I think there’s a legitimate question about how much many people actually ‘believe’ what we call ‘fake news’. In many cases, ‘fake news’, the latest manufactured outrage, functions as a kind of ideational pornography, ideas and claims that excite people’s political feelings, desires and fears and create feelings of connection with kindred political spirits.

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo. Why You’re Fooling Yourself About ‘Fake News’ (via protoslacker)

anarchadelphia:

Anti-Racist Neighborhood Watch stickers

If You See Something Do Something!

To have the president-elect of the United States simply reject the fact-based narrative that the intelligence community puts together because it conflicts with his a priori assumptions — wow

Trump, Mocking Claim That Russia Hacked Election, at Odds with G.O.P. - The New York Times

I witnessed something powerful and profound today. Wes Clark Jr and the assembled veterans took a knee and collectively asked for forgiveness for the genocide and war crimes committed by the United States Military against tribal nations in this country. Leksi Leonard Crow Dog on behalf of the tribes in attendance accepted and asked for forgiveness for any hurt that might have been caused June 25, 1876 when the Great Sioux Nation defeated the 7th Cavalry. The last thing he said to the veterans was, “… and today we forgive and ask for world peace.” All the veterans replied in a single unified voice, “WORLD PEACE!!!!”

Jon Eagle quoted an article at* U.S.Uncut*. A group of veterans just did an incredibly moving thing at Standing Rock (via protoslacker)

thisiseverydayracism:

blackness-by-your-side:

And remember, this is 2016. The government itself starves Native Americans who just protect their own land. 

The media is silent, as usual.

God bless these warriors. 

#NoDAPL #NoJusticeNoPeace

This is sickening.

When the levers of power are seized by the small hands of hateful men, you work hard, you stand with those who are most vulnerable, and you don’t give up until it’s morning again. The rest is commentary.

Liel Leibovitz in Tablet Magazine. What to Do About Trump? The Same Thing My Grandfather Did in 1930s Vienna. Historical analogies are always flawed, but some moral principles shine eternal (via protoslacker)

So journalists who do not report that Trump has selected for a top spot in the White House an enabler of white nationalists—which certainly could qualify Bannon as a white nationalist himself—are doing the public and the truth a disservice. Thanks to Trump, a comrade of racists—many of whom are now cheering his appointment—is slated to help run the US government. This fact should be front and center, as the nation heads toward the Trump era.

David Corn at Mother Jones. Here’s Why It’s Fair—and Necessary—to Call Trump’s Chief Strategist a White Nationalist Champion Stephen Bannon said he was. (via protoslacker)

Rule #3: Institutions will not save you. It took Putin a year to take over the Russian media and four years to dismantle its electoral system; the judiciary collapsed unnoticed. The capture of institutions in Turkey has been carried out even faster, by a man once celebrated as the democrat to lead Turkey into the EU. Poland has in less than a year undone half of a quarter century’s accomplishments in building a constitutional democracy.

Masha Gessen in The New York Review of Books. Autocracy: Rules for Survival (via protoslacker)

kenyatta:

THE ICEBERG MODEL

The iceberg model is a valuable tool to encourage systemic thinking and help you contextualize an issue as part of a whole system. By asking you to connect an event–a single incident or occurrence–to patterns of behavior, systems structures, and mental models, the iceberg allows you to see the structures underlying the event. Just like an iceberg, 90% of which is invisible beneath the water, these structures are often hidden below the surface. However, if you can identify them and connect them to the events that you are seeing, you may be able to develop lasting solutions that target the whole system rather than short term, reactive solutions.

http://donellameadows.org/systems-thinking-resources/

Even here, however, segregation persisted. Vaughan and her colleagues were placed in Langley’s ‘West Computing’ unit. White women computed on the east side. At the back of the Langley cafeteria, a white cardboard sign labeled COLORED COMPUTERS directed the West mathematicians to sit together at lunch rather than mingle. Eventually, “tiny firebrand” Miriam Mann stole the sign, and the table was left unlabelled.

Breaking barriers: the US space programme’s black women mathematicians : A view From the Bridge (via iamdanw)

danielkanhai:

sometimes, when i want to really treat myself, i turn my phone brightness up juust a little bit. i feel like i’m splurging. like i’m living a king’s life. sometimes i turn it up all the way and i’m like, “this is what god’s phone screen looks like.”

The bliss of open stacks is totally intoxicating. You’re let loose with no very large obligation to stick to the subject in a place where every book you’ve ever wanted to read is at hand. It’s a glorious thing, exciting. It takes care of the impulse to explore and to see radically and be radically different.

BOMB Magazine — Marie Ponsot by Benjamin Ivry

What the people I interviewed were drawn to was not necessarily the particulars of these theories. It was the deep story underlying them—an account of life as it feels to them. Some such account underlies all beliefs, right or left, I think. The deep story of the right goes like this:

You are patiently standing in the middle of a long line stretching toward the horizon, where the American Dream awaits. But as you wait, you see people cutting in line ahead of you. Many of these line-cutters are black—beneficiaries of affirmative action or welfare. Some are career-driven women pushing into jobs they never had before. Then you see immigrants, Mexicans, Somalis, the Syrian refugees yet to come. As you wait in this unmoving line, you’re being asked to feel sorry for them all. You have a good heart. But who is deciding who you should feel compassion for? Then you see President Barack Hussein Obama waving the line-cutters forward. He’s on their side. In fact, isn’t he a line-cutter too? How did this fatherless black guy pay for Harvard? As you wait your turn, Obama is using the money in your pocket to help the line-cutters. He and his liberal backers have removed the shame from taking. The government has become an instrument for redistributing your money to the undeserving. It’s not your government anymore; it’s theirs.

Arlie Russell Hochschild in Mother Jones. I Spent 5 Years With Some of Trump’s Biggest Fans. Here’s What They Won’t Tell You. (via protoslacker)

Privileged people are building lifestyles on espousing “Law of Attraction“ type spiritual beliefs, and sharing them with dogmatic insistence. There is an aggressive, holier-than-thou approach that prevails in this behavior.

“We create our own reality.” “Everything happens for a reason.” “What you put out is what you attract.” These are isolating, damaging, victim-blaming thoughts to distribute to people who have endured trauma or suffering as a result of societal madness and centuries-old oppression.

These types of beliefs are homogenizing: they assume a shared life experience background of privilege. Having privilege is emphasized as the norm. Espousing these beliefs reinforces hegemony: keeping those with privilege in a state of dominance over others. This thinking promotes attitudes of entitlement and assumes that having privilege is the “correct” way to be.

Virginia Rosenberg. Converting Hidden Spiritual Racism Into Sacred Activism: An Open Letter To Spiritual White Folks (via protoslacker)

There is a lens that is largely being ignored in attempts to imagine post-capitalist futures - this missing link is a result of the evasion of the reality that capitalism is born of white supremacist thinking and domination - and is therefore directly linked to anti-blackness, and consequently the erasure of black lives and futures. Unless capitalism’s origins in the project of Empire are acknowledged we will continue to hold the flawed assumption that humanness is universally agreed upon. The current circulating prescription of being human is one offered by white capitalism and is highly fueled by control, greed and need for constant accumulation. As different societies across the globe increasingly invest in these structures and relations, we risk narrowing the potential for nurturing of alternative (less cannibalistic) versions of being human.

Gathoni Blessol at Pambazuka News. White supremacy as cultural cannibalism

/therules.org

(via protoslacker)

But what is true is that this work — actually doing alternative economics in black and other communities — was always very dangerous work, which is why I titled this book “Collective Courage.” I’ve documented how there was physical violence and many times there was economic sabotage against these businesses. I often found instances of people getting killed, co-ops being burned down, commercial banks not lending or providing financial services to these businesses.

Jessica Gordon Nembhard in Equity Blog at Policy Link. Collective Courage: Jessica Gordon Nembhard on Black Economic Solidarity

Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice

(via protoslacker)

Luhrmann offered an explanation: Europeans and Americans tend to see themselves as individuals motivated by a sense of self identity, whereas outside the West, people imagine the mind and self interwoven with others and defined through relationships.

Clifton Parker writing in Stanford News. Hallucinatory ‘voices’ shaped by local culture, Stanford anthropologist says Stanford anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann found that voice-hearing experiences of people with serious psychotic disorders are shaped by local culture – in the United States, the voices are harsh and threatening; in Africa and India, they are more benign and playful. This may have clinical implications for how to treat people with schizophrenia, she suggests. (via protoslacker)

In 2013, Jackson, Mississippi elected a very progressive mayor, Chokwe Lumumba, who actually had planned to create a whole cooperative economy in the city. It was very exciting. His plan was to create co-ops out of many of the businesses that the city had already privatized and to help develop other co-ops. There were going to be urban-rural co-op linkages. There was a plan to have a year-long education program to train many people in Jackson, especially unemployed ones, in co-op development so they could start a variety of them. Sadly, Lumumba died [in February 2014, after only eight months in office], but despite this, the people in his administration whom he had hired to start doing this are now moving forward with a few of the co-ops, such as a waste-management cooperative. They hosted one of the largest co-op meetings in the US [Jackson Rising, in May 2014] which attracted about 500 people, predominately Black.

Beverly Bell and Natalie Miller at Truth Out, Other Worlds. The Legacy and Current Growth of Black Cooperatives

Other Worlds Are Possible

(via protoslacker)

Other research teams are taking different approaches to breeding fertilizer-frugal crops. Over the past six years, a group at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre (CIMMYT), headquartered in Texcoco, Mexico, has had success using conventional breeding to create maize that grows well in the nitrogen-starved soils of Africa.

Natasha Gilbert at Nature. The race to create super-crops Old-fashioned breeding techniques are bearing more fruit than genetic engineering in developing hyper-efficient plants. (via protoslacker)

DONALD J. TRUMP, until now a Republican problem, this week became a challenge the nation must confront and overcome. The real estate tycoon is uniquely unqualified to serve as president, in experience and temperament. He is mounting a campaign of snarl and sneer, not substance. To the extent he has views, they are wrong in their diagnosis of America’s problems and dangerous in their proposed solutions. Mr. Trump’s politics of denigration and division could strain the bonds that have held a diverse nation together. His contempt for constitutional norms might reveal the nation’s two-century-old experiment in checks and balances to be more fragile than we knew.

The Washington Post Editorial Board in The Washington Post. The Post’s View

Donald Trump is a unique threat to American democracy

(via protoslacker)

I was thinking as long as I have my hands up … they’re not going to shoot me. This is what I’m thinking, they’re not going to shoot me. Wow, was I wrong.

Video shows moments before North Miami Police shot unarmed man

We’re used to so much nonsense and so many combustible tirades from Trump that we become partly inured to them. We also don’t slow down and look at precisely what he’s saying. What he’s saying here is that millions of African-Americans are on the streets inspired by and protesting on behalf of a mass murderer of white cops.

This is not simply false. It is the kind of wild racist incitement that puts whole societies in danger. And this man wants to be president.

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo. A Propagator of Race Hatred and Violence (via protoslacker)

givemeunicorns:

weepingwilo:

mikekingvividkonception:

volatilequeen:

The distractions…

Shit is crazy out here

I swear I was just talking to my mom about how no one is talking about Flint anymore as if the water problem has ceased. Smdh

Hey guys here are some places still taking donations!

Help for Flint

Life USA

United Way

Community Foundation of Greater Flint

Save the Children

lokitaraine:

Please make this go viral. This is what’s happening in my state right now. The bill was passed almost unanimously. You may view it here : [www.ncleg.net/gascripts…

NEW LAW MAKES POLICE CAM FOOTAGE OFF LIMITS TO PUBLIC

Motivated by the controversial police officer-involved shootings in Louisiana and Minnesota, and the terror in Texas that unfolded after a Black Lives Matter march, Gov. Pat McCrory signed the Body Cam bill into law.

Related story: North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper says body camera law needs fixing

McCrory signed House Bill 972 on Monday afternoon.

The new law details who can view and obtain footage from body and dashboard camera. The footage is no longer public record.

If you are in the video, either your image or your audio, you can request the file. The request could be denied, however, and then you’ll have to take the fight to Superior Court.

McCrory says technology can mislead and misinform.

“My goal is to protect those who protect us,” he said.

The Governor believes the legislation is fair for everyone.

“It’s better to have rules and guidelines with all this technology than no rules and guidelines whatsoever,” said McCrory.

The ACLU of North Carolina calls the legislation “shameful.”

“Body cameras should be a tool to make law enforcement more transparent and accountable to the communities they serve, but this shameful law will make it nearly impossible to achieve those goals,” said Susanna Birdsong, Policy Counsel for the ACLU of North Carolina. “People who are filmed by police body cameras should not have to spend time and money to go to court in order to see that footage. These barriers are significant and we expect them to drastically reduce any potential this technology had to make law enforcement more accountable to community members.”

The Governor’s Office would not comment on the criticism.

The law goes into effect Oct. 1.

Wake County Sheriff Donnie Harrison is backing McCrory’s move. He says what law enforcement encounters in the field is not for everyone’s eyes.

“A lot of groups think we should show everything from start to finish and we just can’t do it,” said Harrison. “They think we’re trying to hide something and that’s not what it is. But if we go into a house for a domestic (assault) and if the wife has been assaulted has been unclothed, we don’t want that on YouTube. We don’t want that out there.”

McCrory took another step Monday to protect officers. He established the Blue Alert System, which is to help catch anyone who intends on attacking or harming a public safety officials.

http://abc11.com/politics/new-law-makes-police-cam-footage-off-limits-to-public/1422569/

** ELECTIONS ARE ON NOVEMBER 8th!!! YOUR VOTE COUNTS TO GET HIM OUT OF OFFICE***

The Slave Trail of Tears is the great missing migration—a thousand-mile-long river of people, all of them black, reaching from Virginia to Louisiana. During the 50 years before the Civil War, about a million enslaved people moved from the Upper South—Virginia, Maryland, Kentucky—to the Deep South—Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama. They were made to go, deported, you could say, having been sold.

Edward Ball in The Smithsonian, Nov. 2015 via Neo-Griot. Retracing Slavery’s Trail of Tears America’s forgotten migration – the journeys of a million African-Americans from the tobacco South to the cotton South

Kalamu ya Salaam’s information blog is good

Slaves in the Family

(via protoslacker)

Both Bar-Yam’s and Cederman’s research suggests one answer to diversity within nation states: devolve power to local communities, as multicultural states such as Belgium and Canada have done.

“We need a conception of the state as a place where multiple affiliations and languages and religions may be safe and flourish,” says Slattery. “That is the ideal Tanzania has embraced and it seems to be working reasonably well.” Tanzania has more than 120 ethnic groups and about 100 languages.

Debora MacKenzie at The New Scientist. End of nations: Is there an alternative to countries? Nation states cause some of our biggest problems, from civil war to climate inaction. Science suggests there are better ways to run a planet (via protoslacker)

There are lots of things you can do if you witness racist behaviour. Bystander intervention may be able to stop a racist incident, prevent it from escalating and potentially prevent or minimise social or emotional harm to the targeted person or group. Taking a personal stand also contributes to the establishment of social norms which make racist behaviour unacceptable in our community and has the potential to affect individuals’ attitudes in the long term.

Monash University. Bystander anti-racism (via protoslacker)

So what caused Muslim societies to go from coolly reading homoerotic poetry to outlawing and stigmatising same-sex love? It’s tough to nail down an exact reason but here’s an interesting coincidence: there are five Muslims countries where being gay isn’t a crime. All that the five – Mali, Jordan, Indonesia, Turkey and Albania – share in common is that they were never colonised by the British.

Shoaib Daniyal in Scroll.in. Orlando shooting: It’s different now, but Muslims have a long history of accepting homosexuality Muslim societies have ignored their own history of accepting homosexuality, latching on to a twisted colonial legacy instead.

Via 3 Quarks Daily

(via protoslacker)

What all of this means is that we are steadily becoming a society of workers without work: a society of people who are materially, culturally and psychologically bound to paid employment, but for whom there are not enough stable and meaningful jobs to go around. Perversely, the most pressing problem for many people is no longer exploitation, but the absence of opportunities to be sufficiently and dependably exploited. The impact of this problem in today’s epidemic of anxiety and exhaustion should not be underestimated.

David Frayne at Roar. Against meaninglessness and precarity: the crisis of work (via protoslacker)

Then I knew the Africans were right. There is spirit stuff. There is spirit affliction; it is not a matter of metaphor and symbol, or even psychology. And I began to see how anthropologists have perpetuated an endless series of put-downs about the many spirit events in which they participated—“participated” in a kindly pretense. They might have obtained valuable material, but they have been operating with the wrong paradigm, that of the positivists’ denial.

Edith Turner in Shamanism, Spring/Summer 1997, Vol. 10, No. 1. The Reality of Spirits

Edith Turner passed away today, she was 95.

Celebrating the Works of Edith “Edie” Turner Youtube video

(via protoslacker)

For the black man to come out superior would be against America’s teachings. I have been so great in boxing they had to create an image like Rocky, a white image on the screen, to counteract my image in the ring. America has to have its white images, no matter where it gets them. Jesus, Wonder Woman, Tarzan and Rocky

Watching Rocky II with Muhammad Ali | Interviews | Roger Ebert

medievalpoc:

Gaspar de Crayer

** **Head Study of a Young Moor

Netherlands (c. 1600-1650)

Oil on canvas, 39,5 x 32,7 cm

Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Ghent

[source]

Therapists Are Less Likely to Take in Black Patients, Study Says

sonofbaldwin:

Yet ANOTHER example of how individual ‪#‎racism‬ becomes institutionalized racism and ‪#‎AntiBlackness‬, and compounds ‪#‎ableism‬ for black people.

“Mental illness in the black community is a public health issue that is all too often grossly underestimated and misunderstood. According to the Department of Health and Human Services, black people living below the poverty line experience a disproportionate amount of serious psychological distress compared to their white counterparts. In 2012, despite the fact that black people were 20% more likely to report symptoms associated with with psychological distress, white people were twice as likely to treat similar symptoms with prescription anti-depressants.

*** Some of that disparity can be attributed to the stigma attached to mental issues, but a Princeton study published in this month’s Journal of Health and Social Behavior found that even when black people did seek professional help, psychotherapists were less likely to actually offer assistance.”***

[Photo description: Indoors. A man is seen from in between the slats of a staircase. Only his face is seen. He is looking into the camera.]

(H/T Rima Regas)

Philosophers still tend to disdain, or at least to conceive as categorically different from their own speciality, the use of language deployed by bards and poets, whether from Siberia or the South Bronx. Again, this disdain leaves out the bulk of human experience. Until it is eradicated, the present talk of the ideal of inclusion will remain mere lip-service.

Justin E H Smith at Aeon. How philosophy came to disdain the wisdom of oral cultures

The Philosopher: A History in Six Types

Via *3 Quarks Daily *which pointed me to Smith’s installment of  Imaginary Tribes entitled, The Crispy and the Crunchy one of my favorite pieces on The Internet.

(via protoslacker)

(via Baby Lives Matter — The Nib)

Thailand’s thoughtcrime arrests are getting dangerously bizarre

kenyatta:

In the past nine months, Thais have been charged for clicking “like” on subversive Facebook memes. For handing flowers to an anti-junta activist. For allegedly insulting the king’s pet dog.

Others have been detained simply for reading George Orwell’s “1984” in public, or for raising three fingers, an anti-tyranny salute from the “Hunger Games” films.

Officers have even snatched up a man for eating a sandwich.

It was no ordinary sandwich, mind you. It was publicly declared a “sandwich for democracy,” scarfed down by an anti-junta activist at a mall — all while reading 1984. He was quickly surrounded by plainclothes officers.

[…]

Thailand has endured 13 successful coups since 1932, the last year in which the nation (then called Siam) was directly ruled by monarchs.

Since the takeover, according to Human Rights Watch, at least 1,300 people have been summoned for questioning or what the army calls “attitude adjustment.”

This can involve several days of interrogation and re-education at an army camp. Failure to attend is a crime. “The United States has the Patriot Act to deal with the situation after 9/11,” Gen. Werachon said. “This is the same.”

Even less fortunate are those accused of Thailand’s most serious speech-related crime: disrespecting the royal family. The army, closely aligned with the palace, considers “upholding the monarchy” to be one of its prime directives.

[…]

The latest high-profile charge targets a 40-year-old widow, Patnaree Chankij, who works as a maid in Bangkok. Authorities said she received a private, anti-monarchist message on Facebook.

Her response to the message: “ja,” which in Thai means “yeah, sure” or “I see.” For typing that single word, she faces up to 15 years in prison.

deliverusfromsburb:

youngvenuz:

deliverusfromsburb:

because-im-freaking-greed:

deliverusfromsburb:

The fact that no time travelers have appeared to stop Donald Trump yet suggests one of two things: either he doesn’t win the election or he does and the entire world ends.

Or Ted Cruz was the time traveller, and his participation in the race is part of a stable time loop which leads to Trump becoming President

Ted Cruz’s uncanny behavior and appearance are actually because he is an alien investigating the exact reasons why Earth became a charred cinder in galactic federation year 20967234. He dropped out when he realized the answer and is now making arrangements to be beamed away before it is too late.

unfortunately due to a mishap during the beaming process he is sent to 1960’s northern california and is driven mad and thus becomes the zodiac killer

which we all gave him the idea for in the first place

In Praise of Naturally Curly Hair

Even if this is oddly directed at Caucasians only (obviously) it is at least 10 years behind the times and lacking in any real knowledge or information about curly hair, which runs a wide range. Was it sponsored by the product photos?

Comment on this absurd “article”. Was it sponsored by the products mentioned by name with links and prices?

hypergoomba:

words-writ-in-starlight:

spacebabenumber-25:

kaijuno:

kirawords:

timetotimeskip:

symphonicsadness:

celestial-cat-prince:

tikkunolamorgtfo:

proudly-pro-choice:

medievaldendrophile:

40yodater:

cobra-23:

40yodater:

cobra-23:

lesfemale:

leftiesneedrights:

lesfemale:

being a female means needing to see 10 different doctors to get a proper diagnosis because they always think you’re exaggerating and/or lying

define proper diagnosis. I mean, does that just mean the diagnosis you want?

no :) it means going to 10 different doctors who disbelieved your symptoms until the 11th found cysts on your ovaries :) which may mean infertility :) sit on a cactus :)

I call bullshit

Of course you do. Like the first 10 doctors. 😒

I call bullshit on the story. If you think you have an issue you should see a specialist not just your PCP.

Like the 4 “specialists” I saw for the crippling numbness in my face and legs I had for over a year while they told me it was “stress”? When it was finally found that I had scars on my brain and spine? Those “specialists” we’re male neurologist who wouldn’t give me an MRI because “women stress too much”. Go fuck yourself.

MY SPINE WAS BROKEN FOR 2 YEARS BECAUSE MY DOCTORS TOLD ME I JUST HAD BAD CRAMPS AND REFUSED TO TAKE XRAYS. FUCK YOU AND YOUR ENTIRE LIFE. WHEN WILL BOYS REALIZE THEIR EXPERIENCES ARENT STANDARD???? I ALSO LOVE THIS IDEA THAT YOU CAN JUST GO TO A SPECIALIST WHENEVER YOU WANT LOL IF OUR PCP DOESNT BELIEVE US WHEN WE TELL THEM OUR SYMPTOMS THEY ARENT GONNA REFER US TO A SPECIALIST YOU FUCKING MOLDY WALNUT

My parents began noticing something large in my throat, saw a specialist….Guess what? Told me to lose some weight..even though I wasn’t overweight. I would have my period for weeks at a time. Was told that it was teenage hormones and stress.

Two fucking years later I attempted suicide they ran a battery of tests as required and bam! They find out that I have untreated Hashimoto’s. The “thing” was a goiter. Possible symptoms of an untreated thyroid disease is the goiter, unexplained weight gain, and depression. All they had to do was test my blood, but they said young people don’t have thyroid problems. 😒

-Allie

Ten years ago, my mother—who is a pretty tough cookie—started feeling both ridiculously wired, anxious, and incredibly emotional. Every doctor she saw told her she was going through early menopause, even though she was still menstruating. Her health declined to point where she was barely sleeping, losing weight, and crying constantly, which was a huge red flag because my mother never cries. Finally, she went to see another doctor 2.5 hours away who referred her to an endocrinologist. And what did the endocrinologist say? He diagnosed her with one of the most advanced cases of Grave’s Disease he had even seen, and said if she had gone just a few more months without being treated, she could have FUCKING DIED. 

Also, it turned out that her thyroid levels had been moving out of the normal range in a progressive pattern for years, but nobody bothered to look at her past test results until after the diagnosis. They would just do a test, see that it was “in the normal range” and leave it at that. She could have caught it before she even had symptoms, instead of basically being accused of having hysteria. 

i had a brain aneurysm/hemorrhage ten years ago, doctors still tell me im faking my disability
BECAUSE YOU CAN TOTALLY FAKE LIMITED MOVEMENT OF THE LEFT SIDE

My sister had intercranial hypertension which was causing headaches, dizzy spells and loss of vision, and you know what the hospital told her? She was being a hysterical girl and making it up.
A few weeks later she spent roughly a month in hospital and had several lumbar punctures to relieve her RECORD HIGH spinal pressure that was causing so much strain on her brain and optic nerves she was being sent blind.

Everytime I see this post (and it’s been a good 5/6 times), it has different stories and experiences of women who have been horribly mistreated by doctors and it just blows my mind that this is so big. It’s absolutely disgusting how terribly women are treated in the medical world and something needs to be done about that.

my friend lea had back pain, then pain in her legs and feet, and then numbness. despite seeing 7 different doctors over 2 years, by the time they found the cancer it was inoperable. chemo and radiation didn’t work. the cancer spread. she died and left behind a 5 year old daughter.

A few years ago I would go through spells where I literally could not stand on my own and I couldn’t get out of bed. I would be freezing and too weak to eat. I would keep having heart palpitations as well. I got up the money to go to a clinic and they told me it was just stress and to basically just work on chilling out. I saved up money for a few weeks to do this and I pretty much get a “chill out” from them.

As time went on it got worse, most noticeably the heart palpitations were happening almost constantly. I went again to a different clinic and was told it was normal and that it was probably stress. They did no tests, and they told me it would “just go away”.

Two weeks later I ended up collapsing going down some stairs, and at the hospital it was discovered that I had such severe anemia that my heart could barely keep up with trying to get enough oxygen to my body. I had developed left ventricular hypertrophy (my heart muscle is too big) and because of them ignoring me and dismissing me I’m at a much higher risk of heart attacks and stroke now.

I went to the doctor with severe intermittent pain in my upper right stomach area that was so bad I had to miss school. Despite the fact that my period has been on a regular 3 month cycle for years, and I still had two months left until my period, my doctor told me it was period related cramps and or indigestion. 2 months later I’m in the hospital getting my gallbladder removed. It was so obstructed that there was gangrene developing my my system.

So…everyone who’s given me shit for that one post (about medicine and equal treatment and shit) can just read this because I’m sick of defending my case.

i know this post is already long but here’s a pretty good article about how gender bias in medicine is quite literally killing women. it focuses a lot on heart attacks but it applies to all areas of medicine

tashabilities:

micdotcom:

Watch: Poet G Yamazawa nails what it’s like to grow up in the U.S. as the child of immigrants.

That “only homework that our parents can help us with” knocked a pause in me, my gawd. 

The writer of the gospel of John, in re-framing the logos ideology of his time, expressed it in terms of relationship rather than reason and intimacy rather than order. The first Latin translators of the Johannine gospel understood this and translated logos as sermo which, in English, means something like an intimate conversation, a dynamic that holds together all things, a reciprocal relationship that evolves and connects. “In the beginning was the Conversation” produces an entirely different worldview where human beings value other voices in dialogue, whether of a different race, gender, or tribe, or a different species, and participates with the creative spirit alive in the Universe. Quantum biologists and evolutionary scientists use this precise language to describe the “deep conversation that holds our biosystems together.” Somehow the Johannine community intuited what scientists now understand but the Church continues to miss: the reality that we are all connected by a continuing Holy Conversation inside ourselves, between one another, with the cosmos, and with all non-human others.

Valerie Serrels and Victoria Loorz at Kosmos Journal for Global Transformation. Re-wilding Christianity: An Emerging Model of Regeneration for a Domesticated Church of Empire

The Church Of The Wild

(via protoslacker)

kenyatta:

@anil is known as one of the wisest people in tech and he also happens to be a huge Prince fan. **Anyone interested in understanding this should give his twitter timeline a read today. **He articulates the importance of Prince to culture, fandom, and technology adoption in a way that nobody else can.

Q: I’m pretty new here, and I don’t actually know much about dinosaurs (just followed this blog because it seemed really cool and interesting) so could you explain what shrink-wrapped means?

palaeofail-explained:

Of course! See, modern animals have a lot of muscles, fat, fluff, etc, and end up looking very little like their actual skeleton. For example, look at how much fluff owls have:

(Source)

However, lots of palaeoartists completely ignore this! They basically stretch skin over the bones and call it a day. One especially bad example that was featured on @palaeofail is this poor pterosaur:

It barely has room for its digestive system. It’s definitely missing the air sac system that allows it to breathe. It’s got virtually no muscles on the arms - how does it fly?? - on the head (no wonder its mouth is open. It has no jaw muscles to close it!), on the torso (it needs to flap), or on the legs (walking) It doesn’t have any fat at all, so it’s definitely starving (maybe because it can’t fly or close its moth?). The skin is much too thin; you can see all of the bones and its wing membranes should be much, much thicker. And it’s missing the hair-like pycnofibres that should be covering its body!

Many palaeoartists have started to strike back at this by drawing modern animals like we might draw them if we found their bones:

(Source)

[House cat]

(Source)

Culture shapes the evolution of cognition

protoslacker:

A new paper, by Bill Thompson, Simon Kirby and Kenny Smith, has just appeared which contributes to everyone’s favourite debate. The paper uses agent-based Bayesian models that incorporate learning, culture and evolution to make the claim that weak cognitive biases are enough to create population-wide effects, making a strong nativist position untenable.

The adoption of surveillance techniques, by both the government and private sectors, undermines the Internet’s ability to serve as a neutral platform for honest and open deliberation. It begins to strip away the Internet’s ability to serve as a venue for all voices, instead catering only to the most dominant

Karen Turner: Mass surveillance silences minority opinions, according to study, The Washington Post

We don’t tend to think of white folks’ fights to secure government benefits and protections as “identity politics,” informed by a set of grievances specific to one’s racial or ethnic background. We tend to talk about these fights in terms of religion, class and other markers, or simply as politics, without racial or ethnic qualifiers. Can Mitt Romney win over evangelicals? Blue-collar workers are feeling the pressures of wage stagnation! The widely understood subtext is that most of the folks in question are also white.

This election cycle, there’s notably broad, public acknowledgement that the concerns and complaints of many white voters are all tied up with race and racially motivated unease.

On Who Gets To Be A ‘Real American,’ And Who Deserves A Helping Hand : Code Switch : NPR

White can’t strike its own structure. White can’t oust its own system.

Claudia Rankine Takes on Teachers and Racists, Vulture

I would sit in class and listen to the sons and daughters of doctors and lawyers and policy makers — people who had never needed and would most likely never need welfare — earnestly advocate the dismantling of the welfare state, and I would shake and shake and shake with something I couldn’t name.

Kaitlyn Greenidge: My Mother’s Garden, NYTimes.com

In a culture that sees the individual as the point of everything, it’s no surprise that racism is viewed as nothing more than what individuals feel and think—an attitude, a conscious tendency to discriminate and harm.

Allan Johnson at Unraveling the Knot. The Racism of Good White People (via protoslacker)

a-petrified-frog:

I had to do it forgive me. I wish I could draw better :P

itsanidiom:

Gross speed painting of sick Oscar Isaac eating Cheetos with a pair of chopsticks…. ya’ll still thirsty? LOL Blame @melliferae for this… (ref)

inhabitableruins:

THE RETREAT OF THE SHOPPING MALLFor my studio project this year I interviewed a number of people about what spaces/situations they inhabit to experience querencia. A close friend of mine, documentary film-maker and graffiti artist, had a very interesting example of inhabiting ruins:

Quite often I find myself going to big shopping malls just to listen to historical podcasts. I don’t know why really, but I guess the activities taking place around me renders quite absurd when I’m not partaking in them. I never buy anything of course, I just walk around, watching people doing their pointless shoppings while I listen to the stories of some old forgotten war. I guess it’s a good way of positioning myself in history.

(My translation from Swedish)

The super-identity-agency of shopping is repurposed by his personal agency through the use of the existing crack that it is *still *possible to be in a shopping mall without shopping – as long as you follow certain rules. My friend, a far-left anti-capitalist, already regards anything to do with shopping as a ruin, as in it being abandoned by him. The walls constituting the shopping mall is repurposed by him for a different – uncoded - querencia-enabling purpose. He gives his personal *perspective *of the shopping mall-perspective-cluster a kick, and thus opens a crack in it so that it produces something different from what its implicit code intends it to. He puts up a wall to create a retreat within the shopping mall and creates a new shopping mall-*sub-identity *as an absurd theatre where to experience history.

The headphones are the essential technological aspect of his repurposing /ruin-making of the shopping mall. It sever one of the senses/walls/tools with which he participate in the perspective-cluster of the shopping mall - essentially turning that sense/wall/tool into a non-sense in regards to said perspective-cluster; opening a crack in the wall of said perspective-cluster to start a new perspective-cluster in collision with the perspectives from the podcast. This only changes his perspective in relation to the shopping mall, it is his personal crack. A boombox on the shoulder blasting history podcasts all over would be a *super-personal *crack potentially turning the whole shopping mall into a history theatre. This is *prohibited *since it is a potential threat to the shopping malls maintenance of its current agency – that of shopping.

This cat stuffed full of wires, this stupid animatronic doll, this unnerving simulation came into her life to mimic memory, not to create new ones. But somehow this thing allows her to glide into the present like a debutant. She was finally there with me, laughing, enjoying herself; the grandmother I hadn’t seen in years had arrived in order to care for the robot cat.

Letter of Recommendation: Hasbro Joy for All - The New York Times

We are the native peoples now whose tacit claims to self-determination have vanished from the maps of our own behavior. They are erased in an astonishing and audacious act of dispossession by surveillance that claims its right to ignore every boundary in its thirst for knowledge of and influence over the most detailed nuances of our behavior. For those who wondered about the logical completion of the global processes of commodification, the answer is that they complete themselves in the dispossession of our intimate quotidian reality, now reborn as behavior to be monitored and modified, bought and sold.

How Google makes its Fortune: Shoshana Zuboff on a dangerous form of Capitalism - The Digital Debate - FAZ

Beyoncé, in a scene from the video for “Formation.” (Beyoncé via YouTube)

npr:

nprbooks:

National Book Award winner (and

Mississippi native) Jesmyn Ward says

Beyoncé’s latest song is for the black Southern woman. And it’s a message she needed to hear. 

In Beyoncé’s ‘Formation,’ A Glorification Of ‘Bama’ Blackness

A look at Southern identity in Beyoncé’s ‘Formation’. -Emily

Meet The Woman Responsible For The Greatest GIFs On The Internet

kenyatta:

Cat, who works by day as an instructional designer for California’s Pacific Gas and Electric Company, says that the point of Animated Text is not so much the retro-’90s aesthetic itself, but rather her “relationship with the followers.” Every gif was specifically requested by one of her fans, so she sees each post as a collaborative process, rather than one where she’s the “keeper of the keys” or whatever.

[…]

By injecting more and more of herself into the Animated Text project, she became more and more comfortable with being vulnerable on the internet, something she did not expect when she was designing ostentatiously disaffected gif mantras like “lol nothing matters” or “blog the pain away.” That newfound comfort with being vulnerable online also inspired Frazier’s latest venture: Ask Cat, an “advice column for the smartphone age” that you can submit to by texting 510-962-9372.

“I’m really affecting people’s lives,” she said earnestly—a far cry from the person you’d expect to have made that (iconic, zeitgeist-capturing, etc., etc., etc.) “lol nothing matters” gif. “It makes me feel like I can be a better person. I may still be the asshole that I am, but it makes me feel good and that I should treat everyone better and that maybe the internet isn’t so bad after all.”

YES.

new-aesthetic:

Generative artworks by Fleen / John Greene, via Gödel says you can’t program intelligence as complex as yourself. But … - but does it float