#BIPOC rights

[cvntyboylove-666]

If you had told me a year ago that we could end up living in a society where uterus-havers bodies belong to the government I would've asked you what kind of omegaverse smut fanfiction you were reading.

[mollyjimbly]

ACTION ALERT THIS IS THE LAST CHANCE!!!

Democratic leadership is quietly working with Speaker Johnson to sneak through reauthorization of Section 702, a racist mass surveillance program. The timing on this is super urgent, they're deciding on what will be attached to the NDAA in the next couple days. FFTF set up a calling tool to put pressure on democratic leadership. Please take a few minutes to call and demand they stop this move. Script and more information are here:

https://www.fightforthefuture.org/actions/tell-democrats-stop-pushing-racist-surveillance/

THE VOTE IS TODAY AT 4.45 EST

PLEASE CALL AND REBLOG I DO NOT CARE IF YOU ARE BUSY DO IT NOW

[cr0mthr]

You can find info for your state at r/50501.

50 states, 50 capitols, one protest. February 5, 2025 at 12:00 p.m. local time.

[toriwritesstories]

Just want to take a moment to ensure that anyone following me knows that this is a safe place for people of any and all (or no!) genders, trans and non-binary folks, as well as all disabled and neurodivergent people.

I keep things pretty light on social media because the world is fucking terrible and this is where I come to post about my gay ships and the stories I make up for them. I’ve been in fandom online since I was 12 years old (damn. 13 years) and I know how toxic it can get, and I try to keep that kind of stuff off of my accounts. And I always think my stances go without saying, but that’s not always the case.

I have so many loved ones who are trans, disabled, autistic, ADHD, or a mix of some or all of the above, and I am also my own flavor of neurospicy. There is a lot of hatred in the world toward us and the people we love and I don’t want my online space to include any of that. I thankfully haven’t seen anything transphobic or ableist on my feed, but I just wanted to make this post so that anyone following me who doesn’t know me personally knows how important these topics are to me. 💜🏳️‍⚧️

[shefightsforall]

It goes without saying: read the books they are trying to ban.

[reasonsforhope]

"If I wanted to convince you of the reality of human progress, of the fact that we as a species have advanced materially, morally, and politically over our time on this planet, I could quote you chapter and verse from a thick stack of development statistics.

I could tell you that a little more than 200 years ago, nearly half of all children born died before they reached their 15th birthday, and that today it’s less than 5 percent globally. I could tell you that in pre-industrial times, starvation was a constant specter and life expectancy was in the 30s at best. [Note: This is average life expectancy, old people did still exist in olden times] I could tell you that at the dawn of the 19th century, barely more than one person in 10 was literate, while today that ratio has been nearly reversed. I could tell you that today is, on average, the best time to be alive in human history.

But that doesn’t mean you’ll be convinced.

In one 2017 Pew poll, a plurality of Americans — people who, perhaps more than anywhere else, are heirs to the benefits of centuries of material and political progress — reported that life was better 50 years ago than it is today. A 2015 survey of thousands of adults in nine rich countries found that 10 percent or fewer believed that the world was getting better. On the internet, a strange nostalgia persists for the supposedly better times before industrialization, when ordinary people supposedly worked less and life was allegedly simpler and healthier. (They didn’t and it wasn’t.)

Looking backward, we imagine a halcyon past that never was; looking forward, it seems to many as if, in the words of young environmental activist Greta Thunberg, “the world is getting more and more grim every day.”

So it’s boom times for doom times. But the apocalyptic mindset that has gripped so many of us not only understates how far we’ve come, but how much further we can still go. The real story of progress today is its remarkable expansion to the rest of the world in recent decades. In 1950, life expectancy in Africa was just 40; today, it’s past 62. Meanwhile more than 1 billion people have moved out of extreme poverty since 1990 alone.

But there’s more to do — much more. That hundreds of millions of people still go without the benefit of electricity or live in states still racked by violence and injustice isn’t so much an indictment of progress as it is an indication that there is still more low-hanging fruit to harvest.

The world hasn’t become a better place for nearly everyone who lives on it because we wished it so. The astounding economic and technological progress made over the past 200 years has been the result of deliberate policies, a drive to invent and innovate, one advance building upon another. And as our material condition improved, so, for the most part, did our morals and politics — not as a side effect, but as a direct consequence. It’s simply easier to be good when the world isn’t zero-sum.

Which isn’t to say that the record of progress is one of unending wins. For every problem it solved — the lack of usable energy in the pre-fossil fuel days, for instance — it often created a new one, like climate change. But just as a primary way climate change is being addressed is through innovation that has drastically reduced the price of clean energy, so progress tends to be the best route to solving the problems that progress itself can create.

The biggest danger we face today, if we care about actually making the future a more perfect place, isn’t that industrial civilization will choke on its own exhaust or that democracy will crumble or that AI will rise up and overthrow us all. It’s that we will cease believing in the one force that raised humanity out of tens of thousands of years of general misery: the very idea of progress.

Changing Humanity's "Normal" Forever

Progress may be about where we’re going, but it’s impossible to understand without returning to where we’ve been. So let’s take a trip back to the foreign country that was the early years of the 19th century.

In 1820, according to data compiled by the historian Michail Moatsos, about three-quarters of the world’s population earned so little that they could not afford even a tiny living space, some heat and, hopefully, enough food to stave off malnutrition.

It was a state that we would now call “extreme poverty,” except that for most people back then, it wasn’t extreme — it was simply life.

What matters here for the story of progress isn’t the fact that the overwhelming majority of humankind lived in destitution. It’s that this was the norm, and had been the norm since essentially… forever. Poverty, illiteracy, premature death — these weren’t problems, as we would come to define them in our time. They were simply the background reality of being human, as largely unchangeable as birth and death itself...

Between 10,000 BCE and 1700, the average global population growth rate was just 0.04 percent per year. And that wasn’t because human beings weren’t having babies. They were simply dying, in great numbers: at birth, giving birth, in childhood from now-preventable diseases, and in young adulthood from now-preventable wars and violence.

It was only with the progress of industrialization that we broke out of [this long cycle], producing enough food to feed the mounting billions, enough scientific breakthroughs to conquer old killers like smallpox and the measles, and enough political advances to dwindle violent death.

Between 1800 and today, our numbers grew from around 1 billion to 8 billion. And that 8 billion aren’t just healthier, richer, and better educated. On average, they can expect to live more than twice as long. The writer Steven Johnson has called this achievement humanity’s “extra life” — but that extra isn’t just the decades that have been added to our lifespans. It’s the extra people that have been added to our numbers. I’m probably one of them, and you probably are too...

The progress we’ve earned has hardly been uninterrupted or perfectly distributed... [But] once we could prove in practice that the lot of humanity didn’t have to be hand-to-mouth existence, we could see that progress could continue to expand.

Current Progress "Flows Overwhelmingly" to the Developing World

The long twentieth century came late to the Global South, but it did get there. Between 1960 and today, India and China, together home to nearly one in every three people alive today, have seen life expectancy rise from 45 to 70 and 33 to 78, respectively. Per-capita GDP over those years rose some 2,600 percent for India and an astounding 13,400 percent for China, with the latter lifting an estimated 800 million people out of extreme poverty.

In the poorer countries of sub-Saharan Africa, progress has been slower and later, but shouldn’t be underestimated. When we see the drastic decline in child mortality — which has fallen since 1990 from 18.1 percent of all children in that region to 7.4 percent in 2021 — or the more than 20 million measles deaths that have been prevented since 2000 in Africa alone, this is progress continuing to happen now, with the benefits overwhelmingly flowing to the poorest among us.

Vanishing Autocracies

In 1800, according to Our World in Data, zero — none, nada, zip — people lived in what we would now classify as a liberal democracy. Just 22 million people — about 2 percent of the global population — lived in what the site classifies as “electoral autocracies,” meaning that what democracy they had was limited, and limited to a subset of the population.

One hundred years later, things weren’t much better — there were actual liberal democracies, but fewer than 1 percent of the world’s population lived in them...

Today just 2 billion people live in countries that are classified as closed autocracies — relatively few legal rights, no real electoral democracy — and most of them are in China...

Expanding Human Rights

All you have to do is roll the clock back a few decades to see the way that rights, on the whole, have been extended wider and wider: to LGBTQ citizens, to people of color, to women. The fundamental fact is that as much as the technological and economic world of 2023 would be unrecognizable to people in 1800, the same is true of the political world.

Nor can you disentangle that political progress from material progress. Take the gradual but definitive emancipation of women. That has been a hard-fought, ongoing battle, chiefly waged by women who saw the inherent unfairness of a male-dominated society.

But it was aided by the invention of labor-saving technologies in the home like washing machines and refrigerators that primarily gave time back to women and made it easier for them to move into the workforce.

These are all examples of the expansion of the circle of moral concern — the enlargement of who and what is considered worthy of respect and rights, from the foundation of the family or tribe all the way to humans around the world (and increasingly non-human animals as well). And it can’t be separated from the hard fact of material progress.

Leaving a Zero-Sum World Behind

The pre-industrial world was a zero-sum one... In a zero-sum world, you advance only at the expense of others, by taking from a set stock, not by adding, which is why wars of conquest between great powers were so common hundreds of years ago, or why homicide between neighbors was so much more frequent in the pre-industrial era.

We have obviously not eradicated violence, including by the state itself. But a society that can produce more of what it needs and wants is one that will be less inclined to fight over what it has, either with its neighbors or with itself. It’s not that the humans of 2023 are necessarily better, more moral, than their ancestors 200 or more years ago. It’s that war and violence cease to make economic sense...

Doomerism, at its heart, may be that exhaustion made manifest.

But just as we need continued advances in clean tech or biosecurity to protect ourselves from some of the existential threats we’ve inadvertently created, so do we need continued progress to address the problems that have been with us always: of want, of freedom, even of mortality. Nothing can dispel the terminal exhaustion that seems endemic in 2023 better than the idea that there is so much more left to do to lift millions out of poverty and misery while protecting the future — which is possible, thanks to the path of the progress we’ve made.

And we’ll know we’re successful if our descendants can one day look back on the present with the same mix of sympathy and relief with which we should look back on our past. How, they’ll wonder, did they ever live like that?"

-via Vox, 3/20/23

Note: I would seriously recommend reading the whole article--because as long as this post is, this is only about half of it! The article contains a lot more information about the hows and whys of human progress, and it also definitely made me cry the first time I read it.

[heejinsleftnut]

A question for all the leftists I see screaming about refusing to vote for Biden "on principle": what is your plan? I'm genuinely asking, because I have seen no actual ideas for what the course of action is if Trump gets elected again. It will not trigger a revolution like you think it will. 4 years of a pandemic with corporations making record profits while the general populace suffers and still almost no traction gained by labor movements should have made that clear to everyone. It will not cause the US to collapse like you think it will. The country will continue to function, however weakened, with a vengeful and sadistic dictator who is impune to the law and cannot be removed, as well as hundreds of millions of enslaved citizens, and millions more being murdered by the state for the crime of daring to exist. Countless others will likely be lost to suicide. And the ones who survive will remember those who refused "on principle" to do the bare minimum to attempt to keep them safe.

[fairyb0ii]

Please share. The situation in Italy is severe. What's happening? In these months our government became oppressive against students and protesters. Today police arrested a lot of people who were going to Rome to protest against the g3nocide in Palest*ne. They also started to attack LGBTQ+ people (especially trans/enby folks). They are attacking the scientific research. They are attacking our right to transition or get an ab*rtion. They are attacking our right to learn consent or discuss about queer topics. They ignore the vi0lence against women, BIPOC and queer folks. They are banning laws against discrimination because "it is an attack to free speech" but they are trying to attack everyone's right to exist. Before they start attacking the social medias, please share this.

[personname1]

I can't help but worry about the future now. This event will do two things for the election. One, it will galvanize Trump supporters and make him more sympathetic to moderates. Two, it will make liberals less likely to vote and moderates harder on liberal candidates.

I hope that we don't see Trump in office again, but I am now afraid in a way I wasn't several hours ago. If Trump gets re-elected the people who will be most hurt are going to be BIPOC, Queer, Immigrant, Religious Minorities, Disabled, and importantly both Ukranians and Palestinians.

If you are part of any of these groups I urge you to find support networks to help you survive, however that might look. If you aren't a US American, please encourage your political bodies to pressure the US government to maintain and improve on human rights and environmental protections, as well as being willing to get targeted groups and people ojt of the US if it becomes necessary.

If you are a US American please vote, and encourage everyone else to vote as well. Push your representatives to become more active in supporting protections for marginalized groups, the environment, and protection for Palestinians and Ukraine.

Importantly, don't lose hope. It is dark, I will not lie or obfuscate on that, but do not let your fear make you inactive. This will be a fight, it will be a fight for years,but it is one we can win and ot is one we must win.

[mama-wrath]

I think I’m fucking hilarious

[cvntyboylove-666]

I'm about to become the meanest most anarchist gnc trans man and tear down the system, screw the consequences, I won't live through the second stonewall quietly, who wants to join me?

[shinyasahalo]

[overexciteddragon]

I don't think enough people are aware that fervent support only exists to conteract opposition

"Why are so many people openly supporting trans people lately???" Because trans rights are under attack and it's important to drown the misinformation and bigotry

"Why "black lives matter"??? Why not ALL lives??" Because Black people in North America are being stripped off their rights to life and safety and it's important to scream louder than the racists

"Why are so many people SO damn sexual?? Why do people need to flaunt their sexuality and kinks???" Because fundamentalists are spreading propaganda and committing psy-ops to make the population at large believe sex, sex work, sexuality, and sex education are evil and it's important to flaunt our cock and balls and cock-and-ball tortures as much as we can to show the world that freaks and freakiness will not be prayed away

"Why are people making SO much horrid and freaky and weird media?? Why not write happy stories????" Because our right to explore our traumas, fetishes, fantasies, intrusive thoughts, or just curiosities are being slowly stripped away by a fascist government that hates art and it's important to create as much fucked up, weird, freaky, degenerate art as we possibly can so we can show the neo-nazis we are fucking ungovernable

Do you think we'd be this fucking loud if we weren't trying to fight back???

Don't you see?? Don't you fucking see??? They want you to be white, cisgender, straight, god-fearing and Christian, they want you to have little god-fearing children and live a white-picketted fence life, they want you to wear modest clothing and keep your head down when you are mentally unwell, when you are abused and assaulted. They want you to politely call the Police Officers and report your degenerate neighbour, your Black neighbour, your whore neighbour, your trans neighbour.

You're tired of people being cringe? Being weird? Being sexual? Being loud about their rights? Oh?? You're anmoyed?? You "don't get it"???

Can you imagine how exhausting it is for us to have to always do this? Half the shit i create is 30% self indulgence, and 70% some form of protest, of spite, a big loud "no, you can't assimilate me, I'd rather fucking die than be marketable, I'd rather go out screaming bloody murder than be demure in the face of numerous faceless figures sitting on hand-carved mahogany with fancy robes who never even knew that my DeviantArt OC was a fallen angel with lime green wings and red horns but speak of me like they know who I am. I'll show you who I fucking am, and you will fucking hate it, and you'll have to learn to live in a world where millions of others just like me exist, and I'll give you no other option"

[elhoimleafar]

I'm not gonna say names, cause a bunch of you are just friends with the epitome of toxicity out there and you got me freaking tired of your DMs and boring screenshots, and that fake-ass speech about "I'm not into this discussions and drama", except when this affects you.

But, finally yesterday I listened to someone talking about the political aspects of Witchcraft and how much we can do, not like your favorite white ones, who are all the time repeating that #Witchcraft is political and then keep a very convenient silence when something happens to not lose followers and readers, cause of course... Money is more important than actually putting your hands into action, right?

My constant reminder to all, that witchcraft is a path of empowerment historically carried over the shoulders of slaves, women, immigrants (Romanians, Ukranians, German, British, Africans, Caribbeans, etc...) And being pro-diversity is deeper than just highlighting a #blacklivesmatter in your profile to fake your support to the black community.

Also, if "what you do" in pro of diversity, is just to go around as a white hero repeating over and over how cool you are, and at the same time you're being paid for it, you're not doing it for diversity, you're just "supporting" a convenient cause for you.

Have a nice day, the good ones, and the toxic fake-ass ones too ☝🏻

[esckeyes]

PEN America and Penguin Random House are suing Florida over book bans.

Authors involved in the lawsuit are LGBTQIA writers such as George M. Johnson (All Boys Aren't Blue), Kyle Lukoff (Too Bright to See), and David Levithan (Two Boys Kissing) , as well as Ashley Hope Perez (Out of Darkness) whose historical YA is about a segregated town in Texas. Two parents from the district are also participating in the lawsuit.

There has been a concerted effort across America to ban books by queer and BIPOC authors by calling them "pornographic."

[katzimitg]

Das ist jetzt mehr oder weniger der richtige Anfang von dem Blog und der elfte und letzte Eintrag von dem Twitter Thread.

Auf dem Daumen is der Trans Pride Farbverlauf nicht so gelungen wie ich es wollte und sieht ein bisschen aus wie ein Osterei.

Am Zeigefinger hab ich die Intersex Pride Flag, da es einfach ein extrem schönes Design meiner Meinung nach ist.

Den Mittelfinger hab ich mit nem braunen Chromlack lackiert damit das mit dem kleinen Finger, auf dem ich nen Holographic Gradient auf schwarzem Lack gemacht hab zu Bipoc Pride wird.

Und auf dem Ringfinger hab ich ein Bleiglasfenster Design mit den Farben der Six Colored Pride Flag.

Merkt euch ihr solltet nicht nur im Juni sondern im ganzen Jahr auf euch Stolz sein und euch nicht schämen müssen!

Happy Pride Pride all year round!

Entry Nr. 11