Links: Wider perspectives

[sonia]

world language; your story my story; guanacos by asakiyume, featuring a linguistics video on why it's hard to count the number of languages in the world. The post also contains a photo of a very colorful bird and the term Salvadorans use to refer to themselves.

How Disabled Mutual Aid Is Different Than Abled Mutual Aid by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. Includes some lovely art with disabled people of color.

Like every kind of oppressed people, disabled people are geniuses of staying alive despite everything. However, the kind of non-disabled “mutual aid” that got popularized during COVID didn’t always talk about disabled-specific ways of surviving.

When I think about disabled mutual aid, I think of a million examples of subtle, diverse forms of disabled survival work. Work that is mostly not seen as “real work.”

Omelas Is Here: On Kyle Rittenhouse, White Supremacy, and Us by T. Thorn Coyle.

We cannot escape this. We cannot walk away from Omelas, not while Omelas still stands. Not while one child is still tethered in a dark basement, being tortured.

And these days? Any life of relative comfort is built on torture.

Comments

[silveradept]

It certainly feels Sisyphean to try and make progress against the structural and institutional ideas arrayed against liberation and justice. It's not an excuse not to do it, but these things always feel like one step forward, three bills and court rulings back.

[sonia]

Yeah. Depressing.

There are two encouraging ways to look at it. One is "extinction bursts," that a behavior is the worst just before it goes away. The other is Rebecca Solnit's words in "Hope in the Dark" about how change happens in the shadows until it suddenly becomes mainstream. We don't know the second-order effects of our efforts, small changes that build into later success.

[silveradept]

It always seems impossible until it is done. One can hope that this will not last much longer, but I suppose that's not for us to know until it is done.