Also Vegetarian Diets Are Recommended For Some Medical Conditions, They Aren’t Just A Lifestyle Any

I have some thoughts about the whole trans athletes ban bs.

When I played soccer in school we often scrimmaged against and with actual boys twice my size (I was under 5' and about 105lbs at the time) and we even had a co-ed varsity team. Never ONCE did I or any of the girls complain or think it was unfair. The girls on the co-ed varsity team were incredible and completely equal in ability to the best of the boys. (If not better imo) They won many games. I remember watching those girls play with great admiration. I am now trans-nonbinary and it amazes me how quickly transphobes will accept and parrot the lie that women and girls are inferior in every way to men if it means trans people will suffer. The girls on our team were fucking TOUGH and would have thrown a FIT had you insinuated that to them! "ANYTHING YOU CAN DO, I CAN DO BETTER!" Until trans people are involved, apparently. Then suddenly they're poor, pitiful victims who just can’t be expected to compete with “men”. GET A GRIP, LADIES!

**I have been corrected by a friend who was also on the team at the time (and the coach's daughter)** Our soccer team was completely co-ed until our sophomore year of high school when the girls team was established. I started in 7th grade and don't remember ever hearing any complaints.

I was not personally very good at soccer but neither were some of the boys. Your assigned sex at birth plays NO part in your athletic ability! Just let people play sports! I find it especially telling that they even separate sports like CHESS on the basis of gender and want to ban trans people from that, as well. It's not just athletic ability transphobes believe sex assigned at birth gives you an unfair advantage or disadvantage to, but intelligence too! The internalized misogyny is so sad and pathetic.

I grew up with commercials like this. So many people who also grew up with this message and were taught to embrace that "fuck you energy" in sports and life are now crying about how "unfair" it is that they may have to play against a trans person??? BOO fucking HOO, princess!

Yeah! I would love to see a complete deconstruction of hp lovecraft. Keeping the surface features like shoggoths, mi-go, deep ones etc, but inverting the tone, and pointing out that he was a xenophobic racist and based all his work on that. Seriously, read the parts where he talks about human beings of color, women (and even poor whites), it’s disgusting. He’s an unreliable narrator of the worst kind. Why should anyone trust him to describe other intelligent beings?

Different does not mean evil. Imagine a crew of all his aliens (except maybe the elder things), revealed to be friendly once you get to know them. With a black (human) woman as captain just to spit in the old bigot’s face.

Concept: Star Trek style quasi-utopian deep space drama, except all of the ship’s non-human crew members are really obviously based on particular sci-fi horror tropes.

The chief physician is an amorphous mass of tentacles and teeth that’s infested the entire medical bay, transforming it into a quivering nightmare of meat and viscera. It speaks with a conspicuously posh accent; the human crew members affectionately call it “Doc”.

The head of security is a lurking, probably humanoid something-or-other that’s mostly imperceptible in the visual spectrum, save as a faintly shimmering distortion in the air. Her lack of visibility is treated as a running gag, with the most frequent bits involving a. other crew members not realising she’s in the room until she speaks up, and b. her making reference to various unlikely anatomic features which, of course, the audience cannot see.

The ship’s computer is a blatantly rampant AI that speaks in a chorus of voices. It tends to talk in cryptic, pseudo-religious metaphors which contrast to humorous effect with the mundanity of the topic at hand, and sometimes wanders off on rambling philosophical tangents that require whoever it’s speaking with to remind it to get to the point. You can tell when it’s paying attention to a particular part of the ship because the lighting turns blood red.

The lead science officer is just a huge fucking spider.

(The captain is an apparently ordinary – albeit extremely photogenic – human. We don’t find out what their real deal is until the season finale; what’s revealed firmly establishes them as the freakiest one of the lot!)

Does anyone want to start a school based on a minority faith? Which would expose their Christian-normative hypocrisy. Watch them get up in arms about anything Muslim (even though that’s Abrahamic and conservative), Neopagan, or other ones. How would they feel about a Buddhist school made by Asian-Americans?

Mother Jones

The Supreme Court is about to let religion ruin public education

Two recent cases suggest that the era of secular schools is coming to an end.

In modern America, religious education is offered in private schools or in a homeschooling setting. Public education, by contrast, is secular, because the government is not in the business of sponsoring religious indoctrination. But in two cases the Supreme Court heard over roughly the last week, the justices appear ready to throw out public education as we know it and usher in a new era where tax dollars flow to religious schools and religion can dictate what is taught in public classrooms. When the decisions come down, public education may change forever. On Tuesday, the justices heard arguments in Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board v. Drummond, a case over whether Oklahoma must fund a religious charter school that carries out religious instruction and hosts religious activities, including mass. Rather than consider this an affront to the separation of church and state, four Republican-appointed justices appeared outraged at the idea that a state would fund a charter school focused on language immersion or the arts but not one focused on religious instruction. Without ever acknowledging that the the First Amendment’s establishment clause (“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion”) prohibits government-sponsored religion, several expressed palpable anger that allowing only secular charter schools was a form of anti-religious discrimination. “All the religious school is saying is ‘Don’t exclude us on account of our religion,’” Justice Brett Kavanaugh said. “If you go and apply to be a charter school and you’re an environmental studies school, or you’re a science-based school, or you’re a Chinese immersion school, or you’re a English grammar-focused school, you can get in. And then you come in and you say, ‘Oh, we’re a religious school.’ It’s like, ‘Oh, no, can’t do that, that’s too much.’ That’s scary.” He continued: “You can’t treat religious people and religious institutions and religious speech as second-class in the United States… And when you have a program that’s open to all comers except religion… that seems like rank discrimination against religion.” [ ... ] This case alone will be a bombshell if the court mandates that states begin funding religious schools through their charter school programs. But this term, the Supreme Court is poised to deliver a one-two punch. Last week, the court heard arguments in Mahmoud v. Taylor, in which it considered whether religious parents could opt their kids out of lessons that did not conform with their beliefs. Again, the GOP-appointed majority appeared ready to side with the plaintiffs and allow religious parents to pull kids from the classroom when material they object to is taught—a policy that threatens to create a backdoor through which religious parents have veto power over elements of the curriculum and classroom discussion.  In any school that cannot accommodate children leaving the classroom and being provided alternate materials, the religious preferences of a minority seem destined to dictate the curriculum for all. The likely result is the wide elimination of LGBTQ content. Teachers may fear answering a question about a gay politician, for example, or even displaying a picture of their same-sex partner on their desk. If the justices decide in the next few months to allow religious opt-outs in public schools and the creation of religious charter schools, it’s hard to see how public education will not change profoundly. In many districts, together the decisions would likely mean the only publicly-funded school options would be either explicitly religious or circumscribed by the religious preferences of certain parents.

I don’t really have a choice since I can’t drive or afford a car. It’s bike or bus for me, ride shares are too expensive. But honestly I like bike riding anyway.

Bike propaganda by me

While some people who take away help and aids are just bullies motivated by cruelty, I think others are doing it out of misguided love. They want to help you be independent and strong, and you have to tell them that no, you can’t do it, you need the assistance. And this is humiliating, to admit weakness. If we were still hunter gatherers you’d be the one the lions got.

We don’t live in nature though, but in a built environment, and it is our choice to support the weak and helpless or not.

what abled ppl think is a massive problem for disabled folks: 13 year old on the internet faking something

what is actually a massive problem for disabled folks: "well you don't LOOK disabled, are you sure you're not faking? I'm not giving you accommodations until you PROVE you're not faking. Please give me, a stranger, your medical info and explain your condition to me in detail so I know you're not faking and only then will I respect or take you seriously"

The mistake is thinking that no men would be into this. Au contraire, I can direct you to whole forums of feminine straight men who would love a gal like her.

Trapeze artist, strongwoman, and all around badass Laverie Vallee, stage name Charmion, flexes for the camera in this (colorized) picture from around 1905. Born in 1875 in Sacramento, Charmion was a pioneer. She shocked conservative Victorian/Edwardian men with her daring "Trapeze Disrobing Act" (which was the subject of one of Thomas Edison's first films) and her insanely jacked body. But the ladies loved her, and her performances, which were viewed as practically pornographic by the extreme standards of the time period, were mostly attended by women. Throughout her career, she inspired women to exercise and to free themselves of the restrictions society placed on them. Charmion criticized the prudish attitudes of the time and told women they could be just as strong as men (this was a radical claim for that era, but her own body was the proof). A brilliant woman, she was fluent in six languages and regularly lectured and wrote newspaper articles about fitness. She was the highest-earning performer on the vaudeville circuit for much of her career, sometimes earning as much as $500 per week (equivalent to almost $20,000 today). Charmion was known to curl 70-pound dumbbells as part of her workout regimen and she could walk 12 miles without feeling fatigued. Charmion's biceps reportedly were almost exactly the same size as those of Eugen Sandow, who was widely considered the world's strongest man, and in a friendly sparring match she fought on an equal footing with the then-famous boxer Terry McGovern. She retired in 1912 and lived a quiet life outside the limelight until her death in 1949.

EDIT: I made a second post with some more info about Charmion if anyone's interested:

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washingtonmarvel

Since my first post about Charmion only scratched the surface, I thought I'd give some more info about a few different aspects of her story

My thoughts on this:

What if we lived in a world with reversed gender roles? If he never got to see breasts because they were hidden behind comfortable shirts? If he never was encouraged to objectify women but rather himself, make himself a desirable sex object for women regardless of his own comfort? And he never got to approach women but had often quite ugly women in his face, groping him? What would he think of breasts then?

modern empath crisis of faith

Crows are scavengers, they get a bad rap similar to vultures. But scavengers perform an ecological function similar to dung beetles, cleaning up waste. Corvids also are very smart birds, they have been observed using tools and even inventing new ones for a specific task. (Reaching inaccessible seeds, they’re omnivorous). As scavengers they have learned what situations are likely to generate dead bodies, following predators and even soldiers on the way to battle.

So maybe the crows follow around a villain character because they figured out he is likely to unalive someone. Nothing personal, they just are waiting for him to prepare their dinner.

logically I understand that crows have lots of folklore about them where they’re tricky and backstabbing and evil and that’s why they’re usually associated with characters who do at least one of those things but it always makes me :( because I am first and foremost a huge crow defender

yes they’re suspicious little shits. but they also have incredible communication abilities and strong social bonds. they’re intelligent opportunistic creatures just like humans, what do you expect?

Between the (so called left-wing) people who hate technology and right wingers hating science and social progress, we might go back to the dark ages while calling it good. 🤦

Meanwhile I grew up on Star Trek and I desperately want a future like that. I believe in social and technological progress together. Technology can improve society if we use it that way, such as home labor saving devices helping women’s liberation. It is not however sufficient, we need the political will to make a more fair and equal world.

The recent surge of reactionary sentiment makes me wonder if there really is hope. But maybe this is just the “gets worse before it gets better” stage. I can hope.

In one of my posts the other day about how expensive smartphones are there were people saying that "the luddites had great ideas" like they were proto-socialists and all. And well. That isn't really the case, as some others explained their reaction to industrialization did not have any lasting change as a goal. I'm not really introduced to the historical specifics.

But anyways, what the luddites were like in 1800s England doesn't really matter as what identifying yourself as a luddite means in modern times: being anti-technology. And no, not skeptical of technology, not being in favor of a better use of technology, not hating on AI while liking other stuff. It's being anti-technology. Luddite is a word used for exaggerated positions like breaking machines. It's not a nuanced ideology or a thing you would like to be called.

And being anti-technology not only is as nonsensical as being anti-art or anti-philosophy, technology is one of the things that define humans since the Oldowan rock tools. But it also means being against progress. It is technology that has enabled social progress. It is technology that allow us to understand the world and also to build a fairer society. Material conditions and all that.

I will try to say this without getting into much theory or philosophy of science, but your focus should not be on calling certain technologies "good" or "bad" by nature, much less rejecting the advance of technology, as if that is possible or desirable at all. You should instead see how society uses technology and how the structures of society use it. And how to change society so that technology serves to the benefit of people instead of capital.

Anyways. Don't be a luddite.

I would add that it’s disappointing more grown women haven’t stopped having babies. No one asks to be born, even if circumstances are perfect your kid could wish they never lived. We have 8 (!) billion people in the world and counting, we need fewer people not more.

Women are pressured socially to have children. I want to tell any woman that you do not have to have kids, your career comes first. We need male birth control, I want to tell any cisgender man to be kind to women by not siring any kids on them. And maybe we should stop being queer-phobic and let people boink others of their own sex (regardless of gender identity).