My Hearing Has Been Aided And Holy Shit Is This How You Guys Hear All The Time

I am guilty of this. Academy brain-rot has me stating that we should hear the voices of the oppressed and their experiences... and at the same time prioritize inexistent statistics or articles devoid of the people it's discussing, about events that are currently happening and individuals that right now need to be heard. It's neat to find a little graph showing you that The Violence Is Rising, but who is this for? Who are you trying to convince that there is a reality away from the text that should already compel you? What good is a study when you make the stories, wants and struggles of others secondary to it?

It is a way of thinking that is hard to unlearn, but must be done to move forward, towards a better, critical and caring world.

getting incredibly tired of westerners responding to firsthand accounts shared by palestinians in gaza with the reflexive demand to see a "source"

because by source, they always mean a western news report

never mind, of course, that international journalists are banned from entering gaza; the word of the western journalist, writing in passive voice about a genocide 6000 miles away, is still deemed more 'reliable' than the firsthand accounts shared by the victims living through that same genocide

a palestinian shares a video of an IOF solider brutalizing civilians in gaza? not good enough; they still need a ''source.'' the video in question was posted by a palestinian journalist? okay cool, but does someone have a more reliable source? can we get a word in from the esteemed fact-checkers over at the new york crimes, or the iraq-has-wmds-post? we just don't want to spread misinformation...

No poem

No poem can do this right.

I promise you I'm trying,

but how can these words tell you

that there's so many feelings

where words won't fit in.

Love falls short

and the word pain is too little

for this strange hunger I have

when I can't eat your lips.

It's not that I can't sleep,

or that part of me is still watching the sunset;

it's that I am wandering around it

in circles

and that no poet can point at it

without . missing

Hey,

There's a comfy space in my mind, I've made room for you. We can hug and eat cookies or we can just talk about the rain- about this strange weather that covers the moon with a grainy filter. About the pictures you took of me when I wasn’t looking. Hey, Sometimes I feel like I don't know you, and I love that because it means you are you and I am me. Like when you admire someone so much you don't want to be them, you want them to be themselves. Hey, I just want to be with you so I can tell you how I couldn't wrap my head around the fact that I love you so much that I almost forgot.

Are you saying the use of AI will be/is the next stage of our (technological) culture of immediacy?

People are so impressed with AI for what? Because it can make stuff? You know what else can do that? A human being…..oh but that’s not fast enough 🥺 its not fwast enuwf fwor you 🥺🥺 ?

vegans make peace with honey

no shut up do it

How do you process grief?

by running from it until it finds me in the middle of a sunny street on a beautiful day

So you dreamt the new Mario movie

I became the ruler of penguins but they were all jealous and didn’t show up to my coronation so I melted all the ice in the kingdom and made them watch.

I've been reading some stuff on punitive justice, and it made something click for me that I've observed a lot online but haven't been able to put into words before.

When someone does something wrong, that's bad, and the damage it does needs to be repaired while the person needs to try to do better in future to minimize repeating harm. We learn it in preschool - say sorry, don't do it again. If they keep at it, remove them from the situation where they can do the harm until they prove they're responsible enough to go back in.

So if it turns out someone DIDN'T do anything wrong, that should be a relief! There's no damage to fix, no internal errors to correct. Less work for everybody, literally no harm done. False alarm, all good.

The thing I've observed is, lots of people want them to have done something wrong. There's almost disappointment when it turns out there's no harm done. And I think that's because of this general undercurrent of punitive justice as morally righteous and desirable: someone does something wrong, you get to punish them. Turns out they're innocent? That's disappointing. Find another reason you get to punish them, or find another bad person you get to punish. But at the core of it is that desire to punish someone. Someone you can hurt in a way that makes you a better person for hurting them.

This particular brand of almost cannibalistic pseudo-justice is super common in tumblr, one of the most ostensibly liberal spaces on the internet; I see more borderline savagery in online discourse here than in the actually toxic parts of the internet that are just openly cruel for cruelty's sake. It's always thrown me for a loop, and has frankly also hurt me, because on the rare occasions I get personally dogpiled, it only actually stings when it makes me worry that I've legitimately hurt someone. If I did something wrong, or more realistically when I inevitably do something wrong, that would make it good and right for people to give me shit about it every day until I'm dead.

The thing that clicked for me most recently was this bit in Ijeoma Oluo's Be A Revolution:

Punitive justice is specifically, uniquely appealing to people who have suffered injustices. Of course it's the Tumblr zeitgeist. Everyone here is a marginalized person failed by at least one system. Punishing someone for perceived injustice is how someone the system has deemed worthless proves their value in blood, even if the person being punished hasn't harmed you directly - even if they haven't harmed anyone. "Righteous" anger isn't about the target in these cases, it's about the inflicter. This is how much my pain is worth.

And that kind of violent validation is so alluring and so very dangerous. It seeks an outlet, wearing the justification of justice. Who's in reach? Who's an acceptable target this week? What's a good reason to use?

Is there anything they could do that would make me stop?

the whole “i used to be a teen who hated authority only to grow up to become the authority that hates teens” is a bad bad thing that practically every other generation has fallen into and we all need to make an extremely conscious effort not to repeat the fucking pattern

Have you ever found a writing or a drawing you don't remember making? Well I found a poem written two years ago that I must've left as a draft. I don't know how it was supposed to end, what the meaning was supposed to be, the person (or thing?) I'm adressing, or even the theme. I don't know how to feel about this ngl.