Welp… Guess I’m a Terrorist, Now…

Okay… I should probably qualify that title a bit… thanks to my anxiety, I haven’t actually participated in many protests (though I’m working up the courage to actually start participating in more… and I have participated in dialogues and such). Plus, despite realizing that I’m not a pacifist, I’m actually a coward who’s usual reaction to face-to-face conflict is to curl up into the fetal position and cry for Mommy. So… you know…

However, I do support Antifa and consider myself Antifa, and I’m friends and comrades with Antifa. Despite the qualifications above, I am part of it… or at least I try to be…

So… that title? It’s not clickbait.

The DHS has officially classified Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization.

[Read more…]

Spoilers!

Another post from my old blog, from November 28, 2013. I’m very curious if anyone else feels similarly… note that there’s some major editing (consisting of a section being moved up) to make this flow a bit better, as well as an addition.

I remember back when Batfans were getting amped up for The Dark Knight Rises. It was an exciting time. So many rumors and theories and tantalizing glimpses and…

The argument over spoilers gets very heated in pretty much every fandom ever. I think most forums dedicated to a TV show, a character, a book series, an author, a movie franchise, or a comic series has a subforum dedicated to spoilers, and often that forum will have at least one thread dedicated simply to compiling spoilers into one place for easy reference. These same forums will also contain a subforum dedicated to the same discussions about future work, but where spoilers are simply not allowed. And furthermore, even in a spoiler subforum, you still have to provide huge warnings and find a way to hide the spoilers so that people who may want to be surprised don’t have to read those spoilers.

Now, this seems like a great compromise where everyone gets what they want, right? People who enjoy having spoilers get them, and people who hate spoilers are free to avoid them.

This seems perfectly reasonable, doesn’t it?

[Read more…]

Uncomfortable Confession: I Am No Longer a Pacifist

For most of my life, I’ve been a radical pacifist. I believed that violence was literally the very last of last resorts… that violence should only ever be committed by you if, and only if, you are directly being attacked and are directly fighting for your life… and even then, you should commit the barest minimum amount of violence possible, working only to save yourself rather than hurt them.

But then we reached 2012, and Trayvon Martin was murdered by a man who was all but given a ticker tape parade for it, and was acquitted in 2013, sparking #BlackLivesMatter.

And then 2014 rolled around, and Michael Brown and Eric Garner were murdered by the police and there were no consequences.

And then there was 2015, and Baltimore, and I wrote the post White Supremacy and Violence (that’s the original link, not the most recent one with edits, which you can find here). That really should have been my first clue that my pacifism was being challenged, but it wasn’t.

The challenge wouldn’t play out publicly, or even consciously, until much more recently. No, not Richard Spencer getting punched in the face. It was when a preacher got wacked upside the head with an aluminum baseball bat. I found it impossible to feel bad for said preacher, and even wrote it about here on this blog. The reality is that I felt some level of schadenfreude for it, and didn’t, and still don’t, feel bad for that. I could only laugh at the preacher, having felt, and actually still feel, that, while he may not necessarily have deserved an aluminum bat to the head, he absolutely deserved something more than a tongue-lashing.

I went back to being quiet about it, not really thinking about the fact that, after that post, I couldn’t really justify calling myself a pacifist.

[Read more…]