Seriously disappointed by how many so called “leftists” don’t know that in the temple to Sobek, the ancient Egyptian god of Crocodiles, the Nile river, and might, was actually a giant multi-story labyrinth filled with sacred crocodiles. It’s frankly basic Marxist theory to know that only the priests of Sobek knew the correct route through the labyrinth, and we’re the only ones who could safely navigate the maze without being eaten by the sacred crocodiles.
It’s the secret to enlightenment that the mainstream Egyptologists like myself are keeping from people. Can’t have people know the correct route through the labyrinth or they’ll stop asking who built the pyramids.
At the center of the labyrinth is a big ornate chest. Inside is a gilded scroll that reads “The Egyptians.”
God I hate these fucking floating monoliths. They always go, like, 10mph below the speed limit and if you try to pass them they just fucking distort reality around them until you’re back behind them again. One of them cut me off on the highway once and when I honked it banished me to a hoary netherworld where I wandered, lost and alone, for untold centuries, trapped in the liminal space between what could have been and what never was, black stars dotting the bright infinity yawning out around me as I drove out of thought and time, through endless ruined cities and blighted lands unmarked by the sun’s cold rays, and when I finally got out I was more than 20m late for my dentist appointment and they had to reschedule me.
romans: conquer a shitload of the known world, including parts of africa and the middle east
romans: institute a policy that says that conquered peoples are allowed to gain citizenship by military service, but also can’t serve in their home areas (because armed native soldiers + angry locals = revolt), thus requiring everyone who wants to be a citizen to work abroad for years of their lives, creating diversity.
racists: a single black person in an educational video about rome is unrealistic and i feel attacked.
Anonymous
Anonymous asked:
don't use "ftm" it's outdated and offensive. it implies that the trans person was their agab, which we never were. i was always a boy, never a girl who became a boy.
i’m 35 years old. i’ve been IDing as trans or something similar to trans for nearly 20 years. i was probably calling myself FTM while you were playing tag during recess, anon.
i WAS a girl. i IDed as a girl early in my life. i recognized myself as a girl, called myself a girl, lived as a girl, and was a girl. who then IDed as a man. hence, F t M.
spend more time worrying about yourself instead of strangers on the internet, anon.
sorry not sorry if this comes off as needlessly hostile, but i’ve been getting a lot of shit from a lot of teenage trans kids about the language i use to describe my own goddamn experience, and i’m growing real fuckin weary of it.
i have elder trans friends who call themselves transsexuals and transvestites and trannies. are you going to seriously go to a 60-year-old trans person who survived the reagan years and tell her she’s not allowed to use certain language to describe herself because it might offend the delicate sensibilities of some teenager on the internet?
do yourself a favor and log off, find some real-life trans people who are over the age of 20 or 25, and spend time talking to them instead of getting all holier-than-thou at random strangers on tumblr.
It may be weird to encounter because it’s not the trans narrative that the media sells to us as ‘the only valid way to be trans’, but the 'I always knew I was x’ is not all-encompassing.
Anon there are more people than you think who were girls who grew up into men, or boys who grew up into women, or girls or boys who grew up to be nonbinary. There is a rather obscure theory that girl and boy are distinct genders from man and woman and while the most common trajectory is that boys grow into men and girls grow into women it’s not the rule.
Let people define themselves.
also if you think genderfluid people are real and you’re not just humoring us, you by definition have to allow that gender can change over time. I was a girl once. I am not a girl now.
Chiming in with solidarity to OP.
I feel very protective of my former identity BECAUSE there’s so little room in the Mainstream Trans Narrative ™️ for allowing gender to change.
I was a girl. Now I’m genderqueer. Maybe later I will find different words for myself.
There has to be room for all of us in the trans community or there’s no point to any of this.
Ive been here long enough to see words like ftm/mtf, afab/amab, transmale/female, trans man/womanall go through the cycle of ppl telling you to “Dont use X word its out dated. Now use this Y word”. Only for a year or two pass and suddenly “Y word is outdated. Now use Z word” like yall this is exhausting. Just because a word is old doesn’t automatically make it a slur or offensive.
They’re pulling high school clique bullshit out and just replacing 'uncool’ with 'problematic’ and pretending it’s activism somehow. We’re trying to get work done here not everybody is going to keep up with the ever-rotating lexicon of words.
I used to be a member of the commentariat where I learned the phrase
THERE IS NO QUEER REVIEW BOARD
Which has kinda helped me be a bit better at being decent
btw to anyone who’s concerned about how the starbucks boycott affects employees: as an ex-barista i can tell you that when business slows down the baristas just vibe and chill in there. they’re fine. and furthermore if sbux starts letting people go or shutting down entire stores, baristas will make it out ok. sbux has a solid severance package for things like this, i lost my job bc of covid and i was covered for several months of pay. the unionized ones are probably even better off. do not even worry about it. there’s better coffee out there anyway
as someone who currently works for starbucks, a lot of this just isn’t true anymore.
starbucks is driving out tenured employees. no one is being “let go,” people are being fired for inconsequential infractions that are hard to battle in court. there is no “covid pay” anymore, and unionized workers are being pushed out of the company because starbucks doesn’t want to give them the same protections as regular partners. the union doesn’t even have any power yet because starbucks has refused to negotiate a contract.
business is still booming (at least in the states) and will continue to rise during the holiday season. stocks have taken a hit, but your average starbucks customer funneling money into this company is a regular with a gold card; they don’t care about starbucks’ reputation.
with that being said, it’s not a good place to work. so no, baristas won’t be fine and things won’t improve. but who fucking cares? this isn’t a company that anyone should even work for to begin with. any barista with a good head on their shoulders is gonna jump ship and find a better job before things get worse or because they finally realized this place fucking sucks.
don’t worry about starbucks employees. they chose to work there in spite of the horrible working conditions, and if they choose to stick with them through yet another pr disaster, that’s on them. starbucks looks great on a resume, and there are plenty of other places with even-matched pay and better working conditions. they’ll be fine.
didn’t know things had deteriorated that much since i left, holy shit. gonna boycott even harder now
weird anti ideology finally leaking out into the mainstream
I’m so exhausted by all of this.
I think we’re seeing the consequences of surveillance, honestly. Like they’re policing themselves this heavily because they’ve never had privacy before, not from their parents, not from their peers, not from advertisers, not online, nothing. And with all that constant and conflicting criticism, there are no consistent rules for when they’re going to be attacked so they’re responding by making elaborate, false rule-sets as a coping strategy. LIke “maybe, if I act this way, I’ll finally be safe” but it doesn’t work so they get more desperate.
Add on all the school shootings in the US, inaction on climate change, and a pandemic that was allowed to rip through schools unchecked, kids and young adults have a deep sense that their lives are disposable. And they’re right! Our society is systematically hostile and abusive to children in so many ways! However, the only child abuse society gets riled up about is pedophilia. Adults act like pedophilia is the only kind of child abuse that counts as abuse.
And that’s why I think we are seeing kids stretching the meaning of pedophilia. They are looking for language that encompasses all of the kinds of abuse that they’re experiencing. All of the emotional abuse of children is normalized, quite a bit of physical abuse is normalized, and the lack of privacy, agency, and bodily autonomy is all socially enforced. The truth is that all of these other forms of abuse can and do lead to sexual abuse, too. These kids are on to something, but it’s getting deflected and warped by the fact that they still live in the dangerous environments they’ve been abused in. I think more specific language will be empowering here and will also bridge the gap between the current generation of young people and other anti-violence movements.
So if you are a child or young adult who resonates with any of the above, I want you to know that as a child abuse survivor, I believe you when you say that you’ve been abused. I think the anxiety about fandom websites and queer people and kink is misplaced because strangers don’t usually have the structural power and access to you to hurt you but I know that there are people in you life who do have that power and I’m worried about you. I think ao3/queer/kink are just the issues that you feel safest speaking up about. I see you speaking up and I think there’s more going on.
So what I can do for you, as a random stranger on the internet, is give you some resources and language so you can start to articulate your experiences and find solidarity with others.
Here’s a copy of the UN’s Convention on the Rights of the Child. The US has refused to sign this but it’s still a good idea of what the rest of the world believes you deserve and what we know will help you thrive.
Here’s a copy of the power and control wheel for child abuse. Power and control wheels are commonly used in many forms of victim advocacy to help map abuse. To be clear, we count these things as abuse because we know from research that they are traumatic. Many laws have not been updated to include all these forms, so you’ll notice that many of the things on this wheel are completely legal even though we know they are harmful.
Additionally, I’m including a zine I found on peer support for suicide ideation. I know that growing up, my friends and I were always told to tell a trusted adult but we didn’t have one and ended up trying to help each other through some really awful shit. This is a guide written by someone with a similar experience and it details ways to informally support someone who is feeling suicidal.
Anonymous
