call me manatee

I found this piece of bark on the beach that looks like a manatee and I decided to keep it and named him manny

we're looking to create an AI policy, and when we were talking about this, my boss (older millennial) was genuinely shocked to hear that younger people do not (seem) to view AI positively (a la the recent commencement speakers being booed)

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Straight people are absolutely victims of homophobia. Girls too close friends with other girls. When a woman turns down a men and gets called a slur. Men doing anything perceived to be feminine. Years ago a cop tortured and killed his small child because he said the boy was gay. We will never know if that kid turned out to be gay because he wasn't killed for "being gay" but because his father's violent homophobia had him on the hunt for "signs" his child was queer.

Cis people are constantly victims of transphobia. Cis people get transvestigated, gender nonconforming people are attacked in bathrooms, people who "look" or "seem" trans are followed by cops and attacked by security guards. Anyone presenting in a way that doesn't align with the most rigid ideas of male and female are potential deviants who need punished.

White people are absolutely not victims of "reverse racism", but are still not necessarily "exempt" from being victimized by racism and antiblackness. The bar has shifted, and now more groups of white people enjoy being accepted into white supremacy who hadn't been previously--or were conditionally-- for example: Italians, Irish, and Jewish people. The entire concept of "race traitors" is a study on white people being brutalized by anti-Black racism. Racists hate Black folks so severely that white allies and partners are sometimes attacked and killed for it.

None of these people are the main targets of these bigotries, but their privileges are conditional still. Nonconformity and association with the "other" can get those privileges revoked.

But what we need to understand and understand well is that their victimhood in these scenarios is crucially not accidental. It is always a punishment for stepping out of line, either by potentially being the feared/hated category, or for "taking the side" of the feared/hated category. This is always intentional, and framing what happened to them as catching strays or that they aren't even really victims because they aren't the thing that they were hurt/killed over is extremely misguided and dangerous.

Defining ourselves by the violence done to us supports the idea that to exist as we are means to suffer. That a world where we can be ourselves without pain for being ourselves is impossible. It traps us in a cycle of hopelessness. And when we define ourselves by what is done to us, then those who experience what we do must be infringing somehow, because they ARENT us, so they cannot be victims like us. It cheapens their suffering, especially those harmed for allying with us because if to be one of us is such a doomed reality, what does that make someone who chooses to stand with us?

And it also cheapens our identities. It makes our identities and harm synonymous, creating a loop where violence is inevitable and a lack of violence is a lie. Anyone who isn't us is dangerous, and anyone who is us is only ever a victim like us.

It creates insular community that is just as capable of harm as the outsiders, and it deprives us of loving community who actually do know a bit about what it's like to be us, even if they aren't exactly like us.

'wAAyfarer - The total youth travel experience'

So many adults abandon reading as a hobby/coping mechanism because they feel they can only read adult books. And that takes a lot of time and effort a lot of us don’t have.

You don’t have to get large chapter books with long, complex plots that take hours to days to read to enjoy reading. You’re allowed to enjoy short, simple stories.

Reading has literally no rules. Books don’t discriminate. Read whatever you enjoy, even if that includes children’s books.

Yes, because the Washington state government activated like a sleeper-cell and ruthlessly, systematically hunted them down and annihilated them.

“Y2K came to nothing amirite?”

Yes because an army of software engineers working around the clock, losing sleep, and busting ass till the last minute prevented it from happening.

“Remember the hole in the ozone layer?”

You mean the one that was fixed through rigorous world wide government action?

One of the root problems of our society is a refusal or inability by media to articulate that all those “it’s gonna be an apocalypse” disasters were not disasters because we collectively did something about them.

The good news is this is actually quite correctable. I maintain my firm belief that we as humans are capable of solving almost all of our problems, when we decide to do so.

And I still think that’s going to happen. I don’t know when or how, but I do know that abandoning hope won’t help bring it about.