this google doc contains fundraisers for Palestinians/Congo/Sudan and im asking you pretty please to share and distrubute this in every way you can, these people deserve to feel safe and if one person donating a dollar is multiplied by the thousands, imagine the kind of help we could give them.
People online are willing to hate for so little. I made an unserious post about how my friend watches instagram reels a bit too loudly sometimes and got comments about how he’s an awful person and that I need to ditch him as a friend. Buddy… it’s really not that deep
On the internet everybody hates you, your friends, your partners, your spouses, your parents, fucking EVERYBODY. Oh, you and your partner sleep in separate rooms because they snore? You must secretly hate each other and need to break up NOW. Your friend missed brunch because they overslept? Ditch them immediately. Your grandpa doesn’t understand neopronouns? No contact until he dies.
There’s a secret character in all of your relationships. It’s the internet, and they want you to be as lonely as possible. They hate your friends, family, and partners for the smallest of flaws
An Ainu woman named Chiri Yukie wrote down some of her people's oral traditions into Japanese because, as a child, her people were being displaced by Japanese settlers in Hokkaido. Her language was disappearing, so she (ironically) saw translating the stories into Japanese as a way to preserve them. She died at age 19.
Some of the objects from the Ainu exhibition at Japan House in London this year, showcasing traditional Ainu skills and culture. There is a campaign to get Ainu recognised as an official language, at least in Hokkaido, and small steps are happening, for example, bilingual bus stops. It reminds me of the struggle for Welsh to be revived after suppression for centuries.
second image ID: the cover of The Song The Owl God Sang: The collected Ainu legends of Chiri Yukie, Translated into English by Benjamin Peterson. end ID
Also, this is a good short ~25 minute documentary that shows Ainu people fighting to recover their ancestral bones and bodies from Hokkaido University that's worth a watch.
This is something which it is extremely important to understand about Japan as a nation. It has a national and international narrative about itself as a unified, geographically and culturally consistent polity, but from Hokkaido in the north to Okinawa in the south, to the Ryukyuan island chain near Taiwan (and well beyond at various times), the Japanese have undertaken imperial conquest and colonization of their nearby territories, and have attempted brutal assimilation or eradication of the indigenous people of those places, and the Japanese government has historically been wildly resistant to recognizing those minority groups as minority groups, likely in part because it would commit the country to offering them appropriate legal protections.
Japan IS ethnically diverse, Japan IS linguistically diverse, it IS culturally diverse, and the portrayal of Japan as a homogenous society is a portrayal which serves the political aims of particular groups, often the far right and conservative wings of Japanese society, and certainly the apologists for empire.
Initially, to justify Imperial Japan's conquest of Continental Asia, Imperial Japanese propaganda espoused the ideas of Japanese supremacy by claiming that the Japanese represented a combination of all East Asian peoples and cultures, emphasizing heterogeneous traits. Imperial Japanese propaganda started to place an emphasis on the ideas of racial purity and the supremacy of the Yamato race when the Second Sino-Japanese War intensified.
Fuelled by the ideology of racial supremacy, racial purity, and national unity between 1868 and 1945, the Meiji and Imperial Japanese government carefully identified and forcefully assimilated marginalized populations, which included Okinawans, the Ainu, and other underrepresented non-Yamato groups, imposing assimilation programs in language, culture and religion.
I hate HATE hate how Jon and Tim could've been friends. How they were friends, with Tim teasing him about Basira's visits, inviting him to drink with the others.
And I hate how inevitabile their fallout was, because that's who they were as people, trying to be both the victim and the bystander, trying not to worry others but itching for connection and understanding.
All they needed was talking, but that's not who they are.
It’s honestly so close to being funny that the take of “It’s fucked up that there’s a kind of “irredeemable person” you can treat like dirt, especially since you can label anyone as that if you don’t like them.”
Was met with “I didn’t like that, I think she’s an irredeemable person, let’s treat her like dirt.”
