I Did Not Realize This Was a Sad Occasion

Greece suspends asylum applications for migrants from North Africa by Laura Gozzi (BBC).

Greece passes draconian legislation with prison terms for rejected asylum seekers by Helena Smith (The Guardian).

Greek coastguard threw migrants overboard to their deaths, witnesses say by Lucile Smith and Ben Steele (BBC).

Bill on Detention Centres for Asylum Seekers Published by Jelena Ćirić (Iceland Review).

Italy sends 40 rejected asylum seekers to Albania by Karl Sexton (DW).

Record number of migrants, refugees reached Canary Islands by sea in 2024 (Al Jazeera).

If you want your memory or executive function to improve, stare out a window at the skyline or sidewalk or trees or birds on the electrical wires for like 20+ minutes per day. (With no other stimulation like a podcast or TV if you can manage but hey baby steps innit). If you're fortunate enough to have safe outside with any bits of nature, go stare closely at a 1 meter square of grass and trip out on the bugs and shapes of grasses and stuff.

Literally this will make you smarter. Our brains HAVE TO HAVE this zone out time to do important stuff behind the scenes. This does not happen during sleep, it's something else.

That weird pressurized feeling you get sometimes might be your brain on no defrag.

I was having a conversation with my dad a while back, and the subject of the police came up because my then girlfriend's abusive ex was squatting at her house and neither of us wanted to call the police. He knows I'm an abolitionist, its probably my single most vocal belief. And he says, "I know you've had bad experiences with cops but they're not all bad."

And thats when it occurs to me that he hasn't just disagreed with me during our past conversations on the matter, he literally was not listening. Or, he wasn't equipped to listen. I'll explain later on.

When I was arrested, I was not treated particularly bad by the police, and I've never claimed to have been. I was white, and I was in the closet. From the back of the van they loaded me into after cuffing me, I saw first hand how much worse they treated the black man they arrested on the way to taking me to jail, not even allowing him the dignity of stepping inside his home to dress.

When a liberal hears someone say ACAB, they think they're hearing someone say, in addition to being a police officer, every police officer is a bad person. They're all corrupt, they all beat their partners, etc. And thats closer to the truth than not, genuinely, but its still not what we have ever been saying.

Its not the fault of the acronym, that would be a goofy claim. But a more accurate one could be ACIAKOHT: A Cop Is A Kind Of Human Trafficker.

One of the main things a cop gets paid to do is traffick human beings to do forced labor. When they do this to trans women, this forced labor is sexual, it is sexual slavery, something that the vast majority of people I love will risk in every single interaction they are ever made to have with a police officer. Its a matter of policy, its called V-Coding, google it. Even in cases where no forced labor occurs, they are committing kidnapping.

"They've got nobody in the Odyssey?"

"No I'm saying they don't got nobody."

"Nobody's there?"

"Nobody's not there!"

"So everyone's there?"

"Everybody but nobody!"

Yes. Fucking is great. I enjoy it myself on occasion. But condoms are not free just because people enjoy fucking. Condoms used to be much, much, much harder to come by, and they were significantly more expensive. Many humans have always enjoyed fucking, but condoms have not always been available, much less for free.

This post was originally made in September of 2020. It was made after I got into a pitched argument with a straight cisgender woman, who argued that free condoms are actually oppressive in a society where free menstrual products are hard to come by. Her argument was that it is an act of violent misogyny for free condoms to be available anywhere when menstrual products are not, and that the prevalence of free condoms is clearly due to male privilege.

That is not why condoms are free, and if you think free condoms are in any way oppressive, you need to get your head out of your ass. You cannot drag free condoms into the conversation about free menstrual products without acknowledging the massive, grueling efforts of queer activists and allies–including WOMEN–that brought condoms into wider use.

Condoms are often free because AIDS activists put endless amounts of effort into education and distribution of resources for safe sex. Condoms are free because they keep everyone safer, not just the people (NOT JUST MEN!) who use them.

Free condoms are not patriarchal, and they benefit everyone. Please read up on the history of AIDS activists. There’s even a convenient Wikipedia page all about HIV/AIDS activism.

And since I didn’t include a source link in my original post (nor do I remember where I got that number by this point), here is some updated, properly sourced data on global HIV/AIDS infection rates, courtesy of unaids.org:

39.9 million [36.1 million–44.6 million] people globally were living with HIV in 2023. 

1.3 million [1 million–1.7 million] people became newly infected with HIV in 2023. 

630 000 [500 000–820 000] people died from AIDS-related illnesses in 2023. 

30.7 million people [27–31.9 million] were accessing antiretroviral therapy in 2023. 

88.4 million [71.3 million–112.8 million] people have become infected with HIV since the start of the epidemic. 

That’s only 60 years of “condoms are legal FOR MARRIED PEOPLE, WITH ADVICE FROM A DOCTOR.”

…Several people on the current SCOTUS are trying to figure out how to overturn Griswold.

That right got extended to unmarried people in 1972, with Eisenstadt v Baird.

Condoms used to be a felony. And then they were a felony for unmarried people. And even after that, they carried a lot of stigma - why would you need a condom, unless you were being promiscuous?

The administration either got rid of or didn't listen to people who could explain the algae problem, and decided that the problem was because other administrations were just stupid and didn't know how to take care of the pool, and also saw an opportunity for grifting some money.

So they painted the bottom of the pool dark blue, which absorbed more heat from the sun and made the algae bloom faster than ever. So they dumped hydrogen peroxide in it, which only killed the algae around the edges and also made the new paint job peel.

The media blackout on Palestine coinciding with new bomb types dropped in a ceasefire tells its own story.

Jervis got stepped on a few times... He kinda deserves it.