[My main Tumblr can be found over at myasphyxiatedmind]
If you want your ask replied to privately, just put '****' before you start typing.
My name is: Michelle, but most people call me Dark online.
My gender-pronouns are: They/them/their.
I am: 26 years old, a feminist, liberal, an atheist, an omnivore, and an ISFJ.
The Feminist: Intersectional, body positive, pro-choice, and sex positive.
My privileged identities include: Female assigned at birth (trans* privilege), white, able-bodied, allistic (?), dyadic, monogamous.
My non-privileged/oppressed identities include: Gender-fluid, fat, gray-a, neuroatypical, and gay.
I have: Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, Generalized Anxiety Disorder, and Major Depressive Disorder.
I like: Pets & animals, animal welfare, pet care & pet care education, ~*SCIENCE!*~, anatomy & physiology, roleplaying, anime/manga, computer & video games, rock & metal music.
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
Not the worst idea I’ve ever heard.
Hell, it’s actually a good idea.
let’s do it
ARE YOU FUCKING SHITTING ME RIGHT NOW.
WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK, RYAN.
THANK GOD YOU ARE NOT THE VICE PRESIDENT.
??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????
Permission to stab Paul Ryan in the eyes with glass
granted, but only if you get to stab one eye and i get the other.
May I grab the jug of gasoline to drown this little shit in?
I hope this man dies a horrible and disgusting death. Soon.
Hey, did you know Border Patrol agents are fond of destroying the food and water caches left in the desert crossing so people don’t die of hunger and thirst?
179 people died crossing between Mexico and Arizona last year, where this happened.
Way to contribute to the deaths of innocent people, sworn officers of the American government!
US flu epidemic worsens, 29 children dead
A flu epidemic gripping the United States is more severe than usual, striking the elderly especially hard, health authorities said Friday as they also announced 29 child victims.
With the nation only about halfway through the season, complications are likely to worsen for those who caught the flu, said Tom Frieden, chief of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“We expect to see both the number and rates of hospitalization and deaths to rise further,” Frieden told reporters.
The CDC said 30 states and New York City are reporting high influenza rates, up from 24 states last week. And more than 5,000 people have required hospitalization to treat their flu symptoms. New York has declared a state of emergency over the crisis.
Widespread geographic flu activity was also reported in 48 states for the week ending January 12, up from 47 states the previous week.
Nationwide, influenza rates dropped slightly to 4.6 percent, down from 4.8 percent the previous week.
There is no national reporting system for flu-related deaths among adults, but the CDC said that 8.3 percent of deaths reported through the 122 Cities Mortality Reporting System were due to pneumonia and influenza.
That exceeds the epidemic threshold of 7.2 percent. The rate of flu- and pneumonia-linked deaths the week before was 7.3 percent.
Nine children died last week alone, bringing the total to 29 since the season began in early December. The flu kills an average of about a hundred children in the United States each year. The toll was 34 in 2011-2012.
Jackie Chan calls US 'most corrupt' country in the world
Hong Kong action hero Jackie Chan has once again provoked criticism, this time from an American blogger, after suggesting on Chinese television that the US is the “most corrupt” country in the world.
“When you talk about corruption — the whole world, is there corruption in the United States? The most corrupt in the world!” the Rush Hour star, who has made headlines recently for his controversial views, told Phoenix TV last month.
Chan reaffirmed his view after the show’s host questioned him — “Of course! Where did the great breakdown come from? The world, the United States started it,” Chan said, referring to the financial crisis and gesticulating as he spoke.
His comments were rebuked Thursday by Max Fisher, a foreign affairs blogger for the Washington Post, who called them “anti-American” rhetoric that was rooted in China’s insecurity.
“To the degree that Chan’s comments were anti-American, they likewise reflect a common Chinese view of the United States, one that is rooted not just in attitudes toward America but in China’s proud but sometimes insecure view of itself,” Fisher said.
Jackie Chan also said China is a relatively young country, where in the first half of its history it was “bullied by so many people”, and that it only achieved “real success” in the past decade.
“Our country’s leaders admit they are corrupted, etcetera. We are improving — I can see our country is constantly improving and learning,” he said, adding that everyone is making an issue out of China because it is “powerful” now.
Chan, who is known for his martial arts skills and daring stunt work, sparked criticism in Hong Kong, which was returned to China in 1997, after he reportedly told a Chinese magazine last December that protest in the city should be restricted.
In the same interview, he said that he was bullied by Hong Kong triads and had to hide in the United States. He also said he needed to carry a gun everyday to protect himself, leading to a police investigation.
oop
“Anti-American” must be code for telling the truth.
I think the part of Tumblr that makes me the most tired is the party line of:
“We found this person saying/doing a problematic thing(s) and now no one is allowed to like anything that they have ever said or done, because this happened, and now everyone’s previous experiences with this person’s work are invalid and/or must be disavowed”.
This creeps me out for a wide variety of reasons.
Like let’s say a sad queer kid gets really into a certain writer in high school—idk who to pick, let’s pick Hemingway, because I’m tired.
So this sad queer kid gets super into Hemingway and it helps him survive high school, right?
And then years later this kid reads A Moveable Feast, which is Hemingway’s memoir, and discovers that Ernest Hemingway was a grade A total complete absolute homophobe who destroyed his own relationship with Gertrude Stein by reacting shittily when she explained she was a lesbian.
So there are a few ways we can go with this, right.
We can accept that Hemingway is flawed and complicated, or we can make this kid feel shitty about ever having been into Hemingway and invalidate his queerness by suggesting that the only possible way to be still into Hemingway is through some measure of internalized homophobia.
THIS IS NOT A GOOD WAY TO MODEL SURVIVAL STRATEGIES OR MENTAL HEALTH.
This is a good way to hate yourself!
We are living in hell world, ok, to steal a phrase from Mehron, and the idea that we can somehow isolate ourselves in someplace that isn’t hell world is so problematic on so many levels and relies on so many creepy notions of boundaries and purity! Hell world is all around us and inside of us and in order to deal with that we have to engage with it.
Why do you think I like WAUGH? Absolutely NOTHING about Evelyn Waugh’s politics is even a TINY bit redeemable, as far as I’m concerned.
I’m just tired of all the different ways ~young radicals~ have of determining who’s a “real” radical.
And I think that loudly forever disavowing people who fuck up is a way of implicitly saying, “because I never fuck up, because obviously I don’t, because if I ever fucked up why would I suggest that all people who fuck up be forever removed from the near sphere of people we might like or value”.
And I think that helps ~radical communities~ to foster a certain quality of “but we are Good People” which renders everybody impervious to call-outs once they have amassed enough cultural capital by, idk, talking loudly at events about how much they hate [x].
Disavowal is an incomplete strategy.
Anyone who pulls the “you are not a real [insert minority here] if you like [insert problematic thing here]” can go fuck themselves. I am so sick of this bullshit mentality on Tumblr, this shit doesn’t exist anywhere else, where you are only a good social justice advocate/person if you hate every problematic thing. Frankly if you do that, you are left with one boring ass life since you cannot like anything. Everything has some problematic elements to it. Also, what really pisses me off about this whole mindset is it assumes people do not have critical thinking skills. However, I guess one wouldn’t have critical thinking skills if they cannot admit something they like has problems. -shrugs-
This is something that’s been bothering me for a long time, and there are particular factions of Tumblr that do this all the fucking time. It’s quite a bizarre way to look at the world actually, especially when you’re advocating fairness and equality. Like everyone fucks up — every single person — that’s the whole point of social justice. It’s a learning process; it’s calling people out; it’s articulating the nuance and grey area of social interactions; it’s critical thinking that allows you to say “this is what I like and this is what I would change”; it’s the analysis of culture and people. And for all the oft-heard cries about paying more attention to intersectionality, I barely hear anyone talking about the intersection of “fucking up” and “being a decent person who’s learning and improving all the time”. Those categories aren’t mutually exclusive.
I particularly hate when this attitude extends to “if you even reblog from somebody who has done something problematic in the past (whether you were there for the drama shit-storm or not) you are somehow tainted by association”. It’s fucking ridiculous.
And none of this is takes away from the fact there are obviously super fucked up things where such ostracising the problematic is warranted. But too often that perspective is lost.
Anyhoo. That’s my rant for the moment. Here’s a pertinent quote on the topic.
Wendy’s Franchise Cuts Employee Hours To Part-Time To Avoid Obamacare
Wow. Apparently the owner companies of Applebee’s, Wendy’s, and Taco Bell are saying they have no control over franchisees cutting full-time employees to part time hours to avoid having to offer them health care. Looks like I’ll be boycotting those restaurants until the corporate offices take more responsibility and put pressure on all their franchisees to not screw over their employees.
Denny’s and the parent company that owns Red Lobster and Olive Garden saw their profits drop sharply when they did the same thing, so boycotting works. Everyone deserves health care, and it’s just plain wrong to cut someone’s hours to avoid a legal obligation.This is the biggest reason I will support Starbucks forever. While other companies are cutting hours so they don’t have to give their minimum-wage earners health care, Starbucks offers it to those who work 20 hours a week, and they’ve been offering it for a long time. I know it’s saved my life.
Okay people.
These are *franchise owners*, not the actual corporation saying this. Franchise owners are generally giant scumbags so I fully advocate boycotting! Unfortunately, not all of the franchise owners are doing this and there are also corporately owned stores too. So please research locally to make sure the franchises are in on this shit before you boycott.
And now an anecdote:
I used to work for an IHOP that was corporate run before the resident trust fund kid’s father helped him buy it. I say kid, but the guy was a full grown man in his 40s with a wife and kids. The idiot ran the business into the ground, the state and federal tax services seized all of the business’ assets and the idiot eventually went on the lam.
Google ‘Pancake Partners’ and ‘Brad woodard’ if you’d like to know more.
Moral of this story is: a corporate owned IHOP generally isn’t a bad place to work! Under Brad, however, we had no health care, no vacation pay and our paychecks routinely bounced. So the working conditions vary greatly from franchise to franchise.
Yes, these are individual franchisees doing this, not the corporations themselves. However that doesn’t mean that there is nothing that the parent corporation can do about it. In order to operate a franchise the franchisee has to sign a franchise agreement that has certain standards that the franchise has to maintain in order to keep their license from the parent company.
These standards cover everything from maintaining food and service quality, to standards for the look of the structure, to advertising standards, to agreeing to honor coupons issued by the parent company, and so on. These franchise agreements are the sort of thing that are normally for a certain term, and have to be reviewed and renewed periodically, and usually contain some sort of clause allowing the parent company to either retract the franchise agreement, or take over a location, if the franchisee doesn’t maintain those standards.
All of that is to say this, if the parent company wanted to they could do something about franchisees who pulled things like this. They could update their corporate standards and make it known that they expect their franchises to meet those standards within a certain period of time, or when franchise agreements came up for renewal they could amend the language, or any of a number of other things.
It is a case where silence from the powers that be is the same as agreement.
Well, at least they have the courage of their screwed up convictions
The 112th Congress gaveled to a close on Thursday afternoon without passing a relief package for victims of Hurricane Sandy or reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act, but Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) isn’t too concerned about finishing what Republicans had left undone. Instead, at 12:00 PM she introduced the very first piece of legislation to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which states are now busily implementing.
House Republicans have unsuccessfully voted 33 times in the last two years to eliminate health care reform and wasted at least 88 hours and $50 million, while failing to pass a single piece of job creation legislation in the last session of Congress.
With Millions Still Waiting For Sandy Relief, Republicans Reintroduce Obamacare Repeal
(Source: wateringgoodseeds)
god tumblr is just
awash
in misinformation tonight
guys a few things:
mary gonzalez is not a senator; she ran unopposed for a seat as a texas representative. which is freaking awesome! but not as awesome as a senator
tammy baldwin and tammy duckworth are two different people
maybe you guys should do some fact-checking about tammy baldwin, just a thought. her bit with the gender identity amendment of ENDA back in 2007 was actually a pretty complex issue awash in shades of grey, which didn’t even matter because ENDA died in the senate that year and would have been vetoed by bush if it’d passed in any form. i think she’s pretty aware (for a politician) of the issues she’s representing and even though she’s damn wishy-washy i wouldn’t call her transphobic (i haven’t found anything more recent than this so feel free to prove me wrong because i love being jaded)
the current version of ENDA does protect gender identity, and it isn’t any closer to passing
also i know everyone’s going on about 51st state puerto rico, but from some of the things i have read it actually seems pretty unlikely that congress will make that a thing. i know little to nothing about this issue but it’s definitely a thing to read up on
finally what the fuck is with that post about the fucking serviceman who killed bin laden dying that one is just straight up fabrication
tumblr’s ‘pasta be dry as fuck
always ask for sauce
Okay. I know the U.S. would be a lot worse off if Romney was elected…
but we should not ignore what is going on around us just because Obama is still the President. Sure, many folks have rights that they would never be able to have under Romney, but we cannot forget all of the folks who DO NOT have rights under Obama.
- increased Internet censorship
- lack of privacy rights
- foreign aid to Israel
- the signing of NDAA
- illegal torture
- drone strikes
These things are happening on President Obama’s watch.
Please, PLEASE do not be satisfied with President Obama just because Mitt Romney is a worse human being.
Do not be neutral in this fight.
And queer rights activists: human rights does not stop at same-sex marriage. There are many more life-changing, important queer issues out there that affect the lives of millions.
To name a few issues: ENDA (inclusive to trans* folks too), trans* and queer discrimination protections, accessible healthcare, immigration rights, etc.
