The Endless Forest

A collection of random thoughts...

[ikwo-uwem]

Community and Leftist Politics

It seems that for so many leftists, our model of politics is a fundamentally liberal one, despite or protestations to the contrary. In saying this, I don't our desired policies or institutions. Rather, I mean the very model of the political subject we have in mind. We envision organizations or parties that are composed of a series of abstract individuals united primarily by a shared ideological commitment and then we say we want a socialist future. How exactly does that come about among people who remain largely alienated from each other? People who barely know each other and only care about one another in an abstract way as "comrades"? The future we want certainly involves building political power but, perhaps more foundationally, it involves tearing down the walls that this white supremacist, settler (and yes, capitalist!) society has erected between us. It requires welding all of these abstract persons who come to our organizations into a genuine community of care from which solidarity emerges, not as an abstract moral injunction, but as an obvious practice of being in community with others. If we're not building living communities, then what motivates us to *care* about the people we fight beside?

Yak ikwo uwem ada inemesit osok mbufo.

[ikwo-uwem]

Joy and Revolution

A revolution should and must be a joyous event. It's true, of course, that many of us committed to revolutionary politics were brought to this through a righteous anger at the injustice of the world we're confronted with. That rage is entirely justified and appropriate. Yet, still, I insist that a revolution must be joyous. It cannot simply be a negation of the ills of the world but must be an affirmation of life, an affirmation of community, and ultimately, an affirmation of ourselves as we dance in the world. We must build a world fit for ourselves, that honors our ancestors, and creates a space for the generations after us to live a happy and dignified life. That process of creation flows from a deep love of our communities and the deep, all consuming joy of seeing ourselves reflected in the world through what we build and the lives we nurture and care for. The revolution must be joyous. Yak ikwo uwem ada inemesit osok mbufo.

[tamamita]

Visit Original Link

Paper Mario: The Origami King - Boss Fight

[chilewithcarnage]

@junkyoushas

[junkyoushas]

[startorrent02]

@freddkong

[freddkong]

[thechildrenarewaiting]

Why the FUCK does this go so damn HARD

[ikwo-uwem]

Answer:  Because Paper beats rock.

[ikwo-uwem]

I get that there’s a lot of things going wrong in the world that we feel the need to fight against but maintaining the energy we need to fight is dependent not only upon righteous fury but the capacity to imagine a future more beautiful than today.

So, for everyone who sees this, I’d love for you to comment with what sort of future you dream of living in when the current struggles have ended in victory.

[left-reminders]

[mysharona1987]

From The Washington Post. Damn

[leafwhirlwind]

Do not let them make you numb.

[5hahem]

Bayard Rustin was an openly gay Black man who was Martin Luther King’s right hand man. He planned the Million Man March and was subject to scrutiny for his sexuality and deemed a “deviant” and “pervert”.

Bayard Rustin can be found in nearly every picture of MLK yet he has undoubtedly been erased from history. We have to fix that.

[skeletonmug]

Well then, let’s bring that name back.

Bayard Rustin, openly gay, human rights activist, proud black man.

[metrospotting-deactivated202104]

(the guy on the left in case you wondered)

[gaypriori]

Yeah he was literally the guy who was the head of planning the March on Washington.

If you want to learn more about him, there’s a great documentary on him called Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin

You can watch the full documentary here (until March 31st, 2016)

[studyeliza]

I did a research project on him, Ella Baker, Claudette Colvin and Stokely Carmichael comparing their contributions to the Civil Rights Movement to the lack of recognition and misrepresentation they received in commonly used high school American History textbooks. All of these people played major roles in the Civil Rights Movement—almost on par with MLK—yet they go largely unnoticed or unfairly pushed aside not only during their time, but even now in classes on American History. These men and women deserve to be remembered.

[klaineharmony]

I would also like to add Jame Baldwin to this list: writer, activist, and openly gay black man:

[trenderbakugou]

Y'all do realize the more you call trans kids “transtrenders” and that they’re “faking it” the more parents aren’t gonna support even Actually Real Dysphoric Trans People, right?

[andro-purpur]

i actually experienced this last summer.

my mom is friends with this trans woman, who was really sweet and she was super cool, but then i tried to come out after my mom expressed how much she liked her trans friend and how amazing she is. i told my mom about my crippling chest dysphoria and how much i’d love to be called by he/him pronouns and my preferred name. i told her about how i’ve always felt this way and i’ve known since eighth grade.

well the thing is, her friend is a transmed.

my mom is an uninformed person on trans issues, because she didn’t really care about them until recently. she took resources from her transmed friend and it ruined my life. she went off about how i’m not really trans because i didn’t come out sooner, i have piercings, my hair is always a crazy color, i still like girly things, and my glasses are weird. she kept yelling about how i didn’t have dysphoria before, so i obviously have the wrong definition. she told me if i was trans it would’ve been diagnosed by my therapist already, and it was just a cult bandwagon phase. i was locked away from the outside world for a month.

when my next year of high school rolled around, i was out as trans. my partner provided me with a binder and all was well. i came out to all my peers at the beginning and about halfway through the school year to my teachers. it was quiet, under the table. i told them my mom didn’t know and under our school guidelines, they were not allowed to tell my mom that sort of thing. well, one of my teachers ended up being lgbtphobic and i didn’t know, and announced to the class that she didn’t “agree with the lifestyle” and that “gay marriage isn’t what god wanted.” my mom got an email that day about me being out as trans at school. i wonder who could’ve sent it?

my mom blew up. she was sending me treat after threat because i was a trender, all i did was lie for attention, that i chose to be trans because it was trendy and that real trans people wouldn’t flaunt their transness. of course, she got these resources from her transmed friend. she pulled me out of public school and cut my contact with the outside world for three whole months. i didn’t get back into school until february.

DO NOT TELL ME THAT PEOPLE WITH DIFFERING OPINIONS ISNT TRANSPHOBIC AND HARMFUL BECAUSE EVEN AS A DYSPHORIC TRANS PERSON, TRANSMEDICALISM HAS RUINED MY HOME, MY FAMILY, AND MY LIFE. I WILL NOT STAND FOR TRANSMEDS OR PEOPLE WHO ALLOW THEIR INTERACTION. THEY ARE EXTREMELY HARMFUL AND NEED TO BE STOPPED BEFORE MORE LIVES ARE RUINED.

[findingfeather]

I mean: we did this with bi kids and particularly bi girls, right. With people my age.

We got super gatekeepy and “you must be THIS GAY to ride this identity” and we complained at length about it being “trendy” and how girls only did it to be “cool” and to get attention.

And so among other things I know one person I love is, for example, only JUST getting to have her FIRST relationship ever with a woman at slightly older than me because this shit got into her head and she didn’t think she was “allowed”.

So watching people turn the same bullshit on even more vulnerable kids?

This is a problem. This is lateral violence. And it needs to fucking stop.

[eroticarchaeology]

Let me be clear, even if Transtrending was a thing (I do not think that it is), I would still much rather hear a 15 year old tell me that they thought they were trans and then realized they weren’t after a few months of playing with the idea, than hear about a 30 year old who finally transitioned after having a mental breakdown because they spent their life thinking they weren’t trans enough and therefore weren’t allowed to transition.

Fighting the Transtrender Boogeyman isn’t protecting the integrity of trans rights, it just makes the struggle of atypical trans people harder.

[sadmac356]

^

[matronofthevoid]

THIS SHIT NEEDS TO STOP

[theinfiknight]

Can cis people reblog?

[alitakitasita]

Everyone reblog. This is important

[shyocean]

Yes. But also.

The thing ruining bp’s mom is bp’s mom. If she’s screaming at them about faking things for attention, sending threat after threat… that’s a problem with mom that the right education would not have fixed, because invalidating and abusive behavior isn’t caused by having one transmed friend. It’s caused by condoning abusive and invalidating behavior.

Which is why I don’t think I am down with refusing to listen to transmed trans people as they talk about their experience and understanding of it.

Like, yes, I support trans people without dysphoria. I fucking coined my own gender term.

But the “how” sticks around. Abusive and invalidating behavior seems like the real villain in a lot of this.

[gorgonsach]

x

[justgfy]

Unions are trash. Theyll Destroy a whole company for firing a shitty worker.

[gorgonsach]

unions are the reason you aren’t paid 2.50 an hour with steel beams about to bust ya head open shut up lol

[explorerrowan]

Unions are why you have 5 day, 40 hour full-time work weeks. Unions are why they have to pay you in actual dollars instead of “company credits” that you can only spend at the company-owned stores. Unions are why there are fucking fire exits at your place of work. Unions are why it’s not okay for your supermarket ground beef to be any percentage human.

You think your company pays you out of the goodness of their hearts? Or even out of “market pressure?” The “job market” is a myth perpetuated by the capitalists. Corporations would pay you nothing if they could get away with it. And you argue “oh, but if they paid me nothing I’d just go to another one.” Wrong. Because to maximize profits, they all want to pay you nothing. Corporations exist to maximize profits while reducing risk for investors. It’s part of their entire function to find ways to cut costs as much as possible, and that includes finding ways to pay you nothing.

Unions are your defense against that. You think all a union does is strike? If you pay union dues, a lot of that is spent on lobbyists in various governments reminding your lawmakers that you have rights as a living human being that a corporation should not be able to stomp all over. Unions hire lawyers so that if you’re fired for bullshit reasons, the union can stand up for you against your boss. They’re called unions because workers are uniting to pool resources so that they can stand up to these corporate overlords with more money than God. Unions exist because you might not have the words, resources, or time to fight workplace injustices all by yourself. That’s the whole fucking point.

And if a business shuts down because a union is striking, it’s because the business was abusing people and didn’t deserve to be in business anyway. Don’t make excuses for the corporations. They already have trillions of dollars and a couple million lawyers to do that for themselves. They don’t need your help.

[mierac]

The erasure of labor history from US history curriculum has caused so much fucking damage to this country. 

[ikwo-uwem]

Uhhh...y'all need to pay attention to this.

Healthcare has always been a racial issue on top of everything else we have to deal with.  Still, minority populations are likely to be over-represented in the group with "pre-existing conditions" as a direct result of being poorer and not being able to afford quality medical care.  Thus, conditions that could have been manged before they became acute escalate to truly problematic levels.

I want to generally think the best of doctors.  I have some in my own family and I know a great many of them are die hard committed to caring for all.  Even so, the structure of this society and how white supremacy overlaps with capitalism has produced a situation in which the rationing of care could lead to an atrocity even greater than the fundamental atrocity of our healthcare system as it stands...

Medicare for All just went from "we really need this" to "this must happen by any means necessary".

https://twitter.com/stevenspohn/status/1278096633406906369?s=19

[brainstatic]

“Don’t call Trump supporters nazis, it hurts their feelings.”

[jewish-privilege]

Yes, this is real (link to tweet). Yes, Tucker Carlson is literally repeating Nazi propaganda that aided the genocide of the Romani during the Holocaust. Yes, I am furious. 

(Also, although there is a large population of Romani in Romania, they aren’t indigenous to Romania. They’re a diasporic group originally from northern India.)

[tikkunolamorgtfo]

Romani and Jewish have been screaming at the top of their lungs for years about neo-fascism in Europe, and Americans were totally aloof.

Then neo-fascism reared its head in America, but Roma and Jews were left out of the conversation in terms of people being impacted, because our oppression was “over.”

Now Tucker Carlson is on live TV using slurs and Nazi propaganda about Romani people, and I’m 90% most people on the left are just going to ignore it.

[volaee]

It’s fucking starting y'all. It’s happening again.

If you’re not Jewish or Roma PLEASE BOOST THIS.

[mioxenoblade]

Lots of trans people, if not all, have slipped up and misgendered themselves. We’ve all used the wrong phrases, pronouns, deadnamed ourselves, everything you can think of is probably just as common as the last. Accidently misgendering yourself is simply that, an accident. It doesn’t mean you’re “fake,” you’ve spent your whole life being referred to a specific way, you’re bound to mess up. It’s ok. Just forgive yourself and move on.

[divine-noire]

Reblog, share, and remember him. This story hits me differently for so many reasons, these murderers MUST be brought to justice. SAY HIS NAME TOO! ELIJAH MCCLAIN!

[rapeculturerealities]

Sex Workers Have Never Counted on Cops. Let’s Learn From Their Safety Tactics.

Sex workers have kept each other safe outside the purview of the state for decades, and probably centuries.

Sex workers (as well as people who use and/or sell drugs) have always known they can’t rely on police for protection because cops regularly use laws that criminalize prostitution, drug possession, and living outside to harass, coerce, extort and arrest them. Research shows sexual misconduct and sexual assault is endemic among police officers in the United States. A 2017 study based on interviews with 250 women selling sex on the streets of Baltimore found that 71 percent reported “abusive” encounters with police. Police get away with it because the law is currently on their side, and their position as law enforcement officers with powerful unions almost guarantees that they will not be held accountable.

Spellman said police are notorious for extorting money from sex workers in exchange for “protection” from being arrested. However, that protection only extends to the officers who get paid off, and with others, it’s a “crapshoot.” And what about protection from abusive clients and other risks that come with working on the street?

So, sex workers have developed practices for keeping each other safe and providing mutual aid outside the purview of the state, providing models for addressing public health safety without police. Activists say their knowledge and experience should be centered in conversations around defunding the police, redistributing those resources to communities and dismantling police altogether:

Sex workers need to be at the center of talking about alternatives to policing when it comes to addressing violence.

Sex working communities have been creating different ways to keep each other safe from those who wish us harm (INCLUDING THE COPS) for decades.

— The Prodigal Whore (@MPDreamWhore) June 7, 2020

“In the face of criminalization and whorephobic violence, sex working people have always sought to create our own systems of support and protection outside of the cops, criminal legal processes and societally accepted channels because most sex workers know those systems will never bring justice and have no interest in listening when harm happens,” said Red S., an organizer with a mutual aid organization for sex workers in Chicago and New York City called Support Ho(s)e, in an email.

read more

[gahdamnpunk]

The kid truly care about our planet more than adults and politicians

[neontologist-deactivated2020100]

hahahahah the nypd has bureaus in foreign countries???? their budget is literally unknown??? they kill twice as many people as they report??????? in what universe is that not a private militia. this is warring states period shit 😭

[jonpertwee]

Whoa, they WHAT?

[40ouncesandamule]

New York police department bureaus in foreign country

New York police department budget is unknown

New York police department kill twice as many people as they report

[jonpertwee]

The first link is behind a paywall for me, but the 2nd one -- "The idea is that American communities have come to rely on their more than 18,000 police agencies to do much more than police. They’re fighting terrorism abroad, performing homeless services, working with children in schools, [...]"

The fuck???

The same article says the NYPD budget is $6 billion though (Christ).

[daggers-drawn]

That’s their public budget. They’re also funded through a private foundation that (afaik) doesn’t need to disclose its contributions.

[inkskinned]

ive been on tumblr a long time and i remember when everyone said “oh don’t romanticize mental illness” and it was agreed that doing that was gross and a good way to kill people indirectly

but somehow we’ve come full circle and there are people who legit defend their right to be anti-recovery there are people who don’t want to get better and spread the idea that you can’t get better as if it’s gospel and it’s fucking frightening to me bc nobody seems to want to say “hey? this is toxic and untrue and is your disease speaking, and it’s not something you should accept.”

and i feel like every recovery post gets about 500 of these people saying “this isn’t something that will work” “cool karen i’m depressed” “maybe it worked for you but it won’t work for other people” and that’s… just… im so sorry if you’re 15. i’m sorry if you’re in high school and watching grown adults tell you it doesn’t get better. that nobody says that with time and help and patience the world stops being so heavy, that accepting your illness as a fact is one thing but accepting it as the only way to be is just wrong, that you can learn to live with it and still find some degree of “happy”…. if i had seen this shit back when i was … oh god starting at 12 when i was already self-harming …. i think i’d have actually honest-to-god killed myself. not a joke, not a funny tumblr punchline, i would have actually just killed myself. 

i’m saying this right here and right now to the adults on this site. if you for any reason shoot down positivity that’s causing no harm - you might have indirectly worsened someone else’s condition, and you should try and do better in the future. if you find it necessary to tell people “recovery is a lie”, you need to do better. i know everyone has different circumstances, but i also know that mental illness behaves in such a way that everyone thinks they can’t recover.  if you feel like you should be spreading the Word Of Relapse, you are causing toxic language to be normalized and you need to do better. 

im team “cool karen ive got depression and that means i’m going to try this because i’ve got to try something” i’m team “romanticize recovery” i’m team “it isn’t working now but it might in the future and it’s worth staying to find out” im team “hey this didn’t work for me but it might help somebody else out”

fuck guys it shouldn’t be an unpopular opinion to say “i don’t want any of you to die”.

[stephrc79]

Oh thank fuck someone finally said it!

[fierceawakening]

I’m sometimes very leery of tumblr’s tendency to assume things are fixed traits and build identities around them, for exactly this reason.

[baixueagain]

When I was a teenager I believed it was impossible to ever heal, or even cope. It very nearly did kill me. Despair is tempting, but it is a false god.

[catboy-dysphoria]

I see some folks in the notes talking about “but I have XYZ and it’s lifelong, how am I supposed to be pro-recovery?” And I want to throw out there that recovery isn’t always about reaching some end goal of “cured,” recovery is about getting better and getting to somewhere manageable. I have some conditions both physical and mental that are lifelong, that won’t go away. For example, I can never un-traumatize myself. However, I’m a lot more recovered than I was a month ago, a year ago, ten years ago. I don’t have panic attacks as frequently, I’m more knowledgeable of my triggers so I can avoid them easier, I’m better at setting boundaries and taking care of myself. There’s even small things, like how I do my laundry before I have no clothes left (usually.)

Recovery looks different for everyone. Maybe your recovery isn’t being able bodied and mental illness free, but just being able to enjoy a night out with friends every once in a while.