merelygifted:

mojokittykittysrevenge:

nevver:

1963, Gordon Parks

Still are…

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, mes chers.

merelygifted:

Scotland hit by second earthquake in a week with Highlands tremor | Scotland | The Guardian

roadtonothing:

shethedistance:

guerrillatech:

the-aspiring-maverick:

mojave-red:

saltrat88:

frederick-the-ii:

pinetreeanarchism:

thedevitoanditsown:

llleighsmith:

heartmurmuration:

llleighsmith:

i told ya we’ve canceled discourse n we’ve moved on to homesteading skills

it’s just choppin wood and harvesting vegetables and herbs from here on out

amen!

unironically this

Please hit me with more homesteading concept drawings

Good reference material here.

vaspider:

ms-demeanor:

illuminator-of-eternal-warfare:

ms-demeanor:

ms-demeanor:

ms-demeanor:

ms-demeanor:

ms-demeanor:

ms-demeanor:

ms-demeanor:

ms-demeanor:

My dipshit online history textbook:

As women asserted themselves economically, socially, and politically, the idea of remaining trapped in an unhappy marriage became less and less appealing. Consequently, the divorce rate soared. An 1974 book entitled THE COURAGE TO DIVORCE encouraged individuals to put their own happiness above that of their spouses and children.

Susan Gettleman’s The Courage to Divorce:

I keep making the decision not to yell at my history teacher in my homework, but since I have a handy citation right here I do think that I’m going to note that this single sentence that we get about the women’s liberation movement in the 1970s significantly mischaracterizes a book that attempts to destigmatize leaving an abusive partner.

I’m just mad about everything today and I have access to the internet and so now that’s everyone’s problem.

You wanna see where that fucking “next” button goes? You wanna see what this fucking website thinks a new American dawn looks like?

I’m going to set someone on fucking fire.

This, by the way, is describing Regan as the new dawn that *SAVED* America from the new right that formed at the end of the seventies.

This assignment is due in ten fucking minutes and I have to come here and yell and I’m going to get marked down and I do not care because otherwise I’m going to end up writing “ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME” on my homework and hitting submit before I can think better of it.

Assignment turned in it was on the 70s so ronnie is probably next fucking week but I’m looking through all the fucking readings on Regan and whoops:

The hedonism of the 1970s was being re-evaluated. Many drugs, which were considered recreational in the ‘70s, were revealed as addictive, deadly substances. As reports of celebrities entering rehabilitation centers and the horrors of drug-ridden inner cities became widely known, FIRST LADY NANCY REAGAN’s message to “JUST SAY NO” to drugs became more powerful. Regardless, newer and more dangerous substances like crack cocaine exacerbated the nation’s drug problem.

The sexual revolution was rocked by the spread of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, or AIDS. This deadly disease was most commonly communicated by sexual contact and the sharing of intravenous needles. With the risks of promiscuous behavior rising to a mortal level, monogamy and “safe sex” with condoms were practiced more regularly.

While greed may have been rewarded in the '80s, lust, be it for drugs or sex, proved fatal for thousands.

That’s all we’ve got for the AIDS crisis.

Oopsie doodle, guess you shouldn’t have been such a druggie slut but we’re not even going to mention the fact that it was gay men dying of AIDS first and foremost, which further stigmatized the disease and also made it an object of fucking ridicule to the goddamned president whose fucking administration kept making jokes about queers every time the press brought it up I am going to

I

I fucking watched people die of this.

For anyone who is concerned that higher education is indoctrinating your kids with liberal propaganda, I’d like to point out that this is my college history homework in Los Angeles County in 2021.

The only reason why gay people died from AIDS first and foremost in USA was that heterosexual people were much less likely to be highly promiscuous. It’s just being risk-averse regarding sex resulting in much lower number of infections in that specific location.

I don’t know how people can continue to defend this stuff after almost two years of suffering that covidiots brought at us. I haven’t went out to coffee house or restaurant for almost a year and I’m supposed to absolve people who weren’t willing to stop sleeping around to avoid contracting/transmitting a much deadlier disease?

Imagine we are in a global pandemic.

Imagine we’re not 100% sure how it spreads.

Imagine that there are a lot of people talking about masks, and saying that wearing a mask will probably reduce the spread of the disease.

Now imagine that the President and the CDC say that ACTUALLY mask-wearing will just make people overconfident and the only way to actually prevent the spread of the disease is to just not be around other people ever, unless you have to, you know, go to work in order to make money to feed your family.

Are you imagining that? That thing that very clearly happened and that has been an ongoing fight with people who still claim that masks don’t prevent the spread of covid?

That is almost literally exactly what the government response to HIV/AIDS was when they got around to finally acknowledging it. Here, I found an article that explains it very clearly for you.

Activists created informative handouts and posters about how to reduce the spread of HIV/AIDS, and the government loudly shamed them for having sex while hiding the information that prevented the spread of HIV/AIDS.

That’s perhaps a bit over-simplistic, but that seems just about right, given the level of thought you put into this response.

But hey, if you’re not a fuckhead and you want further information:

• A disturbing new glimpse at the Regan administration’s indifference to AIDS.
• AIDS research was chronically under-funded. When doctors at the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health asked for more funding for their work on AIDS, they were routinely denied it. Between June 1981 and May 1982 the CDC spent less than $1 million on AIDS and $9 million on Legionnaire’s Disease. At that point more than 1,000 of the 2,000 reported AIDS cases resulted in death; there were fewer than 50 deaths from Legionnaire’s Disease. This drastic lack of funding would continue through the Reagan years.
• Although previous literature has been published on Reagan’s rhetoric, and many anthropological analyses of rhetoric itself, there is not much literature specifically examining Reagan’s use of rhetoric during the AIDS epidemic. Through the use of coding, I analyzed the instances where rhetoric was used when the Reagan
  administration spoke about the AIDS epidemic. I found that the Reagan administration often used rhetoric to avoid discussing the complex issues of the epidemic and taking responsibility for stopping the spread of the disease. This, in turn, led to the continued marginalization of AIDS patients and the risk groups associated with the disease. Research on this topic is important because marginalized groups are often scapegoated during times of crisis. This can be seen in recent times with the rise in hate crimes against Asian Americans in response to the spread of COVID-19.
• Dr. C. Everett Koop, Reagan’s surgeon general, has said that because of “intradepartmental politics” he was cut out of all AIDS discussions for the first five years of the Reagan administration. The reason, he explained, was “because transmission of AIDS was understood to be primarily in the homosexual population and in those who abused intravenous drugs.” The president’s advisers, Koop said, “took the stand, 'They are only getting what they justly deserve.’ ”
• Although he embraced many of the commission’s less controversial ideas, Reagan deferred for more study several major proposals, including recommendations for changes in health care financing, methods of protecting patients’ rights of confidentiality and government management of health issues.
  He rejected outright one proposal–to expand the National Health Service Corps to provide more AIDS services in neglected communities.
  “It was in the implementation plans themselves that we perhaps differ (with the AIDS commission)–not in terms of the goal, but in how best to get there,” Macdonald said in news media briefings on the response. “Discrimination is one of those issues.”
  The AIDS crisis has hit particularly hard at homosexual men and intravenous drug users. Some conservative lawmakers and White House officials have fought strenuously against any anti-discrimination legislation as a “hidden gay rights” bill.
• Dr Marcus Conant got a closeup view of the Reagan administration’s beliefs about Aids and the gay community, not once, not twice, but three times. Conant, who is a clinical professor of dermatology emeritus at UC San Francisco, was one of the first physicians to diagnose and treat Aids.
  His first bird’s-eye view was a 1983 meeting about the Aids epidemic in Washington DC, with the White House liaison for medical care. Conant and his colleagues “were going on and on about how this was a disease, an infectious disease”, he recalled. Reagan’s representative wasn’t buying it.
  “Her response was [that] this was a legal problem, not a medical problem,” Conant said. Simply because of who gay men with Aids were and who their sexual partners were, she told him, “these people were breaking the law”
• But in 1987, activists were still frustrated by government inaction as bodies continued to pile up, and they founded the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power, or ACT UP, in New York City.
  Today, their actions and their activist art are legendary for speeding the government’s response to the AIDS crisis, allowing quicker testing and treatment of lifesaving experimental drugs, and drawing public attention to the deadly impact of homophobic public health policies.
• Reagan’s first significant initiative against the disease came in February 1986, when he declared combatting AIDS to be “one of our highest public-health priorities” and asked Surgeon General C. Everett Koop to prepare a major report on it. Critics noted, however, that on the same day, the administration submitted a budget that called for sharply reducing federal spending on AIDS research and care programs.
  Koop, an imposing figure who wore an admiral’s uniform and an Amish-style square-cut gray beard without a mustache, was an unlikely champion of AIDS activists. He was a deeply religious Presbyterian and anti-abortion crusader deemed “Dr. Unqualified” in a New York Times editorial when he was nominated in 1981. His expertise was in pediatric surgery, not public health. Initially, he put most of his effort as surgeon general into raising awareness of the dangers of smoking.
  But once he was tasked to write the report, Koop undertook a full-scale effort to discover everything that could be known about AIDS. As it happened, his personal physician was Fauci, then the director of NIAID. “He would come in, he would sit down right on the couch, and he would say, ‘Tell me about this.’ So, for weeks and weeks, I started to tell him all about the things we were doing,” Fauci recalled. “Then he started going out and learning himself. So, as we were getting into the second term, and he realized this was a big problem, he shifted his emphasis from tobacco to HIV.”
  Koop wrote his 36-page report on AIDS at a stand-up desk in the basement of his home on the NIH campus. He did not submit it for review by Reagan-administration policy advisers because he knew that the White House would have watered down its conclusions and recommendations. Released on October 22, 1986, it was a bombshell, projecting that 270,000 Americans would contract the disease by 1991 and that 179,000 would die of it. The report used explicit language, explaining that AIDS was transmitted through “semen and vaginal fluids” and during “oral, anal, and vaginal intercourse.” A version was ultimately sent to every one of the 107 million households in the country, the largest mass mailing in American history. It carried a message from Koop: “Some of the issues involved in this brochure may not be things you are used to discussing openly. I can easily understand that. But now you must discuss them.”
  Conservatives liked some of what was in the report. It warned against “freewheeling casual sex” and asserted that the surest means of preventing AIDS were through abstinence and monogamy. But they weren’t so happy with Koop’s recommendation that condoms be used as a fallback. And they were especially disturbed by his call for schools to begin educating children as young as third grade about the disease. Reagan himself was uncomfortable with the implications. “Recognizing that there are those who are not going to abstain, all right. Then you can touch on the other things that are being done,” he said in an April 29, 1987, interview with a group of reporters. “But I would think that sex education should begin with the moral ramifications, that it is not just a physical activity that doesn’t have any moral connotation.”

On June 2, 1988, Watkins described the commission’s draft report and called for state and federal laws to provide anti-discrimination protection for AIDS patients. He called that discrimination “the rule, not the exception.” He explained that testing and the identification of sexual partners could not be successful without such protections against discrimination: “So, once those with HIV are treated like anyone else with a disability, then we will find that what is best for the individual is also best for the public health.” He said “Semen, blood, and ignorance surround this epidemic, and we were in that last category” when starting work.[15]

In an initial review, Dr. Mathilde Krim, founder of the American Foundation for AIDS Research thought the commission’s work both more expert than she expected and free of ideology.[15] Tim Sweeney, executive director of GMHC call the draft report “courageous, aggressive and compassionate” and added: “We challenge the President, Congress and presidential candidates to respond to this report by implementing its recommendations”.[15] The American Public Health Association called it “an aggressive first step towards developing an integrated national strategy to deal with the AIDS epidemic.”[15]

The commission produced its final report on June 24, 1988. The commissioners approved it by a vote of 7 to 6. Its recommendations surprised observers by arguing against every measure advocating by conservative observers, such as mandatory testing, and characterizing partner notification as an inappropriate activity for medical professionals.[16] Its principal findings and recommendations were designed to provide a national strategy for managing the epidemic. It made more than 500 recommendations, which it summarized under these headings:[17]

1. replacement of the obsolete term “AIDS” (Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome) with the term “HIV infection”;
2. early diagnosis of HIV infection;
3. increased testing to facilitate understanding of the incidence and prevalence of HIV infection;
4. treatment of HIV infection as a disability under federal and state law;
5. stronger legal protection of the privacy of HIV-infected persons;
6. immediate implementation of preventive measures such as confidential partner notification;
7. prevention and treatment of intravenous drug abuse;
8. implementation of drug and alcohol abuse education programs;
9. establishment of federal and state scholarship and loan programs to encourage nurses to serve in areas of high HIV impact;
10. extension and expansion of the National Health Service Corps;
11. aggressive biomedical research;
12. more equitable and cost-effective financing of care for HIV-infected persons;
13. addressing the concerns of health care workers;
14. federal assurance of the safety of the blood supply;
15. undertaking all reasonable efforts to avoid transfusion of another person’s blood;
16. development and implementation of education programs;
17. addressing the problem of HIV-infected “boarder babies”;
18. addressing the problem of high-risk adolescents;
19. addressing ethical issues raised by the HIV epidemic; and
20. support and encouragement of international efforts to combat the spread of HIV infection.

Vice President George Bush, who was running for President at the time, immediately endorsed both an executive order and legislation to meet the commission’s call for the extension of Federal anti-discrimination protection to those with AIDS and those who test positive for HIV. He emphasized children in his discussions with reporters: “My conscience has been advising me on AIDS…. I’d hate it if a kid of mine got a blood transfusion and my grandson had AIDS and the community discriminated against that child, that innocent child”. Reagan said his drug policy advisor would review the report and make recommendations to him in 30 days.[18] President Reagan later said he opposed such discrimination in principle but took no action before his term as president ended in January 1989.

So, you have perfectly parroted the information endlessly regurgitated by the Regan administration about promiscuity that was countered at the time by Regan appointees who called for safer sex education, antidiscrimination policies, and more funding for research into drugs and who were all roundly ignored while Regan ate jellybeans through the end of his term and got pats on the back from the moral majority.

And, in case this wasn’t clear, fuck entirely off you homophobic piece of shit.

Okay but like on top of that, can we just talk about the presumption that queer people – and to be clear, MSM/men who have sex with men – are soooooo much more promiscuous than cishets?

• There’s only a 1% difference between heterosexual and homosexual (terms used in the study) people as regards promiscuity.
• An extensive 1994 study found that the difference between the mean number of sexual partners, comparing heterosexual men and men with “at least some same-gender activity”, “does not appear very large.”
• A 2013 study in Britain appears to confirm what researchers long suspected: that a small number of gay men have a disproportionate amount of the sex in question.

The idea that gay & queer men have soooooooo much more sex than straight men comes from homophobic stereotypes of the “decadent gay,” and its only statistical support comes from surveys employing convenience sampling, where the “study” uses a sort of non-probability sampling. In this case, that sampling pretty much invariably comes from a location/group already prone to the activity in question. You know, like, going to a bathhouse or a gay bar, or finding volunteers through queer personals or on Grindr. Yes, of course you’re more likely to find “statistics” that back up your point of view, and why? Because you’re drawing volunteers from a source that already leans toward that conclusion.

It’s like going to a convention of bakers and asking “okay, who here really likes making bread every single day?” Well, fucking surprise, you’re gonna find way more people there who would love to do that than you would in the general population! It’s what we who understand a single fucking thing about statistics call a “non-representative sample.”

If you’re still confused, here’s a quick summation for you.

(And like… fuck this person. People talk about like 'oh I knew one person who died’ but a lot of queer people of my generation and older didn’t know one. No. Try dozens. Fuck Regan, fuck Bush, fuck that whole crusty coterie.)

mhalachai:

rainnecassidy:

This is such a good article though

The argument Pinto makes is that the story and the doll normalize 24-hour surveillance in the mind of a child, which makes them susceptible to more passively accept police-state surveillance as adults.

“I don’t think the elf is a conspiracy and I realize we’re talking about a toy,” Pinto told The Post. “It sounds humorous, but we argue that if a kid is okay with this bureaucratic elf spying on them in their home, it normalizes the idea of surveillance and in the future restrictions on our privacy might be more easily accepted.”

It’s based in a theory that was developed by Jeremy Bentham and popularized by Michel Foucault in which students, prisoners, factory workers and others were thought to function better (for whatever value of better) in a system called a panopticon, in which an individual is potentially under surveillance 24-hours a day, but never actually KNOWS whether or not he or she is being surveilled. 

Pinto said she’s not the first person to be troubled by Elf on the Shelf’s surveilling. She’s said parents routinely contact her to say they changed the rules of the game after it made their families uneasy. And many kids, she said, often intuitively feel like spying and being a tattletale is wrong.

“A mom e-mailed me and told me that the first day they read the elf book and put the elf out, her daughter woke up crying because she was being watched by the elf,” Pinto recounted. “They changed the game so it wouldn’t scare the child.”

In addition to the problem of normalizing surveillance in the mind of a child, this also forces the child into a situation where they never feel like they are free to simply be themselves; they are forced to be “on their best behavior” at all times, unable to relax and make mistakes and do the job of growing up and being a child, because they never know if the elf is spying on them, ready and waiting to report back to Santa Claus that they’ve been bad.

Here is a link to the paper that the article is talking about

My co-worker got Elf on the Shelf for her four-year-old daughter last year, and was so freaked out by her daughter’s sudden and complete change in behaviour (uncharacteristically worried and anxious, while trying to be on her ‘best’ behaviour that she never kept up for family or at school) that she stuffed Elf in the garbage after a week, telling the daughter that the Elf had to go back to the North Pole to help Santa with Christmas. 

Also read the paper linked above, it’s a good one.