sad but true.

Women are told that they peak at 18 and any nubile looks they maintain are a saving grace. Women are told that their worth precisely how much they can ensnare or seduce or benefit a man. Women’s lives, according to our society, begin at 18 and end at 29. If we manage to maintain the whole “young & fun” air we can get away with maybe a couple more years of being considered of worth.

(source)

Bonus:

please take a moment to really appreciate the argument of why "most cops don't live in the cities they oversee" needs to be addressed

Yusuf Abdul-Qadir: what percent of the police live in the city?

mayor: about 5% or so

Yusuf Abdul-Qadir: 5%, so 95% don’t live in the city.

mayor: yes.

Yusuf Abdul-Qadir: so when you say that the vast majority of the percentage goes towards salaries, et cetera, fringe benefits, that means that they take their money on 81, go to outside the city, pay taxes in those communities that have some of the best schools while we have an underfunded school district--

someone else: $60 million up.

Yusuf Abdul-Qadir: so i just want to put into context what we’re talking about, because it’s really easy to say, mayor-- and with all due respect, i like you. but that was a very politician answer.

mayor: sorry, what specifically?

Yusuf Abdul-Qadir: the, “we will consider, and we will look.” what we’re saying is we’re not interested in considering and looking. what we’re saying is, actually, there’s $50 million. commit to $20 million cut, because we’re sending money-- as the mayor of Syracuse, when you don’t have a tax base, you’re sending money out of Syracuse. and not just for 30 years-- for the rest of their life because their pensions, their health insurance, their families. so we are funding for other people’s communities to have the promise of the American dream while we are denying it in our community. that’s the context that you, as the mayor, have to look at this under.

so when we talk about renegotiating union contract, what we’re saying is you can’t play around with, “maybe, um, we will--” no. y’all got to go, because you don’t provide a service that is beneficial to the community, that is meaningful to the community. the services that you provide criminalize our community, impoverish our community, reallocate resources to suburbs. we are actually funding the suburbs, both in our police departments and in our schools.

Fans are absolutely capable of finding meaning and substance to thing the author didn’t add consciously.

Imagine your 10th grad English teacher telling you that the use of the colour blue represents depression. The author didn’t do that consciously, but contextually? It makes fucking sense.

Maybe the author didn’t explicitly say a character wasn’t white, but white readers always assume they are. That doesn’t mean they can’t be coded as, and interpreted as people of Color.

Maybe the author didn’t explicitly say the character was disabled, but context and sustained injuries made them disabled even if the author never conceptualized them in that way.

Maybe a character isn’t specifically said to be mentally ill, but they’re written to have experienced trauma and they’re interpreted by readers as mentally ill.

Authors have no control over the interpretation of their novels, and the argument that it wasn’t consciously and canonically written is ridiculous. Any author will tell you that half the details that emerge are subconscious.

If your subconscious is racist or sexist or transphobic, and in any other way bigoted? It will come out in your writing. And your readers will pick up on it. Which I think is why it’s so important to have marginalized people’s voices involved in editing and publishing.

Why do employers offering minimum wage expect dedicated, hard working, knowledgeable, experienced employees instead of just someone who shows up and does the job?

http://thinkbeforeyoupink.org/

http://www.somethingawful.com/feature-articles/for-the-cure/

http://thestir.cafemom.com/in_the_news/132728/susan_g_komen_foundation_has

that’s right fracking you know, a process using chemicals known to cause cancer that leech into the water supply

http://www.triplepundit.com/2014/10/baker-hughes-fights-breast-cancer-pink-fracking-drill-bits/

Breast Cancer Research Foundation

Cancer Research Institute

Dana-Farber Cancer Institute

-thanks to a telecoms deal Facebook came preloaded on a lot of mobile phones and often time on FB didn’t count towards your minutes so to many in Myanmar Facebook WAS the internet

-nonetheless FB was not optimized for Burmese, Myanmar was not renders on Unicode, and the terms of service were translated extremely late and passed out on paper flyers instead of posted anywhere. FB in Myanmar had little to no oversight and there was only one contractor in Dublin monitoring hate speech in Burmese even when there were LITERAL RIOTS caused by misinformation posted on Burmese FB

-Myanmar was not a priority for FB leadership so after LITERAL RIOTS they only hired one other contractor who seemed to remove posts from peace activists rather than hate speech or posts calling for violence

-due to what seems like internal politicking against the author, the person she tries to hire to be in charge of Myanmar in the right time zonenever gets hired

-FB higher ups were warned in advance of huge misinformation efforts like troll accounts and takeovers of fan accounts for pop stars but did nothing, leading pretty much directly to what the UN calls genocide and crimes against humanity

First, you need to understand that the rule that jurors can’t just google things is coming from a good place. Like imagine that you are on a jury that’s considering, say, a medical malpractice lawsuit and one of your fellow jurors comes into the jury room and says to you, “I think the victim’s expert was lying because WebMD totally contradicts everything they said.”

And you might be like, “But WebMD is notoriously unreliable website and the expert you’re talking about is a researcher from Mayo Clinic.” But this person cannot be swayed.

Like, we can all agree that would be bad.

So even though these rules can contribute to unjust outcomes as in the case above (and seriously, the fact that the defense attorney didn’t fact check that is probably grounds for legal malpractice), they also prevent jurors from just looking up bullshit online and taking it more seriously than the actual experts the court has put on. And I think in the era of anti-vaxxers/QAnon/COVID denial/etc., we can all understand why it’s a bad idea to trust that people can tell fact from bullshit online.

So in light of this, how do you as a juror fact check something?

The key here is that you have to ask the court for information. Jurors can ask questions of the court during deliberations, so if something you said sounds off to you, you can ask for more information.

The key term you want to use here is “credibility.”

The job of a jury is to decide what are called “questions of fact.” Long before the trial even starts, lawyers will have hashed out all the “questions of law” --- like, what the statute of limitations is; what laws, exactly, were allegedly broken; whether the court you’re in even has jurisdiction; stuff like that. Jurors are responsible for deciding which side’s version of the facts has more credibility.

For instance, if the prosecution’s witness says X and the defense’s witness says Y, the jury is responsible for deciding which is true, X or Y. And you do this by weighing which one is more credible.

So in this case, if the juror had known to, he could have told the judge, “In order to properly assess the ICE agent’s credibility, I need more information about his tattoo. I have doubts about whether he was telling the truth about it, which would impact how credible I would find his testimony. Can the agent please provide evidence that it really is what he says it is?”

8. respect your body

respect your body. this is everything. 

i’ve been blogging on the many facets of body respect for years and will not be able to cover them all in one post. but very basically, body respect means:

accepting your largely inherited size and shape, and your body’s unique weight set point, and

honoring your body as a living organism deserving of care irrespective of its aesthetic qualities

respecting your body means practicing interoception, living from the inside out, learning to attend to the body’s cues, from hunger to gut instincts, rather than imposing rigid, external, culturally determined rules on, to borrow mary oliver’s phrase, the soft animal of your body. it’s not treating or speaking about your body any worse than you would the body of a friend or a child or a pet–your body is as valuable as theirs. body respect does not require the presence of “positivity,” but it does require the absence of cruelty. 

respecting your body means caring for the body you have today, not punishing it for the sake of a future fantasy. it means honoring your health by determining what behaviors are available to and appropriate for you, and to what degree. it means reckoning compassionately with limitations, cultivating boundaries. it’s learning to collaborate with the body in the pursuit of meaning and self actualization, instead of treating the body as an obstacle to those things. it doesn’t mean never changing the body in any way, but it does mean distinguishing between alterations which can improve quality of life (e.g. transition) and those which, in the long term, cannot (e.g. intentional weight loss).

body respect is wearing clothes that aren’t painful, physically or emotionally. it’s affirming the total okay-ness of your bare face, even if cosmetics are sometimes needed for practical or creative purposes. it’s unlearning messages that body hair is undesirable; it’s decolonizing your beauty standards, defining the idea of beauty for yourself and deciding what place that idea has in your life. it’s exploring the possibilities of ugliness. body respect is highly political.

sometimes the best body-care practices are not within our power to access, and sometimes they are. in the former case, body respect is remembering what our bodies do deserve, and holding the injustice the body suffers with compassion. it’s appropriately externalizing blame for those injustices (which are structural), not turning blame inward toward the body.