Linlalaland ^V^

happy 20 year anniversary of Neil banging out the tunes!

though every rat is special, it's a wonderful and unusual thing for their accomplishments to be remembered and cherished by so many people so many years later. we're all so fortunate to know about the rat who banged out the tunes!

thank you to all the people who sent me reference photos of their beloved rats for this piece!!! credits under the cut!

Young kids are also a lot more socially aware than people give them credit for. Young children are perfectly aware that adults don't take them seriously. They know when their parents don't actually like them. They listen and remember when adults talk about them while they're in the room. Kids will develop basic abilities to charm etc. from babyhood and will begin experimenting with social norms and concepts of deception, appropriate information, and acceptable language and attitudes in toddlerhood. By the time a kid is five or six, they have solid social strategies for relating to adults and separate ones fr relating to their peers, that they'll continue to refine for the rest of their lives. They will also say completely off the wall shit because they don't have the context to know what is and isn't considered super fucked up yet.

By the time a kid is eight or nine, their main difference from adults is in experience, interests, and ability for long-term focus. An eight year old can think as intelligently and coherently as a thirty year old, they just have less experience and information to draw from, and are likely interested in very different things. They're also likely still slightly hamstrung by vocabulary and literacy, though much less so than a younger kid.

Oh, yeah my sexuality fluctuates a lot.

Oh, yeah I go by multiple different names depending on how I feel.

Oh, yeah I’m asexual but it fluctuates occasionally.

Oh, yeah my clothing style changes frequently.

Oh, yeah my personality changes sometimes.

Oh.

Oh.

It might take time. More than has already passed, but it will get better.

than has already passed, but

it will get better.

Write it badly or it'll never be written

Write it badly or it'll never be written

Write it badly or it'll never be written

Write it badly or it'll never be written

It wasn't close I beat the pants off that man, and others like him. I did it more than once. Some guys got humble and stayed. One guy got angry and stormed out.

And I think about that every fuck damn time I hear that bullshit, which seems to be all the fuck over the place these days. Oh, women are just fragile little soft delicate flower creatures who can't do ANYTHING and could NEVER compete with big strong manly muscular strong MEN.

I think about driving that dude into the mats and seeing the brutal reality of this big dude's misogany meet the realization that a woman was beating his ass literally that second, that none of his strength could stop the fact that I'd just hip thrown him facefirst into the mats and that had I actually connected with the axe kick to his neck I would have crushed a bunch of important shit and he could not stop me, and his whole psyche collapsing like a dying star in that moment.

The more you learn about Jung... the more plural he gets.

He outright says he had multiple personalities when he was a child; he had dream-companions and visions he spoke to throughout his life (including a recurring one named Philemon).

And... a lot of Jungian psychology seems like an attempt to explain How Personality Works from the perspective of someone who is More Than One. The focus on archetypes (many headmates line up with one- there's been some research on fairy tale motifs in DID, fictives, etc.), the focus on individuation and self-actualization as the path to happiness, the interviews with imagined people...

And then he's trying to apply what he's learnt about how his selves work to people who only have one ~self~, but who are masking all the time because that's what you do when you're a person who can get therapy in the 1930s.

....I know a lot of my friends who are plural describe having a brain state they call the "sea" or the "void" or the "soup", and it sounds a lot like how Jung describes the collective unconscious. Similarly, the anima/animus split and the persona/shadow split are very common headmate dualities.

Privilege is when you lack barriers another person faces due to your identity (or perceived identity!) and social position, and it's often unnoticeable that you're experiencing it until someone points it out.

An example: I have privilege over my POC friends because I am perceived as white. My man friends have privilege over me because I am perceived as a woman. So my Puerto Rican man friend and I have privilege over each other in different ways, him because he doesn't face sexism and misogyny the way I do, and me because I don't face racism the way he does.

Relative Privilege is when one person with the same identity as another experiences discrimination or barriers to a lesser degree than the other.

An example: My friend and I are both Autistic, and we both experience discrimination due to that. Our autism presents differently, and (generally speaking!), I am more disabled by it than he is. Thus, he holds relative privilege over me. He is still discriminated against more than an allistic person is, but he is discriminated against for his autism less than I am for mine. This is relative privilege. This can also be applied more broadly, for example, I hold relative privilege over many disabled people who are not Autistic but are also otherwise disabled, because they experience more barriers than I do.

Also please note that privilege, because it's given or denied from larger social structures, is often more about how people perceive your identities than your actual identities! For example, I am not a woman, but I am perceived as a woman, and thus experience discrimination based on that.

and as im searching for them, one of the results that comes up is this preschool talking about how they have their kids make their own tea as like. a fun activity and a grounding exercise. and also as a way to build independent skills. all these cherubic lily white children dipping little bags of tea into their cups of warm water.

and at first i'm hit with the overwhelming horrific irony of the situation. like i guarantee you no one involved is really thinking about the violence against children that produced that tea. or the racial and class dynamics of who produced it and who is consuming it.

but then there's Another level of like. these children are the lucky ones, but they still have no say about being sent to this institution that's meant to train them for induction into global capitalism. and their images are still being used without their consent (and probably even their knowledge) in the marketing for this institution in order to generate profit. for the adults who own it.

and all this is happening on a platform that is notorious for using image data in massively privacy violating ways for surveillance and consumer analysis. again, in order to generate profit for the adults who own it.

and then i'm seeing this post and reading these reports using my laptop and smartphone, which both use cobalt, lithium, and copper mined throughout central/sub-saharan africa and latin america. minerals which are mined by tens of thousands of children.

church, extracurriculars, summer camps, school classes, their biological family's houses. notably, these are the places that child abuse is enabled by the child's inability to just fucking leave if they need to. they can't walk out of church if their youth pastor touches them inappropriately; they'll get punished for leaving. if they walk out of their house because their dad hits them, the cops pick them up and give them right back to their dad.

children need the legal autonomy to leave abusive situations in order to even begin to usefully materially address child abuse.