You did a bad job with me, god

Hi, everyone. It's Caesar. It's been a while since I posted here, mostly because ive been having a hard time figuring out what i want to do with this. I guess I should just get right into the final post for a while.

First, some clarifications:

I AM NOT DELETING THIS BLOG. I've deciding to do what i-am-a-fish did a while back and just head out for a while. I will be back here one day, when I am in a place where I can better emotionally handle the pros and cons that come with having 10k followers on a site as hostile and volatile as this one. I have had this blog for so long now that I really can't delete it. This is a part of me now. How long I'll be gone for will depend, really. It could be next week, it could be next year, it could be a few months, it could be 2030. I will be back some day, when things in my life are better, but I don't know when.

I am still active on tumblr, but I've downsized significantly by offloading onto an entirely separate account under an entirely separate email. I will be painstakingly going through everyone who asked for that URL and telling them. If you want to send asks or messages asking for that URL, I'll still see them, but I'll answer privately instead from now on. I also can't guarantee I'll answer right away, it depends on when i think to log back in. So if you want that URL, I will give it to anyone who asks, but you have to ask for it.

I will be periodically reblogging this so that everyone can see it and have the opportunity to ask, as well as pinning it.

personal life update under the cut, for those wondering/worried about me because of the radio silence:

of course, i ask this with zero intent to pressure you--starting over with a new blog should be all about leaving behind the stresses of your old one ^__^

condolences again for getting such terrible backlash for a natural response and opinion... that everyone seems so blind to their reactionist tendencies is scary. the justification that if "'conservatives' do it 'us leftists' can too" in reference to several actions/beliefs/behaviours/etc. is something i've seen a rapid rise in, especially in the wake of what has been happening.

p.s. i also live in alberta and knowing you're here brings me great comfort! just as additional clarification: although we share similar beliefs i want to make sure it's known that i don't just want your url to add your blog to my echo chamber. i just know that i'll miss your blog, and not for the politics but for the care and thought you approach everything with.

Hey there, I really appreciate everything youve said here

The response ive been getting lately of everyone telling me how positive of an impact ive been on their feeds and even their lives outside of tumblr has been really really amazing. I was starting to feel like no one really liked me or wanted me around and that I was just secretly hated by everyone, but I realize now that I was wrong and its just that bullies are really really loud about everything.

Yesterday was the last day of my work week, so I have today and tomorrow free to make it. I do have to buy groceries today though and I am now battling spider mites that I found on one of my house plants:

But Im spraying and brushing all the leaves with rubbing alcohol and dawn dish soap and I think my preventative pest treatments kept them from getting too bad to treat. Im just scared because I keep this guy fairly close to my prized years-old hanging Boston fern and if any got blown over to that one the leaves are too small and delicate and the plant is too big for me to treat effectively. I only mention this because my plants are like my children so Im probably going to obsess over this and might forget about a lot of other things until theyre all dead, including remaking.

You arent obligated to agree with me, no one is obligated to agree with me. But everyone is obligated to treat people with respect and have compassion for others and give them the benefit of the doubt. Which unfortunately often gets portrayed as "so you think i should hug my local nazi?" These days.

I will say from personal experience that ive changed a lot of conservative minds irl by just being around them and showing them that trans people arent the boogeymen after their children that they were told we were. They see me having the same everyday struggles as them with the current Canadian economy and job market and skyrocketing housing prices and the same anxieties about my future, they see me making nervous kids laugh and jump up to give me high fives at the metal detectors and they think "oh, hes nothing like what Andrew Tate said he would be like." And it chips away at what they told people different than them are like, little by little. Its definitely not easy and it will take blows to your ego and feelings to deal with but it is worth it when you see your coworker change their thin blue line pfp on Facebook to a thin green line (which is for park rangers, game wardens, and environmental workers) and tell you that she didnt feel right about voting for the conservatives anymore so she ticked the box for the greens this time instead (normally I would be mad at someone for basically throwing their vote away, but in cases like that its serious personal progress to see someone start to think about others and the world around them instead of their own ingroup. That coworkers husband used to be an ultra maple leaf maga and actual maga and now hes offering to service my car's brake pads for free as long as he can show me his collection of military plane models after I told them I like to build models too).

What a lot of these experiences have taught me is that in a lot of cases, people are conservative because theyre scared. This is obviously not the case for everyone and a lot of others are conservative because they just hate other people, but in these cases where they have legitimate concerns and anxieties for the way the world is changing around them, taking their hand and telling them they have nothing to be afraid of and no one is coming to take anything away from them, we just want to have all those baseline things too, can go a long way. A year ago these people used to think that litter boxes were being put in children's schools, and now my coworker is asking me genuinely curious questions about what how HRT works and saying things like "thats so cool that the human body can do that!" and "its so disgusting that our premier cares more about taking away your medicine and banning books about queer people than the real reasons why theres a crime and safety problem here >:(( shes never getting my vote again"

I had a similar experience when a friend of many years dumped me with no explanation after I started putting my foot down that maybe we should treat the Israel/Palestine situation with more nuance instead of harassing every Israeli because they may actually dislike their government and be on your side about how shitty it's being (it's me I'm that Israeli lol).

You have been a refreshingly level-headed presence on my feed and I will miss that. It's good you are attending to your mental health and I hope find the healing you need. Your response was completely rational considering how traumatizing what you witnessed is. Frankly I'm concerned with how readily and carelessly such obviously triggering footage is being tossed around. Regardless of how you feel about the man, watching another human being die is traumatic and shouldn't be taken lightly.

Im right there with you about everything. Thats another thing that I can not make exceptions for: innocent civilians never deserve to be hurt or die. How i feel about the nazis is vastly different than how I feel about the average innocent German from the 1940s, and I say that as a jew.

Not to reveal myself as an MCU stan but theres a line in the first captain america movie that I have never forgotten: "the first country that the nazis invaded was their own." When people like this take power, its an invasion of their own country. The innocent civilians have nothing to do with it. Also like, i think nations with compulsory military service should be taken with more nuance too, because you can not seriously expect the average person to throw their life and future away to a prison sentence just to make a point that will not be heard by that invading force.

The average Israeli is no more of a participant in Netanyahu's fascist bullshit than the average american is from across the Atlantic just because their government sells him weapons. I as a random Canadian shmuck am not an active participant in my country's Saudi arms deals to make the Yemen situation worse, and its a little wild to pretend that i am.

I really think the goal that needs to be worked towards in the I/P region is a dismantling of the Palestinian apartheid that leads to harmonious co-governance based on reconciliation and reconstruction. Theres been multiple generations of Israelis born and raised in the region, its neither logistically possible nor morally sound to just kick all of them out and tell them to go die stateless about it because of what their passport says.

It... also kind of disturbs me that when Russia invaded ukraine there were essay length posts everywhere about how the average Russian is not responsible for the actions of Vladimir Putin and that you cant expect them to risk their lives to protest in the street against a tyrant that will just kill them about it, which is true. But when the Palestinian genocide began, suddenly that didnt apply to your average Israeli civilian who was a violent nazi zionist if they didnt run down the streets of Tel Aviv setting themselves on fire. I uh, I really wonder what the demographic difference might be after the dead silence when jews marching for their hostages were actually set on fire /s

It reminds me a lot of the violent Islamophobia that permeated north american society after 9/11. Id honestly just venture to say outright that if youre suspicious of jews and random Israeli civilians for something they can not control and had no power over because of the actions of the IDF, then you would also be Islamophobic after 9/11 because of the actions of Bin Laden.

Its just... disturbing all around how quick everyone is to point fingers and look for demographics its "progressive" to be bigoted towards. And the incredibly stupid part is that when you create an environment where people like waste so much time and energy fighting back the tide of violent antisemitism in our own backyards, we have no more time left to actually fight for the Palestinians these people claim to care about so much. Because like im sorry but if you throw a molotov cocktail at my immediate next door neighbour my first response is going to be to aggressively chase you away and call 911 and try to administer first aid, its not going to be to think about the Palestinians that are staring down gun barrels and landmines now that you are claiming you want more people to think about. People will naturally dive to help those they can physically reach if you are creating an environment where those people are being discriminated against for something they didnt do. Thats not because we dont care about the people being targeted and attacked overseas, its because youve created another violent problem that I can physically react to in time.

I know I've only been following you for a little while but I've really appreciated seeing your more grounded takes on a website where the discourse is... anything but that, honestly. Seeing the video would have been really awful, and it's shitty that takes like "public assassination and gun violence is bad, actually, even when the victim is a real piece of shit, and I personally am uncomfortable celebrating it" will get you so dogpiled.

You make me think about my older brother, who has similar issues with a lot of leftist discourse as you do while still holding a lot of left-wing views. My brother is a Christian (unlike me) and he's been trying to find ways to persuade Christians who vote for racist assholes with no political integrity because they're "upholding Christian values" that maybe that's not the right route to go down. Unfortunately American-style Christian nationalism is taking hold among a lot of young Christians in Australia, and I admire my brother's commitment to maintaining his own values and speaking out despite that. The way you maintain your own positions instead of jumping on bandwagons reminds me of him and he's one of the people I admire most. I hope that's not weird to say.

Anyway I guess all that is to say I'd love to be able to keep following you on here, although if you don't want that then that's perfectly fine. I hope that you can get some peace when you make a new blog.

Thank you so much. I dont think its weird to say, it really means a lot to compared to someone who sounds a really great guy with a lot of integrity who knows what he stands for and believes in

I've kinda stopped... calling myself a leftist even though I hold a lot of leftist views because the term has just atrophied itself after seeing the behavior of others that I really dont want to be associated with. I dont really think I can ascribe fully to any one ideology, but democratic socialism is pretty damn close to where I stand on things socially and economically. Ive honestly just started calling myself a "left-liberal" because "liberal" in and of itself is a very wide-sweeping umbrella term that has also been memed to hell and back by people who dont seem to know what it means and just think it means "people i dont like." Also seeing how others react to someone calling themselves a "liberal" is a really good litmus test to see who actually means it when they talk about solidarity with people who are different than them, because if you cant manage it with someone like me who doesnt believe in bloody revolution, than you dont actually mean it with anything else.

Also, my ideology is boring and beurocratic and involves chipping away at the block of shit over time to get the people trapped inside of it out safely instead of just blowing it all up with dynamite and hoping for the best. Because politics should be boring and beurocratic, honestly. The recent change of winds to this incredibly just... vibes-based body politic is not... great. I once heard someone say "sufficiently advanced mutual aid is indistinguishable from beurocracy" and it gagged me so hard that it snapped me out of the last little bit of revolutionary thinking that was clinging onto my brain

I had a friend go through similair harassment. Restarting sucks but it does help. I hope youre able to get breathing room away from internet assholes.

If you do recreate though Id like to follow. I enjoy seeing you on my dash whether its shit posts or more serious stuff. If not, I totally get it too. Either way I hope youre able to get out n away from this shit, it weighs but creating some distance away from it really does help, reminds you that assholes on the internet aren't that important to your routine/life and makes that rock in your gut and heart ease off with time.

Hey man, we've been mutuals for a long time now and I see no reason to let you go now

What gets me about this whole thing is that if you removed this from an extremely online echo chamber it would sound rightfully fucking insane: "im being painted as a crazy fascist for saying that i dont like political assassinations, and that was the final straw for me after being continuously shat on for not thinking we should kill the people we dont like." I think it just absolutely goes to show how removed a lot of this site is from the reality of their actions. All this talk of the guillotine from a comfortably disconnected place behind a screen, but... are you going to be the one who drags a real, living, breathing human being out into the streets by their hair while they cry and scream, probably soil themself, and beg you for their life?

Thank you so much <3 ill add you to the list of people ill pass it on to

Thank you so much <3

And yeah, all this glorification of violence and carving out people its acceptable to murder has never worked out in history and will not work in the future. If im going to sit here and say that I dont believe in gun violence or the moral nor pragmatic implications of political assassinations, then that doesnt change when its someone I hate who would dance on my grave.

Ive seen people comparing it to being upset Hitler killed himself. Its just completely lost the plot.

I also just... dont like my generation very much, I think. For all this talk about how boomers are regressive bad people, boomers had the free love movement and the anti-vietnam protests and actually mobilized at the polls and marched with civil rights leaders to end segregation. For all our talk about our generations amazingness and how uniquely progressive we apparently are, y'all cant even boycott chick fil-a or fill in a bubble on a piece of paper because youre too concerned with spray painting "zionist nazi" on a jewish person's car for wearing a star of david in public and telling people who dont share the exact same ultra-specific increasingly-violent opinions as you that the world would be better off if they were dead.

Would absolutely love to be mutuals again on whatever new blog you create so feel free to dm it to me when the time comes, and I think the James Bond handle is really clever LMAO

Absolutely, you've been a lovely mutual to have on this blog so I would love to have you on my new one too.