Meet me in the pit, Hun

Hey, DC fans (Or other comic fans) I saw a poll like this a while back but wanted my own data set.

If you're not sure, just guess. I keep track of all the comics I read using League of Comic Geeks (It's both an app and a website)

This is important. Not only because he is a hero. But because this is proof that they were going after jews, not Israelis in general. Otherwise Israeli arabs would've been harmed.

It is also not lost on me that this is the second time in the past 13 months where an Israeli arab man has risked their life to save jews whilst the west either participates or cheers terrorists on

“My thesis is that at many levels of human interaction there is the opportunity to conflate discomfort with threat, to mistake internal anxiety for exterior danger, and in turn to escalate rather than resolve.” (from Conflict Is Not Abuse by Sarah Schulman. highly recommend it if you’re interested in having better dialogues and feeling less defensive in your life)

In the New Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency, John Seymour - who pretty much defined the principles of “self-sufficiency” as a modern political movement - goes into detail about conflict and community-building. So far from today’s interpretation of self-sufficiency as an American prepper-homesteader isolated from their neighbors - self-sufficient in the sense of “alone” - he envisioned self-sufficient in the sense of “not needing to buy things,” whether that was buying things for pure survival or buying things just to feel good. Seymour felt strongly that a community of close friends, preferably meeting frequently in pubs with wood-burning fires and live music, was a hallmark of being especially practical and self-sufficient; and if you think about it, you’ll see that it makes sense.

After all, if you want to buy absolutely nothing - if you want to create a way to live separate from society - you cannot do it like Thoreau; even Thoreau wasn’t doing it like Thoreau; you have to create an separate society, a self-sufficient community, and live in that.

And interestingly Seymour put his finger on “why communes fail.”

In his experience, which was deep and broad, experiments in self-sufficient communities/communes virtually always failed. And not because the idealistic fools weren’t capable of growing crops, or chopping wood, or whatever. It isn’t even the founders were stupid or ignorant or inexperienced, or because self-sufficiency only attracts dramatic personalities. No, the communities he observed consistently failed because they had no ability to resolve conflict. Every group of people will have to come to a tricky decision, resolve a sticky situation, have an awkward conversation or even just get along with unideal situations. They didn’t fall apart because a sheep fell in a ditch; anyone can get a sheep out of a ditch; they fell apart over the arguments about ideology, ditches, sheep and blame. It was always some issue of conflict or communication that broke these well-meaning, well-intentioned, well-educated people apart.

Step back from that and think: people frequently try to live outside capitalism even in this modern world, people frequently try to live in the most environmentally-friendly way, people frequently try to envision an alternative to a hostile state, even in this world where it is difficult or impossible to do so. For every utopia you might picture, people (being people) will have already made a decent attempt at building and living it, in the hope of showing it or even giving it to you. And those utopias aren’t here at the moment for you to have, because it’s terrifically difficult to make communities out of nothing. And that’s largely because it’s very hard to have communication skills about anything at all, let alone something that gets you mad.

So it’s worth having communication skills. As a matter of self-sufficiency.

If you have ever worked with the public, remember: the public will be part of your politically utopic community.

All the mommy bloggers, all the brosephs, all the every single customer or client or other person you have dealt with who you wanted to fucking strangle, or at least wanted to be allowed one of those amazing moments of Put Down that viral reddit posts are made of, every single frustrating as fuck human: they will be part of your post-capitalist utopia.

They will not wake up, the morning of the revolution, and suddenly become different people. Your choices will be to line them all up against a wall and shoot them . . . .or figure out how to live with them in your community. (And multiple revolutions in the past hundred years have tried that whole "line them up and shoot them" thing, tried it REAL HARD, and it didn't work out great for them either.)

The more de-industrial, de-urbanized, de-impersonal, whatever, your ideal society is? The more it will involve having to work, and work well, and work effectively and without interpersonal violence (physical or social) against people who irritate the fuck out of you.

And no, we never really had any Neat Trick to make that easier in the past. What we most often had was survival pressure so intense that the threat of being ostracized (or having the group turn on you) was enough to force resolutions that nobody was really happy with, or that left an unspoken wound to fester for generations, or to offer up a scapegoat to vent the community's violence on and then pretend to move on, or . . . .

Etc.

If you want a cooperative, non-violent, non-coercive community, and especially if you want that to be the norm, you end up having to learn to work collaboratively and productively with the person who irritates and frustrates and upsets you most in the ENTIRE world. And if you can't picture doing that, then maybe it's time for some self-reflection about how you really want the world to work, and what you're capable of contributing to that.

Reposting this quote from The New Complete Guide to Self-Sufficiency just because I find it extremely funny:

“Do not be put off if you find some of the people irritating or bizarre in some way. You have to remember that several of these people are likely to become very good friends as time goes by.”

Do not be put off if you find some of the people irritating or or bizarre in some way. You have to remember that several of these people are likely to become very good friends as time goes by.

The New Complete Guide to Self-Sufficiency mentioned! By the way the author of that was badass. In that book he says that he ate pound apon pound of bacon every year. He then lived to 92. Like a year before he died he set fire to a field of gene spliced canola.

“All the mommy bloggers, all the brosephs, all the every single customer or client or other person you have dealt with who you wanted to fucking strangle, or at least wanted to be allowed one of those amazing moments of Put Down that viral reddit posts are made of, every single frustrating as fuck human: they will be part of your post-capitalist utopia.”

I mean, yes, but also all the straight up more than frustrating people. The con men. The Nice Lady Therapists. The Pillar of the Community who keeps a slave to do his chores.

There’s a very real tendency for people arguing for post capitalist utopia to pretend those people will either just stop existing or become magically unable to gain social power once society is put right.

That’s never going to happen. These people will always exist, and they will always be part of your society unless you banish, imprison, or kill them.

If you think those three things are inhumane, you have to come up with ways to both live with them and mitigate the harm they tend to cause. There is no third way.

Oh I mean you're not wrong!

I specifically chose the ones I did there because to be honest people shut off, often, when I make reference to those and in this case I wanted to avoid that specific pitfall - even if someone had already told themselves the story that somehow if people were not under capitalistic stress they wouldn't be con-men, well, there's plenty of mommy-bloggers who are pretty stable and unconcerned about that kind of stress who are still gonna be exactly like that post the revolution. Etc.

And also because honestly even if you are still okay with banishment, or imprisonment, or execution, for Actual Confidence Artists - and sometimes these people are - people usually realize someone is pretty unhinged if they think you should be imprisoned for being a bit of a broseph or a Karen or a mansplainer.

And because people will divide the world into Decent Normal People (ie themselves) and Bad Criminal People and decide there are relatively few of the latter, but everyone who's worked customer service is aware of how many annoying stupid fucking customers there are in the world and so suddenly a bit more receptive to the scope of the problem.

So it's not that I'm unaware that there are even bigger conflict problems.

Rather, that in this specific instance, I was deliberately pointing out that it doesn't even matter if there weren't. Because there is definitely going to be someone who has a different idea of how often the garbage needs to be emptied than you do and who's gonna be an absolute stubborn asshole about it; there is definitely going to be someone who is pissed off about how you hanging your underwear to dry on the balcony of the housing complex is gross and who's going to bring it up to every single commune meeting and try to get people on their side about it and make this into a massive fight with you, the same way that there's customers who are just THAT FUCKING ANNOYING and those people will be there in your worldwide post-apocalyptic commune and you might actually discover that some of them are people you thought you were friends with before you were bound together in mutual interdependency to make this commune work.

(Signed, someone who cut her eye-teeth in Community Non-Profit Performing Arts circles, organizations and relationships.)

The "if you voted for Trump unfollow me" posts are returning, but given then general makeup of your average tumblr user I think there's a different message I'd like to give.

If you didn't vote because "both parties are the same" or "it won't make a difference" or because Kamala wasn't the pure and perfect leader that you wanted or you "didn't want blood on your hands", honestly whether or not you follow me doesn't make a damned bit of difference. But I want you to look. Take a good look at the despair around you right now. And every godforsaken thing that follows I want you to fucking look. Look and know that you could have helped prevent it. We still haven't recovered from his last four years, the world hasn't fucking recovered, and now we're staring down the barrel of god knows how many more years and a river of fucking blood to come along with it.

But your pride and your principles were more important to you than the actual real fucking world we live in.

I hope, if nothing else, that you can take this in. I hope you learn. I hope you grow. I hope you find it in you to realize that in this country they soak our hands in blood the second we take our first breath and the only thing that matters then is what you fucking do with them. What you fight for. Who you fight for. Who you defend.

I hope you wake up. And you step up. And you fucking fight.

But until then. Don't you fucking dare look away.

For the sake of this poll, define a sibling as someone who was raised by at least one person who also raised you if you consider them a sibling, regardless of precise legal or familiar relationship.

almost every person i know bathes/showers in the evening while i do that in the morning, i’m curious which is more wide-spread so please reblog with tags saying if you take a shower/bathe in the morning or the evening

BONUS: tell me why in the tags or comments

(Source)

"The Tech Guild is asking readers to honor the digital picket line and not play popular NYT Games such as Wordle and Connections as well as not use the NYT Cooking app."

they are canceling me for the way i deal with grief. also, for the infinite number of destroyed universes

not all character interpretations are valid some of you are sexist

not all character interpretations are valid some of you are racist

i was thinking about this today so how long has YOUR JOB existed- not how long your industry has existed, but how long someone has been doing the work you do as a trade notwithstanding changes in terminology and technology. no unemployed option cuz i cant add more answers sorry... tell me about it in the tags

like i'm sorry but we as a fandom have to stay firm on our anti-AI values. we cannot suddenly start giving AI a pass when it's something we "want to see" like destiel kisses. it's not suddenly fine. we're not going to start using AI to make fanfic scenes come to life or audio AI to make characters "say" stuff we want to hear. you have GOT to be firm on your anti-AI stance. if you start making exceptions then suddenly anything will fly. fandom is for real art and creations made by real people. no AI fanfics. no AI art. no AI rendered "bonus" scenes. no AI audio. none of it has a place here.

ao3 needs a "Batman - No Media Types" tag

down with found family. UP with FOUND DIVORCE!!!!!!!!!!!!!

getting many questions about FOUND DIVORCE. FOUND DIVORCE is when TWO PEOPLE who were NOT EVEN MARRIED are already DIVORCED. thank you.

@rainbowfoxes