#because i am white and usamerican

[saintverse]

forgive me on possible poor wording on this post (suggestions and discussion are welcome and open) i'm really not feeling well right now and i struggle with articulating myself because of brainfog.

tumblr is an echo chamber but if you say that you're accused of being a fascist or whatever when it's just plainly and simply true. it's genuinely wonderful to have an online space dominated by autistic people and leftists but the disadvantages of such a space rear their head quite quickly when you think about it for more than five seconds.

(there is NOTHING inherently wrong with the way autistic people think vs allistic people think, merely i think a lot of us struggle with the same issues that can sometimes inhibit our understanding of the world around us and experiences different from our own)

autism being the norm is fun and cool until you try to explain the nuances of like, for example, online behavior. because i think a lot of us struggle with black or white thinking that goes unquestioned and it can lead to really unhealthy habits. like yeah terfs are shitty people and we should reject their ideas, but spending your spare time sending random people on the internet gore is really weird, is giving them more attention than they deserve, and is overall a waste of time that can't be good for your mental health. and if you explained to anyone offline that one of your hobbies is sending gore or suicide baiting people on the internet, even with those people being bigots, they will be weirded out. it's not healthy to put that much emotional energy into your oppressor. it's just weird. go for a walk or something, girl. i can't watch this.

(creating public campaigns against specific terfs just gives them more of a platform and a weird victim complex. most importantly, you're putting your transfem friends and mutuals in danger by exposing them to this shit and giving transmisogynists a way to find them!)

(i don't say any of this to be shitty about autistic people i just think our brains are wired or whatever to make it really easy to fall down weird pipelines. hence why 4chan was filled with a lot of autistic white dudes. a lot of us are fairly susceptible to rhetoric if it goes unquestioned and aligns with our personal unchallenged world views.)

another example, if you say the r slur in real life everybody is just going to think you're saying the r slur. the average person (who also is chill with the r slur and probably uses it themselves) will be like haha yeah. and the average autistic or intellectually disabled person will be like oh good god i need to stay away from them. but for some reason people on here think they can reclaim the r slur by using it as a slur online (especially when they themselves are NOT intellectually disabled and have ZERO right to reclaim that term). you've all been infected by 4chan brain and you don't even see it because you've convinced yourself being a coldhearted edgy bully is cool and that being shitty to, for example, people with social anxiety is funny and aligns perfectly with your progressive persona (you reblog posts about social justice but you're a dick to everyone you've ever met and you have no friends because you're a negative person who is genuinely unpleasant to be around)

image credit goes to: @batmanreturnsnineteenninetytwo

and did you know that randomly deciding to make asexuals or polyamorous people (people who deviate from the norm) the butt of your jokes and calling them freaks and shit is actually progressive? everyone has just been slowly and slowly becoming more mask off disgusting and it's wild to me. on tumblr.com, you people are being shitty to anyone who deviates from the norm? i mean. who am i kidding. this website hates trans women and people from the global south more than anything so i haven't believed tumblr was a truly "forward-thinking" space since i was a naïve young teenager.

people who lose their shit about tankies. people who clutch their pearls about misandry and "transandrophobia"... people who accuse all palestinians of being scammers. people who send suicide bait and debate with bigots they should really be ignoring. people who make fun of people with a complicated relationship with sex or with social anxiety. you freaks are everywhere and you're all ridiculously reactionary, you just dress it up as progressivism and how to be cool on the internet or whatever. i'm SOOOOOOOO tired...

100% a line of thinking inspired by this very spot-on post, as well as the interaction that had in the comments with @deepseasmetro - thank you!

tumblr is a flimsy ego-boosting platform that's filled with bullies who hide behind their politics and relationship with oppression meanwhile they don't give a fuck about anyone who has less than them, who has it worse than them. it's all about the oppression olympics, looking cool, and punching down. obviously most of us with a head on our shoulders know this already but it truly never ceases to astound me tbh 😐

it's the same people posting inspiring poetry & textposts about kindness and love and small animals that are out here telling teenagers to kill themselves!

anyway. while you're here please donate to hamada and mohammed and heba and her father bakr ⭐️

[asilidae]

If anyone following me is still on the 'vote blue no matter who' bandwagon I'm not going to try to convince you of anything I just want you to read Settlers.

Here is a link to the book. It's free. It's available as html plaintext or as a pdf, so there's really no excuse. I even put the pdf onto an old secondhand kindle paperwhite I have so I don't strain my eyes reading it. Do yourself, and everyone else, a favor and read some actual books instead of regurgitating selfish shit you read on twitter or whatever.

[135-film]

some people really do act like gay marriage wasn't only legalized in the US 9 years ago.

[saveyoursunshine]

! rant dont mind me !

[elbiotipo]

United States politics views everything in demographics ("X% of White Women voted for Biden! X% of Latinos voted for Trump!") instead of, well, actual political and social dynamics. Of course racism, homophobia and other social issues play part in politics. But they are shaped by larger things, and the demographics analysis that US pundits do love to miss those things and focus on sheer numbers and categorization.

This is dangerous because once you say "this demographic is responsible for these politics" you're in the fast track to fascism. As we've seen with liberal Usamericans blaming whole groups of people for Trump's victory. This kind of thinking can only lead to ruin.

Why I am talking about this, even if it's not my own country? Because the US way of political thinking spreads easily through its cultural dominance. It's an individualistic, essentialist way of thinking, which blames supposed characteristics of people instead of understanding their social and material history and conditions (because that might lead to actual change and even worse, Marxism!). If you want to understand why the right wing is rising globally, it's not because some nasty people got together to vote and the good people didn't vote. You have to understand how each society works.

[thefoolsprocession]

Let's settle this once and for all:

Being general here because I know people are gonna say 'but there's more than one!!!!!!' I do not care.

If you are from either of these two countries DO NOT VOTE I am NOT accepting biases

[hussyknee]

Us: "If your democracy hinges you voting for the guy blowing up toddlers' skulls RIGHT NOW to prevent a guy who MIGHT blow up MORE toddlers' skulls and take away the same rights you're already losing under the first guy anyway, YOU DON'T FUCKING HAVE A DEMOCRACY. And also you should and will rot in the deepest bowels of hell because Martin Niemöller was talking about you."

Liberals: "YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND. WE CAN ONLY FIGHT FASCISM BY DOING GENOCIDE MATH! THIS IS HOW radical leftist BIPOC WE WON OUR CIVIL RIGHTS!"

Libs are like, "YOU CAN'T LET TRUMP WIN JUST BECAUSE BIDEN IS COMMITTING A GENOCIDE! THIS IS NOT THE TIME FOR SINGLE-ISSUE VOTERS", when the fact is that people are already really fucking angry at him for funding two wars during a severe cost of living crisis. Biden's pet dog has already gotten Israel and the US embroiled in a steadily escalating conflict with Houthis and Hezbollah in Syria and Lebanon, and now Netanyahu is trying to ethnically cleanse two million Gazans by pushing them out of the country into Egypt, one of the countries the US gives billions of aid money to make nice with Israel and help them trap the Palestinians. Egypt is already mad about this (although Idk what they expected lol) and if Israel creates a border conflict with them, Iran might press their advantage and then the whole region descend into an all-out war in which the US is embroiled. At which point oil prices will jump, the US economy get even worse, more tax money funnelled into TWO wars, one of which is due to the genocide.

People might not care about Muslims living thousands of miles away, but they have some very strong opinions about putting food on the table. At this point there's a pretty significant shift in the Black community towards Trump because Biden has INCREASED funding for police, is supporting Cop City that someone DIED protesting, and hasn't made a dent in mass incarceration (the marijuana pardon was fucking hilarious in a depraved way). The right has also been weaponizing Black people's resentment against Latino "illegal aliens" and Biden's "concessions" towards them, when actually his immigration policies have barely been less draconian than Trump's all this time. The reason he's making those concessions is that he has to look more progressive than him, except he's also been slowly escalating ICE crackdowns, keeping kids in cages and building a border wall. So the Latin voters are entirely fed up with him too.

So far, he's lost the Muslim vote, the Latin vote, the Black vote, the youth vote (people of ages 18 to 35 are the most outraged at the genocide in Gaza), and they're hemorrhaging the working class votes. These are the extremely angry and betrayed people the liberals are currently working overtime screaming at about Trump "bringing the death of democracy", like democracy means anything to them compared to losing jobs, money, visas, family members, health (Biden's first and ongoing genocide is disabled people due to his COVID policies), social infrastructure and money.

Y'all said Blue Not Matter Who and elected a career racist and known incompetent who supported segregation, was an architect of mass incarceration, got Clarence Thomas elected to the Supreme Court and spewed rhetoric against Arabs so genocidal that motherfucking Menachem Begin was like "....bro." And you got exactly what you paid for. If Trump gets on the ticket next year he's going to win, and no amount of screaming at people online is going to change that. So I suggest you start organising now. The age of trying to create a revolution at the ballot box is over.

[minipisi-is-dumb]

people don't believe that fascists rather see venezuela rot than see us free, this clown thinks that supporting a lesser of two evils makes me a white cracker zionist apparently. friendly reminder I am not white and not right wing. never put those words in my mouth.

also. since it seems like I have to spell it out on usamerican terms and political lenses so that people listen:

most of the venezuelan population is black and brown (including me) and y'all are silencing and ignoring our situation

maduro is an israel ally and trades with them since years ago, y'all downplaying his direct hand on this because he said free palestine one day before the elections is disgusting.

the US sanctions affected the nation, yes, but the nation was already at rock bottom by the time they were applied because of human rights violations, censorship, etc. don't defend the us but that doesn't mean maduro is a saint when he consistently steals money and resources from the nation while killing children and students

this isn't a left or right situation. this is a democracy vs dictatorship situation. this is a sovereignty vs human rights violations situation. have some common sense

It's insane that people hate the US more than you care about nations in the middle of a dictatorship that need support about our situation.

we don't want you to defend an imperialist nation because THIS ISN'T ABOUT THE UNITED STATES AND THEIR WHIMS, we want you to CONDEMN A DICTATOR and SHOW SUPPORT FOR THE CIVILIANS THAT CAN'T DEFEND THEMSELVES

share about venezuela every time you can if you're not in the country.

and if you are venezuelan, don't waste yourself with people that defend our suffering. we don't need it

[jewish-sideblog]

"Both indigenous and colonizers" CAN PEOPLE STOP TALKING ABOUT SHIT THEY DON'T UNDERSTAND PLEASE

This wave of antisemitism and bullshit about "indigenous vs colonizer" makes me so scared as an indigenous person in the US of what will happen when Land Back movements do result in actual sovereignty restoration and then tribes do what people do and disagree over land and resources, like we were doing for thousands of years before Europeans arrived. Will we be reduced down to colonizers too??

It feels like Westerners, especially USAmericans, have such a black and white idea of what it means to be indigenous and what it means to be a colonizer/settler (because those terms are always conflated) and it makes me so angry and frustrated to see people apply those standards and lines thinking not just to complex sovereignty movements in their own countries but also to incredibly complex conflicts and wars happening on the other side of the world.

The damage I've seen done to sovereignty movements here in the US alone, people going around claiming that we want all "settlers" to go back to Europe or that we're going to start massacring people, has been horrible and the fact that it's all just to justify antisemitism makes me sick.

Genuinely. They're blocked now, but that same person said something to the effect of "Would an Iranian praying in a Mosque built on the ashes of a former synagogue be decolonization?"

And that was the point at which I was like. Ok. It seems like most people genuinely don't actually know what the terms "colonization", "colonizer" and "coloniality" mean. Obviously, that wouldn't be decolonization, because the Jews never colonized Iran. Emigration and colonization aren't the same fucking thing!

I used to have so much faith in my generation. I thought we were critical thinkers, capable of flexibility and engagement with new ideas. But I'm realizing now that we're basically just rebranded boomers. Back in the day, anybody you disagreed with was labelled as a "Communist". It didn't actually fucking matter if they were communist sympathizers, Soviet sympathizers, or even if they were remotely allied with socialist ideals. You could just call them a "Communist" and be done with it, without even understanding what that term means.

It's the same shit today. Instead of a HUAC witch hunt targeting communists, it's a social witch hunt targeting "colonizers" and "Zionists". I am terrified that the moment indigenous rights movements in the Americas and Oceania start making practical strides in Land Back, regaining rightful control over the ways your own land is used, you'll all be labelled as "colonizers" or "imperialists" or whatever the bad buzz word of the month turns out to be.

People simply can't wrap their heads around the idea that indigenous decolonization doesn't have the end goal of ethnically cleansing non-native people from the Americas. And it's because they're so absorbed in colonial thinking. They can't even fucking imagine what sovereignty could look like beyond an authoritarian structure based on control and violence. It's the same with Israel and Palestine-- they think that Jewish sovereignty must look like complete Jewish control to the detriment of Arabs, and they think Palestinian sovereignty must look like total Arab control to the detriment of Jews. The idea that a shared state or a two-state solution is "racist" stems from that false dichotomy.

Establishing an ideological binary of violence that pits "indigenous" against "colonizer", "native" against "settler", and "us" against "them" with no room for cooperation or collaboration is the core of colonialism. Because the core of colonialism is the idea that only one group can have true power at a time. And that's just not the way the world has to work.

[shoplifting]

The thing is that as long as the hegemony is white, any deviation from the white "standard" will cause a member of the hegemony to also be mentally excluded by any white person less deviant, while the excluded person includes anyone at their level of deviation but no more.

Like, take Tumblr. "We're the queer neurodivergent former gifted kid website" - let's assume that's even true - "that's why we act like this" ok. So. We know you actually act like that primarily because you're white - that's not debatable, it's fact, even if you choose to ignore it - therefore you're excluding all POC from this hegemony. So we know the perceived hegemony is the white queer USAmerican neurodivergent gifted kid crowd.

"We act like this," and "this" is defined by the speaker as writing essays on fiction (real example I saw yesterday). Hi! White queer USAmerican neurodivergent (AuDHD) former gifted kid here! I don't do that because I have a writing disability and language disorder! You have therefore excluded me from the dominant class, even though I am white, queer, and neurodivergent in the same ways as you.

What do white queer neurotypical people generally think of you? They think you're not the default, they think you're weird, and they might be treating you as a liability behind your back. What do cishet white people think of them? The same! And that's not even bringing up how intersex, physically disabled, non-AuDHD neurodivergent people, and anyone higher needs have their deviance weighed more heavily, particularly I've seen online, which bleeds into real life.

That's what defines whiteness, I think. "Everything as deviant as me is ok because that keeps me included, everything moreso is weird and bad." Please just unlearn shame, and never lump me in with you in your conversations.

[apocalypticvalraven]

Delicious in Dungeon in The Kitchen

So... I was struck by the thought that I kinda wish some food nerd would go through the Dungeon Meshi dishes and analyze them and sort of give a "this is the real world thing they're making" run down.

And then I realized I'm a food nerd that can do research.

So.

We're gonna try this out, starting with Volume 1. I don't promise that I know everything about cooking. I don't promise I'll always be able to make the thing I'm looking at (I am broke, and I don't have my own kitchen). But I can at least look at a dish and figure out what they're doing and how to replicate it, at least sorta.

Dungeon Meshi Volume 1-- Huge Scorpion and Walking Mushroom Hot Pot

The two main components of this dish are the Huge Scorpion and Walking Mushroom.

Walking Mushroom

Looking at the images in the manga, Walking Mushroom seems to just... be a mushroom that can walk around. There are no organs, the interior seems pretty uniform in substance...

Like, literally, that's exactly what sliced mushrooms look like. Senshi cuts the mushroom into ~4" strips (judging by their size next to the small cabbage-like vegetable, and comparing those plants to his hand in the image of him gathering them. I am assuming dwarf hands are roughly the same size as human hands).

There's a variety of edible mushroom that is probably as close as we're going to get to the size of a Walking Mushroom, growing a cap up to 3' wide, but it seems to only grow in termite mounds in a very specific part of the African continent (please forgive my USAmerican, White education leading me to not being able to identify the specific region), so... if you can get that at all, it's probably crazy expensive (as it should be, unless you're literally getting it from the mounds or local markets yourself). Portobello or similar large culinary mushrooms are probably just fine. The Mushroom Feet are literally just mushrooms, so no worries there.

Huge Scorpion

Ok, so... there is a difference between arachnids and crustaceans. As a start, arachnids have book lungs and crustaceans have gills. Arachnid guts are different from crustacean guts, just because of environment. Hell, crustacean limbs grow differently from arachnid limbs.

That said, everything I see in Dungeon Meshi implies that, from a culinary standpoint, Huge Scorpion is a crustacean-

So, really, it's just a big lobster. Take a lobster, cut off its legs, antennae, and the tail fluke, and you're going to see something that looks pretty similar to the huge scorpion in Dungeon Meshi.

Seaweed

Next is seaweed, which... is just a thing, but also kind of an imprecise term, I think. Basically, "seaweed" just refers to any marine algae that is multicellular and macroscopic (big enough to see). Arctic Moss seems to be a real thing which refers to a couple things- the aquatic moss Calliergon giganteum and the terrestrial lichen in the genus of Cladonia, which includes Reindeer Lichen.

Reindeer lichen is edible, in a number of ways, but it's also not seaweed. So we look at Calliergon giganteum. I cannot get an answer as to whether this particular variety of moss is edible. So... fuck it, say Senshi used Reindeer Lichen, at least we know that's edible.

"Star Jelly" is... I don't know. The main result I find when googling it is that it's the sort of general term for various slimes that show up on lawns and other vegetation, etc. Which means it could be anything from amphibian spawning jelly to who the fuck knows what.

However, one thing it could be is a cyanobacteria known as Fat Choy, a commonly used "vegetable" in Chinese Cuisine:

Looks like jelly? Yep. Looks weird enough that you might imagine it comes from a star? Yep. Edible? Yes!

(I mean, maybe don't eat a ton of it, or get it from irreputable sources. At least some Fat Choy contains a toxic amino acid which may or may not have negative health effects, but I'm not a doctor, so all I'm saying is "be aware of this." It's an expensive delicacy, which means that it is a particularly lucrative target for counterfeiters, and China does not have strong, or strongly enforced, food safety laws).

The Hard Stuff

So that leaves "Invertatoes" and "Dried Slime."

Neither of which seem to have a good direct analogue to the real world. Well... sorta.

Invertatoes seems to refer to the plants. The name calls to mind potatoes, and potatoes do indeed grow in the ground and are starchy. It's probably fair to just use any kind of starchy tuber as the "invertatoes." Maybe cassava, since those are large enough that it's at least somewhat believable that "Fantasy Land Cassava" could look like that (although that doesn't fit the "these are normal plants that grow upside down" unless we're being really generous).

The problem is that it's sort of implied that the cabbage-like vegetable seen in the hot pot comes from the same plant, and everything from a potato plant other than the potato itself is toxic. They also don't look like that.

I literally don't know what those cabbage/lettuce-like leafy vegetables are. They're not seaweed, because the two varieties called out definitely don't look like that. They're not, so far as I can tell, the greens of any kind of starchy tuber--

EXCEPT.

So, I was taking one last look at tubers to see if I could find something that seemed to match, and I think Invertatoes could be likened to something similar to chicory. Particularly endives. I never knew endives were related to chicory (ie, "that thing that I'm aware is popular as a coffee substitute in the South, but I don't have much desire to try it, and I wonder if it even has caffeine..."), but, apparently, yeah. Endives are a member of the chicory genus.

So, yeah, lets say that Invertatoes are a sort of fantasy plant similar to the various members of the chicory genus. The trunk can be replicated with chicory root, and the leaves with endives.

That leaves Dried Slime. Dried Slime makes up the noodles in the hot pot, which implies that the noodles are gelatinous, and probably low in gluten. Senshi's explanation of the slime makes me want to think of it as a macro-unicellular lifeform, but... I'm not sure that's accurate.

While it's definitely not an accurate way to describe a jellyfish, I could definitely see a non-biologist describing jellyfish in a way similar to the way Senshi describes the slime. I could also see some fantasy terrestrial jellyfish thing hunting in a similar manner to the slime. Moreover, there are edible varieties of jellyfish, and they're processed in a manner very similar to what Senshi describes for processing slimes. And one way of preparing edible jellyfish is to thinly slice it into noodles.

Hot Pots

I... think this is using a very specifically Japanese sense of "hot pot" (which makes sense), because in Japan, hot pot can refer to a dish called nabemono, while in general, hot pot refers to a particular kind of dining in China where you get a pot full of boiling stock/broth and a bunch of raw ingredients, and you put the stuff you want into the broth at the table. Nabemono is more of "put a bunch of stuff in a pot, and cook it. Serve it boiling." Which is to say, it's soup.

Senshi puts the scorpion meat and mushroom into a pot on its own, and lets it start boiling-

Then, while it's boiling, he goes and finds other ingredients, coming back with the invertatoes and the slime. The two are prepared simply-

Seasoning isn't included in the ingredients, but I can understand this as a choice for presentation. We do see Senshi add something to the broth after tasting it, and I think it's fair to assume it's one of soy sauce, mirin, fish sauce, or similar. I think it's actually really interesting that we see Senshi add seasoning, but we're not told what it is-

Because... that's cooking. You can follow a recipe, but ultimately, you need to taste your cooking and make your own decisions. Senshi lets the soup cook, tastes the broth, decides it needs something, and gives it a bit of time to let the flavors meld before serving it up.

Dungeon Meshi Lobster and Mushroom Hot Pot

So, we're looking at something like this for the "Huge Scorpion and Walking Mushroom Hot Pot"--

Lobster- ~5 lbs or more (a 1 lb lobster yields about 4 oz of actual meat, which is a single serving), cut into large slices

Portobello- 2 mushrooms large diced, 2 left whole with the caps scored

Reindeer Lichen and Fat Choy- to taste

Chicory Roots- ~1 cup, diced

Endive greens- ~2 cups

Jellyfish, thin sliced- as much as you like

Add lobster and mushrooms to water, and allow to boil. While it comes to a boil, prepare the other ingredients, then add to the water. Let the soup come to a full boil, then reduce heat and simmer for 15 minutes to an hour (can simmer longer, but this will affect the texture of the ingredients. Longer simmering will result in more melding of flavors, but also degraded solid parts).

Taste the broth. It will likely need salt and acid, which could come in a variety of forms, such as kosher salt and lemon juice, soy sauce and mirin/rice vinegar, oyster/fish sauce, or something else. Go with your gut and your taste buds..

[faint-petrichor]

when I see the outright hatred, dehumanization and disgust israelis display towards palestinians, I do not think of their evil as unique. as a settler-colonial project, it shares in common the characteristics of all settler-colonial projects. in that respect it should be seen as the furthest thing from unique, especially to the usamericans who dominate this site. when I see the violence of one settler project I am reminded of the violence of all the others.

the only difference is the US gets to pretend it's better because its settlement is complete, a figment of a tragic past—or so they say. yet the culture of the united states in every regard is just as violent and cruel to the bone. and if you look for even a second you see that its colonization is ongoing and far from complete. you see the same vicious settler-colonial attitudes, the same dehumanization and brutality and hatred and disgust that becomes naked at the slightest push. the extreme militarism, individualism and normalization of cruelty. all of it.

I see so many white usamericans distancing themselves from the horror of the israel project, which can take either the form of condemnation or denial, in order to distance themselves from the settler-colonial violence of their own country they are complicit in much the same way as the israeli people. and this is without even speaking of the imperialist horrors the united states inflicts endlessly on the global south and on palestine itself through the sale of weapons and diplomatic support.

if you are from the US you should be very mindful of throwing stones at glass houses in this scenario. for as unspeakable the atrocity happening in Palestine is, it will never even begin to compare to the scale of the horror inflicted on the world and within as the US. if you aren't aware of what that looks like yet, now is a good time to start learning so you truly understand, and to stop making excuses for why you can't do anything about it.

[txttletale]

Hi txttletale! I am an American voter who respects your opinion a great deal. You have a lot of takes I agree with and I see you as someone with very enlightening, and well-informed perspectives on issues I care about.

That being said, I don't understand your advocacy for withholding votes from the democratic party of the United States. I understand the idea is to motivate a change in the parties politics, but I see the natural conclusion of this being spliting the vote and allowing a right-winger to take power.

What am I missing? I'm very frustrated by this situation, and I'd very much like to find a third solution. I have no interest in furthering the genocide, but I don't see how anyone on the right wing would be any less bloodthirsty, or beneficial to the United States, or its foreign relations. What are your suggestions?

yeah my basic thesis is that if the democratic party fails to notice that it is heading towards loss because of a large bloc of people loudly and explicltly swearing off genocide joe for his bloodlust then yes, donald j trump will in fact be president for four years. as a result of this, the democratic party will learn that biden's degree of open genocidal glee is an election-throwing issue and their 2028 candidate will go back to tacitly endorsing the slow progress of ethnic cleansing but slapping israel on the wrist every time the brutality starts looking too bad on camera.

obviously, this is still a deeply evil position, but that's the best thing you can hope for out of usamerican electoral politics -- you will never get someone in the white house who supports the palestinian struggle, but you absolutely can shoot for having someone in the white house who will see children being incinerated by white phosphorous and tell israel to cut that shit off now or they'll take away their trust fund (not for moral reasons, to be clear, but PR reasons). fucking reagan was capable of it. whether this will work or not is left as an excercise for the voter, as is whether it is worth it -- but i clearly believe it will and is.

[librarycards]

I’ve seen a lot of discourse about Aaron Bushnell and madness, with reactionary genocidaires saying it is madness, and leftists saying it is not madness but principled protest. In my mind I am thinking about madness and sanity under empire, thinking I am surely mad and wondering why anyone is trying to be sane. If you have the capacity, can you share your thoughts on the madness of this moment, or point to others who have shared those thoughts?

you have very much captured the spirit of what i think! there's that common aphorism that goes something like, 'if this world is sane, then of course i'm mad' etc. etc., while i think this doesn't fully capture the specific genealogy and politic of Madness as contemporary scholar-activists understand it, it does provide a quick & effective explanation of Aaron's (z"l) decision to make the ultimate sacrifice in support of Palestinian liberation.

it isn't useful to understand his choices as solely Mad (in terms of an embrace of opacity and nonsensicality/illegibility - in fact, quite the opposite, he took pains to be explicit and serious as to his reasoning and methodology so that u.s. media discourse would struggle to obfuscate it [even though they still are]).

however, it *is* useful to use a Mad conceptual framework for some elements of Aaron's choice, and as a means of understanding pathologized forms of protest –– not only suicide, but med strike, hunger strike, etc. these forms of protest, as many have said, are designed to distress onlookers. they are designed to push against the bounds of the common[/]sensical, to gift us with possible alternatives to, you know, getting a police permit and marching in circles, AND, to the complacent, grease the stopped-up gears of their own imaginations. because Aaron did what is, in many ways (even to those of us who have attempted suicide before) unimaginable: he died. we have not yet died. he died yelling "Free Palestine." he died, and lived his last moments with a degree of moral turpitude, courage, and singleminded commitment to a cause that few will ever achieve, and yet one that –– as Aaron himself acknowledged Palestinians must muster every day.

here is where Madness comes in: Aaron acted as a linker of worlds: between that which many usamericans, and many others who have never undergone military siege/genocide, find exists outside the realm of the imaginable. a world that many would prefer to pretend does not, can not, could not exist. a world from which hegemonic media would have "us" (white americans/others in the ~western world~) believe could never exist, not least because our own military hegemons (with Aaron, until the other day, as one of their sentient weapons) protect "democracy" –– that is, the supposed exceptionality/exemption of the "(white) u.s. citizen" from terror, from sociopolitical Madness, from the absolute violence of settler colonialism. Aaron, in short, brought that unimaginable violence home. he forced us to reckon with the brutal truth of martyrdom, here. as someone on here mentioned, he used his status as an airman in what is perhaps the most effective weaponization of privilege i have ever seen. he killed a soldier, and that soldier was himself.

of course media is leaping and will continue to leap on this as evidence of extremism, of dangerous insanity, etc. etc. in radical movements. always has been. read The Protest Psychosis. the idea of insanity has been used by basically every state power to justify disposal, because it's convenient: by claiming one is insane, you also claim all of their appeals to reason are the result of their insanity. this is called anasognosia. it's a cute little trick. it isn't new. the best way to approach this is to maintain two things: one, that Aaron's choice was rational given a clearsighted understanding of the scale of genocide that's currently taking place. AND, to question those –– leftists included! pro-pal folks included! –– who uncritically cite 'mental illness' as the reason for Aaron's suicide.

this is not because Aaron wasn't what some would call "mentally ill" –– i don't know him, i do not live in his head. the point is, it does not matter if he was diagnosed with anything or not. it does not matter if he was already suicidal or not. it does not matter if he had tried to kill himself before. none of it fucking matters, and attempts to reduce this act to the result of a mad(dened) mind is to distract from the political project he pursued. he performed a politically Mad act, to which his imagined internal pathology was irrelevant. he broke consensus reality, even if only for a moment. he linked worlds. Palestinians felt it. that is what matters.

so, how did he connect worlds? he did something Mad. it is useful to understand suicide as a Mad act, so long as we are careful not to fall into the pathologizing traps that exclude suicidal people as interlocutors outright. he showed many of us, activists included, what we could be doing - the lengths to which it is possible to go in support of liberation. he did not, and i am not, encourage/ing everyone else to kill themselves. self-immolation is effective, in many ways, because so few people do it. we need to stay alive to continue the fight. however, Aaron tore the fabric of the reasonable, the possible, and the legal (consider the pigs who approached his burning body with guns) to disrupt a collective consciousness that would rather move on, equivocate, forget, tune-out. that is Mad. Madness is necessary in our movements, all of them.

[goondah]

If this rap discourse has done one thing its remind me how white this website is. I have also seen a concerning amount of "I am not racist BUT..."

So, my beloved white mutuals, white followers and any other white tumblr user who sees this, this is a call to action. If you would consider yourself not racist but have found that these posts about rap make you feel angry, disgusted or threatened i suggest you ask yourself the following questions:

Have i actually adressed any of my existing racial biases or preconceptions?

How aware am I of the history of different racial groups in my community and how this impacts the political situation today? (this applies to non USAmericans too)

How do i feel when i see a stranger of a different race to me in public? How does that compare to a stranger of the same race to me?

How often do i interact with non-white people? How many of my friends or important figures in my life aren't white?

How often do i engage with art created by people of a different race to me?

Am i actually not racist or do i just think i'm not because i don't call people racial slurs?

It is a well understood concept that a man who does not harass random women (and therefore would not consider himself a misogynist) can still perpetuate misogyny by having patriarchal values and ideas. It seems that many of you have not also applied this logic to race.

This post is not meant as a callout to anyone specific, i just want to challenge what seems to be a blind spot for many tumblr users and hopefully encourage some introspection.

(white people are welcome and encouraged to reblog this post)

[unlimitedbutchworks]

ratliker is absolutely not someone to defend. like she was so racist if you search her name on here you can see so so many posts about her racism by so many different people lol

we are not doing this. i am not defending the genuinely shitty stuff she did say; all I said was that it’s not fair to extrapolate some racism into her being an incest defender pedophile, and that we should not forget the situation that spawned all that mess, that being a Chilean woman joking about revenge on the US for its imperialism that she has materially felt and getting flamed by americans for it. like she gets brought up every time tyler does this and every time they act like she said the slave trade wasn’t genocidal despite her saying otherwise over and over, because this bad faith reading of some scuffed comments and resulting telephone game into “ratliker denies the slave trades violence and is a dogfucking incestous pedophile” is again, completely unjust, and they were looking for excuses to use this genocide-denying language about her ever since she complained about usamericans and joked about nuking the us, just waiting for a sturdy enough pretense for tumblr users to bandwagon. like waiting for a trans woman to reblog an anime girl so you can say some contrived shit about her being pedophilic because wow don’t you know all anime is made to look like kids?

a trans woman saying something racist is not a go-ahead to lie about her being everything evil under the sun, we should just take racism seriously as a bad thing in of itself. except they don’t take it seriously which is why they lie and do this, as we can see every time they lump twoc in with white trans women to bitch about trannies and every time they fabricate accusations of raceplay.