It’s a breezy summer day and the rustling from the leaves outside sound like whispers from my small apartment. I’m sitting in front of my laptop, silently studying the 1.6 billion faces speaking simultaneously in front of me. It’s Monday, the day of the weekly conference call between all Muslims. We have been required to attend this Skype meeting from the the tender age of fetus, but I had never spoken in one of them before.
That changes today.
“Hey guys, what if…” I start to say.
Nobody hears me, but I refuse to be silent. How could I show my face again on Tumblr if I couldn’t even save my mayonnaise friends from death? How could I expect to earn their respect? Anon was right; why hadn’t I done this before? Thousands of lives had paid the price for my ignorance, but not anymore.
“What if you guys….. stopped killing people.“
Suddenly, silence.
1,643,398,023 pairs of eyes are on me. My heart is in my throat as the ISIS leader gives me a blank expression.
A single tear rolls down my cheek. "Please.” I say with a broken voice.
He is moved.
“Aight”.
My fingers are almost shaking as I carefully type in the ten digit phone number I have had memorized my entire life. The buttons on my home phone seem to glow a bit more dull, and even the ringing of the phone from the other end seems to be agonized, almost as if the world is telling me to hang up. But I refuse to give up; I can’t let my white lily friends down. Not again.
The phone rings once. Twice. Three times. Still no answer. Just as I am about to hang up, there is a click.
All I can hear is heavy breathing.
“Hello….” I say quietly, my voice shaking. “Is….. Is this Muslim?”
There was a long silence before I heard a voice answer “ya lol”.
“I was thinking………..” I begin cautiously. “Maybe murder is…………bad.”
“Habibi, I…..I don’t understand. What are you trying to say….?” The voice seems shaken.
“What if…….world peace is good and killing people is…………not good”
He lets out an audible gasp. “Are you saying ISIS is…….bad?”
“Maybe death is…….not good.” I continue. My heart is racing. I remind myself that I am saving thousands of lives, and inhale.
The silence from the other end of the line is almost deafening. He seemed to be thinking, as if he had never considered this idea before in his life. Truly I had opened his heart and his mind. This…. This could end terrorism.
“Muslim….Please.” I whisper.
I hear a tear roll down his cheek, with my Muslim Communication Hearing™ and hold my breath as he finally breathes out his next words.
An increasing number of South Korean women are choosing not to marry, not to have children, and not even to have relationships with men. With the lowest fertility rate in the world, the country’s population will start shrinking unless something changes.
“I have no plans to have children, ever,” says 24-year-old Jang Yun-hwa, as we chat in a hipsterish cafe in the middle of Seoul.
“I don’t want the physical pain of childbirth. And it would be detrimental to my career.”
Like many young adults in South Korea’s hyper-competitive job market, Yun-hwa, a web comic artist, has worked hard to get where she is and isn’t ready to let all that hard graft go to waste.
“Rather than be part of a family, I’d like to be independent and live alone and achieve my dreams,” she says.
…
When I put it to her that if she and her contemporaries don’t have children her country’s culture will die, she tells me that it’s time for the male-dominated culture to go.
“Must die,” she says, breaking into English. “Must die!”
Microaggressions are often represented as little pokes throughout
the day that eventually leave you bruised and tired. In that scenario one micro-aggression
isn’t bad, but a hundred of them are.
But
microaggressions are reminders that there is a force present that threatens your survival. So a single micro-aggression can send your survival instinct into ‘ALERT. THREAT TO SURVIVAL DETECTED’ mode which
sends your whole emotional system into overdrive.
A microaggression is a reminder that you are not safe. That’s why a single microaggression can hit you like a truck.
The notes on this post provide another really good block-list.
Apparentl quite a few of the kind of people that complain about ‘sensitive snow-flakes’ (but who themselves go and seek out things to be offended at…) are now following the microaggression tag. pathetic.
But hey, if you wanna avoid them or annoy them, use this knowledge to your advantage.
This post is also a very good example of how to use reblog graphs to effectively block shitty people. When you look at the reblog pattern:
feminists-against-feminism was the first to reblog, so that is probably the user following various tags to bring them to the attention of an audience. All pathetic messages that followed are in that reblog chain.
Some of them stand out as blogs that leads to a lot of other reblogs, like this lovely post by klubbhead with a big old ableist slur in it:
So It you want to effectively block this audience but you don’t have a lot of time for all that clicking, you don’t need to block all of them, you just need to block
feminists-against-feminism and the blogs like klubbheads. The people who write hateful things but don’t generate new reblogs are less important.
Doing this won’t impact how far this particular post travels but it will help the next time. You can use this technique to limit your exposure to online harassment, to frustrate trolls and to isolate terfs and other shitty groups trying to spread nasty and manipulative shit in your community.
You can find the reblog graphs function at Settings -> Labs Settings -> Enable Tumblr Labs -> Reblog Graphs
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べんきょうしなければならない 