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"The Left are such whiny children. I will scream slurs and threats of violence at them."
-sees a protester display a flag upside-down-
Intentionally flying a flag upside down is a distress signal. Do they not know that?!
For four years I saw the MAGA in my town display their flag inverted as a signal of distress. But I never see anyone reacting this way to clothes or disposables (napkins, paper plates) with the flag on them. It certainly sends the message that a symbolic piece of fabric is more important than what people might be distressed about.
It really does.
I've never understood the obsession the US has (relative to Australia's treatment of our flags), but it seems to be becoming even more pronounced than it already had been.
As an outside observer, it seems that for some folks, the flag holds more value than other people do. Which is disturbing in the extreme.
US flag code is pretty strict, but overall unenforcible. I once had a neighbor call the cops on us for leaving our flag out in the rain. It got tangled in the trees and we couldn't take it down. Cops were also very 'wtf' about it and we were issued a warning.
Conservatives like to use violations of flag code (which is not a criminal offense) to point out liberal hatred.
'See how they disrespect the flag? The liberals hate their country!'
Which often the next sentence is:
'They should be deported/arrested.' Which would be a violation of freedom of speech.
It's part of an overall trend of dehumanizing a perceived 'enemy.' And it's soooo petty.
dandelions deserve more respect than they get
you say “weeds” I say “widespread non-native edible plant and early-blooming pollinator resource that is not considered invasive because it behaves politely and does not cause deleterious ecological consequences”
The dandelions aren’t gonna fuck you bro
they have and they will
for no reason whatsoever here’s a reminder that if you consider yourself a leftist/punk/abolitionist/anarchist/radical in any sort of way and get called into jury duty, you are to become the most square person on earth during the jury questionnaire!!!
don’t be that guy who says fuck the police in the jury questionnaire! that just gets you sent home! if you want to generate change, interact with the case and use your jury vote for good! ESPECIALLY if it’s a high profile case!
Remember, when you're on the jury, a good "that cop's story didn't add up" will sway a lot more Chads and Karens than "fuck the police."
Cards of the Day: Monday Mood, another spread from my planner!
How to get out of your own way. Reverse King of Pentacles. I need to dream big and go for it.
How to make the best of it. Violet. With all the dreaming, I need to be realistic about my goals.
How to power through the week. Spring Rain (fucking weather the past week!). Deal with the shit and try not to hurt yourself.
Like what you see? Link in bio for my shop!
Got his ass together in three words
Okay but frog genitalia are internal whereas male rats have among the largest proportionate ballsacks of any animal.
I reblog anatomy facts, especially from muppets.
Hey did you know that you can’t escape fatphobia even after death? The article talks about how these donated bodies are used for first year anatomy students to study the body, and how the 'perfect' body for that should be 170-180 pounds.
“The storage is one issue, but when you are obese, there’s a lot of tissue everywhere. The students don’t get as good a learning opportunity.”
"That program limits donors to between 170 pounds and 180 pounds, though an exceptionally tall donor might be allowed at 190.
“It’s the maximum our equipment will handle,” Powers said.
Sounds like they just need newer and better equipment?
"Obese bodies are more difficult, time-consuming and unpleasant to study, said Wade, who also heads his state’s anatomy board."
Ah yes, we've arrived at the real reason..
Quick question, if fat bodies are not accepted as potential cadavers for medical students to study on then what are the consequences for that?
Fat people are dismissed medically and are told to lose weight before even getting a chance to be examined. While alive. Then are rejected for further study after death. How many people died and will die because medical professionals are missing potential problems that could be diagnosed?
This is actually a baby reindeer
We’ve waited a year to reblog this. Happy Bread Anniversary!
Because it’s important to celebrate the little victories in life.
No, no, no!
This is April 19 on the Julian Calendar.
The real bread day is on April 7th
As I grow older I feel my capacity to understand that Miss Piggy is not a real person reached a peak in my adolescence and is now on a steady decline. I watched a Wendy Williams interview and there's this part that's like "can we get a ring cam!" and Miss Piggy shows her bling and I'm just like fuck she's so iconic. Miss Piggy who are you wearing? Miss Piggy have you ever considered running for office??
Like literally every time I see Miss Piggy there's a period where I need to readjust to the fact that it's not a person, and I feel that period is getting longer and longer with every instance
now all my Youtube recommendations are filled with Miss Piggy interviews. I’m not complaining. Miss Piggy what’s your secret to ageing so graciously
It's not just the audience; professional journalists, hosts, and actors report it is legitimately difficult to not see the Muppet as a person, and it is, in fact, incredibly easy to interview or act with them once the performer gets properly set up.
Like that one time they couldn't figure out why Kermit's audio was so garbage... then realized they'd put the mic on him instead of the performer.
this has been a very longstanding issue - before the muppet show was even a thing some muppets appeared in commercials, such as rolf the dog they had a continual problem where when people directing/shooting the dogfood commercial would give dirrection to rolf that they would be speaking to the muppet, to which rolf REPEATEDLY had to tell them ‘i cant hear you, you have to talk to him’ and point at the performer underneath him rolf is one of the most embarrassing muppets to need this direction as the performer is this, damn, obvious when not on camera
‘sir, i am a bathroom mat, the man you need to talk to is back there’
I did an interview with Gonzo one time, and when I got into the Zoom call, it was the actor on screen trying to figure out his audio. And then once he did, he went like “OKAY!” and then just like dove to the floor and it was Gonzo and there was never a moment when I doubted that the dude was just Gonzo’s tech guy
I have met a muppet-like puppet in real life and when I tell you that my brain was hacked FUCKING INSTANTLY..... It was a person, I swear it was a person. I asked it for a hug (no i was not 5 years old, i was like 28 at this time). i genuinely don't know what came over me, it was just. It was a person???? Witchcraft
A couple years ago, I was invited to the birthday party of one of my former preschool students. I decided to bring my teaching puppet (a big rat) along because I knew several other kids from that class would be there, and she was always a huge hit with them.
They were, of course, very excited to see her. But what surprised me was that after the kids ran off to play in the sprinkler, the parents around me struck up conversation with the puppet. They continued for at least fifteen minutes, asking her questions like, "how long have you been teaching?" and "eaten out of any good dumpsters lately?" until one dad exclaimed "why have I been talking to a rat puppet this whole time!"
There's a guy who comes to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science with life size Skeleton puppets of mammoth/young T-Rex that he wears. You can fully see him in the middle of the skeleton, and it's a SKELETON, but absolutely everyone interacts with the puppets like they're living, breathing animals. I watched multiple people attempt to feed pretzels to the baby rex.
Because we don't teach history right.
We teach history like it's a work of fiction where the characters act the way they do because they were written that way. And not like the real world with real people who were just as human as us and had reasons to act the way they do. And that the same mistakes and foibles they had could happen to us too.
And even this history is woefully undertaught. People learn it to memorize the events of the story and then forget about it. They don't learn to comprehend it, they don't learn to learn from it.
This will be a long story, but settle in, because this is important.
I was fortunate enough to have some great teachers growing up, in a small, fairly well-funded school system (and during times when everyone still agreed that fascism was bad). In 8th grade, our school had an interdisciplinary unit for about a month focusing solely on the Holocaust. Every class taught something related to it, even math. For a month, we read horrifying stories and watched documentaries and did research assignments on the Holocaust. By the end, any one of us would have said we were experts on the subject.
And at the very end, our entire grade (about 100 kids) was broken into four groups, and we were told that as a reward for all our hard work on the Holocaust unit, we were going to compete for a trip to Disney World. Only one team could go, but the entire team would get to travel there and spend a few days in the park, all expenses paid.
The competition was simple: the group with the most team spirit would win. We were instructed to come up with a team name, a catchy slogan, and a logo (something simple and easy to draw). We were allowed to prove our team spirit however we wanted. That was it. That was all of the instructions. The competition would last a week, and short of stopping physical violence, the teachers stepped back and let us have at it.
It was terrifying.
At first, everyone just hung up posters in the halls and cheerfully recited their slogan whenever the teachers were watching. Within a few days, posters were being torn down and shredded. Verbal fights were breaking out in the hallways. It wasn't enough to say your team was the best, everyone had somehow decided. You also had to prove that everyone else's team was inferior. People started making up lies and gossip, saying that everyone in a particular group was lazy or ugly or smelly or what have you (we were 13). Slurs were thrown around. (Again, we were 13.)
By the final day, the groups were marching down the halls in formation, shouting their slogan in unison. Shouting slander against the other groups. The floor was covered in tattered paper.
I was shy and introverted and weird and unpopular and mostly stayed out of it. But those images are burned into my memory. These kids had turned into vicious monsters, all for a stupid school project.
The teachers had us march down the hallway to the auditorium to announce the results of the competition. The groups were little armies now. Most students marched in lockstep, shouting their slogans. We were seated together in our groups. The teachers dimmed the lights, quieted us down, and the teacher in charge of this whole project said that before he announced the winners, he had something to share with us about the person who was responsible for this entire competition. He turned on the projector and displayed a portrait of Hitler.
Everyone lost their minds. Kids were booing and throwing things. We knew that Hitler was a Bad Guy.
The teacher calmed us back down, and then explained that there was no trip to Disney World, and the fact that not one student questioned for a moment that such a massively expensive and complicated prize would be granted for such a silly competition was honestly kind of disappointing. This entire week, he said, was our final exam. The final exam for the Holocaust unit.
We had spent a month learning about this. About how this "bad guy" inspired a whole hell of a lot of people to march in lockstep shouting slogans and plastering their symbol all over everything. That one bad guy had told them that they were special, and other groups were trying to take away what was rightfully theirs for being the best, and they ultimately got extremely violent. We had learned all about the Hitler Youth and the SS and book burnings and, of course, the concentration camps. We'd all read the Diary of Anne Frank. We'd been marinating in this information for a month, in all of our classes.
But we hadn't learned. We hadn't really understood what they were trying to teach us. Not that this happened. But that this happens. It can happen very easily, especially if people aren't watching out for it.
The kids were furious. They shouted that this wasn't fair, that we were only following instructions. The teachers had lied to us. They had told us to do this, and now they were mad at us for following directions?
He was ready for this, of course. Calming us back down again, he pointed out that all they'd done is tell us to give ourselves a name, a slogan, a symbol, and demonstrate "team spirit." That was literally it. No one told us to rip posters down. No one told us to march in the hallways. No one told us to spread rumors and shout insults. No one told us to fight each other.
They didn't have to.
All it takes to get people to behave this way is to tell them that their group is special, they deserve good things, but the good things aren't there because those other people are taking them from you.
The Nazis were not uniquely evil people. They were just encouraged to demonstrate their team spirit. And there were no teachers to stop it from getting violent. Because the person encouraging them wanted things to get violent.
The Holocaust was not the story of Hitler the Bad Guy. He was there, and he was responsible for a lot, but that wasn't the point. Germany during the Holocaust wasn't suddenly, by total accident, full of evil people.
It was just full of people like us.
This time, it just was a lie about Disney World and a week of chaos. But if we didn't watch out, the next time fascism started to rise, we would get swept up on the wrong side of it. We had just proven that we would. We'd be too swept up in making sure that our special group got the prize they deserved to notice that we were being lied to about the prize in the first place.
That could happen. If we weren't careful. If we forgot the lesson we'd just learned.
After he'd let the horror and shame and embarrassment and indignation of that week sink in properly, he reassured us that it wasn't our fault. The point wasn't for us to prove that we understood the lesson of the Holocaust. It wasn't actually a test after all, it was our final lesson. The most important lesson.
He'd known that this test would go this way, because it always did. He did this every year. He said in all his years of teaching, only one student, one student, had ever questioned it. Pulled him aside in the hallway and said straightforwardly that whatever was going on was messed up and he wanted no part of it.
And you know what? That is how you teach history. You give students the facts of what happened. And then you show them how easily it can happen again.
Sadly, most schools don't have the resources for this sort of thing, and these days they'd probably not be allowed to run this little experiment. But I'm extremely grateful to that teacher, grateful that I was part of that experience. It was harrowing, and it made me and a lot of other people vigilant for the rest of my life in a way I know I would not have been otherwise.
It was over 35 years ago now and it still makes me emotional to think about.
Most people never got to have that experience, to properly learn that lesson. But at least I can pass the story on to you. And you can pass it on to others. Because if you think you would have acted differently, that you would have seen through the ruse, think again.
A simple banishment spell:
Step 1: A rock. Any rock will do.
Step 2: Throw at target.
Step 3: Repeat as necessary.
Follow me for more witchcraft tips.
to the great surprise of absolutely no one
(and she's so much worse in the comments, fucking hell)
I'm grateful to everyone quote-tweeting her and pointing out all the ways asexuals are, indeed, marginalized and oppressed. As Thomas pointed out, they're lesser-known issues. But as an ace person, I'm more concerned with the way she completely invalidates our identity
This isn't a case of "you aren't oppressed because everyone already accepts your identity" (which we see a lot online), or the usual exclusionism. She's saying we don't have an identity to oppress. This is why she doesn't see posting hate against asexual people on international asexuality day as oppression (or, you know. wrong). The thousands of bigoted comments under her post aren't proof that people do, actually, discriminate against aces: she agrees with them, and is there riling them up.
As someone also pointed out, mocking people for not wanting sex isn't very I'm-only-protecting-women of her
I've been reporting terfs and the like on Pinterest (where they, sometimes, actually do something about it) and ace/arophobia is never far. It just got more obvious
