But Natasha is the only one who mines her own vulnerability. She’s the only one who makes it into a performance. And there’s something radical in acknowledging that feminine vulnerability as a performative, as something fake we are taught to expect and to mimic. That can be our superpower. We can be strong in ways men never will be because we face bullshit they will never have to face. That’s not justice, but it is power. It is strength. It’s control.
Tag Archives: i do politics
You may not agree with a woman, but to criticize her appearance — as opposed to her ideas or actions — isn’t doing anyone any favors, least of all you. Insulting a woman’s looks when they have nothing to do with the issue at hand implies a lack of comprehension on your part, an inability to engage in high-level thinking. You may think she’s ugly, but everyone else thinks you’re an idiot.
So what did Republicans get for shutting down the government for 17 days?
Their poll numbers tanked.
Their gubernatorial candidate in Virginia appears headed for defeat in next month’s election.
The business community is rethinking its support.
Veterans and the elderly are ticked off.
And any leverage they ever had to push their goals of reducing the size of government and chipping away at health-care reform is gone.
All in all, it’s been a worthwhile exercise for the GOP.
M. Ball, Republicans Shut Down The Government For Nothing, October 16th, 2013. (via robbiebaldwin)
And yet, the Tea Party is still going to label this a success as they move on to Plan TripleZ-Alpha.
kate mothafuckin’ wisehart: “Pacific Rim” is a proof of concept.
kate mothafuckin’ wisehart: “Pacific Rim” is a proof of concept.
The more I think about Pacific Rim, the more I realize that half the stuff in there is stuff that’s never done because people say it’ll keep a movie from being successful. There’s so many tropes inverted, and it’s all done…
What we see through social media is a generation of ignorant social activists. Young men and women all too willing to care about and defend something they don’t truly understand and refuse to educate themselves further on because they assume the limited information they receive has been vetted by someone more knowledgeable than themselves. This happens on both sides of the fence, with both conservatives and liberals.
I’ve seen arguably intelligent young men and women stand up at banquets and rallies, demanding answers about things like healthcare, DOMA, federal military actions. Asking questions about things they’ve seen on Facebook, on twitter, things that they’ve taken little to no time to research for themselves, and they look like fools. No matter their age, they paint themselves with a red mark that announces ‘I’m not mature enough to be here, to discuss these issues’.
But even so, it isn’t truly about age. It’s about social awareness. You are not discounted until you make a mistake. Say the wrong thing or quote the wrong statistic. Until then, your legitimacy remains intact.
Tumblr is like this.
I’ve seen people furious over gay rights legislation that doesn’t actually exist. Wars that haven’t happened. Most recently text posts with tens of thousands of notes alleging that China and Russia are going to go to war with the US over Syria.
Blogs relaying damaging misinformation written by individuals who can’t seem to be bothered to read a newspaper or use google properly. This is a crippling trend, and no one sees it.
These people get untold attention and affirmation until one person with a large enough follower count points out the flaw in their argument. Corrects the mistake, and shifts the tide. But this doesn’t fix the thousands of people who liked and reblogged the original post. The damage is done.
If there is one thing I’ve learned from working on political campaigns, very little is more damaging than an activist who argues only one side of the story without recognizing the existence of the other; because your opinion, no matter how solid and seemingly factually based, is invalid the second your audience realizes they know more than you.
And the result of all of this is a generation of young activists who don’t understand why they aren’t being taken seriously.
a recent conversation with a colleague regarding social media (via onawingandaswear)
The problem with saying after a mass shooting that it’s “too soon” to talk about gun control is really with the frequency of mass shootings.
It’s always too soon to talk about /gun control/ after a mass shooting because /gun control/ has little or nothing to do with the frequency of mass shootings. Let’s talk about mental health assistance instead, and how much easier it is to get a gun legally /after/ all the gun control hoops than it is to get consistent, worthwhile, inexpensive mental health care.
It’s amazing how mass shootings never seem to decrease in frequency, isn’t it? No matter how much ‘gun control’ there is.
Did you know that legally I probably can’t own a gun? Because I spent three days involuntarily incarcerated in a mental health institution on suicide watch. Three years ago. I’ve been in treatment, one way and another, for mental health issues of various sorts, for over twenty years.
Whom would you rather have a gun? Me, or someone who /can’t/ get treated for their issues? Who is more likely to have one?
“Straight Male Gamer” told to ‘get over it’ by BioWare
“Straight Male Gamer” told to ‘get over it’ by BioWare
David Gaider is consistently pretty damn awesome.
A man admittedly followed and killed an innocent teenager, and was declared not guilty.
States are passing laws allowing guns in public schools.
Women are losing their reproductive rights at an increasingly alarming rate.
Riots are tearing through the streets in cities all over the world.
College tuition keeps rising, sending a generation into debt as soon as they are entering the adult world.
Education funds keep getting slashed.
Privacy no longer exists.
Corporations now have the same rights as people, and the funds to actually protect them.
Through loopholes, many U.S. Corporations pay a lower tax rate than middle class families.
States are now passing more voter ID laws and similar laws that only affect the lower class.
The corporate giant, Monsanto, has pretty much purchased and bribed its way into every grocery product on the shelf, resulting in food becoming less and less like, well, food. There are reasons Cancer rates are getting worse.
Likewise, Monsanto is making sure small American farmers are ran out of business. Also, their constant pesticide use is killing bees and other insects, causing dire environmental issues.
The mass media is more concerned with pop culture and trends, than the real issues the world is facing.
Human population is ever growing, and at rapid rates. It can’t just continue this way.
We have put so much trash in giant landfills all over our world and in our oceans. We are killing our planet.
By planet you mean we are killing ourselves.
Can we also pay attention to the fact that there aren’t just political problems going on???
I mean, seriously, I have been trying to tell everyone, BUT NO ONE IS EVEN REBLOGGING THE ARTICLES THAT COULD SAVE A LIFE
While all this is happening, the Pacific Ocean is being contaminated by not just trash, but Radiation.
There was a leak in the Fukushima power plant that has now poisoned the entire Pacific Ocean.
Some think that oh, maybe it will go away with time. Sure, it will, in about 16 million years. Yes, you read that right. Due to the long half life of iodine-129, the whole ecosystem of the Pacific Coast will be contaminated pretty much forever.
Here is the radiation levels in the ocean.
Everyone needs to wake up.
The government needs to be set straight. They were hiding this information so that people don’t panic. Well, now everyone’s gonna die and not know why.
Shit is going down, and we need to make sure EVERYONE knows EVERYTHING that is happening in this place we call home.
http://www.naturalnews.com/041200_Fukushima_radiation_poisoning_contaminated_food.html#ixzz2Z9XEqBnN
Yes, let’s make sure that a whole lot of information that is likely to completely overwhelm a lot of people gets spread to a lot of teenagers and young adults with a fairly obvious history of depression, self-hatred, frustration, and instability, who are frequently unable to get themselves out of the holes their lives have become, so they can castigate themselves even more because they now know about these things they can do nothing about.
And if you can parse that sentence, you can rip me a new one. Meanwhile, shut UP.
The Label It Yourself (#LIY) campaign is a decentralized, autonomous grassroots campaign born out of our broken food system. We have been asking our government to label food products so we can make educated decisions about what we eat. The government has ignored our requests and so we are taking matters into our own hands.
Get your labels at www.labelityourself.org or create our own!
Hey, so the grocery stores who are hit by this are going to have to go through a lot of shit over those stickers. They will have to either remove them or, if they cannot, probably reclaim every product stickered. It won’t be the companies that make the products who deal with it directly, it will be the minimum wage employees at the store fronts—and the way distribution works, those stores are miles down the chain from producers. I get this campaign and the sentiment behind it, but just like trashing the office of a corporation will only force the ill-paid janitor to have a bad day, I don’t think this will do anything except make trouble for people who have nothing to do with decision making.
Seriously. I hate stunts like this.
wow… even poptarts betrayed us…………..
pop tarts, long renowned for their wholesome, natural goodness,
I don’t know how some of the most ignorant, downright foolish shit passes my dash on a daily basis.
All food is genetically engineered, you asses. Logic bomb, I know. Human beings have been breeding animals and grains to provide more (larger kernels of wheat/corn/barley – seriously, primitive grains looked just like overgrown grass because that’s what they were), better (higher starch content for mixtalization of maise in the Americas, higher sugar content in yams and sweet potatoes for reliable energy), less likely to run off or kill you (every livestock animal ever) and healthier (yes, even from the dawn of time, we’ve been breeding disease-resistant crops and livestock) food. Now, we just have access to the genomes. Those gimmicks with the glowing corn and animals? They’re mapping out the genome and seeing where splicing is successful. They’re not meant to be eaten.
And did you know, your god and savior Mark Lynas has publicly apologized for stirring up the anti-engineered food sentiment?
Congratulations for being in the top 1% of the world’s population who can afford to complain about this. Genetically engineered food simply means food that can last longer, produce more, and feed more people. If we splice sorghum to live and flourish in drought conditions, we can feed a lot of people who are living in drought conditions a whole hell of a lot faster than taking several decades to unreliably breed it into existence. Thanks to you pure-food activists, all Western (ie, the only people who really have the money to fund this shit!) research into GEF has nearly ground to a halt, setting back the goal considerably.
If you’re going to protest anything, protest the companies who set their seeds to be unviable after planting season. Protest the companies who are so fucking focused on making a buck that they have a stranglehold on seed production and planting. Protest the subsidization of corn in the US which has spurred unhealthy and unethical additions of cheap HF corn syrup to every mode of non-fresh food in order to boost production volume at low cost. That same subsidization has led to harmful, exhaustive farming practices, too.
I notice you are only targeting food that is sold/consumed in lower income areas in this photoset. How about a little classism for brekkies?
Seriously, guys. Why would you think this is a good idea? If you’ve got this much time on your hands (and enough money to be assholes about it), grow your own food. Stop making life harder for everyone else in your moral crusade to dictate what is available to put into my body. For fuck’s sake.
Do this bullshit in my store and the cops will be called. Jfc you can tell the people doing this have never worked a fucking retail job in their lives, or have ever struggled to buy food to last a week with only a few dollars. Classist, ignorant bullshit, straight up.
ALSO: if the items get claimed and thrown out, the already underpaid employees get their hours cut to make up for the lost money. DESTROYING MERCHANDISE THAT THE STORE HAS ALREADY PAID FOR IS LITERALLY THE MOST POINTLESS FORM OF “PROTEST” BECAUSE IT’S PUNCHING DOWN, NOT UP. It doesn’t hurt Monsanto and ConAgra. They got their money already. It doesn’t stop people from buying the shit you haven’t put stickers on (or, let’s be real, the shit you HAVE put stickers on. Nobody’s ever looked at a cinnamon pudding Snack Pack and been like WOW I’M SO GLAD THIS IS ORGANIC AND ALL-NATURAL—which, as said above, doesn’t mean it’s not genetically engineered).
It DOES hurt the nonmanager employees of the stores you’re trying to mess up, though. Way to fuck up on every single level!
I get where people are going with this, but it’s a bad idea for several reasons, all of which are named above.
Also can we talk about how the major issue with GMO foods is economic? Because these new breeds are now “patented” and thus under strict control of the company that created them?
I’m not saying that GMO foods are all healthy or whatever, I’m just saying that we’re ignoring a major issue.
Also yeah classism. -.-