On Saturday I hung out with my 84-year-old ecologist great uncle and he stopped in mid-conversation (abt the return of the whooping crane) and very seriously told me that “you can go one of two ways, as a naturalist”; either you keep sight of the hopeful possibilities, or you don’t. I’m one of nature’s wretched little pessimists but when an old ecologist literally holds your hands in his and tells you, “don’t despair,” you have to try, I feel.
I’m immune to a lot of the “hopepunk” narratives about ecology but…
The Karner Blue butterfly was extirpated from Canada the year before I was born. He donated to one of the projects to bring it back for years, and even though the project he was working on fizzled out, I told him about the branch in Toronto, still going strong. They save every lupine seed they can harvest and germinate them carefully so that in 20, 30, 40 years we might have enough habitat to bring the Blues back. He was part of the first wave of that effort.
Fuck!!!! What do you do with that kind of care? You have to at least try to believe that better things are possible!
I think people need to be more comfortable with illegalism and I’m not kidding. Of course the more legal something is, the safer and easier it is to do, but the more people who disregard the law, the harder it is to enforce. There are plenty of laws on the books that people just ignore and are never or rarely policed.
Becoming more comfortable with little illegal activities makes you more comfortable with bigger more important illegal activities. Additionally, it is crucial to build a wall of silence. Nobody talks everybody walks.
People who give out food without a permit, hold a march without a permit, grow a garden without a permit, are more likely to be people you could turn to to work with on preventing an eviction, or keeping people out of cop hands, or helping your friend Jane get crucial healthcare when it’s not legal in your state.
Communities comfortable with these acts won’t call the cops, and then nobody knows that it’s happening.
People have got to shift from both the idea that lawful = good/ illegal = bad, and that the illegality of something means that’s the end of it, and the only fight left is to make it legal again.
There’s always a balance! ⚖️✨ I’m working every day towards my long-term goals, but I also make sure to have fun in the short-term because you have to enjoy the present as well!🍦
Are the Trump indictments election interference? asked someone whose question I will take in good faith against my better judgment.
The American presidential election (November 5, 2024) is more than a year away. There is more than a whole year for these four (4) trials to occur. If candidates want to start campaigning (and have already been campaigning) year(s) in advance, that is not the American judicial system’s problem. Do not let anyone tell you that “I DECLARE CAMPAIGN SO YOU CAN’T TOUCH ME” is how this works.
I welcome criminal charges of actual substance for any candidate of any party. If you have dozens of pages of carefully documented charges against any/all Democrats, please have a DA call a grand jury whenever you would like. Political parties are not sports teams to me. Justice can do what it gotta do, whether it’s convenient or not.
District Attorney Fani Willis was careful to state that there should be a presumption of innocence (a standard American judicial doctrine). That said, I consider (as one example), this fourth indictment to be “charges of actual substance” because she delivered a 96-page document describing the racketeering (which, ironically, WAS ITSELF ELECTION INTERFERENCE):
u/code_archaeologist:
The math on this is easy.
For a jury to find a person guilty on a RICO charge in Georgia the prosecutor has to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that they engaged in two incidents that predicated the overarching conspiracy.
The RICO charge lists 161 predicating incidents.
So Fani Willis has 161 shots at each defendant, and only has to hit twice.
Fani Willis has 161 predicating incidents of conspiracy to work with. I am pretty confident that, while a defendant is innocent until proven guilty in the American justice system, these charges have some weight and deserve to be heard in court.
tl;dr if you don’t want to campaign under a legal cloud, don’t do crimes.
If anyone reading this truly wondered if the substance or timing of these proceedings are warranted, sincerely, I hope laying it out like this helped.
And, since these charges all involved gathering evidence and following legal procedures, they took time which is why they didn’t happen immediately in 2021. If you are going to pursue justice you can’t just point and declare things. especially if the case includes multiple infractions and a whole lot of witnesses…..
I love how different forms of art are all obsessed with each other. A book tries to capture the feeling of music, a painting tries to depict a scene in a book, a song tries to paint a picture. And it’s always insufficient. No single form of art can encapsulate another form of art and capture the essence of it – but it tries, and its attempts are impossibly compelling. All the forms of art are in love with each other and spend so much time trying to express what makes the other kinds of art so lovely.
for chinese new year they get all these famous actors and comedians together and they do a lil show and one of the comedians was like “i was in a hotel in america once and there was a mouse in my room so i called reception except i forgot the english word for mouse so instead i said ‘you know tom and jerry? jerry is here’
jerry is here
my chinese teacher once shared this story in class about someone who went to the grocery to buy chicken, but they forgot the english word for it, so they grabbed an egg, went to the nearest sales lady and said “where’s the mother”
When I was a teenager, we went to Italy for the summer holidays. We are German, neither of us speaks more than a few words of Italian. That didn’t keep my family from always referring to me when they wanted something translated because “You’re so good with languages and you took Latin”. (I told them a hundred times I couldn’t order ice cream in Latin, they ignored that.) Anyway, my dad really loved a certain cheese there, made from sheep’s milk. He knew the Italian word for ‘cheese’ – formaggio – and he knew how to say ‘please’. And he had already spotted a little shop that sold the cheese. He asked me what ‘sheep’ was in Italian, and of course, I had no idea. So he just shrugged and said “I’ll manage” and went into the shop. 5 mins later, he comes out with a little bag, obviously very pleased with himself. How did he manage it? He had gone in and said “'Baaaah’ formaggio, prego.”
I was done for the day.
This makes me feel better about every conversation I had in both Rome and Ghent.
I once lost my husband in the ruins of a French castle on a mountain, and trotted around looking for him in increasing desperation. “Have you seen my husband?” I asked some French people, having forgotten all descriptive words. “He is small, and English. His hair is the color of bread.”
I did not find my husband in this way.
In rural France it is apparently Known that one brings one’s own shopping bags to the grocery store. I was a visitor and had not been briefed and had no shopping bag. I saw that other people were able to conduct negotiations to purchase shopping bags, but I could not remember the word for “bag.”
“Can I have a box that is not a box,” I said.
The checkout lady looked extremely tired and said, “Un sac?” (A sack?)
Of course. A fucking sack. And so I did get a sack.
I once was at a German-American Church youth camp for two weeks and predictably, we spoke a whole lot of English.
When I phoned my mom during week two I tried to tell her that it was a bit cold in the sleeping bag at night. I stumbled around the word in German because for the love of god, I could remember the Germwn word for sleeping bag.
“Yeah so, it’s like a bag you sleep in at night?”
“And my mother must probably have thought I lost my mind. She just sighed and was like ‘So, a Schlafsack, yes?”
Which is LITERALLY Sleeping sac … The German word is a basically a one on one translation of the English word and I just… I failed it. At my mother tongue. BIG
My former boss is Italian and she ended up working in a lab where the common language was English. She once saw an insect running through the lab and she went to tell her colleagues. She remembered it was the name of a famous English band so she barged in the office yelling there was a rolling stone in the lab…
I’m Spanish and have been living in the UK for a while now. I recently changed jobs and moved to a new office which is lost somewhere in the Midlands’ countryside. It’s a pretty quaint location, surrounded by forest on pretty much all sides, and with nice grounds… full of pheasants. I was pretty shocked when I drove in and saw a fucking pheasant strolling across the road. Calm as you please.
That afternoon I met up with some friends and was talking about the new job, and the new office, and for the life of me I couldn’t remember the English word for pheasants. So I basically ended up bragging to my friends about “the very fancy chickens” we had outside the office.
Best thing is, everyone understood what I meant.
I love those stories so much…
Picture a Jewish American girl whose grasp of the Hebrew language comes from 10+ years of immersion in Biblical and liturgical Hebrew, not the modern language. Some words are identical, while others have significantly evolved.
She gets to Israel and is riding a bus for the very first time.
American: כמה ממון זה? (”How much money?” but in rather archaic language)
Bus Driver: שתי זוזים. (”Two zuzim” – a currency that’s been out of circulation for millenia)
that’s hilarious
I am officially screamlaughing at my desk from that last one OH MY
Does everyone know the prime minister who promised to fuck the country?
So in Biblical Hebrew the word for penis and weapon are the same. There is a verb meaning to arm, which modern Hebrew semanticly drifted into “fuck”: i.e. give someone your dick.
The minister was making a speech while a candidate, bemoning the state of the world. “The Soviet Union is fucking Egypt. Germany is fucking Syria. The Americans are fucking everyone. But who is fucking us? When I am prime minister, I will ensure we are fucked!”
What the hell Biblical Hebrew.
Just guessing: The path from something like “give someone a blade” to “give someone a blade, if you know what I mean ;)” is probably not that difficult or unlikely.
^Given that the Latin word for sheath (like, for a sword) is literally “vagina”, I can verify that this metaphor is a time-honored one.
Oh yeah and one time my Latin professor was at this conference in Greece and his flight was canceled, so he needed to extend his hotel stay by one more night.
Except he doesn’t speak a lick of modern Greek, and the receptionist couldn’t speak English. Or French. Or German. Or Italian. (He tried all of them.)
Finally, in a fit of inspiration, he went upstairs and got his copy of Medea in the original Greek (you know, the stuff separated from modern Greek by two and a half thousand years). He found the passage where Medea begs Jason to let her stay for one more day, went downstairs, and read it to the receptionist.
She laughed her head off, but she gave him the extra night.
Reblogged just for Medea
The way I have to find anything on this website. Hair the color of bread, me, 2016.
idk how you can straight faced say you experience misogyny as a man. like 1 you are ontologically incorrect and 2 how does it not give you Immense dysphoria?! i simply do not get it. be a real man lol :3
“Trans men must strive to be like cis men in every possible way and blend in with cis society and be dysphoric if they don’t, and if they are or choose to be any different they’re not real men.”
Where have we seen this before?
It used to be like. Feminism 101 to acknowledge “when boys deride each other for ‘dressing a girl’ or 'kicking/hitting like a girl’ or having 'girlish’ interests, they are saying that to be a woman is to be lesser and this is fueled by misogyny”. If a boy likes pink, and his peers respond to that with “what are you, a girl???”- that’s misogyny baybee!!!
Also anon is the one who is ontologically incorrect, because “misogyny” means “the hatred of women”. Being incorrectly gendered as a woman and then being treated poorly for it is, in fact, misogyny. Misogyny is directly tied to transphobia because no matter who it’s directed towards, a hatred of women is what fuels it.
Like.. men experience misogyny
This isn’t some fringe theory
It’s the very basis for the whole idea of the patriarchy and how it’s upheld
I think anon heard the pre-101 explanation of liberal feminism given to 6 year olds “feminism is when you think women should be equal to men” and then just didn’t think to learn further than that
I’m trying not to be a huge dick about it but I got a “but what about us q-slurs who are traumatized by the bad words?” on my slur reclaimation post and so I’ve made a handy guide
1. You are being called the slur.
A. If it is with malice, I am sorry for this experience, however, this situation is not at all what I was talking about.
B. If it is with affection or as a joke from other LGBTs, and it makes you uncomfortable, ask them to stop. If they don’t, they’re a dick for not respecting your boundaries.
2. You are being “forced” to see other people use the word for a larger community
A. If it bothers you then you are probably not the “fag community” to which they are referring, then. In a post? Block. Blacklist words. Block tags. Walk away. Avert your eyes. You don’t vibe with “queer community” then refer to it as LGBT. You make it sound like a “someone saying Happy Holidays means I can’t say Merry Christmas anymore” situation. You don’t have to use any words you don’t vibe with. Hate to say Dyke March or Dykes on Bikes? Don’t go to the march. Avoid the bikes.
3. You are being “forced” to hear other people use the word for themselves
A. I mean this with love and respect…suck it up. If it is so deeply triggering, remove yourself. Leave the situation. Block. Blacklist words. Block tags.
In a conversation about reclaimation, I am sorry, but you only get to decide how people refer to you, no one else. If someone else’s use upsets you, YOU have to do something about it, not them. You do not, under ANY circumstances, get to ask someone not to use dyke or fag or queer or tranny for themselves. You don’t get to ask someone not to use it/its. You don’t get to tell someone to tuck or bind because it gives you second-hand dysphoria. You do not get to decide how someone else is queer.
If being around them is that debilitating, you need to take steps to insulate yourself.
On the curate your own experience website, you should know how to do just that. There are so many guides out there. And to the complaint that “now” Pride uses all these slurs which has made Pride hostile to you, I’d invite you to crack open a book, but perhaps what you find will be too upsetting
[ID: 3 photos of old marches and protests. The first shows people marching, holding up a banner that says, “queer nation: get used to it.“
In the second photo, people are holding handmade signs that say, “cocksuckers for muffdivers”, “go girls go,” “we like dykes,“ and “fags in support of dykes.”
The third photo shows many people holding a large black and pink banner that says, “international dyke march, NY, 25 June 1994.“ End ID.]
ALT
Anonymous
