thinking about that time I was at some kind of diversity and inclusion thing that involved discussion in small groups and one straight girl said she really wanted to be a good ally but sometimes there were some things she just didn’t know and was too afraid to ask for fear of accidentally being offensive. and as the only queer person in this 4-5 person group I said well go ahead and ask me, I don’t care if you accidentally use the wrong term right now or whatever, it’s better to talk about it and learn something, I love talking about queerness and I’ll answer the best I can. and she just looked so nervous and in the end wound up refusing to ask for fear of causing offense. and it wasn’t just the group setting, I’ve known straight people to act similarly even when it’s just one on one
and just. you guys. this is what purity culture and the “if you don’t know something you were never a real ally in fact you’re a bigot in fact you’re worse than bigots because you pretended not to be one” attitude does. how can our allies be allies if they’re scared to talk to us? to ask questions, to make mistakes, to learn? can we please bring back the idea of “in good faith”? there’s way more to say here about identity politics and virtue signaling and acting like language is more important than action but I’m too tired for that right now
please feel free to add to the discussion (regardless of if you’re queer or not), I would love to hear about people’s experiences with this and if others feel differently about it
@chronosfear
Just a Spirk meme I made.
Fuck Ned
#help
Show respect.
@wonderingsam @chronosfear
In the town where I grew up, there was a large statue in one of the parks, of a famous historical white colonizer. I'm not going to say who specifically, suffice it to say that it was someone who wasn't worth memorializing for their deeds. And as you can imagine, this statue was a frequent target of vandalism, with paint or toilet paper or eggs on multiple occasions. Now, the local council was generally pretty lax when it came to repairing potholes or other public damage in the town, but every time, 24 hours after this particular statue was hit, the same person would always appear in a Hi-Vis vest, hat, mask and sunglasses, carrying a bucket of water, and wash it clean. They would do it as quickly as possible, but always made sure the face and the name carved at the bottom were generously scrubbed. This only encouraged people to do it again, and so it became a vicious cycle.
Within a year, the statue had sustained so much damage that it was unrecognizable and the lettering unreadable, so eventually the council came and took it down. Also apparently, the person in the Hi-Vis vest didn't even work for the council. They were supposedly just some 'good samaritan' who cleaned it, often before the council even discovered it needed cleaning, so they just let them do it and ignored the problem. They didn't bother putting the statue up again.
Much later, we found out that the anonymous 'samaritan' had been deliberately washing the statue with a bucket of saltwater, which had dramatically corroded it, causing irreversible accumulative damage far worse than spray paint ever would have done. It's even theorized that they were also often the one spray-painting it, just so that they had an excuse to come back after a day to wash it.
SENTIENT COIN EATER
i'm bored. i want attention. i want to lay on the beach and have a group of kids gather around and poke me curiously with a stick
You know people are saying this was an overreaction but listen if I was Mei Mei's mom and I thought a whole ass 17 year old was trying it with my 13 year old daughter he would be on the news