In case you feel down today, just remember that the Norwegian Royal Guard has a penguin as their Colonel-in-Chief. This penguin legitemately fucking inspects the troops and fucking outranks so many people. His name is Sir Nils Olav, and he was knighted by the actual friggin King. Remember him. Remember Sir Nils Olav and feel better.
Is anyone ever going to talk about the fact that George Washington is naked on the US quarter coin?
Look at his clearly defined neck and collarbone. He’s shirtless. Compare to Thomas Jefferson on the US nickel:
or Abraham Lincoln on the penny:
Franklin D Roosevelt on the dime cuts off at his neck, so it’s entirely possible that he’s wearing a shirt but it’s just not showing.
Why did the person who designed the quarter choose to leave him shirtless??? Why would they make the decision to leave his neck and collarbone exposed???? What new conspiracy is behind this wh
george washington wore nothing but a thong his entire presidency and no one has uncovered the truth Untill Now
Years ago, a friend went to a party, and something bothered him enough to rant to me about it later. And it bothered me that he was so incensed about it, but I couldn’t put my finger on why. It seemed so petty for him to be upset, and even more so for me to be annoyed with him.
Recently, something reminded me of that scenario, and it made more sense. I’ll explain.
The party was a house party. One of those parties people throw if they’re renting a good-sized house in college. You know the type—loud music, Solo cups of beer, and somebody doing something drunk and stupid before the end of the night.
At some point, my friend had occasion to use the bathroom. When he went into the bathroom, he was disgusted to see that the hostess had left a basket of feminine hygiene products on the counter for guests to use if needed.
Later, when my friend told me about it, he wrinkled his nose and said, “Why would she do that? Guys don’t want to see that!”
When I suggested that she was just making them available in case a woman needed them, he insisted that they could be left in the cabinet or under the counter. Out of sight, anyway.
I wish I’d had, at the time, the ability to articulate what I can now.
To me, this situation is, while relatively benign, a perfect example of male privilege.
A man walks into the bathroom and sees a reminder that women have periods. And he’s disgusted. He wants that evidence hidden away because it offends his senses. How dare the hostess so blatantly present tampons and pads where a man might see them? There’s no reason for that!
A woman walks into the bathroom and sees that the hostess is being extra considerate. She gets it. She knows what it’s like to have a period start unexpectedly. The feeling of horror because she’s probably wearing something she doesn’t want ruined—it is a party after all. The sick embarrassment because someone might notice, especially if she’s wearing light-colored clothes, or worse, sat on the hostess’s white couch. The self-conscious, semi-nauseated feeling of trying to get through a social event after you’ve exhausted every avenue to get your hands on an emergency pad or tampon, and you’re just hoping to God that if you tie your jacket around your waist—you brought one, right?—keep your back to a wall, clench your buttcheeks, squeeze your thighs tightly together, and don’t…move…at…all—you might get through the evening, bow out gracefully, and find an all-night convenience store with a public restroom.
Or maybe she came to the party during her period, but didn’t bargain for her flow to suddenly get that heavy. Or she desperately needs a tampon, but her purse is in a room where a couple is not to be disturbed. Maybe she doesn’t know the hostess well enough to ask if she can use one. Or she doesn’t know anyone at the party well enough to ask. Or she figures she can make do with some wadded up toilet paper or something.
Whatever the case, she walks into the bathroom, and she hears the hostess saying “Hey, I know what it’s like, and just in case, I’ve got your back.” She sees someone saving her from what could be a minor annoyance or a major embarrassment.
The hostess gets it. The woman who just walked into the bathroom? She’s either going to see that the person throwing the party is super considerate, or she’s going to be whispering thanks to Jesus, Krishna, and whoever else is listening because that is a basket full of social saviors.
But to the guy who wrinkled his nose, it’s still offensive that those terrible little things are on the counter, reminding his delicate sensibilities that the playground part of a woman is occasionally unavailable due to a gross bodily function that he should never have to think about.
In the grand scheme of things, it’s a tiny thing. It’s a tiny annoyance for the man, and a more significant but relatively tiny courtesy for the woman. After all these years, my friend has probably forgotten, but I never have. As a woman whose life is partially governed by a fickle uterus that can ruin an evening faster than a submerged iPhone, his story has stuck with me.
How can you be so offended by a small gesture that has zero effect on you, but could make such an enormous difference to the person who needs it?
It occurs to me now that this is a small but effective illustration of how men and women see the world. It’s part of the same thought process that measures a woman’s value through her bra size and her willingness to have sex with him—that everything about us is displayed or hidden based on how men perceive them or what he wants to get from us. Unattractive women should be as covered as possible, while attractive ones shouldn’t be hiding their assets from male eyes (or hands, or anything else he wishes to use).
A woman who isn’t smiling is an affront to him because it detracts from her prettiness, despite the fact that there might be a legitimate reason for her not to smile (or more to the point, that there isn’t a legitimate reason for her to smile). Her emotional state is irrelevant because she’s not being pretty. It’s the line of thinking where a man blames anything other than cheerful sexual consent on the woman being a bitch, being a lesbian, or—naturally—being on her period. Everything we do, from our facial expressions to our use of hygiene products, are filtered the lens of “how it looks to a man.”
It’s the line of thinking where a small gesture from one woman to another, an assurance that someone else understands and will help her without question or judgment, a gesture which could save a woman’s evening from being ruined, is trumped by a man’s desire to see an untainted landscape of pretty, smiling women with visible cleavage and vaginas that never bleed.
And people wonder why we still need feminism.
This is actually an amazing idea I hadn’t though of. (And apparently it has the bonus side effect of showing which of your male friends are whiny pissbabies.)
Luckily, the hostess got the message before the next party, and hid the toilet paper out of sight so that no one would have to be reminded that other people shit.
President Barack Obama just made his final campaign pitch for Hillary Clinton at an energetic election eve rally in Philadelphia. In a roughly 18-minute speech, Obama emphasized that, even after a turbulent and sometimes divisive eight years in the White House, he still believed in voters' capacity for hope, and he urged them to turn out to vote for Clinton: "She will work, she will deliver, she won't just tweet."
"I'm betting that America will reject a politics of resentment and a politics of blame," he said. "I'm betting that tomorrow, you will reject fear, and you will choose hope. I'm betting that the wisdom, decency, and generosity of the American people will once again win the day—and that's a bet that I've never, ever lost."
After listening to Hamilton for the first time: Oh wow so many words how did the cast memorize all those fast raps
After listening to Hamilton for the 1000th time: I mean yeah you can buy The soundtrack if you want but I can just sing the whole show to you right now start to finish nbd but whatever you prefer let me know HOW DOES A BASTARD ORPHAN
me: *complaining about my quality of writing in nanowrimo* katelyn: just don’t edit yet! or Neil Gaiman’s ghost will come after you me: …Neil Gaiman isn’t dead. katelyn: are you saying he doesn’t have a ghost? me: …are you suggesting Neil Gaiman has a pet ghost? katelyn: yes. because Neil Gaiman. me: that would…make a lot of sense actually
Okay, let me tell you a story about Hillary Clinton. She first made national headlines when she was something like 22 and the student graduation speaker at Wellesley College. Now Wellesley is the most famous women’s college in the United States and at the time when women were not admitted to most of the Ivy League it was considered one of the top schools in the country for a woman to attend. She used her platform to eviscerate the sitting Senator of Massachusetts, a Republican, for his support of the Vietnam War. To his face because he was on the stage with her.
She was identified as a future leader of the Democratic Party from when she was in her early twenties. After law school at one of the top law schools in the country she was hired as a staff worker on the Watergate Commission. Now everyone in American politics in 1973 knew that the young people who worked on the investigation of Richard Nixon’s criminal activity were the future leaders of the Democratic Party.
And from that moment, in her twenties, the American right decided to try and destroy her. As an aside the right has spread unfounded rumors that she was fired from the Watergate Commission, the man who claims to have done it never had the authority to fire her and she worked on the commission until it closed down only leaving when all the staff at her level left, but facts have never gotten in the way of a good demonization of this woman.
She was one of the leading advocates for abused children and legal aid for poor people in the country in the late 1970s and 1980s when she was living in Arkansas and the narrative about her then was that she was the demon feminist who was masterminding letting children “divorce” their parents. Because apparently there is never a circumstance in the minds of those on the right that a child might need to be emancipated from their parents or that children’s rights might be independent of those with the most power to control and abuse them.
When her husband was running for president she was attacked for her looks (and for the looks of her at the time twelve year old daughter). Her career as a lawyer and as a law professor was used against her and the reason we have a “first ladies cookie recipe contest” every presidential campaign is because she had the audacity to say she was busy having a career and not baking cookies. By the way this humiliating exercise is one she won both times when her husband was running and the magazine didn’t think that perhaps when she was running for president this little 24 year old personal attack exercise against her should be retired when she was making history. Bill submitted the same recipe she won with in the 1990s.
And then the investigations started immediately.
She lost several hundred thousand dollars in an investment scheme and she was accused of insider trading.
A personal friend committed suicide and she was accused both of having an affair with him and of killing him.
She was routinely accused of sleeping with … basically any female friend of hers. Because making someone a scary lesbian wasn’t yet out of fashion in the mid 1990s.
She was attacked for trying to keep her family together as she was humiliated daily on national television.
And she was attacked for being mad at her husband as she was humiliated daily on national television.
They even attacked her cat because proper presidential families have dogs and it was clearly her witchcraft familiar.
The Republicans in congress have been launching fishing expeditions against this woman for the last 22 years and that’s not even counting the smear attacks that started in the late 1960s. Today the Republicans in the House have spent more time and money investigating the attack on the embassy in Benghazi when she was secretary of state then was spent investigating the attacks on 9/11. Ignoring that attacks on American embassies have occurred under every presidential administration for the last six decades and there were far more of them under George W Bush and for more people died in them under Ronald Reagan.
Oh. And she was mocked in the late 1990s for daring to say there was a vast right wing conspiracy against her and her husband. Because a woman should never acknowledge … you know… a provable fact.
So of course the average American voter has trouble distinguishing the truly horrific facts about Trump from the noise about Clinton. We’ve been fed a steady diet of it for 45 fucking years with the express purpose of making sure this woman was never president of the United States.
The fact that she is going to be anyway isn’t a condemnation of my country. It’s evidence of how strong and smart and resilient Hillary Clinton is.
In 2012, the Justice Department had more than 780 election observers and monitors at polling places in 51 jurisdictions in 23 states. This election, they have many fewer thanks to the Supreme Court's 2013 ruling striking down a key portion of the Voting Rights Act. They're having to spread the 500 monitors over a larger swath of the country.
The U.S. Justice Department says it will have more than 500 monitors and observers out Tuesday watching polling sites in 28 states. They'll be looking for any voting rights violations, such as whether voters are discriminated against because of their race or language. […]
The change also means that of the 500 personnel, fewer DOJ personnel will be stationed inside polling places as official poll observers. Instead, more will be monitoring the election from outside, which gives federal authorities less opportunity to spot irregularities and correct them while individuals are voting.
The Justice poll watchers will be at "voting sites in 67 jurisdictions around the country, including many in Florida, North Carolina, Texas and Pennsylvania." In addition to the Justice poll observers, the Election Protection Coalition has 23 call centers set up around the country, and volunteers on hand (nearly 1,200 of whom are from the Daily Kos community!) to provide legal advice and intervention as necessary. They've already answered more than 50,000 calls since the hotline—1-800-OUR-VOTE—opened. "In addition to providing practical help-desk-level assistance to stressed and distressed voters, coalition officials said they are focused on constitutional obstacles."
They are all geared up for the first presidential election in 50 years without the protections of the Voting Rights Act, and the likelihood that the Trump campaign will have worked his deplorables into enough of a froth to create chaos at the polls.
If you see issues at the polls, the Justice Department will be taking complaints and dispatching help as necessary from a toll-free hotline, 1-800-253-3931, and by email at voting.section@usdoj.gov. The numbers for Election Protection and other voting rights groups:
I think we should all take a moment to thank Aaron Burr for being so creepy during the election that Thomas Jefferson had the law changed so that the person with the second largest of votes no longer became Vice President.*
*Yes, my sum total of knowledge of this DOES come from Hamilton.
by Ellie Shechet on The Slot, shared by Gabrielle Bluestone to Jezebel
It’s hard to imagine a more fitting bookend to Donald Trump’s freudian howl of a presidential campaign than a 67-year-old in a camo hat jiggling his tiny man parts onstage at a campaign rally. Just one more day, ladies and gentlemen.
i would just like to point out that the recent conversation surrounding the male birth control trials isn’t just “lol weak men can’t deal with side effects” it’s the fact that when they were testing hormonal birth control for women in the 50s & 60s, the side effects were much worse, and the women who participated in them, mostly in puerto rico, were not told about the side effects or that the drug was experimental
and THEN when women dropped out, they started using incarcerated women as their guinea pigs, and then despite the fact that some scientists who participated in the original trials were like “uh i don’t think this is actually good, it’s making a lot of these women sick,” the pharmaceutical industry & fda were like ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and approved it for the general population anyways, without really warning women about the potential for all these negative side effects
and THEN researchers basically ceased to do any type of research on side effects like depression and decreased libido for 50 years, despite the fact that women were still complaining about them, and because there was no “hard evidence” of these side effects, a lot of doctors basically just assumed women were exaggerating or making it up. and that continued until the first major studyof depression in women who take hormonal contraceptives was released just. this. year.
so yeah, the patriarchy. *waves flag*
In the 1950’s we were still intentionally sending schizophrenic patients into seizures with insulin(x)and thought that a normal part of the maturation process for young boys involved wanting to kill their fathers so they could have sex with their mothers (x).
You’re assuming that regulations then were the same as regulations now, but for a long time the pharmaceutical world was a free for all. While I’m not arguing that there wasn’t some sort of bias at work back then, medicine as we know it is a very new science and regulation in the 50′s was splotchy at best. You’re essentially comparing the number of solved murder cases in the early 20th century to those of today without acknowledging the invention of DNA analysis.
nah you’re missing my point. obviously medical ethics in the 50s fucking sucked, although it’s still worth talking about bc a lot of people don’t realize that. the point is, people on the pill and the iud and the patch are still experiencing those side effects now, in the year of our lord 2016, and we have been for decades. by the 1980s, medical standards had increased by like 1000x. so why didn’t we look into the side effects people were facing then? why didn’t we look into it in the 90s? why not the 2000s?
why did it take until motherfucking 2016 for us to get so much as a single study on depression in women on hormonal contraceptives? why have doctors and researchers spent all this time telling people that it’s not possible for their bc to cause these symptoms, despite the fact that we documented these types of side effects back in the fucking 50s when this whole thing started? in the clinical study for men, their complaints about depression were taken very seriously (as they should have been). so why did no one ever bother to take a closer look at this problem in women until now?
I really want Hillary to just say “Donald how does a bill get passed” and just wait for his response
We all know how a bill gets passed. There are some great bills. Beautiful bills. Unbelievable bills.
Will you pass bills, they ask me. I will pass some bills. Some of the best bills.
Hillary will never pass bills. She’s never passed any bills. I will pass them. I’ll pass so many bills it’ll be yuge. Hillary passed some of the worst bills. Worst bills ever. Unbelievable. She’s married to Bill Clinton.
i want more fantasy stories where wizards are treated in that culture the way hackers are treated in ours. like ‘and then the wizard spelled the door open. he spelled the guards to be on the good side. he spelled all the food to be poison. he spelled the mayor to give everyone a medal. he spelled his friends to be invisible. he spelled all the swords to explode.’ and anyone who’s actually done any spellwork ever is just sitting there quietly frustrated like magic doesn’t fucking work like that, it’s 90% fussing with numbers alone in your room and 10% lying to people.
