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*Thinks back*

I think it was "Sailor Moon..." I didn't watch it regularly, but I think I caught a few episodes.

#tumblr polls #anime

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Putting on makeup to get a good grade in being a patient shouldn't be something I feel compelled to do lest the new doctor I've never met before write down that I'm apathetic about my appearance and thus clearly Mentally Unwell when I'm not there to talk about my mental health shouldn't be normal, and yet it's happened to me several times in the past so here we are...

#medical misogyny (?) #that assumption is a logical fallacy #even if OP were there to talk about their mental health

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Not to mention all the microplastics that get washed into our waterways from all the polyester clothes we wear (and throw out; cheap, fast fashion, clothes are taking up an obscene amount of space in landfills around the world).

Here's a report from 2021, From "Nature Communications," on the amount of polyester fibers from our laundry that's ended up in the Arctic Atlantic. I'm not fluent enough in reading scientific reports to be confident enough to say: "Well, actually, it's really our clothes that make up XX% of plastic waste in the ocean!".

But going after the fast fashion industry, and greedflation in clothing production in general, will do a lot more good for a lot more people (considering how clothing workers are exploited) than demonizing disabled people for using plastic straws.

If you dare come at me about banning straws, I will throw you into the sun cannon. I’m disabled, I’m crippled, I need disposable plastic straws, and all those pricey ridiculous alternatives aren’t working as well. Plastic straws were invented for the disabled.

Way to shit all over a vital access need because you think straws are worse than corporate greed.

We all care about the turtles, the seals, the oceans, obviously. Notice how the easiest thing to yell about was something that would barely affect anything but appealed heavily to emotional discourse.

The disabled community is huge, and it can be joined by anyone. Most of those As Seen On TV products were invented for us. Society still mocks us and ignores us, and often outright harms us in multiple ways.

Communicate better. Listen better. But stop putting us out in the cold because you are inconvenienced by our simplest needs.

#the straw discourse #disabled life #eugenics rhetoric #fast fashion #microplastics in the ocean

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This video, which premiered on YouTube on 5 July 2023, showed up in my YouTube recommendations, today. It turns out to be a promotion for a law firm, which is ...fine. At least it opens with talking about the issue of disability representation, before touting their own merit.

I was impressed that it not only has a variation of the Disability Pride Flag as a feature of its thumbnail/opening image, but it also associated the different stripe colors with symbols for the different broad categories of disability (All accept for the white stripe; I'm not sure what symbol you'd use for invisible disability).

There's one factual inaccuracy: They say that the "Catalyst" for the American with Disabilities Act started with the Capital Crawl, in 1990. But the fact is, the first version of the Bill that would become the ADA was introduced in Congress back in 1988 (Timeline of ADA history, here). The reason activists held their rally in 1990 is that they were tired of waiting.

(See also: The Section 504 protests of 1977)

#disability pride #disability pride flag: seen in the wild #disability history #the ADA #Section 504 #Youtube

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And not just in other countries they colonized, but in how they treated their own marginalized citizens. The Nazi program of Aktion T4, through which 300,000 disabled people were killed for being "unfit to live," was inspired by the American eugenics movement (also, it was through the Aktion T4 program that Nazi "physicians" perfected the use of poison gas to kill lots of people all at once)

The flip side of the post-World War II cries of “Never again” was an unspoken “Never before.” The insistence on lifting the Holocaust out of history, the failure to recognize these patterns, and the refusal to see where the Nazis fit inside the arc of colonial genocides have all come at a high cost. The countries that defeated Hitler did not have to confront the uncomfortable fact that Hitler had taken pointers and inspiration on race-making and on human containment from them, leaving their innocence not only undisturbed but also significantly strengthened by what was indeed a righteous victory.

Naomi Klein, Doppelganger

#the Holocaust #colonial powers #eugenics #disability history #american history

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As an asexual, I read that first word as "HoMiness."

And the sentiment still holds true. If I want to put novelty throw pillows on all my furniture, no matter how kitsch, because it makes me feel cozy and comfortable, that's valid, too.

Horniness is not intrinsically less pure than any other human motivation

#all motivations are valid #horniness #hominess #asexual

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Gee -- who'd a-thunk it?

Most of the plastic waste in the ocean comes from the things we deliberately drag through the ocean.

What an effing surprise!

If you dare come at me about banning straws, I will throw you into the sun cannon. I’m disabled, I’m crippled, I need disposable plastic straws, and all those pricey ridiculous alternatives aren’t working as well. Plastic straws were invented for the disabled.

Way to shit all over a vital access need because you think straws are worse than corporate greed.

We all care about the turtles, the seals, the oceans, obviously. Notice how the easiest thing to yell about was something that would barely affect anything but appealed heavily to emotional discourse.

The disabled community is huge, and it can be joined by anyone. Most of those As Seen On TV products were invented for us. Society still mocks us and ignores us, and often outright harms us in multiple ways.

Communicate better. Listen better. But stop putting us out in the cold because you are inconvenienced by our simplest needs.

#the straw discourse #disabled life #eugenics rhetoric #disablism #plastic fishing nets #fishing waste #undescribed images #Corporate misdirection #capitalist rhetoric

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An important difference that often gets lost in translation:

Dog rolling onto their back: I love you, love you, you! Treat me like a baby puppy and rub my belly! Cat rolling onto their back: You have earned my trust. And for that, I love you. I trust you with my vulnerability. And I know you won't violate my personal space.

#dogs #cats #not the same #interspecies communication

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My main problem with the "Free Thinker / 'Skeptic" atheist movement (from what I've seen of it)

Is that they are usually White, Cishet, Normate, English-Speaking, American, Men, who were raised Christian (in other words, the most privileged cohort in America today), who realized Christianity they were raised in is Wrong. ...And considering the state of much of American Christianity today, that's not, in itself, an unreasonable conclusion.

The problem is, they then jump to the conclusion that all religion is wrong, and all people who espouse any Faith at all must be unintelligent and/or morally corrupt. They claim (and likely sincerely believe) to have grown past Christianity. But they seem to have bought into the Christian propaganda of being the Only True religion.

So here's my advice: if you're questioning your faith, and you think you might be atheist, conduct some thought experiments with yourself, and imagine the universe being inhabited with different sorts of deities. Do some research on what people throughout history have believed. Like putting on a different set of glasses, to put the world in a new focus. Make up your own deities, while you're at it (It doesn't matter if you're a religion of one).

You may still end up deciding no gods are "actually" real. But at least you'll have a broader idea of what it is you don't believe in.

#religion #atheism #thoughts I've had for years #american christianity

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Sometimes, the Dreaming Mind™ translates worries you can't put into words, and turns them into private movies. Other times, it just listens to the waking thoughts and goes: "You're right. And you should say it."

dream about disney trying to get in on the harry potter money with a big interactive attraction and I kept thinking "man all this extra worldbuilding could be real cool if I still cared about this world. at least it was written by someone else instead of the joke, that usually makes better quality worldbuilding."

#dreams #when our dreams are just opinion pieces

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~sigh~ I had a whole folder of designs I made for Zazzle.com, years ago. But it seems to have been deleted.

(I have no memory of deleting it, but it doesn't show up in any search on my computer)

So I go log on to my Zazzle account, and discover 2 things:

They no longer let me re-download my own designs to my own computer (which is how I was hoping to recover my favorite designs), and

They no longer offer women's t-shirt dresses, which I was wanting to buy for myself.

So anyway, I "Started a new project" and picked the design I was looking for when I discovered the whole folder was missing. And then, I did a screen-cap, and cropped it.

Here it is:

#frustrations #where'd my folder go? #zazzle #my designs #image description in alt

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Okay. So, now I will explain it the way my mother did, as a little fable:

There was once a merchant with many bags of straw to sell, and as he wanted to sell as much as he could in one day, and save himself the trouble of multiple trips on the road, loaded more an more bails of straw onto his camel's back. Even after he saw that his camel was having trouble standing under the weight, he didn't want to stop, but instead, started loading the straw onto his back one piece at a time. But then, he loaded one straw too many, and the camel's back broke, and he couldn't take any straw to market.

I looked that up in Wikipedia, just now:

... And apparently, it was only ever some sort of proverb, and Mother wove the whole fable, with character motivations, and all, from it all on her own (including the implicit condemnation of capitalist greed).

...The more I look up "traditional" fables my mother told me, when I was a kid, the more I find out she actually created them, probably without realizing it.

Anyway, so when someone says: "That's the last straw!" it means they've been dealing with "minor" frustrations for a long time, and they are done trying to hold it together, aka: "No spoons left. Only knives," or "Stick a fork in me, I'm done."

Also: this is the song that prompted this poll, by the Folk Metal band Bloodywood:

I heard a line in a song today, and now, I'm just curious:

#tumblr polls #English Idioms #“the last straw” #memories of my mother #music video #bloodywood #lyrics on screen #eye contact #Youtube

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Quoted tags:

#as an education major there was this one tiny ass white bitch who's goal in life #was to teach ASL to kids in Africa [...] #what's worse is that she didn't know ASL and couldn't even read the joke on her own shirt #it was a basic “on the grind” joke shirt in ASL and I said it was funny and she snapped at me that it wasn't a joke???

~Sigh~

Attitudes like that are what led to the question you sometimes see around social media:

"Is it cultural appropriation to learn sign language?"

No. Of course not. The more people who know sign language, and are at least able to sign a decent pidgin with their spoken language, the better.

What is cultural appropriation is to take a few weeks of Level 1 Sign Language, and start posting videos of you "translating" your favorite songs into sign language so that "The poor Deaf people don't miss out on the beauty of music."

Those videos, with bad, incomprehensible, signing go viral, and drown out the work of native-signing deaf artists who are creating their work.

That's cultural appropriation.

this is a niche one but instead of "they would not fuckin say that" it's "they would not fucking use American sign language".

ASL is not the only sign language. two british characters in your fanfiction would not be using ASL. England in fact has its own kind of sign language, BSL, that forms a sign family with many other sign languages around the world.

ASL isn't even the original member of its sign family, it comes from french sign language. do you know sign languages aren't related to spoken languages? that's an important one! it's not a direct 1:1 with people speaking English around the world. people in other countries don't learn ASL just in case they run into an usamerican or Canadian (who do often use it)

i know the entire world is the USA or whatever and sign languages do sometimes borrow from ASL for signs they don't have, but please be aware that there are other sign languages and families in the world that are not in fact ASL.

#Sign language #white saviorism #hearing saviorism #sign language education #quoted tags

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I'm one of those atheists that a lot of Fundamentalist Christian pastors warn [proverbial] you about:

I'm not someone who just happens not to be Christian, by accident of birth or upbringing. I am an Apostate. I consciously and eagerly turned away from Christianity and toward Paganism. And then, I turned away from Paganism and became atheist.

Not only is Christian teaching irrelevant to me, I am actively opposed to it.

(Not necessarily the teachings of Jesus, mind you. But the teachings of Church[es] that evolved around his worship after his execution)

I literally do not care what the Bible says about any political issue. I am not Christian. Christian scripture should have zero effect on my life or my personal freedoms. 

#about me #separation of church and state #Freedom to practice your religion #is not the same as forcing that religion on me

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What does the "banana republic is a fucked up name for a store" post you reblogged mean? I'm afraid of looking dumb.

The term "banana republic" was originally coined to describe countries in Central and South America (mainly Honduras and Guatemala) whose economies were rendered dependent on the production and export of bananas (among other agricultural goods, but mainly bananas) by American fruit corporations leveraging the power of the U.S. government, the U.S. military and the CIA.

Throughout most of the of the 20th century, American corporations such as United Fruit, Cuyamel, and the Standard Fruit Company owned large portions of these countries' lands, to the point that in some cases they controlled their railway, road, and port infrastructure, and they engaged in a variety of imperialist actions to lower production costs, such as violence against labor activists and anti wage reform lobbying.

The pinnacle of this phenomenon was the 1954 Guatemalan coup, when United Fruit convinced the goverment of US president Dwight D. Eisenhower that the elected president of Guatemala, Jacobo Árbenz (who had expropriated some of the company's unused land and given it to Guatemalan peasants) was secretly working with the Soviet Union, resulting in a CIA coup which deposed the Árbenz government and replaced it with a thirty-year right-wing military dictatorship which effectively acted as a puppet government to protect the interests of United Fruit and the U.S. government.

Nowadays the term has broadened to refer to any small, economically unstable country with an economy which has been rendered dependent on the export of a particular natural resource due to economic exploitation by a more powerful country.

#history #us imperialism #guatemala #honduras #history in my lifetime #right-wing violence #exploitation

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Thanks for the transcriptions!

I love English (my native language).

I also love the idea that merriment has a 1 to 1 correlation with people.

One person = One Merriment Unit.

[ID: youtube comment from Hal Sawyer:

My favorite relic English still used everywhere is the word "the" used in phrases like: "the more I look at this, the stranger it seems, or "the bigger they come, the harder they fall". This "the" is not the article of any noun, it is a different word, a conjunction descended from the old English "þā", pronounced "tha" which means either "when" or "then". Back in early Middle English the structure "if - then" had not taken over and if you wanted to express an if - then relationship you said "þā whatever, þā whatever", meaning "when such-and- such, then such-and-such". "þā" sounds almost the same as "the" and the spelling of the two converged, but the meaning remained totally different. "the more, the merrier" literally means "when more, then merrier" or "if more, then merrier'; same as centuries ago.

end ID]

this is so cool

#middle english #english grammar #english idioms

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For the record, it was my mother who told me the story of where it comes from.

(Reblogging for the visibility/greater numbers)

I heard a line in a song today, and now, I'm just curious:

#tumblr polls #English Idioms #“the last straw”