In case you didn't realize they have short little faces due to their daddy's lineage. Jasper especially.

I mean, the Nazis piloted their programs on disabled people because nobody would give a shit and they knew it. The first one was a 5 month old infant named Gerhard Kretschmar, willingly surrendered by his parents. They started Aktion T4 with a disabled infant. 200k to 300k people died under this specific program.

Life unworthy of life.

That is how oppressors will see us. Not as criminals or corrupting influences but as things that should simply not be allowed to live.

Your activism needs to include and protect us from day one. Folks didn't show up for us after we showed up to get you your marriage rights. I still can't fucking marry...I can't even have a civil union, or even have a partner they decide we are close enough to that we are "holding out as married". Y'all want to unionize. There is no union to protect us. (Don't fucking talk to me about the IWW, they have NEVER answered me when I have contacted them four times, and even the name excludes anyone who can't work, fuck us, labor is still a moral virtue I guess, fuck representing those who can't.) Y'all want a survivable minimum wage. I draw max SSI, but have to live on less than 11k a year, and am punished if someone gives me cash to pay to fix the oven that has been broken for 2 years; they'll deduct the full fucking amount past the first $60 as "unearned income". Y'all want SNAP. My disability payments are held against my SNAP. Y'all want housing for everyone. We get our benefits slashed if we live with someone who helps us, but we often HAVE to, fucked either way. Y'all want student debt forgiveness. I can't go to school too much or they might cut my benefits, but nobody can tell me how much that is.

Y'all want us disabled fucks to volunteer? GUESS WHAT, MOTHERFUCKER? THEY HOLD THAT AGAINST US.

FUCK. THIS.

I want ALL the things y'all want. Y'all need to familiarize yourselves with our struggles.

Fucking see us.

Fucking SEE US!

Wise words from Tammy.

From that post I saw going around. I just wanted to add something

something I’ve noticed at least with people I know is that it’s considered very hard or even embarrassing to talk about sexual assault or abuse in ways that are explicit. not even necessarily that to be honest, just the act of acknowledgment of it is something considered uncomfortable in and of itself.. leaving you to fill the blanks in because they don’t want to talk about it with just ‘well, you know’ etc.. the way people abbreviate it to ‘sa’ in a face to face conversation. I once was talking to someone and they were telling me about a scene in a movie and they paused thinking of how to word it, obviously hesitant. they asked me if I knew the story of medusa and i said yes and they told me what happened to her is what happened in the movie. i don’t have too much to say on it because everyone is obviously different and a huge part of everything is probably due to political correctness, but i do feel the more taboo people let the subject and even word of rape and such be the more it will be damaging in both the long and short run of things.

If you wanna fix problems with the world the first thing you have to do is kill the impulse to stigmatize literally anything. I'm serious. Stigma is the enemy of compassion, and compassion is the most essential tool to fixing social ills.

There are no ifs, ands, or buts in this. Stigma is wrong.

Since we're getting into "did you know that Santa's eight tiny reindeer are a reference to the eight legs of Odin's steed?" season once again, remember: while there are some elements of Christmas (or Hallowe'en, or Easter, or...) observations that are probably pre-Christian in origin, before one believes any of that this-is-really-100%-just-a-Pagan-holiday-with-the-serial-numbers-filed-off stuff, one must consider all of the following possibilities:

#Also: modern neopagans feeling guilty about christian cultural hegemony eating up point no 5 #while obfuscating / willfully ignoring just who is feeding that narrative and why #your legitimate beef with institutional christianity does not justify leaning into anti-christianism that is rooted in antisemitismmmmmm (via @screambirdscreaming)

reblog if its friday and you made it

MUTUALS . EVERYONE GET IN .

This is literally my favorite tweet of all time. It’s so powerful.

She Freaken Forgor Me

We need to bring back the term “benevolent sexism” into widespread use for real. It’s a major mechanism in how bioessentialist Girlboss Radfems can be turned into bioessentialist conservative Tradwives.

I’m not actually interested in the bad faith radfem readings of this post where I get called an incel pervert (????). But I will be donating a lot of money to trans organizations and blocking all the radfems in the notes, because I don’t think it’s worth speaking to people whose position is that their politics are incorruptible and anyone who critiques them is wrong (and having incel fantasies???? What???)

I do want to talk about how there’s a lot of radical feminists in the notes acting like men doing small nice things for women like opening doors is what benevolent sexism is. It’s not, and I don’t want anyone who’s new to the term getting confused.

“Benevolent sexism” refers to sexism that masks itself as complimentary and beneficial to women. That might include holding open doors, but that’s a tiny and useless example. The bigger part is putting women on a pedestal as kind, innocent, safe, pure, etc, often in contrast to the roughness and violence of men. That used to be a major argument against women voting and engaging in politics, that they needed to be protected from something so rough, dirty, and corrupt. That’s where the similarities to radical feminism comes in.

Let me expand on my original thought:

Gender/sex essentialist radical feminists/TERFs and traditional sexism conservatives share many of the same basic beliefs about the world. Men are inherently rough, violent, and sexually aggressive where women are kinder, gentler, and inherently safer to be around. That’s benevolent sexism. Traditional sexists turn this into a belief that women must be protected by men from the world, so women must have husbands to shelter them from the world (ie control them). There’s also strands of outright misogyny that come with traditional sexism, but this post is long enough. Radfems turn this into a belief of separatism from men, which is interesting because many sexist and misogynistic societies do practice many kinds of separation between men and women.

Any radfem who’s insecure or unsure in her beliefs, who’s attracted to men, or who thinks she knows a good man is vulnerable to traditional sexist beliefs because she’s already accepted the same base premise. She just needs to change her mind about rejecting men entirely (which can be a struggle when you’re attracted to men or have men close to you in your life) to the idea that she can pick a Good Man(tm) to protect her. A person who jumps out of one set of radical beliefs can easily overcorrect in the other direction, as well. This is what sets up radfems who do become tradfems.

It’s a lot easier for benevolent sexism to slip into queer and feminist spaces in general, which is part of why it’s important to talk about it. The traditional sexist role for women is posed as subservient to that of men, but it’s still often posed as good, honorable, necessary, etc. If you’re willing to accept anything that paints women in a positive light into your feminist spaces, then it becomes easy to let benevolent sexism slip in.

The fundamental belief of feminism about women should be the women are human beings, people, not that women are inherently good. Any type of feminism that rejects that (as transphobic and separatist strands tend to) becomes vulnerable to benevolent sexism.

Bringing back this post in the context of 52% of white women who voted doing so for Trump. Benevolent sexism, the promises and pedestals patriarchy offers as its bait, is definitely a part of some of that.

In my area, I only heard "benevolent sexism" as "if you are a special kind of woman, you'll be able to to join the lower ranks of men, who are required to trample upon other men and women. E.g. upper-middle class women trampling on the poor men and women and the minorities.", so your part is absolutely going to be my new usage of the term! Thank you.

Good to know! I first ran into it while learning about the suffrage movement and the paternalistic framing of keeping women from voting as protecting their “goodness” by keeping them away from dirty politics, so it’s interesting to hear about other contexts.

I do think that benevolent sexism tends to come into the Madonna-Whore complex where there are good, wonderful, perfect, pure women and then tainted, fallen women, so it certainly can enable certain women to become enforcers of sexism and other -isms from their pedestal of being seen as Pure, Angelic creatures. But to get pedestal treatment, they still do have to be middle class, white, cishet, etc, and perform feminine gender roles that put them as subservient to men.

This also goes for things like 'divine femininity' and 'women are mystical creatures that need herbs based on their menstruation and not western medicine' etc etc.

Yes medicine has large gaps regarding qualitative treatment of bodily systems generally associated with women. No that doesn't make women ~mystical aliens~ that need completely different things than regular humans (men).

new variant on “your boos mean nothing; I’ve seen what makes you cheer”

"Your thirst means nothing; I've seen what makes you horny."

hello everyone, hope you enjoy this lab mouse adaptation of Frankenstein; I am completely exhausted

… i saw this without the caption at first and i thought it was a lab mouse desperately trying to fix his friend who had been sacrificed

The implications of “what if Frankenstein, but mouse” are vast and deserve careful follow-up and contemplation.

@kriber

#for real though#what if we were both experimented on and we were nothing but test subjects and you were the only light in my life and I in yours#what if we saw each other through it all#what if we didn’t get to be people what if we didn’t get to determine our own fates what if we were cut into again and again#what if you died and I didn’t – a failed experiment and a successful one – what if you died and the world didn’t end#what if I said no. no. this will not stand.#what if I took all that had been done to us and I did it to others ruthlessly and without hesitation#for the slightest chance I could have you back#what if I treated them like disposable things – like we have always been treated – what if I said they don’t matter#only you do#in exactly the same way you and I have never mattered#what if I refused to let death part us#what if I pieced you back together with the flesh of our kindred and it worked and you lived#what if you were my creature and I was the monster that made you#what if you were my friend and I lost you and I got you back and I lost myself#what if I loved you to the point of atrocity#what if I pulled on the thread holding your body together and did not weep and did not know if the love was enough

#and we were both mice

tags via @aethersea because holy shit

What is reincarnation?

Following the author of The Last Unicorn on Facebook is the only thing that makes being on that site worthwhile.

(source)

#all i know about the last unicorn is that alex hirsch hates this film#because the unicorn is a spoiled little bitch that never thanks the wizard for doing anything to help her

???????????????????????? is this true? because....she very much does thank him at the end of the movie

it’s in the gravity falls directors commentaries, and I trust his take

thank him while he’s busting his ass for you and you sit there complaining goddamnit

You should see it. It isn't worth the risk of not seeing it if it's something that you might even remotely enjoy. Especially based on what one person says, no matter how much you admire or trust them.

He can dislike it, but if the unicorn had been buddy-movie grateful, disney-movie emotional, it would have been a very different, very shallow, MUCH worse movie. Like just, really really bad.

She's not bitchy or catty or cruel, she literally does not understand humans or their drive or their big emotions. She doesn't feel love, she doesn't feel regret. She doesn't have ambition, she doesn't desire or benefit from change. She barely wants anything. She's complete by herself. She is content.

She can't be ungrateful unless you expect what is essentially a...a kind of immortal spirit, a place, a forest in the shape of a creature, to be in any way at all human. She can't be a deity, that's an extremely human concept, but she is not a normal living thing in any regard whatsoever.

The entire point of the movie is change, and truth. Front to back, it is change and truth, and the destruction of illusions, and surviving it, and the toll that takes, and the gifts it can bring. It's full of tremendous and intense, unthinkable, incomprehensible, destructive, renewing, life-altering change. And also truth, and the unraveling of illusions, which are everywhere in the narrative, and are almost always dangerous, or hiding something that is.

The unicorn unravels everything around her by being the catalyst for change, and it is incredibly destructive. Things come apart around her. It leads to good things, usually, but it breaks everything first.

She changes on the road, she learns to care about humans enough to help them, to save their lives, and that is very much an expression of gratitude.

She just doesn't care about the wizard questing for greatness. It is irrelevant. Glory is useless. And she's right.

She doesn't experience a fundamental alteration of her nature until she is forcibly changed against her will to survive, and it is not a positive change. It ruins her. It is a tremendous trauma that leaves her empty and broken, and eventually, partly and unnaturally human. She keeps losing what she was, and it is tragic and painful to watch. Why would she be grateful for that? She wishes she had died.

She finally develops something like love, but only after she has forgotten much of what she was. Then she desperately grasps onto it as something to replace what she lost.

Her encroaching humanity is killing what she was (her first response to being human was absolute visceral terror at having a mortal, and thus actively dying, body) a trauma response that allows her to survive, to hide. An illusion.

Love is an attempt to make peace with it all, and it is beautiful enough, but also empty. You are never meant to cheer for it. Only feel for them both. It's a sticking point for some people that the romance isn't done well. It isn't meant to feel right. They leaned on it a little hard in the movie, the book does it better, but it was a "kids' movie" (it isn't) so that was a little inevitable.

Change destroys everything, and it breaks everything.

At the end, when she changes back, who is it she appears to, to acknowledge what happened? And who is it she visits and touches and loves and says goodbye to? She is grateful.

The movie/book does exactly what it set out to do, and I have to say that I don't necessarily trust the judgment of people who dismiss it out of hand.

Yes, I saw it young, in the theater, so I imprinted, but it has been a radically different movie at different parts of my life. I've identified with every character in different phases of my life, so it has had the depth to stand up to easily over a hundred viewings by a half dozen versions of myself. I know people have their issues with the style of animation which, whatever, I think it's gorgeous and I also don't consider that a reason to dismiss an otherwise good movie or show (I really dislike the animation style of Gravity Falls, actually, it bores the crap out of me, but that isn't the point). But the story itself is not like anything else I've ever seen.

If you get it, you get it. If you don't, you don't. But wanting her to be grateful and kind is...really super duper extremely not the point, and would actually be antithetical to it and ruin the story as it is. And it's missing the ways she expresses those things. If that's what you take away, that she is somehow morally deficient, you literally did not understand it, or you haven't seen it, or you have a take so radically divergent from mine I am probably incapable of understanding it.

It is so, so good.

It's currently a 'free with ads' watch on YouTube*, too!

(in the US, at least, idk if these are region locked)

I know most of tumblr is thinking about the USA right now. but fuck the nz government right now too. tomorrow, the treaty principles bill, the 'worst, most comprehensive breach of Te Tiriti in modern times' is being introduced to parliament early, because there were activations planned country wide and the cowards decided to pull it forwards. fuck this government. a friend of mine had to go home early, crying. I've been in shock all day since it came out.

check on your Māori friends, e hoa mā. see what they need. see how you can help. everyday, we see and experience racism. from people around us, up to our government. community care will save us.

in case people wanted a source

The Spinoff has a pretty good debunking of the supposed “rationale” behind the bill in this opinion piece by Carwyn Jones, the academic quoted in that Guardian article above:

There’s also this newsletter from this morning that explains the current situation pretty well:

For people overseas, you know how it's a popular simplification that here in Aotearoa New Zealand we did way better than every other colonial nation when it came to our relations with the indigenous population?

Well, for the sake of communication, let's ignore that that's actually bollocks. We've got our cool Treaty that made us better. The Treaty Principles Bill seeks to redefine how our Government follows that Treaty. How, you might ask? Why, by COMPLETELY IGNORING LITERALLY EVERYTHING IT SAYS of course!

The bill is being pushed by the ACT party, who are treating the Treaty of Waitangi like the USA's founding document, as if every founding document ever written exists to codify a set of rights for all citizens equally. That is not what Te Tiriti is! Te Tiriti is a document codifying the relationship between Crown and Māori, in such a way that at least the Te Reo version explicitly ensures that Māori are not erased.

It is not a founding document meant to lay down human rights. Know what does that here? The Human Rights Act. The Treaty is what says "hey you pākehā, you can settle here, just don't fucking trample māori in the process."

And yes, it's more complicated. The Crown have never followed Te Tiriti. Not properly. And the English language version was explicitly written not to be a correct translation and by the English text the Crown has more rights than the chiefs agreed to. But putting that aside for a second, we have a treaty, and in recent decades there has been a push to do so, in part by the establishment of the Treaty Principles by the Treaty of Waitangi Act 1975 which laid out specifically how the Government is meant to follow the Treaty and uphold Māori rangatiratanga, which is most widely agreed to mean sovereignty. The following are the 1975 Principles:

Basically, Māori did not cede sovereignty, they keep their land and treasures, and the Crown is supposed to be in partnership and consult Māori. Māori are guaranteed a voice in government and in decisions. That's why we have Māori electorates in our elections! Māori, as per current law, are guaranteed representation in Parliament. Whether or not it's enough is another topic, but they're at least guaranteed something.

ACT, through the Treaty Principles Bill seeks to go in the complete opposite direction. They have three principles they want to replace the 1975 ones with:

Principle 1 is pretty insidious - because the New Zealand Government means, in this context, the representation of the Crown. Whom there has been much controversy over lately, with the Prime Minister and head of ACT's coalition partner National saying - against the academic consensus - that the Crown has absolute sovereignty. The point of Principle 1 is to erase the idea that Māori have any sovereignty over themselves, or that they are in any way their own group outside of a Crown hegemony.

Principle 2 is again pretty insidious. It puts all property rights on equal standing. I might point out that Māori lost 74% of the entire North Island between 1860 and 2000 (having had 80% of it in 1860, and at most 4% of it in 2000), and what of it was gifted to the Crown for specific purposes was not returned after those purposes were done. When does this Bill decide "their land" begins in time? Now, when almost all Māori land has been stolen? After all, this Government have recently removed the rule that said Māori could still claim seashore rights despite not having had exclusive use of it which the criteria normally requires, if their land had been stolen. Y'know, that thing that typically prevents one from having exclusive use of one's land! And they're using their recent Fast Track Proposals Bill to cut Māori out of decisions that affect what land they are recognised as having. Under these rules, an Iwi has to defer to the Crown wanting to build a pipeline through fucking wāhi tapu (sacred land) (WHICH BY THE WAY IS NOT SOMETHING I MADE UP, THAT'S A RECENT NEWS STORY) because they would have no codified right to disagree, especially not under the Fast Track Bill which literally allows the Crown to decide arbitrarily that the Iwi is being too precious and ignore their objections entirely.

The story I linked? To illustrate this, the above two principles seek to unequivocally side with the Council, the Crown, on the pipeline, and remove all avenues for Tūhourangi, Ngāti Tūmatawera, to fight back and protect their land from a Crown body that does not in any way respect them or the graves of their tūpuna. Because well, they can say nope, the government has a right to do this, and the land belongs to the Council, never mind it was stolen.

Principle 3 is just a dogwhistle. That's not the point of the Treaty, not remotely, and it's already covered by the Human Rights Act. In fact, it goes directly against the Treaty, because, as is painfully fucking obvious, the whole POINT was that Māori were not culturally annihilated by the hegemony of a much larger power! The whole point was to make explicit that Māori, as per this agreement, have certain fucking rights to make sure they're not overwhelmed!

And it's obvious that this interpretation of the Treaty of Waitangi removes literally the entire point of the Treaty. The Treaty Principles Bill is one side of a codified relationship seeking to unilaterally eviscerate the protections supposedly built into that relationship for the other side. The Crown signed a contract, saying they had to respect Māori. And now that progress is meaning it might be slightly followed, the Crown's representatives in the coalition Government are seeking to make sure the Crown no longer has to follow any part of that contract.

If New Zealand is supposedly better than other colonial nations, this government is trying to do everything possible to change that and get rid of the one thing that demands the Crown and Iwi be equal. The one thing that means we did better? Yeah, that is the thing they're trying to get rid of.

Kia ora, me again.

So I thought I'd add something on.

Two days ago, a march began against the Treaty Principles Bill. Interesting use of the word began, some of you from the rest of the world might think. Well, I don't mean a march down a city street.

I mean a march from Pōtahi Marae, all the way to Parliament. For reference, Pōtahi Marae is only 30km southeast of Cape Reinga, the northernmost point of Aotearoa, and Parliament in Te Whanganui-a-Tara (Wellington) is about as south as you can get in Aotearoa without having to take a ferry or plane to Te Waipounamu (the south island). That's a more than 1000 kilometre route, and yes, some of it will be done by car but large chunks of it won't be.

This march, or hīkoi, follows in the footsteps of the 1975 Māori Land March, another such hīkoi made in response to continuing theft of Māori land by Pākehā who deemed it "unproductive" and passed laws allowing it to be compulsorily turned into public land and used by Pākehā against Māori objections. That march took 29 days. This hīkoi will be nine.

ACT are attempting to declaw and destroy every victory Māori have ever won against the encroach of colonial oppression, and prevent any further victories. They even suddenly brought forward the introduction of the Bill to before the hīkoi and, more importantly, before the Waitangi Tribunal could make their analysis of it. That means the Tribunal, and any official voice that can point out how flagrantly this Bill violates te Tiriti, is being explicitly cut out, they're not allowed to step in on Bills already before Parliament as I understand it.

I'm brain disabled (autism), not in very good shape, and don't already own walking shoes. By all rights I should not even be thinking about going to a march this long. I'm still going. It's going to be a hell of a distressing disruption to my routines to sort out shoes before I go, and breaking in new shoes with a fifteen kilometre walk in the hot sun probably isn't the best idea, but I'm going to join it. The hīkoi passes through Tāmaki Makaurau (Auckland), where I live, tomorrow, and will march across the Harbour Bridge from Onepoto Domain (departing at 10am), splitting into two to go to Takaparawhau (Bastion Point) and Ihumātao. My only lament is that I know that I'm not going to be able to continue with them south. I can't make that journey, and I can only imagine the dedication and strength, mental and physical, of those doing it.

It should not be in any way notable that I'm going. But Pākehā, like me, need to be taking part in these things far more. And it's to other Pākehā in particular I'm talking to when I say that.

We have a duty to support the fight against this Bill, against normalising it even if it fails. All these evils, all these attacks upon Māori, they were done in my name. In our name. They weren't my ancestors, I'm a first generation kiwi, but that doesn't matter. It was done in my name, so that I and every other Pākehā after them could have a miniature England to live in in the Pacific. As (I would like to think) tangata Tiriti, we have a duty to spit on that and say no. No, you do not do that in my name. To stand in kotahitanga with tangata whenua and uphold our Treaty. To any Pākehā who've reblogged my little explanation above after @takataapui reblogged it, get off your keyboard and join the hīkoi if you in any way can. Even if it's just one leg of it.

Not in my name. Toitū te Tiriti.

Done my donations to the welcoming iwi as I can't attend the hīkoi. Bought stickers and posters to put up.

This bill needs to be fought. We show up, we support, we give. Aroha atu. Kia kaha to all those on the hīkoi.

I've seen people say "The bill won't get passed, so why worry?"

Our government claims they have no money for school lunches or healthcare or benefits (cuts that will disproportionately affect Māori).

Meanwhile, they're spending at least $4,000,000 on a circus that less than 9% of people voted for.

The National Party claim they "have to" because they're powerless to oppose their far right coalition partner, ACT.

But ACT only exist because National allows them to. (A cynic might say National needs ACT to push the public further right.)

This bill is designed to make everyone more comfortable with racism and entrench white supremacy and it doesn't have to pass to achieve that.