Wendy free living amoeba model

I’ve been porn free for 2 years now and don’t even have any urges. Im currently 22 and discovered porn sometime around 10 years old. By the time I was around 17 I realized I was addicted and it was a problem and I unsuccessfully tried to quit for some time. Sometime around the first lockdown in the covid pandemic my mental health was terrible and an unsuccessful attempt on my life made me change everything around. A couple months following that event I made another attempt to quit not knowing it would be the last attempt I would ever need to take. At that point I wouldn’t say I was cured from my depression or anything, or that I am fully better now, but I atleast had a will to live which I havent had for a very long time. I believe the need to be better in life helped me out alot. A few months following that I met a wonderful girl who is still my girlfriend who gave me even more will to stay away. I knew that I couldn’t put her through what I was before, and she deserves the man I am now. From there the thoughts of using slowly faded away, to the point now where I can go weeks without even thinking it could be a good idea to watch porn. And to be honest, at the start I loved this sub, I use to look at other people’s journeys as I went through mine. Now I feel like being apart of this sub is just a dark shadow in my past, and I pretty much ignore it 99% of the time. Not that I think the sub is bad or anything, but it has served it’s purpose in my life and I need to move on from it. I am wishing you all luck in your journey and I want you all to remember that no matter how small you see your accomplishments as it is still something to be proud of.

Was anyone else raised with the idea that non-Christians or even Christians that weren’t “saved” were “living in darkness”? And that everyone that was saved was “living in the light”? I’ve heard it in music a lot and i also heard it from religious family members and i never completely understood it even when I was a believer. If anything, it feels like its the other way around. The Bible tells us to rejoice that we are saved but I only felt like rejoicing once I left the fold. I didn’t feel like I was living in darkness when I became atheist. I’m actually way happier as an atheist than I was as a Christian and I find it ironic that believers tell you the opposite. I also heard of sayings like “being free from chains” or something along those lines. And the same goes for this, I feel way more free now than I did and i just find it all really ironic. Anyone heard of this or something similar?

The slender and feminine frames of the four Star Sirens floated with an inhuman ease in the microgravity of their shuttle’s cabin, their prehensile feet and tails either dangling freely or clutching an opalescent perching rod. They stared with a novel curiosity out their window towards the small and relatively unsophisticated Earthly craft that had gradually been drifting its way towards their fleet.
“It’s still not answering hails, and I can’t find any sort of transponder or visual identification,” Akioneeda, the eldest of the group, sang in their musical and surgically precise language; the chevron-shaped slits over her trachea granting her a superhuman vocal range.
Using the glittering diodes embedded throughout her mauve skin, she fired jets of light to propel herself over to a crystalline computer terminal on the other side of the cabin.
“Why do they have to make their ships so ugly?” the magenta-skinned Pomoko asked; her large and bright cat-like irises constricting in their dark sclera as she squinted at the foreign craft in disdain.
Its design was a smoothly contoured rocket, with a rounded nose and a flaring aft that allowed it to hold both rear and forward-facing thrusters. Its dark hull was nearly invisible against the black of space, and coated in a radar-absorbent material that until recently had masked its approach. The Siren’s shuttle, in contrast, was a luminescent, bright-pink spiral seashell nestled in an array of gossamer-like radiators, sails, and solar panels that resembled blooming flower petals.
“I think the polite word is ‘spartan’,” the violet-skinned Kaliphimoa corrected her with an excited grin. The crystalline, oval exocortexes embedded on the sides of her elongated skull began flickering as she began reviewing any information that she thought might be pertinent. “Macrogravitals have a much harder time surviving in space than we do, so they have to be fairly pragmatic in the designs of their vessels. And remember that, unlike our ships, that rocket is meant to launch from and land on planets, so it has to be pretty rugged.”
“Kali, there can’t be any Macrogravitals on that thing; there’s no centrifuge,” the Cyan-skinned Vicillia pointed out. “Macrogravitals need macrogravity. It’s literally their defining characteristic.”
“They don’t die in microgravity, Vici,” Kali said with a roll of her eyes. “In olden times, baseline humans would spend months, sometimes even over a year living in space with no artificial gravity at all.”
“This isn’t the Apollo & Artemis Era, Kali. It’s virtually unheard of for Macrogravitals to leave cislunar space without a centrifuge,” Akioneeda said as she examined the telemetry on the intruding object. “That thing definitely has a habitat module, but Earth is on the other side of the sun right now. That’s weeks of travel, and that’s if its fusion rockets are functional. And it is a ship, not a habitat. Something like that is meant primarily for ground-to-orbit transport, and in a pinch travelling between the inner planets during optimal launch windows. It’s not intended to be lived in for prolonged periods of time. I don’t think it came here on purpose. It must have gotten knocked out of orbit and just found its way here. I wish I could tell for sure if there was someone inside, but its mini-magnetosphere is really scattering the sensor beams.”
“But doesn’t its magnetosphere mean there must be Macrogravitals inside?” Pomoko asked. “Even normal cosmic radiation is dangerous to humans without our enhanced DNA repair and chromamelanin, isn’t it?”
“They might have died before they had a chance to shut it off,” Kali suggested as tactfully as she could. “If there are bodies in there, we should recover them and send them back to Earth.”
“Wait a minute. It’s pretty suspicious that there’s no transponder or identifying markings on the craft, isn’t it?” Vici asked. “This could be a trap or terrorist attack of some kind.”
“An attack? Why would anyone want to attack us?” Pomoko asked in dismay.
“They wouldn’t. She’s being paranoid,” Kali said dismissively as she comfortingly slid her arm around her. “Vici, save your racist horror stories for when we’re not within visual distance of an Earth vessel, okay?”
“Reavers are real! Macrogravitals brains get cooked by cosmic radiation and they go crazy!” Vici insisted.
“Reavers are most definitively not real, Vicillia. Nonetheless, we probably shouldn’t rule out the possibility of an attack,” Akioneeda conceded. “Star Sirens now make up the majority of all humans permanently living off-world, and that’s not a lead we’re ever likely to lose. We’ve only been around a hundred years or so, and there are already over two million of us. We breed like rabbits.”
“That’s because we fuck like rabbits,” Vici said lasciviously, only to incur glares of confusion from the others. “Well, not directly, since we don’t reproduce naturally, but it’s good for our esprit de corps, right girls?”
“The point being, there are factions on Earth who view our current and forecasted success as a threat to their own potential expansion into space,” Akioneeda continued, failing to hide her annoyance at the younger Siren’s interruption.
“That’s backwards. Macrogravitals evolved to live on planets, and we were literally made to colonize space,” Pomoko objected. “Why shouldn’t we breed like rabbits? The solar system, the galaxy, the universe should be filled with as many Star Sirens as they can sustain!”
“And they will be – eventually. But if we prioritize our long-term survival over the near term, we might not have a future to prioritize,” Akioneeda gently reminded her. “Steady, safe, and sustainable growth is better than fast and risky growth. We don’t want to spook anyone down on Earth into doing something that might hurt us, which is why we have to abide by the Solaris Accords.”
“Exactly! We’re signatories of the Solaris and Orion Accords, which we’ve always been in complete compliance with,” Kali said. “We’ve already lowered our population growth to two percent per annum, and have agreed to lower it to point four percent when we hit two billion. Anyone attacking us over that would be in violation of the Accords and incur the wrath of every other signatory, including Olympeon, of which we are still a protectorate.”
“Ugh. Don’t remind me that we’re technically compatriots with Macrogravitals,” Vici said in disgust.
“Vicillia, a little respect please for our creators and allies,” Akioneeda reprimanded her.
“I gratefully respect them, Preceptress Akio, because no one able to launch this ship out to us would ever do something so suicidally foolish as commit an act of war against Olympeon,” Kali insisted.
“You make valid points, Kali, and I’m not saying it’s likely this is an attack, but we should still proceed with caution,” Akioneeda reiterated. “At the very least, the scanner still has enough resolution to rule out the possibility of there being any potential high-yield explosives on the vessel. I think it’s worth the risk to jet over and see what’s inside; if that’s something you girls would be interested in?”
“Yes, preceptress,” Kali and Vici said in unison, each immediately assuming an attentive posture with their hands behind their backs as they nodded politely, eager for the opportunity to explore a non-Siren spacecraft. Pomoko, however, joined in a little more reticently, and solely because she didn’t want to upset her companions.
Unlike Vici, she never told stories about Macrogravitals driven into mad savagery by the harshness of space, because she found them unbearably terrifying.
The four of them filed into the airlock and grabbed a lungful of air before depressurizing, the short siphons at the base of their necks cinching shut to hold it in. The only things they brought with them were a small bundle of additional air pods and a field kit, both of which were carried by Pomoko.
The enhanced proteins and nanofiber weaves in their bare skin rendered them impervious to vacuum exposure, and their eyes were protected by transparent graphene lenses. Hundreds of small jets of light from all over their bodies propelled them across the gap between their shuttle and the errant vessel, with Kali and Vici taking advantage of the vast open space to perform challenging acrobatic maneuvers.
Akio was the first to arrive at the foreign spacecraft, circling it several times for any signs that might give her some idea about what it was and what it was doing there, but found none. She even peered into a porthole, but could see nothing of note in the darkened interior.
When she reached the airlock, she gestured for Pomoko to hand her a small but rugged cyberdeck from the field kit. While her exocortexes possessed more computing power than she could ever need, the cyberdeck contained a compact suite of sensor arrays for environmental analysis, as well as antennas and ports for electronic interfaces. Syncing the device with her own exocortexes, a holographic AR display projected itself on her bionic lenses.
It didn’t take long for her to find a frequency to engage with the airlock control mechanism, and even less time to find a skeleton key that could best that woefully inadequate security system. As the outer door of the airlock dilated open, Akio signalled for Kali and Vici to rejoin them, and they all funnelled into the ship together. The outer door snapped behind them, sealing them in complete darkness that was staved off solely by their photonic diodes until some emergency lights began to flicker on and off at random intervals.
As the airlock slowly began to repressurize, the Sirens – who were accustomed to an atmosphere maintained at conditions optimal for them - shuddered slightly at the feeling of foreign air creeping up against their skin.
“The air’s acceptable. It’s a standard oxygen/nitrogen mix with no detectable toxins or pathogens present,” Akioneeda assured them as she opened her siphons and exhaled the breath she had been holding since they left their own shuttle. “CO2’s a little high, but not dangerous.”
“Doesn’t high CO2 mean there’s someone here?” Pomoko asked, nervously looking about in all directions as she clutched her supplies close to her.
“Not necessarily. I’m not detecting any human environmental DNA,” Akio replied confidently. “I am however sampling some environmental DNA that doesn’t match anything on file. It might take some time to analyze it enough to make any sense of it. The power system is failing, which is why the lights aren’t working right. The electrical surges are generating enough EM interference that the sensor beam is still pretty scattered, so I can’t see much through the bulkheads. Keep your diodes lit up bright and stay alert.”
The shadowy main corridor was hexagonal in shape, spanning several meters across and roughly twenty-five meters from end to end. It was broken into six segments, with every other segment containing a pair of hexagonal doorways across from one another, along with a door at each end of the corridor.
“The door next to us should be the engine module, and the one at the other end should be the command and communications center,” Akio said, opening the door to the engine room and sticking her cyberdeck inside. “I’m going to do a quick scan of each room before we start rummaging through everything, so don’t go sticking your tails anywhere they don’t belong until I’m done.”
The other three Sirens all nodded obediently, and limited their exploration of the ship to a solely visible inspection. None of them were used to being in low light conditions, and their pupils were dilated so much they were nearly round. Though their visual acuity was raptor-like in its detail and they could see into the ultra-violet spectrum, night vision had not been a priority when they had been designed. Nonetheless, their large eyes and vertical pupils still let them see better in the dark than any unmodified human.
“The writing is Cyrillic, but everything I can see is just basic labels. I can’t tell for certain which language it is,” Kali said. “That doesn’t mean much though. This thing is definitely second-hand, likely even stolen. That would explain the lack of identification. Maybe whoever stole it got spooked and just set it adrift.”
“So, it’s a pirate ship then?” Pomoko asked, sounding slightly relieved. “That’s better than terrorists, or Reavers.”
“It is not. We’re space mermaids. Space pirates are our natural enemies,” Vici claimed. “If they catch us, they’ll pry the exocortexes from our skulls and pluck out our photonic diodes one by one, then bind us to the front of the ship as figureheads.”
“Vicillia, that is enough!” Akio reprimanded her as she scanned the next room. “Stop trying to scare her! Kali’s right. This is an old ship that’s been stripped of nearly every non-essential piece of equipment. Someone stole it, and then abandoned it when the authorities started closing in. That’s it. There’s not a raiding party of pirates hiding behind one of these doors.”
“Famous last words,” Vici muttered, defensively folding her arms across her chest.
Kali once again put her arm around Pomoko in comfort and gave her a loving kiss on the head.
The glowing, sylph-like Sirens continued floating through the dim and unevenly lit corridor like ghosts, checking one room after another and finding nothing of note until they finally reached the end.
“Now that we’re done checking for pirates, we can focus on the command center,” Akio announced. “Assuming they haven’t been wiped, we’ll check the ship’s logs and records for evidence of its origin and how it got here. If it was stolen, we’ll send it to Pink Floyd Station and they can deal with it. Otherwise, we’ll be free to keep it as salvage.”
She raised her finger to tap the AR command to open the door, but suddenly hesitated.
“What is it?” Kali asked.
Akio squinted at her HUD display in alarm, but seemed reluctant to answer.
“There’s something on the other side,” she whispered.
Without warning, the door was manually thrown open with a physical force that shocked the gracile Sirens. From the impenetrable gloom beyond the door’s threshold, there emerged a grotesque figure the likes of which the Sirens had never seen before.
Its round torso was squat and bloated, vaguely resembling that of a frog’s. Its veiny, crimson hide was mottled in purple splotches from where those veins had broken. Four long limbs dangled down limply, each possessing five boney, claw-like digits. As with the Star Sirens, its pinky fingers had been repurposed into a second opposable thumb; but unlike them, its digits were arranged more radially so that its hands resembled starving sea stars. It possessed a prehensile tail as well, though closer in appearance to an opossum’s than the Siren’s simian tails.
It was the front of the creature that was most alien to them. It had no neck or even a head distinct from its bulging torso. It had two eyes on mobile stalks, each a bloodshot blue with a crescent-shaped pupil. There was a blowhole near the top of its vaguely defined head, and near the bottom hung a toothless proboscis, as prehensile as an elephant’s trunk.
All four Sirens broke out into screams at the sight of the deformed creature, jetting backward as quickly as they could. Wheezing, the creature lurched towards them, slowly raising its proboscis in the air as it did so.
Vici grabbed the bundle of air pods that Pomoko had released in her panic and began beating the creature over the top of the head with it. Though she possessed just barely enough physical strength to walk in nothing greater than Lunar gravity, her love for her sisters and her fear, disgust, and contempt for anything else drove her to assail the hideous being as hard as she could.
The creature groaned, though it seemed to be more of sorrow than of pain. Raising its arms up protectively while keeping its proboscis elevated, it slowly sunk down to the bottom of the corridor as Vici bashed away at it.
“Vici! Vici, stop!” Kali commanded, grabbing hold of her and pulling her back. “It’s not attacking us!”
She was right, of course. Despite its fearsomely unfamiliar form, it actually seemed rather pathetic as it lay quivering on the floor, making no sound aside from laboured and gasping breaths.
“Alien! It’s an alien!” Vici cried in dismay, scarcely believing her own eyes.
Though that improbable, if more palpable, explanation for the being’s origin may have seemed the most obvious, Kali felt a growing sense of horror well up inside her as the pieces started to click together. She glanced over at Akio who was rapidly reviewing the readings from her cyberdeck, and could tell from the revulsion on her face that she had reached the same conclusion.
“Preceptress; please say that it’s an alien,” she pleaded in a softly cracking voice.
Akio looked up at her with pity, and slowly shook her head.
“I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “But that, save for the skill and wisdom of Olympeon and the Grace of Cosmothea, is us.”
“It… it’s human?” Pomoko asked, floating up behind Kali and Vici and just barely daring to peek over their shoulders at the horrid beast.
“It’s bred from a human base, yes,” Akio explained. “Heavily modified, of course. Much more than ourselves, though nowhere near as adroitly. It’s a genetic chimera; probably because its embryo was cobbled together from multiple lines of modified cells. Its hide and at least a few of its major organs appeared to have been grown separately and grafted on in vivo. It’s literally a Frankenstein Monster.”
“What’s that old saying? Knowledge is knowing Frankenstein was the Doctor, not the monster; wisdom is knowing that Doctor Frankenstein was the monster,” Kali quoted, pitying the poor wretch that wallowed before her.
“Yeah. I think… I think that whoever made this was trying to make a new species of space-adapted humans, probably in the hopes of eventually surpassing us,” Akio speculated. “But it’s a failed experiment. All of its genomes are highly degraded and riddled with off-target mutations and poorly thought-out on-target ones. Its cells are barely functional, and it’s undergoing mass organ failure at this very moment.”
“It… he’s dying?” Kali asked softly.
“It was probably dying before it even decanted; it’s been held together with prayers and twine,” Akio explained.
“Good! It’s an abomination! It never should’ve existed in the first place!” Pomoko declared.
“Pomoko, shush!” Kali yelled, hot tears beginning to pool in her eyes. “Can… can he hear us?”
“It can hear, I think. Its brain size and neuronal density are actually over the optimal limit, and its neurochemistry and connectome are a complete mess,” Akio replied. “It’s probably an idiot savant, at best. It likely has some linguistic capability, but I don’t think it would be able to understand Sirensong. It doesn’t have any kind of speech organs or comm implant, either. Its digestive and respiratory systems are separate, and that blowhole doesn’t have any kind of syrinx.”
“In other words, he has no mouth and he must scream,” Kali lamented. “Did he escape, do you think?”
“It must have,” Akio nodded. “Pomoko may have been a bit insensitive just now, but she’s right. This thing’s a violation of multiple transnational laws, treaties and conventions. Its creators wouldn’t want anyone to know about it. It… it must have known that escaping its creators and whatever convoluted life-support system they were using to keep it alive would have meant a slow and painful death, but it did it anyway. All it could have hoped for was that someone would find it and be able to hold its creators accountable. We don’t understand enough about its anatomy to offer any meaningful assistance. The most we could do is prolong its suffering. I think we should just let it pass in peace; it shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours at most now. We’ll return to our shuttle, tell the fleet what we found, and then have the carcass put in cryostasis as evidence. We’ll send it and this vessel to Olympeon, and they’ll deal with it. They’ll find who’s responsible and bring them to justice.”
“Yeah, we need to get back to the shuttle immediately for decontamination and med-screening. We could be infected by whatever microbes and nanites they stuffed into this bloated wretch,” Pomoko said with barely restrained panic, jetting back to the airlock as quickly as she could.
Akio and Vici followed closely behind, but Kali lingered in place as she gazed at the creature’s proboscis, which it still held upright. She recalled that elephants on Earth would raise their trunks when they were dying, and that the ancient Romans, despite being one of the cruellest cultures of humans to exist, had still recognized this as a plea for mercy. Though the gulf between the two species was significant, one self-aware being could still recognize the suffering of another, and be moved to pity by it.
“I’m staying with him,” she announced softly.
“What?” Pomoko shouted, she and the others all spinning around to look at her in bewilderment.
“Until he passes. Akio said it wouldn’t be long,” Kali replied.
“Why?” Vici asked.
“So he doesn’t die alone!” Kali screamed.
Pomoko started jetting back towards her friend, but Akio caught her and gently shook her head in refusal. She silently ushered the two of them back through the airlock and, with some reluctance, left Kali alone with the dying creature.
Kali tenderly took hold of the being’s trunk with her left hand, compassionately petting it with her right. He shuddered slightly, letting go of a noticeable amount of tension in his malformed body. Snorting from his blowhole, he focused his teetering eyestalks up at her, and she could see in those eyes a great, crushing sorrow, both from the suffering he had endured and the lost potential of the life he could have had if fate had been kinder.
A life like the one Kali had led as a privileged and well-bred daughter of Olympeon, and would most likely go on to live for many centuries more.
The tears in her eyes reached a critical mass now, budding off into tiny orbs and floating out into the air.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” she sobbed. It was all she could think to say, and she said it in English, hoping there was a better chance of him understanding it than her native language.
Remarkably, he reacted by raising the flat palm of his right hand up to the space beneath his trunk – a struggle for him even in the absence of gravity – and then lowered it with the palm facing up and out. Kali wasted no time in running the gesture through her exocortexes, frantic to decipher what the creature could be trying to tell her before it was too late.
It was sign language for ‘thank you’.

I went in as a ‘model’ and paid $85!! Live and learn

August 2, 2018
So frequently we have seen the figure of the child deployed to moralize what should be political. Family values campaigns. Pro-life propaganda. Today, this moralization is what distinguishes the rhetoric of families belong together from the insistence that no human should be caged.
In extracting "the family" as the ideological backbone of mass resistance to ICE, however, many questions are in danger of evaporating into moralistic rhetorics. For liberals and conservatives alike, the idea of children is a political instrument to which various radical traditions have developed a healthy aversion. Yet as a result, there is a scarcity of anti-capitalist thought about children.
These are some notes written in a moment of urgency, a moment when the idea of children demands more rigorous consideration.
"… but what about the children?"
We're all familiar with the cliché—but what about the children? We hear this, all too often, as a conservative trope that has little at all, in fact, to do with children.
With innocence as its baseline, the liberal idea of children seeks to make natural (but also to moralize) a property relation between child and parent. "Innocence" is code for powerless—a way to fetishize the child as both dependent and sub-human.
This idea of the child is indistinct from private property. And it is likewise through the logic of private property that Trump justifies family separations: "when you prosecute the parents for coming in illegally—which should happen—you have to take the children away." This logic of the parent-child property relation is why Jeff Sessions can speak of children like a bag of cocaine: "If you are smuggling a child then we will prosecute you, and that child will be separated from you as required by law. If you don't like that, then don't smuggle children over our border."
In liberal critiques of Trump's zero tolerance policy, we can locate an important contradiction in the idea of children. On the one hand, the child is an idealized subject, whose ostensible innocence is formed in contrast to an articulation of adulthood as guilty, complicit, and flawed. On the other hand, the child is perpetually subordinated, not only understood as property, but as unthinking and without agency.
To what extent can this contradiction be not only undermined, but refused? Rarely has the rejection of the child's political instrumentality been in the service of children.
Too often the rejection of the child's instrumentality in the false binary of the U.S. political landscape has been in the formulation of an entirely adult-centered conception of political practice. So as not to deploy the figure of the child as an ideological tool, perhaps, the left has made little room for these concerns at all. However centered on the "adult" as political subject, such political conceptualizations exclude more than just children, and even the vast majority of adults. Implicit in this idea of adulthood is a version of neoliberal "self-sufficiency": the promise of an autonomous, market-mediated individualism, whose lack of social resources is a mark of independence. This idea of adulthood excludes many adults—it is not about age, but the non-recognition of care.
What is keeping us from politicizing these problems?
The idea and the material reality of children being "taken away" cannot be imagined as theft: we must insist that this is a discrete form of torture. The distinct horror of the "tender age facility" is precisely this: a separation not from The Family, but from care. Children come into this world, inspiringly, without an ideology of property relations, yet with an undeniable need to be cared for.
Bringing care to the foreground of our political outrage, while disassociating from the ideological pressure to embrace institutions of private property, can be a way to insist that no human should be caged. All humans need care, and need care differently. The child is not the only way of understanding this, though as a caretaker of a six-year old, this is how I am reminded of this throughout most hours of the day.
The Care Crisis
More and more, we hear the present moment described in terms of a care crisis. The accelerated privatization of care is a regime of coerced care labor. It's estimated that 16 million Americans perform the role of a primary caretaker unwaged. Neoliberal economic policies, as Evelyn Nakano Glenn writes, have "exacerbat[ed] the care crisis by intensifying the conflicts between caring and earning and increasing the stresses on caregivers, both unpaid and paid." [1] With the dissolution of the family wage, this "care crisis" must be understood more systemically: Nancy Fraser argues "the crisis of social reproduction is not freestanding and cannot be adequately grasped on its own," suggesting that the focus on care should come with a broader theory of "general crisis." [2]
The focus on care presents an opportunity for broadening and making legible a politics of family abolition. However, this opportunity will be missed without a keen sense of the demands of care, particularly the labors performed seemingly out of love under social conditions of No Alternative.
In feminist traditions of family abolitionism, these questions rush to the surface. That is: how does the revolutionary horizon of the end of "the family" as a unit of private property mobilize us toward a fuller, less exploitive vision of care? [3] This longing for collective caretaking must be hand-in-hand with any discourse against the family—otherwise doomed to logics of self-management and autonomy. The alternative posed by family abolition cannot, in other words, be a matter of self-imposed austerity on behalf of neoliberal capitalism. Rather than orienting toward this question of abolition in negational terms—withdrawing, undoing, subtracting—how might alternatives to The Family be made imaginable and practicable as a political project of dismantling capitalism's care crisis?
Abolish the Family For Kids

"The purpose of a thought-experiment [is] not to predict the future… but to describe reality, the present world." – Ursula K. Le Guin [4]

It is an unspoken truth that while many children fear adults, many adults also fear children. How would you talk to a child about family abolition? How would you frame a critique of white bourgeois patriarchy, the institution of marriage, the logic of private property? What language would you use? Do you feel it would have to be over-simplified, dumbed down, uncritical? Why? What would you have to do to your own thinking in this process? What would you have to ask yourself?
The child's imagination is one of the most vital models we have for the project of ideologically disrupting capitalist realist epistemologies—confronting the rationalist rebukes of liberalism that systematically infantilize revolutionary politics. [5] But this critical capacity we encounter in thinking with and learning from children remains politically untapped and socially devalued, throughout even our most radical traditions of thought.
Caring for children can be an ongoing tragedy of naturalizing capitalism in order to survive in it.
Yet caring for children can also entail questioning the idea that there is no alternative to capitalism. We teach our kids about stealing—either not to steal, or how not to get caught—but how do we do this without leaving private property uninterrogated?
How do we make use of commune, in this sense, as the anti-family?
Willful Children
Colonial rule has imagined and positioned the colonized as children and animals. The willful child, as Sara Ahmed suggests, is the story of the subaltern: "addressed as a member of the subordinate class," Ahmed writes, the willful child "is subordinate when she refuses to be a member of that class. The demand to be willing [is] articulated as the demand to obey the colonizer (who takes the place of the parent): the rod comes to embody his sovereign will."
Ahmed leaves us with this imperative:
"We must learn from where and when the willful child comes up. As soon as she appears, the rod comes quickly after her. She tells us what might happen if we refuse to give up. She tells us what we become when we keep coming up, when we protest against the violence of the rod, when we challenge how some are beaten as if beating is a right: black bodies, brown bodies. Some have to become willful to survive a history." [6]
No Borders: Abolish Adulthood

"Sometimes I think the conditions of daily life, of everyday oppressions, of survival, not to mention the temporary pleasures accessible to most of us, render much of our imagination inert. We are constantly putting out fires, responding to emergencies, finding temporary refuge, all of which make it difficult to see anything other than the present… When movements have been unable to clear the clouds, it has been the poets—no matter the medium—who have succeeded in imagining the color of the sky, in rendering the kinds of dreams and futures social movements are capable of producing. Knowing the color of the sky is far more important than counting the clouds." – Robin D.G. Kelley [7]

On the one hand, this is a demand for child-inclusivity in our political struggles. We have left children to be the concern of the right—a right for which the fetus is more important than the child, precisely because the issue has nothing to do with children but with property. On the other hand, this is a critique of an ideology of "child-inclusivity," to the extent that such inclusion always already renders children marginal to the ostensibly "adult world" of political struggles.
More than de-centering the adult from revolutionary thought, the border between child and adult must be abolished. As in any abolitionist project, imaginability is an integral problem. This is a problem that's necessarily taken up in revolutionary terms. That is: how do we re-think the adult-child relationship as one of mutual care and learning? How do we take up the challenges of comradeship, without leaving the concept of childhood unquestioningly defined by capital?
In the tradition of feminist utopian thought, these questions have been explored more deeply than elsewhere, while leaving open certain points of inquiry yet to be politically awakened. In The Dialectic of Sex, for instance, Shulamith Firestone projects a revolutionary horizon [...] [8] As in her thorny, often categorically confused explorations of "sex," Firestone writes through an ongoing friction with conditions of unimaginability. [...] her text is about the trying and failing to imagine a world of freedom, fundamentally antagonistic toward the social totality for which this freedom appears impossible, even "unnatural."
Through a framework of care and comradeship, the imaginability of shared non-adulthood can be more delicately engaged than it is in Firestone's vision, predicated on forgotten histories of child abuse. Illuminating different thresholds of imaginability, care helps us to renegotiate the proprietary relationship of adult and child—to undo the transhistorical character of the white bourgeois "family" with more expansive forms of mutual caring. While this un-bordered world is unthinkable without total revolution, these questions get us closer to the thinkability of revolution, sharpening our politics for making such a future, and strengthening our capacities to struggle collectively. It is a start, among many others.
Notes and Citations
[1] Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Forced to Care: Coercion and Caregiving in America, Harvard University Press, 2000
[2] Nancy Fraser, "Contradictions of Capital and Care," New Left Review, July-August 2016
[3] bell hooks articulates this intervention with great clarity: "problematically, for the most part feminist thinkers have never wanted to call attention to the reality that women are often the primary culprits in everyday violence against children simply because they are the primary parental caregivers. While it was crucial and revolutionary that the feminist movement called attention to the fact that male domination in the home often creates an autocracy where men sexually abuse children, the fact is that masses of children are daily abused verbally and physically by women and men. Maternal sadism often leads women to emotionally abuse children, and feminist theory has not yet offered both feminist critique and feminist intervention when the issue is adult female violence against children." ("Feminist Parenting," Feminism is for Everybody, South End Press, 2000)
[4] Ursula K Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness, introduction
[5] This includes more recently the infantilization of precarity, as a dominant form of unquestioning neoliberal austerity. As Johanna Isaacson writes, "The ideologeme of 'maturity' as deployed against youthful, utopian uprisings in the struggle against austerity, serves to create an epistemological framework that combines an ethics of ascesis, patriarchal familial structures, and naturalized hierarchical global uneven development in a blinding constellation. This understanding of maturity—insisting that there is no alternative to harsh austerity for ordinary people (as large financial institutions are bailed out)—has become hegemonic in our moment." (See: "Life Versus Survival in Tangerine," Blind Field, August 11, 2015)
[6] Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, Duke University Press, 2017
[7] Robin D.G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, Beacon Press, 2002
[8] [...] Problematically, yet consistent with the text's foundational contradiction, Firestone conflates the distinction between adult/child with that of male/female—a biological framework that struggles to untangle a theory of "culture." Elsewhere, I more deeply pry into some of these integral problems in Firestone's project, while here I want to emphasize the strong correspondence between her utopian method and her vision of "feminist revolution."

this is an absolute shot in the dark here, but does anyone living in Chicago or the northwest or western suburbs have a 2023 Prime they would let me sit in/maybe drive? I want to order one, I think - but I am leery of buying absolutely sight unseen (in person). it's the old man in me.
I can prove I am not a criminal in whatever way you would like within reason. would gladly meet in a police parking lot of your choice.
nothing in life is free, I know. name your price. :-) as well.
tia

Okay so I was wondering if the public universities over there are free for Non EU students, and if it is free, does it include public art universities? Since I want to get a bachelors in fine arts. If it is free, how expensive is it to live over there? and how much would rent or a student hostel cost? Would i require to get a work permit to work part time? How many hours would i be able to work in a week? How much does a part time job pay a month? How much should someone earn working part time in order to pay for rent and living expenses, and how are the living expenses of Non EU students in these two countries? I hope I've come to the right place for some guidance, i know it's alot but i really hope i could gain some advice, Thank you!! :)

When I was 8 years old, my Uncle woke his wife up, punching her in the face in a drunken rage. She ran to my house. He came inside and tried to beat her up in our bathroom. He and my Dad fought in our kitchen as I sat on the stairs with a BB gun, looking for a clear shot. Eventually, my Dad got him into a headlock and beat his head into the wall until it split open. You can see the scar on his head, just above the hairline.
His wife went to my grandfather and asked him to remove my Uncle from the property, but was told that if anyone had to leave it was going to be her. Then, our family conspired to kidnap their daughters from their mother a couple of years later before the divorce paperwork was filed, and the girls and my Uncle lived with my grandparents until their deaths.
Years before this, my Mom urged my Dad to hire my Uncle at his bumper repair company. David spent all his money on alcohol and then lied and told my grandpa that he wasn't getting his paycheck because my Dad couldn't afford to make payroll. He also got drunk and insulted a bunch of clients, telling them the company didn't need their business.
I could go on and on about his irresponsible behavior. For example, he thought it would be a good idea to breed pitbulls with two daughters too young to attend kindergarten. I remember these dogs. He got rid of them because they became too aggressive and one of the kids almost got hurt.
Another tale is from one of my older cousins, from a different part of the family. He and my Uncle were drinking together at someone's house and as a conflict broke out, my Uncle jumped into their vehicle and drove off, leaving my cousin behind. Every member of my rather large family seems to have an "Uncle story."
I have heard time after time of tales of my grandparents repeatedly bailing my Uncle out of jail. I remember one time clearly. I was about 15 years old when he told my best friend (also a minor) about his illegal marijuana plants. A few weeks later, my Uncle was in jail for these marijuana plants. Apparently, he ordered the seeds online and the cops found out about the order.
When I was barely a teenager, before my parents were divorced, they did a trial separation and my Mom and I moved into a little trailer on my grandparent's property. My Uncle had bought a tattoo gun and was tattooing both gimself and his preteen daughter. At some point, my Dad came back and moved in there with us. I just remember a bunch of commotion one day, and it turned out that my Uncle had walked into the woods with a shotgun, threatening to kill himself.
For a long time, our family hid the fact that my grandparents got divorced, married other people, then got back together and had my Uncle, a fifth child much younger than their other children.
My mom, my whole life, has made excuses for "Baby Uncle." It tore my parents apart. It drove my oldest Uncle to move away and not speak to my mom for over a decade.
At one point, my oldest Uncle even tried to make amends and let his younger brother come from many states away to live and work with him, but my Youngest Uncle started getting drunk and causing trouble again. He started spending time with his ex-wife who lived nearby, and one day beat her up so bad she had to go to the hospital.
Now, my mom has let my Uncle move into her home. He sold his home and spent all the money. Now, some years have gone by and he is still there, but he has confessed to her how much he hates her and can't stand to be around her. He threatened to commit suicide if she sticks around.
This is her house, owned free and clear, and instead of filing eviction paperwork and residing in her own home, she would rather wander around the country at 68 years old, staying at various people's homes and living out of a suitcase.
I am not perfect and I do not expect anyone to be perfect, but I do believe in owning your mistakes and admitting when you've been wrong. I believe that if there are details of your life that you are ashamed of, then the actions you take supporting those details are indefensible.
I do not think my Uncle is trustworthy enough to be left alone with children or to be around firearms. I believe he probably manipulates and verbally abuses his daughter to this day. Why do my family members think that the solution to this latest conflict is for my mom to flee to my house? Why do my family members not think they should have him psychologically evaluated by the state? Why does my mother encourage other people to tolerate his behavior?
I do not think it would be responsible for me to pretend that this pattern of acceptance is healthy or appropriate, but I can't help people that won't help themselves.
I have no personal authority over the actions of others, but, I don't have to condone those actions. All it takes for evil to prevail, is for good people to do nothing. Indecision is a decision. Make a choice or a choice will be made for you. I can no longer in good conscience sit quietly while my elderly mother continues to make poor choices that harm her and make me upset.
The dilemma I face is deciding whether or not to share this story and risk hurting those that I care about. I think the conclusion is easy if I ask myself the right questions. Would I be surprised if he killed himself and his grandchildren found his body? Would I be surprised if he killed someone and then killed himself? Would I be surprised if he hit my mom?
Enough is enough. I have more important things to worry about than being too honest about what I think and feel because someone might like me less. I am sorry that these words may hurt some of those that read them. I hope anyone that reads this understands that at the time of writing, I am unable to see things any other way.
This man is a threat to anyone and everyone around him. He has a history of abusive and violent behavior. I would never leave my children alone around him, and I am uncomfortable knowing that he has access to firearms.
I have to now ask myself what I am obligated to do to protect my mother if she is unwilling to protect herself. To be completely honest, a part of me resents her for leading such a poor example and putting me in this difficult situation.
*Names have been edited out. I imagine I would send this to my mom, her brother (my youngest Uncle), his daughter that lives with him in my Mom's home, and her husband. They have two children ages 7 and 4 that live in the home with them. My mom has her belongings there but has not stayed there regularly for a few years. She has been staying at my house for about 9 months a year for the past few years and recently returned home. I live out of state. They have all been living in her home for around 7 years.
If I should omit anything, please advise. I doubt my cousin's husband knows her father's history in any detail so I thought he deserved to know so he could make decisions regarding his kids.
If I should do something other than present this to them all simultaneously, please advise.

I’m probably not alone in thinking and feeling contemporary movies are missing an X factor so I picked up the plex app recently and started reconnecting with some of the old school movies, some good , some I didn’t enjoy the first go around but am finding it enjoyable now like die hard 4.0 live free or die hard. Guess a part of that is probably comparing to Bruce’s recent works while he was experiencing aphasia, but this movie on its own isn’t as bad as most people panned it for being at the time.
What are some old movies that hits you in the feel?

So a quick rundown. I got a used Precision 7540 from work that was being retired. It's got an i7 9850H, 64Gb ram, 512Gb SSD, and a Quadro RTX 3000 on it.
Used it as a free gaming laptop and it did really well for the first 6 months. I'm gonna sell it cause I need the cash but in the last month every time I reboot the PC; hyperthreading gets disabled in the bios.
I've updated the bios itself, reverted back to factory settings, even reinstalled windows from a fresh USB installer. But every time I reboot it goes back to 6C 6T. What am I missing here, is this a known bug with this model? Is my main board defective??? I'm an IT tech an I'm stumped.

I just watched the latest anime episode 1035 wherein Kin'emon was stabbed by Kaido cutting him in half. It turns out that his reattachment from Law's devil fruit powers wasn't perfect, thus plot armour made him immortal and this theory came up my mind. In Wano arc and Egghead arc, some of the life altering devil fruits shows one by one. I made a list of the devil fruits that caan alter life.
OPE OPE NO MI
We have Big Mom's devil fruit soru soru no mi, wherein user can manipulate human soul. Big Mom can increase her own life span by soul manipulation, acquiring life force of another to herself. She can also trade her life force and turn it into strength. She can also give a soul to an inanimate object bringing it to life. Big Mom's df effect are still active even she is unconscious apparently, the souls will live even she dies. As long as Big Mom, eats souls and grabs life force she can live, but, her youth is not retained, she can still age.
https://preview.redd.it/3sluqm3uiw4b1.jpg?width=350&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=07e8ab9463a63856ac8e876ef775a6fa6f290b24
We also have Toki's devil fruit, toki toki no mi, wherein Toki was only using it by travelling through time. Obviously, it is the only purpose of this fruit which sparks a theory that it is the awakening of the fruit. But some theories states that it can also alter objects and humans form from the past or the future, which is how Bonney's devil fruit works (no name up to now). The awakening supposedly takes much energy or it has cooldown when she can use her power again. We don't how much it works but I think she cannot keep her df active when she becomes unconscious or died, thus, she can't make herself immortal.
https://preview.redd.it/v1vz79ghjw4b1.jpg?width=350&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c10802af130fceef462c5e9e9cd1eb3a5933ee06
We also have Brook's devil fruit, yomi yomi no mi, wherein the user's soul can go back to its body after dying. One of the immortality power devil fruit but, user cannot be eternally young because he already died yohohoho.
https://preview.redd.it/ubrmbqvtlw4b1.jpg?width=220&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=7ed24aa95bd261888decf0addd3cf969ac12cd92
Next is the Hito Hito No Mi Model: Nika, Luffy's devil fruit. It seems that Luffy supposed to be dead there. There is a theory that Luffy stretched his own life or time after awakening his df, extending his last moments until his awakening bring him back to normal. Of course this is a theory.
https://preview.redd.it/lugvabhenw4b1.jpg?width=509&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a972b10bb1a7b4cfa16c27fed02f92d82ea1db3e
Enel also revived himself back to life, but it was not eternal youth. This also parallel's Luffy but that is out of the topic.
https://preview.redd.it/wqtwp2sttw4b1.jpg?width=179&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=5bd605d4e0c0c420ce89b5f206a787564da4d9a6
So how will Ope Ope No Mi, will make someone immortal? Legend says, at the cost of the user's life, user can "perform" the Perennial Youth Surgery.

• In theory, if the user gives his life force to someone, it will only give 2 lifetimes, so this must not be it. Big Mom's df can do better. I bet only the ope ope no mi user can perform it, thus, it is one way. I mean it cannot be done again by the patient.
• In ope ope no mi's awakening, Law coated something with "Room" manipulating it's appearance. Could he stop the time inside the "Room" and keep the time stopped as he died? But if he did, someone inside the room cannot move too? If it can move, this might be it. It might be something medically related, like rapid tissue healing or quantum restoration (woah!) inside the coated "Room". But I think Haki can negate devil fruit's powers, thus, Immortality Surgery has weakness too. As Law learned in Wano. He might perform it soon knowing it has weakness too.
• We know that Law can extract any part of the body, like the heart. What if he can extract the soul of the person, like Brook's devil fruit, at the cost of his own soul? And that soul can move from one body to another. If the said soul has devil fruit, and it possessed another person with devil fruit, will it die? Or it can only be operated to someone without devil fruit?

You can add other theories at the comment section.
https://preview.redd.it/rxzd4rv3vw4b1.jpg?width=318&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=bad9671f0c15b35e1f960d167170964a7af57263
If Imu-sama was the "patient" of the Perennial Youth Surgery, it was revealed in manga episode 1085 that he/she has devil fruit powers, or is it? I still believe that Imu's body right now is just a vessel and if my 3rd theory is right, Imu is looking for Vivi to be the next vessel. Vivi does not have devil fruit powers, she is young and beautiful. And I believe Imu needs someone from their lineage. Maybe the first vessel was Nefertari Lily and Imu's body right now is Cobra's wife.

Good Evening Redditors
I am selling my Steam Deck that was originally the 64GB model (Intending to upgrade to the ROG Ally) that has been swapped to an NVMe 512GB SSD. I noted that there is s stripped screw for the left trigger bracket. However the left trigger and button work as intended. The Steam Deck will include a Samsung micro SD Card and the original carrying case. My asking price is $450, I open to offers so feel free to message me (be sure to message PM in the thread before message me) :)
Timestamps
https://imgur.com/ZLbZjkq
https://imgur.com/m2mjAn1
Visual example of the screws for the left trigger bracket https://guide-images.cdn.ifixit.com/igi/IQ1XfGaxeSPaaoo5.huge
https://imgur.com/OiiKHhb
https://imgur.com/VQtqZIc
https://imgur.com/FTPn07X

I’m not sure if this is allowed here, please remove if it’s not. My mother in law has dated this guy for about 8 years, about 6 of those years he and his young daughter have lived in the home with her completely for free. He doesn’t have a job, he takes her money for food and cigarettes and whatever else. They recently broke up but he refuses to leave, he got a job for about a week but got fired so he is back to taking her food and money. She can’t afford to have him evicted so is there a way she can force him to start paying rent to continue living there? And considering he can’t hold a job, he won’t be able to pay rent, will this help her at all? Would she still have to pay to have him evicted? The biggest problem for me is that it’s gotten to the point where she has just borrowed $2000 from me to pay the mortgage that she’s behind on just so she doesn’t lose the house.