May the Bridges We Burn Light Our Way Home

Self-defense, crime, policing, oppression, and Revolution.

Which is to say, let’s talk about civilian ownership of weapons!

This is a super-controversial subject that’s the main reason why people have blocked me on here, so it’s probably the big stumbling block between me and a lot of otherwise ideologically similar folks, so I’d like to dig around on this topic a bit.

First, I obviously need to say flat out, this is “about guns” but it’s really about civilian weapons ownership with a solid sprinkle of class and race issues on top, because that’s what the laws actually end up being about.

What, if any, weapons should civilians, of what ages, classes, races, genders, etc have access to? What is at stake when civilians are disarmed? Who has the right to defend themselves and their loved ones? The right to defend their own property?

How wealthy do you need to be for armed defense of your person to be licit?

How do these positions interact with policing and crime rates? The fact that at best, “when seconds count, the police are minutes away” and at worst, the police have zero obligation to piss on you if you are on fire and might just shoot your dog, you, and burn down your house “saving” you.

And how do they interact with threats of insurrection, rebellion, and Revolution? Can you have a successful Revolution while limiting your weapons for ideological reasons, or are the people proposing overthrowing the government with bicycle parts insane or feds?

Do physically weaker and outnumbered people deserve to lose violent conflicts?

random-thought-depository:

professor-pants:

Genre of character: submissive like a guard dog is submissive

A lot of bonobo-like human males would have some of this going on. The masculinities of the more militaristic historical bonobo-like human societies would have included a lot of socialization to be like this.

Well, in societies that were militaristic in the sense of needing to be heavily oriented toward defensive violence male socialization would have looked like this. In societies and classes that did a lot of raiding, conquering, etc. it would have instead been more like a mix of this and submissive in the way a hunting dog is submissive.

@who-canceled-roger-rabbit, this is pretty relevant re: how gender in a matriarchy/female privilege society might work and how it wouldn’t be just a gender-flipped patriarchy.

Yeah, I find this a pretty potentially interesting dynamic, I think for reasons related to what I wrote here, like if the sub could overpower the dom physically that immediately raises the question of why they continue to submit and invites me to try to come up with interesting answers to that question. And it works really well for het femdom where the domme is nice to the sub.

northshorewave:

(Kontextmaschine voice) “Growing up I thought waterbeds would be a bigger part of adult life.”

My parents had a waterbed, so I kinda assumed that grownup beds were waterbeds. Instead foam got better and ate every advantage that waterbeds had.

(via the-grey-tribe)

therecipelibrary:

Whipped Cream Sandwich

-New Delineator Recipes 1929

This is some absolute gremlin food

garmbreak1:

OP: “It’s fucked up that people are saying that all squids should be exterminated.”

Reblog 1: “They should be! Those foul creatures don’t deserve to share our planet!”

Reblog 2: “Nobody’s calling for the extermination of squids, squid lover.”

cromulentenough:

isaacsapphire:

kaziusklasterzoroaster:

duran-duran-less-official:

This is probably going to sound like a really dumb question to Americans, but

Why are carbon monoxide detectors a thing?

I can’t name a single person I know who has one, so what are they for? What sources of carbon monoxide are Americans regularly exposed to that we Australians apparently don’t ever contend with?

After some googling, I’ve learned that they’re also available in Australia, but hardly anyone talks about them. I have to conclude that the American domestic energy supply is vastly more dependent on natural gas than Australia. Is that it?

stop getting your info about my country from weird PSAs

I never owned a carbon monoxide detector till I moved to Europe

The other day someone said that everyone they knew had a CO2 detector. The thing with CO2 detectors in the US is, they’re mandated in rental units in some states, sometimes conditional on the type of heating. And yeah, any heating involving combustion, like gas, caries a risk of CO2, so that’s probably part of the picture. If everyone you know rents from vaguely reputable landlords in a state that requires CO2 detectors, they’re all going to have CO2 detectors. If they are in a state without the requirement, or own, or rent from sketchy landlords, they may not.

Carbon monoxide detectors are a thing because carbon monoxide can kill entire families overnight. If you are burning anything in an enclosed space, carbon monoxide is a potential danger. Every bad winter, someone uses a kerosene heater or wood stove or something and fucks it up and kills half or all of their family.

Also, too high but not fatal CO2 levels can really fuck up people’s heads and make them see crazy stuff or have memory lapses and stuff, to the degree that it’s standard advise for dealing with a “haunted” house to get a CO2 detector to check if elevated CO2 levels aren’t causing haunting symptoms.

I thought the seeing and thinking weird stuff was about carbon monoxide not dioxide

I made an error and used “CO2” where I should have used CO.

kaziusklasterzoroaster:

duran-duran-less-official:

This is probably going to sound like a really dumb question to Americans, but

Why are carbon monoxide detectors a thing?

I can’t name a single person I know who has one, so what are they for? What sources of carbon monoxide are Americans regularly exposed to that we Australians apparently don’t ever contend with?

After some googling, I’ve learned that they’re also available in Australia, but hardly anyone talks about them. I have to conclude that the American domestic energy supply is vastly more dependent on natural gas than Australia. Is that it?

stop getting your info about my country from weird PSAs

I never owned a carbon monoxide detector till I moved to Europe

The other day someone said that everyone they knew had a CO detector. The thing with CO detectors in the US is, they’re mandated in rental units in some states, sometimes conditional on the type of heating. And yeah, any heating involving combustion, like gas, caries a risk of CO, so that’s probably part of the picture. If everyone you know rents from vaguely reputable landlords in a state that requires CO detectors, they’re all going to have CO detectors. If they are in a state without the requirement, or own, or rent from sketchy landlords, they may not.

Carbon monoxide detectors are a thing because carbon monoxide can kill entire families overnight. If you are burning anything in an enclosed space, carbon monoxide is a potential danger. Every bad winter, someone uses a kerosene heater or wood stove or something and fucks it up and kills half or all of their family.

Also, too high but not fatal CO levels can really fuck up people’s heads and make them see crazy stuff or have memory lapses and stuff, to the degree that it’s standard advise for dealing with a “haunted” house to get a CO detector to check if elevated CO levels aren’t causing haunting symptoms.

Edit: originally this post erroneously used “CO2” where it should have used “CO”.

triviallytrue:

misanthropiccatboy:

I think the young women who harassed me had sized me up as a white gentrifier, a person they had many legitimate reasons to be angry with. At the same time, they recognized a social vulnerability in me that made expressing that anger seem possible. So they took hold of the opportunity, and used homophobia and transphobia as tools to express their greater outrage at the world’s unfairness.

this line from the article demonstrates perfectly what I like to call the trickle-down theory of punching up. the regular theory of “punching up” is that you are hitting people who fundamentally cannot be hurt because of their social privilege. the problem is, if someone fundamentally cannot be hurt by you, you cannot hit them. people who want catharsis for their anger and pain by “punching up” will eventually realize - consciously or by trial and error - that truly privileged people cannot be hurt, and will move on to the subsections of that group that they are capable of hurting: typically socially vulnerable people who are kept down by similar social structures they claim to be “punching up” at (but sometimes people disadvantaged in insular, non-normative social structures). the paradox of “punching up” is that if you are truly doing damage, hurting someone, or having an easy and/or large effect, you are not punching up.

that whole article was kind of fascinating because it hit on a lot of the issues with the whole identity-as-morality way of viewing the world and then instead of leaning into that, essentially made a patch request for cis white women to be moved into a different morality category

femmenietzsche:

Spanish request for new EU languages adds to translation woes | Financial Times

Sánchez wants Basque, Galician and Catalan added to bloc’s 24 official tongues

ft.com

Brussels would need to translate hundreds of thousands of pages of EU law into Basque, Galician and Catalan under a Spanish proposal that will add to the strains on Europe’s stretched translation service.

Spain has asked the EU to add the three tongues to its list of 24 official languages as part of Pedro Sánchez’s efforts to woo smaller regional parties, whose support he needs to secure a fresh mandate as prime minister.

If member states unanimously agree, the plan would require the translation of the full acquis of EU laws into each new language, as well as international treaties and thousands of proposals and decisions from the European Commission over the past six decades.

Irish became an official and working language of the EU in 2007 but its use was phased in and not all documents were translated until 2022, in part due to an inability to attract enough personnel to translation posts.

…

Every 100 pages of legislation takes 30 days to translate, according to parliamentary officials. In 2022, the commission produced almost 2.6mn pages of translation, just behind the record year of 2.77mn in 2021.

Can’t imagine why it would be hard to find people to translate millions of pages of legalese into a language spoken natively by a few tens of thousands of people

Does, “inability to attract enough personnel” mean the pay is shit?

thathopeyetlives:

Oh yikes the illegal gun silencer ads have appeared on Tumblr.

I swear that in 2045 the NFA is going to be taken as seriously as the marijuana laws in 2015.

“car parts”?

the-grey-tribe:

So I want to write a post about an episode of This American Life about what is happening, politically, in Florida, and the people who moved to Florida and out of Florida as a result of those policies.

The problem is I don’t really want to discuss Ron DeSantis. I want to bracket any and all discussion about whether and how he is wrong. I want to focus on the way this is reported on by This American Life, specifically. So for the sake of argument, I’d just like to bracket whether university courses are woke, whether lockdowns were a mistake, and whether they actually made it illegal for a teacher to say “gay” or talk about slavery.

But at the same time, I think it’s interesting to mention the way hand washing, mask mandates, lockdowns, vaccines, and ivermectin are all caught up in this “vortex of Covid”. Putting masks on preschool children did not and does not work, and impairs their social and interpersonal development. Remote schooling was way worse than in-person schooling. I’m not saying Ron DeSantis knew what he was doing, but it looks like Florida got some of these things wrong by accident.

But that’s not what I want to talk about. What I want to talk about is This American Life. They want to be fair and balanced, and they don’t want to bash the people who moved to Florida just for the absence of school closures, but at the same time, they let experts speak at length about why ivermectin doesn’t work against Covid (but not before calling it a “horse drug” to jog your memory). Why not let experts talk about school closures or masks in kindergarten?

Then there’s more about rich Florida men doing Florida man things and rich man things, like a “second amendment focused summer camp”, and retired general Mike Flynn buying a really expensive podcasting setup.

These rich Florida men all bond over “medical freedom”, which I would call “informed consent”, but they don’t. I find it odd that This American Life happily takes the framing and branding from Ron DeSantis, instead of calling it “informed consent”. The problem, medical experts say, is not the informed consent, the problem is that those people want to take ivermectin and think this cures their illness, so once the have the ivermectin, they don’t agree to any treatment that would actually help them.

The next segment is about anti-woke legislation. Now many of those anti-woke laws are rather narrow, some repeat things that are already illegal, and there is a lot of internet pessimism on twitter about this. People say CRT is not taught in schools, but also those anti-CRT laws will make it impossible to teach slavery, and also the whole bureaucratic apparatus will interpret the laws a certain way even if they are phrased narrowly, in anticipatory obedience. In this segment, we get to hear a professor who complains that her whole class about books by African-American authors will be impossible. It’s impossible to teach those books without teaching the history and the racism and the whole context, because those books are all about racism.

But then, a professor tries to re-write the curriculum to comply with the legislation (that isn’t even finished at that point) and they decide (paraphrasing from memory): Screw this, this is the one time I have an opportunity to tell impressionable undergrads about politics. They don’t even care about literature, they only take this as a blow-off class to fulfil their requirements, and I am not going to make them read Faulkner or Hawthorne!

Then there is an attempt to re-write a course about women’s literature, but the lecturer can’t write a syllabus without mentioning radical feminist concepts like the “lesbian continuum”.

When the episode started with masks on five year olds, I thought they were just trying to be impartial, but at this point, I can’t help but think about Straussian Hermeneutics. The Florida men who want to make Florida into a Rapture for the unvaccinated are portrayed as grifters and ideological fanatics. Ivermectin is a horse drug first, and a de-worming drug second. The normal people who are moving to Florida are portrayed as sympathetic, but you can hear the reporters strain not to sneer at them. The lecturers are portrayed as thoroughly sympathetic, but also shown to be paranoid about politics, and focused on activism in their classrooms.

There are four possibilities here: 1. They don’t know what they sound like, and they just say what they think 2. They do know what they sound like, but that’s what their audience expects 3. They are doing this on purpose 4. They know no anti-woke people listen to This American Life anyway.

None of this is supposed to imply that the idea of the “lesbian continuum” is not an appropriate lens through which to view, say, Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of Little Women, or that it wouldn’t be a fun premise for an episode of a sci-fi TV show.

At this point in the episode, I thought “I bet the people who voted for DeSantis will hear about this and see themselves vindicated. They don’t listen to this, but maybe somebody will share a clip on social media, and their suspicions will be confirmed, and next time they will demand even more anti-woke legislation for higher education.”

Then came the coda. A family with a transgender teenager is moving away. Florida has outlawed gender affirming care for minors. I assume that means medical interventions like puberty blockers, hormone replacement therapy, and surgery. I felt reminded of the beginning. Nobody drew the connection from HRT to “medical freedom”. They don’t really have to. It’s obvious. Perhaps it’s better left unsaid.

“but maybe someone will share a clip on social media” you say on Tumblr.

How egregious has Boston Market been in screwing over their employees? Apparently there’s lawsuits about unpaid wages in Massachusetts and Arizona too. Like, I am one of the people who left an extremely negative review of a local Boston Market so I at least was aware that they were in near-freefall, but it’s a bit heartening to see the government going after them for the mistreatment of their employees.

caesarsaladinn:

caesarsaladinn:

caesarsaladinn:

I’m surprised I can’t find any trace of an anti-bed movement online, I feel like such a huge and expensive piece of furniture would be an obvious target for people who want to simplify and minimize their life. maybe I have to pick up my sword and cross and sleeping bag and start this crusade myself

people seem to assume that sleeping on the floor or on a camping mat will make them sore in the morning, but empirically it seems like it’s roughly equal or slightly better for back pain on average than a normal mattress, plus you shave a shit ton of space and money. I imagine it’s worse for fucking but I’m sure arrangements could be made

people seem to have pretty different reads of what I mean by bedlessness, so for clarity, here’s the rough spectrum in my head (blankets are not relevant here; you can add as many or as few as you like):

1. bare floor (kitchen tile, hardwood, or maybe a thin carpet. this probably sucks for almost everybody)
2. very light padding on the floor, ≤ 1 inch (non-inflatable foam pad, a substantial pile of blankets, camping mattresses, etc. this is what I have)
3. Japanese futon or similar (several inches of padding with no frame, directly on the floor)
4. western futon (couch-bed with a solid frame. the mattress is thick but basically a pillow, just stuffing with very little structure)
5. bed, with a structured mattress probably ≥ 6 inches tall. might be made of foam, fabric, springs, or whatever. bed frame and box spring optional bc that’s not really the point I’m trying to make.

and I’m advocating for normalizing stuff between maybe 2 and 4. obviously it’s a very individual preference, the musculoskeletal system wants what it wants and ymmv, but my stance is that it should not be seen as strange (and trust me, it is seen as strange) to go without one. it makes a lot of sense in a lot of situations!

I seriously looked into Western and Japanese style futons as mattress alternatives when I was first moving out on my own, but the cost for even the shittiest Walmart Western style futon was comparable to a cheap mattress and bedframe fifteen years ago and cheap mattresses have gotten cheaper and better since then. And Japanese style futons were prohibitively expensive to get in the US at the time.

The problem is that it doesn’t really fix a common problem to not have a mattress, and a loft bed is a better solution to lot of the time when floor space is at a premium (and you aren’t planning to have sex on this bed, since that’s kinda implied by all options here except maybe the Japanese futon). Really small rooms don’t seem to be a common problem, and they’re solved by loft beds and sleeping on couches most of the time.

Further, the only (housed) people I have known who didn’t have mattresses for any period of time were extremely poor at the time and their lack of mattress was a demonstration of that poverty. One slept in a recliner in an enclosed porch for their entire childhood because poverty + unfavored child and the other was subletting a room in a condemned house after fleeing their abusive parents and had a Walmart futon.

thathopeyetlives:

The basic version of that is “what if there was something like a car, but was a large shared vehicle that travelled on a fixed route with a limited schedule and it wasn’t really possible to carry more cargo than a small suitcase”, or “what if there was something like a backyard, but it was a park with lots of rules and no persistent use allowed that was a quarter mile away from your pod in the commie block”.

But you also see some unusual versions.

I saw this cartoon where it was describing a situation where there was a city block full of townhouse-type residences has street parking along it, such that each townhouse has at approximately one parking space in front of it.

The cartoon described various cases where people might put various stuff in the parking spaces other than cars, with flippantly dismissive commentary about how that wouldn’t be preferred (“an eyelid might twitch”) – and then proposed that instead, this should be used to make a bike lane.

Having street parking on every street, and the attendant excessive street width, is a problem in America. And yet:

1. Having some significant amount of visitor parking is valuable for this kind of residence or people with cars find it very difficult to visit.
2. Street parking is usually shared and disallows multi-week persistent claims on spaces or the storage of items that are harder to move or compel to be moved than a car, specifically to allow it to be more shared.

3. Putting either cars or random stuff in spaces like these can be done ad-hoc per space, a bike lane is only useful if every space is given over to it semi-permanently and generally for multiple city blocks.

4. Bike lands are not actually that great in many scenarios.

For further nuance and potential issues around maintenance of street parking, please consider the humble parking chair, which is often not a chair.

loki-zen:

dabwax:

andossp:

dabwax:

dabwax:

Just had a mutual I really respect on tiktok tell me mocking the Texans who suffered badly or died in the blizzard in 2021 is fine because fuck Texas and I truly might delete that app. I can’t deal. I knew more trans and queer folks in Denton Texas than I do in the blue state I’m in now, there were queer art markets constantly and a lot of diversity and compassion for the poor in a way that doesn’t exist in my liberal fucking city and all I ever hear is how Texans deserve to suffer, as if there aren’t thousands protesting constantly and participating in mutual aid and doing their best to survive in a deeply gerrymandered fascist state. Homeless people died, disabled and poor people who couldn’t prepare died. My partner and I lived in a food desert with no access to buyable water and no running water for eight days and I guess we fucking deserved it because she was born there and I got literally abandoned by my ex roommate at the start of covid and left with nothing there!!! Fuck all Texans no matter what!!! This is a rational and compassionate way to think!!!!

So this person doubled down and made my feelings about “white people finding anything to be upset about” so I’m gonna say this:

If you’re openly celebrating the suffering of the average Joe and Jill and Jam in fash southern states, you’re celebrating the suffering of thousands of people of color particularly black folks subject to extremely racist gerrymandering and profiling, the suffering of thousands of queer and trans folks who are fighting to survive under politicians who are trying to outlaw their existence, the suffering of disabled folks who are ignored out of existence or worse, the suffering of the impoverished who are intentionally left to die in mass climate events.

I don’t care how much you hate Florida or Texas. I’m from Virginia and live in New Mexico and Texas was still one of the most diverse places I lived with a ton of passionate folks fighting against fascism.

If you’re ready to throw out every citizen who is trapped under fascist rule, particularly the ones the fascists WANT gone, then congratulations! You’re supporting fascism! DeSantis isn’t harmed one bit by yall laughing at disasters in Florida but the poor folks who can’t leave absolutely can see you calling them stupid idiots who deserve their suffering 🤗

i mean y'all know this is because of white supremacy right? like op is right and its concerning but people have been conditioned into it by white supremacy, its not like a ‘people suck’ thing. the erasure of individual european american communities and cultures, the erasure (both attempted and successful) of Black Brown and Indigenous cultures has made us unsympathetic to one another, and specifically white people unsympathetic to other white people. it has made us look at each other as violent and prone to violence as a solution and in some cases it has made us violent and prone to violence as a solution, and i dont mean that in a preachy, 'we shouldnt protest violently’ way, i mean it in a 'we are spending all our energy on prosecuting the 'bad white people’ that we aren’t actually doing any healing of ourselves or others’ way. people are simply acting the way that our system was designed to make us act.

im not an expert, and i could be wrong about some of this. im still learning about the generational trauma that white supremacy has put european americans through even as a european american. but the collective lack of sympathy and love for one another is and was a tool of white supremacy. the lack of compassion is a tool of white supremacy. we have been trained into this behavior, and it’s reinforced with the lack of community and culture that white supremacist america has left us with.

Hey, I’m OP, and yes, I personally am aware this is a white supremacy thing and not a “people suck” thing. There’s a teaching concept called scaffolding that I’m kind of borrowing with this.

“Scaffolding is a classroom teaching technique in which instructors deliver lessons in distinct segments, providing less and less support as students master new concepts or material.”

When I mention fascism, gerrymandering, racism, queerphobia, ableism, and everything else I mentioned in this post, that could all be summarized by white supremacy. But what if people who make these sorts of comments aren’t sure entirely what that entails? We break it down piece by piece and point out, to their broken, liberal perspective, why the things they’re saying are wrong for reasons they would understand and care about. And hopefully they’ll grasp it and continue doing the work on their own, or they won’t and they won’t.

An added note to address some of the tags this post has been getting: I absolutely agree that the average Joe white conservative doesn’t deserve horrible death by freezing, either. The examples I provided were, again, to reach the fucked up perspective people have on the south. If they believe that everyone in Texas should die because there are bigots that live there, they’re going to listen a little better if you point out their entire worldview on the types of humans living in specific places is ignorant and based in (insert whichever aspect of white supremacy they’re personally utilizing). And then, with steps, maybe realize the people who deserve to suffer are those who will never suffer unless we all come together as a fucking unit against them.

I wish absolutely terrible and torturous things on those worldwide who have dragged their people into absolute hell with evil, fascist, inhumane policies, but those aren’t the people dying from carbon monoxide poisoning from trying not to freeze to death. Those doing this to us go on cozy vacations during the worst of any crisis and laugh at everyone in their state calling for their heads while the rest of the world laughs alongside them. A leftist who mocks mass death events because the government there is more fash than the government where they live is no better than the worst average Joe bigoted conservative. Absolute lack of humanity or perspective.

it’s a bit bizarre to see this confidently described as ultimately ‘white supremacy’ with this very US-specific proposed origin when people behave exactly the same about some places in Europe.

It seems pretty obvious to me that what’s going on is Nationalism making people stupid, and you can have Nationalism about a US state because the US is a bunch of countries in a trench coat.

People think Texans deserve to suffer because Texas enacts policies they don’t like. Conflating moral blame between the ordinary people and the elites who get to make the rules? that’s nationalism baby.

I agree with the original point that being unsympathetic to the suffering residents of red states is bad, for reasons including “people who belong to categories you think Matter live there too”, but wtf racism, abelism, queerphobia, gerimandering, and fascism are subsets of White supremacy. Like, clearly racist, abelist, queerphobic brown people are uwu agency-less darlings who are just being manipulated by Whites and gerimandering is only about disenfranchising Blacks and never about other demographics being disenfranchised.