He's totally dead, dude

Tenna art by @9Aaaalt29 on twt

Due to the uptick of ICE activity across Maine, let's shine a spotlight on organizations serving the community there and make known ways anyone anywhere can help, starting with Project Relief.

Project Relief is a Black immigrant-led mutual aid and racial justice collective based in Maine. Since 2019, we’ve been on the frontlines defending immigrant families from ICE, providing emergency food and shelter, and funding legal support for those detained. We are not a charity. We are a community of immigrants and allies building power together because no one should face deportation, hunger, or homelessness alone.

This is where support of Project Relief goes:

Providing Legal Support & ICE Defense: 'When a community member is detained by ICE, we act fast. We use mutual aid funds to pay for immigration lawyers, cover legal fees, and support families through every step of the process. No one faces deportation alone.'

Providing Emergency Shelter & Housing: 'Safe housing is a human right. We’ve provided homes for dozens of individuals and families, especially women and children, who were at risk of homelessness or displacement.'

Providing Mutual Aid & Community Defense: 'We are immigrants helping immigrants. Our network mobilizes during ICE raids, advocates for policy change, and takes to the streets in solidarity with those targeted by systemic racism.'

"When institutions fail, community steps in.

Every act of giving — every dollar, every meal, every bed — comes directly from people who care. That’s what makes Project Relief different: we are powered by the people we serve."

"etymologynerd" is at it again and this time i do feel i have to say something. the disability advocates have it covered on addressing the impact, but there's also a serious problem with the linguistics.

in a video shared on may 16, adam aleksic begins by saying: "i think we have to accept the fact that the 'r-word' [retard/retarded] is permanently coming back and it's functionally changed meanings to no longer directly refer to disabled people."

this first sentence alone betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of language change in several points.

this word never went away. what we're seeing now is an attempt at re-normalization by people who sense that they will not be socially punished by openly using this term.

we actually don't have to "accept" its return to mainstream use. for decades, disability advocates have worked to inform the public of the harm caused by casual use of this term. the harm has not disappeared, and neither will this advocacy and its impacts.

now i'm just mad. how tf does it NOT refer to disabled people? the entire point of a pejorative term is that it negatively invokes comparison to a person, group, etc. the assertion that the r-word has changed meanings is categorically false. at most, its primary context has changed from clinical to casually pejorative, but the insult fundamentally rests upon the original reference.

he goes on to refer to the "euphemism treadmill," another concept he misrepresents by extending the metaphor to say that terms which have been sufficiently distanced from their original reference are no longer pejorative. to quote: "...once we sufficiently distance a word from its historical usage, it stops taking on the same offensive power and just becomes colloquial instead."

which... what? what the fuck is he talking about? the words he uses as examples – idiot, imbecile, and moron – are definitely still offensive, if perhaps less impactful. "just becomes colloquial instead" is a nonsense phrase. are offensive words not colloquial? the only english word that comes to mind as having changed so much in definition as to no longer be offensive is "nice," which has been shifting in meaning for more than 700 years and was never a weaponized clinical term.

he ends by saying, "it is undeniably true that the people who are afraid to say the r-word right now are going to get old and die out, while younger generations keep saying it with no knowledge of where it came from." again, fundamentally misunderstanding language change in society over time. it rests on the assumption that we're all going to start or re-start using this slur and never have a conversation about its harms, which just completely ignores both the abovementioned disability advocacy and the fact that people tell each other not to use offensive words. you think i'm just not gonna teach my kids that using slurs is bad??

the whole video is devoid of both empathy and an understanding of long-term semantic change.

YOU🫵'RE 🫵 NE->XT.!! moTHERFUCKER!!!!

But wait, there’s more!

Who wants to see my rabbit launch himself at my face this morning

Another older tarot card commission "Temperance"