FLAMING_AUBURN_LOCKS [she/her]

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Joined 5 years ago
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Cake day: August 5th, 2020

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  • CW alcohol mention, criticising my own food choices

    hi Megathread! longtime no see

    a trip to the local cornerstore freaked me out recently. on duty was a relative of the lad who is usually at the counter, the whole family being immigrants from Pakistan as is common in New England’s convenience shops. brief tangent, but while i’m glad the Pakistani community has found a place here in my little corner of the world, it has led to the dying out of an old New England slang term: we used to called cornerstores ‘packies’ (short for package shop) but for obvious reasons that’s now off the table.

    anyways, i bring my beer and candy up to the counter like the slob that I am, and the clerk gives me a strange look— i’m a trans woman, so i’m used to people studying me to find out why there’s something so uncanny about this weird woman in front of them. but as i’m swiping my card, she asks me “not that it matters to me, but are you one of those people from (random address down the street)?” I don’t recognise the address so I answer in the negative. she tells me “okay, sure, i guess you aren’t. but i just want to make sure you know…people talk about that kind of thing. when they hear it happen in their neighborhood, i mean. people talk about what is going on there,” as she hits me with a look somewhere between suspicion and disapproval.

    i grab my bag and say goodbye, eager to get away from this stranger’s judging eyes. i have absolutely no idea what she was talking about, but she clearly thought i was lying when i told her just as much. now i’m just thinking about it nonstop— my therapist would be annoyed with me for thinking so much about what a stranger thinks about me, but it’s…the mystery of it. not knowing what on earth this woman thinks i’m up to. i almost want to go back and ask her for more info, to set my mind at ease. assess the scale of the damage, yknow? its probably best for me to drop it, but i don’t like the idea of people in my community thinking i’m anything less than an upstanding citizen and a friendly neighbor.

    anyways, we need a new cool slang term for cornerstores here in New England. something snappy to compete with NYC’s ‘bodegas’.



  • I think calling it a US/Israeli coup makes it sound like a deliberate and well executed plan instead of the sloppy rapidly evolving shitshow it is.

    to me, it seems like no one expected HTS to be so successful this past month or for the SAA to disintegrate like it did, and the ties between HTS and the west are mostly just forming now post-hoc. the US has prevented the SAA from launching an offensive into the Iblid pocket before, but that doesn’t require developing ties with HTS. the Idlib rebels/HTS are only in that area because of Bashar al-Assad’s rebel relocation policy in the late 2010s, so the West had no direct hand in creating it. and even up until this past month, that one instance of Trump threatening the SAA over Idlib was the closest way in which the West and HTS had ever worked together.

    There is a ton of signaling from the victorious rebels that they seek to work together with the US and Israel now that they are behind the steering wheel. the reason they’re signaling so loudly isn’t because they’re just super duper excited to talk about their existing ties with the US and Israel, but because they want to secure their gains and win some legitimacy and friends in the world— they are desperate for Israel and the US to take them up on it, because otherwise they’re on their own up against the entire Iranian bloc.

    tl;dr the rebels are being loudly pro israel not because they have existing ties, but precisely because they lack any ties to anyone and want to make it clear which ‘side’ they’re on in the region