ThePrettiestOne

“This country is in serious trouble. Our economic system benefits the rich and large corporations and leaves working families behind. Our political system is dominated by billionaire campaign contributors and their lobbyists and is moving us in the direction of oligarchy. Our media system, owned by the corporate world, spends enormous time and energy diverting our attention away from the most important issues facing us. Climate change threatens the planet and we have a major political party denying its reality.
 
Clearly, the struggle to create a nation and world of economic and social justice and environmental sanity is not an easy one. But this I know: despair is not an option if we care about our kids and grandchildren. Giving up is not an option if we want to prevent irreparable harm to our planet.
 
We must stand up and fight back. We must launch a political revolution which engages millions of Americans from all walks of life in the struggle for real change. This country belongs to all of us, not just the billionaire class.
 
Please join the grass-roots revolution that we desperately need.”

- Sen. Bernie Sanders (I, Vermont) “For A Political Revolution”

I could do that, sure, but I’ve never seen the point in adjusting my behavior based on what a total stranger on the internet finds annoying but not actually, you know, harmful. I figure, why start now?

You know what’s really terrible and unnecessary? Messaging someone you don’t know so you can try to moderate what they do or don’t say on their personal space. That’s a pretty douche move, in fact, on a lot of levels. Not that this particular request in and of itself is dreadfully earthshattering, but my point is, the fact that you think it’s okay to suggest it is kind of shitty.

tl:dr: No, and get over yourself.

Stone Soup by Jan Eliot for April 04, 2015

Flashback Friday.

Having a criminal record negatively affects the likelihood of being considered for a job. Devah Pager conducted a matched-pair experiment in which she had male testers apply for the same entry-level jobs advertised in Milwaukee newspapers. She gave the assistants fake credentials that make them equivalent in terms of education, job experience, and so on. Half were Black and half White.

One tester from each pair was instructed to indicate that they had a past non-violent drug possession offense. Pager then collected data on how many of the applicants were called back for an interview after submitting their fake applications.

The results indicate that getting a job with a criminal record is difficult. Having even a non-violent drug offense had a significant impact on rates of callbacks:

What was surprising was that race actually turned out to be more significant than a criminal background. Notice that employers were more likely to call Whites with a criminal record (17% were offered an interview) than Blacks without a criminal record (14%). And while having a criminal background hurt all applicants’ chances of getting an interview, African Americans with a non-violent offense faced particularly dismal employment prospects. Imagine if the fake criminal offense had been for a property or violent crime?

In addition, according to Pager, employers seemed to expect that Black applicants might have a criminal record:

When people think of Black men they think of a criminal. It affects the way Black men are treated in the labor market. In fact, Black testers in our study were likely to be asked up front if they have a criminal record, while whites were rarely asked…

African American men face a double barrier:  higher rates of incarceration and racial discrimination.

Originally posted in 2009.

Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.

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

unite4humanity:

He gets it.

“In general, I think we need to move away from the premise that being a good person is a fixed immutable characteristic and shift towards seeing being good as a practice. And it is a practice that we carry out by engaging with our imperfections. We need to shift towards thinking that being a good person is like being a clean person. Being a clean person is something you maintain and work on every day. We don’t assume ‘I am a clean person therefore I don’t need to brush my teeth.’ When someone suggests to us that we have something stuck in our teeth we don’t say to them ‘What do you mean I have something stuck in my teeth—but I’m a clean person?!’”

- Jay Smooth in his TED speech “how I learned to stop worrying and love discussing race”
(via wickedgirlssavingourselves)

jumpingjacktrash:

i think a lot of us, when we’re growing up, we learn kind of the opposite of self-care. a kind of self-disregard, if that makes any sense.

especially those of us who have invisible disabilities, we needed extra rest or extra help or something different from other kids, but not only did we not get it, we were made to feel greedy or lazy for needing it. so we internalized that, and we grew up with this feeling that having needs is weakness.

hands up if you were shocked to discover that not everyone goes through life being exhausted and hungry and strung out all the time. o/

for the longest time i just thought everyone else was better than me at hiding the fact that they were constantly in pain and sleep deprived.

vixyish:

Wowsers! 

Cats, I’m getting hate mail for a comment I added to an earlier reblog, suggesting that advocacy for male victims of rape & abuse can co-exist with feminism, and that feminists actually want to end violence against men just as much as they want to end violence against women. (No threats, though one person did say that people like me “should be shot”.)

I debated answering these publicly, but they’re not anon, and I don’t really want to drop the internet on their heads. In particular, one identifies himself as a male victim of abuse/rape, and no victim of violence should be attacked or shamed, or declared publicly if they haven’t chosen to tell the story in public themselves.

So instead I will just clarify once again: rape and abuse of men is a feminist issue.

By which I mean, rape and abuse of men is an issue that feminists care about.

The reason men get dismissed or told “you should’ve just enjoyed it” if they are raped or abused is PATRIARCHY. It is patriarchy that tells men that being vulnerable or a victim of violence is shameful because it isn’t “manly”. It is patriarchy that tells men that being “like a girl” is a bad thing. That being beaten up makes them a “pussy” or a “sissy”, especially if the perpetrator of violence is female. That message is everywhere. From body type to sports ability to sexual orientation. Patriarchy is the system that tells women they have to be submissive and sexy, and tells men they have to be dominant and unfeeling, and tells non-binary folks that they flat-out don’t exist.

That’s kinda why feminists would like everyone to be working together on this dismantling-the-patriarchy stuff. Patriarchy harms people of all gender identities.

Men get shamed for seeking help for mental health issues, violence, abuse, and other problems because PATRIARCHY tells them it’s “weak”. 

Feminists don’t want women to be told there’s a right and wrong way to be a woman. We also don’t want men to be told there’s a right and wrong way to be a man.

nubbsgalore:

photos by mark smith and mark bridger who document, respectively, the fox and the deer who roam london and its suburban environs at night in search of food. the skittish deer tend dine on residential gardens, while the fox look for discarded take out which litters the streets. 

there are now 16 foxes for every square mile of london, who share sidewalks with pedestrians and raise cubs in people’s backyards. foxes have even sneaked into the houses of parliament, while another broke into buckingham palace, eating one of the queen’s prized flamingos. 

that said, a survey by the london based mammal society found that 80 percent of londoners liked having the fox around, with wildlife experts refuting the claims by some that the population of the animal is either growing or becoming more aggerssive in character.

Why Women Don’t Negotiate Their Job Offers:

misandry-mermaid:

In repeated studies, the social cost of negotiating for higher pay has been found to be greater for women than it is for men. Men can certainly overplay their hand and alienate negotiating counterparts. However, in most published studies, the social cost of negotiating for pay is not significant for men, while it is significant for women.

The results of this research are important to understand before one criticizes a woman — or a woman criticizes herself — for being reluctant to negotiate for more pay. Their reticence is based on an accurate read of the social environment. Women get a nervous feeling about negotiating for higher pay because they are intuiting — correctly — that self-advocating for higher pay would present a socially difficult situation for them — more so than for men.

But here’s a twist: we love it when women negotiate assertively for others. It’s just when women are negotiating assertively for themselves — particularly around pay — where we find a backlash. Unsurprisingly, research also shows that women perform better (e.g., negotiate higher salaries) when their role is to advocate for others as opposed to negotiating for more for themselves. Men’s behavior and the ensuing social effects don’t shift much depending on whether they are advocating for themselves or others.

julietsemophase:

I LOVE ALL OF THESE SO MUCH I CAN’T EVEN DEAL!!!

“As I’ve worked to dismantle my own internalized racism and the ways that I privilege whiteness, I’ve learned to resist being ‘othered’ through the use of language. So when someone says, ‘Oh, they did that to you because you’re black,’ I quickly correct them with, ‘No, they did that because they are bigots.’ This often shocks people. I can see the panic in their eyes. Sometimes, their eyes dart about. If there are lot of people, they may get quiet.
Sometimes, someone will try to lessen the blow of my words with some clever deflection. I then come back with, ‘No. They are bigots.’ I name the problem. Trayvon and Michael’s blackness wasn’t the problem. The problem was the negative perceptions of that blackness and what spaces that blackness was ‘allowed’ to occupy. These perceptions are supported, funded, and reinforced by institutionalized racism. Matthew Shepard wasn’t murdered because he was gay. Sakia Gunn wasn’t murdered because she was a lesbian. Matthew and Sakia were murdered by people who made a choice to exercise their bigotry within a culture that deemed Matthew and Sakia ‘others.’”

-

Toni Bell, "I’m Not Your Token" via The Body Is Not an Apology

How one uses language can be so constructive for their (hopefully just) cause.

RWSWJ/RAWJ

(via theblacknonblackdivide)

shwetanarayan:

idiopathicsmile:

ash-of-the-loam:

beautiesofafrique:

bogleech:

dimetrodone:

People horrifically fucking up facts about evolution and genetics too support their stupid beliefs or to seem smart and “rational” is probably one of my big pet peeves 

Yeah. An enormous number of racists, misogynists, homophobes and transphobes I’ve met eventually whip out something about evolutionary biology and they never, ever, ever, ever have the slightest shadow of even a half-right idea what any of it means or ever cite a claim ever actually made by a scientific study.

Here’s a quick handy reference list or anyone who isn’t sure:

• Homosexuality does exist in almost all social species.
• "Alpha males" are not a real phenomenon and in fact the most aggressive males tend to be the least reproductively successful.
• "Survival of the fittest" simply means that the success of a species hinges on how well it "fits" its environment. It does not mean that stronger or smarter individuals are supposed to succeed. Those things can even be a detriment in nature by wasting too many resources.
• "Race" is not a biological concept. Someone who looks different from you has the same human genes, just a different grab-bag of dominant traits.
• Evolution is not a march towards higher complexity, more intelligence or even more adaptability. It’s just a fluctuation of characteristics dictated by environmental pressures and mutation. A slime mold isn’t “less evolved” than a hawk, just adapted for success under different parameters.
• People didn’t evolve “from apes.” It’s more complicated than that. We are a category of ape, sharing a common ancestor with the other apes.
• No human on Earth is “closer” to an evolutionary ancestor than any other. We all descended from the same one.
• Neanderthals were also a “sibling” species of ours. We didn’t evolve from them.
• Some of us did, however, cross-breed with Neandethal man. It is exclusively non-African races, such as white people, who still carry hybrid human/Neanderthal genes. Whoops, sorry “white purity” skinheads, you’re actually mixed with a whole other species.

Just had to reblog this because I am honestly so tired of people claiming that Africans are “less evolved” than everyone else 

My addition to the above list:

Epigenetics does not have anything at all to do with genetic memories. It is a thing that affects characteristics like health risks, and this speculation floating around about how phobias could be related to some ancestral trauma is complete and utter nonsense.

It’s only a matter of time before such a claim is used as another pseudoscientific tool in the arsenal of people claiming that bloodlines have anything to do with the validity of one’s worship of European pantheons. “My ancestors were Swedish, and because of epigenetics I have genetic memories passed down from those ancestors, so therefore my connection with the gods is better than yours!”

Just, no. Stop. STOP.

gonna also chime in here:

saying the “male brain” works one way and the “female brain” works another way is ludicrous. for so many reasons, even beyond the obvious of imposing that tired old either/or mentality with regards to maleness and femaleness

occasionally you will read about how a study suggests that “men are naturally better at spacial reasoning” or “women are naturally better at cooperation”, but for one thing, given how early the brain wires itself and how easy it is to influence the wiring (like, disturbingly easy), and given the tremendous social expectations we face from pretty much the moment we leave the freaking womb, it’s impossible to study gender differences in a vacuum. 

like, do your findings prove that “women are better at reading faces”, or do they prove that, when you are part of a group that has been socialized since birth to be “nice”, to take care of other people, and to above all avoid making folks angry, you damn well have to learn how to read the room, and read it fast.

also, the “left brain, right brain” thing is bunk. there are not, like emotion-driven people and logic-driven people. everybody is primarily emotional. that circuitry is older and reacts much faster, and this is why nobody is immune from sometimes making wildly irrational decisions.

Also: every child study I know of that looked at gender, found that tiny children were being treated differently by adults based on assigned gender. Not that they behaved differently but that different behavior was rewarded or stopped.

Also: every study I know of that looked at “rational” decision making with uncertainty has found that even people w/ relevant expertise made narrative-based rather than probability based decisions when the two are in conflict. (The conjunction fallacy & work around that is the example that comes to mind). ie we all have storyteller brains.

Also: you know those nice neat little brain areas that light up in fMRI studies? Yeah, those are the difference between test & control condition activity. If you just look at activity, and try to figure out what lights up when you do stuff? The answer is almost always all of it, the whole brain is active. The only really hemisphere-specific left-brain vs right-brain activity is sensory - stimuli on the right side of your body activate parts of the left hemisphere & vice versa. 

There are hemispheric differences, but they are subtle and complicated and about division of labor in tasks that are spread all over the brain.

forget-no-sleep:

FINALLY

Sociologists are interested in the workings of power. How is inequality produced and sustained? What discursive and institutional forces uphold it? How are obvious injustices made invisible or legitimized? Why is it so hard to change hearts, minds, and societies?

How does all this work?

Earlier this month, a sliver of insight was posted. It’s a clip of a speech by Anita Sarkeesian in which she reveals what it’s like for one person to be the target of sustained, online harassment.

In 2009, Sarkeesian launched Feminist Frequency, a series of web logs in which she made feminist arguments about representation of women in pop culture. In 2012, she launched a kickstarter to fund an ambitious plan to analyze the representation of women in video games. This drew the attention of gamers who opposed her project on principle and thus began an onslaught of abuse: daily insults and threats of rape and murder, photoshop harassment, bomb threats, and a video game in which her face can be beaten bloody, just to mention a few examples. Last fall she canceled a speech at Utah State University because someone threatened to commit “the deadliest school shooting in American history” if she went on. It’s been brutal and it’s never stopped.

So, is this power at work? Has she been silenced? And has her larger project – awareness of sexism and misogyny in video games – been harmed?

I’m not sure.

As an individual, Sarkeesian has continued to speak out about the issue, but how she does so and with what frequency has been aggressively curtailed by the harassment. In the four-and-a-half minute clip, with the theme “What I Couldn’t Say,” she talks about how the harassment has changed how she engages with the public. I offer some tidbits below, but here’s the full clip:

She explains:

I rarely feel comfortable speaking spontaneously in public spaces, I’m intentional and careful about the  media interviews I do, I decline  most invitations to be on podcasts or web shows, I carefully consider the wording of every tweet to make sure it is clear and can’t be misconstrued. Over the last several years, I’ve become hypervigilant. My life, my words, and my actions are placed under a magnifying glass. Every day I see my words scrutinized, twisted, and distorted by thousands of men hell bent on destroying and silencing me.

How she gets her message across has been affected as well:

[I cant’ say] anything funny… I almost never make jokes anymore on YouTube… I don’t do it because viewers often interpret humor and sarcasm as ignorance… You would not believe how often jokes are taken as proof that I don’t know what I’m talking about… even when those jokes rely on a deep knowledge of the source material.

And she feels that, above all, she’s not allowed to talk about the harm that her harassers are doing:

I don’t’ get to publicly express sadness, or rage, or exhaustion, or anxiety, or depression… I don’t get to express feelings of fear or how tiring it is to be constantly vigilant of my physical and digital surroundings… In our society, women are not allowed to express feelings without being characterized as hysterical, erratic bitchy, highly emotional, or overly sensitive. Our experiences of insecurity, doubt, anger, or sadness are all policed and often used against us.

A youtube search for the video reveals a slew of anti-Sarkeesian responses were published within days.

——————–

Sarkeesian’s revelations put an inspiring human face on the sacrifice individuals make to fight-the-good-fight, but also reveal that, in some ways, her harassers are winning.

That said, their grotesque display of misogyny has raised Sarkeesian’s profile and drawn attention to and legitimized her project and her message. That original kickstarter? The original call was for $6,000. Her supporters donated almost $159,000. The feminist backlash to the misogynist backlash was swift and monied.

Ever since, the abuse she’s suffered as an individual has made the issue of both sexism in video games and online harassment more visible. Her pain may have been good for the visibility of the movement. I wonder, though, what message it sends to other women and men who want to pursue similar social justice initiatives. It is a cautionary tale that may dampen others’ willingness to fight.

The battle is real. The gamers who oppose Sarkeesian and what she stands for have succeeded in quieting, if not silencing her and have probably discouraged others from entering the fray. But Sarkeesian’s cause and the problem of gamer misogyny is more visible than ever. The fight goes on.

Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College and the co-author of Gender: Ideas, Interactions, Institutions. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

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

“BitCoin looks like it was designed as a weapon intended to damage central banking and money issuing banks, with a Libertarian political agenda in mind—to damage states ability to collect tax and monitor their citizens financial transactions. Which is fine if you’re a Libertarian, but I tend to take the stance that Libertarianism is like Leninism: a fascinating, internally consistent political theory with some good underlying points that, regrettably, makes prescriptions about how to run human society that can only work if we replace real messy human beings with frictionless spherical humanoids of uniform density (because it relies on simplifying assumptions about human behaviour which are unfortunately wrong).”

-

Charles Stross, Why I want Bitcoin to die in a fire

(via

stoweboyd

)

dreaming-moreorless:

bustysaintclair:

exeggcute:

california anti-drought measures are always like “take shorter showers! consider brushing your teeth with the sink turned off” and never mention the fact that nestle is bottling all of our fucking water and selling it to people who live in areas with plenty of water

It’s like the Irish potato “famine” I stg

In California, residential use only accounts for 4% of total water use. Industrial use is 80%. Source: http://www.alternet.org/environment/california-fast-running-out-water-blame-it-big-ag

“Still, the evocation of religion as a veil for intolerance remains. In February, a lesbian couple took their newborn daughter to her first appointment with a Michigan pediatrician they’d chosen months earlier. When they arrived, they were told that the doctor, after “much prayer,” decided she could not treat a child of lesbians. The couple called the experience “humiliating,” but it was also legal, since there is no federal or Michigan law that explicitly prohibits discrimination against LGBT people. (All New England states have laws prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation.)
 
Several generations ago, black people were denied service at Southern lunch counters. Now, under a cloak of religious liberty, some business owners and lawmakers want to do the same to lesbians and gays. And such bans likely wouldn’t stop there. Could they next deny service to single mothers or followers of religions that differ from their own? Such a law isn’t a slippery slope; it’s a bottomless pit. What they are proposing is nothing more than archaic Jim Crow-era tactics covered in stained glass.”

- Lawmakers approve intolerance with religion as a veil .

pokeballssohard:

It’s amazing how men will make fun of teenage girls for being vapid, immature, loud, annoying, ect but when he’s sexually attracted to a teenage girl suddenly she’s this crafty seductress who has purposely constructed her entire outfit and mannerisms with the mature intent to illicit a sexual response from him

agreekdoctor:

fyeahpsychiatry:

spoonsandstripes:

Helpful ways to redirect an appointment if your doctor is telling you to lose weight 

So important considering weight gain can be a common side effect of psychiatric medication, and there is a huge amount of stigma surrounding this fact from both patients and uninformed doctors alike.

Remember, fat does not equal unhealthy, and you as a patient have the right to proper care and treatment from your physician, not discrimination/ignorance!

I’ve posted this before, but now that it’s back on my dash it deserves another reblog.

missmisandry:

I’ve always been chubby. Always.

When I was about seven,  I started getting these episodes where my heart would race and I would get light headed and even faint. My mom would call the pediatrician and he’d tell us to come in, but by the time we got there my heart had slowed down and, according to him, he had no way to check what it was. 

He advised my mom to put me on a healthier diet and make me exercise more because it was probably my weight, even though  I wasn’t that much overweight and I practiced softball for an hour a day.

So my mom did as he said and I didn’t really lose any weight. Also, the episodes continued to happen. They always ended before we could get to the doctor’s office. The doctor never ordered any kind of tests on my heart, though he did test my thyroid and scold my mom for apparently not trying hard enough to get me to lose weight.

This went on for five years. I’d be laying in bed and suddenly my heart would start beating so hard, my shirt would move. I’d stand up out of the bathtub and black out, causing me to fall out of the tub. I’d be playing softball or in gym class or just playing with my friends and suddenly I’d get light headed or my heart would race.

There would be several fruitless calls or visits to my doctor, who would insist that it was complications due to my weight and they would continue until I was a normal size. My mom was scolded. I was body shamed. I had blood drawn twice a year to test my thyroid. And yet the episodes continued.

Then, the week of my 12th birthday—also, the week I started my very first period— I didn’t want to go to school because the day before, a girl who had seen me in the bathroom had told everybody that I had started my period. In 6th grade, being chubby with frizzy hair and huge teeth, that was pretty much a social death sentence and I was mocked mercilessly for it.

So the next morning I woke up and begged my mom not to let me go to school. I cried and begged and she still insisted I go. So I went to change when suddenly, I felt an attack hit and I blacked out and fell, knocking things off of my desk. My mother heard the noise and found me dazed on the floor. I told her I could feel my heart beating hard again. You could see my shirt moving over my chest from  how hard and fast my heart was beating.

My mom loaded me up in the car and took me to the pediatrician. This time, my heart continued to race and I remained light headed. They had to bring out a wheel chair to get me into the doctors office because I was too dizzy and weak to walk.

Once there, I was ushered into an examination room and I just laid down on the table. I couldn’t even sit up. They took my blood pressure and of course it was high, but they took it as a sign that my mother was feeding me salty, fatty foods instead of fruits and vegetables. they made me wait on the table for like two hours until an EKG machine was available in the office. I fell asleep for like half an hour because I was EXHAUSTED. Eventually, they sent us to the ER.

At the ER, they ushered me into a small little room with an EKG machine. They hooked it up and like fifteen seconds later, the nurse flipped shit. She called a “code blue” and about fifteen nurses rushed into this tiny room and then they raced me to another part of the ER. Didn’t tell my mom what was going on, just left her there and took off with me in the bed. They hooked me up to a ton of IVs and monitors and gave me medication to slow my heart that caused me to vomit everywhere.

Then they did a bunch of x-rays and EKG tests and kept me overnight. They found out that I had WPW, which is a tiny hole in the walls of the chambers of the heart, which caused my heart to beat so rapidly. They explained to my parents that this hadn’t happened as an effect of diet or habit, but that I had been born with this hole.

They also told her that me playing softball and being active with this condition was incredibly dangerous, because this is the condition that causes athletes to die on the field for seemingly no reason. The heart starts beating fast through exertion, the signals that cause the heart to beat get all scrambled and the heart beats so fast that it just gives out.

And the reason this particular attack had lasted so long was because it had come dangerously close to causing my heart to give out, which would have killed me. I ended up having to have heart surgery,  something that should have been done 5 years earlier when I first started having the attacks.

But, because I was overweight, my doctor was more concerned with thinning me down than providing me with the treatment I needed to live a healthy life.

“Much like fairy tales, there are two facets of horror. One is pro-institution, which is the most reprehensible type of fairy tale: Don’t wander into the woods, and always obey your parents. The other type of fairy tale is completely anarchic and antiestablishment.”

- Guillermo del Toro on how horror is inherently political as a genre, Time Magazine (x)

aquarian-sunchild:

bloodyxbaroness:

downlo:

This excellent visual representation of that old scam, “trickle down economics”, has been all over Twitter recently.

And then the glass on top gets too big and too full and all the other little glasses below it break and then they all shatter.

And the big glass blames the little glasses for not working hard enough to hold it up.

“Every 3 days, someone is exonerated of a crime for which they were convicted.”

-

Source

Most of these exonerees are Black or Brown. Let that sink in.  

(via unite4humanity)

punlich:

kiloueka:

punlich:

kiloueka:

is it your own skin though? As in you grew it, on your own body, from birth?

This skin was grown yes. On a human body. That is mine. I’m not a robot

Ok ok I’ll believe you… If you first tell me what this says:

I don’t need to prove myself to you how dare you, I love breathing oxygen

eatprayvalkyrie:

kaijuvsgiantrobotsvsme:

ripplesfromawaterlily:

fuck-me-barnes:

tessalynn:

A snippet from an article on Huffington Post about what it means to be working poor.

Pretty spot on…

I got into an argument today with someone who is a landlord, and they were outraged, outraged, to find that their evicted tenants owned an Xbox 360. Never mind that the console was ten years old and worth perhaps $50 on Craigslist, they were outraged that their evicted tenants did not sell it, along with the very clothes on their back, to pay their back rent. I tried to explain to him that when you are $1800 in back rent, $50 isn’t even a dent in that debt. Why bother? Why bother selling that $50 item if it isn’t going to get you any less evicted? If it’s not going to save you, you’ll hold on to it. Money becomes meaningless when you’ll never have enough to hold onto. You just let it flow like water through your hands. It’s all gone anyways, no matter what you do. It was gone before it ever touched you.

The other day I got very mad at someone because their justification of why a family didn’t deserve their council house was because they had decorated the front of their house with xmas lights. DO YOU REALLY KNOW WHAT ITS LIKE TO LIVE WITH NO SMALL PLEASURES AT ALL?!?!? DO YOU REALLY?!?!

This is one of the great end results of capitalism: we treat people as if the only thing they should care about are their mechanical needs but without things to nourish the soul or the capacity to talk about same, we fall apart.

We aren’t meant to be things which sit in blank boxes waiting to be used by our employers.  Nothing in nature acts that way.  Nothing’s meant to.

The source article:  ”This Is Why Poor People’s Bad Decisions Make Perfect Sense”

#um this topic makes me fucking furious#i will do a murder immediately#don’t#not only are small pleasures necessary to keep from SPIRALING INTO DEPRESSION WHEN YOU ARE POOR but they are STATUS MARKERS#you NEED a fucking phone to get a job#you need a fucking SMARTPHONE to be accepted as a normal person#you need nice clothes to be treated like you’re worth something#especially if you’re a poor poc#everyone sit down#think about this if you haven’t before#smashes a vase#fuck capitalism

At least 14 people were killed and 18 others injured when two shooters opened fire on at the Inland Regional Center, a social services provider for people with disabilities, in San Bernardino Wednesday, December 2. The shooters have been identified as Syed Farook, 28, and Tashfeen Malik, 27, who were in a relationship with each other. Motives are still unclear.

Every shooting is its own private tragedy for the victims and their families. But events like this are also part of a much bigger problem. The United States has far more gun violence than the rest of the developed world. To Americans, that can seem like a regrettable but unavoidable fact of life. But to much of the rest of the world, the US attitude toward gun control seems absolutely crazy.

Australian comedian Jim Jefferies was the victim of a home invasion once. He was tied up and beaten, and his girlfriend was threatened with rape. So you might think he'd sympathize with the idea that Americans want guns to protect their families. Quite the opposite — he does an excellent job of summing up why so many foreigners are baffled by America's gun culture:

In Australia, we had the biggest massacre on Earth, and the Australian government went: "That's it! NO MORE GUNS." And we all went, "Yeah, all right then, that seems fair enough, really."

Now in America, you had the Sandy Hook massacre, where little tiny children died. And your government went, "Maybe ... we'll get rid of the big guns?" And 50 percent of you went, "FUCK YOU, DON'T TAKE MY GUNS."

He continues with a blistering smackdown of the idea that Americans seek guns to keep their families safe:

You have guns because you like guns! That's why you go to gun conventions; that's why you read gun magazines! None of you give a shit about home security. None of you go to home security conventions. None of you read Padlock Monthly. None of you have a Facebook picture of you behind a secure door.

He doesn't see at all how a gun would have helped him when his home was broken into. "I was naked at the time. I wasn't wearing my holster." How exactly would a gun have protected him? he asks. Was he supposed to be crouched at his windowsill, gun cocked, waiting on high alert for intruders?

By the way. Most people who are breaking into your house just want your fucking TV! You think that people are coming to murder your family? How many fucking enemies do you have?

Watch: America's biggest gun problem is the one we don't talk about