Don’t Know If You’re Still Doing These N I Resisted The Urge To Pick All The Kissing Ones So Mamihlapinatapei

Richard Siken, Boot Theory // Frank Bidart, The War of Vaslav Nijinsky // astralcorbozo on TikTok // Mary Herbert, A Long Time in the Desert // Dan Deacon, When I Was Done Dying

Iris’ first time playing Among Us doesn’t go as planned

[Characters from CTC]

It's just very important to me that you know prairie-style gardens exist.

Ok. Thank you. Carry on.

a wildflower in the reeds

Jujutsu Kaisen Episode 1: Ryomen Sukuna

“Am I just going to wait here like he told me to? What am I afraid of? That’s right. I can sense death all the way out here. I’m afraid of dying.”

walking home from school

i've said this before but it bears repeating: a concerning amount of information circulating on this website about islam directed towards non-muslims comes from conservative sources and paints a very specific and narrow image of an extremely diverse religion. outsiders have this fictitious understanding of a monolithic islam, and somehow it is always the most dogmatic and overzealous and inflexible version of religion they can think of.

the reality of things is that like with all organized religion, there are muslims who are very strict in their practices and interpretations, and there are people who were born in muslim families and are influenced by islamic culture but are not religious, and there is a whole spectrum of beliefs in between these two extremes. this isn't even touching on the matter of different sects and ethno-cultural divergences.

i don't like making direct comparisons, but this is the language most anglophone westerners understand: if all the information about christianity you received was from evangelicals, you would have an incredibly biased conception of the daily life and beliefs of the average christian. you would also have an extremely problematic understanding of christian dogma - and i do mean problematic here as in something that causes problems, something that has harmful consequences. i understand and appreciate that people are usually walking on eggshells when handling issues of marginalized and stigmatized religions, but let's be bluntly open for a second: all organized religions have extremist ideological currents whose tenets directly contradict core progressive and liberatory ideas. accepting those tenets as valid and respectable in the name of battling bigotry is counterproductive and reverberates badly first and foremost on minorities.

the uncritical propagation of conservative (and sometimes straight up fundamentalist) conceptions of islam among non-muslims, especially in fandom/creative spaces that are concerned with political correctness and a genuine will for accurate and respectful representation, feeds a vicious cycle of insidious islamophobia: supposedly progressive depictions of muslims confirm the previously internalized bias that all muslims are indeed Like This, and said bias is what makes people swallow literal wahhabi propaganda without blinking in the first place, rinse and repeat.

this point of this post is not to embolden white people to start commenting on intra-community issues; rather it is a plea for people to be a little bit more critical, a little bit more analytically active in their consumption of information. may i suggest, accessorily, interacting with muslims in other contexts than just uhhh "learning". none of my white friends pull this shit, mostly because they have hung out with us enough to internalize the notion that we are... human beings, with a vast array of political and spiritual beliefs.

suguru geto