itās sooo funny when rude customers encounter employees who can deny them service for the first time.
i was working at a little cafe where I could deny service over bad behavior, harassment etc. & mask mandates had just ended a week before & already people were being weird about me still wearing mineāan N95, the kind shaped kinda like a duckbill.
so this man walked in, looked at me sooo scathingly, laughed at me, and said ādamn. never known a woman to chooseā¦practicality over looks.ā
And I just said, āoh. you can go, youāre not getting a drink.ā And he said, āwhat???ā
I said, āsir, you just walked in at 6 am & called women impractical and me ugly in one sentence.ā
And he was so astonished he didnāt even argue he just turned around and left ššš» it was like he suddenly became self aware
One summer I was running ferry rides across a lake so people could see the waterfalls without walking 6 miles when a guy snapped my bra strap as he was boarding the boat. So i immediately threw him off, he started yelling for my manager, my boss cheerfully informed him that, yeah, sheās the captain of the boat and she can kick off anyone she wants. He goes to storm off, looks expectantly at his girlfriend, and she just goes, āWell, IāM not walking six miles, Michael! Iāll meet you back at the car!ā and sits right back down!!!!
The expression on his face when he was told that he couldnāt get on the boat, then immediately told that his girlfriend was ditching him? PRICELESS. he just blinked at her and then stormed off like a child. I gave her a free hat and was like maybe rethink this relationshipā¦ā¦.
i once had this fucker come up to order a beer. while i pour it he shows me the wanky fucking chemical structure tattoo on his arm and heās like āhey. you know what this isā i was like ānah sorryā (never cared abt chemistry in school, plus having to look at a some randoās pretentious tattoo gives me the douche chills). he decides to respond with āheh. you must not read many booksā
i immediately stop pouring his beer. i reply: āheh. you must not want this beer.ā thirsty boy immediately starts groveling like a worm āplease please no i do want the beer im sorry im sorryā believe me when i say it was one of the most pathetic things ive ever witnessed
I genuinely believe that part of why it has become so normalized to be openly callous and evil in politics is that customer service culture has trained affluent people that they can treat everyone they consider beneath them however they want and still be treated kindly.
Taking up Japanese as a side project for myself has reminded me of something.
So like a long time ago I had a professor that I absolutely adored. She happened to be Japanese American. She grew up speaking Japanese at home but never really spent a lot of time in Japan. She mostly spoke with other Japanese Americans and read books.
So one day early in her teaching career thereās an exchange student from Japan whoās having a hard time understanding a concept so she explained it to him in Japanese and then he looked absolutely rattled. Like in shock. Pale.
This is how she learned that the way she speaks Japanese makes her sound like a gang member.
Japanese doesnāt exactly have cuss words in the same way as English does but imagine that the nicest professor youāve ever had pulls your paper over and says āOkay listen here you little piece of shit Iām gonna fucking explain this to you. Violently.ā
This (studying in Chile for a year) is more or less how I realized my two PhD-having, tenured professor expat parents raised me to speak the most disrespectful and swearword-riddled version of Spanish possible (with plenty of ancient slang I didn't know was slang thrown in). It was like:
āLife after menopause is exceptionally rare in animals. It can evolve only in creatures where grannies help younger family members survive. Only human, killer whale, and short-finned pilot whale females routinely live for substantial periods after they stop breeding. Like humans, killer and pilot whales have roughly twenty-five to thirty childbearing years, then can live another thirty or so. And as Kenās just explained, some live a lot longer. Up to a quarter of the females in a group are postreproductive. These whales are not waiting to die; they are helping their children survive. As human children often benefit from their grandmothersā attention, killer whale grandmothers boost their grandkidsā survival. A rather bizarre twist of killer whale society is that killer whale mothers remain crucial to the survival of their adult children. When older killer whale females die, their adult children start dying at high rates, especially males. Male killer whales who are under thirty years old when their mothers die suffer a tripling of the annual mortality rate compared to males in their age group whose mothers are still alive. Male killer whales who are more than thirty years old when their mothers die face death rates more than eight times as high as males in their age group whose mothers are still living. Daughters under thirty show no mortality increase after their mothersā death. But daughters older than thirty when their mothers die have more than two and a half times the death rate of same-age females whose mothers are alive. Malesā handicaps of the extra drag of their huge dorsal and pectoral fins and the extra food required for their immense size (at around 20,000 pounds, males can be one-third more massive than females) seem to make them reliant on their working mothers for food. Females donāt have the malesā impediments, but while raising young, females may rely on food shared by their no-longer-breeding mothers. Adult females share essentially all the fish they catch, and more than half goes to their children. Adult males share their catch only about 15 percent of the timeāusually with their mothers. While no one fully understands their strange death pattern following the loss of a mother, extreme parental care is likely at the root. Toothed whales are the worldās champion nursers. Short-finned pilot whales continue to produce milk for up to fifteen years after the birth of their last calf, likely nursing other femalesā young. In bottlenose and Atlantic spotted dolphins (further study might reveal others), some females never give birth. Denise Herzing dubbed them ācareer females,ā because their role in society does not include motherhood. They might be infertile. They might be gay. But their contribution is crucial: they do a lot of babysitting. When Herzing entered the ocean with a visiting nine-year-old girl, āWhite Patches, the eternal babysitter herself, had never seen me babysitting a young human before. Her excitement vocalizations were audible and electric and she continued to swim around us, eyeing the human youngster attached to me.ā (Researchers sometimes call babysitters āaunts.ā Thatās precisely who they often are.)ā
so, i noticed that in āsinners,ā remmick is portrayed as playing a banjo when he performs. that piqued my interest because i know somebody, hannah mayree, who runs something called the āBlack banjo reclamation projectā which aims to educate people about the banjoās african origins and history in Black music, accepts donations of banjos to be distributed for free to Black folks who are interested in playing, and offers shows and events oriented toward helping Black people reconnect to their roots through this instrument.
thereās a campout that starts tomorrow, june 4th, and an online study group that starts this weekend, june 6th, and some events and shows this summer that look really fun. thereās also a newsletter for any future events!
looks like i canāt put the link to the website, but itās just the name of the project dot org
I have always loved a good banjo. It's crazy bc it's from Africa, but it always gets a bad rap as a Southern White Hick stereotype. Which, interestingly enough, is probably why they gave it to Remmick. A sort of sign that even in this, he's trying to use Our Music to get Inside to Us. But anyway, somebody shredding on a banjo is š¤š¾š„
I'd actually love to participate in something like that, because I gave up on this guitar š I don't have the memory and focus anymore to teach myself music.
This seems like a great place to plug the full-length documentary about the all-Black old-time string band Carolina Chocolate Drops:
They formed at a Black Banjo Gathering in North Carolina in 2005 and have been a big influence in the revival of Black traditional/string band/old-time/folk music in general but also from the Piedmont region of the Carolinas.
I especially like this documentary because they talk about how you take a style of music that's been whitewashed/repressed and bring it back for a modern audience, while repairing its ties to and honoring the Black ancestors who played it first. The origins of the banjo are a huge part of that and a huge part of the documentary.
General tumblr reminder, since some people don't know: If the person's URL has "deactivated" plus a string of numbers (a date) after it, that means that they manually deleted their own blog. It doesn't mean they were banned. Banned blogs don't have "deactivated" after them and will just be the normal URL you can't click on or interact with. They look very similar and function the same, but they were caused by two very different things.
trans women and trans men and nonbinary people and everyone else being friends and holding each other close and falling in love and thinking of each other. I'm making this my future. let's all be okay together
We had one of these in the planetarium the other day!
Honestly he was a very Well Behaved guest who snootled around the lobby before politely leaving when we opened the door for him. 10/10. Definitely prefer this lovely gentleskink over the lady who showed up a day early for a show and blamed us for her failure of reading comprehension.
seconding these tags by @ragsy:
#if the social consciousness has decided that duckduckgo is the Only Othet Search Engine#might i suggest 'go duck yourself'
1. Striking is the LAST RESORT. If a union is at the place where a strike is being proposed it is because they have been bargaining for a long time and exhausted all their other options.
2. Before a strike happens, all the members vote. Everyone is very aware of the status of negotiations long before theyāre made public. But if a strike is occurring itās because an overwhelming majority voted to strikeāyou want almost everyone in the union to agree before you take such a huge step.
3. Strikes are difficult but necessary demonstrations of workersā collective power. The hope is that your labor is so essential that the bosses lost profits will make them come back to the bargaining table. The bosses are hoping that the workers will starve to death.
4. Working during a strike is called scabbing. Coming in from an outside industry to do work during a strike is sometimes called crossing the picket line. Both send you straight to hell.
Sometimes I really want to take everyone under the age of 24 (as of 2026) by the shoulders and say:
"I'm really sorry that lockdown and the ongoing pandemic interrupted pivotal educational and social/emotional development moments for you. You have an uphill battle towards adjusting to a lot of community based efforts because you experienced a mass trauma during an incredibly important time in your life where you should have physically been around your peers learning to engage in shared community. There is no "but" here, I'm genuinely really sorry. Something many of us consider key points in our interpersonal growth as youths was taken from you, not without reason but without care for its impact on you. I hope you know we are eternally allies in our struggles and if that is something you struggle to know I hope you can learn it someday."
Because so many of the angriest, most disenfranchised people I see on this website are under 24 and I often try to put younger people's behavior in the context of where they might have been 2020. I've seen the impact on my siblings and their peers+friends first hand, all ages 18-24. We've talked about how its impacted them, the isolation, the attachment to the internet, the anxieties and phobias and fears it developed in them due to the pandemic, the political unrest, and the responses to both that we've seen since. I know they're not the only ones and I know how much being marginalized also influences that impact too.
It's terrifying. I know it must be terrifying for a lot of the young people on Tumblr too. I hope one day we're able to bridge all of those complex feelings into something collective and positive so we can do our best to prevent similar traumas from happening to future generations.
my wizardgirl keeps mage regressing during the big boss fight, throwing out level 1 Ice Bolt and giggling like we're supposed to find it cute. I know this bitch can do a level 12 modified Frosthammer Vortex. It's not even hard for her. But the Wyvern Queen, who we're supposed to be killing, keeps going "Wow, that was a really big spell for you! good job giving me -1 speed! You're soooo powerful!" and my fuckass mage is beaming at her with those big wet eyes. I don't care if you get "level dysphoria" from your gigantic big-girl mana pool I'm about to die out here
been seeing a lot of people locked into trans discourse express disdain that "ugh the trans unity people want us to all hold hands and pretend there is no beef" and it demonstrates such an inability to see a bigger picture.
I'm nonbinary, and in recent years the people who have been the most exorsexist to me have been binary trans people. Binary trans folks, yall piss me off every damn day on this website. And if I was unable to see past short-sighted ideas that prioritized comfort above autonomy, safety, liberation, authenticity, I could conclude that binary trans people are my biggest enemy. But they aren't. Not even close.
It's not trans people following you into bathrooms, it's not trans people shouting shit when you walk past, it's not trans people killing us. If we want to play oppression olympics, I've got more reason to hate you guys than you do to hate each other, but it's such a cowardly position to take. It's so inauthentic.
Not because trans people aren't doing harm in this shit storm, the race to acceptance and assimilation comes with a body count, but the crabs in your bucket are not the ones who put us here.
This is WHY I am critical of ideology and not of groups. Reactionary movements are an attempt to take back power as a powerless group, but it only empowers you to violence over other powerless people, because your power is granted BY the oppressors. We must build power as a collective against them.
Trans unity is not a fake-smile-we-all-love-each-other bullshitfest, it is a recognition that we are not each other's enemies, even when we are not each other's friends. The shittiest trans woman deserves the things I am fighting for, the most vile trans guy MUST have access to what we are dreaming of. That is the point. And my unity extends to cis people, not just because i do not want to be another barrier to the closeted trans person finding people who will take them in, but because the gendered liberation of cis people is tied to my liberation too.
We are on lists, we are struggling to afford our care, we are abused by people and systems beyond our control, and fighting against a massive machine for our right to live. Of course it makes sense that bullying someone you think is doing transness wrong makes you feel big. Of course it makes sense that you think policing hard borders stops people from getting what you are afraid of losing. But it doesn't work like that. We are too intertwined that cutting each other off is like cutting off our own arm out of spite. Our oppressors LOVE that you have one less arm to fight them with--it doesn't do shit to them!
But it feels like control. It feels like action. When you feel stuck and hopeless, doing something, often especially out of anger FEELS like progress--like movement.
We do not preach "loving" our fellow trans people out of a naive belief that we could all just get along, but because the only way to survive is to survive together. The only way to thrive is to celebrate the wins of others. The only way to move forward is with all of us.
Because if you whittle and whittle away at "threats" and cut down on your circle until only those you can "really" trust who "fully" understands you inherently--rather than meet them and build collective understanding--eventually the only one who will be left is you, and if other trans people are your enemy, how do you think it goes when it's just you vs yourself in the end?
The above is a video shared by smrchildsadness on Twitter, showing a person participating in a pride parade exchanging a pride flag with a person standing on his (am using his pronoun based on the TikToks/Tweets of what happened) doorway who had a Portuguese flag. There are sounds of cheers and crying and the two people hug each other as they exchange the flags. The man at the doorway then waved kisses to the crowd within the pride parade.
The Tweet says: "NO YOU DONT UNDERSTAND HE WAS WAVING THE PORTUGUESE FLAG BECAUSE HE DIDN'T HAVE A PRIDE FLAG AND THEY TRADED FLAGS AND HE'S SO EMOTIONAL TO GET HIS OWN PRIDE FLAG I'M EMOTIONALLY RUINED"
For context, apparently they were worried that maybe he's a nationalist because he was waving the Portuguese flag and some nationalists opposing the pride march were waving that flag. But upon interacting with him, it turns out he didn't have have a pride flag and he wanted to wave *a* flag in support of the pride march. So they had an exchange and now he has his own pride flag šš„¹.
The image above is a Tweet by kunwara_ladkaa that says "I'm crying so much right now (Image taken by Manuel Fernando AraĆŗjo/Lusa)". The image shows the same man from the pride parade crying as he hugs his new pride flag.
The above image is a Tweet by dudz_zZzz that says "ainda não parei de pensar nele," which according to Google translate from Portuguese to English is "I still haven't stopped thinking about him." The image is a drawing of the person from the pride parade, crying as he hugs his new pride flag.
hi!! over the past year or so, iāve been radicalizing leftwards (does that make sense?), and while i do like to say that i have a pretty good understanding of things like socialism and communism and such, one thing i havenāt really been able to figure out is what anarchism is and how it works. like, i get the basic idea, but what with google being google and most people on breadtube not being anarchist, itās definitely not as easy to research as socialism.
anyways, tl;dr: what defines anarchism and how does it work?
thanks in advance! have a cookie šŖ
"Anarchism asserts the possibility of an organization without discipline, fear, or punishment, and without the pressure of poverty: a new social organism which will make an end to the terrible struggle for the means of existence,āthe savage struggle which undermines the finest qualities in man, and ever widens the social abyss. In short, Anarchism strives towards a social organization which will establish well-being for all."
leftward ho! thanks for writing. these questions are always difficult to answer because i donāt know where youāre coming from on your personal journey. but iāll try to answer some of the basics and recommend some good resources to start with.
first of all, there are many anarchisms and if you ask three anarchists youāll get five opinions. but probably the most prevalent form of anarchism is anarcho-communism, so while iāll try to talk broadly from a general anarchist position, much of it be from an anarchocommunist perspective for simplicityās sake.
at itās most basic, anarchism is an opposition to hierarchy, to one person having control over another. it is a radical commitment to compassion and absolute freedom. like communists, anarchists want a moneyless, stateless, and classless society. unlike leninists, who falsely claim to be communists, we know that there has never been a good state, and never can be. they are by their very nature oppressive, and cannot be used as a means to an end to achieve communism. no group or individual can wield that much power over others and not become corrupted by it. absolute power corrupts absolutely, etc. so while we are committed to the fight against capitalism, we are also committed to the fight against the state. they are intertwined and must be defeated simultaneously. so we believe in the abolition of all government and the organization of society on a voluntary, cooperative basis without recourse to force or compulsion, and the abolition of money and private property, as the best way to ensure the basic and higher needs of everyone are met.
if you havenāt read it yet, the wikipedia article for anarchism is actually a pretty good place to start:
Anarchism is a political philosophy and movement that is skeptical of all justifications for authority and seeks to abolish the institutions they claim maintain unnecessary coercion and hierarchy, typically including, though not necessarily limited to, the state[1] and capitalism. Anarchism advocates for the replacement of the state with stateless societies or other forms of free associations. As a historically left-wing movement, usually placed on the farthest left of the political spectrum, it is usually described alongside communalism and libertarian Marxism as the libertarian wing (libertarian socialism) of the socialist movement.
Humans lived in societies without formal hierarchies long before the establishment of formal states, realms, or empires. With the rise of organised hierarchical bodies, scepticism toward authority also rose. Although traces of anarchist thought are found throughout history, modern anarchism emerged from the Enlightenment. During the latter half of the 19th and the first decades of the 20th century, the anarchist movement flourished in most parts of the world and had a significant role in workers' struggles for emancipation. Various anarchist schools of thought formed during this period. Anarchists have taken part in several revolutions, most notably in the Paris Commune, the Russian Civil War and the Spanish Civil War, whose end marked the end of the classical era of anarchism. In the last decades of the 20th and into the 21st century, the anarchist movement has been resurgent once more.
Anarchism employs a diversity of tactics in order to meet its ideal ends which can be broadly separated into revolutionary and evolutionary tactics; there is significant overlap between the two, which are merely descriptive. Revolutionary tactics aim to bring down authority and state, having taken a violent turn in the past, while evolutionary tactics aim to prefigure what an anarchist society would be like. Anarchist thought, criticism, and praxis have played a part in diverse areas of human society.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism
Anarchism - Wikipedia
i donāt know how much original theory youāve read before, but iāll give some reading recs. personally iām a big fan of peter kropotkin, and found the conquest of bread to be a breath of fresh air after studying marx for years. others have recommended starting with errico malatestaās anarchy or peter gelderloosā anarchy works. and zoe baker (anarchopac) is excellent if videos or tweets are more your speed.
Pƫtr Kropotkin The Conquest of Bread 1906
Pƫtr Kropotkin Mutual Aid A Factor of Evolution 1902
Errico Malatesta Anarchy 1891 Freedom Press 1974, 1994. ISBN 0 900384 74 3. LāAnarchia was written in 1891, appeared in English translation
Peter Gelderloos Anarchy Works 2010 Anarchy Works was originally published by Little Black Cart and can be found in book form here.
I'm a trans woman (she/her), who talks about the theory and history of anarchism, feminism and marxism. I have a PhD in the history of anarc
getting involved masterpost
hopefully thatās enough to get you started but please feel free to ask questions, and there are many more knowledgable people here who can help as well.
š¬ 0Ā Ā š 659Ā Ā ā¤ļø 729Ā Ā·Ā It's Safer in the FrontĀ Ā·Ā Faced with intensifying repression and state violence, there is an understandable inclination
Tumblr scrolling induced like/reblog fugue state @bee-dazzle - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag