The Big Bat Rastard

dear usamerican high schoolers looking for a way to resist fascism: sit through the pledge of allegiance.

no getting up. no looking at the flag.

everyone will be looking at you. you'll be sweating like a fucking hippopotamus. your teacher will sternly tell you to get up. you'll feel stupid and that maybe its not worth it because you're just a kid in a classroom. but I'm here to remind you that there are no real life consequences to detention. there are however real life consequences to resisting a thoughtless performance of nationalism.

Not that I was ever a fan of what AirBnB was doing to housing markets anyway

BOYCOTT AIRBNB

These people are trying to take over every aspect of our lives.

Vent art

#my wife is on the SOR for being gay #no joke #she hit on a girl in a straight bar once #in 1997 #and while the girl was into it #the off duty cop sitting nearby was not #and so he arrested her for ‘soliciting homosexual activity’ #which in our state was still a felony #in 1997 (and would remain so until Lawrence v Texas in 2003) #and since ‘soliciting homosexual activity’ was a felony and a sex crime #she got put on The List #she is still on there to this day #because it costs MONEY to ask a judge to take you off #and she has tried four times#since 2003 #to get taken off the SOR #but every time the judge has said something like ‘no you pled guilty to the crime i can’t possibly take you off the sex offender registry’ #with no acknowledgement of what the actual crime was #(the crime of being a butch lesbian hitting on a cute girl who was into it) #(in 1997)

Reposting these tags with consent from the person that wrote them. The post about the Sex Offenders Registry is locked, but these tags are too important to go unnoticed.

Younger queer people need to realize that the SOR being used against queer people simply for being queer isn’t some ancient history thing. It still impacts queer people today. And it can quite easily be used that way again.

obsessed with how fixable society is, on a structural level.

obsessed with how all you need to do is throw money at public education and eliminate most standardized testing and you will start getting smarter, more engaged, kinder adults. obsessed with how giving people safe housing, reliable access to good food, and decent wages dramatically reduces drug overdoses and gun violence. obsessed with how much people actually want to get together and fix infrastructure, invent new ways of helping each other, and create global ways of living sustainably once you give them livable pay to do so. obsessed with how tracking diseases, developing medicines, and improving public health becomes so much easier when you just make healthcare free at point of use.

obsessed with how easy it all becomes, if we can just figure out how to wrench the wealth out of the hands of the hoarders.

For the last goddamn time...

"Kill your darlings" means "if something is holding you back, get rid of it, even if it sounds pretty."

That's it! That's all it means! It means if you're stuck and stalled out on your story and you could fix the whole block by removing something but you're avoiding removing that thing because it's good, you remove that thing. That's the darling.

It does NOT mean

That you have to get rid of your self-indulgent writing

That you should delete something just because you like it (?wtf?)

That you need to kill off characters (??? what)

That you have to pare your story down to the absolute bare bones

That you have to delete anything whatsoever if you don't want to

The POINT is that you STOP FEELING GUILTY for throwing out good writing that isn't SERVING THE STORY.

The POINT is that you don't get so HUNG UP on the details that you lose sight of the BIG PICTURE.

Good grief....

Do you get it now? Without due process, everyone is at risk. How are you going to prove your citizenship otherwise?

Things it's okay to do because you don't find someone attractive:

Refuse to date them or have sex with them.

Refuse to let them touch you, or reserve certain types of touching for those who you find attractive.

When choosing between hanging out with them or someone you find attractive, choose to hang out with the person you find attractive.

Want your friend group to include people you find attractive.

Put more effort into your connections with people you find attractive.

Things it's not okay to do because you don't find someone attractive:

Tell them that you don't find them attractive when they're not doing something that requires them to be attractive.

Treat them differently in professional settings.

Expect them to be less visible in public.

Treat them like they're objectively unattractive as opposed to just not attractive to you personally.

Judge someone for finding them attractive.

Recruit others into disliking them.

Single them out. (For example, invite everyone to an event except them.)

Expect them to be grateful for anyone showing interest in them and to never reject anyone.

Strictly limit all of your social interactions to only people you find attractive.

Allow people who you do find attractive to get away with abuse.

Go out of your way to find something wrong with them so you can feel better about not being attracted to them.

A lot of people genuinely do hate or dismiss romance novels because they think all sexual frankness in fiction is immoral and harmful, or because they think women (and only women) are too stupid to know fiction from reality, or because they think it’s gross and laughable for women (especially ones they don’t consider fuckable) to have sexual desires, or because they automatically assume that anything popular with women is inferior, or because they only care about fiction being formulaic or light entertainment when it’s something women like. This doesn’t mean that every romance novel is great and deep and progressive, but these people aren’t coming from a good place with their criticism and they don’t deserve a pass.