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bfpnola · 1 year

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Abolition For Beginners (2023 Edition)

In honor of Tyre Nichols and all others we have lost to policing and imprisonment. In honor of Black History Month. In honor of Better Future Program's mission to educate and serve marginalized youth globally... Let's break down abolition, again. (As usual on Tumblr, tap for better quality.)

Image description below. Written by @reaux07. Proofread by the volunteers and supporters of @bfpnola.

Image Description:

[ID: All of the following slides use a wrinkled, black fabric as their background with black text (bolded red added for emphasis) on top of white boxes with rounded corners. “@bfpnola” is written in the top right corner and the sources for the slide are in the bottom left corner.

Title Slide (No. 1):

Written in red text, “UPDATED FROM 2021 EDITION.” The outlines of the word “ABOLITION” is written line by line 8 times in light grey with the year “2023” written on top in bold, white lettering. Below, written in red within a white bubble and red arrow, it reads “FOR BEGINNERS*.” Across from the bubble, “@BFPNOLA” is in red. Below, in red again, the asterisk mentioned before leads to the following note: “This post is heavily text-based so if you do not learn best by reading, feel free to utilize our Abolition Study Guide in our bio under "Social Justice Resources" instead!” Lastly, white stars and outlines of grey circles can be seen in each corner of the slide.

Slide No. 2 reads:

Abolition is an anti-capitalist, intersectional framework that aims to not only destroy the cages created by various “industrial complexes,” but to create inclusive, effective alternatives for addressing harm. As defined by Dr. Jennie Wang-Hall, an “industrial complex (IC) is a system that creates profit through embedding into social inequities and providing an ineffective product that keeps consumers under-resourced and returning for more.”

The most common examples of such systems? Prison and policing, psychiatry, foster care/family policing, the military, and even the Family (as an institution, not kinship altogether).

Despite common misconceptions, abolition is not just a negation of what currently exists, but an active evolution of what community-based support can and has looked like. Abolition is about the radical working-class imagination, about Black and Indigenous imagination.

If individualistic, reactive, punishment-based strategies are maintained, true accountability and rehabilitation will never exist. Instead, we can choose to be proactive, analyze the circumstances that perpetuate violence, and address harm at the root! Of course, no one is saying that harm will completely cease to exist, but to paraphrase butch anarchist Lee Shevek, wouldn’t it be a profound improvement to expand our capacity to respond to harm and challenge our abusers, rather than being restricted to system-granted authority? Especially when such systems deliberately ignore the suffering of marginalized communities (e.g. people of color, queer and trans folks, women and femmes, Mad and disabled folks, and so on) to begin with?

Sources: @Dr.JennieWH, @ButchAnarchy, Stella Akua Mensah, Erin Miles Cloud, @WokeScientist

Slide No. 3 reads:

Before we continue any further, let’s destroy the myth that cops actually stop violence. First off, we can’t depend on crime stats at face value because this begs the question of who exactly gets to define what counts as a “crime” and why (e.g. drug possession and sleeping in public vs. tax evasion of the wealthy and wage theft). Continuing, crime rates often only reflect violations that have actually been reported, chosen to be shown, and deemed out of line. By this logic, crime rates are simply reflections of cops’ perceptions, not of the material and emotional realities of the proletariat (i.e. the working-class).

As for perpetuating violence, “US law enforcement killed at least 1,183 people in 2022, making it the deadliest year on record for police violence.” (And those are just the deaths that were reported. In our home state of Louisiana, turns out the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office, as of January 12, 2023, has been unlawfully destroying records of officer misconduct for at least 10 years.) Many (69%) of these murders were cases in which no offense was alleged, were mental health or welfare checks, or involved traffic violations and other nonviolent offenses.

This is, of course, without even touching on the involuntary servitude (i.e. enslavement) and maltreatment ongoing in American prisons. How many more deaths must occur before the general public says enough is enough? Or is this acceptable since these are working-class, disabled, Mad, non-white, queer, and trans lives being lost?

Sources: @InterruptCrim, The Guardian, Mapping Police Violence, @VeriteNewsNola

Slide No. 4 reads:

So we agree police are harmful. Why abolition instead of reform? Historically, reforms have either provided further funding to the prison, foster care, and psychiatric industrial complexes and/or just reinforced harmful ideologies surrounding policing as a whole. And trust us, these systems already have more than enough money. In the fiscal year of 2021, at least $277,153,670,501 were spent on federal law enforcement and prisons as well as on police and prisons by state and local governments. Can you even conceptualize a number that large? We could end all American medical debt with that much money. We could even provide clean water and waste disposal to everyone on Earth!

Continuing, reforms like body cameras are pitched as making officers more accountable, that if “done right” policing will actually keep people safe, and that those who do not use excessive force are suddenly no longer guilty of perpetuating centuries worth of systemic oppression. In reality, body cameras require further funding and increase surveillance!

Similarly, civilian oversight boards and the push to “jail killer cops” reinforce the belief that cases of murder, assault, falsifying information, and so on are exceptional occurrences rather than intrinsic to the very nature of policing itself. This is where the phrase “All Cops Are Bastards” comes into play, stating that while the individual character of some officers may be morally permissible, all cops are part of a “bastardized,” or corrupt, system.

Sources: Security Policy Reform Institute, Matt Korostoff, @CriticalResistance

Slide No. 5 reads:

Even laws don’t prevent police violence, e.g. the murder of Eric Garner despite the NYPD passing a policy against chokeholds, or the murder of Daunte Wright despite the passing of the George Floyd Law Enforcement Trust and Integrity Act and a separate Justice in Policing Act of 2020.

Alternatively, we can advocate against the expansion of policing “responsibilities,” i.e. not allowing officers to address Mad individuals in vulnerable states, the housing crisis, or people who use drugs (PWUD). We can reroute funding into non-coercive, peer-led initiatives for harm reduction, de-escalation, first aid, and self-defense. And maybe most importantly, we can reaffirm that EXTENSIVE power can, in fact, be found amongst everyday folks like you and me!

Abolition is not a one-and-done sort of deal but rather a progression of steps toward an infinite future of improvements. The act of building parallel infrastructures and modes of governance while the previous ones still exist is known as dual power. Abolition must begin as dual power. We can start today!

And in building such, these steps cannot: legitimize or expand oppressive systems we aim to dismantle, create divisions between “deserving” and “underserving” people, preserve existing power relations, or utilize exclusionary, one-size-fits-all, standardized treatments.

Sources: @ProjectLets, @HarmReductionCoalition, CrimethInc., Survived & Punished NY

Slide No. 6 reads:

One of the main questions brought up, though, is what abolitionists plan to do in the case of homicide, rape, domestic violence, and other harms. While this is entirely valid, this question seems to imply that 1) police are already effectively responding to such harms rather than perpetuating and/or ignoring them and 2) that there is one collective abolitionist response.

For one, the majority of sexual assault, for example, goes unreported and less than 0.5% of perpetrators are incarcerated. (And this assumes that through the reporting process and incarceration, survivors will somehow find healing, perpetrators will find understanding, and that sexual assault does not continue within prisons.) Meanwhile, let’s use our hometown as one example of many, a complaint of sexual violence is filed against a New Orleans Police Department officer every 10 days and nearly 1 in 5 NOPD officers have been reported for sexual and/or intimate partner violence.

And secondly, we have a plethora of organizations like Critical Resistance and cultures like that of the Diné (Navajo) to learn from and build upon. We don’t have to be stuck within this false dilemma fallacy, that there is only policing or total chaos. Don’t you see that that is the state’s way of constricting communal power?

Sources: @RAINN, @CopWatchNola, @WokeScientist

Slide No. 7 reads:

To expand this conversation, abolition heavily aligns with the political ideal of “anarchism.” Anarchism supports the absence of government and absolute freedom of the individual. And despite its negative connotations, anarchy also reflects an evolution of community-based care rather than just a deconstruction of what currently exists.

A simplified version of its 6 agreed-upon principles are:

Autonomy and Horizontality: define yourself on your own terms, we stand on an equal footing

Mutual Aid: bonds of solidarity form a stronger social glue than fear, support your community

Voluntary Association: associate or don't associate with whomever you wish

Direct Action: accomplish goals directly rather than depending on representatives or authorities

Revolution: overthrow those in power who enforce coercive hierarchies (ex. white supremacy)

Self-Liberation: you must be at the forefront of your own liberation, freedom must be taken

While being an abolitionist does not require alignment with anarchism, it is worth considering how the state plays such an enduring role in various social harms. Concurrently, whenever you treat other living beings with consideration and respect, come to reasonable compromise rather than coercion, and decide to share or delegate tasks, you are already living by anarchist principles.

Sources: Peter Gelderloos, David Graeber

Slide No. 8 reads:

So, how can you get involved? How do we continue the efforts already being made by activists worldwide? After such an overload of information and even more to learn, we understand how political frameworks like abolition can seem daunting, but they don't have to be! Here are some general next steps:

Read the "8toAbolition" steps.

Look into "podmapping" so you know whom to run to when you have been harmed or perpetuate harm.

See if there are any pre-existing mutual aid networks in your community, and if not, start one with your neighbors or peers!

Begin to research issues affecting communities other than your own. Abolition is intrinsically tied to all of us as we are all surveilled. For example, do you understand how prison and policing further ableism, transphobia, or the sex trade? What about policing internationally (see our allies in: the Kingdom of Hawai'i, Palestine, Artsakh, Kashmir...)?

Research the differences between capitalism, socialism, and communism. Abolition and anti-capitalism are foundational to one another as well.

Look into the other industrial complexes we named in the beginning (psychiatry, foster care, the military, the Family...).

Volunteer (remotely or in-person) with organizations like Better Future Program (@bfpnola) to both educate yourself and directly serve your community!

And if you're looking for further reading/listening, BFP offers over 3,000 FREE social justice, mental health, and academic resources in our Linktr.ee, including study guides for beginners. While we can't promise that the struggle for liberation will always be easy, BFP will always do its best to support you in whatever way we know how.

End ID.]

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nataliesscatorccio · 11 months

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about kevyn tan. like, why did this burnout goth kid elect to enter The System despite being so fringe in his youth? kevyn is first presented as our suburb 90s version of alternative gender expression, but he wears the goth title the same way he wears the cop title. loosely, ill fitting. this guy? really? on the surface he seems likable, but! but. he is always trying to be the most "inoffensive" in an offensive party, no matter which side of the line on. (he doesnt say anything when nat is harassed by the boys in the car, like he doesn't say anything about the out of line "undercover" work Saracusa does on the Sadecki case). he only takes on either role (goth/cop) because he thinks it will impress a girl. in a show centered so much around girlhood, womanhood — we have travis, who starts out immediately (begrudgingly) taking this very Masculine role in all the regular teen boy ways he's been bullied into but then also in the grown man ways he has to in his father's absence, for javi. and we have kevyn who is experimenting with a more Feminine self expression. they both suck at it. natalie has to cut the ring off of coach martinez's finger for travis to bring it back to javi. natalie has to tell kevyn not to use sharpie on his nails. but then javi goes missing for travis, and natalie goes missing for kevyn. without javi, travis can begin to slip into this honorarily Girl role that he was never allowed to before, a role he is more comfortable in. (travis' angry outbursts through the series are almost always linked back to moments when he is being asked to perform Manhood, vs the peace and comfort it brings him when someone else relieves him of that burden. like nat asking him not to go on tai's hike, and the sex scene where hallucination lottie holds him gently, opposed to how much nat saying "I want you so bad" scared him off). while travis is studying the blade coming into womanhood in the wilderness through his loss of bodily autonomy, through adhering to the rituals they begin to set (the laws of the wilderness/girlcode) and finally his emotional and bloody participation in the birth of shauna's ("their") baby... kevyn is in society coming into manhood by the laws of civilization, now that he no longer has nat to, yes, guide him but more importantly to wear the uniform for. travis wants to be a part of girlhood. kevyn covets girlhood, the same way he covets nirvana. he doesn't actually care about it, he just wants it to be his and nat's thing. he liked it better when it was just them. he begins his descent to cop (derogatory) as travis begins his ascent to deadwife (affectionate). later when nat tells kevyn that he and travis were a lot alike, it's true and it isn't. they have the same middle point, but only pass by each other briefly on their way to opposite ends of the spectrum, where they were headed all along.

#yellowjackets #kevyn tan #travis martinez #natalie scatorccio #javi martinez

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skeletonsgeorg · 1 month

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Okay so here are my silly doodles for Earthspark: Shattered Glass

Musings below the cut

I love Earthspark in large part because of its narrative against black/white thinking and the idea that defining "good vs. evil" is easy. And in canon Earthspark even the worst Decepticons are portrayed as just kinda sillygoofy????? So I don't imagine the Autobots would be tooooo bad. Especially with Optronix defecting to the Decepticons because he just. Got bored with torturing and slaughtering his way across the galaxy and was like "You know what would be hilarious. What would just be really fucking funny. If I swapped sides, LMAO."

Anyway I thought about drawing a parole anklet on Optronix up there but I figured instead they would install a remote detonation device inside his spark chamber a la Suicide Squad in exchange for allowing him to keep the Matrix of Leadership in his chest. Optronix came up with the idea. He said it was his Act of Profference to Megatron and Megatron is just like "?????"

Speaking of Megatron he has deep entrenched eye bags because Optronix is his conjunx partner and because his handler is Agent Jon Schloder, who inherits his canon timeline sister's genocidal hatred of Cybertronians in this AU. Also he's busy managing all of the Decepticons and being a diplomat to Earth. He's still besties with Dot though, who in this AU is a cop because she prioritizes duty and the law and her work ahead of her family.

Also Optronix is besties with Karen Croft because Karen was really into True Crime shows as a youth and thinks him being a repentant serial killer is cool as heck, she owns all of his merchandise.

Breakdown is the teacher of the Terrans in this AU and he carries a deep sadness within him because he yearns to help his best friend Bumblebee recover from millions of years of enslavement under Optronix but Bumblebee is off being insane in the wilderness or something. Breakdown looks for him in his freetime.

The Terrans themselves are relatively unchanged, though perhaps a touch more anarchic/chaotic.

And now I'm out of time andweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee the cat is attacking the keyboard so let me know if I should keep musing???

#transformers earthspark #transformers shattered glass #optronix #megatron #tfe optimus prime #tfe megatron #tfe breakdown #the maltos #transformers #tfe headcanons #noel draws

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qweerhet · 3 months

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reading list requests take about 10x longer to fulfill than other asks as i'm multiply disabled. if you send a request for reading recs, i will most likely get around to it eventually, but it may take several months.

this is an anonymous sideblog where i dump my political & discourseposting. i will probably not argue with you in reblogs, but i may respond to good-faith challenges in reblogs. i appreciate healthy & constructive discussion. my inbox is generally open, but i don't respond to about 50% of anons i get, so you're taking a risk by attempting to contact me that route.

i cannot tag consistently as i use this blog as a "dumping ground." however i do attempt to tag in-depth discussion of csa as "cw csa"

if you ask me for information regarding my personal life, i am going to assume you are a cop.

if there's a political opinion that is so disgusting to you that you feel the need to write callout posts about people who have it, do us both a favor and just assume i have that opinion before following this blog.

you may be interested in following this blog if you like:

post-left anarchism

youth liberation

prison abolition & transformative justice

radical disability liberation

the psychiatric survivor movement & antipsychiatry

transfeminism

radical sex positivity

this blog has a high likelihood of making you incredibly angry if your opinions on any of the above happen to include:

anarchoprimitivism

pro-child-molestation ideology

physical vs. mental disability separatism

transfem separatism

belief in the validity of the sex binary and/or utility of CASAB language

carceral solutions to mental health issues (including paraphilic disorders)

belief in the utility of callout posts, harassment campaigns, or other forms of en masse unpersoning/shunning

belief in the validity of thought crime of any form

stay safe and don't talk to cops.

#pinned

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cock-holliday · 7 months

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The conditional support many give re: Palestine is frankly a bit alarming. For many, they can fortunately empathize with slaughtered helpless civilians—a feat apparently impossible for our administration—but any sort of active resistance is either ignored or lumped in with the exceptions to your support.

I am not referring to the “killing of Israeli citizens”, I am talking about the killing of military leaders, the storming of Israeli bases, the destruction and liberation of prisons, the bulldozing of part of the border wall. Right now, Palestinian youths have been getting into skirmishes at the wall. There have been fistfights and gunfights with the IOF in various towns not held under Hamas control.

The video of Ukrainian civilians making molotov cocktails to defend their towns was celebrated, photos of Ukrainian kids with guns was a harrowing but honorable display of their commitment to their homes…Palestinians with guns are “terrorists.”

Footage of skirmishes with cops in Portland and New York showed the fighting spirit of people uprising against injustice…kids throwing stones at tanks and flashbangs at the wall are either ignored or framed as “playing into Hamas’s hands.”

Israel doesn’t care if it kills its own people to slaughter Palestinians but Palestinians taking an active role in resistance are “giving Israel an excuse to attack.”

Palestinian existence IS the excuse.

Why can we celebrate resistance in other forms but not this time? Why do Palestinians only get sympathy as helpless victims, but emboldened fighters with nothing to lose fighting back with their last breaths are a condemnable offense?

This is so much more than Israel vs Hamas, and Hamas is a monster of Israel’s own creation

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catholic-character-tournament · 11 months

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Round 2 - Side B

Propaganda below ⬇️

Paul

he's like if renfield from dracula was cool youth pastor.

He's also a priest, who essentially becomes a vampire due to an "angel" and tries to convert the entire town. He also runs an Alcoholics Anonymous group. I love him

Listen you've probably gotten this guy idk how many times but JUST IN CASE, I submitted him. He's a priest who fell in love and had a lesbian daughter. He becomes a vampire after his money-laundering fundie simp sent him to the Holy Land. He's so torn up over his lover having dementia and God allowing so much overwhelming death that he decides he's going to try to Cure Death Forever but oh boy is it a slippery slope and the man is surrounded by enablers.

so i binged watch the chosen (it's a drama series but it's the bible) and I needed to balance or else Id be insane so I watched midnight mass. It was good. Fuck this rat. I loved the ending though -- op

Father Brown

He's one of the most open minded catholic priests I've ever seen in media. He's curious, clever, and kind. He solves mysteries the cops can't. He hangs out with a handyman/petty thief, the Lady of the local manor and her niece, and his parish secretary/town gossip on the regular. He's frenemies with a master thief. His bosses hate him but his parish loves him. He can't cook for shit.

#father paul hill #midnight mass #cct polls #tumblr tournament #tumblr bracket #tumblr polls #father brown #polls #r2sb

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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 13 days

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By: Helen Dale

Published: Apr 29, 2024

A new book raises tough questions about the history of gay liberation

Trans activism has caused bitter divisions within the gay rights movement

Medical professionals responding incorrectly to gender nonconformity has dire consequences

When scriptwriter Gareth Roberts was 14, he called a helpline promoted by a new organisation, one dedicated to helping gay and lesbian youth. The operator tried to set him up on a date with a 19-year-old. Fortunately, the young Roberts had the wit to realise this ‘was a very bad idea’.

A related organisation opened the first – and, at the time, only gay youth club in the country. Roberts joined, only to discover meeting rooms and communal areas littered with literature from PIE. That, for readers who aren’t gay or lesbian and of a certain vintage, stands for ‘Paedophile Information Exchange’.

What you need to understand – as Roberts argues in his first book, Gay Shame: The Rise of Gender Ideology and the New Homophobia – is ‘that there was a prominent streak of gay activism that was absolutely insane’. And, despite major successes borne of both a mature response to the AIDS crisis and opposition to Section 28, the bonkers quality never went away. That said, he admits he didn’t expect ‘the gay rights movement transmogrifying into a cross between the Church of Scientology, Heathers: the Musical and Act 4 of The Crucible’.

In Gay Shame, Roberts does two things. First, he explains how and why trans activism has become the ‘official’ gay rights movement that now (bitterly) divides gays and lesbians. It’s impossible not to notice the extent to which fights over trans issues often involve two opposed teams of homosexuals: Stonewall vs LGB Alliance. Roberts is a gay man and directs ordnance (for the most part) at gay men while also contextualising this division in an intelligent way. However, when feminist and lesbian adherents of the religion he calls ‘genderism’ cross his radar, they cop a similarly witty serve.

Secondly – and in a way that tracks the careful evidence-gathering of the Cass Review – he conveys the extent to which transgenderism represents ‘transing the gay away’. Most of the children who went through the Tavistock – 9,000 of them in all according to Cass – were same-sex attracted or simply gender nonconforming. Rising numbers, year-on-year, of glittery, swishy little boys and even more sporty but quirky little girls.

‘This is an ideology,’ Roberts points out in a coruscating passage, ‘that says there is something wrong with camp little boys and butch little girls and that they need to be fixed’.

This is impressive despite its grimness. Gay Shame only came out last Thursday, and – due to typical lead-times in publishing – was written in 2023. Despite a stint as a writer for Dr Who, Roberts didn’t nick the Tardis and get early access to the Cass report. This care and foresight has the effect of forcing readers – both heterosexual and homosexual – to think about how we respond to gender nonconforming behaviour.

Most people do not understand what it’s like to be gender nonconforming or appreciate the extent to which gender nonconforming people stick out like sore thumbs. Gays, lesbians and bisexuals won social acceptance before everyone else properly ‘got’ us. Roberts’ hands must be a mess, because he grasps every bloody nettle on the gay male side of the equation: from the extent to which gay male sexuality is utterly unlike straight male sexuality (because it does not involve women) to taking aim at a string of overpraised, low-quality gay male contributions to popular culture.

Does that mean every gay man on the planet sleeps around and adores Eurovision? No, of course not, but there are also no lesbian chemsex parties and heterosexuals really don’t have to pretend Eurovision is bloody marvellous. Meanwhile, if a straight man wanted some sort of chemsex equivalent, it would involve handing over a lot of cash to a group of women he doesn’t know in icky bits of London he would prefer not to frequent.

This absence of theory of mind – common but not universal when dealing with people unlike oneself – has implications. In a discussion of what he concedes is ‘a small minority of gay men,’ Roberts observes how ‘the Metropolitan Police’s shockingly inept handling of the case of the serial rapist and murderer Stephen Port in London in 2014/15 was partly down to their assumptions about the chemsex deaths of gay men’.

Of value is Roberts’ account of what he calls ‘the fall of Stonewall’, which was, in retrospect, astonishingly swift. ‘You can literally narrow it down to about three weeks in late 2014,’ he told me last week. He documents the extent to which Stonewall’s pivot to trans activism arose in part because it fell for queer theory (‘peer review is the process by which academics mark each other’s homework,’ he observes, tartly) and partly because it had won. ‘What was Stonewall for?’ Roberts asks. ‘It had no active political campaigns left to fight in the UK. But it had a huge staff, and a massive engine room of fundraising and campaigning machinery. A tender full of coal and no track’.

One effect of Stonewall’s pivot – and later persecution, along with Mermaids, of the LGB Alliance – was that the latter organisation spent years fighting off attacks on its charitable status, unable to do much else. Only recently has it been able to work normally, ‘doing,’ as Roberts says, ‘exactly the same work as Stonewall did before its fall to genderism’.

Gay Shame raises all sorts of difficult questions. It’s really striking, for example, what a recurrent feature the sexualising of children is within allegedly ‘liberatory’ streams of thought. This manifests in something Roberts calls ‘The Leap’. The Leap consists of the belief that ‘people (including, incredibly, children) are always what they claim to be, rather than what they are’.

Roberts’ discussion of gay men and gay male sexuality – and of male and female gender nonconformity more widely – also serves to remind the rest of us that we know very little about homosexuality. I know loads of ‘right-on’ straight parents who bought their son girl toys or their daughter boy toys. The kids simply blew them off. This, I’m afraid, is because most children are gender conforming. Gender has biological roots: the stereotyped behaviours it produces mean that deviations are really going to show. The thing is, gender nonconforming behaviour and the homosexuality and bisexuality that often accompany it also have biological roots, but we don’t know why.

In biology, a spandrel is a phenotypic trait that’s a by-product of some other evolved characteristic, rather than a direct product of adaptive selection. It’s a term borrowed from cathedral architecture, where it refers to something decorative, but which provides no structural support. Maybe some homosexuals don’t mind the idea that we’re just the fancy bit at the corner of an arch, but we’re too common to be an evolutionary spandrel. We exist for a reason. Why would evolution throw up a group of people of both sexes who are attracted to their own sex? Not exactly going to contribute to reproducing the species, are we?

Gareth Roberts isn’t sure that ‘genderism’ will collapse. At the end of Gay Shame, he presents two plausible scenarios. One depicts a world where queer theory and all its works and all its ways has gone down the long slide and all seems well. The other shows what things look like in the event of a genderist win. And in that world, the grim joke that emerged among staff at the Tavistock has come true. There are no gay people left.

#Helen Dale #Gareth Roberts #homosexuality #bisexuality #gay conversion therapy #gay conversion #gay rights #genderism #gender ideology #gender identity ideology #gay not queer #queer theory #intersectional feminism #gender nonconforming #gender non conforming #trans the gay away #medical scandal #medical corruption #religion is a mental illness

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grandma-battle · 1 year

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propaganda below !!

Sophie Hatter | @kyriad-iel & @lord-of-pterodactyls

A very energic granny, but a granny!

Pinako Rockbell | @spidermanifested & anonymous

little old lady who lives with her dog out in the countryside... and also a genius surgeon and mechanic who raised 2 successive generations to follow in her footsteps. was known in her youth as "the pantheress of resembool", striking fear into the hearts of men. her best friend was like 500 years old and hadnt aged a day since they met 50 years ago but that was none of her business and so she simply never gave a shit. made a prosthetic leg for her dog. yells at cops. outlived the aforementioned 500 year old friend. will live forever probably. somehow lost to a dog that wasnt even hers in the fma character poll and we need to avenge her

she's Winry's grandmother and is an automail engineer (and apparently a surgeon too?!)

#grandmabattle #grandmapolls #round one ✧.*#sophie hatter #howls moving castle #pinako rockbell #fullmetal alchemist #fma brotherhood

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shinidamachu · 2 years

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Sid, I know you’re mostly an InuKag blog and this probably isn’t your area of expertise, but as a POC the discourse surrounding Kikyo - and by extension InuKik as a ship - really bothers me.

Seems like all anyone can focus on about Kikyo as a character is stupid Iove triangle shipping discourse, if she is hated or called out it’s generally only for that reason and that reason alone. Otherwise if people aren’t hating her because “she gets in the way of InuKag,” she’s treated as this cool girlboss who’s a tragic figure and simply misunderstood, now this is not to erase the complexities and nuance that is inherent to her character, but it kinda bothers me that she’s not called out more for her actual crime in actually being really low-key racist? Like personally she’s one of the most problematic characters in the franchise to me.

The way she treats Inuyasha throughout the anime and manga she acts like she’s doing him a favor and gives off strong “I can’t be racist, I have a black friend/bf!” vibes. She treats him as one of the “good demons” constantly comparing him to the full-blooded ones saying how he’s not like *that* because he has human blood. She straight out just asks him if he ever just thought of stopping being biracial essentially, telling him to throw half of his identity and race away and get rid of his problematic “ethnic features.” She is literally Microaggressions: The Character.

And I know IY is fiction and demons aren’t an actual race that exists in real life, but I’m of the belief that fiction does not exist in a vacuum, it influences and informs reality just like reality informs it. The whole “demons vs humans” conflict that is at the center of the narrative and a hanyou’s place in it feels like it’s meant to be a direct allegory/metaphor for racism between different ethnic groups out in the real world and how mixed people are often caught in the middle. Inuyasha to me reads as a very POC-coded character with very distinct physical features alien to the dominant human society that he is judged for constantly. And maybe I’m just being overly sensitive but it feels really wrong that shipping drama is people’s biggest issue with Kikyo when they’re kinda ignoring this big 5ft pink elephant in the room? I mean tons of other fandoms are always ready to decry and call out the racism inherent to their franchises so why doesn’t the IY fandom? (Though the callouts of Sunrise over whitewashing Shiori in Yashahime was a good start)

InuKik’s whole relationship in general is just really uncomfortable and has these weird racial power undertones to it, I mean Kikyo is a respected village authority who is a Miko in charge of protecting the village in demons, so literally in the position of a “cop,” while Inuyasha himself is a poor, disenfranchised minority youth who’s discriminated against day in and day out and Kikyo basically takes it as her task to play white savior and try to “rehabilitate/civilize” him society, all while she clearly has the upper hand and holds all the privilege between the two and yet she wants to play little miss “woe is me” and pretends or even dismisses the fact that she has any privilege at all? That her and Inuyasha “are in the exact same position???”

And sure we could talk about misogynist double standards and how it’s unfair I’m suddenly interested in “cancelling” her character when Sesshomaru himself is also a big ass racist, but see the difference is is that at least Sesshomaru is an upfront, out-and out open racist. Neither he nor the narrative ever attempt to paint him in the right and openly criticize and give him comeuppance for his racist attitude in life which he has to actively learn from. Kikyo on the other hand is imo the much more dangerous type of racist, she’s the insidious “covert” racist, who might not even realize they’re being racist but has internalized a lot of toxic societal messaging regarding certain skin colors (Or I guess in IY’s case, supernatural powers and animal-like physical features) and so overtly looks down on POC and does a lot more institutional harm to them than a KKK-style racist like Sesshomaru could ever do. She’s not a self-aware racist, which imo is the much more dangerous type.

Anyways sorry for going off on this long rant to you like this, it’s just always bugged me that the fandom seems to overlook this major flaw and problematic connotations surrounding Kikyo’s character when this is an an extremely important issue that deserves to be talked about more and has much more serious implications than any petty shipping debates.

I'm gonna preface this by saying I'm not white either. However, this doesn't necessarily make me an expert on the subject by any means. It's definitely not my intention to speak for every people of color in the fandom. I'm simply sharing a personal opinion.

Of course Inuyasha is fiction and demons aren't an actual race, but as you so pertinently put it: fiction doesn't exist in a vacuum. It influences and informs reality and, in return, reality equally influences and informes fiction.

Inuyasha's predicament is a very clear representation of racism. Just because it doesn't get called out by name, it doesn't mean it's not there. The prejudice, the discrimination and the ostracizing he went through certainly are.

The unfair way in which he has been treated might have nothing to do with his skin tone, but it's deeply associated with his status as a half demon, something he can't nor should naturally change. For an allegory, it can't get more explicit than this.

In that sense, it matters little which real life minority we think Inuyasha was coded after. What's really important is recognizing that his half demon heritage carries an undeserved stigma. It shaped who he is and how he's perceived by others. As a result, everything concerning his demonic blood will inevitably rise very real racial issues. That's why Kikyo comes off in a bad light.

She initially spared Inuyasha's life because she didn't see him as a half demon, but as a half human. And then she got into her head that, due to their shared loneliness, they were not so different — completely neglecting the fact that said loneliness came from totally different places.

Like I've said before: Inuyasha didn’t choose loneliness. Everyone else chose to isolate him. Kikyo, on the other hand, isolated herself. Both Kaede – as the village priestess – and Kagome – as the new guardian of the Jewel – proved that it's more than possible to fulfil their duties while still mantaining deep, meaningful connections to other people. Kagome in particular relied on those connections for her power to grow.

And so Kikyo had the option to simply drop everything if she so desired: pass the Jewel on, stop using her powers and start fresh somewhere. She had the option to ask for help, to let people in.

At the same time, all the reasons why she doesn't are completely understandable. It makes perfect sense for her character, fleshs out her personality and it makes her interesting from a storytelling perspective. What she didn't have was the right to compare her situation to Inuyasha's, who didn't have the luxury of choosing.

Of course, having a little sister who loved her to death and an entire village worshipping the ground she walked on aren't impediments to feeling lonely or depressed, but it's still way more than what Inuyasha ever had at the time.

Kikyo's sorrow doesn't take away from the fact that she was privileged and therefore, could never speack to Inuyasha from a place of parity. Presenting herself as his equal is a false equivalence and the way the scene was framed made it look like Kikyo was asking Inuyasha for sympathy when the goal was — or at least should have been — showing him compassion and understanding.

In that sense, suggesting to use the Jewel to turn him into human is just awful. Not only would it be a selfish wish, but also there's no way for us to know exactly how it would backfire, only that it would. Inuyasha was being used to test a theory that would have failed. Spectacularly.

Sure you can. You're half human, after all. But if it was used to turn you into a human... the Jewel would be purified and would probably cease to exist.

The repetition of the word "human" emphasizes said circumstance. Also, notice how it gets confidently associated with "purity", while such certaninty is not applied to what could happen to the Jewel, which would only "probably" cease to exist.

Not to mention Inuyasha canonically hates being human. It's bad if Kikyo doesn't know that fact, because it shows just how little they actually knew about each other for two people who are supposed to be in love, but for obvious reasons, it's even worse if she does know.

One might argue that her intentions here were good. Adopting the "we're not so different" approach was her way of reaching up to Inuyasha and turning him into human was mutually beneficial in theory. Regardless of what her reasoning was, though, the point is that she never should have done it in the first place. It was highly insensitive at best.

And even if you believe that Kikyo didn't have an actual issue with Inuyasha's demonic features — which is as valid an interpretation as any — there's no denying she wasn't too fond of them either, otherwise she wouldn't have jumped at the chance to get rid of them. She liked Inuyasha despite of who he was, not because of it.

The situation gets even worse when you realize that this arrangement isn't mutually beneficial at all. Hypothetically, Kikyo would be free of her duty, becoming an ordinary woman with a human Inuyasha by her side, which was already everything she wanted. But what about him?

Inuyasha is the one making all the compromising. He was the one putting his life — the one his demon father died to save — on the line. He was the one sacrificing his powers, his physical appearance and his father's legacy (because he wouldn't be able to wield Tessaiga as a human, even if he didn't know about its existence yet). Inuyasha being a half demon was the living proof of his parents tragic love story and he was turning his back on that not because he thought was what he wanted — like becoming a full demon, for instance — but because someone else suggested it to him.

What was Inuyasha getting out of it? "Acceptance" from villagers he didn't really care about and who would only be friendly to him because he wouldn't look like himself anymore, while still being racist to other demons? An "official" relationship with Kikyo, even though there isn't really a good reason as to why he couldn't have that without forsaking a part of who he was, since relationships between demons and humans, though rare, already existed and he eventually got that with Kagome?

Unless, of course, Kikyo's offer to live together was conditional. Which raises the question: what was Kikyo giving up, apart from things she wanted gone anyway? And what would have happened if Inuyasha refused to go with her plan?

Because it was one thing to kiss him in secret — like the anime-only scene in the docks — or after she was technically dead and had nothing to lose, but it's a totally different thing to own up to that relationship without the prospect of using the Jewel to change him. Unfortunatelly, her character isn't written well enough for us to draw our own conclusions based solely on canon material.

The point I'm trying to make is that despite the narrative portraying Kikyo's suggestion as a selfless act on her part, she would be the only one actually benefiting from this deal long run. In the end of the day, it was more about her needs than his, because the kind of acceptance she was offering Inuyasha wasn't the one he needed, which Kikyo should've known.

Inuyasha going for it isn't the proof of love Takahashi — and part of the fandom — tend to paint it as. It's a proof of desperation: desperation that Kikyo would walk away if he told her no. Desperation to belong somewhere. Anywhere. Remember: Inuyasha had his mind set on becoming a full demon literally a few days prior.

That's why this ship was build to wreck, with or without Naraku. There were no trust, no intimacy, no honesty. They barely knew each other. Inuyasha put Kikyo on a pedestal and was constantly trying to act like someone he wasn't to please her (restrained, apathetic and unsure). Their whole relationship was based on loneliness and idealization.

All of this is to say that the way Kikyo treated Inuyasha's heritage is a defining trait of her character and, by extension, of Inukik as a pairing. And although it is possible — even preferable — to call out her behavior outside the shipping discourse, it's also perfectly understandable that both things will blend together because Kagome and Inukag are direct paralells to Kikyo's actions in this regard.

Trust and acceptance are recurring themes in Inukag's relationship and the lack thereof, in my carefully curated fandom experience, is the biggest source of Kikyo and Inukik criticism and it circles right back to those racial issues. Sadly, the closer we ever got from the narrative challenging Kikyo's perspectie on the matter was having Inuyasha end up with Kagome, who had an opposite worldview.

Obviously, there are still people who will make this solely about the love triangle and there will always be, but as far as I can tell, they're mostly casual anime watchers nowadays, not at all comparable to how it used to be back when the ship war was still raging on.

I dislike Inukik and Kikyo is one of my least favorite characters not because I'm an Inukag shipper or a Kagome stan, but because as an Inuyasha stan and someone who appreciates themes and character growth, I can't get behind it even if Kagome never became a part of the equation.

And I believe a considerable amount of people who share this feeling think the same, we just don't express it more often because... Well... You said it yourself: I'm mostly an Inukag blog. And I'd much rather focus on the things I love instead of the ones I dislike.

You see, the Inuyasha fandom is old and the Inuyasha material is older. Inevitably, some part of its content did not age well and inevitably, someone has already pointed that out. It's understandable, though, that some people would chose not to engage the discussion in exchange of peace of mind. Especially with the "let people enjoy things" trend going on.

I think your frustration is completely valid and strongly encourage that you keep the discussion going on your blog if voicing your opinions and experiences will make you feel better. Particularly, I'll be avoiding the topic unless prompted by asks such as this one, in which case I'm fine talking about it.

Fandom is my escape from reality and using my recreative time explaining to the white people in it why certain dynamics portrayed in the show can be considered problematic in a racial level feels exhausting and it's not really my — or any other people of color's —obligation to do so if we don't feel up to it. Especially when there's a huge chance of backlash and of people reducing valid points to ship wars.

It's funny you shall mention the Shiori incident because, unlike Inuyasha, the sequel doesn't have the "test of time" to blame for its poor "creative" choices, since it's from 2020. I distinctly remember calling out the blatant white washing her character suffered, along with the sane part of the fandom and either got ignored because people thought we were overreacting or straight up got told that we were only speaking up because we didn't like a specific ship the show portrayed and that what Sunrise did was fine because Shiori's dark skin is, and I quote: actually orange. So yeah.

That being said, I have reservations about comparing Kikyo to a cop because, personally, I've always thought the priestess occupation — at least as it was originally portrayed in the series — had more to do with medical and spiritual care than with mantaining law and order. Plus, cops tend to do everything in their power to keep their authority and privilege intact, while Kikyo was willing to give that up to become an ordinary woman, but I do see where you're coming from.

As for the double standards, Kikyo isn't the first female character to fall victim to rooted misogyny and unfortunately won't be the last. Kagome herself gets hate for sexist reasons, often from the very people who reprove it when the same thing happens to Kikyo. However, I feel like claiming misogyny is the only reason Kikyo gets hate is not a completely honest statement.

I'd say this argument would hold a lot more water if Kikyo hadn't constantly belittle and actively tried to kill the female protagonist — who had been nothing but kind and understanding towards her — over jealousy, or if her post death existence wasn't literally based on feeding off of miserable women's souls.

The double standards regarding Sesshomaru are real, but it had little to do with gender and everything to do with context. Kikyo was a fallen priestess. One the narrative asks me to believe is in love — or at least loved — a half demon. Sesshomaru is a racist demon who despised his half demon brother and humans alike.

So when Sesshomaru takes a little human girl under his wings and acts somewhat respectfully towards Inuyasha, that's a huge deal to me. But when Kikyo, who is already dead, gives up her "life" to save the child she was planning to sacrifice for the greater good and treats Inuyasha with dignity, my reaction will naturally be "alright, what else is new?" Swap or even their genders and my feelings will remain the same.

It's not a crime having higher expectations for her than for an actual antagonist when the narrative insists on sweeping the bad things she has done under the rug and focusing on how she is still as good as she has always been because, in that case, doing good deeds is not some extraordinary feature, but rather the bare minimum.

Sesshomaru's bad actions were openly and correctly portrayed as bad. He was forced to face his limitations, his weakness and his loses. That made him grow as a character. And if I criticize Sesshomaru, people will most likely ignore me or agree instead of try and justify his actions with his daddy issues. Kikyo being armored by the plot didn't do her any favors in this regard.

Besides, if we're talking double standards, I frankly don't think some people would be as willing to look past Kikyo's mistakes — Sesshomaru's too, for that matter — and ship her with Inuyasha if she wasn't so pretty. And honestly? That's fine. No one needs an actual reason to love or hate a character.

Lastly, it's not like I don't get Kikyo's tragic backstory, it's just that a huge part of why it's tragic in the first place is because of the choices she made. Naraku was detrimental to her fate, yes. But Kikyo's appeal is that she wasn't a passive person to whom things just happened to. She had agency to make decisions for herself.

People like Inuyasha, Sango and Kohaku had way worse than her and definitely not by their choice, but they never used their traumas as an excuse to be cruel. And I'm not saying this is a competition. Kikyo's pain it's just as valid. I'm just saying that, given these circumstances, in a fictional level, it's way harder to relate and empathize with her character.

And it's not like I didn't want to stan Kikyo. On the contrary. She's beautiful, cunning and interesting. I have a long list of powerful, unapologetic, morally grey female characters that I love and most of them were a bigger treat to my ships than Kikyo ever was to Inukag. The difference is that they were well written.

Kikyo's entire concept is fantastic, but the execution was abysmal. It's very clear to me that Takahashi didn't know what to do with her and it's a shame to see so much potential get wasted. I don't mind her characterization at all. She should be flawed and controversial. It's the lack of character development and satisfying redemption arc that I take issue with, if the narrative is gonna sell her as a changed woman worthy of our sympathy.

Anyway... if you want her complexities and nuances done justice, I've heart the Sesskik fandom is the place to be. They actually acknowledge her flaws, hold her accountable for the things she's done and explore very interesting sides of her personality.

I didn't mourn Kikyo's death for a second. But I mourn the character she could have been every single day.

#Holy fuck I feel like I owe you a new keyboard #Thank you for passing by #And thank you for your patience as well #This has been sitting in my inbox for a while #But I felt like your question deserved a more complex answer #Also don't feel sorry for ranting to me #I actually enjoy when people go off over a topic they have strong feelings about #Especially when they put it as respectfully and politely as you did #Sidmailing #Also please you guys don't use this post to start anything alright?#I won't answer #This is just my opinion not an invite to debate

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