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sometimes men are obsessed with other men not because theyre secretly gay but because theyre so misogynistic that they literally dont view women as people worthy of any degree of attention or value

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People actually do post like this on bluesky it rules

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Made a little something on slur reclamation.

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If we wanted to engage in nuance (lol, lmao) on the "are audiobooks reading" debate, we really do need to bring literacy, and especially blind literacy, into the conversation.

Because, yes, listening to a story and reading a story use mostly the same parts of the brain. Yes, listening to the audiobook counts as "having read" a book. Yes, oral storytelling has a long, glorious tradition and many cultures maintained their histories through oral history or oral + art history, having never developed a true written language, and their oral stories and histories are just as valid and rich as written literature.

We still can't call listening in the absence of reading "literacy."

The term literacy needs to stay restricted to the written word, to the ability to access and engage with written texts, because we need to be able to talk about illiteracy. We need to be able to identify when a society is failing to teach children to read, and if we start saying that listening to stories is literacy, we lose the ability to describe those systemic failures.

Blind folks have been knee-deep in this debate for a long time. Schools struggle to provide resources to teach students Braille and enforcing the teaching of Braille to low-vision and blind children is a constant uphill battle. A school tried to argue that one girl didn't need to learn Braille because she could read 96-point font. Go check what that is. The new prevalence of audiobooks and TTS is a huge threat to Braille literacy because it provides institutions with another excuse to not provide Braille education or Braille texts.

That matters. Braille-literate blind and low-vision people have a 90% employment rate. For those who don't know Braille, it's 30%. Braille literacy is linked to higher academic success in all fields.

Moving outside the world of Braille, literacy of any kind matters. Being able to read text has a massive impact on a person's ability to access information, education, and employment. Being able to talk about the inability to read text matters, because that's how we're able to hold systems accountable.

So, yes, audiobooks should count as reading. But, no, they should not count as literacy.

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Portland Police killed Damon Lamarr Johnson while in custody.

Our police force are professional lynchers.

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I am BEGGING people to actually learn the true definitions of abuse terms like gaslighting, dogwhistling, lovebombing, grooming, etc. because yes, they are often misused and to some degree have lost all meaning, but they are still legitimate terms for abuse tactics and people need to learn what they actually mean so that they can better understand what victims are trying to say, instead of just going "that's a tiktok word!!!" and completely discrediting someone's actual trauma

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honestly the way people will talk about fat or poly people is often super indicative of how they would talk about queer or otherwise marginalized people if it was 10% more socially acceptable to do so within their circles

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u ever notice when a celeb dies some sicko goes in and changes their wiki picture from them looking old and normal in 2019 to them looking cherubic and mystical in 1973

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By the way, the prosecution just violated Luigi Mangione's HIPAA rights and I have not seen people talking much about it

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Tumblr is a website where the least punk thing you can do is listen to punk, where the queerest game is Dungeons & Dragons because it lets you play as anyone, including a straight man, and where the presence of cishet men is seen as an indicator of the health of a queer community.

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okay

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the oceangate rabbithole is un-fucking-paralleled. what do you mean they left that thing outside in the snow in canada for the entire fucking winter. of course it imploded literally the next time they put it in the water. holy shit.