anyway jeff bezos could eradicate homelessness. he could literally give each homeless person 100k and it would only take less than .5% of his entire wealth. what the actual god giving fuck
Why do you think they deserve it
Well shelter is a basic need, and would at the very least allow them a place where they can get back on their feet. Food water and shelter are necessary for a healthy body and psychology. There’s also the fact that they’re people too, and a little help goes a long way in making a decent community. There’s plenty of reasons
Yeah they need stuff, but why does every homeless person deserve 0.5% of someone’s income
You have five hundred apples, and just one day to eat them all.
You pass by a small crowd of hungry children, and decide you’d rather 455 apples go rotten than give them to some snotty brat who isn’t your problem.
It doesn’t matter how hard you’ve worked for your 500 apples, or that you aren’t the parent of any of those kids. in the moment you decide to walk away, it doesn’t matter why they’re hungry, or who owes who what.
You had the opportunity to help people, you had the ability to help people, you had the resources to help people. You had everything you needed to make a small, tiny little difference in someone’s life, and you decided not to.
What are you going to buy in your lifetime that’s worth more to you than your own humanity?
the older i get the more disgusted by diet culture i become.
there’s a reason it targets young girls. there’s a reason it hinges on making grown women look tiny and helpless and weak. there’s a reason that it is normalized to the extent that what is ostensibly not a healthy act is seen as being a “good” choice and something to be proud of.
young people are just completely submerged in it. adults forget that kids pick up on fucking everything and they hear their parents and their teachers and everyone on this planet not eating red meat this week or on juice cleanses or denying denying denying themselves (”oh good for you! i’d never be able to be so well-behaved”). they learn really, really fast that “fat” is a funny, not-good, close-to-a-swear word – to the extent that my usually well-behaved five year olds will devolve into crazy giggles because i asked “pass me one of the fat markers please”. they don’t react like that to anything else, just “fat” which they know is bad/off-limits/terrible.
and we pretend we’re so confused by obesity and by the skyrocketing eating disorder rate – a rate of diagnosed eating disorders, mind you, since disordered eating is now essential to many american eating traditions – and we blame millenials or GMOs or whatever won’t make us look a multi-billion dollar industry in the eye and realize. they literally teach us from a young age what is essentially a restriction/denial cycle that is very close to a binge cycle. they teach us “good” and “bad” and “safe” foods but don’t supply the money for us to obtain those foods (and god forbid you live in a food desert) while also selling us Magical Cures For Magical Transformations.
and of course it works. you teach people to crash diet and lo and behold their metabolism becomes entirely dependent on your cycle of starvation/refeeding. the statistic that most people gain back the weight they lost isn’t because people are these terrible people have no self control (but they sell that idea to you, don’t they), it’s that their metabolism was trashed and the way they look at food cannot change in the span of a crash diet – if it takes someone with an eating disorder seven years to recover, we understand that, but if someone overweight gains back their lost weight it’s “a shame”. and the diet culture wins both sides, i want you to understand that. they make money of of you either way. they know that you’re gaining the weight back but fucking scrambling – they know you’ll try to buy their product because last time it worked to buy atkins or weight watchers, and they know that when you’re losing the weight, well, goddamn, you’re going to be an advertising board for them because we teach each other that this is coffee-break material, isn’t it.
and we sell each other on it. we say, “oh this worked for me, you’ve gotta try it.” none of the people we speak to are nutritionists, but everyone on the internet has a degree in medicine, so don’t worry, if you step outside in a bikini and are not unhealthy levels of skinny (oh but it’s healthy if it’s the right kind of skinny), you will be reminded to lose weight. we keep our women running on such low levels of carbs/calories/fats that they’re permanently exhausted, weak, emotionally drained – and then we crow women are just crazy. meanwhile men get the opposite treatment that is unhealthy in a different way – the obsession with masculinity through food, of all things, that salad is “rabbit food” and that a real “man’s meal” is red meat and beer.
and god forbid you say, “this shit is fucking predatory, it’s evil, it’s controlling people’s bodies” because you’ll get fifty-seven “okay, fatty” comments that miss the point completely, because the companies are really, really smart and they learned: if you call someone fat, you can ignore them completely. and anyone who isn’t “into dieting” is therefore fat and incapable of healthy eating. healthy eating, is of course, defined by the company – but hey! you can help that person realize they’re just a stupid/dumb/ignorant fatty. or if they’re somehow magically not fat, you can tell them, “well, one day you will be.”
and i just know. i know. this shit will continue. it always does.
“When I was a freshman, my sister was in eighth grade. There was a boy in two of her periods who would ask her out every single day. (Third and seventh period, if I remember correctly.) All day during third and seventh she would repeatedly tell him no. She didn’t beat around the bush, she didn’t lie and say she was taken—she just said no. One day, in third period, after being rejected several times, he said; “I have a gun in my locker. If you don’t say yes, I am going to shoot you in seventh.” She refused again, but right after class she went to the principal’s office and told them what happened. They searched his locker and there was a gun in his backpack. When he was arrested, some of my sister’s friends (some female, even) told her that she was selfish for saying no so many times. That because of her, the entire school was in jeopardy. That it wouldn’t have killed her to say yes and give it a try, but because she was so mean to him, he lost his temper. Many of her male friends said it was “girls like her” that made all women seem like cockteases. Wouldn’t have killed her to say yes? If a man is willing to shoot someone for saying no, what happens to the poor soul who says yes? What happens the first time they disagree? What happens the first time she says she doesn’t want to have sex? That she isn’t in the mood? When they break up? Years later, when I was a senior, I was the only girl in my Criminal Justice class. The teacher, who used to be a sergeant in the police force, told us a story of something that had happened to a girl he knew when she was in high school. There was a guy who obviously had a crush on her and he made her uncomfortable. One day he finally gathered up the courage to ask her out, and she said no. The next day, during an assembly, he pulled a gun on her in front of everyone and threatened to kill her if she didn’t date him. He was tackled to the ground and the gun was taken from him. When my teacher asked the class who was at fault for the crime, I was the only person who said the boy was. All the other kids in the class (who were all boys) said that the girl was, that if she had said yes he would’ve never lost it and brought a gun and tried to kill her. When my teacher said that they were wrong and that this is what is wrong with society, that whenever a white boy commits a crime it’s someone else’s fault (music, television, video games, the victim) one boy raised his hand and literally said; “But if someone were to punch me and I punched him back, who is at fault for the fight? He is, not me. It’s self-defence. She started it, so anything that happens to her is in reaction to her actions .It’s simple cause and effect.” Even though he spent the rest of the calss period ripping into the boys and saying that you are always responsible for your own actions, and that women are allowed to say no and do not have to date them, they left class laughing about how idiotic he was and that he clearly had no idea how much it hurt to be rejected. So now we have a new school shooting, based solely on the fact some guy couldn’t get laid, and I see men, boys, applaudin him, or if they’re not applauding him, they’re laying blame on women as a whole. Just like my sister’s friends did. Just like the boys in my Criminal Justice class did. This isn’t something that’s rare. This isn’t something that never happens, or that a select group of men feel as if they are so entitled to women that saying no is not only the worst possible thing a woman can do, but is considered a form of “defence” when they commit a crime upon them (whether it be rape or murder-as-a-reaction-towards-rejection). Girls are being killed for saying no to prom invites. Girls are being killed for saying no to men. They are creating an atmosphere where women are too scared to say no, and the worst part is? They are doing it intentionally. They want society to be that way, they want women to say yes entirely out of fear. Even the boys and men who aren’t showing up to schools with guns are saying; “Well, you know, I wouldn’t do that, but you have to admit that if she had just said yes …” If you are a man and you defend this guys’ actions or try to find an excuse for it, or you denounce what really happened, or in any way lay blame on women, every girl you know, every woman you love, has just now thought to themselves that you might lose your shit and kill them someday for saying no. You have just lost their trust. And you know what? You deserve to lose it.”
“Wouldn’t have killed her to say yes? If a man is willing to shoot someone for saying no, what happens to the poor soul who says yes? What happens the first time they disagree? What happens the first time she says she doesn’t want to have sex? That she isn’t in the mood? When they break up?” -vampmissedith.tumblr.com
our entire culture treats female boundaries like they’re an aggression. like violence is a natural consequence of establishing personhood. not exaggerating when I say this is terrorism
while i get and agree with the fact that gay people should probably play gay people and gay stories are best written by gay people, the fervor to prove that “straight people shouldn’t play gay characters!!” is what the interviewer used to forcibly out lee pace so like
idk maybe slow your roll and realize that like… actors can be closeted, content creators can be closeted, and tbh this “you can only write your own experiences, never write someone else’s” rhetoric is also a bigot’s fucking wet dream?? like the perfect excuse to never write diverse characters?? and to say that they have nothing in common with people who don’t look/love/exist the same way as them??
yeah, the author of simon vs the homo sapien’s agenda is a cis straight woman, which means love, simon (though directed by a married gay man with multiple gay characters played by gay/bi actors) is based on a novel written by a straight woman… but this straight woman literally ends her book acknowledging the LGBT teens who helped her write the book and make sure she was writing it appropriately.
this is the content we want
listen… EVERY SINGLE piece of media EVER involves some level of writing about experiences that are not your own, especially if it’s diverse. even bland stories just about white people involves an author writing about genders that are not their own. if you want a story with characters of color, white authors are going to have to write about those perspectives. if you want gay characters in every story, straight authors are gonna have to write about those perspectives. even LGBT narratives might involve gay authors writing about bi characters or cis authors writing about trans characters.
what we HOPE FOR when they do that is that they talk to people… actually belonging to those groups to learn what is and isn’t appropriate and true to life. which is what the author of simon vs the homo sapien’s agenda did.
it’s exactly what she did. she literally worked in a support group for LGBT and GNC kids, saw they did not have cute love stories written for them after they told her this, and then worked with them to give them the love story they craved.
this is a good thing. this is progress for lgbt people. this is the path we need to walk towards getting LGBT content created by LGBT authors.
when you attempt to take the ~moral ground on protesting this film, all you’re doing is telling people who fund these projects that gay products don’t sell. they don’t get the nuance of what you’re going for. and, chances are, you’re looking like a fucking hypocrite, because i can promise you most of the canon gay characters you stan profit a cishet somehow (if they’re even canon).
so, y’unno, as someone who has read simon vs the homo sapien’s agenda AND seen the fucking movie let me tell you!! it’s fine!! it’s diverse beyond having gay character, it’s written respectively, and it hit home on a lot of experiences i WISH i had as a gay teen. it’s corny, it’s silly, and it’s all i ever would have wanted at 13, 14, 15
if you don’t want to see it, just fucking say so! but don’t act like you’re doing it on moral grounds. you can just… not like a movie or not want to see it without it being some moral victory.
At my last company, one day someone in accounting approached me at lunch and quietly told me I need to ask for a raise because I was way underpaid.
They gave me a number to shoot for. It was about twice than what I had been making at the time.
So I went online, did some research, found some figures backing up my claim, put it all together and went to my boss.
I got what I asked for.
If it hadn’t been for that person in accounting telling me I was way underpaid, I’d have never known. I went from barely scraping by to being able to have a savings account and getting all my debts paid thanks to them.
You should at least check sites like salary.com to start the process of seeing what you should be making.
When I explain cultural misappropriation to children, I use the example of The Nightmare Before Christmas.
It’s effective because especially for children, who don’t have enough historical context to understand much of the concept, you can still fully grasp the idea.
There was nothing wrong with Jack seeing the beauty and differences in Christmas town, it’s when he tried to take what is unique about Christmas town away from those it originally belonged to without understanding the full context of Christmas things is when everything went wrong.
When Jack tries to get the folk of Halloween town to make Christmas gifts for children, etc., children understand that the Halloween town folk do not have the full context for the objects they are making, and they are able to see that the direct repercussions and consequences are very harmful.
what i like about this is the implication that if jack had taken the time to understand christmas town, bringing christmas to halloween town would not have been harmful. that’s how it works, folks. cultural sharing is GOOD, it’s only misappropriation when it’s done in ignorance and disrespect.
So it’s not just accidentally removing things form their context; he has intentionally disregard the meaning of the rituals he purports to be recreating, making them more fun for the recreaters but not like what the rituals are supposed to be and without the related significance.
This is the best way to conceptualize the wrong way to share culture I have ever seen and I think I finally get where people are coming from when they talk about “cultural appropriation.”
in before nazis twist this around and say we’re being intolerant
I read an interesting article once that said that in a tolerant society, the only way to keep it working was to become intolerant to intolerance if that makes sense.
It’s called the irony of tolerance or something like that. And it was written in the 1940’s. Give you one guess as to what inspired that article.
Imagine having control of more money than you could ever spend in your lifetime, and then going out of your way to try and bleed even more money out of people who can barely make ends meet. Imagine being the kind of person who could literally just spend all your days painting or writing or playing with dogs or helping to nurse orphan baby sloths, with no worry that you will ever lack the funds for housing, entertainment, health care, vacations, etc, imagine reaching that point, and then deciding you are going to work your ass off to screw everyone else over instead. You are going to spend your days bribing politicians so that you can charge some minimum wage single working mother an extra $40 a month for her ability to use Facebook. So that you can charge some uninsured kid so much for his insulin that he can’t afford it and ends up dying while he begs strangers on the internet for help. That’s what you want to do with your life.
I do not understand billionaires.
There are psychological conditions imposed by having a lot of money; it’s quite hard to imagine how or why a billionaire acts the way they do, because you have to orient your brain in a way that probably isn’t natural to it.
People with inherited wealth have a very strange view of the world and part of that really does involve the sense of being separate from other humans. We point out that they don’t have empathy; they would not be interested because they don’t recognise that we are the same species to even begin emphasise with. We point out that they are socially irresponsible; they don’t see any reason why they should care about your society. We point out that society cannot function in this matter: this is not a concern to them. They have not been raised as humans, really, so humans telling them “you should care about humans because humans” is met with blankness. the part where “caring” and “sharing” are rewarding to the brain is supposed to be programmed in by parents, to make the baby fit in with society and be loved. If the parents don’t have that mechanism, and it isn’t important that to them that strangers love and help their baby because of its inherent worth, (because the parents can simply pay strangers to do so), then where does the kid learn better? Their caretakers are not paid to teach the child how to love. And if the baby loves the paid caretaker too much, the caretaker will be taken away. So emotional appeals to the super-wealthy are a bit like asking a snake to herd sheep for you.
Not only that, but people with inherited wealth overidentify with their money. So they perceive our attempts at reason, and our emotional appeals, to be the yammering of scary creatures – rodents, maybe – trying to steal from them. Trying to trick them. We are only interested in their money, and we are coming up with all these tricksy plans to take it away!
And further, the human brain isn’t very good at the reality of numbers (we are best with numbers that we can comfortably count to.) So humans can usually conceive of fifty minutes, fifty people, fifty dollars, fifty apples, fifty days. We can understand the concept of fifty years, or imagine a room with fifty cats, or wince at the idea of fifty people being injured; if a scientist says there are fifty things, we nod happily. We know the shape of fifty dollars and the impact its gain or loss will have on our month. We can just about picture the reality of a “thousand”. We cannot really manage a million.
Billions are fake numbers. A human will nod politely, but will never understand. You have to break the billion up – “a billion dollars is forty thousand dollars spent every day for life!” – for the human to comprehend it.
The wealthy don’t perceive their billions either. They don’t comprehend them as a billion; they count numbers the same way as everyone else . They don’t drop a fifty in a homeless guy’s cup because they don’t feel like they have that kind of money (and also, fuck the homeless guy.)
Pretty much the only positive/affectionate thing I can say about Britian’s royals (apart from 👍Meghan Markle) is that they are reared with an immense sense of duty and social responsibility. This is an expectation of the nation, and the children are brought up accordingly. So even though they are a bunch of squinting gibbering lemurs, they are trained to empathise, to look human for the cameras, to hold pleasant conversations with everybody (even if the royal gives the impression of being an early design of chatbot while doing so), and to spend their lives doing Vaguely Positive Things for the Public. Even if they don’t have the mechanism where caring for people is rewarding, they can spend their lives miming it, because the world has tremendous social expectations, and royals are raised to meet those expectations since birth. Because we’ve all decided that the rich can do literally whatever they like, but the royal are still expected to have public appeal! So one set is deliberately trained to be approximately human, and the other is not.
It would be horrifying for Prince William to be accused of colluding with the Russian government; people around the world would consider it a personal betrayal. But a president’s children, apparently, may do so with our blessing.
So is it possible to be human and rich?
Well, there is an actual quantity of money that gives comfort and happiness; people research this. Below that number, you worry about money. When you reach the number, you are okay. After that number, it causes anxiety and outrage and feelings of scarcity again. Worse, because (like a cursed hoard of dragon’s gold) when the money reaches a certain size, then you stop having it because of the things it can be traded for (comfort, security, pleasure, happiness) and start keeping it for itself. Which is a toxic and terrible thing to do to that poor money…
So I think that wealth should be capped at that number and redistributed thereafter. It’s quite a high, happy number, but not an unreasonable one. It’s generous. A generous amount of money. And we will say gently to the crying billionaires, who will perceive this as us killing them, that it is for their own mental health. They were being cruel to the money, and it was a health hazard.
All of this. I have a hard time conceiving of billionaires as being human, cause they sure don’t act like it.
I sometimes try watching media that scientifically explains the mindset of the super rich, but I always get too enraged to engage with it for long. Explaining it the way the OP did is super helpful. Also thank you for explaining exactly why people view the royals more positively than non-royals, something which has always confused the hell out of me (although perhaps it was a little mean to lemurs to compare them to the British royal family).
These are great! These are all really useful methods of defending yourself and I actually learned most of these in my Krav Maga classes.
I would have to go up against people (usually guys) twice my size and could easily overpower me, but these tricks DO work and they don’t require a lot of strength.
Nothing but My Aching Soul 