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From pics community on reddit

You can fight ICE by annoying them

Mess up their food/drink orders- Lose their tickets/reservations

Overtighten lug nuts, strip spark plugs

Give them incorrect but real-sounding information

Record them with your phones

Disrupt them with loud noises (car alarms, music, banging metal) and bright lights (flashlights, headlights)

Shame them

(fuck yeah)

The fascists want complacency.

Do not give it to them.

(fuck them white supremacists )

But

Meanwhile, according to a 2016 study on retired boxers, about 11% of all retired boxers examined had a mild case of CTE, and about 6% of the boxers had major neurological problems. And if you just looked at boxers who were over the age of 50 and fought in over 150 fights, the rate of CTE went up to 50%. (2)

I’m sorry, but it is absolutely reasonable for a boxing fan to say that American football should be illegal due to the injury risk, because American football is a much more dangerous sport than boxing in relation to the risk of traumatic brain injury.

And if you’re surprised to learn that American football is more dangerous than the sport where you literally punch each other. Well. I’d say that that’s part of the problem, actually.

(1) Mez J, Daneshvar DH, Kiernan PT, et al. (25 July 2017).

To be clear, I personally don’t think that it’s necessary to outright ban American football. There are a huge number of things that we could do to make the sport dramatically safer, short of just banning it altogether! But I think that part of the issue is precisely that people don’t know the relative risks of these things. Many fewer parents are comfortable letting their kids play the “hit each other in the head” sport than are comfortable letting their kids play American football, and that’s absolutely an issue of informed consent.

that should disgust and enrage you.

if any other demographic of students had a 95% failure rate, we would be demanding reform and studies to understand why that’s happening

when i was at my first university, trying to get accommodations for my ADHD, they just kept asking me what accommodations i wanted, and refused to answer when i would ask what was available to me. how the Hell am i supposed to know what i can have? what’s available???? also, i don’t know!!!! i’m an adhd sufferer, not a fucking disability expert for the fucking college, unlike you, DISABILITY EXPERT WHO WORKS FOR THE COLLEGE.

but because the us is OBSESSED with making sure no one gets anything “”for free””, she literally would not tell me what my options were until i broke down in tears and asked her why she was refusing to help me. and then she did a big sigh, like i was fucking up her entire career by *checks notes* asking the disability center in my university to help me, a disabled student

at the second uni i went to, i tried to explain to a dean that i was literally two gen eds that had nothing to do with my degree away from graduating and that i was burnt out and broke and exhausted and suicidal and i just needed to be able to finish my degree without the gen eds. and this. fucking. guy. looked me right in my face and said in the most patronizing tone he could muster “if you can’t handle it, then maybe college just isn’t for you.” keep in mind that up until that semester, i had been an honor student who made Dean’s List every semester and didn’t get below Bs. if it hadn’t been for my mental breakdown, i would have graduated cum laude, maybe even summa cum laude.

So if it feels inescapable and like evidence of it is everywhere, whether at times or always, that might just because you're in a Western country where you're surrounded by Christians who believe that, fundamentally, in their worldview. And also they talk and make art about it all the time and run the vast majority of news outlets. And spent over a thousand years burning any art or texts that disagreed with them. Etc. etc.

If you're gonna come to as drastic and painful a conclusion as that, at least take the time first to make sure you're not working with biased evidence (surrounded by too many people and cultural products that believe original sin is real)

how often do we find human remains / burials attributable to a peaceful death of old age, or at least to disease / wild animals? and attributable to human violence, i.e. with traces of weapon impacts?

I personally am much more convinced and compelled by newer theories that, if any piece of technology made us human, it was not the weapon - it was the carrier bag, the story, and/or fire. (But not fire with the primary purpose of violence, mind you - fire with the primary purpose of heat and food and sanitation)

Here's a quote on this from one of my absolute favorite thinkers and writers, Ursula K. Le Guin:

If you haven't got something to put it in, food will escape you- even something as uncombative and unresourceful as an oat. You put as many as you can into your stomach while they are handy, that being the primary container; but what about tomorrow morning when you wake up and it's cold and raining and wouldn't it be good to have just a few handfuls of oats to chew on and give little Oom to make her shut up, but how do you get more than one stomachful and one handful home? So you get up and go to the damned soggy oat patch in the rain, and wouldn't it be a good thing if you had something to put Baby Oo Oo in so that you could pick the oats with both hands? A leaf a gourd a shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container. A holder. A recipient. The first cultural device was probably a recipient. . . . Many theorizers feel that the earliest cultural inventions must have been a container to hold gathered products and some kind of sling or net carrier. So says Elizabeth Fisher in Women's Creation (McGraw-Hill, 1975). But no, this cannot be. Where is that wonderful, big, long, hard thing, a bone, I believe, that the Ape Man first bashed somebody with in the movie and then, grunting with ecstasy at having achieved the first proper murder, flung up into the sky...? I don't know. I don 't even care. I'm not telling that story. We've heard it, we've all heard all about all the sticks and spears and swords, the things to bash and poke and hit with, the long, hard things, but we have not heard about the thing to put things in, the container for the thing contained. That is a new story. That is news... It sometimes seems that that story is approaching its end. Lest there be no more telling of stories at all , some of us out here in the wild oats, amid the alien corn, think we'd better start telling another one, which maybe people can go on with when the old one's fin- ished. Maybe. The trouble is , we've all let ourselves become part of the killer story, and so we may get finished along with it. Hence it is with a certain feeling of urgency that I seek the nature, subject, words of the other story, the untold one, the life story.

Fire is literally the reason our brains are larger than any other species of ape's, because harnessing fire meant we spent radically less energy spent on digestion - and those excess resources instead changed the evolution of the human brain.

Also fire is probably the reason we're not fully covered in hair anymore, evolutionarily - because we evolved in equatorial Africa, where not wearing a fur coat everywhere was an evolutionary advantage due to, you know, the temperature of it all. Once we could make our own heat to survive the cold nights and winters, less insulation was a huge evolutionary advance in equatorial regions especially

Wherever humans have gone in the world, they have carried with them two things, language and fire. As they traveled through tropical forests they hoarded the precious embers of old fires and sheltered them from downpours. When they settled the barren Arctic, they took with them the memory of fire, and recreated it in stoneware vessels filled with animal fat. Darwin himself considered these the two most significant achievements of humanity. It is, of course, impossible to imagine a human society that does not have language, but—given the right climate and an adequacy of raw wild food—could there be a primitive tribe that survives without cooking? In fact, no such people have ever been found. Nor will they be, according to a provocative theory by Harvard biologist Richard Wrangham, who believes that fire is needed to fuel the organ that makes possible all the other products of culture, language included: the human brain. Every animal on earth is constrained by its energy budget; the calories obtained from food will stretch only so far. And for most human beings, most of the time, these calories are burned not at the gym, but invisibly, in powering the heart, the digestive system and especially the brain, in the silent work of moving molecules around within and among its 100 billion cells. A human body at rest devotes roughly one-fifth of its energy to the brain, regardless of whether it is thinking anything useful, or even thinking at all. Thus, the unprecedented increase in brain size that hominids embarked on around 1.8 million years ago had to be paid for with added calories either taken in or diverted from some other function in the body. Many anthropologists think the key breakthrough was adding meat to the diet. But Wrangham and his Harvard colleague Rachel Carmody think that’s only a part of what was going on in evolution at the time. What matters, they say, is not just how many calories you can put into your mouth, but what happens to the food once it gets there. How much useful energy does it provide, after subtracting the calories spent in chewing, swallowing and digesting? The real breakthrough, they argue, was cooking.

-via Smithsonian Magazine, June 2013. Emphasis mine. In the time since this article was published, what was considered a "provocative theory" in 2013 has become a matter of increasing scientific evidence and scientific consensus.

Richard Wrangham lays out his theory as a whole in his 2010 book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human.

For more current summaries on the history of fire, and scientific and archeological evidence for its role in human evolution:

Evolutionary fire ecology: An historical account and future directions. August 2023. BioScience, volume 73, issue 8, pages 602–608. Permalink: https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biad059, paywall-free.

The discovery of fire by humans: a long and convoluted process. By J. A. J. Gowlett. June 2016. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, volume 371, issue 1696, epage 20150164. Permalink: doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2015.0164, paywall free.

Or, less scholarly:

Current archeological evidence suggests that humans are, if anything, defined by the hearthfire.

By cooking. By our ability to keep ourselves warm. By our ability to provide for ourselves and each other. By humanity's millennia-long quest to beat back the ravages of starvation and hunger.

Ask them how long ago we looked at wolves and saw friends. Ask them when we first tilled the soil and planted seeds so we could grow things on purpose. Ask them how long ago we began to travel simply to explore the world around us.

The Thin Veneer Theory--the Christian one, the one that says humans are inherently violent--falls completely the fuck apart when you realise that we would not have survived if we were that violent. We just would not have! If you kill someone in your very small group--because we lived in very small groups at first, under 10 people--then you've lost someone's knowledge, their hands, their legs, their eyes, their HELP. Help that you are going to need! Makes no sense. Not even chimps, our most violent cousins, are this violent to one another across their species. Because it's impractical for a social animal.

But the data says otherwise as well. Humans help. From birth. Other social animals also help--not just their immediately family or their group, but even other species of animal from them. Helping is inherent to being an intelligent animal that lives in groups, it seems.

But if you don't want to believe all those experiments and data, that's fine. Believe your own DNA then. Unless you are from Subsaharan African peoples, you have more than one species of human in your DNA. This means at some point, your grandmother and grandfather found someone of a whole other species attractive. That's a fact. And we keep finding more species hidden in our DNA even now--I think the most recent one was Denisovian! I don't know HOW you could interpret THAT information as "humans are violent and hate strangers" because it wouldn't be there if two people of two different species hadn't fucked enough to make a baby that survived long enough to make another and so on down the millions of years to now. That's incredible stuff. That means MILLIONS of humans had cross-species relationships! That means our species is SO friendly that we willing to reach across species and make babies with someone else! That is an incredibly high amount of friendliness!!!

We are a motley of many species of human being. That alone should be proof enough that we are inherently so full up with the desire to Make Friends that we will do it over and over to strangers and other animals unlike ourselves. We domesticated one of our main predators. We were so friendly and kind to cats they decided to bring us their babies and we were so friendly and kind we took care of those babies and now we make images of cats and put them everywhere and share them with one another. Even animals we eat, we are kind to and even decide that some of our gods are in their image, and make rules that say "it is Forbidden to kill this animal in a way that brings it suffering, it is Forbidden by the gods to make this animal suffer while it is alive" in MANY religions.

Once again I am bowled over by the widely accepted narrative that Jews are colonisers and Israel has no historical right to the land in the Levant and the Arab Muslims are, in fact, the indigenous people, when even the slightest understanding of history on the most elemental, basic level shows that narrative as patently ludicrous.

You're willingly backing a guy that hasn't even won the fucking primary yet as The Guy to beat Collins and make her seat blue. But when he suddenly decides to do similar shit like Collins or worse, then what?

Please stop buying Harry Potter, a free zine. Printed January 2026. Feel free to copy and distribute in book stores, libraries, neighborhood little libraries, and at conventions and conferences. No credit required. See this guide for how to cut and fold this single-page, one-sided zine.

Transcript of the zine:

Page 1: Please stop buying Harry Potter. Harry Potter is a worldwide phenomenon. Unfortunately, J.K. Rowling is using the popularity of the series to attack transgender people’s human rights.

Page 2: Recently, there has been a moral panic about trans people. A lot of it is recycled from anti-gay rights campaigns in the past.

Image descriptions: The first image features a man holding a protest sign that reads, "NO Men in Women's Bathrooms." The second image shows a Daily Mail article headline that reads, "Children 'Put At Risk' By Gender Ideology In Schools." The third image shows a newspaper article about Anita Bryant that reads, "Popular singer became known for opposition to gay rights." The picture of Anita Bryant shows a protest sign that reads, "Sign petition here to repeal Metro's 'gay' blunder! Save our children from homosexuals!"

Page 3: To be clear: Trans people have existed throughout human history and across cultures. Suggested reading for trans history: Transgender History (Stryker), Trans History (Combs & Eakett), Before Gender (Erlick).

Page 4–5: J.K. Rowling is not just "being mean" on Twitter.

Yes, she bullies trans people and cis women she thinks are trans. She also funds hate groups and spreads dangerous misinformation to her millions of followers. In 2024, she donated 70,000 British pounds to an anti-trans organization’s effort to petition the U.K. Supreme Court to take away trans rights. They won.

Image descriptions: Five newspaper headlines. Headline one reads, "JK Rowling accused of 'Holocaust Denial' over posts about transgender persecution in Nazi Germany." Headline two reads, "JK Rowling and Elon Musk named in Imane Khelif's lawsuit over Olympics gender row. Rowling referred to the boxer as a ‘male’ and accused her of ‘enjoying the distress of a woman he’s just punched in the head.’" Headline three reads, "JK Rowling donates £70k for legal challenge on defining a woman." Headline four reads, "How JK Rowling funded a legal battle that curtailed trans rights in the UK." Headline five reads, "Harry Potter and the Supreme Court Ruling - are the new cast tainted by association?"

A screenshot of a Twitter post by JK Rowling dated April 16, 2025 shows Rowling sitting on her yacht while smoking a cigar. She wrote, "I love it when a plan comes together. #Supreme Court #Women's Rights."

Page 6: J.K. Rowling has said that any support for Harry Potter tells her that she is right and that people support her anti-trans actions. She is using her immense wealth, fame, and social power to violate human rights. Any attention or money that the Harry Potter franchise gets goes directly to harming trans people.

Page 7: "But what if my child asks for Harry Potter?" We often underestimate children's intelligence. Tell them what I’m telling you: Harry Potter’s creator is using her fame and money to attack a vulnerable group of people. As long as she is doing this, we cannot support her by giving her money and attention.

Page 8: No one is perfect. But consider giving these authors and their works a try instead:

Amari and the Night Brothers by B.B. Alston

Animorphs by K.A. Applegate

So You Want to Be a Wizard by Diane Duane

Alanna: The First Adventure by Tamora Pierce

Percy Jackson and The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan