I just learned that Nichelle Nichols ad-libbed “sorry, neither” in rehearsals and they were only able to sneak it by the censors because it wasn’t in the script and—excuse me I’m overcome with happiness because my favorite Uhura line of all time was actually written by Uhura.
The future is an inherently good thing. And we move into it one winter at a time. Things get better one winter at a time. If you're going to celebrate anything, then have a drink on this: The world is, generally and on balance, a better place to live this year than it was last year. ~ Warren Ellis
eurydice smuggles immigrants across country lines
she knows what it’s like having to stay behind
because of someone else’s fuck-up
medusa doesn’t leave the house without a headscarf
works with sexual assault victims
knows there’s no sure way to keep them safe
even snakes and stone couldn’t protect her in the end
persephone hitchhikes across the world
which gets warmer with each car blurting exhaust
she hasn’t seen her mother for centuries
pandora works with breakthrough scientific theories
burning with the hope that she can make this better
she forgave herself for the box a long time ago
cassandra is an 0800-psychic
barely makes enough for weekly rent
people scoff when they hang up the phone
before walking right into their fates
the sirens are a sideshow act turned all-girl band
midas’ daughter never runs out of coins
artermis works in a slaughterhouse
helen of troy poses in the centerfold of playboy
once they were the women
people told those stories about
but it’s been a long
long time
wonder woman: hey bruce, uh, question
batman: shoot
wonder woman: what's mr. freeze's motivation again
batman: his wife is sick + in suspended animation, he's also sick, wants to find a cure
wonder woman: so like. loss of a loved one basically
batman: more or less
wonder woman: right, right, and he's planning to do this...
batman: well he's a brilliant researcher so mostly he crimes for funding
wonder woman: and your day job is?
batman: owner of an incredibly successful corporation, practically the cornerstone of the Gotham economy
batman: why do you ask
*Fans consistently express desire for movies with more diverse leads*
Marvel: Well, you see, it's not that we don't want to, it's just that we already laid out this plan that just happens to not include those, and everything is just so tightly woven together and carefully planned that we couldn't possibly add anything or change anything without ruining the whole plan.
*Marvel unexpectedly acquires Spider-Man rights*
Marvel: Okay, we want to get him onscreen ASAP, but we didn't plan for him to be in Phase 2. No biggie, we'll just push all of these movies (including the only female-led and PoC-led movies we've announced) back several months, and he'll fit in perfectly with no repercussions to the overall plan beyond changing release dates. In fact, we're still early enough on that we can probably write in a role for him into the movie before his!
Me: ಠ_ಠ
“People believe that little white kids in the suburbs have the right to live. They have the right to be happy. They have the right to peace. When it comes to black babies in urban neighborhoods, people don’t believe these children deserve to have similar rights. When people say things like ‘I can’t believe this would happen here,’ they are effectively saying that there are some neighborhoods where these tragic outcomes are far more acceptable. I reject this notion entirely, and it is reflective of both white supremacy and classism.”
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better to have children starving in the street and women dying in childbirth rather then a safe medical procedure I always say
I mean I think we can all agree that comparing humans to plants is probably bad all around, but as the comparison has already been made …
So when I was in my teens, my high school class spent a week in late spring working in a grape vineyard. And the main thing we were doing was thinning out the clusters of buds before they could bloom. Because if we didn’t, there would in fact be too many flowers. Which would turn into too many grapes, each of which would grow less well because they would have to compete with each other for nutrients from the vine.
Saying there can’t possibly be too many flowers is easy, I guess, when you’re not concerned with how well they grow or what’s going to feed them.
Look, I get it, let’s all share cultures and whatever, blah blah etc. The phenomenon of cultural appropriation, however, is not that simple.
Imagine that you have been born into a culture whose people have historically been oppressed and discouraged from expressing themselves and practicing their traditions. Example: I’m Indian; When my parents were kids in India, they started learning English from primary school onwards, which is great, but they were not allowed to speak their own language at school (in our case, Bangla). They were not allowed to wear clothes from their own culture, but had to dress up in ridiculous starched up British school kid uniforms; they didn’t learn any of their own history in school but had to learn about the ‘accomplishments’ of the British Empire; they were forced to study the Bible but received no education on the religions native to their own country. They were made fun of by the white and Anglo-Indian kids if they brought Bengali food for lunch. Basically, they were forced to conform to British standards and were discouraged from expressing and celebrating their own culture and heritage. They were taught that Indians were inferior and primitive compared to the Brits.
Now, imagine that after growing up like this, pieces of the culture you were once shamed for started showing up among those who had once oppressed you (and in many ways still do). Imagine that all those things you held dear while the outside world tried to make you believe they were stupid, embarrassing, unsophisticated—imagine that all of a sudden these things were taken up by your tormentors (read: white people). Think of my parents, who left everything in India and came to the US when they were just 22; think of my parents packing away all their old clothes and buying these ugly American clothes with the small amount of money they had. Imagine them, so far from home, and still packing white bread sandwiches to bring to work. Imagine them giving up everything they loved, everything that was life to them, and having to wear and eat and read bland American culture. Imagine my poor mom seeing Madonna wear a bindi, but still knowing she can’t wear one at work because she’s disrespected enough there anyway.
Imagine shutting away your own vibrant culture and then seeing it paraded about by those that taught you to let go of it in the first place.
But don’t be fooled into thinking your culture is finally being celebrated. It’s not. It’s been taken out of any context and stripped of any real meaning. The trappings of your culture and your people and your rich history are now just a trend. Imagine that it’s now “cool” for those who oppressed you (white people) to take part in parts of your culture you were once condemned for. That’s a slap in the fucking face. And you will still be condemned for your culture. It’s not cool if you do it. To them, your culture is just something to be tried on and worn for a day, without the burden of the heavy history behind it. And it’s not cool to wear it every day, so we still have to conform to white society. Imagine how much that hurts. Imagine seeing parts of the heritage you love and respect being thrown around flippantly, and imagine still not being able to express your own culture. That’s cultural appropriation and it fucking hurts.
“People think that Brian Williams is the problem because he exaggerated a war story about Iraq? Are you kidding me? The whole war was based on a monstrous lie that almost the entire media enabled and perpetuated. That’s the real problem.
If the rest of the press scapegoat Williams and feign righteous indignation over his lie, as they are in the middle of doing now, it will be unbearable. Where were all of those people when we were being sold a bill of goods on Iraq? Oh I know, on air. They sold us those lies en masse. So, please don’t pretend you have integrity now. Please don’t pretend that the real problem is an exaggeration about a tiny story in the middle of the war.
Sixty-nine percent of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was personally responsible for 9/11 when we invaded Iraq. That is the biggest failure of the media I have ever seen. Has anyone apologized for that yet? Has anyone been fired for that yet? If you want to fire all of the executives and editors who let that lie be sold to the American people through their media outlets, then I’m a 100% with you. Then we can also fire Brian Williams.”
“I take the decision not to vaccinate personally. I’ve tried to have empathy for the other side, I’ve tried to tell myself that it’s none of my business, but I can’t and it is. Someone who refuses to vaccinate their children because they’re afraid of autism has made the decision that people like me are the worst possible thing that can happen to their family, and they’re putting everyone at risk because of it. I’ve been told by some anti-vaxxers that they don’t mean my brand of autism; they mean non-verbal autism, or as they are so fond of calling it, “profound autism.” I’m not about to take any solace in the idea that they’re willing to make exceptions for autistic people who can perform as neurotypical, or at least pose as little annoyance to neurotypicals as possible. That just means that I will cease to be of any value to these people if I am no longer able to pass as one of them, and that they see no value and no humanity in anyone who communicates or behaves differently from them.
Tell me again who has the empathy problem?”
Excellent book on how our minds make leaps like this, so as to understand how brains work, and why they don't: SuperSense: Why We Believe in the Unbelievable by Bruce M. Hood https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4189843-supersense
Victorian era surgeons didn’t wash their hands and found the suggestion that they should wash their hands offensive.
This was said by Charles Meigs AFTER multiple papers had been published showing how important it was that surgeons wash their hands and sterilize their instruments.
The reason? Class. The gentlemen doctors weren’t like those dirty poor people.
Which sounds a bit like anti-vaxxers.
Because TODAY, when we were going to see the eradication of measles within in our lifetime, the upper crust decided that their children didn’t need to have “chemicals” put in their bodies. And why would they need vaccines anyway? Their upper class precious children could never contract measles… not like those dirty poor people.
If you don’t think this outbreak stems from blatant classism and racism, just remember that the lowest vaccination rates in California are also in its whitest, wealthiest cities.
Read that last line Read it over and over and get through your heads: this anti-vaxxer thing is not about your caricatures of poor, ignorant white folks. This is white, WEALTHY people with access to information and resources thinking they’re too good for all of this.
I’m seeing some confusion about this one in the reblogs, and it is for my money one of the most interesting things to know about birds, so:
The big guy in this picture is the cuckoo - a young cuckoo. The little one is the momma bird, who is feeding the baby, even though the baby is now like five times as big as she is. That’s because the cuckoo is a brood parasite.
Cuckoos lay their eggs in the nests of other birds. If the hosts notice the cuckoo egg, they will try to get rid of it - if they don’t, though, and the cuckoo chick hatches, they will raise it as their own, even though the first thing it does when it hatches is to murder all of their other children.
The question with this is always: why, at that point, do the host birds raise the cuckoo chick? It’s way too hungry, it’s way too aggressive, it hangs around way longer than a normal chick would, and it’s huge, for god’s sake. It’s obviously not theirs. There are a couple of theories. One is that the begging call a baby cuckoo makes sounds like an entire nest of normal chicks, and the parents are programmed to feed whatever makes that noise. I got some doubts about behavior models that are that deterministic, though. I like to think it’s some avian variation on the sunk cost fallacy - the parents put all these resources into making this nest and laying this clutch, and by god they’re going to get a baby out of it, even if it’s a giant monster baby.
There is absolutely zero science behind this but my impression has always been that the parasitized parents, upon raising a gargantuan monster child, are basically just thrilled to pieces, like, “fuck yeah my huge Gundam kid can beat up your honor student” and “gaze upon my feathered monster truck pride and joy and despair”.
Listen, when you use a word of hate ironically — like, and your defense is “I’m not racist, how could you ever think I’m racist??” I want you to imagine owning a gun, but never buying live ammunition. You only purchase blanks. Ok?
And say sometimes when you hang out with your close friends, you take out your gun, which they know contains no live ammunition, and you shoot it at stuff, and you think it’s funny. And maybe the first time you do it, they’re like “Shit. I mean, I know those are blanks, but that’s kind of fucked up,” but your argument is, “But I can’t really hurt anyone! They’re just blanks!” And over time they just get used to it and find it kind of funny. “Oh, that Cliff, sometimes he takes his gun out and shoots some blanks, but he doesn’t really mean anything. It’s just funny! You know how it goes.”
Now, imagine that over time, having received the acceptance for your actions from your friends, you decide you can start firing blanks around people you’ve never met. In mixed company. You’re at a dinner party one night, you’ve had a few, so you go “Hey, wanna see something cool?!” and those who are your friends at the party know what’s coming, so they’re prepared, but then the people who don’t know you, they see you whip out a piece and go “Oh shit, I’m going to die, it’s everything I feared,” but your friends explain to them it’s not a big deal, there’s nothing to be afraid of, “Cliff wouldn’t hurt a fly,” so they eventually, begrudgingly, don’t say anything about it, don’t call you, Cliff, a fucking asshole. “Fine, it’s kind of ridiculous, but whatever.” Something like that.
And then you are at a large public place. A concert, an open mic, where you and your friends are outnumbered by the rest of the audience. And maybe someone pushes you or gives you a hard time, so you decide, just to give the guy a taste of his own medicine, to pull out your gun, and fire some blanks. Give him a real, real visceral jump. And everyone around you feels threatened, unsafe, about to be part of something they were always on some subconscious level afraid would happen, but at the same time hopeful it would never happen because our society’s getting smarter and more considerate of those around them. And then some other people, who after seeing it happen, feel relieved that you were firing blanks, but also feel empowered by your choice to fire a weapon in a public place, and choose to do the same thing.
Do you get it yet?
The fact is that derogatory remarks, whether used sincerely or ironically, and ammunition, whether blank or live, still creates the same environment of discomfort and fear every time it is used. So cut the shit.
- Junot Diaz
And that’s not even counting what your funny little joke might do to someone who has been shot at, or actually shot, with live ammunition.
Super Opinionated.
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