anti-sjw: why?? am I triggering your delicate tattoo artist sensibilities?? trigger warning: waving arms and logic! you mad bro? huh, you ma - ow ow ow that’s not what the tat is supposed to look like.
as a tattooist please beleive me when i say that i have tattooed this guy before.
i know its satire, but like. you’re not even wrong.
this is both the most enlightening and the saddest addition to my post.
i was exaggerating the best i could, and it turns out to be real. i’m so sorry for you.
The computer said my next patient’s name was Lucifer, and that he was a domestic. Not that an unusual name for a pet, I have to admit.
“Come on in. Do you have Lucifer hiding in that box for me?” I say. A gentleman dressed all in black with a rather spiky aesthetic and a selection of piercings comes into my consult room and opens the box.
He places a perfectly black rabbit on the table.
Honestly, I had been expecting a cat.
Turns out Lucifer is his new rabbit. He’d insisted on taking it from a friend who wasn’t taking care of it a few months ago.
Lucifer, for his part, had decided the table was too scary and that his dad’s leather clad armpit was the best place to be.
To my surprise and delight, our new goth rabbit owner is doing everything right. Perfect diet, read up on rabbit health, vaccinating, enrichment, the works.
He even started a vegetable garden to grow treats for the rabbit, or as he put it, “tributes for lucifer.”
A patient’s appearance is often used by mental health professionals to indicate what may be wrong with them. This is obviously wrong at a surface level, however, I’d to go in-depth about exactly why it is so damaging to so many. Doctors judging their patients by appearance is also heavily influenced by misogyny on the part of the doctor.
For example, if a woman wearing jeans and a t-shirt, with no makeup on comes to a doctor complaining of the basic symptoms of depression, she will often be considered “visibly depressed” due to being “unkempt in appearance” and presumed to not be taking care of herself. However, if a man wearing jeans and a t-shirt, with no makeup on comes to a doctor complaining of those exact same symptoms, he will often be dismissed as “normal in appearance” therefore, presumed to be looking after himself properly at home.
The woman goes away with an inappropriate dose of anti-depressants. The man goes away dismissed, invalidated and still suffering.
This is the most common example used when we discuss appearance in mental health. It is medical neglect, and misogyny. And yet, mental health professionals are still taught to look for “being unkempt” as a sign of ill health.
Now, I want to go more into how Doctors personal norms regularly completely let down their patients.
In leaflets and handbooks about detecting mental illness, usually things like “abnormal appearance” or “irregular mode of dress” are brought up as indicators of various illnesses. Usually, Autism and Asperger’s spectrum disorders or schizophrenic type disorders are described as presenting themselves in “abnormal modes of dress”.
The immediate issue here is obviously that each individual doctor will have a different idea of what is or is not “abnormal”. Often, the divide is by age. Older doctors who grew up with different mainstream fashions will be more likely to stereotype their young patients as “abnormally dressed”.
Especially in current times, when “alternative” fashion is more mainstream than ever, and things that are still technically considered “alternative” are in fact, quite normal. A slightly older doctor (30+), meeting a younger patient (25 or younger), may see black jeans, a leather jacket, or a studded belt, and immediately type them as “irregularly dressed”, when those types of things have been mainstream for many years.
Speaking of alternative fashion, the current normalization of “alternative” looks may be directly impacting the current up-swing in attention-seeking-disorder diagnosis. Because, so many older people have been fed the belief that everything “alternative” is done for the expressed purpose of attention seeking, and they have no idea what is actually alternative any more. For example: it is completely normal these days for people to dye their hair. Unnatural colors, partially died, partially shaved. All of these may have been considered fairly unusual 10 or even 5 years ago, are now completely mainstream. But if a person with purple hair goes to see a doctor whose norms are 10 years out of date, they will immediately be typed as “abnormal”. (This goes tenfold if the patient is a man). Then, it is up to the doctor’s personal bigotries towards the young whether they stereotype this as “attention-seeking behavior” or as “detachment from social norms”.
The truth is, it is neither. They simply enjoy a currently attainable hair color. But the doctors personal bigotries will land them on the long, expensive track to diagnosis with a Personality Disorder or an Autism Spectrum disorder.
This phenomenon becomes even more amplified when it comes to gendered appearance norms, and how conservative the individual doctor’s ideas of gender norms are. And again, depending on the doctor’s individual bias will determine whether they dismiss and neglect the patient, ironically type them as unaware of norms, or maliciously type them as being attention-seeking.
●GA Redistricting, GA State House: Late on Friday and without warning, Georgia's Republican-dominated state House rammed through a bill that would re-gerrymander their districts to protect their lopsided majority. Donald Trump won Georgia by just 50-45, but Republicans captured nearly two-thirds of the state House seats in 2016 thanks to their ultra-partisan gerrymander. Apparently even that 118-to-62 majority isn't safe enough for Republicans. Redistricting normally only takes place immediately after the census, and redrawing the lines in the middle of the decade simply because they were at risk of losing seats is nothing short of an attempt to nullify elections.
If the similarly GOP-dominated state Senate and Republican Gov. Nathan Deal agree to these changes, Georgia would redraw the lines for eight Republican-held seats and one Democratic district. These changes would reduce the proportion of voters of color in certain districts where these Democratic-leaning voter demographics had threatened to oust Republican incumbents. This new map could even lead to Republicans regaining a veto-proof majority, preventing Democrats from blocking gerrymanders in the 2020s even if Team Blue wins the critical 2018 election to succeed term-limited Gov. Deal.
What's more, seven of the nine districts Republicans are trying to fiddle with are in the northern Atlanta suburbs, and two of them are located entirely within the 6th Congressional District, as shown at the top of this post. That's where the upcoming special election to replace Trump's new health secretary, Tom Price, is about to take place. While this effort doesn't directly affect the state's congressional lines, if Republicans are futzing with legislative district borders in this part of the state, it's a sign they're worried about the race for the U.S. House too. Stephen Wolf has more here.
Georgia Republicans are no strangers to just this sort of attack on democracy. After they won their first unified control over state government since Reconstruction in 2004, the party swiftly passed a mid-decade gerrymander of the congressional map that almost led to them gaining seats in 2006 even as Democrats picked up scores of seats in other states in that year's anti-GOP wave election. Republicans similarly replaced the court-drawn state Senate map with their own gerrymander to protect their newfound majority in that same election.
If these changes become law, expect to see Democrats and civil rights groups launch a barrage of lawsuits challenging these plans as illegal racial or partisan gerrymanders in violations of the Voting Rights Act or the Constitution's Equal Protections Clause. Given the recent string of court victories against racial gerrymandering and the possibility that the Supreme Court could soon impose limits on partisan gerrymandering, Georgia could soon find itself embroiled in one of the country's biggest redistricting fights.
Not the first post pointing this out BUT STILL THE TRUEST FUCKING THING IN THE WORLD. Especially since the Duggars couldn’t afford the kids they HAD until TLC was in the picture - now imagine if they were black.
Senators and my congressional rep...(tile) have been contacted. Just email, but that's the best I can do.
After much ado, House Republicans have released their bill to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act (commonly known as Obamacare). If passed, millions of people could lose health coverage, and Planned Parenthood will be entirely stripped of funding.
If you’re ever in an Irish speaking part of Ireland (Gaeltacht), and you see a mother with her child, tell her, “Ith an páiste.” It’s a beautiful way of saying, “Your motherhood glows with radiance and grace.” There is no English equivalent for this so give it a go!
last time i trusted an irish guy i walked home at 4am with my bra in my handbag so lets see
Fuck that. Let's get free, safe birth control on demand to everyone in this country who needs it (and i'm not talking condoms) and let's all watch the abortion rate keep dropping like it has been because of the ACA.
The Trump Administration has issued an impossible proposal to Planned Parenthood: stop performing abortions and the essential, low-income health clinics providing care to millions of Americans won’t lose federal funding. According to a report in the New York Times, officials even suggested that public funds could…
The pink dye in the new Peeps-flavored Oreos has some cookie and marshmallow fans experiencing strange side effects, including pink tongue, saliva, and most notoriously, magenta-hued poop. Don’t fret, Peeps-eaters! This is just the latest in a long line of products that can color your number-twos.
There are medicines, other junk foods, and even actual vegetables that can pass through your system unchanged by the digestive process and seriously freak people out. But not every parent knows everything their kid eats, and many of us aren’t expecting that the foods we consume will have such colorful results, so the surprise can sometimes be alarming — even when there’s no reason to be alarmed.
Natural Foods
As anyone who has fed a small child a large quantity of blueberries or who eats a lot of beets can tell you, some natural foods with strong colors pass unchanged through the digestive system.
For some people who eat beets, this has the alarming effect of turning their urine red. For others, the red coloring of beets makes it look like they have intestinal bleeding.
Pepto-Bismol
If you don’t know that the active ingredient in Pepto-Bismol reacts with saliva to produce a substance called bismuth sulfide, and that substance can discolor your tongue, saliva, and stool, you might get a serious scare and run to Google.
Fortunately, the over-the-counter medication’s manufacturer reassures us all, “This discoloration is temporary and harmless.”
Artificial Food Dye Freakouts
Franken Berry Stools and Nerds Turds
In 1971, General Mills introduced its first “monster cereals,” including the very pink Franken Berry. One of the many children who tried the new product was a 12-year-old boy in Maryland, and he ended up hospitalized and immortalized in medical history because of it, in the February 1972 issue of the journal Pediatrics.
That’s how the phrase “Franken Berry Stool” appeared in a serious medical journal.
There were other reasons to maybe be extra cautious about the child’s health: He had a seizure disorder and was a polio survivor. He was occasionally constipated, but that’s not unusual. He ended up at the University of Maryland hospital after producing “stools [that] were somewhat loose and described as ‘looking like strawberry ice cream.'”
He was kept in the hospital for several days for various tests, but they didn’t turn up anything wrong with his digestive tract. The pink poop problem cleared up. Finally, in what was perhaps the most fun medical test ever, he was given four bowls of Franken Berry cereal on his fourth day in the hospital. The “strawberry ice cream” effect returned later that day. Medical mystery solved.
The doctor contacted General Mills about the case, and the company responded that it had not heard of any similar cases (yet) and that it used the food colorings FD&C Red #2 and #3.
A similar case writeup appeared in Pediatrics a decade and a half later in 1988. Physicians at the University of Virginia Chidren’s Medical Center evaluated a 5-year-old believed to have blood in his stool, which was described as “red-orange.”
However, it tested negative for blood, as did the red-orange stain he left on toilet paper. The boy finally admitted eating an entire box of Nerds cereal, which the medical staff learned contained FD&C Yellow #6 and Red #40 to make the orange and cherry flavored colored cereal pieces.
“The mother suggested the diagnosis of ‘Nerds turds,'” the doctors wrote when submitting the case to Pediatrics.
Flamin’ Hot Cheetos
And yet somehow, our society didn’t remember these important medical lessons, and people who ate Flamin’ Hot Cheetos in 2012 ended up in the emergency room, concerned about what looked like blood in their kids’ stool.
“So even though we might eat some foods with red food dye in them regularly, our stool doesn’t usually become discolored unless you eat huge amounts of it,” a doctor explained to CBS New York at the time. “Flamin’ Hot Cheetos is one food that people will eat enormous amounts of and will see a change in their stool.”
Diagnosis: Too many Cheetos.
Burger King’s Black Whopper
Burger King blamed of the color of this 2015 Halloween-themed Whopper on A1 steak sauce and “less than 1% food coloring,” but customers still complain that something in the bun is coming out green on the other end. Green food dyes can be part of creating black-colored products, so that’s possible.
The worst side effect of this was that customers posted photographic evidence online.
Peeps Oreos
That brings us to the current controversy over Peeps Oreos, since people are sharing online that it has turned their tongues and saliva pink, and onward through the digestive tract.
We checked the Peeps Oreos ingredients list. Sure enough, there it was: FD&C Red #3, just like in the original Franken Berry of the ’70s.
What all this tells us is to not panic when you see unusual colors in your mouth or in your toilet. Think about the food you’ve eaten recently: Are any of them brightly colored fruits or vegetables, or even more brightly colored junk foods? Maybe they were simply so bright that you couldn’t break them down.
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A long, detailed explanation of exactly why she is a terrible, terrible person. Which charts. And pictures.
Kellyanne Conway has spent her career lambasting feminism, depicting the ideology as one of “gloom and doom” that revels in hating men or, as Conway once put it, a movement based on the “revulsion towards men in your life.” Indeed, Conway has built her career on being what she’s called a “conservative feminist,”…
by Andrew Liszewski on Sploid, shared by Beth Elderkin to io9
For being an amateur Lego enthusiast, Jason Allemann, of JK Brickworks, has created some masterfully-engineered toys made from nothing but plastic bricks. However, his partner, Kristal Dubois, might have just outdone him with a flying bat sculpture featuring some amazingly articulated wings.
Yeah, you BETTER keep your hands down there, boys.
Active duty and retired members of the United States Marine Corps are being investigated for sharing nude photos of women—many of them fellow Marines—on a secret Facebook page. Some of these photographs were purportedly taken without the knowledge and consent of the subject.
Because I am a good American, I was happy to answer the president’s recent call to action that came in the form of an online “Mainstream Media Accountability Survey.” I get a lot of this sort of Trump stuff because he loves me so bigly. I know this because he emails me once a […]
When The Girl With All The Gifts first hit theaters in the U.K. last September, the world was a different place. The film has recently opened in the United States, which is a much scarier place now.
*blows kiss to space* for the 7 exoplanets orbiting Trappist-1
See, this is what old-timey science fiction never predicted - the human tendency to grow attached. They wrote stories of colonizing other worlds, of exploration and discovery. They didn’t write that four minutes after discovering new worlds, the humans had made up nicknames for them all, given them personalities, and were prepared to fight to the death for their honor.
Just kidding, guys. These birds are just trolling the hell out of ants. I really, really wanted to show you this clip of a Galapagos finch or something harassing the shit out of formica ants and then being all “Yes, yes, bathe me in your fury! Your chemical defenses are now my own! Mwahahahaha!”, but the closest thing I could find is this video of David Attenborough pissing off some wood ants. It was basically like that, only instead of an Englishman with a stick, it was a bird stomping around with its wings spread just being an absolute asshole about everything.
This behavior is actually called anting, and there are two types of anting that birds can engage in. One is just anting, where birds will rub ants all over themselves to get that precious, precious formic acid all up in their feathers. They’ll also do it with mothballs, cigarette butts, and certain sorts of beetles and millipedes. The other one is passive anting, where a particularly lazy bird will find an anthill and just flop down on it with all their feathers spread and puffed and annoy the ants until they hop to and try to make them leave, at which point the bird rubs its wings together and goes “Yeeeeeess.”
They do this to get rid of external parasites, because external parasites are annoying. Ant-eating birds who do this are getting a two-for deal out of it, because they get the ants to empty their acid sacs in a beneficial location (the bird’s feathers) and then get to eat them without having to deal with the acid in their crops, so it’s basically like if your bug-spray or deoderant came in a bacon bottle.
Formica ants get the brunt of this, because they’re super-common and quite frequently spray the acid instead of trying to inject it, so the bird can get itself doused and then preen it into its feathers. Considering the spraying of acid is like the ant way of saying “Oh my god go away you dickhead I hate you we all hate you why are you still here jesus christ what is wrong with you,” we can be reasonably sure that they’re not super-thrilled by this bird behavior. Since the birds keep doing it, we can be reasonably sure that they don’t care about the ants’ feelings.
I can’t stop laughing at the text Why can’t every science book be written like this?
My sister and I see pigeons do this all the time too, we were kind of freaked because I was afraid the ants were hurting the pigeons.
But now I know. They were doing to to get rid of those nasty parasites.
OK, if you haven't see this yet, it's the Cracked folks doing a group discussion of "The Trump Show," and critiquing the administration as if it was a TV show. This is the first one I got all the way through without the cognitive dissonance killing me.
Burger King blamed of the color of this 2015 Halloween-themed Whopper on A1 steak sauce and “less than 1% food coloring,” but customers still complain that something in the bun is coming out green on the other end. Green food dyes can be part of creating black-colored products, so that’s possible.
