paypal / cashapp

you've seen the jokes. india is "dirty", indians are "everywhere", why don't they fix their own country. ok. let me tell you why, and what's happening right now while nobody's watching.

first, the history you skipped: britain ruled india for two centuries and drained it. economist utsa patnaik's research estimates around $45 trillion in today's money was taken. the india that got independence in 1947 was one of the poorest countries on earth. every "why is india like this" question starts there. you don't get to profit off a robbery and then mock the crime scene.

now, what's happening RIGHT NOW:

in may the question paper for NEET leaked. that's the national medical entrance exam. over 2.2 million students took it. cancelled. years of studying, families' savings poured into coaching, gone overnight because someone sold the paper. students died by suicide after. these were kids who wanted to be doctors.

and out of that came a protest movement. a gen z group called the cockroach janta party, started by a 30 year old named abhijeet dipke, got 22 million instagram followers within DAYS. they've been doing a sit-in at jantar mantar in delhi demanding education minister dharmendra pradhan resign.

and then there's sonam wangchuk. if you've watched 3 idiots, he's the real engineer the character was based on. built solar schools in ladakh. invented ice stupas so himalayan villages have water. spent his whole life on education. he's 59 and he's been on hunger strike for 17+ days now. reporters went to see him this week and he was too weak to talk. and the troll armies are calling him "anti national" and "foreign funded". a man starving himself for other people's children. that's the thing here, anyone who asks a question is suddenly a traitor.

it's not one incident, it's everywhere you look:

• infrastructure worth thousands of crores failing within months of the ribbon cutting. tunnels collapsing in regions where heavy rain is a guarantee, not a surprise.

• youth unemployment near 10% for ages 15 to 29, 13.6% in cities. in a country of 1.42 billion where more than half the population is young.

• only about the top 3% of indians earn above 10 lakh a year. meanwhile billionaire wealth keeps ballooning and the headlines celebrate it.

• manipur burned for over two years. an ethnic conflict, tens of thousands displaced, and the prime minister barely said the word manipur while it happened.

• journalists raided. critics' houses bulldozed. activists sitting in jail for years without trial under laws like UAPA. our press freedom ranking has cratered.

• even the petrol is a fight now, ethanol blending pushed through while drivers complain about their engines and get no straight answers.

and through all of it, the PM, who came to power on religious polarisation (americans, sound familiar?), travels abroad for photo ops and has not held one single open press conference in over a decade. not one.

what i'm asking:

if you're not indian: share this. our media mostly won't cover any of it because the big outlets are owned by the same billionaires the government serves. the only reason wangchuk's fast is getting any coverage is people refusing to look away.

if you ARE indian: speak up even if you're comfortable. especially if you're comfortable. join the protests. add to this, correct me, translate it. staying quiet is a choice when nothing in this post touches your life.

india is not "dirty". india was robbed, and it's being robbed again, from the inside this time. but it's also the country where a 59 year old will starve for strangers' kids and 22 million young people will rally behind a party literally named after cockroaches, because cockroaches survive everything.

we can still save her. but only loudly.

The most absurd example I've seen of this is in the coining of the term "malgendering", where the example is used of the Ukrainian military insisting that both trans women and trans men count as "men" for the purposes of the draft. I find the idea that this gender validation constitutes a kind of specific oppression of trans men hard to understand: I can only speak for myself, but if the women in my country were all expected to undergo some horrible experience I would not want to be exempted from it on the grounds of my birth sex, I would expect to suffer alongside them, it's called solidarity! Also how is your first instinct on seeing that that it is trans men rather than trans women who are the victims of the greater injustice?

There is a meme about certain trans men that they don't believe transition does anything, that they regard themselves as a type of woman who is called a "man", rather than actually a man. This is has a kind-of parallel in transfemininity in the internally-transphobic trans girls that are quite common on places like 4tran, who hyperbolically regard any transition that starts after the age of 16 as doomed. But I don't think these are fully mirrors of each other, because the hypothetical internally-transphobic trans girl regards a "passing" transition as something desirable but available only to the young or rich, the trans men I'm talking about seem to regard a "passing" transition as a genuine impossibility for everyone ever (even while so many of their trans male peers are living happy, often stealth, lives as men). It's less doomerism and more unfounded bioessentialism.

I think this comes back to the issue of asymmetry. A lot of trans men initially come out as men only to find that society merely shifts from viewing them as "weird girl" to "deluded girl", the misogyny doesn't stop, it just gets combined with an increase in transphobia. Meanwhile, for a lot of trans women, their coming out experience is the sudden transition from "weird boy" to "T-slur", there's a massive and immediate change in life experience that comes after asserting "I am a woman" that doesn't really have a transmasculine parallel. The joke slogan "trans 👏 people 👏 are 👏 women" has a grain of truth in the sense of how wider society views early-transition trans people, irrespective of transition direction. For transfems, the mere act of coming out (even if you don't transition medically) massively changes your social positioning in a way that doesn't really happen in reverse.

I think a lot of the reluctance of early-transition trans men to consider themselves fully men is simply down to a material assessment of how wider society views and treats them. It's no surprise that trans men who are far into medical transition tend to be much more willing to regard themselves as fully men, since at this point many others are treating them that way too. The difference with transfems is that we are treated as particularly marginalised women immediately on coming out, and (depending on how the closet went for us) often even well before that, maybe for our entire lives.

There's a similarity to the "double-empathy problem" in which autistic and allistic people struggle to understand whichever experience they haven't had themselves. Growing up as a closeted trans girl, the way I interacted with the closet was to ignore the heavy social pressure to perform "manhood" and just be myself, resulting in me facing a whole lot of misogyny from basically the moment I could talk. I used to think the closeted trans boy equivalent of me was undergoing an opposite experience at the same time, one of actually being treated like a boy to some extent, but in fact he was just also facing a whole lot of misogyny too. We were both treated like girls, although the only one of us allowed to name ourselves as "girl" was the one who didn't want that in the first place. That's not to say our experiences were the same: the transmisogynised occupy a much lower social position. Only that the attachment a lot of early-transition trans men seem to feel towards womanhood is understandable given that they still occupy a misogynised social position.

Updated post for August!

Thank you to everyone that helped out with the July goal! Rent was paid in time to avoid eviction!

Until I'm able to find a job $1,209 is the total gap between our income and our monthly rent and utilities.

This amount does not include food, toiletries, or medical expenses. We’d appreciate any help with these but the goal is to prioritize the roof over our heads and the utilities. Our only source of income depends on remaining housed.

Please help however you can every amount helps.

https://www.paypal.me/dykemiles

https://venmo.com/u/celestialmonsta

if y'all could help me with this asap i would really appreciate it!

0/1550

Deep thanks to everyone who's donated and continues to donate! As always there continues to be more need for support. Abdul's let me know that they've used the previous funds to get a new space to live. Problem is, the shelters run down and full of leaks and just generally not very safe.

Right now they need funds for:

fixing leaks (there's a lot of rain lately)

putting up a fence

adding a toilet

adding a bathroom in general

general labour costs

food and medical expenses

paypal / cashapp

Updated post for August!

Thank you to everyone that helped out with the July goal! Rent was paid in time to avoid eviction!

Until I'm able to find a job $1,209 is the total gap between our income and our monthly rent and utilities.

This amount does not include food, toiletries, or medical expenses. We’d appreciate any help with these but the goal is to prioritize the roof over our heads and the utilities. Our only source of income depends on remaining housed.

Please help however you can every amount helps.

https://www.paypal.me/dykemiles

https://venmo.com/u/celestialmonsta

via Seattle Times:

Local Ballard raccoon has been spotted thriving in a remarkably unique and charming body

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

Designed this character based off of Spanish Moon Moths.