in law school, my mom took me to this stress retreat because my family was vaguely aware i was a suicide risk. and they didnt allow phones, so i brought this huge bag of books. and one of the options for "destressing" was this fake cave grotto thing, where they'd decorated a room to make it look exactly like an underground cave and the air was like -10 degrees, but there was a like 4ft deep pool in the middle that was kept super super hot, so you would just switch between the hot and cold. and they would bring you an endless supply of this weird syrupy drink thing that was like super caffeinated and tasted like sugar and mint. and so i spent multiple days sitting half submerged in this fake grotto drinking mystery liquid and reading. and i have to be honest i really did feel less stressed
Someone will say "as a queer person in the heart of empire, my life is in danger every day" and you'll find out they're a developer for Amazon and live in San Francisco or Seattle or some shit, and then you'll meet a trans girl from Alva, OK who's like "Yeah, things are pretty good. AutoZone moved me to full-time."
#That's what I mean when I say the foundation of feminism and queer community should not fixate on victimhood #Once you feel that our suffering is our shared experience an not our love then our suffering becomes vital to the culture #I don't want a culture where suffering is vital #I want a culture where love is celebrated #The suffering is an imposition not a prerequisite #And yeah I sure fucking hope our oppression is diluted bitch you WANT us freebasing the uncut shit???
Bodily autonomy (like abortion, anti draft, etc) -> “The government shouldn’t be able to force anything on my body I don’t want.”
Anti surveillance -> “I don’t trust big government/big tech (big brother if you’re feeling frisky) with the ability to spy on me and my family.”
Immigration -> “Next to all of us immigrated at some point, I don’t see why the elites get to decide who’s allowed to be where. What’s to stop them coming for me?”
Climate Change -> “Big oil shouldn’t get to determine whether or not I get to go places. I don’t want to be dependent on some big business to survive.”
State Violence -> “I don’t want the goddamn secret police breathing down my neck! I trust my community a whole hell of a lot more to help me than I do the state!”
The vast majority of conservatives think of themselves as underdogs being repressed by the government/the elite, and they value personal freedom (specifically their personal freedom, they don’t care about other people). The will almost always agree with leftist points if you can find a way to blame the problem on their vague enemies (useful, since rich people are the root of most problems), and tie it back to their ability to say fuck everyone else. NEVER appeal to science, theory, logic, or human goodness. Make it seem as if you are a paranoid lunatic who trusts no one. They love it.
Ok, so, bottom surgery recovery is going ~splendidly~ tbh, I’ve been off opioids basically all week, she’s healing well, she even looks pretty which at under the one-month mark is making me feel pretty optimistic. The only problems it’s giving me are that sometimes if I see something really gross it makes my body feel like it’s trying to suck itself inward from my vagina, like a black hole generated by the power of “ew ew ew,” and that healing is really tiring so I’m like…always sleepy. But tbh most of bottom surgery recovery has been peaceful, I’ve had a lot of time to do some self-reflection (which I hate, doing my own therapy as a patient suuuuuucks), BUT, I do have one funny story:
Right as I wake up there’s a nurse there who hustles over and says he’s glad he saw me wake up and tells me he’s giving me some pain meds and then he gives me IV Fentanyl and so I go from like “Ow ow ow ow awake awake awake” to “ooooooh fuck I’m floating on clouds made of rainbows” in like 6 seconds and so I was pretty out of it. The hospital had all the recently-post op patients all in one big-ass room, and they see patients for ALL sorts of surgeries, so I was next to an old guy who got his knee replaced on one side and some young 30-something dude with some kind of mechanism on his leg. So I asked him what happened since I was high as fuck and feeling kind as a result, and he said he broke his leg hiking off-trail when his leg went down a literal rabbit hole and snapped his shinbone. I say something like “damn dude that blowssssss” while giggling because I’m high as FUCK on actual fentanyl and he’s like “Yeah, for real, I’m feeling great right now though! What about you? What are you in here for?”
And I fully was not thinking like a person, I was thinking like a fentanyl-addled tgirl so I just go “Oh, haha, they cut my dick off!”
And he just kinda stops and is like “Hah-WAIT what? Why?” and I was trying to think of an acceptable answer to tell this cis guy because it’s dawning on me through my drug-induced haze that not everybody wants their penis gone and before I can think of a response two nurses just came up and…wheeled him away. Idk where to, and I don’t think he did either, because he kept looking back at me and frantically asking the nurses where they were taking him and I never gave him an adequate response so he probably thought he was gonna get that “Transgender for Everyone” shit before he was probably actually delivered to whoever his ride home was.
unconvinced i'll ever find "the vitamin" that makes me all better so i can get real work done but i do expect they'll elucidate whatever my deal was post-mortem, after which what i did manage to accomplish with my life will be regarded on the level of Beethoven composing despite being deaf or Gordon Ramsay cooking despite being british
being extremely out of the loop especially regarding social media trends and discourse means you often end up learning things only after they've been turned into memes like ten times removed from the original context. for example the first time I ever read the term "girl dinner" it was on a gif of the T-Rex from Jurassic Park eating people so you can imagine the confusion when some time later I stumbled upon posts where people were hating on it and calling it gender essentialist
We have this interesting situation where we basically no longer have privacy nor the expectation of privacy, but we also don't have community or meaningful connection with others, so we're all simultaneously both completely exposed and absolutely alone, and please understand that when I say this situation is "interesting", what I in fact mean is that it's "nightmarish and I wish I could wake up"
Jewish baby named Edgardo Mortara is seemingly about to die in Bologna, 1851
Catholic nanny secretly baptises him to save his soul, which she’s not exactly the kind of authority who can do that, but w/e, it’s interpreted by the church as valid later
Kid survives
1857 her secret gets out, a baptising makes a kid a Catholic according to the Church and a Catholic can’t be raised in a non-Catholic household in the Papal States, so the church authorises the police to kidnap Edgardo from his family
Raised personally by Pope Pius IX, Jewish family not allowed to take him back due to Church doctrine, this action destroys the family with grief and despair
This case gets international infamy with the Pope not understanding why everyone’s shiting on him for doing this, including allies
Emperor Napoleon III shifts from opposing Italian unification to supporting it as a direct consequence
Bologna falls the next year, 1859
Kingdom of Italy forms 1861
By 1870 Rome is lost to the Italians and the Papal States are no more
(Edgardo Mortara goes on to become Father Mortara)
(He dies in Belgium in 1940 three months before the Nazis occupied the nation, which if he’d have lived he would’ve been persecuted as a Jew)
Fun fact: the Catholic Church did not stop doing this after Edgaro Mortara. During WW2, many Jewish children were put in convents or catholic-run orphanages for their own safety. Sounds nice right? Except after the war ended, when parents or surviving relative went back to claim their children, the church went, “uhhh, actually they’re catholic now, no take backs!”
The most infamous of these cases was the Finaly affair. Two Jewish children in France, Robert and Gerald Finaly, were placed in a Catholic nursery in 1944 in anticipation of their parents being deported to Auschwitz, where they were both murdered. Their aunt, Marguerite Fischel, survived the war and went to find the boys so she could take them to live with her. However, the nun who had custody of the boys, Antoinette Brun, adamantly refused to give them up, reportedly saying that “The Jews are not grateful”
What followed was a years long custody battle where despite being repeatedly ordered by courts all over Europe to return the boys, Brun took them to many different countries and hid them, with the support and help of other nuns and priests. It was suspected at the time, and later confirmed by documents released in 2020, that Pope Pius XII had supported the effort to keep the boys away from their surviving family and have them be raised Catholic.
Thankfully, after negotiations between a sympathetic cardinal in France and the chief Rabbi of Paris, the boys were finally recovered and reunited with their aunt.
Documents reveal the private discussions behind both Pope Pius XII’s silence about the Nazi deportation of Rome’s Jews in 1943 and the Vatic
I wish I could say that the phenomenon of the Catholic Church kidnapping children and keeping them away from their families for the purposes of forcefully raising them Catholic is unique to Jews, but it’s not. From the mid nineteenth century to the mid twentieth century, the Church ran hundreds of residential schools in the US and Canada where indigenous children were kidnapped from their homes and forced into these cruel and inhumane “schools”. The children were forbidden from speaking their own languages or practicing their own cultures and religions, their hair was cut, and they were subject to emotional, verbal, spiritual, physical, and sexual abuse. Many of the children died due to malnutrition or medical neglect, their bodies buried like dogs beside the schools. The Catholic Church was not the only Church to participate in this, but they’ve been the most reluctant to fully acknowledge and apologize for it. It was only in 2022 that Pope Francis apologized on behalf of the Catholic Church for their part, but some people found the apology inadequate.
Idk what my point is here, just that there’s such a clean link between evangelizing, cultural/religious imperialism, and how damaging and horrifying a religion can be when it is thoroughly convinced of its own superiority. And that unless an institution is forced to change, it probably won’t change on its own.
Crusaders with Cupcakes @theannualextremistbakesale - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
