Fluffiness.

Like… if you open a coffee shop and run it for a while and it makes you happy but then stuff gets too expensive and stressful and you want to do something else so you close it, it’s a “failed” business. If you write a book or two, then decide that you don’t actually want to keep doing that, you’re a “failed” writer. If you marry someone, and that marriage is good for a while, and then stops working and you get divorced, it’s a “failed” marriage.

The only acceptable “win condition” is “you keep doing that thing forever”. A friendship that lasts for a few years but then its time is done and you move on is considered less valuable or not a “real” friendship. A hobby that you do for a while and then are done with is a “phase” - or, alternatively, a “pity” that you don’t do that thing any more. A fandom is “dying” because people have had a lot of fun with it but are now moving on to other things.

X

The murder of Palestinian children and ethnic cleansing of Palestinian communities is being supported by the US. Americans' taxes are funding these atrocities.

Please include Palestinians in your activism 🇵🇸❤️

I recently saw a tweet that went something like this:

Reading about anti-racism doesn’t make you an anti-racist.

My defensive response was immediate.

*Man looking at his phone with a thought bubble* Is this putting people down for reading about anti-racism?

Then:

*Man looking more curious* Wait a minute. What if I switched ‘anti-racism’ with ‘mountain climbing’?

Let’s try it out:

Reading about mountain climbing doesn’t make you a mountain climber.“

*Man reading a book about brain surgery* Right. You can read about something, but then there are a whole series of actions and experiences that lead to you doing that thing.

That takes: expert advice, trial and error, humility, setbacks, and regular practice.

Not to mention: racism is nuanced with hidden levers, built in secrets, unwritten rules, and over 400 years of social conditioning. *Man thinking with speech bubble: “Crap. The word ‘racism’ set me off.”*

*Man disappointed* The point here is upsetting: I almost missed the truth of that tweet because of my white defensie response.

As a white person in this culture, I need to question my defensive reactions constatnly, or I’m just repeating history.

Signed: BH 20

children exploited and trafficked by their families

Homeless minors engaging in survival sex work

One of the best ways to reduce sex trafficking is to provide resources and a robust safety net to allow people to escape from abusive situations. Housing first initiatives, safe injection sites with addictive drugs provided by local governments, and support for nontraditional family structures can all help to reduce sex trafficking.

Most of the victims of sex trafficking are safe to traffic because they’re people society has already decided that they don’t care about. Most are easy to traffic because they don’t have anyone they can go to for help.

I know these tweets are from 2019 but 2020 saw a massive surge in discussions of sex trafficking with almost no talk about who the victims are, and even less talk about how much more common labor trafficking is (and how hard things are for trafficked workers).

I mean

Applegate’s statement on the piracy subject is quoted from an AMA here for those that have moral issues with it. for those that don’t want to click, she says: “We do not take them down. Or ask for them to be taken down. I think once the books are available to buy—paper or e—it would be nice if people who could afford it would buy. (our kids have very expensive tastes. You know: food and whatnot.) But for years they’ve been unavailable except by ‘pirated’ means. These men and women kept the series alive. They kept the books available. So no, we did NOT take these books down.”

Holy Tree of Bunny Butts

Once at a business setting, a CEO physically grabbed me at the door and said “You can’t go in like that” and redid my tie. Kept pushing me in the chest tsk-ing at me. This was at the height of covid; I don’t like to be touched, much less then. Why was this okay?

At a grocery store (where I’ve had multiple racist encounters) the cashier asked me “How do you make fried rice?” The bagger behind her, a wonderful Black woman, said to the cashier “Honey are you out of your mind?” Never forgot that intervention. Thank you.

Been thinking about this a lot ever since before the recent news spike; never was sure how to say it gracefully, so fuck it, I'll just say it ungracefully. We all saw various pronunciation guides for the victims' names pop up in the aftermath of the Atlanta shootings, which I and I'm sure many others of Asian descent hugely appreciate. Most white Americans will never truly experience of having every school teacher, classmate, colleague, customer service rep, and so forth mangle your last and/or first name, especially for first gen kids or kids whose parents didn’t give them an English nickname. It's hard; I get it. Many phonemes in my native Mandarin, for example, have no common English equivalents. They're literally not in your lexicon. So I for one appreciate any good faith effort to ask people of Asian descent how to correctly pronounce their name.

But I also want to bring up the converse: if your Asian friend refuses to divulge their name in their mother tongue, or looks really uncomfortable as you repeatedly fail to master the pronunciation, please just drop it. I cannot count the number of times I've seen white people try to say my Chinese or Korean or Indian friends' names; it usually goes something like this: Asian friend gives pronunciation; white friend repeats it back while sounding nothing like what they heard; Asian friend repeats it again; white friend tries again all while looking at Asian friend with puppy dog eyes like, did I get it right? Did I get it right? Meanwhile my ears are bleeding.

Or the weird thing where white guys are really interested in our Asian names because they think it's sexy or exotic? ? Like my creepy weeb colleague back in New York with a serious case of yellow fever: I told him my Chinese name just to get him off my case, because he thought it was more romantic (??) that instead of my English name which is what I go by. It's far from the first time that's happened. Anyways, that turned out to be a stupid decision as he wouldn’t shut up about it; I ended up changing my Tumblr and Ao3 names which were based on my Chinese name out of fear that he would find me using it. Four years later, I still get random messages from him using my Chinese name and begging me to come back and see him. Jfc

The Scientific American is one of the world’s leading science journals, so when they print an article about transgender athletes, it is a safe bet that it is science based.

Jack Turban is a fellow in child and adolescent psychiatry at the Stanford University School of Medicine, where he researches the mental health of transgender youth. 

He addresses the arguments behind the American anti-trans bills:

There is no epidemic of transgender girls dominating female sports. Attempts to force transgender girls to play on the boys’ teams are unconscionable attacks on already marginalized transgender children, and they don’t address a real problem. They’re unscientific, and they would cause serious mental health damage to both cisgender and transgender youth…

The notion of transgender girls having an unfair advantage comes from the idea that testosterone causes physical changes such as an increase in muscle mass. But transgender girls are not the only girls with high testosterone levels. An estimated 10 percent of women have polycystic ovarian syndrome, which results in elevated testosterone levels. They are not banned from female sports. 

Transgender girls on puberty blockers, on the other hand, have negligible testosterone levels. Yet these state bills would force them to play with the boys. Plus, the athletic advantage conferred by testosterone is equivocal. 

As Katrina Karkazis, a senior visiting fellow and expert on testosterone and bioethics at Yale University explains, “Studies of testosterone levels in athletes do not show any clear, consistent relationship between testosterone and athletic performance. Sometimes testosterone is associated with better performance, but other studies show weak links or no links. And yet others show testosterone is associated with worse performance.” The bills’ premises lack scientific validity.

Read the whole article here!

Thanks for stopping by for tea with our positive bunny friend! ☕ We can be so critical of ourselves and not even realize, so sometimes we just need someone on the other side of the table to tell us what they really see.

1) This tweet comes after a thread that starts like this :

2) Goes on to condemn the carceral framework of immigration policy as a whole :

3) And as for the tweet screencapped by op, it’s a response to this :

So here’s what AOC, quote-unquote “cannibal”, is actually saying in that tweet :

- no immigration facility should be carceral

- immigrant children who come in the country alone (which is a situation which has always existed and. will. always. exist.) and/or children who’ve been torn apart from their families should be taken care of in (separate) facilities which need to go through a tougher vetting process

- none of these facilities should be sub-contracted by the gvt

- and some facilities which have had problems in the past should maybe just be closed

- all of these solutions should be short term before a deeper reform can occur.

ALL. OF. THESE. ARE. VALID. AND. PERFECTLY. NORMAL. POINTS. TO. MAKE. NONE OF THEM ARE IN CONTRADICTION WITH AOC’S EARLIER TWEET.

Seriously some people have this idea that advocating for radical reform means you’re exempt from thinking about the meat-and-potatoes day-to-day inner workings of any policy. You’re all for immigration ? Great, me too. How do you plan to house migrants when they arrive ? What kind of facility would you need ? Who would run it ? How do you survey and vet the people running it ? What extra services do you need to provide for immigrant minors who come in unaccompanied and need to be protected in a country they don’t know ? And how do we deal with the damage already caused by the current system ?

AOC is absolutely not saying, as the framing suggests, that “concentration camps” would be fine with a few tweaks. She is saying that such a system is not okay and that deep change is needed, while providing concrete solutions to the most pressing issues with the current way the system works. These two statements are not incompatible.

And that's not a joke or an exaggeration.

If criminals don't have rights, then all the government has to do is find some excuse to label people as criminals, and those people will no longer have rights. It's what literally every tyrannical government in all of history has done.