There's something about atheism that I've repeatedly tried and failed to put into words on several posts on this blog but I think I finally got it.

Atheists are the only religious minority who, even (or sometimes even *especially*) in ostensibly progressive spaces are not allowed to ever act like they're sure of their beliefs.

Like I'm not even an atheist, I've considered myself an agnostic for as long as I've been able to articulate my own beliefs, but it's not lost on me how often atheists in leftist spaces are hit with rhetoric like this:

Why is it bad that atheists are 100% sure that no god or any higher power exists? I mean. That's what they believe.

Everyone else is allowed to be 100% sure in whatever belief they hold and express it, but atheists are held to the higher standard of constantly conceding that "yeah I *could* be wrong haha of course I'm not saying it's impossible for gods to exist I'm just personally unconvinced" because openly expressing any confidence on the certainty of their own beliefs will immediately be perceived as close-minded and invalidating everyone else's belief systems when like.

When you get down to it "all this shit is made up" isn't really a meaningfully more close-minded or invalidating position than "all this shit is made up except for this one, which is the real and correct one". Atheism is just held to a higher standard when failing to immediately back down and cede ground in any situation where it doesn't align with anyone else's belief system is inherently seen as a mark of close-mindedness and intolerance, a standard to which no other religious minority is ever held in these spaces.

"Oh well it's because the New Atheism movement was shitty and Reddit Atheists™ were intolerant and-"

Okay so some guys were shitty about atheism in 2013. I have bad news about every single religious belief system on the face of our planet.

joining the military to escape an abusive situation is like cramming yourself into a 400° oven to escape a house fire

oh no did something happen in 1918?

from what we can tell "full movie online free" seems to be some kind of 21st century prayer

somebuggy

i aint the snuggest bug in the bed

Just jerked my shit during lunch break 😊

do it on the clock are you stupid

To update this, the astronaut didn’t actually do it, she and her wife were getting a divorce and the wife plead guilty to lying to the feds about it

And framing your ex for a crime mid-divorce while they are actively in space is some Agatha Christie level shit

Being put on a pedestal where you are Absolutely Nothing Like Men (violent and perverted subhumans) because you are a woman instead is not just still sexism it is just the logical conclusion of the most basic traditional sexism we all grew up with.

Just treat women as human beings instead of as just opposites of men (complimentary).

Also I am 100% a pervert and proud of it and I don't think it's any better or worse when I do it than when a man does it.

I have said it before but I'd find it uncomfortable and suspicious to be in any kind of group (cis or trans) that did gender segregation because it'd be drawing a line that to me feels completely arbitrary and clearly fake.

Like they expect markedly different behavior from women than they do from men but I know damn well that I am an adult with agency and the capacity to harm others. I'm not even interested in fitting the "feminine" box.

Anything a man can do I can also do, and vice versa.

We really need more people to be familiar with the term "benevolent sexism." Or at least the concept of it.

So many people are buying into it and calling it feminism. It's just misogyny wearing a different hat, similar to how "model minority" racism is still racism.

So many people think of women as being inherently nurturing, emotionally intelligent, kind, prone to assuming the best about people, caring, and full of divine feminine mystique. So many people frame all of this as a good thing because, after all, aren't those positive traits? Isn't being caring and emotionally intelligent a good thing?

And it's not that those traits are bad. They're not. They're positive traits, which disguises why this is a problem.

Because all of those are traits associated with being a mother, a caretaker for others, and excluded from traditionally "male" spheres.

It's not that motherhood or being a caretaker are bad things, but misogyny operates under the assumption that women are inherently more suited to these things (and only these things) because their place is in the domestic sphere - taking care of their man, bearing and raising his children, being the unpaid and unacknowledged emotional support for the whole family, without anyone to do the same for them, etc. The idea that women have some sort of divine secret is also connected to misogyny; men get to be the intellectual, intelligent, logical ones, while women are more suited to less logical ideas, "magic" or manipulation rather than physical capability, seduction, and mothering.

So while it's true that women can have any or all of those traits, men can have them, too, and just as men can be brave, strong, independent, bold, intelligent, good at leading, logical, etc., women can be those things, too, just as easily, because women are fully fledged people and not just the ones who cook and clean so their husbands and sons can live full lives, run the world, and pursue other endeavors.

The idea that women can't do smart things ("girl math"), be independent ("I'm just a girl"), or are simply too naive and vulnerable (e.g. the idea that women must be protected because they're all easily fooled and taken advantage of by men with ill intentions) goes hand in hand with the idea that they're only suited to be mothers, caretakers, and submissive to the men in their lives who protect them and make the big decisions because women can't take care of themselves or think logically enough to make their own choices.

And these ideas are EVERYWHERE right now. I thought we'd gotten past that mindset. I thought that most people were aware that women can do anything men can do just as well, and that men don't need to be babied and have someone else handle the laundry, cooking, and unpaid therapy. Evidently, we've regressed several decades in the past five years or so.

Men and women just aren't that different, fundamentally, and it serves no one but misogynists (and abusive people who want to escape accountability) to insist that women simply inherently have traits that make them far more suited to the roles misogyny has relegated them to, even if, on the surface, those traits seem positive. Men can be emotionally intelligent, nurturing caretakers, and women can be logical, intelligent, and bold, just as men can be irrational, moody, and manipulative and women can be emotionally stunted, selfish, and violent. Gender stereotypes are tools of the patriarchy that are taught, not innate or inherent based on gender, and they never have been and never will be universally applicable to ANY gender.

Even on a personal level benevolent sexism is not flattering to me. It's othering and dehumanizing.

It's overlooking someone's actual traits to instead round the individual up to an essentialist, infantilized stereotype.

OP: Another year has passed, time to make another natural freezer

[eng by me]

This is brilliant but the energy sticker at the end KILLED me.🤣

I love this blog so much for basically being an enormous library of interior background references but MAN. There is something Vile and Poetic about that saying being painted on the wall of one of the bleakest-looking school hallways I've seen in a long time. It's like that poem about the stars being painted over in landlord white. Incredible.

mr beast partnering with the lds church to help bring in younger people so they can marry off said younger people was not in my 2026 bingo

Lot of talk about "slop" not so much about "troughs" (for the slop. Like a pig). Many accounts are troughs. Sometimes entire platforms are troughs. Platforms will try to add a trough subplatform, and direct you towards it, so you spend all your time eating slop. Beware the trough

As a young boy in school, Masaki Sashima would be dragged out of his classroom and beaten by his fellow students.

Masaki, now 72, was different to the other kids. 

He was Ainu, an Indigenous people from the country's northern regions, most notably the large island of Hokkaido.

"During recess, the hallway door would open, and several guys would yell at me to come out," he said.

"I clung to my desk in the classroom and kept quiet.

"Everyone would surround me and beat me."

Japan has long portrayed itself as culturally and ethnically homogenous, something that some have even argued is a key to its success as a nation.

More than 98 per cent of Japanese people are descendants of the Yamato people. 

But the Ainu are distinct, with their own history, languages, and culture.

But, as the victims of colonialism, assimilation, and discrimination, much of that identity has been lost. 

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.

To grab a quote from Wikipedia:

timeless

I know I haven't posted regularly on this blog in years but I'm not seeing a whole lot of posts on this site about what's happening in Minneapolis right now. And the posts I am seeing are not covering the scope of it. I'm genuinely surprised because tumblr is usually where I find out about things organically through my feed. So I'm making a post about it.

A brief summary of events, from someone who pays attention and also lives here, best taken with a grain of salt and some fact checking:

2020: George Floyd is murdered by Minneapolis police. There are weeks of protests about it. It makes national news. Protests happen in DC. The infamous Trump and his bible photo shoot happens.

2024: Gov. Tim Walz is Kamala Harris' running mate in the presidential election. He starts the "they're just weird" thing. Is folksy, Trump personally hates him.

November 2025: ICE starts showing up to "crack down" on "illegal immigrants" in our Somali community. I may remember the numbers wrong, but something like 90% of our Somali neighbors are either naturalized or were born here. People distribute ICE whistles and are on high alert. Localized to the twin cities.

December 2025: Nick Shirley is paid by a bunch of MN Republicans to do an exposé on daycare fraud. I didn't hear much about this. All I really know is this was an ongoing investigation that MN officials were already taking care of and some of the guilty parties have already gone to court from a COVID era food assistance program. Mostly, if not all, legal US citizens. He did a really bad job at doing journalism and just showed up to day cares with a camera crew and went "YUP nobody's here" as if they weren't in lock-down procedure because some fuck ass white men showed up with camera equipment that could easily be mistaken for guns. I believe. I will fact check all of this and will correct myself in a reblog if necessary. (source but not all the details that I remember hearing about but they said there was no recorded evidence of fraud)

Conservative internet explodes. Kristi Noem sends a mess of agents. I know it's more than a thousand more. They call it Operation Metro Surge. They are going everywhere. There are protests. People try to interrupt the arrests. It's a lot.

1/7/2026: Renee Nicole Good is shot by an ICE agent in the middle of a protest. A few blocks away from where George Floyd was killed. Broad daylight. In front of a crowd. While she was following instructions to turn her vehicle around. Jonathan Ross, the piece of shit Nazi who did it, was recording on his phone the whole time, switched his phone to his non dominant hand so he could more effectively shoot her in the face from 2 feet away. Claims self defense, several angles immediately disprove him. He releases his video, he calls her a "fucking bitch" as her corpse drives away. Does not help him at all. (source) He has not been seen since. Some photos/reports exist of a bunch of agents showing up to his house and taking some tubs and art away. His wife is an immigrant. (source but it's the daily mail so grain of salt.)

Not hours later they go raid a school and tear gas a bunch of kids. (source). Minneapolis has switched to distance learning. I'm not sure about St. Paul.

The last week: There are up to 3,000 ICE agents here. Keep in mind Minneapolis and St. Paul only have 600 or fewer police officers each. So these dudes are roaming in packs. It's 2-4 dudes to a car and 2-5 cars per pack. People are "commuting with" ICE agents to honk and alert people that they're there. People are going on patrols with their neighbors.

ICE is no longer asking "are you a citizen." They are simply walking up to you and taking you into custody. They are going door to door. They have started just breaking the door down if you don't comply. They are driving recklessly to just grab pedestrians and drivers alike (source). People are afraid to go get groceries. It's all over the state. I am learning names of cities in places I thought were just factory farm land and I've lived here my whole life because they're doing raids there. I had to text my family in the suburbs because I saw reports of my small little hometown an hour away getting door knocks today.

It's insane and I am not doing it justice. There are thousands of masked federal agents roaming around all of Minnesota with no warrant or specific goal. They are just trolling around looking for people. They are detaining anyone and everyone. They are beating people. They are pepper spraying people. They are kidnapping people. They are acting unconstitutionally, aggressively, and unpredictably. They are creating situations that are dangerous so that they can try to justify beating or shooting their way out. I will run an errand and then get fed a tiktok that was shot from the Cub Foods that I just left and there's 20+ ICE vehicles parked there now. They're taking people from work, from day care, from schools, from shopping centers.

Iceout.org tracks ice sightings. This is a screen shot with the date set to 12/1/2025.

And from today.

They have cut off SNAP and WIC benefits. Just for us. Not any other state, just Minnesota. They're saying it's because of fraud but I think it's because they hate that we use federal funds to give free breakfast and lunch to every public school student.

And this is breaking just now, 1/13/2026: the DOJ is trying to investigate Renee Good's widow. 4 people have resigned about it. (source). I don't even want to read the article to see what they're saying.

So that's a brief history.

Unicorn Riot is doing a lot of good reporting and they don't seem to have the spin that a lot of local news stations will have where they downplay everything. This article specifically goes into a lot of the specific instances of brutality.

It's also a rumor on TikTok that all of the videos of ICE and protests and the such and the like are being geo locked. So my feed is all footage of people being detained and talking about the "commuting" they're doing and what they're seeing but people outside of the state are not seeing it. So if you're also on that infernal app, try searching for Minneapolis or Minnesota and see what you see. I'm kind of curious if this is true. Because I've been living and breathing ICE and doomsday prepping content for a week. I'm sure those two topics aren't connected.

I don't really know what my goal with this post is. I'm tired. I'm in the first ring of suburbs, so it's been pretty quiet. But I have friends in south Minneapolis. And I'm worried for them. And I know it's a matter of time before my quiet pocket is affected. Because they're coming door to door.

Pay attention to Minnesota, I think an example is being made of us.

I've been monitoring this closely because I have friends in the area, and because I think every city in the country is at risk of having the feds come to do what they're doing in Minnesota, and we all need to get ready.

There are some Twin Cities activists who have been very clearly laying out what they're doing, and why it's effective at slowing down ICE. It sounds like all you really need, is neighborhood group chats where people can let one another know when and where ICE is present, and then people show up, start recording, and blowing whistles, and then ICE will leave again more often than not. This VERY SHORT thread by a Twin Cities activist outlines what to do and how it works.

Also: Minnesota Public Radio has been doing great coverage of what's happening, and the local NBC affiliate has some excellent interviews with activists who were arrested and detained for hours.

And finally, some good news: the courts restored SNAP funding.

People love to say things like “Hiding Anne Frank was illegal, turning her in would have been legal” without like fully grasping the modern implications properly. You have tons of folks like “if WW2 happened today id have __” that do not realize what is happening around them.

We have this idolized AND sanitized version of what happened then, and so we do not recognize it when it happens now.

Resistance fighters assassinated nazis and blew up weapons and infrastructure and destroyed records and forged paperwork and raised secret funds and smuggled people in vehicles and yes, hid them in their homes.

“Well it’s sad he got sent to an ICE camp but he faked his permit :/“

Whoever helped him fake his paperwork did what fighters in ww2 did. People who cut through chain link fences do what fighters in ww2 did, people who blow whistles chasing after ice cars do what fighters in ww2 did, people who destroy arms factories and cop city cranes do what fighters in ww2 did, people unmask agents do what fighters in ww2 did.

People are doing it now! They’ve been doing it now! You keep saying “oh if this happened here__” it HAS! It IS!

What are you doing about it?

As someone on the front lines of the court system, I’m confirming this. It’s easy to assume that people are being hyperbolic. They’re not. People in the courthouse for speeding tickets and child support are being strongarmed into locked rooms and arrested, loaded into vans under tents behind the courthouse, and they built a fence with netting over it to prevent reporters and court watchers from photographing faces.

One local jail contracted with ICE voluntarily. We were getting close to forcing them to actually follow the rules of ICE detainers and release people if ICE hadn’t come for them. That’s over now. If anyone gets bond on a pending criminal charge, they are arrested and deported without the chance to prove innocence or guilt.

Two of my clients were victims of severe domestic violence. Nearly all have dependent children. Some of the children are US citizens. There are no questions. No support. Give your kids to CPS — this is the only option.

You know undocumented people can get a driver’s license? They can file taxes and get a tax ID? Those, the ones who tried to obey the law, are being taken out one by one, because their names are in a database that they voluntarily joined. Because they want to be here. They want to be Americans.

The judge in a case of mine gave someone a two-day jail sentence. Gone. Case deferrals for dismissal are available for all Americans; if an undocumented person tries to take the same deal, they’re gone. A child client of mine had his father disappear to ICE. A woman had her husband disappear.

It’s now. Detainees kept in horrible conditions, unfed, unwashed, no lawyers, no doctors. It’s now. Shipped to countries where they’ve never been and left without papers. It’s now. It’s now. It’s happening now. It’s happening now.