#when you become an activist

[remembertheplunge]

When you become an activist, you make history

November 25, 2024

I was listening to KPFA radio on the drive home from work in Stockton this evening and heard Delores Huerta talking on a show called Flash Points. Huerta was a co-founder of the United Farm workers along with Ceasar Chavez.

When asked what her message was to young people in these troubled times about how to get involved, she said the following “When Ceasar Chavez talked with students, he wad say that in school, you talk about history, you read about history and you write about history. But, when you become an activist, you make history. The times we are living in now are history making moments. She talked about forming human chains around immigrants so that they cannot be forcibly put in camps to be deported after Trump is sworn in as a  possible example of activism that may be required in the coming days.

To hear the entire interview with Delores Huerta, go to the KPFA web site. Then go to archives. Type in Flash Points in the search bar, and then November in the month search bar that comes up for the November 25, 2024 show.

[fourgottencoast]

I’ve been having issues with this ‘it’s never too late to mask again’ rhetoric people have started using to try to get people to take covid precautions again because it’s a phrase that demands no accountability, no self reflection, no growth. Because unfortunately IT IS too late for MILLIONS of people who’ve been killed/disabled by covid and conditions triggered as a direct result of covid, and i think it’s disrespectful to those lives to allow people to just jump right back into pretending they care without acknowledging this enormous tragedy they actively participated in! Sorry but you don’t get to ignore a pandemic for 4 years and then wash your hands of the blood you helped spill through willful ignorance while claiming to care about social justice!

And it’s also aggravating because it’s SO OBVIOUS most of these people are only doing it because they’re afraid of how covid/bird flu/a trump health admin will personally affect THEM, not because they’ve evolved politically or actually care about their community. There’s no genuine solidarity with the disabled community, no self-reflection on their participation in eugenics and normalization of mass death/disability, no connecting the dots between disease mitigation (or lack thereof) and capitalism/imperialism/racism, etc. its just more individualism that ultimately does not help lead to collective liberation and will not prevent this from happening again.

[chaos-of-the-abyss]

wait i thought i’d seen the full extent of the silm fandom’s misogyny but i guess the silm fandom can always hate female characters more because apparently?? people believe indis the manipulative malicious bitch came onto and cajoled and stalked finwe until he relented and married her all while specifically aiming to make it so that miriel could never come back and she could have finwe's dick for all of eternity and abuse poor helpless feanor to her black shriveled heart’s content??? apparently that is a take that exists and has shooters??? yall are truly smoking that good stuff

[cator99]

I always get detained at da border because PROFUNC never ended but basically I'm like if a targeted individual didn't even care

[katyspersonal]

[wolflover33100aj]

CHOKE

No thank you, I'm good

[featherymainffins]

Because I haven't really interacted with X-Men media in a fairly long time, sometimes I'm like "Why is Magneto a villain again? Because he's radical and brutal or am I forgetting something?" And then I read the words "mutant supremacy" somewhere and yeah turns out that's what I keep forgetting about.

Tho I'm gonna be real I probably keep forgetting that because in the situations they keep putting mutants in it seems like a total non-issue. Like idk imagine if there was someone who was like a REAL damn BEAST when it came to disability advocacy or queer rights and the only problem was that sometimes they'd go "Actually autistic/queer people are superior to everyone else and should be in control." Like idk about you but I'd be all "Hmmm that sounds like something that might not be great in the long-term but rn I'm not even allowed to drive." You know what I mean?

[kyouka-supremacy]

---

[sendmyresignation]

recently watched two trains runnin' which i was so overwhelmingly taken by, the parallel music and political histories forming a kind if implicit ideology without totally overlapping is so cool to me- like extrapolating based on a coincidence in time (that the three murdered freedom summer activists disappeared in mississippi the same exact day a pair of previously unlocated bluesmen were tracked down) this whole theory of black (southern) intellectual involvement in the counter-cultural is really impressive.

[fuckyeahgoodomens]

David Tennant interview at the British LGBT Awards, June 2024 (x)

Int: You being an ally to the community isn't something new. You've been doing it, but recently you've obviously really stepped up for trans and non-binary people in a time that's so, so needed. What made you do that?

David: I don't know that I feel like I've done anything that I wouldn't just sort of be normally doing. I mean, it's for me it's just common sense that there's there should be any suggestion that people aren't allowed to live the life they want to live and and to be who they want to be with and to express themselves wholeheartedly. I mean, as long as you aren't hurting anybody else, everybody else just needs to fucking butt out. I don't really understand why...

Int: ...it's controversial.

David: Yeah, there is and the thing... the thing, if there's something that's particularly sobering and depressing, it's that certain debates are being weaponized by certain elements of the political class, often for no... it seems it's not ideological so much as opportunistic. And I just think that's pretty disgusting, really.

Int: I couldn't agree more. What message would you like to send out to trans youth?

David: Please don't feel like you're not loved and that you're not accepted and that you're not... you know, most people in the world are good and kind and just want you to be able to be who you are. Most people in the world don't really care. I mean... you know what I mean?

Int: We're all narcissistic.

David: Exactly. Everyone's so self obsessed that really, the sort of noise that comes from a certain area of the press and of the political class is... it's a minority. It really is. And please don't let that make you feel diminished or dissuaded or discouraged, because, you know, you just... you have to be allowed to be yourself, and you are, and you are yourself and you must thrive and flourish, and we're all here for it.

Int: Amazing. I think, yeah, it's so important .I think sometimes it feels like there's so many people, but it is a minority. It's such a minority.

David: It's a tiny bunch of little whinging fuckers that are on the wrong side of history and they'll all go away soon.

Int: Like what happened with gay people 20 years ago.

David: When I was a kid, when I was a kid, exactly. You know, I was at school when Clause 28 came in and it all felt like being gay was something to be terrified of. And gay men in particular were demonised as paedophiles and now that just feels historic and ludicrous and, I mean, I don't see all those... all those battles aren't won, but we're in a very, very different place. And I feel like.I feel like history is on a progressive trajectory and it might get knocked sideways now and again by people for all sorts of reasons, which are often quite selfish and quite, as I say, not coming from a place of any sort of genuine belief system, but other than a place of opportunism. And that's something that we... I hope that in 20 years time, we're talking about, you know, these culture wars as something of the past.

Int: I believe we will. I'm a huge Doctor Who fan, so.

David: Oh, good, me too!

Int: You are my Doctor.

David: Oh, thank you very much.

Int: But recently, obviously, you came back for the 60th anniversary and you got to work with Yasmin Finney.

David: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Int: What was it like working with her?

David: Oh, she's brilliant. She's fantastic. Yeah. And she's in the show again now, she's back in it, so that's fantastic to see. She's lovely, talented, cool as a cucumber, articulate, brilliant. I learned a lot from her as an actor and also as someone who, you know, who's become a sort of de facto activist just because of who she is and where she is, and she becomes a sort of symbol of hope, and she's wonderful.

[probablyasocialecologist]

In this book you focus on the idea of gender as a global ‘phantasm’ – this charged, overdetermined, anxiety- and fear-inducing cluster of fantasies that is being weaponised by the right. How did you go about starting to investigate that? Judith Butler: When I was burned in effigy in Brazil in 2017, I could see people screaming about gender, and they understood ‘gender’ to mean ‘paedophilia.’ And then I heard people in France describing gender as a Jewish intellectual movement imported from the US. This book started because I had to figure out what gender had become. I was naïve. I was stupid. I had no idea that it had become this flash point for right-wing movements throughout the world. So I started doing the work to reconstruct why I was being called a paedophile, and why that woman in the airport wanted to kill me with the trolley. I’m not offering a new theory of gender here; I’m tracking this phantasm’s formation and circulation and how it’s linked to emerging authoritarianism, how it stokes fear to expand state powers. Luckily, I was able to contact a lot of people who translated Gender Trouble in different parts of the world, who were often gender activists and scholars in their own right. They told me about what’s happening in Serbia, what’s happening in Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Russia. So I became a student of gender again. I’ve been out of the field for a while. I stay relatively literate, of course, but I’ve written on war, on ethics, on violence, on nonviolence, on the pandemic… I’m not in gender studies all the time. I had to do a lot of reading.  There’s a lot of focus in the book on how the anti-gender movement has moved across the world in the past few decades, and how it’s inextricable from Catholic doctrine. It was clarifying for me; domestic anti-trans movements in the UK mostly self-identify as secular.  Judith Butler: In the UK, and even in the US, people don’t realise that this anti-gender ideology movement has been going on for some time in the Americas, in central Europe, to a certain degree in Africa, and that it’s arrived in the US by different routes, but it’s arrived without announcing its history. It became clear to me that a lot of the trans-exclusionary feminists didn’t realise where their discourse was coming from. Some of them do; some people who call themselves feminists are aligned with right-wing positions, and it’s confusing, but there it is. There’s an uncomfortable history of fascist feminism in movements like British suffragism, for instance. Judith Butler: Yes, and of racism. But when Putin made clear that he agreed with JK Rowling, she was probably surprised, and she rightly said, ‘no, I don’t want your alliance’, but it was an occasion for her to think about who she’s allying herself with, unwittingly or not. The anti-gender movement was first and foremost a defence of Biblical scripture, and of the idea that God created man and woman, and that the human form exists only in this duality and that without it, the human is destroyed – God’s creation is destroyed. So that morphed, as the Vatican’s doctrine moved into Latin America, into the idea that people who advocate ‘gender’ are forces of destruction who seek to destroy man, woman, the human, civilisation and culture. 

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

what’s the story about the generative power model and water consumption? /gen

There's this myth going around about generative AI consuming truly ridiculous amount of power and water. You'll see people say shit like "generating one image is like just pouring a whole cup of water out into the Sahara!" and bullshit like that, and it's just... not true. The actual truth is that supercomputers, which do a lot of stuff, use a lot of power, and at one point someone released an estimate of how much power some supercomputers were using and people went "oh, that supercomputer must only do AI! All generative AI uses this much power!" and then just... made shit up re: how making an image sucks up a huge chunk of the power grid or something. Which makes no sense because I'm given to understand that many of these models can run on your home computer. (I don't use them so I don't know the details, but I'm told by users that you can download them and generate images locally.) Using these models uses far less power than, say, online gaming. Or using Tumblr. But nobody ever talks about how evil those things are because of their power generation. I wonder why.

To be clear, I don't like generative AI. I'm sure it's got uses in research and stuff but on the consumer side, every effect I've seen of it is bad. Its implementation in products that I use has always made those products worse. The books it writes and flood the market with are incoherent nonsense at best and dangerous at worst (let's not forget that mushroom foraging guide). It's turned the usability of search engines from "rapidly declining, but still usable if you can get past the ads" into "almost one hundred per cent useless now, actually not worth the effort to de-bullshittify your search results", especially if you're looking for images. It's a tool for doing bullshit that people were already doing much easier and faster, thus massively increasing the amount of bullshit. The only consumer-useful uses I've seen of it as a consumer are niche art projects, usually projects that explore the limits of the tool itself like that one poetry book or the Infinite Art Machine; overall I'd say its impact at the Casual Random Person (me) level has been overwhelmingly negative. Also, the fact that so much AI turns out to be underpaid people in a warehouse in some country with no minimum wage and terrible labour protections is... not great. And the fact that it's often used as an excuse to try to find ways to underpay professionals ("you don't have to write it, just clean up what the AI came up with!") is also not great.

But there are real labour and product quality concerns with generative AI, and there's hysterical bullshit. And the whole "AI is magically destroying the planet via climate change but my four hour twitch streaming sesh isn't" thing is hysterical bullshit. The instant I see somebody make this stupid claim I put them in the same mental bucket as somebody complaining about AI not being "real art" -- a hatemobber hopping on the hype train of a new thing to hate and feel like an enlightened activist about when they haven't bothered to learn a fucking thing about the issue. And I just count my blessings that they fell in with this group instead of becoming a flat earther or something.

[186-3]

courting antisemitism

so i recently decided to take a look at the latest stonetoss comics (probably because i love suffering). and while i was expecting some content on the israel palestine conflict, what i did not expect was how... standard it seemed. well, most of it at least, but i'll get to that in a second.

for context, if you don't know what stonetoss is, it's a (poorly drawn) webcomic known for having radical alt-right views - meaning it's incredibly racist, homophobic, transphobic, islamophobic, antisemitic. all that fun stuff.

so while i was expecting to see bad stuff, one of the first things i saw on the topic of israel was this:

terrible art aside, this comic is making a point that i usually see in left wing circles: that israel is pinkwashing genocide.

curious if there was more like this, i kept looking, and the comic right before that one was this:

again, this makes points that i usually see in left wing circles. that american healthcare is crazy expensive, that canada tells poor people to commit suicide, and that israel is bombing hospitals.

why does stonetoss, this well known alt-right nutjob, now seem to be bringing up left-wing talking points?

curious, i kept going deeper:

well this is... odd. clearly, stonetoss is trying to say that israel is on another level of bad, even worse than russia, iran, and north korea. i can possibly see someone on the left making the argument that the russian invasion of ukraine isn't as bad as what israel is doing in gaza, or that at least north korea isn't invading any other countries, but... iran??? the country that has a police force designed to enforce religious law, and gets away with murdering women who do not properly cover their hair? the country that props up paramilitary groups in countries all over the middle east, including lebanon, yemen, and yes, palestine?? that's completely ridiculous

but, given how much more israel is in the news nowadays than any of these other countries, i could see why someone would buy this

and now, we're starting to get to the crux of what stonetoss is trying to do. when someone sees this, they might be inclined to agree with it. they might begin to think that israel is the worst country on the planet

and that might not seem so bad at first. but the more you hate israel, especially irrationally, the more you feel allowed to dehumanize those who support it. the more you might be willing to agree with this comic, which came out two days prior to the one above

this comic says that jews, as a whole have no desire to exist with other people. it is blatantly antisemitic

i'm sure you could imagine some young leftist who sees the comics above this one and thinks, "this guy makes some good points". and then, when they get to this one, they might realize that this is antisemitism

or, they may not.

and that would start them down the road to becoming an antisemite.

this is what stonetoss and other alt-right nutjobs are hoping to achieve. to take left wing fury at israel, and direct it at jews.

we saw it with those neo-nazis at the palestine rally, and we're seeing it again here.

and if you've found yourself agreeing with what stonetoss has said so far, i would like you to see the last comic stonetoss put out before october 7th:

this horrifically racist comic is in reference to an environmental activist who was murdered by a black man in early october. this blatantly racist garbage is the kind of stuff stonetoss usually puts out.

but as soon as october 7th happened? these were his next two comics:

stonetoss completely changed the comic's tone as soon as the current crisis started. why?

to get as many people as possible to get on board with hating jews.

and i know many of you might be thinking that "well, everyone knows that stonetoss is racist garbage. nobody is going to fall for this"

except, as we saw with the neo-nazis at the rally for palestine, it's not always that obvious who the antisemites are and who is just rallying for peace. they are often a lot better at disguising it than stonetoss is.

AND EVERYONE NEEDS TO BE AWARE OF THAT

EVERYONE, no matter HOW much experience you have, can fall victim to propoganda. EVERYONE needs to be aware of what people around them are saying, and able to pick out hateful rhetoric, because even the stuff that is just kind of toeing the line of what's hateful is still putting your foot in the door

be cautious, everyone. and stomp out hate where you see it.

[prokopetz]

Thinkpieces about why people seem to become more authoritarian as they get older tend to focus on neuroscience and survivorship bias and such, but based on my experience in various activist communities, I think a big piece of the puzzle that these sorts of discussions often overlook is that a large chunk of people just never had any principled objection to authoritarianism in the first place.

It's easy to talk about fighting the power when you're under the boot, but when some folks get hold of any sort of power or authority for themselves and sticking it to the Man is no longer a proposition with no perceived downsides, they start backpedalling in a real hurry. Power didn't corrupt them. Nothing changed about their politics. Their commitment to anti-authoritarianism was only ever as strong as their perception that it personally benefited them.

(You absolutely can't tell who they are just from looking at them, either; a person can use all the right jargon and support all the right causes and show up at all the right protests, yet the moment their private emotional calculus determines, rightly or wrongly, that they have more to gain by putting a boot on your neck than by lifting it off, watch out!)

[queer-scots-geordie-dyke]

You know what?

I’m not even Jewish and it’s gotten to the point where I have seen *so, so much* utterly rancid antisemitism from “Pro Palestine” activists over the last year and a bit and I’ve seen how my Jewish friends have suffered, that I automatically cringe and inwardly flinch whenever I see a Palestinian flag or a watermelon in someone’s social media profile, because more often than not, it comes accompanied by cruelty and lies and hate.

And that’s not fair, it really isn’t. It’s not fair to people who genuinely do care about Palestine and don’t peddle in antisemitism. It’s not fair to Palestinians themselves who *are* actually suffering terribly in the war but their lives have become co opted to prop up a hate movement by people who didn’t give a shit that they existed before this war and won’t again when it’s over. And it really isn’t fair to Jewish people who have seen people and spaces they could feel safe and welcome with grow ever smaller and smaller.

The damage this hate movement disguised as activism has done will last a lot longer than it takes for them to eventually get bored and move on.

[genderqueerdykes]

disabled intersex trans person needs help saving up for bills in winter

hello there, my name is Equinox. i am a severely disabled intersex trans person who deals with hypermobile ehlers danlos syndrome, psoriatic arthritis, IBS, schizophrenia and other health issues, leaving me unable to work a conventional job. i am an artist and activist who makes and sells jewelry as well as zines on my Ko-fi shop, and I have an eBay shop as well. currently it is below freezing where i live and my power bill has been higher this month as a result from the drop in temperature:

i have been trying to use my heat as little as possible, but it is difficult when i have health conditions that are exacerbated by cold weather, including my chronic pain. if you are interested in helping, you can do so in the following ways:

$0/$142.70

cash app: $glitterGraphix pay pal: glittergraphicnightmare @ gmail. com chime: $Equinoxian venmo: $Equinoxian

sharing also helps a ton. thank you to everyone who supports and reads, i am super grateful for the help!

1/14/25:

$143/143