The Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) was just reformed so that disabled people can’t sue public businesses for discrimination because it would be discrimination against that business.
50% of all US murder victims by police officers are disabled
Bathrooms, entryways, seating, parking, and other public spaces are segregated for disabled people
Disabled children are required to go to segregated schools
Disabled people can’t…
Get married without losing their health insurance which is a death sentence
Have savings accounts
Have more than $2000 at any given time
Own or inherent property
Own jewelry worth more than $100 or other items worth more than $500 without reporting them to the government
It is legal for a parent to murder a disabled child if they consider that child an undue burden
This is an extremely short list of things you are leaving out of your social justice
Saw this on Essence Magazine’s Snapchat and thought it would be helpful💕
Yeah seriously, sex education never told me any of this in school. Little me was panicked seeing the dark coloured bits and i had no clue that’s just the normal colour blood goes when its clotted or dried.
note to self: just because someone did the thing you were thinking about doing, and did it way better than you could ever hope to do, doesn’t mean it would be stupid or pointless to go ahead and try to still do the thing anyway.
Also, when it comes to creative things? There really is no “better”.
Sure, someone might be more technically accomplished than you – you might not be able to colour as nicely or craft a sentence that rings as poetically – but art is only really secondarily about that. It’s firstmost about what you, uniquely, have to express, and how the precise way you express it might be what others need to relate to it – even if it’s less flashy, less “beautiful”, and gets fewer notes.
I promise you this: there are obscure fanfics with only a handful of notes that are the read-and-re-read favourites of someone too anxious to comment. There are drawings done by 14-year-olds in poorly-blended markers that are someone’s favourite because they spoke to something that nothing else did. There are covers of songs where your voice cracks and you cringe every time you hear it but someone thinks the way it cracked just at that moment added beauty to the song. There are angsty three-line poems you wrote at 4am that someone once called “pretentious emo trash” that are loved by someone else going through the same thing as you.
And I guarantee you, there is something unique about your art. Even if you’re “saying something someone else has said”. Even if you’re the thousandth person to take on the subject. Even if you feel like you’re not at all unique. You’re bound to express something, however subtle, that didn’t exist until then.
Art is about connection. And the more you create, the more chance you have of finding other people who experience the world the way you do.
“But the one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can.“ via @neil-gaiman
The “two cakes” theory of content production.
It was only yesterday that I was lamenting thing I no longer felt allowed to do because someone had done similar.
I ought to read this post daily. Maybe twice daily.
At 23 weeks chances are good that this fetus is being removed because it is:
a) Already dead b) Suffering abnormalities such as it developed no brain, or had a serious genetic condition that would kill it quickly. c) Was actively dying (not dead yet but would be within a few days, 100% guarunteed, 0 chance of saving it) d) Was actively killing the pregnant person.
Late term abortions, as shown here, make up only 1.5% of all abortions. The above four reasons are the only reasons such procedures are performed. Almost every abortion performed after 20 weeks is done on a wanted pregnancy. So you know what that means? You’re calling people who miscarried murderers. You just implied people who had a miscarriage or would have died murderers. How dare you call yourself pro life for that.
Now for the fun fact: They used to use a different procedure for these abortions in which they removed the fetus intact and allowed these people to grieve for the intact fetus, have pictures, etc. Pro lifers decided people losing a wanted pregnancy should not be allowed to grieve an intact fetus and we were left with this.
Congrats. Your movement is the reason they use this one now when people lose a wanted pregnancy late into the pregnancy. Your movement is intentionally making it harder for people to recover from the lose of a much wanted pregnancy. It’s your movement who left grieving people with this instead of allowing them something easier to deal with, something that would let them hold their deceased fetus.
Congrats. If you think you were ‘saving’ something think again. You’re hurting born people. You’re hurting people who lose a wanted pregnancy by shaming this abortion procedure. And you’re movement is the reason this is procedure doctors are forced to use now. You’re probably an awful and mean person to tell people losing a wanted pregnancy that they’re killers.
This is the post that made me pro-choice. Glad to see it still circulating.
I lost a baby brother at something like 14 weeks because he’d attached to the uterine wall backward, and when he started kicking he tore himself away and hemorrhaged to death.
You goddamn “pro-lifers” were ready to let my mother die with him rather than “killing him before God’s time.” He was already dead; it was a matter at that point of him bleeding out. My mother was bleeding with him. My mother was dying with him. And the hospital she was in? That fine pro-life hospital? Refused to let her transfer to another hospital to abort. She had a ten-year-old and an eight-month old at home, but making sure Joey didn’t die “before God’s time” was more goddamn important than making sure my mother survived.
My mother asked the nurse if she’d take pictures, saying that the ultrasound images were really blurry and she’d at least like something to remember him by. The nurse, after Joey was dead and my mom was in recovery, threw pictures on my mother’s bed. This fine pro-life nurse gave my mother pictures of a baby that was jet black where he wasn’t blood red. He didn’t even look human. And she threw the pictures in my mother’s face, like it was her fault that there was a terrible, terrible biological mistake that made it impossible for her baby to survive.
We wanted him. Not that the fact that you’ll notice he already had a name picked out would’ve clued you in. I would have had a baby brother just a year younger than me. My sophomore year in college I spent a lot of time crying alone in the student union, thinking it wasn’t right, it wasn’t fair, I should be taking my brother to dinner with friends or helping him study for his first midterms. I’m a big sister with no little brother to show for it, and there was a year that pain and loss came back eighteen years after the fact to wound me when I least expected it. There was a year when there were songs I couldn’t bring myself to listen to without crying because they reminded me of what I could have had. And I still wish, I still wish, they’d aborted him. Because the end result would have been the same. And my family would have been spared a world of pain believing we were losing brother and mother both. I was in ICU at the time after an allergic reaction that left me unable to breathe. How do you suppose my sister felt? Mother dying, sister dying, brother dead—just a matter of time on that one. Ten years old, watching her entire family struggling to breathe, struggling to live.
And you motherfuckers would call my mom a murderer for this. And you cared more for a baby already dying than you did for the two already born who needed their mom.
Fuck you. You’re not pro-life. You’re anti-woman, anti-family, anti-compassion and anti-love.
Someone on my FB shared this photo and I had to go sit in silence for awhile at the stupidity of her comment that went along with it. Most people don’t wait so late into a pregnancy and randomly decide ‘kill the baby’ because they want to. What the fuck is wrong with people.
Why I will always be pro choice
I’m absolutely crying right now
This really pisses me off, because last year my cousin Emily (Emmie) actually did die from not being able to abort her baby. When she was just under 20 weeks along with her second daughter they found out she had a condition which causes high blood pressure and protein in urine. The doctors gave her like a 5% chance of being able to bring the baby to term with both of them surviving. She and her husband were DEVASTATED.
She regretfully scheduled an appointment to terminate, but people found out. She went to church for comfort, so that she would have people there for her when she would need them but she got the opposite. Her church threatened to ex-communicate her, even though she tried to explain she didn’t want to abort, she had to to survive. People told her that a good mother would be willing to risk her life for her child, and sent her letters saying she was going to hell and threatening to physically attack her if she went through with it. Someone even told her four-year-old daughter, who was really excited about getting a little sister, that “You aren’t going to get a little sister because mommy is going to kill the baby.” They told that to a FOUR-YEAR-OLD! The harassment got so bad that on the day of her appointment, she didn’t go. About a later her liver started to fail, then her kidneys. Within a few days she was dead. They did deliver the baby at 23 and a half weeks, but she didn’t survive more than a few hours.
Of course the church held a big memorial for her and the baby, going on and on about hour strong she was and what a great person and mother she was. And how it was a tragedy that she was taken so young but “god works in mysterious ways.”
BULL FUCKING SHIT! Emmie was already vulnerable and distraught and she went to those people looking for comfort and they turned on her so brutally that she was too terrified and ashamed to have a necessary medical procedure. That’s NOT pro-life. That’s not even anti-choice, because she didn’t have a choice, she NEEDED that abortion to save her life. That is pro-birth. Congrats, the baby was born. She lived for 2 hours and 48 minutes, the entire time in pain, but she was born. Mission accomplished. But now the baby’s dead, Emmie’s dead at only 28 years old, her husband is a widower, and her now 5 year old daughter gets to live the rest of her life without a mother.
Yeah, I got one of Tumblr’s you-may-have-unwittingly-interacted-with-propaganda-blogs emails too. And like everyone else, I kind of shrugged because really, what am I supposed to do about that now? I have search disabled on my blog, and my tags are a mess; there’s no way I could go through and actually find any of the propaganda I may have inadvertently boosted over the seven years I’ve been on this site.
But out of curiosity I looked over Tumblr’s list of IRA-linked blogs. And one username stood out to me. I recognised it because for several months last year it had been showing up constantly in my notifications after I reblogged one of their posts with a response.
When I first saw the post by black-to-the-bones, I wanted to know more about these women. I dug up the original Tweet, ran a reverse Google image search and… well, as you can see from my reblog, there turned out to be quite a lot of information about them on the internet, which I spent the next hour or two collating into my post.
Now, don’t get me wrong here: I am one hundred percent aware that history regularly erases the contributions of women, and especially women of colour. But as you can see from my reply, in this particular case the history of these three women absolutely is not “hidden from us”. The person attempting to hide these women’s history was black-to-the-bones themself.
The original post – which we now know was posted by a state-sponsored propaganda blog – took a legitimate issue, but misrepresented facts to stir up emotion about that issue. The issue was perfectly tailored to resonate with Tumblr’s culture of social justice, and it worked. The vast majority of reblogs of the original post do not include any correction or further information.
Again, don’t get me wrong: anger is important. It’s a necessary part of social justice. But we have clear evidence that bad-faith actors are intentionally fomenting false anger to keep us reacting emotionally rather than thinking rationally. And they are smart about it. They will mix in their attempts to divide and enrage us with innocuous cute videos to gain followers, and legitimate posts about issues. So that when they do post actual misinformation, it slips under our radar.
When propaganda blogs do something like try to smear a Jewish woman as a white supremacist, it’s obvious who their target is, and what their goal is. But I wanted to highlight the black-to-the-bones post above because it’s a subtler, more insidious kind of propaganda. It’s part of a continuum of tactics designed to keep up a constant background noise of outrage.
Because while anger is important, constant anger makes it harder for us to empathise with each other. It makes it harder for us to be constructive, rather than destructive. And ultimately, it just exhausts us and leaves us too apathetic to care.
So getting back to my original question: What are we supposed to do about that now?
Fact. Check. Everything.
Your racist grandparents aren’t the only ones being targeted by fake news. We are being targeted with posts that are specifically designed to appeal to Tumblr’s social justice culture. So if you see a post about an issue that makes you angry, stop before you reblog. Check the source. Google the details. Make sure your anger about legitimate issues isn’t being exploited by malicious actors.
Propaganda like this relies on us reacting to outrage before we stop to think. Be smarter than that. Don’t let yourself be manipulated.
“Cars kill more people than guns! What’re you gonna do, regulate cars next?”
You idiot. You moron. You utter buffoon.
Cars ARE regulated.
The permit test. The permit. The practice year. The regulations on how many hours you have to drive and at what hours and with whom. The driving test. The license. The requirements regarding insurance. License renewals. Road laws. Highway laws. Speed limits. Seatbelt laws. Carseat laws. Laws against drinking and driving and other forms of intoxication. Red lights. Not passing in intersections. Right of way.
WHO can drive and WHEN and HOW and WHERE are all regulated, because yes, a car in the wrong hands can kill a person. Just like a gun.
Oh but wait, there’s more!
I, as a licensed driver, can’t drive anything I want. I can’t drive a motorcycle. I can’t drive a speedboat.
You know what else I can’t drive? One of these.
To drive a semi-truck, I would need a Commercial Driver’s License or CDL. There are age limits involved, as well as required hours of training and study. There’s a written test and a driving test. There are also medical requirements.
And even if I passed all that, you know what I STILL couldn’t drive? One of these.
To drive a semi loaded with hazardous materials, you would have to get a federal H endorsement added to your CDL. And to get that, you have to jump through even MORE hoops, including another written test and a background check.
So yeah, guns should be better regulated. Any Joe Blow shouldn’t be able to stagger down to a gun show and get himself a sweet piece without some oversight.
And ESPECIALLY no one should be getting their hands on a semi-automatic assault rifle like an AR-15, aka the Hazardous Semi Truck of guns. There are professional reasons that a person might need clearance to handle and own such a weapon, but not a civilian. Not an unscreened rando off the street.
Try not to be such an utter wanker that you place the mere potential of a power-boner over the lives of actual children like those killed in Parkland, Sandy Hook, and elsewhere.
There’s also the fact that if I fuck up and injure, or even KILL someone with my vehicle, or another person’s vehicle, or a vehicle I’m not even supposed to drive in the first place- I CAN AND WILL BE PUNISHED FOR THAT. I will be made responsible for that damage/death. Insurance exists to help cover the costs of damages- both to cars and people. If my negligence with a vehicle leads to someone’s injury or death- my access to vehicles in the future WILL BE COMPROMISED. .
So yes… we do regulate cars. We also regulate the DAMAGE CAUSED BY THOSE WHO DRIVE THEM.
also, cars are meant for transportation. sure they can kill people but their sole purpose is not to kill. a gun’s ONLY PURPOSE is to maim or kill its target. you can’t take a road trip on a gun or load up a gun with groceries. fuck outta here with this bullshit comparison.
Hey, unpopular opinion, apparently. But people don’t just “have pain for no reason” doctors say this all the time (especially to women and chronically ill people) and the truth is, Thats literally not possible. Even if your pains are psychosomatic (a word I hesitate to even use because of the way its used so often) there is a reason you are having those pains whether its mental illness, abuse, etc. If your doctor consistently tells you that “well some people just have pain for no reason” get a new doctor. That’s a doctor who is not going to give a shit what your actual symptoms or experiences are.
I just wanna add to clarify the psychosomatic thing.
That word DOES NOT MEAN you’re making it up. It doesn’t mean you’re imagining the symptom. What it means is that the symptom ISN’T DIRECTLY CAUSED BY ANY OF THE THINGS THAT WOULD NORMALLY CAUSE IT.
I fought to get a PCOS diagnosis for 2 and a half years. For the ENTIRE time I was fighting, I was dealing with 3 cysts that were not going away by themselves and eventually required surgery to remove. At one point close to the end of the battle, I suddenly went blind. I was visiting my parents and was standing on the veranda looking out over the tree we had planted in memory of my dog and suddenly I got one of the shooting pains that I was quite frankly used to at that point and my vision started to go dark. It was like the sun was setting while being completely hidden behind storm clouds but it was 2pm in the middle of Summer on a clear day. Within about 30 seconds I couldn’t see ANYTHING. I was 27 years old and I was screaming for my mother.
My mum raced me to her doctor (he was a 15 minute drive away as opposed to 45 minutes to the nearest hospital) and he quickly worked out that there was nothing wrong with my eyes and what had happened was totally unrelated to them. Then he said it was psychosomatic and I freaked out, yelling that I was NOT making this up and I definitely wasn’t imagining it. Very quickly he calmed me down and said he believed me and I had misunderstood. He explained that whatever was going on with my abdominal pains (he suggested PCOS which I hadn’t even heard of at that point) had been ignored for so long that my body was starting to do things other than the normal pain response to try to draw my attention to the problem. My sight going was my body basically jumping around in front of me going “HEY ARE YOU EVEN LISTENING TO ME HELLLOOOOOOO??????”
He gave me some prescription strength painkillers and my sight started to come back as soon as they started to kick in. About 45 minutes after it started I could see well enough to walk around without help and within a day and a half I was back to normal. On top of that I finally had a scan booked to figure out what the hell was causing all the pain.
Psychosomatic symptoms are NOT imagined or fabricated or happening for “no reason”. Experiencing them DOES NOT make you a liar. It makes you someone who has been battling with something serious for so long that your own body has started to get impatient with you.
I completely agree. Thank you for sharing this.
I didn’t know this and now that I do I am crying in relief.
Unfriendly, in your face reminder that there are straight trans people and they do not have to tell you they’re trans in order to be included in the community. See a “het couple” at pride?? Shut the fuck up about it. They could be bi, pan, trans, etc etc.
Asking someone to disclose if they’re trans is rude as fuck. Don’t do it. You are NOT entitled to know someone’s sexual orientation or assigned at birth gender.
Ways to tell if somebody doesn’t belong at Pride:
1) they’re harassing the other people there
2) they’re in acute medical distress, in which case they belong at a hospital instead, and can come back to Pride when they feel better
…that’s about all I can think of, really.
3) they are a lion with a confused expression, in which case they may be in the wrong type of pride and need a lift home. Or maybe not! Maybe it is just their first time at pride and they’ll be fine.
Since once in a blue moon I actually discover a decent rule for adulting, and since I know I have followers a few years younger than me who are just entering the workforce, I want to tell you about a very important phrase.
“I won’t be available.”
Imagine you’re at work and your boss asks you to come in on Saturday. Saturday is usually your day off–coming in Saturdays is not an obligation to keep your job. Maybe you were going to watch a movie with a friend, or maybe you were just going to lie in bed and eat ice cream for eight hours, but either way you really, really don’t want to give up your day off.
If you consider yourself a millennial you’ve probably been raised to believe you need to justify not being constantly at work. And if you’re a gen-Z kid you’re likely getting the same toxic messages that we did. So in a situation like that, you might be inclined to do one of three things:
Tell your boss you’d rather not give up your day off. Cave when they pressure you to come in anyway, since you’re not doing anything important.
Tell your boss you’d rather not give up your day off. Over-apologize and worry that you looked bad/unprofessional.
Lie and say you’ve got a doctor’s appointment or some other activity that feels like an adequate justification for not working.
The fact is, it doesn’t matter to your boss whether you’re having open heart surgery or watching anime in your underwear on Saturday. The only thing that affects them is the fact that you won’t be at work. So telling them why you won’t be at work only gives them reason to try and pressure you to come in anyway.
If you say “I won’t be available,” giving no further information, you’d be surprised how often that’s enough. Be polite and sympathetic in your tone, maybe even say “sorry, but I won’t be available.” But don’t make an excuse. If your boss is a professional individual, they’ll accept that as a ‘no’ and try to find someone else.
But bosses aren’t always professional. Sometimes they’re whiny little tyrants. So, what if they pressure you further? The answer is–politely and sympathetically give them no further information.
“Are you sure you’re not available?” “Sorry, but yes.”
“Why won’t you be available?” “I have a prior commitment.” (Which you do, even if it’s only to yourself.)
“What’s your prior commitment?” “Sorry, but that’s kind of personal.”
“Can you reschedule it?” “I’m afraid not. Maybe someone else can come in?”
If you don’t give them anything to work with, they can’t pressure you into going beyond your obligations as an employee. And when they realize that, they’ll also realize they have to find someone else to come in and move on.
THIS^
I can rubber stamp this as something I have learned as an Adult, too.
Steel Phoenix Studios 