Travels with Stormcrow into the Internet

Over 500 years spent trying to cut down a whole trunk of human culture.

[ID: a rectangle flag made to mimic the progress pride flag. The flag is horizontal, equally sized, and 9-striped with the colors lavender, magenta, red, orange, yellow, green, teal, indigo, and purple from top to bottom. There's a layered Star of David on the left of the image with the colors black, brown, blue, pink, white, and yellow from outside to inside. The yellow part has a small purple Star of David that makes the yellow part mimic the intersex flag. /End of ID]

happy prides !!

Unlike Earth, where sunsets are red and orange due to the scattering of shorter blue wavelengths by our atmosphere, Mars has an extremely fine dust that scatters blue light more efficiently near the Sun.

So during sunset on Mars, the sky turns reddish-brown while the area around the Sun glows a soft blue. It’s the opposite of what we experience on Earth.

NASA’s rovers have captured this eerie sight

It's rude. You're making someone take their time to read something you couldn't bother to write. You're telling them they were so unimportant you couldn't be bothered to actually take the time to say something yourself. And frankly, you're lying about it while you're at it.

When I was younger I was very right-wing. I mean…very right-wing. I won’t go into detail, because I’m very deeply ashamed of it, but whatever you’re imagining, it’s probably at least that bad. I’ve taken out a lot of pain on others; I’ve acted in ignorance and waved hate like a flag; I’ve said and did things that hurt a lot of people.

There are artefacts of my past selves online – some of which I’ve locked down and keep around to remind me of my past sins, some of which I’ve scrubbed out, some of which are out of my grasp. If I were ever to become famous, people could find shit on me that would turn your stomach.

But that’s not me anymore. I’ve learned so much in the last ten years. I’ve become more open to seeing things through others’ eyes, and reforged my anger to turn on those who harm others rather than on those who simply want to exist. I’ve learned patience and compassion. I’ve learned how to recognise my privileges and listen to others’ perspectives. I’ve learned to stand up for others, how to hear, how to help, how to correct myself. And I learned some startling shit about myself along the way – with all due irony, some of the things I used to lash out at others for are intrinsic parts of myself.

You wouldn’t know what I am now from what I was then. You wouldn’t know what I was then from what I am now.

It distresses me deeply to think of someone dredging up my dark, awful past and treating me as though that furiously hateful person is still me. It distresses me to see others dredging up the past for anyone who has made efforts to become a better person, out of some sick obsession with proving they’re “problematic.”

The obsession with finding shit in someone’s past and then claiming that a questionable or even sordid past negates all possibility of a good present needs to become extinct. Gold-star activism and purity culture are bullshit and we need to collectively reject the fuck out of them.

We really need to start asking where this purity bullshit came from. I’m not  Christian and was not raised Christian but there has been a lot evidence that much of gold star activism and purity culture originated in of evangelical youth movements and then infiltrated progressive left-wing and center-left politics when those youth left their churches but failed to leave behind the black-n-white puritanical “you’re going to hell if you stray one inch from the righteous path” style of thinking they were taught.

I distinctly remember some conversations I had in the late 00s and very early 2010s with long time social justice activists who were baffled and disturbed by the new crop of youth activists who were practicing something that was decidedly NOT social justice despite stealing that phrase from us.

In the decade and a half that has passed since then, all of this gold-star activism and purity culture has done exactly what I predicted back then: empowered the far-right while sowing division everywhere.

Rumination is probably the most common type of OCD compulsion, but I rarely see anyone talking about it. I've talked to multiple people diagnosed with OCD who didn't even recognize it as a compulsion.

Basically, if you have OCD you have terrible intrusive thoughts. They can be about anything, but common themes are fear of being a bad person, fear of hurting someone, fear of contamination. etc.

Rumination is when you get stuck in a spiral. Rumination is when you spend hours catastrophizing, overthinking, analyzing, telling yourself it's going to be okay.

I'll say it again:

Rumination is a compulsion.

Rumination is a compulsion, and that means you have to stop doing it.

I did ERP (exposure response prevention) for my OCD with a therapist! For 9 months! And it did help, but the idea didn't really click until I found this website a couple years later.

And Oh My God. It made things make so much more sense, and I was able to pull myself out of an episode even though I wasn't in therapy or on meds at the time.

Genuinely if you have OCD, or even if you suspect you have OCD, I'm begging you to read some of these articles.

Like this was genuinely life changing for me.

Here are some of the ones that were most helpful to me:

Defining Rumination

How to Stop Ruminating

ERP Exercises for Compulsive Rumination

Yeah, sure, serial killers deserve human rights too, but isn't there a more obvious demographic you're sliding right by? Isn't there a demographic of people so thoroughly erased by human rights discourse that their rights aren't even debated, it's just taken for granted that human rights don't apply to these people?

I take a poll: "how many of you would agree that 'everyone deserves the right to privacy' is a pretty uncontroversial statement?"

when 95% of them have put their hands up, I say "now, what if I clarify that 'everyone' includes children?"

Pedophiles, rapists, serial killers, the most evil people you can imagine are, in fact, still people.

All of them, if we're humoring the idea that your government has your best interests at heart and can be relied upon to do the right thing. Which, lol. Lmao, even.

But also, this has nothing to do with *forgiveness*. I don't have to "forgive" a person for that person to be *a person.* I don't think that only good people are people. I don't think that your humanity is dependent on your innocence or moral purity, and I think it's actually really dangerous to literally dehumanize people, especially as a way to justify state violence against them.

You must have a lot of faith in the inherent goodness of all governments.

But we're going to have to disagree on that.

Here's something to consider- the atrocities of the American prison system (functional slave labor and all that) aside for the moment - did you know that in the mid 2010s, a tribunal found that the Chinese government was illicitly executing and harvesting organs from prisoners, to then sell those organs to foreigners for transplants. The vast majority of these prisoners being religious minorities, and the conviction rate in China (so the % of people accused of a crime that are found guilty) is more than 99%- suggesting that the opportunities for people to demonstrate their innocence is.....limited.

they spent 20 YEARS, and surprise, it also still looks like a fucking gym, with a roof about to rust through

like, look at the interior of this shithole

what the fuck were they doing for 20 years??

is that a goddamn drop ceiling? who the hell wants to live in a house with a drop ceiling? so you can throw pencils up when you're bored, like you're perpetually stuck in hell high school?

gonna start dunking turkeys at the freethrow line? I bet that kitchen smells like feet

I didn't think the plain, stanky old wood court could be topped until I saw this sad carpet. I bet it's just plain carpet directly over concrete. no insulation. all cold in winter.

why the fuck are you tired, you barely did anything

ick, it looks like it's definitely rotting