welcome to my humble trash can

Namaygoosisagagun First Nation/Collins has burned to the ground. The entire community is nothing but ashes after being quickly consumed by wildfires. They did not have any support from emergency services, and no one offered aid. The community saved themselves by escaping into boats because no one came.

Mishkeegogamang and Cat Lake have lost power. Families are ending up in shelters with nothing. Armstrong, Lac La Croix, Whitesand, Gull Bay, Lac des Mille Lacs are currently in the fires path and all members are being evacuated.

All this loss, all this devastation, and it was entirely preventable.

After steadily underfunding wildland firefighting and purposefully excluding Indigenous wildland firefighters and Indigenous wildfire organizations from wildfire operations, firefighter training, decisionmaking, and resource exchanges, in 2025, Doug Ford slashed the forest firefighting budget.

It's hard to ignore his decision to cut funding and leave us out of adequate fire training (even though we've lived with forest fires for thousands of years—far longer than settlers have been in Canada—and made sure fires like the ones we're all seeing today were prevented through kinisitotēn) when, despite making up less than 5% of the population, we account for 42% percent of all wildfire evacuations in Canada.

And when we are successfully evacuated, we face discrimination and racism—like Kashechewan—because it's always been easier to blame us than it is to blame the true culprit: denialism, corportate greed, and colonization.

The people of Collins and every other impacted community deserve better.

Right now, the AFN is currently accepting donations to help Collins First Nation. If you're able to, please consider donating.

ONWA (Ontario Native Women's Association) is another great place to donate to. They have outreach vans going to motels and inns and offering food, water, resources, and cultural support to those impacted by the wildfires.

Other places to consider donating to are Mikinakoos Emergency Fund, Red Cross, True North Aid, Indigenous Climate Action. You can also send donations directly to Whitesand First Nation via e-transfer ([email protected]) and they request that you add your full name in the e-transfer comment section to receive a tax receipt.

*Before sending money, verify that the appeal appears on an official First Nation, Tribal Council or registered charity channel.

If you can't offer financial support, please consider donating items of need. Moontime Connections is currently accepting drop-off donations. If you live in the Thunder Bay area, Namaygoosisagagun Health Office is also taking in donations! They can also bemailed to Superior Inn Hotel & Conference Centre at 555 West Arthur Street, Thunder Bay, ON, P7E 5P8.

items needed are: food, diapers, medical masks, men’s and women’s joggers (all sizes), children’s clothing (newborn to size 14), children’s shoes, summer clothing, men’s clothing, toiletries (lotion, Vaseline, toothpaste, toothbrushes, shampoo, conditioner, soap, deodorant, etc.), strollers, adult depends-all sizes, dog & cat food

As someone who has epilepsy and used to have several grand mal seizures a day, I’d also like to add that “offer help” can range anywhere from keeping the person calm to explaining to them where they are and what they were doing to even just telling them they should sit and rest for a while longer (lack or coordination is common, and it can be hard to walk straight or see clearly).

It’s okay for them to take up to a half hour to fully regain their bearings and sort out what they were doing prior to the seizure. Just answer any questions calmly and be there for support.

If they come around and you start to panic or shake them or ask them what the heck is wrong with them they are going to freak out and panic too.

I cannot stress it enough that this is bad.

DO NOT CALL THE POLICE. I’m dead fucking serious. I had a grand mal in public once and the POLICE were called and imagine coming out of the seizure, feeling like you got smacked in the head with a sack full of bricks, confused, dazed, in desperate need of some sugar to boost low blood pressure and some DIPSHIT has called the police and I was being threatened with being ‘drunk and disorderly’. It took a phone call to my doctors office to get them to back off. The police cannot properly deal with sick people. 

Offer help can be:

assuring person where they are/what time it is

getting them something to drink if they can; seizure burns so much energy and does cause a blood pressure drop

getting them safely to transport or a carer

getting them some dignity like a blanket/towel [loosing control of your bladder and bowels is fucking horrifying]

ensuring they have a way to get home. Someone who has just had a seizure should NEVER DRIVE straight after

calling emergency services if you notice any of these symptoms because they may have stroked out.

Why you shouldn’t put anything in someone’s mouth: they will choke. Yes, they may bite their tongue but I can assure you it’s less traumatic than cracking your jaw on someone’s greasy wallet or choking on a spoon.

Because PNES seizures aren’t caused by the same thing as epileptic seizures, they can look similar but people can be semi-conscious during them, generally do not lose full control of their bodies (bladder/bowels and other reflexes remain), and importantly, they can last longer than 5 minutes (even hours) without causing long-term damage.

The “do not call the police” point was especially vital for them, because people with PNES are more vulnerable to medical abuse by professionals who think they are “faking” because the seizure isn’t epileptic, and a person with PNES may have medical trauma from being treated cruelly by doctors, family members, etc. while seizing in the past. This study looked at stigma around PNES (also called functional seizures; I’m using PNES because its what my coworker called it):

Literature suggests that it can take years for patients to finally get a diagnosis of FS, but once they receive the diagnosis, it is often met with negative stereotypes and perceptions that lead to stigmatisation and treatment resistance. […] Moreover, with 34 of the 70 included data sources reflecting HCP [healthcare professional] stigma, one of the main themes that arose from this review illustrated the importance of HCPs’ acknowledgement and acceptance of their role in both perpetuating and reducing FS stigma. From our review it became apparent that HCPs’ negative attitudes towards patients with FS persist in the health community, often because of a lack of knowledge, general awareness, understanding and medical training with regards to this disorder

For my coworker, they expressed that one of the most important things for them was to just not be alone, to have someone verbally saying they were with them and it would be alright, and then to be supported according to their needs once the seizure ended. Their seizures were often triggered by stress, or from trauma triggers, so being treated with compassion, having their body respected, and having a calm environment during and after the seizure were very important.

When I asked why, a student answered honestly: It was too long, and she kept losing track of what the paper was about. This was not a remedial class: These were students who had cleared the admissions process and written essays good enough to get them here. Yet a routine academic reading assignment had defeated them.

Every generation of professors has complained that their students cannot read. The lament is usually overblown, but data have caught up to anecdote, and what I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch. There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires.

In February 2024, Adam Kotsko, who teaches in the Shimer Great Books School at North Central College, wrote in Slate that students who once handled 30 pages of reading per class meeting now seem “intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding.” Crucially, he added that this is “not a matter of laziness on the part of the students” but of underlying skills they were never given a chance to build.

The Chronicle of Higher Education’s 2024 investigation found the same pattern across institutions as different as the Stevens Institute of Technology and Wellesley College, where the average SAT exceeds 1400. Nicholaus Gutierrez, an assistant professor at Wellesley, told The Chronicle that the baseline for what students consider a reasonable amount of work has dropped so noticeably that he has cut his readings accordingly; a 750-word essay now strikes many students as long. At Stevens, the science and technology studies associate professor Theresa MacPhail described following the mantra of “meet your students where they are” for so long that she has begun to feel “like a cruise director organizing games of shuffleboard.”

Worse, the national data tell the same story in colder language. On the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) writing assessment, which is the most recent comprehensive writing benchmark, only 24 percent of 12th graders reached the Proficient level, and just 3 percent reached Advanced; another 21 percent scored below Basic. The reading side of the ledger is worse, and getting worse fast: The 2024 NAEP results released in September 2025 show 12th-grade reading scores at the lowest level recorded since the assessment began in 1992. Thirty-two percent of 12th graders now score below NAEP Basic in reading, meaning that, in the assessment’s own language, they likely “cannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text.” And yet more than half of these same seniors reported being accepted to a four-year college. That last sentence is the whole problem in one line: We are admitting a cohort that cannot read at a college level and are pretending otherwise.

Why is this happening? One reason, of course, is smartphones.

I came into teaching as a skeptic of the anti-smartphone argument: I had a phone in my pocket throughout high school and college in the 2010s, and I read long books anyway. I now think I was wrong, because the neuroscience has caught up. In a 2017 paper, Adrian F. Ward and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business showed that the mere presence of a participant’s smartphone — whether that be face down, powered off, untouched, or across the desk out of vision — measurably reduces available working memory and fluid intelligence on cognitive tests, with the largest effects on the most phone-dependent users. A 2022 study by Motoyasu Honma and colleagues at Japan’s Showa University used near-infrared spectroscopy to compare reading on a smartphone with reading the same passage on paper, and found that smartphone reading produced overactivity in the prefrontal cortex, suppressed sigh generation, and led to general lower comprehension scores; the authors argued that the sigh inhibition and prefrontal overload were causally linked to the comprehension decline.

So when a student tells me they “kept losing track” of a 20-page article, I have to acknowledge that they may be describing a measurable neurological condition. The neural pathways that support sustained attention are built by use, and they atrophy without it. Your body is a use-it-or-lose-it system, and the brain is no exception.

Another reason for the decline in student reading capability is increasing reliance on generative AI. In June 2025, Nataliya Kosmyna and colleagues at the MIT Media Lab released a preprint titled “Your Brain on ChatGPT.” They divided 54 participants into three groups writing SAT-style essays — one using ChatGPT, the second group using a search engine, the last group using nothing — and monitored brain activity with a 32-channel EEG. The ChatGPT group showed the lowest neural connectivity of the three, with up to 55 percent reduced connectivity compared with the brain-only group, and “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.” Eighty-three percent of LLM users could not quote a single line from essays they had written minutes earlier. When the LLM group was forced to write without AI in a follow-up session, their brain activity did not bounce back to baseline; the researchers coined the term “cognitive debt” for the lingering deficit.

This is the first neurophysiological evidence that early reliance on LLMs measurably alters the brain’s engagement with writing tasks, and it is consistent with what those of us in front of classrooms are watching happen in real time. When I assign analysis, I am not trying to extract a polished product; I am trying to put the student’s mind through resistance in order to make it stronger. Offloading the struggle to a chatbot does not “free students up for higher-order work.” It deprives them of building the strength to do any substantial cognitive work at all.

There is a final factor that is contributing to this decline in reading skills, and that is that the students arriving in my classroom today are the first cohort to have experienced Common Core-influenced reading instruction across the entirety of their K–12 schooling. Whatever the standards’ original intent, the on-the-ground implementation in many districts replaced sustained reading with the practice of pulling “evidence” from disconnected short passages, the same format used on the standardized tests that increasingly determine school funding. The education scholar Natalie Wexler, among others, has documented this pivot in detail: Students drilled on “finding the main idea” in two-paragraph excerpts never build the stamina or background knowledge that longform reading requires. The pandemic then added fuel to a fire that was already burning. NAEP scores for 13-year-olds dropped sharply in 2022 and have not recovered. A 2023 EdWeek survey found that 24 percent of secondary-school administrators described pandemic learning loss in English and language arts as “severe or very severe.”

In July 2025, the journalist Mary Harrington argued in The New York Times that “thinking is becoming a luxury good.” The ability to read deeply and reason at length is fragmenting along class lines as ultra-processed digital media replaces text in everyday life, much as ultra-processed food has replaced cooking. Her longer treatment of the subject in First Things makes the more provocative case that we are witnessing the end of print culture itself, and with it the end of the cognitive substrate on which modern liberal democracy was built.

I see this stratification in the classroom and on the page every week. My students from districts that protected sustained reading through small class sizes, strict phone policies, and faculty who refused to teach to the test all arrive with their attention relatively intact. My students from districts that surrendered to devices and standardized testing arrive cognitively winded. A democracy that requires a literate electorate is now training one fraction of that electorate out of literacy while marketing to the other a “deep work” lifestyle as a luxury good. The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow.

I do what I can in my own classroom to address the problems. I break 20-page articles into two halves and assign the first half with explicit analytical tasks. I require exploratory writing before formal drafts. I model (visibly, on the board) how to track an argument across pages or distinguish a source’s claim from my own analysis. I make structured peer review explicit, because the workshop format I used to take for granted now collapses into “this is good” and “maybe add more details” the moment I step back.

But I want to be plain about the limits of what an individual instructor can do, and all of these solutions have costs. Scaffolding a 20-page article into halves compromises the integrity of the argument I am asking students to engage, just as modeling note-taking in a credit-bearing rhetoric course is using a college slot to teach a middle-school skill. None of the syllabi I teach are designed to deliver this type of cognitive rehabilitation, and pretending otherwise has produced credential inflation. We cannot keep conferring degrees on students who cannot do what the degree is supposed to certify.

I’m afraid I don’t have answers. I do, however, have some questions that may point us in the right direction. If higher education is going to respond to the reading crisis as a structural problem rather than a private burden carried by composition instructors and adjuncts, it has to stop avoiding the following questions: If a majority of incoming students cannot read at a level the curriculum requires, are we admitting students we cannot serve, or offering a curriculum we cannot provide?

Why are first-year writing and reading-intensive general-education courses still the most adjunctified, lowest-paid, highest-load corner of the university, at the precise moment when their work has become the most important work the institution does? What is the responsible institutional response for AI usage: Is it a syllabus statement, or a sequencing principle that requires students to demonstrate the cognitive work themselves before AI assistance is permitted?

Why are most college classrooms still phone-permissive by default? K–12 districts from Florida to California are now banning phones bell to bell; higher education has somehow lagged behind the public schools. Universities benefit from a pipeline they did not build and refuse to repair. What would it mean for a university system to invest seriously in the reading instruction happening in the high schools that feed it, rather than treating remediation as something to be quietly outsourced to first-year composition instructors?

The thing I am no longer willing to do is pretend this is a temporary adjustment period, or that “students will adapt.” They will not adapt on their own. The conditions that produced this collapse are still in place: the phones, the algorithmic feeds, the test-prep excerpts, staffing models that load the reading-intensive work onto the most precarious faculty, and now the chatbots that finish students’ sentences before they’ve even begun to think of them. If we want literate citizens, we will have to rebuild the conditions for literacy deliberately, against the grain of every incentive currently pointed the other way. I know the academy has the will to do that. It also has the obligation."

— Tyler Jagt, 1 June 2026, "My Students Can’t Read"

The Kingdom of Hawai’i was illegally overthrown with the help of American businessmen and we have suffered under the iron grip of America.

Our land is simply seen as a vacation spot, my people are simply seen as tour guides and hula dancers. We have had our culture, our history, and our people turned into a commercialized joke by America.

The rampant tourism kills our islands with endless hotels, attractions and overcrowding. The housing and living costs are out of control because of the false “paradise” narrative. The Navy poisons our water and destroys our land. Covid has killed so many of my people due to the reckless and selfish nature of tourists. I have lost loved ones to this virus, because tourists “couldn’t stay away”.

My people have suffered. I have suffered.

We are more than your vacation. We are more than an aesthetic.

We are a sovereign nation illegally occupied by the United States of America.

Restore Hawai’i to Hawaiians. End the American Occupation.

See the links below to learn more and to read up on your Hawaiian history.

There is a reason why legislation and social pushback is typically focused on preventing you from coming out, preventing you from transitioning from the start, or detransitioning and/or closeting you. That is state violence, but the state is hoping you will either do the dirty work yourself (suicide) or fall in line with the White Supremacist Patriarchal gender roles it expects of you (closeting/detransition). I know that is bad. It's abysmal. It's awful. We are not here to downplay the violence that happens broadly to queer people at the hands of the government.

However, under White Supremacy, as a white queer person, you can be "saved" from the "lifestyle choice" you have "made". We're in a country dominated by Christian savior complexes, conversion therapy is a regrowing industry, the laws targeting us are laws of restriction, laws of "prevention". White queer people are a "problem" to be "solved" by trying to "save" us from ourselves so we can reintegrate into broader white, Christian society alongside other white people. We need to be "corrected" and "saved" because our whiteness is still valuable to Christian, Patriarchal, White Supremacy.

White Supremacist state violence in the United States murders Black infants on the false allegation that their mothers are stealing diapers. White Supremacist state violence murders Black children for playing with toy airsoft guns. White Supremacist state violence murders Black women for experiencing a mental health crisis. White Supremacist state violence murders Black men on the unproven allegation that they used a counterfeit $20 bill. White Supremacist state violence murders Black people for simply existing in their homes. Kohen Wiley, Tamir Rice, Sonya Massey, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Roger Fortson. The list could go on because just existing while Black is dangerous under White Supremacy.

Your analysis of your own place in society as a queer person is incomplete without this analysis. It is not enough to say "well trans WoC have it harder than me but cishet people all have it easier" because that is incomplete and ignorant at best and flat out wrong and racist at worst. Why do trans WoC, particularly Black trans women struggle and experience so much violence in our country? Why does that violence happen? You can't just say "because they're transgender and they're women and they aren't white" and leave it at that. What are the institutions, the power structures, the long standing histories of violence and subjugation at play here? Why is it dangerous for someone to exist as a Black person, everything else aside, in the first place? Why and how does your whiteness protect you where their Blackness creates a target for them and how do the systems around you exploit that and target you differently on a material level?

some other mostly well-known texts by Black writers that may be useful here:

Audre Lorde’s “The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House”

The Combahee River Collective Statement

less well-known but really useful: Angela Davis and Jane Elliott in conversation on race and privilege

and, how to use all this work: bell hooks’ “Theory as Liberatory Practice”

several of these authors were or are lesbians or queer and those who ever commented on trans experience were or are trans allies (to my knowledge), therefore specifically relevant to this post. :)

two extras:

this 1975 conversation between James Baldwin and Maya Angelou is much clipped and GIF’d (you’ll probably recognize the imagery if you’ve been on tumblr for any length of time) but I actually don’t know if I’ve ever seen a link to the full thing before - enjoy; it’s beautiful and worth watching

Tema Okun’s From White Racist to White Anti-Racist Ladder, a step-by-step resource designed for white allies who want to do what OP is telling them to do but need help figuring out how to manage their defensiveness/emotional reactions to trying to learn to become anti-racist and unlearning the structural racism in which they have been raised. these reactions are not something we have to be terribly ashamed of (in fact, shame can make us dig our heels into our racist behavior, so learning to forgive ourselves and behave differently is an important part of unlearning racism). feeling defensive is a totally normal part of unlearning racist patterns and white supremacy, just like it’s a normal part of unlearning any kind of privileged pattern we hold. what matters most is that we do our best to keep trying and not to push our emotional reactions onto the people around us and the people we love who are impacted and oppressed by white supremacy.

So, in terrible news, Trump's trying to pull some strings to pass this massive internet censorship bill, featuring all the kinds of internet censorship we're terrified of, including mandatory ID for accessing basically any website, specifically to crush state regulation of AI, because apparently this man will always see the moral bottom of the barrel and start digging.

Apparently there isn’t much news coverage of this outside of the islands

Towns are flooded, homes destroyed and collapsed, roads collapsed, lives at risk, gas leaks from the flood damage

Haleiwa and Waialua are currently evacuated because the 120 year old dam is at risk of bursting

Mind you that damn is owned by Dole. Theyve known about it needing to be fixed for years and years and years. Despite having more than enough money they refuse

The state has been trying to buy it out from them for years so they can fix it, but the sale hasn’t gone through

Keep in mind that the Dole family were the ones who illegally imprisoned Queen Liliuʻokalani and illegally overthrew the monarchy.

If I see another goddamn person say how sad this is for the tourists whose “trips were ruined” and compare a messed up vacation to people losing their homes, belongings, and livelihoods, I’m going to lose my mind

I am so lucky that my family or friend’s are safe and the few whose houses flooded didnt have it too bad, but so so so many were not as fortunate

If you haven’t heard anything about this until now, I suggest looking into it

The sirens didn’t go off until the flood had been going on for hours. Our state government is spending so much money on a fucking monorail we don’t need rather than fixing the infrastructure.

It’s been the locals and Kanaka doing the most to help get people to safety from the start

I don’t really know how to end this

I just need to know people are aware

I don’t think I need to explain to y’all why this is wrong but in case I do, buying a service from someone and following their rules as a client is not a breech of consent.

A lot of the danger that comes from being a prostitute has to do with its illegality. If a client breaks the rules and the service provider can’t file a complaint without risking imprisonment of themselves and/or their client, that’s not a safe work environment.

The idea that nobody would willingly sell sexual services unless they’re desperate is just false. There’s also a lot of other jobs people do when they’re desperate and they don’t like doing. For me it was working retail.

The difference between me pretending to be happy for clientele while working retail and someone pretending to be happy while selling sexual services to clients is that while I was working retail I at least theoretically had sick leave, health insurance, and a way to file a complaint if a customer assaulted me.

Everyone in this world is just living their lives, each with their own complex needs and desires and interests and emotions. They all have hobbies and friends and families and favorite foods. They all have their own motivations and varying political opinions and views on their governments. They all weigh the risks of standing out or speaking up and they all make their own decisions about that.

They all fear the same in times of danger. They all feel grief and pain and terror the same. They all love and hate and bleed the same.

but at the same time - if Good and Pretti's murders are radicalizing people, it's radicalizing them. someone online (with 5k likes) said: i don't know why, but this one feels more personal than usual. i don't blame them for their ignorance (they're just people) but that one comment hurt me. none of the other crying mothers or little kids calling out for their parents or men slaughtered by police felt personal?

and ... i get it. maybe for once other people are finally saying that could have been me in the car. they are finally saying he just tried to help someone up, he wasn't even at a protest. maybe they finally realized: these people did nothing wrong, but the government defamed them before any investigation was even begun. the killer was pardoned before he even drew the fucking gun.

and i know what that's like, i have seen this happen too-many times.

but maybe this was the first time they've ever actually seen ICE violence. maybe they don't read the news, maybe they genuinely believed every kidnapped person "deserved it". maybe... i don't know. maybe it didn't feel real until now, you know? to be fair: social media has a way of making everything film together, a massive wave of tragedy that you cannot parse. and maybe there's just such a sense of pointlessness to it that it filtered out for them. the government usually provides such a clean narrative (he was resisting, she was a criminal); maybe it had given them some peace to just-believe. maybe this is the first time that the lie is obvious even to their eyes.

it's frustrating, and dehumanizing. a white lady and a white man shouldn't be the face of a movement that largely affects everyone else.

and... they died for our movement. and if this is what it takes. if now there are people who are going to take up a banner and walk with me... I want them to be there. i want them to feel the same fire i do. i want them to have that fury that has been burning in me for so long. hell, maybe because they're new to it - they'll burn hotter. there's probably places i am jaded and overwrought. a friend in need is a friend indeed, right?

i have always hated the parable of the prodigal son. i cannot help but feel i have been standing in this space, screaming. that we have been begging for help. that we have warned you. why wasn't it enough when it was one of us?

still. still. i close my eyes. they're here now, and that is something. a handprint. at least, at last: they're by my side. as the saying goes: better late. okay. okay.

Assumptions:

"Racism is simply personal prejudice."

"I am free of racism."

"I will be the judge of whether racism has occurred."

"My learning is finished; I know all I need to know."

"Racism can only be intentional; my not having intended racism cancels out the impact of my behavior."

"White people who experience another form of oppression cannot experience racial privilege."

"If I am a good person, I can't be racist."

"I am entitled to remain comfortable/have this conversation the way I want to."

"How I am perceived by others is the most important issue."

"As a white person, I know the best way to challenge racism."

"If I am feeling challenged, you are doing this wrong."

"It's unkind to point out racism."

"Racism is conscious bias. I have none, so I am not racist."

"Racists are bad individuals, so you are saying that I am a bad person."

"If you knew me or understood me, you know I can't be racist."

"I have friends of color, so I can't be racist."

"There is no problem; society is fine the way it is."

"Racism is a simple problem. People just need to..."

"My worldview is objective and the only one operating."

"If I can't see it, it isn't legitimate."