honestly it’s kind of upsetting how much of the autism experience is just being shamed out expressing yourself in any way that’s normal for you and learning to keep everything to yourself so you’re not shamed for being weird and then being shamed for being so quiet because it’s also weird to be quiet but if you tell this to anyone else they’ll say “why do you care so much what people think” and that’s when the ancient ape part of your brain gets ready to beat them to death
the ‘yimby’ approach to defeating gentrification (and the housing crisis overall) is a combo of 'build more units’ and 'change zoning laws.’ i guess it’s always nice to have more units and make parking lots things of the past and have a little store that’s also near a house. and i like big n tall buildings that are also close together, so let’s have more of those. but neither of these problems will actually address why there’s a housing crisis and you fucking freaks KNOW that. you’re RE-ZONING DECK CHAIRS ON THE TITANIC.
TURN LANDLORDS (including 'mom and pop landlords’ lmao) AND HOUSING SPECULATORS/'FLIPPERS’ INTO MULTIZONED GENDER NEUTRAL BATHROOMS. BAN THE SALE OF HOUSES FOR ANY MORE THAN WHAT THEY WERE BOUGHT FOR. SEIZE LANDLORDS’ ASSETS (or, if you’re not a revolutionary, buy them out by force). then you’re not getting houses in poor neighborhoods being 'flipped’ and sold at prices that push old neighbors out. also, create and maintain radical tenant unions.
market urbanism is at best a set of jangling keys to distract you from actual effective solutions, and at worst a rebrand of neoliberalism. trust no wonk. 'yimbys’ (i refuse to dignify the acronym by removing the derisive scare quotes; i’m not a 'nimby’ or a 'yimby’ i’m an adult, thanks) are only sufferable when they are anticapitalist and are really into trains.
ultimately what i find grating about the incursion of psychotherapeutic jargon into quotidien speech isn’t even that it makes you constantly sound like you’re about to institutionalise me (it does, but im lucky enough i can generally just lie, or avoid you forever) – it’s the insistence that by doing so you’ve magically eliminated the communicative ambiguity that characterises literally all speech, body language, social cues, norms, expectations, &c &c &c now until the end of time inevitably and always
in the figure of “just a little guy, just a little birthday boy” is the image of 21st century ethics. everyone is constantly trying to like position themselves as uniquely non-agentic, to defer or deny what power they have or can have over others, to self-absolve by adopting an affect of ignorance or victimhood or perpetual adolescence that can be transmuted into moral righteousness
the problem with everyone becoming a reviewer and essayist now is that, plainly and gently, a lot of these people are not smart enough for the position
Everyone else talked about outdoor cats, it’s time for me to talk about offleash dogs
Reasons not to have your dog offleash at a public park:
1) roads (this one is self-explanatory)
2) it makes the park inaccessible to like, entire swathes of the population. If you have experience with police dogs or guard dogs in your neighborhood, or you’re a new immigrant from somewhere with a large population of feral dogs, it sucks ass going to the park and having someone’s massive lab bound up to you!
3) If, for example, you are in a protected wetland area plastered with friendly signs asking you to please leash your dog to avoid causing an ecological impact, having your dog offleash might cause an ecological impact! “Oh no, my dog is well-behaved, they would never bother the wildlife” wrong! your dog is in the pond trying to eat the endangered Blandings’ turtles!
4) Non-zero chance of a jokerified park guide (me) just clipping your dog to a leash and stealing them
5) “Oh but my dog is friendly!” If your unleashed “friendly” dog runs up to my leashed UNFRIENDLY dog, and my dog bites yours, guess who’s getting the blame despite doing everything right?
6) Allergies. “Oh but my dog is friendly!” oh well that’s great I guess I can just put the epipen away because, yknow, he didn’t mean to induce anaphylactic shock, it was all in good fun, nothing to worry about!
7) Small children, the elderly and disabled people. “Oh but my dog is so friendly!” When your friendly dog slams into me/jumps on me/knocks me over I am just as injured.
8) Many of the places where it seems attractive to let a dog off the leash are home to wildlife! My local swamp park has a whole-ass coyote pack living in it. That is their house, and they will view your precious little sausage roll as a delivery dinner. I have legit seen a coyote come out of the bushes and take a small, off-leash dog. Leash your dogs.
A couple people reblogging with my addition have gone on to say that a well-trained dog can be off-leash and all these things only apply to badly-trained dogs (who presumably deserve to suffer? and who apparently also deserve the opportunity to harm and distress people who didn’t sign up for Bad Dog Encounters?). Leaving aside the fact that dogs are animals, will always be animals, and will thus always have the potential to act unpredictably, just like every other animal, including humans, who do you think is training the wildlife?
I have seen the incident I referenced above play out three times. All three times, the dog lost. In one of the instances, the dog was two feet from its owner. In one instance, the owner followed the coyote into the bushes, still lost the dog, and got bitten badly. The parks service killed half the swamp coyotes after that, which isn’t fair. Again, the swamp is their home. They live there. If you bring them DoorDash, they shouldn’t be punished for eating it.
Coyotes. Bears. Venomous snakes. Squirrels, either rabid or leading your dog into traffic. And feral cats who also shouldn’t be outside and uncontained, but don’t deserve to be ripped apart by dogs because people failed them. Your dog is not the only animal in the world.
Please. Do yourself, your dog, and my coyotes a favor. Leash your dog.
Please. Do yourself, your
dog, and my coyotes a
favor. Leash your dog.
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.
I don’t care about accusations of ”pedophilia.” I will not give a fuck, I won’t investigate your claims, I will just ignore it.
For one thing the accusation of pedophilia is often entirely meaningless. This is because pedophile/pedo etc are words that carry the taint of child rape, of calling up the disgust such an act naturally produces, but are accusations that don’t require such an act or a victim of it. If you call someone a “child rapist” that has weight, but you also have to back it up with a victim this person supposedly raped for the accusation to actually be meaningful. But words like “pedophile” carries no such demands, it literally just means “someone who has an attraction to children.” It doesn’t require an actual victim. It’s an accusation about how someone feels in their head and can thus be liberally applied. Someone criticizes your asinine submarine idea to rescue some children in a cave? Call them a pedo. And even words that once had a more specific meaning, such as “grooming” can be stretched beyond all meaning to mean whatever it wants to. Someone talked to under-18 people about sex and gender in a way you don’t want to? Call them a groomer.
In a culture of pedohysteria, pedojacketing is easy. And it’s especially easy to weaponize it against queer people, the idea that queerness spreads through queers recruiting children by molesting them is one of the oldest queerphobic narrativeness out there. I’m using “queer” here because this is a narrative used both against gay and trans people. But in the present transphobic/transmisogynistic backlash it’s most often used against trans people, especially transfems, as transmasc people are more often infantilized.
But on a more deeper level “pedophilia” is the wrong framing of the real problem of child sex abuse. It’s literally a medical term, a diagnosis. It makes child sex abuse a problem of some sick individuals with a diseased attraction.
This is of course a bad and antifeminist understanding of what rape and sexual violence is. It’s an inevitable and natural expression of power. The widespread rape of women is caused by the patriarchy, of men having power over women. And the misogynist oppression of women with sexual violence naturally extends to young girls. But all children are disempowered in our society. Adults have power over them in the patriarchal family, in the capitalist school system and other institutions of our society. Sexual violence against children flows from the power adults institutionally and systemically have over them. The vast majority of sexual violence towards children comes from the family and schools, not the “stranger danger” of creepy weirdoes hiding in bushes.
This is the reality that the framing of sexual violence as the result of sick individuals with a diseased attraction obscures. And it inevitably calls for a reactionary carceral and psychiatric response, justifying the police, prisons and psychiatric institutions. That’s why “what will we then do with the pedophiles?” is such a popular clichéd response to prison and police abolitionism. This very framing of the problem calls for a carceral response. If the problem of child sex abuse is sick individuals instead of the system, if we constantly root out and punish individuals we will eventually solve the problem.
In reality carceral responses actually make the problem of sexual violence much worse. The police, prisons and involuntary psychiatric hospitals are violent expressions of power and thus create the conditions for rape.
Pedohysteria is constantly used to justify the expansion of state power. Here in European Union we have had a legislative push to ban end-to-end encryption and make all online communication accessible to law enforcement, total online surveillance. And the reasoning is because otherwise pedophiles can use e2e communication to secretly send child porn to each other without the police being able to do anything, which is of course true, that does and will happen, but doesn’t justify killing all online privacy. This “chat control” act is literally called “regulation to prevent and combat child sexual abuse.”
The pedohysteria also justifies vigilantism, which tumblr callout culture is part of and is also a deeply reactionary and even fascist phenomenon. Vigilantism rests on the idea that what the police do is right, but they are not doing it well enough, because they are too reigned in by liberal ideas such as laws and regulations and the courts. So random people should take on the role of police to punish “criminals”, like pedophiles. And this goes through tumblr callout culture. A subtext running through pedojacketing callouts of transfems is the idea that transmisogyny does not exist and does not lead to transfems being disproportionately punished, but instead transfems are using their minority status to get away with sex crimes.
This standard conservative rhetoric about how liberals often literally let minorities get away with murder justifies their reactionary vigilantism. Of course in reality, transfems are far less likely to commit sexual abuse of children than other groups of people, because we are systematically excluded from the very institutions where such abuse happens, such as parenthood/the family or schools, because of the transmisogynist stereotype that we are all perverted child rapists. And the callouts of transfems as sex predators are in themselves abusive and protect actual abusers, just like how police and prisons are.
So no, I will continue to not give a fuck if you call someone a pedophile.
Everyone wanted to be thicc but nobody wanted to be fat. Everyone wanted the dad bod but nobody wanted to be fat. Everyone wants fat mommy milkers but nobody wants mommy to be fat. Everyone wants to be a bear but not like, an actual fat bear. You get what i’m saying
