*lemony snicket voice* police cars say ‘protect and serve’ for the same reason a box of dry, unflavoured rice cakes might say ‘delicious treat’. rice cakes are not a delicious treat, nor are the police there to protect and serve, but if you are unfamiliar with either you’re likely to believe what you’re told.

this is within the green line (in southern palestine)

Lucky Clover Cat

my horny ass could never work at the airport

tswift's planesona

they're generating product keys in the notes

Note carefully the part where the actor ONLY GETS PAID for the time they are actually working the production, but must be ON HOLD, aka available, aka there and doing nothing, WITHOUT PAY, for the entire time stipulated.

That's the part you need to not miss.

As soon as it looks like Trump is headed to jail, Fox News suddenly discovers American prisons can, in fact, have inhumane conditions.

i'm just thinking abt how many providers i've had who heard my story abt psychiatric abuse + immediately individualized it. "oh, you're so smart + kind+ obviously sane! you didn't deserve that! i can't believe they gave you that diagnosis when you're obviously not like that! they shouldn't have treated u like that when all you did was xyz! they shouldn't have assumed you were crazy like that!"

there is always a third person haunting this interaction- the patient who does deserve that, who is "actually" that evilscary diagnosis, who did Have To be treated like that. if i want to soak up the affirmations of these providers, i must be careful to never become this third person. i must affirm myself by setting myself apart from her- i did not deserve to be treated like that because i am not like that.

i reject this. not only was i like that, she + everyone else like that deserve everything i deserve. they are my siblings + my friends + my lovers. i do not need to cut them out of me to believe i deserved better. i refuse to comfort myself through the lens of someone else's dehumanization. the tragedy is not that psychiatric violence was applied to someone who not insane enough to warrant it. the tragedy is the violence.

hey i said this in a group chat earlier and honestly it fucks, so i’m gonna post it here too

Feel disgusted by something? Don’t immediately act on it. Deconstruct your disgust!

Be just a little curious about it. Why do you feel disgusted by something? What is it about the thing that disgusts you? Is it the whole that disgusts you, or just a part? Do you feel disgusted because you’re supposed to? Has someone told you to feel disgusted? Are you just disgusted because something looks unfamiliar to you? Do other people seem disgusted or are there people opposing your disgust (or do they, on the flipside, like it?). Is there a cultural context you might be missing? More importantly, could there be biases like racism, sexism, classism, homo- or trans-phobia at play? Is the object of your digust actually causing harm? Does someone benefit from your disgust politically?

Disgust is a powerful emotion, but one that deserves a lot of self-reflection. It’s easily weaponised and often deeply flawed.

…is this supposed to apply to finding wet moldy produce in the back of the fridge, because I don’t see how, and if it isn’t supposed to apply to that, how are users supposed to tell when to use it?

Mould is an excellent place to go to talk about the application of interrogated disgust. There are a lot of cases were foods are intentionally laced with mould for the flavour it produces. We control rot and mould in a lot of ways in food - kimchi, stilton, sour cream, they’re all produced by allowing things to rot in specific ways. And some ways are more blatently obvious than others! You can look at stilton and see the green penicillin moulds used to create it, whilst you might look at bread and go ‘this isn’t going off’ - but yeasts are creating alcohol and CO2 inside the bread, which is a sort of spoilage.

In relation to food in the back of the fridge, absolutely throw it out. You’re not harming anyone by not wanting to eat food you know is past its best. But there are cultures who ferment foods in ways we might immediately balk at because your brain connects the mould in your fridge and the sensible ‘probably not good to eat’ warning with something harmless, and that’s the danger of disgust.

You might genuinely find them disgusting. Icelanders can do what they want, nothing about kæstur hákarl (fermented greenland shark)* appeals to me and I think I’m fine in saying I’m disgusted by it. All theirs.

But, you can see how this could be weaponised, yeah? There are plenty of cultures and peoples where ‘they’re disgusting, vermin-like’ were used as legitimate reasons to oppress and destroy. In that case, their food - harmless and controlled as the spoilage might be - might be used as evidence to prove their point UNLESS you interrogate your initial gut reaction to their fermented foods.

Back to our questions - Does the person telling you about the fermented foods have an agenda? Yes, they do, bigotry. Is your unfamiliarity playing in? Yeah, you’ve never actually tasted the food, you don’t know what it’s like. Is there cultural context you’re missing? Might be! Again, in the case of kæstur hákarl, Iceland is a hard place to grow food and you make edible what you can. Has someone told you to feel disgusted? Yes! Do other people disagree with the speaker? Yes - the culture that created the food think it’s swell!

In this case, you might want to hold back on acting on your disgust. There’s enough rhetorical evidence here to suggest it might be displaced.

(* I’m using kæstur hákarl as an example because the sort of strongly fermented fish products scandinavians make are a good example of food you might not want to eat that doesn’t have any other strongly anti-Scandinavian things attatched to it. I can discuss a theoretical here in a way that means I don’t have to walk into someone’s pre-existing biases. White Scandinavians don’t have to worry about it, no-one is actually using kæstur hákarl to oppress Icelanders.)

I had things like kink culture, purity culture ect. in my mind when I wrote the original post, and you might be able to see now how weaponised disgust is used against fandom and kinksters. A gut-level disgust is what drives a lot of homophobia and transphobia too, when you scratch down deep enough.

I hope that gives you some more context on why I wrote what I did and how you might apply it to the real world!

It’s a good example of how easy it is to assume “deconstruct” or “interrogate” means “throw out” or “disregard” or even “treat in the opposite way you would otherwise.

…It’s something that I think is both interpreted and intended  - a lot of the time, someone will say “you should question X”, but really they mean “You should decisively be against X.” Honestly, it’s kind of rare for someone to say Question and really mean it, like what OP is doing. Refreshing!

No gods no masters

You guys I just realized that what I’ve always wanted out of werewolf fiction is a story where lycanthropy isn’t a purely human condition

Like this dude wakes up from his wolfbender and his room is full of all these fucking chickens from local farms that he initiated into his pack. They all start clucking and crowing at the moon and when it’s full they all transform into these tiny little weird bipedal wolves with wings.

I don’t remember making this post but it’s going around again and I’m losing my shit

Imagine becoming a werewolf because you got attacked by a fucked up chicken

A wildlife rehab centre discovers that one of its patients is a lycanthrope when the full moon hits and their wolf transforms into a slightly different wolf.

the "what number comes next?" problem

here's a sequence of numbers:

3198, 11, 734, 11, 1115, 11, 1440...

can you guess what number comes next?

So it turns out that ChatGPT not only uses a ton shit of energy, but also a ton shit of water. This is according to a new study by a group of researchers from the University of California Riverside and the University of Texas Arlington, Futurism reports.

Which sounds INSANE but also makes sense when you think of it. You know what happens to, for example, your computer when it’s doing a LOT of work and processing. You gotta cool those machines.

And what’s worrying about this is that water shortages are already an issue almost everywhere, and over this summer, and the next summers, will become more and more of a problem with the rising temperatures all over the world. So it’s important to have this in mind and share the info. Big part of how we ended up where we are with the climate crisis is that for a long time politicians KNEW about the science, but the large public didn’t have all the facts. We didn’t have access to it. KNOWING about things and sharing that info can be a real game-changer. Because then we know up to what point we, as individuals, can have effective actions in our daily lives and what we need to be asking our legislators for.

And with all the issues AI can pose, I think this is such an important argument to add to the conversation.

Edit: I previously accidentally typed Colorado instead of California. Thank you to the fellow user who noticed and signaled that!

i love headcanoning old men as ftm. like considering fandom loves to equate being transmasc to being young no one will probably agree with me but i look into his eyes and see the wisdom only a post-menopausal man could provide

yesterday I went to a little meeting at my local queer community center and I was admiring their bookshelves and mentioned that I work at the public library and someone said "well I bet they don't have any [LGBTQ+ books] at our library" and I was like um. yes we do. we have tons of them. half of our employees are queer leftists so they said "oh well I bet they don't in [nearby rural county]" and I was like uh once again yes they absolutely do. gay people live and work there as well

so here's a quick reminder that if you don't think your local library has enough queer centered materials you should actually check before assuming, and if you're not satisfied with their collection you should submit a request for more such books. I don't know what the political landscape of libraries looks like outside the us rn, but within the us no matter where you are, I promise you there are employees at your library fighting for inclusion and intellectual freedom and they can't win without vocal public support

"Why am I so tired," I mutter, knowing full well I've got at least four different comorbid conditions that cause sleepy bitch disorder.

when we talk about killing Cringe Culture that includes harmless Weird Fetishes too. if you rag on people who are into like feet or vore or inflation or whatever and make a whole big thing of yelling about how cursed it is thats super lame of you and i wish you the courage to Grow Up

FAQ for people who will choose to misinterpret this post:

i need friends that want to go to the library with me & want to go to the aquarium with me & want to play board games with me & want to sit in silence with me & want to go grocery shopping with me & want to kiss me & want to live forever with me

BTW on the subject of agricultural labor, I was doing research on human trafficking and it made me very angry how the subject has been misrepresented.

(You might have to get a JSTOR account to see the sources here but it's free and you don't need an institutional login )

For one thing, there is a strong misconception that most human trafficking is sex trafficking, but this is because sex trafficking is more strongly targeted by laws and has all the publicity and awareness. For example in the USA, numbers based on law enforcement data report that sex trafficking is the majority of trafficking, however organizations helping trafficking victims find that labor trafficking is much more common. In the USA, police often exclusively or mostly concern themselves with sex trafficking. The effort to fight against forced labor is befuddled by policies that focus exclusively on sex trafficking and ignore other forms of forced labor, and on top of it, define all sex work as being "trafficking" or "forced labor." People who are against sex work (whether feminists negative toward sex work, or conservative Christians) have worked to make "human trafficking" mean "any form of sex work" in policy and it's seriously fucked over efforts to actually help people dealing with any form of forced labor.

The second link for instance talked about women going to police for help and getting arrested repeatedly for prostitution before police could figure out that a forced labor situation was going on, police ignoring forced labor in immigrants because they think it won't be sympathetic and that "illegals" deserve it anyway, and police ignoring forced labor in men. It's terrible.

Several of the articles linked above refer to human trafficking as a "moral panic" and it is, not because human trafficking or sexual exploitation doesn't happen, but because everybody's idea of it is more based on reactions of panic and disgust to shocking, sensationalized images and scary urban legends, rather than reality.

It's so wild that middle-class suburban white women in Ohio genuinely believe and fear that "human traffickers" will follow them around Walmart and kidnap their kids in broad daylight and that this is a common occurrence, when the common victims of human trafficking are actually people fleeing from war-torn, unstable, or impoverished nations and trying to cross international borders in hopes of finding opportunity elsewhere, and getting snapped up by exploitative contracts. Like it's straight-up malicious how warped the popular image of human trafficking is.

I lived in a place where there was a persistent rumor that a local business (a foreign/"ethnic" restaurant, to be specific) was a "front" for human trafficking and everyone believed it and no one seemed to ever get the notion that something could (or should) be done about it, if it was indeed true. It was just a local boogeyman, like "Don't go near the Foreign Restaurant after dark or the human traffickers are gonna getcha!"

Also do y'all remember the Wayfair human trafficking conspiracy that a bunch of people on here fell for that turned out to be a weird Qanon thing?

It's like this creepy urban legend that appears validated by official sources and policies, but the official sources and policies are heavily mutated and warped by conservative moral panic about sex, fucked up policies about immigration and refugees, and incompetent, malicious criminal justice system.

A few years ago, I talked to a Polish guy on discord who had been offered a job in the Netherlands doing farm work or something via a contracting company. He asked me for advice and I told him this is most likely a scam, they bring you over with promises of well-paying work and then they take your passport and they put you up in a hovel with five other people, which costs you most of your pay in 'rent'. He decided to take the offer anyway, but it was a terrible situation as expected, and fortunately he managed to go home a few months later.

This is human trafficking in spirit if not in letter, and while these workers' rights are being violated it's hard to prove that these contracting companies are doing anything strictly illegal. I don't know how common this is outside the Netherlands but in the general case it's easy for foreign laborers to be exploited when companies in richer countries try to recruit them.

Link to a short news article because I can't find the more in-depth one

No that is virtually identical to some of the examples of human trafficking provided in the articles I linked. It is human trafficking it's just seldom punished.