i think a lot about that calvin & hobbes strip where they find a trickle of water and calvin is like “i guess we have the afternoon booked solid” or smth. i just really miss that. when you’re a kid and you get completely involved in small things without any real purpose. i remember when i was a kid i used to observe ants for long stretches of time, not doing anything, just looking at them work. there was no anxiety or guilt over being so idle, and very small things could hide a world of enchantment. i just really really miss that feeling.
“biological sex is a social construct” doesn’t mean “chromosomes, anatomy, hormones, and genitalia don’t exist”. it means “these exist, but assigning roles, labels, and expectations to certain combinations of these characteristics is a social construct, and an unnecessary and pointless (actually harmful) one at that”.
So as a division officer to nearly 60 sailors over 3 years. I asked every single one. “What made you join the Navy?” Here is the breakdown. 80% – To pay for college 10% – To get out of a bad family situation 5% – Family Tradition 5% – Because of 9/11.
“Would poor people literally risk their lives to win access to things that the rich take for granted if that weren’t set up as the only way to get them?”
Kinda fucked up how cis women are allowed to abandon feminity in the name of feminism but trans women are forced to adopt it just to be recognized as women
even worse is when cis feminists accuse trans women who overperform femininity for safety of being tools of the patriarchy, and trans women who underperform femininity for ANY reason (including abandoning it in the name of feminism) fakers.
Why I never mock or even bring attention to mispronunciation in a conversation, and will snap down anyone who tries to
Besides poverty, for many peoplevEnglish is a second (or third+) language and has weird rules too.
Most of the time, even when words are mispronounced, they’re still understandable if you make an effort. Just be patient and don’t look down on people who mispronounce!
I
own firearms. I’m a leftist. Not a #feelthebern leftist. Bernie is too
far to the right for me. Because of my politics, men have come to my
home to kill me. This has happened more than once. When it did happen
the only things that saved my life, and the lives of my roommates, were
training and the physical possession of effective tools.
I’ll tell one story that will put the current clamor for more control
on everyone and everything in perspective. I was actively organizing
against the KKK and other white supremacists. So were my roommates and
my entire social circle. The FBI attempted to contact me but claimed
they could not find me. They got a call from a payphone via an
intermediary. The agent, tired and wishing he didnt have to do this said
“I am required by statute to inform you that we have credible threats
against your life from white power groups.” He got my lawyer’s phone
number. I was not going to talk to him.
It was really clear that the FBI would rather bungle the
investigation of my death than prevent it. We detected the surveillance
attempts by the white supremacists. We allowed their surveillance to see
that we were well armed. They went away. The FBI did not have us under
surveillance. There was a police precinct house three blocks away. The
police were never on our block. We were being set up to die.
The FBI knew what these guys were up to. The FBI knew where we were
because these nazis did. Planning to murder someone in conjunction with
another person and then putting your target under surveillance is a
felony. It is conspiracy to commit murder. The FBI could have arrested
and prosecuted these guys at any time. The FBI did not do so. The police
were actively not present. The FBI did what was the barest minimum. We
saved our own lives and we only could do so because we were armed.
This was not the only time in my life this happened. I was in
Mississippi once defending a Planned Parenthood Clinic from militant
pro-life activists. Planned Parenthood did not want our help. Both local
and national pro-choice groups did not want our help. On the very first
day of the protests somebody planted a fake bomb in the park where we
were. We marched against this violence. The police arrested some of us
for jaywalking.
We had our own house there. We rented it and filled it with
activists. We knew that to control our own actions, politics and message
we needed total control of our own logistics and safety. Our house had a
gun locker. It turned out we needed it.
We took great care not to be followed home by the pro-lifers. They
were not successful in finding us through direct surveillance. The
police did find us and they did watch us. On the last day of the
protests several car loads of pro-lifers came by and circled the block
constantly. The only way these people could have found the house was if
the police told them. The police were helping them to kill us. I was in
the house alone. I displayed that I was armed, and very well armed at
that. They’re circling stopped. They backed off.
In both situations I had the kind of firearms that people scream to
ban. Serious weapons with hi-capacity magazines. The kind of guns that
bounce their head off the glass ceiling of legality. I have never
discharged these weapons at anything more dangerous then a paper
silhouette. However, as soon as my enemies knew that I had this
capability, they fled, never to return. My enemies were planning on
killing unarmed liberals. The police and the FBI helped my enemies. Once
my enemies discovered I was not bringing a bong to a gun fight, they
left.
The police will never disarm white supremacists and other right wing
thugs. When people clamor for more background checks or denying firearm
ownership to people on terrorist watch lists, they fail to understand
the mentality of the people that make those lists.
In Minneapolis, now, today, the head of the Police Union is Bob
Kroll. He is a white supremacist. He is part of a law enforcement only
motorcycle club that openly displays neo-nazi imagery. He is not only
allowed, but required to be armed. He has called Black Lives Matters a
domestic terrorist organization. The perpetrator of the recent
homophobic massacre in Orlando was a prison guard, thus allowed and
required to be armed, and was trying to become a policeman. I grew up knowing policemen that I would not trust with anything more dangerous than a nail clipper.
When Bob Kroll calls Black Lives Matter domestic terrorists, he cites
a shooting that happened while the group was occupying the entrance to
the 4th precinct police station in Minneapolis. Three white supremacists
from the suburbs came to force a confrontation. When ejected they fired
on the crowd wounding several people. The White Supremacist Cop Union
Leader Bob Kroll calls people terrorists for being shot at a non-violent
protest by white supremacists while they were unarmed.
Gun Control is racist. We live in a society that is White
Supremacist. Liberal icon and gun control advocate Hillary Clinton has
called black teenagers “superpredators that need to be brought to heel.”
Dogs are brought to heel. That is where the expression comes from.
Hillary Clinton thinks that black people are dogs. Hillary Clinton wants
more police at home, more war abroad, fewer guns in the hands of the
people and she does not even think that black people are human beings.
Who will be disarmed by Hillary Clinton?
Diane Feinstein is
another leading liberal gun control advocate. Her husband is a
billionaire who has directly profited from drone strikes on schools all
over the middle east. Her core constituency is San Francisco, which has
seen a recent uptick in the shooting of unarmed black men by police. She
was mayor there before she was Senator. As Senator she is the head of
the intelligence committee. She makes the rules which govern who gets
put on what list.
The Orlando massacre was not an attack by ISIS. It was an attack by a
homophobic prison guard and domestic abuser licensed by the state to be
armed. The victims were majority black and brown. The victims friends
are being denied the right to even donate blood because the state
regulated hospitals and blood banks are officially homophobic by
regulation.
The news today, and everyday, brings me a parade of how society is
deeply racist, deeply sexist, and deeply homophobic. Nobody clamored for
a crackdown when some transphobic person bombed a Target store for not
conforming to their religiously based potty regulations. Indeed they
clamor for the same racist, sexist and homophobic murdering policemen to
guard bathrooms as if they were banks. Somehow, in all this, middle
class liberals who have comfort of protection from a white supremacist
state want the rest of us to be disarmed by that state. Their petitions
and lobbying did not save my life. I saved my life through my own
training and preparation. My life needed saving from people they hate
who were being helped by the people that protect them because I putting
it on the line for values and ideas they espouse. They can go back to
their guarded gated communities and watch the rest of us earn, win, and
live our own just society and decent lives.
Of course, this is also a compelling argument, and an experience and viewpoint that a lot of marginalized people share.
My great-grandfather and my great uncle had to sit on their front porch with shotguns while the KKK members of the local police drove by their house in their cop cars throwing bricks and rocks at them while my grandfather and five of his siblings hid inside with their mother. If they didn’t have access to firearms, I might never have been born. And nothing has changed.
I keep saying this. The government is not going to disarm the people you’re scared of. Ok? And if you feel like you can rely on the police to protect you, you clearly have not been outside in awhile.
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