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Non-binary

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I had a friend ask me how to handle people justifying their poor treatment of non-binary people with biology - penis, vagina, procreation, chromosomes. I answered: It is important to address all the straw men that they throw out when they argue these points. They set up things for you to battle - gender, procreation, biology - and thereby define the terms of the argument. And those terms are (shrug) all good, for them. If they want to procreate, honor their penises and vaginas, and be addressed as Mr and Mrs, I would fight in the streets for their right to conduct their lives in any way they choose fit.  Point 1. However, just because they are offended by the way other people conduct their lives does not mean they are right. In fact, Mr and Mrs have no right to lean over any fence and dictate to anyone how that person chooses to be addressed or how that person chooses to think about biology.  Point 2. Under the guise of community or religion their attitude is unkind, ungenerous, backwa
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Interruptible

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I had a thought about how people pick up their phone as soon as I start talking, or interrupt with endless unrelated topics three times in my sentence. I wondered when I have that urge to pick up my phone. I have it when I know the other person is going to interrupt me with their interminable interruptions. Social media is interruptible because it's repetitive, brief, and the algorithm will serve it up again. I can always scroll back or double tap to regain those seconds. The minute or two that I have between the other person's interruptions are entertaining and sharable. Their interruptions are just part of the endless scroll. We're just tossing out personal anecdotes and we're the algorithm. I suppose that is the good thing. I'd rather have the algorithm be us than the coderboys. A silver lining. I can even double tap them if I say, "I missed that last bit, what was that?"
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De-bigotting

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Colonising your neighbours. Your interest in controlling how I live, bringing your culture to where I am, and declaring this is how I should live. Bear in mind that in the olden days (and in America in the newden days), bigotry infested public institutions. The people who didn't like the bigotry and wanted to, for example marry homos, had to leave government or suck it up.  Then public institutions were lobbied for decades by people representing race, color, religion, sex, age, national origin, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, or other bases of discrimination. The government... or institution... considered the arguments, consulted, read the studies, made committees and wrote constitutions and bills based on creating an equitable environment for all to thrive and manifested it in the community (aka government mandate).  Now people in the instution who don't want to enact government not-bigotries and want to be able to not enact the rules, for exam
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Women as incubators

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 #Feminism ~ Women as incubators. When you’re wondering why Planned Parenthood’s are really being closed, consider this. Adorian Deck says that - of the next 1, 000 babies born worldwide Asia will have 511 of them and North and South America will only have 106 babies combined.  (Add that to the space launches [and - not in this one - nuclear ‘tests’] if you really want to see other ways capitalism flexes patriarchy.)  (jajaja, I know there are always ‘ways’ of presenting numbers, and there are always people who want to say there are ways of presenting numbers.) Data source: (hehe) https://youtube.com/shorts/Kw59I1V0UFw?si=B9eFSb9J5_1vTNTH
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My Own Private Idaho (1991)

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#HomeStories ~ My Own Private Idaho (1991). When I saw this, as always I was sitting near the front row. I went with a crowd. After they were shocked to find that I had been crying throughout, quietly. They had not enjoyed it. I walked behind them as we left, contemplating my alienhood and that no one fits. We round the people around is up to The One who is friend, The One who is lover, as Dan always says. It's always been a 10 movie for me. This article is a 7min read. This person heard me.  My Own Private Idaho at 30: This Is Not/Is Another River Phoenix Essay By Roxana Hadadi https://crookedmarquee.com/my-own-private-idaho-at-30-this-is-not-is-another-river-phoenix-essay/?utm_source=pocket_saves
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Her (2013)

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#ParaphrasingGenius ~ Something that has to be considered when having a relationship with an AI is the aspect of being chosen by those you love. Their ongoing choosing of you is important to us. If we don't have faith in that, it causes significant pain in real-life relationships. Even in relationships where you pay to be chosen, you know you are not. Some little part of you knows. What will be the subtle effect of your awareness that the AI didn't choose you? (Ezra Klein)
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Moralistic bleeping

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#picksthattickleme  My search. Google only gets people who want to turn off cursing. Not people who want to turn off moralising totalitarianism of opinion-mongers who want to 'protect' their children. I'm a fucking adult!
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Positive note about institutions

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  In the olden days (and in American in the new den days), bigotry infested public institutions. The people who didn't like the bigotryand wanted to, for example marry homos, had to leave government or suck it up. Then public institutions were lobbied for decades by people representing race, color, religion, sex, age, national origin, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, or other bases of discrimination. The government... Or institution considered the arguments, consulted, read the studies, made committees and write Constitutions and bills based on creating an equitable environment for all (aka government mandate) to thrive was manifested. Now people in the instution who don't want to enact government not-bigotries want to be able to not enact the rules, for example, not marry homos, don't want to leave government t and don't want to suck it up. And they feel descriminated against.  Government is not secular, government is calling us to provi
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Treating people like criminals

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Even if you know me, you may not know that something that bugs me is that, as the world is divided into goodies and baddies - that people who are goodies get treated like baddies 'in case'. So yes, that applies to me. Men should be treated with caution. I think a certain level of caution is warranted in life-and-death situations, even situations that men don't think are life and death. So, always meet in a public place, and give your friend their researched identity number and phone number before leaving the house. And men, for their part, bring your mother to the date and two of your male friends. Do your bit to show women you know they are vulnerable. However, I don't want to hand in my handbag to a shop locker when I go into a store. Capitalism's loss is not life and death. Put up a camera and witness my honesty.
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You're corrupted by Tanya Pretorius

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Feminism plays a role in saving the planet

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#Incels ~ I watch a lot of BBC's 'Who do you think you are' and so many people's histories involve men abandoning their families for new younger women. And in the olden days sometimes leaving previous wives with upwards of five children to fend for. Women couldn't have bank accounts, were prevented from having education, and couldn't sign leases with no husbands.  What did men think would happen? And now, with control over our fertility, and the right to sign a lease without a husband... (although I can tell you I'm old enough to have been discriminated against because I didn't have a co-signing husband). Now men feel 'useless' and are committing suicide. They have to redesign their worth to no longer be based on coercive domination of creatures they have purposefully made weak.  Also, if humans don't return to the opposite of nuclear family (community family or our modern version - state family suppprt) our population bells will crash as we
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Love and LURVE

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Why do I think people cheat in relationships? I think you lose the NRE - new relationship energy. It's normal. It always happens. And your partner doesn't give you that lust feeling, that INTENSE LURVE anymore. And then, you're an arse for not appreciating the other things that are there in its place - you've taken the time because of past LURVE to really know them, to build history, share common values and goals. Those things are the things that that insignificant LURVE leads to. So you, idiot, think LURVE is the goal and wander off looking for more of it. OR once the LURVE fades you find they're an arse and you have no partner-choosing skills so you wander off aimlessly. 
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Men must bring the condom

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Women disproportionately carry the burdens of sex, starting with buying and wearing the clownsuit we have to arrive at the date in, the tampons or mooncups we have to spend years buying and applying. And then, to top it all!, the biggest risk and burden of our gender being pregnant, carrying the baby to term, and bringing it up. Not to mention the risk of a man ignoring our No if we see a red flag on the date, or the risk of outright violence. The very least a man could do is bring the condom. The very least. They should bring the condom because of all the dickheads in the world who don't bring condoms and cause abortions and ruined lives of mothers and babies. Condoms are reparations. Cheap reparations.
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The Bonobo Sisterhood

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#Feminism ~ #MeToo is a pivotal moment. It's the moment when women learned that they must stand together to have any hope of toppling toxic men. That it was a public man is the only reason it was publicised and women could see it work. This has worked elsewhere, where I know women who decided to take down a rapist by themselves because you cannot ask the master's tools to help. It saddens me to hear women say 'I' so much. A word deeply Western, patriarchal, and capitalist. The things are so interrelated that they produce oppression without trying. We are 'we'. The Bonobo Sisterhood
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#Blackness ~ As an editor... oh oh, activisting again

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I thought you might like to look at this phrase as an indication of why Black should be capitalised. That Black is not ‘just an adjective’, that the adjectiveness and lowercaseness diminishes Blackness. The activists believe that along with ‘European’ (not really accepted in South Africa) the word White and Black are indicative of heritage and culture. Black is an indication of allegiance and statehood that is self-chosen and aligns so broadly with the Black diaspora. Inclusive, diverse, and welcoming. Some Black people born in America strategically avoid ‘African American’ as they feel they are neither, as neither identity is readily accepted by white Americans (see how I decentered white Americans here by lowercasing white). In South Africa, the idea that Whites are South African has also been destabilised, so they become Whites separated from country, and decentered when white. Whites don’t need to indicate allegiance and statehood and have already been White for so long. But yes,
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Collaboration, focus on strategies for overcoming inertia

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Western culture’s fixation on copyright, branding, and ownership creates a toxic environment for activists. And it’s a mindset that activists often don’t know they have. The most difficult thing to do is to get people to overcome inertia . Inertia is the gravity that holds people to the familiar, to the TV, to the job they have hated, and to the traditions of the past. As an activist, once you have managed to create a slight shift, a tiny movement can become an action by feeding that momentum. I don’t want to ask for permission to take a step out of the movement and check in with branding. The mass is moving. It has started to flow… Don’t embolden the slogan? Don’t put a drop shadow on the logo? Put the logo on top of the banner? I am 4000 miles away from your global movement, and I have to wait for you to arrive at work on the other side of the globe to give me the OK. Even if I had to wait for 20 minutes… why? Give me a visual element to rally around and leave it at that. It is
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Patriarchs workplace bum in the butter

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Dear feminist scholars You have not spoken to the concerns of the patriarchs – women abandoning their careers for family care, elderly care, and sick children. Women abandon their posts due to menstrual cramps and pregnancy. The perception that women are ‘fragile’ and victims of mental health – disinformation campaigns run by the patriarchy claim this. Women leave their posts because they have been raped and harassed. Women cannot focus on their work because the harassment prevents them from doing their work.  The patriarchs want someone on their post no matter what and will harass them out of the post so they don’t have to deal with these issues. The ability of women to lead is severely compromised due to men’s behaviour. They won’t stop. They see it as an effective way to prevent women from entering the workplace and having another place to judge their asses. They homophilically play all day with other men and are free from the demands of women. Women's mere act of demanding is c
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I believe

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To be a feminist is to believe that one can make a difference. How people behave during #loadshedding tells you about how they think about #voting . It's all about the heater. Do you turn it on or don't you? On the one hand, if you turn it on, it's equal to you-don't-vote because you don't think it will make a difference. It's just one heater. It won't crash the system. On the other hand, if you don't turn it on, you join voices with all the other people not turning it on so that electricity can be more evenly spread throughout the population for necessities. There are people that believe that the saved electricity would be hogged by the capitalist monopolies. And there are people who believe that the saved electricity is shared among the people on the ground. #Worldviews . #GetAFuckingBlanket . Dammit.
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Apartheid

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Apartheid was vile. And its effects are so far-reaching. Colonialism led to apartheid which led to eugenics. The whole world was gripped with hate. The task of dismantling that hate is slow, and this global recession will set our efforts back because precarity makes the powerful into monsters and conservative monsters.
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Feud between Mulgrew and Ryan

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#StarTrek ~ I'm so disappointed in Kate Mulgrew for being cross with Jeri Ryan. Ryan was used by the patriarchy to insert a 'babe' (yes, I personally heard them use this word in a documentary) into the show. Ryan did an admirable job of ignoring the myriad leering references to her appearance on the show by men from so many species. Mulgrew should know that you can't be upset with women for doing what they need to do. Don't infantilise women by saying they should say No. Their choice is their choice. And if you don't like it, suck it.
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