Let's see if I can fall back asleep

I had a horrible nightmare that the world was ending (volcanoes were erupting and the sky was on fire) and the media kept focusing on the president's tweets. Oh, and people kept grabbing me by the wrist, which is a trigger.

Now he spends his time ranting about marginalized people online

You want to know how my father got radicalized into white supremacy?

He started with an average amount of bigotry and a large amount of insecurity. Around 2005, he started hanging out in gun affictionado forums. Then he lost his job and his friends there were all like "it's because the Mexicans and Indians are taking all the jobs!" My father refuses to believe he's anything less than perfect, so he bought it. From there, everything else was easy.

And then I'll make myself tea and play with my digital dollhouse

This whole "only Jews were targeted in the Holocaust" thing is enraging and depressing and triggering. Do you know that I have ZERO second and third cousins because of the Nazis? Anyone who could have spawned them died. I'm lucky to be alive myself.

Anyway, there's a protest going on in about half an hour, I'm going to make a big sign about "NEVER AGAIN" and dress up as a good little white boy with blond hair and (almost) blue eyes, pretty sure that will be more productive than reading Holocaust denial on Tumblr.

And that's just the people who approached me!

I had a sign referencing my family who died in the Holocaust.

Out of a crowd of about forty people, four (10%) approached me to talk about the people they'd lost in the Holocaust.

We do not live in a heavily Jewish, Romani, or Eastern European area.

Denial is a hell of a thing

For as long as I maintained contact with my parents, my mother could believe that our family was fine, that what they had done to me wasn't so bad. I wonder how she's coping now that I've cut them off.

The Pacific Theater: apparently not a thing that happened?

One other thing I've noticed: it appears that Tumblr has collectively forgotten that there was more going on in World War II than just the Holocaust. The Holocaust death toll is ~18 million. The total death toll? ~72 million. And most of them were civilians.

[evil laughter]

[deliberately writes about adult relationships with large age gaps because fuck it, antis don't get to appreciate my stories]

Processing things aloud, don't mind me

The Tumblr Blogger Who Shall Not Be Named (but I'm sure my followers know who I'm talking about) very frequently made "harassment/death threats/doxxing are bad" posts.

The thing is, a significant part of their output was yelling at people who disagreed with them and using insults (but not insults related to marginalization, that would be a step too far). Considering how much of their fanbase was young (and likely had a history of being abused, which messes with your sense of normal and right), I can definitely see why they didn't listen. (I do not personally recall seeing this blogger sending death threats, but it's possible they did on anon.)

(Does Dreamwidth have tag blocking systems? I'm going to try and tag further posts about this mess as Tumblr cult drama.)

Come on, people, we're better than that

Milo Yiannopoulos is a horrible person. I am 100% in agreement that he, like all Nazis, should be ridiculed to chip away at his platform.

But the way people would deliberately misspell his name? As an immigrant with an "ethnic" name, I'm really not okay with that.

Answers: I have none

Thought #1: I don't like it when 50-year-olds sleep with 15-year-olds. Age of consent laws are great.
Thought #2: for a lot of teenagers who end up on the streets for whatever reasons (especially those who are marginalized on multiple axes), sex work could be the best or even only way they can survive.

I don't know how to fit those thoughts in with my very much pro-decriminalization stance. Ideally we would have a robust social net and a support network for abused teens, but we have to figure out something until we get there.

(I would ask some sex worker blogs, but I haven't been able to find any that weren't on the "if you so much as think about minors having sex you're a child molester and deserve to be punished forever" train. Maybe I'm bad at searching.)

The kind of adventure where you lose your faith in humanity

Watching radfems trying to guess whether I'm AFAB (and therefore a traitor to lesbianism, nevermind that I love dudes as much as ladies) or AMAB (and therefore an evil invader who needs to be forced out before I taint them with my evil dick, nevermind that I don't date lesbians because I'm genderqueer) is... an adventure.

Dangerous combinations

The thing about my family is that were very, very easy to radicalize (because we have low self-esteem and a hard time admitting that we could be at fault for anything), and subsequently very, very hard to deradicalize (because we're stubborn and can't admit to being wrong).

How much is a memorial worth, to a government?

I understand that the point of unknown soldier memorials is "this person could be anyone, could be your relative!"

But... some of my relatives went off to war and never came back. I know it would significantly ease my grandma's pain if one of the unknown soldiers turned out to be her uncle, and the body was turned over to us for burial with the rest of the family.

Can't sleep

Re: Warren's plan to reduce childbirth death rates, isn't the leading cause of parental death in childbirth racism? Like, if you compare the numbers for Black/Native/Latine parents vs white parents... yeah.