ThePrettiestOne

This is what it looks like when government fails to protect its citizens:

When Hurricane Katrina hit, more than a quarter of people living in New Orleans in August of 2005 lived below the poverty line. Many of the poor in stayed at home to weather the storm. Why?

27% of New Orleanians didn’t own a car, making evacuation even more difficult and expensive than it would otherwise be.

People without the means to leave are also the most likely to rely on the television, as opposed to the radio or internet, for news. TV news began warning people how bad the storm would be only 48 hours before it hit; some people, then, had only 48 hours to process this information and make plans.

Poor people are more likely than middle and upper class people to never leave where they grew up. This means that they were much less likely to have a network of people outside of New Orleans with whom they could stay, at the same time that they were least able to afford a motel room.

For those who were on government assistance, living check-to-check, it was the end of the month. Their checks were due to arrive three days after the hurricane. It was also back-to-school time and many were extra cash poor because they had extra expenses for their children.

A study of New Orleanians rescued and evacuated to Houston, described here, found that:

…14% were physically disabled, 23% stayed in New Orleans to care for a physically disabled person, and 25% were suffering from a chronic disease…  Also,

• 55% did not have a car or a way to evacuate
• 68% had neither money in the bank nor a useable credit card
• 57% had total household incomes of less than $20,000 in the prior year
• 76% had children under 18 with them in the shelter
• 77% had a high school education or less
• 93% were black
• 67% were employed full or part-time before the hurricane

The city failed to get information to their most vulnerable residents in time and they failed to facilitate their evacuation.  The empty buses in flood water, buses that could have been filled with evacuees prior to the storm, is a testament to this failure.

Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. She writes about New Orleans here. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

voidbat:

misandry-mermaid:

misssuzyvalentine:

coveredinsnow-:

ilovemaydayparade69:

rubee:

“why dont you just give him a chance”

idk because im not physically or mentally attracted to him and ‘but he likes you’ or ‘but hes really nice’ isnt going to change the fact that im not interested

Damn, I don’t think women know how much that really hurts

I don’t understand this “you don’t know how much that hurts” stuff. Do men not remember rejecting women? Have they forgotten that they hold us to impossibly high standards of behavior and beauty? That our personality alone is not enough for most men. Us being a “nice person” isn’t what men list as their prime quality in a woman.

How come we’re rejected constantly, compared to each other, pitted against each other and pretty much just accept this and move on but the second we do that to a guy we’re friend zoning bitches that are shallow and heartless.

Normally the men complaining about rejection would have no problem finding a lovely girlfriend if they’d just expand their idea of beauty.

If you’re not a stereotypical “hot guy” don’t expect to pull a stereotypical “hot chick”. It’s not every man’s right to have an extremely attractive girlfriend; it’s not your right to have any girlfriend. And if you wouldn’t date a woman based purely on her having a nice personality, why the fuck should any woman date you?

This is how you know that men are incapable of empathizing with women. When they say shit like “You don’t know how much it hurts to get rejected” it is a DIRECT, CLEAR implication that we don’t experience emotion or pain on the same level that they do.
That is some basic-ass misogyny and dehumanization and you should back away from any man that talks that way.

“Damn, I don’t think women know how much that really hurts” 

your hurt feelings do not override my right to say no.

(Warning: Hugo neepery. Avoid if you don’t care.)

As most of you know, at last Saturday’s Hugo Awards ceremony, the voters, of which there were a record number, chose not to offer awards in five categories rather than to give the award to nominees who got on the ballot because of the Sad/Rabid Puppy slating campaign. In the categories in which awards were given, in nearly all cases the Puppy nominees in the category finished below “No Award.” The only category where a Puppy nominee prevailed was in Best Dramatic Presentation, in which one of their choices was Guardians of the Galaxy. There’s not a lot of credit they can take for that one.

Why did the Puppies fare so poorly? There has already been much speculation and analysis on the matter, and there will continue to be for some time. But in my estimation (and leaving out issues of literary quality of the nominations, which is super-subjective), the reason for their massive and historic failure is simple:

They acted like jerks, and performed a series of jerk maneuvers.

Specifically:

1. They created slates for awards that are meant to be about an individual’s personal tastes and choices. That’s a jerk maneuver.

2. They gloated about the slates getting on the ballot, and the upset that this caused other people. That’s a jerk maneuver.

3. They created an imaginary cabal of people and asserted without evidence that this cabal indulged in slate-making, and used this assertion to justify their own bad action. That’s a jerk maneuver.

4. They spent months insulting the people they associated with their imaginary cabal. That’s a jerk maneuver.

5. They spent months crapping on the writers they dragooned into their imaginary cabal, and crapping on the work those writers created. That’s a jerk maneuver.

6. They spent months denigrating the award they went out of their way to build slates for. That’s a jerk maneuver.

7. They spent months pissing on the people who love and care about the awards, and the convention that hosts both. That’s a jerk maneuver.

8. They expected the people who they’d been treating with contempt to give them the respect they would not afford them. That’s a jerk maneuver.

9. They pretended they didn’t actually care about the awards for which they put in months and sometimes years of effort to get work on the ballot. That’s a jerk maneuver.

10. They had the poor grace to whine about people potentially voting “no award,” which is fully allowed by the rules, after gleefully pointing out that slating was not disallowed. That’s a jerk maneuver.

The first of these points in itself would almost certainly have been enough to motivate people to vote against the slates, and the nominees who willingly (or, sadly in a number of cases, unwittingly) found themselves on them. But the other nine points didn’t help, and a lot of the people who declared themselves Puppies or allied themselves with them went out of their way to do some or all of those points. Repeatedly, and with increasing foaminess as things went along.

Here’s the thing: If you perform a bunch of jerk maneuvers, people are likely to treat you like you’re a jerk.

Consonantly: If you perform a bunch of jerk maneuvers, you might, in fact, actually be a jerk. Not always. But the correlation is there, and that correlation gets increasingly significant the more jerk maneuvers you perform.

There is (usually) no crime in performing a jerk maneuver, or acting like a jerk. Everyone can, and has, acted like a jerk from time to time. It’s a regrettable but natural part of the human experience. But most people have the good sense to understand that acting like a jerk should not be a lifestyle choice, and that if you make it one, people will respond to you based on your choices.

As they did, in this case, with the Hugos. The Hugo vote against the Puppy slates was not about politics, or cabals, or one species of science fiction and fantasy over another, no matter what anyone would like you to believe — or at the very least, it wasn’t mostly about those things. It was about small group of people acting like jerks, and another, rather larger group, expressing their displeasure at them acting so.

Mind you, I don’t expect the core Puppies to recognize this; indeed I expect them to say they haven’t done a single thing that has been other than forthright and noble and correct. Well, and here’s the thing about that: acting like an jerk and then asserting that no, it’s everyone else that’s been acting like a jerk, is the biggest jerk maneuver of all.

(Comments on this piece off for now, because I’m about to start an event and have a super-busy day today. I might turn them on later.)

Chubby raptor run

mostlysignssomeportents:

Kansas loves them some voter fraud hysteria. From going to the Supreme Court to try and make doubly-sure that non-citizens can’t vote in their elections to setting up a voter fraud website where citizens can report every kind of voter fraud except the kinds that have actually happened in the state, Kansas is on the forefront of voter fraud readiness and protection.

Except, perhaps, when it comes to the machines they use to record their votes.

According to the Wichita Eagle, Wichita State mathematician Beth Clarkson has found irregularities in election returns from Sedgwick County, along with other counties throughout the United States, but has faced stiff opposition from the state in trying to confirm whether the irregularities are fraud or other, less-nefarious anomalies.

Analyzing election returns at a precinct level, Clarkson found that candidate support was correlated, to a statistically significant degree, with the size of the precinct. In Republican primaries, the bias has been toward the establishment candidates over tea partiers. In general elections, it has favored Republican candidates over Democrats, even when the demographics of the precincts in question suggested that the opposite should have been true.

Clarkson’s interest in election returns was piqued by a 2012 paper released by analysts Francois Choquette and James Johnson showing the same pattern of election returns, which favor establishment Republican candidates in primaries and general elections. The irregularities are isolated to precincts that use “Central Tabulator” voting machines — machines that have previously been shown to be vulnerable to hacking. The effects are significant and widespread: According to their analysis, Mitt Romney could have received over a million extra votes in the 2012 Republican primary, mostly coming at the expense of Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich. President Obama also ceded significant votes to John McCain due to this irregularity, as well.

You can read the paper in full here.

Read the rest…

Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

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“Can you say a curse word in European?” People of color experience racist microaggressions every day. Here's Franchesca “Chescaleigh” Ramsey with a hilarious take on if the tables were turned.

Although I’m no rookie to shooting festival street style (10 years and counting), Afropunk was a first for me. In light of the #NoChella movement and a general distaste for copy+paste festivalgoers, the two-day Brooklyn event is a welcome enabler for all expressive persons and personalities.

Now in its 11th year, Afropunk remains a sacred and safe spot, not akin to Burning Man, but sharing common ideologies with enormous billboards framing the stage stating “No sexism, no racism, no ableism, no ageism, no homophobia, no fat phobia, no transphobia, no hatefulness”.

You get the message. The result was a visual chaos of playful prints, intricate neon braids, and head-to-toe body adornments, and more importantly, it was the warmest and wholesome crowd I’ve come across in a long time.

NEED INSPIRATION? WGSN publishes 350 in-depth reports each month. That’s a seriously awe-inspiring amount of inspiration. Find out more here.

Love The Curated Cool? Check out Sarah’s latest photography and what she’s seen – follow her on Instagram @sarahsarahowen.

The post The Curated Cool: Afropunk 2015 appeared first on WGSN/INSIDER.

If you associate bullies with playgrounds and elementary school, that means you probably haven’t experienced one as an adult. Unfortunately, some people never outgrow being a jerk and continue this type of harassing behavior well into adulthood. Here are some tips for understanding and dealing with bullies, no matter…

Read more...

cacchieressa:

loisfreakinglane:

endless evidence that peter parker is most interesting as a former teen superhero defending and dispensing advice to current teen superheroes

#he is so good with the kiddies #someone introduce him to dick grayson (via swatkat)

it makes me so sad that in the multiple DC/Marvel crossovers, that has not happened. They would be AMAZING crossover crimefighting buddies.

when you can’t tell the difference between being hungry or being angry or being sick or being overloaded or being scared

Source

ROWAN BLANCHARD’S INSTAGRAM POST ON INTERSECTIONAL FEMINISM

“Hi! This is such an important thing to be discussing. I have made a very big point at making sure my personal feminism includes everyone- and educating myself and discussing these topics have really helped.

Issues that are commonly thought of as feminist issues include sexual assault, rape, abortion, Planned Parenthood, domestic violence, equal education, and the wage gap. Feminists have also adopted marriage equality and gay/lesbian rights as their issue which is wonderful.

However, with as many issues as feminists have succeeded in adopting, many of us seem to have not accepted the fact that police brutality and race issues are our issues too.

“White feminism” forgets all about intersectional feminism. The way a black woman experiences sexism and inequality is different from the way a white woman experiences sexism and inequality. Likewise with trans-women and Hispanic women. While white women are making 78 cents to the dollar, Native American women are making 65 cents, black women are making 64 cents, and Hispanic women are making 54 cents. Kimberlé Crenshaw said it perfectly in 1989 when she said “The view that women experience oppression in varying configurations and in varying degrees of intensity. Cultural patterns of oppression are not only interrelated, but are bound together and influenced by the intersectional systems of society. Examples of this include race, gender, class, ability, and ethnicity.” This includes trans women especially, who have been robbed of their souls when they are told they are not “real women” It is SO important to protect trans women and trans youth as they are incredibly at risk when it comes to sexual assault and hate crimes. People also seem to forget that black women are victims of police violence too- from Sandra Bland to India Clarke- a trans woman who was beaten to death in Florida just a month ago.

The fact that when Amandla Stenberg wrote this beautiful and truthful piece http://instagram.com/p/5D-u1Vm1c8/ she was automatically labeled the “angry black girl” says enough. We are so quick to applaud white women for commenting on race issues/discussions like #BlackLivesMatter, and #SayHerName, but when a black girl comments on it- she is told she is overreacting or being angry.

Comments like the ones you mentioned in your question drive me insane. I have personally seen men get called gay/ f**/ pu*** for wearing anything even remotely feminine. Gay is simply not an insult. Also, let’s not forget that black men cannot wear hoods without being stereotyped as thugs.

To only acknowledge feminism from a one sided view when the literal DEFINITION is the equality of the sexes is not feminism at all. We need to be talking about this more. Discussion leads to change. Xo, Row”

Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

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Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

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cockatielcove:

Is angellic.

http://www.youtube.com/v/KSnkqk-MeC0&rel=0

- commentaires
- via: www.youtube.com

BEST NOVEL

The Three Body Problem, Cixin Liu, Ken Liu translator (Tor Books)

BEST NOVELETTE

“The Day the World Turned Upside Down”, Thomas Olde Heuvelt, Lia Belt translator (Lightspeed, 04-2014)

BEST GRAPHIC STORY

Ms. Marvel Volume 1: No Normal, written by G. Willow Wilson, illustrated by Adrian Alphona and Jake Wyatt, (Marvel Comics)

BEST DRAMATIC PRESENTATION, LONG FORM

Guardians of the Galaxy, written by James Gunn and Nicole Perlman, directed by James Gunn (Marvel Studios, Moving Picture Company)

BEST DRAMATIC PRESENTATION, SHORT FORM

Orphan Black: “By Means Which Have Never Yet Been Tried”, ” written by Graham Manson, directed by John Fawcett (Temple Street Productions, Space/BBC America)

BEST PROFESSIONAL ARTIST

Julie Dillon

BEST SEMIPROZINE

Lightspeed Magazine, edited by John Joseph Adams, Stefan Rudnicki, Rich Horton, Wendy N. Wagner, and Christie Yant

BEST FANZINE

Journey Planet, edited by James Bacon, Christopher J Garcia, Colin Harris, Alissa McKersie, and Helen J. Montgomery

BEST FANCAST

Galactic Suburbia Podcast, Alisa Krasnostein, Alexandra Pierce, Tansy Rayner Roberts (Presenters) and Andrew Finch (Producer)

BEST FAN WRITER

Laura J. Mixon

BEST FAN ARTIST

Elizabeth Leggett

JOHN W. CAMPBELL AWARD FOR BEST NEW WRITER

Award for the best new professional science fiction or fantasy writer of 2012 or 2013, sponsored by Dell Magazines (not a Hugo Award).

Wesley Chu

[Editor’s Note: By now, I’m sure many of you are celebrating the results of last night’s Hugo Awards! We’ll be publishing a roundup of this year’s winners soon, but in the meantime, here’s Marcy J. Cook on what the puppies stand for and the transphobia they demonstrated at this year’s Awards.]

If you are at all a Sci-Fi or Fantasy book-geek you know that the 2015 Hugo Awards were mired in controversy thanks to the actions of right wing conservatives, mostly older white guys. It’s a group that formed ‘Sad Puppies’ and it’s fraction spin-off the even more extreme ‘Rabid Puppies’. They aim to fight back against what they see as liberal bias in Sci-Fi and Fantasy towards women, LGBTQ and the mythic liberal agenda. Yes these are the terms the USA Republicans use too, this is because the puppies are mostly Americans so there is a lot of cross over in the rubric.

As the world has grown more progressive it has meant that the extreme-conservatives and white old guys have less control than they used to have. That is what this is about, a slight loosening of their grip. More women are winning awards, more PoC and people from the LGBTQ spectrum – in other words there is more acceptance of diversity. This has been reflected recently in the Hugo Awards, in particular women have been winning more Hugo Awards in the last few years. This is against everything that the puppies believe in.

Belief is the right term here, as the world the puppies yelp back to has never existed. They imagine a 1950’s era of white hetro male domination where all men-were-men and women existed only to be rescued, PoC knew their place and LGBTQ people didn’t even exist. This era in novels never existed of course, but why would mere facts stop the puppies? Reason certainly didn’t and neither did the concept of fairness.

The two puppy groups were not just trying to weight the Hugo Awards, or game it, they were out to break the Hugo’s. When the puppies gathered at Worldcon yesterday, the puppies were there to spread their particular brand of hate. Trigger warning for transphobia & abuse:

The slightly larger version is here, click to enlarge:

This was placed in a stack on the freebie table at Worldcon. I love Sci-Fi, I love fantasy, and I love reading and writing it ,too. What I don’t like is hatred. Puppies conflate free speech with the freedom to be abusive towards people they don’t agree with. It’s vile and the Hugo’s are going to struggle to recover from this. The puppies though don’t care about what the world thinks of the Hugo’s in the same manner as Trump’s wig doesn’t care about what it is riding on.

Just to prove that women can be as utterly transphobic as men, here’s how a puppy responded to the removal of the leaflets. She’s a writer I’ve never heard of, and I won’t give her publicity by using her name here; she uploaded more transphobic content and declared the leaflet “funny” and people opposed to ‘the freedom to abuse others’ as “devils”.

Thankfully the Hugo Award results backfired against the puppies and the hate speech they put out. The Hugos were watched more closely this year than ever before.

(image via Shutterstock)

Marcy (@marcyjcook) is an immigrant trans woman and writer. This includes Transcanuck.com, a website dedicated to informing and helping trans Canadians. She also has a nerd job, too many cats, is a part time volunteer sex educator and has an ongoing sordid love affair with Lego. Those last two are not related… probably.

—Please make note of The Mary Sue’s general comment policy.—

Do you follow The Mary Sue on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, & Google +?

thysweetpoison:

Understanding How Depression Feels (via buzzfeed)

Last night, the Hugo Awards were handed out. And the fans rejected the attempt of a small minority to impose its ideology on the nominations via slate-voting. But last night, we also learned which works would have been on the ballot, if the nominations hadn’t been rigged.

Read more...

Hovertext: And it smells... goooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooood.

New comic!
Today's News:

“This is how thoroughly we women have been sexualized, that we cannot make the kind of noises that come with physical exertion without it being associated with sex. In fact, everything about our bodies has been sexualized in one way or another. If we groan during sport or we breast-feed in public, we are criticized for making people think about sex. If we talk openly about things like menstruation and poop and farts, then we are criticized for making people not want to think about sex.
Think about what it means to be ladylike and all of the adjectives that go along with it: elegant, cultured, classy, sophisticated. To be successful at being feminine means being successful at being private, keeping your body’s natural functions behind closed doors and never letting anyone know they exist. It means to be constrained, that you do not let your legs spread wide in public transportation and you do not make noises that are harsh on the ears. It means presenting a polished, shiny surface to the world at all times, one that allows others to project whatever they wish onto you while never showing too much of your true self.”

- Women’s tennis and the gender politics of grunting  (via health-time)

Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

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conservatives: the government should not interfere and should not be involved in anyone's personal lives or decisions
conservatives:
conservatives:
conservatives: except gay people's
conservatives: and black people's
conservatives: and women's
conservatives:
conservatives: basically I meant I want a gun and no taxes

Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

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A much-discussed New York Times story this week revealed that Amazon doesn't just treat its warehouse workers terribly. Its professional staff also face a horrifying workplace culture:

A woman who had thyroid cancer was given a low performance rating after she returned from treatment. She says her manager explained that while she was out, her peers were accomplishing a great deal. Another employee who miscarried twins left for a business trip the day after she had surgery. “I’m sorry, the work is still going to need to get done,” she said her boss told her. “From where you are in life, trying to start a family, I don’t know if this is the right place for you.”

A woman who had breast cancer was told that she was put on a “performance improvement plan” — Amazon code for “you’re in danger of being fired” — because “difficulties” in her “personal life” had interfered with fulfilling her work goals.

According to Jeff Bezos, "I don’t recognize this Amazon," but The Onion offered Bezos a more plausible script. Here's the thing, though: Even if you take out the horrible stories about people being penalized for having cancer or losing a loved one, Amazon's workplace practices are still terrible. Terrible for workers, and not great for productivity. The ethos of working super long hours and being available even when you're on vacation is widespread among American corporations ... but we know it's a bad idea. The Harvard Business Review's Sarah Green Carmichael reviews the research:

In a study of consultants by Erin Reid, a professor at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business, managers could not tell the difference between employees who actually worked 80 hours a week and those who just pretended to. While managers did penalize employees who were transparent about working less, Reid was not able to find any evidence that those employees actually accomplished less, or any sign that the overworking employees accomplished more.

Considerable evidence shows that overwork is not just neutral — it hurts us and the companies we work for. Numerous studies by Marianna Virtanen of the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health and her colleagues (as well as other studies) have found that overwork and the resulting stress can lead to all sorts of health problems, including impaired sleep, depression, heavy drinking, diabetes, impaired memory, and heart disease. Of course, those are bad on their own. But they’re also terrible for a company’s bottom line, showing up as absenteeism, turnover, and rising health insurance costs. Even the Scroogiest of employers, who cared nothing for his employees’ well-being, should find strong evidence here that there are real, balance-sheet costs incurred when employees log crazy hours.

If your job relies on interpersonal communication, making judgment calls, reading other people’s faces, or managing your own emotional reactions  — pretty much all things that the modern office requires — I have more bad news. Researchers have found that overwork (and its accompanying stress and exhaustion) can make all of these things more difficult.

But too many companies prefer the illusion of added productivity through overwork to the reality of similar productivity from healthy employees with lives, and, thanks to decades of corporate attacks on unions and worker power, American workers rarely have the leverage to push back.

Continue reading below the fold for more of the week's labor and education news.

“

I think that queer readers have trouble escaping into a world that doesn’t include queer characters, because we know that we wouldn’t be welcome there. In fact, SFF that create worlds without queer characters seem to suggest that we wouldn’t even be able to exist there: our existence is not conceivable in the context we are given. When we read a story that doesn’t include queer people, a world that doesn’t include queer characters, it comes with the nagging message You don’t belong here.

Whether it’s a horrific dystopia or a silly space romp, that implication makes it difficult to “escape”, because the truth is, we’re already all too familiar with that sentiment.

”

- “Why We Need Queer Escapist Lit” at The Lesbrary
(via fuckyeahlesbianliterature)