thatdiabolicalfeminist:

the-transfeminine-mystique:

the-transfeminine-mystique:

closet-keys:

I’m always a little baffled when liberals will see leftists doing something and object out of the fear that the right willĀ ā€œuse it as justificationā€ to do xyz oppressive shit.

because like… literally 100% of the time they already are doing that exact oppressive thing, and there’s centuries of evidence that they will just make up justification when they don’t find anything concrete to blame it on anyway

organizing to combat voter suppression isn’t the cause of voter suppression.Ā 
organizing to prevent fascist groups from terrorizing communities isn’t the cause of fascism.Ā 
advocating for the end of boarders isn’t the cause of the United States government deporting peopleĀ 

I don’t understand how so many people have been convinced that any advocacy or organizing is the cause of oppression instead of the fight against it. How do you consistently mix up cause and effect this much?Ā 

So much of liberal rhetoric is focused not on stopping or combatting what is happening, but instead on trying to get the referee to notice that the other side isnt playing fair so they’ll step in and put things back *~*the way they should be*~* and so a lot of the time when they say that the right would ā€œuse _____ as justificationā€ for something, what they really mean on some level is ā€œ_______ could be said to provoke that response, and as soon as we do anything to provoke, we no longer have the moral high groundā€

and of course there is no referee — there’s nobody standing outside the system who is empowered to step in and throw a flag when somebody is ā€œcheating.ā€ But they just can’t get past the illusion that if they point out enough times that the right is breaking laws or acting badly, then somebody (with the appropriate authority) will step in and do something about it

This is also the very real impulse lurking behind all of those joking posts on fb from liberals going like ā€œdamn I wish the queen would just take the US backā€ because the idea that the British royal family, the last body that controlled America from the outside, could step in and stop everything bad is much more appealing than the thought that if they want change they’re going to have to do the hard work of making it themselves

#that’s not even getting into how they totally ignore the atrocities perpetuated by the british crown#like a little genocide and imperialism doesn’t matter at least she doesn’t sound UNCOUTH on the television#when
ppl say shit like that it makes it clear they do not give a fuck abt
the actual oppression occurring just that the Cheeto Manā„¢ is R
ude (via)

diversehighfantasy:

tillthenexttimedoctor:

Has anyone read any – positive or negative – takes on ā€œRosaā€ by black fans or black writers? Iā€˜d be interested in reading posts or articles (or seeing twitter threads or youtube videos) that aren’t just white people telling each other that the episode was great.

I thought it was a great episode, much more detailed and historically accurate than I expected. I do wish it had mentioned Claudette Colvin’s part of the story, as the one who ignighted the bus boycott with her previous, less peaceful, arrest and conviction.

I’ve read a lot of white criticism of the episode on Reddit and Twitter over the last couple days, and while many posts say they don’t like being spoon fed a story, an equal amount missed major points that shouldn’t have needed to have been even more spelled out. For example, Rosa was clearly portrayed as an activist in the inner circle of the civil rights movement. Martin Luther King Jr wasn’t at her house randomly because all Black people know each other – they were meeting.

And yet I keep seeing people complaining that Rosa was ā€œmisrepresentedā€ because she was in reality an activist. Or that she was ā€œchosenā€ as the face of the movement, as if she was a puppet and not an active participant herself. (Which really goes to show how nonblack people will twist information in order to put it in a bad light – a lot of people seem to think that because she was an activist, the whole thing was faked. That’s misrepresentation).

Another pain point I’ve seen is the time traveling villain, whose name I don’t even remember. Scruffy white guy sent back in time to stop the bus boycott. His motivation? Racism. So why are so many complaining he had no motivation? And why is racism considered a ā€œboringā€ trait for a sci-fi villain? Especially since when I post about racism in media and fandom, people act like it’s the most over the top suggestion (because racism is something only Evil People do)? There’s nothing worse when someone thinks they’re being called racist, but when a mass murdering villain is openly racist, that’s not a good reason to be a villain.

I won’t even get into the people who wanted to ā€œunderstandā€ the white space villain better. Or the ones who call him a dumb villain because he’s from the far future, and obviously racism wouldn’t be a thing in his time (or maybe racism is something that isn’t exclusive to the US in the ā€˜50s? Maybe it’s not just going to go away by itself over time?). Like, no stopping and thinking about the implications, just, no, there’s no racism in whatever future world this villain we just met came from.

Which, of course, goes hand in hand with complaints that Ryan and Yaz’s talk about the racism they’ve experienced in the present day UK was unnecessary and ā€œheavy handed.ā€ It was absolutely necessary for a British show exploring an American civil rights event to do that.

Anyway. Episode was great. A lot of the reactions, not so much.

brainstatic:

I’m really glad this anti-Confederate backlash has picked up steam, because we’ve allowed Confederate apologists to completely seize control of Civil War history. The fact that we even think of it in terms of ā€œNorth vs. Southā€ or ā€œUnion vs. Confederacyā€ is a sign of that influence. It should be ā€œAmerica’s Slaveowner Revolt.ā€ We ask questions like ā€œwhat if the South won the warā€, as if that was remotely possible given their numbers and logistical failures. The Confederacy was barely a government. Within a year of forming there were riots from food shortages. The whole notion that this was between two equally formidable and legitimate sides is a fallacy of the so-called Lost Cause.

This isn’t griping from a history buff by the way, the Lost Cause has been one of America’s chief guardians of white supremacy for 150 years. The Big Lie about states rights affects politics to this day, and always in the context of letting states curtail civil rights that the federal government has guaranteed. Prior to the Civil War, when Northern states tried to push back against fugitive slave laws and make themselves sanctuaries for runaway slaves, the government cracked down hard on them. There was not a peep about states rights on that. We see it happening today. The states rights scolds have not said a word about Jeff Sessions threatening to destroy cities that refuse to hunt undocumented immigrants. Yet somehow the rights of states become sacrosanct when they want to keep gay couples from adopting kids. All of this is relevant to our current situation, and hopefully taking down some statues of (frankly overrated) treasonous generals is just the beginning.

sangled:

joanne k rowling, woke intersectionalist: hey bud. listen. you know that evil snake named after an indian story? the one who died? well heh………… get this…………… she’s actually a korean woman…… who shapeshifts. turns out we had strong representasian after all huh? you poc women are going to love this *checks off ā€˜cho chang’ on her mile-long list of sins*

me, a korean woman who just wants to forget: how did you get in my house

brehaaorgana:

j.k.r. needs like one close friend to sit her down and go: ā€œokay, but, go over this with me again. you decided the evil snake your dark wizard kept as a pet and vessel of his fragmented horrific soul – the one that has to be murdered in order to defeat the evil wizard – is in fact….an asian woman who was cursed to eventually become a beast and monster in her own body. am i getting this right? the asian woman turns into a snake because her bloodline is cursed and then she becomes the pet of a white supremacist with magic. you invented a body curse specificallyĀ for turning women into monsters and your first thought was not like, subversion of fairy tale misogyny but….to add a layer of racism? just trying to understand here.ā€Ā 

quoms:

The thing about baseline nationalism – not even ā€œradicalā€ nationalism, just that sort of normal set of underlying nationalist principles that everyone adheres to who believes in the legitimacy of nation-states, which is most people – is that you don’t even need to say, for instance, ā€œit’s okay for the government to put people in camps and torture them because they’re not Australian.ā€ You don’t even need to formulate that as a coherent thought in a way that might result in you dealing with it, because it’s simply taken for granted as a fundamental truth. Your brain does you the favor of gliding right over it so you can get on with writing your internet screed about how the conditions ā€œprobably aren’t that badā€ and people are only attempting suicide and children are only falling comatose as a trick to be allowed into Australian hospitals, which just proves even more they shouldn’t be allowed to come here, on and on, etc. etc.

It is a mistake to think that only extreme nationalists, only violent nationalists, are the problem. The normal everyday nationalism that is so commonplace we often don’t even register it as being nationalism is – perhaps after gender – the most widespread and deeply entrenched system on this planet for licensing violence done by others, for turning violence into something sanitary and bureaucratic and amoral, for allowing people who are not fundamentally indecent to nevertheless avert their eyes from damning evidence of human suffering. It is a social pathology. A disease.

Child Refugees Sent To A Tiny Pacific Island Are Becoming Unconscious From Their Trauma

quoms:

iamoutofideas:

realmoths:

Sorry to link to buzzfeed but i want peter dutton’s head on a pike

should note that nauru banned facebook because refugees were using it m to spread awareness

Dr Nick Kowalenko, who chairs the Child and Adolescent Psychiatry international relations subcommittee at the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Child Psychiatrists, said that environmental features of pervasive refusal syndrome – including trauma, parental mental illness, and a pervading sense of hopelessness – have been the reality for years for the kids on Nauru.

ā€œPeople can endure difficulties if there’s an anticipated hopeful outcome, a light at the end of the tunnel,ā€ Kowalenko said. ā€œBut the dawning experience on a lot of those families and kids is that’s not the case.ā€

the explicit point of australia’s immigration policy, the explicit point of the way the detention centers on nauru and manus island have been run, is to provoke a sense of hopelessness. the trauma being done to these children is not even an accidental byproduct of conditions at the camps: it is an intended and inevitable consequence of the way the system is run, because it is a system designed to traumatise, regardless of the number of euphemisms deployed to design that fact

the stories in this article are proof positive that the people running australia’s immigration system are doing so competently and effectively

Child Refugees Sent To A Tiny Pacific Island Are Becoming Unconscious From Their Trauma