#late liberalism

[mysharona1987]

[heynhay]

rising over the tide

[intersectionalpraxis]

if you watch one video today, please let it be theirs.

"capitalism requires poverty to function and for people to struggle" "let's not pay for housing. let's not have rent. let's get rid of landlords because that was not even a thing anywhere else besides europe"

[trans-axolotl]

getting arrested brought up a lot of psych trauma for me and there's so many things from years ago that are just playing on repeat in my mind right now. i haven't been this fucked up about solitary confinement for a long time. I've spent the first two weeks after getting arrested sleeping on the floor of my friends rooms because I can't be alone in a room without freaking out. and getting arrested wasn't anywhere near as bad as solitary in the psych institution or getting brutalized by the cops when they sectioned me. But it was just close enough to remind me of how fucking scared i was back then. how many fucking times i lost my mind. how the worst part wasn't even the assaults but that knowledge that by getting those diagnoses on my chart, i would never be seen as credible again. I had to lie there, understanding that psychiatric authority could rewrite my every action into a symptom that justified increased confinement. It didn't matter that parts of my madness were in response to the carceral violence i was surviving and that i had been placed in a situation where self-destruction was my only path for demanding autonomy. it did not fucking matter, because i had become a "patient" and that meant i would never be believed again in a system that prioritized social control over any real safety, care, or healing.

last week when they got me alone in a cell with five cops i started to feel that same type of fear that i felt all those years ago when i had to prepare myself to survive some pretty fucking unspeakable things. the moment it sunk in i would be there alone, with no witnesses, i started to feel that same type of powerlessness again. those labels of patient and criminal are weaponized in the same way to create a situation where your words, your protests, your actions are not legible or believed in any way (civil death is how the philosophers would probably describe it. "world-destroying world" is how they refer to solitary confinement.) Sitting in court for hours this week feels the same--seeing dozens of cases each day where the judge is just destroying people's lives and doesn't even fucking care.

i am so angry. i am so fucking angry. i've known all this shit for years, i've joined programs to learn to copwatch and courtwatch and inside-outside organizing and hours and hours of anti carceral suicide support training, harm reduction organizing, trying to build similar stuff for my institutionalized comrades. but i am just so fucking angry every day about the amount of people whose lives are destroyed, who are murdered by the state in these fucking places. it's the same fucking shit over and over again and like, this time i had comrades and community and knowledge and had that type of support I could rely on even when I was in there alone. but I want to scream when I think about how many people don't have any of that shit going through the same fucking thing day after day, who are as alone as I was four years ago, who disappear and are cut out of our communities day after day and we don't always even know whose missing. i want to scream and just keep screaming. i want to tear all this shit down, i don't want the world where I live in to be one where prisons and jails and institutions and any fucking form of confinement still stands.

[asytho]

Valentines date night looks pt 2

[wikiangela]

sometimes it feels like some people don't even like eddie as his own character (same often goes for buck for that matter), they only exist for each other and with each other, and ppl bend over backwards, twisting all the words said in canon, trying to make all their individual storylines about each other. it's insane lol

let them be their own characters jfc, there's so much more to them than whatever you want their relationship to be😫

[all-socialism-is-democratic]

[is-the-owl-video-cute]

Splatoon players. Whatever his team is this Splatfest, vote for big man. He is an advocate for Palestine.

[itslianotlea]

everyone who says "free palestine is anti-semitic, because it wants to exterminate jews!" is projecting what they want for palestinians

[my-midlife-crisis]

It's called being WOKE!

[icantalk710]

Very glad my team gets the option to work from home for quarter-end week 😌☕🥐

[very-lost-hobbit]

"US proxy war in Ukraine" Beating u with lead pipes

[syekick-powers]

honestly like. the flaws in trying to universalize gender socialization aside, i think the reason why t/e/rf/s trying to claim that there are some kind of Universal Female Socialization or Universal Female Experience pisses me off so bad is like. the reason why i didn't experience a lot of the Typical Female Experiences is because i didn't fit into the standard expectations for how girls should dress, look, and behave, so as a result i was treated differently by my peers. and it feels to me that the kind of standards of femininity that te/r/fs and r/a/df/e/ms try to enforce on others match the same kinds of standards other kids put on me that i failed to match up to.

so when i see them saying shit like "all girls/women experience X!" it pisses me off real bad because i didn't experience that shit BECAUSE of the standards of femininity people enforced on me that i failed to live up to. and i know that they have standards of female experience that i just don't match. to name a few: i've never been stalked by a man. i've never been catcalled or continually hit on by men who wouldn't take no for an answer. ive never felt threatened by unfamiliar men on the streets at night. the only person who ever coerced me into sex i didn't want was a cis woman who pressured me into topping her. any expression of femininity i DID engage with was seen as a cheap, faulty imitation of real femininity that made me unworthy of anything but disdain and insults. i was constantly degendered and desexualized and treated as unworthy of sexual or romantic attention due to the way i looked (fat and gnc) and acted (neurodivergent and unapologetic about it).

so when i hear t/er/f/s crowing about how trans men and mascs are just gnc women and that they'd "love" to "help" us express masculine womanhood, i think about how so many people saw my masculinity when i was perceived as a woman and treated me as a socially untouchable freak who was unworthy of being granted the status of womanhood. like. get fucking real. you don't actually accept people afab who are gnc, you just want to say anything you possibly can to convince trans men, transmascs, and any other nonbinary/abinary people assigned female who want to or are actively transitioning in a masculine direction to either detransition or never attempt transition in the first place. you don't support female masculinity, you just want to use the Idea of it to lure us into transphobic abuse and convert us into "proper women". fuck all the way off with that shit.

[trans-axolotl]

also: I mostly switched over from saying "antipsychiatry" to psych abolition after I started to see more groups like CPA use it, and thought I'd share some of my thoughts on it.

antipsychiatry is a fundamental part of psych abolition for me, but i think my definition of psych abolition contains a lot more. first, there's a lot more things than just psychiatry that i want to abolish and transform--the whole mental health system and many different belief systems, types of providers, forms of treatment, and types of incarceration that are encompassed in that. i think it's important to name and identify the particular harms of psychiatry as a value system in the way it is the strictest example of pathologizing, medicalizing, and the strongest adherer to the purely biomedical model of illness and how this creates so much harm. but i think that there are also so many other harmful structures + belief systems within the whole mental health system. i also sometimes see therapists, for example, portraying themselves as alternatives to psychiatry, and while that's true in the sense that they are a different treatment option than a psychiatrist, they are often still harmful actors in their own rights and entangled with the state in an equally bad way.

second thing for me is that i think it's really important to intentionally build cross movement solidarity, especially with the prison abolition movement and to expand the way psych survivors currently support support people fighting for abolition of all forms of incarceration. (i drew inspiration from sins invalid and the 10 principles of Disability Justice). I see so many people in psych survivor spaces saying " I can't believe we were treated like prisoners on the ward" with the implication that it's fine if prisoners are treated that way, but it's bad when it happens to them. i think that's fucked up and i think that any psych survivor movement that doesn't actively support people incarcerated in prisons is a movement that does nothing to dismantle white supremacy. we need to be able to recognize the ways carceral logics operate in many different structures, and approach our activism as a shared struggle, where we constantly are led by those most impacted. so i think that naming what we're doing as "abolition" is important (with the important caveat that our organizing must then actually be abolitionist, and especially for white organizers, that we need to learn about the history of abolition, actively support the Black leaders and thinkers who have created the prison abolition movement and not center ourselves, that we actually have to be actively involved in supporting abolitionist work happening in your area, instead of just stealing the work of Black abolitionist scholars to use it for our own benefit without any credit or reciprocity, that we need to actively interrogate ways white supremacy culture and antiblackness are showing up in our movement places so that we aren't inviting our comrades who are people of color into spaces that are not safe for them, or exploiting our comrades of color by expecting them to do the work of dismantling the racism within our shared organizing spaces--don't call yourself a psych abolitionist if you still call the cops on your homeless neighbors, if your solutions to psych incarceration contribute to gentrification, if you refuse to support currently incarcerated comrades, for example.)

third thing is that antipsychiatry as a specific term is often associated with the sociologist theory from the 1960s, some of which i think is useful, some of which comes from antisemetic and racist psychiatrists who should not be given any legitimacy. antipsychiatry also often gets associated with cults like scientology. although i think that scientologists bastardize a lot of antipsychiatry stuff and weaponize it for their own ends, a lot of the public thinks of them if you say antipsychiatry, and it can cause misconceptions. also think that people sometimes assume antipsychiatry is inherently against medication and while i don't think that's our responsibility to clear up every time people misread our words on purpose, i think it's been a lot more helpful for me to talk about medication in the context of autonomy, harm reduction, war on drugs, and the ways that psychiatry creates issues to consent, autonomy, informed use, risk reduction, etc etc etc. and i think psych abolition helps me do that a little better.

i get in a lot of conversations with people who say "well from what i've seen you are just against institutionalization. why not just say that instead of attacking psychiatry?" and my answer is always if we want to end institutionalization, we have to end the structures, belief systems, and power dynamics of psychiatry--psychiatry is one of the logics that enables institutionalization to continue, and abolishing institutionalization without abolishing the structures that allow it to continue mean that it just pops up again in a new form with a new name (asylums to hospitals to group homes etc etc etc). so i think psych abolition to me is a clearer way to encompass the ways that all these systems are interconnected, and that when we're fighting for mad liberation, the right for mad/neurodivergent/mentally ill people to access care, support, healing on our own terms, to be free from institutionalization and violent treatment, and have the right to exist as mad people, whether or not we're "cured."

TL;DR: I switched to saying "psych abolition" rather than antipsychiatry even though there are many core ideas of antipsychiatry that I agree with. I think that for me, psych abolition helps clear up some misconceptions that people have about antipsychiatry, more clearly connects to prison abolition, and makes it clear that we need to transform more of the mental health system than just psychiatry.

[emmikouu]

Don't mind me...just thinking about how intense the sexual tension between Aizen Sōsuke and Tanisha Chōdhori would be. I mean, Aizen's the prisoner bound to a sentence of 19,976 remaining years (I think?) and Tanisha's the warden bound to guard him for almost two Millenniums...BOUND to Aizen for that long? Literally everyone in the Gotei 13 would be gone by then, and I don't even think that there would be a Gotei 13 by the time that era will arrive, there will just be Aizen and Tanisha—the immortal prisoner and warden. Last two remaining people in the world? Most romantic fucking shit I've heard.

[lilithism1848]

Atrocities US committed against AFRICA

In early 2017, the US began conducting drone strikes in Somalia against Al Shabab militants. An attack on July 16th killed 8 people.

In 1998, the US bombed the Al Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Sudan, killing one employee and wounding 11. It was the largest pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum, producing medicine both for human and veterinary use. The US had acted on false evidence of a VX nerve agent from a single soil sample, and later used a false witness to cover for the attack. It was the only pharmaceutical factory in Africa not under US control.

In June 1982, with the help of CIA money and arms, Hissene Habre , dubbed Africa’s Pinochet, takes power in Chad. His secret police, use methods of torture including the burning the body of the detainee with incandescent objects, spraying gas into their eyes, ears and nose, forced swallowing of water, and forcing the mouths of detainees around the exhaust pipes of running cars. Habré’s government also periodically engaged in ethnic cleansing against groups such as the Sara, Hadjerai and the Zaghawa, killing and arresting group members en masse when it was perceived that their leaders posed a threat to the regime. Human Rights Watch claimed that Habre was responsible for thousands of killings. In 2001, while living in Senegal, he was almost tried for crimes committed by him in Chad. However, a court there blocked these proceedings. Then human rights people decided to pursue the case in Belgium, because some of Habre’s torture victims lived there. The U.S., in June 2003, told Belgium that it risked losing its status as host to NATO’s headquarters if it allowed such a legal proceeding to happen. So the result was that the law that allowed victims to file complaints in Belgium for atrocities committed abroad was repealed. However, two months later a new law was passed which made special provision for the continuation of the case against Habre. In May 2016 he was found guilty of human-rights abuses, including rape, sexual slavery and ordering the killing of 40,000 people, and sentenced to life in prison.

In the 1980s, Reagan maintains a close relationship with the Apartheid South african government, called constructive engagement, while secretly funding it in the hopes of creating a bulwark of anti-communism and preventing a marxist party from taking power, as happened in angola. Later on, in the wars against Apartheid in South Africa and Angola, in which cuban and anti-apartheid forces fought the white south african government, the US supplied south africa with nuclear weapons via Israel.

In 1975, Henry Kissinger launches a CIA-backed war in Angola, backing the brutal anti-communist leader of UNITAS, Jonas Savimbi, against Agostinho Neto and his Marxist-Leninst MPLA party, creating a civil war lasting for 30 years. The CIA financed a covert invasion via neighboring Zaire and a drive on the Angolan capital by the U.S. ally, South Africa. Congress continues to fund UNITAS, and their south-african apartheid allies until the late 1980s. By the end of the war, more than 500,000 people had died and over one million had been internally displaced.

In 1966, a CIA-backed military coup overthrows he widely popular Pan-Africanist and Marxist leader Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, inviting the International Monetary Fund and World Bank to take a lead role in managing the economy. With this reversal, accentuated by the expulsion of immigrants and a new willingness to negotiate with apartheid South Africa, Ghana lost a good deal of its stature in the eyes of African nationalists.

In 1965, a CIA-backed military coup installs Mobutu Sese Seko, described as the “archetypal African dictator” in Congo. The hated and repressive Mobutu exploits his desperately poor country for billions.

In 1962, a tip from a CIA spy in South Africa lead to the imprisonment of Nelson Mandela, due to his pro-USSR leanings. This began his 27-year-long imprisonment.

In 1961, the CIA assists in the assassination of the democratically elected congolese leader Patrice Lumumba, throwing the country into years of turmoil. Before his assassination the CIA sent one of its scientists, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, to the Congo carrying “lethal biological material” intended for use in Lumumba’s assassination. This virus would have been able to produce a fatal disease indigenous to the Congo area of Africa and was transported in a diplomatic pouch.

In 1801, and again in 1815, the US aided Sweden in subjugating a series of coastal towns in North Africa, in the Barbary Wars. The stated reason was to crack down on pirates, but the wars destroyed the navies of Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco, and secured European and US shipping routes for goods and slaves in North Africa. US Representatives stated: “When we can appear in the Ports of the various Powers, or on the Coast, of Barbary, with Ships of such force as to convince those nations that We are able to protect our trade, and to compel them if necessary to keep faith with Us, then, and not before, We may probably secure a large share of the Meditn trade, which would largely and speedily compensate the U. S. for the Cost of a maritime force amply sufficient to keep all those Pirates in Awe, and also make it their interest to keep faith.” Thomas Jefferson echoed and carried out the war, saying that war was essential to securing markets along the Barbary Coast.