Brotherhood of The Orb

Imagine if we took the cop budget and turned it into a free ride service budget

Bringing this post back because I wanna talk about it more.

Read an article in the local paper submitted anonymously by a woman who got a DUI two years ago.

My first instinct was to hate her. Because I hate drinking and driving. Viscerally. Anyone who knows me knows how intense I can be about impaired driving of all kinds (drunk, high, tired). It’s not worth it. It gets people killed. I lost a good friend to a drunk driver. Don’t ever. I’ve gotten in fights with people! I have stolen keys!

“Don’t ever” was, in fact, the point of her writing it. But not because of the danger posed to others. Because of how much a single DUI had ruined her life for two straight years. This also didn’t garner much sympathy from me, because obviously the REAL reason not to drink and drive is because you could kill someone. What do I care if someone irresponsible is inconvenienced?

Anyway, this woman was pulled over after leaving a bar where she had two beers to drive a few blocks to her friend’s place. This didn’t really make me more sympathetic because I’m a hardass when it comes to drinking and driving, but she wasn’t pulled over for any kind of impaired driving. She was driving perfectly. It was clearly the kind of stop that happens late at night when the cops are just fishing. The cop made up something about her stickers being placed wrong or a faulty light, before making her take the normal physical impairment tests (as someone with dyspraxia these scare the shit out of me, but that’s neither here nor there) which she passed just fine. In fact, her driving was perfect, her reactions were perfect. But then came the breathalyzer. And her blood alcohol was just too high.

She got arrested.

And the rest of article was her detailing her attempts since to try to get her license back.

The for profit companies she had to take classes from, the for profit companies who make you pay to install the breathalyzer in your car, how if you are able to plead poverty to get aid for that installation you also have to commit to going once a month to a for profit company that will calibrate your discounted breathalyzer and how if you don’t go your car will get remotely bricked and how the pandemic interrupted the hours of these places without notice meaning her car needed to be towed when she missed an appointment after the place was closed when she expected it to be open, how this added to her sentence, how she lost her insurance.

As I read this, I thought, sure, about how much I hate drunk driving. About my knee-jerk, visceral lack of sympathy. And I asked myself:

Does any of this actually make me feel safer?

And it doesn’t. It doesn’t make me feel any safer at all. This woman was writing this article to say “Don’t drink and drive. Not even once. It’s not worth it.” But what I got from it was, these punitive measures aren’t preventing people from drinking and driving. They’re just… giving cops and for-profits fun new ways to mistreat and exploit normal people. People we, people I personally, can feel disinclined to protect because of judgments we have about them.

Meanwhile, people are still going to drink and drive.

And I thought about what would work. What would make me feel safer. And you know what would make me feel safer? If people who hadn’t planned ahead could still get a ride home. I’d much rather someone call the police (or a service that’s one of the many we institute to replace them) and go “I drove here but I don’t think I’m safe to drive home” and have the reply be “someone will be right there”. Then a pair of public servants show up, one to drive you home and one to drive your car home, and you get home safe.

I would love for traffic safety to be, like, the actual goal of how we manage traffic laws.

But more than that, punitive attempts to control people, blatant disproven behaviorism, doesn’t work. If your political philosophy is about finding the “bad” or “undeserving” and ensuring they struggle, I can’t identify with it. It’s hard to come up with a type of “common crime” that I have more disdain for than drinking and driving, but disapproving of the way this woman has been treated is not the same as justifying her actions. I don’t care! I don’t care if she learns her lesson! I don’t care if I like her! Everything you’re doing to her for a single breathalyzer failure is not keeping the roads safer!

The moment she failed the breathalyzer, you should’ve just given her a ride. That’s all I need.

#you know what else is heavily criminalized in the usa? sleeping in your car#realize you're not safe to drive home? well too fucking bad you also cant just sleep it off#then the thing about how they don't drink any less in europe but have significantly lower DUI instances#literally because they have working public transit

@elodieunderglass

I love to think about this. Not just because it’s a swan, not just because it’s clockwork, not just because it’s old, but because the creator thought about how to physically animate the idea of light on water.

Me and my cousin have an ongoing bit where we pretend we made "slightly better" versions of things where we'll be like.

"That was a pretty good movie, but not as good as my movie, House of 1001 Corpses," or "I guess this song is okay. Kind of reminds me of a song I'm working on called 'Faster Car'."

Never once has it been funny or made anyone but us laugh.

This reminds me of a joke I have with two of my cousins

spent MONTHS looking for this stupid tumblr post bcuz i constantly want to reference it and it wouldn't come up no matter what i searched despite it being (what i thought) was a popular well-known tumblr post only to find that the original blog turned off reblogs and deactivated and that it only got 12k notes total. but im posting it anyway to preserve its legacy

oh boy i sure do love having tons of trinkets

the nefarious dust particle:

You've heard of multi-shipper now get ready for multi-headcanoner: where multiple interpretations of the same character coexist in your head and they are all great.

Don't ask chatgpt! Ask your librarian

me getting silly in the pussy if im being honest ?

could you lie

I love thinking I'm a hater and then meeting a real hater and going wow that does not look fun actually. Going back to my lukewarm hater ways. Performative haterdom. I couldn't name five hater bands.

It feels almost unbelievable that there's an Olympics this year. Not just this year but next month. Like can you please come back another time thanks

At least they're in Italy though

context according to instagram:

original image from the magazine:

Found a scan of this issue on the Internet Archive (it's the back cover). This scan is 4000x6000 for all your high resolution needs!

The caption reads: "Defeated by roses. Near Turin's Lingotto station, along a lonely path, Miss Guida Concetta Rinino, 28 years old, who was bringing a nice bunch of roses to a relative, was accosted by an unknown young man. The young woman, rather than losing heart, defended herself with extraordinary energy, using the bunch of flowers as a weapon. So it was that the scoundrel, his face all scratched up, had to flee. (Drawing by Walter Molino.)"

Incredible. At a distance I understand how the woman might appear to be the abuser and the man the sympathetic victim, but the second you zoom into the man’s face the pink-cheeked rage- not remorse, or rejection, or embarrassment- not heartbreak or despair- but RAGE- the deeper story speaks itself into your suspicions.

And the bit where they’re HER roses? Almost a relief, but also sadder, as she will arrive at whatever event without them, or with them destroyed.

Do you think when the righteous anger and anxiety and annoyance fade, when she arrives at her destination- will her loved ones applaud her? Will she be proud? Will her hands shake? Will she walk home with company from then out, and for how long?

In this moment, she is provoked into anger. Anger is good- it appears strong. But look at his face. Would you put it past him to linger there after dark, in case she returns alone?

What story will HE tell, of ‘I was perfectly polite, but she didn’t even give me a chance- women like that, they’d swoon for a jerk in a heartbeat, but kind and flattering men like me?…”

I love this piece. It paints both stories while illustrating the power dynamics and struggles at play. This should be shown in art classes

I really appreciate that the artist, Walter Molino, drew the man with an angry/frustrated face, making sure that the man is not innocent at all here; he accosted the woman to the point she had to violently defend herself. Had the man been drawn screaming or crying, this picture could be misconstrued even more easily by incels like the one in the first post

joining the war on kids reading any book they want on the side of kids reading any book they want. simply you will be fine. it's even good to be confronted with things you don't understand and even find upsetting, uncomfortable and difficult. it's a surprise tool that will help you later.

prev tags:

literally ok so not a funny story but kind of funny? when I was nine I encountered rape in a book and I was like hey mom what’s this mean and she explained it and I was like oh. gross. and then like two weeks later a girl on the bus abruptly disclosed her csa and we were all like ????? what ???? but I was like wait hang on there’s a word for that ☝️🤓 and explained what it meant and that it was illegal and that you could talk to a teacher or my mom if it had happened to you and everyone was like ohhhhh I see I see and very somberly comforted the girl (she was safe she was removed from her home and living with my neighbor at the time so it wasn’t Urgent)

And this is a perfect illustration of why it is important for kids to read or variety of things, and why abusers don’t want them to.