artist: felicia chiao
d e v o n
Claire Keane
KIROKAZE
Sade Olutola
we're not kids anymore.
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
todays bird

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AnasAbdin

shark vs the universe
Mike Driver
tumblr dot com
Aqua Utopia|海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
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pixel skylines
styofa doing anything

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blake kathryn

JVL

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@knowthelessyouneed
artist: felicia chiao
Hey, stop scrolling.
Everyone who is reading this: I’m so glad you’re alive. I’m so proud of you. You are loved. I’m here. Don’t give up, we’re almost there.
Pass it on.
Here’s the opposite story, though. With apologies because I don’t have the book in front of me, so I may get some details wrong, but I read this “Irena’s Children“ by Tilar J. Mazzeo.
Irena lived in Warsaw during the Nazi occupation, and dedicated her life to rescuing Jewish children from the Ghetto, and her story is complicated in a lot of ways but - well, this story isn’t actually about Irena, per se.
It’s about a bus driver.
It’s about a day when she’s traveling across town by bus with a very young Jewish child, and partway to their destination the child looks up and asks a question - in Yiddish. and the whole bus goes quiet, because everyone knows what that means. And Irena thinks, okay, we’re going to die here today.
And she’s running through her options - all of them bad - and suddenly the bus stops, and the bus driver announces that there’s been a mechanical failure and the bus needs to return to the depot immediately. Everyone off, please.
And she stands and goes to get off the bus and the driver says - not you two. Sit down. So she sits down as everyone else leaves, because, well, what else is she going to do? the options are all still bad, at this point.
and when the bus is empty the bus driver says,
“Where do you need to go?”
And then he drives them as close to their destination as he can, and lets them off, and drives away. And Irena lives, and the kid lives, and they never cross paths again.
So a janitor got three people killed, and a bus driver saved two lives - not to mention all the other lives indirectly saved because Irena was able to continue her work.
I think about that almost every day now, to be honest.
We can’t all be Irena. I couldn’t be Irena. She was in a unique place with very specific skills and connections that let her do what she did. I am just one mentally ill librarian. I can’t be her. But - I can be the bus driver. Or I could be the janitor. Because it doesn’t matter what your job is. It doesn’t matter who you are. In a world like this, every single one of us has the opportunity to do massive harm or massive good. We can save lives or end them.
And that’s scary. but it’s also very comforting? at least for me. Because at the end of the day it means this: no matter of how small and helpless and unimportant you feel, you’re never powerless in the face of great evil.
You can choose to be the bus driver.
[ID: “Most people who know the name Sophie Scholl know she was a 21 year old German student activist who was executed by the Nazis for distributing anti-Nazi pamphlets on her college campus. But people don’t talk about what happened leading up to her execution, or what happened after. Sophie and her brother Hans were caught by a university janitor named Jakob Schmid as they distributed pamphlets in a courtyard. He grabbed them, declared them "under arrest,” and turned them over to the Gestapo. Four days of interrogations later, they were in front of Nazi judge Roland Freisler (one of Hitler’s favorites, his “hanging judge” flown in from Berlin) for a show trial that Hans and Sophie’s parents weren’t allowed in the courtroom for. Hans, Sophie, and their friend Christoph Probst were all found guilty of treason, sentenced to death, and beheaded a few hours later. No one talks about this janitor, Jakob Schmid. He got a cash reward and a promotion for turning in Sophie and Hans. The University of Munich threw him a celebration. Hundreds of students attended and cheered for him. He thanked them with a Nazi salute. After the war, Jakob Schmid was arrested and put on a trial of his own. He said he only turned the Scholls in because distributing pamphlets was against university policy - it wasn’t because of the content of the pamphlets.
When you think of Nazis, you probably think of uniformed officers. But the Nazis were a political party of everyday people. So also think of a janitor tsk-tsking that someone wasn’t protesting “the right way.” A student at a rally applauding him. A judge towing the party line. We like to tell ourselves Nazi Germany was so horrific it could never be repeated. Maybe you don’t personally know someone who would have flipped the switch on the gas chambers. But I can almost guarantee you know a Jakob Schmid.“
Libby Jones (via Twitter.) End ID.]
we are nature - Author: 1hooda
RIP Miss Major
Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, a Black transgender woman and longtime activist who once lived in the Bay Area, died October 13.
A good way to honor Miss Major's memory, if you have the ability to, would be a donation to the Transgender Gender-Variant & Intersex Justice Project Black Trans Cultural Center.
This is a project originally led by Miss Major herself and aims to provide political education, leadership development, re-entry resources following incarceration, and legal advocacy to Black and Brown members of the transgender, gender-variant, and intersex community.
Donate today and help TGIJP continue in the fight for self-determination, gender justice, and abolition! Donate Today!
the main problem i have with america is that nothings old as hell there. i cant be so far away from a castle it damages my aura
man people really just say stuff on here huh
Noooo haha don't spread racist ideals and colonizer propaganda by idolizing white european aesthetics above all else and denying the life and accomplishments of native peoples on their own lands
People have been living in the downtown area of Tucson, Arizona for at least 4,500 years. The greater Santa Cruz river valley has been occupied by humans for 12,000 years.
You see this?
That's not a river. That's the South Canal in Mesa, Arizona (Phoenix metro area).
This is a view of the East and South canals. At least half of all the Phoenix metro canals were originally built by the Hohokam (from roughly 200-1400 CE), and are still in use (restored) today.
Phoenix, Arizona actually has more miles (kilometers) of Canals total than both Venice and Amsterdam. No, really. Phoenix has about 180 miles of canals, many of which are built on ancient canal foundations.
below is an aerial view photo taken in the late 1930's of one branch of Phoenix's canal systems:
Also have the "Montezuma Castle," if you need a castle:
I don't need to look at some 12th century European castle to see age.
Taos Pueblo has been continuously inhabited for over 1000 years and is a UNESCO World Heritage site, but sure, let's pretend our indigenous people don't exist.
tiktoks with vine energy pt. 13
source
I have NO IDEA what I just watched but my life has been enriched and my day has been made
Nobody celebrate holidays the way Tumblr celebrates our weird little Tumblr holidays
WATCH THE WHOLE THING
I was looking for this all morning!
shit man this got me emotional
left: the Nebra sky disc, circa 1600 BCE, showing the Moon, Sun, and stars in gold on copper - the oldest depiction of the cosmos in the world
right: the Webb Space Telescope, July 2022, revealing thousands of baby galaxies forming in the early days of the universe - humankind’s deepest look into the sky
If you wanna know what kinds of trans rights activist you are dealing with, don’t just look at whether they’re using the right language and know the word ‘intersectionality’. Also take a look at whether they ever focus on material things.
Non-material are things like, being accepted by your loved ones, being adressed with the right pronouns, positive representation.
Material is things like acces to health care (covered by insurance and without gate keepers), housing (that we can’t be evicted from for being trans), jobs (that we can’t be fired from for being trans), safety.
If someone is only ever fighting for non-material things and has no specific demands for the material improvement of trans lives, they’re a liberal trans activist. They may not even realize it themselves, but this is what liberalism does. It sprinkles rainbows everywhere and ignores the material nature of our oppression.
The liberal approach to activism is tempting because it brings lots of little success stories. Politicians trying to look ‘progressive’ LOVE the non-material list because calling someone by their pronouns, meeting with a transgender celebrity and hosting a book presentation for a transfriendly childrens book doesn’t require any significant part of their budget. It’s free positive publicity. That’s why they’ll cosy up to liberal activists and will ignore our material needs. The moment we start asking for things that really keep us alive like housing and health care, we’re the inconvenient extremist fringe.
genuine question: what would be a better term here for activists who do fight for material improvement? i would love it if someone can even point me to a book or a search term to learn more. i try to fight for the causes i care about and have always slung around the terms “progressive”, “liberal”, and “leftist”. i want to do the work to improve lives and secure rights alongside always learning and improving
I know this might be a frustrating answer, but my point was that there’s no label that we can use that won’t be co-opted by people who want to sound cool without changing the world.
It’s useful to learn what different ideologies mean so you know what people think of themselves when they describe themselves as a marxist or an anarchist or a social democrat etc. but if you want to really know what activists do: look at what they do.
I’ll give you some examples. The following things directly create material improvement in trans lives:
Cooking meals at the LGBT centre
Organizing housing for homeless trans people
Providing free legal services to sex workers
Organizing a trans clothes swap
The follow are campaigns for material improvement that strive to achieve that goal indirectly: , if the campaign works someone else does the thing that creates material improvement.
Campaigning for free STD testing and needle exchanges
Campaigning for more and better transition care
Campaigning for trans rights in the workplace
The following do not create material improvement in trans lives. They may or may not result in abstractions such as ‘more transpositivity’ or ‘better role models’, which might one day create material improvement, but their success is hard to measure and more aspirational than anything else:
Putting a rainbow flag on the city website
Putting a trans person on an advisory boards
Having politicians sign a pledge to promote trans inclusivity
Campaigning to have trans roles in movies played by trans actors
It’s okay to do some of this stuff. I’m not going to claim that all this is useless. But if someone claiming to fight for trans rights is doing ONLY this stuff, then their activism has no basis in material reality. They may dress their activism up in all kinds of cool radical sounding identifiers, but they’re acting like a liberal.
Purple crowned lorikeets, designed for riso printing by layering aqua, magenta, and yellow colours 💗💙💛
art by @touchofuniverse
wheres seasons greasons
its that time of year again
It doesn’t have to be
its not optional