axmxz

[axmxz]

i’m so fucking sick of people taking aspects of historical gay sexuality and saying “but what if i made it squeaky clean and sexless so i can have it” sometimes not everything is for you babes!!! sometimes you don’t get to have everything!!!

[axmxz]

before it gets bad I'm just gonna tell y'all certain rich people have literally only recently noticed Open Source software availability compromises the bottom line of their proprietary investments so if you see little chickadees on this website talking about the dangers of Open Source software all of a sudden it's cuz they accidentally sipped some koolaid mixed up by the far right yacht people to fuck with peoples software sovereignty and right to repair, modify, and redistribute robust codebases that become a problem when 30% of your portfolio is in, oh, say, adobe or openai.

This is your unfriendly neighborhood computer fucker telling you not to fall for it and to demand your right to digital sovereignty rather than trusting companies to make correct choices about what to do with the parts of your life they would very much like to have in the cloud to continue improving their products.

[axmxz]

perfect headline. no notes

[axmxz]

“wHeRe iS kAmAlA!? wHy iS sHe nOt lEaDiNg the FiGhT aGaInSt fAs-“

you didn’t vote for her. she’s not the president. what exactly do you expect her to do?

[axmxz]

The neurodivergent urge to do this

[axmxz]

husband is on the couch

mrrmrr crawled under his blanket

[axmxz]

incredible to me that in the age of spending minimum $100 for groceries for one person every three weeks where i live, people are still online like "dairy is bad for you because it has a lot of calories". at this point im calculating calories per dollar at the grocery store and youre still stuck in "fat bad" mindset from 1980. you are an absurd person to me. laughable

[axmxz]

ok, it's march 2, now what?

USA people! Buy NOTHING Feb 28 2025. Not anything. 24 hours. No spending. Buy the day before or after but nothing. NOTHING. February 28 2025. Not gas. Not milk. Not something on a gaming app. Not a penny spent. (Only option in a crisis is local small mom and pop. Nothing. Else.) Promise me. Commit. 1 day. 1 day to scare the shit out of them that they don't get to follow the bullshit executive orders. They don't get to be cowards. If they do, it costs. It costs.

Then, if you can join me for Phase 2. March 7 2025 thtough March 14 2025? No Amazon. None. 1 week. No orders. Not a single item. Not one ebook. Nothing. 1 week. Just 1.

If you live outside the USA boycott US products on February 28 2025 and stand in solidarity with us and also join us for the week of no Amazon.

Are you with me?

Spread the word.

[axmxz]

hey, do you think Queers for Palestine, who made such a shitstorm campaigning against Kamala Harris (so, for trump) right before the election, will reform again to protest trump now that trump empowered netanyahu to conduct a full-fledged campaign of destruction and starvation on Gaza?

oh wait, they only existed to sink Kamala among lefties

[axmxz]

"The shift from the Afro-Caribbean zombie to the U.S. zombie is clear: in Caribbean folklore, people are scared of becoming zombies, whereas in U.S. narratives people are scared of zombies. This shift is significant because it maps the movement from the zombie as victim (Caribbean) to the zombie as an aggressive and terrifying monster who consumes human flesh (U.S.). In Haitian folklore, for instance, zombies do not physically threaten people; rather, the threat comes from the voduon practice whereby the sorcerer (master) subjugates the individual by robbing the victim of free will, language and cognition. The zombie is enslaved."

— Justin D. Edwards, "Mapping Tropical Gothic in the Americas" in Tropical Gothic in Literature and Culture.

Follow Diary of a Philosopher for more quotes!

[axmxz]

the fact that we are firmly in a time where conservatives are like "the actual founding fathers, who were slaveowners, were not racist enough for my taste" is wild

[axmxz]

and yet the first thing out of any MAGAt's mouth is "Why are we spending money on X rather than our beloved veterans?!"

Elon Musk, the world's most selfish person, cut thousands of VA jobs, and now veterans have been abandoned and unable to get the help they deserve.

This is heinous and unforgivable.

[axmxz]

[axmxz]

So this was a pre-planned (and likely paid for by the Kremlin) show: to invite Zelenskyy, scold him like a kindergartener in front of the press, present him with an unreasonable "deal" - an ultimatum - knowing full well he will refuse it (as anyone in this position would). And then tell the world: "Look, our mighty Orange King could've ended this horrible war in a day, but this poorly-dressed, warmongering, ungrateful twat just doesn't want peace! It's not our fault, we did what we could!"

The show is so cheap, so transparent, yet still effective for so many brainless people.

[axmxz]

[axmxz]

having taught preschool for a long time one of the (many) things that always bothered me about conservative values is the rallying cry of "protecting the children". in my experience in the classroom, these parents often present with a strange dichotomy of "fear-of-the-hypothetical-sexual" versus their casual and comfortable acceptance of real violence.

you will listen to a parent merrily tell you: oh i think spanking is the way to go. sometimes they will even suggest you, the teacher, spank the kid if this infant misbehaves - it makes the hair on your neck stand up. you, meanwhile, have never needed to injure a child to control a classroom of 30 of them.

this is very often the same parent who is mortified about the body. they can handle their child's mortification, but not their own. simple, basic-use plain language for genitals is abhorrent to them. "that dog has a penis" - a neutral statement, just a child making an observation like any other - is usually punished or treated as a swear word. the child (particularly a girl child) is taught to refer to their own body in objectification: "my cookie" "my button" "my ding-dong" or other obfuscations.

this is, according to many conservatives, an effort to "protect the innocence" of children. the implication here is that even an acknowledgement of body parts is tantamount to pornographic depictions of sex. (it additionally implies, of course, that sex or any age-appropriate acknowledgement of sex cannot be innocent or without sin - but we will leave that discussion for a different post). teachers, however, on our ever-dissolving islands of sanity, want you to know that plain language can protect children, as it gives them the ability to discuss their own bodies (and potentially any abuse).

it will not surprise you these fearful parents are very often the same parents who are wild-eyed about the acknowledgement of gay or trans individuals. not even in an in-depth discussion - we aren't allowed to mention that nonbinary people exist.

the parent often wails at me. they cannot conceptualize having that conversation with the child. how will they tell their kid about gay people! any discussion on this matter will encourage their child to be depraved, lose their innocence, "turn gay" or somehow otherwise perverted.

any teacher here will roll their eyes. kids don't actually care, unless you make them care. i wish we could make them care - that there was some magic switch to flip where i could force them to have the same passion for math as they have for pokemon. children do not have the same shame parents have until you teach them to.

the conversations these parents fear so much are incredibly, painfully easy. you say, "yeah, some people have two dads, or a stepdad and another dad. some people have two moms. some people have a mom only. families can look very different, but what's important is that you're loved and safe." you say, "yes, that is a vagina. yes, that is a penis. yes, a penis like on your dog. let's leave our clothes on during school, please, we've talked about this." you say, "thank you for telling us your daddy used to be a girl. that's very special. however, we're talking about math right now."

(i've spoken about this before, but i do believe a large portion of the "protect the children" fear stems from the fact many conservatives see queerness as being solely about sex. while sex is an inherent, important part of our lives; we should be able to talk about our partners with the same neutrality as straight people do. it is so normalized for straight couples to say that they're trying for a baby - to actively admit to raw sex - but a gay person admitting to even having a partner can be very politically or professionally dangerous. and all of us have, at some point, probably met the stranger who says how does that even work about our bodies or sex, as if we owe them a dictionary on our experiences).

we have people in powerful positions in the government defending a parent's right to actively strike an (innocent) child, but horrified by their child being exposed to gay people. in certain states, parents are given almost complete free reign to abuse their child at home. often these are the same states with some of the strictest rules against sex education or queer expression. (we don't have time for the gun conversation, but you can fill in the blanks).

one phrase always ends up haunting me - when a parent defends their right to hurt their child with i lived through it and i'm just fine. isn't the point of being a parent to protect our kids from what we experienced? isn't the point to do better than the generation before us? why even have a child if you're not going to show them a better life than the one you lived?

i don't know. i was hit quite a lot. i was raised in a very strict catholic house. i don't think the hitting ever taught me anything except to lie and hide and sneak around. i was raised thinking gay was a bad word.

i still turned out like this - a person who wants to actually protect the innocent.

[axmxz]

everyone wants to be an armchair activist, but actual reading of books? at the library? books that aren't porn or manga? clearly too hard.

Guys, queers. Specifically my fellow queers.

I work at a library. We do this thing where, every so often, we weed the collection. It hurts to see books go, but it's necessary to make sure there's room in the library for new materials.

I have seen so much support for the library in text, and I've seen folks pass around those beautiful "queer your library" flyers. Keep doing that. That's great. Nothing wrong with that. But you HAVE to turn your words into action. We MUST remember to actually go to our local organizations and libraries and actually, with our own fucking hands, interact with these materials we want to see more of.

My branch is medium-sized for a library, maybe a little small. We don't have as many materials as I'd like, but we have fundamentals. Tell me why, even with all the verbal support I've gotten from my local community for the library as a resource for our LGBT+ community, every single trans biography and a good chunk of our vaguely queer theory books were on the list. This isn't a scheme to take the books off the shelves, it isn't another bigoted American governmental push. The only thing we look at when we weed is how long it's been since the last time the item was checked out.

Three years.

No one in my community interacted in any meaningful way with the few books on trans life and history we physically had on the shelves for three fucking years.

I promise you the materials you want and need are there, but this isn't a horde. This isn't a static safety net. You have to use them. You MUST use them or, in the future, maybe in three years, they *won't* be there anymore.

This isn't a vague post, there's no one person I'm hinting at or calling out. I'm not even talking directly to anyone who's directly in my line of sight. I just want everyone to hear this. Big library, small library, whatever. Doesn't matter. Please, we cannot be losing our shelf visibility like this.