you, me, a bottle of Corellian red

If it makes people in the UK feel any better, people in the US literally do not know this (like literally no one I have ever met and/or know). Here being spastic is usually meant to mean something along the lines of acting like a hyper-active child (like running around in circles yelling just because they feel like it please be quiet for just 2 minutes type of child). NOBODY here uses it as a slur.

Since Weird Al is a US musician and the US music industry is pretty non-international, yeah actually I think its entirely possible that none of the people who worked on this song actually knew that spastic was considered an awful slur in some parts of the world.

Tax Evasion

Heirloom Tomatoes

Respecting Women

Less than a week later, the billionaire who owns the companies, shut down the sites. It’s not a coincidence, he stated that he did not want them to unionize. 

Unions exist to protect the worker. Unions are what built the middle class, gave us the right to lunch breaks, worker’s comp, safe work places, overtime, fire escapes, and hundreds of other advantages that are considered so necessary we forget we ever had to fight for them. 

Unions have fallen from public high opinion, and stories like this are reminiscent of the 1920s and 30s, when union busters tried to stop the formation of the Steel Workers Union – A group now known as the AFL-CIO. 

Unions encourage regulations. Regulations protect citizens. 

Han Solo: Who did you reblog it from? Ducain?

Rey: I reblogged it. From Unkar Plutt. He reblogged it from the Irving Boys, who reblogged it from Ducain.

I do not subscribe to praxis driven by vengeance. Ever.

This is something that’s been making me read this place as unbearably hostile and unsafe for quite a while now. And I shouldn’t be surprised, I come from a line of people traumatized (some outright murdered) by that political environment known as ‘totalitarianism’, I grew up watching people I loved bearing the scars that came from having been the targets of politically and socially-motivated vengeance. 

When I was seventeen, I worked part-time with a non-profit that took care of at-risk elderly people. One of these was Mrs C. a woman in her eighties, completely blind from cataracts, barely able to walk anymore, with the fingers of both hands bent terribly out of shape. She craved support and companionship like a man in pain craves release and talked constantly about her family, all of them departed. It turned out that the bones in her hands had been shattered when, in 1948, she and her family were driven out of their house by the newly-installed regime in Bucharest. The people responsible for this relished in their cruelty, not letting them take even books from the library and ripping up family photos in front of the family itself. My little old lady, back then a young woman, tried to save a photo of her mother by kneeling and scooping the shreds from the floor. That’s when a soldier simply stomped on her hands several times, breaking all the bones in her fingers, in the process. They never healed properly because she never did get medical attention in time and later on it would have involved breaking them again, something she wouldn’t go through. 

I felt nothing but love and compassion for this kind woman, who always waited for me with something sweet she’d managed to make and who told me I was infinitely better than the bullies at school I’d complain about. And I know, by username, people on this site who wouldn’t be capable of doing anything other than sneering at the suffering she and her family went through because ‘they were bourgeois getting what they deserved.’ 

Another example, Just a few moments ago, I saw a fundamentally sensible post. ‘Critique bigoted people for their bigoted actions, not their appearance, because an innocent person with the same physical features will only be hurt by your words.’ Understandable and compassionate advice. The notes were filled to the brim of people shouting that the OP an others concurring just wanted to ‘give racists and homophobes a free pass.’ 

There comes a point when activism can turn into nothing but a vicious cycle of wishing for revenge for one’s suffering and then enacting said revenge when one has the power to do so. Across multiple fronts, this place has long blown past that line.