people new to tumblr angry about being blocked or writing huge paragraphs about why they chose to block someone like i promise you it’s not that deep i once blocked someone because their blog was obnoxiously orange and i hate the color orange
i think being incapable of engaging with a fictional narrative that deals with oppression without saying it endorses that oppression is indicative of deeper issues with like, being unable to deal with feelings of discomfort. which isn’t to say that there’s no such thing as narratives that do endorse oppression, only that defaulting to paranoid reading is. not great
personally i’m trying to not fall back on criticizing peoples’ “reading comprehension” or intelligence or whatever anymore, because that’s all so loaded. doing so has caused me to see something new in how people interact with more difficult narratives: willful disregard and “fiction is praxis, actually” moral posturing. to be clear, again, i think it’s fully possible for a narrative to express its creators’ biases, and that should be critiqued, but i also think that many people feel so powerless irl that they truly believe approaching fiction with paranoid reading as the default setting is praxis
i hesitate to bring up the helicopter story because what happened to its author is so hideous. but i think this attitude was really on display there. the story itself, if you read it in good faith, was very obviously attacking the military industrial complex’s recuperation of lgbt+ and feminist movements, showing a dystopian future where bodily autonomy has been fully absorbed by an imperialist power. but many readers’ impulse was to take the discomfort that caused and decide that that discomfort had to be a sign of the author being a transphobe when she was in fact a trans woman
neighborhood garden enthusiast here to give another friendly reminder in the midst of all the vegetable price inflation– most of the people telling you to just grow your own have no idea what theyre talking about. growing most vegetables can be expensive, cause good dirt aint free!
instead, find local farmers to support, put your effort and attention towards community gardens, work with food pantries, just dont expect to be able to feed your community (or even just yourself) with stuff from your backyard… unless youre willing to dump a huge amount of time and money into it
I think the word “power” tends to get kind of abstracted in conversations about oppression, and I think the scale of this also makes it difficult to get this idea across. So I’m gonna explain with a microcosm:
You start a small business with two friends.
When making decisions about the business, you all meet together.
Eventually, the business grows enough that you need more employees. You include all of them in the meetings, because all of them want a say in the decisions that impact them.
But as the business continues to grow, this gets a little out of hand.
You decide it’s time to scale it back.
Now it’s just you and your co-founders making decisions again. You still have all those people working for you, of course- you’re just making decisions for them instead of with them.
When it comes time to adjust salaries, well… suddenly, there aren’t twenty people advocating for a fair and even split. In fact, nobody else even knows what the budget is. You could just give yourselves more money than they get, and none of them would even know about it.
So that’s exactly what you do.
One day, you and your friends have a falling-out… and you remember that while you’re all co-founders, all the paperwork actually says that you’re the owner. So you fire them.
You have to hire replacements, of course, but you don’t know these people, and they don’t need to know any more than the rest of the staff. You take the excess from their salaries that your friends were collecting, and add it to your own salary.
Now you’re making double what you used to, and nobody can do anything about it- because nobody else is in the meeting room with you. Nobody else has any decision-making power.
The more staff you employ, the bigger the company grows, and the more money you make.
If you were to include anyone in that meeting room, you’d just be dividing up your power again- and probably your money, too. It’s in your best interest to continue to exclude everyone you can.
Here’s the thing: oppression is based around excluding people. Oppression literally cannot work with any kind of inclusive principles.
Inclusion means dividing power; not just money or whatever other resources, but the decision-making power that allows oppressors to maintain their status in the first place. It’s in the best interest of the oppressor to exclude everyone they possibly can; which is why definitions of oppressor classes tend to be so narrow and hyper-conditional.
It’s also why exclusionary movements within activist spaces are so counter-productive. People claim to be protecting vulnerable groups, but even with the best of intentions, this only ever perpetuates the overarching oppressive systems: they are recreating those oppressive systems, validating their logic, and leaving people who deserve a voice in the decisions that impact them out in the cold- and all it does is benefit the few who remain included. For now.
not to be problematic but i literally do not give a shit about age gaps when dating vampires. they thirst for your blood. “but it’s predatory!!!!” yeah. it is. “they’re preying on you!!!” they’re vampires. they do that. “it’s a power imbalance!!!!!!” what part of vampires are you not getting
they eat people and can turn into bats and crawl around on walls, lizard fashion, and can hypnotize you with your eyes. a) the age gap is not the creepy part and b) the creep factor is kinda the appeal
they don’t age. that’s part of the horror of it actually. would you accept eternal life, if you can never progress? can never grow or change? you’ll live forever, eternal youth, but frozen exactly as you are now. you will never become the person you’re meant to be. you are trapped in the mind of a 17-year-old forever. also ‘theoretically old if you disregard the fact that he’s a vampire’ doesn’t even make the top 20 worst things about edward cullen list. girl he’s mormon. prioritize
The water is also going to be safe until at least 3:30 PM Tuesday, the 28th - they’ve been testing it, and they’re going to keep testing it, and they’ve been releasing more information as it’s available.
You also don’t need to buy it - you can safely fill up, say, pots and pans, or other containers with tap water tonight or tomorrow morning. They’re recommending storing at least one gallon per person per day, for at least 3 days worth of water. (More if you have pets or have a medical condition where you’d need more water.)
It’s also safe for bathing and washing. The concern - and we don’t know yet if it’s even going to be a problem - is only about cooking with or drinking the water.
It’s all “be gay do crimes” “cringe culture is dead uwu” until y'all lay your eyes upon someone genuinely weird/transgressive like nonhuman-identifying people, or kinky people, or even neurodivergent people who can’t mask to your satisfaction and suddenly y'all are chomping at the bit to become attack dogs for an oppressive social order/“normalcy”
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