The 1.1 million Rohingya Muslims squeezed precariously into the
north-west state of Rakhine, in mainly Buddhist Burma, bordering
majority Muslim Bangladesh, are stateless and unwanted.
Neither country will give them citizenship even though their
families’ roots in modern-day Rakhine, once called Arakan, can be traced
back to the Eighth Century.
Since World
War Two they have been treated increasingly by Burmese authorities as
illegal, interloping Bengalis, facing apartheid-like conditions that
deny them free movement or state education while government forces
intermittently drive out and slaughter them.
Over the
past year, military operations against Rohingya villages have been so
intense and cruel that the minority’s defenders have warned of an
unfolding genocide.
The United Nations has reported that the army may have committed ethnic cleansing.
…The
latest military crackdown, which began on August 25, caused almost
90,000 Rohingyas to flee under fire to squalid, overflowing relief camps
across the Bangladeshi border in just two weeks. Officially close to 400 people had died by early September, but human
rights activists claim to have confirmation of at least 1,000 deaths
and believe the figure is much higher. The death toll will inevitably rise after Burma, also known as
Myanmar, blocked UN agencies from delivering vital food, water and
medicine supplies to 250,000 Rakhine residents desperately in need.
Diagnosing someone doesn’t have to be like fitting them into a box. It can be like drawing a map of them. There are thousands of types of maps. Topographical maps; road maps. Water table maps. Population density maps. They are all very different ways of understanding a space. None of them tells the complete story of it, and none of them are the same as the space itself.
A correct diagnosis, like a good map, should serve to orient and clarify; to make the relationships and distances between things easily apparent. The map of depression can draw together anger and poor memory and stomach pain into a coherent space, letting you see the lightless void where grief is hiding like a deep aquifer. The map of autism can link a hundred days alone on the playground and the small pinpricks of light that were understanding and acceptance into a constellation of stars, something with hope for the future.
Bad diagnoses obfuscate, confuse, lead astray; they end in ROAD CLOSED signs of failed therapy or plateaus of stalled progress. The worst diagnoses come from hardly glancing at the ground; they’re a single session, “That looks like a river i saw once.” The best diagnoses are drawn by hand, using the best grids and measures available, with frequent reference to the land itself.
And the land is never, never the map. It is always so much more.
Something for all the “But Mike Pence!!!” types still arguing that we shouldn’t try to impeach Trump.(article)
Thank fuck, someone explained this more eloquently than I could.
(Though another reason this galls me is that Trump should be impeached because he has violated more laws than any president in our history. He needs to be punished for that. Saying that he shouldn’t because you don’t like the guy who comes next is attempting to game the system in much the same way the Republicans have been. Impeachment isn’t about trying to get the president you want. It’s about punishing the ones who break the law.)
I try to keep politics off this blog but god damn
Impeachment isn’t about trying to get the president you want. It’s about punishing the ones who break the law
Plus there’s that whole thing were Drumpf is a massively greater danger to the rest of the world than Pence would be. I get that Pence could do a lot of damage to the US, I do. But he is a hell of a lot less likely to bomb random places because he was looking for a headline or somebody egged him on. On a worldwide scale, a massive step up.
THOSE WERE ONLY A COUPLE OF INCIDENTS YOU ASSHOLE! Compared to the MAAAANY terrorist attacks by radical muslims
Wow. Can we just appreciate this cognitive dissonance here. “Only a couple of incidents” versus ‘many attacks by radical Muslims’
Like, they aren’t even denying that pro-lifers have blown up clinics but it’s different because it supposedly happened less times within the US than attacks by radical Muslim extremists.
I’m not sure why you said “supposedly” when it is less.
According to statistics gathered by the National Abortion Federation (NAF), an organization of abortion providers, since 1977 in the United States and Canada, there have been 17 attempted murders, 383 death threats, 153 incidents of assault or battery, 13 wounded,[12] 100 butyric acidstink bomb attacks, 373 physical invasions, 41 bombings, 655 anthrax threats,[13] and 3 kidnappings committed against abortion providers.
Meanwhile, between 1970 and today there have been a grand total of 13 terrorist attacks by Muslim extremists within the US and 8 in Canada.
So, even if you only count the terrorist attacks in which damage was done. You’re looking at 587 successful terrorist attacks from pro-lifers (not included death and anthrax threats) and 21 terrorist attacks from extreme Muslim fundamentalists.
That is why supposedly is there.
Pro-lifers are quantitatively, significantly, statistically, a larger threat to public peace than Muslim extremists.
FOR THE PEOPLE IN THE BACK:
Pro-lifers are quantitatively, significantly, statistically, a larger threat to public peace than Muslim extremists.
I started writing this as a comment on another post, but it got too long so fuck it, this is going to be its own post, and it’s going to be a collection of basically everything I can get my hands on about asexual oppression, history, and the shit aphobes say. Yeah, this is going to be long, heavy with links to a lot more reading, but I’ve had it up to here with the “discourse”.
Everyone who wants to is free to reblog this post and use it as a reference when arguing with aphobes. (fyi, I created the blog @asexuality-and-aphobia in the middle of this project to be a reliable source for my links.)
Asexuality was listed in the DSM as HSDD (Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder) until 2013, making it officially a mental illness that would be treated with therapy and medication. It is still in the DSM, except that you can ‘opt out’ if you self-identify as asexual, which is great except that asexuality is still so unknown that there undoubtedly many people who are asexual but don’t know that it’s “a thing”. This means that who knows how many asexuals have been sent to therapy and told they’re sick, then been “treated” for their orientation to try and force them to experience sexuality “correctly”.
Posts of people describing the hardship they’ve faced for their asexuality: x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x
The blog @acephobia-is-real has so many submissions and examples of hatred, harassment, hostility, and abuse, of aces who have been raped and/or sexually assaulted in an attempt to ‘fix’ them, and made suicidal due to aphobia and/or their own perceived brokenness, that it would be pointless for me to try and link any. Just go and start reading. Try their suicide tag.
There may be dissatisfyingly little research done on asexuality, but there has been enough done to prove that they do face discrimination, no matter how hard some may find that to believe. But guess what? You, an allosexual person, do not get to say shit like “aces don’t get kicked out” or “aces don’t _____” any more than I as a white person get to say that things I don’t experience must not happen to black people either. Just because you haven’t experienced it personally or witnessed it with your own eyes doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. You haven’t walked in an ace’s shoes, you don’t know what they deal with. Period.
Not even other aces can tell asexuals that their experiences aren’t real or aren’t valid. Different people can deal with different amounts of oppression, that doesn’t mean the lack of oppression is the default “truth”.
Nobody is trying to say that asexuals have it “as bad” or worse than gay or trans people, but we don’t HAVE to “have it worse” to be included and for our experiences to have merit without being compared to anyone else’s. Let me say that again: our experiences have merit without being compared to anyone else’s.
Told asexuals to die: x, x, x, x, x (tbh this is only a tiny sample and I don’t have the heart to go digging for more)
Are all aphobes this vile? Maybe not, but this is still the disgusting, hateful attitude festering in the gatekeeping community, and it stinks like shit. The examples I have provided above are only a fraction of the harassment and abuse that is perpetrated on a regular basis.
“Het aces/aroaces are straight”
Some het aces identify as straight. Some het aces don’t identify as straight, they identify as asexual, and it’s not your place to label them against their will. There is no world in which aroaces, people who experience no attraction to anyone, are straight.
“We accept SGA (same-gender attracted) and trans aces”
Firstly, SGA (same-gender attraction) is a term that was used and is still used in Mormon conversion therapy, so as one can understand, a lot of people are very uncomfortable being labeled with this description. Secondly, it enforces a gender binary of “same” and “opposite” gender that leaves a large number of nonbinary people out in the cold. Is a genderfluid person only “same-gender attracted” if they’re attracted to other genderfluid people who are genderfluid in exactly the same way? How about agender, intergender, demigirl/boy people? And before the argument “well they’re included as trans” is made, there are plenty of nonbinary people who do not identify as trans. I’m one of them.
The standard of “SGA and trans” as requirement for entry to the LGBTQ community is used nowhere outside of aphobic tumblr, and it seems crafted specifically for the purpose of excluding aces, aros, NBs, intersex people, and others not deemed “gay enough”.
The modern American movement was first known as the “gay community” when cis gay men refused to even accept lesbians, then the “gay and lesbian community”. (Good reading on the subject.)
“After the elation of change following group action in the Stonewall riots in New York, in the late 1970s and the early 1980s, some gays and lesbians became less accepting of bisexual or transgender people.
Critics said that transgender people were acting out stereotypes and bisexuals were simply gay men or lesbian women who were afraid to come out and be honest about their identity.
Each community has struggled to develop its own identity including whether, and how, to align with other gender and sexuality-based communities, at times excluding other subgroups; these conflicts continue to this day.” (source)
“From about 1988, activists began to use the initialism LGBT in the United States.
Not until the 1990s within the movement did gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people gain equal respect.” (ibid)
Insisting that LG people have always been accepting of bi and trans people is incredibly revisionist and does a great deal of injustice to those who have been excluded.
Despite the fact that bisexual and transgender people have always been around, and have done great things for the community, they have faced a great deal of lateral oppression from the LG part of the group that did not want to see them get an equal share of attention, support, or legitimacy. This post is not about proving LG transphobia and biphobia, but it’s so rampant that I don’t feel like I need to provide sources whatsoever. Nevertheless, here’s a collection of biphobia, and the blog @terf-callout documents some of the violent transphobia on this site, particularly in the lesbian community. This post is an example.
“The A stands for Ally so that closeted people can be the community without being outed”
No one is saying that we don’t care about closeted people, but a) even if you’re a closeted L, G, B, or T, you are still a L, G, B, or T. Allies do not need to be part of the acronym to be intrinsically welcomed. As someone said, this is like saying the ‘B’ in BLT stands for ‘bread’. We can pretty much safely assume that a sandwich is going to include bread, we don’t have to go of our way to give it a letter. Either you are outing every “ally” as a closeted queer person, or you are giving 100% cis straight people an LGBTQ member card, the very thing you are arguing against by trying to exclude asexuals.
Furthermore, this puts forth the argument “I’m willing to let cishet straight people into the community for the sake of a few closeted people” while at the same time stating “I’m not willing to let the A stand for asexuals because I don’t think letting cis heteroromantic asexuals into the community is worth giving all asexuals representation and support”. Which says that you consider asexuals less valuable and more of a threat than cis straight people.
“I have proof of an asexual being homophobic/transphobic/racist/a terrible person”
Of course there are asexuals who are terrible people. There are legions of gays and lesbians who are racist and transphobic. Does that make them not gay/lesbian? Does their bigotry invalidate their sexual orientation, or remove the L and G from the acronym? No, I don’t think so. Some asexuals being bad people doesn’t justify you trying to invalidate all of us.
“’Allosexual’ is a bad word because ____”
I actually have an ‘allosexual’ tag just for posts about why ‘allosexual’ is a perfectly fine word: x, x, x, x, x. x
“The split-attraction model is homophobic”
What we call the split-attraction model was first described by Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, a gay advocate from the 1800s, as “disjunctive uranodioning”. (source) (credit to this post)
“The term ‘corrective rape’ was coined by South African lesbians and should only be used by lesbians”
No one means any disrespect to lesbians or other victims of corrective rape, but this is not a correct statement.
“We’ll Show You You’re a Woman” describes the violence directed towards LGBT people in South Africa, stating, “Negative public attitudes towards homosexuality go hand in hand with a broader pattern of discrimination, violence, hatred, and extreme prejudice against people known or assumed to be lesbian, gay, and transgender, or those who violate gender and sexual norms in appearance or conduct (such as women playing soccer, dressing in a masculine manner, and refusing to date men).” It goes on to say, “Much of the recent media coverage of violence against lesbians and transgender men has been characterized by a focus on “corrective rape,” a phenomenon in which men rape people they presume or know to be lesbians in order to “convert” them to heterosexuality.”
The Wikipedia article on corrective rape in South Africa states that, “A study conducted by OUT LGBT Well-being and the University of South Africa Centre for Applied Psychology (UCAP) showed that “the percentage of black gay men who said they have experienced corrective rape matched that of the black lesbians who partook in the study”.”
It is not only lesbians, but also bisexual women, transgender men, gay men, and
gender non-conforming people
in South Africa who experience corrective rape. This is not in any way meant to minimize the horror of the epidemic or shift attention away from lesbians, but other victims, including asexuals, deserve attention as well. Do not silence or speak over victims of rape by policing their language.
“Aces are valid, they’re just not queer/LGBTQ”
You cannot in one breath say “Asexuals are valid” and in the next deny their experiences. Spend five minutes in the community and you will see testimony after testimony from aces describing their abuse, their sexual assault(s), the countless times people have called them confused, broken, wrong, mentally ill, inhuman, sinful, and how these experiences have left them feeling hopeless, alone, alienated, subhuman, depressed, and suicidal. Almost every asexual out there will tell you a story of how their orientation has caused them pain and struggle, and you can’t call them valid while at the same time calling these experiences invalid and nonexistent.
“Aces take resources from other LGBTQ who need them”
I’ve seen some pretty wild claims about this one, insisting that asexuals “steal” things such as scholarships, beds at homeless shelters, food and space at pride events, suicide hotlines, and so on, yet I have never seen any actual proof that any “stealing” has ever taken place. For one thing, I thought “you’ll never get kicked out or fired for being ace”, “no one is suicidal because they’re asexual”, so why would you think aces need these resources? Either we don’t need them or we don’t use them, you can’t have it both ways.
For another, how heartless do you have to be to tell asexuals that they can’t use suicide hotlines? Do you realize that you’re saying that asexuals should be denied life-saving services? That, in essence, asexuals are suicidal due to their orientation, but you think they’re not “queer enough” so they deserve to die? Because that is the logical progression of refusing someone suicide prevention, and that’s the message aces receive when you tell them they are “stealing” suicide prevention.
Lastly, do you not realize we are also PROVIDING resources? We are bringing bodies and minds to the community, we are here to be voices, to volunteer, to bring encouragement, information, and support. We earn our keep. You just have to admit that you don’t WANT us here.
“Nobody wants to hear about your nonexistent sex life”
So one thing I’m not seeing mentioned much but that I think is really important to acknowledge is: not every member of a hate group is equally radicalized.
See, a lot of our rhetoric re: dealing with them assumes that every member is a hardened lifetimer. But there are always many, many lackeys to every kingpin. Not every terrorist sympathizer is Osama bin Laden. Cultlike movements are largely composed of people who are isolated or gullible or otherwise vulnerable. Their leaders know this. They capitalize on an underlying dysfunction and turn it into something monstrous. In any such movement, there will be people who have doubts but fear being crushed for their dissent. And those are the people it’s critically important to reach out to.
I think a lot of people assume that compassionate outreach is about, like, nicely asking hardened leaders to stop. It’s not! I frankly resent seeing pacifism strawmanned so badly. It’s about undermining those leaders’ bases. It’s about getting through to people who aren’t yet in too deep. When we write them off as exactly as bad as the people recruiting and manipulating them, we’re implicitly yielding ground. We’re ceding a huge number of potential allies to hateful causes, and I am not willing to do that. I want as many people on the side of good as possible. To do that, we have to be willing to get in and help deradicalize.
It’s laughable to expect that someone like S p e n c e r will just wake up one day and realize he’s wrong. It’s not impossible, but it’s not worth banking on. But what about an eighteen-year-old flirting with dangerous ideologies? Isn’t giving up on him implicitly ceding him to S p e n c e r ‘ s side? Do not conflate the psychological profile of someone who’s just beginning to become radicalized with that of someone who’s been entrenched for decades. That difference matters.
This is… my own position as well, honestly. I’m seeing an absolutely terrifying lack of nuance on here and more than a few times I’ve felt the blood run cold in my veins. Radicalization and edging toward extreme views and measures aren’t something that solely the people who dwell to the right of the center had and have a monopoly on. I’ve got half a murdered family for political reasons as testament enough to that!
Deradicalization is as much of a key-word as resistance and direct action and at this point, Ifeel that none of these can properly work without the other two in play.I worked for years as a journalist and an adviser for one of the MPs in my country and one of the side-projects I dedicated my time to was compiling data and resources on burgeoning anti-radicalization and deradicalization programs here in Europe, aimed at at-risk youth, particularly those who had joined Daesh, then returned to their homes, for whatever reason. I also wrote news-stories on these programs, in order to help spread knowledge and awareness of them. Programs such as the one spearheaded by the Danish authorities in 2015, aimed at working with former Daesh fighters, some of whom could have done unspeakable things while in Syria or Irak.
This ties in to the rise of various populist and far-right groups both here and in the US and the way in which an entire generation of youths is being radicalized by members of these groups, through the Internet. I’d always known there was a connection, but it became clear in my mind when a researcher studying the phenomenon wrote that when we speak about radicalization through the World-Wide-Web, we mustn’t speak only of actions taken by groups such as Daesh. We need to also look at the users of forums like Stormfront, who disseminated their ideas like viruses through subreddits and gaming forums, drawing in a dangerously high number of youths, preying on their uncertainties, their biases, lying to them and stoking their fears and their bigotries, encouraging ‘us versus them’ polarized thinking and creating what this researcher outright called ‘a radicalized generation, taught to lie to their own families about their extremist sympathies.’
I want to be clear, because sometimes I feel that people on here read posts while wearing Misunderstanding Goggles. I’m not saying ‘poor widdle baby bigots who need butt-patts’. I’m saying that a society where a significant proportion of youth ends up radicalized is a society that is, frankly, FUCKED and that’s something we need to handle and we need to fix, with pragmatism as much as with passion and a commitment to resisting extremist policies and extremist thought at every opportunity. I’ve dedicated years of my life and will dedicate many more to supporting and promoting deradicalization for people who ended up in nightmares like Daesh and who have a chance, however small, of getting out and fighting against extremism. I’d be one hell of a hypocrite if I didn’t do the same in other cases as well.
Keep in mind always that the son of the guy who runs The D/aily S/tormer left white nationalism because an Orthodox Jewish classmate in college started inviting him to Shabbat dinner.
I say this every time I argue for raising the minimum wage. I never hear anyone else say it and I’m glad I found this.
If you build your business and your bonus on the backs of others who you don’t pay a living wage you don’t deserve to be in business.
this is making capitalists bleed from the ears keep reblogging it
Since I tend to get into this with people who argue that robots will replace minimum wage workers if they get too expensive, I like to lean into the robot metaphor.
If you have a machine performing a valuable talk for your company, the upkeep of that machine is part of your operating cost. You have to pay to power it, to upgrade it, to fix it when it breaks. And if you can’t afford the machine, the manufacturer doesn’t have to do business with you. They’re free to take their service somewhere else where they think the price is fair.
For humans, a living wage is the operating cost. If you can’t afford to pay your worker enough to live nearby, feed themselves, and get basic health care – all of which are things they need in order to be able to work for you – you’re failing to pay for the cost of their service.
The difference is that humans have to eat, like, all the time, so they often don’t have the option of taking their business somewhere else if the price isn’t fair – even insufficient food and shelter is better then starving on the street. But that means those people are not really able to act as agents in a free market, and it’s easy to exploit them under the guise of “the market setting the price.” People can’t act like reasonable economic agents when they’re desperate. As for as I can tell, that’s the whole point of having a minimum wage.
Keep reblogging this, it’s making capitalists mad and reaching out to the working class
Steel Phoenix Studios 