See the chap with glasses and an incredible moustache in the bottom right? that’s Magnus Hirschfeld, the gay Jewish doctor who ran the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Research) in Berlin. It was largely his books, his research that the Nazis burned.
Everyone else in this photo is a trans person that Dr Hirschfeld worked with. This photo was taken at their christmas party.
Their cult teaches them that the world is full of scary monster people who hate them for being so good and loved by god. If you swear at them and call them names or get in their face you’re just doing the cults work for it.
I’m not saying you have to listen to their presentation or try to debate them (and really getting into a debate without thoroughly understanding what they’re being taught will just make things worse)… I am just saying to be polite and say no thank you like if they were trying to hand you a flyer for something you don’t care about.
It’s easier for them to see the world outside their bubble as less scary if they see everyday people just going about their business and being as nice to them as you are to everyone else. This goes doubly for anyone who happens to dress modestly, not swear, and not drink or smoke because whatever you believe, they’ll see you as a “good” person who happens to strangely have no interest in their “message”, and that might be enough to get some curious about the possibility of themselves living in the real world.
It’s sometimes hard to be nice to people who seem to represent something you dislike. Just remember these “elders” are sheltered young men, some of which are getting their first real contact with people of other/no faiths.
They are not your enemy. They are victims.
They aren’t being sent out to actually convert people, they are being sent out hoping that they will be harassed and treated poorly so they view those outside the cult as dangerous and evil and stick to the safety of the familiar group.
You being mean to some teenager isn’t sticking it to anyone, you’re doing exactly what their church elders want to happen.
PLEASE READ THIS.
Please read this.
Don’t do the church’s work for them.
If you’re kind to enough of them, they put you on a block list.
They were such sweet kids, they’d turn up at my door with the thatch of raspberries out front and try to share their word with me, and I’m me, so, I fed them.
Then it was one of the wee ‘elder’s’ birthday, so I made him a cake, and all the little lads came, and they asked about my books and board games and CCGs, I was just a nice frumpy middle aged Jewish lady, I was no threat, so I fed them and made them cakes and took them to the local gaming store and listened when they talked.
One loved yu-gi-oh cards, and it turns out, one of the other wee lads, we’ll he loved him back, so I got them in touch with some resources so they had support and a different way to pay for college, they’re still together 15 years later, they have dogs, they send me ecards on their birthday. No-one figured out I’d.helped them, I was just the nice lady who made them tea and listened when people were slamming doors.
The next one really wanted to be an artist, so I left out art books and resources, my eldest shared their coptic markers, they draw comic books now, no idea why his folks were insisting he needed to be a dentist, but, he’s not a Mormon anymore, (not a Jew either before anyone makes any counter conversion claims).
The first 2 lads were the only dramatic ones, the rest went back into the network but, like Hugh of Borg, they spread the word, sometimes I’d get Mormons from other cities come and make the journey to break bread at my Sabbath table and be seen.
I still think very fondly of that time.
Many of those boys still email me now and then.
Most of them aren’t Mormons anymore.
Someone higher up spotted the pattern and suddenly no more Mormons at my door.
I was blacklisted, for kindness.
So there you go, if you don’t want Mormons at your door, just love those kids for a couple of years, feed them, help them, and eventually, no more will be allowed to visit
I FINALLY GOT TO USE THE ‘well i don’t trust the government’ AGAINST AN ANTI-MASKER THIS WEEKEND
i was buying wood at the camp ground and the store clerk pitched a bitch fit about not being able to understand me through the mask and then rolled her eyes and informed me we don’t have to wear those anymore bc the mandate’s already been lifted
AND THE LOOK ON HER FACE
WHEN I LOOKED HER STRAIGHT IN THE EYE
AND SAID
“oh, well I don’t trust what the government says. I’d rather make up my own mind.”
UNO REVERSE MOTHERFUCKER
ID: tweet from @ShotgunWife with text reading “just some ideas” followed by a meme image of a generic, black mask overlayed with the following text.
keeping wearing a mask because it’s fun…
use these lines when asked “why are you wearing that?”
“it’s a free country, I ain’t no sheep, no government gonna tell me when I can wear a mask, my body my choice, it’s for religious reasons, I’m just ugly fuck off.”
The last line of text in the image reads by “now it’s our turn”.
/End ID
responded to a customer with a southern accent why I still wear one with “‘Cause I look like the wrong end of a dead donkey.” using the smallest bit of a twang in my voice, and he stopped, blinked a few times, and went “A'ight. fair ‘nuff.”, nodded, and then I helped him pick out a leaf blower while he self consciously put his hand over his mouth.
Jesus, I hadn’t even thought of this, but of course.
This is something that historians have been warning about for a couple of decades. How much of our history was not just on Twitter, but on MySpace, on blogs and web sites that came down after a few years, on e-mail, on texts. None of that leaves a record. Once the file is deleted, the server shut down and scrapped, the backup disks decay into being unreadable junk, that history is gone.
Does anyone remember when Obama and Clinton each held town hall campaign events on MySpace? Good luck finding anything about those now other than some news articles that say they happened. How many business zoom calls have formal meeting minutes taken? We are not saving histories. We aren’t even writing letters. I’m as guilty as anyone. My art is online and kept in the cloud. I make my Christmas Card every year, but I haven’t printed and mailed one in over a decade. It’s all sent electronically. Meaning that a generation from now no one will remember.
So the problem is bigger than Twitter. We are now a couple of decades into an age that will not leave any detailed historical record.
It’s thought this might just be a black spot of knowledge, there are organizations working to stop this — archival websites primarily, but these are not able to penetrate all these corporate gated gardens, where paywalls, sign up walls, and more block access to. There is an ongoing campaign by megacorps to shutdown as many archival sites as possible.
This coupled with the fallibility of hard drives, CDs (make sure to back them up! They only have a 20-30 year lifetime!), and more and there is a chance that even though there is more information than ever before, more primary and secondary sources than ever, we may become just a strange blank spot in societal and cultural history. Digital decay is a terrifying concept that we are already beginning to live through.
This is exactly what I’ve been saying. It’s a loss of history. And, given how important it has been for activists of all sorts, it will be a loss for the future as well.
It sucks that people are treating the Reddit blackout as a joke or assuming it’s impotent rage over a minor decision bc it’s Reddit when like. No, a tech company shutting down access to their API by forcing third-party devs to pay completely unreasonable fees ($12,000 per 50 million API requests, which to the largest third party clients would be tens of millions of dollars) and in the process destroying both accessibility apps and moderation tools is Bad Actually
Also, this is the death of forums part 2. Forums died in web 1 because it was more convenient to gather on larger social media platforms, like reddit. Reddit is used by a lot of people to find answers to obscure questions that are written by humans and not advertizers or bot. Now reddit is imploding, and a lot of the useful communities (like the 3d printing one) are moving to discord, which makes it impossible for non members to find the answers they need.
We need to bring forums back in a better way, where they are convenient to use and affordable to host, or we will lose the ability to find humans on the internet with answers
We need everyone’s help right now to protect the rainforest and Indigenous People
The Amazon Rainforest is under a massive threat. I know you’ve heard this a million times, but this is different. There is a piece of legislation that will decimate the rights of Indigenous people of Brazil, who have been protecting the rainforest. It’s unfathomably bad. It has majority support. And they’re voting tomorrow. As reported here, the Bill allows “the Brazilian government to find energy resources, set up military bases, develop strategic roads, and implement commercial agriculture on protected Indigenous tribal lands, without any prior discussion with the affected peoples.”
The thing you can do—and I know this sounds overly simple—is sign this petition—and tell your friends to do the same: SIGN HERE.
As reported here, the Bill allows “the Brazilian government to find energy resources, set up military bases, develop strategic roads, and implement commercial agriculture on protected Indigenous tribal lands, without any prior discussion with the affected peoples.”
Again, this bill has majority support. You may be wondering, why will a petition signed by people who don’t live in Brazil make any difference? Because it will give those opposing it political air cover. It will show the world is with them.
this is excellent proof of how cops train each other to think. merely wearing protection against possible cop violence IS an escalation in their view. like how dare you prepare for me to become unhinged, now my repeated violations of the geneva convention are your fault >:(
A friend once said to me “I feel like I’m not actually working at my job because there’s so little to do” and I was like “the way I see it, if you can’t sleep and you can’t jerk off, you’re at work no matter what”.
And I just realized this gives me a new perspective on homelessness. There’s a certain baseline amount of labor you’re expected to do in public, finding places to exist unobtrusively, moving when the cops tell you to. No one is ever truly “off the clock” until they’re in their own home, if they have one.
I’m sure Michel Foucault or somebody wrote about this long before I did.
Or to put it another way, if home is the “first place” and work is the “second place” then the removal of third places from society means that if you don’t have a first place everywhere defaults to being a second place
If existing in public is a job then police are the managers, and calling the cops on someone for sleeping in public is, in effect, snitching on a fellow worker. I guess this functions as an explanation for why police unions “don’t count”.
