Notices by timberwraith (timberwraith@mastodon.social), page 5

I have a lot of respect for squirrels because they thrive when everything is completely nuts.

Here is an irony about deeply prejudiced people who firmly believe that oppression and violence against a marginalized group of people are justified:

They tend to see anyone who opposes their bigotry as being prejudiced and bigoted against *them*.

I receive regular versions of "religion is to blame" in my mentions on a regular basis.

I will again remind people that I saw bigotries just as hateful and virulent rise up in the white/cis/het dominated environs of New Atheism, as I did in the nominally christian home that I grew up in.

I'll remind people of the virulent racism, xenophobia, transphobia, and other sundry myriad bigotries that currently flourish in the secular UK.

It's not religion. That's not the problem.

Humans are.

To this day, I still remember white atheists losing their shit over indigenous people in Hawaii opposing putting a new telescope on top of a mountain that is sacred to them.

Lots of particularly racist comments about non-white people and their "superstitions" impeding science.

Hey, you know what? If someone's spiritual beliefs can serve as an organizing force in preventing even more of their home being destroyed by white colonizers' needs and priorities, I don't have problem with that.

I'm going to toss out one more thing on this thread for the other white people in my mentions.

Consider how religion has served as a tool of liberation for non-white people in fighting white supremacy and the maw of colonization.

Now, tell the people who have benefited from using religion as a tool in their liberation from white supremacy's bullshit that their religion is a part of the problem.

Go ahead white atheists. Try that out.

That root of "protect me and mine and fuck the people who are not a part of my family/nation/neighborhood/race/religion/political party/[insert in-group]" runs strong in us and lives at the root of so much of our fuckery.

"I must survive and my group must survive at all costs. Fuck the people not in my group." selfishness drives this.

Stare it in the face and get to know it well. It's the demon we all live with.

The sad thing I have learned in my life is that human beings will reach for *any* tool at their disposal in serving as a means to justify their prejudices and their desire to exploit other human beings.

Whether it's science, religion, philosophy, political/economic theory (that goes just as much for capitalism as it does for its competitors among communism and socialism), or some other systematized perspective, they all can be bent to serve the maw of our desire to hate and exploit others.

I don't think that my liberal college friends in the 1990s ever really understood how deeply white conservative culture (which is most of white culture) turns people into generally awful, petty, mean-spirited miscreants.

I suspect, after nearly a decade's worth of MAGA's public parade of hate and violence, they might have a better understanding of that mess than they did when I was just their token white working class friend from a right wing neighborhood.

Bad culture. Bad people.

I have no surviving friendships with anyone I grew up with.

I don't talk to my blood relations anymore either.

To give you an idea of how bad my hometown was, the one sort of liberal friend I had met in my hometown, who was my roommate in college as well, dropped our friendship after I came out to him.

That place and that culture corrupted nearly everyone who grew up there.

This is a small complaint, tough. I don't really mean to badmouth them. They were the first group of people I had encountered in my very young life who were not deeply bigoted assholes. That was an entirely new experience for me, and as a newly out trans woman, knowing them made my life far easier to live than being around the horrible people from my hometown.

Someone pointed this person out to me today. Y'all might want to add this bigoted piece of refuse to your block lists.

Also, anyone who wants to quibble with this post should probably be added to your block lists, too.

TERFs and other sundry bigots go away. I'm not interested in your defenses of transphobia.

And that first item on their list sounds like a baited sentence that's covering for Islamophobia/anti-Arab/orientalist racism. I've seen racists in atheist spaces use similar phrasing.

[Dawkins] said other children in his school peer group had been molested by the same teacher but concluded: “I don’t think he did any of us lasting harm.”

Since I see a few good quotes from Dawkins popping up, let's look at some of his terrible quotes.

Here's an Islamophobic one:

"Of course you can have an opinion about Islam without having read Qur'an. You don't have to read Mein Kampf to have an opinion about nazism."
— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) March 25, 2013

https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/08/short-history-richard-dawkins-vs-internet/312350/

@FlashMobOfOne Yeah, that does happen and it's a bit stunning when it does, huh?

A group of people have been oppressed/bullied for ages.

A subset of that group of bullied people decide to violently push another group of people off their land and steal that land for themselves.

The second group of people push back with return violence.

The first group of people respond by killing even more of the second group of people and stealing more of their land.

This goes on for decades with the first bullied group gaining even more power and land, and becoming bullies themselves.

There are days when I just want to give up on humankind but I can't bring myself to do that.

Because I already gave up on the species a long time ago.

I know people don't like mastodon.social because the moderation isn't that great around here.

Ironically, at this point, I stay here mainly *because* the moderation isn't that great around here. That leaves me with a sense of security that I'm less likely to have someone's political periscope rammed up my bottom regarding posts that some moderators might censor.

(And yeah, I'm talking about posts that confront the racist bullshit going on with Israel's genocidal war right now.)

I wasn't a human child when I was growing up.

I was an object who was treated like an extension of my father's fragile male ego.

You don't get to be who you are or who you want to be. You get to be what your parent insists on, and if you don't, abuse and suffering are the result.

So, you try to be what they want you to be.

I was his property.

And I'm glad my owner died in 1989.