Very cute! Snakes can drink water in a more normal-looking way - but the cup setup is a little awkward, and anyway lots of snakes like to be a bit silly with it! I have several who like to drink water exclusively with their heads resting on the bottom of their water bowls!
I want to stick my entire head in a jar of water and for people to see the amount of water slowly decrease as I chug silently
A message from a few of the trans staff at Tumblr & Automattic:
We want trans people, and LGBTQ+ people broadly, to feel welcome on Tumblr, in part because we as trans people at Tumblr and Automattic want it to be a space where we ourselves feel included. We want to feel like this is a platform that supports us and fights for our safety. Tumblr is made brighter and more vibrant by your presence, and the LGBTQ+ folks who help run it are fighting all the time for this, for you, internally.
A few days ago, Matt Mullenweg (the CEO of Automattic, Tumblr’s parent company) responded to a user’s ask about an account suspension in a way that negatively affected Tumblr’s LGBTQ+ community. We believe that Matt’s response to this ask and his continued commentary has been unwarranted and harmful. Tumblr staff do not comment on moderation decisions as a matter of policy for a variety of reasons—including the privacy of those involved, and the practicalities of moderating thousands of reports a day. The downside of this policy is that it is very easy for rumors and incorrect information about actions taken by our Trust & Safety team to spread unchecked. Given this, we want to clarify a few different pieces of this situation:
The reality of predstrogen’s suspension was not accurately conveyed, and made it seem like we were reaching for opportunities to ban trans feminine people on the platform. This is not the case. The example comment shared in the post linked above does not meet our definition of a realistic threat of violence, and was not the deciding factor in the account suspension.
Matt thereafter failed to recognize the harm to the community as a result of this suspension. Matt does not speak on behalf of the LGBTQ+ people who help run Tumblr or Automattic, and we were not consulted in the construction of a response to these events.
Last year, the “mature” and “sexual themes” community labels were erroneously applied to some users’ posts. An outside team of contractors tasked with applying community labels to posts were responsible for this larger trend of mislabeling trans-related content. When our Trust & Safety team discovered this issue (thanks largely to reports from the community), we removed the contracted team’s ability to apply community labels and added more oversight to ensure it does not happen again. In the Staff post about this, LGBTQ+ staff pushed to be more transparent but were overruled by leadership. The termination of a contractor mentioned in the original ask response was for an unrelated incident which was incorrectly attributed to this case. We regret that the mislabeling ever happened, and the negative impact it has had on the trans community on Tumblr.
Transition timelines are not against our community guidelines, and weren’t a factor considered by the moderation team when discussing suspensions and subsequent appeals. We do not take action against content that is related to transitioning or trans bodies unless it includes violations of the Community Guidelines.
When it comes to the experience of trans folks on Tumblr encountering transphobic content, and interacting with bigoted users, we understand and share your frustrations. Tumblr’s policies, and Automattic’s policies, are written to ensure freedom of speech and expression. We prohibit harassment as defined in our Community Guidelines, but we know that this policy falls short of protecting users from the wider scope of harmful speech often used against LGBTQ+ and other marginalized people.
Going forward, Tumblr is taking the following actions:
Prioritizing anti-harassment features that will empower users to more effectively protect themselves from harassment.
Building more internal tooling for us as Staff to proactively identify and mitigate instances of harassment.
Reviewing which of the tags frequently used by the trans community are blocked, and working to make them available next week.
We’re sorry for how this all transpired, and we’re actively fighting to make our voices heard more and prevent something like this from happening again in the future. We know firsthand that having to deal with situations like this as a Tumblr user is difficult, particularly as a member of an already frequently targeted and harassed community. We know it will take time to regain your trust, and we’re going to put in the work to rebuild it.
We appreciate the space we have been given to express our concerns and dissent, and we are thankful that Matt’s (and Automattic’s) strong commitment to freedom of expression has facilitated it.
We will continue to fight to make Tumblr safe for us all.
— This statement was authored by multiple trans employees of Tumblr and Automattic.
ok, I had a quick chat with some of the people who authored this post, so I’m just posting this so it appears in the notes of the original staff post so some people reading around may see it.
This is not a ‘official staff post reflecting staff position on something’, this is something a bunch of trans automattic employees have done on their own.
They asked HR to be able to post their thoughts without facing reprisals.
The person who is covering for Matt as CEO while he’s on sabbatical said yes.
That’s Toni Schneider, who not only is not an employee, he is one of the earliest investors in automattic and a board member, and he will be interim CEO just for the next couple of months, so he doesn’t need to fear from any backlash from Matt.
On the other hand, the people behind this post will have Matt as their boss again once he’s back next May, so this is incredibly brave.
As “not an official whole-staff” post but something authored by a small subset of staff, they can’t promise anything, just that they are trying to get things to improve. But they are individual members of Staff, and not even any of the big bosses.
Also they obviously can’t either fire Matt, make him step down, or make him face any consequence: He’s their boss and the owner of the company they work for.
Have I said how absurdly brave is to post this talking about something the guy that owns the company that employs you has done?
A message from a few of the trans staff at Tumblr & Automattic:
We want trans people, and LGBTQ+ people broadly, to feel welcome on Tumblr, in part because we as trans people at Tumblr and Automattic want it to be a space where we ourselves feel included. We want to feel like this is a platform that supports us and fights for our safety. Tumblr is made brighter and more vibrant by your presence, and the LGBTQ+ folks who help run it are fighting all the time for this, for you, internally.
A few days ago, Matt Mullenweg (the CEO of Automattic, Tumblr’s parent company) responded to a user’s ask about an account suspension in a way that negatively affected Tumblr’s LGBTQ+ community. We believe that Matt’s response to this ask and his continued commentary has been unwarranted and harmful. Tumblr staff do not comment on moderation decisions as a matter of policy for a variety of reasons—including the privacy of those involved, and the practicalities of moderating thousands of reports a day. The downside of this policy is that it is very easy for rumors and incorrect information about actions taken by our Trust & Safety team to spread unchecked. Given this, we want to clarify a few different pieces of this situation:
The reality of predstrogen’s suspension was not accurately conveyed, and made it seem like we were reaching for opportunities to ban trans feminine people on the platform. This is not the case. The example comment shared in the post linked above does not meet our definition of a realistic threat of violence, and was not the deciding factor in the account suspension.
Matt thereafter failed to recognize the harm to the community as a result of this suspension. Matt does not speak on behalf of the LGBTQ+ people who help run Tumblr or Automattic, and we were not consulted in the construction of a response to these events.
Last year, the “mature” and “sexual themes” community labels were erroneously applied to some users’ posts. An outside team of contractors tasked with applying community labels to posts were responsible for this larger trend of mislabeling trans-related content. When our Trust & Safety team discovered this issue (thanks largely to reports from the community), we removed the contracted team’s ability to apply community labels and added more oversight to ensure it does not happen again. In the Staff post about this, LGBTQ+ staff pushed to be more transparent but were overruled by leadership. The termination of a contractor mentioned in the original ask response was for an unrelated incident which was incorrectly attributed to this case. We regret that the mislabeling ever happened, and the negative impact it has had on the trans community on Tumblr.
Transition timelines are not against our community guidelines, and weren’t a factor considered by the moderation team when discussing suspensions and subsequent appeals. We do not take action against content that is related to transitioning or trans bodies unless it includes violations of the Community Guidelines.
When it comes to the experience of trans folks on Tumblr encountering transphobic content, and interacting with bigoted users, we understand and share your frustrations. Tumblr’s policies, and Automattic’s policies, are written to ensure freedom of speech and expression. We prohibit harassment as defined in our Community Guidelines, but we know that this policy falls short of protecting users from the wider scope of harmful speech often used against LGBTQ+ and other marginalized people.
Going forward, Tumblr is taking the following actions:
Prioritizing anti-harassment features that will empower users to more effectively protect themselves from harassment.
Building more internal tooling for us as Staff to proactively identify and mitigate instances of harassment.
Reviewing which of the tags frequently used by the trans community are blocked, and working to make them available next week.
We’re sorry for how this all transpired, and we’re actively fighting to make our voices heard more and prevent something like this from happening again in the future. We know firsthand that having to deal with situations like this as a Tumblr user is difficult, particularly as a member of an already frequently targeted and harassed community. We know it will take time to regain your trust, and we’re going to put in the work to rebuild it.
We appreciate the space we have been given to express our concerns and dissent, and we are thankful that Matt’s (and Automattic’s) strong commitment to freedom of expression has facilitated it.
We will continue to fight to make Tumblr safe for us all.
— This statement was authored by multiple trans employees of Tumblr and Automattic.
i think most of the negative commenters here have no idea how to read corpo-speak when the employees actually care but their bosses are making dumbass decisions. people are acting like the staff who wrote this are oppressors when they’re literally saying they are having to fight internally to be heard by the people making decisions.
this basically says, “sorry our CEO is being a dipshit, we really don’t like it and we were overruled on decisions that made things worse. now that he’s blown this up we can finally do the things higher-ups didn’t let us do earlier.”
the note about being thankful for “matt’s strong commitment to freedom of expression”, i’m not sure how sincere it is, but it reads to me like “thanks for not firing us for making this post, and thanks for listening (or being strong-armed into listening) to us when we told you that you’re fucking things up and you should let us fix it.”
my heart goes out to y'all for dealing with this bullshit, both internally and externally, and i hope you get the changes that you want and deserve to make tumblr a better workplace and a better posting zone. a lot of ppl really don’t understand how hard it is to be in a company whose work you believe in when leadership is doing things you disagree with and you have to thread the needle of communicating that while being professional (i.e. compliant with corporate communication guidelines).
Corpo speak professional here. I’m the lawyer that corpo consults when they want to make a corpo speak apology or do some PR management.
In all my career, I have never seen a corporation issue a public statement written by line employees like the post above on an official account. A corporation will always issue an apology or something like this from the highest level - the CEO itself or speaking on behalf of the corporation as a whole, written by their lawyers and/or PR team.
For Tumblr to allow and issue a statement written by employees speaking on behalf of themselves is incredibly rare and frankly shows tumblrs commitment to it’s queer staff and users.
That in and of itself should make this be a positive sign
Self-reblogging because I see enough things in the comments where people are saying “well they need to fire the Matt.”
Under normal governance, a corporation’s CEO can be removed by the board of directors, but the board of directors can be removed by the shareholders… and while I’m not EXACTLY sure who has controlling interestI’ve got a pretty good idea who it is:
In February of this year, Automattic closed a new primary funding round of $288M, bringing in some great new partners including BlackRock, Wellington, Schonfeld, and Alta Park. Existing investors ICONIQ and Aglaé (Bernard Arnault) also participated. This round was common stock, and like all funding since 2011, included a proxy assigning me the right to vote the shares.
Automattic is a privately held company so teasing stock ownership out is difficult. From everything i’ve checked Matt sill has controlling interest in the company and is therefore unfireable.
(Please correct me if I’m wrong)
You aced it
I was really bracing for a gun-totally-not-held-to-their-head-haha-please-remain-calm style “us lgbt+ staffers believe that our valued CEO’s words have been taken out of context; we’re great at moderation and everything he said is justified” and was increasingly shocked and impressed at, instead, “oh god oh fuck why doesn’t that man know how to shut up god dammit look we know we fucked up but we SWEAR it’s in a different way than you think and despite what our fool CEO said we ARE trying”
I’ve been seeing a lot of anti-Nazi ones, which is great, but I felt like we needed one to show our support for the Jewish community.
all you goyim I follow - I see you reblogging this and it warms me.
I support the Jewish community, but not that bullshit genocide the Israeli government is committing. There’s a difference, don’t get it twisted.
I don’t want to be confused with supporting zionists. There is a reason. You would need to live under a rock to ignore the genocide Israel is committing.
there are more christian zionists in the united states than there are jews in the entire world. why bring up zionism on a post for jewish solidarity? i agree with you, what israel is doing is flat out genocide, but by making that jump and saying i support the jews EXCEPT the zionists, on a post that has nothing to do with zionism or israel, it starts treading into some murky water.
Okay, this has been living in my head rent-free, so I’ll dig my grave now:
1. I’m not quite sure why you brought up Christian-Zionists, I’ve picked plenty of beef with Christians, too. I have a post on my blog saying “fuck your god” in response to a shooting at a gay club committed by a Christian extremist. Christian-Zionists, from what I understand, are Christians trying to return to Isreal instead of Jews… that difference means very little to me.
2. I admit, I was being ignorant with my behavior and should’ve focused largely on supporting the Jewish community, especially with antisemitism becoming more prevalent these days. I should’ve left my personal feelings out and focused on the group itself.
3. You’re right, the initial support had nothing to do with zionism or Israel. However, with the recent media flare-up of the Palestinian genocide, that was on the forefront of my mind, and I didn’t want people to confuse my support of the Jewish community with support for the Israeli government. I’m pretty sure I already reblogged this post a year or so ago without even mentioning Israel. So me mentioning it now, while unnecessary, wasn’t irrational.
I’m honestly not trying to pick a fight either, I’m completely open to an honest and productive conversation.
I’ll give answering these a shot.
So, to start with a quick (well, “quick”) background, the label “Zionist” is remarkably useless from a communication perspective. It can mean anything from:
wants there to be at least one country with no threat of discrimination for being Jewish
wants to ensure that Israeli citizens are safe from the surrounding countries who want to kill all the Jews and anyone standing too close
wants all Palestinian territory ceded to Israel and Palestinians wiped out
wants whatever’s expedient to stop Israel getting bombed
wants all Jews to be in a little strip in the Middle East to bring about the end of the world - the “second coming,” IIRC?
wants all Jews to be in a little strip in the Middle East to get them out of their country
wants all Jews to be in a little strip in the Middle East to make them easier to exterminate
wants to maintain a country to reliably flee to if/when their current country starts Holocaust 2: Here We Shoah-gain, without worrying about being turned away for being too many Jews
wants Netanyahu and his party to be able to do whatever they want
a Jew you don’t like
and many more. I admittedly hadn’t heard your definition of Christian Zionism, as some sort of New Crusade for a Christian Jerusalem, but I wouldn’t doubt people believe it. So in online discussions, you often wind up with exchanges like “I believe [nobody should kill all the Israelis].” “What? You want [all Gazans slaughtered, and the West Bank Palestinians too]? You monster!”
So, with that preamble, let’s get into the meat of it:
The likely reason for bringing up Christian Zionists is because, well, it’s a label that we simply never see. Despite, as the other person said, the entire global Jewish population being outnumbered by Christian self-described Zionists in the US alone, basically all accusations of zionism on tumblr are directed at Jews. We saw people saying “Happy Chanukah to all the non-zionist Jews!” but not “Merry Christmas but only to Christians who aren’t zionists!” It’s a frustration directed not specifically at you, but more at a general sort of collective of leftist goyish tumblr, which you happen to fit: people only think about zionism when Jews are involved, which is bigoted and also annoying.
This ties in nicely with your third point, actually:
I didn’t want people to confuse my support of the Jewish community with support for the Israeli government.
Your followers would presumably have no issue if a post about protesters shutting down an anti-abortion event didn’t include a caveat that you support pro-choice but not Israel. Hopefully, no callout posts will be made if you reblog a “happy easter” post without adding “but I don’t condone the slaughter of Palestinians.” Yet you worry that reblogging “I support the Jewish community” will have backlash from other users if you don’t condemn Israel on it. Again, the topic of I/P only comes up when Jews are mentioned.
That also means that someone - possibly you, possibly your followers - believes that supporting Jews implies supporting Israel, that the default state for anyone who isn’t bigoted against Jews is to cheer on the Israeli govt. And you did say that this is a new thing, that you reblogged it last year with no issue, which means that there’s a growing trend of people who see “I support the Jewish community” and their first thought is “hmm, they must be evil.”
This is… relatively easy to remedy, at least on a local-corner-of-tumblr level: stop bringing up Israel when Israel isn’t mentioned. Over time, two things will likely happen: 1) your followers will see “Jews -> pro-Israel” less, and therefore themselves make the association less, and God willing it’ll spread until the only people calling random Jews zionists are the people who would accuse us of being (((elite globalist lizard bankers))); and 2) you’ll get the occasional ask demanding why you didn’t denounce Israel in a “Jews are human actually” post, at which point you can try to explain that it’s kinda bigoted to assume Jews and the Israeli govt think in lockstep (if you’re up for it, of course - I admit the temptation to just block is pretty strong).
Honestly watching western goyische leftists veer sharply into blatant, violent antisemitism ostensibly due to Palestine inspires a very specific type of rage in me that can only be triggered by ideologically-driven hypocrisy.
It’s like watching the anti-abortion people also opposed comprehensive sex education and birth control while lamenting at how many abortions are currently happening. Every single person with more than one functioning brain cell knows that the only way to reduce abortions (not stop them, because that’s literally impossible) is to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies - something for which there are mountains of evidence demonstrating that comprehensive sex education and birth control can accomplish. But they don’t want those things, because they allow childbearing capable people reproductive autonomy and freedom. So they DARVO and move goalposts and in general try to pretend it’s about protecting babies when it’s literally just about controlling women, girls, and people they’re misgendering as such. Because if they truly cared, if they were genuine in their beliefs, they would support whatever method was most effective at reducing unwanted pregnancies and therefore abortions.
The antisemitic “pro-Palestine” leftists do the exact same thing by ramping up antisemitism in the diaspora, despite the fact that the main driving force behind Zionism is a desire for Jewish safety. If you make the entire world unsafe for Jews except Israel, and you also want to dissolve Israel, where does that leave Jews? And I get that a lot of people just straight up do not care, genuinely want us dead, but here’s the thing: people who are backed into a corner are going to fight for their lives. That is what Israel has done for the last 75 years. They have nowhere else to go, and the more antisemitic you make the diaspora, the more Jews will congregate there out of necessity.
If you don’t address the root cause in a humane way, you are never going to make headway and you’re literally just spraying water on a grease fire.
There’s no such thing as a free Palestine in a world where we don’t combat antisemitism with equal passion as unjust displacement and murder of Palestinian people .
We need to fight to make the world safe for Jewish people. This is integral to our mission of fighting for peace in Palestine and combating violent political movements in our home nations and globally.
We can not compromise anyone’s lives in our humanitarian endeavors.
Bismillah may we be open minded to peaceful solutions and loving our neighbors.
If yall didn’t know, the Amy Winehouse statue in the UK has her iconic star of David necklace covered with a pro Palestine sticker.
She has not spoken her thoughts publicly on Israel and Palestine when she was alive.
Best case scenario, the sticker was put on the statue because people think she would support Palestine.
Worst case scenario, the sticker was placed there because she was Jewish.
The thing is, the best case scenario isn’t even good! At best within the best case, you are putting words in a dead person’s mouth and worst case within the best case is that you’d think she’d denounce being jewish for palestine. Which is fucked.
Vandalizing a statue of a famous jew is not activism. It is not spreading the word of supporting Palestine. It does absolutely nothing to help those in Gaza.
All it does is show that you either view dead jews as a conduit for your opinions regardless of their actual opinions or think that Jewish symbols need to be hidden because of what’s going on in Palestine.
“Just we two” Postcard from my collection. Copyright 1907, mailed 1909. This is by C.E. Bullard, my favorite of the Victorian/Edwardian cat photographers. He seemed to genuinely love cats and didn’t restrain them or cram them into tiny costumes.
20-something nerd into dragons, video games, wordplay, dragons, and dragons. He/him. Queerphobes blocked on sight. Art/Writing blog: @dzamie-oc. Feel free to message or send an ask! This blog doesn't contain any explicit sexual content, but does discuss sexual topics, especially with dragons and vore. If you see something you don't like, ask me to tag it so you can blacklist it.
ALT
