Coffee, Nerves, and Cigarettes

Socially, someone on hormones for the rest of their lives and constantly getting under the knives due to complications from previous surgeries is a lot more profitable than someone getting a decade of therapy and antidepressants.

Admitting that transitioning a child is objectively just medical malpractice would mean admitting that doctors have spent the last two decades operating experimental surgeries and prescribing medications without having enough data or research to be certain that it wouldn't harm patients. Psychiatry, and specifically US psychiatry, has been using your kids like lab mice.

she was a mother to a young child. her own mother had to identify her body by watching the horrific video online.

i don't know enough to speak on this war, so i won't be, but remember this: when men wage war, it's women who pay the price. it's women who are sexually abused, degraded, and tortured.

there hasn't been a single war in history that has avoided this. revenge rape. comfort women. forced prostitution. every war, every side, every time.

no israeli woman deserves this treatment. no palestinian woman deserves this treatment. there are no women in this war who deserve this.

the weaponization of positivity stretches beyond that. fred and george weasley’s inventions, meant for laughter, turn into arms against umbridge’s regime. and after their departure from hogwarts, their joke shop becomes not only the single bright spot in diagon alley (literally & figuratively) but a hub of defensive magic. the whole weasleys’ wizard wheezes narrative serves as maybe the clearest example in the series that happiness can act as both shield and sword.

there is something deeply empowering in a depiction of happiness as something so tangible and usable. as a profoundly depressed person, i often feel myself scrounging for happy memories and clutching them close; i find myself grasping for laughter in the dark. the physicalization of expecto patronum is not a quantum leap from reality. the boggart’s laughter as combat fuel, the weasleys’ levity as not just a choice but a difficult and defiant one—it’s all familiar.

You could wake up tomorrow with absolutely no human right to life. You are not owed an explanation. Your very existence is precarious and depends entirely on the whims of the powers that be.

Your very existence is political.

The legality of same-sex relationships in your country does not always protect you. Homosexuality was legalised in Chechnya in 1993.

“Because we can” is enough of a reason. There was no political gain to be had from the events in Chechnya.

Casual rhetoric which either ignores the existence of same sex attraction or condemns it as shameful/disgusting/a lifestyle choice often, though not always, foreshadows these events.

The fight to obtain or maintain your rights is never really over.

A third of Poland has recently declared itself an "LGBT-free" zone. Adoption laws in Hungary were just changed, with the sole intent of preventing same sex couples from adopting a child (which was previously possible through loopholes).

Joe Biden is boring and often bad at tooting his own horn, but by god, he is good at process.

Justice 40 is simple but powerful application of that. its a shift in how the executive branch works. 40% of money from a bunch of existing programs should go to census tracts that are overburdened with pollution, at higher risk for climate change, and have been historically underserved.

The shorthand here is basically "communities that don't have enough internal resources to deal with long term problems". So yes, communities that had been redlined for decades, ones that have Superfund sites, ones that have high rates of asthma from air pollution.

and this is by census tract. Not city. census tract. So parts of New York City qualify... but other parts don't. And the city HAS to use the money in the targeted part. it doesn't go into the communal pool. it's for THAT tract specifically.

Also all land federally recognized as belonging to a Native American tribe and all Alaskan Native Villages qualify, specifically.

And again, this is for existing programs that are already running and have existing staff and budgets. They're supposed to prioritize grants and projects for those areas specifically. And that's everything from Department of Agriculture, to FEMA, to Labor, to Environmental Protection.

Does it instantly get rid of all the baked in racism from decades past? No, not even close. But it puts in a countermeasure that has a concrete and measurable goal to aim for rather than a nebulous "suck less." even if the administration changes, many of those changes will stick.

And as things improve, some tracts may come off the list! Some may go on that weren't there before!

You can see a map here. Blue highlighted tracts are "disadvantaged" so qualify for that extra assistance! Check and see if you live in one or part of your town does. Because if you've been hearing constantly "we can't afford to fix X problem..." and you're in that tract.... there's money available. For you. Build that sidewalk, fix those lead pipes, get that brush truck your volunteer fire department has been asking for.

Okay, I am reblogging this from myself and copying my own tags, because it's even COOLER than I thought!! it specifically pairs burdens with socioeconomic markers, and in order to qualified as 'disadvantaged', a community has to be BOTH 'more likely than other communities to be dealing with this problem' and 'less likely than other communities to be able to RESPOND to this problem'.

so for an example: my census tract is in the 93rd percentile for the presence of lead paint! because that's what you get in older New England buildings! BUT because our overall poverty level is pretty low, we're not actually considered 'disadvantaged' on that metric - basically, yeah, we have a lot more lead paint than most places, but we also mostly have enough money to be able to deal with that.

On the other hand, we're in the 97th percentile for 'linguistic isolation' (aka having a ton of households where nobody over 14 speaks English well) AND we have a relatively high level of people who don't have any education past high school, and that combination specifically is what has us considered 'disadvantaged'.

I want black girls and women to be happy.

I want black girls and women to be protected.

I want black girls and women to be loved.