i wish i had a soul

I like pretty colours in stripes and blähaj(ar); also, pretty flowers! terfs fuck off. Free palestine.

[polyamorousmood]

It really says something that a lot of monogamous people consider polyamorous and aromantic to be "opposites" but every polyam person I know took one look at aromantics and said "they're just like me for real"

[silosworld]

Poly folks x aro folks in the sense that "alloromantic heterosexual monogamous people view love and sex as an entirely different entity than me, and that makes life kinda strange"

[rincent-van-uggh]

[aromanticofficial]

official aro-polyam solidarity post

[polyam-aro-culture-is]

Might’ve already reblogged this but it needs to be said again

[urfavhatesterfs]

YOU hates terfs

[switchingtogeico]

[captainhaterade]

[stankpasta]

rb if u hates terfs

[official-pussy-posts-2]

Official ‘terfs get out of my house’ Post

[libraford]

An incomplete list of

Potions of Hydration!

Earlier this week I mentioned putting pickle juice in my water to replenish electrolytes. I work outside in a very hot and humid area, so it was very necessary.

Since then, a LOT of people have chimed in with their favorite hot weather drinks. I want to try... all of them. I've only had a few. Many of them are similar, but I still think its cool how many variations there are for 'its fucking hot out here and I don't want to die.'

So here is the incomplete list.

ORS (oral rehydration solution) (link has several recipes)

Shrub (sharaab)

Agua de pepino

Switchel

Posca

Ayran

Straight up drinking pickle juice (small doses)

Agua fresca

Sekanjabin

Pickle lemonade

Lebanese lemonade

Salted watermelon

Jamaica/hibiscus tea

Lebu pani

Ayuvedic gatorade

Soda chanh muôi

Suero

Aam paan

Sharbat

-

These ones were given to me without names, and were just lists of ingredients, to taste:

- water and umezu

- diluted apple juice with lemon and salt

-watermelon, lime juice, mint

- sparkling water, mint leaves, lemon or lime juice, cucumber

-coconut water, lime juice, salt

-salt, lemon juice, water

-orange juice, salt, sugar, water, lime or lemon juice

-elderflower syrup and lime juice in water.

There are probably more! Hydrate or die straight!

[love-ardour-anarchism]

“If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself—as men have done to women, and class has done to class, and nation has done to nation—you may hate it, or deify it, but in either case you have denied its spiritual equality, and its human reality. You have made it into a thing, to which the only possible relationship is a power relationship. And thus you have fatally impoverished your own reality.” Ursula K. Le Guin "American SF and The Other" in Science-Fiction Studies 7, 1975.

[asteroidtroglodyte]

Ok so lemme get this straight the boys get advertised their body weight in protein powder and girls are told to get by on uncooked foliage and I’m supposed to believe that the observed differences in gender are strictly because of sex chromosomes with no cultural influence at all uh huh sure hey buddy what kind of idiot

[fullmetalfisting]

Tbh germ theory DOES sound crazy. Like if you told a regency-era nobleman that tiny creatures lived on the surface of everything and THAT’S what causes consumption, they’d be like “ah, I see you are a lunatic. Would you reside in my hermitage? Rantings and ravings do so amuse my guests”

[mysteryteacup]

But if you told a Medieval person this they would probably go "Ah, so when the miasma settles on surfaces it gains evil life. I understand."

[alarajrogers]

Yeah, actually, it would probably be pretty easy to explain germ theory to a Medieval person as tiny evil spirits that live on everything, but they can be purified by soap and water, or by alcohol, because that is why God has granted us those things. And because they can float in the air, if you cough or sneeze after they have infested you, that can cause them to infest others. And when you are sick, the angels God has deputized to defend the bodies of His beloved children are at war with the evil spirits, and, sadly, sometimes they lose, but the best way to help your angels win their battle is to rest, drink plenty (this would probably be small beer in this time period, not water, because the water was also infested), stay clean, and for the sake of God do not allow anyone to let your blood, for the angels need that blood in their war against the evil spirits. Bloodletting is good for some types of illnesses but not the kinds caused by the tiny evil spirits.

[chekhovs-raygun]

boiling as a sterilization measure is also easy to explain. water returns to the air when heated and it rises as steam back up to the floodgates of heaven; we know God created the world in seven days, He's not up there making more water every time it rains. it circulates. the returning of water to heaven also purifies the water of unclean and malign influences. you know wormy water from a muddy puddle will kill your kid. you know you wouldn't wade into a bog and have a slurp. water that remains in the low places of earth absorbs all that is unclean from our waste and it may also sponge up new diseases from hell, we're not totally sure about that one, but it seems likely. God set up the heavenly water cycle so that the earth's waters wouldn't totally fill up with gunk.

what does this have to do with boiling your surgical tools? well look, the boiling water releases bubbles of steam which carries the malign influences up to heaven. you boil a knife, you send all the miasmic particles off with the steam to heaven. if you rinse the knife off in a bucket the water isn't hot enough, the particles go into the water and then right back on to the knife. you gotta boil it to get the particles all the way away. how can a tool or rag or a bed have miasmic particles on it when you can't smell them? humans have a lousy sense of smell. look at your dog on the hunt. are there no rabbits in the woods just because you can't smell them? we know that miasma is carried on the air, and is what makes stench so dangerous, and we know that humans can't smell worth a damn compared to dogs cats horses etc. a dog can smell if a rat died in a corner of the room last week. you can't. do you think licking the spot where the rat died is going to go well for you? luckily, what humans lack in snout we make up for in brains. we have extra brains where our sniffers should have been. God set that up for a reason.

and why does a rinse with wine spirits work? man, look how fast alcohol evaporates. my guess is that because wine contains a lot more vice than water, it evaporates a whole lot faster, in sort of an equal and opposite way that a rock falls faster than a feather. if you want the miasmic particles to get off there FAST, you dunk it in something that's going back to heaven at a gallop.

what's up with honey? it just preserves things against corruption. doesn't clean them off. honey doesn't evaporate at all. probably because bees don't sin. it's not good for ridding a tool of particles-- it's sticky-- but fine for preserving anything you don't want to go to heaven OR hell. this is why you wash the wound with wine spirits or purified water FIRST, to sluice the miasma out, then slap the honey on AFTER. and boil the damn bandage, too. you wouldn't put a rotten door in a sound doorframe and expect it to keep out bandits, would you? cmon.

[literallymechanical]

I love when a poster tries to convince people they know what they're talking about by presenting bare-minimum academic credentials and nothing else. It's giving nothing.

[nagi-kirima-style-cateran]

Like sure I get that bachelor’s degrees aren’t shit, but I’ve gotten published in pop science publications talking about fields that have nothing to do with my degree. I know a linguist who’s written several articles about physics, a physicist who’s written about biology, and a my grandmother worked in computer science with a degree in American studies.

Understanding most topics on a surface level or even a bit deeper is just reading and doing math.

[literallymechanical]

Least trustworthy pop science writer?

Linguist writing about physics

Physicist writing about biology

Voting ended onJul 18

[literallymechanical]

[lakemojave]

You know that whatever character did those problematic things isn't like. Real, right?

[lakemojave]

You are aware that a fictional character is just a rhetorical construct designed to fulfill a narrative/thematic purpose right? That their actions are written by an author who wants to use them to explore complex ideas and moral gray areas within the safe confines of fiction right? That they aren't a real person who has killed real people right?

[kayvsworld]

Thinking abt immortality and how meticulously you’d have to keep track of all of your shit so some nosy historian didnt spot your old journal or coat or copy of a book and call an infuriating time-based finders keepers

“It’s two hundred years old” they say. “It’s essentially public property” they say. It’s a letter you sent to your friend and it’s in a museum now and you’re screaming

[galwednesday]

Why are vampire stories always I Want To Drink The Sexy Neck Milkshake and never two vampires texting about the passionate letter one wrote to the other in 1863 but never sent that the other just saw in the Smithsonian’s fall exhibition on Love Through the Ages and what the fuck, Claude, why didn’t you say anything

[lastoneout]

Sorry we really went from free the nipple, take back the night, slut walks, and ending gender/sex segregation in sports being fucking milquetoast feminism 101 concepts to fucking girl dinner and "I just worry about fairness if we let trans girls play against cis ones" and "it was right of that woman to call the cops on a black man for existing near here in public during the day time because men are all violent monsters" and "radical feminism isn't transphobic we just need to kill all men including trans ones those oppressive traitors" and I will legit never be able to be normal about it. What the FUCK happened. I'd say I wonder what the feminists of my youth would say about this but I'm one and lemme tell ya I want to throw up. Go fucking read bell hooks or do something else useful please because all of this learned helplessness, gender essentialism, and transphobia dressed up as feminism is actively holding us back.

[pussyhoundspock]

joining the war on kids reading any book they want on the side of kids reading any book they want. simply you will be fine. it's even good to be confronted with things you don't understand and even find upsetting, uncomfortable and difficult. it's a surprise tool that will help you later.

[nonevahed]

prev tags:

literally ok so not a funny story but kind of funny? when I was nine I encountered rape in a book and I was like hey mom what’s this mean and she explained it and I was like oh. gross. and then like two weeks later a girl on the bus abruptly disclosed her csa and we were all like ????? what ???? but I was like wait hang on there’s a word for that ☝️🤓 and explained what it meant and that it was illegal and that you could talk to a teacher or my mom if it had happened to you and everyone was like ohhhhh I see I see and very somberly comforted the girl (she was safe she was removed from her home and living with my neighbor at the time so it wasn’t Urgent)

[zarohk]

And this is a perfect illustration of why it is important for kids to read or variety of things, and why abusers don’t want them to.

[barstoolblues]

mozzarella and parmesan is kind of like the age gap yuri of cheese

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Post-political

THIS SATURDAY (Jul 11), I’ll be at the Idler Festival in LONDON.

There's plenty of reasons to be skeptical of centrists who bemoan "political polarization" and call for a politics that abandons the "tribalism of left and right."

Obviously there's the false equivalence: on the right, you have fascists who want to send masked, armed goons into the streets to beat, kidnap and murder your neighbors. On the left, you have calls for higher taxes, unions, environmental impact reviews for data-centers, and an end to the genocide in Gaza.

"Leftist extremism" is moving some zines around:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jun/24/prairieland-texas-ice-protests-zines

Right wing extremism is attempting the overthrow of the government, murdering brown people in gulags, and the earth's richest man slaughtering the world's poorest children for the lulz:

https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hundreds-of-thousands-of-deaths/

"Horseshoe theory" (the idea that the far right and the far left actually bend around to meet each other) is bullshit:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/26/horsehoe-crab/#substantive-disagreement

The reality is that the right and left have large, substantive disagreements that are matters of life and death. Anyone dismissing these as "tribalism" doesn't know what "left" and "right" mean. At best, they have mistaken a collection of cultural signifiers – pronouns, MMA, brands of beer – for politics.

Mistaking cultural signifiers and identity markers for politics is centrism's most dangerous pathology, the thing that makes centrism the handmaiden of the right. If you think identity markers are politics, then you'll be tempted to think the answer to a world run by 150 rich, white, cis straight guys is to replace half of them with women, POCs and queer people. The difference between the left and the right isn't the identities of the ruling class – it's whether we have a ruling class at all.

I collect definitions of "right" and "left." There's Corey Robin's definition from The Reactionary Mind, that conservatism is the belief that some people were born to rule, and others to be ruled over, and that any attempt to elevate the latter group to positions of power (through civil rights movements, affirmative action, etc) will result in dire misrule and disaster:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/22/all-day-suckers/#i-love-the-poorly-educated

This explains how the right can encompass white nationalists (rule by white people), Hindu nationalists (rule by high-caste Hindus), libertarians (rule by bosses), imperialists (rule by military aggressors), etc. It also explains the right's obsession with learning the racial and gender markers of anyone involved in a plane crash or other disaster: "See, the oil tanker was being piloted by a DEI hire when it crashed into that bridge!"

Another important definition is Wilhoit's Law:

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/26/sole-and-despotic-dominion/#then-they-came-for-me

This one hardly needs explanation in this era of "it's not a crime if the president does it," where Alex Jones can owe billions to the parents of dozens of murdered children and somehow not have to pay or give up his assets:

https://www.status.news/p/infowars-the-onion-alex-jones-ben-collins

But when it comes to a "post-politics that is neither right nor left," the definition I turn to most often comes from science fiction writer Steven Brust, who once told me:

"Left" and "right" have had the same meaning since the French Revolution. If you want to know if someone is on the left or the right, ask them, "What is more important: human rights or property rights?" If they say "Property rights are a human right," then they are on the right.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/16/wage-theft/#ppp

That's it. That's the crux. If you think that property rights are a tool for achieving human rights, then you're on the left. You might support the right of farmers to block attempts to expropriate them via eminent domain in order to build a data center, or the right of people to not have their homes or devices searched by cops, or a library's right to own and archive digital books, even if the publishers insist that ebooks are never "sold," merely "licensed."

If property rights are a tool to achieve human rights, then property rights can be set aside when they impede other rights. Human beings have the right to health care, which is why we should have taken away the pharma companies' patents and copyrights, ending vaccine apartheid and letting the poor world make its own vaccines:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/25/the-other-shoe-drops/#quid-pro-quo

Human beings have the right to shelter. If your town has a million empty homes and a million homeless people, there's an obvious solution. At the very least, you can tax the shit out of empty homes to discourage the creation of derelict, empty blights:

https://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/owners-homes-left-empty-more-28622796

Human beings have the right to food. If a cartel claims that you may not legally sell your 100,000lbs of nectarines, you can just give them away and tell the cartel to fuck off:

https://apnews.com/article/california-farmer-nectarines-lawsuit-patent-4f7bc8ab185e8b9cbdd6d6ad4f2aabd1

As Brust says, this fight is as old as the French Revolution. It's literally the plot of Les Miz ("In days gone by, I stole a loaf of bread in order to live").

Note that this framework leaves plenty of room for disagreement among leftists: we can disagree about who should get taxed and how, when a company should be ordered to destroy its ill-gotten loot and when that loot should be divided up among its victims, and what to do about empty houses and homeless people. We can disagree about reparations, about collectivization and co-operatives, about land reform. Very (very!) few leftists want to abolish property, but to be a leftist is to agree that property is only ever a means, and never an end.

In systems thinking, we are counseled that the most profound and durable changes come from shifts in paradigms, from which all rules, laws and arrangements flow:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/12/donella-meadows/#paradigmatic

"Left" and "right" represent two radically different paradigms. The right's paradigm is that property rights are human rights, which cashes out to "property rights are the only human right." If property rights are a human right, then I can burn down my orchard and laugh as you starve outside the gates. If property rights are human rights, I can leave an apartment building empty while you freeze to death on its sidewalk. If property rights are human rights, I can fill my factory with death-traps and insist that the workers I kill freely chose to assume that risk (as economists would say, they have a "revealed preference" for being killed at work):

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/30/players-of-games/#know-when-to-fold-em

Leftists view property rights as a tool, like laws, or regulations, or polls, or voting. Used well, these tools can produce prosperity for all. But "voting" and "laws" aren't good unto themselves. The Swiss practice of voting on whether your neighbors qualify for citizenship is barbaric:

https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-38595807

Good regulations and laws are good, but simply passing any law is stupid and gets you into terrible trouble, even if the stupid law you've passed is designed to solve a real problem:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/23/destroy-the-village/#to-save-it

Viewed as tools, property rights are perfectly useful ways of achieving the primary purpose of a civilization: to safeguard the human rights of its people. Viewed as ends unto themselves, property rights are a terrible danger to our civilization and species.

If you believe property rights are tools, then you can pass laws banning corporations from electioneering:

https://sos.mn.gov/media/3k4hu2if/minnesota-election-laws-statutes-and-rules.pdf

If you believe property rights are human rights, then you end up supporting unlimited dark money spending in elections:

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/24-621_h315.pdf

If you believe property rights are tools, you can order landlords who want to ban their tenants from installing balcony solar to fuck off. If you believe property rights are human rights, then landlords can force their tenants to pay every dime the fossil fuel industry demands of them. "Property right as tool" allows you to defend a farmer's right to install a wind-farm, and still, to block a data-center from installing a gas turbine on its own land.

"Post-political" movements are made up of people who don't know what politics are. A "centrist" is ultimately a rightist, because the foundation of rightism is the supremacy of property. It is the ideology that breeds hereditary aristocracy ("property is a human right" means that it's a violation of your human rights to expect you to work for a living if you emerged from a lucky orifice). It's the ideology that breeds oligarchy.

Politics aren't a bunch of cultural signifiers or identity markers. Politics aren't about who rules – it's about whether we are ruled at all, or whether we are free.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/08/wilhoitian/#human-rights-v-property-rights

Image: Lewis Clarke (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bridport_,_Bridport_Suburbs_-_geograph.org.uk_-_6489460.jpg

CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en

[polyamandhellaglam]

Polyamory is safe for work. Polyamory is safe for kids. Polyamory is safe for day time tv. Polyamory isn’t more sexual than any other relationship and it can be just as romantic, sweet, and healthy.

[evilwriter37]

Aggressively reblogs.

[vizreef]

Olympus BH-2 microscope (Japan, 1980)

[screambirdscreaming]

Kfgshhgl checking up on the Manhattan building situation to see if a cause of structural failure has been identified yet and fucking

" Nathan Berman, founder and managing principal of MetroLoft, told CNN his company added roughly 18,000 square feet to 15 upper floors, and the additional load caused two columns to bend. Those floors then shifted and sagged, some as much as four inches, he said.

The columns bent “essentially from not having been properly reinforced or having been missed in the reinforcement process.” Berman said they will determine the exact reason “in due time.” "

Dude??

" As for calling it “a typical construction mishap” after the buckling occurred on Tuesday, Berman said he is not trivializing what happened but it shouldn’t be blown out of proportion.

“What I basically meant to say, maybe not so artfully, is that construction mishaps happen,” Berman said. “This was one such mishap that is unfortunate, but this is not so completely unique in the history of construction that it warrants this kind of scrutiny.” "

DUDE???

this is like, the worst pr I have ever seen anyone do. Jesus christ dude. Do you hear the words you are saying!!

[mortalityplays]

here's a secret: whatever you're doing, you have to root for your peers with all your heart because it forces you to root for yourself too. I've seen people in various spheres of my life (workplaces, education, art, activism) fall into the trap of envy and resentment when they see others succeed while they struggle, and it always always goes hand in hand with them pulling back and giving up and stagnating.

when you let yourself get sour grapes about shit, you tacitly give up on yourself. when you sit around hoping other people will flop and fail so you can catch up to them, you stop trying. it's a fantasy of mediocrity, the vain wish that other people would walk so you could take the gold medal at a jog. wouldn't you rather come last place at 27mph?