Rose (The Dumbass)

She/They, Trans, 25 | Mage of chaos

[sailatina3]

[weetbixcuits]

[lakemojave]

Happy Pride Month everyone! Remember 4 months ago when the CEO of this platform harassed and chased a trans woman off this website just for posting her transition timeline, then chased her to other social media platforms to continue harassing her, and threatened to call the FBI if she continued disputing the multiple dubious terminations of her blogs that did not violate tumblr's terms of service in any way? And despite tumblr staff insisting that the CEO was acting against their interests, the broad transmisogyny evident in the site's culture and moderation policy has still not been adequately addressed?

[lakemojave]

Remember that staff is continuing to nuke the blogs of trans women even after all of this. Remember this post when they call this site the queerest place on the internet again this month

[lakemojave]

It's 2 years later. It's gotten worse. Happy pride month.

[ot3]

i think a new rule of engagement we should have for discourse is that any time someone says "the lesbian community" "the trans community" "the queer community" or something of that ilk you just dead stop the conversation in its tracks until they have successfully explained what group of people they're trying to refer to with this. because there is no such thing as a 'community' that every lesbian, or every trans person, or every queer person automatically belongs to/participates in, and acting like there is, or that we are all otherwise on the same page about which people these 'communities' actually consist of, lets people do a whole lot of lazy generalization that doesn't hold up to the slightest bit of scrutiny.

[witnotwitchcraft]

...we call the queer community a community because we are choosing to band together for safety and support. it is not woke to say "actually its every man for himself! i have nothing in common with the rest of you freaks!"

[ot3]

ok. well is "we" in this instance Every Single Queer Person on the planet, or are you perhaps doing a bit of generalization that won't stand up to being scrutinized. dont you think there could be some benefit to attempting to establish which people have made that choice you're referring to, and whose safety they are prioritizing. because if you have to make the choice to do this, then it categorically doesn't include everyone. and if it categorically doesn't include everyone, then conversation only stands to benefit by clarifying who it does include.

[witnotwitchcraft]

literally no one is able to speak for "every X person on the planet", that gotcha expired three years ago.

"we" refers to anyone who is fighting beside me. self inclusion and self exclusion are copacetic concepts.

i understand the danger of generalizations but if you lean too far in the other direction you get people trying to establish a literal gay card and set of criteria that is Queer Enough.

do you have a specific example of this generalizing language being utilized in a harmful way? it largely seems that language is being used by people being people and speaking in general terms about broad subjects

[ot3]

when did i say anyone was or wasn't queer enough? this isn't about deciding who does or doesn't actually count as queer this is saying that people are not automatically in community with each other by sharing an orientation label.

here's some examples of how these phrases are used that i don't like:

"the queer community needs to remember our history!" which history? in practice, on tumblr at least, almost always the american lgbt movement. i think its wrong to imply that american queer history Is queer history, and not just the history of queerness in one corner of the world. i think expecting any and everyone to both know and be deferential to the history of the american lgbt movement just because they are queer and speak english, regardless of whether or not thats actually their history, is weird nationalist behavior.

"the trans community has too much infighting" this is a statement that serves to imply that trans people are not allowed to have or capable of having legitimate ideological conflict with each other. it's frequently used to paint trans women specifically as instigators of meaningless internet drama, and completely discredit the critiques they have of the way they're treated by people who are supposedly 'in community' with them

i think pretty much every time "the lesbian community" with no further qualifiers is rhetorically used in a discussion it's been at best meaningless but often actually harmful, because understanding of lesbian identity has long been pretty heavily split between people who are using bioessentialist ideas about who actually Counts as a lesbian and people who aren't. i am not in community with twerfs and never will be, and i think trying to understand or portray lesbianism as a "community" without factoring in these peoples' presence just throws trans women under the bus.

"we refers to anyone who is fighting beside me" is literally a meaningless statement to make to a stranger. i dont know who you are. i don't know what you're fighting for. i dont know what someone has to do to qualify as being beside you. that clarifies nothing. the problem isn't broadness of the category, it is the complete lack of specificity regarding the criteria used to categorize. i'm not trying to gatekeep or police anyone, i'm just saying if you're trying to have a conversation about groups of people, you need to make sure whoever you're addressing can understand who is being rhetorically included in that group.

[rosetwinshadow]

Yamato is Genji if she transitioned and survived her brother's assasination attempt.

[mapleejay]

does anyone else think about how brave all their friends are and get really emotional about it

[mapleejay]

I'm glad everyone is alive rn

[40ouncesandamule]

One of the useful liberal tactics that has led to their continued crushing of the left over the last decade that has been under discussed is the tactic of blaming cooption/recuperation and sheepdogging on the "far left"

For example:

Black Americans put forth a simple demand that we, and ideally everybody else, not be executed by armed members of the state without trial. In a word: equality. Liberals can't answer that demand because it is antithetical to their project of maintaining the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Instead they give a bunch of shit that nobody asked for which annoys everyone and the right wing of liberalism is able to capitalize on that annoyance to generate a backlash to a demand that was never met.

Instead of dealing with the scourge of killer cops, the democrats kneeled in Kente cloth. This did nothing for Black people and only served to fuel the grievance of white people. Instead of dealing with the effects of redlining, the liberal hegemony got rid of Aunt Jemima. This did nothing for Black people and only served to fuel the grievance of white people. Instead of dismantling white supremacy, the liberals coopted, recuperated, and sheepdogged every movement they could while stoking dissatisfaction and grievance that was then blamed on the "far left"

In essence, the "far left" was blamed for the tactics the liberals used to suppress us.

This pattern can be seen across what are now being attacked by the leadership of the democrat party as "groups"

Whether it be women, queer people, black people, the dreaded "Latinx" (remember that "discourse"?), trans people, disabled people, or any other marginalized group: we asked for equality. Liberals can't answer that demand because it is antithetical to their project of maintaining the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Instead they give a bunch of shit that nobody asked for which annoys everyone and the right wing of liberalism is able to capitalize on the annoyance to generate a backlash to a demand that was never met.

As a result, the left wing of capital can convince itself that it needs to move even further right to win because the spectacle of them fighting against the actual left caused them to do stupid shit that nobody liked that was unpopular and they blame on the actual left whereas the right wing of capital can point at the stupid shit that nobody liked as proof that they are being oppressed by the mere existence of the stupid shit that nobody liked.

The ratchet only turns one way.

[monochromeblend]

but why

[monochromeblend]

alright

[bunabi]

I'm in awe of how we ran historical revisionism on the civil rights movement so bad that people truly believe it was quiet self-sacrifcial non-disruptive christ-like activism that forced progress and not — like — the incredible economic pressure of boycotts and outbreaks of illegal civil disobedience

Yapping to the choir but eughhh it burns me up girl effective protests have to be loud and inconvenient for change to happen because silent cries die in the dark that's the entire pointtt

[umbrellahat07]

Also, a lot of the so called harmless examples used for peaceful protests were specifically supposed to be disruptive as all hell. Like, take sit-ins, for example. What you were probably told is that black people just refused to leave white only establishments to make a point.

But how they actually worked was manipulating racist policies to cause as much of a delay as possible. They'd sit down at the bar to order (that's how those restaurants worked, you had to sit down to order and there weren't many tables) and when the waiter said they couldn't serve them, they'd respond that they would wait until they could be served. And then all their friends who they organized this with would do the same, and they would sit there at every seat until they're holding up the whole line. Then nobody could order and the restaurant was forced to either close, serve them, or try and fail to work around them. It wasn't just to make a point, it was to cost them money and time.

Even what was framed as "quiet peaceful protest" was actually very disruptive both socially and economically.

[beatrice-otter]

Does this look quiet, peaceful, nondisruptive?

And the struggle didn't stop after formal integration, once the Civil Rights act had passed. Because even when they are legally required to serve you, they can make you really fucking uncomfortable and threaten you and the cops probably will take their side.

For one example, there was a cafe that would serve Black people, but would then publicly break the dishes so that no white customer would ever have to eat off a dish a Black person had eaten off of. This was done publicly, right as the Black diner was done eating. The waitress takes the plate and smashes it. This is a signal both to the white diners "see, we hate them just as much as you do, you're safe here" and also a threat of violence to the Black diners. "If you're not careful we'll smash you just like we did this plate."

But at the same time, if Black people go there and eat every day ... how long before the cafe can't afford to do that? How long before they have broken so many dishes that it's eating into their profits? How long before the white diners start getting used to eating alongside Black people and simply don't care as much any longer, or start getting annoyed at the noise and fuss and mess?

Black people eating in white establishments was loud, inconvenient, and disruptive. Because that's the nature of challenging the status quo.

[sionnualanicheallachain]

All of this, plus a couple of additional thoughts:

1. Folks in these movements trained. They were disruptive and they were strategic about it and they trained so that they could stay calm in terrifying situations and create the targeted disruptions they wanted to create and not get goaded into deviating from that. Absolutely badass.

2. Not at all a criticism of OP because I think their description of people thinking it was "quiet self-sacrificial non-disruptive christ-like activism" is dead on, but I think that description itself speaks to the same kind of revisionism re: the Christ of the Gospels and how disruptive he was and why, and it's important to remember that, especially in this era of renewed christofascism. Rev. Dr. King was a prophet and you will never convince me otherwise.

[pixie-likethecut]

As I told my students a few weeks ago:

Nonviolence is not a goal, it is a strategy. A deliberate strategy at a calculated time in response to violence of the oppressor, which can be effective if it shames the perpetrators. See: why Selma or Montgomery was chosen by the SCLC (they had the most racist unhinged sheriffs who would deploy maximum force, which got shown on nationwide broadcasts and finally moved the public).

Nonviolence doesn’t mean you don’t carry weapons if necessary, as many organizers in Selma did. Nonviolence doesn’t mean that you accept that people will throw bombs into your family’s home, as they did to MLK.

And yes, the absurd simplification and bastardization of this strategy is deliberate. It went from being a tool for fighting for liberation to being a justification for more violence and oppression used against future generations of protestors who didn’t meet the standard of perfectly obedient nonviolent non disruptive protestors. Which of course there is no such thing.

And it’s all a lie. Know that people in the movement, at the time, were called criminals, because they knowingly and deliberately broke laws with the idea that they’d get arrested. Know that most of the country hated King at the time of his death. Know that no movement demanding change from the system will ever be loved by those in power.

[elljayvee]

once again I feel I must mention Erica Chenoweth & Maria J. Stephan's "Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict".

For more than a century, from 1900 to 2006, campaigns ofnonviolent resistance were more than twice as effective as theirviolent counterparts

[free-my-mindd]

[maidthings]

every time i say velociraptor is very important to imagine a turkey-sized predatory bird and not the weird lizard thing from jurassic park

[maidthings]

you have to love her. you have to

[battlecrazed-axe-mage]

[4e3076]

patricia taxxon should be allowed to kill people

[reagan-slayer69]

“but what if you abort the baby who’ll cure cancer?!” sir the baby who will cure cancer is an organic chemistry major who works at a Home Depot because you use AI to go through your resumes

[mel-155-a]

"I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops." - Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History

[omgthatdress]

ily, menswear guy

[depsidase]

[sailatina3]

You ever create peak fiction in your head and do nothing with it

[tiktoks-for-dead-pope]