Something I’m Not 100% Sure How To Put Into Words B/c Flu But Nonetheless Woke Up Thinking About Is:

I am mere centimeters away from writing a full on essay about how the “goblins are inherently antisemitic” myth spawned by this website propagates misinformation, displays a huge misunderstanding of what folklore is and does, and contributes to an environment that distracts people from how antisemitism actually operates and the ways in which it’s dangerously on the rise in our current climate–something which, surprise surprise, has almost nothing to do with little green fairy men

So Delta flight 302 flew in to San Juan, picked up passengers, and threaded one arm of Irma on the way out. The pilot basically said “hold my beer” and took on a hurricane.

I am not entirely convinced that Poe Dameron was not flying this plane, to be honest.

You can read the Twitter thread here.

also I noticed a lot of people (i.e. liberals) framing the discussion around love and violence as if fighting oppression or oppressors (including in immediate self-defense) was somehow antithetical to being a loving person, or to being committed to loving ourselves and other people in our communities, or to recognising love as a revitalising and necessary force in activism and in life in general, such that we need to utterly shun violence as something that’s always morally reprehensible (and thus, to shun people who commit violence in self-defense as morally reprehensible) in order to be capable of love

and I started thinking about how a lot of edgy radicals & leftists essentially agree with this but in the opposite direction–as if we need to utterly shun love as a necessary & revitalising force in order to be capable of revolutionary action or self-defense

in the same way that liberals will say “we must love and see the humanity in our oppressors, so that we cannot use violence against them even if we are ourselves the targets of violence” (or–more likely, since these kinds of people aren’t likely to be people who have ever been seriously targeted by violence–”more immediately & materially marginalised people shouldn’t use violence even if they are themselves the targets of violence”), edgy radicals will say “we must be prepared to use violence against our oppressors, and therefore we must hate and demonise them, as if they are somehow essentially, ontologically evil by virtue of their identities.” & I think that both of these approaches are fundamentally misguided

of course we must be prepared to use violence in self-defense against institutions that commit violence against us–but ultimately, the basis of revolution or whatever cannot be hatred and it cannot be the romanticisation of violence for the sake of violence (and again, a lot of these edgelord-y people have probably never been seriously targeted by violence, don’t have bodies that are marked out for violence–they just like the thrill of it all). it has to be love–love for ourselves & each other & for the future that we have to believe is possible–& that will include love for the people who used to be our oppressors. because otherwise what is the point?

to me “love your oppressor” doesn’t mean that you can’t fight back against violence and it doesn’t mean that you can’t hate the people who hate you or else you’re just as bad as they are and it doesn’t mean that you can’t be angry… what it does mean is that you have to have some kind of fundamental respect & empathy for people’s humanity

it means that, rather than just assuming that all white people are evil by some kind of mystical biological necessity and thus The Revolution requires killing them all or something (I’ve seen this suggested, which is… terrifying), you’ve got to try to understand the material and psychological factors that play into white people behaving in the way that they do (such as, applying class analysis to the racism of poor whites–see, the psychological wage of whiteness, etc.). that attempt at understanding is what I mean by “empathy”

and of course this has a necessary practical function in addition to a theoretical and psychological one–because how can you hope to fight a system that works to fragment and divide the people whom it oppresses without understanding & fighting against the reasons for that fragmentation?

so in all of these ways I see the willingness to empathise & love and the willingness to fight against oppression, not as antithetical, but absolutely necessary to, each other.

“why aren’t u talking abt this one Problematic thing involving that actor/show u like??”

listen. i am tired. im putting down my pitchfork. i’ll acknowledge that thing was bad if it was but im tired of vilifying ppl for their mistakes just bc they’re famous. i want to enjoy things. i want Peace

Poem: I lik the form

My naym is pome / and lo my form is fix’d Tho peepel say / that structure is a jail I am my best / when formats are not mix’d Wen poits play / subversions often fail

Stik out their toung / to rebel with no cause At ruls and norms / In ignorance they call: My words are free / Defying lit'rate laws To lik the forms / brings ruin on us all

A sonnet I / the noblest lit'rate verse And ruls me bind / to paths that Shakespeare paved Iambic fot / allusions well dispersed On my behind / I stately sit and wave

You think me tame /   Fenced-in and penned / bespelled I bide my time /   I twist the end / like hell

* “lik” should be read as “lick”, not “like”. In general, the initial section on each line should be read sort of phonetically.

Written for World Poetry Day, March 21, 2018. When I had this idea earlier today, I thought it was the worst, most faux hip pretentious idea for a shallow demonstration of empty wordsmithing skill in poetry ever. So I had to try to write it. I mean, how often do you get to fuse the iambic dimeter of bredlik - one of the newest and most exciting verse forms - with the stately iambic pentameter of the classic sonnet?

impostor syndrome is a common problem in academia. For example my colleagues keep putting me in the airlock and ejecting me into space

Pictures of the UNESCO World Heritage site of ancient Palmyra taken following the recapture of the city by Syrian troops backed by Russian forces on March 27, 2016 show the damage made by ISIS during its 10-month occupation. In 2015 the archaeologist, Khaled al-Asaad, who had looked after the ruins for 40 years and refused to reveal the location of archaeological treasures of the city was also murdered by ISIS.

Photos taken on March 31, 2016 by Joseph Eid/AFP/Getty Images

kickstarter to send Scott back and forth on planes forever

Plane travel makes me high. No pun intended. When I’m in an airport, or on a plane, I get into a weird hypomanic state where I start feeling great about myself, making grandiose plans, feeling like the world is my oyster. I’m more creative, more ambitious. Sometimes I leverage this to get stuff done (usually write blog posts I’ve been putting off) at the airport or on the plane. Other times I feel confident that I’ll still be able to do all this great stuff when I reach my destination, and am invariably disappointed; a few hours after landing, I go back to being as cautious and unambitious as usual.

I think this kind of thing is why I’m so interested in psychopharmacology. I don’t need some sort of deep transformative advice to turn my life around. I don’t need to reconcile with my true self. There are predictable times when I’m already exactly the person I want to be. If I could be the person I am at airports 100% of the time, I could change the world. I know being that kind of person is possible, because it happens. But I can’t control it. And I always think that surely there must be some minor tweak that I can do to replicate it. There’s nothing magical about airports, it just has to be unlocking some possible brainspace that’s already there. But I just. can’t. find. the. key.

01101000 01110100 01110100 01110000 01110011 00111010 00101111 00101111 01111001 01101111 01110101 01110100 01110101 00101110 01100010 01100101 00101111 01100100 01010001 01110111 00110100 01110111 00111001 01010111 01100111 01011000 01100011 01010001

Of the many marvels a lifetime offers, this experience was truly my favorite so far.