I wanna make it clear that if I response to your reply and it feels like I’m arguing you or asserting my opinion as correct that’s never happening. I am never forcing others to think how I do and saying they’re wrong, the extent of it is me passionately explaining my pov as a way to communicate so we can share ideas but it’s never me going “I’m right and you’re stupid.” I’ve run into this problem where people assume that if they offer an opposing opinion and i respond giving more evidence for my original thought or otherwise not agreeing with them they think I’m arguing and I promise I’m not. You said your piece so I’m going respond to you and share my piece too. It’s called a discussion. I know tone is hard to understand over text and many people assume people are being aggressive or argumentative so that’s why I’m saying that’s not happening. Please don’t misunderstand me and ask for clarification if you need it. I’d rather that than animosity forms and I’m not even aware or feel like you hate me because we don’t share the same opinion. Respect and understanding is all I ask basically <3
FIT 4th Semester Student Fashion Show: 1996 Fall
Current Scene
SHUT UP. SHUT THE FUCK UP. RETIRE. KYS.
Vacuous nothingburger culture devoid of any soul or relationality to humanity. Literally one of the most evil things to happen in history being turned into Product to be Consumed to sell movie tickets. Vile.
girl with four different "I SURVIVED THE TIME LOOP" pins on her backpack like prestige star ranks
To people who hide their icons on mobile fuck you I wanna look at your shitty 8x16 square of a random anime character no one’s heard of but you’d give your kidney for the icon is part of the blog aesthetic bitch!!!!
time loop fans when it happens again
i went to my fav zoo today and i will post more photos soon but i felt this very good bat-eared fox deserved his own post bc….well look at him. hes living his best life
This list includes doctors in the United States, Australia, Canada, and Europe!
Even if you're not the target demographic, please share for any of your friends who may be.
And if you or someone you know would like to be added to the list, there's a place for that!
Are you a real persona fan if you haven’t sung aria of the soul in full opera at the top of your lungs having a whole beautiful tragedy by yourself
Somehow this poll has upset more people than the chips/crisps/fries poll
Dear tumblr staff,
stop. its ok. you don’t need to do these things. just focus on functionality(like the video player). we don’t need these little updates when somethings(like the video player) need your focus. thank you for your time but really, tumblr looks great. try to fix more important things(like the video player) so that we can all properly enjoy the features of tumblr(like the video player)
This post is a decade old this year.
“the term mpreg is inherently transphobic because pregnancy is gender neutral” I hate to tell you this but in the pregnancy fetish fanfiction community they also use the term fpreg
there are -pregs you wouldn’t even dream of
🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃
you know what. i am physically sick as hell this week so i'll bite. i read the original slate article, which is free to read so i don't know why OP chose to screenshot instead of let people draw their own conclusions. i agree with MANY of the writer's points on the need for comprehensive criminal justice reform, but i also care a lot about numbers and stats and increasingly, this bullshit "democrats are the same as republicans" messaging is straight-up delivered using propaganda tactics
this is going to be an incredibly long post and i had to use GOOGLE SLIDES and GOOGLE SHEETS which i hate so so much so in the words of twitter kpop stans please don't let this flop
let's look at the numbers, claim by claim
claim #1: "the number of people held in ICE detention has increased by 70 percent since Biden took office"
- if you click through 3 link layers from the slate you land at cbs as the source for this which tells you that mainstream media is certainly not immune to playing with stats to make the democrats look bad
- fortunately ICE detention stats are easily publicly available thanks to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, which does the lord's work of crawling through federal agency publications and submitting tedious FOIA requests to collate useful data
- here is the data -- not only was cbs not wrong about the total number of detainees at the time of publication (25k in aug 2021), but the increase from when biden was inaugurated is actually 90%, not 70%. look:
- well holy shit!!! that's terrible. biden is the worst and he hates immigration reform and the democrats are no different from trump, right?
- but if you zoom out
- actually, Jan/Feb 2021 was at the absolute low for detainees, after a full year of covid restrictions slowing down or minimizing gov't operations of all kinds AND reducing border volume
- and if you actually want to compare the biden admin to the trump admin?
- relative to Aug of 2019, after 18 months the biden admin has reached a 56% decrease in the number of detainees. even if you look at only the month before COVID lockdowns really hit, it's still nearly a 40% decrease
- and to put the total numbers in perspective, at NO point before COVID did the trump admin have fewer than 30k people in ICE detention. most of the time it was well above 40k, or about 2x more than under biden
- that's not to say that immigration reform isn't still needed, but it IS to say that myopically comparing current-state to january 2021, aka one of the WEIRDEST months statistically on record ever, is going to give you crap perspective
claim #2: "the federal prison population has grown for the first time in a decade"
- by now we know that federal data is public so let's go look for it
- and indeed the federal bureau of prisons has made 45 years of federal prison data available for download
- so this should be straightforward! it looks like the inmate population did in fact peak in 2013, the start of obama's second term, before decreasing. obama made reducing the number of people in prison one of his key focuses and was in fact the first president since jimmy carter (term 1977-1981) to leave office with fewer inmates than when he started
- this trend continued under trump. in fact, the rate of decrease at the end of trump's presidency was even bigger than obama's -- turns out the republicans were BETTER than the democrats at criminal justice reform?!
- (it is worth noting at this moment of sarcasm that a bipartisan group of senators did actually manage to get the First Step Act bill through the senate gauntlet and onto trump's desk for signature, which lowered some sentences)
- (note i've only included data from 2005 onward so it's easier to actually see what's going on in the last 10 years. for those who like math, these are CAGRs calculated over each presidential term)
- but there it is -- decline in populations accelerated under trump. surely both parties same. surely democrats actually worse than republicans
- but wait, what's that?
- that can't be ...
- SPIDERS GEORG????
- WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE
- ARE YOU SAYING THAT ... THERE IS AN OUTLIER?
- THAT SHOULD NOT HAVE BEEN COUNTED?
- so it turns out that under trump, the trend had decelerated to less than half the rate of change at the end of obama's last term
- that precipitous drop we see is ... covid. it's pretty much just covid, during which federal prisons stopped accepting new prisoners, courts were closed and couldn't hand down sentences, and parole officers weren't sending people in for minor violations
- here's what things might have looked like had there been no covid outlier:
- now that assumes trump wasn't successful at slowing down the momentum from the obama years
- this is what it might have looked like had we perhaps ended up with a second trump term:
- again this isn't to say that biden is pure and perfect on criminal justice, even if there were some agreed-upon definition of what pure and perfect legislative or policy priorities would look like
- it's to put the context back into place around the data
- are the democrats and republicans actually the same or are we being fed a diet of pruned stats and catchphrases to make us simultaneously angry and disempowered
last claim: "federal covid relief funds are being used to pad local police budgets"
- you know what, this one is relatively not decontextualized
- for example, $10B of ARPA grants to state and local gov'ts has been committed to “public safety programs, including domestic violence prevention efforts, drug abuse and mental health services, and bonuses for hiring and retaining police officers”
- it's hard to know how much went to cops, but knowing how much cops take up of local jurisdiction budgets it's unfortunately probably a significant share
- biden doesn't help his case by going on record telling states and local jurisdictions to use ARPA funds to shore up before summer, when crime typically goes up (same source as link above)
- that said in the grand scheme of even just ARPA funds, this is what $10B looks like, so like ... is this the hill to die on
SO all of that to say
- we don't stop pushing for immigration or criminal justice reform
- or any other reform that is sorely needed
- but using data in incredibly selective ways, out of context, to promote a narrative that somehow democrats are the same or even worse than republicans
- ESPECIALLY the republicans of today
- is literally propaganda
- propaganda by definition uses kernels of truth and then presents it in a biased way to attempt to push a narrative
- pretending that the democrats are exactly the same as the republicans is propaganda, and i'm like 80% sure it's right-wing propaganda designed to discourage left-wing turnout that has somehow been accepted by an online population that doesn't understand statistics
- so like
- understand statistics
- do a bit of research
- draw conclusions that you can back up
- and for fuck's sake, vote
Some time has passed. Have your views changed, at all?
i think this question is for me so i will try to answer briefly, though lmk if it was intended for op lmao
also i'll answer on the assumption it was asked in good faith:
do i still think that democrats and republicans are not the same? yes; i don't have the time today to refresh charts etc., but a very quick glance at the same sources i used the first time around looks like the numbers have remained more or less stable. happy to take correction here if anyone has more time to delve
- importantly, we are also already seeing the impact of elected democrats at both national and state / local levels. there are many many many sources covering what has been done federally (or attempted in the face of GOP obstructionism) both from mainstream news sources (think NPR, Hill, WaPo, the recently-deservedly-maligned NYT, etc.) and on tumblr itself, so i won't do the google work here
- at the state level, states that put democrats in power during the midterms are already seeing legislation and orders being put in place for abortion rights and LGBTQ+ protections -- something visible on any map showing where "safe(ish)" states are
- in michigan alone where dems won a trifecta for the first time in decades we've repealed anti-union legislation, enacted increased background checks for gun purchases, repealed the draconian 1931 abortion law set to take effect post-Roe, and passed protections for sexual orientation and gender identity
- so much for democrats being the same or worse than republicans
on immigration specifically, do i think reform is still needed? yes; in particular i do think there should be close scrutiny of how the numbers trend as the biden admin continues to announce and enact its proposed policies if the PHE does indeed expire in may
- with that said, i think any truly focused analysis should consider the context of those numbers as well -- the quick-and-dirty i did looked only at raw numbers, not conditions of detention, enforcement approach, targeted or prioritized nationalities, and many other factors that provide a better picture of what is actually happening at the southern US border
on criminal justice specifically, do i think reform is still needed? yes; and importantly here it's worth keeping track of what the dem white house and dem congresspeople are trying to do vs what is able to happen (e.g. George Floyd Act)
- i won't get into a long screed here on the need for tumblr and voters broadly to understand how laws get passed (or don't get passed bc they get stuck eternally in committee) but even pre-midterms we had valuable laws trapped in congressional deadlock. midterm losses weren't nearly as bad as they could have been, but it's still a tighter margin with a deeply-intractable set of republicans -- whose inaction should be emphasized and considered when it comes time to vote
- it's also worth noting that the comparison here is between a party that on average acknowledges racial disparity in policing even if they don't always agree on the approach / align with the leftmost demands on how to address the problem vs a party that on average openly courts cop unions, openly calls protestors rioters and terrorists, frequently denies that racial disparities even exist, and proudly yells "blue lives matter"
- like yeah, the bar is in the ground. but do we want to be in the ground with it or actually trying to get some lift-off?
- comparison also applies to immigration point above tbh i am just disorganized today and didn't write it there
do i still think dems-and-repubs-are-the-same reeks of voter-suppression propaganda? yes, and even more so when the evidence continues to pile up that dem legislatures and leaders at every level are making real progress on issues that we all purport to care about. who benefits when certain types of voters feel like their vote doesn't matter? the people who want to disenfranchise them!
do i still think it's important to contextualize data and question sources and stats? yes!!!!!!!!!! yes!!!! and i know it's not easy and it's time-consuming, but again: who benefits when we don't approach information with a critical mind? not us!
- this doesn't mean we (collectively, as voters, as well as specifically voters on the left) are always going to agree -- but the more we can approach disagreements using the same set of facts, the more we can have a meaningful debate on what can actually be done instead of what is even reality
do i still think it's important to vote? yes yes yes yes yes yes yes
- again i won't get into what could be a long screed here, but we are already seeing what can happen when we get left-leaning politicians into office
- i specify left-leaning as opposed to any specific set of political beliefs because i know there is no such thing as a perfect politician, even putting aside the fact that nobody would be able to agree on what a perfect politician would believe or do
- but incremental progress is still progress -- and voting is as much a form of feedback for legislators as it is a demand, which is to say if you have a democrat who has done things you like? reward them by voting for them again! have they missed some things? call up their office and say "as someone who voted for [x], i'm disappointed by [y]" -- it's MUCH more effective than complaining as a non-voter
- our current political context is also particularly important here -- there are times when it's valuable to have a slimmer margin to keep both parties on their toes. right now however one party is doing everything it can to leap off the deep end and it's more valuable to deliver some security to the party that isn't so it doesn't feel as much of a need to tread carefully and court the mid-right and can take firmer leftward stances
- in other words we have got to stop thinking of politicians as individuals acting on individual preferences. they get elected to represent a set of priorities indicated by voters -- but if a portion of those voters doesn't show up, how are they supposed to prioritize or even know about those people's issues? vibes????
- look, for all the many foibles of the US system, it remains a fact that the right to vote is one of the most powerful tools a citizenry can have
- you actually get to show up and tell your government -- local, state, federal -- whether you're pissed off. and they have to hear it!
- there is a reason status quo groups want to prevent more people from voting -- because it's powerful and they know it! why let them take that power from us?
am i still going to abuse bullet points? yeah
- i'm not sorry about it
- i've made so many slide decks in my life
- i've earned this
- i am sorry i made this post even longer though. sorry to anyone who has 'keep reading' turned off
if we wanna save tumblr we just have to put on the biggest talent show this town’s ever seen
that feeling when you get a brand new story idea, but it literally has no plot yet, just vibes>>
This isnt a joke my favorite piece of writing advice that I’ve ever seen is someone that said if you were stuck with a fic and couldn’t figure out why or what was wrong, your problem is actually usually about ten sentences back. Maybe there was something wonky about the tone or the dialogue or you added something that didn’t fit but it’s usually ten sentences back. And every single time I get stuck in a fic I count back ten sentences and it’s always fucking there
If you write yourself into a corner, back out of the corner.
One of my favorite tropes is character with a nasty toxic personality who tries very hard to do the right thing anyway
I like my protagonists sad, tired, bitter, fully convinced they will never get the recognition they deserve, but they still gotta get up in the morning and be a good person
hello kingdom hearts fandom
I do not go here
but I would like to tell you that this image right here is my favourite thing
several years ago I randomly stumbled across this meme and for some reason it is the funniest thing in the universe to me
so I started a running joke: literally every time I see a picture of Riku anywhere I always say aloud to myself “Riku demands to know why”
every. single. time.
this has been going on for years
I have never played kingdom hearts and I know very little about it
but I think of this image so often
and last night I had a dream where I was watching a video on youtube that had Riku in it. and in my dream. I said. the thing. in my god damn dream I said aloud to myself “Riku demands to know why”
this joke has taken over my brain to the extent that I’ve had a literal dream about it
anyways that’s the post please enjoy your day
when your and your opponents pokemon both use protect in the same turn
