As someone who has personally had to take those calls, they do matter. It just doesn’t matter what you say in the call: the only way your calls actually reach the politician is a tally sheet of each call received on different topics. End of the day/week, the politician gets told “you had X many calls about people wanting you to do this, Y many calls about people wanting you to do this, etc.”
Individual calls matter little, but if they get tons of calls on one topic then they take it seriously. The example above was probably during a time where the office was flooded with so many calls at once that they took the phones off the hook, which actually means that calls are working especially well. When the phones are blowing up, everyone in the office notices.
The best call to your representative does not involve you making an impassioned and well-argued case, because you’re probably talking to an intern. The most effective call you can make takes 15 seconds: “I am from [place in your district] and I am very pissed about [topic].”
OI. PEOPLE IN THE THREAD. CAN WE REBLOG THIS VERSION PLEASE. DON’T STOP MAKING CALLS.
But also as another person further up says, don’t let your activism start and stop with phone calls either.
saw a thing recently about how callin ppl “y’all” and “folks” is becoming cringe. buddy you can pry those terms of address from my cold dead hands, they’re the only thing keeping me from calling everyone “honeybee”
at least if i die on this hill i’ll go to y’allhalla
Doing research for a thing everyone reblog or reply and tell me what you would do with your time if you didn’t have to work. Like if you suddenly got enough passive income to live a comfortable middle class life and you didn’t have to do a single thing to get it, what would you do all day?
If you think your answer is embaraseing anon it to me.
the queer community was formed by people who were deemed strange and abnormal in society based on them not conforming to expectations about sexuality & gender. there are no specific boundaries bc this isn’t a club. a cishet guy that likes wearing dresses who fights side by side with us for true liberation, is 100x more queer than a millionaire gay man who’s besties with companies that sell us watered down versions of our own culture for profit during pride while donating to homophobic lawmakers every other month.
i’m gonna say this again because it really pissed some people off: yes, I would rather have a cishet GNC man who stands with queer people, is involved in our spaces and our culture, stands up for us when we are attacked, and is active in furthering queer liberation, than a rich gay man who spits on the lower-class queers who gave him the ability to be out, who sells his soul to corporations who couldn’t give less of a shit about us, just for the wealth and power of capitalism. Fuck that guy. I’m not saying he isn’t gay - he is! Nothing can take that away! But we have the saying “not gay as in happy but queer as in fuck you” for a reason. The family-friendly gay millionaire isn’t my brother. The poor crossdresser who has been a part of this community since it’s inception is. Fuck your bootlicking bullshit.
Hemitite is an iron ore material that is incredibly brittle since it’s iron rock.
It breaks because it is made thin as a ring and any decent pressure on it snaps it.
Not because of negative vibes
In other words:
The guy that made ‘em
I work at a rock shop, we have had these boys forever but due to some tik tok trend last week we have been getting people just comming in and rushing for the bands. Not to mention when they are like “man i hope yours does not break” and I tell them they are fragile and you should be careful with them they get angry with me since the only way the can possibly break is by vibes alone and not jusy throwing your hand down on a table too hard.
The entire population of Sweden getting collectively called out on twitter is funny as hell so far because every single tweet by a Swedish person is either like “first of all being racist is my cultural heritage…” or it’s “god, finally, I’ve been trying to tell everyone for years that my country is full of assholes”
Oh I guess this didn’t spill over enough to tumblr so this is what happened:
There was a twitter thread asking people about their weirdest encounters with someone else’s cultural practices.
Someone said that when they were just a child, they visited with a Swedish family who made them stay in another room while they ate meals and didn’t offer them any food or snacks.
This picked up lots of responses like “wait, what? That happened to me too but I just thought this one family were freaks???”
I don’t need to tell most people why most reactions to this were positively aghast that anyone anywhere expects guests to either bring their own food or just suffer.
The thread truly exploded only when some Swedes not only admitted to it but got defensive about it, calling it selfish and childish to expect food as a guest. Yes even from personal friends and yes even as children, because you should apparently actually be grateful enough that you’re even allowed in someone else’s home at all.
Other Swedish citizens chimed in to say they feel like they’re in the minority for having any concept of sharing or giving in general and that their other Swedish friends keep track of every cent they owe them for every little thing.
Immigrant and racial minority Swedes began to add that the whole “be grateful you’re even allowed here” attitude is how they’re treated everywhere they go just for existing.
From there, a whole lot of discussion, again mostly from people living there, about how Sweden has a cutesy, harmless image to most of the world only because its leadership and media work so hard to downplay its true prevalence of active white supremacy and hardcore nationalism.
“#swedengate” starts trending.
Sweden is being cancelled like it’s a celebrity and every Swede who gets upset about it just immediately demonstrates exactly what was being criticized in the first place:
Actually this part in itself is not funny at all. It’s just funny how many of them had to lock or delete their accounts like they genuinely thought these were normal things to say.
I hate how white people invented the we don’t owe each other anything mindset
its a leftover from the mindset we got after food scarcity got so big in 1945 we had to eat plant bulbs and 30k people starved to death in one winter. expecting someone else to feed your kid is seen as pretty rude & especially if you leave the other parent with extra food that the kid wont eat now because thats wasted food. it might seem weird, but thats where its from
If you’re invited over for dinner then yeah ofc you’re being fed but dutch people tend to buy and cook exactly how much they need and no extra. we usually dont make extra dinner and eat that as leftovers the next day because we only eat warm food once a day
so if youre coming over unexpectedly and expect to stay over for dinner either you get told no or everyone goes hungry because youre getting a plate of scraps from other people’s plates which is awkward af and then no one gets enough food. youre usually expected to leave before dinner anyway if youre not invited
don’t know how to tell you this but plenty of peoples’ ancestors suffered famines without becoming multi generational assholes
ashfkdhsf that comment though lmao if im visiting in ireland its literally more rude for me to refuse food - to the point of being almost impossible, you gotta take something or ur insulting their hospitality. but no sure famine made yous Like That haha
Meanwhile my friends got vaguely alarmed when my parents wouldn’t stop trying to fill up their plates and make them drink more tea and “are you sure you don’t need a top up?” Gots to feed them guests, otherwise they may report you are bad hosts and we Can’t Have That XD
“We found these visitors at church, so we’re going to share dinner with them” was also a regular thing. I’m sitting in my PJs and my parents roll in with random strangers to feed like a cat bringing in a mouse.
Just a friendly reminder that on this godforsaken website you can and should do the following few things that involve going into your settings:
1: Under Dashboard, disable Best Stuff First, Include Stuff In Your Orbit and Based On Your Likes. The former ruins the how the timeline works here, the middle violates the sanctity of anonymity if people you follow don’t want you to see their likes, the latter is a crapshoot and annoying and inaccurate because the likes algorithm is fucked.
2: Under Account, turn off letting people finding your blog through your email address, your email should not be just out there like that.
3: Under Notifications, turn off news because nobody knows what the hell is popular or gaining traction at any given moment. Posts from 6 years ago will randomly gain a resurgence of popularity for no good reason. Also just turn off the stuff that gives you immediate info about notes or updates or notices it’s just so fucking annoying and useless.
Under Appearance, you can choose to make who you follow private and what you’ve Liked private. I recommend doing both of those things. The old days of dumbass slapfights and following discourse are long gone but not yet over. Defend your mental health by just not letting folks know what you’re following or what you like, do what the Bird Site never ever let you do. From here you can also choose to turn anonymous asks off and that’s a good way to learn who you need to block if they’re being a shit to you, which to that I say block early and block often.
This website is different than the Bird Site in that 1: it will not tell you who to follow and 2: Likes do nothing, Reblogs are what matters. Likes are nice but Reblogs keep the blood pumping and posts/works by artists circulating. You can even choose to reblog your own stuff. This site is a massive sea of islands that have boats parked around them and bridges between them. There are, regrettably, Nazis and TERFs and tradcaths on this site. I have never seen them except for when they decide to pick fights with people I follow. You should also make it abundantly clear those people are not welcome to interact with you. You can threaten them with death here. It tends to work. Tell the fascists to die, recirculate the blood of content, treat this site well and keep it healthy and it will keep your mind healthy in turn.
This site allows a shocking amount of anonymity in the modern age. You don’t have to share personal information if you don’t want to. I don’t recommend you do. People can and have used DNI criteria and trigger/content warnings to dunk on people or upset them. Keep yourself and your data safe, you don’t have to have a carrd in your header or a list of kinks or a laundry list of things you believe in. Keep strangers at an arm’s length and moderate what you tell other people about yourself. I know this used to be the internet’s #1 naked picture dump and so many people courted parasocial relationships with folks here. Those times have changed. Don’t be weird and don’t let people be weird to you based on what they know about you.
By many standards on this website, I am an old-timer, even though I’ve been here steadily since 2015 with an initial reg date of 2013. I know the old stories, of the Oncelor, of Dashcon, the Kickstarter scams, the doxxing. I only qualify as an old-timer due to the fact that I stayed through the porn ban of 2018 and kept circulating content. This site…it’s not good, but it iswhat you make of it. Curate your content, even though the tagging system doesn’t work. Find what you like, even though the search function sucks ass. If you’re here for popularity you generally won’t find it because the algorithm straight up does not work, but also if you were forged in the fires of the Bird Site you likely knew this would not be the case. My advice is to find a handful of people who provide a feed like I do and if any specific names you see a lot interest you, skim their own blogs, follow them if you like, let your network spread, never be afraid to prune who you follow. Also your follower count doesn’t mean shit, it doesn’t really dictate who can see what you’re putting out there, your marketing and self-promotion is more or less tied 1:1 to using the tag system and your own hustle.
My other advice is to be as queer as you want, support queer people, and most importantly to tell the fascists to die as creatively as you’d like.
