Cactus Codex

post-cactus:

With the election coming up, I’d like to express one final piece of advice.

Vote with you conscious. Do the research and analysis. Vote for whoever you feel will better run this country and bring it to the future.

Whether it be Clinton’s shadow politics, Trump’s frat-boy revolution, Johnson’s don’t-give-a-shit policy, or Stein’s pandering pile of nonsense. I can’t judge you for wanting the same thing I do.

But given the ridiculous nature of this season, I’d like you to keep your choice in the back of your head. Keep it there for the next four years.

Note your satisfaction with your victory or attempts at such. Note if you ever regretted your choice. If you voted third party, note how your decision affected the turnout of the election. Could something else have been done? Is there still time to fix this?

Maybe there is. So please keep that in mind and good luck.

Edited to remove my rather rude generalization of third-party voters. It was uncalled for, and I apologize.

But on that note, let’s talk about why I don’t believe in third-party power in the US.

Is there a Green in congress? Is there a Libertarian in congress? No, not really. And that’s kinda the point. Third-parties have no power and no backing in the place that really matters. All they do is show up to elections with the futile belief that they’re a good alternative, and then they lose and never get go anywhere until four years later.

Which isn’t to rag on third parties in general, of course. Other countries do them just fine! Why? Because they actually have representatives to back them up

Just look at Canada’s House of Commons. Liberals (red) dominate along with the Conservatives (blue), but look at the NPD (orange) sticking out there. And the row of Bloc Québécois (light blue) members behind them.

The German Bundestag! Look at the distribution! It’s as if people vote for the party that mosts represents them and if enough people desire it, they can get a voice1 And they got alliances and stuff that lets you vote for a minnow party that hooks up with other bigger parties and you get in as a whole!

The Russian State Duma! Sure, the United Russia party makes this look like a single-party state, but you got your Communists and Liberal Democrats in there a bit. And know your political system is fucked when even Russia looks more like a rainbow than your own lower house.

The United States House of Representatives. See the difference?

American third parties don’t exist with regards to who’s making our laws. Sure, plenty of niche parties exist in the countries I just mentioned, but at least you get all the good ones represented in some way. And granted, parliamentary systems elect heads of government in a different way than we do, so there’s also that.

But where does that leave us? Well, if you’re a firm supporter of a third party, that is, you align yourself the most with that party’s platform and policies and wish to see it grow in the potential future, then I wish you good luck. Get motivated. Rally more people year-round instead of only at election time. Build up a consistent and loyal base. And get someone into Congress so it can look a little more colorful.

But if you’re voting third party because you’re bandwagoning on a hatred of having to pick between two lackluster candidates, then I have no respect for you. You really don’t believe in the third party you’ve chosen, and you’ll just abandon them after the election is done and they haven’t won a thing. You remove votes from the race that does matter and skew the results, most likely away from your favor. And you get a pile of nothing but annoyance and possibly regret.

Your message of dissatisfaction gets redirected to a wall because you didn’t win a single electoral vote in the college. Newsflash: the popular vote does not matter in the presidential election (see 1876, 1888, and 2000, years where the college elected a president who lost the popular vote). Win a handful of states, see how that affects the election, then we’ll talk.

Do you believe in your third-party choice for 2016? Prove it. Stay with them, rally with them and don’t ever look back. Protest-vote like you actually mean it.

Otherwise, flip a coin or something for crying out loud.

piratedashmod:

I don’t think the theme I have would allow me to do that.

Or I haven’t figured it out how to do that yet.

Time for a tutorial!

There are two ways to add links to other sites on your blog page.

A) In the Description with HTML (customizable)

You could put a link in the description with the help of HTML stuffs.

The base code is:

<a href=“URL-GOES-HERE”>BUTTON TEXT HERE</a>

Just replace those ALL-CAPS with your URL, and you get a nice little link.

You can also upload a pic somewhere and use that pic as the button for the link. 

The code for that is:

<a href=“TARGET-URL-GOES-HERE”><img src=“IMAGE-LINK-GOES-HERE” alt=“OPTIONAL BUTTON TEXT FOR IF THE IMAGE DOESN’T LOAD”></a>

Different themes will react in different ways to this approach, though.

B) Tumblr’s Redirect Page feature (no weird coding, I guess)

This approach uses what most Tumblr has built in, and that’s pages.

Go to your blog’s theme editor and scroll to the bottom of the options. You’ll see a button called [+ Add a page].

You’ll get a new set of options for a new standard page. Click the dropdown reading [Standard page] and select [Redirect].

Then click on the switch to show a link to this redirect page

And give the link some text. This will be the button to link to another page.

The [/url] box can be filled with anything; it doesn’t really matter most of the time. The [Redirect to] box is for the target URL, or the blog you’re trying to link to. Like such.

Save the page and presto, all done. The button appears on the same bar as your ask and submit buttons.

Hope this helps!

broken-pen-draws:

A fact that often slips by is that Cactus not only is one of the greatest artists that I’ve had the pleasure to meet in the year that I’ve been on Tumblr, but also one of the greatest persons. He’s kind, he cares a lot about his friends, he’s funny and he’s found the perfect way to be modest about his work without being self-deprecating. He works hard on his stories and although he had (and has) to deal with a lot of shit in his life, he doesn’t let any of it acerbate him. Anyone who tries to give him a hard time or put stress on him for not fulfilling their every wish can go eat a prickly dick.

Two years ago, my best friend @broken-pen drew this little paper Belle. At the time I was understandably grateful (and I froke the fuck out because AAAAA IT’S SO CUTE). I’d been thrust into bad places left and right and he along with folks like @chaotic-conundrums and @discordsparkle, they’ve helped me along.

Back in February of this year, I met up with these guys for the first time at Ponycon NYC, along with @laurenbanksart. I had such a fantastic time with them! So much, I didn’t even make a big convention wrap-up post because I was just so excited and overwhelmed by everything.

Really, I can just sum everything up with one pic.

The Paper Belle came along too. Granted, it was kinda left behind because I had left the con after the first day, but it managed to get back to me regardless thanks to Chaos. And all the way from Germany, at that.

Honestly, I don’t think anything can ever top this. Thank you guys so much…

I feel like I’ve broken too many ties. Like I’m running out of options. Or rather just feeling nostalgic about the times when I was bombarded by a bunch of new people.

Is it my fault that I just don’t seem to talk to anyone anymore? Yeah, probably.

Do I want to talk to new people? Yeah, definitely. But I’m still reserved. What if I mess up a fourth time? Sean, Chris, Boulder, and then who’s next? Who will I lose this time?

Who will I offend? Who will I push away? Who will I never talk to because we’re so different?

That anon message from a while back. The one about questioning whether they should still be friends with me. I still think about it everyday. Who could it be? Is it one of the three? Is it someone I still know?…

That message is the realization of my greatest fear. The main driver of my paranoia. People hate me. Everyone hates me. This community is blacklisting me. I just exist to waste space or suck the life out of everyone. I ruin everything I touch. I’ll never be happy. And I’ll never be in touch with friends for the rest of my life.

I’m so tired of having this dictate my life. I’m tired of pretending that I’m happy with this status quo. I’m tired of being ignored and being so shy and being so reserved. I hate that stupid message. I want to change.

So I might as well start by just acknowledging everything that’s wrong with me. Confront the demons and all that jazz.

One day I’ll be as strong as I want to be. Comfortable in my own skin. Surrounded by people I love. The fears and depression all but a distant memory. My time on this site ending with fanfare, with a future to look forward to.

Maybe that’s why I’m still so engaged with FiM. Why I must insist keeping PC going. It keeps me going, too.

So while today I feel like shit over bad memories, blocked contacts, and general mopiness, hopefully one day it’ll all be past me.

facts-i-just-made-up:

Serious post, if you want comedy, ignore.

Ever notice how on massive posts with hundreds of thousands of notes, most of the time the blogs that started them mouse-over as deactivated?

That’s not because they’re old. It’s not because they’re even that controversial. It’s because once they get a post up to a hundred thousand notes, no matter what its content, they’re fucking FLOODED with hate mail.

I have around ten posts that big. Two of them at just under half a million. And I pay for it. In addition to the hate mail from my regular posts, maybe one letter for every five hundred notes, I still get hate mail for things I posted in 2012. It’s hard to tell sometimes what comes from what, other times it’s clearer. As one of those huge posts is a bunch of people asking to see my dick, it’s pretty clear when I get new requests what caused it. Every time that post gets bumped by a large blog, I get a couple dozen lewd requests of varying degrees of aggression.

This is the best thing that ever happened to me.

Growing up, I was extremely shy. I didn’t figure it all out until recently but I was shy because I was quite heavily abused. Not by any adult, but the things my “friends” did to me left me not only chemically incapable of feeling happiness, but so psychologically deranged that I could not understand compliments. I could not understand that they were anything but the set up for something mean to happen. I could not understand that anything good could happen on its own and not as a prelude to something cruel. For most of my life, I was unnaturally introverted because I was afraid of people. Terrified of them, especially the friendly ones.

I’m not like that any more. Now I’m probably known on tumblr as one of the most loud-mouthed silly braggarts ever. As recently as six years ago, I was not capable of speaking positively about myself. I could not, for fear alone, say anything good about myself. Or even think it. It went beyond anxiety, it was outright terror. So what changed?

I got fuckloads of hate mail.

And with every letter, a little bit of me died. Not the way people usually mean that. The part that died was the fear. Because everything bad I feared happened to me here. Everything I was scared to hear, I was told a hundred times. And in time, it all became as meaningless as background noise like a waterfall or rain. Years of being harassed here have so desensitized me to my old nemesis that it lost all power. 

And that was before the book. When the book came out, I advertised it heavily and knew a new level of ceaseless rage from the tumblr community. From death threats to some of the most disturbing sexual messages ever to worse, I got it all and thank the blog gods I was desensitized enough to take it and reply with some solid snark. And I was lucky enough to notice that when I replied with snark, book sales rose. In time, I began to enjoy getting hatemail because it always boosted book sales.

My outlook on the constant verbal abuse of this site is very different now. It’s a tool. When people threaten and berate you, they’re giving you clay to sculpt with. You can sculpt a needle into your own heart or you can sculpt a hammer to bash their heads in. The amazing thing is, you get to choose which. It doesn’t seem like it sometimes, it seems too hard to do, it seems too cruel to shape into anything useful. But we’re not kids anymore. We don’t have to take it and absorb it. We can all use it here. There is nothing tumblr can do to you that you can’t grow strong on, and happy on.

So that’s my advice to the person I’m writing this out for. A good friend who is a damn good writer, who is afraid of what will happen when she posts her first poems on this cruel and vicious platform.

You can hide your works and never change. But I know you want to change. I know you don’t want to be afraid anymore. This is how it begins. Yes, you will get hate mail. They will tell you your poetry sucks. You cannot control them. But you have absolute control over what you make of their bullshit. There are abuses that you cannot transmute. That post saying “Nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent” is a lie. People can do some pretty fucked up shit to each other. But on tumblr there’s a limit. The cruelest shit this site can muster isn’t squat compared to the pettiest playground bullying. It’s the internet. You’ve survived so much in the real world, this site, no matter how mean it looks, it about as practically effective as a declawed kitten with no teeth. You can let it do its worst and you won’t get a scratch.

Sure, the hatemail still bites. So if you put yourself and your poetry out there and you get hurt, come to me and I’ll teach you what to do. How to sculpt beauty from that ugly clay. That goes for anyone reading this. But the truth is you don’t even need me. You’ll figure it out if you only try.

Those deactivated blogs, thousands of them, tens of thousands, those people aren’t weak. I think no less of anyone who leaves this often toxic blogging platform. Some people just don’t need this in their lives. But I know you do, and if anyone else has read this far, they know it too. The rewards of posting your work, publishing it for all to see, taking the hate and the love and trust me, people WILL love what you post the way so many have loved mine- Are incomparable.

You have so much fun ahead of you. You have nothing to fear. So post what you’re afraid to post. Jump in the water, and soon you’ll swim, and when the sharks come for you we’ll kick their butts together.

Metaphorically I mean, sharks don’t have butts.

(via adurot)

conspicuouslad:

adurot:

conspicuouslad:

refinery29:

Yet Another Stat That Proves The Male Gamer Stereotype Is A Farce

With new data from a Pew Research Center survey, we know that women play an even bigger role in the gaming community. Of the 40% of Americans who own a video game console, 42% are women and only 37% are men.

READ MORE

I’m really confused by this because none of these numbers add up to 100

Well the pie chart is males under 18 vs females over 18, so I can see where that and the race one can have additional categories they’re not showing, but the main male v female one only adding up to 79% definitely makes me wonder what they’re not showing.

A pie chart implies it is representing a whole, not 53%, and not comparing two sides that don’t make sense to be compared. Women over 18 vs. Boys under 18? Why?

And the race one adds up to 127% so are they saying that 39% of white people play games?

No damn sense, any of it.

Awww yeah, time for some research.

Long post incoming. [Link to the Pew Survey]

Long post incoming. [Link to the Pew Survey]

Here’s a chart grabbed from Pew’s survey, the source of that infograph above. The numbers aren’t meant to fill up a whole 100% because the percentages aren’t divisions of the 40% of all people who own a console. They’re actually tied to the demographic itself.

45% of Hispanics in the survey owned a console. 42% of women in the survey owned a console. 56% of the 18-29 age group in the survey owned a console. And etc.

That’s how you’re supposed to read it. Not as “42% of the adults who own a console are women” like OP implied.

Dumb math after the break.

Keep reading

Guh. This Wi-Fi Sense crap is confusing when the argument for it doesn’t tell me exactly how it works. So I took the liberty of reading an FAQ about it and well, here we go.

You invite a Skype friend over to your house, covered with a Wi-Fi connection with a password the length of the Articles of Confederation.

Both of you have Windows 10 devices, doesn’t matter which kind.

You want to share you network access with your buddy without having to dig out that dumb post-it. So here’s where Wi-Fi Sense comes to work.

You have to turn it on yourself. Then allow it to share the network you’re connected to to your contacts (Skype, Outlook, Facebook). So what happens now? Here’s the iffy part:

The password is sent to a Microsoft server in an encrypted file (so they say :v). Then they send it (still encrypted and over a secure connection, so they say :v) to your buddy’s devices.

If your friend has Wi-Fi Sense on and allows it to connect to a network shared with Sense, and also is in range of said network, then they can connect without needing to copy your password. Just to note, they’re only given internet access. Any locally shared files or printers on your net are still invisible.

If you turn Sense off, then the password stops streaming around and your friends can no longer connect.

So in short.

Yes, you’re sharing your password with people you choose with Wi-Fi Sense turned on and activated. And also with Microsoft itself. The password is supposedly encrypted so neither party theoretically can’t see it.

Compare it to typing your password into a login screen. That text is, hopefully, encrypted and sent over the air to the company’s servers and responds back with access granted. Only this time, it’s giving approved people access, namely your friends, if they’re around.

Again, only with people you choose and only if you turn it on. None of this “sharing with absolutely everyone behind your back” sensationalism.

It’s pretty darn convenient if you ignore the whole middleman thing. If any of this makes you feel a little uneasy, then perhaps you should turn it off.

So I’ve heard that some people have had bad experiences with upgrading to Windows 10. Namely, the computer just refused to boot after the thing restarted during the upgrade, a sign that their hard drives were probably nuked to hell.

Well, this just happened to my dad.

But, not all was what it seemed! I think the upgrade messed with some crucial partition table stuff and just made it look like all was lost. But after digging in with a recovery tool, it turned out that the drive wasn’t wiped and the upgrade was merely unfinished.

Perhaps the same happened to those people or anyone you know.

If your computer refused to boot up after restarting once for the upgrade to Windows 10, this might help you out.

1. Download the Media Creation Tool for Windows 10 for your architecture. System Info should tell you if you’re on 32-bit or 64-bit.
2. Run the MCT and select “Create installation media for another PC” and click “Next.”
3. Choose your language, any edition (you’re not installing anything) and your architecture.
4. Have an empty flash drive ready and plug it in. Select “USB flash drive” and select your flash drive on the next screen. After that, a W10 installation file will download onto your drive.
5. When that’s done, take the flash drive and plug it into the plagued computer and turn that on. Some may boot automatically into the USB drive, or require a keystroke to show a boot menu (F12 in my case). If you get a boot menu up, look for the option labeled USB and select it.
6. When booted into the USB drive, a Windows 10 installation screen will pop up. Select your language and continue. Do not click “Install now”. Instead, click on “Repair your computer.”
7. In the “Choose an option” screen, click on “Use another operating system.” It should be there if all is well. If not, then RIP.
8. Finally, click on “Windows 10.” Or “Windows Rollback” if you figured all of this was just plain old ridiculous.

Voila! The upgrade should resume and the world has not ended! (and you also have a neat recovery flash drive in case other things go awry.)

samrosemodblog:

Okay, so reading the actual Law as it’s written in legalese, I even MORE think people on Tumblr are freaking out over nothing. To TL;DR it in human speak, it says along the lines of:

• If you want to make a work based on something you find on the internet (Let’s say a drawing on DA), then you have to TRY and find the copyright holder. Not just a “Google search, do I find them? Nope! This is mine now” but like, a DETECTIVE level search for them.
  
• This means E-mails, websites they are on, usernames they go by, addresses, phone numbers, the works. You HAVE to TRY and find the Owner of that work.
• Then and ONLY THEN can you file a copyright for it to make it yours.
• BUT IF THEY ARE USING THAT PROPERTY, AND YOU’RE JUST UNDER A DIFFERENT NAME, then you can still file for Infringement because you have been posting the same content and still have full copyright on your work.
• This literally means you have to basically be dead, go completely dark, or not care at all for someone to take a piece of work you posted up and make it their own.
• The other half is about pieces of work that have so many people help make it literally no one knows who has copyright on what.
• Example: Slenderman. 1 guy on a Forum made the original pictures. Marble Hornets then made a popular Youtube series that added to that lore. Slender: The Arrival then made collecting pages popular. Various other people added Proxies, and Symbols, and new characters, etc, etc
• In the case of this, they want to Create an organization where all of those Copyright holders can choose to be a part of it or not, and you all get compensation if someone comes along and decides to use part of your idea.
• Literally no one will be able to just casually steal your ideas or your copyrights and they’re not being ‘flushed down the toilet’ as a popular image is showing.

So yeah, basically as far as I can tell Tumblr is upset over basically nothing. They think the scary legal speak is saying “Gov’munt gonna come and steal mah baby!” when in actuality the new Copyright bill is about giving the people the ability to create projects out of things that either no one cares about/owns anymore anyway, or so many people are part of the project that it’s just easier to split the compensation anyway.

If you have specific examples from the law itself that proves me wrong, then by all means feel free to correct me, but otherwise it’s all just mass hysteria, as per usual on this website.

discordsparkle:

some-gamer-girl:

discordsparkle:

thelakeiswatchingyou:

elionking:

thisisnotlatino:

thisisnotlatino:

tsuki-nekota:

THANK YOU

For the pinche güeros who keep saying, “this is America, speak English!”

ADD THE CARIBBEAN YOU POTATO!!!

But America isn’t a continent…
North America and South America are two separate continents…
I understand what you’re saying but….

dude why was this never explained to me in school i feel like such a moron

The continents were never explained to you in school? What the hell kind of school did you go to?

probably my school because my school said the country was the contenent, either that or the school never understood

So there are people who think Obama is the leader of the entire Western Hemisphere then?

Yay, fun post!

Okay, the North/South vs. One America deal is mostly a cultural and regional thing that can’t really be solved.

Historically, “American” referred to the natives of the New World back in the 1500s. In English, the word narrowed its scope down to the British American people (Britain’s colonial territory). Then the U.S. was brewing, and it was really the British who called us Americans to start with. The name stuck because they all spoke English, lived in an English-ruled zone, and it just did.

Another English quirk? It’s commonly taught that there’s 7 continents, including the North and South Americas, inhabited by North Americans and South Americans.

So using the sole “Americans” as the U.S. demonym had and has no conflict in that respect. If you speak English and live in the States, you can rightfully call yourself an American.

Besides, it’s not like there’s any alternatives. United-Statian? That’s a mouthful and it just sounds terrible. Uniters? That sounds overly patriotic and would makes the rest of the world angry(ier). Yankee? Well that could work, but with in the States themselves, yankees are New-Englanders.

The Spanish-speaking world has you covered, though. Their 6-continent model says what OP just showed: one America. Anyone living on that continent are “americanos.”

A person from the U.S. (or E.E.U.U.) is called estadounidense. Literally “united-statesian” but in a better form.

Really, no one uses this term in informal conversation. If someone sees a white guy in the streets of Lima talking with an apparent American accent, he’s americano. Even if he’s actually Canadian.

I mean, it’s not wrong to start with. It’s like a pun. :U

Fun Fact: Mexico’s official name is The United Mexican States. Technically, they can claim the estadounidense word for themselves. But that leaves EEUU with nothing to use, so they’re just mexicanos. In English, this works out pretty nicely:

United States of America => Americans
United Mexican States => Mexicans

Case in point, stop whining about this. There’s no right way or wrong way from a universal standpoint. The differences come from two radically different cultures and regions with their history and sorts. Just use the term your environment uses. Most of the western world calls us Americans anyways. :P

Click for a source and more info.

(Source: adoniramleon)

I feel like my indifference towards video games is becoming steadily more detrimental.

I knew that it already was to start with because it was the primary factor in me not socializing with other people online and trying to make friends. Like, when they start discussing Pokemon or Animal Crossing or anything else, I just kinda fade into the background and listen in, trying to make sense of it all. Of course, when the discussion goes back to pony, I jump back in because that’s all I have going for me. It’s literally preventing me from making new friends.

Which I guess isn’t too bad, considering that I already have my own group of best buddies.

But now I’m seeing that not knowing much about games is forcing me to distance myself from people I’m already friends with. Because again, it’s a limiter. I obviously can’t stick to pony all the time, but at the time being it’s the only thing I can do. So I just don’t say anything. I fade into the background again.

And I’m suddenly intimidated and afraid to talk to them. Like I’m meeting them for the first time over and over again and it makes me an anxious wreck.

And the solution is so simple! I could just buy a fucking 3DS, get some games, and get into them. Immerse myself for the first time in my life. But then I ask, what if I can’t? I’ve never fully focused on an any video game in the span of 18 years, how can that possibly change now?

What if I’m doomed to lose everyone I know and love all because I’m becoming stagnated, annoying, and obsolete?

yours-yearly-sweetie-belle:

Sweetie Belle: We’ve had a lot of fun and it was a really great year. And I feel like we’ve never been closer to getting our cutie marks!

suddenlyinfomercial:

screenshotsofdespair:

This is a bad sign.

the fucking ghost error message floating in the sky

(via discordsparkle)

(Source: the-lizard-hunter-sociopath, via zerojanitor)

morphine-dementia:

cyanwrites:

lediableaquatre:

pookaglamour:

stirringwind:

spookyunity:

stirringwinds:

that imo is “American privilege”- it’s a problem here on tumblr. Like yeah, to my American followers, I know lots of you try to learn and I wouldn’t generalise to say all Americans do this- but there’s a big problem especially amongst popular social justice blogs here.

What is very disturbing about the tumblr social justice discourse is that a lot of popular US social justice bloggers like to splatter the US categorisation of race and understanding of racism over the rest of the world. Race, and racism- are both social creations. Therefore, it only makes sense that they can vary from society to society. Here are some issues:

1. Things like insisting that white people cannot face racism in the world. I’m sorry, but I can tell you that’s BULLSHIT in Europe, at least. How people are othered operates differently sometimes. It’s pretty obvious I have Chinese ancestry, for example, but I speak fluent English. That often makes me seem more assimilated and less of an “Other” in the UK, than the immigrant worker from Poland whose accent is plainly obvious. Do Chinese people face racism in the UK? I’m sure they do sometimes.

• But my point is that the way xenophobia and hostility is targeted isn’t always based on skin colour. The Holocaust, the Nazis’ deliberate starvation and mistreatment of Soviet soldiers, the genocide of Bosnians by Serbians are all instances where genocide was committed against people who WOULD be racialised as “white” in the US, who were genetically European. I will seriously throttle anyone who dares to suggest no racism is involved or tries to literally posthumously say claim the victims are “POC” to fit their narrative that global oppression is “White people oppressing POC!!!” ( E.g “Bosnians were not really white because they were Muslims.” WRONG. Genetically they are Slavic people- like Russians, Ukrainians…and Serbians themselves). There was more about cultural otherness, religious divisions at play here, about Serbian nationalism really, rather than seeing Bosnians as “less white”.

Bosnian Muslims in concentration camps in the 1990s 

• The experiences of “white people” are far from universal AND they can be very familiar with racism, oppression and marginalisation. I mean like try telling a recent Russian immigrant to the US who was descended from Russian serfs that he has MORAL RESPONSIBILITY for slavery in the US? Geez. Yes, maybe he’d benefit from “white privilege” but to say his ancestors benefited from it would be nonsensical when they were getting similarly abused by landowners in the 1800s Imperial Russia. Please tell me how a US POC is necessarily always more familiar with oppression than a Polish person or German whose family lived under Soviet authoritarianism right up till 1989, who lived in fear of the Stasi, aka the East German secret police?

An extremely privileged, white Russian serf girl listening as two landowners bargain over how much they want to pay for her.

• This is an example of ridiculous mental gymnastics to maintain the “White people oppress POC!!!” paradigm.

Haha, ok. So this person (it’s a US blogger) has proclaimed Ashkenazim are not white. Alright, how about some…experts? Like real Ashkenazi Jewish people?

• How about this other Jewish person’s opinion? 

• See? The “wtf Ashkenazim aren’t white they will slap you” person was American-splaining (yes, they are American) European race categories with clearly a US-centric understanding of race and subconscious failure to realise for Ashkenazi Jewish people, the definition of whiteness CAN FLUCTUATE in the US vs Europe. I understand that how Jewish people conceptualise identity can vary and may not fall neatly into “whiteness” or “non-white”. But the quarrel I have with that comment is because it’s obvious that person completely refused to countenance the notion that those people murdered in the Holocaust could be “white” because they don’t want to think about the complexity of racism around the world, they just want to perpetuate the narrative that racism globally is “white people oppress POC!!!” And that’s wrong, if you are gonna distort and step on other victims’ experiences for your own ends, no matter how noble your own cause is.

• (Btw, MANY Ashkenazi Americans identify and do look “white” in the US.) Genetically, studies show they’ve enormous amounts of European ancestry because it seems European Jewish communities were formed from constant intermarriage with European women for CENTURIES, before they started to marry within the community. Just imagine how minimal their non-European heritage might be by then- 80% of Ashkenazim can trace their maternal line to prehistoric Europe. See why oversimplifying Nazi racism as “less-white” is kind of a wrong paradigm to understand it? And how it’s kind of wrong if you are so insistent on denying “white people” can face racism when we are not talking about neo-Nazis saying “white genocide!!!” about immigration, but real crimes against people?

2. “POC” cannot be racist. Sure. I’m laughing. I guess it wasn’t racism AT ALL when officers in the Imperial Japanese Army said they saw Chinese people as “subhuman”. When one of my family’s most awful experience of imperialism was under the Empire of Japan during World War 2. Where Chinese people were buried alive and experimented on. Young men executed en masse. Women forced to become “comfort women” (aka forced prostitution) to service the Imperial Japanese Army. So, my teenage grandmother bound her chest, cut her hair and rubbed her face with ash- and spent the entire time disguised as a boy in order that she wouldn’t be raped. All war crimes the Japanese government doesn’t want to apologise for even till today.

How about the fact that the people of a group who were victimised at one point can also have racist and discriminatory policies themselves?

And hurt their OWN people too?

Purges during the Chinese “Cultural Revolution”.

• So, saying “POC” cannot be racist (or oppressive in general) is offensive precisely because it lets governments who haven’t apologised off the hook. Because, hooray, all racism and oppression only comes from what is the US understanding of “white people” (European origin?) ! How about Ottoman Turkey’s genocide of 1 million+++ Armenians, Greeks and Assyrians? (Greeks! “White” victims at the hands of “non-white” people? I know, shocking, but it has happened. Also, it’s another debate whether Turkey can be so easily be considered “non-European”.) Hideous things like forced death marches to the desert. If what the white settlers did to the Native Americans is genocide, what the Ottoman Empire did to their Christian subjects sure as hell is genocide too. Like you know what, yes I’m glad Turkey criticises Israel for its policies towards Palestinians which indeed look like ethnic cleansing- but at the same time…I think, “what about you? When are YOU going to admit those 1 million people were murdered because you wanted to exterminate them?”

Wanna bet that anon earlier doesn’t know who this guy is? He’s Mehmet Talaat Pasha btw, Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire and chief architect of the Armenian genocide.

• How about the “Death Railway”, where plenty of “white” POWS died working in conditions of near slavery building a railway line for the Empire of Japan, treated no better than the Asian labourers working alongside them?

• How about things like this, happening right now? 

• That’s why the term “POC” doesn’t speak much of solidarity to me with that kind of history. Outside the US…it’s very often meaningless. In Europe, it’s already problematic because it obscures inter-European racism, and in countries where non-European people are a majority, some of the worst things we have suffered were by the hands of other “POC”. And that is exactly why the term “POC” and the entire “white people oppress POC” dichotomy SHOULD NOT be indiscriminately spilled all over non-US contexts and pre-US history.

3. If you’re an American person of colour, I’m going ask you, as a non-American and fellow non-white person, to think twice about trying to claim solidarity with all non-white people around the world and blaming all problems like modern capitalism and exploitation on “White supremacy”. Because that is not true, because that is a shameful abdication of recognising our moral culpability in other forms of oppression.

• Like…US POCs, imo, are quite culpable in US foreign policy imperialism. How can they not be? Many do benefit from America’s political hegemony over the world even if within their country they’re less privileged than white Americans and still face discrimination. But vis a vis some poor person in another country about to be trampled by the boot of US foreign policy, they are privileged. Many US POCs serve in the US Army. The President is a person of colour.

• One cannot claim equivalency in marginalisation with the Pakistani man whose family was killed in a mistargeted drone strike- because you are a US citizen. Just as I can’t claim I’m somehow as oppressed by capitalist exploitation as those Chinese villagers whose water supply got poisoned by factories making goods for the MNCs. Because although my great grandparents were poor Chinese who left China amidst the strife caused by the Opium Wars, I am not them. I had an infinitely more privileged upbringing, because I am a consumer in the developed world and actually on the other side- the side that in many ways enables oppression. My hands may be clean vis a vis white supremacy, but they ARE NOT when it comes to the way the developing world is exploited. Are wealthy Chinese businesspeople who mistreat their workers free of moral blame?

Are these people

as underprivileged or institutionally oppressed as these?

Are these two’s experiences, privilege and power

EXACTLY the same as these rural Kenyan kids- who are happy that they now have access to clean running water?

(Yes, Kenya and the African continent as a whole have made great strides. But it is a fact that these children face more challenges and have fewer opportunities and are much less privileged than most Americans.)

NO.

Just because we have been wronged by others in the past doesn’t mean we may not be hurting others now, and that we don’t have a responsibility to stop it. 

It is one thing to talk about your own experiences and raise awareness about the injustices you face. That is great and should be supported. But it is another to step on other victims so your narrative of oppression is the loudest and drowns them all out. Oppression is not a contest, and we can talk about our experiences in SOLIDARITY with one another, recognising that throughout human history, racism and oppression has worn MANY faces around the world- not just white ones.

Lol no white peoplecannot face racism nice try though

Did you even read my post? I’m guessing not.

Racism is a dynamic between oppressor and oppressed, and yes there is no “reverse racism”, but there are places where other faultlines beyond skin colour exist. Which means people you like to homogenously lump together as “white” actually don’t see themselves uniformly. Just like the Japanese sure as hell didn’t see we Chinese as “yay Eastasians!” during WW2 when they massacred 300,000 people of my ethnic group in Nanking, or how the Rwandan Hutu extremists saw Tutsi as “cockroaches” even though they were both African, even though plenty of Hutu-Tutsi marriages had taken place before the genocide. Unlike the Americas, in Europe, where because a lot of people there are white, other stuff like language, culture, history and geopolitics actually often becomes used as an excuse to murder entire groups of people.

Clearly, you know more about what is or isn’t racism than the law enforcement, than people like the British police- who have dealt with everything from neo-Nazis to attacks on black African immigrants to attacks on Muslims. It’s not like they have the statistics to know there is systemic racism against Poles to arrive at this conclusion or something. It’s not like they’ve had responded to numerous reports of anti-Polish graffiti. It’s not like they know recently, a man got beaten up by 15 people outside a London pub, who yelled “go back to Poland!”

Clearly, your assessment that white people cannot face racism is more correct than the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia, which held that the Srebrenica massacre of Bosnians in the 1990s was genocide. Clearly, you know more typing on your blog than these people trained in international law and the genocide convention, than the witnesses who actually dug up all the bodies of the victims in their mass graves.

Clearly, what the Greeks experienced at the hands of the Ottoman Empire- forced death marches, massacres, summary executions, forced removal from their lands and destruction of the Christian religious symbols was not racism at all. Because, their magical white skin protects them from experiencing racism, and the fact that they were followers of a minority religion in an Islamic country and a minority ethnic group without much institutional power is totally irrelevant.

Clearly, this Czech Jewish girl, with blonde hair and fair skin, must definitely be a POC since she was murdered in the Holocaust. Her name is Hana Brady, btw. Unless you want to say the Holocaust wasn’t about racism, about Nazi Aryanism. Because racism is only the US flavour of white vs POC, because other forms like Aryanism don’t exist. Nevermind how often the Nazis called Jewish people “vermin” and “subhuman” and an “inferior race” and the Holocaust a “purification” of Germany.

Clearly, white people cannot face racism even though the Holocaust is an internationally-recognised genocide. Because you say so. Or are European Jewish people all “POC”? Hmm? This is amazing. I’m glad the most major genocide in the 20th century wasn’t about racism after all. Humans aren’t so bad after all!

You may also want to share your amazing findings with historians, human rights lawyers and legal scholars regarding the way the Nazis  deliberately starved and abused Soviet POWs to the extent 60% died in custody, compared to less than 5% for British and Americans. Cos, y’know, they think it is genocide. Cos historians know about Generalplan Ost, and how the Nazis elaborated how they intended to exterminate Eastern Europe of Slavic people to increase German living space.

Or alternatively, you may wanna tell these Russian soldiers that you have just discovered they are not white after all, that they are POC, since racism cannot happen to white people.

Or you can do the easy thing which is to take off your American-centric lens, realise there is a whole different world outside the US and Canada, and recognise that racial Othering and discrimination doesn’t always function based on skin colour differences.

This is absolutely perfect. Most of tumblr is fixated on the specific race relations of the US which they then apply to everyone everywhere regardless of fact or how those nations are

Shit,it’s blatant in daily life when I have to explain to people exactly why the assumption of nationality of East Asians can be horrendously offensive and messy. I have Chinese ancestry, I have learned some Japanese. In order to practice, I used Japanese in a Japanese restaurant. The proprietor was all smiles until upon her asking if my features were from a Japanese ancestor, I replied no, actually I’m Chinese. She immediately flipped to icy and rude.

My European ancestry is mostly Polish and none of the came to America until the mid 1930’s, yet I have had fun chats about white responsibility for slavery when my family had no involvement. (Except on the Jamaican side which uh…well they obviously weren’t the oppressors there.)

The American experience of race and oppression is utterly alien in other places.

Jews being POC is one of tumblr’s most damaging inventions because it is turning the Holocaust, which is a “european” based atrocity, because it dealed with a European background that involves religion, sociability, and European based prejudices (basically, Jews had been discriminated in European societies long before any definitions of whiteness came along - So OBVIOUSLY the problem goes much farther than that). And people turn it into a white kills POC dicothomy to fit IN AN AMERICAN PARADIGME OF OPPRESSION. Do you see how wrong this is? You’re appropriating the suffering of those people to fit into your society although it’s not the same at all. Do you people not understand that the world doesn’t function according to your society? That there was for ages actually slavery and division between black people and white people in the US and that is something that the European countries never experienced in a large scale? Even the countries that had colonies enforced those systems back in the colonies. For instance, Portugal was the first country to actually abolish slavery in their Continental territory in the 18th century. You know why? BECAUSE IT MADE NO DIFFERENCE. There were really no numbers of significant slaves in Continental Portugal, most people who lived in CP never had to deal with that reality. So the European society in this case (not to mention Asia, which I won’t speak of because I don’t know) is completely different from the basis on which the American society was formed. Therefore, the prejudices are going to be different. It’s really not DIFFICULT.

As a non-American, I’m pretty damn tired of American-splaining. >___>

Thank you.

I would also like to point out how Russia wrecked havoc on Eastern Europe (which was definitely white). Labor camps and gulags. Purging the brightest minds, you name it. Here’s but one country’s example. The effects of it can still be felt now. But nobody talks about it, of course.