Tag: fairness

apfelgranate:

bogleech:

exeggcute:

satire is “I’m going to take this concept to an extreme or absurd level in order to demonstrate how bizarre/nonsensical/illogical it is” and not “I said something bigoted but just kidding I didn’t really mean it hahaha”

Dang it I’ve written like 5000 words trying to explain this and I only needed this post to reblog

#i always remember that thing terry pratchett said #about how satire is meant to ridicule power #if you’re laughing at people who are hurting it’s not satire it’s bullying (tags via @vrabia)

Call Your Dang Reps

stultiloquentia:

I
just stumbled into a prime example of a local action I could take that
matters right this instant. This afternoon @thedeadparrot tweeted a link
to an article about a Boston city councilor who yesterday expressed his
desire to make Boston a “sanctuary city” immigrants, i.e. defy Trump
& co. by barring local law
enforcement from initiating or participating in deportation actions.

I
googled the City Council’s phone number, called, and got put through to
an aide right away. Here follows an illuminating conversation:

Me:
Hi, my name is [Stulti]; I’m a resident of [neighborhood]. I just read
in the Herald that Tito Jackson wants to make Boston a sanctuary for
immigrants. I’m calling to express my support.
Aide, choking a little: Support??
Me: Yes, I want Boston to do everything possible to protect immigrants, documented or not.
Aide: You’re actually the first person to call in support of that.
Me: Really?
Aide: It’s been a rough day.
Me: Oh, jeez. Well, I hope it improves. I feel very strongly about this issue.
Aide: Thank you for calling.
Me: Thank you. Hang in there. Bye.

Moral
of the story: There are legislators out there right now, trying to get
the damage control in motion. They’re being harangued by, at a guess,
right-wing retirees with nothing better to do. Plug their numbers into
your phones and even the score.

If
no one on your city council has proposed such a measure, call to
suggest it. I’ve been told phoning is best, but if telephones give you
hives, send an email.

Another, less serious, coping post (but also a little bit serious)

lauramkaye:

And the other things that I am doing, in no small part because the Republicans would HATE IT:

  • Read a lot of slash
  • Write a lot of slash

Partly because, yes, it’s a relaxing thing where I can read about love and feel better. And partly because I like doing things that would make James Dobson clutch his pearls.

But also because slash was a huge part of what made me question my conservative Evangelical upbringing, become a liberal, vote for and support progressive causes, and eventually realize that I was bi myself.

How so, Laura? You ask. That’s just silly. They’re only stories.

I am the daughter of an Evangelical minister, raised in the deep South. I went to religious school. All of my activities were either church or school-focused. Everyone in my social circle was from either church or school. I knew a tiny handful of people who weren’t white and nobody at all who was openly LGBTQ. I was told very little about sex and what I was told was steeped in sexist, racist, homophobic rhetoric. (The curriculum my school used for sex “education” was called “Sex Respect.” Look it up; it’s horrifying.) I was literally taught that Christians could only vote for Republicans. (”What about Christians who vote for Democrats?” I asked, and was told, dubiously, that they MIGHT not go to hell, but that they were certainly not following the Lord’s will. I was also raised to view other, more liberal Christians with skepticism.) One of my proudest achievements in 10th grade or so was when I wrote an anti-abortion poem (called, I shudder to recall, something like “the cries of the murdered children”) and it was published in the school newsletter and put up on the main bulletin board, right outside the office.

So I went away to college, a wee Christian Republican, and landed in a dorm with free broadband internet. I met people who weren’t like me, and made friends with them, for the first time in my life! I was still in the South, and still keeping pretty squarely to religious college circles, but I was at least meeting people of other races and religions, and liberal Christians who showed me a different side of my faith. I still didn’t know any out LGBTQ people, but I was scandalized by my RA, who I thought was super cool, being in both Campus Crusade for Christ and Straight But Not Narrow. Eventually, I had a gay computer science TA, and I remember looking at his rainbow jewelry with wide eyes, like I was seeing an alien. (Hopefully, he just thought I was confused by the homework.)

(Note: I was VERY confused by the homework, and he was a FANTASTIC TA, and I would never have passed that class without him. Bless you, gay CS TA.)

 Anyway, at the same time, I started devouring fanfic for the shows I loved, X-Files and Star Trek and Star Wars. 

And I discovered… so much.

I had been so sheltered that I was rabidly curious for ANY information about sex. Before college, my best sources had been Harlequins and medical dictionaries and old sex manuals from the 70s I snuck peeks at when browsing the used bookstores. I learned at church camp that “fellatio” meant “oral sex”, but I didn’t know what that WAS. I was eighteen years old, and I thought that how sex worked was that the man stuck it in, came immediately, and then pulled back out again. (Somehow I guess the Harlequins had been too purple-prose in their sex scenes to convey the idea of thrusting?) And here was the information superhighway, ready to give me not only information, but lovingly crafted stories of Mulder and Scully (my obsession at the time) falling in love. And falling into bed.

I was scandalized the first time I discovered slash. It was a Mulder/Skinner, and it was super tame – nobody even did anything physical, it was just an acknowledgement of an attraction. But it seemed like the most transgressive thing EVER to me. And we all know about the erotic charge of the taboo, right?

I started reading slash. Lots of slash. X-Files and Star Wars and Star Trek and Highlander and Sentinel and Due South and Pros and Buffy and Starsky and Hutch and anything else that was well written or had characters I even halfway cared about. At first it was because, honestly, it was hot, and I felt guilty every time even though I wasn’t going to stop. I reasoned that it wasn’t real, right? Just stories. No real people were doing anything wrong, and masturbation was only a sin if you fantasized about real people while you did it. 

And then, over time, I got more and more uncomfortable with the sorts of things my church said about “homosexuals.” Because even though I still didn’t have any close friends who were gay, I’d spent several years reading gay love stories, and you know what happened? I loved those characters. I identified with them, I felt for them, I wanted them to live happily ever after and get married if they wanted to and have families if they wanted to and they weren’t doing anything wrong by loving each other.

And if Ray and Fraser, or Jim and Blair, or Kirk and Spock, weren’t doing anything wrong and should be protected, then the real live actual LGBTQ people in the real world weren’t doing anything wrong, and they should be protected, and my family and my school and my church had been lying to me all along.

That wasn’t an easy conclusion to reach. It was hard. It hurt. I sat in my room desperately Googling “can Christians support gay rights” and “what does the Bible say about being gay” and sobbing. I was afraid. What if this was what my mother, my teachers, had warned me about, that I would go away to school and lose my way, lose the truth, backslide, lose my salvation? Would my family love me anymore if they knew? I had started drifting a little leftward politically and testing the waters with relatively minor things like opposing the death penalty and my mother had harangued me about it until I cried; I couldn’t imagine what it would be like for something like this.

But once my eyes had been opened, there was no going back. I was afraid, but I had to be honest with myself.

I left my church. I went to a more liberal church that some gay people went to, and that used gender-inclusive language and didn’t preach about “homosexuality”. It was still Baptist, though not Southern Baptist, and they had a brick church and a steeple and choir robes, so it passed well enough to get my mom off my back.

I stopped hanging out with only church people and made fandom friends, and many of them were LGBTQ. 

Today, I’ve moved churches again, and now I’m happily to go to a social justice-promoting Episcopalian church with a sweet, grandmotherly priest. I have many dearly loved friends who are LGBTQ, and I’ve realized that I myself am bisexual, though I don’t think I’ll ever come out to my family or to anyone who might tell my family. I am solidly progressive in my values and my charitable spending and my letters to Congress and the things I speak up for.

Eighteen-year-old me would have probably voted for Trump, even after all the ugliness, because Trump was the Republican and good Christians vote Republican and I was a good Christian.

Slash was the thin end of the wedge that cracked open my perspective so I could entertain the thought that maybe the things I’d been taught weren’t true. I’m not saying that’s the only way it could have happened, but that’s the way it did happen.

So I’m going to keep voting and speaking up and donating to progressive causes. I’m going to give all the support I can to the marginalized and oppressed in the real world. Of course I am. But also? For all the kids growing up in conservative and Christian families, who have an uneasy sense that some things don’t quite ring true? For the ones who are struggling with questions and doubts, as well as the ones who are smugly sure of themselves? For the ones who know they don’t believe but aren’t safe to say so? For the ones who know they’re different but they’ve never met anyone like them and feel so alone? For all of the kids who are like I was…

I’m going to keep writing slash.

neddythestylish:

memelordrevan:

rosslynpaladin:

iamthethunder:

s8yrboy:

“If autism isn’t caused by environmental factors and is natural why didn’t we ever see it in the past?”

We did, except it wasn’t called autism it was called “Little Jonathan is a r*tarded halfwit who bangs his head on things and can’t speak so we’re taking him into the middle of the cold dark forest and leaving him there to die.”

Or “little Jonathan doesn’t talk but does a good job herding the sheep, contributes to the community in his own way, and is, all around, a decent guy.” That happened a lot, too, especially before the 19th century.

Or, backing up FURTHER

and lots of people think this very likely,

“Oh little Sionnat has obviously been taken by the fairies and they’ve left us a Changeling Child who knows too much, and asks strange questions, and uses words she shouldn’t know, and watches everything with her big dark eyes, clearly a Fairy Child and not a Human Like Us.”

The Myth of the Changeling child, a human baby apparently replaced at a young age by a toddler who “suddenly” acts “strange and fey” is an almost textbook depiction of autistic children.

To this day, “autism warrior mommies” talk about autism “stealing” their “sweet normal child” and have this idea of “getting their real baby back” which (in the face of modern science)  indicates how the human psyche actually does deal with finding out their kid acts unlike what they expected.

Given this evidence, and how common we now know autism actually is, the Changeling myth is almost definitely the result of people’s confusion at the development of autistic children.

Weirdly enough, that legend is now comforting to me.

I think it’s worth noting that many like me, who are diagnosed with ASD now, would probably have been seen as just a bit odd in centuries past. I’m only a little bit autistic; I can pass for neurotypical for short periods if I work really hard at it. I have a lack of talent in social situations, and I’m prone to sensory overload or you might notice me stimming.

But here’s the thing: life is louder, brighter and more intense and confusing than it has ever been. I live on the edge of London and I rarely go into the centre of town because it’s too overwhelming. If I went back in time and lived on a farm somewhere, would anyone even notice there was anything odd about me? No police sirens, no crowded streets that go on for miles and miles, no flickery electric lights. Working on a farm has a clear routine. I’d be a badass at spinning cloth or churning butter because I find endless repetition soothing rather than boring.

I’m not trying to romanticise the past because I know it was hard, dirty work with a constant risk of premature death. I don’t actually want to be a 16th century farmer! What I’m saying is that disability exists in the context of the environment. Our environment isn’t making people autistic in the sense of some chemical causing brain damage. But we have created a modern environment which is hostile to autistic people in many ways, which effectively makes us more disabled. When you make people more disabled, you start to see more people struggling, failing at school because they’re overwhelmed, freaking out at the sound of electric hand dryers and so on. And suddenly it looks like there’s millions more autistic people than existed before.