There are a fair few faux feminist statements I hate, but “We are the daughters of the witches you couldn’t burn” is one of them.
Historically inaccurate understanding of both who was persecuted by the witch trials and how those persecuted were typically dealt with? ✅️
Trivialising the torture and live immolation of real actual people by implying they somehow weren’t strong or clever enough to avoid being burned at the stake? ✅️
Invoking a legacy that categorically does not belong to them in an attempt to claim an oppression they and their ancestors never faced? ✅️
please do not let online system spaces convince you that you need to label and have every single thing in your system figured out. that’s an extremely unrealistic goal and you’re not any sort of faker for not knowing every single thing.
Really beating the “you’ve built a concentration camp” accusations about gaza threatening to send inconvenient political dissidents there as a form of punishment aren’t'cha?
*tries to type through blurred eyes* No no no you don’t get it this is. This is fucking amazing. There’s so many absolutely beautiful things about desi weddings, so many things that I don’t know about. They’re chaotic and loud and joyous and awkward and lovely, at least from what I’ve heard.
I’ve never been to more than two, and those when I was very young, because of many reasons, from my extended family’s age range being such that everyone was already married, my family not getting along with any friends, or, in later years, I was just so religiously traumatised and exhausted from tradition being pushed onto me that I chose to reject it.
And when I think about my future wedding, I cannot imagine one that will be like those, because I cannot imagine my blood family coming to cheer on a queer marriage, I cannot imagine being treated as a groom and not a bride, I cannot imagine being allowed to both be myself and have that part of my culture. Which is fucked up, because queer people have always been a part of desi history.
But looking at videos like this reminds me that hey, maybe it won’t be my blood family, but there will be family at my wedding, should I choose to get married. There will be queer desi people, just like me, and they will see my wedding and they will have some hope, too, maybe. Queer marriage is still illegal in India, but maybe one day it won’t be, or maybe one day I can finally leave. Maybe there’s hope. Maybe I don’t have to choose between being myself and having the normal things that everyone else gets to have.
oi invite me. i’ll come/j
what’s with the /j you better fucking come. if my wedding isn’t 99% maggots then what am i even doing.
I’m sorry but it’s fucking delusional to act as if prioritizing the actual material consequences of an election over making an abstract ideological “point” comes from a position of passive, moderate liberalism. I literally don’t have a guarantee to basic bodily autonomy as an American woman anymore because people didn’t take the threat of Trump presidency seriously enough in 2016. I don’t think democrats are undeserving of criticism either but if you don’t think there’s a significant difference between the parties at this point I have to assume you are not actually informed about the issues and institutions you’re discussing
I get that there was a problem with hybrid and electric vehicles being so quiet that people didn’t know that they were coming and got hurt, but why was the noise that they chose to implement The Sound of the Ghosts trying to contact me from Another Dimension
‘i have to take medication because my immune system decided kinkshaming the trees is more important than breathing’ is objectively an insane concept. thumbs down to seasonal allergies.
“I just want my body to stop telling shrubbery it is problematic”
Sex pollen is real and my body is violently rejecting it
Friendships as a teenager: we used to talk 5 hours every night now it’s down to 3… are we still friends 🤔? I wonder if they don’t like me anymore
Friendships as an adult: omg I’ve finally cleared up 20 minutes of my schedule to talk to my friend I haven’t spoken to in 4 months #bffs #we will find eachother in every life
Children’s oppression and lack of humanization is one topic that makes my insides feel like they’re rotting and I’ll die on the hill of defending them and pointing out how fucking gross it is every single time people act like it’s cool actually to hate a group of people who are the least able to defend themselves in any terrible situation
Y'all will scream “protect queer kids” “protect trans kids” “protect kids of color” then forget all that and proudly stand behind “well kids are fucking annoying in public actually so it’s fine when I talk about wanting to have grocery stores and planes that are child free :)” individualism has killed humanity so deeply
There are child free spaces, it’s just that some obnoxious parents for some fucking reason decide to bring their kids there with them.
I’ve never seen a child in a child free space. I’ve been to bars, clubs, sex shops, kink events, etc etc and I’m 32 and have never, ever seen a child in a child free space. If I have, for example, seen a child at a weed dispo, they were chill as hell and not bothering anyone. If a child isn’t being chill in public, they’re a fucking child with limited life experience. Sometimes parents also have limited life experience and limited resources and limited social nets to help them with their fucking kids. I’m an impoverished queer autistic whore with no family at all and the idea that I could have gotten pregnant and had a kid at some point and had another reason for the general public to hate me is fucked up. Yall are fucked up to parents and treat them like they’re inherently in a different class of human than everyone else. There are places where abortion will get people put in prison and yall act like this to parents.
What do yall expect parents to do? Do yall think all parents have the ability to hire a babysitter or afford daycare? Do you think parents with children should be locked away from the general public too? What have you done to fight for social benefits to help parents get these sorts of care for their kids so you don’t have to see them ever? Is it a leftist stance to see people as inherently obnoxious for having kids and having nowhere to put them aside for “with them”? Do you think kids should be left with strangers rather than be in spaces that make you uncomfortable? What happens when kids get left alone or with strangers because of stances like this? (In my experience as a neglected abused kid - more abuse esp sexual)
Google Right to Comfort. Please. And stop acting like people are horrible for having children. It’s exhausting that this is 25% of all the replies on this post, just shitting on parents for having kids at all and daring to bring them in public without crushing any form of sound they make immediately for your benefit. That’s not helping kids. Yall are the obnoxious ones for acting like this on a post about the most oppressed group of humans on the planet. Be better.
My mother was isolated for years because every possible social group or club or event she was interested in told her that she wasn’t allowed to bring her children “unless they could behave.” What this usually actually meant was, “teenagers are allowed, but only if they sit in the corner and don’t make any noise.”
When I was a teenager, she and I tried to join the SCA together, and some bitchy lady at the new member meetup straight-up asked us to leave, telling us it didn’t seem like “the right environment” for us because my mom couldn’t “control her children.” What actually happened was that my sibling, who was a literal toddler at the time, wanted to run around in circles because he was bored and restless and there were no other kids to play with. The venue didn’t have anywhere outside that I could take him to play while my mom stayed at the meeting, so we got told my sibling was “too loud” and asked to go home and not come back until we could hire a babysitter. I still don’t know where this woman found the audacity, but she did, and my mom didn’t have it in her to start a fight.
So we had to leave. And it was mortifying. I was furious because I really, really wanted to join the SCA, but I felt fucking horrible for my mother. I at least got to see friends at school, but this was the one thing my mom had tried to do in order to be social and get out of the house. It resulted in her getting shamed for having children who act like normal goddamn children instead of little dolls that can’t speak or run around or make any noise.
We lived in poverty. She couldn’t afford a sitter. We had just moved to the area and didn’t know anyone who could help. My dad worked long hours because his paycheck was our only income. My mom had to quit her job because childcare was too expensive. I couldn’t babysit very often, because I had to go to school. People insisting that children shouldn’t be a “nuisance” in public kept my mother trapped in the house, to the point where she would hesitate just to get groceries because so many people would yell at her when one of the babies cried. She hit the point where she refused to go run errands at all unless someone could either come with her or stay home to babysit.
But because my dad was always at work and I was always at school? It made it hard to get groceries outside a very specific window. It’s not like we could just get them delivered–that service didn’t exist yet. Getting groceries was frequently a once-a-month affair, and this on top of the poverty had a direct impact on food availability in our home.
And to top it off, when my mother talked to her doctor about the amount of horrific stress and pain she was dealing with during this time? He told her “that’s just what being a mom is like.” She still tells this story, because it was such a horrific example of medical misogyny. She didn’t diagnosed with her multiple chronic medical conditions for years, all because some doctor had it in his head that “moms are supposed to be isolated and exhausted.”
Our society treats parents and children like utter shit, and it’s appalling.
Have you seen the new show? It’s on Tubu. It’s literally on Heebee. It’s on Poodee with ads. It’s literally on Dippy. You can probably find it on Weeno. Dude it’s on Gumpy. It’s a Pheebo original. It’s on Poob. You can watch it on Poob. You can go to Poob and watch it. Log onto Poob right now. Go to Poob. Dive into Poob. You can Poob it. It’s on Poob. Poob has it for you. Poob has it for you.
Are you high?
I am actually one of the dozens of people worldwide who make jokes on purpose
Have you seen the new show? It’s on Tubu. It’s literally on Heebee. It’s on Poodee with ads. It’s literally on Dippy. You can probably find it on Weeno. Dude it’s on Gumpy. It’s a Pheebo original. It’s on Poob. You can watch it on Poob. You can go to Poob and watch it. Log onto Poob right now. Go to Poob. Dive into Poob. You can Poob it. It’s on Poob. Poob has it for you. Poob has it for you.
Are you high?
I am actually one of the dozens of people worldwide who make jokes on purpose
animators fuck me up. if you asked me to draw something it would take every ounce of my life to complete this task. if you then asked me to draw it again a little to the left I would die
this is so mean but sometimes i see published writing and suddenly no longer feel insecure about my own writing ability. like well okay that got published so im guessing i dont have much to worry about
I have a friend who is an editor, and gets submissions of mostly poetry and short stories.
I have had a glimpse into her slush pile, and let me tell you, the contents were unbelievable and immediately disabused me of the notion that reading through submissions is in any way glamorous. People have the nerve to submit unhinged paranoid ramblings, fetish porn, and a seemingly endless supply of poems about masturbation.
I no longer feel like my fiction is somehow an imposition on the people who read it. It may be forgettable, but at least it isn’t typeset to look like sperm.
Do not be afraid to submit your work. Your competition is not only worse than you think, it’s worse than you ever imagined.
Do these three things to get to the top of the slush pile:
The place has a style sheet. Use it. They say they want your MS in 16.5 point Papyrus italic with 0.8 inch margins all around, guess what you’re doing before you send it off? Save As, reformat, send it. In the absence of a specific guide: Courier 12 pt (Times New Roman if you must), double spaced, align left, tab 0.5 at each new paragraph.
Check the word count. Don’t submit novellas to 2500 word short story venues. BTW, you format the MS in that old style above because the question isn’t literal words. Courier 12pt double spaced gives you 250 words per page for typesetting purposes. 2500 words is 10 ms pages, 5000 is 20 pages, etc.
Don’t send your romance to Analog or your war story to Harlequin. If it’s a cross-genre story, be sure there’s enough of what the publication is focused on to interest them, but breaking through is hard if that’s not something they usually do.
That’s basically what every single editors’ panel at every con I’ve ever been to has boiled down to. And invariably, someone tries to get up and argue with them, not realizing it’s not a discussion.
Bonus tip: Don’t be in any way cute in your cover letter. Just the facts/Luke Skywalker’s message to Jabba the Hut in ROTJ.
Enclosed/attached is my story <Title> for your publication <Magazine>. It is x (rounded to the nearest 500) words. I can be reached at <email> (that you check regularly and isn’t likely to dump things into spam) and <phone>.
(If submitting a hard copy: The manuscript is disposable. A SASE is enclosed for your response./A SASE is included for return of the manuscript and your response.)
Thank you for your consideration.
If submitting a novella length piece or greater, a brief and complete summary is appropriate.
In the midst of an interstellar revolt against an evil galactic Empire, vital weapon plans fall into the hands of a farm boy on the edges of the galaxy. With the help of an aging warrior from the Old Republic, and a smuggler with a dark past and his imposing alien copilot, the four set out to deliver them to the rebel forces but are instead flung into a rescue mission to save the beautiful princess who stole the plans as worlds are destroyed by the might of the Empire’s weapon, the Death Star.
Captured by the Death Star on route to deliver the plans, they manage to escape the base with the princess, the old warrior sacrificing himself to make this possible. As the Death Star approaches the rebel base, they use the captured plans to stage a desperate final stand. In a fierce space battle of single-pilot ships over the surface of the moon-sized weapon, the farm boy manages to make the critical shot with an unexpected assist from the smuggler, destroying it.
Never under any circumstance put a cliffhanger into a query letter summary. There is no faster way to get the entire MS binned than doing that.
Happy writing.
PS “Top of the slush pile” means into the top 25% of manuscripts received. Three quarters of the submissions don’t take the trouble to do even those three basic steps.
Now, that still means 25/100 submissions or 250/1000 submissions, but it still improves your odds and forms the basis for starting a relationship with the publisher for the next piece you send them.
PPS This is obviously about prose. Poetry certainly has its own submission rules, and I know none of them. If you’re writing poetry, find out what they are.
this is so mean but sometimes i see published writing and suddenly no longer feel insecure about my own writing ability. like well okay that got published so im guessing i dont have much to worry about
I have a friend who is an editor, and gets submissions of mostly poetry and short stories.
I have had a glimpse into her slush pile, and let me tell you, the contents were unbelievable and immediately disabused me of the notion that reading through submissions is in any way glamorous. People have the nerve to submit unhinged paranoid ramblings, fetish porn, and a seemingly endless supply of poems about masturbation.
I no longer feel like my fiction is somehow an imposition on the people who read it. It may be forgettable, but at least it isn’t typeset to look like sperm.
Do not be afraid to submit your work. Your competition is not only worse than you think, it’s worse than you ever imagined.
Do these three things to get to the top of the slush pile:
The place has a style sheet. Use it. They say they want your MS in 16.5 point Papyrus italic with 0.8 inch margins all around, guess what you’re doing before you send it off? Save As, reformat, send it. In the absence of a specific guide: Courier 12 pt (Times New Roman if you must), double spaced, align left, tab 0.5 at each new paragraph.
Check the word count. Don’t submit novellas to 2500 word short story venues. BTW, you format the MS in that old style above because the question isn’t literal words. Courier 12pt double spaced gives you 250 words per page for typesetting purposes. 2500 words is 10 ms pages, 5000 is 20 pages, etc.
Don’t send your romance to Analog or your war story to Harlequin. If it’s a cross-genre story, be sure there’s enough of what the publication is focused on to interest them, but breaking through is hard if that’s not something they usually do.
That’s basically what every single editors’ panel at every con I’ve ever been to has boiled down to. And invariably, someone tries to get up and argue with them, not realizing it’s not a discussion.
Bonus tip: Don’t be in any way cute in your cover letter. Just the facts/Luke Skywalker’s message to Jabba the Hut in ROTJ.
Enclosed/attached is my story <Title> for your publication <Magazine>. It is x (rounded to the nearest 500) words. I can be reached at <email> (that you check regularly and isn’t likely to dump things into spam) and <phone>.
(If submitting a hard copy: The manuscript is disposable. A SASE is enclosed for your response./A SASE is included for return of the manuscript and your response.)
Thank you for your consideration.
If submitting a novella length piece or greater, a brief and complete summary is appropriate.
In the midst of an interstellar revolt against an evil galactic Empire, vital weapon plans fall into the hands of a farm boy on the edges of the galaxy. With the help of an aging warrior from the Old Republic, and a smuggler with a dark past and his imposing alien copilot, the four set out to deliver them to the rebel forces but are instead flung into a rescue mission to save the beautiful princess who stole the plans as worlds are destroyed by the might of the Empire’s weapon, the Death Star.
Captured by the Death Star on route to deliver the plans, they manage to escape the base with the princess, the old warrior sacrificing himself to make this possible. As the Death Star approaches the rebel base, they use the captured plans to stage a desperate final stand. In a fierce space battle of single-pilot ships over the surface of the moon-sized weapon, the farm boy manages to make the critical shot with an unexpected assist from the smuggler, destroying it.
Never under any circumstance put a cliffhanger into a query letter summary. There is no faster way to get the entire MS binned than doing that.
Happy writing.
PS “Top of the slush pile” means into the top 25% of manuscripts received. Three quarters of the submissions don’t take the trouble to do even those three basic steps.
Now, that still means 25/100 submissions or 250/1000 submissions, but it still improves your odds and forms the basis for starting a relationship with the publisher for the next piece you send them.
PPS This is obviously about prose. Poetry certainly has its own submission rules, and I know none of them. If you’re writing poetry, find out what they are.
Donald Trump wants to deport 15 million people. He has now made that promise on multiple occasions. He made similar promises during his first term, when he said he’d deport 8 million people. Back then, he was thwarted by institutional resistance, other priorities, incompetence, and his general tendency to get distracted.
But this time there’s a plan. It is not a smart plan, nor is it an achievable one. But it is an unapologetically autocratic plan.
“You don’t even try something like this unless you aspire to have an authoritarian government behind you,” Lisa Sherman Luna, executive director of the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition told me. “You’re talking about soldiers marching through neighborhoods across the country, pulling families out of their homes.”
The Atlantic, New York Times and Washington Post have all looked at what Trump and the MAGA coalition have planned for immigration policy should he be elected again. Those stories all got some attention at the time, but not nearly enough to reflect the insanity of what he’s proposing. Perhaps it’s the sort of bluster Trump often spurts out in the moment, but never bothers to implement.
We ought to take it more seriously. Trump has made 15 million deportations a central part of his 2024 campaign. And he’s stepped up the dehumanizing of immigrants he’ll need to get a significant portion of the country on board.
Even if Trump gets distracted, it’s likely he’ll put Stephen Miller in charge of the plan. Miller is the only non-relative senior staffer who served the entirety of the first Trump term. And Miller won’t be distracted. Ridding the country of non-white immigrants has been a core part of his identity for his entire life.
Miller himself has long made clear that the distinction that matters most to him is not between “legal” and “illegal,” but between white and non-white immigrants. Both prior to and after joining the Trump campaign in 2016 and White House in 2017, Miller sent hundreds of emails to far-right outlets like Breitbart touting racist literature like Camp of the Saints, and links to unabashed white nationalist sites where writers argue that nonwhite immigrants are of lower intelligence, and are disease-ridden, parasitic, and predisposed to criminality.
“I hate how American media will just make up a European nation rather than do any research, so I’m going to get back at them by writing a story set in a fake American state” like, do you have the slightest idea how much American media is set in a geographically impossible fictional small town located in no particular state and characterised entirely by some guy from Los Angeles’ collection of half-remembered stereotypes about the American Midwest? They’ve already got the “badly inventing fictional parts of America” bit locked down.
No, if you want to play the Uno reverse card on American media, what you need to do isn’t to make up a fake state: you specifically need to wilfully misrepresent southern California.
“School districts that don’t respect transgender and nonbinary students’ pronouns or force them to use restrooms that don’t align with their gender identity could be committing federal civil rights violations beginning this fall.
Today, the U.S. Department of Education announced the issuance of a final rule under Title IX to protect people in public schools from sex-based discrimination and harassment. The announcement marks a significant update in federal efforts to combat sex discrimination in federally funded educational institutions. During a call with reporters, Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona emphasized the administration’s dedication to ensuring that Title IX effectively serves all students by providing safe, welcoming, and rights-respecting educational environments.”
Title IX is a cornerstone of protection for women, girls, and gender/sex minorities in schools, I saw it used so many times in the 17 years I was in school to enact real consequences for sexual harassment. The Obama administration added “guidelines” to include gender identity but they were more like suggestions. This is REAL. All those states and school districts that have passed anti-trans policies in the last few years will HAVE to abide by this. Coming in the wake of things like Nex Benedict’s case, this might actually force schools to pay attention to harassment of LGBT kids. And they’re working on an addendum protecting trans kids’ right to play on the correct sports teams.
I’m… this feels like a tide changing. We’ll see how it plays out on the local level, but I have seen Title IX work in my own life. I know people who have been removed from sports teams or classes, even removed from an entire school because they harassed or assaulted someone. It’s not perfect and I’ve also seen the process fail to fully protect victims. But it’s incredible to me that future queer kids could see their rights considered important like that. Queer rights are intertwined with women’s rights, trans rights are feminism, and it’s actually a big deal that the government is acknowledging that!!
Also, though, if Trump is elected he will try to walk this back. Part of this change is just undoing damage that his education secretary did 6 years ago (including forcing victims trying to invoke Title IX to testify in a live hearing rather than private meetings… about their experience of SEXUAL HARASSMENT… Biden’s changes just removed that part) So I hope we can make progress before that happens, if it does.
Explaining homestuck isn’t hard and doesn’t take ten thousand paragraphs to do y'all just don’t know how to summarize things.
Homestuck is a webcomic where there is a multiplayer video game called Sburb which is a standard component of reality itself. Sburb, when played, destroys your original universe and transports you to a liminal place called a Land where the goal is to create a new universe and reality. Because all the realities are made by previous players of the video game, there’s a large cast that follows multiple timelines/realities. Because all of this is also a video game, there are some bugs/hacks/glitches. Much of the later plot of Homestuck revolves around trying to glitch reality in a way to kill an unkillable glitched final boss to save and fix the timelines/realities which were all glitched to being unplayable/unwinnable because of it. There are a variety of mediums in which the story is told and the guy from Undertale did a lot of the music for it.
“liking something in fiction doesn’t mean you condone it in real life” but instead of dark fanfiction tropes it’s about liking jeeves and wooster while being a socialist
This is what mass consumerist art has done to the idea of selling that as a product when it’s so clearly fine art. Like, with the effort she’s putting in x20 for a decent wage and materials?? That’s a $80,000 piece of art a member of the landed gentry would commission a year in advance for his wife on their 20th wedding anniversary. This is a priceless heirloom. How can you say “Oh yeah, I wanna buy it, you should sell them” as if you could ever turn something like this into a product??
This is fine art, period. That piece will be in a museum, or if not is should be in a museum in a hundred years.
This is what mass consumerist art has done to the idea of selling that as a product when it’s so clearly fine art. Like, with the effort she’s putting in x20 for a decent wage and materials?? That’s a $80,000 piece of art a member of the landed gentry would commission a year in advance for his wife on their 20th wedding anniversary. This is a priceless heirloom. How can you say “Oh yeah, I wanna buy it, you should sell them” as if you could ever turn something like this into a product??
This is fine art, period. That piece will be in a museum, or if not is should be in a museum in a hundred years.
“how dare you say we piss on the poor” is perhaps THEE best piece of vernacular to come out of tumblr dot com in the past decade. along with “what were you doing at the devils sacrament” (cheeky. inspired. relevant in every context) and “harold, they’re lesbians” (timeless. funny as hell. gay)
In 2022, Massachusetts residents voted in favor of a Fair Tax ballot measure to extra-super-duper-tax those earning more than one million dollars a year and to spend the revenue from that on education and transportation initiatives.
Naturally, there were the naysayers. Those who warned that all of the state’s rich people would move away to their very own Galt’s Gulch or whatever, if they were forced to pay a four percent tax on anything they make over a million dollars. The implication there, of course, is that raising this tax would, ironically, lead to the state collecting less revenue overall.
That didn’t happen! In fact, the state has already raised $1.8 billion in revenue so far for this fiscal year — which is $800 million more than they expected, and they still have a few months to go. The vast majority of the surplus will go to a fund that legislators can use for one-time investments in various projects.
The revenue has already been invested in universal school lunches, in more scholarships to public colleges, in improvements to the MBTA, and to repair roads and bridges. These are all things that will improve the quality of life for everyone, including the “ultra-rich” who happen to live there. The fact is, it’s just nice to live in a society that is more civil, that takes care of its people and its children and that fixes things when they are broken.
[ ]
Elizabeth Warren, Pramila Jayapal, and others have introduced bills in the House and Senate for a nationwide millionaire’s tax of two percent — two cents on the dollar for all wealth exceeding $50 million and six percent on all wealth over a billion dollars. This would bring in an estimated $3.75 trillion over 10 years, which we could use to improve the lives of all US citizens. We could have so many nice things!
It’s time to stop living in fear of what millionaires and billionaires — who have made their fortunes off of roads we’ve paid for and employees we’ve paid to educate — will do or where they will move if forced to pay their fair share. That’s no way to live. If they have some place better to go that won’t force them to contribute to improving their community? Let them. Other people will come along and be more than happy to pick up where they left off. But more than likely, they won’t do jack shit because they’re rich, and if they wanted to live someplace else, they’d be there by now.
Now that Eurovision is over, I want you all, especially the Americans, to take a good hard look at how the voting results turned out when people boycotted the event.
In the UK, the viewing figures were down about 2 million people compared to last year. Up to 2 million people made the conscious decision to not watch and not vote because of Israel’s inclusion.
The final results of the public vote, Israel came in first place in the UK and got 12 points. Because the only people watching and voting were people who backed Israel or at least didn’t care one way or another.
This doesn’t matter. It’s a music contest. The boycott was still the right thing to do because it is just a show at the end of the day, and the viewing figures have more impact than the results.
But it is also a good object lesson to show you what happens if you boycott a vote over something that does matter. Choosing not to vote in, let’s say, a presidential election will have similar results.
The far right justices in question are Clarence Thomas (75) and Samuel Alito (73). The likelihood that both will be able to remain on the bench until 2029, at the earliest, is small, especially with the growing ethics concerns around Thomas’ financial improprieties and his wife’s association with January 6 that may push his retirement even though he is currently (very) resistant. Thomas and Alito are the oldest members of the Court.
Re-electing Biden substantially increases the chances of the loaded 6-3 court shifting to 5-4, moving control away from the far right bloc, by 2029.
But it also has to be considered that Sonia Sotomayor, even though she is only 68, may not be able to remain on the bench through the next presidential term due to health concerns.
The first Trump presidency and Mitch McConnell’s scheming loaded the court with three right wing ideologues who barely qualify to teach law at Regent University, let alone have lifetime appointments to our highest court.
It is crucial to remember that the impact of a presidency on the courts outlasts any other presidential legacy and can change the entire course of American life for decades.
Obergefell vs Hodges is one of the things that might be on the line in the future. If you don’t want gay marriage to have the same spotty rights as it used to — as happened with abortion without Roe vs Wade — then I recommend voting in your interest, even if it feels like there’s no moral choice on the ballot.
Ah yes of course, like the all you can eat shrimp was simply too generous sounded like a fucking dumb explanation
Also their largest shareholder, a seafood distributor, maneuvered things so they became the sole supplier of breaded shrimp for the chain. Think of how much breaded shrimp Red Lobster buys.
One of the other fun tricks of private equity firms is to charge the company to be managed by them. Imagine if your boss charged you literal actual dollars to be managed by them.
It’s kinda funny how often people think there are machinations behind the scenes, but as long as there’s a good joke, they don’t look further. A big chain doesn’t go bankrupt because of a single $11 million loss due to a shrimp promotion. (Also, btw, they were forced to make that losing promotion permanent instead of time limited.)
Private equity has and continues to kill companies and livelihoods. The pacific northwest had an amazing chain of sporting goods stores called GI Joes that was founded as a military surplus store post-WWII and grew to automotive and sporting goods. They had the best bike center with full time techs and you could get a decent overhaul of your bike, find some camping gear and clothes while also picking up parts for your car. They got bought by a private equity firm, the “brand” got changed to just Joes and it failed, they dropped the automotive part, fired bike techs from their stores and basically ran it to the ground. I know the 2008 recession didn’t help but it was a successful company killed off for investors. The former management of the chain tried to resurrect the name but some other firm got the rights to it and the slogans and sued to keep it from returning, so like a lot of other brands, it rests in a graveyard and due to equity and trademark vampires, will never exist again.
The thing that gets me about people complaining about “vote-shaming” and about needing to be convinced to vote, both in general and specifically for Biden, is that so many of those people are committed to not accepting arguments in favor. You can point out Biden and his administration passing more LGBTQ protections, or the Inflation Reduction Act, or numerous other actions, and it’s never enough - nothing outweighs the negatives, in their minds.
And then when you point out the consequences and results of *not* voting for Democrats and Biden, it’s also not enough and you’re now shaming or pressuring people and not presenting a positive argument. It’s so convenient.
The reason republicans keep winning elections is cuz the right doesn’t need to be convinced to vote like this
The amount of single issue republican voters is bonkers. Abortion alone. Republicans didn’t vote for candidates expecting them to wave their own and make abortion illegal on day one. They turned out and voted for forty years to get conservative judges appointed to overturn Roe and it fucking worked.
Meanwhile you try to explain to leftists that Biden can’t just wave his pen and do everything and they get pissed and say he hasn’t done enough and ignore all the good he’s done and then they threaten to stay home
why are yall so afraid to double text like ill be out here sending 9 messages in a row buzz buzz another message? its me bitch i just got a lot to say!!
a poem i am sure everyone has seen but i’m still going to share anyway
as well as this other poem inspired by giovanni’s
and this beautiful tweet
sorry to bitch but every time i see these (certainly beautiful!) poems circulating online i get so frustrated that they’ve both been completely divorced from their original contexts. both of these poems were written by prominent BLACK poets who wrote them about POLICE VIOLENCE. these are metaphorical, it’s not just about bugs (though i do believe in pacifism for all things).
nikki giovanni is a black woman and educator who has written about black liberation, culture, and struggles for decades now, and also a mother, and rudy francisco is a young black man and poet. you’re meant to read between the lines of these poems, not take them at face value, with that context in mind.
these are not about spiders.
[ID: a green-ish spider against mostly black background. Beneath it, white text that reads, “i’m sorry for scaring you but i didn’t know being seen would cost me my life”]
[Text ID: “Allowables” / by Nikki Giovanni // I killed a spider / Not a murderous brown recluse / Nor even a black widow / And if the truth were told this / Was only a small / Sort of papery spider / Who should have run / When I picked up the book / But she didn’t / And she scared me / And I smashed her // I don’t think / I’m allowed // To kill something // Because I am // Frightened" -end ID]
[Text ID: “Mercy // after Nikki Giovanni // She asks me to kill the spider. / Instead, I get the most / peaceful weapons I can find. // I take a cup and a napkin. / I catch the spider, put it outside / and allow it to walk away. // If I am ever caught in the wrong place / at the wrong time, just being alive / and not bothering anyone, // I hope I am greeted / with the same kind / of mercy. // -Ruby Francisco” -end ID]
[ID: a Tweet from @/KaylaAncrum that reads, “I had a dream that I was commissioned to write a poem from a bug to god, and I do not remember any of the poem, except for the last line which was: I pray nobody kills me for the crime of being small.” -end ID]
The amount of people who feel the need to claim there was no antisemitism in palestine pre nakba/still isnt any are just rewriting history but also not seeing these people as humans because they can’t grapple with condemning genocide if they don’t paint them as magic perfect Arabs that for some reason never had the same issues all of their neighboring countries have + the entire world has (there is not a place with no antisemitism. That doesn’t exist.) you shouldn’t need to paint an entire group of people as morally pure to think they shouldn’t be occupied and slaughtered. People do this same shit with native Americans and pre slavery Africa as well where they will literally claim they lived perfect lives and had no issues before colonialism. Which ironically is just another way you’re erasing their history
Pretending people from third world countries are perfect moral beings who accept everyone and were corrupted by the white man is like some sort of new wave of orientalism
The midjourney stuff just reminds of when we were trying to find a new platform to host the ao3 donation form, and companies kept trying to tell me about all their “ai” features that would track donor engagement, and figure out the optimal pattern to email individual donors asking for follow up donations, and all the ways they suggest we manipulate people into staying on our websites. It was a great way to filter out who either wasn’t listening to us when we described our ethics and donor base, or just didn’t believe us.
Now granted ao3 is a unique case based on a) the amount of page views we get in any given time period and b) the fact that most donors absolutely do Not want to be identified as such anywhere, (the default “list of recent donors” module got nuked Immediately) but it surprised me some that the concept of “donors who value their privacy and would be furious at even the whiff of AI” is unique. Some of us really are just existing in different worlds.
The last part was kind of insane, honestly. When we started changing platforms for the donor database, I kept telling them that yes I was aware we already had an account for the volunteer database, and no that could not be connected to the donor database. And they said yes fine sure and then connected them anyway. And I called them back and said, excuse me, I’m confused, I can see both databases. And they said, well, yeah, but it’s only you, someone has to be able to see both databases to give other users access. The other users can’t see both. And I said, no, we have been asking for a completely separate database. I should not be able to see both. And they said, you are one organization, one organization can’t have two databases. And I said, last year someone used our volunteer email list to commit approximately one thousand felonies. Please feel free to imagine how much worse it could have been had they had a way to use volunteers’ email addresses to get their legal names. We do not want this to be something anyone can do no matter how much we trust them. Let me describe those felonies to you in more detail. And they emailed me two hours later and said, you can have two separate databases.
This post feels like watching an iceberg go by in clear water. The amount of stuff going on beneath the surface of AO3 just astonishes.
ALT
