Little Toy Rabbit

I often struggle internally about whether or not I should be speaking out on certain topics that do not affect me personally. For example, in 2020, when the Black Lives Matter movement began, I was not the only white American who was in support of the protests and wished to articulate the issues facing black Americans. That said, being white, I am (hopefully obviously) not the best-qualified person to do so. If I wrote an article, if I gave a speech or whatever, am I adding my voice to that of my comrades’, or am I crowding out voices that deserve to be heard more than mine? It may sound silly, but I feel a little embarrassed every time I post something on Instagram related to a world conflict or issues affecting people in other countries. Do I really understand what’s going on? Is my voice really useful? Or am I just doing something that makes me feel better?  I think this type of paralysis is shared by many of us on the left, on the progressive side of things. We know that minori...

I read something interesting this morning. Ok, sorry, no, saying "I read something interesting this morning" sounds like I picked up a newspaper and rubbed my chin, and said, "Hm, yes. Yes, indeed." I was scrolling through instagram stories and one of my friends shared a s post from an account that reposts tweets. (I hate the world that we live in so much.) Regardless, the tweet made me think and made me speculate wildly about the author and the state of the world we will be living in soon. To summarize, the original poster was soliciting stories from men asking them to share stories of abortion. It's nice. It's a good thing. It helps share one side of the story that we don't get to hear often, and I think that's a valuable experience. We're not talking about abortion today though. One of the respondents to the tweet was a young man, still in college, who is kinda dating a young woman, but decides that it's not working out. He calls her over ...

 The following message is for Dr. Ibram X. Kendi, internationally acclaimed historian and anti-racist activist, about how to make a ton of money. A ton of it. It is ONLY for Dr. Kendi, so if you're not him, it's illegal for you to keep reading. Please do not read my brilliant idea on how to get rich. I asked AI to make an image with "Ibram Kendi rich money dollar bills" and I think it did a good job. Somewhat recently, Candance Owens was fired from the Daily Wire for reasons that I don't really care about. I'm not sure if Candance Owens is the type of person who believes the things that she says, and I think it's unimportant. She has long history of saying incendiary things for both shock value to those that disagree with her and credibility to those on the right who lack the layer of protection that a darker skin tone affords when saying disparaging things about black people. This, of course, creates an upward cycle of notoriety. The libs get triggered, w...

  Apologies right off the bat. I recently quit my job and am in the middle of a career change, so my writing is going to be sporadic and nonsensical for a little while. I recently moved out to the suburbs of Tokyo about a year ago, and for the past year, I've been working the typical Monday-through-Friday 9-5 schedule. (Although, I was a teacher, so it was more like 7-5 and I live in Japan, so it's more like 7-7.) A combination of the schedule and the location of my house means that I was stuck in public transportation rush hour going to work and coming home. You've seen this before, haven't you? The gifs on Reddit where people have to get squished into the subway cars by force. For a long time, I just assumed that this was a rare occurrence. There are times when inclement weather knocks out the subway system for a while and the number of awaiting passengers piles up. (Not to belabor the point about working conditions in Japan being awful, but the majority of times when...

*Trigger Warning: S*icude*   This book is like reading 3 suicide notes at once.   A quick glance at the Goodreads reviews for this book, and I'm certain that I must be the only one who understands it. The book is about trauma, and the things we should, or should not, do to alleviate that pain. If you don't know what that means, I'll state it a bit more plainly' The characters are awful people due to their experiences and their inability to deal with them. As I suggested before, the likely outcome for at least 3 of the characters is death.  I've read this book maybe 6 or 7 times in my life, from high school to young adulthood to not-so-young-anymorehood. I've take different things from the novel depending on where I am in life. (You can imagine an immature, antisocial teenaged version of me coming away from this with a bad streak of "women are bitches and sluts@. A heavily intoxicated college college student version of me taking a way very wrong ideas about ...

 (Part of a long-standing, ill-advised series titled "Idiot White Guy Talks About Race on the Internet") Overall, I find the definition of "Racism is Power Plus Prejudice" a very good concept and I'm happy that it exists, despite the flaws that I find it in it personally. It was essential to moving the conversation away from racism being defined as an individual choice or opinion held by someone, and towards the idea that racism is something systemic, something that is acted upon people. However, I do think there are some flaws with having this be the only or even primary way to think about racism, and I think these flaws need to be addressed and improved upon. First, I think we have an issue with definitions in general that needs to be addressed. Stop me if you heard this one before, you see someone walking down the street wearing a dress, high heels and makeup, with an hourglass figure and long hair, who speaks in a feminine way and with a high voice*, and you...

 Japan is just as old as everything else. That might not seem like a controversial statement in any way, but many geologists would disagree. The island of Japan itself was formed, more or less, 23 million years, when a section of the Eurasian continent split off due to the subduction of the Pacific plate underneath the Eurasian plate. Other sections of Japan were uplifted from the ocean floor about 11 million years ago. For comparison's sake, with the exception of Scotland, the Isle of Britain's youngest sections are at least ten times older than this. And the surface of the island is constantly in flux as well. Being a volcanic chain of islands, the topography is unceasingly shifting and growing. Just recently the official census of islands of Japan nearly doubled -- bringing the total number into the tens of thousands. This is also to say nothing of the almost daily earthquakes on the archipelago, which slide and crack the bedrock. It is not uncommon for a landslide or partic...