Ok but this actually bothers me? The number of times I have been Luke… because I WASN’T CLEAR WITH MY DIRECTIONS!
I cannot count the times students have looked at me very very confused because it turns out that I have explained this thing precisely five times, and they are class number six. So Luke had better be rolling his eyes at *himself*, or else he is not the Luke we all know and love.
(Who am I kidding? TJL dragged Luke’s character through the mud. Still.)
a girl i know told me how a guy she knows once moved out from his parents, ate nothing but fries and meatballs for HALF A YEAR, and got scurvy. imagine the doctor’s face when this guy shows up with like his gums bleeding and the doc has to fucking say DUDE…. THATS SCURVY…. in this day and age
this is turning into a “how a person i know got scurvy” thread and im so here for this, please share your scurvy stories if you have any
the other day someone posted pics from the reddit page r/zerocarbs where these fools only ate meat and 0 vegetables or fruits and all the posts were about various symptoms of scurvy. i died when one literally read ‘i don’t want to start the vitamin C debate again but’
THE VITAMIN C DEBATE
My mother told me all about scurvy when I was five and trying to resist eating pumpkin and let me tell you it’s been 35 years and I still get nervous if I go for two days without eating a green vegetable.
I told my own little picky eater about scurvy, rickets etc and now one of her most frequently requested lunch items is baby spinach, closely followed by carrots.
I’m not saying everyone should mildly traumatize their children to make them understand that vegetables are vital to ongoing possession of your teeth and organs, but.. no, that’s exactly what I’m saying. Go for it.
“My body, my choice” only makes sense when someone else’s life isn’t at stake.
Fun fact: If my younger sister was in a car accident and desperately needed a blood transfusion to live, and I was the only person on Earth who could donate blood to save her, and even though donating blood is a relatively easy, safe, and quick procedure no one can force me to give blood. Yes, even to save the life of a fully grown person, it would be ILLEGAL to FORCE me to donate blood if I didn’t want to.
See, we have this concept called “bodily autonomy.” It’s this….cultural notion that a person’s control over their own body is above all important and must not be infringed upon.
Like, we can’t even take LIFE SAVING organs from CORPSES unless the person whose corpse it is gave consent before their death. Even corpses get bodily autonomy.
To tell people that they MUST sacrifice their bodily autonomy for 9 months against their will in an incredibly expensive, invasive, difficult process to save what YOU view as another human life (a debatable claim in the early stages of pregnancy when the VAST majority of abortions are performed) is desperately unethical. You can’t even ask people to sacrifice bodily autonomy to give up organs they aren’t using anymore after they have died.
You’re asking people who can become pregnant to accept less bodily autonomy than we grant to dead bodies.
reblogging for commentary
But, assuming the mother wasn’t raped, the choice to HAVE a baby and risk sacrificing their “bodily autonomy” is a choice that the mother made. YOu don’t have to have sex with someone. Cases of rape aside, it isn’t ethical to say abortion is justified. The unborn baby has rights, too.
First point: Bodily autonomy can be preserved, even if another life is dependent on it. See again the example about the blood donation.
And here’s another point: When you say that “rape is the exception” you betray something FUNDAMENTALLY BROKEN about your own argument.
Because a fetus produced from sexual assault is biologically NO DIFFERENT than a fetus produced from consensual sex. No difference at all.
If one is alive, so is the other. If one is a person, so is the other. If one has a soul, then so does the other. If one is a little blessing that happened for a reason and must be protected, then so is the other.
When you say that “Rape is the exception” what you betray is this: It isn’t about a life. This isn’t about the little soul sitting inside some person’s womb, because if it was you wouldn’t care about HOW it got there, only that it is a little life that needs protecting.
When you say “rape is the exception” what you say is this: You are treating pregnancy as a punishment. You are PUNISHING people who have had CONSENSUAL SEX but don’t want to go through a pregnancy. People who DARED to have consensual sex without the goal of procreation in mind, and this is their “consequence.”
And that is gross.
^ THIS. This is this this THIS THIS THIS. THIS!!!!!
This is probably the strongest and well worded/supported argument for abortion that I have ever read.
This is probably the strongest and well worded/supported argument for THE RIGHT TO CHOOSE abortion that I have ever read.
I keep thinking about an article I read several years ago about how activists got a coal plant shut down when the corporation wanted it to have its license extended for another 20 years. No-one knew who should take credit for the win – the lawyers suing for health reasons, the lawyers suing for worker protections, the activists protesting politicians and corporate offices, the activists who chained themselves to the plant gates, the group who pressured banks to refuse loans for the plant, etc. A while later someone read the company’s annual report and it more or less said they’d cancelled the plant, not because of any single reason, but because all the difficulties across so many aspects of the project made it more trouble than it was worth. They could win on one or two problems, but not a dozen attacks at once, especially when they were all weary from fighting the last battle. I wish I could find the article again, it was much more interesting than I make it sound!
But in the same way that people here keep reminding us all that this is a marathon and not a sprint, I think it’s important to attack Trump and the Republicans on all fronts rather than try to find the one perfect sniper shot to take them down. There should not be a single aspect of their working life where they can escape protests and delays and being overruled by courts and new lawsuits and bad publicity and stupid jokes about them and investigations into their affairs. Washington? Investigators and lawsuits. Home town on recess? Angry locals. Media? Questions about what they knew and when. Internet? Demands for healthcare and video compilations of them saying daft things.
It’s not that one of those tactics is a silver bullet, it’s that this is a war of attrition and every little bit of hassle is worth it. Every individual Republican congressperson should be dreading the sound of a phone or notification because it will be yet another fire they have to put out. They shouldn’t have time to provide assistance to their colleagues or cover for Trump, or time out to refresh and regroup. There are more citizens than there are politicians – tag team until they break ranks.
This Metafilter comment is good and smart and makes me feel better about the work ahead of us.
Hey so friendly reminder about voting and elections that I haven’t seen going around yet but is SUPER IMPORTANT.
Watch what you wear and say while you’re waiting in line for the voting booth/at the polls. It is against federal law to do anything that might be considered campaigning once you’re there, and since we know that voter suppression is the name of the game this election, there will be people looking for ANY reason to remove you from the polling place. And they will nitpick. You have a shirt with a artistic picture of donkey on it? You’re visibly supporting the Democrats, you’re disqualified from voting. Want to wear a Black Lives Matter shirt? Not there you don’t. They’ll call it intimidation and kick you out. Pins, buttons, stickers, none of it. Wear the most bland, plain clothes you can imagine.
And then keep your mouth shut. Even the slightest hint of discussion about which candidate you’re voting for can get used against you. Don’t assume the people around you are safe to discuss it with. You might be overheard. There WILL people watching for these things, hoping to get rid of anyone they can. Voter suppression isn’t just about making registration impossible. It happens at the polling stations too. Be smart, be bland, be quiet, and make sure your vote gets in.
Also- and I have seen this mentioned but it bears repeating- DO NOT TAKE A PICTURE OF YOUR BALLOT. EVER. It’ll also disqualify your vote. Take a selfie when you’re out of their with your fun little sticker.
This is for your protection as much as your oppression: this means the opposition party can’t use those tactics against you either – and if anyone tries, REPORT THEM.
Around fourteen years ago, I was a young (and rather sheltered) History student. My friends and I used to lie down in mattresses on the floor in the tiny room in the student housing building one of them lived in, slightly high and giddy, and we’d ponder what we thought was unthinkable. This was 2004 and we’d been involved with rememberance activities (lectures, seminars, classes), since it was 40 years since the military coup that saw thousands killed in our country. Some of them were students like us, some of them were grabbed by police from the very building we were in.
What we pondered was “what would we do if-” and the end of that sentence, unspoken was “if it happened again”. That was hilariously unthinkable to us because we were born in the last throes of that same regime. Its end was a messy, mostly peaceful negotiation that involved the signing in 1979 of an amnesty law that cleared both those who had fought against it and those who had killed and tortured in its name… And I don’t need to tell you how that in itself is problematic. My friends usually laughed at my answer: “I’d go into exile, because I faint when I see blood” (I still do).
I didn’t even know of Bolsonaro’s existence then. The people we saw denying or justifying the dictatorship’s crimes were old military men or elderly people who we thought didn’t know any better. Newspapers usually treated the period as a stain in our past, when they themselves had been censored and used to publish cake recipes in the place of the stories that were struck down. We didn’t know that people who might miss this time or had weird misconceptions about it (“it was safer to walk in the streets”, “the economy was a lot better”) were living right next door to us or were, in some cases, our own parents.
Tonight is especially hard because I miss being that girl. I miss laughing about how I faint when I see blood (I still do), I miss having a future as an academic without any fear of saying, reading and writing what I want. I miss not being afraid for my friends who were LGBTQ+ or people of color or involved in party politics. Today I had to buy clothes softner while a couple milled around me with t-shirts on which there was the face of a man who said I deserve to be shut up, if not jailed (or worse), and that some of my friends aren’t deserving of being alive. Mostly through the measures of the democratic governments that preceeded this mess, I became a researcher and then a professor at a freshly created university. Now all that is at risk and then some (the Amazon, what is left of our indigenous peoples, Afro-Brazilian communities, workers’ rights, children’s rights, years of a people trying to learn how to make democratic choices).
We’re not a dictatorship yet, but the man who was elected our president tonight (through the popular vote, not some incomprehensible electoral college system) is a former army captain who has repeatedly said he would support the return of a similar regime and that the only mistake it made was torturing instead of killing its opponents.
Rebellions are built on hope 