Always reblog
10/10 THIS
I actually adore her because I’ve NEVER seen a black person get to be so fucking frank and honest about racial injustice on tv.
She’s real, she’s smart, she’s witty, she’s informed and she’s fucking unapologetic. I’m obsessed.
yes
She makes the daily show with Jon Stewart 50 Times funnier
- protect bi kids
- protect bi kids who are told “it’s just a phase”
- protect bi kids whose parents are hoping they settle into a heterosexual relationship
- protect bi kids who are accused of really just being gay
- protect bi kids who are told they’re “just doing it for attention”
- protect bi kids who are badgered by gross people asking for threesomes
- protect bi kids whose identites are constantly dismissed and invalidated
- protect bi kids
I love this
oh my god
As a person from California, this is 100% accurate
As a person from Michigan, this is 100% accurate
As a person from England I was so confused because I forgot you use the Fahrenheit system
50 degrees in England
100 degrees in England
I don’t know why I found the skeletons so funny, it’s almost like they’re dancing really sarcastically?
they’re british skeletons of course they’re dancing sarcastically.
Franchesca Ramsey (x)
Bingo.
(via lousyfeminist)
ThePrettiestOneHonestly, read some of David Wong's posts on Cracked about poverty.
Also, read John Dies at the End.
David Wong did an AMA not long ago about being Cracked.com’s head editor, and had some great things to say in response to repeated accusations of the site being “liberall biased” or “social justice flavored.” Includes admitting to and working on problematic attitudes, something rare and exceptional among anyone in entertainment.
Whatever you think of Cracked or any of David Wong’s work, at least read the last paragraph here.
"I don’t want to work for a site that stomps people who are already down."
That’s it, that’s what every content creator should be saying.
His comment about a creator’s politics existing in their art whether we like it or not is so important given Gamergate and the like.
It is actively impossible to make something purely apolitical so saying “I don’t want politics in my games/films/literature/media/reviews” you’re really asking for politics you personally agree with so it flies under your radar and everyone else should shut up.
women’s arguments for being against feminism are so IRONIC theyre like
i dont need feminism because i can vote, i feel safe, i get equal pay, i feel like an equal member of society
glad youre fuckin comfortable, the only reason you’re in that position is because of feminism
One Student’s Epic Tweets Call Out the Biggest Hypocrites Marching for Free Speech In Paris
Adding to the symbolic weight of the demonstrations, more than 40 world leaders joined the start of the Paris march, linking arms in an act of solidarity. But as Reporters Without Borders points out, not every world leader present is really a defender of free speech.
😷
drst:
Just if anyone was wondering WHY the NYPD hates Mayor Bill DeBlasio so much: he openly admitted he sometimes worried about his black son and what would happen if he got into confrontations with the police.
That is literally all he did and now they want to ruin him.
I’m aghast.
THE ONLY REASON WHY THEY WOULD LEAVE HIS SON ALONE IS BECAUSE OF HIS FATHERS POSITION… after that, he would be in the same boat like the rest of us. Thats the ONLY reason why cops wont fuck with him
America can’t stand being reminded of the trials of Black life, but even more so when politicians do the reminding. The reaction was the same when President Obama had the nerve to admit that, if he’d had a son he’d have looked like Trayvon Martin. They lost their minds.
He mentioned that he and his wife have told their son how to conduct himself if he ever gets stopped by the police, so the NYPD now loathes him for “throwing them under the bus” to the point where they turned their backs on him at services for one of the murdered officers.
If you ever wonder where this absolutist with-us-or-against-us mentality about law enforcement comes from, welp.
This is true but not the whole truth— It’s worth noting that he ran his campaign on an anti stop and frisk platform and on the idea that cops are using excessive power and racism. He didn’t just say that one thing, it was probably his most popular add, and he ran his campaign with that focus, that cops weren’t doing their jobs right. He has also clashed with the NYPD over twitter, when the NYPD put out a statement saying that the protesters all had “blood on their hands” he replied stating that was extremist and untrue, and that we must realize this was not the fault of people asking for justice.
They hate him because he’s the first mayor to speak out against them, he’s the first mayor not to cozy up next to the NYPD and smile and do as they want. So they’re disrespecting him and acting like complete power hungry assholes. And he’ll probably lose the next election for it. The cops are an extremely powerful segment in the politics of new york— their endorsements carry lots of weight, as do the huge amounts of money they donate, and the volunteer time they put in to elections.
Worth noting also that he won the mayoral election by a huge landslide because the population of NYC agreed with him that stop and frisk and aggressive policing were problems.
And the furor against him has been lead by the completely looney tunes asshole in charge of the benevolent association.
Awful convenient that the white lunatic managed to change the discussion here from “police are murdering unarmed black people and it has to stop” to “the mayor disrespects the police force.”
Comedian Adam Conover of the CollegeHumor web series Adam Ruins Everything makes a case for why tipping should be banned in the United States. Conover explains the history of the custom, the downsides to it, and compares the American custom to how the service industry works in other countries.
Cougar breaks into man’s house and….destroys his blinds.
all cats is the same
Take former FDNY Captain Brenda Berkman, for example. Berkman was one of a group of women who sued the fire department for sex discrimination in 1982 and won; she became one of the first women firefighters in New York City. The harassment she faced was downright dangerous - in addition to her male colleagues playing sexist pranks like covering her locker in a huge bra, they also tampered with her protective equipment and drained her air tanks. Berkman has said they were sending a clear message: Your life might be at risk if you pursue this.
Asking individual women to enter hostile spaces to make them better is really asking women to make men better – and to make men better at women’s own risk. But it shouldn’t be women’s responsibility to fix men or deal with their misogyny. Instead, men should be taking it upon themselves to treat women with respect, and demand their other male colleagues do the same.
”ThePrettiestOneLoss Aversion: http://youtu.be/YpiGVWO-C64
If we are told that there is something we can't do or have, that affects emotionally much more than having or doing it would have. Not excusing cultural appropriation, just explaining why humans with power act childishly when told there's one dang thing they're not allowed to do.
The commodification of culture is ‘you can wear it, but I can’t’.
Cultural appropriation is the same - ‘You can wear it, but I can’t!’ cries the white person as they drench themselves in henna, superglue a bindi to their forehead, and refuse to brush their hair for weeks on end.
Growing up, I was surrounded by white kids. They said I smelled dirty every time I got back from visiting my family, or when I went to school the morning after my mother had made a particularly strong curry. They complained to their parents, who complained to their teacher, who complained to my parents, who gently told me that I spilled rice on the table at lunch time. Thus the switch to white bread and red meat began - bleaching myself from the inside out. School meals fucking sucked. I was banned from using my tastebuds for years.
Every time I went to Delhi, I would leave with henna on my hands - my mother would take me to the market in a rickshaw and we’d sit there for half an hour while some stranger drew these beautiful things all over me, and I would watch him, fascinated, on a stool before me, his legs splayed out. We’d hand him a few coins and be on our way, and she’d stop for panipuri on the way home. I’d be careful not to wipe my hands on the rickshaw rail, careful not to wipe my hands on anything . I’d smell the traces of India on my clothes, and washing them the evening I got home would always be a little sad.
'You can wear it, but I can't.'
Kids ran away from me at school like I was poison ivy. Convinced that I would give them a horrible disease, or if I didn’t, I probably smelled anyway so there was no reason to go within a thirty foot proximity of me. Their parents would encourage them - instating bans on ever ending up at my house when they saw my mother pick me up in the playground with a bindi on her forehead one day, when they heard my father’s strong accent. Like they’d have wanted to go to my house anyway.
'You can wear it, but I can't.'
Funnily, I can’t wear it. I can’t wear the sari, the lengha or the bindi, even now, without someone looking me up and down with disgust. ‘Get out of our country’; ‘dothead’; ‘Paki’; ‘lousy immigrants, running our healthcare systems to lock us out’; it’s all the same to me.
'But it's cool to wear it at Coachella, right? At the party next week? I saw Madonna doing it, it's completely in right now.' And if I say no, I'm the bad guy, and it's people like me that are keeping the stereotype of Indian people alive - they're all freshies, they don't belong here and they're just, like, so intrusive. What's with them taking all our jobs? Why is there one behind every corner shop counter and on every call centre line? Why are all the doctors in my local hospital brown, yet the receptionist is white? Seems like some kind of supremacy, right?
Thus the commodification of my culture continues. I watch crystal bindis being marked up to be sold in Forever21 and Topshop when I can buy them on the street in Delhi for a tenth of the cost. I see girls I knew in primary school plaster Friday night pictures of them in their bodycon dress and their bindi spot with a mixer in their hand all over my news feed, and I know that this is how it is -
'You can wear it, but I can't.'
I have somehow been locked out of a culture that I want to be proud of; I am rejected as the fresh off the boat immigrant who’s going to give everyone a disease with their dirty hands. On me it’s dirt, worthy of a slur in my direction and an inside joke with the next white person you see - but on you, it’s chic. It’s cheerful and oh-so-boho-indie-pastel-pale-cute.
You point with your left hand, and painstakingly apply your bindi spot with the right. Then you forget about it, because you can afford to, and adjust your sari in the mirror with both.
White hipster shitstains, take note.
ThePrettiestOnePeople hate Martha? How could people hate Martha?
The Unbearable Solitude of Being an African Fan Girl | omenana
Just fantastic.
(via acafanmom)
#1
This was my favorite cover of the original set I grew up with - the desert palette contrasting with the deep blue of Alanna’s pants and cloak. (Finally, some pants!) Even the font works with this background, and the rearing horse gives it a bit of a Calamity Jane feel, which I always felt worked well with the character.
Complaints:
the other hand, the fact that she’s holding what I think is supposed to be a flame backfires and looks like a lotus. I AM LADY KNIGHT, CHAMPION OF FLOWERS. Also, the horse is still frilly.
Minimalist-formerly-11-year-old-butch disliked this one the least of the original four because of the super-coiffed-ness of both horse and rider (we grew up with the same set).
#2
The first-edition artwork continues to ascend with this awesome daylight desert cover. The detailing again is what makes it shine - the horse’s saddle gear, the skirt. Love the determined expression, the movement in the fabric and tail, the little plume of dust behind them.
Complaints: you could make a horse so expressive and realistic, but the cat looks like the love child of a badger and a beaver?
#3
I’m starting to think of this series as the ‘fairytale collection’ given the colors and drawing style, and in this case, it works. Points for not making the glowy thing look like a lotus, for the unruly mane and the fact that Alanna’s hair looks like a red version of mine (snarly curls ftw). Also points for book accuracy: glowy sword, cat riding in saddle cup, etc.
Complaints: Minimalist is not amused by the lioness faces - in fact, is rather unnerved by them. Also, the horse is doing some kind of a limp-wristed HEY GIRL HEY with a chin tilt and some side-eye.
#4
Congratulations to Gollum, who is growing into her face and pulls herself up from the trenches! The lightning around the sword is an excellent touch/nod to the book, the horse is in some armor, as she should be, and I’m digging the chain mail sparkles.
Complaints: it’s still Gollum, guys. Even the horse looks alarmed.
#5
The French continue to be the best of the foreign publishers, again showing a nice sense of movement (dust, mane, etc). It’s a clear image, with a nuanced, slightly different color palette.
Complaints: Probably the weakest showing from this set so far. I’ve given up on the French understanding that Alanna =/= Mulan. Also, wtf is with the cat perched on the horse’s ass? He’s going to fall. And he’s not going to like it.
#6
Inoffensive, but boring. I like the tent-flap as a reveal, becuase it feels a little like a stage curtain, and this may be the first cover to really get the cat right - that’s a perfect prowl.
Complaints: the font makes it look like a book report, and Minimalist points out that the whole thing looks like a middle-school photoshop job. Also, for some reason, Alanna looks like a Musketeer, though I can’t tell if this is a good thing or not .
#7
Thailand, when you get it wrong, you at least get it spectacularly wrong and full of badassery.
Complaints: A Power Rangers villian is riding a dragon towards Agrahbah. The sun looks like a giant nipple. Take your pick.
#8
Watch your back, Thailand. Japan is coming for you! This one gets points for being the Lisa Frank Entry of the batch, and decent-if-not-spectacular cat and horse depictions.
Complaints: The jewlery, the borders, the sword that looks like it couldn’t cut anything, the Dunescape - and generally the absence of anything as badass as the Thai version.
#9
Points for..um…having a nice color spectrum from the sky to the land. And for the nifty shin guards on the horse.
Complaints: super-magic-swirly-sparkly-meteor shower! Looking At That Tank Top Makes My Breasts Hurt! White Leggings! And Good Lord Would You Read That Tagline Because This Book Is Totally Not About A Woman Coming Into Her Own As a Knight At All!
#10
OMG, they finally got the Gift color correct. Hallelujah.
Complaints: NO NO NO NO NO NO NO. Seriously, what conversation led to this f’kakta version of events? Can you imagine it?
"So, what we’re thinking this whole Team George/Team Jonathan approach is really going to appeal to the kids, yknow? I mean, the book is essentially about how she runs away to the desert to escape having to make the choice between them, right? Won’t the readers appreciate having something to root for? ‘Cause, I mean, let’s face it - what else are they going to root for? Her?"
In our house the next-to-last one is known as the “Alanna as showgirl” cover, and the last, of course, is the Twilight cover. The newest cover, which just came out from Atheneum, is infinitely preferable.
I don’t see the Thai cover where they took the picture of Napoleon crossing the Alps and subbed in a blonde girl’s face. Did Thailand do two covers?
I love the breakdowns!
Fucking thank you
See, ma
I’m afraid of dogs. But my positive experiences with well-trained pitbulls owned by friends and acquaintances mean they are actually some of the dogs I trust most. I’ve got my issues with dogs, but pitbulls are absolutely not the problem.
Tyler Cowen passes along the following chart, a modified version of one Matt Yglesias used to show the trend of total government expenditures (federal + state + local) and declare "2014 is the year American austerity came to an end":
This comes from Angus, who comments incredulously: "From this graph I concluded one of two things must be true depending on one's definition of austerity. Either austerity means nominal cuts and we never had any of it, or austerity means cuts relative to trend and we are still savagely in its grasp."
Oh come on. There's an obvious third option. Let's take a look at this chart done right:
This is real per-capita government expenditures (using 2014 dollars). I used CPI, but it looks the same no matter which inflation measure you prefer (PCE, GDP deflator, % of GDP, whatever).
Austerity is all about the trajectory of government spending, and this is what it looks like. You can argue about whether flat spending represents austerity, but a sustained decline counts in anyone's book. The story here is simple: for a little while, in 2009 and 2010, stimulus spending partially offset state and local cuts, but by the end of 2010 the stimulus had run its course. From then on, the drop in government expenditures was steady and significant. It was also unprecedented. If you run this chart back for 50 years you'll never see anything like it. In all previous recessions and their aftermaths, government spending rose.
Finally, in 2014, the spending decline stopped. Austerity was over, and now we're even starting to see a small uptick in government spending. At the same time, the economy started to pick up.
This is not bulletproof evidence that austerity is bad for the economy, or that government spending helps it. But it's certainly consistent with the hypothesis, and it's really not hard to see.
“A growing number of scientists are suggesting that depression is a result of inflammation caused by the body’s immune system”
Yes but enough men that every girl is terrified of smiling to that guy on the bus or talking with the boy in the coffee shop. Every girl has been walking late at night at one point and been afraid of who might be following her. Every girl has referred to someone as a “creep” and every girl has refused a drink from someone she doesn’t know.
Not all men.
But enough men that all women are now afraid of most men.
It’s gotten so bad that we have to be afraid of even telling you we are afraid. We can’t ask that you please stop talking to us. Because if we do we run the risk of being labeled a “stuck up bitch” and blamed for murders and rapes in which we are the victims.
So we speak to you with body language that we hope you’ll understand. We cross our legs and look out the window and wear giant headphones that are giant signs that subtly read “DON’T TALK TO ME!” But you insist on ignoring those signs because you have it in your head that our body language doesn’t mean anything. That our bodies aren’t our bodies.
Not all men.
You can start fucking saying that when all women can stop being afraid. But that’s not gonna happen if every man a women opens up to about this issue dismisses her by saying “Not all men.”
an unofficial letter to the skeezball at work all men.
(via thehansoloist)
We have become more aware that Americans’ chances of upward economic mobility have for decades been a lot lower than Americans imagined, that being poor or rich can last generations. Efforts to explain that lock-in have pointed to several patterns, from the intergenerational inheritance of assets (or debt, as the case may be) to intergenerational continuity in child-rearing styles (say, how much parents read to their children). In such ways, the past is not really past.
Increasingly, researchers have also identified the places – the communities, neighborhoods, blocks – where people live as a factor in slowing economic mobility. In a post earlier this year, I noted a couple of 2008 studies showing that growing up in poor neighborhoods impaired children’s cognitive skills and reduced their chances to advance beyond their parents. In this post, I report on further research by NYU sociologist Patrick Sharkey (here and here) suggesting that a bad environment can worsen the life chances not only of a child, but that of the child’s child, an unfortunate residential patrimony.
Consider the ways that the immediate environment shapes a child’s development. It does so physically. Air and soil pollution, noise, and traffic, for example, measurably affect children’s health, stress, and cognitive development. Local institutions and resources, such as the policing, quality of the schools, availability of health services, food options, parks, and so on matter, as well. And the social environment may matter most of all. Growing up in a community with gangs, dangerous streets, discouraging role models, confused social expectations, and few connections to outsiders commanding resources is a burden for any child. Just getting by day-to-day can be a struggle. (In a pair of studies, Sharkey found that a violent crime occurring near black children’s homes in the days before they took a standardized test reduced their scores on the test, presumably because of anxiety and distraction.)
In their research on historical effects, Sharkey and co-author Felix Elwert used a survey that has followed thousands of American families since 1968 (the PSID). The researchers know much about the adults in the survey, including where they lived when they were around 16, about the children they had and where those children lived around the age of six. The researchers also have the results from cognitive tests administered to those children in 2002.
Sharkey and Elwert found that living in a neighborhood where 20 percent or more of the residents are poor — many other things being held constant (including the parents’ education, health, and attitudes) — seems to lower the test scores of children. And so does having a parent who grew up in such a neighborhood. The effect on children of living in a poor neighborhood and having parents who had also are substantially greater than the effect of only the second generation living in a poor neighborhood. Moreover, the children of two generations of poor neighborhoods do much worse than those of two generations who managed to stay out of poor neighborhoods (over half a standard deviation worse). For technical reasons, these statistical results probably underestimate the real effect of neighborhood poverty on scores.
What appears to have happened is this: Survey respondents in the first generation who grew up in poor neighborhoods ran higher risks than other respondents, on average getting less education and worse jobs, if any, and bearing more physical, social, and psychological problems. Not surprisingly, they tended to end up in poor neighborhoods as adults. When this first generation became parents, they commonly passed on some of their personal disadvantages, such as weak reading skills, to their own children. And they also passed on their places, raising the second generation in poor neighborhoods, which further hampered their children. In this way, Sharkey and Elwert argue, neighborhood problems dragged down (at least) two generations.
No discussion of neighborhood effects can ignore the racial dimension, because the residential segregation of blacks has been and, though reduced, continues to be extreme: 41 percent of the African-American parent-child pairs in the study grew up in poor neighborhoods in both generations; only 2 percent of white families did. Poor whites were less likely to live in concentrated areas of poverty and are more likely to get out of them if they did. The weight of the past is much heavier for some than others.
Claude Fischer is a sociologist at UC Berkeley, is the author of Made in America: A Social History of American Culture and Character. This post originally appeared at Made in America and was re-posted on the Boston Review BR Blog.
(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)
I think my biggest “huh” moment with respect to gender roles is when it was pointed out to me that your typical “geek” is just as hypermasculine as your typical “jock” when you look at it from the right angle.
As male geeks, a great deal of our identity is built on the notion that male geeks are, in some sense, gender-nonconformant, insofar as we’re unwilling or unable to live up to certain physical ideals about what a man “should” be. Indeed, many of us take pride in how putatively unmanly we are.
Viewed from an historical perspective, however, the virtues of the ideal geek are essentially those of the ideal aristocrat: a cultured polymath with expertise in a vast array of subjects; rarefied or eccentric taste in food, clothing, music, etc.; identity politics that revolve around one’s hobbies or pastimes; open disdain for physical labour and those who perform it; a sense of natural entitlement to positions of authority (“you should be flipping my burgers!”); and so forth.
And the thing about that aristocratic ideal? It’s intensely masculine. It may seem more welcoming to women on the surface, but - as recent events will readily illustrate - this is a facade: we pretend to be egalitarian because it suits our refined self-image, but that affectation falls away in a heartbeat when challenged.
Basically, the whole “geeks versus jocks” thing that gets drilled into us by media and the educational system isn’t about degrees of masculinity at all. It’s just two different flavours of the same toxic bullshit: the ideal geek is the alpha-male-as-philosopher-king, as opposed to the ideal jock’s alpha-male-as-warrior-king. It’s still a big dick-measuring contest - we’re just using different rulers.
And, in both “jock culture” and “geek culture”, women are seen as an enemy/a prize to be won. They value the exclusion of those who don’t fit their defined gender roles, to a violent degree.
someone in the world is maimed or killed by a landmine every hour. apopo is a not for profit ngo that has spent the last twenty years developing and implementing “hero rats” to clear affected areas of their landmines - over 1500 in tanzania, where apopo is headquartered, 2,728 in mozambique, and 657 in thailand. there are also ongoing operations in angola and cambodia.
rats are known to be amongst the most sensitive animals when it comes to smell, with more functional genes for their olfactory system than any other mammal. a rat’s nose is constantly active and moving, and is always close to ground where vapour concentrations are highest and wind speeds are lowest.
the african giant pouched rat, being highly sociable and native to sub saharan africa, is specifically trained to detect tnt and mine casing minerals. using a combination of click training and food rewarding that begins shortly after birth and lasts nine months, the rats are able to cover 100 square metres of land in 20 minutes - something a human would need an entire day to do.
weighing just over a kilogram, the rats are too light to set off a landmine, and not one has died from the work. apopo adheres to very strict animal welfare protocols, and the rats are treated with the greatest of care and attention, with most meeting their expected eight years of life.
photos by sylvain piraux. consider adopting a rat, where you’ll get real time updates on your rat’s training and life saving work. you can also chose to instead have your rat trained to sniff out tuberculosis in sub saharan african villages (apopo has trained rats to do in ten minutes what it takes lab technicians a day to detect)
