Because Reasons

Guest: Hey can I use your bathroom?

Host: Oh, yeah! It's right over there.

Guest: Sick!

a criminal

A hero

an artist

ch iken….

trans bears are literally stronger than any US marine

How on earth would they be able to tell that a bear is trans. I’m not saying they can’t be but how would they communicate that.

:/

this is so fucking funny

update:

we the jury find the defendant not guilty your honor

I found this very funny because I had the same thought

right now it’s almost halfway through 2023, and 2024 is an election year in the US. I have started to see a growing proliferation of posts suggesting that there is no difference between the republican and democratic parties–the exact same kind of posts I saw an awful lot of before the last major election here. I am unfollowing folks who post or reblog these sort of posts, as I consider these posts to be fascist propaganda framed as leftist discourse, designed to suppress anti-fascist votes and voters. 

Prepare yourself to vote for Biden now, because the only other option is someone who will make 2016-2020 look like a picnic.

You work with what you’ve got, not what you wish you had.

I detest Biden more with every passing day (and he was not in my top 10 candidates in 2020). 2024 will be an election between:

No Labels is an op. It’s being funded by unknown parties to defeat Biden and the Democrats. Their election scenarios are fantasy football for political junkies.

No Third Party has a road anywhere outside statewide offices (Bernie is the exception that proves the rule, and he’s a Democrat for all intents and purposes).

Arguably the rosiest scenario is that TFG breaks with the Republicans to form his own party and tanks any chance the Republicans have, but that’s not looking as likely as it did two years ago.

If you’re pissed, get involved in your local elections. Ensure that no position is running unopposed (and that includes if you’ve got a conserva-Dem somewhere now–primary them).

Get the House back in the Democratic hands (unless you’re up for two more years of this only with MTG as Speaker this time). Increase the margin in the Senate (and send Selema to her post-senate career). Make sure your school board isn’t full of flat-earthers. Wake sure your county counsel isn’t going to shut down your libraries if they have a book someone doesn’t like.

As Stonekettle says, if you want a better country, but a better citizen.

There’s a reason we call it a civic DUTY, not a civic privilege.

Starting mid-April I’ll be posting to-do lists and action items for people who’ve never gotten involved before. One party wants you dead. FIGHT.

Speaking as a Michigan resident:  Look at the laws being passed in Michigan.  Now look at the laws being passed in Florida.  Spot the difference?  That’s because Michigan is being governed by the Democratic Party, and Florida is being governed by the Republican Party.  That’s the difference.  They’re different parties.  It is not the same.

You want what we’ve got?  Vote for it.

(And you want Michigan to stay the way it is and not slide backwards into the shit we had to deal with with Rick Snyder, or even just the way it was when the House and Senate were Republican-controlled?  Keep fucking voting.)

D are not our friends or even allies but R is a staunch enemy

look the main thing is that our first-past-the-poll voting style automatically and always devolves into a two party system where the majority of people dislike both parties. This is now a known phenomenon, a feature of our voting method as inevitable as water running downhill. 

But that isn’t going to change until we get some sweeping voting reform that revises our voting system into some kind of ranked or run-off voting

Meanwhile one of our destined-to-be-disliked parties is actually trying to do things we want (health care, living wages, social services, public transportation, civil rights, education, support for gay and trans people, religious tolerance, etc) and one of our parties is banning books and undoing women’s rights and supporting corrupt racist police and endangering gay and trans lives while paying people to make posts about how both parties are equally bad so that people don’t vote democrat.

Like, we are going to not like a lot of how the Democrats operate, that is a feature of the current design, but they are trying to protect women’s rights, they are trying to help the homeless, they are trying to raise minimum wage they have agendas that include important things. And republicans? are at this point a literal cult that want to create a religious fascist state.

Even my father, now 80 years old, a man whose politics i have often despised, a man who voted for Reagan for fucks sake! even he (unhappily) votes Democrat now, because he’s not an insane person, and the republican party has become SO BLATANTLY EVIL AND STUPID that he can’t ignore it.

Democrats pass legislation we want that republicans then find ways to block. Democrats have passed bills that:

close gender pay gaps raise federal minimum wage make becoming a US citizen easier for immigrants protect civil/public water sources from pollution cut greenhouse gas emissions to fight climate change increase gun regulation lower and control prescription drug prices improve healthcare access for those with pre-existing conditions protect net neutrality protect gay marriage rights

these are all the subjects of specific real bills that democrats have either passed into law or tried hard to pass in the last few years. Meanwhile republicans act to block these bills while championing book bans and attacking trans folk and giving more power to corporations to ruin our planet and taking away women’s rights. 

when you see posts attacking Democrats from the left or whatever, the talking points and quotes can often be traced back to right wing sources

So all posts trying to keep non-republicans arguing amongst ourselves and calling for us to not vote democrat (or not vote at all) ? I will be assuming they are bad-faith posts and i won’t be spreading them or engaging with them or anything.

Honest critique of the party is necessary, but like it or not our system currently is a two party system, and i’ll be voting for the better of the two until we can change our voting style to make additional political parties viable.

I live in Pennsylvania.

Neither of my children is cisgender.

The last gubernatorial election was, literally, do we elect this guy who is overly fond of cops but is generally a normal human being, or do we elect this other guy who believes frightening conspiracy theories and wants my children removed from my care and forcibly detransitioned and honestly would prefer them to be dead?

That’s it. That’s the kind of choice we get in first-past-the-post voting. If that second guy won, we needed to move. There was no safe way to stay here. The votes of my fellow citizens were all that was standing between my kids and serious fucking danger.

And my fellow citizens DID turn out. Lots of them came out and voted to reject the scary death cultist. I am grateful to all those who went, ugh, I don’t really like this guy, but the other guy is worse, and hauled themselves down to the polling place to get it done.

You, too, can vote to reject scary death cultists, in your hometown and your home state and in the country as a whole.

Getting rid of the scary death cultists is a prequisite for getting political representation you actually want.

it’s fun to stay at the Y

M

M

M

*smacks the side of my boom box to get the cd to stop skipping*

C

after my fall out boy concert i told my mom that they played my second favorite fall out boy song of all time (headfirst slide into cooperstown on a bad bet) and she asked what the song was called (it’s called headfirst slide into cooperstown on a bad bet) so i immediately answered “headfirst slide into cooperstown on a bad bet” and she turned to me and said “there’s no way that’s the name of the song” which gave me the incredible privilege of saying “alexa play ‘headfirst slide into cooperstown on a bad bet’ by fall out boy” to which the alexa responded “NOW PLAYING ‘HEADFIRST SLIDE INTO COOPERSTOWN ON A BAD BET’ BY FALL OUT BOY” and my mother promptly walked out of the room

joined the ranks of oppa homeless style and homestuck cop for playing a song for my mother, more at 11

Always nice when math helps make it all the more clear how ridiculously reasonable the worker demands are.

This is what the studios have brought everything to a grinding halt for.

Btw, if you have not had tragedy dropped on you before, grief does fuck you up in unexpected and physical ways. If you can’t sleep or sleep more than expected or have more or reduced appetite, or energy goes weird— your brain just had a bunch of emotions dropped on it and sometimes it reacts by hitting every button in your brain. It will pass. Just try to not get too frustrated with yourself.

It’s also fine if you feel normal. Grief literally hits everybody differently, and some people are made to be able to to keep the farm going the day after a death, and some of us turn into sleepless gargoyles and get really into trying to help, and some of us are just unspeakably sad. Grief is weird. Be kind to yourself.

Something else I want to say is that grief is cyclical. It is very common to go "why am I just a wreck today/this week" and then you check the calandar and see that something awful happened at this time last year. Or a couple years ago. Or a decade ago (my decembers are a wash every year).

So if you find yourself having memory issues or unaccountably grumpy or anxious for no reason or however it hits you, be gentle with yourself.

also I would like to add something grief and mourning also shows up for events that may not be tragedies (or well tragedies in the traditional sense)

say for instance you just got your dream job and it seems to be going well and you're only there for a short amount of time and then you get laid off by no fault of your own. there will be grief, and you should allow yourself to mourn this loss but realistically it may not be considered a "tragedy" because theoretically you can possibly go out and get a similar job. This grief is just as valid and please give yourself space to feel your feelings

i miss when you could make political art without placing personal identity (and the self) at the center of everything

this piece (“artist bio” by anna daliza) sort of perfectly sums it up. the emphasis on identity politics and tokenization in art/music/performance spaces feels reductive and exploitative- like it offers a sort of racial tourism for the wealthy white patrons. none of what im saying are original thoughts btw go see White by james ijames

Lots of people arguing about this but I would say that while background and history can add interest and context to art, one also has to ask if you like a work of art, what does it matter if you know anything about the artist? 

This is very modern conceit and it absolutely does influence galleries and patrons while saying nothing about the quality of the art itself. I don’t feel it is against anyone or their identity to point out that the identity is not the art itself.

Mark Rothko was over this by 1950, when he was asked to write two self-statements and said,  “I have nothing to say in words which I would stand for. I am heartily ashamed of the things I have written in the past. This self-statement business has become a fad this season.” 

In his case, Rothko trusted the communication between the art and the observer to do the job and worked hard to make sure there were no preconceived notions about the work at all, which is why he did not title his paintings.

I don’t generally reblog anything but I think whatever you think of this art itself, it’s good to ask question about what’s influencing you to like to dislike it.

I see your ‘the grumpy one is only soft for the sunshine one’ and I raise you ‘the sunshine one is friends with everyone but wants to hang out with the grumpy one most of all’

You’re an ancient Greek man coming home from 4 months of war to find your wife 3 months pregnant. Now you’ve embarked on a solemn quest: to punch Zeus in the face.

Soon after you begin your quest, you encounter another man in a similar situation. You decide to join forces, as two mortal men stand a better chance at punching Zeus than one. Two villages over, you encounter a woman who had relations with Zeus and was left with a highly aggressive half-boar half-man offspring. She too feels your anger and offers to join your quest. By the time you reach Mount Olympus, you’ve amassed a large and formidable army of cuckolded/ravished mortals, demigods with daddy issues, mythical creatures with scores to settle, and a seamstress who you’re pretty sure is Hera in disguise. Zeus never stood a chance.

What I find best about this scenario is that the original wife probably expected to be murdered for her infidelity at worst or have her relationship with her husband ruined as he grew to resent her baby, at best.

Instead this man looked at his beloved and said, “who did it?”

And she replied “Zeus,” accepting he probably wouldn’t believe her.

And then he sighed, strapped his sandals back on and said, “I’ll be back before the baby is born.”

“Where are you-?”

“The lord of the sky came into my house, molested my wife in my bed and ate my food. I am going to settle the score.”

“Darling, he’ll kill you.”

“He may try, if he would like.”

You’re so right, that IS the best part.

I’m personally caught up on the seamstress.

“The pathway up Olympus is guarded by dozens of traps and perils strong enough to thwart even the Titans. How are we going to get past all of…” the shepherd boy with golden eagle feathers gestured uselessly at the slopes above them, particularly the herd of eight-legged goats snorting fire.

“There’s a way around,” Yiorgos said, though he was not specifically asked. But he had been the first to begin the march on Olympus, and so felt obligated to take the lead whenever possible, “In the stories there’‘s always a way around whatever obstacles the Gods place in our way.”

He hadn’t meant the words to come out as a question, but they had that lilt to them none-the-less. And even though he hadn’t meant it to be a question, much less a question directed at anyone specific, it was directed at one all the same. Just as the eagle-feathered shepherd boy’s had.

“Way I heard it,” a woman’s voice said. Rough with the Mycenaean Greek equivalent of a backwoods accent, and with the depth of a farmer’s wife who straps cattle to her back to carry to market, “there’s a back path. Hidden behind an invisible door that only one key in the world can open.”  Everyone’s eyes had turned to the broad older woman in heavy shawl sitting amidst supplies in the foremost cart. “Least, that’s what my grand-mammy always told me.” she added after a moment of dozens of eyes on her.

“Oh, we were so foolish!” That was Lydia, a lithe waif of a woman, many months pregnant, sitting opposite the seamstress in the wagon. “Of course there’d be a.. a quest. They’d keep such a key in the depths of Tartarus or in the golden chariot of Apollo, or, or-”

“Or”, the older woman cut her off in a voice both firm, but much gentler than she used on anyone else, “he’s like all husbands and has been promising to move the key someplace better for the past three thousand years but hasn’t gotten around to it.”  She gestured vaguely to the hillside, “Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was under, say, that bush right over there.”

It was. Of course. And everyone in the caravan agreed that it had been a very lucky and wise guess from the nameless woman and for the upteenth time since she first sat herself down in the front wagon and announced she was coming along with no further explanation, each and every last member very purposefully gave no further thought to the matter.

Daydreams.

my brother started calling our cat "doobie brother" which he then lengthened to "dubious brother" and has since morphed into "brother dubious" like he's some sort of fucked up little monk

brother dubious

"My liege, I'm afraid I have reason to believe your concubine plots against you. Worry not, your eminence, you can still trust me, of course..."

I didn't feel it was appropriate for me to add to that last post but it's related so - Please, for the love of God, learn to manage your own emotional responses to media on your own.

Maybe it's because I started reading horror at a young age, but I learned pretty quickly that if a book is too heavy or graphic or whatever for you, it's alright to recognise those feelings, and either stop reading it entirely, or take a break. Do something that helps you calm down. Re-engage with comfort media. Give your pets a lil kiss.

It's not a moral failing on the author for a book to upset you. It's not a moral failing for you to be upset. It's just a fact of life we all have to learn to cope with.

If you don’t know how to handle discomfort in a book you’re not going to enjoy Life™.

Maybe this sounds dismissive to you but stop for a moment and think about it. If you’re losing your mind at a minor inconvenience, a serious incident will destroy you. I had to learn to triage my emotions by severity, and it made my anxiety far more manageable and given the pile of shit life has handed me lately and I’m still here it seems to have worked.

I don't know yet how to clearly express this but this is something I think about from a different angle: young children. Who, obviously, become adults, so it's still directly related.

So many parents I've encountered, when discussing what media they show their children, have this standard: if it upsets the child, they weren't ready for it. Ah, they cried watching the Lion King, so I should have waited until they were older. It's SO STRANGE to me and I'm at a loss to know when we got like this. You are supposed to cry watching the Lion King. I do.

One Crazy Summer is supposed to upset you and challenge you, shock you and make you angry. When we were reading it, and the kids needed extra time to process something, we'd just pause and either discuss it or just wait until we could all collect ourselves again, and then continue. My son struggled with the subject of anti-black racism for weeks afterwards. I took that as a sign that he HAD been old enough to grapple with the themes of the book, and connected well.

I think the cultural tendency to shield children from any painful emotion a piece of media might create leads pretty obviously and directly to the stuff discussed above. The ability to process, discuss, and analyze media, or just to sit with your pain and then collect yourself and move past it, is a skill and must be practiced.

The aliens are gonna be so confused when humans first board their ships and start doing this, and by GOD I hope at least one of them is going to have a camera when it happens.

It’s interesting how diseases rip through schools at incredible speeds despite being in an arguably modern, clean(ish) environment. I wonder if it has something to do with the whole “you need a doctor’s note to excuse your absence of even one day” combined with the average price of going to a doctor, the lack of education on things like “you’re still contagious even after the fever goes away”, and the overwhelming message of “if you don’t struggle through it, you’re a failure!”

On my campus there tends to be a problem where even I you have the doctors note professors will still take points off of your final grade regardless of how sick you are. I’ve seen people show up to class with the stomach flu, pneumonia, respiratory infections and all sorts of other contagious ailments.

Here’s a fun story:

The school system I grew up in put an absolutely ungodly amount of pressure on kids to Show Up Every Day No Matter What. Many schools are like this, but looking back, my town’s was borderline fucking dystopian. They asked me why I didn’t just “postpone” a surgery at one point— when I was fifteen— to give you an idea of how monumentally obtuse these people were.

So, in elementary school, I started having chicken pox symptoms, right? They were mild because I was vaccinated (yay!) but my mom recognized them quickly and took me to the doctor, because my mom is a reasonable human being with standards. The doctor said “yup, you’ve got those pox, it may seem mild but please for the love of god DO NOT take her to school, she is very contagious even though she may FEEL okay.”

So I had to stay home from school until I got clearance from my doctor to go back. I was an angry little gremlin the whole time, because I wanted to go to the school library and read books about the human skull, but my mother said, “no, you cannot leave this house, and do not scratch the bumps please.” So I sat at home and tried not to scratch the bumps, like a good little gremlin.

A few days into my Chicken Pox Related House Arrest, we got a letter from the school. I was far from the only person with chicken pox, as it so happened. Like… a tenth of my second grade class had Confirmed Pox. We all fell ill within DAYS of each other.

So how did this happen, you ask? Well, a kid had chicken pox, and he came to school anyway. “Ah, well perhaps they didn’t know,” you may very well say. “Maybe his parents didn’t notice!” No. No, they noticed. In fact they KNEW it was CHICKEN POX. They sent him to school anyway.

The kid’s parents…….. were, in fact, teachers at the school. And they KNOWINGLY made him go to school sick, because they didn’t want to risk hurting his precious “perfect attendance” record. They figured that since he wasn’t, like, Literally Dying, it was better for him not to miss school. Never mind the fact that they were actively endangering hundreds of little kids.

Fast forward to my freshman year of college. A kid came to class with mumps because he ‘couldn’t afford to miss’. Guess what happened? Mumps outbreak! Diseases are, as it turns out, good at being diseases! Vaccinations are phenomenal, but they can only do so much, and some people rely on herd immunity to not be killed by preventable illness.

This entire attitude needs to die. It’s dangerous. Food service workers are forced to show up sick, little kids are forced to show up sick, college students show up sick because they’re afraid of flunking out.

And on top of it all, misinformation campaigns are encouraging people not to get vaccinations! It’s 2019 and we’re flirting with the plague! Next thing you know some blogger is gonna be like “actually we should all be fucking rats and eating our meat raw, death to all science and god bless america”

Many kids at my school will show up really sick because we only get like three days of excused absences without a doctor’s note.

this is what those in literary academia call “foreshadowing”

(note the dates)

this post aged like an ice cube in an oven

Pretty sure that generation has been dead for awhile but ok, pretend one thing has something to do with another

The end of Jim Crow laws was in the 1950′s. The first black student to attend a formerly all white school was Ruby Bridges in 1960. 

Here she is being walked to school under the protection of Federal Marshals because angry white people were ready to harm or kill her. 

Here she is in 2010, eight years ago. 

The generation that enforced segregation is not dead, fucko. They were our fuckin grandparents, and it was not that goddamn long ago. 

Google is free. 

Grandparents?!

I’m 31.

My MOM was born the year before school segregation ended.

She was NINE when MLK was shot.

She remembers race riots in her school over school segregation ending in our home state.

My MOTHER lived through this. She’s 61 years old–which means while her own health is shot, people from her generation will be around for another twenty to thirty years.

1956. This is not colorized. IT WAS SHOT IN COLOR. Look at that–segregation was still ongoing in the age of neon lights.

Same exhibit. 1956. Banana splits, poodle skirts, and the ability to get “colored” drinking water only from the white folks’ backwash. You can see the pipe connecting the white tank to the colored fountain behind the little girl in the light pink dress.

Less than ten years later. That’s Martin Luther King, Jr. in the middle. Have you ever seen him in a color photograph before? There are many, but for some reason … maybe because black-and-white makes things look old … nobody ever uses them.

Look at the bank logo in the back. Colored squares like that were a thing in the mid-to-late 1960s. The slicked-down hair on the Black girl in front says we’re not yet to the mid-1970s, and since these signs all say “Honor King” it’s quite likely this is 1969-1970. You know what else was happening in 1969? Not Woodstock, not the moon landing, although both of those things happened. No, something we think of as being much more recent.

THE INTERNET STARTED.

1969 was the launch of ARPANET, which would later become the Internet. BLACK PEOPLE WERE STILL MARCHING FOR BASIC HUMAN RIGHTS WHEN THE INTERNET WAS STARTED.

This picture was taken sometime between 1956 and 1958. I don’t have a precise date on it, but the sleeveless sundress says later 1950s, the hair on Orange Plai says this was after Elvis, and the stars on the flag say that’s not a modern 50-star flag, which was first used in 1959. (We had a single year, 1958, with 49 stars.)

Ah yes. It was so long ago. Let’s get some more perspective:

Donald Trump was eight years old when school segregation was declared illegal in 1954. He was nineteen when the police beat and shot at peaceful Black protest marchers in Selma, Alabama and twenty-two when MLK was assassinated by the FBI for trying to encourage desegregation.

Hillary Clinton was seven when school segregation was declared, eleven when it went into effect, and eighteen when Selma happened.

Bernie Sanders was thirteen when the integration ruling occurred, 19 when Ruby Bridges started going to a formerly all-white school, and twenty-four when Selma happened. Joe Biden is only a year younger than Bernie.

Elizabeth Warren was eleven when Ruby started her new school, fifteen when Selma happened, eighteen when MLK was shot.

You will notice that all of these people are running for President, or were rumored to be running for President, this year. They’re not just alive, they’re thriving. And they were all alive for desegregation–in fact Trump, Clinton, and Sanders were all old enough to either endorse or oppose what happened at Selma.

But let’s keep looking, because they’re probably outliers, right?

Hm. Three of MLK’s children are still alive. They’re between 56 and 62 years old. (His elder daughter died of unknown causes; her family suspects an undiagnosed heart condition.) In fact one of his siblings is still alive, and she was born before him! She’s 96.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg? Yeah, she was 21 when school integration was made the law of the land. And she’s still serving on the Supreme Court.

But tell me again how long ago it was.

I’m sure the people from those generations are all dead, after all.

my father was graduated from high school when the civil rights act was passed and was in his last semester of college when MLK was killed. i was born in the 2000s

people who remember segregation are very well alive

I am in my 30s, and my father remembers when his elementary school was integrated. His grandfather whooped him for playing with one of his Black classmates. He played college football with one of the people who was depicted in Remember the Titans, a film about the integration of a high school.

My father, who is still not quite old enough to get a senior discount at Denny’s, went to college with people who were in high school when their schools were finally integrated.