“Sometimes, people who oppose same-gender marriage ask, “If we allow two men to marry, for example, what’s to stop people from marrying multiple people at once?”
Commonly, the mainstream queer community responds to this by saying that it’s a slippery slope argument. This might be true, but we need to respond to this mentality by pointing out that multiple consenting people should also be allowed to get married.
Sometimes, people want to marry multiple partners. They shouldn’t be thrown under the bus for the benefit of monogamous queer people.”
For the second time this month, a black transgender woman has been killed.
Authorities in Montgomery Village, Maryland, are investigating the killing of Zella Ziona as a hate crime, according to NBC Washington.
“We are not ruling out the possibility that this could be hate-based,” Montgomery County police spokesman Capt. Paul Starks told the station.
The 21-year-old victim was found in an alley Thursday night after being shot in the head. She was taken to the hospital, where she later died.
A witness to the killing told WJLA he heard four to five gunshots following an argument between Ziona and a group of teenagers.
“They argued and things happened so fast,” the witness, who didn’t want to be named, told the station. “I don’t know what they argued for.”
Ziona is one of at least 21 transgender women who have been killed in the U.S. this year, according to The Advocate. The actual number may be much higher, as family members of a victim may not report to police or media that the individual was trans. At least 17 of the 21 victims this year, including Ziona, were women of color.
The amount of trans people of color who get killed increases drastically everyday. This just shouldn’t happen! It’s obviously always a hate crime because these people literally do nothing bad to anyone. Other than that, I would really like for the relatives of the victims to actually call the police if this happens. If we don’t hear about this enough, the number of murders will just continue to rise and it needs to be changed!
“We were told we were fighting terrorists. The real terrorist was me. The real terrorism is this occupation.” Mike prysner - US soldier fought in Iraq 2003.
“قالوا لنا أننا جئنا لنحارب الإرهاب، الإرهابي الحقيقي هو أنا والإرهاب الحقيقي هو هذا الإحتلال” مايك برسنر - جندي أمريكي قاتل أثناء الإحتلال الأمريكي للعراق 2003.
‘It’s just a word’ is a fairly common protest when I point out problematic language. It’s frustrating, because the truth is that language, power, society, and structural discrimination are deeply entwined. As someone who has studied linguistics and social information practices, I can absolutely speak to the fact that language is a powerful and insidious tool for keeping people down, whether it’s hissed at you by a passerby on the street, or spray-painted on your house, or used jokingly by your peers, or used to describe you in legislation, the language that describes and defines us has consequences that ripple through our lives, right down to our bones.
The flip side of this is that when you’re aware of the power of words, it becomes important to be able to take control of that power by self defining and reclaiming language. People get weirdly upset at ‘made up words’ for gender and sexual orientation without understanding the history of criminalizaing, pathologizing, misinterpretation, and discrimination that the ‘normal’ words carry. We are aware of this power, and we’re using the power of language to self-identify. Apparently that’s very threatening.
“it’s only a word” – so, it won’t be a big deal for you to stop using it, right? Right?
The pay gap between what CEOs make and what they pay their workers is pretty well known. A new report released on Wednesday
illuminates a different gap: that between what CEOs have stashed away
for retirement and what their workers have been able to amass.
The report from the Center for Effective Government and the Institute
for Policy Studies looks at the retirement accounts among CEOs at
Fortune 500 companies and finds that on average they have $49.3 million
saved. By contrast, Americans have just $2,500 saved at the median.
Something I would still like called out, though: “Sheriff Lott said he expected that the student, who was arrested on a charge of disturbing the school, would still face prosecution. A lawyer for the student did not respond to a message on Wednesday.”
This teenage girl who is obviously the victim of police brutality is still under arrest. Not suspended from school or reprimanded, but under arrest and being prosecuted.
W. Kamau Bell tweets “‘We don’t know the whole story!’ ‘Oh, it begins w/the transatlantic slave trade… Where you going? I THOUGHT YOU WANTED THE WHOLE STORY!”
can you imagine how much the Jaeger Program meant to the poor and weak of the world?
like it is explicitly stated that the rich and powerful lived way inland, safer from the kaiju than those along the Pacific coastlines of the world. Can you imagine the interiors of various countries gentrifying, forcing lower-income families further and further from safety? Can you imagine having to tell your kids that you can’t afford your suddenly hyper-expensive home in, say, Idaho, and your best chance of being able to get an affordable house is on the coast of Oregon, where any day an enormous monster could pop up to say ‘hi fuck all of you’?
can you imagine how beloved the jaeger pilots are by the people on the coast? how happy they are that the battles are taking place out in the ocean rather than on top of their houses?
just
I just want to know precisely everything about the world of Pacific Rim not even just about the pilots I want to know about the average people living on the front lines of this horrible alien war and what sort of things they think about every day and how they live their lives and what kind of dumb blog posts they make and I want to see the riots that started over the Wall because no fuck you, you can’t take away their giant metal protectors and leave them with a wall that’s practically nothing, how dare you
This is why the “life wall" was bullshit and it’s hilarious that mostly the poor and disenfranchised would be working to build it and it wouldn’t even protect them.
The main purpose of the life wall project was probably to keep a steady supply of unskilled work along the coastline, as part of a one-two punch with the gentrification of the inland. If the only jobs are on the wall and the wall is by definition along the coast…
But notice that while they were supposedly racing to get the walls finished they were also handing out a finite amount of jobs. The largest civil engineering/public works program in the history of ever, and they still made it a buyers’ market for the employers. They still made people compete for the right to work for a pittance (bread was a luxury) in unsafe conditions.
I keep wondering what the actual endgame of the world leaders was… if they didn’t think the Kaiju would ever strike farther inland if left to run rampant, or if they thought the walls and the target-rich environment on the other side of them would always slow them down enough to be brought down with conventional weaponry, but at the end of the day I think it’s perfectly realistic to believe they had no endgame.
What’s the endgame on denying climate change? What’s the endgame on vulture capitalism destroying the consumer class that makes capitalism possible? What’s the endgame on propping up this quarter’s profits by stripmining the future? Strategies that literally have no future in them still win out.
There have been studies that show that neurologically speaking, we regard our own future selves as different people, that when we contemplate consequences of our actions down the road, the parts of the brain that activate are the same ones that happen when we regard things happening to other people. I think there’s a profound implication in this for how people who lack empathy also seem to lack any sense of long-term self-preservation even they clearly embrace it in the short-term.
The architects of the wall don’t have a plan for the future, because the future is something that happens to other people. In the here and now, they’re a thousand miles form the ocean and that’s good enough.
“It’s crucial because the members of our community who are the most vulnerable have and continue to experience a far more difficult time in our society. When the life expectancy of transgender women of colour in this country is 35, and 40% of homeless youth are lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender, we still have so much work to do.” – Ellen Page
Outdoor goods retailer REI announced that on top of being closed on Thanksgiving Day it will also keep its doors closed on Black Friday this year.
On Tuesday, the company announced that its 12,000 employees will get a
paid day off on November 27 in an effort to get more people to go
outdoors, and its website will feature a black screen.
“Girls slip through the diagnostic net, said Attwood, because they are so good at camouflaging or masking their symptoms. “Boys tend to externalise their problems, while girls learn that, if they’re good, their differences will not be noticed,” he said. “Boys go into attack mode when frustrated, while girls suffer in silence and become passive-aggressive. Girls learn to appease and apologise. They learn to observe people from a distance and imitate them. It is only if you look closely and ask the right questions, you see the terror in their eyes and see that their reactions are a learnt script.”
Girls also escape diagnosis, said Attwood, because they are more social than boys with the condition. Their symptoms can also be missed because it is the intensity of their interests that is unusual, and not the oddity of what they do.”
So she wasn’t being rude and disrespectful? I swear the media will always twist the story and make black people the aggressor
and even if she was being rude or disrespectful
there is no need to body slam and assault a child like that
^^^ That’s it.
and since when is being “rude and disrespectful” (which can mean different things to different people) illegal? you know how many rude people i deal with in my job? hundreds. you know how many i’ve assaulted? none.
My other theory, aside from the oxygen issue, is that the mega-fauna aren't around for the same reason that we all use the internet instead of several huge mainframes. It's simply easier to feed more biomass if it's smaller and faster, and networks are capable of being a lot more efficient at hunting than one big critter.
The Titanoboa, is a 48ft long snake dating from around 60-58million years ago. It had a rib cage 2ft wide, allowing it to eat whole crocodiles, and surrounding the ribcage were muscles so powerful that it could crush a rhino. Titanoboa was so big it couldn’t even spend long amounts of time on land, because the force of gravity acting on it would cause it to suffocate under its own weight.
omg me too. I’m scared enough of 26 ft long anacondas. I’m so happy Megalodons, those giant sharks, aren’t alive either
Praise natural selection
I remember watching Walking with Beasts or something similar, or some British tv show about evolution
The subject was something like a 12 foot long water scorpion
I was so startled by its sudden appearance and narration that I yelped: “12 fucking feet?!?! I’m fucking glad it’s extinct!”
Dude, prehistory was home to some fucking TERRIFYING creatures. For some reason, everything back then was enormous and scary. Extinction doesn’t always have to be a bad thing!
And Poppy, what you saw was an arthropod known as Pterygotus (it was actually featured in Walking With Monsters). Not only was it as big (or maybe even bigger) than your average human, it had a stinger the size of a lightbulb. REALLY glad that bugger isn’t around anymore.
Also, Megalodon deserves to be mention again, because just hearing its name makes me want to never be submerged in water ever again.
GOD, I HATE THIS POST. HOW DO WE EVEN KNOW THAT SHIT ISN’T STILL AROUND? LURKING? EVOLVING? WE DON’T. WE DON’T KNOW SHIT ABOUT SHIT DOWN THERE. THE OCEAN IS A PRIMEVAL HELLSCAPE NIGHTMARE AND WE ALL JUST DIP OUR STUPID FRAGILE UNPROTECTED FETUS BODIES AROUND THE EDGES OF IT LIKE THAT’S NORMAL. FUCK THE OCEAN.
this is so relevant to my interests
It wasn’t just the predators. North Carolina was once home to giant ground sloths…
THAT IS A GODDAMNED LEAF-EATING SLOTH.
We’ve got a skeleton of one of these fuckers at the museum downtown, and man, just being NEAR it is unsettling.
DON’T FORGET PREHISTORIC WHALES, SOME OF THOSE FUCKERS WERE TERRIFYING
AMBULOCETUS WAS AMPHIBIOUS AND PRETTY BADASS
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BASILOSAURUS WAS THIS GIANT REPTILIAN CETACEAN THAT PROBABLY SWAM LIKE A DUMB EEL BECAUSE OF ITS TINY FLUKES BUT THIS FUCKER WAS 60 FEET LONG AND AT THE TOP OF THE MARINE FOOD CHAIN
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AND THEN THERE’S MY FAVORITE, ZYGOPHYSETER, WHICH WAS THIS HUGE EARLY SPERM WHALE THAT ATE SHARKS AND OTHER WHALES
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IT WAS NOTHING BUT TEETH
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The reason why the animals in the prehistoric times were so big was because there was much more oxygen in the atmosphere if I recall correctly. Because there was so much oxygen and so few carbon gasses, life on earth was able to grow to terrifying lengths and heights, don’t forget how giant the bugs were.
Seriously, I have a degree in ‘this might have happened but it might have been this and no one really knows and the primary sources always disagree so you can basically find someone arguing any angle on this and you just have to make your own mind up about which seems the most realistic to you.’
So even if there was a game that was supposed to be 100% historically accurate (which, honestly, I can’t think of a single one), it’s just not true. Just another reason why the “historical accuracy” argument about diversity is completely unfounded.
Republicans like to claim that they're not coldhearted, they just want to cut anti-poverty programs like food stamps because those programs don't work and Republican ideas would be better. Never mind that Republican ideas mostly just involve less help to people who need it, people who those same Republicans have blocked from getting a minimum wage increase or paid sick leave. But anti-poverty programs do work. We know that, and now, thanks to a new study, we know that they work even better than we thought.
The study, by University of Chicago economist Bruce Meyer and CERGE-EI's Nikolas Mittag, looks at actual government data rather than people's self-reports about how much assistance they get. Because people don't always want to admit that they're in programs Republicans have done such a good job stigmatizing, the numbers are pretty different:
They found that more than a third of people getting housing assistance, 40 percent of people getting food stamps, and 60 percent of people getting TANF or state-based General Assistance didn't say so when surveyed for ASEC. And even people who said they got assistance underestimated how much they were getting, by 6 percent for food stamps, 40 percent for TANF/General Assistance, and 74 percent for housing assistance. [...]
... from 2008 to 2011 in New York, the average poverty rate before taking these programs into account was 13.6 percent. According to the survey data, food stamps/welfare/housing assistance dropped that down to 10.8 percent. But according to the more accurate administrative data, those programs actually cut the rate to 8.3 percent. Using the right numbers, in other words, nearly doubles the poverty-fighting power of these programs. The differences for "deep poverty" — that is, the share of households living on 50 percent of the poverty line or less — are a bit smaller, but for "near poverty" (the share of households living on 150 percent of the poverty line or less) they're even bigger, as the above chart suggests.
This finding echoes lots of earlier data showing real effects of War on Poverty programs in reducing poverty. The U.S. still has a lot of work to do—work that, again, Republicans are blocking on multiple fronts, constantly working to slash these programs that are working and to prevent legislation that would help the many, many government assistance recipients who have jobs that still leave them in or near poverty. But when those same Republicans tell you that the things the government is doing now don't work ... don't believe them.
