quixotic chaotic

Despite every moment of life being indescribably precious and a wondrous mystery, I will spend it caring about dividends and how many rental properties I have.

Rich people are truly dead inside. 

I can't imagine caring this much about numbers that absolutely will never impact my life. This person is making more in passive income than I've ever made in my life and he's just like "but but I need more :(".

I mean, fuck that guy, but psychologically it's interesting.

Some desperate remnant of his soul knows what he needs. As soon as his debt is cleared, he goes on to live what many would call an utterly charmed life: working no more than 20 hours a week, travelling and spending time with friends (which he, at $150,000 a year and no mortgage, has ample money to do). He has a loving relationship also.

But his brain is so rotten that he cannot understand happiness anymore. He is incapable of conceptualising it other than in money.

A man who has everything except the ability to feel it.

How poetic.

But fuck that guy.

I want to hit this man.

I want to rob this man.

Meow appears beside Rogue, holding a sign: "Heist? Heist."

This man is so so so close to realizing a fundamental truth to how humans operate, but I genuinely don’t think he’s going to get there. Although I’m not sure he realizes it this man views the money he earns as a direct translation of his sense of personal achievement and engagement. 

Which means that when he says he regrets the months he didn’t pick up more hours to earn more money, what he’s describing here is boredom. He’s doing it in the crassest, shallowest, most income-obsessed and unattainable for most of us way possible, yes. But this man is expressing that once he achieved a certain financial goal he relaxed, enjoyed himself, got bored, realized on some level he was understimulated, and then started working more hours to meet whatever stimulated activity threshold he personally needs. 

This is infuriating because this man experienced the counter-argument to that nonsensical talking point that if we meet people’s financial needs with a universal basic income they’ll grow lazy and won't do anything. 

Anyone trying to develop $200,000 in passive annual income is not working three minimum-wage jobs to live paycheck-to-paycheck. This man’s basic financial needs were met. Working more hours to make more money is just his own personal code for ‘I still needed to use my mind to do things’ (using what might be the only metric of personal achievement he might actually have). This man lived the argument for universal basic income and I genuinely don’t think he realizes that. Once his basic income needs were met he still needed to do things to keep himself stimulated and engaged with his own life.

You see a version of this play out with retirees who leave their jobs, go home, and very quickly find themselves in need of new activities or friends or engagements to keep them present and stimulated in their lives. Ensuring someone’s basic financial needs are met doesn’t make them stop doing things, humans don’t work that way.

Reblogging for the psychology lessons

There is, I believe, a line in an Agatha Christie story about a man so desperately unhappy he doesn’t know he’s unhappy. “Ah, a rich man,” responds the nun.

i wanna make it so incredibly explicitly clear: the ONLY way the phrases TMA/TME can function in the way their advocates claim they’re meant to is if it is explicitly acknowledged that it does not matter what you were “born as;” TMA describes being affected by transmisogynistic oppression and TME describes not being affected by transmisogynistic oppression.

the reason i critique the terminology is not because that shorthand is not useful. shorthand for whether or not someone experiences transmisogynistic oppression is incredibly useful.

my critique comes from proponents of the terms claiming that they only describe the experience of transmisogynistic oppression, while simultaneously saying things like:

and many more. some of these takes contradict one another, and i have seen intracommunity discourse on which classifications of trans/intersex people experience transmisogyny, but the discussions on doing away with this kind of hyper-specific birth-assignment scrutiny altogether are so few and far between as to always be invisible in the grand scheme of things.

the result of this has been that, whether or not the terms mean this, the vast majority of discussion around these terms, and by extension the casual usage of them, has grown to posit them as replacements for (or just interchangeable with) AMAB/AFAB.

(discussion around these terms has also grown into a weirdly aggressive posturing game where people who take issue with this usage are often derided as “TMEs” and assumed to be trans men, regardless of whether or not they openly admit to experiencing transmisogynistic oppression, and oftentimes, regardless of whether or not they openly admit to being transfeminine. i can’t take any discussion of the terms seriously if anyone involved resorts to this kind of posturing. “TME” is not a name to call someone; it’s a description of an experience; besides, most TME people are cisgender, it’s by no means a shorthand way to call someone a trans man. if someone’s experiences don’t line up with that description, calling them TME isn’t a sick burn, it’s just stupid and makes you look like you don’t understand what you’re talking about.)

until and unless we can refine how we use these words, they don’t mean what their proponents claim they mean. TMA/TME are useful as descriptions of whether or not someone experiences transmisogynistic oppression, but that’s not how they are used currently in most circles of queer internet discussion.

What if we let people actually… idk… let people… name their own experiences? Like, if someone says they experience transmisogyny, we could trust that they do? We could not contest them on their own lived experiences of oppression?

“You can’t tell what someone experiences based on what was in their pants at birth and you can’t tell what someone experiences by looking at them” seems like something trans people should understand.

One of the most important lessons I ever learned about art was when I became a late addition to the editorial board for the literature part of my high school's lit/art magazine, which nobody ever read.

Because I realized after a couple of meetings that my moments of baffled distress during them were centering around a pattern of our votes electing by majority to reject most of the good, interesting stuff and agree to publish the very bland.

So I was looking around this room of people I mostly liked or respected if not both, trying to figure out what the fuck when there was no reasonable way of asking, until the day we by majority vote sent definitely the best thing submitted all year back pending 'revisions' which of course would not be made, because the poet would definitely either become demoralized or know for damn sure she was too good for our stupid journal. I have no idea which it was; it's a question of mindset, and the submissions were anonymous.

This good poem was rejected for two reasons, both of which were actually manifestations of it being good. One was that it had made a couple of the board uncomfortable--not by having any shocking subject material, mind, just by provoking emotions with unusual descriptive language and indirectness--and they'd transmitted that uneasiness throughout the group during discussion.

And the other, seized upon as an excuse in light of the first, was that by being complex in terms of both structure and notion it had drawn several of us in, interested enough to engage critically and respond in depth, and so we'd marked it up with lots of places we thought a word choice could have been a little stronger, a line break had been a little odd; ways we thought it could have been a more excellent version of the poem we perceived in it. None of them ways it was actually bad. Just places we felt it could have been better.

At the same meeting, we voted to accept a poem that was an utterly tepid rectangle of predictable nothing-in-particular, because no one could find anything in it to object to.

It wasn't good. It wasn't noticeably bad, either, though; it was one consistent level of mediocrity clear through, and thus no part of it stood out as a weakness, and therefore the committee found it more acceptable than the poem that was superior in every way, but which by being daring and interesting had left itself covered in vulnerable places.

The understanding I reached as a result of this experience was multi-layered and difficult to articulate, but the most important part, I think, to share is that the value and quality of a work are not, in fact, very well measured by how many negative things you can find to say about it.

What I tell my students is, “When I start arguing with your ideas, rather than correcting your facts, you know you’re doing something right.”

There’s another takeaway here:

Mediocrity sells.

Well, yes, that's a pretty blatant takeaway, but it is also Known; what this episode illuminated for me was the mechanism by which it sells.

The process by which a group of reasonably intelligent people who mostly have reasonably good taste can still wind up collectively favoring the weak and unremarkable art over the strong and complex.

Because it's not just dumb people with bad taste in decisionmaking positions, or the public Lowest Common Denominator barometer of interest, or cynical marketing teams with very low opinions of their audiences. Like, those for sure are things, but this tendency is also just...an emergent property of group decisionmaking.

One that will tend to crop up whenever it's not compensated for in some way. Committees tend toward the conservative by nature of their structure.

And there's a lot you can do with this knowledge, other than create works infused with your own cynical contempt for your imagined audience. (Seriously. Don't do that.)

What I think is the most important actionable point, which I highlighted above, is you can apply it to interpreting critique constructively, because constructive criticism is a two-player game.

I know a tendency in myself (heightened by why I realize in retrospect were my parents' truly terrible communication skills) and have seen it often in others to think of quality, improvement, and success in terms of the elimination of flaws; to see each individual shortcoming in a creation as a bite taken out of its ideal form, and thus a diminishment of its total value.

This idea is demoralizing, and makes it hard to take artistic risks whole-heartedly. And, especially combined with a defensive frame of mind, it tends to the encourage obsessive pursuit of erasing vulnerable spots as a measure of quality and worthiness. Which, in turn, leads to very poor art for a number of reasons.

The one we're focusing on here being that it becomes bland and characterless in the pursuit of a version of perfection that consists only in negative terms, as 'the inassailable.'

So: do not measure your work primarily by its count of flaws, or count any and every point on which it can be criticized as its ruination. That is not a reasonable measure of value.

A real thing should not be placed in competition against its imagined perfect self to determine its worth; among other reasons sometimes the perfect form of one thing is less impressive or useful or beautiful than a incomplete attempt at something else, and anyway if you already have one of the ideal thing you don't need a second. And if you only see each of them in terms of their distance from perfection that value is lost.

And while 'critical' analysis isn't the same thing as 'criticizing' they will often coincide, because the more invested someone is in a piece and the more points of mental engagement they have, the more likely they are to find something they want to push back at.

So sometimes an absolute storm of criticism mainly indicates 'this is interesting.'

seems like a reasonable explanation for why some of the canons with the most interesting, nuanced things to say devolve into total fandom war zones

This exactly describes a lot of my experiences workshopping poetry

i didnt realise ao3 was started in response to lj deleting account relating to p//edophi|ia and they explicitly support the posting of such works yikes

it wasn’t, like, ~~~we luv pedophilia, it was way more complicated than that!

although it’s true AO3 does allow all fannish content provided it’s properly warned for, there’s a long history there - of spaces being used by fans until the host decided whatever we were doing was too weird and distasteful and either kicking us off, banning certain content, or changing the nature of the site until it was no longer viable as a host.

you’re referring to the LJ Strikethrough of 2007, which, being an ancient crone, I lived through, and since I was hanging out in the last vestiges of SGA and in bandom, I saw some of the fallout. this was before LJ was sold to the Russians (which is a whole ‘nother story), when it was still owned by Six Apart; in an effort to clean up LJ’s act, Six Apart decided to delete all accounts using tags like underage, incest, rape, etc.

this was supposed to get rid of actual child porn on the site, and I hope it did, but it also targeted fan communities. this was a problem for a couple reasons; for one thing, not every story tagged with these words is in favor of them; for another, these things happen to real people and these personal posts were also potentially in danger of being attacked; for the last one, look, I ain’t into this kind of fic but people write about what people write about, and if it’s fictional and not explicitly banned in the TOS (correct me if I’m wrong; I don’t think written content about this stuff was banned?) then it’s not cool for a content host to just start deleting communities without warning.

but that’s what happened! these deletions were also primarily targeting slash communities, which smacked of some serious homophobia since things were deleted that had nothing to do with any of this kind of content.

eventually someone found out it was this super conservative religious group who’d sent a list of journal names to Six Apart, and who if I remember correctly targeted slash fic on purpose, even after it became clear that the fic was, well, totally fictional. after a while, Six Apart admitted they’d made a mistake and started to reinstate journals, but all of fandom was pretty shaken up.

THEN Boldthrough happened, which was essentially the same debacle several months later, at which point fandom began its long slow migration from LJ to GJ, IJ, and eventually AO3, Twitter, and tumblr.

AO3 was opened in 2008 in response to several incidents, of which Strikethrough was a really intense one. remember, also, that back in 2008 the stigma surrounding fandom was significantly greater and more shameful than it is today, so finding hosts willing to archive fic was difficult unless someone had the dough to pay for server space - often not an option. this was also back when fanfic.net’s HTML restrictions were so great that users couldn’t use any special characters or bold or italicize anything, and it didn’t allow R-rated content, so it was clearly not ideal. in addition, although cease & desist letters were much less common than they were in the early 2000s and before, DMCA takedowns were still a phantom on the horizon.

LONG STORY SHORT, even though pedophilia is reprehensible and I personally cannot stomach fanfic that involves that kind of content, AO3 was founded specially as a safe space for fandom communities that could not find homes elsewhere. it requires warnings precisely for that reason, and if you find a story that is not properly warned, you can alert the admins and get the story labeled appropriately.

IDK, maybe it’s just because I am, again, ancient, but I was in and around fandom before homosexuality was legal in all 50 states. so were most of the people who started AO3. for most of my formative life, being gay was associated with pedophilia, and so was writing about gay characters. just - it’s a lot more complicated than you might expect, and there’s a reason many older fans who have been involved in several generations of fandom were so grateful to have AO3 as an option.

I don’t read, for example, Hydra Trash Party fics.  They squick me, and I generally feel they are pretty gross.  But writing noncon body-horror is not the same as saying “yeah, I totally want to go out and rape and torture people for years while brainwashing them!” or even “yeah, I wouldn’t do it myself, but it would be totally okay if someone did!”  Nobody is hurt by it, and nobody is going to be hurt by it.  So should I have the right to go, that is gross, you don’t get to write or read that?  No.

In the same way, writing about underage teens getting it on–sometimes with each other, sometimes with adults, sometimes consensually, sometimes not–is not the same as child pornography, nor does reading a fic about Hermione and Snape getting it on while she was his student mean someone thinks that would be a good and/or healthy thing in real life.

Fiction affects reality, but fiction is not reality.  And writing about something does not mean you want to do it in real life, or believe that anyone should.

Let’s take a closer look at that “Ao3 supports pedophilia!” shall we?

1) The only fics I have ever come across that had actual pedophilia (i.e. someone having sex with a child), it was clearly and explicitly abuse.  It was not meant to titillate or arouse.  It was meant to horrify.  It was seldom explicit.

2) There’s a lot more incest, but it is usually portrayed either as explicitly mutually consensual (i.e. Sam/Dean) or as abusive.

3) I’ve been in fandom for a decade and a half.  When people start getting upset at “omg pedophilia, think of the children!” the fics they are usually objecting to aren’t actually pedophilia.  Usually, it is teenagers having sex, especially queer sex.  And people don’t like that, and use pedophilia as an excuse to shame people for writing/reading sex they don’t like.

Let’s look closer at Strikethrough, shall we?  I hope that, if there were any communities of actual pedophiles on LJ, they got taken down, too.  But here are some of the communities that got taken down that were not in any way supporting pedophilia and/or rape and/or incest that got taken down:

1) at least one support community for survivors of sexual abuse.

2) a literary book discussion group that was reading Lolita.

3) lots of slash fanfic communities, for things like Draco/Harry fic set in their fourth year (when both boys would have been 15).

Basically, this very conservative “family values” group hated porn, and they hated queer stuff even more, and used “but think of the children, it’s pedophilia!” to pressure LJ to get rid of huge swathes of things they didn’t like.  And one time taking down the worst of it wasn’t good enough for them.  No, this was step one on a moral crusade.  If you acceded to their demands, all that did was whet their appetite, and soon they would be back with a new list of demands.  This is why the 2007 strikethrough was not an isolated event, but rather one of a series of events, nor was LJ the only website thus targeted.  It starts with anything that can get labelled “pedophilia” or “incest” because that’s low-hanging fruit.  But they use that to go after anything relating to queer teen sexuality.  Then anything with teen sexuality.  Then once the community is already divided and diminished, they go after anything with non-con.  Then whatever is next on their list.  It doesn’t stop until they’ve won the point and nothing but suitably “family-friendly” fics that match their purity test are allowed.

Which is why AO3 has no morality content in their terms of service.  You can’t break copyright beyond fair use (and AO3 has an expansive view of “fair use” and a team of lawyers on call).  You can’t use AO3 for commercial advertising.  And you can’t post ACTUAL child pornography, i.e. the things that are legally prohibited, i.e. actual photographs or videos of actual children (not teens) in sexually explicit positions–you know, the stuff that actually hurts kids.  Other than that?  It’s fair game.  You can post anything you want, and the archive will not judge.  There is no handle for the Moral Majority Family-Friendly Thought Police to latch onto, no cracks they can exploit to divide and conquer.

We’ve been down that road.  It doesn’t lead anywhere good.

Reblogging this for the excellent explanation of what exactly the moral crusaders did last time. They had an explicit agenda of anti-queerness, and they specifically targeted slash and femslash communities in particular, such that many ship communities became (or started as) deliberately members-only. You had to apply, and your personal blog had to look like a real person and a fan. You were vetted, a la 1990s private servers.

During this period, Dreamwidth was also targeted by attacking its payment processor. They had to get a new one. These “Warriors” (literally called themselves that!) were totally on board with destroying fandom as a side effect of destroying the parts of fandom they didn’t like.

If you’re carrying out harassment of people right now because they’re posting works with sexual elements you don’t agree with? (And it’s always sex, never non-sexual violence, how strange….) If you’re doing that, you’re also totally on board with destroying fandom as a side effect of destroying the parts of fandom you don’t like. Because your tactics are fandom-destroying, and so is your agenda.

reblogging because this is important: strikethru and boldthru and all the various “purges” that fandom went thru about 10 years ago: this had to do with OUTSIDERS deciding that fandom in general and fanfiction in specific were evil and needed to be destroyed; unless we were writing and shipping good vanilla M/F married people. These were outsiders, going after fictional writing about fictional characters.

AO3 and OTW are HUGE, because now we have an organization, with very smart women and a lot of lawyers, that have our back. Fannish history is important, people! It has not always been this way.

This is so, so important: there’s that other post about AO3 and fanfiction floating around, about our history. People decry violent video games but no one is trying to force companies out of business. But people can and do attack fanfiction: an activity primarily written by women for women, about fictional characters. And often about sex. We have to constantly defend ourselves, protect ourselves, support each other against charges like “paeodophilia”.

^^^rebageling again for excellent commentary

Throwing this in because I was also present: This was during the American Government’s attempts to pass censorship laws on the internet. As MOST of those domains had their serves in America, they were beholden to those censorship laws. A great deal of fanfiction.net was removed because they happened to lose a goddamn courtcase. I’ve been on the site since 2002. They may not have ‘officially’ allowed NC-17 rated content (what it used to be listed as in the filters), it never did a damn thing to remove it. Ever. They had it listed as a rating option during ‘New Story’ uploading after all. It was i nthe search filters. After they lost the courtcase however, they legally had to start doing things about the mature content reports they got. The admins and mods were not actively looking for fic to remove, they were just responding to reports they had already received. 

tl;dr - I know tumblr is all about black and white “you’re either all right or all wrong” thinking, but it’s important to understand what actually happened before going “ew ao3 was made to give pedophiles a safe place to post” because that is 110% not what happened.

This is why so, so many of the comparatively older fannish folks on tumblr like me are so vehemently against stuff like the anti movement and “all ships are valid UNLESS”. It smacks of censorship and content policing - and we’ve been there. We got our shit deleted and our accounts banned because someone else thought what we were reading or writing or talking about needed to just… not exist. No warning. Literally overnight. We just woke up and stuff was gone.

And yeah, the group was legit called Warriors for Innocence (or maybe of). I knew several people that were members of survivor/support groups that lost their groups - and their main support network - when Strikethrough happened (ten years ago holy shit).

You antis need to listen when us older fans tell you that the censorship you’re advocating for, when put into practice, is NOT a positive thing; it’s an extremely scary thing!

I can guarantee that you would be very, very upset if another event like LJ Strikethrough were to happen today because *you* are just as vulnerable as the rest of us! If you support the rights of marginalized groups of people, if you’re a slash or fem slash shipper, if you support gender identities that aren’t defined by biological sex, if you care about representation, if you support women, if you have any kind of kink, if you care about fandom in any capacity beyond its eradication, YOU DO NOT ACTUALLY WANT THE SORT OF CENSORSHIP YOU’RE ADVOCATING!!

People were terrified during Strikethrough.  I was there.  Communities were being shut down, individual users were being shut down.  People were losing access to their own fics, their feedback, their comments – a LOT went on in comments on LJ.  Think more coherent reblogs, much more personal, very widespread.  Comments were also very important, and in terms of networking/communicating, were absolutely critical.  

LJ was, for many people, central.  

It was a fundamental part of the infrastructure of fandom at the time.  

Having it attacked, having parts of your fandom’s territory just deleted like that, was very very scary.  People didn’t know who was next.  Every day, the list of stricken journals grew.  And not all of them came back, not all of them recovered their content.  Some people even voluntarily deleted their content as a form of protest.  It was a bad time.

You do not have to interact with fic that grosses you out or makes you uncomfortable.  Tagging is a thing.  And even outside of tags, you are responsible for curating your own fandom experience.  It is not right to expect it to be curated for you.  And it is not right to lash out when someone refuses to do so and expects you to walk away from things that do not concern you.

I was gonna say “things that don’t harm anyone” but I realize you can argue that.  If you get triggered, that’s upsetting.  That could be considered harm.  And I have sympathy for that.  I do.

I have run across fic that triggered me.  I have pretty specific triggers, and people don’t always think to warn for them because they aren’t that big a deal for a lot of people.  Or it’s sort of bundled into kink and is presumed, that if you’re okay with certain kinds of kink, you’re okay with this.  So I’ve been blindsided by it before.  And it sucks for a couple of days while I get over it.

That was not the fault of the authors! You could argue that tagging should have been used, and maybe it should, but ultimately that’s not an ironclad obligation.  It’s a tool people provide out of courtesy.

That was not the fault of the site!  The site is there to give authors a way to make fiction available, not to judge each work and interrogate its validity and make sure everything is tagged so that nobody has to see anything bad, ever.

That was not even my fault!  It was my responsibility to try to curate my experience, and I tried, but it wasn’t my fault because I didn’t deliberately set out to trigger myself.

When I get triggered, unless it is by a deliberate act, it is actually the fault of the people who hurt me in the first place! And I refuse to let them off the hook and blame perfectly innocent people who just wanna write their fanfiction! I may hate that fanfiction, but that is irrelevant to the question of whether or not people should be allowed to post whatever they want.

Also, some people cope by writing about fucked-up shit.  My best friend in the whole wide world has shared her fic with me, and HOO BOY it is messed up. She wrote it during a time in her life when she was in and just coming out of a horrifically abusive relationship.  I mean, it was exactly the kind of relationship all of us here on Tumblr love to hate.  She was married to a shitty, abusive man who preyed on someone younger than he was and used his influence over her to treat her in a way that would be right at home in that Lundy Bancroft book Why Does He Do That?  He was a real rapist, a verified grade-A bad fuckin’ guy.  (She was lucky to escape.  I have immense respect for her.)  And she wrote some fucked up fic to deal with it, and she shared it, and people were invested in it.  And because this was early 2000′s, she had to host it on a foreign server and cover her tracks, because at that time no-place was safe to post it.

“Yeah, but if she’s writing it for therapy, she doesn’t have to post it where other people might have to see it!” I hear you say.

But like … what the hell??? “Shut up, don’t talk about it, it’s bad to talk about these things, because these things are bad!” is something used against folks with trauma.

“This isn’t good for me, I can’t talk about this, I can’t be your audience for this,” that’s fine, those are boundaries that people with trauma use to defend themselves.  You should learn to say those things!  It will help you!

But expecting other people to never create and share art about trauma is just so thunderously oppressive I lack the ability to fully articulate it.

And nobody should have to disclose their history of trauma to prove their motives are pure or virtuous enough for their speech to be protected.  I’ve only really been able to openly say “I was assaulted, it was traumatic, I am a little fucked up from it” for the past couple of years, tops.  I couldn’t talk about it before that.  Couldn’t!  And it was over 20 years ago!

I also believe, very firmly, that you don’t need a history of abuse to find writing really messed-up shit satisfying, or to find reading it cathartic.  I believe 100% in the freedom of creative expression, and the freedom to read whatever fucked up shit you want to read.

All y’all fandom youngsters can spit nails all you want over gross rape fic, incest fic, whatever.

Fine, I don’t like it either!

But that fucked up shit?  That fucked up shit helped carve out the spaces we have today.  You don’t have to like it, but campaigning to get it deleted, harassing content creators, calling people rapists and pedophiles who have never done and would never ever do such a thing, that is not the way to improve the world, it doesn’t keep actual kids or teens or assault/rape victims safe.  It wouldn’t have made me feel safe when I was 16 and did’t want what was going on.  It doesn’t make me feel safe now.  I can say with the perspective of someone 24 years away from that event, it doesn’t make the world safer for people like I was.  It actually makes it worse.

Learn to steer clear of the messed-up stuff you don’t like.  It’s a skill, you get better with practice.  Have someone else vet stuff for you if you need help doing it now.

Everything that is sketchy and gross is not criminal, and writing about a thing is not morally the same as doing it.  Please stop acting like writing about an adult and a teenager having really questionable, gross sex is as bad as the actual registered sex offender they caught hanging around an actual elementary school two neighborhoods over from mine, just trying to talk to the kids.  The former is, at most, in poor taste, and potentially triggering to abuse victims.  The second makes me want to vomit because even though he was just talking, that guy was gearing up to try something and create another abuse victim.  A g a i n.  

The first can be avoided because it is imaginary and you, an adult, have power over your back button so that you don’t have to witness harm to imaginary people.  The second, those very real kids had to rely on real adults and real law enforcement to keep them safe from very real assault.   (It worked!  The neighborhood rallied!  He was arrested for violating parole!)

Pretty sure Sleazebag McDongface didn’t read some gross NC-17 Draco/Lucius fic before deciding to harm an actual human being.  Pretty sure not having read it didn’t keep him from doing it. ‘Cause he fuckin’ did it.  And he would have done worse. But actual people stopped him.

I get wanting to protect victims when so many of us are victims ourselves, but man, going after fiction is not the way to do it.

An author is not a perpetrator.  Stop trying to make those things synonymous in the minds of other fans, and in the minds of other recovering victims.

I’m a crone who also lived through strikethrough, and all y'all young fans need to read this and understand it if you don’t want history to repeat itself someday.

Here’s the thing, also: it doesn’t stop with fic about objectionable stuff.

If you have a website with TOS that includes any kind of “objectionable content” rules, there will be parties who will use those rules to try to silence other people whom they want silenced.

Let’s look at the alt-right and MRA movements today, or GamerGate a few years ago. What is one of their primary weapons? They report black or feminist or really any leftist YouTube channels (or Twitter accounts, or whatever) whose message they don’t like and claim those channels are are violating TOS by posting hate speech or incitations to violence or whatever bullshit they can come up with, in an attempt to silence those channels.

When Anita Sarkeesian of Feminist Frequence came under fire for starting a crowdfunding endeavor to fund the production of her Tropes vs. Women in Video Games series of videos, male gamers tried to get her KickStarter and various social media accounts shut down by reporting her for for hate speech and promoting terrorism.

Luckily, that became a big enough story that the dudes failed and their efforts backfired. But a lot of times, these tactics work.

How do I know this? Because it happened to me. Not over major shit like the examples above, but over something completely petty.

Back in the mid-to-late 90s, before LiveJournal really became the place for fandom, before FF.net was really a thing, you had to create your own personal website on whatever free webhost you could find (GeoCities was popular, but there were others) if you wanted to host your fic somewhere.

And back then, TV studios and book authors were still sending their lawyers after people who wrote fanfic, issuing cease and desist letters to not only the authors, but also to their webhosts.

At the time, I was writing perfectly het Mulder/Scully fanfic. No rape, no pedophilia, no slash. Maybe a little BDSM. But largely it was unobjectionable.

Then the 8th season of X-Files started, David Duchovny decided he only wanted to be involved part-time, and the show decided to bring in another male character. The fandom lost their shit–as fandoms do–over the idea of “replacing” Mulder blah blah blah.

One of the most popular fanfic mailing lists–one that had previously had no restrictions on what characters or pairings could be posted–decided that if you wrote fanfic involving this character, you were no longer welcome. Well, this was the mailing list with all the readers. Sure, authors could go to other mailing lists, but they wouldn’t have exposure to the sort of readership this other list boasted.

I spoke out, saying that this change was unfair to fic authors and that the moderator of this list was behaving in a pretty vile way. The moderator and her friends took aim at me and began a campaign of harassment, and a few days later, suddenly my website with my XF fanfic was TOSed because someone had reported it. So was the next site I tried to create to host my fic, and the one after that.

Thanks to the way AO3s TOS are constructed, that sort of shit doesn’t happen now. I can speak up if I need to, and while I may receive harassment on my various social media accounts, there’s no chance they can have my fic taken down just because they have an agenda and don’t like me for reasons not relating to my fic.

So yeah, AO3′s rules protect fic a lot of us might find objectionable. But they also protect fic that is in no way objectionable from being targeted by unrelated harassment campaigns. And since any of us could find ourselves in the sights of those sort of campaigns at any time, we need to thank our lucky stars for that.

I like this last addition.

When I helped write the ToS for AO3, I wasn’t primarily thinking about strikethrough. I was primarily thinking of FFN, where so many people post things that are technically against the ToS but that the community tolerates. Any time someone gets pissed off, they can go on a grudge-reporting spree and target their enemy’s work. Often, that means guys targeting slash or Twilight fic because it’s “for girls” and thus sucks. Sometimes, it’s one ship vs. another. I was also thinking of Miss Scribe and all of that other Harry Potter fandom drama. (And if you think fans are above destroying an entire archive just to strike at one enemy, think again!)

We can’t force people to like each other. We can’t force people to be nice to each other. But we could take away fandom bullies’ favorite tools.

So we did.

Watching young (ostensibly liberal) bloggers and fans take up the deeply conservative rhetoric and moral crusading of the right wing and evangelical groups from the 90s has been both fascinating from an anthropological perspective, and fucking horrifying for someone who lived through this time period and the death of LJ.  

This thread keeps getting better.

It galls me to think that those of us who went through all this shit might have to go through it again because people who were still in primary school at the time don’t see anything wrong with harassing us over

Like, I hate to pull this argument, but we are your fandom elders, we did what we did to preserve fandom for y'all, so y'all would have space to safely explore the sane things we did and still do. And in doing so we rightly realized that if we wanted to protect the comfortable, cuddly parts, we also needed to protect the dark parts.

You can hate non-con fic all you want, and I will always advocate for adequate tagging/warning (especially with franchises that are aimed at younger audiences, e.g. MLP:FIM and SU) so that you don’t have to see it because I sympathize, but I will never support people who want to make sure that it isn’t even there to be seen. I’ve been through that once. It didn’t help anyone. It didn’t fix anything.

Please, learn to curate your own online experience. You are responsible for not clicking, or clicking away. Don’t try to force others to do it for you. That’s not cool. You aren’t protecting children. You are asking fandom to treat everyone like a child. There is a massive difference.

Reblogging for the history (was there; can confirm), and also–

Come on.  When you hear an extreme claim like “ao3 supports pedophilia,” an entire protocol should kick off in your head.  Who, exactly, is saying it?  How much confidence do you have in your knowledge of this person?  (A more important question than it used to be; I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that 15% of “fandom leftists” are actually Russian bots.)  What basis do they have for this claim–were they in a position to know first-hand, are they known to have studied the topic carefully?  How complete is their knowledge?  Could they be missing important context?  Do they have any known biases or preferences that might slant their reading of something?  Do they have motives to be untruthful?  Could they just be mistaken?  What are the underlying facts supporting their claim?  Are there other readings of those facts that you can think of?  Do you have any biases/preferences that you need to keep in mind that might lead you to prefer an inaccurate reading?

Honestly, were you all raised by wolves, that you need this explained to you?  Why do we have to tell you not to set everybody’s house on fire because you want to drive out imaginary intruders?  Kneejerk reactions to buzzwords is for followers of our current president.  Do better.

Honestly, were you all raised by wolves, that you need this explained to you?

[*points up* this made me lol. 

*points down* but this below? sooo painfully true.  And how much more do we need AO3 now than ever?  Dudes, our rights to literal free speech are being threatened, not to mention I don’t know about you but I need proper escapism!]

Kneejerk reactions to buzzwords is for followers of our current president.  Do better.

From the mouth of a One Percenter -

Abigail Disney

!!!!!!!!!!!

“Yes, there is a superyachtinvestor.com. Go look at it and it will make you so angry, you could chew glass.”

we stan class traitors on this blog

Abigail Disney has no control or input on the operations of the corporation, she is a Disney heiress and, in that respect, nothing else. She puts her money towards philanthropy, especially women’s movements around the globe and peace organizations like Peace is Loud and the Global Fund for Women. She is a documentary filmmaker who explores these themes as well.

There are problematic family investments she earns money from that, legally, she cannot divest from. Instead, she donates these profits to charities that counter to those investments.

Reblogging this version because I needed to read this after watching the video

fuck every democrat who says the issue of trans rights is a “distraction.” fuck every single liberal who say that the threat of stripping every trans person of legal recognition is a red herring or a losing issue and if we focus on it too long we’ll throw the election. we’re talking about human rights, access to medical care, sex education, discrimination, citizenship, and a whole lot else, for millions of people.

trans people aren’t a “distraction.” we’re human beings. the fact that so many liberals turn their backs on trans people is fucking despicable.

Okay…but this, right here? This is exactly what the Republican party wants. Young voters turning against the Democratic party and either not voting at all, or voting in favor of some third party candidate that has literally zero chance of pulling in enough votes to win. They want division among the ranks. They want to split our vote. 

In political terms, calling something a ‘distraction’ means it’s a distraction tactic, not that the issue itself isn’t important. The Republican party has a very longstanding history of dropping hints of major policy changes right before big elections in the hopes of getting the “hot-headed liberals” all fired up about it so we start bickering among ourselves. They deliberately drop issues that they know are hot-button topics because these are the topics that have the potential to be the most divisive. 

They’re awful but they’re not dumb. They know trans rights is an issue that could potentially split the democratic vote. It’s an issue that’s very heavily weighted toward the younger side of the party, which again, was a deliberate move on their part. If they can convinced you that the “big bad Democrats don’t care about you little trans and nonbinary kids so why bother,” then they’ve effectively won the election in a walk because the democrats went in divided–again.

Look, the democratic party isn’t perfect. Not by a long shot. But it’s literally the only party that has a snowball’s chance in hell at overtaking the republican majority right now. If we as trans and nonbinary individuals ever want our identities respected and protected, it’s the only party that’s going to be able to get us there, because it’s the party going in the direction we need to go. If you want to vote in favor of our rights, then vote Democrat. No number of videos with pennies is going to change the fact that right now, in this political climate, third party candidates are not going to have enough power to effect the changes we want. 

Warning against something being a distraction doesn’t mean “don’t look at it or worry about it,” it means, “hey, I know this is majorly upsetting, and absolutely something needs to be done, but don’t let it divide us.” It’s literally because the issue is so important that democrats are warning against it as a distraction tactic–if we want to prevent that kind of change from happening under republican rule, we have to keep our heads and not let them keep us from voting as a unified party. 

Please don’t let the political rhetoric make you think that the democratic party isn’t going to be fighting for us and our rights. That’s kind of exactly what the Republican party wants you to think. It’s a division tactic. Don’t fall for it.

The Republican party has a very longstanding history of dropping hints of major policy changes right before big elections in the hopes of getting the “hot-headed liberals” all fired up about it so we start bickering among ourselves.

THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS

I’ve been voting since 1998. This is what they do every single election.

Exactly. Hold ya nose and vote the fucking ticket.

when i was 13, i thought i was ace. when my friend was, 14 they thought that they were ace. my cousin is twelve years old and already ids as pan ace. do you see the fucking problem?

why would a twelve year old think they have to id as ace? who told her she should already be thinking she’s ace because she doesn’t experience sexual attraction WHEN SHE’S TWELVE FUCKING YEARS OLD?????

literal children should not be thinking about this shit. and no, fuckers, this is not the same as figuring out you’re lesbian/gay/bi/trans young because none of those imply anything about sex!

being ace is literally directly about sex and how people experience sexual attraction! i don’t know how to explain to you people that pushing these labels towards children is harmful!!!!!

I’m going to cut in and say young children id-omg as ace isn’t the problem. The sexualization Of teens and children is what causes kids who haven’t felt those emotions yet (or never will) to gravitate to a label that they feel describes them

We constantly expect teens and preteens go have crushes and little boyfriends/girlfriends/etc. We push the narrative that everyone is losing their virginity by the time they graduate high school without thinking about those who haven’t or don’t want to.

Personally? when I was 15 I Id’ed as ace bc I wasn’t interested in any boys or girls romantically or sexually. And all over the tv eas teenagers and tweens at minimum having those feelings or being swept up in romance or sex. When I discovered the ace community, it was a comfort to know there were people who didn’t feel that. And having never experienced sexual feelings, I couldn’t IMAGINE ever wanting it

By the time I had given up on love and sex, I was 20.

THATs when naturally I fell for someone and did have those feelings. Was I late in that? Absolutely not.

I was so shocked to find his sexual experience was just as limited as mine— because the narrative we are told is that if you’re 18 surely you’ve fucked or at least agreed to wait till marriage with your HS sweetheart or whatever.

But that’s not the universal— or even common experience.

TLDR; aces aren’t responsible for young children feeling pressured to adopt that label, its our societal narrative that sexualizes children and relies on the assumption that All Teens Have Fucked

It is much better for a teen to misidentify themselves, take comfort in their label and remain safe than for them to push themselves into experiences they are not ready for. Society’s saturation of sex and sexualisation pushes that narrative so badly. So what if later they decide “actually that’s not who I am.” Like @bravebattalion, many teens who don’t have crushes and attraction are made to feel abnormal and wrong by media, dominant social narratives, and by extension their peers. If the ace label makes them feel whole for a while, then that is a good thing. If the community has something to offer them, be it kinship, feeling whole, or simple resources, and they identify with us, then they belong here as long as they choose to stay.

This confuses me because when I was a kid, I had no idea what asexuality was, but I knew that the dominant heterosexual culture I was in wanted me to have sexual feelings. I was assumed to be boy-crazy, to have crushes, to sigh over celebrities. I was supposed to want to sneak out of the house at night and hang out with guys. I was supposed to want to be found sexually attractive. My classmates sang about being sexy and wanted to know if I found them sexy. The lived experiences of tweens and teens for generations have abounded with stories of kids who feel pressured to develop sexually when they aren’t ready for it.

I would have loved to have a way to say, “Nope, this all feels uncomfortable and overwhelming, please count me out,” without implying I was babyish or immature. Because at 13 I wanted to be grown-up more than anything, but there was nobody around to say, “Some adults never develop sexual or romantic attraction and that’s fine.”

I’m not ace and wasn’t even particularly ace then; I just want to handle my attractions and relationships without a ton of social pressure on my back. But goddamn, how can you blame aro/aces for something THE PATRIARCHY has been doing, that they provide resistance against?

So I started identifying as ace when I was fourteen. That was… *whistles* Coming on thirteen years ago, now. Different perspective, I think–I’ve grown and changed a lot since then, and I have shifted in how I conceptualize my sexuality and my orientation, but I still identify as asexual. And I think having access to that identity so young was critical to me and the adult I grew up to be. 

For god’s sake, ace communities have been explicitly welcoming to folks doing this since I started identifying that way. It’s been a huge cultural point for my entire experience with those communities–including those I’ve personally shaped–to cheer on and encourage people to drop labels that stop working and pick up new ones and to particularly celebrate folks figuring themselves out. Whatever that means to them. This is not theoretical–I personally watched several people, including good friends of mine, decide that “asexual” was a label that didn’t fit them and choose to pick up a new one. They remained welcome within asexual communities as allies, people told them it was awesome they found something that fit, and just–that was generally a good thing, within those communities. That was and is an actual ethos. Similarly, a community concept that was and remains important to me is the concept that a label can change without having been wrong–the concept that labels are tools for communication, not prescriptive categories, and that labels might change 

Those were incredibly helpful tools for me as a teenager, in and of themselves. Like. Holy shit, you guys, I can’t emphasize enough how comfortable and good those concepts make coming to terms with your baby queerness and the general uncertainty and pressure of adolescence. You don’t have to be anything except what you are right now. You don’t have to want anything except what you want right now. You can be grown up and never want anything differently than you do now, or maybe things will change and other things will shift, and that is okay, too. You aren’t betraying anyone or anything by being something different. You don’t have to understand what you want right off the bat; you can pause and think about what you want before you go for it. You can disentangle love and sex and family and romance, if you want some of those things but not all of them. There are other people like you. 

When I was fourteen, having the concept that asexuality was a possible option was huge for me: it told me that I could be myself at my own pace, and I didn’t have to do anything I didn’t fucking want to, and if I refigured my shit later on that was all fine, too. The adults around me didn’t necessarily understand that, but that didn’t matter–I had reassurance from other people, including other adults, that I was fine just the fucking way I was. Do you have any idea how crucial that was for me? Literally no one else in my life thought I was fine as I was, I was getting coercive, horrible sit-down talks about my lack of interest in boys and my weird butchness from my parents and marginally less horrible talks about “you can tell us anything, we’ll support you” from random fucking strangers in my high school. I didn’t want to date as a teenager–I barely wanted to have friends!–and I definitely didn’t want to talk about anything, but I didn’t want to femme my life up or pretend to fit into heteronormativity, either. (Probably for the best; I am aggressively uninterested in most men, which is literally why I gravitated towards male friends in high school–it was easier to keep them at arms’ length.) 

Asexual communities were the only source of messaging I had that said that I didn’t have to be anything other than myself, that I didn’t have to want anything at all to be okay and healthy and good. That was so fucking crucial for me, and I can’t think that it could hurt for any teenager to have access to that idea, so long as they also have the idea that they can put down a label and pick up a new one the very moment that the old one starts being constricting instead of useful.

Which is why that secondary concept is so incredibly important in community, goddammit. 

Alright… Let’s get into the REAL reason why this matters.

Long story short, well-meaning liberals (*cough* tumblr *cough*) are falling for manipulation by straight-up nazis, and this info really needs to be shared.

In case anyone here is out of the loop, James Gunn was fired by Disney from directing GotG3, or any further films for the company, because of some repulsive and creepy jokes he made on twitter a long time ago. This has sparked some passionate reactions– from agreement that he should be fired, to a quickly growing petition to rehire him. The latter is mainly supported by those who saw his apology as genuine, (he apologized for this YEARS ago,) and see his hatred of his younger self as a reassuring sign that he’s changed.

But this is so much bigger than one man and his career. Let’s be real, Gunn will recover. This isn’t about him at all.

HOW this stuff got brought up, and WHO got him fired in the first place, is what really matters right now.

Yeah…. you’re probably aware of exactly where this is going, now.

Yes, the crack-down on Gunn was started by a bunch of bad faith conspiracy theorists who are ~*~ strangely ~*~ obsessed with pedophilia. And yes, the reality is that Disney is capitulating to a fucking Pizzagate conspirator over shit they already knew blown up into “pedophiles run Hollywood” nonsense. This is validating far-right conspiracy theorists who know they can take down anyone who dare criticize Trump.

The Gunn case sets a dangerous, terrible precedent, and Disney needs to walk it back.

Seeing their success at what should be a non-starter, there are already far-right ops in place to take down other “Hollywood pedophiles” like Patton Oswalt and Michael Ian Black and others who use their platform to criticize Supreme Leader.

This is why the push to rehire Gunn is bigger than Gunn himself - he’ll be fine. His career will recover regardless of who directs GotG v. 3. But Nazis are confident that they are in control of hollywood now, and this isn’t something we should just roll our eyes at and ignore.

To be clear about Disney’s intentions, they likely wanted to cut it off before the story started getting picked up by major outlets. They’d be hit with the narratives that there’s a double standard based on politics. (Gunn can get away with it, but Roseanne can’t.) Which, yes, is unfair, since Roseanne also got a second chance, and she didn’t change. Gunn used his to change, and he hasn’t reverted back to his older self. Meanwhile Roseanne tweeted racist things just this very year.

But hey, has Disney ever been fair?

(Also– They’re the same people who still hire Johnny Depp.) This whole game is that the Left has a sense of moral accountability, the Right doesn’t, and the Right has learned to weaponize the Left against itself. Gleefully.

So please, listen to others who can put this stuff into words so much better than I can:

There’s further views linked here. Please take the time to listen to these people, and try to understand why they’re taking this particular stance. (Lindsay Ellis’ twitter right now is especially informative.)

Link 1     Link 2     Link 3

This summarizes my feelings on the matter. For me, it’s a fairly simple equation. Firing James Gunn over mistakes that he’s accepted responsibility for and tried to redeem himself from, because of an orchestrated campaign on behalf of a fascist white supremacist that was literally lying about Gunn in order to get him fired, is reprehensible.

Call out culture is immoral. It’s authoritarianism masquerading as social justice, where people weaponize public opinion to allow them to shame their targets into submission. The context doesn’t matter. If the target committed their ‘sin’ in their childhood, it doesn’t matter. If the call out is actually a lie and it never happened, it doesn’t matter. If the people orchestrating the call out can get enough people on board, they have a weapon and they’re going to use someone to hurt it.

All people make mistakes. Everyone will at some point do something that’s offensive. Yes, even you. In order to have true justice, you must leave room for people to make those mistakes and learn from them.

Sometimes the mistake will be too great. Sometimes the offense will go too far. But those are outlier cases, and far more likely you’ll two types of people, people who are unrepentant and wish to continue doing harm, and people who have learned from the mistakes of their past and are trying to redeem themselves. Call outs don’t differentiate, they just look for a target and they strike.

I think this is a perfect example of why it’s such toxic behavior. First, it was founded on a lie. Don’t forget that Cernovich is one of the driving forces behind Pizzagate, the bullshit conspiracy theory about a pizzeria being involved in a child trafficking ring that inspired a jackass to harass the staff at the restaurant and fire off a gun on their premises. Second, it was targeted at someone who was vulnerable specifically because he had grown out of being an asshole, exactly the kind of person that we want to inspire others. Because angry asshole white guys that have a chance to stop being angry assholes are a hell of a lot more likely to be inspired by someone like James Gunn than they are the rest of us.

Finally, here’s what James Gunn said in relation to the firing:

“I understand and accept the business decisions taken today. Even these many years later, I take full responsibility for the way I conducted myself then. All I can do now, beyond offering my sincere and heartfelt regret, is to be the best human being I can be: accepting, understanding, committed to equality, and far more thoughtful about my public statements and my obligations to our public discourse. To everyone inside my industry and beyond, I again offer my deepest apologies.”

Let’s be honest. People who manipulate and deceive are never that hard to see through, it’s just that they’re hard to see when you’re right up next to them. At a distance, they always out themselves, because they can’t help feeling proud of what they’ve done, or desiring of getting another shot in at someone. That’s not the kind of person that writes an apology like this.

He’s apologizing again. He’s taking full responsibility for what it happens. He’s affirming his dedication to continuing to learn to do better.

You’re damn right that James Gunn getting fired was total bullshit, but that’s the world we live in now that we have to teach people to fight fascism all over again. We should all feel ashamed by this. We should all do better.

I’m only just catching up on all this, I didn’t even know who James Gunn was, but it is really fucking screwed up. These guys wholeheartedly believe that “the left” is going around getting people fired for “petty” reasons. You know, like only a little holocaust denial or child molestation. They also believe “the left” does this not out of any actual moral qualms but to just punish conservatives. So they believe they’re “leveling the playing field” if they do just that; dig through the past of anyone who happens to disagree with their politics and see if they can find anything that they understand is “offensive” to the “other side.” They sure as hell don’t actually think it’s offensive. They were the ones defending that same kind of shitty humor themselves until they realized they could use this to their advantage. They’re aping what they falsely believe their enemies have done to them, and huge multi-billion-dollar employers don’t have time or reason to know the difference so they’re just going to play it safe and fire anyone a large number of people voice complaints about.

The Imam of Peace drops a MOAB on the U.K. Trump protestors

Hello rightsmarts, the latest in conservative news. I’m just reblogging this because it’s gotten around to the punk side of things and sometimes it seems like anarchists forget that PR is important in political movements.

The balloon cost around $3k to make and fill, the remainder of the money is going to go to take the balloon on tour. People DID donate $52,000 dollars to the Trump Baby.

They also donated $21 million to The Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES) to help the children in detention camps. The comparative cost of the balloon is about a quarter of a percent of what was donated to RAICES alone.

You know what’s great about a balloon? It’s ridiculous. It’s got a fun, airy parade feel. You go to a protest with the Trump Baby and you see people who share your values and are equally frustrated with the world - and it’s hard as hell to show a bunch of people having a fun old time with a parade float as dangerous antifa terrorists.

(Also it gets news cameras pointed at protests of Trump, and at this point we should all recognize the value of big stunts that get you free press because Trump sure as hell did.)

That and it gives frustrated, burned-out activists a bit of a laugh. We’ve got to have levity, we’ve got to be able to enjoy things and have a sense of humor. If we’re all grimly grinding away and donating all of our spare change to the ACLU and only ever talking about the horrible things that are happening we’re going to get too exhausted to carry on. Which is exactly what folks like rightsmarts and Imam Tawhidi want.

Oh yeah, that’s the other thing - imamofpeace up there bills himself as a moderate Muslim who wants reform but he’s supported calls for Muslim immigration bans in Australia. He claims to want reform to prevent extremism but denies extremism in his own sect and only targets Muslims of other sects. He doesn’t have many Muslim followers but he does have a lot of twitter followers who seem to like being able to point to Imam Tawhidi and say “see, I’m not islamophobic, I only want to listen to *reasonable* Muslims, like this guy who tells me how backward all those Muslims are and how they’re preparing to take over the west.”

So a professional pot-stirrer is criticizing activists for spending the equivalent of a quarter of a percent of their donations on a fun balloon that bring out large crowds to protest, creates feelings of solidarity and levity, and is an excellent PR tool.

Yeah, fuck off with your bullshit. People recently crowdfunded a couch for Elon Musk and tried to give Kylie Jenner $100 million so she’d be a round billionaire. Nobody should feel the tiniest bit bad for donating to the construction and display of a protest sign.

The Trump Baby balloon is a good investment on the part of protesters and helped ensure that Trump knows he’s not welcome or appreciated by the people of London.

(hey by the way this criticism of decadence and fun is the kind of puritanical authoritarian shit that you get from the right and from tankies and it’s why nobody likes tankies. bread AND roses, motherfuckers.)

^ Continuing the Tour of the Rhetoric, the tweet in the OP is another good example of how right-wing platforms try to use “whataboutism” to break up left-wing arguments. Note that it perfectly follows the same pattern I mentioned earlier, in which “the liberals” are randomly accused of “not caring” about some unspecified quantity. Because the left-wing wishes to be perceived as caring - and wishes to care about as many Good Causes as possible - they may indeed find this confusing or demoralizing, just as it’s intended to be. but it’s a complete non sequitur. And note how it simply wouldn’t work on the right-wing at all; they just don’t have the same buttons to press. “If you really cared about babies, you wouldn’t make a protest sign” is so pitch-perfect as an example that I would include it if I was teaching a course on rhetoric!

More Beautiful After Being Broken

What this trite imagery misses out on is the fact that kintsukuroi requires a lot of work to repair a piece like that.  It takes a lot of time, a lot of effort, a great deal of investment.  Sometimes parts of the original are damaged beyond repair, and you have to instead painstakingly create entirely new ones.   It’s still not the same.  Maybe it’s something more beautiful. But it’s not the fact that it broke that makes it beautiful. It’s the work put into it.  It’s the fact that people made the effort to salvage it, because it was worth salvaging, because it was important enough to salvage.      It’s the care that makes the beauty.   An apology can’t always fix what has been broken.  That doesn’t mean it’s not irreparable, sometimes you can go on to rebuild and repair.  But it won’t ever be the same as it was again.   

I really appreciate this addition because I’ve always hated the “more beautiful for having been broken” thing. Being broken sucks and I hate all those tragic romantic sensitivities that try to make it what it’s not. These pieces are beautiful because they’re repaired with effort put in to making them shine.

the original reason why people were making fun of “fandom moms” on this site wasnt because theyre misogynistic and hate women in their late 20s-30s its cuz on this site specifically, like this specific platform of blogging and socially interacting with people online, there has been set a precedent of older women quite literally preying on younger children under the guise of guiding and befriending them and using fandom to groom them sexually by sharing inappropriate content and rping with them. like it sucks that there are dumbasses who have warped this beyond repair for the sake of dumb jokes and women can and should be encouraged to pursue their interests without facing inane backlash but thats why people were wary of Fandom Moms for a good like. year on tumblr. thats it

lol let’s not pretend that a really significant number posts about ‘fandom moms’ that are 90% about being repulsed by older (and by older i mean like… 26) women doing innocuous but Embarrassing things with like, some perfunctory reference to actually heinous behavior to justify everything being said about a huge ### of women who are not all necessarily predators just because they like, read erotic fanfiction or whatever

it’s not missing the point or being dumb to point out that it’s necessarily to actually focus on the wrongness of predatory behavior on here because it’s predatory rather than using that as a bad faith pretense to couch petty misogyny, and it doesn’t just incidentally ‘suck’ that oops, apparently using sexual repulsion towards the concept of a woman existing after an arbitrary online cutoff date as a way to convince people that pedophilia is wrong has somehow, totally independent of anyone’s intentions, turned into counterproductive misogyny that doesnt actually protect anyone or deal with the actual issue

like just because the original reason had a good intention doesn’t mean it’s derailing or irrelevant or insidious to criticize the actual practice

Also acting like random innocuous shit is a red flag for pedophilia is like…. not doing anybody a favor. You’ll get already traumatized kids feeling further isolated because they think random adults are out to get them, adult child abuse survivors being portrayed as predatory for engaging in fandom, and it’s not going to make anything safer for anybody. If anything it could further obfuscate actual predatory behavior, which absolutely happens on here and is not at all a thing of the past btw. So with the extent that ppl on here really seem to be dedicated to defending their right to make and propagate these posts, you’d think that there would actually be a positive effect to them, but no. Like, I’d see the point if these posts actually pointed out abuse tactics or anything, but they’re literally just lists of traits that people find laughable in women once they’re over 18.

Yup thank you. I made a post about this that got popular and I think people are assuming I’m in favor of adults acting inappropriate around minors. As someone who has had adults act inappropriately around me when I was a minor, both online and irl, of course I think adults should watch how they interact with those who are underage. I just think “adults who try to roleplay smut with minors are creepy” and “adult women who like to wear pigtails are creepy” are two completely different statements

I think also context is necessary.

- on the Internet, no one knows you’re a kid unless you say so

- what qualifies as “roleplaying smut” may vary from person to person

I was once chiming in on an RP thread, in character. A person playing a character who’s canonically an enemy of the protagonists had made a threat toward the protagonists. I was playing a chaotic neutral kind of character who considers the protagonists to be their property and therefore no one else is allowed to hurt them. This character is also sarcastic and flippant. I made a comment about the enemy character needing to back off before I had to spank them.

I literally meant this in the context of “you are being bad and I will have to punish you”, said in character. It never occurred to me that anyone would take it as intended sexually until someone PM’d me to say the person playing the enemy character is a minor and was made very uncomfortable by the comment.

OK… the RP blog did not state in its about that the owner of the blog was a minor, and I had had no sexual intent behind the comment whatsoever, and part of me kind of felt like, if you are going to RP online as adult characters, you’re going to get comments that make you uncomfortable and honestly maybe you need to stick to RP’ing only with people you know rather than popping in on a general thread if you’re going to be bothered by such things. But at the same time, I also felt really guilty, because I don’t want to make kids feel like I’m making skeevy sexual comments at their expense… and I felt like I couldn’t continue to take the risk of participating in general RPs with that character, because to be in character, I’d have to say flippant and cruel things and I don’t want kids who haven’t declared themselves to be kids thinking I’m some kind of would-be child molester.

I have a suspicion that a lot of what kids have interpreted as “older women being inappropriately sexual toward teenagers” is actually “older women being used to an environment in fandom where we don’t have to heavily police our own sexuality, and kids not declaring that they are kids, coming into spaces where adults are having a conversation, and expecting adults to cater to them and protect them from sexual implications.” Because I just don’t think there are enough female predators out to groom kids on the Internet to account for what seems to be a large enough phenomenon that people got freaked out about it. What seems far more likely to me is that women in fandom are used to being openly sexual with other members of their fandom (not like “I want you”, more like “I want {hot guy from fandom who is half of favored OTP}”), and this new thing where a. everything is mixed together and there are no boundaries because of the way Tumblr works and b. kids are all over the place but unless you actually go to their blog and read their about you have no way of knowing they are kids has done a lot of damage.

Also, what qualifies as sexual varies between people, judging from the number of antis who seem to have genuinely not known that “pee your pants” references the omorashi kink, as well as my experience above (I mean… yes, I knew spanking can be a kink, but in context it was supposed to be a flippant threat to harm the enemy character, not a sexually harassing comment.)

Thank you. This is a highly valuable addition, because it clarifies some things hidden or twisted by the miasma of disinformation and hyperbole that fandom is marinating in right now. I’ve been in fandoms since the year 1999, when I was eleven years old. You’d expect that I’d have seen ample proof with my own eyes, if fandom were as filled with dangerous women trying to prey on minors as some corners of Tumblr would have people think.

But no – in twenty years, I directly ran into two women who turned out to be grooming children through the net (and in both cases, alarms kept going off in my head, so I stayed clear). What was going on (and what the Tumblr-addled Twit Brigade calls ‘predatory’ behavior is… bog-standard fannish behavior, such as:

Is there a chance that there are women who genuinely go after very young users online / are trying to groom and sexually abuse said users, through fandom? There’s a chance of that everywhere, not just online. The thing is that

We’ve already had examples here on Tumblr, of predators who got close to minors because they specifically wanted to roleplay inappropriate things with said minors – and they gained the minors’ trust by howling from the rooftops against ‘gross women who write fic about anime teenagers, but I’m not like them, I’m a Trustworthy Person.’

The second girl at least read the book to confirm that it was shit, she even had Capote on deck as backup. Chick 1 is just lazy

Nope. Girl 2 saw that Girl 1′s absolutely accurate analysis was being shut down just because it wasn’t stated in an intellectual way (in spite of its validity). So Girl 2 reinforced Girl 1′s opinions in solidarity and made sure that it was absolutely clear that Girl 1 was factually correct. WITHOUT taking credit for her observations (”kim is right” instead of “Actually, kim”)  

Girls supporting Girls. 

Girls not letting other girls be treated poorly.

“I stopped after 30 pages” should always be taken as a severe mark against the book, not the reader.

A.I. is coming in more sympathetic than some people…it’s 2017

according to Amazon, the Echo (Alexa) CANNOT actually do this unless the woman set it up beforehand–just like you can put in a phone number so it’ll dial it when you say “Alexa, call mom” or whatever. the woman apparently programmed it to dial 911 when she said “Alexa, call 911″ (which the woman is heard saying on the 911 recording). so why am I nitpicking about such a tiny distinction?

because Alexa WILL NOT call for help unless you’ve set it up this way first!

this woman was REALLY smart to do that, because otherwise the Echo thing would’ve done nothing. don’t think your Echo will respond to “call 911″ or “call the cops/ambulance/fire department” unless you’ve set it up with the numbers first, and certainly don’t think it’ll hear sounds of a struggle and call for help without a direct command. otherwise think of how many false reports it would make just from overhearing TV and movies being on! 

so instead of this being shared as “Amazon’s AI is going to hear that you’re in trouble and will call for help by itself!” this story should really be shared as “hey if you have one of these things, set it up to respond to a voice command CALL 911 before you’re in that kind of situation!”

Also, for those in abusive situations, consider setting it up so you don’t have to say 911 to get it to call 911. You could program it so “call nina” calls 911.

Sharing for the clarification and tip needing to pre-program Alexa beforehand. You could program it to “call nina,” “get help,” or some more obscure safeword command.

Brilliant thinking on this woman’s part; a pity she was in such a situation she needed to do that.

BOOSTING!

Greetings Tumblr, we have some important news for those of you who call Europe home.

In early 2012, the European Commission set out to better protect the data privacy rights of those citizens living in Europe. And on May 25, 2018, the culmination of those efforts, known as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), goes into effect.

More specifically, the GDPR gives you more control over your personal data, privacy, and consent.

We are also updating our TOS and Privacy Policy as part of our commitment to these new regulations.  

Starting on May 25, 2018, some users in Europe between the ages of 13 and 16 may no longer be able to access Tumblr. This ultimately depends on the age that your country has determined is appropriate for you to consent to the processing of your personal data. Read more about our rules on age here.

If you are a resident of the US, this does not apply to you. However, all Tumblr users, no matter where you live, will be able to access the Privacy Dashboard in the coming days. There you can view, manage, and download the data associated with your account. You can read more about it here.

Good.

I read the comments why on earth did I read the comments

the amount of clueless people in the comments is amazing

The thing most people don’t seem to understand is, this law that Tumblr (and all other companies operating in the EU) is now following is actually for your protection. This data protection law is a good law, because it forces companies to tell you what data they are collecting, what they do with it, and they need a valid reason for every piece of information they collect. They also need to be able to tell you who in the company has access to your information. It also allows you at all times to get insight in the information they have collected about you, and to get your information removed at your request (and with that, access to the site, but still - you can force them to forget you).

Literally this situation is for the good of the user/consumer - the only difference (IMPROVEMENT) from before is that companies can no longer collect information at random and can no longer get away with random/illegal information collection. The fines these companies may get for breaking the law are huge, and this law will actually be enforced, as opposed to all the vagueness about data collection before. Hence why all these companies are scrambling to get their shit in order and sending you all these e-mails on privacy policy updates.

Everyone world wide should actually be glad the EU created this law, because guess what! you all profit from extra data security and privacy

Also extra note: this goes for literally every single company operating in the EU or providing services to individuals and companies in the EU. Profit from this law, because trust me, you will.

So in short, you literally can go up to any company operating in the EU and demand: - to tell you what information they have collected on you - to tell you why they have that specific information - to tell you what they are using it for - to tell you who can access your information - to tell you who they are sharing your information with - to remove your information permanently And if they can’t do that? They can be fined.

And yes, all of that comes with limited/revoked access to underage people. sucks.

[edit] To add: this law goes for every company, organisation, club etc collecting personal information. That is: the government, your school/university, your local sports/hobby club, social media, online/physical stores, etc etc. They are only allowed to collect information that they may reasonably need for providing their services. All the above rules apply. This also goes for any clubs/organisations that you have set up yourself, even if it’s not for profit. If it involves any form of personal data, the law applies.

Edit: 

This might be the worst reply in the notes. JFC. WHAT THE FUCK. 

my brain hurts just looking at that comment jfc

also edit to add: @ all kids who wanted to be protected from adults, who wanted safe spaces and who wanted adults to conform to THEIR standards: you got exactly what you wanted, sucks that it didn’t play out the way you wanted it to 🤷 You are being protected - by being blocked from using the site.

Also if you need to know WHY these age limits apply: according to the law (in specific countries), you are not old enough to give your information to companies without approval of a legal guardian. Tumblr is just taking the safe way and not even giving this approval as an option (for now).

I don’t ask this often, but @ everyone who is following me: PLEASE reblog the information I shared. This is important information and hopefully helps clear up a lot of confusion.

This new law and Tumblr’s reaction has nothing to do with net neutrality and everything to do with protecting your privacy.

I want to ask the same. Please reblog this post!

I looked it up just to be sure and this shit is Fr y'all The Tasmanian people had a dialect and way of life that was different from other Aborigines. The British killed the men and women of the tribes and took away their food supply when they first arrived. Later they tried to “civilize” the Tasmanians and subject them to foreign diseases to kill off the last of them. The last full-blood Tasmanian woman was said to have lived until the year1888.

Wow!

at this point, what isnt racist in this country??!!

WHAT THE FUCK

Wow 😳😥

As a History Concentration with a rather unsettling love for Looney Tunes and other classic cartoons, I never thought that I’d see the day where my two completely unrelated passions merged up so wonderfully.

And yet, here we are.

So let’s talk about Tasmania, shall we?

Actually, pretty much everything that the OP said about Tasmania is correct.

By the way, her name was Truganini (Nickname: Lallah Rookh.) If you’re going to use her legacy to try to criticize an old cartoon character you should at least give her the common courtesy of a name.

Now then, let’s talk about Looney Tunes.

Or more specifically, let us talk about the Tasmanian Devil.

Taz for short.

Great character.

Fun, energetic, hungry, and not a racist portrayal in any way, shape, or form.

The statement that Taz is a racist portrayal of the Tasmanian people is completely and one hundred percent wrong.

Now I know what you’re thinking…

“Alright marauders4evr, what is the Tasmanian Devil based off of?”

Well, Im glad that you asked.

Gather ‘round and listen closely now because this is going to be one of the greatest revelations that you will ever hear in your mortal lives.

The Tasmanian Devil…

…is based off of the Tasmanian Devil!

Yeah!

It’s a real animal!

An energetic animal who eats everything in its sight.

And Robert McKimson based a character off of it.

Speaking of one of the great men behind Looney Tunes…

Let’s talk about Mel Blanc!

I love him!

I wish that I could have met him!

He’s one of my late heroes.

Phenomenal voice actor.

The best that has ever existed.

The Man of 1000 Voices he’s called.

(And that’s an underestimate!)

The point is that he took a lot of pride in his work.

So what did he base Taz’s dialect off of?

I can tell you right now that it wasn’t the Tasmanian people.

Mel Blanc based the sound of the Tasmanian Devil…

…off of the Tasmanian Devil!

Here’s a clip of Taz’s dialect:

And here’s a clip of the Tasmanian Devil’s scream:

(Chilling, ain’t it?)

(On a side note, I just love to imagine Mel in the recording booth, screaming and growling before calmly doing Bugs’ voice!)

In conclusion…

What happened to the Tasmanian people truly is saddening and I wish that it hadn’t happened.

THE TASMANIAN DEVIL (TAZ) IS NOT A RACIST PORTRAYAL IN ANY WAY, SHAPE, OR FORM

THE TASMANIAN DEVIL IS A REAL ANIMAL!

MEL BLANC WAS AWESOME AND DESERVES YOUR UTMOST RESPECT!

T-T-T-T-T-T-THAT’S ALL FOLKS!

Fabulous

There’s enough actual, legitimate racism in this world. Speak out against that instead of making shit up.

I thought it was common knowledge that all the animals in Looney Tunes were based on actual animals, and aren’t meant to represent people.

And by the way, Tasmanian Aboriginals are still around. Truganini was the last full-blooded Palawa, but that doesn’t mean they are “extinct” as those reductive infographics would have you believe. Doesn’t matter how much milk you put in a cup of coffee, it’s still a cup of coffee, and just because Tasmanian aboriginals today are mixed race doesn’t mean they’re not still aboriginal with a living culture and a strong connection to their ancestors and their history.

On Bruny Island, Truganini’s birthplace, which the Nuenone people called Lunnawanna-Alonnah, there is a thriving cultural centre called Weetapoona. The government restored land to Tasmanian aboriginals a few years back. There they are doing some fantastic work to revive their customs, work with archaeologists, as well as achieve reconciliation.

Colonists certainly committed incomprehensible atrocities. Kidnapping, rape, murder, massacre, theft of land, even theft of aboriginal bodies. Not content with taking their lives and exiling them from country, they took bodies as trophies and sent them across the sea, away from land and ancestors. As a way of excusing their atrocities, perhaps, colonisers spread the idea that Tasmanians were the most backward and least evolved of all human beings, making them valuable “specimens.” It was Truganini’s greatest fear that she would be made a souvenir after she died, and unfortunately her fears came true. It took many, many decades before her body was returned to country. I could go on and on, but my point is that it is so important that we don’t spread this idea of extinction and acknowledge them instead as a living culture who must be allowed to define themselves, their past and their future. Spreading nonsense and reductive half-truths like the one above only makes it worse.

There’s enough actual, legitimate racism in this world. Speak out against that instead of making shit up. 

- @thatjedirey

Colonizers gone colonize. 😂😂

@lmsig

In December of 1940, America still hadn’t entered the war.

There were a lot of Americans - such as the 800,000 paying members of the America First Committee - who looked at fascists massacring their way through Europe and declared “that’s not our problem.”

Captain America was created by two poor Jewish Americans, Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, with the specific intent of trying to convince Americans that entering the war was the right thing to do.  It wasn’t easy - Kirby went far beyond what was expected of artists at the time, penciling the entire issue with a deadline that would have been difficult for a two-man crew to pull off.  

Captain America punched Hitler right on the cover, at a time when a majority of Americans just didn’t feel like doing anything decisive against the Nazis.

Kirby and Simon faced considerable resistance for their creation, including steady hate mail and outright death threats.  

Both creators enlisted after America entered the war.  Kirby, as an artist, was called upon to do the extremely dangerous work of scouting ahead to draw maps.  He also went on to co-create Black Panther in 1966.

They didn’t create Captain America to be an accurate depiction of America-As-It-Is.  The character was meant to inspire and embolden, to show America-As-It-Should-Be.

The subject of where the Vibranium for the shield came from actually never came up for decades of comics, until it was finally addressed by Black Panther’s writer, Christopher Priest, in 2001.  Priest never shied away from acknowledging America’s racism, but he also understood that Captain America represented an ideal, intended to inspire Americans to be better. 

The story mixed together a “present day” discussion between Cap and T’Challa with flashbacks to when Cap met the Black Panther ruling Wakanda during World War II.

FLASHBACK:

PRESENT:

PRESENT -> FLASHBACK

PRESENT:

The Vibranium was given, freely, by one good man to another good man.

It is right to rage against the injustices done by our governments.  We must call them out, and we must fight for what’s right.

But if you can’t even stand to see the symbols created to inspire people to be better, and rail against those, then you’re just confusing cynicism for realism.

Hmmm. Interesting post!

Anyway, I’ve seen some of my followers reblog from this freak, and I think it’s worth stating that you should probably unfollow me if you agree with them.

did he really just say “proudly-perverted” 

Yeah, that makes no sense at all.

(to any people unfollowing me: please block me at the same time so I never have to deal with you again. bye and good riddance)

When did @comcastkills decide to become hot garbage to THIS degree like, damn. 

I forget the age range on this site runs only a little past the teens most of the time because nothing said here is in any way outside of LGBTQ history. 

But, you know, thats reactionary bullshit for you. Are discoursers all younger than 21 or something? Would that explain this nonsense?

The first person who welcomes me into the community as a sort of mentor proudly ID’d as a Dyke would insist that be used over lesbian or homosexual.

Comcastkills showing the same regard for people as the average school bully, I see.

It’s wild and depressing and wildly depressing for me to see this kind of stuff, because when I was a kid, any of us babygays would have literally killed to have an older queer mentor of any kind. Shockingly, there were few around, because, you know, AIDS. But now, the next generation, finally having what we lost, an older generation to teach them about their cultural history n shit… Just. Actively hates and in some cases even tries to kill them (I’ve seen kids on this hellsite try to cost grown-ass adults, sometimes parents, their jobs, kids, and lives). 

Like, I feel so old to be like “back in my day” or “when I was your age” but seriously. I always thought the younger generations would be better off for having what we lost. Instead: this. 

And we gotta call it by its name:

It’s not a generation gap. It’s not just ignorance (though that plays a part). It’s not just TERF manipulation against the word queer (though that plays a part).

We’re seeing a young generation of LGBT conservatism: kids who want their civil rights but who don’t want all the mess and scandalousness of actual liberation. Kids who want to hold on to what has been won for white middle class binary identified LG kids and don’t want to thing about what’s happening on the margins on the LGBT movement. Kids who want glamorous LGBT celebrities on tv, not homeless LGBT youth in their spaces. We have kids into gay nationalism. We have lesbians longing for the time when we didn’t include bisexuals and trans women in our communities. We have LGBT youth voting for Tories.

These kids aren’t shitting on their queer elders out of just ignorance, they actively reject our struggle against all oppression.

I’ve been thinking about this lately too.

The thing I created this blog to oppose is, ultimately, a right-wing reactionary movement, and if you scratch even a little bit at the veneer of leftism, you find bootstrap logic, xenophobia, militarism, anti-intellectualism, the veneration of retributive justice, disrespect for bodily autonomy, and other characteristics of right-wing politics underneath.

Let’s start calling it what it is.

I thought for the longest while that I was off-the-mark in mentally categorizing Tumblr Anti-X (anti ace/aro, anti kink, anti gender-fluidity/gender-spectrum, anti-labels-actual-queer-people-use, anti certain-kinds-of-fiction, etc)  Discoursers as the social conservatives of the future, but the above lines up incredibly well with my own observations.

Years ago, someone asked me to do a portrait of the social conservatism of decades to a century in the future and at the time I predicted highly limited and conditional acceptance of white, able-bodied, very gender-conforming, white-picket-fence, cis gay men and lesbians, who vote conservative. Maaaaaaybe also a limited acceptance of transgender people who medicalize and pathologize themselves out the wazoo, performing a constant show of ‘I’m just a good person who seeks the appropriate treatment for my medically-acknowledged condition, won’t you accept me, I promise not to rock the boat?’ and whose gender-presentation after transition is also very high in conformity to what the conservative mind thinks of as acceptable + again, support for conservative politics. 

Imagine how depressed I was when a large assortment of discoursers, transmedicalists and others along these lines basically confirmed a good deal of the above, here on Tumblr, decades before I thought it would ever become a thing! I started getting alarm bells in my head when I saw the vicious responses toward the concept of gender as a spectrum (and thus toward the existence of genderqueer / nonbinary, agender, genderfluid/genderfuck people), because after years of monitoring and seeking to understand social conservative communities, I knew that they consistently felt a deep, existential sense of threat from anything that challenged their rigid, binary views of gender. And here, on Tumblr, I was seeing young, so-called ‘progressives’ reacting in the same manner, as if threatened, by the concept that gender as a binary is a small and very reductive lens through which one can see the human experience. Whoever coined the phrase ‘conservatism with a gay hat’ couldn’t have been more apt.

And the thing is, this isn’t exactly something new for the community, the only thing that’s truly different is that an entire generation is now in the thrall of reactionary politics. Seeing sneers at queer people daring to (gasp!) describe ourselves as ‘proudly perverted’, as highly sexual beings, as kinky and unapologetic, reminds me what a massive impact radfems have had in shaping the Tumblr social environment and what a net contributor they’ve been to the aforementioned reactionary politics. Whenever I look at the notes of popular radfem posts, it’s always the same exceedingly telling image: usernames along the lines of ‘empress-vulvalini’ or ‘uter-person’ routinely interspersed with ‘tradcatholicnationalist’ or ‘jesus-is-my-savior’ (looking at the latter kind of blogs reveals that they’re Fundamentalist Christians to a one and I say this as a progressive Christian, lest someone accuse me of bigotry. It’s not the Christianity that’s my issue here, it’s the fundamentalism and the deep conservatism that comes with it). In the most darkly hilarious situations, I’ve found posts made by actual religious fundies (’sexual promiscuity and behavior characterized as ‘kink’ damages the inherent dignity of the person’, for one example) with the notes filled with radfems liking, reblogging and lauding the content.

It’s been noted ad-nauseam that radfems and conservative politicians have been good allies on several fronts, starting with the 1970s, but even something as simple as a Tumblr post can show how radfems share idea-space with fundamentalists. Radfems, in this case, have been the social-vector through which LGBT teens on Tumblr have been introduced to and influenced by fundamentalist thought, giving us the incredibly baffling sight of queer youngsters reacting with knee-jerky viciousness to non-normative sexual practices that hardly warranted the batting of an eye-lash in queer-dominated spaces, ten years ago.

I wonder how well this lines up with the timeline of AfterEllen being taken over by the alt-right.

(source : “AfterEllen is no longer a community resource. The entire AfterEllen staff was fired. The new editor has connections to the alt right movement, and is using the website to spread divisive propaganda. 

They’re also erasing the credits of former writers from older articles, presumably to make it look like they’ve always worked there.Alt righters have co-opted the word “lesbophobia” to pit lesbians against bi/trans/queer women & vice versa. Classic divide & conquer tactic. 

Note: This coincides neatly with the rise of “queer is a slur” discourse on tumblr.”)