the source is here, and the original JPN post is here
it's a very good post about the author, a Japanese artist, dealing with harassment from western antis over OMORI fanart, and learning about "proship" discourse, written as an informative piece for others to learn from, and as a warning of how to deal with potential harassers
lesbian related discourse tires me out sm. first it was aro/ace lesbians then it was nonbinary lesbians then it was he/him lesbians and it/its lesbians and now its bi/pan/mspec lesbians like when are all of you going to realize that the lesbian experience is extremely diverse and has never been as strict as "women who only identify as women who love exclusively women who only identify as women". like this goes for many identities but lesbians end up at the forefront a lot and it makes me wonder if any of you actually give a shit about queer history because istg lesbian separatism has been reinvented like 50 times in the past decade.
stop convincing each other that the queer experience is nothing but strictly defined boxes and labels that can always be condensed into one sentence. lesbians can experience a lack of sexual attraction and a lack of romantic attraction and lesbians can be nonbinary and lesbians can be gnc and when you actually go into what those last two mean you should realize that yes this means sometimes lesbians are men because genderfluid and bigender and trigender and transmasc and whatever gender lesbians exist and when you actually goes into what THAT means you should realize yes actually people combining labels like mspec and lesbian makes perfect sense because of fucking course orientation and gender and whatever else you consider to be apart of your queer experience is all fluid its all up to personal interpretation
its not shit like bi lesbians or mogai or aroace people or gnc people or "trenders" or it/its users or whatever fucking bonafide weirdos that are ruining the community its the people who want to sort everyone into neat little boxes because they cant handle that sometimes you arent going to understand other peoples experiences. its fine if mspec lesbians dont make sense to you. its fine if it doesnt make sense to you how someone could use it/its, if it doesnt make sense how a lesbian could consider himself transmasc, if it doesnt make sense how someone could seriously mean "my gender feels like a star", if whatever queer experience you run into doesnt make sense.
someone's identity does not have to make sense for you to respect them as a person and realize that exclusionary behavior is nothing but a crabs in a bucket type mentality. not only have "weird" queer people existed since fucking forever, but even if they didnt the human experience is diverse and we still dont know everything about the world and why the fuck would you decide that no actually if it cant be understood it must be bad and you need to find out reasons for it to be bad. focus on the people who are actively hurting others, taking advantage of vulnerable people, dont become one of them. dont become one of the people who scorns anything they dont understand and hurts innocent people in the quest of getting rid of anyone who they deem is abnormal. its fucked up and being any type of exclusionist is fucked up.
bi lesbians, as an overall community, is just a bunch of people who decided that a complicated label fits their complicated attraction and thats Fine. it is literally fine. being a lesbian was never about being strictly a woman who strictly loves other women who are strictly women. its about loving women in a gay/queer way, whatever that means for the individual. if an individual person is using it in a transphobic way, then thats a fault of the person, not the label. but at its core, all the identity is about is about recognizing that attraction is complicated and identity is complicated and not everyone is comfortable putting themself in neat boxes for other people to scrutinize until they Get It.
to any mspec lesbians (and hell, any mspec gays) who are reading this: im proud of you and theres nothing wrong with recognizing that your identity is complicated and maybe even contradictory. its Your experiences and no one has the right to say that youre inherently a bad person simply because they heard some strawman arguments and decided to believe in fallacy over reality. and because its probably obvious why im making this yeah maia arson crimew is literally fine its an absolute legend actually and i hope that its okay. fuck anyone who was a piece of shit to it because they cant handle someone being openly complicated and contradictory and unabashedly "Weird"
The women in Closer To Home give themselves many names. Bi-dyke, bi-lesbian, lesbian-identified bisexual, bi- affectional, lesbian, and formally- lesbian bisexual. Anything but straight. As Margaret Mihee Choe points out in her essay. "identity is that which makes one recognizable to self and other." The plurality of names, and the combinations used, are all attempts in our clumsy and woman-wordless language, to create this identity, to make ourselves recognizable. To indicate that we, as feminists and women who recognize the realities of sexism and heterosexism, embrace our queerness, our lesbianism, our woman-loving, and also claim and embrace our openness to men.
There is no "after the revolution." No "ideal world." I don't care how much progress we make, we will always fail someone, hurt someone, and the best thing we can do is accept that, and keep striving to make it better as we go.
And don't get me wrong, I don't say this to discourage anyone from trying to make that ideal world. Quite the opposite.
I feel like it's very naive to continue to approach these big changes we want to make in the world as if there's an "after it's all over" when we don't have to worry about it anymore.
We should always be striving to make life better, even when life seems pretty damn good.
"a lesbian is a woman attracted to woman!" "no it's a woman exclusively attracted to women!" "no it's a woman-aligned person attracted to woman-aligned people!" "no it's a non-man attracted to non-man!!!" literally none of this matters. a lesbian is whatever a lesbian wants to be.
no one is self-made. did you raise urself? did you build your washing machine? do you make all of your medicine and grow all of your food?
if you think of yourself as self-made or totally independent bc you financially support yourself: hard times will be especially hard on you with that attitude.
So much more people are falling into poverty, esp in certain cities and countries. But so many ppl grew up with this "i dont need anybody" mentality they have absolutely no irl support systems when times are hard. Begging online has unpredictable outcomes, but your neighbor could invite you over for dinner after you give them your netflix password.
Even if you're totally fine now, even if you're making more than enough money.. What if you become disabled? Who could you rely on? No seriously, think about that.
Poverty with & without irl support systems are vastly different experiences. Save yourself now. Talk to your neighbors. Stop being suspicious of or assume malice of other ppl. Help ppl without keeping score, just accept help and offer help when it's sustainable (aka don't exert yourself). It's so important to care and be cared for.
I think it's a sign of good media when you have to reread or rewatch it to get the full experience. First time is for getting your brain blasted by the story and being confused second time is for knowing who's who and what's what and willingly getting your brain blasted again.
it is a legitimate travesty that autistic people aren't given the resources to live life as brilliant artists and instead have to play autistic death hell capitalism and get yelled at by dickheads
A few weeks ago, the New York Times called mask-wearers "the last holdouts". This week, the world's richest people went to great lengths to
In photos of 2023’s World Economic Forum- or Davos as it is commonly called, after the Swiss resort town where it annually occurs- you might not notice the HEPA filters. They’re in the background, unobtrusive and unremarked upon, quietly cleansing the air of viruses and bacteria. You wouldn’t know- not unless you asked- that every attendee was PCR tested before entering the forum, or that in the case of a positive test, access was automatically, electronically, revoked. And if you happened to get a glimpse of the strange blue lights overhead, you could reasonably assume that their glow was simply a modern aesthetic choice, not the calming buzz of cutting edge Far UVC technology- demonstrated to kill microbes in the air.
It’s hard to square this information with the public narrative about COVID, isn’t it? President Biden has called the pandemic “over”. The New York Times recently claimed that “the risk of Covid is similar to that of the flu” in an article about “hold outs” that are annoyingly refusing to accept continual reinfection as their “new normal”. Yet, this week the richest people in the world are taking common sense, easy- but strict- precautions to ensure they don’t catch Covid-19 at Davos.
These common sense, easy precautions include high-quality ventiliation, use of Far UVC-lighting technology, and PCR testing. You’ll also see some masks at Davos, but generally, the testing + air filtration protocol seems to be effective at preventing the kind of super-spreader events most of us are now accustomed to attending.
It seems unlikely to me that a New York Times reporter will follow the super-rich around like David Attenborough on safari, the way one of their employees did when they profiled middle-class maskers last month. I doubt they will write “family members and friends can get a little exasperated by the hyper-concern” about the assembled Prime Ministers, Presidents and CEOs in Switzerland. After all, these are important people. The kind of people who merit high-quality ventilation. The kind of people who deserve accurate tests.
Why is the media so hellbent on portraying simple, scientifically proven measures like high-quality ventilation as ridiculous and unnecessary as hundreds of people continue to die daily here in the US?
Why is the public accepting a “new normal” where we are expected to get infected over and over and over again, at work events with zero precautions, on airplanes with no masks, and at social dinners trying to approximate our 2019 normal?
We deserve better. We deserve to be #DavosSafe as the hashtag going around on twitter puts it. Your children deserve to be treated with the care that world leaders are treating each other. Your family deserves to be protected from the disease which is still- unlike the flu- the third leading cause of death in the US. We don’t deserve to be shoved back into poorly ventilated workplaces while our politicians and press assure us that only crazy people would demand to breathe clean air.
Clean water and clean food are rights we fought for; we have regulatory bodies that ensure we aren’t exposed to pathogens via our water supply nor our food. In 1854, John Snow famously conducted his Broad Street Pump study in London and demonstrated that cholera was water-bourne; however, it took decades for our public policy to catch up with our scientific knowledge.
A public health case study published by the NBCI describes the years that followed:
The first use of chlorine as a disinfectant for water facilities was in 1897 in England. The first use of this method for municipal water facilities in the United States was in Jersey City, New Jersey, and Chicago, Illinois, in 1915. Other cities followed and the use of chlorination as standard treatment for water disinfection rapidly grew. During the 20th century, death rates from waterborne diseases decreased significantly, and although other additional factors contributed to the general improvements in health (such as sanitation, improved quality of life, and nutrition), the improvement of water quality was, without doubt, a major reason.
Forty-three years passed from the initial demonstration that pathogens were being spread via water, and public action and regulation to halt disease.
Can you imagine, in the 1890s, being somebody who argued against cleaning the water?
Can you imagine, in those years of plentiful cholera, calling the people who demanded shit-free water “hold outs”?
One thing COVID realists are accused of is being “doomsayers” and “fearmongers,” so let me share a dose of optimism about the future with you. When we choose- whenever we choose- to get COVID under control, there’s an exciting new world awaiting us. One, not only without constant COVID reinfection, but where our kids can grow up free of colds, flus, RSV, and many other common bugs. And no, contrary to what you may have heard, staying healthy (shockingly enough) is not bad for children!
Once we choose to institute ventilation standards and introduce new technologies like Far UVC lighting- and embrace masking as an easy, kind, and useful tool to control outbreaks- we can bring every nasty airborne pathogen under control the way we did cholera. We didn’t have the science before; now we do. (I mean that quite literally; I can’t recommend enough the linked Wired article cataloguing the long journey to establishing that Covid is, indeed, airborne).
We face a stark choice; down one road, the one with zero infrastructure upgrades, no air quality regulations, and Covid safety only for those who can afford it, you and your family will get Covid this year. You will get Covid next year. You will continue to get Covid over and over and over again, as the health problems - like cardiac damage, viral persistance, and immune system dysfunction- continue to build up. (The billionaires, of course, will not).
Down the other road, we quite simply treat ourselves the way Davos would. We engage with what the science is telling us and we build a safer, better world for our kids. We embrace the lessons this pandemic is teaching us, and let go of things we now know are harming people. We stop clinging desperately to the idea that 2019 will come back if we just get the virus one more time, and we come together to achieve what we’ve been told is impossible: elimination.
The economic elite thrive on our divisiveness and blame casting. They don’t mind that we’re calling each other names, engaging in racial stereotyping, or leaving disabled people to die, so long as we keep their machine running. But we can choose to stop throwing blame at each other, and direct it where it belongs: at the powerful people who’ve left us to suffer, at the politicians who are whipping people into a frenzy over masks instead of over our millions of dead, at the talking heads on TV that work so hard to convince us: you want to get sick. It’s better than being a *weirdo* or a *hold out*.
We needn’t wait 43 years to redirect our energies. France and Belgium have already introduced new air quality standards, and DIY projects to build Corsi-Rosenthal boxes for schools and healthcare settings have popped up around the country. We have the science, we have the technology. All we need now is the political will and the solidarity to truly end the pandemic- the kind of solidarity the super rich always show with one another.
The billionaires at Davos don’t accept continual Covid reinfection. They demand better. It’s time we demand better too.
It's in the NYTs interest to mock and belittle people who still continue wear masks because if the actually necessary policy that will solve all this was publically acknowledged then the onus and accompanying financial burden for installing these air filtration, high quality ventilation, and far UVC systems at every establishment would fall on private corporations to change their own behavior by making costly investments.
It’s so fucked up how tiktok culture has made clout-poisoned people turn the public into content, every day I see people minding their business have their entire faces put online for thousands of likes, a couple kissing on the train, a lady dancing across a cross walk, a guy nodding his head to the music at a club, a lady buying a banana at the store, ring camera footage of the neighbors kids being stupid. Just let people live jfc
I think I may have made it seem like this is about wholesome content (which my sentiment towards that is the same) but most of the time when I see this stuff people are being ridiculed for being completely normal. And I didn’t make up any of these examples btw, I couldn’t find the dance one but only because there are too many videos of people being recorded at cross walks
Im gonna add this to every post about this i see im never gonna shut up about it. This will get people killed. This will ruin lives. More people live in hiding than you think. So many people are one post away from having to abandon their whole lives. Dont ever post anything of anyone without their consent, stranger or not.
i used to work at a summer camp and one day per summer the organizers would go around and take photos of the kids getting involved in activities to use as promotional photos for the camp website/marketing. obviously this was all done with signed permission from the kids' parents or guardians BUT there were always a significant number of kids who for whatever reason were not allowed to have their photo taken. sometimes cos they just didn't want to be included but most of the time it was for the safety of that kid often due to custody legalities, kids who had people who weren't allowed to know where the child was, who could be put in serious danger if their face was included in any of these photos and if they could be traced to the camp. it was a big deal
these kids were made to wear a recognizable Fluro green t-shirts on the day the photos were taken so that A. the photographer could avoid them and B. if they accidentally ended up in a photo then that photo could be deleted
SO SERIOUSLY TAKING PHOTOS OF STRANGERS AND POSTING THEM ON THE INTERNET MAY PUT THEM IN SERIOUS DANGER so get permission or just don't freakn do it full stop
NYT article abt goncharov has comments like 'what is the purpose of this film's existence these kids are just lying' motherfucker how do you think our ancestors survived. how do you think folklore formed. culture. music. art. PURPOSE????? do you think everything must be commodified? sold? weighed to be valued? has the rot in your soul spread so far you cannot find value in anything not spoken in numbers??? it's FUN. THAT'S WHY. THE PURPOSE IS THE ACT, THE MESSAGE IS THE MEDIUM, THE SYMBOL IS THE STORY. it brings people joy for its mere existence and that IS the point. existence is its purpose alone
Unless you were a tech at NASA back in the day, when one time some hydrogen a) escaped in a particular building, and b) caught on fire. This was extremely difficult because hydrogen does NOT burn on the visible spectrum humans evolved to see (and flee). Rather, it technically does, but it’s so pale that in practice, no one could see it. Additionally, pure hydrogen burns without smoke and with so little ambient heat that you can’t really sense it till you walk into it. So, per the lore, for a few days all the techs in that building just walked around brandishing brooms in front of them like lances. If your broom lit on fire, congrats! You have located more burning hydrogen! Do not proceed!
the beautiful thing about being genderqueer is there are no rules. genderqueer doesn't have a "look". genderqueer doesn't have requirements. you don't have to be 50/50 masc and fem. you don't have to be masc or fem at all. you don't have to get surgeries or take hormones. you define your genderqueerness. one's genderqueer status is determined completely by who they are as a person, and i think that kicks so much ass.
genderqueer is an identity as well as a form of gender expression, and there is no right or wrong way to identify as OR present as genderqueer. don't ever let anyone tell you you are or are not genderqueer, because there are no requirements. the entire point is that there are no rules. be free, go nuts