sad but true.

Negating men’s violence is the power of patriarchy.

ty for stealing this one much appreciated

people in the notes suggesting it was "improper" for the juror to do this or that it "introduced bias" to the court proceeding 🙄 the ice agent in question accused a moc of assaulting him / resisting arrest. how is the agent being a white supremacist not relevant. what universe are you living in

As a member of the world’s SECOND oldest profession, I assure you this is just one of many ways the justice system is systematically fucked up.

For anyone who wants to know how to fact check something you are told while on jury duty without getting fined:

First, you need to understand that the rule that jurors can’t just google things is coming from a good place. Like imagine that you are on a jury that’s considering, say, a medical malpractice lawsuit and one of your fellow jurors comes into the jury room and says to you, “I think the victim’s expert was lying because WebMD totally contradicts everything they said.”

And you might be like, “But WebMD is notoriously unreliable website and the expert you’re talking about is a researcher from Mayo Clinic.” But this person cannot be swayed.

Like, we can all agree that would be bad.

So even though these rules can contribute to unjust outcomes as in the case above (and seriously, the fact that the defense attorney didn’t fact check that is probably grounds for legal malpractice), they also prevent jurors from just looking up bullshit online and taking it more seriously than the actual experts the court has put on. And I think in the era of anti-vaxxers/QAnon/COVID denial/etc., we can all understand why it’s a bad idea to trust that people can tell fact from bullshit online.

So in light of this, how do you as a juror fact check something?

The key here is that you have to ask the court for information. Jurors can ask questions of the court during deliberations, so if something you said sounds off to you, you can ask for more information.

The key term you want to use here is “credibility.”

The job of a jury is to decide what are called “questions of fact.” Long before the trial even starts, lawyers will have hashed out all the “questions of law” --- like, what the statute of limitations is; what laws, exactly, were allegedly broken; whether the court you’re in even has jurisdiction; stuff like that. Jurors are responsible for deciding which side’s version of the facts has more credibility.

For instance, if the prosecution’s witness says X and the defense’s witness says Y, the jury is responsible for deciding which is true, X or Y. And you do this by weighing which one is more credible.

So in this case, if the juror had known to, he could have told the judge, “In order to properly assess the ICE agent’s credibility, I need more information about his tattoo. I have doubts about whether he was telling the truth about it, which would impact how credible I would find his testimony. Can the agent please provide evidence that it really is what he says it is?”

There are a lot of problems with our legal system, and I think one of the biggest is that jurors aren’t educated about what they can and can’t do. Juries have a lot of power, if (and only if) they know how to use it.

Reblogging for that last post, because frankly, “what to do as a juror” is one of those things the schools should really be teaching us. Serving on a jury is one of the most powerful rights of citizenship and everyone should be educated in how to exercise it correctly.

All women are forced to live under an arbitrary and unfair system which sorts us into the categories of “Fuckable” and “Worthless.” The solution to this is NOT to expand the definition of “Fuckable.”

intuitive eating principles,#8

8. respect your body

respect your body. this is everything. 

i’ve been blogging on the many facets of body respect for years and will not be able to cover them all in one post. but very basically, body respect means:

respecting your body means practicing interoception, living from the inside out, learning to attend to the body’s cues, from hunger to gut instincts, rather than imposing rigid, external, culturally determined rules on, to borrow mary oliver’s phrase, the soft animal of your body. it’s not treating or speaking about your body any worse than you would the body of a friend or a child or a pet–your body is as valuable as theirs. body respect does not require the presence of “positivity,” but it does require the absence of cruelty. 

respecting your body means caring for the body you have today, not punishing it for the sake of a future fantasy. it means honoring your health by determining what behaviors are available to and appropriate for you, and to what degree. it means reckoning compassionately with limitations, cultivating boundaries. it’s learning to collaborate with the body in the pursuit of meaning and self actualization, instead of treating the body as an obstacle to those things. it doesn’t mean never changing the body in any way, but it does mean distinguishing between alterations which can improve quality of life (e.g. transition) and those which, in the long term, cannot (e.g. intentional weight loss).

body respect is wearing clothes that aren’t painful, physically or emotionally. it’s affirming the total okay-ness of your bare face, even if cosmetics are sometimes needed for practical or creative purposes. it’s unlearning messages that body hair is undesirable; it’s decolonizing your beauty standards, defining the idea of beauty for yourself and deciding what place that idea has in your life. it’s exploring the possibilities of ugliness. body respect is highly political.

sometimes the best body-care practices are not within our power to access, and sometimes they are. in the former case, body respect is remembering what our bodies do deserve, and holding the injustice the body suffers with compassion. it’s appropriately externalizing blame for those injustices (which are structural), not turning blame inward toward the body.

respecting your body is a lifelong process. the more you practice it, the better attuned you will be to the needs of the moment and the long term, from responding to hunger to choosing relationships to coping with inevitable illnesses. your body is your companion; your body is you. all of you deserves respect.

A brilliant metaphor.

Follow Ramona Flour on twitter @RamonaFlour

I understand not letting kids quit classes/sports/whatever to teach them to follow through with commitments and not quit everything when they have one bad practice/project/etc but I think parents need to be very flexible on this rule.

Wanting to quit something because you’re in a bad mood or you have a spat with one of the other kids is completely different from wanting to stop doing something because you genuinely do not enjoy it, or because you are being torture and abused by the other kids. It is important for parents to be able to recognize the difference, or they can cause lasting damage/trauma for their children.

It’s fine as a guideline for teaching commitment and perseverance to your children but you do not want to be teaching your child they need to do things they hate to make others happy, or stick with something that doesn’t make them happy/harms them or they will be a ‘quitter’ or a failure.

“makeup is an art/a form of self-expression” totally falls apart when you see the way women are mocked when they go off-trend

“the woman who chooses not to wear cosmetics at all faces sanctions of a sort that will never be applied to someone who chooses not to paint a watercolor” (Bartky, 1998, p. 33)

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen

Image text:

— Why Do Teen Magazines Idealize Underage Girls Dating Adult Men?

— Joe Biden’s Last Campaign

There really are not words strong enough to describe the absolute lack of any logical foundation, or consideration for any person or any issue inherent in the idea of not voting because you “hate Joe Biden” or because you’ve suddenly become a one issue voter and haven’t bothered to develop a real understanding of the one issue that is allegedly animating you. 

This is a binary choice, one of these two candidates is going to win, one of them isn’t perfection, the other is a completely corrupt asshole who wants me to die, and since this is the queer trans disabled monsterfucker website, if you are reading this, he almost certainly wants you to die too.

Act like it.

a lot of tumblrs indoctrinated into microcult groupthink factions like liberal vs left, trans vs terfs, hipster vs fandom, and other bs are all so desperate to be involved with epistemological bubbles because they otherwise have no access to knowledge or any actual social experiences, like if they ever stepped out of line with their cult frameworks they would be completely cut off immediately and have absolutely no one to speak to. with no friends, family, career, networks, or even any real social media tumblr IS their whole "life" so having original thoughts without adhering to the group consensus is something "life" threatening, etc

the amount of times I've gotten asks and ims saying "I'm afraid to agree with you publicly" and it was just a mild observation on some regular quotidian shit. Honey, you are wasting your young adulthood being groomed into an internet cult that will give you absolutely nothing

Man it really tickles me how many years women were banned from fighting in the military and now men are turning around and blaming the fact that only men have to register for the draft on feminists

Like??? Buddy…

You’re never gonna believe who set that system up

I can’t believe there are people out there who just like…… don’t care about the welfare of others. Completely unaffected by the knowledge that people are out there suffering. Don’t give a shit that there are children who will be hungry and starved because of their choices. Unbothered that there are people who won’t be able to afford medicine because of their choices. People will die and people will suffer horribly. How can they just not care?????? Or even support those choices?????? I cannot wrap my mind around how it is even possible.

there is no magic "the new generation will be more progressive as the old one dies" btw history has only had things get better because of people who didn't act like it was inevitable and acted like things needed to get better here and now and that will always be true

there was a whole generation of boomers who fought for a better world, not as many of them survived as the ones who shaped a worse one. generation warfare is not real. they are not , and have never been your enemy for simply being born before you, and as you get older the youth will not be yours because the enemy has always been the ones holding power and abusing it

“if you’re worried that you’re a bad person, don’t be! bad people don’t worry that they’re bad” <- seeing this a lot lately and i find it so goofy lol. it’s always a waste of time to categorize anyone as an essentially good/bad person but also like. you can be a “good” person who agonizes over their choices and still end up making choices that are careless or cowardly or even deliberately harmful. the act of worrying doesn’t absolve you of shit bro

imo it is one more thing in a long line of this site setting people with anxiety up for failure. there's an obsession with treating the symptom rather than the cause and just making blatant sweeping statements to assuage fears. "don't worry the cashier isn't judging you they have better things to do!!! don't feel anxious!!!" instead of "a cashier might judge you and you shouldn't care because a stranger's opinion on your groceries should not impact your self-esteem". pack it up class i'm assigning you all introspection on patching together your own fragile nerves instead of relying on the quick bandaids of ignorance and absolution

what's wild is already in the notes of this post some people are trying to argue that anxiety or worrying about "being bad" is in itself inherently harmful.

people need to stop attempting to flip mental illness symptoms back and forth in discourse from Inherently Morally Good to Inherently Morally Bad. symptoms are not moral. someone with an anxiety disorder or OCD or certain manifestations of PTSD or personality disorders or other trauma-caused disorders that cause rumination and intrusive thoughts relating to one's moral worth or goodness etc. is not inherently good OR bad for having these symptoms. they are literally just a person experiencing a symptom. everyone constantly trying to argue over whether experiencing the emotions of worry/shame/guilt is an inherent virtue or an inherent evil is literally one of the reasons these symptoms develop.

someone's emotions are not a moral issue. emotions are not actions. there is no emotion you can feel that makes you a good or bad person. your emotions do not hurt or help people. your actions do. please understand this.

My coworkers complain when we can’t assign homework over Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. As if somehow this interferes with their ability to teach their classes.

My coworkers complain that our Muslim students get to leave class to pray Salat at noon. Like, we have maybe one Muslim student every two or three years - thus far, all extraordinarily respectful and lovely kids! - and they slip quietly out of class to pray.

My coworkers find all this infuriating. “Imagine,” they cry, “If a Christian kid asked to do that.”

I calmly explain, every single time, that a Christian kid would never HAVE to do that, because every single Christian holy day is a day off school. Good Friday. Easter Sunday. Christmas day. Our entire country interrupts its financial and educational systems - schedules its WEEKS - around the Christian prayer customs and seasons.

God forbid we temporarily unclip the rope barrier and leave an opening for someone whose religious traditions vary from our own.

"In a bar, the cool blokes wear t-shirts and jeans, perhaps even with a casually unbuttoned shirt or jacket. Women are expected to wear as little as possible.

The skin gap, coined by Allison Josephs of social media non-profit, Jew in the City, is the difference in the amount of skin men and women are expected to show in the same social setting."

I think for a lot of white people, when you call them out on their casual racism (microagressions and non-overt things), they see it as a case of hurt feelings from your point of view as opposed to a discussion of harmful practices that aid the vehicle of racism. So in response, they take it as a personal attack, rather than a learning experience, and go on the defensive by bringing up a time that you made them upset as leverage. Or they defend their actions by doubling down on the behavior at hand and dismissing your criticism as over sensitivity and emphasizing their “harmless” intent. And I think that is one of the reasons why it’s so hard to address casual and interpersonal racism with the general white population (and also other poc tbh).

This whole obsession with wheelchair users struggling on foot down the aisle at their wedding or across the stage for graduation is 100% powered by ableism.

“The heartwarming story of how one woman worked for 8 months straight so she could escape the horror that is being in wheelchair for a few short minutes to struggle slowly and painfully down the aisle on her special day.”

“the horror that is being in a wheelchair” bitch it’s hella better than struggling slowly & painfully down the aisle ffs

“Despite being permanently paralyzed, her one goal since her accident has been to walk across the stage for graduation. The whole crowd gave her a standing ovation and broke into tears when she dragged her paralyzed legs across the stage with the help of leg braces and a walker to collect her diploma, after which she immediately sat back down in her wheelchair, which she will use to move around for the rest of her life.”

How the hell is this an inspirational story? This person needs better goals. And a therapist.

They’re toxic in an even greater way because as a disabled person, I didn’t realise till I was reading this how much I had internalised that. I genuinely have had feelings of fear and shame about using a chair or a walker if I get married. And why? Because I’m constantly seeing “heartwarming” stories about disabled people who shed their mobility aids for that moment. Why the hell am I afraid of using them to get married? Anyone who marries me or attends the wedding will know I need them and love me regardless.

Bless this post for making me realise I’d internalised that shit.

These types of stories teach people, both abled and disabled, that using mobility aids, especially wheelchairs, is inferior.

here are some beautiful brides in chairs with dresses they ROCK. I know a lot of disabled ppl with internalized ableism think they “won’t look good” if they use their chair, but here’s some literally gorgeous gals for ur consideration

(that last ones cute as fuck and i teared up at it)

Who needs a bouquet when you can be a bouquet?

I made my addition to this post in June 2019. Its now January 2020 and I no longer feel guilty about the idea of going down the aisle one day with mobility aids.

God bless the disabled community, y'all saved me from some internalised bullshit

This post floated by a few months ago, and I remember something to effect of there’s a difference between recovery and refusal. That is, like, I have a friend that suffered an incomplete spinal cord injury. He can walk again now, and I don’t think I’ve seen him use his chair in a few years. When he walked at his graduation, it was to show off his recovery. That he wasn’t quite ready to go through a full day upright, but he could walk across a stage, unassisted, and soon he would be able to do that every day. There’s also a difference in someone like me choosing to not use a mobility aid. My mobility is intensely fluid, especially seasonally. So, I would plan a summer wedding. And while I love my cane it can also be the biggest pain in my ass, so I’d want to just go unassisted. But that’s normal for me, at least right now. I can walk without an aid during about half of the year. It’s reasonable to assume I can make it through one day without it. All of that is different than someone that is fully and permanently paralyzed, that will never walk again, dragging themselves along because they feel that’s somehow better. Overall though, my biggest takeaway is fuck the media. Because disabled people should be able to make whatever decision they want without the media turning it into this grand inspirational story.

Disabled people should be able to make whatever decision they want without the media turning it into this grand inspirational story.

THIS.

Couldn’t pass up the opportunity to add my disabled joy to this post. Look at this love!

Taking the opportunity to add these photos of Jessica Kellgren-Fozard and her wife Claudia, from this twitter post. Jessica also has a youtube channel that’s primarily about disability and chronic illness and LGBT stuff (it’s amazing!) 

I would also like to personally share, Annika Victoria who ALSO has a youtube channel. This photo was taken from her instagram - she made her wedding dress dress herself, BY HAND. Her youtube channel is mostly DIY fashion and sewing tutorials. I love her so much, she’s so unapologetically herself and informative

I also wanna add these pictures of Ade Adepitan fucking rocking this badass suit at his wedding! Give my fellow disabled mascs some love too

look how much fun they’re both having! yes!

and also this couple, who are both wheelchair users

this is from their beautifully coordinated wedding!

This parts so important to me; I’m disabled tho not in a chair—sometimes I feel like there’s no disabled masc people at all, at least on tumblr.

My partner and I are both masc non-binary physically disabled people!! This is really nice to see <3