Here, Queer, Managing the Fear 😎🥹🙃🥱

My good opinion, once lost, is lost forever.

[unadulteratedhideouttrash]

[rederiswrites]

Turns out the horsemen of the Apocalypse now prefer to go by Shareholder Profit, Private Equity, Corporate Personhood, and Workforce Optimization.

[jottingprosaist]

Shareholder Profit: War (the casus belli for attacks on workers' rights)

Private Equity: Pestilence (they are parasites that voraciously strip the value out of a healthy business until it withers and dies)

Workforce Optimization: Famine (cutting hours and employees until the business is starved of staff, barely functioning)

Corporate Personhood: Death (a hollow, shambling mockery of a human with rights and needs)

[rederiswrites]

Yeah I can work with that.

[anarchistmemedistro]

[anarchistmemedistro]

[cyanide-sippy-cup]

For anybody not caught up: Tennessee just passed a new map that pretty much makes it so black neighborhoods have no power in local votes. Two things about this. While protestors were chanting "No Jim Crow", white Tennessee lawmakers were caught laughing on video. On top of this, Representative Justin Pearson and his brother KeShaun Pearson were arrested for trying to give their takes on the matter (which is not only their legal right but literally his job). If you give a shit about black people, help fight this. We can't allow a return to Jim Crow.

[aqueerkettleofish]

For those who have missed it, a tourist in Hawaii decided it would be fun to chuck a rock (a BIG rock) at a monk seal. He missed, but he was captured on video, and when told it was illegal to interfere with them, said "I'm rich, I can pay the fine."

Is the best part that he got doxxed? No.

Is the best part that he got tracked down by a local and beaten? No.

Arrested on state at federal charges, looking at up to 5 years and 50K? Nope.

The best part is the local city council's reaction.

And the best part of that is the look on the attorney's face.

[iamnotlanuk]

it fucking sucks how you can do all the therapy and self healing in the world and you still have to wake up living under a capitalist death cult that's killed community and crushes your soul

[iamnotlanuk]

congrats you want to live and be happy

bad news the world doesn't want that for you

[iamnotlanuk]

I'll still love fully and crawl to hope until my body gives out anyway I guess

[jackkdaniels]

when i was a kid i decided that killing people was bad therefore war was bad therefore the military was evil. and adults would tell me it's more nuanced than that and i would understand when i grew up. well i'm a grown up now and idk i still think that killing people is bad and war is bad and the military is evil

[madfoolish]

[oediex]

Just fyi, the title is a quote by James Baldwin, but the poem is by Nikita Gill.

I shared the source of Baldwin's quote here. It's from an essay that he started writing after Kwame Ture, then still known as Stokely Carmichael, had his passport confiscated by the US government in 1967.

I also share the poem there. Nikita Gill wrote it in 2024. You can find her on Tumblr as well, @meanwhilepoetry

Here's a transcription (copied from my previous post):

"Every bombed village is my hometown" - James Baldwin And every dead child is my child. Every grieving mother is my mother. Every crying father is my father. Every home turned to rubble is the home I grew up in. Every brother carrying the remains of his brother across borders is my brother. Every sister waiting for a sister who will never come home is my sister. Every one of these people are ours, Juist like we are theirs. We belong to them and they belong to us.

[paper-wounds]

“If I Am Killed For Simply Living” — Althea Davis

[tockthewatchdog-deactivated2020]

[findingfeather]

Every time I see this quote I realize how poor even very smart people are at looking at the long game and at assessing these things in context.

One of my favourite illustrations of this was in a First Aid class. The instructor was a working paramedic. He asked, “Who here knows the stats on CPR? What percentage of people are saved by CPR outside a hospital?”

I happen to know but I’m trying not to be a TOTAL know it all in this class so I wait. And people guess 50% and he says, “Lower,” and 20% and so forth and eventually I sort of half put up my hand and I guess I had The Face because he eventually looked at me and said, “You know, don’t you.”

“My mom’s a doc,” I said. He gave me a “so say it” gesture and I said, “Four to ten percent depending on your sources.”

Everyone else looked surprised and horrified.

And the paramedic said, “We’re gonna talk a bit about some details of those figures* but first I want to talk about just this: when do you do CPR?”

The class dutifully replies: when someone is unconscious, not breathing, and has no pulse.

“What do we call someone who is unconscious, not breathing, and has no pulse?”

The class tries to figure out what the trick question is so I jump over the long pause and say, “A corpse.”

“Right,” says the paramedic. “Someone who isn’t breathing and has no heartbeat is dead. So what I’m telling you is that with this technique you have a 4-10% chance of raising the dead.”

So no, artists did not stop the Vietnam War from happening with the sheer Power of Art. The forces driving that military intervention were huge, had generations of momentum and are actually pretty damn complicated.

But if you think the mass rejection of the war was as meaningless as a soufflé - well.

Try sitting here for ten seconds and imagining where we’d be if the entire intellectual and artistic drive of the culture had been FOR the war. If everyone thought it was a GREAT IDEA.

What the whole world would look like.

Four-to-ten percent means that ninety to ninety-six percent of the time - more than nine times out of ten - CPR will do nothing, but that one time you’ll be in the company of someone worshipped as an incarnate god.

If you think the artists and performers attacking and showing up people like Donald Trump is meaningless try imagining a version of the world wherein they weren’t there.

(*if you’re curious: those stats count EVERY reported case of CPR, while the effectiveness of it is extremely time-related. With those who have had continuous CPR from the SECOND they went down, the number is actually above 80%. It drops hugely every 30 seconds from then on. When you count ALL cases you count cases where the person has already been down several minutes but a bystander still starts CPR, which affects the stats)

[myfatfuckingface]

That Vonnegut quote brings this particular moment to mind:

Yes, it’s just a pie. Yes, the pie itself doesn’t do much direct damage in the grand scheme of things. But the pie is resistance, and resistance inspires resistance. Resistance inspires survival. Throwing pies sometimes starts a movement. Throwing pies sometimes saves lives.

And of course, we haven’t spoken about the inherent morality of throwing pies at oppressors in a world where oppressors have outlawed pie throwing. At the very least, pie throwing is a reminder to the oppressors that no matter how much money they have, no matter how much power they have, there are still some people, some moments they can’t control.

I’d rather go out throwing pies than just rolling over and accepting that pie throwing isn’t going to solve anything. Yeah, the pie throwing doesn’t immediately solve the problem, but it doesn’t have to because it’s just a starting point. So throw the damn pie.

[holy-muffins]

So throw the damn pie

[kingscrown666]

Speaking of the effects of pie throwing and art in opposition of oppression, and “resistance inspires resistance”:

Imagine sitting in a packed auditorium and some asshole is up front is spouting bullshit about minorites. Like saying they’re filthy and deserve a violent death etc. And there are lots of people nodding along and even cheering and applauding

But no one is saying or doing anything to disagree, so you think that you’re the only one who opposes the speaker. And you don’t want to say anything because you don’t want their ire or violence to be aimed at you

So you go through the entire speech, and possibly your entire life, thinking you’re alone

BUT if just one person has the courage to speak up, to throw a pie, to project art on the screen behind the speaker, then that single act of resistance will inspire others to do the same. It could even inspire you to stand up. Or if you’re the first, then you can inspire others

Small acts can snowball into an avalanche

[ralfmaximus]

Reblogging this in 2025 because of all the “Yeah the No Kings protests were cool but they didn’t doooo anything” crap I’ve been seeing lately.

[kata-chthonia]

The No Kings protests absolutely did do something. Just tune into your local city council meeting the next week and see public forum. Chances are there’s a public official advocating resistance of all and any federal orders, or a local housing/immigration activist saying it helped them and then pointing that energy in the direction of more.

3.75% of the entire country was in the streets on Saturday. Might not sound like a lot, but those are the kind of numbers that signal a toppling government or a revolution.

If nothing else it proves to wannabe authoritarians that they can sure fucking try, but they can’t kill us all.

[asparklethatisblue]

wait let me just add about Vietnam:

every single outspoken anti-war protestor did do something. Muhammad Ali famously refused to join the war, which in turn inspired people to draft dodge, or help others draft dodge. Every person dodging the draft is one less person shooting at someone during a war, and one less person likely to die.

[earhartsease]

also, that pie in Anita Bryant’s face? did literally destroy her career as a raving bigot, she lost so much face nobody really took her seriously after that - and she’s not the only one

this is why we still want to see an entire stadium of people show up for a trump rally and then just point at him and laugh derisively

[cryptid-corpse]

The best way to contact me is to meet me in my dreams at 3am

[mckitterick]

[rip-quizilla]

[polliantics]

Posting on 1/13/2026

[enbye]

From The Star Tribune, a local Minneapolis newspaper

[socialistfremenist]

[your-void-senpai]

heated rivalry has been like the reintroduction of wolves in yellowstone for this website

[probablyasocialecologist]

AI can impersonate humans in public opinion polls, study finds

‘We can no longer trust that survey responses are coming from real people,’ said the lead author of a new study from Dartmouth University.

‘We can no longer trust that survey responses are coming from real people,’ said the lead author of a new study from Dartmouth University. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is making it nearly impossible to distinguish human responses from bots in online public opinion polls, according to new research. A Dartmouth University study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday shows that large language models (LLMs) can corrupt public opinion surveys at scale. “They can mimic human personas, evade current detection methods, and be trivially programmed to systematically bias online survey outcomes,” according to the study. The findings reveal a “critical vulnerability in our data infrastructure,” posing a “potential existential threat to unsupervised online research,” said the study's author Sean Westwood, an associate professor of government at Dartmouth.

[...]

“With survey data tainted by bots, AI can poison the entire knowledge ecosystem,” said Westwood. His study argues that the scientific community urgently needs to develop new ways to collect data that can’t be manipulated by advanced AI tools. "The technology exists to verify real human participation; we just need the will to implement it," Westwood said. "If we act now, we can preserve both the integrity of polling and the democratic accountability it provides".

18 November 2025