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xdaringdamselx:

BOOKS. BUY LOTS OF BOOKS.

This is a good suggestion in the best of times, but I’d particularly like to extend the suggestion now.

Buy books detailing everything important in our pasts: black history and culture, Muslim history and culture, Latinx history and culture, LGBTQ+ history and culture, Jewish history and culture, feminist history, labor and organizing and activism history, science texts, everything. I would suggest hard copies, and if possible, multiple copies to share. Don’t let anybody erase or alter the past. Never let a moment of it be forgotten or revised or washed away. Hold onto it, and hoard it like treasure.

And grow your wealth in this form, too–write your own histories, document and detail things if you can. Don’t let them change the present, and don’t let them normalize any of this shit. Write things down, remember them, and keep shouting to the heavens–we won’t be forgotten and kept down.

And buy lots of fiction from those same groups as well! Fantasy breeds hope, and we’re gonna need a lot of hope in our hearts, and a place to escape to when things get rough.

I am just… DEEPLY CONCERNED about the kind of people soon to be in charge, the people who want so desperately and direly to crush all of us underneath their heels and stamp us out, and have made no secret of it. All too often, that kind of shit starts with a controlling of the story and the press, and sometimes even worse. And that walking hairclog has made no secret of how he wants the story to be told.

So extend your library. Just in case. Stay knowledgeable and clever and wise.

chthonicserpent:

kaijutegu:

jezebelxx:

littlefroggies:

I try not to get political on my art blog, but I am gonna share this sentiment from my twitter.

It’s nice to hear “Fuck Trump” but piling all hate on him is misguided, Trump is not the only person who should be factored into protests, impeachment and human rights lawsuits: his team DEFENDED him and ENABLED him.

There are a lot of people who either played down, ignored or supported his conduct

Fact is, if Trumps impeached, all the people who helped his campaign will flip and agree and chastise him, cuz it’ll make them look noble, which they would LOVE, they get to sweep house and senate, have Pence be president, and pretend they’re on our side. “We hate Trump too, friends! We agree, he’s a bad man, let us fix his mess for you.” 

Think about it, anyone on his team right now looks really good by comparison to him. People who’re just as bigoted and heartless.

Do not forget that Vice President Pence is poised and ready to help anti-women and anti-LGBT legislation roll out and take away 50~ years of human rights progress. [source] And he just sat back and watched Trump be Trump, cuz all he cares about is getting his foot in the door – and we all just held it open for him and welcomed him inside. Slam it on his stupid foot, friends. Fact is, Pence is a hateful bigot, but he looks really good superficially next to Trump.

If we’re gonna support lawsuits for human rights violations, impeachments, etc, we can’t fixate on Trump alone. A lot of people made Trump happen via complacency and lies, with smiles on their faces.

Not My President… Not My Vice President.

Note: I genuinely don’t have time for debates or arguments on Tumblr even on my good days, so sorry if you wanted to engage me about this, even if you agree with me. I’m not ignoring people (unless, you know, insults), I just can’t give this more time. I have to get back to work and stuff.

Mike pence said literally that “cigarettes do not cause death.” He wants to fund gay conversion therapy. He is the literal embodiment of Satan.

Mike Pence caused an HIV crisis in 2015. In an age of STD tests and anti-retrovirals, Mike Pence’s attack on Planned Parenthood (meaning that in rural areas, there very often weren’t any places to get STD tests- the HIV wasn’t actually spread through sexual contact as much as it was injecting drugs- but no PP access meant no testing that could pick up on HIV) caused an actual HIV crisis. 

And his response? “I’ll pray for them.”

Later, he did authorize a needle exchange, but his first response wasn’t “I’ll take actual legislative action because holy shit, people are dying,” but “I’ll pray for them.”

Pence and Trump are two very different kinds of dangers. I want to stop the political posting and just go back to my regular blogging, but I grew up in Indiana. I’ve seen what Pence’s terrible decisions have done to my friends and family, and as bad as a Trump presidency’s going to be, a Pence presidency might actually be worse.

Pence is what I was afraid Cruz would be. 

discworldtour:

It was much better to imagine men in some smokey
room somewhere, made mad and cynical by privilege and power, plotting
over brandy. You had to cling to this sort of image, because if you
didn’t then you might have to face the fact that bad things happened
because ordinary people, the kind who brushed the dog and told the
children bed time stories, were capable of then going out and doing
horrible things to other ordinary people. It was so much easier to blame
it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. 

–Terry Pratchett, Jingo

queendread:

Like it literally doesn’t matter if Trump can’t do any of the impossible, illegal things he’s promised. It doesn’t matter, because as soon as a platform built on hate is validated in this way, culture changes. Britain the morning after the Brexit vote was a different place. It wasn’t just the measurable rise in hate crimes and plummeting economy, it was people feeling free to say all the ugliest things they’d ever thought because they knew at least half the country was behind them.

In the coming days and months, please stay safe. Please never stop fighting for a better world. This won’t be forever.

danharmon:

I don’t know what you text to a girlfriend this morning and I sure don’t want to find out through trial and error. Last night, she never came over because an hour into the election, at the sight of the first numbers, she stopped knowing how to interact with the world and couldn’t get out of bed. I share that deeply private fact without fear of embarrassing her, not because embarrassing women was legalized in last night’s referendum, but because she’s numb. If I texted her for permission to share her numbness, I’d get the same response as if I asked her to eat a submarine. “Okay,” she’d reply. “I’m going to try to sleep. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

I had no part in doing this to her, right? My state is blue, we legalized weed and protected Riley Reid’s workplace last night, and between being called an MRA, a douche and a pig by folks that remember me comparing Season 4 of Community to rape, I’m more often these days called an SJW cuck, which I like, because it sounds like someone younger than me. I want to be relevant and woke and lit and Pokémon to the max. Which is why I quietly rooted for Bernie but saw the Democratic primaries as being too sensitive to benefit from my loud mouth, and when Bernie conceded, I quietly switched to the only candidate that wasn’t anti-vaccination, anti-immigration or that Gary guy. I played my part in this whole thing just fine from beginning to end. So I’m off the hook with my shell shocked girlfriend, right?

No, because I played my part begrudgingly. And if I had known these results were possible, I wouldn’t have put an adverb on my playing of it. Except maybe “humbly” or “apologetically” or “extra cuckily” Because, at the risk of riling up anyone that will only see the political aspect of this personal confession: I know this wasn’t about emails.

If you feel it was, nothing bad is going to happen to you if you walk away from this post. I can assure you, I’m not challenging or invalidating the results of an election you see as a win. Fair play and all that. I’m glad we didn’t have a civil war.

But I want to leave a message here to my numb girlfriend that can’t work as tweets or texts or my trademark pillow talk babbling. And I guess there’s a few ex-lovers and coworkers that I hope read this too. Women that have reason not to believe I’m on their side.

The message starts with the obvious, I’m sorry. But what I’ve learned in my cuck SJW workshops is that saying “I’m sorry” isn’t an apology. A full apology is an acknowledgment of the offense, an expression of remorse and a commitment to change.

The remorse, that’s easy. I feel bad she lost and that I assumed she’d win and therefore was a dick about it. I’m all remorse this morning, I’d cut a pinky off if it let my girlfriend face the world today, smiling the way she was the last time I saw her. I don’t know if I’d be capable of actually doing the pinky cutting, I think that’s something a full on Trump guy would be better at, and if it were possible, I would like to be knocked out or at least anesthetized for the removal, because I’m a cuckity cuckimus maximus beta mega cucksuck. But I’d donate the finger and more to make this unhappen. Remorse expressed.

Acknowledgment of the crime is the one that’s going hurt and upset people because it’s confession to a crime that is life long and confusing and that won’t stop just because I confessed it.

I acknowledge that until this election, I have always felt, on some level, that although women weren’t getting a fair shake, it probably “kind of evened out” in other ways. No I can’t tell you what that means in detail because I’ve never actually consciously parsed the thought, and that’s the crime, I’ve just walked around with it. “It’s clearly harder to be a woman in this society,” I’d think, “but it’s probably easier in other ways. And in any case, one thing we know for sure…it’s different.” I do a podcast every week in which I’m constantly running my mouth about race and gender but my goal in doing so, I see now, has always been less to investigate, grow or connect and more to figure out how to make people like me (yes that last 43 years was me trying to make you like me, yes I know how sad and funny that is). I’ve kept one eye on the ever morphing fashion of gender discourse and the other eye on my own survival as a primate and figured I was, underneath it all, a feminist because my thoughts about women were never “they suck” or “they’re dumb” or “I want to hurt them.”

Now I see the crime starts so much earlier in the thought process than that. In figuring out how to survive as a frightened man, I’ve built every thought about people on a foundational assumption that the sexually reproductive dichotomy we inherited from life as old as plants was a more important dichotomy, regardless of context, than any other difference between two humans you could name.

And hey, sometimes that emphasis on sexual dichotomy is fun, or benign, or even progressive feeling, like when two men of two different complexions are so busy bonding about how women be shopping that they’re accidentally something other than racist for a second.

And then last night this thing happened. This thing that we know was not about emails. And not about the tangled roots of semi-documented corruption and not about revoked promises of walls or recanted suspicions about birthplaces, or anything you could name outside of that one thing that has us more divided than all our divisive specialities put together. This thing that has had us all so divided since before this country was a glint in its explorers’ eyes, that last night, with no ways left to express the division subtly, we walked up to the concept of our first lady president, gave it some thought, and walked away having opted for the first President to call Mexicans rapists in the same year he was charged with raping a 13 year old girl.

And I really hope you’re not still reading this if it’s making you want to argue with me. I don’t want to argue. There is no debate here to be had and we can all agree debates have stopped mattering because we also just elected the first President to blame flaming out in a debate on the moderator’s menstruation.

There I go to my comfort zone. Anger, babbling, competition, show everybody what a dramatic underdog hero you are. That’s the part of me represented by this election, that’s the part of me that got our first David Duke endorsed President into an office where he has access to the camera in your laptop and that’s the part of me I want to apologize for, which means to express remorse for, acknowledge the existence of, and finally, most importantly, to commit to changing.

I’m never going to secretly suspect anyone of exaggerating again when they tell me they don’t feel supported, or that they feel attacked. I’m going to take everything people tell me about the challenges facing them at face value and make it my goal to help them get their elusive fair shake however they can. And I’m going to take that part of my thought process that recognizes another human’s gender or race, and rather than nobly ignoring it or hilariously calling it out, I’m going to remove it from the foundation of my thoughts and just put it over to the side, where it’s as significant as someone’s horoscope and says as much about their needs as their height or weight or number of limbs, which is to say, sometimes a lot, sometimes not at all, but never by default. I am going to stop trying to find meaning in chaos by categorizing people, no matter how optimistic or supportive those categories might seem. They’ll never be fair and they’ll never lead to me doing right by anyone.

I’m not going to achieve this new thinking by typing it, I’m going to change it the way my therapist says change works: by behaving and speaking like a person that already lives in that world and letting my neurology gradually adapt. By slowing my thoughts down at the top of judgments and practicing the observation of my own brain in even the most common moments. By disrupting my mental routines even when I don’t perceive them as existing, in every encounter I have with every human being, even while I’m just laying in bed alone, running simulations of others. I’m going to stop expecting things like fairness and respect from the world and start seeing what happens when I become the source of those things. I’m going to stop making it my business to punish and reward others and defending myself. I’m going to try to figure out what the people that enter my life need in the moment of their entrance and make unique real time decisions about my relationship with them. No, I’m not going to be nicer to anyone on Twitter. Twitter is a fucking toilet. Don’t meet people in a toilet if you want to have a healthy encounter. I go there to shit on the planet and make jokes.

And if it takes me until the moment before I randomly die, I’m going to focus on making the space around me an effective advertisement for a decent world. Without expecting the world to buy into it. I don’t control the world. I don’t control other people. I control whether or not I surrender. I control when my walls come down, when the bullshit stops and whatever’s behind the walls joins whoever’s near me.

Whatever this is isn’t going to get better by getting longer. It also stopped behind honest in the last paragraph because my girlfriend came over and is now sitting next to me and I’m not interacting with her because I’m trying to finish this. I don’t know how to finish writing things. And I don’t know what people need or what they’ve been through or what hurts them and when it’s me. Cody, I’m sorry about last night, about the thing with the guy with the hair and the stuff. I acknowledge my role in it, I feel bad about it and I’m going to change the only part of it I can change. I love you. You deserve better.

Everybody reading this deserves better. Maybe this is how we end up getting it.

Or maybe this is how the statue of liberty ends up buried on a beach up to its armpits in Planet of the Apes. I always wondered what the hell could make that happen.