Actually, this is good news to me. No, I don't want President Trump. But I also don't want, "Holy Shit our election actually got hacked now what the fuck do we do."
The Jill Stein-backed recount in Wisconsin has concluded, and Donald Trump still won the state by some 22,000 votes. Meanwhile, a judge has rejected Stein’s effort to continue a recount in Pennsylvania. Take a moment to appreciate the dependable, almost soothingly predictable shittiness of 2016, and then use this as a case study to show your non-voting friends why they should feel bad.
These alarming and quirky yearbook quotes are found inside Spokane High’s Class of 19111, which include some pretty bizarre ambitions. Some of them include “ambitions” of murdering the faculty and marrying a dwarf. Take a look at their perplexing words below.
“Globalization is beautiful sometimes” Stockholm, 2015 by Ninni Andersson
i love this picture so much. There isn’t even any backstory and yet immediately the feeling or theme if this image is simply “We’re all different, and that’s ok.’
Also their heads are both red but for different reasons and they’re both looking at their phones. They’re different and the same.
They also both have black bags and coats, and are both wearing sneakers. The similarities were what struck me right away–that we are the same, although we may not see it.
A new high-profile name has joined the calls for the Electoral College to reject Trump when electors meet on Dec. 19 to vote.
“We’re 5 wks from Inauguration & the President Elect is completely unhinged,” Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.) tweeted Sunday night. “The electoral college must do what it was designed for.”
Himes’ call for faithless electors to break their pledge to vote for Trump came in response to yet another Trump tweet assaulting the press.
So far, only one Republican elector has publicly stated he will vote against Trump. Read more
you gotta put your heart into it! no. no, not literally– not your actual– no. how did you even manage to get that. is it even yours. put that. away. back. put it back
Santa is on strike due to global warming. All presents this year will be delivered by Sasha the Christmas Tiger. Milk and cookies may not be sufficient.
Is it worth it to engage with people on that Dude Writing Post? I genuinely believe that it is better to reach out and try to connect on important issues than not to reach out, but also, I am so tired. Is it worth it to say to a self-righteous stranger on the internet: “Friend, your argument completely disregards the context in which women read and men write?” Is it worth it to say “The point of view male character filter that you want to hold up as a reason that this Is Not Bad Writing is actually NOT AN EXCUSE FOR BEING BAD WRITING, it’s just THE SAME FUCKING THING we see in EVERY BOOK ALL THE TIME???”
Would it be useful to say, using patient and kind words, “No, you are wrong, no book could ever use these descriptions about a dude AND BE CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED: and for example the statement ‘she could have been any age between eighteen and thirty five’ would literally never be written about a dude and it is disingenuous AT BEST to pretend that it would, and the reason for that is because there is NO DIFFERENCE between our cultural conception of a 35 year old man and our conception of a 36 year old one, but there IS a difference between our concept of a 35 year old woman and a woman literally EVEN A YEAR older, that difference being that it is literally only used as a shorthand for ‘she was of a fuckable age?’”
Would it be useful to say, “No, none of these paragraphs is individually That Bad, but reading this kind of thing over and over is actually a really painful experience for many women, in the same way that being gently tapped on the forehead with a hammer over and over and over and OVER while trying to participate in an enjoyable activity your whole life might not actually cause you a traumatic brain injury but it might give you a fucking bruise? You might keep trying to do the activity, but you would also every once in a while yell ‘I WISH DUDES WOULD STOP GENTLY TAPPING ME WITH A FUCKING HAMMER!’ and it doesn’t mean that you think YELLING will STOP IT, it just means THAT YOU GOT TIRED AND YOU YELLED!”
Would it be useful to say “I realize that my objection to this one book does not solve a vast societal/artistic issue; that is why i did not NAME THE BOOK in my POST, because I DIDN’T WANT TO FOCUS UNDUE NEGATIVE ATTENTION ON IT, but I did wish to ILLUSTRATE the POINT that had me ALL HET UP IN THIS SPECIFIC INSTANCE?”
Would it be useful to ask “What is the value, for you, in objecting to my desire to be seen as human?” I would really like to know!
Or would it be useful to say “Actually, I too am a professional writer for a living! But thank you for your shitty, condescending five-paragraph assumption that, when I yell angry jokes on the internet, it’s as close as I get to activism! Thanks for that, you humorless clown!” Again, I would use nicer words.
SO MUCH THIS, I could actually cry.
Like. There are so many dudes who just assume that Everything Is Equal For Everybody Now because Women Can Vote and Racism Is Illegal, and who genuinely do not consider the issue with any more nuance than that because, well: if Everything Is Equal, then what is there left to talk about? Logically, they think, logically, if Everything Wasn’t Equal, they would’ve noticed it, because they are of course observant intelligent dudes, and as they have not noticed, their theory is solid forever, QED.
And then they see a post suggesting that Everything Is Actually Not Equal, and their first response isn’t to go “huh” and investigate, but to assume the writer just doesn’t understand how the world works - because in assuming that Everything Is Equal For Everybody Now, what they’ve subconsciously done is substituted their own experience for a universal one. To them, Everything Is Equal For Everybody Now really translates to Everyone Has The Same Basic Advantages And Receives The Same General Treatment That I Do, and while individual people can obviously have individual differences that change things just for them, those differences are never collective enough or common enough to be representative of any genuinely different experiences at a base level. Thus, if someone claims to have experienced a thing that they don’t recognise - and more, that this thing has a context and meaning beyond what they understand those terms to mean - it’s easy for them to assume that this person must be:
a) lying for attention; b) a statistically insignificant outlier ; or c) confused/ignorant.
Because even when they’re reading books about the same kind of white dude, written by the same kind of white dude, reviewed by the same familiar subset of famous white dude names; even when they’re watching the same suite of movies starring the same six white dudes in the same approximation of heroic lead roles over and over again; even when they’re viscerally used to seeing themselves represented in every sort of position and job and story, they genuinely assume that this isn’t because there’s a bias in the kind of materials being produced or a historical thumb still pressed to the relevant social scale - it’s just that this is what they like, and why shouldn’t they enjoy it? More importantly, why can’t we? Everything Is Equal For Everyone Now, after all, which means we’re all free to enjoy exactly the same sort of stories, safe in the knowledge that they don’t really mean anything beyond the superficial, because Everything Is Equal and there is no war in Ba Sing Se and women can vote and racism is illegal, clearly, so nothing discriminatory or bad can ever happen at a collective cultural level ever again - and if it did, they’d notice, they promise they’d notice (they’re observant dudes!), but as they haven’t noticed a thing, there must be nothing to notice.
And that’s before you even get to the ones with active biases.
“it would be impossible for this disabled character to be played by a disabled actor because of the things this character can do in this movie” well then maybe…… you fucked up in the writing of this disabled character……
also cgi exists. if you need your disabled character to walk for a couple of scenes use a body double and green screen. this can also be used for trans characters prior to transition.
if it’s possible to make chris evans look 5ft nothing and skinnier than a maypole then it’s possible to cast disabled actors for disabled characters
The Spy Kids films had disabled actor Ricardo Montalbán play the kids’ disabled grandpa, and in the third movie he was CGI’d into an Iron-Man style bodysuit that made him look like he was able to walk and take part in a high-speed futuristic car race and other action sequences. And this was in 2003. If a goofy kids’ franchise can do it using embarassingly bad early 2000s CGI, you have literally no excuse.
It’s one of Canada’s most cherished holiday practices, and it may also be unwittingly robbing resources from some of Canada’s most important charities.
You’ve seen it at the office. You’ve seen it at the library. You’ve seen it at your kids’ Christmas recital. You’ve seen it championed by police, firefighters and municipal officials.
I’m talking, of course, about donating canned goods to holiday food drives.
Now don’t get me wrong. Donating to charity is a good thing, particularly during the holidays, when many charities budget for yuletide donations. But, the simple rules of economics are begging you: Give money to food banks, rather than food.
Canned goods have a particularly low rate of charitable return. They’re heavy, they’re awkward and they can be extremely difficult to fit into a family’s meal plan. Worst of all, the average consumer is buying their canned goods at four to five times the rock-bottom bulk price that can be obtained by the food bank itself.
That $1 you spent on tuna could have purchased $4 worth of tuna if put in the hands of non-profit employee whose only job is to buy food as cheaply as possible. The savvy buyers at the Calgary Food Bank, for instance, promise that they can stretch $1 into $5.
Probably the worst tragedy of the inefficient food drive is holiday events and theater performances where organizers ask for canned food donations in lieu of selling tickets.
The better option, of course, is to keep selling tickets and donate the box office take to the food bank. By not doing this, these well-meaning organizers are effectively surrendering vast amounts of critically needed grocery money in exchange for heavy cardboard boxes filled with god knows what.
And then there’s the logistical nightmare when these boxes show up at the food bank’s loading dock.
Put yourself in the place of a food bank that has just accepted an anarchic 40 pound box of random food from an office fundraiser. It’s got pie filling, Kraft Dinner, beans, pumpkin and chick peas. All those food items need to be sorted, stored, inventoried and then shoehorned into the food bank’s distribution schedule.
It’s bad form to have low-income families eat nothing but creamed corn until the stocks run dry, so some items move faster than others.
Consider the Herculean plight of the food bank warehouse manager, and it’s easy to imagine how a particularly unhelpful box of food could end up doing nothing but wasting a bunch of people’s time before it ends up shunted into a dumpster.
All this has been known for years, and yet the practice continues. There’s a few reasons for this.
First, charities are extremely leery about telling people how to donate. Nothing alienates a good samaritan faster than watching them pull up in a cube van of donated food, only to suggest that “maybe next time they just cut a cheque.” When charities get picky, it’s human for would-be donors to think that they don’t really the need the help that bad.
Second, people don’t trust charities. Charities have particularly fragile brands, and it only takes one or two charitable scandals showing up in someone’s Facebook feed for them to start casting aspersions on our nation’s non-profits.
So, by donating a flat of condensed milk instead of $30, donors feel they are insulating themselves against any unseemly corruption.
This was something seen during the Fort McMurray fires. Many Albertans, leery of seeing monetary donations vanish down some kind of bureaucratic black hole, insisted instead on donating mountains of diapers and toiletries that got wasted..
And lastly, something that is probably the most uncomfortable fact about all this; it doesn’t feel as good to donate money. As much as we like to pretend that charitable giving is a selfless act, a lot of it is driven by the human need to feel special and magnanimous.
And as donations go, it’s much more satisfying to donate a minivan filled with Ragu than to send a $100 e-transfer.
Charities know this, and it’s another reason why they are so hesitant to pooh-pooh canned food drives, despite the extra logistical cost. Non-profits know that people get a buzz from loudly dropping $6 worth of cans into an office hamper, and they’re happy to channel that urge towards something good.
They also know it’s a tougher sell to convince schools and offices to merely pass the hat for the hungry, rather than big photo-worthy gestures like building towers of creamed corn.
So, if you feel your coworkers or students need something spherical and tactile in order to fire their benevolent instints, then by all means hold a food drive, and remind people to stick to the always-needed staples like peanut butter and canned fish.
But if you’re a pragmatist just looking to vanquish as much poverty as possible with your disposable income, suck it up, key in your credit card number and enter the glorious world of anonymous, non-glamourous philanthropy.
That empty food hamper at your office needn’t be a mark of shame, but a badge of honour.
Here’s an Otocolobus manul – nature’s Grumpy Cat – discovering a camera trap outside it’s den. Camera traps are used by biologists to lean about rare animals’ behavior, abundance, and health – just by setting up a solar-powered camera with a motion trigger. No physical trapping necessary.
O. manul (also known as Pallas’s cat) is about the size of a house cat, but you’ll notice has round pupils instead of slits. It lives in western China and the steppes of Central Asia.
You’d think that Pallas’s cat would rule the internet by now - but there aren’t too many photos of them because they are both rare and shy. The IUCN lists them as near-threatened. Just another reason to support species conservation!
And to justify cutting Welfare and defunding food programs, Republicans disingenuously equate having the basic necessities needed to live — like food — to dignity. Following that logic, are we to believe that wealthy people somehow have more dignity than poor people, because they have more access to more resources like housing, food and clean drinking water? Do the mostly white residents of Bismarck North Dakota have more dignity than the Native Americans at Standing Rock? Do Donald Trump’s children somehow have more “dignity” than does Little Miss Flint? Because Trump’s children don’t need to depend on free lunch programs?
Wealth ≠ dignity.
Access to resources ≠ dignity.
People living in or born into poverty do not have less dignity. They have less wealth and less political power.
Providing free school lunches to children living in poverty doesn’t “give kids an empty soul” it simply feeds hungry children. Feeding a hungry child is not “giving them undue comfort” or making them lazy, it’s simply feeding a hungry child. How did feeding hungry children become a controversial act for “Christian” conservatives?
Intentionally starving children to teach them the “dignity” of hunger is inhumane.
Stop stigmatizing poverty. Stop equating poverty with a lack of dignity. Stop reinforcing the notion that poor people have no dignity just because they’re poor. There is no nobility in starvation, and there is no benevolence in allowing children or anyone else to go hungry when you possess the power to prevent it.
All very good points, and a very solid analysis. But the thing that matters, the thing that’s pointed out in a reply to this tweetstorm is that it’s actually really simple:
This is treason. What the Trump Campaign did with Russia’s help using Wikileaks, what Mitch McConnell tried to suppress, what James Comey did eleven days before the election, is treason.
This transcends political parties. This is bigger than Trump and Clinton and any single politician at any level of government. What is happening, right now, is a state-sponsored coup.
Look at all the connections that the Trump campaign has to Russia:
Putin wants Russia to be a global superpower again, and wants to reconstitute the former Soviet Union. That isn’t whacko conspiracy stuff, that’s widely-known fact, published and researched and well documented.
Right now, at this moment, the integrity of the United States as a nation is under threat. Right now, the only people who can stop this are the electors, and this is exactly why the electoral college exists, according to Alexander Hamilton, who some of you may know as one of the founders of this nation.
If this is allowed to go unchallenged, if this is swept up by some bogus Republican “investigation” that does nothing, because Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell and the chairs of the House committees that would be tasked with doing something about this put partisan politics ahead of the fucking sovereignty of the nation they are sworn to serve, they should all be tried for treason.
This can’t be said loudly and often enough: Russia manipulated our election and at the moment appear poised to install their puppet into the presidency of our nation. Are our elected officials in Washington DC with us, or against us?
“Ew you’re an adult why are you in fandom” Kid, if being mocked for fandom shit wasn’t enough to stop me when I was an actual 15 year old, hearing it from a 15 year old when I’m 30 is genuinely hilarious
Please re-post to show that you’re okay with using someone’s gender-neutral pronoun! The No Big Deal Campaign is a project by Lee, founder of They Is My Pronoun dot com, and launches December 1st with amazing infographics - check it out!
Benjamin Franklin helped to create Impeachment Clause of US Constitution. He realized that if a president were to “render himself obnoxious,” then people would logically consider assassination unless there was a legal way to get rid of the president.
Just obnoxious. Not treasonous or acting outside of the best interests of the American people. Just really really fucking annoying.
