ThePrettiestOne

“

You know the statistic. We incarcerate a higher proportion of the population than any other country does. Russia and South Africa rank respectively second and third.

Hundreds of thousands of young, now aging, men, are doing hard time for possession of small amounts of drugs. More and more people find themselves in jail because they got caught with bench warrants for their arrest for exorbitant fines they could not afford to pay. More than a century after debtors prisons were abolished, thousands are again behind bars because of debts.

But one category of felon is free on the street. I refer, of course, to corporate criminals.

Consider the case of a checkout clerk at Walmart who puts her hands in the till and walks off with a couple of hundred bucks of the company’s money. That clerk could expect to face prosecution and jail.

Now consider her boss, who cheats her of hundreds of dollars of pay by failing to accurately record the time she clocked in, or the overtime she worked. Maybe, just maybe, after the worker risks her job to complain, she might get back wages. In rare cases, the company might even pay a fine.

Every year, workers are cheated out of tens of billions of dollars of pay—more than larceny, robbery and burglary combined. Until the incomparable Kim Bobo gave the practice its rightful name, wage theft, most people didn’t equate cheating workers of their rightful pay with simple thievery.

Even so, no boss ever goes to jail. But tell me, what’s the difference between a clerk putting her hands in the till and the boss putting his hands on her paycheck?

”

- Robert Kuttner, "We’re Jailing the Wrong People.  We Need To Jail More of the Right Ones: Corporate Criminals" (via holygoddamnshitballs)

In the third episode of their “100 Years of Hair and Makeup” series, Cut shares the visual history of the past 100 years of beauty in Iran using a model named Sabrina, whose hair, makeup, and hijab are changed appropriately to each decade.

hartorotica:

sandandglass:

Bryan Stevenson on The Daily Show.

There’s a very interesting piece in Nature today about how science is making it more clear than ever that the binary nature of the sexes isn’t actually binary at all — that there are a lot of gradiations in biological sexual development, brought on not only via chromosomal differentation (the old “XX” and “XY” thing) but a host of other processes. This is how people with XY chromosomes can (rarely) get pregnant and give birth, and how a man who fathered four children can be discovered to have a womb. Biology: It’s wacky.

I don’t imagine this report will make essentialists (“There’s men and there’s women and that’s it!”) particularly happy, but then it’s not actually the job of science to reinforce people’s comfort zones — or bigotries, to be less polite about it. But I look forward to the mental two-step some of these folks will take to try to cram this information into their understanding of the world, rather than to expand their understanding of the world based on this information. That should be interesting, and a little bit sad.

spart117mc:

viridieanfey:

romanimp:

beatnikdaddio:

admiring the stockings. 1940’s.

#[40S COMMERCIAL ANNOUNCER VOICE] WHAT’S BETTER THAN THIS? GALS BEING PALS

Fun fact: Though being gay in the 40s sucked, being gay in the military was easier, and pretty common. There were apparently, at one point in time time so many lesbians in the military that when they tried to crack down on it, the girls wrote back and said “Look I can give you the names, but you’ll lose some of your best officers, and half your nurses and secretaries.” And they pretty much shut up about it unless you were especially bad at subtlety. (Source: Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers. A good source for gay history from 1900s onwards.)

Sergeant Phelps worked for General Eisenhower. Four decades after Eisenhower had defeated the Axis powers, Phelps recalled an extraordinary event. One day the general told her, “I’m giving you an order to ferret those lesbians out.’ We’re going to get rid of them.”

"I looked at him and then I looked at his secretary. who was standing next to me, and I said, ‘Well, sir, if the general pleases, sir, I’ll be happy to do this investigation for you. But you have to know that the first name on the list will be mine.’

"And he kind of was taken aback a bit. And then this woman standing next to me said, ‘Sir, if the general pleases, you must be aware that Sergeant Phelps’s name may be second, but mine will be first.’

"Then I looked at him, and I said, ‘Sir, you’re right. They’re lesbians in the WAC battalion. And if the general is prepared to replace all the file clerks, all the section commanders, all of the drivers—every woman in the WAC detachment—and there were about nine hundred and eighty something of us—then I’ll be happy to make the list. But I think the general should be aware that among those women are the most highly decorated women in the war. There have been no cases of illegal pregnancies. There have been no cases of AWOL. There have been no cases of misconduct. And as a matter of fact, every six months since we’ve been here, sir, the general has awarded us a commendation for meritorious service.’

"And he said, ‘Forget the order.’

- The Gay Metropolis: The Landmark History of Gay Life in America

“Ignorance is bad for everybody. It only lowers the collective IQ when lawmakers still push to teach “intelligent design.” It similarly should never be a matter of any dispute that the Inquisition and the Crusades were bad ideas, and to take offense over pointing that out is inane. Likewise, these targeted, strategic attempts to force students – students who are intellectually sophisticated enough to take on college level coursework – to accept a propaganda-based curriculum is detrimental to critical thought as a whole. It should be absurd to promote any educational agenda that pushes jingoism as a lesson plan. It should never have gotten this far. And the reality of life in the 21st century is that we are sharing this planet with the rest of its inhabitants. It’s not just dumb and wrong to teach kids that we’re better than the rest of the world, and to attempt to conspicuously leave our past misdeeds from lessons — it’s bad diplomacy and it’s bad business. That’s not teaching exceptionalism; it’s teaching entitlement – not a useful quality on the global playing field.
 
There’s a profound insecurity at the heart of any agenda that presumes that if kids aren’t spoon fed a black and white fairy tale of our national greatness, they’ll have no pride or loyalty. Arrogance isn’t patriotism, and education isn’t indoctrination. And anyone who doesn’t comprehend that difference doesn’t just need a history lesson, he needs a dictionary.”

- Oklahoma’s demented fight against AP history.

#nerdjokes

“What is significant about fan fiction is that it often spins the kind of stories that showrunners wouldn’t think to tell, because fanficcers often come from a different demographic. The discomfort seems to be not that the shows are being reinterpreted by fans, but that they are being reinterpreted by the wrong sorts of fans - women, people of colour, queer kids, horny teenagers, people who are not professional writers, people who actually care about continuity (sorry). The proper way for cultural mythmaking to progress, it is implied, is for privileged men to recreate the works of privileged men from previous generations whilst everyone else listens quietly.”

-

Sherlock and the Adventure of the Overzealous Fanbase by Laurie Penny  (via basilandtheblues)

I’ll always reblog this.

(via chase820)

whoop there it is

(via randomfandomteacher)

betthearm:

There are no such thing as ghosts. There are wormholes which allow you to see hazy images of the past. So at any given moment, you’re freaking out someone in the future. Act accordingly.

At this point, the debate over "strong female characters" has gotten a bit stale. Movies and TV keep serving up tough women, but they mostly still don't come across as actually "strong characters" in any meaningful sense. So this Twitter mini-rant by science fiction writer Ada Hoffman is incredibly useful.

Read more...

“Patiently persevere in the face of hardship hoping for a good outcome because you never know how many dead hearts you will bring to life in the process. No hardship lasts forever. There is always an end.”

- Babar Ahmad (via islamic-art-and-quotes)

hart2hartsquared:

Adult Wednesday Addams: Planned Parenthood

“"Icarus. The original myth had two parts. Daedalus said to his son, ‘I fashioned these wings for you. Two rules. Don’t fly too high, or the sun will melt the wax. But, more important, son, don’t fly too low. Because if you fly too low, the water and the waves will surely weigh down the wings, and you will die.’ We’ve left out the second part of the myth. We don’t say to people anymore, ‘Don’t fly too low.’ All we do from the time they are 4 years old is warn them against hubris. We have created this industrially led structure that says: How dare you."”

-

Seth Godin (via petrak)

flying too high melted his wings, yea, but it was the ocean that killed him in the end

(via xekstrin)

Perspective.

“

To date, ISIS has killed four Americans, a horrible tragedy for those people and their families. But since the idea of the group’s threat to America is at this point entirely hypothetical, we should be as specific as we can when we talk about that threat. Do we think they’re going to try to hijack planes or send agents here to set off bombs? And if so, what do we need to do to counter those threats that we aren’t already doing? If we’re going to expand our military involvement in the Middle East, is there a way to do it that won’t create more problems than it solves?

Those are simple, obvious questions, but so often they’re overwhelmed by people waving their arms and shouting “We’re all gonna die!” In the days and years after September 11, Republicans repeated that al Qaeda was an “existential threat,” a notion that was utterly insane yet seldom examined. And we certainly acted as though the very existence of the United States of America was indeed in question. Congress gave the federal government a slate of new powers to spy on its citizens. We created a surveillance apparatus of gargantuan size and scope. We deployed a network of secret prisons as sites for a program of torture. And we all got used to the idea that the War on Terror is forever.

”

- A couple of hundred thousand Americans die every year from preventable medical errors and the response from the government amounts to “Gee, that’s too bad,” but all it takes is a few videos of brutal executions 6,000 miles away to spur a wholesale reexamination of American foreign policy.

“It would be nice if we could look at each new development in this conflict and make a rational assessment of what it actually changes, how it affects the United States, and what we should do, or not do, in response. But brutality overwhelms rationality, just as ISIS intends. A couple of hundred thousand Americans die every year from preventable medical errors and the response from the government amounts to “Gee, that’s too bad,” but all it takes is a few videos of brutal executions 6,000 miles away to spur a wholesale reexamination of American foreign policy.”

- Get ready for the return of the Global War On Terror

nbcsnl:

Times have changed.

“

If I look up “carrot” in the dictionary, most people will acknowledge I do not know all there is to know about carrots and if I truly want to understand carrots, I should probably pick up a horticultural text book. We know that legal and medical terms are going to be, at best, simplistically represented and know we need to find a lawyer or a doctor if we want to know more. Anyone deciding to base their argument on, say, a philosophical concept or term using the dictionary is going to be laughed at at best, or automatically lose whatever argument they’re trying to make at least.

Yet the minute we move into a social justice framework, the ultimate authority changes. We don’t need lived experience, we don’t need experts who have examined centuries of social disparities and discrimination, we don’t need societal context. We don’t need sociology or history – no, we have THE DICTIONARY! That ultimate tome of oracular insight, the last word on any debate!

It’s patently ridiculous and you can see that by applying it to any other field of knowledge. But the privileged will continually trot out simplistic, twitter-style dictionary definitions as if they are the last word and the ultimate authority. No-one would drag out the dictionary to debate science with a scientist. But they’re more than willing to trot out a dictionary definition of racism over any sociological analysis. A dictionary is not the ultimate authority - they’re a rough guide for you to discover the simple meaning of words you’ve never heard before – not an ultimate definition of what the word means and all its contexts.

”

- Sparky at Womanist Musings. YES! (via flowerskss)

m0llyh8su:

therickymartin:

andysambergsbitch:

explaining autism

Holy fuck Arthur was on some next level shit

Oh my god

fattysaid:

First there was hardly any coverage of the Chapel Hill shootings and now that there is, a number of major media outlets are trying to pass this off as a “dispute over a parking space.” Stop trying to twist the facts: this was a sickening Islamophobic attack. This was a hate crime. 

bogleech:

mousathe14:

ninetynineno:

gifsboom:

Video: MorpHex MKI

Make a robot that knows how to resist being turned off, that’s a great idea.

It appears after decades of films and literature about how to not have robot overlords… We proceed to say “Screw that noise.”

finally we’re using robots just to frighten and confuse small children, our destiny as a species has been realized

feministjewishfangirl:

poniatowskaja:

suddenlyprompts:

I fell for her like Troy fell to the Greeks; quickly, and in the most embarrassing way imaginable.

I’m guessing you’re referring to the incident with the horse, but that came at the end of a war that lasted 10 years. Speed is relative, but if it takes you ten years to fall for someone, I would not call that ‘quickly’.

I fell for her like Troy fell to the Greeks: slowly, then all at once, and with the aid of a giant livestock model

erinkyan:

maythefoxbewithyou:

Pouncing lessons with dad.

OH MY GOODNESS

by Robert Niese


by Robert Niese


by Robert Niese

thebrainscoop:

somuchscience:

Valentines from a biologist’s perspective.

See more of my silly science valentines here.

Happy Valentine’s Day, tumblr!

I always admire my husband’s low parasite load.

writingwithcolor:

Many authors can relate to the frustrating accusations of their characters and settings simply being the way they are for “diversity points” and writers are often scared of adding diversity out of fear of it being received poorly as a gimmick. Why does this situation exist?

Bad representation and gratuitous diversity are not the same thing and have to be addressed separately. The first one is a legitimate fear; the second one is exaggerated and has the dangerous potential to shut down legitimate representation. There’s so much diversity that you don’t even notice it in real life.

You go shopping in a Korean and Black neighborhood, get directions from some Desi folks, hop on to a bus and sit behind the guy in the wheelchair lift. When you come home to crack open a book (after shopping in that same neighborhood and riding on that same bus), does seeing diverse characters make you or someone you know cry, “WAIT A MINUTE NOW. I AM THE GRAND WIZARD. I SAY THIS IS TOO DIVERSE?”  

What is representation that ends up being harmful instead of supporting diversity?

“I need a tough drug dealer ex-boyfriend for my MC to be scared of. I know! I’ll make him Black and/or Latino.”

“My MC is oppressed by her parents who want her to get married, have babies, and not major in anything that would threaten a man’s ego, when she’d rather marry a girl and become a physicist. I know! I’ll make her Muslim, Hindu, or an Orthodox Jew.”

“My MC is very sexually open and adventurous. I know! I’ll make her Latina because that sounds sexy.”

“My MC has an older female boss who yells at him all the time, who he’s scared of. I know! I’ll make her East Asian.”

When choosing a character’s ethnicity, if your logic flows like this – you have to work harder to free yourself from the white supremacist myths that permeate our everyday life.

This is not the same as “gratuitous” diversity.

People have a way of accusing diversity that doesn’t seem plot-relevant of being “gratuitous”, but a character doesn’t need a plot reason to be Muslim, Jewish, Black, Latina, in a wheelchair, trans, or anything else.

If you have a witness in a trial, and she wheels herself into the witness box instead of walking, you don’t have to sit there justifying it. It doesn’t have to mean anything. If you walk into a coffee house and ask directions from a cute barista in a headscarf, you don’t have to work her ethnoreligion into the plot for that to be “allowed.”

Now, if you have actual significant characters who are diverse – and you should! – their identities should be incorporated into their characterization and not feel like they’re wearing a series of nametags. There are plenty of ways you can do this – giving them names common to a group, mentioning a Black character’s specific natural hairstyle, having them endure a microaggression, having a trans character experiment with presentation, having a gay or bi person mention a partner or a celebrity crush. You can also just say “He introduced me to a tall East Asian man wearing a polo shirt” or “the new doctor was a Black woman with her hair in twists and glasses that looked like they could stop a bullet” and just leave it there, since that’s referencing a visible trait; if that looks pasted on or artificial to you, you may have unexamined prejudices, which is normal, but something to work on.

Remember that if you’re not in a group, your meter for determining whether or not diversity is “forced” is going to be unreliable. Don’t assume that other writers whose works are diverse are trying to coast on diversity stats or that the diversity in their books is automatically unrealistic and forced just because it’s more diverse than the media you usually consume. The real world IS diverse and lots of people get erased by the way mainstream fiction is structured, most of all being people who are marginalized in multiple ways at once.

—WWC

underneaththepowerlines:

themakerisamotherfucker:

paintballedhyena:

neoliberalismkills:

so here’s a thought: who cares if food stamp recipients test positive for drugs. we still deserve food.

Oh I don’t know. I think if you test positive for drugs, you’re probably spending it on drugs rather than food. So no, they don’t deserve it, they will when they quit. I’m not putting my taxes towards that.

how the fuck are you gonna spend food stamps on drugs?? Do you know how food stamps work???

It’s called selling food stamps to people so they can buy drugs

I grew up on food stamps.

My mother was a trophy wife.  Young, attractive, blonde, gregarious.  I was a child from a previous relationship.  Her marriage left her with two additional children (my sisters), and with an eldest child who was receiving serious therapy from the state, after her now ex-husband had been sent to jail.  Mom had no job skills.  Childcare cost more than welfare would pay.  Any job she could get would have left us on the street in under a year, since it would have cut off our benefits.  So she enrolled in government aid.

Three little girls.  One adult woman.  Not nearly enough food stamps.

I assure you, most people on food stamps are not selling them to buy drugs.  If they’re selling them for anything, it’s to buy toilet paper and toothpaste and sanitary napkins.  My mother cried when I got my period, not because her baby was growing up, but because another box of pads every month was a big fucking deal.  It was one less meal where we ate chicken, instead of rice and beans.

At one point, she was getting $300 in food stamps a month, to feed all four of us.  How much would that be, in drugs?  How many starving children is okay, if it means that the people we’re supporting can’t afford to get high?

I stole food.  My sisters and I dumpster-dove and brought home fresh things.  The cafeteria ladies at my elementary school sent me home with crates of expired milk, even though they could have been fired.  And every time Mom asked for more, because we were starving, she got told “No, this is enough, more and you’d be buying things you didn’t need, more and we’d have to be concerned about drugs.”

Food stamps are not the magical gravy train people think that they are.

6dogs9cats:

sandandglass:

Bassem Youssef, anchor for the Egyptian satire show Al Bernameg, on The Daily Show.

AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN until if fucking sinks in.

Part One here.

"Certain damp crevices were of great interest to them; other damp crevices were carefully avoided. There appeared to be little logic behind the distinction, but there it was all the same."

"Hands that had very recently been used to pet a cat were now inserted inside another human being's vulnerabilities."

"Although both parties were close enough to one another to be heard using only a very quiet voice, they both insisted on speaking to one another quite loudly, preferring vague and meaningless vocalizations over specific words. Had they used words familiar to the both of them, things might not have become so confusing."

"Fluid was produced in three chief areas, but consumed in only one."

Read more Erotica Written By An Alien Pretending Not To Be Horrified By The Human Body at The Toast.

Candorville by Darrin Bell for February 14, 2015

“

In many, many communities that see themselves as somehow marginalized or “fringe” you see a tremendous reaction to change, ironically often a very strong reaction against people within those communities who are trying to point out the way those communities themselves are elitist, unfair, exclusionary.

You see it in the science fiction community, with this huge backlash against LGBT writers, writers of color, women writers. There was a whole organized campaign this year at the Hugo Awards to “take back” the Hugos by nominating politically conservative white male writers as a kind of act of spite after no white men won any of the Nebula Awards earlier this year.

It’s a whole thing.

”

- Andrew Chu (via vaspider)