Someone said "Are you really so stupid to think that Africa has the same technological advances as us? If they did they would probably have clean water and not live in houses made of sticks and mud. Get over yourself and stop being so ignorant."..... Below is a tiny collection of images of the Africa they refuse to show you..

ches

I’m sorry you’ve been made to believe that the whole of Africa is poor, I really am..

Reblogging for those of you who think Africa is only what the media and movies portrays it to be

This fucks me up because it’s scary to think that we can be showed something all our lives and not even know it’s a lie

And that my friend is the power of propaganda, indoctrination, and media

Are these pictures of South Africa or of Africa as a whole? 

@the-collecting-turnip From top to bottom:

1. Port Elizabeth (South Africa)

2. Unknown

3. Nairobi (Kenya)

4. Pretoria (South Africa)

5. Aburi Botanical Gardens (Ghana)

6. Cape Town (South Africa)

7. Pretoria (South Africa)

8. Harare (Zimbabwe)

9. Windhoek (Namibia)

10. Windhoek (Namibia)

To @kushandwizdom this is a rather unfair portrayal of Africa as a whole since half of these are literally just South Africa.  So Instead to add to this post and better dispel the myth of Africa as the vast wasteland of poverty most people think, I found a much more mixed collection of pics from various countries.

Luanda, Angola

Agadir, Morocco

Lagos, Nigeria

Cairo, Egypt

Port Louis, Mauritius

Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire

Algiers, Algeria

Tripoli, Libya

Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

Tunis, Tunisia

So, there, a much better case demonstrating the various major cities around Africa showing it isn’t some technologically backwards continent, but actually pretty up-and-coming in the world of commerce.

I once was talking to my Ethiopian manager about ignorant people asking her dumb shit about her life before she moved to the states…

the worst story she told me about was when she told a fellow student (at a fairly prestigious university) about a concert she went to back home. The other student responded with “omg you have music there!?” 🤦🏾‍♀️

Rebloging, because we need to see these pictures. 

As for stupid questions: “do you have grocery stores in Ecuador?”

These are great!

A redneck neighbor once asked my mom (in the 80s) if they had cars in Peru. Sigh.

This is the product of poor world history in school & little current affairs coverage outside Western Europe, except for catastrophes, so all we see are the war torn, poverty stricken, disaster-affected parts on the news. And racism, of course.

I bet most Americans who think that African countries are just completely poverty stricken have no idea what the US looks like in its poorest areas, not everywhere in the US is nice suburbs or unrealistically large apartments on tv

Los Angeles, California

Hartford, Connecticut

New Orleans, Louisiana

Camden, New Jersey

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

McDowell County, West Virginia

Flint, Michigan

Washington, D.C.

Do you see the world as it is, or as someone told you it is?

This photoset proves you can make anywhere look great or terrible. It’s all framing and more people should know about that

Worth a reblog. I don’t think the US version was on there when I first reblogged.

me when i have definitely played dnd before

Did this person get their idea of DnD combat from the 3.5 grappling rules?

Love to say “only straight white men can do maths and solve complex puzzles” in more words and claim I am being progressive.

Yall know that “toxic masculinity” refers to expressions of masculinity that are toxic, right? it doesn’t imply that all masculinity is toxic- it’s used to talk about like, how people will repress their emotions aside from anger in order to seem “manly”, and how they might act in violent or self-destructive ways because that is what society expects of men.

masculinity is not inherently toxic. it hasn’t been poisoned or corrupted. it is a neutral concept, a kind of gender presentation, and it doesn’t make you a bad, unhealthy, or toxic person to be masculine.

masculinity does not need to be “soft” to be acceptable, it can just be neutral. because it is not toxic, just sometimes expressed in toxic ways or for toxic reasons.

Does this mean there is toxic femininity?

imo? Yes.

Like when white women fake cry to win arguments, or to appear to be the victim (despite how much damage they may have caused), or when female abusers point to their femininity as a reason they couldn’t possibly be hurting anyone. Or when the girls in school weaponize their performances of femininity against more androgynous, less traditionally attractive, or more masculine girls.

Plenty of cis women have a similarly toxic relationship to femininity as cis men do to masculinity. A good example of a less material expression might be the tendency to self-martyr, using the “caregiver” role to guilt trip and gaslight, and abuse in a more manipulative, emotional/mental way than the physical aggression more typical with toxic masculinity.

The patriarchy rewards gender conformity, and requires cis people of both genders to uphold it. Cis women are at a structural disadvantage to cis men regardless, but can absolutely gain more social power by adhering more strictly to traditional femininity- and weaponize that power against others.

There absolutely is toxic feminity and the fact that this aspect is not discussed frankly worries me, because it perpetues the “men bad, women good (nb people? never heard of them)” mindset which belong to fringes of feminism I’d like to stay the hell away from. 

something we need to talk about more is that toxic masculinity is HARMFUL TO MEN. not just to men as a whole but to the specific men who perform it. IT IS A SELF DESTRUCTIVE BEHAVIOR.

just as toxic femininity centers around self-negation in the form of caregiver-and-sexual-object, toxic masculinity centers around self-negation in the form of beast-of-burden-and-sexual-aggressor. just as women destroy themselves by neglecting their own needs to service others, men destroy themselves by being unable to accept help or input, unable to express emotion, unable to form healthy relationships.

and make no mistake, these toxic gender-linked behaviors are very useful to those in power. i don’t just mean capitalism, btw. capitalism is our bogeyman here on tumblr because that’s currently the boot on our necks, but authoritarian regimes all embrace toxic gender rigidity – communist and monarchist and theocratic ones as well. when people are at war with themselves and their families, they can’t unite against their overlords.

authoritarian regimes foster rigid social divides because authoritarianism relies on people accepting a steep and violently-enforced hierarchy as ‘natural’… which it really isn’t. people have to be traumatized into accepting it. imposing rigid and self-destructive gender norms is one of the first ways we get kids to accept that hierarchical violence, domination, and coercion is natural and even admirable thing for people to do to each other.

men and women are more similar than they are different. but neither incels nor terfs can accept this notion, and they similarly don’t understand how men and women can peacefully, constructively, and cooperatively share a common cause. so not only can they not work together, they can’t even live together.

the end point of both toxic masculinity and toxic femininity is powerlessness, isolation, then death. accepting that men and women are much healthier when they’re free to adopt traits, interests, causes, and characteristics from across an entire gender spectrum, rather than having squeeze themselves into only one of two boxes.

fun fact! the producer of shrek based Lord Farquaad on his evil former boss, the CEO of disney, Michael Eisner. They even look the fucking same

in real life Eisner is pretty tall. on the other hand, the shrek producer, Jeffrey Katzenberg, is quite short . Eisner, being an asshole, once infamously said of Katenzberg, “I think I hate that little midget.” 

so 5′0″ Katzenberg went and turned his asshole boss into a little person named Lord Fuckwad

yeah

They’re giant robots, bro. Uncomfortably eroticised body horror is one of the pillars of the genre.

Uhhhh..... heads up Amazon device users, I guess????

Happy Pride!

Every pride, you must reblog this. No exceptions

Cat Pen Mumurka

I keep meaning to post about Marvel #5 because I don’t think a lot of other people read it, and I’ve had these screencaps on my desktop for a month, so here we go.

Marvel #5 is not to be confused with The Marvels #5 (which hasn’t been released yet) or Marvels #5 (which does not exist because it only went up through #4). Marvel #5 here was the last issue of an anthology series that came out relatively recently, and one of the stories it contained, “The Best of Us,” by Adam Hughes, was about Nick Fury reminiscing about Steve in 1945 after his death.

Right. So it’s Berlin, May 1945, and Nick Fury is regaling some unseen German with war stories. He is also, and this is relevant, Completely Wasted:

Anyway, Fury decides he would like to tell this random German about one guy he served with who meant a lot to him:

Yep. Cat Pen Mumurka. He’s my favorite too.

Anyway, Fury initially thought Cap here was a weirdo, because, I mean, the outfit, can you blame him:

And then we get a flashback of Steve in battle:

There’s also a great page of Fury reminiscing about the Invaders, with some more nice art:

He says a lot more nice things about Steve. He is still very drunk. And maudlin! Cap is gone! For good!

And then we finally pull back and get a response from the mysterious stranger whom Fury has been talking to, dramatically revealing:

A small German child who has not understood a single word he’s been saying! Whom he has probably bribed with that chocolate bar!

He then goes outside and vomits on a portrait of Hitler, because why not, I guess:

And then he sits there and keeps drinking. The end.

Comics are great. I love Cat Pen Mumurka.

my best OC is Brad Wayne, Bruce’s illegitimate biological child via a totally normal woman he had a fling with when he was younger and didn’t stay in touch with

Brad grew up a totally normal kid, went to college, joined a frat, and decided to get in touch with Bruce, who now has an awkward situation on his hands

now the other Batkids have to deal with fucking Brad Wayne, whose normalacy is absolutely insufferable... he tells Dick to try yoga and suggests that Tim will sleep better if he gets more exercise... Bruce goes out of town and Brad decides it’s time to throw a house party with his frat friends

he’s so good

All of Brad’s Bat-siblings are absolutely unprepared to deal with him. They can’t handle it. They can’t even hate him properly, even Damien, because he’s just... he’s not even... he’s just Some Guy™️!

They’re all braced for the inevitable reveal that he’s a villain, an imposter, or an interloper there to usurp the Wayne fortune or spy on Batman. They have all sorts of plans to foil his schemes and the only thing they’re not able to prepare for is the fact that he’s just. Brad. He’s not a bad guy, but he’s not a saint, either—his problems are just so mundane, so ordinary.

They TRY to understand what his life is like, but how are they supposed to relate to someone who doesn’t text back because he’s hungover or his phone died, not because he’s tied up in a death trap somewhere being menaced by someone in a Halloween costume?

No one’s ever tried to ritually sacrifice him before and it shows.

Does he know they are the batfam? Or does he just think it is so cool that his dad has adopted all these kids that needed a home?

Oh he has no idea. Brad didn’t grow up in Gotham and isn’t really familiar with its culture, so he thinks it’s an ordinary city with ordinary problems (presumably there’s still a concept of ‘ordinary’ in the DCU).

When someone tries to tell him he laughs it off. Maybe one of his friends asks him about the popular rumor that Bruce Wayne is Batman, but he’s never even contemplated the possibility. Later he’s trying to coax Dick into playing beer pong and loudly tells the story to party guests as a funny anecdote. He thinks the whole concept of Batman is hilarious. Maybe he makes up stories about seeing Batman to impress his family and make himself sound cool.

Eventually though some bad guy who wants a huge ransom is going to kidnap Brad. What happens then? Does Batman call in a favor to one of the other members of the Justice League or does Damien go out and rescue his brother and tell him he’s the most useless of all his brothers because he’s so ordinary? Because you know if anyone is going to blab it’s going to be Damien.

Brad gets kidnapped and Steph and/or Cass rescue him in costume.

Later, in Wayne Manor, he tells his family all about how the Batgirls were totally flirting with him and how he managed to take out a few of the bad guys all by himself.

Brad Wayne: “Hey, do you guys think Batman fucks? Like, you think he has ever gotten laid?”

Dick, stiffly: “Um. Yes. I think so.”

Brad: “Really? Guy sounds like a turbo-virgin to me. I mean, he fights crime in a fursuit! Come on!”

Tim: “I have it on reasonable authority that Batman fucks. Unfortunately.”

Steph: “Hey, Damian. Penny for your thoughts?”

Frat Kid Brad Wayne

Brad: “Bro do you remember what Robin used to wear, back when we were kids? With like, those little feathery booty shorts?”

Dick: “Scaled. Not feathery. He wore an armored leotard.”

Brad: “Nah, man, they were totally feathery! ‘Cause robins have feathers. I never really understood that—why would Batman’s sidekick be themed after a songbird? Robins aren’t scary. They don’t fight crime, and they don’t come out at night. Why not ‘Batboy’ or ‘Owlkid’ or something?”

Dick: “I’m pretty sure Robin’s schtick was based off Robin Hood the outlaw, not the bird. That’s why he wore green, and had a uniform cleverly blending medieval costumery with, uh, acrobatic attire.”

Brad: “Whatever. I’m just saying, it was weird.”

Dick: “Not really? Look up classic strongman costumes and historical illustrations of Robin Hood. Or Google Jules Leotard.”

Brad: “But the bare legs! The pixie boots! Why would Batman let him wear that? It’s creepy.”

Dick: “It wasn’t! Look. It was a different time. In context, that costume was obviously heroic. Besides, he was a little kid. I’m sure he’d wear something different now.”

Jason: “Yeah, but didn’t he keep wearing the short pants until he was old enough to vote? I’m pretty sure I remember that Robin wearing the pixie boots through college... he must have spent a fortune getting his legs waxed. I think I’d die before I’d do that.”

Dick: “This is Gotham. People do weirder things all the time.”

Brad: “Haven’t there been a lot of Robins? What happens to them? Do they die and Batman just hopes no one will notice when they’re replaced?”

Dick: “I—”

Jason: “I think that’s exactly what happens. He’s probably got a whole cellar full of dead Robins.”

What do you think would happen when he saw Jason's gun collection? Cause Brad would at some point want to see where his adult siblings live and Jason probably just leaves his guns on whatever surface is clean. I wouldn't be surprised if there's one in the fridge from when he went to get a beer last night. And Brad already suspicious just opens up the fridge and there's a loaded gun and maybe a granade just staring at him when he goes to grab Jason a beer.

Honestly? I doubt he’d think much of it. He’d probably assume Jason was some kind of stockpiler with an extreme paranoid political bent, which are all too common, and suggest that he get a gun locker or twenty for safety—imagine if Damian were to come over, and there were unsecured guns, just think! You hear sad stories about little kids finding guns and playing with them all the time.

"Look, bro, I'm all for your second amendment rights. My LB in TKE wound up leading the campus conservative club, and we still hang. But, like, I worry about Damien and Tim, y'know? Shit happens when kids clown around."

Brad is my new favorite batkid everyone else can leave.

Brad, wandering out of the shower: “Wassup, T-man? You lose a fight to poison ivy or something?”

Tim, frozen in surprise: “H-how did... how did you know?”

Brad: “I’d know those blisters anywhere! My roommate freshman year had to go on steroids, he got it so bad. All over his ass. Almost got him kicked off the team ‘cause no one believed him until he dropped trou right on the field. Ever tried Tecnu Gel?”

But does the Tecnu Gel help tim? Does brad have seemingly random health items in his medicine chest bc "you never know what might happen to you?" have his frat bros gotten hurt doing stupid things and did those events lead brad to be like "I got a splint and some Advil in my car hang tight!" @glumshoe

I want to say yes just because the idea of Tecnu being useful against supervillains is very funny to me.

I imagine Brad is very familiar with sports injuries and alcohol poisoning, in ways that actually prove helpful to the Bat clan with surprising regularity. Maybe one of the guys gets the shit beaten out of him and tries to hide it, but Brad notices how stiff he is and is like, “I got you bro! Sit down, I’ll rub your back. No homo. I mean, unless you’re gay, that’s cool too, I mean hell, I’ve fooled around a bit with the team and I think I might be bi, but you’re still my bro even if you’re adopted, so nah. Haha damn dude, your shoulders are gnarly. You gotta stretch that shit!”

Also I just like the idea of him referring to The Joker as “Pennywise” by mistake.

Fratman.

This is about Sci-Hub. yeah we get it.. gatekeep knowledge and protect the interests of capital…

Listen, this is serious.

Do not use the website called Sci-Hub!

It lets people access scientific articles for free. This is dangerous. It helps the free flow of knowledge and reduces the competitive edge of all the people who worked really hard to have been born into a wealth.

Like, it’s literally a website where you can type in the DOI of an article and read it, without ever having to pay the publisher who exploited the author.

So, again, do not, under any circumstance, use Sci-Hub. I mean, can you imagine a world where knowledge is free and easily accessible to everyone? Even, y'know, poor people?

Libgen also has many books online, including textbooks, searchable by name, author, and ISBN. Can you imagine textbook companies not getting their hard-earned income from poor college students? Here is the link just so you make sure that you never accidentally stumble across this horrible, unethical website.

Oh, and while we’re talking about books, if you’ve managed to stay clear from Libgen, definitely don’t go to zlibrary, where you can also find a lot of textbooks, but unfortunately they’re completely free.

This is the link from the video. It’s important that we try to take action. Don’t buy chocolate that may be connected with slavery. In the link there’s also information about slavery free chocolate.

https://iradvocates.carrd.co

On chocolate, coffee, tea, other products coming from the global south: if you can afford it, buy only products with some kind of a certificate that demonstrates the product has been ethically produced (and this has been verified by an outside agency), such as the Fairtrade, UTZ or Rainforest Alliance certificate.

But also beware that some producers have made up their own certificates, with no outside oversight. These essentially fake certificates include Cocoa Life, the certificate invented by Mondelez – one of the companies listed behind the link for using slave labour, who stopped using Rainforest Alliance certified cocoa and switched to their own certificate instead.

here’s a list of companies who use fair trade chocolate:

and a list of companies who knowingly use slave labor to make their chocolate:

sources: 1, 2, 3, 4

Ian McKellen  says that all gay people should be trans allies

Sir Ian McKellen urges gay people to be better allies to the transgender community.

The legendary actor and Stonewall co-founder joined It’s a Sin star Olly Alexander for a special LGBT+ History Month talk on TikTok on February 25, Pink News reports. 

Sir Ian said: 

This is not the first time the actor has stood up to transphobes. 

Speaking to lifestyle magazine Attitude, the veteran star talked about how happy he was about Elliot Page coming out as transgender. 

He felt “so disappointed” with himself for not recognizing the struggles that the then-teenage actor could have been facing when they worked together.

The actor talked about why it is important to be honest with oneself.

Top photo from The Talks.

1. KING SHIT

2. yes

3.”common or garden gay”

I was just a little bit too old to really get into it by the US release of the first Harry Potter book, so I never read those books until quite recently (2016) and I was really surprised when I finally read them. I thought Harry Potter was supposed to be like, this model for nerds and outcasts, but instead he’s a dumb jock who’s famous for being famous. And he wants to be a cop (which is at least consistent). There’s something really off-putting and mean about it. It’s “ethically mean spirited” as Ursula Le Guin remarked when asked her impressions of the series, and a better writer might have been able to take that and Say Something about the hierarchy of life as teenage, but JKR is just not able to think through the implications of anything she writes whether that’s the antisemitic implications of goblin bankers, why Dumbledore sent Harry back to his horrible family instead of placing an anonymous tip to muggle child protective services, or why Harry Potter’s shit for brains attitude is always, always rewarded and what that tells her more impressionable audience. Five years ago, I couldn’t figure it, but with what we’ve learned about JKR’s politics in the mean time, it makes perfect sense.

It’s not just that Harry isn’t particularly bright that’s troubling, but the fact that he treats his friend who isn’t a dullard as a pain in the ass, except for when he needs to exploit her book smarts for something because he didn’t fucking study. He’s the kid who doesn’t do the reading, acts disengaged through most of the class, but then when the big test comes around he’s cribbing off whatever sap is willing to put up with his shit, whether due to insecurity or pity or some combination of the two.

For all the faults in her writing on a structural level, JKR has a very specific world view that comes across very clearly without making it superliminal a la Ayn Rand.  Fundamentally, her world view is shaped by being a lower middle class Briton who resented the class system while also idolizing it. It’s the Chris Hitchens disease (not the one that killed him, the other one). She hates power and is fascinated by power. A very fraught relationship. So instead of making Harry this special boy who upsets the order of the Wizarding World with his otherness, his arrival is actually celebrated and makes him an instant sensation because it represents a return of normality and order. She wants to make him a rebel, but she can’t actually have him challenge power in any way because power is constantly valorized in these books. His biggest ally is the headmaster of his exclusive private school (or would it be a public school in British vernacular?). So instead she makes him a cut-up and a delinquent who’s misbehavior is constantly hand-waved by everyone, except the one hard-ass professor who absolutely has Harry pegged except that professor happens to be a former Nazi so we can’t really sympathize with him, no can we? The whole thing is a fantasy for suffering lower middle class British kids who dream of secretly having a peerage even as they resent the class system for all the opportunities it’s denied them and doors its slammed in their face. It’s an extremely British point of view and it’s not really surprising most American readers are oblivious to it, but at the same time it’s weird that more critics haven’t pointed it out.  This point of view perfectly unites the three main political causes Rowling has taken up: empire fetishism, austerity politics, and TERFism, all hallmarks of middle class British social climbers. Rowling has of course made it long ago, made it far further up the ladder than Hitchens ever did, and is fantastically wealthy beyond the dreams of many of the peers she once might have envied (and maybe still does). Still, the basic grubby insecurity of the class position she lived in for years before her big break remains, which explains a lot about how she sees higher taxes as some kind of personal affront, above and beyond what even many rich people born into money would see them as. 

HOLY SHIT SIGNAL BOOST

SIGNAL BOOST THIS

REDDIT FOR GOOD!

This is actually true and could make a difference

Holy shit.

trans guy: i feel dysphoric cis ally: ur literally the handsomest manly dude guy bro dude man i ever seen before in my life my guy dude! just because you’re biologically a woman doesnt mean you aren’t super manly and handsome!! honestly wow your jawline is so sharp cut me with your jaw daddy father sir

for cis people asking what they should say, here’s a few suggestions:

- don’t overdo it (the reason why this example is Bad is because the cis person overuses all these masculine words and it’s too extreme).

- don’t say anything about how he is ‘biologically a woman’. never mention that to a trans person. ever.

- don’t shower him with compliments. yes, one or two might be good, but he isn’t asking you to confirm that he looks male (most of the time).

- do show sympathy. tell him you’re sorry that he feels that way and try to comfort him if you can (and if you try to comfort him, refer to the points above this one so you don’t do anything wrong).

- do ask if you can help. if he says that you can’t, leave him alone till he’s feeling better (or maybe try to cheer him up by changing the subject).

- do tell him you’re there for him, if all else fails. if anything, you can make him feel better by reminding him that he has a friend.

I really like this post because it’s honestly really helpful and doesn’t shit on cis people for being ignorant in this situation.

This is some real shit. I have some cis guy friends who react with “you’re so manly and check out that beard and blah blah blah” and while I appreciate they are trying to help…. it’s also not helping. Those tips though are very much on point. Do those things. Especially asking if you can help in any way. 

Thank you for not throwing shit at us and actually telling people what they CAN do.

And also check yourself and make sure you’re not being condescending. Transmasc people deal wit being infantilized all the time and it’s infuriating.

Send this as a response when people message you memes (maximum effect: Transformers memes)

it's 2022. donald trump has died in disgrace days after being impeached and jailed. my chemical romance's new album is coming out the same day as the new spiderverse movie. the lizzo and janelle monaé collab song is blowing up the radio. lil nas x has a verse in it. you and your partner have time and energy for dates after work after jeff bezos' assets have been seized and distributed to the public in the wake of his arrest for keeping employees in unsafe working conditions.

oh what a life

Like to charge, reblog to cast.

Everyone has been vaccinated for free and the virus hasn’t caused a single death in months.

Those dates you go on with your partner? They’re in public. Unmasked. Your server smiles at you. Everyone feels safe.

You can hug your friends.

You can see a movie. The people in the movie are gay people of color and they kiss and live happily ever after.

And so will you.

LIKE TO CHARGE, REBLOG TO CAST

Or do both for twice the punch!

hey girl uhhhh did you know that

blobbyland

In case you are unaware

Crinkley Bottom, aka Blobbyland, is an abandoned theme park in Lancashire dedicated to this beloved abomination

Blobbyland, uhhhh. It isn't so much a theme park as like a themed....park? idk what you call them. like no rides to speak of it's just a collection of concrete shells of houses where Mr Blobby mascot characters are meant to walk around and interact with guests

Here are some fun and entirely true Blobbyland facts