slept in and had a dream i was exploring portland and in a dark forested park we stumbled on tall shaggy birds that slam their heads on the ground and a pair of severed feet ran past me tall as a house
but it was revealed they were all just puppets and i was a bit disappointed
Rapists, and killers, too? Really? (Those on death-row?) The drug/prostitution problems are just a portion of USA criminals.
yes, all criminals. the moment you say “except X criminal” is the moment that people will try to convict their opponents as having committed X crime.
it’s the same thing as what’s going on right now with people equating drag to some sort of child exploitation. “but the children!!” they wail, and people listen because oh, if drag is harming children, then drag MUST be BAD, so we HAVE TO BAN DRAG.
do you understand what i’m saying? you can’t take away the rights of any category of criminal, because suddenly that category will be overflowing with people who totally 100% definitely committed that horrible crime.
Just to look at this from one step further back, let's accept the premise. Let's imagine that there is a type of crime that is 1) horrible evil irredeemable universally-agreed-upon bad, and 2) could somehow be prosecuted with 100% accuracy and 0% bias. Yes, even then, those criminals deserve a right to vote.
Do you they're going to like vote themselves out of jail? Vote to make murder legal? What exactly are you afraid of.
Realistically they'll just... vote just like anyone else. They'll help elect city councilmembers they think will better their hometowns, and presidents they think will best serve the country. They might even vote in their own interests! To reform prisons, fund rehabilitation programs, and outlaw predatory practices by telecoms. Are you saying you don't want any of those things?
And even if there were one of those super-duper-unambiguously-evil totally misanthropic death-row convicts, who's scheduled to be execute the very next day and just wants to sow chaos and watch the outside world burn however they can... what's the worst they could do, vote republican?
Taking people's rights away isn't bad because it might happen to someone you like, it's because taking people's rights away is bad.
I’ve noticed some posts around about how you can’t romanticize your life during a fascist regime and while I deeply sympathize with this sentiment, I want you to try to understand that’s what they want you to believe.
Fascism thrives best in the cesspool of hopelessness. They want us so confused and hopeless that we give in. When you give in, you don’t fight back.
If you wait for life to look good to do the things that bring you joy; life will still be bad - you will just have less joy.
As someone who has struggled with my mental health a lot for the last thirty years, I know this struggle firsthand. And changing this belief system - the one where you spend all of your time expecting bad things so you won’t be surprised when they happen - it’s the hardest work that I have ever done. And I’m not perfect; I still have setbacks. I still experience really real fears about the state of the world and the US, in particular, because that’s where I live.
But I made a vow to myself that I will not let the choices of others ruin my life. When I made that vow, I was thinking of my parents - but it applies to the state of the government right now, too.
There are still flowers in my garden, and ripe tomatoes, and it’s almost pick-your-own apples season, and I have plans with my friends to go to as many cemetery ghost walks as we can find this October.
I still deserve to live. I still deserve to laugh. I still deserve to love. I still deserve to be as happy as I can be.
And you do, too.
Dan Savage.
*gestures broadly at the resistance movements in europe during the last reich*
“Where there's hope, there's life. It fills us with fresh courage and makes us strong again.”
— The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank
“One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return. One must negotiate this passage as nobly as possible, for the sake of those who are coming after us.”
— The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin
The standoff with agents happened on Jan. 8, one day after an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Good in south Minneapolis. Wooten’s refusal to comply with ICE was captured on video and posted to Facebook.
The agents tried everything to intimidate the guard.
“You can’t come back here, bro,” Wooten can be heard in the video saying to an agent wearing a mask and sunglasses. “I’m talking to your manager,” the agent said. Wooten responded: “No, you’re talking to security, I’m in charge.”
ICE left empty-handed. Wooten said he just stood his ground, “10 toes down.”
“I was doing my job like I’m supposed to,’’ Wooten said. “If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything. I just want to make my family safe because I’ve been here three years.”
there’s a place downtown where the freaks all come around
it’s a hole in the wall it’s a dirty free for all
If you want to stand up for transgender Canadians, then there's a petition to ask the federal government to repeal the acts signed into law that restrict transgender medical care for transgender youth:
You need only be a resident of Canada, not a citizen to sign. Please help us give transgender youth a fighting chance. Their medical care decisions should be between the handling physician and family only. This isn't a matter for politicians to decide.
hey, so I would he grateful if people living in Canada could sign this and if non-Canadians could signal boost, please.
if you pitched goncharov vs the dangerous crow boy (who destroys plastic) alongside one another to an outside person and asked them to choose which one was a tumblr fever dream and which one was a real thing published in the real world. i do not think they would choose correctly
We owe it all to them.
To repeat the message louder: musicians, journalists, radio stations, listeners, record companies, streaming sites, discos; anyone remotely involved with popular music, you probably owe a big chunk of it to black musicians.
