modernmonkeymind

[modernmonkeymind]

So, you know how certain Christian missionaries are trained to act in a very obnoxious way, so that most people they preach to will reject them outright, so they feel like the world hates them for being Christian and they can only be friends with fellow Christians? You know that thing?

I think as activists, we sometimes need to stop and ask ourselves whether we're acting like those missionaries. I think this type of behavior is a little more ingrained into our society than some of us realize, and some of us have internalized it without realizing what it's actually meant to do.

[modernmonkeymind]

Anti-voting rhetoric will be the death of the left. Literally.

Not a single fucking Republican voted to protect roe. It was fucking overturned in the first place bc trump got three Supreme Court appointments.

Every fucking thing wrong in this country is almost certainly the result of Republicans being in power. In 2020, Texas cut half of the polling places in black neighborhoods, and doubled them in white ones, regardless of population. It was Republicans bitching about mail in voting, and constantly, constantly fearmonger about voter fraud. Literally, their platform is about making civil rights harder to practice.

Would you like to know why? It’s because Republican politicians know better than anyone that higher voter participation means higher republican loss.

But what do I see from the online left, champions of the oppressed?

“Voting doesn’t do anything, the parties are the same, the system is rigged, etc, etc”

Don’t sit here and tell me you give a fuck about marginalized people if you aren’t ready to march your ass to the voting booth and vote out the party actively stripping their rights away.

Protest, donate, community build, unionize, and vote, vote, vote.

By the time direct action is the only option, it will be too fucking late.

[modernmonkeymind]

A hundred sixty some odd years later, Lincoln would be disgusted by what his party has become

[modernmonkeymind]

America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.

Abraham Lincoln

[modernmonkeymind]

You know what?

My ancestors would have wanted pasteurization, vaccines, antibiotics, disinfectants, birth control, psychiatric medications, pain management, anesthesia. My ancestors would have wanted to be able to keep their loved ones around longer, and not lose them too early/too soon to childbirths, injuries, bacterial infections, mental illnesses, and diseases that are curable and/or preventable in our modern day life.

Modern medicine saves lives.

[modernmonkeymind]

The fact that bigots don't understand how not tolerating intolerance isn't a flaw says SO MUCH.

The paradox of tolerance is only a paradox if you think of tolerance as some sacred and unconditional moral duty. Some ultimate and absolute law with no exceptions, and if you ever slip into the sin of intolerance, you must repent yourself and beg for forgiveness. Yeah no fuck that. Tolerance is a social contract. You're in the game as an equal player for as long as you play by the same rules as everyone else, and if you don't, your ass is fucking out. You're not entitled to the same respect you won't give others.

"Oh so you all tolerate each other just because you tolerate each other, but if I want to destroy you, then all of a sudden you want to destroy me?" Literally yes. That's the gist of it. What's not clicking. This equation is so simple it barely counts as math.

[modernmonkeymind]

Yes and no.

Whether or not you have a partner at age 50 is no metric for wokeness. Yet some people do seem to struggle with the idea of self-love.

The problem stems from two places.

The first is that we generally understand love as a subject-object relationship. I love you, or I love lamp.

The second, as consequence, is that we attempt to objectify ourselves and then try to love that object in the name of self-love.

This is actually a form of self-harm, because perceiving yourself as an object is inherently problematic.

Some struggle with self-love because they feel unworthy—they have difficulty feeling love toward their objectified self. Others struggle because they become too attracted to their objectified self, in other words vain. That is the form of “self-love” that would rather bail than resolve conflicts, that prefers self-indulgence instead of growth.

I think it might be best to conceptually divide self-love into self-care and Love.

For self-care: eat right, sleep right, care for the body, cultivate and use your energies enthusiastically, and learn how to listen to yourself and others.

For Love: a flower is simply fragrant without aiming the fragrance at anyone. Notice the place inside yourself that feels loved and loving. Nurture the feeling and radiate it regardless of who is around.

[modernmonkeymind]

Everything Republicans accuse Democrats of doing is something they're doing. They're masters of projection. They're liars and hypocrites, and they're destroying the country they claim to love, because if they actually believed in the will of the people and didn't fuck with elections they'd never win again, and they know it. And they'd never win again because their policies of fucking over the majority to enrich the minority aren't actually that popular.

"if voting worked they'd make it illegal"

meanwhile, in the real world:

[modernmonkeymind]

Take the worst people from Russia and the worst people from America, and they share the exact values.

[modernmonkeymind]

There's a reason I fucking hate Republicans. This isn't a problem in the rest of the developed world.

[modernmonkeymind]

[modernmonkeymind]

There are a fair few faux feminist statements I hate, but “We are the daughters of the witches you couldn’t burn” is one of them.

[modernmonkeymind]

this animal

[modernmonkeymind]

Whatever happens, two things remain true: 1. Trump might be distancing himself from Project 2025, but his Agenda 47, which is on his website, is basically the same thing. 2. Third party voting is useless without ranked choice voting; it's mathematically impossible to elect a third party candidate. DO NOT SPLIT THE VOTE.

[modernmonkeymind]

people say folks with adhd struggle with "delayed rewards" aka long term goals and as such we tend to focus more on short term rewards. what they don't talk about is that at when we Do accomplish long term goals we don't actually feel anything proportionate to the amount of work we did to achieve it. In my head I suffered for a while and then money spontaneously appeared in my bank account.

[modernmonkeymind]

Went to the Aboriginal artifact exhibit in Chicago. And it’s interesting. How many blankets and masks and totem poles say ‘unknown source’, because every five seconds my mom would stop and point to something and say. “Pauline’s grandmother made that,” or, “That belongs to Mike’s family, I should call him” because. It’s all stolen