I was reading something about Whitestown, Indiana and my eyes nearly popped out of my head thinking it was one of THOSE comically racist towns. Nice to know, at least the name, wasn’t that.
Racisttown, named after the abolitionist Stopbeing Racist,
That’s nothing. Check THIS shit out
WHAT THE HELL
George Washington Hitler and his son Dr. Gay Hitler,
I think sometimes people forget that the gov is the corporations’ bitch, not the other way round.
I really hate this shitty ‘doom-and-gloom/everyone’s corrupt/there will never justice’ mindset.
According to L.A. City Controller Kenneth Mejia, they fined Universal as much as they possibly could as permitted by law, but “outdated laws limit fine amounts and aren’t equitable across offenders, especially big corporations.” [X]
The problem is how the laws are written, which can be amended.
This isn’t the fault of some deep corruption in the LA government that had them taking money under the table to avoid fining Universal or something.
additionally! it kept the strikes in the public conscious! in a way that was favorable to the strikers, even! a way to keep people angry and morale higher without anyone dying! obviously the fine was disappointingly small but it isnt like $250 is the only consequence
Most of the uranium used to build the atomic bombs were mined in Shinkolobwe in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The Congolese people had to work in the uranium mines without protection. Exposure to uraniun could result in negative health impacts such as: renal failure, decreased bone formation, cancer, issues with fertility etc. The labor of the Congolese people for the Manhatten Project were kept secret until recently, and still no research has been conducted on the long-term consequences of uranium intake in the people at the extraction site in the Congo.
And this is why the narrative surrounding Oppenheimer (the man himself and the film) makes me angry. The atomic bombs are a product of colonialism. It was a bomb funded by a settler colony (USA), it’s materials are dug from a colony (DRC) by colonized people (the Congolese) and tested on colonized lands (Hispanic village of Tularosa and Mescalero Apache Reservation). But, the narrative that always gets perpetuated is of the tragedy of a brillant White man and his deadly creation, the many Black and Brown people who became collateral damage of the creation are always erased. And it says A LOT about whose labor and pain matters.
Gender reveal parties, and big planned reveals, literally were not a thing ten, fifteen years ago. Don’t let anyone pull that “it’s a tradition!” crap on you, youngsters. They’re LYING. People would either get the ultrasound or not to find out about the genitals, and tell people or not. That was that.
The fuss over “revealing” a baby’s gender in utero stinks of pushback against the shift toward a more nuanced understanding of gender. I mean yeah part of it is social media, and trends catching on, but don’t think for a minute this isn’t part of some regressive attitudes creeping into the mainstream with a cute (blue or pink) bow on it.
Even the woman who helped popularize gender reveal parties is like…slow your roll, fam.
She only had a gender reveal party because it was her first pregnancy that made it to a gender pregnancy scan. All her others had been miscarriages. She was only celebrating a pregnancy milestone!
ngl, this song slaps way harder than it has any earthly right to
Story time: When I was at university in Japan I lived in an international dorm with all of the other foreign exchange students, and my best friend at the uni was a French girl who lived directly across the hall from me. Nausicaa, and we taught each other slang from our native languages.
One of the first things she taught me was to respond like this when someone’s looking for something, so like “où sont mes clés?” (where are my keys?) “dans ton cul” (in your ass), which can then be followed up with “comme ma bite” (like my dick)
Fast forward 8 years and Nausicaa comes to visit London from Lyon with her boyfriend, who I’ve never met before, and at one point he says “ou est mon tabac?” (where’s my tobacco?), and of course I say “dans ton cul”, and the boyfriend looks at me like “what the fuck English person” and then when the follow up of “comme ma bite” comes, he laughs so hard I think he’s gonna break a rib, and Nausicaa is just there with this shit eating grin and is like “I taught them that”
She told me later that day that of all the things she taught me and we learned together, she was so proud that saying “up your ass, like my dick” was what stuck
for a while there i was sympathetic to tumblr because of how much they’re in debt; i was kind of like “well of course they’re absolutely desperate for new users, they literally need the money or else tumblr goes down forever”. and then suddenly today it hit me that there’s actually no fucking reason for that debt to be causing these ui changes? the userbase has been INCREDIBLY clear about what they want from tumblr over the years, not to mention clear about the fact that even twitter people don’t need this place to look like twitter. it actually would be very… EASY? for them to just make changes in a direction people would actually be HAPPY with?
for fuck’s sake there were people trying to organize a “crab day” for tumblr despite tumblr doing nothing but telling us to go fuck ourselves for months on end. there were people spending hundreds of dollars on check marks just for the glee of MAKING FUN of twitter. can you IMAGINE how much money this userbase would donate to tumblr if they actually made ui updates geared toward what people have been asking for?
if tumblr actually crowdsourced ideas or even just LISTENED to their userbase it may have been possible for them to make way more money than they’re begging for now, they just insist on trying to drive their actual demographic and loyal userbase out for literally no reason
They are doing surveys that are really hard to find because their survey blog has reblogs disabled for some reason.
embracing the patterned ambiguity of gender and sex as more or less social constructs can grant you so much more precision in thinking about so many concepts in science.
like, if there was a study (and I’m just making this up as an example) showing women suffer from mosquito bites more than men do
you could do the ~“Gender Critical”~ thing and go “see!? mosquitoes get it!!”
OR
you could go “that’s interesting” and start asking more questions, like:
is this data self-reported? controlled?
were they studying the women or the mosquitoes?
did the study use methods that would let you tell the difference between “being bitten more often” and “noticing bites more often”?
did the study include any trans people and were their results any different? if yes were they on HRT or not?
how similar were the men and women in aspects other than gender? do we know their social class, jobs, diets, blood types?
because in fact the study i made up just then could lead to a huge variety of conclusions. from my description above you can’t tell the difference between studies that show:
mosquitoes are attracted to people with higher estrogen levels
mosquitoes are opportunistic and women spend more time near mosquito habitats for sociocultural reasons
every gender gets bitten about the same amount but men are socialised to pay less attention to physical discomfort so more of them don’t notice minor bites compared to women (and by more we mean like 60-40, this is a bell curve thing)
we accidentally got heaps of women in the study that have the mosquito’s favourite blood type and not so for the men, oops
mosquitoes are attracted to people with more x and y in their diets, which is currently mostly women for, again, largely sociocultural reasons
etc etc etc
you’re just not going to understand actual Gender Science, and therefore reality, if you can’t put “hmm, but what do they mean by woman this time” in your mental toolkit in a relatively neutral way.
Honestly this is a great way of presenting the kind of scientific literacy that is needed in an era of clickbait headlines and sound bites and facts that turn into memes; so much science “news” as reported by mass media distills nuanced studies into easily quotable and shocking one-liners that generally ignore the context behind the statistic.
