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Kara | 28 | MN | she/her/hers | trans woman, nonbinary, butch, polyamorous, white, system | t4t & lesbian | working on converting to Judaism | deeply in love with my partners nbndn 💚 & flowergirlfemme 💗

[txttletale]

i have a copyright related question that i was hoping you could help me wrap my head around, because i agree with you basically all of the time on that matter, but something about this specific scenario is giving me a bit of a hangup (not that we should KEEP copyright because of this specific scenario but that i dont know what should be done instead). i also apologize in advance there definitely used to be a post about this that i wish i could link to but i cant find it so this ask is going to be very long. the long and short of it is there used to be a "band" called new jersey weather report. they released an album and some other stuff, there were related side projects too. they sold their stuff on bandcamp one of my good friends has 1 of 12 cassettes ever produced by them. they were part of a virtual festival in minecraft, and the vod got flagged for copyright infringement for a completely different band. as it turns out, all of new jersey weather report's (and all of their side projects') music was completely stolen from other groups - i know white oak and the planet you were 2 of them but there may have been more idr. and by completely stolen i mean absolutely no editing, just changed the names of the songs, and no attribution to the original artists at all. and i know this kind of thing happens legally all the time under the current copyright system anyways and we dont have any recourse for it now either. but it seems like... disingenuous to say that under a copyright-less system that it would be perfectly acceptable to do exactly that? like if we didnt have copyright, and njwr did what they did, but this time just no one ever found out. does that make it ok? and like im framing this around njwr because its something that i know happened but i guess it would apply to anything subject to copyright - if i just started printing like, the shining, or the name of the rose or whatever, but changed only the title and said i wrote it, is that just... fine?

if i just started printing like, the shining, or the name of the rose or whatever, but changed only the title and said i wrote it, is that just… fine?

i mean, i don't think that's fine--because you are lying to people. the copying is not the morally fraught aspect of this--i think it is completely morally fine to print the shining and evne to make money off it; it's when you start lying about the authorship that you start causing harm. i think this sort of deception has three direct and evident harms:

you are denying the original author credit for their work. it is natural, when you have made something, to feel proud and want to be recognized for it--it is hurtful to see people enjoying your work without feeling credited. depending on the context, being denied credits in this way can also be a material harm; in many artistic industries, credits and reputation are crucial to finding jobs and opportunities

you are denying those who enjoy the work the opportunity to understand its actual context. if someone reads the shining, they can go on to find the rest of steven king's ouvre; they can see what he has cited as his influences and go back and read those. the circumstances of a work's production, its position in an artist's broader body of work--all this epitext is shorn off completely when you deceive someone about the origin of a work

you are committing an act of vandalism against the culture more completely; if your version of the work becomes more notable than the original, you build a false citation into the history of the medium. you create a dead end, a cul-de-sac of the rich interconnectness of culture where something is put into a position it doesn't actually occupy. in the worst cases, where this behaviour mixes with e.g. colonialism, racism, etc. you participate in actively writing oppressed peoples and their culture out of cultural memory

but this has nothing to do with copyright; none of these harms are caused by the act of reproduction. an opposition to plagiarism is completely in line with a copyright abolitionist stance, because the harms of plagiarism stem from a particular intentional deception around crediting rather than from breaking copyright laws

[marxistlesbianist]

Oh yeah, I remember what I wanted to say!

At the risk of sounding like a more standard USAmerican vague left, I do think that there is potential to see a revolutionary movement develop within the US military at some point. It's just that (and here I go putting on my Marxist goggles again) we are a couple decades and a whole bunch of humiliating military defeats away from seeing the conditions that could actually give rise to this en mass.

[marxistlesbianist]

Like right now the US military is a) volunteer based, b) expansionist, and c) broadly seen as powerful. All three of these are condusive to producing/selecting for hyper patriotic subjects, yet none of these conditions is likely to hold as the empire further declines. As global class struggle develops the US empire will certainly find itself in the positions of reinstating the draft to maintain personnel numbers, defending established bases in previously allied countries rather than establishimg new bases to terrorize hostile ones, all the while appearing weaker and weaker to everyone watching. At this time the new generations of soldiers being brought up in the military will be much more amicable to the kind of socialist recruitment that leftists here fantasize about.

Which brings me to the other point, that even under the most ideal circumstances, the military can only become a ground for socialist recruitment if there is a functional and consistent Communist Party to recruit them! I have met enough (two) veterans who came out of their service with an actual anti-imperialist critique to know that it is possible, and if/when these above mentioned conditions are met I do believe it will become more common. I have seen some on here refer to even radicalized leftist vets' propensity to maintain an inconsistent politics and slip back into US chauvinism. Which is generally true—but *much* more reflective of the sorry state of socialist politics here than anything else. Anyone flirting with radical left politics will be statistically more likely to fall back into reactionary chauvinism because that's what the bourgeois superstructure promotes. If Communists in the US want to see leftists develop a more consistent critique then we need to build a political movement that can attract people. This much is as true for veterans as it is for Uber drivers (though the latter, of course, have much more immediate revolutionary potential at this stage)

[marxistlesbianist]

In the seven months since I posted this, both the expansionist nature and powerful image of the Amerikkkan military have been delt serious blows by the IRGC! We love to see history marching on 😊

[verminfang]

Thinking about a vampire dude bro who won't drink girl blood- because he's afraid it will estroginise him soy products style- getting trapped in a mental cage when he learns vampire dude who only bites other dudes reads as gay

[cafffine]

woke up this morning, rolled over, and very confidently tried to blow out my alarm clock like a candle. absolutely no precedent for that.

[wizardshark]

In the year 1450 a priest rolls over and slams his hand into his candle, burning him and sending wax flying all over the place

[hagiomoto]

The Sameer Project desperately needs your support right now. They’ve had to scale back some of their operations due to dwindling funds. Please consider setting up a recurring donation to help sustain their important work!

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[guelwaar]

whose definition of "graphic violence and torture" ? do we think maybe those conceptual boundaries depend on factors like the speaker's prior ideological commitments? have we ever read a censorship policy?

at what age does a child cross from innocent pre-exposed object to sullied brain adult? what is the normal age to experience or witness violence? where does that leave those who experience and witness violence at younger ages? who may never have lived a 'violence-free' existence?

do we actually think that children are ontologically incapable of being interested in violence, or are we merely so threatened by the idea they could be that we refuse to even speak the possibility?

is it the worst thing in the world to pick up a book and then decide its subject matter is unappealing, frightening, or overwhelming? is that such a foreign fucking concept? did anything scary ever happen to you as an 8 year old? did it have an instant off-switch as effective as 'close the cover and pick up something else'?

what kind of violence? is all violence the same? do all depictions of violence have the same literary merit, political meaning, or emotional effect?

[captain-price-returns]

the republican party under donald trump starting the iran war is going to go down in history as the biggest blunders for the US ever committed by an american president it's kind of incredible. it's a shame iranians are suffering due to this imperialist regime

[marxistlesbianist]

Democratic Party: *shoots self in both kneecaps*, "your move, orange man"

Republican Party: *sticks rpg into mouth*

[sigmaleph]

game with the conceit that you are a swarm of medical nanobots injected the patient as an experimental last-ditch effort to save their life. you can expand your swarm and create all sorts of specialised bots, but all the resources to do so are ultimately from the patient's body, so if you drain them too much they die. you are fighting against tumour cells, though, who have no such concern, so maybe sometimes taking too many resources for yourself is better than giving it to the cancer?

envisioning the gameplay as divided in stages, the first one being just 'get rid of all the cancer cells before the patient dies', where you have to balance aggressive expansion to improve your capabilties with not throwing the patient's vitals too out of whack, researching better 'weapons' that kill cancer cells faster or with fewer deleterious health effects, etc,

then a 'solidifying' phase where the cancer is gone, but the patient might be in poor health and you start building systems to catch opportunistic infections, automated systems that respond when something about the patient is off (fever, low blood pressure, broken arm, whatever), and some rudimentary communications capability. not enough of whatever mineral in your resources? you could communicate with the little wearable medical device the patient has on their wrist to tell them to change their diet! or, y'know, you could give them a craving for a specific kind of food. either works

and then in the third stage, you really go deep into host manipulation and host cooperation mechanics. you can make your host superhuman, get messages from them about what changes they want to their body and implement them, and in return they do things for you. change their diet, buy a better communications interface, tell all their friends that medical nanonbots are great. or you can effectively turn them into a zombie, just a vessel for the bots. or split the difference, and make the patient want specific things that the swarm can easily provide to build 'trust'.

yes this does mean you can induce your host to want to be a girl and then be really happy with you for speedrunning their medical transition

[specialagentartemis]

Intelligent alien species based on bugs but specifically those moths that don’t have mouths and only live for a week after they pupate. This species’ whole conscious life is actually in the larval phase; larvae are the ones considered people, larvae are the ones with conscious and complex brains who build society, and each instar of the larva is treated as a different phase of life. Larvae become emotionally and socially and cognitively mature without ever becoming sexually mature. When they pupate, they metamorphose into something different and strange and close to mindless, with no mouth and no digestive system, whose only instincts are to mate and then quickly die. Metamorphosis is treated, functionally, like a person’s death, and the imago phase is a kind of proto-afterlife of majestic flight and the continuation of the species. Birth and death inextricably intertwined. Sex is not something people do during their lives, it’s a thing that is done as an imago after you’ve passed on from your life but before you return to the soil in death. Resultant eggs are collected by family members to raise. I think this would be fun.

[grison-in-space]

you know what? I want dragons with ontogenetic niche partitioning.

niche partioning is a concept from ecology wherein groups within a species expand into different ecological niches so they're not competing with one another, right? so for example, sexual niche partitioning happens when sexual dimorphism means that one sex eats different things / occupies different spaces / etc. as another within the same species. you have one species that occupies multiple niches within the ecosystem.

ontogenetic niche partitioning is when this happens as a result of developmental changes. paternal care tends to obliterate this partitioning--hard to have your juveniles eating something different from your adults if the adults are feeding them!--so we just don't see it very often in mammals or birds, but it's quite common in other species, especially invertebrates. for example, a caterpillar and a butterfly are examples of classic niche partitioning, even though every butterfly will occupy both niches over the course of its life. you don't have to have a big fancy chrysalis transformation to engage in ontogenetic niche partitioning, but those transformations are a pretty big sign that it's happening in a given species.

anyway, it's most common in vertebrates among fish, lizards and snakes these days, especially monitor lizards, where juveniles will occupy a different (often arboreal or otherwise sheltered) niche from adults and hunt different prey until they get big enough that the juvenile niche. there are some good reasons to think that some dinosaurs might have engaged in ontogenetic niche partitioning, especially the bigger species, too. we think sea turtles might do it, although that's hard to say because we don't know very much about sea turtle development once the hatchlings go back to the sea.

the neat thing about ontogenetic niche partitioning is that it allows a given ecology to host a much larger population size for a given species than would otherwise be the case, because the total space occupied by that species is spread across a lot wider niche space. this is especially relevant for, say, a large carnivore that eats livestock.

basically, what if dragons are just the very oldest, reproductively mature members of their species, and the common wall lizard or whatever is just a juvenile that might or might not survive long enough to reproduce? imagine if dragon eggs are very small with big clutches of little insectivorous hatchlings that are eaten by anything that comes by, any of which might have the potential to become a great fire-breathing monster if it lives long enough.

imagine that dragon society. do people know that the hatchlings and the dragons are the same species? (they might not: there are real examples of people mistaking ontogenetically niche separated groups for independent species in their own right.) if dragons are sapient but the sapience takes time to develop, what does that say about the nature of sapience itself? how does a society work and transfer wealth if you remove parental care?

so many possibilities.

[parawyrm]

More from that one post

[parawyrm]

[parawyrm]

[parawyrm]

[parawyrm]

[napoleononthebellerophon]

the amount of lawsuits these exploited children are going to be filing 20 years from now is going to be crazy and im all for it

[souplover13]

image: cropped caption of a tiktok. "POV: you're a content creator and your kids can now sense when a sweet moment is about to become content...and immediately shut you down 😂". end ID.

[isuggestlandback]

I went to a market recently that was absolutely swimming in appropriation of First Nations religious and cultural items.

I'm talkin white people selling rattles and dream catchers, white people banging First Nations style drums, white people teaching talking stick workshops, that kinda shit

So what do you do when you see this crap? How do you show your disapproval in a way that makes them give a shit?

I'll tell you what I do. The point is to show them that appropriating Indigenous cultures will lose them customers.

When I see fakey Native art I say something like "Oh wow, you make dreamcatchers! What nation are you from?" (Use tribe in the states)

I used to ask point blank if they were Native, but I'd nearly always get some Cherokee great grandmother bullshit, or even "I'm not sure, I could have some Native in me!"

Most of the time they don't know what I'm talking about, because they're not Native and don't know that this is a very normal thing to ask when meeting another Native.

When they ask me what I mean I say "I mean your tribe, which First Nation are you from?"

This is the point where they sheepishly mumble that they are not First Nations.

I let my face fall and say something like "Oh. That's disappointing" or "Wow. Unfortunate."

I let it get awkward. And then I leave, shaking my head in disapproval.

You may feel like you need to educate them on cultural appropriation but here's the thing: it's 2025. They know. Brenda the middle class reiki shaman is FULLY aware that her smudge fans are stolen culture. She doesn't care. The only way to make them care is to hit them where it hurts: the wallet.

Make them think that you would have purchased what they are selling if it was AUTHENTIC.

If you wanna go the extra mile send an email to the organizers, in your best white people voice, and tell them that you are disappointed that they are facilitating culture theft.

Go out and make Brenda uncomfortable!

[biophonies]

not to be a snitch, but if this is happening in the US you can also straight up report Brenda for a fine up to $250k under the Indian Arts and Crafts Act.

[stonefemmesiren]

the terf mind cannot comprehend the WFTDA gender policy btw

[stonefemmesiren]

"she's invading women's sports" and the policy of the governing body for my sport is that I Belong Unconditionally

[isuggestreleasingwolves]

the official policy is also to refer to all people with they/them unless you know their pronouns personally or they have pronouns clearly indicated (such as a helmet sticker), regardless of their appearance

or at least, that was the guidance given to me as policy when I was training to be an official

[stonefemmesiren]

that has not been necessary in my time coaching and playing (7ish months) bc for bouts we provide officials roster sheets w names numbers pronouns etc. also just doesn't happen much unless it's an official review bc players are addressed by jersey color and number when they commit penalties, pronouns rarely factor

[poecilea]

sure, I just think it's another cool point of gender inclusivity from a very cool sport. In practice it may not come up much but I do like that it's there.

[stonefemmesiren]

speaking as a frequently they/them'd she/her I don't actually find defaulting to they/them pronouns inclusive of my gender at all but i'm glad it serves you personally

[nepenthean-sleep]

straight white people making a romance movie: haha what if it was illegal to have sex? wait what's lawrence v texas. wait what's mclaughlin v florida. wait what's loving v virginia

[ninewheels]

As preposterous and stupid as this fucking movie's premise sounded (for a light-hearted rom-com, and not The Handmaid's Tale) I didn't want to think about it too much until the movie actually came out, and then I could see if it was somehow more intelligent and subversive than the trailer let on, but guess what, it's even worse!

One Night Only review: Pull out from this sex-negative rom-com

If this is what it takes to get a rom-com greenlit these days, maybe we should just let them die.

Sex workers are thrown under the bus, shown only as thieves who fleece men in the woods at night, while queer sexuality is relegated to a few scenes with Allie’s roommate (a woefully underused Quintessa Swindell) and a handful of pans past blurry same-sex extras making out in the background. “This night is for the straights,” Swindell’s character says to Allie, before saying that queer people have worked around straight laws for centuries.  This is supposed to be a nod to queer resilience, but largely comes off as straightwashing the history of anti-LGBTQ legislation in this country that led towards raids of queer clubs and incarceration of queer people in the not-too-distant past (let alone the current barrage of anti-Trans and LGBTQ legislation currently in the works and on the books). It’s also ignorant of the long and fraught fight for the normalization of age-of-consent laws, which, by the way, did not happen in all states in this very country until 2003. Yes, that’s not even thirty years ago.  By the end, our intrepid protagonists have not had sex with anyone, because this is a film about Romance with a Capital R (and I guess sex is not part of romance!) and for that very same reason they ultimately embrace the fascist state of things. They aren’t the only ones who refuse to fight back. No one in this cursed film is protesting this mandate beyond “repeal” signs in various windows and some creative graffiti (...) (...) If we are supposed to believe that the film is making some subversive statement about the state of sex and bodily autonomy in this country, it cannot end with its leads embracing their chains. That’s just warmed-over conservatism running around in sheep’s clothing.

[nepenthean-sleep]

yeah i wrote this post having only seen the trailer, but jesus christ. was this movie a psyop LMAO??

also, for the unaware: mclaughlin v. florida was a 1964 supreme court case that struck down a florida anti-miscegenation law that criminalized cohabitation (and thus, as implied, sex) between white people and people of color of opposite genders. anti-miscegenation laws made marriage and sexual relationships between white people and people of color, most often specifically black people, a FELONY in several states in the united states up until the 1950s and 1960s. though it was already struck down by the supreme court, the state of alabama didn't repeal their law until 2000! there were THREE ATTEMPTS at codifying anti-miscegenation into the us constitution!

like yes, the issue here is partially straight white people's ignorance on the united states's history of homophobic policy, but it's also really important to recognize that arguably the majority of the issue here is straight white people's ignorance of the united states's history of codifying eugenics and antiblack racism.

the premise could have been interesting as a serious dystopian story, especially taking that history into account, but it wasn't written that way at all. this movie should never have been a fucking romcom making light of the violence the united states (and many other countries) has enacted on any kinds of sexual relationships it deems undesirable.

[nepenthean-sleep]

can y’all maybe reblog this version i feel like people are forgetting about the racism and just focusing on the homophobia

[bunbuttbread]

Because Tumblr is very English speaking and some ppl like France a little too much I just want to remind you of a few things:

- France abolished the Code Noir 2 months ago. That law project that said hey you can enslave, mutilate, kill, cross breed, etc. black people at will bc they're not people they're property ? Yeah. Abolished 2 months ago. We are in July 2026.

- the last human zoo closed its doors in 1994 in France due to social pressure. Not bc they were running out of business, no. Ppl still visited that place until it closed its doors. No, it was bc (black) French people were fed up. That human zoo was specialized in displaying black (presumed Congolese) people in fake huts in enclosures, for white entertainment.

- now while this might no longer be the case, when I was growing up, I went to a French school (as in. It was an international French School w the French flag n all) and the way we were taught French geography was that France has the biggest and largest access to the sea in the world. And they'd show us a map of France and its colonies around the world. It's all occupied indigenous lands. I don't know if they still teach that. I hope not. But they absolutely did until I graduated high school in 2017. Again, I write this on July 21st 2026, for the record.

Anyways that's all I have for now. Y'all don't hate France enough. Y'all need to hate France more.

[thedorkdionysia]

the thing is that the way people treat trans women they don't like is that the behavior they're engaging in is like as old as (and even older than) the modern generation of transphobic backlash against the trans liberation moment

[thedorkdionysia]

Beth Elliott is a transfem folk singer who was involved with West Coast lesbian political movements in the 70s. her inclusion was debated for a while, partly because she was transgender, but also because a lesbian who she used to have a relationship with was involved with a separate lesbian group, who protested against her inclusion at a lesbian conference that she had helped to set up. the conference took a vote that resulted in the majority saying she should be allowed to stay, but the trans-exclusive lesbians refused to allow the vote to hold. she performed once on the first night, and then didn't return, and the next night one of the speakers delivered a speech that was changed from her original notes to be more of a transphobic screed against Elliot, alleging her of having "the mentality of a rapist". this incident certainly didn't *invent* the idea of trans women being rapists, but it does predate The Transsexual Empire by several years and was definitely a contributing factor to its creation.

and i say "is" at the top of this story because Beth Elliott is still alive!!!! this incident was not that long ago!!!!! it DID damage her career, however, and it practically made her a social pariah. but it's the same type of shit people do to trans women to this very day. these tactics are relatively recent overall but they are still time honored traditions with trans-exclusive feminists.

[thedorkdionysia]

this isn't even about michfest is the crazy part. this incident happened in 1973, and michfest as an event started 3 years later in 1976. the first michfest where trans women were explicitly removed from the event took place in 1991, after it had already been running for 25 years. the type of thinking that caused the organizers of michfest to push trans women out of participating in an event they had long been a part of was the same type of thinking that had caused lesbian activists to push Beth Elliott out of the event she had organized as well as her career, and it's the same type of thinking that led to writings like The Transsexual Empire coming into existence.