Day Twenty-One - My Favourite Thing To Drink

I must object to the use of 'Phobia' in this context. If you identify as trans/homo/whatever-phobic, you are not afraid - you are an asshole.

Five Ways to Spot Somebody Suffering from Transphobia

...no-one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away... The span of someone's life, they say, is only the core of their actual existence.”

Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man

As a leftist Jew who believes strongly in the cause of dignity and freedom for the Palestinian people, and that Israel has abused them, I am begging fellow leftists to understand that real life is not a comic book. A government being “the bad guy” in a situation does not automatically make anyone who opposes it “the good guy”.

Hamas denies the Holocaust. Hamas disseminates the Protocols of the Elders of Zion—the conspiracy theory it paints is what they mean by “Zionist”. Hamas forbids foreign aid educators from teaching human rights to Palestinians, and claims that even teaching that the Holocaust happened is a war crime. Hamas has written the aim of annihilating Israel (the country and its people) into its charter—the mass slaughter and violent expulsion of 7 million Jews from the land is written into its laws.

There is no crime any state could ever do that would justify any of that; there is no act of state repression that could ever make it acceptable to side with the organization spreading Nazi pamphlets and Holocaust denial.

Oppose Bibi Netanyahu. Oppose Israel’s far-right, authoritarian government. Oppose its apartheid policies. Oppose its violent abuse of the Palestinian people. That isn’t antisemitic. But Hamas is—verifiably, beyond a shadow of a doubt, to its core—antisemitic. Its portrayal of Israeli Jews as blood-thirsty, child-killing master manipulators that control international media and finance is antisemitic. Its insistence that Palestinian freedom necessitates the death & expulsion of Jews from the land is antisemitic. Its redefinition of “Zionism” as a pejorative to mean genocidal Jewish/Israeli Supremacy is antisemitic.

Supporting the Palestinian people in their plight is a noble and loving goal; please never stop that. But do not let Hamas co-opt that into excusing or denying their rampant antisemitism and war crimes.

Day Three - Love

“To the world you may be just one person, but to one person you may be the world.” ~ Brandi Snyder

Love is certainly one of the more... complicated emotions, one that is never the same twice. I feel privileged to have experienced love a few times in my short existence to date, I won't go into the sordid details because 1) a gentleman never kisses and tells and 2) it's none of your gorram business :p. Unfortunately (as I have learned through a lot of pain) lust can seem very similar to love at first sight and so the only way to truly find out is by riding it out and seeing where it leads.

Obviously, so far I've merely covered Eros (erotic love as defined by the greeks) and briefly mentioned Thelema (lust) however the greeks identified three other forms of love too;

Agape - which is defined as an unconditional, self sacrificing love - something that has been identified with religious experience though is also reserved for close loved ones like a partner or a child. Until recently I couldn't've said I'd experienced this, as I'm not in the slightest bit religious nor do I have any children however I admit that my feelings for my amazing girlfriend Amanda seem to have merged into this category - I would truly do anything for her (even though she can drive me crazy sometimes :P)

Philia - Brotherly love or close friendship, is again something I am blessed with - despite the fact that I am an only child, I feel a close bond with my best friends - while I cannot compare this directly with brotherly love, I can only estimate that it's roughly there... :P

Storge - is defined as familial love, something else I can certainly say I am blessed with, being part of a close knit family.

As far as I see it, love is an essential part of life in all its forms, for a start it keeps things ever changing, but also it is the glue that binds people together and has allowed us to create the great dynamic culture in which we live...

I probably rambled quite a bit there but Love is quite a hard abstract to talk about without going all tangential, though I must admit the timing is rather apt seeing as it's V day tomorrow...

Nik

Curriculum is about preparing minds to think and reason, it's not about parental control and subordination. Banning books is small-minded.

HR: if they work 40 hours a week u have to give them benefits

Big company: hmm okay. They shall work 39

The "if you voted for Trump unfollow me" posts are returning, but given then general makeup of your average tumblr user I think there's a different message I'd like to give.

If you didn't vote because "both parties are the same" or "it won't make a difference" or because Kamala wasn't the pure and perfect leader that you wanted or you "didn't want blood on your hands", honestly whether or not you follow me doesn't make a damned bit of difference. But I want you to look. Take a good look at the despair around you right now. And every godforsaken thing that follows I want you to fucking look. Look and know that you could have helped prevent it. We still haven't recovered from his last four years, the world hasn't fucking recovered, and now we're staring down the barrel of god knows how many more years and a river of fucking blood to come along with it.

But your pride and your principles were more important to you than the actual real fucking world we live in.

I hope, if nothing else, that you can take this in. I hope you learn. I hope you grow. I hope you find it in you to realize that in this country they soak our hands in blood the second we take our first breath and the only thing that matters then is what you fucking do with them. What you fight for. Who you fight for. Who you defend.

I hope you wake up. And you step up. And you fucking fight.

But until then. Don't you fucking dare look away.

We mourn. We remember.  We stand with the LGBTQ community against hate and violence.

To my uk trans people and allies out there.