i have been in community with profoundly developmentally disabled peers and peers with brain damage my whole life, bc i had a childhood diagnosis. i have also been leftist my whole life; my mother was a marxist and raised me that way, and while their politics were absolute dogshit, they were lefty dogshit.
my entire life, i have seen leftist educators throw mentally disabled people away as “lost causes” because they couldn’t engage with the material the way it was being presented. leftist outreach and education does, genuinely, have a massive lack of accessible material. to be blunt, people are not interested in retrofitting their leftist outreach to be accessible to people who learn best through episodes of sesame street.
as in, i have repeatedly faced outright laughter and cruelty over the idea that this could be a priority. or even something that we consider doing at all.
“people who are that mentally disabled don’t need to know about these things,” the kindest interpretation goes. (“people who are that mentally disabled don’t interact with the world, anyway, they’re all in institutions or monitored 24/7 by their parents,” the uncharitable underlying assumptions go. “they wouldn’t be a worker who needs a union. or a library attendee. or a member of the community garden. or a volunteer at the food bank. or or or”)
the people i have seen this hurt the worst, over and over again, are profoundly mentally disabled people of color whose lack of access to accessible antiracist education is causing real danger in their lives. institutionalized disabled people of color who have learned racist ideology and behaviors from white authority, whether they were adopted by white families or incarcerated in care institutions run by white staff. who are treated lower than garbage by leftist educators, who view them as “lost causes,” as unworthy of time and effort and attention, as deserving of their abuses because they… what… internalized the abuses that make up every aspect of their lives since birth?
i see people saying things in this conversation like “disability isn’t an excuse for racism or transphobia or whatever, people have the obligation to improve themselves.” oh, believe me, i have seen again and again how many privileged disabled people utilize their disabilities to punch down on others, try to escape accountability for their punching down by citing disability. but individual weaponization of identity is just that: weaponization of identity.
the power structures at play are what they are. it is a noble and admirable goal to want leftist outreach and education to be more accessible to all. if that is truly your goal, you must eventually reckon with the existence of people who do, actually, really need it presented in a picture book. or an episode of bluey. or a conversation where you only use examples of people they know in real life, using things that happened to them personally. the existence of people who cannot grasp forms of abstract reasoning, who need information presented as rules, or as guidelines, or as categories. the idea that yes, fully grown adults who need daniel tiger to explain racism to them are human beings who not only deserve access to that very thing, but who also deserve to be a part of leftist spaces and benefit from leftist organizing. are people for whom it might be INTEGRAL they get to be a part of leftism. are victims of racism themselves and suffering without access to antiracist spaces and community and support.
and you will need to reckon with the abject cruelty of your peers who laugh and mock the very idea of this. you need to reckon with the fact that a lot of people you respect, a lot of leftists doing genuinely good work, will respond to this by making fun of the people you’re serving, even outright telling you their violent fantasies about these people. that is the experience of organizing in leftist spaces for profoundly disabled people. that is why so many of us burn out so fast. there IS a structural problem with mentally disabled people being seen as disposable and not a part of community. and it is EXTREMELY present in leftist organizing and outreach efforts.
did you know that the well-known factoid that male anglerfishes degenerate after attachment until they’re basically just a pair of testes is false? i knew of course that they don’t just become “growths” on the female because I’ve handled dozens of attached pairs and every male I’ve ever seen has been very much obviously a whole and complete second fish, but I sort of assumed there was internal degeneration, perhaps muscle atrophy, etc. i can’t believe no one ever corrected me on this but this just doesn’t happen. in obligatorily parasitic species, the male actually continues to grow and increases considerably in size after he attaches to the female, because the two of them can only reach sexual maturity together. me, an octavia butler fan: is this the height of romance??
what is true is that attached males do have hugely enlarged testes proportionate to the rest of their bodies & organs, and that they receive all nutrition from the female’s bloodstream so their stomachs are always empty, though their own gills seem to still be functional, as are their fins and muscles—you can even induce movement and swimming motions on recently dead attached males. I can only assume that at some point someone said that basically the only biological function a male anglerfish needs to perform is sperm production and this got taken out of context and luridly exaggerated over time. he’s not just a pair of testicles! he’s her forever partner! one flesh one end!
there’s a type of creature that lives six miles underwater in the sunless void and it’s hatched in two bodies and unless they find each other and fuse into a single chimaeric whole they can never grow up properly. hello? hello??
That’s extremely cool! also, distracted and enraptured by the writing style at the second link.
i fucking hate being an adult with a slowly increasing number of responsibilities its like one day you wake up and youre like aw fuck when was the last time i descaled the coffee machine
I think the hardest part about addressing child abuse is getting people to acknowledge, not just intellectually but actually responding accordingly, is that the biggest threat to children, the biggest risk of abuse, is family and parents.
it is of course most often parents who are crowing about needing to protect children (often against far smaller threats than family), and pointing out that they are, statistically, the biggest threat to their kids is not gonna be received well.
tbh I feel like most of society’s rhetoric around “protecting children” comes from the same place as deep-patriarchy rhetoric on “protecting women”, where the idea is that they’re sacred and valuable but also treated essentially as property, and the the desire to protect them is largely experienced as a desire to ensure that those property rights are sacrosanct
seeing all the 14-17 y/o queer kids who don’t know what v for vendetta is…. u mean the blockbuster film written by two trans women about a masked vigilante who decides to singlehandedly take down a fascist alternate version of england set in the distant year of 2020… and his driving force was getting justice for a lesbian who he never met but whose diary he found, who was separated from her wife before being killed by said fascist gov…. and it stars natalie portman…. okay
and they’ve never been more relevant
“People shouldn’t be afraid of their government. Governments should be afraid of their people.”
There’s strong subtext that V is a trans man and A)the lesbian from the diary or B)her wife.
frankly I prefer the movie over the comic, for three reasons:
1) lewis prothero as a rush limbaugh/glenn beck/bill o’reilly type is both more applicable and way funnier than a 1940s radio propagandist
2) it has stephen fry as gordon detriech, and makes him explicitly gay and pretending to be attracted to evey as part of being closeted than actually attracted to evey and having sex with her while she hides in his home.
3) the movie came out in 2005; that is, only four years after 9/11, while the Iraq war was still in full swing, and while xenophobia and Islamophobia were not just acceptable, but tacitly encouraged by the administration at the time. which makes the following exchange even more poignant and sweet:
Evey: [seeing a book in a glass display case] What is that? Gordon: It’s a copy of the Qur’an, 14th century. Evey: [shocked] Are you a Muslim? Gordon: No, I’m in television. Evey: But why would you keep it? Gordon: I don’t have to be a Muslim to find the images beautiful or its poetry moving.
just… the easy acceptance of it. the idea that a religion that he doesn’t believe in and that has been explicitly outlawed in-universe is a source of beauty. I’m not Muslim, either, but that particular moment really stuck with me emotionally.
“people show their true colours in life threatening situations” no, they show you what they act like when they’re mortally terrified, an emotion notorious for literally turning your entire brain off to the point where people who go into those situations as a profession need to be literally trained on how to not have that happen
People ACTUALLY show you who they are when it comes to convenience (in my experience) lemme explain:
How they treat wait-staff
How they handle literal accidents (like spilled coffee, a broken item, etc)
And something small admittedly- do they put the shopping cart in the designated spot? I know we ain’t all perfect and sometimes ur tired and hurting but more often than not? Do they put it where it’s supposed to?
Humility (how do they act when they find out they’re wrong? And do they act different if someone of a “higher” rank tells them they’re wrong vs if a “lower rank” tells them they’re wrong?
So they wait for u to enter your home or do they leave as soon as they drop you off?
please can we do inbox trick-or-treating this year. can we make that a thing on tumblr. please please please please please
literally all it entails is sending people “trick-or-treat” asks and people answering those asks with pictures of candy or those silly spooky plastic toys or whatever else you would give a trick-or-treater. please. please can we have some whimsy
Don’t forget trick or treating this year everyone!
I won’t forget this year
You’ll all get treats this year if you send those asks my way!
You really shouldn’t let your Poor Pussy be indoor/outdoor. It’s bad for the environment around your home and dangerous for your Pussy. Keep them inside and give them an engaging and simulating environment
what kind of engagement and stimulation would you recommend?
Literally the fifteen images before this one are horny. I moved a bunch of memes to the smut and lewdity reactions folder, so this was a saving grace :3
