Bianca

ALSO: I just showed this post to my roommate, who is an MD at a clinic that specializes in care for the LGBT community in the Baltimore area. I asked her  whether hormones were responsible for the difference in the “male/female” symptom arrays. I asked how that would apply to her trans patients (which, she treats a LOT of trans patients). She said, basically, that the longer you’ve taken testosterone the more likely you are to get the intense chest pressure and the arm pain, versus the upper back pressure and shortness of breath.

I am aya living in North Gaza with my three children, and we are facing starvation in the northern region. We have moved more than 13 times trying to find a safe place, but there is no safety anywhere.

I am asking for your help to protect my children and get us out of this imminent danger😥.

Your donations and sharing of my story will greatly contribute to our survival.🙏🙏

https://gofund.me/7dc97966

I haven't seen this circulating here on Tumblr, so I decided to make my own post.

last saturday, in Porto, there was a pride parade going down the street and this old man was standing there, by his front door, waving the portuguese flag. most people on the parade probably thought the same: old person waving the national flag? he's probably protesting against the parade, he's a nationalist of some sort.

then the old man called for that person to come near him. the whole parade stopped. everyone just.. stopped moving. they didn't know what to expect, and most expected the worst. and that person decided to give him the benefit of the doubt and approached the old man. and then... they traded flags, he hugged the person and then he waved the pride flag happily. everyone cheered him.

such a wholesome moment. 🥹❤️🌈

I understand—and agree with—that sentiment of, “I want slower deliveries by drivers who are paid better,” as one recent tumblr post put it. I absolutely agree with the idea that we need to produce and consume less as a culture, and that an actual substantive conversation about politics should involve willingness to relinquish the many modern luxuries that are built on exploitation.

I don’t think these are good examples of those luxuries, though.

Large budget movies are possible because consumers (and investors) are willing to pay for them. A large budget is actually a necessary component in making sure workers are being adequately compensated; the fact that they currently are often exploited by studios is a result of deliberate misallocation of resources, not anything intrinsic to the size of the production. Same thing goes with high-quality video games. As for releasing a new film/game every month/year, that’s only unsustainable because there’s only a handful of monopolistic studios doing it. In a well-regulated industry that encourages growth and competition, we could see tens, if not hundreds of studios producing big-budget films and games. And, with a well-compensated and socially-supported citizenry, consumers would have enough disposable income to support it.

Similarly, the problem with soda isn’t that we have 80 brands; it’s that we have two. And those two brands each own 800 different labels. In a healthy economy, these monopolies would be dissolved, and we could support well over 80 moderately-sized independent beverage companies producing their own sodas.

Same-day delivery, again, could be easily supported with proper allocation of resources. Currently, we have huge centralized distributors like Amazon exploiting gig-workers with slave-wages to ferry cheap mass-produced crap to people, and that’s what makes it bad, not the speed at which they do it. If instead, we had something like a super-robust USPS, with well-compensated deliverypeople working reasonable hours within a decentralized network of independent-but-cooperative suppliers, there would be absolutely no reason why you couldn’t get something delivered to you from the distro ten miles down the road within a day.

When we critique capitalism, and they respond, “Yeah, well capitalism made the cell phone you’re using!” our response shouldn’t be, “Oh shit u right,” it should be, “No, capitalism made the cell phone I’m using break after a year so I’ll buy a new one, and they use slave labor to do it while they pocket the rest.”