USA Please Listen To Me: The Price Of “teaching Them A Lesson” Is Too High. Take It From New Zealand,

Having been a part of the left for decades I think I can sum up how they went wrong

The left used to look to grassroots fighters of injustice as role models. They saw what the Black Panthers did giving school children free lunches. They saw groups like the Gay Liberation Front fighting for rights. They saw so many people in developing countries fighting for freedom and safety

A generation ago we knew why we were fighting. Then minority groups started to gain more of the equity they fought for and membership became about identity; nobody wanted to be a straight white person. The new generation came in after the struggle and tried to continue but so many of the fights were won and instead of picking up the fights remaining, they just wanted to continue with violence

They looked at radical Islam and assumed if someone is being violent there must be a righteous cause. They kept the violence and lost the fucking point

Dara Horne said it best, "People Love Dead Jews."

I've seen discussions sometimes about how fanfiction-based fandom culture is heavily influenced and dominated by people who are not cis men.

One thing I haven't seen discussed as much though is how much of fandom in general is shaped by neurodivergent people.

I mean, you have autistic and ADHD people with special interests or hyperfixations collecting information and writing detailed meta, connecting very strongly with characters and fandoms. I would not be surprised if the percentage of autistics in fandom communities was significantly higher than in the general public.

And that's not even getting into other types of neurodivergencies and how they influence fandom culture.

I sometimes see people try to divorce fandom culture from the idea of being a "geek", and I understand that this is sometimes because of the association with the sexist geek stereotype, but I also know that there is a connection between the two concepts, and it's probably us neurodivergent people.

A very brief introduction to the world's oldest hatred: antisemitism.

📷: Instagram user @/rootsmetals. Support their work with cashapp: $rootsmetals

Fic authors deserve more credit.

Story time: I started a book about 23 hours ago and just finished it. Also in that time I slept for 10 hours, spent time with family, was at work, etc. Anyway, I enjoyed the book (Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda). But it felt like it flew by, so after I finished I looked up the word count because what are pages? Pages are meaningless. I only function in word counts anymore.

The estimate I found was 58,580. My immediate reaction was “oh, that’s why. That’s nothing!” But what a shitty response. Because no. That’s not nothing. That’s a whole. Damn. Book. An entire novel! And Fic authors regularly bust out 30k, 50k, 100k, 150k words. AND THEY DO IT FOR FREE. WHILE WORKING AND LIVING THEIR LIVES.

So anyway, thank your favorite fic author today because they deserve it. Because they’re amazing. They’re the MVPs.

I found it so bizarre when I came across posts on Tumblr talking about a random Palestinian online influencer by her first name (yeah, I know she has a "press" vest, so people call her a journalist. Seriously laughing at anyone thinking or pretending like there's any free press in Gaza. If you're Gazan and have a "press" vest, you got it from Hamas, or it was at some point approved by Hamas). But it's not just the way they talked about her by her first name, as if she was someone they personally knew, and therefore could fully trust, it's the way that there were instructions passed on from her to the masses reading the posts. "Bisan said" this and "Bisan asked that we" that, and I felt like I was reading the instructions of a cult leader being passed down to the cult members. Honestly, it might as well have said, "Saint Bisan" the way that she's quoted like her every word is to live and die by.

Examples will be attached to the end of this post.

Anyway, turns out Saint Bisan has asked people to donate to her and other Gazans, and then just decided to keep all that money to herself? What a shocker.

And I'm gonna stress again she's got some sort of a connection to Hamas, or she wouldn't be able to pass herself off as a journalist. That's where everyone's money has gone to. Someone with at the very least ties to a genocidal, antisemitic terrorist organization, responsible for the biggest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, with their only greater victim being the Palestinians themselves, when Hamas uses them as human shields or directly kills them.

Anyway, here's just two random examples of some cult-like posts with instructions from "Saint" Bisan...

Oh, and I just read that before the war, her family's home and her office were in the neighborhood of Rimal. Before the Oct 7 massacre, that was considered a luxury neighborhood, and ONLY people affiliated with Hamas were rich enough that they could afford to live there. She's been saying that she's Hamas all along. People just don't know the nuances of her language.

(for all of my updates and ask replies regarding Israel, click here)