v3rgEz writes: The FBI followed Ray Bradbury's career very closely, in part because an informant warned them that his writing was not enjoyable fantasy, but rather tantamount to psychological warfare. "The general aim of these science fiction writers is to frighten the people into a state of paralysis or psychological incompetence bordering on hysteria," the informant warned. "Which would make it very possible to conduct a Third World War in which the American people would believe could not be won since their morale had seriously been destroyed."
my favorite thing is when the same people who complain about “everyone is too easily offended!!” go into a raging tantrum over something as simple as Target deciding to remove gendered descriptions from their toy aisles
“Conservative media and Fox News in particular have spent years - decades, if you count talk radio - training their audiences to believe that exhortations against sexism and racism are nothing but the “political correctness” police trying to kill your good time. Indeed, one reason that Trump was able to get so much attention for his presidential run in the first place is that Fox has spent years building him up, knowing that their audience enjoys vicariously needling imagined liberals and feminists with his loud-mouthed insult comic act.
As Jill Filipovic as Cosmopolitan recently explained in a feature piece about the conservative website Twitchy, there are entire sectors of the conservative media dedicated to getting the audiences to spend all day and night trying to piss off liberals, believing themselves to be courageous freedom fighters against the P.C. police. Women, in particular, are favorite targets. There’s apparently no getting tired of the pleasure of feeling naughty because you say mean things about women and racial minorities for conservative audiences.
Well, conservative media built Twitchy Nation, and now it looks like they have to live in it. You can’t tell people, day in and day out, that nothing is more fun than putting some mouthy broad in her place and then get upset when they continue to think it’s fun, even when the mouthy broad is one of yours.”
Don’t use fat as a negative word or thin as a good one.
Don’t engage in pro-diet talk.
Don’t make assumptions about people based on their weight.
Stop assuming fat people are unhealthy.
Don’t hold up “health” as the be all of everything- esp when it means “not fat”.
Stop using the word “obesity”- size is not a disease.
Don’t concern troll fat people.
Acknowledge that fat people get eating disorders too.
Demand an end the bullying of fat kids- which means an end to the fear mongering around “childhood obesity”.
Demand positive fat representation in media.
Don’t tell fat jokes or laugh at them.
Hold your faves responsible for their fatphobia.
Boost the voices of fat activists.
Support fat artists & creators.
Support & defend the fat women who speak out about fatphobia & get attacked ALL the time.
BELIEVE FAT PEOPLE.
There are things EVERYONE can do to move the needle on fatphobia.
You can start doing them NOW.
This is a slightly different thing, but I’d also like to add that we need to start celebrating fat bodies that aren’t cis, white, and femme because it seems that those are the loudest voices in the community. A body positive activist that is racist has failed. A body positive activist who is transphobic has failed. It is impossible to be truly body positive and deny individuals the right to exist in their bodies without fear. This means challenging “acceptable” fatness (often manifesting itself as cis, white, femme, and inexplicably, rockabilly) within the body positive community. We have to acknowledge that being black and fat or being Latinx and fat, for example, carry, for lack of a better word, different weight than being white and fat, even within the body positive community. It must be understood that failing to acknowledge these things, failing to turn a critical eye on the body positive community itself, results in a replication of the same oppressive beauty standards as well as oppressive standards of personhood that already exist on a broader societal level.
Reblogged for really important commentary.
“It must be understood that failing to acknowledge these things, failing to turn a critical eye on the body positive community itself, results in a replication of the same oppressive beauty standards as well as oppressive standards of personhood that already exist on a broader societal level.”
Seriously, it kills me when I see people hold scientists up as pinnacles of logic and reason.
Because one time the professor I was interning for got punched in the face by another professor, because mine got the funding, and told the other professor his theory was stupid.
This same professor told me to throw rocks to scare the “stupid fucking crabs” into moving so we could count them properly.
SCIENCE
thank you
this is one of the best comments this post has recieved
I have witnessed:
Two professors hiding around a corner and snickering, “Shhh, here she comes!” While a female professor approached and, when she finally found them, she proceeded to scream while pointing from one to the other, “You! I called your office but you weren’t there! So I tried to call YOUR office to figure out where HE was but YOU weren’t there!”
Two grad students standing outside a closed and locked door yelling, “Come out of the damn office. You haven’t left for days. If you didn’t have a couch in there I’d be concerned as to where you were sleeping!”
A religious studies professor apologizing for being late to class because, “security stopped me because I’m dressed like a hobbit”
Watched a professor snort the results of my experiment to determine if I had the right final compound.
Two archeology professors toss priceless fossilized teeth back and forth in an attempt to figure out who is smarter by “guessing the type of tooth and species of animal before it lands”
Multiple fully degreed individuals throw dry ice at one another in an attempt to be first to use the lab/get that piece of equipment/or change the iPod song.
A genetics professor build furniture out of stacks of paper and planks of wood because she is that far behind in grading papers/responding. One of the impromptu furniture pieces housed a fish tank.
I could go on but I think that covers the larger portion of the insanity…
Every time it comes around on my dash, it gets better.
- I have had a professor buy a huge fuckoff bottle of rum during fieldwork in Costa Rica and let the undergrads get wasted because “you’re not underage in Costa Rica and we’ll be up all night with the bats anyway!”
- Same professor hung a bat from her headlamp and wore it as a decoration for an entire night.
- A whole swarm of older women - and these are women with PhDs and world-renown bat experts, the bigwigs - all, to a woman, go to the formal charity dinner at an international research symposium in Toronto in late October dressed in skimpy Batgirl costumes. Because Halloween was that weekend, you see.
- At a different conference, a professor get blackout drunk and pass out on the side of the road.
- “Yeah, we have to say we did it properly for the grant but to be really honest, Miracle-gro works better.”
- Teaching lab: we had liquid nitrogen for a demo, and after class the professor, the other TA, and I spent a good two hours freezing and breaking things in it.
a chemistry class begins with 30 students nine months later just six of us left sitting on tables dipping paper into contaminated chemicals to see what happens when we burn it teacher making idle suggestions while he marks our work
“go to the fume hood thing, yeah now put some potassium in chlorine” can i burn the results sir? “fuck it sure whatever its tainted anyway”
The prof I’m working for just asked me if I knew how to pick a lock, and when I responded “yes” she replied, “see, this is why I hire the former delinquents instead of the suck-ups. You’re actually useful.”
I then let her into her office.
“Security stopped me because I’m dressed like a hobbit.” I would bet anything this has happened to Dr. Medievalist.
Semi-related non-academic anecdote: The concert hall security guys tried to throw out our violone player in between performances this spring because they thought he was a homeless guy. Despite the fact that he was wearing concert black… and carrying a violone. There is no more obvious instrument.
Gov. Bobby Jindal was the first among Republican governors to cut off Medicaid funding to Planned Parenthood after the latest attacks on the organization, the release of "sting" videos by anti-choice extremists posing as a medical research company. The organization filed suit Tuesday to stop the defunding effort.
Without a court injunction, more than 5,200 Planned Parenthood patients who rely on Medicaid for health care would have to find care elsewhere, the organization says.
"We're in court today to protect over 5,200 people's access to cancer screenings, well-woman exams, and basic health care in Louisiana," Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said in a statement. "Many of these folks would have nowhere else to turn for health care."
Richards slammed Jindal for attempting to cut Planned Parenthood funding "to score political points," charging that the governor's moves are putting women's health at risk.
Of course it's about scoring political points and trying desperately to gain an edge in the presidential campaign. Neither of Louisiana's two Planned Parenthood facilities even provides abortion services, so the cut-off of funds was absolutely baseless. But they provide a huge service—the East Baton Rouge clinic "served 60 percent of the female contraceptive clients served at publicly funded clinics in 2010."
The law is on Planned Parenthood's side, as the feds have reminded Jindal. Medicaid law specifically requires that recipients can choose whatever provider they want that accepts Medicaid patients. That includes Planned Parenthood, the medical home for millions of low income people. The only way a state can intervene and withdraw its portion of Medicaid funding is if the provider has committed fraud or certain other criminal acts. Which Planned Parenthood has not done, in Louisiana or anywhere else.
You’re fourteen and you’re reading Larry Niven’s “The Protector” because it’s your father’s favorite book and you like your father and you think he has good taste and the creature on the cover of the book looks interesting and you want to know what it’s about. And in it the female character does something better than the male character - because she’s been doing it her whole life and he’s only just learned - and he gets mad that she’s better at it than him. And you don’t understand why he would be mad about that, because, logically, she’d be better at it than him. She’s done it more. And he’s got a picture of a woman painted on the inside of his spacesuit, like a pinup girl, and it bothers you.
But you’re fourteen and you don’t know how to put this into words.
And then you’re fifteen and you’re reading “Orphans of the Sky” because it’s by a famous sci-fi author and it’s about a lost generation ship and how cool is that?!? but the women on the ship aren’t given a name until they’re married and you spend more time wondering what people call those women up until their marriage than you do focusing on the rest of the story. Even though this tidbit of information has nothing to do with the plot line of the story and is only brought up once in passing.
But it’s a random thing to get worked up about in an otherwise all right book.
Then you’re sixteen and you read “Dune” because your brother gave it to you for Christmas and it’s one of those books you have to read to earn your geek card. You spend an entire afternoon arguing over who is the main character - Paul or Jessica. And the more you contend Jessica, the more he says Paul, and you can’t make him see how the real hero is her. And you love Chani cause she’s tough and good with a knife, but at the end of the day, her killing Paul’s challengers is just a way to degrade them because those weenies lost to a girl.
Then you’re seventeen and you don’t want to read “Stranger in a Strange Land” after the first seventy pages because something about it just leaves a bad taste in your mouth. All of this talk of water-brothers. You can’t even pin it down.
And then you’re eighteen and you’ve given up on classic sci-fi, but that doesn’t stop your brother or your father from trying to get you to read more.
Even when you bring them the books and bring them the passages and show them how the authors didn’t treat women like people.
Your brother says, “Well, that was because of the time it was written in.”
You get all worked up because these men couldn’t imagine a world in which women were equal, in which women were empowered and intelligent and literate and capable.
You tell him - this, this is science fiction. This is all about imagining the world that could be and they couldn’t stand back long enough and dare to imagine how, not only technology would grow in time, but society would grow.
But he blows you off because he can’t understand how it feels to be fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen and desperately wanting to like the books your father likes, because your father has good taste, and being unable to, because most of those books tell you that you’re not a full person in ways that are too subtle to put into words. It’s all cognitive dissonance: a little like a song played a bit out of tempo - enough that you recognize it’s off, but not enough to pin down what exactly is wrong.
And then one day you’re twenty-two and studying sociology and some kind teacher finally gives you the words to explain all those little feelings that built and penned around inside of you for years.
It’s like the world clicking into place.
And that’s something your brother never had to struggle with.
This is an excellent post to keep in mind when you see another recent post criticizing the current trend of dystopian sci-fi and going on about how sci-fi used to be about hope and wonder.
in 2006, the USA had its first death from a coral snake bite in almost 20 years. it actually bit two people… one, fatally… because… wait for it…
they were trying to kill it.
time and time again, we’re reminded that the safest thing to do when you encounter a venomous snake is simply to leave it the fuck alone.
Contrary to what any would be tough guys think, your odds of getting fatally hurt by a wild animal go way up when you get in its face and try to hurt it. Who would’ve guessed.
I tell you, it has been seriously amusing to watch the narrative take shape around this.
Background: George R. R. Martin has been attending WorldCon since 1971, I believe when he was up for a Campbell (new writer award). He did not win, but as no more than six people are considered finalists for this honor each year and each writer has at most two years of eligibility, he recognizes this as such a signal honor that he lists it on his website alongside his awards and other honors.
(Contrast this with Larry Correia, who seems to feel like his own Campbell nomination constituted a contract that was broken when he didn’t win it.)
A few years after that, Martin, being a frequent flyer on the Hugo ballot, instituted what he called the Losers’ Party, for all the nominees who don’t win. There are alcohol, and ribbons. It sounds like a lot of fun, and of course, it’s all in good spirit… it is an honor to be nominated, and the Losers’ Party just reinforces what rarefied air one breathes in making it to the ballot.
This year, Mr. Martin decided to hand out his own award, which he calls the Alfies, after Alfred Bester (the author, not the Babylon 5 character named after the author).
He apparently made them out of hood ornaments, which award trophies are often mockingly compared to. That right there should tell you how serious this business was.
Now, Mr. Martin is not the president of science fiction and fantasy. He does not occupy a position of leadership or authority with WorldCon. He is not affiliated with the Hugos except insofar as they are occasionally affiliated with him. This party that he instituted is a Hugo tradition, but it’s not a Hugo institution. In short, the party is no more an official ceremony than a guy who looks like Drunk Scary Santa Claus is an official presenter, which he is no more than the hood ornaments he’s passing out are official trophies.
George R. R. Martin, in his private capacity as an individual human being, thought he would have some fun and recognize some individuals he thought could use some recognition/a laugh.
And a few Puppies “caught him” doing it, and immediately started casting around for “evidence” and wringing their hands with glee over the thought that they’d found proof that the Hugo award ceremony was a scam, that the fix was in, that the real awards were being handed out by Drunk Scary Santa Claus to the people ordained by the hive mind…
It’s funny, but you know, this is the difference between the Sad Puppies and everybody else.
All along, people have been telling the Sad Puppies that if they don’t like the tastes of the broader fandom that selects the Hugo Awards or they don’t like how the awards are administered, they’re welcome to go make and give out their own awards.
The Puppies, meanwhile, not only demand complete control over these awards right here, they’re outraged at the idea that someone they disagree with can just up and decide to give out an award they don’t have any influence over.
If you want proof positive that the Puppies won’t be happy until everything is under their control, if you want the ultimate refutation of their cherished PR myth that they are anti-authoritarian, look no further than this: the epic tantrum they threw over a private individual taking it upon himself to hand out trophies he made as he saw fit.
David Duke, a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and self-described “racial realist,” says Donald Trump is the best Republican candidate for president because he “understands the real sentiment of America.”
Since I don’t see this all that often, but part-time wheelchair usage is a thing and these are things I learned as someone who uses a wheelchair part time. (Please add to it if you think of things!)
*Not as many people as you think are watching you get out of your car to walk to where your wheelchair is to get in it.
*Chances are you have only a manual one- this can be hard on your arms. It’s okay to ask for help from someone to push. But it’s just as okay to yell and make a big deal when they push without asking (Then asking them 4 minutes later to push you. Wheelchairs can be emotional things- it’s okay to be emotional.)
*It’s okay to get up from your chair occasional. You don’t have to “pretend” that you can’t get up from your wheelchair. Everyone is different. You don’t owe ANYONE an explanation.
*Don’t be embarrassed about telling family members or friends you need the wheelchair. Chances are they WILL forget. They won’t mean to- but this is new for them and even more part-time for them. It IS okay to insist on bringing the wheelchair. Even on short trips.
* This is an important one I had to learn. IF ITS HARD FOR SOMEONE TO PUSH YOU. Say a hill, or something. DON”T JUST SAY “I feel bad” AND GET UP AND WALK IT. IF ITS HARD FOR THEM TO PUSH YOU. THAT MEANS IT’LL BE JUST AS HARD TO WALK IT. You are in that wheelchair for a reason, don’t feel guilty.
*You are NOT faking. Part-Time wheelchair usage is OKAY to do. You are not exaggerating your symptoms, you are not pretending you are worse than you are. Everyone’s story is different. You do not owe anyone an explanation.
just one tiny note as a former part-time wheelchair user. If you’re wondering why it hurts your arms so much/ why it’s tiring, it takes a looooot of time and constant use to build up those muscles, especially if you have other things to take into consideration (fatigue, pain, issues with your upper body as well, etc.)
so yeah, don’t be afraid to ask for help, and don’t worry if your approach to being in a chair is different than someone else’s. Do what works best for you.
Four of the most prominent activists in the fight against police violence are launching a new campaign to fight police brutality. Campaign Zero, "a comprehensive platform aimed to create systems and structures that will end police violence," was unveiled Friday by the campaign’s planning team, including DeRay Mckesson, Johnetta Elzie, Sam Sinyangwe, and Brittany Packnett.
The campaign’s launch announcement emphasized the need to demand policy change now.
"A year after Mike Brown's murder, after more than 1,000 protests nationwide, we must continue to work together to develop and advocate for solutions to end police violence.
Right now, the country is awake. We must continue to leverage this awakening for substantive change. We have an opportunity to change the way that issues in blackness are prioritized in political spaces and an opportunity to redefine how the political process interacts with our communities."
The platform is comprised of 10 fundamental policy recommendations, which were developed with input from protestors and activists, research organizations, the President's Task Force on 21st Century Policing, and data analysis. The categories include ending broken windows policing, improving law enforcement training, and increasing community oversight, among others. Within each category there are multiple specific policy solutions, including suggestions for local, state, and federal government. Says Campaign Zero:
"We can live in a world where the police don't kill people by limiting police interventions, improving community interactions, and ensuring accountability. It will take deliberate action from policy-makers at all levels of government to implement these policy solutions."
The planning team is committed to continuing the inclusion of community voices and has pledged to host policy conference calls to get feedback on the platform. They also expect to expand this policy agenda. Says Campaign Zero, "This is just the beginning, and we will continue to update the campaign with your rigorous solutions and ideas."
Campaign Zero’s coordinated and comprehensive policy platform is another welcome tool in the fight to end racist policing and hold law enforcement and elected officials accountable. You can see their whole platform and learn more about the campaign by visiting their website.
when you know a lot about something and people don’t respect your expertise and reference your “special interest” in an “oh isn’t that cute” sort of way
Now here's some sweet justice—a stinging indictment of the court practices in Ferguson, where a new municipal judge has ordered a complete overhaul of the system (via Reuters):
Municipal Court Judge Donald McCullin, appointed in June, ordered that all arrest warrants issued in the city before Dec. 31, 2014 be withdrawn.
Defendants will receive new court dates along with options for disposing of their cases, such as payment plans or community service. Fines may be commuted for indigent people.
The changes come five months after the U.S. Department of Justice strongly criticized city leaders in its report, saying the police force and court worked together to exploit people in order to raise revenue.
The Department of Justice inquiry found a calculated pattern of abuse had arisen in Ferguson where minor municipal violations like traffic stops were continually ratcheted up until they resulted in arrests, jail time, and fines that far exceeded that of the original violation.
Judge McCullin also said that many people who have had their driver's licenses suspended—a common practice in Ferguson—will be able to get their licenses back and drive legally again.
McCullin succeeded municipal judge Ronald Brockemeyer, who was roundly criticized in the DOJ report.
I’m so excited to see my Lord and Savior represented in such glorious Italian stone do hope his eyes gaze upon me and my allegiance is recognized. …The statue is a symbol for what they advocated the separation of church and state.You can’t have one without the other you know, like a mule carts God and the devil. A cloak of shame covers this man and only supreme light wash my body clean but how could that might possibly reach me with a thick clouds of indecency surrounding my poor soul so I carry my wrongdoings on my back like some kind of tormented hiker lost in the hills of misfortune looking desperately for that peak to rescue him from the valley of depraved habitual self pleasuring but again I find nothing except for sweaty devastated loneliness and a thousand judging eyes staring back at me from the cover of a stolen Victoria’s Secret catalog. I didn’t take your mail Mrs. Pemberton, stop asking me that.
And Donald Trump continues to rack up the endorsements.
Four of the most prominent activists in the fight against police violence are launching a new campaign to fight police brutality. Campaign Zero, "a comprehensive platform aimed to create systems and structures that will end police violence," was unveiled Friday by the campaign’s planning team, including DeRay Mckesson, Johnetta Elzie, Sam Sinyangwe, and Brittany Packnett.
Now here's some sweet justice—a stinging indictment of the court practices in Ferguson, where a new municipal judge has ordered a complete overhaul of the system (via Reuters):