[la-laborista-republiko]

[thinkherenow]

fuck this guy

[redroadtoadventure]

These continents were already tamed by the indigenous inhabitants. And had been for tens of thousands of years.

[krungle]

Over 80% of the Native Americans were dead by diseases brought over by Columbus’ crew long before the Pilgrims arrived in North America. The Native Americans suffered an apocalyptic catastrophe that made the European Plague look like a bad cold season. This was not done on purpose but it was inevitable that it would have happened eventually.

So what we had here was a Post-Apocalyptic world being resettled by a technologically more advanced civilization. Anthropologically speaking, there was no other outcome possible but what occurred, not on the grander scale of it, anyway. That a bunch of political and religious refugees turned a culturally devastated land into the greatest bastion for freedom, self-rule, and scientific advancement this planet has ever seen is nothing to be sorry for.

[fandomsandfeminism]

Smallpox blankets

The effort to eradicate bison specifically to starve the Sioux

The trail of tears

Residential schools

Bounties for scalped Native Americans in Pennsylvania

The multiple broken treaties to respect Native Land

Please dont fucking act like Native genocide was some kind of unfortunate accident. It was a series of deliberate, violent acts that took advantage of the aftermath of the plagues Europeans brought with them.

[leosuncancervenus]

“Refugees”

[ophaniell]

i love how white people like to act like they weren’t dying from dysentery and dumb as shit before they met us indigenous peoples. u fuckers couldn’t bathe your ass properly and u want to tell me u helped us “advance technologically?” we already had advanced structures and a method of doing things before u came here and infected us and assimilated our people. kindly shut the fuck up.

[sapphicdogmeat-blog]

My dad was born in 1956 and remembers mysterious boxes showing up on their doorstep with food and blankets/clothes. They once gave the family dog the food and it died.

He also said people would try to hit his brothers and him with a car while they were walking to school.

His dad was allowed to die over appendicitis in a hospital. He suffered for days while the staff did NOTHING.

His uncles disappeared and the police did NOTHING. Their car was later found in a canyon, full of bullet holes. The bullets were military issue.

His eldest brother also died under mysterious circumstances.

My great grandmother, the last of our tribe to be born traditionally, outside, owned 5000 acres in northern California. Active imminent domain left her with 1 ACRE. Which they later took to build a post office.

That same grandma, who I’m named after, was kidnapped as a child and held as a slave in a white mans house. She had a wire put through her ear that tethered her so she could only go from her bedroom to the kitchen. Her dad found her and rescued her, ripping the thing out of her ear. My dad said her earlobe was forever split in two pieces.

In church when I was a kid people alienated my family and my dad got jokey death threats all the time. My mom, who was white, was told she was too good for my dad. I was told I was dark but I would hopefully lighten up if I stayed out of the sun. At school we read a story about a “drunken injun” and I cried in class while my classmates mockingly did a raindance and chanted. My first boyfriend said he wished he wasn’t a white guy because Indians get free college.

This shit was recent and current. Go look up suicide, sexual assault, and drug addiction statistics within Native American communities.

White people came to this country and slaughtered us. Your white ancestors did this. Maybe even your grandparents.

America wasn’t won, it was stolen. Native Americans aren’t better off because we have electricity. I’d rather have my people back.

Fuck Donald Trump. Fuck his voters. And fuck white people who try to downplay what happened here.

[camreapher]

JUST LETTING Y'ALL KNOW WHERE THIS BLOG STANDS.

[yafavmilf]

Reblog every time it hits my Dash

[sidneyia-deactivated20210826]

I realize most people on here are too young to remember the Bush years but when you guys frame your SJ posts as “you hate[x]!!! why do you hate [x]???” it sounds an awful lot like how Bush supporters would scream WHY DO YOU HATE AMERICA???? whenever anybody would criticize the president. 

So that’s something to consider if you want to reach people over 25. Because most of us have an extremely negative conditioned response to that type of rhetoric.

[glorious-spoon]

Yeah.

[shinelikethunder]

There’s a surprisingly sharp generation gap on Tumblr–when I first got on the site in 2011 it was between high-school age and college age, but I don’t think it’s defined primarily by life stage or maturity level, because it’s tracked steadily upward ever since. Anecdotally, right now the split seems to be centered around age 23, plus or minus a couple of years on either side, which corresponds roughly to the birth years 1990-1994. My hypothesis for the generation gap boils down to “how old were you on September 11, 2001?” Those solidly on the older side of the gap were at least vaguely aware of a pre-9/11 political landscape, witnessed how disruptive the first term of the Bush administration was, and have a visceral reaction anything that smacks of neoconservatism or Religious Right propaganda. Those on the younger side attained political awareness in a world where the changes wrought by the Bush administration were the new normal, and their right-wing bogeyman uses Tea Party and GamerGate rhetoric.

So for the record, Bush-era “innovations” that unnerve the FUCK out of people on the older side of the generation gap:

- Casual acceptance of fear as an excuse for hatred and pre-emptive retaliation

- An “ends justify the means” approach to stamping out the slightest trace of vulnerability, no matter how repressive the means, or how slight or unlikely the potential harm

- “If you’re not marching in lockstep with us, you’re one of THEM, why do you hate all that’s good and noble?” / “Dissent and safeguards against the abuse of power just give aid and comfort to the enemy” / “Don’t you SEE that insisting that the protections of civil society apply to THOSE PEOPLE is just going to GET OUR PEOPLE HURT, YOU’RE HURTING PEOPLE YOU MONSTER”

- Anything that smacks of religious-fundamentalist logic or rhetoric

These things are not normal. These things are not how just societies are built. They are the hot water that an entire generation of lobsters has been raised to swim in without noticing. The undercurrents in the internet movement calling itself Social Justice that disturb the older generation are, essentially, the dirty tactics of the Bush administration and its unholy marriage of neocons and fundies–rebranded with a new set of acceptable targets, but with the tactics themselves unquestioned. Are they the younger generation’s fault? Fuck no. They’re what happens when the most culturally and politically powerful nation on Earth tries to pretend it’s moved on from the Bush years, but without ever having confronted the devastation those tactics left in their wake, dismantled the self-sustaining fear-and-repression machine, or held the perpetrators accountable for their officially-sanctioned torture, shredding of civil liberties, and thinly-justified wars of aggression.

So if I were to do the annoying geezer thing (at the ripe old age of 27) and Address The Youth, I guess what I’d say isn’t just that most people over 25 get an overwhelming urge to throw up in their mouths at the slightest sign you’re playing “but why do you hate freedom” Mad Libs. (Although that’s true.) It’s more than that. It’s that “why do you hate [x]???” belongs to an entire toolbox of fear/attack, ingroup/outgroup, and absolutist tactics that we’ve left lying out without bothering to re-affix the giant warning labels that they aren’t normal, or necessary, or even effective over the long term, however tempting they may be for a quick fix. And that it’s okay to refrain from using them.

The bad guys will not win if you ease off the attack a little and give your opponents room to tell you where they’re coming from. Opening yourself up to argument-counterargument with Bad, Unacceptable, Forbidden ideas is a form of vulnerability, but finding and evaluating the weak spots in your beliefs ultimately strengthens them and strengthens your ability to win people over to your side. Doubling down on the repeated assertions that you shouldn’t even have to argue and that disagreement is harmful or immoral is an alluring way to get what you want in the short term, but it produces superficial compliance out of fear rather than genuine agreement, and the backlash it causes is ultimately more dangerous than the vulnerability of opening yourself to disagreement. And it blinds you to the possibility that you may not be entirely in the right. This isn’t some MRA sneak attack to manipulate you into ceding ground. This is how discussion normally works in a functional society. You have been handed a dysfunctional, toxic system for exchanging ideas, in online SJ as well as in wider politics–and no, it’s not normal or effective, and no, you do not have to buy into that system’s claims that it’s the only thing standing between the innocent and an orgy of destruction and victimization. 

[glorious-spoon]

The strangest thing about this is that I would not consider myself particularly old (does anyone?) but I was in my late teens on 9/11, and yeah. This is exactly what I find unnerving about the approach of some younger people to SJ issues. For a long time I just put it down to (im)maturity, but I’m really starting to think that there’s something fundamentally toxic and broken about the way our country has been approaching these things for the last 15 years or so. That kind of black and white, ‘if your fave is problematic then they’re basically the antichrist’ thinking that demonizes and squashes any kind of disagreement is really unhealthy, and it’s something that is learned.

[sidneyia-deactivated20210826]

Same, I’m 30, married to someone older than me, and we have a lot of friends in their 40s/50s. People I encounter on a regular basis comment on what a “baby” I am.  I was 15 on 9/11. I’m not like. Ancient. But there is a definitely a difference between how people my age discuss issues versus how younger folks discuss them. Neons have really done a number on out ability to talk about stuff. 

[cupidsbower]

This would explain a lot about how fandom conversations have been going down recently. The absolute us/them nature of some of them, and the way SJ tools are used to bully people in order to win an argument.

I thought it was largely to do with Tumblr being a poor design for actual conversation, but this makes more sense, given the patterns I’ve seen.

[judeoceltische]

I…think that most of the people on Tumblr will get older. The no holds barred, right or wrong, FUCK YOU surety is part of being a teenager. Then you get it knocked out of you and learn to nuance. Both phases have value. What I’m saying here is that I think it’s more developmental than generational.

[terrasigillata]

I don’t understand what this has to do with 9/11

[medusamori]

9/11 largely serves as a convenient symbolic marker for a severe shift in public discourse– I was 14 when it happened and I very clearly remember the before-times socially and politically and the after, when there really was a huge public shift in the way things were discussed, and how people in my age group and a  little younger responded to things like “national tragedies,” “us vs them,” good vs evil" etc?

Kind of dumb example but I think is illustrative– when we were 12/13, the year before 9/11, a group of kids went to DC and New York and visited all the war memorials. People whose uncles and fathers had fought in Vietnam visited the wall and Arlington, were moved, went through all the ceremonial stuff, but not to the point of dramatic hysterics. Maybe two/three years after 9/11, many of the same kids went to Pearl Harbor while we were on tour in Hawaii and everything was prefaced with this really jingoistic Us Vs Them language, and half the group spent the entire time bawling performatively. There were also a lot of recriminations for not engaging in the theatrics, because it wasn’t showing Proper Respect to Our National Heroes, none of whom any of these kids could have known because they all died in 1941.

My little brother is only 22 months younger than me but he doesn’t really remember the day at all, and doesn’t really remember anything about the politics or big news stories from beforehand, whereas I very clearly remember having an opinion about the 1996 election and my The Talk with my mom was kicked off because of the Clinton impeachment. 9/11 kicked off a lot of the worst of what we see in American political discourse today, and so people who don’t remember it as clearly or the time before may have different outlooks, especially in the States.

[taikonaut]

On the one hand this is a fairly enlightening take on the somewhat rabid state of what passes for online discourse these days.

On t’other, remind me again why we haven’t built a wall around America yet?

[postcardsfromspace]

This is a fascinating conversation. I think there’s more to it than this–the way digital social spaces intersect with social phenomena informs the discourse hugely–but there’s a lot here worth considering.

It also occurs to me that a lot of us who were old enough not only to remember 9/11, but also to be aware of the shift in public discourse around it, are also old enough to remember the Cold War, or at least its last lingering throes. 

I’m 32, and I grew up with parents who were very active in the nuclear freeze movement. One of the fundamental truths I absorbed very early was that us-vs.-them absolutism and refusal to compromise and engage in good faith with ideological opponents wasn’t just stupid; it was deadly–potentially on a massive, global scale. I remember projects to hook U.S. kids up with penpals in the U.S.S.R. in hopes that we’d learn to see each other as people and so maybe not end life on fucking Earth if by some miracle our parents didn’t beat us to the punch.

And that approach was critical to the peace movement in general: humanizing the enemy. Trying to find points of connection; to learn to disagree humanely. That was a core, fundamental value of my childhood, in ways that were very closely and directly linked to the contemporary geopolitical scene; and they’re philosophies that continue to profoundly inform and steer my discourse and my approach to conflict–personal and political–as an adult.

Which is part of what scares the shit out of me about the discourse I see online, especially from the left: it’s all about radical dehumanization. I see people who are ostensibly on my side casually call other human beings trash or garbage or worthless. Scorch earth. Go to unbelievable lengths to justify NEVER engaging. Meet overtures to peace or steps toward change with spectacular cruelty.

I mean, I’ve seen variations on this exchange more times than I can count:

“[group x] are people, too.”

“No, they’re not.”

And then people LOL, and I don’t even know where to start, because–No. You do not say that. You do not EVER say that. EVER.

And I can so easily imagine how terrifying it must be to grow up in that–to be 15 or 16 or 17 and just becoming, and trying to find and place and grow into yourself in that kind of violence, and–

–to paraphrase someone profoundly and complexly flawed and still a person worth paraphrasing: Remember, babies, you gotta be kind.

[graemem]

Rachel is so very, very spot-on here.

[jessicalprice]

There’s a lot of good stuff here, and part of what it boils down to, especially with regard to fandom, is:

1) “This piece of media upholds a status quo or supports a position that marginalizes people” != “This piece of media is worthless and anyone who likes it is a horrible human.”

2) The flipside of the above, which is “I like this piece of media” SHOULDN’T = “This piece of media is perfect and I will shut up anyone who criticizes it.”

It’s okay to like problematic things. It’s okay for other people to like problematic things.

It’s not okay to say that because you like something, it’s not problematic and people can’t talk about how it’s problematic. 

It’s also not okay to say that because something is problematic, other people can’t like it, that they’re wrong to see things that speak to them in it, etc. (Note: I’m not talking about if the problematic elements THEMSELVES are what they like.)

[abstracthistory]

I just thought I might add something to this conversation from the other side, since I was 1 when 9/11 happened.  I can’t remember what the country was like before Bush, I can barely remember the Bush administration itself, and when I was reading earlier in the post one of the things that hit me hardest was the line:

Opening yourself up to argument-counterargument with Bad, Unacceptable, Forbidden ideas is a form of vulnerability, but finding and evaluating the weak spots in your beliefs ultimately strengthens them and strengthens your ability to win people over to your side.

I’ve been trying to make sure I don’t fall into the trap of hateful rhetoric that’s everywhere in our media, but even I realize I’ve internalized this idea that  looking at the other side’s beliefs is somehow a poisonous and traitorous thing to do.  The phrasing that @shinelikethunder​ used perfectly describes the line of thinking that I’m trying to get out of my head and my thought process.  That conceding on any point is giving up or giving in.

More importantly, I didn’t realize that this wasn’t always true, that this thought process isn’t normal to some people, and I have to thank everyone for having this discussion so that I could find out.  I thought it was just an American thing.  For example: Trump, his nomination, and his presidency haven’t surprise me that much.  He is only the continuation of what I’ve seen in my life to be standard politics, and his hatred a normal thing.

Anyway, I just thought it might be useful to have input from the younger side.

[jeaniefranklins]

I’ve been trying to think of a good term for the “weepy movies about tragic queer people aimed at straight audiences” subgenre, and I think I’ve got it:

dead gays for the straight gaze

eh? eh??

[powpowhammer]

queers die for the straight eye

[moon-crater]

SO YOOOO who wants to learn why this is a thing because the history is actually really fascinating and ties into some of my favorite shit ever?

Okay, so like, back in the mid-twentieth century, when being queer was still totally a crime everywhere in the United States, queer writers started working in pulp fiction–starting with Vin Packer (she is awesome)–and writing pulps to tell our stories.

So one day over lunch, her editor asks her, “Hey, Vin, what’s the story you most want to write?”

And she goes, “Well, I’d like to write a love story about lesbians because I’m, you know, gay.”

He says, “Hey, that’s awesome, I will publish it. One thing, though, the homosexuality has to end badly and the main character has to realize she was never gay in the first place. We can’t seem to support homosexuality. I don’t actually think that’s cool, but the government will literally seize our book shipments and destroy them on the basis of the books being ‘obscene’ if you don’t, so if we want this story actually out there, and not burning in a bonfire somewhere, it’s what you gotta do.”

So Vin goes home and writes Spring Fire, the book that launched the entire lesbian pulp genre. And while one character ends up in an insane asylum and the other ends up realizing she never loved her at all, it’s massively successful, and queer women everywhere snap it up and celebrate quietly in their closets across the nation because HOLY SHIT THERE’S A BOOK ABOUT ME? I’M NOT ALONE and it starts a huge new genre.

But: every publisher is subject to those same government censorship rules, so every story has to end unhappily for the queer characters, or else the book will never see the light of day. So, even though lesbian pulp helps solidify the queer civil rights movement, it’s having to do so subversively or else it’ll end up on the chopping block.

So blah blah blah, this goes on for about twenty years, until finally in the seventies the censorship laws get relaxed, and people can actually start queer publishing houses! Yay! But the lesbian pulps, in the form they’d been known previously, basically start dying out.

MEANWHILE, OVER IN JAPAN! Yuri, or the “girls love” genre in manga, starts to emerge in the 1970s, and even starts dealing with trans characters in the stories. But, because of the same social mores that helped limit American lesbian pulp, the stories in Japan similarly must end in tragedy or else bad shit will go down for the authors and their books. Once more: tragic ends are the only way to see these stories published rather than destroyed.

The very first really successful yuri story has a younger, naive girl falling into a relationship with an older, more sophisticated girl, but the older girl ends up dying in the end, and subsequent artists/writers repeated the formula until it started getting subverted in the 1990s–again, twenty years later.

And to begin with cinema followed basically the same path as both lesbian pulps and yuri: when homosexuality is completely unacceptable in society, characters die or their stories otherwise end in tragedy, just to get the movies made, and a few come along to subvert that as things evolve.

But unlike the books and manga before them, even though queer people have become sightly more openly accepted, movies are stuck in a loop. See, pulps and yuri are considered pretty disposable, so they were allowed to evolve basically unfettered by concerns of being artistic or important enough to justify their existence, but film is considered art, and especially in snooty film critic circles, tragedy=art.

Since we, in the Western world, put films given Oscar nods on a pedestal, and Oscar nods go to critical darlings rather than boisterous blockbusters (the film equivalent of pulps, basically), and critics loooove their tragedy porn, filmmakers create queer stories that are tragic and ~beautiful~ that win awards that then inspire more queer stories that are tragic and ~beautiful~ until the market is oversaturated with this bullshit.

The Crying Game? Critical darling, tragic trans character.

Philadelphia? Critical darling, tragic gay character.

Brokeback Mountain? Critical darling, tragic queer (? not totally sure if they’d consider themselves gay or bi, tbh?) characters.

And so on and so on VOILA, we now have a whole genre of tragedy porn for straight people, that started out as validation for us and sometimes even manages to slip some more through the cracks occasionally, but got co-opted by pretentious ~literary~ types. While tragic ends made these stories more acceptable to begin with, and in the mid-to-late nineties that started getting subverted a little bit (Chasing Amy, But I’m a Cheerleader), eventually that became the point, as more straight audiences started consuming these narratives and got all attached to the feels they got from the ~beauty of our pain~.

[mortallyfoolish-blog]

Queer history is crucial

[thecuriousviolet-deactivated201]

Fun fact

Native Americans weren’t allowed US citizenship until 1924.

Let that sink in. We lived here first…for thousands of years. And less than a hundred years ago we were finally given citizenship.

[istamaza-deactivated20200505]

We also fought in WWI despite not being US citizens.

[the-yaadihla-girls]

In Arizona, natives weren’t granted the right to vote until 1948. Think how that type of neglect ties into resource colonization as infrastructure was developed within years prior. 

[giizhigaate-deactivated20160220]

In addition: the indigenous peoples of Canada were not recognized as Human Beings until the year 1960. Now let that shit sink in.

[fatbodypolitics]

In the US it wasn’t until 1968 that the Indian Civil Rights Act was passed and allowed for the right to freedom of speech / assembly / press, a jury trial, the right to an attorney etc. It’s so fucking frustrating.

[xpeachsweettea]

and it wasn’t until 1978 that we were legally allowed to practice our own religions. in a nation founded on religious freedoms, it was illegal to practice our own religions. in our own country. how fucked up is that?

[halfhardtorock]

Aaaand Native Americans weren’t entitled to their own languages (had no legal rights to teach them in their schools, use them in business) until the Native American Language Act of 1990.

[jeankd]

I teach this to my students, because NONE of it is in a single textbook. This is and act of indoctrination

[smallrevolutionary]

Boosting because I didn’t know any of this.

[travelerofthetimestreams]

These facts should be known by all.

[indirispeaks]

Didn’t know half of this.

[westfailia-deactivated20240822]

beginning to get the impression anti-sjws have never actually caught an sjw acting like they think sjws act and only ever mistaken anti-sjws making fun of sjws for the real deal because it’s how they think they act

[afloweroutofstone]

Four-dimensional Ouroboros

[rasec-wizzlbang-blog]

[spikeasaur]

i didn’t realize marine le pen won the french election after all

[daggers-drawn]

France: *siphons huge “colonial debts” from the economies of North Africa*

French President, in the actual year 2017: “They’re doing badly because they’re savages.”

[ohcoolaslug]

If you shared that post celebrating this man for disrespecting Trump, you better reblog this one, too.

[scienceoftheidiot]

Tumblr people you’re the one putting him on a pedestal since he was elected. 

We didn’t have any choice, it was him, or worse. But he ain’t a fucking saint and far from it. 

[biestcallisto]

In 20 years a hollywood movie called “Aleppo” will win 7 Oscars and everyone will say “Something like that should never be allowed to happen again”

[audreynical2]

The protagonist will be a white photojournalist.

[singing-not-sleeping-beauty]

Story Time

I was six the first time I went to disney world. It was also the first time I met my step family in florida. See, my grandfather had three wives in his lifetime, and the third wife was the only one I ever met. She had five kids when they married, and moved to Hawaii from the Phillipines. Now jump forward, my dad’s step siblings have families of their own, including my uncle Jett, who married a native hawaiian woman, and had two beautiful daughters.

Back to that first trip to disney. I was six, my sister was ten, and our smack in the middle of that age difference was my cousin Malia at age eight. She, and her younger sister Bella, both took hula classes, because their mother wanted them to stay close to their roots, despite the distance of having moved to florida. We were all pretty young, but we knew enough that the princesses at disney world were actresses in costume.

“How cool would it be to play a princess at one of these parks?” I had said after a long day in the magic kingdom. “I wanna do that one day.”

“Who would you play?” Bella had asked. 

“I don’t know. Belle maybe. She’s the only one with brown hair other than snow white, and mulan, and I could never play either of them.”

“Yeah, but you don’t really look like Belle either. Your noses are to different.” Malia had cut in, and I shrugged it off, knowing It’d never happen anyway.

“What about you guys? Who would you play?” I asked them, unaware that there was no answer to that.

“We don’t look like any of them either. There are no princesses from where we’re from.” So we all settled on the sad belief that none of us would ever get to be disney princesses.

Years pass, and I decide that one day I would help write a movie for a princess from either the phillipines, or the polynesian islands, so my cousins could become princesses. Because they held on to that dream. It might have been harder for them to let go of it, because they lived so close to disney.

Now it’s 2014, and Malia has just been hired as a dancer, at the polynesian resort at disney. She started as a swing, and in two years worked her way up to a featured dancer. It helped that she was of polynesian decent. 

About a year ago it was announced that disney would be releasing a movie featuring their first polynesian princess, and my cousins & I were all excited, but none of us had high hopes. We all figured they’d make her look more like Rapunzel, the way Anna and Elsa had. 

Fast forward a few months. They have just released the first look at moana.

I text my cousin as soon as I see it.

“Did you see Moana?”

“No, why?” I send her the picture above, and a minute later I get a call. “SHE LOOKS LIKE ME! I LOOK LIKE HER!” Malia is screaming into the phone with unabashed enthusiasm. She couldn’t believe that a disney princess bore such a resemblance to her.

Yesterday, 11/16/16, my cousin began her new job at disney world, and I couldn’t be happier that her dream of ten years had been realized.

This is why representation matters. This is one of many reasons why Moana is so important. 

Congratulations Malia. I can’t wait to come down and say Mahalo

[ultrafacts]

Source 

[hellkatsally]

These dudes are fucking legit.  They don’t just show up one day in court, either, they actually make friends with the kids and let them know they have a support system and that there are people in the world who care about them and will always have their back.  And less important, but also cool, is that the few times a couple of them have come into my cafe, they’ve been super friendly and polite and when I told one of the guys that I noticed his Bikers Against Child Abuse patch and wanted him to know how awesome I thought he was because of it, he got kind of shy and blushed and said, “The kids are the awesome ones, we just let them know they’re allowed to be brave.”

[bebinn]

The source is long, but so, so good. These men and women are available in 36 states, 24 hours a day to stand guard at home, in court, at school, even if the child has a nightmare. Many of them are survivors of childhood abuse as well, and know what it’s like to feel scared and alone.

In court that day, the judge asked the boy, “Are you afraid?” No, the boy said.

Pipes says the judge seemed surprised, and asked, “Why not?”

The boy glanced at Pipes and the other bikers sitting in the front row, two more standing on each side of the courtroom door, and told the judge, “Because my friends are scarier than he is.”

[lesbian-moon-gf]

Actual tears.. hnngh

[bee-whistler]

Show me more of people like this, world. I give up on humans too easily.

[groovypirate]

where do i sign up for this,i want to be in this gang

[ultrafacts]

This is fucking amazing. It may be out of character for me to say this but rock on

[clatterbane]

Bikers Against Child Abuse was founded in 1995 by a Native American child psychologist whose ride name is Chief, when he came across a young boy who had been subjected to extreme abuse and was too afraid to leave his house. He called the boy to reach out to him, but the only thing that seemed to interest the child was Chief’s bike. Soon, some 20 bikers went to the boy’s neighborhood and were able to draw him out of his house for the first time in weeks.

Chief’s thesis was that a child who has been abused by an adult can benefit psychologically from the presence of even more intimidating adults that they know are on their side. “When we tell a child they don’t have to be afraid, they believe us,” Arizona biker Pipes told azcentral.com. “When we tell them we will be there for them, they believe us.” ( Article)

More about BACA, from their site

[uriesays]

My parents are a part of this organization and they are metal af

They go on runs to protect the child if they feel even the slightest threatened no matter where. If the child needs them to go on vacation with them, they do. Bikers come from across the nation to watch over and take shifts for these kids. And the best part is once you’re adopted into this family as a BACA kid, you’re always one. Even when you’re 40 and the perp gets released from jail, they’ll come meet with you and find your best options for avoiding the person and maintaining the life you’ve built for yourself. Once a BACA child, always a BACA child. In Florida, there’s 100% rate for identifying the perp based on the child’s testimony. Why? Because BACA stands with the child and supports the child so they feel comfortable enough to point out their attacker.

What’s better than a badass biker gang being on your side???

[kikithegirl]

NATIVE AMERICAN CHILD PSYCHOLOGIST WHO IS A BIKER AND NAMED HIMSELF CHIEF HELL YES I’M HERE FOR THAT AND BIKERS BEING BAD ASS TO PROTECT KIDS. HELL YEAH.

[birdungehrl]

it’s back! I will always reblog BACA

[kayinnasaki]

OKAY SO WITH WHAT I WAS TALKING ABOUT BEFORE.

People are complaining about this headline. “Just call them Neo-Nazs” or whatever… But this is the best headline. It acknowledges there is a thing called the Alt-Right. This is something they identify with, this is something the readers will hear more as time goes on. It doesn’t try and hide that fact. But it makes it clear that they are neo-nazis. It puts it front and center. It scare quotes “alt-right”. It makes sure that when you, the reader, see Alt Right said by someone who doesn’t want you to think Nazi, you will still think Nazi.

You can’t stop horrible people from using this term. So if you try and act like Alt-Right is a term that doesn’t exist you just help conceal them.

[radatav]

A comic about Seagulls. If you feel like this comic doesn’t accurately represent you, and that you personally don’t act like this, good. That means this comic isn’t about you.

If you DO act like this, and are working on a counter argument about how not all _____ are ______ , well that’s just disappointing. 

[sleepnoises]

80% of my actions are now fueled by sincere hatred for mike pence

[sleepnoises]

if you donate to Planned Parenthood in his name he will apparently get the certificate of donation, but to be sure, i also put his name in the “notification recipient” of the in honor section

and you can put whatever you want in the in honor blank, so it’s a very wholesome way to communicate & start a dialogue! by which i mean, you can be sure he really fucking chokes on it.

he is at:

Office of Governor Mike Pence State House Room 206 Indianapolis, IN 46204-2797

Planned Parenthood is over here ($5 minimum donation, although the most common donation right now is apparently $100, which i cannot swing but which i am glad to know). 

[artistformerlyknownasbutttrumpet]

what do we do tho? like, honestly? what happens if he’s elected? what do we honest to god do?

[i-gotta-go-good-day-bitch]

YOU MUST VOTE IN 2018

The 2018 United States elections will be held (for the most part) on Tuesday, November 6, 2018. During this mid-term election year, all 435 seats in the United States House of Representatives and 33 of the 100 seats in the United States Senate will be contested. 38 state and territorial governorships and numerous other state and local elections will also be contested.

[thefingerfuckingfemalefury]

THIS THIS THIS

Okay this is CRUCIAL

If Trump seriously wins this election then YOU NEED TO GET OUT AND VOTE DEMOCRAT IN THESE ELECTIONS

ALL OF THESE ELECTIONS

[erinptah]

“but what has Hillary ACCOMPLISHED?”

Yeah, okay, I’m gonna do one more of these.

Because it’s an ugly sexist myth that Hillary Clinton has never gotten anything done, and Donald keeps saying it anyway, because he knows his supporters will never bother to look it up. (Also to distract from his own record of bankruptcies and lawsuits and not getting an Emmy.)

And even on the left, you get people saying “how can we trust Clinton, even if her positions sound good, how can we know if she’ll follow through?”

Gee, I dunno, maybe we can look at her forty-year track record and extrapolate from there.

(Buckle up, this one’s gonna get long.)

In fact, let’s go back farther, let’s look at Hillary Rodham the Wellesley undergrad, 1965-1969:

This kid pushed for everything from “increasing the number of black students and faculty members” to “a better system for returning library books

Seriously, Hillary did more to advance racial justice while she was in college than Trump has done in his entire life

…and one friend remembers her as the only white person who called with sympathy when MLK was shot

And then let’s talk about Hillary the law student, lawyer, and professor, with some First Lady of Arkansas thrown in:

1972: went undercover to expose secret illegal segregation in Arkansas private schools

1973: went door-to-door for the Children’s Defense Fund, looking for people whose kids weren’t getting to school, and asking why

Turns out the reason was usually “the school can’t handle my kid’s disability”

In fact, pre-1975: “U.S. public schools accommodated only 1 out of 5 children with disabilities. Until that time, many states had laws that explicitly excluded children with certain types of disabilities from attending public school.”

HRC researched and helped prepare the CDF report that was a major catalyst for the US finally making that illegal

1975: you may have heard that this was the year when Hillary was the (court-appointed) defense attorney for a rapist (who pled guilty)

but you probably haven’t heard what she did next:

She founded the first rape-crisis counseling hotline in Arkansas

And this was not a symbolic gesture

This was not something she halfassed for the sake of looking good

Hillary made herself a nationally-renowned expert in the field

Listen: “In 1975, I helped start the first rape crisis center in Atlanta. I was trying to navigate the legal issues related to child assault victims, but the law was so new, I was lost, so I asked for help. Everywhere I called, the experts would say, ‘Do you know Hillary Rodham? She’s who you need to talk to.‘”

1977: co-founded Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families, a nonprofit that’s still going strong

And worked for the Legal Services Corporation – a government service that makes sure low-income people can get attorneys – under Jimmy Carter

Note that conservatives hate the LSC, in part because it was openly serving gay clients in the ‘70s

Seriously, open this Heritage Foundation screed and skip to the bit about “homosexual activists”

(or just read the whole thing, it’s great)

With HRC’s chairmanship, that agency tripled its budget

1979: chair of a committee that expanded healthcare access into rural Arkansas! and helped establish the state’s first neonatal nursery! and a program to help parents of preschool-age at-risk children!

Let’s talk about First Lady Clinton, 1993-2001:

1994: (movie trailer voice) In A World where gay sex was literally illegal … where gay people were thrown out of the military, to laughter and applause on the Senate floor … One Political Couple had a politically radioactive idea: what if we stopped doing that?

1995: Hillary fought for mental health care for Gulf War veterans, back when the Defense Department hadn’t even worked out that Gulf War PTSD and chemical-warfare-related health issues were a thing

1997: long before Obamacare, the Children’s Health Insurance Program

More than 8 million children got health insurance

HRC wasn’t even in Congress yet, and her efforts were pivotal in getting the law passed – and then translating it into action

Same with the Adoption and Safe Families Act, “the most significant change in federal child-protection policy in almost two decades”

Note: “it expands both adoptions and federal assistance in general to a wider population of Americans — single adults, including lesbians and gay men, even single elderly people — people usually left out of family focused agenda”

1999: Followed that up with the Foster Care Independence Act, making sure kids who have aged out of the foster care system could get things like healthcare, housing assistance, and counseling

HRC followed that by immediately getting elected Senator from New York, and then re-elected by an even wider margin, so she served from 2001-2009.

I’m just gonna focus on the 77 bills Senator Clinton sponsored or cosponsored that that became law (although she introduced more than 2000, so imagine what could’ve happened with a Democratic majority):

Of the 70 GOP senators she worked alongside, a whopping 56 of them co-sponsored at least one bill with her.

That’s 80%

That’s the “4 out of 5 dentists recommend…!” tier of approval

(and STILL you get people trying to spin that as proof that she’s not bipartisan!)

2001: Clinton was “instrumental” in getting federal aid for NYC after 9/11

Then in getting medical treatment for first responders

And it’s not just the people close to home she works for: check out the Afghan Women and Children Relief Act, to “provide urgent funds for immunisation, basic education and other assistance to vulnerable women and children, including refugees.”

You like research and care for leukemia and other blood cancers, right? So does HRC

You like research and care for breast/cervical cancer, right? And you think Native American women should be covered by the treatment options? So does HRC

2002: Requiring pharmaceutical companies to do specific research on the effects their drugs have on children, and label accordingly

Pediatricians talk about how this has led to real, substantial improvements in their ability to treat kids

2003: You like research and care for West Nile and other mosquito-borne viruses, right? So does HRC

Congress’ very first nanotech bill, authorizing R&D funds

2004: Creating a State Department envoy to monitor and combat anti-Semitism

Try to look this one up and most of what you’ll get is furious articles from Stormfront

2006: You like research and care for babies born prematurely, right? So does HRC – and the March of Dimes loves it

Protecting people in the armed forces from predatory insurance schemes

Improving our preparedness for public health emergencies, including funding for NHS workers, more consideration for at-risk individuals, and uniform coordination of electronic response systems across states

Look, I’m not saying there will be a zombie apocalypse

I’m just saying, HRC has taken into account the needs of children, people with disabilities, and people with limited English if there’s a zombie apocalypse

2008: You like research and care for traumatic brain injuries, right? So does HRC

You like early screening and care for congenital disorders that show up in newborns, right? So does HRC

There’s a whole package of amendments to the Americans with Disabilities Act to make it apply more broadly, which, again, just go read the whole thing, it’s worth it

You like research and treatment for ALS, right? “A nationwide registry will help us learn what causes ALS, how it can be effectively diagnosed and treated, and ultimately how it can be cured. This is a tremendous victory.”

btw, this was 6 years before the Ice Bucket Challenge

Hillary Clinton: Cares About Stuff Before It Goes Viral

Mapping broadband access across the US, particularly in rural and native communities, so we can compare our progress to other countries and identify barriers for getting high-speed internet access everywhere

Hey, Tumblr, you care about keeping sexual predators from targeting children online, right? Here’s a bill with a ton of provisions going at that

2009: the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which is still having real-world effects as it lets women and minorities sue for equal paychecks

At this point she was also running for President, but in swept Barack Obama and charmed the hearts of America, so Clinton ended up serving as his Secretary of State from 2009-2013.

There’s no Big Flashy Showpiece you can point to from Secretary Clinton’s tenure. A lot of her diplomatic work was straight-up post-Bush-administration repair work and maintenance. A lot of it was, frankly, unsexy. No one writes breathless headlines about statistically-supported initiatives to distribute lifesaving low-pollution stoves.

Also, she didn’t singlehandedly bring peace to the Middle East. So, y’know, missed opportunity there.

But she was obviously doing something right, because Hillary Clinton had a 69% approval rating when she left the State Department in 2013.

A quick roundup of some things Secretary Clinton pulled off just fine:

Visited more countries than any Secretary of State in US history

Seriously, she spent the equivalent of 87 full days on airplanes

Do not talk to Clinton about stamina

2009: Policy nerd Hillary gave the State Department internal reviews and long-term planning on a level they had literally never done before

(I told you some of this was unsexy)

2010: Did you know we had a 25-year loss of military defense ties with New Zealand? Yeah, HRC fixed that

“Clinton enacted a new rule making it easier for transgender people to register their identities on their passports. […] At the time, this was the most pro-transgender action by the federal government ever, and—coming a full six years before the Pentagon announced transgender troops could serve openly—it stands as one of the most progressive things Clinton has ever done.”

2011: pledging disaster relief for Japan after the earthquake and tsunami

Oh, and the team behind the takedown of bin Laden

When surveyed a few months after that, a third of Americans believed Clinton would’ve been a better president than Obama

2012: Negotiated an unexpected ceasefire in Gaza between Israel and Hamas

and hey, you want to talk about business experience?

Clinton’s State Department helped clinch a bunch of business contracts between US companies with foreign governments

Notables: Boeing and Russia in 2009, Lockheed Martin and Japan in 2011, Space Systems/Loral and Australia in 2012

”…the State Department’s 2012 fiscal-year request includes $1.2 billion in programs specifically targeting women, $832 million of which will go toward global health initiatives. Tellingly, comparisons with past years can’t be made, since the department only started tracking women-focused dollars in 2010.“

People keep talking about how Clinton is, historically, one of the most unpopular presidential candidates. Those people usually don’t mention how, three years ago, she was the most popular politician in the United States.

And, look: no one is saying she’s only done good things. You can’t work this long in politics and expect to make only the right choices – follow only the strongest intelligence – back only the best policies. Reasonable people can find plenty to disagree with in her record. Plenty to criticize.

But when people try to claim she’s done nothing?

Or that she doesn’t have any consistent beliefs or principles – that her record doesn’t have constant themes that she’s been reliably standing for since the 1970s?

Hillary Clinton has made real, substantial progress for women’s rights.

Real, substantial progress for people with disabilities.

Real, substantial progress for the rights and protections of children.

Anyone tries to tell you otherwise, you laugh in their faces and start listing things. I bet you anything they run out of patience before you run out of list.

[thefingerfuckingfemalefury]

<3 THIS <3

THIS RIGHT HERE

[drst]

Plus she punched a boy who hurt bunnies. This woman started out badass and getting shit done and hasn’t stopped.

[furbyhater]

“But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, 

pursuing invariably the same Object 

evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, 

it is their right, 

it is their duty, 

to throw off such Government, 

and provide new Guards for their future security.”

-Declaration of Independence, 1776

[10oclockdot]

Saying that man and woman are the only genders is actually LESS nuanced than saying that earth, water, air, and fire are the only elements.

[afniel]

This is fantastic.