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me when someone abruptly asks me if i want to go and do something fun together but the fun thing wasn't part of my daily plan:

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as a jewish man with a schizospectrum disorder

there is something to be said about how a good portion of antisemitic beliefs are very, very detached from reality but are accepted as normative and therefore not antisemitic.

if someone said to a psychologist who did not share the belief system that is antisemitism

“jews use mind control on most of the population”

“jews are controlling the world’s governments to act in their benefit and keep the rest of us under their thumbs”

“jews have horns and tails that they retract and hide”

“jews harvest organs to use for rituals/vaccines/etc”

these are incredibly illogical beliefs with no basis in reality. any psychologist worth their salt would be concerned about a person who believes these things, especially if it’s impacting how they live their life and interact with the world and people in it.

there is something to be said for the parallel between delusion and antisemitism - the disconnect from reality while utterly believing in your perception… but i don’t know quite how to articulate it. antisemites are not psychotic… psychosis is individual and antisemitism is sociological… i wonder if anyone has done research on sociological phenomenons like this, where large populations hold beliefs that are detached from reality in a manner that mirrors how individuals experience psychosis?

idk. these are just my thoughts. some of my worst moments i have believed things like, a demon possessed my phone, that my physical body was dead, that i should physically punish myself for certain thoughts and behaviors…

antisemitism is sometimes as detached from truth and reality as those kinds of thoughts…

at the same time, and i have said this before, it bothers me when people call antisemites psychotic. like i said… antisemitism is culturally sanctioned/normative. this is a sociological problem spanning thousands of years, not something happening in the isolation of individual minds, although individual people’s own mental struggles may lead to them finding something external to project onto…

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you know instead of white people guilting each other going “I don’t want to blog in an ethnostate” (a real thing I’ve really seen people say) or “omg we’re so white that’s dire” maybe they could actually unpack and address the problems that make Tumblr a difficult space for nonwhite bloggers.

also I don’t think any of us should be taking criticisms from Twitter users - any nonwhite person who’s on Twitter at this point is in bed with literal Nazis, and they don’t get to go “oh wow racist website” at someone while Grok is declaring itself Mecha-Hitler and they stay logged on - but that’s a completely different post.

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i don't think bodily autonomy for minors should be a luck of the draw type thing where you have to cross your fingers that your parents are chill about it.

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what we lose when we reject porn

let me paraphrase an exchange that you’ve almost certainly seen play out many times by now:

“We can’t let the platforms we use bow to the pressure to ban porn, because conservatives consider queer existence itself to be inherently pornographic. They’ll use it as an excuse to ban all queer content.”

“That’s true, but don’t forget: porn is art, and art has a right to exist even if it is unwholesome smut.”

i agree completely with both of these points, for the record. they’re not mutually exclusive, and they are both relevant, persuasive reasons to support porn. they’re the only reasons you need, honestly. these points alone suffice for a robust defense of pornography!

i want to talk about something else, though.

i want to tell you what gets me about all this.

every time we create and enforce restrictions on pornography, we reify the idea of “pornography” as a meaningful and obligatory category. we are forced to say, for any given work of art, whether it is or isn’t pornography. if it is, we restrict it: we hide it away, we place odious limitations on where it can be seen and sold, and we never, ever talk about it in polite company.

but what about art that doesn’t fit neatly into one of these two boxes?

well, the answer is that, for the most part... it doesn’t get made! it’s just too risky. the benefits of making art in the public sphere are too huge to risk incorporating content or themes that might get your art labeled pornographic. and if you’ve decided from the get-go that you are making adult content, then there’s less than no incentive to waste your time and energy creating art that doesn’t fit cleanly into the box of “pornography”, because your opportunities to reach people outside of that box are so limited.

this sucks ass!!!

eroticism by and for itself is great. but art can be anything. art can be erotic among other things. imagine if you were only allowed to eat frosting straight out of the packet. imagine if you never got to taste a cake, because there’s massive financial disincentives to combine bread and frosting into one foodstuff!

anyone who’s into romance can tell you exactly how cathartic a real, explicit sex scene can be in a story, even when that story is not necessarily about sex. indeed, romance is just about the only genre that gets away with this forbidden combination at scale. but only to a limited extent, in limited contexts, and not without its own share of heavy policing from sales platforms.

sex and sexuality are unavoidable parts of the human experience. horniness is one of the primary colors in the spectrum of human emotions. to restrict the use of sex as a storytelling tool is to make artists forever paint with a limited palette. sure, there is lots of great, sexless art out there. for that matter, there’s tons of full-on porn that is likewise great art. but there is SUCH a huge space of possibility in between these two extremes.

and we can’t have it!

because pornography exists as a category in all of our minds, and because we are compelled to reify that category at monetary gunpoint by the jesus freaks upstairs, art must only ever at most orbit the pornographic: if it touches the event horizon, there is no going back.

we don’t just need to fight back against the censorship of pornography. we need to fight aggressively to normalize the existence of pornography. we need to make pornography mundane.

finally: it goes without saying, but there are, in fact, people who are making the kind of art i’m talking about. including me! that’s one of the great things about the internet: it democratized art for a lot of people in a lot of ways. for all its faults, the internet has enabled a golden age of horny queer art that’s allowed to be anything it wants. that’s why many of us are so distraught by the recent waves of censorship at steam and itch.io. if you’ve read this far, please take a moment to consider giving the payment processors responsible a phone call to let them know how you feel about it.

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Starting my speech at the Omelas city council with a child acknowledgement statement

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itch.io was the only place one could find sufficiently weird and experimental horror-erotica vns... what will i do now

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I think parents don't understand how punishing a child isn't for when they make you upset, it's for when they do something wrong. Like, you don't just punish them for stress relief, it's so they can learn right from wrong.

So if your kid learns, for example, that helping mom make dinner = getting in the way, but not helping = being lazy, but asking if mom needs help = being annoying and asking stupid questions, then you have basically trained a person to see the only option that doesn't lead to scolding as 'hide and don't be thought of until dinner is done'. So now what relationship is your kid going to have with cooking or cleaning or chores in general? How is that going to affect them as an adult?

If there is no right answer regarding the things that bother a parent, then your kid is going to associate those things with being punished no matter what they do. If talking during a car ride is bad and annoying, but being quiet and staring out the window is bad and disrespectful, then what are they going to do every time they're in the car with you but count every word they say? If texting is suspicious, but why don't they have friends, but going out with people is irresponsible, but why don't they ever leave their room, but their friends are all bad influences, but why did they stop hanging out with them, they were nice kids, then what are you even doing?

If playing video games is lazy, going outside is unsafe, playing is ignoring chores and doing chores is being in the way, then YOU'VE CREATED A CHILD WHO'S LEARNED THE ONLY WAY TO AVOID BEING SCOLDED IS TO DISAPPEAR WHENEVER YOU'RE IN A BAD MOOD! You've created a person who is hardwired to feel guilty no matter what they choose to do. You turned them into a confrontation ninja, who can vanish as soon as a hard conversation enters the picture. You've trained a person to disregard why rules exist and instead focus on who they can placate and suck up to in order to make the rules change. Because to them, rules and punishments are just who gets on the bosses nerves at the wrong time.

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there's this thing where online leftists will be like "no history book talks about this!" and it's just blatantly untrue, like almost every history book talks about that, just not the specific one the Republican state board of education mandated for use in your middle school. most recently I saw this on a post about how gay people put in concentration camps by the nazis weren't freed after the war and the op was like "no one is ever taught this!" like no I'm sorry. most people who study the Holocaust in basically any depth will encounter that information fairly early. it was in my high school textbooks in Canada. it's in a LOT of the books you could take out from your local library. it will be mentioned in university courses. the hyperbole is not endearing actually

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Sorry for donner party rocking

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woke up. saw black rectangular piece of plastic on floor. my half asleep brain invented tons of tiny wriggling legs on it. half asleep brain then concluded it must be a cockroach egg case. got halfway to flushing it down the toilet before i woke up enough to realize it wasn't actually moving nor was the correct color

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a) there’s not mainstream criticism of the Talmud like there is with the Christian Bible or Quran because the Talmud isn’t mainstream like those books are.

Christians are 32% of the world population, Muslims are 26%, and Jews are only 0.2%—not all of whom are even religious, and even fewer who have actually read the Talmud in its entirety.

“how many white people follow that religion” my ass. ain’t even that many of us period.

b) bro the talmud is like 2.5 million words long and looks like this

who tf is going out of their way to put themselves through reading a super niche, dense, 2.5 million wordcount legal text that’s formatted like the ancient precursor to House of Leaves just to criticize a teeny tiny little religious minority??

anybody who hates Jews that much isn’t going to take that much time out of their schedule to read what actual Jews have to say about Judaism when they could just make up some salacious shit & repost Nazi memes instead

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Gina Wynbrandt

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got stopped at the bathroom the other day and they asked me to go to the other bathroom and i wasnt feeling the hassle so i did exactly that and i got asked to leave again and i said mate i was just asked to leave the other bathroom and the copper goes well whats your sex? and im like intersex. and they go well we dont have intersex-specific bathrooms so can you just go to the disabled one cause that's a medical condition so I'm like sure. whatever. and then when i came out another copper scolded me for improper usage of the disabled bathroom??? glad to see the supreme court ruling is coherent and respects trans & intersex people.

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baby i could treat you so good you just have to get past my strange and off-putting demeanor and my kubrick stare and my inability to behave like a human and the 40 layers of icy fortress walls i have up and answer my riddles three