This is Shrimp. She is emaciated and came in covered in maggot eggs and fleas. Didn’t think she would make it through the night but she seems to have turned the corner.
Within a generation of genuinely good reform that makes things better for particular groups, there will be a backlash from people who weren’t yet alive way back when and don’t remember what it was like in the bad old days, but are sure something about the reform is a scam.
This is true for major things, like vaccines, or women being able to have their own bank accounts, paying jobs, maternity leave, and the vote. And it’s just as true for smaller things like a fan-run Archive of Our Own (so named, after Virginia Wolfe’s famous feminist essay, for a reason)
that makes fanfiction available for free with a mandate to legally protect it as long as it conforms to the Terms of Service.
The current backlash against the OTW I’m seeing all over my dash is completely unsurprising, because we’re at that point in the organisation’s life. There are now fans who weren’t in fandom yet when we made the OTW and AO3, and who have no idea what fandom used to be like.
The fact the backlash is riddled with right wing vocab and lack-of-fact-checking laziness is just as predictable. I doubt most of it is even said with genuine worry – it’s just concern trolling. It’s another face of the usual efforts by the right to suppress the work of women, queers, and other minorities. And yes, I’m being serious. Both right wing trolls and Russian trolls infiltrated fandom conversations, where they overlapped with social justice movements, during the USA’s 2016 election, and they haven’t gone anywhere. Fandom is a nice juicy target for that kind of propaganda effort, because we tend to skew left and be full of minority-identifying people.
This anti-AO3 push is not just wank. It’s propaganda, and it’s attempting to sow discord, distract from important issues, and do harm.
Thanks to those of you who have taken the time to point out those posts are rubbish.
Note: The OTW is a charity, run by fans for fans. I was one of the original Board members, but I’m not currently doing any work with them.
They don’t, that’s part of the problem with an authoritarian mindset. They aren’t coming at this by forming an argument, they’re attacking because they’ve identified an enemy.
Change is terrifying. People who are trapped in authoritarian viewpoints are generally fearful, so they tend to push back on any kind of change with anger and potential violence, whether that’s social, political, or physical violence.
The one correction to what @cupidsbower said that I’d offer is that it’s not actually witnessing the ‘bad old days’ that prevent us from engaging in this kind of behavior. There are plenty of older people who are authoritarian who lived through the that period that are still going to behave like this today.
What it did was galvanize the people who didn’t want to embrace authoritarianism by helping them understand exactly what the world looks like when we don’t have things like OTW or AO3. That’s why you’ve got a core of fandom people that were involved in those groups who, upon seeing stuff like LJ strikethrough, who learned really quickly that authoritarians will destroy everything if you give them the chance.
But everything else is spot on. Authoritarians are surging right now. We’re at a peak of corruption and inequality that we haven’t seen in a long time, which both terrifies them and emboldens them, because their response to fear is to go on the attack and elect leaders that are just as violent and ignorant as they are.
This is absolutely authoritarians attacking any and all social progress they see. In their eyes, any move away from a social hierarchy that prizes obedience and oppression is terrifying, so they’re going to attack anyone they see as the enemy to feel better about it.
This is a pretty good article and I recommend actually going over there and reading it in full and understanding it, because this is a trend that is NOT going away.
As a society, I think we’ve gotten to the point where we can wrap our heads around the existence of female anti-feminists, but we haven’t gotten to that point yet for people of color who are open white supremacists! We need to stop wasting our time saying “omg I can’t believe it’s happening” so we can start fighting it. It’s really always been there—it’s just become more visible now.
Here are some of the simple reasons why this is happening/has happened/will keep happening.
Organized white supremacists are very skilled at racial manipulation and triangulation. Over the last century, they’ve field-tested ways of setting any minority against any other minority.
Misogyny, homophobia and transphobia are embedded in right wing politics as much as racism is, and for some individuals they’re more motivating than racism. They’d rather live in a social world where their race/ethnicity is hated but they also get their own license to hate who they want to hate.
There are many things that can be done at the cultural level to keep young men of color from falling into this bullshit. The most effective intervention is other young men of color standing up and arguing them down.
so a few days ago i sat down for dinner and my mom handed me the camera with a strange look on her face. all she said was “you need to see this” and i was like ?? okay
but then
that is my dad with a pigeon on his head.
SO OF COURSE MY REACTION WAS JUST “WHAT?! HOW??? HOW” and APPARENTLY when my dad was outside gardening, he saw it land on the roof of our house. and then it just. flew down. and landed on his head
BUT NOW IT WON’T LEAVE
like the other morning i stepped outside to call my dad in for lunch and the pigeon was just sitting on the front porch watching him work
I’ve come across multiple posts now about why you shouldn’t release your pets to the wild. It’s insane to me that this would even cross someones mind! I can only think that may be this is because the people who would release an animal to the wild either don’t consider animals to have actual lives, or have no compassion. My family recently had a death in the family. Uncle Bob had been living in a retirement home for quite some time when he finally passed peacefully in the hospital. After the news was spread, my mother decided not to engage in squabbling over the will with the rest of her cousins and went to work cleaning up Uncle Bob’s now abandoned house. He was a hoarder, and the smell alone was enough to drive people away. While mom was cleaning out the mess, she found a very scared and aggressive cat hiding under a partially collapsed bed.
Minnie had been living under that mattress for more than a year. What we found out later is that Uncle Bob had arranged for a neighbour to take care of Minnie while he was living in the retirement home. What the neighbour did was open the front door, throw some food in the landing, and some water in a bowl. That’s it. So for a year, Minnie was living in filth, with no social contact whatsoever.
I got a call while I was at work that day from my very distraught mother. Apparently, none of the cousins, not even the ones who lived on farms with other animals, was willing to take Minnie. Their answer to the problem was just to let her outside to fend for herself. Mom couldn’t take the cat, because her own cat absolutely hates other cats and one of them would have ended up dead. So to help my already grieving mother, I offered to take Minnie in, at least temporarily.
Minnie arrived and was basically wild. She had mats all up her back (which Dad eventually shaved), and had no idea how to interact with people. She spent the first 2 months of her time in my house crouched in a box in a dark corner at the top of the stairs. When I looked up the stairs to try to talk to her, she growled. When I would walk by, she hissed and swatted at me. She had no interest in any toys, company, or light. After the first two weeks of this, we got together as a family and decided that since she is old (we don’t know exactly how old, but old enough to have a saggy cat belly and grey fur) she should just be allowed to live out the rest of her existence in as much comfort as we could offer her, even if she doesn’t want to interact.
Cut to now, three months later. When I get up in the morning, Minnie sits on the carpet in the living room, yelling at me to come sit down on the couch with her. She plays with her own toys, and any ball I can find for her. She eats a lot, both her own food and tuna right out of my hand. She has come a long way since she moved in with me. I can brush her, carry her, and give her medicine. The only person she remains hostile toward is mom, unfortunately. We think she remembers that mom is the one who removed her from Uncle Bob’s house, and doesn’t want to be taken away again.
The point of this story is to show that all animals have value to somebody. I’m not a cat person by any means, but having an extra being in the house has been nice. If she had been released to the wild, she would probably have died by now and wouldn’t have the opportunity to live out her life in peace the way she deserves to after having been abandoned. Always try to re-home the pets you can no longer take care of, and then use no-kill shelters. Release should never be seen as an option
Here’s a bad picture of us sitting on the couch together
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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