Beyond This Place There Be Dragons

I drew things because of Twitter. That’s Maul with a tiny clone Thrawn in the first one. Thrawn is hugging the Darth Maul bear form Build-A-Sith. It’s RP. Don’t look too deeply into it.

And that’s Ahsoka popping out of a birthday cake in the second.

“House on Fire” by Sarah Anne Johnson, 2009. Dollhouse/mixed media.

“protect asian lives”

asians worldwide are being beaten and killed. and it keeps going unnoticed. if you are being silent, fuck you.

the amount of hate crimes against asians have risen 1900%. it’s not our fucking fault we are in this pandemic. asians arent a virus or a disease. leave us the fuck alone.

now say it again.

“protect asian lives”

asians worldwide are being beaten and killed. and it keeps going unnoticed. if you are being silent, fuck you.

the amount of hate crimes against asians have risen 1900%. it’s not our fucking fault we are in this pandemic. asians arent a virus or a disease. leave us the fuck alone.

now say it again.

If y’all wonder why older tumblerians get twitchy about censorship that shit is why.

Hell, one day when I was in grad school I was walking around and said something like “I hate Bush” to the person I was with and they shushed me in obvious fear.

“Doing X is letting the terrorists win” has become a hyperbolic meme but people were fucking serious about that.

I was just a wee baby high schooler for discussions about the patriot act and libraries handing over information and the government tracking searches, but I knew I didn’t like it, I knew that it was a bad idea and said so.

“What, do you want the terrorists to win? We’re just going to let everyone buy explosives with no oversight because you wanna read fanfic at the library? What if your mom had been on those planes, how would you feel about it then? We have to do this to keep everyone safe, what is wrong with you that you don’t want to stop this from happening again?”

In early 2002 I was a wee baby high schooler at an airport for a school conference. I’d left my boarding pass at the security station and ran back to get it once I’d realized it was lost. When I stumbled up to the metal detector (which seems so quaint in this era of full body scans) two national guardsmen in full BDUs with helmets and armor turned and pointed their M4s at me. “Are you Allison?” one barked and I unfroze long enough to nod. He handed me my boarding pass. “Be more careful!” When I got back to my group I was bawling and having what I didn’t realize at the time was a panic attack (having guns pointed at you is extremely scary).

“Well what did you think, you can’t just go running around an airport! They’ve gotta keep everyone safe - of course they’ve got military guns at the terminal, what, you think terrorists should just be able to waltz onto an airplane whenever they please?”

(Sidenote, I don’t check bags anymore because they always get opened and examined for “random” searches and I get pulled aside and patted down more than anyone else I know and I’m 100% convinced that’s because of this one mislaid boarding pass when I was 15)

Don’t want people tortured in prison? You’re letting the terrorists win. Questioning the validity of invading Iraq? You’re anti-american and letting the terrorists win. Sitting for the pledge of allegiance? You hate this country, which is what the terrorists want and you are therefore letting the terrorists win.

Saying “if we change our whole way of life and stop protecting people’s rights and freedoms then the terrorists HAVE won and we’re sacrificing liberty for security which is exactly the kind of thing you assholes say we shouldn’t do” to your political science professor in college? Oh my god maybe you are a terrorist. 

Also tumblr kiddos - read up on the Dixie Chicks:

During the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, the Dixie Chicks performed in concert in London on March 10, 2003, at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire theatre in England. This concert kicked off their Top of the World Tour. During the introduction to their song “Travelin’ Soldier”, Natalie Maines, who along with Robison and Maguire is also a native of Texas, said:

“Just so you know, we’re on the good side with y'all. We do not want this war, this violence, and we’re ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas.”[41][…]

Maines’s remark sparked intense criticism;[44] media commentators claimed that she should not criticize Bush on foreign soil. Maines responded, “I said it there ‘cause that’s where I was.”[45]

[…] Maines attempted to clarify matters on March 12 by saying, “I feel the President is ignoring the opinions of many in the U.S. and alienating the rest of the world.”[47]

The statement failed to appease her critics, and Maines issued an apology on March 14: “As a concerned American citizen, I apologize to President Bush because my remark was disrespectful. I feel that whoever holds that office should be treated with the utmost respect. We are currently in Europe and witnessing a huge anti-American sentiment as a result of the perceived rush to war. While war may remain a viable option, as a mother, I just want to see every possible alternative exhausted before children and American soldiers’ lives are lost. I love my country. I am a proud American.”[48][49]

In wake of the statement against Bush, many supporters of the group dropped their support. […] In one famous anti-Dixie Chicks display, former fans were encouraged to bring their CDs to a demonstration at which they would be crushed by a bulldozer. […] Bruce Springsteen and Madonna both felt compelled to come out in support of the right of the band to express their opinions freely; however, Madonna herself postponed and then altered the April 1 release of her “American Life” video in which she threw a hand grenade toward a Bush look-alike, after witnessing the backlash against the Chicks.[51][52]

Colorado radio station KKCS suspended two of its disc jockeys on May 6 for playing music by the Dixie Chicks.[60] On May 22, at the Academy of Country Music awards ceremony in Las Vegas, there were boos when the band’s nomination for Entertainer of the Year award was announced. However, the broadcast’s host, Vince Gill, reminded the audience that everyone is entitled to freedom of speech. The academy gave the award to Toby Keith, who had been engaged in a public feud with Maines ever since she had denounced his number one hit “Courtesy of the Red, White, & Blue (The Angry American)” as “ignorant” the year before.

That Toby Keith song was the one I kind of obliquely referenced in my post up there, the one with the lyrics:

Justice will be served and the battle will rage This big dog will fight when you rattle his cage And you’ll be sorry that you messed with The U.S. of A. ‘Cause we’ll put a boot in your ass It’s the American way

The hyper-militarization of the police, invasive overreach and surveillance of our digital lives by the NSA, the jingoism and mandatory patriotism that have transmuted into virulent nationalism, and the longest war in US history are relics of Bush.

*Fuck* Bush and the awful, imposing, frothing all-or-nothing patriotism that so many people were expressing at that time.

Remember the protests against the Iraq war? Remember the largest anti-war rally in history?

The local Independent Media Center produced a short video claiming to show inappropriate and violent police behavior, including backing horses into demonstrators, shoving people into the metal barricades, spraying a toxic substance at penned-in demonstrators, using abusive language, and raising nightsticks against some who couldn’t move. However, NYPD spokesman Michael O'Looney denied the charges claiming that the tape was “filled with special effects” and that it did not prove the police had not been provoked.[57]

This was long before everyone had a video-camera in their phone, so it was very difficult to prove fuck all. But I knew people who’d been there, and the violence was pretty extensive. 

In Colorado Springs, 4,000 protesters were dispersed with pepper spray, tear gas, stun guns and batons. 34 were arrested on failure to disperse and other charges[21] and at least two protesters had to have hospital treatment.[61]

It did little, as far as US action was concerned (although it probably - thank gods - convinced Harper that he should stay the fuck away). 

The unprecedented size of the demonstrations was widely taken to indicate that the majority of people across the world opposed the war. However, the potential effect of the protests was generally dismissed by pro-war politicians. The Prime Minister of Australia, John Howard, claimed that the protests were not representative of public opinion, saying “I don’t know that you can measure public opinion just by the number of people that turn up at demonstrations.” In the United States, the then National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice was reported as saying that the protests would “not affect [the administration’s] determination to confront Saddam Hussein and help the Iraqi people”.[22]

The Obama Administration was far from perfect, and I am not going to claim it was but I swear to god, people younger than ~27-30 do not actually grasp quite how Fucking Awful the Shrub was and how astonishingly united the opposition to the Cheeto is. And how fucking bad the Cheeto has in fact proved to be at PR-and-shit since the election. 

Rep. Barbara Lee was the ONLY member of congress who voted against the Authorization of Force that led to the war in Afghanistan.

the equivalent vote for the Iraq War passed the House 296-133 and the Senate 77-23. A lot of Democrats voted for both of them.

Being against the president in 2020 was a firmly mainstream position. Being against the Iraq War was portrayed as fringe leftist nonsense. Being against the war in Afghanistan was treason, as far as a lot of people were concerned.

Do not use the website called Sci-Hub!

It lets people access scientific articles for free. This is dangerous. It helps the free flow of knowledge and reduces the competitive edge of all the people who worked really hard to have been born into a wealth.

Like, it’s literally a website where you can type in the DOI of an article and read it, without ever having to pay the publisher who exploited the author.

Text:

It’s gotten to the point where it isn’t even a joke anymore as it originally may have been. Generation Z literally does not believe Helen Keller existed. And frankly, I’m having a hard time accepting that she did myself.

I don’t feel bad or wrong for it, and I don’t think anyone else my age does either. But older generations seem to think differently. “Helen Keller overcame many obstacles, and she’s a great inspiration,” my mother said in an attempt to reason with me. She failed to invalidate my disbelief.

Does it stem from our own insecurities — could it be that a blind, deaf woman with more success in life than all of us is too much to grasp? Possibly.

Text:

Boomers and Generation X love to chirp on the younger ones, quoting the adage, “don’t believe everything you read online,” but we’re the ones who have the most trust issues when it comes to news.

We have to fight to have our opinions about the state of our country heard and understood by older generations.

We have to march in the streets and endlessly retweet to try and stop our schools from being shot up.

We have to hear about the injustices committed at the border, against the black community, and against women, all of which are covered in lies that sugarcoat the situation, and you wonder why we have trust issues when it comes to the government.

We don’t have to believe in Helen Keller, and it shouldn’t be surprising if we don’t. The world we were born into makes us profoundly different than other generations, and hopefully, it will also make us into change agents.

also besides there being literal footage on youtube of helen keller (she only passed away in the 1960s), there was also a documentary released this year about her socialist politics and advocacy

https://youtu.be/8ch_H8pt9M8

https://fishnetcinema.com/2020/10/05/nyff-review-her-socialist-smile/