#no one is called an immigrant here

[a-dream-deferred]

kind of losing my mind over the semantics of expat vs immigrant

[chamerionwrites]

Also it brings me zero pleasure to be Cassandra here, but “mass deportation” is a synonym for murder. I need you all to understand this. Even in the absolute best case scenario, it means large numbers of people being warehoused in slapdash facilities where illness spreads quickly and medical care is inadequate. It means government contractors providing food, trying to make a killing, and inevitably cutting corners on costs/quality/safety. It means police violence against people being rounded up. It means US citizen children being removed from their families or deported with them. It means people being returned to countries they fled in fear of their lives, and killed by domestic abusers/gangs/governments. It means bureaucratic mixups (/apathy/malice) that result in people getting dropped off in dangerous cities that they’ve never even visited late at night.

It means all of this and more, and if the government comes for your neighbors you should respond as if you are witnessing an attempted murder.

[pnfc]

im not drawing im in the au crafting headspace but i'm so slow at story construction, i just gnaw on the general shape of a reality until more bits of it gradually come into focus. and then never turn it into a fic

[mishkakagehishka]

I'm still pissed off at the fact that so many responses to that post were "um ackshually the dictionary definition☝️🤓" and now that i'm actually a linguistics student i have the vocabulary necessary to explain why it pissed me off so i want a round two.

[ratatatastic]

no im still on maffhew calling the forsymaffhew lovechild a missile

[sandandlightning]

A Rose by Any Other Name Would Cause The Author a Logistical Nightmare

As I begin to write new posts I have come to something of a conundrum. In the past, while there was still a fair bit of name variation, it was easy to settle on my favorite Egyptian modernizations. 

Now, however, all of my ritual work uses Goetic names, while communion and prayer I use any number of different ones ranging from their myth and pantheon of origin, the goetic, to modern nicknames. Which begs the question what to use here.

I had decided to leave the name of the blog as ‘Temple of Set’ even while changing the icon to the Sitri Sigil. It seemed a strange change to make given Set was already venerated in Satanic spaces and that is more or less what led me to where I am now. It seems a bit more natural in the cases of Set and Anpu, who I have worked with for so long, to refer to them with kemetic names.

Ashtaroth, particularly I really don't know what to do. I have a whole post on her smorgasbord of etymology, and I do have some attachment to her identity as Ishtar, but had never properly approached her until Goetic pursuits. Honestly when I think about her, it's almost like a mental image of both the name Ashtaroth and Ishtar overlayed on each other at the same time. I've been sort of settling for a Ashtaroth | Ishtar denotation for now, but that hits right in the Consistent Formatting OCD.

The same can go for Bune, who has ties to Neith. And I worked with Neith recently as a Kemetic, but I have stronger ties to Bune as an entity, and also the identity overlap, while there, is just less strong from Kemetic to Goetic with Bune than it is for Anpu as Ipos or Set s Sitri.

Meanwhile the Boiz of Abrahamic Origin are just over here vibin, despite the fact that arguably Lucifer has the most convoluted and nonsensical etymological history of them all. And yet is the most normalized? Though at least that has some of the comforting energy that harkens to ‘Set literally trolling historians bc it's funny’ phenomena I ran into a lot. Or the energy of a kicked out kid yelling ‘jokes on u dad Im naming myself after something from those Romans you hate so much, get fucked’.

[navree]

Are you French in the way Americans say they are Italian or Irish or are you actually French, because if it's the first one I'm sorry but you are actually not French and it's kinda a bit offensive of you (and of everyone who does it) to say so😭

First of all, no it's not. In any way whatsoever. No matter which way you swing it. God Europeans wanna be oppressed so fucking bad.

Second of all, hi, hello, you must be very new here because this is, like, day one orientation information, my name is Amélie, I am quite literally a card carrying can vote in elections if I so choose French citizen due to a French parent who has spent nearly every summer of her entire life in France, with my French family, who are the closest family members outside of my mom and my dad and my sister to the point where me and my sister and my French cousins almost view each other as siblings than cousins and French is literally my first language to the point where I was given an exception in my school's rules of "no freshmen taking AP classes" so that I could take AP French due to being French, which I mention quite often because I am and have the right to do so without getting the tone police on my case about my own life in my Frenchness on www.tumblr.com. So fuck you.

Third of all, it still wouldn't be offensive even if I wasn't a dual citizen closely tied to that part of my family and just had French relatives because it's not and the only people who think that are cunts. God Europeans wanna be oppressed so fucking bad! 😭

[jotarrokujo]

i hate this country

[thewingedwolf]

i hate the way people will say the most out of pocket nonsense about Latinos in the US and then act surprised when people say they’ve got some racism issues. “oh if it weren’t for the fact that people in the USA hate everyone with ancestry from Latin America, lock Latino children in cages even under democratic presidents, and regularly hop on tv to call all Latinos evil rapists and murderers, they’d all be considered white” yeah no SHIT if literally every aspect of how Latinos in the US are racialized was different, they would be racially categorized in a different way, that is a very intelligent thing to say about race relations and doesn’t at all exacerbate issues thanks you are so wise and educated and learned

[avo-kat]

you know what grinds my gears? how my coworkers are literally unable to write peoples names correctly so the outlook search becomes completely and utterly unusable. this shit matters! mohamed is not muhammed is not mohamad is not muhamed is not mohammed!!!! husein is not hussein is not hosein is not hossein!!!

this shit even happens at national level with the most important government departments. there have been soooo many people whose names are written wrong on their id or their social security card or their health insurance card. why does nobody care!!! come on!!!!

[persephoneflouwers]

Whenever events like last night happen I feel this urge to run on the street and help. It’s a bit odd since usually I’m sooo far away but like I’m always wondering what can i do what should I be doing? It’s like innate. And it happens all the time in these circumstances.

[thenwethrowitonthefire]

Our previous-prime-minister-now-head-of-navo currently keeps saying that we should prepare for war which might break out between now and the next 5 years.

[shortqueershakespeare]

Something really annoying about being told I’m not an immigrant

[kil9]

the british have to stop trying to cook this is hell

[nothingenoughao3]

It's because the word "landmark" is being used in place of the correct (series of) word(s), which is "palatable for the broadest audience possible".

Not only is new queer fiction and art coming out all the time, it always has been. You just have to be willing to watch a movie (to pick a form of storytelling in particular) that's older than you.

Like, did you watch "Paris Is Burning" or do you just nod wisely when it's brought up? Did you know that it's part of an entire damn movement of filmmaking from the '90s called new queer cinema? Have you ever heard of Gregg Araki? Did you vote "never heard of him" on that Tumblr poll where the vast majority of folks on The Gay Website did not know who John Waters was?

Are you only watching stuff that's produced in your own language? Are you aware that most non-English language parts of the world are and have been producing queer cinema for decades and that those films aren't hard to get? Do you know what New Maricón Cinema is? Are you aware that the most highly decorated Spanish director is an out gay man who's produced films about trans women and queerness since the 1980s?

A fuckton of queer cinema also depicts heavy, bleak, and triggering subject matter; are you mentally prepared for facing that when you engage with art? Are you mostly/only watching children's media because you, personally, are not in a place to deal with heavy subject matter--and therefore you don't actually know what's out there and can't judge? Or are you only watching children's movies because you're afraid of being challenged?

Are you going outside of your comfort zone? Are you taking a risk? Do you not have time to waste on major IPs because you're too busy in the back alleys of fiction and cinema, exploring for something exciting and new?

Are you, you know, being queer?

ngl i keep seeing new iterations of "all landmark queer media is children's media! i want queer media for adults!" and i guess i kind of get where it comes from but i have never really experienced this issue

new adult queer cinema is coming out all the time, a lot of it very good and a lot of it not, new adult queer fiction is coming out all the time, a lot of it very good and a lot of it not, and i totally get it when you say queer kids' stuff isn't enough for a queer art-loving adult to subsist on (you're right, it's not enough for me either!)

but like, are you actually checking out new and exciting queer stories that appeal to your sensibilities? or are you spending your time in insular fandom spaces instead of going out and looking for art that speaks to you?

listen to new albums, click through galleries, find art made by people who might not be where you're from or share every life experience with you, and talk to folks about that stuff and you'll make lots of friends.

[ceilidhtransing]

The discussions around whether or not to vote for Kamala keep being dominated by very loud voices shouting that anyone who advocates for her “just doesn't care about Palestine!” and “is willing to overlook genocide!” and “has no moral backbone at all!” And while some of these voices will be bots, trolls, psyops - we know that this happens; we know that trying to persuade progressives to split the vote or not vote at all is a strategy employed by hostile actors - of course many of them won't be. But what this rhetoric does is continually force the “you should vote for her” crowd onto the back foot of having to go to great lengths writing entire essays justifying their choice, while the “don't vote/vote third party” crowd is basically never asked to justify their choice. It frames voting for Kamala as a deeply morally compromised position that requires extensive justification while framing not voting or voting third party as the neutral and morally clean stance.

So here's another way of looking at it. How much are you willing to accept in order to feel like you're not compromising your morals on one issue?

Are you willing to accept the 24% rise in maternal deaths - and 39% increase for Black women - that is expected under a federal abortion ban, according to the Centre for American Progress? Those percentages represent real people who are alive now who would die if the folks behind Project 2025 get their way with reproductive healthcare.

Are you willing to accept the massive acceleration of climate change that would result from the scrapping of all climate legislation? We don't have time to fuck around with the environment. A gutting of climate policy and a prioritisation of fossil fuel profits, which is explicitly promised by Trump, would set the entire world back years - years that we don't have.

Are you willing to accept the classification of transgender visibility as inherently “pornographic” and thus the removal of trans people from public life? Are you willing to accept the total elimination of legal routes for gender-affirming care? The people behind the Trump campaign want to drive queer and trans people back underground, back into the closet, back into “criminality”. This will kill people. And it's maddening that caring about this gets called “prioritising white gays over brown people abroad” as if it's not BIPOC queer and trans Americans who will suffer the most from legislative queer- and transphobia, as they always do.

Are you willing to accept the domestic deployment of the military to crack down on protests and enforce racist immigration policy? I'm sure it's going to be very easy to convince huge numbers of normal people to turn up to protests and get involved in political organising when doing so may well involve facing down an army deployed by a hardcore authoritarian operating under the precedent that nothing he does as president can ever be illegal.

Are you willing to accept a president who openly talks about wanting to be a dictator, plans on massively expanding presidential powers, dehumanises his political enemies and wants the DOJ to “go after them”, and assures his supporters they won't have to vote again? If you can't see the danger of this staring you right in the face, I don't know what to tell you. Allowing a wannabe dictator to take control of the most powerful country on earth would be absolutely disastrous for the entire world.

Are you willing to accept an enormous uptick in fascism and far-right authoritarianism worldwide? The far right in America has huge influence over an entire international network of “anti-globalists”, hardcore anti-immigrant xenophobes, transphobic extremists, and straight-up fascists. Success in America aids and emboldens these people everywhere.

Are you willing to accept an enormous number of preventable deaths if America faces a crisis in the next four years: a public health emergency, a natural disaster, an ecological catastrophe? We all saw how Trump handled Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. We all saw how Trump handled Covid-19. He fanned the flames of disaster with a constant flow of medical misinformation and an unspeakably dangerous undermining of public health experts. It's estimated that 40% of US pandemic deaths could have been avoided if the death rates had corresponded to those in other high-income countries. That amounts to nearly half a million people. One study from January 2021 estimated between around 4,200 and 12,200 preventable deaths attributable purely to Trump's statements about masks. We're highly unlikely to face another global pandemic in the next few years but who knows what crises are coming down the pipeline?

Are you willing to accept the attempted deportation of millions - millions - of undocumented people? This is “rounding people up and throwing them into camps where no one ever hears from them again” territory. That's a blueprint for genocide right there and it's a core tenet of both Trump's personal policy and Project 2025. And of course they wouldn't be going after white people. They most likely wouldn't even restrict their tyranny to people who are actually undocumented. Anyone racially othered as an “immigrant” would be at risk from this.

Are you willing to accept not just the continuation of the current situation in Palestine, but the absolute annihilation of Gaza and the obliteration of any hope for imminent peace? There is no way that Trump and the people behind him would not be catastrophically worse for Gaza than Kamala or even Biden. Only recently he was telling donors behind closed doors that he wanted to “set the [Palestinian] movement back 25 or 30 years” and that “any student that protests, I throw them out of the country”. This is not a man who can be pushed in a direction more conducive to peace and justice. This is a man who listens to his wealthy donors, his Christian nationalist Republican allies, and himself.

Are you willing to accept a much heightened risk of nuclear war? Obviously this is hardly a Trump policy promise. But I can't think of a single president since the Cold War who is more likely to deploy nuclear weapons, given how casually he talks about wanting to use them and how erratic and unstable he can be in his dealings with foreign leaders. To quote Foreign Policy only this year, “Trump told a crowd in January that one of the reasons he needed immunity was so that he couldn’t be indicted for using nuclear weapons on a city.” That's reassuring. I'm not even in the US and I remember four years of constant background low-level terror that Trump would take offence at something some foreign leader said or think that he needs to personally intervene in some military situation to “sort it out” and decide to launch the entire world into nuclear war. No one sane on earth wants the most powerful person on the planet to be as trigger-happy and careless with human life as he is, especially if he's running the White House like a dictator with no one ever telling him no. But depending on what Americans do in November, he may well be inflicted again on all of us, and I guess we'll all just have to hope that he doesn't do the worst thing imaginable.

“But I don't want those things! Stop accusing me of supporting things I don't support!” Yes, of course you don't want those things. None of us does. No one's saying that you actively support them. No one's accusing you of wanting Black women to die from ectopic pregnancies or of wanting to throw Hispanic people in immigrant detention centres or of wanting trans people to be outlawed (unlike, I must point out, the extremely emotive and personal accusations that get thrown around about “wanting Palestinian children to die” if you encourage people to vote for Kamala).

But if you're advocating against voting for Kamala, you are clearly willing to accept them as possible consequences of your actions. That is the deal you're making. If a terrible thing happening is the clear and easily foreseeable outcome of your action (or in the case of not voting, inaction), in a way that could have been prevented by taking a different and just as easy action, you are partly responsible for that consequence. (And no, it's not “a fear campaign” to warn people about things he's said, things he wants to do, and plans drawn up by his close allies. This is not “oooh the Democrats are trying to bully you into voting for them by making him out to be really bad so you'll feel scared and vote for Kamala!” He is really bad, in obvious and documented and irrefutable ways.)

And if you believe that “both parties are the same on Gaza” (which, you know, they really aren't, but let's just pretend that they are) then presumably you accept that the horrors being committed there will continue, in the immediate term anyway, regardless of who wins the presidency. Because there really isn't some third option that will appear and do everything we want. It's going to be one of those two. And we can talk all day about wanting a better system or how unfair it is that every presidential election only ever has two viable candidates and how small the Overton window is and all that but hell, we are less than eighty days out from the election; none of that is going to get fixed between now and November. Electoral reform is a long-term (but important!) goal, not something that can be effected in the span of a couple of months by telling people online to vote third party. There is no “instant ceasefire and peace negotiation” button that we're callously overlooking by encouraging people to vote for Kamala. (My god, if there was, we would all be pressing it.)

If we're suggesting people vote for her, it's not that we “are willing to overlook genocide” or “don't care about sacrificing brown people abroad” or whatever. Nothing is being “overlooked” here. It's that we're simply not willing to accept everything else in this post and more on top of continued atrocities in Gaza. We're not willing to take Trump and his godawful far-right authoritarian agenda as an acceptable consequence of feeling like we have the moral high ground on Palestine. I cannot stress enough that if Kamala doesn't win, we - we all, in the whole world - get Trump. Are you willing to accept that?

And one more point to address: I've seen too many people act frighteningly flippant and naïve about terrible things Trump or his campaign want to do, with the idea that people will simply be able to prevent all these bad things by “organising” and “protesting” and “collective action”. “I'm not willing to accept these things; that's why I'll fight them tooth and nail every day of their administration” - OK but if you're not even willing to cast a vote then I have doubts about your ability to form “the Resistance”, which by the way would have to involve cooperation with people of lots of progressive political stripes in order to have the manpower to be effective, and if you're so committed to political purity that you view temporarily lending your support to Kamala at the ballot box as an untenable betrayal of everything you stand for then forgive me for also doubting your ability to productively cooperate with allies on the ground with whom you don't 100% agree. Plus, if the Trump campaign gets its way, American progressives would be kept so busy trying to put out about twenty different fires at once that you'd be able to accomplish very little. Maybe you get them to soften their stance on trans healthcare but oh shit, the climate policies are still in place. But more importantly, how many people do you think will protest for abortion rights if doing so means staring down a gun? Or organise to protect their neighbours from deportation if doing so means being thrown in prison yourself? And OK, maybe you're sure that you will, but history has shown us time and time again that most people won't. Most people aren't willing to face that kind of personal risk. And a tiny number of lefties willing to risk incarceration or death to protect undocumented people or trans people or whatever other groups are targeted is sadly not enough to prevent the horrors from happening. That is small fry compared to the full might of a determined state. Of course if the worst happens and Trump wins then you should do what you can to mitigate the harm; I'm not saying you shouldn't. But really the time to act is now. You have an opportunity right here to mitigate the harm and it's called “not letting him get elected”. Act now to prevent that kind of horrific authoritarian situation from developing in the first place; don't sit this one out under the naïve belief that “we'll be able to stop it if it happens”. You won't.