People existing with self-harm scars is not promoting self-harm.

People posting photos of themselves with scars is not promoting self-harm.

People making and sharing art of characters with self-harm scars is not promoting self-harm.

Your just ableist.

No body should ever have to hide their body or be told their existence needs to come with a trigger warning

I think you missed the entire point of the post if you think it's very good + reblogged, but also entirely disagree.

Idk how to make this clearer but disabled people should NEVER have to censor their bodies for the comfort or sake of others triggers. Scars can be triggering but it's also dehumanising, ableist, and often triggering to tell someone their body is too disturbing to exist normally in public /online.

When it is actively harmful to others to accommodate your triggers it is your problem to manage them instead of harming other people.

btw the whole thing about feminism is that women are equal to men. not like. starting a matriarchy. because if you started a matriarchy we would just have the cycle of abuse repeat. i feel like some of you do not know that and probably should know that

You're not immune to being the bully btw. You're not immune to being in the wrong

"But i'm-" there is no identity or state of being that makes you immune to hurting someone. You can be convinced that you are in the right for doing so. You can be convinced that you're defending someone by doing so. You have always got to examine if you're taking pleasure in hurting someone or if you're actually doing something good.

[Image text: there's actually no political label or identity that absolves you of doing harm.]

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

really hate the framing "ultraprocessed food is leading to increased colon cancer in young people". it's not technically incorrect, but the average person can gain next to nothing from reading that. what should be specified is lack of fiber. you'd be fine eating ultraprocessed food if you ate enough fiber, it just so happens that a lot of ultraprocessed food doesn't contain much fiber due to how the food is processed (to enhance taste and extend shelf life), which is why this correlation exists.

mako ferret

The conversation surrounding cultural appropriation has been so severely mutilated by white “allies” that the original intention behind that conversation has become almost unrecognizable in most social contexts.

To explain what I mean, the conversation around cultural appropriation was started by black and native people to discuss the frustrations we feel at being punished socially and financially for partaking in our cultural heritage while white people could take, I.e. appropriate, aspects of our culture that we are actively shamed for and be heralded as innovators. It was about the frustrations we feel when the same white people who shamed us would take our culture and wear it as if they were the ones who created it while still actively shaming us for doing the same.

The original push behind naming cultural appropriation and having these conversations were so that we as a society could evaluate why we were punished for our heritage while white People were not. It was supposed to be about seeking solutions. The idea was to create a society where we could celebrate our cultures with impunity. It was never about telling white people that they “weren’t allowed” to do certain things. We did ask that white People stop doing certain things because they weren’t doing them respectfully and were not invited to do them, but the primary reason we asked them to desist was to reclaim the things they had stolen and to reassign them culturally back where they belonged.

White “allies” saw these conversations happening and instead of trying to aplify our own voices or even try to learn about the complexities behind why we were saying what we were saying, they instead began screaming over us and creating a narrative that was hardly even the bones of what we originally set out to say. It was like they took the conversation we were trying to have, completely decontextualized it, and stripped it of all it’s nuance in order to gain social currency by seeming progressive.

So the conversation around cultural appropriation went from “This aspect of our heritage belongs to us and we find it egregious that we are shamed for it. What steps can we take to address the racism that’s creating this situation as well as rehome the things that have been stolen” to “you’re not allowed to do that because if you do that you’re racist, we don’t really understand why that’s racist but you’re not allowed to do that and if you do that you’re a klansman no exceptions. So you’re not allowed because because”

At the end of the day, did I like the fact that sally was wearing dreads? No. But my primary concern was not that sally was wearing dreads but rather that sally could wear dreads and I couldn’t. THAT was the intended focus of those conversations. It was about addressing the inequality. It was about us. Now the conversation is just about sally and were completely forgotten.

White People are always asking me what they can do to help. You want to know? Stop talking. Aplify our voices and shut the fuck up because you all have pretty much derailed this conversation and many more like it to the point that we no longer are trying to make steps to understand and dismantle the racism around cultural appropriation and instead are just using it as social shaming tactics.

TL;DR: read my post. Most things worth learning about can’t be summarized in the bullet points of a buzfeed article. Don’t come into academic circles and complain because everything hasn’t been conviently summarized for you. Stop pretending that things aren’t accessible to you because you refuse to do the intellectual labor that is learning.

I think it’s normal for people to be mad at each other sometimes even if they’re close friends or family or intimate with each other. Like I think that’s a normal and healthy part of relationships that can happen sometimes

“Why were you on Mad At Me island” because at the time I was mad at you and yet our friendship has weathered that without trouble

not finding animals people are obsessed with particularly cute or appealing will have you feeling like a cartoon villain actually

Dinosaur cartoon.

Important reminder

This reminds me of the fact that "Ancient Egypt" goes back so many thousands of years, that the most recent "Ancient Egyptians" were already studying (even more) Ancient Egypt.

Not even the most recent ones. It was an Egyptian prince from the 13th century BCE studying and restoring artifacts from the 26th century BCE.

For context, the last Pharaoh, Cleopatra VII, lived in the 1st century BCE. Prince Khaemweset, known as "the first egyptologist", was as ancient to her as the pyramids and tombs he was studying were ancient to him.

Mammoth still existed on the earth while the pyramids where being built

The oldest written story we have begins "In those days, in those distant days"

This is literally how you actually improve ADHD symptoms btw

alright everyone is being sassy but nobody has brought up the actual reason why scientists are interested in the titanic in the notes

Per wikipedia:

The Titanic was made of steel, presumably to resist corrosion (i mean. thats why boats are made of steel i assume) but even when iron/steel rusts people did not expect to find like. decomposition. bacteria are EATING the titanic.

and there's wood furniture from the titanic that isn't decaying. hell, there are wood ships at the bottom of the ocean that archaeologists study. so the expectation people have for the titanic is not that the steel would decompose at the bottom of the ocean. Even in 100 years, since there are much more ancient preserved wooden ships iirc.

(im not particularly knowledgeable about ships, i just had heard about the science going on around the titanic so i wanted to clarify that on this post for people)

The Titanic is an exceptionally weird whalefall basically.

Not a marine biologist but biologist enough to weigh in on this. The reason we have iron eating bacteria but not wood eating bacteria at the bottom of the ocean is simple. Hydrothermal vents release a cocktail of different mineral ores into the ocean. And bacteria and other organisms evolved alongside those so they evolved to digest these, like iron or other metal ores

Wood however does not exist at the bottom of the ocean since it basically never sinks down, even when logs are flushed out into the ocean they basically never end up at the ocean floor. So there's no bacteria that evolved to decompose lignin, which is already complex enough to decompose on the surface. And that's why wooden ships or the furniture on the Titanic stay intact for hundreds of years or longer.

Okay, but I remember reading a magazine stating that the titanic would basically be gone by now because of the rust eating the ship.

The sister ship HMHS Britannic is still perfectly preserved because of the way it sank, and partly in due to the coral that has grown around it keeping the structure in tact I believe was the reason.

Coral acting like a living fossil specifically for sunken ships is the coolest thing I've ever heard

So lemme get this straight, the Titanic is a whalefall, the Britannic is a biological mummy, and all the wood ships that sink into the deep ocean are preserved incorrupt because nothing can eat them.

Zombie, mummy, lich, respectively.

I just want to add that wood may not end up in the deep sea constantly enough to have caught the interest of bacteria, but the deep ocean has an echinoderm we call a "sea daisy" that only eats wood.

i saw someone say nobody needs to know what a .txt file is anymore. what the fuck is the world coming to

unironically i think we need to bring back computer labs because APPARENTLY some people WERENT taught basic computer literacy and internet safety in school

things about computers/the internet i think kids should be formally taught in schools because theyre important to know and the amount of soon to be grown adults i know who know NOTHING about any of these is quite frankly almost all of them (and resources to learn if you dont know these things, because its never to late to get better with computers)

as an additional note: things i think everyone should know on computers and the internet but schools may bit hesitant to teach about for whatever moral/legal standards schools pretend to operate on

ok one last addition! if you want to take it one level higher, i think learning the very basics of at least one programming language is good for people. it makes computers less scary and it makes you feel very cool, and a lot of people get discouraged about it because it seems overly complicated and hard to learn outside a formal classroom setting, so heres some resources for learning the very basics of python (because i consider it the easiest language to learn and knowing one language will make it easier to learn others)

y'all need to relearn the word erratic and stop using schizophrenic/bipolar/psychotic as a replacement

y'all need to relearn the word particular and stop using ocd as a replacement

People need to relearn the word "egocentric" and stop using narcissist/narc as a replacement.

People need to relearn the word "impulse" and stop using "intrusive thought" as a replacement

People need to relearn the word "callous" and stop using "sociopathic" as a replacement

"Some of you have never [experience specific to the usa] and it shows" yeah by the pure halo of light above my head

what’s really amazing to me is that people are so afraid of body hair on women that even in a shaving commercial they won’t show a hairy leg. they demonstrate the razor by shaving a hairless leg. they show their product being completely useless instead of showing leg hair. it’s just crazy