality of the accusations against her, but to me all I can think is— I take hormones, is my body “unnatural” or inauthentic in some way?

The policing of drug use is seen as obvious and naturalized (that would be cheating!) but why? Cheating at what? At one's own embodiment?

(cheating implies being awarded with a value of which one is undeserving. what value would they be given "unjustly"? why does that value exist politically? what is the implied "danger" of awarding it to an undeserving body?)

It's more subtle, to be sure, but I feel if you dig into the logics of it, it comes from a similar logic of the transphobic idea that people are deceptive/unnatural for intentionally altering our bodies. It comes from a similar logic as the claim of “in nature this disabled person would die”— what is “nature” here? If isolated from all other human beings and sources of care, anyone would die.

(deceiving to whom? who is the implicit authority on what is natural? whose gaze must we be authentic before? and why is an "unnatural" body cast as immoral and deceptive? why is survival cast as "unnatural" for some bodies and not others? why is there a negative moral judgement attached to survival for disabled bodies?)

Why invoke the “natural” when justifying our discomfort with people using drugs to adjust their bodies and abilities?

Human bodies are not isolated, they are part of a physical world and constantly altered and influenced by their interactions with it. What enters our bodies--whether that's food, water, drugs, pollution, antibiotics, ammunition, oxygen, heart valves, semen, bacteria, catheters, viruses, vitamins, all of it--fundamentally impacts our bodies and how they look and function.

there is nothing that makes a trans or intersex or disabled body uniquely "unnatural" on a material level--these are all just eugenic judgements leveled on politically devalued bodies.

it is not "cheating" or "deceiving" on any material level to have a body that is intentionally shaped by hormones any more than it is to have a body intentionally shaped by exacting exercise and dieting, or by escaping from warfare, or by getting an abortion.

we all have bodies deeply impacted by the world around us, intentionally and unintentionally. there is no "natural" isolated state of a body to be in.

when bodies are deemed unnatural, that is a purely eugenic designation. it's not a material one.

that's why this bodily policing is leveled, primarily and most severely, on Black women, colonized women, transgender women, intersex women. It is no surprise that these eugenic mechanisms for "proving" someone is disqualified from being considered "physically superior" are brought out specifically for those most deeply politically devalued.

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JK Rowling has done more damage to feminism than any other person in modern history and I'm not joking.

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I'm at a stage where I will not entertain any kind of conversation around Palestine unless there's at least permanent ceasefire. Before then, anything anyone wants to say is futile and means absolutely nothing.

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According to the Palestinian Prisoner’s Club, the occupation released the prisoner Moaziz Abayat after several months of detention, where he was subjected to a systematic assassination attempt during his time in “Ofer” Prison.

He faced systematic and brutal assaults that included the breaking of all his limbs, visible in circulating videos, and he was left without treatment until his liberation.

It is worth noting that Moaziz is the nephew of martyr Hussein Abayat, who was martyred 24 years ago in 2000 during the Second Intifada. His uncle was one of the early founder’s of Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades in the southern West Bank and became one of the occupation’s most wanted resistance fighters due to his executing of several significant resistance operations which killed and wounded many zionist soldiers.

After receiving treatment for the first time since his abduction, the barbaric torture Moaziz endured and witnessed at the hands of zionist soldiers has become even clearer in a video where he is heard saying,

“They killed me…put me in a bag, in a black bag. I have been martyred…”

Resistance News Network

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Also people act like autistic people would have been, like, left in the woods to die or something as kids for most of history, but as i said i'm researching islamic saints and in both islam and christianity there's an awful lot of just, like, "Yeah that guy decided to go live in a cave by himself and wore one (1) article of clothing and sometimes he would walk around and scream randomly, it meant he was closer to god than everybody else"

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white americans when you tell them that the idea of climate change as an impending disaster is a reductive first world perspective because it’s a tangible reality for many in the global south already:

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just wanna say as someone who's Aboriginal that I think First Nations peoples have every right to be a little angry at white leftists (NOT Palestinians, people blaming Palestinians stfu) who ignored our anti-colonial movements for years but are now supporting the Free Palestine movement. If you, someone living in the US, Canada or Australia or Aotearoa, are serious about the liberation of Palestine then you NEED to be just as serious about justice and liberation for the First Nations peoples' who's stolen and colonised land YOU live on. If you're not serious about where YOU fit in the paradigm of anti-colonial work, fix it. Here's a good place to start: if you're a person living on occupied Indigenous lands, learn who's land it really is, and how you can help them as an ally.

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People on here are always like "fuck capitalism, why can't things be weird anymore" and then write up a whole dissertation about how the biggest IPs need to change to be weirder.

Like, you are so close. You are so close to getting the point. "Big" IPs *can only exist because they are normal*. They will *never* be weird. They will *never* do what you want. Go find some smaller IPs. Bring back discovery. Bring back never having heard of a book before you buy it. Bring back watching obscure anime online that none of your friends know about. Bring back trying new things, even if they're bad or cheaply made. That is how you get *weird*.

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😭😭

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the thing that most guitar people won’t tell you is that the most important factor when choosing a guitar to buy is how cool it looks

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Fuck self-sufficiency. It's time for Interdependence. Always offer help and always accept it. Cook meals for the people you love. Grow fruits and vegetables and give them to your neighbors. The "independent" person is merely the perfect version of a Consumer, eating directly from the palms of Corporation. Fuck self-sufficiency. Need one another.

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Justice for Rekha Shankar. She should have won