Latest Posts by torubun - Page 2

so... i woke up at 1:30 am bc my brain is full and the first thing that came to mind is... Latinamerica is collapsing and i wonder if the rest of the world knows.

if it doesn't, then maybe it should, so, i wanna explain:

México🇲🇽

we are actually about to run out of water: 85% of the mexican territory is in a draught, the worst in 30 years, they say. and there's lakes that are disappearing.

government is spreading "tips" and "infographics" about how to save some water when they're allowing companies like coca-cola and pepsi; cemex, bonafont and bimbo to have leverage in aquifers and they let them own basically 70% of the water in the country thanks to the National Waters Law (Ley de Aguas Nacionales)

oh and just last night (may 3rd) the 12th metro line collapsed in México City and 23 people died. everyone is blaming it on the 2 previous governments' corruption for using cheap materials and rushing to finish it and inaugurate it before it was actually ready

Honduras🇭🇳

same as México, they're running out of water, so far three states are totally out of it, which is around 1.4 million people.

the press has been calling it the worst draught in the history of the country SINCE LAST YEAR

besides the government has stopped buying vaccines and they're leaving around 70% of the population without a vaccination...

Paraguay🇵🇾

there's no space left in the hospitals, the government stole the 1.6k million usd loan that the country got for health care related buys during the pandemic and left the hospitals alone to their luck. people have to sell their things; from their TV's and fridges to their cars, houses, bodies... there's actual people recurring to prostitution so they can buy medicine the government is supposed to be providing

Brasil🇧🇷

Nicaragua🇳🇮

Argentina🇦🇷

Guatemala🇬🇹

they've been having a hard economic crisis; again, surprise surprise, the government has stolen 14 million quetzales (1.8million usd) that was destined to the healthcare department: since the pandemic started people has been fired by hordes, there's no jobs, there's no money, there's no more safe hospitals or doctors to work in them, or equipment. and the president approved the 2021 budget in the middle of the night and took away money from the health and the education departments, leading to massive protests that, as you have guessed, were repressed with police violence.

Costa Rica🇨🇷

government actually created an espionage agency, the UPAD, they're fining people for being outside hiding behind the excuse of the pandemic; which is making hospitals collapse, they passed a recessive tax reform, the Electoral Supreme Court was scammed in the latest elections and they're actually seeking to create a higher rank power, a "superminister", higher than a president, who can hold the three powers of the nation (dictatorship, everyone?)

Uruguay🇺🇾

Perú🇵🇪

they're enduring a huge political crisis, they have to chose a president and their only two options are: a leftist man that wants to take all the agricultural land and divide it in equal parts, doesn't support lgbtttiq rights, privatize almost all services and more reforms that would lead to massive firings AND a woman that it's being investigated for fraud and money laundering and that descends from one of the biggest peruvian dictators and wants to get him out of prison.

this uncertainty of course has made the usd price to sky rocket (because what else is new) and now the prices of everything are rising as well, and the wages? they're staying still

reports on the presidential debate

El Salvador🇸🇻

another political crisis: the president along with the congress (which is mostly sitting his party) dismissed and basically fired the judges of the supreme court and the attorney general. and recommended/nominated new ones from his party, opening the way to the totalitarianism and welp, the end of democracy in the country: dictatorship.

the people is outraged and the international community along with the America States Organization are rejecting this horrid violation to the Constitution of El Salvador but the panorama is still uncertain.

Colombia🇨🇴

the government of Ivan Duque just has been in the process of passing a tax reform to collect around 25 billion Colombian pesos (around 6.5k billion usd) through taxes without raising the minimum wages; this would throw the country in an economic crisis that would impact the lower and middle classes and it would take products off the basic market basket.

the people of Colombia have been marching and protesting about this and the government has replied with police violence, they have their own anti-raid police, the ESMAD, and they have orders to shoot to kill, the process now has paused because of the protest.

there isn't yet an exact number on the death count but what the people is sure of is that they're gonna try to hide it along with the number of rapings and tortures the police has been conducting.

Chile🇨🇱

in 2019 chilean government rose the price of the metro/subway and there were protests and marches and manifestations, which led, of course, to policial repression, this was a whole ordeal that was condemned by the UN, now, the people is tired that the same government hasn't dealt properly with the sanitary contingency so they starter planing a huge strike; dozens of worker unions planning to march on april 30th to show that they're millions and they want the president out.

then the president was acused of crimes against humanity before the International Court of Human Rights for the repression of the 2019 protests...

Venezuela🇻🇪

well, if you haven't heard about the venezuelan crisis, you've been living under a rock: it's been going on for more than 20 years, venezuelan people live under a dictatorship (fucking incredible we still have those in the world), the police kills people that march and manifest, citizens don't have dignified access to: public transport, gas and gasoline, electricity, food, water, medicine and medical equipment let alone the covid vaccine.

and when the venezuelan people wanna leave the mediocre and deplorable conditions in which their government had made them live? conditions in which if you don't die of sickness, you get killed by a cop or killed in a robbery or killed on a raid? if you don't die of hunger you die of thirst? they raised the passport prices! and so the venezuelan people as a lot of people in Latinoamérica have to illegally migrate; and we all know how that's seen.

Puerto Rico🇵🇷

an immense femicide rise and Gender Violence alert.

Panamá🇵🇦

and all this happened within the last week.

donations and ways to help México and Colombia

So what I’ve learned from the past couple months of being really loud about being a bi woman on Tumblr is: A lot of young/new LGBT+ people on this site do not understand that some of the stuff they’re saying comes across to other LGBT+ people as offensive, aggressive, or threatening. And when they actually find out the history and context, a lot of them go, “Oh my god, I’m so sorry, I never meant to say that.”

Like, “queer is a slur”: I get the impression that people saying this are like… oh, how I might react if I heard someone refer to all gay men as “f*gs”. Like, “Oh wow, that’s a super loaded word with a bunch of negative freight behind it, are you really sure you want to put that word on people who are still very raw and would be alarmed, upset, or offended if they heard you call them it, no matter what you intended?”

So they’re really surprised when self-described queers respond with a LOT of hostility to what feels like a well-intentioned reminder that some people might not like it. 

That’s because there’s a history of “political lesbians”, like Sheila Jeffreys, who believe that no matter their sexual orientation, women should cut off all social contact with men, who are fundamentally evil, and only date the “correct” sex, which is other women. Political lesbians claim that relationships between women, especially ones that don’t contain lust, are fundamentally pure, good, and  unproblematic. They therefore regard most of the LGBT community with deep suspicion, because its members are either way too into sex, into the wrong kind of sex, into sex with men, are men themselves, or somehow challenge the very definitions of sex and gender. 

When “queer theory” arrived in the 1980s and 1990s as an organized attempt by many diverse LGBT+ people in academia to sit down and talk about the social oppressions they face, political lesbians like Jeffreys attacked it harshly, publishing articles like “The Queer Disappearance of Lesbians”, arguing that because queer theory said it was okay to be a man or stop being a man or want to have sex with a man, it was fundamentally evil and destructive. And this attitude has echoed through the years; many LGBT+ people have experience being harshly criticized by radical feminists because being anything but a cis “gold star lesbian” (another phrase that gives me war flashbacks) was considered patriarchal, oppressive, and basically evil.

And when those arguments happened, “queer” was a good umbrella to shelter under, even when people didn’t know the intricacies of academic queer theory; people who identified as “queer” were more likely to be accepting and understanding, and “queer” was often the only label or community bisexual and nonbinary people didn’t get chased out of. If someone didn’t disagree that people got to call themselves queer, but didn’t want to be called queer themselves, they could just say “I don’t like being called queer” and that was that. Being “queer” was to being LGBT as being a “feminist” was to being a woman; it was opt-in.

But this history isn’t evident when these interactions happen. We don’t sit down and say, “Okay, so forty years ago there was this woman named Sheila, and…” Instead we queers go POP! like pufferfish, instantly on the defensive, a red haze descending over our vision, and bellow, “DO NOT TELL ME WHAT WORDS I CANNOT USE,” because we cannot find a way to say, “This word is so vital and precious to me, I wouldn’t be alive in the same way if I lost it.” And then the people who just pointed out that this word has a history, JEEZ, way to overreact, go away very confused and off-put, because they were just trying to say.

But I’ve found that once this is explained, a lot of people go, “Oh wow, okay, I did NOT mean to insinuate that, I didn’t realize that I was also saying something with a lot of painful freight to it.”

And that? That gives me hope for the future.

hot flaming take i’m abt to slap you with: it’s not acceptable to punish children for their grades, no matter the circumstances.

American Girl stories were the best tbh

Scientific American article points out there is no real reason to exclude transgender athletes

The Scientific American is one of the world’s leading science journals, so when they print an article about transgender athletes, it is a safe bet that it is science based.

Jack Turban is a fellow in child and adolescent psychiatry at the Stanford University School of Medicine, where he researches the mental health of transgender youth. 

He addresses the arguments behind the American anti-trans bills:

There is no epidemic of transgender girls dominating female sports. Attempts to force transgender girls to play on the boys’ teams are unconscionable attacks on already marginalized transgender children, and they don’t address a real problem. They’re unscientific, and they would cause serious mental health damage to both cisgender and transgender youth…

The notion of transgender girls having an unfair advantage comes from the idea that testosterone causes physical changes such as an increase in muscle mass. But transgender girls are not the only girls with high testosterone levels. An estimated 10 percent of women have polycystic ovarian syndrome, which results in elevated testosterone levels. They are not banned from female sports. 

Transgender girls on puberty blockers, on the other hand, have negligible testosterone levels. Yet these state bills would force them to play with the boys. Plus, the athletic advantage conferred by testosterone is equivocal. 

As Katrina Karkazis, a senior visiting fellow and expert on testosterone and bioethics at Yale University explains, “Studies of testosterone levels in athletes do not show any clear, consistent relationship between testosterone and athletic performance. Sometimes testosterone is associated with better performance, but other studies show weak links or no links. And yet others show testosterone is associated with worse performance.” The bills’ premises lack scientific validity.

Read the whole article here!

Photo by roibu

settle this for me once and for all

is “chai” a TYPE of tea??! bc in Hindi/Urdu, the word chai just means tea

can we please bring back “in poor taste” as a concept

Because at some point it got folded in under “problematic,” and now every damn thing that has Unfortunate Implications or deals with sensitive topics indelicately enough to raise hackles or gores somebody’s sacred cow is treated as a grave injustice or a threat to society. Online activism culture has lost the vocabulary to express “this deals with touchy stuff in a way many people might find inappropriate, and you should probably avoid it if insensitivity on this subject gets you angry/upset, but it’s not promoting hateful ideas or demeaning people or affecting anything but my opinion of the creator’s sense of tact.”

tips for what to do after a really long cry because you’re probably feeling all kinds of exhausted and drained and i don’t want that for you in the slightest:

take a shower and change all of your clothes even your socks and underwear. this is the first step to everything. 

pour yourself a big, cold glass of water and drink it. all of it. once you’re done, get yourself a refill. this will boost u physically and emotionally instantly please trust me.

grab a snack, something light that you don’t have to wait to prepare. i recommend a pudding cup, a piece of fruit, yogurt, a popsicle, or some crackers. 

get under the covers. turn on something - tv, a movie, music, anything distracting. or consider calling a friend or talking to anyone nearby, even your sibling the next room over!!

know that you are loved. you are important. you mean more than you know right now, more than you will maybe ever know. you are worth all the stars in the sky. you deserve to feel good. 

This is Grga. Grga is six. He is a vibrant, beautiful child full of life. Grga is awesome.

Up until a few months ago, Grga was on top of the world. He had everything he needed in his life, he was happy and healthy. His family adored him, they still do, he had many friends, many wishes and wants. 

Everything changed in December of 2020. Grga was in a horrible, horrible accident. Horrible beyond words. Grga got crushed by an elevator. The media reported about every single detail of it, including how the firefighters who arrived to free him could hear his family’s screams from hundreds of meters away.

In a time where sensitivity was needed, a lot of people were insensitive. Fingers are being pointed, his story sensationalized, but his accident was just that - an unfortunate accident. 

It was a terrible shock to his loved ones. I can’t even begin to imagine how they felt while he was being reanimated in the back of an ambulance, clinging to life just barely on the way to the hospital.

Grga beat the odds and survived. But he’s not well. He’s not happy nor full of life anymore. He’s suffering and he’s having a hard time, though through it all, he has remained a fighter and a dreamer. His family too, they’re not giving up.

Grga needs our help.

The care he needs to be getting in order for him to make the best possible recovery is expensive and lengthy. Draining for everybody involved, but especially for him. That’s why I’m asking, no, begging you to share this post.

Share the link to his family’s GoGetFunding page, please.

Let us all help bring Grga one step closer to recovery. Let us all help him get him beat the odds once more. Grga needs us. Even if it’s just a share, it could get him and his family the exposure and the funds needed. Please, help.

X

A truly moving story via Gregory McKelvey. Removing police from schools is an urgent need, especially for Black students.

👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾

look at those

Egypt's first female ship captain Marwa Elselehdar has been falsely accused as being the captain of the Ever Given by some foreign media, in a story that went viral and garnered a lot of hate towards her.

The only problem? She was 370km away at the time, acting as the first mate of another ship (Aida IV) and had nothing to do with the situation in the Suez Canal.

I think we should all help spread this, since some people are still sharing the malicious slanderous fake posts about her!

Please fucking lie to your employer. Like they don’t need to know your mental health issues or what drugs you do. Ffs

Streaming Service Rant

Please help me with my overdue rent and bills!!

*URGENT: PLEASE READ/SIGNAL BOOST*

Tuesday, April 6th: Hi everyone, I’m Gemma, a bi, mentally ill disaster, who’s in desperate need of help, and I had to remake this post as I'm still struggling to pay my rent and keep my utilities on.

As most of you are already aware, I have been struggling financially for quite some time due to my welfare benefits being under a review, which is due to my worsening mental health and the UK’s controversial changes to how benefits are assessed and assigned. And at the moment, I'm currently struggling to get by, as I'm a bit behind on my rent, as I had to replace my broken washing machine + pay some overdue bills and I am still awaiting the outcome of my PIP assessment (April 2021 at the latest)

I'm completely heartbroken to keep asking for help, but I still desperately need some as I don't have anyone else to turn to for help and my rent is now overdue!

If anyone could spare any amount to help me, even if it’s just £1/$1/€1, it would literally save my life, and sharing definitely helps just as much as donations. Nobody is obligated in any way to donate if they can’t or don’t want to, I know we’re all struggling right now.

£24.40/£250!!

~PayPal~ | Ko-Fi

Sex doesn’t make us whole.

HAPPY INTERNATIONAL ASEXUALITY DAY!

people talk about found family but then they see these characters and they’re obsessed with fitting them into nuclear family roles??? there doesn’t HAVE to be a “mother” and a “father” and they don’t all have to be “siblings” IT’S A FOUND FAMILY IT’S A MULTIFACETED RELATIONSHIP

they’re shutting down yahoo answers in a month….future generations will never know how is babby formed…..they will never plumb the depths of digital knowledge asking “does spider have pusspuss?”……they will never know if they can name their band radiohead 2……..this is the modern burning of the library of alexandria. all those answers lost forever……RIP 

Dormant Predators

Keyboard-related PSA: these Procreate macropads are a scam. Procreate themselves have even gotten involved to warn people about them.

https://twitter.com/Procreate/status/1379174891425959936

With Spring coming Steven had started up gardening and it seems like he made a new pal. Steven’s dragon scales protect him from spikes which proves to be useful for handling and petting his cactus friend.

Both of them get to enjoy getting a little sunbathing!

Okay but after schools reopen, students should still have the option of telecommuting from home. especially high school students, who are expected to work an insane number of hours. as a teenager with mental health issues, I cannot imagine the amount of trauma I could have been spared if I had been allowed to work from home a few days a week. It's an accessibility and a quality-of-life issue.