drake

This is an important watch for folks in the U.S. about the fight for women to get the right to vote.

The in-fighting across generations and races is important to see. Politics isn't pretty, and basic rights don't come easy or free when it's a constant uphill battle against oppressors.

"Forgive my trespass, I mistook for work a crown of raspberries and custard. Thank you, tartlet, thank you, Miss, for arranging it on a doily on a saucer, thank you, Nature for these hypnotizing concentrics. My mother (did I have one?) was likewise hypnotic. My queen, she used and tossed me, thoughtless, from the palace. But this isn’t a poem of woe. I’m illiterate to that emotion. Spackled with sugar, I’ve swum through dispassionate debris. I’m ready to lie, freakish and freezing, in a berry. This is my first and only spring on earth. I get it. I’m free as an orphan who’s aged out of a baffling system. Still, the snowfall mornings. Still, the rosy sometimes. To be alone in this world is fatal. I accept that. It was all a blur, anyway. No biography. A complicated coin paid my passage. Thank you. I won’t be returning."

Yeah I said something similar yesterday but we can NOT let what happened to Renee Good cloud what happened to everyone else at the hands of these SS Demons!!!

The above screenshot reads:

A Black man was killed by ICE (off duty) in Los Angeles on New Year's Eve. And like Renee Good, he was an American citizen. But most people have not heard about Keith Porter. I need y'all to realize this. Black people experience this lack of visibility all the time when it comes to being victims. (Christopher Webb @cwebbonline.com)

The second screenshot above reads:

Renee Nicole Good wasn't the first killed by ICE... In 2025, ICE murdered: Silverio Villegas Gonzalez Carlos Roberto Montoya Valdez Genry Ruiz Guillén Serawit Gezahagn Dejane Maksym Chernyak Juan Alexis Tineo-Martinez Brayan Garzón-Rayo Nhon Ngoc Nguyen Marie Ange Blaise Abelardo Avellaneda Delgado Jesus Molina-Veya Johnny Noviello Isidro Pérez Tien Xuan Phan Chaofeng Ge Lorenzo Antonio Batrez Vargas Oscar Rascon Duarte Norlan Guzman-Fuentes Miguel Ángel García Medina Johnny Noviello Santos Banegas Reyes Ismael Ayala-Uribe Norlan Guzman-Fuentes Miguel Ángel García Medina Huabing Xie Leo Cruz-Silva Hasan Ali Moh’D Saleh Josué Castro Rivera Gabriel Garcia Aviles Kai Yin Wong Francisco Gaspar-Andrés Pete Sumalo Montejo Shiraz Fatehali Sachwani Jean Wilson Brutus Fouad Saeed Abdulkadir Delvin Francisco Rodriguez Nenko Stanev Gantchev In 2026, ICE has murdered 2 people: Keith Porter [New years eve 2025] Renee Nicole Good -From the ICE_Raids Community on Reddit

And to all of our lovely WWC Followers, particularly those in the United States:

Take care. Take care of each other, your community, yourselves.

Travel in groups and make sure your loved ones know where you are. And absolutely know your rights.

And even in troubled times, try to find a spark of hope, creativity and comfort and hold onto it. For even joy is resistance.

Resources

Immigrant Defense Project

City of Mpls website: Know Your Rights (Minnesota)

For those who can support:

I've included the verified GoFundMe for Keith Porter's daughters.

Keith Porter's family GoFundme

from In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado (2019)

In Dorothy Allison’s short story “Violence Against Women Begins at Home,” a group of lesbian friends gathers for a drink and they discuss a bit of community gossip: a pair of women recently broke into another woman’s house and trashed it, smashing glass and dishes and destroying her art, which they deemed pornographic. They spray-painted the story’s eponymous phrase on her wall. The friends debate police involvement and intragroup conflict mediation; but toward the end of the story, as they are parting ways, the problem crystallizes into a single, telling exchange:

“Look, do you think maybe we could hold a rent party for Jackie, get her some money to fix her place back up?”

Paula looks impatient and starts gathering up her stuff. “Oh, I don’t think we should do that. Not while they’re still in arbitration. And anyway, we have so many important things we have to raise money for this spring—community things.”

“Jackie’s a part of the community,” I hear myself say.

“Well, of course.” Paula stands up. “We all are.” The look she gives me makes me wonder if she really believes that, but she’s gone before I can say anything else.

Queer folks fail each other too. This seems like an obvious thing to say; it is not, for example, a surprise to nonwhite queers or trans queers that intracommunity loyalty goes only so far, especially when it must confront the hegemony of the state. But even within ostensibly parallel power dynamics, the desire to save face, to present a narrative of uniform morality, can defeat every other interest.

The queer community has long used the rhetoric of gender roles as a way of absolving queer women from responsibility for domestic abuse. Which is not to say that activists and academics didn’t try. When the conversation about queer domestic abuse took hold in the early 1980s, activists gave out fact sheets at conferences and festivals to dispel myths about queer abuse. [see footnote 45] Scholars distributed questionnaires to get a sense of the scope of the problem. [see footnote 46] Fierce debates were waged in the pages of queer periodicals.

But some lesbians tried to restrict the definition of abuse to men’s actions. Butches might abuse their femmes, but only because of their adopted masculinity. Abusers were using “male privilege.” (To borrow lesbian critic Andrea Long Chu’s phrase, they were guilty of “[smuggling patriarchy] into lesbian utopia.”) Some argued that consensual S&M was part of the problem. Women who were women did not abuse their girlfriends; proper lesbians would never do such a thing. [see footnote 47] There was also the narrative that it was, simply, complicated. The burden of the pressure of straight society! Lesbians abuse each other!

Many people argued that the issue needed to be handled within their own communities. Ink was spilled in the service of decentering victims, and abusers often operated with impunity. In an early lesbian domestic abuse trial, a lawyer noted the odd and unsettling detail that most of the time the jury spent behind closed doors was—contrary to what she’d been worried about—the straight jurors attempting to convince the jury’s sole lesbian member of the defendant’s guilt. When she was later questioned, the lesbian juror told the lawyer that she hadn’t “wanted to convict a [queer] sister,” as though the abused girlfriend was not herself a fellow queer woman.

Around and around they went, circling essential truths that no one wanted to look at directly, as if they were the sun: Women could abuse other women. Women have abused other women. And queers needed to take this issue seriously, because no one else would.

footnote 45: Among the myths tackled by the Santa Cruz Women’s Self Defense Teaching Cooperative: “Myth: It’s only emotional/psychological, so that doesn’t count.” “Myth: I can handle it—unlike her last three lovers.” “Myth: Staying together and working it out is most important.” “Myth: We’re in therapy, so it’ll get fixed now.”

footnote 46: Actual questionnaire language by researcher Alice J. McKinzie: “Is your abuser present at this festival? If your abuser is at this festival, is she present while you are filling this out? If your abuser is not present while you are filling this out, is she aware that you are filling out this questionnaire? If you answered NO to the question above … do you plan to tell her later?”

peeta : “that’s true. only i think he hates me even more…”