The line to draw, I feel, is are you attacking institutions (i.e. smashing the windows of Wall Street, chaining yourself to the doors of the police station), or people (like the loons here in Oregon attacking minority families during the fires)? Are you harassing oppressed groups (like kristallnacht did) or the overpowered establishment (like Blair Mountain did)?

(Obviously, punching individual Nazis is still fine.)

But really, at the end of the day, violence is still violence, and while it may be the right action, it is never a good action. That is something I feel all protesters need to keep in mind.

To paraphrase Dan Shive, there are times when you best (or only) choices lie between the least-bad and most-bad options. And when that happens, humans tend to try and rationalize the least-bad choice as being the good one. This is a trap. If you start to think of the least-bad choice as a good choice, pretty soon you start to believe it—and then you stop looking for the actual good options.

Even if an actual good option—like a nonviolent protest—isn’t feasible for one situation, you should always try to find a truly good option, if you can. That’s why the combo of violent protests on one side, peaceful group on the other, tends to get the best results.

Good for you. History disagrees with your disagreeing.

Look up Malcom X, the Black Panthers, and the Battle of Blair Mountain sometime. Pretty much every victory oppressed groups have won has had to draw blood in order to win the day.

MLK didn’t; Malcom X did. MLK’s underlying message was ‘acknowledge my peaceful protest, or you get stuck with his less peaceful protest’. Peaceful protesting alone tends to get you a whole lot of nothing.

Edit: of course, most history classes seem to forget Malcom X even existed, because the ‘just peacefully protest over in that corner and don’t bother us, it will totally make us change our ways’ narrative is much more desirable for certain demographics.

I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.”

Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

-Martin Luther King Jr

Got a lot of the same vibes, really

Imagine being told every minute of every day that you don’t matter. That as a woman, your only purpose is to glorify men, support men, breed more men. That it’s the greatest and highest calling of women to surrender your life and your choices to men.

That women are stupid and sinners because of Eve’s actions, and will be forever. So you can never be allowed any kind of authority, because like Eve you’ll just do something foolish or abuse it.

Now imagine everyone and everything around you shows and supports this worldview. All the time.

That’s where it comes from. When something is all you’ve ever known, then it’s normal. And, even if you consciously don’t believe it, it still worms its way inside of you.

I very, very much doubt it’s a tiny minority. But even if it’s, let’s say, 1 in 200 men doing it, that’s still a very large number of people. Way too many people. And realistically I doubt the number is that low given the frequency of occurrences and the scope of area over which they occur.

1 in 2 women have experienced sexual harassment in some form.

1 in 4 have been sexually assaulted.

One could cry ‘not all men!’ and that is most certainly true. But it is still doubtful it is a small minority running about perpetrating all these acts. Even if it is not 1 in 4 men committing the assaults, those numbers are still far too high.

See, this disingenuous argument works better when you just generalize it, because when you get into specifics it looks very different. Example:

Step 1: label the people that hold the belief that ‘trans people are subhuman trash that need to be excised from society by violence if necessary’ as intolerant

Step 2: skip diplomacy because they refuse to engage in actual conversation

Step 3: use force on them because they are actually attacking trans people.

Although really even parts 2 & 3 are disingenuous, because there are plenty of examples of people trying to engage the intolerant in debate, far beyond what would really be reasonable even. And you’ll also notice that force is rarely, if ever, used against those intolerant folks either, even as they use force, even deadly force.

Hell, even the law won’t do more than slap their wrists in many cases. I use trans people as an example because until recently, ‘I went on a date with this lady and then found out she was trans, and I was so shocked I killed her’ was an actual legitimate legal defense and several people used it. If we’re being pedantic, that defense is still perfectly acceptable at the national level, as several bills banning it have been introduced, but none have been passed.

People following the story of a former Olympic runner: First time?

Yup, everyone loves a good old-fashioned idiot plot.

I probably would despise Star Wars too if I tried to make a good movie in that universe and kept getting micromanaged into the ground at every turn by clueless Disney execs.

He is a very good director, as his other films show. The problem was and still is in no way with him.

And of course he adds in a picture of John Wayne, the draft-dodging, woman-beating, other wannabe cowboy poser.

An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last. -Winston Churchill

It depends in part on male vs female; male rats and mice mark territory (and sometimes even their favorite walking paths, so beware if you let them roam) with urine. Back when I kept rats and mice, the female cages would always smell better than the male cages, no matter what I did.

Now I keep pythons, and both male and female cages don’t stink lol. I have to admit that the smell is the biggest thing I don’t miss about having pet rodents.

Hahahahahaha

Go to any place Christian nutters have ‘missionaried’ in over in Africa and you can see them with the masks off.

The only reason that sort of shit doesn’t openly happen in most of Europe anymore is it isn’t a popular idea with secular people, and religious leaders don’t have enough power to force it down people’s throats - yet.

21 out of 24

That was kinda fun

Citation needed

Because I’m pretty sure puberty blockers do literally none of that.

Oh, don’t worry; they definitely want to ban them for cis kids too (or at least girls). The one thing Conservatives the world over have in common is they like their women young.

I wonder if there’s a bit of not wanting to believe what people can accomplish if a massive number of us all teamed up to do something.

Because then they’d feel guilty for not getting up out of their armchair and going to support whatever cause they claim they’re supporting from the comfort of home.

‘Tell him we will pray for him.’

‘He needs your prayers.’

‘Is he, then, an unhappy man?’

Poirot said, ‘So unhappy that he has forgotten what happiness means. So unhappy that he does not know he is unhappy.’

The nun said softly, ‘Ah, a rich man…’

Poirot said nothing—for he knew there was nothing to say…