Day: November 6, 2018

carnivalseb:

softheartedbutch:

it worries me so much that there’s been this (mostly unintentional) culture built up around coming out, to where young lgbt kids are putting themselves in danger at school and at home because they don’t want to “live a lie.” i just want to say, i came out when i was 15 and it created a lot of difficulties in my life that i could have avoided by waiting until i was older. it isolated me socially, it exposed me to homophobia from my parents, my family, my teachers, and my classmates at the most important developmental stages of my own confidence and sense of self… closeted people are not living a lie. closeted people are surviving. don’t let anyone pressure you to come out before you’re ready. don’t put yourself at risk when you don’t have to.

Historically, the importance of coming out was put forward by Harvey Milk as a tactic for normalization through representation; if your librarian, your postal worker and seven of the people in your local sports fanclub are all gay & you’ve been friends for years with no disasters, the rhetoric of queers as a monstrous unknown Other collapses.
The thing is, Milk was mainly talking to other adults who had their own means of survival; their own incomes, their own houses.

Yes, homophobia has been used & is being used to eject people from their apartments & that is monstrous, & yes there are vulnerabilities which can cause you terrible harm as an adult, but when you are so much more vulnerable, your job is surviving.
The closet is a survival tactic, & that’s all it’s ever been.
It is not your job right now to be on the front lines of queer representation. Ellen DeGeneres & Laverne Cox are taking care of that so that you can be safe, & we’re going to need you to still be with us in ten years, ok?

You can find people who are safe to be fully open with, and you deserve to be able to do that but you do not owe the intimate details of the way you fall in love to people who would not treat you with basic human dignity.

People who will put you in danger have no right to your privacy, and no right to honesty from you, if that’s the way you want to frame it.

For all the other problems dealing with my mother sometimes, she totally got the half-joking “just go sit on a rock up a mountain” urge. I may have taken it from her.

Not many other people in my life right now who would get it on the same level. Along with some other things, of course, but that one hit me this time.

fierceawakening:

mindthelspace:

anaisnein:

mysharona1987:

anaisnein:

mysharona1987:

But before she had her child…where *was* Tasha when the GOP were trying to take healthcare away from other people’s sick kids?

you and Twitter aren’t wrong. but, consequentially as well as humanly speaking, it’s much better to welcome people like this and gently encourage them to continue the process of figuring their shit out than to yell at them and tell them they’re not welcome on our side and never will be because of their disgusting unfixable state of sin.

2020 is coming. we can’t afford to treat new blue voters taking their first baby steps leftward as expendable.

let people grow and change for the better.

I mean, yeah, I know.

But she only changed for selfish reasons. Otherwise the woman lacked any empathy. 

That is…disturbing. 

(warning: longwinded blathering)

I mean, my guess a lot of people who fail to deploy empathy in this way do so in the sense of being thoughtless as opposed to cruel. like, they literally didn’t think it through. because they didn’t have to, because they were complacent, because they had a whole bunch of unexamined assumptions and faulty premises. that’s bad, but it’s not the same type or degree of bad as someone who does think about it, decides that people in [group X] are unworthy and expendable, and votes deliberately and in cold blood to hurt them. there are unfortunately plenty of that second kind of person at large and I’m a lot more anxious about them than about the sort who basically have been half asleep.

till the 2016 election I was pretty complacent myself. like, in a Hillary-voting neoliberalish way, not in a Trump-voting existentially threatened by difference way (and given that same binary choice, I’d vote Hillary again like a shot, I’d just be way more pissed about it), but I’m several notches to the left of where I was a couple of years ago and considerably more engaged. and this is not because prior to 2016 I was horrible and cruel, hated my outgroups and/or thought they were expendable, etc. mostly I didn’t think about politics much, I was distracted and busy, most political news struck me as boring, anxiogenic, irritating, etc, and I just kind of subconsciously figured it wasn’t my division; the received conventional wisdom in my center-left cultural niche was good enough for the (nice! smart!) people around me and presumably it was also good enough for me.

so I can credit the existence of Tashas out there who might have merrily voted R in the past, largely out of habit and convention, assuming the emerging bad shit wouldn’t really be that bad and it was surely all just a lot of bluster and entertaining rhetoric, and then something appalling happened, and they were like w h a t and had a pretty painful rude awakening. and I don’t care if the appalling thing had to affect them personally to get through; the point is that it did get through. that’s a start. like. you have to start somewhere. something has to resonate with you in order to kindle a spark.

I just. I don’t believe that people are only as good as their worst mistakes. and I don’t think a movement can grow or be successful if it locks out newcomers and the curious as definitionally impure.

“I can credit the existence of Tashas out there who might have merrily voted R in the past, largely out of habit and convention, assuming the emerging bad shit wouldn’t really be that bad and it was surely all just a lot of bluster and entertaining rhetoric, and then something appalling happened, and they were like w h a t and had a pretty painful rude awakening. and I don’t care if the appalling thing had to affect them personally to get through; the point is that it did get through. that’s a start. like. you have to start somewhere. something has to resonate with you in order to kindle a spark.”

This. Sometimes people honestly don’t realise how bad things are until they get slapped in the face with it. Far-right governments couch their bullshit in nice language that makes it sound reasonable, or hide it behind walls of legal jargon, or claim that the only people it’ll affect are bad and deserve it. People aren’t evil for not having the ability, energy, or interest required to see through it right away. 

Also, caring about the outgroup is hard.

What if the Nazi needs his taxpayer funded universal health care because when you punched him he fell and cracked his head open?

On the left we like to claim we care about everyone, but in practice cut off our enemies. On the right they like to claim they only care about the morally upright people in the first place so why should anyone be surprised.

probablyapineapple:

trashmouse:

regzillas:

goingtohellgobigorgohome:

working-dreamer:

Unpopular Opinion:

Tumblr’s “walking on eggshells” and “one strike, you’re out” mentality is really really immature.

Reblog if ya agree.

Another unpopular opinion:

The “You can apologize, beg for forgiveness, and change your ways all you want but it won’t change a thing cause you’re still horrible vile trash that deserves to die a fiery death” mentality is really harmful, scary, disgusting, and will probably get someone killed, be it by someone else’s hand or their own

yet another unpopular opinion: the ‘unproblematic fav’ mentality is really bad because you’re putting an individual up on a pedestal and treating them like a deity of sorts and forgetting that they too are human beings and make mistakes.

Another unpopular opinion: Not every mistake is the Worst Thing Ever.  Sometimes people make small mistakes, and sometimes ignorance is a small mistake, and they do not need to grovel and beg and apologize perfectly because in the scheme of things it was a small mistake that didn’t even seriously hurt anyone, outside of tumblr’s performative moral outrage being offended.

these opinions should not be unpopular.

A giant insect ecosystem is collapsing due to humans. It’s a catastrophe

bogleech:

Pesticide-based agriculture is killing the one part of the natural world people thought was “unkillable” and it’s the part that keeps everything else alive.

This is an article from last year but it still sums it up the best. By this year, we found it was actually even worse. There’s almost no part of the planet that hasn’t lost over half of its insects in less than sixty years, even the most “untouched” depths of the rainforests.

A giant insect ecosystem is collapsing due to humans. It’s a catastrophe