עזרא

NO you absolutely WANT your PLASTIC SURGERY procedures to be done by a PLASTIC SURGEON.

As in someone who is specifically trained in it and does it every day.

Someone who is not specifically trained in pleasing cosmetic results and not actively practicing pleasing cosmetic results is how you get horrifying cosmetic results

The "plastic" in "plastic surgeon" did not get here to mean "cheap and fake."

Plastic, the word, predates plastic, the material. The material was named for its noteworthy quality.

"Plastic" means "shapeable." Workable, moldable, malleable, et cetera.

When the first reconstructive surgeries were being pioneered in the 19th century, working absolute miracles like restoring whole faces to girls and women who'd caught fire tending to their kitchen stoves, among a multitude of other devastating conditions, it was this miraculous reshaping that gave the surgery its name: plastic surgery, the shaping surgery.

Time passes, and plastic, the material, is developed, and goes from fantastic modern wonder material to byword for cheap imitation; plastic, the surgery, expands from reconstruction to aesthetic finicking, Barbie is introduced with her unrealistically-proportioned plastic body, and the phrase "plastic surgery" goes from indicating "the reshaping surgery (what a marvelous thing)" to "the fake face/fake tits/fake nose surgery (how vulgar and deceitful)."

Same phrase. Entirely different connotation.

Just sayin'.

In the primary election, your voters are either all registered Democrats (closed primary) or voters who habitually lean Democratic (open primary). You'll sometimes get a Republican voting Democratic in an open primary just to ratfuck, but not by huge margins. Primary voters are much more engaged and politically aware than the general electorate.

Much as they may deny it, these bozos are clearly all trying to emulate Obama. Barack Obama's win in 2008 was a fluke, and I don't think leftists realize that. I was a teenager and had a front-row seat to how bad shit was, although I didn't understand it all at the time (I have since read research about his campaign and he was underwater before key endorsements). George W. Bush was considered a national disgrace. "Fannie Mae" and "Freddie Mac" were household names, the housing bubble was bursting, and we were on the brink of the Great Recession. And EVEN SO, Hillary Clinton had so much support that he could have lost the primary. I know this because I helped campaign for him the summer and fall of 2008, and someone I cold-called said she was never voting for him after he "did Hillary like that," and she hoped I wasn't expecting to "give him no money." EVEN SO, we were all terrified that McCain might win, and before the crash in Fall 2008, he looked like he had a fighting chance.

My dad was working with rural individuals in a neighboring county that year. He told me, not too long before the election, that someone he talked to told him Obama was a "[N-word]," but they were voting for him because of the economy. He was a populist hero ONLY in the eyes of young Democrats because he seemed like one of us. The rest of the country saw him as their last hope to pull them out of an economic hole after Dubya crashed the Clinton surplus into the ground and put us in a pointless war. And when he couldn't singlehandedly do that, they turned on him. There are states that went blue on Election Night 2008, but haven't voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since. (No one thinks of Indiana as anything other than a red state anymore.)

The ACA? Obama's triumphant piece of legislature, the crown jewel of his political career, the law that ended his supermajority, the thing any leftist would cry to be able to pass? It lost him Congress in the midterms. "Why didn't he codify Roe into law?" He couldn't. The supermajority only passed the ACA because all of the Dems agreed with it, and not all of them would support blanket nationwide legalization of late-term abortions. "He didn't codify gay rights into law -" HIS SUPREME COURT STRUCK DOWN THAT PART OF THE DEFENSE OF MARRIAGE ACT WHEN HE WAS A LAME DUCK. THAT IS WHY THE SUPREME COURT IS IMPORTANT. I was in my twenties and openly bisexual, with a girlfriend. The absolute infants screaming about neoliberalism today were in elementary or middle school. They have no idea how good they have it, because not even Trump has been able to resurrect DOMA.

And here's the thing. Even if Obama really had been a populist hero, a living avatar of hope and change, every politician has to compromise. The much-vaunted El Sayed is already softening his stances, just like I thought he would. Hong backed off her previous statements (and no doubt would have done so even more if she won), and it wasn't enough to get her elected. Troy Jackson is white and he's going to lose because he's a pugilistic moron who's Groping Platner's bestie, but even he will probably be conciliatory about his positions closer to the election.

In the video the survivor said “Never seek a permanent solution to a temporary problem. And they’re all temporary problems.”

It’s very honest. It’s very clear. It’s very kind. It presents you with a lot of information and a lot of understanding and lets you take it all in like the autonomous human you are, and make decisions from an informed place. It goes over the reality of suicide attempts, pain involved, likelihoods of survival, after effects of attempts, and how to get help if you want it after reading all of that and learning about the reality of suicide attempts.

You can read it for free here: https://qprinstitute.com/pdfs/Forever_Decision.pdf

Carb starts your engine, protein keeps it going.

Cookie

Fruit (canned or fresh)

Chips

Piece of bread

Popcorn

Crackers

Easy protein add on:

Nuts

Spoonful of nut butter

Cheese

Roasted chickpea snacks

Glass of milk (dairy or non dairy)

their (live!) young gestate for. wait for it. eight to eighteen (??) YEARS. can have up to 10 at a time. good grief.

longest lifespan of any vertebrate, up to five hundred years

toxic flesh

has giant eyes but is usually blind because of a weird little crustacean that's evolved to live on and eat their eyes. this doesn't seem to bother them much.

lives in deep cold water and has the lowest swim speed and tail-beat frequency for its size across all fish species. just generally lives life in extreme slow motion

largest genome of any shark

eats everything including moose and polar bears

"oh, that's easy! it's because they're fundamentally Bad people who want to hurt others and choose their beliefs to justify that! :) hope this helps"

or

"they just don't have access to the same information we do. look at this person who was raised in a cult! don't you feel sorry for her?"

and like, yes, fine, some people were in fact raised in cults, but what i wish people would understand is that the bulk of it is just normal human flaws, like:

they want to believe stuff that makes them feel smart and cool and like they've figured everything out (you also do this)

they want to believe stuff that makes them feel like their emotions are justified and grounded in reality, and that the people they want to hurt deserve to be hurt (you also do this)

they form conclusions before they've processed all the relevant information, and cling to that first impression even when new info comes to light (you also do this)

they pick up beliefs from the people around them because they want to be liked and fit in, not because the beliefs are good or true (you also do this)

they come up with reasons that the stuff that benefits them (and the people they like and identify with) is actually overwhelmingly best for everyone and obviously the right thing to do (you also do this)

they pay more attention to stuff that supports what they already believe and avoid looking in places that might show them otherwise (you also do this)

they listen to people who talk like 'one of them' and ignore others (you also do this)

they come up with reasons to dismiss people with conflicting viewpoints as obviously in bad faith or ignorant or a shill or evil (you also do this)

they fail to take their own beliefs seriously sometimes, and take their beliefs way too seriously other times, in a selective way that lets them do the things they already wanted to do (you also do this)

the very ways they construct the ideas of 'knowledge' and 'wisdom' and 'belief' and 'understanding' are biased so that what they don't want to believe comes under lots of scrutiny and what they do want to believe receives less (you also do this)

you, dear reader, are presumably right about everything and were correct to die on every hill you've ever died on, but the difference between you and someone who's wrong about important stuff doesn't look like "well they're inherently evil and i'm not", it probably looks like a combination of:

natural environment (they would have been exposed to different information than you regardless of their choices)

being in the right place at the right time (your particular profile of flaws and virtues happened to be what was needed to lead you to the right conclusions, they had the opposite experience)

random luck (you doubled down on what felt right to believe but wasn't, but it turned out to be inconsequential, or even right for different reasons, while they doubled down on what turned out to be a horrible mistake distorting their entire worldview)

you do less of the things in the previous list, and over time the difference between you and them adds up

and, look, i also do these things. the nicest and most thoughtful people i've ever met do these things. if you meet someone who never does any of these things, i dunno, give them a fucking medal or something.

This is really exciting, linguistically speaking.

Because it’s not true that Tumblr never uses punctuation. But it is true that lack of punctuation has become, itself, a form of punctuation. On Tumblr the lack of punctuation in multisentence-long posts creates the function of rhetorical speech, or speech that is not intended to have an answer, usually in the form of a question. Consider the following two potential posts. Each individual line should be taken as a post:

ugh is there any particular reason people at work have to take these massive handfuls of sauce packets they know they’re not going to use like god put that back we have to pay for that stuff

Ugh. Is there any particular reason people at work have to take these massive handfuls of sauce packets they know they’re not going to use? Like god, put that back. We have to pay for that stuff.

In your head, those two potential posts sound totally different. In the first one I’m ranting about work, and this requires no answer. The second may actually engage you to give an answer about hoarding sauce packets. And if you answer the first post, you will likely do so in the same style. 

Here’s what makes this exciting: the English language has no actual punctuation for rhetorical speech–that is, there are no special marks that specifically indicate “this speech is in the abstract, and requires no answer.” Not only that, it never has. The first written record of English (actually proto-English, predating even Old English) dates to the 400s CE, so we’re talking about 1600 years of having absolutely no marker whatsoever for rhetorical speech.

A group of teens and young adults on a blogging website literally reshaped a deficit a millennium and a half old in our language to fit their language needs. More! This group has agreed on a more or less universal standard for these new rules, which fits the definition of “language.” Which is to say Tumblr English is its own actual, real, separate dialect of the English language, and because it is spoken by people worldwide who have introduced concepts from their own languages into it, it may qualify as a written form of pidgin. 

The tags are absolutely a factor. You want someone to take a breath in the middle of a sentence, you start a new tag. You want to have, as seen here, this removable piece between commas (does it have a name?) - you have 5 tags in this sentence alone. And sometimes you just

pause in the middle of a sentence…

and let your voice

language is this constantly evolving thing tbh, it doesn’t remain the same unless it’s dead and the people who used it gone so seeing the evolution of the language used on tumblr is literally so fucking amazing i want to cry with joy at it

because we also add in words from other languages, or make entirely new words up as additional terms to denote something (see ‘tol’ and ‘smol’ in relation to ‘tall’ and ‘small’) and this is constant. we are doing this daily without any sort of breathing space because there’s millions of us on this hellsite and we are constantly talking and so the language changes day-by-day until we have general, universal rules for what to do in a post, what to add in our tags, how to add it, why we add it, what we mean by it

we’ve created a language in the same way our ancestors all did: by building on the ones that came before and changing them to suit our needs and our system

and that’s fucking awesome okay

What?

What.