Elon Musk’s attorneys are immolating themselves as we speak

[“Seeing the indigent as wastrels, as the dregs of society, was certainly nothing new. The English had waged a war against the poor, especially vagrants and vagabonds, for generations. A series of laws in the fourteenth century led to a concerted campaign to root out this wretched “mother of all vice.” By the sixteenth century, harsh laws and punishments were fixed in place. Public stocks were built in towns for runaway servants, along with whipping posts and cages variously placed around London. Hot branding irons and ear boring identified this underclass and set them apart as a criminal contingent. An act of 1547 allowed for vagrants to be branded with a V on their breasts and enslaved. While this unusual piece of legislation appears never to have been put into practice, it was nonetheless a natural outgrowth of the widespread vilification of the poor.

By 1584, when Hakluyt drafted his “Discourse of Western Planting,” the poor were routinely being condemned as “thriftless” and “idle,” a diseased and dangerously mobile, unattached people, everywhere running “to and fro over all the realm.” Compared to swarms of insects, labeled as an “over-flowing multitude,” they were imagined in language as an effluvial current, polluting and taxing England’s economic health.

Slums enveloped London. As one observer remarked in 1608, the heavy concentrations of poor created a subterranean colony of dirty and disfigured “monsters” living in “caves.” They were accused of breeding rapidly and infecting the city with a “plague” of poverty, thus figuratively designating unemployment a contagious disease. Distant American colonies were presented as a cure. The poor could be purged. In 1622, the famous poet and clergyman John Donne wrote of Virginia in this fashion, describing the new colony as the nation’s spleen and liver, draining the “ill humours of the body . . . to breed good bloud.” Others used less delicate imagery. American colonies were “emunctories,” excreting human waste from the body politic. The elder Richard Hakluyt unabashedly called the transportable poor the “offals of our people.”

The poor were human waste. Refuse. The sturdy poor, those without physical injuries, elicited outrage over their idleness. But how could vagabonds, who on average migrated some twenty to eighty miles in a month, be called idle? William Harrison, in his popular Description of England (1577), offered an explanation. Idleness was wasted energy. The vagabonds’ constant movement led nowhere. In moving around, they failed (like the Indians) to put down healthy roots and join the settled labor force of servants, tenants, and artisans. Harrison thought of idleness in the same way we might today refer to the idling motor of a car: the motor runs in place; the idle poor were trapped in economic stasis. Waste people, like wastelands, were stagnant; their energy produced nothing of value; they were like festering weeds ruining an idle garden.”]

Nancy Isenberg, White Trash: The 400 Year Untold History Of Class In America

POTS Medication Vocabulary

after about the third time a doctor prescribed a medication that made my POTS drastically worse, and about three doctors visits past giving up on being an easy patient, i started asking my doctors the following questions whenever they prescribed a new long term medication:

is this medication a hypotensive? (will this medication lower my blood pressure?)

does this medication have a risk of tachycardia? (can this medication raise my heart rate?)

is this medication a diuretic? (will this medication dehydrate me?)

can this medication cause hyponatremia? (will this medication cause my body to lose salt?)

your doctor likely doesn’t know all of this off the top of their head for every medication, but they should know the most common adverse reactions. some may simply tell you they have no clue. i still think it’s worth asking to force them to consider these mechanisms.

for additional consideration:

Keep reading

[“…. right from its psychoanalytic beginnings, mental illness was connected to amorality, a legacy that is challenging to distance ourselves from, and amorality was connected to femininity. Although we have come a long way, assumptions about the superiority of rationality persist in our field, at least within Anglo and Western dominant paradigms. For example, the field of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) rests on the assumption that we can literally exercise mind over matter. CBT does view a connection between thoughts, emotions and behaviors but mostly intervenes at the level of thoughts and behaviors, trying to change “distorted thinking” and “maladaptive behaviors.” There is an almost unspoken assumption that “rational” thoughts and behaviors are always morally superior and to be preferred in the field of mental health.

It is no accident, in my opinion, that rational thoughts and behaviors are stereotypically associated with masculinity and, more specifically white and Anglo masculinity. Even though gender seems to be but a minor branch of topical interest in psychology and mental health, gendered assumptions run deep in our field. It’s rare that anyone questions bold assertions, made by mental health providers on a daily basis, on how “men and women work.” Those assumptions are, after all, foundational to many theories and approaches.

Even when gender is not mentioned at all in certain theories, in practice people tend to apply them differently with “male and female” clients. It’s even rarer that the whole premise of two gender is put into question and, when it is, it only seems to pertain to transgender and/or nonbinary people, leaving the main tenets of gendered thinking in dominant culture untouched and unquestioned. Mental health with and for transgender and/or nonbinary people then becomes its own specialist branch, which means the rest of the field can continue undisturbed in their assumptions about men and women, as long as we keep to our turf and don’t shake the cisgenderist foundation of the whole discipline. This too is a colonizing and capitalist approach. If we’re kept separate from one another, we can be better controlled and, most importantly, there can be more specialties, and therefore more certifications and trainings to be sold and bought.

Even in the field of family therapy, where systemic thinking could open a different conversation about gender, all too often we fall back on established stereotypes and pseudoscience about gender as a rigid binary. Yet, I have found that when I can support people in connecting genuinely to gender as a historical, social and cultural construct, a better understanding of one another can emerge across differences that are made to look chasmic by people who are invested in selling solutions specific to “men,” “women,” and “transgender and/or nonbinary people.” Unfortunately the discourse that men are from Mars, women are from Venus and trans people from Transylvania (at least according to The Rocky Horror Picture Show) is familiar to people and, like many other popular discourses, is reproduced effortlessly by providers and researchers who are also brought up within these dominant paradigms.

Sometimes people acknowledge that what they’re working with are issues like toxic masculinity, but they’re reluctant to then broaden the lens to indicate how larger systems support the reproduction of such harmful, colonial binaries. This means that, ironically, while working to dismantle toxic masculinity, they also keep reifying it by framing their work as being with “men” or “boys.” I can understand how the latter is more marketable than the “smash the colonial patriarchy” approach I am proposing in this book but I truly believe that if we don’t start questioning the rigidity of the gender binary altogether, for everyone, we will keep running around in circles to find ourselves in the same places, or maybe just a few inches over to the left.”]

alex iantaffi, from gender trauma: healing cultural, social, and historical gendered trauma, 2020

Ethical Porn

Here is an ongoing list of ethical (feminist, BIPoC, queer) porn sites, pls add in the comments what you love and know:

Imagine you're an actor on Gotham Knights and you're planning to come out for pride month 2k23 and you confide this in human low battery smoke alarm MISHA COLLINS and he proceeds, before you can come out, to vague tweet about how of someone comes out while he's on his "meditation retreat" he's very proud of them and the insane destiel cockles girlies assume this is about human manscaped ad Jensen Ackles and now you can't fucking come out because everyone is going to lose their fucking minds about whether you coming out means jackles is straight and you can't even bitch out Misha because he turned his phone off while he's getting his asshole bleached in Tahoe

every day the supernatural fandom sends emails.

which they do because Misha Collins is committing psychic warfare against them WHAT THE FUCK

this tweet is less than a day old and i can already hear in the hall of the mountain king.

This is where the violins come in.

Okay fuck so for like the entire first part I thought this person was like... Using one of those 3d pens to replace lace in this curtain somehow

Then the next couple I was like "wait are they just like painting the curtains a different color? Were the lace threads just black or something on that other one?"

Then finally it clicked and I freaked the fuck out

EXCUSE ME

Fluffy Faerie - sentient seasonal allergen

2.5"x3.5" ACEO format. Watercolor, white acryla gouache, white gel pen, colored pencil. Original available

Sue Price as the genetically engineered future woman, Alex, in Albert Pyun’s “Nemesis 2″ (1995). 

I think people need to be more comfortable with illegalism and I’m not kidding. Of course the more legal something is, the safer and easier it is to do, but the more people who disregard the law, the harder it is to enforce. There are plenty of laws on the books that people just ignore and are never or rarely policed.

Becoming more comfortable with little illegal activities makes you more comfortable with bigger more important illegal activities. Additionally, it is crucial to build a wall of silence. Nobody talks everybody walks.

People who give out food without a permit, hold a march without a permit, grow a garden without a permit, are more likely to be people you could turn to to work with on preventing an eviction, or keeping people out of cop hands, or helping your friend Jane get crucial healthcare when it’s not legal in your state.

Communities comfortable with these acts won’t call the cops, and then nobody knows that it’s happening.

People have got to shift from both the idea that lawful = good/ illegal = bad, and that the illegality of something means that’s the end of it, and the only fight left is to make it legal again.

keep seeing Temu ads on here so just to share cause idk if people are widely aware

if people wore either but one or the other would have been weird. pick the not weird one

A failure can sometimes lead to unexpected success

happened again where i was reading about cicadas and thought "damn i should get a cicada tattoo" and then glanced down at the part of my arm where i would put a cicada tattoo, which is where my cicada tattoo is

i love u

harry sharing a name with a series of fighter jets and kim wanting to be a pilot is kind of cute it’s sorta like when you get two cats and you name them salt and pepper

also worth mentioning that harrier jets kind of sucked

Myself and my hot butch lesbian Fiancée Gideon at Portals, DIY time travelling dyke night in London

Taken by photographer Jody Evans