Fierce, Gitaxian Librarian

shiny and chrome

[punkitt-is-here]

Hello person having transgender thoughts but convinced they aren't trans because they don't have the requisite amount of dysphoria they think they need

Hi I transitioned without even thinking I had dysphoria. Like later in hindsight I can go "oh that's probably what it was" but for the first year of my transition I was straight up like "I like being a guy but I like being a girl WAY more" and you can do that!! There is no prerequisite amount of suffering needed to make yourself happier.

[punkitt-is-here]

Gonna include these tags cuz they're good

[fierceawakening]

I experience (mild, relative to some people) sex dysphoria, and I don’t completely understand what people who say they are trans but don’t have ANY dysphoria mean. The best I can perspective take still lands me at “I have dysphoria but I call it other words” or “I’m happy with my sexed body, but have social dysphoria about the social role attached to it.”

However!

I do not go around being a jerk about this, for precisely the reason this post was made:

No one should have to suffer just to have a reason to improve their life.

I don’t have to understand what exactly they’re experiencing to believe that and hold to it.

[striders]

the other day i saw a tiktok of a woman talking about how her hyper-militant abusive parents would sometimes punish her by “taking away her name” and referring to her as a prisoner number. genuinely terrible stuff, obviously. but i skimmed the comments and. listen. i truly DO NOT mean to dunk too hard on this person, like they could be a kid or something, but.

just. breathtaking. imagine if your primary reference for the concept of the un-personing of prisoners was (check notes) a book series about owls.

[saleensundria9]

This is why it's important to Include stuff like this in fiction, especially ya fiction. It can be a lot of sheltered and/or indoctrinated children, in the case of a lot of rural "Christians", first introduction to these types of concepts in a way they can understand.

I don't think there's anything weird or shameful about it. Knowledge is knowledge, regardless of where it came from.

[a-polite-melody]

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

I was once listening to one of the ten billion animorphs podcasts out there, with two hosts, one who'd read Animorphs as a kid and one who was reading it for the first time as an adult. For those who don't know, Animorphs is a war story in which a handful of children have to secretly hold off an alien invasion until the "good" aliens arrive to save Earth. It starts off with fairly clear-cut Bad Species of aliens and Good Species of aliens but as the series goes on it becomes clear that there is no such thing as a good, clean or glorious war, that a clean Good Side and a clean Bad Side is usually propoganda, that heroism is a matter of circumstance and that war will chew up and spit out even the victorious; there are no winners in war, just the side that lost less.

It's a lot, for books aimed at eleven year olds who want to read about kids turning into fun animals.

On the podcast, the two (American) hosts happened to get onto the topic of the post-9/11 Iraq War and their reactions to it. They were both children at the time and as such could not be expected to have particularly nuanced views of US military policy. The person who hadn't read Animorphs was unsurprised by the declaration of war; that's what you did. Someone attacks America, America goes to war. That's how a country protects itself, through military revenge. The Animorphs fan, about the same age, had been devastated and against the war from the start. War was a Big Deal and, while sometimes unavoidable, should be a last resort; a lot of people were going to die, and a lot more were going to get hurt, and no matter how the war shook out it was still going to be horrible. They attributed this perspective, of course, to the series that had taught them about the horrors endemic to war in an engaging way at such a young age -- to Animorphs.

That's what kid fiction is for.

[fierceawakening]

And the dark twin:

More disabled characters who were “cured” feeling weird and cynical and Complicated about it.

Now.

[fealty-to-thee]

More characters ending disabled and happy NOW

[battle-for-dyke-island]

dear fellow autistic people: if you consistently come out of doctor’s appointments feeling emotionally (and sometimes physically) hurt, but you feel bad for feeling hurt because “the doctors were being nice”, the doctors were not being nice.

this is something I had to learn the hard way. doctors often dress up their words all pretty so you can’t sue them. I, for a long time, mistook this as genuine kindness. It’s not. It’s just being professional. even if they didn’t call you a slur or anything that doesn’t mean they weren’t ignoring your needs.

trust what your body and emotions tell you. if you are feeling hurt, there is a reason, and you need to listen to it. please listen to it.

[penumbralwoods]

every time someone realizes they dont have to pick between being a boy or a girl an angel gets its wings btw. and also extremely loud cheering can be heard in the distance from me specifically

[penumbralwoods]

btw if you've ever wondered why i make posts like this and get really obnoxious about nonbinary positivity. this is why

and for all of yall that are still figuring it out or aren't getting the support you deserve:

[xfhsfh]

@this-is-nonbinary-joy

[argumate]

I know it's already been passe for decades to jest about IKEA product naming but you see a word like KRÖNIKÖR and it goes straight into the D&D folder for when you need your next big bad guy amirite

[argumate]

KRÖNIKÖR is the Swedish word for chronicler or columnist.

all hail THE CHRONICLER!

[altonin-deactivated20180325]

if you want to actually start to end homelessness, you need to give homeless people unconditional homes, including when we use them to do drugs or sit around drinking. either housing is unconditional or it isn’t

someone sitting at home alone, an active alcoholic, squandering your charity, drinking all day is better situation than a street homeless alcoholic. someone using drugs in your charity house is better than them doing the same w no shelter

most of you would not like most street homeless people, I definitely don’t and didn’t when I was street homeless. for every one person who uses unconditional shelter to turn themselves around, someone else will do jack shit and very slowly, if ever, work through the issues that made them homeless, will maybe never be able to live independently. still better than street homelessness, still worth doing. ultimately either you believe that shelter should be universal or you don’t

homeless people actually can’t be rehabilitated if you want to end homelessness. we either affirm the right to shelter for the worst drunken, lying, filthy, cheating, self destructive homeless people that exist, genuinely irredeemable wankers, or we concede that shelter is not a right

[funereal-disease]

This post is the distilled essence of everything I believe in.

[fierceawakening]

When I first heard of “unschooling” I was afraid of exactly this.

People said I was just overly convinced by a system built only to create factory workers, but I couldn’t figure out how exactly someone’s interests would lead them to a solid basis in something as deep as phonics (or computation/math fundamentals too) unless they were already savant.

Funny to see this.

[thistoowillpasss]

[thistoowillpasss]

[thistoowillpasss]

[thistoowillpasss]

[kittykittyredcat]

[quakerjoe]

[captain-price-returns]

A real page on the White House website

[free-and-to-none-accountable]

The American century of humiliation is goin great 👍

[virtualgirladvance]

every time I think of putting political commentary in my art america just pumps out a new all time low shot and i have to wonder if ill ever keep up

[xerserise]

Stop asking 'but without police, how will we address crime?'

Crime is a social construct. We could eliminate all crime right now, simply by making everything legal. And cops don't stop crime (typically). They don't protect people (typically). They show up, after the fact, and put people into the prison system, where, if found guilty (or coerced into taking a plea bargain, even if innocent), they can be legally enslaved (in the US, at least).

So, um, maybe don't ask the equivalent of 'how will we enforce the laws that the state enacts, if we don't have armed thugs threatening people with death and enslavement?' It kind of makes you look like a bootlicker.

[top-lil]

"Crime is a social construct" is a good example of something that is true by definition, yet entirely useless by all other metrics. Yeah, "fruits" are also a social construct, but there are many good reasons as to why apples or peaches make for good pie filling, while rock salt and metal filings don't.

Predicting crimes is hard, generally, even with the modern panopticon in consideration. That's why criminal justice, instead of trying to physically preclude crime, leverages long-term personal consequences. Such a tactic obviously doesn't work perfectly; many people may consider the risk still worth it, or just don't consider the long-term in the first place. But it's a third barrier to some specific crimes most people agree are typically bad (murder and rape, mainly), reinforcing the existing social and psychological barriers. There's also the calculus that keeping people who are guilty of particularly heinous acts separate from civil society prevents them from committing more of those same acts... except against each other, I guess. But then it doesn't strongly affect anyone else, so the calculus still works.

There are crimes on some books that defy these purposes, and exist as either extensions of more coherent crimes into contexts that make much less sense, or means of social control. "Digital piracy" is a good example of the former, "hate speech" is a good example of the latter. And this sort of belief makes some sense when considering victimless crimes such as these. But consider...

Rape and murder. What's the fucking answer for those?

Undue mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.

[xerserise]

Hate speech is not a victimless 'crime', it's a reinforcement of societal biases that maintains unjust hierarchies.

Also, you eliminate a lot of 'crime' by eliminating unjust hierarchies.

Also, you eliminate a lot of 'crime' by having a society where everyone's needs are met,

Also, studies show that punitive justice systems don't work.

Also, cops don't stop murders or arrest rapist, in the vast majority of cases.

Whatever the answer is, it isn't what we have now.

[top-lil]

"Hate speech" is a farcical, and intentionally vague, concept, created to artificially inflate the supply of "crime" and to use state violence to coerce political conformity. Policing speech is a tool of "unjust hierarchies", you complete rube.

"Also, you eliminate a lot of 'crime' by having a society where everyone's needs are met" Not "a lot", just some. Shoplifting food isn't a particularly large slice of the pie...

Also, studies show that 99% of statements prefaced with "studies show" are bullshit.

"Also, cops don't stop murders" Neither do hugs and kisses. Again, the idea is that long-term personal consequences will preclude a lot of people from committing particularly heinous acts. It doesn't work perfectly, because many people just don't care about long-term consequences, if they consider them at all.

"arrest rapist[s]" This is sometimes true (see: the grooming gangs scandal in the UK), but any appearances to this effect are mostly an illusion of statistics being portrayed in a dishonest manner.

"Whatever the answer is, it isn't what we have now."

And it's not having no system at all, either. You dodged my question last time, so I'll make it easier: what the fuck is your plan for any heinous act? Or is it the typical "prison abolitionist" bullshit where there is no plan, and you're driven entirely by bellyfeel?

[fierceawakening]

“Crime is a social construct. We could eliminate all crime right now, simply by making everything legal. “

But I don’t want to make lynching legal. Sorry about that.

The leftism leaving people’s bodies, again.

(I do not agree with everything @top-lil is saying here, but ‘we could simply make everything legal’ nearly made me spit out my drink. Sure, we could do that. We could do a lot of very dumb things. Doesn’t mean we should.)

[xerserise]

See, there's this thing called logic. Nowhere did I say that we *should* make everything legal. What I said was that crime is a social construct, and I pointed out that we *could* eliminate crime by making everything legal. 'Crime' is anything that people decide is a crime. It's not some inherent thing with its own existence. It's whatever we label as crime.

Anyway, way to continue missing the point, which was: "So, um, maybe don't ask the equivalent of 'how will we enforce the laws that the state enacts, if we don't have armed thugs threatening people with death and enslavement?' It kind of makes you look like a bootlicker."

[fierceawakening]

Okay, but my question remains, which is; in a world where the state can enforce no agreed upon rules at all, what do we do with lynchers?” It’s not a weird hypothetical. Lynchings are absolutely currently happening.

If the state cannot enforce the rule “no lynching,”who enforces it instead?

[sister-lucifer]

i would trust weird al with my drink at a party. granted he may put one of those capsules that expands into a sponge animal in it,

[rhyme-plus-zombie]

sorry i had a vision and i just had to draw it

[vinceaddams]

It's nice that loud noises don't stick to clothes like smells do. That would be really bad if they did.

[banderboucher]

[fierceawakening]

JFK is Emrakul????)

[nokie]

this video changed me as a person

[jelloswingsets]

[Video description: Someone offscreen uses a Hatsune Miku hand puppet to play an IPad rhythm game. The song has a fast tempo and a complicated beat pattern on the game. The player doesn't miss a beat. When the song ends, the game shows, "Full Combo." The Miku puppet does a happy dance. /end description]