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Republican officials insult women nearly killed by abortion bans.

Red states would rather let a patient die than let her terminate a dangerous pregnancy. And they’re barely pretending otherwise.

#politics #us politics #republicans #republican #republican family values #abortion #abortion access #abortion rights #reproductive choice #reproductive justice

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I have a lot of thoughts, but the thing I think I keep coming back to the most is this:

It should not be this easy to find ourselves on the precipice of losing 21 years of internet creation and history. In the same way it shouldn't have been that easy to cancel a completed movie, or to scrub hundreds upon hundreds of hours of animation.

And yet, here we are.

#rt #rooster teeth

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When I was in ninth grade I wanted to challenge what I saw as a very stupid dress code policy (not being allowed to wear spikes regardless of the size or sharpness of the spikes). My dad said to me, “What is your objective?”

He said it over and over. I contemplated that. I wanted to change an unfair dress code. What did I stand to gain? What did I stand to lose? If what I really wanted was to change the dress code, what would be my most effective potential approach? (He also gave me Discourses on the Fall of Rome by Titus Livius, Machiavelli’s magnum opus. Of course he’d already given me The Prince, Five Rings, and The Art of War.)

I ultimately printed out that phrase, coated it in Mod Podge, and clipped it to my bathroom mirror so I would look at it and think about it every day.

What is your objective?

Forget about how you feel. Ask yourself, what do you want to see happen? And then ask, how can you make it happen? Who needs to agree with you? Who has the power to implement this change? What are the points where you have leverage over them? If you use that leverage now, will you impair your ability to use it in the future? Getting what you want is about effectiveness. It is not about being an alpha or a sigma or whatever other bullshit the men’s right whiners are on about now. You won’t find any MRA talking points in Musashi, because they are not relevant.

I had no clear leverage on the dress code issue. My parents were not on the PTA; neither were any of my friend’s parents who liked me. The teachers did not care about this. Ultimately I just wore what I wanted, my patent leather collar from Hot Topic with large but flattened spikes, and I had guessed correctly—the teachers also did not care enough to discipline me.

I often see people on tumblr, mostly the very young, flail around in discourse. They don’t have an objective. They don’t know what they want to achieve, and they have never thought about strategizing and interpersonal effectiveness. No one can get everything they want by being an asshole. You must be able to work with other people, and that includes smiling when you hate them.

Read Machiavelli. Start with The Prince, but then move on to Discourses. Read Musashi’s Five Rings. Read The Art of War. They’re classics for a reason. They can’t cover all situations, but they can do more for how you think about strategizing than anything you’re getting in middle school and high school curricula.

Don’t vote third party unless you can tell me not only what your objective is but also why this action stands a meaningful chance of accomplishing it. Otherwise, back up and approach your strategy from a new angle. I don’t care how angry you are with Biden right now. He knows about it, and he is both trying to do something and not doing enough. I care about what will happen to millions of people if we have another Trump presidency. Look up Ross Perot, and learn from our past. Find your objective. If it is to stop the genocide in Palestine now, call your elected representatives now. They don’t care about emails; they care about phone calls, because they live in the past. I know this because I shadowed a lobbyist, because knowing how power works is critical to using it.

How do you think I have gotten two clinics to start including gender care in their planning?

Start small. Chip away. Keep working. Find your leverage; figure out how and when to effectively use it. Choose your battles, so that you can concentrate on the battle at hand instead of wasting your resources in many directions. Learn from the accumulated wisdom of people who spent their lives learning by doing, by making mistakes, by watching the mistakes of their enemies.

Don’t be a dickhead. Be smarter than I was at 14. Ask yourself: what is your objective?

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this can't be true can it

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Republicans want rape culture and gun culture to empower the worst in white men.

Rape and homicide are what women can expext in Texas. Not to mention lawsuits for losing a pregnancy.

MAGA is pure poison.

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so this happened to me today

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If women ruled the world...

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This was very lovely to wake up to. It's completely legit, in the replies people posted videos and pictures of the 'walk for El Vaquita', the fake protest to get El Vaquita desperately needed medical attention.

The comments in the tweet lead to celebration of a another Chilean comrade doggo named Negro Matapacos. And this is exactly the kind of education I want this month.

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I really like what this physicist, Lamar Glover, has to say in Behind the Curve. 

+ this part from Spiros Michalakis:

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We need to end lobbyism as we know it. Corporate bribery is the worst way to provide a human right like health care.

Sad that $800 million/year in bribes costs us 650 billion/year in savings.

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Avavav always has the most interesting concepts

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Flying Objects. A recent cartoon for New Scientist.

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“In 1984, when Ruth Coker Burks was 25 and a young mother living in Arkansas, she would often visit a hospital to care for a friend with cancer.

During one visit, Ruth noticed the nurses would draw straws, afraid to go into one room, its door sealed by a big red bag. She asked why and the nurses told her the patient had AIDS.

On a repeat visit, and seeing the big red bag on the door, Ruth decided to disregard the warnings and sneaked into the room.

In the bed was a skeletal young man, who told Ruth he wanted to see his mother before he died. She left the room and told the nurses, who said, “Honey, his mother’s not coming. He’s been here six weeks. Nobody’s coming!”

Ruth called his mother anyway, who refused to come visit her son, who she described as a “sinner” and already dead to her, and that she wouldn’t even claim his body when he died.

“I went back in his room and when I walked in, he said, “Oh, momma. I knew you’d come”, and then he lifted his hand. And what was I going to do? So I took his hand. I said, “I’m here, honey. I’m here”, Ruth later recounted.

Ruth pulled a chair to his bedside, talked to him

and held his hand until he died 13 hours later.

After finally finding a funeral home that would his body, and paying for the cremation out of her own savings, Ruth buried his ashes on her family’s large plot.

After this first encounter, Ruth cared for other patients. She would take them to appointments, obtain medications, apply for assistance, and even kept supplies of AIDS medications on hand, as some pharmacies would not carry them.

Ruth’s work soon became well known in the city and she received financial assistance from gay bars, “They would twirl up a drag show on Saturday night and here’d come the money. That’s how we’d buy medicine, that’s how we’d pay rent. If it hadn’t been for the drag queens, I don’t know what we would have done”, Ruth said.

Over the next 30 years, Ruth cared for over 1,000 people and buried more than 40 on her family’s plot most of whom were gay men whose families would not claim their ashes.

For this, Ruth has been nicknamed the ‘Cemetery Angel’.”— by Ra-Ey Saley

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Yeah, I noticed your post was about the patriarchy, but you never used the term "patriarchy". Instead you blamed heterosexuality. Not only does this error allow patriarchy to fly under the radar, it also isolates and renders invisible nonpatriarchial heterosexual people, instead of recruiting them as allies in the fight against patriarchy. Call a spade a spade, dude. And call a potential ally a potential ally

ok this post got me thinking - and this isn't really a criticism, bc the point it's making still stands - I don't think this description is quite accurate. if teens were allowed to figure out their heterosexuality they'd be getting het sex ed, not no sex ed.

in this context, 'heterosexuality' ISN'T a sexuality. it's a gender role. it's not about pleasure/desire/attraction, in fact, those things are considered deviant even within heterosexuality. a man moaning during sex or wanting his nipples played with is 'gay' even if it's with a cis woman. a woman expressing any SHRED of sexual availability is shameful even if it's for cis men.

sexuality is still dirty for cishet people. men and women aren't even supposed to like eachother! have you noticed that? that the more a person elevates heterosexuality, the more they tend to hate the opposite sex? how the most homophobic men also seem fundamentally grossed out by women? how the most homophobic women seem to view men as animals?

conservatives do not think women should be attracted to men or vice versa. they think that having a husband and bearing him children is what makes you a woman and having and impregnating a wife is what makes you a man, and THAT'S what teens are allowed to do. you will never be allowed to be sexual, but you are never too young to perform gender roles.

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Oh Star Trek Prodigy fans were NOT kidding when they said that show is slept on. IT IS AMAZING