were you perpetually and exclusively praised for what you could one day become, instead of what you were, leading you to a lifetime of feeling like you were not only never good enough, but that the best thing about you was a future that would never come, that constantly felt like it was slipping away? Did you become so afraid of closing doors, of losing that one good thing, that potential, that you stagnated at the crossroads until your life began to rot around you and the asphalt ground to gravel and the roads grew ever rougher, the doors closing one by one even as you tried in vain to keep them open, instead of choosing a path and committing to a direction for your own progress? Did you watch the best thing about you, the one thing you were praised for, slowly collapse in your arms as you tried desperately and hopelessly to save it, finding yourself kneeling in the ruins of your unexplored promise, looking for a way out, and wondering if there was no where else to go? no way forward? When someone tells you they’re proud of you, that they love you for who you are, that what you are is good enough, do you cry? do you struggle to believe them? do you have to try your damnedest just to make yourself hear the words? Do you wonder if, one day, you’ll learn to be happy with who you are?
Today, we take a moment to celebrate a historic milestone - the anniversary of South Africa legalizing same-sex marriage. 🇿🇦🏳️🌈 On this remarkable day, South Africa not only became the first country in Africa to recognize love in all its forms, but also set a precedent for human rights and equality across the globe. This day serves as a reminder of the progress we’ve made, and the work that still needs to be done. Let’s continue to fight for love, acceptance, and equality for all. Today we celebrate love, human rights, and the beautiful rainbow nation of South Africa. 🌈❤️
THE NUMBER OF PEOPLE IN THE NOTES WHO THINK THINK THIS IS A RECENT LEGALISATION???
PISS ON THE POOR WEBSITE FOR SURE. Girlies we legalised it before the UK and the USA, we were the 5th country on the planet to do so, you not look down on us like this.
I’ve been reading some more of the works of eugenicists while thinking about the state of education about this ideology. Yes, “Eugenics” is a dirty word nowadays; in my opinion, it’s not nearly dirty enough.
Here’s a fact to make your head spin: Eugenics wasn’t about killing people. Yes, it ended up killing people, and if you examine the way eugenics has influenced the world, you realize it still does kill people, but the architects of eugenics weren’t leading with, “My fellow countrymen, we should On Purpose Kill People.”
The reason that’s important is, people keep coming up with ideas labeled (by their critics) “uncomfortably similar to eugenics”— ideas for a compassionate, scientifically-grounded way of improving humanity by understanding the heredity of good and bad traits and influencing the fertility rates of people with different genetic traits.
There is already a word for this kind of idea. That word is: eugenics. It is silly to set yourself apart from eugenicists by explicitly repudiating killing people or forcibly sterilizing them, when many founding eugenicists also explicitly repudiated killing people or forcibly sterilizing them.
I’m afraid that his brief introduction to eugenics could sound, to the layperson, surprisingly less scary and disgusting than expected. Mister Davenport’s word choices may provide a “red flag” to the reader: he refers to human babies as a “valuable crop,” to marriage between people as “mating.” The disquiet these word choices cause is because they dehumanize the subjects. Humans, from Davenport’s perspective, are essentially the same as agricultural plants or animals, which in turn are assets, sources of economic gain—they are things.
Davenport articulates the contribution of a human being to the United States: “…forming a united, altruistic, God-serving, law-abiding, effective and productive nation.” However, relatively few people are “fully effective” at this purpose, because a proportion of society is “non-productive”—either criminals or disabled, or among the people required to care for and control criminals and the disabled.
After you read the introduction of Davenport’s book, read his wikipedia page. He was a Nazi. He was a Nazi until the day he died. He was rabidly and repugnantly racist, so much so that his later scientific works fudged together garbage conclusions that contradicted his actual data in order to prop up his racist beliefs. He lobbied Congress to restrict immigration into the USA, out of the belief that the immigrants would poison the blood of our country with inferior genetics.
Overwhelmingly, eugenicists were concerned with disability. They believed that disability would normally be eliminated by natural selection, and that caring for the disabled and allowing them to grow up and to have children would cause a steady increase in the proportion of society made up of disabled people—who were, as Davenport puts it, a “burden” on society.
Eugenicists were also concerned with race. They wanted to gather data that demonstrated what they already believed: that race was a biological reality, a reality that could only appear unclear or malleable because of harmful, aberrant, unnatural scenarios, namely miscegenation or race mixing. Basically, race was both a natural reality, and in need of enforcement.
But eugenicist ideology was not just about the inferiority of disabled people or people of color. Eugenicists thought of their ideas as a science and thought of themselves as scientists, and they broadly addressed virtually everything we would now consider a matter of “public health.” Eugenicist writings almost universally address crime, and often don’t recognize a clear distinction between crime and mental disability, or between either of those things and poverty. Criminals, disabled people and poor people were basically the same; they had something wrong with their genes that made them that way.
“Sexual deviance” is generally included in this, and Davenport explicitly references this in his introduction, where he says that “normal” people are not likely to have the kind of sex that leads to the transmission of STIs.
For many proponents (including Davenport), the key dogma of eugenics was that genes predetermined everything about a person. Tuberculosis was a huge problem at the time, and eugenicists were insisting that, although the disease was known to be bacterial, susceptibility to the disease was genetic, and therefore people who became sick with tuberculosis were genetically defective. Likewise if a child developed epilepsy after a head injury, the injury did not cause the epilepsy but instead revealed an inherent genetic weakness that was already there. This implied that spending resources on healing or rehabilitating anybody was a waste of time.
If you read more of Davenport’s book, you will see that he makes some WILD statements—he asserts that artistic talent is a Mendelian trait controlled by a single gene, basically that you are either born an artist or you aren’t. This seems absolutely absurd but, there is a good amount of popular belief in inherent aptitudes for art or music or math or what have you.
Eugenics isn’t just about named prejudices like racism or ableism, it is even bigger than that, it is a set of beliefs encompassing how the potential and value of human beings is determined and how society should care for its members as a result of that.
very interesting horrifying stuff! i also wanna flag how this:
Tuberculosis was a huge problem at the time, and eugenicists were insisting that, although the disease was known to be bacterial, susceptibility to the disease was genetic, and therefore people who became sick with tuberculosis were genetically defective.
isn’t dissimilar to how mainstream media & governments talk about covid rn! they don’t call it “genetic” but they use the same implication— that there’s ALREADY something wrong with people who die from covid or get disabled long covid.
like disabled people, high risk people, immunocompromised people, anyone with a “pre-existing condition”—they’re just an expected & unpreventable casualty
I low-key love the fact that sci-fi has so conditioned us to expect to be hanging out with a bunch of cool space aliens, that legitimate, actual scientists keep proposing the most bizarre, three-blunts-into-the-rotation “theories” to explain the fact we’re not.
Some of my favourites include:
Zoo Theory: What if there are loads of aliens out there, but they’re not talking to us because of the Prime Directive from Star Trek? (Or because they’re doing experiments on us???)
Dark Forest Theory: What if there are loads of aliens out there, but they all hate us and each other so they’re all just waiting with a shotgun pointed at the door, ready to open fire on anything that moves?
Planetarium Theory: What if there’s at least one alien with mastery over light and matter that’s just making it seem to us that the universe is empty to us as, like, a joke?
Berserker Theory: What if there were loads of aliens, but one of them made infinite killer robots that murdered everyone and are coming for us next?!!
Like, the universe is at least 13,700,000,000 years old and 46,000,000,000 light years big. We have had the ability to transmit and receive signals for, what, 100 years, and our signals have so far travelled 200 light years?
The fact is biological life almost certainly has, does, or will develop elsewhere in the universe, and it’s not impossible that a tiny amount of it has, does, or will develop in a way that we would understand as “intelligent”. But, like, we’re realistically never going to know because of the scale of the things involved.
So I’m proposing my own hypothesis. I call it the “Fool in a Field” hypothesis. It goes like this:
Humanity is a guy standing in the middle of a field at midnight. It’s pitch black, he can’t move, and he’s been standing there for ages. He’s just had the thought to swing his arms. He swings one of his arms, once, and does not hit another person. “Oh no!” He says. “Robots have killed them all!”
I low-key love the fact that sci-fi has so conditioned us to expect to be hanging out with a bunch of cool space aliens, that legitimate, actual scientists keep proposing the most bizarre, three-blunts-into-the-rotation “theories” to explain the fact we’re not.
Some of my favourites include:
Zoo Theory: What if there are loads of aliens out there, but they’re not talking to us because of the Prime Directive from Star Trek? (Or because they’re doing experiments on us???)
Dark Forest Theory: What if there are loads of aliens out there, but they all hate us and each other so they’re all just waiting with a shotgun pointed at the door, ready to open fire on anything that moves?
Planetarium Theory: What if there’s at least one alien with mastery over light and matter that’s just making it seem to us that the universe is empty to us as, like, a joke?
Berserker Theory: What if there were loads of aliens, but one of them made infinite killer robots that murdered everyone and are coming for us next?!!
Like, the universe is at least 13,700,000,000 years old and 46,000,000,000 light years big. We have had the ability to transmit and receive signals for, what, 100 years, and our signals have so far travelled 200 light years?
The fact is biological life almost certainly has, does, or will develop elsewhere in the universe, and it’s not impossible that a tiny amount of it has, does, or will develop in a way that we would understand as “intelligent”. But, like, we’re realistically never going to know because of the scale of the things involved.
So I’m proposing my own hypothesis. I call it the “Fool in a Field” hypothesis. It goes like this:
Humanity is a guy standing in the middle of a field at midnight. It’s pitch black, he can’t move, and he’s been standing there for ages. He’s just had the thought to swing his arms. He swings one of his arms, once, and does not hit another person. “Oh no!” He says. “Robots have killed them all!”
Today in “Animals that it didn’t occur to me might be able to go to the beach and enjoy it, but apparently do and now that I’m seeing it makes perfect sense”: Camel!
So, new theory for the explanation of the Loch Ness monster:
Monday, February 10th: Hello, everyone. I’m Gem, a bi, mentally ill, and disabled woman in desperate need of help, as I am drowning in debt and struggling to pay my bills!!
I apologize for asking for help again; as most of you know from my previous posts, I have been struggling quite a lot to make ends meet while on welfare benefits and due to my rent arrears and ever-increasing debt. And to be quite honest, these past few months have been absolute hell for me, and with no other income, I’ve been relying on the kindness of others to get by.
However, I’m in desperate need of that kindness again, as I was overdrawn quite a lot last month, so I had to choose to pay my rent and basic utilities instead of my bills & credit card, so I’m currently struggling to pay them off. I owe my credit card, £258.29 in 30 days + Bank Acct £138.82 = £397.11!! I don’t receive my welfare until the 28th, but what I owe is more than I can afford to pay!!!
Again, I know this is a lot to ask, but if anyone could spare any amount to help me, even if it’s just £1/$1/€1, it would save my life, and sharing helps just as much.
Here’s a photo of when the PBS people let me see the newshour set after I went to their offices for a focus group— I totally second everything in the video above! PBS is great and so, so vital!! Please protect public television and public radio!!!
Republicans have wanted to kill PBS for years.
Wouldn’t it be hilarious if hundreds of thousands of people suddenly started tuning in to watch PBS News Hour?
WOULDN’T IT?!?
Also, SUPPORT PBS. They get not very much funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (which unevenly doles out $500M a year to 1,300 radio and tv stations, a mere $385K each if averaged out. The rest is member donations and grants from nonprofit foundations, the latter of which have increasingly been announced in “it’s not an ad but kind of an ad” ways which skirts the rules.
They have apps on all the streaming platforms and devices, and you can buy a PBS Passport membership to get access to their complete library.
Someone in the notes said shes doing this with 200 lbs and i cant stress enough how wrong that is. Thats at least 160 kg she’s lifting, so closer to 350 lbs.
Ok finally looked it up, this is Hyejeong Park, clean and jerking 165kg (364 lbs) to win Senior World Champs in the W 87+ kg class this year (2023)
Reblogging again because another person in the notes said this was 200 lbs and it’s upsetting me
literally no better feeling than blurting out some loud dumbass joke with your buddies and hearing a total stranger ugly-snort-laugh as they walk past bc their own laughter caught them by surprise. find joy and connection in the spontaneity of strangers you son of a bitch. i fucking got your ass
This is what it’s like when I say the dumbest things imaginable to my wife or partner in the checkout lines to see if the cashier will crack a smile. A little human connection between the drudgery.
A few years ago when my little sister was maybe ten or so we went to this like, novelty/antiques store which had an impressive amount of really bad taxidermy. We were sort of doing our own things and I was across the room from her so when she spots this horrible fish she has to run over and yell “ come see the ugliest taxidermied old fish I’ve ever seen “ at me. Without even thinking I just said “you’re the ugliest taxidermied old fish I’ve ever seen.” Which got a snort from an old man across the room. Anyways a few minutes later my stepmom came in and my sister said the same thing to her, and without missing a beat my stepmom deadpans “your father’s the ugliest taxidermied old fish I’ve ever seen”. The old guy absolutely LOST it
is there any data showing an increase in retention/click through from having opt out buttons say shit like “Maybe Later” or “No because i hate puppies” or do sites just have naught but contempt for the user
If Sherlock Holmes was Isekai’d to a fantasy world he would just deduce the rules of this world and get back to solving crimes. He’ll find an elf girl sidekick,name her Watson, and pretend like nothing happened.
“If you look closely, you can see traces of chalk dust on the floor. Our murderer must have used a magic circle to kill our victim.”
“Actually Holmes, this looks like salt. Quite unusual for a magic circle, since it can be scattered so easily…”
“It tastes like salt too. Good eye Watson. Let us start by visiting the fish mongers.”
“Well I would enjoy some fried dragonfish, but how does this help our investigation?”
“A process of elimination, my long-eared friend. There’re only two ways for the culprit to get salt in the city. They could have brought it in themselves-”
“But then they’d have to pay the tarrif!”
“Very astute! No, a much likelier option is that they bought it here. Either the docks or the meat market would be the place. And I have a hunch that our culprit is fishy in more ways than one.”
“But Holmes, how did you know the merfolk ambassador was the killer?”
“An excellent question, the key was the footprints.”
“But he doesn’t even have feet!”
“He doesn’t as of right now. But you forget, the magic circle.”
“I see! The killing spell was a water spear, which normally requires a circle.”
“But doesn’t if you’re already imbued with water magic like our scaly ambassador.”
“So the circle…”
“To grant him a pair of feet. For just long enough to leave distinctive footprints in the scattered salt and to make us suspect a two-legged killer.”
trans men existing around trans women are not a threat to those trans women. trans men occupying space made for trans men and/or accepting of trans men are not taking space away from trans women. the concept of transmanhood is not a threat to trans women. coining a term for the specific type of transphobia trans men face is not diminishing transmisogyny. trans men expressing how manhood makes them feel euphoric is not being done to make trans women feel dysphoric.
we good? okay. stop with the rad fem shit. it’s actually good & healthy & normal for trans men and women to share the same spaces &trade experiences & engage in discussion about their differences. we don’t have to separate everything in life by gender. the outside world is not school. you literally don’t have to separate people by gender for the rest of your life. let’s move on.
we have infinitely more in common than separating us! don’t let assholes turn you against your friends and comrades-in-transhood!
THE CASUALNESS OF THAT COLLIE SLIPPING RIGHT OUT OF THEIR COLLAR. That dude is a Willing Participant of this walk and by god everyone else is going to follow the RULES.
So I had a hysterectomy today (hooray!) and I brought along my stuffed orca, Shamu, as a comfort object. And everyone i interacted with during my pre-op was like “Oh! Who’s this?” so I was telling them all about him, how he’s been with me since I was 9 and gone on every single vacation and road trip, and they were telling me about their own stuffed buddies (one lady said she still has hers after 40 years!) and all of this while I was signing consent forms and providing a list of the things I’d brought with me, you know, small talk.
So then a nurse comes over and goes “Okay, I’ve got some stickers I’ll put on your things so we know they’re yours” and I’m like “OK cool” so she puts a sticker on my coat and stickers on my bags of clothes and then she turns to Shamu and I’m like “oh I guess he gets a sticker too”
But no. She pulls out a hospital bracelet that’s an exact copy of mine and slaps it on his tail, like so:
And i was delighted by this, so I took a picture to send to my friends, who were equally delighted, and were cracking me up with their reactions (like so:)
Anyway, they take me back and put me under, and when I awake groggily a few hours later it takes me a minute to get my bearings, so I don’t notice Shamu at first. But then I realize he’s tucked up next to me in the gurney, so I grab him, and my hand touches gauze.
And I’m like “huh?” so I look at him and I realize
So I had a hysterectomy today (hooray!) and I brought along my stuffed orca, Shamu, as a comfort object. And everyone i interacted with during my pre-op was like “Oh! Who’s this?” so I was telling them all about him, how he’s been with me since I was 9 and gone on every single vacation and road trip, and they were telling me about their own stuffed buddies (one lady said she still has hers after 40 years!) and all of this while I was signing consent forms and providing a list of the things I’d brought with me, you know, small talk.
So then a nurse comes over and goes “Okay, I’ve got some stickers I’ll put on your things so we know they’re yours” and I’m like “OK cool” so she puts a sticker on my coat and stickers on my bags of clothes and then she turns to Shamu and I’m like “oh I guess he gets a sticker too”
But no. She pulls out a hospital bracelet that’s an exact copy of mine and slaps it on his tail, like so:
And i was delighted by this, so I took a picture to send to my friends, who were equally delighted, and were cracking me up with their reactions (like so:)
Anyway, they take me back and put me under, and when I awake groggily a few hours later it takes me a minute to get my bearings, so I don’t notice Shamu at first. But then I realize he’s tucked up next to me in the gurney, so I grab him, and my hand touches gauze.
And I’m like “huh?” so I look at him and I realize
I really love all the creative ways that podcasts and radio plays try to get their environment across in audio. Some are like, “the details of the location don’t matter, we can use soundscapes and if there are any important visual details we can work it into dialogue.” Some are like, “we’ll give our protagonist a recorder to either use as a journalling device or to be recording their adventure for someone else, so they have an excuse to describe the environment.” Some just go, “fuck it, we’re introducing a non-diagetic narrator, who cares”.
And then Malevolent is like, “Why overcomplicate things? Let’s just steal our protagonist’s eyes and give them to a demon living in his head, so the demon has to describe everything to him in sufficient detail for them to get anything done. That should work.”
“The problem with podcasts is that the audience is blind and needs a narrator”
“Okay then let’s also make our protagonist blind and need a narrator”
You know how we all pretty much universally agree that people who leave comments on recipe websites like “I substituted the carrot with spinach, the flour with cornmeal, and the egg with banana, and I decided to double-boil it instead of baking it because I don’t like using my oven. It came out terrible, 0/10, terrible recipe” are doing an extremely silly thing and we all screenshot their comments and post them here to laugh at them?
Every time you see someone say something along the lines of “D&D is not a universal system, it wouldn’t be the right system to use for a modern-day political intrigue campaign for example” and come into their post to inform them that actually D&D is a perfectly good system for modern-day political intrigue as long you completely rework how the charisma skills work and add in your DM’s super special homebrew faction reputation system and romance minigame and don’t use any of the combat or exploration mechanics and remove the magic and replace all fantasy races with humans and get rid of the medieval fantasy classes… you’re doing the same exact thing as a recipe website commenter but in reverse. That’s what you sound like.
You know how we all pretty much universally agree that people who leave comments on recipe websites like “I substituted the carrot with spinach, the flour with cornmeal, and the egg with banana, and I decided to double-boil it instead of baking it because I don’t like using my oven. It came out terrible, 0/10, terrible recipe” are doing an extremely silly thing and we all screenshot their comments and post them here to laugh at them?
Every time you see someone say something along the lines of “D&D is not a universal system, it wouldn’t be the right system to use for a modern-day political intrigue campaign for example” and come into their post to inform them that actually D&D is a perfectly good system for modern-day political intrigue as long you completely rework how the charisma skills work and add in your DM’s super special homebrew faction reputation system and romance minigame and don’t use any of the combat or exploration mechanics and remove the magic and replace all fantasy races with humans and get rid of the medieval fantasy classes… you’re doing the same exact thing as a recipe website commenter but in reverse. That’s what you sound like.
ppl in the north don’t believe in god as much because it barely lightnings up there. northerners don’t even worry about getting smote. that’s why the bible belt is all humid states
this honestly just came out of left fucking field i would have never expected to hear anything like this in this show. consider me Pleasantly Surprised tbh
This was the autism episode
people seem to forget that house was a multiply disabled man, so it should be a given that he’d be against eugenics and eugenicist doctors
that british scum assuming i was american just because they didnt agree with my post is about to be my catalyst to put a brazilian flag on my bio. the colonizer mindset of forgetting that people from third world countries can learn to speak english and post online is impressive
