“I consider myself a confident person, but there’s always been an undercurrent of insecurity throughout my career. Self-esteem is never set in stone. It’s fluid, and it’s something you constantly have to manage. It can dip so easily, and when it does, you have to work to get it back up to a place where you can look at life properly.” Queen Latifah, InStyle Magazine March 2017
OK, so now the forced-birthers are trying to tell me that, because I believe that every child born should be a wanted child, I believe that children are inherently a curse? These fuckers don't listen to anything outside the buzzing in their heads.
Republicans are loving The Haidmaid’s Tale and all the ideas it’s giving them.
hooooooooolllllllyyyyyyy shiiiiiiiiittttt
What the ever living fuck.
What in the actual living fuck.
I have been thinking about this post all fucking day.
Ok, so I havent seen the show yet. I’ve just read the book. So I dunno, maybe it’s different in the show.
But like, in the book, the wives don’t have it great. Like, of course they are better of than the Handmaids and the Marthas. But like, their lot is still sad. They can’t have jobs, can’t read, can’t have hobbies besides maybe some light gardening or needlepoint. They are stripped of “purpose” and aren’t allowed to seek their own purpose. They don’t cook or clean (the Marthas do that), if they fail to conceive there are handmaids for that. And if the Commander and Serena Joy are in any way typical, the wives don’t even provide their husbands with friendship or company. They have been stripped of and denied anything to do or have.
Again, of course, they are better off than the other women in the story. But that doesn’t mean that we should admire them or want to be like them or that they have it good. They are so lonely and unhappy they fake being sick so they can have company.
How anyone could read this story as a positive thing for ANYONE (besides the most privileged of men) is so bizarre.
On Saturday, in Virginia, a blindingly white punching bag by the name of “Richard Spencer,” led or participated in two rallies of fellow white nationalist and “alt-right” protesters, complaining about the planned removal of a Confederate monument in Charlottesville. The statue in question is of Confederate General…
You guys, you must stop doing this. You must. We cannot keep yelling at you about it because it makes us so angry, and we are already angry all the time, about real things, like how our lives are turning into a real world Handmaid’s Tale, ha ha ha ha ha ha ha haha ha ha ha ha ha. We cannot keep spending our energy being mad at mediocre men for writing mediocre books that inexplicably win awards and that people tell us to read, for some fucking godawful who knows reason.
So men. My guys. My dudes. My bros. My writers. I am begging you to help me here. When you have this man in your workshop, you must turn to him. You must take his clammy hands in yours. You must look deep into his eyes, his man eyes, with your man eyes, and you must say to him, “Peter, I am a man, and you are a man, so let us talk to each other like men. Peter, look at the way you have written about the only four women in this book.” And Peter will say, trying to free his hands, “What? These are sexy, dynamic, interesting women.” And you must grip his hands even tighter and you must say to him, “ARE THEY, PETER? Why are they interesting? What are their hobbies? What are their private habits? What are their strange dreams? What choices are they making, Peter? They are not making choices. They are not interesting. What they are is sexy, and you have those things confused, and not in the good way where someone’s interestingness makes them become sexy, like Steve Buscemi or Pauline Viardot. Why must women be sexy to be interesting to you? The women you don’t find sexy are where, Peter? They are invisible? They are all dead?” He is trying to escape! Tighten your grasp. “Peter, look at this. I mean, where to begin. ‘She could have been any age between eighteen and thirty-five?’ There are no other ages, I guess? Do you know what eighteen-year-olds really look like, in life? Do you know what thirty-SEVEN-year-olds look like, god forbid? And not that this is even the point, but why are these supposedly sexy and dynamic and interesting women BOTHERING with your boring garbage ‘on the skinny side of average’ protagonist? Why did you write it like this, Peter?”
And maybe Peter will say at last, “I don’t know.” Maybe he will be silent for a long long long time, and then maybe he will say, “I guess it’s scary and difficult for me to imagine the interiority of women because then i would have to know that my mother had an interiority of her own: private, petty, sexually unstimulating, strange: unrelated to me and undevoted to my needs. That sometimes I was nothing to my mother, just as sometimes she is nothing to me. That I was not at all times her immediate concern.”
“I know, Peter,” you can tell him gently.
“I don’t want to know that my mother was a human being with an internal life, because to know that would be to risk a frightening intimacy with her,” Peter will say, maybe. “Because to know that would be to know that she was only a small, complicated person, no bigger or smaller than I am, and I am so small. To know how alone she was. How alone I am. How alone we all are. That my mother survived with no resources more mysterious than my own. And yet she gave me life. My God: she gave me life. How can I pay her back for that? And how can I forgive her for it? How can I ever repay her for the good and the evil of it, my life, every day of my life?” He will be sobbing probably. “I am frightened of her. I am frightened of loneliness. I am frightened of dying. O God. My God. I didn’t know. I didn’t know.” Drool will run from his mouth as he cries. The way babies cry. He will be ashamed. You must hold him. You must say, “Shh, Peter. Shh.” Wrap your man arms around him. Hum into his thin hair as your own mother hummed once into your own sweet-smelling baby scalp. Kiss him gently on his mouth. There. You did it, men. You fixed sexism. Thank you. You’re the real hero here, as always, you men, and your special man powers, for making art.
A bolt of lightning shoots from your temple, through your tooth, around your jaw, down to your knee. As it goes through the tooth, an explosion occurs, filling your entire head with raw, concentrated agony.
Just as your brain begins to process this, a leg forgets its purpose. You barely realize you've dropped to the ground when a scream you didn't know was there forces your mouth back open, allowing the air pressure fluctuation to begin the cycle again. All you can see is white.
After a week-long hour or so, it ends. You can go about your day, but it will happen again. Probably tomorrow. Maybe today. It will happen with no warning, and it could happen at any moment. You are acutely aware of this, every second of every day, until you save up enough money to get it pulled out of your head.
The Washington Postexamines one of the most overlooked aspects of inequality in this country—the high cost of obtaining even basic dental care. Dental care is a subset of health care, but historically separated out in the U.S. health care “market,” even though dental problems can quickly cascade into serious medical conditions. Those of us with decent dental coverage through our employers usually receive it through a plan separate from our health care coverage. And just like health insurance, the coverage provided in employer-based dental plans varies drastically.
But even meager coverage is better than no coverage at all. And no coverage is what millions of Americans—many working steady, full-time jobs—are forced to cope with:
As the distance between rich and poor grows in the United States, few consequences are so overlooked as the humiliating divide in dental care. High-end cosmetic dentistry is soaring, and better-off Americans spend well over $1 billion each year just to make their teeth a few shades whiter.
Millions of others rely on charity clinics and hospital emergency rooms to treat painful and neglected teeth. Unable to afford expensive root canals and crowns, many simply have them pulled. Nearly 1 in 5 Americans older than 65 do not have a single real tooth left.
More than a third of American adults have no dental coverage. Medicare does not cover dental issues—Medicare-eligible seniors must purchase separate dental insurance, which usually caps benefits at $1500 per year, even as dental costs have skyrocketed. Although states require coverage for children on Medicaid and CHIP, many non-eligible kids have to go without care because their parents can’t afford the plans offered through their work. One of the benefits of the Affordable Care Act (and one of the measures callously repealed by the Republican House of Representatives last week) was a requirement that dental care be included in health insurance plans for those up to age 19. Thanks to Donald Trump and the Republican Party, those benefits (and dental coverage for five million adults) are likely to be taken away.
After promising several fans on Twitter last week that she’d cover their student loans, college tuition fees, and school supply costs, the beneficent Nicki Minaj posted on Instagram on Friday that she’d made eight of those payments that day and intended to go on another shopping spree to free fans from student debt…
The theme that unites all of Trump’s initiatives so far is their
unnecessary cruelty.
1. His new budget comes down especially hard on the poor –
imposing unprecedented cuts in low-income housing, job training, food
assistance, legal services, help to distressed rural communities, nutrition for
new mothers and their infants, funds to keep poor families warm, even “meals on
wheels.”
These cuts come at a time when more American families are in
poverty than ever before, including 1 in 5 children. So, why is Trump doing
this? To pay for the biggest hike in military spending since the 1980s – at a
time when the U.S. already spends more on its military than the next 7 biggest
military budgets put together.
2. Trump and his enablers in the GOP are on the way to repealing the
Affordable Care Act, and replacing it in a way that could cause 14 million
Americans to lose their health insurance next year, and 24 million by 2026.
Why is Trump doing this? To give $600 billion in tax cuts over
the decade mostly to wealthy Americans, when the rich have accumulated more
wealth than at any time in the nation’s history.
The plan reduces the federal budget by only $337 billion over
the next ten years – that is a small fraction of the national debt, in
exchange for the largest redistribution from the poor and middle class to the
wealthy in modern history.
3. Trump is banning Syrian refugees and slashing the total
number of refugees this year by more than half. This comes just when the world is experiencing the worst refugee
crisis since World War II.
So, why is he doing this? Your odds of dying by a lightening
strike are higher than by an immigrant terrorist attack. No terrorist attacker
inside the U.S. has come from Syria (nor, for that matter, from any of the 6
countries in Trump’s current travel ban.)
4. Trump is rounding up undocumented immigrants helter-skelter
– including people who have been productive members of our society for
decades, and young people who have been here since they were toddlers.
Why is Trump doing this? These actions come when unemployment is
down, crime is down, and we have fewer undocumented workers in the U.S. today
than we did ten years ago.
Trump is embarking on an orgy of cruelty for absolutely no
reason. This is profoundly immoral. It is morally incumbent on all of us to
stop it.
If there’s one complaint about the later Halloween movies (though, realistically, there are several), it’s how damn indestructible Michael Myers became. The masked killer escaped death so many times, he basically turned into a god. Well, writer Danny McBride has promised this won’t be the case in his planned Halloween…
“The comparisons with Richard Nixon are plentiful these days, but even he did not seem so untethered from our basic governance. And I have never seen so many members of a political party rally around incompetence, intemperance, and inanity.”
The Republican-lead Congress is enabling and encouraging the absolute unraveling of our constitutional democracy. They are unable to govern, and they are unfit to hold office.
I tried writing about the James Comey firing earlier in the week and got mostly a lot of GRWARRRRGHNNNNGHFFFFFK out of it, so I decided to let it be, and anyway, at this point there’s very little to add to it that hasn’t already been said elsewhere, mostly relating to Trump being incompetent, possibly criminal, and in all cases a schmuck.
That said, I think it’s reasonable to address a point that both Trump and his various apparatchiks have been petulant about, namely that no one on the left liked James Comey and many people thought he should have been booted from the job, and yet when Trump booted him, they freaked out. Isn’t this what they wanted? I mean, hell, just before he got punted, I wrote this tweet about him:
So you would think I would be among the ones cheering the punting. As much as I roll my eyes at the Trumpkins, I think it’s reasonably fair for them to be confused about this.
Well, here’s an answer:
Let’s say there’s this guy who is an enormous asshole and everybody hates him and wishes that he’d get, like, hit by a bus or something. Then one day, a bus indeed comes up on the curb, smacks into him and basically turns him into paste. Does everyone then pin a medal on the bus driver? Well, no, the bus driver just killed someone. Now we look into why the bus went up on the curb. And if in this particular case the bus driver just happened to be someone the enormous asshole was investigating for possible criminal activity (because the enormous asshole was maybe a cop or a private investigator), well. There might be cause for concern. Especially if the bus driver then says “I was driving around looking for him in order to hit him with a bus!” to Lester Holt in a televised interview.
An even shorter, analogy-free version is: It’s allowed to both believe Comey wasn’t very good at his job and that Trump fired him in order to impede the FBI’s investigation into his, his campaign’s and now his administration’s ties to Russia. And while the first is a problem, the second is stuff impeachments are made of.
That Trump appeared to think that the annoyance of the first would make people brush aside the potential criminality of the second is yet another reason why he’s not actually very good at his job. So there’s irony there, at least.
i have no idea whether or not i can classify this character as “ruggedly handsome” so i literally did an image search for “ruggedly handsome man” and im no closer to an answer. this
and this
were both top results
they both look like werewolves except the top guy is from a video game where he constantly wrestles with his beast self and his human self and it’s a metaphor for the rage inside us all and he probably accidentally kills his girlfriend and the bottom guy is on a sitcom where he doesn’t keep track of the phases of the moon and his kids are always embarrassed when he turns into a werewolf at the movie theatre and eats all the popcorn
“straight people die all the time on shows, you were just being treated equally”
analogies work best with dumbasses so let me use yet another one
you got two people
one of them has a plate and it’s filled with so many cookies you can’t even count how many there are on it, there’s so many of them they’re falling off the plate
another one who has exactly one cookie on their plate
you take one cookie away from each plate, to treat them equally, right? meaning equality to you is that one of them has absolutely no cookies left whereas the other one can still stuff his fucking face of cookies for the next 35 years to come
this is the simplest way i can explain to someone with less ability to think than a 5th grader what’s the difference between formal equality and substantive equality if at this point you don’t understand you need to go back to the basics of critical thinking
It's been James Comey week, and rightly so: President Donald Trump's firing of the FBI director threatens the investigation into Russia's interference in the 2016 election. Some Democrats are calling it a constitutional crisis and even some Republicans say an independent investigation is necessary. But while everyone was watching the Comey saga unfold, the Trump administration continued to advance its agenda. Here's what happened while you weren't paying attention:
The administration launched a commission that could suppress voting.
Trump signed an executive order establishing a vote fraud commission on Thursday to study "vulnerabilities in voting systems and practices used for Federal elections that could lead to improper voter registrations and improper voting, including fraudulent voter registrations and fraudulent voting." Since voting fraud is nearly nonexistent problem, civil rights advocates are rightly concerned that it'll be used to justify voting suppression efforts. As Mother Jones' Pema Levy reported, the leadership of the commission gives further credence to these concerns.
The Justice Department reupped the war on drugs.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced Friday that he's reversing a key part of the Obama administration's criminal justice reform. Sessions has instructed federal prosecutors to "charge and pursue the most serious, readily provable offense." Former Attorney General Eric Holder's guidance had directed prosecutors to pursue drug charges in a way that did not trigger mandatory minimum sentences if defendants met certain criteria such as not belonging to a gang or major drug trafficking organization. "Jeff Sessions is pushing federal prosecutors to reverse progress and repeat a failed experiment—the War on Drugs—that has devastated the lives and rights of millions of Americans, ripping apart families and communities and setting millions, particularly Black people and other people of color, on a vicious cycle of incarceration," said Udi Ofer, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Campaign for Smart Justice, in a statement.
The EPA signaled that it's choosing industry over science.
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt dismissed half the scientists from the agency's 18-member Board of Scientific Counselors and is considering replacing them with industry representatives. "The administrator believes we should have people on this board who understand the impact of regulations on the regulated community," an EPA spokesperson told the New York Times. The board gives advice and recommendations to ensure the integrity of the EPA's scientific research and has been the target of political attacks from industry groups and Republicans. "If they are proposing that the decisions not be based on science, what is it they are proposing they be based on?" Andrew Rosenberg, director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told ThinkProgress. "The alternative is pure politics. Who has the most influence?"
The health secretary rejected effective treatment for opioid addiction.
Trump has promised to fight the opioid epidemic and appointed a commission to address the issue, but comments from the government's top health executive raise concerns about the administration's approach. When asked about drug treatment this week during an event about the crisis, Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price said, "If we're just substituting one opioid for another, we're not moving the dial much. Folks need to be cured so they can be productive members of society and realize their dreams." The website for the National Institutes of Health says it's a myth that medicine-assisted treatment substitutes "one addiction for another," and studies have shown it to be effective. "This is a dangerous, dangerous statement," physician Corey Waller, chair of legislative advocacy for the American Society of Addiction Medicine, told Politico. "He is moving out of the world of scientific fact into the world of alternative facts."
One of the few bright spots of the diminishing usefulness of White House press conferences is Melissa McCarthy’s unhinged impression of Sean Spicer’s antagonistic relationship with reporters and all other human beings who ask him to come out of the bushes and explain what the hell Donald Trump is up to lately. She’s…
“It’s time to face up to the scary reality here. Most people now realize, I think, that Donald Trump holds basic American political values in contempt. What we need to realize is that much of his party shares that contempt.”
On Pod Save America, Favreau reminded us that the checks and balances and systems that were put into place by the Founding Fathers are still there, and that we are in our current nightmare in large part because the Republican-controlled Congress won’t use them.
Those men and women swore an oath to uphold the Constitution, and they are currently breaking that oath. Every single one of them needs to be removed from office.
