ready 2 rumble

“I don’t like this expression “First World problems.” It is false and it is condescending. Yes, Nigerians struggle with floods or infant mortality. But these same Nigerians also deal with mundane and seemingly luxurious hassles. Connectivity issues on your BlackBerry, cost of car repair, how to sync your iPad, what brand of noodles to buy: Third World problems. All the silly stuff of life doesn’t disappear just because you’re black and live in a poorer country. People in the richer nations need a more robust sense of the lives being lived in the darker nations. Here’s a First World problem: the inability to see that others are as fully complex and as keen on technology and pleasure as you are.”

Donations Needed

maybe y'all didn't notice but fat people who don't hate ourselves sure did notice that people were obsessed with shitting on fat people in the late 90s and early 2000s (conservative political time) and now are again (fascist political time), coincidentally while the market for weight loss has become a 90 billion dollar industry due to glp1s.

a lot of the fearmongering over fatness comes from studies directly funded by the weight loss industry...i think people don't really realize or think about the fact that research can absolutely be influenced and skewed by its funding. there is also research that shows that an amount of the negative health outcomes for fat people come from anti-fat bias. if you go to the doctor with concerns and the doctor simply tells you to lose weight, your problem is neglected and you may not even bother going to the doctor with the next problem.

scrolling through the tags on a post about a serious social issue simulator

I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and while I completely agree with the spirit of this post—that it is fundamentally important to ask why the media or information you’re consuming is presented in a particular way—I do think it’s important to highlight that the umbrella of what we often call “media literacy” is very very wide, and includes a lot of different skill sets that are related but not the same. The traditional understanding of media literacy really has broadened since its conception and especially in the past decade, but I think one of the casualties of that broadening as compared to its initial usage is that I do think we need to spend a bit more time emphasizing the different kinds of work that go into things. Understanding why the author made the curtains blue involves an understanding of literary symbolism, tone, (possibly) character, and plot; understanding why an author making certain racialized character choices is racist requires an understanding of character, of history, and of the distinct racial discourses that surround different racialized people. Understanding when a news source is biased involves both being able to interpret how information is presented and being able to evaluate the legitimacy of sources, which involves thinking about their funding, their political leanings, their history of reporting, etc. Identifying propaganda requires all of the above, as well as a good sense of current political movements. All of these also shift based on genre: a novel might say the same thing as a news broadcast as a poem but they all mean something very different, and the interpretation required vary as a result.

Huh. I wonder what else is going on in Tennessee (and specifically Memphis) right now?

*opens the oven after preheating to 400*

me when i'm in genuine agonising distress: i'm so sorry if i'm bothering you with my childish histrionics :/