Month: January 2018

Department of Justice abruptly drops charges against 129 Trump inauguration protesters

saywhat-politics:

Federal prosecutors are dropping felony rioting charges against 129 of the nearly 200 people they have spent a year pursuing in cases stemming from a protest that turned violent on Inauguration Day last year.

The news came late Thursday in an email from representatives of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia. Prosecutors will continue to pursue cases against 59 others from the march, the email said.

Department of Justice abruptly drops charges against 129 Trump inauguration protesters

trans-mom:

Sometimes your story, your feelings, and your life in regards to being trans isn’t going to meet the stereotypical narrative. Sometimes you’re going to experience things wildly different from the mainstream community and it’s going to make you feel fake, make you feel different, and make you feel alone. 

When I was growing up, I had a suspicion I might be trans. I was talking to a trans woman on a forum once and when I mentioned i thought I was trans she started telling me about parts of her life. When I failed to relate to her specifics, she told me point blank that I was absolutely not trans. I’d go on for years after that uncertain of who the hell I was, trying to discover my identity and suffering for it along the way, just to have the ultimate realization that I am a trans woman who needlessly suffered and refused to accept myself because I didn’t connect with a single narrative of transhood.

We’re all different people living different lives experiencing the world differently at different points of time – we will never have the same experiences all the time. Your path is your own and just because it’s not what mainstream media has forced down our throats as “the universal experience,” doesn’t make you any less of a trans person. You’re not as alone as you may feel, there’s many of us who are different. Don’t torture yourself over being you.

tiredtrauma:

Having a disability or a chronic illness, whether it’s physical or mental, sucks rocks sometimes. And that’s okay.

It’s okay to say “this fucking sucks”

It’s okay to say “I hate this”

It’s okay to think negatively, to have a bad day. Nobody can be positive 24/7

You have the right to be angry, or frustrated, or sad. That doesn’t mean you are dealing with things badly, that doesn’t mean you have been set back, that doesn’t make you a bad person.

You are allowed to complain about things that make your life difficult.

animate-mush:

jdkaplonski:

shoren18:

damnselfly:

quick protip: if someone is crying or freaking out over something minor, eg wifi not connecting, can’t find their hat, people talking too loud, do NOT tell them how small or petty the problem is to make it better. they know. they would probably love to calm down. you are doing the furthest possible thing from helping. people don’t have to earn expressions of feelings.

I’m just gonna put it out there that if someone’s freaking about something small, they’re really freaking out about something big that they’re trying to deal with, or something long term that’s been building up, and that little thing is the straw that broke the camel’s back.

I don’t know, try and give people the benefit of the doubt. Don’t be the next straw on their broken back.

Needed this today.

People don’t actually go from 0 to 60. If you think they did, you have failed to notice how long they’ve been at 59.

chavisory:

Do you know what I want to see die in a fire for 2018?

The trigger-happy assumption that if someone is speaking off-script or in dissent from common narratives of, say, disability or gender, that they are an insensitive, callous, fake ally who needs to be educated more or maybe go read some books, and not a person who is potentially telling you the truth about their own experiences.

The job of allies is not to help enforce a single story about a marginalized group of people, I didn’t think.  People have complicated experiences, they have inconvenient experiences, they have a right to talk about them, and they don’t necessarily owe you an itemized list of their marginalizations before they do.

bittersnurr:

theunitofcaring:

There’s a discussion on my dashboard about whether UBI is harmful because it promotes idleness, which is psychologically unhealthy. 

I do think that people vary, and that there are in fact lots of people who’d rather have a subsidized make-work job than a handout. I think it’s important to acknowledge that those people exist, because they’re not common among young progressive some-degree-of-anticapitalist tumblr users, and a discussion about idleness that either writes them all off as evil or pretends they don’t exist is going to be a less constructive one. I think that the reason this is so central to many peoples’ identify is because we have told them repeatedly that if they fail to provide for their family they have no other sources of value and affirmation, and that in the long run we should be offering other sources of value and affirmation, but in the meantime, their desire to provide for their family through work does matter, and policies which give them that opportunity are doing a good thing for them.

That said, I do not think that not having a paid job is soul-destroying or psychologically destructive or even unhealthy for most people, particularly not compared to actual real-world minimum wage jobs, and I don’t think that most people who say that have really thought about it. There are a lot of stay-at-home spouses, and I don’t tend to see opponents of idleness campaigning to make this unaffordable and untenable for the sake of saving those poor souls. There are rich people who just do whatever they feel like, and I’ve never seen the people who think the poor need to be saved from idleness argue that these rich people should be taxed into privation for their own good (or even that it would be good for their souls although it is poor overall economic incentives).

So, we clearly don’t think that idleness is always soul-destroying. But lots of people think that specifically the idleness of poor people would be soul-destroying. I think this is mostly just an error. Some people find value in work, and with a UBI they would largely choose to work. Some people find value even in stupid makework, but they’d probably find more value in real work, and there’d be plenty of real and needed jobs for them to do if they weren’t competing with people for whom those jobs are awful and torturous hells they are subjected to only because it’s slightly better than slowly starving. And most minimum-wage jobs are absolutely awful and soul-destroying! “More soul-destroying than a 12-hour shift being shouted at and forbidden from bathroom breaks” is a pretty high bar and it’d honestly be astonishing if idleness cleared it. 

I think a useful way of thinking about this is to imagine that tomorrow someone invented tiny, cheap robots that could produce food, water, electricity, shelter and wi-fi and cost $5, with $1/year in upkeep. 

Would lots of people buy one and quit their jobs? Yep. Would this make them worse off? I really really doubt it. I bet they’d spend more time with their loved ones; write their novels; recover from mental illnesses they’ve been fighting through for years, start a band, corner the Minecraft market, whatever interested them. I expect most of them would be made better off by their robot purchase. I expect that some would notice they were bored and go back to work, but I’d expect almost everybody who was better off working to notice this on their own, once they had both work and non-work to compare to. and it would astonish me if we were good at guessing in advance who would be worse off through a robot purchase. 

The biggest problem with UBI is that we don’t actually have those robots. And that’s legitimately a big deal. But it’s absurdly implausible to me that if we had those robots, most people who bought one would be worse off. And I feel like to some degree we’re putting the breaks on robot development (on efforts to make it as easy as possible to live extremely cheaply, and on private-sector privately funded UBI efforts which libertarians really shouldn’t be objecting to, and on efforts to spread the value ‘it’s good if people don’t have to choose between working and starving’, and to give poor people money when we want to make them better off) because we just don’t realize that, no, actually, most lives would be straightforwardly more fulfilling out from under the threat of starvation.

I feel like people who think this have never been in a position they legit CANNOT WORK for whatever reason forna long period of time.

Like if you can replace work with hobbies it’s one thing but it took all of like a year for me to feel worse about being unable to work when my previous job was so awful I was fired for refusing to walk 6 miles in 2’ of unplowed snow. I’d much rather have that job then be disabled but I don’t get to make that choice.

For every person who sits there drinking in front of the tv when they don’t have to work there is another person who is full on suicidal from boredom. I frequently injure myself because I need to do things or I lose my mind.

Also so many people who have degrees in “things that would move humanity forward” currently are working minimum wage retail and go home at night and collapse from exaustion. Prioritizing busy work over what is actually productive and healthy isn’t actually helpful and instead full on stagnating progress.

kelpforestdweller:

all right. gloves off. i’ve never seriously contemplated doing this before because of fear. i’m done being afraid of hypothetical assholes.

here’s my deal: i transitioned, and then i did it again. when i was 15, i realized i was a guy. so i did that for about a decade, including various medical interventions.

in my early 20s, i encountered more nb people and, particularly, nb people who used to identify as binary trans, including ones who had gone the medical route. this opened up uncomfortable possibilities i promptly repressed (and was a huge dick about. im sorry).

at 24 my health, already flagging, broke down completely. housebound in a basement studio apartment for 8 months in an icy northern city, to put it simply i lost my mind. when you are alone with yourself like that 24/7, in pain and no end in sight, no answers, no friends, not knowing if this thing inside you might kill you… well, that’s a really great time to have a crisis about your gender apparently.

so that took me to some places. eventually it all shook out to where i am now. i’ve arrived at a point where my gender is fuck you and my gender expression is whatever the fuck i want and i prefer not to think about it.

but i am going to talk about it now, like it or not, because someone has to. someone who has been there and been somewhere else too and not regretted it. someone who is not brandishing their experiences to support violent terf rhetoric. i have seen one or two people allude to similar experiences but i am here to start a conversation. i’m done feeling alone. i can’t be the only one and i don’t want others to feel like they are, either.

most importantly: every way of being trans is right and good. binary, nonbinary, even if you eventually realized that you aren’t or never were trans, or not the way you thought at first. just do what’s right for you. i regret nothing. i lived the life i had to live and i went through the places i needed to go. i was who i was and that was real. now i am who i am and i am better than ever.

if you feel inclined to reblog this, feel free. i feel like there was more i wanted to say but i need to post this now or i never will.

there is nothing wrong with exploring. there is nothing wrong with trying different things. there is nothing wrong with changing your mind. there is nothing wrong with who you are changing, or realizing something different fits better. there are no rules. make the life that works for you and don’t look back.

it is also ok if you do have regrets. mistakes are a thing. metal illness is a thing. if you want to talk about it. im here. but don’t use your regret as a weapon against innocent people.

and let me make one last thing clear: do not come to me or onto this post with any terfy garbage. i am specifically, completely against that and my story will not be used to support anything that hurts trans women, or anyone else for that matter.