neverdirtfree

[neverdirtfree]

do y’all remember before direct messages tumblr had a dumbass ask limit of 10 per hour and communication was impossible until they introduced dumbass fan mail and we were basically sending telegraphs back in forth trying to communicate those were…dark times

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Saw a tiktok of a guy saying he doesn’t feel comfortable talking to minors because he’s 19. And it’s just. I’m so fucking tired of this.

And like to be clear, I’m speaking as a victim of pedophilia when I say: We need to get over this collective fear of endangering children. Because holy shit, this stuff is getting out of hand.

The average person is not a threat to a child.

And also!!! It is actually really really good for kids to have friendships with adults that aren’t their family.

Having friendships with adults when you’re younger prepares you for adult life in a better way then only interacting with adults that are family members or teacher as well.

And also if there’s any sort of weird behavior happening with adults or teachers, it’s very helpful to have unrelated adults, you can go to, and also have a model for what normal adults are supposed to look like.

And also! You’re just making it way easier for pedophiles to prey on children when you completely avoid interacting with them as an adult. Because kids are naturally inquisitive and curious. They are going to want to interact with adults and they are going to want to ask questions. And if the only adult adults that are willing to interact and speak with them or adults who have ulterior motivations. Guess what’s gonna happen.

Also on a more general note. Having a model for what a normal healthy adult is supposed to look like makes it way easier for kids to be able to recognize and identify when adults in their personal life are being weird.

[neverdirtfree]

If i was a sickly little peasant boy designated by the aristocracy to carry messages back and forth for pennies and you found me against our citys outer wall with a deep wound in my chest from a musket ball and a letter cluthed in my hand and i told you that my dying wish was to have someone read that letter to me so i would know i died for something important and you open it up and you find a single large illustrated diagram of an onion would you tell me what it was? What would you say?

[neverdirtfree]

twitter is owned by a tech bro supervillain, facebook is getting rid of FACT checking bc it’s “biased” and moving all moderators to texas, tik tok is getting banned (I’ll b using a vpn but still), insta is owned by the dude getting rid of fact checking……but tumblr? good old tumblr? here she remains, vastly unchanged but for the few updates we usually bully staff into undoing. a true stronghold of democracy and free speech. waiting for those who abandoned her to come crawling back. bc yah. we’re still here

[neverdirtfree]

sherlock holmes deduces you are trans before you've figured it out yourself and refers to you with those pronouns and then when you look confused is like "ah...had you not arrived at that conclusion yet?" and wafts away in his dressing gown to smoke seventeen pipes, leaving you in a gender crisis

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as someone who has been involved in union organizing through my dad's union since i was literally in second grade, the way that people on tumblr think unions work drives me literally insane

[neverdirtfree]

As someone who grew up in the U.S. in the 1990s, I am all too familiar with a culture in which anything you and your friends disapprove of is “retarded,” and anybody you might care to insult is a “retard.” And, like others my age who grew out of such harmful language not long after graduating from middle school, I have been dismayed to see it flood into mainstream adult discourse over the past few years, abetted by social media and its laziest, most callous shitposters.  You have Anna Khachiyan of the edgelord podcast Red Scare, which helped repopularize these terms, using that word to describe progressives in the wake of the 2024 election; Elon Musk replying “F u retard” to a Finnish doctoral student on his platform X (formerly Twitter) who accurately described him as a historically dangerous purveyor of disinformation; and countless users across alt-tech sites including Kick, Rumble, Gab, and Truth Social who have inserted the word in their account handle. TikTok blocks you from searching the slur, noting that it “may be associated with hateful behavior” — a change implemented after Mashable contacted them about the use of the word on the app — but it’s all over Facebook and Reddit. Disability advocates have been sounding the alarm for months as the word has once more became entrenched as a commonplace eptithet, despite their long and tireless campaign to protect the intellectually disabled from pejorative abuse. Is there a point anymore in explaining what makes the R-word offensive? Everybody knows why it’s ugly and vicious. Today’s trolls use it because it crosses a contested boundary, as a deliberate (if uninspired) provocation. The same way reactionaries misgender and deadname transgender individuals in hopes of triggering them, the R-word has lately served as an anti-virtue-signal, affirmation that the speaker is not bound by the standards of “wokeness,” which of course is the updated idiom for that older conservative bugbear, “political correctness.” Mocking preferred pronouns and putting down a person who disagrees with you as a “retard” are two functions of the same ideological reflex system.

Much continues to be written about how the harsh vulgarity of President-elect Donald Trump has coarsened the national conversation since he launched his 2016 campaign. Critics of this coverage are correct when they note that the recklessly destructive way Trump wields power is more important than his violations of state decorum, those ill-mannered outbursts that leave longtime Beltway observers gasping about the dignity of the office and so forth. Yet the invective Trump pours out in public statements encodes, quite clearly, his atrocious agenda: His open racism toward migrants advertises a dystopian border policy, and his misogyny is a not-so-tacit endorsement of laws that choke off women’s access to life-saving reproductive care. Where the R-slur is concerned, one recalls Trump’s grotesque imitation in 2015 of New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski, who has arthrogryposis, a congenital joint condition. Trump flailed his arms at awkward angles and pulled a distended face in this little performance, disqualifying for any another era — indeed, the following April, likely voters polled on his controversies judged it his worst offense to date. Now it is a distant memory, even though this mockery of Kovaleski’s ailment prefigured his attempts to deprive millions of Americans of medical insurance by repealing the Affordable Care Act. We have since witnessed that strain of cruelty again and again, with Trump and the MAGA movement indulging their fascistic impulse to dehumanize their opponents in Washington, members of the press, and voters aligned against the authoritarian proposals of Project 2025. When culture warriors throw around the R-word online, it’s a reminder that they’re not interested in civic debate, and never were — they imply not only that leftists and liberals are wrong, but that these groups are not entitled to an opinion, and, moreover, lack the means to form a coherent idea in the first place. The American right objects to Black mayors or female CEOs as mere “DEI hires” without the qualifications to occupy those roles, and smears detractors as the unproductive refuse of a supposedly meritocratic society.       

It’s no coincidence that Musk and his tech-bro cult are meanwhile fixated on IQ scores, a highly suspect metric of intelligence, when peddling the pseudoscience of their biological superiority. Eugenics have roared back into fashion among the Silicon Valley elite, prompting ever wilder justifications for the belief that whites of European descent possess some evolutionary advantage, and inevitably leading to the dark question of whether certain demographics shouldn’t reproduce. (Whereas the pro-natalist Musk is reportedly offering his sperm to women in order to spread his precious DNA far and wide, his father, Errol Musk, has outright suggested that having babies should be like breeding horses.) Children shouting “retard” at recess can easily be made to understand how it isolates and stigmatizes their developmentally disabled peers. The same ought to go for those of us already old enough to know better. As a redditor recently wrote in a thread on the topic: “I used to work as a job developer for people with developmental disabilities. Every once in a while in an overheard conversation or on the radio/TV, someone would jokingly call their friend or co-worker ‘retarded.’ My clients would never get mad or make a big deal out of it, they would just say something like ‘oh’ to themselves and get real quiet and not really interact with anyone for the rest of the day.” The word, “even if it’s not in reference to them,” this user explained, “shuts them down and reminds them they aren’t who they wish to be.” Yet the increasingly normalized and casual use of the slur in the digital public square is so far removed from this framework of basic empathy, and from the euphemistic origins of the expression — a clinical term twisted for the purposes of disparagement — that the appeal to decency doesn’t apply. X’s own policy against hateful conduct forbids attacks on the basis of disability, and if you pressed Musk on his violations of that rule, he’d probably demand that his targets produce documentation of their cognitive impairment to prove the personal injury. It’s nothing but a recursive semantic game to this crowd, pressing the big red button for a totally predictable reaction. “I realized it was retarded of me to say retard,” Musk mused last month, when his lackeys were commending his latest post using the word. Nobody else reads these as the quips of an enlightened futurist. Like Trump’s repetitive attacks on favorite scapegoats, they are verbal spam, designating specific targets as undeserving of safety, self-fulfillment, or a say in the direction society is taking. It’s almost fortunate that their naked contempt exposes their goal of disenfranchisement. When battling that tide, though, it will be crucial to hold on to language that correctly diagnoses the moment and its villains — not the kind that tramples the innocent. 

[neverdirtfree]

i don't have time to be sad about things i literally have to study and be hot at all times

[neverdirtfree]

[neverdirtfree]

straight men have beauty standards for men that are completely different than the beauty standards women and gay men have for men and then they get mad when they conform to the beauty standards other podcast bros set for them and women still don’t find them attractive

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Would anyone like to join me in my New Year's tradition of reading about good things that happened this year?

[neverdirtfree]

Healthcare issues reflected in yaoi ✊😔

[neverdirtfree]

the bottom of the museum of human history

[neverdirtfree]

Hello🤗❤️

I hope you are well🌹

Can you help me get my voice heard

and share my family's story?🙏🏻

Can you Reblog my pinned post from my blog or donate 10$?

By helping to reblog my story, you could

save a family from death and war.🌹

Thank you very much🌸

🕊️❤️🌹🙏🏻

Hello. I have reviewed 4 different messages with this identical wording and the same pictures from different accounts over the last two days. It is absolutely disgraceful that you are trying to profiteer off a humanitarian crisis, I half hope you are stuck in some terrible situation and not doing this of your own free will because it is is Suck sickening behaviour.

[neverdirtfree]

On my hands and knees begging adults to allow children to engage in risk play.

And by risk play I don't mean handing them a gun and playing Russian Roulette.

I mean like climbing trees, getting so sick spinning on the swing they throw up, balancing on the curb, sitting in the mud, walking on slippery surfaces, building half ass ramps to ride their bike over, standing on rocks, or anything that involves a smidgen of confidence and out of the box thinking that could result in injury.

Obviously like watch your kids and such, but when we talk about the fun of being an 80s or 90s kid, it's not just talking about CDs and Walkmans or not having iPads. It's about how kids today were robbed of critical learning and experience skills we were allowed to have.

Playgrounds disappearing, helicopter parents, and sue culture really destroyed a child's development in the United States, and I think it's about time we as adults recognize that, because the kids sure have.

[neverdirtfree]

My favorite part about being sapphic is when the things I love about other women become things I love about myself. One day I was tracing another woman’s stretch marks in a dim bedroom light. And then, seemingly by accident, I was doing it to myself in my bathroom mirror. I loved the feeling of a full hand of flesh when I grabbed a woman’s hips, and then mine didn’t need to be so skinny anymore. I looked at a woman’s lower stomach pudge and thought it was so soft and cute, then never wanted a flat stomach again. Loving women can be so healing when you come from a world that doesn’t.

[neverdirtfree]