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Suppose you own a car. You stop at a stoplight and get carjacked. Some guy walks up and sticks a gun in your face and makes you get out of the car.

He gives you a bicycle with no wheels and drives off in your car.

Now the car thief dies, and in his will he leaves the car to his son.

You know who the thief was and you can prove it’s your car. But the son insists that because he didn’t steal anything and the car was given to him by his father, it’s his car.

He refuses to give it back because he thinks you might not let him use it any time he wants for anything he wants. He gives you a tire pump for your bike with no wheels and tells you to be grateful for what you have.

Who is the rightful owner of the car?

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That’s colonialism. That’s literally the primary argument against giving stolen land back to indigenous people both in North America and all over the world.

Many corvids also mate for life. They have foods they prefer more than others, and it has been discovered that they can also know and remember their partner’s favourites, and bring those treats to each other, even if they personally don’t care for this food source.

Is that love? A crow cannot be forced to do something it does not want to do, they do as they please and it pleases them to bring gifts to their partners. What is love but joy that stems from the joy of another?

Do they know what love is? A jackdaw knows that another jackdaw it can see has seen it in return - do they know that a spouse that brings them treats does it as a treat to themselves as well?

still thinking abt this person who tried to say ao3 is a library and claimed you can't expect a library to censor its contents...

like. i don't know how to tell you that books and by extension libraries absolutely fucking do have their content censored. you wanna know how i know? because PUBLISHING SHIT LIKE CHILD PORN AS A BOOK AND SELLING IT WOULD BE AGAINST THE LAW.

no, written content is not included in the federal laws against child porn. but it is against obscenity laws, which don't allow you to sell and profit from content that fails the miller test. and written CP absolutely does fail.

"but what about meaningful explorations of abuse and dark subjects?" i hear some people whine. don't worry, the test accounts for that, because believe it or not people do have braincells and can tell when things are meaningfully depicting dark topics and when they're just pornographic! lolita, for example, does not appeal to "prurient interests", which is a fancy way of saying it condemns the pedophile it's depicting, and is not intended to be sexually appealing. therefore, it's not considered child porn.

or how about OP here, who claims we would have to ban classic books because of racist or antisemitic content? the test accounts for that, too! some books are considered to hold great literary, scientific, political, or artistic value, and therefore are preserved even as they may contain obscene content we wouldn't tolerate normally. to make it simple, the great gatsby holds literary value. your incest fanfic does not.

here's that test by the way, along with more information on obscenity laws. always check your sources!

i say all this to say- real writers, ones who officially publish, are held to real standards. you will not find sexily written incest and pedophilia on the shelves of any library, and if you somehow did, there would be legal grounds to have it banned. the real world doesn't tolerate this shit.

so in conclusion, ao3 is NOT a library. and if you want it to be one, you'll be having your work held to the same standards. US law doesn't believe in "ship and let ship".