Latest Posts by iheartflutes - Page 5

I’ve heard an argument for abortion that basically says legalizing abortions decreases the amount that it happens. As much as I’m pro choice, I don’t think this is the case. I think that places that allow abortion have other systems that decrease need for abortions. Here is an uncomplete list of these systems:

1. Free/affordable healthcare

2. Affordable food

3. Free/Affordable education (INCLUDING COLLEGE)

4. Livable wages

5. Affordable housing

6. Actual sex education, not just saying iF yOu DoNt WaNt KiDs ThEn DoNt HaVe SeX

7. Cities built to encourage human interaction, not to discourage

8. NO RACISM IN MEDICINE/MEDICINE EDUCATION (I specifically mentioned this one because black women are still extremely likely to die during childbirth)

9. More gun control

Feel feee to add if you have any other ideas!!

Edit: I forgot to add one of them

10. Don’t encourage men to rape by saying things like “wHaT wAs ShE wEaRiNg” or “bOyS wIlL bE bOyS” and for the worlds sake doNT PUT A RAPIST INTO POWER

let's recap what we've learned about the United States in the last few days.

things that are terrorism:

allegedly shooting a healthcare CEO whose company generated more pure profit (not revenue, profit) in a year than the GDP of 94 countries, exclusively by denying coverage to people who pay for it

a 42-year-old mother of 2 using the wrong combination of 7 words during a heated conversation with a call center employee at a health insurance company who was in the process of denying her health coverage.

things that are not terrorism:

mass shooting in a Black church to incite a race war

going to a BLM protest specifically to kill protestors

a neo-nazi running over a crowd of people, killing a woman

targeting and killing 23 latinos in an el paso, texas walmart

killing 12 people in a theatre, shooting 58 others, rigging your apartment with explosives

a QAnon groyper killing 7 and shooting ~50 at a 4th of July parade

killing 3 people and shooting several others at a Planned Parenthood in defense of the unborn

stalking someone relentlessly and then killing them and their child despite months of the victim making police reports

any one of the 1,200 murders committed by US police yearly, the vast majority being minorities

tightening your border while ~100 immigrants (including children) drown every year in the Rio Grande

United Healthcare killing an unnknowable number of elderly people by using faulty AI to deny medically necessary coverage

Aetna killing a woman by refusing to cover her cancer care

Blue Cross killing a 6-year-old by denying her appendicitis surgery

Cigna killing a 17-year-old child by denying her liver transplant

the pharmaceutical industry killing half a million people with opioids in the name of producing revenues in 2023 that rivaled the GDPs of countries like Spain, Mexico, and Australia.

the United States killing 45,000 people a year because they can't access health coverage

make sure you keep this guide handy the next time you find yourself interacting with your insurance company or any other millionaire, billionaire, or an individual who is part of a protected class such as a CEO or president of a corporation.

The #AllLivesMatter degenerates love the two-tier style of justice and complete disregard for children.

Why do they keep accidentally making him look like the coolest person alive don’t they want us to hate him

This really needs to be a worldwide discussion. While it might seem like censorship has lessened, the requirements of companies to show their ads has become ridiculous, to the point that people have a hard time being taken seriously when they’re trying to spread any kind of message deemed as “inappropriate” to as many people as possible.

we have GOT to kill tiktok/twitter self-censorship i just witnessed a grown adult say the word “smex” out loud to our professor

Pour one out for a real one.

"edit images with AI-- search with AI-- control your life with AI--"

Fighter

Cleric

OMG I FORGOT TO PROVIDE AN ORIGINAL FILE OF MY SPINNY BOI ON TUMBLR

Spread this fucker

seeing them everywhere gives me so much joy lol

HIGH GEOLOGIST POST

so i know someone who claims that a majority of inclusionists are white and a majority of exclusionists are non-white, and they seem to be implying that the inclusionist movement is wrong because it's mostly white people? like non-white people know best about this issue, I guess? for context, the person saying this is white, and so am I, and i guess I don't even know what i'm asking, this argument just really confused me.

Inclusionists being majority white is laughable. This blog alone has only one white person out of four modding. My new blog, aspecparenting, gathered mods at random, and half of the six mods are of color. I make it a mission to weed and determine who’s white and reblogging from my inclusionist personal, and its very low.

Who the hell is measuring this racial discrepancy? Is it based off of what blogs make your way across your customized, limited network? Is it from the hearsay of said other white exclusionists?

If we’re gonna talk about the whiteness in the ace community, we sure as hell gonna talk about whiteness in the lgbt+ community as a whole. Because … I mean, not to be lactose intolerant, but its like hanging out in a box full of styrofoam packing peanuts.

Aspecs of color have gone to lengths to try to get their voice out there. Exclusionists saying that the aspec community is largely white is an effort to erase our voices. And that’s not excusable.

- Fae

A pro-Palestine Jew on tiktok asked those of us who were raised pro-Israel, what got us to change our minds on Palestine. I made a video to answer (with my voice, not my face), and a few people watched it and found some value in it. I'm putting this here too. I communicate through text better than voice.

So I feel repetitive for saying this at this point, but I grew up in the West Bank settlements. I wrote this post to give an example of the extent to which Palestinians are dehumanized there.

Where I live now, I meet Palestinians in day to day life. Israeli Arab citizens living their lives. In the West Bank, it was nothing like that. Over there, I only saw them through the electric fence, and the hostility between us and Palestinians was tangible.

When you're a child being brought into the situation, you don't experience the context, you don't experience the history, you don't know why they're hostile to you. You just feel "these people hate me, they don't want me to exist." And that bubble was my reality. So when I was taught in school that everything we did was in self defense, that our military is special and uniquely ethical because it's the only defensive military in the world - that made sense to me. It slotted neatly into the reality I knew.

One of the first things to burst the bubble for me was when I spoke to an old Israeli man and he was talking about his trauma from battle. I don't remember what he said, but it hit me wrong. It conflicted with the history as I understood it. So I was a bit desperate to make it make sense again, and I said, "But everything we did was in self defense, right?"

He kinda looked at me, couldn't understand at all why I was upset, and he went, "We destroyed whole villages. Of course we did. It was war, that's what you do."

And that casual "of course" stuck with me. I had to look into it more.

I couldn't look at more accurate history, and not at accounts by Palestinians, I was too primed against these sources to trust them. The community I grew up in had an anti-intellectual element to it where scholars weren't trusted about things like this.

So what really solidified this for me, was seeing Palestinian culture.

Because part of the story that Israel tells us to justify everything, is that Palestinians are not a distinct group of people, they're just Arabs. They belong to the nations around us. They insist on being here because they want to deny us a homeland. The Palestinian identity exists to hurt us. This, because the idea of displacing them and taking over their lands doesn't sound like stealing, if this was never theirs and they're only pretending because they want to deprive us.

But then foods, dances, clothing, embroidery, the Palestinian dialect. These things are history. They don't pop into existence just because you hate Jews and they're trying to move here. How gorgeous is the Palestinian thobe? How stunning is tatreez in general? And when I saw specific patterns belonging to different regions of Palestine?

All of these painted for me a rich shared life of a group of people, and countered the narrative that the Palestininian identity was fabricated to hurt us. It taught me that, whatever we call them, whatever they call themselves, they have a history in this land, they have a right to it, they have a connection to it that we can't override with our own.

I started having conversations with leftist friends. Confronting the fact that the borders of the occupied territories are arbitrary and every Israeli city was taken from them. In one of those conversations, I was encouraged to rethink how I imagine peace.

This also goes back to schooling. Because they drilled into us, we're the ones who want peace, they're the ones who keep fighting, they're just so dedicated to death and killing and they won't leave us alone.

In high school, we had a stadium event with a speaker who was telling us about a person who defected from Hamas, converted to Christianity and became a Shin Bet agent. Pretty sure you can read this in the book "Son of Hamas." A lot of my friends read the book, I didn't read it, I only know what I was told in that lecture. I guess they couldn't risk us missing out on the indoctrination if we chose not to read it.

One of the things they told us was how he thought, we've been fighting with them for so long, Israelis must have a culture around the glorification of violence. And he looked for that in music. He looked for songs about war. And for a while he just couldn't find any, but when he did, he translated it more fully, and he found out the song was about an end to wars. And this, according to the story as I was told it, was one of the things that convinced him. If you know know the current trending Israeli "war anthem," you know this flimsy reasoning doesn't work.

Back then, my friend encouraged me to think more critically about how we as Israelis envision peace, as the absence of resistance. And how self-centered it is. They can be suffering under our occupation, but as long as it doesn't reach us, that's called peace. So of course we want it and they don't.

Unless we're willing to work to change the situation entirely, our calls for peace are just "please stop fighting back against the harm we cause you."

In this video, Shlomo Yitzchak shares how he changed his mind. His story is much more interesting than mine, and he's much more eloquent telling it. He mentions how he was taught to fear Palestinians. An automatic thought, "If I go with you, you'll kill me." I was taught this too. I was taught that, if I'm in a taxi, I should be looking at the driver's name. And if that name is Arab, I should watch the road and the route he's taking, to be prepared in case he wants to take me somewhere to kill me. Just a random person trying to work. For years it stayed a habit, I'd automatically look at the driver's name. Even after knowing that I want to align myself with liberation, justice, and equality. It was a process of unlearning.

On October, not long after the current escalation of violence, I had to take a taxi again. A Jewish driver stopped and told me he'll take me, "so an Arab doesn't get you." Israeli Jews are so comfortable saying things like this to each other. My neighbors discussed a Palestinian employee, with one saying "We should tell him not to come anymore, that we want to hire a Jew." The second answered, "No, he'll say it's discrimination," like it would be so ridiculous of him. And the first just shrugged, "So we don't have to tell him why." They didn't go through with it, but they were so casual about this conversation.

In the Torah, we're told to treat those who are foreign to us well, because we know what it's like to be the foreigner. Fighting back against oppression is the natural human thing to do. We know it because we lived it. And as soon as I looked at things from this angle, it wasn't really a choice of what to support.

Israel has worked hard to portray Gaza as a barren wasteland, backwater that is a terrorist stronghold. In reality, Gaza is a beautiful city/region with a rich history that has been decimated from constant bombings and strangled by the blockade. So much of what is being destroyed by Israel are restaurants, bookshops, schools, universities, houses and much of what contributes to life in Gaza and people’s livelihoods. Places that are attached to and filled with the memories of Palestinians in Gaza. It’s not just about making life miserable for the people who live there, but about projecting a particular image of Gaza to the world. This is also similar to how the US has portrayed places like Afghanistan to justify its invasions.

NOT MY VIDEO. DONT STOP TALKING.

hey as a local aroace, i want to specify something.

were no strangers to love. you know the rules and so do i (do i). a full commitments what im thinking of. you wouldnt get this from any other guy. i just wanna tell you how im feeling. gotta make you understand. never gonna give you up. never gonna let you down. never gonna run around and desert you. never gonna make you cry. never gonna say goodbye. never gonna tell a lie and hurt you

To this day people will cry over the knowledge and works destroyed when the library of Alexandria was burned down.

And yet no tears are shed as Palestinian archives and libraries are bombed.

Saint Porphyrius Church, built in 1150 and the 3rd oldest church in the world has been bombed.

It's not an accident.

Israel aren't simply killing Palestinians, they are trying to erase that there ever were Palestinians in the first place.

Destroying their livelihoods, trying to to destroy their culture and history and pretend this land was never there's.

It's easy to deny someone's existence when there's no record of them.

Which is why it's so important to look at the atrocities and bear witness to what's happening.

But to also recognise that Palestine is more than it's suffering.

There is a living breathing culture, of art, history, literacy which all come from the Palestinians.

Traditions they've carried for centuries.

So while we mourn the dead, we shall fight for the living. Fight for the preservation of their crafts, amplify their voices as they speak on their culture.

Palestinian history and culture is alive. And no matter how much the world wants to erase that, they cannot and will not.

This makes sense, considering how only about 1-2% of the population identify as aroace. The thing is tho, we are out there! I’ve met multiple people through pride events and other things in my life.

aroace people really said "the closet? no no no, i'm gonna hide in caves, in the woods and even underneath rocks, i'm gonna be the best damn hide and seek player in the world" because i have yet to find one aroace person in real life

Yeah I’m sure a polar bear couldn’t write as awesome backstories for my characters as I could and that’s not sex

"Sex is what makes us human" is stupid. Almost every species fucks. Humans are the only species that jumps motorcycles over school buses that are on fire. Some other things too probably

The fact they put jimmy on the losing one 😭😭😭😭

guys we hit 69 textposts!! ( 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 )

I play D&D without a brain just fine

things you need to start a d&d game

access to the internet

that's it

you don't need any fancy dice, there's apps and websites for that. you don't need expensive textbooks, basic info is available for free and everything else is homebrew-able. you don't need spell cards or a fancy dice box or a rolling tray or a dm screen. print your spell cards out for free online, store your dice in a plastic bag, roll your dice on the table, and stand up folders or boxes like we did when taking tests in primary school.

all those things are cool but the only thing you need is a brain, so don't let all the stuff you can buy deter you from doing some badass d&d stuff.

Did y’all know that the melody of in the hall of the mountain king has the same rhythm of mary had a little lamb

Do with that what you will