I’m Actually In Love

since I’m thinking about this instead of studying for bar prep:

people in general tend to assume that a person who’s been arrested is either innocent or guilty. and if they’re guilty, then they deserve fewer rights than the innocent person.

like, if the police break into an innocent person’s house and look for drugs, we recognize that it’s a bad thing and a gross violation of rights. but if the police break into someone’s house and do find drugs, well, that’s just what they deserved. we’d all be upset if the police started randomly murdering people on the street for no reason, but many wouldn’t mind if the police started randomly killing known child molesters. it’s not okay if the police plant evidence to frame an innocent man for murder, but if they know he’s the murderer and plant evidence to help the case along? well, that’s unfortunate but necessary.

there are three problems with this:

You cannot always know with certainty who’s innocent and who’s guilty;

A two-tiered “innocent” and “guilty” legal structure will always be used against innocent marginalized people;

Even guilty people have rights.

this happens a lot on tumblr. not exclusively on tumblr (it’s also a major aspect of most “gritty” police dramas and almost all comics), but it’s definitely there. like, calls to summarily execute rapists sound great in theory, because we all agree that rape is evil. except for when it’s used to kill innocent black men who looked the wrong way at a white woman. 

and there are people who will say that no, of course, the problem isn’t summarily killing rapists, the problem is summarily killing the wrong people (that is, innocent people). which, again, you can’t know who’s innocent and who’s guilty - lots of innocent people aren’t sweet old ladies who’ve never done anything wrong, or have perfect alibis and never contradict themselves. hell, being guilty of a crime in the past doesn’t mean that they committed this specific crime that they’ve been accused of.

and even if they are guilty - even if they are stone-cold, unrepentantly guilty - they still have rights. that’s what “innocent until proven guilty” means. it means that stripping someone of their legal rights is a big fucking deal, so no matter how guilty Obvious McCriminal looks, you still have to follow the rules we’ve set in place to prevent abuses. 

like, it’s not that every person who’s ever been treated shittily by police and the court system is actually innocent, so therefore the system is bad. it’s that we have a system that treats people like shit once we’ve decided they’re guilty, regardless of when the decision is made, and we’re okay with that. after conviction? definitely. after arrest? yup. before arrest, because we just have a feeling about them? sure.

and I get why people make posts or write stories about guilty people being treated badly. wanting vengeance is a powerful emotion. grief and anger are powerful emotions. it is not unnatural to want to hurt people who have hurt others. people like the idea of karma, of cosmic scales balancing out the hurt and suffering inflicted by a person by making them suffer back. I’m not saying that no one is allowed to have those feelings. 

I’m just saying that there are implications behind them that are deeply disturbing (“if I decide you’re guilty, you’re less of a person to me”) and that it’s the primary driving force behind most of the issues in our criminal justice system.

Rutger Bregman is the Dutch historian who became a global sensation after an appearance at this year’s Davos summit, where he accused attending billionaires of ignoring taxation. Now he has created another viral moment in an extremely uncomfortable interview with Fox News’s Tucker Carlson.

Bregman so riled Carson with his accusations of hypocrisy, critiques of Fox’s conservative agenda, and attacks on Donald Trump that the TV host called him a “moron” and angrily told him: “Go fuck yourself.”

Source

Lot more people around the world are going to watch this now than if it actually aired. Speaking truth to power is the best viral content!

Americans- put your Thanksgiving Wokeness where Your Mouth is.

This is the website of the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe.

These are the People who met the “pilgrims”.

 In spite of this, the US government doesn’t fully acknowledge their sovereignty as a Tribal Nation, or human rights, or their right to live in their own home land.

They are trying to keep their last few scraps of land out of the greedy grabbing hands of the Tr^mp Administration.

Land is more than square footage. It’s ancestral sites, it’s the right to say ‘We live here and you can’t just throw us out when it’s convenient to you’, and it’s Family for generations, and it’s Home.

Donate to help them keep it, and to fund their community programs, education, healthcare, senior services and more.

name one native american intellectual off the top of your head, name one native american actor or actress off the top of your head, name one native american senator, one native american news anchor, or an author or a tv personality or a singer or a poet or a comedian, name a single native american teacher you’ve had, can you? probably not 

ok so now think of one native american cartoon character you know of or a sports team relating to native americans whether it’s their actual name or their team logo, or a town you live in or near with a “native” name bet a lot of these things came to you right away i bet you didn’t even have to think 

needing native representation in media, education and government are not decoy issues, the commercialization and appropriation of native cultures are not decoy issues, the lack of native representation is institutional oppression at work 

2020 Creator Wrap: Favorite Works

I was tagged by @sohotthateveryonedied, thanks for the tag!

Rules: It’s time to love yourselves! Choose your 5 (or so) favorite works you created in the past year (fics, art, edits, etc.) and link them below to reflect on the amazing things you brought to the world in 2020. Tag as many writers/artists/etc. as you want (fan or original) so we can spread the love and link each other to awesome works!

I’m not going in a particular order, except #1 is my #1 right now just because my head is so stuck in that story and I’m obsessed lol 

1. Reclaiming Innocence 

This idea came to me while I was writing Not All Kidnappings and pretty much the first chapter was jotted down in my notebook in early August and left there until I started flipping through it in like October or whenever I started posting and I got re-obsessed with the idea and wrote three chapters in about a day. I just love Jason-joins-the-family fics and recovery-from-abuse fics and so I guess it’s natural I love this story with my entire heart. 

2. Jason and the Three Terrors

I LOVE this AU. The basic premise was given to me in a prompt over 2 years ago at this point, and I wrote like the first 40k words in 2019, but I didn’t start posting until 2020 so I think it counts. I really want to get back to it and finish up part one so I can start drafting part two, but I’ve bitten off more than I can chew when it comes to writing so it’s sitting on hiatus at the moment. :( but i LOVE Mara with my entire heart and really look forward to the first time Jason tells her he loves her because both those children deserve family and love and happiness and 😭 (and same with damian and athanaisa as well. and I can’t wait for Bruce to meet them all. ahhhhhh I really want to write the (alternate scene) where jason takes them straight to bruce and bruce is like !!!!!!! jason??????? and jasons freaking out because he knows bruce hates him and he’s sorry he’s there but b you just have to take these kids okay? and bruce just wraps jason up in a hug completely ignoring the three kids for the moment because ‘omg jason how– how are you here? i miss you so much.’ and 🥺 but again that’s just an alternate scene because jason moves the kids to metropolis per the prompt first.) but anyway, I love this story, I daydream in it all the time, and I can’t wait to get back to writing it.

3. Not All Kidnappings Are Bad

This was really fun to write. I had no idea I could write an entire book so quickly, but I wrote this in about three weeks? It also is what spawned the Reclaiming Innocence idea, and I’ve had a lot of fun daydreaming in the AU. Like I imagine Jason became friends with Billy, and maybe Garfield later. Does he become Robin? Dunno, but he certainly hangs around the team a lot, and he’s everyone’s little brother, not just Dick’s. What a cutie pie. 

4. Second Chance

Honestly I think this is my best one shot. I just… i love it so much. It might be because I wrote it at like 2 am one day, and was extremely sleep deprived, but I just feel like it was so emotional and compelling and I love it so much. Talia being a good mom and Bruce getting to meet his baby son (and being so happy about it) and baby Jason getting a little brother is ❤️   I reread this one all the time.

5. To Cheat Death

Jason doesn’t die Au!!!!! I’m obsessed with this idea, too. I have so many plans for a second chapter, but no time to write it so I haven’t. I also screwed up by making Bruce sing and say he discovered Jason liked it on a road trip, but like Jason was supposed to be excited Bruce suggests they both take a break and go on a trip because he’s ‘never been on a road trip’ so that’s lame, but yeah. This was another emotional fic that made me tear up while writing it. Bruce’s absolute gut-wrenching fear when Jason was dead in his arms, to his overwhelming relief when he started crying again was just 🥺 I go back and reread this one a lot, too. 

I tried to tag people but I chickened out, so if ANYONE wants to do this, feel free! I tag you!!

Eight Jews Dead in an Antisemitic Hate Crime, and Trump is Already Victim Blaming

This morning, a white man named Robert Bowers entered Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue, shouted “all jews must die,” and shot 14 people. At least 8 so far are dead.

When asked if this reflected on gun control, the president of the united states said, “If they had protection inside, the results would have been far better…if they had some kind of a protection inside the temple, maybe it could have been a very much different situation. They didn’t — he was able to do things that unfortunately he shouldn’t have been able to do.”

This is victim blaming. He is saying that because these congregants had chosen not to defile a house of g-d with instruments of death, they were shot.

When building the Temple in Jerusalem, it’s said, g-d required the stones not be cut with metal tools, as such things could be used to kill people. We believe that instruments of death have no place in the praising of g-d. We should not be required to sacrifice this value in order to stay alive.

May their memories be a blessing.

VACCINATE YA KIDS FFS

if you are neutral in situations of injustice you have chosen the side of the oppressor

[Image Description: Three hands shaking. One is labeled ‘Aces’, one is labeled ‘Non-binary folk’, and one is labeled ‘Bisexuals’. The handshake is labeled ‘purple’.]