Please keep our beloved Vulcan in your thoughts! This could be very important! Please, reblog this and spread the awareness to stop smoking!
How should I not be thinking about the man whose character was both my great mid-teen crush, and someone on whom (a decade and a half or so later) I found myself being privileged to spend nearly a further decade of happy creative time?
I hope he may be well quickly. My life wouldn’t be the same without him.
It’s perfectly okay to dislike my books, but don’t disrespect teen girls. It’s so tired. It’s so easy. And it’s so unfair.
Teen girls are pushing culture toward openness and fairness. Teen girls are making the art and music and fanfiction that has reshaped contemporary media and art. You know who donated most of the $1,400,000 raised by this year’s Project for Awesome? Teen girls. You know who were the first supporters and collaborators for online video projects from Lonelygirl15 to Brotherhood 2.0 to Five Awesome Girls? Teen girls.
This whole teen-girls-are-stupid-and-vapid shit is just so played out. Teen girls are human beings. They are not inferior to other human beings. Their lives and contributions are as interesting and as complicated and as meaningful as anyone else’s.
"This is what I was wearing today when two women saw fit to laugh at me in a restaurant while I sat and ordered food with my partner.
It started with one pointing me out to the other.
I watched while the friend “casually” stretched and turned to face me, her head whipping back around to confirm her shared opinion of what I as wearing. They both began to laugh.
I sighed, willing to let it go… but it didn’t stop.
Finally when the friend pulled out her phone to take my photo over her shoulder (disguising it as a selfie) I had had enough.
I got up from my table approached them both and simply asked “I’m sorry but are you both laughing at me?”
They responded that it wasn’t the case, but the obviousness of whole façade made the bullshit buzzer go off in my head.
“Oh good! I was starting to feel really self conscious!” (I finished) and went back to my seat.
What these two women subjected me too today is a symptom of Internalised Misogyny:
I haven’t mentioned the women’s age or what they were wearing because it’s not relevant.
How they present themselves does not affect me.
It doesn’t change my life in any way.
Women are constantly judged for everything. It’s inescapable.
Let me get one thing straight.
I am fully aware that I dress like I’ve been fucked by a unicorn.
I know because I dress myself every morning… and would you believe? It’s deliberate!!!
I don’t wake up and think “Gee, I wonder how I can appeal to strangers today?”
Our patriarchal society makes strangers -of any gender- think it acceptable to humiliate a woman based on how she woke up that morning and got dressed to please herself.
So next time you catch yourself critiquing someone’s appearance negatively (In particular, how women dress) maybe try to think instead of why you feel the need to make that horrible assessment?
Are you intimidated by them? Are you sexualising them? Are you repulsed because they don’t adhere to your standards of beauty?
Then ask yourself why any of those things bother you in the first place.”
Also that is the most fabulous dress in the history of dresses. Srlsy. Hard core hands down.
I might have laughed, too, but it wouldn’t have been derisive laughter, it would have been a “THAT IS SO CUTE!” laugh. And I probably would have gotten up, came over and said how cute that dress was. Because I do that.
Yeah—if I don’t care for something someone is wearing, I don’t feel a need to share, BUT, if I think something’s cute? I’ll tell the person, as long as it’s not in a “I went out of my way to get close enough to speak to you” way, because that’s creepy. BUT THE THING IS I know that my opinion on their appearance ultimately doesn’t matter at all, so if they don’t act grateful, that’s OK =)
James Gunn took to his Facebook page to respond to a number of disses superhero movies took during the awards season. He was mostly very unconcerned with it all, but he did end with the admonition that their characters were every bit as loved as those from "serious" films.
The white male style of debate is to antagonize you until you snap. Then they win by default, because they make up their own rules in which being upset automatically invalidates your argument. The key is also to argue about things that they have no stake and experience in, so they dont snap first. Of course in the event that they do snap first, its of course passion, not anger…
White people are like little kids who make up new rules and obnoxious powers to keep themselves from losing….
At the end of it all, they are happy that you are so civil and can debate things rationally and clearly without getting upset. Everyone shakes hands and thanks everyone for being able to discuss “conflicting” viewpoints. Because after all everyone needs to hear the opposing side to truly be sophisticated. Even if you’ve heard that side all your life and it completely devalues you as a human being.
What i hear is that the mark of civilization to white people is being dehumanized and taking it like a champ.
They also have little to no concept of power dynamics in these ‘sophisticated” discussions.
oldies but goodies
This reminds me of a study done about conspiracy theorist comments online (specifically 9/11 truthers). The study found that anti-conspiracy commenters tended to be more hostile than the conspiracy theory ones. This was taken by conspiracy theorists and put all over their websites as proof they were more “sane.” To the point that the author of the study actually needed to add a comment to the abstract of the paper correcting the misrepresentation of his study.
I find that this dynamic happens a lot between people who argue in good faith (i.e. expecting a debate to involve actual understanding of what other people are saying, discussing the actual points, etc) running into people who are absolutely certain of their point of view and do not read or care what the other person has to say, or who aren’t operating in good faith at all (trolls.) When you bang your head against the wall continuously of somebody just going “nuh uh”, it gets frustrating, and people tend to get angry. The “wall” can be either because they’re arguing from a privileged position where it doesn’t matter to them if they’re right or wrong because ultimately it doesn’t affect them, or that they’re just trolling, or that they believe so strongly that they’re right without proof (like a conspiracy theory) that it doesn’t matter what you say they know they are right.
Plus, all the other stuff mentioned above about how race and gender (and other factors) affect people’s perception about whether anger is irrational or justified, and how angry people are allowed to get before they appear “too angry." And some ablism thrown in about how if you get too emotional, you appear "unstable” therefore you cannot be trusted to be a reliable narrator.
“Selma is now. Because the struggle for justice is right now…we know that right now the struggle for freedom and justice is real…there are more black men under incarceration today then there were slaves in 1850.”
- John Legend’s using his acceptance speech for “Glory” to drop some harsh truth (via nowitallbegins)
When we first got these greyhounds, they didn’t know what to do with dog toys, they didn’t understand glass or stairs, they didn’t even really understand being petted. Now they are full of joy and affection.
Next time you are thinking of getting a pet, please consider a rescue!
““Some problems we share as women, some we do not. You [white women] fear your children will grow up to join the patriarchy and testify against you; we fear our children will be dragged from a car and shot down in the street, and you will turn your backs on the reasons they are dying.””
- Audre Lorde, “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference” (via commiekinkshamer)
"Feminazi" is a real timesaver, because someone saying that just freed you from listening to them ever again. It’s such a specific strawman that it has its own name. But the term "feminazi" is far too evocative and powerful a phrase for this phantom. I suggest the term "boogeywoman," reducing the concept to the appropriate level of maturity and power.
Those who fear the boogeywoman claim feminism is a crusade of man-hating assholes, instead of a struggle against a patriarchal system that damages men as well as women. But don’t worry, there’s a useful quick check to find out if someone’s an asshole, and it works on both sides: Ask them how they feel about transgender people. That’ll identify who truly cares about equality and who’s just being an asshole real quick.
Even if a woman is mean to you, boohoo. You can’t dismiss an entire concept because one supporter is an asshole. If “one of them was a jerk” was reason enough to censor entire concepts, men would have become extinct long ago, along with every political and sociological concept ever conceived. I’ve met dickhead professors of quantum mechanics, but that doesn’t mean my computer stops working.
See that guy up there looking at you like you’re the crown ruler of all fuck ups? See how super white he is? Well, that ruggedly handsome devil is me.
Yup…I’m white. If I was Adam in the Biblical tale of Adam and Ave, God wouldn’t have made me out of dust/dirt. He would have made me out of Cool Whip and vanilla beans. That’s just how white I am. So, that puts an end to the whole “reverse racism” thing, doesn’t it? I’m a white man making fun of white people. You just got M. Night Shyamalan’d up in this bitch.
Also, racism doesn’t work that way. If a person of colour tells us we look like mayonnaise or that we’re weird as fuck because we don’t use wash cloths, that’s not racism. There’s no built in oppression there. That’s just commentary. Being mocked isn’t being held down. It isn’t being systematically deemed “lesser” by an entire group of people over years and years and years. It’s not based on anything. For racism to work (for want of a better term) there has to be that oppression. That’s why white people are so good at being racist. Also, white people being called out as racists isn’t racist. A person of colour saying “White people ruined hip hop” or “White people always steal pieces of our culture” isn’t racist. It’s the other way around. Iggy Azalea is racist. White people trying to pass durags off as high fashion is racist.
That’s why people hate us. Because we’re the most racist people on Earth and yet we don’t even understand how racism works.
“Elected officials who want to block the EPA and legislation on climate change frequently refer to a handful of scientists who dispute anthropogenic climate change. One of scientists they quote most often is Wei-Hock Soon, a scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who claims that variations in the sun’s energy can largely explain recent global warming. Newly released documents show the extent to which Dr. Soon has made a fortune from corporate interests. ‘He has accepted more than $1.2 million in money from the fossil-fuel industry over the last decade while failing to disclose that conflict of interest in most of his scientific papers. At least 11 papers he has published since 2008 omitted such a disclosure, and in at least eight of those cases, he appears to have violated ethical guidelines of the journals that published his work.’ The Koch Brothers are cited as a source of Dr. Soon’s funding.”
In case you still don’t understand how badly women have had it, when anaesthetic was first invented doctors weren’t allowed to give it to women who were giving birth because the church said that the pain of childbirth was God punishing women for not being men
“Depression turns you into a series of nouns, without the adjectives and without the verbs. You don’t remember where you misplaced your descriptions, your actions … You become: bed, shower, socks, coffee, keys, obligations.”— A Series of Nouns
The crows she feeds obviously have their own little lives. They go about their business, and they spot *pretty thing* or /unique thing/ in question. What gets me is that the *first* thing on their minds as recipient of this thing is the little girl that feeds them.
They spot a thing, and immediately must think, “that nice girl with delicious foodstuffs must have this to show my gratitude.”
Crows and ravens are so cool. I have lots of them near my home. When my dog is bored they dive bomb her with twigs they pick up so she can chase them. They seem to enjoy entertaining her.
There is a group of people in SF fandom who really really hate some other people whom they consider “social justice warriors” (SJWs for those of you not already familiar with the acronym), and whom they feel are spoiling/destroying/polluting the precious bodily fluids of science fiction. These people also really really hate the way the WSFS’s Hugo Awards are being run — apparently because they feel that awards are being unfairly won by people they don’t like. So they have been making up and publishing lists of people they think should win awards.
What seems to be happening, interestingly, is that some of the people whose names are being put forward on these lists are becoming annoyed to find themselves there, and are standing up in public to disavow the lists, the people making the lists, and their own names’ appearance on the lists (which the writers in question didn’t ask for and for which they did not give consent).
John Scalzi brought the situation to rather wider attention a few days back with this posting. Follow the links in it, and (for better understanding of some of the underlying dynamics) read the comments. David’s response, linked to at the top of this, will then make more sense.
For myself, I was briefly astonished to find myself mentioned in one or two places (comments on blogs friendly to the listmakers, not main posts) as a possible candidate to be on such lists. Just saying, now and for the record: please leave me off.
(Let me also add a link to this post, which made me smile. One of very few smiles to be found in this whole business.)
I was there. I know what Gene Roddenberry envisioned. He went on at length about it in almost every meeting. He wasn’t about technology, he was about envisioning a world that works for everyone, with no one and nothing left out. Gene Roddenberry was one of the great Social Justice Warriors. You don’t get to claim him or his show as a shield of virtue for a cause he would have disdained.
Most of the stories we wrote were about social justice. ‘The Cloud Minders,’ ‘A Taste Of Armageddon,’ ‘Errand Of Mercy,’ ‘The Apple,’ ‘Let That Be Your Last Battlefield,’ and so many more. We did stories that were about exploring the universe not just because we could build starships, but because we wanted to know who was out there, what was our place in the universe, and what could we learn from the other races out there?
Star Trek was about social justice from day one.
”
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David Gerrold, Author of the ST:TOS episode “The Trouble with Tribbles”
As much as it would make me incredibly happy to see Jessica Williams take over The Daily Show, I think it's really important that we learn to respect others' boundaries. Even when those others are celebrities.
After Jessica Williams declared that she does not want to replace Jon Stewart, a journalist decided it to diagnose Williams with “imposter syndome” (the idea that a woman in a male dominated field doesn’t feel as if they’re not doing enough to be in said position) and this was Williams response.
