“If a society puts half its children into short skirts and warns them not to move in ways that reveal their panties, while putting the other half into jeans and overalls and encouraging them to climb trees, play ball, and participate in other vigorous outdoor games; if later, during adolescence, the children who have been wearing trousers are urged to “eat like growing boys,” while the children in skirts are warned to watch their weight and not get fat; if the half in jeans runs around in sneakers or boots, while the half in skirts totters about on spike heels, then these two groups of people will be biologically as well as socially different. Their muscles will be different, as will their reflexes, posture, arms, legs and feet, hand-eye coordination, and so on. Similarly, people who spend eight hours a day in an office working at a typewriter or a visual display terminal will be biologically different from those who work on construction jobs. There is no way to sort the biological and social components that produce these differences. We cannot sort nature from nurture when we confront group differences in societies in which people from different races, classes, and sexes do not have equal access to resources and power, and therefore live in different environments. Sex-typed generalizations, such as that men are heavier, taller, or stronger than women, obscure the diversity among women and among men and the extensive overlaps between them… Most women and men fall within the same range of heights, weights, and strengths, three variables that depend a great deal on how we have grown up and live. We all know that first-generation Americans, on average, are taller than their immigrant parents and that men who do physical labor, on average, are stronger than male college professors. But we forget to look for the obvious reasons for differences when confronted with assertions like ‘Men are stronger than women.’ We should be asking: ‘Which men?’ and ‘What do they do?’ There may be biologically based average differences between women and men, but these are interwoven with a host of social differences from which we cannot disentangle them.”

— Ruth Hubbard, “The Political Nature of ‘Human Nature’“ (via gothhabiba)

Yes.

The tumblr experience is having politics that make the most left leaning progressive you know irl blush and then logging on here and getting called a bootlicker fascist because you said that you dont think we should make the reign of terror happen again

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine "Past Tense, Pt. 1"

Hey I saw you from across the bar but my girlfriend didn't. Are you some manner of spirit

Hey, amidst the chaos of... everything on the internet, pay attention to Hawaii/Hawai'i!

There have been plans from a non Hawaiian organisation to build a 5 acre parking lot, 13 lot subdivision and a comfort station for tourists on the ridge of the sacred Pololū Valley!

This project doesn't acknowledge Pololū Valley as a wahi pāna (a celebrated and storied place in the cultural traditions of Hawaii/Hawai'i) and instead treats it as just plain land that can be sold to a highest bidder.

Pololū Valley is anything but that.

So please sign the petition to stop this project! As of writing this, 883,470 people have, but we need more!

Petition to protect Pololū Valley

Reblog to reach more people, please! Don't just like and move on, sign the petition and make sure more people see this!

I'm on a duet kick and I'm marvelling about what an amazing song Somebody That I Used to Know is from a narrative perspective. We're told this sad tale about love and we're all sympathizing with this poor man:

And then the girl shows up shouts, "UNRELIABLE NARRATOR!"

The guy tries to get us back, "No wait! This is my pity party! Hear my sad tale again." But he's lost us, we can't see him in the same way again. The spell is broken. And the spell remains broken, you cannot hear the first verse in the same way ever again.

The acting in the music video too, the way he silently accepts her words. The way he flinches as she talks. He was trying to write his own narrative but he can't stand hearing the truth. And he has no new rebuttal, he can't refute her.

really recommend getting a partner with a different religion than you and very little knowledge of your religion because the opportunities for explaining things to each other are just exquisite

“it’s going to be WW3!!” no bitch it’s going to be vietnam, korea, afghanistan, it’s going to be another war wherein the US commits unspeakable and indefensible acts against a severely weakened people seeking self determination. it’s going to be another war where protesting is criminalized and “freedom of speech” is gutted in the interest of pushing propaganda. it’s going to be another nation of people added to the long list of victims of US imperialism and another demonstration of the strong undercurrent of fascism running through the foundation of america

so: masking: good, unequivocally. please mask and please educate others on why they should mask to make the world safer for immune compromised people to participate in.

however: masking is not my policy focus and it shouldn't be yours, either. masking is a very good mitigation against droplet-born illnesses and a slightly less effective (but still very good) mitigation against airborne illnesses, but its place in the pyramid of mitigation demands is pretty low, for several reasons:

it's an individual mitigation, not a systemic one. the best mitigations to make public life more accessible affect everyone without distributing the majority of the effort among individuals (who may not be able to comply, may not have access to education on how to comply, or may be actively malicious).

it's a post-hoc mitigation, or to put it another way, it's a band-aid over the underlying problem. even if it was possible to enforce, universal masking still wouldn't address the underlying problem that it is dangerous for sick people and immune compromised people to be in the same public locations to begin with. this is a solvable problem! we have created the societal conditions for this problem!

here are my policy focuses:

upgraded air filtration and ventilation systems for all public buildings. appropriate ventilation should be just as bog-standard as appropriately clean running water. an indoor venue without a ventilation system capable of performing 5 complete air changes per hour should be like encountering a public restroom without any sinks or hand sanitizer stations whatsoever.

enforced paid sick leave for all employees until 3-5 days without symptoms. the vast majority of respiratory and food-borne illnesses circulate through industry sectors where employees come into work while experiencing symptoms. a taco bell worker should never be making food while experiencing strep throat symptoms, even without a strep diagnosis.

enforced virtual schooling options for sick students. the other vast majority of respiratory and food-borne illnesses circulate through schools. the proximity of so many kids and teenagers together indoors (with little to no proper ventilation and high levels of physical activity) means that if even one person comes to school sick, hundreds will be infected in the following few days. those students will most likely infect their parents as well. allowing students to complete all readings and coursework through sites like blackboard or compass while sick will cut down massively on disease transmission.

accessible testing for everyone. not just for COVID; if there's a test for any contagious illness capable of being performed outside of lab conditions, there should be a regulated option for performing that test at home (similar to COVID rapid tests). if a test can only be performed under lab conditions, there should be a government-subsidized program to provide free of charge testing to anyone who needs it, through urgent cares and pharmacies.

the last thing to note is that these things stack; upgraded ventilation systems in all public buildings mean that students and employees get sick less often to begin with, making it less burdensome for students and employees to be absent due to sickness, and making it more likely that sick individuals will choose to stay home themselves (since it's not so costly for them).

masking is great! keep masking! please use masking as a rhetorical "this is what we can do as individuals to make public life safer while we're pushing for drastic policy changes," and don't get complacent in either direction--don't assume that masking is all you need to do or an acceptable forever-solution, and equally, don't fall prey to thinking that pushing for policy change "makes up" for not masking in public. it's not a game with scores and sides; masking is a material thing you can do to help the individual people you interact with one by one, and policy changes are what's going to make the entirety of public life safer for all immune compromised people.

star trek has always handled trauma/mental illness well imo but sisko explaining to the prophets in the first episode that humans live in linear time and can't ever go back... and then the prophets are so confused and show him his wife dying and ask "but you exist here?" that was. that one.... hit

I think I’m going to think about this youtube comment forever

so we all agree that harrows letter to camilla in htn explained the lobotomy right. or at least explained that she removed all memory of gideon to preserve her soul. do you think camilla thought ‘yeah sounds like a solid plan’ or was she a hypocrite who thought, ‘this bitch is crazy. i, camilla hect, on the other hand am responding to my necromancer’s death in a way that is correct and normal’.

Boromir

getting high will fix me