The EARN IT Act Has Been Reintroduced

For my followers in the US, here is a linktree I've found with more info, as well as petitions and forms you can fill out to tell your representatives why this would ruin everything for everyone on the internet.

As much as I loved the mardi gras. They shouldn't have cops at pride.

On the same day as the mardi gras me and my mother went to our local pride match, It was so fun and everyone was so kind. There was even a drag king as well as Queen there and they were both so lovely.

But ofc there was a counter, homophobic protest. They were yelling slurs at everyone, holding up signs saying awful things, yelling horrible things at the drag queen/king through a fucking megaphone, two even dropped their signs and walked through the event scoffing at everything. And by the way this was a community event, which mean they shouldn't have been able to do this.

But guess what the police did? That's right nothingggggg.

When we wanted to counter protest on the other side of the street, the police stopped US, but the people yeling slurs while blocking the toilets were fine.

whatever they said to get into the mardi gras was complet bullshit, there is a law/ regulation that you can't disturbed community events. The police don't care about us.

No cops at pride

if a single one of you motherfuckers saying "free palestine" votes for biden bc hes the "lesser of two evils" while he's enabling the genocide against palestinians i hope you know what a deeply unserious person you are. fuck any of you who are planning on voting for him.

Every now and then I run into people pointing out that x hypothetical alternative to capitalism hasn’t solved the problem of creating and distributing insulin, and I always have to wonder if they think capitalism has solved it. Like, people die from a lack of insulin all the time. Are we not supposed to try to make things better because people might die then? People are dying now.

I’m thirty years old and I still get so fucking angry at the way I was raised and educated by conservative evangelical Christians to believe that there had never been anyone like me (queer) in history who was worthy of mention—that queer people didn’t exist who were happy or successful or did anything at all worth noticing other than be rare cases of family disappointment and societal exile.

Fanfiction was even more of a fantasy world to me because in it people in various historical eras could be gay—in school the fact that many of my favorite writers and poets were gay wasn’t mentioned in class, even as we ostensibly learned about their historical context. And when I researched these people later and found out that so many of them were queer I was so angry. All this time I’d felt I was an embarrassing exception, that I had no one respectable to look up to, no precedent for how I might live in accordance with my actual self. Considering a life outside the one set down for you as normal and acceptable is frightening when you’re raised in that world—the wages of sin is death, etc.

I’m reading a history of the Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom and I’m struck by the fact that I still get surprised by the historical presence of queer people, e.g. France’s eighteenth-century sodomite fraternities. A pope was warned about sodomy as early as 1100, when one of the king’s lovers was appointed as a bishop. The 20th-century sexologist Iwan Bloch believed that homosexuality was perverse until he found a 120-year-old manuscript by Sade and came to understand that the behaviors he advocated against had long been present in the population.* Yes, queer behavior has often considered errant and punishable, but it’s been here the whole time.

And though queer advocacy organizations often use those “queer people have always been here” taglines, I think that’s very in-group language, because IME many conservative cishet people don’t have the historical context to understand how true that is, or why it matters.

So now we have this grand conservative movement in the U.S.—one that is itself not new, that is very recycled from earlier eras of backlash against homosexuality—that frames queerness and gender-nonconformance as novel, and uses that basis to argue that it’s insidious and should be eradicated before it spreads deeper into the “normal” “virtuous” population. And an accompanying movement to remove mentions of queerness from education, which will only more deeply entrench these notions—the same ones I grew up with—into the next generation.

It’s just so fucking frustrating to me that western societies have these conversations and realizations about queerness over and over again, and then they’re quashed, over and over again, and we’re still stuck in this cycle of shame and stigma. Hundreds of years of bullshit, because people are so afraid of “deviance.”

* source note: The Curse of the Marquis de Sade by Joel Warner

Cartography is power. Every human choice is a political choice.

Few things more cathartic than seeing some mild take from the terminally online, scrolling down to the replies and getting splashed in the face with vitriol (shocker), composing an eloquent reply to the horrors, and then deleting the whole thing. Burning the drafts is therapeutic because you get your feelings out, release them into the ether, and then don't have to worry about idiots trying to sea lion you to death.

TW: political talk, mentions of war crimes and genocide, mentions of terrorism.

Preface and addendum, added 11 December 2023: I’ve been watching this conflict off and on for years now and have been keeping an eye on this most deadly wave of violence. Israel should not fucking exist; it is an apartheid state based in colonialism and only able to maintain funding and any legitimacy by using pity and guilt tactics against European nations and the United States (based in guilt or fears from after WWII) and propaganda that biases these nations further against Arab people who have lived there for centuries, vs American and European Zionist Jews who have only had a politically-recognized “nation” there since 1948. Yes, there were Jews in the Middle East (i will make another post later about why I as an Arab Jew hate that descriptor personally), and there have been Jews there since the dawn of Judaism. And Israel, as a “nation”, was originally written in sacred text to be a large family and community that defended itself when needed and only to the extent needed and other than that left everyone the fuck alone. The Israeli apartheid regime as we know it today is very well and truly NOT founded in scriptural law. I feel as if my post pre-addendum made it sound as if i thought the apartheid nation should continue to exist. I have never once believed it should; the extreme racism and violence against Arab people regardless of religion that i have previously discussed should more than show what i believe. And while yes, i do support Judaism as a religion and Jewish people (and why wouldn’t i as a fellow Jew?), i refuse to support, tolerate, or otherwise allow a genocide against my fellow human beings in Palestine.

Furthermore, Israel is a notoriously homophobic political entity, and the fact that the IDF is spreading propaganda that they are more tolerant than Palestinians is honestly bullshit, and it is a disgusting way to attempt to cover their own crimes and aggressions toward another marginalized community in order to further delegitimize and attack Palestinians.

Palestinian people have no food, no power, no water, and no hope of humanitarian aid because of the increasingly dangerous situation caused by the IDF and its allies and supporters.

FTRTTS🇵🇸

UPDATE: turns out part of my family is actually Palestinian too. My great aunt did a little digging and found some old papers. This was really stressful to learn on the same day I learned about the fact that there are no more hospitals in Gaza. I’m kind of going through it.

End addendum; original post begins below.

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I’m not gonna make any more fucking comments about politics except in the United States for a while because my heart is torn to pieces by the act of a certain nation using white phosphorus over populated areas, which is a war crime, and murdering, displacing, and injuring (over the course of several years) over 2.4 million mostly innocent people, or 1.5 times the amount of people killed and displaced in the Armenian Genocide. On top of that, they started attacking a THIRD country. Also with white phosphorus, a chemical known to be so flammable that it burns people, buildings, trees, infrastructure, crops, etc., ON CONTACT.

The second nation mentioned is allegedly the main origin of a terrorist organization that has taken over 800 people hostage (the real causes of the conflict as it is currently unfolding), but the first nation’s response is disproportionately affecting civilians and not having the intended effect on the actual source of the conflict.

My heart is torn in two because my mother’s family is from one nation. My father’s family is from another. Both are now wrapped up in this conflict. And I can’t help but be mad on behalf of the poor civilians on all sides caught in the crossfire and the chemical weapons residue on all sides.

This is not to say I condone a terrorist organization taking hostages and murdering people. I loathe terrorism. But I do believe that this is something way larger than we’re all making it out to be and that there are facts being buried because they don’t suit a narrative. A fourth nation, nowhere near the geographic proximity of the affected areas, promised the same parcel of land for two of the nations and colonized the SHIT outta that land for many years.

And yes, I will share my complicated and nuanced feelings about this, as this will be my ONLY post on the subject.

I am Jewish, and I am Arab simultaneously. My family is not Palestinian, but Lebanese. White phosphorus is being poured over my family’s original homeland. Another ancestral group is the group using the chemical weapons over populated areas and committing a war crime. I don’t condone the actions of Hamas (edit: some of what i have read may be propaganda and i am attempting to find better sources), as they do not speak for the majority of the people of Palestine. I also do not condone the Israeli genocide of Palestinians over the past several years. As I mentioned before, the total casualty count of this genocide (and I WILL call it that since it does meet the criteria even if it isn’t formally recognized as such yet) is currently at least 2.4 million people, probably more. This is, as I’ve said, 1.5 times the casualties of the (formally recognized) Armenian Genocide, and over 1/3 the total of people killed in the largest formally recognized systemic murder of a target group or set of groups in human history.

Atrocities are being committed by a terrorist organization, but the response disproportionately affects civilians. Especially children. Most cases being treated by Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), are Palestinian children. Actually, scratch that, nearly one hundred percent of cases. They as an organization have confirmed that number.

ADDENDUM: Médecins Sans Frontières have also just confirmed, as of about three hours ago, that BOTH SIDES of this conflict have been beheading CHILDREN. So far at least ten beheadings of children have been attributed to Israeli forces. We also must not forget that Hamas has also been beheading children, in much greater number that has yet to be successfully totaled. My heart goes out to the grieving Israeli and Palestinian mothers and fathers and siblings today.

UPDATE: the above may have since been proven incorrect and i am locating all possible sources to re-evaluate this statement.

Furthermore the injured are currently at immediate risk. See below.

I don’t agree with Hamas and their policies of beheading and assault (edit: as previously stated, these may have been disproven), but I don’t agree with any of this shit that the Israeli government’s response has caused. This isn’t antisemitism, this is being against human rights violations. The Zionist movement’s governing body does not speak for all Jews. Hamas does not speak for all Palestinians.

There really is a colonial power to blame for a majority of conflict since 1918, and that is Britain. Everything got SIGNIFICANTLY worse when the British came in and promised the same parcel of land to two groups of people, and then worsened even more at a rapid rate when the British left.

And now Lebanon has been dragged into the crossfire; i will edit this post if I find evidence of direct involvement of the Lebanese government in these events.

EDIT: as confirmed by Al Jazeera news, at least two Lebanese people and a journalist in Lebanon have been killed by Israeli air strikes. Israel has infringed on Lebanese airspace more than 22000 times since 2007. Lebanese rockets or similar very rarely land over the border.

But for now, I’m really against Hamas but also against the Israeli government’s decision to arbitrarily hurt civilians in their efforts to stop Hamas.

being raised in the Church and seeing people pray for the lives they vote against is a rough experience

can republican law makers realize that like. the human body is more fucking complicated than just "xy = boy and xx = girl" etc. 2% OF THE WORLD IS INTERSEX. MAYBE MORE. that is more than how many people are redheads!!! how many natural redheads have you met in your life? now imagine that amount of people, but instead of red hair they're cis women who are xy or people who have xxy chromosomes or etc. dude. people are fucking stupid.

I was just reminded that I wanted to go check up on the situation in Armenia and so I made the mistake of looking at some news. I want to tear my hair out. This isn’t a question of two equal sides. You can’t negotiate your way out of a situation where one country wants to ~genocide the other~. Azerbaijan had a fucking murder theme park. I was a little skeptical of the idea that the mainstream news could be so fucking out of touch when I heard about the situation for the first time, but this is just embarrassing. Peace talks only work when there’s an actual conflict!

People on this website really hold anarchists to a standard they wouldn’t liberals. Like, I’m not saying ~someone~ doesn’t need to know how insulin is going to work, but does your random Joe off the street know how it works now? It’s like they think ~we~ think that expertise is bourgeoises, which. No. We’re not the fucking Khmer Rouge. Also, these questions are literally never asked in good faith. If you ~want~ to know how food production will work in a post capitalist world, then there’s plenty of leftists that have done actual good work on this. You could go talk to them. Google things. See if the obvious questions you had within five seconds of encountering an idea have been broached by literally anyone.

Yes, there are people with unrealistic ideas. Obviously. But “things can continue as they are now” is one of them.

This post is dedicated to my homeland.

Not to the people who live in it, not to the country, not to the cities or history. This is dedicated to the land itself, the ground, the mud and the sand. To the trees and the desert and the rivers and the lakes and the migrating birds and the loud sea and the striped clouds and the overbearing sun. This is dedicated to a land people are fighting over for the wrong reasons.

This is dedicated to a land.

A home I'm watching burn bright but somehow become darker than it ever was.