#genocide tw
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Some day the indiscriminate mass killing in Palestine is going to be an event in the history books
and people with the exact same intelligence, conscience, and ability to become informed as you or I will be reading about it, and they will think to themselves, how could so many people see that happening and really believe that it was justified, or that the Israeli government had no choice? The internet had been invented by then, right? I just don't understand how the government got away with killing 15 times the number of people that died in the terrorist attack and saying it was self defense when they said themselves that they were mostly killing innocent civilians that had nothing to do with it. Look, it says it was known at the time that over 6,000 of the dead at that point were children. It just doesn't make sense.
They will maybe decide, based on the small information the book gives about us, that people in the past were just more ignorant and closed-minded, that we hadn't yet developed the conscience of the present, because we were Ignorant Past People that didn't know anything and didn't have the same morals.
But then again, the book is not written yet. We can still change it.
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The murder of 700+ Jewish people isn't something to be celebrated. I'm against Israeli government and what they've done to the people of Palestine. But there is nothing to encourage or support, this was a terrorist act. We haven't had this many people die in a single day since the Holocaust, and the attack happened on a Jewish holiday. Have some respect.
this isn't an antisemitic attack?? this is people who have been subjected to more than half a century of ethnic cleansing and colonization at the hands of Israeli settlers fighting back against their oppressors
you're ignoring the death toll of Palestinians over the years to make them out to be "terrorists" when all they're doing is fighting back in self defense. when colonists kill brown people it's a "complicated conflict with good people on both sides", but when those brown people fight back they're "terrorists". it's so fucking transparent.
the occupation of Palestine is brutal and genocidal, and you're comparing the people perpetrating said genocide to holocaust victims?? bullshit.
you say you support Palestinians, but what would you have them do? keep asking for help from countries that only end up arming the Israeli state? keep being killed in their homes and schools and hospitals and places of worship because fighting back makes them the bad guys? fuck you
this isn't Palestinians being antisemitic and attacking jewish people (not to mention that there are plenty of jewish Palestinians), this is about a colonized people fighting back against those who are colonizing them. it's about fighting an oppressive colonial state, not persecuting jewish people.
your rhetoric is the same as France's rhetoric when Algerians fought back against the french occupation, and as Britain's when Indians fought back against colonization. colonists slaughter at will but the colonized fighting back get called terrorists. you're on the wrong side of history, and I'd like to cordially invite you to go fuck yourself
#asks#anonymous#mine#un-fucking-believable#palestine#free palestine#israel#zionism#colonialism#genocide#ethnic cleansing#colonialism tw#genocide tw#ethnic cleansing tw
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Fun upside of rats and spambots fleeing Twitter for Tumblr are all the new fucking, uh...
They're not TERFs this time, they're "not feminists" because "feminism is cancer", they're, uh...
"Violent Misandrists"?
Like, huge use of Judith killing Holofernes vibes. 15yos posting "Kill all men (except my male mutuals lol!)" and insinuating that banning pornography will end child abuse forever.
(deep breath)
Look.
If you are a teenager from the USA, and your parents are Republicans, please consider that EVERYTHING you were ever taught about media, politics, gender, sex, feminism, and the advisability of mass murder as a political tool
has been carefully tailored to make you feel enraged with the state of the world, which is full of Good People and Bad People (groups it is very easy to sort everyone you meet into) and the way to Fix Society is to criminalize, incarcerate, or brutally murder as many Bad People as possible. You have probably seen several different sorting systems proposed, and may not have seen much political discourse beyond debates about "Which PART of society are Bad People who should be punished?"
And yes, I realize you've also been taught that people like me insisting on bullshit like "nuance" and "tolerance" and "educating yourself" are literal Satan and probably in favour of ritualized child abuse and puppy-kicking.
We're not. I'm not. I'm like a lot of people you wouldn't think are Good People, who nevertheless work to make the world better in what we understand to be the best methods available.
I don't know why I'm saying this. I'll probably end up a target of vitriol and regret ever speaking up. Just.
You are not smart for coming to the conclusion that the world is full of Bad People who just need to be killed. You did not figure out (or find the true prophet of) The Secret Truth of the Entire Universe. You haven't figured out how to fix the world. You just followed the fucking breadcrumb trail laid down by people who want to recruit you to commit atrocities in their name.
The world is so much more complicated than you've been led to believe. Fixing its problems is so much more tedious and difficult. Cruelty is so much less useful. And you've got so much more learning to do.
#genocide tw#mass murder tw#incarceration tw#misandry tw#terf shit#csa tw#child abuse tw#us politics tw
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I’m genuinely asking that question btw like I’m just a dumbass on tumblr I have no idea what will happen next but like I remember all the exhaustion and the side-eyes about “returning to normal” after covid lockdowns were lifted. we did “return to normal” but like it wasn’t normal and it wasn’t like before and I think a lot of people knew that. and that was the pandemic, an event you could easily handwave away as people just dying because of a disease, not active social murder. but this is genocide, nakedly openly genocide. what’s ‘normal’ gonna look like? how do you tell people to just forget the pictures of dead Palestinian children and civilians they see every day on social media? That press conference those doctors gave after the Ah-Ahli hospital was bombed surrounded by corpses with a man holding a dead infant is going to be burned into my brain as long as I live. It’s the most horrifying image I’ve ever seen in my life. How do you go back to normal from there?
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We are one Iowa caucus into the absolute shitshow that is going to be the US 2024 elections, and I'm already sick of seeing takes downplaying the risk that Trump and his fascist followers represent.
Look. Around 1900, my mother's grandparents immigrated to the Lower East Side of New York City. They brought with them children born in Europe (Poland? Ukraine? which country they were in depends on what year we're talking about) - we're not 100% sure they were THEIR children, even, but there were three, and they were young, and they came. But my great-grandparents had siblings, parents, cousins, uncles, aunts, huge families. And while my understanding is that an attempt was made to convince those folks to move to the US, none of them ultimately opted to.
They all kept in touch as they were able, exchanging letters and pictures, but through World War 1, through the 20s, through the Great Depression, through the worsening situation in Europe in the 1930s, my entire extended family who chose not to immigrate...continued to stay.
I think we all know how this story ends.
I have an entire family photo album of people whose names I will never know, because after every single one of them died in the Holocaust, my great-grandparents and grandparents couldn't bear to even label them. And they were PEOPLE, poor, vibrant, eager to maintain connections with their loved ones abroad. One was a Klezmer musician, and we have photos of him with all the different instruments he played. They're so real on the page, and they all ended in ashes.
And you know how that started? Fascism started with every inch allowed, with every well-intentioned moderate who tried to maintain a middle position even as the whole ground shifted right beneath their feet and even "middle" became extreme, every "no that change isn't coming fast enough, I want instant full improvement NOW" liberal who felt that doing nothing was better than accepting a slower improvement in the (truly awful!) post-World War 1 living situation in Germany.
Most of the members of my extended family also downplayed the risks. They never imagined that the worst could happen to them. They never fathomed how bad things could become.
And now I have their example always before me to know and to scream:
I KNOW HOW BAD THINGS CAN BECOME. I KNOW WHAT HAPPENED TO MY FAMILY THEN.
I WILL NOT LET THAT HAPPEN TO MY FAMILY NOW.
People look at me like I'm crazy when I say I've got our passports ready (and have had since before the 2020 election).
Look. I don't know what will happen if Trump is elected, but there's a very real possibility he will, and he's been extremely clear about saying what he'll do. He did a lot of the things he said he'd do last time. I expect he'll continue to do the things he says he'll do. And the things he say he'll do will lead to the deaths of more people than we can imagine - in the US, in Palestine, throughout the world.
Don't tell me there's a middle ground here. Don't tell me I'm over-reacting. Don't tell me the worst won't happen. Don't tell me the risk is mild. Don't tell me we're safe.
We. Are. Not. Safe.
The lives of dozens, hundreds, of members of family were lost in the 1940s amid the horrifying statistic "6,000,000 dead Jews."
I will not let my life (as a Jew), my wife's life (as a disabled woman), my son's life (as a biracial boy), my daughter's life (as a biracial trans girl), be part of the statistics that come from our a second Trump presidency.
If you won't vote like YOUR life depends on it, vote like someone ELSE'S life depends on it, because IT DOES.
And if you can't even do that much, at least shut the fuck up and stop spreading your poison around. You're wrong. The danger is real. Downplaying it now won't make your conscience feel any clearer when it actually happens, and comforting everyone else downplaying it will just make you that much more complicit.
#unforth rambles#politics#us politics#genocide#genocide tw#i don't know how to tag this#i wish the album was here instead of at my mom's#i want every one of you who think this doesn't matter#to stare at the smiling faces of my long-dead relatives#and see these people who were shot and stabbed and burned and raped and destroyed#who died in rebellion or despair in hopelessness or desperation#no matter how much or how little they fought#they're all ashes now and nothing will bring them back#i have no family in europe#not a single person survived#i won't let my family be the ones who stay too long because we don't take it seriously#and neither should you
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I was in Undertale; I was doing the genocide run, but Undyne the Undying killed me many many times.
#dream#text#October 22nd 2023#undertale#undyne#undyne the undying#genocide tw#death tw#game#gaming#violence tw#queueueueueueueueueueueueueue
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Residential school deniers tried to dig up suspected unmarked grave sites at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School, not believing a May 2021 announcement from the Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc that as many as 215 Indigenous children had been buried there, according to a new report.
"Denialists entered the site without permission. Some came in the middle of the night, carrying shovels; they said they wanted to 'see for themselves' if children are buried there," said a Friday report from Kimberly Murray, the independent special interlocutor for missing children and unmarked graves and burial sites associated with Indian Residential Schools.
She did not say who the denialists were or when they came to the site.
But the unauthorized visits to the site are the work of a "core group" of Canadians who continue to deny, defend or minimize the physical, sexual, psychological and emotional abuse inflicted on Indigenous children in the Indian Residential School System "despite the indisputable evidence of survivors and their families," Murray said at a Friday news conference. [...]
Continue Reading.
Tagging: @politicsofcanada
#cdnpoli#Kamloops#British Columbia#Indigenous persecution#genocide denial tw#racism#white supremacy tw#colonialism#residential schools#child death tw#genocide tw#Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc
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Would it be problematic for me to have a black girl convert to sikhi over the course of the story with the assistance of her Sikh friend & the friend’s family and then get married to said friend in the future? I don’t want it to seem like she did it simply to be with her friend so I thought that maybe if I showed how she enjoys hearing things about the religion (for example how sikhi emphasizes treating everyone equally and also the protection of those facing injustice) from her friend that it could seem more natural but could that be seen as fetishizing? The black girl has been friends with the family for 10+ years (aka since she was 8) and also wasn’t raised following any religion (but not as an atheist either) so I feel the conversion would be somewhat easy for her but if any of what I’ve wrote is problematic I’ll change it! I’m still doing research so if I messed anything up I’m extremely sorry. Thank you in advance!
Black woman converts to become Sikh - Is this problematic?
If SK thinks these circumstances are okay from the Sikhism standpoint, then absolutely it is fine. Black people are all individual and different people throughout the diaspora. We are not some collective monolith with a build-in set of interests, beliefs and rules on what we can and cannot do! The real question to me is if someone can convert to Sikhism and if so, how being Black factors into the lifestyle.
On that note, I will hand the mic to SK and also welcome Black Sikh followers to chime in.
-Colette
Sikhi accept converts
Short answer: No, it is not problematic. Sikhi accepts converts. There’s nothing wrong with being drawn to a faith because of certain aspects and then looking deeper and choosing to convert.
Longer answer: Conversion into a completely new faith is rarely easy. I would say Sikhi is a harder faith to convert to because there are few resources in other languages and many Sikhs are unaccustomed to converts. As in most, if not all, religions, there is a gap between what is said and how it’s practiced.
Despite the messages about fighting injustice and treating others equally, many Sikh converts, especially Black Sikhs, deal with prejudice. This is not even unique to converts - Afghan & Kashmiri Sikhs have also faced ignorant comments from Punjabi Sikhs who aren’t aware of Sikh communities outside Punjab. The 1980’s-1990’s Sikh genocide disconnected many Sikhs in Punjab from the revolutionary messages of justice and equality laid out in Sikh holy texts.
A challenge unique to Black Sikhs is that the way kesdhari Sikhs take care of their hair and tie it in turbans can be a challenge for someone with Black hair. I would recommend Gurpreet Kaur’s writing.
Resources
Being Black & Sikh
Articles by Gurpreet Kaur
I would also suggest checking out The Black Sikh Collective on Tumblr, Instagram & Facebook for more perspectives of Black Sikhs.
-SK
If this answer was helpful, SK accepts tips here: https://ko-fi.com/skaur | Venmo & Cashapp: skaur1699
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If you find yourself thinking, "maybe the Nazis had the right idea about-" just stop right there. The Nazis had no good ideas. Not about family planning, not about book clubs, not about vacation destinations or housing.
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Hey, I came from your post about Night. I’ve been wanting to read it for a while now, but I’ve heard that the English version is very watered down and stripped of the original emotions that are in the Yiddish version. Do you know if there are any more accurate English translations, or if the Hebrew one is more like the original? Sorry if you’re not the right person to ask about this, you just seem quite knowledgeable
(also coming from my vent account so I don’t get any hate on main for being a Jew lol)
No worries at all, @nonbinary-vents:
I want to be clear about something: My post was aimed at goyim.
You are a Jewish person, and reading this book (especially if you haven't read any other accounts of experiences in concentration camps) may be an important thing for you to do. And I'd cautiously encourage you to do so if you feel emotionally stable. But you do not need to worry about the experience of this book feeling watered down.
If you are Jewish and not in a very stable emotional state, do not read this book. Do not cause yourself harm.
(If you are goyiscshe, you should challenge yourself and force yourself to read this book. Obviously if you are in an actual emotional/psychological crisis or dealing with the death or illness of a loved one, then you are the only goyim who has an excuse not to read this book. No matter who you are, do not read this book if it will cause you actual mental harm or drive you to somehow cause yourself physical harm. But if it will make you upset, depressed, panicked at your own failings, or other extremely unpleasant but ultimately human discomfort, then you should read this book. Jews don't get a choice about knowing this shit, because knowing this shit is how we survive. And you NOT knowing this shit is what makes it so easy for you to dismiss and target us over and over and over again. You should be uncomfortable. You should feel guilty. Because unless you're actively learning how to disentangle yourself from the antisemitism that led to The Holocaust, then you are actively participating in thee fomentation of another. And that should horrify you.)
Sure, I bet this book is even more haunting and visceral in the original Yiddish. I've spoken recently about how hard Jewish language is to translate to English.
But there is no world in which this book will feel watered down to you.
@nonbinary-vents This book will haunt you. This book will change you. This book will challenge your faith and your ability to trust people.
Remember going in that Judaism asks us not to separate ourselves from our community--not just our Jewish community, but any community in which we find ourselves. Resist the urge this book may stir within you to become insular and fearful of goyim. That is not our way. We are a part of the communities and cultures and nations in which we find ourselves. And we must do good for those communities, because that is what we are called to do. The lesson of this book for Jews is different than the lesson of this book for goyim.
The lesson of this book for Jews -- in fact, the lesson of "Never Again" for Jews -- is that we cannot ever allow this to happen to ourselves again. No, of course, I am not blaming Jews for the Holocaust and if anyone thinks that's what I'm arguing here, then they can fuck off.
The lesson of this book for Jews is that we must never again let fear hold us back from fighting for ourselves. If he world calls upon us to die, we must refuse. Refuse to put ourselves on a list. Refuse to follow our oppressors' directions to the ghetto. Refusal to get on the train or to enter the gas chamber. And we must refuse to be silent for other people's comfort. While it is a Jewish imperative to believe that every human being is capable of kindness and has inherent goodness within them, we can never again trust that the kindness and goodness they possess will ever be directed at us. There was the very understandable thought back when this all started that if we just complied--if we were just willing to suffer a little bit by moving to the ghettos or registering on the lists of Jews the Nazis demanded or carried our papers with us at all time and wore our stars just as they said --then they would eventually realize we were good citizens. They would eventually realize we were just people like them doing their best to live quiet lives and follow the rules. People believed that, if we just complied, they'd remember their humanity and our own. If we just complied and let ourselves suffer, hen maybe our friends and loved one would be safe.
But that was a lie we told ourselves.
No amount of compliance or agree-ability or self-sacrifice will ever make someone who sees Jews as evil and subhuman realize that Jews are actually just human beings like everyone else. Compliance will never ensure our safety; it will just make us easier to kill. Compliance won't make antisemites see us as human; it will only ever make them see us -- at best -- as agreeable livestock.
(although I doubt any farmer would treat their animals as cruelly as Nazis and their supporters treated us).
I am not advocating for violence. But I advocating for discomfort and defense. That is why I am on here every day writing the things I write. I will not shut up for the comfort of people who don't care about my life or my safety. And neither should you. Neither should any of us. I will not allow antisemites to co-opt our own tragedies to demonize us further while casting themselves as warriors for justice.
No, we should not take to the streets and start harming goyim. But if the day comes that they once again start to round us up, I for one will tear those Nazis a-fucking-part with my bare hands. And if they live to have children and grandchildren of their own, they will have to explain to their children and grandchildren that they got the scars on their face and the missing eyeball because the Jew they were trying to murder wouldn't submit quietly.
And if this seems like a hyperbolic and absurd hypothetical to anyone reading this? Well, yeah. It seemed like one back then, too.
(And if any goyim chose to read "Night" by Elie Wiesel because of my post, please tell me. Please engage. I cannot be emphatic enough about this. If you are willing to read night in the way I asked of you in my post, then please do reach out to me with your experience and thoughts. Because that's the whole point. Jews need you to listen and engage with us about our own suffering. We need you to consider your impact on us and to not run away from that guilt or from us. If any of you are willing to read this book in the way that I have asked of you, please please please don't keep your experience to yourself. A lot of Jews desperately need to see goysiche growth in understanding antisemitism and its affects. I don't think you can even imagine how scared and lonely we are right now)
#ask me stuff#nonbinary-vents#antisemitism#leftist antisemitism#deconstruction#Shoah TW#Holocaust TW#Genocide TW#I don't care about my oppressors' discomfort#Or their opinions about my own morals#If you don't care about Jewish suffering then I don't value your opinion#I live in fear of your opinion#Your opinion makes me actively endangered#your apathy makes me actively endangered#But your opinion's value is worth rat's diarrhea to me#it is nothing
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against the logic of the lawn
Imagine a box.
This box is sealed with tape or adhesive, which shows you that it has never been opened or re-used. It is in pristine condition. Apart from that, the box could hold anything. It could contain a Star Wars Funko Pop, a printer, a shirt ordered from some sketchy online vendor, a knockoff store-brand cereal, six individually wrapped protein bars.
As a Consumer ("the" Consumer) this is your fundamental right: To purchase a box that is, presumably, identical to every other box like it.
When you Buy Product, it arrives in a box, entire of itself and without context. It has not changed since its creation. If and when Product does change—whether it is broken, spoiled, used up, or eaten—you can Buy Product that is identical in every meaningful way to the original.
It's okay if this doesn't make sense yet. (You can stop imagining the box now.)
Imagine instead a suburban housing development, somewhere in the USA.
Imagine row on row of pristine, newly built houses, each constructed with small, meaningless variations in their aesthetic, all with beige or white vinyl siding and perhaps some decorative brick, all situated on identical rectangles of land covered with freshly unrolled sod. This is the Product that every consumer aspires to Buy.
I am not exactly—qualified, or entitled, to speak on the politics of land ownership in this country. My ancestors benefited directly from the genocide of Native Americans, which allowed Europeans to steal the land they lived on, which is where a lot of wealth comes from in the end, even today. However, I have eyes in my head to see that the act of colonizing a continent, and an economic system that formed as a supporting infrastructure to colonization, have embedded something almost irreparably dysfunctional into the dominant American culture's relationship to land.
This dysfunctional Thing, this Sickness, leads us to consider land to be a Product, and to consider a human upon the land to be a Consumer.
From this point of view, land is either locked into this relationship of control and "use" to varying extents, or it is free of human influence. People trying to reason about how to preserve Earth's biosphere, working within this framework without realizing, decide that we must "set aside" large areas of land for "nature."
This is a naive and, I would reckon, probably itself colonialist way of seeing things. It appears to be well-validated by evidence. Where human population is largest, there is less biodiversity.
But I find the broad conclusions to be strikingly unscientific. The plan of "setting aside part of Earth for nature" displays little curiosity about the mechanisms by which human presence impacts biodiversity. Otherwise intelligent people, perhaps caught up in the "bargaining" phase of climate grief, seem taken in by the idea that the human species gives off a magical anti-biodiversity force field, as if feeling guiltier will fix the problems.
(Never mind that lands managed by indigenous folk actually have MORE biodiversity...almost like our species' relationship to the planet isn't inherently exploitative, but rather, the capitalist and colonialist powers destroying everything.......)
Let's go back to the image of the new housing development. This image could be just about anywhere in the USA, because the American suburban home is made for universal interchangeability, where each little house and yard is static and replaceable with any other.
Others have written about the generic-ification of the interiors of homes, how houses are decorated with the most soul-killing, colorless furnishings to make them into Products more effectively. (I think @mcmansionhell wrote about it.)
This, likewise, is the Earth turned into a Product—razed down into something with no pre-existing context, history, or responsibility. Identical parcels of land, identical houses, where once there was a unique and diverse distribution of life. The American lawn, the American garden, the industry that promotes these aesthetics, is the environmental version of that ghastly, ugly "minimalism" infecting the interiors of homes.
The extremely neat, sparse, manicured look that is so totally inescapable in American yards originated from the estates of European aristocracy, which displayed the owner's wealth by flaunting an abundance of land that was both heavily managed and useless. People defend the lawn on the basis that grass tolerates being walked upon and is good for children to play, but to say this is *the* purpose of a lawn is bullshit—children are far more interested in trees, creeks, sticks, weeds, flowers, and mud than Grass Surface, many people with lawns do not have children, and most people spend more time mowing their lawn than they do doing literally anything else outside. How often do you see Americans outside in their yards doing anything except mowing?
What is there to do, anyway? Why would you want to go outside with nothing but the sun beating down on you and the noise of your neighbors' lawn mowers? American culture tries to make mowing "manly" and emphasizes that it is somehow fulfilling in of itself. Mowing the lawn is something Men enjoy doing—almost a sort of leisure activity.
I don't have something against wanting a usable outdoor area that is good for outdoor activities, I do, however, have something against the idea that a lawn is good for outdoor activities. Parents have been bitching for decades about how impossible it is to drag kids outdoors, and there have been a million PSAs about how children need to be outside playing instead of spending their lives on video games. Meanwhile, at the place I work, every kid is ECSTATIC and vibrating with enthusiasm to be in the woods surrounded by trees, sticks, leaves, and mud.
The literal, straightforward historical answer to the lawn is that the American lawn exists to get Americans to spend money on chemicals. The modern lawn ideal was invented to sell a surplus of fertilizer created after WW2 chemical plants that had been used to make explosives were repurposed to produce fertilizer. Now you know! The more analytical, sociological answer is that the purpose of the lawn is to distance you from the lower class. A less strictly maintained space lowers property values, it looks shabby and unkempt, it reflects badly on the neighborhood, it makes you look like a "redneck." And so on. The largest, most lavish McMansions in my area all have the emptiest, most desolate yards, and the lush gardens all belong to tiny, run-down houses.
But the answer that really cuts to the core of it, I think, is that lawns are a technology for making land into a Product for consumers. (This coexists with the above answers.) Turfgrass is a perfectly generic blank slate onto which anything can be projected. It is emptiness. It is stasis.
I worry about the flattening of our imaginations. Illustrations in books generally cover the ground outdoors in a uniform layer of green, sometimes with strokes suggesting individual blades of grass if they want to get fancy. Video games do this. Animated shows and movies do this.
Short, carpet-like turfgrass as the Universal Outdoor Surface is so ubiquitous and intuitive that any alternative is bizarre, socially unacceptable, and for many, completely unimaginable. When I am a passenger in a car, what horrifies me the most to see out the window is not only the turfgrass lawns of individuals, but rather, the turfgrass Surface that the entire inhabited landscape has been rendered into—vacant stretches of land surrounding businesses and churches, separating parking lots, bordering Wal-Marts, apartment complexes, and roadsides.
These spaces are not used, they are almost never walked upon. They do nothing. They are maintained, ceaselessly, by gas-powered machines that are far, far more carbon-emitting than cars per hour of use, emitting in one hour the same amount of pollution as a 500-mile drive. It is an endless effort to keep the land in the same state, never mind that it's a shitty, useless state.
Nature is dynamic. Biodiversity is dynamic. From a business point of view, the lawn care industry has found a brilliant scheme to milk limitless money from people, since trying to put a stop to the dynamism and constant change of nature is a Sisyphean situation, and nature responds with increasingly aggressive and rapid change as disturbance gets more intense.
On r/lawncare, a man posted despairingly that he had spent over $1500 tearing out every inch of sod in his yard, only for the exact same weeds to return. That subreddit strikes horror in my heart that I cannot describe, and the more I learn about ecology, the more terrible it gets. It was common practice for people in r/lawncare to advise others to soak their entire yard in Roundup to kill all plant life and start over from a "blank slate."
Before giving up, I tried to explain over and over that it was 100% impossible to get a "blank slate." Weeds typically spread by wind and their seeds can persist for DECADES in the soil seed bank, waiting for a disastrous event to trigger them to sprout. They will always come back. It's their job.
It was impossible for those guys to understand that they were inherently not just constructing a lawn from scratch, and were contending with another power or entity (Nature) with its own interests.
The logic of the lawn also extends into our gardens. We are encouraged to see the dynamism of nature as something that acts against our interests (and thus requires Buy Product) so much, that we think any unexpected change in our yard is bad. People are sometimes baffled when I see a random plant popping up among my flowers as potentially a good thing.
"That's a weed!" Maybe! Nonetheless, it has a purpose. I don't know who this stranger is, so I would be a fool to kill it!
A good caretaker knows that the place they care for will change on its own, and that this is GOOD and brings blessings or at least messages. I didn't have to buy goldenrod plants—they came by themselves! Several of our trees arrived on their own. The logic that sees all "weeds" as an enemy to be destroyed without even identifying ignores the wisdom of nature's processes.
The other day at work, the ecologist took me to see pink lady's slipper orchids. The forest there was razed and logged about a hundred years ago, and it got into my head to ask how the orchids returned. He only shrugged. "Who knows?"
Garden centers put plants out for sale when they are blooming. People buy trees from Fast Growing Trees dot com. The quick, final results that are standard with Buy Product, which are so completely opposite the constant slow chaos of nature, have become so standard in the gardening world that the hideous black mulch sold at garden centers is severed from the very purpose of mulch, and instead serves to visually emphasize small, lonely plants against its dark background. (For the record, once your plants mature, you should not be able to SEE the mulch.)
Landscapers regularly place shrubs, bushes, trees and flowers in places where they have no room to reach maturity. It's standard—landscapers seem to plan with the expectation that everything will be ripped out within 5-10 years. The average person has no clue how big trees and bushes get because their entire surroundings, which are made of living things (which do in fact feel and communicate) are treated as disposable.
Because in ten years, this building won't be an orthodontists' office, in ten years, this old lady will be dead, in ten years, the kids will have grown, and capitalism is incapable of preparing for a future, only for the next buyer.
The logic of the lawn is that gardens and ecosystems that take time to build are not to be valued, because a lush, biodiverse garden is not easily sold, easily bought, easily maintained, easily owned, or easily treated with indifference. An ecosystem requires wisdom from the caretaker. That runs contrary to the Consumer identity.
And it's this disposable-ness, this indifference, that I am ultimately so strongly against, not grass, or low turf that you can step on.
What if we saw buying land as implying a responsibility to be its caretaker? To respect the inhabitants, whether or not we are personally pleased by them or think they look pretty? What creature could deserve to be killed just because it didn't make a person happy?
But the Consumer identity gives you something else...a sense of entitlement. "This is MY yard, and that possum doesn't get to live there." "This is MY yard, and I don't want bugs in it." "This is MY yard, and I can kill the spiders if I want to."
Meanwhile there is no responsibility to build the soil up for the next gardener. No responsibility to plant oaks that will grow mighty and life-giving. No responsibility to plant fruit-producing trees, brambles, and bushes. None of these things, any of which could have fulfilled a responsibility to the future. Rather, just to do whatever you damn well please, and leave those that come after with depleted, compacted soil and the aftermath of years of constant damage. It took my Meadow ten years to recover from being the garden patch of the guy that lived here before us. Who knows what he did to it.
The loss of topsoil in all our farmland is a bigger example, and explains how this is directly connected to colonialism. The Dust Bowl, the unsustainable farming practices that followed, the disappearance of the lush fertile prairie topsoil because of greed and colonizer mindset, and simple refusal to learn from what could be observed in nature. The colonizing peoples envisioned the continent as an "Empty" place, a Blank Slate that could be used and exploited however.
THAT is what's killing the planet, this idea that the planet is to be used and abused and bought and sold, that the power given by wealth gives you entitlement to do whatever you want. That "Land" is just another Product, and our strategies for taking care of Earth should be whatever causes the most Buy Product.
It's like I always write..."You are not a consumer! You are a caretaker!"
#plants#native plants#no lawns#kill your lawn#anti lawn#consumerism#capitalism#colonialism#genocide tw
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And l'm tired of theoretical debates about the definition of genocide as if more people aren't dying every day like I'm sorry but we REALLY don't have that kind of time it's been many MONTHS now
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If genocide joe loses the 2024 election don't cry about the people who understandably will not vote. I dont want trump but it'll be his own fault if he loses. If you still believe in the 2 party system you need to grow up
If you still believe that your own righteous fury is worth more than people's lives, then you also need to grow up. If a compromise will save lives, I'll compromise. I won't let people die holding out for a perfect solution that will never come.
#genocide tw#i am far less angry about people abstaining from voting this year than i was in 2016 for obvious reasons#but i have seen one too many 'the ceasefire isn't good enough' bad takes to be completely charitable#especially to those who seem to think that preaching to the choir on here is a better use of their time than flipping people on the fence#biden might be pro israel but he at least can be pressured into 'let's not kill civilians'#trump and his ilk think that annihilating gaza and everyone in it sounds great and that's what they will do if we let them
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"Pictures drawn in blood link decades of legacies of people who have been imprisoned and tortured by Israeli guards. A hidden archive of poems, letters, drawings, and handmade objects—containing stories of resistance, messages of despair, and hope—amass behind prison walls. Throughout each resounds a pulsing call for freedom.
I asked my uncle about the first piece of art he produced. "It's not easy to handle where to start, but what I can tell is that Palestinian detainees inscribe their emotions and resist through crafts," he said.
Sometimes prisoners draw on handkerchiefs, or embroider different symbols of life and hope: broken chains, olive branches, white pigeons, Al-Aqsa Mosque, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and the Dome of the Rock.
Khader showed me what he painted in 1995 in the Asqalan prison as a gift to my mother because he couldn't celebrate her graduation with her. In the piece, a white pigeon holds a letter as it flies to Rafah—my uncle's city. The letter frame is colored blue and red.
"I always used blue in my art," Khader explained. "It reminds me of the blue, wide sky—the sky I couldn't feel for years in prison..."
With all this potential to create, if those detained were free, what creative inventions would they contribute to humanity? How many stories would be released?
"I think I produced more than 100 pieces [while detained]" Uncle Khader said with pride.
Amazed and excited, I asked Khader to show me more handmade art. Suddenly, the conversation changed. His voice faded, his smile disappeared, and his eyes shrunk a little. The wrinkles of age and sorrow were clearly painted on his face.
"Israeli bulldozers entirely demolished our old home in 2004. You were only three years and don't remember. There, under the rubble, I lost all my photos, memories, and handicrafts —the ones I made and the ones my detained friends gifted me after release."
Israel chases Palestinian crafts inside and outside prison. They fear our art. They fear our memories."
-DIARIES OF BLOOD: The secret artists within Israeli detention facilities
by Eman Al-Astal
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Me: maybe I'm being too harsh on christians
Conservative christians: Genocide is morally ok when god does or commands it and you cannot comprehend why because you're an unknowing human. Also you can't call anything immoral if you're not christian because god is the arbiter of morality. You only have personal preference, not morals. So there!
Progressive christians: the antichrist is real and the rapture is coming so please become a christian before you go to hell! Unless you already have the mark of the beast and then it's too late for you :( Jesus loves you!
Me: ... I'm not harsh enough.
#exchristian#text#exvangelical#religious trauma#ex christian#genocide tw#rapture tw#these are absolutely not strawmen and you can find these losers a dime a dozen#but especially the apologist article about how god commanded the killing of babies in the bible
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I got commissioned by @insomniac-dormouse to make a 2 page comic about my OC, Misha Mistaka, I haven't drawn him this much since high school so this was a blast! the thing with Misha is that I'm only allowed to draw him with my non dominant hand, so you can see he's a bit more wobbly than other stuff here haha. I think I was, like, 15 when I made him and it was mostly a way to cope with a lot of intrusive thoughts and trauma about abuse, particularly sexual and racial abuse. So his story is pretty rough, at least at first.
#nnstuff#nnart#original art#nnoc#misha mistaka#sa tw#rape tw#csa tw#genocide tw#fantasy racism#racism tw#comic#original comic
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