serpent453

Fucking wild to be teaching about Rosa Parks at the same time as a trans woman in Florida does an act of civil disobedience to use a women's restroom in the state capitol

As far as I know, she is the first woman arrested bc of this law. The law requires that the trans person be warned to leave the bathroom by a state official, and then if they stay they are guilty of trespassing after a warning.

So like, me, my gf, others just piss and nobody asks or tells, but this young woman sent a statement about the law to over 100 FL lawmakers so they would know she was coming, the cops were ready for her, she brought a reporter and went in anyway and spent the night in a men's jail. She is out on bail, and is hoping this will inspire change of the law. But if found guilty, and the law is upheld as constitutional, then she could spend up to 60 days in a mens county jail.

i'm probably going to regret this, but i think we genuinely need to address the phrase "at least they’re doing something" when an American politician gives a big speech, or participates in symbolic protest, or makes a grand gesture that doesn’t actually change anything. i get that the shapes and colors are moving in front of you and it looks real effective, but it’s one of the most effective ways movements get neutered and it's already happened repeatedly in the last 10 years. why?

1. it mistakes motion for action

just because someone looks like they’re fighting doesn’t mean they are. for example, a Senator talking for 24 hours isn’t a filibuster if it doesn’t stop a bad bill. a protest that doesn’t disrupt anything is just a cathartic parade. if the outcome is the same as if they’d done nothing, then functionally, they did nothing. there have been nominees and legislation to filibuster against - why now, when it's completely directionless? celebrating it as "something" is a reflection that we’ll always settle for scraps if it means surviving another day.

2. it assumes the system works "as designed"

liberals believe institutions are broken, but ultimately fixable. that if we just elect the right people or pass the right bills, things will get better. but THIS system wasn’t designed to work for us. it was built by the rich, for the rich, and it’s working exactly as intended when it lets symbolic resistance like line dancing in front of a Tesla dealership replace real opposition. when you heap unearned praise upon ineffective measures, you're playing by their rules and actively losing.

3. it lowers the bar forever

every time we call a weak gesture "better than nothing," we redefine what "resistance" means. Occupy Wall Street in the 2010s was criticized for not having "demands." now politicians get applause for reading tweets on the senate floor. if we keep moving the goalposts in this way, then "political bravery" has lost all meaning.

4. it keeps us passive

real change doesn’t happen because people asked nicely. "no one has ever obtained freedom by appealing to the moral senses of the people oppressing them." the civil rights act wasn’t passed because of speeches. it happened because protests shut things down. labor rights weren’t won by polite lobbying, but by strikes that stopped profits. when you treat performative acts as meaningful, we’re telling people they don’t need to do anything but talk about solutions. you're telling them that they don't need to fight and that you can win with words alone.

so what should we do instead?

stop asking "is this better than nothing?" and start asking:

the next time someone says "at least they’re doing something," please remember that no political movement in the history of the world has never succeeded by asking people to kindly listen to what they have to say. they win by making it impossible to ignore them no matter where they are.

You don't have to like weed but I find people who are vehemently anti-weed but claim to be left leaning infuriating. If you go into a rage because you smelled someone smoking pot, how the fuck do you expect to form community with people addicted to meth? It's easier to say you hate smokers than to say you hate all drug users in leftist spaces because one makes you sound a bit like a square while the other is the writing on the wall. You aren't anti-weed, you're anti-drug user and anyone who uses substances is not safe around you.

I know dozens of people who use meth, coke, and fentanyl. While heroin is harder to get I do know some folks who use it when they can. Some of these drug users are my neighbors, some are my clients, and some are my friends & family. One does not cease to be human just because they use a substance you find scary.

Community doesn't mean you need to invite them to your home and look away if they smoke there. It means you don't call your property manager because you suspect your neighbor uses. It means you don't require drug tests for homeless shelters and housing services. It means the very idea of someone who smokes meth in your community doesn't make you go, "what the hell."

Genuinely kind of a wild thing to see in the replies as someone who has been professionally practicing harm reduction for years.

Considering recent events over here in the States, this seemed like a good time to bring this back. Over the next four years, expect an increase in discourse around "undesirables." This will include but not be limited to drug addicts.

Also, from someone who works at a smoke/head shop: WAY MORE PEOPLE ARE DRUG USERS THAN YOU THINK. Way more people are addicted to opiates, meth, whippets, cocaine, you name it, than you have been lead to believe, and on top of that, they are often the "normal" or "functional" people you see every day, not just the person tweaking out at the gas stations. Judges, bank tellers, grandmas, teachers, the nice lady who runs your bakery— all of them. You are ALREADY IN COMMUNITY WITH THESE PEOPLE. Start fucking acting like it.

I'm gonna keep repeating this: 'community' is not a fucking friend group.

It's not a clique. It's not you and the people YOU think are cool and funny.

Drug users are your neighbors whether you're too much of an obnoxious self-righteous asshat to be aware of that or not. You don't *get* to say drug users don't deserve to be meaningfully connected to and included in the populations they call home (which is what community actually means, btw) and the mere assertion that you can is a big part of why ppl seek connection in drugs in the first place.

It doesn't matter if ppl use or not but tbh if we really wanted to cut down on addiction all we'd need to do is have fewer stuck up motherfuckers who look down on 'undesirables' in the first place.

'community' is not a fucking friend group.'community' is not a fucking friend group.'community' is not a fucking friend group.'community' is not a fucking friend group.'community' is not a fucking friend group.'community' is not a fucking friend group.

In this argument tho, there seems to be a huge bloody leap from "being annoyed by drug use" to "literally can't stand anybody who could possibly have ever used any drug"

I'm by no means a puritan, but not wanting to be exposed to fumes against your will is a pretty fucking normal thing.

it is, however, telling that anarchists once again seem to only have any sympathy for the most run-down strata of the lumpenproletariat, leftovers of a bygone mode of production and various rejects of the system. yes, we should sympathise with them, but it is seriously not irrational to exclude them from some things. drug addicts make terrible revolutionaries.

I don't usually reblog shitty responses to go 'whoa look at this shithead', but I'm gonna go for this one because it's an educational example and if you reblog this stuff directly from me and then write this, you're gonna piss me off. So here goes:

Look at the first two paragraphs, the way the post tries to start with a reasonable sounding take, of just 'being annoyed' and 'not wanting to be exposed to fumes'. It's a weak take because nobody said you can't be annoyed by people or that you can't have any non-smoking spaces. Everything was just about accepting addicts as members of your community and not subjecting them to isolation.

But, you see, the first two paragraphs are not meant to be a coherent response to the above, they're meant to set the tone 'I am the voice of reason', to soften the taste of what comes next.

And what comes next, the third paragraph, is just a bunch of slurs about addicts and very poor people. For those unfamiliar with marxist lingo:

And this is ended by rejecting the call of accepting addicts as members of your community because they supposedly 'make terrible revolutionaries'.

Note the huge shift here from 'annoyed by smoke' to judging the character and abilities of the entire group labelled 'addicts'. The original post said 'it's easier to say you hate smokers than to say you hate all drug users' and this poster just did exactly that: lead with 'not wanting to be exposed to fumes' to then whip out the open bigotry in the third act.

The idea that drug addicts can't be revolutionaries is bullshit of course. But this reveals the value system of the 'revolutionary' tumblr user writing this, They see nothing of value in including the most oppressed in their communities and their solidarity, simply for the sake of not leaving anyone behind. Their only standard for who matters is whether they can be productive enough to contribute significantly to the revolution.

With that kind of take, it's understandable why they want you to think it's just about 'being annoyed by drug use'. Because what comes next is just 'fuck the poor' wrapped in marxist language.

responses like this also hijack the conversation away from practical movement-building and towards someones feelings. the post is discussing forming solidarity with ur neighbors to actually solve the problems underlying drug use and addiction and this mf comes in to say "im allowed to be annoyed and want to exclude these ppl from my community"

ok, exclude them how? where will they go? r u just gonna throw em in jail like the state as it exists now does and hope it somehow goes differently? leave them in the wilderness to die from withdrawal? or just ostracize them from all community to make 100% sure that they have no possible escape other than drugs?

but the conversation isnt about questions like that anymore, now its just someone self-soothing bc they got told they believe something harmful and cant accept that idea w/o feeling like an asshole. its straight out of the conservative playbook just dressed in progressive language

"There is an impulse in moments like this to appeal to self-interest. To say: These horrors you are allowing to happen, they will come to your doorstep one day; to repeat the famous phrase about who they came for first and who they'll come for next. But this appeal cannot, in matter of fact, work. If the people well served by a system that condones such butchery ever truly believed the same butchery could one day be inflicted on them, they'd tear the system down tomorrow. And anyway, by the time such a thing happens, the rest of us will already be dead.

"No, there is no terrible thing coming for you in some distant future, but know that a terrible thing is happening to you now. You are being asked to kill off a part of you that would otherwise scream in opposition to injustice. You are being asked to dismantle the machinery of a functioning conscience. Who cares if diplomatic expediency prefers you shrug away the sight of dismembered children? Who cares if great distance from the bloodstained middle allows obliviousness. Forget pity, forget even the dead if you must, but at least fight against the theft of your soul."

quoted passage from Beirut Fragments: A War Memoir by Jean Said Makdisi

It's normal to be hard on yourself, because you want to do the best you can and accomplish everything, even when your time or energy is limited. However, sometimes the criticism towards yourself is too much, and it has a negative impact on your mood and motivation. The next time you catch yourself thinking that you "should" be doing more, pause and see if that's actually helpful, because maybe you're doing as much as you can already.

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ethics of making AI images aside, I do find a bit amusing the kinds of sob stories and mental gymnastics people make up to pretend like drawing is this super technical skill with an impossibly high barrier of entry when its like one of the first hobbies toddlers pick up

suddenly a lot of people think they got the next Lord of the Rings in their head but they were never able to turn their stories into anything tangible because the evil elitist artists are hogging all the talent and skill and they need a bajilion years of training or something as if one of the most popular manga and anime of the past decade wasn't made by a guy that draws like this

Pulling this out of my tags but for real one of the best webcomics(and also best story in general) I have ever read started out looking like this:

You do not have to be Michaelangelo to make art, just make it. Also, obligatory quote from my good man Bob Ross:

Sorry to pull this out of the tags also but I absolutely agree and wanted to elaborate further, bcs like another reason I genuinely think anyone who is interested in art but feels like they suck too much to make it should really just stay away from AI and actually just give drawing a chance is because AI cannot create new art styles. It can only make copies of what you put into it, so much so that if you want something in a specific style you have to tell it the name of the artist you want it to mimic because it cannot make something that doesn't already exist. If all you ever fed it were drawings of stick figures that's all it would ever know how to do.

But humans can make new art styles, every person's art is unique. And when it comes to ONE(author/artist behind Mob Psycho 100 and One Punch Man) and Rich Berlew(author and artist of Order of the Stick), if these guys never just started making their comics we wouldn't have ever been able to see these expressive, funny, strange, and just all around captivating pieces of art!

The image I used of Order of the Stick isn't actually exactly what it looked like at this start, this is:

And THIS is what Order of the Stick looks like now:

And while it does still look similar, it's clear how much Burlew has improved and grown comfortable in his unique artstyle, how far he's come in the last 21 years. The lighting, the line art, the panel layout, all of it has improved while still essentially just being stick figures. And I cannot even begin to describe how much I fucking LOVE the way this comic looks.

Switching to ONE, his art started out super rough

And while One Punch Man did get a new artist...I genuinely think the "better" art has lost a lot of the charm the original had. I'm so glad that ONE did Mob Psycho 100 himself and that the anime mimicked his style rather than trying to make it look more standard like OPM did, because my god, this guy's stuff conveys humor in a way that is as brilliant as it is unique. It's rough, but the roughness doesn't take away from the impact or emotions, it honestly adds to them, and overall it's incredible to see how much ONE has improved, but also how much it still looks like his art:

I do not want to live in a world where ONE and Rich Burlew didn't make their comics because they were too scared of their art looking bad. I don't want to live in a world without these stories and these dynamic and original art styles. Burlew's art legit has given me confidence, I always felt bad that when I finished and colored my art all my lines were so thick and smooth and coloring-book-esque, it's why most of what I post is like, sketches, colored or not. But after reading Order of the Stick I legit cried a little because for the first time I didn't feel bad about just doing the kind of line art that feels right to me, which looks like this:

So fr, please if you want to make art just make art. Everyone's art is unique in one way or another and if you just rely on AI all the time we'll never get to see styles like ONE and Rich Burlew's and again, I don't want to live in a world where we don't get to see all of these amazing, imperfect works of art. I want to see YOUR art, because it's yours, and the world is a better place with your art in it.

?????????

He’s financially abusing women he pressured into carrying his children.

"It's mere routine for imperial powers to strike terrorists oceans away" could it be not though? I think it would be nice if they would not bomb people.

"but the Houthis are bad"

And there's people still defending this. Por favor no sean tan pelotudos.

I mean the best thing that leak did is to prove that US airstrikes are not about protecting the country or fighting terrorism but for posturing the US as a strong country (all the comments about dick measuring with the Europeans)

You would think people picked up in that hypocresy but they didn't and that's because in a sense they still think that bombing people is acceptable.

"This group is overwhelmingly arab" lol I love how they gotta say this because palestinians with israeli citizenship will always skew the results

guys this is so crazy to me i feel like we're regressing if we, despite the history of this country droning and bombing civilians and covering it up to, are still led to believe at face value that the people killed were "justified targets this time around!" And now that trump is in charge well the guy and his fascist crew certainly believe who theyre bombing are all guilty, right?

In 2009, the Obama administration conducted "the first known U.S. cruise missile strike in southern Yemen . . . That strike, which killed 14 alleged "militants," also killed at least 41 civilians, including 21 children and nine women, five of whom were pregnant at the time."

The Obama administration would continue to claim that their drone strikes were "exceptionally surgical and precise" and "do not put… innocent men, women and children in danger" but we know then and now there was mass civilian casualties.

In 2013, the administration launched four Hellfire missiles in a counterterrorism operation in Yemen. The Obama administration claimed all killed were militants and terrorists, witnesses said the administration killed a wedding procession

We know that the Obama administration would define militant as any "military aged male" to drastically lower the "non-combatant" death

Biden continued this policy. In 2021 there was footage showing a drone strike killing civilians, seven of the ten those killed children. In fact civilian deaths are so rampant that this "mistake" continues to happen. In Syria, the biden admin claimed to kill an al-Qaeda leader then find out they killed a father of ten children

Now, with the lack of accountability, may we ask why the hell we should believe that this airstrike the TRUMP administration sent killed only the "bad guys". He killed civilians in Yemen before

Whats even more just disappointing is that people not only believing at face value what the administration will say who they target, but the complete pivot from "progressive" people being against droning to just not caring. I was in class this semester and my professor thought it would be a fun learning exercise to ask the class how many civilian deaths would they be alright with if it killed so and so top dictators and people kept their hand up for 100+ civilians. I had to disrupt that shit and say "so would any of you would have raised your hand if it was you and your family at risk of being killed because canada claimed they needed to bomb your town to eliminate a terrorist group and they cant help but kill civilians because its just war?" and surprise i was met with silence.

Can we bring back being against droning? can we make that a mainstream belief again wth.

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not unique to zionists really but i get so angry at how zionists respond to hard facts with hypothetical nonsense. a Palestinian or pro-Palestine person will say something along the lines of, "Palestine is being ethnically cleansed, here is all the evidence, including witness and survivor testimonies from people on the ground and even the perpetrators" and zionists will almost always respond with something like, "but WHAT IF we didn't ethnically cleanse and WHAT IF these people then killed everyone and WHAT IF i had to hide in the basement forever from these EVIL ARABS that i literally just made up and aren't real but WHAT IF all that happened and then the Holocaust happened again??" and none of what they say is referring to a concrete present. its always this "what if", this unreality, that they then expect you to stoop to and argue from as if its legitimate. Palestinians, Lebanese, etc we're always speaking of our experiences and the experiences of our families and friends of real events etc but Zionists rarely ever are. but somehow the world is more willing to believe their genocidal fantasies than the reality Arabs face because that's racism and colonialism, i guess. the weaponisation of lies and dellusion

every single article, post or mention of a Muslim or Latino person on a Visa or Green Card getting dragged off the street by masked men in broad daylight has the same exact comments: "wow, they're gonna start doing this to citizens soon." some of these people have lived here since they were 8 months old and have lived here for over 30 years. it's very telling that Americans are still are managing to separate them in their head from a "citizen" and that their outrage will be far greater when it's someone who "actually lives here" as if 3 decades in the same country shouldn't qualify you for the same rights as everyone else.

yeah so you are actually part of the problem. you assumed this was about conservatives. but i am referring to this being said by American liberals to other American liberals in fear that they are next, while completely and utterly disregarding that it's happening to people who have lived here their entire life unless they can find one who voted for Trump and then they squirm with joy over getting to use the term "face eating leopards" like you just did.

do liberals have empathy or decency? i really am starting to doubt it because the entire political ideology since November has been "Trump supporters have no empathy or decency, they're not human, they deserve to die and if you didn't vote for Kamala, then you deserve to die, too."

furthermore, it's people like you who sarcastically say "thoughts and prayers" and "FAFO" under news articles about dozens of people getting killed by tornadoes in the South or drowning from floods and saying shit like "Bon voyage" to Latino people getting deported because "their Uncle voted for Trump and asked for this" that has subsequently caused people to realize your advocacy for people is paper thin horse shit. Palestine is another great example.

the entire American political philosophy across the board has basically just turned into a giant circle jerk dehumanization campaign against anyone and everyone who disagrees with you. i want people in this country who want me dead to still have free health care and education because my advocacy for what is right is not hinged on someone else's behavior. i am not going to derive joy from someone's suffering in this way because i understand how we are all harmed by what is taking place. my beliefs are not conditional. that is why i hated Joe Biden.

like... you're making the correct argument, but for the wrong people. why would Trump supporters listen to this rationale? everyone is WELL AWARE that Trump supporters are, by and large, okay with this and are NOT going to be persuaded by "it could happen to you." the PROBLEM is that American LIBERALS and regular, every day center of the road people are supposed to be the ones who don't need incentive for it to "happen to citizens" in order to actually stand up and do something and they're the ones saying this shit. they're smashing Tesla cars and line dancing in the street. hello?????

the liberal urge to deny structural causes for oppression via asserting that "conservatives" are "just picking groups at random" to scapegoat for their "culture war"

it's not random, and the very existence of the constructed "group" itself should be a clue. all groupings are always already political.

Many people have said this before, and I’ve said this previously on my prior blog, but the ways the media demonize Palestinians and Black Americans as innately criminal and terroristic and thus deserving of any violence inflicted against them by vigilantes and the state should be more in conversation with each other. The fact that the victims have their entire lives scrutinized after their deaths reads too similar to me.

Different places and contexts but it’s ultimately the same phenomenon of declaring the whole population of an oppressed people to be anti-social militants so you can justify violence against them.

the funny thing is that i don't think younger people - and i mean those under the age of 40 - really have a grasp on how many of today's issues can be tied back to a disastrous reagan policy:

this is just what i could come up with in a relatively short time and i did not even live under this man's presidency. the level at which ronald reagan has broken the united states truly can't be overstated.

I do not believe in Hell, but I will make an exception for Reagan.