No One Is Safe Until Trans Women Are Safe

therapy is such a scam. all you need to do is buy a 5'6 zweihänder and swing it around your home now and then to feel better. been doing it for years and im the very picture of good mental health

the word empathy is WIDELY misused, even in mental health spaces. 

empathy:

is responding to a person’s emotions by experiencing the same emotion as them (i.e. feeling sad when something sad happens to that person, or happy when something happy happens to that person.)

is an automatic response that cannot be controlled

cannot be learned

sympathy:

is recognizing that another person is in pain, even if you do not experience that pain, and offering comfort to that person

is something a person must actively choose to do

can be learned

compassion:

is showcasing care and support via words and actions

is something a person must actively choose to do

can be learned

if you need an example of a person with no empathy who practices sympathy and compassion, look no further than data from star trek: the next generation. he doesn’t have emotions at all, but he’s still kind to people and wants to help them.

stop telling people that they’re evil because they don’t experience empathy. stop equating empathy with morality. stop equating empathy with caring. stop saying that cruel people “lack empathy.” stop throwing neurodivergent and mentally ill people under the bus. 

had a minor crisis when 12ft.io went down yesterday and thankfully it's back now but this seems like a good opportunity to compile a list of similar paywall-evading tools in case 12ft ever gets canned for real:

12ft.io: the legend himself. definitely my favorite of the bunch by virtue of being the easiest to use (and the easiest url to remember), but it's configured to disable paywall evasion for a handful of popular sites like the new york times, so you'll have to go elsewhere for those.

printfriendly: works great; never had any issues with removing paywalls, even on domains that don't work with 12ft.io. since this site is literally designed to make sites print-friendly, it might simplify the overall formatting of the page you're trying to access, which can be a good or bad thing. my only real issue is that the "element zapper" (which lets you remove content blocks from the print-friendly preview) is a little sensitive if you're browsing on a touchscreen device, which means you might accidentally delete a paragraph when you're just trying to scroll. but if that happens you can reload the page and it'll revert everything back to its original state.

fifteen feet: basically a 12ft clone, minus 12ft's restrictions. haven't used it much since I only discovered it yesterday in the wake of 12ft's 451 error but it seems to do the trick.

archive.today: an archival tool very similar to the wayback machine, but it also works as a de facto paywall removal tool. (the wayback machine seems to remove paywalls as well, but archive.today has better UX imo and is way faster to use.)

and an honorable mention for sci-hub: only works for scientific/academic journals, not random news articles, but the other sites listed above only work for random news articles and not academic publications so you gotta have this one in your toolbelt for full coverage. pubmed is your oyster.

this is exactly why I love radiohead

every day i think about the cat on twitter who looks more like a scheming eunuch than any creature has ever looked

monkey i love you beloved little freak i would die for you

Gaycation - “USA”

recipes will be like "prep time: 5 minutes" beloved it took me 10 just to get out the ingredience dont underestimate me

you guys Need to start seeing bugs as animals im not even joking anymore. the second u start seeing them as tiny animals the more your world opens up and the more you accept different types of life Into that world. youll begin accepting that even life you cant understand is still worth living. and itll legitimately make you a better person. fuck

ultimately a lot of feminists will look down on or outright condemn transmasculinity and transmanhood simply because it is not narratively satisfying. because transmasculine identity and joy does not mesh with their feminism-as-defined-by-cis-women. they see trans men&mascs and, immediately or deep down, feel disappointed. by the womanhood dropouts. feel that transmasculine people will always be less feminist, or that they relinquished their place when they "quit" or "betrayed" their "sisters." they may not even hate trans men, they may not even be cisgender, it's just that they think it would be such a better look for the movement if you didn't... you know.

anyways. without acknowledging this feminist discomfort with transmasculinity and transmanhood, how it's caused by the friction between trans m&ms and cissexist feminism, we'll keep being failed over and over and over again by our own communities. we need to change the narratives we prize instead of treating trans men's identity as a problem to be solved.