too absent-spirited to count

18 / infj / mbti stuff and poetry, usually

[such-a-yankee]

Laci Green is embarrassing, and it’s kind of sad. I get wanting to have dialogue with people, I’ve done it from both liberal and conservative perspectives, and it has tremendous value.

HOWEVER, you can’t have a dialogue that changes anyone’s mind if one party goes in believing the other is a lesser person in some way. Kindness will not function to convince someone they are wrong about what causes them to antagonize other people, especially if they never meet the people they’re antagonizing.

And in this case, these people aren’t antagonizing, they’re attacking, threatening, and dehumanizing other people. Giving someone a platform to say they think progressive tax is bad policy is engaging in a dialogue. Giving someone a platform to say that poor people are leeches on society and deserve to suffer under a flat tax is helping them to spread vitriol without ever confronting them or their toxic ideas.

If an idea is directly opposed to someone’s basic humanity, it’s a bad idea. If you help someone spread such a bad idea, you bear responsibility commensurate with the harm you help cause.

I miss the Laci Green who educated people about the basic humanity of others. When does she come back?

[undertonic]

hi! I don't know/follow you but I'm scrolling through the Laci Green tag rn bc I've been thinking a lot about this lately.

I def agree with you that we HAVE to draw the line on subjective views of reality/truth when it comes to human rights. an “opinion” can be harmful in very real ways to very real people, and we have every right to feel indignant when it seems like a prominent online presence (Laci) is using her popularity to defend people’s rights to have those opinions -- like, yes, they are legally ALLOWED to have those opinions, first amendment and all, but that’s not the point here, the point is fighting for basic human rights!!!! -- but I have to say, I genuinely don’t believe that’s what Laci is doing here. hear me out:

to us, it’s very clear that we have the moral high ground, which makes it so tiring to converse with people who have bad ideas, like you said. the Internet is a wonderful thing but also, on some level, I believe it’s contributed to this huge rift between two political groups that all of a sudden have NO idea how to converse meaningfully with each other. we always expect the other to use hateful speech with us. but like.... we HAVE to somehow engage with the other side to make any sort of difference, ya know? and the rhetoric used by extremists on both sides (while one may be morally righteous at its core) just further polarizes these issues, undeniably. just look at the comments on Laci’s most recent vid! the hypocrisy of the “antis” just ASTOUNDS me . . . but until we talk to them on a different platform, on a different level, they’re never gonna even have the chance to reconsider their beliefs. there’s some huge misunderstanding happening somewhere, and we should investigate that & figure out where it comes from!

we’ll have to wait and see, but it’s my hope that Laci is trying to show us an example of what that meaningful conversation might look like. and I think that is SUCH important work that not many people have the ability/guts to do. if I remember correctly, Laci prefaced this whole thing by saying that no one fighting for social justice is required to engage bigots in conversation -- but she can, due to her online presence, and she IS. I’m really excited to see what happens. I don’t know if it will make a difference, but I hope it is a step in the right direction.

(disclaimer I’m not trying to defend Laci on any problematic views that she might have I’m just playing devil’s advocate about this whole debate thing. also, sorry for the novel on ur post! <3)

[annaxmalina]

[27oct16] 001\365 (digital, laser print)

Keep reading

[violentwavesofemotion-deactivat]

Everything touches me—I see too much, I hear too much, everything demands too much of me.

Clarice Lispector II Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector (via violentwavesofemotion)

[taywhytetrash-deactivated201706]

Hit me with your best

car

[ofgeography]

i left where i was watching the results because i couldn’t stand to be in a room with other people, since other people remind me that i am also a person, who lives in the world, and has to react to it.

god, i’m so tired. aren’t we all so fucking tired? 

i don’t know what the way forward is. i don’t know how to keep going except to just do it. to take each day as it comes and not stop fighting and not stop being loud and not stop holding onto each other and not stop doing the best we can in a world that caters to the worst of us. that’s what i’m going to do. i’m just going to get up in the morning and get out of bed and put one foot in front of the other. i want to do it with you. i know we are all walking blindly but there aren’t any other options. we just move forward. we don’t let ourselves go back.

i love all of you. whether or not you follow me, or think i’m funny, or have read a single word i’ve ever written, i’m grateful to be alive at the same time that all of you are alive. to all of you who are LGBTQIA+, POC, muslim, jewish, undocumented, women, latin@s, and all the groups i haven’t mentioned, we let you down. too many of us sat when we should have stood. too many of us were blinded by resentment. i’m sorry. i’m so, so sorry. i love you. you matter. you are important. your life is precious. your life is precious. your life is precious.

i will keep fighting for it. ❤️

[goalsmami]

I wish I could kiss you tonight

[tinyghosthands]

Today is a scary day.

This is a play about being scared.

This is a play from my new book, which is coming out soon. 

Earlier, I could have said “this is a scary play,” if I wanted to make it rhyme.

That’s one possibility, out of many.

[existential-celestial]

darling girl, do not apologize for the way you drag your heaviness across the months; for the way you needed a hand to get through; i am willing to carry you. there should be no guilt in the belief that you are going to win this race. there should be no guilt in trying. there should be no guilt in faith. let me tell you  about how a well-written book once said: ‘love casts out fear,’ so please know that i love you, but the sky loves you better. i join the heavens in cheering you on. i join the heavens in celebration. you are alright.

j. p. berame // fragments from a conversation // no. 091916 (via existential-celestial)

[impressoess-blog]

[undertonic]

if I’m being really honest the worst part about being in a LDR is that boys always have pockets to hold ur things and without my boyfriend I usually have 0 pockets 

[2complx-deactivated20161228]

If you get to see the person you love everyday you are one lucky fucker

[taliabobalia]

who you are in high school is not who you will be in college and who you are in college is not who you will be when you are 30.

when you accept that you are malleable and ever-changing, you will be less resistant to new ways of thinking and being and you will grow into the beautiful person you are meant to become.

resist the urge to remain stagnant. there are always things to learn about the world and yourself. let yourself learn them.

[thelovejournals]

I don’t know what they are called, the spaces between seconds– but I think of you always in those intervals.

Salvador Plascencia, The People of Paper  (via thelovejournals)

[thelovejournals]

And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter— they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long.

Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (via thelovejournals)

[gothhabiba]

My family’s native language, which I grew up speaking, is far from a niche language. Bengali is the seventh most common native language in the world, sitting ahead of the eighth (Russian) by a wide margin, with as many native speakers as French, German, and Italian combined. And yet, on the Internet, Bengali is very much a second-class citizen – as are Arabic (#5), Hindi (#4), and Mandarin (#1) – any language which is not written with the Latin alphabet. The very first version of the Unicode standard did include Bengali. However, it left out a number of important characters. Until 2005, Unicode did not have one of the characters in the Bengali word for “suddenly”. Instead, people who wanted to write this everyday word had to combine three separate, unrelated characters. For English-speaking teenagers, combining characters in unexpected ways, like writing ‘w’ as ‘\/\/’, used to be a way of asserting technical literacy through “l33tspeak” – a shibboleth for nerds that derives its name from the word “elite”. But Bengalis were forced to make similar orthographic contortions just to write a simple email: ত + ্ + ‍ = ‍ৎ (the third character is the invisible “zero width joiner”). Even today, I am forced to do this when writing my own name. My name is not only a common Indian name, but one of the top 1,000 names in the United States as well. But the final letter has still not been given its own Unicode character, so I have to use a substitute… I am not the only one who has trouble writing their name correctly in Unicode. Linguistically, East Asian languages such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean have distinct writing systems. Some (but not all) of the characters trace their lineage back to a common set, but even these characters, known as Han characters, began to diverge and evolve independently over two thousand years ago. The Unicode Consortium has launched a very controversial project known as Han Unification: an attempt to create a limited set of characters that will be shared by these so-called “CJK languages.” Instead of recognizing these languages as having their own writing systems that share some common ancestry, the Han unification process views them as mere variations on some “true” form. To help English readers understand the absurdity of this premise, consider that the Latin alphabet (used by English) and the Cyrillic alphabet (used by Russian) are both derived from Greek. No native English speaker would ever think to try “Greco Unification” and consolidate the English, Russian, German, Swedish, Greek, and other European languages’ alphabets into a single alphabet. Even though many of the letters look similar to Latin characters used in English, nobody would try to use them interchangeably. ҭЋаt ωoulδ βε σutragєѳuѕ. Even though our language is exempt from this effort, Han unification is particularly troubling for Bengali speakers to hear about. The rhetoric is a blast from our own colonial past, when the British referred to Indian languages pejoratively as “dialects”. Depriving their colonial subjects of distinct linguistic identities was a key tactic in justifying their brutal rule over an “uncivilized” people.

I Can Text You A Pile of Poo, But I Can’t Write My Name – Aditya Mukerjee (via dangercupcakemurdericing)

[ashtonf2m]

Steven Universe/Parks and Recreation - Lions

[undertonic]

hey me, here’s the thing to know: your good qualities & your bad qualities are not mutually exclusive

sometimes when you feel guilty about something it can overwhelm all self-appraisal besides “I am a piece of shit”

you are a human with human flaws. you are learning, maturing, trying your best. it’s way too easy to conflate having regrets, having flaws and this overwhelming sense of absolute immorality.

criticism does not help you grow when it is improperly harsh; keep it constructive, learn from your regrets who you want to become, and most importantly, recognize the traits you love about yourself – value them, nurture them, let them guide you into maturity

this is who you ARE. you want to make that mold out of positivity & love, not hatred.