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She knows by sniffing my mouth first. Which she does at least once a day

Part of that means if I'm awake, she's On Duty. At night we put her in the laundry to sleep because we found it reduces how protective she gets and lets her go "off duty", but we figured out recently that when she's in the laundry she thinks I'm in bed. We discovered this because we realised if she hears me talking to people after she's gone to bed, she starts throwing a tantrum and won't quiet down until I talk to her, and then stop talking completely.

Anyway. Some mornings a family member will let her out of the laundry in the morning and she always checks to see if I'm still in bed. She does that by coming up to my door and barking.

This always wakes me up if I'm not already awake, but on days off I will just pretend to sleep. This is fine, she just barks the once (usually), waits to see if I respond, and then wanders off and does her own thing.

But the moment she realises I'm awake -- I sneeze, or cough, or she hears me moving around in my room -- she's now On The Clock. She will stand outside my bedroom and woof intermittently until I let her in. If I don't let her in, she'll eventually give up on barking, but she will camp out outside my room until that door opens. I am but a poor vulnerable human being and assassins could appear at any moment, so she needs to be by my side. Or I will DIE.

It's character exploration; it's possibly character growth. If you can make the thing feel in character, then it's not mischaracterization! People are complex and nuanced and contradictory, and fictional characters are supposed to at least feel like they're those things, too. If you can make the stoic character who never sheds a tear break down and sob and have it feel right in the story, then your writing is good.

And then during the festival at the end there were so many white people in keffiyehs walking around and a guy with a huge 12 foot tall pole with two massive pali flags that towered over everything else. Half of the booths were selling pali related merch or promised to donate absurd amounts of their proceeds not to accredited charities, but to notoriously hamas backed ones. A local charity that helps support refugees from places like Sudan had a booth and basically no one was paying any attention to it.

G-d I miss when I felt safe at pride and when I didn't have a panic attack in public because of antisemites who would do G-d knows what to any Israelis and "bad Jews" if they knew. It's not even about LGBTQ+ pride anymore. Everything, absolutely everything, is about Palestine. At this point I don't know if this obsession they have will ever go away. I don't know if the queer community will ever feel safe again. I don't understand why they just can't do anything or go anywhere without forcing the matter into it. It's not that I don't care about the Palestinian people, I do. But none of this is doing anything to help them as much as it's sending a clear message of violence and exclusion.

Sometimes I just don't want to leave the house anymore because literally every event around here, my campus, even just downtown, for the past three years straight has been crawling with screeching angry radical protestors, slapping stickers on every bus stop and street pole calling for the murder of Jews and the destruction of Israel. I can't do this anymore.

Feedism is IMO specifically connected to antifatness in a psychological sense. To me it's more like raceplay: kink that is grounded in the oppressive social attitude towards a person's oppressed status (in this case fatness). That's the primary reason I'm pretty strongly negative towards feedism.

Excuse you? You're opposed to oppressed people finding sexual or kink pleasure in taking control over the means of our own oppressions?

And you're just? Openly saying this shit with your fucking words?

I'm not a feedist or chubby chaser or a fat fetishist or whatever the terms may be these days, but I am a fat person, a kinkster, and a raceplayer of colour and you fucklechuck shitheads sure do seem insistent on forgetting that the majority of raceplayers in the world are not fucking white.

Look me in the eyes, coward, and say it again. You think people of colour shouldn't be allowed to have sex the way we want to, because what if the white people hear about it?

(don't mean to burden you, but i saw your post about the inbox being open!)

hi! there is a distinct genetic difference between us, studies place the break somewhere in the 1600s that deepened with the cultural & ethnic isolation / bottlenecking. settled irish have more english diversity in their dna, meanwhile we have pretty much intermarried between the different families & clans for the past 3 centuries.

it also put a nix in the theory that travellers became travellers because of the great famine as the split happened 2 centuries before, instead a theory replacing it now is the plantations of ulster prompted nomadic lifestyles in irish that didn't intermix with english populations in ireland, hence the genetic differences.

the ethnic split between irish travellers & settled irish is comparable to irish & the spanish, both genetically & culturally. we have different family structures, marriage & courtship traditions, we experience the land differently because we're primarily nomadic.

They don't know and they don't care - but the deeper problem is that BDS isn't aimed at anything that would actually matter even if it worked.

You're right that Palestinian workers depend on access to Israeli markets, Israeli employers, and the shekel. A successful BDS campaign that seriously damaged the Israeli economy would devastate Palestinian livelihoods first.

The people pushing BDS the hardest have not thought about this because thinking about it would complicate their performance.

The one time BDS claimed a clear win - pressuring SodaStream out of its West Bank factory - about 500 Palestinian workers lost their jobs. One of them, Ala Al-Qabbani, had been earning around $1,500 a month on the line; afterwards he was selling produce from a street cart for a quarter of that. The BDS movement called the factory closure a victory. (Haaretz coverage of story)

Efficacy, though, isn't the point. BDS is a performance.

The targets it actually goes after (academic conferences, SodaStream, Airbnb) don't touch any substantial part of the Israeli economy.

The Israeli economy runs on defense exports, semiconductor fabrication, and agricultural technology. Intel, NVIDIA, and Google have R&D centers there because Israeli engineers are world-class, s-tier brilliant at what they do. You're not going to get the world to boycott a major source of its own innovation, and nobody in the BDS movement is seriously trying to make that happen. I mean...if they were sincere, they'd stop using all the Israeli technology in their phone and laptops.

So...why do they bother?

The point of the performance is to cast Israel as the new South Africa*.

They know that If they repeat the same lies often enough, gullible western leftists will embrace the lie as gospel despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Apartheid South Africa was genuinely vulnerable. It was isolated, had no powerful allies, was dependent on a single major trading partner, and was economically fragile enough that any capital flight actually hurt.

None of that applies to Israel. BDS has built a tiny lever and pointed it at things that will never move. Waving the lever around dramatically is the point - not what it is purportedly supposed to do.

So when BDS 'succeeds', Palestinian workers lose jobs and Israeli tech exports are unaffected - but the participants in the western movement gets to feel like they did something. Nevermind that they themselves actually do live on stolen land and do reap the benefits of the settler-colonialists states they live in.

As usual, they're not actually interested in producing social change, they're engaged in a performance that makes them feel better about themselves.

More on BDS: Comparison with South Africa

State Laws re: BDS

Boycott PHP?

IF YOU CAN’T GET A JOB, IT’S NOT YOUR FAULT!!!!! THE SYSTEM IS DEEPLY BROKEN!!!!!!!!

The hiring process has never been great, but in the past couple of years it’s hit rock bottom. Ghost jobs probably outnumber real jobs on job sites. Recruiters and HR use AI which throws out 90% of resumes before a real human being sees them. And most companies are hellbent on holding out for a unicorn candidate- meaning someone who already knows how to do the EXACT role without any training while also accepting entry level wages- instead of investing in new people.

Art

This one is kinda both