Saoirse Stone 🏳️‍⚧️

A group of men who regularly rape children decided to ruin the public's perception of trans people in this country for shits and giggles and every time I think about that my heart clenches into a blood-red fist of rage.

And I can't stop thinking about it.

my biggest transphobia red flag on dating apps is a cis lesbian describing herself as politically moderate

Dragon Age games lack agency, and that's the whole point All that matters is who you love, and how you do it

the one and only @susanapolo.bsky.social wrote about dragon age and the way it handles player choice and it's SO GOOD y'all it's SO GOOD www.mothership.blog/dragon-age-g...

I went to my annual physical with my regular PCP. You know, the one that's supposed to be free with insurance? Well, she asked me if I had any new health concerns. I brought up my desire to shed a few stubborn pounds. We talked about it for 5 minutes. That's now a "split appt" and the cost is $225

"Why doesn't HP have the same intergenerational relevance as Lord of the Rings"

Because it's mediocre and suffers from a terminal association with cringe millennials. Sorry. You could as well ask "Why doesn't Twilight have the same intergenerational relevance as Dracula."

We WILL still be here after this current moment. Maybe not me, maybe not you, but the people will persist. We must plan now to not retreat into the comforting arms of relative safety, but we must instead act then to decisively and boldly to correct the rot at the heart of this nation.

Abolish ICE, prosecute and imprison its leaders, impeach and remove the President from office. This is the only sane reaction to a group of armed men kidnapping and gunning down our neighbors in the street.

We cannot allow the rotten spirit of compromise of 1787, of 1877, of 1945, of 2021 to fester further.

Several of these steps are outside the norms thus country has operated by, but not a single one of them is outside the realm of political power. A better world is possible, but it’s not enough to stop ICE. We need to root out the source of its evil and crush it so it can’t come back.

Step 4 - End Qualified Immunity as we know it. I have thoughts on how exactly to accomplish this, but they’re a little too inside baseball for this thread.

Step 3 - Allow a new SCOTUS to instate former dissents as majority holdings where possible, to save time from rehearing entire cases. Use this to overturn flagrantly wrong and unconstitutional decisions such as Citizen’s United, Shelby County, Dobbs, etc.

I suspect this will have a number of notable benefits beyond the obvious, simply due to how many of this country’s worst have made their way to the organization.

Step 2 - Charge every employee of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, as well as all collaborators, under RICO. As with the Federalist Society, sweat them in regular jails until they agree to talk. Use what they say, but emphasize plea deals rather than immunity agreements.

This will push many to become collaborators with the prosecution. They are weak, selfish, and unprincipled, and they will fold. Make resignation from their judgeships/legislative seats/other positions a requirement of any plea deals/immunity agreements. Install replacements loyal to the people.

Step 2 - Go after the Federalist Society on corruption, conspiracy, and treason charges. Use this to purge the judiciary and legislature (federal and state) of fascist collaborators.

Cast a wide net, refuse to allow bail, and keep them in regular jails, not fancy white collar institutions.

Abolishing ICE was the compromise solution. That’s not on the table anymore.

Here’s what we need to do now:

Step 1 - Take back political power.

Since his socialist ideology was written out of the history books.. In his own words:

"If America does not use her vast resources of wealth to end poverty and make it possible for all of God’s children to have the basic necessities of life, she too will go to hell."

Happy MLK Day.

What all this self-pitying sludge about ICE agents feeling depressed and scared is forcing into our collective forebrain is the knowledge that our culture has placed a premium not just on creating classes of men who kill and torture at will, but on forcing the rest of us to love them at gunpoint.

A big paradigm shift you need to make if you want to be a good artist, good critic, or good person-who-enriches-themself-through-art is that you have to recognize that whether something is Good is often way less important than whether it is Interesting.

I want my kids to read, absolutely. But it’s equally important to get them to apply the analytical skills we develop to all the media they encounter. It takes effort, but they’ll be happier and wiser for it.

Just last week, a girl was telling me about how she was induced to investigate William Moulton Marston, his wife, and their partner, after seeing an old Wonder Woman panel that referenced Sappho.

I never feel more proud than when my students start grappling with the media they engage with critically. A student that last year came to me, so excited, because he had identified allusions to Macbeth and Oedipus in the new God of War game.

Now more than ever, it’s crucial to question. It’s crucial to ponder why things are the way they are, and to seek to comprehend the reasons. We need to support the next generation in developing and honing intellectual curiosity. If we can do that, there’s no end to what they can accomplish.

It’s not that these things were too difficult or too boring for them. All they needed was the context to understand what the work meant and why the work mattered.

And the kids liked it! They felt challenged by it, but they felt that they actually learned something. They felt the same way when we read Antigone (and of course discussed the other Theban plays), and when we did a whole month long unit on poetry.

I refuse to do that. I teach whole texts, and I include companion sources to explain the historical and cultural details. When I taught 10th grade English, we read some fun stuff, but we also read Things Fall Apart. And you had best believe that we read The Second Coming before we did it.

The curriculum from my county is laughable, and I know enough teachers to know they face the same issue. Everything is isolated from context. They don’t want us to teach Macbeth. They want us to teach an excerpt from Act II, Scene 3 and call it a day. It reinforces the incuriosity I’m talking about.

If I successfully teach my students a single thing, it’s the importance of applied curiosity. We live in the Era of Algorithmic Content designed to stifle independent investigation. Our society incentivizes kids to accept and internalize what is given them, not to seek understanding, and that sucks.

I’m not sure which is more concerning: the prospect of SCOTUS overturning Humphrey’s Executor or the prospect of Trump entirely bypassing the issue with political prosecution. Or the very real chance that both occur.

Republicans will talk about ICE officers 'acting in self-defense' like they're wild animals and then expect you to treat them like heroes