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Gee -- who'd a-thunk it?

Most of the plastic waste in the ocean comes from the things we deliberately drag through the ocean.

What an effing surprise!

If you dare come at me about banning straws, I will throw you into the sun cannon. I’m disabled, I’m crippled, I need disposable plastic straws, and all those pricey ridiculous alternatives aren’t working as well. Plastic straws were invented for the disabled.

Way to shit all over a vital access need because you think straws are worse than corporate greed.

We all care about the turtles, the seals, the oceans, obviously. Notice how the easiest thing to yell about was something that would barely affect anything but appealed heavily to emotional discourse.

The disabled community is huge, and it can be joined by anyone. Most of those As Seen On TV products were invented for us. Society still mocks us and ignores us, and often outright harms us in multiple ways.

Communicate better. Listen better. But stop putting us out in the cold because you are inconvenienced by our simplest needs.

#the straw discourse #disabled life #eugenics rhetoric #disablism #plastic fishing nets #fishing waste #undescribed images #Corporate misdirection #capitalist rhetoric

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An important difference that often gets lost in translation:

Dog rolling onto their back: I love you, love you, you! Treat me like a baby puppy and rub my belly! Cat rolling onto their back: You have earned my trust. And for that, I love you. I trust you with my vulnerability. And I know you won't violate my personal space.

#dogs #cats #not the same #interspecies communication

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My main problem with the "Free Thinker / 'Skeptic" atheist movement (from what I've seen of it)

Is that they are usually White, Cishet, Normate, English-Speaking, American, Men, who were raised Christian (in other words, the most privileged cohort in America today), who realized Christianity they were raised in is Wrong. ...And considering the state of much of American Christianity today, that's not, in itself, an unreasonable conclusion.

The problem is, they then jump to the conclusion that all religion is wrong, and all people who espouse any Faith at all must be unintelligent and/or morally corrupt. They claim (and likely sincerely believe) to have grown past Christianity. But they seem to have bought into the Christian propaganda of being the Only True religion.

So here's my advice: if you're questioning your faith, and you think you might be atheist, conduct some thought experiments with yourself, and imagine the universe being inhabited with different sorts of deities. Do some research on what people throughout history have believed. Like putting on a different set of glasses, to put the world in a new focus. Make up your own deities, while you're at it (It doesn't matter if you're a religion of one).

You may still end up deciding no gods are "actually" real. But at least you'll have a broader idea of what it is you don't believe in.

#religion #atheism #thoughts I've had for years #american christianity

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Sometimes, the Dreaming Mind™ translates worries you can't put into words, and turns them into private movies. Other times, it just listens to the waking thoughts and goes: "You're right. And you should say it."

dream about disney trying to get in on the harry potter money with a big interactive attraction and I kept thinking "man all this extra worldbuilding could be real cool if I still cared about this world. at least it was written by someone else instead of the joke, that usually makes better quality worldbuilding."

#dreams #when our dreams are just opinion pieces

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~sigh~ I had a whole folder of designs I made for Zazzle.com, years ago. But it seems to have been deleted.

(I have no memory of deleting it, but it doesn't show up in any search on my computer)

So I go log on to my Zazzle account, and discover 2 things:

They no longer let me re-download my own designs to my own computer (which is how I was hoping to recover my favorite designs), and

They no longer offer women's t-shirt dresses, which I was wanting to buy for myself.

So anyway, I "Started a new project" and picked the design I was looking for when I discovered the whole folder was missing. And then, I did a screen-cap, and cropped it.

Here it is:

#frustrations #where'd my folder go? #zazzle #my designs #image description in alt

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Okay. So, now I will explain it the way my mother did, as a little fable:

There was once a merchant with many bags of straw to sell, and as he wanted to sell as much as he could in one day, and save himself the trouble of multiple trips on the road, loaded more an more bails of straw onto his camel's back. Even after he saw that his camel was having trouble standing under the weight, he didn't want to stop, but instead, started loading the straw onto his back one piece at a time. But then, he loaded one straw too many, and the camel's back broke, and he couldn't take any straw to market.

I looked that up in Wikipedia, just now:

... And apparently, it was only ever some sort of proverb, and Mother wove the whole fable, with character motivations, and all, from it all on her own (including the implicit condemnation of capitalist greed).

...The more I look up "traditional" fables my mother told me, when I was a kid, the more I find out she actually created them, probably without realizing it.

Anyway, so when someone says: "That's the last straw!" it means they've been dealing with "minor" frustrations for a long time, and they are done trying to hold it together, aka: "No spoons left. Only knives," or "Stick a fork in me, I'm done."

Also: this is the song that prompted this poll, by the Folk Metal band Bloodywood:

I heard a line in a song today, and now, I'm just curious:

#tumblr polls #English Idioms #“the last straw” #memories of my mother #music video #bloodywood #lyrics on screen #eye contact #Youtube

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Quoted tags:

#as an education major there was this one tiny ass white bitch who's goal in life #was to teach ASL to kids in Africa [...] #what's worse is that she didn't know ASL and couldn't even read the joke on her own shirt #it was a basic “on the grind” joke shirt in ASL and I said it was funny and she snapped at me that it wasn't a joke???

~Sigh~

Attitudes like that are what led to the question you sometimes see around social media:

"Is it cultural appropriation to learn sign language?"

No. Of course not. The more people who know sign language, and are at least able to sign a decent pidgin with their spoken language, the better.

What is cultural appropriation is to take a few weeks of Level 1 Sign Language, and start posting videos of you "translating" your favorite songs into sign language so that "The poor Deaf people don't miss out on the beauty of music."

Those videos, with bad, incomprehensible, signing go viral, and drown out the work of native-signing deaf artists who are creating their work.

That's cultural appropriation.

this is a niche one but instead of "they would not fuckin say that" it's "they would not fucking use American sign language".

ASL is not the only sign language. two british characters in your fanfiction would not be using ASL. England in fact has its own kind of sign language, BSL, that forms a sign family with many other sign languages around the world.

ASL isn't even the original member of its sign family, it comes from french sign language. do you know sign languages aren't related to spoken languages? that's an important one! it's not a direct 1:1 with people speaking English around the world. people in other countries don't learn ASL just in case they run into an usamerican or Canadian (who do often use it)

i know the entire world is the USA or whatever and sign languages do sometimes borrow from ASL for signs they don't have, but please be aware that there are other sign languages and families in the world that are not in fact ASL.

#Sign language #white saviorism #hearing saviorism #sign language education #quoted tags

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I'm one of those atheists that a lot of Fundamentalist Christian pastors warn [proverbial] you about:

I'm not someone who just happens not to be Christian, by accident of birth or upbringing. I am an Apostate. I consciously and eagerly turned away from Christianity and toward Paganism. And then, I turned away from Paganism and became atheist.

Not only is Christian teaching irrelevant to me, I am actively opposed to it.

(Not necessarily the teachings of Jesus, mind you. But the teachings of Church[es] that evolved around his worship after his execution)

I literally do not care what the Bible says about any political issue. I am not Christian. Christian scripture should have zero effect on my life or my personal freedoms. 

#about me #separation of church and state #Freedom to practice your religion #is not the same as forcing that religion on me

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What does the "banana republic is a fucked up name for a store" post you reblogged mean? I'm afraid of looking dumb.

The term "banana republic" was originally coined to describe countries in Central and South America (mainly Honduras and Guatemala) whose economies were rendered dependent on the production and export of bananas (among other agricultural goods, but mainly bananas) by American fruit corporations leveraging the power of the U.S. government, the U.S. military and the CIA.

Throughout most of the of the 20th century, American corporations such as United Fruit, Cuyamel, and the Standard Fruit Company owned large portions of these countries' lands, to the point that in some cases they controlled their railway, road, and port infrastructure, and they engaged in a variety of imperialist actions to lower production costs, such as violence against labor activists and anti wage reform lobbying.

The pinnacle of this phenomenon was the 1954 Guatemalan coup, when United Fruit convinced the goverment of US president Dwight D. Eisenhower that the elected president of Guatemala, Jacobo Árbenz (who had expropriated some of the company's unused land and given it to Guatemalan peasants) was secretly working with the Soviet Union, resulting in a CIA coup which deposed the Árbenz government and replaced it with a thirty-year right-wing military dictatorship which effectively acted as a puppet government to protect the interests of United Fruit and the U.S. government.

Nowadays the term has broadened to refer to any small, economically unstable country with an economy which has been rendered dependent on the export of a particular natural resource due to economic exploitation by a more powerful country.

#history #us imperialism #guatemala #honduras #history in my lifetime #right-wing violence #exploitation

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Thanks for the transcriptions!

I love English (my native language).

I also love the idea that merriment has a 1 to 1 correlation with people.

One person = One Merriment Unit.

[ID: youtube comment from Hal Sawyer:

My favorite relic English still used everywhere is the word "the" used in phrases like: "the more I look at this, the stranger it seems, or "the bigger they come, the harder they fall". This "the" is not the article of any noun, it is a different word, a conjunction descended from the old English "þā", pronounced "tha" which means either "when" or "then". Back in early Middle English the structure "if - then" had not taken over and if you wanted to express an if - then relationship you said "þā whatever, þā whatever", meaning "when such-and- such, then such-and-such". "þā" sounds almost the same as "the" and the spelling of the two converged, but the meaning remained totally different. "the more, the merrier" literally means "when more, then merrier" or "if more, then merrier'; same as centuries ago.

end ID]

this is so cool

#middle english #english grammar #english idioms

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For the record, it was my mother who told me the story of where it comes from.

(Reblogging for the visibility/greater numbers)

I heard a line in a song today, and now, I'm just curious:

#tumblr polls #English Idioms #“the last straw”

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May! Yay!

(I couldn't let a rhyme go unused)

And you're welcome.

New Philosophy Tube Dropping in May

The next episode of Philosophy Tube is gonna be very special I'm travelling back in time to chat to my past self, and it does not go well... More pics on my Patreon now!

I also want to say a special thanks to you all on this one. Today we cross-shot a dramatic scene with three cameras, a dedicated sound engineer, a hair and makeup artist, a professional actor, plus me. We had a full hour lunch break and everyone got paid a pro rate. I'm proud of the production quality we're able to achieve on Philosophy Tube and, I hope, of the way the crew get tret - that's super important to me. When patrons and Nebula subscribers trust me with their money it's important to me that it goes on the screen.

So thank you. This kind of thing just would not be possible without audience support - Patreon subscribers and Nebula subscribers - because advertising doesn't pay for quality like this.

#philosophy tube #YouTube ad revenue is nothing #patreon #Nebula

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I heard a line in a song today, and now, I'm just curious:

#tumblr polls #English Idioms #“the last straw” #(I wish there were a 3-day duration choice)

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I had not actually seen this, yet. So thank you for pinging me.

i am unreasonably proud and excited about this

#image description in alt #International Symbol of Access (parody) #no spoons left - only knives #disability #disability pride #disability wrath

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Happy Shakespeare Day (the observation* of William Shakespeare's 460th birthday)

To celebrate, here's Shakespearean actor Emma Fielding reading Shakespeare's Sonnet 60 -- all about the passage of time, growing from a baby to old age, the inevitability of death, and ending on the hope that this poem will live on, in spite of Time. So it seems appropriate.

Eye contact. Open captions.

[Note: in Shakespeare's pronunciation, "sequent" (i.e.: sequential) is a perfect pun for "second." I think if you told him he wasn't allowed to pun, his brain would go into buffering mode]

*We don't know exactly what day Shakespeare was born; we're guessing based on the record of his baptism, and that we know he died on April 23rd. And we like round numbers.

#Shakespeare day #favorite sonnets #when in doubt: puns! #open captions #Emma fielding #royal shakespeare company #kitchen table video #Youtube

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Our priorities are not comfort. Our Priorities are Justice.

The TL;DR / TL;DW:

In 1973, Richard Nixon signed The Rehabilitation Act of 1973 into law (tl;dr-2: a new set of regulations over how states get federal grants to fund vocational rehabilitation services for the Disabled).

But in order to get the bill passed, one section (Section 504) -- the one that prohibits any institution that receives any federal money at all from discriminating against the disabled -- is set aside and tabled, on the grounds that accommodating the disabled is just too complicated and expensive.

Three and half years and two presidents later, Section 504 is still tabled, and Disability Rights Activists are tired of waiting.

On April 5, 1977, there are simultaneous mass sit-ins in cities across America. Most of these were demonstrations outside the Health, Education and Welfare offices, and most dispersed relatively quickly (The one in Washington, DC lasted 26 hours).

But the activists who were sitting-in at the H.E.W. building in San Fransisco, managed to con their way inside -- and they stayed for Twenty-Eight Days -- The Longest Occupation of a Federal Building in US history.

----

The Americans with Disabilities Act, which was signed into law on July 26, 1990, is based on "Section 504;" it 'simply' extends the requirement to not discriminate against the disabled to private businesses, not just those who receive federal money.

You know what makes me sad?

It makes me sad, and not a little bit mad, that there are disabled people -- even those who are Disability Advocates -- who hate Disability Pride Month because they're convinced it was invented by normate people to make themselves feel better. I suspect that's because it follows directly after June's Queer Pride Month, and, if you are young enough to not remember the history for yourself ('cause we all know it's not being taught n schools), it can feel like a leftover crumb. But it is so, so, not.

If I were Queen of Calendars, I might move Disability Pride Month to April, to commemorate the 504 Sit-in of 1977, especially the occupation of the regional offices of Health, Education, and Welfare in San Fransisco, by over 500 people, mostly disabled (with their personal care assistants). The Occupation lasted 28 Days -- the longest protest occupation of a federal building in U.S. History. Since Queer Pride Month commemorates a protest, maybe Disability Pride Month should, too. The biggest knock against April is the weather is still iffy in much of the country for pride parades and outdoor gatherings.

(Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 was the legal predecessor of the ADA. And no, that's not a typo. Most of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 was passed in 1973, but the one section that outlined rights for the disabled was put to the side, and ignored for four whole years, because it was deemed to be too expensive and confusing to extend civil rights to disabled people. It was the Sit-In in 1977 that finally pushed President Carter to sign it, and make it law).

Here's a retrospective report on the Sit-In from CBS news, that aired in the '80s (Auto-generated captions):

(the video is 6 minute, 12 seconds. But the news report ends at 5 minutes 42 seconds)

#disability history #U.S. History #civil rights protest #Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 #504 sit-in #Disability Pride #I was 13 in 1977 #Mother and I attended a small auxiliary protest in a local town on April 5th #history in my lifetime

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But you draw triangle stick figures. And triangles have three faces.

So it makes for a different kind of parody...

shit, sorry, I'll delete that post right away. I didn't know he was a mythologist at all, let alone that he was infamous for positing a "universal" narrative structure that reduces a variety of works and storytelling traditions to variations on a single Jungian theme regardless of whether their actual contents line up with his thesis. I only knew about his work with Canned Soups.

#joseph campbell #parody