Political Punk

“I’m not into Indian girls, but you look [other ethnicity]” you’re into Indian girls.

“Omg I love Indian food” and it’s just butter chicken or chicken tikka masala.

“Chandelier earrings” you mean my jhumkas?

“I love avatar/atla” you don’t know what the concept of an avatar even is.

“Your slums are dirty” tell that to the unusually low Covid rates in those slums.

“Indians don’t experience colourism” that is certainly an echo chamber chronically online take.

Exams during our festival season while every other religion gets their days off. Told to speak English when many of us in the diaspora already do (thanks colonialism!). Made to take English exams or considered international students on the basis of our names. Overlooked in job applications. Blamed for climate change. Blamed for lack of jobs. Blamed for crashing economy. Blamed for terrorism (more issues there). Random TSA checks. Random hate crimes. Stolen culture. Stolen property.

Uncredited for simple things everyone does nowadays. Coconut oil, miswak, mehndi, indigo, the number 0, banking cheques, chess, yoga, chakras, third eye, evil eye, turmeric, clean girl aesthetic, lost wax casting, bindis, kohl, dupattas, bangles, courtyards in houses, paisley, the very concept of rebirth and reincarnation. I could go on.

The racism towards Indians is so entrenched in every single western culture that nobody bothers to look twice when India suffers a heat wave. You all love Greece and Rome but did you know they directly benefitted from trade with the Indian subcontinent? Did you know Indians were taken as indentured labourers too? Did you know we were slaves too? And I’m speaking for South Asia as a whole here, did you know many of us are still slaves?

Kirk was friends or acquaintances with almost everyone in the Drump administration and Drump himself found out when his son Baron called him in sobbing hysterics about it because now he was convinced people were gonna try even harder to kill his dad now.

JD Vance actually truly was personal friends with Kirk. Charlie Kirk got him into Republican politics. Charlie Kirk was one of the few people who was friends with everyone in the maga movement and could mediate. Some people thought he might run for president someday.

And in the midst of this mourning for their friend and connection to the conservative youth, they took advantage of his death. They sought out revenge. In some cases they tried to encourage violence against leftists.

And it’s like, I thought you were being ghoulish before, but knowing that this guy actually meant something to you? That you now know firsthand the devastating effects of losing a loved one to political violence? And you still spread lies about it? You still refuse to show the smallest amount of sympathy for democrats that were victims of political violence? That you’re trying to start conspiracy theories over your friend’s death?

But knowing that these people at the top of the executive branch also without a doubt, without ambiguity, know that exact same pain and still inflict it on others while laughing? It makes me sick.

They pull parents from their children, bomb civilian boats, mock democrats that are the victims of violence, continue a pointless war that’s killing foreign civilians and American soldiers and subjecting thousands of people to that exact same torment with no remorse or hesitation? While mocking their victims?

Nothing here feels normal anymore.

Finding food, clean water, medicine, or even a small sense of safety has become a daily struggle.

We are living in very harsh conditions, surrounded by insects, rats, and disease, with no proper way to protect ourselves from any of it.

And while all of this is happening, my father is still fighting his illness every day.

He urgently needs treatment and medication, but providing them has become incredibly difficult for us.

I spend my days trying to keep my family going and trying to reach people for help, because we truly cannot survive this alone anymore.

Please let your humanity stand with us.

Please donate and share. 💔🙏

📌 Fundraiser vetted (#167 by el-shab-hussein & nabulsi), But we created a new GoFundMe page because GoFundMe suspended the beneficiary’s account on the platform, which put us in a very difficult situation.

An Egyptian programmer created a page dedicated to every Palestinian soul killed by the occupation during the war of extermination in #Gaza.. So far, he has registered 72,000 names.

Each point of light on the screen represents the name of a martyr, and when it is clicked, the name of the person it belongs to appears.

The link is in the first reblog :

Like "You have to venture into the scary insane asylum!" VS "You're a patient who was admitted by force to an asylum, and you are very clearly in real danger, but everyone is pretending that you're just deluded, and are essentially leaving you to die because they don't really see you as a person."

It's been interesting to see what media people are recommending based on the first post alone. A lot of recommendations for games/franchises like World of Darkness, Carrion, Kill All Humans, Among Us, etc. It's interesting because these are games that put you into the shoes of the violent other that has to infiltrate, without actually challenging the idea that the other is a threat. They actually parrot the ideas of the other as violent.

Funnily enough, the people recommending the comedy game Octodad understand the post much better than most of the people recommending horror media. A few mentions of Am I Nima, which isn't finished yet but does look like it could be what I am describing, so brownie points to the people recommending that.

But everyone saying stuff like "This is just being Trans/Autistic/Etc" really gets it, like really really gets it. Horror always communicates the fears and anxieties of the people who create it, this post was basically: "What if instead of communicating the fear of the other, we communicated the fears of the others, which are actually vastly more legitimate than the dominant groups fear of the other. We should recognise that it is overwhelmingly the others who are the ones who actually suffer and die, all for the perceived "saftey" and "comfort" of the dominant group."

This idea is about transphobia, it is about ableism, about anti-imigrant rhetoric and white supremacy, about queerphobia, it's about all of it. It is horror from the perspective of minority groups. It is the twisting of a trope built upon reactionary fears and narratives in order to critique them, it is a direct allegory for all those experiences you are describing.