Rise Up, Oh Heart, For There is Another Battle to Win

justsomuchhacking:

bleedingshoulder:

zanmor:

taxloopholes:

taxloopholes:

Wonder how all the liberals who used the term “alt left” are feeling right now

It’s almost like demonizing the far left and taking on a moderate position during times of far right violence helps Republicans more than Democrats…

“I think there is blame on both sides. You look at both sides. I think there is blame object on both sides,” Trump said during his remarks today.

“You had some very bad people in that group. You also had some very fine people on both sides,” he added.

Some very fine Nazis showed up at Charlottseville 

I’m sorry.
question.

”times of far-right violence”

whose been starting fires, destroying property, macing folks in the face, smacking photographers over the head with bike chains, throwing glass bottles filled with m80s at crowds, tagged walls with “liberals get the bullet too”, and assaulted people in gangs on the streets for like the last 6 months, all while wearing black clothes?

A crazy asshole rightwinger claimed the first life of this bullshit, but do not for one fucking second make the assertion that the far-left are innocent victims, that they have not done their fair share of violence, and have no blood on their hands.

also, how about the people that came who don’t want history destroyed because it was ugly, and the people on both sides that came to protest but not engage in violence? could those people be very fine, on both sides?

Hey there.
Answer!

You’re young, and male, and in your 20s, all according to your profile. I was young and male and in my 20s once, so let me explain something to you.

There’s a cultural narrative that’s been sold hard to young intellectual men, to you and to me at one point, and that narrative is roughly: “you’re smarter and more enlightened if you’re neutral in politics”. The extremes are too passionate to see clearly, they’re biased.

I believed this, once.

But back to your point. Is there leftist violence? Sure. But read this.

https://www.cato.org/blog/terrorism-deaths-ideology-charlottesville-anomaly

That’s by the Cato Institute, a conservative (libertarian, but chaired by a Koch brother) think tank. Here’s the analysis:

“the annual chance of being murdered by a Left Wing terrorist was about 1 in 400 million per year. Regardless of the recent upswing in deaths from Left Wing terrorism since 2016, Nationalist and Right Wing terrorists have killed about 12 times as many people since 1992.“

Let me repeat for you that this was a conservative point of view, published by a conservative organization. Even a very, very casual look into terrorism data reveals that right-wing extremist groups are many times more violent than left-wing groups. I’m a leftist and think this analysis is horseshit, by the way, it’s way too soft on what counts as right-wing violence. But it’s from the opposite side of the isle, from an organization that cares about the truth enough to be credibly debatable.

So, this is where the trick is. When you don’t have truth on your side, when you know you’re wrong, a great tactic is to try and paint the other side as badly as you can. Make it about relativism, subjectivity. This is where the “both sides” rhetoric you’re repeating comes from: a desperate need by white supremacists, nazis, and other right-wing hate groups to muddy the water enough to make the uninformed complacent. By the way, take a look at a logical fallacy called False Equivalence.   

For men like you, normal rhetorical tactics can’t cut it. But! They can appeal to your desire to be more knowledgeable, to find a higher ground and to defend it.

But neutrality is not “higher” or more “noble”. It is not the “smart” position. It is not “balanced”. It is complacency. It is propaganda designed to take bright people like you and turn them into a buffer for extremists.

It’s designed to make you a nazi ally.

So go ahead with your “both sides” rhetoric if you want, but know what it is.

(via aethersea)

nine-for-a-kiss:

Anyway here is an itemised list of the reasons why I’m loving Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries so much:

1. Miss Fisher is obviously a badass but also she’s not young! She’s Of A Certain Age and she still lands the absolute hottest dudes. The hottest dudes. The hottest dudes
   
2. It’s the Carousing Good Guy trope but a lady!
   
3. Her lady-loving doctor friend Mac wears the most wonderful suits and she is amazing and I want to kiss her
   
4. What kind of a name is Phrynie. It’s absurd
5. Super old-school anti-procedural. Like Jonathan Creek but without all the British cringiness. Like Star Trek but instead of space stuff it’s murders and instead of space it’s set in Australia.
6. I didn’t even know Australia had a ‘20s until I watched this show. Upon closer study, it seems plausible
7. Miss Fisher is absolutely ruthless, clever, dangerous, insightful, and willing to go to any length to solve her case - including playing any number of fanciful parts, scaling large buildings, getting herself nearly poisoned to death, and otherwise putting herself in physical and emotional danger - and she does all this without having to sacrifice her love of pretty things. She scales those buildings in beautiful hand-tooled Italian heels. She is always impeccably, gorgeously dressed, and doesn’t ever change that about herself, even when she starts being taken more seriously by the police force or when she is doing serious detective work like interviewing wicked murderers or hunting for the man who killed her sister. Miss Fisher is only ever entirely herself.
8. She adopts strays like no one’s business.
9. There’s something very appealing about the story of a woman who has seen terrible, gruesome things, decided afterwards to dedicate her life entirely to pleasure, and then (almost despite herself) ended up becoming a philanthropist and a den mother and a doer-of-good. I have seen this story many many many (many, many) times from a male perspective, but not so often from a female viewpoint, and Miss Fisher does it without ever begrudging what she’s become. She’s infinitely more graceful than every other good-guy-against-his-better-judgment story I’ve watched or read.
10. THE END
    

(via notahotlibrarian)

lokisweboflies:

roane72:

Honestly, I think the whole “don’t pay the writers” thing boils down to the notion that everybody thinks they can write. It’s the old saw about the novelist at a cocktail party having to hear someone say, for the millionth time, “I’d love to write a book someday.”

Someone–Stephen King? Pretty sure I saw this in a Stephen King foreword–once said they’d like to say to a brain surgeon, “Boy, I’d love to do brain surgery someday.”

We treat “the ability to put words into a sentence” like it’s just the same as “the ability to form a coherent narrative that engenders a variety of emotions within the reader and puts them in a scene and shows them what they didn’t see before”.

And that’s like me drawing a stick figure and saying I’m an artist.

Writers are constantly devalued because everyone thinks they have a book in them and don’t realize the level of skill and commitment it takes to finish even a short story, much less a whole book. 

This goes well beyond fandom, but man, I would’ve hoped fandom would know better.

***REBLOGS AGGRESSIVELY***

(via thebibliosphere)

litanyofexcuses:

middle-eastt:

“Are you gonna let politics ruin a friendship?”

Yes tf I am

People talk about politics as if it’s this isolated, abstract concept that only matters at election time. Somebody’s politics is their world view. It’s whether they think certain human beings deserve rights. It’s how they think the world should be. And if somebody thinks that the world should be colder, meaner, less accepting and downright hostile to people that are different to them, then sure as fuck is the friendship over.

(via the-hogfather)

Violence, Abusers, and Protest

fabulousworkinprogress:

My grandfather was a generally peaceful man. He was a gardener, an EMT, a town selectman, and an all around fantastic person. He would give a friend - or a stranger - the shirt off his back if someone needed it. He also taught me some of the most important lessons I ever learned about violence, and why it needs to exist.

---

When I was five, my grandfather and grandmother discovered that my rear end and lower back were covered in purple striped bruises and wheals. They asked me why, and I told them that Tom, who was at that time my stepfather, had punished me. I don’t remember what he was punishing me for, but I remember the looks on their faces. 

When my mother and stepfather arrived, my grandmother took my mother into the other room. Then my grandfather took my stepfather into the hallway. He was out of my eye line, but I saw through the crack in the door on the hinge side. He slammed my stepfather against the wall so hard that the sheet rock buckled, and told him in low terms that if he ever touched me again they would never find his body. 

I absolutely believed that he would kill my stepfather, and I also believed that someone in the world thought my safety was worth killing for. 

In the next few years, he gave me a few important tips and pointers for dealing with abusers and bullies. He taught me that if someone is bringing violence to you, give it back to them as harshly as you can so they know that the only response they get is pain. He taught me that guns are used as scare tactics, and if you aren’t willing to accept responsibility for mortally wounding someone, you should never own one. He told me that if I ever had a gun aimed at me, I should accept the possibility of being shot and rush the person, or run away in a zig-zag so they couldn’t pick me off. He taught me how to break someone’s knee, how to hold a knife, and how to tell if someone is holding a gun with intent to kill. He was absolutely right, and he was one of the most peaceful people I’ve ever met. He was never, to my knowledge, violent with anyone who didn’t threaten him or his family. Even those who had, he gave chances to, like my first stepfather. 

When I was fourteen, a friend of mine was stalked by a mutual acquaintance. I was by far younger than anyone else in the social crowd; he was in his mid twenties, and the object of his “affection” was as well. Years before we had a term for “Nice Guy” bullshit, he did it all. He showed up at her house, he noted her comings and goings, he observed who she spent time with, and claimed that her niceness toward him was a sign that they were actually in a relationship.

This came to a head at a LARP event at the old NERO Ware site. He had been following her around, and felt that I was responsible for increased pressure from our mutual friends to leave her alone. He confronted me, her, and a handful of other friends in a private room and demanded that we stop saying nasty things about him. Two of our mutual friends countered and demanded that he leave the woman he was stalking alone. 

Stalker-man threw a punch. Now, he said in the aftermath that he was aiming for the man who had confronted him, but he was looking at me when he did it. He had identified me as the agent of his problems and the person who had “turned everyone against him.” His eyes were on mine when the punch landed. He hit me hard enough to knock me clean off my feet and I slammed my head into a steel bedpost on the way down.

When I shook off the stunned confusion, I saw that two of our friends had tackled him. I learned that one had immediately grabbed him, and the other had rabbit-punched him in the face. I had a black eye around one eyebrow and inner socket, and he was bleeding from his lip. 

At that time in my life, unbeknownst to anyone in the room, I was struggling with the fact that I had been molested repeatedly by someone who my mother had recently broken up with. He was gone, but I felt conflicted and worthless and in pain. I was still struggling, but I knew in that moment that I had a friend in the world who rabbit-punched a man for hitting me, and I felt a little more whole.

Later that year, I was bullied by a girl in my school. She took special joy in tormenting me during class, in attacking me in the hallways, in spreading lies and asserting things about me that were made up. She began following me to my locker, and while I watched the clock tick down, she would wait for me to open it and try to slam my hand in it. She succeeded a few times. I attempted to talk to counselors and teachers. No one did anything. Talking to them made it worse, since they turned and talked to her and she called me a “tattle” for doing it. I followed the system, and it didn’t work. 

I remembered my friend socking someone in the face when he hit me. I recalled what my grandfather had taught me, and decided that the next time she tried, I would make sure it was the last. I slammed the door into her face, then shut her head in the base of my locker, warping the aluminum so badly that my locker no longer worked. She never bothered me again. 

Violence is always a potential answer to a problem. I believe it should be a last answer - everything my grandfather taught me before his death last year had focused on that. He hadn’t built a bully or taught me to seek out violence; he taught me how to respond to it.

I’ve heard a lot of people talk recently about how, after the recent Nazi-punching incident, we are in more danger because they will escalate. That we will now see more violence and be under more threat because of it. I reject that. We are already under threat. We are already being attacked. We are being stripped of our rights, we are seeing our loved ones and our family reduced to “barely human” or equated with monsters because they are different. 

To say that we are at more risk now than we were before a Nazi got punched in the face is to claim that abusers only hurt you if you fight back. Nazis didn’t need a reason to want to hurt people whom they have already called inhuman, base, monsters, thugs, retards, worthless, damaging to the gene pool, and worthy only of being removed from the world. They were already on board. The only difference that comes from fighting back is the intimate knowledge that we will not put up with their shit.

And I’m just fine with that.

(via johanirae)

raptorific:

Also the Enterprise vs. Millennium Falcon debate has never ceased to confuse me, like, you’re basically wondering who’d win in a fight between a fully staffed US Navy research vessel armed with harpoons and torpedos and all sorts of other boat vessels OR your weedman and his sweet vintage van, his buddy riding shotgun with a crossbow

(via dubiousculturalartifact)

littlestartopaz:

claudiaboleyn:

Just putting this out there cause I’ve had about twenty asks calling me a ‘total fucking weirdo’ a ‘deluded fangirl’ and a ‘brainless tumblerina’ for shipping Vision and Wanda: 

IN

THE

COMICS

THEY

ARE

MARRIED

AND

HAVE

BABIES

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

@words-writ-in-starlight !!!!!!!

(via littlestartopaz)