Wrestling With Angels: Get Your Tickets Now! @healingmoth - Tumblr Blog

Drugs are morally neutral. Doing or not doing drugs is not an indicator of how good a person is. There are addicts who’d give you the shirt off their back, and sober people who poison the homeless for fun.

momoboyds

white europeans love to pretend like the united states and europe aren’t two cheeks of the same ass

hiimneptune

Listen, nobody who's ever opened a history book says we didn't do that shit first. Pick an atrocity and chances are there was a time europeans did it on mass to someone for the sake of profit. The difference, is that we have for the most part put that behind us, while the US is just sinking deeper and deeper into it. We're not perfect, and we were a lot worse in the past. But it has been a while since we were the problem

momoboyds

so the racism, antiblackness, islamophobia, and hatred for immigrants just disappeared huh

creatingblackcharacters

"its been a while since we were the problem" someone Black was murdered by police violence in Ireland last month

#yeah #I think you guys conflate the fact that you have better social supports than the US #With the idea that you've solved your racism issues #I think the romani are the greatest example because boy the way some of you openly talk about how much you hate them #is truly fucking despicable #and that's just the tip of the iceberg #your immigration policies are awful #the way poc are treated in so many of your countries is crazy #i mean in France the Islamophobia went so far that you banned halal and kosher slaughter #and won't let Islamic women veil or wear headscarves in many public spaces #you guys do have it better there in so many ways #but does that actually include your most marginalized populations?#how much better do they really have it?#i know it varies country by country #but there is a consistent theme of continued racism #plus idk if you're aware but you're still benefitting from imperialism and colonialism

sophsun1

Buffy the Vampire Slayer – 2.19: I Only Have Eyes for You

#btvs

northstareclipse

It’s striking how often the neurodiverse community polices itself. I see more and more of it every day here on tumblr - someone expresses frustration or anger at systemic ableism, or even just points out that it's happening and the response is almost immediate:

"Life gets so, so good once you learn how to meet neurotypicals halfway!"

"You just need to adjust, the world isn’t going to change for you!"

These statements might come from a place of wanting to be supportive, but as far as I'm concerned they are a glaring symptom of respectability politics. We are pressuring OUR OWN to shrink, to accommodate, and to smooth over their own discomfort, even when it's perfectly justified, and I'm not going to stand for it.

Here are the problems with this type of thinking.

ND-to-ND respectability politics centers neurotypicals. The message implies that the goal is to make them comfortable, or force ourselves to be comfortable around them no matter how they're behaving towards us, rather than to create environments where neurodivergent people can thrive.

It silences anger and critique. Frustration with neurotypical expectations and prejudices gets reframed as a “bad attitude” or even a "superiority complex" instead of legitimate response to structural inequities.

It creates a hierarchy within our own communities. Those who play nice and do cross-stitch and make posts with lots of exclamation points about how friendly the world is to everyone no matter what are rewarded with social acceptance; those who resist or have "youth-coded" rather than "elder-coded" hobbies or have more PTSD symptoms or point out that this isn't the case everywhere/for everyone are seen as “difficult” or “ungrateful.”

We need to name this shit for what it is. Respectability politics is not the harmless advice you might think it is. It’s a tool of control that we have come to use to police each other instead of challenging the systems that marginalize us, and it's even more insidious than the Aspie-supremacy bullshit from 10-20 years ago where you'd see people saying shit like "I'm autistic too but I don't use it as an excuse to act weird/be unemployed/not drive a car/etc." because it gets couched in cutesy, progressive-peacemaker language.

Our value should not be measured by how little space we take up, how agreeable we are, or how much we make others comfortable. Neurodivergent anger, intensity, and boundary-setting are political acts. They are acts of survival.

strawberry-seal77

time loop with two people in it but one person refuses to acknowledge the loop and pretends to be looping with everyone else. meanwhile the other person is freaking out

jonzinmybonz

✊🏽Black men deserve peace.

✊🏾Black men deserve respect.

✊🏿Black men deserve to feel safe.

✊🏽Black men deserve to grow.

✊🏾Black men deserve to thrive.

✊🏿Black men deserve to love.

✊🏽Black men deserve to be themselves.

✊🏾Black men deserve to live their lives.

sunnfl0w3rr

mutuals if I like your vent post I promise I’m acknowledging your post and sending happy thoughts and hoping your ok bc I don’t know what to say and I promise I’m not happy you’re in pain

hometoursandotherstuff

bunabi

I'm in awe of how we ran historical revisionism on the civil rights movement so bad that people truly believe it was quiet self-sacrifcial non-disruptive christ-like activism that forced progress and not — like — the incredible economic pressure of boycotts and outbreaks of illegal civil disobedience

Yapping to the choir but eughhh it burns me up girl effective protests have to be loud and inconvenient for change to happen because silent cries die in the dark that's the entire pointtt

umbrellahat07

Also, a lot of the so called harmless examples used for peaceful protests were specifically supposed to be disruptive as all hell. Like, take sit-ins, for example. What you were probably told is that black people just refused to leave white only establishments to make a point.

But how they actually worked was manipulating racist policies to cause as much of a delay as possible. They'd sit down at the bar to order (that's how those restaurants worked, you had to sit down to order and there weren't many tables) and when the waiter said they couldn't serve them, they'd respond that they would wait until they could be served. And then all their friends who they organized this with would do the same, and they would sit there at every seat until they're holding up the whole line. Then nobody could order and the restaurant was forced to either close, serve them, or try and fail to work around them. It wasn't just to make a point, it was to cost them money and time.

Even what was framed as "quiet peaceful protest" was actually very disruptive both socially and economically.

beatrice-otter

Does this look quiet, peaceful, nondisruptive?

And the struggle didn't stop after formal integration, once the Civil Rights act had passed. Because even when they are legally required to serve you, they can make you really fucking uncomfortable and threaten you and the cops probably will take their side.

For one example, there was a cafe that would serve Black people, but would then publicly break the dishes so that no white customer would ever have to eat off a dish a Black person had eaten off of. This was done publicly, right as the Black diner was done eating. The waitress takes the plate and smashes it. This is a signal both to the white diners "see, we hate them just as much as you do, you're safe here" and also a threat of violence to the Black diners. "If you're not careful we'll smash you just like we did this plate."

But at the same time, if Black people go there and eat every day ... how long before the cafe can't afford to do that? How long before they have broken so many dishes that it's eating into their profits? How long before the white diners start getting used to eating alongside Black people and simply don't care as much any longer, or start getting annoyed at the noise and fuss and mess?

Black people eating in white establishments was loud, inconvenient, and disruptive. Because that's the nature of challenging the status quo.

sionnualanicheallachain

All of this, plus a couple of additional thoughts:

1. Folks in these movements trained. They were disruptive and they were strategic about it and they trained so that they could stay calm in terrifying situations and create the targeted disruptions they wanted to create and not get goaded into deviating from that. Absolutely badass.

2. Not at all a criticism of OP because I think their description of people thinking it was "quiet self-sacrificial non-disruptive christ-like activism" is dead on, but I think that description itself speaks to the same kind of revisionism re: the Christ of the Gospels and how disruptive he was and why, and it's important to remember that, especially in this era of renewed christofascism. Rev. Dr. King was a prophet and you will never convince me otherwise.

pixie-likethecut

As I told my students a few weeks ago:

Nonviolence is not a goal, it is a strategy. A deliberate strategy at a calculated time in response to violence of the oppressor, which can be effective if it shames the perpetrators. See: why Selma or Montgomery was chosen by the SCLC (they had the most racist unhinged sheriffs who would deploy maximum force, which got shown on nationwide broadcasts and finally moved the public).

Nonviolence doesn’t mean you don’t carry weapons if necessary, as many organizers in Selma did. Nonviolence doesn’t mean that you accept that people will throw bombs into your family’s home, as they did to MLK.

And yes, the absurd simplification and bastardization of this strategy is deliberate. It went from being a tool for fighting for liberation to being a justification for more violence and oppression used against future generations of protestors who didn’t meet the standard of perfectly obedient nonviolent non disruptive protestors. Which of course there is no such thing.

And it’s all a lie. Know that people in the movement, at the time, were called criminals, because they knowingly and deliberately broke laws with the idea that they’d get arrested. Know that most of the country hated King at the time of his death. Know that no movement demanding change from the system will ever be loved by those in power.

elljayvee

once again I feel I must mention Erica Chenoweth & Maria J. Stephan's "Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict".

For more than a century, from 1900 to 2006, campaigns ofnonviolent resistance were more than twice as effective as theirviolent counterparts

ambidisastrous

People who work within a system: okay so studies show that the normal system works 90% of the time, but because it’s very bad when it doesn’t work, we’ve set up a process to manage those outliers. We need six well-trained workers to run the system 100% of the time without any serious incidents.

CEOs and politicians, every time: Well i just saw it go right twice in a row which means the normal system which you say works 90% of the time actually works 100% of the time. We’re cutting the team down to one person pulling 18 hour shifts without breaks

cipheramnesia

If they even wait to see if it works once, it's lucky. If they care whether it works, it's astonishing. If they know how it works, it's fiction.

kirby97

sorry if i weirded you out with my messages earlier (remembers im trying to be more self confident) but actually it was normal of me to do so (becomes nervous im acting superior) because i am a human like everybody else and not better than anyone (remembers i am better than some people) except for really bad people (notices the ideological can of worms opened by previous clause) but anyone can work towards self improvement (remembers im trying to be more self confident) like meeee :)

free-my-mindd

#hm #yeah way too relevant rn

tearlessrain

actually caring about the rights and safety of children is so stressful right now because a large amount of the time I'm sitting there internally screaming "THAT'S WORSE. THAT POLICY IS GOING TO ACTIVELY CAUSE HARM TO CHILDREN YOU ARE MAKING IT WORSE." and nobody cares because it's not actually about protecting children but the thing is children actually do need more protection very badly, just not like that. REALLY not like that. and the things that would actually protect children (education, greater personal autonomy, access to knowledge and resources that don't hinge on their parents being willing/able to provide them) would give adults less absolute power over them and that upsets too many people who see children as status symbols and tools and extensions of themselves.

progressivemillennial

“If I have one message to give to the secular American people, it’s that the world is not divided into countries. The world is not divided between East and West. You are American, I am Iranian, we don’t know each other, but we talk together and we understand each other perfectly. The difference between you and your government is much bigger than the difference between you and me. And the difference between me and my government is much bigger than the difference between me and you. And our governments are very much the same.”

― Marjane Satrapi, Iranian graphic novelist