Arielle @skiscratcher@skiscratcher.com

It’s important, if you can, to give the new folks a little bit of grace

They’re coming from the most toxic place on earth, a carefully perfected hate engine

They’re expecting everyone to be horrible to them, for many, that’s all they’ve ever known of online interaction. They’re expecting to be manipulated, dogpiled, and abused.

Some folks will slip into their new place and fit right in, others might be a little feral at first

I’m not saying to ignore abuse or bad behavior, I’m just saying, WE can do a lot to show folks how this place works and what we expect from each other

And remember, they’re coming up from the bottom of a cold crushing sea

There’s a lot of nitrogen still dissolved in their blood, and they might need some time to decompress

The liberal reduction of a mass shooting that resulted from years of escalating genocidal rhetoric and violence towards trans and queer people (made possible by the media and the state) to being simply an issue of gun violence is a fucking insult as far as I’m concerned.

We’ve been sounding the alarm about how we are being actively targeted in organized attacks via social media, mainstream media fear mongering and misinformation about trans healthcare, forced detransition of youth, and more. But liberals want to make this all about guns.

The violence towards us is not a result of individual pathology. It is not dangling outside of history, the accidental result of too lax a weapon’s policy. It is organized, historical. It will not be disappeared by a strategic application of gun law.

Guns are such an easy focus for liberals because casting them as the main *cause* of mass violence allows them to flatten all incidents of mass violence and escape having to question the ways they are connected to and constructed by other forms of social violence in our society.

It allows them to think that the way to solve mass violence is through some bureaucratic adjustments to gun law, rather than having to look at the way that mass shooting is but one expression of a system of violence organized to erase entire groups of people from social life. A system that they are complicit in and regularly benefit from.

In reality, guns are tools. In the hands of reactionaries they are used to strengthen systems of violence. In the hands of the marginalized, they are used as tools of protection from a system of violence that very literally wants us dead.

When you focus on legislating away guns, you engage in the liberal fantasy that gun laws will be applied evenly across all populations. In reality, the reactionaries will, by and large, keep their guns, because they are ultimately allies of the State.

I don’t think guns alone will save us, but I do think that removing tools of protection from marginalized communities who are actively under attack, and telling us it’s for our own good while our enemies remain armed, is NOT what solidarity looks like.

Btw, the enemies that are armed are not only lone reactionaries. But the police also. And I’ve yet to see a single liberal in favor of gun laws be as avid in their desire to apply those laws to the police as well 👀

Regardless, the cause of mass violence will never be as simple as the accessibility of firearms, no matter how much you want it to be. Mass violence against trans and queer people happens because our society is literally organized towards that end.

it is an extra kick in the teeth that today is #TransDayofRemembrance. I am #trans and #gay and very very afraid (I am not in #Colorado). We have been warning about #fascist violence for some time and we NEED #cis people to step the fuck up. Call out those #transphobic "jokes." Don't tolerate #transphobes in your circles. Don't allow it to be normalized one bit. Block and report #TERFs on Mastodon and elsewhere. Educate yourself on the issues. Educate your reachable but ignorant family and friends. Silence and apathy provides fertile ground for #fascism to grow. This is how we die.

huuuuge fan of L Frank Baum’s oz series.
yes give me that fantasy land ruled by a trans communist lesbian princess, inject it into my veins.

less a fan of his call to genocide native americans. that was extremely not cool

oh you like programming languages? name 5 target triples

of course you may or may not be aware of my suggestion for the trans flag:

A shark throwing a brick at a cop

i feel like there’s something there for everyone, especially if you like bricks and sharks

every few weeks im like "Oh, my god, i am gay" all over again

#feditips welcome to the fediverse! leave your irony poisoning, channer shit, and casually ableist, racist, and transphobic "jokes" at the door, I don't want to see it here. thanks!

I'm a masochist and even I'd rather use Rust than C++ at this point

@JoeSondow @arcade I had someone on Twitter shitting on mastodon because it ran on ‘free labor’, as if it was a bad thing

I volunteer to do this shit and pay the $50/mo for it because it is anticapitalist!!! I do not want a profit!!! I do not want compensation!!! I want to fuck over big social media companies and have a SINGLE space online that hasn’t been taken over by capitalism. Ugh.